The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum turned 85 on Wednesday, and a birthday gift as weighty as it was generous was dispatched to Cooperstown, N.Y., by the family of legendary Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley.
Seventy back-breaking boxes of documents and photographs comprise the Walter O’Malley Archives, providing a road map of the Dodgers franchise from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Los Angeles by way of annual spring training in Vero Beach, Fla.
The cigar-chomping, unfailingly upbeat O’Malley owned the Dodgers from 1944 until he died in 1979 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2008.