Girls of Summer
Author: Carey L. Draeger
Original Publication Date: September/October 1997
Summary: Called the Diamond Damsels and the Queens of
Swat, the women who played baseball in the All American Girls Professional
Baseball league entertained a war-weary public and set records that any
major leaguer-male or female- would treasure.
Highlights
Male ballplayers left for war, girls league formed as a temporary
replacement
Girls instructed to portray “wholesome” image
Players drew crowds, earned impressive stats
When I told my dad I was researching an article about
the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, his face lit up with a
smile. “I remember seeing them play at Horlick Field in Racine, Wisconsin,
when I was a boy. They were great!”
Male ballplayers left for war, girls league formed as a temporary
replacement
Active in the Midwest from 1943 to 1954, the
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) was founded by
chewing-gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley, in response to
a wartime shortage of male major-league players. In 1942 the Office of War
Information advised Wrigley and other major league owners that the 1943
baseball season was in danger of being canceled. The farm teams, from which
the big leagues pulled their new talent, had been thinned out by the wartime
draft. Half the players for the American and National Leagues had joined the
war effort; big-league stars like New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio and Detroit
Tiger Hank Greenberg had donned army uniforms. The players who were left
were either older or classified 4F. Although Wrigley believed the leagues
could still operate with the remaining players, he feared that even these
men might leave to work in the war industries.
In late fall 1942 Wrigley formed a task force to develop
solutions to the threat of a shutdown. The committee proposed a bold, new
baseball enterprise: a women’s professional baseball league. Wrigley liked
the idea and formed a nonprofit organization with three trustees: himself;
Paul Harper, a Chicago Cubs attorney; and Branch Rickey, president of the
Brooklyn Dodgers, the only other team owner who showed interest in a women’s
baseball league. Wrigley used the Chicago Cubs organization to run the
All-American Girls Softball League (as the AAGPBL was originally known).
Arthur Meyerhoff, Wrigley’s choice to take charge of advertising and
promotion, was responsible for developing the league’s unique image. He also
bought the league from Wrigley in 1944.
Wrigley saw the AAGPBL serving two purposes—as a form of
entertainment for a war-weary public and as the temporary replacement for
the men’s game to keep the stadiums filled and fan interest alive. The
league also played USO show games on military bases, visited hospitals and
helped develop youth programs. “As a patriotic gesture,” noted historian
Gale Berlage, “before every game the tams lined up in V formation on the
field.” In a nighttime double-header on 1 July 1943, a crowd of seven
thousand at Wrigley Field watched as the Racine Belles, the Kenosha Comets
and the Rockford Peaches played under the lights to benefit the Women’s Army
Corps recruiting unit. It would be another forty-five years before the
Chicago ballpark was lit for the major leagues.
The AAGPBL began as a softball league, but with some
modifications to the game. Regulation softball did not permit base
stealing—the AAGPBL did. The distances from the pitcher’s mound to home
plate and between the bases were slightly longer. Although the ball used
during the league’s first games was a 12-inch softball, it gradually changed
to a 9 ¼” inch baseball. The teams’ managers, usually former major-league
players like Hall of Famer Max Carey, also “pushed the AAGPBL toward
baseball, teaching the players the finer points” of the game. Management
encouraged the transformation after concluding the fans liked baseball,
where a ball “traveled fast and resonated with a resounding crack when the
bat met it squarely.” By 1948, at the height of the league’s popularity, the
women were playing baseball.
Girls instructed to
portray “wholesome” image
Player image was important to Wrigley. He wanted his
players to be wholesome, all-American girls who projected femininity and
charm at all times. They would wear makeup and skirts on the field and the
teams’ names would be dignified—the Racine Belles, the Muskegon Lassies, the
Fort Wayne Daisies and the Grand Rapids Chicks. Chaperones garbed in
military-style uniforms accompanied each team to all the games to ensure the
high moral tone of the league was kept intact. During the first few spring
training sessions, player attendance at evening charm schools was mandatory.
Although Brooklyn, Michigan, resident Vivian Kellogg, a first basewoman with
the Fort Wayne Daisies, remembered attending charm school was a positive
approach to “teaching the girls more polish as public figures” she was later
fined for “fisticuffs” during one ball game.
Each player received a Guide for All-American Girls,
which reminded her that “when you become a player in the All-American Girls
Baseball League you have reached the highest position a girl can attain in
this sport.” Instructions for beauty routines before and after a game, for
pregame warm-ups and for etiquette on and off the field were clearly spelled
out. The after-game routine consisted of ten steps: “shower, dry, apply
cleansing cream to the face, wash the face, apply skin astringent, apply
rouge moderately but carefully, apply lipstick with moderate taste, apply
eye make-up, apply powder and check all cuts, abrasions or minor injuries.”
Over 250 young women from all over the country were
invited to the AAGPBL’s first tryouts in May 1943 at Chicago’s Wrigley
Field. Former Rockford Peaches team member Dorothy “Kammie” Kamenshek, who
later worked in Michigan as a physical therapist, remembered, “They started
weeding people out almost the first day. You’d be afraid to answer the phone
in your hotel room.” Only sixty women were chosen to play on the first four
teams, which were scheduled to play 108 games. The teams—the Rockford
(Illinois) Peaches, the South Bend (Indiana) Blue Sox, the Kenosha
(Wisconsin) Comets and the Racine (Wisconsin) Belles—were located in
midsized war production cities within a hundred-mile radius of Chicago. With
the end of World War II—and gasoline rationing—the league expanded to
include the Grand Rapids Chicks, the Muskegon Lassies and the Fort Wayne
(Indiana) Daisies.
