We had won the local talent contest and were on our way to New York to be on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour!

The local show had been sponsored by New York Life, and their local agent, Jim Colburn, was saddled with the daunting task of getting the teen-age winner(s) to New York. The date was set and the arrangments made, and whe the big day came we all loaded our instruments into the back of Mr. Colburn's station wagon and headed for New York City.

To save some expenses, Jim Colburn had arranged for us to stay overnight in Philadelphia with some relatives of his. We didn't sleep much that night. We doubled up in the beds, and spent the night laughing and cutting up. Once it was relatively quiet, Jerry got out of bed and crawled across the floor over to Ron's bed, jumped up, and screamed like a banshee. Ron came about three feet off the bed, and I think we laughed for the rest of the night.

Once in New York, we got settled in and began doing what lots of tourists do. We went to a couple of TV game show broadcasts, took a trip to Coney Island, toured the New York Life headquarters of course, and gawked a lot. But the big treat for us was that three of us were eighteen (Ron was only seventeen), and we could visit bars in NYC since the legal age was 18 there. So we went to all the prominent bars in town for a beer...Toots Shors and Jack Dempseys are two I recall off-hand. Ron didn't want to get into trouble, so when we ducked in for a cool one, he'd go looking for cool clothes.

On the day of the audition, we were driven to this huge theatre in downtown Manhattan, where there must have been a thousand people standing and sitting around waiting for their audition. It was like a zoo. There were baton twirlers, opera singers, spoon players, saw players, jugglers, contortionists, tap dancers, ballet dancers, country singers, and every other possible "entertainment" endeavor you might imagine. As an act was called to the stage, behind a curtain, we couldn't see them but we could hear them, and what we heard mostly were songs not finished. If the act wasn't doing well, they'd just cut them off, and out from behind the curtain they'd come. When our turn came, we were led behind a curtain where our instruments were already set up. It was private from the standpoint that no one out in the audience awaiting their audition could SEE us, but not private enought that we couldn't hear all the commotion out there. Three or four staff people sat at a table at the back of the stage, and told us to begin. We played Chuck Berry's "Carol", and were allowed to finish it, which was certainly not the norm for the other acts we saw come and go. After a brief discussion by the staff and some note writing, we were asked if we had anything "original". So we played "Rockamotion", a song Ron had put together impromptu for a radio studio thing we had done back in Clinton some weeks before. We were allowed to finish THAT one, too! After another short delay, we were thanked and told that someone would be getting in touch with us within a few weeks. On the way off the stage, a stage-hand gave us the thumb/index finger circled gesture of "very good", and we left knowing that we would be back soon to be on the show.

That call never came.