Mickey & Me (11 page)

EVERYTHING YOU READ IN THIS BOOK WAS TRUE
.
THAT
is, except for the stuff I made up. It's only fair to let you know which was which.

First, the facts…

Mickey, Connie, Tiby, Merle, and all the other players in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) were real people. So was Max Carey, the Chicks' manager. During World War II, when so many men were away fighting, suddenly American women had the opportunity to enter fields in which they were not welcome before, and professional baseball was one of them. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley (whose father started
the gum company in 1891 with $32) founded the AAGPBL in 1943, mainly to keep baseball alive during the war.

After two seasons, with the war won (almost a year after D day, Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945), Wrigley sold the league to his advertising director for $10,000. The AAGPBL thrived in the late 1940s, and closed up shop in 1954.

Why did it die? Lots of reasons. Americans had new things to do. Drive-in movies. Bowling. NASCAR started in 1948. The NBA was founded in 1949. Young women were getting married and starting a baby boom.

And, of course, there was television. In 1945, there were only seven thousand TV sets in the entire United States. Six years later, there were ten million. People could watch major-league games for free in their living rooms, so why go out for anything less? Many men's minor-league teams went out of business at this time, too.

After their poor start in 1944, the Milwaukee Chicks came back strong. They went on to finish the season at 70-45 and win the AAGPBL championship, beating the Kenosha Comets in a seven-game play-off.

Sadly, that was the only year the team existed. Due to poor attendance, they were moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945, where they remained for ten years. Wrigley really did hire the Milwaukee Symphony to play before games, in
hopes of increasing attendance. It didn't work.

Borchert Field (which was actually nowhere near the train station) was torn down in 1954. Interstate 43 now covers the site.

Connie Wisniewski was the AAGPBL player of the year in 1945. When the league switched to overhand pitching in 1948, she became an outfielder and led the league in homers one season. After her baseball career, she worked at General Motors and also opened a restaurant called The Chicks' Dugout. She died in 1995.

Alma “Ziggy” Ziegler was player of the year in 1950. She became a court reporter. Thelma “Tiby” Eisen worked at General Telephone in California, where she became one of the first female equipment installers.

Merle “the Blond Bombshell” Keagle died from cancer in her thirties. Doris Tetzlaff became a physical education teacher and died in 1998.

Chicks manager Max Carey was president of the AAGPBL from 1945 to 1949. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1961 and died in 1976.

A fifteen-year-old boy named Joe Nuxhall really did pitch for the Cincinnati Reds on June 10, 1944. He didn't last one inning, walking five batters and giving up two hits. But Nuxhall came back in 1952 and had a productive fifteen-year career in the majors.

The players in the AAGPBL really were required to go to charm school. Everything the charm school
lady said in this book came directly from
The Charm School Guide,
which was given to all the players in the league. The rules of conduct are also real, though I shortened them.

The facts in this book came from interviewing Mickey Maguire's son Rick Chapman; her sister Jean Cobb; and her teammates Tiby Eisen, Alma Ziegler, Vivian Anderson, Viola Thompson Griffin, Helen Steffes, Helen Hannah, and Sarah Lonetto.

I also got a lot of information by reading
A Whole New Ball Game by Sue Macy; Girls of Summer: In Their Own League
by Lois Browne;
When Women Played Hardball
by Susan E. Johnson;
Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball
by Barbara Gregorich;
Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History
by Gai Ingham Berlage; and W. C. Madden's reference books about the AAGPBL.

After the AAGPBL folded, the women went on with their lives and rarely talked about the league. Mickey Maguire never even told her children that she had been a professional ballplayer! The surviving players held a fortieth anniversary celebration in 1982, and in 1988 the Baseball Hall of Fame included them in a new exhibit titled “Women and Baseball.” But the world didn't really learn about the AAGPBL until 1992, when the movie
A League of Their Own was released.

You may have found it odd that the women of the AAGPBL were called “girls” in this book. In 1944, women were often called girls and did not take offense at it. Times have changed.

Now the fictions…

The teams of the AAGPBL did not have mascots, and men were never allowed to play. I must admit I made that part up to get Stosh into the action.

While Chicks first baseman Dolores Klosowski did break her leg during a game in 1944, it happened a week after the events in this book, on June 14.

While Toni Stone was a real person and was eighteen years old in 1944, she never tried out for the AAGPBL. She did play second base in the Negro League in 1953, hitting a respectible .243. Two African-American women worked out with the AAGPBL in 1951, but they were not signed up.

The news that the Allies captured Rome was actually in the newspapers the same day that D day was reported, but for the sake of the story, I placed it a few days later.

Finally, Joe Stoshack and the characters from the present day do not exist. Time travel is impossible with baseball cards or any other way, darn it.

One more thing…

It's true that three days after D day, Mickey Maguire got the news that her husband, Tom, had been killed in action, and she insisted on playing that day. But there is more to the story. Two
months later, Tom Maguire was found in Italy—alive! He had suffered severe burns while fighting.

A year after Tom came home, he and Mickey divorced, partly because he wanted her to quit baseball. Mickey played until 1949. By that time, she had married a man named George Chapman. They had six children. Their son Rick tried out for the Kansas City Royals in 1970. Mickey loved horses and trained many of them. She died on August 2, 1981.