In memory of my wife, Eva Ferguson, 1919 - 1996,
the best dancing partner a farm boy ever had.

Hello. I am eighty-two years old and I am typing this myself, which is why the page is so plain and why it took me most of August. My granddaughter Emily Stockard got me set up on her old computer when she bought a new one, and she showed me how to make the letters big and how to put in the colors. She said I could have a picture of anything I wanted, so I picked the flag, an airplane and a music note. That about covers it.

This page is about Glenn Miller. He was the biggest name in music when I was a young man, and he was an Iowa boy, born about an hour and a half down the road from here. My wife and I danced to his records before the war. Then during the war I heard his band play in person, in England, in a hangar full of airplanes, which is a thing I never expected to happen to an implement dealer from Pottawattamie County. I have written down that night on a separate page:

On this page: His Life  |  The Sound  |  Our Records  |  Afterward

His Life

Alton Glenn Miller was born on March 1, 1904, in Clarinda, Iowa. His family did not stay put. He went to grade school in North Platte, Nebraska, then the family moved to Grant City, Missouri, and then to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where he finished high school in 1921. He went to the University of Colorado for a while but music won out over school, and I understand his grades showed it.

He played the trombone. He was a good trombone player, but where he really shone was in writing the arrangements, which is putting down on paper which instrument plays what. In the twenties and early thirties he played and arranged for other men's bands, Ben Pollack's band and Red Nichols's among them, and he helped put together the American band that the English bandleader Ray Noble led in New York in 1935.

His first band of his own did not make it. It broke up at the start of 1938. Most men would have gone back to working for somebody else. He started over that same spring with a new band, and in 1939 it caught fire. They played the summer at the Glen Island Casino in New York, the radio carried them all over the country, and by the fall everybody knew the name. From 1939 until 1942 there was not a bigger band in the land. They made records for Bluebird, they had their own radio program three nights a week for Chesterfield cigarettes, and they made two pictures in Hollywood, Sun Valley Serenade with Sonja Henie in 1941 and Orchestra Wives in 1942.

Then he gave it all up. In 1942 Glenn Miller was thirty-eight years old and married, with the top band in America and more money coming in than he could count. Nobody would have blamed him for staying where he was. He joined up anyway. The band played its last show on September 27, 1942, in Passaic, New Jersey. They tell me some of the crowd cried, and some of the band too. He went in as a captain, and before long he was in the Army Air Forces putting together a band of the best musicians in the service. They played for the cadets at Yale and on the radio, and they livened up the marches so a fellow could actually step to them.

In the summer of 1944, right after the invasion, he took the band to England. They were quartered near Bedford and they played everywhere, for the airfields, the hospitals, the Army camps and the BBC, sometimes two and three times in a day. I will tell you about the time they played for us on the other page.

On Friday, December 15, 1944, he took off from a small airfield near Bedford in a little single-engine plane, a Norseman, to fly to Paris ahead of the band and set up their Christmas shows. The weather was poor. The plane went out over the English Channel and was never seen again. No wreck, no trace. The band went on to Paris without him and played the shows. He was forty years old.

People have had all kinds of ideas about what happened to that plane, and I have read some of them, and I don't believe any of them is worth more than the paper. The weather was bad and the Channel is cold and wide. That is enough for me.

The Sound

If you have heard a Glenn Miller record you would know the next one in three notes. What he did was put a clarinet on top of the saxophones. The clarinet plays the tune up high, a tenor saxophone plays the same tune underneath it, and the other saxophones fill in the harmony in between. It makes a sweet, smooth, full sound, and nobody else had it. Eva used to say it sounded like the music was smiling. I can't put it better than that.

Then on the fast numbers the brass would come in and knock your hat off. That was the other half of it. Sweet and then hot, and back again, and you could dance to every bit of it. That was the point. It was music for dancing.

Our Records

Eva and I were married in June of 1940. We did not have much. What we had, besides each other, was a phonograph her folks gave us and a stack of Glenn Miller records that grew by one every time we had a spare thirty-five cents or so. They were the old 78s, black shellac, and if you dropped one it broke. We pushed the kitchen table against the wall on Saturday nights and danced on the linoleum. I still have every one of those records but two, and I know which two, and I know which of us dropped them. (Me, both times.)

Here they are, as near as I can remember the order we got them:

I never had the radio programs, of course, and I never bought the albums they put out later on the long-playing records. Emily got me a compact disc player for Christmas two years ago with a disc of the greatest hits, and I will say it sounds very clean, and no, it does not skip. But I still play the 78s on Sunday afternoons. They crackle, and I am used to that.

Afterward

I came home in 1945 and went to work selling tractors and plows and corn pickers, and kept at it for forty years, and the last twenty-two of those years the business had my name on it. We raised two boys and a girl. Big bands went out of style and the kids had their rock and roll, and I don't hold that against anybody. Every generation gets its own music.

In 1954 they made a picture called The Glenn Miller Story, with James Stewart as Glenn Miller and June Allyson as his wife. Eva and I saw it at the picture show downtown. She cried at the end and I told her I had something in my eye. That was not true.

Clarinda has a Glenn Miller Festival every June. Eva and I drove down for it one summer, and they had bands from all over playing his music, some of the young players not more than twenty, and they had it right. It did my heart good. If you are ever in southwest Iowa in June, go.

Some other pages I read on here. The Reveille is the newsletter of a VFW post in Ohio, put on the computer every month by their adjutant. I am not a member there, I belong to my own post here at home, but their commander writes a good column, and this month he writes about the VFW turning one hundred years old this Wednesday, September 29. I belong to an outfit that is a hundred years old. Think of that. And Lt. Lily Elam, Army Nurse Corps is a page about an Army nurse who served in England and France, put up by her daughter. The nurses don't get enough credit and never did.

If you danced to Glenn Miller, or served with the Eighth Air Force, or your father or grandfather did, I would be glad to hear from you. I read all my mail and I answer it, slowly.

Earl Ferguson
Sergeant, Army Air Forces, 1942 - 1945