Queen Lizzie Plays First Base

Money wasn't everything with Lizzie. She often said later that she considered the touring an education and an experience, and anything but a chore.

"I was always rough and ready, and I could take it," she maintained. "I got in shape beating rugs and chopping wood. This kept me fit for running the bases and driving the ball to the outfield."

Traveling the countryside with a group of young males was never a problem either, she said. "Of course they cursed and swore," she said, "but I didn't mind. I knew all the words myself."

Lizzie considered her competitive peak came in a charity game, just a couple of innings long, played in Boston between the Red Sox and a collection of major leaguers going under the working title of the American League All-Stars—with Lizzie Murphy at first base. It was during that contest she displayed the baseball skill of which she was most proud; namely, her ability to handle anything that came her way. The third baseman on her own team that day was the one who—for spite, Lizzie always suspected—put her quickly to the test.

"The first man up hit to him at third," she said, "and he held onto the ball as long as he could and then gunned it across. What an arm! I fooled him, though, and handled the ball easily. He went over to our shortstop and said, 'She'll do.' What he didn't know was that I liked fast ones better than slow."

In 1935, at the age of 40, Lizzie put aside her uniform, retired to Warren and two years later married a nonbaseball player. Her husband met an untimely death a few years thereafter, and Lizzie took to various and modest ways of making a living for herself and her mother. She worked at the mills for a time and for a number of years went on the oyster boats then working out of Warren. Obviously there was very little money around from her baseball days and, perhaps partly because of that, she seemed to sour on the game in her later years.

"It's hard to explain why I liked baseball so much," she once said grumpily to a visitor seeking her reminiscences. "And the more I think about it the less I understand the reason."

She died on April 17, 1964, at the age of 70. Occasionally, in her last years, someone would try to revive her interest in baseball. Once she was asked to take part in the dedicatory festivities for a Little League, and Lizzie's reply was, "I don't want any part of it." Again, some friends and admirers planning a testimonial dinner on her behalf thought it wise to ask Lizzie whether if so honored she would attend. "I would not," she told them firmly.

She declined, her friends decided, because of pride and because she never did go much for frivolities. It also might have been that at the time they asked her she was thinking of that day in Dorchester, Mass.