3.The pueblo’s full name was el Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula (the Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of the Porziúncola River). It came from the name of the Italian city where Francis of Assisi established his Franciscan religious order.
4.The island of California was said to be populated only by Amazonian women who had “beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong” and whose weapons were golden “because there was no other metal in the island than gold.” So when the Beach Boys, and Rivieras, and many other pop acts, sang relentlessly of the glowing golden sun over California and the bikini-clad girls who walked under the sun, they were merely continuing a centuries-long tradition.
5.New York Times, August 17, 1932. However, as C. Frank Zarnowski points out in his dissertation, “A Look at Olympic Costs” (Mount St. Mary’s College [MD], 1982), the official report for the 1932 Olympics included “not one sentence” of financial information about the Games.
6.Also known as the Pasadena Freeway, or State Highway 110, the Arroyo Seco Parkway is still in use today, though it’s considered outdated and somewhat dangerous.
7.One of them, a native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, named Bobby Troup, had had his songwriting career postponed for the duration while he served as the leader of the Marine Corps’ Fifty-First Battalion Band. In 1946 Troup moved his family to California to pursue a songwriting and acting career. His first effort, a song called “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” that joyfully listed the place-names on the main highway that ran at the time from the Midwest to California, captured the imagination of a nation on the move.
8.Journalists and commentators praised the new California experience almost constantly in the postwar years with descriptions like “land of promise,” a “unique” place, and a state where “old ways and traditions have their freest rein.” Krise Granat May, Golden State, Golden Youth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 11.
9.May, Golden State, Golden Youth, 13.
10.Though family lore had long suggested that Tom’s mother, Clara Farrington Fallon, had died after being beaten by her drunken husband, this central family tragedy actually had much deeper dimensions. That is, a recently discovered death certificate reveals that Clara died on August 20, 1926, at 10:30 p.m. of sepsis brought on by the self-induced abortion of what would have been the young woman’s sixth child.
11.One of these families, who became friends with his own family, were Armenian immigrants named the Deukmejians. This family’s oldest son, George, would, after finishing a law degree in 1952 and serving as an advocate in the army between 1953 and 1955, follow Fallon to California in 1955. Fallon remained friends with George Deukmejian as he began a career in California politics in the early 1960s and into the 1970s. Deukmejian would eventually become California’s thirty-fifth governor, in 1983.
12.With an area of 20,105 square miles, San Bernardino County is the largest county by area in the contiguous United States.
13.Disney signed a contract with ABC TV to make use of the back catalog of his entertainment assets by airing a weekly Disney show. In return, ABC agreed to invest in Disney’s park.
14.Morrison had been born in Utah in 1920 but moved to Southern California with his family when he was a teenager.
15.J. Gregory Payne and Scott C. Ratzan, Tom Bradley, the Impossible Dream: A Biography (Santa Monica CA: Roundtable, 1986), 4–5.
16.Bradley was one of only about a hundred black students at UCLA at the time, out of about seven thousand total students. A noted athlete who had grown up in Pasadena named Jackie Robinson would follow Bradley by enrolling at UCLA in 1940 and running track (as well as playing football, baseball, and basketball).
17.According to Bradley, Yorty was “no more than a part-time Mayor. Most of the time [he] wouldn’t arrive until mid-morning, and then he was gone by mid-afternoon.” Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 85.
18.Bernard Galm, “Interview of Thomas Bradley,” UCLA Library Oral History Collection, September 6, 1978.
19.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 111; Galm, “Interview of Thomas Bradley.”
20.Galm, “Interview of Thomas Bradley.”
6. We Were All Rookies Again
1.John Hall, “Still Bubbling,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1977.
2.He would be released before the start of the regular season.
3.Hall, “Still Bubbling.”
4.Newhan, “Now the Dodgers Know.”
5.Newhan, “Now the Dodgers Know.”
6.Newhan, “Now the Dodgers Know.”
7.Burke had a hepatitis infection, and Rodriguez was struggling with a serious shoulder injury, from which he would not recover enough to play in the Major Leagues again.
8.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 125.
9.Bill Shirley, “Everything’s Jake,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1977.
10.Bill Shirley, “Tom Lasorda Makes His First Cut—on Long Hair,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1977.
11.Bill Shirley, “Is Tom Lasorda Contagious?,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1977.
12.Don Merry, “Questions Surround Downing Signing,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1977.
13.In 1976 a straight-up Sutton-for–Tom Seaver trade with the Mets had fallen through at the last minute.
14.Don Merry, “Unhappy? Sutton Won’t Deny It,” Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1977.
15.John Hall, “Silly Season,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1977.
16.Merry, “Unhappy?”
