Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (13 page)

The board members were used to such decisions
. They were men of substance, men who had invested their money and time in the All-American’s future, men with useful networks of friends and business associates who could be persuaded to lend a hand.

The reason for their involvement varied
.

Judge Edward Ruetz, president of the Kenosha Comets for many years, was chiefly concerned with the rising incidence of juvenile delinquency
. Nate Harkness, president of the Grand Rapids Chicks, also headed the local Chamber of Commerce, sat on the board of the Kent County Family Service and was a member of half a dozen clubs. J.L. “Hans” Mueller, Fort Wayne’s president, oversaw the city’s baseball association.

None of these men was inclined to sit back and see if the All-American would work
. They were determined to make it work, to get their hands dirty if the occasion demanded.

One night, in the midst of “a fearsome downpour,”  Ed Deslauriers and the entire South Bend board rushed to the ballpark, “even those who were dressed in good clothes, grabbed shovels and worked all night digging trenches to drain the water away from the infield,” so that the next day’s game could take place on schedule.

But the local boosters were human, too. Some, confronted with a troop of young, attractive and seemingly eligible young women, developed a roving eye. One or two club directors – and a couple of managers – were known for their unwelcome gallantries. The League intervened when necessary.

Harold Greiner , a Fort Wayne board member, recalls that, in the course of a later season, the club was looking for a new manager, and Hans Mueller enthusiastically volunteered
.

“Let me put it this way,” says Greiner
. “Hans fancied himself as a lady’s man. The players would come to us and say, ‘Keep him away from me.’ I was 42 then, but he was up around 60 – too old to be chasing women, even though he didn’t get anywhere with them.”

Greiner’s fellow board members quietly vetoed Mueller’s offer, appointing in his place the circumspect Greiner.

But that didn’t stop the overtures.

Tiby Eisen remembers that another, recently widowed, director invited her to a dinner for two
. “He told me how lonely he was,” she says, “and that he hoped I would stay in town when the season ended, not go back to California. He said he wanted to get to know me better and that something might come of it.”  Eisen, then in her mid-20s, was in doubt as to his intentions.

“Are you asking me to marry you? ” she asked
. “Oh no,” said the director, in a shocked tone. “Nothing like that.”

After this cryptic re
sponse, the conversation lagged – and to this day, Eisen isn’t sure whether he wanted her as a daughter or as a girlfriend.

By this time, of course, a team’s backer couldn’t afford to be side-tracked by infatuation
. They were first and foremost businessmen and had their investments to consider. The clubs were non-profit entities, so any contributions were tax deductible, but no one wanted to be out of pocket for short-falls. The head count after each game was anxiously tallied. Ticket revenues not only kept the clubs afloat, they covered the League’s shared costs and the services of Meyerhoff’s Management Corporation.

By mid-1945, the teams had relatively few concerns
. Fort Wayne and Grand Rapids were doing reasonably well; there would not be a repeat of the previous season’s big-city fiasco. In fact, almost three times as many people would pay to see the League play in 1945 as they had in 1943. The future looked secure, and good news arrived from every quarter.

Betsy Jochum, Lou Arnold and Lib Mahon were on the road with the Blue Sox in August when the end of the war was announced. The news came on August 15 when they were in Grand Rapids. All games were canceled and the team traveled overnight to Racine, to a hotel overlooking a park.

“God,” says Mahon,” at four of five in the morning, people were still out there celebrating in the streets, throwing each other into the fountain
. They celebrated all night and all the next day. I was happy myself. I had two brothers in the war.”

But when the war ended, one of the League’s founding premises went with it
. People were no longer asked to support the teams out of patriotism. Instead, the twin themes of family and community came rapidly to the fore – family because reunion was on every returning serviceman’s mind, and community because the League cities would enter upon a period of upheaval.

And so the All-American shifted focus
. Now it would present the players as role models, the game as a sport worth emulating, something that young people could aspire to.

Now the backers turned their attention to juvenile delinquency
. Civic administrators looked for ways to keep idle youngsters occupied. Hence the creation in most League cities of the Knot Hole Gang, or fan club. Any kid who joined got a membership card and was entitled to reduced admission on special nights.

Players who appealed to the younger fans, including Jo Lennard, a “wise-cracking left fielder” who single-handedly started a bubble-gum craze among her pre
-pubescent admirers, were moved front and center in a team’s publicity efforts.

Beginning in 1945, cities began to foster spin-off teams (composed of both boys and girls) that adopted the All-American’s rules
.

Racine’s Junior Girls League would draw over 100 hopefuls to its spring training sessions, and often played a game at Horlick Field before the scheduled contest
.

Muskegon, a 1946 expansion club, would set up a six-team league that drew 350 kids to the initial tryouts and played throughout the entire summer
.

In Kenosha, the Kiwanis Club sought to “cultivate the young as future fans” by letting them “pick their favorites, seek autographs and go into huddles for conc
erted cheering during the games.”

In Muskegon, the Optimist Club (whose somewhat exclusive motto was “Friend of the Boy,” although they were co-ed and all-girl Knot Hole Gangs aplenty) drew 700-odd youngsters to Monday and Saturday
night games.

No wonder, then, that the All-American’s code of conduct rules continued to be enforced
. Discipline would not be relaxed, as Marie Keenan, the League’s secretary, rather ungrammatically made plain in the course of a newsletter.

“If you gals think you are going to get away with wearing slacks during the post-season series and other times, and other things that went on, you have another think coming, and it’s going to be quite an expensive experience for you.”

