ARIZONA'S LARRUPING LASSIES

Packed stadiums in Phoenix indicate popularity of Ramblers, Maids and the Queens, Arizona's famous girls softball teams. twilight and after-dark games. A new sport was born. Softball really began to catch on in Arizona, where mild spring, summer and early-fall climate with little rainfall permit a much longer playing season than is possible in other sections of the U.S. But as recently as fifteen years ago softball still was considered a man's game even in Arizona, and Phoenix was turning out some fine teams. The Lettuce Kings of Phoenix trekked to St. Louis to annex what the American Softball Association termed a "world championship." The Funk Jewels battled all the way to the semi-finals in the "world championship" tournament of the rival Amateur Softball Association of America. An O. S. Stapley team out of Phoenix always had to be reckoned with in title battles.

Then, perhaps because rabid baseball followers decreed "HEADS-UP SOFTBALL." Girls softball in Phoenix attracts thousands of fans because it is fast, colorful and smart. In the top photograph on the opposite page Dodie Nelson, Queen heavy hitter, is a'busting one out. The catcher is Dot Wilkinson, Rambler star, and the umpire, H. E. Stewart. In the lower picture, Sue Brooks, Queen third baseman, is receiving a throw from the field to tag Carrie Hill, Maid fielder, for the close out. Charlotte Armstrong, one of softball's "Big Pitches," is backing the play. Heads-up softball like this makes the game popular. Off the field, as well as on, the Maids, Queens and Ramblers present a pretty picture. The teams, shown in the center panels, are as follows: PHOENIX MAIDS: (standing left to right) Softball something of a "sissy" sport, the girls began to take it up. They may have been slow in starting, but once they got into the game its progress snowballed Phoenix and Arizona into national and international softball recognition. And next month Phoenix will present, for a second consecutive year, the "world series" cf feminine softball, the national championship tournament of the National Softball Congress. Teams will come from all parts of the U.S., from Canada, and perhaps from Mexico. Girls brought to softball something the men never could have supplied glamour. They gave the game the beauty treatment, without robbing it of any of its skill or thrills. The West stole a march on the rest of the country and was the first to outfit the girls in blouses, shorts or short skirts in-

instead of masculine looking slacks or knicker pants. And snappy play and short skirts were soon bouncing girls' softball up and up in the realm of sport.

In Phoenix and Arizona the effect was startling. Men's softball always had drawn its quota of interested crowds. Yet girls' softball, which wasn't just a display of pretty legs and trim figures but found the teams battling one another with unmistakeable fierceness, brought out the fans in droves.

Dyed-in-the-wool baseball followers just couldn't believe it. Here was upstart softball steadily but surely putting baseball to bed in Phoenix. To be sure, they were confident softball never would usurp baseball in nationwide popularity and importance. But in Phoenix the alltime national sport was bowing to a newcomer.

On a Friday night, for instance, the Phoenix Senators and Bisbee Yanks of the Arizona-Texas Baseball League were struggling for second place in loop standings. Five hundred of the baseball faithful turned out to watch. In a softball park on the other side of the city two top girls' teams were tangling in an exhibition. Three thousand spectators were in the stands.

There was an instance a couple of years ago when Art Nehf of Phoenix, onetime pitching great of the New York Giants, escorted two members of the current Giants' front office staff to a girls' softball tournament fracas. They were Garry Schumacher, right hand man of President Horace Stoneham, and Edgar Feeley, Giants' treasurer.

Looking on in open-mouthed amazement, Schumacher finally exclaimed, "Where did these goils learn to play this game?" In more than twenty-five years as a baseball sports writer before he joined the Giants' organization, Schumacher never had seen the opposite sex run, throw and hit like that.

So in softball-a sport which today annually overshadows even sandlot baseball in competitive and spectator interest the girls are here to stay. And they have enabled Phoenix to lay claim to the title "Softball Capital of the World" in this sport whose ruling officials agree this summer is attracting more than 1,300,000 participants in the Americas men and women, boys and girls whose games will be watched by 150,000,000 or more spectators.

Down around New Orleans they have a great women's softball team known as the Jax Brewers. In the softball stronghold at Oklahoma City there's a fine feminine aggregation known as the Sooners. Atlanta, Ga., has its Lorelei Ladies, Toronto, Can., its Sunday Morning Class and Portland, Ore., its talented Florists.

Well, Phoenix has not one, but three feminine wonder teams. And two of the three have time and again defeated the best women's softball teams in the world.

There are the PBSW Ramblers, first of the feminine aggregations to thrill Arizonans. They were the first girls' team to bring a world softball championship to Arizona, they have held the title three different years, and currently they are the world champions recognized by the Amateur Softball Association of America.

