One Saturday morning in the Commodore Record Shop in New York City, I put on a 78 of Muggsy Spanier and about four others playing thrusting Chicago-style jazz. A skinny, middle-class kid in spectacles from Melrose, Mass. \u2014 “Spotless Town” \u2014 was getting into it. 1936.<\/p>\n
Benny Goodman opened Camel Caravan<\/em> with “Let\u2019s Dance” and closed down with a “Goodbye” that would have surprised Tosti. In between we heard, maybe, “Stealin\u2019 Apples,” and some ballads played so they moved. Artie Shaw\u2019s band did “Back Bay Shuffle” on the Boston Common, for free. We had to pay to hear Tommy Dorsey, with Frank Sinatra. Better. 1937-38.<\/p>\n Moving up: One Friday night, Harvey and I went up to Kimball\u2019s Starlight Ballroom in Lynnfield, Mass., to hear the Duke Ellington band. Sonny Greer, so thin he could have disappeared behind Sinatra, came on first, tuned his snare, hit a few muted rim shots. The rest drifted in a few at a time, noodled. Then, The Man Himself was at the piano. 1939.<\/p>\n I went, pretty shaky, to a dance band tryout-rehearsal one evening in Chase Hall. I survived and got the job, largely, by default. There really wasn\u2019t anybody else. I could read and play the blues. My best key was C. Saverio “Shove” Scavotto \u201942 fixed me with a commanding eye from behind his traps: “Your job is to keep the beat.”<\/p>\n This was the best. I was inside \u2014 not far \u2014 but inside. I was the piano player for the Bates Bobcats, the most popular thing on campus in 1941. For a fearful, acnoid freshman, being a Bobcat meant instant status: In Rand Hall\u2019s reception lounge, some pretty girl I didn\u2019t even know would spot me and conduct me to the piano to play “Stardust” or “Sophisticated Lady.” Maybe I played “Walkin\u2019 by the River” \u2014 hardly near the top of the hit parade but popular at Bates \u2014 where the title was sometimes rendered “Scroggin\u2019 by the \u2018Scoggin.” I didn\u2019t have to stand with the rest of the ravenous in the holding pen at the Commons. The door opened to me, and I was brought to a beat upright to play boogie-woogie. I even got to claim my spot at table before the herd thundered in.<\/p>\n The proximate power at Bates in the early \u201940s was Harry W. Rowe \u201912, properly a Bates icon. At best, Dean Rowe tolerated the Bobcats. Perhaps he\u2019d have liked to close us down. Like most of the people who ran Bates in those days, Harry Rowe liked to be in control of things, liked to see that they fit his image of the College.<\/p>\n Yet the band was slippery, and Dean Rowe couldn\u2019t keep tabs on us. Our leader in the early \u201940s, Howard Jordan \u201944 (succeeding Stanton Smith \u201941) had connections and got us jobs off campus: Bowdoin, the University of Maine, at fraternity tea dances, four in the afternoon until three in the morning. One famous gig took the band to Bar Harbor and back in time for 7:40 class on Monday. We played grange halls and town halls, sometimes a long way from campus. Once we got a booking for a club in Boston. Dean Rowe said no.<\/p>\n We took the college name on our Bates-garnet flannel blazers, on our music stands, to uncertain places. Further, he scented something like sin. One phrase from the Freshman Handbook<\/em> became proverbial irony among us all: “Bates frowns….” Some shadow of that frown crossed Dean Rowe\u2019s brow. Did he smell alcohol? A little. A jug of fermented cider might have sat on the outside window sill in a hard freeze: Bates Calvados. My freshman roommate, the late Perry Stone \u201944, came home drunk after an evening at the Silver Slipper. (His widow told me he had got drunk because he was a homesick Jew from East Orange, N.J., in a nest of New England WASPs.)<\/p>\n Was there sex in the air? Maybe. We were young. But what was at the root? Know it or not, Dean Rowe smelled jazz<\/em>, more dangerous than the poolroom in River City, more potent than the fetid Androscoggin River. The music curriculum at Bates in those days included just two courses \u2014 Music Appreciation 201, 202 \u2014 taught by Seldon Tupper Crafts, organist and choir director. What did he<\/em> think of the Bobcats? Probably he heard what we played as a renegade music, quite outside the pale.<\/p>\n What Dean Rowe smelled was what we loved, what the student body loved. We agreed with Ronnie Graham in Leonard Sillman\u2019s New Faces of 1952: <\/em>“Man! I can\u2019t stand anythin\u2019 square.” We took our pants to a tailor downtown to have them pegged, cinched from the knee down so tight you had to take off your shoes to take off your pants. Some of us wore porkpie hats. We really looked sharp. Our form of address was “Man.”<\/p>\n But as my roommate Perry knew, we were a long way from New York and even further from New Orleans, where 24 years earlier the U.S. Navy had shut down the infamous Storyville \u2014 the dance clubs, the bars, the cribs, the whole tissue of black-polyglot life in and out of the quarter from which jazz had come. Ours was a pale imitation of vice. We were as hip as we knew how at Bates College, 1941. We felt our limits. We were Bates boys about to enter a wider world the hard way.<\/p>\n Sixty years later, after 47 years of rock \u2014 Bill Hailey and the Comets, “Rock around the Clock,” to heavy metal and punk \u2014 the Grateful Dead are now old. Jerry Garcia\u2019s dead. On April 15, 2001, Jeffrey Hyman, Joey Ramone of the “three chord thrash,” father of punk, died at 49. On page 14 of the Bates President\u2019s Report 2000, <\/em>Mark Dobbyn \u201903 of Warren, R.I., sits on the porch of Wilson House, on Frye Street, on a warm October afternoon. “This winter,” says the caption, “he\u2019s taking \u2018Jazz Performance Workshop,\u2019 a theory and applied music course that culminates in public performances of small-group jazz improvisation as well as jazz standards.”<\/p>\n Mark could use a nice big 17-inch traditional archtop jazz guitar like the one Mike Lategola \u201946 brought to his tryout in 1942. Mike had waited and waited at Chase. Finally, Howard, Merle, and Lou \u2014 expecting no tryout candidates \u2014 showed up, spotted Mike\u2019s pickup and amp and said, “You\u2019re hired!” Perhaps Mark and his mates in that music course watched Ken Burns\u2019 Jazz: America\u2019s Music <\/em>and listened to all five CDs for the rest of the homework. I hope they enjoyed it. I hope they like to play. I hope they had a great recital. I don\u2019t suppose anyone danced.<\/p>\n Jazz made it all the way to Carnegie Hall. Now it\u2019s enshrined at Lincoln Center. Wynton Marsalis gives an annual viewing. Jazz \u2014 sanitized, sanctified, where once it was suspect, a musical pariah \u2014 has come to roost in the catalog and classrooms at Bates College 2001. Mark and his mates may be living in the latter days of the music, the time of summing up, codification \u2014 curriculum.<\/p>\n The Bobcats of 1941 were about 20 years from the jazz\u2019s beginning. The inner circle in the early 1940s included Howard Johnson \u201944, trumpet; Lou Scolnik \u201945, tenor sax; Merle Eastman \u201943, alto sax; Bill Walters \u201943, trombone; and Stan Smith \u201941 and Camp Thomas \u201943, trumpets. Lou and Merle, like any big-band musicians of the day, doubled clarinet.<\/p>\n Big bands grew bigger in the \u201940s. Count Basie\u2019s 1937 band had but 12 pieces. By bandleader Stan Kenton\u2019s time in the mid-1940s, bands had swelled to 20 or more. But we couldn\u2019t squeeze 13 pieces out of a student body of about 700. Since Howard Jordan and Lou Scolnik were Lewiston men \u2014 they had played together in high school in bands led by Lloyd Rafnell and Lou Paul, with Dick Poulin\u2019s Varsiteers \u2014 we were able to recruit some townies. (The Bobcats, which emerged as a band as early as 1930, certainly had roots in Lewiston. Richard Tuttle \u201935 remembers band leader Gil Clapperton \u201932 augmenting the band with Lewiston musicians.) Our townies in \u201941 included Ray Lebel, Howard Dion, trumpets; Carroll Poulin, tenor sax; Bob Bedard, bass. An earnest fellow, Bedard read<\/em> his bass part. Few bass players do.<\/p>\n The pivot point was the Saturday night dance, seven to 11, Chase Hall, in a space that\u2019s changed little in 60 years. For $36, Bates got a big band for four hours. We might do a little better with off-campus gigs, but our Bates fee was not negotiable, and Saturday night was contractual.<\/p>\n The boys wore their best suits, in some cases their one suit. (Bates ran that way back then: A girl at Cornell in 1953, on the other hand, was surprised to see a roommate unpack 32 angora sweaters.) In Bates\u2019 “New Dorm” at 6:15 of a Saturday night, you couldn\u2019t see in the showers for the steam. More steam came from hot irons on slightly shiny navy-blue pants. A smell of Vitalis hung in the air. Ties were borrowed and loaned. A pocket watch, if you had one, sat in a little pocket on the top right side of your pants. A chain ran to your side pocket with keys or a nail clipper on the end. Shirts: well starched and white. When the boys were ready, they looked ruddy and scrubbed, every hair in place. When the dorm doors shut behind them, shoeshine rags lay abandoned on floors.