Girls of Summer: In Their Own League

by Browne, Lois

  The chaperon had to run interference between players and the manager. The manager, being male, was often ill at ease when it came to intimate details. Once, Hunter had to explain to Rawlings that three of her players had simultaneously started their periods and were indisposed.

  “What is this,” barked Rawlings, “the Red River Valley?”

  “I was shocked,” said Hunter. “I’d never heard that one before.”

  Hunter – a tall, beautiful brunette of considerable personal charm – was sometimes the focus of flirtatious teasing from admiring managers. She remembers one time when she completely lost her poise.

  “At spring training, I came out of this building and the men were all sittin’ over to one side, while the players were kind of waiting for the bus in the other direction. I saw the managers there so I went the other way and there was a big piece out of the step and I went flyin.’ I rolled and I hit the side, and those guys flew down there and tried to pick me up. ‘Are you hurt? Are you hurt?’ they kept askin’.’ And I was so mad I said, ‘What do you care? It’s your entire fault.’ God, talk about bein’ chagrined, I tell you. I was going to be hoity-toity, I’d have nothing to do with them. That sure rained on my parade, so I always remembered that.”

  The list of chaperon’s duties was a long one. Some managers couldn’t bear to tell a player she was finished, that she was being traded or released. This fell to the chaperon.

  Marty McManus, who headed the South Bend Blue Sox, was incapable of wielding the axe, which he thrust instead upon Lucille Moore, who remembers these occasions as the worst part of the job.

  As for the managers, their life expectancy in the All-American was short. One writer observed: “The All-American League is the Little Big Horn of the managerial profession.”

  In a sport where the manager was the first to go when his team did poorly, the League earned a reputation for ripping through managers like a buzzsaw – 37 of them in all, not counting the players.

  “There were a lot of managers we didn’t like, and who didn’t like us,” says Pepper Paire, “For one thing they were squares. Life goes on and changes but they didn’t.”

  Mind you, some were pleased to make their escape. The chaperons weren’t the only ones to be initiated by the players.

  Charlie Stis, who spent a very brief spell managing the Racine Belles, lasted just long enough to provide the League with one of its better and oft-told stories. Stis was a mild-mannered man who seemed pretty gullible – tailor-made for a practical joke.

  The team was on the road and Stis was awaiting the arrival of a couple of new players. Egged on by their teammates, Joanne Winter and Clara Schillace went out of the hotel and returned shortly with two prostitutes, who had agreed to go along with the joke, for a small fee. Clara and Joanne, their teammates nearby but out of sight, knocked at Stis’s hotel room door. When Stis answered, Winter spoke up: “Charlie, we’ve brought you the two new players you’ve been waiting for.”

  Stis was nonplussed, since the women facing him didn’t look at all like All-American players were supposed to. It wasn’t until the whole party had gone back downstairs and the manager was about to arrange rooms for his new charges that Winter and Schillace let him in on the joke.

  After the women left, Stis told his players, “I didn’t think they were ball players. They looked like they fell out of a tree.”

  Wrigley and (and Meyerhoff, in later seasons) continued to comb the big leagues for likely managerial talent. Men like Max Carey, Johnny Rawlings and Dave Bancroft brought glamour and the sense of rubbing shoulders with sports immortals when they strode onto the field.

  Dave Bancroft, who managed League teams in Chicago and Battle Creek, another expansion club, had 40 years experience and four World Series appearances as a player with the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Giants.

  Josh Billings, who started off with the Kenosha Comets, had spent 11 years with the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Browns.

  Leo Murphy’s career spanned 25 years, many of them with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds.

  Johnny Rawlings had played with the Reds, the Giants, the Pirates and the Boston Braves.

  But although some were very good managers, others were not. An illustrious baseball career didn’t always guarantee great coaching. Many of them began enthusiastically, but only a few lasted very long or left without a huge sigh of relief on one side or the other.

