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19791776 Club

Fans storm the field at Comiskey; White Sox forfeit the second game to Detroit

Steve Dahl blows up a crate of disco records between games, 50,000 fans rush the grass, and the umpires rule the park unplayable.

By the summer of 1979, the Chicago White Sox were mired in a losing season and disco had become a target for a certain kind of rock fan's resentment. On July 12, radio DJ Steve Dahl and promotions manager Mike Veeck offered fans a 98-cent doubleheader ticket if they brought a disco record to blow up between games. Roughly 50,000 people showed up, thousands stormed the field after the explosion, and the second game was forfeited to the Detroit Tigers the next day…

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More from July 12
1812

Hull crosses the Detroit River; his army occupies Sandwich, Upper Canada

The Army of the Northwest pushes onto British soil weeks after the U.S. declared war, planting American forces on the Canadian side of the river.
1862

Lincoln signs a Medal of Honor into law; the Army has no decoration for valor until today

Congress authorizes the medal for enlisted men who show gallantry in action; the War Department will contract for 2,000 to be struck.
2001

Atlantis lifts off with Quest airlock; station finally has its own door to open space

Astronauts Gernhardt and Reilly will bolt the 6.5-ton steel-and-aluminum chamber into place across three spacewalks, giving the station a hatch usable by both American and Russian suits.
19731776 Club
The NPRC building had no sprinklers, no fire barriers, and open storage floors 728 feet long; crews could not fully enter for 22 hours, and not one destroyed file had a backup copy.
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Read the full July 12 edition →Everything that happened on July 12 →
More from Cold War America
1956

Eisenhower signs the words already stamped on coins into the law itself

The phrase had ridden American currency since 1954; Congress just gave it a statute to stand on.
1971

Scott lands Falcon by hand at Hadley Rille; astronauts get a car on the Moon

The computer drifted off course, so David Scott flew the last stretch himself, straight toward a mountain valley chosen for its scenery.
1991

Bush and Gorbachev sign a treaty to cut the world's largest nuclear arsenals

Nine years of talks end with limits of 6,000 warheads and 1,600 missiles and bombers on each side.
1961

McNamara moves to merge the Pentagon's rival spy shops into one agency

The three service branches have been running separate, often conflicting intelligence operations for years.
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