Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (17 page)

Some players, aware of these developments, decided it was high time to make their mark as entrepreneurs
. Connie Wisniewski and Doris Satterfield opened The Chicks Dugout, a hole-in-the-wall burger joint. After the last picture show, Grand Rapids moviegoers from the theater down the street dropped by for a late-night hotdog or a hamburger and fries.

Wisniewski was a quick study, learning her short-order skills from the landlord, who also owned a drugstore and soda fountain:  “He showed me how to make these things
. I probably had about two evenings’ training.”  This venture was an off-season job; obviously you couldn’t superintend a hot stove while playing 120-odd games of baseball. But it was successful, and the partners eventually sold it for a profit.

Meanwhile, in Racine, Joanne Winter had a similar idea
. “I figured I’d arrived,” she says, “and I thought I’d capitalize on my name.”  Her father advised her to investigate the candy business, and she took his advice, with Mildred Wilson, the chaperon, as her partner.

Wisconsin abounds in German candy-makers
. Winter and Wilson made the rounds and settled on Barkdall’s in Milwaukee, considered by chocolate connoisseurs to be the nation’s best. Barkdall had a long-standing rule; he only sold direct from his factory. But, impressed by the businesslike Belles, “he sold us two boxes of vanilla creams and that was our start.”

“
He got to like us, and we plagued him, and he started selling us anything we wanted. We used his creams and chocolate-covered cherries. Then we got Louis’s chocolate-covered nuts from Kenosha. We called the shop ‘Joanne Winter, A Finer Candy.’ It was tiny, just 45 square feet, right on the main street. We didn’t mind telling people where we got our stock. After all, it was excellent, from these champion candy-makers.”

Winter eventually dared to make some stock herself, including divinity and peanut brittle, while her father made the fudge
. “It was a lot of hard work,” she says, “but when you’re not afraid of that, it’s a lot of fun.”

This agreeable enterprise lasted until 1951, when Mildred Wilson succumbed to the attentions of a doctor who rented offices in the same building
.

“I used to tell people I lost the shop in a poker game,” says Winter, “but we just folded it up when Mildred got married.”

Meanwhile, the League was pursuing its latest rule change.

This season saw the introduction of a full, as opposed to modified, sidearm delivery
. It wasn’t mandatory; you could still throw underhand if you wanted.

“But” says Winter, “it behooved you to throw as hard and as fast as you could, with as much stuff on it as possible
. They kept pushing the distance back, too, so it got tougher and tougher.”

Tough or not, Winter threw well, winning almost as many games as Mildred Earp, the 1947’s leading pitcher.

Connie Wisniewski converted, too, biting her lip against the pain.

“But my ball would sail,” she says. “It would just take off
– the catcher couldn’t catch it, I threw it so hard.”  Her best seasons had been 1945 and 1946; both years she’d won the pitching championship. But in 1947, she found that she “simply couldn’t do it. It hurt my arm every time. But if I threw underhand, I couldn’t expect to compete with the sidearmers.”  That was the problem – the more variety in your grab-bag of pitches, the more advantage you had.

In 1947, Wisniewski won a mere
16 games, losing almost as many – a bitter blow.

“I think the hardest thing for me was the first time I was taken out of the game,” she says
. “The manager would come out and ask me if I thought I could do it. I’d say ‘If you think you’ve got somebody better, put ‘em in. But if you’re asking me if I’m ready to come out, then no, I’m not.’ But I know Millie Earp and Alice Haylett saved a couple of games for me. If I’d stayed in, we’d have lost.”

That knowledge
– that she couldn’t deliver her best – hurt Wisniewski the most.

So fortunes ebbed and flowed
.

In the course of a crucial play-off game, Tex Lessing, the Grand Rapids catcher, made headlines by going after an umpire
. Lessing was accurately described by Dottie Hunter as “cute as a bug’s ear.”  This did not diminish her fighting spirit.

