Free Girls of Summer: In Their Own League by Lois Browne

opposition teams, who arrived surly and exhausted after a marathon journey.
    The League realized their folly within weeks and folded the franchise . Rather than disband the team, however, Wrigley kept it going throughout 1944. Its members became known informally though accurately as “the orphans.”
    They lived in hotels and played nothing but on-the-road games, wandering the countryside with their manager, Claude “Bubber” Jonnard .
    Dancer and Jonnard did not see eye to eye . She remembers she “hated him with a passion” because of his play-it-safe style. He didn’t gamble for extra-base hits. His runners were instructed just to get on board; the next batter could bunt her along.
    Dancer’s technique was at odds with Jonnard’s conservative approach: “I liked to play wide-open, hard-sliding but clean . So I ignored him. I just ran on my own, and if I knew an outfielder didn’t have a good arm, I wouldn’t even slow down, I’d just keep going.”
    In 1945, the Minneapolis Millerettes were adopted by Fort Wayne, Indiana . Renamed the Daisies, they lasted in one form or another till the very end of the League.
    Milwaukee, the other new franchise in 1944, also had prob lems. It was accessible enough – a short drive beyond Racine and Kenosha. The city also supported the Milwaukee Brewers, then a Double A team, providing exactly the situation that Wrigley had originally envisioned – the League’s first chance to place a team in a large city to play in a regular baseball stadium. But Milwaukee did not embrace girls’ baseball.
    Local sportswriters adopted a “show me” attitude, and fans weren’t encourag ed to come out and watch. The Chicks were forced to play mostly daytime games, because the Brewers moved in at night, effectively limiting the number of potential spectators.
    The tick et price for All-American games – a dollar, the same as for the Brewsters – was regarded as too high, but Wrigley refused to cut the price. He felt that a reduction would admit defeat and reinforce the idea that girls’ baseball was second-class. Instead, in a bizarre decision, he chose to boost attendance by hiring the Milwaukee Symphony to play a program of classical music prior to the Chicks’ home games.
    In a memo, he urged the team’s backers to mount “a complete show, a woman’s show . If people feel our price is too high, we can say 50 cents is for the show and 50 cents is for the game.”
    The symphony orches tra failed to draw the crowds. The Milwaukee Journal’s sports editor summed up general reaction to the program thus:  “Mr. Wrigley’s minions hope that the music lovers who attend the concerts will not get up and walk out when the girl ballplayers take the field. Mr. Wrigley’s minions, confidentially, think he is nuts, but they would not be quoted for anything – not because P.K. would fire them (he is not that way at all), but because they have thought before that some of the millionaire gum man’s ideas were screwy and have seen those nutty ideas pay off.”
    Wrigley finally realized that he was fighting a losing battle in Milwaukee; he had just been handed proof positive that his original concept wouldn’t wash . The real problem was that the All-American game, played on a smaller diamond, got lost in the cavernous environment of a big-league park.
    League President Ken Sells watched the Chicks play, and confessed that “it was a flop . It was awful. We could tell in just a few weeks that it wasn’t working. We would go out to the ballpark ourselves and we felt that we were too far away from the ball players.”
    The symphony soon abandoned heavy-duty classics and chugged its way through such accessible melodies as “Tales from the Vienna Woods” and excerpts from Lohengrin and Carmen . But faced with this cultural hybrid, and the sensation that they were looking at the field through the wrong end of a telescope, fans went elsewhere.
    Amazingly, given these conditions, Milwaukee’s