Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (25 page)

Back in the spring, to prove good faith in the new
atmosphere of cooperation, South Bend had lent Fort Wayne its second-string catcher when the Daisies’ first-stringer was injured.

By the end of August, South Bend’s catcher was herself immobilized
. The Blue Sox asked for and received their second-stringer back, forcing the Daisies to make do with one of their pitchers behind the plate. This player had, in fact, caught for other teams, but Allington didn’t want her for the play-offs. He wanted the League’s top-ranked catcher, Ruth Richard, a Rockford Peach.

Commissioner McCammon polled all the club presidents and everyone, including Roy Taylor of Grand Rapids, had approved
. Unfortunately, Taylor, who was now sole owner of the Chicks, had not informed his team.

The final best-of-three contest between the Daisies and Chicks was slated to begin at South Field in Grand Rapids
. This was good news for the Chicks, who tended to falter badly on the road. An initial victory would get them off on the right foot.

At the first game, on a Saturday night, the Chicks and manager Woody English arrived to find the Daisies preparing to put Ruth Richard behind home plate
.

Marilyn Jenkins, catching for the Chicks, though
t that “it was like the Boston Red Sox in the World Series taking Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, and it wasn’t fair.”  English made a formal pre-game protest, claiming that Richard, having played all season for a team that was out of the play-offs, was ineligible.

Allington argued that he had the commissioner’s backing, and that Richard should stay
. At this point, the Chicks left their dugout and returned to the clubhouse.

Faced with a stadium full of
restless fans, League officials negotiated a compromise. The Chicks would play under protest, on the understanding that the issue would be resolved before the second game on Sunday. Thus assured, the agitated Chicks pulled off a triumphant 8-7 win over Allington and the Daisies, scoring the winning run in the ninth inning with two out and the bases loaded.

On Sunday night, the action shifted to Fort Wayne’s Memorial Stadium
. The Chicks arrived to find 1,600 fans in the bleachers and Richard suiting up. English ordered the Chicks off the field. He would have been wise to follow them, but he remained to argue with Allington at home plate.

No one can remember who swung first, but there was certainly a fistfight, and the umpire and others had to separate the two managers
. The umpires forfeited the game to Fort Wayne – not because of the brawl, but because the Chicks, at English’s direction, had defaulted.

Who was behind these events depends on whom you listen to
.

Marilyn Jenkins lays some of the blame on Allington, who “had a lot of ways to win .”

Gabby Ziegler remembers how belligerently English reacted. “He got very bull-headed about Fort Wayne having this other catcher. He wasn’t going to have it. So he pulled the team off the field.”

Ziegler wasn’t as worked up about it as some of the players were
. “We had won the last game against them, even with Richard as their catcher. What was the difference?” But you couldn’t argue with English.

“The whole thing was like a nightmare
. You’d like to forget it but you can’t.” She thinks also that the episode left a bad taste in Allington’s mouth, that he didn’t want to win that way.

Nonetheless, says Jenkins, “that’s the way Grand Rapids ended, and that was the end of the League
. We didn’t like to talk about it, but the more we thought about it, I think we’d make the same decision today.”

The next day, the Chicks went home, leaving English and other club officials to sort matters out with Commissioner McCammon
.

English reminded the others that the teams played for a share of the gate during the play-offs, and that Richard’s presence loaded the dice against them
. It was bad sportsmanship, he said, to salt the Daisies with another team’s top player.

Taylor, the Grand Rapids owner, was faulted on two grounds – for failing to inform his team of what he’d agreed to, and for not insisting that they perform the job they’d come to do
.

Some people think English led the walkout; others criticize him for giving in to his players
. Memories differ, and it was a long time ago.

Fort Wayne went on to play Kalamazoo in the finals – and lost, by the way, in a surp
rise upset. Once again, a low-ranking team had snatched the championship from the season’s top-ranked club.

Meanwhile, McCammon banished English from League management and fined him $35 for failing to field a team
. He was fined another $15, as was Allington, for the fight. The players’ money was held in escrow until further notice.

Only the Grand Rapids officials escaped without censure
. They “did everything they could to prevent this unhappy occurrence,” McCammon concluded, and “are to be commended for their efforts.”

All in all, it was a nasty way to end the League.

When the All-American’s players took to the field in 1943, they were fulfilling not a dream, but a fantasy
. For a young woman in 1940s America, a professional sports career of any kind was not a likely prospect.

