Paula Merritt / The Meridian StarMeridian resident Eula Miller displays a photo from her professional baseball playing days with the Allington All-American Girl All-Stars.

Eula Miller pulled into Mexico, Missouri, in the early morning hours of the summer of 1957. The 650-mile drive from her home in Whynot, Mississippi, and the realization of her recent commitment manifested themselves in a wave of emotions that engulfed her.

Less than 24 hours before, the red-headed, 19-year-old ballplayer waited in anticipation on the porch of her family’s home with a packed suitcase near her side and teemed with excitement when her eyes caught the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League station wagon pull into the driveway.

Those feelings of elation morphed into anxiety as Miller, team manager Bill Allington and player Dolores Lee drove through the night to unite Miller with her new Allington All-American Girl All-Stars teammates. The memory was still vivid many years later for Miller, now 81, as she retold the story in Meridian this week.  

Once settled at their motel, Allington wished Miller a good night.

“(Bill) told me, ‘I’ll be in room so and so, and you better get some sleep because we have a game tomorrow,’” Miller said. “This was about 4 o’clock in the morning. I got up around 8 o’clock and it was pouring rain. I was so homesick, so I went down and knocked on Bill Allington’s door. I said, ‘I made a big mistake, and if you’ll get me to the bus station, I’ll be headed back to Whynot, Mississippi.’ ”

Allington called Miller into his room and brokered a deal: If Miller gave the team a chance for two weeks, he would take her to the bus station if she still wanted to return to Mississippi.

First pitches

Miller credits her East Mississippi Community College classmate Paul Alexander for setting in motion her mark on history. Alexander pitched for East Mississippi, and the two shared mutual friends. The group routinely studied and played tennis together. It wasn’t long before Miller and Alexander began playing catch.

Miller first picked up a baseball at around 4 or 5 years old, and with three brothers for siblings, she didn’t have much of a choice.

“I can thank them for helping me learn to play baseball because they didn’t cut me any slack,” Miller said. “I grew up in Whynot, Mississippi, with those three brothers, and we lived on a farm. If we weren’t farming, we were playing some kind of ball.”

Miller’s cousin, Joe Miller, recalled being on a team she coached shortly after she ended her professional career.

“She was our first baseball coach,” Joe Miller said. “She could hit ground balls and fly balls as well as anybody. She could pitch batting practice as well as anybody. Everybody knew how good Eula was, so nobody thought about her being a female coach at that time.”

Alexander played semi-pro baseball during the spring of 1957 and the schedule that year pitted his team against the Allington All-American Girl All-Stars. After the game, he asked Allington if his team needed another player. Allington did, and thus began the search to locate Miller to let her know of the opportunity. After numerous phone calls, Alexander and Allington found Miller’s uncle, Rev. Albert Miller.

“My uncle drove to Whynot with a number for me to call if I was interested in playing,” she said. “So I went to Booker’s Store, which had this little phone, and Ms. Leann Booker called up Bill Allington and Paul Alexander. (Bill) said, ‘I’m not coming to Whynot if you’re not interested in playing.’ To this day, I don’t know how he found me in Whynot, but he did find me.”

The professional

The Allington All-American Girl All-Stars were based in South Bend, Indiana, and Miller pitched and played infield for two seasons. Throughout the course of her career, she visited 38 states and played in more than 100 games. On a roster filled with players in their late 20s and mid-30s, she was always the youngest member of her team during both seasons. But despite the age difference, she never felt detached from her teammates.

“They took me in and made me feel welcome,” Miller said. “They had been on the road three or four years with (Bill), so they knew the ropes, and they helped me out a lot.”

Miller and Dolores Lee quickly became friends. Lee played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League – depicted in the 1992 film “A League of Their Own” – for two seasons with the Rockford Peaches and was the league’s Rookie of the Year in 1952. She later joined the Allington All-American Girl All-Stars.

“She could take two baseballs in one hand and throw them to two different catchers,” Miller said. “We had little activities that we did before the games, and she used to do that.”

While Miller honed her baseball skills in Whynot and Scooba, they flourished under Allington’s tutelage. Allington played on the minor league circuit for 20 years before becoming a minor league and All-American Girls Professional Baseball League coach.

“Bill Allington was an amazing baseball man,” Miller said. “He had played professional baseball, and he had coached in that league — A League of their Own — and I learned a lot of baseball from him. I knew a lot about baseball because I’ve always been a fan, but he taught us so much baseball riding up and down those roads from one place to another.”

Baseball practices and games consumed much of Miller’s time, but she and her teammates on occasion were able to break away from the sport. On one such occasion, Miller found herself at Comiskey Park watching the Chicago White Sox play the New York Yankees.

“We got seats in center field right near Mickey Mantle,” Miller said. “At the time, he was in a hot contest with Ted Williams for the batting championship. I don’t know what this man had up there in 1958, but he had some type of radio and he was listening to the Red Sox. And every time Ted Williams would bat, he would holler down to the field until Mickey Mantle would turn around. He was telling him what Ted Williams was doing. That was a special treat — Yogi Berra and all that group played that night, and I got to see all of them.”

Well-deserved recognition

Miller returned to Mississippi following the 1958 season, and with the money she made playing baseball, continued to attend college. She graduated from Livingston State College (the University of West Alabama). She taught and coached in the Lauderdale County School District for more than 30 years. 

Miller, accompanied by family members Kristi Watkins and Rhonda McRae, traveled to Kansas City for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League’s 75th-anniversary reunion earlier this month. It had been 60 years since she last saw her teammates. The players signed autographs for adoring fans and for three days and were taken back in time to their days as professional athletes.

“I never thought that when I left in 1958 that I’d ever see any of those people again,” she said. “There were three people there that I played with, and we reminisced and replayed some games.”

Miller didn’t consider that she and her teammates at the time were making history, nor does she quickly credit herself for being a trailblazer. According to her, she was just playing the game she grew up loving.

When looking back to her first night in Mexico, Missouri, Miller said she’s thankful she decided to remain.

“That would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life because it was a great opportunity for me to travel,” Miller said. “We played in 30-something states, and I got to see things and places that I never would have otherwise.”