This book contains the original stuff, the newspaper and magazine articles judging, analyzing, vilifying, and adulating Ted Williams, from the beginning of his career in Boston, right up through the Kid in retirement 50 years later. "Ted Williams Blasts Boston" by Austen Lake (1940) contained Ted's first public tirade. In closing his story, Lake writes:
Five or eight years from now, when mature judgment settles in and his adolescent muscle jerks and junior spasms disappear, he may take moral stock of his past and maybe tsk-tsk himself. For the lad is a high-strung nerve victim who thinks whole headfuls of thoughts at a time in a kind of cerebral chop suey instead of single ideas in a sequence like little pig sausages.
Then, like Foxx and Cronin, he may learn to accept the sour and the sweet -- maybe in Boston, maybe in Detroit, maybe in New York. Big money, quick fame, mass adulation, a celebrity at twenty-two, have fogged his perspective.
"Two Guys Named Ted Wiliiams" by Ed Fitzgerald (1948) is a long attempt to figure him out for the readers of Sport magazine. Fitzgerald describes Williams (now pushing 30) as a "badly mixed up young man who is just beginning to get his bearings and is trying hard to draw up on even terms with his inferiority complex." Ted felt this article stepped way over the line into personal matters, and for many years refused to talk to anyone from Sport. On the subject of Ted's mother, Fitzgerald writes:
I didn't get a chance to go to San Diego to see her, but my friend and colleague Hannibal Coons took care of that detail and came up with some interesting information.
"Mrs. Williams is extremely friendly and pleasant to everyone," he reports, "but by now she is a little hipped on the Salvation Army, and if you so much as say hello she will gladly leap aboard the conversation and talk both your legs off about the Salvation Army and its glories."
May Williams not only satisfied her spiritual desires through her Salvation Army work, but also used it to earn a living for herself and her two boys. That was a little detail that apparently didn't always appeal to Ted's father.
Sam Williams, a confirmed wanderer to whom a house was a prison, played virtually no part in the little family's life. He and his wife have been separated for nine years and are now officially divorced. Sam is in the photography business in San Francisco and is very proud of his boy Ted.
The collection would not be complete without a blast from Dave Egan. The date was April 30, 1952; the occasion was Ted's final game before reporting to the Marines for combat duty in Korea. It might very well be Williams' last ballgame. He might be killed or injured in the war, or when he came back -- in his mid-thirties-- he might decide to retire from baseball. Thousands of Red Sox fans, including the mayor and the governor, turned out for a touching tribute at Fenway Park that day. Dave Egan wrote a column titled "Ted Undeserving of Fans' Tribute." He begins by describing a teenage boy who idolizes Ted Williams:
... Swings left-handed like Williams. Wears his pants long, like Williams. Plays the outfield, like Williams. And will not wear a necktie even when the occasion insists upon a necktie, simply because the great man will not wear a necktie.
The skies will not tumble down upon us, whether a boy wears a necktie or not, but I have the right and the duty to ask where Ted Williams is leading this boy. Does he also refuse to tip his cap, does he feel that even the most indecent gestures will be overlooked, so long as he can hit a baseball with a piece of wood? Is he a rebel against conformity, simply because the man after whom he models himself has successfully rebelled, and may he expect to be honored by the municipal big wheels at a later date, if he follows the pattern set by Williams?
It seems disgraceful to me, that a person such as Williams now is to be given the keys to the city. We talk about juvenile delinquency, and fight against it, and then officially honor a man whom we should officially horsewhip for the vicious influence that he has had on the childhood of America...
Williams has stubbornly and stupidly refused to recognize this responsibility to childhood. The kid has set a sorry example for a generation of kids. He has been a Pied Piper, leading them along a bitter, lonely road.
And so on. You know, I have always disliked wearing neckties. I guess we can blame Ted Williams for that. I also like fishing, and I donate money to the Jimmy Fund. Blame Ted for those things as well.
This book contains many more stories --
some curious, such as Al Hirshberg's story in Cosmopolitan,
some classic, such as an annotated version of John Updike's
"Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" from The New Yorker. Lawrence
Baldassaro is an associate professor of Italian at the U of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee. This book was lent to me by a Milwaukean,
Mr. Martin O'Brien.
Reviewed by David Nevard (2002)