That’s Johnny (on the right in the photo) playing the piano, I’m the one trying to keep up with him on the guitar. I’m not bad, but he’s great.  Jack, taught us both just about everything we knew about music at that point. He still plays that old stride style like a legend.

On the evening of May 19, 1927, Charles Lindbergh read the weather prediction for the following day and decided that although it was drizzling on Long Island, the reports gave a chance of fair skies for his trip.  He spent the small hours of the next morning in sleepless preparation, went to Curtiss Field, received further weather news, had his plane trundled to Roosevelt Field and fueled, and a little before eight o’clock on the morning of the 20th, climbed in and took off for Paris.

Danny joined the Whiteman band on their recording trips to Chicago throughout the nineteen-twenties.  This was a time of unbridled nightlife and abandon.  He writes in his book about one wild night at a speakeasy on State Street known as the Three Deuces, named after the notorious brothel and gambling spot created by Johnny Torrio, known as the Four Deuces.  Torrio was a graduate of the famous “Five Points Gang” in New York, and had moved west when police sought him for the murder of Herman Rosenthal in the sensational Becker case in 1912.