Just some musings and electronic gatherings of an ink-stained wretch turned social media junkie. As JADAL says: No trees were destroyed in the sending of this organic message. I do concede, however, a significant number of electrons may have been inconvenienced.
269 posts
Latest Posts by thecabride - Page 8
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
The Splendid Splinter
‘The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams,’ by Ben Bradlee Jr.
Charles McGrath in the New York Times Sunday Book Review calls “The Kid” “a hard-to-put-down account of a fascinating American life.” More from The Times: “The people at the Alcor cryonics facility, in Scottsdale, Ariz., would have us believe that Ted Williams really is immortal. They have his body there, the head severed from the rest, flash-frozen in a giant thermos-like tank and awaiting only the scientific advancement that will allow him to be thawed, resuscitated and rejuvenated.”
Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid” is out. The reviews are starting to come in. The Associated Press review:
“Absorbing…this is surely the definitive Ted Williams book. …Bradlee’s brilliant account is required reading for any Red Sox fan. It’s also a fascinating portrait of a complex character that a baseball agnostic or even a Yankees fan will find hard to put down.” Full review here.
First of three articles by The Boston Globe adapted from “The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams,” by Ben Bradlee, Jr. to be published Tuesday by Little, Brown and Company.
Startling details about Ted Williams’s life unearthed
A monumental new biography reveals more about the Red Sox legend’s last hours, and his son’s bizarre hope that Teddy Ballgame would one day live again.
(PHOTO: John-Henry Williams, shown with his father in 1982, arranged for Ted to be frozen and then stored in a large “Dewar” by Alcor Life Extension. Boston Globe File 1982.)
how'd they get my family holiday card?
On This Day in Pittsburgh History: November 3, 1939
Pittsburgh has its first movie “world premiere” in Hollywood style, with the showing of “Allegheny Uprising” at Loew’s Penn. Claire Trevor, one of the stars of the film, was among the guests. [Historic Pittsburgh]
At one point, the going slow, the surgeon remarked that he wished he had an electric knife. Finally, he switched to a bone saw to finish the job, and at 9:17 p.m., Mountain time, the head of the greatest hitter who ever lived had been sliced off.
From “The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams,” by Ben Bradlee Jr., to be published Tuesday, December 3, by Little, Brown and Co. (via mcdermott451)
Love this. How can you not?
"Not Jefferson, Wilson, Churchill, not even FDR, but Herbert, by God, Hoover. …To me, that’s a real man." – Ted Williams on his political views, as quoted in Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s biography of the baseball great, "The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams", to be released on Tuesday, Dec. 3 by LittleBrown.
(PHOTO: Ted Williams and Ted Kennedy. Ted Williams Family Enterprises Ltd, Inc.)
Ben Bradlee, Jr. on his biography of Ted Williams. “The Kid” will be released by Little, Brown on Tuesday, Dec. 3
Ted always had his trademark yelps
An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Ted’s booming voice could be heard above any din. And he used it to good effect as a boy, often to shout out an odd greeting cry—“TA-TA-WEEDO”—when he saw a friend, say 100 feet away. No one knew what this meant—it was just a colorful eccentricity. A variation that Ted liked to use in his junior high school Metal Shop class was: “POW-HO-WE-HAH! My muscles are bulging!” according to friend Jerry Allen. “Everyone laughed at that and thought it was funny,” Allen says.
Such yelps were precursors to another odd scream Ted would use when he reached the minor leagues, and into his first year with the Red Sox in 1939, before his early ebullience started to fade. To amuse himself during bouts of boredom in the field as he waited to bat again, when a fly ball was hit his way, Ted would slap his behind and yell, “Hi-ho Silver!” as he took off to run for it.
Ted Williams was quite the cutey as a kid, no?
Ted was candid to a fault
An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Williams was high strung, filled with nervous energy, always biting his fingernails. Ted’s friends found him candid to a fault, unvarnished. If he didn’t like someone, he would tell him so, to his face, rather than gossip behind his back. “I don’t care for you, fellah,” he might say.
(PHOTO: Young Ted Williams. May Williams Collection.)
