The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams (55 page)

“When I passed the important information to him, he listened thoughtfully, but then and there, I knew his fierce pride would not allow him to take the necessary steps for dismissal from his duty,” Turner wrote. “As the future later proved for itself, Ted was 100 percent correct in his judgment. Had he followed through with the plan to excuse himself from
duty, never would Ted have held his head so high or be able to face his loyal public with the same air of confidence as he now can.”

Accompanied by Yankees infielder Jerry Coleman, Ted appeared for his physical at the vast Naval Air Station Jacksonville on April 2 at 10:00 a.m. Coleman and Williams were the only two men examined at that time. A medical board consisting of a handful of officers headed by a Captain J. C. Early conducted the exam, which lasted two hours. Commander L. S. Sims, who assisted Early, was first out of the examination room. “Both boys are in,” Sims said to six reporters waiting outside. Sims watched with amusement as two of the reporters collided and nearly knocked each other down as they raced for a phone in the lobby nearby to spread the news. He suggested they wait just to be sure, because the X-rays of Williams’s elbow hadn’t been developed yet.

That seemed a mere formality. Soon Captain Early appeared with the ballplayers in tow. “Meet Captain Coleman and Captain Williams, boys,” Early said, adding that X-rays and an examination of Ted’s elbow had shown “no significant limitations.” Both players seemed resigned to the decision. “Well, I’m back in the Marines,” said Ted. “I’ll try to be a good one. After that, who knows?”
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Williams’s orders were to report on May 2 to the Marine Air Reserve Training Command at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, for a four-week refresher course and then go to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, in Havelock, North Carolina. Before then, on April 30, the Red Sox staged “Ted Williams Day” to commemorate what was to be their star’s last game of the season and—who knew?—perhaps of his career. Just under twenty-five thousand fans turned out on a sunny and warm Wednesday afternoon to say their good-byes to Ted, who before the game was feted with an assortment of gifts ranging from a new Cadillac donated by a handful of friends to hundreds of “memory books” containing the signatures of some 430,000 admirers, which had been collected by the
Herald
and
Traveler
newspapers. Though it was not announced, the Red Sox also moved to mitigate the sting of his recall by paying Ted’s full $85,000 salary for 1952.

There were tributes from Massachusetts governor Paul Dever, Boston mayor John Hynes, and other dignitaries as Williams listened, head down, hands clasped behind his back, nervously pawing the ground with his left foot. When emcee Curt Gowdy gave him the microphone, Ted said: “I’ve always believed that one of the finest things that could happen to any ballplayer was to have a day for him, and my being so honored today with such little advance fanfare makes me feel humbly
honored. Little did I realize in 1938 that I was joining such a wonderful organization and that I was to be with so grand an owner. I wish I could remain all summer for I feel sure the Sox will surprise a lot of people. I do hope you fans stick with them. This is a day I’ll remember as long as I live, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
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As the crowd roared and Williams bathed in the cheers, a friend standing just behind him,
Herald
sports editor Ed Costello, whispered to him: “Tip your hat.” Ted yanked his hat from his back pocket and held it aloft, first to the right-field grandstand. The fans cheered louder still. Then he turned to home plate and finally to left field. The Kid thought he was done, but Costello leaned in again and whispered: “Center field. Don’t forget center field.”

“Not those [expletives] too!” said Williams, laughing.
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With that, the Red Sox and their opponents that day, the Detroit Tigers, joined hands. Williams was in the middle: on his left was Dominic DiMaggio; on his right was Private Fred Wolfe, an injured Korean War veteran confined to a wheelchair. Then the players and fans sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

Amid all the huzzahs for Ted, which included a resolution from the Massachusetts Senate praising him for being an “inspiration… to the youth of the country,” the only discordant note was struck by Dave Egan, who, after blasting the Marine Corps for recalling Williams, had reverted to form by castigating the Red Sox that very morning for hosting a day in honor of someone he considered ill-mannered and a terrible role model for kids.

If Ted was aware of the blast—and he almost certainly was, since he always paid close attention to Egan—it didn’t appear to bother him. Rather, he seemed to revel in the adulation that poured down on him. He was applauded for anything he did: running to his position in left field, catching a fly ball, running back to the dugout, coming out to the on-deck circle, singling his first time at bat off Virgil Trucks—even striking out in the third inning.

But in the bottom of the seventh, in what figured to be his final at bat that season—and possibly, many thought, his final at bat ever—Williams jolted the crowd past polite applause and into frenzy. With the
game tied 3–3 and a man on base, Ted dug in against Dizzy Trout. He fouled off the first pitch. Then Trout snapped off a knee-high curve, and Williams drove the ball into the wind and six rows deep in the right-field grandstand.

