by Browne, Lois
To Winter’s relief, Meyerhoff accepted the criticism and coughed up an additional daily meal allowance.
Multiplied by 170 players and the three weeks remaining in Havana, this dramatically inflated spring training’s final cost. Money was becoming a sore point between the clubs and League officials, whom individual teams would accuse of high living on foreign shores and capitulation to cosseted hired help. But the clubs were wrong.
Havana was cheap compared to other training venues. The entire trip, even counting the air fare, cost less than had Pascagoula, or would Opa-Locka, Florida, the following year.
By all accounts, opening night at the Gran Stadium de Havana was something to behold. The weather was perfect, with a cooling breeze off the Gulf of Mexico. More than 15,000 fans jammed their way through the turnstiles – the largest crowd to ever see a girls’ baseball game. As many more would witness the three subsequent contests. The Cubans began by pointing and whistling at the unfamiliar sight, but soon grew more enthusiastic, cheering every play.
The All-Americans quickly became used to the aggressive interest of the Latin American men, who welcomed the young and more liberated North Americans. Players were warned not to venture out alone. If they got on a public bus, they’d be pinched. Kissing noises followed them down the street.
“But there was something about the atmosphere down there,” Moore admits. “It just made you feel that you’d like to skip and dance.”
Or hire a translator. Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), a couple of the players spoke Spanish – a fact they kept from their hosts. One of them, Marge Villa, provided a running translation of many encounters.
Dorothy Schroeder and her teammates (several of whom were blonde) were taken on a factory tour. “People down there are all dark-eyed and dark-haired. When they see a blonde, you better watch out. So we were in the factory, and Marge was with us. The workers were making comments about the ‘gringas’ and she understood it all. When we got back to the hotel, she told us they were saying things like ‘Look at the rear end on that one,’ and then they’d smile and we thought they were being real nice.”
The players also received a crash course in Cuban politics.
Spring training ran through May 1, International Workers’ Day, a traditional excuse for a boisterous parade. In 1947 Cuba, however, the occasion provided a focus for growing anti-Batista sentiment. On May Day eve, military authorities advised the League to keep its people indoors, and the players were issued emergency rations.
As it turned out, the Saville-Biltmore made an excellent vantage point for the parade. Players were able to augment their food supply by lowering baskets of money to the street vendors below (some of it disappeared). On the rooftop, where many players gathered to watch, they could see the rooftops opposite, guarded by soldiers with machine guns.
May Day passed without serious incident, but the players’ presence in the hotel made for a spectacle all its own. Cuban men lurked lewdly around, hoping to catch a glimpse of them.
Daisy Junor retains a memory of admirers “in white Panama suits, who’d sit in little alcoves across the street, masturbating and watching us. Then the police would come with their billy clubs. They’d bang them on the cement and the guys would scatter. But after the police left, they’d be back. We went down to the front desk to report them, and the hotel staff told us, ‘Well, don’t look.’ ”
The League had decided that Havana’s vibrant nightclub scene was strictly off-limits. Indeed, venturing out after dark was frowned upon, except when heavily chaperoned. This did not deter the unsinkable Faye Dancer, who managed to find her way to a cemetery, where the practice was to exhume corpses after the coffins disintegrated. Dancer – a blonde – amazed her teammates by launching into an “Alas, poor Yorick” soliloquy, addressed to a handy skull.
Dancer was not alone in bending the rules. Betty Tucker and several daring cohorts decided to accept an invitation from two university students who’d come to watch them practice: “They were really good-lookin’ fellas. They said they’d take us around and show us some of the sights. So we thought, ‘There’s two of them and four of us. That’s OK.’ ”
The illicit date can best be described as Andy Hardy’s Sisters Meet Casanova’s Illegitimate Sons. At one point on the tour of Havana hot spots, they were approached by a man “with an itty-bitty mustache.”
