The Wingmen, page 17
“I have too many friends and I have spent too much time in the Marine Corps not to know that that organization is tops,” it read in part.
Although Williams insisted that Duplantier had been “drinking excessively” before the interview, the written statement ended with an apology, which he essentially retracted upon opening his mouth.
“What I said about the Marines and Taft goes . . . but charges against Truman and the government, that’s a damn lie. If I did say it, I don’t remember it. But if I’d say it, I’d remember. I remember everything else,” he told the Associated Press. “I got a raw deal from the Marines and I’ve said before I’ve got no use for them.”
Again, Williams withstood, deflected, or just ignored the considerable criticism from his remarks and channeled his anger toward American League pitchers. Twice in the first half of the 1957 season Williams hit three home runs in a single game on the road. And on the last day of June his colossal three-run home run at Fenway Park lifted the Red Sox to their eleventh win in thirteen games, pulling them within seven games of the first-place Yankees.
Rejuvenated by a few days off during the all-star break, Williams’s torrid pace resumed. During a five-game road trip through Detroit and Cleveland, he pounded out seven extra-base hits, including five home runs. Following a doubleheader against the Indians, in which Williams homered in both games, the Red Sox headed to Kansas City for a three-game set with the Athletics.
Trailing 2−1 during a ninety-degree summer night, Williams came to the plate with one out in the top of the ninth. He hit the first pitch thrown by veteran right-hander Virgil Trucks over the right field fence to spark a Red Sox comeback victory. For the fifth straight game he socked a home run, the sixth in his last eleven at-bats. He was just one shy of tying the American League record for consecutive games with a home run. With a league-leading twenty-six home runs, Williams now trailed Mickey Mantle, the reigning American League Triple Crown champion, by just one point in the race for the batting title.
“Theodore Samuel Williams won’t be washed up as a great hitter,” Boston Daily Record reporter Joe Cashman wrote from Kansas City, “just so long as he can drag himself to a plate and swing a bat.”
That July 16 morning had been a typical day on the road for Williams. The team’s eight-hundred-mile train ride from Cleveland had taken more than twenty-one hours. While his teammates slept before resuming their eleven-game road trip, Williams woke up early to enjoy his standard breakfast: orange juice, two lamb chops, and double orders of bacon and liver. But unlike his younger days, instead of touring a new city or stopping by the movie theater to see a Western, Williams remained in his hotel room. Room service and valets brought him everything he needed.
Although sportswriter Edwin Pope later explained that the thirty-eight-year-old Williams “had begun husbanding his strength by resting for much of the playing day,” he was just as content to hide out from reporters and autograph-seekers until much closer to game time.
At some point that day, however, he did see a familiar face.
News of Major John Glenn’s transcontinental supersonic flight saturated television and radio airwaves as well as the afternoon editions of hundreds of American newspapers. The Kansas City Star mentioned the milestone on the front page, while pieces in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Missouri’s Springfield Leader were accompanied by large photographs of the Marine in his sleek tan flight suit.
By early evening Williams was ready to leave his solitary confinement for the ballpark. But before heading to Kansas City Municipal Stadium, he had to make a stop. At a local Western Union station he sent a telegram to the rear entrance of the Main Navy and Munitions Building adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The message, addressed to Major John Glenn, Jr., read, “CONGRATULATIONS ON RECORD I AM BIG SHOT NOW TELLING EVERYONE I FLEW WITH YOU IN KOREA TED WILLIAMS.”
When he returned from Brooklyn to his post at BuAer in Washington, D.C., Glenn picked up the telegram. He held on to it for more than fifty years.
CHAPTER TEN
Life Begins at 40
“There’s a man who could make this team. He is just what we need—somebody in position to catch a fly ball.”
—New York Mets manager
CASEY STENGEL
on John Glenn, February 20, 1962
From the moment he popped open the Plexiglas canopy of his F8U-1P, John Glenn puzzled the New York City press gathered along the runway at Floyd Bennett Field.
