The Wingmen, page 3
“What earthly use can the Marines make of Ted’s War II training?” a high-ranking air officer at the Pentagon told the Boston Evening American. “Antiquated ground officers are a dollar-a-dozen. There are thousands of younger, more seasoned air officers still on the inactive list.”
Still, Williams’s actual return to active duty remained in question.
In July 1950—one week after the city of Inchon fell to the North Korean People’s Army—Williams had been in Chicago playing for the American League in the first-ever nationally televised Major League Baseball All-Star Game. In the first inning Pittsburgh Pirates home run specialist Ralph Kiner socked a Vic Raschi pitch deep toward Comiskey Park’s left field. Never known for his defensive prowess, Williams tracked down the ball and made a brilliant running catch. With no warning track paved to alert him to the danger, he ran into the twelve-foot-high, unpadded wall, bracing himself for impact with the heel of his bare, left hand.
Clearly in pain, and persistently rubbing his elbow, he remained in the game. Not only did he make another terrific catch of a hard-hit line drive the next time Kiner came to bat, but Williams’s single to right field in the fifth inning gave the American League a 3−2 advantage. The next day X-rays revealed an impacted fracture of the head of the left radius: a broken elbow. During seventy-five minutes of surgery at Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dr. Joseph H. Shortell removed seven bone fragments, which he displayed for forlorn young Red Sox fans awaiting news on the procedure.
“With Williams out the Red Sox ain’t got a chance,” eleven-year-old Jimmy Walker lamented.
Williams missed the next eight weeks—Boston actually won thirty-nine of those fifty-five games—before returning in early September. But for the rest of his playing career his elbow ached, especially in cold or rainy weather. For that very reason, he fully expected to fail his upcoming Navy medical examination, be declared unfit for service, and return for another season in left field.
Two weeks before the start of the 1952 season, Williams and New York Yankees second baseman Jerry Coleman—a Marine dive-bomber who flew fifty-seven combat missions in the Solomon Islands during World War II—traveled to the naval air station in Jacksonville, Florida. Associated Press sportswriter Joe Reichler tagged along to chronicle the day.
Coleman, six years younger than Williams, passed the exam almost immediately. The well-known injury to Williams’s elbow prompted X-rays that an officer told the group would take at least a half an hour to develop. Just a few minutes later, a Marine captain entered and announced that Williams had passed the examination, greatly confusing the group.
“With more temper than tact, I questioned aloud the Marines’ real purpose in recalling baseball’s biggest name,” Reichler later wrote.
“The Marines really don’t expect a 33-year-old guy with four dependents to fly a plane?” Reichler asked the captain.
“I’m 35, with five dependents and I fly a plane,” the captain replied.
Navy physician Captain Julius C. Early observed “no significant limitations to the use of Williams’ elbow,” and the assisting physician, Commander L. S. Sims, Jr., informed the gaggle outside that the X-rays could not possibly alter their decision. Early approved Williams’s return to active service, even replying to reporters’ questions about Williams’s age by saying “I’m 49, and I’m a pilot.”
Prior to the examination, Early had lowered expectations, telling reporters that the medical board deems only a “negligible” percentage of Reserve pilots unfit for duty and that neither Williams’s age, nor the stiffness he felt in cold weather would be factors in the determination. Early did not mention that Williams had passed a thorough medical exam the previous September in order to receive his promotion from first lieutenant to captain.
In the years that followed, Joe Reichler told friends, including author David Fisher, that “when they told Williams that they would take him, that he had passed the test, he went berserk, he was screaming and yelling.”
Although he received no special treatment from Navy physicians that day, Marine Corps Commandant Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr. sent a “purely personal” letter to Williams (on USMC stationery) expressing “regret that it was found necessary to recall you to active duty at the height of your baseball career.”
Unable to secure a deferment from influential politicians and granted a clean bill of health, Williams accepted orders to report to the Marine Air Reserve Training Command at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, on May 2, less than a month into the baseball season. The Universal Military Training Act of 1951 meant that he could serve up to seventeen months.
