LIMA — In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president, “Ben Hur” won the Academy Award for best picture and the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series, beating the New York Yankees on Bill Mazeroski’s dramatic home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game.
Trois Wood had a pretty good year, too.
In August, just after her 32nd birthday, the Central Junior High School physical education teacher and former women’s professional baseball player won the Women’s City Golf Tournament. Four months later, in early December, Wood bowled the highest game ever by a woman in Lima when she rolled a 290 at Westgate. “Miss Wood opened her second game with a spare, then reeled off 11 straight strikes,” The Lima News reported Dec. 2, 1960.
As remarkable as that feat was, the win at the golf tournament topped it. Wood, as the News noted on Aug. 15, was a “gal who never took a (golf) lesson in her life,” yet “finished giving a series of them to competitors in the Lima Women’s City Golf Tournament Sunday afternoon.”
“I wasn’t nervous at all,” Wood told the News. “I’m used to playing before crowds from the days when I used to play softball and baseball.”
Asked if she could win the next year, Wood replied, “I don’t know about that but I’m sure going to give it a try.” Wood didn’t win the next year, but would give it a lot more tries. She won the title five more times over the next decade and a half.
Dora Trois Wood was born Aug. 5, 1928, in Gilboa to Alva Richard and Lulu May Lowden Wood. She had two brothers, Richard and Ralph.
Shortly after she won the 1960 golf tournament, Wood told Lima Citizen columnist Hope Strong her father was responsible for giving his only daughter the name Trois, “a name he heard or saw printed somewhere.” (It rhymes with Lois.) Wood also credited her father with instilling in her a love of competition. “I don’t value things like winning a trophy except you’ve had fun doing it. Winning is good up to a point but when it becomes the important thing, then it’s no good.”
Wood was graduated from Blanchard Township High School and enrolled at Bowling Green State University to study physical education. On Aug. 1, 1950, the News reported that Wood had signed a contract to pitch for the Fort Wayne Daisies of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
According to the league’s web site, Wood pitched just over an inning at the end of the 1950 season. Wood spent the offseason as a student teacher at South Junior High School and then, in May 1951, reported to the Daisies’ training camp in Alexandria, Virginia.
“After a couple exhibition games I was traded to Kenosha, Wisconsin,” Wood told the News in August 1965. “But I only stayed in it for two years. I wasn’t that good a pitcher and my batting average was only .152. They made a catcher out of me and after three games behind the plate I’d had it. After the third game I had thrown my arm out. I can’t throw yet.”
The league, Wood recalled, “played with a baseball an inch larger in diameter than what the men used” but “could do just about everything the men do with a baseball.” Top players made $400 a month, Wood said, noting her salary was about $235 a month.
“We traveled by bus from city to city and played under the lights every night,” she told Strong in 1960. “Since then, I’ve never been interested in traveling.”
Following her brief baseball career, Strong wrote, “Trois had a go at industry, working on the production line at Sylvania in Ottawa, Automotive Fibers and RCA in Findlay. Six years ago she accepted her first teaching assignment at Central.”
About the same time Wood took up golf. “I just saw other people playing and decided to try it,” she told the News in 1965. “So I bought clubs, watched others and tried to practice the things they did. A lot of people have helped me, but I’ve never taken a lesson in my life.”
Armed with a love of competition, but not a single lesson, Wood entered the Women’s City Golf Tournament for the first time in 1959. She won the consolation round that year before breaking through in 1960 with her first city tournament title.
A month after winning the golf title, the News wrote Sept. 4, 1960, Wood “stormed into the bowling season with the same determination that gained her the ladies city golf championship recently. Trois is in a class by herself when we think of the best combined lady bowler-golfer.”
In December 1960, she proved it with her 290 game, following that up in January 1961 with another gem. “Last Friday in the Ladies Major at Westgate, Miss Wood started her third game with a spare, missed the second frame and then struck out 10 in a row for a tremendous 268 game, second only to her 290 for season honors,” the News wrote Feb. 1, 1961. Wood posted the three highest single game scores that year.
Over the next 15 years, Wood consistently was among the city’s best bowlers, but it was in golf that she achieved the most notoriety.
After finishing second in the 1961 and 1962 city golf tournaments, Wood again rose to the top in 1963. She took medalist honors in the qualifying round on Aug. 13, 1963, and then stormed to the title. “Miss Wood became the fourth woman in the tourney’s 20-year history to win two times and also was the first medalist to emerge victorious since Nancy Kidder turned the trick in 1955,” the News reported Aug. 19, 1963.
Wood won again in 1965 and 1971, when she defeated a former student while making her first appearance in the tournament since 1968. After that win, Wood, by now teaching physical education at North Junior High School, wouldn’t appear in the city tournament again until 1975. She won that year and in 1976, to give her six city golf titles.
Following the 1976 win, Wood told the News that she probably wouldn’t be back for 1977. “I don’t like to devote a full week to playing golf, and I guess I’m just not that serious about it.”
Although she didn’t win, Wood did come back in 1977, perhaps because of something she had told Strong following her first title. “I’ve never been a spectator,” she said. “Today people want to pay money to watch others. I think we need more active participants.”
Wood died Sept. 9, 2008, and is buried in Harman Cemetery in Gilboa.
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