Change, as they say, is good. Changed seemed to be a good thing in the winter of 1957-58 for Roy Campanella, the club’s star catcher since 1949. He had to be flexible. Campy had endured the hardships of the old Negro Leagues, then faced further, more difficult challenges following in Jackie Robinson’s footsteps.
Walter O’Malley moved the Bums from a stadium where Campanella had hit 242 home runs, but now, what was this? The Dodgers would be playing in a football stadium, the Coliseum – and word was that the left field fence was little league distance.
Campanella had learned to adapt because he had to, and after winning three National League MVP awards between 1951 and 1955, he was ready for a new challenge. The new challenge was not just about the impending move to L.A. At age 37, Campanella had become a small businessman. He had bought a liquor store in suburban New York, and on an ice-cold January night in 1958, after working the night shift, Roy got in his car for the drive home. He never made it.
His car skidded off the road, ramming into a tree, and the great athlete, a man with cat-like reflexes and the most powerful throwing arm on the senior circuit, was paralyzed.
Change can be tough to swallow. Campanella went through the grueling process of rehab, but along the way discovered something special. Some time between January 1958 and May 1959, Roy Campanella went from being a suicidal paraplegic, whose wife left him because she could not handle his depressions, to learning that it’s good to be alive. In the process, his nurse fell in love with him. They call that the “Florence Nightengale effect,” and in Roy’s case change again was very good. They were eventually married.
Baseball is rooted in the Eastern mythology of New York City. Cooperstown is a few hours away, and in the 1950s the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers were building their own wings at the Hall of Fame, with three marquee center fielders named Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider. Los Angeles was, well . . . Hollywood. A nice place to visit, you might even want to live there, but not to be taken seriously, as in Major League seriously.
Perhaps it was on May 7, 1959, that the world first took Los Angeles Major League seriously. When former teammate Pee Wee Reese rolled Campy out to home plate, the lights dimmed, and 93,103 fans of the human spirit lit lighters, giving the Coliseum a Heavenly appearance, paying a very moving tribute to a man who had played his entire career 3,000 miles away.
They adopted Roy Campanella as one of their own, and they adopted a club that had finished in seventh place in 1958. The Dodgers would go on to break the 90,000 attendance mark several times during their stay in Exposition Park – the ’59 All-Star Game, and in three games vs. the “go-go” Chisox in that year’s fall Classic. Whether the players were inspired by Campy and their adopted hometown to win the World Championship is grist for speculation, and the stuff of legend.
Duke Snider speculated on what-might-have-been.
“If it hadn’t been for the accident,” Snider once said, “I think Roy would have played another year or two and then been the first black manager.”
Campanella’s life was much more than wins, losses and MVP awards. Another former Dodger, pitcher Joe Black, remembers Hall of Famer Campy this way: “To me, he was the ultimate role model.”
Roy’s life was memorialized first in his uplifting autobiography, It’s Good To Be Alive, and later in a television movie of the same name. Change also came in the form of the West Coast move, which Campy eventually made after all.
He became a fixture at Dodger Stadium, working for the club in an advisory capacity until he passed away from natural causes in 1993. It would seem that Campanella’s starry May night in 1959 inspired his team to great heights. The Dodgers were a team in transition. Many of the Brooklyn stars were aging or gone. Some of the young Brooklyn hopefuls emerged as stars. A new group also began to assert themselves.
The town took to the team in the biggest way possible. Hollywood stars Danny Kaye, Jimmy Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Jack Lemmon, Gene Autry, Groucho Marx, and Ray Bolger were fixtures at Dodger games.
Outfielder Wally Moon hit 19 homers and batted .302 to lead the team. He had the perfect inside-out left-handed swing, resulting in high, arching fly balls that cleared the short, high left field fence at the Coliseum.
Moon, pitcher Larry Sherry, new shortstop Maury Wills, pitchers Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, and Campy’s replacement behind the plate, John Roseboro, kept the team in contention until San Francisco slumped in September.
After tying Milwaukee through 154 games, L.A. beat the Braves twice to capture the league crown. In the World Series, Koufax gave a demonstration of greatness to come when he struck out 13 Chicago White Sox, but lost to Bob Shaw, 1-0. With enormous crowds spurring L.A. on at the Coliseum, they managed to beat the “Go-Go White Sox” in six games to capture the World Championship. What Brooklyn fans had waited some 51 years for, Los Angeles was given in just their second season.
The star of the Series, and in fact the glue of the pitching staff down the stretch, was relief pitcher Larry Sherry. Sherry hailed from Fairfax High in L.A. More great athletes came from the American West in the 20th Century, mostly from California, than any place in the world. A new dynamic played itself out in L.A., that of the homegrown hero. New York did not produce a large number of great baseball players. There were some, to be sure, but nothing like L.A.
More than 2 million fans attended Dodger games in 1959. It was the great incentive, all the way around, that spurred the creation of Dodger Stadium. Bad press regarding the relocation of Mexican immigrants living in Chavez Ravine had been a setback, until readers of the Los Angeles Times had the record set a little straighter. Few owned their property, most lived in makeshift “homes,” one “tenant” owned 11 slum buildings throughout the city; and few were U.S. citizens.
DID YOU KNOW . . .
That the downtown parade welcoming the Dodgers to L.A. reported that at Eighth and Broadway, “a bevy of beauties in brief costumes pitched dozens of toy baseballs at the players,” while on Seventh Street, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a furrier threw out volleyballs covered with white fur made to resemble huge baseballs,” while “a pretty girl dressed like a Dodger” was “in a golden chariot pulled by an ugly Giant”?
TRIVIA
What was Walter O’Malley’s initial plan for television coverage of L.A. Dodger games?
A: O’Malley planned the first-ever pay cable station called Skiatron. He hated “free TV” because fans could stay at home to see games instead of buying tickets. Political and technical difficulties prevented the creation of Skiatron. O’Malley only allowed KTTV/11 to televise road games after much consternation. For years before Prime Ticket, ESPN, Fox, and other cable channels, the Dodgers were one of the least-televised teams, virtually never showing a home game and reducing road contests to the Giants and about one game each per season with each National League opponent. Today, almost all road and home games are on TV in one way or another.
DID YOU KNOW. . .
That the referendum to build Dodger Stadium was put to a vote, called Proposition B, on June 3, 1958? KTTV held a five-hour “Dodgerthon” to drum up support, featuring Debbie Reynolds, George Burns, William Frawley, Danny Thomas, and Jack Benny. 1.8 million viewers tuned in, but the vote was so close that its passage was not verified until June 6, by a mere five percent.
