I grew up on the stories of Grandpa Spot and Nana Rae's childhood together as newsies, Papa Beau's journey from their farm in Mississippi to Brooklyn, Papa Cap's adventures as one of the famed Pinkerton Detectives, Uncle Peb's escapades in the Navy and Uncle Jackson's exploits as a pilot in the Great War. I wanted to do something with my life that mattered...I wanted to be somebody. I didn't want to just be another housewife like my mother or aunts. Cooking made me lose my appetite and cleaning bored me and my sewing, well, I won't even tell you how bad that was.
What I would rather do was join my male cousins in a game of baseball, though in the beginning I wasn't very good. That was until Uncle Johnny took me under his wing and became my own personal coach. By the age of fifteen, I was a better than most of my cousins and the neighborhood boys made a big show of not wanting me on their team whenever they played against a new team. But what they really wanted to do was knock the socks off the other team with how good I was. I may have been tiny, but I had surprising strength. Uncle Johnny told me that if I had been a boy I would have made the pros for sure!
But that wasn't what I wanted to hear. It just wasn't fair that because I was a girl I couldn't play baseball professionally. I was just as good as they were! I knew because Uncle Johnny had been friends with several of the Yankees players for a number of years and I was sometimes invited to practice with them. Mama wasn't really too happy about that, but I did it anyway. I just wanted to play ball.
One day one of the Yankees players told me about how he came up from a farm league. I knew then what I had to do! I had to run away, pretend to be a boy and get on one of the farm teams. And that's just what I did. Since most of the farm teams didn't have locker rooms it was easy enough to keep my identity hidden. But it didn't take long for Daddy to find me. I looked up during one game to see him in the stands giving me that look that he had long ago perfected, but he didn't pull me from the game. I played harder that game than I ever had before. After the game he took me to his hotel room and gave me a whipping that I wasn't soon to forget. Looking back I can't say that I didn't deserve it.
After that Mama and Daddy limited my time with the baseball players as much as they possibly could. Much to the displeasure of my parents I insisted on playing baseball in college. There were only a few women's teams in colleges in those days, and I insisted on going to one of them. But in 1943, when I was twenty-one, I heard through my connections with the Yankees about the new All-American Girls Baseball League. See, with all the men going off to war, the team owners wanted a way to keep baseball alive while they were gone. At last a way to professionally play the game that I loved! Seeing as I was of age, I didn't ask my parents' permission, I simply told them that I was going.
I easily made one of the teams and was soon traveling around playing eight games a week. I was on cloud nine playing a game that I loved and was good at. Don't get me wrong, we didn't just play ball...we also had to go to charm school and dress a certain way. There were strict guidelines as to how we wore our hair, which had to be kept long, and makeup. We even had chaperones that traveled with us. I could handle all that to be allowed to play baseball. Everywhere we went we were treated like celebrities...we were the heroines of every little girl, and most of their mothers too.
Over the first couple of years several girls left the teams to get married or start families and I scoffed at them all. I mean, did they even realize what they were giving up? We were born for this...and we were making 55 a week! That kind of money went a long way! But then one day it happened to me too. I had been playing in the league for about five years at that point. By then the men had returned from war and, like in the factories, women had stepped off the field for the men to play once again. At least we were lucky that the owners wanted to try and keep women's baseball alive.
Some of the returning players were curious and came to watch us play...and on that particular day I glanced at the stands as I always did as I came up to bat and there he was staring back at me. I'm not even really sure how long we stood there staring at each other, but once I got to the plate the first two pitches were strikes. I didn't know who this man was, but he had managed to throw off my game. Glaring up at him and pulling my cap tighter on my head, I turned back to the pitcher and knocked the next ball clear out of the park with the bases loaded! That ought to show those men!
He was waiting for me outside the locker room after the game, wanting to take me out to eat. He had even gone to the team chaperone for permission! Of all the nerve! I went with him and actually had a good time, even though I had tried to convince myself that I wouldn't. It soon became a tradition that anytime we were in the same town for a game we would meet up for food. Then one day Brad asked me if I knew a Wayne Conlon that had played in a farm league for a very short time. We both had a good laugh as I told him that Wayne Conlon and I were one and the same. Our friendship slowly deepened and then grew into love.
Mama threw a fit and Nana merely laughed, but Brad and I were married on a baseball diamond with our teammates as our attendants. I didn't wear a traditional wedding dress...one of my teammates made me a white version of our short-skirted baseball uniforms, though I did agree to wear the pearls that both Nana and Mama wore on their wedding days. After the ceremony, we played a game of baseball...his team against mine. And can you guess who won that game?