Girls of Summer: In Their Own League

by Browne, Lois

  The clubs, who had to contribute to the cost of these games, thought them a waste of time. Meyerhoff disagreed. It was the way to enlarge the talent pool, to attract attention. Very few prospective recruits had the ability to attend spring training on their own. The League had to go to them.

  Sometimes a player would be spotted in the pre-game tryouts and sent directly to Chicago for assignment to a team. More commonly, they were invited to spring training the following year.

  In 1946, the League elected once more to shrink the ball, this time to 11 inches. The previous year, after a wave of no-hit, no-run games that led the organizers to conclude that pitchers were too much in control, the pitching distance had been increased by two feet.

  Not content with these modifications, the All-American then decided to move away from softball’s underhand pitch. In 1946, it allowed for the first time a modified side arm delivery. Suddenly, the pitcher’s repertoire was increased. She could develop a fastball, a curve or a sinker. This was an interim measure that would lead two seasons later to an exclusively overhand throw.

  The press reported public reaction. “There are two schools of thought on the subject,” said Dick Day, the sports editor of the Rockford Register-Republic. “One group contends that the girls’ League is ready now to make a clean break with the past, discard the traditional underhand pitch of softball entirely and adopt overhand or sidearm delivery. Others take an exact opposite view. They hold to the theory that overhand pitching of steady quality is a virtual impossibility with women, and that the fans don’t want it.”

  Day’s comments stemmed from an interview he’d held in Pascagoula with Johnny Gottselig.

  “Back in 1943, when this League was formed,” Gottselig told him, “pitching was no problem. Amateur softball leagues had an abundance of good twirlers eager to turn pro. But times have changed. The League has advanced to the stage where not many stars from the softball ranks can move right in with the regulars. There just aren’t enough top-flight pitchers in the softball ranks to meet our requirements anymore.”

  This shortage had not escaped the notice of Gottselig’s protégée, Bonnie Baker. In between persuading Maury that her future lay with the All-American, she had touched base with her former manager in Regina: “I asked him, ‘Where are all the softball players? I can remember when they used to be falling off the end of the bench.’ He told me that he was having to steal players from other teams.”

  But it was the same story everywhere. Tiby Eisen had found the previous winter that softball was no longer the sport of choice in Los Angeles; the decline in softball’s popularity had begun. Now that the war was over, there were far more interesting things for people to do; they certainly didn’t start to play sandlot baseball.

  The softball leagues had been the All-American’s farm system. But the more that Meyerhoff and Carey shifted the rules of play toward baseball, the longer it took to train a recruit, who might or might not succeed. If she didn’t there was nowhere for her to go. A club couldn’t send its rookies down to the minors for a bit more experience. It was do or die, in front of everyone.

  But the All-American pressed ahead anyway. The real question – where were all the sidearm or overhand pitchers going to come from, given that there weren’t enough underhanders to go around? – was shuffled aside.

  Most of the League’s pitchers attempted to adapt. Throwing the smaller ball with a sidearm motion increased their speed, but it forced them to use their bodies in a different way.

  Jean Faut, who pitched for South Bend, didn’t like the sidearm at first, but with a strong arm and a good curve, she held her own.

  Umpire Gadget Ward one day challenged her during batting practice. “I can’t understand why these girls can’t hit you,” he said. “I can hit you.” Faut accepted his challenge and took the mound. Ward grabbed a bat, stepped into the box and succeeded only in embarrassing himself for five minutes straight.

  “Afterward,” said Faut, “he still couldn’t understand why he couldn’t hit me.”

  But Faut was an extraordinary pitcher, one of the All-American’s best. Other pitchers, including Janet Perkins, couldn’t handle even the modified sidearm. She had been drafted by the Kenosha Comets, but 1946 was her first and final year. She wasn’t all that happy.

  The punishing whirlwind of baseball and travel, more baseball and more travel, didn’t leave much time for a personal life.

  “I wasn’t going to wreck my arm,” she says, “’cause I knew I wasn’t going to be there that long.” Perkins packed it in and returned to Saskatchewan. Nor was Perkins alone.

  Carolyn Morris, a beautiful woman from Arizona with an outstanding windmill delivery, pitched her last game in 1946. Rather than imperil her throwing arm, she returned to the sunbelt softball leagues.

  Others saw the sidearm as a hurdle to overcome. Joanne Winter, a player since 1943, had enjoyed only modest success, losing as many games as she won. She’d had very little in the way of formal training, having picked up her skills from watching other players.

  “I often wonder what I really looked like,” she says. “I put all kinds of stuff on the ball – I invented my own way of turning it – but I wasn’t sophisticated or good enough, and struggled along.” After the 1944 season, she had confided her unhappiness to the man who’d encouraged her – her father. She wrote to him, saying that she might not be cut out for pitching duties.

  Her father disagreed and sent her in the off-season to a well-known pitcher in Phoenix, Arizona, named Kuhn Rosen. To her surprise, Winter found that he favored the wrist-ball style she’d seen practiced by Canadian Nicky Fox (the former Helen Nicol) who threw for Kenosha.

  “And Nicky was absolutely tremendous. She could make it take off – she had a great rise ball. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can do that, too.’ And I tried it, but it didn’t fit me.” In fact, Winter sank during 1945 to an all-time low, losing 22 games (11 of them by a single run) and winning only seven.

  But Winter persisted. She returned to Phoenix, this time to the tutelage of Knolly Trujillo, who favored a slingshot delivery – an underhand throw with minimal windup. Trujillo worked at the local fire department, and Winter went down there every day and pitched, while her father watched.

  “I took a look at what Trujillo had, and I thought, ‘This is neat,’ so I changed to a slingshot. That fit me, just half of a windmill. By golly, I remember the first time I made that thing hop, and the catcher said, ‘That’s it!’ So now I had something different. It was so different that when I went back to the league, I turned myself around.”

  Winter would tie with Connie Wisniewski, in 1946 for the all-time League season record of 33 wins.

  Other changes were afoot. In 1946, the League expanded to include the Muskegon Lassies, managed by Ralph “Buzz” Boyle, and the Peoria Redwings, who started off under the direction of Bill “Raw Meat” Rodgers. Rodgers was hastily replaced by Johnny Gottselig, who would eventually manage four teams in the All-American.

  Muskegon was an industrial and shipping center, with a population of roughly 45,000, but it had an excellent ballpark called Marsh Field, which the Lassies shared with the city’s Triple-A men’s team.

  Peoria, Illinois’ second-largest city, was something else again. A Saturday Evening Post article commented on its contradictions: “An abundance of churches and an abundance of saloons, a highly-developed civic consciousness and a long and odorous history of gambling and sin dens.” Bumper corn crops from the surrounding countryside had long been parlayed into a brisk distilling business.

  Peoria produced more hard liquor than any other American city. Nor had Prohibition fazed it unduly. Other industries helped it weather the dry spell, and when booze was legalized again, the distilleries picked up steam. As a result, it contained several wealthy areas, located on high bluffs overlooking the Illinois River – the home of such personalities as Faye Dancer’s admiring mobster.

  With two new centers in the League, two new teams had to be cr
eated. But with the difficulties in recruiting new players starting to mount, clubs once more looked to allocation as the best source of good players.

  Pepper Paire was one of the first to be moved in 1946. She interpreted her trade as a plan to plunder the powerful Fort Wayne Daisies, who had nearly won the championship their first year out.

  Paire liked Fort Wayne and didn’t want to be traded: “I had been with the team for two years (counting its incarnation as the Minneapolis Millerettes). We felt we were going to win everything this time out.” But it was not to be.

  The Rockford Peaches were due to see their ranks depleted as well. Dick Day reported from Pascagoula that a rival club’s director had told him, “Well, we certainly have got to break up the Peaches…they’re too strong for the rest of the League.” And sure enough, Bill Allington saw two of his most experienced players snatched away.

  Some players, as usual, were bewildered and hurt. They looked for hidden motives in their trades. One claims to have been shuffled off the week after she ran into her manager at a secluded restaurant in the company of a woman who was not his wife. For the most part, though, it was simply Carey and Meyerhoff playing mix-and-match to maintain something resembling equal strength, to make sure that no one club remained perpetually on top or languished forever in the doldrums.

  Nor was the Chicago League inactive. It continued to lure malcontent All-Americans with inflated salary offers, forcing Carey and Meyerhoff to attempt a truce. In 1946, they reached a verbal agreement with the Chicago owners, pledging not to raid each other’s players but agreeing that any player released by one league was fair game for the other.

  Meyerhoff knew it wouldn’t last. “The stronger the Chicago League becomes,” he wrote, “the more of a threat they are. The working agreement wouldn’t last a minute if they thought they could get our girls. It is only because we occupy a stronger position that they are interested in an agreement at all.”

  What was the All-American’s allegedly stronger position? Setting aside salaries, the All-American was a classier act. With Wrigley at the helm, players had traveled in extreme comfort. They stayed in quality hotels and were featured in national magazines. Household names came to see them play. The All-American may have been finding it difficult to resolve its problems, but it was still “the glamour loop” to its players.

  The season began, amid the customary rash of injuries, Every spring, pulled tendons and broken bones plunged effective teams into a tailspin that depressed both players and fans and set the club directors off in anxious pursuit of suitable replacements.

  Given the chronic shortage of new blood, a lot of the All-Americans played hurt. Their mishaps were standard issue – broken fingers for the catcher, ankle sprains, spike wounds and torn knee ligaments for the runners. Experienced managers became skilled at stop-gap measures.

  During one game, Dottie Ferguson jarred her leg while sliding home. Within minutes, her foot and ankle began to swell.

  “So Bill Allington took me into the clubhouse and told the groundskeeper to get a pail of hot water and another of ice water,” she says. “He dipped my foot first in one, then in the other. Then he told me to put my shoe back on and run on the track. I did, and the next day I played ball.”

  Catchers were vulnerable. Pepper Paire broke a finger when a foul tip hit her in the course of an exhibition game. The doctor applied an enormous “bird-cage” splint, but Johnny Rawlings exchanged it for a couple of popsicle sticks the following day.

  “We opened against South Bend,” she says, “and they’d heard I was hurt, but it just looked like I had a band aid on. They kept passing me on the bench, saying, ‘Hear you’ve been hurt.’ I just say, ‘Naw, it’s nothing.’ They had a lot of fast runners – Bonnie Baker, Senaida “Shoo Shoo” Wirth and Charlene “Shorty” Pryer. They were all set to run against me,” knowing that with her finger taped straight out, the ball she threw would probably sail into the outfield.

  “Bonnie got on first base and took off for second. To this day I don’t know how I did it, but I threw her out. Next up was Wirth, and it was the same thing all over again. Of course it was painful. All year it was painful. That’s why today I can point three ways at once.”

  Later, in the midst of a crucial play-off, Paire twisted her ankle and played the final seven games with her foot taped and frozen: “I had to wear my coach’s shoe, that’s how bad it was swollen.”

  As for Bonnie Baker, she was knocked unconscious for 10 minutes as a result of falling into the dugout in pursuit of a foul ball, then had her hand broken not once but twice when struck by a batter. Both times she was called for interference. The first time put her out for the rest of the season. The second time was only a hairline fracture, and she continued to catch with her hand taped and the mitt packed with extra sponge padding. By season’s end, the fracture had become a full-fledged break.

  The head injuries were the most frightening.

  Dorothy Hunter’s first and only season as a player was notable for a brushback from Olive Bend Little (her best friend, but that didn’t count in the heat of combat).

  “It was the first time she pitched against me,” says Hunter, “but she knew very well I was a sucker for a high inside ball. She got me right in the side of the face and I went down like a ton of bricks. It knocked me silly and I was in tears, but I got to first base.” Little was so shaken by the incident that she walked the next three batters, giving Hunter a walk home.

  Sometimes, of course, the brushbacks were intentional – a matter of retaliation.

  Dolly Tesseine, who played with both the Lassies and Chicks explains, “We played a pretty rough game. I was at shortstop when Gabby Ziegler spiked me coming into second. Ziggy was about as aggressive a player as there was. I said to her, ‘Next time you do that, I’m going to jam the ball down your throat.’ When I came to bat, she threw at my head – Ziggy was a pitcher then. She put me on the ground. But when she came up, our pitcher fired for her head. Nobody got hurt and that was that.”

  And no apologies, either – but excitement usually overruled remorse.

  Once, Dottie Ferguson, at second base, took a throw from the shortstop, looked around and saw that a runner was coming in from first standing up.

  “I stepped on the bag and started to throw to first for a double play. I figured that the gal would duck, but she didn’t, and I got her right in the forehead. It didn’t knock her out for very long, and I thought, ‘Well, I couldn’t have had much on that throw.’ Isn’t that awful? But you didn’t come into base standing up unless you were asking to be killed.”

  The All-American’s famous “strawberries” were unique. Players went into battle with 20 inches of unprotected flesh between knee and upper thigh. In theory, runners ought to sink into their slides at the last moment, avoiding a long and painful scrape along the ground. Actually, they slid in whatever way the situation demanded.

  Base paths were supposed to be sand, but after a couple of innings they were down to hard, unyielding dirt – or in some cases, cinder. As a result, the most aggressive runners spent all season with one or both legs a mass of wounds that never had time to mend or scab over.

  The League provided them with sliding pads – bulky efforts rather like surgical dressings that were supposed to be taped to their legs. But these kept coming off. Besides, players thought they looked disconcertingly like a Kotex pad hanging down from under their skirts.

  Several chaperons experimented with makeshift remedies, including “doughnuts” made from rolled-up towels, but these too came unstuck almost immediately, and looked even worse. No wonder the players returned home covered with scar tissue. No wonder that the managers couldn’t bear to watch them slide. Playing in the All-American qualified its players for the Purple Heart.

  In what little leisure time they had available, the players’ enthusiasms were typical. Music was big, with allegiance split between Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.

  Tiby Eisen spent time experimenting with
novel hairdos; her teammates could count on a free home permanent. She was also adept at jitterbugging and liked to enter competitions in the off-season.

  Dottie Kamenshek was a crossword-puzzle addict.

  The wild-at-heart Faye Dancer waited eagerly for the newest Tarzan movie starring Johnny Weismuller.

  These were the pastimes that fans could read about in their local papers.

  Other hobbies were not so well-publicized. Many players liked to gamble. Poker was the card game of choice, although the aisle of a bus on an overnight trip was the perfect venue for craps. In the hotel room after bed check, players would bring out the cards, and money changed hands until dawn broke.

  Bonnie Baker was a dab hand at poker. She dealt the cards at every turn, with such card-sharks as Lib Mahon, Lil Faralla, Twi Shively and Ruth Williams.

  Daisy Junor played, too, but always heeded Baker’s warning when the stakes got rarefied: “She’d say, ‘Get out,’ and I did. She could clean their clocks in no time.”

  Junor remembers. Lou Arnold, who didn’t play, says of Baker: “She used to come on that bus, looking like a movie star, and she’d sit there with a Coke in one hand and her cards in the other and the sweat would be coming down her face.”

  The Coke bottle became Baker’s trademark. “I drank 24 bottles a day,” she says. “Hot, cold, lukewarm, whatever. I went to bed with one on my night table and got up in the morning and drank it.” So pressing was this addiction that Chet Grant, the Blue Sox’ newly appointed manager, allowed her to bring a supply into the dugout, in flagrant violation of the rules.

  Baker had competition on the card-shark circuit.

  In Grand Rapids, Mildred Earp led a hard-core group of poker fanatics.

  Dottie Hunter, the chaperon, saw this as a disruptive trend: “The kids would get paid and then lose a whole cheque in a game. So one of them was stupid enough to come to me and say, ‘Gee, Dottie, I don’t have any money. Could you loan me some?’ So I asked what happened, and she told me she’d lost it all in a card game. That did it right there. I cut out all poker games, on the road, anyway. What they did at home I don’t know, but nobody ever came and told me they lost their money after that. But these young kids could be talked into anything, you know, so you had to watch them like a hawk.”