Forever Blue

In his six years away at school, Walter O’Malley had changed from an earnest Boy Scout into a tough, competent, and ambitious young man. In that time New York City had been transformed too. Mayor “Red Mike” Hylan had been defeated by the flamboyant Jimmy Walker, who named a new commissioner of public markets. Bernard Patten was Edwin J. O’Malley’s opposite: a nearly invisible functionary. His low profile wasn’t unusual for the new administration. Except for the dashing police commissioner George V. McLaughlin, who once dove into the sea near Coney Island to help in a rescue, few of Walker’s men ever got a chance to share the spotlight with the flamboyant mayor.

An irregular at City Hall but a fixture at nightclubs and speakeasies, Walker was a married man whose affair with a Broadway starlet half his age was the worst-kept secret in America. He represented a hedonistic New York that dressed well, drank heavily, and was up all night. His popularity proved the predictable effects of Prohibition. Instead of drying up the nation, it drove millions of social drinkers to discover that they rather enjoyed breaking the law. As they found common cause with Walker and other sophisticates, ordinary Americans became a little less restrained, repressed, and conformist.

The change was most visible in fashion, where the nineteen yards of cotton and wool once required to cover an American woman were replaced by seven yards of silks and synthetics. Out went the rubber girdle. In came rouge and lipstick and a thousand new creams and potions. Men began wearing two-toned shoes, fedoras, and, thanks to gangsters, pin-striped suits.

Rebellion was made easier by the era’s great economic growth. New consumer-driven industries and a bull market on Wall Street made many Americans feel rich and optimistic. (To get an idea of this prosperity, consider that the number of cars on the road nearly tripled during the decade, to twenty-three million.) The wealth, new technologies, and styles had the effect of turning everyday life in a city like New York from a silent black-and-white movie into a bright Technicolor (another invention of the time) production with full sound.

Much of the color of the mid-1920s was supplied by automobile manufacturers who, thanks to a new chemical called pyroxylin, could challenge Henry Ford’s all-black offerings with models decorated in Florentine cream, Versailles violet, and other exotic hues. The sound of the twenties came from the radio, which allowed the entire country to share the same music, dramas, news, and sports. Graham McNamee’s live reports from the 1924 Democratic Convention, where 103 separate ballots were required to nominate John W. Davis, marked the moment when party politics became a glamorous media attraction. McNamee also gave America major-league baseball over the air, helping to turn the game into a national narrative with characters, plotlines, and morals. The story that baseball told the public in this period featured a hero—Babe Ruth—and a team—the Yankees—who performed so well, they made people forget about the Black Sox.

At the peak of twenties prosperity, it seemed like everyone had enough money to visit the ballpark or buy a radio to hear the games. Workers whose productivity gains were rewarded with higher wages were prodded to join the rich in the stock market through mutual funds. Stories of the windfalls made by professional moneymen and eavesdropping chauffeurs stoked dreams of wealth in every class. At the peak, when Walter O’Malley came home to New York, an unprecedented 20 percent of American households belonged to the investing class and John J. Raskob of General Motors declared, “Everybody ought to be rich.”

SUDDENLY PLANTED IN Greenwich Village, Walter O’Malley found himself at the center of a new bohemia. He sampled all that the brightly lit city had to offer, from prizefights, to Al Jolson, to avant-garde productions at the Province-town Playhouse. Kay Hanson, the girl-next-door in Amityville, accompanied him on some of his excursions to shows and restaurants, but he also went out on the town with male friends, including other Penn alumni who had flocked to the big city after graduation.

After considering his options, O’Malley decided to become a lawyer. Attorneys met the kinds of people—judges, politicians, business leaders—who could offer a young man opportunities. And the gossip that flows through law firms and courthouses could make a person rich. Backed by his father, who had gone from the public markets into real estate, O’Malley was accepted at Columbia University’s law school and in his first year commuted from an apartment on Waverly Place to classes in Morningside Heights. The faculty at Columbia was pioneering an esoteric new branch of legal thought called “realism” that made the school a prestigious center for theoretical research. O’Malley did well enough, but for the first time the realities of life interrupted his progress along a carefully plotted course.

In 1927 Kay, who had complained of a sore throat the previous fall, was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. Specialists recommended a combination of surgery and X-ray therapy. They said that the radiation would likely leave Kay infertile, and the surgery would render her unable to speak above a faint whisper. That was if she survived the operation and the cancer didn’t recur.

When Kay began treatment, she and Walter were, in their own words, “engaged to be engaged” but had not told their parents that their steady relationship was so serious. Imagining Walter without children, easy conversation, and perhaps prematurely widowed, Kay tried to break it off. When he learned of it, Edwin O’Malley also raised objections to their romance. Walter wouldn’t listen to either of them. Telling Kay “I’ll love you forever,” he saw her through the pain and exhaustion, and the devoted pair adopted Irving Berlin’s new hit “Always” as their song. Berlin had composed it just prior to marrying heiress Ellin Mackay—a marriage opposed by her family—and taking her to Europe on a widely publicized honeymoon.

Romantic as their struggle was, the songwriter and the heiress had it easier than Kay Hanson and Walter O’Malley. Though cured, Kay would never recover her voice and for the rest of her life would rely on a faint whisper, notes, and gestures to communicate. It helped that she had very expressive eyes and an engaging smile. She went back to the College of New Rochelle to finish course work on the degree she had been granted in absentia. After graduation she worked as a transcriber for the Braille Institute in New York and then enrolled at St. John’s University’s law school, intent on becoming what was a rather rare creature at that time: a woman lawyer.

