Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (6 page)

Some of the players were grateful – to a degree
. Because Dorothy Kamenshek’s family never ate out in restaurants, she “didn’t know what all those forks were for,” and was mildly interested to learn.

Even the stylish Bonnie Baker, who could have conducted the seminars herself, was appreciative: “It was important, because everybody was watching you all the time
. Much as I like slacks and shorts, I was glad that we couldn’t wear them, because people tend to get slovenly, especially with slacks, and I thought it was good discipline.”

There were dissen
ting opinions.

Lavonne “Pepper” Paire remarks darkly that “some of us could have used a little polish, but it was hard to walk in high heels with a book on your head when you had a charley horse. This we were required to do in the evenings, after we’d been busting our butts for
10 hours on the field.”  Besides, as Choo Choo Hickson admits, a fair number of players “didn’t look any better with make-up on.”

Thrown suddenly into the limelight, meeting prominent people for the first time, having to cope with the attentions of the press, they needed help.
So the cosmetics industry triumphed, to the delight of newspapers everywhere.

Aside from stiff and unconvincing “action poses,” the typical All-American photo showed players lined up in the dressing room, anxiously fluffing their hair before taking the field
. Another much-repeated shot captured Ruth “Tex” Lessing, an attractive blonde who played catcher for the Grand Rapids Chicks, with her mask tilted back to reveal a carefully coiffed head, a powder puff in one hand and mirror in the other.

Catchers did not want for coverage
.

Bonnie Baker was front and center in South Bend’s advertisements, minus both unbecoming chest protector and the face-mask, which would have obscured her dark good looks
.

Some of Baker’s teammates recall that she managed to garner more than her share of coverage, at the expense of other players, which Baker acknowledges: “Libby Mahon would go out and make four spectacular catches and maybe get three hits
. In the same game, I’d run after four pop flies. But I got the headlines. Of course, if I dropped a ball and someone else hit a home run, I got the write-up for that, too, for four days in a row.”  Stardom had its price.

The Charm School was discontinued after a couple of seasons, even though a beauty kit, complete with full instructions, was issued for many years
. But its message lingered on, in the form of a 10-page booklet, penned by Mme. Rubinstein’s staff, with the imperative title “A Guide for All-American Girls: How to Look Better, Feel Better, Be More Popular.”

Copy read thus: “The All-American girl is a symbol of health, glamour, physical perfection, vim, vigor and a glowing personality
. Being included on the All-American roster is indeed a privilege to be granted only to those who are especially chosen for looks, deportment and feminine charm, in addition to natural athletic ability. The accent, of course, is on neatness and feminine appeal. That is true of appearances on the playing field, on the street or in leisure moments. Avoid noisy, rough and raucous talk and actions and be in all respects a truly All-American Girl.”

At one point, Bonnie Baker got a chance to thank Philip Wrigley in person
.

In the midst of 1943 spring training, after an early-morning Charm School session and a couple of hours at the hairdresser (“They dolled me up and I had a sort of upsweep”), Baker went to the ballpark and reported to Ken Sells, the League president, who led her to Wrigley’s box seats
. “The closest I had ever got was chewing his gum,” says Baker, “so I was quite excited. But when I took my mask off, my hair was hanging down. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.”

Sells assured her that it didn’t matter, and introduced her to Wrigley and his wife: “And they were very nice, very ordinary kind of people. I thanked him kindly for starting the League because it had been one of my dreams to play professional ball.”

This was the only time that Baker and Wrigley met – and one of the very few times he saw a player in the flesh. Years later, he confessed to a reporter that he never saw an All-American team in action. He knew, he said, that he’d have been disappointed, because he wouldn’t have been able to stop comparing the players to men.

And how were things unfolding in the founding cities?

Kenosha was pretty representative. The Kenosha
News
was stressing the players’ femininity just as much as Wrigley could wish. Just before spring training began, it was running banner headlines such as “Tom-Boy Tactics Out-of-Bounds in All-American Softball League.”  The story quoted Ken Sells to the effect that “a player is a public entertainer whether in the theater or on the ball diamond and has a definite obligation to the audience to be personally attractive as well as put on a good show.”

Mme. Rubinstein pops up again: “Women can be athletes, and still be feminine and charming, and therefore a double attraction
. Men do not want to come to see women in athletic competition who look like men. A woman who knows how to look, act and walk like a lady is always a Queen whatever her realm.”

