And as New Year’s Eve of 1969 and the 16th annual Fireman’s Ball approached, Local 333 of the International Association of Fire Fighters decided to keep their expenses down by going with local entertainment.
So the Tommy Ray Band set up on the stage of Memorial Hall that Dec. 31, ready to deliver nostalgic songs of the ’40s and ’50s to couples about to welcome in the 1970s.
“Count Basey was one of my favorites,” said Thomas Raymond Nuss,” who organized teh band and donated the first half of his name to the cause.
That was a standard practice at the time.
Bob Yeazell used his initials only in naming the Buddy Young Orchestra, a band in which Nuss had played trumpet.
“Yeazell kind of disbanded, I can’t remember when,” Nuss said. The same had happened with Eddie Kadel’s band.
As a result, in the late 1960s, “they really didn’t have anybody in town that had the Big Band music for older couples,” Nuss said.
Lots of teachers answer the call
Nuss decided to get the band together when he was teaching trumpet at Kincaid’s, which at the time was in the Arcade downtown.
His first step was to order arrangements out of New York for $5.75 or $6 a set.
“I forgot how many I ordered before I figured I had enough to play a three- or four-hour job,” he said.
Along the way, “I started calling up these guys” and lining musicians for his band.
“I wanted a full rhythm section — piano, drums and bass — that’s three, and five saxes, that’s eight. Then five brass, that’s 13, and sometimes you’d get a guitar,” he said.
The players included trumpeter Bud Arthur, who taught at North High Schoolt. Joe Wiekert was on baritone sax and Virgil McKeever on tenor.
Gil Byerman, who taught music at Shawnee High School, played alto. A guy named Jerry, whose last name now escapes Nuss, taught at Cedarville and played alto, too.
“He was a good arranger,” Nuss recalled. “He wrote a show for the high school down there, music and all. He asked some of the guys in the band to fill in the parts, and that town there just went ape over the show.”
Denver “Denny” Seigfreid, another school music teacher, played trombone, as did the music teacher at Yellow Springs High School.
Band didn’t stray far from home
With all the teachers, Tommy Ray had himself a knowledgeable and flexible band, but one that often couldn’t range too far.
“The teachers all had commitments to the schools,” Nuss said. So aside from in-town venues, the Officers Club at Wright Patterson Air Force Base was about as far as the band went.
They also played regularly enough at the old St. Mary’s Parish that Nuss and Bill Henderson built a band stand there.
The Musicians’ Union provided a place to practice, and its trust fund on occasion paid for gigs. The band would set them up and submit the paperwork for people who couldn’t afford to pay them.
“We played the Old Folks Home on Lower Valley Pike,” Nuss said. “We kind of used it as a rehearsal. They paid whatever the union scale was at the time — $10 or $12 for a three-hour job and maybe twice as much for the leader,” he said. “Those people had a great time.”
And when the request for the Fireman’s Ball came around, Nuss didn’t hesitate.
“I knew the band was good,” Nuss said. “It wasn’t just some pick-up band. That’s back when Dick Baker and Bob Gray were playing.”
Baker “played any sax and clarinet,” Nuss recalled. “He was a guy who could read (music) and transpose it (to a different key) as he played. It takes some brains to do that. Such a nice guy, but cigarettes killed him.”
Gray, an alto sax player, “is still playing professionally, as far as I know,” Nuss said. “If people had a request, Bob would say, ‘I can play it.’ ”
For the band members, pay was secondary
With him leading the way, the piano player, often Bob Circle, and bass player and drummer would join in. Soon the band was honoring the request.
“You could make the people pretty darn happy” that way, Nuss said.
“So much of this was Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basey stuff,” he said.
“I don’t know why I never taped” any of the shows, Nuss said.
But if he had, the tapes would have included the music of laughter.
Denny Seigfried and Bud Arthur “split the book” or shared music, Nuss said. Then while Seigfried was in the middle of a solo, “Bud Arthur would start pulling on his clothes.”
“We got paid. But it was as much having fun as anything,” Nuss said, “and we could have played more.”
But that would have required trips to Lancaster, Portsmouth and maybe over to Buckeye Lake like the Buddy Young Band, something Nuss didn’t want to get into.
All good things must come to an end
When the shuffle of end-of-the-year W-2 forms combined with his own business obligations to make it all too much work, Nuss sold his 60 or so arrangements to Hal Harris in Dayton.
“After that, I really dropped out,” Nuss said.
But he loved it at the time. And he still has a newspaper clipping of the band getting ready to ring in 1970 down at Memorial Hall.
Back then, Guy Lombardo, a band leader from an earlier era, was still playing Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve with the Royal Canadians.
To Nuss, the memories might suggest another old standard, too: “As Time Goes By.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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