by Steve Rushin
A year earlier, in 1949, the Stars had even petitioned the Pacific Coast League, asking for a ten-minute intermission after the fifth inning of every game, ostensibly so fans could stretch but in fact so they could spend money at Goodman’s glorious concession stands. To provide cover for this ruse, the Stars’ groundskeepers applied gratuitous maintenance to the diamond. And so began the baseball tradition of “dragging the infield” while spectators queued at the food and novelty stands.
By then, Goodman’s old boss in Newark, George Weiss, had risen to the general manager’s chair for the world champion New York Yankees, who were entering a golden decade with an announcement. “In answer to popular demand of the fans,” read a notice in 1950 game programs, “the Yankees have created this season a new department: Yankee Souvenirs.”
The team had embraced Goodman’s long-ago advice to flog programs, caps, signed balls, and photos and—for the first time in 1950—something called a Yankees “sketchbook,” or yearbook. All of these were made available either by mail order (write to “Yankee Stadium, Bronx, N.Y.”) or at “one of the many gay souvenir stands” in the Yankee Stadium lobbies.
A multitude of new suburban homes going up in postwar America were in need of decor, and the Bombers were happy to oblige. “All of these souvenirs are ideal gifts for baseball minded youngsters or treasures for club rooms and dens,” the team promised. In addition, fraternal clubs and church groups could arrange to pick up and return highlight films of the 1949 World Series simply by turning up at Yankee Stadium, as if it were a branch of the New York Public Library.
Under Weiss, the Yankees won the World Series nine times between 1949 and 1962. Every pennant won sold countless more felt pennants at Yankees souvenir stands, where the team, by 1963, led both leagues in the sale of baseball’s signature novelty: the bobblehead doll.
By the time Danny Goodman introduced them to baseball fans, bobbleheads were already an ancient novelty, often known as “shakers” or “nodders.”
“Someone came to me from Japan in 1958 with a bobble-head doll,” Goodman recalled thirteen years after the fact. “I was the first one that had it.”
The first one in baseball, he meant. To underscore their timeless appeal, doll collectors like to point out the bobblehead’s cameo appearance in “The Overcoat,” Nikolai Gogol’s short story published in 1842. “The collar was low,” Gogol wrote of his protagonist, “so that his neck, in spite of the fact that it was not long, seemed inordinately so as it emerged from it, like the necks of the plaster cats which wag their heads and are carried about on the heads of scores of image sellers.”
Danny Goodman surrounded by Dodgers novelties, including bobbleheads, at Dodger Stadium in 1971. (Larry Sharkey, copyright © 1971, Los Angeles Times, reprinted with permission)
When Goodman issued the first bobbleheads to baseball fans at Gilmore Field, they were rotund and cherub-cheeked, with a permanent smile on each face. The early generic baseball bobbleheads bore a slight resemblance to Goodman himself, who looked like the kind of caricature that hung on the walls of the Brown Derby. He was short and dapper, with a long nose, swept-back hair, and a jutting lower lip that called to mind a benign version of the Penguin from Batman.
In the winter of 1957, when the Dodgers were moving to Los Angeles, Goodman made the unsolicited suggestion that the team play its inaugural season in Wrigley Field, with little more than twenty thousand seats. “Turn ’em away, if necessary, every time,” Goodman said of the fans. “Then they’d really whip up even greater interest, which would pay future dividends.”
And though Walter O’Malley didn’t take Goodman’s advice—the Dodgers would cross the county and play in the cavernous Coliseum—he did hire the visionary upon arriving in Los Angeles. The club already had its food concessionaire—Thomas Arthur, busy dreaming up the Dodger Dog—so O’Malley appointed Goodman the Dodgers’ director of advertising and promotion, a role he settled into at the Coliseum, where he set about selling everything imaginable for an owner eager to do just that. “Business reasons,” O’Malley said of the hire. “If just half his friends show up, we’ll sell out every game.” When the Friars Club finally got around to feting Danny Goodman, Ronald Reagan emceed the event, which saw Jack Benny and Chico Marx roast their friend.
After thirty years in the business, Goodman was finally stepping on a stage suitable to his outsized ambition. At the Coliseum, Goodman sold not just Dodgers caps and shirts, but also Dodgers bugles—he ordered twenty thousand of them, at a buck apiece, on which Dodgers fans would play “Charge!” When kids began to beat one another over the heads with them, Goodman was forced to withdraw the bugles, but he still had countless other novelties to flog.
