Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (7 page)

Local sportswriters adopted a “show me” attitude, and fans weren’t encourag
ed to come out and watch. The Chicks were forced to play mostly daytime games, because the Brewers moved in at night, effectively limiting the number of potential spectators.

The tick
et price for All-American games – a dollar, the same as for the Brewsters – was regarded as too high, but Wrigley refused to cut the price. He felt that a reduction would admit defeat and reinforce the idea that girls’ baseball was second-class. Instead, in a bizarre decision, he chose to boost attendance by hiring the Milwaukee Symphony to play a program of classical music prior to the Chicks’ home games.

In a memo, he urged the team’s backers to mount “a complete show, a woman’s show
. If people feel our price is too high, we can say 50 cents is for the show and 50 cents is for the game.”

The symphony orches
tra failed to draw the crowds. The Milwaukee
Journal’s
sports editor summed up general reaction to the program thus:  “Mr. Wrigley’s minions hope that the music lovers who attend the concerts will not get up and walk out when the girl ballplayers take the field. Mr. Wrigley’s minions, confidentially, think he is nuts, but they would not be quoted for anything – not because P.K. would fire them (he is not that way at all), but because they have thought before that some of the millionaire gum man’s ideas were screwy and have seen those nutty ideas pay off.”

Wrigley finally realized that he was fighting a losing battle in Milwaukee; he had just been handed proof positive that his original concept wouldn’t wash
. The real problem was that the All-American game, played on a smaller diamond, got lost in the cavernous environment of a big-league park.

League President Ken Sells watched the Chicks play, and confessed that “it was a flop
. It was awful. We could tell in just a few weeks that it wasn’t working. We would go out to the ballpark ourselves and we felt that we were too far away from the ball players.”

The symphony soon abandoned heavy-duty classics and chugged its way through such accessible melodies as “Tales from the Vienna Woods” and excerpts from
Lohengrin
and
Carmen
. But faced with this cultural hybrid, and the sensation that they were looking at the field through the wrong end of a telescope, fans went elsewhere.

Amazingly, given these conditions, Milwaukee’s manager, Max Carey, had
succeeded in molding his Chicks – a name inspired by a popular book of the day,
Mother Carey’s Chickens
– into a first-class team. But 1944 would be Milwaukee’s only year. The Chicks moved in 1945 to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they would remain until the League’s demise.

This failed attempt at expansion was alarming to League officials, who wanted to make sure fans were getting their money’s worth one way or the other
. Several changes were put into effect in order to dynamize the game.

Scorers were instructed to lower the number of recorded errors when high figures threatened to make the players sound fumble-fingered
. In midseason, a hastily convened gathering of League managers stepped up to the plate themselves in order to figure out why there was such a scarcity of .300 hitters.

The Rockford
Register-Republic
reported their consensus that “the dead ball was the problem.”  The ball size was promptly dropped to eleven and a half inches and the basepath was lengthened, to slow down base-stealing.

This was the first of many tinkerings that would continue unabated until the League disbanded
. Their effect was to make the game more like baseball, less like softball. In fact, the League now decided that it could legitimately change its name. In 1944, it became the All-American Girls Ball League. In 1945, it was finally changed to “Baseball.”

Pat Keagle’s first assignment in the All-American landed her with the ill-fated Milwaukee Chicks, as part of the League’s player allocation scheme
. When she reported to Max Carey at Milwaukee’s Borchert Field, the team was riddled with injuries. Their left-fielder had sprained an ankle; their sparkplug second baseman had a twisted leg; the third baseman had a sprained finger. The club’s performance showed it.

The night that Keagle arrived, Milwaukee had lost the first game of the double-header against the Blue Sox, and was lagging woefully in the standings.

Connie Wisniewski was the starting pitcher for the second game. She saw Keagle coming and decided that the stylish blonde was not the answer to Carey’s prayers. Keagle was of barely average height. Although sturdily built, she seemed unathletic, perhaps because she’d shown up in best Charm School ensemble.

“She had on real spike heels and her hair was in an updo and she had on a fancy silk dress,” says Wisniewski
. “I thought, oh, my goodness; we’re going to lose 20-0 with her in the outfield.”  What Carey thought is not a matter of record, but he got Keagle suited up and ready to go.

Far from standing helplessly by, Keagle took immediate control of the game, smacking two singles, a double and a home run.

“She was a team all by herself,” says Wisniewski. “We started jumping around and hugging her. She knocked in all the runs.”

Nor was Keagle quite so unassuming as she appeared
. She liked the limelight, and played well to it. On another occasion, when Wisniewski was coaching first base (common practice for a pitcher if her side was up), Keagle was called out at first by the umpire.

“She’d been out by about two steps,” says Wisniewski, “but she was right in there yelling at him, gesturing with her hands, like she’s saying, ‘I was safe by this much.
’ I tried to stop her, because I didn’t want her thrown out of the game. But when I got close enough to hear, she wasn’t even arguing the play. The crowd was booing the umpire, but she was telling him how big the fish was she caught last week. She was a real crowd pleaser.”

Shored up by
Keagle's timely arrival, Milwaukee soon improved its showing to such an extent that the League launched a flurry of baffling player reallocations. The Milwaukee team had captured third place only after asking for and getting better players. Now they looked capable of going much higher in the standings, and so the Kenosha Comets declared themselves in need of immediate help; pitching ace Helen Nicol was out with a bad arm.