In the meantime Walter left Columbia and transferred to night classes at Fordham’s law school, which was on the twenty-eighth floor of the famous Woolworth Building. Eventually the O’Malley legend would hold that he transferred because Edwin lost his fortune in the Crash of ’29 and could no longer support him. But the big stock market plunge was still two years away and Edwin was doing well enough to maintain a home in the city and hold on to his summer place on Long Island. It’s more likely that Walter, having chosen love over his father’s objections, preferred night school because it allowed him time to work, and he could pay his own way. The switch to Fordham also brought him in contact with a more practical approach to the law and a more varied group of fellow students. Fordham left it to the Columbia scholars to develop new theories of law and prepare recruits for old, established firms. Instead it served many sons of immigrants and workingmen, who trained to do the gritty work of contracts, litigation, criminal cases, and politics.

While he was at night law school, O’Malley took a job as an assistant engineer and surveyor for the city Board of Transportation, which was in the midst of building the Eighth Avenue subway line. He worked at this job for about six months, then partnered with a contractor named Thomas F. Riley in a drilling and survey business. The job often required O’Malley to labor all night long on a barge in the East River. The work saw him through the terrible economic turmoil that followed the stock market disaster of 1929, but it was physically grueling. In a December 1930 letter to his sweetheart, Kay, he explained that this duty was especially hard when a cold rain was followed by freezing temperatures and he came down with a cold: “Now I must go out on the East River in a gov’t boat & survey some broken casings—sneeze—sneeze—sneeze—and it is cold.”

Ever ambitious, O’Malley soon left Riley and entered the same line of work on his own with a firm he called O’Malley Engineering. Although the economy was grinding toward the Great Depression, public works projects continued and O’Malley won contracts to perform test borings for the Midtown Tunnel. He made so much money that he was able to maintain his Greenwich Village apartment and use the Mayflower Hotel as an occasional crash pad. O’Malley also worked with a relative who published an annual construction trade directory called the Contractor’s Registry. With all this, he did well enough in his studies that when he took the New York bar exam he ranked among the 30 percent who actually passed. (He also got some help preparing for the test from a Fordham law professor and future federal judge named Harold Medina.)

O’Malley’s schedule, filled with study, work, and social escapades, was hectic even for a young man. In between ball games and boxing matches he saw coloratura soprano Lily Pons make her American debut and Walter Hampden in his defining performance as Cyrano. But he was always careful to assure Kay that he was faithful and true. In one letter he wrote that instead of joining a party at the Carlyle Hotel, where his friend caroused with the women of Norman Bel Geddes’s production of Lysistrata, he chose to be a “good little boy” and went home “to snore.”

Though immersed in the pursuit of wealth and fun in one of the world’s most sophisticated cities, O’Malley cherished the old-fashioned romance he maintained with Kay, who by this time had decided to leave law school. In one letter he recalls that he saw her signal him with flashing car lights as she arrived at the family house in Amityville. “I couldn’t break away as Dad was in heavy conference with me. Gosh but I was disappointed.” In the same note he mentions Kay’s sister Helen, whom he nicknamed “Champ,” and how they resembled each other. “Such a complicated wooing—(I’m glad you are not twins!)”

A letter sent in April of 1931 allowed Walter to joke about his parents, presumably straitlaced and easily shocked, going to see a controversial and sensual movie called Tabu, which was a love story set in the South Pacific. But he devoted many more lines to sensitive descriptions of the setting moon and signs of spring in coastal Amityville, including birds’ nests, tulips, lilacs, schooling fish, and lavender blooming near the back door at the Hanson house.

In their private language, Walter and Kay referred to “g.t.’s,” which were “good thoughts.” He reports that he collected them in great numbers to ease the loneliness when she was not near and his shoulder would be “neglected.” He counted them before falling asleep, and reported that one night, when he gazed up at her bedroom window in Amityville, he “tossed a g.t., which stuck very tenaciously to the pane.”

By mid-July 1931, Walter and Kay were obviously committed to marrying each other despite any objections that might be made by Edwin and Alma. Walter wrote of telling the big news to a friend, who was thrilled. Weeks later a brief message scrawled in pencil on a page from a memo pad said, “Kay—Meet me at marriage bureau, municipal building, Brklyn, as soon as possible . . . look around for me.”

Finally, on Saturday, September 5, 1931, Walter and Kay were married at St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church near Times Square. Known as the Actors’ Chapel, the little church recently had been the site of Rudolph Valentino’s funeral and wake, which attracted one hundred thousand visitors. The O’Malley wedding was small and private, with just a few people looking on. His parents did not attend.

WALTER’S DISAGREEMENT WITH EDWIN and Alma over his marriage to Kay didn’t cause a permanent rift. But it certainly marked a turning point in his life. Having paid for Fordham himself, started his own business, and chosen the woman he loved over his father’s objections—“She’s the same girl I fell in love with,” he told Edwin—he was a fully independent adult.

Stubborn and sure of his own heart, Walter was the product of all that Edwin and Alma O’Malley had given him, including the love lavished on an only child, a confidence-building education, and his father’s example of a life lived with bravado and conviction. What else could they have expected of him when it came to the most important decision of his life?

After a honeymoon in Bermuda, Walter and Kay stayed at his Greenwich Village apartment for a few months while workers finished constructing the building they would move to in January. Despite the growing global financial crisis, certain Manhattan construction projects had continued apace. In midtown the Empire State Building opened in the fall of 1931, with John J. Raskob among the first tenants. Fifteen blocks to the north, the Rockefeller Center complex, the largest private building project in history, rose on a twenty-two-acre site. On the East Side a massive apartment building designed by Rosario Candela rose seventeen stories high on a quiet little street between First Avenue and the East River.

Though deplored by Frank Lloyd Wright as a graceless block of cement and brick, 2 Beekman Place, where the O’Malleys reserved an apartment on an upper floor, signified solid, upper-middle-class achievement. Their apartment was large enough to accommodate their first child—a surprise, given Kay’s cancer treatment—who arrived in May 1933. Theresa “Terry” O’Malley would be the first in the family to gain national fame when a neighbor who happened to be a photographer used her as a model in a magazine ad for Ivory soap. Of course, it was her face and not her name that became known. In the ad copy she was called Jerry.

