Dan Landt
and a perspective on the Landt Trio

Dan Beckwith Landt, my father, was born on October 25, 1896, with his middle name taken from the doctor who delivered him. He was the second of the five children of Matthias Cole Landt and Hulda Benson, whose span of new parenthood ranged from Edith (1892) to Jack (1911). Edith remembered when Dan was born. She had been sent down the block to play for several hours, and when she came home found she had a baby brother. (He was one of twins; his brother, Augustus, died at birth). Edith and Dan were very close; she spoke of him as her defender, even as a small child. If anyone even looked at her sideways, he was ready to fight.

Karl's account said that my father never completed elementary school because of a fight. The story I heard was that a couple years later he later returned and completed night school with that same principal — but that story may have been part of the trio's show business PR. In any case, my father was a good writer. He wrote scripts, songs, jokes, and copy for the act, and in his later years wrote advertising for local businesses in Pound Ridge, New York, where we moved in 1948.

That leads to a story. In the early 1950's he wrote a song called "The Ten Swedes" which was recorded by Yank Yankovich and his Ten Swedes. The gimmick was to guess how many handshakes would be involved if each of the ten Swedes shook hands with each other one. To dad's delight, the song was put out on a 78 record, which we found was actually in stock at the music store in New Canaan, Conn., where I was in high school. For each record sold, we would receive a penny — ok, so it would only be a few hundred dollars, but that sounded good in those days. The royalty was to be paid every three months. When that day drew near, dad walked down to the mailbox every day with anticipation. Then one day, he opened the box and found the envelope from the record company. Inside was our royalty from nationwide sales, a check for two dollars and seventy-eight cents.

My dad was short - about 5'4" - but strong, tough, and athletic. As a kid, he and his friends were apparently part of a gang. Their motto: TOTA, touch one, touch all. In the army (see below), he was the quarterback of the divisional team. His strength and toughness were a source of pride. He was also very handy, loving to rig up things in his shop. Several times during my childhood he would work in his shop building me what he called "buckboards". These typically were old ironing boards with wheels, on which he rigged a steering wheel and brake system. He loved such projects. His curiosity about how things worked had one unfortunate consequence. During the Sing Along years he had bought us a wonderful Chickering baby grand player piano. It was magnificent, and played very well. When it stopped working, during the Pound Ridge years of hard financial times, rather than getting it repaired, he took it apart (perhaps to repair it, but never reassembled it) — ouch! — destroying its potential value, which would have been substantial when it was sold.

Dad sang bass in the trio. He claimed that he had only an eight-note range, though that seems unlikely. The high point of his singing career was a duet in Carnegie Hall with.....some famous female singer, whose name has slipped away. (Marion Anderson?) My uncle Karl talked of dad as a wonderful brother, almost a second father — their age difference was twelve years, and dad apparently took responsibility for making meals for Karl.

I don't know much of Dad's teenage years, but know that dad lied about his age and joined the army in 1912. He was in the Mexican War, during which his unit was in Mexico, chasing — but never seeing or having contact with — Pancho Villa. He then became part of the American Expeditionary Force sent to France for World War I. (At some point in his early military days he married Betty Jay, daughter of a drug store owner in Scranton; his first daughter, Betty, was born in 1913; Janet a few years (?) later). He served in Company C of some unit in the Keystone Division, from Pennsylvania, and was in many of the major battles — writing a song of which I know only a snatch: "...but he died at Chateau Thiery, in the Valley of the Marne." He was the company cook, and one of only three men in the company who were not killed or injured. To my recollection he never talked about his war experiences, except mentioning on one dark night coming across a wounded, moaning soldier and carrying him back from the front line only to find that he had died — and was a German.

After the war he came back and worked a while in Florida during the land boom, selling "bubble boats" — an inflatable boat. He was divorced from Betty Jay by this time. While in Florida, he met my mother, who was on vacation from her job as chief night operator of Chicago (a job in which family history has it that she suggested an innovation that became the telephone headset). They met again a couple years later and were married in 1933 or 35; I was born in 1937, and my sister, Linda, in 1943.

Dad was the joker in the trio, doing much of the talking between songs. Typical jokes were about his brothers (both long-time bachelors) and the ladies, and (later) occasional jokes about Karl's baldness. During their vaudeville act, and sometimes on the radio, he would work with "Minnie", a ventriloquist's dummy that they used. I don't recall him actually doing ventriloquism, so it's puzzle how they handled that on the stage.

