For musician Sam Sturm,  it all started with a bugle in third grade. 

“I was in Oakland Military Academy, and I taught myself to play the bugle, which is very similar to blowing a trumpet. When my uncle came back from serving in the Marines, he heard me play, and he hooked me up with his teacher in Paterson, New Jersey.”

Sam was born in the Bronx on May 5, 1935. His father passed away when Sam was only five years old, so his mom moved the two of them to Paterson to be with her family. 

Moving to Paterson was fortuitous for the young boy because that’s where he started music lessons. 

“I just wanted to play the trumpet. I never wanted to do anything else…as you’re growing up, sometimes you don’t want to go out and play ball. And you don’t want to practice all the time. But I stayed with it. And it worked out really well,” Sturm recalled. “The more I did it, the more I wanted to do it.” 

It also worked out that he had his mother’s unconditional support for a music career. 

“When it finally started taking off, she thought it was pretty good. She used to come to where we played. She was very supportive,” said Sam. 

Besides the trumpet, Sam also played the flugelhorn.

Trumpet lessons with Ernie Di Falco, encouraged the young man to play even more. One night around 1948, comedian Lou Costello, who also called Paterson his home, gave a performance in that town’s Fabian Theatre. “My teacher was in the pit orchestra,” explained Sam, “and he invited me to sit next to him. I realized I liked what these guys were doing, and I got the feeling that I’d like to do this.” 

The Borscht Belt 

and beyond

In 1953, at age 18, Sam arrived in Sullivan County, taking a job at the Hotel Nemerson in South Fallsburg. 

“I realized I had never played a show or anything, but that was like a training session with new musicians to learn how to do this kind of stuff.” 

He played there for two seasons. At the end of the 1954 season, Sam was offered a position in a rhumba band at Grossinger’s Hotel. After playing there for a couple of months, he headed down to New York City and the old Roseland Ballroom, which had been converted into a union hall. A friend of his, trumpeter Johnny Bello, told him to audition for the lead trumpet position on the Ted Lewis show. 

“And the next thing I know,” said Sam, “I was on a Pullman car in January 1955 heading to Miami Beach, where we opened at the Saxony Hotel. It was January, in the south, in the sun. That was something new to me.” 

The Mardi Gras in New Orleans was next, followed by the Chase Hotel in St. Louis, the famous Beverly Hills Country Club in Covington, Kentucky, back to New York, then the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Reno, and the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles at the same time that Disneyland first opened. 

Some side jobs followed here and there, and in 1957, Sam got hired for six weeks with Benny Goodman. 

“I really don’t know how that happened. I met this guy in the street and he told me that Benny was looking for a third trumpet player, so I went there and got the job…and then we did the Kate Smith Show live.” 

For the rest of the year, Sam played the Milton Berle show at the Latin Quarter Nightclub, where the orchestra was mandated to laugh at certain jokes. “Milt did three shows a night on Saturday,” said Sam, “and you gotta realize it’s pretty hard on the third show to laugh at his jokes.”

Marriage, the army and around the world

In 1958 Sam found time to get married to Linda Goldman. Unfortunately for the newlyweds, he also got drafted, and while he hated the basic training at Fort Dix, things got better when he went to the Band Training Unit, where he was picked to audition for the All-Army Show, rehearsing for eight weeks at Fort Jay on Governor’s Island in New York City. 

“We traveled all over the world, every army base in the world, and there were a lot of army bases, and a couple of Navy bases.” 

After his discharge in March of 1960, Sam got some side gigs including those at Grossinger’s, the Playhouse on the Mall in Paramus, NJ, a month at the restaurant in the basement of the Empire State Building with Les and Larry Elgart, the Broadway show “Superman” and The Tavern on the Green. 

Then came the jobs on the cruise ships, one of them being the SS Rotterdam, which, Sam remembered, was the first western cruise ship to ever visit China. 

“We docked in Shanghai. And it was unbelievable, it’s like another world…” That cruise, a memorable highlight in Sam’s life, lasted 90 days and took him around the world to visit 22 ports in 19 countries. He also performed in Hawaii, in Aruba with the June Valli Show, and other Caribbean venues. “I love traveling, and I loved every place I went.”

Back to the Catskills

From 1979 to 1984, Sam played The Brown’s Hotel, which at the time, was seasonal, opening in April and closing in October. But that didn’t deter Sam. 

“You always find someplace to work, even in the winter.” When he first came to the Catskills on a regular basis, there was, he says, “the Concord, Grossinger’s and the Nevele, and that was it for hotels open all year round. … The mountains were great. My son Daniel was born here, my son Andrew was born here, my daughter Jessica was born in Brooklyn.” 

And Sam continued to make music in the Catskills, taking a long-term job at the Villa Roma beginning in 1985.

For several years at Christmas, Sam worked at the Concord Hotel. His colleagues were four of the people previously profiled in this series, Larry Ravdin, Frank Petrocelli, Loren “Jake” Lentz and Patti Greco Sunshine. Like Frank Petrocelli, one of Sam’s best-loved performers was Joanne Engel. “She was just a wonderful person.” 

Other favorites? “I loved playing for Tony Bennett, how could you not?” Sam also played with Lou Rawls, and “Sammy Davis Jr. took us on a one-week road trip to the mid-south. The good thing about singers? The good ones have really good music. So, you really like playing it.” 

An exciting life

One of Sam’s favorite memories was also a funny one. He was playing a club in Lake Tahoe called the Stateline. One side of the club was in California and the other side was in Nevada. And there was actually a line going down the center of the room. “So, what would happen,” explained Sam, “was at two o’clock, the California side would close, and everybody would walk across to the Nevada side where they could drink like 24 hours a day.” 

Sam officially retired from his most recent gig at the Villa Roma, where Sam said Marty Passante and Paul Carlucci “made me feel like part of the family.”

According to Sam’s son, Dan, his father was also a very popular member of the Villa Roma gym’s staff and a lot of people knew him from there. 

In 1992, Sam’s wife Linda passed away from cancer. He remarried in 2001, and together with his new wife Kathy and stepson Jonathan, relocated from Jeffersonville to Newburgh to be nearer to Kathy’s grandchildren. 

Following retirement from the Villa Roma, Sam continued to perform “only in my living room.” It was a conscious choice to slow down. “When I got to be 80 years old, I made a decision that I wasn’t going to play that much anymore, because I wanted to save all the air I would need when I got older,” he joked. “…every once in a while. I’ll pick up [the trumpet] and just start playing something, whatever comes to my head.”

Sam Sturm never thought he’d live most of his life in Sullivan County, but he admitted “it worked out pretty good.” Quite an understatement from a man who traveled the world, worked with the likes of Sammy Kaye, Buddy Morrow, Les and Larry Elgart, Richard Maltby Sr., Tony Bennett, Lou Rawls and Sammy Davis Jr., and performed on Broadway, television, and major resorts across the country including those in the Catskills. 

And he was glad that live music was the standard when he was actively involved in performing, because, as he passionately affirmed, “I love playing music!”