The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  If those sentiments represented normal immigrant sensitivity to what the Venzors perceived as the garden-variety prejudice of the day, Ted thought he had much more at stake. Coming of age as a baseball player in the 1930s, he decided then to hide his Mexican heritage for fear that deeply ingrained prejudice in baseball would hurt his career. He maintained silence on the topic throughout his tenure with the Red Sox and beyond.

  “Ted didn’t want anyone to know he was part Mexican,” said longtime friend Al Cassidy, the executor of Ted’s estate. “It concerned him. He was afraid they wouldn’t let him play. He’d say, ‘It was an entirely different time back then.’ ”3

  In late 1939, after Ted’s sensational rookie season with the Red Sox, he returned home to San Diego for a visit, the conquering hero. But when a gaggle of his relatives on the Mexican side of the family gathered to meet him at the train station, Ted beat a hasty retreat after spotting the ragtag group from afar.

  According to one of Ted’s relatives who was there, Williams took “one look at this big group of Mexicans, and he says, ‘Oh, my goodness, my career is down the drain if I’m seen with these people,’ and he walks away.”4

  Carolyn Ortiz said that when she was about twelve, “Aunt May called and told us Ted was going to be coming through Santa Barbara and he’d stop for a visit. Well, you would have thought the pope was coming. My aunt Jeanne painted the house inside and out. They had us kids cleaning and making all kinds of preparations. But when the day came, he didn’t show up. He never even called. That’s the way he was.”5

  Several years later, a host of Venzors traveled to Los Angeles to watch Ted and the Red Sox play an exhibition game against the Los Angeles Angels, then a Pacific Coast League team. When the Venzors hollered and waved at him from the stands, Ted made a motion to indicate that he would see them later, but he never did. “All the family went to root him on and he didn’t have the guts to come over and say hi to them,” said Ted’s cousin Rosalie Larson.6

  Another cousin, Salvador Herrera, used to spar with Ted about denying his roots. “Ted was a Mexican,” Herrera said. “He was embarrassed to be a Mexican. He wanted to be an American, a gringo. I said, ‘You asshole, you’re a Mexican! Say you’re a Mexican and say the Mexicans are the best hitters in the world.’ I used to push his button. He laughed and he’d say, ‘I’m Basco.’ He wanted people to think he was Basque. But he was Mexican, just like me. He just laughed me off. He’d say, ‘Don’t tell nobody’ and hang up the phone.”7

  Years after he retired, Ted did say in his book: “If I had my mother’s name, there is no doubt I would have run into problems in those days, the prejudices people had in Southern California.”8 In My Turn at Bat, published in 1969, he even misspelled his mother’s maiden name as “Venzer,” and devoted just one line to her heritage, saying she was “part Mexican and part French.” Herrera thought the misspelling was deliberate. “Venzer with an e, that’s the way Basque people spell it. Hispanics, it’s Venzor with an o.” Yet no reporter developed this theme or dug into his Mexican heritage until Nowlin explored some of the Venzor family lineage in an article for the Boston Globe Magazine published in June of 2002, a month before Ted died.*

  The Venzors were a colorful collection of cowboys, longshoremen, evangelicals, bricklayers, sandlot ballplayers, and truck drivers. And many of them had serious drinking problems.

  The patriarch, Pablo Venzor, was a stonemason and a sheepherder. Occasionally he would also get work as an extra at Flying A Studios, a onetime Hollywood outpost in Santa Barbara, but he finally quit in a huff after being cast as a Mexican peon once too often. Pablo died in 1920 at the age of fifty-two.9

  His widow, Natalia, never remarried and would outlive her husband by thirty-four years. Natalia chopped wood, rolled her own Bull Durham cigarettes, and never learned to speak or write English. She raised eight children (two others died in childbirth) and also watched over most of them as adults from the family’s Santa Barbara base at 1008 Chino Street. Son Bruno lived next door at 1006 Chino, son Paul was at 1002, youngest daughter, Jeanne, lived across the street, and daughter Mary lived several blocks away, at 1716 Chino.

  The oldest of Natalia’s brood, born in 1889, was Pedro Venzor, known as Pete. A World War I veteran, Pete was a working cowboy at Santa Barbara’s Tecolote Ranch, whose owners would stage grand barbecues that attracted California political notables and Hollywood cowboys like Will Rogers, Gene Autry, and Tex Ritter. Several of Pete’s siblings worked stints at Tecolote at various times, and Ted visited the ranch as a boy.