The players couldn’t get a single moment’s peace. Having narrowly survived the war, they were now expected to be idealized, skirted, heavily made-up Big Sisters.

By 1945, girls’ baseball was making an impression on the sports world
. People argued about whether it was real baseball, but whatever side of the argument they took, no one could deny the players were popular – often more popular than men’s teams.

The Baseball Blue Book
, a regular publication that reported baseball statistic for the major leagues, decided to try to figure out why.
Blue Book
publisher Earle Moss chose Fort Wayne, home of the Daisies, for his research project because there were two champion men’s teams the Daisies could be compared to.

For
t Wayne’s local businesses sponsored a men’s professional world champion softball team and a semi-professional baseball team. The men’s teams had excellent facilities, played during the day and charged low or no admission. The All-American League team was in its first season, played night games, had temporary bleachers holding a maximum of 3,000 and charged 74 cents admission.

Moreover, there was a six-week newspaper strike in Fort Wayne right in the middle of the baseball season
. During the strike, the Daisies used word-of-mouth advertising to build their following to average over 1,500 a game, and fan interest grew even more after the strike. The men’s pro softball audiences plummeted when there was no newspaper to advertise their games, while the semi-professional men’s team won the Indiana state title, playing in Fort Wayne, but the gate for the entire series was under 900.

Moss declared that girls’ baseball was not just another version of softball
. It was baseball, albeit a form more popular 30 years ago than in 1945. The girls’ game drew larger crowds because there was a constant alertness on the playing field, Moss said, and the play contained “spotlighted episodes subordinate to the game contest,” such as runners on base constantly poised to steal.

“There were more intentional passes, strike-outs and bases-on-balls and a larger proportion of runners left on bases to runs scored than in standard baseball practice…
. It brought about a continual pressure and movement toward the plate – an around-the diamond threat… to reach that focal point of game interest,” wrote Moss.

The
Blue Book
editor also timed the players, right down to how long it took for a pitch to reach the plate and how long for the average player to make it from home plate to first. Given the game’s slightly shorter distances, it took the female players just about the same time as men to make a specific play, he said.

As a final argument in favor of what the girls’ game could teach men’s baseball, Moss pointed out that the League game “produced more sand-lot activity in the city among both boys and girls, than any influence of the last 25 years.”

New figures on the scene for the 1945 season included Fort Wayne’s manager, former major-leaguer Bill Wambsganss, who had changed his name to Wamby because it fit better in the box scores
.

Wamby was distinguished by the fact that he’d made the only unassisted triple play in a World Series game
. This story was paraded out with such regularity that even Wamby got thoroughly sick of hearing it.

His feat took place in 1920, when he was playing second base for the Cleveland Indians against the Boston Red Sox
. In the fifth inning of the fifth game, there were two Red Sox on base, who had been given the sign to start running. The batter swung and sent a liner straight to the vigilant Wamby. He caught it, thus making one out. He then touched second, eliminating the runner who’d started for third. The runner who was heading from first to second, transfixed by these developments, stopped dead in his tracks. Wamby calmly walked over and tagged him, completing the triple play.

This was the high point of  Wamby’s major-leag
ue career, but he did reasonably well upon joining the All-American. He spent two seasons at Fort Wayne, followed by another two with the Muskegon Lassies, when they entered the League. He was remembered with affection. Almost every year, his teams stood high in the standings, or lasted in the play-offs until the final game.

In South Bend, Bert Niehoff’s replacement as manager was Marty McManus, who had arrived from Kenosha
. He was in his early 40s, having spent 15 years in the majors with the St.Louis Browns, the Detroit Tigers and the Boston Red Sox. But his playing days had been over for a decade, and McManus sometimes sought solace in drink.

McManus’s arrival coincided with South Bend’s decision to expand their board of directors from the customary eight men to a larger, consultative board numbering
25 – one of the club’s less sensible tinkerings. The Blue Sox president took advantage of the confusion and embarked on a series of unilateral moves, undercutting the manager’s authority.

Doris Barr, a speed-ball pitcher from Starbuck, Manitoba, who also wielded a good bat, ran into trouble early in the season
. McManus decided to shift her to the outfield for a rest. The president, however, insisted that she be put on waivers, and she was picked up by Racine, where she recovered her momentum and helped beat South Bend silly.

McManus attempted to reassert his authority by yelling at those players who remained
. “He’d just bawl the heck out of girls if they didn’t move,” says Lucille Moore, the chaperon. “The minute they got a hit, regardless if it was a foul, they had to take off. And if they loafed to first base, there were no words spared.”

On the road after the game, however, McManus’s mood would improve and he’d tell stories about the good old days.

At one point, the board passed a resolution reaffirming that he had full charge of running the team, but nevertheless continued to meddle. At season’s end, McManus resigned and took two years off – only to be lured back in 1948 by the election of an old friend, Dr. Harold Dailey, as club president.

His return would prove ill-fated
. He continued to drink, his health declined, and he tried to leave again to manage the Springfield Sallies, an expansion team. Dailey dissuaded him from doing so, a decision he would live to regret.

“I should have let him go,” Dailey later wrote.

Meanwhile, in Grand Rapids, the relocated Chicks were making do with Bernhard “Benny” Meyer. This was his first and only season in the All-American. He had spent four years in the majors as an outfielder, and had extensive experience coaching the minor-league men’s teams. He freely admitted that he once considered girls’ baseball a joke.