Previous Message

Likely so John, but I'm not completely sure. I began to do some work in that direction a few years ago - maybe 2019 - based on some suppositions.

Our own experiences at FC with Nick and John (and later Bob) indicated to me that they didn't care much about things like songs' composers. Nick was always courteous, but he didn't have answers to questions that a number of people asked him about events or experiences in the group's first decade.

Dave, of course, was in no hurry to discover the authorship of S&S since he had sole copyright to the song and would have lost a pretty penny if the author could be established. Bob was likely the same devil-may-care guy when he was young as he was in Scottsdale and wouldn't have cared either.

So - my train of thought was this. We know that Marjorie and Carl Guard, Dave's folks, were married in Hawaii in 1931 but delayed a honeymoon til some time in spring of 1932, June I'm pretty sure (easily checked). They honeymooned, of course, in Phoenix, and it was there that they first heard S&S.

In 1932, the only hotels in Phoenix that were big enough to be suitable for a honeymoon were the San Carlos Hotel, the St. James Hotel, The Stag Hotel, the Jefferson Hotel, the Westward Ho Hotel, the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, the Swindall Tourist Inn, and the Squaw Peak Inn. (Source: Wikipedia List of historic properties in Phoenix at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historic_properties_in_Phoenix#Buildings_and_structures ) Several of these still exist and might well have archives that would go back to the '30s.

While any info as to where the newlyweds stayed might be helpful in figuring out if there was a club in the hotel where they might have heard the tune, this list of newspapers might be the actual key:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/arizona/

The most promising of these - existing at the time of the Guards' 1932 honeymoon - appear to be The Coolidge Examiner and The Bisbee Daily Review . Newspapers, of course, carried ads - here are all 8 pages of The Examiner's June 10, 1932 issue, including ads:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94050542/1932-06-10/ed-1/

No ads for restaurants or clubs, but there are dozens of more archives like this.

So what could be done is to find issues in the month and preferably the week of the senior Guards' honeymoon and search the ads for nightclubs or hotels that had had floor shows in the 1930s. Should we find a solo piano player - or more than one - we might be on track to make a very educated guess as to who the mystery composer was.

I also talked via phone to the archivist at The Arizona Republic paper. It didn't exist in its current form in 1932, but the guy told me that their archives included some material from a dozen or so of southern Arizona's defunct newspapers from the 1930s. I have always planned that if I can get back to Scottsdale for (the last) FC, I'd commit a bit of time to searching the graveyards (newspaper lingo for where they store archives) to see if I could turn anything valuable up.

It is most certainly a long shot at best, but one woth taking IMO.