Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (18 page)

“It was a miracle,” she says
. “They were still pitching underhand and sidearm then, and I was strictly an overhand pitcher. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

She went back to picking cotton to repay the money she’d borrowed to go to Chicago
. In 1948, the League, undismayed by her last-minute bolt for home the previous year, sent her a recruiting letter. Risinger borrowed more money and set off again. This time she overcame her homesickness and, with her overhand talents at a premium, remained with the Grand Rapids Chicks for seven years.

The ball season that began when the players left Opa-Locka in late April was going to be played in a very different world.

Rationing had ended
. No more full-page advertisements urged people to work harder, give more blood, buy more bonds. Brand-new cars, snub-nosed and sleek-backed, were once again available. The latest toy was television. And fans had fresh reasons for wanting an escape from reality. Just as war had brought sudden, radical changes, so had peace; by 1948, people were feeling the effects.

Almost all the armed forces had by now been ferried back, and hundreds of thousands of men were in search of work
. Industries, with varying degrees of success, were shifting gears away from war production. A baby boom was underway. Inflation was unnerving everyone. Workers were taking to the picket lines in search of raises to cover spiraling costs. The “let’s pull together” wartime spirit had disappeared.

The League’s players made it to their team cities just a few days before a national strike deadline by railway workers, who threatened to bring almost every train in the country to a halt
. President Truman had to pass legislation to forestall the strike and keep the trains running.

On the international scene, the Cold War had begun, a Middle East conflict was brewing over the creation of the state of Israel and the U.S. was testing atomic weapons on remote Pacific atolls.

Inspired by postwar change and expectations of even greater crowds, the All-American cities had been indulging in a burst of renovation of their ball fields.

The Kenosha Comets moved inland to Simmons Field, well away from the lakefront’s unstable weather
.

The Blue Sox were now in Playland Park, which sat twice as many fans as had the Bendix field
.

Grand Rapids had launched a $60,000 expansion of their ballpark, a fair portion of which was paid for by the Chicks, who’d been drawing 4,000 people nightly. Now there were an extra
2,000 seats, new right-field-bleachers, a raised grandstand and an enlarged outfield, which increased the chances of in-the-park triples. Players got improved dugouts and the lighting system was upgraded.

Grand Rapids could well afford these upgrades
. Dottie Hunter remembers that nothing seemed impossible during the team’s heyday. “In the first years, we were so successful in this town,” she says. “We were making money hand over fist.”

But the weather was not as sunny as the team’s prospects
. It was raining and cold; many fields were flooded out. The All-American circuit was not large; if it poured rain in one city, chances were that it poured rain in the rest. These delays would play havoc with the 1948 schedule.

Clubs made plans to soak their infields with gasoline and set them ablaze to burn off the moisture, in order to make the opening-day date of Sunday, May 9
.

Everyone stood peering at the leaden skies.

The Midwest must have been a depressing contrast for the players arriving from the sunny south. When one of Rockford’s seven daily trains pulled into town, it carried the Peaches, looking “bronzed and in the pink of condition.”  With only a day or two of enforced rest – given the fact that the playing surface was a bog – they would be ready to launch themselves on yet another season. High prices and the woes of unemployment were forgotten.

The girls of summer were back in town, and the good times could start to roll.

And so the season began, in shaky fashion.

Once again, expansion
– this time to Springfield and Chicago – would almost immediately prove a costly error.

In 1944, when Minneapolis and Milwaukee folded, Wrigley had picked up the tab
. This time, under the terms of their arrangement with Meyerhoff’s Management Corporation, the clubs would be jointly liable for any shortfall. They were rightly concerned that losses in the expansion cities would sabotage their own attempts at solvency.

Meyerhoff had told them that the League must expand of die
. Critics, including the acerbic Dr. Dailey, argued that adding more clubs would simply increase expenses, with no guarantee that the anticipated extra revenues would be enough to cover them.

Dailey and his fellow detractors were right
. By this time, it should have been obvious that an All-American franchise succeeded because of a simple formula:  sound management and strong local backing in a small community.

Springfield did not qualify
. The Sallies were owned by one man, James Fitzpatrick, who also owned the stadium. He had built the ballpark as a war memorial and named it for his son, who’d been killed in action overseas. But Fitzpatrick had funded it through public subscription.

The public was less than impressed to learn that they’d have to pay full fare to attend All-American games
. In fact, Springfield was a last-minute choice. It had been accepted primarily to make up an even number of teams, which simplified the schedule, and balanced the long-planned entry of Chicago.

Chicago was plainly a unique situation
. The League had seen the enormous potential of a franchise there since 1943. It was awash with softball teams; a baseball team should have found a home among hundreds of thousands of fans. But no such luck.

The Colleens were run by a Roman Catholic parish which hoped that the club would set a good example for urban youth
. The organizers’ hearts were in the right place; the Colleens almost certainly weren’t. They were managed by Dave Bancroft, a former major-leaguer who deserved a more serious treatment from the local press than he got.

A typical newspaper feature –
in the home of the toughest softballers in the country – ran thus:  “To be blunt about it, ‘Banny’ was managing a girl team, and he had to consult the chaperon of his charges to find out if his pitcher felt fit (after a rather long afternoon visit to the beauty parlor) to take the mound against the Muskegon Lassies. Fortunately, the pitcher was ready and willing and looking cute, with long, fluffy hair billowing from under her green cap.”

Meyerhoff tried everything he could think of to salvage the team
– including arranging television coverage of the its games, a League first (although games had been broadcast on the radio in Racine, Muskegon and Grand Rapids). The Chicago broadcasts, sponsored by the Patricia Stevens Modelling School, succeeded only in encouraging people to stay home and watch.

