Book Review
Ted Williams: A Tribute
by Jim Prime & Bill Nowlin Masters Press, Indianapolis, Indiana, $29.95 © 1997, excerpts reprinted by permission of Bill Nowlin JOHN GLENN, United States Senator
I think I met Ted first at Cherry Point. We were both down there going through jet refresher and he left just ahead of me. When we got to Korea, I was assigned as operations officer of the VMF-311 squadron. We assigned one of the regular Marine pilots to fly with a Reserve. I'd guess probably half the missions that Ted flew in Korea he flew as my wing man. You get to know that guy pretty well.
You fly as a two-person element. Your two people stick together and if you're going into combat, you fly together. You watch out for each other. We were doing a lot of close air support work, with napalms and bombs on the ground and rockets and so on. If somebody got hit, you stuck with that guy, and you made every effort to get him back.
The F-9F Panther was a jet but it was not as fast as the F-86, nor would it go as high as the F-86. I won't say it was more in the truck category but it was close to that in that it would haul an awful lot of bombs for a jet, and was a good platform for doing air-to-ground work. The Air Force in the Korean theater was assigned the task of flying air superiority missions with the F-86, the Sabre. We Marines would be up hitting bridges and rails, and things like that up north of the combat, of the front line area.
We did a lot of flying. Some of the more memorable missions we were doing road reconnaissance, just two planes out on a road rec. You'd take off early in the morning, before dawn, before there was any first light even, and you flew up at altitude until you'd be way up north, oh, maybe 150 miles or so behind lines. You'd be way up there, and then you'd let down, just at first light when you could see enough to skip along on the roads flying at real low level. One plane would fly down there and the other plane would fly along about a thousand feet behind and direct the first plane on the ground to make a right over the next ridge, or whatever, make sure to keep him on the road. Then you'd shoot up any trucks and things that you found which hadn't been hidden. Usually they'd hide them in tunnels and things during the daytime but you'd try and catch them out in the open.
We were under intense anti-aircraft fire on almost every mission in Korea. They had it all over the blooming place. By the time we got out there, which was in late '52 and then into '53, it was a rare mission you went on where you didn't see anti-aircraft fire.
On his third or fourth mission, Ted had to crash-land his plane. I was not on that particular mission but I certainly knew about it. You have to understand a little bit about the old F9 to appreciate how serious that situation was. It's one thing to get hit and another thing to have fire coming out the back in any airplane. There's a matter of some concern, needless to say, that the thing doesn't blow. Ted got hit and was coming back and there was smoke and his radio was out _ he couldn't hear the radio transmissions. He knew he was on fire but he didn't want to bail out. Everybody thought he should have gotten out but I think Ted will tell you he was afraid he was going to knock his kneecaps off. Somebody had bailed out and came out with no legs not long before that. Ted was going to ride her in or go down with it, one or the other. He bought the thing around, Couldn't get the gear down, and bellied it in. The plane slid up the runway and he jumped out of the cockpit and ran off and stood there, watched it melt down. He was just lucky the thing didn't blow.
I was with him on another mission where he got hit. Sometimes you're on a mission and you get a good hit. We were going to areas where there might be fuel dumps and ammunition dumps. And on one mission we were over of the Heaju Peninsula which is sort of the Western part of Korea and there was an area where they were building up their forces as they sent them down to the front. We were assigned an area where we thought they had ammunition stored. Well, one of the best things that ever happened on a mission like that was if you got a good hit and got it right into the bunkers, their ammunition would start going off. That's called a secondary explosion. The first explosion resulted from the bomb, the secondary explosion occurred when all the stuff on the ground started going off. I went in on this particular day and got a good hit and it was blowing up on the ground. Ted was coming right in behind me and he pulled out of his run and yelled on the radio "I've been hit! I've been hit."
I said "Head for the water" which is what we always did if you got hit _ get over the ocean so if you had to bail out you didn't crack up on land. Then we'd have somebody do a Dumbo rescue _ in other words, send out a seaplane to rescue you. He was heading for the water and I was going over making circles around his airplane, flying under him and looking up at the bottom to see if I could see anything _ see where he' d been hit _ and out under the right wing tip was a good sized hole. I went up on top and saw that the hole didn't come out on top. This was a little bit screwy. He still had the airplane under control and there weren't any problems so we flew on back and landed. What had happened was he'd had a rock blown up from the ground on a secondary explosion which had hit him in the tip tank. We always kidded him about the Williams anti-aircraft fire.
The Koreans had a word for rock which was something like "kroindyke." If you wanted to get somebody's attention at night when you were coming back from the club, you picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at a Quonset hut. You could imagine what a racket that makes inside. This was known as Kroindyking. After Ted got hit by that rock, he became known as the "Kroindyke Kid."
