The Story Behind Glenn Band, His Style, His Life
October 20. 1951 DOWN BEAT —PART 2 3 The Story Behind Glenn Miller—His Band, His Style, His Life, His Death On a thickly-befogged afternoon in December, tlton Glenn Miller, born of a farmer father and a 1944, an army specialist» corp» major tossed his schoolteacher mother in Clarinda, Iowa, March 1, 1905, gear into a battered C-47 at an RAF base near ac«(uired his first horn, a broken-down trombon«. from a butcher, for whom he ran errand« as a child. He was Bedford, England, and asked a rhetorical ques a relentless plugger from the start, ami bv the time he tion of a fellow officer. waa a teen-ager, working after high-school clashes in a “Whei'e,” inquired Major Glenn Miller, “are the para barbershop and later, in a sugar-beet factory, Glenn al chutes?” ready was playing concerts »ilh the town band. When the “What the hell, Miller,” jokingly replied Lt. Col. Nor ink waa hardly dry on hia high school diploma, ihe mal' Baes*el, “do you want to live forever?" hard-working Glenn was playing with bis first hand—that Throughout most of the nearly 10 years since the dis of Boyd Senter. - appearance of the well-known bandleader on that ill-fated Next came college «lays in Boulder, Colo., where Miller flight across the English Channel, many a wishful rumor began trying his hand at arranging. He left college to was heard to the effect that Miller, somehow, had man land a job in California with Ben Pollack’s band, the aged to cheat death, after all.
[Show full text]