One of the students warned them against such men. “They’re all gigolos,” he said. But, as the evening wore on, with an even seedier club on the agenda, the players were unnerved to find that they were now being squired by four young men, one of whom sported that very sort of mustache.
Things looked darker still when the students suggested splitting up into two cars.
“Well,” says Tucker, “we went to this next club, a downstairs place, and I said, ‘Be sure if we have a drink it’s just Coca-Cola in a bottle, so they can’t put anything in it.’ Then we were dancing for a while, and Maggie [the bilingual Marge Villa] comes over and says, ‘This guy is terrible. He’s kissing me on the neck.’ And I say, ‘Mine’s singing.’ So we told them we had to get back for curfew. They asked us out for the following night, and Maggie didn’t want to, but I thought if we refused, they might not take us back to the hotel. So I said, ‘Sure, fine,’ and meanwhile I’m winking at Maggie, and one of the guys is asking me why I’m making faces, and I tell him I have a nervous condition. We laughed about it a lot, but we swore we’d never do that again.”
The 1947 season was distinguished by the absence of Bill Allington, who remained in California, unable to get time off from his job at Twentieth-Century Fox. This suited Dorothy Harrell, who had decided that she “couldn’t stand listening to him.” Now she settled in to cope with the two interim managers Bill Edwards and Eddie Ainsmith, whose combined efforts would produce a sixth-place showing for the team.
Those players who could abide Allington’s presence yearned for his return. The only thing that Edwards and Ainsmith succeeded in doing was to turn Dorothy Ferguson into an outfielder.
“We were playing in Racine,” she says “and Lois Florreich and Snooky Harrell and Dottie Kamenshek said, ‘Come out and eat with us.’ So we were all sitting there with the manager, and suddenly one of them said, ‘Dottie, how would you like to play in the outfield?’ I thought, ‘This was all planned – I know it.’ So the next night I was in center field. I thought I was being demoted, but once I got out there, you couldn’t get me back. When I had been at second, I couldn’t ease up. I’d throw too hard, no matter what the distance. Now I had room. Boy, did I have room. I covered right, left and second base. You should have seen me run.”
In Peoria, meanwhile, the players were mounting a revolt, led by Faye Dancer. Midway through the season, having touched bottom in the standings, they blamed Johnny Gottselig, who according to Dancer, “had got to the point where he didn’t even care about the team anymore.”
After a game in Kenosha, someone was delegated to call a Redwings board member and demand a meeting. When the team arrived back home, they marched to the stadium and convened a gathering involving most of the players, the board of directors, and a startled Gottselig.
The players listed their many grievances, while Gottselig sat in silence. After which, says Dancer, “the board fired him then and there,” replacing him with Leo Schrall. It wasn’t, however, the last time Gottselig was to manage a League team.
The world outside the League’s ballparks was changing daily. Most of the servicemen were back, standing in line for a finite number of jobs. The end of gas rationing and travel restrictions meant that fans could and did go to Chicago or Milwaukee to watch the major-leaguers. The home-field bleachers began to lose their allure.
Some players, aware of these developments, decided it was high time to make their mark as entrepreneurs. Connie Wisniewski and Doris Satterfield opened The Chicks Dugout, a hole-in-the-wall burger joint. After the last picture show, Grand Rapids moviegoers from the theater down t
he street dropped by for a late-night hotdog or a hamburger and fries.
Wisniewski was a quick study, learning her short-order skills from the landlord, who also owned a drugstore and soda fountain: “He showed me how to make these things. I probably had about two evenings’ training.” This venture was an off-season job; obviously you couldn’t superintend a hot stove while playing 120-odd games of baseball. But it was successful, and the partners eventually sold it for a profit.
Meanwhile, in Racine, Joanne Winter had a similar idea. “I figured I’d arrived,” she says, “and I thought I’d capitalize on my name.” Her father advised her to investigate the candy business, and she took his advice, with Mildred Wilson, the chaperon, as her partner.
