The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (9 page)

Such yelps were precursors to another odd scream Ted would use when he reached the minor leagues—and continued to use in his first year with the Red Sox, 1939, before his early ebullience started to fade. To amuse himself during bouts of boredom in the field as he waited to bat again, when a fly ball was hit his way Ted would slap his behind and yell, “Hi-yo, Silver!” as he took off to run for it.

Sam Williams toiled away in relative obscurity. Compared to May, who was well liked and a real presence in San Diego, Sam didn’t leave much of a footprint in town. In 1923, he did reach out and formally fraternize, joining the Freemasons, a group he would stay active in for the rest of his life.
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In 1931, Sam was named a deputy US Marshal at a salary of $1,440 a year.
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This was “the best job he ever had, his biggest claim to fame,” Ted wrote.
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“It was kind of a political appointment because he had done something for Governor Merriam when Merriam got elected. Strings were pulled.”

Actually, Frank Merriam, a Republican, did not become governor until three years later, so more likely the appointment was arranged as a favor to the politically connected May.

On February 2, 1932, Sam the marshal made news for participating in a Prohibition-era raid of a bootlegging ring that had been smuggling what was described as “rare liquor” from Tijuana to San Diego. Sam and three other officers struck an Eliot Ness–like pose for the
San Diego Evening Tribune,
holding their contraband with grim visages.

One of the perks of the marshal’s job was an Oldsmobile, complete with a siren on top, which Sam could drive home and which he delighted in showing off. May’s niece Teresa Cordero Contreras remembered Sam letting her and her siblings horse around in the car. “He’d come in the police car over the house, and he’d do the siren for us. We pressed a little red button on the dashboard. I was just a little kid.”

In 1934, Sam took another position in law enforcement, becoming jail inspector for the state of California, a $2,160-a-year job that would keep him almost constantly on the road over the next five years. He was based in Sacramento and seemed to take an activist approach, notably in Fresno, where he made recommendations to ease overcrowding at the Fresno County jail.
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Ted was sixteen and blooming as a baseball player when Sam went to Sacramento. He became the star of his high school team, and professional scouts were tracking him hard. Until this point, when the promise of money was in the air, Sam had shown zero interest in Ted’s baseball, beyond once threatening to beat his son for skipping school to play an American Legion game.
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But when the scouts materialized, Sam got religion. “By this time my dad was in on the act.… He got the idea I was the second coming of Ruth,” Ted remembered. Sam started buying Ted steaks on game days, which the boy thought slowed him down. “But I was pleased he was interested so I ate the steaks.”
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Still, to Ted, Sam’s belated and materialistic interest in his baseball stung. “In the real crises of my life he never once gave me any advice,” Ted wrote.
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He tried to get Sam’s attention but couldn’t. He even
learned photography, his father’s former profession, because he hoped it would give them something to talk about. But it was all to no avail.

“His father could have cared less,” said Steve Brown, the Florida filmmaker and fisherman. “He said, ‘I thought I could impress him,’ but it wouldn’t have mattered. Ted didn’t understand his father at all. How he could have no concerns for his sons. He shared nothing with them. He’d come in the house and let May make all the decisions. Ted said his dad would get up in the middle of a meal, leave, and not come back for two days. Ted told me he was an alcoholic. That the only time his father would talk to him was when he was drunk.”
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So Ted searched out surrogate fathers. Chief among these was Les Cassie Sr., the father of Ted’s friend Les Cassie Jr. The Cassies lived across the street from the Williamses.

“Ted was at our house a lot,” said Les junior. “My mother and dad treated Ted like me, like just another one of their sons.”
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The elder Cassie, who was superintendent of construction for the San Diego schools, would play checkers with Ted, but they bonded over fishing. Les junior wasn’t interested in the sport, so his dad would take Ted down to the beach at Coronado and teach him surf casting. They’d catch croakers, corbina, and maybe some perch starting in the early evening, and they wouldn’t come home until two or three o’clock in the morning. By the time he was sixteen, Ted could cast farther than anyone else on the beach.

