1952 Rockford Peaches Back, L-R: Jacquelyn Kelley, Rose Gacioch, Eleanor Callow, Bill Allington (Manager), Marie Mansfield, Amy Irene Applegren, Carol Habben, Jean Buckley. Front, L-R: Dorothy Harrell Doyle, Dorothy Ferguson, Dolores Lee, Joan Berger, Dottie Green (Chaperone), Alice Pollitt, Ruth Richard, Helen Nordquist, Migdalia Perez.
The Peaches were one of 2 teams to play in every AAGPBL season, the other being the South Bend Blue Sox. They played their home games at Beyer Stadium on 15th Avenue in Rockford. The team's uniform consisted of a peach colored dress featuring the Rockford city seal centered on the chest, along with red socks and cap. In later years, the Peaches wore a white home uniform with black socks and cap.
Team names and colors were picked by Mr. Wrigley according the location proximity of the cities that did not have a major league male baseball team. Rockford, Illinois was one of them. Mrs. Wrigley, Wrigley's Art Designer, Otis Shepard, and Ann Harnett worked together to design special uniforms for the League. Ann Harnett, Chicago softball star and the first girl to sign a contract with the league for the one-piece short-skirted flared tunic that resembled a figure skating costume, tennis skirt and field hockey uniforms at this time period. All uniforms were based on pastel colors. Satin shorts (a darker color than the tunic), knee-high baseball socks and baseball hat the uniform. Each city had a different colored uniform and its own symbolic patch decorated the front of the uniform. Femininity, was a high priority for Mrs. Wrigley and she employed Helena Rubenstein's Beauty Salon to teach personal hygiene, makeup, hair and mannerisms to make each Rockford Peach and all AAGPBL players the most attractive they could be. Part of the uniform was a makeup kit and instructions on how to use makeup to be part of the overall look for each team in the league.[1] Rockford Peach player, Dorothy "Kammie" Kamenshek, recalled, "The first year was very difficult because [the skirts] were too flaring and too long. You'd go to stoop for a ground ball and the skirt would be there. But we accepted it." Ballplayers also accepted the wounds from sliding called 'strawberries' due to the shortness of the skirt and shorts.[2]
Olive Little threw the first no-hitter in team and league history, on June 10, 1943.[3]
When former player Eileen Burmeister was asked why The Peaches supposedly favored theatricality over technical skill, she replied, "If God meant for us to play baseball, He would've made us any good at it."[citation needed].
The last living player of the first Peaches roster in AAGPBL, pitcher Mary Pratt, died on May 6, 2020, at the age of 101.
The Rockford Peaches feature in the 1992 film A League of Their Own by Penny Marshall. However, all of the characters in the film are fictitious. The team did not play in the 1943 league championship, as depicted in the film. In real life, the Racine Belles faced the Kenosha Comets in 1943; the Peaches won their first title in 1945. The formation of the AAGPBL and the Rockford Peaches are also centered in the 2022 TV series A League of Their Own.
↑Immodest and Sensational: 150 Years of Canadian Women in Sport, M. Ann Hall, p.57, James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Toronto, 2008, ISBN978-1-55277-021-4
↑The Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League: A Biographical Dictionary – W. C. Madden. Publisher: McFarland & Company, 2005. Format: Paperback, 295 pp. Language: English. ISBN0-7864-3747-2
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