Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  And America didn’t just revisit the styles and culture of the past; it also used the material to inspire new cultural production. In 1971 the stage musical Grease referenced the fads, fashions, and musical styles of the 1950s as part of a story about contemporary sexual mores. In 1973 filmmaker George Lucas—who would become widely known a few years later for another little movie—released American Graffiti, which followed a group of teenagers during a long night of cruising and listening to rock and roll in the very early 1960s. In 1974 TV followed Lucas’s lead with Happy Days, a sitcom that presented an almost surreally idealized 1950s middle-American family, the Cunninghams. The show became so popular it spawned national catchphrases, icons like the “Fonz,” and endless cultural detritus (lunch boxes, dolls, play sets, board games, comic books, trading cards, clothing, books, and so on). The 1970s also saw the resurgence of 1950s phenomena like the yo-yo, Ovaltine, and, briefly, Howdy Doody. Even the original 1950s version of the Mickey Mouse Club found enough of an audience in the flood of nostalgia to go into syndicated reruns between January 20, 1975, and January 14, 1977.

  The patriarch of the Happy Days family, Howard Cunningham, was an American ideal with wide appeal: a hardworking small businessman who ran his own hardware shop. Starting in 1976 Tom Fallon would follow Howard Cunningham’s lead. In that year Fallon bought an existing business called Cucamonga Hardware—located, appropriately enough, in Cucamonga, California, a small town located about fifty miles due east of Los Angeles—along with a partner named Nelson Hawley.1 As in Happy Days Tom Fallon was following his vision of an America in which hardworking, independent, average American citizens could go about their business without interference, putting a bounty of daily bread on the table in front of their strapping American families and otherwise living the good life.

  Far across the country, meanwhile, a humble and unknown politician—James Earl Carter Jr. of Georgia—cleverly tapped into the national nostalgia when he announced his campaign for presidency late in 1974. “We Americans are a great and diverse people,” Jimmy Carter said. “Each of you is an individual and different from all the others. Yet we Americans have shared one thing in common: a belief in the greatness of our Country. We have dared to dream great dreams for our Nation. We have taken quite literally the promises of decency, equality, and freedom. . . . Now it is time . . . for American citizens to join in shaping our Nation’s future. Now is the time for new leadership and new ideas to make a reality of these dreams.”2 Reality, of course, stood in sharp relief against the country’s wistful nostalgia for more golden times. But on TV, in music, and in the deep recesses of the public imagination of the 1970s, Detroit was still ascendant, America was still the undisputed leader of the world, Ozzie Nelson still dispensed golden nuggets of wisdom, and Mickey and Joe and Willie and Teddy Baseball still played the national game.

  That the deep and all-consuming nostalgia for the past extended to baseball in the 1970s is clear in how Americans said they viewed the game at the time. Throughout the Me Decade baseball fans remained attached to an older game and its storied stars. This attachment took a number of shapes. For one, there was the popularity of an unlikely baseball book written in 1966 by an unknown economics professor from New York University. Lawrence Ritter was a fan of the work of John and Alan Lomax, ethnomusicologists who recorded, in the 1930s and 1940s, the aging exemplars of the nation’s nearly forgotten early folk music. Ritter’s own anthropological book on baseball—called The Glory of Their Times—was conceived after the author had heard about Ty Cobb’s death in 1961 and began wondering what happened to the rest of the great baseball stars of Cobb’s era. The idea came not a moment too soon: many of the game’s heroes of the early twentieth century were—like the country’s folk singers twenty years earlier—fading away in near obscurity. Ritter logged more than seventy-five thousand miles over four years to interview players such as Rube Marquard, Wahoo Sam Crawford, and Smoky Joe Wood where they lived. The Glory of Their Times sold more than 350,000 copies. It was so popular in the 1970s that Ritter also released a vinyl album containing some of the actual recordings of the interviews, and Bud Greenspan made a documentary film version of the players’ stories in 1977.

