Girls of Summer: In Their Own League

by Browne, Lois

  Local shopkeepers supported the club, rightly sensing an advertising opportunity. Programs and yearbooks sold everything from sewing machines to nights out at the bowling alley. Everybody wanted to get aboard, including people with a couple of rooms to rent.

  Peaches players were housed, if possible, with families who lived close to the park. They walked to the field, meeting fans who came early to secure a good seat and watch them warm up. At the brick ticket booth sporting sign “Home of the Peaches” they separated – fans to stand in line, Peaches to descend to cramped locker rooms beneath the bleachers where the chaperon waited with fresh laundered uniforms.

  Each of the All-American’s four founding cities had some variant on Rockford’s mix of ethnic and social groups united around civic-minded enterprise. Each was large enough to respond to a call for community involvement, yet small enough that community interest could be defined and appealed to.

  This was the winning formula that Milwaukee and Minneapolis had lacked.

  In Grand Rapids, the self-styled “Furniture Capital of the World”, things were somewhat more cosmopolitan. Now that Milwaukee and Minneapolis had fallen by the wayside, it was the largest city in the All-American. Its population was 175,000 – almost double the size of Rockford.

  It was wealthier, having been settled by thrifty Dutch settlers whose descendants maintained an allegiance to traditional Christian values. This was made plain to the Chicks when they arrived, fresh from the wicked city.

  “In Milwaukee, there was a beer garden on every corner,” says Connie Wisniewski. “In Grand Rapids, there was a church.”

  Indeed, the Chicks’ arrival had been less than auspicious. Their train was met by a local nay-sayer, who informed them that, if they planned to play on Sundays, they needn’t bother to unpack their bags.

  “You’ll be gone in a week or two,” he predicted.

  Fortunately, the Chicks came equipped with Dottie Hunter, who feared neither man nor beast.

  “If you’re our welcoming committee, forget it,” she said. “Goodbye. We’ll find our own hotel. We’ll take care of everything.”

  Before too long, the doubter was forced to apologize a hundred times over.

  “The people who didn’t want to come on Sunday gave their tickets to somebody else,” says Wisniewski. “We really had crowds.”

  A Roman Catholic priest became a fan, and passed the message along to his parishioners. Some of the players began to attend a Methodist church, whose minister had a phone-in radio program and talked about the Chicks at every opportunity. These ecumenical blessings did much to ensure success.

  “They were all thrilled with us that first year,” says Hunter.

  One day, the owner of the Coca-Cola bottling plant flagged down the team bus in transit and presented the players with cases of his product, unloaded from the trunk of his car.

  Others rewarded the All-Americans in more lucrative ways. The Chicks played at South Field, another former high school park. It was rather small, and its right field was drastically foreshortened by the presence of the Dexter Lock Factory. These surroundings made for player-spectator contact.

  When one of the Chicks hit a home run, she never headed to the dugout after touching home plate. Instead, she cruised the first-base-line stands.

  “Here were all these guys standing up with their hands out,” says Hunter, “and you wanted to shake hands with them, because you never knew what you were going to bring back.”

  Inez Voyce, a left-handed hitter who gloried in the shortened right-field boundary, made a thousand dollars just from handshakes after hitting home runs.

  But even those players who didn’t receive four-base tips liked South Field. It’s still there, untended now and overgrown with weeds, but you can see why it was fun to play in. It’s on an appropriate scale; everything seems to fit. People sitting in the back rows must have felt that they could almost reach out and touch the basemen.

  Marilyn Jenkins began playing with the Chicks in 1951, but she was only 11 years old when they climbed off the train from Milwaukee. Her father said that he knew she’d want to see them, so she’d better pay her way by going down and getting herself a job:

  “So I moseyed over and got a job picking stones out of the infield and cleaning underneath the bleachers. The place was kind of run-down at the time. Then this bat girl idea came up, and I was it. I’d come early and shine their shoes, set out equipment and bring them towels and blankets. I’d take Cokes to the locker rooms.”

