Harmony Headliners Band Is Sweet Music to His Ears

Lew Bregen, 77, has one of those high tenor voices made for bringing tears to the eyes of Irishmen.

He turned professional in 1938, when he became a singing waiter in Atlantic City. But his crooning career not only began, but ended there as well.

He married a woman named Olga who didn’t want any part of the craziness of show business, so he became a nightclub waiter and then a drapery salesman. He confined his singing to warbling, “Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life,” in the shower from then on.

He did work as a waiter in some chic places, though, like the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles when Freddie Martin headed the orchestra and Merv Griffin did the singing.

“They should have let me do the singing. I had a better voice than he did,” Bregen says.

The couple moved to Northridge in 1956, and while he worked as a waiter and then sold draperies his wife tried to get him interested in community events.

In 1978, she talked him into attending a senior citizens’ meeting at the Presbyterian Church in Granada Hills.

“She was always dragging me to those meetings. I hated going to them because I didn’t feel like an old person. But I was glad I went to this particular one,” he says.

It was at this meeting that he sat next to Mel Anthony, a guitarist, who told him about a group of Swing Era musicians, many of them former professionals, who were forming a band called the Harmony Headliners that practiced at the church.

It was music to Bregen’s ears.

Today he is the orchestra’s vocalist, manager and master of ceremonies.

The band, which now is conducted by Dan Coviello, has 20 members and is much in demand at senior citizens events and others, says Bregen.

On Thursday, it celebrated its 15th year anniversary with a concert at the Robert Wilkinson Senior Citizen Center in Northridge where it now practices.

It is a balanced orchestra that plays 400 different arrangements. But it was not always so.

“When we first started out, we had a drummer, a harpist, a mandolin player, but no sax, no trumpet, no horns at all. It was a pretty strange orchestra. But, once word got out to musicians about our band, we got more balance as we started to grow,” says Bregen.

Mary Drodge was the first bandleader and also the vocalist. Bregen says that when he asked her how she was able to ride herd on a bunch of unruly musicians, she said she had been a second-grade teacher, and that it was basically the same thing.

Bregen says Drodge died of lung cancer.

“Actually, several band members are playing harp in the big band in the sky, which is only to be expected, I guess. In fact,” he says, “our last four leaders have died, including two in one year.”

Bregen said he is particularly proud of the caliber of talent in the current orchestra, which includes trombonist Lois Magee, who once played with Ina Rae Hutton and on television; Leonard Lebow, who plays trumpet with the house band at the Sahara Hotel and Disneyland; Bill McKeag, who played trumpet on cruise boats such as the Ile de France and Normandy; Hershey Bell, also a trumpet player, who played with several society bands, and pianist Hal Keller, who played nightclubs and wrote songs, one of which was recorded by Coleman Hawkins.

Bregen, in his job as manager, says he is thinking of putting the band on the road.

“We’ve actually been invited to India,” he says. “All expenses would be paid and it would be such a great opportunity.”

The main drawbacks are some people can’t get time away from work, some don’t want to go to India, and some have wives who won’t let them go, he said.

These Squeezers Have a Serious Juicing Habit

Bob and Doris Bell are juicers.

People with a big habit.

Their children know it.

Their friends know it.

Their Granada Hills neighbors have known it for 34 years.

They aren’t, however, candidates for a 12-step program.

They are back-yard orange juicers, and this is their orange-picking season.

Working for four days last week, they picked about 6,000 pounds of oranges from the 20 trees on the Bell’s half an acre and squeezed 280 gallons of juice.

Some of the juice they give to friends, neighbors and family, including their two daughters who came to help with the picking and juicing.

The daughters are now married and live with their families--in Orange County, of course.

But Bell, 68, says he and his wife keep most of the juice, freeze it and drink it throughout the year.

“We have been having our annual weeklong orange picking for family and friends for almost all the 34 years we have lived here,” he says, adding that when they moved there in 1960, their Granada Hills home was surrounded by lemon and orange groves.

“It’s one of the things that attracted us,” says Bell, who met his wife of 41 years when both were students at Kansas State University.

After graduating with a degree in engineering, he and his wife moved to Milwaukee, where he went to work for General Motors. Then, in 1959, he was offered a job working for Litton Industries in Beverly Hills.

They moved into their orange-tree enhanced Granada Hills home several months later, and soon after began the annual orange-picking extravaganza.

When asked if he has some fancy tools for picking, he moaned and said, “No, we pick them the old-fashioned way, one at a time.

“We use a ladder for the ones high up on the outside. For the ones high up on the inside, we scamper up the trunk like a monkey,” he said.

Where There’s Honorary Degree, There’s a Hope

Dolores Hope, a longtime Toluca Lake resident, was back at her alma mater recently.

A 1923 graduate of the Creighton University School of Law in Omaha, she had returned to participate in ceremonies opening a new student center and to pick up an honorary degree from the school.

She told everyone she loved getting the honor, because of a family tradition.

She said it keeps her in the honorary degree accumulation competition with her husband, comedian Bob.

Overheard

“With all the money David Letterman is making, he should pay people to watch him. That would give him the kind of ratings that would make the kind of money he’s making make sense.”

--Screenwriter to breakfast companion at Du-par’s in Studio City