Tatum’s Town: The Story of Jazz in Toledo, Ohio (1915-1985)

Author Robert Dietsche is a Toledo born jazz historian and jazz critic who has resided in the Portland, Oregon area most of his life. Tatum’s Town is the jazz history of his hometown, Toledo, Ohio, a city well known for producing and supporting great jazz. Well-researched and heavily illustrated with photographs of Toledo’s jazz greats and jazz hotspots, Tatum’s Town offers an exciting look at Toledo’s jazz heritage from 1915 through the 1970s.

Written with a sense of rhythm and finesse, Dietsche vividly describes Toledo’s infamous after hour joints, speakeasies, and dive bars, as well as the town’s classy night clubs, cocktail lounges, ballrooms, and supper clubs. Dietsche tells the lost history of the town’s brothels, gaming halls, and jute joints, Toledo’s notorious underside, where Toledo’s jazz was born. Toledo’s great jazz venues, the Trianon Ballroom, Centennial Terrace, Chateau La France, Kim Wa Low’s, Fifi’s, Aku-Aku and Rusty’s Jazz Caf are fondly recalled.

The book provides a history of Toledo’s most famous jazz personalities including Candy Johnson, El Meyers, Buddy Sullivan, Gene Parker, Bill Takas, Jimmy Harrison, and the Queen of Toledo Jazz, Margaret Rusty Monroe. The lives of the author’s talented Toledo high school friends, the jazz greats Arv Garrison, Charlie Mewhort, and Bob White, as well as the future movie and book critic, Fred Lutz, are chronicled. Dietsche details the life of the greatest jazz piano player who ever lived, the renowned Toledoan, Art Tatum. This jazz narrative makes it quite clear why Toledo is Tatum’s town.

Dietsche is author of Jump Town: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942-1957. Dietsche owned and operated downtown Portland’s legendary used record store, Django Record Company, from 1977 to 1999.