In his new memoir of the conservative movement, “Upstream,” American Spectator publisher Al Regnery tells of the first time he met conservative icon Bill Buckley, who died last week at age 82.
In 1951, when Regnery’s father, Henry Regnery, was about to publish Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale,” he had the young writer as an overnight guest in his Chicago home.
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Al Regnery, who was then about 8 years old, writes that the 26-year-old Buckley was “charming, erudite, good-looking, probably had a few presents for the children, and was enormously entertaining.”
Regnery’s parents were not only accomplished musicians, but classical music purists, even sneering at Brahms. “Pop music was strictly verboten,” he writes.
When Buckley sat down at the piano, Regnery writes, “he started playing just a run-of-the-mill ‘Three Blind Mice,’ probably not much different than any child would play it. But gradually the familiar tune morphed into jazz.”
His parents “were stunned. Here was my father’s young, star author … playing this forbidden tune. On their Steinway grand, no less.”
For Regnery and his siblings, however, Buckley was “the favored guest from that day on.”