Wisconsin abounds in German candy-makers. Winter and Wilson made the rounds and settled on Barkdall’s in Milwaukee, considered by chocolate connoisseurs to be the nation’s best. Barkdall had a long-standing rule; he only sold direct from his factory. But, impressed by the businesslike Belles, “he sold us two boxes of vanilla creams and that was our start.”
“He got to like us, and we plagued him, and he started selling us anything we wanted. We used his creams and chocolate-covered cherries. Then we got Louis’s chocolate-covered nuts from Kenosha. We called the shop ‘Joanne Winter, A Finer Candy.’ It was tiny, just 45 square feet, right on the main street. We didn’t mind telling people where we got our stock. After all, it was excellent, from these champion candy-makers.”
Winter eventually dared to make some stock herself, including divinity and peanut brittle, while her father made the fudge. “It was a lot of hard work,” she says, “but when you’re not afraid of that, it’s a lot of fun.”
This agreeable enterprise lasted until 1951, when Mildred Wilson succumbed to the attentions of a doctor who rented offices in the same building.
“I used to tell people I lost the shop in a poker game,” says Winter, “but we just folded it up when Mildred got married.”
Meanwhile, the League was pursuing its latest rule change.
This season saw the introduction of a full, as opposed to modified, sidearm delivery. It wasn’t mandatory; you could still throw underhand if you wanted.
“But” says Winter, “it behooved you to throw as hard and as fast as you could, with as much stuff on it as possible. They kept pushing the distance back, too, so it got tougher and tougher.”
Tough or not, Winter threw well, winning almost as many games as Mildred Earp, the 1947’s leading pitcher.
Connie Wisniewski converted, too, biting her lip against the pain.
“But my ball would sail,” she says. “It would just take off – the catcher couldn’t catch it, I threw it so hard.” Her best seasons had been 1945 and 1946; both years she’d won the pitching championship. But in 1947, she found that she “simply couldn’t do it. It hurt my arm every time. But if I threw underhand, I couldn’t expect to compete with the sidearmers.” That was the problem – the more variety in your grab-bag of pitches, the more advantage you had.
In 1947, Wisniewski won a mere 16 games, losing almost as many – a bitter blow.
“I think the hardest thing for me was the first time I was taken out of the game,” she says. “The manager would come out and ask me if I thought I could do it. I’d say ‘If you think you’ve got somebody better, put ‘em in. But if you’re asking me if I’m ready to come out, then no, I’m not.’ But I know Millie Earp and Alice Haylett saved a couple of games for me. If I’d stayed in, we’d have lost.”
That knowledge – that she couldn’t deliver her best – hurt Wisniewski the most.
So fortunes ebbed and flowed.
In the course of a crucial play-off game, Tex Lessing, the Grand Rapids catcher, made headlines by going after an umpire. Lessing was accurately described by Dottie Hunter as “cute as a bug’s ear.” This did not diminish her fighting spirit.
The Chicks were locked in an eighth-inning 2-2 tie with Racine. The bases were loaded, and a runner was about to be sacrificed home by Choo Choo Hickson. The play was close, but the official called it safe.
“In a split second,” said a captivated newspaper reporter, “Lessing pounced on the umpire George Johnson with both hands flying and slugged him so hard in the eye and face that he staggered back under the attack, so dizzy he was unable to continue working behind the plate.”
Lessing was, (not surprisingly) booted out of what remained of the game, and considered herself lucky to escape without a suspension. The Belles, their morale boosted by the win, went on to capture the championship, and Johnson’s fellow officials opted for leniency. Play-off pressure, they said, might get to anyone.
Lessing was fined $100 – a punishment blunted when Grand Rapids fans raised $2,000 on her behalf, in payment for granting their fondest wish at last.
1948 The Last Ascending Season
Somewhere, way off in the world of big-league baseball, Joe Dimaggio was signed by the New York Yankees for $65,000 and bonuses. The Cleveland Indians paid $87,000 for ace pitcher Bob Feller. The weekly budget for an entire All-American team was $4,000.
