I Wondered Whatever Became Of ...

…well, lots of people. When I have nothing else to do, I will occasionally stick an old friend’s name into the Google search engine and see what comes up.

A lot of other people, that’s what comes up. But I can often latch onto the odd hit that puts me in contact with someone I once knew; or, at least, let’s me know what they are up to.

Happened earlier today, as you can see by the time stamp. I rather idly entered the name of a kid I hung out with back around 1960. We lived in the same village, only a few streets away. Actually, everybody there lived only a few streets away. He went off to college and I also moved away; we kept in touch sporadically and somewhat temporarily by mail. The last I heard he was earning tuition money as a studio musician, playing first and second clarinet behind then-nameless vocalists who hoped to sell lots of records. They may still be nameless, for all I know, or they may be famous; I asked Paul if he ever took one record from each group against the day when they were hot stuff, but he didn’t care. He just did the gig, got paid and went back to campus.

He’s a hot musician now, most likely on the side. I noticed that he’s playing with one of the good regional bands out of Southern Connecticut and is featured on a number of discs doing hard-playing Dixieland. I’ll have to check some of them out, as they sound very good and the word is he does an excellent job on both clarinet and sax. A photo shows him looking just as excited as ever.