Following his physical in Jacksonville, Williams rejoined the Red Sox on an exhibition tour spanning Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, North Carolina, and then finally back to Boston. On Opening Day in Washington, D.C., Williams went 1-for-3 as the club topped the Senators 3−0, but he pulled a muscle in his leg that afternoon and could only pinch-hit sparingly over the next two weeks.
The injury healed just in time for the Red Sox game against Detroit on April 30, which also happened to be “Ted Williams Day,” as declared by the mayor of Boston, John B. Hynes.
“Naturally I feel greatly honored,” Williams said, “but I only wish they had tried to contact me. I would have tried to discourage them.”
Following Williams’s reactivation, talk about his baseball future was inconsistent. Joe Cronin—now the Red Sox general manager—cast doubt to the press almost immediately. Upon receiving the news, Williams called Cronin who in turn told a reporter the next day that it would take “a miracle” for him to resume playing ball upon his discharge.
“It is hard to visualize Ted coming out of the service and returning as a star at the age of 36, the odds are obviously heavily against him,” he said. “You must remember that he has always been a rather determined fellow. Nevertheless, this could be the third strike for him.”
During spring training in Florida, Williams said, “If the Marines want me, I’ll gladly go, but if I go I’ll quit baseball. Heck, in two years I’ll be 35.” And just prior to his physical at the naval air station he told reporters, “If I pass the examination, I expect my baseball career will come to a sudden conclusion.” As he drove back to Jacksonville’s airport with Jerry Coleman, reporters continued to beg him for a comment.
“Why don’t you write one of those statistical stories after a player has passed away or retired,” he said. “Just say Williams is all through. He went to bat 5,096 times during his 10 years with the Red Sox, scored 1,273 runs, made 1,763 hits, 323 home runs, and drove in 1,261 runs.”
Still, as Ted Williams Day approached, he held out hope.
“I don’t know whether or not I will be able to return to baseball but I hope so,” he said on the eve of his final game. “I had only one ambition when I joined the Red Sox in 1939. It was when I’m through I want them to say, ‘Gee, that guy was one hell of a hitter.’”
Prior to game time at warm, sun-soaked Fenway Park, both teams lined up along the infield, as did a series of local dignitaries, including Mayor Hynes; the governor of Massachusetts, Paul A. Dever; and the commissioner of the Boston Fire Department, Michael T. Kelleher. Williams stood in the center, gripping teammate Dom DiMaggio’s right hand. With his other hand, Williams held that of a young man in a wheelchair named Frederick M. Wolf. Less than six months earlier, the seventeen-year-old medic in the Army’s 7th Cavalry was attending to a comrade’s severe leg wounds from machine gun fire when a shell hit their position. Everyone in the trench died except Private Wolf, who lost both his legs. Dressed in his Army greens, Wolf thanked Williams for his many visits to nearby hospitals.
“I’m speaking for the guys who can’t be here themselves to tell you how much they appreciate what you have done for them,” Wolf said.
He continued to hold Williams’s hand as the crowd and many on the field sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Williams stood motionless, his tearing eyes shut.
Wolf, on behalf of the many veterans of New England, brought Williams a gift, the contents of which he kept private. Others chose to make a far more ostentatious presentation of their offerings. Frederick G. Payne, governor of Maine, sent a smorgasbord of canned local foods as well as a complimentary state fishing license. Mayor Hynes handed Williams a solid silver replica of the Paul Revere Bowl, aka the eighteenth-century Liberty Bowl. Filene’s department store hand-delivered gold cuff links engraved with the number “9.” Even the local sportswriters gave Williams a baseball they all signed.
“I might let some kids play on the street with it,” he joked.
But the brand-new, robin’s-egg-blue Cadillac caught everyone’s attention as it was driven to home plate. Williams’s friends, including his accountant Paul Brophy and local sporting events promotor Sheldon Fairbanks, had purchased the $5,000 Sedan Series 62.
“Some wagon!” Red Sox teammate Vern Stephens exclaimed.
