A little slice of heaven

One in a series of stories marking the Dodgers’ 50th anniversary in L.A.

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It was a far different world the night Paul Pettit drove in 10 runs for a team called the Hollywood Stars. This was a minor league town then, with the Stars on one side of it, the original L.A. Angels on the other and oceans of bad blood between them.

The Dodgers would bring the major leagues the next year, as if the magic in baseball couldn’t come from anywhere else. But the big leagues seemed to matter most to grown-ups and politicians, two groups that should never be considered one in the same. To a kid listening to the Stars on the radio, baseball was fine just the way it was.

If anybody had asked me, I’d have remembered how Pittsburgh made Pettit the first of the $100,000 bonus babies when 100 grand was more than valet parking money. And how his left arm went bad and he reinvented himself as a cleanup hitter who wore glasses. I’d have remembered because I thought nothing was more important, and I’d have said that all the magic I needed was in Pettit’s bat.

I would have gladly confessed to the same sentiment about the Angels’ Steve Bilko even though the Stars were my team and I should have hated him reflexively. But he belted 55 home runs in 1956 and 56 in ‘57, and home runs in that quantity make willpower weak and temptation strong.

Besides, the moon-faced Bilko was an amiable, beer-loving galoot who bore a striking resemblance to a double-door refrigerator. The only time his smile disappeared was when someone asked if he had stepped on a scale lately. Said a headline in this very newspaper: “Not Even Mrs. Bilko Knows His Weight.” L.A., which had yet to embrace the thin, the gaunt and the cadaverous, loved every well-padded inch of him.

He tore up the Pacific Coast League when it ran from San Diego to Vancouver, and never was he more terrifying than at home in L.A.’s Wrigley Field. With two decks and 20,000 seats at Avalon and 42nd Street, it was modeled after its namesake in Chicago and built by the chewing-gum magnate who put his name on both ballparks. The power alleys were short, and there was a jet stream that Gene Mauch, the Angels’ second baseman from ’54 to ‘56, said once carried one of his pop-ups into the right-center-field bleachers. No wonder they filmed TV’s “Home Run Derby” at Wrigley.

They made baseball movies there too -- “Damn Yankees” and “It Happened One Spring” come to mind -- and Chuck Connors, a slugging Angels first baseman before Bilko, became “The Rifleman” on TV. But if you wanted to see celebrities, you went to Gilmore Field, the cozy, wooden home of the Hollywood Stars, hard by Farmers Market on the turf that CBS now occupies. The Stars attracted big names the way the Lakers do today -- Bing Crosby, Groucho Marx, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart. The young and scrumptious Elizabeth Taylor even took a turn as the Stars’ batgirl.

If a player poked his head in team owner Bob Cobb’s office after a game, he might find George Raft, the movie gangster, hobnobbing with the boss. (This is the same Bob Cobb who owned the Brown Derby and invented the Cobb salad.) And if the Stars looked in a certain box seat during a game, they would see a real gangster, Mickey Cohen, the scourge of the L.A. underworld.

But even with all those marquee names, the L.A. where the Stars and Angels dwelt had a small-town feel. Lou Stringer, a second baseman for both teams, sold my dad a ’56 Chevy, and Eddie Malone, who caught for both, would have done the same. Roger Bowman, a 22-game winner for the ’54 Stars, had an upholstery shop in Santa Monica, and Murray Franklin, who hit the homer that made champions of the ’49 Stars, spent the off-season selling sporting goods for J.C. Penney. When Franklin wanted to turn the garage at his Compton home into a den, his teammates helped him.

Four years later, they squared off against one another in the damnedest baseball brawl L.A. has ever seen. What began as just one of many beanball wars between the town’s teams turned nuclear when the Stars’ Ted Beard slid into third base with spikes high. The blood he spilled was Franklin’s. Old Moe was playing his first game with the Angels, but he never had to be asked twice to throw a punch, and he certainly wasn’t going to start then.

While Franklin tried to rearrange Beard’s profile, the rest of the Stars and Angels battled all over Gilmore, a donnybrook that couldn’t be stopped until 50 uniformed cops poured onto the field. Life magazine filled three pages with photos of the mayhem, and in those days Life was as big a part of the culture as the Internet is today.

It was a far gentler moment, however, that convinced me to care about baseball before the Dodgers. One night at Gilmore, Red Munger, a rough-hewn right-hander for the Stars, spotted my head of corn-silk hair in the grandstand and said, “Hiya, Whitey.” I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5, but I felt like the most important person in the world.

The wonderful thing is, I can still hear those words. They are never louder than when I go to the Pacific Coast League Historical Society’s L.A. reunion every spring. I like being around people who remember the Stars’ base-stealing Carlos Bernier, who had a temper as big as his chaw of tobacco. And there’s always a chance that Gail “Windy” Wade, the ’56 Angels’ loquacious center fielder, might make another trip out from North Carolina, still looking as if he could play both ends of a doubleheader.

No reunion is official, though, unless someone mentions Steve Bilko. He died long before his time 30 years ago this month, but he lives again when old Coast League players and fans gather. For that one day, he’s still hitting home runs, the big man with the big smile and the big belly. Everybody is young once more, and it really doesn’t matter whether the Dodgers are here or not.

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John Schulian is a former Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist and a longtime contributor to Sports Illustrated. He is the author of “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods,” a collection of his baseball writing.