Lynn Baumel, 82; Sang In Latin Combo In Miami
Bill Schenley
Photos:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/obituaries/story/772256.html
FROM: The Miami Herald ~
By Elinor J. Brecher
In the 1950s, vocalist Lynn Baumel dazzled Miami
club-goers with her bandleader husband's Latin combo
-- a vision of postwar glamour in body-hugging satin
gowns.
She gladly left the bandstand to raise kids, then took up
an entirely different musical genre. Cloaked in
Medieval-style velvet, she played recorder and viola da
gamba with an Early Music ensemble at Renaissance
fairs.
On Nov. 5, Baumel died of brain cancer at her Kendall
home. A 1926 New Year's Day baby born Evelyn
Saurbier in Chicago Heights, Ill., she was 82.
The catalyst for her transformation from Midwestern
German-Lutheran steelworker's daughter to
maraca-shaking Miami mambo queen: Marvin ''Rey''
Baumel, her husband of 59 years.
The bongo-playing Baumel led a five-piece band
called Rey Mambo and, with partner Dick Sterling,
did stand-up comedy at Miami's Playboy Club.
Lynn and Marvin met just after World War II when she
was a USO entertainer and he was attached to the War
Department's Special Services Training Unit:
a clearinghouse for show business-affiliated military
personnel.
The place was Daytona Beach, ''when I was meeting
actors at the train station and getting them settled in,''
Rey said. ``Entertainment was so important and at times
heartbreaking, when we did the [hospital] ward shows.''
Lynn was on her way to Miami, where the Baumels had
been living since leaving Coney Island in 1938. Rey said
he got ``a weekend gig that turned out to be a steady job
at the Pan American Hotel's Latin Room. I was 21.''
When a promoter pressed him for a catchy band name,
Bamuel grabbed the title of a Latin record:
Rey del Mambo.
''Who knew it would be my name for over 15 years?'' he
said. 'My poor Lynn had to go through life as
`Mrs. Mambo.' ''
They married in 1948 at the old Unitarian Church near
Vizcaya. Then Lynn joined the band.
When her husband, fluent in Spanish, offered to teach her
how to sing in Spanish and play maracas, she told him '
`You're crazy.' But I taught her phonetically and she had
perfect pronunciation.''
With Latin rhythms all the rage, the band had steady
work at Miami Beach hotels like the Seville, the Aztec and
the Thunderbird, and clubs like Copa City. They also had
gigs in Aruba and Jamaica.
Edwin Saurbier of Ocala, one of Lynn's two younger
brothers, recalls that his sister left their small town 30
miles south of Chicago to join an Andrews Sisters-style
trio right after high school, and performed on radio
amateur hours.
''She always loved music,'' he said, and played bassoon
in the Bloom Township High School band. ``. . . It was
a continuance of her dreams when she met Rey.''
His sister was ''always a beautiful woman,'' Saurbier said.
``I'd pick her up at the airport and all the men were looking
at her.''
In 1955, Lynn gave birth to daughter Andrea.
''A few times I was backstage on a little cot,'' Andrea
Baumel Mustelier, of Miami, recalls. Her parents ``would
sleep when they got home at 5 a.m. and be out until all
hours. We'd open gifts Christmas Eve and New Year's
Eve, we'd never see them, because they were working.''
She quit show business when son Lonny followed in
1960.
But Lynn never left music behind. She sang in the Unitarian
Church choir, then took up the recorder in the 1960s.
For 25 years, she met weekly with a recorder group,
Andrea said, and taught the wind instrument to children
in Liberty City.
''There was always music and always laughter in our house,''
she added. ``My parents almost never fought. Anytime
anybody would get upset, my father would say something
funny and she would crack up. She laughed at his jokes to
the very end.''
Jone Vaughn was one-third of an Early Music trio called
Tapestry that formed in the mid-1990s, now its only
surviving member. Lynn played the viola da gamba:
a cello-like stringed instrument dating to the 1400s.
''I was always intrigued with her life,'' Vaughn said,
``how she and a girlfriend took off and performed with
the USO. She was absolutely gorgeous -- she looked like
Ava Gardner -- she remained beautiful her whole life, from
within.''
She joined the American Recorder Society's Miami
chapter when it was ''flailing,'' Vaughn said, ``and she
kept it together . . . She was a doer and a super organizer.
She was always the one who brought the prettiest
tablecloth, and she'd make sure the cookies were on
a good plate.''
Two years ago, Lynn Baumel suffered a grand mal
seizure that eventually led to a brain-tumor diagnosis.
She underwent aggressive treatments, to no avail.
''She rarely complained,'' Rey said, though her illness was
``an ordeal. What bothered her the most was the inability
to put a sentence together.''
She died quietly, in home hospice care, at 1:17 a.m.
Nov. 5. In addition to her husband, daughter, son and
brother Edwin, Lynn Baumel is survived by brother Marvin,
of Ocala.
A memorial service is planned.