Part One of this essay can be found here.

ALAN writes:

On many days I worked on upper floors where I would comb through hundreds of boxes of books in perfect disarray, many of which had not been opened in years. I was excavating for books or periodicals or ephemera that I knew would sell or that I would set aside for myself or for customers whom we knew were looking for certain subjects or authors. As a booklover, I enjoyed the work. It was clean work except for the dust. Occasionally I opened a box and found a spider or two dwelling within. But I tried not to disturb them because they didn’t make all that much noise. Some customers were not that courteous. I remember one woman who climbed a ladder to reach books on a high shelf and then purposely dropped them on to the floor. We objected to that. She was one of a kind.

At the end of many workdays I would come downstairs by way of the ancient freight elevator at the back of the building and then walk down a two-tiered carpeted staircase leading to the ground floor. The proprietor and one or two employees (there were never more than two or three) would be standing there, getting ready to close the shop in late afternoon, and I would say to no one in particular, “Is everybody happy?”

Doubtless they thought it was nothing more than a phrase I made up at that moment. But it wasn’t. It was a decades-old phrase that I borrowed from bandleader Ted Lewis.

It was in 1977-’78 when I began to appreciate American popular song of the kind that flourished during the “Big Band Era” of the 1930s-‘40s and was still being played by WEW, the oldest radio station in St. Louis.

Years before that, I enjoyed watching the 1941 Bud Abbott and Lou Costello motion picture “Hold That Ghost”, in which Ted Lewis and his band appeared and performed their two best-known songs, “When My Baby Smiles at Me” and “Me and My Shadow”.

Ted Lewis worked in tent shows, vaudeville, hotels, and ballrooms across the country from the 1910s through the 1940s. He played many engagements in St. Louis, including several at the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel in the 1950s when I was a boy and did not even know he existed. His trademarks were a top hat, a cane, and the phrase “Is everybody happy?”, which he spoke at the end of many songs in a manner and inflection that no one could duplicate. Because those melodies and that phrase projected such a feeling of confidence and uplift, they stuck in my memory.

And so it was, ten years later when I worked in that bookshop, that that phrase floated in my awareness as I came across books about Glenn Miller or the music of the Big Band Era. While other people my age were absorbing the trendy noise called rock music, I was discovering the charm in songs that were decades old and had been made famous by men like Ted Lewis.

My father especially would have appreciated the kind of music that Ted Lewis presented. He was not a great musician or a great vocalist and he never claimed to be. But he was a great entertainer. He gave his audiences their money’s worth in pretty melodies, polished arrangements, corn, sentiment, and uplift. Afterward, they walked out of ballrooms or theaters feeling better than when they walked in and humming the songs they had just heard.

Many of his songs were half-sung and half-spoken. “Stepping Out With a Wonderful Memory” was entirely spoken and autobiographical, as he recalled taking a date to Churchill’s Restaurant in old New York or to Reisenweber’s Restaurant and then around the corner to Childs Café for coffee and cake, places that were popular when he was a young man but were long gone and “just a memory” by the time he recorded that song in 1957.

(Reisenweber’s was put out of business by petty tyrants on the pretext of the Volstead Act, an extremely bad idea that Americans permitted their government to enact into law and that then had terrible consequences. A hundred years later, Americans now see their restaurants put out of business by petty tyrants acting on the pretext of an alleged virus, another extremely bad idea that will have even worse consequences. They put up with tyranny called “Prohibition” for 14 years. How long will they put up with tyranny called “Lockdown”? )

There was a Childs Café in St. Louis, too, in years long before I was born, and a certain Miss Hulling worked there as a waitress (more about her below).

I am older now than Ted Lewis was in 1957, and I could recite an equivalent version of “Stepping Out With a Wonderful Memory” about places in old St. Louis that are now long gone…..like the magic of nightlife in Old Downtown; of two movie palaces and a third theater offering stage plays; of candy stores with floor-to-ceiling glass windows; of dining rooms and ballrooms in hotels like the Statler, the Mayfair, the Lennox, and the attractive lobby in the Sheraton-Jefferson Hotel…..

…..of restaurants like The Orient and the Quiet Corner, of Pope’s Cafeterias and Teutenberg’s Cafeterias and The Forum Cafeteria and the unforgettable split-layer lemon cake at Miss Hulling’s Cafeteria; of parades with beautifully-lighted floats and of night excursions down the Mississippi River on the S.S. Admiral; of the many shops at street level and on the mezzanine in the Arcade Building, where my aunt worked as an elevator operator when it was brand new in the 1920s…..

…..of the tall clocks that stood outside a jewelry store and at the corner of a department store; of the Doubleday Book Shop, where my father and I browsed and bought new books and records in the late 1960s; of the tall illuminated figure of “Reddy Kilowatt” on top of the Union Electric Building; of the TWA offices in the Mansion House Center, where I purchased a ticket for my flight to London in 1971…..

…..of the wonderful old Mercantile Library, six floors above Locust Street, with its large fireplace, wood-paneled reading room, statues and paintings, card catalogs, and old-world elegance, just around the corner from Hunleth Music Company, a landmark in music which dated from 1901, had five floors of music instruments, sheet music, the largest collection of 78-rpm records in St. Louis, and a dozen listening booths for customers; had all of Ted Lewis’s records in 1927 when he appeared on stage at the Orpheum Theater four blocks away; and was visited by musicians like Yehudi Menuhin, none of which I knew on the many days in 1966-’71 when I stood in its entryway between its two large display windows as I waited for my southbound #40 Broadway bus.

…..and of the voice of John McCormick coming from 3rd-floor KMOX Radio studios overlooking the riverfront downtown as he said to his listeners each morning at dawn, “…And now the night has separated from the day…”

Last year I wrote about feeding the birds and squirrels in a nearby park. Imagine my surprise weeks afterward when I discovered a 1947 news article about Ted Lewis in which his wife told how, every day after breakfast, he would walk across the street to a park to feed the birds and squirrels.

In another of his songs, Ted Lewis had other days and other ways in mind when he said “I’ve got a million wonderful memories…..” So have I, Ted. So have I. And the uplift that you put into your recordings is now part of them.

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