Eddie Condon, 1928 – 1931

by Richard M. Sudhalter
(from the liner notes of Eddie Condon 1928 – 1931 on Timeless Records)
Easy going? New York City? Certainly not in May, 1928. Work had just begun on the New Jersey tower of Othmar Ammann's projected 3,500-foot suspension bridge across the Hudson River; popular Governor Alfred E. Smith, though a Roman Catholic and a "wet" — a foe of Prohibition — was gaining momentum in his headlong rush toward the Democratic presidential nomination. 

Lillie P. Bliss, daughter of a millionaire industrialist, had begun talking informally with Arthur Davies, an organizer of the famed 1913 Armory show, about her pet obsession: a permanent museum for modern art in New York.

The New York Yankees, powered by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the rest of Miller Huggins' "murderer's row", were cranking up for another sweep of both pennant and World Series. Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928, with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Adelaide Hall among its headliners, had opened on Broadway in a starburst of brand new songs and rave reviews.

Fortified by such preoccupations, and by the simple ebb and flow of day-to-day business, the city took no notice, on a Sunday at mid-month, when two wiry little guys, dressed like race-track touts, emerged, blinking in the sunlight, from the majestic glass-domed twilight of Pennsylvania Station.

The way they glanced around, snapping out side-of-mouth one-liners and appearing to strut, rather than simply walk, up Seventh Avenue, made two things clear: they were from out-of-town, and they intended to be noticed. William "Red" McKenzie, at 28 the elder of the pair, was from St. Louis, and had ridden racehorses until a fall broke both his arms. Somewhere along the line he'd discovered that by singing falsetto through a strip of newspaper wrapped around a comb, he could produce a reasonable facsimile of a muted hot trumpet. 

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