A Remembrance by Tom Jones

Wow.  Tommy Jones.  I remember him.  Skinny kid with a big nose and stooped shoulders.  Sort of agitato, if you know what I mean.  Yes, I remember this small album. It was part Texas University but more the U. S. Army, when Harvey was at Fort Bliss in El Paso and I was in the Counter Intelligence Corps in Baltimore.

I wrote the lyric to HELLO, MY TOWN when I was still in a heavy weapons infantry unit in California waiting to be shipped to Korea.  It was about Austin and I sent it to Harvey who was finishing his senior year.  As I remember, he had it printed in the campus magazine and also wrote a lovely melody for it.  It was just a spontaneous emotion for both of us.  Despite the success of our one college musical, we neither of us thought of ourselves as writers or composers.

However, when Harvey graduated and was also drafted, he proved to be so invaluable to his commanding officer with his artwork and his fancy lettering of helmets and facilities that he was pulled from his artillery training and put in charge of the camp's movie theatre where he arranged for the showing of instructional plus entertainment movies and painted his latrine signs.  He found he had lots of time on his hands and also, fortuitously, a piano backstage.

And thus it was that we began to write songs by long distance mail.  I would mail him lyrics.  (I don't think we ever did a music first song until TRY TO REMEMBER many years later.)  Harvey would "set" the lyrics to music.  Then he would get friends - either army buddies or their wives and girlfriends - to go with him to a little recording studio in El Paso to make a 78 rpm record to mail to me.  Fade out/fade in: I went into the army first so I got out first.  I went to New York, had a brief splash of success with a comedy act I wrote and directed for Tom Poston and Gerry Matthews, followed by an equally brief flop when we put the act in a chic New York supper club.  Licking my wounds, I went back to my hometown in Texas, and resumed the long distance writing with Harvey. Some of the songs were funny (or so we thought) and we began to create a comedy revue to be called PORTFOLIO, which was to be our introduction to New York as a writing team.

I waited for Harvey to be discharged, then we met up in Fort Worth, where we boarded a Greyhound bus to Auburn Alabama, where Word Baker (who had directed the college revue HIPSY-BOO) was teaching.  We showed him the stuff we had written; he agreed to direct it; we continued on to New York, and Word joined us (along with his pregnant wife and two children) in September of 1955. And that's how the whole thing got started.

We didn't have a recording of THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE so, at Christmas time, John Schak (Harvey’s long-time assistant) got the cast (who sang it in the show) and recorded it with Harvey at the piano.  As for the photo of Harvey, I think it was from University of Texas days but it may have been early New York.  When Harvey worked for NBC television he dressed up everyday to go to Brooklyn where, at the huge sound stage, he did his art work for the live television shows.  He used to tell amusing stories about ongoing arguments about billing where Harvey was painting and re-painting the credit logo which often went, still wet, on the screen when the issue was at the last minute resolved. And as I now recall, we also didn't have a recording of FRESHMAN SONG (which was also in PORTFOLIO REVUE) so John must have used the occasion to make a Christmas gift for Harvey.

— Tom (the artist formerly known as Tommy)