[Dixielandjazz] Fifty year and holding.

[dingle at baldwin-net.com]

Good day friends of the list. I just wanted all to know that my wife 
Jean and I  are celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary today. And a 
lot of those years were road years -- so we are survivors for sure.
We spent the evening talking about the places and people we have known 
over these years, especially the many musicians and entertainers we have 
been fortunate to know and call friends, from my mentor and first 
teacher Red Nichols to the gentle gentlemen Matty MAtlock and Eddie 
Miller, and the "mythical beast" as Jean called him before she met him, 
Joe Rushton. Moving about from Michigan where we met to New Orleans 
where we were married when I was with Ted Weems and played a WHOLE month 
at the Old Roosevelt Hotel. Jean's folks couldn't be there so Ted was 
proxy father and gave the bride away. A nervous Jean had breakfast the 
day of our wedding in the New Orleans Hotel and a friend named Merwyn 
Pogue sat with her to calm her down -- you might better have known him 
as ish Kabibble. His small group was playing a club in town at the same 
time.
Characters galore. We worked a season in Aspen in ;59 and'60 with 
Freddie Schnicklefritz  Fisher, and with Joe and Adele Marsala. Freddie 
was the character of characters. Joe was a great clarinetist but has a 
quick fuse Italian temper after a few toddies and he once got in a fight 
with the bartender at Trader Ed's ii Aspen and I had to peel the two 
apart, getting a fat lip from a stray waving arm in the process.
Worked in House bandf at Jazz Ltd. in Chicago for five years with our 
late listee Jim Beebe for part of that time and with drummers Freddy 
Kohlman and Barrett Deems. Deem goes to the top of the character list, 
but could drive a band.
So many places, so many moves, L.A., Denver, Aspen, Chicago, Vegas, 
Reno, and "One Thousand and One-nighters," the title of the book I may 
get a round to writing some day. Through it all, with support and TLC is 
my little gal from way up north in Michigan that I was fortunate enough 
to meet, curt, convince to marry me, and keep me for making too big a 
damn fool of myself over the fifty years we've been hitched.
I have been blessed in wife, friends, experiences and through it all the 
music we share.
A most happy and wonderful Thanksgiving ahead this week to all. For me, 
my biggest reason to give thanks is my wife and my best friend Jean.
May you all be so lucky.
Don Ingle