The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (20 page)

On their way north, the Red Sox stopped in Atlanta to play an exhibition game on April 1 against the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association. The right-field portion of the park was oddly designed—almost as though it were a prison compound. It had a succession of three fences, each rising higher than the one before it, like steps. The farthest fence had been too far for Crackers batters, so management had built a second fence in front of it; when the second fence had also proved too challenging, they had built the third, closer still.

During batting practice, Johnny Orlando goaded Ted by telling him that Babe Ruth had once cleared all three fences with a home run. “I wanted to get him worked up so he’d give the crowd a show,” Orlando said.
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His first three times up, Williams struck out. On his fourth appearance, in the seventh inning, he tripled in three runs. But in the eighth, he struck out with two men on and went back to right field seething. Then a short fly ball was hit out to Ted in foul territory. After dropping it, he became so enraged that he picked the ball up and heaved it out of the park—over the last fence he’d been trying to reach with his bat—and onto Ponce de Leon Avenue.

Cronin immediately yanked Ted from the game. He “disappeared into the clubhouse wearing a sheepish grin,” the
Globe
’s Gerry Moore reported, adding that Cronin planned a “nice fatherly talk” with the rookie back at the hotel.
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The Sox lost, 10–9.

Williams was back in the lineup for a rematch with the Crackers the next day, and this time “the glorious screwball… problem child,” as Moore called him, smacked one over that last fence and made a “spectacular fielding play,” to boot, as the Sox won, 3–0.
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Entering the dugout after his home run, Ted said he gave Orlando “a hard look.”
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Five days later, the Red Sox arrived in South Carolina by train for the Cincinnati Reds game scheduled by Yawkey in Florence.

Yawkey was no stranger to Florence. According to his friends and associates, after he bought the Red Sox, at age thirty, he would take the train down to South Carolina after the season ended and get off in Florence, which is some seventy miles north of his estate in Georgetown. The estate consisted of thirty-one square miles of marshland, managed wetlands, pristine beach, and forests spread out over North, South, and Cat Islands. Today the varying habitats support more than two hundred species of birds, including peregrine falcons, golden and bald eagles, and the federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.

Yawkey had inherited all this, along with the rest of his wealth, from his uncle, William Hoover Yawkey. Born into a genteel New York family and educated at Yale and a fancy prep school before that, Tom was the son of Thomas and Augusta Austin. After his father and mother both died when he was young, Tom was taken in by his mother’s brother, William Yawkey, the heir to a mining, oil, and timber fortune who also owned the Detroit Tigers. Tom was seven. Yawkey later adopted his nephew and gave him the last name Yawkey. When William died suddenly in 1919, he left half his $40 million estate, as well as two $500,000 trust funds, to Tom Yawkey, who was then only sixteen. The will provided
that most of the proceeds be withheld until he reached the age of thirty, in 1933. That was the year he bought the Red Sox.

Tom loved the baseball life he had soaked up hanging around his uncle, and would pick up William’s habit of drinking heavily with executives, managers, and favored players. Ty Cobb had been especially pampered by the elder Yawkey, and Cobb reportedly was at William’s bedside when he died. Cobb, a mercurial avowed racist and frequent plantation guest, then lavished his attention on young Tom and encouraged him to buy a major-league team of his own as soon as his ship came in.

Tom Yawkey had been married since 1925 to Elise Sparrow of Birmingham, Alabama, but the marriage was troubled. Elise, a former Miss Alabama and Broadway showgirl, was an effusive socialite who loved to party, while Yawkey was a virtual recluse who preferred to quietly hunt, fish, and tend to his Red Sox. But Yawkey, by all accounts, also liked to patronize houses of ill repute, and while in Florence, he made the acquaintance of one Hazel Weisse, a former Indiana schoolteacher who had decided there was an easier way to make a living.

Yawkey grew fond of Hazel, and around 1935, he came to her with a business proposition. The International Paper Company was opening a plant in Georgetown. The city fathers were concerned that scores of factory workers with too much time on their hands might terrorize the fragile belles in town. Instead it was thought prudent that a cathouse be established to enable the workers to channel their energy in alternative directions. So acting as both a friend and civic leader, Yawkey asked Hazel if she would move to Georgetown to establish the business, and he offered to finance the venture. Hazel accepted, and before long the Sunset Lodge was up and running just south of town, along Route 17.

