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WORK TITLE: Dust Bowl Girls
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://lydiareeder.com/
CITY: Denver
STATE: CO
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://lydiareeder.com/about-lydia/ * https://www.workman.com/authors/lydia-reeder * http://algonquin.com/author/lydia-reeder/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:University of Colorado, Denver, M.A. (instructional design), 2010; M.A. (instructional design and adult learning), 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), instructional designer, 2004-. Formerly associate editor at Whole Life Times (Los Angeles, CA) and Delicious Magazine (Boulder, CO) and copywriter and editor for corporate clients.
AVOCATIONS:Hiking.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Lydia Reeder, born and raised in Oklahoma and now living in Denver, Colorado, earned two master’s degrees from the University of Colorado, in instructional design and in adult learning. She works as an instructional designer for the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), a nonprofit organization that provides nursing education and clinical nursing practice resources to its members. She also has worked as an associate editor at Whole Life Times (Los Angeles, California) and Delicious Magazine (Boulder, Colorado) and as copywriter and editor for corporate clients. Reeder is the author of Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory, a book about her great-uncle Samuel Foster Babb, basketball coach at Oklahoma Presbyterian College, and the women’s team he coached during the darkest days of the Great Depression.
Reeder spent several years conducting research for the book after her great-aunt, Babb’s sister, gave her a packet of articles and letters to pique her interest. She perused scrapbooks and diaries and conducted interviews with still-living team members, compiling a riveting history of this come-from-behind, unlikely basketball team. Babb traveled around the back roads of Oklahoma in search of sturdy farm girl recruits—all of them lovers of basketball—to take his offer of a full college scholarship in exchange for playing on the team. Basketball was a firm part of the culture of the Midwest during the Depression. The star player, Doll Harris, was pitted against the famous (and infamous) Babe Didrikson, star player for the rival Dallas Golden Cyclones, who were the defending national champions. Babb’s team, the Cardinals, won eighty-nine consecutive games (including two national championships) between 1931 and 1934.
Maureen McCarthy, in an article for the Star Tribune Online (Minneapolis, Minnesota), gave the background: “The times were not hospitable to women’s sports. A national campaign was trying to save girls from competition that might make them unfit for motherhood.” Nonetheless, the women prevailed. McCarthy described the story as a “faithful telling” that “allows us to sit in the stands and watch a forgotten era when times were tough, odds were long, and underdogs rose to the occasion.” Sandra Dallas, writing in the Denver Post, called Dust Bowl Girls a “compelling, heartwarming story of a group of college students determined to accomplish the impossible.” Ed Godfrey, reporting online at NewsOK, asserted that the “best part of any success story is the journey” and termed this “the heart” of the book. He recommended that readers “do yourself a favor and pick up [this] new book.”
A critic in Kirkus Reviews commented that the book was “both worthwhile and entertaining” as well as “heartwarmingly inspirational.” In Library Journal, Janet Davis pronounced Dust Bowl Girls a “hidden gem,” with “high appeal to sports fans and historians.” Alan Moores, contributor to Booklist, considered the book a “well-told, inspirational story perfect for YA collections.” In Publishers Weekly, a correspondent gave a mixed review, remarking that the “political strife and characterizations” sometimes “seem forced and caricatured” but that when Reeder turned to relating the team’s exploits, the story was “comfortable and engaging.” Hope Baugh, correspondent in School Library Journal, predicted that “young adults will love details that bring the time and place to life” and concluding that this “compelling offering makes for good recreational reading.”
In the Washington Independent Review of Books, Robert C. Cottrell commended Reeder for detailing the “hardscrabble backgrounds of Coach Babb and so many of the young women whom he convinces, in spite of economic circumstances and familial pressures, to attend Oklahoma Presbyterian College.” In Reeder’s hands, “several of the protagonists come alive.” Cottrell also applauded how Reeder “dissects key games, turning low-scoring affairs into riveting experiences.” Richard Crepeau, in his critique for the New York Journal of Books, deemed the book a “multilayered history and a compelling story.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2016, Alan Moores, review of Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory, p. 36.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2016, review of Dust Bowl Girls.
Library Journal, September 15, 2016, Janet Davis, review of Dust Bowl Girls, p. 91.
Publishers Weekly, August 29, 2016, review of Dust Bowl Girls, p. 77.
School Library Journal, April, 2017, Hope Baugh, review of Dust Bowl Girls, p. 162.
ONLINE
Algonquin Books Web site, http://algonquin.com/ (June 7, 2017), author profile.
Denver Post Online, http://www.denverpost.com/ (January 19, 2017), Sandra Dallas, review of Dust Bowl Girls.
Lydia Reeder Home Page, http://lydiareeder.com (June 7, 2017).
NewsOK, http://newsok.com/ (January 22, 2017), Ed Godfrey, “Another Oklahoma College Team Once Gave Folks a Reason to Cheer,” review of Dust Bowl Girls.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (January 23, 2017), Richard Crepeau, review of Dust Bowl Girls.
Star Tribune Online (Minneapolis, MN), http://www.startribune.com/ (January 30, 2017), Maureen McCarthy, review of Dust Bowl Girls.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (February 27, 2017), Robert C. Cottrell, review of Dust Bowl Girls.*
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Lydia Ellen Reeder is the grandniece of Sam Babb, the extraordinary basketball coach featured in Dust Bowl Girls. She spent over two years conducting research for the book and also wrote and narrated a short film about the Cardinal basketball team, currently on view at the Oklahoma Historical Society website: youtu.be/fokmbnWmp50. As a former associate editor at Whole Life Times in Los Angeles and Delicious Magazine in Boulder, Colorado, Reeder has worked for many years as a copywriter and editor on behalf of corporate and organizational clients and most recently developed e-learning for a national nursing association. She lives in Denver with her husband and enjoys hiking in the mountains of Colorado. Dust Bowl Girls is her first book.
Lydia Reeder
Lydia Ellen Reeder is the grandniece of Sam Babb, the extraordinary basketball coach featured in Dust Bowl Girls. She spent over two years conducting research for the book and also wrote and narrated a short film about the Cardinal basketball team, currently on view at the Oklahoma Historical Society website: youtu.be/fokmbnWmp50. As a former associate editor at Whole Life Times in Los Angeles and Delicious Magazine in Boulder, Colorado, Reeder has worked for many years as a copywriter and editor on behalf of corporate and organizational clients and most recently developed e-learning for a national nursing association. She lives in Denver with her husband and enjoys hiking in the mountains of Colorado. Dust Bowl Girls is her first book.
I am the grandniece of Sam Babb, the extraordinary basketball coach featured in Dust Bowl Girls.
An Oklahoma native, my roots run deep. Some of my favorite times as a child were spent on my grandfather’s ranch near Chickasha making hay-bale tunnels, fishing for bass, or traipsing through miles of pasture. I always had a skinned knee or a sunburned nose. There was nothing like the beauty of an Oklahoma sunset. At night, the only noises were crickets and wind.
Today, I live in Denver with my husband and our five cats. My outdoor adventures include hiking the long, rocky trails that wind through the mountains of Colorado.
Dust Bowl Girls is my first book.
Regional books: You won’t want to put down “Dust Bowl Girls”
By SANDRA DALLAS | The Denver PostPUBLISHED: January 19, 2017 at 2:46 pm | UPDATED: January 19, 2017 at 2:46 pm
dust-bowl-girls“Dust Bowl Girls” is the sort of book reviewers love to find. Denver author Lydia Reeder takes what might have been an academic work about a basketball team in the Great Depression and turns it into a compelling, heartwarming story of a group of college students determined to accomplish the impossible. This is a book you can’t put down.
Doll Harris is a high school basketball star in the early years of the Great Depression.
She has little to look forward to besides graduating and going to work to help support her Oklahoma farm family.
Then she meets Sam Babb, teacher and women’s basketball coach at tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College (OPC) in Durant. He offers her a scholarship. The college will pick up her tuition and living expenses in exchange for her playing basketball. For Doll and for a handful of other small-town girls, the offer is a win-win. Not only will they get an education, but they can also play a sport they love.
