Rod Serling
Rodman Edward Serling was an American screenwriter, television producer, narrator known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science-fiction anthology TV series, The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen, helped form television industry standards, he was known as the "angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues including censorship and war. Serling was born on December 1924, in Syracuse, New York, to a Jewish family, he was the second of two sons born to Samuel Lawrence Serling. Serling's father had worked as a secretary and amateur inventor before having children, but took on his father-in-law's profession as a grocer to earn a steady income. Sam Serling became a butcher after the Great Depression forced the store to close. Rod had Robert J. Serling, their mother was a homemaker. Serling spent most of his youth 70 miles south of Syracuse in the city of Binghamton after his family moved there in 1926.
His parents encouraged his talents as a performer. Sam Serling built a small stage in the basement, where Rod put on plays, his older brother, writer Robert, recalled that, at the age of six or seven, Rod entertained himself for hours by acting out dialogue from pulp magazines or movies he had seen. Rod talked to people around him without waiting for their answers. On a two-hour trip from Binghamton to Syracuse, the rest of the family remained silent to see if Rod would notice their lack of participation, he did not. In elementary school, Serling was seen as the class clown and dismissed by many of his teachers as a lost cause. However, his seventh-grade English teacher, Helen Foley, encouraged him to enter the school's public speaking extracurriculars, he was a speaker at his high school graduation. He began writing for the school newspaper, in which, according to the journalist Gordon Sander, he "established a reputation as a social activist", he was interested in sports and excelled at tennis and table tennis.
When he attempted to join the varsity football team, he was told. Serling was interested in writing at an early age, he was an avid radio listener interested in thrillers and horror shows. Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin were two of his favorite writers, he "did some staff work at a Binghamton radio station... tried to write... but never had anything published." He was accepted into college during his senior year of high school. However, the United States was involved in World War II at the time, Serling decided to enlist rather than start college after he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in 1943; as editor of his high school newspaper, Serling encouraged his fellow students to support the war effort. He wanted to leave school before graduation to join the fight but his civics teacher talked him into graduating. "War is a temporary thing," Gus Youngstrom told him. "It ends. An education doesn't. Without your degree, where will you be after the war?" Serling enlisted in the U. S. Army the morning after high school graduation, following his brother Robert.
Serling began his military career in 1943 at Camp Toccoa, under General Joseph May "Joe" Swing and Col. Orin D. "Hard Rock" Haugen and served in the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne Division. He reached the rank of Technician Fourth Grade. Over the next year of paratrooper training and others began boxing to vent aggression, he competed as a flyweight and had 17 bouts, rising to the second round of the division finals before being knocked out. He was remembered for berserker style and for "getting his nose broken in his first bout and again in last bout." He tried his hand with little success. On April 25, 1944, Serling saw that he was being sent west to California, he knew. This disappointed him. On May 5, his division headed to the Pacific, landing in New Guinea, where it would be held in reserve for a few months. In November 1944, his division first saw combat; the 11th Airborne Division would not be used as paratroopers, but as light infantry during the Battle of Leyte. It helped mop up after the five divisions.
For a variety of reasons, Serling was transferred to the 511th's demolition platoon, nicknamed "The Death Squad" for its high casualty rate. According to Sergeant Frank Lewis, leader of the demolitions squad, "He screwed up somewhere along the line, he got on someone's nerves." Lewis judged that Serling was not suited to be a field soldier: "he didn't have the wits or aggressiveness required for combat." At one point, Lewis and others were in a firefight, trapped in a foxhole. As they waited for darkness, Lewis noticed. Serling sometimes went exploring on his own, against orders, got lost. Serling's time in Leyte political views for the rest of his life, he saw death every day while in the Philippines, at the hands of his enemies and his allies, through freak accidents such as that which killed another Jewish private, Melvin Levy. Levy was delivering a comic monologue for the platoon as they rested under a palm tree when a food crate was dropped from a plane above, decapitating him. Serling placed a Star of David over his grave.