The Chicks were locked in an eighth-inning 2-2 tie with Racine
. The bases were loaded, and a runner was about to be sacrificed home by Choo Choo Hickson. The play was close, but the official called it safe.

“In a split second,” said a captivated newspaper reporter, “Lessing pounced on the umpire George Johnson with both hands flying and slugged him so hard in the eye and face that he staggered back under the attack, so dizzy he was unable to conti
nue working behind the plate.”

Lessing was, (not surprisingly) booted out of what remained of the game, and considered herself lucky to escape without a suspension
. The Belles, their morale boosted by the win, went on to capture the championship, and Johnson’s fellow officials opted for leniency. Play-off pressure, they said, might get to anyone.

Lessing was fined $100
– a punishment blunted when Grand Rapids fans raised $2,000 on her behalf, in payment for granting their fondest wish at last.

Somewhere, way off in the world of big-league baseball, Joe Dimaggio was signed by the New York Yankees for $65,000 and bonuses. The Cleveland Indians paid $87,000 for ace pitcher Bob Feller. The weekly budget for an entire All-American team was $4,000.

DiMaggio and Feller went to the bank; the All-Americans went to Opa-Locka, Florida.

Its ball field – a change, at least, from the rigors of Pascagoula, though a slight come down from 15,000 frenzied Cubans – showed signs of recent manicuring. The players faced Johnny Rawlings, sprung for the occasion from his duties with the Grand Rapids Chicks and ready to lead them through their first exercise of the day.

Already their faces felt the warmth of the Florida sun
. Most players had smeared white zinc paste on their noses, hoping to protect against blisters. Before the week was out, many would have their first sunburn of the season.

They had left Chicago’s Union Station in the middle of a snowstorm
. The rookies, having made their connections from small towns near and far, had worried that they’d get lost in its echoing depths, or miss their train. They needn’t have worried.

Even Christine Jewett, fresh from rural Saskatchewan, had no trouble finding her way
.

“The station was wall-to-wall girls,” she says, “all headed for the same platform
. There were two or three carloads full. I just followed the crowd.”

The train pulled into Miami well past midnight, but the players stayed up for hours in their hotels, renewing old acquaintances or cementing new ones
. Now, groggy and train-lagged, they didn’t dare show the signs. Even though they had arrived late, they had to report to the field in fighting trim, sharp at 10 o’clock.

Opa-Locka, now absorbed into the sprawl of Greater Miami, was an abandoned naval air station, converted after the war to more pleasurable use
. The grounds contained several playing fields, but only one was large enough to hold the 160 players, including 40 rookies.

The League was once again on the expansion trail
– this time, to Springfield, Illinois, and for the first time to Chicago itself. The result was a record 10 teams, divided for the first time into two divisions, east and west. They would play the longest League schedule ever – 126 games, not including play-offs.

While Rawlings kicked off the exercise session, Max Carey stood on the sidelines conferring with League officials
. These men were there to decide which of the rookies and how many veterans would be assigned to the expansion teams – the Springfield Sallies and the Chicago Colleens.

They stood side-by-side with the chaperons and a group of local club directors there to get their first look at the new crop.

A hundred players had come down on the previous night’s train. Sixty more would arrive by the week’s end, but all the pitchers and catchers were in the first wave.

They needed all the preparation time they could get, to familiarize themselves with the 1948 season’s bold new innovation, the overhand pitch
.

This year, Carey was bound and determined to erase the last suspicion that girls’ baseball was still softball in disguise
. For insurance, Carey had also changed everything else – the pitching distance, the baseball length and the size of the regulation ball. Pitchers and catchers had been experimenting with these modifications over the winter months using a smaller ball sent them by the league.

Now was the time to try it out for real.

Photographers had set up tripods and heavy cameras at strategic points around the field. One newsman, anxious to gain a unique prospective, was lying flat on the ground in the path of a row of players who ran obligingly towards him. The click of cameras and the scratch of pencils on notebooks would make a steady background accompaniment to training over the next two weeks.

