6

World War II

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AMHERST, Ma. Dec. 1—They've put him in a forest green suit that doesn't fit just so, and they've succeeded in knotting a necktie around his gander neck, but the Navy can't fool us. He's still Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter of Slugdom.

Obedient? Restrained? Amenable? Sure he is. He's just one of 30 Naval Aviation Cadets in the Civilian Pilot Training Course at Amherst College. He gets up at 6:45 every morning. He makes his bed neatly. He sweeps the floor. He falls in, falls out, about faces, salutes. He eats the regular chows; sleeps the regular hours. He takes the bus to Northampton on a Saturday night. But he's still The Kid.

HAROLD KAESE, BOSTON GLOBE, DECEMBER 1, 1942

He was a student of celestial navigation. He was a student of meteorology. Doors that had remained closed at Hoover High School, boring and uninviting, dull, now were wide open, and the reluctant and indifferent student in San Diego now was plowing through math and physics and a bunch of other subjects at one of the top colleges in the country, taking his obsessive mind in directions away from the study of the well-struck baseball. He was learning how to fly.

Ted Williams was going to war. His way.

“Why do you want to be a pilot?” reporters asked. “You probably could have found something less dangerous in the service.”

“Because I like to hit!” Naval Aviation Cadet Williams (service number 705-53-11) replied.

He arrived at the postcard campus of Amherst College in the postcard town of the same name at the foot of the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts on November 15 as the final leaves fell away from the fall foliage of 1942. He was a day late, of course, for the start of the Civilian Pilot Training Course and pulled up in the backseat of a Boston taxicab. The driver took his two bags into the lobby of Genung House, dropped them in the lobby, and accepted 25 bucks.

“Gee, kid, the best of luck to ya,” newspaper accounts reported the cabbie said, shaking the new recruit's hand.

In June 1942 Williams had been spotted at the Harvard University graduation exercises watching Hugh Voorhees, a Hoover classmate, receive a bachelor's degree. Asked his opinion of the school, his comment was, “It's old, isn't it?” Now he was traveling from classroom to classroom in another old and prestigious New England school, wearing an ill-fitting green uniform from the Civilian Conservation Corps, tie and all, trying to fill in enough holes in his high school education to become a pilot.

“The colleges have changed because of the war,” Dr. Warren Green, professor of astronomy and now coordinator of the CPT program, said. “They're all pitching in. Now we're teaching trades and forgetting theory. It's going to be hard to go back to the old method of teaching.”

This was a crash course—hopefully not literally—to provide airmen for the sudden war. Campuses across the nation were being used as first-step facilities for fliers. The government was paying Amherst $12 per week for room and board for each cadet, plus $70 for each cadet who graduated, $55 for each cadet who didn't. The cadets themselves were receiving $75 per month.

“We lived in the frat houses,” Johnny Pesky, also in the program, remembers, “and at Genung House. That's where Ted and I were at the beginning. Dr. Green was a big guy, a good guy. He'd won the Croix de Guerre in the French Foreign Legion in the First World War. There wasn't any fooling around. We even were doing some flying, little Piper Cubs and WACOs. It was beautiful country.”

Reveille was at 05:45, sounded by a large bell taken from the Amherst Fire Department and installed on the front of the Chi Phi house. The college students, still in session, complained about the early morning noise. The cadets complained in return about the college students making noise all night.

Work began at 06:45. The cadets, half Army, half Navy, were split into two groups. One took a bus to the tiny Turner's Falls airport to fly those Piper Cubs in the shadows of Mount Tom and the Berkshire Mountains. The other group stayed on campus for ground training, learning the elements of navigation, aerology, recognition, and radio code. In the afternoon, the two groups switched.

The naval cadets were called “the baseball squad.” In addition to Pesky and Williams, Buddy Gremp and Johnny Sain of the Boston Braves and Joe Coleman, property of the Philadelphia Athletics, were in the program. (Alex MacLean, one of the writers who filled in for the drunken Dave Egan, also was in the squad.) This was an eight-week course that would prepare the cadets for the more difficult training that lay ahead. A full calendar year would be covered before they could possibly receive their wings and head into combat situations.

“I'm just tickled to death to be in this thing,” Williams said. “It's just what I want.”

He did close-order drills with a ten-pound dummy rifle. He ran the commando obstacle course. He did morning calisthenics and tried to learn how to swim and looked at math problems until his head hurt, and he jumped into the tiny planes with his instructors and flew. The landscape was a carpet beneath him, the farms and rounded-off mountains, the Connecticut River and, oops, the power lines.

The military life, surprise of surprises, suited the loner, the incendiary public figure, the squeakiest of all celebrated wheels. He liked it. He was pretty good at it. Save for one public relations afternoon when a half-dozen Boston writers were allowed on campus, he was almost able to be another 24-year-old name and serial number in a vast sea of names and numbers getting ready to face the Japanese or the Germans, whatever was needed. No spotlight, no headlines, he was as close to being anonymous as he ever would be.

Not that there hadn't been headlines on the way to this little slice of artificial anonymity. No, probably no one else in the country had entered the war effort with more controversy and clamor, more noise surrounding him, than Ted Williams did.

   

Eleven months earlier, the bombing of Pearl Harbor had changed all lives in an obvious instant. The lives in baseball were no different. Bob Feller, the number-one pitcher in the game, had joined the Navy on December 8, the quickest, fastest change of all, the words of President Roosevelt's “Day of Infamy” speech still resonating. A few other players had followed his lead, but the bulk of the major leaguers considered options. Enlist? Or wait? The military draft, which eventually would take more than 10 million young American men off to war, hung over all of them. Married players, players with children, were lower on the list, classified 3-A, but most single players were part of the great lump at the top of the 1-A draft pool. Indeed, slugger Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers had been drafted during the 1941 season, an indication that athletic success was not grounds for deferment.