Ted loved to cruise around
An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:
Ted couldn’t afford his own car as a kid, but loved to cruise around San Diego with those who did have wheels. Bill Skelley, a teammate of Ted’s on the 1937 Padres, had a 1929 maroon Chrysler roadster, and they’d glide down Broadway with the top down, or zip through Balboa Park. When they passed a golf course, and someone was getting ready to tee off, Ted would reach over and honk the horn to try and disrupt the golfer. “Just fooling around,” Skelley says.
Girls? Forget it. “I never went out with girls, never had any dates, not until I was much more mature-looking,” Ted wrote in his autobiography. “A girl looked at me twice, I’d run the other way.”
(Photo: Ted Williams tipping his hat at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park.)
Ivanka Trump instagrammed this photo of Arabella with the caption, “Through this stare you can almost hear Arabella imploring me not to make her go to school this morning!!” I have mastered that look, and this one here is clearly the work of an amateur.
Also, what does she have to complain about? She goes to a school that lets its students wear faux fur vests and riding boots. Does she not understand how lucky she is?
Ted Williams had great aim off the field
An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: On Saturday mornings as a boy, Ted [Williams] and one of his best friends, Joe Villarino, would hike up into the hills outside of San Diego and go rabbit hunting, swim and look for Huck Finn-like adventure. “One day,” Villarino remembers, “we was walking around this trail and a rattlesnake come out and Ted shot it with a .45 he had. We laid it aside, and when we came back, he wrapped him around his neck and shoulders and carried it home. Another time, at Dobie’s Pond, there was a kid in trouble. He was about eight or nine. We was about fourteen or fifteen. The kid was kinda splashing around. Ted went in and got him. He didn’t make a big deal of it. He didn’t like to be in the limelight too much.”
(PHOTO: Ted Williams hauling in his kill in Minnesota, 1939. Ted Williams Family Enterprises.)
DESIGN: Good Ideas Glow in the Dark by Adris Group
Croatian designers Bruketa&Žinić have created a book that can only be identified in the dark.
Read More
Ted loved listening to the radio
An exclusive excerpt of Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Growing up, on Saturday afternoons during football season, Ted [Williams] liked to get home in time to listen to the USC games on radio. He loved Irvine “Cotton” Warburton, a San Diego boy who was the team’s All America quarterback in 1933. “On Saturday night we’d listen to Benny Goodman,” Ted recalled. “Swing bands were the thing then. I still prefer swing to anything else.” His favorite radio program was “Gang Busters,” which, in collaboration with J. Edgar Hoover, dramatized closed FBI cases. Originally launched in 1935 and called “G-men,” the show featured dramatic sound effects of screeching tires, police sirens and tommy-guns.
(PHOTO: Ted Williams passing a football at the Navy Pre-Flight School, 1943. North Carolina Collection, UNC at Chapel Hill, Wilson Library.)
Ted: “Let’s malt up”
An exclusive excerpt of Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Growing up, Ted liked to hang out at the Majestic Malt Shop, not far from his house, where you could buy 10-inch-high malts for a quarter. Or at Doc Powelson’s drug store across from Hoover High School, often mixing the malts with eggs in his perpetual quest to gain weight. (“Let’s malt up,” Ted would say to his friends.)
There was time for mischief, though nothing too serious. Once, Ted and his brother climbed a nearby water tower, got stuck, and the fire department was called to get them down. On Halloween, Ted would join his pals in greasing the trolley tracks to play havoc with the streetcars. One year, the group pilfered some fruit from downtown storefronts with the intention of using it to raise hell that night. The police caught them. Most were apologetic and let go, but Ted was a smart aleck, so he was hauled in to the station. The cops ended up playing pinochle with him and driving him home at midnight, charmed. But beyond such childish pranks, Williams was straight as an arrow—never smoked a cigarette as a kid, always in bed by 10:00.
(PHOTO: Danny Williams, Ted’s brother, at work on his truck. May Williams Collection)
Ted declines Harvard’s offer
Exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Unlike many professional ballplayers—probably most of them—Ted was embarrassed that he never went to college, or had no formal education beyond high school. In 1991, on the 50th anniversary of his .406 year, Harvard University wanted to give him an honorary degree, but he turned it down, feeling that he would have been out of place among the intelligentsia in Harvard Yard.
(PHOTO: Ted Williams at Boston’s Back Bay station, April 1939, arriving in the city for the first time. Boston Globe photograph.)
Ted Williams knew how to get on base…just like David Ortiz.
