Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (15 page)

Nor was the Chicago League inactive
. It continued to lure malcontent All-Americans with inflated salary offers, forcing Carey and Meyerhoff to attempt a truce. In 1946, they reached a verbal agreement with the Chicago owners, pledging not to raid each other’s players but agreeing that any player released by one league was fair game for the other.

Meyerhoff knew it wouldn’t last
. “The stronger the Chicago League becomes,” he wrote, “the more of a threat they are. The working agreement wouldn’t last a minute if they thought they could get our girls. It is only because we occupy a stronger position that they are interested in an agreement at all.”

What was the All-American’s allegedly stronger position?  Setting aside salaries, the All-American was a classier act
. With Wrigley at the helm, players had traveled in extreme comfort. They stayed in quality hotels and were featured in national magazines. Household names came to see them play. The All-American may have been finding it difficult to resolve its problems, but it was still “the glamour loop” to its players.

The season began, amid the customary rash of injuries,  Every spring, pulled tendons and broken bones plunged effective teams into a tailspin that depressed both players and fans and set the club directors off in anxious pursuit of suitable replacements.

Given the chronic shortage of new blood, a lot of the All-Americans played hurt
. Their mishaps were standard issue – broken fingers for the catcher, ankle sprains, spike wounds and torn knee ligaments for the runners. Experienced managers became skilled at stop-gap measures.

During one game, Dottie Ferguson jarred her leg while sliding home
. Within minutes, her foot and ankle began to swell.

“
So Bill Allington took me into the clubhouse and told the groundskeeper to get a pail of hot water and another of ice water,” she says. “He dipped my foot first in one, then in the other. Then he told me to put my shoe back on and run on the track. I did, and the next day I played ball.”

Catchers were vulnerable
. Pepper Paire broke a finger when a foul tip hit her in the course of an exhibition game. The doctor applied an enormous “bird-cage” splint, but Johnny Rawlings exchanged it for a couple of popsicle sticks the following day.

“We opened against South Bend,” she says, “and they’d heard I was hurt, but it just looked like I had a band aid on
. They kept passing me on the bench, saying, ‘Hear you’ve been hurt.’ I just say, ‘Naw, it’s nothing.’ They had a lot of fast runners – Bonnie Baker, Senaida “Shoo Shoo” Wirth and Charlene “Shorty” Pryer. They were all set to run against me,” knowing that with her finger taped straight out, the ball she threw would probably sail into the outfield.

“Bonnie got on first base and took off for second
. To this day I don’t know how I did it, but I threw her out. Next up was Wirth, and it was the same thing all over again. Of course it was painful. All year it was painful. That’s why today I can point three ways at once.”

Later, in the midst of a crucial play-off, Paire twisted her ankle and played the final seven games with her foot taped and frozen:  “I had to wear my coach’s shoe, that’s how bad it was swollen.”

As for Bonnie Baker, she was knocked unconscious for 10 minutes as a result of falling into the dugout in pursuit of a foul ball, then had her hand broken not once but twice when struck by a batter. Both times she was called for interference. The first time put her out for the rest of the season. The second time was only a hairline fracture, and she continued to catch with her hand taped and the mitt packed with extra sponge padding. By season’s end, the fracture had become a full-fledged break.

The head injuries were the most frightening
.

Dorothy Hunter’s first and only season as a player was notable for a brushback from Olive Bend Little (her best friend, but that didn’t count in the heat of combat)
.

“It was the first time she pitched against me,” says Hunter, “but she knew very well I was a sucker for a high inside ball
. She got me right in the side of the face and I went down like a ton of bricks. It knocked me silly and I was in tears, but I got to first base.”  Little was so shaken by the incident that she walked the next three batters, giving Hunter a walk home.

Sometimes, of course,
the brushbacks were intentional – a matter of retaliation.

Dolly Tesseine, who played with both the Lassies and Chicks explains, “We played a pretty rough game
. I was at shortstop when Gabby Ziegler spiked me coming into second. Ziggy was about as aggressive a player as there was. I said to her, ‘Next time you do that, I’m going to jam the ball down your throat.’ When I came to bat, she threw at my head – Ziggy was a pitcher then. She put me on the ground. But when she came up, our pitcher fired for her head. Nobody got hurt and that was that.”

And no apologies, either
– but excitement usually overruled remorse.

Once, Dottie Ferguson, at second base, took a throw from the shortstop, looked around and saw that a runner was coming in from first standing up
.

“I stepped on the bag and started to throw to first for a double play
. I figured that the gal would duck, but she didn’t, and I got her right in the forehead. It didn’t knock her out for very long, and I thought, ‘Well, I couldn’t have had much on that throw.’ Isn’t that awful?  But you didn’t come into base standing up unless you were asking to be killed.”

The All-American’s famous “strawberries” were unique
. Players went into battle with 20 inches of unprotected flesh between knee and upper thigh. In theory, runners ought to sink into their slides at the last moment, avoiding a long and painful scrape along the ground. Actually, they slid in whatever way the situation demanded.

Base paths
were supposed to be sand, but after a couple of innings they were down to hard, unyielding dirt – or in some cases, cinder. As a result, the most aggressive runners spent all season with one or both legs a mass of wounds that never had time to mend or scab over.

The League provided them with sliding pads
– bulky efforts rather like surgical dressings that were supposed to be taped to their legs. But these kept coming off. Besides, players thought they looked disconcertingly like a Kotex pad hanging down from under their skirts.

Several chaperons experimented with makeshift remedies, including “doughnuts” made from rolled-up towels, but these too came unstuck almost immediately, and looked even worse
. No wonder the players returned home covered with scar tissue. No wonder that the managers couldn’t bear to watch them slide. Playing in the All-American qualified its players for the Purple Heart.

