Word for Word: Norby Walters

Norby Walters opened the Bel Air club in 1953, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on Sutter Ave. at Junius Street. A regular at Latin dances at the Palladium in Manhattan, Walters owned a series of clubs and restaurants that catered to Brooklyn's large postwar Jewish community. He later became a notable Hollywood agent.

My interest in the music began as an early be-bopper in the '40s. As a kid in school. A lot of people were into the big swing bands, and I was into the early be-bop sounds in the early '40s -- Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, people like that. And I moved from the be-bop sound into the Afro-Cuban sound, which was the sound of Machito. Dizzy Gillespie got very much enthralled with Latin music and I kinda followed him along right to that as my own tastes changed.

The mamboniks of '49 and '51 was a big gang of Jewish boys and girls from all boroughs who used to converge on the Palladium on Wednesday nights. In 1949 I was 17 years old, all the young people, well hundreds or literally thousands were mamboniks. A mambonik was a trombenik who loved mambo. "Trombenik" being a yiddishe word for a bum. A knockaround guy.

When did you first hear that term?

I guess around 1950 or '51. We considered ourselves mamboniks. It was a badge of who we were, you know? There was really thousands of people into it, but there were a couple hundred core faces. You'd see them all the time. Wherever the dances were. And when I opened up the club, hundreds of them came to my club. I kinda knew everybody, I was part of that clique.

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