The Kenny Douglas Mentor & Life Coach Award

Kenny Douglas

“Roy and I are in a drugstore, in L.A. in 1947 and Jimmy Durante comes through the door. So we talked to him for a while. Here we are, the two of us, just twelve and thirteen, loose in Los Angeles.”

When I returned home, I noticed that I had a message on my e mail. It was from an old boy named Kenny Douglas. He wanted to meet with me and tell me, his stories, about his days in the band and what Arthur had meant to him. I arranged to meet with Ken the next day. Ken lived in White Rock, so we agreed to meet half way, at a White Spot Restaurant on King George Highway in Whalley, a neighborhood of Surrey. Ken had been on the 1953 trip to England, the 1948 trip to the Calgary Stampede via the old Kettle Valley route and also on the 1947 trip to Hollywood, which I did not know much about.

Sitting across the table from Ken in the White Spot, I soon discovered that Ken was a jovial fellow, who remembered lots of stories from his band days. After talking to Ken, for a while, I knew that those days had meant a lot to him,

Kenny

as they had to everyone else that I had thus far had the pleasure of interviewing.

“So how did you meet Mr. D?”

“We lived down at Glen Drive and Fourteenth Avenue. My dad was born and raised in the dairy business and the first business he worked for, when he came to Vancouver, was a company called Four X Bakery, the old Shelley’s, down behind the General Hospital. Roy Griffith’s dad used to run a butcher shop in the neighbourhood. My dad, used to drop in to see him regularly. Roy’s dad mentioned that Roy was going into music. My brother was already in Arthur’s Grandview band and then later he was promoted to the Kits band. My dad thought it would be a good idea, if I joined the Grandview band, along with Roy. So, Roy and I went into the Grandview band in 1941. I remember playing in the Lyric Theatre, on Granville Street, when I was seven years old. Arthur said,

“How did you get your trumpet?”

By this time, my dad had a bicycle shop. What he did was trade a fellow a used bicycle for a used trumpet. It was a thin bore horn and tough to blow but it developed the lungs. That’s how it all started. I am in that picture of the band down at the Hotel Vancouver in 1946. I was just coming into the Kits band at that time. I remembered Arthur before I met him, from his stage playing around town.

Roy and I were picked out of the Grandview band to go to Hollywood in 1947. That was our first trip. I remember, Roy and I got into one of the radio stations, NBC/ABC, and saw the old Red Ryder western half-hour show, that was on the radio in those days with Red Ryder, Little Beaver, and his horse Thunder. We watched them live on the stage. We came out of that and the first day after, Roy and I are in a drugstore and Jimmy Durante comes through the door. So, we talked to him for a while. Here we are, the two of us, just twelve and thirteen, loose in Los Angeles. I remember we stayed at the YMCA in Hollywood. The band played in the Los Angeles Police Benefit Show. On that show, were the Mills Brothers and others of that stature. Roy and I were two little go-getters. We had a lot of fun getting into all sorts of things.

Later on in life, I became a Shriner and here I am back in Toronto in 1975, celebrating a show for a great Shriner/potentate named Jack Streight, who was a lawyer. Don Bellamy, the Vancouver alderman, was a great choreographer for tattoos. Don produced the show with the Glenn Miller band and others. They also had the Mills Brothers. Of course, they were not all the originals. So, I go around and hunt up the Mills Brothers and ask them if any of them are originals. One says,

“Yes I am!” I said,

“1946, LA Police Show. There was a youth band from Canada playing on the stage of the El-Bekal Shrine Temple (the place where they held the Oscar Awards).

“Ya, I remember.”

“I was one of those kids!” He turned to the other fellows and said,

“You guys won’t believe this” and told them the story. He remembered the band!”

“You played with some pretty top-name acts!”

“Yes, we sure did,” Ken replied.

“Tell me about the trip to England in 1953.”

“On the trip across Canada, we traveled on trains drawn by a steam locomotive. On the trip back, we traveled on a train drawn by a diesel locomotive. Roy Griffith, managed to talk his way into the cab of the train on the way back. We came through the Connaught Tunnel, through the Rockies, right up front! They showed us everything and got out of the cab in Revelstoke. They explained to us the detonating switch, how they give it the juice to stop any jerking, and explained to us the difference between a steam engine and a diesel. How smooth the diesel was, as the train glided along. The tunnel was a little frightening!

We were in tourist class, sitting up by day, bed by night. Just out of Sarnia, we decide that Arthur has cookies he was not sharing. So, we get a little raiding party going. We sneak up after everybody is asleep to the front car, through the kitchen, and into the storage room and we get the cookie box. He had a stash of cookies. So we swiped them! Took them back to the back car and ate them all. The next day Arthur said, “Somebody stole my cookies.”

Boy was he upset!

“Who stole my cookies?” He was just flipping mad!

