Jun 20 2006 07:35 AM
I'm sure more than a few members remember this guy, cool article.
| ] Recalling the Time of the Signs at Shea  By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI Published: June 18, 2006 One recent morning in Queens, Karl Ehrhardt walked over to his bedroom closet and unlocked the door to a dozen memories, every one of them in black and white. Karl Ehrhardt, a k a the Sign Man at Shea Stadium in 1969. Ehrhardt, 81, better known to fans of a certain vintage as the Sign Man of Shea, looked down at a pile of placards he once flashed in Flushing, bits of commentary designed to praise and inspire, or tease and rattle, the Mets and their opponents. From 1964 to 1981, the Sign Man, dressed in a blue shirt and a black derby emblazoned with a Mets logo, responded on cue to much of the drama played out between the white lines. One summer day in 1979, the Sign Man followed a bouncing ball into and out of the glove of Mets shortstop Frank Taveras. The Sign Man showed no mercy: "Look Ma, No Hands." And whenever the journeyman Jose Cardenal struck out for the Mets, the Sign Man never failed to hoist: "Jose, Can You See?" "I just called them the way I saw them," Ehrhardt said. A commercial artist from Queens who grew up in Brooklyn rooting for the Dodgers, Ehrhardt said he "adopted the Mets" in 1962, the year the franchise was born, five years after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. When Shea Stadium opened in 1964, the Sign Man set up shop, running his business of baseball barbs from a box seat behind the third-base dugout. Long before television coverage and giant scoreboards became littered with never-ending distractions, the Sign Man was the only sideshow in town. He took roughly 60 signs to each game; he once owned as many as 1,200, but only 12 remain. The letters were white paper spray-glued onto black cardboard measuring 20 inches high and 26 inches wide. "Before I went to the ballpark, I would try to crystal-ball what might happen that particular day," said Ehrhardt, whose signs had color-coded tabs for different situations. "I would read all the newspapers to learn who was hot and who was in a slump, stuff like that, and create my signs accordingly." One of his creations was the Frankenstein's monster sign, made specifically for weak hitters who rarely reached base. That sign screamed: "It's Alive! It's Alive!" Bob Mandt, a former Mets vice president for baseball operations, said of Ehrhardt: "Not all of the players were in love with him. It all depended on what he was putting up there." But Mandt said that even M. Donald Grant, the team's chairman at the time, could appreciate one dig, four sad words on the state of the woeful Mets in August 1965: "Welcome to Grant's Tomb." By 1969, Ehrhardt had become a fixture at Shea. That year, when left fielder Cleon Jones squeezed the final out of the World Series in his glove, the Sign Man, too choked up to talk, reached into his bag of shticks and pulled out: "There Are No Words." In 1973, Grant and the Mets flew Ehrhardt and his wife, Lucille, to Oakland, Calif., for Games 6 and 7 of the World Series. After losing to the Athletics, the Mets allowed the Ehrhardts to fly back on their team charter — with Mayor John V. Lindsay on board as well. Every member of the team, including Tom Seaver and Willie Mays, autographed a sign that Ehrhardt had held proudly: "Only the Beginning." By 1981, Ehrhardt began noticing signs of changing times. He said that the Mets, who had become a laughingstock, were no longer inviting him to team functions. "The front office was now run by new ownership, and they didn't like me criticizing the team," he said. "They turned their backs on me, so I just packed up my signs and went home." But in August 2002, the Mets asked Mandt, now a team consultant, to persuade Ehrhardt to return to help celebrate the franchise's 40th anniversary. Ehrhardt attended a game between the Mets and his once beloved Dodgers. At that game, he held this message high for fans of a certain vintage: "The Sign Man Lives." E-mail: cheers@nytimes.com  |
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/sports/baseball/18cheer.html