A couple of weeks later, just before the season opener in June, the
News
was running display ads, complete with a picture of a fielder stretching to catch a line drive, whose copy was indicative of the drums being beaten in every All-American city: “A New Sports Thrill for Kenosha! See America’s Greatest Girl Softball Players! Enjoy America’s Newest National Sport!  It’s Carefree, Exciting, Clean Fun! Come out and have the time of your life! Watch these nationally famous girls take their rightful place in the American Sports World, as women are doing in hundreds of other fields. You’ll forget your cares – enjoy yourself so completely that you’ll go back to work refreshed and cheered. Cheer for Your Own Kenosha Team! Make it a Date and Bring the Family.”

This stirring copy was provided by the League’s head office.

Over the years, almost every national magazine, including
Colliers, Life
and
Holiday
, would feature coverage of the All-American’s progress. In 1943, however, only one publication marked its launch – complete with minor reservations.

Time
covered the League’s opening week of regular-season play in June. It managed to get two out of the four team names wrong (welcoming the “Rockford Teachers” and the “Kenosha Shamrocks”). Otherwise, its copy delivered all that the League could have asked for, saluting Wrigley’s attempt to sign up only players of the most sterling character.

Women softballers, the author said, had a “hoydenish” reputation and were given to a “special brand of umpire-baiting.”  It quoted “the dean of girl softball umpires,” a man named Harry Wilson, who complained that a catcher had addressed him as follows: “Listen, big boy, if you’d take your lamps off the batter’s knees long enough to look around, maybe you’d see more of these pitches coming over as strikes.”

The League’s uniform was heralded as suitably dignified, but with an element of the “provocativeness of a Sonja Henie skating skirt.”  Nonetheless,
Time
felt that these advances might be insufficient, and cited a double-header played between South Bend and Rockford, during which, “despite Helena Rubinstein and Mr. Wrigley, two of the ladies got into a fish-wife arguments that nearly ended in a fist fight.”

And so the League was formally underway
. Its first games were tied to patriotic themes; men and women in uniform were admitted free. Occasionally late-night contests (with an 11 p.m. starting time) were scheduled to suit workers coming off the evening shift. Players began each game by marching into a “V for Victory” formation along the first and third base lines.

All across the United States, baseball was firmly linked to war, although major-league owners had considered and rejected the idea of having an army sergeant drill each team before the games got underway, a common practice during World War I
. (In Yankee Stadium, the program contained specific Air Raid Regulations. “Mayor LaGuardia has provided a system of safety for patrons attending ball games,” it said. “This park is not bombproof but it is as safe as elsewhere.”)

In July, an all-star game between two All-American teams took place at Wrigley Field in aid of a Red Cross recruiting drive
. One squad was composed of players from Racine and Kenosha, the other from Rockford and South Bend. In fact, two games were slated. The first was a lopsided contest, won 16-0 by Peaches/Blue Sox players.

This game was notable for several reasons
. For one thing, it was the first ever played at Wrigley Field under lights. Few people knew that Wrigley, despite his fear and loathing of night games, had bowed to the inevitable by ordering a set of lights for his Chicago stadium back in 1941. On December 1, they had arrived, and workmen were on the verge of hooking them up when, on December 7, the news came in from Pearl Harbor.

On December 8, Wrigley sent his brand new equipment to the government
.

Now, however, he had relented once again in a good cause, and rigged temporary floodlights atop the grandstands
.

Dorothy Hunter remembers that the effect left much to be desired
. “You were lucky if you could see who was sitting next to you,” she says. “The outfielders were dead ducks; the ball went up in the air and they didn’t know where it was.”

Due to a lengthy between-games program starring Victor Mature, the latest Hollywood sensation, the second contest was called after three innings, everybody went home, and Wrigley Field returned to the dark ages.

How were the players received in their team cities?  The local sports fraternities were instant converts – if only because they had a good thing going.

The League ensured positive coverage by hiring newspapermen as scorekeepers and announcers
. What seems to us an obvious conflict of interest today was then standard practice, even in the major leagues.

Many a sportswriter confessed that his initial doubts vanished when confronted by the quality of play
. But this did not guarantee local enthusiasm, and a couple of teams had difficulty getting off the ground.

