Detroit '67: As violence unfolded, Tigers played two at home vs. Yankees

Fifty years ago today, while one of the nation’s worst civil disturbances was taking place, remarkably the Detroit Tigers played a doubleheader against Mickey Mantle and the New Yankees at Tiger Stadium.

Two days later, Mickey Lolich, the starting pitcher for the Tigers in Game 1 and who would become the World Series hero the following year, was protecting the city with the Michigan Air National Guard while his teammates flew to Baltimore after the home stand with the Orioles was moved to Maryland.

The day before, metro Detroiters had no clue that the Motor City was about to be rocked in the “Summer of Love.”

On that hot Saturday afternoon, Tigers fans were caught up in a thrilling pennant race that saw Detroit and four other teams battle for first place, all within two games of one another. At Tiger Stadium, 18,439 fans witnessed the Tigers destroy the last-place Yankees, 11-4, thanks largely to Norm Cash’s grand slam and Willie Horton’s three-run homer.

On Lake Huron, a record 206 sailboats vied for position at the start of the 43rd Port Huron to Mackinac race.

In Bloomfield Hills, first-year Lions coach Joe Schmidt was putting his squad through a rugged scrimmage in stifling 86-degree heat at Cranbrook School.

At beaches, backyards, parks and in cars, thousands were listening to Ernie Harwell and Ray Lane broadcast the Tigers game while others were tuned to CKLW or WKNR to hear the top hits that day including “Light My Fire” by the Doors and “All You Need is Love” by the Beatles.

But at 3:45 a.m. on July 23, 1967, as most people were sound asleep, at the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount on the near west side of Detroit, police raided an unlicensed drinking club (“blind pig”) where 85 people celebrating the return of two Vietnam veterans were taken into custody. When a rock was thrown at police, one of the most devastating riots in American history was ignited.

By the end of the week, baseball statistics suddenly didn’t seem as important.

When the mayhem ended, 43 people had been killed, 1,189 injured, 7,231 arrested, 2,509 stores had been looted or burned, 690 buildings were destroyed or had to be demolished, and 388 families were displaced.

At the ballpark

Amazingly, because Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh on that early Sunday morning somehow convinced the local media to refrain from reporting on the insurrection, few of the 34,623 baseball fans and media personnel who entered Tiger Stadium for the Sunday doubleheader against the Yankees had a clue of the growing violence taking place just 3 1/2 miles north on 12th Street. Now named Rosa Parks Boulevard, the street intersects at Michigan Avenue three blocks west of where Tiger Stadium once stood.

Pete Waldmeir, at the time a sports columnist for the Detroit News, recalls taking his 13-year-old son, Peter, and 11-year-old daughter, Patti, to the doubleheader, partly as a gift for her birthday three days later.

“I remember pulling into the players’ parking lot around 11:30 a.m. and Carl, a Detroit street cop who worked there quite a bit, had a dark hat on and not the white one I usually saw, which was kind of strange,” Waldmeir said recently. “When we got out of the car, he says: ‘What are you doing here, don’t you know there’s a riot going on?’ I, of course, had no idea. He says: ‘Come with me.’ ”

More of our Detroit 1967 riot 50th anniversary coverage

The officer escorted the Waldmeirs up the press box elevator to the third deck, where they opened a door and walked onto the roof of Tiger Stadium for a panoramic view toward the north.

“We could see all this smoke coming up from the 12th Street area,” Waldmeir said. “I turned around and said: ‘We’re going home.’ Carl said: ‘Don’t take the freeway because they are sniping there.’ ”

Waldmeir remembers the ride home to Harrison Township where the family lived at the time.

“I took Michigan Avenue to Gratiot rolling through some red lights and swung by the police station, where it was already barricaded,” he said. “Over the next few days, helicopters and planes from Selfridge flew over our house as they headed to the city.”

Soon after the 1:30 start of the first game that day, Harwell and Lane noticed the black smoke rising in the distance over the leftfield and centerfield third deck.

“We thought it was one hell of a fire and that perhaps someone was burning tires because it was so black,” Lane said a half century later.

“I remember Ernie was at the mike when the phone rang around the second inning and Howard Stitzel (broadcast engineer) answered it. Howard told us that Jim Campbell (Tigers general manager) said to never mention the smoke you see over the third deck, but we never asked why.”

In the first game, Yankees first baseman Joe Pepitone belted a two-run homer in the second inning off Lolich, and although the Tigers battled back to tie the score on a Dick McAuliffe solo shot and a Mel Stottlemyre wild pitch, they fell, 4-2, thanks to three errors in the seventh and ninth innings. When the first game ended at 4:07 p.m., the growing civil disturbance had just begun being reported by radio and television stations.

Lolich left the ballpark when the game ended, never knowing about the riot or that he soon would be wearing a uniform of a different sort. He just had lost his 10th straight decision, a club record.

“I guess I’ll go home and barbecue some spare ribs,” Lolich said at the time. “But I think that little black cloud over my head will start raining on me as soon as I light the fire.”

More: Follow the '67 Detroit riot in real time

Between games and after the doubleheader ended, Tigers pitcher Denny McLain recalls Campbell coming into the locker room to address the team.

“We had seen the smoke, and I think it was Gates Brown who first told us about what was happening,” McLain said. “Campbell gave us an update, told us that our safety was not threatened, that there was no threat near the ballpark, and that if we wanted an escort home to let him know.”

In the nightcap, the Tigers beat the Yankees, 7-3, as John Hiller, in relief of starter Johnny Podres, won his first major league game while pacing a Detroit rally in his first major league at-bat with a bases-loaded, two-run single following a Horton homer.

In his 1997 book, “The Tigers of ’68: Baseball’s Last Real Champions,” author George Cantor, who was the Tigers beat writer for the Free Press in 1966-69, recalled:

By the time the last fly ball of the doubleheader settled into the glove of leftfielder Lenny Green, it was after 7 p.m. Detroit did not observe daylight saving time, so light was already starting to fail. Twilight was made even deeper by billowing columns of smoke that ascended in an unbroken wall north of the ballpark. The public address announcer gave the final totals of the game. “For Detroit, seven runs, 12 hits, no errors; for New York, three runs, nine hits and one error. Winning pitcher Hiller. Losing pitcher Peterson. The Detroit Baseball Club has been advised that the Grand River, Linwood and Fenkell bus lines will not be operating this evening. Please drive safely.”

Cantor, who died in 2010 after a long career with the Free Press and Detroit News, also recalled smoke was pouring in dense waves across the Lodge Freeway and that homeward-bound drivers had to slow to an anxious crawl to get through.

Max Lapides, a Tigers fan since the late 1930s who lives in West Bloomfield, attended the doubleheader with his father.

“I lived at the time in the Greenfield/7 Mile area, and we had no idea what was going on,” said Lapides, 89, a retired marketing executive. “When we got onto the Lodge going home, we could see all the smoke and then learned about it on the car radio. When I got up to go to work the next day in Allen Park, we were told to stay home. I missed a couple of days, and it was very unnerving.”

More: James Craig had no love for police in 1967 — now he's Detroit's chief

Former Free Press sports writer Curt Sylvester was at the ballpark that day working for United Press International.

“Three things stand out for me that day,” Sylvester said. “Seeing the smoke rising during the game, listening to Willie Horton in the locker room as a voice of reason making an appeal for the violence to stop and having bricks hit my car on West Grand Boulevard,” said Sylvester, whose job interview with Free Press sports editor George Puscas the next day was cancelled. (Sylvester was hired in September that year and eventually spent 38 years at the Free Press, the last 27 covering the Lions.)

Horton had attended Detroit Northwestern and became the Tigers’ first black star player. In ’67, the Tigers had four African Americans: leftfielder Horton, pinch-hitter Brown, outfielder Green and starting pitcher Earl Wilson.

In his 2004 autobiography with Kevin Allen, “The People’s Champion: Willie Horton,” Horton says he drove to the epicenter of the riot area following the game. Horton wrote, in part:

Most of the players didn’t even shower. I didn’t even remove my uniform. I jumped in my car, I drove over by 12th Street near the blocks where I had delivered Michigan Chronicle newspapers as a child. … It looked like a war zone. … I exited my car, climbed on the roof and started shouting at people until I got their attention. … “Why are you burning up and tearing up the neighborhood you live in?” I asked. I kept asking why are you doing this, but no one had an answer."

McLain headed to his home in Southfield near 13 Mile and Northwestern Highway.

“As it turned out, there were false reports that rioters were headed to the suburbs,” McLain said. “I had an uncle in town, and we stayed up until 4 a.m. with my Winchester .30-30. The fear some of the media put into us was uncalled for.”

The days that followed

Waldmeir also was briefly armed during the week of the riot.

“I went to work on Monday, and the only bars open were Leo Derdarian’s Anchor Bar and the Lindell AC at Cass and Michigan,” Waldmeir said.

“I went to the Lindell, and there’s owner Jimmy Butsicaris at the alley entrance sitting in a chair with a shotgun over his lap. When I went inside, his brother, Johnny, asked if I had a gun, which I didn’t. He takes me to the upstairs office, opens a cabinet, and there are six guns, and he says: ‘Take your pick.’ Having been in the Marine Corps, the only one I recognized was a .45, so I took it and a clip, put it in my car and returned three days later.”

Also armed that week, but with an M1 rifle instead of a 95-m.p.h. fastball and a Spalding left-handed glove, was Lolich, a staff sergeant in the 191st Combat Support Unit in the Michigan Air National Guard. Fifteen months later, he would be named the 1968 World Series MVP after jumping into arms of catcher Bill Freehan on a glorious autumn afternoon in St. Louis.

More: Detroit '67: The officer who led the raid on the blind pig that ignited the riot

From 1963 to 1969, Lolich served in the Michigan Air National Guard, where for two weeks, right in the middle of the baseball season (except for early spring duty in ’68 and ’69), he attended summer camp in Alpena. Lolich already had fulfilled his summer camp duty in 1967 a month before the Detroit riot.

On Monday, the day after the riot began, the Tigers-Orioles series scheduled to start Tuesday at Tiger Stadium was switched to Baltimore. They were to play Tuesday and Thursday (a soccer match was slated for Wednesday).

On Tuesday morning, Lolich drove to Tiger Stadium to get on the team bus that was headed to the airport for the trip to Baltimore.

“Before I got onto the bus, the security guard at the gate said I had a phone call,” Lolich said. “It was my sergeant, who informed me that the Guard had been activated to help quell the riot.”

With the Detroit Police department overwhelmed by 1:30 p.m. that day, some 8,000 Michigan National Guardsmen were deployed on orders from Gov. George Romney. They later would be augmented with 4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and 360 Michigan State Police officers. Besides Lolich, who would be on active duty for 12 days, two other Detroit athletes had been activated: wide receiver John Henderson and quarterback Tom Myers of the Lions, both summoned from the Cranbrook training camp.

As a sergeant in charge of an 11-man unit, Lolich and his men were assigned to station themselves on the roof of a DPW building in Southwest Detroit to guard a police radio tower.

“We were all hungry, and they had given us K-rations, which nobody wanted,” Lolich said. “I said: ‘OK, everybody cough up 5 bucks, I’m going to get us something to eat.’ About three blocks away, I enter this restaurant in my military fatigues and helmet carrying an M1 carbine. Everybody’s eyes got as big as saucers, but no one recognized me. I ordered hamburgers, shakes and fries for everyone. The owner comes out and says: ‘What’s going on here?’ I said: ‘You know there is a riot going on?’ He said: ‘Well, it’s good that you guys are around here, it’s on me.’ He ordered his dishwasher to help me take it back to the guys.”

When Lolich reported the next day, he heard that the Guard had checked records and found he was the second-most qualified for rifle accuracy.

“I was told ‘we have a problem, one, we don’t want anyone shooting Mickey Lolich and, two, we don’t want Mickey Lolich shooting anyone,’ ” Lolich said with a chuckle. “Since I was in the motor pool, they assigned me to the major in charge, and I drove him around in a truck in the downtown area. What I remember most is seeing all these tanks and machine guns around the police station on Beaubien and an overflow of prisoners on the floor of the police garage. They had to bring in city buses to place more prisoners. I saw a lot down there.”

On Wednesday, with the riot starting to slow down, Lolich was ordered to go home for the remainder of the week, where he remained in case he was called back in. Lolich did not pitch again until Aug. 11, when he ended his losing streak with a five-hitter. He then won nine of his 10 decisions in August and September.

Shortly after his return to the Tigers, Lolich experienced something even more unsettling.

The Tigers and their fans weren’t the only ones who wished Lolich had not been called to duty.

“I received a letter in the mail that said: ‘The next time you pitch at night in Tiger Stadium, you’re going to get it,' and it was from the Black Panthers,” Lolich said. “At first, I thought it was a prank, but then I thought: ‘What prevents some guy from waiting for me outside the park or even in the stands with a gun?’ In my first two appearances at Tiger Stadium, there were FBI snipers on the roof of the ballpark and also parked outside of my home.”

While decimated neighborhoods still smoldered, the Tigers remained in a torrid pennant race until the last day of the season, when they split back-to-back doubleheaders against the Angels at Tiger Stadium, finishing tied for second place with Minnesota, one game behind Boston.

And although the societal problems that had helped ignite the riot of ’67 continued and Detroit still was reeling from the aftereffects, the next season, instead of rioting in the streets, Tigers fans were instead, to steal a Motown anthem, “Dancing in the Street” when Lolich, McLain, Horton, Kaline, Cash and the other “Boys of Summer” finally gave Detroiters something to cheer about: a World Series winner.

