Dick Williams: Tennis great, Titanic survivor, Philly Hall of Famer

When Richard Norris Williams is inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame on Thursday night at the Sheraton Society Hill, no family members, many of whom reside in the area, will be there to acknowledge the honor.

Williams, who died in 1968, would be delighted.

Despite winning two U.S. Open tennis titles, an Olympic gold medal and enduring three of the 20th Century's most catastrophic events, the genteel Philadelphian always preferred the shadows to sunlight, the present to the past, silence to bluster.

"He was a very modest man," grandson Quincy Williams, a Chestnut Hill antiques dealer, said this week. "He didn't like to talk about himself. He never really looked back or thought about the 'what ifs'. He just kept moving forward with life."

A descendant of Benjamin Franklin and the Biddles, Williams, one of 15 area athletes to be inducted in the Class of 2015, was a tennis Hall of Famer. In addition to the Open championships, he collected doubles titles at the Olympics and Wimbledon, was ranked No. 1 and contributed to six Davis Cup-winning teams.

Those tennis accomplishments are public record. But there is much more to his fascinating resume that, perhaps understandably, Williams rarely let surface.

He fought in one of World War I's bloodiest battles, earning the Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor medals. He made a fortune with a Philadelphia investment bank, then watched the Great Depression threaten it all. And on the night of April 14, 1912, he lost his father and nearly his own life as the unsinkable RMS Titanic sank in the icy North Atlantic.

Much later, as president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Williams would record his triumphs and traumas in an unpublished memoir. He had just 12 copies made so that only his children, grandchildren and a few historical archives might know of the remarkable life he so seldom revealed.

"There was talk at one time of publishing the memoir," Williams' son, Richard Norris III, who is 84 and lives in Newtown Square, told the Main Line Times in 2012. "But we think our father probably wouldn't have wanted that."

Main Liners of Williams' era were famously close-mouthed about wealth and accomplishments. If his reticence ran even deeper, it was likely because of that terrible night at sea, when he dove into the black waters after watching his father die.

"I yelled, 'Father! Quick! Jump!'," Williams recalled to an Evening Bulletin reporter in 1948, one of his few public retellings. "He started toward me, just as I saw one of the great funnels come crashing down on top of him."

He couldn't draw his eyes from the horrible scene.

"It had killed my father, for whom I had a far more than normal feeling of love and attachment," he said. "There I was transfixed, wondering at the enormous size of this funnel, still belching smoke."

Charles Williams was a successful Main Line lawyer who, for health reasons, moved to Switzerland. In Geneva during the winter of 1891 a son was born, an only child that he would name for a deceased brother.

A Merion Cricket Club member, he taught his son tennis. A righthander, Williams, according to tennis writer and historian Bud Collins, "learned . . . the continental grip and hitting his groundstrokes with underspin."

By the time he was admitted to Harvard in 1912, he was one of the best young players in Europe. Traveling to college, he and his father booked passage on the Titanic, nearly missing the doomed ship's April 10 departure from Cherbourg after a botched railway connection in Paris.

Occupying a cabin near the luxury cruiser's grand staircase, Dick Williams spent considerable time in the squash courts.

On that fateful night, he heard something brush against the ship. It soon became apparent that an iceberg had punctured the Titanic's hull. As it took on water and passengers began to be evacuated, the Williamses calmly walked the decks. At one point, trying to keep warm, they rode stationary bikes in the exercise room.

Soon they too decided to abandon ship. As they stood near the captain's bridge, one of the Titanic's four enormous smokestacks fell. When Charles was struck, a frightened Dick, wearing a raccoon coat, leapt 11/2 stories into the 28-degree water.

"I was not under water very long," he wrote in a letter to another survivor, Col. Archibald Gracie, "as soon as I came to the top I threw off the big fur coat. I also threw off my shoes. About 20 yards away I saw something floating. I swam to it and found it to be a collapsible boat."

About 30 passengers made it onto the uninflated, wooden-bottomed vessel. Half would die of exposure before the rescue ship, the Carpathia, arrived hours later.

Young and fit, Williams recovered quickly. At Harvard, he established himself as America's top tennis talent, winning the 1914 Open at Newport and the 1916 event at Forest Hills.

"Williams had a daring style of play," Collins wrote in his 'Tennis Encyclopedia.' "On his best days, when he had the feel and touch and his breathtaking strokes were flashing on the lines, [he] was unbeatable."

In a match against tennis legend Bill Tilden, a fellow Philadelphian, he took a set in five minutes.

After graduation, he joined the Army and was part of the deadliest American engagement of World War I, the fighting at Belleau Wood.

"One of the few things he told me was that he had to search this no man's land for dead bodies," said his grandson, 56 now but 9 when his grandfather died. "He seized some stuff off of dead soldiers. One thing I remember was a German diary with a bullet hole through it."

Williams stayed in Europe, working at staff headquarters during the peace negotiations at Versailles. Returning to Philadelphia and tennis, he would win a men's doubles crown at Wimbledon in 1920, a mixed-doubles gold medal at the 1924 Olympics and play on six Davis Cup champions between 1921-26.

Living in St. David's, playing tennis at Merion Cricket, Williams was a successful partner at C. Clothier Jones & Co, an investment firm that nearly went under twice during the Great Depression.

Later, he would spend 15 years leading the Historical Society, to which he donated much of his war memorabilia. And few who encountered him ever heard the stories.

"I'd heard of these things he'd done, but they were just stories that grew to be part of the family," said Quincy Williams, who resides in Strafford. "It wasn't like there was any 'Wow' factor."

Neither Quincy Williams, his father nor any of the new Hall of Famer's other relatives will attend Thursday night's ceremonies.

Williams died at 77 in 1968. A romantic, he is buried with his wife, Frances, at St. David's. Their headstone is engraved with this excerpt from a John Greenleaf Whittier poem:

"Yet love will dream, and faith will trust

"That sometime, somewhere meet we must."

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz