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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks
SEEING A MAN SHOT
At that time Mr. Fred Temple had established radio station WDSR in Lake City, sometime during World
War II, and one of his announcers was a disc jockey named Eddie Baumel, who was an absolutely
fantastic jazz piano player. At about the time I got out of the Army, Eddie Baumel was forming a little
band to play at dances and other social functions, and I was invited to play trumpet with this group. If I
do say so myself, we were quite good, and soon obtained a job playing for a dance every Saturday night
at the VFW Hall in Perry, Florida.
Eddie Baumel was the band leader and played piano, the clarinetist was Don Hubbard, who at that time
was Columbia High School Band Director, Herbert Bohrman on tenor sax, an old friend of mine from
high school days, although he was about 4 years older than I, and the drummer was Robert Lord who
had been the First drum major of the Columbia High School Band when it was first started back in about
1936, and Robert Lord was an absolute fantastic drummer. The standup bass was played by Dale
Richardson, who was married to the former Zona Lee Avery, and so this little band consisting of piano,
drums, string bass, trumpet, clarinet, and tenor sax was much in demand.
I recall on Saturday nights at the VFW dance in Perry, that there was a young lady, apparently in her
early 20’s who was quite striking on the dance floor, and usually wore a gorgeous white dress with a full
flaring skirt which would come up and show some extremely pretty legs when she whirled about the
dance floor. She was much in demand as a dance partner on those Saturday night dances, and the last
time we played at the VFW Hall in Perry was about 3 weeks before I entered Stetson, and our job
playing that Saturday night dance came to an unexpected end.
What happened was that there were apparently two men who greatly admired the young lady I have
spoken about, and they had an argument and one of them shot and killed the other one right there on the
dance floor before our very eyes. That of course ended that dance, and 1 do not know if they ever
resumed those Saturday night dances or not, since shortly after that time I began attending Stetson.
That little dance band was one of the most enjoyable things I have done in the field of music, but so
vastly different from what I experienced playing in the Dallas Symphony a few years later.
A few people have tried to get dance bands together in Lake City since that time but 1 don’t believe
there has ever been one that was equal to ours. Not because I played in it, but because everybody in the
band was an accomplished musician, and we played real well together.
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