Those Were the Days

Long, long time ago, when we were full of zip...to borrow some lyrics from some songs, the two brothers I hung out with and myself were regulars at a bar on Broadway, the Spotlight. It was at 52nd Street, on the West side of Broadway, a narrow place adjacent to the Ed Sullivan theater, run by a squat man Joe Harbor, who may or may not have been from the U.K.—I called Yiddish British— and his wife Sarah and their long-time bartender Gene Williams.

Gene had been a bit of a singer during the big band era, and to us, famously appeared in a 1943 Abbott and Costello movie, 'Hit the Ice,' singing something on a sled in a movie studio's sound stage. It's been years since I've seen any part of that movie again. Perhaps Turner retired it. Or purposely lost it.

We were not yet even 21, but in those days you didn't have to be in New York to go drinking. Legal drinking age was 18, and we were that. It was probably 1969, and we had already made the Spotlight our destination after rounds of pool at Broadway Billiards in the lower level of the penny arcade upstairs, just south of the bar on the same side of the street.

Times Square was decidedly different then. Still seedy in enough places; plenty of porn movie theaters and street walkers in doorways near cheap hotels and other regular movie theaters mixed in. It was brightly lit, but nowhere near as brightly lit as today. The fairly recent HBO series 'The Deuce' more than accurately depicted the vibe of the place and the era. It's always been about sex. 

The Spotlight is long gone. Last call was on New Year's Eve 1972, an event I missed when I had a terrible cold. I believe you can catch a fleeting glimpse of it in Al Pacino's early movie, 'Panic in Needle Park' in a scene filmed from across the street. The penny arcade is long gone, as is the pool hall. The Novotel Hotel sits on the land now, a fact I'm still annoyed at.

One night in 1969 we arrived at the Spotlight and the bartender Gene was a bit animated. There had been a shooting across the street, a murder of Lloyd Price's partner Harold Logan. At the time we didn't know the name, just that Gene told us about the shooting and that the cops were there all day. 

Directly across the street from the Spotlight was I think the Mark Hellinger theater and offices. In one of those offices Lloyd Price had his production company. And there, at some point  Mr. Logan was murdered. There was still police activity there after many hours had already passed. The lights were still on the offices.

All this came back to me when I read Lloyd Price's obituary, but only after I first thought that wasn't Lloyd Price already dead?

Well, of course not. His partner was, and to this day it remains an unsolved murder. Talk about a cold case. That one's in the freezer.

In fact, archival search of the NYT didn't find any story about the murder. It was probably a professional hit, because they never get solved. Price's office was just blocks from the famous Brill building, home of a slew of music publishers and songwriters in the '60s. The place was an incubator for hits. 

Years went by and I learned of Lloyd's association with Don King. It was mentioned in the obituary, and I used to speculate that King had something to do with the shooting, since he was already a convicted murderer. Don King has never  been linked to the murder, so the case will likely remain unsolved forever.

I write all this because once again something always reminds me of something else, even a single line in someone's obituary.

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