Serling la
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. Each episode presents a stand-alone story in which characters find themselves dealing with disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone," ending with a surprise ending and a moral. Although predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show towards fantasy and horror; the phrase “twilight zone,” inspired by the series, is used to describe surreal experiences. The series featured both established stars and younger actors who would become much better known later. Serling served as executive head writer, he was the show's host and narrator, delivering monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. Serling's opening and closing narrations summarize the episode's events encapsulating how and why the main character had entered the Twilight Zone. In 1997, the episodes "To Serve Man" and "It's a Good Life" were ranked at 11 and 31 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
Serling himself stated that his favorite episodes of the series were "The Invaders" and "Time Enough at Last". In 2016, the series was ranked No. 7 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest shows of all time. In 2002, The Twilight Zone was ranked No. 26 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it as the third best-written TV series and TV Guide ranked it as the fourth greatest drama and the fifth greatest show of all time. By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was a prominent name in American television, his successful television plays included Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, but constant changes and edits made by the networks and sponsors frustrated Serling. In Requiem for a Heavyweight, the line "Got a match?" had to be struck because the sponsor sold lighters. But according to comments in his 1957 anthology Patterns, Serling had been trying to delve into material more controversial than his works of the early 1950s; this led to Noon on Doomsday for the United States Steel Hour in 1956, a commentary by Serling on the defensiveness and total lack of repentance he saw in the Mississippi town where the murder of Emmett Till took place.
His original script paralleled the Till case was moved out of the South and the victim changed to a Jewish pawnbroker, watered down to just a foreigner in an unnamed town. Despite bad reviews, activists sent numerous wires protesting the production. Serling thought that a science-fictional setting, with robots and other supernatural occurrences, would give him more freedom and less interference in expressing controversial ideas than more realistic settings. "The Time Element" was Serling's 1957 pilot pitch for his show, a time travel adventure about a man who travels back to Honolulu in 1941 and unsuccessfully tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. The script, was rejected and shelved for a year until Bert Granet discovered and produced it as an episode of Desilu Playhouse in 1958; the show was a great success and enabled Serling to begin production on his anthology series, The Twilight Zone. Serling's editorial sense of ironic fate in the writing done for the series was identified as significant to its success by the BFI Film Classics library which stated that for Serling "the cruel indifference and implacability of fate and the irony of poetic justice" were recurrent themes in his plots.
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that, known to man. It is a dimension as timeless as infinity, it is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination, it is an area. The Twilight Zone premiered the night of October 1959, to rave reviews. "Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. Others agreed. Daily Variety ranked it with "the best, accomplished in half-hour filmed television" and the New York Herald Tribune found the show to be "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year"; as the show proved popular to television's critics, it struggled to find a receptive audience of television viewers. CBS was banking on a rating of at least 21 or 22; the series' future was jeopardized when its third episode, "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" earned a 16.3 rating.
Still, the show attracted a large enough audience to survive a brief hiatus in November, after which it surpassed its competition on ABC and NBC and convinced its sponsors to stay on until the end of the season. With one exception, the first season featured scripts written only by Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson; these three were responsible for 127 of the 156 episodes in the series. Additionally, with one exception, Serling never appeared on camera during any first-season episode (as he woul
Jack Warden
Jack Warden was an American character actor of film and television. He was twice nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor—for Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, he received a BAFTA nomination for the former movie, won an Emmy for his performance in Brian's Song. Warden was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Laura M. and John Warden Lebzelter, an engineer and technician. He was of Irish ancestry. Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he was expelled from high school for fighting and fought as a professional boxer under the name Johnny Costello, he earned little money. Warden worked as a nightclub bouncer, tugboat deckhand and lifeguard before joining the United States Navy in 1938, he was stationed for three years in China with the Yangtze River Patrol. In 1941, he joined the United States Merchant Marine but he tired of the long convoy runs, in 1942, he moved to the United States Army, where he served as a paratrooper in the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, with the 101st Airborne Division in World War II.
In 1944, on the eve of the D-Day invasion, Warden a staff sergeant, shattered his leg when he landed in a tree during a night-time practice jump in England. He spent eight months in the hospital recuperating, during which time he read a Clifford Odets play and decided to become an actor. Warden portrayed a paratrooper from the 101st's rivals—the 82nd Airborne Division—in That Kind of Woman. After leaving the military, he moved to New York City, studied acting on the G. I. Bill, he performed on stage for five years. In 1948, he made his television debut on the anthology series The Philco Television Playhouse, appeared on the series Studio One, his first film role, was in the 1951 film You're in the Navy Now, a film that featured the screen debuts of Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson. Warden appeared in his first credited film role in the 1951 in The Man with My Face. From 1952 to 1955, Warden appeared in the television series Mister Peepers with Wally Cox. In 1953, Warden was cast as a sympathetic corporal in From Here to Eternity.
