Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (11 page)

So successful were Carey’s seminars that the Milwaukee pitchers managed to put the brakes on even the Racine Belles, who’d stolen
24 bases in a single game that year. Unfortunately, when he became president, Carey felt it only fair to attend spring training camp and teach his tricks to all the League’s players – which, according to Wisniewski, “took our advantage away.”

But this was part of Carey’s philosophy
. He was a fierce competitor, but he believed in the greater good. He emphasized that baseball was a team sport, although he sometimes failed to follow his own advice.

“He used to tell us that we were a team
. It was always ‘We’, never ‘I,’ ” says Eisen. “But then we’d all go out to dinner and he’d pull out these news clippings of his career and show us what he used to do.”

Carey lived in Miami, and he returned there during the winter of 1944, before he assumed the presidency
. He held numerous press conferences, stressing his conviction that girls’ baseball would continue to thrive when the war ended.

Asked if the All-American game was as fast and colorful as men’s ball, Carey took the reporter’s ears off
. It was a matter of scale, he said. The All-Americans ran their 72-foot base paths as quickly as male big-leaguers covered their 90 feet. As a result, the game looked just as fast, which was the important thing.

“Why, my good man, it’s four times as fast,” he said, “and a helluva lot more colorful
. Baseball men themselves – executives, players, old timers – who have seen it are amazed. Not only at the speed and color of it, but at the skill of these girls. I’m telling you that a lot of them perform as gracefully and with as much talent as good men players.”

Later, Carey would tell anyone who’d listen that he was happier in his post as president of the League than at any time during his career, and he actually considered the girls’ game “much superior to the game I was mixed up in for
25 years as a player and coach.”

Even allowing for an element of hyperbole in his enthusiasm for the organization he was then heading, it was a strong enough endorsement to be genuine.

And so the season ended. The top two clubs – Milwaukee and Kenosha, kept afloat by their respective allocations – met in the play-offs.

Carey’s Milwaukee Chicks, who had not one iota of local support, won the championship
. Attendance for the year had increased by almost 50 percent, up to 260,000 over an extended 152-game schedule.

All well and good –
but Wrigley was the man who counted, and Wrigley had changed his mind. By now he was out of pocket by at least $135,000 (the seed money for six franchises). Ken Sells, whose job it was to wind up accounts for him at the end of the 1944 season, says it was closer to $200,000 for the two years.

Wrigley had taken counsel with his sources in the government, and decided that the war
–

by now sweeping through Europe, with the Pacific
theater a mopping-up operation – would end sooner than he’d thought.

His fellow Wrigley & Co. board members were noisily split over how the gum business should be run
. Some argued that, since the public had accepted a cut-rate product during wartime, the company could continue foisting it on people when hostilities ended. This to Wrigley was anathema. He resigned as president of the firm, making public the admission that he was “pretty well worn down physically, with a consequent lack of vigor and enthusiasm,” but remained as a director.

The All-American ha
d become peripheral in his mind – particularly since, if Milwaukee

and Minneapolis were anything to go by, his hopes for establishing the League in major-league centers could not be realized,  Besides, the threat to men’s baseball was passing, and he could return to propping up the Cubs.

Wrigley sold the All-American League for a token $10,000 to his associate Arthur Meyerhoff’s Management Corporation. From now on, the League’s responsibilities would remain the same – scouting and recruitment, training, player allocation, a publicity package. But these would be provided on a profit-making basis, while the individual clubs remained non-profit and jointly liable for any overall deficit – an obvious conflict that would plague the All-American for many seasons to come.

The All-American’s third summer found Arthur Meyerhoff holding the purse strings, Max Carey elevated to the president’s chair and two new clubs in business – the Fort Wayne Daisies (the orphaned Millerettes resettled) and the Grand Rapids Chicks (the ill-fated Milwaukee franchise, name and all).

Spring training, held in another Chicago ballpark because of Wrigley’s departure from the League, was the scene for yet another allocation shuffle
. Competition for the good players was fierce among the managers, who “almost came to blows sometimes through wanting specific players,” says Dorothy Hunter. But a really wily manager could use other means to get his way.

Shortstop Dorothy Harrell remembers an instance when Bill Allington relied on his wits to get the player he wanted
. Harrell had been approached by the League in 1943, but her employer, the Bank of America, was loath to let her go. The following year she had joined the Peaches, where she and teammate Dorothy Kamenshek, the All-American’s premiere first baseman, began to forge their fabled double-play collaboration.

Harrell recalls the arrival at spring training of Kay Rohrer, a Californian catcher who immediately became the object of a typical Allington manoeuvre
.

“Kay was so knowledgeable and had the greatest throwing arm I think I’ve ever seen,” says Harrell
. “She was a great player and Bill knew it – he’d seen her play before. Well, when she was assigned to practice with our team, he didn’t play her as a catcher. He put her in the outfield.”  Harrell is certain that Allington deliberately made sure that Rohrer couldn’t display her talent. Rohrer came to Rockford, and did much to fulfill Allington’s hope of a better showing.

