Canadians in the AAGPBL

The Callaghan sisters, Helen (left) and Margaret. (British Columbia Sports Hall of Fame)

 

The young women gathered on the grass in Chicago shagged flies and fielded grounders. They played scrub games under the watchful eyes of coaches. Even the practice games were not without incident, as Gladys “Terrie” Davis, a batting star in Toronto’s amateur softball leagues, discovered during one at-bat.

“I’ve been playing ball for over 12 years,” she told a reporter. “I never had a scratch or a bruise. So what happens? The first time I come to bat here at Wrigley Field, I pop a foul tip. Bang! Down comes the ball right on my eye. Just look at the shiner.”1

Davis, who, the reporter assured his readers, “will have no trouble pounding out homers while looking as petite and feminine as a French mannequin,”2 covered the injury as best she could with makeup.

In May 1943, as the world was gripped by World War II, young women athletes were lured to Wrigley to try out for a roster spot in a new professional softball circuit. The All-American Girls Softball League (later the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League) was formed in February 1943 by chewing-gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley. With the future of major-league baseball uncertain as players enlisted or were drafted to fight in the war, the new league planned to provide entertainment on the home front.

Scouts fanned out across the continent to evaluate ballplayers in the top women’s leagues. The best 280 ballplayers were invited to Chicago for a final test. Some players were worldly, while others were as green as the verdant lawn on which they played. For more than one, Wrigley Field was the destination of their first train trip. They hailed from 17 states and four Canadian provinces. In the end, 60 athletes made the cut in the league’s first year. Fourteen of them, including Davis, were from Canada.

The league evolved over the years, switching from underhand pitching to side-arm to overhand. As well, the size of the ball shrank and the distance between bases grew, as the game they played came to more resemble baseball than softball, a change reflected in changes to the league’s name. The teams were mostly based in midsized cities in the American Midwest. The league folded in 1954, a victim of poor business decisions and the growing popularity of television, which brought major-league baseball into the living room.

Over the years, the league was forgotten, as the former players returned to more conventional lives as breadwinners and homemakers. Many did not even tell their children about their earlier careers as professional athletes. In 1987 documentary filmmaker Kelly Candaele (pronounced can-dell) released A League of Their Own, featuring the careers of his Vancouver-born mother (Helen Callaghan) and aunt (Margaret Callaghan).

Five years later, Penny Marshall directed a Hollywood movie of the same name starring Madonna, Geena Davis, and Tom Hanks. The movie gave the world the immortal (if debatable) line, “There’s no crying in baseball.” It also revived interest in the trailblazing women who played professional baseball. Most former players went about everyday lives in obscurity. Many had not even told their children. “I never said a word all those years,” said Betty (née Berthiaume) Wicken, who had been recruited out of Regina, Saskatchewan. “Nobody seemed to know about it, it never came up, so I didn’t say anything.”3

The movie changed that. The National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooper-stown, New York, opened a permanent exhibit on women in baseball, while the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame at St. Marys, Ontario, inducted all 68 Canadian women to have been placed on a team roster.

Most of the athletes came from the three Prairie provinces, where competitive women’s softball circuits were in full swing. Over the league’s history, 28 players came from Saskatchewan, 13 from Manitoba, and 10 from Alberta. Another 10 came from Ontario, where women’s softball was well established at lakefront Sunnyside Park in westside Toronto. British Columbia produced six players, while a lone player (Alice Janowski of Sherbrooke) hailed from Quebec.

They were clerks, teachers, stenographers, farm girls, and housewives. At least one (Margaret Callaghan) gave up a factory job building warplanes to play pro ball. They were scouted at their amateur league games and in tournaments played in the United States. Most were unmarried.

They played for teams based in midsized cities in the American Midwest: South Bend, Indiana; Rockford, Illinois; Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Later expansion and franchise moves saw teams in Milwaukee; Minneapolis; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Chicago, Springfield, and Peoria, Illinois; and Muskegon, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

They played for teams with such nicknames as Chicks, Comets, Peaches, Daisies, and Belles. Instead of traditional wool flannels, they wore pastel uniforms consisting of a short-sleeved, one-piece, belted, flared tunic with a bodice flap that buttoned on the left side, leaving room for a circular crest on the chest. They suffered scrapes on their exposed legs from sliding on tough dirt infields. There were even beauty instructions provided them on how best to cover such abrasions.

