HALL OF FAME SMILE
At 91, she’s in a league of her own and Alberta hall finally catches on
Betty Carveth Dunn, 91, who played for the women’s team depicted in the movie, A League of Their Own, will be inducted this year into the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame. As a young woman, she was the first female Little League coach in Edmonton.
At 91, Betty Carveth Dunn will be the oldest person at the time of her induction to ever go into the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame.
“No kidding?” she said when your correspondent informed her of that fact.
“Is that an honour?” she giggled.
When you have a baseball bubble gum card that proves you played for the Rockford Peaches, you’re for sure going to be older than Geena Davis and Tom Hanks.
Davis, 61, played the part of the star catcher and Hanks, 60, the drunken manager of the Peaches in the classic movie League of Their Own. The Peaches played in the league created by chewing gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner Phil Wrigley during the Second World War.
So often people wonder why So-And-So isn’t in the Hall of Fame and so often the reason is because people figured they must already be in, because nobody thought to nominate them or simply because time forgot them.
In the case of Dunn, it was probably: D) All of the above.
Dunn was in attendance at the J. Percy Page Centre on Monday as the ASHoF Class of 2017 was unveiled.
“It’s quite an honour — a real honour,” she said of getting into the Hall in the Pioneer category.
She’s already in baseball’s hallowed hall in Cooperstown along with the rest of the women from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. And she’s already in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame with the 64 Canadian players who played in the league from 1943 to 1954.
Dunn became the first female Little League coach in Edmonton and has a long list of involvements in sports, including her selection as an ambassador for the inaugural IBAF Women’s World Baseball Championships held in Edmonton in 2004, and again when it returned in 2012. She threw out the ceremonial first pitch for both.
But receiving the honour and being invited to the inductees press conference tickled her as pink as her Peaches uniform.
The Peaches and that league were forgotten, but the movie brought it all back to life again and the last time your agent visited Cooperstown, the exhibit on the league was one of the most interesting of all.
“Some of it was very true and some of it was a little Hollywood,” she said of the film. “I thought the movie did a really good job portraying that it was wartime. A lot of that was true. The girls lived in fear of telegraphs coming.
“I loved playing ball. I just loved it. And to get paid for something you loved to do, you had to go and do it.”
Dunn, who came to Edmonton from Grande Prairie to play for the all-girls Walk-Rite team from where, at age 20, she was scouted and recruited to play in Wrigley’s league.
In the spring of 1945, she climbed on a train to Chicago.
She made $75 a week, more than four times what she had been paid as a secretary in Edmonton.
“We were told we all had to look like ladies and play like men,” she said. “They took us to Helena Rubinstein’s beauty school where we learned how to apply make-up properly and handle cutlery when dining out.
“Our uniforms were the same throughout the league except for their colour. They consisted of short dresses and knee socks as well as baseball caps. There was no protection for our thighs when sliding into base.
“I was in the first years and we weren’t allowed to party or anything like that. You couldn’t even wear slacks. If you were caught wearing slacks, you were sent home.
“We played six nights a week and doubleheaders on Sunday. I was only there for one season, from April to October 1945, but it was the most exciting unforgettable time ... I still get fan mail from all over the States,” she said. “People are forever sending me my baseball card to get it signed.”
There aren’t many of them left anymore, but they still have reunions. “The last one was in San Jose a couple of years ago. The lady I was going to go with, from Saskatchewan, played for the Peaches, too. We’d always gone together to maybe 10 of them. But she died of a heart attack just before we were to leave. It’s not as much fun to go by yourself.”
The only other Edmonton area girl she knew from that league was Millie McAuley, who married New York Rangers goaltender Ken McAuley, coach of the Edmonton Oil Kings in the ’50s.
“I never knew her until we went to the reunions. We didn’t play the same years.”
Why did the gal, who would get traded to the Fort Wayne Daisies late in the year, only play one season?
“Well, I came home and married Jim Dunn, my boyfriend, and we started our family,” she said of sons Jerry, Bill and Patrick.
It was 1945.