Girls of Summer: In Their Own League

by Browne, Lois

  Marilyn Jenkins, the Grand Rapids bat girl, remembers hoping that the League would last long enough for her to play. It did, and she became the Grand Rapids catcher until the League’s demise.

  Signs of decay were everywhere. Local newspaper coverage dwindled, a victim of decreasing fan interest and high costs. The sports editor was usually paid both by the newspaper to cover an event and by the League, as official scorer. Yet, though the papers paid for the telegraph costs, they often had difficulties getting the results for the morning paper of out-of-town games.

  The cash-strapped League agreed to changes in the scorekeeping that would have made the job of covering games easier and a little cheaper for the newspapers, but the League couldn’t enforce them. Home-city reports in some papers became perfunctory.

  The clubs, especially the new franchises, couldn’t stabilize.

  Battle Creek, which had taken over the Belles in 1951, lasted only two seasons, and the team then moved to Muskegon, which must have been missing the departed Lassies.

  This period was ruled by the Fort Wayne Daisies, under the trans-planted Bill Allington, who won the pennant in 1952 and 1953 but lost the play-offs both years, first to the Blue Sox and then to the Grand Rapids Chicks.

  By the end of 1953, total debt for all the clubs was a staggering $80,000.

  The League was ready to call it quits. President Van Orman made the announcement only to discover he was out of step. He received a “deluge” of protest calls. He convened a meeting at which the clubs’ directors decided to give it one more try.

  It seems miraculous that in 1954 the clubs could still find local backers for what seemed inevitable losses.

  Only one team – the Muskegon Belles – dropped out. That left Rockford, South Bend, Grand Rapids, Fort Wayne and Kalamazoo as the cities prepared to continue, with reduced rosters (and of course, reduced salaries).

  In many respects, the League was scarcely recognizable. Players behaved more or less as they pleased, in and away from the park. Standards were lax for everybody.

  Sue “Sis” Waddell, who didn’t join the League until 1951, remembers when she and some of her teammates went out joyriding in the middle of the night. They were picked up the police for speeding and had to call their manager. At three o’clock in the morning, he didn’t answer his phone and neither did the chaperon when she was called, prompting rumors that the two were together.

  For the players, there was no other fall-out. A few years before, it would have been grounds for sending players home.

  Exhibition games against men’s teams were commonplace. Rented buses were long gone, and the clubs gypsied around from town to town, packed in players’ cars.

  Marilyn Jenkins realized that the All-American’s days were numbered when her week’s pay was counted out in one dollar bills. “It was the gate receipts from the night before,” she says.

  An advertisement for a double-header in South Bend sounded like a freak show. Still assuring people this was “real baseball….not softball,” it urged fans to come out and see the “Baseball Babes!” and the cow-milking contest that would be part of the entertainment.

  Some of the early managers were still around.

  Bill Allington had declined to re-sign with the Rockford club in 1953 on the grounds that he planned to return to California to attend to business interests there. But just after the Peaches announced they had hired Johnny Rawlings, the Fort Wayne Daisies released the news that Allington was theirs. Both men were back for 1954.

  Besides the old rivals, Woody English, a former Chicago Cub, was piloting the Grand Rapids Chicks. Karl Winsch, married to South bend’s ace pitcher, Jean Faut, would manage the Blue Sox for the fourth year in a row, while Mitch Skupien headed the Kalamazoo Lassies.

  Given the League’s rocky reality, the general level of good cheer was surprising.

  South Bend went so far as to hire a full-time business manager from the Detroit Tigers, in hopes of balancing their books.

  By midseason, rumors were finding their way into print that the clubs wanted to be rid of the latest League president (Earl McCammon, who in fact was now called the League’s “commissioner”). This, they said, was because they needed an abler man to guide them into 1955.

  They also took the last step in converting to men’s baseball. The League adopted the nine-inch regulation-size ball and expanded the base paths to 85 feet – once again in midseason.

