Ted & Me

by Dan Gutman

  “WAKE UP!”

  I woke up.

  “We gotta drive to Washington and tell President Roosevelt about Pearl Harbor!”

  It was the next morning, and Ted Williams was screaming at me again. The euphoria of hitting .400 seemed to have worn off. I took a shower, brushed my teeth with that Pepsodent stuff, and got dressed.

  Ted was wearing cheap tennis sneakers, a pair of baggy pants, and a red-checked shirt that looked like it was made from the tablecloth of an Italian restaurant. It seemed like a strange way for somebody to dress who hoped to meet with the president of the United States.

  “I thought you would put on a tie or something,” I said.

  “I’ve found that you don’t need to wear a necktie if you can hit,” Ted replied.

  It was early, not even eight o’clock in the morning. We ordered bacon and eggs from room service and checked out of the hotel. A guy was sent to get Ted’s car from the parking lot.

  “Hop in,” Ted told me as he slipped the guy a bill.

  I was expecting that a famous celebrity like Ted Williams would have a limousine or some fancy wheels. But the car in front of me was a Ford station wagon, and it didn’t even look new. The inside was kind of messed up, and there was junk all over the backseat. Instead of power windows it had those windows you have to roll down with a crank. And we would need that, because the car didn’t have air-conditioning.

  Thinking about it, the station wagon was a death trap. There were no seat belts or mirrors on the sides. Air bags? Forget it. They hadn’t been invented yet. If we got into a head-on collision, I would go flying through the windshield.

  The car didn’t even have turn signals! When we pulled away from the hotel, Ted rolled down the window and stuck his hand out to let the cars behind him know which way we were turning.

  Washington is less than 150 miles from Philadelphia, Ted told me. I figured that would be a few hours on the highway. We could be in Washington by lunchtime, meet the president, and I would be back in Louisville before dinner.

  Only one problem: there was no highway. It hadn’t been built yet. The only way to get to Washington was to take narrow, two-lane roads. But that didn’t seem to bother Ted. He started driving.

  Ted’s car didn’t have a GPS, of course. That wouldn’t be invented for decades. He told me to pull a map out of the glove compartment and be his navigator. I’m pretty good at that stuff, and it didn’t take long to figure out that the best way to get south toward Washington would be to take Route 1.

  Soon we were out of Philadelphia, and I started to see a series of small red billboards with white letters. They totally baffled me. The first one simply said…

  DOES YOUR HUSBAND MISBEHAVE?

  I didn’t think much about it. But then, a little down the road, a second sign appeared….

  GRUNT AND GRUMBLE?

  Now I was really confused. Then a third sign said…

  RANT AND RAVE?

  The fourth sign really shocked me. It said…

  SHOOT THE BRUTE

  “They’re telling women to shoot their husbands!” I exclaimed.

  Ted laughed and pointed to one last sign as we approached it….

  SOME BURMA-SHAVE

  “It’s an ad for shaving cream,” he told me. “Are you telling me they don’t have Burma-Shave ads in Louisville?”

  Not in my century they don’t. A few miles down the road we passed another series of evenly spaced signs. These read…

  IF HARMONY

  IS WHAT

  YOU CRAVE

  THEN GET

  A TUBA

  BURMA-SHAVE

  We continued on Route 1 through rural Pennsylvania for a while until I spotted a WELCOME TO MARYLAND sign. About ten miles after that we went over a bridge that crossed the Susquehanna River.

  “After we finish talking to President Roosevelt, I’ll help you get a train back to Louisville,” Ted told me. “I’ll drive you to Union Station in Washington.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I can get home on my own.”

  I explained to Ted that I didn’t need to take a train. My baseball cards would take me home. It was hard for him to comprehend that, of course, and he drove along without talking for a while as he tried to grasp the idea.

  “I’ll bet you miss your mom and dad,” he finally said.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “They got divorced a few years ago.”

  “Mine too,” Ted said.

  He said his parents were never close and split up when he was playing minor-league ball in Minneapolis. Then he started to talk about his childhood. It hadn’t been a happy time for him.

  He was named after Teddy Roosevelt, he told me; and he grew up in San Diego with his brother, Danny. Their father ran a little photo studio, and they didn’t see much of him. He usually got home late at night, and sometimes he had too much to drink. Ted’s father reminded me a little of my father. But Ted said his dad had never seen him play a game in the majors, which was amazing to me. If I ever made it to the big leagues, my dad would be there every day.

  Ted gestured with his hands as he talked. Sometimes he would take them off the wheel and steer with his knees so he could express himself.

  His mother, he told me, worked for the Salvation Army. That sounded like a good thing, but Ted said he didn’t see much of her either because she was always out on the street asking people to donate money.

  “My brother and I would be on the front porch past ten o’clock at night waiting for her,” Ted told me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He was talking very calmly now. It was so different from the times he would be yelling and screaming. Today they would probably call Ted Williams bipolar or something and give him pills to keep himself under control.

  Ted told me that his mother didn’t cook many meals when he was a kid, and she hardly ever cleaned. He was ashamed of his house and didn’t bring friends home with him.

