Free Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble by Nora Ephron

out toasters that day, and I found even that an uncomfortable responsibility. The point of all this, though, is Bernice Gera, and the point of Bernice Gera is that Bernice Gera failed to play out the role. In her first game, she made a mistake. And broke down under pressure.And couldn’t take it. And quit. Which was not the way it was supposed to happen: instead, she was supposed to have been tougher and stronger and better than any umpire in baseball and end up a grim stone bust in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Bernice Gera turned out to be only human, after all, which is not a luxury pioneers are allowed. At the time, I thought it was all hideously ironic and even a little funny; a few months later, I got to wondering what had really happened and what was happening to Mrs. Gera now, now that she had blown her modest deferred dream.
    Bernice Gera lives in a three-room walk-up apartment in Queens. In it there is a candle shaped like a softball, an ashtray shaped like a mitt, a lighter shaped like a bat, a crocheted toaster cover shaped like a doll wearing a baseball cap, an arrangement of dried flowers containing a baseball, powder puffs, and a small statue of Mickey Mouse holding a bat. On the wall is a very large color photograph of Mrs. Gera in uniform holding a face mask, and a few feet away hangs a poem that reads: “Dear God, Last night I did pray/That You would let me in the game today./And if the guys yell and scream,/Please, God, tell them You’re the captain of the team.” All the available shelf space is crammed with trophies and plaques; there must be forty or fifty of them, some for bowling (she averages 165) but most for baseball, for her career on a women’s softball team in Detroit, and for her charity batting exhibitions against people like Roger Maris and Sid Gordon. “I can hit the long ball,” she says, and she can, some 350 feet. There is also a framed clipping of an old Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, a 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 areporter to cover Mrs. Gera’s education, and Finley said she was coming along just fine. “She had the habit of