Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Five worst fires in Packers history

 
Maybe one of the reasons Green Bay Packers memorabilia from the distant past doesn’t surface more often on the collector’s market is because much of it went up in flames.
While the Packers actually owned only one of the properties, here is a list of the worst Packers-related fires since the team was founded in 1919.

No, not that Hagermeister Park!  This one being the site of the infamous "Bros before pizza" quote.

1. Hagemeister Park Armory (Dec. 25, 1926) – The Packers used the city-owned building as a locker room and for storage. The team lost uniforms, blankets and equipment, including headgear. The players lost their pants, shoulder pads, knee and ankle braces, and shoes, all of which they had to furnish at the time. But perhaps the biggest loss “was a string of old footballs that had seen use in important Packers victories.” The Armory was located just east of where Cherry Street ends at Baird and was used by the Packers when they played at Hagemeister Park from 1919-22. It survived the wrecking ball when East High School was built and was used again during the Packers’ first two seasons in City Stadium (1925-26). The fire was discovered at 5:15 Christmas morning and by the time the firefighters arrived 15 minutes later, the building was doomed.



2. Rockwood Lodge (Jan. 24, 1950) – The Packers purchased the building in 1946 at Curly Lambeau’s urging and used it as a training headquarters for four seasons. They lived there and practiced there. The lodge (pictured) resembled a centuries-old European chateau and sat on a pristine tract of land overlooking the waters of Green Bay, near Dyckesville, but it wasn’t practical. It was a drain on the franchise’s finances at a time when it was going broke, and an unforgiving bed of limestone lied not even inches under the practice field and wreaked havoc on the players’ legs. The caretaker said he had feared fire for a long time and blamed it on faulty wiring. It also was an eerie January afternoon marked by thunder, lightning and howling winds, a rare winter mix in Green Bay. The Packers’ uniforms and equipment were packed away at City Stadium so their losses were reportedly minimal. In truth, they were better off collecting the insurance money than continuing to pay the bills there. But what a waste. The building would be a cherished landmark today.

3. Lambeau’s Bay Shore Cottage (Sept. 24, 1937) – The fire burned from 10 o’clock at night until 5 the next morning. Lambeau reported he lost pictures and trophies that could not be valued in terms of money. He had purchased the cottage that summer, refurnished it and planned to spend about 10 months a year there. The cottage was located along the east bay shore, near what is now the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Lambeau said all he saved was the suit he was wearing. 


4. Lambeau’s Fish Creek Home (Aug. 7, 1961) – Lambeau reported he lost almost all his mementos collected over his football career. The fire was reported at 10 a.m., not long after he had left for Green Bay. Retired by then, Lambeau was living in Door County during the summer and spending winters in California. The home included six bedrooms, five baths and was located on Fish Creek’s fashionable Cottage Row.

5. Astor Hotel (Feb. 4, 1966) – Starting in the late 1920s and continuing into the 1950s, most every single Packer and even some of the married ones lived at the Astor during football season. By 1966, it had become a fleabag, but there still had to be precious possessions and records around from when the likes of Johnny Blood, Clarke Hinkle and other future Hall of Famers stayed there. If nothing else, the memories that went up in smoke were inestimable. Hotel managers Mayme Toule and Sue Wallen served as surrogate mothers for the players during the 1930s and ’40s. They’d watch their money, darn their socks anything they needed. Located on Adams Street almost kitty-corner from the Hotel Northland in downtown Green Bay, the Astor also had a bar that was a hangout for players and fans alike, and where Sunday nights would turn into New Year’s Eve following a Packers home victory. Eight people perished in the Astor fire, which was called the worst in Green Bay’s history.
 

Wednesday, May 20, 2015


SHAFT!

Who's the cat who won't cop out when the heat
is all about?  SHAFT!

Monday, May 18, 2015

RIP


Garo "I KEEK A TOUCHDOWN" Yepremian, Whose Kicks Outshined One Pass, Dies at 70


Garo Yepremian, a highly accomplished field-goal kicker who proved to be a comically inept Super Bowl passer in one of the most famous bloopers in the history of the National Football League, died on Friday at a hospital in Media, Pa. He was 70.   
 
