All-American Girls Softball League · Chicago, Illinois · 1943

Beauty at Bat

June 5, 1943. The Washington Daily News runs the new league's first pin-up worthy photo spread: Racine pitcher Gloria Marks, once judged second in an Army camp beauty contest by Bing Crosby, and six players from Kenosha and Racine striding across the field in their flared skirts. The paper calls it the Girl's National Softball League. It was a week old and already nobody could get the name right.

One week after the All-American Girls league played its first games, the Washington Daily News of June 5, 1943 gave the new venture the full photo-page treatment under the headline “Beauty at Bat.”

The star is “Pitcher Gloria Marks of the Racine, Wis., team,” who “comes from San Diego, Calif., was second choice in a beauty contest held at an Army camp. Bing Crosby judged the contest from girls’ photos.” Notice that Bing Crosby’s opinion of her photograph outranks her arm in the caption, and she was the one about to pitch professionally. Below her, six teammates and rivals get a group portrait worthy of a recruiting poster: “Six of the girls from the Kenosha and Racine teams… strike across the field in their uniforms. Left to right, are Irene Ruhnke, Elise Harney, Marion Wohender, Annabella Thompson, Leola Mae Brody, and Gloria Marks.”

Now look at what the paper calls the outfit: “the Girl’s National Softball League,” opening “at Wrigley Field Sunday.” The league’s actual name that spring was the All-American Girls Softball League, announced in March and previewed in this same paper the week before, and before its first season ended it would rename itself a Base Ball League, then a Professional Ball League. The confusion was baked in from birth, and it never went away. A year later a rival league in Chicago really would take a nearly identical name, keep playing softball and call it baseball, but that’s a clipping for later this month.

The caption’s better gift is the names. Irene Ruhnke, Elise Harney, Marion Wohender, Annabella Thompson, Leola Mae Brody and Gloria Marks were six of the league’s seventy salaried originals, one week into the job, striding across their new field like they owned it. The skirted uniform was the league’s idea. The stride was all theirs.