Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (16 page)

“So I took the electric streetcar back,” she says
. “When it got to the outskirts of Kenosha, it ran into a picket line. J.I. Case Implements were on strike, and they’d taken a propane tube and laid it across the tracks. We sat there so long I could have walked home, but I stayed on the streetcar, and got to the station just in time to meet the rest of the team. There was no mystery about where I’d been; the streetcar only went to Racine. So there it was – fraternizing,  I had to go home and get my uniform and catch the next streetcar back, and they fined me $25.”

And players continued their bouts with managers
.

In South Bend, Marty McManus had taken his leave and was replaced by Chet Grant, a former football player
.

Bonnie Baker didn’t always see eye to eye with Grant, who was known for his sarcastic turn of phrase
. One Sunday afternoon, during batting practice, his remarks put Baker’s back up. “Whatever he said, it just hit me the wrong way,” she says, “so I just went into the clubhouse and sat there.”  Maury was in town, and she told him that it was time to go back to Saskatchewan. “Think about it,” Maury advised. “Don’t do anything you’ll be sorry for.”  Maury then proposed a deal:  “You go to the ballpark, get into your uniform and go out on the field. If he doesn’t have you in the lineup, I’ll take you home.”  Baker did so. Grant had forgotten the incident, and Baker played the double-header as scheduled.

Meanwhile, in Rockford, relations between Allington and the Peaches were plumbing new depths
. He rode the rookies hard, while veterans like Harrell and Kamenshek tried to calm them down by promising revenge. Their retaliation was poetic justice.

Allington was in the habit of watching batting practice from the third-base coaching box
. Kamenshek, whose hitting had improved under his tutelage, knocked sharp line drives straight at him. “We’d make him skip rope,” she says. When it came his turn, Allington would respond with the meanest grounders he could muster, but thanks once again to his skilled instruction, the team was ready for them.

In Grand Rapids, Pepper Paire was making life hard for Johnny Rawlings
. She had discovered that he had a stomach ulcer.

“I was in a hitting slump for a while,” she says
. “I kept popping up so Rawlings would tell me, ‘Get your elbows out. Get your elbows out.’ I got sick and tired of hearing this, so I went out to the plate and stuck my elbows way out, up around my ears. Dottie Hunter told me later that Rawlings was so mad he went back into the locker room and threw up.”

This wasn’t the only time that Pepper ignored Rawlings’ instructions. The cautious Rawlings instructed her to take intentional walks in a game against Rockford, whose pitchers feared her post-slump hitting power
. She drew three in a row, but each time, the next batter had struck out to end the inning.

Intentional walks involve a pitch-out, thrown well beyond the batter’s reach
–

but Paire had kept her eye on the pitcher’s technique, and saw that the tosses were close enough to get a bat on:  “She threw one just outside the plate, so I reached out and popped it into the right field stands and we won the game
. Rockford was standing there half asleep. If they’d been alert, someone would have caught it, but I got them off-guard.”

Rawlings was happy, and eve
n Allington, whose team she’d just defeated, came trotting over for a congratulatory handshake.

And so the 1946 season unwound, marked like all the others by endless hours on the bus
–long hauls around Lake Michigan and through the rolling farmlands of Wisconsin and Illinois.

“We’d get on at midnight and pull into town at seven o’clock the next morning,” says Hunter
. “The players would fall into bed and I’d have to get them up to make sure they got to the game on time that night. That was a grueling schedule, I don’t care what anybody says. But they were young enough to take it and survive.”

The team bus
– cramped, with low ceilings and overhead shelves packed full of blankets and pillows, rows of two seats along one side and singles on the other – doubled as hotel and locker room. Some buses had no toilet, which meant that a ride was punctuated with roadside stops. Incredibly, regulations decreed that a player struggle into a skirt – at two in the morning, in the middle of nowhere – before she could get off and walk to the gas station restroom. If the bus stopped in a town, the local all-night hangers-on would gather like flies.