According to Phil Wilkinson, a biologist who lived on the Yawkey estate for eleven years beginning in 1966 and helped his boss manage the wildlife on the property, Yawkey told him the money he gave Hazel was a loan, and that she “quickly” repaid it, with interest.
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Hazel told her friends—including Ralph Ford Jr., whose parents owned a fine local grocery where the plantation owners shopped; George Daniels, her Charleston-based financial adviser; and Bettye Roberts, who bought the Sunset Lodge after it closed in 1969—that she was fully indebted to Yawkey financially.

“She’d say, ‘If it hadn’t been for Tom,’ ” Roberts recalled. “He would pay handsomely for the girls, unlike other dignitaries like the sheriff, who did not pay. The girls were real happy when they went out to
Mr. Yawkey’s place. They made good money. When the Red Sox would come down, all the girls would go to his plantation and entertain. Not just for the night but for a couple of days. That’s what she told me.”

Yawkey would frequently visit Sunset Lodge as well. And whereas Hazel had a rule that dogs were not allowed, she would waive that requirement for the Red Sox owner, who would sometimes appear with his Labrador retriever. “The dog stayed at the foot of the stairs until Yawkey finished his business,” Roberts said. “He was lord and master there. Hazel thought he was very generous. Anything she needed, he saw to it that she got it. Like they needed more electricity, and he took a transformer from his plantation and had it installed so she could have enough power. She needed a stronger current for air-conditioning. It was during the war that Yawkey did this for her. During the war you could not come by a transformer, and you had to have some pull to get it.”
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The Sunset Lodge complex was fifteen acres, consisting of a main house with four bedrooms and several outbuildings with apartments. In the main house, there was a jukebox for dancing and a cigarette machine. Both would only take dollar bills. Hazel generally kept eighteen girls on the premises but might cut back to a dozen during slower times of the year. The clientele was upscale—mostly businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and politicians. “She wouldn’t let any drunks come in,” said Roberts. “She’d take ship captains but not the ordinary sailor. I guess when you’re in that business you can read people pretty well.”

George Daniels, who served as Hazel’s financial adviser from 1954 to 1974, when she died of cancer, said Weisse told him that after backing her financially, Yawkey “went to the sheriff and told him to lay off, and that she would run a very fine establishment. She was a very fascinating person, with a heart big as a whale. She did a tremendous amount of charitable things in Georgetown anonymously. She ran a very tight house of prostitution and insisted that the girls conduct themselves accordingly. They were meticulously examined regularly by one of the local doctors.”
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Ralph Ford, whose father was Yawkey’s best friend in Georgetown, said that after a night of drinking and carousing at Sunset, Yawkey would often come by the Ford house and roust him from bed. Ralph junior played the organ and piano, and Yawkey would demand that he get up and play for him. When he was old enough, Ford was invited each year to Hazel’s birthday party at Sunset, which was considered the social event of the year in Georgetown. “It was all men,” Ford said. “We
supplied the food from Ford’s store. The girls were on the house. There were doctors, lawyers, politicians. The Social Register of Georgetown. Most of the men’s wives knew. They were right proud to have their husbands invited, as I recall.”

According to Ford, Yawkey did most of his philandering with the Sunset girls between 1939, when he was separated from Elise, and 1944, when he was divorced and married Jean Hollander. Yawkey had met Jean in New York, where she worked as a model for Jay Thorpe, a high-end women’s clothing store on West 57th Street.
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Elise took Tom shopping at the store one day, and she asked Jean to model a dress for her. After Tom and Elise separated, he began courting Jean, who also volunteered at the Red Cross. When she came to Boston to see Yawkey, she would wear her Red Cross uniform in an effort to travel incognito.
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They dated for about five years, but Tom would not marry Jean until Elise remarried first. Tom and Jean—both dressed in hunting clothes—were wed on Christmas Eve of 1944 in Georgetown at C. L. Ford & Sons, Inc., reputed to be the finest grocery store south of S. S. Pierce in Boston.

