McGee: Rosalind Wyman and the Dodgers’ move to L.A.
From SABR member Bob McGee at The National Pastime Museum on May 24, 2017:
Rosalind Wyman, the woman instrumental in luring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, is at age 86 still a player, a veteran of every Democratic National Convention since 1952. Only one year after that convention, just out of USC, she ran as Rosalind Wiener for the Los Angeles City Council, walking and crisscrossing LA’s Fifth District and using her parents’ drugstore at Ninth and Western as her base.
With verve, grace, enthusiasm, spunk, and an appeal rooted in an earnestness that made people smile with the sense that she’d have the energy to do something, she crisscrossed the Wilshire Boulevard and West LA area up to the San Diego Freeway, and, aided by legions of USC students, she pulled it off. She became only the second woman elected to the LA City Council, the only other having been Estelle Lawton Lindsey, a socialist and writer elected in 1915.
It was the first year of the Eisenhower presidency. The four-level interchange was completed connecting the Hollywood, Pasadena, and Harbor freeways. Three years earlier, in the 1950 census, LA had passed Detroit to become the fourth-largest city in the nation, with a shade under 2 million people. But it was an ominous time in the City of Angels. This was the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the blacklist, and the Hollywood Ten.
Read the full article here: https://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/rosalind-wyman-trailblazer-who-reminded-o-malley-it-never-rains-california
Originally published: May 24, 2017. Last Updated: May 24, 2017.