Girls of Summer: In Their Own League

by Browne, Lois

  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 protested 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 ballplaying 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.

  Rumors were fed by the hothouse atmosphere that existed during the regular season. Not only were the players under steady scrutiny by managers and chaperons, they had to contend with host families and landladies, club officials and their curious wives. Privacy was almost nonexistent.

  Chaperons could give the green light to dates with male admirers, but the theory was that a player’s safety lay in numbers. An admirer might find himself squiring not only the object of his affection, but half a dozen of her teammates – an ad hoc watch committee.

  Few of the All-Americans had steady boyfriends. Six out of seven days were spent in a blur of practices, hard-fought evening games and weekend double headers. After you won or lost, you usually celebrated or commiserated with your teammates, if you didn’t climb aboard an overnight bus. Even if you stayed put, it was curfew before you turned around. There wasn’t time to get to know a new face.

  Some players were married, with husbands in the service or down on the farm. Several had children. Dottie Collins pitched until she was five months pregnant.

  When Olive Bend Little gave birth to her first child, Roberta, in 1944, Ken Sells announced that the League had sent “Bobbie” a contract for the 1960 season.

  Motherhood was fine, a plus when it came to the publicity mill. But husbands seem to have been most appreciated in the abstract, valuable as long as they kept their distance.

  Roberta Little’s father was safe at home, in Poplar Point, Manitoba. Bonnie Baker’s married state contributed to her positive image but Maury was far away overseas. She got at least one letter from a fan (also in the service) who’d learned of her exploits in Life magazine: “He told me he had two daughters, and hoped they grow up to be just like me. That type of thing means a lot.”

  Pat Keagle’s husband was in the service as well, and appeared only when he was on leave, accompanied usually by their toddler son. This made for a charming photo opportunity, after which father and son retired westward.

  Other husbands remember feeling almost unwelcome. Don Key (who married Dorothy Ferguson) and Dave Junor (who wed Daisy Knezovich) would come to visit from time to time and tried to make themselves useful. They would act as chauffeurs, or swat balls during fielding practice. These gestures were not appreciated.

  When Ferguson was mired in a hitting slump, she received an anonymous letter suggesting that she would be better off single, and thus able to keep her mind on the ball. Even when she and Don Key were married, they had to keep the chaperon informed when they went for a post-game dinner with fans.

  The Kenosha Comets’ Christine Jewett, single and unattached, remembers that “you were discouraged from getting friendly with any of the fellows in any of the towns, even the towns you played in. They didn’t want you involved in other things. They wanted your whole attention on baseball.”

  Daisy Junor found this unnatural and stifling. She liked the home in which she stayed because there were men in the family. She would often go dancing with a young male relative who lived next door. These excursions set tongues wagging, although they were strictly platonic.

  The reason why Junor enjoyed them, she says, is that “I was starved for the sound of a man’s voice.” It was, after all, 1944, and men were in short supply. Many of the players had fathers, brothers and husbands overseas.

  Just before a game against the Comets, Dorothy Maguire, a catcher with the Milwaukee Chicks, learned that her husband had been killed in action. A public announcement was delayed, and she insisted on playing, standing in the “V for Victory” formation on a warm June night, knowing that her husband’s voice was stilled forever.

  When there was bad news to pass on, it was usually the chaperon who did the dirty work. A chaperon did everything that was needed to be done, and Milwaukee’s Dorothy Hunter was one of the best.

  She had been a valuable player with the Racine Belles in 1943. Asked to return in 1944, she declined, having decided that 28 was too old to risk life and limb on the base paths. The League counter-offered with a chaperon’s position.

  Hunter thought about it. She remembered that Racine’s chaperon, Marie “Teddie” Anderson, had suffered much: “She was a sweet woman but the girls could be hard on her.
” Well, it would be a challenge, and if she didn’t like it or couldn’t take it she could always quit. So Hunter accepted. She joined the Milwaukee Chicks, moved with them to Grand Rapids and stood by her post until the League folded in 1954.

  Hunter’s no-nonsense manner did not detract from her popularity. If players were too boisterous in the shower room, she would stand by the door and swat them with a metal coat hanger as they came out. On the bench, when the team faltered, she would offer sound advice: “If you put your bats where your mouths are, you’d be good hitters.”

