"The Curves of Annabelle Lee"

If you follow baseball, you probably know that pitcher R.A. Dickey of the Mets has taken the major leagues by storm this year, thanks to his mastery of the knuckleball. In honor of Dickey, the New York Times recently ran a story about famous knuckleballers from the past, including Annabelle Lee of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. As I was looking for a "classic" post to rerun on I.N.K. this month, I found the one I wrote about Annabelle in October 2008. Here it is again, for your summer reading pleasure.

One of my favorite sports articles of all time is a retelling of the classic poem, “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. Only this version, written by K.C. Clapp of the Grand Rapids Herald in July 1945, was not the story of a lost love, but of a lost baseball game. The Annabelle Lee in Clapp’s poem was a left-handed pitcher for the Fort Wayne Daisies of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). On July 7, 1945, she pitched nine innings of no-hit, no-run ball against Clapp’s hometown team, the Grand Rapids Chicks.


Annabelle Lee Harmon, a native of North Hollywood, California, died on July 3 at the age of 86, and as the baseball playoffs begin, it seems like the perfect time to remember her. Hardly any media outlets noted her passing, and that’s a pity, because she was a warm, elegant, delightful woman who made an indelible imprint on the national pastime. She played pro baseball for seven years and threw the AAGPBL’s first perfect game on July 29, 1944. Beyond that, she was the aunt of major league pitcher Bill Lee—and the person who the “Spaceman” credits with teaching him how to pitch.



My most vivid memory of Annabelle is from 1995, when the All-Americans met for a reunion at a resort in Indian Wells, California. Annabelle was there with her mother Hazel, who was close to 100 years old. The paperback edition of my book about the league, A Whole New Ball Game, had just come out, and I had traveled from the east coast to show it off to the women who inspired it. With me were two friends, including Felicia Halpert, a sportswriter and a storied softball player from the women’s leagues in Brooklyn, New York.



It was late—close to midnight—but Felicia had been asking Annabelle if she still had her “stuff.” Annabelle said, “Sure, I’ll show you.” She laid down a makeshift home plate on the edge of the hotel’s patio, stationed Felicia there with a glove that seemed to appear out of nowhere, and walked off her pitching distance. Then, under fluorescent lights in the warm autumn night, the 73-year-old southpaw put on a pitching clinic. She delivered fastballs, curves, and knuckleballs, and Felicia, whose position was shrouded in darkness, did her best to catch them. Pretty soon her former teammates were lined up on the patio, cheering her on.



As I watched, I couldn’t help but think of my favorite line from Clapp’s poem: “The moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the curves of Annabelle Lee.” All these years later, I still remember Annabelle on that patio, firing pitches through the night, a feisty blond with a poetic name, a wicked knuckleball, and a shared legacy as one of the original girls of summer. She will be missed.



“Annabelle Lee Again Arouses Poet’s Muse”


by K.C. Clapp

Grand Rapids Herald, July 10, 1945



It wasn’t so many hours ago


July 7, specifically,


That a maiden there pitched whom you may know


By the name of Annabelle Lee,


And she hurled so well that not a Chick hit,


Going down to her, one, two, three.



She was not wild, this talented child,


Who twirled so effectively.


And no free passes were handed out


By this stingy Annabelle Lee


But the base hits rang for the Fort Wayne gang


For a 6-0 victory.



And this is the reason as 3,000 know


Who witnessed her wizardry


That not a Chick could hit a lick


Off the slants of Annabelle Lee,


So they sharply dropped from second spot


To a humble berth in 3.


But Fort Wayne cheers its peach-clad dears


Because of Annabelle Lee.



The moon never beams without bringing me dreams


Of the curves of Annabelle Lee.


And the South Field lights will gleam many nights


Before such a sight I may see—


No hits by Ziegler or Tetzlaff or Eisen,


No hits by the bustling “B.”


No hits by Maguire or Petras or “Twi,”


Why? Because of Annabelle Lee.

Announcing: A Contest Where Kids Contemplate History

Of all the subjects I talk about when I do school visits, the exploits of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) seem to resonate most with students of all ages. Those kids who play ball are hungry for details of the games and life in the league. Those who value the players’ role as sports pioneers want to know what motivated them to leave home to forge careers in one of the first professional opportunities for female athletes.

My relationship with the players in this league, about which I wrote my first book, A Whole New Ball Game, has progressed from professional to personal, and I now serve on the AAGPBL Players Association Vision Committee, a group charged with considering how best to preserve the league’s legacy. As such, we have just announced BATTER UP!, a contest that challenges students in grades 6, 7, and 8 (in the United States and Canada) to write short essays answering one of three questions about the impact of the league and its players. The Grand Prize Winner, and a parent or guardian, will get an all-expenses-paid trip to the 2012 AAGPBL players reunion, to be held next September in Syracuse and Cooperstown, New York. Each of the four Runners-Up will win AAGPBL prize packs, including autographed bats and balls and other memorabilia. The winning essay will be published in the AAGPBL newsletter, and it, along with the runner-up essays, will be featured on the organization’s Web site.

