The rhetoric got so heavy that on October 26, a full week and a half after the last game of the Series, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner suddenly demanded an apology from the Dodgers for their comments about Yankee fans. “If my fans want to pull up the grass after we win a championship,” said Steinbrenner, “that’s all right with me. I can pay for the grass. They can tear up all they want and if they want a hunk of it in their front lawn then I’m happy for them. If they want to throw toilet paper all over the place they can do that too, because we can clean it up. The fact is they didn’t hurt anybody. They were just having fun. But you’d never know that from the remarks the Dodgers made.”2
For any manager whose season ends in the ultimate disappointment, there is always the solace in the chance that next year could be the year. And certainly Lasorda had plenty of reason to be optimistic—his team still had a solid core of productive everyday players and a vaunted pitching staff. Despite the swirling frustration, a few days after the World Series Tom Lasorda had sorted his feelings out and returned to his usual bubbly self. “It’s hard to believe it’s all over and we weren’t victorious,” he said at a Chinese restaurant, fielding reporters’ questions about the next season. “We’re just going to see how the free agent draft goes. I’m sure Al (Campanis) will be doing all he can to improve the ball club. We’ll be in constant touch and we’ll both be going down to the Arizona Instructional League to look at the kids.” Unfortunately for Lasorda, however, his dreams for 1979 began to come apart almost immediately after the end of the 1978 World Series. On October 18, the same day that Lasorda ate a double order of egg rolls in front of a gaggle of reporters, Tommy John, the Dodgers’ stalwart left-hander who had won seventeen games and recorded an ERA of 3.30 in 1978, announced he was filing for free agency. At issue for John was the lingering resentment he felt at the Dodgers’ lack of interest in signing the pitcher to a longer-term contract. “We repeatedly attempted to sit down with the Dodgers last winter,” said John’s agent, Bob Cohen. “We tried to say, ‘Hey, Tommy’s two-year contract is up this year, he can become a free agent when the season ends, he wants to sign here again, let’s get a new contract out of the way so it’s off everyone’s mind. Nothing. April. May. June. They didn’t really sit down with us until July. . . . Now, of course, what we want isn’t what we wanted four or five months ago.”3
The loss of John was a definite blow, but it wasn’t the only change to the team. That is, plenty of the players who came to spring training full of hope in 1977 would be gone by the start of the 1979 season. Glenn Burke, who had been traded during the 1978 season, was now struggling on an eviscerated team in Oakland.4 Left-handed reliever Lance Rautzhan, who had appeared briefly in each of the last two World Series against the Yankees, was not included on the team’s extended forty-man roster in 1979, and his contract was purchased by the Brewers in May.5 Pitcher Hank Webb, meanwhile, who had languished on the Dodgers’ AAA team in Albuquerque in 1978, was released by the Dodgers after the season. Webb would pitch one more season, for the Class AAA Miami Amigos of the Inter-American League, before retiring to South Florida.6 And the intriguing slugger Claude Westmoreland, who had continued to show power at the plate in 1978, unfortunately remained too much of a liability in the field for the Dodgers to find a place for him.7 Though he would remain with Albuquerque for several more years, Westmoreland would never really come close to breaking into the Major Leagues.
A number of other Dodgers, middling and established veterans, would also see their Dodger careers end in 1979. Mike Garman, who had been traded by the Dodgers for a couple of low-level prospects to Montreal in mid-1978, was released by the Expos before the start of the 1979 season. Garman would kick around a couple of AAA teams in 1979 before retiring at the end of the season. Right-handed pitcher Rick Rhoden, meanwhile, whose star was once so ascendant that he had been named to the 1976 National League All-Star team, was traded in April 1979 for left-handed pitcher Jerry Reuss.8 And finally, established left-handed starter Doug Rau, who barely missed earning a spot on the National League All-Star Game in 1978, would get shut down in the second half of 1979 after injuring his shoulder. After sitting out the second half of the season, Rau would be released by the Dodgers in 1980 and play one final season a year later with the California Angels.
All the injuries, trades, retirements, and poor performances9 combined to doom Tom Lasorda’s season in 1979. Rather than enacting his revenge against the Yankees in the World Series that year, the team instead suffered its first losing campaign in the past eleven seasons.
In 1979 the great Jamaican singer Bob Marley wrote a song that many would come to see as his greatest achievement, a work that spoke volumes about overcoming the fears and uncertainties of the era. At the time that Marley wrote “The Redemption Song,” he was secretly suffering a great deal of pain and uncertainty from a recently diagnosed cancer. For Dodger watchers who were disappointed at two unjust losses to their bitter historic rival in 1978, redemption from the pain and frustration and uncertainty would certainly have been a welcome thing in 1979. But it was not to be.
In retrospect, however, it seems clear that the Dodgers’ second straight World Series loss to the New York Yankees in 1978 was something of a watershed moment. Not only would the members of the losing team remember the loss with some bitterness for many years to come, but this Series would be a signal that the times had finally changed, that the age-old traditions of baseball had been replaced by a new reality. To many 1979 is now seen as the final year of baseball’s “expansion era,” which had started in 1961. In this era a number of vast, bewildering, and unsettling structural changes took place in the game, and the general behavioral patterns of ballplayers shifted.10 Whereas the 1977 season had begun with an onslaught of worries over free agency, the 1979 season brought dawning acceptance of the changes to baseball, to its technologies and structures, and to the overall feel of the game. The designated-hitter rule, while still reviled by some throwback purists at the end of the decade, was accepted enough that several designated hitters were among the highest-paid players in baseball. The growing specialization of ballplayers—such as the pure closing reliever Bruce Sutter, who would save thirty-seven games in 1979, and Manny Mota, who would break the record for pinch hits in 1979—would scarcely be an issue. While some fans still recoiled at the replacement of age-old quaint urban ballparks with a wave of new spacious, bombastic space-age ballpark construction projects—the Astrodome in Houston (1964), Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (1965), Arlington Stadium (1965), Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati (1970), Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh (1970), Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia (1971), the Kingdome in Seattle (1976), and so on—the majority of fans hardly batted an eye. Even the imbalanced league structure—of fourteen teams in the American League and twelve in the National League, a result of the expansion in 1977—merely had the effect of increasing national interest in the sport, attendance at the ballparks, and league profits. Other changes deemed foul by traditionalists that were (mostly) accepted by 1979 were the deployment of lighter, harder bats that promoted more home run power; the use of batting gloves to aid in the gripping of these “whippier” bats; the tracking of pitch speed with newfangled radar guns; and the use of lighter but still durable catchers equipment that gave backstops more ease and mobility behind the plate. Then there were the lights. “Of prime importance,” wrote David Q. Voigt, “was the almost total acceptance of night baseball games. [With the use of] such technology baseball now became a night-time spectacle.”11
For the tradition-minded Dodgers the changes of the era had been somewhat hard to swallow. For the longest spell—starting with the collapse of the late 1960s all the way through their close-but-no-cigar championship drives of 1977 and 1978—the Dodgers sought to ignore the changing times, to turn their heads away from the increasingly flashy modern ballplayers and their odious multiyear contracts and focus simply on the Dodger Way. But Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner helped put an end to that sor
t of outmoded thinking, as did the team’s collapse during the 1979 season. In 1979 the Dodgers fell to third place in the National League West, behind the resurgent Cincinnati Reds and the up-and-coming Houston Astros. The team’s final record was 79-83, a kind of waking nightmare for Tom Lasorda. A few years after the season, he would tell a joke. “In 1979 two men met on the street,” said Lasorda, “and the first guy asked, ‘How are things?’ ‘Not so good,’ the second guy answered. ‘Business is just terrible. January was bad, February was awful, March was brutal.’ ‘You think you’ve got problems,’ the first man said. ‘My whole family was in a train wreck and they all got killed. What could be worse than that?’ ‘April.’ That about sums up 1979.” Not the funniest joke, to be sure, but a clear indication of the manager’s state of mind during a long stretch of frustration. “Throughout the season,” he continued, “every time I thought to myself, things could be worse, sure enough, they got worse.”12
The annus horribilis that was 1979 did not affect the Los Angeles Dodgers alone. In 1979 recession returned with a vengeance to California and much of the rest of the country. With inflation climbing to 11.3 percent in 1979, several industries in the United States—primarily housing, steel, and the automotive industry—went into steep decline, dragging a number of associated industries with them. In 1979, in an effort to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve Board began clamping down on the money supply, causing interest rates to rise sharply.
