JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

Although Peter Buffa has already dealt warmly with Tex Beneke in the

Pilot last week, I can’t allow his recent passing to go unnoticed here.

He not only symbolized an entire, wonderful prewar period of my life, but

I was also privileged to know him a little and talk with him at some

length during the years he lived among us in Costa Mesa. So I have to

offer up a send-off of my own in this space.

The numbers are fast dwindling of those of us who saw Tex work in the

Glenn Miller days and remember what a presence he was on the bandstand.

That’s when the Big Bands played one-nighters in venues as disparate as

the Glen Island Casino and the ramshackle dance hall at Shriner Lake in

northern Indiana where I last saw Tex with Miller in 1941.

I may sometimes forget my children’s names, but I remember Tex Beneke in

that Shriner Lake dance hall in vivid detail. The stainless steel music

stands said “GM” with the letters intercut, and there was a derby hat

perched on each stand. The 15 musicians were bunched together tightly on

a raised platform flanked at stage left by a half-dozen straight chairs

for the singers when they weren’t performing.

Dancing was difficult because the dancers were massed around the

bandstand, holding one another and swaying in tightly packed unison to

the music, but mostly listening.

The leader was a slim, owlish, unsmiling man holding a trombone like a

sceptre. And at extreme stage right was a tenor sax player with a face as

open as the Texas prairie where he was raised and a voice like gravel

being sluiced in a stream.

When the singers came stage center, he’d usually join them, and at least

once a night he would sing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Kalamazoo.” His

named was Gordon, but his boss called him “Tex” and it stuck. For a

lifetime.

Tex Beneke was a Navy aircraft maintenance chief petty officer on leave

in New York when the news came of Miller’s disappearance in an Air Force

plane over the English Channel. Miller had urged his musicians to hang

tight until he could reform the band after the war. So in accord with her

husband’s wishes, Miller’s wife asked Tex to take over the band, billed

as the Glenn Miller Band directed by Tex Beneke.

That honeymoon lasted for six years -- until Tex, restless with the

addition of strings to a swing band and wanting to move out from under

the Miller umbrella, changed the name to the Tex Beneke Band.

Instantly, Tex told me when I last visited him at his home in 1986 (I

kept the notes of that day), the Miller estate sent plainclothes officers

backstage to impound all the music and other Miller material, thus

creating a rift between Tex and Helen Miller that had still not healed

when she died two decades later.

“That’s why I never appeared in ‘The Glenn Miller Story,’ the movie in

which James Stewart played Glenn,” Tex explained.

Tex remembered Miller respectfully but not warmly. “He was smart -- very

smart. In the beginning, he did all his own arrangements and he just kept

updating all the time until he got the full sound he wanted. But with his

musicians, he could be tough and often cold. If Glenn heard somebody he

thought was better than one of his own musicians, he’d just give the boy

two weeks’ notice. It was as simple as that.”

When Tex’s wife died in 1978, he wanted out of the rugged Midwestern

weather and moved to Costa Mesa where his mother was then living. He

bought a house in the country club district where he lived for more than

two decades in near anonymity.

He had recently remarried when I last talked with him, and his new wife,

Sandra, told me: “He’s been around crowds all his life, and when he isn’t

working, he likes peace and solitude.”

He was 72 then, still playing a half-dozen gigs a month and indulging

some living habits left over from his Big Band days -- like smoking and

no exercise -- that would do in most of us. Except for a belly visible in

a sports shirt, he looked an astonishing lot like he did that night at

Shriner Lake.

He was surrounded in his home by a prodigious supply of memorabilia,

ranging from an old Philco console radio that belonged to his parents to

dozens of photos of Tex with big-name entertainers of his day and stacks

of priceless audio tapes.

He talked easily and comfortably about the past, but he didn’t live

there. He lived in his music. “I can get on that bandstand with a

bellyache,” he said, “but once I find my audience is with me, it picks me

right up.”

Tex adjusted to the demise of the two main sources of Big Band bookings,

Vaudeville houses and ballrooms, by concentrating on concerts and private

dances, where his name was always a drawing card that offered a kind of

immortality to folks of my generation.

Tex told me 14 years ago: “We will never see another era like the ‘30s

and ‘40s. The young kids made the Big Bands, and for a few years, it was

the greatest thing that ever happened to all of us.

“When I play dances these days, so many couples -- sometimes with tears

in their eyes -- tell me the greatest stories about how they got engaged

after a Miller dance or how this music was the last thing they shared

before he went off to war.

“The kids who are discovering Big Band music today are a very different

breed. But at least they’re finding out that their grandparents aren’t

quite the squares the kids thought they were.”

So if you hear a tenor sax instead of a horn blowing you into Nirvana one

day, don’t be alarmed. It’s just Tex sitting in for Gabriel.

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

Thursdays.