From stubborn Milt Mason to foam headed Bernie Brewer

As I’ve written in other posts, being a brewers fan is not always an easy task and evidently 1970 (a 65-97 season) was no different.  Many are probably already familiar, but this was the year that Bernie Brewer was born.  However, Bernie started not as a large foam headed mascot with good hygiene, but rather a 69 year old retired aviation engineer (who I’ve heard, but haven’t confirmed, helped to build the original County Stadium).  This aviation engineer, Milt Mason, so loved the Brewers that to combat struggling attendance numbers during their first Milwaukee season, he stubbornly vowed (with a nudge from his friend, Marvin Milkes, the Brewers’ Operations Director) to sit on top of the scoreboard (81 steps high) until attendance at a home game reached 40,000 (at first his goal was a sellout but he eventually became more realistic).  He was even given a specially constructed trailer with a 21-inch-color TV, a gas stove, an exercise bike, a refrigerator, and two telephones for talking to fans and the media respectively.  Opposing coaches even accused him of stealing signs from his trailer with binoculars.  His goal was accomplished on Bat Day, August 16, 1970, when a crowd of 44,387 showed up just to get Milt down from the scoreboard (or wanted free bats).  To celebrate that day’s 4-3 victory over the Indians, Milt swung down from the scoreboard on a 30 foot rope (and supposedly badly burned his hands) before falling another 15 feet and breaking some bones.  Although I haven’t completely confirmed this, due to some pretty severe storms during those 40 days and Milt’s love of beer, I’ve heard that he could be smelled from just as far away as he could be seen on top of the scoreboard.  I’ve also heard that after those 40 days, Milt was never hard to find around County Stadium because fans could just follow their noses.  As a tribute to Milt, who died on June 12, 1973, Bernie Brewer became the team’s mascot in 1973 and celebrated Brewers’ success by sliding into a stein of beer (something that Miller Park has been criticized for omitting).  By the 1980s, Bernie began resembling wrestler Colonel DeBeers until he was retired in 1984.  Fortunately, in 1993, fans voted 21,751 to 1,389 to resurrect the Bernie Brewer that I grew up with and he returned on Tuesday, June 8, 1993 (who by then looked a lot more like Robin Yount).

Bonnie Brewer

As a side note, who knew that from 1973-79 there was also a Bonnie Brewer (Bernie has probably been lonely ever since).  Also, evidently, another blogger has also noticed that there seems to be a real lack of information on Milt Mason.  I’d love to see a picture or read some historical news accounts of the man.  I did just purchase True Brew: A Quarter Century With the Milwaukee Brewers – maybe it will shed a little more light on the subject.

Sources: Bernie Brewer makes comeback splash, USA Today, 1993, Wikipedia, brewers.com

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Update 7-23-09:  My new book, True Brew: A Quarter Century With the Milwaukee Brewers, has just arrived and it was well worth the $1.05 that it cost on amazon.com.  The chapter describing Milt has some great quotes from the man himself!  Here a some pictures of Milt Mason, the original Bernie Brewer, scanned from my new book.

 

Milt Mason Pictures from 1970

Milt Mason camped above the scoreboard during his 40 day protest	Milt Mason sliding down a rope after the win over the Indians	Milt Mason greeting fans at County Stadium

 

More Early Bernie Brewer Pictures

Bonnie Brewer spanking an Orioles coach during a seventh inning stretch	Bernie Brewer Slide 1978-83	Bernie’s Chalet being dismantled in ‘84 for outfield bleachers

 

Bernie’s Resurrection in ‘93

Bernie’s chalet in front of Country Stadium field	Bernie in his chalet (maybe falling over railing)	Bernie going down his slide
Bernie Brewer closeup going down his slide	Bernie Brewer slide backwards	Bernie putting out the vibe into the beer mug

You know what really grinds my e-mail gears?

Today I received an e-mail that was both flagged with a high importance red exclamation point and requested that I send a read receipt.  However, it turns out that the e-mail was neither “highly important” nor required urgent reading.  There are definitely a lot of e-mail manners that are violated on the interweb everyday.  Here are just a few that bother me (in what I believe to be order of severity).

Violation 8:  Assuming the person goes by a shortened name
Maybe I’m partial to this because everyone assumes that my name is “Matt” no matter how much I try to use Matthew – especially in a professional setting.  However, I try to stick to what’s listed in a digital signature unless someone offers a less formal name at the end of their message.