In Cucamonga the rising interest rates of 1979 and steadily slowing sales put Tom Fallon’s business suddenly at risk. Making matters worse, that year also saw the opening of an expansive new home improvement store called Builder’s Emporium—a corporate-owned chain store that predated later, bigger stores like Home Depot—just a mile or so north of the spot where Cucamonga Hardware had quietly survived since the late 1800s. The decline in sales at Fallon’s hardware store, which continued through the year and into 1980, presaged a likely default on the larger debt load on his recent land purchases. Realizing he would have to do something dramatic to rescue the partnership, Fallon proposed selling off the land they had purchased just a year or so before to developers who would turn the corner into a new and modern shopping center. With the profits from the sale they could find another location for their store and continue on as before. Complicating matters, unfortunately, was son Kenneth. In the spring of 1979 Ken, panicking at the downturn and spurred on by his wife, Sandy, asked to be bought out of the partnership, just as Nelson Hawley had been only a year before. Unfortunately for Tom and his remaining partner, son James, even as money had grown tighter for the business, Ken and Sandy argued that the increased value of the partnership’s assets warranted a big payoff to leave the partnership. That is, they wanted a 100 percent return on their original investment in the partnership, fifty thousand dollars, and threatened to sue if they didn’t get it.
As if the year wasn’t tough enough for everyone, 1979 also saw the end of an era with the passing of movie icon John Wayne. On June 11, 1979, the seventy-two-year-old actor succumbed, at the UCLA Medical Center, to complications from the stomach cancer that had been discovered earlier in the year. Though Wayne’s very Americanist, very patriarchal, and conservative swagger and life outlook put off a few members of the younger generation of the time—in 1982 a San Francisco–based punk band would release a song called “John Wayne Was a Nazi,” which celebrated the death of a “great white hero” who “had lived much longer than he deserved”—to many others he was the great and rugged national hero of his time.13 As the years passed, suggested the New York Times in its obituary, “Mr. Wayne was recognized as some sort of American natural resource, and his various critics . . . looked on him with more respect. Abbie Hoffman, the radical of the 1960’s paid tribute to Mr. Wayne’s singularity.”14 Wayne made his last public appearance in April 1979 at the Academy Awards, where he presented the Oscar for Best Picture and received an emotional standing ovation. “Thank you, ladies and gentleman,” Wayne had said from the stage. “That’s just about the only medicine a fella’d ever really need.”
So, in 1979, times were up and down for many around Los Angeles. A small bit of good news for the city early in the year was the capture of one of the men who were suspected of perpetrating the Hillside Strangler murders of late 1977 and early 1978. Kenneth Bianchi, a troubled drifter, was arrested in January 1979 in Bellingham, Washington, where he had fled nearly a year earlier after he and his partner began to suspect that police were closing in on them. He had crudely murdered two young women in that city but left a host of clues that led to his apprehension and his connection to the murders in California. His Hillside accomplice, an older cousin named Angelo Buono, was apprehended in October.
Even better news in 1979 occurred when Tom Wolfe at last published his big book, which fully described the ineffable qualities of the American astronauts who innovated space travel for the country. The New York Times would give The Right Stuff an unequivocally glowing review, and it would become a best seller, be made into a well-received film that would garner eight Academy Award nominations (including for Best Picture), and would win four Oscars. The success spurred Wolfe to plan future books on the same grand scale, and his efforts after the early 1980s, mostly fiction now, would become major literary events.
