Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (4 page)

As the best managers began to be reabsorbed into the majors at war’s end and the number of managers the League needed increased, some clubs had to settle for second-best
. Some of these men were over-the-hill, dependent on drink, beset by personal problems, and should never have been put in charge of a baseball team.

Past achievements in the ballpark were no guarantee of success
.

Jimmy Foxx – known variously as “Double X” or “The Beast” – was a truly outstanding player in his day, hitting 58 home runs in 1932
. Unfortunately, neither he nor such personalities as Bill “Raw Meat” Rodgers, so named because of his boasted fondness for raw hamburger, succeeded in bringing much glory to the All-American.

But success or failure was still in the future
. From such unlikely material as he had to hand, given such unlikely ground rules as he had established, Philip Wrigley’s goal was to forge a brave new League of female ball players.

His time was short, and so the search for players began in earnest.

Wrigley had dispatched his scouts to the World Softball Championships, held in Detroit in September 1942. The unknown author of the report handed to Wrigley displays considerable style in describing many of the League’s first players.

The New Orleans Jax had been the play-off favorites
. “In their attack,” said the scout, “they could be compared with the heavy-hitting New York Yankees of old. The majority are long-ball clouters. Their base running and fielding keep pace with their hitting. Flashing spikes and perfect hook slides are regular practice with them. They can bunt to perfection. All in all they possess remarkable baseball sense and are considered by many fans as the greatest girls’ softball team in the game’s history.”

Despite this glowing recommendation, however, none of the Jax was signed by Wrigley’s organization
.
Time
magazine might have been referring to the Jax when it reported that, in recruiting for the League, scouts “turned down several outstanding players because they were either too uncouth, too hard-boiled or too masculine.”

The Saturday Evening Post
described the New Orleans brigade: “Good, substantial girls like the sinewy Savona sisters and the strapping Miss Korgan. Give ‘em a cud of tobacco and these female softball players would look just like their big-league brothers.”  This was not the image Wrigley had in mind.

Nonetheless, Freda Savona, the captain, was supposedly offered a contract, but she refused; the Jax were about to lose their (male) coach to the draft, and she was slated to take his place
. In any event, the Jax stayed intact.

It didn’t matter; a wealth of talent remained.

Close behind the New Orleans contingent were teams from Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and Cleveland, as well as Canadian teams from Saskatchewan and Toronto. All displayed a hard-driving style, and many of their players made favorable impressions.

Edythe Perlick of the Chicago Rockolas, who later joined the Racine Belles, “out-hit most of the right fielders in this district
.”

He
r teammate, Tila “Twi” Shively, who would be assigned to the Grand Rapids Chicks, was considered to be the championship’s most outstanding defensive outfielder, covering her position with “long, easy strides.”

The pick of the “short fielders
,” a second shortstop position peculiar to softball, was the “diminutive seed-merchant,” Shirley Jameson of the Garden City Brew Maids: “Fast as lightning on the bases or in the field, she has a great arm and is a good hitter. Opposing pitchers say she is one of the hardest hitters to pitch to, because of her size and the power in her bat. She is smart and plays heads-up ball at all times.”  Jameson went to the Kenosha Comets, and on retirement from active service became a scout for the All-American.

Charlotte Armstrong, a pitcher with the Phoenix Ramblers, was fast, with good control and a good hook: “Her delivery is also very deceptive
. Although there is plenty of back swing in her normal windup, she has a habit of releasing the ball with no windup at all. To a batter at the plate, it seems that she just flicks her shoulder a trifle, flips her hand, and the ball comes sailing over the plate.”  These skills earned Armstrong a place with the South Bend Blue Sox.

Ann “Toots” Harnett was already well known to the scouts, thanks to her third-base duties with Chicago’s Rheingold Brew Maids
. Sturdy, well-built and blessed with a strong accurate arm, Harnett was “a free-swinging power-ball hitter who sends her drives whistling over the infielders’ heads. She covers her position beautifully and has one of the best cross-diamond throws in softball.” She was the first player to be signed by the All-American and was soon after sitting at a head-office desk, phoning prospects in remote corners of the continent and urging them not to commit themselves to their teams until they heard what the new League had to offer.

