13

Fishing at Islamorada
(The Saltwater Life)

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People who know me are aware that I have a dream of one day owning a seaworthy vessel big enough to carry a couple of skiffs on deck. The plan is to live on the big boat and fish out of the small ones as I cruise from port to port. I've been looking for the perfect boat for about 40 years now, and perhaps it's just a dream that will remain forever out of reach.

But it really doesn't matter because I've done as much fishing as I could do in this great country of ours and I've enjoyed every minute of it. Fishing has given me a lot in life and the reason I've made such strong statements regarding the future is that I'd like to give something back. We've got the best country in the world for fishing right here in America. Let's do everything we can to keep it that way.

TED WILLIAMS, POPULAR MECHANICS, MAY 1989

The voices carried across the water on any given morning for over 40 Florida winters. The heat and the humidity would keep everything down; the waves, the air, the day itself. The eye would have to search across the flats, along the horizon, maybe find the shapes. A boat? Two men? Fishing? The silhouette would be as much as five, maybe six miles in the distance. The voices would carry, seemingly from nowhere. The words would not be confused with any spiritual messages.

“You dumb cocksucker. You don't know what the fuck you're doing. . . .”

“I don't know what the fuck I'm doing? You sad son of a bitch. . . .”

The first foul voice, of course, belonged to the famous baseball player. The second, of course, belonged to the famous fishing guide. There were two of those famous fishing guides in Islamorada, Florida, Jimmie Albright and Jack Brothers, equally conversant in the language of expletives, and it was pretty certain that either one of them would be out on the water on any given day with Ted Williams.

They owned the water. Jimmie, Jack, and Ted.

“They were the three big figures in Islamorada fishing,” Rick Ruoff, guide and writer and broadcaster, says. “For a long time, they just scared the crap out of me. Jimmie would be out there fishing with no shirt on, barefoot, a pair of khakis rolled up. Caustic. Tough. Jack was like a longshoreman. A good guy, just a tough case. Jack drank a lot, which Jimmie didn't, but they'd both rib you, ride you. Ted . . . Ted was Ted Williams.”

The famous man lived his life in compartments. Most people do this to varying degrees, lines drawn between work and home and, perhaps, other ventures—different environments, different friends. Williams built fences between his compartments. Very few friends or associates were allowed to move from one environment to another. The baseball people were the baseball people. The Boston friends were the Boston friends. The California family was in California. The camp people, the Sears people . . . Williams split up his calendar year into neatly defined segments. Like a child at the dinner table, he did not like the different servings on the plate to touch each other. Each was a separate pleasure.

Fishing was his dessert, his favorite compartment of all. He had a separate life in Islamorada. He was with Jimmie and Jack on the water, away from all of the stuff. The tarpon and the bonefish never asked for an autograph or wrote a bad word. This was his fun.

The term the guides used to describe taking a client onto the water was “to fish” the person. Jimmie fished Williams for tarpon for over four decades. Jack fished him for bonefish for more than three. There were variations to the routine—Jimmie certainly fished Williams more than anyone, all kinds of fish, plus sometimes Williams used other guides—but that was a general rule. The two guides fished him for almost four decades.

“Jimmie and Jack were very much the same,” John Sutter, another Islamorada guide, says. “This is a very competitive business, kind of a testosterone contest. There were a lot of strong personalities trying to establish who was top dog when I got here. Jimmie and Jack were the top dogs.”

The two guides had the same type of reputation Williams had on the baseball field. They seemingly had been in the business forever. They definitely knew everything there was to know. They were the old pros, grand masters in their art.

Sutter, who is six-foot-nine, became a guide in 1978. He came into the business from the National Basketball Association. A former all-American at Tulane, he had played for the Indiana Pacers and the Portland Trailblazers. He could recognize written and unwritten testosterone rules that already had been well established.

“I told myself right away that I had to defer to these guys,” Sutter said. “It was obvious. I'd been around basketball all my life, and believe me, Jimmie and Jack got as much deference as anyone I'd ever seen in basketball. More.”

When Williams was still playing with the Red Sox, he would block out his dates for the winter before he ever left for spring training. He would follow the schedule, same as baseball, except in this sport he had to pay to play instead of being paid for it. The price for a guide for a day was $40 a day, beginning its climb to the present $400 a day. Williams would be there for most of the climb, paying his money, fishing.

“Ted liked to go early,” Cecil Keith, another guide who fished Williams, says. “He'd go as early as 6:30 in the morning if you were fishing for tarpon. Bonefish, you'd have to go a little later because you couldn't see 'em. You could see the tarpon because they're so much bigger.”

Sight fishing was the game. See the fish. Go after them. The bonefish—the biggest one Williams ever caught was 121⁄4 pounds—would give themselves away when they fed. Their silver-green tails would stick out of the water. There! The trick was to be able to cast into the middle of them, drop a fly close enough for them to turn in their feeding and take a bite, soft enough not to startle them. The task required precision, touch, definite technique. Skill.

The tarpon, some weighing 100 pounds or more, were easier to spot, dark shapes in the shallow water. Everything took place in shallow water. The intrigue was important, hide and seek. There were other ways to fish both bonefish and tarpon, easier ways, trolling with live bait or waiting at a bridge for the fish to come past, but this was the sportsman's way. Fly fishing. Light tackle. The lighter the better. This was the challenge. See the fish. Make him bite. Let the fight begin.

“I went fishing with Ted once in Islamorada,” Billy Reedy, a friend, says. “I caught a fish. I was proud. I caught a fish with Ted Williams! He still hadn't caught one. He said, ‘But did you see the fish? Did you see him?' I had no idea what he meant. I thought I'd done a good thing, catching a fish.”

“But did you see him?” Williams asked again.

“No,” Reedy finally admitted.

“Jee-sus.”

The jump was the amazing moment in catching a tarpon. The big fish would realize his predicament, jump out of the water to try to free himself—there! the picture!—and the fight would begin. With the bonefish, the first run would be the moment, line flying out of the reel, a rocket suddenly attached to the end. No fish would fight harder to get away. None. Jack Brothers said he had seen two bonefish in his life die of heart attacks because they were trying so hard to escape, fighting until their own death.

