The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (113 page)

Shortly after 9/11, Ted told an old friend that while he still wished to be cremated after he died, he knew that John-Henry wanted him to be cryonically preserved and that whatever his son wanted was okay by him. But several months later, in the spring of 2002, Williams told one of his caretakers that he did not want cryonics.
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In his final months, Ted began to feel a general sense of foreboding, of disquiet and unease. He told five friends, including Bob Breitbard and Isabel Gilmore, that he was unhappy with his isolation and that he wanted to see a lawyer. He also said he was concerned that John-Henry had made a mess of his finances, and he was worried that his wishes were not being carried out.

One of the first to receive these anxious calls from Williams was Billy Reedy, an old friend from Detroit whom he had met through Islamorada
fishing guide Jimmie Albright. Reedy, who owned two bars near Tiger Stadium, had helped arrange the meeting between John-Henry and Detroit Tigers owner Mike Ilitch to discuss Hitter.net. Reedy would send Ted a shipment of sausage each year, and he had clashed with John-Henry once when young Williams said to mail packages like that through him. “I said, ‘You go fuck yourself,’ ” Reedy recalled. “ ‘I knew your father before you were born. I wouldn’t send anything to you unless Ted told me to.’ ”

Starting in late 2001 and extending into the spring of 2002, Reedy said Ted called him about a half dozen times to complain that he was feeling increasingly isolated. He asked Reedy if he could come live with him in Detroit. “He called me one Saturday and started talking to me about coming out here to live,” Reedy said. “That I was the one guy who could get him out of there. I called Bob Breitbard about it right away. Bob said there was no goddamn way.”

Williams told Reedy that he felt like he was being held captive, cut off from many of his friends. “I wondered if he was senile,” Reedy said. “When I told my wife about it, she thought he was hallucinating.” But Ted persisted: “By the second or third call he said, real quiet, ‘Do you remember what we talked about? Can you do it? You’re the guy who could do it.’ About a week later I got another one, then another one. One day I called him. He was really bad that day. I said, ‘How are you?’ He said, ‘I can’t talk right now.’ I said, ‘Do you remember talking to me about a few things?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is that why you can’t talk now?’ ‘Yes.’ ”

Reedy said he never actually told Ted no. “I was hoping it would just go away. But he kept saying, ‘I’d just like to come up there and live with you.’ I had a small house on a lake. Nothing fancy. He sounded weak. He’d cry a little bit when he talked to me. I’d say, ‘How we gonna do it, Ted? The weather up here? We got winter.’ The second or third time he called I told my wife, ‘I don’t think he is hallucinating.’ ”
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In the spring of 2002, Ted reached out for help from his old friend Daisy Bisz, who besides having helped represent him in his first divorce had drawn up an early version of his will.

“He called me in May and asked me to get an attorney for him to get his property back from John-Henry,” said Bisz. “He said John-Henry had taken everything over, taken everything he had. He asked me to come to his house. I told him I’d come as soon as I could, to hang in there and I’d try to help. He was just upset. He wasn’t nutty. He was clear. Not crying.”

But Bisz, then ninety-two, was recovering from recent surgery and
was not able to visit Williams or, it would turn out, arrange for another lawyer to help before Ted died. “I was saddened by the call, and it turned out that was the last time I got to talk to him.”
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On May 28, 2002, Ted received a visit from John Burgess, a Greenville, South Carolina, business executive who had been working with him to champion the cause of getting Shoeless Joe Jackson admitted to the Hall of Fame. Ted had contributed to the building of a bronze statue of Jackson that had recently been dedicated in Greenville, Shoeless Joe’s hometown, and Burgess wanted to show Williams a photo of the statue. He’d flown down for the day on a private plane along with his friend and lawyer Mike Glenn, who wanted to meet Williams.

While they were at Ted’s house, Bob Breitbard called and was talking with George Carter, who was back working for Ted occasionally, despite having been fired by John-Henry the previous year. Carter told Breitbard that John Burgess was visiting. The two men knew each other through Ted, and Breitbard asked Carter if he could speak with Burgess. Carter handed Burgess his cell phone. Breitbard told Burgess that Williams had called him the other day, upset. He had said: “I really need a lawyer. Things aren’t going well here.”