There were – as there are today – female tennis players and golfers
. But women’s professional softball – let alone baseball – simply did not exist. Wrigley created it, then gave up on it before it could prove itself.

Nor did the All-American keep pace with the changes that ebbed and flowed around it
. The players never unionized (although there were rumors of group action in South Bend, in the early years).

Unlike the major leagues, the All-American never integrated
. Two black players tried out with South Bend in 1951. Their arrival was met by – in the carefully chosen words of the keeper of the League minutes – “various views from different cities.”

In the United States, 7,000 girls play little league ball, as opposed to more than 2,500,000 boys
. They are effectively discouraged from joining the boys’ teams. Like Pepper Paire, they take a lot of guff.

As for the players of the All-American League, those who survive are now in their
60s and 70s. Age has taken some of their fire and dash away. Some live in comfortable retirement. Others – perhaps because of their gypsy existence – are less fortunate, but they have few regrets.

Every other year, someone else discovers them, and a magazine article or
10-minute television feature wonders whatever happened to Bonnie Baker. Well, Bonnie Baker and all the rest of them have found each other again. They have formed the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Association.

As early as 1943, Philip Wrigley promised that photos of the players of the All-American would han
g in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, next to those of the men who made pro baseball history. It never happened.

It wasn’t until 1988, after many years of lobbying by the Association, and
34 years after the League folded, that the Baseball Hall of Fame finally recognized women’s professional baseball. In November 1988, a permanent display was installed amid much fanfare.

The Association holds annual reunions, at which they salute empty chairs and sing the “Victory Song.”  They correspond through a newsletter in which they publish poems and report on what they’re doing and who amongst them needs help or a friendly letter.

Once upon a time in the Midwest, they did something no one else has done. They were just kids, having fun and enjoying one another. They weren’t thinking about being pioneers, about making history. They didn’t realize what pioneers they were.

Today, they look forward to the next reunion, living very much in the present but looking back on occasion through the glow of nostalgia to the best years of their lives, when they were young and strong and together, playing the game they loved and at which they excelled, with all the time in the world stretching out before them.

It’s been nearly 40 years since the players of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League filled their hometown diamonds. Forty years since the last time the local newspaper carried the box scores, since fans strolled along shady streets to the park to watch the Peaches or the Daisies or the Blue Sox play.

There were some who just wouldn’t believe it was gone
.

After the 1954 season, a couple of dozen players joined together with Bill Allington as the Allington All-Americans and continued to tour the
Midwest for three season, playing games against men’s and women’s teams.

When the contest was against men, they switched the batteries (the male pitcher and catcher playing for the women’s team, and vice versa) to give the crowd a good show
.

They covered a lot of ground, from Ohio to the Dakotas
. The players rode a bus that had seen better days, used friendly townspeople’s basements as dressing rooms and camped in cheap motels. They played rodeos and circuses; it was one step up from the days of wandering Bloomer Girls.

“They were the best years of my life.”  It’s the way most former players sum up their careers in professional baseball
.

Some players married and raised families; others went back to school
. The money they saved from playing baseball often financed the changes in their lives. Their years in the League gave most of the players confidence and a vision of a life outside the little town or city they’d grown up in.

Many couldn’t go back to fulfilling the ideal of the dependent, housebound wife and chose careers instead
. Others would still have married if they could, but marriage on their terms didn’t happen.

Many of the players settled in the town they had played in and are still there today, still occasionally recog
nized by fans of the 1940s and 50s. Friendships couldn’t be as easily dissolved as the League.

Friendships that began on a baseball field in the
Midwest have continued all their lives. There are pockets of former players all over North America – Saskatchewan, California, Arizona, Florida, the eastern seaboard and the four mid-western states that were their stamping grounds.

In Grand R
apids, Dottie Hunter took up her off-season job – sales clerk in a jewelry store – full-time. Players couldn’t break old habits. Former Chicks like Marilyn Jenkins and Earlene “Beans” Risinger still dropped by to let her know what they were up to and ask her advice about their education or their careers.

Some continued to play ball, although that meant returning to amateur softball
. There were others who found softball too tame after the faster pace of professional baseball, and they opted to take up other sports.

For most of the players, life after professional baseball had its ups and downs
. For a few, life has been hard, even tragic.

