Free Crazy Salad by Nora Ephron Page B

syndicated feature that has come a long way since the days when it printed items that were remotely unbelievable. “Believe It Or Not,” it reads, “A New York City housewife has won 300 large dolls for needy youngsters living at the children’s shelter of the Queensboro Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children by her skill at throwing a baseball at amusement parks.”
    Mrs. Gera is a short, slightly chunky woman who wears white socks and loafers; her short blondish-brown hair is curled and lacquered.Around her neck is a gold charm decorated with a bat, mitt, and pearl baseball which she designed and had made up by a local jeweler. Her voice is flat and unanimated, unless, of course, she is talking about baseball: she can describe, exultantly, one of the happiest days of her life, when she had a tooth extracted and was able to stay home from work to see the Pirates win the World Series in 1960. Bernice Gera is, more than anything, a fan, an unabashed, adoring fan, and her obsession with baseball dates back to her childhood, when she played with her older brothers on a sandlot in the Pennsylvania mining town where she was raised. “I have loved, eaten, and lived baseball since I was eight years old,” she says. “Put yourself in my shoes. Say you loved baseball. If you love horses, you can be a jockey. If you love golf or swimming, look at Babe Didrikson and Gertrude Ederle. These are great people and they had an ability. I had it with baseball. What could I do? I couldn’t play. So you write letters, begging for a job, any job, and you keep this up for years and years. There had to be a way for me. So I decided to take up a trade. I decided to take up umpiring.”
    In June, 1967, Mrs. Gera enrolled as a student at the National Sports Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida, a school run by an old-timer named Jim Finley for ballplayers and umpires. The Associated Press sent a reporter to cover Mrs. Gera’s education, and Finley said she was coming along just fine. “She had the habit of carrying on conversations with the players,” said Finley, “but we broke that by giving her push-ups.… I had expected a tomboy when she signed up, but Bernice is every bit a girl.” A few months after her graduation from the Academy, magna cum laude, Mrs. Gera commented good-naturedly on her experience there. “I didn’t have too much trouble,” she said. “The chest protector didn’t fit very well. Those things aren’t made for women. And the players tried to give me a hard time.” (Little jokes about Mrs.Gera’s chest protector were to become the leitmotiv of her saga.) Years passed before Mrs. Gera confessed that the school had actually been a nightmare. “It was a horrible, lonely experience,” she said. “They all thought there was something wrong with me.” At night, in the dormitory, the men threw beer cans and bottles at her bedroom door. On the field, the players hazed her, threw extra balls into the game during a play, spit tobacco juice on her shoes, cursed to try to shake her up. She would call a runner safe and he would snarl, “Bad call. I was out.” Said Mrs. Gera: “When you begin, you take an awful lot of abuse. They make you, to prepare you for the future. I think they overdid it with me. Tobacco juice. That was unnecessary. It all hinged on whether I could take it. I took it. But after, I’d go home and cry like a baby.”
    A diploma in umpiring was worth nothing at all when it came to getting a job, and so in 1968 Mrs. Gera began the first of several lawsuits against professional baseball. Her lawyer, who served without fee, was a New York politician named Mario Biaggi, who called press conference after press conference to announce action after action. Finally, in 1969, Mrs. Gera was given a contract by the New York–Pennsylvania Class A League promising her $200 in wages, $300 in expenses, and five cents a mile for a month, beginning with a twilight doubleheader August 1. The sports