Debra A Shattuck - Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN IN WORK for almost three decades. It is impossible to convey fully the gratitude I feel toward the many people who have helped me along the way and who have created and maintained the archives, libraries, historical societies, and digital resources that make historical scholarship like mine possible. I am grateful to Dick Wentworth, former director of the University of Illinois Press, who first suggested to a young Air Force captain in 1990 that she write a book based on her research, and to his successor, Bill Regier, who allowed the now-retired scholar to pick up where she had left off more than a decade earlier, and who waited with supreme patience for the project to finish.

I collectively thank all of my professors at the University of Iowa for teaching me the craft of historical scholarship. I especially thank Susan Birrell and Tina Parratt, who encouraged and aided my application and acceptance into a UIOWA doctoral program. I am grateful to my primary advisors, Linda Kerber and Leslie Schwalm, and to PhD committee members Connie Berman, Tina Parratt, Chris Ogren, and Allen Steinberg. Linda, Leslie, and Allen provided invaluable assistance on my manuscript, as did UIOWA alum and scholar Barbara Handy-Marchello.

I have benefited immeasurably from the work of myriad colleagues in the fields of women's history and baseball history. Gerda Lerner, Kitty Sklar, and Tom Dublin introduced me to women's history at a critical juncture in my development as a scholar. John Thorn was the first to publish my research and is an irreplaceable mentor and font of baseball wisdom. David Block's Baseball Before We Knew It inspired me, and David's friendship and willingness to share his research has been of inestimable value. The same is true of Barbara Gregorich, whose Women at Play was one of the first books dedicated to revealing the hidden narrative of women's involvement with baseball. Like David, Barbara has generously shared her research and offered her encouragement.

I have received invaluable help from fellow baseball and sport historians at conferences of the North American Society for Sport History, NINE, and the Frederick Ivor-Campbell Symposium. I have benefited from the online camaraderie and expertise of members of the Society for American Baseball Research's Nineteenth Century Base Ball, Origins, and Women and Baseball committeesparticularly Tom Altherr, Jean Ardell, Priscilla Astifan, Jerry Casway, Bob Cullen, Leslie Heaphy, Richard Hershberger, Dorothy Seymour Mills, Bob Tholkes, and the late Craig Waff. Special thanks go to Larry McCray for maintaining SABR's invaluable Protoball Chronology Web site. Countless individuals graciously shared articles, clippings, and photographs from their collections; those not already mentioned elsewhere include Randall Brown, John Dyke, David Kemp, Jeffrey Kittel, Joann Kline, John Kovach, Marty Payne, Mark Rucker, and Phil Zaret. Maria Brandt, Donna Burdick, Gloria Lundy, Susanne Stahovec, and J. Camilo Vera conducted research on my behalf. Of the many archivists and librarians who supported my work, I am especially indebted to Ken Cobb (New York City Municipal Archives), Julie Couture (Lebanon Historical Society), Gloria Gavert (Miss Porter's School), Joseph Gleason (George Sim Johnston Archives of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), Lillian Hansberry (Penn State Abington Library), Nancy Logan and Linda Miller (Roanoke College Library), Janalyn Moss (University of Iowa Library), Rosemary Plakas (Library of Congress), Bill Rowan (Tri-State Corners Genealogical Society), Joyce Salmon (Punahou School), Tim Wiles (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library), Jeffrey Willis (Converse College), and Dot Willsey (Gerrit Smith Estate National Historic Landmark).

This book would never have come to fruition without the support of my familyparticularly my mother, who accompanied me on countless journeys near and far in search of elusive clues to the forgotten history of women baseball players. She labored alongside me for yearsexamining endless pages of microfilm and digitized newspapers, typing hundreds of pages of transcripts, and proofreading hundreds of pages of text. She doggedly persisted in keeping me on track when I despaired of ever finishing. My sister, Sandye, helped with research and echoed my mother's encouragement along the way. My late husband, Cliff, and children, David, Kristen, and Katie, brought joy into my life and patiently endured the many absences and sequestrations my research necessitated.

I appreciate my John Witherspoon College colleague, Jamin Hbner, for pushing me through the last hurdle of discouragement with a timely quotation from Winston Churchill:

Writing a book is an adventure.

To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement;

Then it becomes a mistress, and then a tyrant.

The last phase is that, just as you are about to be reconciled

To your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.

What a relief to finally fling the monster out into the public. I trust the adventure of reading it will prove as enjoyable as the adventure of writing it.

Finally, I pay homage to the gracious God who gave me life, redeemed me, and set my feet upon a Rockthe God who walks with me through life's darkest hours and fills my heart with joy unspeakable and a peace that passes understanding.