Canadian teams had taken part in the championships and in occasional U.S. exhibition games since 1933
. The scouting reports noted with approval that the Canadian teams “show more of the girlish side of the picture when it comes to the style of their play. Their actions in throwing and batting do not have the tinge of masculine play like the United States girls. They do not go for boyish bobs and do not have the fire and fight of the average American teams.”

Nevertheless, only two Canadians caught the scout’s eye
.

Olive Bend Little of the Moose Jaw Royals (later a mainstay of the Rockford Peaches) was a “fire-baller” and “one of the fastest pitchers in the game
.”

Thelma Golden played with Toronto’s Sunday Morning Class, a team organized by a church parish, who were then the Canadian champions
. Golden was supposedly one of the hardest pitchers to bat against. To see her in the daytime, the scout reported, she was almost skinny and didn’t seem to have much on the ball. Under the light, however, “she seems even taller than she really is. She cups the softball in front of her and draws her arms close to her sides, leaning over at the same time. As she gets ready to release the ball, the batter has a vision of giant spider unfolding on the mound. And out of those uncoiling long thin arms, the ball comes zooming over the plate.”

Golden’s performance must have lived up to this heated prose
. She was recruited early in 1943 and assigned to the Peaches. Before the end of spring training, however, she packed her bags and returned to Canada.

The explanations for her departure differ markedly
. Rumor had it that she demanded special privileges, including, according to Bonnie Baker, a separate hotel room. But Gladys “Terrie” Davis, another Canadian who, with Baker and Olive Bend Little, could be counted on to project the requisite feminine grace under pressure, noted that Golden couldn’t cope with power-sluggers: “They started hitting her into the lake.”

Golden told Canadian sportswriters that she didn’t like the League’s grueling schedule
. As a rule, Canadian teams tended to play less frequently – perhaps only two or three times a week. The League’s season was, by comparison, action-packed, with games six nights a week and a double-header on either Saturday or Sunday.

Wrigley’s scouts uncovered a wealth of talent at the Detroit championships, but they were confirming what they already knew or had heard about
.

Though softball in the United States and Canada was supposedly an amateur sport, in reality, it followed the Chicago model; it was highly commercialized, especially in large cities
.

Firms such as Dr. Pepp
er or the Bank of America in Los Angeles, Admiral Corporation in Chicago and every brewing company everywhere sponsored workplace teams. Many were all-female teams. Chrysler had 60 such clubs in the Detroit area alone.

Companies offered people jobs based on their ball-playing skills – a variation on today’s athletic scholarships
. This was a tremendous inducement to compete, especially during the Depression, and was as much the norm in Canada as in the United States.

Many firms recruited from distant parts in order to field a winning team
. Players were offered higher salaries than their non-playing co-workers, along with time off for games, free meals, travel expenses and other perks.

This practice continued even when jobs became more plentiful.

In 1939 in Toronto, a talented left-handed pitcher named Bea Hughey, then unemployed, had agreed to play for Toronto’s Langley Lakesiders on the condition that they get her a job. When a team owned by Orange Crush came up with a job for her within a couple of days, she switched – to loud complaints from the Lakesiders, who refused to release her. The dispute went to arbitration, but the Lakesiders lost Hughey to Orange Crush.

Helen Nicol, of Edmonton, Alberta was western Canada’s for
emost pitcher of the early 1940s and would win the All-American League’s pitching championship in 1943 and 1944. Both she and Bonnie Baker, who lived in Regina, Saskatchewan, worked in Army and Navy department stores by day and played ball on a company-sponsored team a couple of times a week. For her efforts, Nicol received twice the normal rate of pay.

By February 1943, Wrigley’s plans were well underway
. Thanks to judicious use of the Cubs’ scouting network, he had targeted players as far away as New York City and Memphis, Tennessee.

On the Canadian prairies, the driving force was Johnny Gottselig, who had enjoyed a successful career as a defenseman with the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team during the 1920s and 1930s
. He came from Regina, where he had played amateur baseball before injuring his pitching arm, and he coached women’s teams in the off-season. By 1942, he was managing the Blackhawks’ Kansas City farm team, but he still had useful contacts among sports figures in the prairie provinces.

