On his own initiative, Williams would often call on other children like Nicoll until 1947, when the Jimmy Fund launch gave him an organized way to focus his efforts. The Variety Club of New England, an association of people in show business, decided that year to adopt Boston Children’s Hospital as its favored charity so that they could spotlight the problem of cancer in children, not just in adults. They raised $47,000 through a raffle and established the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, headed by Dr. Sidney Farber, a renowned pediatric pathologist at Children’s Hospital, who is credited with being the father of chemotherapy.
Farber’s early work attracted wide attention, and to build on that success, the Variety Club arranged for Ralph Edwards to feature the Boston effort on his nationally syndicated Truth or Consequences radio program in 1948. On the air, Edwards telephoned the Children’s Hospital room of a young cancer patient. The child chosen by Farber to talk with Edwards was twelve-year-old Einar Gustafson, who was from a small town in northern Maine, near the Canadian border. His identity was not revealed on the broadcast, which assigned him the pseudonym Jimmy.
Since Einar was a Boston Braves fan, it was arranged that Edwards would steer the discussion to baseball, and that some of the Braves players would be standing by to make a surprise appearance in the boy’s hospital room.
The players—including Johnny Sain, Warren Spahn, Eddie Stanky, and Earl Torgeson, as well as the manager, Billy Southworth—assembled around Einar’s bed and presented him with a raft of baseball loot, including a uniform, bats, and balls. A piano was then brought into the room, and the boy led everyone in a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in an animated, off-key voice. Edwards concluded the broadcast with a fund-raising appeal, and when he bluntly suggested to Farber that the clunky Children’s Cancer Research Foundation was too long a name for people to remember, Farber quickly came up with a handier two-word alternative: the Jimmy Fund.
The radio show struck a chord. People in Boston walked in off the street to give cash, while letters containing checks arrived from various parts of the country. Jimmy Fund collection canisters began popping up throughout New England and became fixtures at Little League games, movie theaters, bake sales, and wherever large numbers of people gathered. By the fall, more than $231,000 had been raised, and the following year, ground was broken on a five-story Jimmy Fund headquarters building in Boston, which replaced the tiny lab Farber had been working out of.5
The Red Sox’s first major event was the fund-raiser starring Williams in the summer of ’53, following his return from Korea, and Ted was effectively the spokesman for the charity from that point on.
After Einar Gustafson went into remission and left the hospital, Jimmy Fund officials lost track of him over the years, and many assumed he had died. But Gustafson would later reemerge dramatically and identify himself as the original “Jimmy” more than fifty years later, as the charity prepared to celebrate its golden anniversary.
Williams remained closely linked to the Jimmy Fund from 1947 until his death—a span of fifty-five years. That marked one of the longest associations of any public figure with a charity—rivaling or surpassing Jerry Lewis’s work for muscular dystrophy and Bob Hope’s for the USO. During Ted’s involvement, the Jimmy Fund became a New England phenomenon, raising more than $200 million for the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation, which later became known as the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Williams was the impetus behind a significant portion of that total.6
He was the public face of the Jimmy Fund, personally attending fund-raisers at American Legion halls, drive-in theaters, local police stations, Little League games, temples and churches, department stores, fish fries, bake sales, and cookouts. He would also lend his name to major pledge drives and endorse any checks sent to the Jimmy Fund—a creative way for fans to get his autograph. At speaking engagements, in lieu of a fee, Ted would ask whoever had invited him to send a check to the Jimmy Fund. He also made movie trailers for the charity, along with stars such as Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, and Joan Crawford.
But his most important work was unheralded—the quiet visits Williams made to the bedsides of dying children, which he insisted could not be publicized. Ted came to call because he cared, that was all. He feared that if the papers wrote about the visits, the authentic would look inauthentic; that his compassion would appear to be a calculated attempt to soften his bad-boy persona. Reporters knew about the visits, but whenever one broached the subject, Williams warned him not to write about it or he would never talk to the writer again.
