Ebby Cohran had raised his daughters Rozene, Hortense and Pauletta as baseball fans. Even if Rozene followed along to please her dad at first, she was well-versed in the game long before she started dating a professional baseball player.
“Many of the young women who hung around the stadium did so just to meet ballplayers and be part of the social life of the season,” Pride wrote in his 1994 autobiography Pride: The Charley Pride Story. “But Rozene could talk baseball with the savviest of the players or coaches.”
Rozene had lived a comparably glamorous life while Pride was raised by sharecroppers in Sledge, Mississippi. Still, the young couple gelled without a clue that Charley would eventually have more in common professionally with Hank Williams than Hank Aaron.
“Rozene came from a background that was as alien to me as a camel in a cornfield,” Pride wrote in his autobiography. “She had finished high school, attended college and cosmetology school and had an air of maturity and self-assurance.”