The Williams-Luscomb sessions attracted notice. Ted’s pals would often gather and watch, as would some Triple-A players on their way to the majors, such as Earle Brucker, Lee Stine, and the Coscarart brothers, Pete and Joe, all of whom lived in San Diego.
In the heat of the competition, Ted might pop off and snarl at Luscomb. “We’d argue, boy, we’d argue,” Ted wrote. “I was always the kind of kid who spoke his mind, just blurted it out, without thinking of the consequences or what anybody might think.”38
But Luscomb didn’t think Ted impudent. “He always wore a grin on his face,” Rod told Time’s Rees. “That’s the first thing I think of now when I recall him as a boy. Also, I greatly admired the qualities he had—aside from his ball-playing abilities. Honest, good-natured and loyal to his friends—he’s a lot better man than many. He was pretty sensitive too. Things would bother him deep down, although he wouldn’t let on. I’m sure a lot of his trouble with the press can be laid to this.”
Luscomb didn’t think Ted was a leader. Or a showboater. He seemed to take as much delight in hitting a homer off Rod in their private games as he would hitting a drive in a weekend sandlot game before a few hundred fans. He did what Luscomb told him to do. When Rod said he thought Ted was going to the movies too much, that his eyes might get strained, Ted stopped going—unless a movie starring Olivia de Havilland, his favorite actress, was playing. And when Luscomb suggested he eat more to fill out his scrawny frame, Ted went on an eating binge that lasted for years, though to no great effect.
When Ted finally left the playground for high school and pro ball, Luscomb picked up the bats his pupil had used and was struck by one thing. All the dirt smudges from the balls striking the bats were in the same place: the thickest part of the bat on the side opposite the label, at the heart of the sweet spot. In the seven years they played almost daily, Luscomb said he had never seen Ted break a bat by hitting a ball in the wrong place.39
Williams would never forget Rod. When he got to the big leagues, he would write Luscomb letters that included diagrams of the various ballparks he was playing in and where some of his hits had landed. And he would complain about the fickle fans who cheered him one minute and booed him the next. When Rod got Parkinson’s disease in the 1960s, Ted sent him letters of cheer and sympathy; in 1966, while being inducted into the Hall of Fame, he cited Rod’s role in his development, and in 1969, Ted sent his mentor a warmly inscribed copy of his autobiography. Luscomb died in 1977, a letter from Williams taped to the wall near his bed in a San Diego hospital.40
May didn’t altogether discourage Ted’s interest in sports. She bought him a baseball glove (a Bill Doak model), a shotgun, and a tennis racket. But she hoped sports would be Ted’s hobby, not his passion, and she tried to hold the line as his baseball increasingly encroached on her religious realm.41 When he turned six, in a ceremony similar to a baptism, May had had Ted formally “dedicated” to the Army, hoping he would follow in her footsteps and make a career of it. For a while, Ted was a “Corps cadet” and participated in a program for Salvationist youth that involved Bible study, going to group meetings with other kids, and attending Sunday services. But Ted would hide whenever it was time to go to church, and May couldn’t find him. And by the time he was nine, Ted, while swinging a stick or a bat, would repeatedly say to his mother, “This is the way I’m gonna do it, Mom. I’m gonna be a Babe Ruth.” Not surprisingly, when he came home with the blasphemous idea that he could earn $5 a game by playing ball on Sundays for a local club called, of all things, the Texas Liquor House team, she vetoed the plan with fury. “No Sunday playing, and no tie-up with demon-rum!” May said.42 For a long time, Ted respected her wishes—in the face of ridicule from his pals—until finally May relented and allowed him to play on Sundays—as long as it was not for the liquor team. Ted started playing for another sandlot club for $3 a game.
This ballpark allowance did not mean a broader recess from his mother’s convictions. May took Ted on her street rounds, insisting that he march in the Army band.
“Oh, how I hated that,” Ted recalled. “I never wore a uniform or anything, but I was right at that age when a kid starts worrying about what other kids might think, especially a gawky introverted kid like me, and I was just so ashamed. Today I’d be proud to walk with those people, because they are truly motivated, but then I’d stand behind the bass drum, trying to hide so none of my friends would see me.” He said the dedication ceremony simply “didn’t take. The thing was I had to go so damn often. I just hated it.
