by Browne, Lois
The next season she’d stayed in Ontario, where, despite the emissary’s urgings, she would remain.
Several married players had decided to spend more time on the home front in 1945; now, they were filtering back. Dorothy Wiltse, the Californian pitcher, (now known by her married name of Dottie Collins) was among them.
Bonnie Baker was absent from spring training yet again, but had promised to report to South Bend for opening day.
Perhaps the biggest news was that Pat Keagle, “the Blonde Bombshell,” who’d left in 1946, was coming back. Keagle had not been idle. She had kept her hand in with the Arizona Queens. She showed up in Opa-Locka “in flashy sunbelt sportswear,” but carrying 10 extra pounds.
“Sure, I’m overweight,” she said, “but I can lose that quick.” Keagle was widely popular, and her return perked everyone up.
And Allington was back with Rockford. He had settled, for the moment, his feud with Snooky Harrell. The two foes had reached an uneasy détente during the winter months, in the course of dinner at a Los Angeles restaurant.
“My mother warned me,” says Harrell. “She said, ‘He’s going to be so nice to you, and you’re going to agree to go back.’ ” And by the end of the evening, sure enough, Allington had won her over. “Then,” says Harrell, “we all went out that next Sunday to practice in Pasadena. Pepper and Faye and Tiby were there, and Allington was as snotty as ever.”
This had infuriated Harrell all over again. She wrote to the League’s business manager, asking to be placed on another team – any other team, as long as it was miles away from Allington. But her conscience began to bother her.
“I had joined church,” she says, “and felt that I should make an attempt to play for Bill again. I felt a responsibility as a Christian to try and get along with him.” During spring training, she was temporarily assigned to the Colleens, but when the final choices were made, she was back on the Rockford roster.
A combination of excitement and apprehension gripped the players. Some feared that they wouldn’t make the grade, and they were right.
Christine Jewett remembers one young recruit, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, who didn’t stay the course. “One night, when we got together for supper, she wasn’t there. Somebody said they’d told her she wasn’t going to make it, and they’d just gone ahead and made arrangements and she disappeared. I knew of two or three others like that. One by one they were told they didn’t make it, and then they’d be gone.”
By the time it got to the last day or two, most of these cuts had been made.
This year, as always, the players sweated and groaned through the tough workouts. The Californians could frolic on a beach during the off-season, but players who returned each winter to frigid climates lived more sedentary lives.
Doris Satterfield, the nursing graduate, was fitter than most, but admits that no one would have survived the season without the spring training ritual: “It was intense exercise. I know that the first year, I couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings. My legs were black and blue. We weren’t even allowed to ride an elevator. If our room was on the fifth floor, we walked up and down the stairs. Somebody dropped a quarter one night, but decided not to pick it up. She kicked it aside, saying, ‘It’s just not worth it,’ ”
By the time allocation day rolled around, the League had made its choices.
This year, the rules had been toyed with more than usual, mostly to make sure the expansion teams fielded able rosters and that pitchers were well distributed. The best teams were allowed to retain a core of eight players from the year before, but only two could be pitchers. Second ranked teams were allowed to keep nine, also with two pitchers. But no team would be assigned any additional players from the reserve pool until the Colleens and Sallies had drawn seven players each.
One sportswriter summed up the general attitude: “When the League’s own rules are not sufficient to equalize the teams, then a new rule is adopted forthwith to do the job.”
But they didn’t know the half of it. Dismay would intensify in June when there was a second, sudden reallocation based on the early-season standings.
Some players had nothing to fear from the allocation process.
Dottie Kamenshek, the Rockford Peaches’ first baseman, didn’t have much to worry about. About to start her fifth season with the League, she was generally acknowledged as its best all-round player. She was from Cincinnati, where her family had struggled through the Depression. The memory of hard times had spurred her to think about what to do when her playing days were over. She had shrewdly banked her salary and would eventually enroll in university. But she felt that she had a good many years left with the Peaches.