In those days, the people at Woodwards and at Safeway Stores were the two sponsors (food/clothes), who got us across Canada. Garfield White was Arthur’s contact with the CPR. He was a great pal of Delamonts. He had an act during the war called ‘Madame Olga Petrovich.’ Garfield was the Madame, singing to another fellow dressed in a tuxedo. Oh, God was it funny! Garfield was a character.

My brother Ian was in the band from 1939 to 1947 and

he played clarinet. He was just a young toad. Arthur called Norm Mullins back from university, in order to play and handle some of the legal work for the 1950 trip. I got that job in 1953. I handled copyrights. There were copyrights on music back in those days. We had to estimate the number of people in the audience. After every concert, I kept a tab, on which I had to list what we played. I did all the copyrights, two shows a day, six days a week. On the seventh day, we traveled. Between Arthur and I, we would estimate the number of people at each concert. If there was a collection taken, we had to pay just dues. Arthur took care of it. Years later, when I became a Shriner, we were told that if we played tunes, we had to pay the copyright people. Nowadays, it has all gone to hell, with computers and copy machines. It was only pennies but add it up. Rumor was later on when I was running one of the Shrine bands, which I did for about twenty years, we had to be careful! The copyright people were going after the universities at the basketball games and football games. They had people sitting in the audience. You get into a basketball game and you have a band on this side and a band on that side. The score is 101 to 103, which is not unheard of in a game. You play a tune on this side 101 times. You play a tune on that side 103 times, plus the rah rahs before and everything else. They had guys sitting in the audience keeping track of it all. One of the universities got a bill for well over $100,000. That was about 1975.

We arrived in Quebec City after touring across Canada and boarded the Samaria, where we were locked up for another three days. We had lots of band practices. Boy, were they practices, right through gales and all. For two days solid the storm lasted and the ship went up and the ship went down. We were in tourist class, which wasn’t first class and it wasn’t second class. It was below deck. We didn’t even have portholes in our rooms. We would have a two-hour practice in the morning and a two-hour practice in the afternoon and a two-hour concert in first class. The next day we had a two-hour practice in the morning, a two-hour practice in the afternoon, and a two-hour concert in the second class and so it went. He was getting us ready for London because we were doing BBC’s ‘In Town Tonight.’ The last night on board, we were all confined to our cabins for being out on deck at two in the morning and for sneaking into first class. The crew told the Captain and the Captain confined us to our cabins. The next morning, Arthur read us the riot act!

“You’re going back on the next ship. You’re all going home.” We of course knew that if he was going to carry on across Britain, he couldn’t send his older players back home. When we finally landed, all was forgotten, and on to the next chapter. In London, we were asked by ‘Ealing Studios,’ to act as the John Philip Sousa band, for the July 4 celebrations. A very young Petula Clark was on the bill as well!

Next, we were off to Sunderland, where we headlined with David Whitfield, the singing coal miner. Some of the boys went out for fish and chips at a roadside stand. They ran into some Teddy Boys. One of them asked, one of our boys if he had a light. When he put his head in reach of the Teddy Boy, the Teddy Boy slammed our lad in the mouth. They just wanted to intimidate us. The police came around and talked to us. They rounded up a few of the ruffians....

Arthur never knew! They had square-toed shoes and razor blades. Striped pants were in vogue and white socks, penny loafers, t-shirts, and sweaters!

When we returned to London, all of a sudden, we were drawing young people to our shows. Kids were crowding around our stage door. We started to make friends with some of them. They were all our age.

We played at Charing Cross, two shows a day. It was an open-air amphitheater across the Thames from British Empire Gardens. We walked from there, up to a place called the Lyceum. It was a dance hall. Oscar Rabin, probably England’s best-known dance band was playing at the Lyceum. When we got there, the Teddy boys would be there with their girlfriends and they invited us to sit with them. They would say,

“Ah, here’s the Can-i-dians. The boys are here. You dance with my bird.”

We listened to Oscar Rabin playing Night Train, which had just come out. The stage would revolve and a small band would give way to a bigger Rabin band with Oscar playing bass saxophone. What an instrument! Unbelievable!

We went to the original productions of South Pacific, Seagulls Over Sorrento, and Paint Your Wagon. Because we were part of the Empire chain, we played at different Empire theatres, the Hackney or Shepherd’s Bush, Darby or Leicester, and we knew about all the shows.

The 1953 trip was probably the neatest trip of them all! It was very professional, very professional! We stayed in digs which were private homes that catered only to theatrical people. We traveled on Sundays. Sometimes we would have tours arranged for us to China factories and so on. At the place we stayed in London, there were two huge poles that went all the way up to the ceiling. One of the boys in the band bragged, that he could hypnotize any one of us who wanted to be hypnotized. He hypnotized one little fellow and had him shimmy up one of the poles, touch the ceiling and shimmy back down. When he snapped his fingers, the young lad said,

“Come on let’s go kick the ball around.” He hadn’t realized what he had just done.

