Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (14 page)

“But in a few days,” he said, “I felt like apologizing to every girl in the League
. The entertainment they give the public is nothing less than superb.”

Meyer himself was no slouch when it came to mounting a show, but showmanship ran a distant second to the need for victory
. He liked to win.

His nickname, “Hungry Ben” stemmed from an early-season double-header, in the course of which Meyer sent his best pitcher to the mound in both games against the ailing Blue Sox
. A South Bend sportswriter found this a bit much, pointing out that Meyer had four top-notch hurlers to choose from, that the Chicks were in first place and that more than 90 games remained in the schedule. Under these conditions he wrote, “such hungriness is uncalled for.”

Meyer disagreed
. The previous year (under Max Carey), the Chicks had begun each game with a morale-boosting huddle, during which someone recited an inspiring message. Most of these homilies dealt with such ennobling themes as courage, friendship and faith.

When Meyer took over, his pep talk was short and to the point:  “Girls, here’s what I want to say
. If we win this game, I’ll give each of you a $5 bill, including the chaperon.”

Meyer also liked clowning amiably for the fans
. One of his stunts was to bait the umpire.

In South Bend, he loved to make life difficult for Gadget Ward, who had quite enough to deal with already
. Carey had been on his case about the umpires’ personal habits, which included chewing tobacco. Ward received a memo stating that, if they couldn’t get through a game without spitting juice all over the field, he was to fire them.

As for Meyer, Ward recalls that he “came down on every strike I called
. He’d waddle over to home plate, and each time he got there, he’d take his hat off and get right up in my face. Then he’s says, ‘You know something, you’re the best-dressed umpire in this League. Matter of fact, you’re the best umpire in this or any other league.’ ”  After several more compliments, back would go Meyer to the coaching box as fans yelled encouragement, delighted that someone would stand up to the hated official.

“The crowd was going wild,” says Ward
. “But the third time Meyer came over, I called time. I told him, ‘Mr. Meyer, I know I’m the best-dressed umpire. I know I’m the best umpire. And I’m going to run your fanny out of this ballpark the next time you leave the coaching box.’ So he put his hat back on and went back to third base.”

Despite these diversions, the Chicks could not be inspired
. They slid badly in the standings (but managed on one occasion to score a questionable ninth-inning win over Racine, which so appalled Charlie Stis, the Belles’ manager, that he attacked the home-plate umpire). Grand Rapids finished the season in third place, a comedown from their championship performance the previous year. Benny Meyer retreated to a men’s league, the Chicks found themselves another manager in Johnny Rawlings, and Bill Allington’s Rockford Peaches won the championship. The All-Americans headed home again, this time to a brave new post-war future.

Back on the Canadian prairies, those players who had stayed at home had been fascinated for the past three seasons by the experiences of their friends returning from the All-American. In 1943, Daisy Knezovich had been about to marry Dave Junor, so she’d refused the League’s initial offer and settled down. But every year, “everyone came back raving about this glamor League down south, and everybody was having such a good time. I was just busting to go, but I thought, ‘Well, I can’t now, I’m married.’ ” Then the news came that the League would be holding tryouts in Pascagoula.

“Dave and I talked it over, and he knew I really wanted to go, and he said, ‘Well, you know I could never afford to take you down there.
’ So I decided to go.”

As for Bonnie Baker, she had promised Maury that she would quit when he returned from the service
. “And my intentions were good. I was going to stay home like a good wife, but the closer it came to the time to go, the more miserable I got.”

Spring training in 1946 was over and the regular season about to start when Maury looked at her and said, “I know you’re not going to be happy here all summer
. You might as well go where you’re going to be happy.”  Which Baker very promptly did.

Restrictions on domestic travel had been eased, and the All-American looked forward to a relaxing session in the Deep South
. Pascagoula was far from the sleet and snow of the Midwest; but spring in Mississippi had its own trials to offer.

Pascagoula was an abandoned air base, located on the Gulf of Mexico just west of the Alabama state line
.

Dr. Harold Dailey, the avid chronicler of South Bend’s woes, vilified the site as “the worst mess I ever saw
. The housing conditions were terrible. They were war-built barracks used by the shipyard workers. They were alive with roaches and bugs of all kinds. The main field was rutted and the smaller diamonds were unmown grass. We got the diamonds repaired, and they tried to build extra diamonds that were finished about the time we were through.”

The players of the Glamor League coped as best they could
. Jean Faut recalls that “we bought that place out of DDT. You’d sprinkle it across the doorway, or the bugs would march right in.”

Daisy Junor was filled with a mixture of horror and admiration:  “The cockroaches were so big, they didn’t scurry, they strolled.”