Williams would spend an adult lifetime looking for these moments. Plotting, planning, spending big cash. These weren't commercial fish, good eating on the family table. They were sport fish, alive only for the fight. Williams would come to that fight with all the care and ritual of Manolete meeting the bull on the sand at the Plaza de Toros in Madrid, sunscreen on his face, options in his tackle box, passion in his heart. When he was younger, he would stand on the dock at the end, the victor, posed for a picture next to his vanquished foe. When he was older, smarter, he would release the fish, send it back into the arena, a competitor for another fight on another hot day.

   

The Keys still had the feel of tropical wilderness when Williams first arrived during World War II. This was virgin fishing territory, opened up by technology. The outboard motor was an invention that came out of the war. New places along the coastline could be explored. A guide could anchor a big boat offshore and take his clients out in little skiffs that could be maneuvered around the flats with the new 71⁄2 horsepower motors.

The fish were everywhere, pretty much undisturbed forever. The water was clear, like looking through a plate-glass window on a still day, sediments undisturbed, pollutants from back in Homestead and Miami still not seen.

“We'd order four motors at a time,” Cecil Keith, a guide at the beginning, says. “There weren't any mechanics around back then, anyone to fix 'em. We'd put two motors on the boats, then use the other two for parts to fix the first two.”

The only place for a tourist to stay on Islamorada was Beard's Cabins. Three cabins, take your pick. The only tourists mostly were fishermen. The place was being invented. The sport was being invented. It was a brand-new time.

“The hurricane of 1935 had cleared everything out,” Keith says. “Everything had to be rebuilt.”

The Hurricane of 1935 was one of the most devastating storms in U.S. history. It struck directly at Matecumbe Key, the center of a string of islands that make up the town of Islamorada. An 18-foot tidal surge and winds as high as 200 miles per hour hit the island. Sixty of the sixty-one existing structures in Islamorada were destroyed. The official death toll from the storm was 463, but the true figure probably was much higher. People were swept out to sea, never seen again.

Many of the victims were disgruntled World War I veterans, “Bonus Marchers” sent to the Keys to work on the construction of a highway proposed from Miami to Key West. Many others were local residents, herded onto a rescue train, people who had just boarded at Islamorada when the storm struck. A series of mistakes brought the Flagler Railroad cars up from Miami into town too late. With no highways between the islands, with boat travel impossible, the one-track Flagler train, the lifeblood of the Keys since 1912, was the only possible means of escape. And it didn't work.

“I was four years old,” Cecil Keith says. “Our family got on the train, and we hadn't traveled much when it got knocked over. Our car landed on its side and on top of a pile of lumber in a lumberyard. That's what saved us. All the men stood on the bars, the poles, in the car and held all the children over their heads to keep us from drowning. We made it. The other cars . . . a lot did not.”

A first highway across the Keys was built on the remains of the railway trestles, tiny two-lane bridges, and opened in 1938, but the advent of World War II slowed most development. The area still was being put back together when Ted Williams first appeared in 1943. Jimmie Albright was one of the people arranging the pieces.

“Ted had fallen in love with fishing in the Everglades during the war,” Rick Ruoff says. “He bought a house in Miami. He'd go out along the Tamiami Trail, fishing for snook. One of the guides, Red Greb, told him, ‘Hey, if you like this so much, you should go out on the Keys for bonefish.' That's how he went out to Islamorada and met Jimmie.”

Jimmie, one rival guide said, was “the Meriwether Lewis” of the Keys. He charted out the entire area. He made the wilderness—the fishing wilderness—manageable. He came down to Florida from Detroit in 1942 to go fishing. He basically never left. He always said that he showed up for the first time in Islamorada on a hot afternoon and stopped in a little store to buy a five-cent Coke. The proprietor thanked him for being the first and only customer of the day. There was no water, no electricity, and there were no fishing guides on the island. Albright remedied the last of these problems.

He married a blond girl from Alabama named Frankee—one of three sisters who all married fishing guides—bought a big 37-foot boat that he named Rebel, and went into business. There was a slight stall when he was commissioned into the Coast Guard for the war, but he came back and went to work. Using the new outboards, he began exploring the local waters on both the ocean and gulf sides. He took note of where the fish could be found. The fish were everywhere perhaps, but some spots were better than others. Jimmie discovered one small stretch of water off Buchanan Bank that was positively magical.

“The tarpon start migrating in the spring, around March,” guide Buddy Grace says. “That's when they start to appear around here. They keep moving through until the end of July, middle of August. The theory is that they're going out to spawn. The University of Miami says they spawn 80 miles out in the Sargasso Sea grass. We just know they come through here.

“When they get near Buchanan Bank, they head into this little indentation. Then they have to turn around. Nobody knows why. They all do it.”

“It's an area no more than 30 feet long and 30 feet wide,” former guide Hank Brown says. “That's what Jimmie found. Tarpon probably had been turning around there for thousands of years, but nobody ever had noticed.”

The area became known as “the Pocket.” Want to catch a tarpon? Go to the Pocket. Florida Bay covered maybe 500 square miles, and this little 30-foot by 30-foot cul-de-sac was the best spot of all. This was where the tarpon were.

“The first one out to the Pocket in the morning put his stake down and had control,” Joe Johansen, a guide, says. “That became the rule. Jimmie and Jack would each try to be the first out there. They had a rivalry at the Pocket.”

Jack Brothers appeared in Islamorada in 1953. He came down from Brooklyn with a buddy and decided to stay. An employment agency sent him to the Theater of the Sea, a small-time operation on the island, one of the first marine parks in the country. The job was to be a tour guide in the theater, talking about the attractions, answering questions.

“The place had two guides,” Brothers's son, Frankie, says. “My dad took the tour with one of them to see what you had to do. The guide was a woman. She reached down into the tank to pick up a nurse shark and picked up a sand shark by mistake. The sand shark took all the skin off her arm.”

After the woman was sent off to the hospital and normalcy returned, Brothers took the next tour of the day with a male guide. This guide reached into the tank and was stung by a moray eel. He also went to the hospital. What kind of place was this? Two tours. Two people in the hospital.

