Todd’s Olympic Games host cities tour visits Atlanta.
My first visit to Atlanta happened a year or so after my first journey to Montreal. Although I can cite the three specific times I traveled to Montreal, all I can say about Atlanta is that I have visited on numerous occasions both before and after the games of the XXVI Olympiad in 1996. Like the last of my three trips to Montreal, I went to Atlanta to visit family. In both cities I was visiting the same sister but in my early visits to Atlanta I spent time with a different brother-in-law.
My sister married her high school sweetheart in May 1968 and by August, her baby brother had pestered her into letting me visit for a week or so. Before I go much further, I trust you will bear in mind that it was 1968, I was not quite 14 years old, and I had a lot of room and need for personal growth.
I write this because so much of what we did – places we visited, places we ate and the like – were so deeply tied to the image of the old South and its antebellum glory that I would be uncomfortable doing them now. At that time in my life, I never gave a second thought to the effect of the likenesses of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, and President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis carved into the side of Stone Mountain might have on the descendants of slaves and the people who lived in the Jim Crow south. And I probably shouldn’t mention the restaurant called Aunt Pittypat’s Porch but it, too, was a part of that initial trip.
(Other than its reference to being young and the fact that I like it, this song by Fun featuring Nate Reuss and Janelle Monae has nothing to do with anything else in this post.)
Take me out to the ballgame.
Although I remember some of those now embarrassing moments, the real highlight and most indelible memory of my first visit to Atlanta happened on my last night there – Friday, 9 August 1968. Those of you who read the Montreal segment should recall that one of my trips to Montreal was simply to see a baseball game. Baseball has been a long time passion for me. If my father was still living he’d tell you that even at age five or six I was something of a student of the game so I was excited when Paul, my erstwhile brother-in-law, told me that he’d gotten tickets not only to see the Braves host the Saint Louis Cardinals at a nearly sold out Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium but that the pitching matchup was going to be Bob Gibson against Phil Niekro.
[Photo from www.ballparksofbaseball.]
Here’s some context for this game:
In 1968, the leagues had not yet split into divisions and the Cardinals were on their way to a comfortable National League title that they would win by 9 games. The Braves were not much of a challenger in 1968 but they were an up and coming team. They’d finish the season at 81-81 – a four game improvement from their 1967 record and in 1969 would win the National League West with a record of 93-69.
In August of 1968, Bob Gibson was in the midst of a historic season in which he would finish 24-10 and lead the NL in strikeouts (268) and pitch to an unfathomable 1.12 earned run average. (In the more than 50 years since that Gibson season only two pitchers – Dwight Gooden in 1985 and Greg Maddux in 1994 – have come within half a run of that.) Niekro’s 1.87 E R A had led the majors the season before.
In addition to the pair of future Hall of Fame pitchers, the Cardinals’ lineup featured two players – Lou Brock and Orlando Cepeda – who would be so enshrined and, of course, the Braves had Henry Aaron in their lineup as well as Joe Torre who would reach the H o F for his later success as a manager. One could probably argue that two others in the Cardinals’ batting order are at least worthy of consideration. They would be Curt Flood and Roger Maris.
The location of the tickets Paul was able to get aren’t visible in the photo above. We were in the top tier over left field. The game itself was the classic pitcher’s duel. Gibson pitched a complete game shutout striking out five and walking none. Niekro pitched into the eighth inning having given up a lone run in the third (Brock singled with one out, stole second, and scored on Maris’ single to right.). The game took one hour and 49 minutes (4 or 5 innings in today’s world) and Paul took me right from the stadium to the airport where I caught a late night Eastern Airlines flight home to Baltimore. (It was such an innocent time. There was no TSA, magnetometers were nowhere to be seen, anyone, ticketed or not could walk to the gate. And you could arrive at the airport 15 minutes before your scheduled departure.) For my not quite 14 year old self, it was better than my Bar Mitzvah.
I’m reasonably certain that if I opened the door, released my travel homunculus (who, in my case, looks suspiciously like the Travelocity gnome), and allowed it to stimulate the neurotransmitters where the engrams of Atlanta trips are stored, I could recount details of sights seen on some of my other visits. The truth is that after those early excursions, my trips were mainly centered around spending time with family. I wrote about one such trip that happened in 2013 over Thanksgiving. If you’d like to get a sense of it, you can read about it here.
In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at the Games of the XXVI Olympiad.