“At 36, Major Glenn is reaching the practical age limit for piloting complicated pieces of machinery through the air at speeds that can only be compared with those of sound and of the earth’s turning on its axis,” the New York Times wrote. “But he looked a lot more like a youth than a supersonic man when he climbed out of his jet Crusader.”
Sporting “thinning red hair, freckles, and a boyish grin,” Glenn eschewed a ladder set up for him, sprang out of the cockpit, and bounced off the fuselage onto the ground to embrace his family. He handed his children mementos (David’s pocket knife, Lyn’s Siamese cat charm) which they had asked him to make “supersonic.”
Throughout the informal press conference, reporters found easy copy in Glenn, who deflected praise by saying “any bouquets around here should be tossed to [Admiral Clark].”
While referring to the Crusader as his “Old Girl” and “a scalded duck,” he shrugged off his remarkable achievement as another day at the office.
“Flying at 1,000 miles an hour you don’t feel speed as much as you do driving 70 miles an hour on the highway,” he said. “Speed is just something you read on the dials.”
No longer simply a Central Ohio celebrity, Glenn became an overnight national figure. In addition to newspaper, radio, and television coverage of the flight, an Ed Herlihy−narrated Universal-International Newsreel featured Glenn. Tens of thousands of moviegoers across the country saw him wave goodbye from Los Alamitos, soar high above the clouds, then touch down in Brooklyn.
The publicity tour carried on throughout the rest of the summer. While still in New York, he appeared on I’ve Got a Secret and The Ed Sullivan Show. Even Annie and the kids were guests on Arlene Francis’s nationally syndicated daytime talk show Home as Glenn executed Project Bullet. After returning to Washington, D.C., where he collected the telegram from Ted Williams as well as his fifth Distinguished Flying Cross, from Secretary of the Navy Thomas S. Gates, Jr., Glenn visited his hometown in September.
To kick off “John Glenn Day” at Muskingum College, the local Board of Trade honored the favorite son with a parade, banquet, and the unveiling of the “Major Glenn Trophy,” to be awarded each year to the New Concord High School student with the top grades in mathematics. Held inside the college’s Brown Chapel, the ceremony concluded with everyone walking down to the basement to attend the New Concord Potato and Vegetable Show. Glenn awarded prizes in the contest for best scale model airplane, but not the five different potato events: best Irish Cobbler, Red Triumph, Chippewa, Katahdin, and largest of any variety.
The following week, Glenn was back on the East Coast at a slightly different beauty contest, the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. A guest speaker to the annual convention of the National Exchange Club, Glenn joined the rest of the conventioneers in witnessing Miss Colorado, Marilyn Van Derbur, take the crown. But the main reason for his trip to the Tri-State Area was to attend nationally televised programs as a contestant, not a spectator.
The day after his historic flight, a television producer spotted Glenn, in his Marine officer’s uniform, walking through a Manhattan Macy’s department store and asked him to appear on the CBS game show Name That Tune. Intrigued by the possibility of good PR, Navy administrators encouraged Glenn to participate. Paired with a ten-year-old from Mississippi named Eddie Hodges, Glenn was poised and engaging during a five-week run on the popular Tuesday evening program. Correctly identifying songs such as “South America, Take It Away,” “Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day,” and “Roaming in the Gloaming,” Glenn and Hodges claimed the show’s grand prize of $25,000, which they agreed to split evenly.
Glenn applied his share of the winnings to a college fund for David and Annie, but the exposure he received from the national broadcast proved far more lucrative than the money.
News of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik in October 1957 signaled that the United States had fallen behind in the burgeoning space race. While he and Eddie Hodges were competing for the penultimate $20,000 prize on Name That Tune, the show’s host, George DeWitt, asked Glenn about the first-ever artificial satellite, launched by the Soviets into Earth’s orbit four days earlier.