Williams, during his .406 heroics, had been classified 3-A as the sole support of his mother. He then was reclassified in January 1942 to 1-A, no different from the six other unmarried Red Sox ballplayers, Johnny Pesky, Dominic DiMaggio, Charlie Wagner, Eddie Pellagrini, Earl Johnson, and Bill Butland. Lefthanded pitcher Mickey Harris already had been called by the Army. The rest could be drafted at any moment.

Back in Minnesota, living at the King Cole Hotel in Minneapolis and the Gagen in Princeton, hunting and fishing and visiting Doris, Williams was called for his physical on January 8 in Minnesota. He passed.

“I guess they need more men,” he told reporters as he left the physical.

“I can tell you baseball ought to be proud to have men like Ted Williams in the service,” Eddie Collins said from Boston, certain of what would come next. “That's the way we feel about it. And he'll make a fine soldier.”

The business appeared to be done, except . . . well, except two days earlier Williams had seen a lawyer. Something didn't seem right to Williams. Had the draft laws changed? Why was he being reclassified? Was it because the law had been changed or because he was the .406 hitter of 1941, a famous name? He was told the laws had not been changed. Then why, he wondered, had his status been changed? This did not seem right to him.

“Do you want to appeal?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes, I do,” Williams replied and proceeded to fill out the paperwork, getting affidavits from May in San Diego, whom he now had not seen in almost two years.

The lawyer warned about the negative publicity. Williams said he had dealt with negative publicity just fine. What was right was right. Why should he be treated differently from anyone else? He said his mother was 50 years old, in poor health, and shouldn't be forced to work. He said he sent her $5,000 in the past year and wanted to keep up payments on three other annuities that would insure her future.

Two days later, Hennepin County Draft Board No. 6 in Minneapolis voted down his request, 5–0. He was tentatively scheduled to be inducted on January 24. He surely was gone again.

“Ted won't be hurt by the layoff,” Joe Cronin said, already in Florida, certain of this outcome. “Other players have been out of baseball for a year or more and come right back. A lot of them did it during the other war. Uncle Sam comes first.”

Not exactly. Williams's lawyer, Warren Rogers, went to see Colonel J. E. Nelson, head of the draft in Minnesota. Rogers asked if anyone else with the same file as Williams would be judged 3-A. Nelson said he probably would. Nelson also said “this case is an exception.” Request was still denied.

The last chance was the President's Board of Appeal. Only Nelson or state appeal agent Harold Estram could appeal. Williams met with Estram in Minneapolis. Estram studied the case and decided that Williams had no more money than the average 23-year-old earning $35 a week. He agreed to carry the appeal the final step, essentially to President Roosevelt's desk.

On February 27, 26 days later, an order from Roosevelt was issued, changing Williams's status back to 3-A. He was free to go to spring training for the 1942 season.

The newspapers exploded. Not just in Boston, everywhere.

Who did he think he was? Hardship deferment? Hadn't he been making good money the past three years? Comparisons were made with boxer Jack Dempsey, who was deferred during World War I and labeled a “draft dodger.” Wasn't that what Williams was doing? Dodging the draft while the guy down the street, who had real hardships, was packing his bags? The UPI pointed out that since the appeals law went into effect in October 1940, the state of Massachusetts had “no more than a dozen” appeals to the presidential board. No more than 1,500 people had appealed during the same time in the entire country.

“I am a bartender and a Ted Williams fan, but from now on you can count me off his list of supporters,” William Lago, a South Boston bartender, said in a common opinion poll of “Mr. Average Man” in the Globe. “I am in the draft and I have a mother and child to support, but I know if I'm called my dependents won't starve.”

Red Sox management reacted to Williams's possible return with cautious, muted pleasure. The public relations situation was obviously combustible.

“Naturally, I welcome him back with open arms,” Cronin said in Sarasota, where Jim Tabor already was practicing in rightfield to be Williams's replacement. “I'm certain that his is a most worthy case and that Ted wouldn't hesitate an instant about jumping into the Army when and if he is called. If Uncle Sam says fight, he'll fight. Since he has said play ball, Ted has the right to play.”

The story grew juicier when Williams at first said he had nothing to do with the appeal, didn't even know what his lawyers were doing. The draft board responded by saying that he personally had okayed the appeal. Williams admitted that he had, but said he did it on the advice of the attorneys, none of whom he had paid, people who simply acted on his behalf out of their own belief in his case.

He would claim years later in his autobiography that he suffered from a lack of advice. He had no help from his father or his mother, had no friends in baseball to give him counsel. He simply let the lawyers take charge. What did he know about the Germans, the Japanese, the war? He was not any great student of current affairs. The Sox already had sent him a contract for $30,000 for the next season, the most money he ever had made, and the figure burned in his head.

“There are a million ballplayers in 3-A—Joe Gordon played baseball that year, Joe DiMaggio played, Stan Musial played—but Ted Williams is the guy having trouble with the draft board,” Williams said in his book. “I remember I had a contract to endorse Quaker Oats, a $4,000 contract. I used to eat them all the time. But they canceled out on me because of all this unfair stuff and I haven't eaten a Quaker Oat since.”

Now he had plenty of advice. Cronin advised him to join the service, any service. Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey advised the same route. James A. Silin, his business adviser, sent a telegram.

“This is the biggest decision you ever have to make, Ted,” Silin wrote. “Be sure you do the right thing. Your baseball career as well as your patriotism and your future happiness for many years to come are at stake. If you enlist you will gladden the hearts and stir the Americanism of thousands of kids to whom you have been and should always remain an idol. Don't let those kids down. You will never cease to regret it if you do.”