Burgess said he happened to have Glenn with him and offered to put the lawyer on the phone. They took the cell phone outside for privacy.
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“Bob told me that Ted felt like his son was doing things that were not appropriate, that he didn’t want,” Glenn said. “He was unhappy with the circumstances.… I told Bob I didn’t think he could do anything as a friend unless one of Ted’s other kids wanted to intervene.” Added Glenn, “It was pretty clear to me the day I was there that Ted would not be able to go to court and help himself. There were times during our visit when he was as sharp as he could be, and a few minutes later you’d think he was in a coma. He went back and forth that way.”
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Glenn wondered why Breitbard, a wealthy man with many resources at his disposal, didn’t consult an attorney on his own.
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On June 18, 2002, Buzz Hamon, a friend of Williams’s who ran his museum from 1994 to 1999, called Ted to gauge his interest in doing a book about the last twenty years of his life. The book would be written by former Williams collaborator John Underwood. Hamon said Ted was interested, but John-Henry nixed the idea. “Then Ted told me, ‘I need a lawyer. I’ve made a mistake.’ After that he went silent, like somebody had walked into the room. Our conversation ended.”
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Ted’s expressions of angst to Reedy, Bisz, Breitbard, and Hamon were delivered over the telephone, but he spoke to Isabel Gilmore in person
about his fears during her visits. “He begged me the last three or four times I was down there that he needed a lawyer,” Isabel recalled. “He said, ‘I need a lawyer. Things aren’t going right.’ Ted could hardly talk.” But she was unsure how seriously to take what he said. “I didn’t know whether it was just his being sick, and also I knew if I did anything I’d be sued by John-Henry and Claudia for interfering.” She consulted her son, a lawyer, and he advised her to stay out of it—this was a family problem, and she wasn’t part of the family.

“I didn’t know what it was about. I said, ‘Why do you want a lawyer?’ He said, ‘I just do.’ I thought it was something running through his mind. This happened three different times on three different occasions over two months in the spring of 2002. He said something like, ‘I need a lawyer. My wishes not carried out.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. His wishes. No one had ever mentioned this cryonics to me. I never dreamed of it, never heard of it until I read it in the paper after he’d died. I said, ‘What wishes? Can I take care of it? What’s the problem? Can I help?’ ‘No, I need a lawyer. I’m not going home.’

“That’s it. He meant he was not going to be cremated. He wanted to be cremated and his ashes put in Islamorada. He’d told me that back when we were dating, and he told me that again in 2002, but now he knew he was not going to be cremated, and it was bothering him as he was getting closer to death. He said this to me as I was holding his hand on one of my visits. I would say it was about a month before he died.

“I never told John-Henry or Claudia what he was saying because they had a family lawyer, and John-Henry had power of attorney. He was doing everything he could to make his father comfortable, so it never dawned on me there would be anything other than what Ted wanted.”

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illiams now had a virtual intensive care unit set up in his house with what seemed like platoons of nurses monitoring his every move. One of them, John Butcher, a paramedic and RN who had started training to become a firefighter, didn’t like what he saw when he started his shift at 2:00 a.m. on Friday, July 5.

“Ted was having a restless, difficult sleep, and I couldn’t do anything to comfort him,” Butcher recalled. “He seemed to be starting to show the signs and symptoms of shock; he was sweaty and pale, his oxygen level dropped, so I tried suctioning and ventilating manually.” But without success.
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Butcher tried to get a pulse but couldn’t. Then he asked a nurse’s aide who had come on duty, Joshua Poulin, to try, but Poulin couldn’t detect one, either. “There was absolutely no point of consciousness the whole night,” Butcher added. “He thrashed a bit and made noises, which he often did at night if he was having a dream.”

Then Kathleen Rolfingsmeier entered the room. She was the live-in nurse who coordinated all Ted’s at-home care. A Kansan with red hair and green eyes, Rolfingsmeier had been on the job for two months. “We turned him over, we tried different things and put him back on the ventilator, and it just didn’t look good to me, so I called 911,” Rolfingsmeier said. It was 8:10 a.m. She told Butcher to ride in the ambulance while she and Poulin followed in her car.
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Rolfingsmeier called John-Henry as she drove to let him know his father was being taken to the hospital, and it didn’t look good. “I could hear the terror in his voice,” she remembered. John-Henry was still in Fort Myers, two hundred miles to the south, nursing the broken rib he’d
sustained on June 27. His new girlfriend, Jenna Bernreuter, was with him.

John-Henry struggled to contain his emotions and to prepare to implement his cryonics plan of action. Over the next half hour, he would make a series of cell phone calls to Rolfingsmeier, Butcher, Josh Poulin, Dr. Joseph Dorn (Ted’s primary care physician), Alcor officials, and others. One person he could not reach was his sister Claudia, who had left Tampa early that morning to fly to Boston for the weekend.

Arriving at the hospital at 8:30, Rolfingsmeier still had John-Henry on the line and handed her phone to Butcher, who had been in the ambulance and had more recent news. Butcher told John-Henry that they had done CPR on Ted on the way to the hospital, and now he was being worked on in the emergency room.

