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Kevin Riordan: In era when the field was a refuge, no one played softball harder

Margaret Hicks Morris knows as many stories as a listener has time - and tells them all with a grace that's nothing short of amazing.

Margaret Hicks Morris, 90, who lives in Edgewater Park now, pitched for vaunted softball teams in Beverly, where she had moved as a teenager. (DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer)
Margaret Hicks Morris, 90, who lives in Edgewater Park now, pitched for vaunted softball teams in Beverly, where she had moved as a teenager. (DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer)Read more

Margaret Hicks Morris knows as many stories as a listener has time - and tells them all with a grace that's nothing short of amazing.

"I've had a fantastic life," says Morris, a 90-year-old Edgewater Park resident who was ace pitcher for the champion Beverly Keelers and Beverly Amazons softball teams in the mid-20th century.

"There's no joy," she declares, "like hearing a ball meet a bat."

Morris first heard the sound while growing up in a family of seven girls and two boys in Goldsboro, N.C. Her father taught his kids the game using a ball he made himself; in their backyard playing field, second base was "near the outhouse."

At 7, her life shattered after a white door-to-door salesman groped her mother, who defended herself with a flatiron. Three Ku Klux Klan members in full regalia soon showed up at the house, and Mrs. Hicks escaped to a sister's in Riverside while the rest of her family dispersed locally before heading North.

Only Morris and an older sister remained in Goldsboro - until their father sent for them. They were reunited at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.

"I will never again have the joy I felt that day, until I reach heaven," Morris says. "I looked, and there was Papa, Mama, my sisters, my brothers. . . . I thought I'd never see them again. My world came together."

In 1935, when Morris was 15, the family moved from Riverside to Beverly. That little city by the Delaware River was segregated; blacks lived downtown and whites uptown.

"We had to go back of the balcony at the movies. I didn't like that," Morris says. "And at the drugstore we couldn't sit at the stools."

Then the Hicks sisters started playing ball on a field close by the Delaware. Other girls soon joined in, and word got around that some amazing games were being played in Beverly.

"The next thing you know, doctors and their wives came down and brought chairs," Morris says, her face alight. "The next thing you know, uptown was downtown, and you couldn't get your car past Second Street. There was standing room only."

In 1936, at Morris' urging, a local merchant agreed to sponsor a team in a regional women's softball league. Uniforms (or "suits," as Morris calls them) were purchased, and then prayed over by clergy at Macedonia Baptist.

For the next several years, the Beverly Keelers (a.k.a. "Killers") defeated almost all comers from as far away as Upstate New York.

White teams were sometimes "standoffish," black teams in cities like Camden and Burlington wanted to pick fights, and a team in Salem even fielded a man in disguise.

"We insisted on an examination" is how Morris delicately puts it. "Some of their other girls looked like stevedores. Stevedores! But we tore them up. You didn't mess with the Hicks girls.

"We won because we practiced and practiced and practiced. We'd practice before breakfast in the summertime and then go pick tomatoes."

After marrying in 1940 and having four children, Morris periodically played on, coached, or managed teams until 1967, "when I finally hung up my shoes."

Now a grandmother of 12, great-grandmother of 13, and great-great-grandmother of seven, she's an evangelist and motivational speaker. She walks regularly to stay in shape and watches the Phillies occasionally, but gets irritated when she notices mistakes.

"My health is fairly well," says Morris, who keeps a Bible on the coffee table and a photo of President Obama and Michelle Obama atop the TV. "I used to do five miles a day, and now I do a quarter-mile. I get halfway and it's 'Girl, get back home.'

"I've come this far on faith. And I get all things through Christ. I have very little strength of my own. I'm on his strength now.

"I've really been blessed with a beautiful life."

Morris has been invited to share her story at the meeting of the Riverfront Historical Society at 7 p.m. Friday at St. Stephen's Church, 158 Warren St., Beverly.

"It's a chance to hear about history from someone who lived it," says Dennis Rogers, the society president. "Mrs. Hicks is American history."