Larry Kent was a swing band leader in 1941. He and his orchestra were the first band whose music was transmitted on a trans-oceanic broadcast that year. Larry's hot band played the night away in the penthouse of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.
Typical of traveling orchestras, the band wrapped up its performance just before dawn and headed down for breakfast before a warm day's sleep on the magical island of Oahu. The boys in the band wouldn't get much sleep that day!
Just before dawn, Larry told me years later in a high rise office in Woodland Hills, weird noises began to happen. Distant popping sounds screamed into roaring blasts. The American territory of Hawaii had been attacked, by the Empire of Japan.
Horrific booms, siren cries and car horns blasted into the first light of that Sunday morning.
After the war, and returning from his military service, Larry Kent found work in Hollywood as a theatrical agent. Later, he became a master of licensing and marketing. He helped invent the NFL Properties, gave the Super Bowl its Roman numerals and licensed images of the famous cowboy Roy Rogers.
Larry Kent is long gone. Let us hope that the lives of our American servicemen and women, and the civilians who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 won't be soon forgotten.
Jerry Fecht
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