MOVIES : Back at the Plate Again : Four decades after the All American Girls Professional Baseball League disbanded, its players are recalled in ‘A League of Their Own’

In 1945, a little-known professional baseball player touring the Midwest posed a threat on every trip to the plate, breaking league records with a .299 batting average and stealing 92 bases.

But this player, at 5-feet-2 and 103 pounds, wore makeup and a skirt and went to charm school. Helen St. Aubin was a star player for the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL).

St. Aubin and her sister Margaret, who played under their maiden name Callaghan, took part in the little-known chapter of baseball history that inspired director Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own,” starring Geena Davis, Tom Hanks and Madonna. This week, almost 40 years after the last women’s league game was played in Indiana’s Ft. Wayne Memorial Field, the film opens across the country.

It follows the members of the Rockford Ill. Peaches, who include sisters Dottie (Davis) and Kit (Lori Petty). Madonna plays the worldly Mae, a center fielder with a “fast” reputation, and Tom Hanks portrays a gruff former major leaguer assigned to coach the women’s team.

St. Aubin, who lives in Lompoc, had five sons after her playing days were over, including Casey Candaele (pronounced can-DEL), who plays infield for the Houston Astros. Another son, Kelly Candaele, co-produced a documentary on the league, also called “A League of Their Own.”

Kelly Candaele later wrote a treatment for Marshall based on his mother and his aunt’s play in the league. He and the documentary’s co-producer Kim Wilson receive a story credit on the film, although the script was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. The film’s producers say, for the record, that the characters of the women players are composites, and aren’t based on specific players.

Marshall’s film deals with the first season of the AAGPBL teams, which toured 14 cities across the Midwest from 1943 to 1954. What started as a curious spectacle among men amused by the notion of women wielding bats soon had fans swearing allegiance to teams such as the Peaches, the Grand Rapids Chicks, the Springfield Sallies and the Battle Creek Belles.

Chewing-gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner P. K. Wrigley organized the all-women’s league during World War II, when the military depleted the ranks for minor and major leagues. Stars such as Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams enlisted and went overseas.

Wrigley had received word from the Office of War Information that the 1943 Major League Baseball season might be suspended due to a shortage of men. Although the major leagues never closed down, some minor league teams did, and there was some fear that the nation’s pastime might suffer. Wrigley--he becomes chocolate-bar magnate Walter Harvey (played by Marshall’s brother Garry) in the movie--saw the women’s league as a means of preserving the sport of baseball while entertaining civilians and making money.

Scouts combed softball and baseball fields for athletes, recruiting players from all over the United States and Canada. At 21, Helen Callaghan and Margaret, then 22, were spotted when they traveled with the Vancouver City League to Detroit for a mini-softball world series.

The siblings’ talent had been nurtured on the sand lots of their native Vancouver, where they played softball, baseball and lacrosse. They were raised under the stern hand of their father after losing their mother at an early age.

“There wasn’t anything else to do. We didn’t have money to go to the shows so we grew up playing baseball,” St. Aubin said.

The league scouts quickly recognized the girls’ talent and offered them a position on the newly formed AAGPBL as one of the first sister duos.

“My father wasn’t too happy about that but we did a lot of talking, begging and whatever else it took to get us there,” St. Aubin laughed. “Heck, we could make $60 a week. That was a lot of money for me. I didn’t see 60 pennies in a week at that time.”

Confident but naive, the teen-ager wasn’t prepared for the adventures that awaited in the United States.

At spring training in Pascagoula, Miss., “I saw right off the bat where black people had to ride in the backs of buses and couldn’t walk in front of people. To me that was astounding,” she said.

St. Aubin joined the Minneapolis Millarettes in 1944 and displayed her speed as a defensive outfielder (she rotated among the three positions) who chased down fly balls that were out of the reach of others.

But it was at home plate where she excelled. Swinging left-handed with the biggest bat in the league, a 36-ounce Louisville Slugger, St. Aubin led the league in hits, extra-base hits, doubles and home runs in 1945. Her tenacity and heavy-hitting style earned her the batting crown that year and a newspaperman dubbed her “a feminine Ted Williams.”

“I think men liked the way we wore short skirts, socks up to our knees and the fact that we could still play ball,” St. Aubin said. “They may have initially come out to see pretty legs, but when they saw us play they kept coming back because we played damn good baseball.”

At the same time, the players were sent to Helena Rubenstein’s charm school to persuade the public they hadn’t lost their social graces. Rules forbade them to appear in public in shorts or slacks or with curlers in their hair. Smoking and alcohol were out of the question. On the field, they were not allowed to scream or kick the umpires.

