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ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW
LOIS YOUNGEN
Women in Baseball
Born: October 23, 1933
Resides: Eugene, Oregon
Interviewed by: Frank Boring, GVSU Veterans History Project, August 5, 20010,
Detroit, Michigan at the All American Girls Professional Baseball League reunion.
Transcribed by: Joan Raymer, December 9, 2010
Interviewer: “To begin with what is your full name and where and when were you
born?”
My full name is Lois Joy Youngen and I was born October 23, 1933 in a little town of
one hundred people called Ragersville, Ohio.
Interviewer: “What was your early childhood like?”
Full of activity, I had a wonderful childhood and my mother was an elementary
schoolteacher, my father was a principal and subsequent superintendent of schools and he
also was coach and he also was a varsity baseball player. So, I think maybe that’s where
I got some of my ability. 45:03
Interviewer: “What was your school like? You said it was a small town, was it a
small school?”
We had moved to a little larger town where I started first grade. The first few grades
were rather uneventful and by the time I hit the fourth grade we had moved because my
father got a better job and it was about then that I started playing with all the
neighborhood boys because there weren’t any girls in the neighborhood and if you
wanted to play outside, and there’s no television remember, and other than reading books
and trying to learn how to play the piano, which I didn’t do very well and they finally
gave up on me, I played outside with the boys.
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�Interviewer: “Give us an idea what the lot was like. What was your neighborhood
like for example? Was it a big back lot? Was it a full diamond where you play
baseball? What was it like?” 45:57
A yard and a back yard and then a little later on when we moved again and my father got
a better job, we were in—all the houses were on one side of the street and across the road
it was farmland, it was pasture field, so we took our paper bags and our one ball, you
only had one ball and you reused it, and our bat which had copious amounts of, I guess
it’s electrical tape, it’s black and it also had a screw and a bolt through it, but that was it
and I remember that the boys weren’t too excited about my wanting to play, originally
when we moved to this new town with the pasture field across the street. 46:40
Interviewer: “How old were you roughly?”
Let’s see—probably ten, ten years old.
Interviewer: “You’re the daughter of educators, small town, you’re playing the
piano, but you don’t want to play, you’re reading, which is wonderful, and how did
you hear about this boys’ baseball going on? How did you happen to get involved
with that?”
Well, there were a lot of boys in the neighborhood and they always just played ball over
there, so I wandered over naturally. I was interested and I asked about playing and they
said, “You can play right field or catch”, and being rather intelligent I said, “well, if I
play right field at this age, no one will ever hit the ball to right field because when we
choose up teams, which you often do in elementary school, the last person to be chosen is
the one who gets to play right field”, so I said, “I’m going to learn how to catch.” I knew
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�my dad was a baseball pitcher and if he could throw to me some, I could really become
proficient as catcher. 47:44
Interviewer: “Did you have a glove?”
At the time I don’t know if I had a glove or not, but I know my father was supportive,
which is important, so we went out and bought me a glove. I don’t think it was a
catcher’s glove originally. Later on I got the real thing, but I’m not quite sure.
Interviewer: “So in the early days in elementary school, why baseball as opposed to
anything else?”
Well, we’re talking about the nineteen forties and individual sports were only for those
elite families that had money and could have private lessons. There was no physical
education in the schools during the forties, there was some extra, what would you call it?
Varsity sports, there were some varsity sports floating around, but baseball was one of
those things that every small town had a baseball team. That had maybe changed some,
but I think there were enough remnants so you could play with a limited amount of space,
a limited amount of equipment and still have a very good time. 48:48 All the small
schools that I went to, there was no football, no track and field when you look out and
soccer was something you played in PE, I think for fifty years before it caught on as
being a really important kind of sport around the world, but maybe never will catch on in
this country, we’ll see how that goes. Anyway, it was a remnant of a sport that
everybody could play you could join in. Everybody had a little softball game at a reunion
or at a picnic. You played softball, but this was baseball with a hardball that we threw
overhand. 49:24
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�Interviewer: “Did you have access to sports either by newspaper or radio? Did you
know what was going on in the world of baseball?”
I had a grandfather that kept his ear to the radio to listen to the Cleveland Indians games,
so we had no television, but we did have radio and I think our family was always so busy
trying to earn a living—we had gardens in the summer and I had odd jobs that I did and
every kid had chores to do around the house. Some of my friends at that age, in
elementary school, got an allowance and other students had to work and they were doled
out certain amounts of money if they asked for it and that kind of thing. I’ve lost your
question. 50:13
Interviewer: “You actually already answered it in terms of did you know about
baseball from the outside.”
Oh yeah, the radio and newspaper, yes, yes.
Interviewer: “Did baseball from the very beginning or when did baseball become
more important to you than just kind of playing?”
Well, that’s an interesting question. That’s a very interesting question. By osmosis I
suppose, I don’t know if I ever realized when. I got to the point where we gathered more
boys to play on our team and then we started to call ourselves the “Town Team” and then
we walked to other small towns five miles away, no soccer moms to take us anywhere,
we took our one ball and our one bat and we would walk and we would play and then we
would walk home. They would walk over and we would kind of pre determine, it was
usually in the afternoon because we didn’t have jobs or anything and we were free to
play, and I know that one summer, I think I probably was in junior high school by then
and we did this for three or four years, and finally they came down, the boys, the team,
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�came down to my house and they told me they didn’t want me on the team anymore
because the other towns teams and kids were laughing at us because we had a girl on the
team. 51:40 All I know is I think I suppressed that to the point where I don’t remember
it, but my mother said, yes, I was there and I heard them ask you to do that, you were
devastated she said, but it took them about a week before they came trudging back down
and asked me to join them again because they had lost two games and they wanted me
back on the team. I said, “well, that proves that winning is more important than having a
girl on the team”, so then I sort of graduated from their team. The boys got older and we
did have a varsity baseball team in that town and there were a couple of women’s softball
teams in the larger cities, Wooster, Ohio and Ashland, Ohio, so in the summer the
manager stopped by, I don’t know how they found out about me, but they came to me
and asked if I would like to play. I didn’t know if I was good enough, but then I played
softball with the Wooster, Ohio softball team for a year and then I played with Ashland
probably two years. 52.42
Interviewer: “A couple questions between all this, what was your father’s and
mother’s reaction to your playing baseball with the boys?”
Nothing, I mean it wasn’t negative, and you know the research shows, all the early
research shows, that the father is supportive and supportive of their daughter playing.
There’s no problem and my father was always supportive and my mother probably didn’t
disagree at all because she was a horsewoman in her early years and rode a lot and grew
up on a farm and farm women had to help and get out in the field, so she knew what
physical work was like. She was a little bitty woman, but she use to drive when they
made hay and would drive the horses, so I don’t think she thought there was anything
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�wrong with it and like I said, dad was supportive. They didn’t get to very many games,
but they had other things to do, but I think they were supportive. 53:37
Interviewer: “So a scout of the softball team somehow heard about you and came
along and said, “I understand you’re a pretty good ball player?” You played for a
year or two years?”
I played with the Wooster team one year and Ashland was closer and I think that was one
of the reasons, I can’t think of any other good reason, why I went from one to the other. I
went to play with Ashland and I was in high school by now, I was in high school.
Interviewer: “And you were still a catcher?”
I am still a catcher.
Interviewer: “Do you have a catcher’s mitt now?”
I have a catcher’s mitt now.