The customary
30 or 40 rookies – touted, as usual, as the best yet – were parceled out, with fingers crossed. Clubs always seemed to be wanting more good players, but the shortage was still not seen as a serious problem. When Carey became president, he swore that he would step up training and recruitment.

T
he League’s publicity apparatus – now controlled totally by the astute Meyerhoff – was working overtime.

Pathé and Cinetone news produced lively short features on the All-American’s activities, which played in movie theatres nationwide
.

Coverage continued unabated in the national press
. It turned up such prospects as star-struck autograph-seekers and the occasional bedraggled runaway, who got her photo opportunity and was shipped back home to mother.

The trouble was that, even in 1945, the League was becoming hard to break into
. As Connie Wisniewski points out, it was almost impossible to become a full-fledged player in two short weeks. Instead, “you rode the bench,” she says, “and a lot of these girls that were picked were the best their little cities or towns had to offer. They didn’t like that, and I don’t blame them. But people weren’t going to pay money to see you learning to play baseball. They wanted to see a team that knew how to play.”

In the early years when the game was still being played on a relatively small diamond, players had a better chance of making it in two weeks
. As the game moved closer to baseball, it took softball players longer to adjust.

Carey and Meyerhoff had attempted to alleviate the shortage by various means
. They put much thought into the creation of alternative leagues.

One, in Canada, would have involved Toronto, Hamilton, London, and Brantford
. Given the success of the All-American’s Canadian Players, it seemed like a logical step, but it came to nothing.

Carey tried to set up a winter league in Florida, where he had a permanent home
. He dispatched Fred Avery, the All-American’s general manager, to negotiate with several Florida owners, but Avery pushed too hard and put their backs up. The Florida promoters responded by pulling out of the negotiations, leaving Meyerhoff and Carey to hold wider-ranging (though ultimately fruitless) talks with promoters in New York, Alabama and several Latin American countries.

None of these panned out, with the exception of the Latin American contacts, which would eventually result in a quagmire of double-dealing and disorganization.

The League also tried to solve its problems by hiring more scouts. In 1945, it budgeted $7,000 for this purpose. It wasn’t sufficient.

The so-called scouting network, which never really materialized, dwindled into something
called the Commissioner System – a series of one-shot finder’s fees payable to anyone who turned up a promising body. That didn’t work either.

The best recruiter the League had was the promise of a full-time, fully professional career
with “the Glamor Loop,” as the League was sometimes called. When the League’s reputation began to fade, so did its chances of renewing itself, and it turned inwards, building up new teams while weakening the old.

Life
magazine’s description of Rockford called it “as nearly typical of the U.S. as any city can be.”

It lay
90 miles southwest of Chicago – far enough away from the metropolis that it could sustain its own symphony orchestra, a radio station and 10 movie houses. Seven trains pulled into the railway station daily. Every Saturday morning, farmers poured in from the surrounding countryside to shop, while their kids roller-skated at a rink across the street from the AFL-CIO office.

But on summer evenings, an appreciable number of its 100,000 ci
tizens had only one destination – the ballpark, located on Fifteenth Avenue, and known to one and all as The Peach Orchard.

Fred Leo remembers the first time he saw the Peaches play
. It was on the Fourth of July weekend, in 1945. He had been sent (much against his will) by his employer, who owned a radio station in Peoria, which was then debating whether or not to get behind an expansion team.

“This infuriated me,” says Leo, “because I was against the idea of girls playing anything.”

Leo and several potential Peoria backers got the grand tour. Their first stop was the country club, for a game of golf and a meeting with Bill Allington. That was a fairly positive omen; they’d heard all about him.

“I thought they were doing a real good sell job on us,” says Leo
. “But later, when we went for lunch, people were talking about whether this girl’s arm was any good, whether that girl was ready to start. I thought to myself, ‘They’re carrying this thing a little too far.’ But as we went to the ballpark that night, there were people waiting at each of the bus stops. And when we got there, the park was overflowing with fans. I saw two fine games, and it really changed my attitude.”

The country club set would have given Leo only one impression of what made Rockford tick
.

A third of the city’s inhabitants were of Swedish descent, followed by Germans and Italians
. While the privileged gathered at county clubs such as the Maun-Nah-Tee-See or the Forest hills, small businessmen joined the Chamber of Commerce or fraternal organizations like the Knights of Columbus or the Loyal Order of Moose, and the Italian working man had his St. Mary’s Society.

Residences of the well-heeled spread along the east side of the Rock River
. Heavy industry and humbler homes found room for themselves on the riverbanks to the south.

