Sandy was a dancer back in the days when Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly ruled the boards. He was part of the back-story tapestry of Broadway and Hollywood and he watched the world from the sets at Paramount, MGM, and the rest. His friends were the same friends he grew up with as a boy in Bay Ridge Brooklyn. They called each other by names like Blackie, Brownie, Shorty, Irish, Lefty and Fatso. Names that would raise eyebrows in today’s polite world, but fitting, descriptive and natural back then. Too smart to go to college they thought - too much easy money to be made following the crowd to Hollywood right after WWII. Some of them jumped at the chance to fight Hitler and travelled to England to join up before the US got into the war. These guys all had natural talent to make people laugh, smarts they’d learned on the streets of New York. Each day they’d gather on street corners and practice the fine art of getting away with whatever they could. They were practical jokers, loyal to the bone to the American flag, and out to to make a buck as long as it was fun and they could do it while they were high.

 

     Oh yes, did I mention that they were high lots of the time?  No, they weren’t junkies shooting stuff and all that, and they weren’t sniffing powders and taking pills. They were buying it on the street - pot, shit, weed – cleaning it in a shoe-box lid on the kitchen table, and rolling it into joints while grandma looked on without a clue as to what they were up to but assuming it was okay because these were such nice boys so it must be okay.

 

     Now this was before Timothy Leary made pot a religious rite of passage and insisted that everyone should smoke it. No, these guys kept it to themselves and laughed their asses off behind facades of propriety and grace. Do you know what they called themselves? You won’t believe it. ‘Hippies’. This was the late 40’s and very early 50’s before Leary, Lennon, and Prior gave smoking weed a bad name and passed it around to the ‘un-hip’. ‘On The Road’ was just beginning to wake a generation but to the kids in the upscale Brooklyn kosher and lasagna ghettos, it was their private secret. They smoked it in their clubhouses, in their basements, and faced the world as well-dressed little gentlemen, hiding their mischief behind a masquerade of propriety and denying to any stranger that they had indulged in anything, keeping their mirth to themselves. After all, back then doctors did it, lawyers did it, and law makers did it. It wasn’t until the sixties when it was transformed into a substitute for work and the whole thing changed for the worse.

 

     Back to Sandy and his gang of merrymaking dancers, comedians, and connivers. In their twenties now, they laughed and conned their way through the underpants of just about every chorus girl on the line at The Latin Quarter and the Copa, and Radio City Music Hall, then on to Hollywood to dance behind the greats in the movies. Yes, that’s probably Sandy behind Fred and Ginger. Some formed their own acts, played in clubs, Miami, the borscht belt in the Catskills. Some made it. Some didn’t. Some disappeared. They’d bullshit whomever they could into making any kind of deal, some for movies that never got made, and some for movies that got made, some even for movies that didn’t exist. Sandy landed in Miami Beach and settled in as successful night club owner who knew just about everyone he needed to know in a city like that. I mean, everyone. He owned the club, Ciro’s, until the day two guys with cigars and fedoras walked in and informed him he didn’t own it anymore. (A quick read of the book, ‘The Godfather’ might help flesh that part out for you)

 

     I met Sandy when I was in my twenties, and he, in his forties. He had joined us as a road manager for The New Christy Minstrels.  We had just come off a year of national TV exposure on the NBC Andy Williams variety show and we were burning up the road doing college concerts - more than two hundred of them in one year alone. Sandy was a friend of our managers, two hustling Jewish guys from a generation of big bands, Vegas and yes, Miami.  They didn’t have a clue as to what folk-music was all about but they knew that folk was ‘in’ and so were they.  We needed an experienced road guy to get us from town to town, to the airports on time and in and out of hotels at crazy speed. Sandy was the man and the day he showed up, things got easier and a whole lot more fun.

 

     Years later, before he died, Sandy told me that the reason he was there was to make sure a ‘certain loan’ made to our managers through one of his Miami friends, a chap by name of Johnny ‘blue-eyes’ (fictitious name-do you blame me?) was paid on time. A few years after that, when the last weekly payment was made, Sandy left the group. That explained a lot.

 

I never quite understood why Sandy was always so cheerful and how he had everything totally under control. He knew just how much to tip, who to tip, when to tip. We never had to wait on lines, never waited for seats in a restaurant, never had to look for anything that wasn’t right there when we needed it. We never saw him grease a maitre d’ but we knew he did. Otherwise, why did we get the treatment we always got? When it was time to go shopping, no matter what city, he knew where to go, and we were always greeted when we got there even if we were in a city we’d never been to before. He was a magician and a natural father to a gang of wild eyed guitar pickers with no idea of how the world worked. He took us in hand and taught us things my father, a hard-working longshoreman never knew.

 

     Now I could have done things the way I had always done them for the rest of my life, but somehow, my experience under Sandy’s wing, and that’s what it felt like for a few of us, made the practical day-to-day easier and smoother - finding a good restaurant.  Knowing which cities had good restaurants and clubs (“Check the phonebook for Jewish names”, he’d say when we’d check into a hotel somewhere in the farm country. “If there’s less than a page, forget about going out. Order a sandwich from the hotel. There’s nothing worthwhile out there”.) He knew when a deal was real and when it wasn’t. Little ‘tells’ that people gave off that let you know if they were on the level or if they were scammers. He gave us a toolbox full of gadgets that lasted a lifetime. Taught us how to move in a crowd and get to the front table in a restaurant or a club without making waves. Stuff like that. . He taught me and McGuire how to dress.  He shared the fine art of getting high with a couple of us and taught us how to spot the ‘working girls’ in the hotel lobbies or cocktail lounges. I don’t remember him ever being wrong. They were drawn to him like bees to honey. There’s more on that subject, but that’s for a longer book. Maybe someday.

 

     Sooner or later things change and along with that, the songs and the dances became old hat and Sandy’s generation of dancing gypsies found themselves taking odd jobs on the edges of the advancing juggernaut of show biz. Some became road managers, talent managers. Some became salesmen. Did I say ‘became salesmen’? I guess that’s who they always were. But now, instead of just selling themselves, some were forced to other things. Cars? Aluminum siding? Real Estate? Land? Sandy never lost his grace, charm, wits and good looks, so when the Beatles came to the US for their big tour and needed a road manager who knew the ropes in the US at airports, hotels and theaters, someone gave them Sandy’s name, and he got the job after the first interview. What a pleasure for a bunch of British kids who were having the time of their lives, to find a kindred spirit who loved the smoke-induced laughter of abandon and knew where all the earthly pleasures hid but had the deft of hand to lead them to the well without making a ripple on the surface of the waters they fathomed.

 

     Time has a way of dropping you off at the end of the line before you know you’re there. And Sandy’s final stop was no different. When the big ride was over, it dropped him off with a small pension back in a one room apartment in Miami Beach in the shadow of a big hotel on a street that had been taken over by Cuban immigrants. Each day, after his bowl of Corn Flakes, his favorite breakfast, he tied a silk ascot under his navy-blue blazer with the gold buttons, splash some cologne on his face, grab his polished cane with the gold lion’s head at the top and toodle out for a walk on the strand, and until the day the maid found him in his apartment, people would watch him and think, ‘what a graceful person, that. I’ll bet he’s …after all, so dapper, so elegant, so sure of himself. He must be someone…

 

He was…he was a dancer. He made it all look so easy.