Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 165

Elmo Tanner, left, and Fred Lou ery harmonizing. wetting their whistles with auld lang syne from the Gulf of Mexico whistled harmony through the screens of the open-air bar to which the whistlers had adjourned after a chicken dinner at the Tanner home, nostalgia gave way to amiable competition. Said Tanner, who recalled that he was able to whistle ALL the notes of "Nola" while band leader Lopez whose theme it was had to fake it; "All right. Now I'll whistle "Indian Love Call." Replied Lowery who has fought a 30-year battle with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald for proprietorship of the tune: "Go ahead. Try it." But, full of magnanimity, Elmo relented.

"Naw. I'd scare hell out of you if I did." As it was, graying heads together, they harmonized, Elmo playing alto counterpoint to Fred's soprano vibrato. On her way to the juke box to play a Bobby Daris record, a pretty young secretary in skin-tight levis paused to listen. "That's kind of pretty," she conceded. Told the entertainers' names, her face remained blank then, seeing that something was expected of her she asked hesitantly: "You mean they're famous or something?" Musically, theirs is a different wot Id.

The soft trcm-elos of "Indian Love Call" have given way to rock 'n roll's pounding drums. The light melody of "Heartaches" has been replaced by "the near uninWligle shoutings of the Beatles. But are they famous? Indeed they are. Or were. was coming) barber by the name of Perry Como auditioned for leader Lopez and was turned down.

And, even more tragically, Lowery recalled that trumpeter Henry Bussey played an undertakers' convention and dropped dead the next day. "Kind of makes you think," he said only half joking. Tanner stays close to his beach home, "rooted to his fishing these days. His records are heard now and again as disc jockeys reach back into the musical past. He's only 60 but wonders: "How the hell come everybody's younger than me?" Fifty five year old Lowery has traded the pace and excitement of the big band one-night stand for the relative quiet of the school auditorium and the recording studio.

He tours the nation for an organization called the School Assembly Service in Greensboro, N.C., playing to some 1-million school kids each year. His Decca records still sell but it is probable that more people hear the Lowery whistle today on 7-Up, Fluffo and Philip Morris radio commercials than hear his more artistic endeavors. Both whistlers are chagrined by the fact that neither of them is responsible for radio's best-known commercial whistle THE "Hey, Mable! Black Label," beer spot. It was done by some New York upstart. "I'm darned if I can remember his name," said Lowery.

As the evening wore on and a competing breeze By Brock Lucas, of The Times staff It just might be that the coolest spot in town these hot nights is on a bar stool seated between famed whistlers Elmo Tanner and Fred Lowery. You don't have to like "Heartaches" (even Tanner, the man who made the tune says of the tune that made the man: "It is the or "Indian Love The harmonious breeze they stir entertains as it cools. For Tanner, who is a St. Petersburg Beach resident, and Lowery, who calls Dallas home, a recent melodious reunion was the continuation of a friendship and rivalry which began "sometime around 1931" when Elmo was "playing" with the Vincent Lopez band. The whistle, they explain, was used as a solo instrument and, though they were not actually blowing a horn, they were playing with the bands.

The only people who ever disputed the fact, remembers Tanner, were the members of the trombone section of the Stan Kenton orchestra who, when Elmo was appearing in concert with them, wrote some highly uncomplimentary notations on his music. "But," he says with justifiable pride, "Kenton really told them off when he heard about it." When the boys weren't entertaining each other or "wetting their whistles" with the occasional beer, the talk was nostalgic, full of reminiscence. Tanner recalled the day when a young Pittsburgh he was from McKeesport," corrected Lowery who knew what One Less Retreat from the Associated Press A few quick penstrokes recently put an end to one of the last three artists' colonies in the United States the Huntington Hartford Foundation, in a wooded canyon at nearby Pacific Palisades. The 154-acre Utopia, where musicians, painters and writers have created prize-winning works for 15 years, has been sold to a land developer. The foundation, a sanctuary for both wildlife and the creative minds of this country since 1950, went for a price revealed only as "something under $700,000." The foundation retains possession until Sept.

15, when the last artist-in-residence fellowships expire. Since negotiations began, the tion has dwindled from 48 at peak capac: ity to 14 at present. By summer's end, the one-time volcano of artistic activity will be a lonesome place. Lonesomeness was always one of its chief attractions. The foundation offered mountain solitude and peace for reflection away from the bustle of cities.

And families. Even the wife and kids were barred. Artists came alone, for residence terms of three to six months. Among them have been composers Ernst Toch, Douglas Moore, John La Montaine (all won Pulitzer Prizes for works composed at the foundation), Peter Jona Korn, Ingolf Dahl, Roy Harris, Colin McPhee and Ned Rorem writers Mark Van Doren, Max Eastman, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Carmer, Maria Zaturenska, Seymour Krim and Jean Starr Untermeyer; artists Edward Hopper, Charles Rogers, Thyre Lowell Grant and Irwin Rosenhouse. Hartford, 54, who inherited $90-million in Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co.

stock, supported the foundation at an annual cost of about $100,000. After huge losses on Show magazine, the Hartford Theatre in Hollywood, a 127-acre estate in the Hollywood hills and the $25-millior. development of Paradise Island in the Bahamas, Hartford's attorneys advised him to retrench. offered it to the University of Cali fornia for $315,000, but the offer was not taken up, so he sold it to the Morehart Land Co. and the Second Morehart Trust.

It will be used first as a residence for John M. Morehart, his wife and their nine children and nine horses. The closing of the foundation leaves only the famed MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, N.H., and the Yaddo Colony of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to carry on this particular tradition of artistic par r9 few LEISURE m4 the ARTS St. Ptttnfew? Tim, Smfey. Arty 11.

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