The Fort Wayne Daisies’ bus was a tight ship
. When Harold Greiner managed the team, he would disembark first, making sure the coast was clear, keeping an eye out for unwanted Romeos.

“Once,” he says, “there were some men out in the street, and some smart aleck said something
. I didn’t hear what it was , they’d watched till I wasn’t nearby. Anyway, all of a sudden I hear ‘Wow!”  I turned around and saw that June Peppas had decked the guy – and I mean she really decked him. He crawled away.”

The Grand Rapids Chicks’ bus, on the other hand, was noted for that old-time religion, as interpreted by Pepper Paire and Alma Ziegler:

“Especially if it was on a Sunday, Zig and I would deliver a ‘Sermon on the Mound.’ We’d put our jackets and caps on backwards and have a little holy gospel. We’d get the rookies down on their knees in the aisle, and ask them ‘Are you truly in the game?  Are you going to get a hit tomorrow?  Say Hallelujah, brother!  Hallelujah, brother.’ I think I missed my calling.”

And when they weren’t receiving the good word from Pepper, they sang
. Dottie Green played the harmonica aboard the Rockford bus, while Millie Lundahl led a chorus of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” or “Till We Meet Again.”  Bill Allington sat quietly and listened – a song was the only thing that kept him off his customary post mortem – but Harold Greiner was often persuaded to provide the Daisies with a lullaby.

“I’d be thinking of dozing off, when one of the gals would say, ‘Okay boss, it’s time to put us to sleep.
’ I’d have to sing some songs then. I used to have a good voice. I didn’t sing any boogie-woogie stuff, but one song they liked was ‘The Best Things in Life Are Free.’ Oh, I had about 20 that I could sing, and pretty soon, you wouldn’t hear a peep out of them.”

Sophie Kurys, the Racine Belles’ champion base-stealer, remembers the last play-off game of the 1946 season with pleasure, and everyone who saw it agrees.

Her club had topped the standings and had beaten the Blue Sox 3-2 in
17 innings to win the semi-final. Meanwhile, Allington’s Peaches had triumphed over Connie Wisniewski and the Chicks. The Belles and Peaches met for the championship, which came down to a final and deciding match.

“We had drawn almost 7,000 people to Horlick Field,” Kurys remembers
. “It didn’t have any fences in the outfield, but people had pulled their cars back there, like at a drive-in. They were standing on the roofs to get a better view. It was the most exciting game I ever participated in. It was only a 1-0 score, but there was so much hitting, so much action. We were standing on our heads out there, doing everything to catch the ball.”

Kurys is modest; she won the game herself
. Joanne Winter pitched for Racine, giving up 13 hits over 14 innings and stranding 19 runners on base.

“She got the hard hitters out and walked the easy ones,” says Kurys
.

Meanwhile, Carolyn Morris, throwing
for the Peaches, pitched a no-hit game for nine innings. In the scoreless 10th, the Belles got two runners on base, and Allington pulled her in favor of Millie Deegan.

This was acknowledged to be the turning point
. Deegan, a former outfielder, was less adept at holding runners on base. In the 14th, Kurys hit a single, stole second and came sliding home to score on a single by Betty Trezza.

Max Carey, who witnessed the contest, was later quoted as saying that it was the finest game he’s ever seen, even in the majors
. Carey was always good for a quote, but this time he was right.

And so, at the close of 1946, club directors totaled the season’s gate
. There was good news and bad.

South Bend drew 113,000 people; Grand Rapids even more
. Muskegon, with a population of 80,000, sold an astounding 140,000 tickets. But attendance at Rockford and Fort Wayne declined compared with the previous year.

Meyerhoff and Carey seemed oblivious; they were delighted with the teams that were doing well
. Expansion was unfolding as it should, and the money was rolling in.

Interest in girls’ baseball seemed to be growing beyond the
Midwest.

