Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Bob Kann The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League  July 24, 2012 UP743    cc >> Today we are pleased to introduce and host local author Bob Kann as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's "History Sandwiched In" lecture series and Joyce Westerman's contribution to local and national culture. Wisconsin Innovations is made possible by a grant from the Madison Community Foundation, generous gifts from American Family Insurance, the Evjue Foundation, and Sentry Equipment Corporation, with additional support from Ann Koski, Promega Corporation, Madison Gas & Electric Foundation, US Bank, and Wisconsin Public Radio. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or of the museum's employees. Please join me in welcoming Bob to the stage as he shares stories from the life of Wisconsin native Joyce Westerman. [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you. How many of you have seen the movie "A League of Their Own" about women who played professional baseball? Thank you. I wrote a book called "Joyce Westerman: Baseball Hero." Joyce is an 86-year-old friend of mine from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who played for eight years in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. And today I'd like to share Joyce's story with you. Joyce's story is a story about the Great Depression, it's a story about life on the home front in World War II, it's a story about the changing roles of women in society, but most of all, it's a story about baseball. From 1943 to 1954, more than 550 women from Canada and the United States played professional baseball. 

They played hard, they played competitively, they played to win, and people loved them for doing it. They were famous. They had to sign autographs quite commonly. They left their homes, their families, their jobs to do something they loved to do: play baseball. Joyce and many of the women said they would have played for free, but they were happy to get paid. For many of the women, like Joyce, playing professional baseball was a dream come true. Joyce was born in 1925 in Kenosha. When she was five years old her uncle Lon took a ball and he threw it to her and she caught it. She threw it back to her uncle Lon, he threw it to her, they played catch, and Joyce was hooked. Joyce began to dream of becoming a professional baseball player. 

She would listen to the Chicago Cubs on the radio. She didn't know there wasn't professional baseball for women that existed back then, but Joyce, like many little girls and boys, still dreamed about becoming professional baseball players. Little did Joyce know that 14 years later, in fact, her dream would come true. When Joyce was six, she attended first grade at Roosevelt Elementary School in Kenosha, and when she played baseball at recess, she could hit the ball farther than all the boys she played with. And Joyce was embarrassed because girls were not supposed to be better than boys playing baseball, but Joyce just couldn't help it. She was a natural athlete. Well, around that same time in 1931, the Depression took root, Joyce's father, who was working at Nash Motors, which eventually became American Motors, the car manufacturing plant, was laid off as were thousands of auto workers throughout the United States because nobody was buying cars anymore. Joyce's mother began to bake bread and other baked goods, and Joyce and her three older sisters, she'd eventually have four younger brothers as well, went door to door in the neighborhoods in Kenosha trying to sell bread to help them make ends meet. But it wasn't enough. They lost their house. 

They moved to the country in Pleasant Prairie just outside of Kenosha where Joyce's grandfather had a ramshackle house. They could only live in half of it because the other half was too dilapidated. And her uncle owned some land nearby. And Joyce spent her childhood, a delightfully happy poverty stricken childhood, living in the country, romping on 100 acres of land. House heated by a potbellied stove. No running water. No electricity. They were so poor, when the coal trains would go by, Joyce and her mother and sisters would drop everything and they would go collect some of the coal that feel off the train so they could feed their potbellied stove. Joyce, more than anything else, loved to be with her father. So whatever her father did, that's what Joyce did. 

By the time she was eight years old she was working one end of that two-handed saw with her dad on the other end. By the time she was eight years old she could change the spark plugs on a car, change the oil on a car. When Joyce was 10, she and her sisters had to contribute to make ends meet with the family so they began spending summers working on neighbors' farms earning 10 cents an hour, sometimes working eight hours a day pulling weeds, picking strawberries, picking tomatoes. By the time Joyce was 14 she'd been spending a ton of time on her uncle's farm next door just because she loved farm life. And by the time she was 14 Joyce was lifting heavy bags of grain off of the delivery trucks. She was driving tractors. She was plowing the fields. Joyce was a small but very, very strong determined farm girl. When Joyce was 12, her Aunt Mabel invited her to play on a baseball team with girls about 10 or 12 years older than her. Joyce said sure. 