  Hunter was well-liked by everyone – one of the few chaperons who earned the players’ sometimes grudging respect by means of a delicate balancing act.

  “You had to be a certain type of person,” she says. “You had to get mad at the right time and laugh at the right time, too. I know why they pulled all those tricks. It kept all their spirits up and kept that winning attitude going. I didn’t want to squash them too much, because it went along with baseball.”

  The chaperons tend to get lost in the shuffle of All-American history – the unsung heroines who gave the League its stamp of respectability, a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Underpaid and overburdened, they changed places almost as frequently as managers, which is saying something.

  Like the players, they too had to contend with peculiar restrictions, including a dress code. At first, they wore a sort of modified team uniform, with a longer shirtwaist dress. Later, this evolved to something very like an airline stewardess’s outfit. Debate raged over whether or not they had to be fully jacketed on the field.

  Chaperons tried to imagine having to struggle into their approved wardrobe before administering emergency first aid to a player with a twisted ankle or broken collarbone. The League was nothing if not consistent; it made life hard for everyone.

  Given the importance of the chaperon’s role, the League was surprisingly perfunctory about recruiting them. The announcement of a chaperon’s appointment tended to come out of the blue; the All-American rarely made much of her arrival.

  In some cases, this is because she simply stayed where she’d been. The chaperon’s post frequently went to retiring players, including (besides Hunter) Marge Stefani, Shirley Stovroff, Dorothy Green, Josephine Hagemann and Doris Tetzlaff. Green, Hagemann and Tetzlaff each spent four seasons on the job, but the others lasted only a year or less.

  The change from the limelight out on the field to nursemaid in the dugout wasn’t one that everybody could make.

  Some of those chaperons who were not former players had backgrounds of significant achievement unrelated to baseball.

  Marie Teichman “Teddy” Anderson, who Hunter remembered from Racine, held world records for the 220-yard dash and the indoor high jump. She’d also tied the records for the 50-and 100-yard dashes, the 60-yard low hurdles and the hop-skip-and-jump.

  Elizabeth Daily, who went to Peoria, a later expansion city, had served in the Army Nurse Corps, where she was awarded the Bronze Star.

  The League was not short of grist for the publicity mill, but chose to make little use of it.

  And, perhaps, these women were the exceptions. The League very often settled for what it could get, because it wasn’t offering all that much.

  Chaperons received $250 or $300 a month, but this sum was never increased as the years went by. They had no bargaining power; they weren’t the stars. Nor could they hope to move from the dugout to a managerial position. Still, life in the All-American was a marked contrast to their only alternative – a high school gym class in an anonymous town.

  Some chaperons were plainly signed up on the strength of their ability to function as feminine role models. South Bend’s first chaperon was Rose Virginia Way – a small, birdlike woman with a soft manner and Tennessee accent – who lasted only a year.

  Other clubs opted for a somewhat sterner image. Marie Timm, who rode herd on the Rockford Peaches for three years, was a former physical education instructor (one of many) who had taught baseball in the school system.

  Once a club had made its choice – discipline or feminine role model – it continued to hire chaperons of the same stripe. Ms. Way’s replacement at South Bend, for example, was Lucille Moore, who lasted four years. She looked like the actress Greer Garson, and would reward the younger players with banana splits if they were particularly successful on the field that day.

  In mid-1945, Racine had the good sense to hire Mildred Wilson, from Brooklyn. She had studied physical education at Long Island University and had managed and played catcher for the New York Celtics, a champion softball team. Like Dottie Hunter, her success stemmed from the fact that she’d been there as a ball player.

  She developed a good rapport with both the team and its manager, Leo Murphy, remaining with the Belles for several years, until she resigned to marry a local doctor.

  At first glance, the chaperon’s role sounds simple; keep an eye on the players. In reality, it was demanding and stressful. The contract listed 20-odd separate duties. Most of these dealt with policing the team, but chaperons were also fully responsible for equipment and uniforms.

  In their home cities, the basic drill included making sure that players attended meetings and Charm School, got on the field for afternoon practice and evening game, and then straggled home by curfew. A certain degree of leeway was acceptable. The theory was that the players would be more or less inhibited in their own backyard, but on the road, the potential for mayhem increased.

