The First Women In Baseball
For those of us who love baseball, the anticipation of spring training is as exciting as the thought of spring itself. Oyster Bay has a lot of good stories about baseball going back to the late 1880s, but this article isn’t about baseball, exactly. It’s about nine women who, until a short while ago, were left out of an exciting chapter in Oyster Bay history. They were the Oyster Bay Parkettes and they were members of a North Shore league of softball players that took over for the men fighting in World War II. This period in baseball history is most famously portrayed in the motion picture A League of Their Own, however, our Parkettes stayed on the island playing teams from Sea Cliff to Northport. None of this would have come to light if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Rose Murphy (LoBianco) and her recollections of the times she and her other teammates had playing for Coach Dinky Petroccia.
As the men from Oyster Bay were enlisting in various branches of the armed forces, Petroccia put together a team from around the hamlet and held practices and home games in Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park. Fundraisers were held in order to put the young women in uniforms sporting the team’s name in blue letters on a white shirt with matching blue pants and cap. The girls played games in the natural evening light and held on to the title of North Shore Champions for four years. In time, the South Shore Champions challenged the Parkettes to play a single, winner-take-all, championship game in the Freeport stadium. Problem was, they had never played with stadium lights and sadly lost the game to their opponent.
Though the Parkettes reign ended in 1945, it is clear that, through it all, the idea of a local league wasn’t always welcome. After some digging, I found an article written in the local Freeport/Baldwin paper, The Leader, written back in October 1946 where the Freeport Park commissioner was quoted as saying, “Girl’s softball will tear up our diamond, bring a rowdy element to our town, cause church groups to take out a petition to close down the stadium and generally cause irreparable havoc.”
My goodness, you’d think these ladies were looking to stir up trouble in the old west, but nothing could be further from the truth. Regardless of the naysayers, these young women played hard and never quit.
“We had nine on our team,” wrote Mrs. Murphy, “and if one was not able to play we played with eight—and still would win our games.”
Thanks to the Freeport Memorial Library, www.longislandmemories.org and Mrs. Rose LoBianco Murphy.
Nicole Menchise is the librarian/archivist at the Oyster Bay Historical Society. Her degrees include studies in geography, cartography and history at the University of Memphis and library science at Long Island University, where she also received the Advanced Certificate in Archives and Records Management. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees for the North Shore Historical Museum located in the recently restored Glen Cove Justice’s Courthouse.