Joyce played catcher, and it turns out that, although Joyce hadn't played much baseball, she was just as good as these other girls as well, even that were 10 or 12 years older than her. 1943 Joyce graduated from high school, and, like her dad and older sisters, she wanted to get a job at Nash Motors, but she was only 17, 18 was the youngest you could be to work there. So for six months she worked on her uncle's farm. The day she turned 18 she went to the employment office at Nash Motors, and they said come back later. Because the war had begun, it was easy for them to get employees. People from the south were now flocking to the automobile plants in the north, and so it was easy for factories to get workers. So they hired the local people last. Joyce went back day after day after day. The way she explained it, they got tired of my asking and they finally hired her. So at that time, during the war, Nash Motors was now making airplanes engines for the war effort instead of automobile efforts, and Joyce had a job polishing pistons on the assembly line. 

Joyce also began to play softball on the company baseball team. And that ultimately opened the opportunity for her to become a professional baseball player. Shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, the commissioner of Major League Baseball contacted President Roosevelt and asked him if he thought men should continue to play baseball while the war was being fought. President Roosevelt was a baseball fan. He said, absolutely. He said the workers are going to need diversions and recreational activities to keep their minds off the war and the hard work that they're going to be doing. So the men played baseball in the summer of 1942, but by the fall of 1942 more than 10 million men throughout the company had enlisted or been drafted into the armed forces. Half of the Major League Baseball players were now in the military, and PK Wrigley, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, began to get worried. It was clear that they weren't going to be able to continue Major League Baseball, at least on the terms that they had been hosting it, and he worried that if there wasn't Major League Baseball during the war, when the war was over people would lose interest in baseball. So he concocted this scheme that instead of having men play, they would have women play professional baseball. 

The initial idea, you would have the women play in places like Wrigley Field, the Major League Baseball stadiums, but they soon realized that they weren't going to draw large enough audiences to fill those stadiums. So eventually after lost of research and conversations, they eventually decided to start the league with four teams from the Midwest. In 1943, the league began with the Kenosha Comets, the Racine Belles, the Grand Rapids Chicks, I'm sorry, they came later, the South Bend Blue Sox, and the Rockford Peaches. Nice names, huh? It gets worse. [LAUGHTER] They had them in Midwestern cities because they figured two things. One is they needed to be close because of travel because they traveled by train then because gas was being rationed. And Joyce actually talked about getting off the trains and being covered with soot from the trains before the war was over. And also, they figured in these small industrial cities there would be a local fan base that would support the local teams. The idea was they were going to do some, I would say, blending of softball that women were used to playing because there were thousands and thousands of women softball teams throughout the United States. Chicago is really a hotbed for women's softball which is what gave Wrigley the idea. 

But they wanted to make the game more exciting than they considered women's softball to be. So they kept this ball, the 12-inch ball. They moved the distance between the pitcher's mound and home plate a little further to make it easier for the batters to hit. They made the bases a little bit longer. The women, which they couldn't do in softball, were allowed to take lead-offs. They're allowed to steal bases. Through the 12-year history of the league, every year they tinkered with the rules to try and make it more exciting. So, after about six or seven years, the ball kept getting smaller and smaller until, eventually, it was this size, the same size that men used when they played baseball. They tinkered with the distances between the bases, between the pitcher's mound and home plate. They also initially had the women pitch the way they did in softball, which was underhand like this. 

About 1947, they then had the women start pitching sidearm, and about 1948, women were pitching overhand just like the men. Madison had one woman who played in the league. Her name was Phyllis Koehn. Her nickname? Sugar. Sugar Koehn. [LAUGHTER] So Phyllis started out as an outfielder. She worked at the Red Dot factory as a secretary and she heard there was professional baseball. She tried out. She made the league. First couple of years she played outfield. 