Of course he was a Detroit Lion.

Yepremian, who was left-footed, played in the N.F.L. from 1966 through 1981, kicking for the Detroit Lions, the Miami Dolphins, the New Orleans Saints and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In 1966, he kicked six field goals for the Lions in a game against the Minnesota Vikings.

 
But the high points (and famous low point) of his career were with Miami. As Christmas Day turned to night in 1971, he kicked a 37-yard field goal in Kansas City, Mo., to lift the Dolphins over the Chiefs, 27-24, in the second overtime of a playoff game. The contest was the longest in N.F.L. history at the time. Weeks later, his field goal gave Miami its only points as the Dolphins lost to the Dallas Cowboys, 24-3, in the Super Bowl.
 
Then came the magical season of 1972. Yepremian was his team’s leading scorer as the Dolphins took a 16-0 record into the Super Bowl against the Washington Redskins on Jan. 14, 1973, in Los Angeles. The Dolphins were leading, 14-0, with just over two minutes left when Yepremian was sent in to attempt a field goal. 


 
Don Shula, the Dolphins’ coach, relived the moment decades later, as The Associated Press recalled Saturday: “I thought, ‘Boy, this will be great if Garo kicks this field goal and we go ahead, 17-0, in a 17-0 season. What a great way that would be to remember the game.’ And then Garo did what he did.”  


 
What Yepremian inexplicably did, after the Redskins’ Bill Brundige blocked the kick, was pick up the ball and try to pass it. But Yepremian was used to kicking the ball, not throwing it, and the ball slipped out of his hands. He tried to bat the ball out of bounds, but instead he batted it into the hands of the Redskins’ Mike Bass, who ran 49 yards for a touchdown.
 
Yepremian hid on the end of the bench for the final two minutes, his 5-foot-7 ½-inch stature making concealment easy. He was reprieved as the Dolphins hung on to win, 14-7, but his blunder was already legendary.
 
“Every airport you go to, people point to you and say, ‘Here’s the guy who screwed up in the Super Bowl,’ ” Yepremian said in a 2007 interview with The Associated Press. “Fortunately, I’m a happy-go-lucky guy.”
   
            

Garabed Sarkis Yepremian (pronounced ya-PREM-ee-an) was born in Cyprus on June 2, 1944, and came to the United States when he was 22. A former soccer player, he spoke only a little heavily accented English when he broke into professional football. “I keek a touchdown!” he supposedly exclaimed after a successful kick.  



 
In his Miami years, Yepremian sold neckties, some made in his basement — “wide, wild and woolly ones, with bright, abstract patterns that remind you of the kind of visions people must have on acid trips,” as Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times wrote in 1972.
 
Shula has always been able to laugh about the miscue. Still, he organized a special drill in training camp the season afterward, as he told the A.P.
 
“We had holder Earl Morrall let the ball slip through his fingers,” Shula said. “I yelled at Garo, ‘Fall on it! Fall on it!’ ” This time, he did.



DAILY DRAPER:  
 
DON BUYS THE WORLD A COKE  
 
    

You only like the beginnings of things,” someone once told Don. Well, Don isn’t the only one. As viewers, we love the beginnings of things: Remember the excitement of discovering this little 1960s drama eight years ago on some channel called AMC? The beginnings are always so full of possibility. Maybe that’s why, for all of our wild theories about what will happen, the endings never satisfy us. 

I I'd like to buy the world a home And furnish it with love

Grow apple trees and honey bees And snow white turtle doves

I'd like to teach the world to sing (Sing with me)

In perfect harmony (Perfect harmony)

I'd like to buy the world a Coke And keep it company (That's the real thing)
 
As I wrote last week, it’s often hard to tell the difference between endings and beginnings on Mad Men. Don Draper keeps starting over, only to find himself right back where he started. This show is a time machine, going backward and forward, always taking us back to the same place. “You can put this behind you,” Don tells Anna’s niece, Stephanie. “It’s easier if you move forward.” But moving forward is moving backward. Progress doesn’t exist. 