  “We had mice,” he said, and left it at that.

  I never saw any mice in my house, but it’s no mansion. Money has been a problem ever since my mom and dad split up. I told Ted that we probably wouldn’t be able to afford college for me.

  “Oh, you gotta go to college,” he told me. “You don’t want to grow up and become a bum like me, do you?”

  Despite it all, Ted said his childhood wasn’t too bad because the only thing he ever cared about was playing baseball. He would play all day long in the summer. He told me he was really skinny and that he would sometimes eat a quart of ice cream before bed because he wanted to gain weight and get bigger.

  “I guess that’s why I like underdogs,” he said, “because I was one.”

  We pulled into a gas station to fill up, and Ted casually mentioned that his mother’s parents were Mexican.

  “You’re Mexican?” I asked.

  I never heard that before. He didn’t look Mexican.

  “Half Mexican, yeah,” Ted replied as he got out of the car.

  Ted pumped the gas—12 CENTS A GALLON!—and paid the attendant. There was a little market next door. We stopped in to pick up some sandwiches for lunch. While Ted ordered, I walked around to check out the prices: A dozen eggs: 47 cents. A gallon of milk: 54 cents. A jar of Peter Pan peanut butter: 16 cents. A loaf of bread: 9 cents!

  At the cash register, the lady asked Ted if he needed cigarettes. I guess just about everybody smoked, so she would ask all the customers. He waved her away.

  “That stuff dulls the senses,” he said. “Hurts your batting eye.”

  “It causes cancer too,” I told him.

  “Haven’t heard that,” Ted replied. “but it doesn’t surprise me.”

  We got back on Route 1, heading south and west across Maryland. The road was pretty clear, but every so often we would get stuck behind a truck. There was no way to pass. Ted was just about ready to chew the steering wheel off. He had no patience for slowpokes.

  A little music might calm him down, I figured. I looked for a CD pl
ayer on the dashboard until I realized that CDs didn’t exist in 1941. For all I knew, they didn’t even have vinyl records yet.

  The car did have a radio, with big push buttons that I assumed were preset stations. Ted said it was okay to turn it on; and when I did, a crackling voice was heard.

  “Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany, who are neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?” a man asked.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Father Coughlin,” Ted told me. “He’s a nutcase.”

  The voice of Father Coughlin shouted again from the radio.

  “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.”

  I looked at Ted, but he didn’t react. Stuff like that must have been on the radio all the time.

  After Father Coughlin was finished with his anti-Semitic rant, a jingle came out of the scratchy speaker….

  Pepsi-Cola hits the spot.

  Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot.

  Twice as much for a nickel, too.

  Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

  After the commercial, a song came on. It was big band music, and I recognized the song because last year my mom took a class in swing dancing at a church near where we live. It was “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy From Company B.” I started singing along, and Ted joined in too. When the song was over, another familiar tune came on: “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.” After that was a song by a band called Phil Spitalny’s All-Girl Orchestra. The music was so different from what my friends and I listen to. Actually, I kind of liked it.

  “Oh, this one is the cat’s meow,” Ted said when the next song came on, turning up the volume on the radio.

  I don’t know if I can describe this song accurately. It was just about the strangest thing I ever heard…. The words sounded something like this….

  Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool

  Swam three little fishies and a mama fishie too

  “Swim” said the mama fishie, “Swim if you can”

  And they swam and they swam all over the dam

  Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem Chu!

  Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem Chu!

  Boop boop dit-tem dat-tem what-tem Chu!

  I’m really glad rock music was invented. I’m telling you, that song was lame.

  After that, some other song started playing, and it had equally dumb words. I couldn’t make out all of them, but it sounded something like…

  Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah,

  And a brawla, brawla, soo-it.

  Whatever that means! I can’t believe my mom says the music of my generation is stupid.

  As the radio played, we went though a series of small Maryland towns: Conowingo…Peach Bottom…Fallston. Then, suddenly, after passing a sign that said BIG GUNPOWDER FALLS RIVER, Ted veered off the main road onto a dirt path. I slid across the seat and slammed against the passenger side door.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, a little shaken up. “Is something wrong?”

  “No!” Ted replied, a big smile on his face. “Something’s right. We’re going fishing!”

  14

  If You’re Gonna Do Something, Do It Right

  FISHING?

  If there was one thing that Ted Williams liked as much as he liked baseball, I found out, it was fishing.

  “A guy on the Yankees told me there was great fly-fishing at Big Gunpowder Falls River in Maryland,” Ted said as we bumped down the dirt road. “I always wanted to come here.”

  We drove a couple of miles until we reached the river. Ted pulled over. He looked excited as we got out of the car, like a little kid going to an amusement park for the first time.

  He opened the back, and on top of everything else in there was a shotgun.

  “You keep a shotgun in your car?” I asked. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Only to the stuff I shoot,” Ted replied.

  I have nothing against guns myself. Some of my friends at home like to shoot. But I must have made a face or something.

  “Animals die,” Ted said as he rooted around in the back of the station wagon, “and nature’s more ruthless than bullets. Some folks pay a butcher to do their killing. I’d rather do it myself.”

