Former ballplayer visits Carson Valley

She's the only woman to ever collect a hit off of the legendary Satchel Paige.

She's traveled to Japan with Joe DiMaggio and dined with Penny Marshall.

Ohio State University calls her one of the finest and most versatile athletes to ever play for the Buckeyes.

At $800 a season, she was the highest paid rookie to ever come through the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, memorialized in the 1992 film "A League of Their Own."

She's had trading cards and bobbleheads made in her likeness and spoken to crowds of thousands about her playing days.

Last week, Alice "Lefty" Hohlmayer took a little time while visiting her niece in Gardnerville to sit down with some of her niece's childhood baseball teammates.

The subject matter?

Baseball, of course.

Hohlmayer, 84 of San Diego, played for six years in the AAGPBL " the first three with the Kenosha Comets and the final three split between the Muskegon/Kalamazoo Lassies and the Peoria Redwings.

She thumbs through her photo album, casually naming the faces that flip past.

For a baseball fan, the names strike close to home.

Mickey Mantle, Johnny Bench, Brooks Robinson, Duke Snider, Buck O'Neil, Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks. The album is two inches thick and in each picture, some diamond hero of old either has his arm around Hohlmayer's shoulder or has his lips on her cheek.

That's because to each one of them, and to many more across the country, she is just as much of a legend.

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League first emerged in the spring of 1943 after World War II had forced most minor league teams into obscurity and taken many quality players away from the Major League clubs.

The league was three seasons into its existence before Hohlmayer even heard of it.

While at Ohio State, she played nearly every club sport the Buckeyes offered. She played soccer, field hockey, badminton, archery, volleyball, basketball and softball.

"Different universities would come in from not too far away, Ohio Wesleyan, places like that," she said. "They had to be close because of gas rationing. We had a field house and the other team would stay overnight and we'd make breakfast for them."

It was at a national softball tournament in Cleveland in 1945 that Hohlmayer's athletic career took an unexpected turn.

Former Cleveland Indians second baseman Bill Wambsganss was at the tournament, scouting for the AAGPBL and he took note of Hohlmayer's abilities.

"I didn't even know they had baseball," Hohlmayer said. "Next thing I knew, Max Carey, the league president, was on the phone asking me to come down to Mississippi for a tryout."

So she boarded a train for only the second time in her life and tried out for the league.

"There I am, 20 years old and scared to death," she said. "I could only be there for the weekend because I was still in school. They had eight managers out there watching us. I was so scared that I guess I did everything right. I hit the ball well and I was catching everything.

"When I got home, Mr. Carey called me again and said this was very unusual, but they were going to give me $80 a week. The standard rookie's salary at the time was $55. It was Kenosha, Wisconsin that got me."

Hohlmayer played first base during her rookie season, driving in 33 runs and stealing 21 bases for the Kenosha Comets.

Her play in the infield revealed another talent.

"I was playing first base, and lefties kind of have curveballs anyway," she said. "They saw during infield practice that I got the ball to home plate pretty well, so by my second year I was playing first base and pitching."

She played 90 games at first base in her second year, while pitching 16 games. She posted a 7-6 record on the mound with a 1.88 ERA in 129 innings pitched.

"When I'd pitch, I'd pitch the whole game," she said. "Nine innings. We only had 15 players on the club, so there wasn't a lot of relief pitching. We played six nights a week and doubleheaders on Sundays, so it definitely started to grind on you. That year, I played 106 out of 112 games."

She said she mainly liked to work with finesse pitches.

"I threw a lot of junk out there," she said. "I could hit maybe 80 miles per hour, but I had all kinds of junk stuff.

"When I pitched a curveball, I aimed right at the batter and let it swing in. I had a drop ball that when I was hot dropped like you wouldn't believe. When it dropped, it really dropped. I had a lot of slow pitches, but I was pretty accurate."

The team would ride a rickety bus to their next stops overnight during the season.

"We had to wear skirts anytime we were outside, but when we were on the bus, we could change into jeans and be a bit more comfortable," she said. "We had to go to charm school and everything.

"They wanted us to play like men but look and act like ladies. And that was the way it should've been."

In 1947, Hohlmayer received yet another call from Carey with an unusual invitation.

"He asked if I wanted to play in this all-star game," she said. "He said it paid $100. It was in the middle of the school year and I had $5 a week to eat off of, so it was an easy decision."

Her opponent for the game? The Negro League All-Stars.

"I was playing first base and when I got up to bat, Satchel Paige was out there throwing all kinds of junk at me," she said. "He was even throwing behind his back and stuff like that. My first time up, I struck out.

