Alice would also go out and visit Ted in San Diego. In October of 1941, she was photographed with May outside Lane Field, where Ted, fresh off his .406 season, was on a barnstorming tour with Jimmie Foxx, his Red Sox teammate. Romano recalled that Alice returned home from one trip to San Diego with a dog named Cap that was part coyote. “He was a nasty thing,” she said.
Alice had been the first of the sisters to move to Miami Beach, where she bought a house on 181st Street with her husband, Phil Sheridan, a retired New York City police captain. Then, in the late 1950s, John and Effie decided to come down, too, and bought a place on 177th Street, two houses away from Roselle and her husband, Gennaro, known as Gin. The Romanos were from Fort Lee, New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge from New York.
John and Effie only used their house in the winter, so Effie invited her sister Veacy, whom Romano called Vivian, to use the place when she and John weren’t there. Vivian moved down permanently after her husband, a Con Edison machinist named Tom Grey, died.
The three sisters were petite, none taller than five foot three or so. “John had an Oldsmobile,” said Roselle. “Four doors. John, Effie, Alice, and Vivian sat in the front seat. That’s how small they all were.”
Alice was a brassy blonde, Effie a prim redhead. Vivian dyed her hair red. Effie, though the youngest of the three sisters, was the first to die, in 1971. Vivian died in 1978, Alice in 1984. After they passed, Roselle learned that the sisters were all actually ten years older than they had always said they were.
They were proud of Ted, their famous nephew, but didn’t drop his name. They allowed it to just come up in conversation.
“My husband almost fell off the chair,” Roselle said. “One day they start talking about Ted Williams. They said he was their brother’s child, and their brother had left New York to go to San Diego. They were all crazy for Ted. They’d go down and visit him in the Keys. Three or four times a year, maybe. They were very glad to see one another. Ted to me looks exactly like Vivian. They’d stay for a few days. They were very excited when Ted had his first child.”
Roselle said the sisters thought May Williams was an overbearing wife to their brother, Sam, and that she neglected Ted and his brother. “They said she was an absolute horror. They came back, and they were telling me Ted was so infuriated because him and his brother were out in the dark playing baseball because his mother never came home to cook for them. They were very fond of their brother, Sam. They said he was kind and nice. They thought May overpowered him, and him and the boys had to fend for themselves.”
The sisters didn’t discuss their childhoods much, other than to say that their mother had died shortly after giving birth to Effie and that their father never remarried. In various documents, Effie and Vivian said they worked as bookkeepers, while Alice described herself as a carpet weaver. “They said they were English,” Roselle said. “They bought everything fresh every day. Nobody could cook like those girls. The only thing in the freezer was Howard Johnson’s coffee ice cream. Some days we drove to Fort Lauderdale and we’d go to a fashion show. And we’d have lunch. They were fashionable. They had more money than me. In the afternoon we used to sit on the screen porch and have light conversation. They thought I lived in a circus. Nobody came to their house unless they were invited. I’m Italian—people always in and out.”
Of the three sisters, only Alice drove. One night in Miami Beach, she drove the wrong way down a one-way street. After that, she lost her license, and Roselle had to drive the sisters around wherever they went. Alice grew eccentric as she aged, and took to eating a box of candy before dinner. “They were little square cakes with icing, like an inch square,” said Roselle.
Ted wrote in his autobiography that his father ran away from home at the age of sixteen to enlist in the Army, and—impossibly—served in the Spanish-American War. Sam’s military records show he enlisted in December of 1904, which would have made him sixteen, but if he was born in 1886, the earliest of the birth dates that he variously cited, he obviously could not have served in the Spanish-American War, which was fought in 1898. Nevertheless, Sam was smitten by Teddy Roosevelt, and over the years, either flatly told people he had been one of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at San Juan Hill or failed to correct the impression that he’d been there.
Although Sam hadn’t been in Cuba, he had served in the Philippines seven years later, part of the Fourteenth Cavalry’s drive to quash the Moro Rebellion. There he saw combat and served under Major General Leonard Wood, who had been Roosevelt’s commanding officer at San Juan Hill. Thus the Rough Rider braggadocio, while unfounded, was at least rooted in a link to Wood, the man who really did lead the charge up the hill.
Sam’s infatuation with Roosevelt was apparently the inspiration for his choice of Teddy as the true first name for his older son. He passed on his own name, Samuel, for Ted’s middle name.* According to his military records, Sam was just five foot five and three-quarters, so Ted would eventually tower over him by nearly a foot. “Years later I used to kid my dad when we walked together: ‘Come on, Shorty, let’s keep up,’ ” Ted wrote.24
Sam’s stint in the Army was his heyday. “I remember he had a sword, a big saber he used to let me swing, and he always liked to shoot guns and ride horses,” Ted wrote. “I’ve got pictures of him: a little guy, posing behind a horse that was lying down, getting ready to shoot over the horse, and another of him at attention, standing real straight with a bugle slapped against his side.”25
Sam made corporal in October of 1907, two months before he was discharged. He liked the Army so much he decided to reenlist for a second three-year tour in 1908, drawing tamer duty this time—in Hawaii. It was there that he met May Venzor, the budding Salvationist.
Following his discharge in 1911, Sam, perhaps trying to impress May, enrolled in a Salvation Army training program. It was a bad match, and he soon dropped out, but May didn’t hold it against him. They kept courting, and before long, he asked for her hand. May accepted—at great sacrifice to her career. In the scheme of things, May decided that didn’t matter, so on May 13, 1913, she and Sam were wed in Santa Barbara.
The couple first lived in Los Angeles, where Sam took a job as a streetcar conductor. By 1915, they had moved to San Diego, where Sam opened a photo studio downtown, at 820 5th Street, in a second-floor walk-up above a restaurant. He took passport shots and catered to sailors and their girlfriends. At least at first, May was involved in the business, helping her husband with various chores.
Three years later, on August 30, 1918, Ted was born at San Diego’s Sunshine Maternity Home. Before Ted, May had had two other children, both of whom apparently died at birth.* On Ted’s birth certificate, his name was originally written “Teddy Samuel Williams,” but the typed “Teddy” is crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “Theodore.” Ted said he had later done this himself because he did not like the name Teddy. And the original birth date was typed in as August 20, but the “20” is crossed out and replaced with a handwritten “30.” August 20 may have been the correct date, since the attending physician, J. M. Steade, filled out his portion of the certificate the next day, August 21. Yet compounding the confusion as Ted came of baseball age were references in the San Diego papers to his birthday falling on October 30. May had tried to straighten out the mix-up—at least for the record—years earlier, in 1920, by filing an affidavit with the county clerk, saying that the correct date of birth was August 30 and that “the child’s name should be given as ‘Theodore Samuel Williams.’ ”26 Ted would later explain to Boston Globe sportswriter Harold Kaese that he was born in late August but moved his birth date back to October because he did not want the distraction of celebrating a birthday during baseball season.27
When May and Sam Williams arrived in San Diego in 1915, the city was a benign backwater with a population of about fifty-five thousand and a downtown fraying at the edges. San Diego could lay claim to being the birthplace of California: in 1769 the Franciscan priest Junípe
ro Serra made it the first European settlement in the area and built a beautiful network of Spanish missions. But the tides of history and geography worked against the city’s emergence as an important political or economic center. The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 established the international boundary just south of San Diego, the gold rush passed the city by, and the railroads found San Francisco and Los Angeles to be more felicitous end points for their east-west lines. Until 1919, San Diego had to be content with just a spur line from Los Angeles.
That year, the city finally got its rail link to the East. None of the railroads had been willing to take on the prospect of laying tracks across the hazardous mountains and gorges rising out of San Diego, but in 1905, John D. Spreckels, the industrialist-philanthropist who paid off the Williams family’s mortgage in appreciation of May’s Salvation Army work, underwrote the project. It took fourteen years to build, at a loss of many millions of dollars, and came to be called the Impossible Railroad. But by the time it was built, the connection with the eastern United States seemed moot, as Los Angeles and San Francisco were much better established centers of commerce, and the automobile was emerging as a more convenient mode of travel with the establishment of a coast-to-coast highway system.
Still, San Diego was given a substantial shot in the arm and international attention in 1915 when it hosted a world’s fair to help celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal. Officially known as the Panama-California Exposition, the fair drew tens of thousands of people to see the grand neo-Spanish buildings designed by the architect Bertram Goodhue and the transformation of fourteen-hundred-acre Balboa Park, named for Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first white man known to have crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sight the Pacific.28
Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford all came to San Diego for the celebration. Balboa Stadium was built, along with museums and key elements of urban infrastructure that served as a boon to economic development. A menagerie of animals left over from the fair would become the nucleus for the famed San Diego Zoo, the world’s largest. The exposition was so successful it lasted for two years, through the end of 1916.
The United States’ entry into World War I the following year brought a spike in military activity in San Diego with the opening of Camp Kearny and facilities at North Island and Fort Rosecrans. The Navy had built a coaling station at Point Loma in 1907 and used that as a foundation to greatly expand its presence. Later, the Navy choose San Diego as the base for the Pacific Fleet. A Marine Corps base was launched in 1919 and the Naval Training Center in 1921.
The fair ignited a “smokestacks versus geraniums” debate about how the city should develop, but it was the military and tourists—attracted by San Diego’s near-perfect temperate climate and its proximity to Mexico—who would shape the city more than anything else. San Diego promoted its ties to a romantic Spanish past and collaborated on development projects with neighboring Tijuana, the better to position itself as the gateway to Mexico. Tijuana became a major tourist attraction during Prohibition, thanks to Agua Caliente, its luxurious casino resort, which featured a racetrack and a championship golf course. Hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians seeking the high life passed through San Diego on their way to Tijuana, the Las Vegas of its day, until Mexico banned gambling in 1935. Many tourists liked enough of what they saw in San Diego, though, and the city’s population nearly doubled in the ’20s, reaching about 148,000 by 1930.
“When I was a kid,” Ted would tell the writer David Halberstam in 1988, “I’d see a falling star and I’d say, ‘Make me the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ ”29
The center of young Williams’s world then, a refuge from the angst and sadness of home, was the University Heights playground. Also known as North Park, it was located just a block and a half from his house, and for seven years, when he was between the ages of nine and sixteen, Ted spent part of virtually every day there. North Park had lights and stayed open till 9:00 p.m.—a good thing, given his parents’ prolonged absences.
The proprietor of the playground, the man who would become the most important baseball influence in Williams’s early life, was Rod Luscomb. Luscomb was eleven years older than Ted. Blond, about six foot three, two-hundred-plus pounds, and friendly, he’d played baseball at the University of Arizona and briefly as a pro in the Class D California State League: Williams would recall him as “my first real hero.”30
Luscomb at first paid little attention to the tall and awkward boy who kept following him around, asking questions about pitching and hitting. But he was impressed when he saw the kid hit—the smooth hip turn, the strong roll of the wrists.
When Rod did his chores around the playground, Ted would be nipping at his heels, all chatter. “He hung [on] to me like a little puppy,” Luscomb told Time magazine’s Ed Rees in 1950, in an interview that was part of nearly one hundred pages of unpublished notes and files that Rees and several other correspondents assembled for an April 10, 1950, Time cover story on Williams.* “He would look up and say with his eyes full of excitement, ‘Hey, Lusk, if I get big arms like Jimmie Foxx, and I could throw like DiMaggio and run like Jesse Owens, think I’d make the big leagues?’ ” Sure he could, Rod would tell him. But then Ted would point to his bony arms and say, “How in hell am I gonna get big arms?” Push-ups, Rod would advise—and Ted would do them, commencing a routine of fifty to one hundred fingertip push-ups a day that he would follow until the end of his professional career. He’d also squeeze a handball constantly to strengthen his wrists.*
One day, when he was about twelve or thirteen and Luscomb was wetting down the infield, Ted, all uncorrupted bluster, said to him: “Lusk, some day when I get a million bucks in the big leagues, I’m gonna build myself a ballpark with cardboard fences all around. Then I’m gonna knock ’em down with homers.”31
The park helped provide some structure to Williams’s life, given the infrequent presence of his parents. But there were limits. Luscomb would arrive at the park at 2:30, and a few times, he noticed that Ted was already there. That meant the boy was playing hooky, since school didn’t get out until three o’clock. Ted tried to explain that he was only trying to get a jump on the other kids so he could get in more at bats, but Luscomb bluntly told Ted he’d have nothing to do with him if he cut school again.
