In the spring of 1976 in Ames, Iowa, a group of men told Faye Yates that her daughter couldn’t join their Little League team. She was a girl after all, and girls played softball, they said.
Undeterred, Mrs. Yates, a housewife at the time, signed on to manage a team. That way, no one could tell her she couldn’t draft her daughter.
“She knew nothing about baseball, but she bought all these books on how to manage a Little League team,” said her son Jon Yates, a Tribune reporter. “Everyone got to play.”
Not only did everyone get to play on Mrs. Yates’ team–the Cleveland Indians–members also got a lasting memento: autographed photos from Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians, thanks to a letter from Coach Yates.
Mrs. Yates, 68, a diminutive and determined communications and marketing specialist who rarely met a challenge she wouldn’t tackle, died Friday, July 28, in her Lakeview apartment. She suffered from melanoma.
The high-spirited Mrs. Yates worked for The Wetlands Initiative, a Chicago-based non-profit group that works to create and preserve wetland areas.
“She was anything but quiet,” her son said. “She was like a connector; she knew everybody.”
Mrs. Yates grew up in Detroit and studied English and psychology at the University of Michigan. After graduation, she attended the University of Wyoming, where she taught and received a master’s degree in English, her family said.
In Wyoming, she met the man she would marry. Stanley Yates, a reference librarian at the school, taught Mrs. Yates’ class on how to get the most out of a library.
“I guess it was love at first sight,” Stanley Yates said. “I was struck by her beauty and later by her intelligence.”
Slightly more than six months after their first meeting in the library, the young couple took a train from Laramie, Wyo., to San Francisco and wed. They were married 40 years.
“If nothing else, she was willing to attempt almost anything,” he said. “She was vivacious, a really amazing woman.”
After coaching her daughter’s baseball team for a year, “she decided she could do the sports thing,” her son said.
Mrs. Yates learned the small local newspaper was looking for a sports editor. She applied and was soon trolling the sidelines of Iowa State University football games, writing for the Nevada Evening Journal, her son said.
Shortly after her sports writing stint, Mrs. Yates became an English professor at Iowa State University, a job that morphed into a university public relations position. She did public relations for Columbia University in New York in 1992.
In 2000, she left New York for Chicago, where she could be closer to her son and daughter. For the last five years, Mrs. Yates was vice president of development and communications at The Wetlands Initiative.
“Faye was a very energetic, creative person,” said the group’s senior vice president, Donald Hey. “You always knew where Faye was coming from. She could easily express her feelings.”
Recently, Mrs. Yates favorite role was that of grandmother, a job she always approached with flair and vigor.
“She wasn’t the type of grandmother who baked cookies and told bedtime stories,” said her daughter, Annie Collins. “She taught her grandkids about life in the city: how to visit the museums, how to count money for cabdrivers.
“She would play Scrabble with the kids, and ride the `L.’ She just bought tickets to see `Stomp’ with them.”
Whether attending the theater, perusing a museum or playing video games at the ESPN Zone with her grandchildren, Mrs. Yates almost always wore her trademark purple lipstick and a brooch.
“She was often called the No. 1 grandma,” her daughter said, “and I think that’s the thing she most cherished.”
In addition to her husband, daughter and son, Mrs. Yates is survived by a brother, Fred Steingold ; a sister, Nancy Hearshen ; and four grandchildren.
A private memorial will be held next weekend. .
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bmccarthy@tribune.com