  The craze for old baseball players spread widely into the culture. One famed baseball player of the 1940s was memorialized in a Grammy Award–winning song in 1969, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” In the song’s lines “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? The nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” Paul Simon perfectly encapsulated the national regret over lost heroes. And DiMaggio was the perfect symbol for such sentiment. Nearly universally admired for his on-field grace and exploits with the bat, DiMaggio was dubbed by journalists in 1969, on the occasion of the game’s centennial celebrations, baseball’s “greatest living player.” Fortunately for nostalgic baseball fans, for a brief, celebrated moment Joltin’ Joe returned to baseball. In 1969 he took a position as a coach for the Oakland A’s. Almost immediately, however, the elusive DiMaggio struggled with the attention that growing numbers of fans showered on him. “I think he would have really enjoyed [the A’s coaching post], if not for his notoriety,” said one of his players, Joe Rudi. “He loved coaching, he loved being around the guys and road trips and plane rides. He was a different person than when he was trying to get from the bus to the ballpark, or the bus to the hotel, and people were bugging him. They were just fans wanting his autograph, but he was just overwhelmed.” Around the same time, another all-time great—Ted Williams—took over as manager of the Washington Senators to much the same fanfare. And when Williams led the last-place Washington squad to a fourth-place finish in his first year at the post, the fanfare became a hallelujah chorus. “[The Senators’ players] started believing in him,” said Darold Knowles, an All-Star pitcher for the Senators that year, “because they knew he was Ted Williams.”3 Fans started believing as well, attending games at twice the rate in 1969 as they had the year before. Unfortunately, the Senators tumbled back to earth during the next three years of Williams’s tenure. In 1972, having moved to Texas, the team (now called the Rangers) finished in last place with a 54-100 record, and Williams hung up his spikes for good.4

  After DiMaggio and Williams finally left the game in the mid-1970s, interest in aging stars from baseball’s “golden age” remained high. Commercial television regularly trotted out former players like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, and even Joe DiMaggio to pitch products like light beer, video games, athlete’s foot spray, bowling equipment, Tab cola, and the Mr. Coffee machine. In 1974 the Baseball Hall of Fame selected Mickey Mantle for induction in his first year of eligibility—only the seventh player to be so chosen—and the Committee on Baseball Veterans, which was particularly active throughout the 1970s, added Jim Bottomley, Sam Thompson, and Negro Leaguer Cool Papa Bell to the hall. For the decade special Hall of Fame committees would select thirty-two old-time players for induction (compared to just seventeen in the 1980s), as well as an additional nine veterans from the Negro Leagues.

  Amid all this nostalgia for the baseball of old, nothing quite compared to a game-changing event that occurred in 1972. That summer the New York publishing house Harper and Row released a book by a little-known journalist named Roger Kahn. “This is a book about some young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s,” read the book’s back-cover copy, “in such places as Reading, Pennsylvania; Anderson, Indiana; Plainfield, New Jersey; Woonsocket, Rhode Island; and then went on to play for one of the most exciting professional teams that the major leagues ever fielded—the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s.” In some respects the release of Kahn’s The Boys of Summer was fortuitous, as it was perfectly timed to capitalize on fan nostalgia. In other ways, though, The Boys of Summer was its own phenomenon that encapsulated a generation’s love of baseball tradition.

  Organized into two sections, The Boys of Summer began by recounting Kahn’s memories of his Brooklyn youth and of his two years covering the Brooklyn Dodge
rs as a young reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. The second section, which took place in the 1970s present, portrayed where the great players from the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers had landed in their middle age. Chapters were devoted to each of the players as Kahn rediscovered them: some living quiet lives away from the game, some struggling with tragedy and pain, and some thriving in sports or business. Kahn’s book became an instant success and a widely acknowledged classic.5