  Ted’s mother, May, was born next, on May 8, 1891, though there is confusion about her place of birth. On her 1913 marriage license, she wrote that she was a native of Mexico. But in 1918, on Ted’s birth certificate, she wrote that she was born in El Paso, Texas, though the city has no record of that. (On the 1920 US census she said her native language was Spanish.)

  The next Venzor child, Mary, was born in Mexico in 1893, according to her marriage license. Thus it appears more likely that in 1891, the Venzors were still in Mexico and that May was born there, too. In 1895, son Daniel arrived.

  May and Mary were “inseparable,” according to Mary’s daughter Teresa Cordero Contreras, the youngest of twelve children, who said the sisters always stayed in close touch until Mary’s life ended tragically in 1943, when she and her daughter Annie were murdered by Annie’s husband, who then killed himself.10

  Daniel was killed in World War I on November 11, 1918, the day the armistice was signed. This made Natalia a Gold Star Mother, and provided benefits that financed the purchase of her home at 1008 Chino in 1920.11

  The Venzor sibling who had the greatest influence on Ted’s baseball development was Saul, born in 1903. He was a longshoreman and an accomplished ballplayer himself, a pitcher who managed the local semipro team, the Santa Barbara Merchants. Saul was about six foot five, with arms that dangled down to his knees and huge hands.

  When May brought young Ted to Santa Barbara for visits, the boy would gravitate to his uncle Saul and pester him to play catch. Saul would turn these sessions into tough-love tutorials. The driveway at 1008 Chino was slanted; Saul would stand at the top and put Ted at the bottom, and challenge him to stand in there and see if he could hit any of the nineteen different pitches that Saul boasted he threw.

  Saul would taunt and tease Ted, belittling his ability. “Ted picked his brain on how to throw a curve,” said Manuel Herrera, Salvador’s brother. “Saul wouldn’t let Ted pitch to him, told him he wasn’t mature enough yet.” Sometimes Ted would cry in frustration after the driveway sessions, wishing he were bigger and stronger.12

  Natalia thought her son was being too harsh. “Grandma used to lean out the window and say, ‘Leave that kid alone,’ ” remembered Dee Allen, Saul’s daughter. “May would, too. My dad liked to do things and do them right. He would challenge Ted, to teach him.”13

  Ted had seen Saul pitch in a sandlot game once and was duly impressed. Saul had gotten into a bases-loaded, no-outs jam. He then called time, walked over to the opposing team’s bench, and took bets that he would get out of the inning without that team scoring a run. Saul collected the bets, then went back out and retired the side without further damage. “Ted was there and saw this, and told the story at a family barbecue,” said David Allen, Dee’s husband.14

  According to unconfirmed Venzor family lore, Saul also struck out Babe Ruth in 1935, after Ruth had retired and barnstormed through Santa Barbara. “Saul did this while he was playing with a bunch of ragtag Mexicans,” said Salvador Herrera with some sense of awe.

  Ted was closest to the next Venzor, Sarah, because she had come to San Diego and done yeoman duty helping to raise him as May worked the streets for the Salvation Army, and also because it was Sarah who would take care of May in her final days in Santa Barbara.

  After Natalia, the Venzor matriarch, died, Sarah took over the main house at 1008 Chino, along with her husband, Arnold Diaz, a musician who had a mariachi band. Sarah bec
ame the backbone of the family and its chief caretaker. She would tend to her brothers when they went off on benders, and after her sister Mary and niece Annie were murdered, Sarah helped raise Annie’s son, Manuel Herrera, and his twin sister, Natalie.

  For many years, Sarah served as Ted’s point of contact with the family. “Ted would say to Sarah, ‘I’m coming on such and such a date, and don’t you dare tell anyone that I’m there.’ He didn’t want to see any of the other relatives,” said Ruth Gonzalez, May’s first cousin.15

  If Ted called for Sarah and someone else answered the phone, he couldn’t keep track of who was who. “Ted called one day out of the blue,” Dee Allen recalled. “ ‘Hello, this is Ted; who’s this?’ ‘This is Dee.’ ‘Who’s Dee?’ ‘I’m Saul’s daughter.’ He asked what Sarah needed. Whatever I felt needed to be done—a new roof, windows, a wooden fence—I got bids for all that stuff and sent them to his office. Ted was a hard person to get into. You could only get so close. He wouldn’t allow it.”

