In Search of the Splinter’s Roots

He was sitting on the top bench of the mini-bleachers at Ted Williams Field, the seventy-ish gentleman with the baseball cap perched atop his white hair. I was sure that I had at last found the San Diegan who would give me my definitive interview on the border city's gift to Cooperstown.

His eyes had the squint that comes from looking into a thousand sun-drenched afternoons, pounding his glove and chanting "hum baby" to teammates. I was reluctant to disturb his reverie. Probably remembering that time back in the '30s when he shared a dugout with the immortal Splinter, who was still known in North Park simply as Ted.

"Excuse me, sir," I ventured. "I'm doing a story on Ted Williams. Were you around when he used to come to this park as a kid? Maybe play ball with him?"

"Williams? Names don't mean much to me."

My God, I could walk into any town in the U.S. and say "Ted Williams" to most any senior citizen and get a more informed response than that.

Turns out that Gene Wilson was a WW II vet who moved to San Diego after a wartime hitch as a paratrooper, and that baseball, like names, "don't mean much" to him.

I had already had a number of warm-up interviews with people in the neighborhood. Now I was ready to go nine innings with Gene, but Gene didn't want to play, didn't even know how.

About a half-hour earlier I had encountered a man on the corner of Utah and Lincoln and told him I was looking for material on Ted Williams.

"Did you know Ted," I asked.

"No, I knew about him. I remember he was recalled into the service for the Korean War in '51, the year I moved to San Diego. Oh, you know, everybody knew Ted Williams in a way, but about the closest I came to knowing him was, you know, like I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew Ted Williams.

A self-deprecating little chuckle followed this remark. He wore a cowboy hat and spoke with a slight twang that matched it.

Did he maybe know the house on Utah Street where the Williams family had lived?

"No, but Mo Connolly, the woman tennis champion, lived in that brick house down there on Linclon."

I've gotta find Ted's house, I thought, the one I read about in an article on The Thumper. He described it as being a block and a half from the park. I was about that far from what is now Ted Williams Field when I talked to the fellow in the cowboy hat. The patch of green where the youthful Ted spent countless hours perfecting what is probably the smoothest swing the game has ever seen was one block over, on Idaho Street. Maybe if I went a couple of blocks north I would be in the block where he lived.

The neighborhood evoked a stream of 1930-era memories. The California bungalows that had been built in the years following WW I reminded me of houses I had known in my own youth in Los Angeles. I felt as if the Helms Baker truck would be coming around the corner any minute.

I looked with a sort of resentment at the large two story apartment houses that had been built after WW II and now dominated the neighborhood. Only scattered single family dwellings remained, survivors of an earlier time when a gawky schoolboy was hitting prodigious home runs over the right field fence at the North Park Recreation Center.

Maybe the Williams' house had been torn down to make room for "progress."

I stopped a lady who was walking her Pomeranian. She was friendly and so was her dog.

"I'm looking for Ted Williams' old house. Could you help me," I asked.

"Oh, I've heard of him. Played for Detroit, didn't he?"

"No, he played for the Boston Red Sox. "

"Well, he played some for Detroit, I think," she persisted.

"No, it was all with the Red Sox."

It was a friendly but rather unproductive conversation.

Finally, I decided to try my luck by knocking on doors. At 4104 Utah St., Frances Illig answered. With an air of authority she pointed across the street and up the block to 4121. "That's where Ted and his father, mother, and brother lived. The mother and brother continued to live there for several years after the war."

I looked over at the blue house and tried to picture Ted and his brother, Danny, waiting on the porch for their father or mother to come home. Sometimes, Ted has said, it would be as late as 10 o'clock. Dad was a wanderer, never home much and Mom was so consumed by her commitment to the Salvation Army that she was around even less.

As I crossed the street I decided to knock at 4109 to see if I could get lucky. Maybe the current occupant knew something additional. Harry Ulowetz answered, wearing nothing but a towel. His body gave me hope that he might have grown up with the famed ball player, who is now 77. Sounding like a man who wanted to get back in the shower, he told me he knew about Ted but did not know him.

At 4121 nobody was home. If Ted had been with me, he would have felt, I am sure, like Thomas Wolfe when he revisited Ashville, North Carolina.

My quest for the young Ted Williams was less than successful. I did leave North Park Rec Center and the 4000 block of Utah with a feeling of having touched the roots of the man who wanted to be "the greatest hitter who ever lived", and perhaps was.

I got back in my car, but I was not yet ready to leave San Diego. There was still Hoover High to see. Williams remembers himself in high school as "a lousy student" who looked for classes where he would not have to do much homework.

"I took shop. I was lucky I didn't cut my fingers off."

Now there's a thought to send shivers down the back of any baseball fan.

I was hoping to see the actual buildings that Williams walked in as a teen-ager, but they looked strictly post-war to me. I could not imagine that any of them were in existence from 1934-36 when he attended Hoover.

It was Sunday and the campus was deserted. But wait! Isn't that the crack of bat against ball? And now I hear the familiar chatter of ballplayers. Am I so much into this Ted Williams thing that I am hallucinating.

The sounds were real. As I rounded the corner of a building, I saw another Ted Williams Field.

The players making the real baseball sounds were not high school kids. They were men playing in the 50-and-over division of the Mens Senior Baseball League, a national federation of baseball teams organized so that men in their 30s. 40s and 50s can continue to compete with players their own age.

I talked to a couple of them, telling them I was in San Diego researching a Ted Williams story for The Diamond Angle. They wanted to know if TDA would like to help sponsor their team. "It takes a lot of money to play Sunday ball", one of them explained. "Gotta hire umpires, buy uniforms, bats, balls."

Funny, I was wondering if NSMB would like to buy a few subscriptions and maybe buy some ad space.

They didn't care much about Ted Williams. They were more interested in playing the game. Ted would have loved it. It was beautiful to watch some guy over S0 hit a 40 MPH "fast" ball to the wall and wheeze into second, beating the outfielder's two-bounce throw to the bag I somehow knew that these men would continue to buy their uniforms, pass the hat to pay the umps and ask their wives to hold bake sales so that bats and balls could be purchased.

I only stayed a few innings. On the way back to L.A., I passed one final reminder that the Thumper had left his mark on the San Diego area. Illuminated by the last rays of the setting sun was the sign standing tall above the new ribbon of road winding through the hills of Poway. It read TED WILLIAMS PARKWAY.

I think they should have named it "OUT OF THE PARKWAY."

[Editor’s Note: I lived in San Diego when the freeway was named. It almost became Pete Wilson freeway, after the former mayor of San Diego who eventually became governor. At one point an editorial pointed out that while Ted Williams stood head and shoulders above even fellow Hall-of-Famers, fifty years from now people would be asking Pete who? That more or less settled things.]