Note from a fellow Bruin

A comment below led to the blog below by a writer who's been at it longer than I have (well, not if you count publishing math articles as "writing"), another grad of UCLA, a SoCal guy. His passion for Anita O'Day seems to match mine for Chris Connor. His blog is damn interesting, too, so check it out. Shelly Lowenkopf.

clipped from www.lowenkopf.com The Newspapers in My Life Having just turned in my latest review for the Montecito Journal, and checked to see that the previous one was posted, I couldn't help the yank of nostalgia that drew me, ceaselessly back into the past, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in Gatsby. My first experience with newspapers came when I lived in Los Angeles, near the La Brea Tar Pits and what has now become the County Museum of Art. My job was to stand on the corner of Third Street and La Brea, selling the afternoon Hearst paper, the Herald-Express. I did not do notably well because nearby was a saloon-type establishment called The Swanee Inn, where most afternoons around four, the featured vocalist came to practice and run through her numbers. Thus as a kid who'd had to lie about his age to get the job, I discovered the remarkable Anita O'Day, one of many chance associations that drew me inexorably into the jaws of jazz.