Orioles’ Last Season in Stadium Prompts Recall of the First

Public schools closed for the day, presumably because there were not enough transistor radios to go around. City workers got the day off, too. Most downtown businesses were shuttered by noon.

Nothing about life in Baltimore seemed routine. Men with pot bellies were baseball fans. But so were distinguished, older ladies. For one day, weather was not the topic of conversation over the morning toast and java. Bob Turley’s fastball was.

Baltimore did not know the modern-day Orioles yet. But on the morning of April 15, 1954, that hardly mattered.

--The city had a new major-league team about to play its first home game.

--Memorial Stadium, refurbished with an upper deck, was about to be unveiled.

--The day’s festivities were to begin with a street-clogging parade featuring 20th century luminaries Connie Mack, Home Run Baker and Richard Nixon.

A modern Opening Day with one of those historical bonuses is difficult to imagine. Three is too much.

To Zanvyl Krieger, a Baltimore philanthropist who was an owner of the ’54 Orioles, the first Opening Day was “one of the outstanding events in the history of Baltimore.”

Jim Bready, a former Baltimore Evening Sun editorial writer and a baseball historian, calls it “the biggest purely Baltimore event in 50 years” -- since the Great Fire of 1904.

It was difficult to overstate the importance of the occasion, although Baltimore’s newspapers tried. On April 15, the banner headlines -- In The Evening Sun , “Thousands Greet Orioles for Major League Opener” and in The News-Post, “Thousands at Parade Welcoming Orioles” -- appeared in type size found on the top line of eye charts.

A front-page article in The News-Post began, “A lifetime dream came true for a thrilled Baltimore today as your Orioles came home as ‘big leaguers.’ ... “

On Monday, the Orioles and Chicago White Sox meet in another historic Orioles Opening Day -- the 38th and last the Orioles will play at the stadium before they shift next season to the new ballpark in Camden Yards. The game will evoke tears and stir peculiar Memorial Stadium memories of Brooks, Boog and lines outside the ladies’ rest room. Mostly, it will be a farewell to all the things that have made Memorial Stadium a treasure and a curse at the same time.

Opening Day 1954 was just the opposite -- a season-long hello.

In a roundabout way, that is where the idea for Baltimore’s welcoming parade came from, according to Carle Jackson. Jackson should know. He conceived the idea for a parade with his friend, Clarence Miles, the Orioles’ first president and a Baltimore lawyer who was instrumental in bringing the lowly St. Louis Browns to town as the Orioles. Miles was searching for a way to get his players in front of the public before they trotted out onto the field on Opening Day. Miles and Jackson put their heads together. The next Jackson knew, he had been persuaded by his friend to serve as grand marshal, a job he said neither thrilled nor frightened him.

“Clarence said, ‘We’ll do it if you’ll be the marshal,” Jackson, now 84, and the son of a Baltimore mayor, Howard Jackson, said recently. “I said that was all right. You can’t get hurt in a parade.”

Miles hoped for a modest parade with floats and marching bands interspersed with Orioles players, Jackson said. What developed was a procession viewed by 350,000 people lining the route from the staging area near Johns Hopkins University to City Hall.

The Orioles made their grand entrance into Baltimore by train, arriving from Detroit, where they had opened the season. They arrived looking unmistakably like ballplayers, having changed into their home white uniforms during the trip. It was the most curious sight of the first Opening Day -- 25 ballplayers filing through Camden Station with sport coats and neckties slung over their backs. Police kept a small crowd of well-wishers at a distance, perhaps to prevent the theft of tie clasps.

From the station, charter buses whisked the new Orioles to the top of the parade route, where the party really began.

“People were just everywhere, stacked up along Charles Street and hanging out windows,” said Richard Armstrong, the Orioles’ public relations director in 1954, who is now retired in Princeton, N.J. “It was the introduction of the fans to the new Orioles, who hadn’t been seen.”

The final count was 22 bands and 32 floats, including one display that featured a 14-foot, bat-wielding statue of Babe Ruth. Among the living guests were Nixon, baseball commissioner Ford C. Frick, American League president Will Harridge and two extremely old and precious gentlemen -- Mack, then 91, president of the Philadelphia Athletics, and Washington Senators president Clark Griffith, 84. The two waved to the crowd, but mostly leaned wearily on one another in the back seat of a convertible.

Orioles fans were not alone learning who was who and what was what. Joe Hamper recalls a fair bit of trial and mostly error at the Orioles’ offices.

Until his retirement this year, Hamper was Orioles vice president for finance and one of only two remaining employees with the team since the beginning. In 1954, he was a 28-year-old accountant who watched goings-on in the ticket office, sometimes in horror.

Opening Day 1954 was one such example. There were countless near catastrophes, Hamper recalled. For starters, through the winter of 1954, the Orioles were selling tickets for seats that didn’t exist. The upper deck, which roughly doubled the capacity of the stadium, was unfinished days before Opening Day. No one knew if it would be completed. No one knew how many tickets to sell.

“The ballclub was concerned as Opening Day approached,” Hamper recalled. “We had this fear that we’d sell four tickets to the same seat in one section and there would be big open spaces in others.”

There were other anxieties connected with the stadium. The construction project, completed over five years of stop-and-start work at a cost to the city of $6.5 million, had been even more difficult to pull off than the one that would follow decades later at Camden Yards.

For months before Opening Day, drivers passing the former Municipal Stadium, built in 1924 to hold football games, watched construction inch along. A month before the historic game, the contractor on the project, Joseph F. Hughes & Co., seemed perilously close to failing in its most important job -- delivering the completed upper deck by April 15.

On Opening Day, the concrete was dry. Although work continued outside, the upper deck, miraculously, was finished. Jackson, the parade’s grand marshal, may have been the only person inconvenienced by the ongoing construction -- a wrench dropped from a work area and caved in the trunk of his Buick Roadmaster, which was parked below. The misadventure failed to dent Jackson’s Opening Day high. “There was too much excitement around. That was just a hole,” he said.

Applying the finishing touches took months. It was August 1954 before the Baltimore City seal was lifted into place, completing the sign above the main entrance to the stadium.

The first reviews mostly were favorable. “Baltimore was disposed to be receptive to this large, reinforced concrete addition,” Bready said. “Here was something solid and positive.”

On Opening Day, though, flaws in the design already were being counted up. The outfield fences -- 450 feet to center, 447 feet to left- and right-center -- were absurdly long. An eight-foot wall ringed the infield until 1961, when 2,600 field boxes brought the fans closer to the game. Almost immediately, there was talk of adding a roof to the upper deck.

The sightlines weren’t perfect, either. As generations of Orioles fans would learn later, the jut of the upper deck cut the view for many people sitting below. “We learned the hard way that when a fly ball went up, it went out of sight. ... “ Bready recalled.

The game. Oh, the game. Nixon, then vice president, tossed out the first ball. A Baltimore tenor, Ellwood Gary, sang the national anthem into a dead microphone -- “Like listening to Caruso in Braille,” wrote the late Red Smith. It rained until minutes before the first pitch.

The Orioles won, as did Baltimore.