Carey and the officials studied the rookies with a
n appraising and practiced eye. The League usually rejected four out of five new players. This year, however, it was short of veterans to shuffle around and couldn’t afford to be too picky.

For the benefit of the press and the home-town fans, Carey was optimistic
. “It looks as if our tryout schools are paying off,” he announced. “The time we spent culling over scouting reports is going to pay big dividends. Right at the moment, I haven’t seen more than one or two girls who will be sent back for more experience, and that is most unusual.”

In fact, much of the media attention centered not on unknown quantities, but on the return of veteran players who’d quit or taken time off in previous seasons
.

The League had made an all-out push to coax retired players back into pro
-ball. Some had refused to reconsider.

The All-American dispatched an emissary to Toronto in an effort to persuade Gladys “Terrie” Davis, 1943’s batting champion, to return
. Traded by Jack Kloza to appease his Rockford dugout, she had bounced from the Chicks to the Muskegon Lassies, for whom she played first base in 1946.

The next season she’d stayed in Ontario, where, despite the emissary’s urgings, she would remain
.

Several married players had decided to spend more time on the home front in 1945; now, they were filtering back
. Dorothy Wiltse, the Californian pitcher, (now known by her married name of Dottie Collins) was among them.

Bonnie Baker was absent from spring training yet again, but had promised to report to South Bend for opening day
.

Perhaps the biggest news was that Pat Keagle, “the Blonde Bombshell,” who’d left in 1946, was coming back
. Keagle had not been idle. She had kept her hand in with the Arizona Queens. She showed up in Opa-Locka “in flashy sunbelt sportswear,” but carrying 10 extra pounds.

“Sure, I’m overweight,” she said, “but I can lose that quick.”  Keagle was widely popular, and her return perked everyone up.

And Allington was back with Rockford. He had settled, for the moment, his feud with Snooky Harrell. The two foes had reached an uneasy détente during the winter months, in the course of dinner at a Los Angeles restaurant.

“My mother warned me,” says Harrell
. “She said, ‘He’s going to be so nice to you, and you’re going to agree to go back.’ ” And by the end of the evening, sure enough, Allington had won her over. “Then,” says Harrell, “we all went out that next Sunday to practice in Pasadena. Pepper and Faye and Tiby were there, and Allington was as snotty as ever.”

This had infuriated Harrell all over again
. She wrote to the League’s business manager, asking to be placed on another team – any other team, as long as it was miles away from Allington. But her conscience began to bother her.

“I had joined church,” she says, “and felt that I should make an attempt to play for Bill again
. I felt a responsibility as a Christian to try and get along with him.”  During spring training, she was temporarily assigned to the Colleens, but when the final choices were made, she was back on the Rockford roster.

A combination of excitement and apprehension gripped the players
. Some feared that they wouldn’t make the grade, and they were right.

Christine Jewett remembers one young recruit, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, who didn’t stay the course
. “One night, when we got together for supper, she wasn’t there. Somebody said they’d told her she wasn’t going to make it, and they’d just gone ahead and made arrangements and she disappeared. I knew of two or three others like that. One by one they were told they didn’t make it, and then they’d be gone.”

By the time it got to the last day or two, most of these cuts had been made.

This year, as always, the players sweated and groaned through the tough workouts. The Californians could frolic on a beach during the off-season, but players who returned each winter to frigid climates lived more sedentary lives.

Doris Satterfield, the nursing graduate, was fitter than most, but admits that no one would have survived the season witho
ut the spring training ritual:  “It was intense exercise. I know that the first year, I couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings. My legs were black and blue. We weren’t even allowed to ride an elevator. If our room was on the fifth floor, we walked up and down the stairs. Somebody dropped a quarter one night, but decided not to pick it up. She kicked it aside, saying, ‘It’s just not worth it,’ ”

By the time
allocation day rolled around, the League had made its choices.

