David had played all morning at Trebor's without a shirt, as he often did. While I fussed with the lights he went to his bag and dug out a white, cotton shirt. It wasn't just badly wrinkled, it was extremely wrinkled. So I set the lights to try to stop shadows appearing on the shirt knowing the wrinkles would all but disappear. It wasn't completely successful, but damn near. I set a bulb to blast on the wall behind David's head, hoping to create some kind of highlight ... that worked, too. Everything worked in this time period. Like Trebor's shot above, this remains my favorite photo of David. We were in fine spirits this day.

Three years were magical in St Louis, '79, '80, and '81. The bubble broke when Tom Shea died. Our spirits soared when the Ragtime community came together at the Rag Fest in June, the Wash U. Fests in November, or at the Christmas/New Years break. Everybody who was anybody in Ragtime showed up in this period, Eubie Blake, Max Morath, etc. I once talked about this with Del Sewell, about how you feel the greatness of the moment in the air, how we all could feel it, and Del said, "But, you know, George, it has to end." When it did, we all knew it had. But in those three years, Shea, Hancock, Foehner, & Roberts had all recorded LPs. Trebor could have but procrastinated, eventually doing so. Folk Ragtime went from a term that Trebor coined to a type of Ragtime music that belonged to the world.