The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  Ted’s prediction that the major leagues would be half black proved way off the mark. The number of black players would peak in 1975 at 27 percent and has been in steady decline since, hitting 8 percent as of 2012.23 Still, Williams’s speech—along with the 1970 publication of Robert Peterson’s pioneering history of the Negro Leagues, Only the Ball Was White—forced baseball to reassess its exclusion of the old black stars from Cooperstown. Bowie Kuhn, who in 1969 had succeeded William Eckert as baseball commissioner, admired Williams and considered him the greatest personality in baseball.24 At first, Kuhn proposed only to give special recognition to the Negro League greats, not full membership in the Hall of Fame, since none of the players satisfied the requirement of ten years of service in the big leagues. It was a clumsy move akin to invoking a separate-but-equal doctrine, and there was strong backlash from the press, fans, and some leading black players, most notably Jackie Robinson himself. “If it’s a special kind of thing, it’s not worth a hill of beans,” Robinson said. “It’s a lot of baloney. It’s the same goddamned thing all over again. If it were me under those conditions, I’d prefer not to be in it. They deserve the opportunity to be in it but not as black players in a special category.… Rules have been changed before. You can change rules like you change laws. If the law’s unjust…”25

  Kuhn and the Hall relented. A special committee was appointed to select Negro Leaguers it deemed worthy of full Hall of Fame membership, and on July 7, 1971, the committee announced its first inductee: Satchel Paige. Paige would be followed later by Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Monte Irvin, James “Cool Papa” Bell, Oscar Charleston, Martin Dihigo, William “Judy” Johnson, and John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. More former Negro League players would be enshrined in subsequent years.

  Two days after the Paige announcement, Williams was honored in Washington by historically black Howard University for his role in opening up the Hall of Fame. “I’ve been thankful for baseball,” Ted told the crowd, which included Buck Leonard, the former slugging first baseman for the Homestead Grays, and track great Jesse Owens. “It’s what I’ve done best. It’s what I know. But a chill goes up my back to know I might have been denied this had I been born black. I think it’s time we realized that these great players were not just great black players, they were great players period. They should rightfully be enshrined next to the Musials, Alexanders, Cobbs and Ruths.”26 That statement brought a standing ovation from the crowd.

  Former Negro League stars also praised Williams for giving their ranks a key boost. Monte Irvin, a standout outfielder with the Newark Eagles before signing with the New York Giants in 1949, and who two years later sparked that team to its historic comeback pennant win over the Dodgers, was the fourth player admitted to the Hall of Fame after Paige, Gibson, and Leonard. Irvin credited Ted’s statement for his induction: “There are eleven men from the old Negro Leagues who are now in the Hall of Fame due to the fact that Ted spoke out, and when Ted speaks, people listen, and so everyone was very grateful that he made that statement.”27 Added Buck O’Neil, who was there the day Ted entered the Hall, “He really got the ball rolling.… We all knew it needed saying by someone like him. Regardless of how much we black ballplayers were saying it, it didn’t mean much. He said it because it’s the way he felt.”

  Williams’s statement in Cooperstown had added resonance and significance because he’d played for the Red Sox, the last major-league team to integrate and the club with the worst record on race.

  Owner Tom Yawkey had been among the thousands cheering for Ted that day when he was inducted, but he must have been taken aback by his star’s detour into the subject of race, for not only had Yawkey’s team been the last to integrate, Yawkey had been one of the leaders of baseball’s segregationist old guard, one of the authors of that secret 1946 report advising then-commissioner Happy Chandler to keep the game white.

  Even putting aside the sham tryout the team gave to Jackie Robinson and two of his Negro League compatriots in 1945, and its passing over Willie Mays in 1948, the Red Sox record on race continued to be dismal. In 1966, four months before Williams’s remarks in Cooperstown, Earl Wilson, a black pitcher on the Red Sox, was subjected to an ugly incident in Florida for which he was given no support by the club. Wilson, who had thrown a no-hitter in 1962, had gone to a bar in Winter Haven, the Red Sox spring training site, with two white teammates and was told: “We don’t serve niggers.” Wilson reported the incident to team officials, who told him to forget about it and to say nothing to the press. But Wilson did go to reporters, and in the ensuing uproar was traded away to the Detroit Tigers.