  Jenkins’only pay was free admission, but it didn’t matter.

  “To me, it was the greatest honor in the whole city, and it really became part of my life. I was bat girl until I was 16. I can remember being there sometimes till late at night and was going to school the next morning. My parents didn’t mind. They were happy I was into something. Oh, but Dad had come and checked the whole thing out. He talked to Dottie Hunter and the manager, and made sure I wasn’t getting into something corrupt and naughty, whatever that might have been at the time. Then, when I was 17, I started playing. It would have been the disappointment of my life had I not become a player.”

  Meanwhile, the Blue Sox had settled into South Bend, which was dominated by Studebaker, the automobile manufacturer, and by Bendix Aviation Corporation, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of airplane parts.

  Bendix was a city within a city, a 45-acre site with paved streets, electric transportation, its own parks system and worker housing built on reclaimed marshland.

  The Bendix ballpark, however, was too far from the center of town. By 1946, the Blue Sox would move to Playland, a more convenient location that was also used for stock-car races, with the result that a cinder track ran between home plate and the bleachers.

  Fort Wayne was a little bigger than South Bend, encircled to the north by a low range of hills, to the south by rich agricultural land. Three rivers converge there, spanned by more than 20 bridges.

  Fort Wayne is said to have pioneered night ball in 1883, when a game took place, illuminated by the local company that grew up to become General Electric, between a professional team from Quincy, Illinois, and a group of students from the Episcopal college.

  God was not on the students’ side and the professionals won.

  Every All-American city had a unique ballpark. Some had a grandstand; others were simply a diamond enclosed by makeshift bleachers. The only constants were the clouds of pigeons (or gulls, down on the lakeside) and crusty reporters perched in the press box above the grandstand, smoking vile cigars. There was an intimacy to the proceedings, a vulnerability to the elements.

  Kenosha’s stadium, although it occupied a scenic location on the shores of Lake Michigan, was prone to damp and fog.

  Lib Mahon, who came from South Carolina, grumbles at her memories of miserable spring weather.

  “We damn near froze to death,” she says. “I remember it snowed once in June, and again in September. We were in the play-offs, and this spritz of snow was coming down.”

  Often, according to Lou Arnold, “You could see your breath out there. Here we were in these short skirts, and the fog would roll in.” The fog not only intensified the cold, it enabled players to pull a disappearing act.

  Shirley Jameson, the petite center-fielder, was usually the first to vanish in the murk. “All you could see of her,” says Dorothy Schroeder, “was from about her ankles on down.”

  But every park had its drawbacks and charms, its detractors and adherents.

  Doris Satterfield thought that Grand Rapids’ was the best: “We’d take our infield practice, and I’d see somebody in the stands, and they’d wave and say Hi, so I’d go over and talk to them. You got to know each other real well. You couldn’t do that with 40 or 50 thousand people.”

  Connie Wisniewski agrees: “I loved it. The people were so nice I’m surprised my head didn’t get as big as a balloon. They recognized us everyplace; they knew you when you went to mass at church. If you stopped at a restaura
nt, they made sure you had good seats. No matter what you did, it was ‘Hey, there go the Chicks.’ We never got that in Detroit of Milwaukee.”

  They never got home cooking in Detroit or Milwaukee either, Every year, the All-Americans settled into their home-city accommodations, vetted by the chaperons. Some were commercial rooming houses, respectable but impersonal. Others belonged to local families, who over the years became almost surrogate parents.

  In South Bend, the Blue Sox established a second clubhouse at Arnold and Nadine Bauer’s.

  Arnie Bauer worked at Bendix and was involved with the company’s softball teams along with Ed Deslauriers, who became the Blue Sox business manager. Bendix was to prove a sort of recruiting ground.

  Another worker, Norris “Gadget” Ward, became the All-American’s chief umpire. Ward, at first, would have nothing to do with girls’ baseball. The League had taken over the field that the Bendix men’s team used, putting Ward in a two-year snit. It was Max Carey who finally convinced him to help umpire one or two League games. And once he saw them play, he was hooked.