Most of what I remember of the Landt Trio's programs is, of course, from the '40s. Every now and then I would attend one of their programs. Most of my memories from the shows are unrelated to the music. For example, I remember the way they got that wonderful opening applause that every program begins with. Not only was there an "Applause" sign; there was someone in front of the audience, holding up a giant stuffed animal. The audience had been told that it would go to the person who clapped the loudest. This was a great incentive. The trio appeared for quite a while on the "Bob Hawk Show", a quiz show sponsored by Camel cigarettes. They sang the credits and perhaps an interlude during the show. The credits song included the lines "Here's the Lemac man, here's the Lemac man, he's got five hundred dollars, lined up for this week's scholars, Bob Hawk will tell us when he hollers "Yes! Here's a Lemac now!" Lemac was "Camel" spelled backwards, and the show also had an orchestra that included guitarist Tony Gutuso — a friend of my father. Tony once gave me a closed box, saying that it contained Camels secret ingredient; inside was a piece of coarse brown twine.

When the Trio was no longer on the radio, they had a period in which they did radio commercials, and some with considerable success. My father would talk about how the uncertainty of future work made it scary; the good part was that, they would make several thousand dollars each for working a week or so. Commercials for General Electric paid very well, as did a wonderful commercial for Shell Oil: "Activated, it's activated,/ Activated, activated Shell/ Try a tankful,/ and you'll be thankful,/ thankful for the power you will have - YOU can feel the difference/ on the highway/ or any byway/try it once and you'll see what we mean/ hour after hour you will thrill to surging power/ with that activated Shell, premium gasoline." That spot ran for months played within the credits of the evening news with John Cameron Sweze (as I recall). Within the credits meant that the Trio were paid every time it ran — my memory tells me that my dad's part of this was twelve thousand dollars for the first x months, then half that for the next x months, and then a quarter of that the following x months. Another spot I recall was "They're off, they're off, they're running at Jamaica, they're off, they're off, the thoroughbreds are back again, they're off, they're off, they're running at Jamaica, the thoroughbreds are back again don't fear, this year!" But the most memorable was the fake Indian spot written by Uncle Karl: "Car-pets, from the looms of Mohawk/Car-pets for your rooms from Mohawk" etc.

As indicated elsewhere, Jack's accident put an end to the trio. But my dad had health problems too. Shortly after moving to Pound Ridge in 1948, he had a major heart attack and almost died. His heart was seriously damaged; so much so that whenever he had TB x-rays, the person analyzing the test afterward would see this oddly shaped, damaged heart and think that the person must be having a serious heart attack, as no one could live with a heart like that. But he lived 13 more years. He sometimes stopped and rested half way up stairs, but that didn't stop him. He played once in a father/son softball game at Pound Ridge School — and hit a home run. We worried constantly that he would have a heart attack during an activity like that, but it wasn't exertion that brought his end. Instead, his final heart attack came during lunch with a friend. He had been under a lot of stress; he was just completing his first real estate sale.

After his earlier heart attack, he was careful not to push himself too much; but not being able to do so bothered him. I recall when I gave him a gift of bedroom slippers (a gift I thought was especially nice; great, comfy, warm slippers) my mother noted that he didn't like to think of himself in slippers, like a sick person. By a couple years after that heart attack my mother was supporting the family with three jobs — and he needed a project. He decided to build a stone patio in front of our home on Stone Hill Road, Rt. 137. Working slowly but hard, he collected fieldstones from the nearby woods, just one or two at a time, and at almost no cost and with no help, built that patio. (He asked us kids to press pennies into the cement; the idea was that they would be conversation pieces in the years to come). By the time he finished, he had strong, hard muscles in his arms again and calluses on his hands — and a real sense of pride.

During the summers, he and my mother would sit out on the patio for hours in the evening and talk. To my memory, they never argued, not once. A couple of years later, when I was in college in the mid-50s, they sold that house and bought a 1794 colonial in the "middle of town," across from what was then Emily Shaw's Inn - a restaurant itself dating back to colonial days. That was when he got into his small, struggling real estate business, served on the Board of Assessors, and was a Trustee of the Pound Ridge Community Church — a much loved man in the community. When he died, in 1961, the town honored him with The Good Neighbor Award; my mother had been the first recipient in the mid '50s. After his death, my mother, Lois Landt, was elected Town Clerk, using our house both as a home and an office, and remained Town Clerk until her death in 1972.

My father was especially proud of a phrase he originated when they moved into the 1794 colonial. He referred to his real estate office as being "in the heart of the hamlet." Both my parents were honored by the town naming a new road, Landt Lane, in their honor. They are buried in a little plot in the old town cemetery. That hilly site is near the Pound Ridge Town House, from which town business is now conducted, and just down the road from the heart of the hamlet.