Baseball and American Culture + Women

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On my 75th birthday, I delivered the 37th keynote speech at the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture.

I’m posting here the link to the YouTube video of my talk - a huge thank you to Aime Cuevas, my friend and baseball podcaster, for taking this video and giving it to me to use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQStlUPqvpI

Melissa Ludtke delivering the keynote address at the 37th Cooperstown symposium, and the first annual address as the Larry Lucchino Keynote speaker. Photo by Aime Cuevas

I am also sharing visuals — to the left - that I used to illustrate my talk. When you watch the video, you can follow along with the visuals which will add much to your enjoyment, I believe.

As a Generation Fades from View, Its Stories Will Endure

By Melissa Ludtke

 I knew my friend Robin was battling ovarian cancer.

I just never thought she’d die.

Of course, I knew her odds of beating this disease weren’t good, but I was unwilling to accept that one day I’d wake up to hear that the first of our groundbreaking crew of women sportswriters from the 1970s was gone. I didn’t want to face this gaping hole.

Last week I clicked on a personal note in Facebook messenger:

“I heard Robin Herman died. If true, a very sad day. You and she were the pioneers.”

Resisting, still, I Googled three words I never wanted to write together: “Robin Herman obituary.”

The Boston Globe confirmed my fear.

Alone, in the stillness of that young morning, I wept.

Then, my phone rang, while social media spread word of Robin’s passing far, wide, and fast.

When I saw Jane Leavy’s name appear my cell phone, I knew the news of Robin’s death had found her.

Melissa Ludtke, Jane Leavy, Robin Herman at Fenway Park, 2018. Photo by Paul Horvitz.

A baseball writer for The Washington Post in the late 1970s, she’s the best-selling author of biographies of Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax, and The Big Fella, her most recent one about Babe Ruth. On a chilly night, late in 2018, Jane had come to Fenway Park to talk about The Big Fella, and Robin had come to hear her, with her husband, Paul, and so did I. We sat at adjoining tables as Jane spoke, then after she signed books, the three of us carved out space to be together for what would be our first and last time.

 On the phone, Jane spoke of the specialness of our evening together, and I knew why. To see and hear us that night, gregarious and loud, was to intuit that we’d long been close chums. Appreciating that our time was short, and with much to say, we talked over each other sharing stories for which any of us could supply the ending. We’d bonded intimately, tightly, and unshakably with the glue of emotional fortitude shaped by all of the experiences we’d had separately decades earlier but were imprinted on us. Back then, we were on our own in doing our jobs, steeling ourselves for the possibility of being bullied or hit on, ignored or humiliated, as men tested our mettle. We’d persevered in spite of the barriers – blocking our access to locker rooms while male writers interviewed players – that these same men put up, which made it really tough for us to do our jobs.

 Make it hard on us, they thought, maybe we’d go away.

Robin Herman kept out of the Chicago Blackhawks’ locker room

None of us did.

Soon, Lesley Visser called me with Robin on her mind. I was struck by how each of us had reached out to connect as we did before text and social media came between us. We just wanted to talk, tell stories, and laugh together to ease our collective pain.

Lesley was the first woman The Boston Globe hired to write sports a few years after The New York Times hired Robin to be its first woman sportswriter. That morning, Lesley had said of Robin in the Globe: “When you’re the first, you know you’re doing it for everybody, and boy, she was the perfect role model. … [she was] iron under velvet.  She was lovely, and yet she was not going to be abused.”

Then, I called Lawrie Mifflin, who’d been the first woman hired to write sports by New York’s Daily News, a few years after Robin. Assigned to pro hockey, as Robin was, Lawrie recalled Robin welcoming her, making her feel at home by selflessly sharing all she knew about this team, all the time knowing she and Lawrie would tell New Yorkers about the Rangers ‘ games for competing newspapers.

Robin. Jane. Lesley. Lawrie. And me, the first national woman baseball beat reporter when I worked for Sports Illustrated.

Despite gaps in time and the distance of our separations, we knew to whom to turn that morning. For what each of us endured, what we accomplished together, fills an important chapter in American’s ongoing fight for equal rights. For us, too, Robin’s death signals a reminder of how our generation is departing, and not too long in the future the threads of our collective memory will be untangled, thus rendering parts of this history threadbare.

It's why we tell our stories now.

Robin Herman working in hockey Locker room

Robin fed her blog, “Girl in the Locker Room … and other women’s tales from back then,” so generations after hers would appreciate why she had to “muster Supreme Court-worthy arguments for an inane essentially logistical problem [denial of locker room access] that could easily have been solved by a few big towels.”

Robin Herman’s Blog @ http://girlinthelockerroom.blogspot.com/

Lesley wrote Sometimes You have to Cross When It Says Don’t Walk: A Memoir of Breaking Barriers to leave a trail behind of her extraordinary path-carving NFL broadcast career.

Lawrie stayed in daily journalism for three decades, serving as deputy sports editor at The New York Times along the way, a mentor to so many. 

When Jane writes baseball, she does it with the gift of prose steeped in the game’s history with her woman’s touch, as she writes about in her essay, The Phallic Fallacy.

“When I became a sportswriter in 1977, the unstated goal was to write lean, mean, macho prose. We couldn’t make ourselves invisible in the locker room, so we tried to make ourselves invisible in our writing. How many times did I dare my friends to remove the byline from my stories and try to find any place where my words sounded as if they were written by a girl? We weren’t supposed to acknowledge the differences gender might produce, much less flaunt them. But the truth is, women in the locker room do see things differently–and I don’t mean anatomically. We come to sports with different assumptions and experiences. We are outsiders, which is what reporters are supposed to be. The femininity we sought to hide is actually our greatest asset, our X-ray vision.”

— Jane Leavy

 It’s why I spent years figuring out how to write my book about Ludtke v. Kuhn as a compelling story for younger generations.

Because men dominated the media in the 1970s, they hijacked the telling of our stories about our push for equal access and fair treatment. In those versions, our quest for fairness was transformed into a tale of pesky, immoral young woman wanting to enter locker rooms to leer at naked ballplayers, pretty much ignoring all issues of justice through equal rights.

Robin reclaimed her story later on, leaving us a lasting legacy of her persistence and courage in challenging the men’s rules and practices that made it tough to do that job she loved.

Her story, our stories, are ones I believe younger generations want to hear.

Melissa Ludtke, the plaintiff in Ludtke v. Kuhn, the 1978 federal case that opened equal access for women sportswriters. At the time, she was a baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated, and is writing a book about her legal case.

Summer of 2021: Women, Sports Media, Tokyo Olympics and Mental Health

I am pausing as August takes us to summer’s end to reflect on issues revolving around sports, ones that I think about every day. Daily, though in late August I am on a vacation hiatus until Labor Day, I post stories, along with my thoughts, in the Facebook community I curate, Locker Room Talk. And this summer, I was given a few splendid opportunities to share my insights.