This year, the rules had been toyed with more than usual, mostly to make sure the expansion teams fielded able rosters and that pitchers were well distributed
. The best teams were allowed to retain a core of eight players from the year before, but only two could be pitchers. Second ranked teams were allowed to keep nine, also with two pitchers. But no team would be assigned any additional players from the reserve pool until the Colleens and Sallies had drawn seven players each.

One sportswriter summed up the general attitude: “When the League’s own rules are not sufficient to equalize the teams, then a new rule is adopted forthwith to do the job.”

But they didn’t know the half of it. Dismay would intensify in June when there was a second, sudden reallocation based on the early-season standings.

Some players had nothing to fear from the allocation process
.

Dottie Kamenshek, the Rockford Peaches’ first baseman, didn’t have much to worry about
. About to start her fifth season with the League, she was generally acknowledged as its best all-round player. She was from Cincinnati, where her family had struggled through the Depression. The memory of hard times had spurred her to think about what to do when her playing days were over. She had shrewdly banked her salary and would eventually enroll in university. But she felt that she had a good many years left with the Peaches.

“I didn’t think Rockford would put me on the block,” she says, “but I could see other people being nervous,”

Dottie Hunter viewed the impending forced marches with gloom. “Everybody would be chewing their nails all night long, wondering what team they were going to,” she says. “There was a lot of unhappiness in some places.”

Hunter and the other chaperons would have to deal with it, comforting those players who had been sent against their will to other teams
. Their hurt and rejection ran deeper than anyone imagined. When players were traded away from towns and teams where they had come to feel at home, they felt betrayed and abandoned.

Twi Shively had been fielding with the Brand Rapids Chicks for three years and was shocked to discover that she was being sent to the Colleens
. The League had its reasons:  “They told me I was picked because I had played in Chicago [with the Rockolas, a Chicago League franchise], and I would probably be a drawing card there.”  She didn’t agree, and it made for bitter feelings.

Just prior to allocation day, the speculation was rife in the sports pages of the All-American cities
. If Carey was intent on weakening the most outstanding teams, the Muskegon Lassies, who’d topped the 1947 standings, and the Racine Belles, who’d won the championships, had the most to fear.

Muskegon fans suspected that the rule limiting each team to two pitchers from the previous year had been designed specifically to thwart the Lassies, who had a clutch of first-rate hurlers.

Muskegon’s local newspaper, after reviewing the options, was certain that their third baseman would be kept at any cost:  “A flock of local fans would howl murder if Arleene Johnson, the steady-throwing third sacker, isn’t retained.”

Johnson, from Odema, Saskatchewan (population 500), was a soft-voiced, freckle-faced girl who didn’t fit her nickname, “The Iron lady”, given to her for appearing in 224 consecutive games during 1946 and 1947
. She was a tremendous favorite with the kids of Muskegon. Nevertheless, despite cries of “Murder”, Johnson was temporarily lost to the Fort Wayne Daisies (she would soon be shipped back in a reshuffle).

Grand Rapids pundits were equally certain that Connie Wisniewski would remain with the Chicks, even though her pitching days were over
. In this case the pundits were right. Of the 30 players shuffled around, eight were from Grand Rapids, but Wisniewski wasn’t among them.

Nor did the League’s crop of rookies pan out exactly as hoped
. By scrambling existing teams, the League had to add only 10 new faces.

One was Earlene Risinger, known as “Beans” for her beanpole-thin physique
. She had read about the League the previous year and tried out in Oklahoma City, where the All-Americans played an exhibition game on the way back from Cuba. Her talent was apparent, and she’d been signed and instructed to report to the League’s Chicago office before joining the Rockford Peaches.

But she was only a teenager, and had never traveled anywhere in her life
. Homesickness hit her hard. As soon as the train pulled into Union Station, she went to the ticket office and bought a seat back to Oklahoma. Far from being a tragedy, it proved a blessing in disguise.