  As far as the public knew, Ted’s remarks at Cooperstown were his first about race. He was a baseball player, after all, and what ballplayer spoke out on political issues of the day, much less on the tinderbox of race relations? Few, if any, knew of his acts of kindness toward Robinson, Doby, Pumpsie Green, Blue Moon Odom, or Theodore Roosevelt Radcliffe. His 1954 quote touting black ballplayers in the Saturday Evening Post had been buried in a larger piece about Williams himself, and the 1963 column in which he wrote that “sports do not ask what a man’s color is” was otherwise forgettable.

  Since Williams, not Tom Yawkey, was the public face of the Red Sox in the ’40s and ’50s, and since he seemed to be so powerful, many in the black community actually suspected that Ted had played a role in keeping the franchise white far beyond its time. Such critics “believe Williams to have been the secret engine behind the Red Sox’ reluctance to integrate during the 1950’s,” said Howard Bryant, author of the 2002 book Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. “I think it is illustrative of many blacks’ need to ‘find some plausible explanation’ for why the Red Sox were so recalcitrant during those times.” Yet there was no evidence to indict Williams for this, Bryant noted. In fact, the record proved the opposite, and Bryant rejected the hypothesis as “absurd” when discussing his book in a forum.28

  According to Al Cassidy, the executor of Ted’s estate, Ted, later in life, regretted that he had not done more to use his influence with Yawkey to speed up the integration of the Red Sox. “Ted didn’t feel he had the standing to force this change,” Cassidy said. “He said, ‘Who am I?’ He knew he had status as a player, but Ted had a strict rule with Yawkey. Yawkey was the owner of the club. Ted drew a line, and he would not have crossed that line. Still, it was one of those things that truly bothered him. Not just the Pumpsie Green case but the other Negro League players. Inequalities hurt him.”

  Once, Cassidy’s father, with whom Ted had started the baseball summer camp in Lakeville, asked Williams directly why he had not done more to help the black cause. Recalled the younger Cassidy, “I was there when Dad asked him point-blank: ‘You were so powerful back then; you could have made it an issue.’ Ted said, ‘Looking back, you’re right, but back then I didn’t think I had any authority with Mr. Yawkey.’ He said that was one of his regrets—that he didn’t do more.”29

  Certainly for Williams to have lobbied his club owner on a major policy issue like integration in that era would have been unusual. “Ted challenging Yawkey on race, or anything else, would have been like a guy on the Ford factory line going up to Henry Ford and saying, ‘You know, I think you need this in your V-8,’ ” said Martin Nolan, former editor of the Boston Globe editorial page and a lifelong Red Sox fan.30 Buck O’Neil agreed. “Ted had nothing to do with the Red Sox decision,” he said. “Ted was a ballplayer, not the owner.”31

  Yet Williams was not just any assembly-line worker and certainly was not just any ballplayer. He was a superstar to whom Yawkey had shown great deference: moving Fenway Park’s right-field fence in for him, making sure he was the highest-paid player in baseball, tolerating his temper tantrums and outbursts, backing his demand that writers be temporarily kept out of the clubhouse after games, condoning his ploy to miss two months of the 1955 season and conceal income so he could get a better divorce deal, and offering to make him a player-manager. So it is not implausible to argu
e that since he knew Yawkey gave him a wide berth and admired him greatly, Williams might have leveraged his status to prod the owner on race—especially in the ’50s, after the color line had been broken and it would have been easy to mount an economic argument, not just a moral one. Red Sox teams were consistently dismal that decade, attendance was in decline, and the addition of black players could have made the team far more competitive. As his early acts of compassion to Robinson, Doby, Pumpsie Green, and others attested, Ted knew better, but he went along. “He framed it as being a different world back then,” Cassidy said. “It embarrassed him it took so long. But he said prior to Robinson, it was just accepted that blacks had their league and whites had theirs. It was normal. He looked at Robinson coming in as a good thing, but not necessarily as a call to arms. It was the times.”32

  Williams’s comments to the Cassidys suggest that his failure to at least broach the question with Yawkey festered within him, perhaps contributing to his decision to take a stand on racial equality in his Hall of Fame speech.