About 1946 she began pitching when it was underhand. She was great. She won 22 games. 1947, they're switching to sidearm. She's still going underhand. She wins another 16 games. 1948, everybody's pitching sidearm and they're starting to go overhand. She couldn't throw overhand. It killed her arm. She had a dead arm. 

She was out of the league the next year. And that wasn't uncommon for women who could pitch underhand not being able to make the transition to pitching overhand. The big idea behind the league is people would pay to see women who would play like men but would look like women. [LAUGHTER] To make sure they played like men, the coaches were often former Major League Baseball players. They taught them and trained them the same way they would train men to play baseball. To make sure that they looked and acted like women, they designed a special uniform. On the cover of the book, Joyce is wearing her uniform, and you can see that she's wearing a skirt. All of the women had to wear skirts throughout the duration of the league, and there are awful, awful pictures of the bruises and the bloody scabs that they had. They played just as hard as the men, but these were not the well-kept fields that we have today. Remember, these are the 1940s and 1950s with gravel and they just tore their legs to shreds. 

And they all thought it was stupid, but they knew that's what they had to do to play and they wanted to play. Also, to make sure that they acted like women, the first couple of years they all had to attend charm school. [LAUGHTER] Initially taught by Helena Rubinstein of beauty salon fame who represented the epitome of the female ideal. So these baseball players learned how to apply makeup, how to choose clothing, how to walk very properly with a book on their head. Most of them thought this was ludicrous, but some of them came from small towns throughout the United States and Canada, they never knew these things before, so in fact they were appreciative that they actually got to learn them. So, that was the idea behind the league. The league began play in 1943. So, second year of the league, 1944, Joyce is playing for the company team in Kenosha, working at Nash Motors, and she receives a phone call from somebody from the Kenosha Comets saying that they had lots of injuries, could she fill in for a weekend. Now, Joyce has heard about the league, although she'd never seen them play, and she said sure. When I interviewed Joyce, I asked her how did they find out about you? She said I have no idea. 

My guess, though, is that one of the scouts saw her because the way they found players in the United States and Canada, they took the Major League Baseball scouts from baseball and they hired them to scout for the United States and Canada to find good female baseball players. And they looked a lot in the industrial leagues and found many players there. The first year, there were four teams. Sixty girls played in the league out of about 280 that had been hand-picked to try out. So, Joyce decides, okay, I'll check it out. So she goes there to watch the Kenosha Comets, and the first thing she sees is all these, I don't know if I should call them girls or women, they were about anywhere from 17, in their 20s, she sees all these women playing baseball wearing skirts. In her family, she said, wearing a skirt in public was a no-no. You did not show bare legs in public. She thought, I'm not going to do that. But then she thought, well, shoot, they can do it, I can do it; I want to play. 

So Joyce played that weekend. She batted three times. She struck out three times. She hit one foul tip, and she thought she was really lucky to have done that well. Afterward, Joyce starts thinking, you know, if they can play professional baseball, why can't I play professional baseball? I'm going to try out for the league the next year. Joyce did no training during the next year to make herself any more able or ready to compete to play in the league. The next year, 1945, she tried out in Racine and Kenosha. She was one of about three or four girls out of about 60 who tried out. These tryouts were going on all over the United States and Canada to make the league. And Joyce was one of three or four who are chosen to go to Chicago to actually be in the final tryouts to see if she can make it into the league. 

So, Joyce then was going to have to take the train from Kenosha to Chicago, and Joyce, like many of the girls, was terrified. Not of the competition but of Chicago. Chicago was the big city. One girl, there's a story, she was taking the train from Oklahoma to Chicago. She got off the train, she looked at the big city, she looked at the bustle of the people, she went right back on the train, and she went right back to Oklahoma. Joyce had been to Chicago once before. Her aunt had taken her there for a baseball game. But she was 19 years old, she'd never left home except to go visit her grandparents in Door County, and she was scared. She didn't know if anybody was going to greet her, what was going to happen when she got there. Well, she took the train there, and, in fact, they did greet her. 