Interviewer: “This is a more difficult question I know because you’re delving back
quite a few years, but did you have any indication what so ever of what you wanted
to do with your life at that point? Did you want to be a teacher like your parents?”
54:31
I always knew I would go to college, that was never a doubt. That was instilled in me
from the beginning, I mean as long as my folks and I communicated about anything, I
knew I would go to college, so I knew I had to do well in school, which I did, but I
wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after I got there and what my major might be at the time.
Interviewer: “Baseball isn’t even in the consideration because it’s something you’re
doing because it’s fun?”
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�Yes, doing it because it’s fun, yes, definitely. Fun, F U N, fun and winning too
occasionally.
Interviewer: “Did you feel like you were pretty good?”
I don’t know, I don’t think I ever really—I don’t think I thought much about that. I was
interested in the fact that we were a team and that every time we won the team won. As
women, I don’t think we spent much time thinking about statistics and who hit the
winning RBI that high. I think it was the team winning and we were interested in the
game as a team game. 55:41
Interviewer: “Now, you’re in high school so your morning you go to school, you
come back in the afternoon, when are you playing baseball?”
Probably on a night, like a Friday night and we might be playing on a Sunday afternoon.
Interviewer: “This is a neighborhood thing, so you got the bleachers full of locals
and those people egging you on with rah, rah, rah?”
It was the thing to do to, and here we’re talking about the nineteen forties and people
didn’t have a lot of money and I think we were much before television was popular. You
might have one or two people in town that had a television set. I remember going to visit
somebody in 1948 and they had this snowy television set, but I think there wasn’t a lot to
do. You could go to the movies, pay seventy-five cents and go to the movies, maybe it
was a dollar by then, or you might go out and watch, I’m sure we weren’t the only
softball team in Ashland, the men probably had one or two teams, and they still had
businesses that sponsored men’s softball teams, so I still think in the nineteen forties
softball was probably a pretty popular activity for a medium sized, we’re talking about
twenty-five thousand people or twenty thousand people, something like that. 56:58
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�Interviewer: “Can you remember, and how did you hear about Pearl Harbor?”
I was sitting with my father in our den and we had one of those Zenith tall radios, you
wouldn’t know about that, sorry, and it had a big round dial on it and so on.
Interviewer: “I actually do know about that.”
You do? I wasn’t going to—and we were in Ohio and it was in the morning, I’m sure it
was in the morning, it was a Sunday morning, I don’t know if we had been to church and
come home or we hadn’t gone yet, I can’t tell you the exact time, but my dad was
listening, I don’t know when it got turned on or anything, but I heard my father call my
mother in and they sat down and I think I kneeled, I don’t know if there was a chair there
or an ottoman or sofa or something for me to sit on, but I get the impression I was
kneeling down and cocking my head and listening and we heard Roosevelt come on the
radio and talk about the date that would live in infamy. 58:10 From there on it sort of
changed everything.
Interviewer: “How did it change around your immediate world?”
All the good teachers went off to work in the war plants, so there was a shortage of
teachers and I don’t know if you know this, but maybe you do, but once a woman got
married, in the nineteen thirties, she no longer could teach. Married women could not
teach, so until World War II, married women were pretty much prohibited from teaching
unless they had a special kind of certificate to do something, but in general married
women, if the husband taught, the wife couldn’t teach. So, my dad came home and he
was the principal of a fairly good size school, and he had been losing all his teachers—
you could make five times as much—you know that’s still the way it is, you can make
five times as much money doing something else as you can teaching. 59:13 Everybody
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�was leaving to go to the was plants, so what happens is dad says, “Mom, you got to go
back and teach third grade, or fourth grade, or fifth grade, but you got to get back in.
They are dying for good teachers”, and my mother was a very good teacher, so she got
geared up to go back and teach and those were the years when people only had one car or
one truck, you didn’t have two. Our life changed immediately after we started in 1941
and we had war drives and war bond drives and we collected scrap metal and I know we
had scrap medal. We had recesses where we got our physical activity and remember I’m
a lot younger than I was from your previous question, but we didn’t have any organized
teams during that time that I’m aware of. 00:07 I had a paper route and I needed some
spending money, so after we lived there a couple of years I got a paper route in that
small town.
Interviewer: “When did you first hear about the league, The All American Girls
Professional baseball League?”
I’m not quite sure whether I read about it, and remember this is 1951, actually it’s 1950
when I first went to visit a cousin in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I don’t know when I heard
about the league, but Fort Wayne had a team and I went to visit my first cousin that lived
there, and she and her husband had two children at that time and they said to me, “would
you like to go see the girls play baseball tonight?” Well, that’s a no brainer you know,
YES, and I’m sitting there and I’m sixteen years old and we’re watching the game and
Fort Wayne had quite good attendance in those years and I’m sitting there and we’re
getting to the seventh or eighth inning and I have no idea who won the game or even
played, all I did was I turned to my cousin and I said, “you know, I can do that”, just like
that, right out of the blue. 1:24 That surprised even me because I don’t think the
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�majority of women in that generation are terribly aggressive and I surprised myself by
saying that, and by golly my cousin got on the phone that next morning about eleven
o’clock I had a tryout with Max Carey, our manager, our hall of fame manager and least
four other Daisies were there and he put me through the paces for about an hour and he
said, when we were wrapping things up, “Lois, we will be in touch with you. We will
contact you probably around the first of the year”, and this was probably in August or
maybe July of the previous year, so I went back home and finished my junior year and
started my senior year in high school. 2:25 Along about January third or fourth I got
and invitation to come to spring training in Alexandria, Virginia, Fort Wayne Daisies.
Interviewer: “What was your parents’ reaction?”
I think they were both very positive about it. I remember my dad talking to my mom and
saying, “well, she’s going to go off to college at the end of this year. She’ll have a
chaperone and that’s more than she’ll have at college. We better send her off, it might be
a good experience for her”, so they were kind of positive about it. 2:57
Interviewer: “I want to walk you through very carefully, with a lot of detail, what
was the preparation to go, packing and the whole bit, what you’re thinking about
while you’re going through this. I don’t want to just suddenly show up there, give
us an idea of what it was like.”
Well, first of all during those years, every senior class had been collecting money for
fifteen years to go on a senior trip. We picked potatoes and we mowed lawns and we had
car washes and you know, some of the same things they are doing today and we ended up
with quite a bit of money, so our senior trip was planned to go to Washington D.C.
