Sport: Softball
Born: March 11, 1917
Died: December 29, 2002
Town: Linden, New Jersey
Margaret Olive Nusse was born March 11, 1917 to Augusta and William Nusse in Linden. She was one of eight siblings, with five brothers and two sisters. Her formative years revolved around a wide range of sports and at Linden High School she captained the basketball and volleyball teams from her sophomore through senior years. She was also an excellent paddle tennis player. Her yearbook quote in 1934 was “My joy is youthful sports.”
Linden High did not have a women’s softball team (schools rarely did at the time) but that did not stop the girl nicknamed “Toots” from becoming a standout in this sport. She played baseball and softball in the spring and summer around Linden starting in her early teens, competing against boys, girls, women and men, and distinguished herself as a fine pitcher. In softball games she opted not to wear a glove—a choice that would become something of a trademark during her playing career.
During the Great Depression, women’s softball became a popular diversion, with companies forming factory teams. Toots was a natural organizer who liked to be in charge of things. Soon after she graduated, because the factory where she worked did not have a team, she formed one of her own and named it the Linden Arians. She was the star batter and pitcher, the manager, the scheduler and the fundraiser for the club—which is still in existence today. During the winter months, the Arians stayed together as a bowling team.
The Arians’ opponents were primarily teams sponsored by companies such as Singer Sewing Machines and Diehl Manufacturing, which drew from workforces in the many hundreds. Aiding the development of the Arians was the establishment of the Amateur Softball Association (ASA) in 1933. It set up offices in Newark soon after—in retrospect a fortunate bit of timing for Toots. In 1937, Toots pitched her team to the ASA state title. In 1939, the Arians played their first of many exhibition games at the New York World’s Fair, including several night games under the lights. During the war, the team played exhibition matches against soldiers based in and around New Jersey.
The Arians played in Wheeler Park and drew from central New Jersey, primarily Union and Essex counties, but were a national power in Women’s Fast-Pitch Softball Tournaments. They qualified to play in the ASA Nationals three times while she was the team’s primary pitcher—1942, 1951 and 1954—and enjoyed the support of key figures in the ASA world, including Nick Frannicola and George Cron, and later Budd Gilbert, the CEO of Dudley. Unfortunately, because of wartime travel restrictions in 1942, the Arians were unable to attend the championship tournament in Detroit after winning the Mid-Atlantic Regionals.
During the 1950s, as her prime years as a pitcher began to wane, Toots started what would be a five-decade relationship with Millie Deegan, one of the top players from the AAGPBL. In time, Millie became the player-coach of the Arians while Toots saw to the team’s business and management needs. In 1959, Toots was pressed into emergency service as a pitcher in the second game of a long doubleheader—having gone three years without facing a batter. She spun a one-hitter against a club from Reading at the age of 43. Toots came out of retirement a few more times in the early 1960s.
By then, the Arians were competing in the Eastern Major Girls Softball League, which Toots actually founded in the late-1950s and for which she served as commissioner. She was also a deputy commissioner of the American Softball Association (ASA) for two decades and served as its youth commissioner. Over the years, her work in promoting softball to kids led to the organization of the National Girls Softball League and the American Girls Softball League.
Toots’s final numbers, achieved almost entirely against top-flight competition over nearly 30 years, included 396 victories (against 164 losses), more than 1,700 strikeouts, 109 shutouts and 30 no-hitters. On average, she walked fewer than a dozen hitters a season and had a career batting average over .500.
Toots became the first woman to serve as president of the New Jersey Amateur Softball Association. She also founded the first Women’s Umpire Association. In 1960, Toots was inducted into the New Jersey ASA Hall of Fame. In 1983, she was inducted into the National Softball Hall of Fame. She and Millie were inducted into Linden’s first Hall of Fame class in 2007 (along with major leaguer Eddie Kasko and basketball star Tamecka Dixon) and a softball diamond at Veteran’s Memorial Park was named in her honor.
Toots and Millie moved to Florida in 1979 but continued to advise the Arians. Millie passed away in 2002 and Toots followed her that same year. Both were 85 years old.
Interestingly, the Nusse family name began appearing in New Jersey sports headlines again around this time. Victoria Nusse, a high-school soccer star in Westfield and descendant of one of Toots’s brothers, broke a slew of Division-III records as an All-American goalkeeper for The College of New Jersey. She was inducted into that school’s Hall of Fame in 2019.