“I didn’t think Rockford would put me on the block,” she says, “but I could see other people being nervous,”
Dottie Hunter viewed the impending forced marches with gloom. “Everybody would be chewing their nails all night long, wondering what team they were going to,” she says. “There was a lot of unhappiness in some places.”
Hunter and the other chaperons would have to deal with it, comforting those players who had been sent against their will to other teams. Their hurt and rejection ran deeper than anyone imagined. When players were traded away from towns and teams where they had come to feel at home, they felt betrayed and abandoned.
Twi Shively had been fielding with the Brand Rapids Chicks for three years and was shocked to discover that she was being sent to the Colleens. The League had its reasons: “They told me I was picked because I had played in Chicago [with the Rockolas, a Chicago League franchise], and I would probably be a drawing card there.” She didn’t agree, and it made for bitter feelings.
Just prior to allocation day, the speculation was rife in the sports pages of the All-American cities. If Carey was intent on weakening the most outstanding teams, the Muskegon Lassies, who’d topped the 1947 standings, and the Racine Belles, who’d won the championships, had the most to fear.
Muskegon fans suspected that the rule limiting each team to two pitchers from the previous year had been designed specifically to thwart the Lassies, who had a clutch of first-rate hurlers.
Muskegon’s local newspaper, after reviewing the options, was certain that their third baseman would be kept at any cost: “A flock of local fans would howl murder if Arleene Johnson, the steady-throwing third sacker, isn’t retained.”
Johnson, from Odema, Saskatchewan (population 500), was a soft-voiced, freckle-faced girl who didn’t fit her nickname, “The Iron lady”, given to her for appearing in 224 consecutive games during 1946 and 1947. She was a tremendous favorite with the kids of Muskegon. Nevertheless, despite cries of “Murder”, Johnson was temporarily lost to the Fort Wayne Daisies (she would soon be shipped back in a reshuffle).
Grand Rapids pundits were equally certain that Connie Wisniewski would remain with the Chicks, even though her pitching days were over. In this case the pundits were right. Of the 30 players shuffled around, eight were from Grand Rapids, but Wisniewski wasn’t among them.
Nor did the League’s crop of rookies pan out exactly as hoped. By scrambling existing teams, the League had to add only 10 new faces.
One was Earlene Risinger, known as “Beans” for her beanpole-thin physique. She had read about the League the previous year and tried out in Oklahoma City, where the All-Americans played an exhibition game on the way back from Cuba. Her talent was apparent, and she’d been signed and instructed to report to the League’s Chicago office before joining the Rockford Peaches.
But she was only a teenager, and had never traveled anywhere in her life. Homesickness hit her hard. As soon as the train pulled into Union Station, she went to the ticket office and bought a seat back to Oklahoma. Far from being a tragedy, it proved a blessing in disguise.
“It was a miracle,” she says. “They were still pitching underhand and sidearm then, and I was strictly an overhand pitcher. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
She went back to picking cotton to rep
ay the money she’d borrowed to go to Chicago. In 1948, the League, undismayed by her last-minute bolt for home the previous year, sent her a recruiting letter. Risinger borrowed more money and set off again. This time she overcame her homesickness and, with her overhand talents at a premium, remained with the Grand Rapids Chicks for seven years.
The ball season that began when the players left Opa-Locka in late April was going to be played in a very different world.
Rationing had ended. No more full-page advertisements urged people to work harder, give more blood, buy more bonds. Brand-new cars, snub-nosed and sleek-backed, were once again available. The latest toy was television. And fans had fresh reasons for wanting an escape from reality. Just as war had brought sudden, radical changes, so had peace; by 1948, people were feeling the effects.
Almost all the armed forces had by now been ferried back, and hundreds of thousands of men were in search of work. Industries, with varying degrees of success, were shifting gears away from war production. A baby boom was underway. Inflation was unnerving everyone. Workers were taking to the picket lines in search of raises to cover spiraling costs. The “let’s pull together” wartime spirit had disappeared.