Terry kept her mother busy while Walter, with his fresh degree and admission to the bar, built a legal practice from scratch. He rented an office in a new skyscraper called the Lincoln Building on East Forty-second Street, which was almost directly across from Grand Central Terminal. His first work involved a will for an Irish priest who had been delighted to find a familiar name from county Mayo in the phone book. Another early client was a man named Tom Anderson who was accused of rape. The case brought O’Malley to the city’s notorious central jail, called The Tombs, and required a substantial investigation of the sordid facts. After two months, during which O’Malley took depositions and dug into events, the charges were dismissed. Although this early case ended with success, criminal law would not consume much of O’Malley’s time. Instead, he would focus on civil cases, contracts, and real estate transactions.

At first glance, 1932 would seem to be the wrong time to start a business of any kind. In the summer the Dow Industrial Average sank to its lowest point in history, taking many banks and investment firms under. Bankruptcies, factory closings, and layoffs combined to create 25 percent unemployment nationwide and even worse conditions in certain communities. Buffalo, New York, for example, saw nearly 50 percent of those eager to work unable to find jobs. But hard times can create big demand for a few types of professionals, including lawyers.

“Times were very rough indeed,” recalled O’Malley decades later. “A good many professional men were actually selling apples on the street corners of New York.” However, the disputes that arise in times of economic crises require lawyers who would sort them out. The best would find more than enough work.

“Two of my very early law clients were relatives . . . They had invested in guaranteed mortgage certificates,” O’Malley said. “The companies that loaned the certificates were not able to keep up the payments to the bond and certificate holders. I got interested in seeing what could be done legally to protect the investment of the people who had these certificates. This resulted in a rather interesting law practice during those troublesome years . . . We wound up representing several of the leading banks and trust companies and a number of the larger industrial companies in the East.”

Beginning with those relatives who held mortgage securities and had come to him when their investments soured, O’Malley focused on distressed corporations and their investors, particularly those involved with real estate development. During the precrash boom, investment companies had devised a way to make risky mortgages into notes—guaranteed mortgage certificates—that were sold with the promise of high-interest payments. (A similar scheme would begin a financial crisis in 2007.) The Depression pushed so many developers into default on these notes that the bond guarantee companies couldn’t repay investors. Working with the bondholders as a class and major lenders as trustees, O’Malley would reorganize the development project, provide relief for investors, and revive the property.

Demand for this service grew as thousands of bankruptcies led to mortgage and bond defaults across the city. Moving from one case to another, Walter O’Malley and the growing number of associates in his firm developed a reputation for getting the best for clients facing very bad situations. In Brooklyn, O’Malley impressed a politically powerful judge and Fordham alumnus named Albert Conway, who once did some lawyering in the public markets. Conway rose steadily and would eventually sit as chief of the state’s highest court. In the 1930s he included O’Malley in a group of young attorneys sometimes called “Conway’s boys,” to whom he assigned various cases from the bench.

Another of Conway’s boys, attorney Charles Mylod, became one of O’Malley’s closest friends. Charlie hit it big early, becoming the main attorney for a titan of real estate, banking, and New York society named Robert Goelet. The Mylods and the O’Malleys joined with couples named McLaughlin and McCooey to form a little social group they called the Myomacs. These young couples, blessed with enough money to enjoy some of the better things life had to offer, attended the opera, organized dinner parties, and even vacationed together in the Pocono Mountains.

The most prominent member of the Myomacs was Everett McCooey, a locally famous tenor whose father, John McCooey, was the most powerful political figure in Brooklyn. After working in the infamously corrupt public markets, John McCooey had founded Brooklyn’s Madison Club, which he modeled on Tammany Hall. He used it to become the party boss of the borough, controlling patronage and politics for twenty-five years and wielding influence all the way to Washington. In his later years he was chubby and balding, with red cheeks, bright blue eyes, and a flowing white mustache. He ruled from an office where the door was never closed and he saw as many as two hundred people a day. As McCooey spoke, in a soft, low voice, each one was made to feel as if he were being let in on an important but confidential bit of information.

Of McCooey’s three sons, the musical Everett was least concerned with politics. But an association with anyone in the family, just like his friendship with Judge Conway, couldn’t have hurt Walter O’Malley. Indeed, anyone hoping to do business with the city, the borough, or in the courts would benefit from relationships with both Fordham alumni and leading Irish-American politicians, who wielded great influence. These relationships were built on mutual favors and reinforced in a never-ending cycle of dinners, fund-raisers, and social events. Few were better adapted to the customs and demands of this life than Walter O’Malley.

Whether he was sipping Dewar’s White Label at the exclusive Stork Club or tucking into a steak at the members-only Brooklyn Club, O’Malley was always ready with a smile, a story, or a joke. He could talk about current events, politics, sports, art, or the opera. With a constantly growing number of contacts in business, finance, and politics, he often possessed information that could help a friend or client. And, like the old political boss John McCooey, he had a certain twinkle in his eye and a reassuring way of making others feel as if they were being admitted into a kind of happy conspiracy. He liked to make introductions, pick up checks, and tell stories.

In certain circles where life remained gay despite the Depression, business relationships were built in the most pleasant surroundings. At Belmont Racetrack, Walter could watch the thoroughbred Deduce, owned by the wife of his friend Judge Henry Ughetta, race against horses owned by other prominent women. (Mrs. Damon Runyon had a filly named Angelic and Mrs. John Hay Whitney owned Singing Wood.) Walter played in golf tournaments put on by real estate men, joined the rich and powerful at the Waldorf-Astoria to watch the Anvil Chorus, a Brooklyn-based lampoon group, skewer the rich and powerful, and played poker in a regular floating game.

In the spring of 1935, Walter O’Malley attended a season-opening baseball game in New York. The first note of baseball in his collection of date books, O’Malley’s entry for April 23, 1935, did not include the name of the home team. On that day the Philadelphia Phillies met the Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, where sportswriter John Drebinger predicted “some 30,000 of the nation’s most virile baseball addicts” would hail the return from spring training of Casey Stengel and the hometown team. However, it’s likely that Walter went instead to Washington Heights, where the Giants and Braves would play at the Polo Grounds.

