I was delighted to learn that the father of a childhood friend from Cincinnati was once a professional musician, whose chosen instrument was the saxophone. Milton Ostrow, in fact, was captured in a live performance with Tony Pastor and His Orchestra, accompanied by Dolores Martel, in a “Snader Telescription” short film from 1951 entitled, “Your Red Wagon” — Ostrow is standing behind Pastor (far right), the lone member of the horn section playing baritone sax:
“Your Red Wagon“
Tony Pastor & His Orchestra
(featuring Milton Ostrow)
WeirdWildRealm serves up a little history about Snader films, in general, and this one, in particular:
The Snader Telescriptions were filmed in black & white, but someone, Turner Broadcasting probably, colorized a [boat]load of them, including Your Red Wagon (1950) with Tony Pastore & His Orchestra.
Tony was a top sax man shown wearing black in the opening scene, sharing a sax duet with a bandmember. It’s his sideman playing the lead though, so that Tony can sing to the jazzy beat:
“If you wanna go crazy & act the clown/ Be the laughingstock all over town/ That’s your red wagon / That’s your red wagon / That’s your red wagon so just keep draggin’ your red red wagon around…”
Lyrics are by Don Raye, music by Gene de Paul & Richard M. Jones. Raye wrote lyrically hip tones like “Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat” & “Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar.”
With Gene de Paul he also wrote hipster lyrics for “Cow Cow Boogie” & “Solid Potato Salad,” among much else that captures the era so perfectly; & de Paul worked also with Sammy Cahn & Johnny Mercer.
Your Red Wagon quite a delightful & amusing number, with some call & response from the band. After Tony sings the second verse, Dolores Martel squeezes up close to the microphone & takes over the vocal for a few lines, then it’s back to Tony. Very nice.
Milton Ostrow (behind, right) with Tony Pastor
Ostrow (behind, right) joined by Dolores Martel
Several years earlier, Pastor had recorded this same song on top label, Columbia, in 1947 as the B-side of “Gonna Get a Girl” (a song that featured The Clooney Sisters – Rosemary and Betty – from the Greater Cincinnati area by way of Maysville, Kentucky).
Zero to 180’s big question: Did Milton Ostrow play on this recording (which has not yet been uploaded on YouTube) or any other?
In the days of 78s –
Every other song was a “fox trot” – am I right?
The 1940 Census (thanks to Ancestory.com) notes the following facts about the Ostrow family, who lived on Prospect Place in Cincinnati:
Head Isaac Ostrow 40
Wife Sophie Ostrow 40
Son Alfred 17
Son Milton 12
Five years later, at the age of seventeen, Milton Ostrow would be a member of Cincinnati’s Local No. 1 musicians union, as reported in the June, 1945 issue of International Musician:
This photograph from The Cincinnati Post‘s April 26, 1946 edition (below) reveals that during Ostrow’s senior year at Hughes High School, he and his fellow clarinet quartet members had been the featured ensemble at the annual Hughes Spring Concert:
Milton served a stint in the Army (and The U.S. Army Band, it is believed), prior to his work with the Tony Pastor Orchestra. Ostrow’s cousin, Irv Herman, recalls their time together:
Milton and I were the last inheritors of a musical tradition founded by our cousin “Brother.” His family may have been the wealthiest of all the Tantes and when he was in high school he was given a clarinet and a C Melody saxophone [pitched in the key of C, one whole tone above the B-flat tenor sax]. I don’t know how adept Brother became, but my brother Leo got the clarinet and my cousin Teddy got the Melody saxophone which being obsolete was replaced by an alto saxophone. The clarinet was handed subsequently to me which I managed to break jumping off a truck. That would have ended my musical career but I was loaned an alto clarinet by the school.
Milton turned out to be the most musically inclined of all us cousins. He would practice. In fact, he would practice four hours a day. His father, my uncle Isaac, found his practicing annoying so Milton would practice in the bathroom with the door closed. This led to playing in dance bands around Cincinnati when he was about fourteen years old and meant that he was actually making money. Sure I was working those days in crappy jobs that paid me a pittance but he was making $10-$20 a night on weekends.
