Written by Glenn A. Wheaton for the closing ceremony— attended by an audience of over 85,000 and carried live on all three national radio networks—marking the end of The Golden Gate International Exposition, “The World’s Fair of the West,” September 29, 1940, Treasure Island, California.

Chapter 1

1

The Band Bus

We’d had a miserable drive down from Portland that day. The radio on the bus had been on the fritz since we’d left Spokane the week before, there are only so many hands of penny-ante gin rummy that seventeen men can endure without a card table or drinks, and while from time to time we might professionally be called upon to perform “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” we sure as hell weren’t about to sing it voluntarily. We were grown men. We all had stories to tell, great stories, but after a few years, we’d told and heard them all.

By the time we crossed from Oregon into California, I’d already read the first paragraph of Seven Pillars of Wisdom for several hours, my gaze wandering back and forth between the yellowed pages and the bleached green scenery outside. When you tour the country, you quickly learn that America is a pleasant view through a bus window that is then repeated eight thousand times before it yields to the dim prospect of a small brown city.

Frankie Pompano, tenor sax, first chair, made his way to my padded pew at the back of the bus. “Bored enough?” he asked. “ ’Cause I’m ready to cut my wrists with a reed trimmer.”

He sat down on my left, just as he did on the bandstand each night, and flopped back so heavily that he caused the bus’s rear door to swing open. It should have been latched and locked, but it wasn’t. I watched his face fill with childish surprise as he began to fall smoothly out of the speeding bus, headfirst.

I instantly swooped after him and grabbed his collar with my left hand, which would have made for a fine rescue if my right hand had been holding on to something other than my Seven Pillars of Wisdom.