  There was a footnote to Ted’s big day at Cooperstown: After being presented with his plaque, the Kid decided that he didn’t care for his bronzed likeness. The features were off, and it just didn’t look like him, he felt. So he asked that the artist have another go at it.

  There are no records kept at the Hall of Fame in the category of inducted players demanding that their plaques be redone, but suffice to say it was a rare, if not unprecedented, request. But this was Ted Williams, so officials agreed.* Williams found the likeness on the second plaque an improvement, though he told friends he was not thrilled with that one, either. Still, he could hardly make another stink about it.

  Years later, in 1985, a life-size wooden statue of Williams by the sculptor Armand LaMontagne would be dedicated at the Hall of Fame and situated in a place of honor in the lobby, next to the statue of another remarkable hitter also sculpted by LaMontagne: Babe Ruth. When Ted pulled the covering from the statue, the crowd cheered, and scores of flashbulbs went off. Williams gazed at his likeness and absorbed the moment, then wept, overwhelmed by his proximity to Ruth.33

  “The comparison with the greatest physical force in the history of the game was too much for me,” Ted remarked later, explaining his tears.34

  22

  Dolores

  Three months after Ted’s enshrinement, he was officially divorced from Lee Howard. Before issuing his decree, Miami circuit court judge Harvie DuVal asked Lee if she thought there was any chance of a reconciliation. “Are you kidding?” she replied.

  DuVal awarded her $50,000, plus $10,000 in attorneys’ fees.1 Ted, after initially trying to win Lee back, had become resigned to the divorce and was ready to move on. And there were other family doings. In December, he became a grandfather when Bobby-Jo gave birth to a girl, Francine Dawn Tomasco, who became known by her middle name, Dawn. As she grew up, Dawn would look forward to visiting Ted, partially just to escape life with her mother, which she described as tumultuous and unsettled. “I used to love going to Islamorada and being with Grandpa,” she said, “because I knew everything would be okay—that’s where I felt safe.”

  Dawn and her younger sister, Sherri, who was born in September of 1968, would play on a hammock and a tire out back. Then they’d watch Ted tie flies by the hour in his workshop.

  “He wanted to know about my grades in school, how long my fingernails were, how much I weighed,” Dawn recalled. “He’d say my hair was a bit long. He was very loud. He used to cook breakfast. He was a terrible cook. He’d make eggs, and they’d still have the whites in them. They’d be raw! ‘Aren’t those the best damned eggs you ever had? You want some more?’ He’d be gritting his teeth. He was always intense. Then he’d make us baked beans from a can. He’d call them Ted Williams’s famous baked beans!”

  Ted had the girls give him a list of all their friends in school, then he would send the friends autographed balls. He’d take Dawn and Sherri out for Key lime slushies. And when he visited in Philadelphia, they’d go shopping—to Radio Shack for the latest electronic gadgetry, or to buy Bass shoes, his favorite. The shoes had to be Bass, Ted said. “He’d spoil us terribly. He loved obedient children. Visiting us with Mom, he’d want us to help her with her chores, then he’d stick hundred-dollar bills in our pockets. ‘Don’t tell your mom,’ he’d say.”

  On August 26, 1968, less than a month before Bobby-Jo was to give birth to her second child, she got a call from her father informing her that she now had a little brother. “There’s a gal by the name of Dolores,” Ted said.2 Dolores Wettach, the Vogue model Williams had met on the plane home from New Zealand in March of 1964, had been helping him tend to his love life after his breakup with Lee Howard. After their San Francisco dinner, he’d invited her to join him at spring training. She declined, but an intermittent courtship began. Ted was traveling, busy with Sears, his Red Sox duties, and fishing. Dolores was traveling, too, from her base in New York, pursuing a fledgling acting career in addition to the modeling work that was her mainstay.

