Read Online Girls of Summer: In Their Own League by Lois Browne - Free Book Online Page A

“windmill” pitching style (full arm rotation, like a ferris wheel) by throwing balls through a tire suspended from a tree . She was living with a mother who was 100 percent against her going anywhere.
    “She was from Poland, very old fashioned,” says Wisniewski . “She said only bad girls left home. There was no way she was going to let me go. I told her that if I didn’t go with her blessing, I’d go without, and join the army for three years. She asked me how long these ball games were going to take, and I said they’d take three months.”
    Wisniewski was back five months later, and played ball every summer for ten years thereafter.
    After the first season, Wrigley’s scouts branched out as publicity of a successful summer spread.
    The Californians were brought in en masse by Bill Allington, who had managed women’s softball teams in L.A. and would later in the season begin a long League career as manager .
    The first six players he brought from California were Alma “Gabby” Ziegler, Faye Dancer, Pepper Paire, Dorothy “Dottie” Wiltse, Annabelle Lee and Thelma “Tiby” Eisen . Allington preceded them, and was waiting at Chicago’s Union Station.
    “Gosh,” he said, “you gals have an awful lot of luggage here for two weeks.”
    Allington knew full well that all of them would make the League. But Ziegler, a wiry little second baseman who became the sparkplug of the Milwaukee Chicks, remembers that they worked themselves hard:  “We wanted to make an impression. I got a terrible blister on my foot, and Faye Dancer wanted to cut it off. To show you how dumb I was, I let her. She used a pair of scissors. Everyone thought I was crazy, and it didn’t help much. But I made the team.”
    In fact, all of them proved to be first-rate ball players, boosting Allington’s reputation as a man who knew baseball talent.
    As for Pepper Paire, she found the prospect of playing ball all summer long – and getting paid in cash, not groceries – appealing.
    “We thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” she says .
    Paire was undaunted by the Midwest’s less than temperate conditions. The stocky redhead, who became one of the League’s most reliable catchers, was also its balladeer. It was she who wrote the All-American’s hummable “Victory Song,” which players sing today at their reunions.
    Paire’s first season was fraught with peril . She was assigned to the Minneapolis Millerettes, in whose service she collided with a Racine Belles player, thus fracturing her collarbone. Racine was much criticized for this, because the Belle was attempting to score an unimportant run, late in a game that Minneapolis had plainly lost.
    The injury forced Paire to spend most of the season recuperating, along with Faye Dancer, who had cracked a vertebra by running full-tilt into one of her fellow Minneapolis outfielders in pursuit of a fly ball .
    The invalids spent most of the schedule in Kenosha, appearing often in the stands with players from the Comets, another team riddled with injuries . If you were out of action, the League’s rule against fraternizing with opposing players was temporarily waived.
    When firing on all cylinders, however , Paire maintained an active social life.
    “I had a boyfriend in every port,” she once recounted . “Only one time did I ever get caught. This was in the days of gas rationing, so you didn’t expect to see someone you knew in one town show up in another. But in this game in Grand Rapids, one of my teammates and I looked up, and there sat four guys we knew from elsewhere. Well, that type of thing wasn’t done in our day, but we handled it like big-leaguers. We hid under the grandstand.”
    And what of Dancer, who’d performed emergency surgery on the luckless Gabby Ziegler?  Her exploits were many and varied .
    Dancer was a talented outfielder whose pranks on and off the field threatened to overshadow her baseball career . She talks like a wound-up toy.
    “My brother says I