The following story, the first seven paragraphs of which are shown here, comes from the Sporting News (then a baseball-only newspaper) of December 4, 1924.

WHEN PETTIGREW LOST HIS GIRLISH FIGURE

A Little Story of a Veteran Minor Leaguer

PONCA CITY, Okla., Nov. 30 --- "Gents, meet Miss Maude Nelson." It was thus back in the early 1900's, that Ned Pettigrew was introduced to the members of the baseball teams throughout the West and Southwest, when their respective towns were visited by Jack DeRoss' "Bloomer Girl" team. It was, to be exact, in 1901, that these "Bloomers" visited old Oklahoma Territory, playing at Guthrie, Oklahoma City and various other towns in what is now Oklahoma.

Ned Pettigrew was the star pitcher for the girls' team. Almost all the other members were girls, who had been organized into such a team and were piloted about the country by DeRoss. There was no girl that could throw a ball equal to the occasion, however, and Pettigrew -- who has since lost his girlish figure -- was secured to do mound duty. And he was exceptionally good. On the day the Bloomers played at Guthrie, they shut out the home team, 6 to 0, with Pettigrew in the box.

Pettigrew was in Ponca City the other day, helping in the organization of the new Mid-Continent League for 1925, to be composed of Cushing, Ponca City, Enid and Blackwell in Oklahoma, and Arkansas City, Wingfield and perhaps Eureka and Wellington in Kansas. He was here with the Cushing fellows and it is generally understood that he will again manage the Cushing team next year and play centerfield as usual.

Posed as Manager's Wife

"We had a lot of fun while the Bloomer Girls were on the road," said Pettigrew. "I had to keep my mouth shut, of course, from when we got into a new town until the game was over, for I had too deep a voice for a girl, but I had the figure all right, and in almost every instance we got through a game without the fans knowing that I was not really a girl.

"My playing name was Maude Nelson, and as such I was introduced, although I was supposed to be DeRoss' wife. Jack always carried my glove to the baseball field and played at catch with the rest of the team until I arrived. He would always refer to me as his wife. Invariably, he would give some local boy the glove and say -- 'Sonny, take this glove out there to my wife.' And then when the boy would reach me with the glove, some of the girls on the team would always say, 'boy, tell Jack that Maude wants some peanuts and to send her a dime, Of course, such conversation would easily get around among the fans and as long as I kept still, I was all right."

Pettigrew played the outfield for Wichita, Kan., over a long term of years, both in the Western Association and the Western League, and it was while he was with that club that he had the climax of his girlhood days in baseball. He tells the story:

"I heard an awful yell from one of the boxes and it turned out to be Jack DeRoss. It was the first time I had seen him since I quit playing with the Bloomers at least eight years earlier, and while renewing the old acquaintance Jack suddenly motioned to a woman to come down to the stand and meet me; it was Jack's actual honest-to-goodness wife. Acknowleding the introduction, I said to Mrs. DeRoss -- 'I do not want to cause Jack any embarrassment, but you perhaps do not know, Mrs. DeRoss, that I was Jack's first wife.' " ...

Pettigrew was born, according to current research, on August 25, 1881, so he would have been 19 or 20 when this was taking place and 43 when the article was written. As it turned out, a later article that winter indicates that he got a higher-level managing job before the season started (at Oklahoma City), which obliged him to retire as a player.

I'm wondering what the readers of 1924 thought of the whole "wife" thing. My guess is that it at least started out relatively innocently: Bloomer Girl teams usually stayed overnight at local hotels either before or after their games. If he was the only male on the team at the time he was signed (not unreasonable, despite the "almost" in the article; another one or two might have been added later), then the choices, short of securing an extra room, were either to room him with the girls or with the manager, with the latter the safer choice. But that required an explanation as to why he was staying there -- the hotel staff, as locals in a small town, probably wouldn't have kept the secret -- and marriage to the manager would have been the only aboveboard answer.

Traveling Bloomer Girl teams weren't all that rare in the period from the 1890's to U.S. entry in the First World War. They generally traveled to small towns and played local male teams, often high school age. The original teams really were "girls" as opposed to women -- the first (pre-bloomer) one, W.S. Franklin's Young Ladies' Base Ball Club of 1890, seems to have cut anyone who turned 19.

It's unclear whether they included males from the start, but the 1906 team that Joe Wood (later a prominent major leaguer of the 1910's and 20's) started with had three: the pitcher, catcher and thirdbaseman. His interview (in the collection The Glory of their Times) indicates that he doubted that they fooled many people. One source says that by the mid-1910's, boys were playing without subterfuge, though the local announcer might get a few laughs by announcing them with female names when they came up to bat.

Baseball star Rogers Hornsby was reputed to have started his career with a Bloomer club in Texas, in 1913 or 1914, though he vehemently denied it in his autobiography. (He claimed to have only played for their male opponents.)

I posted this mostly because I just found it (while looking for something else) and the "wife" part seemed like something out of a story here.

If anyone does want to research further background, I can provide a few references to print publications. (If you can access newspaper articles online, you'll probably find some short articles. There's a business that has most of the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and one of the Atlanta papers (the Journal or Constitution), among others, readable online, with a search program that can handle multiple sources. But they no longer offer affordable (less than $100/year) individual memberships, so you may need to find or ask at a public or college library.

There's some interesting stuff about that first Young Ladies' club of 1890 and '91 (shown in this picture). Apparently they spent a night in jail somewhere in Iowa because they were playing and charging admission on a Sunday, and they got stranded in Florida at one point and IIRC it took them most of a week to get owner Franklin to send train fare home. (Mae Howard, the team's 17-year old captain and star pitcher, was the person interviewed, suggesting that the team was unchaperoned or at least unsupervised by an adult, which seems surprising -- unless he or she took off with the money.) Howard's the short girl at left of the front row.

(One of the research sources guesses that two of the players in the picture are boys, but I suspect that was based on the following year's photo, where a few players' hands and feet are concealed behind other players. With the players' short hair, baggy sleeves and lack of makeup, though, it seems that it would have been easy for a boy to get in there.)

Eric