  They were a combustible mix of sexual tension and emotional volatility. Dolores was smart, sensuous, and sassy. She had a back-to-the-land sensibility leavened by urban sophistication. She told him about her experiences as a nurse, model, and actress. She told him that she’d had a daughter by a hometown boyfriend she was never serious about and that she’d decided to give the girl up for adoption. The two had little contact now.

  At first, Ted liked it when she refused to play the sycophantic bobby-soxer to his Great Man. Dolores seemed to delight in asserting her independence and standing up to him when he was outrageous or too casually asserting his will. They’d be lucky if they went three days without a fight, after which there would be an eruption followed by a tender reunion. Dolores got used to the cycles. “I was smitten with him,” she said. “He was easy to love.”

  In the spring of 1968, Dolores told Ted she was pregnant with his child. Williams was incredulous. He asked her if she was sure he was the father. Dolores said she was quite sure. But Ted wasn’t. Uncertain what to do, he called his second wife, Lee Howard.

  “I got a call from him one day, and he was crying on the phone,” Lee remembered. “He was saying, ‘It’s not mine, sweetie, it’s not mine!’ Dolores was threatening to expose the pregnancy, and he was with Sears, and that would have been bad. Ted told me she was threatening to go to the papers. He kept saying, ‘It’s not mine. It’s not mine.’ ”

  Lee was unmoved. “Don’t tell me, Ted!” she said. “Tell her!”3

  Dolores denied she pressured Williams or threatened to go public with her pregnancy. “That’s silly. No one threatened Ted. You didn’t force him to do anything.” She said she’d been hoping he’d propose for three years, but she hardly entrapped him. “I’m not going to throw myself at someone,” she said. “I’m not going to try and finagle them. You like me or you don’t like me. That’s it.”4

  Reluctantly, Ted decided he would have to marry Dolores, and he told her they would elope to Jamaica, though first he insisted that she sign a prenuptial agreement. When they met at the airport for their flight to the island, he carefully looked her over. She was six months along but still barely showing. “Maybe you’re not pregnant,” Ted said hopefully.

  It was not the most romantic way to start the trip, and the chill continued when they arrived in Jamaica. Williams nixed Dolores’s proposed wedding dress. (She’d brought a formal gown that she considered jazzy and elegant, but Ted thought it was over the top given the circumstances.) She settled for a simple white wraparound knit number, and Ted wore just an Izod sport shirt over a pair of baggy slacks. “He’d say, ‘I like a little ass room in my pants,’ ” Dolores recalled.

  The wedding, on May 7, was held in a remote section of Kingston Parish. He didn’t want a lot of fanfare, he’d told her, and there was certainly none of that: they were out in the middle of nowhere. “He whisked me off down into the hinterlands of the island,” Dolores said. “We went in the
re to get married. The chickens were crowing. I thought it wasn’t a professional place.” The justice of the peace waved in a few locals to be witnesses. When the justice asked for the ring to put on Dolores’s finger, “Ted said, ‘She doesn’t get a ring.’ So the man, he looked at my stomach as if to say, ‘She must be pregnant or something.…’ And then, after being married, Ted took me to spend the night, and the mattress sunk way down, and I couldn’t sleep in the bed because I kept rolling onto Ted. So I got up and slept in the bathtub.”

  Dolores Ethel Wettach was the oldest of four children. Her mother was Swedish, and her father, Karl Joseph Wettach, was Swiss-German. Karl had come to the United States at the age of twenty and headed for Montana, aspiring to make it as a cowboy. He rode Brahman bulls and broncos for a while, but decided it wasn’t as glamorous, or lucrative, as he had hoped. Back east, he married Ethel Erickson, and they settled on an eighty-acre farm in Westminster, Vermont, a town of about three thousand people on the banks of the Connecticut River, some twenty-five miles north of the Massachusetts line, near Brattleboro. Karl made a go of it as a mink farmer.

  As a girl, Dolores would walk a half mile to a one-room schoolhouse. She had to drop out for a while during World War II, when her mother was working and Dolores was needed at home to help take care of her two sisters and brother. She’d get up early and do chores on the farm, including taking care of the minks. They had to be fed ground-up horsemeat and watered five times a day, and Dolores would drag pails of water up a hill from the well to the barn.