“My dad took the job,” Frankie Brothers says. “He stayed there for two years.”

Brothers married a local girl, a conch, and set up shop. Around this time, fly fishing in saltwater started to become popular. The sport had been all spinning rods and reels until then, but developments in equipment and a change in perception brought fly fishing on to the scene in the fifties. Jack and Jimmie and Ted were in the middle of it.

Again, everything was new. What kind of flies worked? What kind of hooks? What kind of line? This was a puzzle that had to be figured out, a sport that had to be constructed by trial and error. Jimmie figured out a knot—the Albright Special—to tie two different diameter pieces of line together. The knot is still used today by every guide on the dock. The Albright Special.

“Jimmie was one of those frontier guys,” Hank Brown says. “Not only in the techniques of fly fishing but in the location of the fish. Everything. Jack was right behind him.”

Jimmie story: John Sutter worked on the same dock as Albright. For two years after Sutter arrived, Albright never said a word to him, acted as if a six-foot-nine former NBA basketball player did not exist. Finally, he spoke.

“Are you from Marion, Indiana?” he asked.

“Yes, I am,” Sutter replied, startled.

“I used to live in Marion. On Boot Street.”

“I used to walk down Boot Street every day to school,” Sutter said. “It was five minutes from my house.”

Jimmie walked away. Sutter was dumbfounded. Welcome to Islamorada.

Jack story: He had taken a client into the flats, and they had found some tarpon. The client was not getting any bites.

“Change the fly, Jack,” the client said. “Something else would work better.”

“I really don't think it's the fly,” Brothers said. “I think it's the presentation. Try it again.”

No luck.

“Change the fly, Jack.”

“I really don't think. . . .”

The dialogue was repeated a number of times. The client started to become hot. Brothers became hotter. He finally took the client's rod, reeled in the line, bent over, and bit the feathers off the fly. A smoking man, he snubbed out his cigarette, then peeled the paper off the filter. He put the filter on the hook, cast once, and almost immediately pulled in a tarpon.

“It wasn't the fly,” he told the client as he brought the fish into the boat. “It was the presentation.”

“Jack's in a tackle store one day, just to shoot the breeze,” Hank Brown says. “Two very heavy guys from Texas are in there, talking with the owner about going fishing. The owner asks Jack if he wants to take the guys out. Jack looks at them and says, ‘If you think I'm going to drag your two fat asses around in a boat all day, you've got another think coming.' That was Jack. Public relations didn't exactly matter. Jimmie was just like him.”

Jimmie and Jack. And Ted. He fit in with these two characters as if he were their brother. They all had the same hard edge, same hard language, same curiosity, same idea of fun. They all had the same short fuse.

“I'd fish Ted on Saturday mornings for my father in the seventies,” Frankie Brothers says. “I was just a kid, 13 years old. He called me ‘Porky.' I called him ‘Mr. Ted.' He'd give me five bucks for the morning. Sometimes I'd fish too. (Something the real guides never would do.) One morning we were out and I was fishing for snook and he was fishing for redfish. I caught a snook, a big one, maybe 18 to 20 pounds. Mr. Ted got all upset. I'd caught a fish and he hadn't. He said, ‘Take me in.'

“For six months after that, he never used me. I was a kid. I caught a fish. He never said anything and I never said anything, and then, six months later, it was suddenly, ‘Hey, Porky, Saturday morning?' And it was like nothing ever had happened.”

The Islamorada that Williams discovered in 1943 on that early tip from Red Greb gave him all the things he wanted. Friends. Fishing. Privacy. He could have lived anywhere in the off-season—Minnesota, California; indeed, he often had talked about buying a place on Cape Cod—but he chose here.

The house he bought in 1953 after his first divorce was a small, spartan bunker on the ocean side of the island next to the grounds of the Villager, the first motel-resort complex. This was definitely a bachelor's quarters. A military bachelor's quarters. Curt Gowdy and his wife visited once and both were struck by the cleanliness and order of the house. Everything had a proper place. Everything was in that proper place.

“My wife, I remember, wanted to do something for Ted in appreciation of his hospitality,” Gowdy says. “There was nothing really to buy, because he had everything, and he had taken care of all the meals. He was a very good cook. My wife said, ‘What can I do for him?' What she did, while Ted and I were out fishing, she put shelf paper on all of his kitchen shelves. Ted just thought that was the greatest thing. Every time he saw my wife, he'd thank her for the shelf paper.”

Retiring from baseball in 1960, getting serious with Lee Howard, thinking about the future, Williams decided to sell the bunker at the end of the season and find something larger. He offered the house to Gowdy, who said he liked it.

The two men talked about the deal during the 1960 World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Yankees, when Williams was a “correspondent” for Life magazine and Gowdy a broadcaster for NBC. Williams returned to Florida from the Series first. Gowdy was scheduled to fly down a day later.

“I got to the airport, it was a night flight,” Gowdy says. “I was going to buy the house. My wife didn't want me to buy it, but I was going to do it. At the airport, though, I realized I'd forgotten my wallet. I called my wife, and she was still mad and refused to bring it. I missed the last flight of the night and went back home. I still was going to buy the house.

“The next morning Ted called. He told me not to bother. He'd gotten home and the house had been wiped out. Hurricane Donna.”

The storm had hit Islamorada on September 9, not as powerful as the Hurricane of 1935, but very close. The wind had gusted to as much as 150 miles per hour. The storm surge was 13 feet. Not a leaf was left on a single tree on the entire island. Homes were destroyed. Everybody ran for cover on the gulf side.

“I went to Jimmie's house,” Cecil Keith says. “We had the big boat and four skiffs over there, and they rode out the storm all right. My house didn't do as well. The roof and the walls were gone. The only parts of the house that were in the same position were the sink and the toilet.”

Williams found that his house, while the walls and ceiling remained, had been cleaned out. All of the mementos from his baseball years had been strewn around the island. Neighborhood kids for the next few years would make a game of going through the brush and weeds near the house, looking for trophies or cards or bats or whatever pieces of his famous baseball life they could find.

