January 13, 1972— The New York Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Bernice Gera in her attempt to become the first female professional umpire. The victory was short-lived, however, as five months later, the former housewife was subjected to such abuse from players and fans--and lack of support from male umpires--that she quit after her first game.
I first came across the story of Gera in a marvelous essay collection by Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women. Forget about her derivative, often snarky work as screenwriter and director: Ephron’s real calling is as an essayist. Her January 1973 piece on Gera, written shortly after the latter’s failed attempt at breaking into the game, is shadowed by irony: i.e., the would-be feminist icon who somehow failed the movement. Yet, for all Ephron’s wishes that everything would have turned out differently for Gera and women’s liberation, you can’t help but like this baseball lover.
Four decades later--and two decades after Gera’s death--it’s even harder not to feel sympathy for her. Reading her story, you might wish that she had succeeded as a rule-breaking pioneer, but then might have been glad that she did not, when you consider the physical and psychic toll that prolonged disrespect might have exacted on her.
What Gera was facing was probably best described by a later woman who got closer--but still didn’t fulfill--her dream of becoming a major-league umpire, Pam Postema. “Almost all of the people in the baseball community don’t want anyone interrupting their little male-dominated way of life.,“ she wrote in her 1992 memoir,
You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League. “They want big, fat male umpires. They want those macho, tobacco-chewing, sleazy sort of borderline alcoholics.”
It was even worse for Gera. Two and a half decades after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, Art Williams was having a tough time becoming the first black umpire in the National League (a situation recounted in Lee Gutkind’s 1975
The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand). If a black umpire seemed difficult for many to accept even at that late date, the concept of a
female umpire was impossible.
By Gera’s own later account, she didn’t really want to be a revolutionary, or disrupt the game she had come to love so well. She would have been content to have been a goodwill ambassador for baseball, serving in some sort of community relations program.
But matters took a turn for the worse when, after graduating from a Florida umpire-training school, she applied for a job with the New York-Penn League, near her Jackson Heights, N.Y. home. The league’s agreement to offer her a contract was rejected by the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, who unsuccessfully invoked a minimum-size requirement to try to keep her out.
The courage of Robinson, Curt Flood, and Roberto Clemente in breaking down racial, ethnic and labor barriers is not to be underestimated. Gera, however, was virtually isolated. The opposition of the male mossbacks of baseball, such as the now-justly-forgotten commissioner, General William Eckert (she would become an umpire “over my dead body," he vowed), was to be expected.
Less well known, however, was that Gera was taking her case through the courts without the help of the feminist movement, which was just then emerging as a significant political and legal force. According to a Craig Davis profile of Gera in a 1989 South Florida
Sun-Sentinel article,
not one women’s organization assisted her in her court battle. This made doubly ironic the later contention of many feminists that she had set back the movement when she quit her job.
Many were chagrined when Gera resigned after a single New York-Pennsylvania League game in Geneva, N.Y., in June 1972, less than six months after she won in court. It seemed as if she had one fight with a manager who didn’t like one of her calls, then threw in the towel. But it wasn’t that simple.
Gera had spent four years in court only to find that, the closer her dream was coming to fruition, the harder became the resistance to it. She continued to receive threatening letters and late-night calls, and the portents for her first game proved particularly ominous: Not only were fans taunting and abusing her, but the other umpire refused to speak to her as the game started.
His behavior was startling and unprofessional, as it meant that these game partners would not know the elementary signals that would allow them to function as a working team.
That’s what happened in the sixth inning of the game, when Gera, momentarily confused by a play, immediately reversed herself. When the manager of the team suffering the reversed call rushed out to protest, Gera let him jabber on and on, feeling he had a legitimate gripe because she had initially blown the call. Finally, she felt compelled to act when he called into question her basic authority: “You made two mistakes. The first was leaving the kitchen; you should have been home peeling potatoes.” Gera ejected him, completed the last few innings, then, before the second game of the double-header, resigned.
Sportscaster Dick Schaap, echoing a comment made by an interviewee about Gera, noted, perhaps ironically, “She committed the cardinal sin of baseball--she admitted she made a mistake.” How times have changed! A year and a half ago, major-league umpire Jim Joyce manned up and admitted he had blown a call that cost a pitcher a perfect game. Even his teary greeting of the pitcher, the next time they encountered each other, was regarded as the epitome of honesty, even a guide to politicians on how to behave after a mistake has become all too public.
In contrast, reactions to Gera at the time for similar behavior amounted to, “What do you expect?” from the antediluvian crowd, and “She let down the movement” from the presumably more enlightened. And so, even though she vowed to Ephron, “Don’t count me out; I expect to be in baseball next year,” she would never umpire a professional game again.
The New York Mets have been taking it on the chin lately for the Wilpons’ financial misadventures. However, even a team that is otherwise horribly run can have real moments of grace. I’m speaking, in this case, of the Mets regime under M. Donald Grant. The team board chairman did succeed in, among many other sins, driving away star Tom Seaver and manager-to-be Whitey Herzog, but the team did during that time employ Gera for five years as part of its community relations and promotions team.
Nobody should ever have questioned the toughness of Gera, a product of a broken home in an industrialized region of Pennsylvania. Even to get to her one game umpiring, she had to endure a pioneer’s struggle, consisting, in Ephron’s words, “of the loneliness she will suffer if she gets the job, of the role she will assume as a freak, of the smarmy and inevitable questions that will be raised about her heterosexuality, of the derision and smug satisfaction that will follow if she makes a mistake, or breaks down under pressure, or quits.”
Two decades after her lawsuit and her exit from the game, Gera died after struggling against cancer, enduring at least 31 radiation treatments, medication that left her woozy, and an operation to restore the use of her right arm that only worsened matters. She was as tough and brave as they come--fully the equal of those who rejected her from the "summer game."
