• Lindy > Swing Talk
• Posted Monday, July 14, 2003
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Yes, kats & kittens its true! The world famous Meadowbrook will open its' doors for one final night of swinging. Come out to NJ with me and see the Glenn Miller Orchestra!

KK 8)

A swinging gala's on tap for the old Meadowbrook

BY PHILIP READ Star-Ledger Staff

It was the big-band era, and through the magic of radio people all over the country would hear these familiar words: "Coming to you from Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook, Route 23, the Pompton Turnpike in Cedar Grove, N.J."

What came next into American living rooms (and perhaps the back seat of the old family Plymouth) were the sounds of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra. The Meadowbrook was big enough to get them all, and for the World War II generation, it was the place to go to see them live.

But, as always, things changed. The big bands came and went, and the Meadowbrook became a dinner-theater in the 1960s and then disco in the 1980s. Then it fell silent, and then into disrepair.

Now one man is bringing back the glory days of the Meadowbrook, if just for one night. Mike Grabas, who spends his Sundays visiting hospitalized veterans, is creating a "Hollywood Canteen" night at the Meadowbrook on Aug. 16 to benefit the men he so admires.

"A lot of them, actually 90 percent of them, are in wheelchairs, some in fetal positions. Basically, they're in their final battle," said Grabas, 46, the chairman of the veterans committee of Cedar Grove Elks Lodge No. 2237.

The Meadowbrook has been renovated by its new owner, Sts. Kiril & Metodij Macedonian Orthodox Church, and is ready to host the special night, headlined by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

Grabas got the idea while visiting the thinning ranks of World War II veterans at the Lyons Veterans Hospital in Somerset County -- men of his parents' generation.

"I grew up with World War II stories," said Grabas, whose mother, Betty, would take him on drives around Cedar Grove, pointing out homes of soldiers who didn't come back.

Grabas -- whose PT Cruiser sports flags from the various branches of the armed services but who never served in the military -- said the gala is intended to raise as much as $15,000.

The money will go to his Elks Lodge, which will use it to help raise the spirits of hospitalized veterans with picnics and entertainment, such as the three-woman, Andrews Sisters-style USO troupe that will open for the Glenn Miller Orchestra at the show.

Grabas hopes the event will draw about 700 people paying $45 each for a night of dancing -- buffet and beer included.

"A lot of people want to see what the Meadowbrook looked like," said Grabas, who works at a West Caldwell supermarket. "It will bring back a lot of memories, a lot of memories."

It will for Herb Degan, who from 1937 until 1941 was the CBS radio announcer for the Saturday afternoon program "Matinee at the Meadowbrook" before heading overseas as a B-17 pilot flying some 25 missions.

"It looks pretty much like it was," he said last week from the balcony overlooking the 40-by-100-foot dance floor. It was the first time he'd set foot in the place since 1947.

"You've done a beautiful job with it," said the 86-year-old Degan, turning to the Rev. Slobodan Petkovski, whose congregation uses the newly refurbished hall for brunches and dances for its 600 families.

Its sanctuary is still under construction next door to the old Meadowbrook, which the church purchased in 1994 and renovated with new woodwork and carpeting. The church has extended invitations to the clergy of Cedar Grove to come to the "Hollywood Canteen" as a way to get to know the community.

"We stumbled across it, actually," Zvonko Veskov, a member of the church committee, said of the old Meadowbrook.

Back in the big-band era, it was a destination.

The Meadowbrook -- started by Frank Dailey's Meadowbrook Syncopators in the 1930s -- was such a cultural icon that Charlie Barnet sang a tune called "Pompton Turnpike," whose lyrics noted that the hall's "music interlude puts you right in the mood." Even the famed Tokyo Rose, the Japanese radio propaganda queen, once falsely reported that the Meadowbrook burned down, hoping to demoralize the troops.

"I don't think there was a finer tribute," said Philip Edward Jaeger, the author of "Cedar Grove," one of Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series.

The place holds special memories for Marietta Rhatican, who was Dailey's nighttime secretary starting around 1950. Dailey, she said, was so touched by a letter from GIs thanking him for his dance club's music that he had it enlarged and framed in his office.

"He was a terrific guy, a very, very nice man," she said of the violin-playing Dailey, who died in the early 1950s after being stricken with a heart attack during a gala event for RCA.

"That was (at) the end of the big-band era," said Rhatican, who now lives in Berkeley Heights. "He was still having Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. They were not drawing the way they had been."

Through all the changes, dinner-theater to disco, the Meadowbrook was always best remembered as the place Dailey put on the map when the big bands were in full swing.

"It's possibly haunted by Frank Dailey," Grabas said while motioning to the late violinist's old office off the bar on the second-floor balcony. "In the disco days, a couple guys came in and heard a violin playing. That I don't believe."