Wednesday · November 11, 2026
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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
1989

A 6.9 quake hits the Bay Area as the World Series is about to start on live national TV

Light rush-hour traffic, cleared early for the game, kept the Nimitz Freeway collapse from killing far more.
1948

Truman stands on Union Square to honor three presidents North Carolina gave the nation

A sitting president stood before bronze and granite to mark where Jackson, Johnson and Polk were born.
1950

Pyongyang falls to UN troops; by nightfall, China's army is already crossing the border

Church bells rang over the North Korean capital hours before Beijing's soldiers began wading the Yalu.
1973

Two Justice Department chiefs quit in one night rather than fire the Watergate prosecutor

Nixon finally finds a third official willing to do it: Solicitor General Robert Bork.
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