  Ted also enjoyed his uncle Bruno Venzor because they both liked to fish. Bruno was an excitable, happy-go-lucky sort who had a stutter. He drove a cement truck and also played some baseball, but not as seriously as his brother Saul. Once, when Bruno was pitching, he kept laughing at the hitters, and an irritated Saul yanked him from the game. Bruno was active in the Elks club and liked to dress up in Western duds. Arnold Diaz called him the sheriff of Chino Street.16

  May’s life calling, superseding all else, was to be a foot soldier in the Salvation Army. Founded in England in 1865, the Army is an evangelical Christian group that considers itself a church but functions as a relief and social service organization whose adherents forswear drinking, smoking, drugs, and gambling. It rose to prominence by targeting and converting alcoholics, the homeless, drug addicts, unwed mothers, and prostitutes to Christianity. These were the kinds of people May tended to in a colorful mission that ranged from San Diego south to Tijuana and north to Los Angeles.

  May was a beloved figure, a star of the street. Indeed, in San Diego during the Depression, “no woman was better known than Salvation May,” wrote Joe Hamelin of the San Diego Union in a 1980 series the newspaper published about Ted. “In Salvation Army bonnet and flowing garb, she patrolled the streets in the ’20s and ’30s, collecting for the poor. Some thought her almost saintly. Others thought her eccentric, or simply a ‘nut.’… She knew everyone, and everyone knew her. She would take a downtown office building, start on the top floor, and work her way down without missing an office. There was no tougher job in Depression time than raising funds for charity. No one was better at her craft than May.”17

  According to Alice Rasmussen, a colleague of May’s in the Army: “She knew all the people in all the right places, and a lot of people in the wrong places, too. She had access to the mayor, the chief of police, business leaders, and she would go into the red light district—there was white slavery in those days—and minister there as well.”

  Kenny Bojens, who eventually became a sports columnist for the local paper, would run into May as she trolled the downtown bars making collections. “I used to run around with a legend of sorts, Gentleman Joe Morgan, the Union’s police reporter,” Bojens said in the 1980 Union series. “May used to call us her ‘Sunshine Boys.’ I remember this one night we were in a night club, the College Inn at Fourth and C, and we were flat broke. May came in, said, ‘How are my little Sunshine Boys tonight?’ and God-blessed the dickens out of us like she’d always do, and asked for a donation. I said, ‘May, we don’t even have the price of a beer,’ which in those days was about 15 cents. And she reached down into her purse and said, ‘Well, let the Army buy you one.’ ”

  Another colleague was Alice Psaute, a lifelong Salvationist who made the rounds with May when she was a young woman. “We’d go to prizefights, and in intermissions we’d go around with a tambourine and try to collect money,” Psaute said. “The smoke was so thick you could cut it with a knife. We’d also go to the county jail for meetings on Sunday morning. I played the violin. It made them better so they could get out sooner. May went to the jail many times.”18

  So popular and influential was May that in 1924, John D. Spreckels, the richest man in San Diego, quietly paid off the note on the Williamses’ house at 4121 Utah Street, where Ted grew up, in the city’s North Park section. May had acquired the six-room house in December of 1923 for $4,000, agreeing to $20 monthly payments, plus interest, until the note was paid off. But by August 1, 1924, the note was discharged, courtesy of Spreckels, a sugar-refining industrialist, philanthropist, and publisher of both the San Diego Union and the San Diego Evening Tribune.

  When Ted became a star, May would unabashedly trade on his celebrity for the greater good of the Army, telling startled bank or bar patrons, “I’m Ted Williams’s mother. Empty your pockets.”19 Worse, as far as Ted was concerned, she’d work Lane Field after he signed his first pro contract to play for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League, collecting money in the stands with her tambourine.

