22B • 50plus • June 2013 homer the brave continued from page 1B about the Braves. He said that the
One day, Wildt saw a story in the Sentinel about Homer that said its creator was Rex. “That’s when I discovered who the Homer artist was,” Wildt said. “But oddly enough, I didn’t manage to get in touch with him until many years later, in the fall of 2010, in fact. I learned he had retired and had moved to Sarasota, Florida. It was then that I obtained his address and wrote to him.” Rex wrote back to Wildt, thanking him for his interest and explained a bit of how the drawings had come into being. He recalled that it had been early in the ’53 season, and how virtually everyone was talking
Sentinel’s advertising art department then consisted of four copywriters and four artists, of which he was one. One of the copywriters, a lady named Gretchen Greiner, had previously worked in Cleveland, Ohio, for a paper known as the Plain Dealer. “She told me about a cartoon character the newspaper had used involving the Cleveland Indians baseball team,” Rex said. “We discussed it and thought the same concept could be used here. I drew a few sketches and took them to the promotion manager, Andy Hertel, who, in turn, took them to the Sentinel’s publisher, Frank Taylor. He liked them so much he ordered
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that they be used on the front page, which was very unusual in that Page 1 was sacrosanct and never used for promotion. The reason was the Sentinel had a high percentage of street box sales then, and the thought was to quickly illustrate whether the Braves had won or lost right on the front page so that it would generate a purchase by the viewer to read the whole story inside.” Rex actually drew more than 30 versions of the Homer the Brave cartoons, only a few of which are seen here, in just one day. From that point on, little input from him was necessary, as the drawings were used over and over again. “The only time I had to draw a new one was for special occasions, such as when the team won several games in a row or were playing in the World Series,” Rex said. Three years after Homer’s debut, Rex left the Sentinel to go into advertising agency work. He was the Milwaukee Art Studio doing graphic design for a few years, and then was given an offer to become the art director for DCI Marketing, a nationally known advertising company. He was with them for 28 years, eventually becoming its creative director
and finally, in 1984, its president and CEO. He retired in 1987 and moved to Sarasota, Florida. Since then, he and his wife, Mary, have returned to Wisconsin every summer to spend time in Door County. As for the Homer the Brave era, it was only 12 years after coming here that the Braves team pulled up anchor again and departed for Atlanta. That was in 1965, and of course, little Homer disappeared from view. Other things were changing, too. After a few more years, the Sentinel also disappeared, as it was purchased by the Milwaukee Journal (they called it a merger). And across America, throughout the newspaper industry, it was determined that cartoon art on sport pages was passé. Time marches on, and sometimes it stumbles.
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