re: UGA broadcaster Larry Munson has passed away

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As a high school senior in Minneapolis, Munson was, by his own account, a “decent” piano player who loved jazz. He was in class when the phone call came. The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, in town and scheduled to play 28 shows over the next week, had lost its regular piano player to illness.

“I had no idea how they got my name,” Munson once recalled. “I couldn’t believe they were interested in me.”

Soon, he found himself onstage with one of the most heralded groups of the big band era. The lead singer was a skinny kid from Hoboken, N.J. named Frank Sinatra.

“The women went crazy over Frank,” said Munson, who played every show with Sinatra for the princely sum of $31 per night. “I had never seen anything like it in my life.”

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