Editor’s note: Former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Roz Wyman died at Wednesday at 92. Wyman was the youngest person ever elected to the city council but she is best known for her role in bringing the Dodgers to Los Angeles, a move that transformed American sports and the city. This article appeared in April 2008 on the 50th anniversary of the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to the West Coast.
In a life full of defining moments, perhaps no single snapshot captures Roz Wyman, confidante to presidents, mentor to the Speaker of the House, patron of the arts, champion of all things civic, pal of Kennedys, Clintons, Sinatra and a Duke, as well as a trip to the ballpark a few years ago.
Wyman and some guests from San Francisco had settled into her front row seats at Dodger Stadium for a game with the Giants. Chavez Ravine fell silent as the public address announcer asked the crowd to rise for the national anthem when an unmistakable voice pierced the stillness.
“Don’t pitch to Barry!!!” Wyman barked at the Dodgers dugout. “Don’t pitch to Barry!!!”
Los Angeles manager Jim Tracy, of course, followed her orders. After all, if it wasn’t quite the House That Roz Built, it was certainly her idea. Besides she owned the key that opened its every door.
Her friend Sen. Dianne Feinstein calls Wyman a “pioneering force in American politics.” But it was her unwavering pursuit of the Dodgers 50 years ago where Wyman truly blazed a trail for sports and the nation to follow.
In September 1955, Wyman, a 25-year-old Los Angeles city councilwoman unknown outside the smallest of Southern California political circles, wrote her first letter to Brooklyn owner Walter O’Malley asking to meet and discuss the possibility of moving the Dodgers to the West Coast. O’Malley blew her off. Wyman refused to take no for an answer and on April 18, 1958 played their first game in Los Angeles.
“For what she did for baseball in this city,” Dodgers manager Tom Lasorda said, “they should erect a monument to her.”
Wyman’s influence, however, extends beyond the Dodgers. The move from Brooklyn, said USC sports business professor David Carter, “opened up sports on a national basis.”
Having been coaxed west by Wyman, Los Angeles County supervisor Kenneth Hahn and others, the Dodgers’ almost immediate success in Los Angeles forced an American sports industry, at the time anchored to traditional markets on the East Coast and in the Midwest, to look beyond the horizon to a truly national sports landscape that today finds the NFL and Major League Baseball in places like Seattle and Denver, the last three Stanley Cup winners in Tampa Bay, Carolina and Anaheim, and David Beckham playing soccer in Carson.
“It definitely changed the climate,” said Alan Rothenberg, CEO of the 1994 World Cup organizing committee.
It also forced a thaw in the Eastern political and business elite coolness toward a city and region long dismissed at Manhattan and inside the Beltway cocktail parties and largely ignored by Corporate America.
“A lot of people underestimate the importance the Dodgers success had in (attracting) new businesses to Southern California and the West Coast,” USC’s Carter said. “It gave a lot of businesses a real vision for relocating to the West Coast. Sports led the way. It reinforced that notion that if you could easily sustain a sports franchise on the West Coast you could also sustain a successful business there.”
After all, Los Angeles now came with a big league seal of approval.
“The Dodgers,” Wyman said, “made us a major league city.”
From concert halls to art museums to parks to charitable foundations, Wyman’s fingerprints are all over her big league city just as they were on a move that 50 years ago that reshaped a game and a region.
“She really changed Los Angeles,” said Christine Pelosi, daughter of the Speaker of the House and like her mother a long-time friend of Wyman.
Wyman, now 77, is still confronted at meetings and dinners in New York where she will forever be known as “that woman who stole the Dodgers.”
“They’ll attack me right there at the dinner table,” she said. She finds the hostility both amusing and a source of pride. Besides, she says, you have to consider the source.
“Fifty years later,” Wyman said in an interview earlier this month, “every once in a while I still think how could New York be so dumb to let those two teams (the Dodgers and Giants) leave?”
Wyman’s passion for baseball and politics and a determination to follow her convictions came naturally.
She was born Rosalind Wiener in 1930. Her parents, Oscar and Sarah, ran a drug store on Western Avenue and 9th Street in Los Angeles. Both were diehard Chicago Cubs fans and loyal supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of Wyman’s prized possessions is a photograph of her at age 2 gazing up admiringly at a portrait of Roosevelt.
Sarah Wiener was a precinct captain for Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Oscar Wiener worried mixing business with politics would cost the store customers. Sarah, however, insisted Roosevelt’s election was more important and ran her campaign operation out of the pharmacy.
Wyman’s political education continued while working on Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas’ 1950 U.S. Senate campaign against Richard M. Nixon. It was an ugly campaign best remembered for Nixon smearing Gahagan Douglas as a Communist sympathizer at a time when the Cold War burned red hot, a harbinger of dirty tricks to come. “The Pink Lady,” Nixon said. Gahagan Douglas, Nixon claimed, was “pink right down to her underwear.” Nixon won the election but Gahagan Douglas got the last word, sticking the future president—and unindicted co-conspirator—with a nickname he would never shake: Tricky Dick.
“It was horrible,” Wyman said recalling Nixon’s tactics.
