by Browne, Lois
Eventually the transition took place, and Carey stayed in the All-American. The following year he took over as manager of the Fort Wayne Daisies.
One of Leo’s first challenges in his new post was to put the Chicago League in its place. All pretense of cooperation had by now collapsed and wholesale raiding was underway again.
By this time, the standard All-American contract included an option on a player’s services, meaning that she was bound to negotiate with the League before signing elsewhere. The option hadn’t prevented several players from jumping to the Chicago League, if it was in their interest to do so. The deciding factor was usually money, although Audrey Wagner made the switch so that she could attend university rather than bounce around the countryside.
Most players waited until the season was over and jumped before their team had come to count on their services for the following spring.
Not so Betty Tucker, whose Californian experience had convinced her to settle where she could get a year-round job.
Tucker had returned to the League in 1949, joining the Kenosha Comets, then being managed by Johnny Gottselig. When the changes to the ball and diamond came in midseason, the Comets – with Tucker part of their pitching staff – hit a prolonged losing streak. After a particularly awful series against Racine, Gottselig chewed them out. To flee his wrath, most of the team headed for a club, where they ate, drank and danced past curfew with a crew of sailors who providentially appeared. When they returned to their hotel, there in the lobby sat Gottselig and the chaperon.
“So,” says Tucker, “we lined up, put our hands on each other’s shoulders and marched past them to the elevators and up to our rooms. Nobody said a thing.”
The next night, at a pre-game meeting, Gottselig had plenty to say. He ripped into the team, accusing them of not caring whether they won or lost.
Stung by his attack, the Comets won handily that night, with Tucker on the mound. But she couldn’t shake Gottselig’s criticisms. She resented the pressure and the midseason changes to the game. Tucker decided to take Frank Darling up on his offer to jump. As he had urged many players to do in the past, she called him up, and the next day he arrived to drive her personally to Chicago.
This suited Tucker well. She could play a familiar sort of game (the Chicago League still played softball, with an underhand pitch) and get a steady day job too. But none of this suited Fred Leo in the least.
Fed up with Darling’s poaching, especially in midseason, Leo launched a flurry of lawsuits on behalf of the League, starting with Darling and the Chicago League, and winding up with Tucker, who was sued personally for $5,000.
Tucker’s mother read about it in the Detroit newspaper and called, fearful that her daughter might wind up in jail. Tucker was unconcerned: “I’m telling her, ‘Look, I just decided to change leagues.’ And she’s saying, ‘You can’t do that, you signed a contract.’ She was ready to put a lien on the house. I told her, ‘I’m not worried about $5,000,’ but she says, ‘You’re not, but I am.’”
In fact, the All-Americans didn’t want Tucker’s hide. They wanted to stop the raids – a determination strengthened by the news at the end of the 1949 season that Connie Wisniewski had been signed by Darling for 1950 for $250 a week. Tucker was a good pitcher but Wisniewski was a star. Other big-name draws might decide to follow her.
Leo found that he didn’t have to follow through on the legal threats. The All-American found an ally, oddly enough, in the Chicago League’s other team owners. By this time they’d decided that they couldn’t afford a salary war, even if Darling could.
So it was that, by the time 1950 rolled around, a new agreement had been reached between the rival leagues, which found them recognizing suspensions and exchanging rosters well in advance. The All-American’s suit against Tucker disappeared, and the League acknowledged Wisniewski’s right to move to Chicago.
The Wisniewski episode, however, cut deep. Darling had lured her away to his club, the Music Maids, with promises of a salary the All-American couldn’t hope to match.
Many of the players recall being courted by Frank Darling, an official of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for whom owning and managing a winning women’s softball team had become a mania.
He had decided to buy a championship team at any cost, and had offered Wisniewski – besides the $1,000 a month – a chauffeured limousine and a two-year contract stipulating that she’d be paid even if injured. The last condition had been demanded by Wisniewski, and when Darling consented, she had hopped. She could go back to being a pitching champ once again.
Wisniewski spent a season with the Maids, delivered to and from each game by Darling’s bodyguard, who also began to take her out for dinner – not part of her contract.
Wisniewski and the bodyguard even discussed marriage, but the ball player decided against it.
“He lied to me,” she says. “He had a daughter he didn’t tell me about. He happened to be the same religious faith as I was, but he didn’t tell me that, either. And he didn’t appeal to me. The kind of man who went for me was two tons and six-foot-four. I wanted a man who was six-foot-four, all right, but I wanted a skinny man. I was gonna fatten him up.”
Wisniewski found that Chicago wasn’t to her liking.
“In all the years I played with the All-American, I’d never had anyone approach me and say, ‘I’ll give you $500 or $1,000 if you throw tomorrow’s game.’ But it happened in Chicago. It got so they’d start to make overtures, and I’d just walk away. I don’t think it had anything to do with the Chicago League itself; it was just the gamblers.”
Chicago played rough, and the All-Americans didn’t – it was as simple as that.