  Advertising hyped the changes: “Home Runs and Power Plays! The most daring revision ever made in girls’ professional baseball! Can the girls handle this small ball? Come Out and See Tonight!”

  To complete the sense of deja vu, they issued a string of statements to the effect that the League hoped to re-expand, this time to Chicago, where it held chummy discussions with a former owner in the now-defunct Chicago League.

  By this time, only a handful of All-American veterans remained. Dorothy Ferguson Key was still with the Rockford Peaches. Gabby Ziegler remained with the Grand Rapids Chicks and Dorothy Schroeder with the Kalamazoo Lassies. Most of their former teammates were long gone, back to factories, farms and families.

  Faced with collective adversity, the clubs had pledged to be more cooperative during the season, lending players whenever necessary to keep the teams evenly matched. By now, they had dispensed with the old allocation system.

  The crowds weren’t huge, but some franchises drew 2,000 fans a night. The latest rule changes once again conspired to produce more hits and home runs. In fact, in Kalamazoo, which had the League’s smallest playing field, the Lassies ordered up a special “deadened” ball that wasn’t so easy to knock out of the park.

  All this resulted in a close race among the five teams that ended, in the closing days of August, with Allington’s Fort Wayne Daisies in first place. Rawlings’ Peaches, in fifth place, were eliminated from the play-offs.

  This paved the way for a pair of best-of-three semi-finals. The second-place South Bend Blue Sox played the fourth-place Kalamazoo Lassies and came out on top, set to play the winners of the Fort Wayne-Grand Rapids series. That series packed considerably more punch.

  Fort Wayne had now topped the standings three years straight, only to lose three play-off championships. The Daisies, led by Allington, wanted to win. However, events seemed to be conspiring against them.

  Back in the spring, to prove good faith in the new atmosphere of cooperation, South Bend had lent Fort Wayne its second-string catcher when the Daisies’ first-stringer was injured.

  By the end of August, South Bend’s catcher was herself immobilized. The Blue Sox asked for and received their second-stringer back, forcing the Daisies to make do with one of their pitchers behind the plate. This player had, in fact, caught for other teams, but Allington didn’t want her for the play-offs. He wanted the League’s top-ranked catcher, Ruth Richard, a Rockford Peach.

  Commissioner McCammon polled all the club presidents and everyone, including Roy Taylor of Grand Rapids, had approved. Unfortunately, Taylor, who was now sole owner of the Chicks, had not informed his team.

  The final best-of-three contest between the Daisies and Chicks was slated to begin at South Field in Grand Rapids. This was good news for the Chicks, who tended to falter badly on the road. An initial victory would get them off on the right foot.

  At the first game, on a Saturday night, the Chicks and manager Woody English arrived to find the Daisies preparing to put Ruth Richard behind home plate.

  Marilyn Jenkins, catching for the Chicks, thought that “it was like the Boston Red Sox in the World Series taking Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, and it wasn’t fair.” English made a formal pre-game protest, claiming that Richard, having played all season for a team that was out of the play-offs, was ineligible.

  Allington argued that he had the commissioner’s backing, and that Richard should stay. At this point, the Chicks left their dugout and returned to the clubhouse.

  Faced with a stadium full of restless fans, League offi
cials negotiated a compromise. The Chicks would play under protest, on the understanding that the issue would be resolved before the second game on Sunday. Thus assured, the agitated Chicks pulled off a triumphant 8-7 win over Allington and the Daisies, scoring the winning run in the ninth inning with two out and the bases loaded.

  On Sunday night, the action shifted to Fort Wayne’s Memorial Stadium. The Chicks arrived to find 1,600 fans in the bleachers and Richard suiting up. English ordered the Chicks off the field. He would have been wise to follow them, but he remained to argue with Allington at home plate.

