Meanwhile, Ted and Sam Williams continued to drift apart. “My dad and I were never close,” Ted said. “I was always closer to my mother, always feeling I had to do right by her, always feeling she was alone, and knowing for years afterward how hard she had worked with nothing to show for it. I loved my dad, it wasn’t that I didn’t love him, but he didn’t push very hard. He was just satisfied to let things go as they were. He was a quiet man. He never smiled much.”94 Nevertheless, until Williams died, he kept a picture of his father smoking a pipe and holding a baby—Ted himself—on display in his house. “He was always very sad he never got to know his father,” said John Sullivan, one of Ted’s caretakers at the end.95
Cousin Gino Lucero thought Ted’s anger, which he would mostly aim toward his mother later in life, was misdirected. “All this anger that Ted vented toward his mom and used playing ball and flying jets—it’s his dad. I don’t think he even knew it. I think the only anger he had at his mom was the embarrassment she caused him. But here’s a guy—his whole youth was spent looking for a father figure. This guy was hungry for a dad that would play catch with him, a dad that would come to his games. I think Ted felt his dad didn’t love him. There was no example of validation. Nothing Ted didn’t know himself. We’re all in denial about our dysfunctions. But there’s no denying, in psychiatry, the importance of a father.”
In 1939, the state legislature decided to eliminate Sam’s position as jail inspector, and he was out of a job. By this time, he and May were also out of business. The relationship had been strained for years. May was turned off by Sam’s drinking, smoking, prolonged absences, and general indifference to her, while Sam was put off by her obsession with the Salvation Army and what he saw as her indifference to him.
They officially separated on April 21, 1939 (coincidentally, the day Ted made his major-league debut in Boston), according to the divorce complaint May brought against Sam in February of 1941. The separation occurred after Sam ran off with a woman who had been his secretary, Minnie Mae Dickson. The oldest of seven children, Minnie had grown up in Sedalia, Missouri, the daughter of a cattle rancher. She had snow-white hair, which she would often highlight with a pink or purple rinse. She was married once before Sam came into her life. “She loved clothes,” said her niece Beverly Schultz. “Her hats and purses and shoes always matched. Real snappy dresser. Probably that was why Sam was attracted to her. She was kind of heavyset but always carried herself nicely, and she was well put together. She was involved in Christian Science but didn’t like to talk about it.” They settled in the San Francisco area and opened another photo studio there.
May was devastated and tried to persuade Sam to come back, according to her younger sister Sarah Diaz. “She was just heartbroken, but there was nothing she could do,” Sarah said. “She even went up there and tried to make up with him, with Samuel. No, he had this woman, so there was nothing she could do.”96
May let Sam have it in her 1941 divorce complaint, saying he had been “guilty of extreme cruelty in the wrongful infliction of grievous mental suffering.” She also said he had “willfully neglected” to provide for her and was still not doing so. Sam initially failed to answer the complaint, but the following year, it was he, not May, who filed a motion to make the divorce final. His motion was granted, and the divorce became official on May 14, 1942.
The divorce, certainly rare in those days, pained Ted, but he didn’t blame his father. “Whenever anybody ever wrote about my dad, they seemed to delight in calling him a ‘wanderer’ or a ‘deserter of the family,’ but that’s a lot of bull,” he wrote. “He stuck it out with my mother for twenty years, and finally he packed up, and I’d probably have done the same. My mother was a wonderful woman in many ways, but gee, I wouldn’t have wanted to be married to a woman like that. Always gone. The house dirty all the time. Even now I can’t stand a dirty house.* She was religious to the point of being domineering, and so narrow-minded. My dad smoked, usually a pipe, and she didn’t like that and never stopped complaining about it. I remember one time he came home sick, he’d been drinking wine or some of that lousy beer, and God, you’d think it was the end of the world the way my mother carried on. My mother had a lot of traits that made me cringe.”97
As an adult, Ted rarely saw his father, but he did provide for him. He regularly sent funds that Sam used to supplement the threadbare income he earned from his photo business. Ted also bought his father a small house in Walnut Creek, California, across the bay from San Francisco, where Sam had settled with Minnie Dickson. The couple had married following Sam and May’s divorce.