• In May, on the HBO sports magazine show, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel

• In July with a commentary I wrote for WBUR’s Cognoscenti

• In August, during the Olympic Games, E.B. Bartels interviewed me about the 2021 Olympic Games through the lens of women, for Wellesley College, my alma mater.

• In August, Lucas Rodrigues, a sports journalism student at Quinnipiac University, interviewed me, and then published a blog post, including my experiences in being a woman in sports journalism with those of several other women.

Image from my interview with Andrea Kremer on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, May 2021

Out of Bounds

“Andrea Kremer sheds light on the challenges faced by female sports reporters in a male-dominated industry.”

Forty years after they won equal access to locker rooms [due to my lawsuit, Ludtke v. Kuhn], female sports reporters continue to face serious obstacles in doing their jobs, from sexual objectification to abuse. Journalists Rhiannon Walker and Jessica Kleinschmid and Melissa Ludtke sat down with correspondent Andrea Kremer to discuss. Link to the trailer, here, and entire interview can be streamed on HBO Max.

After I tweeted about Simone Biles withdrawing from the Team All-Around Gymnastics competition at the Tokyo Olympic Games, the editor of Cognoscenti asked me to write this essay. It was published on July 29.

Here is an excerpt from my essay about Simone Biles, after she raised the issue of mental health. In writing it, I shared, too, the time in my life when I was challenged by clinical depression.

“Long after the cauldron’s flame is extinguished in Tokyo, Biles’ words will burn brightly. Her Olympic exits – paired with the honest clarity of her explanations – will be in the minds of those who grapple with what it is to feel mentally unhealthy. But given the stigma that still hangs over mental health, Biles’ message requires reinforcement from all of us, especially as her critics use social media to falsely accuse her of hiding behind mental illness as an excuse for her poor performance. It’s not.

Long after the cauldron’s flame is extinguished in Tokyo, Biles’ words will burn brightly.

By her actions and with her words, Biles will empower others to share such feelings outwardly, perhaps for the first time, in seeking help towards recovery. Several decades ago, when I was felled by clinical depression, I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I confided my illness only to extremely close friends and begged them to stay silent about it. After absorbing Osaka’s revelation at the French Open and Biles’ blunt talk at the Olympics, then hearing Phelps in his Olympics commentary say, “It is OK to not be OK … we all need to ask for help sometimes,” I knew I could write for the first time what I just did in publicly revealing my mental health struggle a few decades ago from which I recovered – and grew.”

This 4’ 11” Philippine weightlifter, Hidilyn Diaz, won her nation’s first Olympic gold medal. In my interview, I mentioned her in urging us to not “forget the inspirational stories! I think the most encouraging and exciting stories from this Olympics have been about women, too: Mongolia’s three-on-three basketball team, the cyclist from Afghanistan, the swimmer from Alaska, the young women skateboarders. My favorite is the one about ;the weightlifter from the Philippines winning her country’s first Olympic gold medal.

EB Bartels: How do you think sports reporting has changed—or hasn’t changed—since the 1984 Olympics?

Melissa Ludtke: This year is the first Olympics where they’ve had equal participation across gender in sports. And this year a lot of the stories from the Olympics have focused on issues challenging women, in part because women athletes are finding their voices and demonstrating their desire to control their lives as athletes. Just look at the documentary LFG about the women’s soccer team players taking their own federation to court for equal pay and treatment. There are new mothers speaking out about the unfair rules preventing them from bringing their breastfeeding babies to the Olympics or about how Nike treated athletes while and after they were pregnant. How can the media avoid covering women this Olympics season?

EB: And these athletes can speak for themselves more now too, right? Just look at Simone Biles using her Instagram account to speak about mental health and competition.

ML: Exactly. Women are saying, enough is enough, we’re speaking up, we’re going to make you listen—and they can do it through social media, through the t-shirts they wear. As for Simone Biles, she is the only gymnast who was sexually abused by the former U.S.A. gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar who is still competing at this high level. She felt it was important for her to be a leader this year—and there are so many who have spoken up for her, like former Olympic gymnasts Aly Raisman and Dominique Dawes. And there are many people speaking out against the sexualization of women athletes! There was the story about the German gymnastics team with full-body leotards and the Norwegian beach handball team that wore shorts instead of authorized bikini bottoms and the runner who was accused of wearing shorts deemed too short. The federations and associations that have set these rules were led and run largely by men, but now women athletes are changing these rules by choosing what works best for them to wear.

In his story, “Sports Media’s Gender Gap: Passion, Persistence & Patience Exemplified by Women In Sports,” Lucas Rodrigues, a sports journalism student at Quinnipiac University, used this image to show readers the access to the clubhouse that I’d been given before Commissioner Bowie Kuhn took it away from me at the 1977 World Series.

Lucas Rodrigues began his story about women in sports journalism by telling my story from the 1970s, as he and I connected my experiences to what still happens today.

“Women today, as I did working in baseball, can still be made to feel as if they are outsiders. They can feel as if they are foreigners arriving in a place that is perceived to be a man's world,” Melissa Ludtke said. Ludtke, a pioneer for equal opportunity regarding gender within sports media, is arguably the most important example of passion represented by a woman working in sports media. Ludtke was denied access into the New York Yankees clubhouse during the 1977 World Series due to her gender, despite having a press pass, and later won a lawsuit against the MLB which is one of the most pivotal and impactful moments for women working in sports media.

“Although that is Ludtke’s most known moment working in sports, her career in sports media was always in jeopardy due to her gender and it was thanks to her passion for sports that allowed Ludtke to pursue a career that she truly loved. “Women who are going into sports media are doing it because they have a passion and are resolute,” Ludtke said. …

“It was a mix of persistence, passion and ultimately, postcards,” Ludtke said.

But mainly, it was her passion.

Passion is such an intense and almost overwhelming driving force for anyone pursuing a career. But in sports, and for women who possess passion in this field, it takes more than it should based on the historical truth of the lack of gender diversity in the sports media field. As Ludtke showed, women have always had to prove themselves even more in sports due to historical ignorance and lack of understanding of those innately involved in sports coverage. 

“Women were very much quizzed at the beginning of everything because men were incredibly disbelieving that a woman could know a lot about sports. And I still think that happens today,” Ludtke said.

So, if this is the case, why would anyone want to put up with the hardships of working in sports due to their gender? A seemingly non-issue is evidently paramount in this field given the historical happenings to those like Ludtke and many others. Whether it’s 40 years ago or present day, women have always had it tougher in this specific field. And still, the one ever-present quality embodied in every brave and hard-working woman in sports media, is their passion.

“Most people would ask ‘Why do you want to work in sports?’ To me, it was always ‘Why wouldn’t you want to work in sports?’ I never second guessed it,” Liz Flynn said. Flynn is a recent Quinnipiac graduate with a master’s degree in sports journalism. Her passion started at a young age watching her beloved New York Mets with her family, which planted the seed for a passion in sports that bloomed into a career. However, being a woman and growing up wanting to work in sports is not a commonality in a lot of areas, especially in an all-girls Catholic school in New York, Our Lady of Mercy Academy. To this day, Flynn can recall the comments, questions and overwhelming judgment from her peers and others back home as to why she wanted to work in sports. 

