Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (8 page)

It took four years for Bernice Gera to walk onto that ball field, four years of legal battles for the right to stand in the shadow of an “Enjoy Silver Floss Sauerkraut” sign while the crowd cheered and young girls waved sheets reading “Right On, Bernice!” and the manager of the Geneva Phillies welcomed her to the game. “On behalf of professional baseball,” he said, “we say good luck and
God bless you in your chosen profession.” And the band played and the spotlights shone and all three networks recorded the event. Bernice Gera had become the first woman in the 133-year history of the sport to umpire a professional baseball game.

I should say, at this point, that I am utterly baffled as to why any woman would want to get into professional baseball, much less work as an umpire in it. Once I read an article in
Fact
magazine that claimed that men who were umpires secretly wanted to be mother figures; that level of idiotic analysis is, as far as I am concerned, about what the game and the profession deserve. But beyond that, I cannot understand any woman’s wanting to be the first woman to do anything. I read about those who do—there is one in today’s newspaper, a woman who is suing the State of Colorado for the right to work on a team digging a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains—and after I get through puzzling at the strange desires people have, awe sets in. I think of the ridicule and abuse that woman will undergo, of the loneliness she will suffer if she gets the job, of the role she will assume as a freak, of the smarmy and inevitable questions that will be raised about her heterosexuality, of the derision and smug satisfaction that will follow if she makes a mistake, or breaks down under pressure, or quits. It is a devastating burden and I could not take it, could not be a pioneer, a Symbol of Something Greater. Once I was the first woman to deposit $500 in a bank that was giving out toasters that day, and I found even that an uncomfortable responsibility. The point of all this, though, is Bernice Gera, and the point of Bernice Gera is that Bernice Gera failed to play out the role. In her first game, she made a mistake. And broke down under pressure.
And couldn’t take it. And quit. Which was not the way it was supposed to happen: instead, she was supposed to have been tougher and stronger and better than any umpire in baseball and end up a grim stone bust in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Bernice Gera turned out to be only human, after all, which is not a luxury pioneers are allowed. At the time, I thought it was all hideously ironic and even a little funny; a few months later, I got to wondering what had really happened and what was happening to Mrs. Gera now, now that she had blown her modest deferred dream.

Bernice Gera lives in a three-room walk-up apartment in Queens. In it there is a candle shaped like a softball, an ashtray shaped like a mitt, a lighter shaped like a bat, a crocheted toaster cover shaped like a doll wearing a baseball cap, an arrangement of dried flowers containing a baseball, powder puffs, and a small statue of Mickey Mouse holding a bat. On the wall is a very large color photograph of Mrs. Gera in uniform holding a face mask, and a few feet away hangs a poem that reads: “Dear God, Last night I did pray/That You would let me in the game today./And if the guys yell and scream,/Please, God, tell them You’re the captain of the team.” All the available shelf space is crammed with trophies and plaques; there must be forty or fifty of them, some for bowling (she averages 165) but most for baseball, for her career on a women’s softball team in Detroit, and for her charity batting exhibitions against people like Roger Maris and Sid Gordon. “I can hit the long ball,” she says, and she can, some 350 feet. There is also a framed clipping of an old Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, a syndicated feature that has come a long way since the days when it printed items that were remotely unbelievable.
“Believe It Or Not,” it reads, “a New York City housewife has won 300 large dolls for needy youngsters living at the children’s shelter of the Queensboro Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children by her skill at throwing a baseball at amusement parks.”

Mrs. Gera is a short, slightly chunky woman who wears white socks and loafers; her short blondish-brown hair is curled and lacquered. Around her neck is a gold charm decorated with a bat, mitt, and pearl baseball which she designed and had made up by a local jeweler. Her voice is flat and unanimated, unless, of course, she is talking about baseball: she can describe, exultantly, one of the happiest days of her life, when she had a tooth extracted and was able to stay home from work to see the Pirates win the World Series in 1960. Bernice Gera is, more than anything, a fan, an unabashed, adoring fan, and her obsession with baseball dates back to her childhood, when she played with her older brothers on a sandlot in the Pennsylvania mining town where she was raised. “I have loved, eaten, and lived baseball since I was eight years old,” she says. “Put yourself in my shoes. Say you loved baseball. If you love horses, you can be a jockey. If you love golf or swimming, look at Babe Didrikson and Gertrude Ederle. These are great people and they had an ability. I had it with baseball. What could I do? I couldn’t play. So you write letters, begging for a job, any job, and you keep this up for years and years. There had to be a way for me. So I decided to take up a trade. I decided to take up umpiring.”