<\/p>\n And the girls they met at Chase? Beautiful, every one! What was the scene upstairs at Rand or Frye at 6:15 of a Saturday night? We could only guess. Those were mysteries. We saw, smelled only the results. By day it was sox and saddles, sweaters and skirts. For the dance it was pumps, hose, dresses. Chanel? #5!<\/p>\n Remember when we get there honey, Two steps I\u2019m gonna have \u2019em all!<\/em><\/p>\n The Bobcats sat behind folding cardboard stands with the Bates logo; a little clip-on light illuminated the score when the house lights went down and the spot hit the 300 little mirrors on the revolving ball hanging from the middle of the Chase ceiling. When we took the downbeat from Howard for the first number of the first set, that floor was jammed in moments.<\/p>\n The Bobcats did ballads, a lot of them. We were a dance<\/em> band. The dancing to them was quiet and close, cheek-to-cheek if the girl was tall enough or the boy short enough. They were inside the music, alone together in the crowd. Loves that began on that floor led to Bates grandchildren. We played “I\u2019ll Never Smile Again, Only Forever,” “This Is No Laughing Matter,” “A Sinner Kissed an Angel,” “This Love of Mine,” “Be Careful, It\u2019s My Heart,” “He\u2019s My Guy,” “I Had the Craziest Dream,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Serenade in Blue.” We did “Walkin\u2019 by the River.” We did Bob Haggert\u2019s “What\u2019s New?” Sis Entress \u201944 sang “Under a Blanket of Blue.”<\/p>\n The band and the dancers were symbiotic. The dance was the upbeat for Monday through Friday. Dancers would cluster in front of the band to hear and see Scolnik or Eastman solo. “The Bobcats made Saturday night come alive, something to look forward to,” Bob Cote \u201943 said.<\/p>\n “Your Red Wagon,” “Pompton Turnpike,” “720 in the Books,” “Celery Stalks at Midnight,” “Little Rock Getaway,” “Let Me Off Uptown,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” “Blue Skies,” “One O\u2019Clock Jump” had more brass, up-tempo stuff which, as Virginia O\u2019Brien put it, “done swang.” This dancing was open, fast, athletic, acrobatic \u2014 jitterbug, in fact. Bates\u2019 version of “Killer” Joe Piro, the man who cleared a space on the floor with his partner, was George Sommernitz, a Swiss national, a ski jumper off Mount David.<\/p>\n The band dressed as hip as we knew how. We played as hip as we knew how. Lou Scolnik \u201945 could practically get sideways as he soloed. Norman “Doc” Lloyd \u201944 worked on a tenor tone that could scrape the paint. When he soloed he pumped out the notes.<\/p>\n Down on 52nd street, at Minton\u2019s, Thelonius Monk was the house pianist. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were inventing bop as they went along. Part of the idea was stuff the white boys couldn\u2019t play: “Epistrophe,” “Parker\u2019s Mood,” “Donna Lee,” “In Walked Bud.”<\/p>\n We were white boys in Lewiston, Maine. What did we know?<\/p>\n Yet even Saturday night ends. After a dozen sets and the intermission, dance cards complete, the lights went down, and we went into Camp Thomas\u2019 arrangement of Bates songs: “The Bates Smoker”: “Oft\u2019 times at night, I light my pipe, and dream of dear old Bates.” We were as sinful as we knew how.<\/p>\n After the ball was over? For the boys, grilled-cheese sandwiches from a waffle iron, Bismarks and Napoleons from Peterson\u2019s. All-night bridge games. Parlor games, like a limerick circle, where you drop out if you can\u2019t invent a limerick on your turn. (A decade earlier, Richard Tuttle \u201935 remembers the band packing up and rushing back to the dorm to listen to the National Biscuit Co.\u2019s Let\u2019s Dance, <\/em>11:30 to one in the morning. Benny Goodman alternated with Kel Murray and Xavier Cugat. The Bobcats preferred Goodman: “We\u2019d all groan when Cugat came on,” Tuttle said.)<\/p>\n And what did the girls do? The girls had to be logged in by 11:15. The curfew reduced the occasions for sin. What did they do once in? Who knew?<\/p>\n As the years passed, we wondered how the band really sounded. Mike Lategola \u201946 says the band was good, that the section work was right \u2014 good intonation, clean attacks and cuts. No one will ever know: The Bobcats were never recorded.<\/p>\n At the 40th Bates Reunion of \u201944, the remnants of 1941-43 gathered in Chase with the remnants of the townies to play a Chase Hall dance. The band was pretty bad, but when I saw the moves on that floor I knew we were still a dancing generation. We played the ballads for the dancers. We also played the stuff that swung. We played it for the dancers, but even more, we played for us.