The League’s players made it to their team cities just a few days before a national strike deadline by railway workers, who threatened to bring almost every train in the country to a halt. President Truman had to pass legislation to forestall the strike and keep the trains running.
On the international scene, the Cold War had begun, a Middle East conflict was brewing over the creation of the state of Israel and the U.S. was testing atomic weapons on remote Pacific atolls.
Inspired by postwar change and expectations of even greater crowds, the All-American cities had been indulging in a burst of renovation of their ball fields.
The Kenosha Comets moved inland to Simmons Field, well away from the lakefront’s unstable weather.
The Blue Sox were now in Playland Park, which sat twice as many fans as had the Bendix field.
Grand Rapids had launched a $60,000 expansion of their ballpark, a fair portion of which was paid for by the Chicks, who’d been drawing 4,000 people nightly. Now there were an extra 2,000 seats, new right-field-bleachers, a raised grandstand and an enlarged outfield, which increased the chances of in-the-park triples. Players got improved dugouts and the lighting system was upgraded.
Grand Rapids could well afford these upgrades. Dottie Hunter remembers that nothing seemed impossible during the team’s heyday. “In the first years, we were so successful in this town,” she says. “We were making money hand over fist.”
But the weather was not as sunny as the team’s prospects. It was raining and cold; many fields were flooded out. The All-American circuit was not large; if it poured rain in one city, chances were that it poured rain in the rest. These delays would play havoc with the 1948 schedule.
Clubs made plans to soak their infields with gasoline and set them ablaze to burn off the moisture, in order to make the opening-day date of Sunday, May 9.
Everyone stood peering at the leaden skies.
The Midwest must have been a depressing contrast for the players arriving from the sunny south. When one of Rockford’s seven daily trains pulled into town, it carried the Peaches, looking “bronzed and in the pink of condition.” With only a day or two of enforced rest – given the fact that the playing surface was a bog – they would be ready to launch themselves on yet another season. High prices and the woes of unemployment were forgotten.
The girls of summer were back in town, and the good times could start to roll.
And so the season began, in shaky fashion.
Once again, expansion – this time to Springfield and Chicago – would almost immediately prove a costly error.
In 1944, when Minneapolis and Milwaukee folded, Wrigley had picked up the tab. This time, under the terms of their arrangement with Meyerhoff’s Management Corporation, the clubs would be jointly liable for any shortfall. They were rightly concerned that losses in the expansion cities would sabotage their own attempts at solvency.
Meyerhoff had told them that the League must expand of die. Critics, including the acerbic Dr. Dailey, argued that adding more clubs would simply increase expenses, with no guarantee that the anticipated extra revenues would be enough to cover them.
Dailey and his fellow detractors were right. By this time, it should have been obvious that an All-American franchise succeeded because of a simple formula: sound management and strong local backing in a small community.
Springfield did not qualify. The Sallies were owned by one man, James Fitzpatrick, who also owned the stadium. He had built the ballpark as a war memorial and named it for his son, who’d been killed in action overseas. But Fitzpatrick had funded it through public subscription.
The public was less than impressed to learn that they’d have to pay full fare to attend All-American games. In fact, Springfield was a last-minute choice. It had been accepted primarily to make up an even number of teams, which simplified the schedule, and balanced the long-planned entry of Chicago.
Chicago was plainly a unique situation. The League had seen the enormous potential of a franchise there since 1943. It was awash with softball teams; a baseball team should have found a home among hundreds of thousands of fans. But no such luck.
The Colleens were run by a Roman Catholic parish which hoped that the club would set a good example for urban youth. The organizers’ hearts were in the right place; the Colleens almost certainly weren’t. They were managed by Dave Bancroft, a former major-leaguer who deserved a more serious treatment from the local press than he got.
A typical newspaper feature – in the home of the toughest softballers in the country – ran thus: “To be blunt about it, ‘Banny’ was managing a girl team, and he had to consult the chaperon of his charges to find out if his pitcher felt fit (after a rather long afternoon visit to the beauty parlor) to take the mound against the Muskegon Lassies. Fortunately, the pitcher was ready and willing and looking cute, with long, fluffy hair billowing from under her green cap.”