The Kenosha Comets were a case in point
. Placed in the League’s smallest city (its population was less than 50,000), they suffered through a “slow, coaxing start.” One fan complained in a letter to the editor of the local paper that “the girls are playing their hearts out for a town that simply will not back them, except when people can get free tickets. Then the stadium is jammed beyond capacity.”  Kenosha, he concluded, was rife with “pikers.”

But the city rallied, launching a major campaign in which businesses sponsored individual games, offering war bonds as prizes
. One night, 200 firms put up $1000 in awards, drawing a crowd of 1,800 people. The next night, that number was bettered in response to another promotion mounted by the Chamber of Commerce.

Then the Veterans of Foreign Wars sponsored a game that saw the Comets host the Rockford Peaches
. The VFW’s drum and bugle corps played martial tunes while a special train unloaded 100 employees from Milwaukee’s Chain Belt Company, where Eileen Burmeister, a Rockford player, used to work.

Slowly, these and other innovative promotions took hold, and the League’s morale-boosting mandate was fulfilled
.

Kenosha’s attendance surged
. By season’s end, the Comets had attracted 60,000 people to their home games – drawing fans not only from their own town but also from nearby Racine.

The 1943 season ended with Racine atop the standings, thanks in part to Johnny Gottselig
’s managerial expertise. The Belles went on to win the championship, beating Kenosha in three straight games.

The players went back to their hom
es, families and regular jobs. And Wrigley, on balance well pleased with the initial success of his enterprise –176,000 fans for 108 games – sat down to make plans for its immediate future, plans that would threaten to finish the All-American before it had really begun, and  which would contribute to his withdrawal by the time the 1944 season was out.

Pepper Paire was nine years old when she first began to play organized softball in Depression-era Los Angeles. It was 1933, when unemployment and poverty were at their peak. Pepper’s first neighborhood team was sponsored by Sattinger’s Grocery store.

“If we won, I got to go to the grocery store, get a brown bag and put as much as I could into it
. So I learned real early that it was valuable to win.”

Paire was one of the Californians who descended on the League in 1944
. They were brasher and cockier and surer of their abilities than most of the other players. They seemed as different from the other Americans as the quieter, meeker Canadians did.

Illinois must have come as a rude surprise
. In California, practices were held on the beach at Malibu – a far cry from the city parks of the Midwest. But California, despite its sophistication, was just as softball-mad as anyplace else.

Major studios such as Paramount and Columbia sponsored teams
. Stars like George Raft (who specialized in gangster roles, and kept refusing parts that made Humphrey Bogart a star) and Burgess Meredith hung around having their pictures taken with the players. In fact, Wrigley had seriously considered transporting the League’s teams to L.A. for a season of winter ball in 1943. But for various reasons – among them, residency problems for the Canadian players, who would have had difficulty obtaining year-round work permits – it didn’t pan out.

By early 1944, Wrigley had settled on the League’s ne
xt two new centers of operation –  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, where local backers signed up to support, respectively, the Chicks and the Millerettes. These schemes – in which Wrigley took a personal hand – would very shortly prove disastrous.

Just prior to spring training, 1944, however, the League’s future looked bright, despite one or two problems with player allocation
. Wrigley’s original notion – to return everyone to a central pool and distribute them afresh each year – had already fallen by the wayside.

The 1943 season had shown that local fans quickly became attached to favorite players, either because of their winning personalities or specific skills
. If a team lost a popular player, it lost a guaranteed ticket-seller.

The League therefore decided on a compromise
. Each team could keep a core of players from the previous year but would throw the rest of its roster back into the pool. That would still leave plenty of room for trading. But that wasn’t the end of it. Mid-season injuries took their toll. If a top-ranked player was benched, her team would expect the League to supply it with someone of equal skill. There weren’t any farm teams, so replacements had to come either from spring training rejects or (under protest) from another club.

Most organizations wound up feeling hard done by, sometimes with strong justification.

Meanwhile, some of the Chicago teams that Wrigley had raided were setting themselves up as the National Girls Baseball League, which was neither national nor baseball; it was the same old grab-bag of teams, who continued to play softball. They were, however, prepared to give Wrigley a taste of his own medicine by trying to raid his players.

