Helen Nicol Fox is one of the best remaining Peaches who played professional baseball at Beyer Stadium.
Fox was born May 9, 1920, when Woodrow Wilson was president.
If you go through the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League website, Fox is one of at least 22 living Rockford Peaches out of the 145 who played for the Rockford-based team.
Of all of the remaining former Peaches, Fox is both the oldest and the one with the most impressive record.
She pitched in the league from 1943 to 1952, thriving as the league changed from a fast-pitch softball format with the bigger ball and underhand throwing to a standard baseball and overhand pitching.
Maddy English was born on February 22, 1925 in Everett Massachusetts. Maddy was the daughter of Ambrose Tobias English, a longtime Everett city official who served as Everett’s Acting Mayor from July 1947-January 1948, and Anne English. While there were no organized interscholastic sports while she attended Everett High School, Maddy involved herself in pickup games around the Boston area, eventually joining a Massachusetts softball team in 1939, who played their home games on the concrete floor of the Boston Garden when the Bruins and Celtics teams were out of town. Her stand-out athleticism at third-base caught the eye of a professional baseball scout, who invited her to a tryout at Wrigley Field in Chicago in 1943.
Death of Grand Rapids Chicks player may have marked the end of an era
Joyce Hill Westerman played for the inaugural Grand Rapids Chicks team in 1945, and she may have been the last surviving player from that year s team. Author: Matt Gard Updated: 1:44 PM EST January 30, 2021
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich When it comes to Grand Rapids sports legends, Joyce Hill Westerman may not be the first name that comes to mind. After all, her only season with the Grand Rapids Chicks was her rookie year, a year in which she only had 18 at bats over nine games.
But the 1945 season Westerman spent in Grand Rapids was historic for the city. The Chicks franchise had just moved from Milwaukee, where the team struggled to compete for fans with the Brewers, which at the time was a minor league franchise.