Ted Williams baseball on view in Wilson Library through Sept. 6

Ted Williams is remembered as one of the towering greats of American baseball. He didn’t have a great game on a certain day at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1943, but he gave teenage fan John Boring a great gift that Boring has passed on to the University Libraries.

Williams was in Chapel Hill with his Boston Red Sox teammate Johnny Pesky as cadets in the Navy Pre-Flight School, which trained American pilots during World War II. Despite the rigors of training, they and other professional baseballers at the school formed a team called the Cloudbusters, competing against local university, service and minor-league all-star teams.

Boring, now retired and living in Virginia, wrote to the University Libraries about attending a Cloudbusters game with his family when he was 13.

“I don’t remember anything about the game itself,” Boring wrote, “but I certainly remember after the game that our doctor friend had arranged for Ted Williams to come over and hand me an autographed baseball. So, there we were — the great man handing me the ball and saying, ‘Sorry, I could not seem to get the ball out of the infield today.’”

Earlier this year, Boring donated the baseball to the University Libraries, where it is on temporary view in the North Carolina Collection Gallery in Wilson Library through Sept. 6.

It bears the signatures not only of Williams and Pesky, but also players Johnny Sain, Ace Williams, Joe Coleman, Harry Craft, Don Kepler, Ed Moriarty and North Carolinians Ray Scarborough and Dusty Cooke.

At Wilson Library, the fragile memento joins documentary materials about the era, including the United States Navy Pre-Flight School Photographic Collection and issues of the program’s newspaper, Cloudbuster, which the University Libraries has digitized and shared online.