Ventura Friends, Fans Reminisce About the Sing and Swing of Sinatra

People of a certain age on Friday were sipping one for Sinatra and one more for the road.

More saddened than shocked by the death of Old Blue Eyes, his fans in Ventura County told stories about a man who swung well past the era of swing. Friends reminisced about a generous pal. Fellow musicians recalled Sinatra’s genius for coaxing truth from a mere lyric. In memory of Sinatra, Ventura’s singing plumber closed early.

“He was the man,” said Lou Penta, a crooner who exercises his pipes on the job as he runs Paradise Plumbing. “He was the man, the myth, the legend. I’ve got to go up to the lake and contemplate this.”

Newbury Park financial planner Ric Ross has made a lifetime of Sinatra contemplation. The owner of a huge, meticulously cataloged collection of Sinatra memorabilia, he fielded calls all day Friday from news organizations as far away as Tokyo.

Ross has been asked to set up a display coinciding with Sinatra observances in Las Vegas. Three years ago, he helped Nancy Sinatra with her account of Frank’s life, and he is planning his own definitive reference work.

“I’m absolutely numb,” he said with a touch of hoarseness Friday evening. “The voice for the 20th century is stilled. He was the greatest interpreter of popular songs; in my lifetime there will never be an equal.”

In Ventura, Larry Dudley was thinking of a popular song not usually associated with the swaggering Chairman of the Board.

Dudley, who sells yachts at Ventura Harbor, for years played first mate to Humphrey Bogart’s skipper. The two raced sailboats up and down the California coast and cavorted with, among others, Sinatra.

“At this one party for Christmas Eve and Bogie’s birthday, Frank needed to leave,” Dudley recalled. “He said he’d bought Nancy a new Thunderbird and had to get home to tie a big red ribbon around it.”

But someone demanded a song and Sinatra, drifting out the door with Dudley and Bogart, obliged. The well-lubricated trio dished out “Silent Night” as it had never been performed before.

“Sinatra was a very likable person,” Dudley said. “When he turned on the charm, he was tremendous, but it was like a spigot; he could turn it off, too. As Bogie said, he was a good friend and a tough enemy.”

Sinatra’s well-documented tantrums weren’t high on the reminiscence hit parade Friday.

At his Thousand Oaks picture-framing shop, Murray Wald, a former saxophone player for the Glenn Miller Orchestra, wasted no words in pinpointing Sinatra’s remarkable appeal.

“He didn’t sing words,” Wald said. “He sang a story.”

In his basement, Wald often plays along with Sinatra recordings.

“As we used to put it, he really knew how to swing.”

Woolf Phillips wouldn’t disagree.

A British emigre to Camarillo, he remembers the favors a swinging Sinatra used to pass out, like Panatellas.

As music director of the orchestra at London’s famed Palladium theater, Phillips came to like Sinatra immensely. Out of the blue one time, Sinatra gave all 45 or so players in the orchestra gift certificates to Harrod’s. He called Phillips into his dressing room and presented him with a pair of inscribed gold cuff links bearing the image of St. Genesius, the patron saint of entertainers.

“I just had this flown in from New York,” Sinatra said. “Take it.”

“I can’t take it. . . . “

“Take it!”

Phillips took it.

A gift like that would have sent Beatrice McConnell into a dead swoon. At her Thousand Oaks home on Friday, she leafed through the thick Frank Sinatra scrapbook she started in 1944, when she was 14 and a crazed bobby-soxer in Revere, Mass.

“I have ticket stubs from the first time I saw him at the RKO-Keith-Boston,” she said. “I have a letter from him in Hoboken. I have an autographed picture he sent.”

She remembered the “pandemonium--the girls screaming and running down the aisles, hiding in the bathroom between shows” and she was glad to be a part of it.

Nearly four decades later, McConnell saw Sinatra again at the Universal Amphitheatre. “In the audience, we all cried,” she said. “I looked at him and thought, where did all the time go?”