Leonard Garment was born on May 11, 1924, “on a kitchen table,” he wrote, in a three-room tenement apartment in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His father, who owned a dress factory in Queens, had immigrated from Lithuania and his mother from Poland, and the immigrant roots in his neighborhood ran deep; Mr. Garment likened Brownsville to a semirural European shtetl, with the street peddlers hawking their wares in Yiddish. He went to Samuel J. Tilden High School in East Flatbush, Brooklyn College and Brooklyn Law School, where he was editor of the law review and graduated first in his class in 1949. But his first brush with celebrity was not in law or politics, but in his first love — music. Mr. Garment had taken up the clarinet at age 13 and mastered the saxophone as well. As a young man he played jazz gigs from Manhattan to the Catskills. For a time he led his own nine-piece band, enjoying a posh life that offered an escape from what he saw as the dreary confines of Brooklyn. He paid for part of his college education by playing tenor saxophone and clarinet in Woody Herman’s band, and in Henry Jerome’s band he teamed with an aspiring young economist named Alan Greenspan, also on saxophone."
Posted on: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 00:20:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015