Old Oregon
ATHLETICS ADVOCATE
A League of Her Own The latest gift from trailblazing baseballer Lois Youngen supports other female athletes BY MELODY WARD LESLIE
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In 1971, Youngen (far left and above) coached track athletes (front row, L-R) Wanda Taylor, Sherry Wells, (middle row) Chris Moore, (back row, L-R) Karen Gaddis, Janet Newman, and Andrea Aichele
pursued at Kent State University during the off-season. But after the 1954 season, owners shut down the women’s league, which had been created to fill the void in Major League Baseball caused by the absence of players serving in World War II. Youngen wrapped up her bachelor’s in 1955 while playing one more year for the all-star women’s team that barnstormed the Midwest against men’s teams. Disappointed but undaunted by the loss of women’s professional baseball, she completed her master’s degree at Michigan State University, where she taught until joining the UO faculty in 1960. By then, the fact that American women once were paid to play baseball professionally—and
fiercely—was vanishing from public memory. “Nobody would ever have known we existed if it weren’t for Penny Marshall’s film A League of Their Own in 1992,” she says. “That made us all celebrities.” While national awareness of the need to encourage highly skilled female athletes grew in the 1960s, especially in Oregon, Youngen was getting her Ducks in a row. On top of serving as the unpaid women’s tennis coach from 1964 to 1968, she volunteered to coach women’s basketball for the 1966 season. She also spent part of her lunch hour teaching the UO’s lone coed physical activity class with men’s track-and-field coach Bill Bowerman. Until that point, PE
COURTESY OF LOIS YOUNGEN
ois Youngen looks as if she walked straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting into the 1955 newspaper photo promoting a major league exhibition baseball game. The five-foot-three catcher—a self-described “runt”—embodies pugnacity with her fists doubled, biceps flexed, and cap pushed back from her forehead. Amped from a just-completed game, she is still wearing her chest protector, shin guards, and uniform, which featured what can only be described as a regulation miniskirt. Yes, you read that right. Youngen, an 87-year-old Eugene resident and University of Oregon professor emerita of physical education who taught more than a dozen sports and activities, pursued research on human movement that focused on women, coached three intercollegiate sports, and helped lay the groundwork for the Student Recreation Center, was a professional baseball star. Growing up in LeRoy, Ohio, Youngen played sandlot baseball with the boys, unaware of the existence of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League until she was 16, when a cousin in Indiana invited her to see the Fort Wayne Daisies. “About the seventh inning, I proclaimed, ‘I can do that!’ and the next morning I had a tryout,” she says. The following year—1951—she received an invitation and $20 to go to spring training with the Daisies. She made the team, playing four seasons highlighted by catching a perfect game. As much as she loved the sport, Youngen kept her eye on a different ball: a bachelor’s degree in physical education, which she
