This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.
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During this peace she'll be hearing the music of his father, singing. Thie Walter. Let's get into the story. I uh, was eleven years old when my father died. of cancer in nineteen sixty eight, and he was only fifty two and had had cancer for some fifteen years.
But I wasn't aware of that. I was a child and my mother and father made the the difficult choice not to tell we children of his illness. And he worked what were late night nocturnal hours and they decided that it would be better for him to live separate from us and he moved into an apartment on 73rd Street between 2nd and 3rd and This was in in Manhattan on the Upper East Side and It allowed him to sleep late because he would be working from six. in the evening until you know, one or two or three or four in the morning and It also allowed him the privacy and an ability to deal with being ill.
So, my relationship with my father was a very loving parent.
Well, as I grew older, and he. lived apart from us, I would visit him frequently. remember very happy times doing so, uh getting my hair cut with him, wandering through the neighborhood where everyone seemed to know him. He was very much a beloved figure in that sense, and uh he was very kind. And I'll give you a wonderful memory about that.
My mother and father, Cam and Sai, had a rule that I was not to ride my bike from. 87th Street to 73rd Street. I was about eight years old at the time and It was a rational rule because in New York City traffic was dangerous, obviously, but but I you know, was a rebellious kid and one day did exactly that, but Uh unfortunately got a flat tire just before reaching my father's apartment, and I was So standing on the street staring at my broken bike, wondering what to do, fearful of my father's reaction, you know, expecting justified and condine punishment for breaking his rule and As I was befuddled there, a young black kid I'd never met came up and. generously offered to help. He and and I, my newfound friend, dragged the bike to my father's doorstep and when my father opened the door he I introduced my new new friend and he Never said a word about the bike.
Never brought it up, just took it inside. invited us in and uh explained what had happened. He turned to my my friend and said, Well, you know, I'd really like to thank you for helping Mark and He brought us to the piano, sat us down, and Proceeded to play somewhere over the rainbow for us. Every once in a while, there comes along one of those infuriating melodies, which is so beautiful. and yet so perfectly simple that every other tune writer is disgusted with himself for not having written it.
such as somewhere over the rainbow. It was just imagine. Yeah. gift on his part. I remember that moment for the kindness of it, but He also was very humble and modest and I knew he was a pianist and I knew that he was a respected pianist.
I was not aware, however, as a child of his Stature. He was an acknowledged virtuoso, and his contemporaries on so many levels revered his talent. My father was very much a star and his career spanned fr well, his career spanned what was the the Halcyon days of the Great American Song Book to nineteen sixty eight when he passed. He knew all the greats and he knew all the titans and and bold face names of society as well because they were his audience. My father kept a mailing list.
I mean, just a f a few of them, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward. Marlon Brando, Carol Channing. Judy Holliday, a very dear, dear friend of my mother's. She actually nursed him sad nursed her sadly through her last illness. a couple of musicians that were really family were Alec Wilder and Mabel Mercer.
Mabel Mercer was an amazing Chantus who hailed from Britain and came to America in in 1938. and my father was the first pianist to accompany her. And she was also m my godmother and Around 2004, my mother pulled out a Timberland boot box that I still have. that was filled with my father's published sheet music and unpublished scores that he had written, She handed this box to me and she said, About a decade ago, I had a conversation with Michael Feinstein. amazing performer and talent who is also passionate about preserving the American popular song book and uh As Cam explained to me then, she had gotten a call from Michael around, I guess, 1995 or so.
asking her what she still had of size artistic legacy and when she told him that she had this sheet music, Michael said, Well, you should get it into the Library of Congress because if you just keep it in your closet, nobody's benefiting from it. She didn't do anything at that point. You know, other pressures of life interceded, I'm sure, and uh but she did pull it out in two thousand four and asked me to do it. My jaw dropped because I didn't even know at that point that Cy was a a composer. I had no idea of my father's stature.
I was a rock and roll kid growing up during the seventies and My mother really didn't proselytize the music.
