Photograph from the Arthur Witman Collection, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–St. Louis.
You can see through the window that this room’s on an upper story. You can see it’s a grassy month—that is to say, it isn’t winter. This doesn’t seem to be a church or school; there’s a wrestling handbill on the wall, though there are also electrical cords dangling everywhere, like the room is plugged into heaven. The girls’ dance step is simple, and it could be swing, or a shuffle, or the jive. The band is almost certainly playing jazz, the deep blur of the tuba providing the bass line. Duke Ellington once said he played “American music,” not jazz, and in ’41, his music was all over the radio, along with news of the war. We were not involved yet when this picture was taken; that wouldn’t happen until after the snow fell, in early December. For the six years following, everything was done in the name of victory: planting cabbages, wearing imaginary pantyhose, trading in saddle shoes for welding glasses, or losing a boyfriend to a bullet. After the war, Lou Thesz was still channeling the teachings of his Austro-Hungarian father, throwing opponents to the mat in his signature Greco-Roman wrestling style. Girls still wore striped socks with sandals, relishing how well slick leather soles can glide over linoleum during a chassé. But the soundtrack was changing. The war forced a reorganization of radio frequencies, and after a depression and a war, people wanted music that was like marshmallows and Kool-Aid. Flamingo-pink schmaltz like Debbie Reynolds and Perry Como took over the AM bandwidth, even as jazz was pushed off, though it was entering a profoundly artistic period. At that moment, FM radio—a set of frequencies unused until 1939—was streaming a soporific combination of Baroque music and public-service announcements. But it would be waiting, several decades later, when DJs would drop the needle onto Sun Ra, Lester Bowie, and Ornette Coleman.