Ted obeyed, but he did have one other ethical lapse. Once, when Luscomb was getting out of the shower, he overheard Ted and a pal discussing whether to steal a new baseball they had spotted in Rod’s locker. When the friend went ahead and swiped it, at Ted’s urging, Rod walked around the corner, caught them red-handed, and banned Ted from the playground for two weeks.32
Ted and Luscomb played a game on the handball court they called big league. They’d hit a softball against a wall, getting singles, doubles, triples, or homers depending on where they hit it and how well they placed their shots. But what most interested Ted was extended batting practice—hardball—and Luscomb was happy to indulge him. They would play nine-inning games, and each would pitch to the other for three innings at a time. Imaginary fielders would be in their designated positions. A ball landing beyond a designated line would be a single, farther out a double, farther than that a triple, and out of the park was a home run. The score was usually close—6–5, 4–3, 7–5, or 3–2—and each player won about an equal number of games. They pushed each other and threw hard. Rod liked to exploit a weakness of Ted’s at the time—a slow, inside curve—and Ted would bark at him when he threw the pitch: “Hell, Lusk, get back to the bull pen and warm up!”33
Sometimes, Ted would hit Luscomb so hard that Rod would try and cheat in a little and move closer to the plate to reduce the distance he had to throw. When Ted noticed, he’d drill a couple back through the box, forcing Luscomb to retreat.
“I was so eager to play, and hitting a home run off Rod Luscomb in those makeshift games was as big a thrill for me as hitting one in a regular game,” Ted wrote. “We played for blood.”34
These early one-on-one jousts with Luscomb were central to Ted’s emerging view of baseball as more of an individual test of will than a competition between two teams. “I’m sure that during this time the little game between the pitcher and the batter was coming to light for me,” he wrote. “It’s so important, the real crux of baseball, and so many hitters seem to miss it. You’re not playing the Cincinnati Reds or the Cleveland Indians, you’re playing that pitcher—Johnny Vander Meer, Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, whoever he is—and he’s the guy you concentrate on.”35
Williams always believed there was no such thing as a natural hitter. Yes, you had to have good eyesight and strong wrists, but after that, there was only one way to really be great: through hard work and practice.
“I would never have gained a headline for hitting if I hadn’t kept everlastingly at it, and thought of nothing else the year round,” Ted told Joe Cashman, Red Sox beat writer for the Boston Evening American and Daily Record in July of 1941, during the midst of his .406 season. “I never passed up an opportunity to watch the leading Coast League hitters in action. I read every word of advice about hitting uttered by big league stars. And when I wasn’t sleeping or eating I was practicing swinging. If I didn’t have a bat, I’d take any piece of wood, or make a bat of paper and swing it. If I didn’t have a ball to swing at, I swung at stones, marbles and even peanuts and pop corn thrown at me by pals.”36
Or he’d just swing with an imaginary bat. If he passed a storefront that had a big, clear window, he liked to stop, take a few swings, and check his reflection out. When he did this, he’d be in his own world, oblivious to the merchants inside bemused by the vainglorious displays. The truth was, Ted didn’t want to just be good. He wanted to look good, too. “I wanted to have a great-looking swing,” he acknowledged. “That was important to me. Everybody wants to look good.”37
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams Page 5