In June, 1967, Mrs. Gera enrolled as a student at the National Sports Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida, a school run by an old-timer named Jim Finley for ballplayers and umpires. The Associated Press sent a
reporter to cover Mrs. Gera’s education, and Finley said she was coming along just fine. “She had the habit of carrying on conversations with the players,” said Finley, “but we broke that by giving her push-ups.… I had expected a tomboy when she signed up, but Bernice is every bit a girl.” A few months after her graduation from the Academy, magna cum laude, Mrs. Gera commented good-naturedly on her experience there. “I didn’t have too much trouble,” she said. “The chest protector didn’t fit very well. Those things aren’t made for women. And the players tried to give me a hard time.” (Little jokes about Mrs. Gera’s chest protector were to become the leitmotiv of her saga.) Years passed before Mrs. Gera confessed that the school had actually been a nightmare. “It was a horrible, lonely experience,” she said. “They all thought there was something wrong with me.” At night, in the dormitory, the men threw beer cans and bottles at her bedroom door. On the field, the players hazed her, threw extra balls into the game during a play, spit tobacco juice on her shoes, cursed to try to shake her up. She would call a runner safe and he would snarl, “Bad call. I was out.” Said Mrs. Gera: “When you begin, you take an awful lot of abuse. They make you, to prepare you for the future. I think they overdid it with me. Tobacco juice. That was unnecessary. It all hinged on whether I could take it. I took it. But after, I’d go home and cry like a baby.”

A diploma in umpiring was worth nothing at all when it came to getting a job, and so in 1968 Mrs. Gera began the first of several lawsuits against professional baseball. Her lawyer, who served without fee, was a New York politician named Mario Biaggi, who called press conference after press conference to announce action after
action. Finally, in 1969, Mrs. Gera was given a contract by the New York–Pennsylvania Class A League promising her $200 in wages, $300 in expenses, and five cents a mile for a month, beginning with a twilight double-header August 1. The sports pages were full of pictures of Mrs. Gera, thumbs up, victorious. But on July 31, the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues invalidated the contract by refusing to sign it. Mrs. Gera was heartbroken, but she confined her reaction to a string of sports metaphors: “I guess I just can’t get to first base.… It’s a strikeout but I will come up again. The game is not over.”

The lawsuit continued. There was a hearing at the New York State Human Rights Commission, where George Leisure, attorney for the baseball interests, said that Mrs. Gera was publicity mad and that furthermore she did not meet any of the physical requirements for being an umpire. Umpires, he said, should be five feet ten inches tall, and weigh 170 pounds. “Being of the male sex is a bona-fide qualification for being a professional umpire,” said Leisure. In November, 1970, the Human Rights Commission held that the National League discriminated not only against women but against men belonging to short ethnic groups and would have to “establish new physical standards which shall have a reasonable relation to the requirements of the duties of an umpire.” The League promptly appealed the decision, and the legal process dragged on.

Maury Allen of the
New York Post
went into the locker room of the New York Mets at one point during Mrs. Gera’s years in chancery and asked some of the ballplayers how they felt about her. He recorded, in response, a number of attempted witticisms about her chest protector,
along with a predictable but nonetheless interesting series of antediluvian remarks. “I read the stories about her and she said that she expected people would call her a ‘dumb broad,’ ” said Jerry Koosman. “Hell, that’s the nicest thing people would call her. What do you think she’d hear when a batter hit a line drive off a pitcher’s cup?” Said Ron Swoboda: “She’d have fifty guys yelling at her in language she wouldn’t believe. If she heard those dirty words and didn’t react, then they would have to give her a hormone test.”