“No crowd ever was paid off with a bigger thrill as Ted raced around the sacks,” wrote Arthur Sampson in the
Herald.
“When he ducked into the dugout to get away from the applause as quickly as possible, as is his custom, his teammates pounded him heartily in their elation.”
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There was no tip of the hat, as was also his custom. “I said I wouldn’t tip my cap right along,” Ted told the writers afterward, “and I had no intention of doing it. That’s the way I feel about it.” And how did this homer compare with the other thrills he’d had in his career? “Oh, it was a thrill,” Williams replied. “But it didn’t compare with the one I hit off Claude Passeau in the All Star game in Detroit in ’41. That will always stand as my top thrill in this game.” Still, his teammates were incredulous at the calling card he had left them. “He never said it out loud, but I’m sure he wanted to hit a home run before he went to Korea,” recalled Ken Wood, a utility outfielder on the Red Sox for part of 1952, who was at Fenway that day. “He did it. It was almost to say, ‘I’ll leave you with something to remember me by.’ ”
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That night, Ted threw a good-bye party for himself at Jimmy O’Keefe’s, the Boylston Street saloon he frequented, run by his pal Bill Greeley. Not a single teammate or anyone else from the Red Sox was invited—no big shots at all, in fact, which was how Williams liked it. The core group was the so-called Thirteen-Year-Olds, a reference to eight Bostonians who had been close to Ted for the thirteen years he had been with the Red Sox, since his rookie year of 1939. Besides Greeley, this regular-guy crowd included theater manager John Buckley; state cop John Blake; former Red Sox batboy Freddy Stack, who by then was a fireman; Ted’s dentist, Dr. Sidney Isherwood; former Sheraton hotel bellhops Dave and Chick Hunter; and Johnny Benedetti, who had lived in the suite next to Williams’s in the old Canterbury Hotel. Also attending were Ted’s manager, Fred Corcoran, and Dr. Russell Sullivan, his medical confidant on the Korean call-up. “There isn’t a soul here who hasn’t helped me appreciate the friendliness of Bostonians,” Ted remarked to George Carens, a trusted
Traveler
writer whom Williams had allowed in to chronicle the evening.
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The next morning, Ted set out for the Naval Air Station in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, where he would begin his training on the SNJ fighter plane. Ted hitched a ride with Raymond
Sisk, the Boston friend he had served with in World War II at Chapel Hill, Bunker Hill, and Pensacola. Sisk had also been recalled for Korea duty.

They arrived at Willow Grove that evening, and all looked quiet. Remembered Sisk, “Ted said, ‘Just drive by at first. These Philadelphia reporters are the worst in the world.’ On the first pass there was no one in sight. Then they came out of the woodwork. By the time we got back, there were ten or twelve all of a sudden, coming up and taking pictures. The colonel came out and said Ted had to check in, then they could sit down and talk to him.”
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“I hope very much that I can play when I get out,” Ted later told the writers. “I’m going to do the best I can. This is a really wonderful looking base. The best I’ve ever seen.” The next day, the Marines could not resist staging a photo op. They had Williams stand next to the old recruiting poster he’d put out for the Corps that featured his photo and the message “Ask the man who was one!” A smiling Ted was shown changing “was” to “is.”

Before long, Doris and Bobby-Jo arrived and moved into a hotel in nearby Doylestown. Ted easily got the hang of flying again and was assigned an instructor, Bill Churchman, who had also been his instructor at Pensacola during World War II.

“Ted and I became the closest of friends when he became my student at Willow Grove,” Churchman said. “I knew him well enough to say hello, and we reminisced about Pensacola. I challenged him to a dogfight, needling him. You climb to five thousand feet flying SNJs. You decide who takes the altitude advantage and who goes below. Higher directs the order of the scissoring. I said to Williams on my radio, ‘Where the hell are you?’ And he was right in my rearview mirror, ready to shoot me down. I relaxed a little bit, and he beat the hell out of me. We’d have a lot of fun, and [we’d] bullshit together. I never found an indication he wasn’t one hundred percent with the program. He never complained.”
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After three weeks, Commander Clarke Ingraham reported that Williams was doing “very, very well. Not only has he done well, but he’s extremely popular here.”
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Ingraham said Williams would soon be going to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point for advanced instruction and operational training.

Marine Headquarters was thrilled, and no doubt relieved, that Williams was adapting well and being a good soldier, at least in his public statements. The hierarchy almost certainly would have known that Ted had hired a lawyer to explore his rights and that he had consulted with
Dr. Sullivan, who had put out feelers to Marine officials he considered sympathetic. Lemuel Shepherd, then the Marine Corps Commandant, may also have heard that Ted felt he had had a deal with Commandant Alexander Vandegrift after World War II that specified he was not to be recalled.

In any case, on May 22, four days before Commander Ingraham gave his glowing progress report on Ted, Shepherd wrote Williams an extraordinary private letter on official Marine Commandant’s office letterhead.

When Ted reported to Cherry Point, the largest Marine Air Station in the country, located in Havelock, a small city in eastern North Carolina, he was called in to see the commanding general of the Second Marine
Aircraft Wing. The general said the station was fielding a baseball team and they’d love it if the Red Sox star would join the club.

“Of course that was anathema to Ted, and he viewed it as child’s play,” recalled Tom Ross, then a major at Cherry Point who also had been recalled for Korea duty after serving in World War II and who became a friend to Williams.
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“He said something to the effect that, ‘Well, my fee for baseball is about ten thousand dollars a game,’ which of course closed the discussion.”

It was at Cherry Point that Williams learned to fly jets—the Grumman F9F Panther. He took to the new plane quickly, marveling at how easily it handled and how much faster and more powerful it was compared to what he had been used to flying. He would frequently ask Ross and others technical questions: What was the procedure for a restart during a flameout? What about the oxygen system, which had some peculiarities as you went up in altitude? The fuel control system?

If Ross took to Ted, Hoyle Barr, the squadron commander, did not. “He was a spoiled-brat type,” Barr said of Williams. “He had too much money and had too many people rooting for him. By the time I got ahold of him there was no straightening him out. He was thoroughly spoiled. But he was one of the best pilots I ever knew. He had instant reflexes as good as I’d ever seen. He was very talented.”
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