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HOUSTON​ — It​ was​ a baseball​ story that​ sounded too​ weird​ to be true. ​ Supposedly happened 40​ years​ ago,​ yet the evidence​​ was scant. The tale included a 25-year-old man living in a tent for 10 days on top of one of the most famous sports venues in the world.

I was not alive in the 1970s or early 80s, so perhaps my perspective was skewed. Yet I kept coming back to one question: How was this allowed?

The details went something like this: In October of 1980, as the city of Houston reveled in the Astros’ first postseason berth in franchise history, a radio station general manager named Dickie Rosenfeld came up with a promotional idea. As the hometown team chased a pennant and prepped for a National League Championship Series, the station would send an employee to live on top of the Astrodome, the heart and soul of Houston.

The man would eat, sleep and pass the days on a roof platform and inside a circular steel gondola that hung from the top of the building. He would not come down until the Astros won the pennant. Somebody at the station — maybe it was Rosenfeld, though that’s unclear — thought up a name.

Astroman.

The promotion was modeled after the flagpole sitter stunts of an earlier era, when somebody would climb atop a pole or raised platform and sit there, a test of endurance meeting a taste of publicity. Sometimes the “sitter” would not come down for weeks.

And yet, this Astrodome stunt seemed different. Somebody lived atop the Astrodome during the classic five-game National League Championship Series against the Philadelphia Phillies? Somebody relied on a rope system for food? Somebody had a port-a-potty and a landline phone for radio interviews? Really?

“It was a different time,” says Denver Griffith, the man at the center of our story.

Griffith was 25 years old then, a native Texan with a high school diploma and a sales job at radio station KILT. He handled the accounts of Houston’s music venues and rock clubs, using the gig to score concert tickets and relationships with promoters. To those that knew him, he had a nose for a good time.

Which is partly why he was chosen for the Astrodome assignment. He was young, single. He was a little adventurous.

“Back then in the 70s, life around the radio station was pretty wild,” he says. “It was pretty much anything went.”

For decades, Griffith has carried the memories of 10 days atop the Astrodome. But almost nobody else recalls the episode. Contemporary news accounts from back then are spotty. Archived video is difficult to find.

You can find traces of the stunt on internet message boards and a brief synopsis on Wikipedia (with no citation). But then the Astros made the World Series in 2017 for the second time in franchise history, and once again, the town of Houston was engulfed in baseball fever. A local television station tracked down Griffith and ran a short piece. The story was just two minutes long and mentioned the usual details: 1980. NLCS. Man atop the Astrodome.

But was it true? I messaged a number of friend with Houston roots. Nobody had heard of the story. I tracked down other Houstonians who were children during the 1980 playoffs. Nothing. I talked to former Astro Enos Cabell, who started at third base in 1980.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “But that was a different time back then. There wasn’t the coverage there is now.”

There was only one thing left to do: Find Griffith, the sales rep who lived on the Astrodome.

I had to know: Was Astroman a hoax?

Before we go any further in this story, we must establish two things: If you did not grow up in Houston, it might be difficult to understand what the Astrodome means to the city. Not just as a sporting venue, but as a symbol.

Once billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the building officially opened in 1965. It was both a fulfillment of a promise to Major League Baseball to build a covered stadium and a tribute to the possibility of the future. Housing the Houston Astros and the NFL’s Oilers (starting in 1968), the stadium was pioneering in more ways than one.

It was the first stadium in America to feature air-conditioning and the first to utilize Astroturf. It was the venue that hosted college basketball’s Game of the Century, tennis’ Battle of the Sexes, and boxing’s Greatest (Muhammad Ali). To many here, it was a marker of innovation and prominence, a sign of Houston’s arrival as a major American city.

“I think people really misjudge the impact it had on putting Houston on the map,” says Bill Brown, who served as an Astros broadcaster from 1987 to 2016. “It was just such a revolutionary development.”

In the years after it opened, the dome became one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country. When Houstonians ventured to Europe, Brown says, everybody knew the Astrodome.

If the Astrodome was Houston’s great Coliseum, the Astros were its original gladiators, the expansion franchise that changed its name to pay tribute to the city’s connection to the space program. The franchise had little history — it entered the National League as the Houston Colt .45s in 1962. It also had little success.

