Madison Furniture Co. team photo, 1946; married names in parentheses. From bottom left: Melba Conlee, Georgia Hardisty, Jane Vasconcelles (Sullivan), Bobby Degner (batboy). Center, Marcelline Steskal (Power), Florence Capranica (Lozzi), Theresa Joyce, Corrine Jallas (Kruger), Alice Folder (Griffith), MaryDee Degner. Top, George Baker Casey (manager), Eleanor Rudolph, Mary Moak, Amelia Leonard, Charles Madison (sponsor).
Some of the best women athletes in Springfield history drew throngs to the Iles Park softball diamond in the 1940s.
Madison Furniture Co. sponsored men’s teams in multiple sports, but its women’s softball team – fast-pitch, of course – was the star of the company’s athletics stable.
Madison Furniture (the team had no other nickname) dominated central Illinois women’s softball leagues from 1942 to 1951, the entire duration of the store’s sponsorship.
Five years in a row, from 1942 to 1946, when interest in “girls softball” was at its highest, Madison Furniture came in second in the state amateur softball tournament. All five years, Madison lost to the Caterpillar Dieselettes of Peoria. Of course, one of the Dieselettes’ most effective tactics was to poach Madison’s best players.
George Baker Casey, Madison’s coach from 1941 until ’46, remembered those battles in a 1981 newspaper interview.
“I think the two best games we ever played were exhibitions against them,” recalled Casey. “We beat them 2-1 at Lanphier Park once, and they beat us 2-1 at Canton.
“But I never got mad when we lost. As I got older, I think I realized how much entertainment we provided for people who otherwise wouldn’t have had any.
“Things were lean during the war years, but when we played at Iles Park, you had to park two or three blocks away. And we always had to talk about ground rules because the crowds were so big there would be people sitting all around the outfield. There were no fences in those days.”
Some Madison players went on to make their marks elsewhere. Five – Betty Wanless Decker, Rose Folder Powell , Janice “Jerry” O’Hara and Helen Westerman Austin of Springfield, along with Jacksonville-born Ruth DeFrates Miller – played at least briefly in what became the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. And Mary Lou “Smokey” Schneider turned down an AAGPBL offer.
Eleanor “Rudy” Rudolph was Madison’s catcher when they lost the championship to the Dieselettes in 1946. The winners promptly recruited her, and Rudolph retired in 1964 after a Hall of Fame career with the Caterpillar team and its successor, the Pekin Lettes.
Other Madison mainstays included Jane Vasconcelles Sullivan (1923-2005), MaryDee Degner (1924-94), Dolores “Dee” Thrawl (1927-2014), Marceline Steskal Power (1928-2012), and Amelia “Dutch” Leonard (1923-96), who shared a nickname with her brother, Emil “Dutch” Leonard, a major-league baseball pitcher for 20 years.
Surprisingly perhaps, the Madison Furniture women’s team isn’t in the Springfield Sports Hall of Fame, and only two team alumni (Folder Powell and Rudolph) were members of the hall as of 2026. Casey (1906-94), their early manager, was named to the Hall in 1994 as a “friend of sport”.
Madison Furniture Co.
Charles H. Madison (1890-1975) and Bill Dirksen founded the Madison & Dirksen Furniture Co. on West Grand Avenue (today’s MacArthur Boulevard) in 1932. Madison bought out Dirksen in 1934 and moved the renamed Madison Furniture to 11th Street and South Grand Avenue in 1935.
The Dickason family – Janet Dickason (1919-2007), was the daughter of Charles and Ruth Madison – operated the store from the 1970s until it closed in 1998.
Madison Furniture began its sports sponsorships in 1935 with a men’s bowling team, probably because Charles Madison was a top-flight bowler himself – he was inducted into the Greater Springfield Bowling Hall of Fame in 1977. In addition to women’s softball, Madison Furniture supported a women’s bowling team, a men’s basketball team, and men’s and women’s golf teams over the next decade-and-a-half.
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Vasconcellos (1923-2005)