In the early years, the players attended evening classes on posture, etiquette, and deportment at the Helena Rubenstein Beauty School. The players were told to be “neat and presentable in your appearance and dress, be clean and wholesome in appearance, be polite and considerate in your daily contacts, avoid noisy, rough, and raucous talk and actions and be in all respects an All-American girl.”4

There was to be no smoking or drinking in public, no fraternizing unescorted with men, no uniforms in the stands, no slacks off the field. It could be said their training included the application of makeup, as well as the tag. “We were supposed to play like men,” Helen Callaghan once told People magazine, “but look like women.”5 The “Lipstick League,” as some newspapers called it, promised “beauty at the bat, pulchritude on the pitcher’s mound, and glamour in the gardens.”6

The presence of a team chaperone and the threat of fines for not following the rules of conduct ($5 for a first offense, $10 for a second, suspension for a third) did not prevent young athletes away from home from behaving like young athletes away from home. “We did a lot of short-sheeting,” Marge Callaghan (later Maxwell) said. “We’d hide brassieres or slip a rubber snake into a chaperone’s bed. We were always sneaking out on dates. How could they keep track of 19 girls at once?”7

Canadian players were prominent from the first pitch. In the league’s 1943 debut season, the batting title was won by Gladys “Terrie” Davis of Toronto, who hit .332, while the pitching title was claimed by Helen Nicol of the hamlet of Ardley, Alberta, who went 31-8 with an earned-run average of 1.81. (The next season she again won the pitching title, dropping her ERA to 0.93.)

Some won recognition for achievement in a single game, such as Betty (née Petryna) Allen, from a farm near Liberty, Saskatchewan, who recorded 12 assists in a game at third base in 1949.8

The players sometimes hailed from families with interesting biographies. Mildred Warwick of Regina was an outstanding third baseman in the league’s first two seasons. She left the league after marrying Ken McAuley, a goaltender for the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League. Two of her brothers — Grant, nicknamed Knobby, and Billy — also played for the Rangers. The pair were joined by a third brother, Dick, in winning the world hockey championship with British Columbia’s Penticton Vees in 1955.

Utility catcher Terry Donahue, of Melaval, Saskatchewan, spent four seasons in the league before settling down in a Chicago suburb while working for an interior design firm. Her longtime roommate was Pat Henschel, another Saskatchewan farmgirl who had cheered on Donahue’s exploits on the diamond.

Even as social mores changed, the pair insisted they were no more than friends, before coming out to their families in 2009. Their romance was at last shared with the world in the touching documentary A Secret Love, which aired on Netflix.

Each of the 68 Canadian women to have played in the All-American League has a story. Here are some of them.

MARY “BONNIE” BAKER

Mary Baker was a store clerk who left Saskatchewan in 1943 to become a professional baseball catcher. Her dark good looks made her a favorite choice when a player was needed for publicity photos. She became the face of the league, posing for Life and Sport magazines and appearing on television’s What’s My Line? Male reporters dubbed her “Pretty Bonnie Baker,” giving the league what its owners most desired, a touch of glamour. Many women have charm. Not so many can also whack a ball. She played in 930 regular-season games with an additional 18 playoff appearances. She was the only player to become a manager, coaching the Kalamazoo Lassies for a season even as she fulfilled her daily fielding duties.

A beauty in front of the lens, she was a pugnacious presence behind the plate. The catcher was a fan favorite for her spirited arguments with umpires. Those debates were often conducted in small sandstorms generated by the stomping of her feet, which soiled the polished shoes of the arbiter. The 5-foot-5, 133-pound fireplug hit only one home run in her nine-season career. She finished with an unimpressive .235 batting average, but she had a discerning eye – striking out just six times in 256 at-bats in her rookie season – and was a threat to score once on base. Baker stole 506 bases in her career, including 94 in 94 games in 1946, when she was named the league’s all-star catcher.

Baker spent the first seven years of her career with the South Bend Blue Sox. Her first visit to Bendix Field reminded her of her hometown. “The dust was blowing and it was always very windy, but that didn’t hinder me,” she once said. “I felt like I was playing in Yankee Stadium.”9

Mary Geraldine George was born in Regina on July 10, 1919.10 Her father was a mechanic, and both parents were Hungarian immigrants. Her mother died when she was just 11. She had five brothers and four sisters, all of them athletic. She was blessed with a powerful right throwing arm, once hurling a baseball 343 feet. At age 13 she began playing on softball teams with adult women. In 1938 she joined the Army and Navy Bombers, a team sponsored by a department store in which she worked as a $17-per-week clerk. Under manager Arnold “Kappy” Kaplan, the Bombers won the provincial softball championship in 1940.

