What's Ahead: A Musician's Prophecies Of World Events
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Vincent Joseph Lopez was an American bandleader, pianist, and song writer.
Background
Vincent Joseph Lopez was born on December 30, 1895 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the son of Portuguese immigrant Antonio Lopez, a former jeweler and naval bandmaster turned music teacher, and the Baroness Virginia Gonsalves, who came from a Spanish aristocratic family. As a child, Lopez's father had him practice the piano three hours per day during the school year and six hours per day during vacations. Lopez once described himself as a "child without a childhood. " His father did not intend this rigorous musical training to prepare Lopez for a musical career, but rather for the discipline required of the priesthood.
Education
When Lopez was twelve, his father sent him to St. Mary's Passionist Monastery in Dunkirk, New York. There Lopez found solace not in religion, but in the singing of Gregorian chants and playing popular tunes on the piano during recreation. After three years at St. Mary's, Lopez convinced his teachers that he was meant for a life beyond the monastery walls. His father, disappointed, immediately enrolled Lopez in Kissick's Business College in Brooklyn. He was graduated in nine months later.
Career
Lopez began to work as a secretary in a milk company. In addition, he found a job playing piano from 9 P. M. to 4 A. M. at Clayton's, a Brooklyn saloon, through a friend from St. Mary's whose brother was a singing waiter there. A rival pianist, Jimmy Durante, began calling seventeen-year-old Lopez "the pianner kid. " Eventually, lack of sleep caused Lopez to lose both his jobs. Ashamed to face his father, who never forgave him for abandoning the priesthood, Lopez moved out of his parents' home into the care of the singing waiter, Dick Harding, who almost immediately found work for Lopez at McLaughlin's saloon, a mile from Coney Island.
In 1913, Lopez was asked to play at the Pekin Restaurant near Times Square in Manhattan, which was famous for its five-piece orchestras. After performing a few solos, he was hired, and three months later he was put in charge when the bandleader failed to come to work one day. Lopez could not enlist in the U. S. Army during World War I because of gout, so he stayed at the Pekin. During the Prohibition era, Lopez was forced to leave the Pekin. He performed in several vaudeville shows, including the successful Rings of Smoke and the short-lived Lovebirds. Lopez started his first job as a hotel bandleader in 1921 at the Pennsylvania Hotel (later the Statler Hilton) in Manhattan, where he stayed for five years.
On November 27, 1921, Lopez and his band traveled to the WJZ radio station in Newark, New Jersey, to broadcast live dance music for the first time over the radio. Intensely shy, when the microphone was placed in front of Lopez, all he could say was, "Hello, everybody--Lopez speaking. " These words became his trademark and a familiar greeting to Americans across the country for the next forty-five years. A month after his debut, Lopez had his own regular show, radio's first "remote" pickup broadcast, from the Pennsylvania Hotel. Lopez kept an active touring schedule. In a vaudeville program at the Palace on August 7, 1922, he pioneered the use of scenic sets to go along with his band's performances. Two years later, he gave a concert at the Metropolitan Opera House, followed by a performance at President Calvin Coolidge's inaugural ball. Thomas A. Edison was an early fan of his.
In 1925, Lopez brought American jazz to the London Hippodrome. In that same year, he opened the elegant Casa Lopez nightclub in Manhattan, which burned down only two years later. He then opened a second nightclub, but it was less sumptuous and failed to attract enough patrons to stay open. Good news soon came to Lopez with the signing of a million-dollar, ten-year contract with the St. Regis Hotel, the first such contract signed by a bandleader. Lopez stayed at the St. Regis for seven years, before the Great Depression of the 1930's forced the hotel to let him go. Lopez then wandered around the country, playing in obscure nightclubs. Then, in 1941, Lopez landed his steadiest job yet at the Hotel Taft's Grill Room, where he would play for twenty-six years, until he was seventy-three years old.
In 1949, Lopez appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show, " after which he had his own fifteen-minute television program for more than two years. He set a telecasting first in 1950 with Dinner Date with Lopez, a remote telecast from the Taft Grill that became a regular television show. Over the years, Lopez proved himself adaptable to the popular musical tastes of the times, from ragtime to Dixieland, jazz, swing, Latin American rhythms, and rock and roll. At the age of eighty-one he led a band at the Riverboat in Manhattan.
Lopez believed that numbers revealed the rhythms of the universe.
Interests
Lopez was interested in numerology, which he learned about through a friend. Numerology became his way of resolving his "vague discontent with the loose ends of life. " Through numerology, Lopez began to make predictions, some of them startlingly accurate, such as the exact date Italy entered World War II and the exact year of India's independence. Others were wrong--for example, his prediction that the Russians would not fight Japan and that President Roosevelt would not run for a fourth term. Lopez wrote regularly for American Astrology magazine and hosted a numerology game twice a week at the Taft. He also answered questions on his radio show for fans who sent in their initials and dates of birth. Lopez's prophecies seemed most accurate when they concerned his eye for talent.
Connections
On March 5, 1921, Lopez married May Kenny, who died seventeen years later; they had one child. Lopez would not remarry until August 8, 1951, thirteen years after his first wife's death, to Bettye Long.