17.In those five years, 1972 to 1976, Sutton had won 93 games, a total surpassed by only four other pitchers over the same period (Jim “Catfish” Hunter had 106 wins, Gaylord Perry 97, Luis Tiant 96, and Jim Palmer 94).
18.Garvey’s six-year contract paid the first baseman $300,000 in 1977, the highest amount on the team, just above Sutton’s $250,000 per year (for four years).
19.Don Merry, “Limp May Put Baker Out of Running,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1977.
20.“Tommy John Is Ready to Play Out His Option,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1977.
21.Don Sutton was set to earn $250,000 in 1977, while Charlie Hough was contracted for $80,000 in 1977, Doug Rau $125,000, and Tommy John $170,000.
7. The Game Has Gotten Worse
1.Hall, “Silly Season.”
2.Glenn Miller, “125 Years: Spring Training Has Evolved from Drunk-Fest into Big Business,” Naples (FL) News, February 10, 2013. Mack would go on to become a Hall of Fame manager-owner of the Philadelphia A’s.
3.“John Hurls 6 Innings in 4–3 Dodger Loss,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1977.
4.Charles Maher, “Kroc: Big Money Kills the Do-or-Die Spirit,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1977.
5.Dave Distel, “Sparky on Baseball: Think of Loyalty, Fans,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1977.
6.Hall, “Silly Season.”
7.Free agency had been impossible in baseball for years because of a contract ploy, created by National League team executives in 1879, that was known as the “reserve clause.” Because the biggest expense to ball teams in the struggling three-year-old National League at that time was player payroll, owners sought a way to keep player salaries from growing. The idea they hit on was to allow each team to “reserve” five players on its roster whom no other team could attempt to sign.
8.AP, “Silver Anniversary: Baseball Salaries Have Skyrocketed since 1975 Ruling,” Sports Illustrated, December 23, 2000, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/news/2000/12/22/free_agency_ap/ (site discontinued).
9.Distel, “Sparky on Baseball.”
10.Players didn’t object to the new “reserve clause” at first. Because teams reserved their best five players, being chosen as such was thought to be a great honor. Gradually, owners expanded the reserve practice—raising the number of reserved players to eleven in 1883, twelve in 1886, and fourteen in 1887. Also in 18
87 owners wrote the so-called reserve clause into the standard player contract for the first time. The clause stipulated, essentially, that all players were now bound to their team for their entire careers, unless the team decided otherwise. And thus, over just eight years, and before those affected could even react, the basic legal status of professional baseball players was completely transformed; owners had taken a fairly innocuous practice of “reserving” a few untouchable players on each team and, right under the noses of the players, created a system of lifetime indenture.
11.John Montgomery Ward, “Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 40, no. 21 (1887).
12.Other attempts to organize players in the first half of the twentieth century included the Players’ Protective Association in 1900 and the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America in 1912. In 1946 Robert F. Murphy formed the American Baseball Guild, the fourth attempt to establish a viable players union. Despite general support for the guild’s goals, players remained reluctant to sign on. After an attempt to unionize all the players from one small-market, low-payroll team—the Pittsburgh Pirates—went nowhere, Murphy’s guild folded after only one season.
13.Distel, “Sparky on Baseball.”
14.What is often forgotten is that the case, Flood v. Kuhn, failed on appeal in the Supreme Court in 1972. The only direct result of the case and Flood’s holdout was that it effectively ended the outfielder’s playing career.
15.Jane Leavy, Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 204.
16.The Dodgers’ overall attendance in 1965, which was the best in the league at more than 2.5 million, would fall off by nearly 1 million fans (to about only 1.6 million) in 1967, the first year after Koufax’s retirement.
17.Leavy, Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, 205.
18.Dave McNally, an aging former Oriole pitcher who had been traded against his will to Montreal at the end of the 1974 season, was also included in the eventual appeal to the arbitration panel. McNally, knowing his arm was done, had no real intention of playing again, but the players association asked him to add his name to the grievance, and he agreed. He stayed with the grievance even after baseball owners offered him a bonus of twenty-five thousand dollars just to remove his name.
19.“Messersmith, McNally: Far Away from Free Agency’s Beginnings,” The Sporting News, February 9, 1987.
20.The owners, incensed, fired Seitz and then moved to appeal the decision in federal court. They hoped to wait out Messersmith and the players association, and the case dragged into the new year. On February 4, 1976, the Seitz decision was upheld in a federal district court, and the owners appealed to a federal appeals court in St. Louis. In the meantime, with players balking at signing a new collective-bargaining agreement, the owners ordered a player lockout on March 1, putting a stop to spring training before it could even begin. The lockout would last seventeen days. On March 10, 1976, the federal court in St. Louis upheld the Seitz decision, and, with owners deciding against further appeal, Messersmith and McNally were at last free to sign with whichever team they chose. On March 18 Kuhn ended the owners’ lockout by ordering spring-training camps open.