Baker (then married) and other Saskatchewan players were scouted by Hubert “Hub” Bishop, a well-known hockey scout who was helping his friend, Johnny Gottselig, find worthy players for the new professional league. Gottselig, who was born in Odessa in the Russian Empire and later moved to Regina, was an NHL left winger known for his stick-handling prowess. He became one of the league’s first four original managers, guiding the Racine Belles to the league’s first championship.

With her husband serving overseas in the air force, Baker was persuaded by her mother-in-law to accept the invitation to attend the original tryout at Wrigley Field even without gaining her husband’s permission. The adventure was a welcome hiatus from wartime doldrums. There was nothing to do on the Prairies with men away during the war “except play ball and chase grasshoppers.”11 Baker was popular with the fans, who once presented her with an automatic washer manufactured in a South Bend factory. “The fans treated us as though we were stars,” she recalled. “They took us into their homes and treated us as family.”12

Her younger sister, Genevieve, known as Gene, played in 15 games as a catcher for Muskegon in 1948. Three years later, she married football player Jim McFaul of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

Baker was traded to Muskegon in 1950, serving as a playing manager. (The league later barred women from serving as managers.) After taking a year off to have a baby, Baker returned for a ninth and final season. She hit just .208, and for the only time in her career had more strikeouts (22) than stolen bases (20). Baker returned to her hometown, where she led the Regina Legions softball team to provincial and Western Canadian titles in 1953. The team earned a berth in the World Ladies Softball championship in Toronto, losing a one-game showdown for the Canadian title to Toronto Kalyx. Baker hit .500 in the tournament (8 hits in 16 at-bats) in a losing cause.

A broken ankle suffered in 1958 ended Baker’s sandlot days. A noted bowler and curler, she managed the Wheat City Curling Club for 25 years. In 1953 she joined two of her brothers in operating the Hunt Club, a restaurant in a Regina mansion. Late in 1964, Baker was hired as sports director of radio station CKRM. She was introduced as Canada’s first woman sportscaster to the all-male reporting corps at a press conference held by the Roughriders to announce the signing of Eagle Keys as head coach. Baker insisted that she be treated as one of the boys.

“I’ve been on radio and television many times before, but it’s always me who was being interviewed,” she said. “I’ve never been the interviewer.”13

On August 17, 1952, Baker appeared on the popular television program What’s My Line? in which a panel of celebrities question a mystery guest to determine the guest’s occupation. “In the course of your work, do you ever take a part of your costume off?” asked panelist Hal Block. “Yes,” she replied, referring to her catcher’s equipment, as a live audience howled with laughter. While Block’s line of interrogation presumed Baker to be a striptease dancer, panelist Dorothy Kilgallen correctly guessed her occupation. “I certainly think Mrs. Baker is an argument for allowing women to play in the big leagues,” Kilgallen said.14

At Baker’s memorial service in 2003, mourners rose after eulogies to observe a seventh-inning stretch during which they sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

HELEN NICOL FOX

The first pitching star of the All-American league was a former Edmonton department-store clerk who made her first trip to the United States to attend the inaugural tryouts at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The right-handed pitcher thrived even as the league’s game evolved from softball to baseball, with the ball shrinking, the pitching distance lengthening, and the delivery changing from underhand to side-arm to overhand. She spent 10 seasons in the league.

“She had to be very athletic and very committed to the game, especially to make the transition from underhand to overhand, and to do it well,” said sports historian Merrie Fidler of Trinidad, California, who has written a history of the league. “She had speed and control. She was outstanding.”15

Helen Margaret Nicol was born on May 9, 1920, in Ardley, a hamlet in central Alberta about 115 miles north of Calgary. She was the middle child and only daughter born to the former Elizabeth May Dunn and Alexander Nicol, who both immigrated to Canada from Scotland. While attending high school in Calgary, she skated for the Avenue Grills, a hockey team sponsored by a local café, leading the women’s city league in goal scoring.

