Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (24 page)

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 man
y years. Like those before him, Van Orman had grand plans for reorganizing the 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.

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 mid-season, 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 mid-season.

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.