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made his pronouncement: “Mr. Gaudio, your son can finish high school anytime. An opportunity like this comes once in a lifetime. Let him go.” Bob prevailed.
    I didn’t.
    He wrote “Sherry.” I only learned it. And back in the hot summer of my discontent, I couldn’t even talk my parents into taking me home in time to watch the Four Seasons do “Rag Doll” on Sullivan.
    “You’ll get over it,” my dad said. “It’s no big deal.”
    “Yeah, no big deal,” I said, but I never got over it. For me, the Four Seasons style was life changing. For my folks, it was just little Paul obsessed.
    Meanwhile, the summer cottage party scene was in full swing, and my parents weren’t about to cut it short. That Saturday night my folks were invited up to Bill Maloney’s place. Bill, who became a Superior Court Justice, had an outdoor sauna.Because Thunder Bay had a large Finnish population, saunas were a staple of the party scene. In fact, I was awakened at midnight by Bill himself, who insisted I join the party and bring my ukulele. Bill knew I could strum in the style of George Formby, the English music hall star whom George Harrison claimed as an influence. When I cleared the cobwebs from my head and got to the sauna, the liquor was flowing and, in no time flat, my parents were going pretty good to “Mr. Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now.” Bill and I had written special lyrics to “I’m Henry the Eighth I Am.” Our parody was about Sulo the Steam Bath Man and included the line “every sauna was a Satana.” I was especially proud of that line because “Satana” was a Finnish word that meant devil, as in “a devil of a good sauna.”
    Well, it was a devil of a good party—so good that our host, the Honorable Justice William Maloney, scooped up a dipper of boiling hot water and instead of pouring it on the hot rocks, poured it down his bathing trunks, scalding, if you will,
his
rocks. He was immediately rushed to the hospital. The next night, though, while the Seasons were singing “Rag Doll” on Sullivan, Maloney was back partying at his outdoor sauna—and so were the Shaffers.

    Once in a great while we would escape the deep freeze and vacation in warmer parts of the world. A most memorable trip unfolded in the Bahamas. We went to Nassau and stayed at the Royal Victoria Hotel. My dad, of course, was eager to hear jazz and discovered a club on the wrong side of the tracks. He took me and Mom to hear a hip revue where a big band wailed on “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” complete with a smokin’ Hammond B3 organist. Nassau’d gone funky, and I soaked it all in.
    The next day Dad spotted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by the pool. The great leader was in matching shirt-and-bathing-suit cabana attire. My father approached him and said, “My family and I greatly admire you and would be honored if we could take your picture.”
    “With pleasure,” said Dr. King.
    Dad snapped the photo. We all shook hands and went to the lounge chairs. A few minutes later, Dr. King entered the pool from the deep end while I entered from the shallow. Just like that, the dozen or so vacationers, white people all, who were in the pool suddenly got out, as if the water had been contaminated. Dr. King and I stayed in and swam for the next twenty minutes or so.
    When I got out, my father took me aside and said, “We’re changing hotels. I’m not staying anywhere the guests display this kind of racist behavior.”
    An hour later we checked out and headed for the Nassau Beach Hotel, a little outside of town. There we were given a lovely room with an ocean view. The next morning we all went for a swim. This time we ran into Harry Belafonte who, together with his daughter Shari, was about to take a dip. “May we have a photo, Mr. Belafonte,” said Dad, “for the
kin-der?”
    “Of course,” said the singer, who often sang in Yiddish. “For the
kin-der.”
    Decades later I was musical director for a charity concert produced by Joseph Papp.