Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together

1 The Dream Palace of Walter O'Malley

The first time Billy Kleinsasser saw Walter O'Malley was in November of 1955, at Princeton, when O'Malley had come looking for a new ballpark. Billy Kleinsasser was twenty-six years old, a graduate student in architecture, and that fall he enrolled in a graduate seminar taught by the great architect, R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller had devised the geodesic dome, the great igloo that arched across the sky without benefit of intrusive struts and beams. Domes were the subject of the semester, specifically, the feasibility of creating a dome of the grandest scale, one that would, if done correctly, fit over a baseball stadium. This dome, however, was not Buckminster Fuller's idea. It was Walter O'Malley who had suggested to him just this sort of stadium for his Dodgers, in Brooklyn. Fuller, intrigued, enlisted his students who set about building a model for O'Malley. They worked through the fall and by Thanksgiving it was ready.

O'Malley came to Princeton with an entourage, which was to be expected; he was not a man who traveled alone. He brought an engineering friend, Emil Praeger, with whom he had been talking about a new stadium for years, and his public relations man, Red Patterson. And because O'Malley had been speaking of this stadium as a matter of great importance not only to the Dodgers and to Brooklyn but to the entire city of New York, he invited the press, who followed knowing that Walter O'Malley had a keen understanding of the nature of a good story.

It was snowing in Princeton, an early storm that O'Malley commented upon as he walked into the architecture school's laboratory. The storm, he said, was further evidence of the wisdom of the plan: bad weather would never again wash out a Dodger game, which was good for the fans and for him, too. He had calculated that he lost $200,000 for every rained out game. The savings from the dome, however, did not stop there. He explained to Fuller and his students that he stood to save an additional $21,000 for a tarpaulin large enough to cover an infield, the pro-rated salaries of twenty-one groundskeepers who pulled the tarp out and then, when the skies cleared, rolled it back up, and fifty cents to repaint every weatherworn seat in his ballpark each spring. This final savings represented one of the incidentals that especially pleased him: he told admirers of his spring training stadium at Vero Beach, Florida, that he had purposely sunk the park into the ground and surrounded it with a berm to eliminate the need for an annual paint job.

Billy Kleinsasser had never before helped design a project for a real client and was excited to be moving from the theoretical stage of his budding career to the practical. Now he watched as O'Malley approached the model stadium. It was round, and as wide as a loveseat. Fuller explained the design of the dome. The top came off and the two men peered inside. There was no grandstand; there were no seats at all, only a ball field with pegs to show where the players would stand.

"This is great. I'm just thrilled with it," O'Malley said. "I'm absolutely delighted. Let's slip off our coats."

Fuller told him that there would be no shadows, that the sun would shine through the translucent roof but would not burn the patrons. "The grass would grow greener, too," he said. "That has been proved."

"That's an important point, Bucky," O'Malley replied. "That's extremely important psychologically because baseball is traditionally an outdoor game. Bucky, what seating capacity does your model suggest?"

"Walter, we thought 100,000."

"I think 52,000 would be more practical, Bucky."

"It could be 52,000 just as easily," said Fuller.

O'Malley looked at his cigar, a prop he was never without. He smoked big Antonio y Cleopatras. He lit each fresh one from the smoldering butt of its predecessor. Wherever he went ash and smoke trailed behind him.

"Oh," he said, "the advantages are endless." He noted the absence of posts and pillars, and the unobstructed view from every seat. He proceeded with a recitation delivered at length and with such grammatical and syntactical precision that it not only strained the note-taking skills of the assembled hacks, but sounded, in print at least, as if he knew precisely what he was going to say before he ever started talking. He did this effortlessly, without benefit of notes. He was a marvelous talker.

"Well, where do we go from here?" he asked, rhetorically. The moment had come for his pitch. He had his audience, pens at the ready. "Can we purchase the land we need for a stadium? Well, the City of New York has appropriated $100,000 for the study of the Flatbush and Atlantic Avenue area in Brooklyn. Perhaps, in the solving of many problems that must be solved in that area, perhaps as an incident in the rehabilitation of that area, some land will be made available for purchase by the Brooklyn Dodgers."