Meyerhoff tried everything he could think of to salvage the team – including arranging television coverage of the its games, a League first (although games had been broadcast on the radio in Racine, Muskegon and Grand Rapids). The Chicago broadcasts, sponsored by the Patricia Stevens Modelling School, succeeded only in encouraging people to stay home and watch.
Wrapped in bright-red jackets, the Rockford Peaches were in the dugout waiting to start their first game of the 1948 season. They had just spent half an hour warming up. Blankets were piled high, ready to ward off the deepening chill. They’d tossed the ball around, splashed mud on their socks and got it wedged between their cleats.
Every year, the All-American season had kicked off cold and wet, but 1948 was the worst year on record. It was nearly dark, and the air threatened more rain. If they didn’t play tonight’s game, it would be the third time their home opener had been postponed.
It was the same story all around the League. Most teams had yet to play a game.
The year before, in Allington’s absence, the Peaches had fallen apart. Now “The Silver Eagle” was back, raising both hopes and hackles in Rockford: hopes that his winning-is-everything style would bring the city another pennant; hackles among those players who thought his tactics could lose games just as readily as win them.
Allington sat in the dugout beside Dorothy Hunter. Snooky Harrell chose a seat at the far end of the bench. Dottie Ferguson, the wide-ranging outfielder, looked dubiously at the grounds. Her fellow outfielders, Rose Gacioch and Rita “Junior” Briggs, were huddled nearby. Ruth Richard stooped over her catcher’s equipment, while Nicky Fox, the starting pitcher, sat nearby.
Stop a person on the street and whisper “baseball” and you’ll conjure up images of bright-green diamonds, shimmering in the heat of perfect summer afternoons. Rockford was a far cry from that vision.
Regular-season games – except for
weekend double-headers – were played in twilight on shadowy fields, as stadium lights took over and weakly imitated the departing sun. That night in Rockford, the temperature was a mere 10 degrees above freezing. The Peaches wore dark-colored long-sleeved shirts under their new (and snow-white) home-field uniforms. On nights like these, their skirts seemed more inappropriate than ever.
Across the field, in the third-base dugout, the Chicago Colleens, under Dave Bancroft, were preparing to play their first regular-season All-American League game.
They had shown a fair degree of promise during the pre-season exhibition schedule, which wasn’t surprising, because the lineup contained only two rookies. All the rest were veterans, wrenched from their former teams by the hated allocation process. Many of them, like Twi Shively, harbored strong resentment. As a result, the team hadn’t coalesced, and its morale was low.
At 7:30, the scheduled game time, the contest started. And just as well. The stands, by now in murky darkness and every degree as cold as the dugouts, contained a scant 1,000 paying customers, shivering in bleachers that could hold six times that number.
Many had come prepared with umbrellas, blankets and bundled-up kids. Fathers and mothers nursed steaming cups of coffee from thermos bottle caps. As a result of the weather, the customary opening-game hoopla was cut short as though no one was anxious to tempt the rain any further. A local band wheezed through “The Star-Spangled Banner” while both teams stood to attention. The mayor, in natty fedora and his best grey pinstripe suit, threw out the first ball.
The Peaches’ defense ran onto the field, each player’s name crackling from the loudspeakers. Nicky Fox threw a couple of warm-up pitches to Ruth Richard and the game began.
It would be the fans’ first chance to witness the overhand throw.
The battle was at the mound, and Fox was prepared. She was one of the All-American’s original draftees (as Helen Nicol) and had twice been named League pitching champ, in 1943 and 1944, both years with the Kenosha Comets. Her specialty was the wrist ball, a throw that got its increased velocity by means of a twisting action just before release. This style was rare enough that people thought it unique to Canadians. Fox found it difficult to convert to a sidearm delivery, but had the overhand pitch under control.