Swede Jensen was the shortstop on Ted’s high school team and later played for the San Diego Padres in the Pacific Coast League. “North Park was our main getout,” Jensen said. “It was a wonderful meeting place. Ted was loud and boisterous. When he started to laugh, he’d fill the place with laughter, wherever he was.” Swede lived on Iowa Street, and he and Ted would often walk to school. Ted would never be without his bat, and he’d always be sure to stop and swing at any bush that dared to be blooming in his path.
Ted Laven would tell the Boston Globe years later that when Williams first showed up at North Park he was a right-handed hitter: “He was nine or ten years old and always hit from the right side. How he became a left-handed batter is a funny story. We use to play on a softball diamond. The left field fence was only 150 feet away, and we had a rule that if you hit the ball over the fence you were out.… The right field fence was something like 350 feet away, as I remember. Well, Ted decided he could swing from the left side and have plenty of room to swing. From that day on, Ted was a left-handed batter.”58 Williams himself never related that story. In speaking of his beginnings as a hitter he would say that even though he was right-handed, he’d picked up a bat one day and begun swinging it left-handed, and he’d stayed with it because it felt comfortable. But in hindsight he thought he’d have been a better hitter right-handed, because hitting lefty, his power hand, his right, was farther away from the ball at contact, thereby diminishing his power.59
Some just watched the playground show. Bud Maloney, who would become a sportswriter for the San Diego Union, was five years younger than Ted—an avid baseball fan and an early observer of Williams’s coming of age at University Heights. “I was a shy little kid,” Maloney said. “I just simply watched. I never talked to Ted.”60 As Ted’s sandlot career began to take off, that meant watching him not just at University Heights but at other parks around town. “Almost at every field for some years there was a story that Ted hit a ball here that went over the fence of some guy’s backyard. For years Ted was talked about. He was renowned.”
The emerging acclaim made it easy to find shaggers—playground urchins who were more than happy to chase after the long balls Ted would blast hither and yon. One regular was Ben Press, who went on to become a noted tennis pro in the San Diego area. Press lived a few doors down from Ted, on Utah Street. “Rod would take and throw balls to Ted, and he’d hit them over the fence, and we’d chase them for him,” recalled Press. “We did that for hours every day. I was in awe of Ted.” Williams would usually borrow a quarter from his mother to pay Press or other neighborhood kids for their trouble.61*
Looking back, Ted thought he spent all those early years at the playground more for the love of the game than out of any overarching ambition to be a pro ballplayer, which he had grave doubts he could become anyway, given his skinny frame.
He didn’t follow the major leagues closely. “I was out doing it,” he wrote. “That’s all I cared about. If there was any player I thought about imitating, it was Bill Terry. He was having big years for the Giants then, and when I’d be playing, or just swinging a bat, I’d say to myself, OK, Terry’s up, last of the ninth, two men on, two-two count. Giants trailing three to one—announcing the game the way kids do—here’s the pitch… Terry swings… And I’d treat myself to another home run.”62
Terry had hit .401 in 1930, when Williams was twelve, leaving a strong and lasting impression on the boy. “The only players I had ever heard of were Ruth and Gehrig,” Ted said. “And then I read that Bill Terry had hit .400, and that really excited me. Four hundred! I don’t think I even knew what you had to do to hit .400, but I could tell that it was something wonderful. I knew I wanted to do that, too.”63
Ted did discover life outside the playground. His early heroes were not ballplayers but rather George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles Lindbergh. He was particularly intrigued by aviation. And when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927 after spending several months that year in San Diego overseeing the construction and testing of his Spirit of St. Louis, Ted basked in the reflected glory with other San Diegans.
San Diego’s role in Lindbergh’s historic Atlantic crossing had spurred the city to stake a claim in the aerospace industry, and in 1935, the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation moved its headquarters to San Diego from Buffalo, New York. Once in California, it built one of the largest airframe factories in the world and soon became the city’s largest civilian employer.