As a Bronx-born Giants fan, O’Malley would have known that the Polo Grounds was the place to be. With Babe Ruth making his first appearance in New York wearing a Braves uniform, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was rushing home from vacation to throw out the first pitch. A sellout crowd of 50,000, including boxer James J. Braddock, watched as the game went into extra innings. In the eleventh Mel Ott hit a walk-off homer that brought a shower of hats and programs onto the field.

With Ott, Carl Hubbell, and O’Malley’s favorite player, Bill Terry, the Giants had a good team that would play well through the season but finish eight and a half games out of the pennant. Although loyal fans were disappointed to have missed the World Series, at least they could look down on the rival Brooklyn Dodgers, who at seventy wins and eighty-three losses were almost irrelevant to the rest of the National League.

If O’Malley shared the sense of disdain mixed with pity that Giants fans felt for the Dodgers, his heart was about to change. He did substantial business in Brooklyn and was forging a powerful relationship with the borough’s most important banker, George V. McLaughlin of the Brooklyn Trust Company, who also happened to be deeply involved with the struggling team. Soon enough, Walter O’Malley was going to care very deeply about the health, welfare, and success of the Brooklyn baseball team.

THE SAME George V. McLaughlin who served as Mayor Jimmy Walker’s swashbuckling police commissioner, the head of the Brooklyn Trust Company resembled the tough but sophisticated men of 1930s movies. He was six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. He brushed his dark hair straight back from his forehead and had a cleft chin so strong that one reporter called it a “fighting jaw.” Rarely seen without a cigar, McLaughlin wore double-breasted suits and fancy vests cut with separate pockets for singles, fives, and tens. A gifted and aggressive negotiator, he was known for his ability to see every facet of a problem and then talk his way to a resolution that benefited his side. In the twenties, which was the age of nicknames, he came to be called “George the Fifth.”

McLaughlin’s tough image had been helpful when he took controversial stands as a police commissioner, naming the first black sergeant in city history, promoting gun control, and ordering raids on gamblers at Tammany-connected clubhouses. According to the New York Times, there was glee among the old hacks when McLaughlin resigned, because he had refused to make exceptions for politicians and built his own base of public support by joining detectives and uniform officers when they raided speakeasies, smugglers, and gambling dens.

In his decade-long tenure at the Brooklyn Trust Company, McLaughlin had doubled deposits and made the company strong. (In so doing, he joined the ranks of enemies counted by old mayor Hylan, who had remade himself as leader of the World Monetary Reform League and spent the mid-1930s railing against bankers.) During this time McLaughlin also headed the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, joined John H. McCooey on a committee to raise funds for the poor, and was nearly drafted by the anticorruption Fusion party to run for mayor. Instead the party chose La Guardia, who, after he won, named McLaughlin to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. The authority, which controlled vast funds for public works projects, was headed by Robert Moses.

A former young crusader, Moses had remade himself as a political insider. A confidant and adviser to governors and mayors, he held a variety of posts that gave him control over public projects across the state. Often relying on designs by a brilliant young architect/engineer named Emil Praeger, Moses would use the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority’s steady income from tolls to construct bridges, tunnels, highways, and other public facilities. He traded favors, sought powerful allies, and played to the public, who could read about his achievements in thousands of newspaper articles. But even in this new persona, he still disdained many of the old pols he had opposed as a young man, including the McCooey clan, whom he attacked by name in speeches that boosted La Guardia.

Moses knew George the Fifth, because both had belonged to Governor Al Smith’s inner circle in the 1920s. But while Moses had devoted himself to public work, McLaughlin had turned his ambition toward private business. The bridge authority would satisfy any desire he had for civic service, and as a side benefit he would acquire inside knowledge of projects that would affect business and property values throughout the city and in nearby counties. A bright young attorney like Walter O’Malley, who had been introduced to McLaughlin by his father, Edwin, years before, could have found no better mentor.

Between 1935 and the end of the decade, Walter O’Malley’s date books were sprinkled with meetings and meals with McLaughlin. They met often at the Brooklyn Club or at the Hotel Bossert, which was just a short walk down Montague Street from the trust company office. The hotel, which was famous for a top-floor nightspot called the Marine Roof, was mired in financial problems. O’Malley worked on this case over several years as the Bossert family went through bankruptcy.

In between sessions with McLaughlin, O’Malley served a growing list of important clients as near as Manhattan and as far away as Montreal. Included were the Episcopal bishop of Brooklyn, the National Audubon Society, and the engineering firm that built Rockefeller Center. He joined his father-in-law, children’s court judge Peter B. Hanson, on the board of directors of Swedish Hospital, and became so prominent that after settling one real estate case he got a note from a man claiming to be family asking “please remember your poor relatives and give me charge of this building.”

Still in his midthirties, and just a few years into his profession, O’Malley had climbed high. In 1938 his gross income from his legal practice was more than $100,000, which would equal $1.3 million in 2009. More impressive, however, was the wealth of relationships he had built. Besides McLaughlin, O’Malley knew, worked, and played with prominent real estate men, politicians, investors, lawyers, bankers, and judges. True to the ethnic diversity of New York, plenty of Jews and Italians were included in O’Malley’s circle, along with the Irish. And while he often represented the rich and powerful, he also did his share of work for the down-and-out. In 1940, for example, he handled a libel case for a formerly powerful assemblyman from Brooklyn named B. J. “Barney” Moran who had lost party support and been run out of office. A year later Moran died alone in a single furnished room near Flatbush Avenue.

