And now, your weekly pop quiz. Pick the person who doesn’t belong: Johnny Neblett; Red Barber; Helen Dettweiler.

The answer is—none of the above.

All three broadcast baseball games in the years before World War II, including Dettweiler.

Helen Dettweiler?

Not a household name, right? Not like, say, Betty Crocker, although the people behind Better Crocker were also behind Dettweiler’s broadcasting career.

Perhaps I’ve gotten ahead of my own story.

Let me rewind history a bit in the service of unraveling this mystery: Why is the first woman baseball broadcaster a virtual unknown, not only in radio history but in popular culture as well?

The answer seems all the more elusive if you’ve reviewed Dettweiler’s résumé. She was a professional golfer; a founding member of the LPGA (the Ladies Professional Golfers Association); the first woman to design and build a golf course, a 9-hole affair at Cochran Ranch in Indio, California; one of the first women to fly B-17 bombers during World War II; and a wartime cryptographer.

Socially, she and her husband palled around with Hollywood celebrities. That led to a pair of cameo film appearances for Dettweiler, where she shared greasepaint with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

And, yet, it’s Helen who?

“Maybe she wasn’t any good,” suggested former sports writer Jim Thielman. “You have to ask, ‘What does a golfer know about baseball?’” Thielman is author of the book Cool of the Evening, and now works as a web content manager for General Mills.

While we’re on the topic of General Mills, there are three things you need to know about Thielman’s current employer: it makes Wheaties; it’s the company that invented Betty Crocker; and it’s the company that put Dettweiler in the broadcast booth.

After enjoying great success advertising Wheaties on the radio in and around its home town of Minneapolis, General Mills decided to advertise the product nationally. The tie-in between Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, and our National Pastime was too good to pass up.

It was General Mills that convinced baseball team owners that their revenues would go up, not down, if they put their games on the radio.

General Mills took charge of setting up the broadcasts and hiring the game announcers, including Dettweiler. But Thielman doubts there was any grand plan behind their choice of talent.

“They were even throwing comedians like Joe E. Brown in the booth and hoping they’d do kooky things,” he said. Many people would say not much has changed.

But why Dettweiler?

She would not have necessarily been a total unknown to baseball fans. She, and other women  golfers, regularly performed exhibitions before baseball games in hopes of popularizing their role in golfing.

And then, there was Betty Crocker.

“General Mills invented her to provide baking help to women,” Thielman recalled, a move that ran counter to the advertising belief that women preferred to get their advice from men. “When it came to the kitchen, the thinking might have been a little bit different,” Thielman said, “more like ‘What the hell would a guy know about cooking?’”

Betty Crocker grew to be one of the most recognized woman in America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt whom, you may recall, was a real person.

“This is just conjecture,” Thielman said, referring to Crocker’s success in reaching women, “but it’s probable someone thought, ‘Let’s get that woman out here to talk about baseball.’”

Reality rarely lives up to the imaginary, and Dettweiler never achieved Crocker’s notoriety. She criss-crossed the West broadcasting games during the 1938 season, and was cited that year by Sporting News for her authoritative play-by-play accounts that “gained her much commendation.”

Yet as quickly as Dettweiler’s name entered the annals of radio history, it disappeared.

Maybe the country wasn’t ready for a combination of women and baseball. (It’s a controversy that rages today on ESPN.) Maybe, as Thielman surmised, she wasn’t all that good.

Or, maybe, Dettweiler was born under an unlucky star.

While her aviation exploits were captured in the book Fly Girls, much of her legacy feels holographic—it has shape but no substance.

The golf course she built was renovated into oblivion when new owners acquired the Cochran Ranch. Although she founded the LPGA, she never won an LPGA tournament, and her standing in the organization has been eclipsed by other founders.

Thielman believes the truth is less cosmic.

“My theory is General Mills was just grabbing at straws putting Dettweiler in the booth,” he said. “I don’t think the company had a clue as to what was going on.” I feel Dettweiler’s story deserves a more memorable ending.

So let’s leave it at, “Her legacy disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”

Courtesy of Jim Thielman