The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (40 page)

In September the Los Angeles City Council voted to offer the Dodgers 307 acres in Chavez Ravine in exchange for a small parcel of land at the Los Angeles minor league park called Wrigley Field.

The last ballgame at Ebbets Field occurred on September 24, 1957. The Dodgers defeated Branch Rickey’s Pittsburgh Pirates, 2 to 0.

Gladys Goodding, the organist, played sad songs for the crowd, 6,702 fans in — as O’Malley said — “a borough of fully two million.” Goodding played in order:

“Am I Blue?”

“What Can I Say, Dear, After I’ve Said I’m Sorry?”

“Thanks for the Memory!”

“When I Grow Too Old to Dream”

“When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day”

“Auld Lang Syne”

That night Casey Stengel’s Yankees clinched their eighth American League pennant.

The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, four games to three, with three complete-game victories from Lew Burdette, a right-hander out of Nitro, West Virginia.

I flew back on a United Airlines plane chartered by the Yankees. Stengel was angry and drank steadily for three hours. After we landed, he moved down the wheeled stairway to the tarmac at Idlewild Airport and a reporter from channel 11 rushed at him with microphone and cameraman.

“Did your team choke up out there?” the reporter asked.

“Do you choke up on your fucking microphone?” Stengel said. He turned around and clawed his buttocks.

“You see,” he told me later, “you got to stop them terrible questions. When I said ‘fuck’ I ruined his audio. When I scratched my ass, I ruined his video, if you get my drift.”

The Era was done. On October 9, when the Yankee-Milwaukee Series was tied at three games each, Arthur Patterson, wrongly characterized by Dick Young as “a third-string club official,” read a fifty-two-word statement ending: “The stockholders and directors of the Brooklyn baseball club have today met and unanimously agreed that the necessary steps be taken to draft the Los Angeles territory.”

Young wrote, “Following the Giants’ defection, New York is left without a National League club for the first time in 67 years.”

The United Press telephoned Bob Hope in Palm Springs.

“The Dodgers are going to be very big out here,” Hope said. “I can’t wait to see Duke Snider in a bare-midriff uniform.”

Benny Weinrig, a diffident little fellow who served sandwiches in the Ebbets Field press box, burst into tears that night. “This team,” he told his mother, “has been my whole life. What is it now?

“Just a joke . . .”

* * *

The Era was done. Durocher was gone and Robinson and DiMaggio; Reynolds and Raschi; Roe and Gionfriddo; Bobby Brown and Bobby Thomson; Koslo and Rizzuto; and Charlie Dressen, managing the Washington Senators, got himself fired very early in 1957. Fired in May.

The Era ended when it was time for the Era to end: Stengel defeated in the World Series, the Dodgers and the Giants moving West.

The Era ended when it was time for the Era to end and that, I believe, is everlastingly part of its beauty and its glory.

March 6, 1990–October 31, 1992
Croton-on-Hudson, New York

“H
ISTORY
,” Henry Ford once remarked, “is the bunk.” History is neither bunk nor junk, but the more one researches, the more one recognizes that history does become terribly subjective. Important events take place away from cameras and microphones. Often nobody takes notes. That forces the researcher to rely on memories, which differ. When one must rely on something as uncertain as memory, the bunk factor appears, persists, and tends to spread, like mushrooms in a wet, ill-tended lawn.

Walter O’Malley liked to boast that the Dodgers were the only baseball franchise to have won the World Series on both coasts, once in Brooklyn and many times in Los Angeles. When I told O’Malley that the Athletics had won the World Series in Philadelphia and in Oakland, he looked chagrined; not, it developed, at being corrected but at his own mistake.

Arthur E. Patterson told me in 1991 that he was the only man who had started out as a sportswriter and become president of a major league team (the California Angels). But William Veeck, Sr., father of the famous hustler, was a sportswriter who became president of the Chicago Cubs, sixty-five years earlier.

There was no malice, no willful deception in the statements by O’Malley and by Patterson. Yet each is bunk. Each has been reported in newspaper stories and found its way into files and databases, assuring all that the inaccuracies will appear again in yet more newspaper stories and magazine articles. I consider myself fortunate to have kept these two minor errors out of my own work. I am not so vain as to believe that I have been able to exclude all others. Frank Ryan, the former Cleveland Brown quarterback who earned a Ph.D. in topology, speaks of “zero errors” as an objective. “But that’s fairly hard to achieve,” Ryan says, “particularly at quarterback.” Zero errors has been Ryan’s objective in the precise world of theoretical mathematics, and zero errors has been my objective in the less precise world of social history, with sliders.

Zeal is an enemy of reasonable discourse, but zeal appears more often than one would like. Bill James, who writes and edits bestselling books he calls “baseball abstracts,” found several mistakes in David Halberstam’s popular
Summer of ‘49
.

I’m not trying to tell David Halberstam what his standards should be. But hell, I hire a research assistant and Halberstam’s a lot bigger name than I am. Why on earth didn’t he hire somebody who knows something about baseball to read his book carefully before it came out? . . . Is Halberstam this careless with the facts when he writes about the things he usually writes about? It is frightening to think that Halberstam is this sloppy in writing about war and politics.

In one of the abstracts, James published comment on my own book
The Boys of Summer
. He got the year of publication wrong. Does this mean that James is a careless, sloppy, and frightening reporter? I don’t believe he is. This means only that James, or his hired research assistant, made a mistake.

Collegial dialogue is all to the good. Excess frothing, in commentary or in beer, is unfortunate.

The most contentious episodes during the Era played out at the beginning and the end: the Cardinals’ racist strike against Jackie Robinson and Walter O’Malley’s avaricious abandonment of Brooklyn. Neither story easily gives up its secrets or truths.

Most surviving St. Louis ballplayers say during the 1990s that a strike against Robinson was never discussed in 1947. Stan Musial maintains that “the story was made up.” But research informs us that Musial was sick and feverish with raging appendicitis while strike plans developed. He is not deliberately misleading anyone. But in early May 1947, Musial was too ill to know what was taking place; later, when the strike was squashed, his teammates did not seek him out with the obscene particulars of their failed idea.

“Hey,” says Joe Garagiola, “I was rootin’ for Robinson. Strike? Me try to spike him? Hey. No way. I was tryin’ to
avoid
spiking him when I tripped and tore up my shoulder.”

However, in the picture
The Sporting News
published in the summer of 1947, Garagiola appears to be challenging Robinson to a fistfight. We may here have a prominent television interviewer rewriting history and his role in it. I prefer to believe that Joe is deceived by his own memory, the recurrent phenomenon of wishful history.

“Stanley Woodward made the whole [strike] story up,” Enos Slaughter said. “That son of a bitch kept me out of the Hall of Fame for twenty years.”

“Ford Frick never spoke to us about the racial situation,” Terry Moore said. “Doc Hyland talked to us. Not Frick.”

“Woodward,” wrote Bob Broeg, of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, “was practicing barnyard journalism.”

Trying to put these versions together, I come up with something like this: The Cardinals never intended to strike against Jackie Robinson. They liked him. They admired him, even when his adventurous play cost them ballgames and money. Woodward made up a barnyard story about a racial strike that was never planned. The Cardinals’ team physician told the captain of the team not to proceed with this strike that nobody was planning anyway.
Bunkum americanus
.

As the Giants moved West, most accepted Horace Stoneham’s apologia: “I can’t stay where I am, pally. If I don’t move the team, I go bankrupt. Except for Chub [Feeney], all my relatives would starve.”

Starvation was remote from the Brooklyn Family O’Malley. By locating figures O’Malley provided me during the 1950s and adding the television and radio receipts wrung from him by Congress, I provide documentation, I believe for the first time, of the extraordinary profits the Dodgers earned in Brooklyn. But while all the specific figures were not common knowledge during the 1950s, most assumed that O’Malley was making a decent profit in Flatbush. His move was widely and accurately regarded as a matter of greed, not need.