  When the Blue Sox came to town, the Bauers were in their early 30s, with two young children. They started taking in two or three players every season, and Arnie volunteered, first as ticket-taker at the games, then as self-appointed social director.

  “We’d put on a buffet supper after the Saturday game, for the Sox and the visiting team, if they wanted to come. Most of the time they did. Everyone would sit around on the floor or whatever chairs were available. And, by golly, you never heard such a bunch of magpies. I fixed all the stuff before the game and had it ready for them when they arrived. I started off with potato salad and beans. Of course, this was during rationing, but I managed to get meat, too. I knew the butcher.”

  These impromptu feasts weren’t confined to the players. Club officials and the odd fan appeared as well.

  “And believe it or not,” says Arnie, “there’d be policemen come. They’d drop by, have a bite to eat and rehash the game. Then they’d take off in the squad car. We had one on a motorcycle who’d come by pretty near any chance he had.”

  Dorothy Schroeder didn’t room regularly with the Bauers, but she wound up at their place the season she was spiked and couldn’t play.

  “They took me in and took care of me,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to walk, so Arnie carried me up and down the steps, all the time I was recuperating.”

  The pretty, pigtailed Schroeder brought out people’s parental instincts. In Fort Wayne, where she was later traded, the fans treated her and the Daisies “just like we were royalty.”

  She remembers two brothers named Elmer and Arnold Marhenky, who invited the Daisies to their farm. “They were old bachelors, I suppose in their early 50s, and they were so generous. They would invite us over for Sunday dinner, and they were great cooks.” And great fans as well. They kept scrapbooks of the teams achievements.

  Today in her home in Champaign, Illinois, Schroeder has a table lamp crafted by the Marhenkys. It features an actual All-American bat, standing on its tip, with a groove on the base for a regulation ball.

  These and other homes struck reassuringly familiar chords for the young and homesick.

  In Kenosha, rookie Christine Jewett from Saskatchewan would later room with three of her teammates in one of the neat, ordered neighborhoods not far from the park. Her house was on the lakefront and afforded a view of passing freighters.

  “The woman’s name was Mrs. McCann,” she says. “She’d had teachers staying there for years. When they left for the summer, we moved in. She was a wonderful old woman, probably about 65 or 70. Every once in a while, you’d come in and she’d holler at you, and you’d have to go back into her kitchen. Maybe she’d been baking something, and she’d make a cup of tea or coffee and have fancy buns. We’d sit and chat. She was always interested in us. We could come and go anytime. The front door was never locked.”

  Jewett was in luck, and managed to keep her home sickness at bay. Except for the passing freighters, Mrs. McCann’s was a good deal like small-town Saskatchewan.

  But not every player needed or wanted surrogate parents baking them fancy buns. Older or married All-Americans tended to set up housekeeping among themselves.

  Bonnie Baker shared an apartment above a Rockford doctor’s office with several of her teammates. Some players wanted merely to be left alone – impossible, when prowling chaperons were on the watch.

  Snooky Harrell, who had managed to secure a car of her own, remembers that Dottie Green summoned her to the club office one morning to inquire where she’d been at 12:30 the previous night. Harrell replied that she had been home, and wondered why Green thought otherwise.

  “Well,” said Green, “your car wasn’t in front of the house.” Harrell, who had found a garage down the street in which to park her car, was not amused at the prospect of being monitored in the small hours.

  When Pepper Paire heard the story, she could only be thankful that the assiduous Green was not responsible for checking up on her. Pepper lived near a cemetery, where she hosted late-night get-togethers amid the tombstones. She would provide a six-pack of beer and roam the grounds (“being careful not to step on the graves”) debating issues of the moment with visiting players and talking to the departed. Paire’s favorite conversation piece was a memorial to Mrs. Murphy, whose spirit became the recipient of her innermost confidences.

  Exchanges between team members and their benefactors could sometimes be a bit labored.

  Arleene Johnson remembers that being a Canadian proved useful when conversation lagged: “This seemed to be something they were interested in. We’d talk about the weather, the snow. They thought I was living with the Eskimos. They wanted to know what I did in the off-season. I curled, but it was hard to explain what that was unless you could demonstrate. It wasn’t enough to say you threw a rock.”

  The League played up the stereotypes if it got them publicity. One year, they issued a news release about a Canadian player mushing by dogsled from her North Saskatchewan home to the railhead in Saskatoon to catch the train south. Newspapers ran it without a hint of tongue-in-cheek.

  Boosting the clubs had become a fashionable exercise for the civic-minded. The local elite helped raise money and bought the more expensive box seats for the season. It was considered chic to dine at the country club, then stroll on down to the park.

  Once, during a period of high unemployment and lower than usual attendance, Dottie Ferguson’s husband suggested that the ticket price be reduced to draw more crowds. The assembled worthies looked at him askance. Such a course, they said, might attract “the wrong sort of people.”

  The right sort of people stretched the players’ social skills with a non-stop round of lunches, picnics and barbecues. This is where Charm School lessons came in handy. The country club may have served up potato salad, too, but there were more forks to wrestle with.

  These contacts broadened the players’ horizons. Gabby Ziegler, the Chicks’ captain and morale mainstay, clearly recalls a frigid day when the team was invited to someone’s home for a swim. The players wisely declined, leaving their hosts at loose ends, till someone else suggested a round of golf.

  It was a game that Ziegler had no fondness for, but it was the stock invitation, since most of the teams’ male supporters spent half their leisure hours on the golf course. To overcome her resistance, a local sports equipment salesman offered to sell Ziegler and her teammates cheap starter sets of clubs.

  Armed with the right equipment, they soon became converts and hit the links most mornings. (“At least, whenever Johnny Rawlings wasn’t mad at us and called a practice,” recalls Ziegler. “If we lost a game, he’d say, ‘No golf tomorrow.’ But I played golf more and more, and later I just got crazy about the game.”)

  If all this sounds like Norman Rockwell America, that’s because it was. The League lasted as long as it did, weathering good times and bad, only by means of solid local support. The team backers toil
ed ceaselessly to ensure that such support was forthcoming, and that it was merited.

  They believed in the All-American’s founding premises; Wrigley’s initial pitch still rang true. Anything that fostered pride was good for the community and good for them. Which is why they meddled and made mistakes, and landed out of their depth in something that had never been tried before.

  Each year, weeks or months in advance of the players’ arrival, the backers began meeting in the club’s offices, usually provided free of charge by the principal hotel. They set the agenda for the welcoming ceremony, wrote the mayor’s remarks and decided on a program for the opening game. You can see in their faces, in the stiffly posed photographs that record their contacts with the players, that they took these duties very seriously indeed.

  Each club had a board, made up of eight or 10 men, which hired a business manager and office staff, negotiated with the team manager, made sure the chaperon was in place and the ballpark in order. It would decide whether to increase seating or make it a touch more comfortable, whether to upgrade the dugouts, locker rooms and showers, the scoreboard and the press box.

  The board members were used to such decisions. They were men of substance, men who had invested their money and time in the All-American’s future, men with useful networks of friends and business associates who could be persuaded to lend a hand.

  The reason for their involvement varied.

  Judge Edward Ruetz, president of the Kenosha Comets for many years, was chiefly concerned with the rising incidence of juvenile delinquency. Nate Harkness, president of the Grand Rapids Chicks, also headed the local Chamber of Commerce, sat on the board of the Kent County Family Service and was a member of half a dozen clubs. J.L. “Hans” Mueller, Fort Wayne’s president, oversaw the city’s baseball association.

  None of these men was inclined to sit back and see if the All-American would work. They were determined to make it work, to get their hands dirty if the occasion demanded.

  One night, in the midst of “a fearsome downpour,” Ed Deslauriers and the entire South Bend board rushed to the ballpark, “even those who were dressed in good clothes, grabbed shovels and worked all night digging trenches to drain the water away from the infield,” so that the next day’s game could take place on schedule.