<\/p>\n Some of the band kept on, even still are, playing. Lou Scolnik found time off from his seat on Maine\u2019s highest court to play tenor. Merle Eastman played with a big band around Concord, N.H., until recently. Stan Smith plays with two bands, one called The Ambassadors. Howard Jordan had one band or another most of his adult life. After meeting the Russians on the Rhine in the spring of \u201945, mortar-squad man Mike Lategola played guitar with a group that went to camps where American soldiers waited to go home. They held occasional reunions for years.<\/p>\n In the 1940s, we didn\u2019t have to buy a CD and take it home to hear jazz. We were living in a window when, largely through big bands, jazz surfaced and triumphed. Jazz was everywhere. When Artie Shaw took his band to the allied camps in Europe after Normandy, he was “stunned” by the response, as he said on Ken Burns\u2019 Jazz<\/em>. He was not easily stunned \u2014 he owned the bobbysoxers. Postwar, the music faded until the knockout blow from rock sent it back underground.<\/p>\n At Bates, the lights went down for the last smoker in the spring of 1943. The annual group photo of the Bobcats disappeared from the Bates Mirror <\/em>that year too. Many of the men on campus were already in boot camps, basic training, on battlegrounds. By the summer, nearly all of us were gone, leaving the Bates campus to be populated mostly by women and V-12s, potential Navy officers in gobs uniforms. In the spring of its last year, the Bobcats were playing “When The Lights Go On Again All Over the World”:<\/p>\n When the lights go on again all over the world At a Bobcat gig in Orono, Howard Jordan \u201944 entered a cutting contest with the UMaine band\u2019s lead trumpet man. When it was over the Maine man was in shreds. Jordan retired behind the stand to throw up \u2014 it\u2019s called blowing your guts out. He was not a man to duck or lose a contest.<\/p>\n Howard Jordan, who died in January 2000 at the age of 77, was the Bobcat band leader 1941-43. He had an imperturbable oval face, a disposition toward five o\u2019clock shadow, dark hair lying close to his head, a compact figure, and a taste for double-breasted suits. His movements were economical and purposeful. Merle Eastman \u201943 nicknamed him \u201cMole,\u201d from the Dick Tracy villain with furry hands, but you didn\u2019t say it to his face.<\/p>\n His style was laconic, ironic. He would chant, obliquely, \u201cYou must remember this, a gliss is still a gliss.\u201d He was simply sure of and sure in<\/em> himself, as a man, as a musician. By the fall of 1941, not yet 20, he was not only a trumpet player both talented and authoritative, but a bandleader, a veteran professional in a trade I\u2019d just entered with real joy and realer trepidation.<\/p>\n From him I learned a useful principle of musical judgment: \u201cHe couldn\u2019t play \u2018Come to Jesus\u2019 in whole notes.\u201d He liked to play the blues, but he had no false reverence for that archetypal American art form:<\/p>\n Pappy\u2019s got bunions, Jordan came to Reunion 1984. Behind Chase, he opened the trunk of his car to show me his new horn. Years before, he had played a long horn. Sis Entress Holmes \u201944, Bobcat vocalist, says she thought of him as \u201cthe archangel Gabriel.\u201d Behind Chase, he showed me a Bix horn, a cornet. At that Reunion, he played not only cornet but alto sax. His wife, Pat, herself a fine musician, had taught him. Four years later, Jordan had survived encephalitis, but his memory had not. He no longer played alto. But he could still play the trumpet. Early and late, he was faithful to the horn.<\/p>\n \u2014 Bruce Park \u201944<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The time and place was 1941 Bates, and the Bobcats were as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":4081,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-4082","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11394,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4082\/revisions\/11394"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/Images\/Bates_Magazine\/Fall01\/fall01-scolnik.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>And the boys are home again all over the world
\n<\/em>And rain or snow is all that may fall from the skies above
\n<\/em>A kiss won\u2019t mean “goodbye” but “hello to love.”<\/em><\/p>\nHoward’s Band<\/h3>\n
\nHe don\u2019t wear any shoo-hoos.
\nPappy\u2019s got bunions,
\nHe don\u2019t wear any shoo-hoos.
\nPappy\u2019s got bunions,
\nHe\u2019s got those barefoot blues.<\/em><\/p>\n