Williams's head was spinning. What to do? Were all these people right? Maybe they were. He flew to Chicago to take a tour of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station with Mickey Cochrane, the former Hall of Fame catcher for the Detroit Tigers. Cochrane was now in charge of the Great Lakes athletic program. Williams said, again in his autobiography, he liked what he saw. Cochrane, dressed in a blue uniform with bright brass buttons, drove him around the base in a Lincoln Continental with push-button windows. The place was buzzing with activity. He was ready to sign the papers.

Then Cochrane made a mistake.

“Gee, it's going to be awful tough to play ball,” the old catcher said. “You try to play ball, they'll boo you out of every park in the league.”

They will, huh?

This was no different from another voice yelling from the stands, a challenge, an affront. Who are you to yell at me? To tell me what I should or shouldn't do? Where are you in the crowd? Step up. I'll show you. No one had convinced him that he was wrong. There were “a hundred” guys in baseball with 3-A deferments. Why should he be any different from any of them? Forget Cronin and Yawkey and Quaker Oats.

The next day, back in Minnesota, he announced that he was heading south. He went to Princeton, picked up his things, kissed Doris good-bye, and headed for Sarasota. He was playing the 1942 season, would make the big money, and enlist at the end. The hell with everybody else.

   

He arrived at spring training, driving, at 6:30 at night on March 10, complaining that he had lost three hours on the ride in Nashville when he tried to cash a check and no one believed he was Ted Williams. The scene had an easy familiarity, only the Orlando brothers in the clubhouse as he dressed in a hurry and went out with them to the field. He stood at the plate and swung at imaginary pitches using Dom DiMaggio's bat. The Orlando brothers, done for the day, refused to give him balls.

A dozen sportswriters appeared when he was finished and was taking a shower. He proceeded to sit at his locker and explain his case for the next 50 minutes, answering all questions.

“I made this decision myself and I know what I'm in for,” he said. “But I'm going to try my darndest. That's why I came down here.

“Baseball is awfully important to me. This war, of course, is more important, but I just feel that I am as much entitled to this season of baseball as anyone in this country with a legitimate 3-A classification for dependency.”

He went into detail about his financial situation. He said he had lost money in his first year of baseball, broke even during his second, and made a little money in the third. That was why this season was important for him and for his mother.

“I know that I'll have to take abuse,” he said, “but I'm going to try to take it.”

The next day began a series of public auditions, the writers waiting with their built-in applause meters as Williams returned in front of the fans. How would people treat him? Cronin put him in the exhibition game that day as a pinch-hitter. Verdict? There was a warm welcome from the 800 assembled as he struck out in a 6–5 loss to the Cincinnati Reds. First exhibition before a crowd of servicemen? That came three days later in Tampa. The servicemen cheered and asked for his autograph. Boston? That was the question.

Williams said his mail generally was running 60 percent for him, 40 percent against. A lot of the “against” mail seemed to be from Ohio, where he had been taking a battering in the Cleveland papers. He said he hoped Boston would be kind. He speculated that the crowd would be 80 percent for him, 20 percent against. He said if it wasn't, he understood. He was worried mostly about one group.

“That's the kids,” he told Globe sportswriter Gerry Moore. “I've always done everything I could for kids because I remember how I was once. I've never refused a kid an autograph in my life. I try to slip them old bats and balls every chance I get. If a middle-aged man boos me, I feel sorry for him because I think he ought to know better. But if the kids, even though I know they may be ignorant of the facts, start to get on me, I'm afraid that might prove a little too tough to take.”

The verdict? The first game in Boston was an exhibition on April 12 at Fenway against the Braves. The welcome was warm. Williams was enthused. He said he heard only three negative voices in a crowd of 8,186, a loud guy in right and two kids in left. The cheering was even louder the next day at the Sox home opener. On his first time at bat, DiMaggio on second, Pesky on first, he labeled a 2–2 fastball from the Philadelphia Athletics' Phil Marchildon two rows into the bleachers behind the Sox bullpen. Collecting two more singles and hearing only positive noise in an 8–3 win from the crowd of 9,901 that included 1,200 servicemen, Williams declared the day his second best in thrills to the ninth-inning homer in '41 at the All-Star Game.

The verdict? He was going to be able to play baseball this season. The great draft controversy pretty much was done.

“By the beginning of 1944 every able-bodied man will either be in the service or replacing, in industry, the men who must fight,” Major Ernest Culligan, public relations officer of the Selective Service System, said a few weeks later, ending most deferment squabbles. “We've got to start thinking in terms of a 10-million to 12-million-man Army and when we think of that we realize the shortage of manpower.”

Williams officially finished all debate on May 22. He enlisted in the Naval Aviation Service.

   

I've tried to do the right thing from the start,” he explained in a low voice after being sworn in by Lieutenant Commander Thomas A. Collins at the Flight Selection Board at 150 Causeway Street, next to Boston Garden. “I didn't want to be pushed by anybody. I knew I was right all along. Then this thing came along. It was just what I wanted.”

The thought process for this decision was the same process he would use for anything and everything for all of his life. The worst approach to him—be it asking him to go to war, to hit to leftfield, to tip his cap, to act nice around the house—was to try to force him. Don't tell him what he should do. Offer options, offer quiet opinions perhaps, but don't push. Never push. A push was a challenge. Never challenge. Left alone, he would figure out what he needed to figure out.

