Just a Song at Twilight

It is the contention of harmonica entrepreneur Marvin Wolfe that there is music in everyone’s soul. He proves it as he picks out “Love’s Old Sweet Song” on his own harmonica, the notes of the instrument filling his store with small drifts of melody, inscribing soft messages on air.

He has never tried this particular tune before, so his wife, Mickey, helps by playing along on the piano, and together they turn love’s old sweet song into something rare and meaningful on a hot day in the San Fernando Valley . . .

Meet the Wolfes. He’s 84 and a retired businessman. She’s 74 and was forced by arthritis to give up a career as a concert violinist. He boils over with enthusiasm and cants toward the grand gesture, the big moment. She’s as bright and crisp as an early spring, with a sense of being that skips and twirls through a conversation.

It’s like Tracy and Hepburn together again, without the scratchiness that characterized their relationship.

The Wolfes fell in love and married two years ago after prior marriages that lasted half a century and ended only with the deaths of their original mates. Their story is kind of a love song in itself.

I became interested in them when I heard they’d opened a place in North Hollywood called the Harmonica Store, where you can buy from a choice of about 3,500 instruments, ranging from a $10 All-Band to a $1,200, 23-inch Hohner.

The store is an old paint warehouse they transformed into gleaming, black-and-white art decco. Pictures of great harmonica players line the walls: Little Walter, Slim Harpo, Johnny Puleo, the Harmonica Rascals--names from the past that linger on the edge of memory like half-forgotten dreams.

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I’ve always been intrigued by the harmonica. I’ve got five of them, and it has been a great frustration in my life that I can’t really play any of them.

For awhile, I carried a harmonica in my pocket wherever I went, on the assumption that I might absorb an ability to play by the mere proximity of the instrument.

It got to be a joke among my friends. One of them dismissed the harmonica in mock wonder by saying, “What a marvelous instrument it is. Two sucks and a blow and you’ve got ‘America the Beautiful.’ ”

But anything that’s been around almost 200 years is not to be taken lightly. Marv Wolfe began taking it seriously a while back when he was in a music store one day and noticed a display case of harmonicas. During the 1930s and ‘40s, he was a fan of Borrah Minevitch, who was to the harmonica what Vladimir Horowitz was to the piano.

Seeing the display brought back memories of Minevitch, and Marv began asking questions about the harmonica. What he discovered was that no one knew much about it and tended to relegate the harmonica into a category that included derby hats, Victrolas and player pianos.

Marv decided to change all that and to sponsor a resurgence of the free-reed wind instrument once known as the “mundaoline.” And when Marv decides on anything, it happens. So the Harmonica Store was born.

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That in itself would be a column, fleshed out with trivia about the harmonica and my own wretched efforts to play it.

But I began to realize when Marv played “Love’s Old Sweet Song” that what I had here was a romance mellowed by time that was far more compelling than anything sold in a store.

We’re an era given to immediacies, to special effects, to virtual reality, to computerized imagery, to things that shine and blink and dazzle.

Love between two people has somehow dissolved into “relationships,” as though there remains a thin barrier of hesitation to the kind of full commitment we understood in the age of the harmonica.

I thought about that after talking to Marv and Mickey Wolfe, whose love for each other was a palpable presence in the room, glowing with a patina that only age can furnish.

Their families had been friends through all the years of their other marriages, but only when their mates died did they turn to each other. “He hardly noticed me,” Mickey says, “but I always noticed him.”

Marv was busy in retirement boating, making furniture, trying to learn the piano, and teaching himself to be a gourmet cook, but he found time for Mickey. He cooked for her one day, and love bloomed among the pots and pans.

Now they’ve got their own store and it’s somehow right that they sell harmonicas. The instrument fits into the orchestration of their love, and the melodies they play speak of gentler twilights.

That evening I tried “Love’s Old Sweet Song” myself. I’m not there yet. It’ll take time.