Among the earliest known Polar Bear swimmers Frank Sutter (left) and Jim Brazell jump from the icy shore to join their friend Gustav Marx in frigid Lake Michigan, as more sensibly dressed onlookers watch. The photo is dated Dec. 31, 1916.
Posted on 12/31/2008 5:35:02 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
Back when Gustav Marx was jumping into icy Lake Michigan, newspaper articles called him and his friends polar bears, but in lowercase letters.
That was 1916, several years before the Polar Bear Club of Milwaukee would be established enough to merit capital letters.
Marx's grandson, Steve Lister, recently came into possession of a photo album that his grandfather had titled: "Pictures of winter swimming, season 1916-17 at McKinley Beach."
It's evidence that people of that era were perfectly capable of putting good sense aside and plunging into numbing water as a lark.
The men are wearing shoes, even now a wise move on the frozen beach. Photos show they favored mittens and T-shirts along with their swim trunks. Bundled-up supporters stand by to watch the fun.
Hundreds of their modern-day descendants will storm Bradford Beach on Thursday at noon and frolic in the 30-something-degree water in our annual New Year's Day ritual that says we're tougher than winter around here and don't you forget it. (Bragging alert: I did it once, in 2004.)
Marx was about 21 years old when he and two friends, Jim Brazell and Frank Sutter, took regular Sunday dips in the lake all winter long, not just on New Year's. One Sentinel article from the time, carefully pasted in the album, called them "Milwaukee's midwinter mermen," and said they had been swimming out of season for the past three years, which dates the practice to as early as 1913.
"Cold water has been around a long time. At some point, it became newsworthy," Lister said as we flipped through the album this week.
Brazell would become president of the Polar Bear Club by the 1920s, Journal Sentinel archives show. Joseph Sutter, a Milwaukee police detective and perhaps a relative of Marx's buddy Frank Sutter, took over in the 1930s and led the club until 1975, when his doctor told him to knock it off.
The group then crowned its first female president, 23-year-old Jean Pieri. But much of the 20th century was the Garth Gaskey dynasty. The Brookfield man said he will take his 57th consecutive New Year's plunge on Thursday, five days before turning 80.
Until Lister showed up with the photo album, the earliest mention of the Polar Bear tradition I could find was an article in the newspaper morgue from Dec. 18, 1922. Long before the global climate crisis kicked in, the headline was: "Polar Bear Club disgusted to find lake too warm."
Lister, 60, a remodeling contractor who lives in Greendale, said his grandfather was a German immigrant and a larger-than-life figure who left hundreds of photo albums behind when he died in 1972 in Milwaukee.
There's a photo of Marx riding a motorcycle and shooting a bow and arrow at the same time. When he was in his 60s, he came as a guest to Lister's elementary school tumbling club and dazzled the kids by walking on his hands.
"Gus took a picture of nearly every breath he took most of his life," Lister said. "He was just a good historian. Anything of interest to him or the people around him, he had in a book."
By the 1920s, his name stopped showing up in Polar Bear articles as he got married and began focusing on the advertising career that spanned the rest of his life. He was ad manager for Gimbels before opening his own firm, Gustav Marx Advertising Agency, which remains in the family today as Marx Creative in Glendale.
Clearly, those years as a human ice cube at McKinley Beach didn't hurt Marx. I was telling Lister that he should go jump in the lake Thursday to honor his grandfather.
"I've always wondered about it," he said. "But I've never wondered about it enough to want to do it."
Among the earliest known Polar Bear swimmers Frank Sutter (left) and Jim Brazell jump from the icy shore to join their friend Gustav Marx in frigid Lake Michigan, as more sensibly dressed onlookers watch. The photo is dated Dec. 31, 1916.
Three of the earliest known Polar Bear swimmers in Milwaukee — (from left) Gustav Marx, Frank Sutter and Jim Brazell — sit on a snowbank in this photo dated Dec. 31, 1916.
Neat old pictures! On WLS today, they were discussing people in Chicago who do the polar plunge on New Year’s Day. I wondered if some people may risk shocking their systems so badly by doing this dunk into cold water, that they may have a sudden death.
There were at least 4000 people down at bradford beach today. Now I doubt all of them went in, but it was amazing to watch. I myself did my first plunge and really the water is not the issue at all its the getting out by climbing the ice shelf and then making your way to your clothes that hurts...at that point really only toes and fingers.
I hope I am able to do my second next year!
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