So I decided to take an early retirement, which would allow me to do that. But it all goes back to the fact that my mother, God bless her, Out of love for my father and out of love for his artistry, retained everything. And you're listening to Mark Walter tell the story of his father's sigh. Father was only 52 when he died, a world-class musician of first-rate talent. When we come back, more of Mark Walter's story, the story of his father.
Thigh here. on our American stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we do it all from the heart of the South, Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to ouramericanstories.com. Give a little. Give a lot. That's ouramericanstories.com.
Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.
Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. member FINRA and SIPC.
Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures. Mm.
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Healthcare just got less painful. Mm-hmm. And we're back with Our American Stories and Mark Walters' story about his father's sigh. When we last left off, Mark was telling us about how he knew that his father was a pianist. but didn't know that he was a virtuoso of the American Songbook.
Let's continue with the story here again is Mark Walter. Psy had a God-given talent. There's just no. way around it. He was his own unique style and There's never been anyone like him and never since or before.
He grew up in Minneapolis, and his parents were both musicians. Raymond was a talented tenor. highly respected in the Twin Cities and Flossie, as she was nicknamed, Florence, Flossie, was a very well respected and very long-standing piano teacher in Minneapolis. Cy was unquestionably her most successful student. He acknowledged that he learned everything everything he learned about piano, knew about piano, came from her, but they weren't wealthy.
It was, you know, a very sort of middle class existence, I'm sure.
Well, in terms of size, learning how to play piano. I had always thought until a few years back that He took up the piano after initially learning how to play the cello, the bass, because of the uh liner notes that he wrote to one of his albums, A Dry Martini Please. He wrote there that he took up the piano because it had become Clear to him that it was so difficult to transport the cello on the Minneapolis bus system. remember thinking, well, you know, it's probably harder to transport a piano, but However, and this is sort of a story that reflects the amazing journey I have had. My discovery of my father's music has altered my life in a way that is wonderful.
I'm blessed with friends I never would have met. And a perfect example of that is a fellow named Bob Wood Jr., who had found the CyWalter website of. I guess about four or five years ago. called me up out of the blue, lives on the West Coast, to tell me that his father, Bob Wood Senior, was a dear friend of my father's. They knew each other in Minneapolis.
They grew up together. Bob Wood Senior was perhaps six years older than Cy. and had his own orchestra at the time and at age 19 or so he was an orchestra leader. He was approached by Cy, who was then about thirteen, wanting to join the orchestra. And Bob Wood Sr.
said to Cy, I'm sorry, Cy, I don't really need a string instrument. We've got plenty of cellos. But You know, your mother is a wonderful piano teacher. Why don't you go to to her and and ask her to teach you the piano and if if you When you learn the piano, you can be part of my orchestra. And so I said, okay, deal.
When he was ready, he came back and said, I'm ready. And Bob Wood Sr. wrote in his memoirs. He was already playing like a virtuoso at that point, and it was only three months. He had We learned how to play the piano in three months.
I now understand why people marveled at his abilities. Clearly he had the perfect environment to do it, but He also just had an amazing God-given talent. At one point I found a list of pithy quotes by different musicians over the centuries. One of them was attributed to Artatum. I shared it with my mother and when she read it, she read it aloud.
Art was attributed as saying to another pianist, listen, you come in here tomorrow night. and anything you play with your right hand, I'll play with my left hand better. And the left hand's considered this omissive, the right hand the dominant hand in piano playing, so that was quite a statement. And my mother, after reading that, looked up with pride in her face and said, and Art always acknowledged that Psy had a better left hand than he did. But he went from Minneapolis to New York in part because of his having a sort of mentorship with an American songbook great, a fellow named Johnny Green, who composed the beautiful standard Body and Soul.