“I never thought I would run for office,” continued Wyman, who graduated from USC with a degree in public administration. “I thought I would always just help others, try to get good people elected. I really wanted to help really good women candidates get elected because I really thought that was important.”
But in 1953, at 22, Wyman found herself running for city council, going door to door in Los Angeles’ 5th District, handing out some of the 35,000 3×5 inch business cards she bought at a local printer for $20.
“All I could afford,” she said.
“The cards had a checklist of the issues I was running on, my platform,” Wyman continued. “Like transportation and there would be check-off next to it. One of the check-offs was bring big league baseball to Los Angeles.”
Wyman won the election, becoming the youngest council member in Los Angeles history, the headline in one newspaper reading “IT’S A GIRL.”
“Sometimes I ask myself,” Wyman said, “why was I so tough?”
Maybe because she had to be.
“It was quite a different world back then,” Feinstein said at a 2003 ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of Wyman’s first election. “It was still very much a male club. In both Los Angeles and San Francisco, one was hard-pressed to find a women’s bathroom anywhere near the (city council) chambers.”
Undeterred Wyman wasted little time trying to make good on her campaign promise and waded into the male bastion of baseball.
The St. Louis Browns wanted to relocate to Los Angeles after the 1941 season and a major league owners vote on the move was scheduled for December 8, 1941. The vote was cancelled when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 and the idea of big league baseball in Los Angeles seemed to fade until it was rekindled by Wyman.
Wyman sensed the timing was perfect for a move. Aviation advances made travel to the West Coast reasonable. She also realized that a nation restless after World War II was already moving westward. The population of Los Angeles County in 1940 was 2.7 million. By 1950 it was 4.1 million. Major league baseball, Wyman reasoned, would accelerate that growth with companies chasing the masses west. Making it to the majors would also rid Los Angeles of its backwater reputation.
“I just thought how could we be a big league city if we didn’t have big league baseball?” Wyman said. “Everybody around the country always looked to New York. Well I wanted my city to be just as important business-wise, culturally, the arts, and in sports. That’s why I made the arts a priority and was trying to get a baseball team here. We got a big league art museum why couldn’t we get a big league team? It was also good business. We could put the stadium on the tax rolls and generate a lot of revenue for the city. For me there was a love of the game but I also thought it was a good business decision.”
So Wyman began what she later called “the battle of the century.” She was the driving force behind an Aug. 22, 1955 Los Angeles City Council telegram to O’Malley inviting him to Los Angeles. When the council still hadn’t heard from O’Malley by Sept. 1, Wyman took it upon herself to write the Dodgers owner personally. She and Councilman Edward Roybal would be in New York on city business Sept. 20, Wyman wrote, and would like meet with O’Malley.
“I feel that in time major league ball will be played here,” Wyman wrote. “We are merely desirous of speeding up the progress.”
O’Malley wouldn’t meet with them.
“I doubt very much that I could see you during the period when you will be in New York as we will be preoccupied in concluding this year’s pennant race and preparing for the World Series,” he wrote, finally responding on Sept. 7.
“I was mad,” Wyman said. “I wasn’t just ticked off, I was plain old mad. I thought he was rude. He didn’t take me seriously. He thought it was a political joke, that I wrote the letter as a political stunt. But I was serious. I couldn’t have been more serious. So I was frustrated but I just couldn’t quit. I told myself ‘Wyman, you wanted to get baseball here so why quit now?’”
She sent letters to officials with the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians while keeping O’Malley and the Dodgers firmly in her sights and her fellow councilmen on the baseball bandwagon.
When O’Malley spotted Los Angeles officials with Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith at the 1955 World Series, he decided he should keep his options open. O’Malley discreetly let Los Angeles officials know that he would talk to them after all.
At the time O’Malley still hoped to stay in Brooklyn. He was frustrated with the deteriorating state of Ebbets Field and the neighborhood surrounding it. The Dodgers fan base was also moving in increasing numbers after World War II to the Long Island suburbs. Ebbets’ limited number of parking spaces made it tough to draw those suburban fans back to the ballpark.
O’Malley, an attorney who acquired the Dodgers in 1950, wanted to build a domed stadium at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, near the Long Island rail line. But O’Malley would have to get the approval of New York City construction coordinator Robert Moses and Moses didn’t like O’Malley or his plans.
For six decades Moses was simply the most powerful man in New York.
“Robert Moses shaped New York,” Robert A. Caro wrote in The Power Broker, his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses.
He did so, Caro wrote, with “an understanding that ideas—dreams—were useless without power to transform them into reality.” At one point Moses controlled more than 20 government agencies and commissions. O’Malley was no match for him.
Moses was open to a new stadium but only in Flushing Meadows, Queens, on the site that is now home to Shea Stadium. He would never allow O’Malley to buy land in Brooklyn for his domed stadium.
Privately, O’Malley began negotiations with Los Angeles. In February 1957 he acquired Los Angeles’ Wrigley Field, home to the Pacific Coast League Angels. By Sept. 17, 1957, Wyman was able to secure an 11-3 preliminary council vote to offer O’Malley a deal in which the city gave the Dodgers 300 acres in Chavez Ravine in exchange for the club’s promise to build a 50,000-seat stadium on the site. The city would also receive Wrigley Field, valued at $2.2-million. The stadium, Wyman and the council insisted, would go on the tax rolls, generating $345,000 annually in tax revenue.
