By Mitch Gerber Special to The Washington Post Monday, April 7, 2008
I found a piece of my father's past, after more than 60 years, in the stacks of the Library of Congress.
It happened this way.
In the early 1940s, when he was an 18-year-old kid in Buffalo, working as a copy boy at the morning paper, he got a press pass from Down Beat, the national jazz weekly. Years later, when I was a kid in Buffalo, he told me stories about flashing the card to get into downtown nightclubs, where he'd stand at the bar to hear Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa and the other gods when they came to play.
He still had the pass in a dresser drawer, under a little box that held cuff links and tie clips. The pale green pasteboard with barely shriveled edges and art deco lettering had the managing editor's scribble at the bottom and was marked to expire in December 1943. By that time my father was in the Army.
I wondered if he ever wrote about all that good jazz.
"Not that I remember," he said. "I just went to hear the music."
I didn't quite buy that. He had loved to write. After the war, he produced good stuff in a nonfiction-writing course at the University of Pittsburgh, which he attended on the GI Bill. But by that time he was married, and I was on the way, followed by my sisters. Dad spent most of his working life managing the menswear department of a chain of Buffalo department stores. He was contented, but he didn't write anymore, except sales reports and letters to his kids at college.
When I went to work for the morning newspaper, I walked along the same hallways that he had, saw stories impaled on the same spike on the city editor's desk, walked out into the night through the same polished brass doors. It felt good -- Buffalo is a place of strong, deep roots. But the paper went out of business, and I landed in Washington.
I had a good family, a rewarding job, and the years went by. Then I came upon that pale green card again, now squirreled away in a box of ephemera, and again I wondered if my father ever had been published in Down Beat.
Fortunately, I was in the ideal place to resolve the mystery. One of the advantages of living in Washington is easy access to resources that even the Internet can't yet match. The federal government has preserved a lot of paper, and it's just a Metro ride away. At the Library of Congress, I applied for a reader identification card -- the process took less than an hour, and the ID is good for two years -- and turned a couple of corners to the Performing Arts Reading Room, on the first floor of the businesslike Madison Building.
Yes, they said, the library had every issue of Down Beat. Bound volumes were no longer available for perusal, but I could order up the microfilm. I handed in the call slip -- Volumes 9 through 12, January 1942 to December 1945 -- threaded the film into a viewing machine, and advanced to 1943.
The machine whirred in the darkened little room as I maneuvered through the weeks of that wartime year.
Feb. 1: "Tex Beneke Joins Heidt's Band."
March 1: "Niteries Face Race Problem" and " 'God Bless America' Puts American Band Leader in Jap Jail in Shanghai."
May 1: "Dooley Wilson Plays Village."
June 1: "How Columbia Bagged Sinatra."
Below that big story was a brief item, just two paragraphs:
"Blackout No Bar to Solid Buffalo Bash."
I stared at the page for a few moments, drinking it in, hearing Krupa and Wilson in my head.
Then I went home and phoned my father.
"Dad," I said, holding the copy I'd made of the Down Beat story, "I want to read you something."
BUFFALO-- A blackout halted traffic and put out lights in four western New York counties May 5, but it didn't turn out the lights of Memorial Auditorium or stem the frenzy of jive and jitterbugging that went on at the annual Musician's Union Parade of Bands.
He interrupted me: "Did I write that?"
More than 7,500 jammed the huge Madison Square Garden-like structure to dance to the music of 25 bands, headed by Mitchell Ayres, and applaud the rhythms of the Andrews Sisters.
"I wrote that! I wrote that!" Dad hardly ever raised his voice.
Continuous music was provided by local bands that alternated from stands at opposite sides of the auditorium. The music started at 7 p.m., and at 5:30 a.m., when this correspondent was leaving, reluctant but beat to his size nines, the session was still going strong.
I paused before pronouncing the last line:
-- Saul Gerber
Mitch Gerber grew up in Kenmore, left town for college, but came back to work at the Courier-Express until it closed. His grandfather ran Holzman's Drugs, at Delaware and Chippewa, where Spot Coffee now keeps shop. His father worked at Hens & Kelly for many years.