Ted would draw pictures of Lindbergh and his plane. “I never drew a picture of Ruth… or any ballplayer,” he said. “But I drew pictures of Lindbergh—and George Washington and Napoleon. Those three guys.”64
Another passion was marbles, and Ted learned the intricacies of the game, throwing around terms like aggies, immies, and puries. He’d play a game called Boston with Joe Villarino. You drew a big circle in the dirt, got on your knees, and tried to shoot the other guy’s marbles out of the circle. His obsessive play made for holes in the knees of his pants and the toes of his shoes.
On Saturday mornings Joe and Ted would hike up into the hills and go rabbit hunting, swim, and look for Huck Finn–like adventure. “One day,” Villarino remembered, “we was walking around this trail and a rattlesnake come out and Ted shot it with a .45 he had. We laid it aside, and when we came back, he wrapped him around his neck and shoulders and carried it home.
“Another time, at Dobie’s Pond, there was a kid in trouble. He was about eight or nine. We was about fourteen or fifteen. The kid was kinda splashing around. Ted went in and got him. He didn’t make a big deal of it. He didn’t like to be in the limelight too much.”
Saturday afternoons during football season, Ted liked to get home in time to listen to the USC games on the radio. He loved Irvine “Cotton” Warburton, a San Diego boy who was the team’s All-American quarterback in 1933. “On Saturday night we’d listen to Benny Goodman,” Ted wrote. “Swing bands were the thing then. I still prefer swing to anything else.”65
His favorite radio program was Gang Busters, which, with the cooperation of J. Edgar Hoover, dramatized closed FBI cases. Originally launched in 1935 and called G-men, the show featured the dramatic sound effects of screeching tires, police sirens, and tommy guns.66
Ted was a fire buff, an early sparky.67 He became a fixture at his neighborhood fire station, playing pinochle with the firemen. When an alarm sounded and the truck responded, they’d put a fireman’s hat on young Ted and let him hop aboard. Williams would hang on to the rear of the truck with one arm, lean out, face to the wind, and wave his arm, shouting with glee.68
Ted also liked to hang out at the Majestic Malt Shop, not far from his house, where you could buy ten-inch-high malts for a quarter, and at Doc Powelson’s drugstore, across from Herbert Hoover High School, which Williams would graduate from. He often mixed his malts with eggs in his perpetual quest to gain weight. (“Let’s malt up,” Ted would say to Wilbert Wiley or some other friend.)
There was also time for mischief—though nothing too serious. Once, Ted and his brother climbed a nearby water tower, got stuck, and the fire department was called to get them down. On Halloween, Ted would join his pals in greasing the trolley tracks in order to wreak havoc on the streetcars. One year, the group pilfered some fruit from downtown storefronts with the intention of using it to raise hell that night. The police caught them. Most were apologetic and let go, but Ted was a smart aleck, so he was hauled in to the station. The cops ended up playing pinochle with him and driving him home at midnight, charmed.69 But beyond such childish pranks, Williams was straight as an arrow—never smoked a cigarette as a kid, always in bed by 10:00 p.m.
Improbably, Ted tried piano lessons for a while, but that didn’t take. And he dabbled at odd jobs.70 Once, he reported to an employment office and spent several hours tossing barrels onto a truck for thirty cents an hour.71 In 1934, he worked as a lifeguard under Art Linkletter at a YMCA camp that May sent him to.72 He drove a delivery truck for a bake
ry that sponsored a sandlot team he played on. He even did a stint as an elevator operator and waiter at the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego, where, according to the hotel’s proprietor, Edward S. Bernard, Ted “never dropped a room service order, never spilled ice water on hotel guests and never was impolite.”73
Ted couldn’t afford his own car, but he loved to cruise around town with those who could. Bill Skelley, a teammate of Ted’s on the 1937 Padres, had a maroon 1929 Chrysler roadster, and they’d glide down Broadway with the top down or zip through Balboa Park. When they passed a golf course where someone was getting ready to tee off, Ted would reach over and honk the horn to try to disrupt the golfer. “Just fooling around,” Skelley said.74
Girls? Forget it. “I never went out with girls, never had any dates, not until I was much more mature-looking,” Ted wrote. “A girl looked at me twice, I’d run the other way.”75
Ted did go to his senior prom in January of 1937, double-dating with his friend Bob Breitbard. “I had an old ’27 Chevy, green with orange wheels,” Breitbard said. “I was ashamed of that thing. My brother had a Dodge with four doors. Later model. So we went in style. It was the first time I’d ever seen Ted in a tie. Ted took Alberta Camus, a girl in our class. She was fairly attractive. As far as I know, I don’t think he ever had a date before that one. We didn’t think that much about girls. Hell, the fellas hung out together.”76
Yet there was no anxiety when it came to voicing his opinion: Williams was high-strung, filled with nervous energy, always biting his fingernails. Ted’s friends found him candid to a fault, unvarnished. If he didn’t like someone, he would tell him so, to his face, rather than gossip behind his back. “I don’t care for you, fella,” he might say.