“It was a little three-room house with a walnut tree in the yard,” said Beverly Schultz. “There was a living room, a bedroom, and a kitchen. I kept thinking that a big baseball star owned the house, and I wondered why he didn’t buy his father a bigger house. I assumed they were probably not real close. But at least Ted took some care of his father.”98
Though he had received considerable financial support from Ted, including one $6,000 payment in the late 1940s, which he used to buy new cameras and other supplies for his Williams Photo Studio on Main Street in Walnut Creek, Sam was not above using the press to try and leverage more support from his famous son. On January 9, 1950, Sam told the Oakland Post Enquirer that because someone who owed him $3,500 had defaulted on the loan, he was in danger of losing his house and his business. He’d had a stroke two years before, he added. “We just went broke when the note wasn’t paid, that’s all,” Sam said. Minnie was quoted as saying they had asked Ted for help.
The story went national immediately; some papers also published a picture of Sam and Minnie gazing forlornly at a photo of Ted and his new infant daughter, Bobby-Jo. While the implication was obviously that the rich ballplayer was ignoring his nearly destitute father, Williams’s agent, Fred Corcoran, mounted a quick damage-control operation and let it be known that Ted had been taking care of Sam for years. It wasn’t long before the Boston press was rallying to the Kid’s defense.
As he was growing up, and feeling frustrated and saddened by his parents’ neglectful behavior, Ted could find no solace in his younger brother, Danny, who was a classic juvenile delinquent.
Daniel Arthur Williams was born July 20, 1920, almost two years after Ted. Danny was shorter than his brother, a shade under six feet, and darker.
To compensate for May and Sam’s indifference, Ted had baseball—and his surrogate fathers, who helped look out for him and whose authority he respected—as a touchstone. But Danny had an incorrigible bent that always challenged authority, and he had no singular talent or passion to fall back on.
Early on, Danny turned to shoplifting and petty crime. Once, he brazenly stole his mother’s prize cornet and hocked it at a pawnshop, only to have May spot it one day as she walked by the store. Before long, he took to carrying a gun or a knife99 and swiping candy and cigarettes. “Danny would steal stuff, and they’d put him in a juvenile home called Anthony Home,” Joe Villarino said. “He’d go in and out of there. Danny started smoking when he was six or seven years old. Ted and Danny, they didn’t get along too good. One time I was over there and Ted was running away and Danny took a knife out of his pocket and threw it at him. Ted ducked around the door, and it missed him. Then I got the hell out of there.”100
By the time he was a teenager, Danny had become a fixture on the San Diego police blotter, and occasionally his name would appear in the paper for some caper or other, to May’s great shame. If he had a court date, he would ignore it and not show up. Once, Danny led San Diego police on a high-speed chase and ditched them—with his mother and cousin Teresa Cordero Contreras in the car with him. “One day Danny drove me and Aunt May to the grocery store,” Contreras said. “Pretty soon a cop came up behind him. He was going too fast, but instead of pulling over, he stepped on the gas and started leading the cop on a chase! He was trying to lose him, and he did. He just pulled into some garage and the cop passed by. I was so scared I couldn’t even think. May
was saying ‘Stop, Danny, stop!’ ” When his father had the US Marshal’s job, Danny would sometimes commandeer his dad’s car for joyrides to Santa Barbara, its siren wailing. “They’d catch him and send him back to San Diego,” recalled Danny’s cousin John Cordero, chuckling.101
“I know he was a thorn in my mother’s side, always getting into scrapes,” recalled Ted. “Nothing really serious, but one jam after another—piling up traffic tickets, maybe stealing a bicycle, or owing money on a truck and trying to clear out without paying.… For me, respecting authority was no problem, not then or now. I never got into jams with the police or anything. But some guys have absolutely no respect for authority, and Danny was one of them.”102
Rod Luscomb once took a loaded gun from Danny and had to chase him out of the playground several times for shouting obscenities at young girls. “Ask any cop in San Diego who was the most notorious juvenile delinquent in the city, and I’ll bet you he names Danny,” Luscomb told Time in 1950.