There were forty-five different items at fifteen separate novelty booths. “We’ll have 12 different hat styles,” he told the Los Angeles Times before the Dodgers played their second season at the Coliseum, “ranging from a snazzy black-and-white Dodgers Tyrolean number, to Mexican Panamas and peek-a-boo bonnets.”
A manufacturer of plastic products began stamping out plastic hats with the Dodgers logo on them. Goodman offered them for sale at the Coliseum—they were immediately a hit—and soon other teams did the same. They proved so popular that the plastics manufacturer abandoned its other lines and devoted double shifts exclusively to plastic baseball hats.
“There’ll also be Dodger piggy banks,” Goodman promised, “Dodger bath towels, Dodger pillow cases, Dodger bolo ties, Dodger cigarette lighters, bandannas, scarfs, ties, pencil sets, jackets, bracelets, binoculars, money clips, Indian belts”
There were dolls, eight-inch homages to Duke Snider and Don Drysdale, costing three bucks apiece. They were so lifelike, Goodman swore, “you’ll think you’ve bought a new boarder.” As promised, there were piggy banks and pillowcases, film and flashbulbs, bath towels and buttons.
At the Coliseum, Goodman and the Dodgers offered more merchandise than any other team in the nation, and every one of those keepsakes offered fans a sense of belonging as well as a whiff of glamour. “Dodger fans don’t buy hats or jackets to protect themselves, but simply to be seen wearing them,” he told interviewer Jeane Hoffman in 1959. Indeed, the team sold more shade hats at night games than at day games.
During the 1959 World Series, in the shadeless Coliseum, he sold one hundred thousand straw hats in three games. He always insisted that he could have sold a hundred thousand more. That Series, played in Los Angeles and Chicago, was the tipping point for sports novelties, Goodman insisted. In the Coliseum, in front of countless marketers and advertisers from every industry, Goodman’s manifold branded products flew. “Not long after that,” he would say near the end of his life, “the breweries had their own mugs and caps, the airlines had model planes and luggage, the racetracks had jockeys’ caps instead of baseball caps and everybody had our T-shirts with their names on them.”
In homage to his old team, Goodman staged the first annual “Hollywood Stars Night” before a Dodgers home game in 1958, featuring luminaries like the three-foot-nine actor Billy Barty. “I’ll give you stars you’ve never heard of,” Goodman had promised Dodgers PR director Red Patterson, and he certainly delivered.
Those “stars,” if O’Malley got his way, would soon play in baseball’s grandest theater. In 1959, the Dodgers owner submitted a request to the Los Angeles City Council to have 192 acres of Chavez Ravine rezoned for commercial use. Twenty of those would be occupied by the ballpark, and another eighty-four acres were required for parking. That left nearly ninety acres on which the Dodgers hoped to build “concentric rows of novelty and souvenir stands, several restaurants, including a Hawaiian luau layout, and a complete auto service center.”
The service center survived. The orange Union 76 ball—rising like a second sun beyond the outfield wall at Dodger Stadium—would become familiar to generations of Dodgers fans. But the rest of the plan was rejected, councilmen fearing that O’Malley was planning a “downtown Disneyland” for his captive audience.
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It didn’t matter. Deprived of their concentric circles of souvenir stands, the Dodgers and Danny Goodman sold, in the confines of Dodger Stadium, glossy photos, bathrobes, baby rattles, blankets, bracelets, playing cards, record albums of radio calls, vinyl Windbreakers, parasols, and underpants. In 1961, O’Malley bought the Dodgers their own airplane, a four-engine Lockheed Electra II turboprop called the Kay O—after his wife, Kay O’Malley—and had it repainted with a baseball on the cockpit and the Dodgers script resplendent on the tail. The plane cost O’Malley $2.8 million, but Goodman managed to sell the Kay O back to Dodgers fans every day, as a model airplane kit. (A sunburst on the box read, “Your Revell model plane kit is made especially for Danny Goodman Concessions and can only be obtained from them,” which was to say: him.)
