Duane Gundrum Memoirs,Music Grandpa Alex and “The Bologna Song”

Grandpa Alex and “The Bologna Song”

My grandfather was a brilliant musician. While he couldn’t handle his liquor, he lived one step below a state of perpetual poverty, and he died way too early for someone of his passion and age, he had a gift for music like no other I’ve met in my limited lifetime. His instrument of favor was the mandolin, but he was the kind of man who could pick up a musical instrument, turn it over in his hands a few times, blow into it (or run his fingers against the strings, or bang on its surface) and he would have that device mastered in minutes. I’m not kidding about this. I handed him my violin as a child, watched him look at the bow curiously, pluck a few notes on the strings, run the bow across its surface a few times and then managed to actually start playing a novice tune. In an hour, he was composing music on it. After a few hours, you would have sworn he studied under several master violinists for years.

That gift was supposed to pass down to me. My mom was his only child, which meant she was supposed to inherit the talent, but she suffered a little too much in life to ever have the time or discipline to master a musical instrument. She died early, after a life of pain and suffering. Therefore, it was left to me to somehow be the prodigy that should have followed her musical genius of a father.

So I ended up learning how to play the violin. It was never my favorite instrument, and I was always looking for ways to take short cuts with it. My passion was the drums, but in my upbringing, you didn’t really get a choice of what you wanted to learn; you were given a musical instrument and then told “that’s the one you’re learning.”

I was never really good at the violin. I kept breaking from the music sheets and performing what I wanted to perform instead of what was on the paper. The director really didn’t like that. He never liked hearing something that wasn’t what he was expecting from the band. After a number of years of never really making him comfortable with my musical discipline, I sort of fell off the band wagon, for lack of better words, and I lost my interest.

Instead, I managed to end up in a choir instead. At six years old, my mom snuck me into the Santa Monica Boys’ Club (you had to be seven), mainly because she needed some kind of day care so she could work full time, and she couldn’t afford anything other than letting me run free until she returned home from work. The Boys’ Club was her answer. And within my first few days, I found a niche I didn’t realize I was seeking.

It happened on one of my first days when I was playing table soccer in the main room of the place with one of my friends from the place. One of the managers of the place announced that try outs were now being held for the Boys Choir. Not really interested in something like that, I found myself interested when that manager grabbed me and practically dragged me screaming up the stairs to where try outs were taking place. It turned out that they were “recruiting” everyone that was there at the time.

The director of the boys choir was a well known music industry man named David Forrester who was volunteering his time to create this new “event” at the Boys Club. Each one of the kids was required to sing a quick part of a song as part of the try out, and when it came time for me to do so, I wasn’t really expecting much, but as I blurt out the words to whatever song it was they had us singing, Forrester stopped the piano player and had me repeat what I had just sung. So I did. Then there was a bit of a commotion, and Mr. Forrester pulled me aside into another room and had me run through a scale of notes (although I didn’t know that’s what he was doing at the time). He then spoke to one of the managers, and I was allowed to go back downstairs and play table soccer some more.

I figured I had failed the try out, and that was that.

A few days later, my mom took me to a place in Culver City where this guy’s office was.  His office was extremely intimidating as he had pictures of himself with extremely famous music and movie stars, like Elvis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Martin Dean. At the time, I had no idea who any of these people were, but my mom was extremely impressed as she walked around the room.

When he entered the room, he spent some time trying to convince my mom to allow me to take private lessons with him to develop my voice. I remember my mom turning him down, explaining that we just didn’t have that kind of money. He told her it wouldn’t cost us anything, that he really wanted to do this because he had heard something he hadn’t heard in a long time. After some time, she relented.

For the next few weeks, I attended singing lessons with him, and I was, as would happen with any six year old, convinced that this was some kind of punishment. I wanted to be in the regular choir with the rest of the kids, and he was telling me that I wasn’t ready yet. I wondered how come all of those other kids were able to get to start without having to take singing lessons.

When the training was over, I started up in the choir, and soon after that I ended up becoming the soloist for the group. And it was a thrilling experience that continued until we made a few records, and let’s just say that it was a life-changing set of events.

But I had been talking about my grandfather, because during this time, he was really the one encouraging me to embrace this part of my education. All of this time, I kept thinking that I wasn’t a real musician because I hadn’t been actually playing an instrument. I was just singing. And even though I was getting a lot of attention, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t really doing what was possible, considering my heritage.

So, during these years, my grandfather bought me a really cheap guitar, and I started playing with him while he would sit in the park, entertaining everyone who walked by. Unlike other park musicians, he never had an open case to ask for money; he played just because he liked to entertain people. And at the age of about seven and eight, I played right along side him with my little guitar, even though to this day I’m not sure I was playing it correctly.

One of the songs he used to play was an old classical tune from Chopin that he added lyrics to and called “My Bologna Song.” For years, I thought he invented that song all by himself, and then I was at a fancy shindig while at West Point, and the classical version of the song started playing on cello and violin. And all I could think to myself was, Grandpa’s version was so much better. Why did that Chopin guy have to steal his song?

Remembered lyrics to Grandpa Alex Romanuk’s “The Bologna Song”:

Just because you think I’m bologna

I’ll always be with you

Just because you think I’m bologna

I’m still in love with you

Everybody thinks I’m bologna

You know it’s all for you

Everybody thinks I’m bologna

As long as I have you

That’s all I remember of the song, but every time I hear the music play on a radio or in some movie, it’s always The Bologna Song to me.

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