She was also a top provincial speed skater, yet it was on the softball diamond that she excelled, being first recruited at age 13 to pitch for a senior women’s team. She once struck out 23 batters from the Mannville (Alberta) Merrymakers in a playoff game. Much in demand as a hurler, she threw for the Calgary Chinooks, Edmonton Army and Navy Pats, and the Edmonton Walk-Rites, for whom she won the deciding game of the Western Canadian championships in 1942.

When Nicol was assigned to the Kenosha Comets, her All-American contract offered her a princely $85 per week, considerably more than she made as a clerk. The 5-foot-3, 130-pound pitcher was described by the local newspaper as “a handsome brunette, dark-brown hair, violet-blue eyes, and a most charming personality … a refreshing outdoor girl.”16

She became an immediate fan favorite in the Wisconsin city. “I have always enjoyed playing softball more than anything else, and dreamed of someday spending an entire summer vacation doing just that,” she said. “But to be paid for doing it, and be given such a wonderful trip all the way from Calgary to Kenosha still seems like a page torn from a fairy-tale book.”17

Nicol recorded an impressive 31-8 record to help the Comets win the league pennant in the inaugural season. She led the league in several pitching categories, including victories, win percentage (.795), earned-run average (1.81), games pitched (47), innings pitched (348), and strikeouts (220). She was named league pitcher of the year.

In the All-Americans’ first all-star game, played under temporary lights at Wrigley Field, Nicol hurled three scoreless innings as Wisconsin defeated a combined Illinois-Indiana team 16-0.

She repeated as pitcher of the year in her sophomore campaign with a 17-11 record and a miserly 0.93 ERA. Fox retired after 10 seasons split between the Comets and the Rockford Peaches. When the circuit ceased operation after the 1954 season, she held career league pitching records for games (313) and innings pitched (2,382), as well as strikeouts (1,076). She was also the career leader in wins (163) and losses (118). The 13 consecutive victories she recorded in 1943 went unmatched.

Nicol stayed in Kenosha, working for Motorola and the American Motors Corporation. She later moved to warmer Arizona, where she won several golf tournaments. On her 101st birthday, she received a video greeting from Rockford Mayor Tom McNamara, who acknowledged her “indelible impact on the city of Rockford and the Rockford Peaches.”18

MARGARET AND HELEN CALLAGHAN

On a pleasant late May afternoon in 1944, young Helen Callaghan posed along the baseline with her Millerettes teammates at Nicollet Park in Minneapolis. Their opponents, the Rockford Peaches, lined up along the foul line in front of their dugout. The two teams formed a colorful V-for-Victory pattern. The mayors wife threw out the first pitch and was presented with a bouquet of flowers in return. It was Opening Day for the expansion Millerettes, one of two new teams added for the All-American leagues second season.

One of the recruits was 21-year-old Callaghan, a spritely 5-foot-1, 115-pound outfielder with the speed of an Olympic sprinter. Callaghan was a star of Vancouver softball, and had been scouted at the world championship tournament in Detroit the previous summer. She left her family in British Columbia for the adventure of a life on the road, earning $65 weekly to play a game she loved.

On the day of her first game, the front page of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune heralded the impending capture of an Axis capital with a banner headline reading: YANKS WITHIN 16 MILES OF ROME. Inside the paper, on page 6 of the May 27, 1944, edition, a smaller headline on the sports page reminded readers: “It’s Powder Puff Baseball in Nicollet Opener Today.”19

The Millerettes lost the opener 5-4, though Callaghan, batting second in the order, hit a single and caught a fly ball in right field. Her team, coached by former major-league catcher Bubber Jonnard, struggled on the field and at the gate, spending the last half of the season as an orphan team, playing all its games on the road.

By then, Helen had been joined by her sister Margaret, older by 15 months, who got permission to leave her wartime job as a supervisor at the Boeing plant on Sea Island, south of Vancouver, where bomber midsections and flying boats were built by 7,000 workers. The sisters lived out of suitcases through the end of the summer. The itinerant nature of the job didn’t bother Helen, who hit .287 to finish in second place in batting in the league.