There are the Phoenix A-1 Queens, the "Ziegfield Girls of Softball", combining beauty, grace and ball-playing ability which brought them the world's championship in the National Softball Congress tournament two years ago and found them the runnerup for that title last season. And there are the Phoenix Maids, the "youngsters" of the game in Arizona. Now only in their third season, they have at times tripped up both Queens and Ramblers. And it took the strong Jax to oust the Maids from last summer's national tournament.

These Arizona girls have played major roles in putting the S-W-A-T in women's softball They have brought out crowds and set attendance records from coast to coast, and in Canada and Mexico. They're better known around the country at least wherever softball is played than anyone from the nation's "baby state." They've brought nothing but good publicity to Phoenix. And reaching the top in the nation in softball is equivalent to gaining world supremacy, for U.S. teams never have relinquished a softball crown.

Among these three Phoenix girls' teams, it would take the wisdom of a Solomon to select the strongest, or the best, or the one with the greatest aggregation of stars.

Possibly the Ramblers are just as sharp as the Queens, and vice versa. But, for example, a year ago they played two seven-inning games at their home park in a single night. The first was 0-0; the second a 1-1 tie. Last June 6 they tangled in a similar double-header. The first was 0-0; the second 3-3. Of course, all their games don't end like that, but that's a sample of the close scraps they wage. The Ramblers won the Phoenix Metropolitan championship in 1948 by blanking the Queens, 4 to 0, in the first game of a double header, the nightcap going twelve innings to a 2-2 deadlock. The Rambler win in the opener pulled them even with the Queens for the season. Each team won 13 games and there were three ties.

Take the Queens and the Maids. The Queens have generously loaned first one, then the other of their two star pitchers to the Maids, and generally the Queens finished on the short end of the score. But this is certain. The three-cornered Phoenix feminine softball rivalry is hot, and it increases in temperature right along with the summer weather. No words are minced when Ramblers and Queens collide. Razzberries from the bench are common as basehits as players heckle one another. There are no bloody noses or cracked noggins, but on occasion the frequence of verbal explosions and squabbles leads to an umpire's decision to forfeit the game.

The Queens, who annually lure perhaps more people than any other softball team, have been labeled the most beautiful softball team in the world.

They were organized in 1936 when Larry Walker, himself a perennial infielder on Arizona state championship men's teams, assembled a group of young girls anxious to swing a bat and don a glove for fielding practice. They had been playing with various other girls' teams, and he emerged with a club known as the Queens. To be more exact, they became the Arizona Brewing Company A-1 Queens, and the sponsor provides their equipment and some expense funds. Brewing company officials consider the attractive softballers one of their firm's finest advertisements.

The Queens won the NSC championship in 1947 and were runners-up to the powerful Jax in 1948 after being within one game of the title on the final night of the tournament and dropping the crown in an extra-inning battle.

When a national magazine, in an article on the sex appeal of women in sports, held that strenuous athletics are detrimental to femininity, Manager Walker strongly denied that feminine athletes tend to become masculine. Though admitting there are some masculine-type girls

playing softball, Walker declared, referring to the Queens, “We pass them up . . . It is possible to be an athlete and still maintain feminine charm.” He says newcomers to the Queens are screened on the basis of “character first, feminine charm second and ability to play ball third.” Walker, who believes girl softballers with outside interests have a better chance to remain feminine than those whose whole life is devoted to sports, declares: “Our team is based on good looking girls. Even though it is one of the top girls teams in the world, it could draw well if it won very few games.” Walker knows whereof he speaks. The Queens trot onto the playing field wearing a very short skirt over brief tights, giving the effect of a chorus line going into action. They have proved a box office magnet throughout the nation. Last year the largest crowd in New Orleans' 10year softball history—7,500 fans—saw the Queens edged 5-4 by the Jax in a benefit game for crippled children which went 16 innings. There were more than 18,000 paid admissions for their five-game series. Chicago attendance records were shattered when 6,000 saw the opener of a Queen-Jax series there which drew 21,000 in six games. In 1939 the Queens were featured in a softball panorama at New York's Madison Square Garden, and everywhere they travel they are held in high esteem.

The Toronto Daily Star, with a daily circulation of 365,839, featured the Queens a year ago in a half-page picture spread when they appeared there to help raise funds for a children's hospital. Canadian sports writers tabbed Carolyn Morris “Hollywood's double for Jane Russell” and termed Kay Rohrer a movie starlet member of the Queens. Five thousand saw the game.

