Crazy Salad by Nora Ephron Page A

second base and Mrs. Gera, in an uncharacteristically unemphatic move, ventured a safe call. Seconds later, she realized he was out in a force play, and brought her fist up. The manger of the Auburn team, Nolan Campbell, who had said before the game that Mrs. Gera was “going to have one heck of a time taking the abuse,” ran out onto the field and began to shout and chase after her. She ejected him from the game. Campbell was furious. “She admitted she made a mistake,” he said later. “I told her, that’s two mistakes. The first one was putting on a uniform.”
    When the game ended, Bernice Gera, trailed by camera crews and a dozen reporters, strode into the clubhouse and announced, “I’ve just resigned from baseball.” Then she wheeled around, left the field, and burst into tears in the back of a friend’s car. NBC’s Dick Schaap asked Doug Hartmayer how he felt about her quitting. “I was glad,” said Hartmayer. “Her job wasn’t bad except she changed that call at second base, which is a cardinal sin in baseball.” As Schaap later noted, “She committed the cardinal sin of baseball—she admitted she made a mistake.”
    It is hard to believe that things would not have worked out had Bernice Gera hung in there, stayed on, borne up somehow. It is hard to believe, too, that she could not have been helped by some real support from the women’s movement. In any event, Mrs. Gera and the movement did not join forces until three weeks after her debacle, when she attended a meeting at the grubby New York headquarters of the National Organization for Women. “I’m happy to be here with all you girls—I mean women,” said Mrs. Gera, and plunged into her new rhetoric. She spoke of the “calculated harassment by the sexist operators who control baseball.” She hinted at a boycott of the game. She defended changing her call, quoting from the
Baseball Manual
, a publication that seems to provide the messages in fortune cookies: “To right a wrong is honorable. Such an action will win you respect.”
    “People are saying I’m a quitter, but I’m not,” she said, “not after what baseball put me through. Someone else might have quit earlier but I stayed with it. I would have shined a ballplayer’s shoes. That’s how much I like baseball.”
    And so it is over, and Bernice Gera has, if not a profession, a title. She is Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire. That is how she signs autographs and that is how she is identified at the occasional events she is invited to attend. Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire,modeled at a fashion show at Alexander’s department store, along with several other women of achievement. Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire, umpired a CBS softball game at Grossinger’s and was third-base coach for the wives of the Atlanta Braves at an exhibition game. Bernice Gera, First Lady Umpire, sits on a couch in her Queens apartment and looks back on it all. “People say to me, you quit,” she said. “I heard some reports back that I closed the door for all women, that I put women’s lib back years. How could I close a door? I was the first woman in baseball. What did I do—close doors or open doors?” It is an interesting question, really, but Bernice Gera prefers not to hear the answer or dwell on the past or deal with what actually happened. “I’m in contact with baseball all the time,” she says. “Don’t count me out. I expect to be in baseball next year.”
    January, 1973

O N C ONSCIOUSNESS- R AISING
    I try to remember exactly what the lie was that I made up to tell friends a year ago, when I joined a consciousness-raising group. They would ask me why I had done it, why I had gotten into something like that—a group, an actual organized activity—and I think what I tended to reply was that I didn’t see how I could write about women and the women’s movement
without
joining a group. Consciousness-raising, according to all the literature, is fundamental to the women’s movement