Fri. Nov. 30

 Bill Nowlin is the co-owner of the locally based Rounder Records, but he’s devoted much of his creative life over the past decade-plus to writing. Particularly writing about baseball. More so the Red Sox. And even more so, his childhood hero, Ted Williams. His latest, “Ted Williams at War,” just came out – it’s his fourth book on Ted - and Nowlin will be reading from it Friday Nov. 30 at 7 p.m. at Back Pages in Waltham.
We talked to Nowlin recently about his passion for all things Ted, going back to  1996, "Ted Williams: A Tribute." “It was the very first book I did," he said. “The first thing I’d worked on like that. It was so much fun. It involved 200 interviews, and gave me this excuse to call up these ballplayers and talk to them. We talked about flying, fishing, military, baseball, his charity work. It was fascinating talking to John Glenn” – who flew eight missions with Williams during the Korean War – “as he gave me the details about seeing all these explosions. … When Ted died in 2002 I started to put together a book about his military career – I had interviewed Ted’s commanding officer in California for the earlier book. I know baseball because I’m a fan. I was never interested in military history. So it was all new learning for me. I interviewed 40 pilots he flew with. People were very generous. Most flown with him in ’52,  ’53 and were in their 70s and 80s.”

Why Williams? “It goes back to when I was a kid," says Nowlin. "He was my hero growing up. I knew him in all these capacities. I knew he was a great hitter, I knew he was a spokesperson for the Jimmy Fund - I remember giving the Jimmy Fund a quarter at ten years old - I knew he was one of the best fisherman, and I knew he was a military hero. This is 1957, when I was 12. He had only recently flown in Korea, which was ten years before Vietnam, so there was no ambivalence about American military heroes, and there has been since. I unearthed interesting stuff."  Other Ted books, Nowlin, said had a chapter or two on his military life, but no one had done a full book.
Before he became the revered Ted Williams – after his career ended – Williams was a controversial figure in Boston sports, often at war with the writers, sometimes the fans. He got in trouble during World War II by being granted III-A status, as he was the sole support of his mother. Detractors believed that as a fit athletic specimen, Williams should very well serve. “It was a valid exemption,” says Nowlin. “It got overturned at some point. An appeal was entered on Ted’s behalf and he won the appeal. But eventually, despite winning, he decided to sign up. He had played exhibition games in spring training and got loud cheers before the troops. He realized baseball was good for morale and they were on his side. He got more excited about taking part when a guy from Dartmouth made a presentation to the Red Sox and told him if he signed up in the Navy he wouldn’t have to fight in the infantry and he could play out the ’42 season."

"He did play a lot of baseball in World War II," continues Nowline. ”But when the Korean War came, Ted refused to play baseball and said, ‘If you want me back, I want to see some action.’  Says Nowlin: "After World War II, he heard people telling war stories and he said, ‘I was just an instructor; no one ever shot at me.'" Williams wanted the real deal.  He wondered how he would measure up. He flew 39 combat missions, dive-bombing targets. He was hit twice by anti-aircraft fire; he crashed the plane and came back with holes under his wings another time. Nowlin: "There’s no way to know what he destroyed.” Williams was only a high school graduate, but in training he finished at the top of his class, emblematic, Nowlin says, of Williams’ dedication to whatever he thrust himself into: Full-throttle.
In Nowlin’s time spent with Ted, he said he found him “never combative. I know he liked to spar with people, but most of it was fairly businesslike. I had three different meals with him, with nice average conversations. I believe he was a truly generous guy, a little embarrassed, but not too embarrassed, to talk about himself.” Nowlin says he regrets now he didn’t ask Williams more about his war years when he had the time.
In death, of course, Williams became a late-night comic’s punch line, as his son John Henry (now himself deceased) froze Ted's head. Williams is the most famous cryogenics “patient” in history, unless you count Walt Disney, and who knows about that one. Not the legacy Teddy Ballgame would have wanted  ....

“Ted really loved his son, says Nowlin, “and he was no great believer in an afterlife." As to cryogenic preservation, "Ted probably said ‘What the heck?  I’m gonna be dead.’” In other words, he didn’t care. Maybe, it would work, some day. But Nowlin says, “If he knew now how it would become a public spectacle … “ well, maybe he'd have directed John Henry to do something else.

But Nowlin’s book is not about that. It’s about that rare kind of hero, not the sports “hero” who is really not a hero per se. (Do home runs really equate into heroism? Come on.) It's about an exceptional athlete - yes, arguably, the best hitter who ever lived - who becomes a war hero. It’s hard to imagine a modern day professional athlete – exception Pat Tillman – putting himself in harm’s way in this fashion. Nowlin closes his book with a quote from Ted; “The two things I’m proudest of in my life, is that I became a Marine pilot and that I became a member of Baseball’s Hall of Fame.”

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