The Millerettes were dispersed after the season, with both sisters assigned to a new team based in Fort Wayne. The Daisies had several Canadians on the roster, including Penny O’Brian, known as “Peanuts,” an outfielder from Edmonton; Arleene “Johnnie” Johnson, an infielder from Ogema, Saskatchewan; Audrey “Dimples” Haine, a pitcher from Winnipeg; Agnes “Aggie” Zurowski, a pitcher from Regina; Betty Carveth, a pitcher from Edmonton; and Yolande “YoYo” Teillet, a catcher of Métis ancestry from St. Vital, Manitoba, whose grandfather was Louis Riel’s younger brother, and whose own brother served as Canada’s veterans affairs minister under Prime Minister Lester Pearson.

The team chaperone was Helen Rauner, who had been an executive with the International Harvester Company, while the manager was Bill “Wamby” Wambsganss, who earned a place in baseball lore by making an unassisted triple play in the 1920 World Series.

The Callaghan sisters had different temperaments. Helen was quiet, serious, competitive, while Marge was brassy, chatty, and fun-loving. Helen, a left-handed batter, was a proficient drag bunter, maybe the best in the league at deadening a pitch along the first-base line as she raced for the bag. Marge was a home-run-slugging power hitter who is credited with hitting one of the longest homers in league history.

The sisters grew up in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, where they were the fourth and fifth of six children born to the former Hazel Terryberry, a scavenger’s daughter, and Albert Callaghan, a machinist and truck driver. He was Catholic, she Protestant. They were wed in a Baptist ceremony at the bride’s parental home. The girls were aged 9 and 8 when their mother died on December 6, 1932. Their father remarried and the former Ann Muirhead delivered three more children to the family.

Marge and Helen played soccer, basketball, lacrosse, softball, and hockey through elementary school and on into their years at King Edward High. Helen was a track star as a sprinter. They became top players on the sandlot at Centre Park, a rickety wood stadium on the northeast corner of Broadway and Fir. (An oddity of the park was an outfield fence that in left-center field jutted back toward home plate to make room for the side yard of a house on West Eighth Avenue.) Both sisters played for the Young Liberals, a club sponsored by the political party. On a tour of Oregon in the summer of 1940, a newspaper heralded the pair as the outstanding “feminine athletes” of Vancouver, describing the 17-year-old Helen as “pretty” and a “handy hitter.”20

Three years later, their team, by then renamed Mutuals after a new sponsor, won the Western Canadian championship to qualify for the Amateur Softball Association world championship to be held at Detroit. The Mutuals played exhibition games on Vancouver Island to raise funds for the war effort before playing warm-up games as they crossed the Prairies on their way to the Motor City, where they defeated teams from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Cleveland before being eliminated by the New Orleans Jax, who went on to win the tournament. Baseball scouts attended the tournament. They were looking for talent to stock a new women’s pro league.

Back in Vancouver, the sisters had moved out of the family home to join a third adult sister in sharing rooms in an east-side house. All three worked in the sprawling Boeing Production Plant, which still stands at what is now the South Terminal of Vancouver International Airport. Marge, who wore a kerchief on her head and coveralls like Rosie the Riveter, supervised women who stamped identification numbers on bomber parts, ensuring that they did not damage the fragile sheet metal through eagerness or carelessness. She earned $24 a week for eight hours a day for six days a week. When she finally got permission to leave her war job and join Helen with the Millerettes, she tripled her pay.

The presence of her sister at a game possibly saved Helen’s life. She collapsed at home plate during a game in 1946. She was diagnosed with a tubai pregnancy, and when doctors were unable to reach her husband Bob Candaele, whom she had married after the 1945 season, Marge gave permission for the surgery. Helen recovered, only to skip the 1947 season with a successful pregnancy. Helen played five seasons in the league, while Marge lasted eight seasons and played in more than 700 games.

After retiring as a player, Helen dedicated herself to raising a family of five sons, four of them born in Vancouver. She and the league’s other pioneering women went back to ordinary lives as teachers, secretaries, and homemakers, their story forgotten for three decades.

Helen’s youngest, Casey Candaele, showed an aptitude for baseball. His mother encouraged him to develop his skills. “She would hit ground balls and throw batting practice,” he said. “I thought everybody’s mom was doing that.” She told him she had played pro ball, but he always assumed she meant softball. As he grew older and started being scouted himself, she emphasized the importance of being mentally tough and alert. “You can’t have a bad day hustling,” he remembers her telling him.21

Candaele was signed by the Montréal Expos, and after a few seasons in the minors made his major-league debut in 1986. He was small – listed at 5-feet-9 – but versatile, playing all three outfield positions and three of four in the infield. He hustled, earning the nickname Mighty Mite, and finished fourth in rookie-of-the-year voting in 1987.