The Kid’s goal: Get on base
An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: [Ted] Williams’s hitting credo was simple: get a good pitch to hit. Critics said he followed this rule to the extreme by refusing to chase a pitch that was even an inch off the strike zone, thereby hurting his team by having its best hitter often pass up an opportunity to drive a runner home. But Ted made the slippery slope counter-argument: that if he chased a pitch an inch from the plate, it would only encourage pitchers to throw two inches outside the zone, then three inches, and so on. History has vindicated Ted’s approach, as there is now broad acceptance of the value of reaching base, or on-base-percentage, a statistic that was not appreciated and barely even kept in Williams’s day.
(PHOTO: Ted Williams happily crossing home plate at Fenway Park, 1939. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library - Leslie Jones Collection.)
Ted Williams: “I don’t guess what they throw.”
An exclusive excerpt from “The Kid” by Ben Bradlee, Jr.: Williams pioneered the use of a lighter bat—once considered heresy for sluggers—arguing that bat speed, not heft, was the key to power. His entire career, Ted studied pitchers intently for their tendencies, and quizzed hitters about what a pitcher threw to him in what situation. “Ted always said: ‘I don’t guess what they throw. I figure what they’re going to throw,’” says Tom Wright, a backup outfielder and pinch hitter for the Sox from 1948-1951.
(PHOTO: Ted Williams with the Minneapolis Millers, 1938. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.)
Well-read, an exclusive excerpt from “The Kid” by Ben Bradlee, Jr.
A voracious consumer of his own press, Ted ignored all the positive coverage and focused only on the negative. “There were 49 million newspapers in Boston, from the Globe to the Brookline Something-or-Other, all ready to jump us…” he whined in his autobiography, My Turn at Bat. He was particularly sensitive about any stories that he felt delved unnecessarily into his private life, stories that accused him of failing to hit in the clutch, or suggested that he was more interested in his own performance than that of the team.
It was natural for writers to despise Williams, and fear him, because he treated them like dirt. But they also knew Ted was great copy, and if they could get him to talk, he was usually a terrific interview because he spoke with unvarnished candor. He was not above stirring the pot with reporters to give him something to be mad at if he felt he was losing his edge. He often said he hit better if he was mad. “He nurtured his rage,” as the writer Roger Kahn once put it.
A great look at Ted Williams's swing.
From Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Each Williams at bat was an event. Something between a hush and a buzz suddenly filled the air as the crowd shifted from a sort of auto-pilot engagement to edge-of-the-seat anticipation. “I was looking around for a story one day and someone said there was this blind guy on the first base line,” remembered Tim Horgan, who covered the Red Sox for the Boston Herald and then the Boston Evening Traveler in the 1950s. “I went up to the man and said, ‘Pardon me for asking but why do you come to the park? Why not listen to the game on the radio?’ He said, ‘I love the sounds of the game when Ted comes up.’”
(Photo: Ted Williams swinging in 1939, his rookie year with Red Sox. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.)
Marine fighter pilot, brash ball player, accomplished fisherman
From Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Ted was an original; not the traditional, modest, self-effacing hero, but brash, profane, outspoken and guileless. Self-taught and inquiring, he excelled as a Marine fighter pilot, and became one of the most accomplished fishermen in the world. For better and worse, he was always his own man, never a phony—characteristics that helped him outlast his critics and win widespread affection and admiration as he aged. He had three favorite songs, which he played in his mind to help him fall asleep: the “Star Spangled Banner,” the “Marine Hymn” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
(Photo: Ted Williams entering the cockpit in Korea, 1953. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)
Timely with the Series starting tonight in Boston against...the Cardinals
The Red Sox-Cardinals World Series starting tonight in Boston is the fourth time the two teams have played for Major League Baseball’s championship. The first Series, in 1946, was a low point in the otherwise stellar career of Ted Williams.
Williams did not get one extra base hit in the seven-game Series won by the Cardinals, managed just five singles and struck out five times for a .200 batting average. He did reach base five more times through walks. And a combination of good defense and the shift took away several potential extra base hits on balls that Ted hit on the nose. But that was part of Cardinals Manager Eddie Dyer’s plan.
