Wayne Snowsill died on the 21st of April 2018, aged 79. This was my eulogy to him at his funeral service.
Wayne Snowsill was an extremely handsome young man. He was a couple of years older than me, but my peer group, whenever we were at places where teenagers congregated, were always envious of the fact that the girls we wanted to attract, were inevitably gathering around Wayne.
And I so it came as a complete surprise to me when I went into Snowsill’s Pharmacy one Friday night and instead of one those goddesses that normally serve you from behind a chemist shop counter, Wayne came out from the dispensary to attend to me and the first words he said were “They tell me you play the guitar”.
I was surprised, and flattered even, that he knew who I was, and even more surprised that he knew I played the guitar.
“Do you know Melvin Carroll?” he wanted to know. I did by reputation, but not personally. Melvin was another good looking young man about town. Black curly hair, with a DA at the back.
Thinking about it, Melvin was probably Masterton’s answer to The Fonz although the Fonz hadn’t been invented at the time. It was some years later that TV arrived in New Zealand and some years after that that Happy Days was screened.
Wayne said Melvin was coming around to his parents place the following afternoon to learn to play the guitar and would I like to come around and help to teach him. Of course I readily accepted the invitation; to be able to rub shoulders with these two titans of the teenage scene was quite unexpected.
The Snowsill family home was an art-deco style house at the bottom of Cole Street, next to the Times-Age building and Wayne and I spent most of the Saturday afternoon endeavouring to teach Melvin to play the guitar.
Melvin left just before I did and as we were walking out the gate Wayne said to me, “Do you think Melvin will ever be able to play the guitar? I told him no, I didn’t think he had it in him. Less than twelve months later Melvin invited me to join a rock band he was forming called the Drifters with him as the leader and lead guitar.
Melvin was now a better guitarist than Wayne and I would ever be!
Wayne and Melvin were both members of the Riversdale Surf Lifesaving Club and they insisted I join. I was as skinny as a rake and not much of a swimmer, but I joined anyway. Wayne was a good swimmer and had an admirable physique. Despite Riversdale being a notoriously safe beach he would fearlessly dive into the surf and rescue young ladies in bikinis who from my observation were in no danger of drowning.
Our form of transport around the beach was in Wayne’s open-top Model A Ford.
Wayne didn’t join Melvin’s band. He was already in a band with his brother Jack – and Clive and Colin Thorne and Darcy Christianson. Jack and Wayne both very accomplished musicians, able to play a number of different instruments; their talent I suspect inherited from their parents. Wayne’s Mum Ivy was a superb pianist and I have seen a photo of his father Bill playing the clarinet in a symphony orchestra.
There were two other siblings. Janice who as good looking in the feminine sense as her older brother - and young Gary, who was the sort of person whose photo you might see in a college yearbook with the caption underneath “Most likely to succeed.” Indeed, he went on to become a very successful businessman, domiciled on the Gold Coast of Australia. His daughter Emma is a world renowned triathlete and an Olympic and Commonwealth Games gold medallist.
Wane however did play with The Drifters when his band had a night off. He and I became vocalists in the band, Wayne could harmonise well and we sang mainly songs by the Everly Brothers, popular at the time. I’ve often thought that it was just as well the Everly Brothers never heard us, but we can’t have been that bad. The Manager of the Regent theatre in Palmerston North saw us at a function in Masterton one night and asked us if we would come over to his theatre whenever he had a teenage movie screening and sing to the young audience at half time. The pay was good, so went over whenever requested. The Palmerston manager was also the manager of the Regent in Pahiatua so we sang there occasionally as well. We performed in the gap between the front of the stage and the curtain which wasn’t very wide and we were in constant danger of falling into the orchestra pit.
One night Wayne peered beyond the spotlight at the enthusiastic young lasses in the front rows and told me later that they were only about thirteen or fourteen years old. Well you can’t win them all.
Next we tried our hand at comedy. We worked up a 45 minute routine that mainly involved miming some of Stan Freberg’s parodies. Specifically The Great Pretender, The Banana Boat Song and The Dear John and Marsha Letter.
We also wrote and sang some parody’s of our own. My Old Man’s a Butcher was based on Lonny Donegan’s My Old Man’s a Dustman.
We’re the Boys from Camp Wairarapa – this was a story about a local boy-scout troop who go camping up north and happen upon some girl-guides skinning dipping in a lake. It was based on Johnny Horton’s The Battle of New Orleans.
We took Elvis Presley’s song Are You Lonesome Tonight and made it Are You Moansome Tonight.
We even wrote a song about Riversdale Beach.
(Sing with ukelele:)
Show me the way to go home,
Said the girl from Riversdale Beach
I lost my togs about an hour ago
and they've gone out of my reach
Now I've got nothing on,
But seaweed and some foam
So bring me a page of the old Times-Age*
And show me the way to go home.
