The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (34 page)

“Baseball is awfully important to me,” he said. “This war, of course, is more important, but I just feel I’m as much entitled to this season of baseball as anyone in the country with a legitimate classification for dependency.… I’m Ted Williams. That’s why I’ve been getting all this. I’ll bet you there are 100 cases the same as mine in the big leagues. But do you hear any popping off about them? No sir. Just on Ted Williams.”

He said he’d made every decision on his own. “And I guess I’m pretty much all alone right now.… I know it’s going to be tough. But I’m sure that if the fans can learn all the facts and will look at them fairly, they’ll be pulling for me before the season is over.”
²⁴

Williams checked into the Sarasota Terrace Hotel, where they paid their respects by assigning him room 406.
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The early fan reaction was pro-Ted. In the Red Sox’s 6–5 exhibition loss to the Reds in Sarasota the following day, Williams emerged to make his first public appearance of the spring by pinch-hitting in the sixth. On being introduced, he was received with “thunderous applause” from the pro-Sox crowd of eight hundred people, reported Joe Cashman in the
Record,
with not a dissenter audible. He drove one ball four hundred feet, but foul, before striking out on a 3–2 pitch at his ankles.

A more significant test came four days later in Tampa, during another game against the Reds. The game was played before 3,747 people, almost half of whom were soldiers from nearby bases. The soldiers cheered Williams loudly, swarming around him before the game to the point where he couldn’t take batting practice. Ted signed hundreds of autographs, then was asked to do a radio interview that would be sent to the troops
overseas. The soldiers mobbed him after the game, too, delaying the team bus. This buoyed Williams’s spirits considerably—after all, soldiers were the most important constituency, and if they were with him, civilians would seem to have less cause to be upset.

Over breakfast with Huck Finnegan of the
American
a week later, Ted said he’d received about two hundred letters so far, with reaction to his deferment split fifty-fifty. He noted that those against him seemed to be less educated than those who were for him. “I’ve noticed that the mudslingers border on the illiterate side; that the encouraging letters come from well-bred persons,” he said. So far, so good in spring training, but he expected trouble up north, especially in Washington, Detroit, and Cleveland. “But I’ll just keep my mouth shut and tend to my knitting, I mean my hitting,” he said, smiling.
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Still, the harsh early reaction to his deferment in many of the papers and from some fans who wrote to him would stay with Williams for the rest of his life. “What a howl!” he remembered years later. “You would have thought Teddy Ballgame bombed Pearl Harbor himself. Unpatriotic. Yellow. Those were the milder epithets.”
²⁷

The reaction that Williams cared about most, of course, was that of Red Sox fans, and among those, he confided to the
Globe
’s Gerry Moore as the team made its way north, the only group he couldn’t tolerate not being with him was the kids.

His first Fenway Park appearance of the year came on April 12 in the annual exhibition game against the Boston Braves. It was bitterly cold, and there were snow flurries, but a crowd of nine thousand turned out and roared its approval of Ted, drowning out a smattering of boos. Out in the bleachers, six hundred soldiers, sailors, and Marines seemed unanimously for him.

“That was swell,” Ted said of the reaction. “It certainly was great. They were ninety-eight percent for me, weren’t they?”

Williams’s acute rabbit ears had pinpointed the few dissenters: two kids in the left-field grandstand and a guy in the bleachers. “I could hear them,” he said. “That fellow in right had a loud voice, and those kids in left gave it to me all through the game.” The
Globe
’s Harold Kaese had gone down to interview the kids, and Kaese told Ted that one of them had said he had two brothers off in the Army, stationed in Australia.

“There’ll be people like that,” Williams replied philosophically. “They’ll feel pretty bitter, maybe, and say things, but it’s great to know that most of the fans in Boston are for me.”

The writers concluded that Ted had cleared a huge hurdle. They all
had been waiting for the first Fenway reaction as a guidepost for the season’s story line. “Ted’s in now,” a reporter, overheard by Kaese, had remarked in the press box. “All he’s got to do is mind his p’s and q’s, and throw in some base hits and homers.”
²⁸

On opening day—two days later—Ted received more applause from the seventeen thousand fans in attendance, and that only ratified the exhibition verdict. Ted responded by hitting the fifth pitch of his first at bat over the bull pen into the bleachers for a three-run homer. He got two more hits, five RBIs on the day, and even threw out a runner trying to leg out a double as the Sox beat the Athletics, 8–3.

