Popular Culture
O'Malley was mentioned several times in Danny Kaye's 1962 song tribute The D-O-D-G-E-R-S Song (Oh, Really? No, O'Malley!), which spins a tale of a fantasy game between the Dodgers and the Giants. At one point, the umpire's call goes against the home team:
- Down in the dugout, Alston glowers
- Up in the booth, Vin Scully frowns;
- Out in the stands, O'Malley grins...
- Attendance 50,000!
- So ....what does O'Malley do? CHARGE!!
Just before the St. Louis Cardinals began a series of games against the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, in 1963, the Los Angeles Times published a large cartoon, drawn by artist Pete Bentovoja, modeled on the movies about the German submarine captain. The captain is Cards' manager Johnny Keane; his "lieutenant" is Stan Musial. They wear Cardinal uniforms with naval officers' caps bearing the "St.L" emblem. While Keane and Musial are speaking, other crew members load bats, like torpedoes, into torpedo tubes; the bats have players' faces (and names and batting averages) drawn on them. Keane looks through the periscope; the inset shows a battleship with a large head of O'Malley, wearing a naval officers cap bearing the "LA" emblem and puffing a cigar. Keane: "Achtung Shtan ! I zought ve sunk sem last year?" Musial: "Yavohl, Mein Kommander, Ve vill blast zem vit bigger und better torpedoes zis zeazon!" (The Cards made a terrific drive for the pennant but finished the season six games back of the Dodgers.)
O'Malley was featured prominently in the HBO documentary film Brooklyn Dodgers: Ghosts of Flatbush, which chronicled his executive management of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers. The documentary focuses on the post World War II glory years of the franchise and presents a compelling case that O'Malley truly wanted to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn in a stadium near a railroad station, but he was unable to get the proper support from Moses.
Read more about this topic: Walter O'Malley
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)