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When Bands Were Big and Swing Was King - Alexandra Kloster
It's eight p.m.
and the family is gathered around the old Atwater Kent
radio. Gracie is playing the fool for George, and Jack Benny's violin
croons for laughs. The kids' feet start itching with the jitterbug,
sounding the alarm to ditch the box. The girls don their print dresses
and the boys, dapper in glen plaid suits, head out to swing.
"We always dressed up in those days," remembers
Marquette native Bob Moore. Those days were the late Thirties and
early Forties when movies were twenty-five cents and a mother could
have her baby in a hospital for twenty-five dollars and stay for a
week. They were the days when Bands were Big and Benny Goodman administered
Swing into the nation's consciousness.
"We were kind of out of the loop, out of the circuit,
in the late Thirties and early Forties" says Frank Richardson,
also a native. Yet out of Marquette's isolation rose a self-contained
music scene that still swings in the memories of both of these impressive
men.
Moore is a trumpet player, who flew fighters and dive-bombers
in the Pacific. Richardson plays piano and served as an engineer in
Special Units before spending a year in Paris working for the Department
Observers Board.
Before WWII cleared all the young men off the dance floor,
teens in Marquette haunted the Palestra, the Brookton Ballroom, or
the Northland Hotel every weekend.
Recalls Richardson, "In '37 or '38, right before
the war started, the Don Young Quartet: Howard Kitzman, George Cavender,
Don Young and Alan Marks, had a standing engagement at the Venice
Café in Ishpeming and The Minnie Club."
The Minnie Club was located below the Brookton Ball Room.
There was an elevated floor all around and the dance floor was down
below. They called it the snake pit. In addition to the popular Brookton,
The Northland Hotel often booked a travelling band for its dining
room. The Masons would bring in a Big Band out of Chicago for a party
each year and for twenty-five cents you could swing at the Knights
Of Columbus dance every Friday Night.
Moore started playing in 1935 at only fourteen years old.
"A local band leader, Glen ‘Freck' Wilson, contacted my
dad and asked if my brother and I would be interested in playing with
his band. He had booked the Palestra every Saturday night for the
entire winter. There was a little ballroom upstairs in addition to
the skating rink." That wasn't Moore's initiation into professional
music, however. "I had played one job, a six -piece combo, in
a tavern up in Big Bay. It was pretty rough in those days with the
lumberjacks who would come in on weekends. The place was called Sleepy
Hollow. We got up on this bandstand in the corner of the room, and
between eleven and midnight a fight broke out. There was a woman who
started going around whacking a bottle over everybody's heads to quiet
them down. I was absolutely terrified. After that, Freck picked me
up."
With Freck, Moore played the Brookton Ballroom dances
every Saturday night, but Marquette wasn't the only town in the U.P.
to have swing fever. "There was a band from Iron Mountain called
the Corsi Brothers. They hired me a number of times to play on a weekend
when they were short a trumpet player." Recalls Moore, "There
was a place down in Harvey called the Lark, which was popular. And
there were smaller places that weren't exactly ballrooms but people
danced all the time even so. We played in the tavern in Eben called
the Blue Moon which is now the New Moon after it burned down and was
rebuilt. We played in Trenary at Herb's Place. I played in a ballroom
between here and Houghton called the Michigan ballroom. There was
a place called the Rendezvous up beyond Ishpeming that was something
like the Brookton.
"There were always a couple of private parties out
at Willow Farm in Harvey and I'd play with a four- or five-piece group.
There'd be a big Christmas party and New Year's Eve party at the Mather
Inn in Ishpeming. I played several big parties up there. Those were
wild affairs."
The bands played the popular songs of the day, Moore explains.
"We played ballads like ‘Stardust,' all the popular ballads
of the time. Anybody who ran a band would buy stock arrangements generally
written by stock arrangers, nothing very outstanding. All pretty standard
stuff but people enjoyed it."
At nineteen Moore landed a gig with a Big Band in Minneapolis.
"I auditioned... and I didn't really know if they were interested
in me until all of a sudden I got a telegram saying join the band
on such and such a time. I had to send in measurements for my uniform.
In those days all of the bands had distinctive uniforms." It
was the Don Strickland band, a popular Midwest orchestra fronted by
a young female vocalist named Peggy Lee.
Moore compares Strickland's music with that of the immensely
popular Guy Lombardo. "We called him Goo Lombago. They were one
of the ‘sweet bands.' They played sweet music. A lot of people
didn't like Tommy Dorsey, or Goodman. All those guys were playing
the swing. Young people liked it but older people loved the sweet
stuff. Guys who played for their kicks only worked about two nights
a week for four or five dollars a shot. The money was with the "sweet
bands" who played every night."
Moore's girlfriend, Shirley, (now his wife) back in Marquette
would keep in touch with him by tuning in to WCCO radio station out
of Minneapolis to listen to Strickland's band.
"Your Hit Parade," which began in 1935 and highlighted
the top ten songs of the week, was another popular program among teens.
Also popular were jukeboxes and 78 rpm records on nights when the
dance floors were dark.
According to Richardson, "Everybody had a jukebox.
We listened to the new hits on the radio and the girls, if they knew
shorthand, would listen and write down the lyrics of the songs so
they could sing them.
"A bunch of us used to hang around the dime store
or Woolworth's. Some music stores had sound-proof booths in which
to listen to the records. You would ask the clerk to play the record
and you'd go in and listen to it. Of course, it helped that the record
clerk was always a pretty girl."
When the war started, innocence of nights like that gave
way to fear and rationing. But while serving in the military, Richardson
and Moore fell upon opportunities to see some of their favorite Big
Band leaders. Richardson became familiar with Glenn Miller during
his Paris days. "His band played at the enlisted men's club and
I used to listen to them a couple times a week. Johnny Desmond was
their singer."
Moore saw his favorites a little closer to home. "I
used to go to the Eastwood ballroom in Detroit and see Benny Goodman,
Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw. I never did see Miller in person but
I certainly listened to him. And then there were black bands, Fletcher
Henderson, who really wrote many arrangements for Benny Goodman's
band. And Horace Henderson, his brother, played at the Paletstra one
time."
The music of the late Thirties and Forties reflected a
turning point in U.S. citizens' opinions of themselves and our country.
The disgrace of the depression was ending and patriotism was growing
as the prospect of saving the free world fell into America's hands.
The celebratory nature of Big Band music fit the climate of the times.
"You can't separate the music from the mood of the people,"
grants Richardson. "Big bands came about when the depression
ended. And then when the war ended they started to fade. The cost
was too great."
Now, in the infancy of a new century, swing has been resurfacing
everywhere from living rooms to clubs to Gap commercials. Richardson
attributes this renaissance to our love of nostalgia. "On the
other hand," he ponders, "it was good music, and good music
is good music."
For Moore, Richardson and everyone in Marquette who grew
up with "Moonlight Serenade" and "Sing Sing Sing,"
the Brookton, the Palestra and all the little places in between are
still standing and swinging every Saturday night, if only when they
gather around their CD players.
