(A story from the fifties about my days in a rock band. For more of this stuff, visit the Volcanoes web site.)

We had won the local talent contest and were on our way to New York to audition for the Ted Mack Amateur Hour!

The local show had been sponsored by New York Life, and their agent, Jim Colburn, was saddled with the daunting task of getting the band of four teen-age winner(s) to New York. The date was set and the arrangments made, and when the big day came we all loaded our instruments into the back of Mr. Colburn's station wagon and headed for New York City...an experience we knew would be just a stopover on our road to fame and fortune.

To save expenses, Jim Colburn had arranged for us to stay overnight in Philadelphia with some relatives of his. We didn't sleep much that night. We doubled up in the beds, and spent the night laughing and raising hell. Once it did get relatively quiet, Jerry got out of bed in the pitch black of our room, crawled across the floor to Ron's bed, jumped up, and screamed like a banshee. Ron came about three feet off the bed, and I think we laughed for the rest of the night.

Once in New York, we settled into the hotel and began doing what most tourists do. We went to a couple of TV game show broadcasts, took a trip to Coney Island (toured the New York Life headquarters of course, which really was the highlight of the trip for four teenagers), and gawked a lot at the tall buildings and New York City girls. But the big treat for us was that three of us were eighteen (Ron was only seventeen), and we could have a legal alcoholic beverage since the legal drinking age in NY was 18. So we went to all the prominent bars in town for a beer...Toots Shors and Jack Dempseys are two I recall. Ron didn't want to chance an underage arrest, so when we ducked in for a "cool one", he'd go looking for "cool clothes".

On the day of the audition, we were driven to this huge theatre in the New York Times Building in lower Manhattan, where there must have been a thousand people standing around and sitting around waiting for their audition. It was like a zoo. If you remember the kinds of acts that appeared on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, then you'll know what I mean. There were baton twirlers, opera singers, spoon players, saw players, jugglers, contortionists, tap dancers, ballet dancers, country singers, people who sang from their nose, people who made noises with their blown up cheeks, and every other possible artistic endeavor you might imagine. When an act was called to the stage, behind a curtain, we couldn't see them but we could hear them, and what we heard mostly were songs and acts not allowed to finish. If the act wasn't doing well in the opinion of the "panel", they'd just cut them off, and out from behind the curtain they'd come. Finally, it was our turn to be humiliated by the judges. We were led behind a curtain where our instruments were already set up. It was a private audition from the standpoint that no one out in the audience awaiting their audition could SEE us, but not private enought that we couldn't hear all the commotion out there. Three or four staff people sat at a table at the back of the stage, and told us to begin. We played Chuck Berry's "Carol", and were allowed to finish it, which was certainly not the norm for most of the other acts we saw come and go. After a brief discussion by the staff and some note writing, we were asked if we had anything "original" we could do. So we played "Rockamotion", a song Ron had put together impromptu for a radio studio thing we had done back in Clinton some weeks before. We were allowed to finish THAT one, TOO! After another short delay, we were thanked and told that someone would be getting in touch with us within a few weeks.

As we were leaving the stage, a stage-hand gave us the circled thumb/index finger gesture indicating that we were "IN", and so we left the theater and the Big Apple knowing that we would be back soon to be on the show.

That call never came.