Warden's breakthrough film role was Juror No. 7, a salesman who wants a quick decision in a murder case, in 12 Angry Men. Warden guest-starred in many television series over the years, including two 1960 episodes of NBC's The Outlaws, on Marilyn Maxwell's ABC drama series, Bus Stop, on David Janssen's ABC drama, The Fugitive, he received a supporting actor Emmy Award for his performance as Chicago Bears coach George Halas in the television movie, Brian's Song, was twice nominated for his starring role in the 1980s comedy/drama series Crazy Like a Fox. Warden was nominated for Academy Awards as Best Supporting Actor for his performances in Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, he had notable roles in Bye Bye Braverman, All the President's Men... And Justice for All, Being There, Used Cars, The Verdict, Problem Child and its sequel, as well as While You Were Sleeping, Guilty as Sin and the Norm Macdonald comedy Dirty Work, his final film was The Replacements in 2000, opposite Keanu Reeves. Warden had one son, Christopher.
Although they separated in the 1970s, the couple never divorced. Warden suffered from declining health in his last years, which resulted in his retirement from acting in 2000, he died of heart and kidney failure in a New York hospital on July 19, 2006, at the age of 85. Jack Warden on IMDb Jack Warden at the Internet Broadway Database Jack Warden at the Internet Off-Broadway Database Jack Warden at Find a Grave Cinema2000 obituary
The After Hours
"The After Hours" is episode thirty-four of the American television anthology series, The Twilight Zone. It aired on June 10, 1960, on CBS; the opening narration involves Marsha White riding an elevator to the ninth floor. The rest of the narration is heard. Marsha White, browsing for a gift for her mother in a department store, decides on a gold thimble, she is taken by the elevator man to the ninth floor, although the elevator's floor indicator only shows eight floors. She enters the ninth floor and turns to complain to the elevator operator that there is nothing there, but the door closes abruptly, leaving her to ponder her situation. Upon ringing a buzzer for service, she is approached by a saleslady who guides her to the only item on the floor: the exact gold thimble that Marsha wants. During the sales transaction, she grows puzzled by the comments and actions of both the male elevator operator who transported her to the barren deserted floor, the aloof and clairvoyant female salesclerk behind the counter who addresses her by name and sells her the thimble.
The sales lady asks Marsha. The sales lady appears surprised and insulted, Marsha leaves; as Marsha rides the elevator down, she notices that the thimble is dented. When she tries to convince Mr. Armbruster, the sales supervisor, Mr. Sloan, the store manager, that she bought the item on the ninth floor, she is told that the store doesn't have a ninth floor, she has no evidence of the transaction as she paid cash, has no receipt. Marsha spots the back of the salesclerk who sold her the thimble, is shocked to discover that the woman is not a salesclerk at all. While resting in an office following her frightening discovery, Marsha finds herself accidentally locked inside the closed store, she attempts to find a way out and becomes alarmed by mysterious voices calling to her and by some subtle movements made by the lifeless mannequins around her. Moving about aimlessly, she topples the sailor mannequin, whom she recognizes as the somewhat frustrated elevator operator in earlier encounters. Becoming hysterical, she flees backward to the now-open elevator, which again transports her to the unoccupied ninth floor.
There she realizes that the "ninth floor" is a storage area occupied by thinking, animated mannequins. With the mannequins' gentle encouragement, she realizes that she herself is a mannequin. Within their society, the mannequins take turns, one at a time, to live among the humans for one month. Marsha had enjoyed her stay among "the outsiders" so much that she had forgotten her identity and has arrived back a day late. Now that she has returned, the next mannequin in line — the female salesclerk — departs the store to live among the humans for 30 days; as the other mannequins bid farewell to the salesclerk, the sailor asks Marsha if she had enjoyed her time among the humans. Sweetly and sadly, she replies, "Ever so much fun... So much fun." She and the sailor assume "mannequin" postures, grow rigid. The next day, Mr. Armbruster is making his energetic morning rounds on the sales floor and does a double-take upon passing the mannequin of Marsha White on display; the final shot moves in on her, her face, which fades into the stars as the closing narration begins.
