Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (5 page)

The League’s $55 entry-level salary was unheard of for young women
. Besides, players would be on the road half the time, with those travelling and living expenses paid. They could bank money and plan on attending college to make something of themselves, or they could at least escape from the limited horizons of dead-end jobs and one-horse towns.

But there were obstacles
. Many prospective players were still teenagers, and subject to the wishes of their families; even those in their 20s, holding down steady jobs, were often living at home with protective parents, people who had barely survived the Depression.

To a Saskatchewan farm family, South Bend or Kenosha sounded like Sodom and Gomorrah
. They were hopeful of a better life for their daughters, but this seemed a bit much.

While most parents had misgivings, however, few were adamantly against the idea
. Convinced of Wrigley’s bona fides, and having learned that chaperones would be thick on the ground, they usually relented.

The players, of course, had their suitcases packed and were two steps out the door
. Professional softball represented the opportunity of a lifetime. Amid a climate of wartime restraint, as North America battened down for rationing and sacrifice, this was a chance for adventure.

In a few cases, it wasn’t parents but husbands who cried foul
. Bonnie Baker’s husband, Maury, was stationed overseas with the Royal Canadian Air Force when Bonnie was given her chance to play pro ball. She had good reason to believe that he would be less than thrilled at the prospect. They had been married for nearly five years. In 1942, she had had to pass up a chance to play in Montreal for a team sponsored by Ogilvie Oats because he insisted she stay home. This time, however, her mother-in-law encouraged her to go now and tell Maury later. This bold maneuver worked.

When Baker became the South Bend Blue Sox catcher – and the League’s most widely recognized star – Maury burst with pride
. But he accepted her ball career on the understanding that Bonnie would call it quits when he came marching home.

The players reported for 1943 spring training – held for the first and only time at Wrigley Field itself – in a state of great anticipation
. Only 60 players would survive, chosen to fill berths on the All-American’s four founding teams.

They traveled by train, wi
th one or two delays en route. War work had priority; so did anyone in service uniform. Players scrambled for early-morning or late-night connections, clutching cardboard suitcases and other must-have gear, including, in one case, a portable gramophone. Some had never been on a train before.

To many of them, Chicago must have seemed like another planet
.

Lillian Jackson, recruited from Nashville, Tennessee, was thrilled to discover that she and the other hopefuls would use the same locker rooms and showers as the Cubs.

All the players had been told beforehand that there’d be myriad rules and regulations governing personal conduct. They had received the patented no-shame, no-blame pep talk, and knew that chaperones would monitor their every move.

Unsuitable behavior was spelled out in their contracts, complete with the penalties - $10 for back-chatting umpires, $50 for appearing “unkempt” in public
. The League was keen on comparing its standard document to an Actors’ Equity agreement. This suggestion added a touch of show-biz panache.

Smoking and drinking hard liquor in public were forbidden
. Every social engagement had to be cleared ahead of time with the chaperone. A curfew called for players to be tucked safely into bed two hours after the game – just time enough for a shower, change and a bite to eat. Even close friends and blood relatives were kept well away from the bench; a no-fraternization clause prohibited off-the-field contacts with rival club members.

All this was understood – but the League uniform came as an unwelcome surprise
. Unless the players had seen the photograph that caught Bonnie Baker’s eye, they hadn’t realized they’d be playing in skirts.

By the early 1940s, young women everywhere were wearing pants
. Rosie the Riveter – the symbol of a woman’s ability to do a man’s work – went about her business in slacks or overalls. Shorts were customary for casual wear; jeans (known as dungarees) were big with teenagers. But the All-American wanted something entirely different.

Most female softball teams wore modified men’s uniforms, but there were exceptions
. Clubs from the southwestern states, notably the Arizona Ramblers, wore shorts. So did the Moose Jaw Royals, from wind-swept Saskatchewan – but in deference to the prairie climate they wore them with leotards, which made the players look like trapeze artists.

The ultimate fashion statement was made by Toronto’s Sunday Morning Class, as described in the 1942 scouting report: “Their entire uniform is white
. On their heads they wear a small stocking cap about the size of a small plate. The fact that none of the girls have a boyish haircut makes the tiny cap appear even smaller than it really is. Instead of shirts they wear a tight-fitting long-sleeved sweater that makes them appear like a group of Hollywood sweater girls. Flowing out from the bottom of the sweater is a short full-pleated skirt that barely reaches their knees. The pleats are very small and as the players cavort about the field they give one the impression of a group of ballet dancers as their skirts flare out.”

Dazzled by this image, the League opted for skirts
.

The final version was apparently designed by Mrs. Wrigley, with the aid of Ann Harnett and Otis Shepherd, the artist responsible for most of Wrigley’s advertising billboards
.

The result was a belted tunic dress with short sleeves that buttoned up the front, but on the left side, leaving the chest free for a circular team logo
.

The dress came in four team colors: pastel shades of green, blue, yellow and peach
. Only the Blue Sox and Peaches were fortunate enough to match color and name.

The skirt was flared and unhemmed
. Players were expected to hem it to suit their size, but no shorter than six inches above the knee. Underneath they were elasticized shorts, an absolute necessity given their energetic style of play.

They wore a small cap with a large peak and stockings rolled to reach just below the knee
. It looked like a tennis outfit or, more precisely, a British field hockey uniform.

The result, according to Marie Keenan, the League secretary, nicely fulfilled Wrigley’s intentions
. “We do not want our uniforms to stress sex, but they should be feminine, with emphasis on the clean American sports girl.”