Montréal fans adopted him as a favorite for his spirited play. He showed a rare display of power in one game at Olympic Stadium, punching the ball into the front-row seat adjacent to the right-field foul pole, just beyond the 330-foot sign down the line, for his first home run. The team replaced the blue outfield seat with a yellow one to jokingly mark the shortest home run in the stadium’s history. The only other yellow chair in the outfield was about 200 feet farther away from home plate to mark where Willie Stargell hit the stadium’s longest home run.

Even after Candaele made the big leagues, his mother had advice for the young hitter. She disdained the light bat he used, thinner than the one she’d used decades earlier. “What are you using this toothpick for?” she’d ask. “This thing is too small.”22 Whatever Candaele’s limitations as a player, he remains forever the only major leaguer whose mother played professional baseball.

TOM HAWTHORN is a speechwriter for British Columbia Premier John Horgan. Hawthorn’s most recent book is The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country: The Centennial of 1967 (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2017). He served as archival researcher for the 2003 National Film Board documentary Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story. He is an honorary member of Havana’s Peña Deportivo. Born in Winnipeg, he moved to Montréal as a boy, and used earnings from two paper routes to attend Montréal Expos games at Jarry Park.

 

Notes

1 “Rockford Is Entry; Play Opens Saturday,” Belvidere (Illinois) Daily Republican, May 28, 1943: 6.

2 “Rockford Is Entry; Play Opens Saturday.”

3 Tom Hawthorn, “The Girls of Summer,” Vancouver (British Columbia) Province, June 28, 1992: A25.

4 “Charm School,” All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, www.aagpbl.org/history/charm-school, accessed on March 1, 2022.

5 Tom Hawthorn, “Home Runs and Charm School: Baseball’s Girls of Summer,” June 12, 2018, The Tyee, https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2018/06/12/Home-Run-Charm-Baseballs-Girls-Summer/, accessed on March 2, 2022.

6 Jayne Miller, “Girls’ Softball Loop Favors Beauty, Grace as Essential Factors,” Kenosha (Wisconsin) News, May 2 8 , 1943: 8.

7 Tom Hawthorn, “Diamond Days Gone, She’s Still in a League of Her Own,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 7, 2007: S3.

8 “South Bend Takes Third,” Racine (Wisconsin) Journal Times, June 1, 1949: 17.

9 “Field of Dreams,” South Bend (Indiana) Tribune, September 29, 2002: 64.

10 While Baker’s birth year is often listed as 1918, the official Province of Saskatchewan online database gives the year as 1919. “Genealogy Index Searches,” eHealth Saskatchewan, http://genealogy.ehealthsask.ca/vsgs_srch.aspx, accessed on March 3, 2022.

11 Dawn Walton, “Canadian Ball Star Gave U.S. Someone to Cheer,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), December 22, 2003: A1.

12 “Field of Dreams.”

13 “Woman Sports Director for CKRM in Regina,” Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) Star-Phoenix, January 5, 1965: 13.

14 Seamus McFaul, “Mary ‘Bonnie’ Baker on What’s My Line?,” YouTube.com, May 21, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfXG2–b6ys, accessed on March 1, 2022.

15 Merrie Fidler telephone interview with author, August 23,2021.

16 Alma Overholt, “Helen Nicol, Canadian ‘Chucker,’ Gets Results from ‘Wrist Ball,’” Kenosha (Wisconsin) News, June 17, 1943: 8.

17 Overholt.

18 “Mayor Tom McNamara Wishes Rockford Peach Helen Nicol Fox a Happy 101st Birthday,” Rockford Register Star, www.rrstar.com/videos/sports/2021/05/07/mayor-tom-mcnamara-wishes-rockford-peach-helen-nicol-fox-happy-101st-birthday/4995421001/, accessed on March 3,2022.

19 United Press, “It’s Powder Puff Baseball in Nicollet Opener Today,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, May 27, 1944: 6.

20 “Handy Hitter,” Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal, June 25, 1940: 7.

21 Hawthorn, “Home Runs and Charm School.”

22 Hawthorn, “Home Runs and Charm School.”