Most of the players were young, single and
unsophisticated. Many had never been outside their hometowns and the AAGPBL
offered them the opportunity to travel. Former Grand Rapids Chicks third
basewoman Dolly Konwinski enjoyed visiting the small cities and towns where
the Chicks played while on the road. “They treated us great,” she reminisced
in a Grand Rapids Public Museum article. “It was a wonderful opportunity.”
Some players were as young as fifteen and required their
mothers’ permission to play in the league. Most were in their twenties. Some
were married with children. Catcher Dorothy “Micky” McGuire was married when
she began her baseball career with the Racine Belles in 1943. During her
first season with the Grand Rapids Chicks in 1945, she was ready to play a
game in Milwaukee when her mother called from Cleveland to tell McGuire that
her husband was reported missing in action in Italy. She insisted on playing
the game. The incident was later dramatized in the 1992 motion picture A
League of Their Own.
The AAGPBL uniform, a one-piece dress with the skirt
above the knee, was designed to attract fans to the ballpark and “to remind
them that once they were there that they were watching not only real
baseball, but real girls,” explained historian Susan Johnson in When Women
Played Hardball. The league organizers felt that although athletic ability
was important, fans were attracted by the drama of watching a
“feminine-like” girl throw, slide and pitch like a man. The short skirts may
have enticed spectators to the ballparks, but the women’s ability to play
superb baseball brought them back.
Players drew crowds,
earned impressive stats
Unlike today’s players, the women played without
protective gear, resulting in injuries, from pulled muscles to broken bones.
The women also played with bare legs, leaving huge abrasions, or
“strawberries,” when players slid into a base. Flint native Sophie Kurys,
one of the league’s earliest players, told Sports Illustrated reporter Steve
Wulf in 1991, “They tried taping sliding pads to my legs, but they were so
cumbersome. I told them, no, I’d just get the strawberries. Besides, the
pads made it look as if my slip was showing.”
AAGPBL salaries, comparable to war industry salaries,
ranged from $55 to $150 a week plus expenses. Some stars were paid more.
“The women actually earned more money than most men in the minor leagues,”
Kurys remembered in Women in Baseball. “I started out at $85 a week, but got
as high as $375. Also I received bonuses for signing—sometimes $1,000.”
By 1945 women’s baseball had become so popular that the
Fort Wayne Daisies, during their first season, outgrew the local men’s
semiprofessional team. They played to thirteen hundred spectators, while the
men attracted a mere five hundred. The Daisies also received more newspaper
coverage.
Three years later, over one million fans filled the
ballparks to watch women’s professional baseball. Ten teams traveled
throughout the Midwest, playing fast and furious games. National magazines
and newsreels recorded their games, featuring stories about the “Belles of
the Ball Game,” the “World’s Prettiest Ballplayers,” the “Diamond Damsels”
and the “Queens of Swat.” Twenty-five thousand fans watched the AAGPBL play
at the Grand Stadium in Havana, Cuba, in 1947.
According to historian Sharon Roepke, the major league
men were impressed with their counterparts. Former Chicago Cubs player
Charlie Grimm commented, “Dottie Schroeder would be worth $50,000 if she
were a man.” New York Yankees’ first baseman Wally Pipp called Dottie
Kamenshek “the fanciest fielding first baseman I’ve ever seen—man or woman.”
Many of these women set records any major leaguer would
treasure. Racine Belles player Sophie Kurys, dubbed the Flint Flash for her
amazing ability to steal bases, stole a total of 1,114 bases during her
career. Racine Belles pitcher Joanne Winter set the record for consecutive
scoreless innings at 63, one even Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser
fell shy of with his record of 59 in 1988. Grand Rapids Chicks pitcher
Connie Wisniewski earned her nickname Iron Woman because in 1945 “she once
pitched and won both ends of a doubleheader, started forty-six games, and
ended the season with a 32-11 record,” according to historian Barbara
Gregorich. Wisniewski’s performance as a pitcher made her a natural choice
as the league’s Player of the Year.
The success the AAGPBL enjoyed was short-lived. By the
early 1950s daily attendance and gate receipts left several teams with major
financial problems. As returning male veterans replaced women in the
workforce, the sports world once again became the domain of men. Some of the
glamour of playing baseball was fading for players who were getting older
and sought retirement. Other female players wanted to marry and start
families. When major-league baseball games were televised following the
Korean War, the AAGPBL could not compete. After the championship series in
1954, the team owners voted to suspend the 1955 season.
For years the six hundred players of the All-American
Girls Professional Baseball League were largely forgotten, until 1982, when
more than two hundred women met in Chicago for the league’s first biennial
national reunion. In November 1988 the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown,
New York, opened Women in Baseball, a permanent exhibit devoted to the
AAGPBL’s achievements. Four years later, the motion picture A League of
Their Own, starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Rosie O’Donnell and Madonna,
opened across the country to rave reviews. Thanks to director Penny
Marshall’s effort, the Queens of Swat gained a new generation of fans. |