The Chicago Sun-Times featured five Queens in a fullpage picture layout, and the Chicago monthly Industrial Sports Journal devoted 1½ pages to the Queens in its February issue, lauding their “New Look in Softball.” Beisbol, Mexico's baseball magazine, honored the Queens with its cover picture and then devoted five full inside pages to pictures and text when the Phoenicians visited Mexico City.

They once flew to Hermosillo, Mex., with the Jax for a three-game series, and on another occasion flew to Guay-mas on the Mexican west coast for an exhibition which “beisbol” followers there found so dazzling their enthusi-asm knew no bounds. They met the girls with a band, paraded them through the city and presented a trophy as

A good will gesture. And then, enroute home, the whole party had to undergo smallpox vaccination at the international boundary stop at Nogales as an emergency measure because of a recent death in Mexico from that disease.

Besides dipping into Mexico and invading Canada, the Queens annually appear in all the softball centers of the U.S. Overflow crowds have watched them in action at Los Angeles, Hollywood, Fresno, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver, Des Moines, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Toronto, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Topeka, Youngstown and Reading. They come back to Phoenix this month from the same kind of cosmopolitan schedule.

No less than eight All-Americans are on the Queens' roster. They are Carolyn Morris and Charlotte Armstrong, pitchers; Lois Williams, captain and catcher; Dorothy Myers, first baseman; Margie Yetman, second base; Eleanor Anderson, shortstop; Dodie Nelson, centerfielder, and Merle Keagle, outfielder.

Last year the Queens met the Jax Brewers 50 times, winning four of the seven sets of games. That was the first time in history of the New Orleans aggregation it had lost a series of games.

This season the Queens look even better. They won 36 of their first 46 games, and over that stretch hadn't lost a series. They boasted an early-season advantage of eight victories against three setbacks in clashes with the ASA champion Ramblers, but considered their crowning achievement a 4-3 series edge over the champion Jax.

The Ramblers, world champions in their own bailiwick the past two years, are favored to again successfully defend that title in mid-September at Portland, Ore. And they are a team composed entirely of feminine softball talent from the Phoenix area.

Pride of the ASA, the Ramblers were champions in 1940, 1947 and 1948 and have a life-time winning average of .833 against the roughest competition in the world over a 15-year period. All-American recognition was accorded last season to four of their stars-Pitcher Amelina Peralta, Catcher Dottie Wilkinson, Outfielder Margie Law and Shortstop Jessie Glasscock.

Big, rotund Ford Hoffman, who played football at Arizona State College at Flagstaff, was assistant grid coach several years at Arizona State College in Tempe, and long has been prominent in state amateur athletics, organized the Ramblers in 1933. Even today his pride is that the Ramblers are 100 per cent Arizona educated and developed, and the team still develops its own talent, moving players from a junior group to the world champs.

From the first the Ramblers have been backed by the Peterson, Brooke, Steiner and Wist school supply firm of Phoenix, and the ASA says this continuous sponsorship is longer than that of any other major team in the world.

Today Hoffman still coaches the Ramblers, but they are managed by Catcher Wilkinson, one of the classiest backstoppers in the business, who joined the 1933 team as a nine-year-old bat girl but was playing a bit before the curtain dropped on that first season.

No softies, the PBSW Ramblers play like tigers, and they have won so many trophies they could almost set up their sponsor in the trophy business.

The New Orleans Jax always have been a tough Rambler foe, but until the Phoenix Queens really began to hit their stride, the Ramblers never had serious competition at home, and were perennial Arizona champions. Twelve out of 13 years they have gone to the world's championships, and except for one year when the Jax bounced them in the opening game, the Phoenicians always have reached the semi-finals or finals.

Under Hoffman's tutelage the Ramblers developed fast, although even he frankly admits he didn't realize their possibilities until he saw a classy girls' squad in action in California and came home determined to produce a better team.

In a six-team city recreation department girls' league during that infant 1933 season, the Ramblers lost their first game and then won 33 straight. But in the state tournament a surprising Yuma aggregation, which Hoffman claims was bolstered with California talent, edged the Ramblers 1 to 0 in 12 innings and went home with the championship.

Thereafter they never lost a state championship until they were bested in four of six games by the Queens in 1945, although the Queens also were recognized as Arizona champs in 1941 because the Ramblers, defending national titleholders, didn't have to compete to enter the world tournament.

The Ramblers entered their first California competition in 1934, their second year of play, knocking off the California-champion Mark C. Bloom girls in the extrainning nightcap of a doubleheader, 3 to 2, after the first game ended in a nine-inning, 2-2 deadlock.

They went all the way to the semi-finals of the national tournament as early as 1935, when 55 teams were competing in Chicago, and the Rambler pitcher, Louise Curtis, had to twirl 312 games in one day, achieving a no-hitter in beating Chicago in one of them.

