Memory Lane: When Judy Garland threw the first pitch at a society baseball game

Back when early 20th-century Palm Beach society men annually fielded two baseball teams — think blueblood financiers, heirs and industrialists playing infield and outfield — the boisterous games went on hiatus during World War II.

When the once-a-year bouts returned after the war, they were held as usual on a now-gone baseball diamond just west of The Breakers — but some of their traditions were scrapped, opening the door for a new player in 1952: Judy Garland.

She threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the 1952 society baseball game described as a “wild funfest” with a throng of onlookers.

The first-pitch honors had long been reserved for the wealthiest man in Palm Beach as his society-doyenne wife, Eva, reservedly cheered him on from a prominent seat along the flanking grandstand. But since Edward T. Stotesbury had died after the 1938 society game, new ceremonial first-ball hurlers were tapped after the war, including in 1947 the Duke of Windsor, a then-frequent visitor to Palm Beach.

News in 1952 that Garland would handle the honors — she was set to be here on vacation anyway — caused an excited stir.

And no one was disappointed by her theatrics at the game when, after posing for pictures with the teams, she “kicked off her shoes,” headed for the pitcher’s mound and then “wound up in good old-fashioned style from a southpaw stance and pitched the first ball,” as a local reporter observed.

“She made friends and influenced people by being so nice when she was almost mobbed by autograph-seekers at the society baseball game,” The Palm Beach Post noted.

Garland spent a total of nearly three weeks in Palm Beach (part of that involved a weekend getaway to the Bahamas). She stayed at The Biltmore, which, now a condominium, was then a hotel that had served during the war as a women’s Coast Guard training school and Navy hospital.

With her movie career in a slump after the mental-health and alcohol and pill addiction challenges she faced after a head-spinning meteoric rise to stardom, Garland arrived by train in West Palm Beach on March 6, 1952, fresh off a series of praised singing performances in New York.

She was accompanied by her manager-agent Sid Luft, whom she would later marry June 8 after her divorce from Vincente Minnelli was finalized.

Observers at the train station noted that the star, dressed in a beige taffeta dress with a dark-blue top coat matching her flat-heeled pumps, looked “exceptionally well.” What wasn’t plain to see was that Garland is said to have been pregnant at the time — Lorna Luft would be born Nov. 21, 1952.

Either way, the singer-actress said she wanted to devote her Palm Beach stay to “rest and relaxation.” But that would not mean she’d be a wallflower.

She and Luft periodically were spotted around town. One night, Garland appeared in a Rosarian Academy benefit — including the locally famous maestro Val Ernie and his orchestra — at The Paramount Theatre, where the local premiere of the Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn movie "The African Queen" was showing.

Garland also enjoyed an afternoon at the Palm Beach Country Club, where Luft played golf with the Duke of Windsor and others. Later, the couple was photographed at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach.

What whipped up the most interest, though, was Garland’s ceremonial first toss at the society baseball game on March 11.

After all, baseball had been big news in Palm Beach since the mid-1890s, when Standard Oil baron and Florida railroad tycoon and developer Henry Flagler built two neighboring hotels — including one on the lake that’s now gone and the other The Breakers, just east.

As undeveloped as Palm Beach was back then, its lush natural beauty — bookended to the east by the Atlantic Ocean and the west by a then-20-mile-long lake visibly teeming with fish — was a revelation to many, but Flagler’s Gilded Age visitors craved more.

Flagler in 1897 built a golf course and baseball diamond between his two hotels.

For three-plus decades, both hotels fielded their own baseball teams consisting of bellhops and waiters hired solely for their astonishingly agile and powerful baseball prowess (many of the African-American players were considered the best in the country).

The hotel teams’ games drew hundreds-strong crowds who packed the baseball field’s grandstand.

By 1911, society men decided to start their own games to benefit the Palm Beach Police pension fund. Every year, they formed two teams called, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, the New York Police and the Philadelphia Convicts, who dressed in black-and-white-striped uniforms.

Stotesbury, then the elder statesman of Palm Beach society and a partner in Philadelphia's Drexel & Co. and its then-New York affiliate J. P. Morgan & Co., threw out the first pitch for 37 years,

But after his May 1938 death and the end of World War II, times were changing, as evidenced by Flagler’s flagship lakefront Palm Beach hotel, the famous Royal Poinciana, having been razed by 1935.

When Garland threw out the first ceremonial pitch at the 1952 society game — which would be one of the last society baseball games before the tradition fizzled out — the teams that faced each other were no longer called the New York Police and Philadelphia Convicts.

They represented The Everglades and Bath & Tennis clubs, captained, respectively, by Woolworth Donahue (whose team that year included heartthrob actor Peter Lawford) and Michael Phipps.

The Bath & Tennis Club won the game 12-11.

Garland’s 1952 visit to Palm Beach wasn’t her last. She would come again, including the week before John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.

At that time, she stayed at The Colony, which had become fashionable since its 1947 debut on Hammon Avenue at the corner of South County Road and Worth Avenue.

When, during that visit, she reportedly was invited at the last minute to attend the inauguration and its festivities in Washington, D.C., she forgot in her hurry to get there to pack a gown she intended to wear.

“I was asked to rush the outfit to West Palm Beach airport, where a fighter jet had just landed from Homestead Airbase to pick it up,” the late Palm Beach historian James “Jim” Ponce, a former Colony Hotel manager, remembered years ago. “Needless to say, Ms. Garland looked her very best during the inaugural ball.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Judy Garland threw first pitch at Palm Beach society baseball game