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In exchange, they dedicate themselves to the sport — early morning workouts in an unheated gym, hours of practice, with each girl required to shoot 100 baskets a day. Not all of them make the team, but those who do — Doll, Bo-Peep (named for the nursery rhyme), La Homa, Toka Lee, the red-headed 6-foot twins Vera and Lera and their teammates — basketball is their ticket to immortality.
Under Babb, the OPC Cardinals win 89 consecutive games and two consecutive Women’s National AAU basketball championships. And that’s against significant competition. The star of their arch rival, the Golden Cyclones, is Babe Didrikson, soon to go on to Olympic glory.
The Cardinals’ success is due not just to the girls but also to Babb, who lost a leg in a childhood tussle with his minister father. The girls were high school stars, but Babb turns them into a unit willing to sacrifice individual glory for the good of the team. There is little financial support. Bo-Peep drives the ancient bus, often having to stop to tinker with the engine or to change a flat tire. Because of lack of funds, only 10 team members can go to the AAU championship game.
Money was not the only problem. For years, the National Amateur Athletic Federation led an attack on women’s competitive sports. Under the direction of Lou Hoover, wife of President Herbert Hoover, the federation’s women’s division preached that sports competition was violent and therefore unnatural for women. It made them coarse and unfeminine, and — horrors! — might lead to professional sports where men ogled the female players. Dances and luncheons were far more appropriate for the fairer sex, the group preached. The division was especially critical of basketball.
The movement influenced girls’ sports probably until Title IX, but it had little effect on the women’s basketball teams in Oklahoma. After all, basketball didn’t seem so strenuous or violent to girls who had grown up on farms doing the same chores their brothers did.
“Dust Bowl Girls” was in the works for 10 years, and it’s filled with detail. Doll, for instance, always ordered poached eggs while on tour, and the girls used uncooked oatmeal and honey for facials. The author, who is Babb’s great-niece, tracked down many aging members of the OPC team. Reeder became interested in the story after her grandmother, Babb’s sister, handed her a folder of articles and letters about Babb and the team and told her, “You might want to tell their story.” How fortunate that she did.
Dust Bowl Girls: A Team’s Quest for Basketball Glory.
By Lydia Reeder.
Algonquin Books.
Another Oklahoma college team once gave folks a reason to cheer
Ed Godfrey by Ed Godfrey Published: January 22, 2017 12:00 AM CDT Updated: January 22, 2017 12:00 AM CDT
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"Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory" by Lydia Reeder (Algonquin Books, 304 pages, in stores Tuesday)
Before Henry Iba won men's basketball national championships in the 1940s at Oklahoma State, and before Bud Wilkinson and his Oklahoma Sooners ruled over college football in the 1950s, there was another Oklahoma college team that brought pride to the state.
If you are a sports fan and don't know the story of the Oklahoma Presbyterian College Cardinals from Durant, do yourself a favor and pick up the new book “Dust Bowl Girls,” which will be in stores on Tuesday.
It's “Hoosiers” and “A League of Their Own” rolled into one. Author Lydia Reeder (whose great-uncle Sam Babb was the team's coach) tells the story of the Cardinals, a team made up of mostly Oklahoma farm girls, which won the AAU National Championship in 1932 over the defending national champions Golden Cyclones of Dallas, a team led by the legendary Babe Didrikson.
The Cardinals defeated the mighty Golden Cyclones and the self-promoting Didrikson (who sort of becomes the villain of this story) not once, not twice, but three times that season, including in the epic national championship game in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Few people believed in the “church school girls” from southeastern Oklahoma, as evident by the Cardinals' No. 4 seed in the 1932 AAU national tournament, even though they already had beaten the top-seeded Golden Cyclones twice that season. But the Cyclones had Didrikson, the Texas Tomboy as she was dubbed, who later that year would win two gold medals and one silver medal in the 1932 Olympics.
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Didrikson demanded all the media attention, but the real stars of the tournament were the team in garnet and gray from Oklahoma Presbyterian College, a school whose roots trace back to the arrival of church missionaries in the Indian Territory to teach Choctaw children.
The underdog prevails
Oklahoma Presbyterian College closed its doors in 1966, but from March 1931 to March 1934 the Cardinals' women's basketball team won 89 straight games, including two consecutive women's AAU National Championships.