This development consolidated a pattern of mutual raiding that would last for years, and give the All-American’s top ranked players a threat to use when negotiating their contracts
. If the All-American wouldn’t meet their price, they had an alternative employer for their skills.

Having skimmed all the players he wanted from Chicago, Wrigley now needed
30 new faces for the two expansion teams. His scouts had been beating the bushes all winter long.

One of their most promising acquisitions was Connie Wisniewski, a blonde, Polish beanpole from Detroit, who had perfected a dramatic “windmill” pitching style (full arm rotation, like a ferris wheel) by throwing balls through a tire suspended from a tree
. She was living with a mother who was 100 percent against her going anywhere.

“She was from Poland, very old fashioned,” says Wisniewski
. “She said only bad girls left home. There was no way she was going to let me go. I told her that if I didn’t go with her blessing, I’d go without, and join the army for three years. She asked me how long these ball games were going to take, and I said they’d take three months.”

Wisniewski was back five months later, and played ball every summer for ten years thereafter.

After the first season, Wrigley’s scouts branched out as publicity of a successful summer spread.

The Californians were brought in en masse by Bill Allington, who had managed women’s softball teams in L.A. and would later in the season begin a long League career as manager
.

The first six players he brought from California were Alma “Gabby” Ziegler, Faye Dancer, Pepper Paire, Dorothy “Dottie” Wiltse, Annabelle Lee and Thelma “Tiby” Eisen
. Allington preceded them, and was waiting at Chicago’s Union Station.

“Gosh,” he said, “you gals have an awful lot of luggage here for two weeks.”

Allington knew full well that all of them would make the League. But Ziegler, a wiry little second baseman who became the sparkplug of the Milwaukee Chicks, remembers that they worked themselves hard:  “We wanted to make an impression. I got a terrible blister on my foot, and Faye Dancer wanted to cut it off. To show you how dumb I was, I let her. She used a pair of scissors. Everyone thought I was crazy, and it didn’t help much. But I made the team.”

In fact, all of them proved to be first-rate ball players, boosting Allington’s reputation as a man who knew baseball talent.

As for Pepper Paire, she found the prospect of playing ball all summer long – and getting paid in cash, not groceries – appealing.

“We thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” she says
.

Paire was undaunted by the
Midwest’s less than temperate conditions. The stocky redhead, who became one of the League’s most reliable catchers, was also its balladeer. It was she who wrote the All-American’s hummable “Victory Song,” which players sing today at their reunions.

Paire’s first season was fraught with peril
. She was assigned to the Minneapolis Millerettes, in whose service she collided with a Racine Belles player, thus fracturing her collarbone. Racine was much criticized for this, because the Belle was attempting to score an unimportant run, late in a game that Minneapolis had plainly lost.

The injury forced Paire to spend most of the season recuperating, along with Faye Dancer, who had cracked a vertebra by running full-tilt into one of her fellow Minneapolis outfielders in pursuit of a fly ball
.

The invalids spent most of the schedule in Kenosha, appearing often in the stands with players from the Comets, another team riddled with injuries
. If you were out of action, the League’s rule against fraternizing with opposing players was temporarily waived.

When firing on all cylinders, however
, Paire maintained an active social life.

“I had a boyfriend in every port,” she once recounted
. “Only one time did I ever get caught. This was in the days of gas rationing, so you didn’t expect to see someone you knew in one town show up in another. But in this game in Grand Rapids, one of my teammates and I looked up, and there sat four guys we knew from elsewhere. Well, that type of thing wasn’t done in our day, but we handled it like big-leaguers. We hid under the grandstand.”

And what of Dancer, who’d performed emergency surgery on the luckless Gabby Ziegler?  Her exploits were many and varied
.

Dancer was a talented outfielder whose pranks on and off the field threatened to overshadow her baseball career
. She talks like a wound-up toy.

“My brother says I always sound like I’ve been vaccinated with a phonograph needle,” she jokes
. This very brother was fighting in the South Pacific when Dancer entered the League, but she figures that their mother “got more grey hairs over what I did.”

Dancer was a pretty, freckled-faced blonde gypsy, moving from Minneapolis to subsequent expansion clubs, first Fort Wayne and later Peoria
. One of her most notable eccentricities was her collection of glass eyes, which she liberated from blameless taxidermy in bars while her accomplices created a diversion.