Colonel Egan called the opening day reception a vindication—not of Ted, who, he said, needed none, but of New England and “John Quincy Public.” The fans were “telling the world that we do not tar and feather men and ride them away on a rail,” Egan wrote. “That we will not be stampeded into doing an injustice by the loud voices of a few zealots; that we can use our heads for more than a hat rack, and can think things through correctly. It was an exhibition of good, old fashioned common sense.”
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The Red Sox won two more games from the A’s to sweep the series and then set out for New York, where fifty thousand people, including two thousand soldiers, filled Yankee Stadium. In his first road test, Williams was cheered. This was added evidence of popular support for Ted’s decision to play ball and, more broadly, for wartime baseball. FDR had been right: the country did need touchstones of normalcy as its servicemen fought battles around the world. Baseball was proving to be a tonic for the masses, not simply an indulgence for the players.

Still, news from the sports page paled against the life-and-death dispatches from the war unfolding daily on the front page. April 18 brought one of the first welcome headlines in months: sixteen American B-25 bombers based on the USS
Hornet
in the Pacific had successfully pierced Japanese air defenses and bombed Tokyo. The country felt a surge of pride.
REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR
read the
Globe
headline.
³⁰
Less than three weeks later, aircraft carriers from the United States and Japan clashed off New Guinea in the Battle of the Coral Sea, a precursor to the Battle of Midway a month later. While America lost the carrier
Lexington,
it sank a light Japanese carrier and gained a strategic victory by preventing Tokyo from landing troops to take Port Moresby, in New Guinea. With war fever running high, the Armed Forces were taking out recruiting ads in the papers saying: “If you are itching to be in the
thick of the fight, and you’d like to slip those Japs and Nazis a man-sized dose of their own medicine, then here’s your chance to do something about it.”
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In this climate, Williams began to rethink his position. He’d made his decision, made his stand. He had responsibilities to his mother and had therefore been entitled to his 3A. He wasn’t going to forsake it or be pushed. He would act on his timetable, not someone else’s. He hadn’t completed a loop around the league yet, but the fans in Boston and New York had greeted him warmly and respected his decision. To a certain extent, he had already made his point. He didn’t want to overplay his hand, and he wanted to do the right thing. Yet he still had to earn enough money to pay off those annuities for his mother. Maybe there was a way to enlist while still being allowed to play out the year to meet his financial obligations.

On April 29, following a loss to the Tigers at Fenway Park, Williams was introduced to Lieutenant Robert “Whitey” Fuller of the Navy by Red Sox publicist Ed Doherty. Fuller, a former sports publicist for Dartmouth College, urged Ted to take a discreet look at the Navy’s V-5 flight preparation program at Naval Air Station Squantum in Quincy, just south of Boston. Ted agreed, and on the morning of May 6—unbeknownst to any reporters—the two men drove down to Squantum as the Battle of the Coral Sea raged in the Pacific.

Ted spent three hours at the base, talking baseball and aviation with the enlisted men. He climbed into the cockpit of a hornet-yellow training plane, played with the gadgets, looked over the instrument panel, and pulled on the pilot’s stick. If he liked, they told him, he now was eligible to become a Naval aviator, because the educational requirements for that program had just been lowered so that high school graduates could apply. Commander James A. Voit of San Diego sat with him in the cockpit. Voit had known of Ted in their hometown, but they hadn’t met. Voit needled Williams that he’d only hit six home runs as of that day. The Kid also visited a gunnery class, a machine shop, and a hangar, and had lunch at the officers’ mess.

Ted was impressed. Here was a chance to rekindle his childhood fondness for aviation—in a most dramatic fashion. (One of his most vivid memories was of the Navy’s USS
Shenandoah,
a two-million-cubic-foot dirigible that arrived in San Diego in 1924.) He liked Voit and the rest of the fellows he’d met. He liked their work, their mission, and their soft sell. Unlike Mickey Cochrane out at Great Lakes, they
weren’t pushing him. They were letting him make up his own mind. In principle, he was sold, and on the drive back to Fenway Park for a game against the White Sox, Ted signed an application to join the Navy. But nothing could be announced until he passed his physical and an aptitude test. So the Navy and Williams agreed to sit on the news for about two weeks, until the Red Sox returned from a road trip.

