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ON BASEBALL Williams's family ties complicated
By Gordon Edes, Globe Staff, 7/7/2002
Next time you call, Ted Williams had said, just call the office. ''Sarah has passed away,'' Herrera said Williams told him. ''The family's gone. God bless you.'' ''God bless you, too, Ted,'' Herrera had said. ''I understand.'' ''You've got to let gods go,'' Manny Herrera said yesterday by phone from his home in West Jordan, Utah, a town that once was home to Gene Fullmer, the boxer. ''You have to let them do it their way.'' Herrera, who is 60 and retired from UPS, is from the side of Williams's family the Hall of Famer seldom spoke about, the Mexican side. Herrera's grandmother, Mary, was a sister of Williams's mother, May, the Salvation Army worker who was known on the streets of San Diego as the ''Angel of Tijuana'' but more often was a source of shame than pride for her son. He felt the stigma of the family's poverty, as well as the loneliness caused by his mother's frequent absences from home. ''I was embarrassed that my mother was in the middle of the damn street all the time,'' Williams once wrote. ''Until the day she died she did that, and it always embarrassed me, and God knows I respected her and loved her.'' When he was a teenager, Manny Herrera lived for almost three years under the same roof as May Williams, who was nearing the end of her life. Sarah Venzor, another of May's sisters, also lived there. ''I used to visit with May, sit next to her, every night,'' Herrera said. ''She was very strong, very tall. She was a gallant woman, one of a kind. Independent. Strong-willed. Just like Ted. ''She was dedicated to the good ol' Army. That's what she called it, The Army. I asked her one night, `Are you the Angel of Tijuana?' `Yes, Precious, I am,' she said, and she told me how she helped save kids from jail there. ''She liked strong people. She liked to hold my hand. She liked to wear sunglasses in church. `Do you think anyone will recognize me?' she'd ask. `No, I'd say. I don't think they'll know you, with the sunglasses.''' Herrera is part of a story that was never told publicly in full until baseball historian Bill Nowlin unearthed it, an effort that led Williams to become the first inductee, last February in San Francisco, in the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame. May Venzor Williams was born in El Paso to parents of Mexican and Basque heritage. Her husband, Samuel, who ran a small photography shop, was of Welsh and English extraction. ''A Yankee from upstate New York,'' Herrera said. One of May's brothers, Saul Venzor, was a semipro pitcher of some renown in Santa Barbara; the story is told that he once pitched against Babe Ruth on one of the Babe's barnstorming tours, and he served as one of Ted's earliest instructors in the game. ''Saul was the one who started this baseball stuff,'' another cousin, Paul Venzor, told Nowlin in a story published in June in the Globe Sunday magazine. ''He was one of the oldest brothers. He was the one who got Ted into baseball ... My uncle could throw! He could throw 19 different pitches. This is where Ted began to recognize them.'' Family tragedy brought Manny Herrera and May Williams together. He had spent 11 years in an orphanage after losing his parents and maternal grandmother. Then Natalia Venzor, May Williams's mother and Herrera's great-grandmother, became his legal guardian and took him into her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. After May's husband had abandoned her, and her health went into decline, she moved into the house on Chino Street, too, Ted having sold the San Diego home she no longer was able to take care of. Another of May's sisters, Sarah, also lived there. Ted often called Sarah, Herrera said, to inquire about his mom and the rest of the family. But he did not return for a visit until his mother died and he came back for the funeral. ''Ted rented the top floor of the Santa Barbara Inn, and kept most everybody out,'' said Manny Herrera, who was not at the funeral but later gave Ted a ride to the airport. ''He was just always private that way.'' Ted remained in touch with the family. He would call Manny to inquire about Sarah, ask if she needed anything. When he discovered how bright Manny's boy Troy was, he sent $1,500 a month to help him with his studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ''He once told me he'd give back all 521 of his home runs if he could have gone to college,'' Manny Herrera said. ''That was the one thing he said he didn't have, an education.'' Herrera would see him a handful of times more over the years, once driving him to his high school reunion at Herbert Hoover High in San Diego. He said Ted's son, John Henry Williams, came to stay with him for a few months when he was around 22 and taking a stab at playing semipro ball. Even then, long before the younger Williams's bizarre attempt at playing minor league ball at age 33, Herrera was dubious. ''I said to him, `Why don't you go your own way?''' Herrera recalled. ''I told him, `Guys like your father are rare, man. Like gold.''' It doesn't bother Herrera that Williams spoke so seldom of his side of the family. He was just a private man, Herrera said. Williams did tell current star Nomar Garciaparra that they had their Mexican heritage in common. ''I knew there was something I liked about you,'' Garciaparra joked back. Williams once told him, Herrera said, that while the fans in Boston were good to him, he harbored one fear. ''They don't know who I really was, how poor I really was,'' Herrera recalls Williams saying. Replied his cousin: ''We're all poor, Ted.''
This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 7/7/2002.
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he last time he spoke to his cousin, it was a good two years ago. Ted Williams was depressed, Manny Herrera said. He was tired. The family ties that once bound them - Ted had helped pay for Manny's son, Troy, to study mechanical engineering in college - were slipping away, frayed by time and death and fading memory.