Of those, perhaps the most tragic was Merle “Pat” Keagle
. Although Keagle has retired from the League, girls’ professional baseball was still a reality when “the Blonde Bombshell” of Grand Rapids was hit by cancer; she died before she was out of her 30s.

Most of the men connected with the All-American League – its managers, club owners and executives – are now gone
. The exceptions are Ken Sells, the first League president, who retired to Phoenix, Arizona; Fred Leo, another League president, who lives in Colorado; and Harold Greiner, former Daisies manager, who is still in Fort Wayne, nearly blind, but surrounded by photos of his family and his “girls,” those he coached and managed in the heyday of softball and women’s professional baseball. Many of those women he coached still visit him from time to time.

Lou Arnold, South Bend Blue Sox pitcher, took a job with Bendix Aviation in South Bend and worked there for many years
. “I made a good living,” she says. “I have a good retirement. I met all these good people. I’ve had a wonderful life, and a lot of it is because I played ball right here.”

Mary “Bonnie” Baker lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she returned after her stint as Kalamazoo manager
. Bonnie was one of those who found that she couldn’t return to softball after the League, although she tried. When she first returned home, Baker joined a team that was playing Class A softball. They went to the national championships in Toronto in 1953.

“But after that it was downhill all the way,” she says, and Baker put softball and baseball behind her for good.

Husband Maury died just a few years after she left the League. With a nine-year-old daughter to support, Mary returned to work full-time, as western Canada’s first radio sports news director. Later she started work in a curling rink. She eventually became its manager and remained there until her retirement.

Arnold Bauer, now a widower, still lives in South Bend
. He keeps in touch with former Blue Sox by telephone and mail.

Marge Callaghan (Maxwell) is in Vancouver, British Columbia
. Her sister Helen Callaghan (St. Aubin) lives in Lompoc, California. Kelly Candaele, one of Helen’s sons, helped to spark renewed interest in the League during the 1980s when he co-produced a half-hour video documentary on the All-American that has been shown on national public television.

Faye Dancer left the League after 1950, at the age of
25, the victim of a herniated disk aggravated by her baseball career. She trained in electronics and also ran her own business for a few years, all in Santa Monica, California, where she still works and see old friends. She and Pepper Paire and other former League players recently played parts in a television situation comedy about former ball players holding a reunion.

Judy Dusanko moved to Saskatchewan with her husband when she left the All-American
. She took up amateur softball once again and her team won the western Canadian championships. Basketball was the sport she pursued during the winter. Eventually, she and her husband escaped the Canadian winters by moving to Arizona, where they live today.

Thelma “Tiby” Eisen worked in California’s telecommunications industry for over
30 years. She was fortunate enough to join a growing company and became one of the first women to work with its installation crews. She invested in the firm and now lives in Palm Desert, California.

Dorothy Ferguson (Key) and her husband Don remained in Rockford, and they still live in the first house they bought after their marriage
. They have grandchildren, and they continue to operate a home maintenance business. “Dottie” also helps out at the Dixie Cream Donut Shop, where fans periodically drop by to recall old times.

Dorothy “Snooky” Harrell (Doyle) played her last game in the League in 1952 and then went to Phoenix to play softball
. Inspired by other players who decided to attend college, she became a physical education instructor. She owns a house in Los Angeles County, paid for by her baseball earnings, but she lives in Cathedral City, California next door to Dorothy Kamenshek.

Irene “Choo Choo” Hickson still lives in Racine, home of the Belles
. She remained with the Racine team until it folded in 1950 and then ran a restaurant called the Home Plate, for a number of years.

Chaperon Dorothy Hunter stayed in Grand Rapids, Michigan – the city that had been her home for ten years – after the League folded
. She and her Chicks have been friends ever since. At one point, Hunter returned to her home town of Winnipeg, but there wasn’t enough of her former life to keep her there. At the urging of her friends from the League, Hunter has resettled in Grand Rapids, and her Chicks, she says today, “look after me like I was their grandmother.”

Lillian Jackson lives in Arizona
. She played with the Parischy Bloomer Girls, a Chicago League team, for four years after she left the All-American, and worked full-time. She took up swimming as well as golf, and still plays the game in Arizona.