“My mother was strictly Salvation Army. As a result, strictly non-family.” She “was gone all day and half the night, working the streets.… These were Depression years, and we had a housekeeper I think we paid seven or eight dollars a week, I forget exactly, but none of them lasted long and they were all lousy, couldn’t get a job anywhere else, the bottom of the barrel.”
Ted wrote that he gave May “a lot of credit” for working so hard and tirelessly helping others, “but the thing a kid remembers is that he never saw his mother or father very much. Many nights my brother, Danny, and I would be out on that porch past ten o’clock waiting for one of them to come home. I was maybe eight at the time, and Danny was six.”43
That was the key point. For May, charity did not begin at home. She was so absorbed with doing the Lord’s work, tending to others, that she neglected her own two sons and husband, causing resentment against her to fester in all three of them.
Bobby Doerr—the Hall of Fame Red Sox second baseman, a dear friend and teammate of Ted’s—remembered that when they played together on the 1936 Padres, Ted envied Doerr’s stable home life in Los Angeles. “We’d play all day games and afterwards he’d say, ‘Well, I guess I’ll go home and scramble eggs for supper,’ ” Doerr said. “There’d be nobody home. When we came to Los Angeles, and he had dinner with us, he used to love my mother and father. He told me how lucky I was to have parents like that. My dad was always talking with Ted. Ted thought that was impressive—that anyone would give him the time of day. He didn’t get the kind of love that he could see we had in our family.”44
“His biggest thing was the hunger he went to bed with, literally, because his mother was busy feeding orphans in Tijuana,” said Steve Brown, the Florida filmmaker and fisherman who became a good friend to Ted at the end of his life. “His mother never showed him love, yet she showed those street urchins love like you wouldn’t believe. That’s what made him turn against religion. Any God that could have a woman so on fire for street urchins and couldn’t have her tuck in her own kids and even feed them—he didn’t want any part of that kind of God.”45
But May was stubborn. “She thought she was right that she was going to preach the Word, and if her kids weren’t going to listen, too bad,” said Rosalie Larson, May’s niece. “I think if I were the kids, I would have resented that.”
Another niece, Dee Allen, had a different take: May didn’t see it as neglect if the Lord wanted her to put the unfortunate first. “I don’t think May saw she was neglecting her sons, because she was doing something for God.”
John Cordero, son of Mary Venzor Cordero—the third of the Venzor siblings, born two years after May—dreaded the visits to San Diego because he said May would exploit him and his brother and look down on them because their skin was so dark.
“My aunt May was that way,” said Cordero. “She’d call my mother and say, ‘Can I use your boys down here for a couple weeks?’ We’d go down and mow the lawns and clean up. Their yard was awful. The grass was seven or eight inches tall. Hedges were awful, the fence was falling down. They had a dog at one time. A German shepherd. They got rid of him because he was too mean. The garbagemen couldn’t get in there. I told my mom, ‘I can’t stand my aunt May.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said because May’s neighbor would ask who we were, and she’d tell her, ‘They’re not family, they’re friends of Danny.’ Then she’d point down toward Tijuana, as if we were from Mexico. She’d say to us, ‘Don’t call m
e aunt, call me May.’ ”46
Cordero said Ted would avoid talking to him and his brother. “We slept in the room with Danny. My brother and I slept in one twin bed; Danny was in the other. Ted had a new room that had been built in the back. We’d be in the kitchen. Ted wouldn’t come in. If we were in the backyard and he was going to go out, he’d go out the front door. He wanted to avoid us. We never saw him. At nighttime, he’d stay in his room.” And Ted’s father was not much better. “My uncle Sam would come home. Nothing. ‘Hi, Uncle Sam.’ ‘Don’t call me Uncle Sam.’ ”
When May would visit her family in Santa Barbara, after Ted was all grown up, her brothers and sisters had so many children and grandchildren she couldn’t keep track of who was who. “ ‘Now, whose child is this?’ she’d say when she met anyone in the family,” said Salvador Herrera, whose mother was May’s niece. “ ‘Now, how are you, sonny boy? Are you going to church regularly? Do you believe in the Word?’ May would talk to you. In her talk she’d bring up stuff about the Bible. In Corinthians it says so and so. She’d be telling you what life is all about, how you should be in the face of the Lord. May was staunch.”
