If Ted was aware of his heritage I would wonder, given the anti-Semitism of the 1930s-40s, if this in any way fueled his desire to keep his private life private. Under the strictest Jewish matrilineal definition, this made May Jewish, which made Ted Jewish. I remember his discussing that in My Turn At Bat and that's 1969.Р”Р„ year or two ago on SABR-L, a genealogist discovered that May Venzor's mother was Jewish.

The PBS presentation kind of implies that Williams hid his Mexican heritage unto his death.

That's what I call a complete turnaround of conventional wisdom. My father's 82, and he insists that when he was growing up, Ted was the most hated player in baseball, while the most loved ballplayer of the era was. It's a perfect example of the way that the CW on Dimaggio and Williams has turned so completely since their playing careers overlapped I tried to make it through that Richard Ben Cramer book, but got his point about 100 pages in and decided to leave the final 450-odd pages to my next lifetime. There've been times when I've wished I'd been born about 5 years earlier, just so I could've seen Williams and Dimaggio when they were both in their primes. I first saw him a few weeks after he came back from Korea, in this game where he hit a mammoth home run against the Nats, but when you're but 9 years old and he hadn't been in the sports pages since before you became attracted to baseball, the day didn't seem nearly as significant as it obviously was. I'm not sure how long I'd be able to put up with Williams if he ever started on some political rant, but overall I think I'd appreciate him much more now than I did when he was 'just' a very good hitter. A genuine magnetism that attracted people. It's the kid in him that I'm sure came out in other aspects of his life, too. It's the total uncontainable joy of a boy loving to play the game and excel at it. I think that something was expressed in things like that boyish elation he displayed running the bases after he hit that home run in the 1941 All-Star game. Need I mention Dom DiMaggio, Doerr, and Pesky, the 'Teammates'. So many people were able to overlook his faults and find something there to genuinely like or love about him. He even notes in his as told to book, published in '69, that had he a kid able to serve in Vietnam, he be screaming bloody murder probably. He (who was a big fan of Douglas MacArthur) got a personal response from Truman himself, he says, telling him not to worry about it, as he, too, had said in his time a few things he later regretted. This was duly reported and he got static and then apologized. He went public a few times, once in remarks in a bar that included a tirade against Truman. Again, those Boston writers.Р”Р„s for Korea, I think he objected generally to being called as an inactive reservist ahead of the active reservists, and as a gung-ho patriot of the conservative sort, he faulted the way it was fought. He felt that he was being treated differently. He noted the tons of players who played in 1942. He felt he was entitled to that initial deferment for 1942 and took affront at being accused of being a dodger of military service.

As I remember My Turn At Bat, Williams felt he was not being treated fairly by the press. Like many made to feel lacking in their childhood, Williams didn't take personal criticism well.

American masters ted williams