Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (10 page)

Harrell had been playing for Rockford for only a week or two, but had already begun to rival the Peaches’ leading hitter, Dorothy Kamenshek
. None of the Peaches were at their best today, though. Harrell would come to the plate seven times in the course of two games but fail to get on base.

Late in the evening, the second game wound down and people began to head for the exits
. The Comets, who’d won the first game 3-0, were repeating their performance. Both teams would score one more run each, but Kenosha would end up on top.

The lone spectator stayed until the last out
. He couldn’t imagine not seeing a game through to its conclusion. Besides, he wanted to see as much of the Peaches as possible. He was Bill Allington, soon to be christened “The Silver Eagle” by Rockford fans. He has signed a contract to take over the management of the Peaches the following week – a development that would not be relayed to Kloza until the following day at a special meeting in Chicago.

When the league issued an announcement of Kloza’s “resignation,” the public was told Kloza had “worked himself into a frazzle” and had stepped aside “for the good of all concerned
.”  But too many rumors were in circulation; the clumsy fiction couldn’t and didn’t last long.

In fact, a story very quickly began to circulate that players from California had engineered Kloza’s departure and demanded that Allington replace him
. One of the suspects was Snooky Harrell, but she was guiltless. She had been happy to see what she thought was the last of Allington when she left California. His aggressive style struck her as cruel to players and antagonistic to opponents. She believed that his penchant for disparaging remarks had a reverse effect on the rival teams:  he made a mediocre club mad enough to pull out all the stops and beat you.

In fact, however, there’d almost certainly been a coup of some dimension
. At least one player who’d had enough of Kloza’s losing ways had held “indignation meetings” in her room to raise support for his ouster.

Some players knew (or thought they knew) that Kloza was doomed a day or two before he was summoned to Chicago
. This gave managers elsewhere the shivering fits. If players’ wishes were taken into consideration by the League, no one was safe.

A newspaper reported that another manager was reportedly “carrying his signed resignation around in his pocket and has been dissuaded from presenting it to Ken Sells only by the pleas of his club officials.”

Whatever the pressure applied to be rid of Kloza, the All-American’s managers could not rest easy. The mere fact that they piloted a losing team was grounds for dismissal.

As for Allington, once he settled into Rockford, Harrell’
s reservations seemed unfounded – for a while.

“He was really pretty decent for that first year,” she says
.

Rockford’s management certainly thought so
. The club made it out of the cellar and into the first division by the end of Allington’s first season.

Allington’s virtues and fau
lts sprang from the same source – he was baseball through and through. He had begun his career in Kansas and later played professionally with the Pacific Coast League before he turned to coaching women’s softball.

He also worked for the technical department of Twentieth-Century Fox, and would occasionally surface as a bit player in films, including
It Happens Every Spring,
a baseball picture starring Ray Milland.

Many All-American managers had already settled in the
Midwest before they began working for the League, but Allington had family ties in California. He was divorced, but his teenage daughter lived there with relatives. Nonetheless, the profile of the League was growing, and Allington was happy to take on the job of managing the second-division Peaches. It was the kind of challenge he liked.

Allington was an interesting figure
. His strongest endorsements came courtesy of those who never played for him. More than any other manager, he taught his teams how to play baseball.

He insisted on the basics; daily practice was mandatory
. Players were expected to master the hit-and-run, the bunt, the proper fielding techniques, and to do so quickly.

On the road, players had a 10 a.m. wake-up call, followed by a team meeting an hour later
. The purpose of these meeting was to memorize the contents of the rule book, by means of question-and-answer sessions.

After a game was over, aboard the bus heading to the next game, Allington would hold court
behind the driver. Every play – winning or losing – would be dissected, every player challenged to justify her performance.

Some managers never discussed a game
. Once it was over, it was history. Many players on other teams would have rebelled against such rigors, but Allington took care to select players who wanted to learn, to absorb his expertise. He was an expert talent-spotter.

Dorothy Ferguson credits him with exploiting her potential:  “I was never a hitter, but I could run and I had a good arm
. So be brought those things out in me.”

Allington was not liked by everybody all the time
. He would stop at nothing to motivate his players; it was his way or the doorway. Dottie Kamenshek says that you learned or cracked under the strain.

Players with fragile egos
– or rookies, accustomed to small-time success – made painful adjustments, or quit, or asked to be traded. Others, like Kamenshek, weathered the rough patches in return for demonstrable gain. She would stay after practice for additional instruction:  “He’d put a handkerchief on the first or third baseline to mark the place he wanted the bunt to stop. And we’d practice for hours to get it there.”

Kamenshek was left-handed, and Allington taught her to delay assuming her stance until the last possible moment, then drop the bunt towards third and run away from it:  “That way, you got two steps toward first before the ball was even on the ground.”

But all was not smooth in their relationship. In 1945, Allington cost her the League’s batting championship.

“
I was leading, going into the last two weeks,” she says, “and for some reason he came up to me and said, ‘So you think you can hit. You haven’t learned anything yet.’ I suppose he thought it would make me hit better. I think sometimes he thought we’d play better if we were upset. At that point, I wasn’t mature enough to take it, and I went right down the tubes.”

The first year it happened, it crushed her and she slumped dismally
. The next year, Kamenshek got mad at him and regained the title.

