Los Angeles Times, 27 January 1957

Music Sounds Note in Life of La Puentean

La Puente – Rooms filled with instruments, compositions, pictures of composers and musicians reflect the musical career of one of the city’s most colorful personalities, Benedict Bantly.

The house at 15802 E Temple Street has become so crowded with his collection that Bantly is remodelling the attic to serve as an extra music room.

Of all his possessions, the 79 year-old musician is proudest of a framed diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music at Leipzig, Germany, where he studied from 1902 to 1906.

Started in Canada

Bantly’s musical training began more than 70 years ago when he was a boy in Victoria, British Columbia.  He and his father, brother and a sister played at dancing clubs in Victoria.

At one performance, Bantly, who was also a photographer, arrived with his violin case, only to discover that instead of the instrument he had a camera inside.

The La Puentean met his first wife while studying in Germany.  She was a vocalist and he wrote many compositions for her.

“This was a particularly mushy one,” he chuckled, thumbing through one of the many scores that fill a bookcase.

Played for Actors

During the early days of silent motion pictures, Bantly played mood music for such actors as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin.

In 1922 Bantly joined the faculty of La Puente High School and was head of the music department there for 30 years.  One of his special productions was the Ben Sing Laundry act put on for the annual vaudeville.

For this number he used bamboo rakes as music stands and several authentic Chinese instruments.  He still has a Chinese violin and a botak, or mandolin, from Malaya.

Has  Dozen Violins

Of more than a dozen violins, his favorite is a model of an Amati which he played in the Leipzig Gewandhaus where Mendelssohn first conducted.

Among his smaller instruments is a 100-year-old yellow clarinet made of box wood, with only seven keys, which his father brought from Germany.  He has three others of the Albert system that date from the 80s, a mandola, similar to the present viola, and old metronomes.

Of his five pianos the oldest is a three and one-half octave piano built in Paris in 1809.  Beside a modern electric organ, which he said shocked him at first because it sounded synthetic, he has an 1875 Reed Organ.

Bantly was concertmaster for Harold Scott’s San Gabriel Valley Symphony Orchestra for 10 years.  He organized the Rotary Orchestral Club in Victoria, and returns there for a visit each year.

Practiced Diligently

Proving that there is no substitute for practice, Bantly produced a record of his practice week in his early days which showed a total of 45 hours spent on the piano, organ or violin.

Bantly, whose philosophy is “if you can’t laugh it off, it’s too bad,” believes that the best method for staying young is to keep busy.

He practices what he preaches.  He still teaches music and has organized a local Rotary music group.