During the winter of 1946, Meyerhoff was forced to scotch rumors that Mexican promoters were poised to raid the All-American, offering a wide variety of inducements, including higher salaries, to relocate south of the border
. This story, (which had a grain of truth) was broken by the Fort Wayne newspaper, and Meyerhoff wrote an open letter to ease the minds of fans who feared they would lose their favorites.

It was true, he said, that the League’s salaries couldn’t match what the Mexicans were offering
. And the All-American scouting system “consisted of one man,” the widely traveled Gottselig. Nonetheless, Meyerhoff doubted that the All-Americans would be permitted to go abroad by their husbands, boyfriends and families. Nor would money be a deciding factor.

“Most of the girls,” he said, would stay put
. They had, after all signed up to play “for Coca-Colas and glory.”

After the steamy, insect-ridden experience of Pascagoula, spring training in 1947 was pure glamour. That year, Meyerhoff shipped 170 players – rookies and veterans alike – to Havana, Cuba.

Coincident
ally, the Brooklyn Dodgers had already been there that winter, in search of peace and quiet. They had feared that to train as usual in the southern states might mean trouble for their latest recruit, an infielder named Jackie Robinson.

Meyerhoff, however, wanted more publicity, not less
. He got it. And All-American players like to remind people that they, not the big-league Dodgers, drew the larger crowds to the
Gran Stadium de Havana.

The Cubans were baseball mad. One of their home-town favorites was Fidel Castro, a promising pitcher with his university team
. The youthful law student had previously been scouted by at least two major-league clubs, but turned down an offer (complete with $5,000 signing bonus) from the New York Giants, explaining that he liked being an amateur and wanted to complete his studies – thus leaving North Americans to ponder one of the more intriguing “what ifs” of modern history.

Prior to their departure, Max Carey had dusted off his thesaurus and published a glowing description of the typical All-American player:  “A professional ball player knows the answer to not only baseball
– but because she has kept her eyes and ears open, she has become travel-wise and experienced and knows how to deport herself in any company – being unselfish, modest humble, without braggadocio, cooperative, non-primadonnaish, winning graciously, losing sportingly – taking hard knocks as a matter of course and blaming none for her mistakes and shortcomings.”

The All-American players were billeted at the Seville-Biltmore Hotel, from which they were bused to practices at the stadium or the university campus
.

The turbulence that would soon explode in rebellion against the regime of Cuba’s president, Fulgencio Batista, was very close to the surface, but the players did
not immediately discern it. Their first impressions were those of all first-time travelers from a wealthy country, dropped suddenly and unexpectedly (the majority had never been outside North America) into the Third World.

Hair-raising traffic struck them as the clearest and most present danger
.

“Bus drivers would scare the daylights out of us,” says Lucille Moore, the South Bend chaperon
. “We’d start down these tiny narrow streets, and they’d never take their hands off the horn.”

A hard day’s practice simply wasn’t possible beneath the intense Caribbean sun
. Training sessions took place in the morning or at night, leaving the days free for closely chaperoned sight-seeing expeditions.

Dorothy Schroeder remembers the contrasts
. “What struck me about those places was that you were either rich or poor. There was no in-between. Even in Havana, when we rode the bus to the ball park, we went through neighborhoods that were plush, and then maybe two blocks down the street the little kids were playing out in the street. From toddler age to maybe seven or eight, all they wore was a T-shirt. It was an education, it really was.”

Food very quickly became the prime topic of conversation and focus of discontent
.

Breakfast and supper were served barracks-style in the hotel or at local restaurants, at the League’s expense
. Many players found the food unappetizing. It included greasy eggs and alligator steak.

One of Moore’s charges, Daisy Junor, “used to send things back constantly
. She sent some pancakes back one morning because they were too hard. When they brought some more, she stuck her fork in them and they squirted at her.”

A meal allowance was supposed to cover lunch, but restaurant
prices, especially for American-style cooking were high. As a result, the players ended up at Sloppy Joe’s, a bar made famous by Ernest Hemingway.