Gradually, Danny’s crimes grew more serious and brazen. Once, when Ted brought home a new car, Danny stripped off its tires and sold them. In 1941, after Ted paid to renovate the Utah Street house, Danny stole all the new furniture and hocked it, prompting May to have him arrested.103 And according to Daniel Venzor and Manuel Herrera, when Danny was in his early twenties, he was charged with rape in Santa Barbara, but his lawyer got him off after convincing the judge that the evidence might have been tainted.
“My being in the public eye probably made it tougher for him,” Ted recalled. “He never had too many advantages. He never had the outlets for expression I did. His life was just an existence.”104 Danny plainly resented his brother’s success and would do anything to get attention. Nevertheless, as the years went by and Ted’s fame grew, Danny would trade on his brother’s celebrity, using it to get free drinks at bars. And with pure chutzpah, he even sent a telegram directly to Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey asking for money.105
In 1940, Danny and Helen Mildred Hansen, a high school sweetheart he’d married, had a son named Daniel. Then, in February of 1942, with World War II on, Danny enlisted in the Army. This was a time when Ted, coming off his .406 season the previous year, had obtained a deferment as the sole supporter of their mother. But if Danny gained any measure of satisfaction from enlisting before Ted, the regimented military life didn’t suit him. He couldn’t take orders, and he frequently went AWOL to visit his wife and son.
By August of 1943, Danny had been dishonorably discharged, and his marriage was over.106 He barely got to know his son. In the late 1940s, Danny met a girl named Betty Jean Klein when she was a dirt-poor fifteen-year-old from Texas. Before long, they were married, and in 1950, they had a son, Samuel Stuart Williams, named after Danny’s father.
“My dad had a troubled life,” said Sam Williams, who works as the sports editor for a weekly newspaper in Northern California. “I think it was hard for him to live in Ted’s shadow. He had a pretty good temper, and that’s why he got into trouble, I think. If we did something he told us not to do, he was strict. Fathers were stricter back then. We would get spanked.”107
In 1951, a second son arrived. He was given the first name John and the middle name Theodore, after Ted. Growing up, the boy resisted being called Ted, but when people seemed to insist on referring to him that way he stopped fighting it. “The name’s haunted me all my life,” said Ted, the namesake nephew, now a graphic designer living in Oakland. “When I was younger I never talked about it, but finally gave in to it because that’s what people wanted to hear.”108
Danny found work as a commercial painter—MY EXPERIENCE IS YOUR PROTECTION, his business card said—and took his young family on the road, moving between San Diego, Chicago, and Texas, where his wife’s family lived. Ted thinks his father was trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors.
On the long drives across country, Danny would always keep his gun close by. “He strapped it to the steering column of the car. He said, ‘The car is my house, and you’re allowed to carry a gun in your house.’ He had a casual respect for the law,” son Ted said, laughing. “He didn’t like rules. And he’d invoke Ted’s name whenever he got in trouble.”
Always short of cash, Danny kept causing problems. One day, he stole and sold a new television May had received from Ted. By the late ’50s, Danny had contracted leukemia, and his behavior grew even more erratic. On a visit to the family homestead in Santa Barbara, he even pulled a gun on May, apparently in a half-baked robbery attempt.
Salvador Herrera witnessed this: “I seen Danny pull a gun on his mother. He was dying of cancer, bone marrow. He was fuckin’ nuts. He wanted money and said, ‘Give me that goddamn purse.’ I couldn’t believe he pulled that fuckin’ gun out. May said, ‘Oh, praise Jesus! Praise Jesus!’ That was crazy shit. Danny was a fuckin’ gangster.”
Ted’s relationship with his brother was always distant, to say the least. When he was with the Red Sox and would send money home to his mother, Ted knew that she was giving much of it to Danny. Bobby Doerr recalled watching Ted read letters from his mother in the Fenway Park clubhouse: “I’d watch his face turn red. She’d be writing him and usually asking for money, and he knew the money was probably going to the brother.”
Ted also knew that while he had had mentors and others to help him in life, Danny didn’t. “I know Danny suffered because of it,” Ted wrote. “I have to think poor Danny had a tormented life.”