  Bill Starr, a catcher with the Padres in 1937, told writer Ed Linn about “the time one of the players asked Ted if he knew that his mother had been walking around the stands collecting money and telling everybody Ted Williams was her son. Ted looked down at the floor and didn’t say anything for a long time. And then he said, ‘I know. She embarrasses me.’ The whole clubhouse went absolutely silent. Everybody felt so bad for him.”20

  “I was embarrassed about my home, embarrassed that I never had quite as good clothes as some of the kids, embarrassed that my mother was out in the middle of the damn street all the time,” Williams wrote in My Turn at Bat. “Until the day she died she did that, and it always embarrassed me, and God knows I respected her and loved her.”21

  May had entered the Salvation Army training college in Chicago in 1909, when she was eighteen. She graduated in 1911, was appointed a lieutenant, and sent to Hawaii. She made captain in 1912, but after marrying Ted’s father, Samuel Stuart Williams, in 1913, she was demoted back to envoy status because her husband was not a Salvationist—she’d “married out,” as the Army called it, and therefore could no longer be an officer.

  May Williams was lean and tall—about five foot ten. She won awards for selling the most copies of the Army’s newspaper, War Cry. She was an accomplished musician, playing piano, guitar, and banjo as well as cornet in the Army band. She was an eccentric presence, sometimes wearing sunglasses in church, as if she were a street celebrity. She’d use magic—making a quarter disappear in a sleight-of-hand trick—to get people’s attention before asking them for a donation. Eventually, the San Diego Sun editorialized that “to thousands of San Diegans, rich and poor, Mrs. Williams IS the Salvation Army.”

  Sam Williams was born on April 5 of either 1886 or 1888—records conflict—in Ardsley, New York, today a suburb of New York City. He was the only child born to the former Elizabeth Miller and Nicholas Williams, a barber.

  They divorced, and Nicholas Williams later married a British woman, Margaret Higgins. Nicholas and Margaret produced three daughters, all born in Yonkers, New York: Veacy, who was also known as Mae and Vivian, born in 1893; Alice, born in 1895; and Effie, born in 1899—these were Sam Williams’s half sisters and Ted’s aunts.

  Effie Williams married John Smith, a short, stocky fireman who worked in Mount Vernon, New York, in Westchester County. In the summer of 1939, his rookie year with the Red Sox, Ted, on instructions from his mother, came to visit his aunt Effie when the team was in New York playing the Yankees. Smith jumped at the chance to bring Ted down to the firehouse to meet the fellas. Edward Donovan, whose father worked for the department, was there the day Ted came.

  “I was fifteen,” said Donovan, recounting the moment with rich detail, as if it had happened yesterday. “My father called the house and said, ‘Brother—they called me Brother—come down; I want you to meet a ballplayer. This is Ted Williams.’ Ted shook my hand and he said, ‘When you gonna get in shape, kid?’ I
was kind of fat.”22

  It was a big event. All the firemen congregated around. Ted walked behind a fire engine, picked up a broom, and started swinging it. It was a beautiful swing, Donovan thought. Ted answered questions with “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” The firemen, mostly Yankees fans, asked Williams if he thought the Red Sox had a chance to win that year. Ted said, “Oh, yeah, I think we’re gonna win.”

  “Ted charmed everybody. It was what you call awe-inspiring. He was so tall! And skinny! I don’t know how he could hit those home runs. I don’t think he was more than a hundred and sixty-five pounds.”

  Whenever he could in the ensuing years, Donovan would drive down to Yankee Stadium to see Ted play, armed with insider tidbits from John Smith, such as which pitcher gave Ted the toughest time (Ted had confided that it was Eddie Lopat, of the White Sox and later the Yankees). “For a dollar and ten cents we’d get great seats. Hot dogs were a nickel.”

  Ted seemed to like his uncle John, who was obsessed with keeping his firehouse, Engine 6, clean. He also liked to play the horses. According to Donovan, in 1949, Ted bought John a new white Ford. John went to Boston to pick it up and gave Eddie a ride in it when he got home. The car had plates that read ES41. ES stood for Effie Smith, and the 41 was a nod to Ted’s .406 year. “Ted would always ask how Aunt Effie was doing,” Donovan said. “He really cared for his aunt. He always called no matter where he was.”

  But of his three aunts, Ted was closest to Alice, according to Roselle Romano, a Miami Beach retiree who lived near the sisters and got to know them well when they moved to Florida from Westchester County later in life.

  “Alice was a spitfire,” Romano said. “She’d curse you out like a sailor. Vivian and Effie were very much alike. Two ladies. But Alice! What a mouth she had.”23

  Alice told Romano that Ted had spent extended time with her in Mount Vernon as a young man. “He was always with Alice. They would all go into Manhattan to go clubbing. Alice said, ‘He came to me. When he left California he came to me.’ That’s exactly how she put it. They had a lot of his plaques in their house.”