“I told him they were doing everything they could, but it didn’t look hopeful, and he instructed me that if they terminated resuscitation efforts to pack him in ice so he could be transferred to the cryonics place in Arizona,” recalled Butcher.

Ted was pronounced dead at 8:49 a.m.

Butcher called John-Henry back with the news. “He was upset—very, very upset, but he still had it together that he wanted his dad prepped for Alcor. He was very explicit with those instructions.”

Butcher walked back into the ER and relayed John-Henry’s instructions that Ted should be packed in ice. This was no everyday request at Citrus Memorial, so the staff looked at Butcher quizzically.

“I told them first, and they’re looking at me like, ‘What?’ They weren’t moving as quickly as John-Henry wanted them to to get him packed,” Butcher said.

Then Joseph Dorn arrived. Dorn had been Ted’s doctor since 1996, and the two had become friendly. Dorn, who was also a Methodist missionary, had occasionally made house calls, and he and his family had socialized with Ted. John-Henry had felt comfortable enough with Dorn to have confided in him about his cryonics plan more than a year earlier, so when Dorn spoke by phone with John-Henry that morning, the doctor was not surprised, and he helped facilitate young Williams’s wishes.

Someone ran down the hall and returned with a garbage bag containing crushed ice. “They put a large bag of ice on his body, but he really needed to be encased,” Rolfingsmeier said. “So I remember telling them that they had to totally surround him. It was just a bag sitting on his abdomen.” Soon the blood thinner heparin was being pumped into Ted’s veins per the instructions of Alcor and John-Henry.

Several miles away, Bobby-Jo and Mark Ferrell had heard the siren of an ambulance but hadn’t thought much of it; they lived in an elderly community, and people were always being taken to the hospital, it seemed.

It had been ten months since Bobby-Jo had seen Ted. During that time, she had confided to three of her friends that John-Henry was planning to freeze their father when he died. Now one of those friends, who coincidentally was at Citrus Memorial Hospital when Williams arrived, called. Mark answered the phone.

“He said, ‘Tell Jo her worst nightmare is happening. They’re pumping Ted full of blood thinners and icing him down,’ ” Mark said. “Then I had to go and tell my wife that her father was dead. I mean, they were gonna try to hide it, sneak him out of here. But I got that call.”
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To pick up Ted’s body, the hospital called Dwight Hooper, proprietor of Hooper Funeral Homes & Crematory, to which the local newspaper, the
Citrus County Chronicle,
had given its Best of the Best award each year for as many years as anyone could remember. Hooper was thirty-two, the newest generation in a business that had been family owned and operated since 1946. He had never handled a cryonics case before. “I talked to people at Alcor,” Hooper said. “They gave simple instructions on packing: ‘Cool the body off as best you can, and we’ll take it from there.’ I’d assumed they would want dry ice, and that might be hard to find on short notice, but they said just regular ice.” Hooper sent someone down to the local Winn-Dixie to purchase the necessary amount.
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He was told to take the body to the Ocala airport, where he would meet the private plane that Alcor was sending. Hooper pulled his hearse out of the funeral home around noon for the thirty-minute trip to the airport, driving alone with Ted.

John-Henry got in his car and raced north on Interstate 75 from Fort Myers. Jenna followed in her car. “John-Henry felt terrible guilt and also denial,” she said. “He wasn’t there when his dad died. He’d been there for Ted so much, and then the day it happened he was not there.”
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When John-Henry arrived at the airport, he was wearing Ted’s navy blue blazer. He was all business, cell phone glued to his ear, pacing back and forth, organizing, talking to Alcor, and still trying to reach Claudia. Ted had died when she was in the air, and John-Henry desperately wanted to give her the news himself rather than have her learn about it on television.

Jenna and John-Henry didn’t talk much. “I gave him a big hug. He’d have moments where he’d break down, crying and crying. I sat with the Ziegler [the steel case often used to transport dead bodies], and he would come up to touch it.” When he did so, she would leave so that he could have some private moments with his father.

Then Dave Hayes, the Suspended Animation official who was serving as Alcor’s field representative, arrived. He introduced himself to John-Henry; told him how sorry he was. Hayes opened up the Ziegler and tended to Ted, assisted by Jenna, with her nurse’s training. He injected more heparin through Ted’s dialysis catheter, which was still attached to the body.

Jenna made sure John-Henry didn’t see any of this. “I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to see his father like that,” she said. “At that point he’d been dead six or seven hours. That wasn’t his dad anymore, and he needed to let Dave Hayes and I do this. So we got screwdrivers, opened up the case, and put more ice in. I wrapped Ted’s head in a towel, and I just looked at him and said, ‘Bye.’ ”

Hayes still had a raft of paperwork to take care of before he could legally take possession of the body. Unlike virtually everyone else whose bodies were frozen at Alcor, Ted had never submitted an application or signed up for the procedure himself. Nor had John-Henry ever observed that formality on behalf of his father. Hayes called his girlfriend in Atlanta, who went online and directed him to a nearby notary. After about a half hour, Hayes and John-Henry returned to the Ocala airport, where the plane had arrived.

