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This is the story of a national institution. Institution from the Latin meaning, an organized society established for promoting any object, public or social.
The institution in question is certainly engaged in promoting. It is public and in a sense social.
It is in fact the Brooklyn Dodgers.
A professional baseball team is a collection of muscular young men with an assortment of skills of strength and coordination who dressed in nickabockers perform their duties daily in the public view.
How then did one particular collection, the Dodgers, become a national institution?
The story ranges from the sun-drenched coast of Karnasi to the rocky shores of Red Hook. The heroes are many. The tales tall and engaging.
But perhaps the key is the peculiar character of the Brooklyn fan.
The Borough of Brooklyn, a subdivision of New York City, and in its own right the third largest city of the land has spawned more followers of lost causes than the rest of the whole nation.
The Brooklyn fan in the lean days of Uncle Robbie showed up at the ballpark no matter what.
A test of a Brooklyn fan has never been devotion to a winner.
And more than that, the Dodgers have become a symbol.
Elderly ladies from Indiana leap to their feet and applaud when Brooklyn is mentioned.
Visiting Maharajas with astute public relations connections always show up behind a dugout at Abbotsfield just in time for the photographers.
It all started in Brooklyn in the 1840s.
There were a dozen teams playing the game of bass.
Shipwrights, wagoners, and carpenters dropped their tools in the afternoons and headed to the open fields to clout the ball around.
However, these teams just didn't rate.
The Gentry had their own team in Manhattan, the Nicarbacars, and they had definite ideas on just who should and who should not play baseball.
The high tones of Nicarbacars who played their games in straw boaters and fashionable, fawn-colored trousers declined to meet the brawny, brawling boys from Brooklyn.
But baseball boomed on Brooklyn Heights.
Every neighborhood incubated a team.
The Eckvards of Greenpoint, the Putnam's from Williamsburg, the Excelsiors from South Brooklyn.
Every beer hall and volunteer fire company boasted its nine.
Eventually in 1858, Brooklyn finally met Manhattan in an all-star series.
In the 1860s, a gentleman named William Arthur Cummings, hurling for the Brooklyn Stars against the Brooklyn Atlatics,
startled the opposing batters, echoed by ball players ever since, including the traditional rookie who wrote,
Dear Mom, I'll be coming home soon. They're starting to throw curveballs.
The present Brooklyn team was founded in 1883 by a trio of Charlie Byrne Real Estate, Joseph J. Doyle Boniface of a thriving gambling house in Lower Manhattan,
and Ferdinand Abel, Major Domo of a Palace of Chance on Narragansett Pier.
It was at this point that the team became known as the Dodgers, the trolley Dodgers, in honor of the spider web of street cars that tangled downtown Brooklyn.
The name has varied, but the essence of Brooklyn baseball remained.
Whether the Dodgers, the Superbors, the Bridegrooms or the Robins, the Brooklyn baseball team has always been interesting.
The first year they played in the National League under William H. McGunnigal, they won the pennant.
In 1883, a young man joined the club in the capacity of executive.
A versatile young man was Charles Hercules Ebbots, who worked his way up through the front office organization,
acquired a small portion of the stock and became eventually president of the club.
He wore a flourishing mustache and an elegant silk tie and attended every ball game shouting instructions to the manager and arguing with the fans.
There is one thing in particular that bothered Charlie Ebbots, the thought of Brooklyn fans who remained on the other side of the turnstiles,
investing their money foolishly in food and rent.
Something was done.
In the ancient and honorable section known as Flatbush, there existed four and a half acres of filled land occupied at the time by rubbish heaps, goats, tramps and other wildlife.
It was known to the neighborhood as Pigtown.
It was the year that Charles Ebbots dreamed his dream.
It took four years to get the land and another year to build a new ballpark.
In 1913, their first game was played in the new home of the Dodgers, Ebbots Field.
In that first game, there was an outfielder who made a sensational catch of a hard-hit ball.
He named Casey Stengel, who returns this week to Ebbots Field under slightly altered circumstances as manager of the New York Yankees.