In Love With My New OLD Typewriter

I’ve fallen in love with my new OLD typewriter. And the memories it evokes.

This typewriter belonged to the previous owner’s grandmother. I bought it with memories of my mom.

I grew up hearing the rapid tap-tap-tap of my mom's fingers hitting the keys of her most reliable friend, her black typewriter. It resided on a movable grey metal table in an area of the living room close to the kitchen and within earshot of whatever door we used to enter the house. Though movable, that typewriter stayed put, and my mom always seemed to be typing on it – letters to friends, notes for her academic papers, and lots of letters to all of her kids, as they left home. I first got mine during my senior year of high school when her typed words arrived on light blue airmail stationary since she sent them from Oxford, England to Rome, Italy. By the next year, I eagerly awaited her letters as I stood near the mailboxes in my dorm at Wellesley College waiting for the postman to sort the mail, and there was always lots of it. Then, her letters reached me at my tall apartment building on the East Side of Manhattan, and then, when I became a correspondent for Time magazine, they would be in the outdoor mailbox that I’d stop at on my way from my car to my second floor apartment in Los Angeles. Finally, and to a diminishing degree, her letters flew in through the mail slot of the front door of my three-decker home in Cambridge.

But by then she’d started to use a computer, so while her letters kept coming they didn’t carry with them the lingering smell of ink on paper, and the words seemed flatter on the page due to the absence of her typewriter. For a time my mom kept her typewriter next to her computer, turning to use it when special occasions calledto her to use it.

Back when I was almost a teenager and the nation grieved after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, my mom went to her typewriter in our Amherst, MA home. There, unbeknownst to me, on November 25, 1963, she typed her letter of condolence to her Hyannis Port neighbor and childhood “swimming rival,” Robert F. Kennedy, whom she addressed as “Bob.”

Later when my mom encouraged me to learn how to type, she told me that when I mastered the keys by touch alone, no looking, I would think through my fingers, racing to keep up with my thoughts. She was right, but as years later I read her letter of sympathy to her childhood acquaintance, I grasped that she was doing much more through her fingers –she as feeling. In her letter to “Bob,” my mom shared her own searing, unbearable pain of her loss of her beloved sister, Betty, as she found words to try to comfort him. Even at an early age I knew my mom had experienced in the sudden tragic loss of her sister a burden of grieving that would “never become bearable” for her – “only less unbearable, over time.” I knew this even if I never heard her say those same words to me.

Several years after my mother’s death, my childhood friend, Ellen Fitzpatrick, who grew up with me in Amherst, MA, sent me this letter. She’d discovered in when researching her splendid book, “Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation.”

When my desire to own an old black typewriter hit hard, I sent word to my sister, Betty, who frequently wanders through estate sales and returns home with gems. Last Thursday she called to say she’d found this one in an online marketplace. On Saturday morning, I drove about 40 minutes and bought it from a woman whose grandmother had owned it. Her granddaughter described her as a woman who never worked and who she always remembers as wearing white gloves. It's a mystery, Diane told me, why she had this typewriter, though as she later recalled her grandfather worked at The Boston Globe, so perhaps he’d brought a used one home from the office for her to use. By the time Diane and I shared these stories by text and email and then in person, talking about our moms and grandmothers, she assumed me that she knew her grandmother would want me to have it.

I own it now, giving it a new home in my living room.

Soon I will order a new ribbon so again I will hear the tap-tap-tap of fingers, still ones not nearly as fast as my mom's were, pushing down on these keys on my new OLD 1930's Royal typewriter. It will be fun to watch its thin, metal arms rise to meet the paper I roll into this heavy machine, and watch as letters rise off the page, carrying with them that smell of ink.

It was on 1970s version Royal typewriters that I began my journalism career at Sports Illustrated. When I was shown my office at the magazine, a few items were there – a metal desk and swivel chair, a dial telephone, mostly used to call the Time Inc. operator so they could place long distance calls when I was fact checking stories, and a blue metal typewriter on its own stand.

On my office typewriter, in an uninterrupted burst of words, I typed my October memo documenting the events of October 11, 1977, when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned me from entering any baseball locker room to conduct interviews there, as the rest of the reporters did, all of whom were male. My editor, Peter Carry, asked me to write a memo to document what transpired that night at Yankee Stadium, which he told me he’d send to Commissioner Kuhn. This became a contemporaneous record of what happened to me that night, and thus served as evidence in our federal legal case, Ludtke v. Kuhn.

My office at Sports Illustrated. Photo by the Associated Press.

I shared my memo with a few friends at Sports Illustrated, one who returned it with these words in red, referring to me by my office nickname. At that time, I often wore Western shifts I’d bought in Austin, Texas when I’d visit my brother, Mark, who attending the University of Texas in Austin.

Sunday Morning Surprise

Story about Ludtke v. Kuhn in New York Times Sports Section

In its 2019 World Series coverage, the New York Times editors snuck in this box about my 1977-1978 legal action , Ludtke v. Kuhn, to gain equal access for women reporters, which meant we could fully do our jobs by interviewing ballplayers in the locker rooms, just like our male colleagues had done for decades. This photo is from a book party held in Washington, D.C. (home of my friend Ellen Hume) to celebrate the publication of “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America.” Maya is pulling on my friend Hillary Clinton’s necklace as my childhood friend Kathleen Kennedy Townsend joins us.

I posted this photo on my Facebook page, accompanied by a brief story of how I’d learned about it from several friends. After a week in which we heard about the demeaning, degrading behavior that targeted three women reporters in the Houston Astros locker room – and saw how the team tried at first to claim that the Sports Illustrated writer, Stephanie Apstein, had fabricated the account – it’s good to see an accurate account of this history of what women have been up against in sports reporting through the decades. Lots of progress seen – hey, terrific women broadcasting games in network booths is one giant leap forward – but then there are these reminders of how this fight for equal treatment goes on.

“My own Sunday morning shocker! First a text from my former Time magazine colleague Claudia Wallis “so cool to come across the article about you and mentioned your “upcoming memoir” as I read this morning’s paper.” What story, I asked myself. What paper? A text back to her led me to The New York Times sports section, and this boxed story on the World Series page. Complete surprise to me. Then, I see an email with the header NYT, and its from Betsy Lipson who rows where I do Community Rowing, Inc. - CRI, and she writes: “I am CRI rower who’s been a fan girl of yours, and I’m so excited to hear you finished your book. Can’t wait to read it.” And like Claudia, she sends me a shot of the story.

Let’s break here just to say that I am not finished writing my memoir, so it will be a while until it is published. Perhaps upcoming is a bit of misleading word, but I am writing it and it will, one day, be published.

Back to this morning, when another text arrives from Ginger Ryan with news that she’d recognized me in the photo before she saw the headline. Well, that’s good since that photo was taken 22 years ago, when my friends Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend joined me at a book party thrown by Ellen Hume at her home in Washington, D.C. to celebrate publication of my first book, “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America.”