Alexandria, Virginia is real close to Washington D.C., and I thought, “well, if I can plan
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�this and work this out, I can go with the class trip on the train, I don’t know if I had been
on a train before or not, I can’t remember, and we would go down—I think we left from
Akron, Ohio, went through Youngtown, through Pittsburg, on down to Washington D.C.,
this was my thinking, and then I could go to Alexandria and the rest of the seniors were
going to go to New York because they had all this extra money and they could go to New
York and spend it freely in New York City for another four days or so before we had to
go back to Ohio. 4:20 It was standard for every small high school in Ohio to take a
senior trip, so I’m thinking, “maybe I can maneuver this so I can get to Washington,
spend some time with my class, go see some of Washington D.C. and then get myself
over to Alexandria, Virginia, which is just across the river”, so I’m thinking, “well, the
first thing I have to do is I have to get out of school for about three weeks in addition to
our senior class week”, so this is a big chunk and whether you believe this or not, you just
didn’t get out of school. You had doctor’s appointments, dentist appointments, other
kinds of appointments after school or on week-ends. You just weren’t allowed to walk
off the school grounds. So I’m thinking, “how am I going to maneuver this?” I’m
talking to my teachers and I got an ok from all of them except one and I talked to the
superintendent and it was like getting special dispensation from the Pope to get away for
four weeks. 5:23 I jumped through all the hoops that they could possibly put in front of
me. I had one teacher that I had to send homework back to and I promised religiously
that I would do that. Everybody else said, “go with our blessing, and make the team “,
even the fellow I was going to the senior prom with said,” make sure you’re back here for
the senior prom”. Anyway, so I arranged it with the Fort Wayne Daisies, Ernie Bird was
their business manager and we wrote letters, we didn’t call back in those days, long
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�distance phone calls cost a lot of money, so you wrote letter and I think they probably
cost three cents for a stamp too, so we wrote back and forth and we made the
arrangements that I would go spend some time with my senior class and then go over
Alexandria for the tryout for the Fort Wayne Daisies. 6:12 So we got on the train, there
are fifteen in my graduating class, nine boys and six girls, that’s a small town, and all I
remember is all the mothers and fathers were there and you would think we were going to
cyber space or someplace, and they gave us sandwiches, we had food, we had this long
trip to go to Washington D.C., I think it took eighteen hours, it wasn’t that far away.
Anyway, I remember eating sandwiches, we left like in late afternoon, and we went
through Youngstown and Pittsburgh and all the Bessemer burners in the steel mills were
going strong and it was an absolutely gorgeous site to see them lit up the way they were.
That’s one of my vivid memories of taking that trip. The rest would be seeing the
monuments in Washington D.C. and meeting with our local Senator or Representative
and having our picture taken with them, which every small class does on their little
sojourn to Washington D.C. Then they left and went over to New York City and I went
over to Alexandria, Virginia. 7:20 This is where, and I don’t know if you want to
include this, but you may know that Peanuts, Mamie ”Peanuts Johnson” had an article in
the New York Times not too long ago, and she’s an African American woman, and we get
asked this a lot if we speak to groups and so on, and since Jackie Robinson didn’t get into
the majors until 1947 it was obvious that there was a problem with having African
Americans in our particular league as well. Well, here we are in 1951 and according to
Mamie, she came to Alexandria, Virginia during that time that I supposedly was there. I
never saw her, but she indicated that she came, she came with another girl, another
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�African American girl, and they wanted to try out and whoever the management was at
the time that met them and talked to them, told them that there was no place for them in
the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. 8:20 Now, the girls like myself,
none of us that I have talked to ever have any interaction with them or knew that she had
even come and we feel bad about that, but there wasn’t really anything we could do
about it when we didn’t know about it, so that’s something that we have been thinking
about and talking about some. Anyway, we never did have, to the best of my knowledge,
any African American player in our league. So, back to what we did there, I got the
opportunity, I’m not quite sure why, but I got picked out of the group to do some public
relations things and we were supposed to play in Baltimore. 9:06
Interviewer: “Let me back you up a little bit. You got there for tryouts?”
Yes, so I’m trying out.
Interviewer: “Ok”
I’m hitting, I’m running, and I’m throwing.
Interviewer: “In the movie you get this idea, and I know it was in the very
beginning of the league that you saw from the movie, but you walk out onto the field
and there’s all these women out there, girls playing, is that similar to what happened
with you?”
I don’t remember, to be honest, but I don’t think so because there were two teams and the
object in the 1951 spring training was to have two teams, the Battle Creek Belles and the
Fort Wayne Daisies, all have spring training together and then you would play exhibition
games around, I think it was Katie Horstman talking about being in North and South
Carolina and so on. Well we played—we had an exhibition game scheduled in whatever
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�the Baltimore Stadium was at the time and we also were supposed to play in Griffith
Stadium. So this was part of—we practiced in Alexandria and we didn’t practice very
long before we started playing, supposedly, exhibition games. 10:04
Interviewer: “You’re the new kid.”
I know
Interviewer: “what was that like?”
I don’t remember very much about the tryouts. What I remember about it was that I
whisked off to be on the radio and whisked off to meet with Maury Povich, he was the
sports supreme or one of the major sports writers in the country at that particular time. I
had my first glass of wine, don’t tell on me, at one of the lunches we got feted at you
know. We were taken to lunch and I had a glass of Rosé and I have no idea who ordered
it, but I didn’t, but I drank it and I think I enjoyed it.
Interviewer: “You are very articulate and I would imagine, because of your
educational background with your parents and what not, some of the girls may or
may not been able to speak as well as you. If they are going to get you on the radio,
you have to be able to talk and that’s probably what happened.”
Well, we were trying to get them to come out to the games. I the idea we’re playing this
exhibition, come out to the game. I do want to tell you about—we got rained out of
Griffith Stadium, but the one picture I have, other than with Jimmie Fox who came later,
is I have a picture of Clark Griffith, the grand old man of baseball, and myself standing
next to him and another rookie I have never been able to find out, and then Max Carey.
11:25 The four of us are there and Max Carey has the handle of the baseball bat and
Clark Griffith has the other end of it you know and I am there in my dress, you know
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�dresses, we must wear our dresses, and it’s an 8x10 and it’s been chopped and cut and
pasted, but it is my picture with Clark Griffith and Max Carey and it’s the only one I
have. The interesting thing is, I made the team and the girl next to me didn’t and I don’t
have any idea who she is, but that is, that’s my picture. 12:01 The second thing I want
you to know, in the world, as far as that goes, is that we went, we were in Griffith
Stadium and I go and take batting practice and I stood up there and I said, “Joe DiMaggio
stood here”, and I’m standing there and I turned around on the other side and I said, “Ted
Williams stood here”, and we didn’t get to play, we got rained out, but at least I had the
opportunity to stand there in Griffith Stadium at home plate. I never thought about
getting behind the mound like a catcher would. I was thinking about hitting for whatever
reason and now that I think about it in retrospect, I didn’t think about getting down there
and getting into a catchers position like Jim Hagen who caught for the Cleveland Indians.
12:41
Interviewer: “Now, by 1951 was there the—did you have to go through the charm
school and all that kind of stuff?”
It is interesting that you mention this. If you talk to groups of people, especially younger
people, one of the things they want to know is, “was that charm school really for real?” I
have to say, “yes, it really was in the early years”, and most of the gals that went through
it thought it was worthwhile. They didn’t pooh pooh at it and they didn’t think it was
terrible. I’m sure there were some that did, but the few that I’ve talked to thought they
learned some valuable lessons going through the charm school.. I think that was Mrs.
Wrigley’s idea in the first place.
Interviewer: “What about you? By the time you got in?”
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�This is what I tell my audiences, “by the time they got to 1951 they had given up on us”,
so that’s my response. They were more interested in the ability of the players. Some of
those were still maintained through the whole twelve years, but charm school was not one
of the— 13:44
Interviewer: “What were some of the rules, the ground rules, when you started if
charm school was not in there, what are some of the things they told you? This is
what you have to do as a player.”
We always wore a dress or a skirt when you went to the ballpark, when you were out in
public; you were invited to a luncheon, home from the ballpark. You lived in private
homes and usually there were two of us to a private home. I think there might have been
some occasions over the years where there would be four. I’m looking forward to seeing
my Blue Sox roommate here at this reunion. Anyway, the pants thing, nope, no pants, no
slacks and even by then women were starting to wear slacks more and blue jeans were
more common as far as everyday dress. 14:33
Interviewer: “Kathryn Hepburn in particular really made it.”
