Girls of Summer: In Their Own League

by Browne, Lois

  One of their most promising acquisitions was Connie Wisniewski, a blonde, Polish beanpole from Detroit, who had perfected a dramatic “windmill” pitching style (full arm rotation, like a ferris wheel) by throwing balls through a tire suspended from a tree. She was living with a mother who was 100 percent against her going anywhere.

  “She was from Poland, very old fashioned,” says Wisniewski. “She said only bad girls left home. There was no way she was going to let me go. I told her that if I didn’t go with her blessing, I’d go without, and join the army for three years. She asked me how long these ball games were going to take, and I said they’d take three months.”

  Wisniewski was back five months later, and played ball every summer for ten years thereafter.

  After the first season, Wrigley’s scouts branched out as publicity of a successful summer spread.

  The Californians were brought in en masse by Bill Allington, who had managed women’s softball teams in L.A. and would later in the season begin a long League career as manager.

  The first six players he brought from California were Alma “Gabby” Ziegler, Faye Dancer, Pepper Paire, Dorothy “Dottie” Wiltse, Annabelle Lee and Thelma “Tiby” Eisen. Allington preceded them, and was waiting at Chicago’s Union Station.

  “Gosh,” he said, “you gals have an awful lot of luggage here for two weeks.”

  Allington knew full well that all of them would make the League. But Ziegler, a wiry little second baseman who became the sparkplug of the Milwaukee Chicks, remembers that they worked themselves hard: “We wanted to make an impression. I got a terrible blister on my foot, and Faye Dancer wanted to cut it off. To show you how dumb I was, I let her. She used a pair of scissors. Everyone thought I was crazy, and it didn’t help much. But I made the team.”

  In fact, all of them proved to be first-rate ball players, boosting Allington’s reputation as a man who knew baseball talent.

  As for Pepper Paire, she found the prospect of playing ball all summer long – and getting paid in cash, not groceries – appealing.

  “We thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” she says.

  Paire was undaunted by the Midwest’s less than temperate conditions. The stocky redhead, who became one of the League’s most reliable catchers, was also its balladeer. It was she who wrote the All-American’s hummable “Victory Song,” which players sing today at their reunions.

  Paire’s first season was fraught with peril. She was assigned to the Minneapolis Millerettes, in whose service she collided with a Racine Belles player, thus fracturing her collarbone. Racine was much criticized for this, because the Belle was attempting to score an unimportant run, late in a game that Minneapolis had plainly lost.

  The injury forced Paire to spend most of the season recuperating, along with Faye Dancer, who had cracked a vertebra by running full-tilt into one of her fellow Minneapolis outfielders in pursuit of a fly ball.

  The invalids spent most of the schedule in Kenosha, appearing often in the stands with players from the Comets, another team riddled with injuries. If you were out of action, the League’s rule against fraternizing with opposing players was temporarily waived.

  When firing on all cylinders, however, Paire maintained an active social life.

  “I had a boyfriend in every port,” she once recounted. “Only one time did I ever get caught. This was in the days of gas rationing, so you didn’t expect to see someone you knew in one town show up in another. But in this game in Grand Rapids, one of my teammates and I looked up, and there sat four guys we knew from elsewhere. Well, that type of thing wasn’t done in our day, but we handled it like big-leaguers. We hid under the grandstand.”

  And what of Dancer, who’d performed emergency surgery on the luckless Gabby Ziegler? Her exploits were many and varied.

  Dancer was a talented outfielder whose pranks on and off the field threatened to overshadow her baseball career. She talks like a wound-up toy.

  “My brother says I always sound like I’ve been vaccinated with a phonograph needle,” she jokes. This very brother was fighting in the South Pacific when Dancer entered the League, but she figures that their mother “got more grey hairs over what I did.”

  Dancer was a pretty, freckled-faced blonde gypsy, moving from Minneapolis to subsequent expansion clubs, first Fort Wayne and later Peoria. One of her most notable eccentricities was her collection of glass eyes, which she liberated from blameless taxidermy in bars while her accomplices created a diversion.

  She turned cartwheels in the outfield, performed swan dives into mud puddles just because she felt like it, and once called time, either because she wanted a drink of water, or had swallowed a lightning bug, or possibly both. Most people were at a loss to describe her and settled for “colorful.”