Wrapped in bright-red jackets, the Rockford Peaches were in the dugout waiting to start their first game of the 1948 season
. They had just spent half an hour warming up. Blankets were piled high, ready to ward off the deepening chill. They’d tossed the ball around, splashed mud on their socks and got it wedged between their cleats.

Every year, the All-American season had kicked off cold and wet, but 1948 was the worst year on record
. It was nearly dark, and the air threatened more rain. If they didn’t play tonight’s game, it would be the third time their home opener had been postponed.

It was the same story all around the League
. Most teams had yet to play a game.

The year before, in Allington’s absence, the Peaches had fallen apart
. Now “The Silver Eagle” was back, raising both hopes and hackles in Rockford:  hopes that his winning-is-everything style would bring the city another pennant; hackles among those players who thought his tactics could lose games just as readily as win them.

Allington sat in the dugout beside Dorothy Hunter
. Snooky Harrell chose a seat at the far end of the bench. Dottie Ferguson, the wide-ranging outfielder, looked dubiously at the grounds. Her fellow outfielders, Rose Gacioch and Rita “Junior” Briggs, were huddled nearby. Ruth Richard stooped over her catcher’s equipment, while Nicky Fox, the starting pitcher, sat nearby.

Stop a person on the street and whisper “baseball” and you’ll conjure up images of bright-green diamonds, shimmering in the heat of perfect summer afternoons
. Rockford was a far cry from that vision.

Regular-season games
– except for weekend double-headers – were played in twilight on shadowy fields, as stadium lights took over and weakly imitated the departing sun. That night in Rockford, the temperature was a mere 10 degrees above freezing. The Peaches wore dark-colored long-sleeved shirts under their new (and snow-white) home-field uniforms. On nights like these, their skirts seemed more inappropriate than ever.

Across the field, in the third-base dugout, the Chicago Colleens, under Dave Bancroft, were preparing to play their first regular-season All-American League game
.

They had shown a fair degree of promise during the pre-season exhibition schedule, which wasn’t surprising, because the lineup contained only two rookies
. All the rest were veterans, wrenched from their former teams by the hated allocation process. Many of them, like Twi Shively, harbored strong resentment. As a result, the team hadn’t coalesced, and its morale was low.

At 7:30, the scheduled game time, the contest started
. And just as well. The stands, by now in murky darkness and every degree as cold as the dugouts, contained a scant 1,000 paying customers, shivering in bleachers that could hold six times that number.

Many had come prepared with umbrellas, blankets and bundled-up kids
. Fathers and mothers nursed steaming cups of coffee from thermos bottle caps. As a result of the weather, the customary opening-game hoopla was cut short as though no one was anxious to tempt the rain any further. A local band wheezed through “The Star-Spangled Banner” while both teams stood to attention. The mayor, in natty fedora and his best grey pinstripe suit, threw out the first ball.

The Peaches’ defense ran onto the field, each player’s name crackling from the loudspeakers
. Nicky Fox threw a couple of warm-up pitches to Ruth Richard and the game began.

It would be the fans’ first chance to witness the overhand throw
.

The battle was at the mound, and Fox was prepared
. She was one of the All-American’s original draftees (as Helen Nicol) and had twice been named League pitching champ, in 1943 and 1944, both years with the Kenosha Comets. Her specialty was the wrist ball, a throw that got its increased velocity by means of a twisting action just before release. This style was rare enough that people thought it unique to Canadians. Fox found it difficult to convert to a sidearm delivery, but had the overhand pitch under control.

She lasted seven innings, throwing mostly puzzling curves, and held the Colleens to three runs
. She was relieved by the 21-year-old Lois Florreich.

Many batters dreaded facing Florreich, who coupled incredible speed with an alarming lack of control
. Tonight, however, the cold had slowed her down.

In fact, it was Betty Tucker, the Chicago pitcher, who managed to hit three Peaches (Ferguson, Kamenshek and Rose Gacioch) and walk seven
.

“Taking one for the team” was Ferguson’s specialty
. She was a weak batter but could usually get on base by moving herself into the path of the ball. One season, she did so a record-setting 92 times. She’d also worked out an interesting sign with Kamenshek, who followed her in the batting order. If she flipped her pigtails, she was about to steal.

Meanwhile, errors played their part, particularly in the rain-soaked infield
. Even the most efficient team of Harrell and Kamenshek logged their share of bobbles.

The Colleens showed real strength, compensating for Tucker’s weak pitching with a pair of excellent double plays
. But, in the end, hitting power held sway.

Harrell and Wilma Briggs smacked three doubles between them, and Ruth Richard hit a triple to the right-field fence
. When the smoke cleared, Rockford had whipped the Colleens 12-3. Bill Allington was mightily pleased. The result was a good omen for his return.

The Chicago team took their defeat in stride
. None of the Colleens realized that this was about as good as it was going to get.

Five All-American League cities had scheduled opening games for Sunday, May 9
. Ironically, the only city dry enough to hold a game as planned was Springfield, where a Sallies-Fort Wayne Daisies matchup drew 4,000 people, despite mixed feelings toward team owner James Fitzpatrick.

As driving rain continued to play havoc with the schedule, other clubs got the impression that the season would never begin
. Everyone was anxious to discern a pattern.

Who would set the pace?  Would it be (as many people believed) Grand Rapids?  Under the sober John Rawlings, the Chicks had done well in 1947. This was his third year in command; he was a force to be reckoned with
.