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As the curtain descended on a disappointing 1957 Dodger season, O’Malley made his biggest business decision. His decade-long effort to gain the support of elected officials to assemble land at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn, where he would have built baseball’s first dome stadium, came to an end. On October 8, 1957, the Dodgers announced they were heading to Los Angeles.
O’Malley had visited Los Angeles on just three previous occasions before relocating there (on a stopover in October 1956 en route to the Brooklyn Dodgers Goodwill Tour to Japan; in January of 1957 after he purchased a Convair 440 airplane for Dodger flights; and in May of 1957 to view possible sites to privately build a baseball stadium). In January 1958, O’Malley’s focus was where the Dodgers would play in Los Angeles come April — the Pasadena Rose Bowl, the mammoth Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum or at Wrigley Field, the home of the defunct Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels, then owned by the Dodgers.
It came as a shock to O’Malley, as well as the rest of the baseball world, that on January 28, 1958, as Campanella was driving home late from working and closing for the night his Harlem liquor store, his car slid uncontrollably off an icy patch on the road, ran directly into a telephone pole and then overturned, leaving the 36-year-old paralyzed from the neck down with two fractured vertebrae.
At that moment, Campanella’s life would change forever.
Five doctors fought feverishly through the early morning hours to save his life in a four-and-a-half hour operation at Glen Cove Community Hospital in Long Island, New York. While some might have been bitter and blamed the world for a debilitating accident, this sturdy athlete decided to fight back with all his might, going into therapy at Rusk Institute of the New York University-Bellevue Medical Center to try to return to his “normal” routine. However, all of his hard work and determination would suffer another unexpected setback.
Death stared Campanella down once again nearly one year after his first auto accident. On January 19, 1959 an air compressor separated from a truck on the Long Island Expressway, tumbled over a divider and hit the car in which he was a passenger nearly head-on. Visibly and violently shaken internally once more, Campy again refused to let anything stop him from living his life optimistically. He was determined to stay alive. His indomitable spirit and character untouched, Campanella survived the second car crash and continued his rigid rehabilitation regimen.
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Popular Dodgers Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider sign autographs for their many fans during Brooklyn’s Goodwill Tour to Japan in October-November, 1956. |
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Roy Campanella and teammate Gil Hodges wave to well-wishers after stepping off a Dodger charter flight. |
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