This Day in Walter O’Malley History:

  • For the second consecutive day, Walter O’Malley meets with visionary industrial designer and theater architect Norman Bel Geddes at Ebbets Field. As the Dodger Vice President and General Counsel, O’Malley was searching for answers to aging Ebbets Field and one of the options first considered was to rebuild on the present site. Bel Geddes later submitted a 1948 renovation report to determine the costs, but limited parking for 700 cars was still a major deterrent.

  • While being honored by the Cathedral Club in Brooklyn at the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel St. George, Walter O’Malley is named “Brooklyn’s Catholic Man of the Year”.

  • By a 9-0 vote, the Coliseum Commission in Los Angeles grants Walter O’Malley permission to play Dodger games at the 101,000-seat Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the 1958 and 1959 seasons. O’Malley’s so-called “3 a.m. Plan,” which came to him in the middle of the night due to lack of sleep, enabled the baseball diamond to be located on the west end of the massive Coliseum and did not remove any of the physical properties of the stadium. O’Malley pledged to pay $300,000 per annum for rent, the highest paid anywhere by a baseball team. In his personal appointment book, O’Malley writes, “Coliseum Clincher!!!!!”

  • Walter O’Malley holds a meeting regarding the potential use of Dodger Stadium as a venue for ice skating.

  • The Board of Trustees at the University of Pennsylvania names Walter O’Malley, Dodger Chairman of the Board, to a five-year term as a trustee.