She turned cartwheels in the outfield, performed swan dives into mud puddles just because she felt like it, and once called time, either because she wanted a drink of water, or had swallowed a lightning bug, or possibly both
. Most people were at a loss to describe her and settled for “colorful.”

Not surprisingly, spectators loved her
. Dancer’s theory was that “the fans paid my way. So I always tried to involve myself with them, in every town we went to. I wanted to have fun, and I wanted people to feel like they were getting their money’s worth.”  And so they were – especially since Dancer’s eccentricities were founded on real talent.

She won the nickname “Dangerous Dancer” when she helped skunk the Chicks by blasting two home runs into their left-field bleachers, a feat no other player in the League had managed.

Dancer also consorted with doubtful characters.

In Fort Wayne, she befriended a midget, whose lot in life was to bring the players beer
.

In Peoria, a
“gentleman of no fixed income” – a gangster – took a shine to her:  “He and his friends had seats right above the dugout. He drove a blue bulletproof Packard to all our road games.”  The suitor attempted to persuade Dancer to stay in Peoria year-round by promising to establish her in business and buy her a palomino horse, but she refused. California beckoned. This didn’t deter her admirer. He threw parties for her at his home, which was guarded by armed henchmen.

When her parents arrived from California to see her play, the hoodlum obligingly laid on a series of entertainments, both at his house and at a local night club.

Dancer was also known to play the field. Another swain, who acted as the team’s groundskeeper, presented her with a diamond ring, but she had the stone removed and mounted in a nicer band. Neither he nor the mobster got, as it were, to first base.

“I wasn’t interested in either of them” she says.

To make time for these activities, Dancer kept late hours. One night, after a particularly intensive celebration, she returned to her hotel well past curfew and spotted Ken Sells sitting in the lobby with a posse of chaperons.

Dancer’s solution was to stack several beer barrels on top of a coal pile, which enabled her to reach the fire escape
. She then managed to slice her way in through a screen with a nail file and get cleaned up before anyone could accuse her of the prank.

One of Dancer’s main concerns was the All-American’s uniform
. Californians had always played in shorts, “and we kind of resented these dresses. But after half a season, I enjoyed them. I took tucks in the skirt, rolled the socks down and played with the bill of my cap up,” (thus anticipating the Minnesota Twins, who brightened up the 1991 World Series by twisting their hats into shark fins!)

Plainly, Dancer –
along with other recruits such a Merle “Pat” Keagle, who was known as “The Blonde Bombshell” and the “People’s Choice” – would bring sparkle to the All-American’s crucial second year of operation.

Wrigley’s high hopes for his new teams, the Minneapolis Millerettes and Milwaukee Chicks, were almost immediately derailed, for several reasons. A glance at the map reveals one problem facing the Minneapolis team; it was 400 miles from Rockford, Illinois, the nearest League town. Minneapolis represented a nightmare for League schedulers and opposition teams, who arrived surly and exhausted after a marathon journey.

The League realized their folly within weeks and folded the franchise
. Rather than disband the team, however, Wrigley kept it going throughout 1944. Its members became known informally though accurately as “the orphans.”

They lived in hotels and played nothing but on-the-road games, wandering the countryside with their manager, Claude “Bubber” Jonnard
.

Dancer and Jonnard did not see eye to eye
. She remembers she “hated him with a passion” because of his play-it-safe style. He didn’t gamble for extra-base hits. His runners were instructed just to get on board; the next batter could bunt her along.

Dancer’s technique was at odds with Jonnard’s conservative approach: “I liked to play wide-open, hard-sliding but clean
. So I ignored him. I just ran on my own, and if I knew an outfielder didn’t have a good arm, I wouldn’t even slow down, I’d just keep going.”

In 1945, the Minneapolis Millerettes were adopted by Fort Wayne, Indiana
. Renamed the Daisies, they lasted in one form or another till the very end of the League.

Milwaukee, the other new franchise in 1944, also had prob
lems. It was accessible enough – a short drive beyond Racine and Kenosha. The city also supported the Milwaukee Brewers, then a Double A team, providing exactly the situation that Wrigley had originally envisioned – the League’s first chance to place a team in a large city to play in a regular baseball stadium. But Milwaukee did not embrace girls’ baseball.