Bob White made Manhattan Manhattan
by Kevin Cody
Bob White followed a path common to Manhattan Beach’s post World War II generation, when the town’s pre-war population tripled to over 17,000. He was born elsewhere, in St. Louis, Missouri. He joined the Navy at 17 with hopes of becoming a pilot. But the war ended, ending that dream. He used the GI Bill to study engineering at Iowa State, and used his engineering degree to land a sales job in Milwaukee with automation manufacturer Allen-Bradley. He retired in 1996, after 47 years at the same company.
He and his wife Connie raised two daughters, Katy and Ann, and son Link. He coached Little League, and served as the league’s president. He ran unsuccessfully for school board.
Connie passed away in 2005. Bob passed away last Friday, the day after Christmas, at age 98.
White’s decision to move to Manhattan Beach followed a business trip to Los Angeles. A friend invited him to a party in Manhattan Beach.
“There were four guys living with four girls in an apartment in El Porto. This was the mid-50s. I thought if I ever get a chance to live in California, I’m going to live in Manhattan Beach,” White would later recall.
The opportunity came in 1958 when Allen-Bradley transferred him to the South Bay to be closer to its thriving defense contractor clients.
White paid $125 a month for an apartment two blocks from the beach in El Porto, a neighborhood popular with airline pilots and stewardesses.
Two years later he married Connie Perrine, a United Airlines stewardess whom he met on a red-eye from Hawaii. She helped him clean up after he spilled his drink. She also lived in Manhattan Beach, just up the street from Ercole’s, the oldest bar in Manhattan. Ercole’s was founded in 1927, the year White was born.
The couple celebrated every Christmas Eve at Ercole’s. He brought a cow bell to silence the bar, and then led the bar in singing “Christmas Eve at Ercole’s” (written to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree”).
It’s Christmas Eve at Erocle’s
A time to gather families
Tradition is what brings us here
And also lots of liquid cheer
We’ll party on right from the start
But won’t forget the birthday part
A treasured memory we will seize
On Christmas Eve at Ercole’s.
This past Christmas Eve, Link White rang the cowbell and led the singing of his dad’s ode to Ercole’s because his dad was too frail to leave home.
On the evening of his dad’s passing two days later, Link again rang the cow bell at Ercole’s, and led mourners who filled the bar in singing “Christmas Eve at Ercole’s.”
Except for Ercole’s regulars, Bob White’s passing might have gone unnoticed in Manhattan Beach were it not for what former Manhattan Beach Mayor Steve Napolitano observed about White at a 2020 City Council meeting. The meeting was called to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Manhattan Beach Pier.
But the pier’s anniversary was upstaged by the Mayor’s aside that “rumor has it Bob White’s Dixieland band performed at the pier dedication.” The Mayor went on to say he knew that wasn’t true because White was his Little League President, which would make him only 93.
Then, in talking about what makes Manhattan Beach special, the Mayor skipped over the 100 year old pier, and said Bob White was what made the town special.
“Bob lives what is special about Manhattan Beach, and in doing so, makes Manhattan Beach special,” Napolitano said.
The common path White followed from the Midwest to raising a family in Manhattan Beach, and working in the South Bay aerospace industry took on significance for his adopted home town after he and Connie met Syd and Ethel Pattison.
Syd was a local dentist. Ethel, like Connie, had been a United Airlines stewardess. Ethel was president of the United Airlines Clipped Wings. Syd played clarinet in his youth. Bob played trumpet, but not since college. Both preferred big bands to rock bands.
“I like the big sound,” White said in a 2005 Easy Reader interview.
The two men began jamming together in their living rooms. After a few months, White invited Dale Van Stoyke, a friend from work who had played trombone in the Purdue University marching band, to join them.
White named the trio the Hyperion Outfall Serenaders after a sewage treatment plant he could see, and smell from his backyard deck. Their first public performance was at LAX when they surprised arriving friends. Their first paid performance was leading a holiday parade of Manhattan Beach office workers to a downtown bar. The parade became a downtown holiday tradition.
Meadows School Principal and Chamber of Commerce president Don Ryckman gave the trio a rhythm section. White saw Ryckman play guitar at a school function and asked if he could play banjo. Ryckman was raised in Panama by missionary parents, and was proficient on any instrument with strings, from guitar to Panamanian harp. He said he didn’t have a banjo. White gave him his.
When Van Stoyke moved away he was replaced by Jack Freeman, who brought along his brother Dave, who played tuba, and his wife Fran, who didn’t play anything. But she could dance the Charleston. Her husband gave her a tambourine. Then a washboard, then symbols, whistles and cowbells.
“We all have fun playing. But Fran shows it the most. She gives the washboard dignity — but not too much,” White said in a 2005 Easy Reader interview.
She was the percussion section until the early 2000s, when drummer Louie Pastor introduced Manhattan Beach to the boom of the bodhran.
When asked in a 2009 Easy Reader interview why he founded a Dixieland band in the rock and roll era, White said, “Dixieland is easy to play and you don’t have to read music. I picked up my horn after not having played for 15 years.”
“With Dixieland, there are a lot of songs, and the music just comes natural to a lot of people.”
Self deprecation was characteristic of White, as evident in his band’s name. The first of their two vinyl LPs was called “Clam Dip.” A clam is a sour note.