Choked up with emotion, Williams struggled to find words when the program’s emcee, Curt Gowdy, prompted him to speak. For a few moments, he sheepishly dug his left foot into the ground as if he were readying the batter’s box before hitting.
“It’s a day I’ll long remember—as long as I live,” he told his captive audience. “I never thought it would happen to me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Then, he broke a longstanding vow and one that he had privately reaffirmed to friends that morning. Years earlier, when fans booed him, Williams promised to “never acknowledge their cheers.” But spurred on by Boston Herald sports editor Ed Costello, Williams waved his cap to the crowd.
Roughly two hours later, the Fenway crowd expected an encore cap-waiving, but this time they would be disappointed.
With one on and one out in the bottom of the seventh inning, Williams came to the plate in a game tied 3−3. He had singled, struck out, and walked in three appearances that day. Ahead in the count 1−0, Tigers reliever Dizzy Trout, a former twenty-seven-game winner now at the tail end of his career, tried to sneak a curveball by him. Unleashing that indelible left-hander’s stroke, Williams’s six-foot, three-inch frame coiled: United States Poet Laureate Donald Hall once described the swing as “that lanky body twisted around itself almost like a barber’s pole revolving.” His highly customized thirty-four-ounce, thirty-five-inch bat made perfect contact with the ball, sending it deep over the right field fence for the 324th home run of his career.
The crowd of nearly twenty-five thousand went wild. But not Michael Lopilato, a fruit dealer from the North End. The thirty-six-year-old was too busy scrambling for the ball, which bounced out of one spectator’s hands, then ping-ponged around the stands until Lopilato snatched it up.
“Everyone in the stands gave me the business when I got the ball,” said Lopilato, who later returned it to the Red Sox clubhouse. “They told me to send it to the cancer fund and a half-dozen other places. But I thought it best to give it to Williams.”
While Lopilato scavenged for the historic artifact—Teddy Ballgame’s final home run ball—Williams rounded the bases. And although the fans and his teammates wanted him to again acknowledge their cheers, Williams kept his cap firmly on his head as he trotted toward home plate.
The two-run home run gave Boston a 5−3 lead, which rookie right-hander Ike Delock preserved for the Red Sox’ tenth win in their first twelve games. In the postgame locker room, teammate Ray Scarborough remarked, “They can talk all they want about other great guys in baseball. Guys pointing to center field and hitting a home run there. Real great players. But did you ever see anybody bow out like Williams did?”
That evening, without any of his teammates or members of the celebrity crowd, Williams enjoyed a small going-away party at Jimmy O’Keefe’s Grill on Boylston Street, three blocks from Fenway Park.
“It seems that the fans really wanted me to wave my cap,” he told George C. Carens of the Boston Traveler. “I thought afterwards they might have liked me to wave after hitting that homer, but that wasn’t much of a sock. Boy, if the one I hit in the third had stayed inside fair territory, I’d have tossed the bonnet into the stands.”
Although he teased reporters and fans with the suggestion that he might delay his departure to play just one more game, Williams sat out the next day’s showdown with the St. Louis Browns. On Friday morning, May 2, he checked out of the Hotel Shelton and climbed into his Ford: Doris kept the new Cadillac, which she drove to Miami with Bobby-Jo. He then picked up two local Marine Reservists who had also been recalled, Captain Raymond W. Sisk of West Somerville and Captain Robert L. Scowcroft of Needham. Williams had served with Sisk at Pensacola. He barely knew Scowcroft; they used the same tailor.
Sisk, who had been stationed at Willow Grove during World War II, knew the best route and drove the several hundred miles. The three men stopped for hamburgers at a Howard Johnson’s near the New Jersey Turnpike—Williams signed several autographs for fans—then arrived at the base in late afternoon. A swarm of Philadelphia-area reporters and photographers ambushed them. Eventually Williams signed in, was fingerprinted, given an identification card and flight gear, and headed for the Bachelor Officer Quarters, then dinner.
Although he was now a captain with more than a thousand hours of flight experience, Williams was sent to Willow Grove for a pilot’s refresher course: air-and-ground orientation, three to five hours of flight time with an instructor, and twenty hours of solo flying, all in the same Navy SNJ trainer which he had once taught to cadets.