Wrigley shrewdly saw potential in packaging an all-female team in the pleasantries of charm school and short skirt uniforms designed by his wife. Their every move was attended by magazine reporters and other media, and the women were the focal point of Wrigley’s publicity ploys to attract fans into the stadiums.

Charm school, Wrigley professed, would preserve the “feminine angle” of the sport. “Most of the women came from working-class families whose trajectory was not to marry into Rockefellers or Morgans families,” documentary filmmaker and producer Kelly Candaele said.

“That was basically what the league was based on--femininity. Play like a guy and act like a woman. To me, it was just funny,” St. Aubin said.

The women put up with chaperons and broken-down buses that “had to be pushed once in a while.” It all meant nothing to the girls on the road, St. Aubin said. “It was fun as long as we got to the baseball game in time and had enough members to play.”

More than 1 million fans paid the $1.50 general admission and streamed into the stadiums for three consecutive seasons in the late 1940s to watch the women play ball.

Because of the bus travel, their days sometimes began at 4 a.m. and didn’t end until the early hours of the next morning. They played almost nightly for a 115-120 game season, often playing double-headers. During the season, the days merged into one long chain of stadiums and hotels.

While playing for the Ft. Wayne Daisies, St. Aubin married Robert Candaele, an amateur hockey player, and gave birth to her first son, Rick.

Like the others, St. Aubin maintained her role as a mother and wife by juggling her child-rearing duties around a baseball season that often booked double-headers back-to-back and kept her on the road for weeks at a time. She did have the assistance of her sister Pearl, who helped her husband care for her child at home.

But it was still a hectic life. “You were the mother, the ballplayer and the care-giver,” she said.

A burgeoning family prompted St. Aubin to end her baseball career in 1949. “When I decided it was time for me to quit, it was time for me to quit. I didn’t have any regrets,” she said.

Five years later, the league quietly folded, and the names of players like St. Aubin, Faye Dancer and Pepper Paire Davis passed into obscurity.

During the long hiatus between the league’s glory days and her son’s documentary, St. Aubin settled down to raise her five sons in Lompoc, about 180 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

From early on, St. Aubin taught her sons how to pick up ground balls, bat and pitch. She was a regular at their weekly Little League games and starred in the league’s powder puff games for mothers. At those games, Kelly, who later played baseball for the University of Hawaii, recalls his mother quickly dispelling the myths of those who scoffed at the idea of women playing baseball.

Before Casey started playing college baseball for the University of Arizona, St. Aubin told her son, a natural right-hand hitter, that he would have to learn to switch-hit if he were going to compete with the best players.

“You have to be competitive. It’s character-building. If you haven’t got competitiveness, you don’t have anything,” said St. Aubin, who at 69 still retains an air of determination and a competitive edge.

The youngest of the Candaele clan, Casey inherited his mother’s small stature and announced to his family at an early age that he was going to play major league baseball.

“I never even dreamt that Casey would be a professional baseball player even though he told his brothers he wanted to play in the big leagues. He said he wanted to play in the ‘big show,’ so I said, ‘What the heck is the big show?’ “said St. Aubin, who watched her son progress from the Little League teams of Lompoc to the major leagues.

Like the rest of his brothers, Casey grew up holding women athletes in as much regard as men athletes. “I thought everybody’s mom played baseball,” Casey said.

“When (my teammates) find out she had a better batting average and used a bigger bat than I did, they kind of rag on me, but I’m proud of it,” he said.

The Candaeles didn’t realize the significance of their mother’s league days until well into high school. She didn’t talk much about it unless prodded by her curious sons.

The league’s story might have remained lost if Kelly hadn’t remembered those stories his mother told him as a teen.

Candaele and his co-producer on the documentary set out to find the untold chapter of America’s favorite pastime. Their sleuthing led them to dusty reels of film in the garages and basements of the former female baseball greats.

Candaele and Wilson spliced the vintage film from league days with footage from a 1987 league reunion in Ft. Wayne. The half-hour documentary aired on several California stations including KCET-TV’s “California Stories.”

Candaele and Wilson had taken the documentary to Weintraub Entertainment, film festivals and networks, hoping to find some interest in making a feature film from it. The documentary won awards at the festivals, but despite some interest at Weintraub, didn’t attract the attention the two were looking for until Marshall got involved.

“It seemed the story just resonated with her on a number of different levels,” Candaele said. “It was like Zen archery. We hit the target without even aiming for it.”

St. Aubin was to see the film last week at a special screening for the Houston Astros--her son Casey was to escort her. There was a previous screening for some of the former AAGPBL players on the Sony Pictures lot.

Seated in her Lompoc living room, her frail frame engulfed by an oversized chair, St. Aubin (she married for the second time in 1973) reflects on the past as if it were yesterday. Surrounded by portraits of her family, she says her sons, more than her baseball career, have given her the real “glory days.”