The new house, larger and nicer, was on the gulf side, a waterway in the back, big palm trees in the front. The address was 140 Madeira Road, not far from the Islamorada Yacht Basin and the Islamorada Fishing Club. Though he still traveled a lot, this was his home in retirement, his given address.

Williams could walk down every day to talk with the other fishermen, with the guides. What kind of luck did you have? Where were the fish? What were you using? He could practice casting from his backyard, aiming at a float. Without a guide many days, he could take his own boat out for a day on the water, alone or with friends. He had a spot he liked off Long Key, a spot the guides called “Ted's Spot.”

“You'd see him out there all alone,” Buddy Grace says. “Just fishing. Ted's Spot.”

Williams's home life in the new house would go through various permutations—different wives and lovers, visiting children, and assorted resident dogs—but the constant was the fishing. Jimmie and Jack and the water. The lure of fishing, the game, was bigger than the lure of anything else. He would sacrifice anything for the fishing. He did.

“It's hard for a woman in Islamorada,” Williams once told Billy Reedy. “The men go out fishing during the day, and what does the woman do? There isn't anything. If she doesn't have some job, some interest, she's going to be bored an awful lot.”

For men, men of a certain outdoors disposition, the place was easy. For women . . . it took a different kind of woman to survive in Islamorada. Especially if she was with Ted Williams.

   

Louise Kaufman arrived in Islamorada in 1952 with her husband, Bob, and their five kids. They bought one of the biggest houses on the Key, a three-story affair on the Gulf of Mexico.

She was the daughter of Walter Magruder, a businessman who had been involved in lumber and had owned two brick and tile plants and also had been a lobbyist in Washington. In 1942, nine years after his daughter was married, Magruder bought and reopened a metal cookware company in Carrollton, Ohio. The company made stainless steel mess trays, pots, pans, and serving utensils for the government during the Second World War. The company did very well.

Bob Kaufman, Louise's husband, joined his father-in-law in the business and became the president when Walter Magruder died in 1947. The company had switched to the peacetime economy, making stainless steel cookware, utensils, and sinks.

The Kaufmans first lived in Canton, Ohio, but as their family grew, they kept moving to larger houses. They eventually owned a 650-acre horse farm four miles outside Carrollton and lived in a ranch house designed by Louise. They were very comfortable. The Islamorada home was a vacation home. It replaced a home they had owned in Coral Gables, Florida.

“In those years, Carrollton Mfg. prospered and the Islamorada home [soon] was expanded,” Louise's son, Rob, writes in background notes on his mother. “It was supported by a vacation plan for outstanding sales by the cookware direct sales people. Lou had weekly guests from the north who had sold enough to win the Florida Keys Vacation Prize. This plan paid for a full-time captain/fishing guide to maintain and operate the sportfishing yacht and the bonefishing skiffs.

“Louise was an avid fisherman and caught all of the important Keys gamefish. Both offshore and backcountry. She caught a women's world record tarpon on bait casting (#14 line) that weighed 152 pounds. This was about 30 pounds more than she weighed. She also caught bluefin tuna in Bimini as well as dozens of sailfish, white marlin and wahoo off Islamorada. Fishing was her passion for years. She belonged to the International Women's Gamefishing Association.”

Louise loved the Keys. She was a gardener and planted an elaborate orchid walk to the big house. Bob had helped keep the marriage together in 1949 when he had given up golf, which he played at a scratch handicap, to spend more time with her and the kids, but now Louise had her own interest. The house in Islamorada was a new stress. She spent a lot of time in Florida. He spent a lot of time in Ohio.

The inevitable happened, a divorce in the summer of 1957. Louise's mother had died in January, and she and Bob had inherited 75 percent of the company. In the divorce, she received the house in Islamorada and gave up the house in Carrollton and her stock in the company. The kids stayed in Ohio, and Bob eventually married his secretary.

As for Louise, she had fallen in love with Ted Williams. She had fallen hard.

“All those things she gave up in the divorce,” her son says. “That was the price she paid to be with Ted Williams.”

Williams had been brought to her house the first time by Jimmie Albright. Williams, after his own first divorce from Doris, lived in the small bunker on the ocean side of Route 1. He didn't have a phone, didn't even have a television set. Albright brought him to Louise's big house to watch a heavyweight fight because Louise had everything. She certainly had a black-and-white television set.

Born in 1912, she was six years older than Williams, so that put her in her early forties and him in his late thirties when they met. She liked a bunch of things he liked, primarily fishing, and she could churn out a four-letter word on her own, here and there, and she had an edge to her. She would battle him a little bit. They got along fine. More than fine. They became buddies and lovers.

The buddy-lover quotient almost certainly was different for each of them—extremely different—but they worked out their own sort of relationship. Ted was Ted. Louise was there. They each found satisfaction at their own level of interest.

“The first time I saw Ted, I said, ‘That's the most attractive man I've ever seen,” Evalyn Sterry says. “He had the most infectious smile, just a great smile when he wanted it to be there.”

Evalyn was Louise's best friend from Ohio. She had known Louise since they were 16 years old, going to tea dances. When Louise eloped with Bob Kaufman, 20 years old, Evalyn eloped with her own first husband. It was the Depression. They all went together to Wheeling, West Virginia, and were married on the same day, January 3, 1933. The friendship had continued. Evalyn lived now in Delray Beach with her third husband, Saunders Jones, close enough to Louise to visit.

“Come on,” Louise said on one of those visits. “We're going over to Ted Williams's house for a drink.”

This was Evalyn's first meeting with Ted. There was a second man in the house, but Evalyn was too spellbound by the baseball star to catch the other man's name. She figured he was a local fishing guide. Wasn't everyone in Islamorada a fishing guide? The evening wore on, and suddenly Ted and Louise were laughing at her.

“You don't have any idea who this is, do you?” he said.

“No,” Evalyn said. “I don't.”

“Evalyn, say hello to Benny Goodman.”

She remembers riding in the backseat of Ted's car with the famous clarinet player. Ted was doing about 90 miles per hour on Route 1, maybe the most dangerous stretch of highway in America. Everyone except Ted was terrified. The famous clarinet player was digging his fingers into Evalyn's arm.

“Ted, this is making me really nervous,” she finally said, since no one else would speak. “Could you please slow down?”

