Girls of Summer: In Their Own League (9 page)

Others threw up their hands, and decided that, if they couldn’t beat the team, they might as well join it
. Jo Hagemann, of the Kenosha Comets, could be counted on to see that the back door was left ajar, and accompanied her players to out-of-bounds locales.

“We used to sneak off and go to strip clubs,” says Christine Jewett
. “We just took Jo along.”  This could have proved expensive. A chaperon was fined along with a player for infringement of the rules.

Most of all, in the words of Pepper Paire, “You n
eeded someone who wasn’t a fink.”

Some chaperon
s never got past their initiations. These ceremonies fell to such players as Faye Dancer, whose stock techniques included coating the light bulbs in the chaperon’s room with Limburger cheese.

The chaperon’s first duty each season was to get the players lodged in suitable accommodation
. This meant pre-season visits to prospective homes and boarding houses. Next came the process – fraught with pitfalls – of matching players in their home city and on the road. A fresh-faced 17-year-old, away from her parents for the first time, could not be lodged with a hard-drinking, hard-gambling veteran. But birds of a feather bunking together was perilous, too.

One year, Hunter had exhausted every conceivable option and was forced to match up as room-mates two old hands who liked nothing better than to terrorize the surrounding countryside
. This arrangement had hardly been settled when Johnny Rawlings, the team’s manager, appeared in a full-blown rage.

“What in the hell are you putting those two together for?” he shouted
.

“Look Johnny,” said Hunter
. “Have you got any other ideas?  If they’re going to kill somebody, let ‘em kill each other .’”

The chaperon had to run interference between players and the manager
. The manager, being male, was often ill at ease when it came to intimate details. Once, Hunter had to explain to Rawlings that three of her players had simultaneously started their periods and were indisposed.

“What is this,” barked Rawlings, “the Red River Valley?”

“I was shocked,” said Hunter. “I’d never heard that one before.”

Hunter –
a tall, beautiful brunette of considerable personal charm – was sometimes the focus of flirtatious teasing from admiring managers. She remembers one time when she completely lost her poise.

“At spring training, I came out of this building and the men were all sittin’ over to one side, while the players were kind of waiting for the bus in the other direction
. I saw the managers there so I went the other way and there was a big piece out of the step and I went flyin.’ I rolled and I hit the side, and those guys flew down there and tried to pick me up. ‘Are you hurt?  Are you hurt?’ they kept askin’.’ And I was so mad I said, ‘What do you care?  It’s your entire fault.’ God, talk about bein’ chagrined, I tell you. I was going to be hoity-toity,  I’d have nothing to do with them. That sure rained on my parade, so I always remembered that.”

The list of chaperon’s duties was a long one
. Some managers couldn’t bear to tell a player she was finished, that she was being traded or released. This fell to the chaperon.

Marty McManus, who headed the South Bend Blue Sox, was incapable of wielding the axe, which he thrust instead upon Lucille Moore, who remembers these occasions as the worst part of the job.

As for the managers, their life expectancy in the All-American was short. One writer observed:  “The All-American League is the Little Big Horn of the managerial profession.”

In a sport where the manager was the first to go when his team did poorly, the League earned a reputation for ripping through managers like a buzzsaw
– 37 of them in all, not counting the players.

“There were a lot of managers we didn’t like, and who didn’t like us,” says Pepper Paire, “For one thing they were squares
. Life goes on and changes but they didn’t.”

Mind you, some were pleased to make their escape
. The chaperons weren’t the only ones to be initiated by the players.

Charlie Stis, who spent a very brief spell managing the Racine Belles, lasted just long enough to provide the League with one of its better and oft-told stories
. Stis was a mild-mannered man who seemed pretty gullible – tailor-made for a practical joke.

The team was on the road and Stis was awaiting the arrival of a couple of new players
. Egged on by their teammates, Joanne Winter and Clara Schillace went out of the hotel and returned shortly with two prostitutes, who had agreed to go along with the joke, for a small fee. Clara and Joanne, their teammates nearby but out of sight, knocked at Stis’s hotel room door. When Stis answered, Winter spoke up:  “Charlie, we’ve brought you the two new players you’ve been waiting for.”

Stis was nonplussed, since the women facing him didn’t look at all like All-American players were supposed to
. It wasn’t until the whole party had gone back downstairs and the manager was about to arrange rooms for his new charges that Winter and Schillace let him in on the joke.

After the women
left, Stis told his players, “I didn’t think they were ball players. They looked like they fell out of a tree.”

Wrigley and (and Meyerhoff, in later seasons) continued to comb the big leagues for likely managerial talent
. Men like Max Carey, Johnny Rawlings and Dave Bancroft brought glamour and the sense of rubbing shoulders with sports immortals when they strode onto the field.

Dave Bancroft, who managed League teams in Chicago and Battle Creek, another expansion club, had
40 years experience and four World Series appearances as a player with the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Giants.

Josh Billings, who started off with the Kenosha Comets, had spent
11 years with the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Browns.

Leo Murphy’s career spanned
25 years, many of them with the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds.

Johnny Rawlings had played with the Reds, the Giants, the Pirates and the Boston Braves
.

But although some were very good managers, others were not
. An illustrious baseball career didn’t always guarantee great coaching. Many of them began enthusiastically, but only a few lasted very long or left without a huge sigh of relief on one side or the other.

Sometimes the blame for failure had to rest squarely on the shoulders of the impatient club directors
. The men who ran the Kenosha Comets were the worst offenders. They hired a new helmsman every year, except in 1945, when they hired two.

By contrast, the Racine Belles, having settled in Leo Murphy that same year, kept him for five seasons; within two, the Belles had won the championship
. Johnny Rawlings, at Grand Rapids for five years, tied with Murphy for second place in the longevity stakes.

