CAREER GAME

The economy was starting to make a comeback, so Elsie Cox and Betty Bergen, a couple of enterprising Orange High students, figured they could squeeze a few sponsorship bucks out of the fellows down at the local Lions club.

After all, there was no way a bunch of high school kids were going to come up with the $5 it cost for softball uniforms in 1936.

Those first two charter members of the Orange Lionettes charmed their way into their first uniforms, and two years later played their way into the Southern California Championship game. Almost 20,000 spectators packed Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, and Al Jolson and Martha Raye presented the trophies after the game.

Already, the Lionettes were in a fast-pitch league of their own, almost a decade before women baseball players got the more-famous league of their own during World War II.

The Lionettes won their first national championship in 1950 and won eight more over the next 20 years.

But winning wasn’t everything in this sport by any means. More than the joys of any victory, the women who made the Lionettes one of the most successful softball franchises in history, remember the weekend trips through blistering deserts, crammed into station wagons, eating the ‘50s version of fast food with their $2.50 per diem and a camaraderie that still exists almost half a century later.

“It was passion for the game that brought us together,” said Estelle “Ricki” Caito, who played second base for Orange from 1955 to 1962. “We loved the game. It was our life. We didn’t get paid except a little meal money. They didn’t have any McDonald’s back then, but we still ate a lot of cheap hamburgers. It was the friendships you made that were so special.”

There were a number of reasons the Lionettes--who still hold reunions that include a five-inning softball game--were such a tightly knit group. Rosters stayed fairly constant in those days, which meant some Lionettes, such as Amateur Softball Assn. Hall of Famers Carol Spanks and Shirley Topley, played and coached almost 20 years together.

And they also were a band of rebels of sorts and social outcasts in some circles.

“I think those of us who played seriously in those days, in most instances, had a love for the game that was very intense,” said Spanks, now the associate head softball coach at Nevada Las Vegas. “It just wasn’t that acceptable for young women to be playing competitive sports.

“There were a lot of social pressures. I got into the game because of one of my Phys. Ed. teachers who played. And I can remember even the other P.E. teachers saying, ‘Oh, you want to play softball like Miss Brodie.’

“It wasn’t so much what they said as how they said it. There were a lot of snide remarks.”

Bertha Ragan Tickey, an 18-time ASA All-American with the Lionettes and the Stratford, Conn.-based Raybestos Brakettes, was the winning pitcher when Orange won its first championship in 1950.

That game, she says, is her most memorable in a competitive life jam-packed with highlights. This is a woman who won 757 games and lost only 88. In 1950, she won 65 games, struck out 795 in 513 innings, had a 143-inning scoreless streak with 53 shutouts and nine no-hitters. She pitched a no-hitter and struck out a still-standing record 20 of 21 batters in the 1968 national championship game against Fresno . . . and then retired at age 44.

But while the recollection of the statistics fade, the memories of a lifestyle few women knew in those days linger.

“There was no money involved, not even a chance at playing in the Olympics,” she said. “It was the same with every girl. We didn’t care about anything else, we just loved playing ball.

“And it was so much fun to see how people reacted to us. I remember one exhibition tour the Lionettes took across the country in a bus. We’d stop and just take infield practice and people would come to watch because they couldn’t believe girls could field and throw so well.”

The Lionettes, who regularly played in front of crowds that averaged close to 2,000 at Hart Park in Orange, won five national titles in the ‘50s and established a more-with-less mystique along the way. Despite the dynasty-like line of trophies and statistical trappings, they often were underdogs.

Dot Richardson, an ASA Hall of Fame catcher who hit .360 or better in three seasons with the Phoenix Ramblers, was a member of a Phoenix team that battled the Lionettes for the Pacific Coast League title almost every year.

“We always had such a huge rivalry,” she said. “They won it a lot, but we won a time or two. They always seemed to have so many players who were so terrific under pressure.”

Few were better with the game on the line than Spanks, a 13-time ASA All-American who led the PCL in hitting five times and had a phenomenal .417 or better batting average in four national championship tournaments.

“My first championship year with the Lionettes was 1962 and we didn’t have a team that anybody but us figured could win,” Spanks said. “Stratford had Joan Joyce and she was really awesome. Portland had a very strong team too.

“We went back to Connecticut, won our first game and lost our second. It was an 18-team, double-elimination tournament and to lose so early was devastating. No team had ever come that far through the losers’ bracket to win. We had to win seven straight games.

“We had two sets of uniforms, one orange, one white. We had lost in the orange so we stuck with the white and never washed them. We literally ironed them stiff and stood them up to air out between games. The night before the finals, we beat the two best pitchers in the country. The next day, we beat Whittier twice. We won the final, 1-0, in 13 innings.”

Jackie Rice played most of her career with the Portland Florists, but when the team’s long-time sponsor and the sport’s greatest booster, Erv Lind, died after they had won the national title in 1964, the franchise folded. Rice was nearing the end of a 24-year career, but not quite ready to quit playing. Her fastball still had some zip and she was a welcome addition to the pitching-poor Lionettes.

“I’ll always remember 1969, because everyone just assumed Stratford, with their really dominant pitchers, would win,” Rice said. “That was the year the song, ‘Impossible Dream’ came out and that was our theme song.

“Somebody managed to sneak it onto the loudspeaker during the finals in Orlando and we won, which meant we got to go to Japan for the first world championships.”

The Lionettes made it to the championship game in Osaka, where they lost to the host Japanese, 1-0, on a controversial play at the plate.

Orange won its last national title in 1970. The team became the Santa Ana Lionettes of the short-lived International Women’s Professional Softball League in 1976 and then returned to amateur status for a couple of years before disbanding.

The Lionettes won in the ‘50s because they had some of the game’s best players. They continued to win in the ‘60s because they had two of the game’s best coaches.

Spanks and Anaheim resident Shirley Topley, an assistant coach currently on a tour of New Zealand with the U.S. national team, became player-coaches and fostered an always-win-the-big-game mentality.

“Carol and Shirley were so dedicated, they got players to play up to, even above, their abilities,” said Rice, who retired in 1984 after 12 years as softball coach at Western Oregon. “There was always such high expectations, but it wasn’t pressure really.

“Teams really didn’t like to play us because we just expected to win close games, to come from behind, which we did so much of the time.

“There was a cohesiveness on that team that I never experienced with any other team I ever played on or coached. It was an approach to the game, the encouragement, the high expectations, but in a good way, a way of instilling a belief in yourself as a player and a belief in your team. It became the foundation of how I tried to coach all those years.”

There seems little doubt that the Lionettes would measure up in the will-to-win department in comparison with today’s top players. And Ragan Tickey, for one, thinks they could beat today’s best if given the time machine and the opportunity.

“I’ll tell you the truth, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but I was just at the national championships last August and those girls could not have beaten us,” she said. “It sounds like bragging, but when you’ve been there, you can honestly compare.”

Spanks, who deals with some of today’s best on a daily basis, says she “kind of disagrees with that,” but she would love to be able to compare eras first-hand.

“The equipment is unbelievably different, as are the training methods,” she said. “I mean, we never lifted a weight or did any conditioning. And sure, athletes today are different, they’re under so much pressure from such a young age. But there are a lot of kids with the same passion, kids who would fit right in on one of those Lionettes’ teams.

“But I tell you what. I’d love to be 27 or 28 again and have the opportunity to play now. I really loved playing and dreaded the day I had to quit. I love coaching, coaching is great, but if I could still play, I’d be playing right now. In the blink of an eye.”