As I wrote the thumbnail bio of Guy Lombardo for the Jazz Birthday of the Month today, I had vague feelings of déjà vu. This was not a mystical experience, nor a possible neurological malfunction. I simply realized I had written a similar column 46 years ago when I was 15 years old. It’s even possible Guy was still alive when I wrote it.
I’d quote it here (anything to spare myself the drudgery of coming up with new material), but it is in a filing cabinet in a room of my house I cannot easily get to. I should have thought about this days ago. I might have spared myself all the agony of squeezing new copy out of my brain. Having a chunk of prose to slap into a column as my printer’s deadline grows ever closer is a great comfort. If I did more cleaning and straightening, I’d likely have to do less actual writing.
As you yawn and turn toward the more engaging pieces in this month’s issue, I’ll assume instead that you were just asking, “How comes it that you were writing an actual column in 1977, when earth tones ruled the day and Saturday Night Live was still good? Didn’t you have homework to do, or something?”
I’m glad you asked. I’m afraid that nepotism had everything to do with it. In 1976, my father, having been cast aside by his political party and having tried a variety of other lines of work, became the editor and publisher of local franchise of a television listings guide called TV Facts. This, as opposed to TV Guide, was a giveaway booklet distributed through supermarkets and other stores. In other words, it was entirely supported by advertising—and my father’s determination to work for not much money.
He was also burdened with a teenaged pest of a son who was driven to write even though he didn’t have much to write about. But, having written, loathed to have a single word of his exquisite prose tampered with. That unfortunate quality is a stubborn stain on the character of that now over-the-hill scribbler.
Let’s switch to first person here. At first I contributed a few bits of light-verse doggerel as filler for this unassuming weekly. It came to pass that I pitched a column about Old Time Radio shows and other such bits of nostalgia (for things I was decades too young to have directly experienced), and I doggedly wrote a piece every week. I even have the Royal typewriter on which I wrote them stuck in a not-easily-accessible corner of this very room.
Not being anywhere near a public library—and being too lethargic to go there if I had been—I had a handful of reference books and old magazines I relied on for my material. I cribbed heavily from John Dunning’s Tune in Yesterday: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, 1925-1976, which I snagged at Waldenbooks and which my mother saw as an undue extravagance. It turned out to not be a squander, but a goldmine of information to which I could return again and again.
I was cognizant of the evils of plagiarism, and so I carefully paraphrased everything into my own words—a skill I had honed while writing reports for school. Now, of course, it is no great task to cut and paste swaths of prose from Wikipedia—and AI offers some promising developments. But in the impenetrably dark ages before Google, we had encyclopedias—and usually what we had was some watered-down “junior” edition offering scant information but really nice pictures.
Talk of “creative writing” all you wish. That it should be a course by itself bespeaks a failure of resourcefulness. Trying to get a sixth-grade essay out of an entry in a children’s encyclopedia with the assignment due the next day is the true test of a writer. I learned to paraphrase and pad like a pro. Those are skills that serve one well over a lifetime of looming deadlines.
My Guy Lombardo essay was aided and abetted by a 1939 Liberty magazine article—and thus probably full of inaccuracies and public relations puffery. I may have gleaned other bits here and there, and filled in the rest. But no one complained. Who’s going to beef about a column in a free publication as they leaf past it toward the day’s programming?
As I reflect on it, writing that weekly item was excellent practice for what I do now.
At the time I wrote “The Early Years,” my father was a mere lad of 53—the same age I was when I launched The Syncopated Times. We were unalike in so many ways, though there have been certain parallels. We each got married at exactly the same age. The publishing venture is certainly analogous, though TV Facts failed after two years and I’m still rolling my Syncopated boulder. Then I consider that he died at 61—the age at which I now find myself.
I’m not superstitious, but I do have occasion to pause and think. In six months, I’ll be exactly as old as he was when he died. Such a dire coincidence does “concentrate the mind wonderfully,” to purloin Dr. Johnson’s phrase.
The practical aspect of this is that, however long this world forgets to expel me for my various crimes against health and fitness, I want to ensure the continuance of The Syncopated Times. Establishing a durable nonprofit is part of that plan, even if I somehow miraculously manage to outlast the Old Man.
In 1968, Guy Lombardo appeared on Laugh-In and joked, “When I go, I’m taking New Year’s Eve with me.” Though I have no intention of going any time soon, it is my heartfelt wish that my boulder will roll on.
