Something was wrong. The Tigers were cruising in first place as April ended. But it didn’t feel right. The city was still hesitant to come out and see them. There were 12,000 empty seats at the opener, a game that traditionally is a sellout in Detroit. Although the Tigers never expect big crowds until Memorial Day and the onset of warmer weather in Michigan, the early turnouts for a first-place team were disappointing. Two-game series with Chicago, Cleveland, and Oakland drew fewer than 20,000 fans each. The Tigers came back from a successful road trip and opened a set against Baltimore, always a good draw. But only 18,000 showed up.
Something was wrong. Only in three seasons since the end of World War II had the Tigers failed to draw one million fans. Attendance peaked in 1950 when the team made a serious run at the Yankees and attracted 1,951,474 customers, the franchise record. In 1961, another contending year, the attendance had been 1.6 million. If not for the riots, that level might have been equalled in 1967. But the final figure was only 1,447,143. With fear still pervasive in the city, some doubted that total attendance would get even that high in 1968, no matter what the team did.
Detroit was still a great baseball city. But it was a city that had lost its center. Its sense of community lay shattered in the spring of 1968, just as thoroughly as the shop windows on 12th Street. Most of the debris from the July riots had been cleared. There were plans to remake 12th Street into a parklike boulevard, to sweep away any memory of what had happened there. Several committees were put together, made up of the town’s heavy hitters—automotive executives, union officials, prominent black leaders. They gave themselves hopeful names, like Detroit Renaissance, and tried to work out a plan for restoration. They listened to complaints that had long been ignored. But they had trouble coming to terms with what had happened.
As Earl Wilson had observed on his first visit to Detroit, this was a city with a large, prosperous black middle class. Only Washington, D.C., with its base of government workers, had a higher average income in its black community. Detroit’s wealth came out of the auto plants. Those jobs paid better than any other industrial work in the country, and the United Auto Workers was a leader in promoting equal opportunity for blacks. The restrictive housing covenants that had kept the city’s swelling black community penned up around Paradise Valley, on the East Side, had been struck down after the war. Blacks were now served in downtown restaurants, employed at the huge J. L. Hudson’s department store on Woodward Avenue. Although the farthest reaches of the city, where the best schools were located, were still virtually all-white, a small flow of black families was moving into those neighborhoods.
Sociologists called it a revolution of rising expectations. People scrambling for the bare necessities of life did not start riots. It was among those who felt that they should be getting more, who had gained a toehold and now wanted the whole leg, that discontent was highest. The city had prided itself on its progressive policies. It had welcomed Martin Luther King to town in 1963. He led a march down Woodward, giving an early version of the “1 have a dream” speech that he would deliver, memorably, later that summer at the Lincoln Memorial. While other cities went up in flames in the ’60s—Cleveland and Los Angeles and Newark—Detroit assured itself smugly that that would never happen there. Now the city could not recover from the shock. Whites behaved as if they had been betrayed, and black rhetoric reached new heights of threats and indignation.
Rumors swirled everywhere. Reports of new armed insurrections. Riot deaths that the police had concealed. Secret prisons being built for black leaders. You heard the rumors wherever you went in the spring of 1968. There was no reality check on the rumors, either, because both of the city’s daily newspapers were shut down, their employees locked out since the previous November in a labor dispute.
Even now, it is one of the aspects of the pennant year that many of the Tigers bring up. There were no newspapers, and that took the pressure off. Only later did the players realize that there would also be no stories to clip and paste in scrapbooks to show their grandchildren, no way to build up early fan enthusiasm.
In the late ’60s, technology did not allow television to give the extensive game coverage that goes on today. No videotape, no minicams. Equipment was bulky, processing was slow. Radio was still predominantly an entertainment medium, with news and sports coverage as an afterthought. All-news radio and talk radio were still a decade away. The wire services covered the team, but their stories ran in papers far away and went unread by the Tigers. Reporters from a few suburban dailies came to home games but never went on the road. There was even a writer from the Polish-language daily assigned to the team. And when the Communist Party decided that Detroit’s masses might welcome some dialectic with their baseball coverage, the communist Daily World also sent a reporter to do spot stories. He didn’t understand much about the game and was inclined to write sentences like “Norm Cash really rattled the old drainpipes last week.” Needless to say, neither the Dzennik Polski nor the Daily World had much of a readership among the players. To them, the newspaper lockout was liberating.
