Every Brooklynite of a certain age understands that Walter O’Malley and Walter O’Malley alone is responsible for breaking the hearts of every borough resident and ripping the soul out of Brooklyn when he moved our beloved Dodgers 3,000 miles away.
So it is clear that today’s guest on Brooklyn Paper Radio is no Brooklynite.
In his new book “City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles,” author Jerald Podair makes the hard-to-believe argument that Robert Moses, New York City’s mid-20th Century master builder, put the kibosh on plans to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn because he hated baseball, and preferred a new stadium be built in Queens.
But Brooklyn Paper Radio host Vince DiMiceli knows better, and plans to set the record straight on today’s exciting episode.
“Any Brooklynite worth his salt knows that if you’ve got two bullets in a gun, and you walk into a room and find Hitler, Stalin, and O’Malley standing there, you shoot O’Malley twice,” DiMiceli, who lives on Staten Island and doesn’t own a gun, said. “And if you find Hitler, Stalin, and Robert Moses there, you come up with a different, less funny puchline.”
In the DiMiceli-produced portion of the show, Podair, professor of history at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, will make his case against Moses to co-host and judge Gersh Kuntzman, who will then listen intently as DiMiceli lays down the law. Kuntzman will then rule — once and for all time — whether true historians or revisionists are correct in placing the blame for the Dodger loss.
“If there is one thing that America and newspapers stand for, it is pointing the finger,” Kuntzman said. “And if there is one think that I am prejudice toward, it is conflict. On today’s show we will have both, which is pretty much the recipe for a great podcast.”
Also joining the boys during the Kuntzman-produced portion of the show will be mayoral wannabe Sal Albanese, who this week called Mayor DeBlasio a “limousine liberal” and will get a chance to answer tough question from DiMiceli and Kuntzman, such as “What’s the world’s fastest land mammal?”
Bottom line, and at the end of the day, it looks like we’re going to make podcast history.
Brooklyn Paper radio is recorded and podcast live every week — and today at 4:30 pm — from our studio in America’s Downtown and can be found always streaming, right here on Brook