Violation 7: Using “Hey” in the salutation line
This one is largely personal preference, and was something that I had never thought about until I did a co-op with GE Healthcare.  The reality of starting an e-mail with “Hey ____,” is that it’s very informal.  When I e-mail my brother or someone who I go to the Karaoke Kidd at one in the morning with, it’s probably ok.  For anyone else in a professional setting, especially a superior, it’s probably inappropriate.

Violation 6:  E-mailing a co-worker sitting next door
My dad always told me growing up to never do something over the phone which can be done just as easily (and probably more effectively) in person.  I believe this is also true about my own ”e-mail generation.”  I don’t want to work in an office where face-to-face conversations are a thing of the past and when I have entire work days of only staring at my computer monitor, I’m much more fatigued than after a day of meetings with human interaction.  Receiving an e-mail from someone who sits 10 feet away asking me a yes or no question is just ridiculous.

Violation 5: Replying without my original message thread
I send and receive a lot of e-mails every day (sometimes during the school year as many as 150) and I have four different e-mail accounts IMAPed to my MS Outlook program.  Therefore, when I receive an e-mail response without my original message or an action item that I need to take care of with no thread history to provide background, it’s confusing and can be very time consuming for me to figure out what the person is talking about.

Violation 4: Accidental “Reply to all”
Check out the following thread, compliments of my classmate Scott:

—–Original Message—–
From: “Scott”
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 7:48 PM
To: “Matthew”
Subject: Re: RE: ISyE undergrad funding and valuable practical/project experience opportunity

I apparently sent this to the whole IE undergrad

—– Original Message —–
From: “Matthew”
Date: Wednesday, March 4, 2009 2:09 pm
Subject: RE: ISyE undergrad funding and valuable practical/project experience opportunity
To: “Scott”

Scott,
Did you intend to send this to me?
-Matthew

—–Original Message—–
From: “Scott”
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 12:08 PM
To: “Raj”
Cc: ieundergrad@engr.wisc.edu; “Roger”
Subject: Re: ISyE undergrad funding and valuable practical/project experience opportunity

I have a play I need to go to for acting at 730 and can work whenever that ends.

—– Original Message —–
From: “Raj”
Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2009 7:46 pm
Subject: ISyE undergrad funding and valuable practical/project experience opportunity
To: ieundergrad@engr.wisc.edu
Cc: “Raj”, “Roger”

ISyE Undergrad Student Assistants

Starting Summer 2009 and subsequent semesters (15 – 20 hours per week)

[etc…]

Oops…  Although, I appreciated that my friend Scott wanted to let me know that he was going to a play that night, I’m sure the rest of my department’s undergraduate mailing list wasn’t as interested.  The professor, “Raj” (who happens to be my boss) he was e-mailing about the job offer and ”Roger” (who happens to be my supervisor) were probably just as disinterested.

Violation 3: Angry e-mails
Tone is never portrayed well in an e-mail and in my experience sending someone an e-mail while in a heated mood almost always does more damage than good (especially in destroying future communication barriers and trust).  Using an e-mail in which caps lock is used to ”yell” at someone is also insulting.  My biggest problem with this, however, is that a co-worker wouldn’t have the decency to talk to me face-to-face about a conflict, but rather finds it necessary to e-mail you and rub it in by copying a few of your co-workers or supervisors.  This is also known as ”copying up” and one of the most ridiculous experiences I had with it came after I missed a church music rehearsal and the director decided to reprimand me with an e-mail in which our parish priest was copied.

Violation 2: Unnecessary flagging with “high importance”
An e-mail which is flagged as “highly important” (the red exclamation point) gets subconsciously sifted to my “highly unimportant” e-mail folder.  E-mail importance is in the eye of the beholder and I’ll decide which messages in my inbox make the list.

Violation 1: Read receipts
To me the single most insulting e-mail habit is sending a read receipt with a message and it causes me to instantly lose interest (or maybe respect for the sender) for whatever the e-mail was about.  To me, this informs the recipient, “I don’t think you’re responsible enough to respond to my e-mail in a timely manner so I’m going to make you feel guilty and let me know how soon you’ll take care of the issue.”  This is especially annoying when you are a part time research assistant and you check e-mail at all hours of the day.  This option can also be turned off (at the risk of your untrustworthy coworkers thinking you never read their e-mails).  The only thing worse than an e-mail with a read receipt is one that contains both a read receipt and a “high importance” flag.

…and please don’t send facebook messages which contain any importance whatsoever, unless it has to do with going to the Karaoke Kidd…