Dorothy Schroeder expected it to be world-class, but was disappointed to find “it was jus
t like an ordinary bar anywhere.”  At least it served hamburgers and sandwiches, which the players supplemented with coconuts filled with ice cream and half-pineapples (a nickel each) that they could buy in the street.

Ordinary tourists might cope with unpalatable food, but baseball players needed to keep their strength up
. The All-Americans wanted something done, and Joanne Winter, then in her fifth year with the Racine Bells, was appointed the unwilling leader of a mini-revolt.

A hungry group of malcontents gathered on the hotel roof and bolstered their courage by knocking back the local
cerveza.
Winter was appointed spokesperson, and found herself the next day facing Meyerhoff, Max Carey and “whoever else was down there – all the League guys and managers. I’m thinking, ‘I guess this is the end for me.’ And then I thought, ‘To heck with it. It’s not right.’ So I told them, ‘You have over a hundred girls here, and you’re expecting us to kill ourselves on a ball field, practice and play every day for almost a month, and you’re trying to say you can feed this army on stuff we can’t eat?  The orange juice tastes like castor oil.’”

To Winter’s relief, Meyerhoff accepted the criticism and coughed up an additional daily meal allowance
.

Multiplied by 170 players and the three weeks remaining in Havana, this dramatically inflated spring training’s final cost
. Money was becoming a sore point between the clubs and League officials, whom individual teams would accuse of high living on foreign shores and capitulation to cosseted hired help. But the clubs were wrong.

Havana was cheap compared to other training venues
. The entire trip, even counting the air fare, cost less than had Pascagoula, or would Opa-Locka, Florida, the following year.

By all accounts, opening night at the
Gran Stadium de Havana
was something to behold. The weather was perfect, with a cooling breeze off the Gulf of Mexico. More than 15,000 fans jammed their way through the turnstiles – the largest crowd to ever see a girls’ baseball game. As many more would
witness the three subsequent contests. The Cubans began by pointing and whistling at the unfamiliar sight, but soon grew more enthusiastic, cheering every play.

The All-Americans quickly became used to the aggressive interest of the Latin American men, who welcomed the young and more liberated North Americans
. Players were warned not to venture out alone. If they got on a public bus, they’d be pinched. Kissing noises followed them down the street.

“But there was something about the atmosphere down there,” Moore admits
. “It just made you feel that you’d like to skip and dance.”

Or hire a translator
. Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), a couple of the players spoke Spanish – a fact they kept from their hosts. One of them, Marge Villa, provided a running translation of many encounters.

Dorothy Schroeder and her teammates (several of whom were blonde) were taken on a factory tour
. “People down there are all dark-eyed and dark-haired. When they see a blonde, you better watch out. So we were in the factory, and Marge was with us. The workers were making comments about the
‘gringas’
and she understood it all. When we got back to the hotel, she told us they were saying things like ‘Look at the rear end on that one,’ and then they’d smile and we thought they were being real nice.”

The players also received a crash course in Cuban politics
.

Spring training ran through May 1, International Workers’ Day, a traditional excuse for a boisterous parade
. In 1947 Cuba, however, the occasion provided a focus for growing anti-Batista sentiment. On May Day eve, military authorities advised the League to keep its people indoors, and the players were issued emergency rations.

As it turned out, the Saville-Biltmore made an excellent vantage point for the parade
. Players were able to augment their food supply by lowering baskets of money to the street vendors below (some of it disappeared). On the rooftop, where many players gathered to watch, they could see the rooftops opposite, guarded by soldiers with machine guns.

May Day passed without serious incident, but the players’ presence in the hotel made for a spectacle all its own
. Cuban men lurked lewdly around, hoping to catch a glimpse of them.

