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• 104 • 7. The Swoons in June The season began with record crowds filling major league stadiums. As it went on, fans continued to fill seats in numbers beyond anything the game had ever known. The giant crowds for the two rounds of opening days were surpassed by the 288,584 who attended games on Sunday, May 19, and ten days later by a Memorial Day turnout of 277,761. By the end of their June home stand, the Yankees had gone over one million in only twenty-eight dates, while the Red Sox had drawn almost 600,000 in twenty-five dates. The Dodgers and Tigers had passed the half-million mark by mid-June, as had the Cubs, all of them on their way to new attendance records of more than a million. Other teams, like Cincinnati, had already surpassed their 1945 attendance and were all but certain to set new records. Owners, worried about Mexican raids and unionization, found comfort in the money flowing into team bank accounts, while players contemplating strategies for improving their financial lots eyed the game’s new riches as a pot of gold in which they were determined to share.1 The war had contributed to the explosion in baseball attendance. The built-up savings from war work, together with the slow process of reconversion that had yet to meet the demand for major appliances, automobiles, and homes, left money available for vacations and entertainment. The release of pent-up emotions from the gravity of war to the comparative serenity of peace produced a rush to return to the enjoyments of normal life. No sport was more popular in America in 1946 than baseball, which was not only the national pastime but the only major professional team sport that enjoyed wide interest and broad coverage in the nation’s sports pages. Professional football was a struggling enterprise that had barely survived the depression, so, too, hockey, while basketball as a professional sport was still in search • 105 • THE SWOONS IN JUNE of stable league.2 All but hockey would soon share in the sports boom following the war, but the only competitors with baseball in its first postwar season were horse racing, especially the Kentucky Derby, and boxing, especially heavyweight fights. It was big news when Accord won the Derby in 1946 but only for a day or two. It was also big news for several days when Joe Louis retained his title with a knockout of Billy Conn. But baseball was every day. The game also benefited from the social revolution touched off by a war fought in the name of freedom, rights, and equal opportunity. Jackie Robinson , playing in Montreal, would in 1947 cross the color line in the major leagues to lead a revolution on the playing fields that by the 1950s would see the game populated by growing numbers of African American and darkskinned Latins from the Caribbean previously excluded by a “gentleman’s agreement.” The changing role of women in postwar America was also a boost to baseball, especially the large numbers moving to cities and employed outside the home, who now had both more money and greater freedom. David Nagle, director of the U.S. Employment Service, noted that the nation had “gone through a social revolution in terms of employment.” Rosie the Riveter of wartime glory working in shipyards and factories had not gone back to housework after the war. She had enjoyed the “greater freedom” afforded by war work and felt she “had moved up in the social scale.” Large numbers of women simply exchanged their air guns for jobs in textile, chemical, and electrical industries, as well as apparel and leather goods, and even in iron and steel industries, where the number of female employees had doubled from 1940 to 1946. “Just about every woman under thirty-five who wants a job,” Nagle concluded, “is employed.”3 Baseball had always been a favorite sport of women. It had been the earliest team sport played at women’s colleges in the late nineteenth century , when curriculums at schools like Mount Holyoke and Smith embraced sports and team competitions as part of the education appropriate for young women. Big league owners and operators had long courted the ladies with special weekday games at discounted prices designated as “Ladies Days,” and many teams, like those in St. Louis, which had knot-hole gangs for boys, had them as well for girls, though they carefully segregated the sexes...

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