The clear winner was Bill Allington, with eight years in Rockford and two in Fort Wayne, during which time the Peaches topped the standings five times, made the play-off finals eight times and won four championships.

The summer of 1944 was one of the worst seasons for nose-to-nose confrontations involving players, managers, umpires and, occasionally, fans
. A few weeks into the schedule, sportswriters began printing a barrage of complaints voiced by unnamed managers about roughhousing players on rival teams. The first serious injury was Pepper Paire’s broken collarbone.

Paire was decidedly accident-prone
. Worse yet, she wasn’t content to pick on players her own size. She chose to tangle with Lou Rymkus, a former professional footballer who’d taken up umpiring for extra money.

“He was about six-foot-four,” she says, “and he must have weighed 280
. I came sliding into second base, and the ball beat me, but I hooked away from the bag. But the second baseman gave me the old phantom tag. She missed me by a foot. Lou was out of position and he called me out. I was lying flat on the ground, and I could see him make the call. I jumped up, but when I landed on my feet he was behind me, still bent over from making the call. I swung around, and my fist hit him square in the chin and knocked him flat. So he’s lying there looking up at me, and he says, ‘Pepper, I guess you know I gotta throw you out.’ And I said, ‘Yeah but dammit, I was safe. She missed me.’”

A short while later, Bert Niehoff, then managing the South Bend Blue Sox, was warned by other managers about the Milwaukee Chicks, whom Max Carey had inspired to heights of aggressiveness
. They were trying to make up for a bad first half of the season by pushing for the League pennant in the second half. These warnings were born out almost immediately in the course of a double-header.

In the seventh inning of the first game, Gabby Ziegler, the Chick’s captain, was caught between first and second base
. Taking a run at second, she flattened lanky Dorothy Schroeder, the Blue Sox shortstop. Schroeder’s teammate Lee Surkowski retaliated by flooring Ziegler. Both teams, accompanied by their managers, swarmed from their respective dugouts as umpires struggled to restore order. During the second game, tensions escalated. Two Blue Sox players took turns mowing down the Milwaukee catcher. The first collision knocked her out cold.

The next night, it was Pat Keagle and Bonnie Baker who tangled
. Baker had caught a throw from the outfield and tagged Keagle out at the plate before she could retreat to third.

“Keagle very plainly gave Baker the elbow after she was called out,” a sportswriter reported the next day, “the same elbow first knocking the ball out of Baker’s hands and
then winding up on Baker’s chin.”

The umpire sided with Baker, but that wasn’t good enough
. Baker went after Keagle, while Max Carey roared his head off from the sidelines and Niehoff demanded loudly that Keagle be thrown out of the game. Players could always argue that such encounters were accidents. But, as Baker recalls, “You got to know when something was a real mistake.”

This incident was Baker’s second major brawl inside a month
. A few weeks earlier, after Niehoff had been ejected from a game between the Blue Sox and the Kenosha Comets, Baker argued a call with an umpire who threatened to throw her out as well.

At the end of the evening, spectators surrounded the umpires as they tried to get off the field, someone threw a punch, and the police had to call on the services of a group of navy officers who happened to be attending the game to disperse the crowd and get the officials into their dressing room without serious injury.

Obviously, managers had their crosses to bear – especially those who stayed in touch with their players year-round. Johnny Gottselig spent his winters on hockey skates with the Chicago Blackhawks. The Racine Belles, provided with free tickets, occasionally formed a cheering section.

During one closely fought contest, Gottselig eluded the opposition defenseman and set up a clear shot at the net
. Just then, the very audible voice of Clara Schillace was heard above the crowd noise, yelling, “Bunt, Johnny, bunt!”

The first example of the League’s willingness to blame managers for bad results came about halfway through the 1944 season.

The team that started the ball rolling was the Rockford Peaches, who were losing steadily under Jack Kloza
. The scene was Rockford’s home stadium, in early July. It was Sunday afternoon and time for a double-header. The bleachers were filled with happy families; hot dog vendors plied their greasy wares.

The Peaches were playing the Kenosha Comets. If the Comets won both games, they would finish the first half of the season atop of the standings
. Rockford, on the other hand, would finish fifth in a field of six no matter what the outcome.

One man sat on his own, his elbows on his knees, intent on the scene below
. The lone spectator, blue eyes shaded by a Panama hat, was in his early 40s, not as old as his white hair might suggest. In profile, his nose was prominent, almost beaky, his face long and tanned.

Down on the field, a thick-set and worried Jack Kloza was acting as third-base coach
. He had some of the League’s best players under his command, and more than enough experience to run a ball team, but somehow the Peaches hadn’t come together. If they had shown sufficient promise and won a reasonable number of games, Kloza would perhaps have been more popular in the clubhouse. As matters stood, his time was running short.

Kloza’s problems were compounded by dissension in the ranks
. He had hoped to placate the malcontents by allowing the League’s head office to assign Gladys “Terrie” Davis, his temperamental center-fielder, to the ailing Milwaukee Chicks. She had not been universally popular, and Kloza saw her departure as a peace offering. That might have worked, but Kloza had then lost Mary Pratt to the Kenosha Comets. Now Pratt was back on the field against her former teammates, as starting pitcher in the second game.

Not that the Peaches, whose roster had been weakened by injuries, had received no help from the League
. One of the newer recruits was presently at bat.

This was Dorothy “Snooky” Harrell,
who had come from Los Angeles. As the man in the stands watched, she stepped into the batter’s box, rapped her bat twice on home plate, spat on the handle for luck and then assumed a familiar stance.