The head of the mannequin double for Anne Francis was made from a cast of Francis' face done by noted make-up artist William J. Tuttle. Tuttle displayed the mannequin head in the 1968 MGM short film "The King of the Duplicators"; the episode was remade in 1986 for The New Twilight Zone. It starred Terry Farrell as Ann Wedgeworth as the Saleswoman; the plot is similar. In addition, the Marsha in the remake is in denial of her identity and doesn't want to be a mannequin, she wants to be human, unlike the Marsha in the original, who forgot who she was and enjoyed feeling human for the month in which she lived among the outsiders. In 2008, the original episode was adapted as a graphic novel, "Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone: The After Hours", by Mark Kneece and Rebekah Isaacs. DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "The After Hours" on IMDb "The After Hours" at TV.com
Casey at the Bat
"Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888" is a baseball poem written in 1888 by Ernest Thayer. First published in The San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, it was popularized by DeWolf Hopper in many vaudeville performances, it has become one of the best-known poems in American literature. The poem was published anonymously. A baseball team from the fictional town of "Mudville" is losing by two runs in its last inning. Both the team and its fans, a crowd of 5,000, believe they can win if Casey, Mudville's star player, gets to bat. However, Casey is scheduled to be the fifth batter of the inning, the first two batters fail to get on base; the next two batters are perceived to be weak hitters with little chance of reaching base to allow Casey a chance to bat. Flynn hits a single, Blake follows with a double that allows Flynn to reach third base. Both runners are now in scoring position and Casey represents the potential winning run. Casey is so sure of his abilities that he does not swing at the first two pitches, both called strikes.
On the last pitch, the overconfident Casey strikes out swinging, ending the game and sending the crowd home unhappy. The text is filled with references to baseball as it was in 1888, which in many ways is not far removed from today's version; as a work, the poem encapsulates much of the appeal of baseball, including the involvement of the crowd. It has a fair amount of baseball jargon that can pose challenges for the uninitiated; this is the complete poem as it appeared in The Daily Examiner. After publication, various versions with minor changes were produced. Thayer said he chose the name "Casey" after a non-player of Irish ancestry he once knew, it is open to debate who, if anyone, he modeled the character after, it has been reported that Thayer's best friend Samuel Winslow, who played baseball at Harvard, was the inspiration for Casey. Another candidate is National League player Mike "King" Kelly, who became famous when Boston paid Chicago a record $10,000 for him, he had a personality that fans liked to jeer.
After the 1887 season, Kelly went on a playing tour to San Francisco. Thayer, who wrote "Casey" in 1888, covered the San Francisco leg for the San Francisco Examiner. Thayer, in a letter he wrote in 1905, mentions Kelly as showing "impudence" in claiming to have written the poem; the author of the 2004 definitive bio of Kelly—which included a close tracking of his vaudeville career—did not find Kelly claiming to have been the author.:9 A month after the poem was published, it was reprinted as "Kelly at the Bat" in the New York Sporting Times. Aside from omitting the first five verses, the only changes from the original are substitutions of Kelly for Casey, Boston for Mudville. King Kelly of the Boston Beaneaters, was one of baseball's two biggest stars at the time.:9In 1897, the magazine Current Literature noted the two versions and said, "The locality, as given, is Mudville, not Boston. Sportswriter Leonard Koppett claimed in a 1979 article that the published poem omits 18 lines penned by Thayer which change the entire theme of the poem.
Koppett said the full version of the poem takes the pitch count on Casey to full as his uncle Arnold stirs up wagering action in the stands before a wink passes between them and Casey throws the game. DeWolf Hopper gave the poem's first stage recitation on August 14, 1888, at New York's Wallack Theatre as part of the comic opera Prinz Methusalem in the presence of the Chicago and New York baseball teams, the White Stockings and the Giants, respectively. Hopper became known as an orator of the poem, recited it more than 10,000 times before his death. On stage in the early 1890s, baseball star Kelly recited the original "Casey" a few dozen times and not the parody. For example, in a review in 1893 of a variety show he was in, the Indianapolis News said, "Many who attended the performance had heard of Kelly's singing and his reciting, many had heard De Wolf Hopper recite'Casey at the Bat' in his inimitable way. Kelly recited this in a sing-song, school-boy fashion." Upon Kelly's death, a writer would say he gained "considerable notoriety by his ludicrous rendition of'Casey at the Bat,' with which he concluded his `turn’ at each performance.":229During the 1980s, the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller performed a version of "Casey at the Bat" with Teller struggling to escape a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over a platform of sharp steel spikes.