“To say the least, George, they’re out of this world,” Glenn said, inciting studio audience laughter. “It’s the first time anybody has ever been able to get anything that far out in space and keep it there for any length of time, and this is probably the first step toward space travel or moon travel, something we’ll probably run into maybe in Eddie’s lifetime, here, at least.”
Even before the Soviets’ success of Sputnik, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) had already begun recruiting candidates to fly their “rocket planes.” That April, NACA selected Navy aviator Scott Crossfield to pilot the North American X-15, a hypersonic rocket-powered plane believed to be capable of reaching 3,600 miles per hour and an altitude of one hundred miles. By the following spring, Air Force Captain Iven C. Kincheloe and NACA pilot/physicist Joseph A. Walker had joined the team.
But before the end of the year, NACA was disbanded, and effectively replaced by the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA then began to search for an entirely new batch of recruits, who would not simply fly airplanes propelled by rockets, but operate “spaceships,” a term now regularly used by eminent aerospace engineer Werner Von Braun.
On NASA’s radar thanks to Project Bullet and its de facto press tour during CBS’s Tuesday night fall schedule, Glenn was one of 110 men asked to audition for the assignment dubbed “Project Mercury.” Having sold Annie on yet another dangerous career choice, Glenn happily accepted. In late February 1959, as NASA whittled down the list, candidates were stealthily sent to the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“They gave us fictitious names out there and registered into a motel with fictitious names,” Glenn remembered. “We had these fictitious names during the time we were being poked and prodded and all the medical tests that they gave us there.”
For a week in Albuquerque, followed by several more days at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, each recruit was subjected to a draining battery of physical, mental, and emotional examinations intended to test every human limitation that doctors and engineers could conceive. These included extended periods spent in an isolation chamber, a vibration chamber, a heat chamber, spinning in a centrifuge at roughly thirteen hundred miles per hour, repeated barium enemas, ingesting large doses of castor oil, and for some reason, a sperm analysis. Glenn impressed the observers by writing poetry—in the dark—during his extended stay in the isolation chamber.
Each candidate also received orders during their testing: “do not discuss Project Mercury unless authorized to do so.”
In early April, however, Glenn spilled the beans to his former VMF-311 wingman.
Twenty years old throughout most of the 1939 Major League Baseball season, Ted Williams hit .327, smashed 86 extra-base hits, and drove-in a still-standing rookie-record 145 runs. The .406 batting average he posted two years later has barely been approached, let alone matched, across the eight ensuing decades. And in 1949, while setting career highs with 43 home runs and 159 runs batted in, he came within one one-hundredth of a percentage point of winning the batting title to claim an unprecedented third Triple Crown.
But the 1957 season was Ted Williams’s crowning achievement.
In the month following his ninth-inning home run in Kansas City—the one he hit a few hours after sending John Glenn a congratulatory telegram—Williams collected forty-five hits in ninety-two at-bats to raise his average thirty-three points. Hitting a league-best .390 on August 14, Williams crushed an opposite field home run to lift Boston to a 6−4 victory over the Yankees. The three-run blast off World Series MVP Don Larsen gave him thirty-one home runs on the season, just one behind league-leader Mickey Mantle. After the home run, a large group sitting directly behind the Yankees dugout at Fenway Park raised a twenty-foot-long banner reading, “TED WILLIAMS!!! GREATEST AMERICAN SINCE GEORGE WASHINGTON.”
Williams’s pace fell off toward the end of the month, then a chest cold sidelined him for more than two weeks, but he returned in mid-September to pinch-hit at Fenway Park. Beginning with a four-hundred-foot smash into the right field bleachers, which gave the Red Sox a victory over Kansas City, Williams homered in each of his next four official at-bats. (He set a new major-league record that year with thirty-three intentional walks.)
“Funny thing about that,” he said later. “I really wasn’t feeling good when I returned to the lineup. But the writers started saying I was through for the season and that burned me up. So I made up my mind that I was going to play even if it cost me the batting title.”
