The author, a Deadline Detroit contributor, is a former reporter for the Detroit Free Press and The New York Times.
By Joe Lapointe
In the spring, summer and autumn of 1968, I enjoyed the coolest job a 17-year-old Detroit guy possibly could have while approaching his senior year in high school.
A serious-looking Joe Lapointe 50 years ago.
I worked for free (tips only) as a “badge boy” usher in the reserved seats of the upper deck on the first baseline at Tiger Stadium. It was a hulking old ball yard that stood alongside the brick pavement at the intersecting avenues of Michigan and Trumbull, a place where one of America’s oldest baseball clubs played from the 19th century until the end of the 20th.
The Tigers made my job interesting by winning 103 games to finish first in the 10-team, one-division American League, the last pure “pennant” year before post-season playoffs. Then they came from behind to upset St. Louis in a seven-game World Series, a series of events being celebrated this weekend when the Cardinals visit Comerica Park.
If you are younger than 55, you probably have no first-hand memory of the 1968 season and the chaotic year around it outside the sanctuary of the stadium walls. And if you are under 25, you might not remember any games in that now-demolished double-deck ballpark that held more than 50,000 fans. So come on in. Let me show you to your seat. I was there.
Stadium colors
The 1968 Series triumph came a decade before they remodeled the ballpark for its final 20 years. Instead of the siding it had at the end, 1968’s outer walls still showed peeling paint, gray and gritty.
Instead of plastic chairs of orange and blue, the original seats in ’68 were still narrow and wooden and painted dark green, just as they’d been 30 years before when they finished double-decking the place and changed its name from Navin Field to Briggs Stadium. Many views were blocked by posts.
The green contrasted with the off-white of pigeon droppings, which we sometimes removed with our rags in the higher rows. Some of those bird explosions made you consider changing your occupation. But you wouldn’t dare quit. What, and leave show business?
Our section was right above first base, just behind Ernie Harwell, before they moved his radio broadcast booth to behind home plate.
Harwell was a gracious man who treated mere badge boys like valued co-workers. His partner was Ray Lane, another gentleman of the craft. WJR carried the games and Harwell’s voice purred from transistor radios in every section. You could hear it because they didn’t blast music then from the scoreboard between pitches.
Almost all the customers in our section were white. Tiger Stadium wasn’t officially segregated by race, of course, but black fans, many of them older men, tended to gather in the lower-deck bleachers in right-center field. Among them was Turkey Stearnes, a Negro League star and Ford worker, now in the Hall of Fame. The Tigers had been racially integrated for only 10 years, since 1958.They were the second-to-last team (Boston was the last) to employ a player of color.
Left fielder Willie Horton – the team’s first black star and a local guy from Northwestern High School – was the only African American in the everyday lineup. He slugged home runs and was thought to be a mediocre fielder. There were no players of Hispanic descent.
Denny McLain in 1968.
The year before, the season was interrupted by a riot with a racial component. Tigers pitcher Mickey Lolich wore a National Guard uniform to help stop it.
Shaking the money tree
Teams were stingy about television exposure back then, and the Tigers were cheaper than most. They televised only 40 games per season, most of them on the road.
The only home-game telecasts were on Saturday afternoons. So if you really wanted to see most Tigers games, you had to buy a ticket. The Tigers led the majors in attendance that year with 2,031,847. These days, good teams routinely draw three million.
Those Saturdays at Tiger Stadium were also special matinees called “Ladies and Retirees Day.” They could sit on a general admission basis in the upstairs reserved sections for a steep discount off the usual $2.50. Needless to say, Saturdays weren’t good for tips. Sundays were relatively better but we unofficially called them “Farmer Days” because fans would drive into Detroit from smaller towns and rural areas of Michigan.
“If you’re lucky, on Sunday, they’ll tip you with an ear of corn,” said Roy, my senior partner and mentor on the aisle between Sections 24 and 25. He was at least a year older than me, a grizzled veteran.
“Best money is Friday nights,” Roy assured me, because Friday was payday at many factories and the workers went to bars to cash their checks and spend a little or a lot. Few people used credit cards then.
Sometimes, they’d go on to the ballpark, especially for twinight doubleheaders that began at 5:30 p.m. They scheduled such things in those days, and added extra ones to make up rainouts. There were no “day-night” doubleheaders with two admissions. The Tigers scheduled five home Sunday doubleheaders that season.
So the factory workers would pour themselves onto chartered buses outside the bars on payday and enter the stadium with glass bottles clinking in their pockets, waistbands and bulging purses.
They’d show up in a jolly mood and storm up the steep concrete steps while assuring the helpless badge boy ushers “We’re all together!” Few would sit in their assigned seats. Trying to enforce that sort of order was a losing game.
But the trick was to run up the aisle ahead of them with dust rag in hand and slam down a few wooden seat bottoms. Boom, boom, boom! When the customers noticed the sound, they then watched you shine up the wood with brisk rag strokes, a smile beneath your sweaty brow and a friendly howdy-do. “Make a show of it,” Roy advised.
Pretty soon somebody would drop a couple wet quarters in your hand and maybe even a soggy dollar bill picked up from back at the bar. Once one of them tipped you, it sometimes got contagious. Who wanted to look like a cheapskate? It added up. People got generous on payday.
