The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams

by Ben Bradlee Jr.

  “The tide has begun to turn in this case of the Boston sports writers versus Ted Williams, and the verdict is becoming increasingly favorable to Ted as public opinion starts to make itself felt,” wrote the Lowell Sun in an editorial. “If there has been a case of injustice done by a group of sportswriters to a great sports figure, this is it. Time after time they picked Williams apart, they have tormented him, they have knifed him, roasted him, flayed him, tortured him, and have obviously taken what can only be called a sadistic glee in doing so. It is sports journalism at its lowest.”

  In 1957, when Williams was defying nature and batting close to .400 late in August at the age of thirty-nine, the Fenway crowd nearly rioted when a decision by the official scorer, the Globe’s Hy Hurwitz, initially went against Ted. Williams hit a line drive that Tigers shortstop Harvey Kuenn dropped and Hurwitz deemed an error. Spectators shouted insults at the press box and raised their fists menacingly. An hour after the game, fans were still lingering to jeer the writers as they walked out. Hurwitz later changed his decision and gave Ted a hit after talking with Kuenn, who said the ball had had a lot of topspin on it.

  During a three-week newspaper strike that same month, fans flooded the sports departments with calls wanting to know first what Ted did and then what the Sox score was.

  The American responded to the shifting public mood in January of 1958 by running a fifteen-part series entitled “The Case for Ted Williams.” The series totaled eighteen thousand words and was prompted by letters objecting to criticism of Ted and demanding more positive treatment.* The Herald followed with a flattering seven-week serial about Williams’s life by cartoonist Vic Johnson—forty-nine strips in all.

  The warm communal feeling toward Ted held through to the end of his playing days in 1960 and would grow exponentially in his retirement. He became a beloved figure. Visiting Boston later in life, Williams would always be struck by how fans showered him with unabashed affection of the sort he’d not been able to sustain in his playing days.

  He would take great satisfaction from this and delight in the fact that he had outlasted the bastards: the writers.

  6

  .406

  Ted wintered in Minnesota again, and in November of 1940, he met the girl who would become his first wife.

  After a day of duck hunting outside Princeton, the small town fifty miles north of Minneapolis that he had been frequenting since he played for the Millers in 1938, Williams walked into his favorite haunt in town, the Kallas Café. He was fresh from the woods and gamy, wearing boots, a cap with earflaps, and pants with a hole in the seat. Sitting down at the counter, Ted asked the proprietor’s son, Jim Kallas, if he knew any cute girls.

  Kallas wasted little time before calling up a former high school classmate and girlfriend, Doris Soule, and asking her to come down to the café. “I didn’t say who I had down there,” Kallas said. “I just told her point-blank to come down the store and have a Coke—that’s it. When she came in, I left.”1

  Ted towered over the petite Doris, who was five foot three and 108 pounds but quite buxom. She had blue eyes, brown hair, and a wholesome, angular face; sort of a poor man’s Dorothy Lamour.

  Doris was a Princeton native whose parents had divorced when she was a little girl. Her father took off for California, not to be heard from again, and she and her younger brother, Donald, were raised by their mother, Ruby, who worked as a secretary at the local bank. They lived with Ruby’s parents, and Doris was close to her grandfather, a blacksmith, and her grandmother, a piano teacher.

  Doris couldn’t have cared less about baseball and was not impressed by the cocky, unkempt Ted after their initial meeting. “You know, on that first date, I just couldn’t stand him,” Doris told a reporter in 1942.2 “We had arguments all that first evening and I told him I never wanted to see him again. But I guess when Ted fixes on an idea he stays with it. He came right back the next day as if nothing had happened and I hadn’t sent him away at all.”

  Before long, Ted had Doris out on a frozen lake, where he was teaching her to ice-fish. They would hack through ice five feet thick, then Ted would go over the fine points of firing a speargun into the dark water. At night, he’d come over to the Soule house and play cards. It would be Ted and Doris against Donald and Ruby. Ted barely knew Doris’s family, but that didn’t stop him from filling the air with four-letter words.