There's another funny story that I happened to think of. You know when you call a baseball player "bush" _ well, that's the worst thing you can say to a major league player, "You're bush league." When Ted got to Korea, one day somebody referred to something about him being bush one day, joking. Ted responded like you might expect Ted to respond, sort of negatively _ well, that set the pattern. He was known as "Bush" Williams from them on. Everybody liked him.
Sure. I knew about Ted Williams and his records in baseball. I used to follow baseball all the time when I was a kid. Who knows what those records might have been if he hadn't had two hitches in the Marine Corps? I always tell him what kind of a ballplayer he could have been if he'd just been a Democrat. He could have really made history. But I'll tell you _ Ted isn't one who sits around and moans about what might have been. And there's nobody, I swear, there's nobody that served in the Marine Corps who is any more proud of having been a Marine than Ted Williams. He's quoted as saying that there were 75 men in the two squadrons and 99% of them did a better job than he did. I disagree with his assessment. He did a great job and he was a good pilot. He wasn't out there moaning all the time or trying to duck flights, or anything like that. He was out there to do a job and he did a helluva- good job. Ted ONLY batted .406 for the Red Sox. He batted a thousand for the Marine Corps and the United States.
PAUL GLEASON, Actor
I was in the Cleveland chain and later played in the low minors with the Red Sox organization. I was there from '59-'62. Ted lived in Islamorada, Florida, and I lived down there and I used to talk hitting with him all the time there and up in Boston.Back then I was kind of an arrogant little guy. Here's the thing there's a difference between Ted Williams and all other hitters. For example, I told him one time that he screwed me up as a hitter and he really got pissed-off ."Whattaya mean I screwed you up? You're screwin' yourself up, drinkin' and runnin' around!" He used to tell me "Wait for your pitch until you got two strikes on you and then protect the plate." I was always behind the count because I was waiting for my pitch and they'd throw strikes and if it wasn't my pitch, I'd take it or I'd foul it off, so I was always 0 and 2. I went 1 for 23 one year listening to that advice. I was standing up at the plate like a statue. The difference between Ted Williams and hitters like me would be that he can wait for his pitch and when he gets it he doesn't foul it off _ he hits it right on the nose. When I wait for my pitch I might miss it and strike out.
I used to good-naturedly discuss the different hitting theories with him because I used to talk with all the hitters. I'd talk with Hornsby and Waner and Williams. Paul Waner was my number one guru and he would always have you swinging down on the ball, have that bat at the top of the zone hitting line drives. And Williams used to ferociously argue against that. He'd say, "You've GOT to swing up. The pitcher's mound is elevated, you've got to have a slight uppercut in your swing." But when I did pop the ball up, see, so I used to say, "My way is Waner's way." Williams wanted every hitter to subscribe to his formula which he had prose successful, but what's good for one hitter isn't necessarily good for another hitter. And I certainly don't mean that as criticism of Ted.
I used to get in fierce arguments with Ted over his approach versus Waner's, and Ted would say, "Ah, f_ Paul Waner! What does he know?" because that's the way Ted is _ he wouldn't really mean it that way but you know how Ted thinks. He would just fly off the handle about anything. But he's a funny guy, too. All of a sudden he'd say, "OH, OKAY! YOU'RE RIGHT! I'M WRONG! YOU'RE RIGHT! I'M WRONG!" You've gotta realize, here he was talking to a baseball bum _ an out-of-work minor league wash-out talking to a Hall of Fame hitter. He's studied and broken down hitting and made it into a science that very few can argue with. And he's saying, "You're right. I'm WRONG! I've been WRONG all these years!" He just goes on and on when he gets on a tangent. "Oh no, hey, you're right! You've hit a LOT of home runs! I've been wrong all these years man! I m glad you set me straight on that, Paul, ya f__' punk."
At the time I was a minor leaguer in Florida, I knew Jack Kerouac. I met him in 1961. He was from a suburb of Boston called Lowell and he was a Red Sox fan. Jack used to go watch them play all the time and his number one player was, as he used to call him "Number 9." Ted was his favorite. We used to talk about Williams all the time, and since I was acquainted with Ted I could tell Kerouac stories about him.