Took over as far as that was concerned, but that rule was sacrosanct, we did not wear
pants period. Now, if we were going to the corner grocery store or something, if we
happened to be lucky enough to have a day off, of course if it was pouring down rain, you
could wear your jeans. You were very careful about how you presented yourself to the
public that was still very important. You didn’t have to worry about make-up, you didn’t
have to worry too much about the length of your hair, that was something that was
included in this charm school business and make-up, yes or no depending, most of the
time you put it on after the game not before. I remember the idea of dating—I don’t
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�think—I’m going to get side tracked here, but the movie A League of Their Own, has this
wonderful scene at the “Suds Bucket”, I don’t know if you remember, but where
Madonna does her thing and I’m thinking, “oh, if we only had a “Suds Bucket” when I
was playing ball, I would have been there at every opportunity. 15:40 I love to dance
and I don’t remember my date ever asking a chaperone whether they could go out with
me and I dated quite a bit.
Interviewer: “Well, let’s start at the beginning, you’ve gone through the spring
training with the Daisies and the key thing here, I think, is for us to understand, and
remember we’re trying to get as much of your experience as possible and not the
league, but your experience. You had left home to play in the league for how long?”
Four years
Interviewer: “Right, but for your first season, a season is what?”
I think that first year Peoria was in the league and both of the Wisconsin [teams], so we
had eight teams that first year and then it went to six and eventually it went to five, but
we started out with eight teams. First of all I went back home, went to my senior prom
and graduated from high school all in one week and then I became a Daisy. There I am
in Fort Wayne, Indiana, my roommate is Pat Scott and she’s another rookie and she’s a
pitcher and a very good pitcher. I’ve got my Daisy uniform on and somebody picks me
up in a car to take me, I didn’t have an automobile or anything and I had no camera and
by the way we didn’t have cameras, if we had cameras you’d have all kinds of things to
use. The only cameras around were the little Brownie box cameras, no one had a camera
to take any pictures of each other and that’s why we’re short on pictures. The girls keep
asking about former players pictures and none of us had any cameras to take any pictures,
17
�let alone a movie camera. So here I am again, I’m back on track. 17:24 At the ballpark
and Max Carey is our manager we’re playing seven days a week with double headers on
Sunday and a seven inning first game. I think originally they had a nine inning second
game, but the switched and changed that to—I think because it got a little too much
with—we played a hundred and eighteen games that first season, so we had seven innings
and seven innings and then you got on the bus and rode all night to Rockford, Illinois and
then you played on Monday night and then you played seven more games and so on.
Interviewer: “This is overhand at this point?”
This is overhand, yes, this is 1951 and overhand started in 1948, so we went to—we were
definitely overhand pitching. 18:12
Interviewer: “This wasn’t a problem for you because you started out overhand and
as a catcher you were catching overhand anyway.”
Yup, well I loved it because I have short fingers you know and the baseball is small.
Nine inches is very different from a ten inch or twelve inch softball you know and my
softball would every once in a while fly off into right field when I’m trying to throw to
second base. So here we are, I’ve got this wonderful little nine-inch ball that I can get a
hold of, so I really enjoyed playing with a regulation nine-inch ball.
Interviewer: “What did you think of the uniform?”
I didn’t give it too much thought, but the reaction, I think, on the part of a lot of the
players in the beginning, and very much like it was in the film, was, “you mean I have to
play ball in that dress?” I think once they started to play—I think the biggest problem
was the strawberries, I don’t think it was—well, the other problem, and I’m going to
digress here a little bit and go back. By the time I got in the league we’d already made
18
�them into mini skirts. 19:09 If you look at the original uniform it’s got like three yards of
material in it. It’s got all kinds of extra skirt and it was to be worn exactly, according to
the older women, it was to be worn exactly one hand length above the knee. Well, that’s
pretty long and then you try to bend over and pick up a ground ball, you’ve got mostly
skirt and no ball, so you know these gals—our players are smart cookies and the first
thing they did was say, “we got to modify this”, so I talked to some of the older players
and they said was one of the first things they did was they got safety pins and they would
safety pin all this extra material of to the right and to the side, so it was more straight up
and down. By the time I got to the league they had really wised up I’ll tell you, we had
the first mini skirts. We took out all of the extra material, tightened it up and we lifted it
up so it was right below the tight line, so you could completely spread your legs without
any problem. Now, it’s still a one-piece dress and another thing, they wanted us to keep
it cinched in so it looked like we had a waistline you know. 20:20 Have you ever tried
to catch with your arms and your dress tries to go up in the air? It’s practically
impossible, so I kept—we would loosen everything when no one was watching you
know, we’d loosen this decorative belt that we had, which didn’t serve any real purpose
except being decorative, so we’d loosen that up and we looked pretty great out there
because according to everything you’ve read and so on, showing a lot of leg is ok, and we
got to do it in the fifties when it didn’t happen all the time. They were covered up below
the knee, and there were a lot of good-looking legs, so it served the purpose.
Interviewer: “What can you recall, if not your first game, what’s the first memory
you have of a game in the very beginning?”
19
�The first memory I have is being sent in to catch the last inning or the last two inning of
the game and hopefully we were ahead. I would get to go in because I was the rookie on
the team. We had two other very good catchers, and I’d get to catch batting practice
often for experience, and that first year I just sat on the bench and watched everybody.
21:31 Like I said, I’d have to go out and warm up the pitcher or go out to the bull pen
and warm up the reliever that was going in or maybe you got in to catch the eighth inning
or the eighth and the ninth inning for experience, and I know that first year, in 1951, Max
Carey said, “well, if we send her off to Kenosha for August, or part of August”, and
Kenosha was a team that was folding at that time and there last year was in 1951, if I
remember correctly. They were traveling by car and all of their home games were all
now away games, they adjusted that somehow, so I got to play a few games for Kenosha.
I don’t remember much about that; it was only for about a couple weeks. 22:18
Interviewer: “Your first season, this is going to be a touch question because it’s—I
have to keep in mind that you’re a very young, seventeen your first year—Was
there any sense at that point, maybe later it’s different, but was there any sense at
that point, the first season, that this was going to go on anywhere beyond that year,
or next year, playing?”
I don’t think anybody thought too much about it, this was my first year, maybe some of
the older players who had been in the league for four or five years, had a sense, when all
of a sudden they’re thinking about, “we don’t have the turnout in some of these towns
and we’re not going to have a team in Kenosha next year”. Dropping from eight to six-that would have been a clue to me if I had been thinking about that.
20
�Interviewer: “I guess what I’m trying to get at is, today a young boy, even to a
certain degree a young girl, can dream about being a professional, not necessarily
baseball, but you’re playing professional ball, but did you see yourself as a
professional ball player?” 23:24
I knew I was going to college, so after the 1951, first year, I took what money I earned
and paid my college tuition. I did that for four years, so in essence my four years as an
all American paid for my Baccalaureate degree. So there and I think my parents were
very supportive of that, but that’s the way I used the money. I never saw myself or as my
one hat or one role in life as being a professional baseball player.
