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]