Word: spanier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Francis Joseph ("Muggsy") Spanier, 60, another of Dixieland's good men tried and true, a cornetist who in the 1920s and early '30s was the rage of Chicago speakeasy society, went on to tour the land with Ted Lewis, Ben Pollack, and eventually with his own Dixieland band, surviving bop and all the new styles until 1964 when ill health forced his retirement; of a heart disease; in Sausalito, Calif...
...music wafting out of the examination room and down the halls at New Orleans' Ochsner Medical Center last week sounded like an import of old-time Chicago jazz, played from the heart. It was. Francis ("Muggsy") Spanier, 58, was in the room, flat on his back, swathed in surgical drapes, holding up a borrowed cornet with his free right hand as he launched, predictably, into St. Louis Blues. Next came a more or less reverent When the Saints Go Marching In, and then a throbbing medley of old familiar blues...
...Spanier's playing sounded as hot and sure as ever, but that was not what Dr. Alton Ochsner Jr. and his colleagues were interested in. They were more concerned about the inaudible signals they were receiving through the patient's draped left arm. Through one of the veins in that arm they had threaded a thin plastic tube (catheter) right into Muggsy's heart. The doctors were observing the pressure changes inside his heart while the great horn man was blowing, to see whether he could go on playing without putting too great a strain...
...Spanier's return to New Orleans was something of a sentimental journey. Dr. Alton Ochsner Sr. operated on him in 1939 for a perforated ulcer. He then gave a cornet to Alton Ochsner Jr. It was Muggsy's own idea to go back to New Orleans recently, when he was still suffering from the effects of a collapse last summer in Detroit. The diagnosis: acute pulmonary congestion, though he may also have some emphysema (see preceding story). It was his idea to play a cornet for the test-the cornet he had given to young Alton...
Having toured the U.S. women's club lecture loop, British-born Ginette Spanier, directrice of Paris' Balmain fashion house, had a few words about American women yearning to be chic. "American women are so frightened about doing the wrong thing," she said, "and sometimes you can't blame them. There are so many fashion writers in America now that the poor dears are absolutely battered by waves of instructions. That's why when I speak to them, they seem to feel they're getting the God's honest truth. And they ask the most...