"It's Toasted.  The first pitch we saw from Don/Dick.  The first and last pitches were the only real-life ad campaigns used in the show.
 
When people talk about the 1960s, they often say that it was a time of great change. The irony is that Don is supposed to be this great symbol of that era, and yet his refusal to change has defined the show. That’s true right down to the end, as he heads back to California to return Anna’s ring and ends up joining Stephanie at an Esalen-style retreat in Big Sur. He’s just had an emotional breakthrough with some stranger named Leonard, who tells a metaphorical story about closing the refrigerator door that echoes the show’s larger themes about doorways


Though when Don hugs the guy, it’s a bad sign of what’s to come. (“Does hugging feel honest?” the guru asks the group earlier in the episode.) The next thing you know, Don is sitting cross-legged on a cliff, listening to the guru insist that “the new day brings new hope,” maybe even “a new you.” 


Betty made a Coke ad earlier in the series.
 
Watching this, you might think, Don Draper has finally traded the corporate world for something meaningful! But the second you hear those voices singing in that Coke jingle, it’s clear that he has taken this authentic experience and commodified it. He’s just made the most famous ad for one of the most famous companies in the world.

 
 
How fitting that a guy whose whole life has been a lie would invent a campaign called
“The Real Thing.”  
 
 
Is this a depressing ending? A happy one? Your answer probably comes down to whether you believe, as Stan does, that there’s more to life than work. 
 
“People come and go, no one says goodbye,” Don complains of the hippies at the retreat. But he’s really talking about himself.
 
As for Don, did he end up learning anything? I would’ve loved to believe that Don Draper could’ve reinvented himself as Jack Kerouac, just like Bert Cooper implied, hitchhiking out West, following America in his shiny car into the night. I’d love to believe that Don could’ve endlessly followed the same milk and honey route that Kerouac’s hero, Jack Dulouz, followed in Big Sur, leaving everything behind at the height of his career to be alone in the California wilderness. But in the end, Jack Dulouz ended up right back in New York, and I’ll bet Don Draper did, too. The end is just another new beginning. And even in the New Age, you’re still the old you.
 
RANDOM THOUGHTS
  • “Your baby is going to spend the rest of his life staring at the door, waiting for you to walk in,” a woman at the hippie retreat tells Stephanie. She pretty much just summed up Don’s mother issues. Before he gets to the retreat, we see him sleeping with yet another woman who takes his money before she has sex with him, just like Diana, just like many other women he has slept with as he tries to make peace with the prostitute mother he lost so long ago.
  • “A lot has happened,” Don says. It’s an understatement that sums up the last eight years pretty well. I will really miss this show.


Sunday, May 17, 2015




JOAN ON THE RANDOM NATURE OF LIFE
 

Friday, May 15, 2015


DAILY DRAPER,
HAPPY FRIDAY EDITION:    



DON'S WOMEN   

FLOW CHART
 
 
 


The prostitute who took his virginity.
 
 

"The only thing keeping you from being happy is the belief that you are alone."  
The late Anna Draper, widow of the real 
Don Draper. 
 
 
 
Betty Draper Francis aka Birdy,
 the mother of his 3 children.  
 




"I don't make plans and I don't make breakfast."
Artist Midge Daniels who later becomes a heroin addict.

 "Mr. Draper, I don't know what it is you really believe in," Rachel said a few minutes later. "But I do know what it feels like to be out of place. To be disconnected. To see the whole world laid out in front of you the way other people live it. There's something about you that tells me you know it, too."
The late Rachel Menken Katz, department store heiress.

"I'm here to tell you you missed your plane."
 
 
 
 
Bobby Jo Barrett
 
Jet-setter Joy from his trip to California.
 

 
Suzanne Farrell, teacher of Don's daughter.
 
 
"I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things."  
Dr. Faye Miller
 
 
Betty Draper regarding Don's third wife, Megan Calvet Draper pictured above.
 
 
 
Don caught en flagrante with married neighbor Sylvia Rosen.
 

The incomparable Joan Holloway Harris.

Good question.
 
 
The mysterious Diana from Racine, Wisconsin.  In real life she's the stepdaughter of the late Pisons owner Bill Davidson.
 
  
DON WISCONSIN! 

dd

Don Draper passes through Wisconsin on way to “Mad Men” finale

“It’s time to leave the capsule if you dare,” David Bowie sang at the end of Sunday’s penultimate episode of “Mad Men,” as Don Draper did exactly that, passing through Wisconsin in the process.
In the episode called “Lost Horizon,” Draper and his colleagues at the now-defunct Sterling Cooper agency all had trouble making the adjustment to being absorbed by a larger agency.  



The episode also made reference to Miller Beer.

“We just bought an entire agency in Milwaukee to get Miller Beer,” Drapers new boss tells him.
He added: “Miller Beer is coming in tomorrow for handshakes on their new idea – diet beer.”


“For ladies,” Don asks?

No, for men watching their weight, he’s told, in a clear reference to the introduction of Miller Lite, which was introduced nationally in 1975.

But while listening to another ad man in the Miller meeting wax rhapsodic about average Joes mowing lawns and drinking beers, Don has a moment of clarity. It was the same kind of poetic client pitch he was known for. So he leaves the meeting, taking his box lunch with him, gets in his car and drives to … Racine.
adiana

Racine was home to the waitress Diana, a tragic beauty hiding from her past, with whom he had an affair earlier in the season. She was a look-alike for a character named Rachel, whom Don discovers has just died.

When Don went looking for Diana in a later episode she had disappeared.

So in Sunday’s episode he drove to Racine in a silver giant silver Cadillac that could be mistaken for a space capsule, to find her. He arrived at her old address posing as a contest rep, telling the woman who answered the door that Diana has won a refrigerator full of Miller beer and that he needs to find her.

But when her husband, who is Diana’s born again ex-husband, comes home, he calls Draper a liar and sends him on his way.

While he’s on that way he stops to pick up a hitch-hiker, a hippie with a guitar and a knapsack who is on his way to St. Paul. “I can go that way,” says Draper, taking off his sunglasses.
And off they go. To the finale.

It is not the first time Wisconsin has received a shout-out on the show. In 2013, there was a reference to Beloit College, where a minor character attended school; the Milwaukee-based Koss headphones were part of a major subplot and there was a mention of the Green Bay Packers.
 

Thursday, May 14, 2015

DAILY DRAPER: 

 
DON ON HAPPINESS





 

Don Draper, Maverick Ad Man, Dead at 88

  • by , May 5, 2015, 8:02 AM                        
Don Draper, a copywriter and creative director whose ideas were some of the most thought-provoking and talked-about of the decades between the Sixties and Nineties, died Tuesday at his son’s home in Hudson, N.Y. He was 88. 
 
 
The cause was cardiac arrest, according to his son, Robert Draper, who was his father’s caretaker during the last decade of his life.
 
“One of the world’s most-loved, most-hated and most-misunderstood advertising geniuses,” is how Peggy Olson-Levitt, former Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of McCann-Erickson, and one of Draper’s many protégés, described him. “I’d call him an enigma shrouded in mystery wrapped in a paradigm, but if I did he’d say, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ Let’s just say he was complicated.”
 
Draper’s co-workers included AAF president Roger Sterling (deceased since 1982), Pete Campbell, chairman emeritus of the Omnicom Group, and Harry Crane, retired partner of the United Talent Agency. His students also included Stan Rizzo, creator of the “Hippie, Trippy, Dippy Daddy” syndicated comic strip, and celebrated screenwriter and director Michael Ginsberg, a former copywriter.
 
“Don drove me to be better, think harder and write better. He drove me crazy. And when I got crazy, I got famous,” said Ginsberg. “Don also taught me a character’s 'moral center' isn’t a solid core but an amorphous, gassy blob.”
 
Draper’s advertising work was memorable, hard to miss, and often polarizing. In the 1960s, he and a handful of advertising mavericks ushered in the “Big Idea” era of advertising. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce created iconic campaigns for clients including Kodak, R.J. Reynolds, Hilton Hotels, Nabisco Foods, and Peter Pan. 
 
In the 1970s, the agency (rebranded Draper-Campbell), created campaigns for Chrysler that had Ricardo Montalban memorably touting the Cordoba’s “rich, Corinthian leather.” They had the world singing, “There’s a fragrance and it’s here to stay and they call it Charlie.” And they reminded us that diehard Tareyton smokers, despite the Attorney General’s increasingly ominous claims, “would rather fight than switch."
 
“We made a lot of friends but pissed off a lot of people with our work back then,” Campbell said. “I think Don was happiest when he was pissing people off. It meant people noticed what we were doing.”
 
Draper-Campbell’s run ended in the early 1980s when it sold its interests to McCann-Erickson, which absorbed their clients and gradually retired the name. Campbell remained with the agency but Draper quit abruptly. “I refuse to be a name reduced to an initial reduced to a ghost and managed by idiots. So I quit.” So read his short-but-memorable companywide memo, announcing his decision.
 
Draper pursued other interests with typical relish and abandon. He briefly joined the car company of his friend John DeLorean as chief advertising officer before DMC met its infamous, untimely demise. He pursued commercial real estate interests with his fourth wife, Amanda, before their contentious divorce dissolved that business. He even briefly returned to his first career, as a furrier, opening a slew of high-end boutiques in major cities just as the fur business reached huge popularity in the late 1980s. Despite his success, Draper’s first love remained advertising.
 
“Dad made a fortune in the fur business but it bored him. When he saw the 'new' advertising being done in the late Eighties and early Nineties by shops like Fallon, Chiat/Day and Goodby, he wanted back in,” said Robert Draper. “There’s truth and edge to the best stuff they’re doing and he wanted to show the world he still had an edge.”
 
He abruptly sold the fur boutiques and launched Draper with a simple client-acquisition strategy: “Let’s pursue clients who refuse to be boring and who refuse to be ignored.”
 
The strategy worked, and Draper won numerous awards for brash, abrasive, and unforgettable campaigns for clients including Yugo, Seiko, Budweiser, Playtex, Sony and the Archdiocese of New York.
 
Draper was married and divorced five times. His daughter, socialite Sally Draper, and another son, Gene, predeceased him. 
Little is known of Draper’s early years, other than that he grew up in meager circumstances on a farm in rural Illinois. He served in the Korean Conflict and moved to New York City in 1954.
 
His wit and willingness to provoke never left him. When asked to speak to a group of young creatives at a conference in 2000, he followed a famous direct-marketing expert, who told the crowd that 'the big idea' era of advertising is dead. The future would be all direct selling and personally crafted messages.” 
 
Draper took the stage. “The best advice I can give you,” he told the young audience while pointing at the speaker who had preceded him, “is to forget everything that guy just told you.” Then he left

Wednesday, May 13, 2015


DAILY DRAPER 
 
DON ON SMALL TALK

Add caption




How will Mad Men end? Four of the best theories 
 
 
Don Draper in Mad Men season seven
Is Don Draper really DB Cooper? Photograph: Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC

At a recent Guardian event to mark the final run of Mad Men, the conversation kept returning to one subject above all others – how would it end? Would Don Draper kill himself? Would he keel over of natural causes? Would there be a time jump? Would we see him in the present day – still charismatic at 90 – presenting a nostalgia-tinged advertising pitch for a selfie stick?
We won’t find out until the series finale next week. Until then, our best guess is to trawl the internet for its most pervasive theories. Here they are, in descending level of likelihood.

Don Draper is DB Cooper

FBI sketch of DB Cooper
Pinterest
An FBI sketch of DB Cooper. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
One of the most popular online Mad Men theories, now that Megan definitely isn’t going to be Sharon Tate, is that Don Draper is really DB Cooper, a mysterious real-life figure who hijacked a plane for a $200,000 ransom in 1971, leapt out with a parachute over Oregon and was never heard of again. Don has links to French Canada, as did Cooper. He fell to Earth, like the figure in the show’s opening titles. Don worked at a company called Sterling Cooper. DB sort of sounds like DD, Don Draper’s initials. The list of coincidences goes on. But not for long.

Pete Campbell gets eaten by a bear

This one is a couple of years old, but still completely compelling. An article on Uproxx asked: “What if a bear just, like, walks off the elevator, strolls into the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices, nods at the receptionist, then heads straight for Pete’s office and mauls him to death?” This theory isn’t entirely beyond the realms of possibility – substitute “bear” for “lawnmower” and “Pete Campbell” for “Guy MacKendrick” and you’ve got one of the biggest turning points of the third series – but, still, killing Campbell and letting Lou Avery live? Unforgivable.

Don Draper has syphilis

A month ago, a Reddit user posited that Draper was suffering from neurosyphilis, the final stage of untreated syphilis. Symptoms apparently include confusion, depression and hallucinations, all of which have plagued him in recent years. In fact, the theory goes, syphilis has already done Don in. His quest for redemption, of sorts, in these last few episodes has actually been a sort of Jacob’s Ladder ending, experienced at the point of death. As we all know, this is the world’s most frustrating sort of ending.

There is a happy ending

Everything works out great and everybody has a wonderful time. Another Reddit theory: “Don Draper finally kicks alcohol and reconciles with Megan … they all live happily ever after and Duck Phillips dies in a plane crash.” Even the writer doesn’t want to see this happen. Now, if there was a bear involved …

Don buys the world a Coke

I think I know how Mad Men is going to end

Why else would AMC make this particular image available? It's all connected, you hear?! AMC


I am of the firm belief that Don is going to head back to New York. Indeed, I suspect he's already decided to head that way again eventually at the end of "The Milk and Honey Route." I am also of the firm belief that he might believe he's done with advertising — and McCann might believe it's done with him — but neither will prove to be true. Just as Don has finally assembled all the pieces of his life into something like a coherent, whole human being, he'll be shattered again, because I think ultimately Weiner's cynicism will win out over his optimism when it comes to his main character.
There's also the matter of Don's children now needing him more than ever in the wake of their mother's death — and the matter of all of that money Don has been giving away all season long. I doubt he's anywhere close to destitute, but his cash flow problems have to be substantial at this point.
So I think Don is going to go back to New York. I think Don is going to go back to McCann. I think he is going to win back his job with a brilliant pitch for a McCann client. I think we're going to think we're on the verge of the Don Draper pitch to end all Don Draper pitches.

Picture it, if you will.

Don walks into the room with the client. Everything is on the line. His career. His family. His future. Everyone leans forward (including us). He smiles, launching into his pitch with something like "I'd like to talk to you about family," and then either the door to the room closes (shutting us out) or the screen fades to black.
And out of the blackness, we begin to hear perhaps the most famous ad of the 1970s.


Eileen first mentioned this idea to me a few weeks ago as where she thought things were headed, and it instantly became my favorite endgame theory, even as I found it implausible for various reasons. (For one thing, Mad Men does its best not to ape actual campaigns.)

But as the weeks have gone on, Eileen's theory (which I have embellished upon above) has stuck with me. It explains the season's obsession with Coca-Cola (which turns up even in this episode, in the form of the broken Coke machine). It explains the season's obsession with connection. And it explains the long, long wait we've had for a vintage Don Draper pitch. (By my count, we haven't gotten one since the sixth-season finale, which was the Hershey's pitch that lost Don his job.) Why shouldn't the last Don Draper pitch ever be one that gives us a famous ad that feels like it came out of a Don Draper pitch?

What I also love about Eileen's idea is that it has a baked-in, awful cynicism to it, laced with a childlike sweetness. That's an ad about world peace and people coming together in harmony — and it's being used to sell soda. It's the ultimate in commodification of powerful ideas by the wheels of commerce, and it's the ultimate in America's blithe belief that if it could just shut out the bad parts — or share a Coke — with the world, everything would be a little bit better.