Ted’s booming voice could be heard above any din. And he used it to good effect, often to shout out an odd greeting cry—“Ta-ta-weedo”—when he saw a friend, say, a hundred feet away. No one knew what this meant—it was just a colorful eccentricity. Ben Press remembered that Ted would also use this whoop in triumph when he blasted a home run or hit a winning shot in tennis. A variation that he liked to use in his junior high school metal shop class was: “Pow-ho-we-hah! My muscles are bulging!” according to friend Jerry Allen. “Everyone laughed at that and thought it was funny,” Allen said. “My teacher would laugh, too, but he’d tell us he hoped we never yelled like that.”77
Such yelps were precursors to another odd scream Ted would use when he reached the minor leagues—and continued to use in his first year with the Red Sox, 1939, before his early ebullience started to fade. To amuse himself during bouts of boredom in the field as he waited to bat again, when a fly ball was hit his way Ted would slap his behind and yell, “Hi-yo, Silver!” as he took off to run for it.
Sam Williams toiled away in relative obscurity. Compared to May, who was well liked and a real presence in San Diego, Sam didn’t leave much of a footprint in town. In 1923, he did reach out and formally fraternize, joining the Freemasons, a group he would stay active in for the rest of his life.78
In 1931, Sam was named a deputy US Marshal at a salary of $1,440 a year.79 This was “the best job he ever had, his biggest claim to fame,” Ted wrote.80 “It was kind of a political appointment because he had done something for Governor Merriam when Merriam got elected. Strings were pulled.”
Actually, Frank Merriam, a Republican, did not become governor until three years later, so more likely the appointment was arranged as a favor to the politically connected May.
On February 2, 1932, Sam the marshal made news for participating in a Prohibition-era raid of a bootlegging ring that had been smuggling what was described as “rare liquor” from Tijuana to San Diego. Sam and three other officers struck an Eliot Ness–like pose for the San Diego Evening Tribune, holding their contraband with grim visages.
One of the perks of the marshal’s job was an Oldsmobile, complete with a siren on top, which Sam could drive home and which he delighted in showing off. May’s niece Teresa Cordero Contreras remembered Sam letting her and her siblings horse around in the car. “He’d come in the police car over the house, and he’d do the siren for us. We pressed a little red button on the dashboard. I was just a little kid.”
In 1934, Sam took another position in law enforcement, becoming jail inspector for the state of California, a $2,160-a-year job that would keep him almost constantly on the road over the next five years. He was based in Sacramento and seemed to take an activist approach, notably in Fresno, where he made recommendations to ease overcrowding at the Fresno County jail.81
Ted was sixteen and blooming as a baseball player when Sam went to Sacramento. He became the star of his high school team, and professional scouts were tracking him hard. Until this point, when the promise of money was in the air, Sam had shown zero interest in Ted’s baseball, beyond once threatening to beat his son for skipping school to play an American Legion game.82
But when the scouts materialized, Sam got religion. “By this time my dad was in on the act.… He got the idea I was the second coming of Ruth,” Ted remembered. Sam started buying Ted steaks on game days, which the boy thought slowed him down. “But I was pleased he was interested so I ate the steaks.”83
Still, to Ted, Sam’s belated and materialistic interest in his baseball stung. “In the real crises of my life he never once gave me any advice,” Ted wrote.84 He tried to get Sam’s attention but couldn’t. He even learned photography, his father’s former profession, because he hoped it would give them something to talk about. But it was all to no avail.