Michael Cioffi was one of the many children Ted came to see. Although Cioffi later died, Ted’s visits lingered as a loving comfort to Michael’s family, which included seven brothers and sisters. Michael was four years old and had leukemia when Williams first saw him at Children’s Hospital in 1954.
Michael’s brother, Ernest Cioffi, remembered: “I was there with my mother, and Michael said to me, ‘Know who that guy is over there?’ He had his back toward me, so I said, ‘No; who is that?’ So my brother yelled up to him, ‘Hey, Ted!’ and the guy turned around, and my jaw dropped to the floor. Ted Williams came over and talked to Michael and me, and he spoke to my mother, and my mother asked if he’d like to come over to the house for an Italian dinner.” A week later, Williams appeared at the Cioffi house, in the Charlestown section of Boston. Michael, by then blinded from a tumor in his eye, had gone home to die. Ted stayed for two to three hours. “There’s eight of us, so that’s why he was there all that time. It was an honor, a day I’ll never forget. Michael would always say, ‘Ted Williams says I’m gonna get better, to keep fighting.’ Things like that. Ted was a modest person, very nice, and he was really down and hurt when he came to the house, because looking at my brother, he had a tumor in his eye and in his brain, and his head was almost twice the size of a normal head.”7
Mike Andrews, the former Red Sox second baseman who went on to become the Jimmy Fund chairman, told of a time when a little boy wouldn’t let go of Williams’s hand, so Ted had someone pull up a cot, and he slept next to the boy.8 Saul Wisnia, publications editor at Dana-Farber and the author of a book on the history of the Jimmy Fund, told a similar story of Williams spending the night on a bed next to another boy. Then when the boy’s family went to check him out of the hospital and pay the bill, they were told Williams had taken care of it.9
Even four days before his final game, Williams had gone to Rhode Island to make four appearances for the Jimmy Fund. Before he left, he stopped at Children’s Hospital in Boston to visit a dying boy. The boy, who presented Williams with a belt he had made for him and buckled it around Ted’s waist, died a few days later.10
While reporters respected the news blackout Williams imposed on live coverage of his Jimmy Fund visits, fans generally became aware of what Ted was doing because people such as Farber and Richard Cardinal Cushing, of the Archdiocese of Boston, would talk about Ted’s kindness publicly. And sometimes the grateful parents of a child Ted had helped would call the papers and sing his praises as well.
Assessing Williams’s impact on his cancer patients, Farber said in 1958: “I’ve seen Ted with them and he’s better with the children than a collie-dog. He comes in quietly to visit them. He comes without publicity. And I have to respect the man for it. This is his contribution to society. When you put together the whole case for Ted Williams, it’s then you find a wonderful human being who has done a great deal of good.”11*
One mother said that in the late ’40s, Williams helped her young son pull through a delicate operation in which a metal plate was inserted in his skull. “You can’t imagine the tender sincerity with which Ted talked to the lad,” she told American columnist Austen Lake. “It was amazing how he could put himself on childhood’s level, the direct simplicities of which my boy understood and which smoothed away his fears. You know children are quick to detect adult artificiality or a false note, like in a cracked bell. Here was a spiritual therapy beyond medical science
. It gave my little one courage to face his ordeal, which restored him to health with a silver plate in his head.… So in the impressionistic mind of a boy, there is a little bit of God about Ted.”12
In 1957, Williams visited a fifteen-year-old boy at Children’s Hospital who died shortly afterward. Nevertheless, the boy’s father was so touched by Ted’s visit that he wrote the Boston Globe to suggest that a ward at the hospital be named after Williams. “If he could prolong even for a day the life of a child, he would give up all his baseball trophies, honors and records,” the man said of Williams. “It hurts me to hear him condemned, knowing all the good he has done. I don’t care whether he throws his bat, expectorates, wears a necktie or not. Let us not forget the good things about this gracious man.… I know what he has done to try and keep my child and others alive.”13
Once, in the ’40s, when another admiring father sent Ted a letter saying he had named his son after him, Williams sent out a silver cup to the young boy engraved: FROM TED WILLIAMS TO TED WILLIAMS.14
On at least three occasions, Williams responded to appeals to boost the spirits of seriously ill or dying children who lived out of state by quickly chartering a plane and flying to visit them.
