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When Ted was still a schoolboy, his father and mother separated. Mrs. May Williams worked for the Salvation Army, maintained herself, Ted and his kid brother Danny in a modest frame house in the North Park section of San Diego. Ted got permission to go to Herbert Hoover High in another school zone because it was smaller—he wanted to be sure of making the school nine.
The principal of Hoover High told him once that he would get out of life "only what you put into it." For Ted the platitude still shines like gold: "I've sure tried to put everything I have into baseball. And everything I have I owe to baseball. I've tried not to let anything interfere with that."
A block and a half from his house was a public playground where he went, all through his high-school years, to practice batting. "Hundreds of kids have the natural ability to become great ballplayers," he says, "but nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability. I used to go out all the time with another kid named Wilbur Wiley who was just as enthusiastic as me. We'd take turns pitching to each other . . . Come to think of it, one of my greatest thrills came when I was 14, the day I discovered I could hit whatever Wilbur threw."
"Keep Swinging." After that, Ted knew he was on his way. To build up size and strength, the skinny kid went on an eating spree. Even in his sleep, Ted would shout: "Big arms! That's what I need!" Today he still eats like a starved man; he has been known to fork down two dinners in immediate succession and top them off with a couple of malted milks.
At 18 Ted was a professional ballplayer and a star performer for the San Diego Padres. At 19 the Red Sox decided he was big enough to buy (for $25,000 and five players), brought him east to the Sox spring training ground at Sarasota, Fla. He was no great shakes as a leftfielder in those days, but he could hit and he knew it. Had not the great Lefty O'Doul, twice batting champion of the National League and manager of the San Francisco Seals, himself told him never to change his stance? "You'll be a great hitter," Lefty had said. "Keep swinging as you do until you die."
Ted's swagger and his brash honesty about everyone and everything he disliked seemed, to older Sox, an almost intolerable cockiness for a green rookie. Ted greeted Manager Joe Cronin with a palsy-walsy "Hey, Scout!" But after Cronin, now general manager of the Red Sox, had appraised his new recruit, he farmed him out to Minneapolis for further seasoning. On the way to the station, Ted told Johnny Orlando, the Sox's clubhouse factotum, that he would be back the next year. "That," says admiring Johnny, "was the first of a hundred true predictions Ted has made."
The Magic .400. The next year, in 1939, the fresh kid hit 31 homers for the Sox. Two years later his batting average was .406 and Outfielder Williams was the only American Leaguer since 1923 (when Detroit's Harry Heilmann hit .403) to get into the .400 set.*