And now I see a tweet from my dear friend Lisa Olson who paid much too high of a price in the early 1990 for doing her job in the New England Patriots locker room.

What I love most about this morning is how the threads of my friendships weave together in a knot of solidarity ... from my journalism days (Claudia), from my rowing life (Betsy), from my Mothers Out Front climate activism (Ginger), and from my sports writing life and our fight for equal rights (Lisa). Friendship means the world to me, and thanks to all of you who reached out to me to share in this reminder that the struggle endures, the fight goes on.”

— Melissa Ludtke, Facebook page

My Bucket List Row … 47 Years Deferred

From Wellesley College’s First Intercollegiate Team to Her First Head of the Charles Race Nearly Five Decades Later

Our intercollegiate Wellesley four made news in the Fall of 1971 with Boston Globe photo and story about women’s rowing. It would be another year before the Head of the Charles permitted women to row eights in its competition, and our cox and each of these rowers, except me, was in that historic Wellesley eight.

Let’s step back a few decades, in fact let’s start this rowing story at the turn of the century.

My grandmother –I called her Nonna – rowed stroke for her Wellesley crew from 1903 to 1907. Wellesley crews in those times rowed only ceremonially on Lake Waban, our beautiful campus lake.

When I went to Wellesley College, the first of my Nonna’s grandchildren to do so, my aunt Esther, who was an education professor at Wellesley and also an Alumna, gave me Nonna’s rowing Sweater. I have it today – with a few moth holes in it, but the - W - remains in place. The following two excerpts are from a story my Aunt Esther wrote after my Nonna died. In reading this memoir years later, I discovered where I got my stubborn streak and perseverance.

Nonna died when I was 15 years old, so she didn’t live to see me attend Wellesley College nor did she get to see me row there. She would have been thrilled by both milestones.

In my sophomore year of college I discovered rowing. Loved it. I was obsessed by it from the moment I rowed one of the lovingly named “Wellesley barges” out of our Lake Waban boathouse. These boats were built for Wellesley rowers for our dorm and class races and rowing classes and designed to slip into their water slots with our oars raised vertically above our heads. Quite different than racing shells where all oars are removed together at the dock after everyone is out of the boat. A part of my rowing story, below, will show you what happens when someone – I was that someone – raises her oar out of its oarlock while we are all in a competitive boat.

Wellesley’s boathouse on Lake Waban with our specially made boats wide enough to stay upright even without the oars in the oarlocks. Photo Wellesley.edu

Here’s what I wrote for Wellesley magazine about the magical day that I stepped into a racing four.

What I wrote for Wellesley Magazine in a 1984 story headlined “Row, Row, Row Your Boat … A Love Affair with a Lake.”

By my senior year at Wellesley College, I was living in San Francisco with my Wellesley College friend Harriet Milnes, with whom I’d hung out during my first year when she was a senior. As a profile I will post later illuminates, once Harriett and my other senior class friends graduated, every bit of my outside of class focus shifted to rowing. By the way, Harriett’s and my paths that have crossed through the years – she came to my wedding in 1978, met my high school/college boyfriend and dear friend David Conger ,and they were married. I attended their daughter’s wedding last summer. Speaks to the power of enduring friendships.

In the fall of my senior year, the Head of the Charles allowed women’s eights to row for the first time. And Wellesley College – rowers from my class of 1973 driving the boat – competed among 13 other women’s boats of all ages. I will let me dear friend Sally (Brumley) Keller pick up the story of that boat. Just know it’s the boat I wished I’d been in. The one that 47 years later pushed me to row this year’s Head of the Charles as my bucket list race.

Sally (right, with Queen of Rowing Crown) and me, Wellesley classmates, fellow rowers, and Sally rows at a nationally competitive level today. In 2019 Head of the Charles she stroked her 70+ (average age) boat to a gold medal with plenty of time to spare. A dominant row! She stays with me for the Head of the Charles so it was quite fun this year for each of us to be rowing an eight.

Head of the Charles 1972

Fall of my senior year and I’m on the other coast studying Navajo language and education at U.C. Berkeley and rowing for Mills College on Oakland’s Lake Merritt. My friend Harriett was, by then, a graduate student at Mills and she had taken up rowing with Mills, and the crew kindly invited me to jump in. Mills was a West Coast rowing power at that time, so it felt great to be in their boat.

Meanwhile back East, my rowing mates at Wellesley were pulling together an eight to row in the Head of the Charles . Why not? It’s the first time women could row an eight in this race, and so they did.

Here’s a photo of that Wellesley College crew, taken from a bridge followed by the words Sally wrote to me, sharing this memory. You’ll note that she hadn’t forgotten the day when I pulled my oar out after our first row in our wooden racing four – and yes. I was a must less experienced rower than Sally was then, and remain so today.

Sally’s words: Wellesley's W 8+ was 7th of 13 entries in 1972 HOCR, first year there was a W 8+ event (not yet divided into club/collegiate/etc...). First year there were more than a few women racing (scullers).

“We rowed out of MIT’s boathouse, borrowing one of their old wooden boats, as Wellesley didn’t have a racing 8+ at that time, or a coach for that matter... Barbara Jordan was the “water” person - canoeing, swimming, sailing... so she signed when we needed for entries, but knew nothing about crew and didn’t go out coaching us. Did cox us once, which I remember vividly: I was in stroke seat when we came into the dock and Dave said “hand me your oar” to someone on starboard...someone inexperienced (even more than the rest of us!) who took her oar out of the oarlock to hand to him and we flipped right there at the dock. I came up facing BJ and will never forget the surprised look on her face!! (How she fit in that seat, I have no idea...maybe sitting up high enough that she was easily dumped out - good thing)

Happy memories - Sally”

— Sally Keller

Winter 2016

Enter Risa Greendlinger, yes another Wellesley College graduate years later than me, with whom I’d worked on a political campaign in the 1980s. We'd stayed in touch, so she invites me to join her for coffee early one morning, telling me she’s going to be near Cambridge. We meet. She tells me she’s just been on a rowing erg working out at Community Rowing, Inc.. I’m curious. Soon, I’m in, and by the next week I am joining her at 6:00 a.m. to erg.

Thank you, Risa. Serendipity is a big part of my life, as it likely is for everyone. But I always remind younger folks when I speak to them, serendipity only benefits those who recognize it and are ready to act. Go for it.

As winter draws to an end, Risa and I are joining GS 1, a lower level General Sweeps class coached by John Sisk. By March 2016, I am layered up agains the cold morning weather and rowing in the dark in a fiberglass boat (a first) with fiberglass oars (a first), and I am loving it. Can’t wait to be on the dock at 5:25 am, ready to row on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And pretty soon I am signing up to learn how to skull – single, double, quad – and I love that, too. And then I am volunteering to row on Tuesday and Thursdays with para-rowers – rowers with disabilities and by showing up we give them the chance to row, and soon I am bowing quads and doubles.