Whether he was helping out-of-luck politicians or opportunistic real estate men, O’Malley made use of the great social skills that made him so popular at Culver and Penn. He had a big appetite for life. People liked him, and he was welcomed to become a member of the state’s oldest men’s group, the Brooklyn Club. He also became an avid deep-sea fisherman, joining the Freeport Tuna Club and competing in the annual East Coast tuna tournament with his friend Everett McCooey. In 1939 he would win the prize for biggest fish caught with light tackle, and in 1940 he and McCooey would take the overall title for Freeport.

The deep-sea fishing gave O’Malley stories to tell at the Brooklyn Club, where he often attended those rituals of male bonding called “smokers” and banquets called “beefsteaks,” where it was customary for a man to let his hair, if not his guard, down. A New York phenomenon that began in unions, political organizations, and social clubs, beefsteaks were raucous affairs where men equipped only with their fingers and deprived of napkins or tablecloths devoured endless platters of sliced and buttered tenderloin. Bread, crackers, or french fries were offered, along with a tidal wave of beer. By the 1920s more elaborate meals for the upper class—like the members of the Brooklyn Club—might have also included crab and other cuts of meat, but the greasy basics and loosened belts remained.

O’Malley was a fine banquet companion, and after just a few years he was invited to join a club-within-the-club that met in a downstairs room called the Coal Hole. (It was named after a famous tavern in London.) Known as the “Coal Holers,” this group had been created by Charles Hercules Ebbets, owner of both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the stadium that bore his name. When he died in 1925, at age sixty-six, Ebbets left them $5,000 to pay for an annual dinner on his birthday, October 29. O’Malley was asked to join upon the death of an original member, and thus came to attend an exclusive and lavish annual dinner to celebrate the life of a powerful man he most likely never met.

ALTHOUGH HE NEVER KNEW Charlie Ebbets, O’Malley surely understood that he had personified the scrappy Brooklyn spirit as fully as any public figure in the borough. Ebbets had served on the council when Brooklyn was an independent city, and he had long been an amateur sportsman. Present at the team’s founding in 1884, when they were known as the Brooklyns, Ebbets had acquired stock gradually until he became president of the local major-league baseball team in 1898. In that year the city of Brooklyn became a borough of New York City and disappeared as an independent municipality. The Brooklyns disappeared, too, as a wave of marriages moved Ebbets to call them, if ever so briefly, the Bridegrooms. Although modern brand makers would cringe at the practice, name changing was common in early baseball. The Yankees were known, at different times, as the Highlanders, the Invaders, and the Porchclimbers. The Red Sox had been the Plymouth Rocks and the Beaneaters.

The Bridegrooms became the Superbas in time to bring the 1900 pennant home to the faithful at their stadium, Washington Park. After fires damaged or destroyed other wooden ballparks around the country, Ebbets looked for a place to build a modern concrete-and-steel stadium. He quietly focused on a sparsely populated neighborhood called Pigtown, where intermediaries who served a dummy corporation secretly bought parcel after parcel. Though dominated by an ash dump and home to wandering pigs, cows, and goats, the area was close to downtown, Grand Army Plaza, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where thousands of men and women worked. It could be reached by several trolley lines and would be served by a subway that was already under construction. In early 1912, Ebbets announced he was ready to build a stadium in Pigtown that would cost $750,000 and seat thirty-five thousand.

Although it was an entirely private enterprise, the design and construction of Ebbets Field was reported in the press as if it were a grand community project, like a new bridge or, to be more precise, a cathedral. In a country with no national church, baseball had become a secular religion. Scribes turned players into mythic heroes or villains, and outcomes of games were plumbed for life lessons. When prayers were ignored, heartbreaking losses became mysteries of the church. When sore-arm pitchers suddenly recovered, fastballs were seen as minor miracles. And as part of the greater national myth, in which America was always pastoral, manly, and fair, the game came to inspire florid and patriotic oratory.

The Ebbets Field groundbreaking ceremony was a showcase for this art. Borough president Alfred E. Steers talked about the great players of the past—in this case the 1870s—as if they were gods and elevated the team from its status as an athletic squad and business to make it an emblem of the community’s identity and aspirations.

I was born in this neighborhood and every bit of the ground is dear to me, and it gives me much pleasure to be here, fans and ladies and gentlemen and see the start of this proposed magnificent ballgrounds. I tell you what I want to see and I know you all want to see it too and that is for Brooklyn to proudly take her place at the top of the baseball world

—loud cheers—

as she did in the days of old when I was a boy and used to peek through the holes in the fence.

—more cheers—

And I think Mr. Ebbets will give us the best team in the country and it will play right here in this park.

—prolonged cheers—

IF ENTHUSIASM COULD HAVE set the pace, Ebbets would have opened his stadium before September. But construction problems slowed progress, raised expenses, and forced him to sell half of his stock to a pair of wealthy brothers named Edward and Stephen McKeever. By this time Ebbets was calling his team the Robins, in honor of manager Wilbert “Uncle Robbie” Robinson. The name of the team would remain in flux for years, but eventually the Trolley Dodgers and then the shorthand version—the Dodgers—would be adopted in honor of the many lines that crisscrossed the borough and forced its citizens to be ever nimble.

When his stadium was finished in April of 1913, thirty thousand came for the opening ceremonies and an exhibition game with the Yankees. Fans who arrived at the main entrance discovered an ornate rotunda with a soaring domed ceiling, gilded ticket booths, and a white Italian marble floor inlaid with red tiles in the pattern of the stitches on a baseball. Overhead, light came from a chandelier designed to look as if it were made of bats and balls. Valet parking service was offered to the swells who came by car, while businessmen were welcomed to use public phones equipped with desks and chairs.

Before play started, a band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Charlie Ebbets helped to raise the stars and stripes on a flagpole behind center field. He then marched toward the dugout and the band struck up a popular song, “Here Comes Your Daddy Now.” Ebbets’s face broke into a grin. He was the father of big-time baseball in Brooklyn and he reveled in the role.

