Prusi: AAGPBL veteran Karen Kunkel dies at 83
From Renee Prusi at The Mining Journal on December 14, 2017:
Negaunee native Karen Violetta Kunkel — a trailblazer in women’s sports who was a vital force in bringing U.S. Olympic training to the Upper Peninsula — has died. She was 83.
Kunkel was a professional athlete, a professor, an administrator, a movie adviser, a motivational speaker and a community volunteer. She was a wife, mother and grandmother who survived breast cancer. She was an on-set adviser to the 1992 film “A League of Their Own” as well as a participant in professional women’s baseball in the 1950s.
And she was a lifelong dynamo.
Tom Peters, who served for many years as assistant to the president at Northern Michigan University, said Wednesday that Kunkel deserved much of the credit for the arrival of Olympic athletes to this area. He served with her on the committee that worked hard to get Olympic programs here.
Read the full article here: http://www.miningjournal.net/news/front-page-news/2017/12/a-league-of-her-own/
- Related link: Read the SABR biography of Karen Violetta Kunkel
Originally published: December 15, 2017. Last Updated: December 15, 2017.