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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
1973

Agnew quits the vice presidency; pleads no contest to tax evasion

A Baltimore courtroom deal ends a kickback investigation that reached back to his days as county executive.
1968

Apollo 7 lifts off from Cape Kennedy; America flies astronauts again

Twenty-one months after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts on the pad, a Saturn IB carries three more into orbit.
1984

Sullivan steps outside Challenger; first American woman to walk in space

Over the next three and a half hours she and David Leestma pumped hydrazine into a mock satellite to prove orbiting spacecraft could be refueled.
1976

A thread-like shape appears under the electron microscope in Atlanta

CDC virologists Fred Murphy and Alyne Harrison get the first clear image of the virus killing hundreds in Sudan and Zaire.
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