The name Benjamin Paskowitz is not an instantly recognizable one, nor is it a name immediately associated with the swing-era in America when dance orchestras and big bands dominated popular music and youth culture.

In the years between the two world wars, swing music was all the rage and it provided the soundtrack for angst-filled youth—of all races—whose repressed, pent-up energy and raging hormones found an outlet for self expression on the dance floors of America in the form of the latest dance crazes: the Balboa, the Collegiate Shag (Foxtrot), and the Lindy Hop (Jitterbug).

Galveston, Texas, was no exception, and on any given Saturday night, throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, local young people would flock to the spot on the Island where they could spend an evening in front of the bandstand moving and shaking to the big band sounds of a local outfit known as the Merrymakers.

At the helm of what was often a 10-piece orchestra, with baton in hand, was the debonair department store shoe salesman-turned-bandleader, Benjamin Paskowitz.

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” sang Ivie Anderson of Duke Ellington’s Orchestra in 1932, when their seminal swing-era recording was released; now considered the anthem of those who embraced the iconic art form and sub-culture of swing at the height of its popularity in America.

Born into a musical family in 1904 in Wharton, Texas, Benjamin (“Benny” to his friends) spent his formative years on the Island where he was raised in a tight-knit Jewish family who immigrated to the United States from Russia, in 1888, to pursue the American dream.

Paskowitz attended Ball High School in Galveston, and it is where he developed his musical chops in a household as the youngest of five siblings. Benjamin, who worked in the family run department store, Paskowitz Dry Goods Company (located downtown at 23rd Street and Avenue D), was raised in an environment where business acuity, as well as musical creativity, was equally encouraged by the family patriarchs, Max and Sarah Paskowitz.

The first mention of Paskowitz can be found in the December 28, 1922, edition of the Galveston Daily News. There, 18-year-old Benny Paskowitz is described as “lending violin accompaniment to popular songs sung by Harry Rollins that won applause from the guests at the annual Christmas Cabaret presented by the Galveston Ad Club held at Gaido's Café.”

“Benny, his older brother, Louis, and their father, Max, all played the violin. They were all self-taught,” recalled Benny’s niece, Sylvia Price, aged 96, who now resides in Los Angeles.

“I always hoped that Uncle Benny and the Merrymakers would play at my [Ball High School] graduation party but by that time, he had already moved away to California.”

Benny Paskowitz and swing music both came of age at the height of the Great Depression in America. By January 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States, unemployment had reached an all-time high of 24.9 percent. Virtually every bank in the nation was closed when Roosevelt famously reassured the American public they had “nothing to fear but fear itself.”

During those uncertain times, Paskowitz and the Merrymakers were still able to bring their “Gulf Coast Swing” to local nightclubs, hotels, college campuses, Mardi Gras balls, and later to USO canteens. His steadily growing notoriety enabled him to expand his reach and establish himself in Houston and other Texas towns where he was able to book high-profile engagements thereby, increasing his marketability.

“Uncle Benny and his brother, Louis, both had a good head for business,” Price reminisced. “His father Max, not so much. I remember Benny as being tall and charismatic and with a good head of hair. He was very popular with the local young people, and the Merrymakers played many formal dances on the Island.”

On October 15, 1937, Houston’s Rice Institute (now Rice University) campus publication, The Thresher, announced that Benny Paskowitz and his orchestra, the Merrymakers, would perform at a formal ball, to be held at the Houston Club, sponsored by the Rice Engineering Society.

“Benny and the lads have played for many Rice student affairs and have gained much popularity among Rice students,” The Thresher reported, “and Paskowitz and his orchestra will be swinging the latest tunes.”

Swing music, however, was not just limited to the United States. This organic American art form was exported to Europe in the 1930s, where it was embraced by Germany’s own rebellious, angst-filled adolescents known as “swing kids.” This was the era when Germany was coping with its own economic meltdown, mass unemployment, and bank closures.

National Socialism (the Nazi Party) was on the rise, and Germany’s newly appointed Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, considered American swing degenerate “race music,” and it was made verboten to the German public. In 1942, the leaders of these social clubs who fostered American swing music and its culture were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported to concentration camps.

Galveston’s annual Mardi Gras celebration of 1941 would be the last one held on the Island until it was reinstated in 1985. This would also be the Merrymakers’ last opportunity to perform at the annual ball held at the Hotel Galvez.

On December 7 of the same year, the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was attacked by the Imperial Navy of Japan thereby ending the United States’ foreign policy of neutrality and officially bringing the country into WWII. Four days later, Nazi Germany also declared war on the U.S. and her/our constitutional federal republic form of government.

Paskowitz and the Merrymakers now turned their attention to the war effort and performed regularly for members of the armed forces on the Island’s USO canteens.

When WWII ended, and the victorious GIs returned after defeating fascism in Europe and the imperial tyranny of Japan, they were greeted with a new American musical art form as they disembarked from the troop ships that carried them home. This strange new genre of music that was the off spring of swing had evolved in their absence and was now sweeping the nation; it was called “Bebop.”

Bebop was a more intricate and faster form of jazz with multiple chord changes within each composition and with ample space for each musician to take a solo and improvise—at will—and in the moment. These new ensembles that played this music more suitable for listening than for dancing, were also scaled down to bare minimums of three to five member combos at most. And, unfortunately for Paskowitz, the need for a conductor or a figurehead at the forefront was rendered obsolete.

Houston DJ and music historian, Ronnie Renfrow, believes that changing tastes in music, the advent of modern jazz, and economic factors led to the rise of Bebop and the demise of swing music in America.

“Bebop music was a true organic art form,” Renfrow asserted. “These were usually small bands within existing big bands. All the swing bands had streamed down versions of their big bands with their best players who were now able to stretch out and be more adventurous with their improvisations.” Renfrow also explained how “bottom line economics” also played an important role in the demise of swing bands in America. “It was a matter of money, period,”

Renfrow said precipitously. “For one, it’s hard to pay all the members of a big band and take them on the road compared to a smaller Bebop ensemble.”

By 1947, two years after the end of WWII, the swing era in America unceremoniously came to an end, and most of the working big dance orchestras disbanded. Some older swing-era musicians embraced the new musical trend, and some did not.

Benny Paskowitz, who was now 43 years of age, and a recent transplant to San Diego, chose not to engage with this younger generation of musicians who were part of a music movement and sub culture that would eventually come to be known as the “Beat Generation.”

Instead, Paskowitz, who was nurturing his second marriage and raising a new family, chose the stability and the familiarity of working for his two brother-in-laws in their retail clothing outlet, Davidson’s Men’s Clothiers of San Diego.

In 1970, at age 66, however, Paskowitz was diagnosed with cancer, and his family and friends witnessed a once vibrant and vivacious man succumb to the debilitating disease.

The memory of Benny Paskowitz and his contribution to Texas music and Gulf Coast Swing has all but faded away into obscurity. Only old, faded newspaper clippings and stories told by aging family members continue the legacy of the debonair shoe salesman-turned-bandleader, who led the Merrymakers, to the delight of his adoring fans.

And for a brief moment in history and to those who knew of the tall, charismatic bandleader, Benny Paskowitz will always be Galveston’s undisputed—and unsung—sultan of swing.

Ivan Koop Kuper is a freelance writer, webcaster, and drummer with an interest in music, media, history, crime, popular culture - and the human condition. Koop is available for comment at: koopkuper@gmail.com. Follow him online on Twitter: @koopkuper