The opening game went well, as a home run by Casey Stengel helped give the Brooklyns a victory. And though the facilities were strained by the crowd, the stadium was a hit. The new home saw the team win pennants in 1916 and 1920, but Ebbets would never capture a world championship. In the twenties, attendance at his park generally lagged behind the numbers reported by the Giants and the Yankees. In the struggle to keep up with his competition, Ebbets invented more than a dozen special “holidays” to promote the team and draw bigger crowds, especially women and families. These gimmicks helped, but they weren’t a substitute for a winning team.

Often referred to as the Daffiness Boys by sportswriters, the Dodgers in this time were best known for bench riders who read magazines instead of watching the games, outfielders who went for their flying hats instead of the ball, and base runners who turned hits into outs. Fans thought they saw the worst when a batted ball hit outfielder Hack Wilson in the head as he argued with a heckler in the stands. Then Babe Herman set his own pants on fire by tucking a hot cigar in his pocket. By 1937 the team was so bedeviled by the basic elements of the game that manager Burleigh Grimes, declaring “It’s all in the feet,” brought in a track coach to show the boys how to run.

All of the errors and defeat earned the Dodgers another nickname, “Dem Bums,” but also endeared them to the masses of the borough who could relate to finishing second, third, or worse in life’s competitions. The Dodgers faithful heckled and berated the team, but they also loved them with a ferocity unmatched by fans anywhere. They were truly Brooklyn’s own, and the feeling was reinforced by the fact that so many of the players lived in the borough. Their kids went to local schools and their wives shopped at the corner market. They commuted to work on the same trolleys that fans rode. When Harry “Cookie” Lavagetto was bitten by a wirehaired terrier—the bite was so severe that it sent him to the hospital—it happened at a homey Brooklyn restaurant called Whither’s, not some fancy joint in Manhattan. As fixtures in the community, the players were like the town team in a midwestern village or a factory team in a New England mill town. People believed they knew them.

Brooklyn’s love for the Dodgers was genuine and, whatever the score, the game was bound to be a good show. For this reason Ebbets Field was also popular with out-of-town visitors, including many movie stars, who delighted in grandstand eccentrics like the leather-lunged, cowbell-ringing lady named Hilda Chester and a ragged band of musicians who called themselves the “Dodgers Sym-phony.” The park was also home to the immensely wealthy Mrs. Izaak Walton Killam, who was always accompanied by a uniformed servant bearing refreshments, and a champion heckler called Abie the Milkman. But while Abie had the right to criticize, because he obviously loved the team, cracks from outsiders were not tolerated.

On a summer evening in 1938, Frank Krug, a visitor from Albany, went to a bar called Pat Diamond’s in the Park Slope neighborhood. Set on the corner of Ninth Street and Seventh Avenue, Diamond’s was about a mile from Ebbets Field, where the reviled Giants had just defeated the Dodgers. The owner’s son Bill, who was tending bar, said, “The Dodgers, whoever first called them bums was right. Don’t you think so, Frank?”

Laughter followed Joyce out of the bar. He went to the post office where he worked and retrieved a pistol. Returning to the bar, Joyce killed Frank Krug with a single shot to the head and then fired on Bill Diamond, wounding him in the belly. After he was arrested, Joyce said he had reached the point where he couldn’t bear any longer the stress of rooting for the bumbling Dodgers.

FORTUNATELY FOR CHARLES H . EBBETS, the era when his team was so bad it drove loyal fans to violence came after he had died. Most would blame the disarray on the field on confusion and feuding among the owners. In a twist of fate that only the Dodgers could suffer, Ebbets’s death had been followed two weeks later by the passing of the co-owner, who had just seized control of the business. Edward J. McKeever had caught a cold at Ebbets’s funeral, taken to bed, and died of pneumonia. His brother Stephen would live to run the club for twelve years. A bit eccentric, McKeever appeared at the ballpark in a derby hat and always carried a gold-handled cane. He loved to dispense free tickets and to show off the colostomy bag that he wore after abdominal surgery. Charming as he was, McKeever couldn’t exercise much leadership over the franchise: he held only a quarter of the voting stock. The rest was divided among heirs to the two deceased partners, leaving exactly 50 percent in the hands of the Ebbets family and 50 percent with the McKeevers.

Charles Ebbets’s heirs resented the McKeevers and, in the words of one knowledgeable observer, “for a great many years it was almost impossible to do anything constructive.” Contests over control were fierce, complex, and almost continual. At one point the National League threatened a takeover if the Dodgers refused to accept a fifth board member, George Barnewall of the Brooklyn Trust Company, who could break tie votes on key decisions. Barnewall was installed and with the aid of generous loans from his bank—made when no other lender would come forward—the business was kept afloat.

During this muddling time, as the team’s performance eroded a Brooklyn fan’s patience and the Great Depression chewed on his wallet, the stadium that Ebbets built suffered the same neglect as the roster. Although the grass in the outfield still dazzled in the sunlight, in the grandstand and the rotunda paint peeled and dust piled up. Beer spills, hot dogs, and dirty restrooms gave the place a circus smell, especially on hot, humid days. Eventually the stink, on the field and in the stands, got so bad that the splintered owners group couldn’t ignore it. Leland Stanford MacPhail, a baseball executive as fiery and demanding as the Dodgers’ fans, was hired to end the misery.

The son of a wealthy banker, MacPhail went to a military academy as a boy and attended the University of Michigan’s law school, where he became friends with former major leaguer and future baseball legend Branch Rickey. They were an odd match. In those early years and, for that matter, throughout his life, MacPhail would be a profane, booze-guzzling, free-spending brawler with a powerful need to be the loudest man in any room. Rickey would cultivate the opposite image: thrifty, preachy, and extraordinarily verbose. In Rickey-ese, a man might study “a new tangent” for his life, a fellow who took his pension wasn’t retired, he was “superannuated,” and cheers from the grandstand were “ungovernable effusions.”