What makes the Cardinals' achievement even more impressive is that they competed and defeated older and more experienced teams. No college team had ever won the women's AAU National Championship before Oklahoma Presbyterian College's title in 1932.
Of the 22 teams invited to the tournament that year, only six were high school and college teams. The rest were from independent amateur clubs sponsored by companies. A Texas team had won the tournament five straight years before 1932.
The backdrop for “Dust Bowl Girls” is the Great Depression and the stereotypes that existed about female athletes in the 1930s.
There was a national debate at the time about the “appropriateness” of women's athletics. The 1932 AAU National Championships even included a beauty pageant between games, featuring a player from each team. To their credit, the Cardinals were one of three teams in the tournament which chose not to have a representative.
The best part of any success story is the journey. It's that story which is the heart of “Dust Bowl Girls.”
Babb, the architect of the team, was the son of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who eventually lost a leg after protecting his younger brothers from a beating by their father.
Babb may have never started down the career path of teaching and coaching had he not been rejected by a seminary school that doubted his “crippled body” could handle the rigors of religious study and preaching.
Babb recruited a women's basketball team for Oklahoma Presbyterian College from Oklahoma farm girls whose families were likely one crop failure from financial ruin. Babb got them off the cotton fields and into college.
The best of the bunch was Doll Harris, who starred for the Cement Lady Bulldogs when she wasn't feeding the chickens, milking the cow, gathering eggs and hauling water — her daily chores on the family farm.
Most of the girls came from similar circumstances, and they would see the ocean for the first time on a barnstorming tour over Christmas break.
Having a roster of farm girls probably made it easier for Coach Babb to schedule 4 a.m. practices. The Cardinals practiced daily from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. so they could use the Southeastern University gym instead of the limited space available on the Oklahoma Presbyterian College campus.
They would practice for an hour in the cold because the heat wasn't turned on in the Southeastern field house until 5 a.m.
Harris would become the Cardinals' star, outdueling Didrikson in three head-to-head meetings and being named captain of the 1932 AAU All-American team.
There is a great scene Reeder describes in the book during the 1932 AAU championship game about a small group of avid fans who gathered at the Boyet-Long Drug Store in Durant to receive game reports over the telephone.
The crowd's mood would go from somber to joyful as the game went back and forth. The Cardinals trailed entering the fourth and final quarter and the drugstore crowd was quiet when the telephone rang with the final report.
Drinks were spilled, and fans leapt from the soda fountain chairs when it was announced that the Cardinals had rallied in the fourth quarter to win. “Dust Bowl Girls” is another great sports story about an underdog whose triumphs inspired a community that badly needed a lift in the midst of hard economic times.
I can't wait for the movie.
— Ed Godfrey, Staff Writer
Reeder, Lydia: DUST BOWL GIRLS
Kirkus Reviews. (Nov. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Reeder, Lydia DUST BOWL GIRLS Algonquin (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 1, 24 ISBN: 978-1-61620-466-2
A former magazine editor tells the story of how, at the height of the Great Depression, her great-uncle trained a group of young women from rural Oklahoma to become college basketball stars.The son of a stern preacher father, Missourian Sam Babb survived a leg amputation in his teenage years to become a successful Oklahoma school superintendent. His career took an unexpected turn in the early 1920s when he decided to become a part-time high school girls basketball coach. By 1929, he had taken a full-time coaching position at Oklahoma Presbyterian College. On a recruiting trip to bring new talent to OPC, Babb discovered a poor farm girl named Doll Harris who, during the 1930-1931 season, would become his "star shot maker" and an All-American player. The team he built that year was good enough to win a sportsmanship trophy at the Amateur Athletic Union national tournament, but Babb believed they could do better. The following year, he recruited other talented girls with promises of scholarships and worked to create a national championship-winning team. With barely enough funding to keep the team going, Babb took his players on a barnstorming tour of the South to raise money. His OPC Cardinals won every game, including one against the reigning champions, the Dallas Golden Cyclones. In the meantime, Harris found herself in direct competition with sports phenomenon Babe Didrikson, the golden girl who knew how to charm fans and "leverage publicity" for her own benefit. As she tells the amazing story of Babb and his underdog women's basketball team, Reeder also reveals the challenges facing serious female athletes during the 1920s and '30s, including the perceived risk of "destroying their feminine image by invading a man's world." Sports fans and general readers alike are sure to find the story both worthwhile and entertaining. A heartwarmingly inspirational tale.