In the late 1940s, when the Red Sox were in Washington to play the Senators, Williams received a telegram from a doctor in North Carolina who was attending a dying boy. The doctor said the boy talked about Ted constantly and wondered if Williams could send him an autographed ball to give him a lift. Ted flew down to deliver the ball in person and returned to Washington that night.15 On another occasion in the capital, before the Red Sox were to start the season, a Richmond, Virginia, man reached Williams by phone and told him his son was seriously ill in a hospital there. “Can I see him this afternoon?” Ted asked. He hired a plane and returned in time for opening day.16
Then in the early ’50s, broadcaster Bud Blattner, in Boston to televise a Game of the Week for ABC, told Williams he’d visited a ten-year-old boy with leukemia in a Midwest hospital. Ted was the boy’s hero—would he sign a ball for him? Williams said he’d do better than that—he’d charter a plane and go see the boy, on two conditions: Blattner could say nothing of the visit on television, nor could any local press in the boy’s hometown be alerted. Ted made the trip, and the boy died later that year.17
Throughout the rest of his career, Williams kept up a schedule of frequent visits to Jimmy Fund patients and public appearances on the charity’s behalf. In 1957, in Baltimore, when the Orioles wanted to honor Ted on his birthday with gifts, he refused and asked for contributions to the Jimmy Fund instead. In 1958, following a Sunday afternoon game at Fenway, Williams made a dramatic entrance by helicopter at the Suffolk Downs racetrack in East Boston to preside over what was billed as the “world’s largest spaghetti dinner,” at which fifteen thousand people turned out to donate money for the cause.
Until Ted died, he would stay in touch with, and be a mentor to, some of the children who had survived. He always considered most of his Jimmy Fund work—certainly the visits to sick kids—to be private expressions of cheer and goodwill, and he disliked anyone suggesting that he was some sort of saintly benefactor.
“Look, it embarrasses me to be praised for something like this,” Ted said years later. “The embarrassing thing is that I don’t feel I’ve done anything compared to the people at the hospital who are doing the really important work. It makes me happy to think I’ve done a little good. I suppose that’s what I get out of it. Anyway, it’s only a freak of fate, isn’t it, that one of these kids isn’t going to grow up to be an athlete, and I wasn’t the one who had the cancer?”18
Williams also thought of his younger brother, Danny, with that same there-but-for-the-grace-of-God tinge to his voice: “My brother had cancer of the bone marrow or some damn thing. He threw a ball or an orange at somebody and broke his arm. Aw, shit. Could have been me, you know?”19
19
Real Life
With his final home run, Ted’s lifetime average stood at .344407—a sliver higher than Tris Speaker’s .344338. That put him fourth on the all-time list, behind Shoeless Joe Jackson at .356, Hornsby at .358, and Cobb at .367. He was then third on the home-run list at 521, behind Foxx’s 534 and Ruth’s 714. He was first in all-time on-base percentage at .482, ahead of Ruth’s .474, and second in slugging percentage, with .634 to the Babe’s .690. Globe stat guru Harold Kaese calculated that Williams had won a remarkable ninety-eight games with home runs for the Red Sox over the course of his career—a higher percentage than Ruth. He had made the dramatic seem almost routine, and his team came to depend on him so much that his failures—in the 1946 Series, the 1948 playoff game, and the last two games of 1949 against the Yankees—stood out all the more.
Obviously, losing nearly five years in his prime to two wars affected Ted’s numbers dramatically, and now the “what if” games began in earnest. Kaese, adding his projections to those of others, wrote that if Williams had played the 727 games he missed during World War II and Korea, he would have finished with 165 more home runs at 686, 403 more RBIs at 2,242, and 842 more hits for 3,496.
