Girls of Summer  

by Carey L. Draeger

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!”

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 know). 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.

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.

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.