  No one can remember who swung first, but there was certainly a fistfight, and the umpire and others had to separate the two managers. The umpires forfeited the game to Fort Wayne – not because of the brawl, but because the Chicks, at English’s direction, had defaulted.

  Who was behind these events depends on whom you listen to.

  Marilyn Jenkins lays some of the blame on Allington, who “had a lot of ways to win .”

  Gabby Ziegler remembers how belligerently English reacted. “He got very bull-headed about Fort Wayne having this other catcher. He wasn’t going to have it. So he pulled the team off the field.”

  Ziegler wasn’t as worked up about it as some of the players were. “We had won the last game against them, even with Richard as their catcher. What was the difference?” But you couldn’t argue with English.

  “The whole thing was like a nightmare. You’d like to forget it but you can’t.” She thinks also that the episode left a bad taste in Allington’s mouth, that he didn’t want to win that way.

  Nonetheless, says Jenkins, “that’s the way Grand Rapids ended, and that was the end of the League. We didn’t like to talk about it, but the more we thought about it, I think we’d make the same decision today.”

  The next day, the Chicks went home, leaving English and other club officials to sort matters out with Commissioner McCammon.

  English reminded the others that the teams played for a share of the gate during the play-offs, and that Richard’s presence loaded the dice against them. It was bad sportsmanship, he said, to salt the Daisies with another team’s top player.

  Taylor, the Grand Rapids owner, was faulted on two grounds – for failing to inform his team of what he’d agreed to, and for not insisting that they perform the job they’d come to do.

  Some people think English led the walkout; others criticize him for giving in to his players. Memories differ, and it was a long time ago.

  Fort Wayne went on to play Kalamazoo in the finals – and lost, by the way, in a surprise upset. Once again, a low-ranking team had snatched the championship from the season’s top-ranked club.

  Meanwhile, McCammon banished English from League management and fined him $35 for failing to field a team. He was fined another $15, as was Allington, for the fight. The players’ money was held in escrow until further notice.

  Only the Grand Rapids officials escaped without censure. They “did everything they could to prevent this unhappy occurrence,” McCammon concluded, and “are to be commended for their efforts.”

  All in all, it was a nasty way to end the League.

  When the All-American’s players took to the field in 1943, they were fulfilling not a dream, but a fantasy. For a young woman in 1940s America, a professional sports career of any kind was not a likely prospect.

  There were – as there are today – female tennis players and golfers. But women’s professional softball – let alone baseball – simply did not exist. Wrigley created it, then gave up on it before it could prove itself.

  Nor did the All-American keep pace with the changes that ebbed and flowed around it. The players never unionized (although there were rumors of group action in South Bend, in the early years).

  Unlike the major leagues, the All-American never integrated. Two black players tried out with South Bend in 1951. Their arrival was met by – in the carefully chosen words of the keeper of the League minutes – “various views from different cities.”

  In the United States, 7,000 girls play little league ball, as opposed to more than 2,500,000 boys. They are effectively discouraged from joining the boys’ teams. Like Pepper Paire, they take a lot of guff.

  As for the players of the All-American League, those who survive are now in their 60s and 70s. Age has taken some of their fire and dash away. Some live in comfortable retirement. Others – perhaps because of their gypsy existence – are less fortunate, but they have few regrets.

  Every other year, someone else discovers them, and a magazine article or 10-minute television feature wonders whatever happened to Bonnie Baker. Well, Bonnie Baker and all the rest of them have found each other again. They have formed the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Association.

  As early as 1943, Philip Wrigley promised that photos of the players of the All-American would hang in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, next to those of the men who made pro baseball history. It never happened.

  It wasn’t until 1988, after many years of lobbying by the Association, and 34 years after the League folded, that the Baseball Hall of Fame finally recognized women’s professional baseball. In November 1988, a permanent display was installed amid much fanfare.

  The Association holds annual reunions, at which they salute empty chairs and sing the “Victory Song.” They correspond through a newsletter in which they publish poems and report on what they’re doing and who amongst them needs help or a friendly letter.