Beyond the numbers, Updike’s essay reverberated and served to put a sheen on Ted. Having one’s heroics celebrated—even with dollops of clubhouse cruelty and vulgarity—in Sport magazine was one thing, but having them exalted in the pages of The New Yorker was quite another. Now Williams had transcended the sports pages and mass-circulation monthlies and entered the realm of literature, a development that only helped propel him on his way to Cooperstown and formal designation as an immortal.1
On a practical level, however, Ted now had to come to terms with just what he would do next, and his heroic departure from baseball helped elicit a spate of offers. The Yankees—presumably trying at least in part to embarrass their rivals in Boston—asked Ted to pinch-hit for them in 1961 at a salary of $125,000. He said no. The Tigers inquired as to whether he’d have any interest in managing their team. Ted said no. If he were going to stay in baseball, he wanted it to be with the Red Sox, and though he’d agreed to a part-time job helping out the hitters at spring training, he was ambivalent about a continued association with Boston. He didn’t think he was suited to be a manager, but felt that if they’d wanted to, the Red Sox could have fashioned a full-time job for him, combining being a hitting coach with scouting, perhaps. “I thought for a long time the Red Sox wanted to keep me in some capacity, but as I look back I have to think there was a faction that didn’t want me around, that kind of undercut me a little bit,” Ted later wrote. “I never felt I was really wanted, so the hell with it.”2
Of course, it wasn’t imperative that Williams take any job. Ted Williams Enterprises, created by Fred Corcoran in 1946, had been generating well over $100,000 annually for years. There was a clothing and product line: Ted Williams hats, shirts, belts, and hunting boots. There was baseball card income, and there were various endorsement deals. Williams, who didn’t smoke and couldn’t abide the habit, had hypocritically done advertising campaigns for Lucky Strike and Chesterfield in the ’40s. One Lucky ad showed Ted with a cigarette dangling from the left side of his mouth, and he was quoted as saying: “Luckies are really a great smoke. They give me what I’m looking for in a cigarette.” Williams later regretted doing the ads. “I always said I was going to give that money back to cancer research,” he said. “I always said I was going to, but I never did.”3*
There was a contract with the Wilson Sporting Goods company that produced a five-figure annual fee, and a similar deal with the Horton Manufacturing Company of Bristol, Connecticut, which made fishing tackle. The annual fly-casting exhibition at the sportsmen’s show, which he would continue, was lucrative. Publishers were clamoring for his autobiography whenever he wanted to clear enough time to talk into a tape recorder and let a ghostwriter weave it all together. And Hollywood had a standing offer with Corcoran to produce a feature film, The Ted Williams Story.4
Now television also beckoned. Would he do color commen
tary on the Game of the Week? Ted said no. ABC took an option on Ted’s services to host one or more shows on either baseball or fishing.5 Fishing remained Williams’s great passion outside baseball. In late 1952, he’d invested in a Miami-based fishing-tackle business, then several years later, Ted and the golfer Sam Snead had started their own tackle firm, Ted Williams, Inc. In November of 1960, Ted wrote a rather presumptuous letter to L.L.Bean, the venerable Maine-based outdoor clothing and equipment store, asking if it would consider merging, or being acquired by, Ted Williams, Inc. The overture got nowhere.
Ted Williams, Inc., made a good rod and reel, Ted felt, but it couldn’t generate any sales volume. Earlier in 1960, while fishing with Karl Smith—his roommate at Pensacola during World War II, whom he’d stayed friends with and who had a sales background—Ted asked Smith how he could expand his fishing business.
“Have you heard of Sears?” Smith asked.
“You think they can sell fishing tackle?” Ted said.
“They’ve got ten thousand stores. Next time you go to Chicago and have some time off, go to the Sears building and tell ’em who you are and that you want to see a person that sells fishing tackle.”
So Williams did and made a contact, George Struthers, a vice president in charge of merchandising. Then the day after Ted’s final game, Struthers sent Williams a telegram saying he wanted to talk with him about his future. Several days later, Struthers and a colleague were in Ted’s suite at the Somerset in Boston to finalize a contract for Williams to develop and test a range of baseball, fishing, hunting, camping, and boating equipment for the company as well as to do some marketing and promotion. Ted would become chairman of Sears’s “Ted Williams Sports Advisory Staff.”
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 61
