What Survived: The Museum, the Marker, the Memory

1955–2021

The league was forgotten for a generation and then, deliberately, un-forgotten, and South Bend sits at the center of the recovery. The city's History Museum is the league's national repository: it holds the official archives and the largest collection of league memorabilia anywhere, more than 2,000 items in its AAGPBL collection, and it mounted the exhibit "Polished in Public, Fierce on the Field" on the league's South Bend years. The Howe Bureau's stat sheets, the league's own statistical record, sit in the AAGPBL files there. The paper record of the club itself is split between the museum and the University of Notre Dame Archives, whose All-American Girls Baseball League Collection (MSSP 0014) is built on Harold Dailey's nine notebooks — more than 1,100 leaves kept by the team's president — and on Chet Grant's papers.

The players rebuilt their own institution: June Peppas's newsletter project from 1980 led to the first national reunion, in Chicago in 1982, and the Players Association was established in 1987 — the league histories place the organizing meeting at a South Bend home, that of former player Fran Janssen, with Peppas as president. On November 5, 1988, the National Baseball Hall of Fame opened its "Women in Baseball" exhibit — more than 150 former players attended — and in 2006 expanded it into the permanent "Diamond Dreams" gallery. The reunions ran for decades; Faut's oral history was taped at the 2010 reunion in Detroit, and in 2019 the reunion's contingent visited Cooperstown together. The club got its own book in 2012: Jim Sargent and Robert M. Gorman's The South Bend Blue Sox, written from the archives and from Sargent's interviews with the surviving players, with forewords by Jochum, Kidd and Faut and the 1943–1954 roster in its appendix.

And on May 26, 2021 — seventy-five years to the day after the club's first game at Playland Park — the Indiana Historical Bureau, the History Museum and Indiana University South Bend dedicated the state marker for the Blue Sox near the old grounds, with Betsy Jochum, an original 1943 Blue Sox and at one hundred years old the club's living link to its first season, in attendance. The marker's second side carries the honors exactly: "They won Playoff Championships in 1951 and 1952."

Sources

1. The History Museum, South Bend, and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, team page — the museum as national repository and official archives, 2,000-plus items (executive director Brian D. Harding, 2021), the Howe Bureau stat sheets.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives — the All-American Girls Baseball League Collection, MSSP 0014: the Dailey notebooks (1,100-plus leaves) and the Grant papers.
3. All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Players Association pages, aagpbl.org — Peppas, the 1982 Chicago reunion, the association's establishment in 1987; the association's history as also told in the league's general histories, with the organizing meeting at Fran Janssen's South Bend home.
4. National Baseball Hall of Fame — the November 5, 1988 "Women in Baseball" opening (150-plus players present) and the 2006 "Diamond Dreams" expansion; the 2019 reunion visit.
5. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.2021.1, and Indiana University South Bend, dedication release — the May 26, 2021 dedication and Jochum's attendance; the marker text.
6. Jim Sargent and Robert M. Gorman, The South Bend Blue Sox (McFarland, 2012) — the published team history.