Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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Monday was Opening Day at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, where LA beat the San Diego Padres 6-3 on a 3-run homer in the 8th inning. Roz Wyman was there, in front-row seats, as she has been every single year, ever since she helped bring the team to Los Angeles in 1958.
Roz Wyman was elected to the LA City Council in 1953. At 22, she was not only its youngest member ever, but only its second woman, and Jewish to boot. She and her husband were big Democrats … Hubert Humphrey stayed at their Bel Air home and the studios would send over first-run films to screen in their living room.
LA was not a world-class city back then, and Wyman knew that one of the keys to elevating the city's prominence was to bring in a major league team. Meanwhile, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley was trying and failing to replace the team’s stadium in Brooklyn. Eventually, O'Malley made that flight over Los Angeles and saw Chavez Ravine, a former Mexican-American hillside neighborhood that had been razed for a public housing project that was never built, with easy access to the freeways.
The rest is history.