The jet chartered by Alcor was small, with only a pilot and copilot. One of the pilots, Howard Lopez, served as a witness to some of the paperwork John-Henry was now feverishly completing. At 2:44 p.m., about six hours after Ted was pronounced dead, John-Henry faxed an application to Alcor in his father’s name. Then Hayes, Hooper, Jenna, and the pilots loaded the Ziegler case on the plane, strapping it into an open section in the middle. There were four seats in the back. John-Henry and Jenna debated whether one of them should accompany the body to Arizona, but John-Henry decided he had to drive to Tampa to meet Claudia, who was now on her way back from Boston. Jenna preferred to stay home. Hayes convinced them everything would be fine. The plane took off around 5:45 p.m.

Hooper was instructed by Eric Abel to say nothing to the press about what he did that day or how Ted’s body was disposed of. And the death certificate would be deliberately vague on that point—the place of disposition, it said, was “undetermined.”

Bobby-Jo, meanwhile, was desperately trying to find out where her father’s body was. But John-Henry wasn’t taking her calls, so she and Mark called John Heer, a lawyer in Cleveland whose wife was a friend of Bobby-Jo’s from the time both families had lived in Nashville.
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Six months earlier, Bobby-Jo had confided in Heer about John-Henry’s plans for cryonics and about the fact that he had barred her from visiting her father. Hearing that the cryonics plan was on, Heer told Mark to contact law enforcement to see if there was any way they could help. He then advised Bobby-Jo to send an e-mail to Alcor warning the company not to proceed with plans to freeze Ted. Heer, a specialist in environmental law, was not familiar with the specifics of the relevant laws, but he decided there was no harm in putting an adversary on written notice.
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Bobby-Jo went online to the Alcor website, took down the name and contact information of the first official she saw, and then, at 1:25 p.m., more than four hours before Ted’s body left Florida, sent the following e-mail to Jennifer Chapman, then Alcor’s member services administrator:

Getting off the plane in Boston late that morning, Claudia Williams noticed large clusters of people grouped around TV sets, the telltale sign of a big breaking news story. She walked over to see what it was, only to learn her father had died.

“I landed, saw it on the TV, turned right around at the gate, got back on the plane, and came home,” Claudia recalled. “John-Henry had been trying to get ahold of me, but my cell phone wasn’t working. I called him, and he said he’d meet me at the airport in Tampa.”
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Claudia had sensed Ted was close to death, and she would speculate later that he had not wanted her or John-Henry to be with him when he died. Ted had called her early on the morning of July 3—to say good-bye,
she felt in retrospect. “He called up, and he was having trouble breathing. It was five thirty or six in the morning. He said, ‘Claudia? Claudia? I love you! I love you! Don’t you ever forget it!’ ”

When John-Henry met her in Tampa, Claudia was struck by how apologetic he was for not having been able to reach her. “I was afraid to ask him questions,” she recalled, “because he was driving, and I didn’t want him to cry. But he just went on, we were driving home, and on his own, he just told me everything that went down—the phone call that he got from the nurses from the house before the ambulance came and how Dad was struggling. And John-Henry was just telling me all this and crying, and I asked him, I said, ‘Did you talk to Dad at all?’ And he said he did, on the phone, in the ambulance on the way over there.” He had, he explained, called John Butcher, the attendant who was riding with Ted in the ambulance. Then Butcher had placed the phone to Ted’s ear, and she said John-Henry “yelled to him that he loved him.”

It warmed Claudia to hear this dramatic story, and she cried as she told it years later. But according to Butcher, the story wasn’t true. There was no call from John-Henry then. “I cannot substantiate that” was the way Butcher put it—diplomatically—reaffirming that he did not speak with John-Henry until they had already arrived at the hospital and Ted was in the emergency room. The paramedic in the ambulance at the time, Teresa Fletcher, confirmed Butcher’s account.
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It was a puzzling piece of hyperbole, since while he’d been away playing baseball, John-Henry had dutifully called in daily to check on Ted, including once on July 4.

John Heer finally reached Eric Abel in the early evening, but Abel refused to tell him what was going on or where Ted’s body was. “I remember saying, ‘Eric, you’ve got to be kidding me. This is the daughter, and she’s entitled to know what happened to her father.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s what John-Henry and Claudia want me to tell you.’ ”