21.Don Drysdale, the Dodgers’ great ace before Sutton, held the team record for opening-day pitching starts, with seven between 1958 and 1969. Sutton, who would pitch his sixth in 1977, may well have had his eye on that record, as well as several others held by Drysdale (such as all-time Dodger leader in wins, career strikeouts, innings pitched, and shutouts). “They are not that important because they are records,” Sutton said a day after being named opening-day starter, “but because of the man who holds them. When you think of Don Drysdale you think of endurance, longevity, intensity, and consistency. I’d like to be thought of along the same line.” Don Merry, “Sutton’s Place,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1977.
8. But You Can Never Leave
1.California’s El Dorado County today encompasses the “gold country” of the Sierra Nevada and its foothills. It is in this county where, at Sutter’s Mill, gold was “discovered” in 1848.
2.Sherley Hunter, Why Los Angeles Will Become the World’s Greatest City (Los Angeles: H. J. Mallen, 1923). Hunter was a prominent Los Angeles–based advertising copywriter.
3.Art Seidenbaum, “Implausible Dream—L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1978.
4.Without the “warmth and the reliable sun,” L.A. Times columnist Art Seidenbaum explained in 1978, “movies would never have come to settle their own fantasies here.” Seidenbaum, “Implausible Dream—L.A.”
5.Film director Roman Polanski, who came to the region in the late 1960s from his native Poland (via London), agreed with these notions. “Everything is easy here [in Los Angeles],” he said in an interview before 1969. “You want to learn karate, you can learn karate. You want to play chess, you can play chess. You want to drive racing cars, you can drive racing cars. Everything is accessible in this town.”
6.Jack Slater, “Possessed by the Hollywood Dream,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1976.
7.Harry Carr, Los Angeles—City of Dreams (New York: D. Appleton–Century, 1935), 264.
8.Seidenbaum, “Implausible Dream—L.A.”
9.Erik Davis, Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2006), 8.
10.Sometimes the frustrated California dreamer became the tragic catalyst of disaster. Cultist Krishna Venta, who claimed he’d stepped off a rocket ship from an extinct planet called Neophrates, would end up killed in a 1958 bombing likely instigated by several former followers. In the 1960s and ’70s various doomed militant groups and fringe factions thrived in California, including, most notoriously, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Manson “Family,” and Jim Jones’s People Temple.
11.In 1969 Time, even in the midst of its long, glowing feature on the California lifestyle, presciently interviewed numerous people about the area’s troublesome air quality. The reporter found one young woman who had set up a table at the Van Nuys Shopping Center with information about various clean-air advocacy groups: the Clean-Air Council, the Right to Clean Air, People Pledged to Clean Air, and Stamp Out Smog (SOS). “Right now,” she told the Time reporter, “there are 10,000 people in the state getting petitions signed against smog. The people of Southern California are madder than hell.” Meanwhile, just a few miles away in the San Fernando Valley, a woman named Joan Adkins had also been fighting smog for twelve years. “I have to put cream in my nasal passages, but sometimes my nose swells up anyway. . . . And I have to keep washing out my eyes. You know, they say that smog can affect your mental outlook, damage the brain.” “Candide Camera: In Search of the Soul,” Time, November 7, 1969.
12.A subject fictionalized in the 1974 film Chinatown, written by Los Angeles native Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski.
13.“Laboratory in the Sun: The Past as Future,” Time, November 7, 1969.
14.Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Verso, 1990), 131.
15.“Whatever Happened to California?,” Time, July 18, 1977.
16.California’s Family Law Act of 1969.
17.“Whatever Happened to California?”
18.Bernard Galm, “Interview of Thomas Bradley: Tape Number VI, Side Two,” UCLA Oral History Collection, April 13, 1979.
19.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 168. Of course, members of his press team found Bradley’s low-key approach endlessly frustrating.
20.Two years later Phyllis Bradley would be arrested for possession of marijuana and amphetamines. Later charges would include shoplifting, more drug charges, and several felony crimes. In the 1980s, after a ten-year string of arrests, Phyllis finally underwent drug treatment and began to turn her life around.
21.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 191.
9. Hollywood Stars and Blue Hard Hats
1.John Hall, “Curtain Up,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1977.
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2.Don Merry, “36,732 See Angels Lose to the Dodgers,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1977.
3.Hall, “Still Bubbling.”
4.Don Merry, “Lasorda’s Dodgers Test the Count When It Counts,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1977.
5.Don Merry, “The Dodger Image,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1977.
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