They took her to her hotel, the first hotel she'd ever stayed in, and Joyce went and tried out for the league. And she did something very, very astute. Joyce kind of was sizing up the situation there and she looks around and she thought, you know, the hardest position to play in baseball is the catcher. The catcher is the one who's got to protect the plate, meaning there are going to be a lot of collisions and you're going to have to be strong. You have to be smart because you have to tell the pitcher what to pitch. You're involved in all of the action. It's the hardest position, there can't be many girls who actually are decent catchers. Joyce decides, I'm going to be a catcher. So Joyce tries out. She leaves the tryouts after two weeks. 

They didn't tell anyone. What they did was they sent out letters, and they would do this throughout the league. You didn't know from year to year if you were going to play the next year. You would get a letter to find out, in fact, if you were invited back to play. Joyce gets back to Kenosha and she made it. She's invited to play. So it's the summer of 1945. The war is still going on. They did their exhibition games at army camps in Illinois, and during that summer when they played, the two teams would line up along first base and along third base, by home plate they would form a V to represent the V for victory. War bonds were sold at the games. 

The league was promoted as being a patriotic kind of thing to support the men at war by supporting the baseball players who supported them. So that first year, Joyce played with now the Grand Rapids Chicks. Joyce, that first year, barely played. The catcher on the team, if you saw the movie, there was a seen about a women, a catcher, Mickey Maguire who's husband had died during the war, there's a very poignant scene in the movie, well Mickey Maguire was the catcher on Joyce's team who Joyce was the backup for. Joyce barely played. She worked very, very hard. She tried to learn everything by watching Mickey Maguire and playing very hard. She was just timid, timid. She said if I said five words the whole year, that would be an exaggeration. And Joyce absolutely loved it. 

She desperately hoped she would get invited back again to play the next year. And she was. Second year, Joyce is now playing with the South Bend Blue Sox. Spring training that year is in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in an old army barracks. It was inundated with cockroaches so the girls slept at night with the lights on because then the cockroaches wouldn't come out. They called different halls Cockroach Alley and names like that. This was the first time Joyce had really traveled outside of the Midwest, and the two most striking things for her were the poverty she saw in the south that reminded her of the Depression in Kenosha, and also the red soil because being a farm girl she was very attentive to the color of the soil, and they didn't have red soil in Wisconsin. So she's with the South Bend Blue Sox, and Joyce begins to get very, very nervous. So nervous that it made her sick. She was nervous that she just wasn't going to be good enough, that she wasn't going to get invited back, and she had a problem as a catcher. 

Typically as a catcher, if you're throwing out a runner who's stealing a base, you go from your crouch and you throw it like this. That was very unnatural for Joyce. Joyce could throw very comfortably sidearm but not overhand. But her coaches insisted that she throw it overhand, and it was never comfortable for her. So she developed what's called a hitch, meaning she'd go like this, she'd hesitate for a second, and then she'd throw it. And that hesitation often made the difference between a runner being able to steal a base off of her or not. And so she had a hitch. She worried about having a hitch. Everyone told her you should worry about having the hitch, you got to get rid of the hitch, and it was sort of driving her crazy. She actually had to get some medication. 

She became anemic. It was a very, very hard year for her. In the end of the year, in part, was the hardest part. Joyce was totally, doesn't complain about anything and she's one of the most modest, accomplished human beings I've ever met, and I'll tell you more about that later. During the last two weeks of the season, the Fort Wayne Daisies, another team in the league, were short a few players, and so Joyce was loaned from South Bend to Fort Wayne. So Joyce goes to Fort Wayne, and they want to have her practice throwing to second base. So they have one of the players on her team, Faye Dancer, stand in the batter's box with the bat and they tell Faye Dancer just stand there and look like you're batting but don't swing at the ball. Well, they're just sort of lobbing the ball so Faye Dancer figures, ah, can't do any harm. Joyce doesn't have any equipment on, a mask or anything, so Faye Dancer just does a light swing and the bat just tips the top of the ball like this, and it goes back and it hits Joyce right here and it breaks her nose. She gets all bandaged up. 