She’d drive the two-hundred-odd miles from San Diego to Santa Barbara in her old Packard and arrive tooting the horn. She’d tell stories about her famous son, recite the Bible, and play hymns on her guitar, leading sing-alongs.
By early 1950, May was starting to behave erratically. One day, neighbors noticed her watering her lawn barefoot while in her pajamas. And she told Time that Danny was actually a better ballplayer than Ted, and that he would soon be playing for the Padres. Ted, she suggested, owed his success more to God than anything else. It was “God’s will that he become a baseball player, and the reason he is so good is that God cooperates,” May said.
Salvador’s brother, Manuel Herrera, lived with May in Santa Barbara during the last few years of her life. He’d talk to her before she went to sleep, and she’d tell him the stories of her life.
“She told me, ‘Yes, precious, I was the angel of Tijuana.’ She had one thing in her life: to save the world from sin,” Manuel said. “We sang old Baptist hymns. Her favorite was ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ Someone tried to play a rock ’n’ roll song once, and she said, ‘No, precious, we don’t want to hear that.’ She could kill you with kindness and that smile from cheek to cheek. She could penetrate your soul.”47
When Manuel asked May to tell him how she came to be called the angel of Tijuana, she told him it was because she had once convinced Tijuana’s jail commander to release a group of thirteen-and fourteen-year-old American boys being held in filthy conditions.
When May died in 1961, at the age of seventy, Ted flew in and took charge of the funeral arrangements, limiting those who could attend the Salvation Army service to just her siblings. This irritated Manuel and other members of the extended Venzor clan who knew and loved May and wanted to pay their respects. Ted took over the top floor of the Santa Barbara Inn so no one would bother him. He received one of May’s brothers, Bruno Venzor, in his room for breakfast. Bruno brought along his son, Daniel. When they entered Ted’s room, they found him in his undershorts, quietly swinging a bat, gazing at his reflection in the window. “He found it relaxing, I guess,” said Daniel Venzor, Ted’s cousin.
After the funeral, Ted drove his rented white Ford Galaxie over to a Venzor family reception on Chino Street to hold court with “the Mexicans,” as Ted referred to the Venzors privately. Manuel remembered an emotional scene in which Ted and his uncle Saul Venzor talked about the old days when Saul pitched to Ted in the driveway. “Saul said, ‘You did pretty good in the big time.’ They smiled at each other. ‘I knew what you taught me,’ Ted said. Saul asked him what a palm ball, fork, and a split pitch were. Ted said, ‘That’s a damn good question. All they are is curves.’ ”
Later, when Ted went through May’s personal effects at her home in San Diego, he tore up every family picture he came across, Manuel said. “That was there: hate, unhappiness. Later I sent him a picture of May when she was a young girl with her Salvation Army guitar. He thanked me for it.”48
If he’d considered it further, Ted might have concluded that he was indebted to his mother in some ways. May’s dedication—obsession, even—with the Army at the expense of her family was similar to Ted’s relentless drive to be the best hitter in the world—to the exclusion of everything else in his life.
“May and Ted had the same single-minded determination to do what they had to do, and everything else suffered as a result,” said Ted’s nephew and namesake, Ted Williams. “But that determination gave them the strength to overcome obstacles.”
There was also Ted’s compassion—his willingness to do most anything to help a sick child or others who were down on their luck. Jim Vinick, a Springfield, Massachusetts, businessman who acquired the rights to make a movie of Williams’s life, said Ted told him he thought he’d been influenced by his mother in that regard.
“One of the things he conveyed to me was that he felt that he had some of his mother’s genes, in the fact that she was a very compassionate person and a nurturer,” Vinick said. “And he felt that his attitude toward children or sickness” was shaped by his mother.49
Of course when Ted went to the playground, he wasn’t just playing ball with Rod Luscomb. He had a gang of friends with him most of the time—guys like Wilbert Wiley, Joe Villarino, Del Ballinger, Roy Engle, Swede Jensen, and Ted Laven. All were ballplayers who wanted to be out there every day. They took advantage of San Diego’s sublime climate to stretch baseball out into a twelve-month season. All became devoted to Ted and helped build his legend at the grass roots.
