Hillary Clinton could do worse than to take up the trombone.
That was one of the consolations Barry Goldwater pursued after the epic thumping he took in the 1964 election. The defeated GOP presidential nominee returned to Phoenix to lick his wounds—and learn some licks.
Goldwater didn’t exactly take up the slip-horn from scratch. Going back a decade or two, for weekend fun, Barry would listen to his vast collection of Dixieland records and try to play along, sometimes on trombone, sometimes just scraping on a washboard. Goldwater was particularly fond of the feel-good, New Orleans-style jazz revivalists who popped up in the ’40s to counter the stern asceticism of bebop modernists. Barry’s favorite trombonist was Turk Murphy, a great gut-bucket yawper of the Kid Ory school who led a band in San Francisco. (Quipped Dizzy Gillespie: “All I can say is I don’t blame Turk for that.”)
But Barry never thought of tootling in public. Appearing on Jack Paar’s show in 1963, Goldwater was asked if he could do anything musical. After all, Richard Nixon had plinked away at the piano when he was on the program. “I have a trombone” was Barry’s reply—not, it should be noted, “I play the trombone.”
That would change with the local cause Goldwater took up in 1965, the rescue of Camelback Mountain from developers eager to carve it up into luxury house plots. In best conservative fashion, Barry set about raising money: He would save the mountain by buying it. Goldwater hit up his brother for a donation. Bob Goldwater made it a bet: He offered to give $1,000 to the Camelback fund, but only if, by Christmastime, Barry learned to play “Silent Night” on the trombone.
Bob seems to have expected his brother to make a hash of it. Barry, after all, was a legendary tinkerer who liked to work things out for himself and who had already proved that he thought he could learn to play the trombone just by goofing around on his own with records. Goldwater would mess around with the horn all year—probably get distracted with the stupid washboard—and then, come Christmas, he would just blat and blare and have to pay his brother $1,000.
Instead, and in secret, Barry went to see my grandfather.
Lester D. Felten Sr. was easily the best trombone teacher in Phoenix. He had started giving private lessons in the 1930s as a young man in New Jersey. Among his first students were his younger siblings: Ruth Felten would play for two years with Ina Ray Hutton’s all-girl band, the Melodears; Ellsworth Felten would play trombone with Lester Lanin and, later, Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. Having moved to Arizona, my grandfather was the go-to brass teacher for everyone from high-school students to the local Salvation Army band and even a musically ambitious Greyhound driver (who, having dropped off his passengers at the end of a regular route, would park his bus in front of my grandfather’s house for his weekly lesson).
That’s also where Goldwater would show up on the QT. I can picture the set-up, because years later, I would show up for Wednesday night trombone lessons myself. There would be two chairs, side by side, and a single music stand. On the floor would be spread out a newspaper for catching spit-valve effluvia. Grandpa taught not so much by giving instructions as by playing along: One tried to match his clear articulation, his Tommy Dorsey tone.
He would have given Barry encouragement about how to present himself to an audience—he liked to hold out a cupped hand and say, Do this or that and you’ll have them right in your palm. But when it came to showbiz, Goldwater had ideas of his own.
To win his bet, Goldwater didn’t just play “Silent Night” for his brother or at one of their friends’ Christmas parties. No coward, Barry won his bet by boldly taking the stage at the Save Camelback Mountain Dance, a big high-school bash being thrown at the fairgrounds. Not only did he play “Silent Night” successfully in front of a few thousand teenagers, he did so with a self-deprecating nod to the sort of music he knew they really wanted to hear—he wore a Beatles wig.
That was the high point of Barry’s musical career, though, over the years, Goldwater would still occasionally take out his horn.
“A musician, he plays a lousy trombone,” William J. Casey once said. Roasting the senator’s hawkish reputation, the old spymaster razzed him: “His trombone is known as the Goldwater deterrent. This comes of threatening his friends that if they don’t behave, he will play his trombone.”
Which may explain why, for Christmas 1965, fresh off his Beatle-wigged trombone triumph, Barry’s family gave him a tuba.
