Area Native Ray Eberle In Nostalgic SPAC Concert

by Bill Rice, The Troy Record, June 14, 1972

An audience of just under 2,000 nostalgia-minded people turned out at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Monday evening to bask in the familiar sounds of the late Glenn Miller’s music, as performed by a band led by Miller alumnus Tex Beneke.

We frankly felt this was a fairly good turnout for this type of a program until we talked, between numbers, with Hoosick Falls native Ray Eberie, who was featured vocally Monday evening, as he was in the late 30s and early 40s with the original Miller outfit.

“This nostalgia thing we are going through today is really big,” he said, “You wouldn’t believe some of the crowds we have played for in the last year. Some of the crowds have been as large as 14,000 people.

“I wish our fans in the old days had been as warm as the people out there in the audience right now,” he went on, referring to the enthusiastic SPAC audience. “I guess people our age have worn out all their old 78 records, and when they see us In person they say, ‘Hey, they don’t look so bad.'”

Brothers Eberle

Ray Eberle didn’t sound so bad either. In fact he was very secure vocally for a man who, as he put it, cut his first song with Glenn Miller a year after tney caught the Dalton gang.

Last year we heard Ray’s brother, Bob, also a living legend of the big band era, in Colonie, with the late Jimmy Dorsеу group, led by Lee Castle. We asked Ray how two brothers wound up as crooners with different big name bands.

The story he told would be hard to believe if you saw it in a movie, but it’s all true.

In 1936, Bob Eberle, the elder brother, talked his father into driving him to North Adams, Mass., where the Dorsey brothers, Jimmy and Tommy, were playing in a one-night stand.

At that point, Bob had no formal training, had never sung with a big band, and his singing experience consisted of sessions around the family piano, with occasional high school engagements.

“My dad had a good amateur voice,” said Ray, “and my mother played piano very well by ear.”

Signed On Spot

Bob begged the Dorseys to let him sing a number with the band, and when they finally conceded, they signed him on the spot.

Two years later, 17-year-old Ray, still in high school, went to the Terrace Room of the Hotel New Yorker to hear his brother sing with Jimmy Dorsey, who had meanwhile split from his trombone-playing brother.

While Bob was on stage in the middle of a song, Ray walked past a table where Glenn Miller was seated with Jimmy Dorsey’s manager.

“I must be seeing things,” said Miller, “that looks just like Bob Eberle.” When told he had just seen Bob’s brother, Miller’s first question was, “Can he sing?”

It was decided the next day in a rehearsal that he could, and when Ray called home to ask his father if he could drop out of school and go on the road for $35 a week, the reply was, “It’s your life, son.”

Ray stayed with Miller until 1942, when the band leader was drafted. The vocalist followed soon after, but did not get involved in service entertainment as did Glenn Miller.

Worked in Hollywood

Afler the war, from which Miller never returned, Eberle worked in Hollywood as both an actor and musician in B movies.

Eberle talked with enthusiasm about future plans for himself, Beneke, and the Modernaires, with Paula Kelly, who were also on the SPAC billing: “We are all booked up for next year at places like Disneyland, the Steel Pier in Atlantic Cily, and the Reading State Fair, and I just finished a TV series called Stars of Sound.”

“I know one thing for sure,” he said in closing, “I never felt so good with the original band as I do today.”

With that, looking healthy and tan, Ray Eberle, who Beneke still calls “the young man in the romance department,” stepped back on stage and brought back still more memories to a receptive audience.

Let’s see поw, when was it they captured the Dalton boys?