(Well it wasn't going to win any Grammy's)
We did these shows all around the Wairarapa and sometimes beyond. We played at New Zealand’s only licensed restaurant at the time, The Zodiac in Wellington, and the manager wanted us to perform there every Friday and Saturday night, but we felt the constant travel was going to be too much of an effort.
Our biggest audience was when we performed before two and a half thousand people at a conference at the Rotorua convention centre.
We used to charge twelve pounds for the act; six pounds each, usually cash - so tax free.
(I’m hoping the statute of limitations for tax evasion is now well passed.) Sometimes we would perform our act at cabarets, private parties and dances three times over a weekend. Perhaps once on a Friday night; and a couple of times on a Saturday. Therefore we earned eighteen pounds each over a weekend.
We were both working for our fathers at the time, Wayne at the chemist shop and me at the butcher’s shop. Coincidentally, our fathers were both paying us eighteen pounds a week before tax. We explained to them that we could earn eighteen pounds for a few hours work over the weekend and people would ply us with free drinks and applaud us when we finished. But for the 40 or fifty hours a week we spent working for them from Monday to Friday we got the same money, less the tax, and neither free drinks nor applause.
Suffice it to say, they were unmoved.
It was about then that Wayne and I concluded “there’s no business like show business.”
You're never going to believe this, but Wayne and I once started up a "Virgins Club." We even put an ad in the paper disclosing the meeting place as being in the telephone box in Roberts Road, however about 20 young ladies of whom we were acquainted assured us they were eligible and wanted to attend, so we had to find a bigger venue. Wayne was the secretary/treasurer and I was the patron. At our second meeting we had an outstanding guest speaker who gave a dissertation on the importance of chastity. Members were accepted on a neither confirm nor deny basis, but we eventually had to disband the club due to a paucity of suitable applicants.
Virgins clubs, bikini-clad young bathers and skinny dipping girl-guides. There’s a disturbing pattern emerging here. Fortunately the me/too movement was sixty years in the future.
It’s interesting having a chemist as a friend. On one occasion he came up with some tablets that were the precursor I think to no-doz pills. These will keep us awake and on the mark doing our performances he assured me.
We were involved in a concert in the Regent theatre in Carterton one Friday night. The packet advised one tablet at a time but we took a couple of pills each and nearly jumped out of our skins on stage. He rang me next day; “Did you sleep alright?’ he wanted to know. I hadn’t slept at all; my heart was still racing furiously. So we decided to give them a miss.
Another time he came over to shop with a miracle pill that would give you a fake tan; no need to risk going out in the sun. He hadn’t tried them himself, I reckon I was a guinea pig for Snowsill’s Pharmacy. It was a round orange pill that looked for all the world like a Jaffa. “Don’t chew it,” he said, “swallow it whole.” That was an effort in itself, try swallowing a Jaffa whole. I nearly choked. Two days later I turned bright orange.
The only person I know still using these pills is Donald Trump.
But all good things must come to an end. Stan Freberg didn’t produce any more new songs and Wayne and I ran out of ideas for parodies. Anyway most Wairarapa people had seen the show at least once - and so we put it to bed.
Marriage and families were the order of the day. Wayne was the best man at my wedding and godfather to our eldest son, then he got married himself and had two sons of which he was extremely proud. We both joined the Masterton Rotary Club to do our bit for the community and both even dabbled in religion. Wayne studied education for ministry for five years - and to cap that off, he married a priest!
A very loving marriage has ensued.
He took communion at home with Elizabeth a few weeks ago and then just after that, communion with Bishop Justin. “Communion twice in a fortnight,” he said “I must be going up in the world.”
A few years ago we decided maybe we could bring the old comedy act out of the closet and start performing again. A great way, we thought, to supplement our pensions.
Six pounds each in 1960 must have inflated to $100 in the 21st century, surely? That meant potentially $300 each over a weekend which could put us in the lap of luxury.
Technology had moved apace in the intervening years. We used to have a portable record player hidden at the back of the stage. We then had to carefully put the needle arm in the minute groove between each track on a Stan Freberg long-playing record which was precarious, but this was now a thing of the past. Now the tracks could be downloaded on to an iPad or an iPhone and plugged into the amplifier and fired up at the touch of a button.
And so we were back performing.
We played before seemingly enthusiastic audiences at a couple of Probus Clubs, at a 70th - and then an 80th birthday of two friends, at a retirement village, at a Wairarapa College class reunion, and even a wedding. We got the message out there that we were back on the road again and waited for the phone to ring.
But it never rang. It was a quite sobering to find out that we were passed our use-by date.
They say old comedians never die, they just fade away.
Well that’s not entirely true. One died last Saturday.
Rest in peace old friend.
(*Local newspaper.)