Bernice Gera waited almost two years for the State Court of Appeals to uphold the Human Rights Commission ruling; finally, in the spring of 1972, she once again signed a contract with the New York–Pennsylvania League. In late June, having allowed to reporters that she was “grateful to God and grateful to baseball,” she drove to Geneva, New York, for her début. There was a banquet Thursday night and she was cheered over roast chicken. She was ecstatic. “I was in baseball,” Mrs. Gera recalled. “I can’t tell you. I was on top of the world. And then, the bubble burst.”

On Friday, there was a meeting of the League umpires. “That meeting,” Mrs. Gera said. “It was like, if you had a group of people in a room and they just ignored you. How can I express it? They made it obvious they didn’t want me. How would you feel? You’re supposed to work your signals out with your partner. You’re a team. You have to know what he’s going to do. But my partner wouldn’t talk to me. I sat there for six hours. A lot of other things went on that I don’t want to discuss because I’m going to write about it someday. I should have realized if they fought me in court they weren’t going to welcome me, but I never thought they would do
that to me. That was the only way they could get to me, through the other umpires. If they won’t work with you, you can’t make it.”

Saturday night, when Bernice Gera walked out onto the field in her $29 suit, she had come to a decision. She would leave baseball if her fellow umpire would not tell her his signals. Her partner, a lanky young man named Doug Hartmayer, who was also making his professional début, refused even to acknowledge her presence. But the crowd loved her, applauded her emphatic calls, and was amused by her practically perpetual motion. Then, in the fourth inning, a member of the Auburn Phillies came into second base and Mrs. Gera, in an uncharacteristically unemphatic move, ventured a safe call. Seconds later, she realized he was out in a force play, and brought her fist up. The manager of the Auburn team, Nolan Campbell, who had said before the game that Mrs. Gera was “going to have one heck of a time taking the abuse,” ran out onto the field and began to shout and chase after her. She ejected him from the game. Campbell was furious. “She admitted she made a mistake,” he said later. “I told her, that’s two mistakes. The first one was putting on a uniform.”

When the game ended, Bernice Gera, trailed by camera crews and a dozen reporters, strode into the clubhouse and announced, “I’ve just resigned from baseball.” Then she wheeled around, left the field, and burst into tears in the back of a friend’s car. NBC’s Dick Schaap asked Doug Hartmayer how he felt about her quitting. “I was glad,” said Hartmayer. “Her job wasn’t bad except she changed that call at second base, which is a cardinal sin in baseball.” As Schaap later noted, “She committed the cardinal sin of baseball—she admitted she made a mistake.”

It is hard to believe that things would not have worked out had Bernice Gera hung in there, stayed on, borne up somehow. It is hard to believe, too, that she could not have been helped by some real support from the women’s movement. In any event, Mrs. Gera and the movement did not join forces until three weeks after her debacle, when she attended a meeting at the grubby New York headquarters of the National Organization for Women. “I’m happy to be here with all you girls—I mean women,” said Mrs. Gera, and plunged into her new rhetoric. She spoke of the “calculated harassment by the sexist operators who control baseball.” She hinted at a boycott of the game. She defended changing her call, quoting from the
Baseball Manual
, a publication that seems to provide the messages in fortune cookies: “To right a wrong is honorable. Such an action will win you respect.”

“People are saying I’m a quitter, but I’m not,” she said, “not after what baseball put me through. Someone else might have quit earlier but I stayed with it. I would have shined a ballplayer’s shoes. That’s how much I like baseball.”

And so it is over, and Bernice Gera has, if not a profession, a title. She is Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire. That is how she signs autographs and that is how she is identified at the occasional events she is invited to attend. Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire, modeled at a fashion show at Alexander’s department store, along with several other women of achievement. Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire, umpired a CBS softball game at Grossinger’s and was third-base coach for the wives of the Atlanta Braves at an exhibition game. Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire, sits on a couch in her Queens apartment
and looks back on it all. “People say to me, you quit,” she said. “I heard some reports back that I closed the door for all women, that I put women’s lib back years. How could I close a door? I was the first woman in baseball. What did I do—close doors or open doors?” It is an interesting question, really, but Bernice Gera prefers not to hear the answer or dwell on the past or deal with what actually happened. “I’m in contact with baseball all the time,” she says. “Don’t count me out. I expect to be in baseball next year.”