Digging about in my memory cache, I remember now that he started early in high school playing with pick-up bands. He was still in high school when he started playing for Jimmie James, a known jazz clarinetist (I think) who had been a national big band leader in the 1940’s and settled in Cincinnati. Later he joined the Barney Rapp band, which was the “elite” local band. Rapp discovered Doris Day (a.k.a., Kappelhoff). Rapp changed her name to Day when her first song was “Day by Day.” He also discovered the Clooney sisters … before Milton’s time. Milton was playing alto sax and clarinet then. I am not sure when he switched to baritone sax.
Another bit of Cincinnati lore — one of the bands Milton played in was lead by the station manager of WCPO. It may have been Jimmie James. He would go to the station to pick up his pay and get the upcoming schedule. I accompanied him on several occasions. You could look through a window and see Waite Hoyt, an ex-Yankee pitcher, giving a play-by-play of a Cincinnati Reds away game getting his information from a ticker-tape and creating all the color from his imagination. I still remember, and I am sure most old timers do also, hearing the click-click of the teletype strip in the background as Hoyt describes the play. There were no crowd noises…only the clatter of the teletype.
In the years when I was going to school at Columbia, Milton would occasionally come to town with one of the big big bands so popular in that era. He played with Tony Bennett‘s and Hal McIntyre‘s bands and would occasionally play New York at the Roxy or one of the other large theaters in the Broadway area. Whenever he was in town we would get together. We would often dine at a place called The Professor where everything cost $.35: spaghetti cost $.35, meatball cost $.35, a salad cost $.35, a glass of wine cost $.35. I am sure that an institution of this sort is long gone. It was located near the Paris Hotel where the bandsmen usually stayed, located between between 8th street and Broadway.
Milton’s roommate was a saxophone player named Billy Slaton. I remember Billy with long nose and slicked down hair. He apparently had an uncanny ability to connect with women and this often left for Milton unable to use their room until Billy had completed whatever it was he was doing up there. So, I would often get a phone call late at night from Milton wanted to have a drink or a cup of coffee or something. These were the occasions where I kept Milton company until he could go back they go to sleep in his room.
I remember one occasion when I was showing Milton around the campus at Columbia we stopped off at a small theater that had been used as a lecture hall for my course in psychology. I thought it amusing because the lecturer spoke on the stage with a background that was supposed to represent North Dakota. By chance it was the background for an opera called Giants in the Earth, written by my professor in the humanities section on music appreciation. So we decided to get tickets and see the show. At intermission I saw my professor, Dr. Moore, talking to Leopold Stokowski and his wife Gloria Vanderbilt. He noticed me and I saw him excuse himself from Stokowski and Vanderbilt and came over to Milton and myself. He was delighted to see one of his students there and asked me how I was enjoying the opera.
How good a musician was Milton? I am not qualified to say. He told me that he could sight read and could transpose keys (the ability to transpose a piece of written music to the key of the instrument) which requires a lot of technical skill. He did tell me that he did not play jazz because he did not improvise well. Why he switched from alto sax to baritone, I do not know. He complained the the vibration from the mouthpiece of the baritone sax loosened his upper front teeth. Got a rubber pad to modify the vibrations.
He was respected by other musicians. I saw this while he was active and even after he left the business. These were musicians that Milton told me were excellent talent and he admired. This is probably the best evaluation of his skill.
Milton & Sandra Ostrow
In Roselawn
Music would eventually give way to more traditional methods of generating an income, when marriage and family entered the picture. Covington, Kentucky served as the base of operations for A & M Furniture, a store jointly owned by brothers, Alfred and Milton, during the years 1961-1979, possibly 1980.
One Response
Thank you for posting this! I just found out that I’m related to Milton, etc.. my grandfather, Sam Ostrow, left his family during WWII and converted to Christianity and married my grandmother in California. He left his family behind in Cincinnati and didn’t tell my father or his siblings (or the grandkids) about them. We didn’t know anything about Grandpa Ostrow’s lineage. When he passed at 96, we went to visit the Cincinnati Ostrow’s who had recently reached out to us. I just got back from visiting Fred and his wonderful family!
Ironically, not having known each other for a century, I discovered many of them were all engineers and SAXOPHONISTS! My father, Rick, was also a saxophonist and so am I. I am a middle school band director in Florida.