The sports girls, for their part, found the design ridiculous
.

Dorothy Hunter, playing first base for the Racine Belles, thought some of the players looked “like some old lady walking around with an old-fashioned dress….I was tall enough that mine came right to my knees
. Besides, I had heavy legs and I didn’t want to show them off too much.”

Players stuck to the hem rule at first, but gradually shortened them how they pleased
.

Lucille Moore, the South Bend Blue Sox chaperon, remembers that a lot of people were rather shocked because some of the players showed a lot of thigh
. “Each year,” she said, “the hemlines went up and up.”

The skirts raised eyebrows and created problems
.

Joanne Winter, who was assigned to the Racine Belles, found that they cramped her pitching style
. The shoulders tended to bind and the skirt flared out, impeding her release. “It was great from the spectator viewpoint,” she said. “From our standpoint, not many of us enjoyed it. If I’d had a brain and a seamstress, I would have changed it.”

Perhaps the most serious difficulty – aside from chilblains inevitable when playing games in the
Midwest in early spring – was that the skirts made sliding an exercise in masochism. Most players carried terrible abrasions known as “strawberries” – large areas of raw, scraped skin that would scarcely heal before another slide tore them open again.

At least one manager was so undone by the inevitable pain and suffering that he averted his eyes each time a player came careening into base.

Occasionally, the League would attempt to tinker with the uniform design, but the solutions were always worse. At one point, Marie Keenan wrote the manufacturer suggesting that the pitcher might be issued a skirt fitted with an elastic band that would hold it close to her legs, into which she could step like a pair of slacks. This tube-dress or stovepipe concept was never inaugurated.

Some aspects of the uniform had players in stitches
. Winter and teammate Sophie Kurys remember their first glimpse of Thelma Walmsley in a catcher’s uniform. Walmsley sported a high pompadour, a popular hairdo of the time. It was without question feminine, but when coupled with a catcher’s mask, it was also absurd.

On the pitcher’s mound, Joanne Winter recalls, “I turned my back to the plate and then turned around
. And there’s Walmsley behind the plate, and I cracked up.”  Kurys looked at Winter and joined in. But soon she was charging the mound, yelling, “Cut it out, will’ya!  Straighten up!”

“The w
hole bunch of them were after me,” says an unrepentant Winter, “but you know how it is when you get the giggles.”

During the League’s earliest days, the publicity mill was working overtime
. The writer of a Muskegon
Chronicle
article celebrating Arleene Johnson, another player from small-town Saskatchewan, was baffled when told that she liked curling, an activity many Americans had never heard of.

The writer felt compelled to explain the game’s mysteries: “The sport where the players wear kilts and make with the brooms on an ice rink, pushing little black pots that largely resemble cuspidors
. The game is a sort of cross between shuffleboard, bowling, ice hockey and floor sweeping.”

Press releases centered on domesticity at every turn
.

Ann Harnett was presented as “an accomplished coffee maker
.”

Clara Schillace “enjoyed nothing better than to whip up a spaghetti dinner, work with her father in the Victory Garden and wash dishes with her pretty niece
.”

Shirley Jameson was distinguished by “roguish eyes that refuse to behave, a saucy, turned-up little Irish pug nose, and enough concentrated personality to lend oomph to a carload of Hollywood starlets, all wrapped up in a four-foot,
11-inch chassis.”

A League questionnaire, distributed to every player, sought to elicit human-interest data by means of questions such as “Do you get many mash notes from the fans?”

Extracurricular interests were blown out of all proportion.

If someone had taken flying lessons, she became an accomplished aviatrix
. Anyone who’d posed for a department store snapshot was described as a former model. Choo Choo Hickson, who had just once donned boxing gloves as part of a publicity stunt in Tennessee, was labeled “Chattanooga’s Only Girl Pugilist.”

The pity is that Wrigley and Co. didn’t
highlight the players’ real achievements.

Lib Mahon had a university degree and taught school, as did Shirley Jameson, who had also won speed-skating awards nationwide
. Oddly, even the players’ wide-ranging athletic interests received relatively little attention.

Schillace (in-between bouts of dish-washing) had competed in national track-and-field meets
.

Dorothy Ferguson was Manitoba’s top-ranked speed-skater, and Betsy Jochum was the Amateur Softball Association’s throwing champion
.

The League preferred to feature more “womanly” activities – housework or piano playing, pasting pictures into scrapbooks and writing letters home.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the 1943 spring training was its “Charm School,” actually a mandatory course in good grooming and ladylike behavior.

No one remembers who first came up with this bright idea, but Arthur Meyerhoff was an avid supporter
. His conversion took place while visiting the summer home of Patricia Stevens, who owned a well-known Chicago modeling studio.

“We spent the day there and everyone was in swimming
,” he said. “I remember looking around and these were all girls from her school, and I said to myself, ‘What a bunch of homely-looking mugs.’ When they left for their rooms and got ready for dinner, out came the most beautiful group of girls you’ve ever seen.”

Thus inspired, Meyerhoff arranged for none other than Helena Rubinstein, whose chain of beauty salons had made her name synonymous with the feminine ideal, to coach the players in elegant deportment.

Players were issued loose-leaf binders in which to record “Notes of a Star To Be.”  The idea of farm girls and small-town rowdies being given lessons in how to walk, sit, apply make-up, put on coats and introduce themselves at social functions was public relations gold. The Charm School session was the obligatory lead paragraph in every subsequent magazine article.