Gill: A Brooklyn Dodgers fan who never gave up on Ebbets Field
From John Freeman Gill at the New York Times on March 27, 2020:
Nobody ever accused Rod Kennedy Jr. of thinking too small.
A Brooklyn Dodgers fan who took a beating in a Pelham, N. Y., schoolyard in the 1950s defending his team’s honor against partisans of the New York Yankees and Giants, he began making his living 35 years later by manufacturing tiny tin replicas of ballparks.
His favorite, naturally, was Ebbets Field, the Dodgers’ longtime home in Flatbush, where he saw Sandy Koufax pitch as a rookie in 1955 and where, he said, his “nervy” mother once slipped into the team’s locker room — “a room of half-naked men” — to collect autographs.
Dissatisfied with recapturing Brooklyn’s past in miniature, however, Mr. Kennedy soon enlarged his ambitions by many orders of magnitude, embarking on a quixotic quest to build a one-quarter-scale replica of Ebbets Field to house a Dodgers museum. To further his aim, he teamed up with Marty Adler, who ran the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, which had no home.
Read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/realestate/a-brooklyn-dodgers-fan-who-never-gave-up-on-ebbets-field.html
Originally published: April 8, 2020. Last Updated: April 8, 2020.