Milwaukee and the Braves

From the SI archive in 1998, after the Brewers switched to the National League, a look back at the Braves run in the city:

Playing in the second smallest city in the majors (pop. 725,000), they became the first National League team to draw two million fans in a season. They did it annually from '54 to '57 and came up just 29,000 short in '58. And while the Braves relied on the rest of Wisconsin, as well as Iowa, Minnesota and northern Illinois, to accomplish that, there should be no doubt as to where the wellspring of love for them lay. Back then you could walk into the best restaurants in Milwaukee—Karl Ratzsch's, Alioto's, Ray Jackson's—and always find the Braves game on the radio. In the city's multitudinous taverns there were never cries of dismay when Earl Gillespie, the voice of the Braves, reported that a fan had leaped onto County Stadium's diamond; the drinkers simply started betting on how many bases he would touch before the grounds crew hauled him down.
If you ask why the drinkers weren't at the game themselves, it was probably because they couldn't get tickets. Most of the time their best shot was to hop on a tavern's chartered bus and follow the Braves to Wrigley Field, where in those days there were always plenty of empty seats. Selig paid his most memorable visit to Chicago in 1954 when the Cubs were honoring their lumbering slugger, Hank Sauer, who concluded the festivities by dropping a fly ball to give Milwaukee the win. "The Cubs had printed up these signs that said THANKS, HANK," Selig says, "and all the Braves fans started waving them."
Nobody who took those bus trips south ever got shortchanged, but Ruthie Patzke was starting to think she might be an exception when her group dragged her to a restaurant to listen to a Milwaukee Journal sportswriter. What, Ruthie wondered, could be so interesting about some joker who'd just seen the same Braves-Cubs game they had? When the sportswriter started talking, though, Ruthie noticed that his blue suit complemented his hazel eyes. So she took the trouble to learn his name—Bob Wolf—and then she wangled an introduction, and before you knew it she and a girlfriend were at a cozy little bar having a drink with him. No night of lust followed for Bob and Ruthie; this was 1953, and they were delighted just to see each other at Wrigley the next afternoon. Thirteen months later, just before the start of the World Series, Bob and Ruthie said "I do" to a marriage that is still going strong.
The love affair between Milwaukee and the Braves looked as if it would be equally enduring. No suitor courted Elizabeth Taylor, always a league leader in marriages, as ardently as this city did its baseball heroes. It wasn't just the good-time guys such as Mathews, Bob Buhl and Lew Burdette who never had to pay for a meal and always got a free car to drive. It was all the Braves. And the bounty didn't end with T-bones and Dodges, which were no small consideration during an era in which the minimum player's salary was $7,500, and raises for journeymen were measured in pennies. The players got free gas from Wisco, free dry cleaning from Spic 'n' Span, free beer from every brewery in town. "Soap powder and produce were just about the only things that weren't delivered to our door," Burdette says. It turned out to be too good to last.
There is no single explanation why. Bad news simply begot more bad news. In the early '60s Braves management barred fans from bringing their own beer into County Stadium, hardly a valentine to a populace historically as thrifty as it is thirsty. And then the first wave of crowd pleasers started getting old and getting traded. Suddenly attendance couldn't climb above 775,000, even though the Braves continued to make every season a winning one. When the first notes of Atlanta's siren song drifted through the air, the team's owners started checking flight schedules.

My favorite part of the whole article is where it says the Braves management banned the fans from bringing in their own beer in the early '60's.  So from 1953 until the early '60's, fans could carry their own beer in the game.  No wonder they got great crowds.  There is no doubt in my mind that Milwaukee is by far the most fun city in the country.  If you want any kind of festival during the summer, they have it.  If you need an excuse to drink a beer, thy've got it.  It is also extremely friendly, and has some great cheese and sausage to go along with that beer.  If you get the chance, spend a little time there.