We’ve been going through Omaha Public Library’s storage room lately, the equivalent of dusty trunks in the attic, and finding some interesting odds and ends.
One of those odds (odd seems the right word…) is some rather grimy, tattered sheet music entitled “The Dream of Life,” lyric by “Con” T’Lam [sic]; music by Eugene Platzmann. It was published by The Independent Music Publishing Co. in Omaha in 1915.
Looking up Eugene Platzmann, I discovered at http://www.grainger.de/music/composers/platzmanne.html that “Eugene Platzmann … is another of those little known composers known only from sheet music catalogues and their published works. He was a composer, songwriter and arranger of popular music, active between 1904 and 1936 for a number of New York publishers” (and one Omaha publisher, it seems). A little research (at the library, of course) in Ancestry Library Edition revealed that Eugene was a musician born in 1876 in Germany, who in 1917 was working for the Broadway Music Corporation in New York. He seems to have composed or arranged many popular songs (yes, do a Google search), and the New York city directory lists him as a composer in 1915. The 1930 census, however, shows him working as a grocery store clerk. Life takes its toll….
Anyway, I was still curious about the Independent Music Publishing Co. I found nothing about it in either our Omaha historical card file or in our clippings files. So naturally I went to Google Books, where I found an ad for this company on p. 214 of William Bloss McCourtie’s Where and How to Sell Manuscripts: A Directory for Writers (1919).
Looking up that address in the 1920 Omaha city directory (there was no directory printed in 1919), I find, lo and behold, it is the address of—Cornelius Lam! However, his occupation was given as bookkeeper for Paxton & Gallagher Co. The Independent Music Pub. Co. was listed at the same address in How to Sell Manuscripts, by James Irving (1920), also available through Google Books (how I love Google Books!).
The 1920 census shows Cornelius, a 29-year-old unmarried bookkeeper for a grocery business (that would be Paxton & Gallagher), living at 850 S. 23rd St. with his mother, Christena Hillebrand, who was a “machine operator” for a wholesale dry goods business. His career as a music publisher seems to have been short, and the city directories indicate that he did not quit his day job. I wonder how many "snappy and original" ballads he published that he did not have to write himself? According to the Catalogue of Copyright Entries published by the Library of Congress Copyright Office, he did copyright at least two other pieces of music in 1915, “The Little Schoolhouse on the Hill” and “It’s Back to Tennessee for Mine,” both with lyrics by Lam and music by Luther A. Clark. At the time the city directory listed him as a clerk for Western Electric Co., living at 1047 S. 22rd St. (with his mother).
I did find some interesting tidbits about Luther A. Clark. He was apparently a composer-for-hire in Thomaston, Maine, who in 1937 gave the world the benefit of his songwriting expertise in a little pamphlet entitled How To Write A Song Poem (In Three Complete Lessons). Read and enjoy….
Back to Con Lam…..
By 1923 the directory listed him as the manager for the Independent Stamp Co. (he obviously liked the “independent” theme….as any boy who lives with his mother for most of his life probably does) which dealt in foreign postage stamps at 1716 S. 27th St. (Lam’s residence). The 1930 census showed that he now owned the house at 1716 S. 27th St. (which, I note from the Douglas Co. tax assessor’s website, was built in 1920 and has not ever been remodeled), and although he was still living with his mother, HE was now the head of the household, and listed as a stamp broker who worked on his own account. His obituary (14 July 1978 in the Omaha World Herald) mentions a sister, Ada, but no other relatives; he apparently never married.
So ends this brief history of what seems to have been the only music publishing company active (if active is not too strong a word) in Omaha in the early 1900s. Lam was clearly a man who dreamed of a destiny higher than clerking in a store—though he seems to have had a practical streak as well, judging from his not quite deathless lyrics:
We dream of life by day and night,/Of Kings and Queens we’d love to meet./’Mid palace and gardens we would roam,/And call them ours and ‘home sweet home’/But after all, quite sweet is love, /And life the sweetest of the sweet./ Oh! Give to me the joys of love! Life’s what you make it after all!
