Ted Williams, the Chapel Hill Cloudbusters and a forgotten summer of baseball

Story by: Jack Frederick

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Ted Williams stepped out of the batter’s box and took a few steps toward the mound. Then, he looked the Norfolk Airmen pitcher right in the eyes and made a bold prediction.

“You put it across the plate,” Williams said, loud enough to be heard around the ballpark, “and I’m going to put it up on top of that building over yonder.”

Williams, an all-star with the Boston Red Sox, had pointed toward Lenoir Hall in the middle of the University of North Carolina campus.

It was the summer of 1943 and the world was at war. Williams had traded in his Red Sox jersey for a plain white one with ‘Navy’ spelled out across the front.

The pitcher laughed.

Two balls came first, a possible admission that the pitcher wasn’t willing to test the future Hall of Fame left fielder. But the third pitch, a fastball right across the plate, was the mistake.

“He hit that thing a country mile,” said Charles L. Sparrow, now a 90 year old Pittsboro, N.C. resident who was there that day. “Everybody in the stands was standing up when he hit that ball.”

The ball clanked off the shingles of the roof of Lenoir Hall, the cafeteria where he and 1,875 cadets would eat dinner later that night.

From May through August of 1943, Williams trained to become a pilot in World War II at the Eastern Seaboard Navy Pre-Flight School on UNC’s campus. His team? The Chapel Hill Cloudbusters, one of the best baseball teams you’ve never heard of.

‘His majesty has finally arrived!’

Theodore Samuel Williams reported for duty in Chapel Hill on May 6, 1943.

When he stepped off the train at Union station in Durham that afternoon, his new baseball coach, Don Kepler, was there to take him into town, according to Anne Keene’s book, “The Cloudbuster Nine.”

Most cadets had to wait for the military bus, but Williams wasn’t most cadets. He was only 24, but was already established as a Major League All-Star.

Of the nearly 20,000 men who trained in Chapel Hill during World War II — including the likes of legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, and future presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford — Williams was by far the most famous at the time.

“His majesty has finally arrived!” columnist Ben McKinnon wrote of Williams’ arrival for the campus student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. “The pre-flight team should now be one of the strongest service teams in the country.”

“The Splendid Splinter,” as he was nicknamed, arrived on campus that summer as one of nearly a whole team of major leaguers, including Red Sox teammate Johnny Pesky and Boston Braves pitcher Johnny Sain — though to be clear, they hadn’t come to town to play baseball.

The V-5 Naval training base in Chapel Hill required intense training for all cadets — even professional athletes — from 5:30 a.m. to 6:15 p.m., six days a week.

The rigorous pre-flight training was designed to be the toughest leg of training before future pilots sat in the cockpit. With classes and dangerous drills — which sometimes killed Cadets — airmen were expected to leave campus after 90 days in the best shape of their lives, both physically and mentally.

In that respect, Williams fit into the ranks like anyone else.

At the time, the baseball field at UNC stood literally at the center of campus. And baseball players, regardless of their new mission or the new lettering on their jerseys, were going to play baseball.

“Particularly during WWII, the United States is absolutely baseball crazy,” UNC historian Matt Andrews said. “There are teams on bases all across the United States.”

Bases across the nation named their teams in honor of their roles in the war effort. While the exact origin of the Cloudbusters has not survived, it’s not hard to imagine the image of a Navy flier in battle busting through the clouds.

In the afternoons, when they had free time, Pesky and Williams would field ground balls, or throw with local kids. Their ball games became an outlet to raise money for the war, boost morale and give the public some sense of normalcy.

Ted Williams and the Cloudbusters would give Chapel Hill a lot more than that by the end of the summer.

‘He could eat’ and he could play

Sparrow interacted with Ted Williams about as much as anyone did in Chapel Hill.

He set Williams up on several dates while he was in town, which today puts a smile on his face. And during lunch and dinner at Lenoir Hall every day, then a 15 year old, Sparrow served Williams and another table of Cloudbusters meals family-style, with large bowls of food for the table to share.

“He could eat, but he didn’t weigh nothing …” Sparrow said. “He was either running, or playing ball, or he was doing something just about all the free time he had.”

One night, Williams called for more dessert and Sparrow brought out a 9-by-13 inch tray of banana pudding. Williams ate it all.

