Women's baseball league reunites and savors their aging ties in South Bend, Indiana

SOUTH BEND ― The baby of the group, 88-year-old Lois Youngen, quickly leads a Tribune news team to a corner of the museum gallery and stabs her finger at a photo of a young woman who’d pitched a perfect baseball game for the South Bend Blue Sox.

“She made me famous,” Youngen says, noting her own role as catcher in those days.

But she’s in a hurry to move on from this tale ― the 4-0 victory over Fort Wayne in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. There is a reunion and socializing to be done. And it’s precious. So precious that she barely sees the newly refreshed permanent exhibit on the women’s baseball league here at The History Museum.

Thirteen women who’d all played in the league came from across the country ― Oregon, California, New Jersey and parts in between ― for a reunion in South Bend over the weekend.

They’d broken barriers for women. And a new Amazon Prime TV series, “A League of Their Own,” loosely based on the fictionalized 1992 movie, is now telling stories within women’s baseball ― including barriers of race and gender identity.

In fact, one of the women who was here, Maybelle Blair, 95, made national news at the series’ premiere Aug. 12 in New York when she came out on stage as being gay her whole life.

To this dwindling group of spunky gals, though, they are “family.” They may have been competitors. Or not at all. It never mattered. They got to bond as every reunion came along.

From August 2015:Women pro baseball players gather, reminisce in South Bend

“Yes, I know I’m an important part of history, but to be with all of these women is important,” 90-year-old Corky Carl, who was a bat girl for the South Bend Blue Sox from 1945 to 1950, says. “My contacts with people from all over is probably one of the most important things.”

The 1950 graduate of South Bend Central High School, now living in a Cleveland suburb, says her kids were in college when they toured the Grand Canyon and she stumbled ― yet again ― on people with whom the league had a connection.

The women hadn’t had a reunion since 2019, thanks to COVID. Going forth, they’ll consider it “year by year,” AAGPBL Players Association President Rick Chapman says. Two women couldn’t make it this year because they were ill. South Bend’s own legend, 101-year-old Betsy “Sockum” Jochum, who still lives here in the town where she’d played six years for the Blue Sox, came to a Thursday gathering but not Friday.

“They are trying to keep the legacy and history alive,” Chapman says. “We don’t want it to be lost again.”

February 2022:A 101st birthday for Betsy 'Sochum' Jochum and three deaths to note

Saving history

The women’s stories were “lost history,” he says, until the reunions began in 1982, the year after his mother died. Her catcher’s gear is fixed on a mannequin in the museum gallery. Dorothy Mickey Maguire Chapman was among the original 60 players in the league’s first year, 1943, when Philip Wrigley established the league as a way to fill Wrigley Field while Chicago Cubs players went off to serve in World War II. She would play for Racine, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids and Muskegon.

Chapman, who lives in Kansas City, Mo., was among the 70 people total who'd gathered here, including family and friends.

Mary Moore, 90, who played from 1950 to 1952 for the Springfield Salles and the Battle Creek Belles, continued playing some form of baseball until she was 78. She served as the pitcher in slow-pitch baseball when, she quips, “I better quit before I kill myself out there.”

“I just love the game,” she says, now living in White Lake, Mich.

Other barriers

On Friday, she joined the other women in watching the first episode of “A League of Their Own,” and came away with mixed feelings.

Like others, she appreciates the show’s efforts to raise awareness of race and gender identity, but, she says, those matters weren’t even on her mind at the time.

“Back then, we didn’t have any idea why there weren’t any Black people on the team,” she says of the reality that Blacks weren’t recruited to the teams. “We did have a couple of Cubans.”

Skin color, she says, didn’t matter to players. And, in an age before TV and social media, she says, most girls weren’t thinking about gender identity.

“We were 15, 16, 17 years old,” she says. “We weren’t exposed to anything like that at all.”

As for salty language in the show, she says, “We didn’t swear like that.”

Carl, likewise, appreciates the show’s efforts to raise awareness of social issues but has reservations about “too much drinking” in the show. After baseball, Carl made a career out of nudging youth athletes to do better while she kept busting barriers. She became the first female athletic director in Minneapolis to oversee both boys and girls sports. Her daughter is an athletic director now, too.

Executive Producer Hallie Wierenga says she heard similar feedback from the women Friday, plus some positive vibes about it. That feedback will be considered as further shows are made, she says, adding, “I welcome all of the constructive criticism.”

The show’s makers had spoken with the 1992 film’s director, Penny Marshall, but also did extensive research on the league. That meant, in part, consulting with The History Museum’s staff because it holds the national repository for the league, bearing the largest collection in the U.S. of the league’s baseballs, uniforms, scrapbooks and memorabilia.

The show, Wierenga says, isn’t meant to be a documentary. It aims to “tell a longer bench of stories” than the movie could.

What about the language? Well, because historical films and audio clips can feel “anachronistic,” she says, “we wanted to make them feel like they were women in their day.”

“We’re trying to tell a spiritually authentic story about the league,” she says.

From June 2018:A team of their own in South Bend, 75 years later

True to themselves

At the reunion, each woman has her own story.

A Little League baseball field is named after Ann Petrovic where she lives in the small, southern Indiana town of Aurora. Formerly Ann Meyer, she played for one year in the league when she was just 15, for Minneapolis and Kenosha, then went on to five years in another national women’s baseball league, based in Chicago. After that, it was off to college, marriage, raising a family and going to her local YMCA to stay fit, no longer batting balls.

“I miss a lot of my friends,” she says, gazing into a museum exhibit, ripe with team photos. “When I see their pictures, that’s when it comes back to you.”

Moore dons a sweatshirt that reads, “There’s no crying in baseball,” a line that actor Tom Hanks’ character says to whimpering players in the movie “A League of Their Own.”

Moore chalks that up to Hollywood.

“I don’t recall any one of us crying,” she says. “Even when we got hurt. … I broke my ankle and they carried me off the field. I wasn’t crying. We were tough. You played hard.”

Now, though, there may be tears. Shed for those they’ve lost.

Find columnist Joseph Dits on Facebook at SBTOutdoorAdventures or 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend Blue Sox baseball players reunite at The History Museum