Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Sept. 28, according to the Tribune’s archives.
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Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 92 degrees (1953)
- Low temperature: 29 degrees (1942)
- Precipitation: 3.65 inches (1972)
- Snowfall: None
Ann Hartnett, mother of Gabby Hartnett, manager of the Chicago Cubs, was on hand Oct. 5, 1938, for the first game of the World Series in Chicago against the Yankees, and she indicated what team she wanted to win when she gave Gabby a kiss. (AP)
1938: Chicago Cubs manager-catcher Gabby Hartnett’s two-out, two-strike, last-of-the-ninth home run — known as the “homer in the Gloamin’” — beat darkness and first-place Pittsburgh Pirates 6-5. (Lights were finally installed and turned on at Wrigley Field in 1988.)
“You have seen them rush out to greet a hero after he touched the plate to terminate a great contest. Well, you never saw nothin’,” Tribune reporter Edward Burns wrote.
“The mob started to gather around Gabby before he had reached first base. By the time he had rounded second, he couldn’t have been recognized in the mass of Cub players, frenzied fans, and excited ushers but for that red face, which shone out even in the gray shadows.”
Three days later, the Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals for their 10th win in a row and clinched the pennant.
A modern rapid transit train heads for the Loop carrying dignitaries as the city dedicates a $51 million dollar system in the Dan Ryan Expressway on Sept. 26, 1969. The train has just left the Dan Ryan system and is linking up with the Lake Street line into the Loop. (James O’Leary/Chicago Tribune)
1969: The Dan Ryan Rapid Transit line (known today as the south branch of CTA’s Red line) opened.
Confusion arose when thousands of inbound Lake “L” passengers got off at the Clark and State street stations on the Lake Street “L” structure, and then encountered difficulty in transferring to a new Loop shuttle-train service or the Evanston “L” trains for getting to the Van Buren and Wells street sides of the elevated structure.
Gloved hands keep Jayne Schiff of Chicago speeding along in her racing wheelchair on April 5, 1981, at a 10,000-meter course on the Chicago lakefront. In 1980, she was the first unofficial wheelchair winner of the Chicago Marathon. (Ernie Cox Jr./Chicago Tribune)
1980: Though the Chicago Marathon’s first wheelchair competition wouldn’t take place until 1984, Northwestern University medical student Jayne Schiff became its first unofficial wheelchair winner with a time of 3:02:38. Schiff nearly died in 1975, when a landslide inside an upstate New York cave crushed her spinal cord, leaving her paralyzed from the chest down.
“When I’m rolling along the lakeshore, I don’t feel like I’m in a wheelchair, I feel like I’m flying,” she told the Tribune in 1981.
Chicago Cubs broadcaster Ron Santo holds his No. 10 jersey in the radio booth on Sept. 15, 2003, at Wrigley Field where he provides commentary for WGN radio. (Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune)
2003: Cubs third baseman and broadcaster Ron Santo’s No. 10 jersey was retired by the team at Wrigley Field. “This is my Hall of Fame,” he told the crowd.
Santo was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 2012 — almost two years after his death.
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