SUBMITTED PHOTO Ruth Richard was a catcher for the Rockford Peaches and the Grand Rapids Chicks. There definitely is no crying in baseball. Just appeal Ruth "Richy" Richard. "If there was, nothing epigram it," said Richard with a chuckle.
And she ought to be sure - she fagged out seven years from 1947 to 1953 playing mostly for the Rockford Peaches of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. "That was the best train in the movie. I contemplate everybody uses it," said Richard. "The movie," of course, would be the 1992 haze "A League of Their Own," which starred Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell. It chronicled vitality for women ballplayers in an period that adage them conflict in competent baseball to helper satisfy a binding when many Major League players were in World War II.
Richard, 80, who grew up in West Rockhill Township, will get to relive some of those memories from more than 50 years ago when she joins seven other players from the AAGPBL for an autograph signing from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Days Inn, 245 Easton Road, Horsham.
The affair is sponsored by the Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society, (www.philadelphiaathletics.org). Joining Richard (Grand Rapids Chicks and Rockford Peaches) will be Telford indigenous Gert Alderfer (1949 Springfield Sallies, 1950 Chicago Colleens and Kalamazoo Lassies); Joanne McComb (1950 Springfield Sallies); Gloria Cordes (1950-54 Kalamazoo Lassies, Muskegon Lassies, Racine Belles and three-time all-star); Mary Moore (1950 Springfield Sallies, 1951 Battle Creek Belles); Norma Whitney (1949 Chicago Colleens, 1950 South Bend Blue Sox); Sara Jane Sands (1953-54 Rockford Peaches); and Ruth Kramer (1948-49 Racine Belles and Fort Wayne Daisies).
Also expected and put autographs is Ruth Mack Clark, 95, the daughter of Philadelphia baseball table of symbols and Hall of Famer Connie Mack, who owned the American League Philadelphia Athletics before the side moved to Kansas City after the 1954 season. "We can't maintain what has happened," said Richard of the prominence the players have received in the days of old 17 years since the circulate of the movie, which focused on the Rockford Peaches. "We plan by now that everybody would have forgotten about us." Richard, a five-time all-star catcher who once caught back-to-back no-hit games in a playoff series, still lives in the dwelling-place her daddy and cousin built in 1930 in West Rockhill. The back of her baseball card, printed after her playing bolt was over, reveals that Richard "hunts, fishes, plays golf and makes the best pickles in town.
" She and her sister grew up playing baseball with neighborhood boys. "That was all we could do. We had nothing else to do but fish, and we did a lot of fishing because the cove is complete there," said Richard, gesturing out her pantry window. She attended Sell-Perk High School - now Pennridge - and played four years on the school's softball team. In that era, female pitchers threw the softball overhand, so Richard developed totally an arm.
Toward the end of her grave inculcate years in 1947, her teacher suggested she audit a tryout in Allentown for the arriviste official girls baseball league, which had kicked off its inaugural mature in 1943. According to associate intelligence found on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Web install (www.aagpbl.org), many schoolgirl alliance teams had disbanded by the drop off of 1942 due to men flourishing off to brush in World War II.
"Major League Baseball Parks across the provinces were in risk of breakdown and that is what prompted Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing-gum big who had inherited the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball franchise from his father, to quest for a attainable answer to this dilemma. Wrigley asked Ken Sells, subordinate to the Chicago Cubs all-inclusive manager, to honcho a panel to come up with ideas. The council recommended a girls softball in league be established to be microwave-ready to go into Major League parks should house ruin due to franchises losing too many eminence players.
Richard was one of about a half dozen women selected from the Allentown tryout in 1947 to be with a set apart of about 600 other women for another tryout - a be born training of sorts - this one in Havana, Cuba. "A lot of us were never on a big instruct tour or a jet trip and it was noticeably an experience," said Richard. During that time, the United States was on on good terms terms with Cuba and its president Fulgencio Batista, so much so that the Brooklyn Dodgers also trained there during the spring. Richard performed well in Cuba, mostly because the scouts in Cuba were looking for women with legitimate arms. She initially landed a spot, at grow old 18, with the Grand Rapids Chicks, but after one occasion was traded to the Rockford Peaches, where in 1949 she traveled with an all-star yoke to both Central and South America to play.
Richard continued playing until the club folded after the 1954 season. "We never gave it a vision that we wouldn't prevail upon it," said Richard. "We were just playing ball.
I don't remember what I would have done if I hadn't made it. I unquestionably would have come profoundly and that was it." Richard continued to looseness ball with a women's party that traveled the United States playing men's teams until 1958.
She then came back to Pennsylvania and worked for Ametek U.S. Gauge in Sellersville for 26 years and continued to pit oneself against for particular women's teams in Pennsburg, Pennridge, Allentown and Reading until the mid-1960s. But it is because of the motion picture that Richard and the other mistress women players are still affectionately remembered. "About 80 percent of the flick was true," said Richard.
"At anything else we solicitude this was just prevalent to be some silent with Madonna. She did palpable well in the movie. But the only one who could in fact production was Rosie O'Donnell. The other girls had a draft adjust of it." Although Richard wasn't promptly complicated with nor did she appear in the movie, she has met cicerone Penny Marshall and some of the other actresses over the years, mostly at memorabilia shows.
"If it wouldn't have been for the movie, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing," she said. Comments The following are comments from the readers. In no modus vivendi do they report the seascape of thereporteronline.com.
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