One of the very few places that everyone met on more or less equal term
s was in the ballpark – a high school stadium designed for football. The ballpark was on the tonier side of the river, located amid the patchwork of parks the city had cultivated to complement the rolling, wooded landscape.

Rockford’s sporting associations w
ere long-standing. In the 1860s it had been home to the Forest City Nine, an amateur men’s baseball team whose roster included A.G. Spalding. (Spalding would become the foremost promoter of his day and build a sporting goods empire by providing balls free of charge to the major leagues in return for having them designated “official” equipment.)

Rockford’s support for the Peaches surprised some people
. It didn’t have a reputation for supporting losing teams, and the Peaches hadn’t started to make a good showing until Allington came on the scene; they won their first pennant in 1945.

Nevertheless, the people of Rockford were fascinated by the idea of wholesome females playing great baseball, just as Wrigley had ho
ped they would be. The Peaches – like the Comets, the Blue Sox and the Belles – had sold countless war bonds, enabled factory workers to let off steam and had become a part of the city’s social fabric.

Local shopkeepers supported the club, rightly sensing an advertising opportunity
. Programs and yearbooks sold everything from sewing machines to nights out at the bowling alley. Everybody wanted to get aboard, including people with a couple of rooms to rent.

Peaches players were housed, if possible, with families who lived close to the park
. They walked to the field, meeting fans who came early to secure a good seat and watch them warm up. At the brick ticket booth sporting sign “Home of the Peaches” they separated – fans to stand in line, Peaches to descend to cramped locker rooms beneath the bleachers where the chaperon waited with fresh laundered uniforms.

Each of the All-American’s four founding cities had some variant on Rockford’s mix of ethnic and social groups united around civic-minded enterprise
. Each was large enough to respond to a call for community involvement, yet small enough that community interest could be defined and appealed to.

This was the winning formula that Milwaukee and Minneapolis had lacked.

In Grand Rapids, the self-styled “Furniture Capital of the World”, things were somewhat more cosmopolitan. Now that Milwaukee and Minneapolis had fallen by the wayside, it was the largest city in the All-American. Its population was 175,000 – almost double the size of Rockford.

It was wealthier, having been settled by thrifty Dutch settlers whose descendants maintained an allegiance to traditional Christian values
. This was made plain to the Chicks when they arrived, fresh from the wicked city.

“In Milwaukee, there was a beer garden on every corner,” says Connie Wisniewski
. “In Grand Rapids, there was a church.”

Indeed, the Chicks’ arrival had been less than auspicious
. Their train was met by a local nay-sayer, who informed them that, if they planned to play on Sundays, they needn’t bother to unpack their bags.

“You’ll be gone in a week or two,” he predicted.

Fortunately, the Chicks came equipped with Dottie Hunter, who feared neither man nor beast.

“If you’re our welcoming committee, forget it,” she said
. “Goodbye. We’ll find our own hotel. We’ll take care of everything.”

Before too long, the doubter was forced to apologize a hundred times over
.

“The people who didn’t want to come on Sunday gave their tickets to somebody else,” says Wisniewski
. “We really had crowds.”

A Roman Catholic priest became a fan, and passed the message along to his parishioners
. Some of the players began to attend a Methodist church, whose minister had a phone-in radio program and talked about the Chicks at every opportunity. These ecumenical blessings did much to ensure success.

“They were all thrilled with us that first year,” says Hunter
.

One day, the owner of the Coca-Cola bottling plant flagged down the team bus in transit and presented the players with cases of his product, unloaded from the trunk of his car.

Others rewarded the All-Americans in more lucrative ways. The Chicks played at South Field, another former high school park. It was rather small, and its right field was drastically foreshortened by the presence of the Dexter Lock Factory. These surroundings made for player-spectator contact.

When one of the Chicks hit a home run, she never headed to the dugout after touching home plate
. Instead, she cruised the first-base-line stands.

“Here were all these guys standing up with their hands out,” says Hunter, “and you wanted to shake hands with them, because you never knew what you were going to b
ring back.”

Inez Voyce, a left-
handed hitter who gloried in the shortened right-field boundary, made a thousand dollars just from handshakes after hitting home runs.

But even those players who didn’t receive four-base tips liked South Field
. It’s still there, untended now and overgrown with weeds, but you can see why it was fun to play in. It’s on an appropriate scale; everything seems to fit. People sitting in the back rows must have felt that they could almost reach out and touch the basemen.

Marilyn Jenkins began playing with the Chicks in 1951, but she was only
11 years old when they climbed off the train from Milwaukee. Her father said that he knew she’d want to see them, so she’d better pay her way by going down and getting herself a job:

“So I moseyed over and got a job picking stones out of the infield and clea
ning underneath the bleachers. The place was kind of run-down at the time. Then this bat girl idea came up, and I was it. I’d come early and shine their shoes, set out equipment and bring them towels and blankets. I’d take Cokes to the locker rooms.”