  “My mother and I used to whip ’em at whist all the time,” Donald Soule recalled.3 “Ted had such a foul mouth, and my house was a very pious place. He used to swear, and every time he swore we used to make him put a coin [on] the table. At intermission time, there was always enough money in the jar to buy ice cream. So he’d go downtown and buy a couple quarts of ice cream and we’d go and finish the game.”

  Doris also had a salty tongue, though nothing like Ted’s. She was twenty-one, four months younger than Williams. At the time, she was living downstate in Rochester, working as a cashier in a restaurant near the Mayo Clinic.

  “Doris was very likable, very popular,” said Ramona Mitchell, another Princeton girl who was living in Rochester at the time. “She drank a lot after she got out of high school. We used to party a lot.

  “I can remember Ted when she introduced me. He was laying on the bed at Doris’s house, and he didn’t even get up to acknowledge the introduction. He wasn’t my favorite person. Another thing that used to aggravate me is he always used to walk in late to the movie theater. He was a celebrity in town. He’d be wearing those buckled overshoes. You could hear him coming. Ted, I could take him or leave him. Nobody’s better than I am. He put on airs, you know.”4

  Growing up in Princeton, Doris had always been a performer. She and her friend and neighbor, Jean Holetz, would sing each other love songs with a washcloth and bowl of water nearby, the better to sprinkle their faces with faux tears as a tune reached its emotional climax. A cheerleader, Doris took piano lessons from her grandmother, played E-flat alto saxophone in the high school band, and loved to dance the Charleston. Neither of their families was well-off: they shared an outdoor toilet that was part of a garage, and she and Jean would light bonfires between their houses at night and roast potatoes, then play tag under the streetlights.5

  Another friend of Doris’s was Jane Ross, whose father was the town mortician. Doris and Jane had the run of the funeral home, and it was there that Doris sneaked her first cigarette by climbing into an empty casket and closing the lid. She wasn’t spooked by being around corpses. “She used to say, ‘Shoot, you don’t have to be afraid of the dead ones—it’s the live ones you have to watch out for!’ ” remembered Doris and Ted’s daughter, Bobby-Jo.6

  By the end of that winter, Ted and Doris had progressed to the point where he invited her to come to Boston in the spring for the baseball season. Doris lined up a job as a hotel cashier and eagerly awaited her big-city debut.

  But Ruby Soule worried about the transition for her daughter, especially in light of something an ex-beau had remarked upon before Doris left. “One of the boyfriends she had was talking to my mother and me,” said Donald Soule. “He said, ‘You know, you ought to tell Doris she’s drinking too much. She shouldn’t drink that way.’ ”

  On January 23, 1941, Ted interrupted his winter of hunting and romance to appear before a draft board in Minneapolis. Only vaguely aware that Hitler was by then rampaging across Europe, Williams proceeded to register for conscription into the military under the terms of the Selective Training and Service Act signed into law the previous September by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The legislation required that men ages twenty-one to thirty register with their local draft boards. Ted drew number 648 under the law’s lottery system, which meant that he stood to become the 648th man called into service in his Minneapolis district. But a board official said it was unlikely that Ted would be called before the end of the upcoming baseball season, and he indicated there was a possibility he could be deferred and classified 3A, since he was then the sole supporter of his mother
.

  Williams said he was “willing to serve my country if they want me,” but pointedly added that he would “like to cash in on another season’s salary.”7 If that sentiment didn’t exactly square with the nascent patriotic zeal taking shape in the country as World War II approached, few seemed to notice or take offense, and the draft board did, in fact, give him a 3A classification, entitling him to a deferment because his service would create a hardship for a dependent, his mother.

  Ted returned to his girlfriend and the outdoor life, oblivious not only to foreign affairs but also, it seemed, to baseball. By the end of February, when his Red Sox teammates had gathered for spring training in Florida, Ted was a no-show. He surfaced on March 1, calling Eddie Collins to report that he was in the wilds of northern Minnesota hunting wolves with a group of friends. The countryside was so remote that he’d lost track of the time and had only now been able to reach a phone. He asked for a few more days to consider the contract offer that the team had made, and Collins agreed. Ted was technically not late for camp, Collins and Joe Cronin explained, rather lamely, to reporters, because only those players who’d signed their contracts had received notices spelling out when to report.