  Chaperons worked almost round the clock, from breakfast wake-up call to late-night bed check (or lonely vigil in the hotel lobby, waiting for stragglers to return).

  Road trips were the bane of Millie Lundahl’s life. Lundahl was a schoolteacher who signed up to keep the Rockford Peaches under control. Though her father was one of the club’s founders, he didn’t encourage her to join in, fearing a conflict of interest. He wouldn’t go to the board meeting that voted on her hiring. “The night they vote, I’m staying home,” he said.

  When she was hired, he felt that she was starting off with two strikes against her, because the players would assume she was spying for the board. Nonetheless, Lundahl gained the team’s trust.

  “Rockford had the best girls,” she says. “They were all very cooperative, they really had baseball at heart.”

  But Lundahl was in her late 30s, and the hours got her down. “When we were out of town I was rarely free,” she says. “It was often two or three o’clock in the morning before I got to bed. After two years, I was exhausted. I’d had no vacation, because the season started before I was out of school. Then, that first year they made the play-offs, school started up in the fall, and I’d have to teach all day and go to the games at night. I was getting too old, as my father said – too old for the swift pitching.”

  Physical stamina aside, the ideal chaperon was well-groomed, mature and personally charming, with a sense of humor and a knack for coming to terms with 15 to 20 wildly different players. She was called upon to be tactful or tough as the occasion demanded, and to function as a paramedic when the need arose.

  Marilyn Jenkins, the Grand Rapids catcher, credits Dorothy Hunter with a host of innovative patch-ups. “She had a heck of a fishing tackle box.”

  She had to know when to waive the rules. Although some chaperons went so far as to call players back to the dugout to apply their lipstick, Hunter was not among them. She strove to influence the players’ off-field behavior and left the rest to luck.

  “It was hard for them to stay feminine-looking and throw themselves around the field,” she says. “But they did it, and they were pretty good. Of course, the minute I was out of sight, they were into their jeans before you could shake a stick. I have a picture of a banquet at the Rowe Hotel in Milwaukee. They threw a big party for us. So I said to the gals, ‘Let’s look as nice as we possibly can.’ Well, very few of them had a pair of heels, and those that did wouldn’t wear them. I look at that picture today, and there are half a dozen of them, sit
ting there in a nice suit with their saddle-shoes and bobby sox.”

  Some chaperons failed. They were too timid or too rigid, knew nothing about baseball or could not cope with the jungle of cliques and factions. They were supposed to act as confessors and confidantes, to bolster the social skills of shy or awkward players who had difficulty making friends or who needed more than a fast-track Charm School makeover.

  Others threw up their hands, and decided that, if they couldn’t beat the team, they might as well join it. Jo Hagemann, of the Kenosha Comets, could be counted on to see that the back door was left ajar, and accompanied her players to out-of-bounds locales.

  “We used to sneak off and go to strip clubs,” says Christine Jewett. “We just took Jo along.” This could have proved expensive. A chaperon was fined along with a player for infringement of the rules.

  Most of all, in the words of Pepper Paire, “You needed someone who wasn’t a fink.”

  Some chaperons never got past their initiations. These ceremonies fell to such players as Faye Dancer, whose stock techniques included coating the light bulbs in the chaperon’s room with Limburger cheese.

  The chaperon’s first duty each season was to get the players lodged in suitable accommodation. This meant pre-season visits to prospective homes and boarding houses. Next came the process – fraught with pitfalls – of matching players in their home city and on the road. A fresh-faced 17-year-old, away from her parents for the first time, could not be lodged with a hard-drinking, hard-gambling veteran. But birds of a feather bunking together was perilous, too.

  One year, Hunter had exhausted every conceivable option and was forced to match up as room-mates two old hands who liked nothing better than to terrorize the surrounding countryside. This arrangement had hardly been settled when Johnny Rawlings, the team’s manager, appeared in a full-blown rage.

  “What in the hell are you putting those two together for?” he shouted.

  “Look Johnny,” said Hunter. “Have you got any other ideas? If they’re going to kill somebody, let ‘em kill each other .’”