  The Dodger teams of the 1950s may well have experienced an explosion of interest in the 1970s even had Roger Kahn not supplied the spark. Not only was the team wildly successful in those years—only its cross-league rivals the New York Yankees had more success—but the basis of the Dodgers’ winning ways, indeed the team’s essential makeup, reflected two aspects of American culture that were disappearing in the Me Decade. First, as longtime sportswriter Jack Lang put it, the Dodgers were a uniquely homespun baseball team. “There it was family,” he said. Owned by the O’Malleys since the early 1950s, the Dodgers managed their business with much the same personal flair and idiosyncrasy as a mom-and-pop hardware store. The Dodgers of the 1950s were often seen as part of the neighborhood fabric of Brooklyn. Duke Snider and a few of his teammates—including Pee Wee Reese and Carl Erskine—lived in the Bay Ridge neighborhood and would carpool together to their home games at Ebbets Field. Additionally, perhaps because of this familial feel, the team had its own particular well-structured, tradition-based system for teaching young players how to play baseball—called the “Dodger Way”—that stressed pitching, defensive fundamentals, and several intangible personal values.

  The Dodger Way had not always existed. The franchise, which had been founded in 1884, was, for many years, rather disorganized and bumbling, something of a league doormat. The team’s name, for instance, settled on in 1932 after a series of forgettable false starts—Atlantics, Grays, Bridegrooms, Superbas, and Robins—was short for Trolley Dodgers. This was a result of the fact that a confusing tangle of nine trolley lines ran on and around Flatbush Avenue outside of the team’s ballpark, Ebbets Field. As if inspired by the Dodgers’ chosen sobriquet, the years leading up to the 1940s were haphazard and futile for the Brooklyn team—only two World Series appearances, both losses, in nearly sixty years and many years spent in or near last place in the eight-team National League (NL). Even the Dodgers’ own fans—rough and crude, but not unaffectionate, Brooklynites—called the team by their own more descriptive nickname: “Dem Bums.”

  Notwithstanding the boost that Leo Durocher brought to the Dodgers, the team’s ultimate elevation as a franchise was spurred by the 1942 hiring of Branch Rickey to be the team’s general manager.6 Rickey transformed the team’s outlook and philosophy. His pronouncements, delivered with the bombast of a proselytizer—his nickname was “the Mahatma”—became legendary around the Dodger organization and around baseball. Above all else he advocated some very midcentury American values: good character, discipline, clean living, dedication, and, especially, willingness to work hard. “Sweat is the greatest solvent there is for most players’ problems,” Rickey said. “I know of no cure, no soluble way to get rid of a bad technique as quick as ‘sweat.’ . . . Make a man do it over and over again.”7

  But Rickey wasn’t just an aphorist and moralist. He was also a genius innovator. Before coming to the Dodgers Rickey helped make his previous employer the St. Louis Cardinals a perennial powerhouse by inventing the team’s “farm system” of affiliate Minor League teams. Rickey came to the Dodgers in 1943 from St. Louis, where he had developed a team that won three World Series in just over a decade. With the Dodgers Rickey would expand on his approach to developing Minor League players, growing the Dodgers’ system from four to twelve and eventually eighteen teams, and making other crucial changes. In 1947 Rickey, seeking to expand the farm system at his new club, purchased—through a one-dollar lend-lease agreement—a rapidly decaying abandoned naval air station in the city of Vero Beach, Florida. Rickey liked the site because it was isolated and could allow the team to manage the sticky racial politics of the Deep South.8 Also, with the vast barracks and nearly unlimited land on the site, Rickey knew he could build a vast spring baseball school—the Dodger Baseball School—that could focus completely on the task of churning out myriad Major League ballplayers versed on a series of principles he was already calling the “Dodger Way.”

