On May 21, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh completed the first non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic. Lindbergh flew 33 1/2 hours straight, covering 3,600 miles from Long Island to Paris. The wheels had hardly touched down in Paris before the world launched into a chorus of praise for the American pilot, and no form of praise more emphatically exalted the moment and the man than that of music.
Songwriters flew at the chance to assign tunes to Lindbergh’s accomplishment. When Lindbergh landed, the Parisians called him “Plucky Lindy.” Music composers L. Wolfe Gilbert and Abel Baer removed the “P” and named their soon-to-be-hit song “Lucky Lindy.” The tune was played in Manhattan nightclubs that very evening, and soon the song, the moniker, and the accompanying dance of the “Lindy Hop” swept the nation.
Only slightly north of where Lindbergh had taken off, the Sciallas had recently given birth to their seventh child: Orlandino Guiseppe Scialla. The eldest son, Johnny, swept up in the Lindbergh craze, decided that his kid brother too would share the moniker, and soon Orlandino would be known as “Lindy.”
Growing Up in a Big Band World
Lindy grew up in the heart of the Great Depression, which would, as it did with most, put his family in dire straits. The Sciallas soon moved from Amsterdam, New York to Paterson, New Jersey, where employment was available for his father, Aniello. It was the second time in a decade that the Sciallas pulled up their roots. The first time was in 1920 when Aniello came to America from Italy in search of work. Two years after establishing a career as a mason worker, his wife, Rosina, and their children boarded a trans-Atlantic passenger ship to join him.As America trudged through the Depression, past Prohibition, and toward World War II, the era of the Big Band maintained its grip on American culture. It was music, more than anything, that left its mark on Lindy.
While Aniello continued his profession in masonry, the Scialla boys perfected their musical talents. Each brother played an instrument, and they soon formed a band. One played the accordion, another bass, one saxophone, and another clarinet. When Lindy was about 12, he picked up the drums and joined his brothers and their friends. Two of those friends, Bucky Pizzarelli and Walt Levinsky, would become household names in the music industry.
“We played in the beer joints,” Lindy said. “Some of the nightclubs were owned by guys who made their names in racketeering. We as kids liked to hear their stories about their cellmates, guys they met in prison. We met a lot of them.”
Although the nightclubs were run by individuals who had made their money through questionable and often illegal means, the crowds weren’t of the unscrupulous type.
“They were dance crowds,” he said. “I think people were more disciplined when I was growing up. They were there to dance, and not argue. I think it was probably because we played in neighborhood places. Everybody knew each other. It was later when I would play in places where they were known to have fights. That was later after the war.”
Before the war came, Lindy, along with his siblings, did all they could to help the family financially. While performing with the band, Lindy went to work in the city’s silk factories.
“If you came from a working family, they didn’t really push going to school,” Lindy said. “You tried to make money for the family.”
To further help the family, his brother Johnny skipped graduating high school and joined the Army. The military provided stability in many ways, including financially. He fought in Africa and Italy, and was wounded in the Battle of Anzio. His second-eldest brother, Mario, became a medic and was part of the Normandy invasion. Though the group was losing members to enlistments, the band played on. As the war wore on, however, the band dwindled as Pizzarelli, Levinsky, and, eventually, Lindy entered the war.
War and Music
Lindy joined the Marines in 1944, shortly before graduating high school, and was shipped to the Pacific as part of the 1st Division. His first stop was in Guam, the longtime U.S. territory in the Mariana Islands. By the time he reached the island, most of the fighting had been done.Lindy was a replacement in the division and mostly went out on patrols. He said he heard about battle action more than he witnessed it. He said that every so often, patrols would return with a few Japanese prisoners. Soon, he was on his way to Okinawa, though again as a replacement soldier. In many ways, music saved his life.
“They put me in the band by the time we got to Okinawa,” he said. “That was one of the better things that happened to me in the Corps. It was better than being in a line outfit. The band was more stretcher bearers.”
A month and a half after the Battle of Okinawa concluded, America brought the largest military conflict in human history to a close by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in early August 1945. With the fighting over in Japan, Lindy and several Marine divisions were sent to China to assist Chiang Kai-shek with the disarmament and repatriation of Japanese troops. At the end of September, he arrived in Tsingtao and was then transferred to Tientsin, near Peking (modern-day Beijing), and finally to Chinwangtao (Qinhuangdao).
“We spent that first winter colder than hell. Up near the Great Wall,” he said. “We were lucky to start getting some winter clothes because at the beginning we weren’t prepared.”
During that first winter in 1945, there were still hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops, many of whom were still fighting despite the surrender. There was intermittent fighting between the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, and even the Soviets. Those captured by the Soviets, approximately 500,000, were forced into slave labor camps, where many remained even years after the war’s end. Though Lindy was always ready to fight, his ability to play the drums had its saving graces.