When it was all over, Ted gave St. Louis its due, singling out pitcher Harry “The Cat’’ Brecheen as the Series hero for winning two of the games. “I think his mere presence on the field inspired the Cardinals,’’ Ted said. “I had hoped my bat would do the talking for me in the Series, but it was tongue-tied by some great Cardinal pitching.”
When the writers and photographers were allowed in the clubhouse, Williams sat woefully on the bench in front of his locker, hunched over, staring at the floor, disconsolate. Pitcher Mickey Harris sat next to him and struck a similar pose, and the two were pictured in a bleak tableau in the next day’s Boston Globe.
Ted was the last player to dress and the last to leave the clubhouse. Outside the locker room door, scores of Cardinal fans were lying in wait for him, hurling invective inside. “Where’s Williams?” they screamed. “Where’s Superman?” When he finally came out, the fans had formed two raging lines on either side of the door, forcing Ted to run the gauntlet of abuse. Police stood by, watching only to make sure he was not assaulted.
Williams took the insults impassively, yearning now only for the train, and the privacy of his own compartment for the long ride back to Boston. When the team finally reached the train, Ted made his way to his room, shut the door and wept. After a time, when he looked out the window, he saw scores of people gawking at him, a mix of glee and malice in their eyes.
(Photo: Ted Williams during the 1946 World Series. Brearley Collection.)
The Red Sox-Cardinals World Series starting tonight in Boston is the fourth time the two teams have played for Major League Baseball’s championship. The first Series, in 1946, was a low point in the otherwise stellar career of Ted Williams.
Williams did not get one extra base hit in the seven-game Series won by the Cardinals, managed just five singles and struck out five times for a .200 batting average. He did reach base five more times through walks. And a combination of good defense and the shift took away several potential extra base hits on balls that Ted hit on the nose. But that was part of Cardinals Manager Eddie Dyer’s plan.
When it was all over, Ted gave St. Louis its due, singling out pitcher Harry “The Cat’’ Brecheen as the Series hero for winning two of the games. “I think his mere presence on the field inspired the Cardinals,’’ Ted said. “I had hoped my bat would do the talking for me in the Series, but it was tongue-tied by some great Cardinal pitching.”
When the writers and photographers were allowed in the clubhouse, Williams sat woefully on the bench in front of his locker, hunched over, staring at the floor, disconsolate. Pitcher Mickey Harris sat next to him and struck a similar pose, and the two were pictured in a bleak tableau in the next day’s Boston Globe.
Ted was the last player to dress and the last to leave the clubhouse. Outside the locker room door, scores of Cardinal fans were lying in wait for him, hurling invective inside. “Where’s Williams?” they screamed. “Where’s Superman?” When he finally came out, the fans had formed two raging lines on either side of the door, forcing Ted to run the gauntlet of abuse. Police stood by, watching only to make sure he was not assaulted.
Williams took the insults impassively, yearning now only for the train, and the privacy of his own compartment for the long ride back to Boston. When the team finally reached the train, Ted made his way to his room, shut the door and wept. After a time, when he looked out the window, he saw scores of people gawking at him, a mix of glee and malice in their eyes.
(Photo: Ted Williams during the 1946 World Series. Brearley Collection.)
Can't wait for this book to come out. benbradleejr-blog:
Exclusive Excerpt from “The Kid” by Ben Bradlee, Jr.
The Kid appeared in the small room on the night of July 5th, 2002. Video cameras rolled, and the flashbulbs popped – just as if he were making another star turn of the sort he had made so many times throughout his celebrated life.
About 30 people had anxiously awaited the arrival of Ted Williams – the great Teddy Ballgame himself: American icon, last of the .400 hitters, war hero, world class fisherman, enfant terrible with the perfectionist persona. Yet, this was no press conference, no card show, no charity event or meet-and-greet where Ted would wave and say a few words to his faithful.
For he was dead, after all. Quite dead.
Great shot of "The Kid". The definitive biography of Ted Williams is coming from Little, Brown this December from author Ben Bradlee Jr.
Ted Williams
Spring Training
1971
Photo: Ozzie Sweet/ Sport Magazine
vintagesportspictures
Welcome to Boston, students! Explore our city and get to know the City of Boston’s many resources awaiting you with our student welcome guide, which includes tips about city services, rental housing, safety and much more. Visit http://bit.ly/hubmovein and follow @brkthebubble on Twitter!