She remembers that Ted was a gentleman and slowed down. She also remembers . . . and this was odd . . . that Benny Goodman had brought down his latest recording. She wanted to hear it back at the house. Louise wanted to hear it. Benny wanted to hear it. Ted wouldn't play it. What was that? He simply refused. A macho thing? I am the lord of my house? What?

“We went out fishing the next day, the four of us,” Evalyn says. “Ted kept his eye on Benny all the time, watched him cast. It was like he was judging Benny, did Benny know how to fish? We rode around, didn't get any fish, but I remember Ted judging Benny.”

Louise, at any rate, had fallen hard for Ted. They had the same kind of mind. “Industrious” is the word Evalyn uses. Louise had learned how to paint and did fine impressionistic still lifes. She was a reader of nonfiction, never novels, a collector of facts. She was passionate about the subjects that interested her, studying them, mastering the talents necessary to be involved in them. She was passionate about Ted.

He would go off to Boston and play baseball and live in Room 231 and come back, and they would be together in the Keys. He would go off and come back, and they would be together. He would go off . . . and retire . . . and come back . . . and tell Louise he had something important to talk about. He was going to marry a woman named Lee Howard.

“Ted was really broken up about telling her,” Lee says. “He said that this was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do. I know it really bothered him.”

It bothered Louise even more.

“She was devastated,” Evalyn Sterry says. “She wound up going to live in Paris for four or five months. She rented an apartment over there. I was really hoping she was going to meet some man and get over Ted.”

This did not happen. Before she left, she appeared outside Ted's house, looking through the windows, the night he returned with Lee from their Canadian honeymoon. Lee was startled by the noises and spotted her. (“It had to be her,” Lee says. “This was Islamorada. There wouldn't have been any other older women peeking around Ted's house.”) Now back from Paris, also after spending some time with her sister, Alice, who was married to Grant Stockdale, the ambassador to Ireland, Louise was on the telephone to Ted.

“She'd call and tell him I was going to get pregnant and take all his money,” Lee says. “That was what she always said.”

When the marriage ended with Lee not pregnant and not with all Ted's money, Louise was back. She moved her clothes back into his house and was back into his life.

“She just loved him,” Evalyn Sterry says.

Two years later, when Ted was married a third time, the quick wedding to Dolores Wettach, Louise was devastated again. This time she sold the three-story house on Islamorada and moved to an apartment in Delray Beach to be close to Evalyn. She eventually bought a house in Delray Beach.

This time the love of her life surely was gone. Wasn't he?

“Ted shouldn't be marrying this girl,” Louise told John Underwood, a writer. “He should be marrying me.”

   

Underwood, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, had become friends with Williams. (“Williams Befriends Sportswriter!” “Man Bites Cocker Spaniel!”) They had met casually at a horse show in Miami, Underwood tentative, Williams charming, asking the writer to sit in his box for an hour. They had been pushed together again in a boat by Edwin Pope, the Miami Herald columnist.

“I thought it would be a great thing to go fishing with Ted Williams in the Keys,” Pope says. “I knew him a little bit, but not well enough to ask him to do that. I figured, though, if I could get my friend Underwood to have Sports Illustrated do the story, maybe Ted would go for it.”

Underwood pitched the story to the magazine. The magazine liked it. Underwood pitched the idea to Williams. Williams said, “Come on down.” Underwood and Pope went. The result was a terrific SI article in August 1968 called “Going Fishing with the Kid,” one of those bonus stories in the back that ran forever and left the reader feeling at the end as if he were sunburnt and wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sitting in Ted's living room.

“An open boat with The Kid does not happen to be the place for one with the heart of a fawn or the ear of a rabbit,” Underwood wrote. “There are four things to remember: 1) he is a perfectionist; 2) he is better at it than you are; 3) he is a consummate needler; and 4) he is in charge. He brings to fishing the same unbounded capacity for scientific inquiry he brought to hitting a baseball.”

Lovely stuff. Everyone shook hands at the end of the day and thought the story was done. Except for Pope.

“Underwood doesn't just write about people,” Pope says. “He marries them. Every one of those long pieces he ever wrote for SI—Bear Bryant, for instance, John McKay—he wound up best friends with the subject. They do books together.”

A first best friend Underwood had made in this case was Jack Brothers, the guide on that fishing day. Brothers invited him to return to the Keys to fish for tarpon. Underwood, a fisherman like his dad, took Brothers up on the idea. They went out together and almost had a giant tarpon into the boat when Brothers made a mistake and the fish swam free. The fishermen had been so close to capturing the tarpon that it had left a pile of scales on the side of the boat.

Underwood scraped up the scales for a souvenir and, on impulse a few days later, put them into an envelope and sent them to Williams with a note about the misadventure, the old story of the one that got away. Williams sent a note back saying that he hoped Underwood had given Brothers hell, but scrawled over the text “Not really!” He also complimented Underwood on the SI story. He said the story “had captured me.”

The SI editors in New York also liked the story. They wondered if there might be more.

“Do you think Williams would want to sit down to do his life story?” managing editor Andre Laguerre asked.

“I'll find out,” Underwood said.

Williams sputtered, changed his mind, changed his mind again, then finally agreed to do it. Underwood went to see him in Ocala, Florida, where he was working with Red Sox minor leaguers. The start of the project was rocky. Underwood found a grumpy Williams. He saw the dark side.

“Ted came down for breakfast and he was just angry,” Underwood says. “He was angry about everything. Tight. Everything was tight. His eyes got real small and his mandibles jumped when he said something. I tried to pay for the check and he grabbed it out of my hand and said, ‘Don't be a big shot,' slammed some money down, and walked away. I just sat there, saying to myself, ‘I'm not going to put up with this.' The editors at SI would back me if I decided not to do it. I decided that I didn't want to do it.”

Underwood confronted Williams at the ballpark. He said he couldn't work with someone who acted that way. The story was done. Williams didn't argue, said nothing. Underwood was back at the motel, packing, when there was a knock at the door.

“It's time for dinner,” Williams said. “Do you want to go eat?”

