In 1943, Elizabeth Salmon stood on a Times Square stage in front of a giant cash register that advertised war bonds and played tenor saxophone with an “all-girl band” formed and led by fellow Denver resident Joy Cayler.
For Salmon and other young women who played with Cayler during, and immediately after the war, it was a heady time performing for war-weary GIs and civilians throughout the country and overseas.
“We all just loved playing, and the chance to travel was very exciting and most, most appealing,” said Salmon, now 90, and a Maryknoll nun living in Ossining, N. Y.
“It seemed we were always packing up and finding places and in a hurry to get there. But that was part of the fun and excitement. We couldn’t get enough of it.”
The fun came wrapped in sorrow at hospital shows where wounded combat veterans struggled to recover from devastating wounds.
“To see a full audience in head, face or eye bandages, and limbs in slings, with whole groups on crutches or in wheelchairs, stretchers, drew out our prayers for sure,” Salmon said.
Leo Goldner, a GI who helped send entertainers to the South Pacific, remembered the effect Cayler’s band and other female entertainers had on the troops in an
“After months surrounded by jungle, the men had come to hate its smell, the unconquerable fear, the snakes, the bugs — everything about it. To them, every girl they saw was beautiful. Though they were only allowed to shake their hands, the soldiers remarked about how soft the girls were, and how wonderfully sweet they smelled.”
The music, he said, “reminded us of home, and we could have listened to that music forever.”
Cayler, a trumpet player and South High School graduate who died last year, formed the band in 1940 when she was 16. It got off to a rough start, she said in a 2011 by the Colorado Conservatory for the Jazz Arts.
They played their first gig at a downtown club where the crowd wanted to dance to the polka.
It was a style with which Cayler had little familiarity. “We had one polka in the book and we were supposed to play four hours. I don’t know how many times we played ‘Beer Barrel Polka,'” she said.
Salmon, then a 16-year-old clarinet and violin player, was a sophomore at Holy Family High School in Denver when she heard that Cayler was looking for talent. She took a street car to audition at the bandleader’s parents’ home.
She landed the gig, but Cayler wanted her to double on tenor sax, and Salmo, got busy learning that instrument.
Within a year, Salmon’s sister, Margaret, a bass player, also joined the band.
They played locally for private dances and public events and at ballrooms, resorts and military bases, including Lowry Air Force Base, and Fort Logan.
A contract with Music Corporation of America in 1943 led to a cascade of gigs across the country.
The band grew tighter with each performance, and as they travelled they met jazz greats like vibraphonist and band leader Lionel Hampton, who became a friend of Cayler’s.
On the west coast, they shared a stage with Bob Hope, and at the Trianon Ballroom in Chicago, where crowds regularly reached 7,000, they engaged in a battle of the bands with Lawrence Welk’s big band.
“”We had coast to coast air time in (Portland, Ore.), and at the Music Box in Omaha, Neb., Tommy Dorsey played with us. We were talking to him and he said, ‘why don’t I play with you,’ and he came to jam in the evening,”” she said.
All-girl orchestras multiplied during the war, when men were needed to fight. But the jazz world was almost exclusively male, and many were dismissive of the band.
An article at the time in entertainment magazine Billboard referred to Cayler as a “trumpet-tootin’ brunette looker,” and noted that the band “has a number of surprisingly good musicians, even on male standards.
Flo Dreyer was a 15-year-old trumpeter living in Indianapolis when Cayler’s band played at the Indiana Ballroom in July, 1943.
“I went to see her with a date. It was dancing but I could care less, I was listening. She played Clyde McCoy’s Sugar Blues, and I thought, ‘I can play that,’ and I asked her for a job.”
Cayler later called Dreyer and asked her to take a bus south and join the band on a USO tour. “She didn’t audition me, she took my word.”
The pay was big money for band members — the same wage paid to a captain in the Army — many of whom were still in their teens, Salmon said.
And “every place was new, with different arrangements. There were time tables, schedules, train and bus deadlines, and a drastic need to be sure everyone made it,” Salmon said.
Cayler was on top of all of it.
When the war ended in 1945, the troupe flew to Asia with the USO, performing for troops in the Philippine Islands, Japan, China, Korea, and on Iwo Jima, and other islands.
Demand for girl bands, and big bands in general, dried up after the war. Cayler continued to play, and teach. Eventually she formed a band for young people in the Denver area called Brass Beat.
Many of the musicians she instructed went on to successful careers, said Donna Wickham, a member of the Jazz faculty at Denver University’s Lamont School of Music.
The experience Cayler and her bandmates had travelling and playing together bound the women for life, and they met over the years at reunions.
“You don’t look and say “this is a big adventure, you live it and in living it you look back and say, ‘boy, that was some adventure,’ ” Dreyer said. “But when it is happening, you are just doing your thing and playing your music.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dpmcghee
