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

group of ballet dancers as their skirts flare out.”
    Dazzled by this image, the League opted for skirts .
    The final version was apparently designed by Mrs. Wrigley, with the aid of Ann Harnett and Otis Shepherd, the artist responsible for most of Wrigley’s advertising billboards .
    The result was a belted tunic dress with short sleeves that buttoned up the front, but on the left side, leaving the chest free for a circular team logo .
    The dress came in four team colors: pastel shades of green, blue, yellow and peach . Only the Blue Sox and Peaches were fortunate enough to match color and name.
    The skirt was flared and unhemmed . Players were expected to hem it to suit their size, but no shorter than six inches above the knee. Underneath they were elasticized shorts, an absolute necessity given their energetic style of play.
    They wore a small cap with a large peak and stockings rolled to reach just below the knee . It looked like a tennis outfit or, more precisely, a British field hockey uniform.
    The result, according to Marie Keenan, the League secretary, nicely fulfilled Wrigley’s intentions . “We do not want our uniforms to stress sex, but they should be feminine, with emphasis on the clean American sports girl.”
    The sports girls, for their part, found the design ridiculous .
    Dorothy Hunter, playing first base for the Racine Belles, thought some of the players looked “like some old lady walking around with an old-fashioned dress….I was tall enough that mine came right to my knees . Besides, I had heavy legs and I didn’t want to show them off too much.”
    Players stuck to the hem rule at first, but gradually shortened them how they pleased .
    Lucille Moore, the South Bend Blue Sox chaperon, remembers that a lot of people were rather shocked because some of the players showed a lot of thigh . “Each year,” she said, “the hemlines went up and up.”
    The skirts raised eyebrows and created problems .
    Joanne Winter, who was assigned to the Racine Belles, found that they cramped her pitching style . The shoulders tended to bind and the skirt flared out, impeding her release. “It was great from the spectator viewpoint,” she said. “From our standpoint, not many of us enjoyed it. If I’d had a brain and a seamstress, I would have changed it.”
    Perhaps the most serious difficulty – aside from chilblains inevitable when playing games in the Midwest in early spring – was that the skirts made sliding an exercise in masochism. Most players carried terrible abrasions known as “strawberries” – large areas of raw, scraped skin that would scarcely heal before another slide tore them open again.
    At least one manager was so undone by the inevitable pain and suffering that he averted his eyes each time a player came careening into base.
    Occasionally, the League would attempt to tinker with the uniform design, but the solutions were always worse. At one point, Marie Keenan wrote the manufacturer suggesting that the pitcher might be issued a skirt fitted with an elastic band that would hold it close to her legs, into which she could step like a pair of slacks. This tube-dress or stovepipe concept was never inaugurated.
    Some aspects of the uniform had players in stitches . Winter and teammate Sophie Kurys remember their first glimpse of Thelma Walmsley in a catcher’s uniform. Walmsley sported a high pompadour, a popular hairdo of the time. It was without question feminine, but when coupled with a catcher’s mask, it was also absurd.
    On the pitcher’s mound, Joanne Winter recalls, “I turned my back to the plate and then turned around . And there’s Walmsley behind the plate, and I cracked up.”  Kurys looked at Winter and joined in. But soon she was charging the mound, yelling, “Cut it out, will’ya!  Straighten up!”
    “The w hole bunch of them were after me,” says an unrepentant Winter, “but you know how it is when you get the giggles.”
    During the League’s earliest days,