After a win over the White Sox that afternoon, Ted repaired to his room on the eighth floor of the Shelton Hotel. That night, the Red Sox were supposed to leave for Philadelphia for the start of a twelve-day tour that would also take them to Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, and Cleveland. But Williams’s mind was racing. He called his confidant, clubhouse man Johnny Orlando, and summoned him to his room. When Orlando arrived, Williams hadn’t packed for the road trip and was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, trying out a new fishing rod he’d just bought. He was casting out an open window.

“To hell with everything,” Ted said. “I’m going into the Navy right now.”

Orlando counseled against doing anything rash: Ted should keep playing as long as he could. Try and finish out the season. Things were in turmoil, and the Navy wasn’t even ready for him yet. But Ted said he was tired of the distractions and the controversy. He’d made up his mind.

Then there was a knock on the door. It was Eddie Collins. The GM had somehow gotten wind of trouble brewing with Williams. Ted repeated everything he’d told Orlando. He was quitting and joining the Navy now. He had just wanted to finish out the year to earn enough money to pay off those three annuities.

Collins advised Ted not to enlist now. “Eddie didn’t want to keep him out of the service, but he realized, too, that the wild rush to join the Armed Forces had created a traffic jam and the Kid should wait,” Orlando recalled. But Collins told him that the Red Sox would make up any earnings shortfall whether he finished the season or not, so that he could meet his obligations to his mother. “Consider it taken care of,” he said.
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This was a significant statement by the team, which, had it been made earlier, might have persuaded Williams to enter the service months ago and rendered the Red Sox’s public relations concerns moot. In any case, the financial assurances from Collins eased Ted’s mind greatly and were all he needed to hear to resolve his immediate predicament: he quickly packed his bag, then he and Orlando hurried to the train station for the trip to Philadelphia.

Williams was booed lustily at Shibe Park, but it no longer seemed to be because he was 3A—it was just that he was the leading enemy villain again. He’d been hitless until the ninth inning of the third and final game of the series, and the hooting had increased with each out he’d made. Then, when he belted a two-run homer out of the park entirely and onto a roof across 20th Street, the crowd of twenty-five thousand stood and cheered, in what
Traveler
writer John Drohan called “an interesting study in mob psychology.” Ted said of the earlier fan treatment: “They booed me because I didn’t hit. Well, if I haven’t been a good hitter, they wouldn’t have bothered to boo me.”
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Ted’s mind was now made up: he planned to take his physical and his aptitude test on the morning of May 22, after the Red Sox returned from Cleveland. Assuming he passed, he’d announce his enlistment later that day. He’d hoped the Navy would let him play out the year, but if he was called up before the season ended, he now had Collins’s promise that the team would bridge whatever gap he might still have in the annuity payments due to his mother.

On the train ride home the night of the twenty-first, Williams hinted at his plans to Huck Finnegan of the
American.
He said he’d received an anonymous letter recently accusing him of being a “ ‘yellow so-and-so.… You make enough money in a month to keep your mother for three years.’

“I’m not yellow,” Ted said. “I’ll fight. But I don’t want to be rushed into things. I’m going to help my country before this thing is over. Probably a lot sooner than people realize.”
³⁴

When the team train pulled into Boston the next morning, Ted reported to the Naval Aviation Cadet Selection Board at 150 Causeway Street, near North Station. None of his teammates or Red Sox officials knew what he was about to do. He’d written his mother to tell her two days before.

He passed his three-hour physical and aptitude test with flying colors. Then, before being sworn in, Ted called Dave Egan to give him the scoop. Though the Colonel would become his avowed enemy in later years, Ted was grateful for Egan’s numerous defenses of the way he’d comported himself on the draft issue, so Egan and a
Record
photographer showed up and got exclusive pictures of the swearing-in. The next day the Colonel and Williams were shown on the front page of the
Record,
smiling as Ted pointed at a recruiting poster.