1955 Dodgers had goods to win it all

The L.A. Dodgers are as hot as the weather and Southern California is all agog about them. The atmosphere out there is similar in small ways to that which existed in Brooklyn in 1955, three years before owner Walter O’Malley moved “Dem Bums’’ to the west coast.

(Side street: You may remember, as I do, when both the Dodgers and New York Giants relocated, the Giants to San Francisco, in 1958. The Dodgers won the NL pennant the very next year, 1959, and beat the Chicago White Sox, the “Go-Go Sox,” in six games in the World Series. While a new stadium was being built in Chavez Ravine, the Dodgers played their games at Los Angeles Coliseum.)

The Dodgers had a solid core of fans in the Torrington-Winsted area in ’55, when the Dodgers finally won the World Series from the Yankees, and the joy that enveloped the borough

reached Connecticut. My own brother-in-law and life-long friend Dick Friday was a die-hard Dodger fan and I know he was as happy as any man or woman on Flatbush Avenue when they won. And just as disappointed and angry when they abandoned Ebbets Field and went west.

My 1952 THS classmate, Maureen Murphy Pugsley, remembers the 1955 World Series because one of her friends and fellow students at the College of New Rochelle was Terry O’Malley, daughter of Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley.

Mo Pugs remembered, “We were juniors in 1955. Terry was very devout and during that World Series, against the Yankees, she would go to the chapel every day, kneel and pray that the Dodgers would win. And finally her prayers were answered.”

Walter O’Malley was roundly denounced, to put it mildly, by Brooklyn fandom for making the move, especially since the Dodgers were said to be one of the most profitable teams in all of baseball. But those with only a passing interest adjudged him to be a shrewd and far-seeing businessman. Whatever. The deed was done and couldn’t be reversed. Some fans tried halfheartedly to transfer their allegiance to the west coast and root for the Dodgers, no longer “Dem Bums”, across 3,000 miles. Most times, that didn’t work. Dick Friday said, “I and my (4) brothers were all Dodger fans. After they moved I tried to stay with them for a couple of years, but I couldn’t keep up with the names, and so on. Lately, I’ve begun to favor the Yankees, which is kind of interesting because the Dodgers and Yankees were always such bitter enemies.”

In Ken Burns classic “Baseball” Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, tells how the news of the move hit her. Growing up on Long Island, she had been a passionate Dodgers fan since she was old enough to accompany her father to Ebbets Field, which was frequently.

Ms. Goodwin remembered meeting her father at the door when he came home from work on the day of the announcement, falling into his arms and crying her eyes out. However, as she described it, time went by and while she was forced to give up the Dodgers, she could not give up baseball. She discovered the Boston Red Sox and embraced them with almost as much emotion and enthusiasm as she had had for the Dodgers.

The Dodgers were an exciting, dominating team through the ‘40s and ‘50s but always came up short when they went against the Yankees in the Fall Classic. They lost to the Yanks in 1941, ’47, ’49, ’52 and ’53. But the next time they met, in ’55, Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, Roy Campanella, Gene Hermanski and Brooklyn’s good pitching prevailed. Lefty Johnny Podres earned the first ever Series MVP honor and a new Corvette by winning the third game 8-3, and the deciding seventh game, 2-0. Padres was a heck of a pitcher who would win 148 games with a 3.18 ERA over a 16 year career with (mostly) the Dodgers and two other teams.

I was in Louisiana with my bride, serving out my hitch, at the time but there were some Dodger fans on my base and they rejoiced. We followed the Series on the radio and I took part in many arguments in the Day Room.

That 1955 championship was the Dodgers’ first. In Los Angeles they have won several more. Now, in 2017, they have everyone talking about them and thinking out loud that this team, with its fabulous pitching and cool young manager, just might have the goods to go all the way. And there’s one sure thing — they’re not going to move away.