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Right on the Nose. To the Dodger team, the echoing, concrete-enclosed cow pasture is just another place to play. To the Dodger president, it is the brightest achievement of a vagrant, varicolored career. For Walter O'Malley, the tortuous trail to California began in The Bronx, where he was born on Oct. 9, 1903. He was the only son of Manhattan Politico Edwin J. O'Malley, a man who could trace his ancestry back to County Mayo, and Alma Feltner O'Malley, a woman whose family background was stolidly German. At Culver Military Academy young O'Malley had his first and last brush with baseball as a player. He caught a ball on his nose, and quit. At the University of Pennsylvania he shunned athletics to become the complete politician. "I believe he was the first man ever to become president of both his junior and senior class," says a fraternity brother (Theta Delta Chi). "It was typical of him that although he didn't dance, he ran the class dances—and made money out of them."
Walter continued his studies at Fordham Law School, graduated in 1930, and got himself engaged to Kay Hanson; his childhood sweetheart. A shy, pretty girl, Kay developed a cancer of the larynx. In one of the first such operations ever performed successfully, her larynx was removed, and Kay was never able to talk again. Walter saw no reason to change any of their plans. But his father stormily forbade the marriage. "She's the same girl I fell in love with," insisted Walter. And so they were married, and have raised a close-knit family of two children—Terry, 23, an attractive, sad-eyed daughter, and Peter, 20, a husky, quiet son.
In the Depression years, Walter tried a little bit of everything. He dug artesian wells, he worked for the subway system, but nothing paid off. Even an O'Malley-written builders' guide was a financial flop. But after he decided to concentrate on the law, Walter progressed rapidly from wills and deeds to more complicated jobs—the resuscitation of hard-hit bond and mortgage companies. Soon he was senior partner in a firm of 20 lawyers, and he took on the habit of chain-smoking his cigars. He learned to take two solemn puffs before he ever answered a question, particularly questions he was tempted to answer "Yes."
Taut Ship. It was as lawyer that O'Malley first went to the Dodgers. In 1942, when Larry MacPhail resigned as general manager and went into the Army as a lieutenant colonel, O'Malley was hired as the Dodgers' attorney. He succeeded no less a personage than Wendell Willkie, and he obviously saw more opportunity in baseball than Willkie ever dreamed of. Within a short time, O'Malley was loading up heavily with Dodger stock.