We used to do a thing on the trip called, “Rag Time Wedding.” Arthur decided that Roy, Mike Hadley, and David Hughes, would all be a part of it! I had to dress up as a sailor. Mike dressed up as a bride. I used to put on a rubber nose and rubber ears over my own big ears. I could make my ears go back and forth. The people just ate it up! It was a shotgun wedding. Well, we did this at three shows a week. Don Atkins decided to put some spice into the act. He goes down to a store and buys a revolver. It was a 45. He buys the blanks. On cue, Don says,

“Do you take this bride?”

Wham! Wham! The gun goes off! Arthur almost jumped out of his shoes. The audience cheered and so it became a part of the act. But I tell you, when that 45 went off, it was a cracker. It was fantastic!

In London, Arnold Emery, Roy, and I got some tickets for the Gene Autry Show, with his horse Champion. All the way to London to see Gene Autry! Gene sang his songs and the show went on and on and on. We got back to Shepherd’s Bush late for a parade and went straight down to our changing room. Someone had stolen my pants. Arthur finally

KENNY DOUGLAS ~ 175

came down and told me to get out on parade, which we did from time to time to promote the shows. Arthur flipped out because I had no time to shave. So, we had to have a meeting, and the committee and Arthur decided I had to take my punishment, which was to go onto the baggage truck. The guy on the baggage truck was an alcoholic, so it really wasn’t punishment. We would pull into a pub, the bus would go by. We would come out, after a refresher and away we would go. We would pass them again and wave and they never caught on. By the time we got to Blackpool, we were both feeling pretty good. We unloaded the instruments, including the sousaphones with extra enthusiasm, prompting Arthur to yell, “Be careful, watch those sousaphones.” He never caught on!

In Paris, we went to the Moulin Rouge nightclub. It was the place in Paris to go. The stage would come out and then the Can Can girls would come out. We were sitting right in the front row. I tell you! I wanted to say that I had danced with a girl at the Moulin Rouge. I went over to this girl and asked her to dance. She couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t speak French. When it was over, I said,

“Thank you very much” and went back to the boys. There was this little bar across the street, from a small hotel that we knew and when we first went in, they barely talked to us. We got changed into our blue blazers, with the maple leaf on the pocket, with KBB and Canada, white shirts, yellow knitted ties, stripes, white socks, and penny loafers. They took one look at us and saw the maple leaf. Couldn’t buy a thing! They had thought we were Americans. Canadians wow!

We ate eggplant off the tables, along with our drinks and

ABOVE: c1959 Shriner’s Oriental Band, Kenny sitting in middle in red with black sabre

176 ~ Shriner’s Oriental Band

had a great time. When we landed back in London from Paris, a lot of the guys were running out of money and didn’t have enough money left for a hotel room. We had been instructed to be at the train sharp, the next morning, as we were on our way back to Southampton, to catch the boat home. A bunch of us slept on the bandstand at Charing Cross, like bums on the street. We all got up the next morning and caught our train to Southampton. It was a great trip!”

“How did Arthur impact your later life?”

“I will tell you another story and work my way into how he influenced my life. One day, in the 1940s, Arthur was sick in bed. He called me, to see if I could deliver some music over to the West Vancouver band. I went all the way over to Alma Road from Burnaby. Picked up the music, and went all the way down to the West Vancouver Ferry, the old ‘Bonnie Bell.’ I took it out to West Vancouver. I could hardly carry it all! A few days later, I had to do the same thing again for the North Vancouver band. At one time, I rehearsed Monday and Thursday nights with the Kits band. In the daytime, I played in our high school orchestra.

On Friday nights I played in the Grandview band and on the weekends we played concerts. It was my life! I had to give up soccer. My brother was an all-star sportsman. He played against the top British and Scottish teams that came to town. Everybody thinks because you play an instrument, you’re a nerd. A bunch of goody-goodies. Boy, were they mistaken. There were some great athletes in the band. Don Radelet, Stu Ross who was one of the originals. Both were Shriners!

I have had the pleasure of being in two great fraternities, the Kits Band and the Masons. Same as Stu Ross, who was also a Potentate of the Gizeh Shriners.

David Hughes, Robert Sherrin, and myself were from time to time, called upon to make little speeches. That was Arthur grooming us to eventually meet the Lord Mayor of London and so on. To us kids, we were just going on a bunch of trips. To Arthur though, he had a master plan, to have the best organization possible.

The education he gave us was unattainable anywhere else. I have stood up, in front of groups of five thousand Shriners as Master of Ceremonies and at band competitions in Minneapolis, St. Louis, San Francisco, Cleveland, Toronto, and many other cities. I’ve been doing this for years and never really thought about where I got my training. The old boy did it for us and much, much more!