  Sometimes the blame for failure had to rest squarely on the shoulders of the impatient club directors. The men who ran the Kenosha Comets were the worst offenders. They hired a new helmsman every year, except in 1945, when they hired two.

  By contrast, the Racine Belles, having settled in Leo Murphy that same year, kept him for five seasons; within two, the Belles had won the championship. Johnny Rawlings, at Grand Rapids for five years, tied with Murphy for second place in the longevity stakes.

  The clear winner was Bill Allington, with eight years in Rockford and two in Fort Wayne, during which time the Peaches topped the standings five times, made the play-off finals eight times and won four championships.

  The summer of 1944 was one of the worst seasons for nose-to-nose confrontations involving players, managers, umpires and, occasionally, fans. A few weeks into the schedule, sportswriters began printing a barrage of complaints voiced by unnamed managers about roughhousing players on rival teams. The first serious injury was Pepper Paire’s broken collarbone.

  Paire was decidedly accident-prone. Worse yet, she wasn’t content to pick on players her own size. She chose to tangle with Lou Rymkus, a former professional footballer who’d taken up umpiring for extra money.

  “He was about six-foot-four,” she says, “and he must have weighed 280. I came sliding into second base, and the ball beat me, but I hooked away from the bag. But the second baseman gave me the old phantom tag. She missed me by a foot. Lou was out of position and he called me out. I was lying flat on the ground, and I could see him make the call. I jumped up, but when I landed on my feet he was behind me, still bent over from making the call. I swung around, and my fist hit him square in the chin and knocked him flat. So he’s lying there looking up at me, and he says, ‘Pepper, I guess you know I gotta throw you out.’ And I said, ‘Yeah but dammit, I was safe. She missed me.’”

  A short while later, Bert Niehoff, then managing the South Bend Blue Sox, was warned by other managers about the Milwaukee Chicks, whom Max Carey had inspired to heights of aggressiveness. They were trying to make up for a bad first half of the season by pushing for the League pennant in the second half. These warnings were born out almost immediately in the course of a double-header.

  In the seventh inning of the first game, Gabby Ziegler, the Chick’s captain, was caught between first and second base. Taking a run at second, she flattened lanky Dorothy Schroeder, the Blue Sox shortstop. Schroeder’s teammate Lee Surkowski retaliated by flooring Ziegler. Both teams, accompanied by their managers, swarmed from their respective dugouts as umpires struggled to restore order. During the second game, tensions escalated. Two Blue Sox players took turns mowing down the Milwaukee catcher. The first collision knocked her out cold.

  The next night, it was Pat Keagle and Bonnie Baker who tangled. Baker had caught a throw from the outfield and tagged Keagle out at the plate before she could retreat to third.

  “Keagle very plainly gave Baker the elbow after she was called out,” a sportswriter reported the next day, “the same elbow first knocking the ball out of Baker’s hands and then winding up on Baker’s chin.”

  The umpire sided with Baker, but that wasn’t good enough. Baker went after Keagle, while Max Carey roared his head off from the sidelines and Niehoff demanded loudly that Keagle be thrown out of the game. Players could always argue that such encounters were accidents. But, as Baker recalls, “You got to know when something was a real mistake.”

  This incident was Baker’s second major brawl inside a month. A few weeks earlier, after Niehoff had been
ejected from a game between the Blue Sox and the Kenosha Comets, Baker argued a call with an umpire who threatened to throw her out as well.

  At the end of the evening, spectators surrounded the umpires as they tried to get off the field, someone threw a punch, and the police had to call on the services of a group of navy officers who happened to be attending the game to disperse the crowd and get the officials into their dressing room without serious injury.

  Obviously, managers had their crosses to bear – especially those who stayed in touch with their players year-round. Johnny Gottselig spent his winters on hockey skates with the Chicago Blackhawks. The Racine Belles, provided with free tickets, occasionally formed a cheering section.

  During one closely fought contest, Gottselig eluded the opposition defenseman and set up a clear shot at the net. Just then, the very audible voice of Clara Schillace was heard above the crowd noise, yelling, “Bunt, Johnny, bunt!”