There was always a game, always action. Two Mexican-American families, the Tallamantes and the Villarinos, were baseball fixtures at the park in the early ’30s, as Ted and his gang were coming up. Each family had at least five brothers, and the Tallamantes’ father, known at the playground as Dad Tallamante, was out playing with his charges into his fifties. “Those two tribes were very instrumental in baseball at University Heights,” said Jensen. “Between the two of them, they could make a baseball team.”50
Among Ted’s crew, his stalwart at the playground was Wiley, whom Williams described in My Turn at Bat as “my first real boyhood pal.” The son of a streetcar conductor, Wiley had a paper route delivering the San Diego Evening Tribune. Ted would help Wilbert with his route, and then they’d go off to the playground and pitch to each other.
“Wilbur,” Ted wrote, misspelling his friend’s name, “was a little smaller than me, but a little better and a little stronger. We’d play with however many balls we could round up and a bat that was taped up good. We’d hit three or four and go chase them and hit some more.”51
Wiley was amazed at Ted’s power. “When he’d hit, guys would say, ‘Where in the Sam Hill does that skinny drink of water get his power from?’ Ted was unusually strong in his hands and wrists. When I used to hang around his house, I’d see him take a dining room chair and place six or seven big Life magazines on it and get down on one knee and pick the chair up by one leg and raise it up.… When he was 10, 11, 12, he was such a scrawny kid that nobody dreamt he would turn out to be what he was in major league baseball.”52
Ted may have been scrawny, but he could handle himself in a pinch, Wiley said. “No one would ever want to tangle with him. That guy could really fight. I mean, he was good. He got into scrapes around that playground every once in a while.… He could throw those fists and they were fast.”53
It was while playing against Wiley that Ted had a playground epiphany of sorts. “Know what was the biggest thing that ever happened to me in baseball?” Ted told Time’s Ben Williamson in 1950. “Well, it wasn’t getting picked up by the Red Sox, or the first homer I ever hit for Boston. It was when I was playing with a kid named Wilbert Wiley. We were pals in San Diego and we would take turns pitching to each other. I was 14 then and he was a year or so older—and we’d have some small fry chasing the balls we h
it out in a vacant sandlot. Well, Wilbert would always tell me what he was going to throw—fast ball, curve and so on. He had a pretty good roundhouse. And one day I told him never mind calling out what he was going to throw. I said, ‘Come on, throw what you like.’ Well, I could hit anything he threw up there. I could time them right. Boy, I was all swelled up over that. I could hit anything. I knew right then that I was a good hitter.”
Joe Villarino was one of the baseball Villarinos who were fixtures at University Heights. Joe lived five blocks from Ted and would spend forty years working for San Diego Gas and Electric. One of his favorite memories was the day he hit a home run and Ted greeted him at home plate, all smiles. “That was the day of my life,” Villarino said. “Ted said, ‘If there’d been another coat of paint on the fence, it wouldn’t have gone over! He’d hit one the inning or two before. I think that ball’s still going.”54
Del Ballinger moved to San Diego from Monterey, California, when he was thirteen. He had been a batboy for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and lived near Ted, on Nevada Street. Del told Ed Linn that the first time his father took him to the playground, “I heard a lot of noise and looked through the swings and slides—I’ll never forget this—and saw this big, tall string bean hitting the ball a mile, and all the other kids were chasing after it.… This was his life. Ted never shagged for anybody. Nobody wanted him to. Everybody loved to see him hit.” But Del said Ted’s legs were so skinny he was nicknamed Birdlegs on the playground, which he hated.55
Roy Engle was a big, strapping catcher who would become the captain of Ted’s high school team. “We played together on the playground all the time,” Engle recalled. “Ted lived at that ballpark, and if he could get somebody to throw the ball to him he’d be happy. I think we all realized Ted was just a little bit different than we were.”56 Engle also played football, and in 1939 he would become a member of USC’s national championship team. “He was the guy I admired,” Ted said of Engle. “He was so strong. Everything he hit was a line drive.… I couldn’t hit it anywhere near as hard as he did.”57
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 6
