In September 1957 baseball’s Dodgers, who’d called Brooklyn home since 1884, and Ebbets Field since 1913, played their final games in Flatbush. They’d been World Champions just two years earlier.
Simultaneously, over in northern Manhattan, The New York Giants, champions in 1954, and at home near Coogan’s Bluff since 1883, played their final game overlooking the Harlem River.
Both teams would move three-thousand miles west to California. The Dodgers would settle in Los Angeles, first at Memorial Coliseum and then in the famed Dodger Stadium, winning the 1959 World Series, and five more in the years since.
The Giants moved to San Francisco, played their home games at the mercilessly windy Candlestick Park, before moving to a new stadium in 2000, winning three world titles in the twenty-first century.
New York would be left without a National League team to rival the cross-town Yankees for five years, until the New York Metropolitans, colloquially known as the Mets, were formed. They're winners of two world championships of their own.
In 1960 hall of fame pitcher Bob Feller, hosting a syndicated show, spoke about that last Giants baseball weekend at the Polo Grounds.
There’s an old adage that says “change is life’s only constant.” Post-War hope turned into labor strife and a baby boom, which gave rise to the most profitable radio year in history—1948—leading directly to the TV era.
The new deal was more than ten years old and an urban diaspora, guided by white flight and atomic fear, brought families to newly blossomed suburban communities and left cities wondering what the future held.
More uncertainty lay ahead. Four days into October, the USSR would launch Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth-orbiting satellite. Everybody’s lives got a little nearer, and yet a little further apart.
But, if they wanted to feel close, all they had to do was tune on a radio to a CBS affiliate Sunday afternoons as George Walsh breathed “and now” to open for Suspense. They’d perhaps remember a time when Jack Benny drove radio ratings, while his cast drove him crazy. To a time when Tuesday nights meant NBC with Fibber Mcgee and Molly, Bob Hope, and Red Skelton. When Thursdays meant Crosby, Suspense, and Burns and Allen. And to a time when Norman Corwin helped remember what brought us home.
It’s where we’re all going anyway. More specifically, it’s where we’re heading next month.
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