  The first example of the League’s willingness to blame managers for bad results came about halfway through the 1944 season.

  The team that started the ball rolling was the Rockford Peaches, who were losing steadily under Jack Kloza. The scene was Rockford’s home stadium, in early July. It was Sunday afternoon and time for a double-header. The bleachers were filled with happy families; hot dog vendors plied their greasy wares.

  The Peaches were playing the Kenosha Comets. If the Comets won both games, they would finish the first half of the season atop of the standings. Rockford, on the other hand, would finish fifth in a field of six no matter what the outcome.

  One man sat on his own, his elbows on his knees, intent on the scene below. The lone spectator, blue eyes shaded by a Panama hat, was in his early 40s, not as old as his white hair might suggest. In profile, his nose was prominent, almost beaky, his face long and tanned.

  Down on the field, a thick-set and worried Jack Kloza was acting as third-base coach. He had some of the League’s best players under his command, and more than enough experience to run a ball team, but somehow the Peaches hadn’t come together. If they had shown sufficient promise and won a reasonable number of games, Kloza would perhaps have been more popular in the clubhouse. As matters stood, his time was running short.

  Kloza’s problems were compounded by dissension in the ranks. He had hoped to placate the malcontents by allowing the League’s head office to assign Gladys “Terrie” Davis, his temperamental center-fielder, to the ailing Milwaukee Chicks. She had not been universally popular, and Kloza saw her departure as a peace offering. That might have worked, but Kloza had then lost Mary Pratt to the Kenosha Comets. Now Pratt was back on the field against her former teammates, as starting pitcher in the second game.

  Not that the Peaches, whose roster had been weakened by injuries, had received no help from the League. One of the newer recruits was presently at bat.

  This was Dorothy “Snooky” Harrell, who had come from Los Angeles. As the man in the stands watched, she stepped into the batter’s box, rapped her bat twice on home plate, spat on the handle for luck and then assumed a familiar stance.

  Harrell had been playing for Rockford for only a week or two, but had already begun to rival the Peaches’ leading hitter, Dorothy Kamenshek. None of the Peaches were at their best today, though. Harrell would come to the plate seven times in the course of two games but fail to get on base.

  Late in the evening, the second game wound down and people began to head for the exits. The Comets, who’d won the first game 3-0, were repeating their performance. Both teams would score one more run each, but Kenosha would end up on top.

  The lone spectator stayed until the last out. He couldn’t imagine not seeing a game through to its conclusion. Besides, he wanted to see as much of the Peaches as possible. He was Bill Allington, soon to be christened “The Silver Eagle” by Rockford fans. He has signed a contract to take over the management of the Peaches the following week – a development that would not be relayed to Kloza until the following day at a special meeting in Chicago.

  When the league issued an announcement of Kloza’s “resignation,” the public was told Kloza had “worked himself into a frazzle” and had stepped aside “for the good of all concerned.” But too many rumors were in circulation; the clumsy fiction couldn’t and didn’t last long.

  In fact, a story very quickly began to circulate that players from California had engineered Kloza’s departure and demanded that Allington replace him. One of the suspects was Snooky Harrell, but she was guiltless. She had been happy to see what she thought was the last of Allington when she left California. His aggressive style struck her as cruel to players and antagonistic to opponents. She believed that his penchant for disparaging remarks had a reverse effect on the rival teams: he made a mediocre club mad enough to pull out all the stops and beat you.

  In fact, however, there’d almost certainly been a coup of some dimension. At least one player who’d had enough of Kloza’s losing ways had held “indignation meetings” in her room to raise support for his ouster.

  Some players knew (or thought they knew) that Kloza was doomed a day or two before he was summoned to Chicago. This gave managers elsewhere the shivering fits. If players’ wishes were taken into consideration by the League, no one was safe.

