What's New Year's Eve without Guy Lombardo?

     By  Jerry Jonas            

                   Although famed band leader Guy Lombardo has been gone for more than 30 years, somehow, a New Year's Eve without his music is to most individuals who are old enough to remember him like a Thanksgiving Day without turkey.
                   For all the years (1929 through 1976) that Lombardo and his Royal Canadians welcomed in a new year (initially on radio and later on both radio and TV) with their sentimental rendition of "Auld Lang Syne" (loosely translated as "times gone by"), he had been to New Year's Eve what Santa Claus is to Christmas.
                  This was particularly true for those of us who chose to spend the evening at home listening to Lombardo's tunes broadcast live from the ballroom of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel rather than going out partying.
                  But since his death in 1977, the holiday evening just hasn't been the same.
                  Granted, the ball still descends at midnight over New York's Time Square, and the huge crowds still mill about, waiting to welcome in a new year.
                  However, the celebration's current TV honcho, Dick Clark (who hosted the first formal telecast of his New Year's Eve show in 1972 and has been joined since 2005 by Ryan Seacrest), is no Guy Lombardo.
                 Clark's choices of music and musical performers have traditionally been aimed at a much-younger audience, and what he identifies as "Rockin' Eve music" is what I insist is "headache music."
                 With the exception of watching the ball descend at the stroke of midnight, I basically pay scant attention to what ----in my mind, at least ----has evolved into extremely annoying telecasts.
                  Fortunately, I still have a mental store-house filled with exceptional New Year's Eve memories.
                  My earliest recollections of the holiday date all the way back to 1934.  I was not quite 4 years old and my mother had gotten me out of bed to watch the revelers usher in the new year.
                  From the large Zenith console radio in our living room downstairs, I could hear the strains of "Auld Lang Syne."  It was, of course, the Guy Lombardo orchestra broadcasting live from the Waldorf-Astoria.
                 Starting out of the second-story bedroom window, my mother and I watched the falling snow blanket our narrow Kensington street.  Back then, most Philadelphia streets were all but empty of cars, as few people could afford them.
                 There were no elaborate light displays decorating the fronts of homes.  The only exterior decorations were simple Christmas wreaths attached to the front-door windows of the row houses.  Few of them, if any, had electric lights.
                  At midnight, those front doors began opening, one by one, and small groups of people made their way onto the sidewalk, shouting greetings, changing pots and pans and blowing on small paper horns.
                  Although I didn't quite grasp what was happening, the scene from that night is still as clear in my mind today as it was on that long-ago evening.
                  Through my succeeding childhood years, New Year's Eves were relatively quiet.
                  Occassionally, relatives or friends of my parents would drop in, but there was little partying.  It was still the era of the Great Depression and few people in our neighborhood had money to spend frivoloously.
                  Most years, my two brothers and I were in bed sound asleep long before midnight.
                  My second major New Year's Eve recollection is from December 1941.
                  It had been barley three weeks since the country had been brought into World War II by the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.  I was nearly 11 years old and permitted to stay up until the midnight celebration.
                 Famed bandleader Glenn Miller's recording of "Elmer's Tune" was then the No. 1 song in the country, and that night, it seemed I heard it at least a dozen times.  Even hearing it today transports me mentally to that distant time and place.
                 At midnight, the sadness of Lombardo's "Auld Lang Syne" seemed especially appropriate for the country's melancholy wartime mood.
                 During my late-teen years, New Year's Eve began to take on more meaning.
                 By then, World War II had ended and I had begun dating Betty, my future wife.  Now, each year, there would be a New Year's Eve party at her house.  But for me, that would soon be interrupted by the outbreak of war in Korea.
                 On Dec. 31, 1952, I would find myself standing watch in the bitter -cold darkness of a Korean trench line, watching an occasional illumination flare descend from the black sky and listening to sporadic bursts from a Chinese machine gun.
                 Later, warming up in a nearby bunker and listening to Lombardo's "Auld Lang Syne" on the Armed Forces Radio Network, I would dream of other, more-pleasant New Year's Eves that might still be in store for me.
                And they would come.
                During the next 58 years, most of my New Year's Evces would be spent at home, eating snacks, drinking punch and watching the ball descend on television, and then stepping outside and banging on pots and pans with Betty, our six children and our five grandchildren.
                While we no longer have Guy Lombardo to entertain us, and the children and grandchildren have grown and no longer celebrate with us, Betty and I and our son, Dan (who still lives at home), still have a more-than-adequate supply of pots and pans.