Everything about joining the new navy V-5 program, which offered flying to men with no college education, was done in secret. He went to Squantum Naval Air Station in Quincy on the morning of May 6 with Ed Doherty, the Red Sox public relations man, and Lieutenant Robert “Whitey” Fuller, the former PR man for Dartmouth College, now recruiting fliers for the V-5. They toured the facility in a beach wagon, met the commander. Williams was put in the cockpit of a Navy training plane, allowed to get the feel of it, play with the gadgets, let his imagination run.

He signed the forms in the beach wagon on the way back to Boston and an afternoon game. Done. Easy as that. His terms. His way.

“Ted is in the pink of physical condition,” Lieutenant Frank R. Philbrook, the physician who examined Williams, proclaimed on the day of induction. “His nerves are very steady. His blood pressure is perfectly normal and his pulse is right at 60. He is perfect material for any type of naval aviation.”

Philbrook then opened a subject that always would bother Williams: his exceptional eyesight. Stories and more stories would be written about his phenomenal eyes, about how he could read the label on a record as it spun on a turntable, about how he could see things that normal men could not. The stories would imply that Williams was a freak of nature, that he had a gift that most men did not. They implied he simply walked to the plate and was able to hit simply because of his eyes.

Williams always would argue with that idea. To him, concentration was the secret, not any phenomenal set of eyes. Practice was the secret. Who had ever swung a bat more times than he had? Who had ever swung a broomstick, a pillow, had ever swung anything more in a bat-hits-ball motion? Who had studied the components of the batter-pitcher confrontation more? The implication that his eyes gave him an edge degraded all the work he had done. Didn't it?

Philbrook, in his few words, unknowingly started the argument.

“The fact is, Ted has excellent eyes,” the doctor said after Williams was tested at 20-15 eyesight. “He has an unusually high degree of depth perception, which is probably one reason for his success as a batter. He can easily judge where to hit the ball. This is of equal value in determining where the ground is in relation to a plane. He has normal reflexes.”

The doctor said only four or five potential pilots out of a hundred had eyes as strong as Williams's. He said Williams could read a letter at 30 to 35 feet that an average man could only read at 20. Admit it or not, Williams had very good eyes.

As for hearing . . .

“Dr. Philbrook gave me a test,” Williams said, laughing. “In a very low voice he asked, ‘Can you hear me?' If he only knew how I could hear those hecklers up in the 40^th row at the ballpark he'd know my ears were okay.”

The enlistment basically ensured that Williams would be able to complete the 1942 season. Pesky followed him into the V-5 program a few weeks later, and the two of them were assigned to classes at Mechanics Arts High School, three nights a week, four hours each night, on navigation, aerology, physics, and advanced math. The classes started on July 13, and the instructor, unplanned, called Williams to the front of the 250 students to say a few words.

“I only hope I prove myself worthy to go through with you,” he said, serious and humble, so different from his talk at the ballpark. “I give you my word I'll do my best.”

The second sentence, about doing his best, had an added significance for the Red Sox fans in the group. Back at Fenway his effort was being questioned. The baseball season was chugging along, the Sox in a familiar chase after the front-running Yankees, and the man of the moment had landed on the front pages for a more familiar problem. His good hearing had gotten him in trouble again.

In the second game of a Red Sox sweep of the Washington Senators in a doubleheader on July 1, Williams responded to some members of the chorus in left. He gestured to them on the way back to the bench in the middle of the third inning, cupping his hand to one ear, and then proceeded to go through an obviously indifferent at bat against Jack Wilson, swinging at the first two pitches, no matter where they were, then lofting a fly ball to center. He threw his bat high in the air as he trotted toward first. He was booed for the action.

In the fifth he was even more indifferent at the plate. He took the first two pitches for strikes down the middle, then seemed to have a change of mind. He proceeded to concentrate on hitting foul balls down the left-field line, aiming directly at his most prominent hecklers. He later admitted he wanted to “knock some teeth out.”

“It's a scene I remember to this day,” Dominic DiMaggio says. “He had those guys in his sights. Who else would ever do something like that? Could do it?”

The fact that he made a mistake in his foul ball attempts—hitting a liner off the wall in left for a double—made no difference. He jogged slowly into second base on the hit. The people knew what he was doing and the boos increased. Cronin also knew what he was doing. He exploded when Williams leisurely scored a run and came back to the dugout.

“What's the matter, don't you want to play?” the manager asked animatedly in the dugout. “Get out of here then.”

He sent Williams to the showers. Pete Fox, Williams's replacement, was cheered loudly as he trotted to left. (“Look at the son of a bitch,” Fox remarked to Charlie Wagner before being called off the bench. “I bust my hump to try to get a hit and I can't. He gets one without even trying.”) Cronin then fined Williams $250 the next day, an off-day before a big series began with the Yanks. Williams apologized in his own Williams way.

“I deserved to be put out of the game,” he said. “I'm just thick-headed enough, screwy enough, dumb enough, and childish enough to let those wolves in the leftfield stand get under my skin. Someday I'm going to bring 25 pounds of raw hamburger out and invite those wolves down to eat it.”

Contrition was mixed with the usual residue of anger.

“What do they want?” he asked. “I'm leading both leagues in runs batted in, home runs, runs scored, and bases on balls.”

The Red Sox were three games behind the Yankees on the day Williams went into his pout. Twenty days later, they were 11 games out and the race was done. Though the rest of the season went more quietly and Williams wound up winning his first major league Triple Crown with a .356 batting average, 36 homers, and 137 RBI, the outburst and the Red Sox swoon were remembered more at the end of the year than all of his accomplishments.