Marilyn Jenkins, first the Grand Rapids bat girl and later their catcher, is still in her home town
. After her baseball career ended, Jenkins became an estate agent and built up a business for herself. She recently unearthed a large cache of old photos about the League in the estate of a local businessman. The photos have been donated to the League’s archives in South Bend.

Christine Jewett (Beckett) has retired, with her husband, to the tiny Saskatchewan community of Stewart Valley
. Like the other Saskatchewan players, she looks forward to reunions and keeps in touch with her former teammates.

Betsy Jochum quit the League in 1948 when they attempted to trade her away from South Bend
. Using her earnings, she returned to Cincinnati to get a college education and became a physical education teacher until her retirement.

Arleene Johnson (Noga) returned to Regina, Saskatchewan, after the 1948 season and married
. Johnson returned to curling and still plays. She lives with her second husband, not far from several children and grandchildren. She has been active in setting up an All-American exhibit in the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame, which recently inducted all players from the province who played in the League.

Daisy Junor and her husband Dave are retired now
. They spend winters in Arizona and return to Saskatchewan each spring.

Dorothy Kamenshek, slowed down by a back injury, quit the League in 1951 to go to Marquette University
. She studied to be a physical therapist and eventually pursued a career in health administration. She lives in Cathedral City, California, and she and ex-teammate Snooky Doyle regularly take a run out to Palm Desert to visit Tiby Eisen.

Sophie Kurys played softball in Chicago and Phoenix for a few years after she left the League in 1950
. Eventually she went into business in Racine, and lived there until 1972 when she moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Kurys continued working for a time; now she is retired. She golfs with neighbor Joanne Winter and with Nicky Fox and goes to all the reunions.

Millie Lundahl, the Peaches’ chaperon, is still in Rockford, Illinois, busier than ever.

Elizabeth “Lib” Mahon, who had teaching credentials when recruited from her South Carolina home, went back to South Bend after she retired from the game. It was intended as a stop-gap measure, but she remained until her retirement. Mahon, Harold and Jochum regularly get together, visiting each other’s homes, and help keep the League archives in good shape.

Helen “Nicky” Nicol (Fox) didn’t return to her home province of Alberta after she quit the League in 1953
. She settled in Racine and later moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where she works at a local golf course and regularly meets for a game with other former League players.

Lavo
nne “Pepper” Paire (Davis) played amateur softball and bowled in California after she left the League in 1953. She also worked at Hughes Aircraft and raised three children. In 1963, Paire suffered a serious injury to her back when she had a disastrous fall. Slowed, but undaunted, she lives today in Van Nuys, California. Paire has acted as consultant on the 1992 movie about the All-American,
A League of  Their Own.

Mary Rountree left the League in 1952 to go to medical school
. She became a doctor, eventually specializing in anesthesia. She settled in Coral Gables, Florida, where she still lives.

Doris Satterfield has always been “grateful for the opportunity to get out of a small town and come here and live a life that made me very happy.”  After she left the League, Satterfield went back to nursing
. She now lives, retired, on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dorothy Schr
oeder lives in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, with her twin brother. She still works, and she recently moved into a new house that they designed and built.

Betty Tucker spent five years in the Chicago League after her contentious departure from the All-American
. She also went back to school, and then worked in a manufacturing plant for 16 years. During her spare time she took up golf and bowling, but expanded her activities when she moved to Tucson, Arizona, to get away from the snow. Today she hikes, camps and travels whenever she can.

Joanne Winter left the League in 1950 when the Racine Belles folded, spent a year with the Chicago League, then became a professional golfer
. She recently finished writing her memoirs and lives in Phoenix, next door to ex-Belle Sophie Kurys.

Connie Wisniewski retired from the League after the 1952 season because “I’d got a good job at General Motors and I didn’t want to give it up.”  She played softball with the company team for a couple of years, although they wouldn’t let her pitch, “because I had been a professional
. You know, just to be fair to the other players.”  After 28 years, in which she had worked her way up to inspector, Wisniewski retired to St. Petersburg, Florida, where she golfs, visits friends and goes to all the League reunions.

Alma “Gabby” Ziegler returned to Los Angeles and became a court reporter, eventually working for the Superior Court of Los Angeles County
. For her, “softball can’t hold a candle to baseball,” and so she never played again, although she did umpire some games. Golf became the important sport in her life, and it still is. She lives now in San Luis Obispo, California, where she “golfs, delivers Meals on Wheels and socializes.”