“His father could have cared less,” said Steve Brown, the Florida filmmaker and fisherman. “He said, ‘I thought I could impress him,’ but it wouldn’t have mattered. Ted didn’t understand his father at all. How he could have no concerns for his sons. He shared nothing with them. He’d come in the house and let May make all the decisions. Ted said his dad would get up in the middle of a meal, leave, and not come back for two days. Ted told me he was an alcoholic. That the only time his father would talk to him was when he was drunk.”85
So Ted searched out surrogate fathers. Chief among these was Les Cassie Sr., the father of Ted’s friend Les Cassie Jr. The Cassies lived across the street from the Williamses.
“Ted was at our house a lot,” said Les junior. “My mother and dad treated Ted like me, like just another one of their sons.”86
The elder Cassie, who was superintendent of construction for the San Diego schools, would play checkers with Ted, but they bonded over fishing. Les junior wasn’t interested in the sport, so his dad would take Ted down to the beach at Coronado and teach him surf casting. They’d catch croakers, corbina, and maybe some perch starting in the early evening, and they wouldn’t come home until two or three o’clock in the morning. By the time he was sixteen, Ted could cast farther than anyone else on the beach.
It was Mr. Cassie who gave Ted the only present he received when he graduated from high school: a fountain pen. And it was Mr. Cassie whom Ted would ask to drive with him across the country to Florida for spring training in 1939, when he joined the Red Sox. Ted promised then that if the Sox ever made it to the World Series, Mr. and Mrs. Cassie would be his guests at Fenway Park. In 1946, Ted delivered on that promise.
“The night they clinched, he called and said, ‘Are you coming?’ ” said Les junior. “It was the high point of my dad’s life. He introduced him to everyone back in Fenway Park, everyone from [Red Sox owner] Tom Yawkey to the ushers.”
Ted wrote in his book: “I loved Mr. Cassie. The nicest, dearest man.… When Mr. Cassie died, I felt as bad as when my own father died.”87 Williams would later say he always regarded Les junior as a brother, and the feeling was mutual.88 “We just seemed to hit it off real good,” Cassie said. “Right from the start we used to eat lunch together, carry a brown sack, sit on the steps of the auditorium. We’d talk baseball day after day.”
Two other neighbors, Johnny Lutz and Chick Rotert, also played paternal roles in Ted’s life.
W
hen he was only five, Ted had dragged his small bat across the street and asked Lutz to pitch to him.89 Lutz was a poultry retailer and competitive marksman who would take Ted on hunting trips across the border in Mexico. Ted thought Lutz was the best shot he ever saw; Williams, however, needed more patience with a gun. “Once he missed,” Lutz recalled, “he would become so disgusted that he would just shoot off the rest of the round wildly.”90
Later, Lutz, on whose kitchen table Ted signed his first professional contract, grew concerned that the boy wasn’t being adequately cared for. Once, on a hunting trip to the Imperial Valley, Ted said he was hungry. So they stopped and ate, and Ted had four eggs, a stack of toast, a stack of pancakes, and six bottles of a soft drink. Lutz said he and his wife found it pathetic to see Ted and Danny, when they were only eight and six, sitting on the curb until 11:00 p.m. or midnight waiting for one of their parents to come home.91
Chick Rotert, a former game warden who’d had two of his fingers shot off in World War I, was actually the first person to take Ted fishing. He showed the boy pictures of bass he’d caught from local lakes, then took him out to experience the real thing. Eventually Ted got himself a $3.95 Pflueger Akron reel and a Heddon bamboo rod. “I practiced casting until I knew what I was doing, standing on the porch in the evenings, maybe waiting for my mother to come home, casting into the yard or out to the street.”92
During a 1934 deep-sea outing from Point Loma, Ted and his party caught ninety-eight barracuda and gave them all away to people gathered on the docks, hungry in the Depression. The trip helped fuel Ted’s love of fishing, which would become a lifelong passion. Soon he was fishing with his friends, not just Mr. Cassie, Johnny Lutz, and Chick Rotert. Ted and Del Ballinger liked to take the streetcar to Ocean Beach, and on the way home the conductor would make them sit in the back because the fish they caught smelled so bad.93
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 7
