|
|
||
Date published: 4/6/2008
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.
1. Be respectful. No personal attacks.
|
|
|||||||||||||
