Free Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble by Nora Ephron Page B

react, then they would have to give her a hormone test.”
    Bernice Gera waited almost two years for the State Court of Appeals to uphold the Human Rights Commission ruling; finally, in the spring of 1972, she once again signed a contract with the New York–Pennsylvania League. In late June, having allowed to reporters that she was “grateful to God and grateful to baseball,” she drove to Geneva, New York, for her début. There was a banquet Thursday night and she was cheered over roast chicken. She was ecstatic. “I was in baseball,” Mrs. Gera recalled. “I can’t tell you. I was on top of the world. And then, the bubble burst.”
    On Friday, there was a meeting of the League umpires. “That meeting,” Mrs. Gera said. “It was like, if you had a group of people in a room and they just ignored you. How can I express it? They made it obvious they didn’t want me. How would you feel? You’re supposed to work your signals out with your partner. You’re a team. You have to know what he’s going to do. But my partner wouldn’t talk to me. I sat there for six hours. A lot of other things went on that I don’t want to discuss because I’m going to write about it someday. I should have realized if they fought me in court they weren’t going to welcome me, but I never thought they would dothat to me. That was the only way they could get to me, through the other umpires. If they won’t work with you, you can’t make it.”
    Saturday night, when Bernice Gera walked out onto the field in her $29 suit, she had come to a decision. She would leave baseball if her fellow umpire would not tell her his signals. Her partner, a lanky young man named Doug Hartmayer, who was also making his professional début, refused even to acknowledge her presence. But the crowd loved her, applauded her emphatic calls, and was amused by her practically perpetual motion. Then, in the fourth inning, a member of the Auburn Phillies came into second base and Mrs. Gera, in an uncharacteristically unemphatic move, ventured a safe call. Seconds later, she realized he was out in a force play, and brought her fist up. The manager of the Auburn team, Nolan Campbell, who had said before the game that Mrs. Gera was “going to have one heck of a time taking the abuse,” ran out onto the field and began to shout and chase after her. She ejected him from the game. Campbell was furious. “She admitted she made a mistake,” he said later. “I told her, that’s two mistakes. The first one was putting on a uniform.”
    When the game ended, Bernice Gera, trailed by camera crews and a dozen reporters, strode into the clubhouse and announced, “I’ve just resigned from baseball.” Then she wheeled around, left the field, and burst into tears in the back of a friend’s car. NBC’s Dick Schaap asked Doug Hartmayer how he felt about her quitting. “I was glad,” said Hartmayer. “Her job wasn’t bad except she changed that call at second base, which is a cardinal sin in baseball.” As Schaap later noted, “She committed the cardinal sin of baseball—she admitted she made a mistake.”
    It is hard to believe that things would not have worked out had Bernice Gera hung in there, stayed on, borne up somehow. It is hard to believe, too, that she could not have been helped by some real support from the women’s movement. In any event, Mrs. Gera and the movement did not join forces until three weeks after her debacle, when she attended a meeting at the grubby New York headquarters of the National Organization for Women. “I’m happy to be here with all you girls—I mean women,” said Mrs. Gera, and plunged into her new rhetoric. She spoke of the “calculated harassment by the sexist operators who control baseball.” She hinted at a boycott of the game. She defended changing her call, quoting from the
Baseball Manual
, a publication that seems to provide the messages in fortune cookies: “To right a wrong is honorable. Such an action will win you