On the evening of October 7, shortly before a vote to finalize the offer to the Dodgers, Wyman was summoned to the office of Mayor Norris Poulson. Concerned about the potential embarrassment should O’Malley at such a late date reject the deal, Poulson insisted they call Brooklyn to make sure O’Malley would indeed move West. Wyman initially resisted. Eventually, O’Malley was reached. Poulson, too nervous to talk, handed Wyman, then pregnant, the telephone.
“Norrie said ‘Talk to him, talk to him’ and I said I didn’t want to talk to him,” Wyman said.
Despite spearheading the city’s bid to land the Dodgers, Wyman had never actually spoken to O’Malley. She reluctantly took the phone, going over the details of the deal.
“Ask him, ask him!” Poulson whispered frantically.
Finally, she did.
“He said ‘Mrs. Wyman, I’m very grateful but I’m a New Yorker’ and I began to sink. He said I’m not sure how successful major league baseball would be in Los Angeles and I said something like ‘Well, Mr. O’Malley, you won’t have many rain-outs.’”
O’Malley said the deal with Los Angeles was fair, but “if tomorrow I could stay in New York I would do it.”
Wyman headed back to council floor, the vote approaching.
“I was dying, petrified,” she said. “I was put in an impossible situation. I always prided myself in being truthful. One vote was teetering. So in my mind I’m going over what I would say if somebody asked the $100,000 question—did O’Malley agree he would come? And nobody asked. Nobody asked.”
After some last minute politicking by Wyman, the deal passed 10-4. The next day the Dodgers agreed to move to Los Angeles. With the Giants agreeing to follow their crosstown rivals west, major league owners gave O’Malley the green light.
The “girl” had her big league team.
“Roz has boundless amounts of energy and absolutely believes in the pursuit of her convictions, she’s a force of nature and that’s what it took,” said Christine Pelosi, author and a political consult who helps Democratic candidates prepare for congressional campaigns.
“This was a time when wives couldn’t get their own credit cards and here’s this young woman who manages to convince all these businessmen and politicians to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles,” Pelosi continued. “It’s just wonderful.”
Two weeks later Wyman climbed up the steps to O’Malley’s Convair 440 plane at Los Angeles International Airport to finally meet the Dodgers owner. O’Malley had barely stepped out the plane door when he was met by a process server.
“What’s that?” O’Malley asked.
“You’ve just been served,” Wyman said. “Mr. O’Malley just accept it. I’ll explain it later.
“Oh, that’s a great welcome to Los Angeles,” O’Malley said not entirely amused.
“It was just the beginning,” Wyman recalled.
Opponents of the Chavez Ravine deal gathered enough petition signatures to force Proposition B, a June referendum. A no vote was a rejection of the agreement between the city and O’Malley.
Wyman was back on the campaign trail trying once again to sell baseball to Los Angeles. But her opponents were well financed, bankrolled largely by C. Arnholt Smith, a San Diego businessman, who feared a Los Angeles team would hurt his own chances of landing a major league club. Wyman made her case during a five-hour June 1 “Dodgerthon” on a local television station. Two days later in the largest non-Presidential election turnout in the city’s history Proposition B won by 25,785 votes.
“I was a wreck,” Wyman said. “But the day of the vote we won a day game in Chicago. I’ve always said that’s one of the most important wins in Dodgers history. The city really pulled together.”
“Without Roz’s support, her unwavering support, her belief in my dad, in the stadium, the stadium wouldn’t be built,” said Peter O’Malley, who followed his father as Dodgers president in 1970.
The night before Dodgers Stadium’s first Opening Day in 1962 Wyman was among those invited to a dinner at the Stadium Club. O’Malley asked her to come early alone. For a while they sat in O’Malley’s stadium office and reminisced. He thanked her for all her work and then invited her to walk outside. As they looked down on an empty stadium aglow in the dusk the organ began playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
O’Malley turned to Wyman and smiled.
“That’s for you,” he said.
Wyman claims she is slowing down, although her friends don’t see it. She remains a mover and shaker in the Democratic Party and active in a series of civic causes and foundations.
“She’s so young at heart and that’s really the spirit of baseball, renewal,” Pelosi said. “Each spring everybody gets renewed, no one more so than Roz.”
Her life is filled with photos and mementos from the Kennedys, the Pelosis and Clintons. It is, however, another family’s heirloom that Wyman holds dearest.
When Dodger Stadium was built, two master keys were made that opened every door. O’Malley kept one key. Days after O’Malley’s death in 1979, Wyman received a letter from his children, Peter and Terry. She wept as she removed its contents.
It was only right, the O’Malley children wrote, that their father’s key go to the woman who opened the West for baseball and so much more.
RELATED:
Roz Wyman, LA political legend who helped bring Dodgers and Lakers to city, dies at 92
Alexander: Roz Wyman is still the Dodgers’ No. 1 fan