Despite their great difference, MacPhail’s determination and self-confidence impressed Branch Rickey. As an Army captain in World War I, MacPhail joined a group that tried to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm from a Dutch prison so he could be prosecuted by American authorities. MacPhail and company got close enough to steal the Kaiser’s ashtray before being stopped.

After the war, MacPhail got into baseball with the help of his father’s money, which was invested in the Columbus Senators, a minor-league affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals. Branch Rickey, who ran the St. Louis organization, became his baseball mentor. The Great Rotarian, as some called him, built a system for recruiting and training hundreds of youngsters to be ballplayers. Rickey pushed his program like an evangelist rounding up souls. Some of those who bought into it behaved like religious converts, even calling themselves “Rickey men.” And like any determined shepherd, Rickey made a special effort with the most wayward prospects, including MacPhail.

In 1934, Rickey recommended MacPhail for a job in the big leagues, running the Cincinnati Reds. At Cincinnati his protégé used every promotional trick he could imagine to raise attendance, even installing lights for the first night games in major-league history. Some, like the writer who said the lights were so good the ball stood out like a bald head in a steam room, approved. Others, like Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith, insisted the idea would never catch on. For MacPhail the experiment was a success because it drew fans and earned him a spot in history even if he probably borrowed the idea from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League, who had often played under a portable light system that they took along on road trips.

When he made it to Brooklyn, MacPhail tried all the things that had worked in Cincinnati. Some, like the Dodgers Knothole Gang, were practically free of real cost. By joining this club, up to ten thousand youngsters, who might grow into paying customers, would get free admission to certain games when they could fill out an otherwise thin crowd.

Other moves required more effort. MacPhail got the Brooklyn Trust Company to extend the team more credit—roughly $500,000—so he could renovate the stadium, install lights, and buy better players. An over-capacity crowd that attended the first night game roared when the big lights, called mazdas, were switched on. Before play started, they got to see another MacPhail promotion. Jesse Owens, hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, gave a couple of Dodgers a head start and almost beat them both in a hundred-yard dash. (He was nosed out by Ernie Koy.) The game itself was one for the record books, as Cincinnati rookie John Vander Meer pitched his second consecutive no-hitter.

Watching it all from on high was a contingent of sports reporters, in coats and ties, who thoroughly enjoyed one of MacPhail’s other innovations: an open bar for the press. Free drinks for thirsty reporters showed that MacPhail understood that the team needed the press to connect with paying fans. The press created and then fed the public craving for celebrities and pro sport had to compete with every other form of entertainment for attention. In New York, where three baseball teams competed for attention and ticket sales, MacPhail had to do whatever he could to keep reporters focused on the Dodgers until they could draw fans the old-fashioned way, by winning.

MacPhail’s own antics, including the occasional punch thrown in anger, helped to keep the boys on the baseball beat hanging around just so they didn’t miss anything. For the fans he created promotions like Music Appreciation Night—free tickets for anyone arriving at Ebbets with a musical instrument—and he installed one of baseball’s first organs with a gifted musician named Gladys Goodding to play it. (Goodding, who began her musical career as a piano player for silent movies, played organ for hockey games at Madison Square Garden, a job that made her available for the Ebbets gig.) To spice things up on the field, MacPhail obtained shortstop Leo “The Lip” Durocher from Branch Rickey in St. Louis.

A flashy, arrogant scoundrel with mobster friends, Durocher had been a moral rehabilitation project for Rickey. His early life in Springfield, Massachusetts, had been hard. He had practiced petty thievery, learned baseball, hustled pool, developed an appetite for finer things—money, clothes, cars—and generally avoided school. It was there that “Fuck you” and “You son of a bitch” became his catchphrases. He became so tough that as a young man he walked away from his one and only child, a daughter, and erased her so thoroughly from his life that she never appeared in his autobiography.

In Brooklyn, Durocher was reunited with his former Yankee teammate Babe Ruth, whom MacPhail had brought to Ebbets to work as a sideline coach. Once partners in debauchery, Ruth and Durocher had had a falling-out when it seemed The Lip had stolen the Babe’s watch. Durocher would forever insist the charge was false, but people in baseball generally took Ruth’s side. The Babe referred to the weak-hitting Durocher as “the all-American out.” Durocher took every chance to humiliate the aging star, right down to slapping him and calling him a baboon during a clubhouse confrontation. He gradually destroyed the Babe’s chance to become manager and got the job for himself.

Having recruited Durocher as the tough guy who was going to make the Dodgers winners, MacPhail then used Walter Lanier “Red” Barber and his silky southern voice to announce the transformation to the world. Defying an agreement among local big-league owners, who feared that putting a significant number of games on the radio would destroy attendance, MacPhail brought Barber from Cincinnati to broadcast every game, home and away. Play-by-play on the radio helped bring the entire borough into the Dodgers family.

Barber, who had once tried to become a blackface vaudeville performer, was a brilliant showman. His broadcasts became so popular that some Brooklynites would recall walking down the street on a summer day when windows were open and never missing a pitch because Barber’s voice echoed from every apartment. Having proved that the broadcasts only increased interest and brought more paying customers to Ebbets, MacPhail took the next logical step, arranging for NBC’s experimental television station W2XBS to show a Dodgers home game.

A division of the giant Radio Corporation of America, NBC was eager to make the picture technology developed by its parent company the industry standard, and had invested heavily in equipment to get lots of programs on the air. The company spent $125,000 on the world’s first mobile broadcast unit (two converted buses), which brought two cameras to Ebbets Field. When the Dodgers played the Reds on August 26, 1939, cameras positioned in the stands at Ebbets captured the action and fed the pictures to the broadcast buses. The signal was sent via cable to the Empire State Building, where an aerial attached to the side of the building spit it into the atmosphere. Those who caught the program, which carried Barber’s call for the radio, saw the first pro game ever televised. It was not, however, the first ball game ever put on the air. That honor had already gone to Princeton and Columbia universities, which had allowed broadcast of their game played at Baker Field in Philadelphia a few months earlier.

