We were mere boys, though neither of us would have admitted to it then. It was over 40 years ago, in the summer of 1959, and any fellow who had attained age sixteen in those days, like we had, seemed for sure to be, if not a man, then at least on the verge of being one. Manhood was a condition all male teens strived for then, and getting to be 16 put you close.

My buddy's name was Walter, and we were turned loose in New York City for a half-day and a night. It was our reward and capstone for completing two weeks of a Boy Scout leadership training camp near Mendham, New Jersey, a beautiful area 40 or so miles across the river from the massive and magical New York. We had completed our program on midday Friday, and the train that would bring us home didn't leave Newark till early morning Saturday. We had a few dollars (only a few, but enough we thought). So, it was New York, here we come.

We were both innocent teens-naive teens, really-from small town North Carolina. We knew that even then, even if we were big, bad, 16, and knocking on the gates of manhood. Neither of us had ever been up north where the big cities were, with all their people and their traffic and their tall buildings and their subway systems. And their major league baseball teams.

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and Broadway were sights Walter and I wanted to see, since we were there, but what we really, really crossed the river from Newark to see was a major league baseball game. The Yankees were in town, playing the Red Sox at the Stadium. Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford were Yankees then, and so were Moose Skowron and Gil McDougald and Hank Bauer. Jackie Jensen and Pete Runnels and Vic Wertz and Frank Malzone were Red Socks. And so, most especially, was Ted Williams, the most famous player and greatest hitter of the time. He would, of course, later become pretty much universally recognized as the greatest hitter of ALL time. He would, as time passed, become a genuine American legend.

Going to a major league baseball game, and one in Yankee Stadium no less, was going to be a really unbelievable opportunity for Walter and me. It was like we were living a fantasy.

That was before we had much baseball on television here, and the little bit we did have came to us black and white, and in what we would today call rustic form. There were no centerfield cameras then, and not many cameras anywhere else around the field, for that matter. There were no strong telephoto lenses to bring the players up close like we can see them now, and certainly no instant replay.

The nighttime television news shows, if they had any sports news at all included in them, gave the scores, and maybe a detail or two of the games that day, but nothing else. There were no highlight packages nor player interviews. Keep in mind: these were the days before video cameras and computers. These were the days almost before TV itself.

We got our major league baseball news then from newspapers, and our games from radio. Major league teams seemed so far away from us as boys growing up in North Carolina.

Now, we were going to see a game in person. A real major league game. It was, like I said, a fantasy coming alive.

The game my buddy Walter and I crossed the river to see would be on Friday night, so we had the afternoon to see all we could of New York. And we had a fine time that afternoon. We rented a spot on a tour bus, and it showed us most of what we wanted to see-things we had seen pictures of in magazines. We got to the Stadium, via subway and with the directional help of a friendly fellow who said he had grown up in North Carolina, in time to see batting practice. Our seats were behind home plate, but in the third deck. Best I recall, the tickets cost us about five dollars.

I remember how green the grass looked in that beautiful stadium, and how big the place seemed. It must have been a mile, I remember thinking, to the centerfield wall, and it looked as if there were enough seats for everybody in New York, ever how many millions they be. Remember, that was the old, pre-refurbished Yankee Stadium, the one that Ruth built, and that Gehrig played in, and it seemed you could still actually feel their ghosts around there somewhere. What a sight for two small-town southern boys.

The game itself was a thrill, and it had its exciting moments, but the real thrill and excitement for Walter and me came after the game. We found the gate the Red Sox players were using after their showers to get to the bus that would take them back to their hotel, and we joined a small crowd-maybe 25 people-who were watching. Some in the crowd were after autographs, but neither Walter nor myself, as I recall, were particularly interested in autographs. We just wanted to see the players up close.

Most of the players, as they exited the stadium one after another, would acknowledge the crowd of admirers with a smile, or a nod, or a "How ya doing?" Most would sign an autograph or two as they walked to the waiting bus. Some would not. Some would not offer the smile, nor the nod, nor say a word. It seemed the less famous the ballplayer was, the more friendly he was, and vice versa.

So it follows that the most famous of them all, the great Ted Williams-the one player everyone of us in that crowd wanted to see the most, the one every one of us wanted to get close to, the very one either of us would have chosen to give us a smile or nod, if only one was going to-turned out to be not friendly at all.

More than any of the rest of the ballplayers that night, Ted Williams was not friendly. He was not rude, mind you. He was just completely aloof. He simply ignored the crowd as it quickly clustered around him when he came through the gate, as if he were oblivious to it. He was taller than anybody else there, and I remember him towering above us, Walter and me included, as he walked through. The crowd parted like the separate sides of a slick zipper as he lumbered towards the bus. Nobody had the audacity to get in his way, or attempt to slow him.

I don't think anybody touched him. I know I didn't, but it wasn't because I wasn't close enough too. All I had to do was reach out.

Ted Williams was the first famous person I was ever up close to, and Walter and I both were awed by the moment, and by the man. We sensed we were in the presence of somebody different here-somebody who was special in a world class way.

When he died two Fridays ago, we all got reminded of how true that was.

Ted Williams was not just a great baseball player. He did his part in two wars as a pilot, losing almost five prime baseball years along the way. In Korea, he flew a jet alongside John Glenn, who would become famous for another kind of flying and would, at the age of 77, be a crew member on Elizabethtown's Curt Brown's last shuttle flight. Ted Williams would become world-renowned as a fisherman and outdoorsman, and he would teach a generation of young baseball players that hitting was not only a skill, it was also a science.

He would become revered by modern-day major leaguers, and would have perhaps his finest hour on a baseball field when, at the 1999 All-Star game in Boston, stars like McGwire, Gwynn and Ripkin would, on the diamond in Fenway Park, gather around him, like Walter and I had all those years ago outside Yankee Stadium, just to be close.

I never held it against Ted Williams that he ignored me that night in 1959. I reasoned that he was tired and hungry, and ready to sit down somewhere and rest. It didn't seem right to bother him at the end of his workday, I reasoned. How would I like it if I were hassled by a group of people, wanting to get close and asking me to sign my name everywhere I went? Not much, I reasoned.

Of course, it would have been nice if he had given me a smile or a nod or uttered a simple, "How ya doin?" It wouldn't have changed his legend, and it wouldn't have altered my life.

But it would have been nice. And it certainly would have changed the telling and the temperature of a 43-year-old memory.

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