I remember one of the stories I told Kerouac. He got a big kick out of it. I was working out at Fenway Park and we were in the dugout and I was sitting next to Williams down at the end of the bench. It was during the other team's batting practice and he was watching the other team's hitters and he and I were talking about the weather in California versus the weather in Florida _ why even though San Diego has a great climate he prefers :Florida's weather because of the humidity. This was 1960 and he wasn't talking sportswriters much, if at all. In fact, after the games I would be up in the press box with the farm director and all these writers would come over and say, "What did Teddy say?, What was Teddy talkin' about?" And I'd just say, "Oh, nothin' much." Anyway, this particular day there were three writers sitting way down at the other end of the bench and I saw them but I didn't notice that they creeping and sliding and inching closer to us. They kept edging over so that they could overhear what Ted was saying. I didn't know that he was aware of it and I was barely aware of it myself.
Suddenly Ted exploded. He said "I SEE YOU SONS OF BITCHES! GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE! I AIN'T TALKIN' TO YOU. THIS AIN'T NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE, YOU MOTHER F__! GET YOUR ASSES OUT OF HERE!" And they scurried down through the tunnel like rats out of a burning house, all three of 'em.
I think Jack really related to Ted. He loved Williams because he was outspoken and uncensored. He let things flow and that was what Kerouac looked for in everything in life _ people who didn't revise their behavior, didn't conform. Kerouac was keenly grateful to see this in a guy in sports because most sports guys behave rather conservatively. They're trained to contain their emotions, but in Ted's case he just let it fly.
When Ted was young he was an exuberant, ebullient, enthusiastic fellow who loved baseball and loved life, and when he saw how fickle the fans could be he was sensitive enough that he said, Okay I'm not giving them that part of myself: I m not going to share my enthusiasm with them anymore. F_ 'em. I'm not tipping my hat. He was sensitive enough to back off from that, but I don't think he ever lost his enthusiasm for the game or for developing the science of hitting.
Some fans turned on Ted. I think because he is a combative person, it fed him and he used it. Some shrinking violets would have been crushed by that but he was a courageous, stand-up guy who liked the competition, the rivalry, and loved a good argument. Kerouac used to hitch-hike down to Boston from Lowell, starting in 1939, to watch Ted play and he said, "The thing I loved about Williams was his glee. He had great glee." I'll never forget that. And I thought... that glee subsided when the fans turned on him. He was an outgoing guy and he never lost that, but I think he just decided he wasn't going to demonstrate his glee anymore if they were going to boo him.
Kerouac admired Ted's spontaneity and the fact that he didn't seem to have any regrets about what he did. He behaved the way he wanted to behave and he didn't apologize for it. One of Jack's big things as a writer was that he was always connecting things from other walks of life to his writing. His writing was pure spontaneity _ he didn't revise. He called it sketching. He wrote first thought, best thought, no revising. 1 think he liked the fact that Williams wasn't tentative. Let's put it this way: Ted Williams was courageous enough to be himself.
I've always said that Ted Williams would have been a natural as an actor because he had a great sense of reality. He would have been a great actor because he would have used himself well. Beneath Ted's bluster is a very sensitive person. He did things behind the scenes for people that he did NOT want known. He looked after people. He had a sensitivity toward people in less fortunate situations.
Who would he have been like as an actor? He'd have been like John Wayne. He'd have walked in and solved all your problems. Williams is very honest, very truthful. All great actors are very truthful. They have that sense of reality. Ted would have stood there like Spencer Tracy or James Cagney and told it like it was. He wouldn't have pussyfooted around like some phony. And that's the way Ted really is. He's a very loyal guy but once he thinks you've been disloyal, you're through.
Now here's the irony. We're talking about all these associations and connections. This is absolutely true and I don't know if Williams would ever remember saying this to me but I remember we were talking about heroes and I told Ted that my hero was Mickey Mantle (laughs). Williams was never my hero but he was a guy I respected enormously. And I asked Ted, " Did you ever have any heroes?" I fully expected Williams to say "F_ no! I don't have heroes, I'm my own hero!" Instead he said, My hero when I was a kid coming up was John Wayne." I swear to God he told me that. I said "Really?" He said "Yeah, I tried to walk like him and talk like him. He was great. He was my hero." I said, "No shit?" And then I said "TED, YOU'RE THE REAL JOHN WAYNE!!!" He said, "Naw, there was only one John Wayne. I said, "You went to war. He didn't go to war. He was AN ACTOR. HE'S AN ACTOR! His dad was a drugstore clerk in Glendale! You're the real John Wayne, you're the real Duke!" "Yeah," he said, "but I loved John Wayne. I loved the way he walked and the way he talked. I tried to imitate the way he talked." Isn't that something?
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Ted Williams: A Tribute features reminiscences of over 200 people from all walks of life, including Hank Aaron, Bobby Knight, Stan Musial, George Bush, Bobby Doerr, Cleveland Amory, Bill Lee, Curt Gowdy, and Bud Leavitt.
Many of the illustrations come from Bill Nowlins vast collection of Williams memorabilia.
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