HALL OF FAME SALUTES WOMEN’S LEAGUE : Oh, How They Played the Game

Tennessee Jackson, in Chicago, and Red Mahoney, in Houston, could hardly contain themselves. The two retired ballplayers, gray-haired and in their 60s now, had just received the happy news: The Hall of Fame had decided to include them in a special Cooperstown exhibit, tentatively scheduled for 1989.

“This is so wonderful,” said Jackson, a reserve outfielder who hit just .220 with three major league clubs in the 1940s. “All of a sudden, everyone wants to know about us.”

Mahoney, an even weaker-hitting utility player, whooped like a lottery winner. “I tell ‘em, ‘Man, we could play ball.’ ”

This seems implausible, considering their skimpy numbers, but then, those two players faced unusual pressures. Jackson’s first name is Lillian. Mahoney’s is Marie.

Four years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, and 29 years before passage of the initial Title IX legislation aimed at giving women equality in athletics, Jackson and Mahoney had already taken the field.

They were among the several hundred young women who played during that brief period between 1943 and 1954 when there were three major leagues--the National, the American and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL).

The game these women played was good old country hardball. They threw knock-down pitches and low-bridged the shortstop on the double play. They jawed with umpires, played hurt and were tossed out of games. They gambled and drank. Millions paid to see them play.

How good were they? Charlie Grimm, then manager of the Chicago Cubs, said after watching shortstop Dorothy Schroeder of the South Bend (Ind.) Blue Sox, “If she was a boy, I’d give $50,000 for her.”

There was little talk of the AAGPBL once dwindling attendance forced its demise after the 1954 season. But last spring, PBS televised a half-hour remembrance of the league.

By May, rookie outfielder-second baseman Casey Candaele, the son of Helen Callaghan, a star outfielder for the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Daisies, was batting leadoff for the Montreal Expos. In June, Dr. Janis Taylor, an assistant professor of film at Northwestern University, completed a half-hour documentary about the league, titled, “When Diamonds Were a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Then came the news from Cooperstown. The museum plans to mount an 8 x 8-foot exhibit, recounting the history of the AAGPBL.

“When we were playing, we didn’t realize what we had,” confessed star Daisy pitcher Dottie Collins from her Fort Wayne home. “We were just a bunch of young kids doing what we liked best. But most of us recognize now that those were the most meaningful days of our lives.

“Times have changed. I don’t think we could ever have a league like that again. The bond between the girls is now very, very close.”

Philip K. Wrigley, of chewing gum fame and longtime owner of the Chicago Cubs, conceived the AAGPBL. His motivation was not women’s rights, but money.

Fearing that President Roosevelt would cancel the 1943 major league season because of the war effort, he seized upon the idea of a women’s softball league as an alternative means of filling his stadium.

Even then, there was nothing particularly novel about the idea of women playing ball. Time magazine counted 40,000 women’s softball teams in 1943, and noted that several barnstormed across the country, courting fans with such hoydenish names as Barney Ross’ Adorables and Slapsie Maxie’s Curvaceous Cuties.

Wrigley, a stolid moralist, was after something different. He envisioned a league of All-Star Gidgets--hard-nosed ballplayers who dressed and acted the way his Doublemint gum twins would when they came along.

Jane Wyman would have been perfect for the AAGPBL, had she been adept at baseball. Wrigley planned to install franchises in small, Midwestern industrial cities, and promote them as morale-boosting entertainment for war-weary factory workers. In April, 1943, after getting the support of then-Brooklyn Dodger president Branch Rickey, another bottom-line baseball man, he began tryouts at Wrigley Field.

That morning, more than 200 of the nation’s top women ballplayers reported to the ballpark. They were shocked to discover that their baseball credentials were almost secondary to their grasp of social skills.

“Every day after practice, Mr. Wrigley sent us to Helena Rubenstein’s charm school to learn how to put on makeup, how to put on a coat, and how to get in and out of a car, or chair,” recalled Lil Jackson, in Chicago. “Back at the hotel (the Allerton), he made us wear skirts. If you dressed in slacks, you had to use the servants’ elevator.

“The whole idea was to make us as ‘fem’ as possible. Anybody with a boy’s haircut was rejected. If you just looked mannish, you weren’t accepted.”

In the end, not many were. Just 65 players made the final cut. They were divided into four teams of roughly equal ability, and shipped off to Rockford, Ill.; South Bend, Ind., and Kenosha and Racine, Wis., to play the league’s 108-game schedule.

