Welcome to our Visions 2020 issue!
Legend has it, Ted Williams could read the label of a 78-rpm record while it was spinning. He could pick out the spin of a pitcher’s curve or breaking ball and know just how to take a swing at it. Flight surgeons tested his eyes when he became a World War II fighter pilot. The Red Sox star had the vision of one in 100,000.
Williams also had an eye for beauty. That’s why he loved Maine.
“Dad would always take my brother John Henry and me through Maine to his fishing camp on the Miramichi River, just over the Maine border in New Brunswick,” says Claudia Williams, Ted’s daughter. “Maine always felt like a second home to me. Dad was once a pitchman for Moxie. We’d always stop and visit Dad’s friend, sportswriter Bud Leavitt. Dad would stop at tie shops and admire the artistry of his favorite lures. He fished all over Maine—at camps and places like Chemquasabamticook Lake. We were in Maine with Dad when he did the Nissen Bread commercials. I think the first ones were shot with Bud in a cafe in Bangor. One was with Yogi Berra.”
Where were your favorite haunts with your dad up here? I hear he went a number of times to the Griffin Club in South Portland, where no doubt everybody knew his name.
“If it was a bar, my father probably kept my brother and me far away from it.”
Did fans always bring up his eyesight?
“My dad, if he were alive, would really want me to defend him about this. Daddy had 20/20 vision in his left eye and 20/15 in his right. His eyesight was given far more credit than his deeper vision and focus into the sport.” In other words, he worked at it.
“You just don’t see people who have the foresight at 16 to want to grow up to be the kind of person where people would say, ‘That’s the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ Daddy never wore glasses. He could put that fly anywhere on that river he wanted. But it wasn’t about seeing; it was about focus. He got to know how a pitcher was throwing. The way the arm moved, the way the body moved. In reality, he couldn’t see the stitches on the ball. He could envision the way the stitches were spinning because sometimes he knew long before the ball left the pitcher’s hand what was going to happen.”
Fun fact about Ted Williams. He wasn’t just a great pilot during World War II. He was re-drafted to serve in the Korean War. His wingman? Future astronaut John Glenn. Talk about a high sky.
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