Belles of the Ballpark: Celebrating the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League by Helmer Diana Star & S. Thomas

Author:Helmer, Diana Star & S., Thomas [Helmer, Diana Star]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Summer Game Books
Published: 2015-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

Poster for a Red Cross benefit game.

In Chicago, All-Americans saw the Wrigley Building carving out a piece of summer sky. They went to Wrigley Field and remembered how, one night in 1944, Girls Leaguers played a Red Cross benefit game there—under portable lights. In 1982, the year of the reunion, Wrigley Field still had no permanent lights.

Some memories rushed back; others came slowly. Many All-Americans had given up trying to explain the League to people who’d never seen it. No, it wasn’t softball, players repeated—and repeated. Sometimes they almost wondered themselves if it had all been real.

Sharon Roepke came to meet the people she’d only read about on yellowed newspaper clips. She interviewed players; she planned a book that would prove the All-American Girls belonged in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Some women, she learned, had continued playing baseball after 1954 on a summer squad tour. For three years, “Bill Allington’s All-Americans” played local amateur men’s teams. Switching batteries, so that women pitched to women and men to men, the All-Americans almost always won. But Allington’s All-Americans faded after 1957. Life on the road was rough, even for people who loved the game, and the pay for touring was unstable.

And so the last All-Americans turned, like their teammates before them, to real estate or journalism or electronics. They operated print shops or drove school buses and cleaning trucks. They taught school, sold insurance, became doctors, joined the Air Force, maybe the police force. Some stayed in athletics. If given the chance, they coached and umpired Little League Baseball. They raised families, and taught their children how to play ball.

Helen Callaghan’s son Casey Candaele grew up to join the major leagues. He learned how to hit from his mother.

Joanne Winter became a professional golfer and golf instructor. Karen Kunkel worked to establish women’s skiing competitions at United States colleges.

Other former players couldn’t even watch baseball for years. It hurt too much to think there was no longer a place for women in the game.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.