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October 1, 1999/21 Tishri 5760, Vol. 52, No.5
Former female softball ace wonders, 'What if?'
TAMI BICKLEY
Staff Writer
Ina Silverman wishes she still had her dusty uniform or her cork-filled softball bat. Or, at the very least, photographs from her days as a star pitcher on one of Chicago's female softball teams during World War II.
Instead, all she has is memories.
"Isn't it terrible?" she says in a telephone interview from her Scottsdale home. "I wish I had something to remind me of those times. Anything."
But in 1939, when Silverman, then 15, joined a girls' softball league, she was too busy perfecting her underhand, slow pitch to worry about the sanctity of her blouse and bloomers.
A native Chicagoan, Silverman says she was an athlete early on. She played a variety of sports and used to play softball after school in the schoolyard until dusk.
"I used to try to play ball in the girls' schoolyard, but nobody could play (up to my level)," she explains. "So I would walk over to the boys' schoolyard and play ball with them."
Girls playing with boys, let alone competing with them in sports, 60 years ago was about as rare as women wearing blue jeans. Surprisingly, the boys welcomed her.
"The boys wanted me there because I was probably just as good or better than a lot of them. They all wanted me on their teams."
A softball scout spotted her pitching in a game with some friends one afternoon and thought so much of Silverman's talent that she asked then-Ina Teplitz if she would like to play in a girls' softball league in the area.
"Of course I wanted to because these girls (on the team) were real good players," she recalls. When she told her parents, Abraham and Mollie Teplitz, of her plans, they were thrilled. Never once did they try to steer their daughter toward dress-making and cooking instead of the competitive, dirty, sweaty game of softball.
"Even the spectators who came to watch our games enjoyed it," she says. "I think it took their minds off other things (such as the war). And we were so young, we didn't realize the seriousness of what was going on."
Silverman cannot recall the name of her former team. She thinks they were the Bloomer Girls. But her brother, Jordan Teplitz, who still lives in Chicago, contends they were the Rockolla Music Maids. There is not a shred of memorabilia to prove either is right.
What Silverman does remember rather vividly, though, is the voice that called out to her while she stood on the mound during the three years she pitched for the team.
"At every game, I would hear this voice above all of the other voices yelling, 'C'mon, pitcher!' and nobody knew who it was except me," she says. "It was my father, and he never, ever missed my games. My mother couldn't go because she had to watch over our (family) store. But my father would always leave so he could watch me."
While all of this sounds a lot like the movie "A League of Their Own," Silverman says Hollywood's version of World War II women in uniform differs from her recollections in many respects.
For instance, Silverman's team never traveled outside of Chicago. They played their games against other Chicago teams in local parks. And the movie's players were grown women, many of them married and some of them mothers, playing baseball; whereas Silverman's league was made up of all teenage girls playing softball. The movie's team was coached by an often-intoxicated male (Tom Hanks). A group of women coached in Silverman's league.
Eventually, Silverman, who claims she was the first to ever pitch a no-hit, no-run game in a girls' league, quit the game. It was not because she was injured or traded. She quit for a most unusual, but valid reason - the rules of the game changed. Players could no longer wear mitts, which was an aggravating addendum to the new rule that 12-inch hard balls were going to replace 16-inch "mush" balls. To make matters worse, pitches had to be curved and slow. Fast, straight pitches were to be automatically considered balls.
"It wasn't that I didn't still love the game," she says with a touch of sadness. "I just didn't want to stand on that mound and have to catch or throw such a hard ball."
Silverman went to work as a bookkeeper in a high school in Indiana. She later settled into the role of wife and mother to two children. Feeding her need to continue her involvement with female sports, she encouraged her daughter and other young girls to play softball for a B'nai B'rith Girls (BBG) team, which Silverman coached in the 1950s. Silverman and her family moved to Arizona in 1979.
Today, Silverman speaks with pride about one of her granddaughters, a 10-year-old all-star softball catcher who lives in Washington, D.C. She admits she occasionally wonders what life would have been like had she stuck with softball, or if she would have become a professional athlete had she played in more modern times.
"If they had offered professional teams back then, I definitely would have looked into that," she says, adding that she is ecstatic that women are progressing in sports.
"I love to see that and wish I would have been more recognized when I was young."
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