Music In The Air Forces

It looks, at first glance, like lace pants on a top sergeant. The rest of the Air Forces calls it the "Hollywood Commandos." But musicians concede that the star-studded 51-piece Army Air Force Orchestra of Santa Ana, Calif, is undoubtedly the fanciest outfit in the history of U.S. popular music.* Hollywood agents divide their time between deploring its competition and their inability to hire it. Under onetime pipe-organist Major Eddie Dunstedter, it plays only for Uncle Sam.

It works harder than any commercial name band. Its members are up early in the morning for calisthenics and rifle drill. They also have machine-gun practice. From 1 o'clock in the afternoon until dinnertime they rehearse everything from Tchaikovsky to Cow-Cow Boogie. Four nights a week they broadcast with such assisting talent as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny, Dorothy Lamour and Fanny Brice. Their U.S.-sponsored programs, two over coast-to-coast networks, are Thursday's Wings to Victory, Friday's Hello Mom, Saturday's Soldiers with Wings, Sunday's Wings over the West Coast.

Dunstedter's prize catch for the group is swarthy, pint-sized Private Woodrow Wilson Rich (famed boy-prodigy violinist Ruggiero Ricci)* and his cellist brother George Washington Rich. Wood Wilson Rich (who has developed a soldierly liking for hot dogs) sits in the middle of the second row of violinists, fiddles such Santa Ana numbers as Jive Bomber on his $3,000 Lorenzo Storione violin.

Dunstedter's unit is backed by seven arrangers, five copyists (who turned out 22,000 bars of music last week), six writers, six vocalists, two sound technicians and two radio technicians, all of them enlisted men. Says the Major, paraphrasing an Air Forces slogan: "The difficult it does as a matter of course; the impossible takes it only slightly longer."

-It includes many peacetime instrumental stars: Benny Goodman's bass fiddler Artie Bernstein; 20th Century-Fox's concertmaster Felix Slatkin; Hal Kemp's ace trumpeter Mickey Bloom; Paramount's concertmaster Harry Bluestone (Master Sergeant Harry B. Blostein); Harry James's first trombonist Hoyt Bohannon; Toscanini's NBC cellist Edgar Lustgarten; Benny Goodman's hot trumpeter Manny Klein.

-Though he was christened with his concert name, Violinist Ricci's birth certificate, written by a busy and whimsical doctor, lists him as Woodrow Wilson Rich. George, born Feb. 22, is really George.

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