Back in the late summer of 1940 Amy Peralta and the Ramblers marched onto a Detroit diamond with the temperature in the low 50s and bested a jinx which for three years had halted her team in the national quarterfinals.

That night the Ramblers overwhelmed the Koch Furniture girls from Cleveland, 10 to 3, and became the first Phoenix or Arizona team ever to win a world title. Their winning score went into the records as the most one-sided in ASA title play.

The Ramblers again were recognized as world champs in 1947. The Jax beat them in the finals, 6 to 4, then were suspended for meeting a Chicago professional team and the title forfeited. In Portland, Ore., last September, the defending-champion Ramblers romped to their third ASA world crown, and 45,000 persons saw them in action in five games.Besides their competition with the Queens and Maids at Phoenix, the Ramblers are members of the Western States Major League, an ASA organization which includes Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, Utah, and Fresno, Buena Park, Santa Ana and Stockton in California. The Ramblers have dominated the circuit since its organization in 1946-champions the first two years and co-champions in 1948. To get into the national tournament they have won the South Pacific Coast Regional Tournament two years.

The Phoenix Maids are in only their third season of play, but already rank with the top title contenders in feminine softball. They originally were the Park-N-Shop Maids, then the Holsum Bakery Maids, but this season have no sponsor.

That poem in stone, Rainbow Bridge, is 309 feet high and has a span of 278 feet. It is a perfect creation of the elements.

The Trail to the Rock That Goes Over A TRIP TO RAINBOW BY BOAT BY JOYCE ROCKWOOD MUENCH

"How would you like to go up the Colorado River, through Glen Canyon, to see Rainbow Bridge?"

Art Greene, of Marble Canyon Lodge, was asking, and he sounded as though he meant it.

"Upstream!" I asked myself, "on the most treacherous river in the United States?"

The shade of Alarcon, the Spanish explorer who almost wrecked two ships discovering the river's mouth in 1540, nudged my elbow. I heard the echo of Lt. Ives' words, spoken three hundred years later, stating that for the major portion of its 1,200 miles journey, the Colorado was destined to remain unknown to man. Then in my mind's eye, the small boats of Major J. Wesley Powell floated for months (in 1869 to 1872) down the stream, proving at the cost of four men's lives that its waters never disappear underground. What of the jaunty trips men have since made, with danger riding on their oars as they adventured through the eighteen rugged canyons? What would all of them say to an upstream trip?

Art kept right on talking; of the miles of smooth water in Glen Canyon with its spectacularly scuptured walls. His blue eyes lighted up whenever he mentioned the good ship "Tseh Na-ni-ah-go Atin" (The Trail to the Rock That Goes Over.) He praised its 8-foot beam that steadies the twenty-two-foot length with inverted V bottom, built of aluminum and styled for swift and shallow waters. Wait until we saw the big airplane motor mounted behind the silvered grill at the stern! Sitting on cushioned benches that run clear across the boat, we would be as comfortable as riding in a car! In a matter of hours we could cover the distance which usually took days (and downstream, at that). Imagine sleeping under the stars on a sand bar with high walls to guard us and the soft night song of the Colorado River for a lullaby!

Any pioneer blood which I may have inherited from Escalante, who let his horses down the cliffs to make the "Crossing of the Fathers," or the Mormons who chiseled a "road" through the "Hole in the Rock," has admittedly thinned. But July found us on the Colorado-headed upstream!

So because a former cowboy, with an infectious grin under his western hat, has the kind of vision and pertinacity that gets things done, we joined the illustrious company who make "Firsts." We voyaged on the third largest river in the country, deep in a canyon which courses through wild land still unsurveyed to that breathtaking span, Rainbow Bridge, "The Rock That Goes Over," in the first air-driven boat to travel Glen Canyon! Upstream on the Colorado!

The river took hold of us almost before the shore at Lee's Ferry was washed by our wake, and the powerful motor droned to its full strength pitting its pull against the drag of the current. All my fear of the Colorado was suddenly gone, never to return, and I turned with the others to wave goodbye to the diminishing figures on the bank.

"SENTINEL ROCK" BY JOSEF MUENCH. Taken with a Speed Graphic (4x5) on Daylight Kodachrome, 1/10th second at f18. In describing this picture, Josef Muench says: "Coming up the Colorado River, with Art Greene's boat small alongside the steep canyon walls of Glen, 20 miles from Lee's Ferry we turned a bend and were confronted by the immense tower-like walls, guarding the entrance to Waweep Creek into the big river. From any angle its erosion-carved form is full of interest, lifting some 300 feet into the sky from water's edge."