During a season-closing home stand with the Yankees, Williams collected three more hits, including two doubles. It was not enough to reach the fabled .400 mark again, but by hitting .388 at the age of thirty-nine, he became the oldest batting champion in baseball history, and remains the oldest man ever to lead all of Major League Baseball in batting average.
To honor the star player on the final day of the season, Massachusetts governor Foster Furcolo publicly declared September 29, 1957, Ted Williams Day at Fenway Park. But Williams wanted no ceremony or celebration that afternoon. In fact, after a pinch-runner replaced him in the third inning, he left Fenway Park to begin a two-week fishing trip in Canada. Catching landlocked salmon in Labrador interested him even more than the $15,000 that NBC offered to provide guest commentary during the World Series. He did make an appearance at the fifth annual “Tops in Sports” awards banquet in Maryland the following January. On the dais at Lord Baltimore Hotel, Williams sat beside his friend Stan Musial, the thirty-seven-year-old St. Louis Cardinals slugger who had won the National League batting championship the previous season.
“Ted and I have it all figured out,” Musial told the crowd. “We’ve got the young fellows all down on us anyway. So we’re gonna go out this year and lead the [league] again!”
Williams did just that. Although he badly damaged his ankle while eyeing salmon from the rocks of Labrador, Williams gave retirement no consideration that off-season. The $130,000 contract he signed made his decision easier. And despite a miserable opening two months to the season, the newly forty-year-old hit over .400 during the final six weeks to claim a second consecutive American League batting title in 1958.
But in classic Ted Williams fashion, the triumphant season was marred by outbursts. Toward the end of July, he spat at fans in Kansas City. And in late September, at home against the Senators, Williams struck out looking to end the third inning. Irritated at leaving two runners on in a one-run game, Williams chucked his bat toward the dugout, only to see it bounce up into the stands and strike sixty-nine-year-old Gladys Heffernan in the head. As Heffernan—Joe Cronin’s housekeeper—was taken to the first aid station and later Sancta Maria Hospital, the Fenway crowd booed Williams.
In between innings, he hid in the dugout where home plate umpire Bill Summers spotted him in tears.
“I felt ready to just die,” Williams said.
Jovial and forgiving from her hospital bed, Heffernan had suffered no serious damage, unlike Williams’s reputation. National columnists took familiar shots at him from afar. By now, he was used to it. The previous winter, the Baseball Writers Association of America had caused great controversy by awarding Mickey Mantle, not Williams, the 1957 American League MVP. Multiple writers listed Williams as low as ninth on the balloting.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me,” he said after a member of the press told him the results of the voting. “I’m through with you guys.”
As usual, once the 1958 baseball season came to a close, Williams took off for the serenity of South Florida. But while casually demonstrating his swing for a friend beneath a coconut tree in his Islamorada backyard, Williams pinched a nerve in his neck. Although he fought through the injury for a few weeks during spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, by late March he could barely turn his head without writhing in pain.
Sent back to Boston, Williams checked into New England Baptist Hospital, where a neurosurgeon prescribed three weeks of intensive cervical traction. Depressed by both the pain in his neck and the angst of yet another season-interrupting injury, Williams perked up when someone brought him fan mail. One letter was from recently promoted Lieutenant Colonel John H. Glenn, Jr.
“He was writing to tell me he was going through the centrifuge, the weightlessness chamber, and I’d really get a kick out of it,” Williams recalled in his 1969 autobiography. “Then I threw the letter away. Just after that they announced the astronauts and John Glenn was the one from the Marines. I wish I had that letter.”
On April 9, 1959, the day after photographers crowded Williams to snap shots of him leaving the hospital in a foam neck brace, NASA introduced Glenn and six others as America’s first astronauts.
At a nationally televised press conference, the media-savvy Marine took command of the stage, answering reporters’ questions with jokes, enthusiasm, and a charming naivete of the uncertainties of space exploration. As much as it clashed with his meek instincts, Glenn realized that the space program needed a confident, likeable poster boy.
