When the Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn, on a Tuesday evening 50 years ago Monday, the sadness enshrouding Ebbets Field was so impenetrable that not even a five-hit shutout by Danny McDevitt could shake it.
Setting the depressing tone, Vin Scully recalls, was the song selection of organist Gladys Goodding, whose music infused the maudlin mood.
"Gladys was a very nice lady, known to take a drink or three," the longtime Dodgers announcer says. "And Gladys showed up with a paper bag -- and there wasn't any doubt what was in it. It was too late for lunch. . . .
"If I remember correctly, the very first song she played was 'My Buddy,' a pretty down song, and it went down from there. All of us in listening to the music were aware of her mental state, and I'm sure she was dipping into the brown bag, and the music kept getting more depressing every third out.
"It really did have an effect on you. If you had any idea of songs, you knew what she was playing and you also knew what she was doing."
The official announcement that the Dodgers were moving to Los Angeles was still two weeks away, but the rumors were rife, the handwriting on the wall. Walter O'Malley, rebuffed in his effort to build a new stadium, was headed west.
"Everybody knew they were done," Scully says of the Dodgers' time in Brooklyn. "There wasn't a soul in New York that thought they were coming back."
Except one, apparently.
McDevitt, a little-known rookie left-hander on a team littered with name stars such as Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella and Gil Hodges, says he had no idea that game would be the Dodgers' Brooklyn swan song. This may explain how McDevitt, who had made his major league debut only three months earlier, effectively maintained his composure on a gloomy Sept. 24, 1957, pitching the Dodgers to a 2-0 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates in front of 6,702.
"It was just another game, as far as I knew, and when I think about it today, I can't believe that was what I thought," McDevitt, 74, says from his home in Social Circle, Ga., about 50 miles east of Atlanta. "All the older guys -- Pee Wee and Duke and those guys -- seemed to know the facts, but I didn't know.
"I couldn't believe that after working my butt off to get to Brooklyn that I would be going back to another minor league town, which is what L.A. was then."
