Rohr: St. Charles home holds history of lesbian couple with AAGPBL ties
From Lauren Rohr at the Southtown Daily Herald on May 8, 2020:
The night her family moved into their historic St. Charles home last summer, Elizabeth Suwanski sauntered into the dining room to admire a display case of memorabilia from its original owners.
The glass box came with the house, full of memories from another century, another lifetime. It was a 1910 time capsule of sorts, the contents of which were found hidden in the walls just a few years earlier by neighbors who bought and rehabbed the property.
But as Suwanski studied the relics, she noticed one didn’t quite fit with the rest: a 1948 baseball card of Terry Donahue, catcher and utility infielder for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
Donahue, a neighbor later explained, had lived for decades in that very house on Third Avenue with her longtime partner, Pat Henschel. The pair kept their lesbian relationship hidden for more than 60 years, presenting themselves as close friends and roommates before coming out to their families in their 80s.
Their love story is now the subject of a Netflix documentary, “A Secret Love,” woven together with snapshots of Donahue’s baseball career, the couple’s work at an interior design firm and the LGBTQ community in Chicago in the 1950s.
Read the full article here: https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20200508/their-st-charles-home-held-the-history-of-lesbian-couple-featured-in-netflix-doc
Originally published: May 11, 2020. Last Updated: May 11, 2020.