When the Most Valuable Player votes were counted, second baseman Joe Gordon of the Yankees was the winner. Williams was second. The 24 members of the Baseball Writers' Association gave Gordon 12 first-place votes, Williams 9. Statistically, the result was laughable. Gordon led the league in only one category, strikeouts, with 95. He was 34 points lower than Williams in batting average, had 18 home runs (half as much), and was 34 RBI lower. Williams led the league in seven categories, including walks with 145.

He now had hit two rare offensive benchmarks in two consecutive years—the first man in 11 years to hit over .400 and the first man in eight to win the Triple Crown—and still had not won an MVP Award. (He also, remember, had captured the Triple Crown in the American Association and finished second in MVP voting.) The voters talked about Gordon's solid fielding and about the Yanks' overall success, but there was no doubt that this vote had more to do with personality than performance.

“I thought Gordon would get it,” Williams said. “I'm sorry I couldn't win it, but that's all in the past. I'm playing a bigger game now.”

He was quoted from Amherst and the Civilian Pilot Training Course. Diplomacy must have been in the curriculum.

   

Eight weeks in Amherst was supposed to send Williams and Pesky and the baseball squad to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for an eight-week stretch in preflight training. Pesky and the baseball squad proceeded along. Williams stopped at the Chelsea Naval Hospital outside Boston, where he had an operation for a hernia, picked up in the cold at Amherst. He was two weeks late in arriving at Chapel Hill, where he rejoined his class.

“Chapel Hill was the physical part, like basic training,” Pesky says. “It wasn't a problem for any of us because we were in good shape from baseball . . . but they did run us through the wringer.”

“Up by the light of the moon, double-time all day, to bed with the owls” was the way he described the routine to Austen Lake in 1943 in the American. “Drill till your tongue bulged. Sports, hikes, inspections. We played all games to test us for versatility—boxing, football, wrestling, swimming, soccer, and baseball. The object was to find if we had a nerve-cracking point. Some did.

“A lot of guys, knowing Ted's reputation as a pop-off, waited for him to explode. But he never blew any fuses or got a single bad behavior demerit. If anything, he took a little stiffer discipline than the others, sort of stuff like, ‘Oh, so you're the great Ted Williams, huh?'”

All of this activity was on the University of North Carolina campus. The cadets stayed in the dormitories, took classes in the classrooms, used all of the athletic facilities. They played soccer in the football stadium.

Pesky remembers the wrestling training best. The final test for the wrestling course was a match against another cadet, the winner getting the better grade.

“I wrestled some little guy from Cape Cod,” Pesky says. “Vinny Larkin was his name. He beat the shit out of me. Oh, he was quick. I couldn't find him. He killed me. Maybe three years after the war, I'm at the ballpark, and this little guy yells out to me from the stands, ‘Hey, Johnny, I'm the guy who beat you in wrestling.' I took him down to the dugout. He had a beard now, had put on some weight. I told the guys, ‘This is the guy who kicked the shit out of me.' They all said, ‘Well, you didn't do a good enough job. Pesky's still standing.'”

Williams's training camp moment came in the boxing ring. The instructor was a former professional fighter—Pesky thinks his name was Allie Clark—and the fighter noticed Williams's fast reflexes. At the end of one session, some time left in the class, he brought Williams into the ring and said, “Let's see if you can hit me.” They squared off, wearing big gloves.

“Ted was just swinging at first, and Clark got out of the way easy,” Pesky says. “He was a boxer! Then Ted started to get the hang of it. He fakes! And then he unloads. Pow! He hits the guy. Then he fakes again. Pow. He hits the guy again. When the thing was over, the instructor says, ‘Hey, how would you like to have me help you make a fast million bucks?' Ted says, ‘How would you do that?' ‘I'll train you as a boxer.' Ted says, ‘Oh, no, not me.' Clark didn't even know who Ted was.”

An interlude for Williams at Chapel Hill—a chance to go where people did indeed know who he was—came on Monday, July 12, 1943. He was shipped back to Boston. To Fenway Park.

Boston Mayor Maurice J. Tobin had arranged an exhibition game as part of the Mayor's Annual Field Day. (“Proceeds of the day are to be used to purchase artificial legs, glass eyes, eyeglasses, braces, and to furnish milk and food to underprivileged and undernourished school children,” the press release said.) Twisting appropriate arms and calling in appropriate favors, Tobin had Williams freed from preflight school and Dominic DiMaggio freed from the Norfolk Naval Base to return to Boston to play on an all-star team against the Braves. The manager of the all-star team was Babe Ruth.

Now 48 years old, Ruth had been retired for eight seasons. He would be dead five years later. Part of the day's attraction was a home run hitting contest before the game between the Babe and Williams. This was a moment. Williams never had met Ruth.

“Hiya, kid,” newspapers reported the Babe said when the meeting finally occurred in the clubhouse. “You remind me a lot of myself. I love to hit. You're one of the most natural ballplayers I've ever seen. And if ever my record is broken, I hope you're the one to do it.”

“I was flabbergasted,” Williams said, years later, recalling the moment. “After all, he was Babe Ruth.”

The game was scheduled to begin at 4:30 to allow defense workers, whose shifts ended at 3:30, to attend. Prices ranged from $1.00 general admission to $2.75 for box seats. The crowd was disappointing, estimated between 12,000 and 20,000 people. The bleachers were empty. The home run hitting contest was scheduled to begin at four o'clock.

“Boston's my starting town,” the Babe said over a microphone before the contest began. “I was mighty sorry to leave here for New York . . . of course, [smile] I got lots more dough when I went there . . . but here's the town I love.”

The contest was no contest. Williams might not have played for the Red Sox for nine months, but he had been playing on the preflight team at Chapel Hill a little bit, and when he stepped into the batter's box, he pounded three shots into the seats. The Babe was not as fortunate.

