Bosley was traded from the California Angels to the White Sox in 1977. He played for the White Sox from 1978 until the spring of 1981 when he was traded to Milwaukee. In 1983, he was traded back to Chicago, this time to play for the Cubs.
“Chicago was a whole new dynamic for me,” Bosley said. “I had never experienced segregation like that. Chicago in the late seventies was very stressful for me. Then the whole Comiskey Park incident, you know how things implode? It seemed like things exploded in terms of what was really going on, not only in the cities but in the nation as a whole, as far as music was concerned.
“The thing that fascinated me the most about the event is that, boom, the next day disco died.”
Bosley got quiet as he collected his thoughts. “After that there was a shift. When I was traded to the Cubs I ended up buying a place in downtown Chicago and lived there for twenty-three years. That’s a reflection of how much the shift occurred. Harold Washington became mayor of the city (in 1983). A lot of good things birthed themselves out of that experience, out of that time.”
Steve Dahl with a box of disco records waiting to be blown up
Fans wait to enter Comiskey Park the day of Disco Demolition
Every good story has a point of conflict. Steve Dahl’s career ascended after Disco Demolition. Mike Veeck’s career crashed, and never really recovered.
Bill Veeck, Jr. took the blame for Disco Demolition.
The elder Veeck sold the White Sox two years after the event and spent the last summers of his life in the center field bleachers at Wrigley Field. Veeck died of cancer in 1986 at the age of seventy-one and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991.
“The first time I came into Comiskey was the last time I felt safe in this world,” his son, Mike Veeck, said during a conversation on a rainy spring afternoon at U.S. Cellular Field in 2015. “I remember holding Dad’s hand and seeing this beautiful green diamond in the midst of all this macadam. It seemed like he knew everybody in the world. Everybody said, ‘Hi Bill!’ It was the most wonderful thing.”
Mike Veeck had a promising career in Major League Baseball until the night of the promotion.
“I’m the one who triggered it,” Veeck said. “My old man did what a good leader does. He took the heat. For ten years it was very painful for me. Steve Dahl’s career took off. I couldn’t get a job in baseball. I was red hot with soccer clubs because they like riots, and every radio station in the world wanted me as a promo director. I went to hang drywall in Florida. I got divorced. I never wanted to hear the phone ring again.
“Why do you think I disappeared at the bottom of a bottle for ten years? I drank two bottles of VO a day, Extra Calvert was my favorite, not the Lord Calvert. My Dad was the only person in the ballpark who understood exactly how I felt. We weren’t the greatest father and son, in terms of Ward Cleaver. But professional to professional there was nobody better, and he knew this was one that got away—from everybody. I know the event stung my Dad.”
Actually, Veeck didn’t even have the soccer crowd.
In the aftermath of the event, the late Chicago Sting soccer team owner Lee Stern said in the Chicago Tribune, “When I heard about the success of this Dahl guy and his anti-disco nights, we looked at the possibility of having him come to one of our games. But after seeing that weirdo on TV tonight, there’s no way we’d do it now.”
Veeck sat in the open air patio at U.S. Cellular Field as we talked. Members of the Cincinnati Reds were running laps. Yes, the Reds who beat the White Sox in the 1919 World Series, rigged by gamblers. The series is on record. It was worse than Disco Demolition.
“I never talk like this, you know this,” Veeck said. “I invented skyboxes. I was on fire in 1979. I was twenty-eight and every day was an idea. I never thought I would be judged on one promotion. These private party areas that are the background of sports marketing? They were invented here.” Bill Veeck, Jr.’s “Picnic Area” was created at Old Comiskey Park, across the street from the site of Disco Demolition. It became known as “The World’s Largest Saloon.”
“Every area of Old Comiskey that wasn’t being utilized, we turned into a money maker,” Veeck said. “It changed the way sports was marketed. Comiskey had the old Chicago Cardinals press box.” The forlorn Cardinals press box was along the third base line attached to the roof of the ball park.
Veeck nodded at the sky over the empty ball park and continued. “I looked up there one night when I was shooting fireworks and there was the press box in the reflection. You would go to the press box and get two cases of Stroh’s and a rib dinner. Dad was trying to sign (outfielder) Chester Lemon. He needed 70,000 dollars. I said, ‘We’re going to sell that Cardinals press box.’ He said, ‘What are we going to call it?’ They had ‘Owners Boxes’ in the great Astrodome. When I saw the reflections in the fireworks I said, ‘Let’s call it a skybox.’ There wasn’t even a bathroom in it, which is why you only got two cases of beer. My dad got 70,000 dollars in seventy-two hours. It was a great thing. He said, ‘It’s a terrible idea, Mike.’ I said, ‘Why is that? I created money out of nothing.’ He said, ‘It’s elitist.’ I didn’t see that.
I was doing something for my dad.”
Veeck sighed. Sometimes it’s difficult for Veeck to talk about his father. “People acted like Disco Demolition was the first besmirching of my dad’s career,” he continued. “Well, they don’t know much about the Veeck history, going back to Capone days. He testified for a character in Cleveland who buried the 1949 pennant in Cleveland and got murdered the next day.”
Later in life, Bill Veeck became the only Major League Baseball owner to testify on behalf of Curt Flood in the outfielder’s 1970 lawsuit against the organization.
Mike Veeck
His son said, “When you’re a legend, all of that goes away.”
M.C. Antil worked in the White Sox group sales department in the late 1970s. “The media was taking dead aim on the event,” Antil reflected. “Bill deflected all the blame and said, ‘This was mine.’ That stuck with me—his willingness to stand in front of media to shield Mike from it. It’s something that isn’t talked about. Bill didn’t have anything to do with Disco Demolition, he was trying to run a baseball team and Mike was running the business side of it.”
“That was real noble of Bill,” said WLUP-FM’s 1979 Promotion Director Dave Logan. “It is important that Mike Veeck is noted as someone who had the balls to do this. He got hosed.”
Mike Veeck did not listen to WLUP. He liked the wide range of pop, rock, and R&B on AM radio, a child of WLS and WCFL radio. “Somebody told me there was a guy blowing up disco records on the air,” Veeck recalled. “So I couldn’t get to the station fast enough. I’m scaling the Hancock building. I went to call on Dahl when he got off the air. I didn’t have any idea it was going to draw. Dahl didn’t know if it was going to draw. Four thousand people would be fine as far as I was concerned. We did Disco Night in 1977 and drew 20,000 people, and there were about twenty dance clubs from around town. That was the night the seeds of anti-disco or whatever you want to call it were sewn.”
After the Disco Night game, Veeck ushered a group of White Sox front office staff to Miller’s Pub, a favorite Loop watering hole of Bill