Free Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble by Nora Ephron Page A

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 afteraction. 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 double-header August 1. The sports pages were full of pictures of Mrs. Gera, thumbs up, victorious. But on July 31, the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues invalidated the contract by refusing to sign it. Mrs. Gera was heartbroken, but she confined her reaction to a string of sports metaphors: “I guess I just can’t get to first base.… It’s a strikeout but I will come up again. The game is not over.”
    The lawsuit continued. There was a hearing at the New York State Human Rights Commission, where George Leisure, attorney for the baseball interests, said that Mrs. Gera was publicity mad and that furthermore she did not meet any of the physical requirements for being an umpire. Umpires, he said, should be five feet ten inches tall, and weigh 170 pounds. “Being of the male sex is a bona-fide qualification for being a professional umpire,” said Leisure. In November, 1970, the Human Rights Commission held that the National League discriminated not only against women but against men belonging to short ethnic groups and would have to “establish new physical standards which shall have a reasonable relation to the requirements of the duties of an umpire.” The League promptly appealed the decision, and the legal process dragged on.
    Maury Allen of the
New York Post
went into the locker room of the New York Mets at one point during Mrs. Gera’s years in chancery and asked some of the ballplayers how they felt about her. He recorded, in response, a number of attempted witticisms about her chest protector,along with a predictable but nonetheless interesting series of antediluvian remarks. “I read the stories about her and she said that she expected people would call her a ‘dumb broad,’ ” said Jerry Koosman. “Hell, that’s the nicest thing people would call her. What do you think she’d hear when a batter hit a line drive off a pitcher’s cup?” Said Ron Swoboda: “She’d have fifty guys yelling at her in language she wouldn’t believe. If she heard those dirty words and didn’t