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Here's a story sent in by drummer and jazz enthusiast, Richard Hoe.
Enjoy!

About half-way through U.S. Navy boot camp, in Great Lakes, IL, in 1957, the men in my company got a 12-hour pass. Most of us went to Chicago, and I was the first one out of the door. I had prepared for the trip to Chicago by checking the jazz listings in the paper and, once I got to to the city, headed directly to the Blue Note, where I caught about three sets of Duke Ellington (I was 17, but my driver's license had the birth date off by one year in my favor; I had no trouble getting in and was actually just a few days away from being eighteen). I didn't meet the Duke that evening, but I did get to visit with the trumpet player, Shorty Baker, during a break. Shorty was very kind. I was of course mesmerized by the great Ellington orchestra, and particularly enjoyed its then fairly new drummer, Sam Woodyard, whom I always thought was the perfect match for the band.

Six years later, I was back in Manhattan (not Kansas) courting my wife, who lived at 400 Central Park West. One day, I was helping my future mother-in-law carry in some stuff from her car and she pointed out a man, a few hundred feet away, to me, saying, "There's that nice man. He and I seem to be on the same shopping schedule and he often holds the door and helps me get my bags on the elevator." (I need to digress here and remind readers that food shopping in big cities by apartment dwellers is much different than shopping in most places--in New York City, most of us used personal fold-up carts and/or lugged bags through streets, over curbs and so forth; in other words, food shopping is a hassle.)

I recognized him immediately. "Do you know who that 'nice man' is?" I asked.

"Why, no," she answered.

"It's Duke Ellington," I told her. She couldn't believe it.

After that, I saw him a number of times, starting in 1964 and up until the early 1970s, sometimes sharing the elevator--he was few floors above my in-laws' apartment. My wife and I were married in 1964 and continued to live in Manhattan until 1975, although we stopped going to 400 Central Park West in late 1973 or early 1974 (the Duke died in 1974) when my in-laws retired and moved to Florida. He was a genuinely nice fellow.

Richard Hoe
July 8, 2011

How cool to have a personal remembrance of Duke Ellington!
Thanks for sharing, Richard.

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