“The Ford family did not care for Jean because they thought she went after Tom for his money,” said Ralph. “Maybe she did, but she blended into his life down here. No makeup, hunting and fishing—let herself go to pot. Back in New York she looked like a model again.”

But Yawkey continued to visit Sunset Lodge. “Tom went to Sunset frequently between wives and even after,” said Ford. “He was a whore-hopper. He was oversexed but shy, too. He built his own whorehouse so he wouldn’t have to be shy. Tom would talk about his whoring. He made no bones about it.”

Jean Yawkey took a dim view of Tom’s Sunset dalliances but apparently tolerated them. Once, he took her there just to show her the operation. “Jean was highly insulted,” Ford said.
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To others, Mrs. Yawkey offered a more positive spin about her husband and Sunset. “She said this was Tom helping the lady out,” said John Harrington, who ran the Red Sox after Jean’s death in 1992, on behalf of her JRY Trust, until the team was sold in 2002.
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Yawkey often blurred the owner-player relationship and sought out friendships with players he especially liked, such as Joe Cronin, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, and Mike “Pinky” Higgins. Yawkey worshipped Ted and undoubtedly would have liked to have had something comparable with him. Williams resisted that, but according to Harrington, friends and associates of Yawkey in South Carolina, and people who
used to live on his estate, Ted was a visitor to Georgetown over the years, along with other members of the Red Sox, including Cronin, Grove, and Foxx.
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Once, when Cronin was visiting, Yawkey decided to get up a sandlot game in front of his house, and he sent word to have the field hands come over to fill out the teams. Wallace Lawrimore, whose father, Hampton, lived on the property with his family and worked as Yawkey’s chief mechanic from the early 1930s to the early ’50s, was appointed the scorekeeper. Wallace was then six.

“I drew numbers in the sand. It was on South Island. They had the colored people that was working. Yawkey said to send people over. ‘Throw down your shovel!’ My daddy played first base. Cronin was on his team. He couldn’t remember Daddy’s name so he called him Skidmore, for his slide. Yawkey pitched for one team and Captain Gibson pitched for the other team. Williams wasn’t there that day.”

Jim Gibson was the overseer who managed the Yawkey estate. The black field hands usually called him Captain Jim. Wallace’s dad was Captain Hamp.

Yawkey encouraged his field hands to play baseball on their own and equipped them with bats, balls, and gloves. He even made a crude diamond, where they practiced. “They had a real field on the plantation that Mr. Yawkey had fixed up for the colored boys,” Wallace said. “They had a pretty good team. This was on the plantation side. Mosquito Creek cut it off—across that they called the plantation side. It was about five miles from the Yawkey house. But two, three, or four times they played on the lawn in front of Yawkey’s house.”
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Phil Wilkinson, Yawkey’s biologist in residence, recalled a later Williams visit, around 1970. “Ted was by himself. I rode around with him and Mr. Yawkey. Mr. Yawkey drove. One of my impressions was they were good friends. They’d maintained their friendship after Ted was out of the game. Both of them were avid fishermen, but they both had different ideas about it. They would hassle on technique, and neither would give in to the other.”

Wallace Lawrimore vividly remembered the April 6, 1939, game in Florence between the Red Sox and the Reds. “Daddy carried two carloads
of family to the game. We all went up to the dugout to tell Cronin we wanted some passes to get in. I got a program from that day, with all the players’ autographs.”

The one ball field Florence had was deemed unsuitable for a major-league game because the fences were too short, so it was decided to build a field from scratch at the local fairgrounds. They laid down a coating of dirt for the infield and put up some circus-style bleachers for the 2,285 spectators who showed up, but when it came time for the game, gale-force winds blowing out toward left field drove the dirt everywhere, and conditions made the game virtually unplayable. It was called in the ninth inning, with the score tied 18–18, because they ran out of baseballs. Ted went 1–2 before leaving the game in the third inning after complaining of chills and a fever.

Several days later, Gerry Moore of the
Globe
summed up spring training and provided a succinct theme for the coming season in a piece perfectly headlined:
TED WILLIAMS THE ANSWER TO A SPORTS WRITER’S PRAYER
.