“Somebody would say to Daddy, ‘You ever going to try for a boy?’” Barnes says. “Daddy would say, ‘You must have never had a daughter come up and hug you and call you daddy, have you?’”

The Fosters lived in Dalton, working in the Georgia town’s famed textile industry. Benjamin Foster was a shipping director and Mamie Foster, a floor lady, for Ken-Rau Chenilles, a company making bedspreads.

In the late 1930s, when the company began organizing a softball league with teams from other bedspread companies, the Fosters asked Henrietta if she wanted to play. She did.

Playing softball didn’t surprise anyone who knew Henrietta Foster. By the time the softball offer came along, she had already been playing basketball for Dalton High School.

“When I got to high school, they didn’t have that many girls out playing basketball,” says Barnes, but she became one of them.

Then, girls basketball was restricted to playing half-court. Young Henrietta Foster played guard. Four years playing guard on a half-court meant that she never had the opportunity to shoot even one basket in all of her games.

Talking basketball, Barnes laughs. She shares two small, wallet-sized photos, mentioning how everyone talks about today’s revealing fashions. The photographs show a young Henrietta Foster wearing her basketball uniform which includes a pair of short-shorts. She compares these 1930s fashions with the far longer and baggier shorts worn by women basketball players today.

“I don’t know how they can play in those long pants they wear,” she says. “I don’t know how they can move around in them.”

She played basketball for three years after high school, into the mid-1940s, during World War II. She and a group of girls would play university teams in the mountains, she said.

She played softball three seasons, 1939, ’40, and ’41. The war put an end to women’s softball in Dalton, Barnes says.

Though she played high school basketball and had played baseball on the diamond her father built, softball presented a new challenge for Hank and all of the girls.

“It was a learning experience for most of the girls,” she says.

They practiced regularly and vigorously. They played hard.