Before Nolan Ryan and the Killer B’s, and long before the Astros won a World Series in 2017 and were transformed into a juggernaut by general manager Jeff Luhnow, the team was just an upstart club. From 1962 to ’78, the franchise enjoyed just two winning seasons. It never finished better than third in the standings.

So when the 1979 Astros held a half-game lead in the NL West on September 1, the city took notice. Led by starting pitcher J.R. Richard and outfielders José Cruz and Terry Puhl, the club was experienced and exciting. To this day, it is still the last major-league team to finish with more triples than home runs. The next year, they finally won the NL West.

“That was the start,” says Enos Cabell, the third baseman on that team. “When I came in 1975, we weren’t very good. So it was a process of going all the way through that. Finally, we got there.”

It was the kind of team that could capture a city’s imagination. It was the kind of run that caught the eye of a man named Dickie Rosenfeld, the general manager at radio station KILT.

In local circles, Rosenfeld was something of a legend. He brought the Beatles to town in the 1960s. He created the famous “Hudson and Harrigan” morning show. He knew people all over town. And, yes, he had ideas.

One of those ideas apparently included Astroman.

I tracked down Astroman on a late Sunday evening, in the hours before the Astros lost Game 2 of the ALCS to the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. His real name was Denver Griffith. He couldn’t wait to talk.

“Astroman lives!” he told me.

Griffith was born and raised in Houston, but he and his wife had moved to Austin in 1991. They bought a house and never left. This is where he was on Monday afternoon.

In a 45-minute phone conversation, he explained the origins of Astroman, how he grew up in Houston, his father Cotton owning a chain of drive-in theaters; how he spent a couple years at North Texas State University before returning home and selling cars.

One sales job led to another, and Griffith eventually landed a job at KILT, the rock radio station. It was a dream gig of sorts, the kind that often led to three-drink lunches with promoters in town. And then came a morning meeting in a quiet September some years ago: Rosenfeld, the general manager, wanted to send an employee to live atop the Astrodome to draw attention to the station and the team’s pennant chances. By Griffith’s recollection, Rosenfeld had called over to the Astrodome or the Astros (or to someone) and that was all it took. The promotion was on. Would Griffith be down?

“I was the youngest guy there out of the salespeople, so I wasn’t married,” Griffith says. “It was just a natural fit for me to do these crazy promos. So they asked me.

“I remember saying: ‘Absolutely … I’d love to do it.'”

Nearly four decades later, Griffith has just one photo from the stunt. He is standing on a wooden platform on the Astrodome roof, a tent set up behind him, a pennant attached to a pole. He is wearing jeans, a cap and a white T-shirt with four words: “I Love You Houston.”

He remembers the setup vividly: One night in September 1980, the radio station had a party at the Astros game. Griffith was announced on the field and then led up an interior catwalk, to the steel mesh gondola that hung from the ceiling and offered a ladder pathway to the roof. The final door was like a spring-loaded submarine hatch.

On the roof, Griffith had an eight-man tent and access to a landline phone. He did interviews with the station DJs just about every hour. He spent the first night in a sleeping bag in the gondola because heavy storms were pummeling Houston. He spent the other nights sleeping outside. It was that pleasant.

“Really nice,” he says.

The other logistics were less appealing. Griffith was given a makeshift porta-potty. (“My food came in bags and left in bags.”) He never showered, instead using a powder to wash his hair. And the process of getting meals was tedious. At first, the Astrodome supplied a long rope left over from construction and a basket. But Griffith had to manually lower the rope from the gondola and haul the food back up. This process proved taxing.

“Talk about a workout,” Griffith says. “It was just crazy. So I finally just said, ‘Screw this. I’m not gonna do this anymore.’ I would meet folks at the end of the catwalk. I wouldn’t get off the catwalk, but they could just hand up from the floor. They’d just hand up boxes of food so then I’d walk it back up to the top.”

By the fourth or fifth day, Griffith was shouting out restaurants on air and getting free meals delivered to his Astrodome lair. The assignment came with other perks, too. He could watch Astros games from 200 feet above the field, watching Cruz track fly balls. His memories are flooded with other weird instances.