Reeder, Lydia. Dust Bowl Girls: A Team's Quest for Basketball Glory
Janet Davis
Library Journal. 141.15 (Sept. 15, 2016): p91.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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* Reeder, Lydia. Dust Bowl Girls: A Team's Quest for Basketball Glory. Algonquin. Jan. 2017.304p. photos, notes. ISBN 9781616204662. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9781616206536. SPORTS
Now playing its 20th season, the WNBA (Women's National Basketball Association) is among America's most successful women's professional sports leagues. Yet, the struggling basketball league has only turned a profit in recent years, still working hard to put fans in the stands. In this book first-time author Reeder introduces readers to Sam Babb, a remarkable man who saw past the Depression-era thinking that sports were less "ladylike" and even considered physically inappropriate for women. Babb scoured the Oklahoma farmlands looking for young women who would accept his offer of a college education; in return, he molded them into a team that exceeded all expectations. Equal parts social history and sports legend come to life, Reeder's meticulous research and play-by-play game accounts are a fitting tribute to Coach Babb and the trailblazing athletes he inspired. Of special interest for students of women's studies and a strong contender for a film adaptation. VERDICT With high appeal to sports fans and historians, this hidden gem of a story deserves a place in all public library collections.-- Janet Davis, Darien P.L., CT
Dust Bowl Girls: A Team's Quest for Basketball Glory
Alan Moores
Booklist. 113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
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Dust Bowl Girls: A Team's Quest for Basketball Glory. By Lydia Reeder. Jan. 2017.304p. illus. Algonquin, $26.95 (9781616204662). 796.323.
One of the more unlikely national champions in U.S. sports history was the 1932 women's basketball team from tiny, financially strapped Oklahoma Presbyterian College. Coach Sam Babb, who, probably not coincidentally, taught Psychology 101 at the school, masterfully recruited talent, solicited funding for the program, created a culture of unselfish team play, devised unorthodox but effective basketball drills, and instilled in his players the self-assurance they would need in facing public opinion that largely considered basketball "unladylike." And, more urgently, in facing (three times that season) the reigning national champion Dallas Golden Cyclones, led by legendary sportswoman Babe Didrikson. Author Reeder, Babb's grandniece, had access to such primary materials as player diaries, which reveal the players' relationships to one another and their coach, and to a dust-bowl era and region marked by serious hardship. --Alan Moores
YA: A well-told, inspirational story perfect for YA collections. AM.
Moores, Alan
Dust Bowl Girls: A Team's Quest for Basketball Glory
Publishers Weekly. 263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Dust Bowl Girls: A Team's Quest for Basketball Glory
Lydia Reeder. Algonquin, $26.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-61620-466-2
Reeder, a former editor at Whole Life Times, tells the inspiring story of Oklahoma Presbyterian College basketball coach Sam Babb's efforts to create and maintain a championship women's team, the Cardinals, amidst the hardships of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Discussing both Babb's coaching philosophy and the players' individual stories, Reeder explores the charm and excitement that the small team of unknowns brought to their hometown of Durant. In equal parts personal homage to Babb (the author's great-uncle) and surprising underdog story, Reeder recounts the Cardinals' journey from humble beginnings to becoming the 1932 American Athletic Union national tournament champions. They demonstrated the perseverance necessary to overcome the political and financial difficulties facing women in sports. The descriptions of the political strife and characterizations seem forced and caricatured at times, but when the story turns to basketball season, Reeder relaxes into comfortable and engaging storytelling. (Jan.)
Reeder, Lydia. Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory
Hope Baugh
School Library Journal. 63.4 (Apr. 2017): p162.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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REEDER, Lydia. Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory. 304p. notes, photos. Algonquin. Jan. 2017. Tr $26.95. ISBN 9781616204662.