“You must have a hollow leg,” Sparrow told Williams often for his appetite.

On the baseball field, Williams made an immediate impact. When the Cloudbusters weren’t drilling, they were on Emerson Field or traveling to another base to play games.

After sitting out of games for the first three weeks of trainings to recover from hernia surgery, Williams made his debut for the Cloudbusters on May 23, 1943, with thousands of people in attendance for the one year anniversary of the pre-flight school, Keene wrote.

In his first at bat, he hit a home run to right field. The rest of that first weekend, the Cloudbusters scored 40 runs on 37 hits, allowing one run and 13 hits to the opponent, according to Keene.

By mid-July, before the biggest game the team played all season, the team had rattled off 21 wins in 25 games. Williams used his skills to propel the team toward an all-star game of players in New York City.

“The Cloudbuster Nine Handily defeats Babe Ruth’s Yanklands”

On July 28, 1943 the Cloudbusters reached the culmination of the season — a Red Cross benefit game against the New York Yanklands managed by Babe Ruth, the all-time home run leader at the time who retired nine seasons earlier.

Ruth’s team had been constructed of 22 players hand-picked from the Yankees and Cleveland Indians, the two teams who played there earlier that day.

The game had been advertised as a showdown between Williams and Ruth — two of the game’s greatest hitters.

Williams found Ruth in the locker room before taking the field that night and asked him to autograph a baseball. Like he was for millions of kids, Ruth had been his childhood hero.

But that respect for Ruth didn’t stop Williams and the Cloudbusters from beating them.

Across the next nine innings, the Cloudbusters hammered the Yanklands 11-5. To try to give his team an edge, Ruth even pinch hit in the sixth inning, but it was to no avail.

“The Cloudbuster Nine Handily defeat Babe Ruth’s Yanklands,” a headline from the New York Daily Mirror read the next morning, according to “The Cloudbuster Nine.”

One of baseball’s little-known teams — led by one of the game’s biggest stars — had taken down baseball royalty.

The end of an era 

After an Aug. 9 10-3 win over Durham, several players, including Williams, were sent on an abrupt 10-day leave of absence from Chapel Hill. Williams’ Cloudbuster days were over.

From Chapel Hill, Ted Williams went on to Bunker Hill Naval Air Station in Peru, Indiana. While there, he finally got into a plane and learned to maneuver it across the sky like his childhood hero, Charles Lindbergh, did.

His final stop of the war was in Pensacola, Fla. By May 1944, he earned his wings as a second lieutenant in the Marine air corps, though he never saw combat in the war.

Williams returned to the Red Sox in the 1946 season and was named the AL MVP in his first year back. In 14 of the next 15 seasons, he was an all-star before retiring in 1960 with a .344 career batting average, 1,839 RBIs and 521 home runs.

Six years later, at 47 years old, Williams was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the best hitters in the history of the game.

In the 75 years since Williams came to Chapel Hill, the history of what happened there has been mostly hidden. The players didn’t talk much about baseball during war, and in books about Williams career, his time in Chapel Hill was little more than a footnote, until Keene told their story in “The Cloudbuster Nine.”

“It was almost like being in the war,” said Keene, whose father was the team’s bat boy. “They just didn’t talk about it.”

But Sparrow, and others who were there, remember. At a Red Sox-Senators baseball game in Washington, D.C. in June 1947, Sparrow saw Williams again and they talked about Chapel Hill, proof the hall of famer hadn’t forgotten either.

“Hey, Ted,” Sparrow yelled from the stands at Williams nearby on the field. “You remember Chapel Hill?”

Williams turned and met eyes with Sparrow.

“Yeah!” Williams said. “Yeah, I remember Chapel Hill.”

How could he forget?

Jack Frederick

Jack Frederick is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill majoring in reporting and American history. He is from Lumberton, NC, and is serving as an assistant sports editor at The Daily Tar Heel for the second year in a row. After college, he plans to pursue a career in sportswriting.

1 Comment
  1. What a terrific piece that builds on the CLOUDBUSTER NINE book. Mr Sparrow’s recollections are a priceless oral testimony to Williams’ chapel hill experience. Thanks from this Red Sox and Ted Williams Fan!!