Walter O'Malley treated Dodgers, and fans, like family

He is an older man now, weary after traveling from Dodger Stadium to a Best Western motel in upstate New York.

But ask Billy DeLury to describe an important day in his life, and he brightly remembers why he made this trip.

Ask him to describe a precious moment in his career, and he quickly explains why, today, for the first time in his 74 years, he will be sitting in a folding chair on a Cooperstown lawn for a Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Ask him to describe indelible, and he describes Walter O'Malley.

"It was 1955, I was just an errand boy, an office boy, the lowest of the lows," DeLury remembers.

Yet one day that winter, a club official approached the kid and asked for his size.

Size? Shirt size? Shoe size?

"They said they wanted my ring size," DeLury remembers. "And I said, 'Holy mackerel.' "

Holy O'Malley. The Brooklyn Dodgers owner was buying the most menial Dodgers employee a World Series ring commemorating the Dodgers' first world championship.

"I was a nobody, and Walter made me feel like a somebody," DeLury says. "It was the treasure of my life."

So, too, for many Angelenos, was Walter O'Malley himself, the giant, cigar-chomping man who gently bent down and touched us all.

Today's speeches will proclaim how O'Malley was voted into the Hall of Fame on the basis of that grand gesture that moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles and led baseball to the West Coast.

But he is there because of the little things.

He was not about giant sweeping moves, but tiny bits of stability.

His 29 years of Dodgers ownership, including 19 years as team president, were built not only on the Drysdales, but on the DeLurys.

That office boy has now been a Dodgers employee for 56 years and counting.

DeLury was hired as a kid out of a Brooklyn tenement, the son of a vegetable truck driver, with no experience, no pull, and only a high school education.

A half-century later, after doing everything from washing towels to selling tickets to making team travel arrangements, he works as an assistant to the Dodgers' broadcasters.

With the exception of a two-year military interruption, he has never worked anywhere else.

"Walter O'Malley made it so you never wanted to work anywhere else," DeLury says.