Mom Was a Star in Center Field

HOUSTON —  The five Candaele boys got a jump start on life because they had a hero who was as adept on a baseball diamond as she was in the kitchen.

Mom, you see, played center field.

Before retiring to raise her family, Helen St. Aubin played from 1944 to 1949 in the Women’s Professional Baseball League, where she became known as “the female Ted Williams.”

Later, as a mom-manager, she stuffed her sons with apple pie and then went out and threw BP and hit them fungoes.

Casey, her youngest, learned to ignore his smallish frame and earned a place for himself in professional baseball, currently with the Houston Astros.

Mom inspired Kelly Candaele, with friend Kim Wilson, to produce a documentary about the women’s pro league.

Then, they wrote the story line that became a movie, “A League of Their Own,” which premier’s nationally July 1 starring Madonna, Geena Davis and Tom Hanks.

The movie is fiction, but Mom is real.

The former Helen Calaghan played on heart. At 5-1, 100-pounds, she won the batting title with a .298 average one year and has been inducted into the Hall of Fame.

The movie has sent Mom sifting through her own field of dreams about playing center field for the Kenosha Comets, the Minneapolis Millerettes and the Fort Wayne Daisies in her youth.

Her voice remains strong and fiesty. She says ‘yeah’ a lot and it comes out with a can-do finality.

She recalls traveling to Detroit for league tryouts.

“I went home and asked my father if I could play professional baseball and he said I could try out and when I made the team it was really exciting,” Mom said. “It was great. “It was a time when women were supposed to be in the kitchen, doing their chores.

“We were something more. We were athletes besides that, yeah.”

Casey never got any sympathy from Mom about those long bus rides in the minor leagues. She had the time of her life traveling and playing baseball and riding old buses.

“We’d never earned $65-75 a week before, that was unheard of,” she said.

“We had this money to spend and it was our’s and that was great.”

The league flourished throughout the 1940s into the 1950s with teams playing in the Midwest. During the war years, the league drew 1 million fans a year.

The players were sent to charm school, wore makeup and were forbidden to drink or smoke. They wore regular baseball spikes and slid into bases just like any other professional.

“There wasn’t a lot of money,” Mom said. “We traveled by buses, they were old buses but we were young and it didn’t bother us.”

But the show had to end at some point and that point came when Mom decided her family was more important than playing professional baseball. She continued to use a make-shift baseball field as her classroom.

“I thought all moms taught you how to play baseball,” Casey Candaele said. “She was an inspiration to me and she still is. She was a good ball player and a professional. She just helped out with the fundamentals.”

Kelly is carving a career in documentary film-making and he, too, credits his mom for giving him the stamina to keep fighting.

“Coming from a working class family, we didn’t grow up with connections,” Kelly Candaele said. “I didn’t have Hollywood connections and Casey didn’t grow up the great talent. He wasn’t destined for the major leagues.

Despite her admonitions, Mom was surprised that Casey chose a career in baseball.

“No, my gosh, I never thought he wanted to or had such a thought in his mind,” Mom said. “Those dreams came later, I don’t know what he wanted, I just wanted to get him through high school and go from there.

“He was 5-8 and I told him you don’t get nothing when you’re not a great big super star. I’m 5-1, yeah. But he’s a rare specimen.”

The Candaele boys’ Little League memories include those moms’ Powder Puff games designed as comic relief.

Mom didn’t fit the mold.

“They’d get the mothers on the field and she always put on a great display of athletic skills when everybody was there to laugh at the women,” Kelly said.

“She was always there with advice and tips. The more I remember, it was less technique but more in the psychology of the game and what it takes to be an athlete, the discipline.”

Mom is having to use her grit once again and nobody’s betting against her.

“I’ve been sick, I have cancer and I haven’t been able to see Casey play this year, which I’m really disappointed in,” Mom said.

“Maybe I’ll make it to the game soon. I’m taking chemotherapy so I have my ups and downs.

“It depends on the treatments you take, yeah.”