Hometown History#115: Jazzy Erroll Garner Helped Inaugurate Dean Gym

In 1960, hard lines had yet to be drawn between the music of The Greatest Generation and the music of their children, black or white. And in that world, everyone, young and old, still liked the 39-year-old pianist Erroll Garner.

Errol Garner, not well known today, was one of the top acts of his time, reaching peaks of fame in the 1950s and 1960s and playing a starring role, after a fashion, in the 1971 Play Misty for Me, a psychological thriller film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood in his directorial debut. Misty was one of Garner’s most popular compositions and was a fixation of the mentally unstable woman at the center of the film’s story.

Garner graced the stage of Dean at the then new Pieri Gymnasium, in March of 1960, filling it with an appreciative crowd, only too happy to listen to his flowing, rythmic jazz piano, accompanied by a bassist and drummer.

Tickets were $3 per person with a cozy discount if a couple bought a pair of tickets.

Franklin multi-instrumentalist and retired music educator, Randy LaRosa, then a child, recalled the excitement of the event, especially for a musically-inclined young person.

LaRosa said that Garner, who was not tall, brought with him an adjustable leather covered bench with two large telephone books* to sit on, a standard device at the time for adding a few inches to the seat height of a chair. “I was sitting about 10 feet away from him and he also used to hum and kind of sing with his very gravely voice as he played,” LaRosa said.

“Besides being a wonderful musician he was very pleasant to talk with,” LaRosa recalled.

Garner remained very active into the 1970s, dying of cardiac arrest related to emphysema on January 2, 1977, aged just 55.

* For those not familiar with the term, telephone books issued by the AT&T monopoly existed for nearly every geography, listing all telephone number in the country and were often at least an inch thick. Phone books in large metropolitan areas could be three or more inches thick.