But the 25-plus standards they covered suggest a sophistication well beyond rock and roll. A typical performance would include “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” by Irvine Berlin; “Once in a While,” by Louie Armstrong and his Hot Five; “Canal Street Blues,” by King Oliver’s Creole Band; “Royal Garden Blues,” by Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds; and “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider,” by Eddie Leonard.
On rare occasions, White let his pride in his band show.
“We play music that has a tune, and a melody, which is unusual these days,” he quipped in one Easy Reader interview.
In another interview, he recounted, with undisguised pleasure, the first time clarinetist Dave Stanton played with the Hyperion Outfall Serenaders, at a bank party in Palos Verdes. The Mira Costa and Manhattan (NYC) School Music graduate had previously performed with symphonies at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. He taught music at Princeton University.
‘Dave told me afterwards how nervous he was playing for the bank because it was the first time he had ever performed without sheet music,” White said.
The band performed without sheet music because Dixieland, like jazz, is improvised. But unlike jazz musicians, Dixieland musicians improvise collectively, which accounts for the music’s careening off the rails dance sound.
“It takes several songs,” Fran Freeman said in the 2005 Easy Reader interview. “There will be little girls dancing. And then daddies with their babies on their arms start to move with the music. One time I counted 50 children dancing like crazy.”
The Hyperion Outfall Serenaders became the soundtrack of Manhattan Beach through nearly five decades of performing at the Manhattan Beach Hometown Fair, and at the MB10K, beginning with the inaugural fair in 1973, and the inaugural run in 1978.
In 1975, Mayor Joan Dontanville declared the Hyperion Outfall Serenaders the official band of Manhattan Beach. White last performed at the Manhattan Beach 10K in 2017, and at the Home Town Fair, on its 50th anniversary, in 2022.
The band also performed annually at the Skechers Manhattan Beach Holiday Fireworks Show, beginning with the inaugural show in 1983, and for the annual Richstone Family Center Pier to Pier Walk, beginning in their inaugural walk in 1987. In addition to the downtown holiday parade, they led the Manhattan Beach Little League Opening Day parade, and greeted paddlers at the Manhattan pier finish of the Catalina Classic.
When the house across the street from the Whites was torn down and the Manhattan Fire Department set it on fire for a drill, the band scrambled to serenade the firefighters with Bessie Smith’s “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”
Occasionally, the Hyperion Outfall Serenaders were lured out of town. On the Fourth of July, and on New Year’s Eve they performed at the Avalon Ballroom on Catalina Island. In mid-July they performed at the Mammoth JazzFest. On Thanksgiving weekend the band gathered at Ercole’s at 6:30 a.m. to board a bus to the Doo Dah parade in Pasadena. Supporters wearing togas towed their flatbed trailer, equipped with an outhouse so the band could drink beer without needing to make pitstops.
Their most popular performances were opening the Concerts in Park every summer in Polliwog park.
White always took the opportunity to share with residents picnicking in the natural amphitheater his concerns about the direction their town was taking by singing a song he wrote to the tune of Al Jolson’s homage to Pasadena, titled “Home in Pasadena.”
Jolson’s lyrics read:
Home home home home in Pasadena
Home home home home where grass is greener
Where the little bees, they hum melodies
And orange trees scent the breeze
I’m gonna be a home-sweet-homer
White’s lyrics were more cynical than sentimental, and his cigar-cured voice more Louie Armstrong than Al Jolson.
Oh my, Manhattan
What the heck has happened
They’re tearing down the whole darn town
And building castles,
The dirty rascals
My neighbor is a yuppie
Who built a house so tall
It blocks my view
What can I do
You can’t fight City Hall
No one took offense, because even newcomers to Manhattan were nostalgic for the town’s past.
What is celebrated elsewhere as Saint Patrick’s Day, was celebrated in Manhattan Beach as Bob White’s birthday. He was born on Saint Patrick’s Day.
His band last played “Happy Birthday” for him at his home, for the 60th time, when he turned 95 in 2022.
Well-wishers surrounding the 10th Street and Pacific Avenue “White House” included just about everyone who ever played Manhattan Beach Little League baseball, ran the MB10K or celebrated Christmas Eve at Ercoles.
Michelle O’Brien, the girl Bob was dating when he met Connie, was among the guests. Michelle married the guy Connie was dating, future Manhattan Beach Police Chief Hugh O’Brien. The four remained lifetime friends.
In the coming weeks, there will be rolling wakes between Ercole’s, where White is remembered by a 1981 photo of the Hyperion Outfall Serenaders in front of the bar, waiting for the bus to the Doo Dah Parade; and around the corner, the Shellback, where White is remembered in a 2007 mural of his band on the inside, back wall of the bar.
His Hyperion Outfall Serenaders played “When the Saints Go Marching In” more times at Manhattan Beach memorial services than Monsignor Barry has delivered eulogies from the American Martyrs pulpit.
They’ll play it again, at least one more time, for the last original member of the Hyperion Outfall Serenaders “to go marching in …”
Bob White is survived by daughters Katy Newsome (Rick), and Ann White, son Link White (Monica), and five grandchildren. A memorial service is planned, but has not been scheduled. ER
You got that right, beautiful tribute Kevin! Wow!