In the summer of 2018 I returned to Lake Waban for my 45th Wellesley reunion. Each reunion year 1973 returns, the Wellesley athletic department brings our boat – named Spirit of ‘73, in our honor – out of storage. It’s in the boathouse waiting for us. And we get to row it on Lake Waban. We’ve done this at every reunion.

For our Lake Waban Row in June 2018, I united my two rowing families, CRI and Wellesley. Glenda Fishman, Wellesley College 1970, with whom I row in GS Sweeps coxed us around the lake while her husband shoot photos. Sally is stroking, having switched seats with Gigi, who stroked us in 1972. Debbie and I have our old seats in the bow.

If we all make it to 2023, we’ll all be rowing Spirit of ‘73 again. Wooden hull. Wooden oars.

Our legacy. Wellesley College Class of 1973 competitive rowers.

By now, I am obsessively in love! With rowing. And with CRI! Suddenly, I am part of an extraordinary new community where I know everyone by first name. And we are rowing on the Charles River. No better combination possible!

Head of the Charles Practice 2019. This video is one of our early practice for our Head of the Charles Row. Not our final boats. Different mix of rowers, which made it fun. All of us rowed with each other until Anna Jurascheck chose the 3 boats who rowed in the Head of the Charles.

Upstream from CRI, just around the river’s bend, is Wellesley College boathouse. Through the decades, Wellesley kept rowing competitively until in May 2016 Wellesley rowers won the NCAA Division 3 women’s rowing championship. What follows is an excerpt from an Endnote essay I wrote at the time for Wellesley magazine – again uniting my CRI and Wellesley College rowing experiences. If you’d like to read this entire essay – The Girls in the Boat, click here.

“On our first March outing, as we readied our shell, I heard clicking oars on the river. From around the river’s bend, grey-hulled shells powered by blue and white oars emerged. Barely readable in winter dawn’s dim light, I saw WELLESLEY on their hulls.

‘Go Blue. Go Wellesley,’ I shouted, startling my boat mates. From that morning on, shouting to them was ritual. For me it was an invisible tether connecting our baby strokes in the ‘Spirit of ‘73’ to these powerful, polished rowers and their enviable pace.

On the morning of my 65th birthday, when I became a ‘senior citizen,’ I rowed – without a dockside shout-out. Wellesley’s rowers were in San Diego to compete. Midway through our row, we paused and the coach asked if I had a birthday wish. ‘Let’s shout, “Go Blue,” I said. ‘Wellesley’s at the NCAA’s.’ He smiled. We shouted. By the next day Wellesley was the Division 3 NCAA champ, earning the college’s first NCAA win by any team!

Later that summer, my daughter, a Wellesley sophomore, told me that a team rower was a fellow worker at her summer job. ‘I asked her if she heard someone shouting “Go Blue’ on the Charles,” said Maya, who knew about my morning hollers.

’Oh, yes,’ her friend replied. ‘We don’t know who she is, but we love that woman!’

It’s fall now, and Wellesley is on the Charles, rowing from its boathouse upstream from mine. I’m shouting still. Perhaps a few of these rowers know now that I once rowed as they do now, albeit not nearly so well. Decades from now when their NCAA win is lore of aging alumnae, I hope they get to shout, ‘Go Blue,’ to young rowers. They’ll know just how I feel.’”
”

— Melissa Ludtke, Wellesley Magazine, Fall 2016

Head of the Charles 2019

Magnificent October Sunday. I feel the smallest breath of wind off my back porch. Looks like it’s going to be a smooth row in the afternoon. That morning Sally Keller and I settle in at my house to watch the HORC LiveStream of the Regatta before she needs to catch a bus. When she leaves, I eat an early lunch, dress in layers for the race, and I’m at the boathouse with our 3 GS crews by 1:00. Our race goes off at 4:12, but we are Bow # 31 of 35 boats and we’ve got a long slow row ahead of us to get to the starting line in the Charles River Basin near Boston University.

Without these rowers, there’d be no bucket list row for me. All of you are champs in my book. Showing off our CRI red. I wear it proudly. Sort of like Wellesley Blue. Photo taken before our Head of the Charles row.

Here’s a few photo and a video of our row taken by Jeb Sharp, mostly, with one by Matthew McWeeney, who you will meet in a photo at the end.

Bow #31 is on my back.

Emerging from under the Weeks Bridge. About halfway down the 3-mile course.

Weeks Bridge turn. Row hard, starboard. Turn the boat.

Row harder, starboard. Especially you in the bow.

Eliot Bridge turn at the Head of the Charles Race, CRI GS 2-Dory 2019

To the finish. Thanks Jeb Sharp for biking along and catching us here, too.

A huge thank you to all who came out to watch and cheer our boat on and who encouraged me from afar with your many supportive messages on Facebook. Here are Matthew McWeeney, Rose Moss and my daughter, Maya, on Weeks Bridge waiting for us to row under. Photo by Jeb Sharp

The Morning After

On the Head of the Charles Regatta website a profile of me is posted.

"WHY NOT?"

Pioneering Journalist Crosses Big One Off Bucket List

Written by Samantha Barry, a journalism student at Northeastern University, she’s learned about me through a serendipitous conversation I’d had with a Northeastern Journalism professor, my friend Dan Kennedy. Dan relayed my “bucket list” row to his fellow professor who was organizing coverage of the regatta by his students, and presto, Sam and I were sipping coffee and hot apple cider on blustery cold day just before the regatta began. She texted me on Saturday and we turned out to be close by at the Head of the Charles, so she also shot my photo at the Eliot Bridge.

““I’m obsessed with it, completely obsessed by it,’ Ludtke said. ‘I post sunrises, videos, pictures as well, essays about it, so people who know me through Facebook know that I just love rowing.’

Now that she’s back at it, it doesn’t look like she is going to stop anytime soon. In her run-up to his weekend’s regatta, she simply keeping that ‘Why not’ mentality in mind. She might well find herself back at the Head of the Charles; first regattas have an addictive way of leading to second regattas. Either way, she planned to leave it all on the water.

’So that’s what I intend to do, I intend to leave nothing on the river in my one and only,”’Ludtke said. ‘I’m going to look at it as my one and only because it may well be, and that would be fine. I’d leave this life very satisfied if this was my one and only Head of the Charles rowing race.’

Editor’s Note: Melissa Ludtke’s CRI boat finished 34th in the Mixed Eight event, in a time of 19:27.”

— Head of the Charles Regatta News, story by Samantha Barry

If you would like to read Samatha’s entire story, click here.

Play it Again, Sam(antha): Highlights from a Week of Low Lights

A Woman's Work: Home Economics* (*I took Woodworking Instead) drawings and story by Carolita Johnson

The girls in my 7th grade year were the first to be allowed to take woodworking at my junior high school in Amherst, MA. Before us, before the very early 1960s, boys went to woodworking classes while girls went to home economics. There, we learned to sew and cook and about how babies are made, but we did that only when the black shades were fully drawn on basement windows to be sure nobody (the boys) looked while we were being taught what girls needed to know.

Perhaps its why Carolita Johnson's story leapt out, grabbed me, and tugged me in.

