Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever by Tim Wendel Page B
Authors: Tim Wendel
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that late afternoon the two rookies couldn’t have cared less. While the design of Tiger Stadium remained as iconic as any in the land, the ballpark sported plenty of obstructed seats, thanks to a plethora of support columns, and the bleacher seats were uncomfortable and often a distance from the action. “Watching a game in Detroit is a graduate course in capturing the magic of the old-time ballparks,” Time magazine said decades later. “Unlike the ivy-clad perfection of Wrigley Field or the self-congratulatory ugliness of Fenway Park, Tiger Stadium represents the last remaining link with baseball before it became too self-conscious.”
Too soon, the gathering broke up. Cars driven by family or friends pulled up to take the veteran players and team officials home. Soon enough the two rookies, two white guys from the sticks, were the only ones left standing at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. That’s when Warden and Patterson realized that in the hubbub, they had been totally forgotten. Perhaps an easy thing to have happen, what with the disruption accompanying the news of King’s shooting, the pending funeral, and the season opener being pushed back. Nobody had thought to reserve a room for them or make sure they were taken care of.
“We had fallen through the cracks,” Warden recalled. “It wasn’t like these days when I could call anybody up on my cell phone. That night still remains one of the eeriest sights I’ve ever seen. There was simply nobody around in this big city. Simply nobody. Detroit, the place where I was so determined to pitch, had become a ghost town.”
With hanging bags slung over a shoulder, a suitcase in the other hand, the pair began to walk down the street until a police cruiser pulled alongside. The officer asked who they were. When Warden and Patterson replied that they were with the Tigers, the baseball team, the cop didn’t recognize their names, even though he said he was a lifelong fan. “Of course, he wouldn’t have heard of us,” Warden said. “We were about the only new guys on a really experienced club. Household names? Well, we weren’t exactly that.”
The officer told them that Detroit was under curfew, with nobody allowed on the streets after dusk.
After some discussion, the officer dropped them off at the Leland Hotel, a twenty-two-story Beaux Arts building on Bagley Street, a few blocks from the stadium. There the rookies took an efficiency apartment for the night that eventually became their home for the rest of season.
That evening Warden recalled the stories that Willie Horton and the other African Americans on the team had told him during spring training. How last year had broken their hearts on almost every level. Not only had they lost the pennant to the Red Sox on the final day of the season; as they played on, the city literally went up in flames around them.
The summer before, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had ordered the Eighty-Second Airborne to Detroit after the rioting became so bad that the Michigan National Guard couldn’t contain it. During the long hot summer of 1967, just about anything attempted by authority had struck the wrong chord. Tensions had finally come to a head in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, when the police raided an illegal bar, also called a “blind pig,” where a celebration for two black servicemen returning home from Vietnam was underway. When Detroit’s finest, mostly white, began to load everybody into a paddy wagon, an angry mob, predominately black, had formed on the street outside. Outnumbered, the police retreated and rioting soon spread throughout the city.
Now, less than nine months later, it occurred to Warden as he gazed down the city ’s deserted streets that the quiet could well just be the calm before the storm. One could imagine that the cinders from the previous summer’s fires were in fact still smoldering, merely waiting for the right spark to set them off. By now he knew the stories.
Too soon, the gathering broke up. Cars driven by family or friends pulled up to take the veteran players and team officials home. Soon enough the two rookies, two white guys from the sticks, were the only ones left standing at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. That’s when Warden and Patterson realized that in the hubbub, they had been totally forgotten. Perhaps an easy thing to have happen, what with the disruption accompanying the news of King’s shooting, the pending funeral, and the season opener being pushed back. Nobody had thought to reserve a room for them or make sure they were taken care of.
“We had fallen through the cracks,” Warden recalled. “It wasn’t like these days when I could call anybody up on my cell phone. That night still remains one of the eeriest sights I’ve ever seen. There was simply nobody around in this big city. Simply nobody. Detroit, the place where I was so determined to pitch, had become a ghost town.”
With hanging bags slung over a shoulder, a suitcase in the other hand, the pair began to walk down the street until a police cruiser pulled alongside. The officer asked who they were. When Warden and Patterson replied that they were with the Tigers, the baseball team, the cop didn’t recognize their names, even though he said he was a lifelong fan. “Of course, he wouldn’t have heard of us,” Warden said. “We were about the only new guys on a really experienced club. Household names? Well, we weren’t exactly that.”
The officer told them that Detroit was under curfew, with nobody allowed on the streets after dusk.
After some discussion, the officer dropped them off at the Leland Hotel, a twenty-two-story Beaux Arts building on Bagley Street, a few blocks from the stadium. There the rookies took an efficiency apartment for the night that eventually became their home for the rest of season.
That evening Warden recalled the stories that Willie Horton and the other African Americans on the team had told him during spring training. How last year had broken their hearts on almost every level. Not only had they lost the pennant to the Red Sox on the final day of the season; as they played on, the city literally went up in flames around them.
The summer before, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had ordered the Eighty-Second Airborne to Detroit after the rioting became so bad that the Michigan National Guard couldn’t contain it. During the long hot summer of 1967, just about anything attempted by authority had struck the wrong chord. Tensions had finally come to a head in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, when the police raided an illegal bar, also called a “blind pig,” where a celebration for two black servicemen returning home from Vietnam was underway. When Detroit’s finest, mostly white, began to load everybody into a paddy wagon, an angry mob, predominately black, had formed on the street outside. Outnumbered, the police retreated and rioting soon spread throughout the city.
Now, less than nine months later, it occurred to Warden as he gazed down the city ’s deserted streets that the quiet could well just be the calm before the storm. One could imagine that the cinders from the previous summer’s fires were in fact still smoldering, merely waiting for the right spark to set them off. By now he knew the stories.
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