By Dean Poling
VALDOSTA — “I was Daddy’s tomboy, I guess,” laughs Henrietta “Hank” Barnes, referring to her sports career in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
She played girls basketball throughout high school and beyond playing on a team that competed against college teams in the Georgia mountains.
Barnes played in what is considered one of the first women’s softball leagues in North Georgia, winning the 1939 championship.
Throughout most of her adulthood, she played tennis and she competed at golf, playing the game until her late husband, Marty, became ill several years ago.
Sports shaped Henrietta “Hank” Barnes’ life at a time when women’s sports were considered a novelty. Sports gave a young girl named Henrietta the nickname she still uses at the age of 87.
“Hank goes back to softball,” she says.
League organizers offered $25 to the first young woman to hit a homerun. “This was 1939 and $25 was a lot of money especially being in high school,” Barnes says.
At the time, Hank Greenberg was a superstar baseball player for the Detroit Tigers. Known for his home runs, Greenberg was the original “Hammerin’ Hank.”
In one game, Henrietta swatted the ball with great force. Referring to the young woman’s trip around the bases, the announcer yelled, “Watch Hank Greenberg go!”
Had her name been something other than Henrietta, the nickname may have never stuck. But she came away from that game as “Hank” forever more, and $25 richer.
Then, she was Henrietta “Hank” Foster, one of five daughters of Benjamin Foster and Mamie Louise Bryant Foster. Hank was the fourth daughter, coming after sisters Louise, Rachel and Sara, and before the youngest Elfreeda.
None of the other Foster sisters ever showed much interest in sports, but the girl who would become Hank did.
Benjamin Foster was an athletic man. On the family’s 10 acres of land, he mowed out a baseball diamond, put up a basketball hoop, and developed a red-clay tennis court. Benjamin Foster loved competition, especially on the tennis courts. He won a tennis tournament at the age of 63.
He also loved his daughters. Some may think that such an athletically competitive man would have longed for sons. Not Benjamin Foster.
“Somebody would say to Daddy, ‘You ever going to try for a boy?’” Barnes says. “Daddy would say, ‘You must have never had a daughter come up and hug you and call you daddy, have you?’”
The Fosters lived in Dalton, working in the Georgia town’s famed textile industry. Benjamin Foster was a shipping director and Mamie Foster, a floor lady, for Ken-Rau Chenilles, a company making bedspreads.
In the late 1930s, when the company began organizing a softball league with teams from other bedspread companies, the Fosters asked Henrietta if she wanted to play. She did.
Playing softball didn’t surprise anyone who knew Henrietta Foster. By the time the softball offer came along, she had already been playing basketball for Dalton High School.
“When I got to high school, they didn’t have that many girls out playing basketball,” says Barnes, but she became one of them.
Then, girls basketball was restricted to playing half-court. Young Henrietta Foster played guard. Four years playing guard on a half-court meant that she never had the opportunity to shoot even one basket in all of her games.
Talking basketball, Barnes laughs. She shares two small, wallet-sized photos, mentioning how everyone talks about today’s revealing fashions. The photographs show a young Henrietta Foster wearing her basketball uniform which includes a pair of short-shorts. She compares these 1930s fashions with the far longer and baggier shorts worn by women basketball players today.
“I don’t know how they can play in those long pants they wear,” she says. “I don’t know how they can move around in them.”
She played basketball for three years after high school, into the mid-1940s, during World War II. She and a group of girls would play university teams in the mountains, she said.
She played softball three seasons, 1939, ’40, and ’41. The war put an end to women’s softball in Dalton, Barnes says.
Though she played high school basketball and had played baseball on the diamond her father built, softball presented a new challenge for Hank and all of the girls.
“It was a learning experience for most of the girls,” she says.
They practiced regularly and vigorously. They played hard.
“There were none of these slow, gentle pitches,” Barnes says. “They’d burn that ball in there.”
The girls took the softball league seriously. They were the only ones to take it seriously at first.
Many folks viewed the women’s softball league as a novelty. The league angered some men because women’s softball took fields away from the male sport of baseball.
With the girls playing seriously, however, the softball league soon had a serious following. The Ken-Rau Chenilles and the other teams attracted fans who would whistle, shout, cheer and jeer.
“Every time we had a game, the fans would come out and get involved,” she says. “My own little mother would tell someone off if they said something about me or the team.”
A group photograph shows the Ken-Rau Chenilles as the 1939 softball champions. Barnes looks at the picture, herself with all of the other young girls. “I think I am the only one left of all of them.”
Her softball days ended with the war. Her basketball career continued into the war years as she also worked in inspections with the signal corps.
She continued with golf and tennis. She met Marty Barnes. They married and had three children, son Dale and daughters Sandy and Marsha.
Martin R. Barnes worked with the United Way. He served as the United Way director in Augusta when he received a transfer to a similar position in 1964. The family moved to Valdosta.
The walls of her residence aren’t covered in sports photographs, at least not her own.
She has photographs of family, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. She shares photos of great-grandsons playing sports.
As for Barnes’ sporting days, she gave up golf to care for her husband. At 87, her legs curtail her activities. She has remained active the past few years with water aerobics.
She fondly recalls her basketball and softball days, but she doesn’t missing playing those sports. She misses golf.
“Oh, I get near a golf course, I want to play so bad,” she says.
As for softball and basketball, Hank Barnes is content reading in the newspaper about the generations of female players who have followed her.