One of his friends, a Regina-based hockey scout named Hub Bishop, was the person responsible for signing Bonnie Baker, who in turn pointed out to him an extraordinary number of top-ranked western Canadian players
.

No one has ever figured out why half of the fifty-odd Canadians who would eventually play in the All-American came from Saskatchewan, but Baker’s theory is as good as any: there was nothing else to do there “except play ball and chase grasshoppers
.”

At any rate, Wrigley went public with his plans for the League – known then as the All-American Girls Softball League – in February 1943
.

The press release was couched in predictability patriotic terms, with emphasis on the need to entertain war workers and bolster civic pride
.

It introduced the four cities and their teams, heaped praise on local backers and hinted at imminent expansion to centers both large and small
. This was the first suggestion that the League might eventually include franchises in cities as large as Chicago and Detroit. Wrigley stressed that the presumably greater attendance in such locations would mean more money that could then be distributed to help carry the smaller cities.

The League’s non-profit charter was unveiled to general applause
. No one said anything about Wrigley’s actual concern – that major-league ball might be headed down the tubes.

At this point, matters began to pick up steam
. Word spread among players that something was happening in the Midwest, and that it would be wise to get in line.

Mary Baker, whose nickname “Bonnie” was given to her by a reporter smitten by her smile, first learned about the League in the Regina newspaper:
“I was in the coffee shop I went to every morning before work, and I opened up the sports page and there was a picture of Mrs. Wrigley with Johnny Gottselig and a model with this uniform on. I read it and said to myself, ‘Oh, God, it’s happening. Now, am I going to be lucky enough to get in?’”  That very afternoon, she got a call from Hub Bishop.

“I was ecstatic”, she says
. “I knew I was on my way to what I’d dreamed of.”

Dorothy “Dottie” Hunter, a tall, striking brunette who worked in a Winnipeg, Manitoba, department store and played ball during the summer months, heard about the League from her friend Olive Bend Little
. Little called to say that a scout had arrived at the city’s Marlborough Hotel.

“It was on Good Friday, and I was entertaining some fellows who were over at Carberry (an armed forces base)
. But Olive came flying out to my place in a taxi and said, ‘Come on, get in here, you got to go down for an interview.’ So I just left everybody and went down there, and before the day was over I’d signed a contract, even though I was 27 years old. The scout told me he wasn’t sure they’d take me at that age, that they were looking for younger girls. But they took me, so I went down to play.”

By May 1943, newspapers in Toronto and Edmonton reported that the League’s recruiting was “playing havoc with some Canadian teams
.”

An Edmonton columnist suggested that the softball clubs “who make it possible for these girls to develop their latent talents” should be suitably compensated for players lured away by the All-American, much as amateur teams were reimbursed by the National Hockey League
.

In Chicago, two entire teams were wiped out by Wrigley’s raiding
. The Chicago owner-managers were incensed, and they publicly berated Wrigley for taking these players, some of whom held war-related day jobs, out of the work force.

Elsewhere, players were signed up by ones and twos
.

Mildred Deegan, a catcher, came from Brooklyn, New York
. Irene “Choo Choo” Hickson, the alleged 28-year-old who wound up being called “Grandma” by the fans, came from North Carolina. Madeline “Maddy” English, third baseman in a Boston league that played indoors on a cement field with painted bases, was from Everett, Massachusetts. Ralph Wheeler, a Boston sportswriter and sometime scout for the Cubs, came to her home to offer her a tryout, having heard of her from male athletes at her high school. She made the League, along with two other Massachusetts players, Mary Pratt and Dorothy “Dottie” Green.

Were they eager to go when the All-American came knocking?  You’d better believe they were
. Younger players especially jumped at the chance to get paid for doing what they’d have done for free. Plus, they were dazzled by the sums involved. Most were making a pittance – perhaps $10 a week – in offices or factories. Store clerks made rather less. Dottie Hunter’s father, a family man, was making $35 a week.