On the second pitch from Red Barrett of the Braves, he took a big cut and fouled the ball off his ankle. He limped around for a little bit, tried again, but never hit a ball hard. Ted 3, the Babe 0.

In the game, Williams hit another homer, a 425-foot rocket into the bleachers in the bottom of the seventh to give the all-stars a 9–8 win. The Babe, who coached first base for most of the day, inserted himself as a pinch-hitter in the eighth, but popped to second base.

“See that uniform down there on the floor?” he said disconsolately to Mel Webb of the Globe in the locker room after the game. “It's the last I shall ever put on. I started right here in Boston . . . and I finished right here today.”

The uniform on the floor was the home Yankees pinstripes, a special uniform the Babe brought with him for personal appearances, the uniform that he wore in a picture that was made before the game with Williams. Williams wore a 1942 Red Sox traveling uniform, gray, for the same picture. The two men stared at the camera, half-smiles on their wartime faces, captured in a shot that would hang in many Boston homes and taverns for the rest of the century and beyond.

Two weeks later, yes, of course, Babe Ruth took his retirement back. He wore that pinstriped uniform again in another exhibition game, this time at Yankee Stadium to benefit the War Fund. Williams also was there, part of the Chapel Hill Clodbusters, who played against an all-star team comprised of members of the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians.

Will Harridge, president of the American League, was at the game and told reporters about a conversation he had with Williams's commanding officer from Chapel Hill.

“‘You are going to be surprised at the boy we turn back to you when the activities are over,' [the officer] told me,” Harridge said. “‘He is one of the finest young men we have in the entire school. . . . He has taken hold with all of the enthusiasm that could be expected of anybody and is the most agreeable person in the school. I understand he had ideas of his own in baseball which he insisted on carrying out. There hasn't been any of that since we've had him. He's just tops!'”

   

In September, Williams and Pesky and the baseball squad went from Chapel Hill to primary flight school at NAS Bunker Hill, Indiana. This was an 1,800-acre stretch of farmland seven miles south of Peru, Indiana, that had been converted into a training base a year earlier and was called by everyone the USS Cornfield. On four 5,000-foot runways and one 2,500-square-foot mat, this was where the cadets were taught how to take off and land airplanes.

The base population consisted of 1,000 students, 342 officers, 2,400 enlisted men, and 189 civilians, everyone working to churn out pilots like so many cans of beans. Now the instruction became hairy. Williams and Pesky each had only 35 hours of flying at Amherst, 15 solo. The serious flying now began. There would be 99 hours of flying in Indiana, 60 solo. Students were expected to learn precision landings, aerobatics, night flying, slow rolls, snap rolls, inverted spins. Everything in the book.

Pesky had problems. With the book.

“I could fly the plane all right,” he says. “I just had no idea where I was going.”

He was frustrated by the navigational charts, the math, the constant tests that asked him for answers he could not figure out. Williams was part of his frustration. Williams seemed to work less and do better. Pesky would complain.

“Why can't you get it?” Williams would ask. “You're a high school graduate, same as me.”

“Yeah, I'm a high school graduate,” Pesky would reply. “But I'm not Ted Williams.”

The study skills that Williams had developed, virtually by himself, in his passion to dissect the art of hitting a baseball now were turned toward aviation. He had an active, inquisitive mind. He did not blow through the classes in Amherst—finishing with a grade of 2.98 out of 4.00—nor would he blow through Bunker Hill (2.97), but he certainly survived. His ability to concentrate and understand enabled him to jump past the college courses he had missed. There always would be a feeling with him about anything that “if he put his mind to it . . .”

The subjects that would interest him—fishing and photography at the top of the list after hitting—would be explored down to the core. He would develop a noisy interest in politics and history. He would become a reader of more than the sports page, fluent in the small talk of current events.

“You'd see him one day and talk about some subject he didn't know anything about,” Lewis Watkins, a friend and business associate later in life, says. “The next day he'd bring up the same subject, and he'd know more about it than you did. He'd have gone home, researched it, and now he was telling you about it.”

A newspaper account of Williams in the clubhouse during the 1942 season, when he already was taking preflight classes at Mechanics and Arts High School, showed this part of his mind and personality. He picked up a bat, held it like a machine gun, and sprayed phantom bullets around the room.

“Dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit . . . bang,” he said. “All right, you guys! What did Farragut say?”

“Who's Farragut?” someone ventured.

“What a bunch!” Williams shouted, bringing out his newest piece of knowledge, probably one day old. “Farragut was a great Navy hero in the Civil War. I bet every damn kid in the bleachers knows he said, ‘Damn the torpedoes!'”

Full speed ahead. That was how Williams attacked the things he wanted to attack.

“You can tell from the way he acts around the training planes that he is a flying enthusiast,” Captain D. D. Gurney said at Bunker Hill as that phase of training finished in December. “His flight instruction was completed more than two weeks ahead of schedule, and he was right up with his class in ground school subjects. He has an inquiring mind, and that is a splendid piece of flying equipment.”

The splendid piece of flying equipment was off to Pensacola, Florida, and the final, advanced stage of pilot training. Johnny Pesky, alas, was not. His flying days were done.

He was not Ted Williams.

   

Pensacola Naval Air Station was a noisy, boisterous beehive. The skies were filled, night and day, with airplanes of every size. Bombers. Fighters. Transports. The background sound was a constant buzz as planes took off and—whoops, wait a minute, careful now, whew—landed, one after another. The Navy would issue 61,658 sets of wings between 1942 and 1945. Every one of those pilots had to train at either Pensacola or Corpus Christi, Texas.