Rockford’s
Register-Republic
riled fans by reminding them that, in response to Kenosha’s request, “the League lifted southpaw Mary Pratt from Rockford. So what happened next?  Nicol got her pitching arm back in shape, and she and Pratt combined forces last night to sweep a double-header with South Bend and put Kenosha in a tie for first.”

The League received no thanks from the Comets, who a week later sent a delegation direct to Wrigley to find out why they didn’t have an even better pitching rotation.

The upshot was that Milwaukee and Kenosha were the two top clubs of 1944, and played each other for the championship. Milwaukee, which had little local support from fans, won.

The problem of an abstract concept (balancing out the teams all season long by means of piecemeal forced marches) at odds with sporting reality (building morale by keeping a team together) continued to plague the All-American at every turn.

For many of the girls of the All-American, the chance to get away from home and seek new experiences was introducing them to worlds they’d never imagined
. In spite of the homogeneous image put forward in the All-American’s press packages, players came in all shapes and sizes, and some with different sexual preferences.

When the
27-year-old Dorothy Hunter arrived in the League in 1943, she’d “never heard of lesbianism,” so her more sophisticated teammates decided to give her the low-down, bustled her into a corner and spun her suitably lurid tales of the lesbian lifestyle.

“They told me they had wedding ceremonies
. Well, I just thought they were giving me the gears because I was a green Canadian.”

At season’s end, older and considerably wiser, Hunter returned to Winnipeg and confronted her mother
. “How come you didn’t tell me such things were going on in the world?” she demanded.

Mrs. Hunter could only mumble that she thought Dorothy knew
.

“Well,” said her daughter, with heavy sarcasm, “Thanks a lot.”

The lesbian lifestyle (or, rather, its alleged outward signs) had long been a bugbear in ball-playing circles. When Connie Wisniewski began to pitch in Detroit in the early1940s, she was told she’d be kicked off the team is she chose to get a close-trimmed haircut.

More than one All-American recruit who showed up at spring training with a boyish bob was handed her return ticket before she’d had a chance to take the field
.

Dottie Ferguson was warned by he
r chaperon against wearing girls’ Oxford shoes, because they were excessively
masculine-looking.

Pepper Paire endured a “lot of guff” in high school because she played ball
. Her well-publicized success, and the publicity that surrounded her taking part in a tour to Mexico City, only made things worse. Even her teachers thought “it wasn’t the thing for a young lady to do.”

The All-American had lesbianism on its mind, but they didn’t choose to meet the issue head-on with plain speaking
.

By comparison, the rougher-hewn Chicago League, which didn’t believe in chaperons, Charm school or double-talk, warned its members explicitly against pairing off
.

The fear of lesbianism prompted one All-American manager to release two players because he was certain they were lesbians and thought they might “contaminate” the rest of the team
.

It explains the All-American’s manic, ceaseless insistence on femininity at any cost; it consistently protes
ted too much, raising the spectre of same-sex preference even when it wasn’t there. But homosexuality was as much a part of the 1940s as the 1990s. There were some lesbian players, and, chances are, chaperons. The fact of being lesbian was probably an added inducement to flee the stultifying atmosphere of their home towns and go on the ball-playing circuit.

Many of the stories of lesbianism fail to ring true, but others are attested to by independent sources
.

Fred Leo, who became the League’s publicity director and later assumed its presidency, says that he once discovered that an attractive young recruit was living with a man in a hotel
. Confronted, the pair revealed that they were married but had decided to keep the fact a secret. Leo insisted that they announce the marriage, which they did. And that, he thought, was that. Two weeks later, however, he ran into the downcast bridegroom.

“What am I to do, Mr. Leo?” he said.

“What do you mean?” said Leo. “What’s the problem now?”

“She won’t have anything to do with me,” replied the husband
. His wife, he said, had tired of conventional wedlock and left him to carry on a torrid affair with one of her female teammates.

“That player converted this young married woman in just two weeks,” says a wondering Leo.

Told by Leo about the miraculous conversion, Manager Johnny Gottselig decided he needed proof. He took over room allotments the next time the team was on the road and refused to let the two players room together. They were angry, and complained so vehemently that Gottselig considered it proof they were having an affair.

Leo confesses to have forgotten the married player’s fate, but remembers that her teammate remained in the League for a couple of seasons.

In yet another instance, a married player was found to be frolicking with a woman unconnected with the team. Challenged by the chaperon, she was not contrite. In fact, she expressed her intention of continuing the relationship. This time, Leo summoned the husband, who came and took her home.

Given these experiences, the best plan was blanket denial
.

In 1945, Dottie Hunter, by then in Grand Rapids
as chaperon with the relocated Chicks, was approached by Bill Priaulx, the team’s business manager, who had become concerned by rumors of too-close friendships.

“Not on this team Bill,” Hunter replied, thus easing his mind
.

Hunter wisely continued to turn a blind eye unless the violations were flagrant
. She did, however, take pains when making room arrangements.

“I tried to keep the newer girls together,” she says, “because I thought the slower they learned about what was going on, the better.”

Naturally, the players got matters sorted out among themselves. As Hunter learned during her first season, lesbianism was a perennial topic for speculation on the grapevine.

When it came down to cases, older, more mature heterosexual players, even if they were baffled or initially dismayed, accepted lesbian women they liked and respected
.

Younger, more sheltered recruits had no idea how to handle their new-found knowledge
. They feared being approached. Their solution was to make friends with players they knew or felt were “safe,” and keep their distance from those whose motives they weren’t sure of.