A couple of days later, Joyce is going to play again and she breaks her finger. So, Joyce winds up not playing that year. Joyce's worst memory, which happened a couple of years later, breaking fingers for catchers was very common. I can't tell you how tough these women were. They would play through any kind of injury that was humanly possible. So Joyce had broken a finger, but another catcher on her team had even worse injuries so they asked Joyce if she would play. So they taped together three of her fingers like this and she was the catcher and she barely could hold the ball and she basically had no power to throw it. And the other team figured that out, and so they stole more bases off of her that game than any other game in the history of the league. And Joyce is still, this was more than 50 years later that I interviewed her, she has painful, painful memories of all these bases being stolen off her. She was angry the public system announcer didn't explain why it was that they were allowed to steal bases off her because she was very embarrassed and she knew it wasn't her fault. 

So, we're at 1947, Joyce's third year. She's now with the Peoria Red Wings, and she becomes the starting catcher. The league usually played about 120 games. They played seven days a week, double-headers on Sundays, one nine-inning game, one seven-inning game. The only time they took a day off during the summer is if it rained, basically. Just one day after the other traveling. And travel was hard. It wasn't the comfortable trains and eventually buses we have today. They might drive all night going from Peoria to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then get up the next day and have to play a night game and do the same thing again. It was grueling, grueling travel. 

So, Joyce is the starting catcher. She leads her team in doubles. She leads her team in triples. She leads her team in runs batted in. She has a terrific season. She's developing more confidence. She's now more socially relaxed. She's making friends. 1948 she's with the same team again for the first time. She's with Peoria. 

She develops close friendships with three of the girls on the team. They rent a house together. Everything is going great, and Joyce gets traded. She's heartbroken. She loved being with these girls in this house. She said, in baseball there's an expression: there's no crying in baseball. She said, I cried. Nonetheless, she was traded to the Racine Belles, and there was a silver lining: it wasn't far from where her parents still lived on the farm. So she got to spend a lot of time with them. She adjusted to playing with Racine. 

She had been traded primarily because of that hitch. Everything she could do as a catcher, she could do superbly so that when she was with Racine, she was the best defensive catcher in the league. She led the league in defenses as a catcher, except throwing to second base was always her nemesis. So, she plays with Racine in 1948-1949. Then 1950, two very, very significant events occur in Joyce's life. One is she got married. She married Ray Westerman who was working at Nash Motors along with her dad and her sister. When they were engaged, Joyce told Ray that their family had lost their home during the Depression, she wasn't going to let that happen to her. She said we're going to build our own house. So they bought some land from her grandfather. 

They went to the public library. They took out a book: "How to Build a House." [LAUGHTER] They spend the next seven years when they weren't working, and whatever money they had building a house that they would wind up living in for more than 30 years. Parenthetically, when I went to interview Joyce about two years ago, my second interview, I was interviewing her in the dining room next to her kitchen, and when I went in there she started apologizing because all the drawers from the kitchen were on the floor. And she explained that the runners on the drawers weren't working, and she just broke a drill bit as she was trying to repair them. To say the least, Joyce had and has a can-do attitude. So, the other thing that happened was Joyce was now playing back with the Peoria Red Wings. In the first two months, she barely played at all. The hitch she had catching they just found prohibitive. It was too easy. Can we close the door please, Beth? Thank you. 

 It was too easy to steal bases off of her. So she sat on the bench. And then in the middle of the season, about July, one of the players on the team got pregnant. And so they had to switch around players. So one day, instead of having Joyce play catcher, they put her in right field. She got two hits and they won the game. Next day, this is working out, they put her in right field again. She gets three hits. They win again. Next day, two more hits. 

They win again. Within a month, Joyce is playing right field every day. She's one of the top 10 hitters in the league, and she winds up finishing the season leading her team in hitting in all sorts of categories. My theory, and Joyce said maybe, maybe not, is that when Joyce no longer had to worry about catching and doing that dreaded throw to second or third base, it took the pressure off her and she could relax and concentrate on being the player that she was capable of being. So 1951, Joyce is now with the South Bend Blue Sox. They now make her the cleanup hitter. This is for the power, the position in the batting order where you put the power hitter on the team. Joyce has this great season. She's hitting well. They move her to first base. 

