People did dress like this, in big wide lapels featuring big beautiful plaid. How that man wasn't fighting off airplanes trying to land on his collarbone is beyond me, but it certainly looks like an air strip.

There's a gratuitous amount of plaid in this book.

That's recording star Peter Nero, who's a classy guy, but the two-time Grammy award winner would probably prefer that this picture didn't resurface.

It was Nero that composed "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and the love theme from The Godfather. He played those and more while wooing Auburn.

Nero, by the way, is still performing.

Earlier in the year the star of The Fred Waring Show came to town. Waring was a television fixture in American homes from 1948 to 1954. He was "the man who taught America how to sing," and there he was playing to the children of his biggest fans.

He was an entertainment institution, an icon unto himself, playing the Memorial Coliseum in tiny Auburn in the fall of 1975. The king of choral music died in 1984, performing until the very end.

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