There were many heroes in those early days.
Willie Keeler, who hits them where they ain't.
Knapp Rucker, who beat the Giants enough to keep the spark of hope alive in the Brooklyn breast.
And then, in 1913, Uncle Robbie came to Brooklyn.
In 1916, the Dodgers with Uncle Robbie at the helm won the pennant,
only to be mauled by the Red Sox four games out of five in the series.
In the second game, a young Boston left-hander beat Brooklyn, beat him two to one.
A promising pitcher named Babe Ruth.
It was about this story that was about the young Boston left-hander,
beat him two to one, a promising pitcher named Babe Ruth.
It was about this time that the legend of the Dodgers began to emerge.
Perhaps it was the personality of Uncle Robbie.
Perhaps it was the collective character of the team, but a definite pattern began to emerge.
There was a time in spring training in Florida when Robbie and the boys got into an argument.
And so, in the middle of the afternoon, Uncle Robbie stood on the ball field,
glove in hand, waiting for his rendezvous with destiny.
Nobody ever proved it on Casey, but next spring, Robbie traded him to Pittsburgh.
These were the years of Zach Wheaton, Dazzy Vance, and a rough spitball pitcher, Birdie Grimes.
The turnstiles were clicking merrily, and about this time, two things happened to the Dodgers.
Babe Herman and the three men on third base.
Herman was a strong young man who was to sum it up, erratic in the field and on the base paths.
It all happened in a Sunday game with the Boston Braves.
Otto Miller, a coach in the casual manner of the Brooklyn bench,
volunteered to coach the seventh inning in place of O'Neill, who was bored by the lack of traffic at third.
The bases were loaded at Bat-Babe Herman.
The pitch came in high and fast.
The ball was high, very high, but Herman, with the faith of the pure and hard, just ran.
The man on third scored.
Dazzy Vance slow-footed round at third and started for the plate.
Fuster running from first approached third, and Herman, racing behind, threatened to pass him.
Is the picture clear?
Vance running from third to home.
Fuster coming down from second with Herman at his heels.
The volunteer coach threw up his hands in horror and screamed at Herman to go back.
Unfortunately, that gentleman was too busy running to heed the words of advice.
However, Vance, always cooperative, heard the coach shouting back.
He stopped in his tracks and thundered back towards third, and everybody slid at once.
When the dust had cleared, Herman had mated.
Vance had slid back from home with Fuster pinned between them.
The Boston third baseman called for the ball and tagged everybody he could lay hands on.
He neglected Fuster, who ambled out to right field to get his glove.
The second baseman chased him around the outfield and finally tagged him on top of the head.
It's perhaps little incidents like this that have contributed to the essence of the Dodgers.
This was the golden age of the Dodgers.
These were the years when sports writer Eddie Murphy and the Sun wrote,
Westbrook Pegler, then playing the relatively innocent trade of sports writer,
listened nightly on the radio to Ernie Jones and Billy Hare, the happiness boys.
And he dubbed the Dodgers the daffiness boys.
Of course, other teams coming to Brooklyn were affected too.
There was the cardinal pitcher who was missing for two days in Brooklyn.
He showed up bleary-eyed and hung over with a blood-curdling explanation
that several Brooklyn gangsters had kidnapped him and forced large quantities of whiskey down his unwilling throat.
And it was about this time that the anguished wail of the Brooklyn faithful was heard in the land.
Time was running out for Uncle Robbie.
Occasionally, when a team is in the doldrums for a number of years,
a desperate management will try to hand the fans a new manager instead of a new team.
And so an era closed and Uncle Robbie had to go.
The new manager was Max Carey, and some of the other faces were new too.
Hack Wilson, Lefty O'Doole, Ernie Lombardi, Van Lingelmongo,
and then the winner, Bill Terry, manager of the New York Giants, made a remark
which was to echo in the halls of Flakwish.
They asked him how he thought the Dodgers would do that year.
And so they did.
In the last two games of the series, from their vantage point at the tail end of the league,
the Dodgers, with the fans echoing, Carey's unfortunate remark,
blew the Giants right out of the pen and by taking too straight.