Published on Longreads

Carolita never did write about woodworking class, but that didn't matter. With every scene of her tale about her marriage, I sensed I knew precisely what she said she felt. It was as though she was writing what could have been my life. Why not? Our girlhoods – woodworking and lots more opportunities some girls in our generation had – gave us the same running start. Oh, by the way, the first thing I made in my woodworking class was a shoe shine kit for my dad. I still have the shoe shine kit – along with gratitude to my father for always pushing me to live my dreams no matter how unlikely their success or how few women shared them.

My dad and me.

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This is first of what I hope will be my weekly blogs spotlighting stories that stick with me through the week. Focus will be on lives of girls and women and most weeks I'll shoot for having at least some highlight women in sports. I'll annotate each story with my insights and thoughts that come out of life experiences. Hoping you'll comment so we can open up a dialogue about these stories – and events and opinions they bring to mind. 

                    – Melissa Ludtke, author of forthcoming memoir,  "Locker Women Talk: A Woman's Struggle to Get Inside"

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Mercury 13: The Women Who Weren't Astronauts

Look magazine cover, Feb. 2, 1960

I was eight years old when this magazine cover was published. The idea of a "girl" going into space seemed unimaginable and I wasn't the only one thinking that way.  Despite passing every one of the tests, physical and psychological, that the Mercury 7 astronauts (all men) passed, Betty Skelton (pictured on the LOOK cover), NASA declared that neither she nor any of the other 13 women who'd taken the astronaut tests would go into space. It would be 23 years before Sally Ride would blast off in the Challenger space shuttle, becoming the first American woman in space.

Betty died in 2011, but many of the Mercury 13 women pilots who tried out to be astronauts share their stories in this magnificent documentary Mercury 13, a Netflix original. 

“SYNOPSIS: Mercury 13 is a remarkable story of the women who were tested for spaceflight in 1961 before their dreams were dashed in being the first to make the trip beyond Earth. NASA’s ‘man in space’ program, dubbed ‘Project Mercury’ began in 1958. The men chosen – all military test pilots – became known as The Mercury 7. But away from the glare of the media, behind firmly closed doors, female pilots were also screened. Thirteen of them passed and, in some cases, performed better than the men. They were called the Mercury 13 and had the ‘right stuff’ but were, unfortunately, the wrong gender. Underneath the obsession of the space race that gripped America, the women were aviation pioneers who emerged thirsty for a new frontier, but whose time would have to wait. The film tells the definitive story of thirteen truly remarkable women who reached for the stars but were ahead of their time. A Netflix original documentary directed by David Sington (The Fear of 13) and Heather Walsh.”

— Film Review: Netflix’s Mercury 13 Shows The Cosmic Cruelty of Sexism

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Women Sports Reporters: Sexism at the World Cup

‘I prefer to hear a male voice’: Female commentators find harsh judgment at World Cup

Washington Post, June 26, 2018

Category: Happens All The Time:

A man complains about the sound of a woman's voice invading what he considers "his" space. Happened again this week when Vicki Sparks became the first woman to broadcast a World Cup game on British TV. Didn't take long a British soccer player to go on national TV to say he didn't think her voice belonged there. Good news: So many pushed back against his comment on Good Morning Britain,  that by afternoon he had to apologize, and he did. So, too, did a few of the men who groped and kissed three on-air women reporters at the World Cup after the women called them out on their gross, sexist behavior.

““Don’t do this! Never do this again,” Ms Guimaraes shouted at the man, who can be heard apologising in the video.

”Don’t do this, I don’t allow you to do this, never, OK? This is not polite, this is not right.

”Never do this to a woman, OK? Respect.””

— BBC News: World Cup reporter Julia Guimaraes' fury at on-camera kiss attempt

Of course, this happens in other realms, too, like politics, really any place a woman challenges the presumed power of men. In no time at all, she's being told about the irritating pitch of her voice. Remember Hillary Clinton and how The Atlantic did a scientific investigation of her sound. 

And Getty Images faced published a photo album, World Cup 2018: The Sexiest Fans” that featured images of only female fans. After receiving a lot of backlash for this photo album, Getty apologized and removed the album, saying that it did not meet “editorial standards.”

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Nudity and Athletes = Women's Empowerment

From Jessica Mendoza's Twitter feed

Once upon a time – back in the 1970s when I was a reporter at Sports Illustrated – my magazine published its swimsuit issue as soon as the professional football season ended. Hey, the guys needed something to look at and women with as little clothes on as possible proved to be the best-selling answer. Now SI's swimsuit issue also features women athletes like Olympic gold medalists Aly Raisman and Simone Biles posing in bikinis and displaying women's muscularity.

Just as I admire today's women sportswriters and broadcasters for speaking up and pushing back against the vile things said on social media about them, I get how showing strength in a woman's body and breaking out of the male gaze expectations is empowering, and I applaud these athletes for pushing boundaries by showing who they are as women. Here's my recent blog post about SI's most popular issue. 

ESPN does, too, in its annual body issue, featuring male and female athletes, all posing nude, with their private parts creatively concealed. See gallery below for photos on Twitter feeds sent out about the ESPN Body Issue, primarily featuring softball star Lauren Chamberlain.

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Toni Stone: Woman Player in Negro League

From story published by Timeline

This woman shattered the gender barrier in pro baseball

When Toni Stone joined the Negro League, she became the first woman regular on a big-league team

“‘There’s always got to be a first in everything,’ Toni Stone told Ebony in 1953. She knew what she was talking about. By that point, Stone had been the first in a lot of things: the first girl on her church’s baseball team; the first on a traveling barnstorming team; and, now, she had just become the first woman to play Negro League baseball, breaking the gender line at the same time Major League Baseball was making strides with racial integration. Stone felt the sting of both racism and sexism in her journey to becoming a professional in the sport she’d loved since childhood.”

— Ashawnta Jackson, writing on Timeline

History is a great reminder that long before women marched for their rights, there were women like Toni Stone, who in doing what she loved the best, was carving paths into places that girls and women didn't usually go. Even nationally syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen took note of her singular success, praising her with these words: “She belts home runs as easily as most girls catch stitches in their knitting, and the sports boys are goggle-eyed.”Here's a video about Toni Stone, narrated by Martha Ackmann, the author of "Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone."

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Trans women migrate to escape violence and stay alive:

Reporter Alice Driver takes on the journey with one of them.

As dawn arrives, Marfil Estrella looks out the window of the bus that will take her from San Salvador, El Salvador to Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photos by Danielle Villasana.

We return to Longreads for Alice Driver's evocative and elegantly written story about the journey north undertaken by a trans woman who will seek asylum in the United States in an attempt to save her life.

“At Mister Donut, I sat across the table from Avelar and asked Marfil Estrella if I could join her on her journey to the United States. Marfil Estrella, who had tried to migrate before but had faced violence, said my presence would make her feel safer. I agreed to accompany her to Tapachula, Mexico, via bus, then she planned to spend a few months there getting her papers in order to legally pass through Mexico. Avelar, who had helped Marfil Estrella in the process of preparing paperwork for asylum, said she remembered that Marfil Estella had said to her when they first met, ‘I want to leave here because the streets right now are a time bomb. I don’t want to be left lying in the street, as so many have been left. I want to seek freedom. I want to seek peace.’”