The team’s mail-order catalog was promoted on air during games, satin jackets offered in the satin tones of Vin Scully, whose voice had a mesmeric effect on children listening in the evening, in darkened bedrooms, their transistor radios issuing the siren call of “another Danny Goodman Special.” These specials—usually a package of three surplus trinkets, offered at a price of $2—netted the Dodgers about $0.14 apiece, Goodman told his friend Phil Elderkin of the Christian Science Monitor. But every special that was shipped out contained a color catalog of two hundred Dodgers items, and 90 percent of those catalogs were used on a future purchase, for more expensive merchandise.
That inaugural season at Dodger Stadium, 1962, Goodman and team publicist Red Patterson persuaded O’Malley for one game to give away Dodgers caps free of charge. The game sold out and the souvenir baseball caps did missionary work for the club. “The kids get the cap free, take ’em home and other kids see the caps and they want ’em,” Goodman said of the loss leader. “It sort of stimulates interest.” That same year, the Los Angeles Angels moved into Chavez Ravine for four seasons as the Dodgers’ tenant, and Goodman became their concessionaire as well, selling ladies’ aprons emblazoned with TO HECK WITH HOUSEWORK, I’M GOING TO SEE THE ANGELS PLAY and wipe-clean reusable dry-erase scorecards. No idea was too crazy, except for those that were.
“I turn away more people than you could imagine,” he said. “Every guy who comes in here thinks he has the greatest idea. One guy last week wanted to sell me a Dodger kite. ‘If you can’t sell ’em,’ he told me, ‘then buy 50,000 of ’em for a give-away night.’ Can you imagine what would happen if we handed out 50,000 kites? Kids would be flying kites all over the park. Another guy wanted to sell me Dodger boomerangs. I don’t even want to think what might happen with something like that.”
By then, bobblehead dolls had followed Goodman from the Hollywood Stars into the big leagues. In his office at Dodger Stadium, Goodman kept a full set on his desk. George Weiss might have said no to him in Newark, but the bobbleheads, in Los Angeles, would always nod their assent.
At Dodger Stadium, Goodman was creating the future, and not just of baseball. “Why would anyone think it unusual to pick up a hat or a sweater when he’s at the ball game?” he asked Sid Ziff of the Los Angeles Times in 1962. “They go to drugstores for everything from automobile tires to hardware as well as their medical supplies. Years ago, who would have expected luxury cafes and complete restaurants in the ballparks? I think eventually we’ll have full-scale shopping centers inside the parks. After all, we’re dealing with a captive audience for three or four hours. Eventually, we’ll be taking advantage of it.”
Some of his ideas worked too well. In the 1970s, when beach balls began to blight the field of play at Dodger Stadium, it killed Goodman to remove those items from sale at his stands, except that those stands were still heaving with every conceivable kind of product.
When batting helmets became mandatory in 1971, for instance, Goodman had long ago recognized the potential of plastic hats to serve as ambassadors that spread the gospel of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
And so he did likewise with plastic batting helmets. In their first season of mandatory use, Goodman staged Helmet Weekend, May 28 through 30, buying and warehousing 150,000 souvenir Dodgers helmets at a cost of $110,000, secure in the knowledge that Dodgers fans from Oxnard to Long Beach would be buying more of those and all manner of other Dodgers swag on their next visit to Chavez Ravine.
For fans unable to visit, Danny Goodman Concessions shipped satin Dodgers warm-up jackets all over the world, each one bearing Danny Goodman’s signature on the wash tag, in the same leaning script as the Dodgers uniform. Sammy Davis Jr.’s had SAMMY on the back, stitched in white. Every star who walked into Dodger Stadium walked out bedecked in Dodgerana, among them Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles, Walter Matthau, and Jack Lemmon. One memorable evening, a limousine pulled up to second base and disgorged Dean Martin, who wore a glove on one hand and held a cocktail in the other.
By 1976, when Tommy Lasorda took over as Dodgers manager, freeing Walter Alston to ride his motorcycle in Ohio, it was sometimes difficult to tell who was benefiting more when celebrities donned Dodgers gear: the gear, or the celebrities? Asked in 1979 who would win the National League West, comedian Jonathan Winters—renowned as a Cincinnati Reds fan—knew the right answer: “The Dodgers will win their division,” Winters said, “because Danny Goodman gives me a free pass.”
By then, Goodman’s ancient prophecy had come to pass: Novelties were bigger than peanuts. Having begun his career vending hot dogs to a Milwaukee crowd as male as a monastery, Goodman lived to see women—and men—shopping for clothes at the ballpark. “Today women represent about 40 percent of the crowd,” he said in 1980, “and they buy about half of everything we sell.”