  The first full Dodger spring-training camp in Vero Beach in the winter of 1948 welcomed an unprecedented 660 young players—far more than attended any other team’s spring-training camps at the time—and all 660 were allowed to compete for spots on the big-league team. Through the years the team’s full spring-training facility became the state-of-the-art Dodgertown, and Rickey continued innovating, encouraging the use of new tools such as batting cages, pitching machines, and batting helmets. Under Rickey’s system the Dodgers became known for their play-it-by-the-book, no-nonsense approach to baseball, but they were also among the league’s most daring teams.9 Most significantly, the Dodgers overturned the league’s de facto policy of excluding African American ballplayers by fielding a twenty-eight-year-old rookie second baseman named Jackie Robinson in 1947. Again, much credit goes to Rickey for this. With his keen eye for competitive advantage, Rickey was convinced that the African American ballplayers of the age were an untapped pool of talent that would make the Dodgers perennial champions. It was an insight that would pay immense benefits, as players like Robinson, and later Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe—and still later Joe Black, Jim Gilliam, and John Roseboro—added speed, power, and live arms to fuel the Dodger win factory through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

  As Tom Fallon could attest after having moved his family from Albany, New York, to suburban Southern California in 1953 and having reacquainted himself with the Los Angeles Dodgers after their 1958 move west, being a Dodger fan in the 1950s and ’60s meant you were near the pinnacle of all American sport. In the three decades leading up to 1977, only one other team in the league—the New York Yankees—had won more regular-season games than the Dodgers.10 Also during this period the Dodgers won four World Series, a record again surpassed only by the Yankees. Even more admirable to many beyond the wins and championships was the fact that the Dodgers won on their own merits, primarily by developing players from within the team’s system—as opposed to buying players or bullying and bilking weaker teams out of quality players. Between 1947 and 1977 the Dodgers developed more Rookies of the Year (seven) and more Cy Young Award winners for the league’s best pitching (six) than any other team. In fact, the Dodgers had more than double the number of these awards than the next-closest team.

  By the 1960s the now Los Angeles Dodgers had the best of everything: a noteworthy and unique historical legacy, a beautiful new home field in Dodger Stadium, a beautiful setting in Chavez Ravine, and plenty of fans and supporters. Moving deeper into the decade, as the country struggled through urban riots, the civil rights movement, political assassinations, and a floundering foreign war, the Dodgers continued their winning ways by constantly updating their roster with homegrown stars such as Don Drysdale, Maury Wills, Willie Davis, Wes Parker, and Sandy Koufax. Pitcher Koufax in particular was a catalyst for Dodger dominance, winning three Cy Young Awards and one MVP Award and leading the league in earned run average (ERA) for five straight seasons and in strikeouts for three. Between 1960 and 1966, during Koufax’s heyday, the Dodgers won two World Series, appeared in one other, and narrowly missed appearing in a fourth when they lost a divisional playoff game in 1962 to the San Francisco Giants.

  But the success eventually ended. The Dodgers were ill-equipped to cope when Koufax, who had struggled for several years with severe elbow troubles, announced his retirement after the 1966 World Series. In 1967 the Dodgers collapsed. They finished near the bottom of the National League in the next two seasons. It was the first two-year stretch of losing seasons for the team in thirty years.

  While the Dodgers recovered enough by the early 1970s to record winning r
ecords again, the team seemed somehow out of sync with the times. Some critics blamed the team’s struggles to regain its old magic on its dedication to the traditions of yesteryear. Even as the game, and American society, was rapidly changing around them, the Dodgers still preached the value of the Dodger Way and stood firmly by their traditions. To name just one superficial, but highly visible, example of how this dedication to tradition played out, the Dodgers were one of the few teams in the league that did not adopt the new tight-fitting pullover uniforms that became popular in the 1970s. In fact, through the decade the team’s uniform essentially remained unchanged from its first LA-era design in 1958.

  Dick Allen, a talented but flawed slugger who played one season, 1971, with the Dodgers, blamed the team’s poor finish that year specifically on its devotion to tradition. The Dodgers could have won the National League West crown in 1971, Allen suggested, but “the problem was all that Dodger Blue jive. [The organization puts] a lot of pressure on players to sign autographs and have their picture taken. They want you to visit with celebs in the clubhouse before games. Have a laugh with Don Rickles. Eat spaghetti with Sinatra. . . . It distracts from the team’s mission to win ballgames.”11 The Dodgers lost the Western Division title by one game in 1971, and Allen was traded to the White Sox in the off-season.12