Lecture Date: April 7, 2015
JON Properties/Van Zandt Restorations Lecture
Ted Williams is often acknowledged as the best hitter in baseball history — which is precisely what he always said he wanted to be. His batting average of .406 in 1941 has not been topped since. Also, his ranking in all of the major categories of hitting stand at or very near the top, all-time. Those totals would have been even higher if Williams had not left baseball for nearly five years in the prime of his career to serve as a Marine pilot in World World II and Korea. Yet, while his baseball exploits were legendary, his personal life was far from idyllic, marked by a contentious relationship with the Boston press and a troubled domestic life, including controversy that has lingered beyond his death in 2002. These topics and more will be covered by Ben Bradlee, Jr. in his talk, based on his 2013 best-selling biography, The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams.
Lecture Photos
Speaker: Ben Bradlee Jr.
Ben Bradlee, Jr., a graduate of Colby College, served in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan from 1970 to 1972. On his return to the United States, he worked for several years as a newspaper reporter in California before joining the Boston Globe in 1979. At the Globe, he worked for 10 years as a reporter and 15 years as an editor. As a reporter, he covered state politics as well as serving as the paper’s roving national correspondent from 1982 to 1986. He also reported overseas from Afghanistan, South Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Vietnam. He has written four well-received books, including the 1988 biography of Oliver North, which was the basis of a four-hour television miniseries on CBS. His biography of Ted Williams, published in 2013, was a New York Times best-seller. According to one account, that work is ”biography of the highest literary order, a thrilling and honest account of a legend in all his glory and human complexity. In his final at-bat, Williams hit a homerun. Bradlee’s marvelous book clears the fences, too.”