H. Jay Burns, Managing Editor<\/p>\n
The alumni of the Bates Bobcats dance band are a loyal group, so I should\u2019ve expected the polite and purposeful phone calls. They came after the magazine chose the worst place \u2014 in an obituary, last year \u2014 to misspell the name of their early \u201940s leader, the late Howard Jordan \u201944.<\/p>\n
Lou Scolnik \u201945, retired from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court (but more important for this context, the Bobcats\u2019 tenor sax player) came down from his Mountain Avenue home to render his decision on the matter. He described how the Bobcats were a Saturday night fixture at Chase Hall in the years before World War II. (The band\u2019s origins date back to the early 1930s.) \u201cYou looked out at so many people dancing,\u201d he remembered. \u201cIt felt really good. The campus was unified on those evenings.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was interested. Scolnik then tipped me off about writer Bruce Park \u201944, a retired college English professor living in Mobile, Ala. (but more important for this context, the Bobcats\u2019 piano player). Park wrote this issue\u2019s story on the Bobcats band, as it existed right before World War II.<\/p>\n
In recent years, we have learned again how the war disrupted the hopes and destroyed the innocence of a generation. Bruce Park\u2019s story on the Bobcats, illuminating Bates student life in the early 1940s through the lens of jazz and dance, gives us yet another bittersweet example of what was lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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