The Cloudbuster Nine: Baseball and the War Effort | Anne Keene

Anne Keene’s The Cloudbuster Nine looks at baseball star Ted Williams and others (including her father) as they played for the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight school.
From the publisher:
In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year’s World Series, one of the nation’s strongest baseball teams practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Sain were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In this spirited Field of Dreams-like father-daughter account, author Anne R. Keene opens with a story about her father, Jim Raugh, who suited up as the team batboy and mascot. He got to know his baseball heroes personally, watching players hit the road on cramped, tin-can buses, dazzling factory workers, kids, and service members at dozens of games, including a war-bond exhibition against Babe Ruth’s team at Yankee Stadium.
Jimmy followed his baseball dreams as a college All-American, but was crushed later in life by a failed major-league bid with the Detroit Tigers. He would have carried this story to his grave had Anne not discovered his scrapbook from a Navy school that shaped America’s greatest heroes including George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John Glenn, Paul “Bear” Bryant, and John Wooden.
With the help of rare images and insights from World War II baseball veterans such as Dr. Bobby Brown and Eddie Robinson, the story of this remarkable team is brought to life for the first time in The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II.
Anne R. Keene is an Austin, Texas-based writer who focuses on narrative nonfiction. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism, she began her professional career working as a speechwriter on Capitol Hill. Keene’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, Raleigh News & Observer and many other major newspapers. The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win WWII, was a finalist for the Casey Award for the “Best Baseball Book” of 2018. Keene is a recognized voice of America’s surviving major league players who served in the Second World War, and speaks about military baseball to major league baseball organizations and fan clubs, Naval Academy alumni chapters, as well as historical and civic organizations nationwide.
The views expressed in this video are those of the speaker(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the George C. Marshall Foundation.