A West Box seat, Box 5, Row 9, Seat 7. Sounds like it would be a pretty good seat. It cost $1.66 including taxes, which, adjusting for inflation, would be $17.90 in April 2019 dollars. Such a deal.
The ticket itself is a fairly simple one, with two-color printing on one side. The reverse is blank.
What's special about this particular stub is that the ticket-taker left just enough of the ticket body to show us an element of the design I've never before seen; a tiny Brews mascot Owgust in catcher's gear!
We'll have to guess at the rest of the design, but I would bet it's part of a matched set of pitcher and catcher, as featured on the masthead of the club's newsletter Brewer News, and on the inside of every score card, throughout the 1940s.
I've never seen these figures on ticket stub, however. The stubs I have in my collection are too short, with too much of the ticket body removed. Here's one from six seasons before our 1949 stub, and one from three years after:
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That 1952 stub has the exact same layout as our 1949, but there's not enough of either ticket body to see a full design, Owgust or no. I love that they kept this layout, almost certainly a stock style from the Arcus Ticket Company in Chicago.
The only difference, besides date and seat location, is the Brewer official identified. In 1949 it was D'Arcy "Jake" Flowers, a former infielder who followed up his fifteen-year playing career (10 of it in the majors) with a stint as a minor-league manager and a big league coach before talking over as the Brewers' president. He had come to Milwaukee in 1947 when Lou Perini brought the Brewers into the Boston Braves organization. By 1952, the club was run by longtime Brewer catcher/coach "Red" Smith.
Seventy years ago, this ticket was in the pocket of one of the 7,962 baseball fans at the old wooden ballpark who saw the hometown Brews take two games from the league-leading St. Paul Saints, 3-2 and then 5-3.
A wonderful find, a grand addition to the collection.
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