In the early 1930s, Sam Babb recruited farm girls to play for his basketball team at Oklahoma Presbyterian College in Durant. At the time, most women's teams were sponsored by the companies for whom the players worked. Some, including Lou Henry Hoover, wife of President Herbert Hoover, thought that competitive sports were not an appropriate activity for young women. But Coach Babb knew that basketball helped participants develop critical thinking and good judgment. He also believed that a winning team could bring a whole community together and raise spirits that had been battered by the Great Depression. Reeder employs player interviews and scrapbooks to tell the true story of the Cardinals, who in 1932 became the first women's collegiate team to win the American Athletic Union's National Basketball Tournament. Her personable narrative is as much about the daily lives of the players as it is about the sport of basketball, and young adults will love details that bring the time and place to life (for example, because many of the players came from farms with no indoor plumbing or electricity, the hot water in their college dorm seemed extravagant). VERDICT Useful for curriculum support, this compelling offering makes for good recreational reading, too. Hand it to fans of A League of Their Own or to anyone who relishes a good sports underdog tale.-Hope Baugh, Carmel Clay Public Library, Carmel, IN
Review: 'Dust Bowl Girls,' by Lydia Reeder
Nonfiction: The story of young Oklahoma women who left home to seek success in basketball and in life.
By Maureen McCarthy Star Tribune JANUARY 30, 2017 — 2:55PM
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They played for a one-legged coach. They practiced at 4 a.m. on the men’s court. They had to push the team bus before they could ride in it. Yet these young women had heart and the hard times of the Depression driving them. In 1932, they made their mark in basketball history, not that you’d know.
Lydia Reeder’s “Dust Bowl Girls” revives the story of the upstart team from Oklahoma Presbyterian University. Doll was the sure-handed, selfish star. Lucille was the self-flagellating center. Their teammates bore classic Oklahoma names like Toka Lee, La Homa, Vera and Lera and Buena.
Billed as “ ‘The Boys in the Boat’ meets ‘A League of Their Own,’ ” this is another against-the-odds story. We should toss in “The Worst Hard Time,” too, because the Dust Bowl plays its part.
In Oklahoma in the early 1930s, farmers and townspeople were hanging on for dear life. Somehow, a minister’s son named Sam Babb persuaded hard-pressed parents to let their daughters leave home and join his team at OPU, a small school on the Texas border.
The times were not hospitable to women’s sports. A national campaign was trying to save girls from competition that might make them unfit for motherhood. Advocates tried to get women’s events dropped from the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Basketball was deemed especially unseemly, even though the women’s game was hobbled to a half-court affair, with the three defensive players on one side and three playing offense on the other. A player could hold the ball for only 3 seconds. A dribble was ONE bounce. Add the smirking disdain of sportswriters and you might wonder why anyone would endure such indignity.
Dust Bowl Girls
By: Lydia Reeder.
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 286 pages, $26.95.
But for young women who picked cotton and loaded hay, the OPU Cardinals promised a rare shot at an education and a life afterward. They would not let go.
With Babb scraping up money and scheduling games on the fly, they traversed Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. They racked up wins until they earned a shot at the AAU championship game against Dallas’ Golden Cyclones and the dreaded Babe Didrikson. What a game it was.
Reeder, Babb’s great-niece, re-creates the drama with the help of surviving players, scrapbooks of clippings and photos of the players in their homemade uniforms. It’s a faithful telling, though maybe too protective of Coach Babb, who was disliked for some vague reason. Still, like other good sports histories, this one allows us to sit in the stands and watch a forgotten era when times were tough, odds were long, and underdogs rose to the occasion.
Maureen McCarthy is a team leader at the Star Tribune, a former Oklahoman and a onetime forward on a six-girl team.
Dust Bowl Girls
By: Lydia Reeder.
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 286 pages, $26.95.
Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory
By Lydia Reeder Algonquin Books 304 pp.
Reviewed by Robert C. Cottrell
February 27, 2017
A heartening story of how sports elevated a group of young women during a trying time in America.
