When My Horns Were Stolen

There was a time when all the musicians who played softball in Santa Cruz rose as one to my aid. Between the first version of Sofrito and the second, after I’d gone to New York with drummer Jim Baum and came back to town, after I’d played alto, baritone, flute, clarinet and bass clarinet with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, I was in town to play a few tentative gigs with what became Sofrito once again, transformed.

My entire net worth (expressed in woodwind instruments) could fit into the back seat of my 1964 Dodge Dart, and that’s where it was when, after one of those gigs, I arrived at the house the girl who became the mother of my children. I may have locked the doors of the Dart. Her west side house was plenty quiet at 1 in the morning when I arrived.

We were pretty deep into softball then, as I’ve described elsewhere, playing long ball on the short-porch fields of Branciforte Park as many afternoons as not and taking in an Oakland A’s game once every couple weeks.

While the blissful ignorance of all people who trust human nature to be a benign force in the universe, there was my Dart, loaded up with expensive woodwinds, most of them Selmer Paris. Like an idiot, I compounded my stupidity by bringing in my flute, an Armstrong worth maybe $80.

Some time in the night, the car’s contents were removed. I knew that the car’s locks could be easily picked. I was blindly trusting the universe to protect me from villains. Someone with other ideas strolled by in the wee hours.

When I woke up at the crack of noon, I discovered the deed. There was no broken glass, but none would have been required, because any 1964 Dodge Dart could be unlocked with a coat hanger. My horns were gone.

So I called my home team. We had a meeting, dividing the city up into sectors, some heading for the music dealers, some for the pawn shops, some for the schools. Soon we received information about a guy in town who was bragging about coming into some woodwind instruments suddenly. It’s hard to imagine back then that this whole thing was co-ordinated without the benefit of cel phones, which at the time were toys of the idle rich.

The sun went down, and the softball gang had grown militant. They were going to track this guy down if it took all night. Sadly, there was no progress until early the next morning, when my once and future wife went off to Cabrillo, the local junior college and, finding a message chalked to one of the boards of the music department, called the guy’s number and recovered every one of my horns.

So I guess we were not all that successful in our plans to enforce simple justice. The guy left town, and the goods were recovered by Sue Slater and Holly Ray, not by the softball guys with the testosterone pumping.

No matter. We had a potluck at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center to celebrate the oddest thing, the coming together of forces for good in Santa Cruz, where it was at times impossible to get people to see mutual interest in anything. We played music that night, and it was good.

Treasured friends who took part in this mobilization included Joyce Cooper, Sue Slater, Peter Burchard (then known as Peter Ashley), Steve Bennett back when he still flew single-engine planes, Olaf Schiappicase, Dennis Broughton, and many, many others.