Jun 12 2013 12:44 PM
I've been digging into the history of Mr. Met. I'm sorry if a lot of this is familiar to you guys, but it's new to me, and I thought it might be fun to share it. And if anyone has their own Mr. Met pictures over the years, I'd love to see them.
One thing I was surprised to discover is that his name really is Mr. Met! Well, Mr. Metz, actually. But that's pretty close. Here's his senior yearbook picture (Rockford North, 1962). 
When I found this, I figured it was just a coincidence--the big head, the stitches (or is that a little beatnik beard?), the name. It's a long way from the Illinois woods to Flushing, after all, and there are lots of kids who look like that (I remember two from my high school). But then I found an interview with Linda de Roulet that filled in a bit of the story. Apparently after graduation he went to work for his uncle, who was a plumbing contractor in Long Island. The Paysons were having some trouble with their septic system, and they called in Metz Plumbing (Joan, who of course had a great sense of humor, insisted that it had to be Metz Plumbing). Willard showed up, and it was obvious that if he knew how to flush a toilet, that was the extent of his plumbing skills. But the Paysons took a liking to the shy kid from the Upper Midwest, and offered him a job in the Mets organization. And the rest, for lack of a better cliché, is history.
The next picture is from 1965--August 28, to be exact. That afternoon, Mr. Met helped cheer the Mets on as Galen Cisco and Al Jackson combined to shut out the Giants. Then he changed into his street clothes and headed down with Lady (soon to be Mrs.) Met to catch Bob Dylan at Forest Hills. The couple enjoyed the first half of the show, which was just Dylan with his guitar, but were much less pleased with the second, when his band joined him on stage. The extreme volume and the riotous crowd upset Lady Met, and the couple left before it was over. "I enjoy songs with a beat as much as anyone," Mr. Met told the Daily News, “but you couldn't even hear the words!”
The third picture takes a big jump forward in time. It's 1979, and Mr. Met is on his own. The Mets have let him go, and so has Mrs. Met. But for the moment he’s still on the A-list (or whatever list it is that Yul Brynner is on), and determined to enjoy it while he can. Here he is with the gang at Studio 54. (He and Liza joked about his cap matching her dress, but she was not happy about it, and a rift developed between them that wouldn't be healed until the post-9/11 game.)
Maybe next time I'll go back to the Seaver years, or forward to the lean years (I've got a couple of screen shots from his infamous infomercial).
