The Wingmen, page 2
“[Soon] a few critics began to voice the opinion that ‘a team with Williams on it doesn’t win,’” Boston Globe reporter Roger Birtwell declared that off-season. “But there are some who believe that a team’s highest-paid player and highest-hitting star should exude a bit of the old ‘come on, gang’ spirit and help spark the team . . . The last couple of years some baseball followers have discussed the wisdom of such a move.”
A few weeks after the season ended, Boston named their shortstop, thirty-two-year-old Lou Boudreau, the club’s manager. Boudreau, who in 1948 had managed the Cleveland Indians to a World Series championship, immediately lent credibility to the trade gossip.
“As far as I’m concerned, there are no untouchables on this ball club,” he said in late October. “We’ll trade Williams or anyone else if it’ll add to the team.”
Boudreau’s former team reportedly offered star pitcher Bob Lemon and reliable catcher Jim Hegan for Williams, but scoffed at the notion of including all-star center fielder Larry Doby as part of the deal. A blasphemous rumor to Boston fans—sending Williams to their hated New York rivals—began during the World Series and continued well into December. Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio would soon announce his retirement. Williams, rather than a twenty-year-old Oklahoma kid who struck out too much, Mickey Mantle, made perfect sense as a replacement in the lineup. Another alleged deal involved Boston sending Williams to the Washington Senators, who would hold on to him until a favorable trade to the Yankees could be reached.
“We would be a sucker not to take Williams if we could get him,” Yankees owner Dan Topping said the day DiMaggio retired. “But I do not believe the Red Sox will ever give him up. I don’t think they want to make the kind of deal anyone could afford to make.”
Williams told reporters that he would retire from baseball if traded to the Yankees. He then escaped, as he did every off-season, to his sanctuary: alone, on the water, stalking fish.
For several years, he’d spent his winters fishing in Florida. Local newspapers scolded him in January 1948 when a fishing trip in Miami caused him to miss the birth of his first child, daughter Barbara Joyce. He took five days to return to Boston to be with his wife and the newborn, nicknamed Bobby-Jo.
“Fishing is how I relax,” he explained. “I go out alone, or with another guy. We don’t talk much. Boy, I really relax.”
Amid unseasonably cold November weather, Williams moved into his recently built suburban home, which sat on an acre near Route 2 in South Miami. Described as “fashionable” by Miami Herald sports editor Jimmy Burns, the house boasted all-new furniture and even an electric heating fan that Williams’s wife Doris liked to show off. Williams chose the spot because he was only a few hours’ drive from wonderful fishing off the coast of the Florida Keys.
In early December, word came down that Williams wasn’t going anywhere. Frustrated with the Yankees’ front office—or directed to do so by team owner Tom Yawkey—Boudreau publicly announced that the club was no longer interested in dealing their superstar.
“Having spent my entire major league career with the Red Sox, I naturally would like to play out the string in Boston,” he said upon hearing the news. “I have got used to playing that left field wall at Fenway Park, and I now seem to hit better there than anywhere else.”
He promptly returned to the peace and solitude of the open waters. On the morning of January 9, 1952, Williams—his tan face still handsome but no longer the boyish one that inspired his nickname “The Kid”—departed one of the Keys in his 10-horsepower outboard. At the end of a long day on the Atlantic he had caught several prizes, including a nine-and-a-quarter-pound bonefish, then returned home to discover an urgent message. His business manager Fred Corcoran, the famed professional golf marketing genius, needed to speak with him right away. The United States Marine Corps had reactivated Williams to duty.
Prior to the United States entering World War II, Williams’s Selective Service draft status stood as 3A, meaning he would not be eligible for induction because he was the sole financial supporter for his mother. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Hennepin County draft board in Minnesota reclassified Williams as 1A, eligible for service. Despite having joined the Red Sox two years earlier, Williams’s official residence remained 60 Willow Street in Minneapolis, his address while playing for the minor-league Minnesota Millers in 1938.
