Facebook Strikes Again!

Just when you think that the past is safe, buried and long gone, there comes an old associate from the Glenn Miller Orchestra who had pictures of the "good old days." So far one of the pictures is of me in my short tenure with the band. The guy you see above is me in 1977, aged 26. I was four years out of UCSC, I had done a couple years of remedial work in the Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble and I'd been scooped up by the Stan Kenton Orchestra. I'd left that band under a cloud, moved to Boston and played with what MUST have been the first Tower of Power tribute band (1975--Herb Lee's Player's Club, and yes, it meant that) and returned to Santa Cruz. Bored and without prospects, I decided to throw it all to the winds and flew with Peter Burchard on the red-eye to New York City to make it big. No vacancies were available in the saxophone player category, so off I went to get my very own hack license and become an official New York City cab driver, in the middle of the winter, with no knowledge of the territory whatsoever.

Sharon Wong (who was my spouse's roommate briefly before Jan left for Colorado) saved me by letting me move into the third floor of her house in Englewood, NJ. I was leading a perfectly brutal life as a hack, crossing the bridge and having various adventures including my first night on the job, when I picked up a man-woman team of private detectives who told me to "follow that car."

Then Laigh Langley and Jack Mootz flagged me down at Stryker's on 86th St, going downtown to a hotel off Times Square (not the Edison, just around the corner).

Laigh and Jack were on the road with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, on a night off, and had gone to Stryker's to hear some music. I was going to Stryker's to hear a band myself, and to hang with the cats in the band and run them downtown after closing. When Laigh flagged me I figured I'd take a quick fare downtown and deadhead it back to 86th.

On the way down to Times Square, we got to talking about this and that on the road: busses mostly. As they left the cab--and I can remember this with clarity that only a few events in my life have--I blurted out, "If you ever need a bari player, give me a call."

Laigh started laughing and said, "Our bari player is on the third week of his two-week notice."

So I ended up doing an audition, the other guy got sent home and, a couple days after I picked Laigh and Jack up, I was back on the road. The band was pretty good. Jay Cummings was the drummer (those are his drums over my right shoulder), Gary Tole led the bone section, and the leader, Jimmy Henderson, had the habit of introducing the two singers at the end of the night by saying, as he pointed at stage right and stage left, "Anita! Laigh! Everybody!"

In this picture we are I think playing a gig, one of several, with singer Frankie Laine, up in Canada.

Laigh and I work together, and he was kind enough to fly out to attend my son's wedding at the end of September. Jay (Laigh's roommate at the time) works for NCL, and I have a picture of him meeting some of us QE2 guys in the Canary Islands. Gary is on Facebook and so is Anita.

And leave it to Dan Riley to publish these photos on Facebook. Who knew that these still existed away from the Smithsonian?