When compared with the tone of coverage in places like Boston or New York, however, Detroit’s sportswriters were mild. Rarely did they agitate for the sheer hell of it, like the Boston writers who had driven the young Ted Williams wild. Seldom did they resort to ridicule, like the New York writers who called themselves “the Chipmunks.” But the two top sports columnists in Detroit, Joe Falls at the Free Press and Pete Waldmeir at the News, were tough. They were truth-tellers, serious and exceptionally talented reporters. Their writing was consistently sharpedged and irreverent. They did not believe either in leading cheers for the home team or in taunting the opposition.
Falls, a rather puckish man with the accent of his native Queens evident in every syllable he spoke, had been a baseball writer for more than ten years. His sources within the Tigers organization and throughout the game were superb. One of his more memorable features had run the day after Mickey Mantle hammered a tremendous home run over the right field roof at Tiger Stadium. Under the headline “Detroit’s New Mantle Shift,” Falls’s paper ran a photo of Kaline in fielding position atop the roof. People in the Tigers front office went wild, accusing Falls of endangering the life of their best player. Falls had to reassure them that the photo was a gag, a pasteup of Kaline superimposed on the roof. They still didn’t think it was funny.
Waldmeir, who would soon become a top political columnist, had grown up on the city’s East Side and joined the sports staff while still in college. He was the more ascerbic of the two. While interviewing McLain, the pitcher had made a most unlikely statement, then added, “And may God strike me down if that isn’t the truth.” Waldmeir took that and ran with it, constructing a wild scenario about panic-stricken Tigers scampering off in terror whenever McLain stood up to speak. The Tigers didn’t think that was very funny, either.
At any given moment, a half dozen players were not on speaking terms with either columnist. But that was all right because neither had much to say to the other, either. They disliked one another acutely, an attitude that arose naturally in this hotly competitive newspaper city. The two baseball beat writers rarely spoke to each other, either. When Waldmeir was observed by his paper’s beat writer having breakfast with the rival beat writer, Waldmeir said ruefully: “I think I’d rather have my wife catch me in bed with another woman than what just happened.”
So the players had some reason to chortle over the writers’ absence. But the lack of newspapers compounded the sense of unease in the city. Detroit was flying blind, and it was regarded as unwise to venture too far from home.
Diehards still managed to find their way to the city’s premier gathering place for the sports crowd. The Lindell A. C., a tenminute walk from the ballpark along Michigan Avenue, was the undisputed holder of that title. There were no sports bars in 1968, no strategically raised television sets beaming an endless assortment of games from the cable networks or satellite dish. The Lindell was just a place where players and fans could hang out. All four of the city’s professional teams played a short distance away, and fans soon realized that if they went in after a game they might have a chance to share a beer with their heroes. Even the visiting teams knew about it and frequented the Lindell.
The name of the place was a joke, an excuse a customer had used when the saloon was in a former location. He had phoned his wife and told her that he had stopped in at his athletic club on the way home. But the Lindell achieved everlasting fame in 1963. The star tackle of the Detroit Lions, Alex Karras, then under a year’s suspension for gambling, had signed up for a wrestling match against Dick the Bruiser. The Lindell was a favorite spot for Karras because the owners of the place, the Butsicaris brothers, were also of Greek descent. It was arranged for Karras and the Bruiser to encounter one another there in a scripted meeting to hype the bout. Then someone tossed away the script. The two men were soon flailing away in a genuine chair-throwing, window-smashing brawl that had to be quelled by the quelling squad from the First Precinct. Later on, the Lindell’s pugilistic reputation would be further enhanced. Billy Martin, who was then managing the Twins, chose its parking lot as the place to cold-cock his star pitcher, Dave Boswell, to settle a difference of opinion.
The Lindell served up enormous burgers and had in its trophy case one of the city’s most cherished exhibits—the jock strap formerly worn by All-Pro Lions linebacker Wayne Walker. Everybody in sports went to the Lindell, except for the lordly Yankees, who preferred a quieter, Manhattanish spot two blocks away called Danny’s Gin Mill. But even at the Lindell the season was starting off slowly, much too quietly for a first-place team. It was as if everyone in Detroit was waiting to see what would happen next. Could they dare to hope again about this team and this city?