Snooky Harrell was another player who didn’t always see eye to eye with Allington
. One day, he loped over to her shortstop position and suggested a way she could avoid making so many errors. Harrell was outraged.

“Bill,” she said, her voice rising, “I haven’t made an error in
35 games.”  It would be longer than that before she stopped stewing over his slight.

Max Carey was another All-American stalwart. After one season as Milwaukee’s manager, he became the League’s president in 1945.

In some ways, it was a shame he left managing
. He had been a top-ranked major-leaguer and would later be recognized for his achievements in the Hall of Fame. He was an able manager; the League would find few who could equal his talents.

As president, he would prove an equally able promoter
. When things got slow, he could always strong-arm former teammates into seeing a game, producing the requisite I-can’t-believe-girls-are doing-that response. But his grandiose schemes would place him at odds with the club directors. Well-meaning but inexperienced men, they regarded League decisions they disagreed with – and there were many – as personal attacks that threatened their teams and weakened the concept of local autonomy.

Carey was considered one of baseball’s immortals, having played
17 seasons as a center-fielder with the Pittsburgh Pirates. His principal skill had been stealing bases; he led the National League in that department 10 times. He was reputed to have perfected the classic lead-off posture – body stooped and hands braced on the knees, ready to break for the next base, or to retreat when the pitcher tried to pick him off.

He also set a long-standing record as the only man to reach first base nine times in a single game, a 1922 contest between the Pirates and the New York Giants
.

Carey was also a baseball strategist
. He knew how to explain his skills to others, how to discipline unruly players. Most of the players regarded him as a father figure. But – unlike Allington – he was not abrasive. Players could include him in practical jokes without fear.

Once, Dottie Hunter returned to her hotel room only to find that all her clothes had been replaced with a male wardrobe
.

“I blew my stack, but there was nobody in sight to direct it to,” she says. “So I gathered up all this stuff and went to the elevator steamin’
. I go to get in the elevator, and there’s Max with all my clothes in his arms. So we mumbled and grumbled and carried on, and you never saw any of the girls again that night. By the next day we’d cooled off and didn’t make too much of it, but it never happened again.”

Carey had no time for what he perceived as mumbling and grumbling behind his back
. He didn’t tolerate troublesome players. When Milwaukee was fooling about with the symphony and things looked dark, he rallied the players who’d begun to feel they were second class, that people wouldn’t pay full freight to see them, and talked to them in a straightforward manner.

“I don’t want any dissension on the team,” he said
. “You have a problem, bring it to me.”

Unfortunately, there was another side to Carey’s paternalism
.

Judith Dusanko, a rookie third baseman who’d played on championship teams in the Canadian west, made a strong impression during the 1944 spring training
. She was assigned to Milwaukee, but had to ride the bench, because Carey filled the third-base spot with a local player he hoped would draw the fans. Dusanko sulked.

“Of course, you’re pretty dumb at that age, and I didn’t go to him
– which I should have – and tell him how unhappy I was,” she says. “If I had played, and then he’d benched me, it might have been different. But he never even gave me a chance. So this one time in the dugout, I took out my notepaper and stamps and pen and I wrote letters home. Oh, boy. Everything went haywire. He called me right after the game, called me on the carpet in front of everybody, and told me I was off the team. So I went home and cried a lot. I packed my suitcase and I figured I was on my way back to Canada. And I hadn’t even had a chance to play.”

The next day, Dusanko went to Chicago, to report to League headquarters in the Wrigley Building before heading back home to the Canadian prairies
. Here, she was given a reprieve by Ken Sells.

“Heck no,” he said
. “Who says you’re going home?  Minneapolis is playing in Rockford tonight and they need a third baseman.”  Dusanko was driven to the Chicago train station, tossed aboard and arrived in Rockford just in time to get suited up and rush onto the field. But Dusanko’s second chance lasted only a single season.

When 1945’s spring training rolled around, she received a personal letter from Carey, by then the League president, saying there was no room in the League for anyone like her
.

“It wasn’t exactly those words,” she says, “but that was the meaning.”

An unhappy tale – but most players have pleasanter memories.

Tiby Eisen says that Carey handled players well, and was patient even with those recruits who had to learn the basics
.

“He really made the beginnings of a ball player out of me.”

He taught Connie Wisniewski to watch opposing pitchers and learn to predict their moves:  “He pointed out that they always did a little something just before they threw the ball – a twist of the shoulders, a nod of the head. Maybe it was that their toe turned down. But if you watched for it, you could figure out when they were going to go for home plate, and you could get three or four steps on them.”

That was Wisniewski the batter and base-runner speaking
. But she was a pitcher, too, and Carey had a lot to teach her in that department. Just before the season opener, he gave the entire pitching staff a lecture on holding the runner.
Wisniewski wasn’t paying attention.

“After a little bit, he said, ‘All right, you over there that’s talking. You stand up and tell me how to hold them on.’”

Wisniewski, a tall and graceful submarine pitcher whose cocky manner masked a painful shyness, decided to fake it.

“I‘m pitching?” she said
. “Well you tell me how they got on first base with me pitching, and I’ll tell you what I’d do about it.”  This reply appealed to Carey. “He liked that. He said, ‘Okay. You’re
my pitcher tomorrow.’ ” Wisniewski won that game, but there were one too many stolen bases for her liking, “So I went to him afterwards and asked him to show me how to hold runners.”