Perry Barber:
CLASS OF 1971
Hewitt High SchoolClass of 1971
New york, NY
Perry's Story
After graduating from Hewitt in June of 1971, I went from the ballroom to the ballfield in a long, winding, and always illuminating journey. My twin sister Warren and I (and our fellow Hewittite Liz Chanler) were debutantes at the International Debutante Ball in 1971. Ten years later, at my mother's suggestion, I started umpiring little league baseball out in California. Warren watched me work a couple of games and saw how much "fun" I was having, so she became my first regular partner. The next January of 1982, I made her go to umpire school with me so I wouldn't be the only woman in the class of 200 students. Four years after that, I found myself making very obscure major league baseball history by becoming the first woman in the modern era (post-early twentieth century) to umpire a game played between two major lea...Expand for more
gue teams, the Mets and the White Sox. Thirty-one years after I first donned a chest protector and shinguards, I'm still umpiring, and during the spring of 2008 again shook up the baseball universe when I worked a New York Mets spring training game with a crew of three other women! That was the culmination of a dream I had had for years. Four women umpiring a Mets game - another milestone in extremely obscure major league baseball history. I've also put together "equal opportunity" crews comprising two women and two men. My goal is to make a woman's presence behind home plate no more remarkable than that of any other umpire, to render the phrase "woman umpire" as redundant as "woman doctor" or "female astronaut," and to live long enough to see the day when we will have to fight no more not to be in a league of our own.
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