The United States Army brought him in for a series of physical exams at Fort Snelling, outside of St. Paul. By late January he appeared destined for service in “the field artillery, the infantry, or the tank corp.” Thanks to a lawyer—whom Williams claimed he never actually hired—his case was sent to the President’s Board of Appeal. Franklin D. Roosevelt soon issued an order to Director of Selective Services Lewis B. Hershey finalizing Williams’s 3A status. The Red Sox, not the Army, could have him for the spring of 1942.
Williams christened the new baseball season with a home run to right-center field in the first inning of Opening Day. The crowd at Fenway Park roared, but throughout that late winter and into the spring columnists razzed him and fans booed him for being a “slacker and draft dodger.” Even the Quaker Oats company rescinded a $4,000 endorsement deal rather than attach itself to the controversy.
“I’m no slacker. I’m not yellow. I’m as patriotic as anybody,” he told Liberty magazine in April. “I’m only human, like anybody else. Despite all you’ve seen and read, and maybe even have written, I’m sensitive. I’m thin-skinned. The park can be full of people, and they all can be cheering me but one guy, and somehow over it all I can hear that one boo.”
The boos—at least for his draft posturing—soon ceased. Encouraged by a young junior-grade lieutenant in the Navy Reserve named Robert P. “Whitey” Fuller, Williams visited the naval air station in Squantum, Massachusetts, on May 6. Fuller, a Dartmouth alum who had just resigned as the Big Green’s sports publicist to join the Navy’s local Flight Selection Board, convinced Williams to check out the V-5 Naval Aviation Cadet program. For a few hours Fuller and the station’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander William F. Arnold, showed him the base, the planes, and the instruments inside the cockpit. Williams was enthralled and he signed an application on the spot.
Williams did not immediately join the Navy. First, he completed the 1942 season, which ended with him leading the American League in home runs, RBI, and batting average to claim the Triple Crown. He was, however, not presented the league’s Most Valuable Player award, which went to Yankees second baseman Joe Gordon. And unlike the previous year, when Joe DiMaggio’s remarkable fifty-six-game hitting streak kept Williams from receiving the award, many believed that sportswriters selected someone else for reasons outside of baseball.
From the beginning of his professional career, Williams had famously quarreled with reporters, to whom he was often short-tempered, even “fresh and chesty,” as one described. But he also turned off a large swath of the so-called baseball purists who valued grit and tenacity as much as power and speed.
For all his gifts at the plate—an incomparable eye, instantaneous reflexes, upper-body strength that defied his wiry build—Williams earned a reputation as lazy outside of the batter’s box. He did not always run out ground or fly balls and appeared disinterested in playing his outfield position. Personal achievements, solely in the form of hits, seemed to overshadow any team goals.
“He did not pull sufficient votes in the balloting because he is not regarded as a good team player, a vital factor that does not show in the averages,” one columnist observed in November 1942. “[He] lived for but one thing—base hits. Other departments of the game were just something to be tolerated.”
Even Boston manager Joe Cronin—who dressed down, benched, then fined Williams $250 that July for loafing on the basepaths—stated that his choice for MVP would have been Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky.
“Why, if Ted had only hustled all the time on the field and at bat, and if he had a flair for showmanship, which you can’t have unless you hustle forever, he’d be hailed as the greatest player of all time,” Cronin said upon learning the results of the voting.
In the eyes of the voting sportswriters, and much of the public, Williams could not be considered the “most valuable” American Leaguer that season because he was selfish, not a “team player.” That trait was only magnified by his earlier efforts to escape military service.
“I have to think the reason I didn’t get more consideration was because of the trouble I had with the draft,” Williams wrote years later.
Two weeks after learning of his second-place finish in the 1942 MVP balloting, Williams boarded a train from Minneapolis and headed east. Arriving in Boston at 3 a.m. on a frigid late November New England morning, the twenty-four-year-old slept briefly at a hotel in Kenmore Square. The following morning, a $25 cab ride brought him, albeit a day late, to Amherst College for a civilian pilot training course. Lee Friend was the course’s cadet leader and somehow had never heard of Ted Williams. He immediately learned the new cadet was a big deal when the cabbie asked to shake Williams’s hand and wished him luck.