— The Road to Asylum Trans women migrate to escape violence and stay alive. Alice Driver accompanied one of these women on her journey, byAlice Driver

So Long High Heels: Hello Equality, Once Again

I made a mistake. I wore heels. Not stilettos. Mine weren't even close to high enough that my heel looked brittle enough to snap. Slender at its point, my heels were not so pointy as to render me tipsy or tippy. Instead, I swayed, since I'd soon discovered that the cushiony cover on the heel tip was gone so what met the floor was a thin, metal spike. I felt like a tap dancer trying not to tap but only to remain upright as I walked gingerly across the slippery airport floor. 

Gail Sheehy wrote "Passages" – about the predictable crises of adult life. I don't remember reading about this one, though it's certainly one that could be predicted. Won't there come a time in every woman's life – born out of pain – when her body rebels and she sends a message to Self: "Self, I've worn the last high heeled shoes of my life."

Last Wednesday night, when hobbled by foot pain, I left my plane in stocking feet. I walked through the airport, my shoes dangling from my hand, and then to the the parking lot to await my Lyft ride home, and up the stairs into my room where the shoes fell to the floor, never to be worn again.

My last high heels.

 

It's flats from now on. I never did wear heels all that much, but now I'm really done.

My mid-sixties heels' passage got me to wondering what embodiment of youth I will next throw over to age? Tight fitted waists on pants are fading fast. Bungee jumping is definitely out, though I'm not at all sure that in my younger years I would have done that. Not much else I can think of, yet.

What's comforting about ditching my heels is realizing I'm catching a wave of feminist #MeToo rebellion, and not just among peers. Here's a headline on a story I love:

This Unspoken Rule About Heels Is the Reason Kristen Stewart Ditched Her Shoes at Cannes

“Kristen Stewart made headlines at the Cannes Film Festival this week for taking her shoes off on the red carpet. And if you look back into the archives, you’ll realize she did almost the same thing in 2016 when she swapped her black Christian Louboutins for blue Vans sneakers. Her decision is not just about comfort — it’s about making a statement against the Cannes policy that requires women to wear high heels. Although the policy is more of an unspoken rule and isn’t etched in stone like other parts of the Cannes dress code, it’s become clear that women wearing heels are more welcome than those wearing flats.”

— Popsugar, May 18, 2018

And this one: 

How High Heels Became a Feminist Issue at Cannes

Outrage ensued after a group of women wearing flat shoes was turned away from a Cannes red carpet. Why is the high heel such a charged piece of clothing?

“The controversy at Cannes reflects a longstanding debate about feminism and high heels.

Indeed, the high heel—as the Brooklyn Museum’s Killer Heels exhibition revealed—is fraught with historical baggage.

From Chinese women teetering on foot-binding wedges to Marilyn Monroe wiggling in her stilettos, high heels have symbolized femininity, sex, power, and submission—sometimes all at once.

They can never be neutral. Women who wear them know this, whether they do so to express their own feelings of power and control or to look and feel sexy. ... Still some feminists insist women can’t be taken seriously in four-inch platforms. Writing in the anthology Fifty Shades of Feminism, Sandi Toksvig, the Danish writer and actress, argues that women ‘will never meet men on an equal footing … while they literally can’t stand up for themselves.’”

— Daily Beast, May 19, 2015

After finally ditching my high heels, it's fun to feel part of what's become a broader cultural rebellion in which what women wear (or don't wear) on their feel sends a signal about our freedom.

Here's to flats and freedom!

For a history of high heels – and what they tell us about women's lives, check out this Boston Globe story.

“It may seem somewhat overblown to declare the seemingly trivial act of wearing flats to a formal event as an act of resistance, but the potential impact is truly significant. After all, it’s not that long ago that women were forbidden from wearing pants in public,” says Juliet Williams, an associate professor of gender studies and associate dean of social sciences at UCLA. “By this logic, the expectation (if not formal compulsion) that women wear high heels may be seen as one more shackle that needs to be cast off if women are ever to truly compete, toe-to-comfortable-toe, with men.”

— The history of the high heel – and what it says about women today, The Boston Globe, June 28, 2015

And here is an addendum about high heels from a story in the Harvard Gazette in February 2022 about a scholar who is exploring the perceptions of women wearing high heels.

“For some, heels are useful “power dressing” tools for climbing the corporate ladder that boost confidence and convey authority. For others, they signify conventional notions of femininity that encourage sexual objectification and diminish career prospects. In any case, high heels are still widely seen as the most professional choice for women in many lines of work, from luxury retail sales and the airlines to investment banks and courtrooms, Sreedhari Desai, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, said. In some countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan, and Israel, companies can lawfully fire women for misconduct if they refuse to wear heels. In the U.S., employers can institute dress codes provided they are not overly burdensome on one gender group.”

— Harvard Gazette

Desai’s research is ongoing, but early findings remind me of why I ditched the high heels.

“Time after time, women wearing flats were deemed more capable, more prepared, and earned higher evaluations from both men and women in their 20s through their 50s. In the case of a “masculine” job such as tech manager, the bias against high-heeled women held even when the other candidate’s shoes were not visible to observers.”

— Harvard Gazette

In Memory of Christina-Taylor Green: A Girl Who Loved Baseball

Christina-Taylor Green watched over her younger brother, reading to him as a big sister does. in her memory, this sculpture was dedicated and stands in sad remembrance of this girl who was born on 9/11, who died from when bullets aimed at Representative Gabby Giffords hit her. That was on a morning when Christina, who was nine year old, awakened feeling excited that her neighbor was taking her to meet a woman she admired in politics.

Christina-Taylor had just been elected her class president at Mesa Verde Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona. Her plans were to start a club at her school to help her less fortunate classmates. I knew none of this about her or much about her aunt Kim Green, when in my last blog I shared the photograph of Kim as a girl wearing a baseball glove who then was just about the same age as Christina when she died. Kim had tried to play on her town's Little League Baseball team, but she couldn't because she was a girl. When Christina was nine, she was the only girl playing baseball on her Little League team. She put her glove on to play second base.

When Christina was nine, she was the only girl playing baseball on her Little League team. She put her glove on to play second base.

Christina-Taylor Green

Two days after I published my blog, "Play Ball," this comment arrived from Perry Barber. I didn't know Perry then, but I know I lot more about her now – and this tells me why she wrote to me about Christina-Taylor. More on Perry later. Now the words Perry shared with me:

“Kim Green, the little girl shown in the photo from 1974, is the sister of Roxanna Green and aunt to Roxanna’s daughter, another baseball-loving little girl whose name was Christina-Taylor Green.

