How Loonis McGlohon helped us

Suddenly Jan Ross popped into Henry Bernhardt’s mind.

Jan Ross?

Why, she was a Miss Salisbury and nearly a Miss North Carolina back in the ’60s. He hadn’t thought about her for years. Nope, for decades.

But the death of Charlotte’s Loonis McGlohon Saturday brought her back — along with a conviction that all the good things that have been said about Loonis will never be enough. He was the kind of man who shared his talent with the mighty and the wannabes and those who didn’t care about fame but did care about music.

He’d accompanied so many biggies — Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett — and had been called one of the top-three piano accompanists in the world, which was his stage, Charlotte Observer writer David Perlmutt wrote.

But none of that made him too big to help Salisbury Jaycees who thought they had a potential Miss North Carolina to send to Atlantic City if they could just tweak her singing style a bit.

And that’s what brought Jan Ross to Henry’s mind when he and Clyde Young were talking about Loonis after they heard he was losing his long battle with cancer.

Both of them are musicians themselves.

Henry, retired president of Institutional Development Associates (“We called it IDA,” he says, “which meant I’d do anything.”)once led his own orchestra. And Clyde, who describes himself as a “retired dentist and ready musician,” still leads his Music Makers and plays his trumpet.

Back in the mid-’60s — maybe ’65 — Henry was a national Jaycee director when Jan Ross, a Catawba junior from around Burlington, won the pageant here.

“And,” he says, she was “a real fine Miss Salisbury. She was a tall, statuesque blonde, and she sang, but she didn’t have a great voice. She’d sung with a little group, but everything she sang was ricky-ticky, businessman’s bounce.”

Still ...

“She had the figure,” he says, “and was a good interview. A beautiful girl. She looked good in the gown. But we needed to do something about her talent.”

But what?

And then he remembered that he’d met Loonis McGlohon once when he was at WBT in Charlotte on another Jaycee mission.

Loonis McGlohon would know what to do.

So Henry called him and asked if he could bring Jan over for Loonis to hear, and, of course, Loonis being the Loonis everybody remembers, said, “Sure. Bring her over.”

Henry took her, and she sang a couple of songs.

“But she sang all of them,” Henry groans, “with ricky-ticky.”

If you don’t know what that means exactly, forget it. You’re better off.

But Loonis listened, knew immediately what to do and did it — with finesse. Try that “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” at half-tempo, he suggested.

“So she did it as a torch song,” Henry remembers. “And she did it great! When we got to the Miss North Carolina Pageant — it was in Ovens Auditorium in Charlotte — Loonis was there with a band, providing the music for the pageant. We hadn’t known he was going to be there.”

And Jan was great again.

She did exactly what he’d suggested, Henry remembers, “and she was probably the best Miss Salisbury we ever had next to Barbara Harris.” Barbara Harris is still the only Salisbury girl who ever won the state pageant and represented North Carolina in the Miss America pageant.

But Jan might have shared her historical spotlight if the judges hadn’t reached an impasse that night at Ovens auditorium.

Jan came out in the top five, and the judges secluded themselves to make the final decision. Two put her first, Henry learned later. Two put a Gastonia contestant first. And the fifth judge, a music professor from Winthrop, picked another.

“It was an impasse. The judges were hung up,” Henry says. Ty Boyd was master of ceremonies, “and he told all the jokes he knew, and time just ran out.” The music professor from Winthrop wouldn’t go with either one of the other judges. He was going for a dancer or something from Sanford.

“Those judges,” Henry still snorts, “were out for 45 minutes or an hour. Usually they come back in five minutes, 10 at the most.

“But that guy stood his ground. Eventually, the third place girl ended up as Miss North Carolina, and there went Salisbury’s Miss North Carolina. They had to break down or they would have been out all night. I would have stayed out all night if I had been the judge.”

He can speak from experience. He judged 15, 16 state pageants all across the nation during the Jaycees glory years, and his best friend, Tuck Gudger, who now lives in Asheville, “has probably judged more Jaycee beauty pageants than anybody else in the country, at least pageants in 45 different states, some of them many times.”

“Loonis charged us $25. I thought it was going to be several hundred. He did that because he thought she had a shot at Miss America.

“He was the kindest guy, the nicest person,” Henry says, and Bernhardt saw him several times after that meeting. Loonis always remembered.

“He’d ask, ‘Do you remember ... ?’” and, of course, Henry did. He even knows that she’s married, lives in Tallahassee, Fla., has been in education and has children.

And he and Clyde had to take a minute to remember Loonis.

“What a nice guy!” Henry says “What a great musician! And he didn’t hurt her feelings. He just said, ‘Slow it down, and let’s make something out of it.’ ”

Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com .