In what little leisure time they had available, the players’ enthusiasms were typical
. Music was big, with allegiance split between Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.

Tiby Eisen spent time experimenting with novel hairdos; her teammates could count on a free home permanent
. She was also adept at jitterbugging and liked to enter competitions in the off-season.

Dottie Kamenshek was a crossword-puzzle addict
.

The wild-at-heart Faye Dancer waited eagerly for the newest Tarzan movie star
ring Johnny Weismuller.

These were the pastimes that fans could read about in their local papers.

Other hobbies were not so well-publicized. Many players liked to gamble. Poker was the card game of choice, although the aisle of a bus on an overnight trip was the perfect venue for craps. In the hotel room after bed check, players would bring out the cards, and money changed hands until dawn broke.

Bonnie Baker was a dab hand at poker
. She dealt the cards at every turn, with such card-sharks as Lib Mahon, Lil Faralla, Twi Shively and Ruth Williams.

Daisy Junor played, too, but always heeded Baker’s warning when the stakes got rarefied:  “She’d say, ‘Get out,’ and I did
. She could clean their clocks in no time.”

Junor remembers
. Lou Arnold, who didn’t play, says of Baker: “She used to come on that bus, looking like a movie star, and she’d sit there with a Coke in one hand and her cards in the other and the sweat would be coming down her face.”

The Coke bottle became Baker’s trademark
. “I drank 24 bottles a day,” she says. “Hot, cold, lukewarm, whatever. I went to bed with one on my night table and got up in the morning and drank it.”  So pressing was this addiction that Chet Grant, the Blue Sox’ newly appointed manager, allowed her to bring a supply into the dugout, in flagrant violation of the rules.

Baker had competition on the card-shark circuit
.

In Grand Rapids, Mildred Earp led a hard-core group of poker fanatics
.

Dottie Hunter, the chaperon, saw this as a disruptive trend:  “The kids would get paid and then lose a whole cheque in a game
. So one of them was stupid enough to come to me and say, ‘Gee, Dottie, I don’t have any money. Could you loan me some?’ So I asked what happened, and she told me she’d lost it all in a card game. That did it right there. I cut out all poker games, on the road, anyway. What they did at home I don’t know, but nobody ever came and told me they lost their money after that. But these young kids could be talked into anything, you know, so you had to watch them like a hawk.”

Many players, making real wages for the first time in their lives, had difficulty sticking to a budget
. One young Rockford Peach was chronically short of funds, and chaperon Millie Lundahl was forced to act. She persuaded the board to withhold half the player’s salary until the end of the season. The player protested bitterly –  at first.

“At the end of the season,” says Lundahl, “she came and apologized
. She said she would never have saved it. She said she was sorry that she’d given me a hard time.”

Other chaperons considered gambling the least of several evils the young women were capable of
. At least it kept players in the hotel and out of trouble.

The managers ha
d their own prohibited pleasure – illicit slot machines that Fred Leo remembers were a staple of Elks Clubs in every city. However, anything that smacked of wagering on the games themselves was not tolerated.

Hunter recalls that Johnny Rawlings was particularly firm on this point:  “He took his job very seriously, and all these professional baseball men, they knew all the ins and outs of betting
. He was from that era of the White Sox scandal [when Shoeless Joe Jackson and his teammates conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series]. He’d get mad because the fans would come to some of the ball players and ask ‘Who’s goin’ to pitch tonight?’ He didn’t want to tell anybody anything because he thought these guys were goin’ to bet. He’d seen a lot of betting in the big leagues and he didn’t believe in it.”

Road trips were the time for vigilance from manager and chaperon, but it could be a rough game of cat-and-mouse for the caretakers
.

One night in Fort Wayne, Allington sat in the Hotel Van Orman lobby until four a.m. waiting to confront players wh
o dared to stay out past curfew – in this case, they included Harrell and Kamenshek. Allington didn’t find out until the next day that the players had been in their rooms well before the allotted time. They had made their way in via the fire escape, simply to vex him.

Sometimes, a chaperon hoped that her players would go out on the town rather rampage through their accommodations
.

Lib Mahon recalls a handful of bad apples who ran up and down the hallways “throwing beer labels on the ceiling so they’d stick.”  But this, says Mahon, was the exception:  “You could count those people on one hand.”  Their behavior, coupled with the stealthy practice of obtaining more than the regulation two beers each by having non-drinkers order for them, was about as far as the All-American’s went in terms of depravity.

There were, not surprisingly, ceaseless violations of the anti-fraternizing rule that prohibited players from opposing teams – many of whom were former teammates, due to the allocation merry-go-round – from spending leisure time together. This edict covered “room parties, auto trips to out-of-the-way eating places, et cetera. However, friendly discussions in lobbies are permissible.”

On the surface, it had some validity
– “to sustain the complete spirit of rivalry between clubs.”  But it was the underlying fear that prompted the League to levy stiff fines for violations – the fear of lesbianism.

The League sometimes moved players around to break up a suspected romance, and there was no point unless it was followed up by a strict rule that kept them from continuing to see each other
. But after four seasons of play, some players had quite a roster of friends on other teams. And because many players returned to their home towns right after the end of the season, there wasn’t much chance to socialize if you didn’t grab it when you were on the road.

The rule only succeeded in further restricting a player’s social life.

It wasn’t too difficult a regulation for prying officials to monitor and make a show of enforcing.

Nicky Fox remembers taking the streetcar from Kenosha to nearby Racine, where her friends Sophie Kurys and Maddy English lived and played
. The three young women spent the day on the waterfront. Then it was time for Fox to head back to Kenosha, meet the rest of the Comets and return to Racine to play the Belles that evening.