At the end of her season with the Music Maids, Wisniewski decided to return to the All-American. The League had a rule blackballing players who’d left the League for Chicago, but the rule was relaxed for Wisniewski. Players of her caliber were too few and far between.
All in all, 1949 was not a good year for the All-American. Only two clubs showed a profit, and five registered losses ranging between $15,000 and $27,000. One broke even.
Rockford had, predictably, won the championship, and cutbacks continued unabated.
In 1950, umpires were no longer allowed to officiate outside their home cities, to save on traveling expenses.
The League board members argued over whether or not players should take a salary cut. In fact, throughout this dismal period, some players were voluntarily going without pay for weeks at a time in order to keep their teams afloat. Meyerhoff pointed out that since members of the Players Development Teams were playing for $25 a week, regular players should make the sacrifice as well.
Some board members argued that a cut would void everyone’s contract, and that they should at least allow players to quit.
Finally, Dr. Dailey, his eye as always on the bottom line, proposed a compromise – eliminate meal money paid for on-the-road games. That decision started another brouhaha.
When they heard the news, members of the South Bend Blue Sox walked out just before the 1950 play-offs. South Bend’s management got them back by paying the meal money itself, on the grounds that other teams were doing the same in secret. But to no avail.
Rockford won the championships again, losing, over the course of the year, some $3,000, in spite of a stringent budget, which prompted the club’s president, Wilbur Johnson, to insist that Management Corporation cut its share of the gate in half. Meyerhoff reluctantly agreed, but club losses didn’t stop.
In short, the 1950 season was a debacle. The Muskegon Lassies folded halfway through, and the team was relocated to Kalamazoo. This change brought one of the most interesting developments during the second half of the League’s existence.
When the Lassies were shifted to Kalamazoo, the League asked Bonnie Baker to be their manager. It was an unplanned midseason move to fill the gap left by an unsatisfactory male manager who hadn’t been able to carry through on his ambitious plans
for the team.
South Bend was in a quandary about whether or not to release Baker. On the one hand, Dailey thought of her as the “brains” of the Blue Sox team. But, on the other, he didn’t want to lose the chance of being able to boast that it was South Bend that had given the League its first full-fledged woman manager. Baker went.
Baker did well, moving the club from its last-place standing to fourth. The local newspaper reported that she’d inherited “a floundering, colorless group, and turned it into a fighting, winning team. No one could do more.”
At this time, Baker was featured in a film produced by Grantland Rice, the dean of American sportswriters, titled The Kalamazoo Clouters. The League still viewed her as a public-relations asset.
At season’s end, Kalamazoo wanted her back, but the other club directors were against female managers on anything but an emergency basis. In the winter of 1950, they passed a resolution to that effect. Only once more before the League collapsed would a player be made manager – the following year Ernestine “Teeny” Petras took over as manager for a few weeks in Kenosha.
As usual, the explanations vary. Promoting a player who’d be capable of wearing the manager’s hat meant taking a seasoned veteran off the field – a player with brains, experience and guile.
Baker thinks the League wanted to continue its policy of hiring well-known male baseballers: “They didn’t want to take a $400-a-month player and make her into a $500-a-month manager.”
Racine – a founding city – called it quits after the 1950 season, and the Belles moved to Battle Creek, Michigan. The trickle of departing players became a flood.
The League’s board admitted, in a confidential memo, that it was “woefully weak of capable talent.”
The Kenosha Comets and the Peoria Redwings folded in 1951. The single advantage was that their players could be apportioned out in what had become, by 1952, a six-team League.
Over the course of two seasons, the All-American lost something like two dozen experienced veterans, and many who replaced them weren’t of the same quality. They couldn’t have been; the veterans had been playing a game for years that was radically different from the softball that the rookies were used to playing.
The rookies were still paid $55 a week – exactly the same as in 1943. Only four or five players per team made the $100 a week maximum. Raises were limited to $5 a week each year. Sometimes it materialized, sometimes it didn’t. Wages were by now on par with minor-league ball – a poor inducement to sign your life away.
Meanwhile, the press had begun to place some of the blame for the League’s troubles on the players. The Grand Rapids newspaper stated that it was tired of “dismal and colorless” baseball, despite “all-out efforts on the part of the club owners and the league to make it better.”
The trouble, said the sports editor, was that the players were blasé: “The girls have been too long in the league, too satisfied with their jobs and taking things far too much for granted. They know there is a scarcity of good girl players and a manager can’t get along without them, no matter what they do or do not do.”
That wasn’t fair to players who had little control over how their clubs were being managed, but the sense that the troubles were all their fault began to grow.
Many anguished discussions took place, centering on the need to recapture the public’s affection. The directors could see that television viewing, stiff competition from other, more exciting, professional sports and a hundred other shifting realities of a postwar world had to be taken into account.
Nevertheless, the issue they seized on harked back to the earliest days of the League – femininity.
In one of Meyerhoff’s exchanges with Wilbur Johnson, he wrote that Wrigley had sold him the League on the understanding that he, Meyerhoff, would be a “watchdog” when it came to proper standards. He confessed that he had been “negligent in this respect.”
