Jerry Garden, alto sax, second chair, faced a similar dilemma. He refused to pay his wife alimony. This was not as unreasonable as it might sound, since his wife had run off with Jerry’s stepfather. Jerry took issue with the idea of paying alms to someone who had broken his nuts and his mother’s heart in one fell swoop. What made it worse was that Jerry wouldn’t have had to pay alimony if his ex-stepfather had married his ex-wife, but in his home state at that time, the law said you couldn’t marry the co-respondent who had caused your divorce.

There were papers out on Jerry, and Jerry knew that his wife would have no problem tracking down the Glenn Miller or Jimmy Dorsey bands (both of whom had made Jerry offers to play on the East Coast). But to locate Jack Donovan’s orchestra while it toured the Great Plains, send a process server out there to hunt Jerry down, and extradite him before the band had moved on to another state would have been a major undertaking and expense for his ex-wife. Jerry considered it a matter of principle not to pay her, and he stood on his principles by sitting second chair in our band.

Billy French’s story was the darkest of the three.

Late one foggy night, Billy was driving home from a job at Jack Christie’s club on Fifty-second Street in Manhattan. There was a kid working in the kitchen there who, like Billy, lived in Queens and, exhausted after working two shifts, decided to save himself the effort of pedaling home on his bike. So he did what kids have been known to do. He took some twine and tied the steering post of his bike to the rear bumper of Billy’s car, leaving himself about eight feet of slack, and waited in the dark for Billy to drive home along the empty city streets.