At the three public schools he attended—Garfield Elementary, Horace Mann Junior High, and Herbert Hoover High School—Ted was an indifferent student at best. He would carry his bat in to school with him and store it under his desk during the day.
Leila Dickinson Bowen taught for thirty-one years at Garfield Elementary, and in 1928 one of her fifth-grade students was ten-year-old Ted Williams. She knew him as Teddy. “He had those sharp elbows and he used them,” Bowen said. “He’d run out to the playground and shout ‘first ups!’ and if he didn’t get them, he’d take off his cap and throw it as hard as he could down on the ground. Then, he’d cry.… But, that quick, he’d break out in a smile. He was a good boy, never a discipline problem.”109
Another Garfield teacher told May Williams she thought Ted was underweight and not eating enough. May asked how that could be since she was giving her son thirty-five cents a day for lunch in the school cafeteria. A nurse investigated and determined that Ted was giving his money away to kids who couldn’t buy lunch for themselves.110
At Hoover, besides the usual subjects, Ted’s courses included the non–college track typing, print shop, wood shop, and one offering called simply “metal.” He compiled a grade point average of 2.06, and would have been below 2.0 but for phys ed.111
“I was a lousy student,” he wrote. “I always took subjects I wouldn’t have a lot of homework in. I took shop. I was lucky I didn’t cut my fingers off. I wish I had then the inquisitive mind I have now. I feel like I’ve missed so much, and I’m always hammering at myself trying to catch up.”112 Under his high school yearbook picture there was one word: baseball.
At print shop, where they learned how to set type on a press, Ted was best known as the class clown. He’d often drop a match in a metal trash can containing the flammable printing detritus, then run off laughing and whooping.
When Ted graduated from Hoover, in February of 1937, the principal gave him a prize for being one of the school’s best typists, along with his friend and Hoover classmate Bob Breitbard. “We did thirty-two words per minute without an error,” said Breitbard. “We thought we were hot stuff.”
Ted was a fan of Hoover’s principal, Floyd Johnson. Ted credited Johnson as an important influence. “He was a man of high principles and he’d tell me that I’d get out of life and baseball… just what I put into it. Well, I’ve tried to put everything into it.”113 Williams would stop by Johnson’s office regularly to talk about baseball and fishing. He’d relax and feel free to put his feet on the principal’s desk. Concluded Johnson: �
�This was not impudence on Ted’s part, because to him all folks on the campus were just the same—faculty, principal, or kids.”114
Ted’s junior high school included ninth grade, so when he entered Hoover—in February of 1934, on a staggered seasonal schedule—he was a tenth grader. A month earlier, baseball tryouts were held, and Ted’s performance that day must stand as one of the best of all time—indeed, the tale has been told thousands of times.
Les Cassie Jr. was there. He met Ted at the tryout, in fact: “This long, tall kid came in. We were just practicing in a big open area. Ted sat on the porch of the print shop, behind where we were working out. He was just finishing up the ninth grade, so he wasn’t eligible to come out for the varsity yet till he hit the tenth grade. That was going to be the next Monday. There must have been a hundred kids out there. Anyway, Ted yells over to our coach, Wos [Wofford] Caldwell, ‘Hey, Coach, let me hit!’ Finally, Caldwell, who was pitching, said, ‘All right, get up there and hit.’ ”
Williams wore three pairs of socks at the tryout to make his skinny legs look bigger, but once he swung the bat, all eyes turned from him to the sky.115
“Ted hit the first ball on top of the lunch arbor,” recalled Cassie. “That was a series of benches with a roof over it where kids ate lunch, behind the right-field fence. No one had ever hit a ball up there. Must have carried three hundred and fifty feet. He hit the next pitch over there, too. Back-to-back, twice. Caldwell said, ‘What’s your name, kid?’ Ted said, ‘My name’s Ted Williams, and I’ll be back here Monday.’ ”
Despite his splashy debut, Ted was not a regular in his first year; Caldwell apparently didn’t want to rush him. He only played in six games, getting six hits in eighteen at bats for a .333 average.116
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 8