Johnny Green was performing in Minneapolis. I wiggled his way into the performance backstage and introduced himself and When he came to Manhattan, to New York in 1934, Johnny Greene took him under his wing and essentially got him a job coaching a uh some aspiring singers initially and Uh helped him Me many of the then stars of the Great American Song Book Firmament. People like George and Ira Gershwin, he came to know Vernon Duke, he came to know Richard Rogers, and as he started playing in different venues, people got to know him. Fred Astaire and he had been friends, and when Astaire decided to basically sort of retire from the film industry in 1947, he decided to open up his own dance studio. To do that, he created a swing trot dance that he called the Astaire, that he purposely designed to be accessible to a new dancing student.
And he turned aside to create a song to celebrate and Publicized the dance and his launch of his new dance studios, and Sai composed what was also called. The asteroid. Yeah. The Drake Room. He didn't own it in a literal sense.
It was part of the Hotel Drake, which was torn down, oh, I guess about a decade ago now by. a developer that built this monstrosity four thirty two Park Avenue, one of the billionaire skyscrapers. But the Drake Hotel was one of the apartment hotels that was built during the early twentieth century and It was an extraordinarily elegant, classy place that catered to its guests in a way that was truly special. And I'll give you an example of that. Famous pianist.
Arthur Rubinstein. lived there and he wanted his own personal grand piano logically in his apartment and as it turned out it was too large to fit. And the Drake Hotel's elevator. The freight elevator just wouldn't accommodate it. And in a classic example of going the extra mile.
Stanley Turkle and his talented staff arranged for the city to close down Park Avenue and for Crane to. Lift Arthur Rubinstein's piano up through the window of the 20th story or something, wherever it was. It was that kind of elegant hotel. The Drake Room was opened in 1945 by Walter Riddell, who was a man about town and owned the hotel at that time. And he immediately hired, it was opened essentially for Cy because Sy and he were friends, and Sy was then.
And remained the highest paid pianist, popular pianist in New York, because he was so beloved by. His audiences by others. He was Famed for his memory, somebody could come into the Drake room that hadn't been there in years. a patron that had made a request in past years for Psy to play a particular song. And when that patron came back in, maybe five years later, Cy would immediately recognize the person and remember that song and start playing it.
He was a marvelous entertainer. I told you the catalyzing event and that that's the first time. afternoon when I was visiting my mother out in Long Island, where she lived and she pulled out my father's sheet music and told me about her conversation with Michael. At that time, I really did not know much. about this the great American songbook or the the musical genre.
that it encompasses. Talk to me about Cole Porter or George Gershwin or Richard Rogers or. I would have looked at you largely blankly. Uh So Uh it was For me, an enlightenment. That again is a gift.
From my parents. As I went through all these materials and I read the articles about my father, I came to realize that he really was at the heart. a musical era that was very, very special. And a special thanks to Mark Walter for sharing his story of his father, who was the preeminent piano accompanist and piano player. In New York City, at a time when New York City was the center of everything in American music.
And also, what a love story of a son pursuing the story of his father. all the way down. The story of Cy Walter is told by his son Mark here. and our American stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans.
It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. In football, you've got guys from everywhere. Different backgrounds, different beliefs, all of it. You don't agree on everything.
but you got each other's backs. That's how it works. And right now, off the field, hate's going up everywhere. Different communities, different ways. And Jewish communities are getting hit hard.
That's not how a team operates. The blue square is just one way of showing you've got people's backs. Go to bluesquarealliance.org, grab one, share it, be a good teammate. I'm U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
Yeah. We all get distracted when we drive. whether it's from our phones, Or are kids in the back seat bickering? But how we handle these distractions can be a matter of life. or death.
Before you get on the road for your next road trip, Please put your phones on silent. and take a mental note. to focus on driving. Paid for by Nitza. The wait is almost over.
Get ready for the NFL season with the highly anticipated 2026 NFL schedule release. Every rivalry, every rematch, and every rookie debut. with matchups locked and kickoffs confirmed. Be there for every can't miss moment. The full NFL schedule release coming in May.
Get all the details at nfl.com slash schedule release.
