In the fall of 1963 I was a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and was doing my fieldwork at a church out in St. Albans, Queens, where I would spend each Sunday. On one particular Sunday night in October, I was returning from St. Albans and had planned to pick up a fellow student who was doing his fieldwork in Jamaica, Queens. I parked the car across the street from the church where he was working and went looking for him. He was nowhere to be found, and the church was dark, so I assumed he had taken the subway home.

When I returned to my car (an old 1955 Chevy), I realized that I had locked my keys in the car. I didn't belong to the Auto Club, and there were no public phones anywhere around, so I went up to the house in front of which I had parked and knocked on the door. A middle-aged black gentleman answered the door, and when I explained my dilemma he suggested we try to unlatch the door through the window slit using a coathanger or something. He went into the house for a moment, but when he emerged, he didn't have a hanger, but rather a couple of strange looking tools. I asked him what they were and he said, "Oh I use these to clean my bass." Still not making any connections about who this might be, I watched while he worked his tools for a good 15 minutes trying to get through the stubborn car window to no avail.

I remembered that my wife had an extra set of keys, and could bring them out to me from Manhattan. When I suggested this, he said "Sure, call her and then make yourself comfortable." He then introduced himself: "I'm Milt Hinton." I just about fell off the porch. I had always admired Hinton (who I still think is one of the greatest basssists of all time - even today at age 87!) I called my wife and told her to check with a friend of ours to see if he could drive her out with the keys. (I felt like saying, "And please take your time!" but I didn't).

Meanwhile, Milt introduced me to his beautiful daughter, who was then a senior at the United Nations High School, and his wife, who served me some great homemade chocolate chip cookies and coffee. He told me he had been working on some mastertapes he had made a decade earlier with Billie Holiday, and would I be interested in hearing them? No need to tell you what my response was!!

While the tapes were playing on his studio-quality reel-to-reel deck, he then proceeded to show me some photos he had taken of Billie during the recording sessions. (Hinton is a great photographer and always took his camera to every studio session and concert. He has a collection of 35,000 photos he has taken of the jazz greats).

So, talk about being in jazz heaven! We sat there for the next hour eating cookies, listening to Lady Day (some cuts of which have never been recorded) looking at photos taken by "The Judge" himself, and just talking about jazz. He told me about how happy he was doing studio work and how it really beat gigging and being on the road all the time.

When my wife and the friend who drove her out there arrived, Milt insisted they have some cookies and coffee before leaving. What a gracious man! What a memorable evening! And what a lucky fool I was to lock my keys in the car that October night in 1963!

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