  A newspaper reported that another manager was reportedly “carrying his signed resignation around in his pocket and has been dissuaded from presenting it to Ken Sells only by the pleas of his club officials.”

  Whatever the pressure applied to be rid of Kloza, the All-American’s managers could not rest easy. The mere fact that they piloted a losing team was grounds for dismissal.

  As for Allington, once he settled into Rockford, Harrell’s reservations seemed unfounded – for a while.

  “He was really pretty decent for that first year,” she says.

  Rockford’s management certainly thought so. The club made it out of the cellar and into the first division by the end of Allington’s first season.

  Allington’s virtues and faults sprang from the same source – he was baseball through and through. He had begun his career in Kansas and later played professionally with the Pacific Coast League before he turned to coaching women’s softball.

  He also worked for the technical department of Twentieth-Century Fox, and would occasionally surface as a bit player in films, including It Happens Every Spring, a baseball picture starring Ray Milland.

  Many All-American managers had already settled in the Midwest before they began working for the League, but Allington had family ties in California. He was divorced, but his teenage daughter lived there with relatives. Nonetheless, the profile of the League was growing, and Allington was happy to take on the job of managing the second-division Peaches. It was the kind of challenge he liked.

  Allington was an interesting figure. His strongest endorsements came courtesy of those who never played for him. More than any other manager, he taught his teams how to play baseball.

  He insisted on the basics; daily practice was mandatory. Players were expected to master the hit-and-run, the bunt, the proper fielding techniques, and to do so quickly.

  On the road, players had a 10 a.m. wake-up call, followed by a team meeting an hour later. The purpose of these meeting was to memorize the contents of the rule book, by means of question-and-answer sessions.

  After a game was over, aboard the bus heading to the next game, Allington would hold court behind the driver. Every play – winning or losing – would be dissected, every player challenged to justify her performance.

  Some managers never discussed a game. Once it was over, it was history. Many players on other teams would have rebelled against such rigors, but Allington took care to select players who wanted to learn, to absorb his expertise. He was an expert talent-spotter.

  Dorothy Ferguson credits him with exploiting her potential: “I was never a hitter, but I could run and I had a good arm. So be brought those things out in me.”

  Allington was not liked by ever
ybody all the time. He would stop at nothing to motivate his players; it was his way or the doorway. Dottie Kamenshek says that you learned or cracked under the strain.

  Players with fragile egos – or rookies, accustomed to small-time success – made painful adjustments, or quit, or asked to be traded. Others, like Kamenshek, weathered the rough patches in return for demonstrable gain. She would stay after practice for additional instruction: “He’d put a handkerchief on the first or third baseline to mark the place he wanted the bunt to stop. And we’d practice for hours to get it there.”

  Kamenshek was left-handed, and Allington taught her to delay assuming her stance until the last possible moment, then drop the bunt towards third and run away from it: “That way, you got two steps toward first before the ball was even on the ground.”

  But all was not smooth in their relationship. In 1945, Allington cost her the League’s batting championship.

  “I was leading, going into the last two weeks,” she says, “and for some reason he came up to me and said, ‘So you think you can hit. You haven’t learned anything yet.’ I suppose he thought it would make me hit better. I think sometimes he thought we’d play better if we were upset. At that point, I wasn’t mature enough to take it, and I went right down the tubes.”

  The first year it happened, it crushed her and she slumped dismally. The next year, Kamenshek got mad at him and regained the title.

  Snooky Harrell was another player who didn’t always see eye to eye with Allington. One day, he loped over to her shortstop position and suggested a way she could avoid making so many errors. Harrell was outraged.

  “Bill,” she said, her voice rising, “I haven’t made an error in 35 games.” It would be longer than that before she stopped stewing over his slight.

  Max Carey was another All-American stalwart. After one season as Milwaukee’s manager, he became the League’s president in 1945.

  In some ways, it was a shame he left managing. He had been a top-ranked major-leaguer and would later be recognized for his achievements in the Hall of Fame. He was an able manager; the League would find few who could equal his talents.