For six weeks Williams and twenty-nine other cadets—including the Red Sox’ Johnny Pesky and Boston Braves’ Johnny Sain and Buddy Gremp—learned to fall in, fall out, salute their superiors, and properly make their bed.
“The ball players go out of their way to do more than the others,” Friend noted. “When I told them to clean their room, meaning for them to sweep it, Sain and Gremp got a bucket and mop and washed the floor. Williams is so eager to cooperate that he’s like a bird dog.”
In addition to physical training—boxing, swimming, calisthenics—and classroom study in math, physics, navigation, and meteorology, Williams and the others studied the basics of aviation. Eventually, the cadets earned time in the air aboard a two-seat Piper J-3 Cub.
“Flying is the last thing I’m worrying about,” Williams bragged. “It’s a cinch if you just keep thinking and applying yourself.... I was fighting the training ship the first few times I was given the controls, but now I am handling them instinctively.”
From Amherst, Williams moved on to preflight school at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, then Bunker Hill Naval Air Station in Peru, Indiana. At Bunker Hill, Seaman Second Class Williams soloed a variety of single-engine propeller aircraft, including the Boeing-Stearman N2S-3, a biplane dubbed the “Yellow Peril,” partly because of its color, partly because the pilot flying it was usually a cadet.
“You can tell from the way he acts around the training planes that he is a flying enthusiast,” said his commanding officer at Bunker Hill, Captain D. D. Gurley. “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 equipment for a flyer.”
Next came training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in the Florida Panhandle, where he mainly flew the SNJ-4, an unbearably loud, twenty-nine-foot two-seater that featured a 600-horsepower engine with a range of 750 miles. According to Second Lieutenant Daniel E. Whiteley, who oversaw his first training mission at Pensacola, Williams mastered it immediately. He was not even fazed when the instructor covered the instrument panel with a cloth to increase the difficulty.
“He had a great touch; a good feel for the airplane,” Whiteley remembered almost sixty years later. “All he had was an artificial horizon to look into.... We had another flight a few days later and he was even better on that flight.”
Williams advanced quickly and earned his wings on May 2, 1944, accepting promotion to second lieutenant, but with the United States Marine Corps Reserve, a component of the Department of the United States Navy.
Given fifteen days on furlough, Williams traveled north to Minnesota, married his girlfriend Doris Soule, then returned to Florida where he remained for the duration of World War II. Although he occasionally played outfield for the Bronson Field Bombers of Escambia County—a team in the Naval Air Training auxiliary bases baseball circuit—his chief task became instructing new pilots, many of whom marveled at his skills during training sessions thousands of feet up in the air.
“Once he came up to my right and caught my eye,” remembered John Harris, a cadet at Pensacola in 1944. “It was a very hot day, and he wiped his brow and threw his hands to the side as if to say, ‘It’s hot up here today.’. . . Before I knew it, he had maneuvered himself atop our formation and was flying upside down and looking straight at us.”
He was also a tremendous shot. While playing minor-league baseball in Minnesota, Williams had become an avid hunter in the Northwoods. Living in Hennepin County during the off-season, he made quite a haul of pheasants in Dayton and foxes in New Brighton. He had first met Doris at the end of a long day hunting ducks near Princeton. After his rookie season, Williams was arrested and fined by a Minnesota game warden for shooting ducks beyond the 4 p.m. cutoff.
His marksmanship with a shotgun translated to manning the artillery aboard the Vought F4U Corsair aircraft. According to legend, while at Jacksonville’s naval air station, he set a student gunnery record for accuracy, hitting 196 out of a possible 200 targets with his six wing guns.
“From what I heard,” said Johnny Pesky, who served with Williams at several Navy installations, “Ted could make a plane and its six pianos play like a symphony orchestra. From what they said, his reflexes, coordination, and visual reaction made him a built-in part of the machine.”
Although the war effectively ended in August 1945, Williams received new orders. He was sent to San Francisco and told he would eventually be attached to a fighter squadron in either Manilla or Japan. But the farthest west he made it was Oahu, Hawaii. Up to nearly 200 pounds, from his 173-pound playing weight, Williams joined several fellow big leaguers in a week’s worth of baseball games billed as the Navy’s “Little World Series.” The two rosters included future Hall of Famers Billy Herman, Bill Dickey, Bob Lemon, and Stan Musial. In the third game, before a crowd of more than sixteen thousand at Furlong Field (tickets were free), Williams belted a home run over the right field fence.
Once the Japanese formally surrendered in September, Williams became eager to return to playing baseball for bigger stakes. Dispatched to the Marine Corps air depot at Miramar in his home town of San Diego, Williams was relieved from duty in late January 1946. But he was not discharged. Like all Marine Corps Reserve officers, he was simply given Volunteer Reserve status, which he chose to accept rather than request a full discharge.
As a Volunteer Reservist assigned to the 11th Marine Corps Reserve District in San Diego (and later transferred to the First Marine Corps Reserve District in Boston) Williams did not have to log flight hours or participate in training exercises and weekend programs to retain his rank. In fact, he was given promotions, to first lieutenant in June 1949 and to captain in October 1951. By accepting these promotions, and their accompanying pay raises, Williams essentially extended his “contract” with the United States Marine Corps, meaning there always remained a chance that he would be recalled.
He was free to resign his commission at any point, but Williams believed that he would never be recalled. But that all changed with the Selective Service Extension Act of 1950, the United Nations failure to reach a truce in Panmunjom, and Major Bob Conley’s harried review of candidate files.
“They told me when I was separated after World War II that unless we got into another war, I wouldn’t be called back,” he wrote decades later, “and I certainly didn’t believe that what was going on in Korea would have them call back a thirty-two-year-old pilot.”
Upon receiving the news of his client’s recall, Fred Corcoran assembled a group of local reporters and photographers to search for Williams at a few of his favorite fishing spots in Key Largo. Outside Bob Perry’s Fishing Lodge in Rock Harbor they caught up with Williams, who had just returned with his friend Frank Tiernan. For the press, he put up a brave front.
“As far as Uncle Sam is concerned I’m no different than anyone else,” he said while hosing off his outboard. “I wasn’t upset about it but I certainly was surprised.”
Privately, however, Williams fumed.
“I resented the way they singled me out because I was in the public eye,” Williams said a few years later. “I’d have had no squawk if they had called back every reserve officer in the same category. I’ll tell you why they called a lot of us back. They wanted an appropriation from the government for airplanes and they needed pilots to fly them. So they recalled 1100 pilots who hadn’t flown for 11 years.”
Williams’s gripe might have been better received had it not been for the bad publicity over his 3A status in 1942. And when chosen again ten years later, he didn’t exactly jump back into the service eagerly.
According to Williams, throughout the early months of 1952 men of power fell all over themselves trying to broker a deferment for him. One such person from Ohio promised to speak to United States Senator Robert A. Taft on Williams’s behalf. Another, a thirty-five-year-old Massachusetts congressman who was preparing to announce his candidacy for the Senate, told Corcoran that he would pull some strings. But like Taft, John F. Kennedy ultimately did nothing for Williams.
Fans and reporters wrote letters to their local congressional representatives asking for an explanation about the recall. A Wakefield Memorial High School sophomore named Carol Leavitt even wrote to President Truman asking, “if you could tell me how I could help him not get into the Marines.”
There was a perception—for those who did not know the story of Major Conley’s weary rubber stamping—that the Marine Corps had recalled Williams to drum up support for a war that the public didn’t truly understand. The fight over communism in Korea, a tiny peninsula on the other side of the world, did not carry the same weight as World War II, particularly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But if star ballplayer Ted Williams was going to serve, then this war must be righteous.
