Thank you, as always, for being here. Paid subscriptions allow me to dedicate more time to this newsletter. It’s not just the time I spend writing, but the time I spend planning, researching, and reporting that is supported by upgrading. You also get access to our (very active) subscriber Discord server, as well as events.

I’m also excited to announce that we will be doing a virtual author event with Julie Kliegman about their new book, FINDING RENEE RICHARDS. It will be Thursday, September 24 at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT. It will be open for All-Access VIP and Biggest Fan tier subscribers, so stay tuned for a registration link soon.

If you’ve been around here a while, then you know I wrote a book about the first pro women’s football league in the U.S. Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League is full of so many interesting historical connections, from NFL teams handing down their practice uniforms for the women to play in to Billie Jean King’s short-lived women’s sports magazine featuring players on the cover.

After we published the book, we discovered so much more information, most of which I haven’t really had the time to properly dig into yet.

On Friday, news broke that feminist activist Gloria Steinem had died. By pure coincidence, I was looking through a Detroit Demons game program from 1976 in order to send photos of an ad I’d seen to a friend who was doing research on a related topic. The Demons program was sent to me after our book was published, by the son of Detroit coach Dan Adair.

I saw an ad that piqued my interest, one I remember clocking the first time I looked through the program and intended to go back and look into. Of course, I never had and now here it was: