Appearance
Browns owner Bill Veeck was a showman who enjoyed staging publicity stunts. He found Eddie Gaedel through a booking agency. Due to his size, Gaedel had worked as a riveter during World War II. Gaedel was able to crawl inside the wings of airplanes. After the war, Gaedel was the promotional mascot for Mercury Records.
Gaedel was secretly signed by the St. Louis Browns and put in uniform (with the number "1/8" on the back). Gaedel came out of a papier-mache cake between games of a doubleheader to celebrate the American League's 50th anniversary, and as a Falstaff Brewery promotion. Falstaff, and the fans, had been promised a "festival of surprises" by Veeck. Before the second game got underway, the press agreed that the "midget-in-a-cake" appearance had not been up to Veeck's usual promotional standard. Falstaff personnel, who had been promised national publicity for their participation, were particularly dissatisfied. Keeping the surprise he had in store for the second game to himself, Veeck just meekly apologized.
Although Veeck denied the stunt was directly inspired by it, the appearance of Gaedel was unmistakably similar to the plot of "You Could Look It Up," a 1941 short story by James Thurber. Veeck insisted he got the idea from listening to the conversations of Giants manager John McGraw decades earlier when Veeck was a child.
Read more about this topic: Eddie Gaedel
Famous quotes containing the word appearance:
“Most lovers ... picture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else—their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.”
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“The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)