  He found what he was looking for: a goofy-looking tan hat, which he put on his head. Then he smeared some grease on his lips and sprayed smelly bug spray all over both of us.

  Besides the shotgun, the back was filled with fishing rods, a tackle box, bags of feathers, a bunch of boxes of Quaker Oats, and a telescope. I assumed that he got paid by Quaker Oats to endorse the product. But a telescope?

  “I like to watch the stars,” he explained.

  He took out some of the fishing gear, and I followed him down to the water. We seemed to have the whole river to ourselves. There was a little motorboat tied up to a wooden dock. Ted looked both ways and then climbed into the boat as if it was his own.

  “Isn’t this stealing?” I asked.

  “Borrowing,” he said. “Get in.”

  I had done a little fishing with my dad when I was younger, but I’d never tried fly-fishing before. Ted explained that you don’t use a lure or a sinker, and you don’t use a worm. You use a little “fly,” which weighs next to nothing and is made of animal fur, feathers, tinsel, and other stuff to attract fish.

  Ted opened his tackle box and showed me a bunch of colorful flies he had made himself. They looked sort of like insects but with hooks sticking out of the bottom. He chose one and expertly tied it to the line. The rod was in two pieces, and he screwed the pieces together. Then he pulled the cord to start the motor, and we headed out on the water. Ted said he had the feeling that this river was full of trout.

  We headed out on the river.

  He cruised around for a few minutes until he found a spot he liked. He had only brought one fishing rod out of his car, so I figured this would be a relaxing time for me. I leaned back and put my hands behind my head.

  “Get up!” Ted barked. “You don’t fish sitting down. Didn’t your dad teach you anything?”

  “Okay! Okay!” I said, jumping to my feet.

  “If you’re gonna do something, do it right,” Ted said, handing me the rod. “I don’t care what it is. Hitting a baseball, catching a fish, whatever.”

  The rod was long, maybe eight feet, and much lighter than my fishing pole back home. But the line was heavier. Ted showed me how to “shake hands” with the rod and to point my thumb at the target.

  Because there’s no lure or sinker to provide weight, fly-fishing requires a different kind of cast. You have to sort of throw the line itself, and the weight of the line carries the hook. Ted took the rod from me to demonstrate.

  “Watch,” he said as he brought the rod up over his head. “Backcast…and frontcast.”

  He effortlessly flicked the fly forward, then back over his shoulder, and then forward again. The fly would curl over the line in a smooth arc and settle gently on the water. There was something beautiful about it.

  I noticed that he fished right-handed. Ted told me that he also wrote, threw, and did pretty much everything with his right hand. The only thing he did lefty was hit a baseball.

  “Here, you try,” he said.

  I took the rod and tried to do it like he did it. Of course, I failed. The fly flew into the boat, and the hook caught on Ted’s shirt. But for a change, he didn’t get mad. He just removed the hook and told me to try again.

  “Keep a relaxed grip on the rod,” he instructed. “Don’t break your wrist at all. Use your forearm.”

  “Like this?”

  “There you go,” Ted said. “Now you’re cooking with gas.”

  I was starting to get the hang of it. Ted looked across the water, his hands on his hips, while I flicked the line back and forth, perfecting my cast. He was staring at the river with the same intensity he stared at a pitcher about to go into a windup.
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  “Cast it over there,” Ted told me, pointing. “Trout like to face upstream. That’s where their food comes from. They like to hang around where the fast and slow water mix.”

  He maneuvered the boat to change the angle while telling me to bend my knees, check the drag on the line, and cast the fly where he wanted it. He may have had no patience with people, but he had plenty of patience with fish. Fishing seemed to calm him down.

  Not me. After five minutes, I was bored and ready to give up. It didn’t look like there were any trout out there. We were wasting our time, and I said so.

  “I don’t like failure,” Ted said. “Ever.”

  I kept casting out the fly, but I didn’t feel any nibbles. My arms were getting tired.

  “I see one,” Ted said suddenly.

  “Where?”

  “Over there,” he said. “See it? See that stitch on the surface of the water? It looks like a zipper.”

  I didn’t see anything. But I remembered reading in one of my baseball books that Ted Williams had incredible eyesight, better than 20–20. Maybe he could see things that normal people couldn’t. I handed him the rod, and he took over.

  He was staring intently at the water, flicking the line back and forth as he tried to land the fly on a specific spot where he had seen the fish.

  “You know you want it,” Ted said as if the fish could understand English. “Come on. Take it, baby. Take it.”

  And then, suddenly, the line got taut.

  “Got ’im!” Ted shouted.

  The tip of the rod bent. Ted held the line in one hand to control the tension. Then he pulled in the fly line with his reel hand while he pinched the line with his rod hand. I could see the fish now. It was struggling to escape, darting back and forth.

  “He’s going left!” Ted said excitedly. “Look at him! Oh, he’s a beauty! He’s going right now. Watch him, he’s gonna jump.”

  As if on command, the fish exploded out of the water and up in the air. Ted played it, worked it, reeled it in slowly, talking the whole time.