This Day in Walter O’Malley History:

  • Walter O’Malley hosts Federal Judge Harold R. Medina and 40 lawyers, working on an 18-month old anti-trust trial of 17 banking houses, at a Dodgers-Giants game at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Judge Medina, who sat in the President’s Box with O’Malley, was a big fan of the Dodgers and was seen putting a cross-fingered hex on a Giants pitcher. According to the New York Herald-Tribune, “The judge’s day off at the ball game came about after he had suggested last month that lawyers for both sides in the case against seventeen investment banking firms might well adjourn to some ball park. Both sides promptly agreed.” O’Malley was a former law student of Medina and the judge helped to prepare him for the New York State bar exam. One of Medina’s most quoted statements is “Criticizing others is a dangerous thing, not so much because you may make mistakes about them, but because you may be revealing the truth about yourself.” New York Herald Tribune, May 29, 1952

  • The National League, meeting in Chicago, granted the New York Giants and the Dodgers permission to move to the West Coast (San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively), if the two clubs make their request before October 1, 1957 and relocate together.

  • Walter O’Malley is the featured guest on the “The Sam Yorty Show” which airs on Channel 9 in Los Angeles. The program was taped on May 24. Yorty was the Mayor of Los Angeles from 1961-73.

  • Joe King writes in his “Clouting ’Em” column in The Sporting News that Walter O’Malley said that National League President Ford Frick went to the Dodger Spring Training camp in order to have the league take control of the club in 1938 for failure to pay its bills. George V. McLaughlin of The Brooklyn Trust Company, the bank of the Dodgers, then enlisted the help of attorney Walter O’Malley to watch over the financial affairs of the team and, six years later, O’Malley became a Dodger stockholder with 25 percent ownership interests with partners Branch Rickey and Andrew Schmitz.