“It was his way of apologizing,” Underwood says. “He never said anything more about it. He never got that look again with me, as long as we knew each other. He got mad, but never got that look again.”

The partnership was back in business. The result was the longest four-part series SI had ever run, “Hitting Was My Life.” Make that a five-part series. Williams added a fifth part.

“That was all his idea,” Underwood says. “He wanted to do a part just on hitting. He even had the title, ‘The Science of Hitting.' That came from him.”

The words again rolled across the page. This was Williams talking, cleaned up perhaps, but loud and opinionated and funny. He told his side of his story that had been written by so many other people. His worst critics harrumphed that a bunch of the facts were wrong, the situations not exactly as he described them, but facts usually are wrong in arguments, aren't they? This was his argument.

He was absolutely candid. The thoughts came out of him with a rhythm, the way he talked, with a bluster and cadence and sense of passion. He had been wanting to say these things for a long time, whether he knew it or not.

“The best thing is that Underwood recorded everything on one of those big old reel-to-reel tape recorders,” Edwin Pope says. “He took them to be transcribed by some lovely Spanish woman he knew in Miami. She called him the next day and said, ‘Mr. Underwood, I am very sorry. I cannot do this. I have never heard language like this.'”

An editor at Simon & Schuster wound up asking Underwood and Williams to convert the words into a book. The one book became three books. The results were My Turn at Bat, an instant best-seller on the nonfiction charts, The Science of Hitting, still the best instructional book ever written about swinging a round bat at a round ball, and Fishing the Big Three, a memoir and guide about fishing for tarpon, bonefish, and the Atlantic salmon.

Underwood and Williams became so close that Underwood nearly cringed at some of the things Williams revealed about himself. Bobby Doerr was a friend, all right? A friend for a lifetime? Williams would say things, personal things, here that Underwood knew would never be said to Doerr. The conversations went far beyond subjects for the book. None of these words ever would be in any book. Williams seemed as if he wanted to talk, to divulge, to be intimate. He somehow chose Underwood as the person to listen. The writer always wondered why. He thinks it had to do with education.

“I wish I was smart like you,” Williams would say.

“Ted, you're smarter than I am,” Underwood would reply with conviction. “You're probably the most intelligent man I've ever met.”

The writer found sides to Williams he didn't know existed. On a trip to Africa after the 1969 Senators season, he noticed his new friend had become quiet. He couldn't figure out why. They were in Zambia, hunting various animals for an American Sportsman show on ABC. Underwood was there only for the first half of the trip because he had to return for work. Why wouldn't Ted talk?

“Then I realized what it was,” Underwood says. “He was upset that I was leaving. He didn't want me to go. He was pouting. Like a little kid.”

Williams liked all three books. He toured for them, did signings. Finally someone had gotten it all right. (He had. He and Underwood.) This was what he really thought. This was what really had happened.

The first two books were published while he was managing. He wondered if his players had read them. Especially The Science of Hitting. He let it be known it would be a good idea if they did.

“I had a great start in the 1972 season, a great first month in Texas,” catcher Rich Billings says. “I was in the top ten in hitting. Right there in the paper every day. I was batting fourth in the order behind Frank Howard. It was a great start.

“I come in for batting practice one day, and Ted's talking with five or six writers. He's talking about the book. He says, real loud, pointing at me, ‘Look at this big dummy. He should hit 20 homers every year. He just sits there, though, and waits for the slider.' Everybody laughed. I laughed. I thought he was making a joke.”

“Did you read my book?” Williams then asked. “I'll bet you didn't even read my book.”

Everybody laughed. Billings laughed.

“Just because you read a medical book, that doesn't make you a surgeon,” Billings replied, joke to joke.

Everybody did not laugh. The reporters laughed, but Williams did not laugh.

“Get your ass out to the bullpen where you belong,” he said. “Get!”

Billings skipped batting practice, went to the bullpen. When he returned for the start of the game, his name had been scratched from the starting lineup. He sat for the next three days.

The book was serious. All three of the books were serious.

   

Islamorada, after a while, began to call itself “the Sportfishing Capital of the World.” Williams was the face on the Sportfishing Capital of the World. The off-season stories about him always mentioned Islamorada. There was an exotic quality to the place. Hemingway was linked forever to Key West at the end of Route 1, even though he didn't live there very long. Williams was linked to this spot in the middle of the Keys. He lived there for more than 35 years.

“People would come in and ask to sit in the same chair where Ted Williams sat,” Manny Ortiz, owner of Manny and Isa's, Williams's favorite restaurant, says. “They'd ask what Ted Williams ate and then they'd order it.

“Ted Williams saved my business. No one was coming here. Then he started coming three or four times a week. And the people followed.”

People had come looking for Williams from the moment he arrived on Islamorada. When he was drafted back into the Marines for Korea in 1952, reporters had tracked him down to Jimmie Albright's house. Williams hid in the closet, suffering from the heat, while Albright smiled and brought the reporters into the living room and kept the conversation rolling, just to keep Williams suffering. Jimmy Carroll, the friend from Boston during the fifties, remembers just showing up one day at the small, first house.

“I was in Miami, and I met some retired Boston firemen, all guys in their seventies,” Carroll says. “They wanted to meet Ted. I said I would take them. I put two in the backseat, two in the front, and we showed up. Louise Kaufman was outside. She said, ‘Oh, boy, he's going to love this. I'm getting out of here.' People didn't just drop in on Ted.

“We go in and he's upset at first, but one of the firemen, Clarence Brodie, had a great face. He just did, he had a great, friendly face. Ted got hooked on Clarence Brodie, just talking to him. Liked the way he laughed. Ted wound up cutting up some grapefruit for all of us, serving it with sherbet. We spent a couple of hours there.

“On the way out, he said, ‘Jimmy, can you do a favor for me?' I said, ‘Anything.' He said there was a woman in the bedroom. I should take her back to Miami. She was a good-looking woman. Ted told her she was going back with us. She didn't want to go. She thought Ted was going to take her to meet Cary Grant. They were filming Operation Petticoat down there. Ted, I guess, had said that they would see Cary Grant. Now he said, ‘Back to Miami.' She came back with the four firemen and me. A real good-looking girl.”

