The uber-fan and founder of the nomadic Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame died Tuesday at the age of 76.
From the Richard Goldstein obit in The New York Times:
When Jackie Robinson died in 1972, Mr. Adler campaigned to have his school, then known as Crown Heights Intermediate School 320, named for him.
“The parents wanted it to be named after somebody in the civil rights movement,” Mr. Adler told The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers, “but I reminded them Jackie walked with Dr. Martin Luther King. Jackie gave impetus to all the other movements that developed in the 1960s.”
And so the school bore Robinson’s name and graced its lobby with an oil painting of him.
Mr. Adler gave annual talks over the school’s public-address system about Robinson, saying, as he recalled it, “This is what took place here, this is American history.”
In the late 1970s, Mr. Adler began sending letters to former Brooklyn Dodger players explaining his idea for a memorial to the team, and as word of his mission got around, memorabilia began to flow in. His early collection, stored in his school custodian’s office, included seats from Ebbets Field, which was torn down in 1960, two years after the Dodgers departed for Los Angeles; a uniform worn by Casey Stengel when he managed the Dodgers in the 1930s; and jars of Ebbets Field soil used as landfill at Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn.
In June 1984, Mr. Adler helped create a Dodgers exhibit at the central Brooklyn Public Library on Grand Army Plaza and held his first Hall of Fame induction ceremony outside the building.
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