by Sonya Friedman
“Commemorations often tell us as much about the times in which they are held as about the events they are commemorating.” The New Yorker
It was 1949, only four years after the end of World War II: four years of relief and even giddiness for us 12th graders at Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia. President Harry Truman was in the White House, projecting continuity and stability after the death of towering President FDR. But the Cold War was just heating up: we were alarmed by the threat of the new Atomic Bomb. Our memories of those “duck and cover” drills could still produce fear, but also ridicule. In spite of all this, there was our general feeling of an assured and promising future.
Our large graduating class was sixty percent Black and forty percent white Jewish. We all got along fine, united by our frantic enthusiasm for our top-ranking all-Black basketball team.
The boys were wearing pompadours and, at parties, zoot suits: huge padded shoulders, wide pants, shiny-hued shoes. We girls were limited to bobby socks and billowing skirts: we were not allowed to wear pants – “slacks”- in school.
Along with our passion for basketball was our love of dance –“cutting the rug,” a/k/a jitter-bugging. When it came to slow dancing, it was to “Stella by Starlight” and the favorite of all favorites “Stardust.” This was the era of the Big Bands, and they were fabulous, each with its own signature style: Bennie Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, Vaughn Monroe, Duke Ellington and the singers Frankie Laine, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Louie Armstrong (and his band), Perry Como.
We had a huge graduating class in ’49 and I was in charge of the entertainment for our Prom, the Big Dance Graduation Celebration to take place in our gym (home to our fabled basketball team). In the past, the school had hired local bands of which there were plenty. I looked around at them. But then an ad in the Evening Bulletin caught my eye: tickets for a concert by the Harry James Band in nearby New Jersey on a Thursday and Saturday night. Our prom was on a Friday. On a whim, I called the ticket office and asked for Harry James’s agent. I then explained to him that because of the huge size of our graduating class (with contributions from us students and the school), I had the enormous sum of $3,000 to offer the band for a one-night stand. (This may seem a paltry amount, but it would be worth about $42,000 today). The agent checked with James, and then – to my surprise – gave the ok and booked the gig. I couldn’t quite believe my luck.
On the big night, I put on my formal off-the-shoulder gown and pinned on an orchid – the traditional flower that white guys sent their dates on the occasion. My date was one of the cutest of the previous year’s class, and I had gone to his prom in ’48. We arrived at the gym/dance hall early to oversee that the stage – now bandstand – was properly decked out in our school colors, orange and black. Couples began drifting in, not yet knowing how things would proceed. I had kept the entertainment mostly a secret.
Then they appeared: HARRY JAMES ON TRUMPET with HIS WHOLE BAND. My graduating class went more than wild, as the musicians launched into their famous “Snooty Fruity” and “Baby, Baby, Doncha Go Away Mad” and “Slap Happy.” Dancers were cutting the rug – performing break-aways, then coming together in hilarious collisions. It was wild, wild, wild.
But then, another surprise – this time, even to me: Harry James introduced his wife: BETTY GRABLE with her “million dollar legs,” the most famous pin-up in the whole wide world during World War II. And there she was, at our high school prom, even belting out a song or two – and gratis.
James and his band were most generous, taking few breaks, and even responding to the crowd’s requests for its own favorite songs. The musicians seemed to go along with the teen-agers’ ga-ga enthusiasm. Perhaps they’d never been more greatly appreciated. Or at least, not as raucously.
I had loved my four years at Overbrook High (more, in retrospect, than my college years). I had enjoyed the academic excellence of my courses, and shouting myself hoarse at basketball games, and walking two miles to school in heat and ice, and hanging out with at least twelve of my girlfriends, and in the auditorium, singing along to our school anthem: “All hail to the Orange and the Black” – to which we all gleefully added, singing, “…mostly Black!”.
Certainly, my Prom was the icing on the cake.
Sonya Friedman: After subtitling foreign films (working with Rossellini, Fellini, Truffaut, etc), I initiated “supertitles” for opera – first for the NYC Opera, then the Metropolitan Opera, then companies across the USA. I enjoy writing essays about my professional and personal adventures.