It was Mr. Cassie who gave Ted the only present he received when he graduated from high school: a fountain pen. And it was Mr. Cassie whom Ted would ask to drive with him across the country to Florida for spring training in 1939, when he joined the Red Sox. Ted promised then that if the Sox ever made it to the World Series, Mr. and Mrs. Cassie would be his guests at Fenway Park. In 1946, Ted delivered on that promise.

“The night they clinched, he called and said, ‘Are you coming?’ ” said Les junior. “It was the high point of my dad’s life. He introduced him to everyone back in Fenway Park, everyone from [Red Sox owner] Tom Yawkey to the ushers.”

Ted wrote in his book: “I loved Mr. Cassie. The nicest, dearest man.… When Mr. Cassie died, I felt as bad as when my own father died.”
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Williams would later say he always regarded Les junior as a brother, and the feeling was mutual.
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“We just seemed to hit it off real good,” Cassie said. “Right from the start we used to eat lunch together,
carry a brown sack, sit on the steps of the auditorium. We’d talk baseball day after day.”

Two other neighbors, Johnny Lutz and Chick Rotert, also played paternal roles in Ted’s life.

When he was only five, Ted had dragged his small bat across the street and asked Lutz to pitch to him.
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Lutz was a poultry retailer and competitive marksman who would take Ted on hunting trips across the border in Mexico. Ted thought Lutz was the best shot he ever saw; Williams, however, needed more patience with a gun. “Once he missed,” Lutz recalled, “he would become so disgusted that he would just shoot off the rest of the round wildly.”
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Later, Lutz, on whose kitchen table Ted signed his first professional contract, grew concerned that the boy wasn’t being adequately cared for. Once, on a hunting trip to the Imperial Valley, Ted said he was hungry. So they stopped and ate, and Ted had four eggs, a stack of toast, a stack of pancakes, and six bottles of a soft drink. Lutz said he and his wife found it pathetic to see Ted and Danny, when they were only eight and six, sitting on the curb until 11:00 p.m. or midnight waiting for one of their parents to come home.
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Chick Rotert, a former game warden who’d had two of his fingers shot off in World War I, was actually the first person to take Ted fishing. He showed the boy pictures of bass he’d caught from local lakes, then took him out to experience the real thing. Eventually Ted got himself a $3.95 Pflueger Akron reel and a Heddon bamboo rod. “I practiced casting until I knew what I was doing, standing on the porch in the evenings, maybe waiting for my mother to come home, casting into the yard or out to the street.”
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During a 1934 deep-sea outing from Point Loma, Ted and his party caught ninety-eight barracuda and gave them all away to people gathered on the docks, hungry in the Depression. The trip helped fuel Ted’s love of fishing, which would become a lifelong passion. Soon he was fishing with his friends, not just Mr. Cassie, Johnny Lutz, and Chick Rotert. Ted and Del Ballinger liked to take the streetcar to Ocean Beach, and on the way home the conductor would make them sit in the back because the fish they caught smelled so bad.
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Meanwhile, Ted and Sam Williams continued to drift apart. “My dad and I were never close,” Ted said. “I was always closer to my mother, always feeling I had to do right by her, always feeling she was alone, and knowing for years afterward how hard she had worked with nothing to show for it. I loved my dad, it wasn’t that I didn’t love him, but he didn’t
push very hard. He was just satisfied to let things go as they were. He was a quiet man. He never smiled much.”
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Nevertheless, until Williams died, he kept a picture of his father smoking a pipe and holding a baby—Ted himself—on display in his house. “He was always very sad he never got to know his father,” said John Sullivan, one of Ted’s caretakers at the end.
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Cousin Gino Lucero thought Ted’s anger, which he would mostly aim toward his mother later in life, was misdirected. “All this anger that Ted vented toward his mom and used playing ball and flying jets—it’s his dad. I don’t think he even knew it. I think the only anger he had at his mom was the embarrassment she caused him. But here’s a guy—his whole youth was spent looking for a father figure. This guy was hungry for a dad that would play catch with him, a dad that would come to his games. I think Ted felt his dad didn’t love him. There was no example of validation. Nothing Ted didn’t know himself. We’re all in denial about our dysfunctions. But there’s no denying, in psychiatry, the importance of a father.”

