In the beginning, the Orioles wanted Fran Moulden for her looks.
The year was 1968. The Orioles hired a group of young women to serve as waitresses during games at Memorial Stadium. They roamed the aisles wearing fashionable uniforms, sandals with high heels and false eyelashes, took food and drink orders from fans, made the purchases and brought the food and drink (and change) back to the fans.
They were known as Basebelles and it was no secret why they were part of the Orioles’ in-game entertainment efforts.
“They were looking for glamour,” Moulden said during a recent interview with me. (She has gone by her married name, Fran Minakowski, since 1972.)
She was a local girl, a graduate of Towson Catholic High School who liked the Orioles in part because they’d signed a family member who played in the club’s minor league system for a few years. When the Orioles hired her as a Basebelle, she was an English major at Towson State with a senior editing role on the college paper.
She was so adept at being a Basebelle that she became a team captain. But an issue eventually arose. The girls weren’t old enough to buy beer. The drinking age was 21.
It ended her career as a Basebelle, but not her career in baseball. The club gave the underage girls other duties, and Moulden was tasked with helping out in the press box, where Bob Brown, the Orioles’ public relations director, was in command.
Brown saw that Moulden had many other useful attributes besides her attractive appearance. She could write and edit. She was organized and creative. She was quick on her feet. She got along with people. She understood deadlines.
After the season, Moulden became a front office part-timer, helping Brown and Bud Freeman, the club’s director of promotions. When she graduated in 1970, Brown offered her a full-time job as his assistant and she accepted.
It was a groundbreaking moment in Oriole history.
To that point, women had only worked as secretaries in the front office. Moulden shattered the glass ceiling. Brown told her she was probably just the sixth woman in all of baseball to have a non-secretarial job.
Moulden shrugged.
“I didn’t look at it as breaking new ground or anything. I simply wanted to work,” she told me in our interview, which is available as a podcast to all subscribers, both free and paid, with this post.
Moulden worked with Brown and Freeman until shortly after she married, at which point she left baseball and went into corporate public relations and communications, a realm in which she has forged a highly successful career working for entities such as Loyola College (now Loyola University), Maryland National Bank, Legg Mason and Maryland Public Television. She is still working today in a senior role at MPT.
It all started with her groundbreaking job in the Orioles’ front office, where she learned the basics of PR, generated warm memories and made lifelong friends.
“It was a marvelous time to be there,” she said.
The Orioles were a pennant-winning machine when she worked for them. But baseball front offices weren’t nearly as large as they are now. Although the Orioles were a civic treasure with a national reputation, they were effectively a mom-and-pop operation.
“The smallness of the front office meant you did everything,” Fran recalled.
She wrote and edited copy for the media guide and other publications. She helped stage promotions such as a “Players vs. Wives” game.
She did such a superb job writing and overseeing “Road to Birdland,” a 1973 pamphlet about attending games at Memorial Stadium, that Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger sent her a handwritten note of thanks. Her parents displayed the note in their china cabinet for decades.
There were no computers and certainly no Internet in her Oriole years. When the club put out a PR release, Fran and Brown drove around town hand-delivering copies to newspaper, television and radio offices.
“It was a wonderful time of life to immerse yourself in work and get to meet a lot of people and get to do a lot of things that you wouldn’t get to do with today’s bigger [front office] operations,” she said.
The vast majority of people had no problem with her being a woman in baseball. Other than an usher in Pittsburgh trying to kick her out of the press box at the 1971 World Series, she worked pretty much hassle-free.
Times were changing.
These days, the Orioles employ many women with decision-making influence in the front office, including Catie Griggs, the president of business operations, and Eve Rosenbaum, an assistant general manager.
It all started with Fran Moulden, the assistant PR director in 1970.
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