She's a fantastic fielder. 1952, Joyce's last year in the league. She's debating whether she's going to play again because being away summers means she was away from her new husband Ray. Ray was very, very supportive of her career, but she kind of missed him. And the league was having problems, but they convinced her. They made her an offer she couldn't refuse. And so Joyce played one more season with the South Bend Blue Sox. Her team is pretty good but not great. One week right before the playoffs, one of the players has an argument with the manager, and she quits the team. Five of the other players on the team quit in solidarity with that girl. 

So instead of having a team of 18 players as they go into the playoffs, which would have been typical, they only had 12 players, and some of the best players were those who had left the team. So the way the playoffs worked is you'd play two series. First there would be a best of five, and then there would be, is that right? No, best of three, first one to win two. And then after that, there would be two teams that would play for the championship best of five. Well, as a researcher, I had this amazing stroke of fortune having Joyce Westerman as my subject. I had no idea about this until well into the project. During Joyce's eight years she played in the league, her hobby was scrapbooks. For every year she played in the league, she had a scrapbook of all the newspaper articles related to her and her team, all of the baseball box scores. From the time I've been five years old I have read baseball box scores. I can't tell you how much of my life I have wasted reading baseball box scores, but it had a purpose because I could read the box scores for all of the games in the playoffs in Joyce's final season, and I could look at Joyce's specific contributions in every single game. 

And lo and behold, I didn't know this after I had interviewed Joyce because she's so modest, in fact what a good player she was. I thought she was okay, and I didn't care. I was with a celebrity baseball player. It didn't matter to me. It turns out, in every game her team won in the playoffs, she had a major contribution. And her team that year wound up winning the championship. Here's what Joyce said about winning the championship. She said, "It was unbelievable. I was so excited. Everybody just pitched in. 

It was desire. We showed people we could do it. We won first, because we had the desire to win, and second, because we were determined to show the players that left that we could win without them." Well, that was Joyce's last season in the league, and indeed she went out on top. She eventually got a job back at what was now American Motors at a time when women weren't welcome in the workforce, but she got the job anyway and they did everything possible to discourage Joyce and many women in the workforce from remaining in the workforce. So at American Motors, that meant initially they gave her a job as a welder. They eventually gave her a job lifting these heavy engines that would go on the assembly line, and Joyce said I don't care, whatever they're going to throw at me, I knew I could handle it and she did. Eventually, she had two daughters. When one of her daughters was about seven, Joyce pulled out her uniform, and her daughter said we want to see you play, mom. So Joyce began playing softball. Eventually, she began playing on teams with her daughters until actually through college with them. 

She coached at Carthage College, worked for the United States Post Office until she retired in the mid-'80s. In 1988 the National Baseball Hall of Fame had a special exhibit about women in baseball that honored Joyce and the women who played professional baseball. And then in 1992, Penny Marshall's movie, "A League of Their Own," came out, and suddenly people throughout the world new about the great accomplishments of the women who played professional baseball. And all of them who are still around have been on the speaking and celebrity circuit ever since. In 1972, the Title IX law was passed in the United States which opened up opportunities for girls and young women to play high school and college sports, and millions and millions have benefited as a result of that law. In 1974, Little League baseball changed their rules so that girls could now play baseball, and thousands and thousands of girls have played baseball. Now, I don't think you could say that Joyce and the women from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League are specifically responsible for those revolutionary opportunities opened for girls and women to play sports, but they paved the way. What they showed was that women are tough enough to play hard sports like baseball. Joyce and the women in her league represent to me the best of their generation in terms of athletic ability, and in terms of a will to win, and a spirit to achieve. I think, in fact, they were pioneers in the whole world of women sports, and I believe it is fair to say they were in a league of their own. 

Thank you. [APPLAUSE]