That year, in addition to hosting the All-Star Game, the Dodgers held more promotions than any team in baseball ever had. Fans were invited to T-Shirt Night, Baseball Card Night, Fireworks Night, Wristband Night, Helmet Weekend, Poster Day, Jacket Weekend, Batting Glove Day, Ball Day, Photo Album Night, Camera Day, Old-Timers Day, the Dodger Family Game, Country Music Day, two Businessmen’s Specials, three Teen Nights, Fan Appreciation Day, and—as ever—Hollywood Stars Night.
The following summer, the dwarf actor Billy Barty was playing in his twenty-fourth consecutive Hollywood Stars game, and seven-foot-two Kareem Abdul-Jabbar joined him on the celestial roster, whose members had to bat against that summer’s biggest Los Angeles celebrity, who just happened to be a Dodgers pitcher. Danny Goodman had already fed the flames of Fernandomania by stocking the stadium with thirty-five thousand Fernando Valenzuela bumper stickers, fifteen thousand Fernando Valenzuela pennants, and ten thousand Fernando Valenzuela dolls. They found their way all over the Southland, and those that didn’t were dressed up as “Danny Goodman Specials” and mailed out into the world by Danny Goodman Concessions.
Goodman worked in his Dodger Stadium office, festooned with pennants and piggy banks and his own army of yes-men—that multitude of bobbleheads—from 6:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., if there was a night game. Afternoons, he’d play cards and nap at the Friars Club. A bachelor, Goodman took his dinners at Chasen’s or the Brown Derby, whose founder departed this world in 1970 for his eternal rest at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, where the restaurateur still hobnobs for eternity with the Hollywood elite, among them Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, and Jimmy Stewart.
In 1983, at the age of seventy-four, Danny Goodman joined his Hollywood colleagues in the great beyond. Souvenir pennants flew at half-staff in every boy’s bedroom in America.
Goodman was interred at Hillside Memorial Park, where he still rubs elbows with actors and athletes. In Hillside’s own Map of the Stars—a directory called Distinguished Residents of Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary—Goodman appears alphabetically between Sid Gillman and Hank Greenberg. “He is credited with virtually inventing the sports souvenir marketing industry,” goes his entry. “Among his promotions were bobblehead ‘shaker doll’ Dodgers given away at games.”
His legacy endured, too, in Dodger Stadium’s annual Hollywood Stars game, which survived—as low-wattage
bulbs are known to do—well into the twenty-first century, long after Gilmore Field had been razed and Television City had expanded onto its former lot. There, in the 1980s, CBS erected two new soundstages, Studios 36 and 46. In the latter, on the ground where the Hollywood Stars once played, Hollywood “stars” now performed as contestants on the reality show Dancing with the Stars, whose luminaries were often obscure at best. Danny Goodman—“I’ll give you stars you’ve never heard of”—would have been pleased.
What he might have made of twenty-first-century baseball is another question entirely. Goodman lived to see “novelties” eclipse peanuts and hot dogs, as he’d predicted, and even to see Dodgers caps colonize those parts of the world that remained blissfully ignorant of the Dodgers themselves. But he departed this world before concessions became a Frankenstein’s monster—a frank-and-stein monster—that no torches or pitchforks can ever subdue.
In the new millennium, immediately after pennant and World Series victories, players pulled on souvenir caps and T-shirts designed to commemorate the very championship that was being celebrated by the pulling on of those commemorative caps and T-shirts. Those caps and T-shirts were then offered for sale to home viewers in the very next commercial break. The celebratory caps and T-shirts designed for the losing team, meanwhile, were often shipped to foreign-aid organizations, destined for citizens of developing countries, in what amounted to the ultimate Danny Goodman Special.
He didn’t make the interlocking LA on the Dodgers cap quite as famous as the conjoined NY of the Yankees, but then Goodman had helped make the Yankees’ ubiquitous merchandising machine by whispering in George Weiss’s ear all those years ago. Yankees yearbooks—introduced with the rest of the Souvenir Department in 1950—had already reached their peak of popularity by 1981, when George Steinbrenner had to withdraw fifty thousand copies from stadium stands (in his photo in that year’s edition, the Yankees owner—owing to an excess of red in the printing process—appeared to be wearing lipstick).