A woman as a baseball umpire: “You should have stayed home, peeled potatoes”

Bernice Gera's big dream of becoming the first female referee in US professional baseball ended after the first game on June 24, 1972. On the eve of the game, several men stood in front of her motel room, shouted insults and destroyed the outside lighting. “I was very scared,” she later told a Sun Sentinel reporter.

She and her co-referee drove to Shuron Park a day later. People usually always talk about the upcoming match, the rules, the stadium, but he didn't answer her, no matter what topic she brought up. Finally he said, “I have nothing to say to you” – and that was the moment when she realized that this would be her only professional baseball game.

She was greeted warmly by fans, the media crowded around her and women from the “National Organization for Women” also came to congratulate her with a poster. “Right on!” was written on it. But Gera was nervous. And finally made a mistake, which she corrected immediately, but that was enough to cause a lot of men's anger.

The Phillies' manager at the time then harassed her, yelling at her: "You should have stayed home, peeled potatoes." When she sent him off, her referee partner demonstratively took him in his arms and accompanied him to the players' bench. It didn't make any sense. She was later accused of closing the door to other women by withdrawing. She replied, “How could I close a door that was never open?”

Bernice Gera, born in 1931, was a really good player in her childhood. At neighborhood games, she was often chosen for a team ahead of the boys. After high school, she became a secretary in New York, but her fascination with baseball remained. Gera passed them on to the children who lived in her district: “I bought them gloves and took them to the park to train.” She was banned from a throwing booth on Coney Island after she won a total of 300 stuffed animals with her precise throws - all of which she gave away to needy children.

But should that really have been all? No, in 1966 Bernice applied to the Al Somers Referee School and was accepted. However, they misread her first name as “Bernie” and told her that there had never been any women at the school and there never would be any.

She was finally accepted at the National Sports Academy in West Palm Beach. She described the atmosphere there as she was insulted with practically every swear word she knew, “and a few new ones.” Her instructor Jim Finley stuck by her, she successfully completed her training in July 1967 and gained her first experience in amateur and semi-professional games.

Bernice Gera, however, remained unwelcome in professional baseball. A complaint to the New York Anti-Discrimination Authority was followed by lengthy legal battles. In 1972, New York State's highest court confirmed that Gera was being discriminated against because of her gender. The officials gave in. It was her first and last appearance with the professionals.

Bernice Gera was eventually hired by the NY Mets in 1975 for public relations. After her job was eliminated, she moved to Florida with her husband Steve, where she died of cancer on September 23, 1992 at the age of 61. Her gravestone reads: “Pro Baseball’s First Lady Umpire.”