Song Started It, And Music’S Still Going

When Bob Domes proposed, he didn’t buy roses and chocolates. He wrote a song.

It was early spring 1949. Bob knew Shirley Clement would be in the audience when his quartet, “The Collegians,” played at Santa Monica City College. He asked his close friend Joe McCarthy to sing the song, which Bob appropriately titled “Shirley.”

The song won Shirley Clement’s heart.

Dick Lane, a well-known character actor and friend of Shirley’s father, heard about the happy couple. He mentioned them to friends who produced “Bride and Groom,” a radio program popular in those pre-television days.

“All of a sudden, here we were invited to be on `Bride and Groom,”’ Shirley said, chuckling.

On March 24, 1950, Bob and Shirley were interviewed on radio. A limousine drove them two blocks from the radio station to the Country Church of Hollywood where Bob’s second cousin pronounced them man and wife. Joe was best man. Joe’s girlfriend Margie, Shirley’s best friend, was bridesmaid.

Show sponsors gave the Domes a vacuum cleaner, a gas range, a cocker spaniel puppy they called Freddie the Freeloader, and double wedding rings. The radio also announced that the Domes would spend their honeymoon at Timberline Lodge in Oregon.

“We were really jazzed about that,” Bob said.

Instead, the newlyweds ended up at the Shattuck Hotel on the main drag in Berkeley.

On a recent morning, sipping coffee in Hope, Idaho, Bob and Shirley chuckled about the misadventures of their honeymoon and their lives since then.

Through the good times and the bad, Bob has had his music.

“We always had pianos,” Shirley said. “Sometimes two or three. Bob couldn’t live without one.”

When Bob’s quartet disbanded, he formed another one, called “The Ambassadors.” They played in nightclubs around Los Angeles until 1958, when Bob went to work as a film technician, eventually spending 29 years at Deluxe, the film lab owned by 20th Century Fox.

In 1979, long after their children Patti and Rob were launched, Bob and Shirley decided to follow Shirley’s parents to Hope. The Domes took over Pend Oreille Landing, a resort that Lloyd and Bert Clement had operated since the early 1960s.

For the next nine years, Bob continued to spend four months a year in Los Angeles. “You have to eat in winter, too,” he said.

Now the resort is gone and the Domes have officially retired. But not from music.

Bob plays his piano daily, “anywhere from five minutes to five hours.”

“He’s a rare find,” said Ed Brown, a professional drummer who moved to Sandpoint in 1994. “He’s as good as any of the jazz musicians I played with in L.A.” When Brown and Tom Walton organized the Swing Street Big Band in fall 1998, they nabbed Bob Domes for the piano.

Does Bob’s absorption with music bother Shirley?

“I do my thing, like tap dancing,” she said. “And I’m always doing a little project, like painting. I started life with Bob as a piano widow, and now he’s with the Big Band, I’m a piano widow again. But if he’s happy, I’m happy.”

The deep love, affection and good humor that prompted the song “Shirley” remain.

“We’re definitely in a minority,” Bob said, referring to the enduring strength of their 49 years of marriage. “We could file for affirmative action.”

The 18-piece Swing Street Big Band with vocalist Vicki Bullock plays tonight at Sandpoint Elks Club from 8 to 11. Dress is semiformal. Tickets are $15/single; $25/couple. For last minute ticket information, call 265-5353.