George Lucas would make several Star Wars sequels. In 1979 the first, called The Empire Strikes Back, would continue drawing millions of fans to movie theaters around the world. In time Lucas’s ownership of Industrial Light and Magic, his stake in groundbreaking computer animation studio Pixar, and his ownership stake of the Star Wars franchise made Lucas one of the richest men in the world. After completing his presumed last Star Wars movie, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, in 2005, a few years passed before the former auteur sold his entire company, Lucasfilms, to the Walt Disney Company for more than four billion dollars. Disney immediately began planning to produce another Star Wars movie.
Tom Bradley, meanwhile, would sign the final agreement with the International Olympics Committee in a ceremony at the White House on October 20, 1978, just two days after the Dodgers’ loss at home against the Yankees. The compromise agreement that Bradley struck with the IOC put planning in the hands of a private organization, the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, and absolved the city of all liability for costs, just as Bradley intended all along. On March 26, 1979, the LAOC made a fateful hiring, choosing a forty-one-year-old business executive and entrepreneur named Peter Ueberroth to be the president and general manager of the committee. Ueberroth, essentially, would become the ultimate arbiter for every substantive decision made regarding the organization of the Los Angeles Games in 1984. And, despite the intrusion of Cold War politics, Ueberroth would perform this task splendidly. The L.A. Olympics in 1984 ultimately not only came off with hardly a hitch, but also earned a surplus for the city of nearly $250 million. After the Games Ueberroth was celebrated as a hero, receiving the Olympic Order, being named Time’s Man of the Year in 1984, and serving as the commissioner of baseball from 1985 to 1989. In time Tom Bradley’s dream—the 1984 Summer Olympic Games—would be praised and celebrated for its obvious trappings of success. At the same time, however, some would claim the model that Ueberroth and Bradley promoted for the Olympics—of inviting a host of business interests to pay for the event through sponsorships—was the great death blow to the original idea of the Olympics. While Los Angeles may simply have saved the Olympics by bringing their excesses in line with modern realities, many around the world mourned the intrusion of corporate and industrial money in the great amateur ideal of the modern Olympics movement.
Despite the success of his Olympics dream, Tom Bradley’s career would not progress beyond the mayoral level. Twice, in 1982 and 1986, Tom Bradley ran for governor of California against George Deukmejian. Bradley lost both times. In 1982 the margin was extremely close, and for a time it looked like Bradley would pull out the victory. In poll data conducted as late as the day of the election, Bradley was
projected by various news organizations as the likely winner, but Bradley lost the election by about a hundred thousand votes (or 1.2 percent of those cast). The final results of the election would give rise to a new political term, the Bradley effect, which referred to the tendency of voters to misrepresent their true voting intention when it came to black candidates. Though Bradley would serve as mayor of Los Angeles until 1993, an unprecedented total of five terms, his legacy in that office would be somewhat tarnished by a fateful decision he had made back in 1978. His choice for chief of police, a tough, antigang hard-liner named Darryl Gates, would help create the conditions that led to the Rodney King beating in 1991 and subsequent riots in Los Angeles in 1992.
As for Tom Fallon, his fears of expensive family-rending litigation spurred him to urge that the Cucamonga partnership meet Kenneth Fallon’s demands in 1978, and the two remaining members of the partnership took out a loan against their property to cover the costs. In 1979 the partners sold the land to developers, but because of various debts and the costs related to liquidating and relocating the business the two did not realize anything close to the profit that Tom Fallon had imagined. Tellingly, around this time half of Tom Fallon’s six children would leave California. Tom’s daughter Trish would be the first to leave, heading with her husband back to his roots in rural Delaware. Tom’s two youngest sons, Patrick and Barry, would leave over the next few years, each escaping with their very young families to quiet rural spreads in the Pacific Northwest—Barry in Blue River, Oregon, and Patrick in Sequim, Washington. What they fled was what increasing numbers of observers noted about the Southern Californian pattern of growth and its resulting congestion, urban sprawl, crime, and other gritty city problems.
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