“When you’re at that age, you’re wanting to get into the fighting; but I was pretty lucky I had made acquaintances with some guys in the band and they were working to get me in,” he said. “Some of the guys in the band had seen a lot of action out there. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of the church group, your main spec number is a rifleman.”
Lindy was soon installed as the drummer for the Marine Corps band, which meant he was part of Headquarters Company. The band would travel along the Tangku-Chinwangtao railroad, making stops in various areas in order to perform for the troops scattered throughout the mainland. There was one trip in between stops that Lindy remembers quite vividly.
“We were on the train going from Tientsin to Chinwangtao when we got fired at,” he recalled. “Thank God the train was made of steel. You could hear the bullets ricocheting off the steel. The only effects we saw of the shooting was when the glass would come flying in.
“When we played we carried our rifles with us,” he added.
During Lindy’s time in China, the band would conduct marches, play during weekly inspections, and perform during dances and special events for the Red Cross. Lindy said he could tell that having the band and the dances boosted the morale of the troops, especially after some of them had recently come off the line from fighting the Japanese or the communists.
“I think it was one of the great things,” he said. “There was a lot of enthusiasm. We were almost like celebrities. Guys would help us with our equipment. We really made a name for ourselves.”
Communists Take Over
While the Marines were stationed in China, the objective was to capture and repatriate Japanese soldiers, but as time went by, the conflict between the Chinese nationalists and the Chinese communists became more difficult.“On both political and moral grounds, it was impossible for the United States to take a decisive military role in another nation’s civil war,” the Department of the Navy later relented, “and the average Marine on postwar duty in China found himself an uneasy spectator or sometimes an unwilling participant in a war which he did not understand and could not prevent. A steady procession of ‘incidents’ involving Marine guards and raiding Communists continued until the last Marine cleared Tsingtao in the spring of 1949.”
Though the last of the Marines wouldn’t leave until early 1949, Lindy was sent back home to the United States in 1947. As the Marines exited, the Chinese Communist Party’s troops completely took over China, forcing Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists to exit as well. According to Lindy, the communist takeover seemed inevitable.
“Had Chang Kai-shek treated the common man better, there might be a different government in China even now,” he said. “Kai-shek wasn’t as popular as the Americans made him out to be. The coolie [peasant workers] didn’t make many gains under his government. It was a real class system in China. It was almost a matter of life and death. The coolies were treated like slaves by the aristocrats. If an aristocrat wanted to beat some coolie over the head with his cane, he’d do it. And if he called the cops, the cops would side in with him.”
Lindy witnessed something similar when a Chinese aristocrat pushed a young boy off of his crutch. The boy was a coolie, and compared to the aristocracy in China, he had no recourse for justice. Lindy ran over in defense of the young boy and punched the aristocrat. As the cops arrived, so did Lindy’s master sergeant, who quickly told Lindy to leave. The punch, however justified, could have landed him a court martial.
He said he felt for the coolies and had long discussions with some of them, especially those who worked around the Army camp. He said he learned a lot about the history of China and the plight of those who weren’t in the aristocracy.
“The coolie didn’t have much of a chance in anything, really. It was hard for them to better themselves under that nationalist government, even though the communist might’ve been worse,” he said. “The coolies that you befriended, you called them friends and they were really friends, I think they would lay down their life for you, really. Especially if you treat them right, and we did in the band. Sometimes we’d even sneak our house boys some food. Some of the common guys—the enlisted men—made some good friends there.
As he thought for a moment, he added, “I’d like to go back there and see all the changes and see how China is now.”
Let The Music Play
When Lindy returned home in 1947, he went to college, played college football, got married, had kids, and made his career in construction. Lindy’s life has been full of eras, from Prohibition to the Great Depression to World War II to the Cold War and up through the 21st century. Although he has outlived almost all of those eras, there is one era he tries to keep alive: the Big Band era.
“I’ve played since I was a kid. It’s like therapy,” he said. “Here, of late, we were playing a hell of a lot more than we do now. I’m trying to revive that. We used to play a lot of dances. We’ve got some good musicians still around. Maybe the type of crowd we had are gone.”
Lindy believes that Americans, especially young people, really miss out when they don’t experience Big Band music, such as Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and many others who produced the music of that era.
“It’s all great music. It typifies an era,” he said. “If you brought some of that back, you might be amazed at what would happen. Even now, if I got some of those records and some of those kids listened to them, I bet they’d really like that music, especially if they liked to dance.”
At 96 years old, Lindy is still playing the drums every chance he gets. He said he would love to see the day that Big Band music made a comeback.
“Maybe it takes some guys like you to write up that stuff and maybe people will start paying attention to it,” he said. “People would probably think, ‘Damn, that’s nice.’ People would probably wonder, ‘How the heck did we ever get away from that?’”
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