Casey Stangl, in another attempt to divert the fans from the league standings, was brought in as manager.
And after him, Billy Grimes, the old spitball pitcher who tried to improve the team standing
by pure spirit and a belligerent attitude.
Unfortunately, what he needed was a couple of pictures in a good infield.
And in 1938, a new voice was heard in a Brooklyn uniform.
A great gloveman acquired from the Gas House gang at St. Louis, a gentleman named Leo de Rocha,
and to match him for flamboyant showmanship, a new face appeared in the front office.
Leland Stanford McFail, he brought a new deal to Brooklyn.
Larry McFail continued to keep things boiling.
The Dodgers, who had changed managers with the same easy facility
employed by the French Republic in changing premiers, now changed again.
The new incumbent, Leo de Rocha, worked the Dodgers up the third place.
New faces appeared at Abbots Field.
Freddie Fitzsimmons, Pete Reeser, Pee Wee Rees, they finished second in a year that saw de Rocha
and Cardinal Catcher Mickey Owen swap punches while a disc gruntle fan
attacked umpire George Major Curt and knocked him down.
But again the cry of the Dodger fan echoed from Bensonhurst to Coney Island.
And then in 1941, next year finally came.
It started off in spring training in Cuba.
The Dodgers were playing a team of Cuban All-Stars.
The pitches were coming high, hard and close to the head.
And Leo de Rocha got the thumb from the umpire and marched to the showers
just one step ahead of fixed bayonets and the hands of the local militia.
The pennant race went right down to the wire. The tension of the last few games
produced fistfights, bean balls and an assault with furniture
on the umpire's dressing room at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
Finally, the Dodgers clinched the pennant in Boston.
The Yankees, starting a habit they continued in recent years,
beat the Dodgers in the series.
But the good time had arrived. The Daffyness days were gone.
Brooklyn had a top club.
In all these years, baseball was called the national pastime.
But organized baseball was a little less than national.
The headman in the Brooklyn office was now Branch Rickey.
Mr. Rickey was elderly, shrewd, non-alcoholic, a strong churchgoer.
As a player, manager or executive, he never has attended a Sunday ballgame.
Branch Rickey is said to be a man who could trade the devil out of half his kingdom
in exchange for a 200-hitting infielder and a sore-arm pitcher
and make the devil throw in cash besides.
But Branch Rickey took his religion seriously. He had a conscience.
And so quietly his scouts went out through the Negro leagues,
looking for the player who would be the best man to break the line.
And finally, Jackie Robinson was signed to a Brooklyn farm contract at Montreal.
He tore up the international league and came on to Brooklyn.
Everybody knows the story after that.
Meanwhile, Mr. DeRosha had his troubles with the commissioner's office
and ended up sitting out the season while standing in Barney-Shotten,
led the boys to another pennant.
And now the skipper is Charlie Dressen.
His shrill whistle from the third base coaching line rises over the roar of the crowd,
on the field and in the clubhouse. Chuck Dressen is top man.
He leads the greatest team in Dodger history.
And now the Dodgers are in again.
The greatest team in Brooklyn history.
Peewee Reese, still the master at shortstop.
Big Gil Hodges on first. Junior Gilliam, the rookie on second.
And Roy Campanella in his greatest year behind the plate.
Snyder and Furilow filling out the outfield.
Preacher Oh and Collarskin at the head of the pitching staff.
It's a great team, but that isn't all.
The Dodgers are a business. They have stock like the gas company.
They're a professional ball team like the rest of the league.
They own real estate and they're not in business for their help.
But above all, there is something else.
Something that can't be explained as showmanship or the workings of a good press agent.
Perhaps when you get right down to it, it's the fans.
And if they do, they will be rejoicing in Brooklyn.
Across the country and around the world.
And if they don't, well...
And that's our salute to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
And that's our final program in the summer series of the All-American Sports Show.
Until we meet again, sometime, somewhere, somehow, this is Joe Hassel saying, so long.