Interviewer: “Another tough question, and this as you look back—I look at my own
life and as a seventeen or eighteen year old, did I really know what I wanted to do
kind of thing, but did you understand that this was something very unique and that
this baseball team was something very unique at the time or was it just like at the
ballpark when you played in the back lot with the kids, it was fun, but was there any
sense—ok this is paying for my college, but was there any sense the this is really
something great?” 24:32
At least you didn’t ask me the question; did we know we were being part of baseball
history?
Interviewer: “I’ll wait until later for that one.”
I mean no, no, I don’t think there was ever a player that played in our league—my
question to you, do you think you’re going to get the Pulitzer Prize sometime? No,
everybody that I knew loved to play and the only time you didn’t love it was when you
got a strawberry. Another time when you didn’t love it is when it rained in Fort Wayne
21
�and they poured gasoline on the field and burned the field in order to get rid of the water
and you had to go out and play in that and slide in that and field ground balls in that.
There were times when you didn’t—or you were very, very tired. Sometimes in August
when it’s very hot and muggy like it is the last couple of days here in Michigan, it got
pretty hot and when it got muggy we got pretty tired. 25:25 Remember, we didn’t have
any weight lifting or any weight training, we might have had some batting practice in
mornings at home, but very seldom on the road. We had no batting helmets, so if you got
hit in the head, you got hit in the head you know. We wore men’s equipment and I was a
catcher and I was forever—I don’t know what kind of tape it is, the shiny stuff.
Interviewer: “Duct tape”
Duct tape, there you go, I couldn’t think of it. I was forever cutting the chest protector
down so I could lift my arms, and the shin guards came halfway up my thighs because
that’s all we had, we had men’s equipment. Our bats were men’s bats and I couldn’t find
a bat that was small enough around, Ted Williams would have loved me because he
wanted that really small handle there, and I needed that because I had short fingers and
the weight was thirty-five, thirty-six pounds [ounces], that’s Babe Ruth weight for a bat.
26:32 I think I probably would have been a pretty good hitter if I ever could have found
a bat. We’d go into a sporting goods store to buy our bats right off the shelf and there
weren’t that many. Excuse me, I’m getting carried away, but the playing of the game
was made a little difficult because of the fact that there was nothing much out there,
really, for women, but no, the question you asked, did anybody think they were going to
be, or where were they going to be in history, how important was women’s baseball
compared to others? I do know though because somebody asked me, Jean Faut asked me
22
�this, we were the first professional women’s team sport league—first professional
women’s sport period. The golf people have challenged it, the PGA has that, but they
didn’t come into being until 1948, 1948 I think Just a tidbit to throw in there, but I don’t
think any of them ever, I never heard any talk about it, we has more fun singing on the
bus and deciding what we were going to eat or what we were going to wear to something.
27:45
Interviewer: “How many seasons did you play?”
Four, I terminated the league; I finished them out in 1954.
Interviewer: “I want to start now in getting into the actual games, but I want to do
it season to season as opposed to jumping—if you want to jump in there it’s fine, but
I’m just thinking, because your experience actually grows as you get better season to
season and I assume you did, so how was the first season?”
I did get better, you’rer right. It was very enjoyable even though I didn’t play very
much. I got to meet and get acquainted with my teammates and Max Carey was a
wonderful—he was a terrific base runner, so you learned a lot about base running from
him and he was a good teacher and I was very content to be where I was and continue to
learn. I never thought about jumping up and down and saying, “I want to play”, which is
something they would be doing now days, the men would be doing anyway or, “trade
me”, one of the two. 28:49
Interviewer: “I did one of the interviews in Milwaukee and I asked this question
about the managers. Did the manager treat you as a woman baseball player or did
the manager treat you as a baseball player?”
23
�As a baseball player, let’s face it, look at society during those years; the men were in
charge of everything, religion, economics, political, and were in charge of baseball.
There were men managers, the men were the umpires, the men drove the bus, but they
treated us as baseball players. That doesn’t mean they didn’t treat us with respect, they
respected us as women and were concerned about things like we were up all night riding
the bus. The manager was very concerned about that and the bus driver, helping us with
out luggage and be careful that is a bad step or something. They were very aware that we
were women, but as far as the game was concerned, we were treated like ball players.
29:51 No yelling, they were very professional about—the professional players like
Jimmy Foxx and Max Carey and so on, they were very professional in their interacting.
The no crying in baseball, I know that’s Hollywood proverbially, but still there are people
who think that actually happened and if you made a mistake, in some ways, your
manager would maybe call you off to the side or into the dugout and talk to you
individually or after the game was over they might call you in. I only know of one
incident in four years of a manager, in a relatively public area, having words and I don’t
remember what it was about at the time, but they were very professional and I know as a
catcher it was all right for me to kick a little dirt on the plate and to maybe kick a little
dirt on the umpire’s shoes. 30:56 You had to be very careful what you said to him you
know. I didn’t talk much to the umpire and I didn’t talk much to the other players.
Interviewer: “An interesting thing came up in the interviews that I’d done in
Milwaukee and was that a lot of you learned how to play baseball, as you said, just
playing with the boys. You never had professional training per say, but the ones
that I interviewed said that amateurs contributed a great deal because they told you
24
�little tricks or little things that professional baseball players learned in their
training, but since you were kind of a new thing, did you get any kind of tricks or
hints about catching that helped you become a better catcher or did you just learn it
on your own?”
Not too much because none of the—none of my managers were catchers. If they had
been I probably would have, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t listen. I learned a lot about
base running and learned some things about covering the base and certainly—we had
infield practice and we’d have-- the ball would be hit in from right field and you have to
hit the cutoff player you know and bounce it in on one bounce to the catcher. 32:05 We
all knew the basics, I don’t know where we learned them, but we knew the basics. The
manager might, some managers more than other managers, some had practice where
others—it seemed to be individual, from the gals I talked to, it seemed to be
individualized. Different managers worked on different things. I know one of the things,
because I wasn’t playing regular, I didn’t get—I got about two swings in for batting
practice because, you know, we had to get the regular players and hitters out there, and
we didn’t have much bating practice before—the managers I played for, they just didn’t
do that and I know darn well that I could have hit much, much better, every year I got
better at everything, and I know if I’d had more hitting practice and had a bat that I could
hang on to and didn’t fly out to the third baseman every time it flew out of my hands.
33:01
Interviewer: “When did it change for you, in the second season or the third season,
where you were playing more? You said you were sitting on the bench most of the
time.”
25
�I sat on the bench and the next year was 1952 and Jimmy Foxx, we had six, I think six
teams, you can go back and check on this, but I think we dropped down to six teams that
year and for the next two years I think we were at six teams, and Jimmy Foxx was the
manager and don’t let anybody tell you that he wasn’t just a wonderful man, I adored
him. He was renascent, well the exact opposite of Jimmy Dugan. Now, he was an
alcoholic and I want the record—everybody knew that, but if you’re a health educator,
you know that alcoholics can drink quite a bit and it doesn’t show, so he’d go home and
do his drinking at night and he would show up at the ballpark sober the next day and he
was a great big guy, so I suppose he could drink a lot. 34:01 I don’t know, but I think
everybody that knew him, and Bobby Doerr lives in my part of the world out in Oregon,
and I’ve talked to him about Jimmy Foxx and he said that the drinking is what caused his
demise as a baseball player or helped add to that, and we just loved him. If we were
lucky he would take batting practice four or five times during the season and he would
hit the ball over our fence, over a pasture and out over a four lane highway, but we
couldn’t get him—we just couldn’t get him to do it very often and we had to beg him, we
had to grovel to get him to take batting practice, but we all adored him, so most of us feel
kind of bad that sports writers and movie critics have written that the Jimmy Dugan in A
League of Their Own is a thinly veiled Jimmy Foxx and every chance I get I like to say,
“you think what you want, but that’s not the Jimmy Foxx that I played for”, so that kind
of bothered me. 35:10
Interviewer: “In the second season did you start to play more?
I played some, not a lot, we still had two good catchers and we had lost two good teams
from the league. I was always the squirt, about 110 pounds, maybe 115 at my top weight.
26
�I wasn’t a home run hitter, and I was vying with six foot gals that were pretty good sized
and I couldn’t get a bat that I could hold.
Interviewer: “I think that was the reason. When did it change?”
1953 I started to play. I was traded to South Bend and I guess they needed a catcher, I
don’t know, but I was traded to South Bend and started to play regularly.
Interviewer: “Once again It’s unfair, but can you remember the feeling—because
you’d been sitting on the bench for two seasons and now you’re, you got a good gig
going on here, you got money coming in, you’re going to college and all, but there
had to be a difference in your emotions when suddenly you’re now at south bend
and now you’re playing more. Tell us about that, how did that feel?” 36:16
Absolutely, and I guess all of a sudden I realized that, “yeah, I belong here”. Maybe
before I didn’t think that I quite belonged. I belonged in all these ways, but as far as
being a ball player maybe I didn’t quite belong and all of a sudden I started to play and I
started to be able to throw the ball down to second base alright and I got knocked on my
whatever I suppose ten or twelve times and got knocked out a couple times, but I
managed to make the put out at home plate and it’s not easy when you see a six footer
coming at you. Anyway, I took a few of those knocks pretty well, hung onto the ball and
I think my feeling was coming that I really belonged. 37:14 My hitting was coming
along, I wasn’t a great hitter, and that didn’t seem to bother me. I thought it would come,
but my throwing was better and I always knew in my head what was going on, more so
than some of my teamates who couldn’t remember how many outs there were, but you
know, I always was on top—the mental part of it wasn’t any problem.
27
�Interviewer: “I was a pitcher, a lousy hitter, but such a good pitcher, this is little
league and I’m not anywhere in your league, and I’m talking as if we’re both
professionals here, but I do know what you mean. There is a certain amount of
compensation your players give you if you know that you’re a really good pitcher or
a really good catcher. You don’t hit as well, but we got hitters and we’ll take care of
it. What was the most challenging thing about being a professional catcher as
opposed to this sandlot kind of catching? Or maybe there wasn’t a whole lot of
difference, I don’t know.” 38:11
It’s hard to compare because you’re older and have had all these other experiences that
kind of filtered in here. I think part of it might be the idea of playing everyday rather
than just on occasion and you tend to build on that fact that maybe you learned something
last night and you still remember it. Excuse me, but rather than, “I made that mistake two
weeks ago”, because you didn’t play that often, plus the fact that we’re older and
hopefully you learn some things, you read the paper, you maybe read some things about
Ted Williams hitting you know. I mean, different players had a different, I think,
approach. 39:06
Interviewer: “Did you have any sense of how good you were?”
No, not the foggiest and you brought that up earlier and one of the things that I think is
interesting is I have always felt rather uncomfortable knowing I was on a team for four
years, but never contributed heaps and gobs. That I never was, although I played
regularly, especially the last two years and played well and the last year I hit 284 which is
in the top one third or yeah, in the top one third of all the players that played that year,
and I was up there and I feel good about that, but I always felt that I wasn’t quite worthy
28
�and I don’t know quite how to explain this. I never really thought about how to articulate
it, but I’ve always thought—yes, I guess that would be a way of expressing it, that I
wasn’t as good as some of these other players and therefore, I’m not worthy of being
included in the group and yet so many people, people that aren’t just my friends who
might tell me something like this, “hey, you made the league, you made the team, you
played, what else is there?” It’s just a “get a hold of yourself and quit thinking that way,
that thinking is obsolete, it doesn’t make any sense”. 40:34
Interviewer: “A lot of people didn’t make the league and another thing that is
really a good part of that movie, is that scene with Geena Davis and Tom Hanks
where she says, “if it was easy everybody could do it”.
That’s the scene I quote to everybody, throw out that” there’s no crying in baseball” and
get to the heart of the game of baseball. “It just got too hard”, she said and he said, “it’s
supposed to be hard, if it wasn’t hard everyone could do it, it’s the hard that makes it
great”, and to me that is the summary, the overpowering scene in that whole movie that
sums up what baseball is all about. 41:12
Interviewer: “I use it in my writing classes. I teach writing and I said, “If it’s not
hard anybody could do it”. I use that same example.”
It’s the hard that makes it great and to me that is the scene from the whole movie that the
women in this league should take with them to share with friends, relatives, and admirers,
fans, and forget that, “there’s no crying in baseball”, which is a clichéd kind of thing that
got thrown in there so Tom Hanks could do a little acting. I guess he did it well because
according to Pepper Paire, one of our catchers in the league who was one of the advisors
on, or whatever kind of a role she had as far as the film was concerned, she said, “they
29
�had to have ten takes of that with Tom Hanks because the cameraman would break up
every time he said, “there’s no crying in baseball”.
Interviewer: “So you just got to take it realize, “well, that’s Hollywood”. 42:12
Absolutely, but I’m sorry, but that’s the real clincher in that film, that’s my scene.
Interviewer: “I agree”
So I got better every year, all right? 1953 I’m catching with Fort Wayne, I mean with the
South Band Blue Sox and I catch a perfect game. Jean Faut, who pitched as probably one
of the all time greats in our league, she could play any position, she could hit the ball out
of the ballpark, she could pitch, she had all the pitches in the world, she pitched a perfect
game on September 3rd, 1953 and we beat the Kalamazoo Lassies four to zip in
Kalamazoo on their home turf. 42:56 I’m laughing because I have no idea if she called
the game or if I called the game, but I’m sure she did call her own game, so I take very
little credit for that other than the fact that I managed to hang on to the ball, all right?
People keep asking me who called the game and I said, “well, when Jean Faut’s pitching
she calls her own game and whether or not I called the pitches she liked and she didn’t
you know.
Interviewer: “Yeah, but something you might have noticed in baseball, you have to
have a catcher with the pitcher. It’s essential to the whole thing and she may have
been a great pitcher, but unless somebody was on the other end catching it, I’m
afraid the game would just not be the same.”
Anyway, that’s my big claim to fame. That and hitting one home run in Grand Rapids.
43:42
Interviewer: “I want to hear that one, please.”
30
�I hit one home run in 1953 with South Bend, I think it was—no, maybe it was 1954—all I
remember is that I hit it over the fence, it was in Grand Rapids and it was my one home
run and it might have been in 1954, I think it was in 1954. Anyway, 53 or 54 I got my
one home run in there. 1953 I caught almost the whole season for South Bend and that’s
where the perfect game came in. We were playing a shorter—I think maybe six teams,
but we weren’t playing as many games and attendance was starting to fade and I think, if
I’m not mistaken, when I reheard Ken Burns, they had it on PBS again, they talked in
there about the fact that in the early 1950’s all the major league ballparks had problems
with attendance. 44:42 So, I’m trying to put together—people want to know why we
quit playing and I hadn’t realized that the attendance had really fallen off in major league
baseball in the early fifties. So, it stands to reason that we wouldn’t have people coming
out to the ballpark either. They didn’t give any reason for it, but they said there was a
major drop off in all major league attendance during the early fifties, so obviously that
happened with us as well, so 1953 the season was shortened, 1954 I got traded back to
Fort Wayne. I didn’t ask why, I just picked up my stuff and went and Bill Allington was
out manager then and you’ve probably heard his name because he’s the manager in the
league over the years that everybody said, “if somebody cracked open his skull little
baseball would roll out”. I mean, he was a taskmaster, I don’t know if he did spot
quizzes, but he had the rulebook and he expected you to know the rules, he did a lot of
teaching and he was the manager of the infamous Rockford Peaches for many years and
then he came to us in 1954. 45:45 He said, “Lois, I’ve got a catcher, you’re too fast
you’re going to be a left fielder”, and he made me into an outfielder. I didn’t –well, I
roamed well and I was pretty quick, I had to make up for my other lack of strength and
31
�other things by being fairly quick, so I could read where the ball was going to go and
made some pretty good catches out there and I could throw fairly accurately and in left
field you didn’t need a cannon for an arm, only the right—that’s the interesting thing
about playing right field, you know when you’re a kid it’s the worst place to be and when
you’re in the majors it’s the best outfield position because you have to have the greatest
arm and you got to hit and do other things. Left field was a good place for me because I
could handle everything he needed and I hit. There’s something I want to share with you
if we’ve got time. I’m playing left field and we’ve been playing with this ten inch ball
and all of a sudden, around the fourth of July, I think it was a couple of days after the
fourth of July, it was around the fourth of July in 1954 and all of a sudden we get a nine
inch regulation baseball. 47:00 I’ve talked to the gals and I can’t get anybody for the life
of me, able to explain whether or not they ever really practiced with a nine inch ball. It
just sort of appeared. We got to the ballpark, the baselines had been extended, the
pitchers mound had been moved back to sixty feet when we had been playing with it a
little shorter than that. Same old bats and same old uniform, but they moved the outfield
fences back and they kept playing with the distance so they could—I remember hearing
bill Allington say, “If you can hit a home run, we got to move the fences back”, but the
thing that I haven’t been really able to digest is how we could go from a major change
from a ten inch ball to a nine inch ball and change the distances everywhere and not ever
have practiced like two or three weeks before in the mornings or sometime with this nine
inch ball, but it just appeared and bingo there we are with a whole new game. 48:02 I
don’t know what the newspapers or the radio, we had those two venues, but no television,
but what they had to say about it. I would like to go back sometime and do some
32
�research to find out how it happened. I know it happened because of the fan appeal and
they wanted to see if they could bring some more people into the—I think most of the
changes that were made over the years were made primarily to bring more people into the
ballpark. Softball wasn’t a novelty, but boy, throwing it sidearm from a distance with a
smaller ball that’s kind of different. The second part of my theory, since I’m allowed, is
that these managers knew of the athletic ability of the gals they had playing the game. I
don’t think they ever would have tried to change the game if they didn’t think the gals
could handle it. 48:51
Interviewer: “How did it end for you? How did you find out that it was the end for
you particularly?”
Well, fortunately I was playing left field and I think it was around the sixteenth of
August, around the middle of August after we’d made this giant switch to the nine inch
ball, that somebody in South Bend, the catcher, got injured, so they asked me if I would
go back and finish the season because they needed a catcher. They were—we kept losing
the catchers, but anyway, I got shifted back and I said, “Well you know if they need a
catcher, I don’t think I have much choice”. I had to go and that was the year that fort
Wayne was just knocking the socks off the ball you know. They had Jo Weaver and
Betty Weaver Foss and Jean Weaver and these four hundred hitters and home runs every
time you turned around and locomotors on the base pad I’ll tell you that and so, I went
back and finished the season in South Bend. Now, Fort Wayne won the pennant and I
remember going back and I don’t know, I don’t think—they had a banquet or something,
but they did give me—I got a scrapbook and it says Daisies “54” and you know I’m not
sure—I got a couple of things that they gave to the players. 50:08 But I finished at
33
�South Bend and it kind of finished with a whimper and I’m not sure we did anything in
South Bend to end thing s up, but I’ll ask Mary, my roommate, my married roommate
with I don’t know how many grand kids she has now, but we’re rooming together and
I’ll see if she has any feeling about how we ended. It sort of ended with a whimper,
actually. Now the thing that probably didn’t bother me as much was because I was
getting ready to go, I got my degree now and I’m out in the world, I got another goal in
mind and I was fortunate enough that I was very successful in education and went on and
they were four wonderful years, don’t misunderstand me, but they’re not my entire life,
they don’t define me. 50:52 My four years don’t define me.
Interviewer: “That’s an interesting transition for my next question. You say it
ended with kind of a whimper, but you had a life ahead of you and you and you had
a very productive life ahead of you. A lot of the WWII vets that I’ve interviewed
and even some of the women ball players, say that they didn’t really think about
their baseball experience as they’re going through their life. Is that true of you too?
Did you tell people you were a baseball player when you were an educator?”
I did on occasion and the response was, “oh, you’re a softball player”, and you’ll get that
from everybody. No one knew who we were and where we were or what we did. I
wasn’t until Penny Marshall came out with the film and people were coming out of the
woodwork, former students and colleagues say, “Why didn’t you ever tell us you played
baseball?” I said, “If you had been listening, I did tell you that early on and you
responded with “you played softball”? And I never could explain it well enough to get
you to understand that it really wasn’t softball, it was baseball”, and once the film came
out—51:58
34
�Interviewer: “That’s my next question. What effect did the film have on you? I
don’t mean a critical review of the film, do you know what I’m talking about?”
I’m going to give you a critical review of it. I’m in Eugene, Oregon and I get a call from
a local newspaper, the head of the sports section calls me and he said, “ I would like to
take you to see the film and the first showing is Saturday morning at eleven o’clock”,
and at a local theater, and I said, “well”, my mother lived with me for twenty-two years
and she was still in good health then, so this is 1992, so I said, “yes”, and I obviously
hadn’t seen it and hadn’t been invited to any of the premieres. I’m way out there where it
takes a pony express to get to me and no one had ever bothered and I didn’t get to
Cooperstown to the exhibit because my boss was an Englishman and he didn’t think—I
suppose if I had said it was soccer he may have—or cricket, there you go, but he didn’t
think I should go. 53:03 I had to work with the guy for another eight years or so and I
didn’t think it was worth circumventing him to go to the Dean, which I could have done,
but I opted not to do that.
Interviewer: “It shows that you didn’t think it was that big of a deal I guess, huh?”
Well, I had to work with this gentleman for eight years and he was in charge and he could
have made life very uncomfortable for me for eight years. There we are back to the
movie, so I meet him at the theater and we go in. The first thing is the music you know,
overpowering music. I don’t know how many minutes we were into the film before I was
crying and in another two minutes I was sobbing. I sobbed, and I don’t mean cried, I
sobbed through the whole movie. Talk about embarrassed, losing my cool, I just cried
and cried my heart out. I just brought back everything I hadn’t thought about for—since
1954 to 1992. 54:03 It all came rushing forward you know, excluding the hyperbole, the
35
�feel of it, and like I just said, I just sobbed for—I sobbed through the end and then I was
embarrassed and he wanted to buy me a cup of coffee or something and my eyes were
two big red blobs here and I told him I was sorry and I was embarrassed, but it just
brought back this rush of memories and I’m sorry, this is just the way I reacted to it.
54:35
Interviewer: “How did that movie change you or change your perception of your
participation after that. You’re past the crying and the emotional element and now
you’re into day two, day three and the rest of your life. Did it have any effect on you
in terms of other people reacting? You said your students were talking about it and
stuff. How did it change you?”
A number of people wanted to go see the movie with me. They wanted to know, all of a
sudden there’s this big gigantic interest in this movie. It made lots of money because it’s
still being shown every two months or three on cable TV, so anyway, I went, I must have
gone eight times with different groups of people who wanted to go see the movie and
we’d go have ice cream or something afterwards and they could ask me about the movie
and then I got to—I was a chapter in a book and the university bought the book, that
chapter to put in their quarterly. 55:36 Then more people had a chance to read it, but
immediately after the film, I think I went seven or eight times with different groups of
people and I was considerably calmer and could explain what happened and then people
started asking me if I would come and speak to this group, the rotary, there are three
rotary’s in Eugene and while the film was still being shown I got invited to speak to a lot
of-Interviewer: “Were you at all surprised at all of this?”
36
�No, honestly no, because finally our story got told and it was the truth. Now, there are
some things that are out of order and probably the most significant is the fact that in 1943
we would have been throwing underhand and not overhand, but there was a germ of
truth, even Stillwell, you know I played for the Blue Sox and Jean Faut, the pitcher for
the no hit game, was married to the manager, Karl Winsch, and they had a little boy and
he traveled on the bus with us, but he was a little boy of the fifties and not the 1990’s, so
you never heard of him, you never knew that he was there, so they took some of these
ideas and did the Hollywood thing to him, which I could stand. 56:46 I’ve always said
that it captured, that film captured the spirit of the league and the spirit of the women that
played, the spirit of the game, those three things, the spirit of the league, the spirit of the
game that we played and the spirit of the women that played because not being nit
picking, I thought Penny Marshall did us just fine. 57:08 I was pleased with her film.
Interviewer: “Looking back now and for the record, Where do you think this all fits
into the whole scheme of things for—and lets get really big here, you’re an educator,
I’m an educator and we know that in human history there are moments, some of
them tragic, some of them great, some of them—you look at the time line of history
and there’s all these things. We’re blips on these things, but where does the All
American Girls Professional Baseball League fit into all of this?”
Well, I think we need to stop taking credit for being a pioneer in women’s sports. Title
IX is what did this for us. Title IX came along in 1972 and any parent that’s got a child,
male or female, that can get a college scholarship now, we can’t—you know if you’re
going to get $100,000.00 free scholarship to Stanford or Ohio State or Michigan or
wherever it is, it’s not to be sneezed at and that came with Title IX. 58:12 Also, the
37
�proliferation of other women’s professional sports came with Title IX because until
Penny Marshall got to us, nobody knew we even existed, so I see us a sort of a blip, a
very fond, warm, fuzzy blip or whatever you would like to call it, an anomaly actually
and I’m often asked if women belong playing with men’s teams and no, I don’t see that
because of lestosterone and lack of and levers, you know, they’re bigger, they’re
stronger etc., but I do think if the ever wanted to have an al American girls, Women’s
professional baseball team again, and there were enough women who were interested in
doing it, we have professional women’s fast pitch softball and most of those gals, that’s
the way the original All Americans got started. 59:06 Most of them made the transition
to the smaller ball and the longer distances, some couldn’t, but I don’t think we should e
taking credit, in retrospect, for something that really title nine, through federal funding
and balancing the men’s and the women’s varsity sports at the collegiate level, and the
high school levels, helped balance out.
Interviewer: “But you have to admit the number of women who credit you,
regardless of whether the film was there or not. I talk to athletes, women athletes at
our university. There’s a coach at our university who you were a major inspiration
to and knew enough about the fact before the movie.”
We may be an inspiration and I’m not saying that our story won’t inspire prospective
women athletes, and I think we do everything we can to be the voice as well as the face
of the AAGPBL speaking as often as we can, but yes, sure I would love to be an
inspiration to a group of Babe Ruth baseball ten year olds, girls, and boys.
Interviewer: “I’m trying to get my mind around that.”
38
�Interviewer: “Let me ask you the last question and I really appreciate you put up
with this for so long. You mentioned earlier about how you played baseball as a
child and you enjoyed it. You played the baseball as a professional with the idea
that you were going to go to college, you had a larger picture involved, but now,
looking back at that experience, and now you have pre-baseball professional
baseball after you watch the things you’ve accomplished that you’re proud of, this is
just one of them, I know that, but where does that fit in your life?” 1:02
Oh, it’s extremely important because I’ve been sports oriented you know, it’s right up
there with some other awards, alright? It was only four years out of my like, but it’s a
significant four years. I wouldn’t trade those four years for forty of some of my other
years, and it’s even better now that we’re older because we can embellish all those stories
that we’ve been telling over the years you know? You really did get to third base, but I
tagged you, no you didn’t, it was second base, what do you mean, you never got to third
base. It’s a significant part of my life. I simply meant—what I’m saying is it doesn’t
define my total life, but it’s a significant portion of it and I’m extremely proud of it. I
wear my ring with pride and thank god I had those four years and I probably would have
played four more if they had them because it worked out well being a teacher and coming
back and I was getting better. 2:10 That made me feel good.
39
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Interviews
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. History Department
Description
An account of the resource
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was started by Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, during World War II to fill the void left by the departure of most of the best male baseball players for military service. Players were recruited from across the country, and the league was successful enough to be able to continue on after the war. The league had teams based in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, and operated between 1943 and 1954. The 1954 season ended with only the Fort Wayne, South Bend, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Rockford teams remaining. The League gave over 600 women athletes the opportunity to play professional baseball. Many of the players went on to successful careers, and the league itself provided an important precedent for later efforts to promote women's sports.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/484">All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Collection, (RHC-58)</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Sports for women
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League--Personal narratives
Oral history
Baseball players--Minnesota
Baseball players--Indiana
Baseball players--Wisconsin
Baseball players--Michigan
Baseball players--Illinois
Baseball for women--United States
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-58
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-10-02
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Smither, James
Boring, Frank
Relation
A related resource
Veterans History Project (U.S.)
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-58_LYoungen
Title
A name given to the resource
Youngen, Lois (Interview transcript and video), 2010
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Youngen, Lois
Description
An account of the resource
Lois Youngen was born in a small town in Ohio in 1933. She grew up playing baseball with boys from her town, and played on a boys' team for several years before switching to a girls' softball team while in high school. She learned about the All American League while visiting a relative in Fort Wayne in 1950. She joined the league the next year and played for Fort Wayne, Kenosha and South Bend as a catcher and outfielder until the league folded in 1954. She used the money she earned as a player to go to college, and eventually earned a doctorate in Physical Education and taught at the University of Oregon.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Boring, Frank (Interviewer)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral history
Veterans History Project (U.S.)
Video recordings
All-American Girls Professional Baseball League--Personal narratives
Baseball for women--United States
Baseball
Sports for women
World War, 1939-1945
Baseball players--Indiana
Baseball players--Wisconsin
Women
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Relation
A related resource
Veterans History Project (U.S.)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-08-04
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/484">All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Collection, (RHC-55)</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
video/mp4