The miracle that was Disco Demolition

One giant leap for mankind?

It was really much more than that.

No, not Neil Armstrong's bounce down the ladder.

Though his moonwalk, coincidentally, occurred 40 years ago this month, I was more carefully considering the night of Disco Demolition, and the 30-year anniversary Steve Dahl will celebrate Sunday.

That was a dagger to the heart of an era, and if the symbolic blowing up of records that Thursday night didn't kill disco, the riot that ensued almost certainly did.

Personally, I felt fortunate to have survived the evening at all, and after several efforts at telling Steve's side of the story in previous years, he magnanimously suggested this remembrance be told through the eyes of a young vendor.

Maybe he's just tired of me requesting compensation for my losses.

See, I was selling pop along the first-base side in the upper deck that night, just a kid trying to make a buck, with no idea of the storm headed in my direction.

I didn't know of Steve Dahl and didn't much care, but on the way into the park - a good four or five hours before the doubleheader against Detroit - we had good reason to think something was wrong.

Have you ever stood outside and watched the dark clouds roll in, the sky turn green, and wind begin to gust, right before you get walloped?

It's a little scary, because you're not sure if this is the day there's going to be a tornado hiding behind all that green sky.

And that's just what it was like at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979.

So many hours before a game on the South Side, it wasn't normal to witness hundreds of people milling around, looking for the ticket windows.

Young people loaded with signs and records, chanting "Disco (bleeps)," and even worse. Yeah, I'd say it was about as far from normal as a White Sox crowd could be.

For those somehow unaware, this was to be Dahl's anti-disco rally. He didn't think anyone would even show up, but show they did.

By the time the first game started, it was so crowded upstairs, so impossible to navigate the aisles, that I had to walk across the roof to get from first base to home plate with a tray of pop.

Once the fans figured it out, however, that plan was out the window, and they began to use the roof as their own playground.

What amazes me to this day is that no one died that night falling off the roof, or out of the upper deck.

No one collapsed during the riot or was decapitated by a record, though Ed Farmer will tell you that he thinks he got a haircut from a Donna Summer album while pitching the final 32/3 innings of Game 1.

By the third inning of the first game, the pregame buzz had turned to a full-blown roar.

No one was watching baseball, records were flying everywhere, players were wearing helmets in the field, and, in the midst of it all while turning a corner in the darkness of the upper deck in deep right field, I bumped into my high school English teacher.

She was wearing a black leather halter top and matching mini.

Yup.

I decided at that moment to take an entirely different look at the evening.

Sure, the proverbial lightning was all around, the thunder booming, and a monster storm about to engulf 35th and Shields.

But, c'mon, that halter changed everything for me, and I decided I had to find out about this Steve Dahl character.

Of course by then the crowds upstairs were obscene and insane, and I figured I had at least 20 cups of soda stolen from my tray, which means Steve still owes me about $13.

While the players looked around, trying to figure out what the noise was all about, the White Sox had a bigger problem.

By the middle of the first game, with the stadium sold out, there still were tens of thousands outside trying to get in.

And most of them did.

They broke down a metal gate on the first-base side near some cement fire escapes, and those walkways led straight to the upper deck and right past the commissary from which I was fetching my wares.

Now, they announced the attendance at 47,795. Forgive me for laughing, but that was funny even by Bill Veeck standards.

Knowing Veeck, I'm guessing he sold 57,000. Add in the 15,000 to 20,000 who ran into the upper deck without paying, and you're in the neighborhood of 75,000.

That was bad under any circumstances, but with so many people upstairs, it took 20 minutes to move 20 feet, and selling became impossible.

It was the Kennedy during rush hour. In a snowstorm. On a Friday. Before a long weekend. Closed for a presidential motorcade.

It was claustrophobic at best and dangerous at worst, and bumper to bumper, you got to know strangers in ways you didn't think possible in such a public setting.

But more than anything it's the shaking I remember.

So overcrowded was the upper deck in the outfield, that the stands began to shake.

I remember that more than Steve blowing up the records between games, seeing several thousand kids spontaneously erupt and take the field after he left, causing a cancellation and forfeit of the second game.

More than them tearing up the grass and smoking it, running the bases and ripping them from the ground, starting fires and putting them out in rudimentary fashion.

More than the couple getting downright romantic in short center field.

More than the police lining up to take the field back, with visions of 1968 running through everyone's head.

More than anything it was that shaking.

A few guys began to climb the foul poles from the lower deck, and when they swung back and forth, it made the rocking in the upper deck even worse.

People talk about how the ground rolls back and forth under you during an earthquake, and that's pretty much what it felt like.

What I don't understand, what I don't believe - and I can't overstate this - what I don't know even now, is how the stadium stood.

Really.

The old, broken-down, crumbling mess had every reason in the world to buckle under the weight of thousands too many in the upper deck.

It wasn't unusual on a normal, 12,000-attendance day for you to leave the parking lot late at night and see that more concrete blocks had fallen off the facade in right field.

So with all that happened on this night, it defies all logic and physics that Comiskey Park stayed upright.

Thing is, a lot of people hated the old place. The media despised it, the fans were sick of it, the vendors mocked it, and the players wanted a new stadium.

But from that day forward, I always considered it an old friend, one that saved my life, and I figured the lives of several thousand.

Maybe the old ballpark decided the abuse Veeck would receive and the embarrassment the Sox would suffer was enough, and it refused to let a travesty become a tragedy.

Stubbornly, it would not give in.

In the old Sox media guides, under "Significant Dates" - now it's listed under "Timeline" - it states that on July 12, 1979, "Bill Veeck's celebrated Disco Demolition Night results in a forfeit to the Detroit Tigers."

It's a shot at Veeck, who had little to do with the promotion and always felt terrible about seeing a game forfeited.

For that matter, so did Mike Veeck and Steve Dahl. The two men most responsible for an outcome no one could have predicted, and not a soul could have prevented, didn't want a game canceled.

I always felt bad for Bill Veeck, and after he sold the team, I'd run into him in the bleachers at Wrigley, where fans would buy beer from me to give to him.

I sensed that he never got over it, taking it to his grave with him in 1986.

Steve became famous and wealthy, Mike Veeck was pretty much blackballed from the majors, and the fans who were there had one incredible story to tell.

Me, well, I've gotten over the bitterness of having lost, basically, an entire night's wages, what with all the thievery, crowded working conditions and canceled second game.

The storm blew through like a hurricane, but I did, after all, live to tell the story.

Significant date? For me it sure was.

Miracle? Well, that's debatable.

But if you saw what I saw that night, if you felt what I felt, you might think so, too.

brozner@dailyherald.com