“Why do you think you lost?” one reporter asked. “Because the judge was on the boys’ side,”
If your parents were anything like mine, they probably told you, at some point, not to “make a federal case” out of something. But back when I was ten, making a federal case was exactly what I did.
As a ten-year-old gung ho athlete, I wanted to play baseball. Not just backyard, sandlot pickup games — real baseball games. To do that, I decided to join Little League. But in those years of busing and civil rights and desegregation, Little League was strictly all male. Girls were welcome at games, of course, but as family and fans only. Undaunted, two friends and I showed up early one Saturday morning, money and registration forms in hand. We were told that not only could we not play, we couldn’t even register, as we were (obviously) girls.
I arrived home fuming. “Sue them!”
My parents did just that.
In a case that landed me on the front page of the Boston Globe for weeks (and more embarrassingly, on the bulletin board of my fifth-grade classroom), and made me and several other like-minded girls around the nation the talk of the radio talk shows, we took Little League to federal court.
And lost.
After Judge W. Arthur Garrity (of Boston desegregation and busing fame) handed down the verdict, I was interviewed outside the courtroom.
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