Diary of a Young Musician: Final Days of the Big Band Era

In Diary of a Young Musician, 1948-1962, Felix Mayerhofer, from Port Chester, N. Y., grew up fast when he went from Juilliard School of Music in New York City as an innocent teenager to the professional "dog eat dog" world of big bands. It was there he encountered drugs, drinking, and women while traveling on the road. After a couple of years in an air force band during the Korean War (an activated air national guard unit), it was back on the road with more jazz groups, then finally working the showrooms of Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Reno. Felix married Shirley Wagner (Wagonseller), a beautiful dancer at Harrah?s Club in Lake Tahoe where his life began to return to normal.

During the previous 14-year period, he managed to receive a degree in music education, where a part of his time at college had the semblance of a scene from a Dostoyevsky novel. His long tour in the South before the 1950?s was an eye opener for a young boy: problems with a sheriff in Macon County, Georgia, who had a dislike for New Yorkers, and scary run-ins with corrupt policemen in New Orleans, raising his awareness that the situation in that part of the country was more devastating for blacks. The momentous social changes he described in the land of magnolias and mint juleps before the civil rights upheaval and the above events are a fast read, filled with humor, excitement, and in some cases sadness.