[Dixielandjazz] Goldkette's "Stable"

[Hal Vickery]

Don,

You really do need to find the time to write this stuff down.  I eat it up every time you post this stuff, so I know you'd sell at least one copy if you published!

Hal Vickery

> Date: Sat, 14 May 2011 00:27:22 -0400
> From: cornet at 1010internet.com
> Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Goldkette's "Stable"
> CC: dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
> To: hvickery_80 at msn.com
> 
> Marick's comment regarding Goldkette's many bands under his name was 
> spot on. My dad was a member of the "stable" of players, sometimes 
> working with the Victor band or with one of  many bands booked under the 
> aegis of Jean Goldkette.
> Dad joined the band in summer of 1926 and worked with many of these 
> units. Often he worked with Freddie Begin, pianist who led severaal 
> units and also was office manager for bands at the Goldkette office. I 
> have a photos of his Vagabonds, with the kindly face of Steve Brown at 
> one end and my curly-red-headed dad next to Fuzzy Farrar. Dad also 
> worked with the Boblo Island band at the ballroom on that island just 
> inside alcohol friendly Canada.  Spiegel Willcox played at times on that 
> unit as did Walter "Pee Wee" Hunt. Jimmy Dorsey. Jimmy's brother Tommy 
> led a Goldkette unit that played at the Detroit Athletic Club.
> Dad made a road tour with the Victor  Band summer of '27 at which time a 
> photo of dad and Bix was taken - a copy hangs framed on my knotty pine 
> walls.
> Dad was just 20 and married only a month when he joined the Goldkette 
> stable in '26, and he and my mom were at Jimmy Dorsey's wedding to Jane 
> in Detroit. Another unit band dad worked with was led by Chuck Wolcott, 
> who later became a musical director for Walt Disney cartoons. Owen 
> Bartlett also led a Goldkette band. The Orange Blossoms unit was led by 
> Hank Biagini. The members of the band didn't like him, so they fired him 
> and it became the Casa Loma band, led by violin player Mel Jensen but 
> fronted by Glenn Gray Knobloch and the band went coop.
> Incidently one of my first paid gigs was at age 14 and it was for a 
> birthday party for a North Hollywood Jr. High classmate, Jimmy Dorsey's 
> daughter Julie. (The circle keep sending rings back though time.)
>   Someday when I find time to sit and write it, I will put together the 
> many tales told by Red and the later times growing up as a band brat cum 
> player and getting to meet and know many who were to become friends, 
> mentors, and inspiration to a young squirt who just wanted to play a 
> horn like the grown ups. The good Lord was kind enough to let me do that 
> for 65 years. Having a dad who was in the thick of it all didn't hurt 
> either. (Dad's best advice was, "play if you must, but go to shool and 
> learn to do something else. So I went to college and managed to learn 
> enough to make a living as a writer when the music business went 
> electronic and over-amped and evolved into endless two chord vamps.)
> But finding additional writing time is tough - editing a forestry 
> magazine for 32 years, writing monthly columns for a state magazine with 
> a quarter million circulation, and writing three newspaper columns 
> weekly kind of eats the time up.
> But maybe. . .
>     . . . someday . . .
> 
> Good thread, Marick.
> 
> Don Ingle
> 
> 
> 
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