"Next time up, I called time out and walked right out to the mound. I said 'You know, we're all here for exhibition, at least throw me something I might be able to hit.'

"I didn't know who he was at the time, but he throws a straight ball in there and I hit it high up in the air to the shortstop. My last time up, I got a hit into right field.

"I was at a show a few years back and there was a man at the Negro League booth who had been in that game and I asked him if he remembered the first basemen from our team. He said, 'Yeah, she got a hit off of Satchel Paige.' I said, 'That was me.'

"Back in those days, the Negro League and our league was really in the same boat, except they had a lot harder time of it. They were pioneers and we were pioneers."

After six seasons, Hohlmayer's father quietly asked for her to return home to help with the family Laundromat business.

"We owned two Laundromats and my dad said it was too hard for him to be running between both places," she said. "So I came back to run one of them.

"I cried, but I didn't let my dad see me. It's been my best year pitching, it was the only year they'd let just pitch.

After that, she played in some recreational fast pitch softball leagues near home.

"I did that for a while but it just got too cold and I didn't want to play anymore," she said.

She did take a brief foray into coaching several years later, though.

"When my son was 9 years old, we put him in Little League," she said. "I watched practice from my car for two days while his coach was trying to throw the ball up in the air and hit it out to the kids for fielding practice.

"On the third day, I got out of the car and went out to him to ask if he wanted me to try hitting a couple. He didn't know me from Adam, didn't know that I played ball or anything.

"I started hitting them right over their heads and he turns to me and says 'You know what? I didn't want to coach anyway!' So I became their coach and we won 14 and lost none that year."

It was in 1988 that the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York opened up an exhibit dedicated to women's baseball.

Hohlmayer was sitting in the front row for the ribbon cutting.

"That was something else," she said. "We couldn't even see, they had us way down in the front row. All I could do was hold my camera up high to get the ribbon cutting. There were more people there that day than they had ever had at that point.

"We signed autographs all day. To have someone ask you for your autograph was unheard of. That never happened in my playing days."

It was only a foreshadowing of things to come.

Among the many in attendance at the Hall of Fame ceremony was director Penny Marshall. The stories of the former players in attendance so struck her that she decided to make a movie about the league.

This, of course, ended up being "A League of Their Own."

"My friend, Pepper (Davis, who incidentally wrote the league's official song, which is featured in the movie) lived close to where they were doing pre-production for the movie," Hohlmayer said. "They were having their last baseball practice at UCLA before heading to Chicago and Indiana for filming, so she told me to come on down.

"I got a picture of Madonna sitting in the dugout. We went to Penny Marshall's house afterward, had dinner there and they called some of the actresses in. We told them what it was we did and what it was like for us.

"When the filming went to Chicago, they called me up and said they had a big house for us in Evansville, Ind., where they were shooting some of the scenes. They ended up taking Pepper instead, that was as close as I got, but I got over it.

"A lot of what you saw in the movie came from Pepper. They'd have roundtables with the writers where they would ask her questions and she'd tell them how things worked."

Once the movie was completed, Marshall invited every former player within driving distance of the Sony Theater in Palm Springs, Calif., for a private screening.

"We were all crying while we were watching the movie," Hohlmayer said. "We hadn't seen our uniforms for all those years. Just seeing that movie, seeing what we'd done, we were bawling all over the place.

"At least 80 percent of the movie was absolutely true. She couldn't have done a better job with that movie. Our families had never seen what we'd done until then.

We couldn't tell them what it was like. That movie brought us out from underneath the rug."

While the movie stirred up a national audience " to which Hohlmayer has been playing to in the years since, making appearances at baseball shows, softball tournaments and celebrity functions " a close-knit group of friends in Gardnerville was instantly drawn to the story.

Hohlmayer's brother, Earl, and her niece, Dixie Martin, run Commodore Insignia emblem design in Gardnerville. Martin grew up playing baseball in the area and called up a number of her old teammates when the movie came out back in 1992.

"She called us up and got the movie and we all came over and watched it," said Rhonda Moore. "We didn't know anything about the league, or about Lefty before that, but we got done with the movie and we're all crying.

"It was just such a great movie and then Dixie gets Alice on the phone and we talked to her for hours. It was so awesome."

About three years ago, Hohlmayer came up for a visit.

"She came up and we spent a whole day talking with her and looking at her photos," Martin said. "It was a real blast."

And Hohlmayer returned this week, when the group met at The Record-Courier offices in Gardnerville before going to lunch.

"I actually don't make it up here that often, but we always have a real blast when I do," Hohlmayer said.