In 1939, the state legislature decided to eliminate Sam’s position as jail inspector, and he was out of a job. By this time, he and May were also out of business. The relationship had been strained for years. May was turned off by Sam’s drinking, smoking, prolonged absences, and general indifference to her, while Sam was put off by her obsession with the Salvation Army and what he saw as her indifference to him.

They officially separated on April 21, 1939 (coincidentally, the day Ted made his major-league debut in Boston), according to the divorce complaint May brought against Sam in February of 1941. The separation occurred after Sam ran off with a woman who had been his secretary, Minnie Mae Dickson. The oldest of seven children, Minnie had grown up in Sedalia, Missouri, the daughter of a cattle rancher. She had snow-white hair, which she would often highlight with a pink or purple rinse. She was married once before Sam came into her life. “She loved clothes,” said her niece Beverly Schultz. “Her hats and purses and shoes always matched. Real snappy dresser. Probably that was why Sam was attracted to her. She was kind of heavyset but always carried herself nicely, and she was well put together. She was involved in Christian Science but didn’t like to talk about it.” They settled in the San Francisco area and opened another photo studio there.

May was devastated and tried to persuade Sam to come back, according to her younger sister Sarah Diaz. “She was just heartbroken, but there was nothing she could do,” Sarah said. “She even went up there
and tried to make up with him, with Samuel. No, he had this woman, so there was nothing she could do.”
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May let Sam have it in her 1941 divorce complaint, saying he had been “guilty of extreme cruelty in the wrongful infliction of grievous mental suffering.” She also said he had “willfully neglected” to provide for her and was still not doing so. Sam initially failed to answer the complaint, but the following year, it was he, not May, who filed a motion to make the divorce final. His motion was granted, and the divorce became official on May 14, 1942.

The divorce, certainly rare in those days, pained Ted, but he didn’t blame his father. “Whenever anybody ever wrote about my dad, they seemed to delight in calling him a ‘wanderer’ or a ‘deserter of the family,’ but that’s a lot of bull,” he wrote. “He stuck it out with my mother for twenty years, and finally he packed up, and I’d probably have done the same. My mother was a wonderful woman in many ways, but gee, I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to a woman like that. Always gone. The house dirty all the time. Even now I can’t stand a dirty house.
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She was religious to the point of being domineering, and so narrow-minded. My dad smoked, usually a pipe, and she didn’t like that and never stopped complaining about it. I remember one time he came home sick, he’d been drinking wine or some of that lousy beer, and God, you’d think it was the end of the world the way my mother carried on. My mother had a lot of traits that made me cringe.”
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As an adult, Ted rarely saw his father, but he did provide for him. He regularly sent funds that Sam used to supplement the threadbare income he earned from his photo business. Ted also bought his father a small house in Walnut Creek, California, across the bay from San Francisco, where Sam had settled with Minnie Dickson. The couple had married following Sam and May’s divorce.

“It was a little three-room house with a walnut tree in the yard,” said Beverly Schultz. “There was a living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen. I kept thinking that a big baseball star owned the house, and I wondered
why he didn’t buy his father a bigger house. I assumed they were probably not real close. But at least Ted took some care of his father.”
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Though he had received considerable financial support from Ted, including one $6,000 payment in the late 1940s, which he used to buy new cameras and other supplies for his Williams Photo Studio on Main Street in Walnut Creek, Sam was not above using the press to try and leverage more support from his famous son. On January 9, 1950, Sam told the
Oakland Post Enquirer
that because someone who owed him $3,500 had defaulted on the loan, he was in danger of losing his house and his business. He’d had a stroke two years before, he added. “We just went broke when the note wasn’t paid, that’s all,” Sam said. Minnie was quoted as saying they had asked Ted for help.

The story went national immediately; some papers also published a picture of Sam and Minnie gazing forlornly at a photo of Ted and his new infant daughter, Bobby-Jo. While the implication was obviously that the rich ballplayer was ignoring his nearly destitute father, Williams’s agent, Fred Corcoran, mounted a quick damage-control operation and let it be known that Ted had been taking care of Sam for years. It wasn’t long before the Boston press was rallying to the Kid’s defense.