OK, so it never really happened. But it almost did, 50 years ago in Milwaukee. Only a chronic dearth of campaign funds
thwarted Harold Gauer and Robert Bloch's bid to turn the 1940 mayoral race into a three-ring circus. Bt the pair did just
about everything else in promoting Carl Zeidler, the 34-year-old assistant city attorney, in his upset win over six-term Mayor
Daniel Hoan.
Political stunts fill the pages of "War and Peace in the 1940s," Gauer's recently published history of a decade of life in
Milwaukee. It's not really a history, as Gauer himself notes, but more like a cross between a diary and a tongue-in-cheek
scrapbook of Milwaukee politics during the years punctuated by World War II.
Gauer, now retired and living in Glendale, published the book himself as part of a three-volume personalized history of
Milwaukee life. Available in most Milwaukee-area bookstores for $19.95, the large paperback memoir served as something of a
catharsis for its author.
"In the 1940s, we were inventing stuff all the time," he said. "It's almost painful to enjoy such rich nostalgia."