O’Malley’s early years in California were bumpier than expected. His subscription television plan did not work out and the Los Angeles city fathers finally deeded him the promised land in Chavez Ravine by a narrow margin. He had to use a football field, the Los Angeles Coliseum, as his home base for a while. “I’ll admit,” he told me early in the 1970s, “that for a time it looked as if we’d have to play our home games in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard.”

The new ballpark, Dodger Stadium, opened on April 10, 1962. O’Malley met the cost, $22 million, with a low-interest (two percent) loan from the Union Oil Company, which in exchange won exclusive rights to advertise within the ballpark. Dodger home attendance began to surpass three million late in the 1970s.

Some find irony in the fact that O’Malley’s son, Peter, led opposition to the Giants’ moving from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, Florida, after the 1992 season. But the O’Malleys are businesspeople, expedients. It seemed good business for Walter to move West at the end of the Era. It seemed bad business to Peter O’Malley for the Dodgers to lose a profitable intra-California rivalry a generation later.

I suppose every researcher has favorite sources. For the Era, I recommend the
Daily News
, because of Dick Young, and the
New York Post
, because of Jimmy Cannon and Milton Gross. I have never seen an overall sports section as good as the one Stanley Woodward edited at the
Herald Tribune
in the late 1940s.

When the
Tribune
fired Woodward in 1949, the paper took the first step on a road of decline that ended with its death in 1966. To some that was as tragic as the death of two fine New York baseball teams a few years earlier.

T
HE AUTHOR’S SON
, Gordon J. Kahn, A.I.A., of Somers, New York, was kind enough to check certain details pertaining to the Flavian Amphitheater, the Coliseum, in libraries of architecture. My old
Herald Tribune
colleague Harold Rosenthal was particularly generous with his memories, as were many old traveling companions, including Dr. Robert “Bobby” Brown, Stan Musial, Harold “Pee Wee” Reese, and Edwin “Duke” Snider.

Mark Balk provided tireless research assistance, as did Susan Kilgour. Barbara G. Flanagan copyedited the manuscript with great care. Karen Sevell Greenbaum punched it into her word processor. Neil Reshen and Dawn Reshen-Doty, of Benay Enterprises, run the business side of my writing life and they performed difficult work skillfully.

One reads today, with some justification, about changes in publishing, the ascendancy of the M.B.A., and the decline of the editor and editing. This is something close to my twentieth book and I have never been privileged to have more careful, tasteful, and even loving editing than that which John Herman of Ticknor & Fields offered to
The Era
.

My thanks to the following for generous help: Marty Adler; Mel Allen; Emil J. “Buzzie” Bavasi; Yogi Berra; Mildred (Mrs. Bill) Bevens; Ralph Branca; Andrew Bullen, Center for Research Libraries, Chicago; Roy Campanella; Mary Carey, New- York Historical Society Library; Jerry Coleman; Bill Deane, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library; Don Drysdale; Dennis Falcone, WCBS-FM; Edward Falcone, Field Library, Peekskill, N.Y.; Charles S. “Chub” Feeney; David Fischer, Time-Life Library; Edward E. Fitzgerald; Joe Garagiola; Albert Gion-friddo; William J. Guilfoile, National Baseball Hall of Fame; Tommy Henrich; Gene Hermanski; Clem Labine; Al Lightner, Salem, Oregon; Carroll “Whitey” Lockman; Lee MacPhail; Terry Moore; Donald Mueller; Arthur “Red” Patterson; Mark Reese; Arthur Richman; Phil Rizzuto; Emily Rose, Putnam Valley, New York, Library; Albert “Flip” Rosen; Faigi Rosenthal, chief librarian, New York
Daily News
; Steve Saks, New York Public Library; Mike Shannon; George Shuba; Lisa Siclare, SUNY, Purchase; Charlie Silvera; May Stone, New-York Historical Society Library; Robert “Bobby” Thomson; Mariam Touba, New- York Historical Society Library; Gary Van Allen, National Baseball Hall of Fame; Peter Wessley, Field Library; Wesley Westrum; Sal Yvars; and Vic Ziegel.

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––—.
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––—.
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––—.
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