Bill Churchman had also instructed pilots at Pensacola during World War II, and the two men became close. A native of Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill, Churchman had been recalled to service a year earlier than Williams, and following stops at Willow Grove and El Toro in California he was sent to the Pacific in January 1952. He spent three months flying missions for the Marine Corps VMF-312 squadron. Stationed aboard the USS Bairoko, a Navy escort carrier, the “Checkerboards” flew F4U Corsairs to provide air support to Army and Marine troops. When Churchman’s squadron was transferred to the USS Bataan in April 1952, he returned to the United States. Reassigned to Willow Grove, he became an instructor to, among others, Ted Williams. Over the next month Captain Churchman shared some advice with his famous friend.
“Ted, try to get into jets,” he told Williams. “If you go to Korea, and you will, it’s plain arithmetic. You’ll probably make a lot of bombing raids in support of the ground troops. If you are in a Corsair, you’ll go down at 400 miles per hour and come up at about the same time. If you are in a jet, you’ll make your run at 500 and come out at 500. The Corsair is a great plane, but the jets will give you more speed when the gooks are firing at you.”
“That made a lot of sense to me,” Williams recalled. “So I put in for jets.”
By the end of four weeks, Williams had completed his retraining. Base commander Lieutenant Colonel Jack R. Moore endorsed his request for a transfer to the Marine Corps air base at Cherry Point, North Carolina. But on his second-to-last day at Willow Grove Williams received a frightening preview of what might await him. That afternoon, Lieutenant Jack L. Welle, a test pilot at the Johnsville Naval Air Development Center in Bucks County, lost control of his jet and plunged from an estimated five thousand feet. At five hundred miles per hour it smashed into the ground, less than a hundred yards from a local man driving his tractor.
Hundreds of Marine and Navy personnel from nearby Willow Grove, including Captain Williams, arrived to the scene. A small crew from the group surrounded the fiery crater in the ground.
“At first they couldn’t find the pilot,” Williams remembered. “Then a Marine pulled out a foot. It was still in the pilot’s boot. That guy was spread all over the place . . . You were going so damn fast that if you got in a jam, it was hard to get out of trouble due to the speed of the plane.”
The plane was determined to be an F9F Panther, the exact same jet that Williams would begin to train on at Cherry Point.
Williams remained at Cherry Point for much of the next six months. Initially part of a twelve-officer class within VMAT-20 training group, he advanced to VMF-223 by late July. In the fall, he briefly flew to Northern California to attend his father’s funeral and also spent six weeks training at Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico, one of ten thousand Marines training for an amphibious “mock assault” on Onslow Beach, North Carolina. But for the hot Southern summer Williams, Doris, and Bobby-Jo settled into a comfortably air-conditioned, off-base bungalow in Havelock. Most officers at Cherry Point lived in far more modest quarters.
Throughout his stay in coastal North Carolina, local fans and institutions hounded him with requests to appear at their events. He turned down most but posed for a team photo with eleven-year-old ballplayers from New Bern and on a night in July signed baseballs for a group of high-school-aged ballplayers before an American Legion Baseball playoff game at Grainger Stadium in Kinston. Unlike his time at Pensacola, however, Williams did not play any baseball while stationed at Cherry Point. According to a rumor on the base, a high-ranking officer asked Williams to join the station’s baseball team. Williams said he would . . . for his standard fee of $10,000 per game.
“Flying right now is taking my time and consideration,” he told the press. “I really don’t have time to think much about baseball.”
As much as he missed the game—the Red Sox were mired in fifth place at the All-Star Break—he welcomed the new challenge posed by jets.
Williams had been incensed at his recall and during his time at Cherry Point often spoke on the phone to a lawyer who pursued legal avenues for his client’s discharge based on the considerable money he would lose. His contract with the Red Sox would have paid him $100,000 in 1952—he reportedly received $25,000 for the six games he did play—and in previous years Williams earned several thousands more in endorsements. As a Marine Corps Reserve captain, he would earn $6,500.
