Roz Wyman, city’s youngest council member who helped bring Dodgers to L.A., dies at 92
NEW YORK, Dec. 31 (UPI) — Richard “Roz” Wyman, the city’s youngest-ever council member and a driving force behind a series of landmark Dodgers moves, died Wednesday at 92.
Born Sept. 17, 1917, in Brooklyn into Jewish-Irish families, Wyman moved to Los Angeles in 1960 where he became the youngest council member at 21 and the first baseball commissioner at 22.
His father, Albert, was the first city commissioner at Brooklyn after World War I and helped to establish baseball in the city — his sons played first base for Brooklyn’s first three Brooklyn Dodgers teams.
Roz Wyman, left, with Dodger executive Branch Rickey in 1965.
The elder Wyman was also one of the first to invest in the Dodgers as a partner in the sale of his first-born boyhood hero, Babe Ruth, to the club.
The younger Wyman, a Democrat, served on the councils of both the Board of Education and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and was on the city-county Planning Commission during his early career.
He was mayor of Beverly Hills in the 1960s as a Democrat and campaigned unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress.
His son, John W. Wyman Jr., is a businessman and philanthropist and served as the mayor of West Hollywood.
“My father had a remarkable sense of business, a real business brain,” his wife, Barbara, said in an interview, adding he could get on his high horse and “call a spade a spade.”
She described him as a good, if sometimes “too aggressive,” father.
“He did not think the world of him,” she said.
Roz Wyman is survived by his son, Richard W. Wyman Jr.
He began his public career as a Democratic council member and eventually became a Republican, but his Democratic party affiliation remained as a reminder of his Jewish