One day, his mom arrived at the Astrodome with food and interrupted a practice run by Oilers coach Bum Phillips. In the hours before he took his perch, a veteran Astros pitcher had one request: Could he possibly urinate on Tom Seaver’s head?

At night, when the games were over, Griffith would move from the roof to the gondola. For a moment, he would bathe in the silence and serenity of an empty dome.

“You’d come down inside and it was just total darkness,” he said. “You couldn’t see a damn thing, and I sure knew that I was 18 stories up.”

It was an incredible story. It was also incredibly weird. The idea of a professional sports team or venue allowing a radio station employee to live on the roof seemed wild. Why was there such a hole in the digital record?

I emailed an Astros team historian. He had a recollection of it, he said. But no documents. I emailed Griffith back. Did he have any other photos or evidence from the stunt? A press release? Was anybody from the station still around?

He didn’t, he said. But he did have some notes he’d kept from a few years ago. They provided the first clues for a breakthrough.

A few years ago, Griffith was telling the Astroman story to some friends. He realized he had little to document his time on the roof. To fill in the gaps, he went back and kept a retroactive log of the stunt.

First, he needed to remember the day it started. So he accessed a weather almanac and started looking through September of 1980. He found the day it had stormed; it aligned with a Tom Seaver start at the Astrodome. Bingo, he thought.

Still, something felt off. If he started on that date and counted forward, the Astros did not lose Game 5 of the NLCS until 18 days later. Griffith had a lot of fun in his 20s (repeat: a lot of fun) and plenty of memories remained fuzzy, he says. Yet he didn’t remember that many days on the Astrodome roof.

Eighteen days?

“I just went with it,” he says.

He couldn’t find any news articles to help his research. Which meant he couldn’t find anything to support his story. I followed up with one more email: Was there anyone else that remembered?

And then, at the last minute, a breakthrough: I stumbled upon a newspaper article in the Austin American-Statesman, dated Sept. 20, 1979.

The headline: “Astros fall to Atlanta.”

“As part of a ‘Back the Astros’ night sponsored by a local radio station,” Bill Sullivan wrote, “Denver Griffith, an employee of the station, climbed to the gondola inside the roof of the Astrodome and vowed he would not come down ‘until the Astros won the pennant.’

“From the looks of things, Griffith may be up there a while.”

The story mentioned fans braving heavy rains to attend the game. The Astros would face Seaver and the Reds the next night. Two days later, the Dayton Daily News’ Hal McCoy mentioned Griffith again.

“With another howling throng stuffed into the Astrodome, including local radio personality Denver Griffith peering through the roof from his temporary girder residence, the Cincinnati Reds quickly jumped on Houston’s Joe Niekro Saturday night.”

I emailed Griffith one more time: Uhh, was it actually 1979?

“I knew I had been up for 10 days!” he wrote back. “Seaver’s appearance in 1980 would have meant that I was up for 18 days. I was having big trouble making that jive in my head.”

Griffith’s final day on the roof was Sept. 30, 1979. The Astros beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 3-2. They finished 89-73, 1 1/2 games behind the Reds.

It was, at the time, the best season in franchise history. But the city would have to wait one more year for playoff baseball and another 37 for a championship.

On his final day on the roof, Rosenfeld, who died in 2000, called Griffith and asked if he wanted to make his departure an event.

Astroman said no. He just wanted to come down. “It was over,” he says.

Thirty-nine years later, the city of Houston has plans to renovate the Astrodome, a designated Texas historic landmark. There were political fights and public votes. The city didn’t want to leave its history behind.

The Astros, meanwhile, are back in the playoffs, seeking another championship inside pristine Minute Maid Park, a sleek retractable roof stadium with a train above left field. And Griffith, well, he’s still back in Austin. His tenure as Astroman is kind of funny and kind of weird. But yes, it appears to be true. And mostly, I’m still stunned it happened.

I tell him this during our first conversation.

“Houston was booming then,” he says. It was still coming up, still finding its way, and maybe that meant a looser atmosphere.

Of course, it was also the ’70s.

“The ’70s, man,” he says.

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Rustin Dodd is a staff writer for The Athletic.