The Navy called Pensacola “the Annapolis of the Air.” Six auxiliary air stations were located within a 40-mile radius. A military man could arrive—and military men arrived from England, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia as well as the United States—and learn to fly a plane of just about any size, armed to perform just about any military function.

“The pilots, once they got to Pensacola, knew how to fly pretty well,” Bob Kennedy, an instructor in 1943, says. “This was where you put the finishing touches on them.”

Kennedy was the same Bob Kennedy who had been playing third base and in the outfield for the past four seasons for the Chicago White Sox. He had preceded Williams through the school, so when Williams arrived, who was there to teach him? Well, Williams didn't know who at first.

“I worked it so I was his instructor,” Kennedy says. “We were flying what we called SNJs and what the Army called AT6s. They were little twin-seater fighter planes. When I saw a picture of the Japanese Zero, it looked exactly like the planes we were flying. The way training worked, I'd have a group of ten pilots. I'd go up with one, go through what we had to do, then come back, and I'd go up with the next one until the line was gone.

“I kept on my goggles and my headgear when I came up to Ted. I acted really military. Made him do some things you make new pilots do, like salute a lot and carry your chute to the plane. I was rough on him. I knew he was thinking to himself, What's the deal with this guy? We went up and flew, and when we came back, I couldn't hold myself any longer. I took off my goggles, and he looked and looked twice, and then he just started swearing.”

Kennedy and Williams were stationed at Bronson Field, one of the six auxiliary stations. This was another hastily built facility for the war and hadn't been opened until the end of 1942. It consisted of four runways and a circular concrete mat. There were 892 students at Bronson.

The life was alternately invigorating and boring, with a lot of waiting time for available aircraft to train. A cadet could go to the theater at Bronson and see Mr. Lucky on Friday night, Power of the Press on Saturday, Keep 'em Sluggin' on Sunday, and Wake Island, Captive Wild Women, Ladies Day, and Bombardier for the rest of the week. (No report on whether Williams saw either Power of the Press or Keep 'em Sluggin'.) The base newspaper ran a daily contest, two airplane silhouettes, one an Axis plane, the other an Ally, under the heading “Which One Would You Fire At?” Times for church services were listed, denomination by denomination, with a final designation for “Colored Personnel Service” at building C13.

Williams fit in just fine.

“I'm in the air every morning,” he told reporter Stephen White. “You know as soon as you make out in one plane, they put you in a bigger one. First, way back at Amherst, we had Piper Cubs and nothing to worry about except keeping the motor going. Then, at every stage, they give you more and more complicated planes, two or three new things to think about.

“Right now, down here, we worry about course rules. Every field has different rules about coming in—this one you come in one way and let your flaps down, and in that one you swing around and don't let your flaps down until you're in a different position. You have to know everything and know it right. There's a lot of traffic around these fields and a lot of planes in the air. Make a mistake and somebody gets hurt.”

His fitness report from Class 12b-C with Squadron VN5D8 from February 17, 1944, to April 29, 1944, ranked his performance in various areas. All marks were on a scale of 4.0. Outstanding was 3.9 to 3.8. Above Average was 3.7 to 3.5. Average was 3.4 to 3.2. Below Average was 3.1 to 2.5. Unsatisfactory was 2.4 to 2.0. Inferior was 1.9 to 1.0.

“Officer-Like Qualities—Intelligence 3.7, Judgement 3.4, Initiative 3.6, Force 3.5, Moral Courage 3.6, Cooperation 3.6, Loyalty 3.5, Perseverance 3.4, Reactions in Emergencies 3.4, Endurance 3.5, Industry 3.6, Military Bearing and Neatness of Person and Dress 3.6. Average: 3.53.”

In pilot characteristics, he was ranked above average in skill, composure, enthusiasm, aggressiveness, combativeness, and endurance. The only category he was ranked average was judgment.

In personal characteristics, checks were placed next to straightforward, enthusiastic, cheerful, and cooperative. Interestingly, blanks for moody, irritable, stubborn, and erratic were unchecked.

“Cadet Williams has shown a good attitude while in this squadron,” Lieutenant (jg) A. B. Koontz wrote under “Remarks.” “He has been enthusiastic, industrious and cooperative. While in this squadron his progress has been satisfactory and he has performed all duties in an efficient manner. He possesses good moral and military character and is above average officer material. I would like to have him in my squadron.”

Cadets were asked during their training whether they wanted to graduate into the Navy Air Corps or the Marines. They didn't get to choose but were allowed to indicate a preference. They also could indicate what type of plane they wanted to fly. Williams checked “Marines.”

“I checked ‘Marine Fighter' first and let the other choices just string down,” he said. “Some of my buddies are in the Marines and anyway I like the idea of being alone up there with nobody to worry about but myself.”

On May 2, 1944, he received his wings as a second lieutenant in the Marines. It was quite a day. He also married Doris Soule. It was a quiet wedding, the news divulged by her mother, Ruby, back in Minnesota. Ruby had learned about it from a telegram sent by the happy bride.

There had been rumors about a wedding for almost three years, since Doris first was pictured in the Globe with what looked like an engagement ring. Williams had denied and denied the possibility, both in Boston and in Minnesota. In the summer of 1942, reporters had speculated that the couple would have to wait until Williams graduated from flight school. Speculation was right. This became another wartime wedding.

“I always thought he was married,” Major Bill Churchman (ret.), a longtime friend, says. “Pensacola, in those days, was like a Mardi Gras every night outside the base. He wasn't part of that. I always thought he was married to Doris. I know she was around.”

Churchman could be confused about the timing, because after graduation Williams (and Doris) was still around. His assignment was to stay at Pensacola and train the succeeding waves of cadets. He was with Kennedy at Bronson. The usual next stop those days after getting your wings was a brief course in whatever your specialty might be, and then you were off to combat in either Europe or the Pacific. Kennedy had been ordered out of that progression, and now the same thing happened with Williams.