Connie Wisniewski shared Junor’s sentiments:  “You could have put saddles on ‘em.”

People kept the lights on and their suitcases firmly closed
.

Betty Tucker, a novice pitcher, lost no opportunity to turn the situation to training advantage
. “We’d get oranges for lunch,” she says, “and instead of eating them, we’d take them back with us, and if we saw a cockroach on the wall, we’d whip the orange at it.”

At least this remote starting point gave teams a chance to play outdoors eve
ry day during spring training. There were also a series of games en route back north, through what Dailey called “bad mountain country on long night jumps.”

The idea here was to expose the All-American to other centers, to attract new recruits
. In 1946, the clubs played 27 cities in 11 states. It was in fact a good investment – spearheaded by Meyerhoff – in publicity and recruiting, but a somewhat cost-intensive one. Most of the proceeds went to local charities, including the Colored Orphans and Industrial Home of Lexington, Kentucky, which benefited to the tune of $300.

The clubs, who had to contribute to the cost of these games, thought them a waste of time
. Meyerhoff disagreed. It was the way to enlarge the talent pool, to attract attention. Very few prospective recruits had the ability to attend spring training on their own. The League had to go to them.

Sometimes a player would be spotted in the pre-game tryouts and sent directly to Chicago for assignment to a team
. More commonly, they were invited to spring training the following year.

In 1946, the League elected once more to shrink the ball, this time to
11 inches. The previous year, after a wave of no-hit, no-run games that led the organizers to conclude that pitchers were too much in control, the pitching distance had been increased by two feet.

Not content with these modifications, the All-American then decided to move away from softball’s underhand pitch
. In 1946, it allowed for the first time a modified side arm delivery. Suddenly, the pitcher’s repertoire was increased. She could develop a fastball, a curve or a sinker. This was an interim measure that would lead two seasons later to an exclusively overhand throw.

The press reported public reaction
. “There are two schools of thought on the subject,” said Dick Day, the sports editor of the Rockford
Register-Republic
. “One group contends that the girls’ League is ready now to make a clean break with the past, discard the traditional underhand pitch of softball entirely and adopt overhand or sidearm delivery. Others take an exact opposite view. They hold to the theory that overhand pitching of steady quality is a virtual impossibility with women, and that the fans don’t want it.”

Day’s comments stemmed from an interview he’d held in Pascagoula with Johnny Gottselig
.

“Back in 1943, when this League was formed,” Gottselig told him, “pitching was no problem
. Amateur softball leagues had an abundance of good twirlers eager to turn pro. But times have changed. The League has advanced to the stage where not many stars from the softball ranks can move right in with the regulars. There just aren’t enough top-flight pitchers in the softball ranks to meet our requirements anymore.”

This shortage had not escaped the notice of Gottselig’s protégée, Bonnie Baker
. In between persuading Maury that her future lay with the All-American, she had touched base with her former manager in Regina:  “I asked him, ‘Where are all the softball players?  I can remember when they used to be falling off the end of the bench.’ He told me that he was having to steal players from other teams.”

But it was the same story everywhere
. Tiby Eisen had found the previous winter that softball was no longer the sport of choice in Los Angeles; the decline in softball’s popularity had begun. Now that the war was over, there were far more interesting things for people to do; they certainly didn’t start to play sandlot baseball.

The softball leagues had been the All-American’s farm system
. But the more that Meyerhoff and Carey shifted the rules of play toward baseball, the longer it took to train a recruit, who might or might not succeed. If she didn’t there was nowhere for her to go. A club couldn’t send its rookies down to the minors for a bit more experience. It was do or die, in front of everyone.

But the All-American pressed ahead anyway
. The real question – where were all the sidearm or overhand pitchers going to come from, given that there weren’t enough underhanders to go around? – was shuffled aside.

Most of the League’s pitchers attempted to adapt
. Throwing the smaller ball with a sidearm motion increased their speed, but it forced them to use their bodies in a different way.

Jean Faut, who pitched for South Bend, didn’t like the sidearm at first, but with a strong arm and a good curve, she held her own
.

Umpire Gadget Ward one day challenged her during batting practice
. “I can’t understand why these girls can’t hit you,” he said. “I can hit you.”  Faut accepted his challenge and took the mound. Ward grabbed a bat, stepped into the box and succeeded only in embarrassing himself for five minutes straight.

“Afterward,” said Faut, “he still couldn’t understand why he couldn’t hit me.”

But Faut was an extraordinary pitcher, one of the All-American’s best. Other pitchers, including Janet Perkins, couldn’t handle even the modified sidearm. She had been drafted by the Kenosha Comets, but 1946 was her first and final year. She wasn’t all that happy.