  Once upon a time in the Midwest, they did something no one else has done. They were just kids, having fun and enjoying one another. They weren’t thinking about being pioneers, about making history. They didn’t realize what pioneers they were.

  Today, they look forward to the next reunion, living very much in the present but looking back on occasion through the glow of nostalgia to the best years of their lives, when they were young and strong and together, playing the game they loved and at which they excelled, with all the time in the world stretching out before them.

  Where Are They Now?

  It’s been nearly 40 years since the players of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League filled their hometown diamonds. Forty years since the last time the local newspaper carried the box scores, since fans strolled along shady streets to the park to watch the Peaches or the Daisies or the Blue Sox play.

  There were some who just wouldn’t believe it was gone.

  After the 1954 season, a couple of dozen players joined together with Bill Allington as the Allington All-Americans and continued to tour the Midwest for three season, playing games against men’s and women’s teams.

  When the contest was against men, they switched the batteries (the male pitcher and catcher playing for the women’s team, and vice versa) to give the crowd a good show.

  They covered a lot of ground, from Ohio to the Dakotas. The players rode a bus that had seen better days, used friendly townspeople’s basements as dressing rooms and camped in cheap motels. They played rodeos and circuses; it was one step up from the days of wandering Bloomer Girls.

  “They were the best years of my life.” It’s the way most former players sum up their careers in professional baseball.

  Some players married and raised families; others went back to school. The money they saved from playing baseball often financed the changes in their lives. Their years in the League gave most of the players confidence and a vision of a life outside the little town or city they’d grown up in.

  Many couldn’t go back to fulfilling the ideal of the dependent, housebound wife and chose careers instead. Others would still have married if they could, but marriage on their terms didn’t happen.

  Many of the players settled in the town they had played in and are still there today, still occasionally recognized by fans of the 1940s and 50s. Friendships couldn’t be as easily dissolved as the League.

  Friendships that began on a baseball field in the Midwest have continued all their lives. There ar
e pockets of former players all over North America – Saskatchewan, California, Arizona, Florida, the eastern seaboard and the four mid-western states that were their stamping grounds.

  In Grand Rapids, Dottie Hunter took up her off-season job – sales clerk in a jewelry store – full-time. Players couldn’t break old habits. Former Chicks like Marilyn Jenkins and Earlene “Beans” Risinger still dropped by to let her know what they were up to and ask her advice about their education or their careers.

  Some continued to play ball, although that meant returning to amateur softball. There were others who found softball too tame after the faster pace of professional baseball, and they opted to take up other sports.

  For most of the players, life after professional baseball had its ups and downs. For a few, life has been hard, even tragic.

  Of those, perhaps the most tragic was Merle “Pat” Keagle. Although Keagle has retired from the League, girls’ professional baseball was still a reality when “the Blonde Bombshell” of Grand Rapids was hit by cancer; she died before she was out of her 30s.

  Most of the men connected with the All-American League – its managers, club owners and executives – are now gone. The exceptions are Ken Sells, the first League president, who retired to Phoenix, Arizona; Fred Leo, another League president, who lives in Colorado; and Harold Greiner, former Daisies manager, who is still in Fort Wayne, nearly blind, but surrounded by photos of his family and his “girls,” those he coached and managed in the heyday of softball and women’s professional baseball. Many of those women he coached still visit him from time to time.

  Lou Arnold, South Bend Blue Sox pitcher, took a job with Bendix Aviation in South Bend and worked there for many years. “I made a good living,” she says. “I have a good retirement. I met all these good people. I’ve had a wonderful life, and a lot of it is because I played ball right here.”

  Mary “Bonnie” Baker lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she returned after her stint as Kalamazoo manager. Bonnie was one of those who found that she couldn’t return to softball after the League, although she tried. When she first returned home, Baker joined a team that was playing Class A softball. They went to the national championships in Toronto in 1953.