Daisy Junor retains a memory of admirers “in white Panama suits, who’d sit in little alcoves across the street, masturbating and watching us
. Then the police would come with their billy clubs. They’d bang them on the cement and the guys would scatter. But after the police left, they’d be back. We went down to the front desk to report them, and the hotel staff told us, ‘Well, don’t look.’ ”

The League had decided that Havana’s vibrant nightclub scene was strictly off-limits
. Indeed, venturing out after dark was frowned upon, except when heavily chaperoned. This did not deter the unsinkable Faye Dancer, who managed to find her way to a cemetery, where the practice was to exhume corpses after the coffins disintegrated. Dancer – a blonde – amazed her teammates by launching into an “Alas, poor Yorick” soliloquy, addressed to a handy skull.

Dancer was not alone in bending the rules
. Betty Tucker and several daring cohorts decided to accept an invitation from two university students who’d come to watch them practice:  “They were really good-lookin’ fellas. They said they’d take us around and show us some of the sights. So we thought, ‘There’s two of them and four of us. That’s OK.’ ”

The illicit date can best be described as Andy Hardy’s Sisters Meet Casanova’s Illegitimate Sons
. At one point on the tour of Havana hot spots, they were approached by a man “with an itty-bitty mustache.”

One of the students warned them against such men
. “They’re all gigolos,” he said. But, as the evening wore on, with an even seedier club on the agenda, the players were unnerved to find that they were now being squired by four young men, one of whom sported that very sort of mustache.

Things looked darker still when the students suggested splitting up into two cars
.

“Well,” says Tucker, “we went to this next club, a downstairs place, and I said, ‘Be sure if we have a drink it’s just Coca-Cola in a bottle, so they can’t put anything in it.’ Then we were d
ancing for a while, and Maggie [the bilingual Marge Villa] comes over and says, ‘This guy is terrible. He’s kissing me on the neck.’ And I say, ‘Mine’s singing.’ So we told them we had to get back for curfew. They asked us out for the following night, and Maggie didn’t want to, but I thought if we refused, they might not take us back to the hotel. So I said, ‘Sure, fine,’ and meanwhile I’m winking at Maggie, and one of the guys is asking me why I’m making faces, and I tell him I have a nervous condition. We laughed about it a lot, but we swore we’d never do that again.”

The 1947 season was distinguished by the absence of Bill Allington, who remained in California, unable to get time off from his job at Twentieth-Century Fox. This suited Dorothy Harrell, who had decided that she “couldn’t stand listening to him.” Now she settled in to cope with the two interim managers Bill Edwards and Eddie Ainsmith, whose combined efforts would produce a sixth-place showing for the team.

Those players who could abide Allington’s presence yearned for his return
. The only thing that Edwards and Ainsmith succeeded in doing was to turn Dorothy Ferguson into an outfielder.

“We were playing in Racine,” she says “and Lois Florreich and Snooky Harrell and Dottie Kamenshek said, ‘Come out and eat with us.
’ So we were all sitting there with the manager, and suddenly one of them said, ‘Dottie, how would you like to play in the outfield?’ I thought, ‘This was all planned – I know it.’ So the next night I was in center field. I thought I was being demoted, but once I got out there, you couldn’t get me back. When I had been at second, I couldn’t ease up. I’d throw too hard, no matter what the distance. Now I had room. Boy, did I have room. I covered right, left and second base. You should have seen me run.”

In Peoria, meanwhile, the players were mounting a revolt, led by Faye Dancer
. Midway through the season, having touched bottom in the standings, they blamed Johnny Gottselig, who according to Dancer, “had got to the point where he didn’t even care about the team anymore.”

After a game in Kenosha, someone was delegated to call a Redwings board member and demand a meeting
. When the team arrived back home, they marched to the stadium and convened a gathering involving most of the players, the board of directors, and a startled Gottselig.

The players listed their many grievances, while Gottselig sat in silence
. After which, says Dancer, “the board fired him then and there,” replacing him with Leo Schrall. It wasn’t, however, the last time Gottselig was to manage a League team.

The world outside the League’s ballparks was changing daily
. Most of the servicemen were back, standing in line for a finite number of jobs. The end of gas rationing and travel restrictions meant that fans could and did go to Chicago or Milwaukee to watch the major-leaguers. The home-field bleachers began to lose their allure.