90 years before Dawn Staley, these women broke ground in North Philly
Female ushers made their debut at Shibe Park in1927.
A t the intersection of 21st and Lehigh in North Philadelphia, it's just a few steps from Dobbins Tech to the site where Shibe Park stood.
Yet it's a journey that, in a curious way, took women 90 years to complete.
Dawn Staley was back at Dobbins last week, honored by her proud alma mater for coaching South Carolina to the 2016-17 NCAA women's basketball championship.
Staley's latest front-page accomplishment completed a circle in Philadelphia's women's sports history, one that began on April 20, 1927, at that ballpark that once stood catty-corner to Dobbins.
On that unusually warm spring day at Shibe Park, Helen Lackey and 14 others became the first female ushers at a Philadelphia ballpark. If that sounds insignificant now, it wasn't then. They're believed to be the first women to have served in any official capacity with a Philadelphia baseball team.
Baseball was, and to some extent remains, notoriously hostile to females. The historical attitudes of those in the game might best have been expressed by what used to be the demeaning locker-room term for women - "beef."
The sports world was a man's world. The roar of the Roaring Twenties was basso profundo. There was no suitable role for delicate women among the gritty competitors, coaches, and sportswriters who dominated the nation's pastimes.
If women were thought of as anything other than sex objects, it was as the mothers and wives whose influence could help their sons and husbands toe the line.
"Baseball would never be what it is today if it were not for the women," Connie Mack wrote, more than a bit patronizingly, in his 1950 autobiography, My 66 Years in the Big Leagues. "When I first started in baseball, the game was not so respectable as it is today, but the women have been a powerful moral influence in raising its tone."
Females were almost as rare - and, apparently, just as unwelcome – in the grandstands, so much so that some relatively forward-looking owners began to devise ladies days in an effort to lure them to their ballparks.
"An empty seat generated no revenue," local baseball historian Bob Warrington noted. "[The thinking was that] perhaps the women would bring their children along and purchase seats for them . . . visit the concession stands to buy food."
The buttoned-down Philadelphia A's were operated as conservatively as Connie Mack dressed. They would not institute a ladies day until 1937, five decades after teams such as the Phillies had first tried them.
Initially, when the Chicago Cubs and others began to employ female ushers, the A's declined. But in 1927, when Babe Ruth's popularity was at its height and their own team - on the verge of a second dynasty - was starting to draw consistently big crowds to Shibe Park, the Athletics finally yielded.
They hired 15 female ushers to complement a staff of 25 men. Lackey appears to have been a pretty young woman, but it's not known whether those pioneering ushers were employed to attract more men or merely to lead fans to their seats.
Tangential as their role might have been, Lackey and her colleagues apparently drew considerable attention as, with a crowd of 35,000 streaming in that Wednesday afternoon, they began performing their duties.
A newspaper photo taken of Lackey that day, before the sold-out opener of a three-game series between the Athletics and the Murderers Row Yankees, reveals just how revolutionary her role was.
Though the temperature reached a record 89 degrees, she was dressed in what must have been a suffocating uniform, one designed more for modesty's sake than practicality's. Lackey wore a clingy cloche hat and a uniform that descended to mid-calf and completely covered her arms.
Surrounding her in the box seats, men in suits and ties looked on smugly, as if they were witnessing a circus freak instead of a groundbreaking woman.
Lackey disappeared into the mists of time after her debut. But the A's must have deemed the social experiment a success. According to the book Chicago in the World Series: 1903-2005, the Athletics hired an additional 231 female ushers for their 1929 World Series games against the Cubs.
The team departed for Kansas City in 1954, and the Phillies abandoned what was then Connie Mack Stadium in 1970, the year Staley was born.
When the Phils, with showman Bill Giles at the promotional controls, moved into brand-new Veterans Stadium for the 1971 season, they enhanced the concept, though not gender enlightenment.
The Phillies' Hot Pants Patrol featured attractive young female ushers in maroon-and-white jumpsuits whose salient feature were knee-high white boots and tight shorts, the then-fashionable "hot pants."
But the hot pants couldn't withstand the cultural fire of the 1970s. The concept drew heavy criticism from the burgeoning feminist movement and the Hot Pants Patrol was disbanded for good in 1982, six years before the last Playboy Club closed.
As Staley's championship and $1 million salary prove, women have come a long way since that bit of progress ushered in by Lackey. But as another prominent local athlete, Carli Lloyd, recently pointed out in a dispute over the disparate salaries paid to America's male and female soccer stars, there's still considerable distance to travel.
The march toward true gender equality doesn't figure to end any time soon. After all, here in Philadelphia, it took 90 years just to cross a street.
@philafitz