The women were not entirely on their own. Wrigley hired a male manager and a female chaperon to accompany each squad. Some of the managers, such as Hall of Fame player Jimmy Foxx, who nursed a serious drinking problem, were worn-down, somewhat bitter, former major leaguers who for one reason or another had been unable to find work in the big leagues.

They quit, or were fired, as regularly as short order cooks. In one eight-year period, the AAGPBL went through 36 managers.

The chaperons were another story entirely. They were Wrigley’s image police, responsible den mothers whose job, he explained, was to ensure “the physical, mental and moral well-being of the players.”

Their duties ranged from enforcing curfew--12:30 a.m.--to prohibiting the women from drinking or smoking in public, to screening prospective male suitors.

Their vigilance didn’t stop at the foul line. Kenosha outfielder Shirley Jameson recalled: “I remember one of them saying to me, as I went to the plate in a tight situation--a game-winning situation--’Oh, my dear, you don’t have on your lipstick.’ ”

The game rules were far less rigid. In 1943, the sport was a hybrid of baseball and fast-pitch softball. Nine players took the field. Bases were 65 feet apart, the ball was twelve inches in circumference and pitched with a windmilling, underhand delivery, and runners were permitted to steal.

The players wore prim, belted, one-piece dresses that resembled field hockey uniforms. During the years, the uniforms grew shorter and the basepaths longer--to 85 feet in the final season--and the ball shrank nearly to the size of a regulation baseball. Side-arm pitching was first allowed in 1946. Two years later, hurlers began throwing overhand.

Initially, fans came to see the women out of curiosity. But that quickly changed. AAGPBL rules encouraged a wide-open style of ball.

Newsweek reported in 1946: “In its three years, the league has produced fledgling immortals. . . . (One is) 21-year-old Sophie Kurys, speedy second baseman for the Racine Belles. . . . She is the Tina Cobb of the league with 166 stolen bases in 1944. . . . The league’s Honey Wagner is pretty Dorothy Schroeder, shortstop for the South Bend Blue Sox. . . . Christine Mathewson is Connie Wisniewski of Detroit, who won 32 and lost only 11 . . . for the Grand Rapids Chicks last year with an earned-run average of 0.81.”

Once the season began, the players were on the road almost constantly. It wasn’t an easy life. They bused from town to town, playing seven or eight games a week, nursing injuries here, wolfing hurried meals there, for salaries that ranged from $50 to $125 a week. Periodically, they needed to escape from the games, the chaperons and their images.

But baseball was what they lived for. “We would rather play ball than eat,” Paire insisted. “We put our hearts and souls into the league. We thought it was our job to do our best, because we were the All-American girls. We felt we were keeping up our country’s morale.”

Unfortunately, they were not accomplishing quite so much for the league owners. Wrigley sold his interest in the AAGPBL in 1944, when he realized the government would not discontinue major league baseball. Arthur Meyerhoff, a Chicago advertising executive, bought the league.

For a while, the league prospered. In 1946, the AAGPBL expanded to eight teams, adding franchises in Fort Wayne, Peoria, Ill., and Grand Rapids and Muskegon, Mich. Attendance peaked at 910,000 in 1948 when Springfield, Ill., and Chicago joined the league.

By then, however, the baseball-playing soldiers had returned from the war, travel restrictions had been lifted, and the league was faced with a hodgepodge of competing recreational activities, including television. Attendance fell precipitously. By 1954, the league had shriveled to five teams. The players saw the end approaching, but still, for many retirement was difficult.

“Oh, the fun we had!” Lil Jackson reminisced. “The nights traveling on the team bus, singing, playing cards. Sometimes we shot craps. We’d get down in the aisle of the bus. The chaperon would watch us, and not say a word. Somebody would have a mouth organ, and another would have a guitar, and we’d harmonize for hours.

“When I realized I couldn’t play anymore, my heart was broken. For a time, I couldn’t watch a game from the stands. It hurt too much not to play.”

In 1982, the league held its first reunion. Many of the players hadn’t seen or heard from each other in 30 years. Reunions are held every other summer in Fort Wayne. About 200 attended last July’s gathering. The primary topic of conversation was the exciting news from Cooperstown.

“Some people will think that because we aren’t men, and never played against men, that we don’t belong,” said Pepper Paire. “But none of us ever wanted to compete against men. That wasn’t the point. It’s so hard to explain. We deserve this. Baseball was our lives.”