The punishing whirlwind of baseball and travel, more baseball and more travel, didn’t leave much time for a personal life
.

“I wasn’t going to wreck my arm,” she says, “’cause I knew I wasn’t going to be there that long.”  Perkins packed it in and returned to Saskatchewan
. Nor was Perkins alone.

Carolyn Morris, a beautiful woman from Arizona with an outstanding windmill delivery, pitched her last game in 1946
. Rather than imperil her throwing arm, she returned to the sunbelt softball leagues.

Others saw the sidearm as a hurdle to overcome
. Joanne Winter, a player since 1943, had enjoyed only modest success, losing as many games as she won. She’d had very little in the way of formal training, having picked up her skills from watching other players.

“I often wonder what I really looked like,” she says
. “I put all kinds of stuff on the ball – I invented my own way of turning it – but I wasn’t sophisticated or good enough, and struggled along.”  After the 1944 season, she had confided her unhappiness to the man who’d encouraged her – her father. She wrote to him, saying that she might not be cut out for pitching duties.

Her father disagreed and sent her in the off-season to a well-known pitcher in Phoenix, Arizona, named Kuhn Rosen
. To her surprise, Winter found that he favored the wrist-ball style she’d seen practiced by Canadian Nicky Fox (the former Helen Nicol) who threw for Kenosha.

“And Nicky was absolutely tremendous
. She could make it take off – she had a great rise ball. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can do that, too.’ And I tried it, but it didn’t fit me.”  In fact, Winter sank during 1945 to an all-time low, losing 22 games (11 of them by a single run) and winning only seven.

But Winter persisted
. She returned to Phoenix, this time to the tutelage of Knolly Trujillo, who favored a slingshot delivery – an underhand throw with minimal windup. Trujillo worked at the local fire department, and Winter went down there every day and pitched, while her father watched.

“I took a look at what Trujillo had, and I thought, ‘This is neat,’ so I changed to a slingshot
. That fit me, just half of a windmill. By golly, I remember the first time I made that thing hop, and the catcher said, ‘That’s it!’ So now I had something different. It was so different that when I went back to the league, I turned myself around.”

Winter would tie with Connie Wisniewski, in 1946 for the all-time League season record of
33 wins.

Other changes were afoot
. In 1946, the League expanded to include the Muskegon Lassies, managed by Ralph “Buzz” Boyle, and the Peoria Redwings, who started off under the direction of Bill “Raw Meat” Rodgers. Rodgers was hastily replaced by Johnny Gottselig, who would eventually manage four teams in the All-American.

Muskegon was an industrial and shipping center, with a population of roughly 45,000, but it had an excellent ballpark called Marsh Field, which the Lassies shared with the city’s Triple-A men’s team
.

Peoria, Illinois’ second-largest city, was something else again
. A
Saturday Evening Post
article commented on its contradictions:  “An abundance of churches and an abundance of saloons, a highly-developed civic consciousness and a long and odorous history of gambling and sin dens.”  Bumper corn crops from the surrounding countryside had long been parlayed into a brisk distilling business.

Peoria produced more hard liquor than any other American city
. Nor had Prohibition fazed it unduly. Other industries helped it weather the dry spell, and when booze was legalized again, the distilleries picked up steam. As a result, it contained several wealthy areas, located on high bluffs overlooking the Illinois River – the home of such personalities as Faye Dancer’s admiring mobster.

With two new centers in the League, two new teams had to be created
. But with the difficulties in recruiting new players starting to mount, clubs once more looked to allocation as the best source of good players.

Pepper Paire was one of the first to be moved in 1946
. She interpreted her trade as a plan to plunder the powerful Fort Wayne Daisies, who had nearly won the championship their first year out.

Paire liked Fort Wayne and didn’t want to be traded:  “I had been with the team for two years (counting its incarnation as the Minneapolis Millerettes)
. We felt we were going to win everything this time out.”  But it was not to be.

The Rockford Peaches were due to see their ranks depleted as well
. Dick Day reported from Pascagoula that a rival club’s director had told him, “Well, we certainly have got to break up the Peaches…they’re too strong for the rest of the League.”  And sure enough, Bill Allington saw two of his most experienced players snatched away.

Some players, as usual, were bewildered and hurt
. They looked for hidden motives in their trades. One claims to have been shuffled off the week after she ran into her manager at a secluded restaurant in the company of a woman who was not his wife. For the most part, though, it was simply Carey and Meyerhoff playing mix-and-match to maintain something resembling equal strength, to make sure that no one club remained perpetually on top or languished forever in the doldrums.