“I didn't ask for that,” Kennedy says. “And Ted didn't either. I will say this, though, flying every day as an instructor did make you a much better pilot than you would have been just coming out of the school.”

There were classes in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. The night classes were the trickiest, maybe 50 planes in the air at the same time, everyone at different altitudes trying not to crash into each other. Kennedy didn't like the night flying very much.

“Ted and I and the other instructors, we'd teach the whole syllabus,” Kennedy says. “Landings. Checking air speed. Formation flying. Some stunts to control the plane. Shooting at a fixed target. Shooting at a moving sleeve. Night flying. We taught everything.”

For the next year, this was Williams's life. Not a bad life. He would fall in love with the weather and the fishing of Florida, later telling tales of how he would look for the good fishing spots while in the air. He would pick out an inlet where some old-timer was having some success, buzz down to see how many fish were in the boat, then fly back to the base, land the plane, and drive out to the inlet. The old-timer would be startled that anyone could find him. Williams would explain.

The Bronson Bombers—it was noted in the Bronson Breeze—finished first in the Pensacola baseball league during this time, no small thanks to Lieutenant Ted Williams, but he was not serious about the game in the service. His serious baseball thoughts were kept to the idea of returning to Boston.

“Dough's all that counts,” he told the Record's Huck Finnegan during his stay at Pensacola. “Who's going to care about me when I can't swing a bat? It doesn't take them long to forget you. I'm in a business that's a career against time! A big leaguer's got about ten years to pile it up. If he doesn't, nobody's going to kick in to him when he's through.

“I'm not reaching for the moon, but I've come down from $250 a day to $2.50 a day and that's a sharp drop. How do I know I'll be any good when I get back? I don't want much, just enough so I can open a sporting goods store and have plenty of guns around me. I love guns. And I want enough time to myself that I'll be able to do all the hunting and fishing that I please.”

   

On August 18, 1945—12 days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, nine days after Nagasaki—Williams finally had overseas orders and headed toward Pearl Harbor and assignment for combat. He and Kennedy both had been sent in June for specialized fighter training in Jacksonville and were on their way. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the perspective, the war was done.

What Williams truly was heading for in Pearl Harbor turned out to be . . . baseball. That was how he ended the war, playing baseball.

“It was the 14^th Naval District League,” Mel Brookey says. “There were ten teams in the league with a total of 116 major league ballplayers. We were in ninth place, the team from the Marine Air Corps. Then Ted Williams joined us in the middle of the season. We became a little better, if you know what I mean.”

Brookey was a 19-year-old kid, drafted out of Henrietta, Oklahoma. He remembered hurrying to the newspapers, the Tulsa World and the Daily Oklahoman, every day during the '41 season to see how many hits Ted had collected on the way to .406 and whether or not DiMaggio had kept that 56-game hit streak alive. Now he was playing with Ted and against DiMaggio.

“They needed catchers,” he says. “So there I was, getting good exposure to the best there was. DiMaggio and Joe Gordon and Stan Musial and a bunch of big-leaguers were playing the Army League, which also was on Pearl Harbor. We'd play two games a week in our league, then two more in exhibition against those teams.

“I'll never forget DiMaggio hit a liner down third base against us. Our third baseman leaped, and the ball went right between his bare hand and his glove. The ball was hit so hard it went all the way to the fence in left on the fly. The fence was painted Army green. The ball had to be thrown out of play because it took some paint off. . . . Musial, we played against him, he hit four doubles against us. They all were off the right-centerfield fence, and they all hit within two feet of each other. . . . Ted? Ted hit some massive home runs. The parks were all small, and he hit shots that looked like golf balls flying over the fences.”

The remnants of the Japanese attack almost four years earlier still could be seen in the harbor, the twisted and burnt hulls of assorted ships. The remnants of the war in the South Pacific could be seen even more dramatically. Some games were played against hospital units, and GI patients in various stages of recovery would limp or be wheeled out to watch the action.

Bill Dickey, the New York Yankees catcher, was the commissioner of the league. Dan Topping, the owner of the Yankees, was in charge of the two Marine teams.

“We had good uniforms,” Brookey says. “We had the best of everything. Topping made sure of that.”

Pesky played in the league. Alvin Dark played. Ted Lyons of the Chicago White Sox, the toughest pitcher for Williams to hit in his big-league career, was the Marine Air Corps manager. Bob Kennedy played on the team. The competition level was high.

“Oh, yeah, especially for the guys who weren't major leaguers,” Brookey says. “It was really life or death. Especially before the war ended. If you went 0-for-5, you could have found yourself in Okinawa or Guam.”

The average crowds were 10,000, 12,000, all military. Williams and Musial and the biggest stars would put on hitting exhibitions. The service World Series, Army versus Navy, was held at the biggest stadium in the islands, Furlong Field, and attracted crowds of 40,000 for every game. The players said it was much better baseball than the baseball being played in the World Series back home between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago Cubs.

As the war wound down, the league wound down. Release dates were based on the number of points each man had earned in service. Williams was released from the Marines on January 12, 1946, at Camp Miramar, California. He and Doris stayed in San Diego in the house on Utah Street with May until it was time to go to spring training. May, during the war, had served milk, coffee, and soft drinks to thousands of servicemen coming through town. Still in the Salvation Army, still working for the Lord.

Mel Brookey did not have the required number of points to be sent home. He was shipped to Peking, China. It didn't matter anymore that he could catch. Service baseball with a major league touch was finished.

The real baseball could begin again.