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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My Personal Journey Back in Time, January 2, 2007
Rather than watching those traditional parades on television during the morning of New Year's day, I instead spent a very pleasant couple of hours returning to the wondrous days of my youth. It happens that I entered this world only a scant six months before the Copacabana made its own debut in October 1940. However, even by my late teens I had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to frequent a nightclub some two hundred miles distant from my home in rural upstate New York. What we did have here, starting in the early 50's, was television, and that first opened to a cloistered twelve-year-old that wondrous, glorious world of show business. The faces of Jerry Lester, Peter Lind Hayes, Sid Caesar, Vivian Blaine, Martin and Lewis, Jimmy Durante, the young Eddie Fisher and so many others - fixtures on television in its infancy - were all there in this profusely illustrated volume. All those stars I was watching on television as a kid, when they were not before the cameras, were appearing at one time or another at the Copa. For someone like me, who still wistfully dwells in that decade of the 50's, these were all my old friends!
At first glance one would receive the impression that this is primarily a picture book, a miniature coffee table book, as it were. However, the often lengthy and always insightful captions deliver a thorough history of this New York City institution, starting with its conception and tracing the path to its ultimate demise, as the times and popular tastes changed. While the history of the Copa's first decade contains many names unfamiliar to most of us, those in its artistic and financial management, still many others are well known. Some performers appearing at the venue during the 1940's had already achieved fame in the movies, even vaudeville, while others like June Allyson and Joanne Dru, plucked from the Copa chorus line, would later make their mark in Hollywood.
I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the entertainment business in this country during a golden age. The original Copacabana for some four decades provided a venue for the best and most revered talent of the day to display their wares, and Ms. Baggelaar most ably escorts us along the journey through those years.
Albert J. Kopec
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