  Two days later, Ted and Collins agreed on a contract worth a reported $18,500—a $6,000 raise over the previous year—and Ted got in his car for the long drive to Sarasota. When he arrived, four days later, the Red Sox had just left for a three-game exhibition trip to Tampa and Miami. Ted walked into the nearly empty clubhouse at Payne Park and came upon clubhouse attendant Vince Orlando, Johnny’s younger brother, asleep on a training table. Williams tiptoed over to the table and upended it with a loud roar, sending Orlando sprawling to the floor. “It scared the hell out of me,” Orlando remembered later.8

  Williams had the field to himself over the weekend, so he took batting practice until the blisters bloomed on his hands. When his teammates and the writers returned, Ted held court on his wolf-hunting adventure in Minnesota: “It seems as though after hunters out there get tired of shooting ducks and pheasants… they go after wolves on which the state pays a bounty,” he explained to a rapt audience. “It’s easy to track the gray wolves, but pretty hard to get a shot at them. I didn’t get any, but some of the fellows with me came up with three or four.”

  Addressing the baseball season, Ted pledged to go all out. “I’d rather play ball than eat, sleep or hunt,” he said. “The fans want a ballplayer to give everything he has. That’s my aim, not only this year but every year. That’s my greeting to Boston baseball fans. See you later. I think it’s my turn to hit.”9

  Ted had greeted the writers with smiles and handshakes all around, not exactly offering a mea culpa for his poisonous behavior the previous year but plainly chastened and hoping to be given a fresh start. Asked by the American’s Huck Finnegan to account for his 1940 funk, Ted put a new spin on his pop-off session with Austen Lake, during which he had said he wanted out of Boston: “One of the writers came to me last year and we had a good, heart-to-heart talk. One of those off-the-record talks. I had plenty of worries and was upset. I told him everything, never thinking he was going to print it. Then, blooie, all over the paper. What a let-down. And, so I figured to myself, ‘you can’t trust any of these birds,’ and I guess I acted that way. But I know you can trust most of them, so I’m willing to call it quits if they are. Wipe the whole slate clean and start the year right.”10

  The writers seemed amenable. Finnegan wrote that Ted seemed like the “laughing boy” and “personality kid” once more. And the Transcript’s Harold Kaese, who had ignited Williams last season with his low blow about the Kid failing to visit his parents, now suggested that he and his brethren in the press bore part of the responsibility. “Maybe we’re largely to blame, those of us who wrote.… We should have handled the Kid as a psychologist would.”11

  Even Colonel Egan seemed in a forgiving mood. First, he ran a long interview with Eddie Collins in which Collins raved about Ted and said that “last year he reminded me of a friendly puppy who had been hurt in some way and so became distrustful of everybody, including his friends. He is only a boy and he could not understand how anybody could dislike him.”12 Then, a week later, Egan ratified the new détente between Williams and the writers. “The main argument was between Ted and the newspapermen,” wrote the Colonel. “So far as this sports writer is concerned, it is finished, and a new and more satisfactory chapter in the life of the young man is about to begin.”13

  Sensing the friendlier, more convivial atmosphere, Ted relaxed and spoke with the same disarming certitude and confidence that he had during his rookie year. “All right, I ask you: how can they stop me from hitting?” he said, chatting with Kaese about the 1941 season. “They can’t, that’s all.… They couldn’t stop me my first year and they couldn’t stop me my second. They won’t stop me my third.… My second year was better than my first. I’ll tell you why. I hit higher, .344 to .327, I struck out less, and I got more walks. I made more hits and I scored more runs. I was on base more. I didn’t hit so many home runs and I didn’t knock in so many runs. So what? I was batting third instead of fourth. I had more chance to bat in runs my first year because Foxx batted ahead of me.… And remember, I was hitting in the toughest park in the league for a left hand hitter.… I was the best hitter on the Red Sox last year, wasn’t I?… What’s more, I got the biggest raise in baseball, except for maybe Greenberg. I guess that shows what the Red Sox thought of me.”14

  Ted’s aplomb was tempered somewhat by injury. He twisted his right ankle stepping in an outfield gully while chasing a fly ball, then aggravated the injury in an exhibition game on March 19 by catching a spike sliding into second base while trying to stretch a single into a double.

