Women's Baseball Team Postcard -Need Joann's Help

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Posted By: Dan Bretta

Joann, I was researching the "All Nations" team on Google and I ran across this website:

http://www.sff.net/people/michaeljasper/AllNations.htm

That was my first stop...after reading about that interesting incident which by all accounts seems to have been the downfall of the All Nations team I took a closer look at the photo and was astounded to see the two women in the front row wearing "Hopkins Bros" uniforms...I quickly went and grabbed my postcard and immediately you can tell the two women in the website photo are also in the postcard. I believe that one of those women went by the moniker of "Carrie Nation" while playing on the All Nations team. Anyway in that online article it mentions "J.L.", but no last name so I googled up some more info on the All Nations team and found that "J.L." was none other than JL Wilkinson who had just been elected to the Hall of Fame in 2006...tried to find some pics and when I did I could see the match so I went to my Negro League Encyclopedia here at home and found that he got his start in baseball with an all womens team in Des Moines, IA...home of Hopkins Bros Sporting Goods.

So as you can see it was just dumb luck that I stumbled across the information. I'm not done researching this so now that I've found my lead this should be much easier to find out more about this team and perhaps more about the female player named "Carrie Nation". There used to be a poster that posted to Net54 that collected Des Moines baseball items (Craig) but I haven't seen him around for about 6-12 months now.

edited to add: I don't think the postcard has been altered...looking at both team photos it appears the women with the large head is in both photos and you can see she just really does have a large head.