DiMaggio and Feller went to the bank; the All-Americans went to Opa-Locka, Florida.
Its ball field – a change, at least, from the rigors of Pascagoula, though a slight come down from 15,000 frenzied Cubans – showed signs of recent manicuring. The players faced Johnny Rawlings, sprung for the occasion from his duties with the Grand Rapids Chicks and ready to lead them through their first exercise of the day.
Already their faces felt the warmth of the Florida sun. Most players had smeared white zinc paste on their noses, hoping to protect against blisters. Before the week was out, many would have their first sunburn of the season.
They had left Chicago’s Union Station in the middle of a snowstorm. The rookies, having made their connections from small towns near and far, had worried that they’d get lost in its echoing depths, or miss their train. They needn’t have worried.
Even Christine Jewett, fresh from rural Saskatchewan, had no trouble finding her way.
“The station was wall-to-wall girls,” she says, “all headed for the same platform. There were two or three carloads full. I just followed the crowd.”
The train pulled into Miami well past midnight, but the players stayed up for hours in their hotels, renewing old acquaintances or cementing new ones. Now, groggy and train-lagged, they didn’t dare show the signs. Even though they had arrived late, they had to report to the field in fighting trim, sharp at 10 o’clock.
Opa-Locka, now absorbed into the sprawl of Greater Miami, was an abandoned naval air station, converted after the war to more pleasurable use. The grounds contained several playing fields, but only one was large enough to hold the 160 players, including 40 rookies.
The League was once again on the expansion trail – this time, to Springfield, Illinois, and for the first time to Chicago itself. The result was a record 10 teams, divided for the first time into two divisions, east and west. They would play the longest League schedule ever – 126 games, not including play-offs.
While Rawlings kicked off the exercise session, Max Carey stood on the sidelines conferring with League officials. These men were there to decide which of the rookies and how many veterans would be assigned to the expansion teams – the Springfield Sallies and the Chicago Colleens.
They stood side-by-side with the chaperons and a group of local club directors there to get their first look at the new crop.
A hundred players had come down on the previous night’s train. Sixty more would arrive by the week’s end, but all the pitchers and catchers were in the first wave.
They needed all the preparation time they could get, to familiarize themselves with the 1948 season’s bold new innovation, the overhand pitch.
This year, Carey was bound and determined to erase the last suspicion that girls’ baseball was still softball in disguise. For insurance, Carey had also changed everything else – the pitching distance, the baseball length and the size
of the regulation ball. Pitchers and catchers had been experimenting with these modifications over the winter months using a smaller ball sent them by the league.
Now was the time to try it out for real.
Photographers had set up tripods and heavy cameras at strategic points around the field. One newsman, anxious to gain a unique prospective, was lying flat on the ground in the path of a row of players who ran obligingly towards him. The click of cameras and the scratch of pencils on notebooks would make a steady background accompaniment to training over the next two weeks.
Carey and the officials studied the rookies with an appraising and practiced eye. The League usually rejected four out of five new players. This year, however, it was short of veterans to shuffle around and couldn’t afford to be too picky.
For the benefit of the press and the hometown fans, Carey was optimistic. “It looks as if our tryout schools are paying off,” he announced. “The time we spent culling over scouting reports is going to pay big dividends. Right at the moment, I haven’t seen more than one or two girls who will be sent back for more experience, and that is most unusual.”
In fact, much of the media attention centered not on unknown quantities, but on the return of veteran players who’d quit or taken time off in previous seasons.
The League had made an all-out push to coax retired players back into pro-ball. Some had refused to reconsider.
The All-American dispatched an emissary to Toronto in an effort to persuade Gladys “Terrie” Davis, 1943’s batting champion, to return. Traded by Jack Kloza to appease his Rockford dugout, she had bounced from the Chicks to the Muskegon Lassies, for whom she played first base in 1946.