The set-up was that Penn Jillette would leap off his chair upon finishing the poem, releasing the rope which supported Teller, send his partner to a gruesome death if he wasn't free by that time. The drama of the performance was taken up a notch after the third or fourth stanza, when Penn Jillette began to read out the rest of the poem much faster than the opening stanzas reducing the time that Teller had left to work free from his bonds. On July 4, 2008, Jack Williams recited the poem accompanied by the Boston Pops during the annual Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular at Boston's 4 July Celebration. On July 14, 2013, the jam rock band Furthur performed the poem as part of a second-set medley in center field of Doubleday Field in Cooperstown, New York; the first recorded version of "Casey at the Bat" was made by Russell Hunting, speaking in a broad Irish accent, in 1893.
Elysian Fields, Hoboken, New Jersey
Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey is believed to be the site of the first organized baseball game, giving Hoboken a strong claim to be the birthplace of baseball. In 1845, Knickerbocker Club of New York City began using Elysian Fields in Hoboken to play baseball due to the lack of suitable grounds across the Hudson River in Manhattan. On June 19, 1846, the Knickerbockers played the New York Nine on these grounds in the first organized game between two clubs. By the 1850s, several Manhattan-based member clubs of the National Association of Base Ball Players were using the grounds as their home field. In 1856, Elysian Fields was the place that inspired pioneering journalist Henry Chadwick a cricket writer for The New York Times, to develop the idea that baseball could be America's National Pastime; as Chadwick relates: "I chanced to go through Elysian Fields during the progress of a contest between the noted Eagle and Gotham Clubs. The game was being played on both sides, I watched it with deeper interest that any previous ball match between clubs I had seen.
It was not long before I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for a national sport for Americans." Chadwick went on to become the game's preeminent reporter developing baseball's statistics and scoring system. In 1859, an international cricket match was held with an All-England Eleven as part of an English tour of North America. In 1865, the grounds hosted a championship match between the Mutual Club of New York and the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, attended by an estimated 20,000 fans and captured in the Currier & Ives lithograph The American National Game of Base Ball. With the construction of two significant baseball parks in Brooklyn enclosed by fences, enabling promoters there to charge admission to games, the prominence of Elysian Fields began to diminish. In 1868, the leading Manhattan club, the New York Mutuals, shifted its home games to the Union Grounds in Brooklyn. In 1880, the founders of the New York Metropolitans and New York Giants succeeded in siting a ballpark on Manhattan that became known as the Polo Grounds.
The last recorded professional baseball game at Elysian Fields occurred in 1873. The large parkland area was developed for housing. A small remnant of the park remains bounded on the west by Hudson Street, on the north and east by Frank Sinatra Drive, on the south by Castle Point Terrace. To the west of Elysian Park at the intersection of 11th and Washington Streets is where the original diamond is thought to have been located. In 2003 a civic improvement organization called the "Hoboken Industry and Business Association" renovated the intersection and placed concrete and bronze "base" monuments in the sidewalk corners at the intersection. A bronze plaque denoting the connection to early baseball was placed in the median strip of 11th Street between first and second bases; the restaurant and music club Maxwell's front door is adjacent to. Elysian Fields Quarterly Elysian Fields and the birth of baseball About.com: The History of Baseball - Alexander Cartwright Hangout NJ: New Jersey Baseball Media related to Elysian Fields, Hoboken at Wikimedia Commons
History of the Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League baseball team, active in the National League from 1884 until 1957, after which the club moved to Los Angeles, where it continues its history as the Los Angeles Dodgers. The team moved west at the same time as its longtime rivals, the New York Giants in the National League, relocated to San Francisco in northern California as the San Francisco Giants; the team's name derived from the reputed skill of Brooklyn residents at evading the city's trolley streetcar network. The Dodgers played in two stadiums in South Brooklyn, each named Washington Park, at Eastern Park in the neighborhood of Brownsville before moving to Ebbets Field in the neighborhood of Flatbush in 1913; the team is noted for signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 as the first black player in the modern major leagues. The first convention of the National Association of Base Ball Players were from Brooklyn, including the Atlantic and Excelsior clubs that combined to dominate play for most of the 1860s.