By the time the first pitch was thrown, you might have $20 in your pocket, which bought a lot of 45 r.p.m. records in 1968. (The best single that summer was “Hey, Jude” by the Beatles with “Revolution” on the flip side. Other hits in that year’s ether included “Street Fighting Man” by the Rolling Stones and “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud (Part 1)” by James Brown. These songs were not played at Tiger Stadium).
Music you might hear at Tiger Stadium in the 1960s could include a scratchy recording of the National Anthem before the first pitch, a strolling Dixieland band for select games and tunes on the organ. (Yes, Jose Feliciano came later; we’ll get to that.)
The organist might play “In the Good Old Summertime” and “Bicycle Built for Two” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” for the seventh-inning stretch.
By that time, some of our charter-bus customers would be rolling back down those very same steep steps, sometimes because they stumbled on the way to or from the beer stand (vendors didn’t sell it in the seats) and sometimes just because fighting felt so good. (A cup of beer was 45 cents at the concession stand).
Once in a while, one of our guests would work his way down to the lower deck and then onto the field to run across the grass and slide into second base.
Hazy days and fast games
Mind you, it wasn’t like this every game. Weekday games were mostly peaceful. But Fridays were the most crowded and the most fun and the smokiest. People smoked everywhere. Lots of cigarettes. A pack cost 40 cents at the concession stand. Plenty of cigars, too.
And a few pipes. And maybe even – according to the usher rumor mill – the scent of marijuana in the upper deck bleachers, the $1 benches where hippies like John Sinclair might sometimes sit, where there were no reserved seats or tips and few ushers, man or boy, to enforce any sort of law and order. (There were no female ushers. Females worked in the concession stands).
Detroit Historial Society photo
By the time the sun set, you could see the smoke-haze clouds brightened by the light towers mounted atop the narrow “third deck,” kind of an enclosed catwalk at the top of the building. Nobody worried about secondhand tobacco smoke back then. How could it possibly hurt you? We were outdoors in the hot, muggy summer night air, filled with the fumes of leaded gasoline, some of it from muscle cars roaring by outside.
The home games began at 8 p.m., not 7 as they do now, because few games then took three or four hours, common today. In ’68 – you could look it up -- the Tigers played 72 games that lasted no more than two hours and 30 minutes. A few finished in under two hours.
Baseball didn’t have such long commercial breaks every half-inning. Batters didn’t stroll to the plate enjoying every note of their “walkup” music. And umpires called strikes, especially high in the zone.
So you had plenty of time to get home on the DSR bus (25 cents and a nickel for a transfer) and be up on time for school the next day.
High mound, high strikes, high life
Which brings us to the Year of the Pitcher.
They dominated and the starters were stars. The pitching mound of 1968 was a mountain that loomed 15 inches high, five inches higher than it does today.
Starting pitchers worked in four-man rotations on three days of rest (instead of 5/4, as it is now) and planned to throw complete games every time out. There were no closers in the bullpens. Counting Denny McLain’s astonishing 31-6 record for the Tigers, there were seven 20-game winners in the majors.
Best of them was Bob Gibson of the Cardinals at 22-9 with a 1.12 earned-run average. His brilliance showed in Game 1 of the World Series when he struck out 17 Tigers in a 4-0 victory.
But the most sensational performer in the regular season was the cocksure McLain, a charming rogue then and, later, an imprisoned con artist whose victory total that season has never been equaled.
Off the field, McLain cut a high profile, playing keyboards in nightclubs. And he flew his own airplane. He was a prince of the city. On the field, McLain did it with terrific talent, swaggering confidence and some timely luck.
That good fortune visited on Saturday afternoon, Sept. 14, when McLain beat the Athletics for his 30th victory. It was on a national Game of the Week telecast – a big deal, then -- that some people still watched in black and white. Only 33,688 attended. Sure, it was a decent crowd. But would such an event now take place before roughly 20,000 empty seats in a sports town like Detroit?
Trailing 4-3, McLain left the game in the bottom of the ninth for pinch-hitter Al Kaline, who walked. (No designated hitter then). Kaline scored the tying run and Horton drove in the winner in a 5-4 victory.
The McLain-Mantle Gopher Ball
But my enduring impression of McLain that season was from his next start, his 31st victory, when -- before a mid-week day-game crowd of 9,063 and with a five-run lead in the top of the eighth -- McLain and catcher Jim Price conspired with Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees to feed a fat pitch to Mantle so Mantle could hit a home run in his final Detroit appearance.
Which he did. Anyone there could see what they were up to and my view was clear from a back row in the lower deck behind first base. I’ve never seen anything like it since and I’ve covered lots of ballgames.
There were plenty of empty seats for badge boy ushers that day. On days like that, you hoped to make $3 or $4 to break even on bus fare and meals.
In 1968, a hot dog cost 35 cents and you could splurge for the jumbo for an extra dime. A small Coke cost 15 cents and a large one a quarter. You might buy and drink three or four big ones on a humid night, dehydrated from running up and down those steps.
That Mickey Mantle game lasted 2:01. McLain and the Tigers won, 6-2, with Mantle’s blast the last run.
I was able to enjoy most of that one because upper-deck badge boys were usually dismissed from our ushering posts after two or three innings because there was nothing more to do.
Some guys actually went home early, but those of us who thought of the games as a fringe benefit would find empty seats where we could. I’m glad I stayed around on Thursday, Aug. 22.
McAuliffe vs. John
Detroit Tigers graphic