  Not surprisingly, spectators loved her. Dancer’s theory was that “the fans paid my way. So I always tried to involve myself with them, in every town we went to. I wanted to have fun, and I wanted people to feel like they were getting their money’s worth.” And so they were – especially since Dancer’s eccentricities were founded on real talent.

  She won the nickname “Dangerous Dancer” when she helped skunk the Chicks by blasting two home runs into their left-field bleachers, a feat no other player in the League had managed.

  Dancer also consorted with doubtful characters.

  In Fort Wayne, she befriended a midget, whose lot in life was to bring the players beer.

  In Peoria, a “gentleman of no fixed income” – a gangster – took a shine to her: “He and his friends had seats right above the dugout. He drove a blue bulletproof Packard to all our road games.” The suitor attempted to persuade Dancer to stay in Peoria year-round by promising to establish her in business and buy her a palomino horse, but she refused. California beckoned. This didn’t deter her admirer. He threw parties for her at his home, which was guarded by armed henchmen.

  When her parents arrived from California to see her play, the hoodlum obligingly laid on a series of entertainments, both at his house and at a local night club.

  Dancer was also known to play the field. Another swain, who acted as the team’s groundskeeper, presented her with a diamond ring, but she had the stone removed and mounted in a nicer band. Neither he nor the mobster got, as it were, to first base.

  “I wasn’t interested in either of them” she says.

  To make time for these activities, Dancer kept late hours. One night, after a particularly intensive celebration, she returned to her hotel well past curfew and spotted Ken Sells sitting in the lobby with a posse of chaperons.

  Dancer’s solution was to stack several beer barrels on top of a coal pile, which enabled her to reach the fire escape. She then managed to slice her way in through a screen with a nail file and get cleaned up before anyone could accuse her of the prank.

  One of Dancer’s main concerns was the All-American’s uniform. Californians had always played in shorts, “and we kind of resented these dresses. But after half a season, I enjoyed them. I took tucks in the skirt, rolled the socks down and played with the bill of my cap up,” (thus anticipating the Minnesota Twins, who brightened up the 1991 World Series by twisting their hats into shark fins!)

  Plainly, Dancer – along with other recruits such a Merle “Pat” Keagle, who was known as “The Blonde Bombshell” and the “People’s Choice” – would bring sparkle to the All-American’s crucial second year of operation.

  Wrigley’s high hopes for his new teams, the Minneapolis Millerettes and Milwaukee Chicks, were almost immediately derailed, for several reasons. A glance at the map reveals one problem facing the Minneapolis team; it was 400 miles from Rockford, Illinois, the nearest League town. Minneapolis represented a nightmare for League schedulers and opposition teams, who arrived surly and exhausted after a marathon journey.

  The League realized their folly within weeks and folded the franchise. Rather than disband the team, however, Wrigley kept it going throughout 1944. Its members became known informa
lly though accurately as “the orphans.”

  They lived in hotels and played nothing but on-the-road games, wandering the countryside with their manager, Claude “Bubber” Jonnard.

  Dancer and Jonnard did not see eye to eye. She remembers she “hated him with a passion” because of his play-it-safe style. He didn’t gamble for extra-base hits. His runners were instructed just to get on board; the next batter could bunt her along.

  Dancer’s technique was at odds with Jonnard’s conservative approach: “I liked to play wide-open, hard-sliding but clean. So I ignored him. I just ran on my own, and if I knew an outfielder didn’t have a good arm, I wouldn’t even slow down, I’d just keep going.”

  In 1945, the Minneapolis Millerettes were adopted by Fort Wayne, Indiana. Renamed the Daisies, they lasted in one form or another till the very end of the League.

  Milwaukee, the other new franchise in 1944, also had problems. It was accessible enough – a short drive beyond Racine and Kenosha. The city also supported the Milwaukee Brewers, then a Double A team, providing exactly the situation that Wrigley had originally envisioned – the League’s first chance to place a team in a large city to play in a regular baseball stadium. But Milwaukee did not embrace girls’ baseball.

  Local sportswriters adopted a “show me” attitude, and fans weren’t encouraged 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 ticket 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 orchestra 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 illfated 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 abstrac
t 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 ballplaying 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 her 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.”