Free Ted & Me by Dan Gutman Page B

influenced his decision. But he brought up the subject himself.
    â€œI’m going to go for it,” he said quietly as we waited for the waitress to get to our table. “You want to know why?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause if I sat on the bench today,” he whispered, “for the rest of my life I would know in my heart that I took the easy way out. And The Kid never takes the easy way out.”
    The Kid. I had never met anybody before who talked about himself as if he was another person. It was a little strange.
    â€œYou’re making a good decision,” I told him.
    â€œI made another one too,” he added as the waitress arrived. “You’re coming with me.”
    We ordered eggs and toast, but I could barely taste them. I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky I was. I was sitting across the table from one of thetwo greatest baseball players of his age (the other one being Joe DiMaggio), and I was going to be a witness to the greatest day of his career.
    I would wait until later to bring up Pearl Harbor, I decided. And hopefully, there would be time after the game to talk him out of enlisting in the military so he wouldn’t lose all those years of playing ball. It was all good.
    Ted gobbled down his eggs as if he thought somebody would steal them off his plate. He no longer seemed to care about where my parents were or why a thirteen-year-old kid from Louisville was hanging around Philadelphia all by himself. He was focused on the task at hand: to hit .400 for the season. While he ate, I noticed that his fingernails were chewed down to the quick.
    Nobody recognized Ted in the coffee shop. Either that or they pretended not to. He paid the bill and we stepped outside. It was a gray day. That could be good for a hitter, I thought—no shadows.
    It was Sunday, so there weren’t a lot of cars on the street. But when Ted put his hand up in the air, a taxi almost magically appeared.
    â€œShibe Park,” Ted said as we climbed in.
    The driver recognized Ted.
    â€œI’m an A’s fan,” he said, “but today I’m rootin’ for you, Mr. Williams. Good luck out there.”
    â€œI’m gonna need it,” Ted replied.
    We drove through the streets of Philadelphia, passing all kinds of stores. I noticed the movies thatwere playing in the theaters: Citizen Kane. Abbott and Costello in the Navy. Dumbo. Million Dollar Baby , starring Ronald Reagan. I laughed to myself when I saw a sign on a movie theater that boasted WE HAVE AIR-CONDITIONING!
    In about fifteen minutes, we pulled up to a big building at the corner of Lehigh Avenue and 21st Street. It filled the whole city block, but it didn’t look like a ballpark at first. There was a dome at the corner that made it look a little bit like a church. But there was a sign that said SHIBE PARK.
    A smaller sign said TODAY: ATHLETICS VS. BOSTON RED SOX.

    It looked almost like a church.
    Athletics. I always thought that was a dumb name for a team. Of course they were athletic. They were professional athletes. That’s sort of like naming a basketball team the Philadelphia Tall Guys.
    I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think that Shibe Park was still around in the twenty-first century. Neither were the Philadelphia Athletics. I recalled reading that they had moved to Kansas City at some point and later to Oakland. Maybe if they changed their name to something other than Athletics, they could stay in one town.
    Players need to get to the ballpark hours before game time, of course. There were only a few fans milling around: the hardcore autograph seekers. Even so, six or seven newsboys were on the corner hawking their papers. Each one had a different newspaper. I reminded myself that there was no internet in the 1940s. No CNN. They didn’t even have television yet. People got their news from the newspaper, so there had to be more of them.
    I peered out the window of the taxi. The men all wore hats,