“We want to encourage young people to reflect upon the legacy of our league,” explains Players Association president Lois Youngen, a four-year AAGPBL veteran and a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon. “Many of our members became teachers after our playing days,” she added, “so we know how curious and creative young people can be. We’re inviting them to do a little research about our league and to consider its impact.” Some of those players-turned-teachers will serve as first-round contest judges, along with others from a variety of walks of life. If you’re a teacher, librarian, author, or editor who’s interested in joining the panel of final judges, e-mail me at mail@suemacy.com. Contest entries are due via the entry form on the contest Web site by March 18, 2012, and the winners will be chosen by the end of May.

We understand that not every kid will jump at the chance to enter this contest. When I told a friend who works with middle schoolers about it, she suggested sexier prizes, such as iPods or iPads. Add to that the fact that entering requires work and we know that narrows the pool even more. We're hoping some teachers will use the contest as an opportunity to get their kids thinking and writing about history, and have included a small prize for the sponsoring teacher of the winner and runners-up. We're also banking on the hope that for some kids, the prospect of meeting Terry Donahue or Sophie Kurys or any of the other 150 or so surviving players is even more exciting than winning one of Mr. Jobs' miraculous devices.

So spread the word. And if you're interested in reading about some of the highlights of this year's AAGPBL reunion, see Sue's Views on my Web site.

[Note: The statue of the AAGPBL player above is on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown.]

Baseball Bios and a Knockout

In honor of baseball spring training--and because I miss those afternoons sitting in the bleachers watching my son play ball when he was younger--I planned to highlight some baseball biographies in my blog this month. But at the library another book caught my eye, a big beautiful picture book with a knockout cover of a young woman beaming with confidence from the cockpit of a cherry red plane. There was no way I could resist Soar, Elinor! (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010).

Written by Tami Lewis Brown and illustrated by Francois Roca, it's the story of Elinor Smith (1911-2010), who took her first flying lessons at age 10. Blocks had to be strapped to the rudder bar so her feet could reach it! At age 16 Elinor became the youngest licensed pilot--male or female--in the U.S. "Elinor lived to fly," writes Brown. "The sky was her playing field; the hum of the wind rushing through her plane's wing wires, her favorite song." Just three months after getting her license, Elinor performed the daring stunt of flying under four of New York's East River bridges, a feat no one else had attempted. Elinor showed the world that with talent, hard work, and fierce dedication to one's dream, there's no limit to how high a girl can soar.

And now to baseball. Ted Williams's dream as a young boy growing up in the Depression was to "walk down the street and have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.'" In No Easy Way: The Story of Ted Williams and the Last .400 Season (Dutton, 2010), my friend Fred Bowen, who writes a sports column for kids in the Washington Post, tells how Williams made that dream come true. "Ted knew that there was no easy way to be the greatest hitter who ever lived. No easy way to do the single most difficult thing in sports. To hit a round ball with a round bat. No easy way to be a .400 hitter." Illustrations by Charles S. Pyle help bring to life the summer of 1941, the last summer before American soldiers, including Ted Williams and many other baseball stars, went off to fight in World War II.

Henry Aaron's Dream, written and illustrated by Matt Tavares (Candlewick, 2010). Like his hero Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron was instrumental in the fight against racism, both in baseball and in America. I was a kid living in Atlanta when Aaron, playing for the Braves, was closing in on Babe Ruth's all-time home-run record in the 1970s, and I remember hearing about the hate mail and death threats he received from people who couldn't stand the idea of a black man becoming baseball's home-run king. In the jacket copy, Tavares notes that he when he set out to write about Aaron, he "expected to focus on his historic quest to break Major League Baseball's all-time home run record. But in researching his life, I found that the most fascinating part of Henry Aaron's story took place before he ever set foot on a Major League Baseball field--back when he was a skinny kid who held his bat the wrong way and who never gave up his dream of becoming a big-league baseball player, even when it seemed impossible."


Two terrific baseball biographies by Jonah Winter: You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! (illustrated by Andre Carrilho, Schwartz & Wade Books, 2009) and Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates (illustrated by Raul Colon, Atheneum Books 2005). Kathleen Krull sang the praises of the Koufax bio in an INK blog a year ago: "Jonah Winter spins the tale in a folksy voice loaded with Brooklyn pizzazz. The illustrations of Andre Carrilho...ooze style. Best of all is the narrative arc. This picture book's pace is smart and snappy, with triumph coming late in the book, as it did in life: Far from an instant success, this was 'a guy who finally relaxed enough to let his body do the one thing it was put on this earth to do.'" Winter tells Clemente's inspiring story in an entirely different voice, in couplets that suggest the lilt of a Latino accent, the accent that caused some newspaper writers to mock Clemente when he first played for the Pirates in the 1960s.

A beloved family member of mine died recently, ten months after being diagnosed with a very painful type of cancer. I think that's one reason I was so moved by David Adler's Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man, illustrated by Terry Widener (Harcourt, 1997). Like the Iron Horse, my sister-in-law inspired the people around her with her grace, courage, and gratitude.

You don't have to like baseball--or flying--to love these books.