As McCarver’s pop fly settled into Freehan’s big mitt, Harry Grossman, watching the game in his Detroit apartment, suddenly began to cry. His wife, Laura, who had spilled the drinks all over the room when Matchick hit his home run in July, watched with concern. “Harry,” she said. “It’s only a game.”
“You don’t understand,” he replied softly. “You don’t understand.”
The city erupted within minutes of the final out. Secretaries and lawyers and janitors came streaming out of the downtown skyscrapers, shrieking and laughing and crying all at once. No further work would be done on this day. A man in his late twenties, hair askew and tie removed, shouted at a reporter, “All my life I’ve waited for this day.” Someone had ordered the fire trucks from the station in the city’s financial district into the streets. They sat at the curb, sounding their sirens as shredded paper began to rain from the windows on the upper floors.
Blanche Chapp watched the ball game end and searched for an appropriate response. As a young girl, she had lost a job because someone had given her a ticket to a 1934 series game and she had gone there instead of to work. She could not let this moment pass. She suddenly remembered that years ago someone had given her a Tiger outfit as a Halloween costume. Blanche rummaged through the closet until she found it, got into the car, and sped to the office where her daughter, Carol, worked. Carol put on the suit and walked out into the streets of downtown, the living embodiment of the Tigers, accepting congratulations and occasional hugs from everyone she passed. “It was a great way to get the feel of the crowd, and vice versa,” she said.
Fred Steinhardt, who had partied at the Lindell A. C. the night the team won the pennant, watched the game in a private club downtown. “The moment the game ended, the guy standing next to me, who was about my own age, put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘There will never be another sports experience in our lives that will match this.’ I never forgot that. And after all these years, you know, he was right.”
The city’s celebration in 1935 was legendary. But the soiree of 1968 soon eclipsed even that swell party. Within half an hour, every street in downtown was clogged with pedestrians. Cars with revelers draped over their hoods inched their way forward in the mob. No one cared. They didn’t want to go anywhere else. Beers were passed from car to car, as were cigarettes of the illegal variety.
In the suburbs, people who hadn’t been downtown in months jumped into their cars and headed there on the freeways, pulled irresistibly to get in on the party. In the quiet suburb of Birmingham, an elderly widow, living alone, went into her garage and sounded her car horn as her own way of being part of it.
Many observers noted that the racial suspicions that had clouded life in the city finally seemed to lift in the flow of energy and joy. Free Press reporter Barbara Stanton, sent out to do a story on the mood of the city, found herself walking in step with an elderly black man. He smiled and looked at her. “Everybody,” he said. “Everybody.”
Cars loaded with young black people from the neighborhoods surrounding downtown soon joined the flow. “Tell the world, Tigers the greatest,” one young man kept yelling at the top of his lungs. “Tell the world.”
The players were staging their own exercise in hilarity in St. Louis. After the final pop fly, Lolich had leaped into Freehan’s arms, and the catcher, toting his burden, staggered back toward the middle of the diamond. Within a few steps the two were engulfed by the rest of the Tigers, howling and shouting in the eerie quiet that engulfed Busch Stadium.
It was the third time in a seven-game World Series that a team had come back from a 3-1 deficit. The Pirates had done it in 1925 and the Yankees in 1958—against the Braves of Mathews and McMahon. Now those two men, who had tasted the bitter potion of such a comeback, swigged the champagne of triumph.
In the clubhouse, McLain stood on a platform put up for TV interviews and sprayed the bubbly at anyone within range. Horton shook his head and kept repeating, “I looked over the left-field roof in that seventh inning, and there was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I have never been so happy in my life.”
“What a nine,” Earl Wilson shouted, marching around the room with his champagne. “What a nine.”
Even staid John Fetzer, the owner who never intruded, rushed into the clubhouse, grabbed a bottle from the hands of Stanley with a quick “Gimme that,” and proceeded to pour it down his throat. Jim Campbell had come to the game wearing a lucky hat, a yellow fedora. McAuliffe grabbed it from the general manager’s head and put it on his own, and now it, too, was soaked with champagne. “It was when Mickey picked off Brock,” McAuliffe yelled over the tumult. “That was the ball game. We’d talked about it, and Mickey knew he had to make Brock make the first move. He played it perfectly.”