Nevertheless, the show broadcast from Ebbets, a Dodger victory over the Reds on August 26, was a success. New telephoto lenses allowed for close-ups of players in the dugouts and pitchers winding up. These views brought TV-WATCHING fans closer to the game than those who bought tickets. There was no doubt about the quality of the view or the technical challenges of the setting. Television could do baseball. It could also sell products, as Barber demonstrated with a bowl and a box of Wheaties. The big question was whether baseball could find a way to make it pay. Otherwise it would be dispatched as a threat to attendance at the ballpark and the bottom line.

Profit was MacPhail’s ultimate goal, but he was also a baseball romantic and preferred to enjoy himself and reward his friends along the way to the bank. In 1939 he returned his mentor’s many favors by giving twenty-five-year-old Branch Rickey Jr.—some called him “Twig”—an office job. That same year Ford Frick, president of the National League, brought another young man to Brooklyn to get a job with the team. A year younger than Twig, Emil “Buzzie” Bavasi had been Frick’s neighbor in the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale. After graduating from college he had accepted his mother’s offer of an expenses-paid year off. Three months into this adventure he ran into Frick, who declared the vacation over. MacPhail hired him and within weeks he was an office boy who was welcomed to chime in on such heady matters as player trades. (He nixed the acquisition of a pitcher he had faced, and clobbered, during college.) Baseball, he quickly decided, was a great business.

BY THE END OF the 1939 season, as the Coal Holers gathered once again to honor Charles H. Ebbets, everyone could see that the old man’s team was being revived by MacPhail and Durocher. Seventh in 1938, they finished third in 1939. More important, they no longer did those things that made them daffy bums. Nobody got hit by a fly ball when his head was turned. No one’s pants caught on fire. Instead, they played as hard as their fans rooted, and for the first time outdrew both the Giants and the Yankees. Nearly one million tickets were sold to Brooklyn games in 1939, a year when the average big-league team drew about 550,000. The transformation could have warmed old Ebbets in his grave.

Walter O’Malley was the youngest of those who honored Ebbets that October. The others were the departed’s contemporaries. They were not going to see much of what the future held for their community, baseball, and their friend’s team. However, a bright, younger man with his eyes and ears open would recognize the changes at hand as America shook off the Depression and might feel, in his bones, the opportunity growing in Brooklyn.

More crowded every year, the eighty square miles that was Brooklyn in 1939 boasted the largest population of the city’s boroughs. At 2.8 million, up from 1.2 million in 1890, it would have been the second-largest city in America, were it still independent. The borough was also economically strong, with two hundred miles of bustling waterfront dominated by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where at its height seventy thousand workers built ships for the Defense Department. Near the waterfront rose factories, coal yards, warehouses, and rougher neighborhoods where the members of an organized-crime gang whom the press called Murder Incorporated did much of their business. Farther from the docks stretched stable middle-class communities built along avenues and boulevards that stretched for miles in every direction.

The streets of Brooklyn stitched together what once was a region of twenty-five villages, each with its churches and shops, and remained a collection of communities with strong identities. Within these communities young families sometimes lived in ethnic enclaves. Brooklyn had a Little Syria and a Little Sweden to go with communities of blacks, Hispanics, Europeans, and others. But the borough also contained mixed areas like Crown Heights, where all religions and nationalities came together.

Most of all, the borough was as thoroughly middle class and civic minded as a major metropolitan community could be. Along with Coney Island it offered a great art museum, an academy of music, a university, and a medical school. In Brooklyn it was easy to get a great cheap meal—franks and beans at Joe’s—and one of best steaks in the world at Gage and Tollner or Peter Luger. At any of these places you might find yourself sitting next to a judge, a mobster, a factory worker, or a Dodger ballplayer and feel completely at ease.

O’Malley understood what Brooklyn was, because after the birth of his second child, a son named Peter who arrived in December 1937, he moved his family to a big apartment in a building called Albion Court on the corner of St. Marks and New York avenues in the heart of the borough. Peter’s birth, which had been preceded by several miscarriages, was such a joyous occasion that Walter sent a letter to General Gignilliat at Culver, requesting that his son be registered in the class of 1950.

Albion Court was in a neighborhood called Crown Heights, which was a fashionable area of detached homes, brownstone row houses, and graceful apartment buildings occupied by families from a broad mix of ethnic backgrounds. Within easy walking distance were several schools, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and Brower Park. Kay O’Malley’s parents lived a block away and her sister and her family were almost as close. St. Gregory’s, which became the family church, was a short walk away. With three bedrooms, the O’Malley apartment was comfortable but hardly grand. The one thing that made it different from the others in the building was a special window that jutted out from the brick face of the building, which Walter installed so that he could practice a new hobby: growing orchids.

Although his law office remained in Manhattan, Walter O’Malley’s life, like his orchids, became well rooted in Brooklyn, where he found his home, his friends, and his most important allies in business. As a symbol of this commitment he bought season tickets to the Dodgers games.

“That was a great way for entertaining clients—active or potential—and I used my seats quite effectively for that purpose,” O’Malley would recall in the 1960s. “It became generally known that you could find Walter O’Malley at a Dodger ball game in Ebbets Field almost each night.” He spoke in a deep gravelly voice and a slight accent that combined two boroughs and might be called Bronx-lyn. “Purpose” almost sounded like “poi-pus” and the word “potential” began with a strong “poh.”

In 1939, George McLaughlin asked O’Malley to represent the trust company in the reorganization of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper—the bank was a creditor—and he began attending meetings related to the financial concerns of another major trust company client, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The trust was the team’s major lender and guardian of the half interest controlled by Charles H. Ebbets’s heirs.

“The ball club owed the trust company an awful lot of money,” O’Malley would recall many years later. It was also behind in tax payments and under scrutiny from an insurance company that held a mortgage on Ebbets Field. McLaughlin called O’Malley into his office and said, “I’d like you to go over there and do a little troubleshooting and see what you can do.”