After graduating from Fordham Law in 1930, Walter O’Malley worked his way up from leading the legal department of the “emerging powerhouse” Brooklyn Dodgers to eventually becoming its owner. O’Malley was the Dodgers’ vice president and secretary when the team signed Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in major league baseball, and is most famous for relocating the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles as president.
Now, O’Malley’s impressive collection of historic documents and photographs are available to scholars, researchers, and authors at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum located in Cooperstown, New York.
The collection—70 boxes in all—was donated this past summer by O’Malley’s children, Peter O’Malley and Terry O’Malley Seidler. The siblings, who took over ownership of the Dodgers after O’Malley died until 1997, said the archive represents a lifetime of their father’s work and offers great insight into Major League Baseball during his leadership. During their father’s years as owner from 1950 until his death in 1979, the Dodgers won four World Series titles and 11 National League pennants. O’Malley was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008.
“The [Dodgers] ball club was really only in the hands of two people for nearly 50 consecutive years—the first half him and the second half me,” Peter O’Malley reflected. “It’s really unusual to have the archives of the first person for 29 years in one place and to understand what was going on at that time while he was president. Now Cooperstown has nearly 50 years of responsibility—and that’s the key word, ‘responsibility’—for the Dodgers franchise, which makes up a really unique collection.”
American hero Jackie Robinson and his wife Rachel are welcomed back to Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Florida by Dodger President Walter O’Malley in March 1965. Robinson had last visited Dodgertown, the Dodgers’ longtime spring training home, in 1956, his last season as an active player. On April 15, 1947, Robinson was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era and it was for the Dodgers, recognized as leaders in integration. (Photo courtesy of walteromalley.com)
Many of the historic items in the archive assembled and curated by the O’Malley family are available to researchers for the first time in 45 years. The archive includes documentation on the Dodgers’ pioneering move to Los Angeles; details of planning and construction of Dodger Stadium; the genesis of Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida, the first fully integrated spring training facility in the south and the team’s spring training home for 61 years; and materials related to the Dodgers’ goodwill tours of Japan in 1956 and 1966.
But one artifact that may surprise people, according to O’Malley, is paperwork outlining his father’s 10-year efforts to privately fund and build a new stadium for the Dodgers in New York City.
“As Ebbets Field was getting older and older, my father wanted to build a stadium at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues [near the present-day Barclays Center]. That was his first choice,” said O’Malley, who was 21 years old when the Brooklyn Dodgers and his family ultimately moved to California in 1958.
He added, “Most critics say, ‘He wanted to go to California from the beginning,’ which is not true. I mean, why? We didn’t know anybody in California and had no friends there. It was only when he saw he couldn’t do it [in New York], that he looked elsewhere. We all wanted to stay where we were.”
Before joining the Dodgers franchise, O’Malley attended evening classes at Fordham Law, after transferring from Columbia. During the day he juggled multiple jobs, including working as a junior engineer for the City of New York Board of Transportation and as a surveyor for the City, making test borings under the East River near the sites of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the Tri-Borough Bridge.
O’Malley gained valuable legal experience during his final year at Fordham Law working in the offices of Domestic Relations Judge Peter B. Hanson, who would later become his father-in-law. He earned his law degree in 1930, passed the bar exam, and began his career as an attorney and, later, a public works contracting entrepreneur, before moving into an executive position with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization.
Said O’Malley of his father, “I know for a fact that he had great respect for the Jesuits, and I also know that he wanted to accomplish things. He wanted to go to night school while working in the daytime because he didn’t want to lose any time. So he was able to do both, which, looking back, was courageous and ambitious. It’s what he wanted to do perfectly.”
O’Malley will be posthumously inducted into the Dodgers’ Ring of Honor at the ballpark he built, Dodger Stadium, on Aug. 10 as part of Dodgers Alumni Weekend. He will become the 15th member of the team’s Ring of Honor, alongside retired players including Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Sandy Koufax, and Jackie Robinson, managers Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda, and broadcasters Jaime Jarrín and Vin Scully FCRH ’49.
Hall of Fame Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully (left) interviews Dodger President Walter O’Malley in the Dodger studio at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn for WOR-TV. O’Malley was an October 15, 1930 graduate of Fordham University School of Law, while Scully was a 1949 Fordham (Rose Hill) graduate. (Photo courtesy of walteromalley.com)