Through the years, the area pretty much grew up around Williams. The tiny bridges constructed on the railroad trestles were replaced by modern, wider expanses. The Keys became a tourist destination. The 126-mile road from Miami to Key West became a boulevard of attractions and lodges, blinks and winks to entice the curious traveler. Every year civilization intruded one step closer.

The famous man was not happy with the idea.

“The Cheeca Lodge was built,” Hank Brown says. “Ted went there to eat one night. He was told that no one could eat in the dining room without a tie. He went home and came back wearing a tie. Over his V-necked T-shirt. It was a famous moment. The Cheeca Lodge decided to throw out its dress code.”

“I got him interested in buying a condo at the Ocean Reef,” John Underwood says. “He was going to do it. Maybe he even did it. I can't remember. He didn't like it, though. He didn't like the rules at the pool. Or in the dining room.”

This was another stuffy dining room. Neckties required on Saturday nights. Williams ordered a bowl of soup with conch fritters. He tucked his napkin into his V-necked T-shirt this time. The soup arrived. He picked up the bowl and started drinking. The excess soup rolled down the napkin, across the front of the T-shirt. He finished the bowl, walked out, and never returned.

“He looked like a slob when he did that,” Underwood says. “But he was anything but a slob. He was just making his statement.”

No condo. Thank you very much.

The second house, the one on Madeira, was his anchor. There was little night life in Islamorada—though the one local tavern boasted that it had no front door because it was open 24 hours a day, every day—and Williams wouldn't have been involved in it anyway. He entertained at home, kept his early-to-bed schedule. He would rather argue with Jimmie or Jack in the kitchen about proper fishing tackle than go out on any town.

A cypress-paneled den on the second floor was Williams's sanctuary. Rick Ruoff, a neighbor, remembers being brought up there and seeing trophies and baseball pictures on the wall and feeling privileged. The living room gave no indication of who lived in the house, except when Williams was married to Dolores. Then it gave an indication that Dolores lived there.

“There was a painting of Dolores in the room,” Millard Wells, an Islamorada painter and gallery owner, says. “She said Ted had commissioned it from a famous New York artist. It was quite striking.”

It was a seminude, Dolores staring out of the frame with her jeans unbuttoned and a sleeveless shirt unbuttoned. Half of the shirt covered one breast. Dolores's hand covered the other. Her hair blew in the breeze. The word “Vermont” was painted in the background. She looked sensuous, beautiful.

The plan was to have a second painting of Ted in the room. Dolores commissioned Millard Wells to paint it. She said she wanted a fishing painting that showed off Ted's muscular body.

“I didn't know what exactly that was,” Wells says. “The usual pictures I paint show the fisherman catching a fish, involved in the fight, the tarpon in midair. Muscular? I painted a picture of Ted bringing a tarpon into the boat. No gaff, just Ted doing it by himself. The muscles were glistening.

“Dolores didn't like it. To this day, this is the only commissioned painting a customer ever has refused. What she wanted, it turned out, was the same painting I did for everyone else. I sold this one to somebody else. There never was a painting of Ted.”

Williams's years with Dolores in Florida were the same as they were in Washington. Storm clouds followed wherever the couple went. John Underwood, doing the books, saw the highs and lows. He found Dolores alternately tough and delightful. He liked her. She battled with Ted with all guns working, foul word for foul word, sarcasm for sarcasm. Ted battled back.

“One day I came in the house and Dolores had her head in the gas oven,” Underwood says. “I ran across the room. I thought she was trying to kill herself. I really did.”

“‘No,' Dolores explained, ‘the pilot light went out.'

“I thought, though, that this was the marriage that was going to work for Ted,” Underwood says. “I think he loved Dolores at the start. He definitely was trying. If you saw a picture of her in a checked shirt, some denim shorts, she was the perfect woman for him. She loved the outdoors. Smart. She could keep up with him.

“Who knows why marriages fail? Only the two people who are in the marriage can know that.”

Underwood remembers taking Dolores to a dinner in New York. Williams asked him to do it. He showed up, and Dolores was wearing some orange taffeta dress by some famous designer. He suddenly was hit by the fact that, yes, she was a Vogue model. She looked like a Vogue model.

“She was real good-looking,” Joe Johansen, a guide, says. “I was a young guy, and I'd be looking at Ted's house when I went by in the boat. But not really to see Ted.”

The end to the marriage was evident when Williams appeared at Millard Wells's gallery one day in 1972 with the painting by the famous artist in New York. Dolores was gone, and Williams wanted the “damn thing” out of his house. He asked Wells to pack it and send it back to her. This did not happen. Dolores had decided to stay in Islamorada. She had rented a cottage on the ocean side and purchased a skiff to give nature tours to schoolchildren. No shipping was necessary. She came to pick up the painting.

Wells and his wife were in the studio. Wells remembers the conversation.

“I don't know why Ted doesn't want to keep this,” Dolores said, pointing at the work. “It's a beautiful painting by a great artist. The things he did. The atmosphere he created. The use of sunlight. You can see the sun sparkling on my box. . . .”

The three people stared at the painting, the jeans unzipped. What did she say? Did she say what I thought she said? Millard looked at his wife.

“She's talking about her jewelry box,” he said.

Millard's wife looked back.

“You can see it glistening on my hair. . . .”

“Maybe socks.”

Dolores took the painting.

   

What to do now? Williams had tried just about all the ways a man can get married. He had married his first love, his first girlfriend, Doris. That didn't work. He had married the gorgeous second wife, Lee, the actress and model, for love. That didn't work. He had married out of necessity and duty, Dolores. Another gorgeous woman. That certainly didn't work. What was left?

He had lived the single life during different stretches, women available any night he wanted. That didn't work. He was 55 years old.

He did the logical, sensible thing—he married for companionship. Louise was back by the end of 1974.

True, there would never be another ceremony in front of another justice of the peace. True, he told one and all, especially Louise, he never would marry anyone again. True, he was now as married as he ever had been.

Louise had won the race. She was the only one who could take him. The screaming, the words, the flashes of cantankerousness, she understood. The infidelities, she understood. Or at least could handle. She had learned how to hunker down and survive. He had called his second wife, Lee, in 1974 and begged her to return, to try again.

