Bids Being Taken for Pieces of Dodgers’ Soul

It used to be home.

But when Roxie Campanella attempted to enter the bowels of Dodger Stadium for a pregame chat with old friend Dusty Baker last weekend, she was stopped by security guards.

“They didn’t seem to know who I was, or what I was,” she said.

She explained that she was the widow of a Hall of Fame Dodger named Roy Campanella.

The guards shrugged.

She explained she had been coming to Dodger Stadium for years, walking alongside her husband’s wheelchair, then later cloaked in his memories.

The guards picked up the phone, searching for proof.

“I was so embarrassed,” she said.

She was eventually credentialed and escorted to Baker, who greeted her with a hug, but the chill never faded.

Dodger Stadium used to be home, but the franchise’s 113-year legacy doesn’t live here anymore. It doesn’t live anywhere. With fluid ownership and shifting philosophies, memories have become short and space has become tight and there’s little room for history.

But you can buy it.

Roxie Campanella will be auctioning 78 items from her late husband’s estate Aug. 23 at a Pennsylvania auction house that also will accept bids via telephone and the Internet.

It is the new Dodger Way; an aging relative with no place to put some of the greatest moments in Dodger history, selling them to strangers.

You can buy all three of Campanella’s National League MVP awards.

You can buy one of his used catcher’s mitts.

If you can stop shivering, you can even buy the final pair of spikes he wore while he could still walk.

“Roy loved people so much, he wanted them to have what he had done, to know about his life,” she said.

People could easily do that while viewing these items in the Dodger Hall of Fame.

Oh, wait, there is no Dodger Hall of Fame.

Peter O’Malley dreamed of one but sold the team before he could figure out where to put it.

People, then, could simply enjoy the Campanella items at a stadium exhibit, right?

Well, the problem is, the Dodgers really can’t spend several hundred thousand dollars to buy it all. News Corp. would never approve, seeing as the team probably will be sold this winter and the stuff would be handed to someone else.

Couldn’t Campanella just donate everything to the club?

Well, yes, except she needs the money for the Roy and Roxie Campanella Physical Therapy Scholarship Foundation. It is a once-great charity that, like its founder, also is in danger of being forgotten.

On the 10th anniversary of his death, the peddling of his greatness is her only option.

“We understand Roxie’s reasons for selling the items, and we fully support them,” said Derrick Hall, Dodger vice president.

And so, the quiet destruction of Dodger history continues. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault.

Anybody seen the ball that Kirk Gibson hit into that magical October 1988 night? Nope. It’s lost.

What about the uniform worn by Orel Hershiser when he finished his 59th consecutive scoreless inning earlier that fall? What about Maury Wills’ spikes?

Anybody seen the Garvey-Lopes-Russell-Cey gloves? A pasta-stained undershirt worn by Tom Lasorda? A sombrero from Fernandomania?

And what about Eric Gagne? As premature as it sounds, is anyone going to grab and save a pair of those goggles?

Baseball’s Hall of Fame displays some of the great Dodger memorabilia. But, from the estates of Jackie Robinson to Roy Campanella, other stuff is being sold on the Internet daily.

“Hypothetically, we wish we had memorabilia representing all of our great players, and that we had a place to prominently display them,” Hall said. “But, realistically, that’s just not possible.”

Realistically, though, it should be possible. Somebody in this town should be able to figure out a way to keep some of baseball’s greatest traditions alive.

Los Angeles once filled the Coliseum with fans holding up tiny lights to honor Campanella. And now nobody can figure out how to display his shoes?

Roxie Campanella emphasized she is not selling the items as a slap at the Dodgers, who she says still graciously supply her with seats, even if their workers do occasionally forget her name.

“They treat me very nice like that with tickets, always taking care of me when I need it,” she said.

But last year, when she became ill with cancer and worried sick over what would happen to her house full of memorabilia, she didn’t call the Dodgers.

She, like every other former Dodger in need, called O’Malley. She asked him to arrange for the auction, just as he has arranged many things for her since Roy died.

“Peter said he would always take care of me if anything happened to Roy, and he has done that,” Roxie said.

O’Malley does that for virtually every former Dodger who played under his stewardship, calling them in hospitals, helping with funerals, always available.

But he no longer runs the joint. And while Bob Daly has worked hard to bring back such former players as Fernando Valenzuela and Wills, he probably will walk away this winter and hand it over to someone else.

There will be talk of a renovated stadium. There will be talk of a football team.

There will be no talk of a Hall of Fame. There will be other priorities.

Sandy Koufax, you may remember, was so concerned about the exploitation of his trophies that he literally buried some of them.

Another burial is about to take place. Only this time it is happening not with a shovel, but a bulldozer, at www.Hunt Auctions.com, at (610) 524-0822, on Aug. 23.

If only there were someone powerful enough to stand in front and make it stop.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.