Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
As I put together the collection of old news gems for ‘This Week in Toledo’ each week, I find a story every once in a while that triggers my curiosity and, as an old news guy, I am driven to find out more.
That was the case this week with the 1927 story of Fritzi Bigelow, a young teenage musician who dared to play and dance to the “Black Bottom” on the wing of an airplane as it soared over the Maumee River and the nearby shores of Lake Erie.
It was a pretty daring feat for a 16-year-old who had never flown on an airplane before, but she did it and as I was to learn, the stunt was part of a promotional opportunity for her family's band, which played weekly at the Bayshore Inn at Harborview — one of many venues where the Bigelow family performed locally while making a name for themselves in the 1920s.
The Bowling Green-based family had been organized by musician John Marcus Bigelow, who gave each of his children a fine instrument, and they were instructed to learn and play it without lessons, and to help teach their other siblings to play. After nearly 10 years, there were eight children, five girls and three boys, and all of them could play a variety of instruments with skill.
Fritzi, the youngest of the group, was born in 1911, and by the age of 14 she was so talented, she was already getting a taste of Vaudeville. In 1925, she was picked as the new tuba player at the Trianon Ballroom in Toledo with the Vincent Lopez Debutantes. That gig also meant traveling with the band on the Keith Theater circuit throughout the region.
Within a year, she was back home, playing at the popular Bayshore Inn with her brother, Jack, and her other siblings. As entertainers, the family was also eager to find good promotional opportunities and in July of 1927, they got one — a chance to take their music into the skies.
This particular publicity stunt was not just a winner for the Bigelow's but also a good one for the folks who ran the United Cigar Company, a flying cigar store that flew around the nation selling cigars, giving airplane rides and performing thrilling barnstorming feats.
The man in charge of the flying cigar store was the famous Colonel Roscoe Turner, who had purchased it from Igor Sikorsky.
It was a large Sikorsky S-29 biplane that could accommodate 16 passengers, and on July 21, 1927, the passenger list included five of the Bigelow siblings who took their seats on the edge of a wing with their musical instruments in hand. As the big plane circled the Maumee River area, the Bigelow's played their music from the balcony of the birds to the surprise and amazement of the spectators below.
As the plane floated over the river, the band played the “Black Bottom,” a popular jazz song from 1920s. That's when young and tiny Virginia Bigelow, nicknamed Fritzi, set her big tuba aside and on a dare from her brother Jack, she said “let 'er go.”
The band played and she began dancing between the wings of the big plane. We are not sure for how long, but long enough to win the bet with brother and secure a headline in the Toledo News Bee the next morning that said “Fritzi Shows Birds How To Do Black Bottom.”
For the Bigelow family, the promotional stunt earned Fritzi and her family a place in local lore and the hearts of their growing legion of fans.
In the years after she sang with the birds, Fritzi stayed aloft professionally. She left high school and traveled with Jack's band, headquartered in Chicago. They spent the next couple of years playing Vaudeville theaters in major cities across the nation — a thrilling life experience for a teenage girl from Wood County who is reported to have earned her reputation as a tour de force with special music and dance solos that were said to be “showstoppers.”
In 1929, that show stopped for Fritzi, who returned home to Bowling Green, finished high school and enrolled at Bowling Green State University. Surprisingly she did not study music because it was too expensive, so she studied math and French before becoming a teacher, something she had wanted to do for many years.
The lure of music was strong, though, as soon after she was on the road with two of her sisters in a small stage band, touring the South in an effort to earn the money needed to complete a music degree. Her determination must have been as focused as the day she danced on the wing of a moving airplane, because she returned to Bowling Green to complete her degree in French before earning a degree in music from The Ohio State University.
As a 25-year-old in 1936, she met fellow student John Hartman, also a music major and accomplished athlete at BGSU. It was a harmonious match as they soon married and began their teaching careers in the Toledo area. Eventually, they relocated to Bryan, Ohio and began teaching music in the public schools.
For the next six decades, Fritzi and John became strong advocates and organizers of musical events and concerts in the schools and in the wider community. Their devotion to the town and its residents did not go unrecognized.
In 1989, Fritzi was named Citizen of the Year by the Bryan Area Foundation, and the Williams County YWCA honored her as a Woman of Achievement in the Arts. Her music legacy also did not go unrewarded. In 1999, she was awarded the title "Great Lady of Jazz" by the Dixieland Jazz Festival in Sun Valley, Idaho.
At the age of 90, Fritzi Bigelow Hartman passed away, her music silenced but never forgotten as she is still remembered and revered by those who knew her in Bryan, and perhaps so, too, in Bowling Green, where the family's legend lives and where Fritzi's brother Jack would operate Bigelow's music store downtown for 30 years until 1980.
And perhaps they are also remembered out near the Bayshore Inn, where the memory of their music from a century ago still floats across the sky teaching the birds how to sing.