Brooklyn helped make baseball commercial, as the locale of the first paid admission games, a series of three all star contests matching New York and Brooklyn in 1858. Brooklyn featured the first two enclosed baseball grounds, the Union Grounds and the Capitoline Grounds. Despite the early success of Brooklyn clubs in the National Association of Base Ball Players, which were amateur until 1869, they fielded weak teams in the succeeding National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, the first professional league formed in 1871; the Excelsiors no longer challenged for the amateur championship after the Civil War and never entered the professional NAPBBP. The Eckfords and Atlantics thereby lost their best players; the National League replaced the NAPBBP in 1876 and granted exclusive territories to its eight members, excluding the Atlantics in favor of the New York Mutuals who had shared home grounds with the Atlantics. When the Mutuals were expelled by the league, the Hartford Dark Blues club moved in, changed its name to The Brooklyn Hartfords and played its home games at Union Grounds in 1877 before disbanding.
The team known as the Dodgers was formed as the Brooklyn Grays in 1883 by real estate magnate and baseball enthusiast Charles Byrne, who convinced his brother-in-law Joseph Doyle and casino operator Ferdinand Abell to start the team with him. Byrne arranged to build a grandstand on a lot bounded by Third Street, Fourth Avenue, Fifth Street, Fifth Avenue, named it Washington Park in honor of first president George Washington; the Grays played in the minor level Inter-State Association of Professional Baseball Clubs that first season. Doyle became the first team manager, they drew 6,431 fans to their first home game on May 12, 1883 against the Trenton, New Jersey team; the Grays won the league title after the Camden Merritt club in New Jersey disbanded on July 20 and Brooklyn picked up some of its better players. The Grays were invited to join the two year old professional circuit, the American Association to compete with the eight year old NL for the 1884 season. After winning the American Association league championship in 1889, the Grays moved to the competing older National League and won the 1890 NL Championship, being the only Major League team to win consecutive championships in both professional "base ball" leagues.
They lost the 1889 championship tournament to the New York Giants and tied the 1890 championship with the Louisville Colonels. Their success during this period was attributed to their having absorbed skilled players from the defunct New York Metropolitans and Brooklyn Ward's Wonders. In 1899, most of the original old Baltimore Orioles NL stars from the legendary Maryland club which earlier won three consecutive championships in 1894-1895-1896, moved to the Grays along with famed Orioles manager Ned Hanlon who became the club's new manager in New York / Brooklyn under majority owner Charles Ebbets, who had by now accumulated an 80% share of the club; the new combined team was dubbed the "Brooklyn Superbas" by the press and would become the champions of the National League in 1899 and again in 1900. The team name, Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, was coined in 1895; the nickname was still new enough in September 1895 that a newspaper could report that "'Trolley Dodgers' is the new name which eastern baseball cranks have given the Brooklyn club."
In 1895, Brooklyn played at Eastern Park, bounded by Eastern Parkway, Powell Street, Sutter Avenue, Van Sinderen Street, where they had moved early in the 1891 season when the second Washington Park burned down. Some sources erroneously report that the name "Trolley Dodgers" referred to pedestrians avoiding fast cars on street car tracks that bordered Eastern Park on two sides. However, Eastern Park was not bordered by street-level trolley lines that had to be "dodged" by pedestrians; the name "Trolley Dodgers" implied the dangers posed by trolley cars in Brooklyn which in 1892, began the switch from horse-power to electrical power, which made them much faster, were hence regarded as more dangerous. The name was shortened to Brooklyn Dodgers; the "Trolley Dodgers" name was adopted by the team for the 1911 and 1912 seasons, the "Dodgers" name was used in 1913. Other team names used by the franchise that came to be called "the Dodgers" were the Atlantics, Bridegrooms or Grooms (1888
