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In 1948, Smith played for Richmond native Helen 'Gig' Smith holds photos of herself (top left) and her teammates in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League 60 years ago. She played for the Grand Rapids Chicks and Kenosha Comets, immortalized in the film 'A League of Their Own.' |
BY JIM NOLAN
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
RICHMOND
--Hand Helen "Gig" Smith a baseball, and her face lights up like a scoreboard."Oh, boy!" she beams, taking a firm grip and simulating a throw in her comfortable studio apartment at Westminster Canterbury Richmond.
It may have been awhile, years perhaps, since Smith wrapped her fingers around the laces. But it's springtime. Time for baseball.
And at 86, Smith--a retired Richmond art teacher, World War II Army veteran and board member of the foundation that supports the Army Women's Museum in Fort Lee--is still in a league of her own.
Sixty years ago, the Richmond native played for the Grand Rapids Chicks of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The year before, in 1947, she played for the Kenosha Comets--two of the teams immortalized in the 1992 Penny Marshall film "A League of Their Own."
"It was fantastic," she said. "Just like that movie showed, we had chaperones. We had to play in those silly skirts, and we could not smoke, drink, wear shorts or slacks in public."
"There were hot, un-air-conditioned buses, but it was still fun," she added. "We played seven days a week and prayed for rain."
Smith is a member of the National Softball Hall of Fame and was among 150 women invited to the 1988 opening of the Women in Baseball exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
The league was the brainchild of Chicago Cubs owner and chewing-gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley, who took up President Franklin D. Roosevelt's call to preserve baseball during wartime, when many of America's young men--and finest professional ballplayers--were fighting overseas.
The league began in 1943 in such Midwestern cities as Racine and Kenosha, Wis.; Rockford, Ill.; South Bend, Ind.; and Grand Rapids, Mich., before expanding to 12 teams. It lasted nearly 12 years.
Smith is a 1940 graduate of Richmond's John Marshall High School, where she was a four-sport athlete, participating in field hockey, tennis, basketball and track. Softball was not offered, but Smith, a cleanup-hitting third baseman, played on a number of championship fast-pitch teams.
In 1943, she turned down a contract offer from the Girls League to enlist in the Women's Army Corps, where she did top-secret cartographic work at the Pentagon for the Army's Military Intelligence Service.
After leaving the Army, Smith enrolled at the Pratt Institute of Art in New York City with the idea of becoming a professional artist. But when money got tight in the spring of 1947, she contacted the scout who had seen her playing for the Virginia Dairy softball team four years before and was offered a contract. Baseball paid her $85 a week.
"I needed a summer job--something that paid a pretty good salary," Smith said, "and in those days, it was a pretty good salary that they paid us to play baseball, though it's absolutely nothing today. A tip at a nice restaurant."
"These men who are playing for all the salary they get, they wouldn't have played under the conditions that we played under," she said. "We played for the love of the game."
Smith stopped playing after the 1948 season. Her mother became ill, and Smith left Pratt to come home to Richmond to finish her education at what is now Virginia Commonwealth University. Smith went on to teach art and shop classes in the Richmond school system for 31 years.
This year, she was recognized on the floor of the state Senate for her lifetime of achievements, in a resolution introduced by Sen. Walter A. Stosch, R-Henrico. Stosch suggested Smith's playing career is the basis of the grandstanding, flirty character played by Madonna in "A League of Their Own."
No so, Smith insists. "She played my position," Smith said emphatically. "She did not play me. I think [the Madonna character, 'All the way' Mae Mordabito] was modeled after another player named Faye Dancer, who really was quite a character."
Still, the fame from the movie and the baseball exhibit has garnered Smith and other surviving members of the Girls League opportunities she never expected. She has gone to Hawaii to speak about her playing days and has visited the White House twice.
Today, Smith doesn't mind watching baseball on TV. But, like many great athletes, watching others play doesn't compare to actually playing. Sixty years later, her field of dreams exists mostly in fond memories.
"I've had a good life, but I'm 86--what do you expect me to do?" she quipped. Now, as then, in a league of her own.
