Kittenball team was a hit in Quasqueton

QUASQUETON — They did not play in a league, let alone have one of their own, but they were in a class by themselves.

They were the Quasqueton girls' kittenball team, local girls who played in homemade uniforms without a ringer against all comers, losing just one game in two seasons, while drawing thousands to Depression-era games in a town of 360 people.

The original dream team, which lost one of about 100 games in 1934 and 1935, was remembered last weekend in a program sponsored by the Quasqueton Area Historical Society.

'The girls on the team got along so well, and we did so well. It was just a wonderful time,' said Irene Vig, 96, of Cedar Rapids, the last living member of the team.

Vig, who may have best expressed the girls' ebullience when she turned cartwheels from third to home after hitting a homer, was supposed to have been the guest of honor at Sunday's gathering but was hospitalized last week and could not attend. Nevertheless, about 100 people, many of them descendants of the players, heard Vig's recollections via a videotaped interview conducted last October.

Vig said the girls, ranging in age from 14 to 21, started playing for fun in her grandfather's pasture in 1933.

Carl Walter, then mayor of Quasqueton, observed their talent and organized them for competition, Vig said.

The girls were all above average, but what made them nearly invincible was the arm of pitcher Geneva Clark, who later became a star professional pitcher, signing in 1947 a then-unheard-of $100-a-week contract to pitch for the Rock-Ola Music Maids, a Chicago-based team sponsored by a manufacturer of jukeboxes.

'She just threw faster than anyone else around,' said Leroy Carner, 91, a Waterloo resident who grew up in Quasqueton.

The Quaskies, as they were called, went on a winning streak that quickly attracted attention.

Within hours of an announcement of a game, 'the hamlet turns into a thriving metropolis teeming with almost 2,000 people,' The Gazette's Dick Everett wrote in the Sept. 16, 1934, edition.

A poster advertising a game on July 19, 1935, announced: 'The Riverview Park Girls, Des Moines champion and claimant to the state title, have beaten all teams this year and have hollered for a game with Quasqueton. The Quasqueton girls are still undefeated, and the outcome will prove who is best.'

The Quaskies won 3-0.

Edna Oldridge, 99, of Jesup, a sister of Eunice Franck Decker, the second baseman, said her family 'had a whale of a lot of fun' attending all the games.

Decker's daughter, Katha Williams of Waterloo, said the girls were pioneers, 'throwing off their aprons and having some fun' in an era when that was not commonly done.

'We were light on equipment, and most of the girls played bare-handed,' Vig said in the interview.

But with Clark on the mound, making the 12-inch leather ball with raised seams hum, that was not much of a handicap.

While the girls generally traveled to road games in a school bus, Vig said she vividly recalled riding from Quasqueton to Vinton and back on a hayrack pulled by a truck.

The team's meteoric rise ended almost as suddenly as it started. By 1936, Walter, the team's manager and chauffeur, fell ill, and the girls went their separate ways, Vig said.

Kittenball team from Quasqueton, Iowa