  Williams was sidelined for a few weeks, sitting out exhibition games but still taking regular batting practice. One workout companion was Hall of Famer Paul Waner, who lived in Sarasota and had been released by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ted and Waner (who in 1941 would play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and then the Boston Braves) talked hitting with gusto every day.15

  After some initial confusion on a diagnosis, it was finally announced on April 5 that Williams had a slight fracture of one of the small bones in his ankle and would be out for five to six weeks. “Bullshit,” Ted told the writers, promising to be back far sooner.

  Tom Yawkey had insisted that Williams go to Birmingham, Alabama, to be examined by his wife’s brother-in-law, Dr. L. E. Sorrell. Arriving home at Boston’s Back Bay station on the Colonial Express train after a thirty-six-hour ride from Alabama, the Kid was upbeat and bantered with the pack of writers and photographers gathered to meet him. “ ‘I kept telling everybody that the ankle wasn’t getting any better, but I guess they wanted to wait until we got to Birmingham to see some doctor they knew.”16 He said the ankle didn’t hurt when he hit, only when he ran, so the Red Sox held him out of the opening day lineup on April 15 and relegated him to pinch-hitting duty for the first two weeks of the season.

  Ted saw a silver lining to the injury. He never hit well in the early part of the season anyway because of the cold weather. Now he’d bide his time until it got warmer, and in the meantime he’d keep sharp by hitting against Joe Dobson, the pitcher whom the Red Sox had acquired in a trade with Cleveland.

  “I got the most batting practice of my life, and the best, because Dobson had a hell of a curve and a good overhand fastball, and he always bore down,” Ted later wrote. “Every day that his arm would hold out, and the blisters on my hands would hold out, we’d go out there like it was all out war, one-on-one.”17 Back in the lineup, Williams hit .436 for the month of May and .536 from May 17 to June 1. May 15, in hindsight, was one of the most significant dates of the season, for that was the day Ted and Joe DiMaggio each started hitting streaks. DiMaggio’s, of course, would last for fifty-six games, a wondrous skein in which he hit .409 and defined his magnificent career. Williams’s was a more modest twenty-three and lasted until June 8, but during that time he hi
t .487 and launched himself on the path to .400.

  It was the first time that the two men came to be linked in the public imagination as the dominant players of their era. Ted was still only twenty-two and starting his third season; Joe was twenty-six and in his sixth year with the Yankees, but the summer of 1941 would be their gateway to baseball immortality. Lively debates began in Boston, New York, and around the country—debates that would span Williams’s and DiMaggio’s lifetimes and beyond—as to which man was the better hitter, the more valuable to his team, the more reliable in the clutch, the better leader.

  Ted got the edge in two early Red Sox–Yankees meetings, going 7–11 in a three-game series at Yankee Stadium on May 23, 24, and 25, and 3–5 in a Memorial Day doubleheader at Fenway Park that sixty thousand fans turned out to try to get tickets for. DiMaggio had four errors in the doubleheader and barely kept his streak alive in the second game, thanks to a windblown fly muffed by Red Sox right fielder Pete Fox.

  By June 1, Ted was hitting .430, and there was talk in the papers that not only could Williams be the first to hit .400 since Bill Terry in 1930, but perhaps he had a chance to break the .440 mark set by Hugh Duffy of the old National League Boston Beaneaters in 1894. As it happened, Duffy was then the seventy-four-year-old first-base coach for the Red Sox and one of Ted’s biggest boosters.

  “I can say this about Teddy,” Duffy told the Globe’s Hy Hurwitz. “I have never seen a hitter better than Williams in all my life, and that goes for Cobb, Ruth, Hornsby and all the rest.” Duffy said Ted came to him quite often “for a check-up.” But there was little that he could tell him other than to not think about setting any records, lest he lose his rhythm. “All Teddy has to do is keep swinging in that lazy natural way of his and he’ll hit a million.”18