Spoiler : Born in Boston, Massachusetts 2/14/1920; died 9/17/2005 from complications of Alzheimer's disease at the Lillian Booth Actor's Home in Englewood, New Jersey. He began his career playing violin in area Boston clubs before switching to the double bass in the late 1930s, then went on to be a versatile bassist that played with jazz greats of the 1940s and 1950s, and he also had a career as a symphonic player. He was a suvivor of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Boston nightclub fire that claimed 492 lives. He moved to New York in 1943, playing with jazz legends such as Eddie Condon, tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, clarinetist Benny Goodman, pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines, and backed vocalists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. In the middle to late 1940s he performed with the New York Symphony Orchestra, mostly under direction of Leonard Bernstein. In the late 1940s, he began performing with Louis Armstrong, and toured with Armstrong's All Stars band in the middle 1950s. He performed in movie soundtracks of Funny Girl (1968) and Silent Movie (1976); Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and was a performer with the Sydney Symphony in Australia during the 1970s.