A time when big bands were big

JOSEPH N. BELL

One of the problems of reaching my age is reading in the news with

increasing frequency about the death of public figures I have known

or who have affected my life. Last week was a mixed bag. One of them

left this vale, but another -- who is still very much alive at 93 --

was celebrated by the Smithsonian National Museum of American

History.

Artie Shaw, who lives in Thousand Oaks, must be the last survivor

of the big band leaders. Last week, he gave two of his beloved

clarinets to the Smithsonian and was awarded a medal as “the most

accomplished and innovative of all jazz musicians.”

I’ll drink to that.

His appearance in the news -- jaunty in a baseball cap and racy

sports shirt -- brought back vivid memories of the proms in the

spring of 1942 on the University of Missouri campus that a ton of us

carried off shortly thereafter into World War II. Shaw presided

unforgettably over one of them.

The Big Band Era -- like the Great Depression -- is hard to

explain to someone who wasn’t there. It didn’t last very long,

defeated finally by the rigors of one-night stands that brought this

magnificent music live to every corner of the nation but was too

debilitating a regimen on the musicians in the changing postwar

period.

I was in high school in northern Indiana when the big bands

arrived. We were surrounded by dozens of lakes, all with dance halls.

And for 15 years bracketing World War II, those rural dance halls

were filled almost nightly during the summer by the likes of Glenn

Miller, the Dorsey brothers, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Artie

Shaw and such band vocalists as Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Doris Day,

Billie Holiday and Dick Haymes. For a few bucks, we could gather

around the stage and listen or drift to the fringes and dance.

So thank you, Artie Shaw, for those memorable nights. May

“Stardust” and “Moonglow” attend you wherever you go.

The death of physicist Edward Teller takes me to a different

planet. His universe was nuclear energy, and I shared it with him a

little uncertainly for most of a day four decades ago when Teller --

“the father of the H-bomb,” a sobriquet he hated -- and chemist Linus

Pauling were carrying on an angry and very public debate on whether

to stop testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. I was asked by a

national magazine to try and reduce this debate to lay language.

I found Teller and Pauling willing to try to meet me at my opaque

level. But Teller was brusque, acerbic, provocative, outspoken and

impatient. Pauling, by contrast, expressed views just as strong but

wrapped in a patina of edgy charm.

Finally, I said to him in exasperation, “For two days, I have been

talking to two of the world’s most respected scientists, and you have

expressed totally opposite views on a basic scientific issue. So who

am I to believe?”

Pauling said, “Who did you like the best?”

Now that Teller has joined Pauling, who died several years ago,

they have probably renewed their debate, with God in full retreat.

*

Back in this world, Steve Lopez recently wrote a column for the

Los Angeles Times that should be required reading for everyone still

undecided about whether rejecting the process of recall as presently

constituted in California is a more important issue in our upcoming

election than a referendum on the performance of Gov. Gray Davis.

Lopez dreamed up a deliberately absurd proposition calling for the

recall of all state legislators, then set himself up with a sign and

a clipboard outside a supermarket.

When the sun became too hot, he offered a 15-year-old boy watching

him a dollar for each signature he could get and retired to the shade

to watch. The boy got 10 people to sign in a few minutes, only one of

whom read the text of the proposition. Lopez paid off his assistant

and went home with his point made.

Lopez and his new friend were amateurs. Imagine how many

signatures the pros hired to put the Davis recall on the ballot might

have produced.

*

My neighbor John Crean called the other day to point out an oddity

in the Official Voter Information Guide that I missed -- and I

suspect you did, too. The guide, which we all received last week,

carries a paragraph submitted by each candidate -- listed

alphabetically -- to give his or her background and to summarize his

or her positions on public issues to help the voters make a

selection.

Well, not quite all of them.

Take a look on page 28. There we have George B. Schwartman, who

tells us he is “a successful and compassionate businessman who is a

fiscal realist” followed by a “Berkeley Law School graduate and

business advocate” named Richard J. Simmons. Nobody in between. Like

Schwarzenegger, Arnold. We can only imagine what his paragraph might

have said.

“Compassionate actor who is a political realist,” perhaps. And the

rest blank so he doesn’t get himself into any trouble.

I called the office of the California secretary of state for an

explanation of Arnold’s absence and was referred to page 8 of the

voter guide, which I should have read before I called. There, it

explains that only those candidates who accept a campaign expenditure

limit of $10.6 million are allowed to submit a statement to the voter

guide. Neither Schwarzenegger nor his Republican opponent, Sen. Tom

McClintock, accepted this restriction. Cruz Bustamante did, and thus

appears in the Guide -- but only because he finessed personal

campaign expenditures into ads in opposition to Proposition 54.

But at least they are consistent. Bustamante is politically

shrewd, McClintock is strongly out front with his rigid brand of

conservatism, and Arnold is counting on his celebrity status to allow

him to stay outside the fray -- a challenge that will grow more and

more difficult for Arnold and all the rest of us if this turkey goes

on for another six months..

*

Finally, a small piece of good news. The Bush administration has

sent a new public relations man to Baghdad to replace a PR rep who --

among other things -- put a female marathon runner in shorts in an

advertisement that Muslim media found offensive and refused to run.

The new guy can speak Arabic, which is the good news. The bad news

is that even this improvement can’t paper over the chaos he’s being

asked to spin.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.