But that was getting ahead of things. In the meantime, he said, he was very pleased by the work, so much so that perhaps if he were ever allowed to buy the land where he might build his stadium, it would indeed be a domed stadium, which, he added, was both "practical and economical."

As if on cue, the publicist Red Patterson returned to the morning's refrain. "This stadium would be tremendous from the air," he said. "It would be a landmark of New York."

O'Malley tossed away his cigar. "It would be big enough to enclose St. Peter's in Rome," he said, his deep baritone rising for emphasis. "It would be one of the wonders of the world."

He returned in January of 1956 to see the finished model, not R. Buckminster Fuller's, but the work of Billy Kleinsasser. While his classmates moved on to other assignments, Kleinsasser decided to make the domed stadium the final project for his degree. He took Fuller's model and added 55,000 seats, 2,000 of them in hanging boxes. He shrunk the dome: Fuller wanted it 300 feet high and 750 feet in diameter. Kleinsasser made his 550 feet in diameter and 250 feet high, which, he reasoned, was still too tall for any fly ball to reach. He added a parking garage large enough for 5,000 cars. And, as a lark, he added a tramway that would run across the top of the dome. He thought it might be fun for children.

O'Malley was pleased, so pleased that he wanted to put Billy Kleinsasser's model on display. He took it back to Brooklyn, and soon had it placed in the lobbies of banks so people could pause and see what he had in mind for the Dodgers and for Brooklyn. He did not bother asking Billy Kleinsasser's permission to do this. Kleinsasser objected. O'Malley wrote to advise him that things might be made difficult for him if he made a fuss. Kleinsasser relented and was rewarded with an invitation to a dinner at which he was seated next to Sandy Koufax, a pitcher of vast but thus far unfulfilled potential.

Billy Kleinsasser, of course, was happy that Walter O'Malley liked his stadium. Yet there was something about O'Malley and the way he talked about the ballpark that perplexed him. "He seemed a little too nice, a little too enthusiastic," Kleinsasser recalled many years later. "He didn't ask the right kinds of questions. He talked about the idea. But he didn't push." In time, Billy Kleinsasser would learn a good deal about clients, about the way they asked questions and the sorts of questions they asked. The interested ones probed.

But that day in Princeton, Walter O'Malley did not probe. And this left Kleinsasser to wonder whether the whole exercise with Fuller and the class project and his own refinements of the dome had less to do with building a stadium than with building a model that Walter O'Malley could show as evidence of his desire to build a stadium. Billy Kleinsasser recognized, however, that he was only guessing. But then Walter O'Malley, a gregarious man, a talker, an infinitely accessible sort, nonetheless often left people who believed they knew him well wondering what, precisely, he was thinking.

2 Himself

Walter Francis O'Malley was then fifty-two years old and in his manner and bearing cultivated the air of prosperity. He was thick in the middle and in the face; his jowls were so heavy they swallowed his chin. His onetime manager, the vulgar and trenchant Leo Durocher, called him "whale belly." His appearance had changed little over the years, other than in the thickening. His hair was dark and oiled, parted in the middle and combed straight back. He wore frameless glasses and double-breasted suits, the better to conceal his gut. He smoked too much and exercised too little; he golfed occasionally at Vero Beach, but mostly he gardened.

He and his wife, Kay, were approaching their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They had two children, a twenty-one-year-old daughter, Terry, and Peter, an eighteen-year-old son. They lived in the Long Island town of Amityville. The house had been his parents' summer home. O'Malley had remodeled it and relocated his family there from Brooklyn in 1944. The house stood next door to the house where Kay O'Malley had grown up and where her parents still lived. There was no fence between their yards, and the O'Malley children had had a wide field in which to run. He commuted to his office on Montague Street in Brooklyn in a big black Buick chauffeured by his driver, Tony DeMeo. Like so many of the people who used to come to his ballpark, he had moved his family from Brooklyn to the Island and went to work in a car.

He always tried to be home for dinner. The family gathered at one end of the long dining room table built from a thick, varnished piece of wood that sat on two tree stumps. Papers were piled on the other end, and that is where he worked after dinner. In the longer evenings of spring and summer, he retired with his wife to the small greenhouse on the side of the house and tende...