By 1930, the Great Depression had begun to hit Oklahoma and neighboring Texas hard, with collapsing oil, livestock, and crop prices; unemployment soaring; and drought taking hold. Conditions would only worsen over the course of the decade, resulting in population loss, the nearly halving of the monetary worth of farm products, and calls to shutter major programs at the leading state universities.
Eventually, “Okies” joined with other refugee farm families in migrating to the West, seeking better opportunities, as celebrated in Woody Guthrie’s songs, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford’s cinematic presentation of that epic novel, and the brilliant work of photojournalists Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Arthur Rothstein.
In certain regards, author Lydia Reeder, whose great-uncle Sam Babb is one of the central figures in Dust Bowl Girls, has delivered an account worthy of joining that august cultural pantheon.
Dust Bowl Girls relates the story of Coach Babb and the remarkable group of young women who made up a national-championship basketball squad at Oklahoma Presbyterian College during the early stages of the Depression. From 1931 to 1934, the Cardinals would compile an 89-game consecutive winning streak, capture two American Athletic Union national titles, win the North American championship, and cap that off with the 1933 Women’s World Championship.
Reeder explores how Babb put that initial national team together in the face of economic distress and competition that include the Cardinals doing battle with the defending champion Employers Casualty Company’s Golden Cyclones, led by the soon-to-be legendary Babe Didrikson.
Along the way, Reeder explains differences between the women’s and men’s games of the era, including the then-in-vogue six-on-six version on the hardwood, directives pertaining to dribbling and placement on the court, and shortened — 10-minute — periods for the Cyclones, the Cardinals, and their competition.
The public of the time held a longstanding antipathy toward female participation in competitive sports, but basketball was a major attraction for rural inhabitants, who provided the bulk of Babb’s team. Reeder captures details large and small, like the joy the Cardinals experienced upon receiving matching cardigan sweaters, wool skirts, and red berets while they readied for the national tournament.
What Reeder does particularly well is discuss the hardscrabble backgrounds of Coach Babb and so many of the young women whom he convinces, in spite of economic circumstances and familial pressures, to attend Oklahoma Presbyterian College. Several of the protagonists come alive in Dust Bowl Girls, not least of which is Babb, whose prosthetic leg was the result of an attempt to protect his younger brothers from a beating at the hands of their father, a judgmental circuit preacher.
Babb individually recruits each of his players. He seems able to ascertain quickly if a player possesses “the strength of character” to join his Cardinals. A stern taskmaster, clearly not beloved by all, he demands a strict regimen of his young ladies (including banning sweets and snacks) and requires each player make 90 of her daily 100 free throws. In return, he manages to instill near absolute confidence in his players.
Reeder’s biographical treatment of the players proves equally deft, as she delves into their varying levels of confidence, phobias, and expectations. The team’s star, the All-American shooting guard Doll Harris, is diminutive, freckled, and determined to come across as attractive both on the court and off. Doll can be cocky, but she displays a softer side at times, particularly as she develops a crush on her coach.
By contrast, center Lucille Thurman, who was only 16 when she entered college, has recurrent ankle difficulties and suffers from anxiety that she fears will overwhelm her during the Cardinals’ most important contests. Whether knowingly or not, however, she begins believing in herself, providing guidance to young Indian children, and defending the coach against criticisms by teammates.
Dust Bowl Girls dissects key games, turning low-scoring affairs into riveting experiences. Notably, Reeder skillfully explores a pair of early-season contests against the defending national champion Cyclones and their star, Babe Didrikson. Later, she tracks the competition leading up to the seemingly inevitable rematch in the championship game, which culminates in a seesawing final 10 minutes.
The book concludes with a brief epilogue that notes the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame inducted the Cardinals as “its First Team of Legend.” It discusses what happens to the leading Cardinals, a number of whom continued playing for some time; several went into teaching, and more than a few became coaches.
In an apt closing sentence, after explaining how basketball empowered the young women, Reeder writes, “And these farm girls, who at one time never thought of lives beyond the cotton fields, got to be heroes.”
Robert C. Cottrell, a professor at California State University Chico, is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant; Blackball, the Black Sox, and the Babe: Baseball’s Crucial 1920 Season; and Two Pioneers: How Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson Transformed Baseball — and America.
Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory
Image of Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory
Author(s):
Lydia Reeder
Release Date:
January 23, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Algonquin Books
Pages:
304
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Richard Crepeau
Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972 transformed women’s sports in America and is now a familiar historical marker. Women’s basketball has grown at all levels from secondary education up through the WNBA. For many, women’s basketball is seen as a new phenomenon on the national sports scene. In point of fact, its existence stretches back to the origins of the game in the 1890s.
In this fascinating history, Lydia Reeder’s focus is on one season of women’s basketball in the early 1930s at the Oklahoma Presbyterian College (OPC) in Durant, Oklahoma. Reeder reveals the significance of the women’s game in the development of the sport and in the lives of young women well before Title IX.
Lydia Reeder, a former magazine editor, is the grand-niece of Sam Babb, the highly successful coach of the Oklahoma Presbyterian College Cardinals. Babb was dedicated to the game of basketball and to the women who played it. Reeder had access to family stories, diaries, scrapbooks, and was able to interview the surviving players. She conducted extensive research in newspapers and local records and is well versed in women’s history, sports history, and the social history of the southwest.
Dust Bowl Girls is not simply a history of a highly successful basketball team, but also a history of women’s basketball in the southwest in a time of economic crisis. It is the story of the leadership of a woman’s religious college dedicated to enhancing the lives of its students.
A number of the players are central characters in this history, including the captain of the Cardinals, Doll Harris, the daughter of sharecroppers, who starred as a high school player for the Cement Lady Bulldogs. In the midst of drought and the Great Depression, Doll dreamed of playing basketball for a women’s industrial league team. She had not thought about college and seemed to be unaware that basketball could open that door. Sam Babb changed that for Doll Harris and many other young women in Oklahoma that he recruited to come to OPC on a basketball scholarship.
Oklahoma Presbyterian College was a member of the American Athletic Union (AAU) and participated in the AAU basketball circuit in the Southwest. One of the nationally known players in the region was Babe Didrikson of the Dallas Golden Cyclones, a team that ultimately became an archrival of the OPC Cardinals.
AAU basketball teams played a more competitive and aggressive game than the style favored by many physical educators in the Athletic Conference of American College Women. These college leaders and physical educators deplored intense competition for women and decried national or even state and regional championships for women. Doll Harris and her teammates knew the strength of women who came out of struggles for survival in rural America, and they were amazed that anyone would think that basketball was too strenuous for women.
One of the strong themes of Dust Bowl Girls is the struggle of ordinary people for survival in the Depression and the realities of the drought that was beginning to engulf the region. Among other struggles for Coach Babb was maintaining the finances of the college, finding expense money for the team to travel, and keeping the team bus operational throughout the season.
Perhaps the most important story told by Lydia Reeder is that of the significant role of sport in the lives of these young women. Basketball offered the opportunity for a college education, for travel, and for the pure joy of sporting competition. Those who play at whatever level understand that playing a sport is as much about the process as it is about the outcome, and Reeder conveys this very well through the experiences of these young women.
Each of the members of the OPC Cardinals seemed to take something personally important from the game as well as from the total experience of college life and the rigors of high-level competition. Team dynamics and personal interrelationships are a central part of this story, as is a search for identity and meaning in life. Reeder’s story of basketball at OPC clearly reveals these varied elements for each of these women.
Sam Babb, coach of the OPC Cardinals, emerges here as a complex character with a fascinating backstory of his own. His belief in basketball and his belief in his players is a story well worth telling.
If Dust Bowl Girls has any weakness it would be a tendency to over-dramatization and overuse of sports clichés, not simply in language but also in narrative structure. It is, of course, difficult to avoid this linguistic trap when dealing with winning streaks, close games, and championship competition.
This is a multilayered history and a compelling story as the women who played basketball for OPC reveal much about their time and place. This one seemingly minor aspect of women’s sport in rural Oklahoma is one worth knowing and worth reading.
Richard Crepeau has written numerous fiction reviews for the Orlando Sentinel. He is also Professor Emeritus at University of Central Florida where he taught sports history and is author of NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime.