Some Of The #beer Caps From The Brews I "sampled" While In So. Africa. Just Doing My Job...

Ted Williams was quite the cutey as a kid, no?

Ted was candid to a fault

An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:  Williams was high strung, filled with nervous energy, always biting his fingernails. Ted’s friends found him candid to a fault, unvarnished. If he didn’t like someone, he would tell him so, to his face, rather than gossip behind his back. “I don’t care for you, fellah,” he might say. 

(PHOTO: Young Ted Williams. May Williams Collection.)

Ted loved listening to the radio     

 An exclusive excerpt of Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”:  Growing up, on Saturday afternoons during football season, Ted [Williams] liked to get home in time to listen to the USC games on radio. He loved Irvine “Cotton” Warburton, a San Diego boy who was the team’s All America quarterback in 1933. “On Saturday night we’d listen to Benny Goodman,” Ted recalled. “Swing bands were the thing then. I still prefer swing to anything else.” His favorite radio program was “Gang Busters,” which, in collaboration with J. Edgar Hoover, dramatized closed FBI cases. Originally launched in 1935 and called “G-men,” the show featured dramatic sound effects of screeching tires, police sirens and tommy-guns.

(PHOTO: Ted Williams passing a football at the Navy Pre-Flight School, 1943. North Carolina Collection, UNC at Chapel Hill, Wilson Library.)

#AndThenThisHappened! They're just arriving (in batches) in town. @BillBrettBoston's fifth book, BOSTON: IRISH. They make great Christmas gifts...

Important issue.

Cancer Votes Massachusetts was out last week at the U.S. Senate candidate debate in Springfield, MA, the third of four scheduled debates between Sen. Scott Brown (R) and Elizabeth Warren (D).

Cancer Votes volunteers and staff spent time talking with supporters from both campaigns about why cancer needs to be a national priority, and six volunteers and staff were able to attend the sold-out debate.

And Cancer Votes volunteer Pat Spain from North Andover gave several interviews to reporters, including one with NPR!

According to Cancer Votes staffer Patricia Mallios, volunteers and staff were able to meet a lot of people and many of them kept their stickers on during the debate and were interested in hearing about Cancer Votes.

Photos: Cancer Votes volunteers Ellen Croibier, Peter Levine, Pat Spain, Anna Nguyen, Nora Wallace and staff Patricia Mallios, Erica Concors and Whitney Thomas and supporters of both candidates.

how'd they get my family holiday card?

On This Day in Pittsburgh History: November 3, 1939

Pittsburgh has its first movie “world premiere” in Hollywood style, with the showing of “Allegheny Uprising” at Loew’s Penn. Claire Trevor, one of the stars of the film, was among the guests. [Historic Pittsburgh]

Lots of rain in these parts. Lotta rain.

This dog is on Mom's payroll.

Baby, It's cold outside

I really can’t stay… Then, bitch, get ta steppin!

Loving those zany people in the Little, Brown marketing department. What's next? A "The Goldfinch" with yellow Peeps? Oh, please...say you've got a Ted Williams in full swing. 

It’s pub day for Six Amendments by Justice John Paul Stevens, and we’re celebrating peep style! Stay tuned for more peep dioramas this week, inspired by washingtonpost's annual contest.

Art by miriamparker

Ted always had his trademark yelps

An exclusive excerpt from Ben Bradlee, Jr.’s “The Kid”: Ted’s booming voice could be heard above any din. And he used it to good effect as a boy, often to shout out an odd greeting cry—“TA-TA-WEEDO”—when he saw a friend, say 100 feet away. No one knew what this meant—it was just a colorful eccentricity. A variation that Ted liked to use in his junior high school Metal Shop class was: “POW-HO-WE-HAH! My muscles are bulging!” according to friend Jerry Allen. “Everyone laughed at that and thought it was funny,” Allen says.

Such yelps were precursors to another odd scream Ted would use when he reached the minor leagues, and into his first year with the Red Sox in 1939, before his early ebullience started to fade. To amuse himself during bouts of boredom in the field as he waited to bat again, when a fly ball was hit his way, Ted would slap his behind and yell, “Hi-ho Silver!” as he took off to run for it. 

And we lost this for City Hall.

Adams Square, 1906, Transit Department photo collection (Collection #8300.002)

This work is in the public domain and free of known copyright restrictions. Please attribute to City of Boston Archives.

For more photos from this collection, click here