“If you come back, I'll even go to church,” he promised.

“What does that mean?” she wondered. She never had asked him to go to church.

Lee eventually had relocated in California after the divorce. She had obtained her real estate license and worked at a large development in Marina Del Rey. She loved her life, what she had put together, yet she still thought about his offer. She had kept in contact and still loved him and he still loved her. She thought hard.

“No,” she finally said. “I just can't do it.”

Louise had no second thoughts. She moved back in with her framed original Audubon print and her sterling silver and her crystal and her furniture and filled the oceanside home. She had proved to be, after grand trial and grand error, the one woman who could fit inside the blast area. He was, if there ever had been, a man who needed unconditional love. She had it to give.

“She was a strong character like him,” Louise's friend Evalyn Sterry says. “She truly loved him, and I think, really down deep, he loved her. I don't know what it was with those two marriages after she met him . . . maybe he was looking for someone younger, better-looking? I don't know.”

Louise had reached her sixties now. Williams was still leading-man handsome, if overweight. The wrinkles in his face were friendly battle ribbons from a life lived outdoors. The wrinkles were not as friendly to Louise. She looked old, much older than him. People who did not know Williams and met him with Louise would not understand their relationship.

At least one writer, doing a story on Williams the Fisherman, thought she was the maid. Johnny Pesky, who did not really know her, reached for a description and said, “Oh, you mean Grandma.” The same guides who had drooled over Dolores referred to Louise as “that old woman.”

She fit, though, into Williams's life. She gave it order, structure. She cleaned his clothes, cooked his meals, poured him a big cocktail. He liked his cocktails now—“a Ted Williams Special,” a big drink, one bottle of rum only enough to pour two. The alcohol sometimes was not a pleasant addition. He would become noisier, more abrupt, quicker to hit the blowup button. The language would come tumbling out, quicker and louder and more forceful. He was not a drunk, but he was not a good drinker.

“My wife and I were at the house one night for dinner,” Gary Ellis, a guide, says. “We finished dinner, and Ted asked if I wanted another drink. I said I'd have one if he had one. He said, ‘Sure.' Then he changed his mind. Just like that. ‘I don't want another drink. Going to bed now. Bye.' That was the end of the evening.”

Little else really had changed. His life still was his life. The Public Ted still startled and charmed vacationers around the island, telling the alligator story, booming opinions, curt or pleasant, depending on the moment. He still fished with Jimmie and Jack, battling all the time. He still fished by himself. Battling all the time.

“I was watching him one day,” Rick Ruoff says. “I was fishing a client. Ted was out there alone. He made a mistake bringing a tarpon in. Lost him. I see him bring the rod up, break it across his knee, and throw it on the bottom of the boat. Then I see him reach down, pick up another rod, and break that one over his knee and throw it on the bottom of the boat. Then he hits the push-pull, rrrrrrr, and he's gone.”

Ruoff lived almost next door to Williams. He was constantly amazed at the famous man's energy and bluster. Louise had brought a dog into the relationship, a Dalmatian named Slugger. Ruoff owned a brown English setter with white spots. One morning, 7:00 A.M., Williams was driving past Ruoff's house in his blue Suburban. Ruoff's dog was on the front lawn. Williams hit the brakes on the Suburban, came back in reverse, stopped, and got out.

“Hey, Bush,” he shouted. “What kind of dog is that?”

“Now there's shrubs in front of my house,” Ruoff says. “I know he couldn't see me on the porch. I know it! It's seven o'clock in the morning, and he's just shouting. He's Ted Williams! He figures someone's going to answer!”

“It's an English setter,” Ruoff replied.

“That's close enough,” Williams shouted. “Slugger, my dog, needs a girlfriend.”

He got back into the Suburban. He drove away.

“He was this bombastic, iconoclastic guy,” Ruoff says. “He was hard of hearing, you know? So you'd go to dinner, and you know how people speak louder when they're hard of hearing? He'd say, ‘PASS THE GODDAMNED BUTTER,' and you'd pass it real fast.”

The daily push and pull between Williams and Louise in this returned relationship was best examined by Richard Ben Cramer in a 1986 piece for Esquire magazine. Ben Cramer used a wonderful device to describe Williams's out-of-proportion approach to everything by capitalizing almost every word Williams spoke. Williams was definitely a capital-letters man for all of his life. Every person who ever met him, from the earliest days in San Diego, always remarked about how he always was SHOUTING. Evalyn Sterry says, “He talked in italics.”

Ben Cramer showed Williams's affection for Louise in the story and showed her affection for him, but one stretch of description and dialogue near the end details the perils of living with Ted Williams. He has become angry at just the memory of Bobby-Jo not going to college:

“. . . THAT BURNED ME. . . .”

The switch is on. Lou calls it the devil in him.

“. . . A PAIN IN MY HAIRY RECTUM!”

“Nice,” says Lou. She is fighting for him. She has not flinched.

“Well, DID,” he says through unclenched teeth. “AND MAKES YOU HATE BROADS! . . .”

“Ted. Stop.” But her Ted is gone.

“. . . HATE GOD!”

“TED!”

“. . . HATE LIFE!”

TED! . . . JUST . . . STOP!”

“DON'T YOU TELL ME TO STOP. DON'T YOU EVER TELL ME TO STOP.”

Lou's mouth twists up slightly, as she snorts: “HAH.”

And that does it. They have beaten it, or Lou has, or it's just gone away. Somehow it's past, and Ted sinks back in his chair. His jaw is unclenched. He grins slyly. “You know I love this girl like I never . . .”

Lou sits back, too, and laughs.

This was the written example of the unchoreographed doom that three marriages couldn't survive. This was the part that Louise could handle, would handle, did handle, the moldy spot that had to be consumed on an otherwise fine slice of everyday life. She was strong enough—her love was strong enough—to get past it.

Williams was upset by the Esquire piece when it was published, grumping and fuming. Louise told him to keep quiet. The writer had captured him.

“Ted,” she said, “that's you.”

She wrote a letter to Richard Ben Cramer, thanking him and congratulating him on his achievement.