Fred Leo was quick to take his cue. He launched a series of closed-door meetings with chaperons, managers and players themselves. (At this time, the League proposed the idea of chaperon-players, purely as a cost-cutting measure. About half a dozen women took on this double duty, including the venerable Choo Choo Hickson. They even experimented with doing away with chaperons, but that idea didn’t last more than half a season.)
The All-American’s rules were rewritten. After establishing a “balancing committee” to deal with such perennial sources of tension and bad will as allocation, artificially prolonged play-offs and mounting debt, the regulations got down to the heart of the matter.
A series of punishments was laid out for such infractions as on-field profanity, after-hours visits to bars and the still-prevalent habit of slugging umpires. Umpires, for their part, were given authority to prowl the stands prior to a game, in search of fraternizers.
Most players, said Leo, were cooperative, but a few would “feel the sting of a shortened paycheck if they didn’t comply.”
The dress code was altered to ban “masculine hair styling, shoes, coats, shirts, socks and T-shirts” at all times, both on and off the field, and the curfew was tightened up.
So much for Meyerhoff’s and Leo’s paternalistic designs – but both of them were coming to the end of their League careers.
In 1950, the clubs summoned up their resolve and decided to be rid of Management Corporation.
Meyerhoff may have touched off this revolt himself when he once more publicly recommended that some teams move to larger, more hospitable centers. He pointed out that the touring teams – composed of $25-a-week rookies who weren’t considered sufficiently skilled to make the League – were drawing crowds of 6,000-plus in New York and Washington, D.C. He ignored the likelihood that they were one-shot curiosities.
Meyerhoff also said that civic ownership (the local boosters) wasn’t working, that individual ownership (big-city, big-time entrepreneurs) was the wave of the future.
This was a slap in the face of the team owners, who had (for all their warts) borne with the League through good times and bad, loyal to its founding premise. Every spring, they had written the same welcoming speech for the mayor’s delivery, planted the same hopeful stories (money had been found, fans had responded and the club would be solvent once again) in local newspapers. They had devoted years of their lives, and in many cases appreciable sums of money, to make the League a credit to their cities. Why had they continued?
Dr. Bailey proposed a cynical explanation. “Perhaps it is as Ken Sells said,” he wrote. “The short skirts and the girls do a lot of it.”
A more likely reason was that, once in, it was difficult to get out. Having attached their names and reputations to the League for so long, they didn’t want to give up. The All-American was their link to the past – to old values, shared experience and common purpose, to the war, when people pulled together.
Community ownership had defined the League from its outset. Now Meyerhoff was suggesting they sell out to the highest bidder, to men like Frank Darling.
It cost the clubs $8,000 to buy out Meyerhoff’s interest in the All-American – and, in later years, he would admit that he’d done rather well. “The proof that it was a sound enterprise,” he told a researcher, “ is that I operated it for about six years or more and ended up with a very substantial profit.”
Ironically, in the midst of all this change and dissension, some clubs began to do better than they ever had before – at least on the field.
After eight years, without a pennant, South Bend suddenly topped the standings in 1951 and won the championship, that year and the next. On the balance sheet, however, things continued downhill.
At a board meeting in August, president Fred Leo reported that the League owed $6,600 and had $168 in the till. He then distributed copies of his resignation.
Leo was replaced by Harold Van Orman, a prominent hotel owner from Fort Wayne who had been a director of the Fort Wayne Daisies for many years. Like those before him, Van Orman had grand plans for reorganizing t
he League, including bringing it back to eight-team strength.
He asked Chet Grant, sportswriter and former League manager, for his opinion. What he got was a diatribe against what Grant thought was the real problem – “indecorous femininity.”
Decorum was in decline, he said, and “had been progressively for several years.” He pointed to the Racine Belles as “a horrible example of a situation where the girls run the show.” Attendance had dropped even in the thick of the pennant race, he claimed, because of their hard-boiled ways, what he called a “depreciation in their reputation for decorous feminine deportment.”
Grand Rapids and Rockford were on the skids as well, affected by the same “growing overall indifference of the league to the importance of sustaining the illusion [sic] that the girls are nice as well as skillful.”
Nor was Grant alone in finding fault with the players. A few months earlier, Dr. Dailey had noted that the South Bend players had met with the business manager to express a number of concerns.
“They wanted to know why they had to have a play-off, how the club share was arrived at, and how the money was distributed to the players,” he wrote. “They also wanted to know the finances of the clubs in the league, which was, and is, none of their business. It was the usual group of girls, and for my dough they can go straight to hell.”
And so the League straggled on, locked in a losing battle. Attendance and revenues continued their downward slide. But somehow the clubs endured, sustained by never-say-die fans and players for whom the League continued to exert appeal. A new crop of rookies kept appearing, year by year.
The post-1948 period had its own stars, who were as beloved by fans as those glory days, and whose exploits are recalled just as warmly at their annual reunions. The League was still something to aim for, the top of the pole, the only game in town. But even those who dreamed of playing had realized the fragility of their ambition.