Christina was murdered in the same Arizona shooting that severely injured then-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords back in 2011. Christina was honored at the very first Baseball For All Nationals tournament in Kissimmee, Florida in 2013; the more than two hundred baseball-playing girls from all over the globe who participated in the tournament, organized by BFA founder Justine Siegal, wore armbands with Christina’s initials in her memory. Christina’s spirit continues to inspire other girls who play and love baseball the way she did, the way her aunt and her whole family has done for generations. ”

I wrote these words to Perry: 

“How remarkable, Perry Barber, for you to introduce me to Christina-Taylor Green and to share her remarkable life with me – a life of such extraordinary promise, beauty and heart, a life which so sadly was shortened by the violence that’s all too horribly visited on children in America today. And to learn from you about her love of baseball, how Baseball for All honored her at its National Tournament, and how the girls playing in it wore armbands in her memory. Your words are leading me to write another blog post that I will be sharing soon, words of mine in honor of Christina-Taylor, a girl I wish I’d had the pleasure of meeting, a girl whose memory will stay within me forever. With gratitude for you enabling me to know her. Melissa”

And then I put Perry Barber's name into Google search and before long I knew why Perry toook the moments she did to write to me about Christina-Taylor. With this girl and woman, baseball became a shared passion.

Perry Barber, MSBL umpire

Soon, I came upon this story, "Perry Barber: Renaissance Umpire," published by the Men’s Senior Baseball League (MSBL)/Men’s Adult Baseball League (MABL), and is my introduction – now yours – to Perry Barber:

“Perry Barber is a very extraordinary lady. This 61 year old dynamo is a Jeopardy game show champion from 1972 when Art Flemming paved the way for Alex Trebek and is also a musician who’s talent took her to the same stage as the ‘Boss’, Bruce Springsteen, as his opening act. She is also an MSBL umpire in her third year of working the MSBL World Series down here in the warm sun of Arizona.”

— Perry Barber: Renaissance Umpire

How remarkable that by reading about a threat allegedly made about an 11-year old girl who wanted to play baseball in New Hampshire, I start this magical chain reaction with stories of girls and baseball. How magnificent, too, that Justine Siegal, who in 2009 was the first female coach of a Major League baseball team (the Oakland A's) after she'd founded Baseball for All at the age of 23, was the person to introduce me to Karen Zerby Buzzelle, the mom who'd founded the all girls baseball team, the Boston Slammers. So when the 11-year old girl from New Hampshire came to scrimmage with the Boston Slammers and inspired me to write a blog post about her, I came to learn about Kim Green's long-ago passion to play baseball and how in 1974 her mom Sheila made it happen for Kim and lots of other girls, as moms like Karen still do. Then, I thought about how 1974 had been the year when I followed my passion for baseball and other sports to becoming a researcher and reporter at Sports Illustrated, and in this job I'd become the first woman to cover Major League Baseball full-time and four years later in 1978 I'd win a federal court case to give women equal access to report on baseball.

For Perry Barber to be the one to introduce me to Christina–Taylor, this girl who loved baseball, is fitting. Feeling Now connected with Christina and with the youthful Kim and her childhood friend Alice, and with Perry, makes me wish for the day when our shared passion won't be a story told only by a few of us who love this game and possess the inner drive to want to share it with others. Instead, my dream is that one day, soon, when more girls and women play baseball that the crowds cheering them on and the media telling their stories will be the equal in size and yes, in passion, to those who gather to watch and report on the boys and men.

Now in my mid-60s I'm writing this blog, my first, and I am writing my memoir, Locker Room Talk, about the time in America's history when I was in my mid-20s and women in America marched to fight back against gender discrimination. I want my 21-year old daughter Maya to know how I was able to play a small role in this social movement for gender equality by opening the baseball's locker room doors to the girls and women whose job it was then – and one day would be – to report on baseball.

These doors, I am happy to say, are ones that many women have walked through. 

RBG calls for ERA: I'm With Her!

Ruth Bader Ginsburg calls for equal rights amendment to the Constitution

This headline of last Friday's Washington Post story caught my eye. RBG is a hero of mine. Not only do I admire her physical workouts, especially her push-ups, but I am grateful for her ever-watchful eye and  lifetime of steadfast actions she's taken to protect and promote women's rights.

To absorb RBG's legal reasoning about why the United States needs both the ERA and the 14th Amendment to protect sexual equality, read her cogent argument in the January 1979 Washington University Law Review – Symposium: The Quest for Equality.

When the ERA deadline for ratification was reached in 1982, I was in my early 30s, living in heady times when women were on the march and I could see women's lives changing around me. In my federal court case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, Judge Constance Baker Motley's ruling moved a mountain of resistance to secure equality for women sportswriters – and though there weren't many of us, the ruling's symbolic import was huge. Perhaps because I existed in my euphoric bubble I trusted that progress towards gender equality was inevitable and unstoppable; it would be only a matter of time before the ERA would be in our Constitution. After all, who could object to works with legal standing that achieve what is fair, just and right?

THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

It was suffragist Alice Paul who in 1923, on the 75th anniversary of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention, had introduced the "Lucretia Mott Amendment. It read: "Men and woman shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." This was introduced in every session of Congress until a slightly reworded ERA amendment passed in 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification. When favorable state votes stalled as the seven year window was about to end, Congress extended the deadline by three years. Alice Paul died in 1977, which was the year when Indiana became the 35th and last state to ratify the ERA before the deadline came.

In 1980 the Republican Party dropped the ERA from its party platform.

In my book proposal for Locker Room Talk, I noted the similarities in how people talked about gender and locker rooms during my equal rights case in the late 1970s and the debates about the designation and use of bathrooms that have assumed such a central role in the transgender rights movement today. From my book proposal:

“Perhaps our enduring fascination with - and the on-going political currency of – the question of who gets into what restroom tugs our generations together. Back in my day, Phyllis Schlafly, the self-proclaimed defender of women’s propriety and place, put toilets at the moralizing core of her separate spheres campaign against the ERA. Her side won, and many credited the specter of shared toilets as the key in dooming the amendment, along with the fear she instilled about women being forced to assume combat roles in the military. Today women have gone to court so that they can serve in combat alongside men, arguing they are able to perform as the equal of men. Now, too, the politics around transgender people is at its fiercest at the bathroom door. Who enters what door? Who decides? ”

— Locker Room Talk, book proposal

In 1923, Alice Paul, rallied support for the cause of equal rights, by observing that "if we keep on this way they will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Convention without being much further advanced in equal rights than we are. . . .  We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government."

Alice Paul was right. By 1998, the ERA was dormant. Only recently, and with good reason as women experience setbacks in the successful struggles we've waged and won, is there talk of reviving the ERA. And action, too: On March 22, 2017, the 45th anniversary of the day that Congress sent the ERA to the states, legislators made Nevada the 36th (of 38 needed) to ratify the ERA. There's debate, of course, about their timing given that the Congressional deadline of 1982 long ago ended.

So if that's the fight we need to have in Congress, I'm with RBG. I say let's do it.

Excellent interview with RBG in The Atlantic, published after I wrote this post.