Mayo Smith smiled and answered questions, but his hands were shaking as he tried to light a cigarette. After all those long and weary years, drifting through the minors, playing for peanuts, getting the chances and failing, washed up—after all that, it had finally come to him. He had climbed to the top of the only mountain he ever wanted to conquer. At fifty-three, it was Mayo’s turn to taste the wine.
Julio Moreno, who had gone through the season as batting practice pitcher, sat by himself with a small smile on his face. During home games he would dress and leave the park as soon as his job was done. He hadn’t been around for the pennant-clinching bash. Moreno hadn’t varied his routine. He sat there, dressed in his suit and tie, a part of this team, and yet not really. But on this day everyone belonged. Stanley and McAuliffe sneaked up behind him, picked him up, and deposited him fully clothed into the whirlpool as Moreno howled in delight.
Horton circled the room singing “Jingle Bells.” Sparma and Warden emptied champagne bottles at each other in a squirting match from a distance of twenty paces.
Stan Musial walked over from the Cards clubhouse and grabbed Mayo in a warm embrace. “You deserve it, you son of a gun,” he said. Mayo started to offer him a cup of champagne and then pulled it back. “Naw, you got plenty of this in your own restaurant,” he said. “Go drink it there.”
The two men then threw back their heads and laughed. Musial had known this celebration three times as a player and twice as an executive. Now an old friend had joined him on the platform, and the moment was fine.
Down the hall, the Cardinals were quietly sipping their own champagne. “I never had a bad glass,” said Schoendienst. “Besides, we had a terrific season, and we lost to a good baseball team.” In the streets of St. Louis, office workers who had prepared to shower confetti in celebration tossed it out the windows anyhow. Cleaning trucks moved slowly through the deserted streets after dark, tidying up the mess.
Detroit had gone way past the confetti stage. As evening approached, thousands of the celebrants, as if drawn by voices that only they could hear, got onto the freeway and started driving to Metro Airport. A crowd of a few hundred had been on hand when the Tigers had returned from St. Louis the first time. This time there would be 100,000.
Neil and Mark Hertzberg were among those who made the drive. The two brothers, who are now both physicians, decided to make the trip on impulse. “It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” says Neil. “Emotions were running so high, you had to do something. Watching them get off the plane was a great idea. I don’t think anyone dreamed that the same idea would occur to everyone else in the city.”
The Tigers’ plane was due at the United Airlines terminal about four hours after the game ended. Long before then, their welcoming committee brought airport traffic to a complete standstill. All parking lots were full. People simply abandoned their vehicles at the side of the entrance road or the freeway and raced toward the runway. A United flight from Denver landed, and word spread through the crowd that it was the Tigers. The crowd broke down a fence and dashed toward the taxiing plane. “I looked out the window,” one astonished passenger later told a reporter, “and I saw that mob surrounding the plane, and I thought to myself, ‘It’s finally happened. It’s the revolution.’”
Air traffic controllers finally advised airport administrators that they would have to shut down. The situation was out of control. Word was radioed to the Tigers’ jet, still several minutes out of Detroit, to divert to Willow Run Airport. This facility, on the site of the World War II bomber factory, had been the city’s major airport for years but had been closed to commercial flights two years before. The players landed there in almost total calm and boarded buses for the drive back to the city they had levitated.
Several Detroit journalists had so much to write after the ball game that it was impossible to make an air connection back to Detroit. They wound up at Tony’s Restaurant in St. Louis for dinner and a quiet celebration. Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, who had pursued the Tigers for most of the season, seemed to be as thrilled as anyone in Detroit about the series. He kept running up with radio reports about what was going on in Detroit.
“They had to close the airport,” he shouted. “Isn’t that fantastic? God, that’s just great.”
The Tigers peered from the bus windows as they slowly made their way through the city streets, which were still filled with a party that didn’t want to end. A few players had their eyes closed and snored, overcome with champagne and emotional release. Norm Cash had passed up the homecoming in favor of a quicker return to his own home in Texas. But most of the players looked out the windows, as if trying to engrave the scene on their memory for the rest of their lives.
There were a few scattered reports of violence during the night. But almost no looting or gunplay. At Wayne State University, however, a fight broke out between two groups of students at dinnertime in the Student Center. The fight, apparently, had been divided along racial lines. A few days later, the student newspaper, The South End, reported on the incident.
“The fight began,” it said, “when a group of black students objected to the way in which white students were celebrating the defeat of the St. Louis Cardinals, a great black team.”
Had nothing, finally, been learned?