Dean Martin Dedicated One Song to a Dying 9 Year Old — 16,000 People Couldn’t Hold Back Tears

Dean Martin Dedicated One Song to a Dying 9 Year Old — 16,000 People Couldn’t Hold Back Tears

Las Vegas, Nevada, June 14th, 1967, 9:38 p.m. He was in the middle of the second song when Phil Barker came to the side of the stage. Phil did not come to the side of the stage during a performance. This was understood. In 11 years of working beside Dean Martin, Phil Barker had developed the specific professional discipline of someone who understood that a performance in progress was a sealed room, that the room’s function was the performance, and that anything requiring Phil’s attention could wait until the room had finished

its function. He came to the side of the stage. He held a piece of paper. Dean was singing. His back was partially to the side entrance, but the specific peripheral awareness that 30 years of performing had produced in him registered Phil’s presence the way it registered everything that was not the audience as information arriving outside the frame of the performance to be processed without disrupting the frame.

He finished the song. The arena produced the sound that 16,000 people produce when they have received something from a stage, a sound that was different in quality from any smaller number of people, that had its own specific weight and warmth, the warmth of a very large room that has agreed to feel the same thing simultaneously.

In the gap between the applause and the next song, Dean walked to the side of the stage. Phil gave him the paper. Dean read it. He stood there for approximately 15 seconds. Then he went back to the microphone. Before I tell you what Dean Martin said into that microphone and what happened to 16,000 people when he said it, if you have ever been in a room where one person’s choice changed what every other person in the room was feeling, this channel is where those moments live. Subscribe right now.

Hit the like button. Because what happened on June 14th, 1967 in the Las Vegas Convention Center deserves to be heard by every person you know. Now, back to the stage. Dean Martin is back at the microphone. The paper is in his jacket pocket and he is about to say something. The Las Vegas Convention Center had opened in 1959.

By 1967, it had become one of the largest performance venues in Nevada, capable of hosting events that the Strip’s showrooms, intimate, close, Copa Room scaled, could not contain. Dean Martin performed there when the schedule required scale, when the demand exceeded what the Sands and the Riviera could absorb.

 June 14th, 1967 was one of those performances. 16,000 tickets had been sold across 3 weeks. The Convention Center’s floor had been configured for the concert. Rows extending from the stage outward, the specific logistics of a very large crowd in a very large room that was about to be organized around a single voice and its relationship to an orchestra.

 The woman in row J, section 14, seat 22 had purchased her ticket 6 weeks earlier. Her name was Catherine Caruso. She was 34 years old. She was from Phoenix, Arizona. She had driven to Las Vegas the previous morning with her husband, Robert, and their daughter, Emily, who was 9 years old and who had leukemia that had been diagnosed 18 months earlier and that had, over those 18 months, moved from the category of things the doctors described with cautious optimism to the category of things the doctors described carefully

and slowly, using words that Catherine had learned meant the same thing regardless of how carefully and slowly they were said. Emily had been listening to Everybody Loves Somebody since she was diagnosed. Not consistently, not every day, but in the specific way that certain pieces of music become attached to certain periods of a person’s life.

The way the music becomes the container for the period and the period fills the music with its particular weight. Emily had heard the song first in the waiting room of the oncology ward in Phoenix playing from a transistor radio that a nurse had left on the counter. She had heard it again at home and had asked her mother to find it and Catherine had found it and the record had lived on the small record player in Emily’s room since then.

 She played it in the mornings. She played it after appointments. She played it on the days when the world required more of her than a nine-year-old should be required to give. In April of 1967, Catherine Caruso had written a letter to Dean Martin. She had addressed it to his management, care of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas because she did not know a better address and because she had decided, sitting at the kitchen table at 11:00 on a Tuesday night while Emily slept, that the decision to write the letter was separable from any reasonable

expectation of its being received and that the writing was its own sufficient reason. She had described Emily. She had described the diagnosis and the 18 months and what those months had looked like and what Everybody Loves Somebody had meant during them. She had not asked for anything.

 She had simply wanted someone who had made something that mattered to know that it mattered and how and to whom in case the knowledge was of use to anyone. She had signed it, Catherine Caruso, Phoenix, Arizona. She had not expected a response. Phil Barker had received the letter in May. He received a great deal of correspondence addressed to Dean Martin at the Sands.

He had developed across 11 years the specific reading practice that large volumes of correspondence required. The ability to identify in the first paragraph of a letter whether the letter’s content was routine, required attention, or required Dean. He had read the first paragraph of Catherine Caruso’s letter and had gone to find Dean.

Dean had read it sitting in the dressing room of the Sands Hotel on a Wednesday afternoon. He had read it twice. He had said, “Is there a way to find out where they are?” Phil had said, “I can try.” Phil had written back to the return address on the envelope. Catherine had written back within four days.

 The correspondence had established that Emily Caruso was stable enough to travel. That the family planned to be in Las Vegas in June for reasons unrelated to Dean Martin’s schedule and that Emily had no idea any of this was happening. Phil had arranged for three tickets to the June 14th Convention Center performance. The tickets had been delivered to the Caruso family’s motel without a note.

 Catherine had recognized the tickets as coming from somewhere specific. She had not told Emily where they were from. Dean had known about Emily since May. He had known about her in the specific way he knew about the things that arrived through Phil. Not announced, not made into anything larger than what it was.

 Simply present in his awareness as a thing that would be addressed at the right time in the right way. The right time arrived at 9:38 p.m. on June 14th when Phil came to the side of the stage. The piece of paper said, “Row J, section 14, seat 22.” Section 14 was to the left of the stage and back 12 rows. From the microphone, if you knew where to look, you could find it.

 Dean went back to the microphone. He looked at the 16,000 people. He said, “I’m going to take a minute here.” The arena produced the specific quality of stillness that very large crowds produce when a performer steps out of the performance and speaks directly to them, not as an audience, but as people. He said, “There’s a little girl here tonight. Her name is Emily.

 She’s 9 years old. She came from Phoenix with her family.” He paused. “She’s been sick,” he said, “and she’s been listening to one of my songs, and I found out about it a couple of months ago.” He looked at section 14. “Emily,” he said, “this one is for you, and I’m going to sing it like I know you’re listening because I know you’re listening.

” What happened in the 16,000 people in the moment after he said that was not a single thing. It was the specific simultaneous experience of 16,000 individuals receiving the same information and each of them processing it through the particular lens of who they were and what they had brought into the room that evening. The things they had brought without knowing they had brought them.

 The things that an ordinary Wednesday evening carries that are not visible until something gives them permission to become visible. What they had brought included children of their own, children they had lost, illnesses they were carrying, illnesses that people they loved were carrying. The specific fear that attaches to the word sick when it is said about a child and the specific tenderness that attaches to the image of a 9-year-old girl from Phoenix who had been listening to a song.

 The thing that happened to 16,000 people was not unified, but it rhymed. Dean Martin did not say anything else. He nodded to the orchestra. He sang, Everybody Loves Somebody. He had sung this song hundreds of times. He had sung it on his television show and in his Las Vegas residences and in concert halls across the country. He had recorded it in 1964 and it had gone to number one and it had become in the three years since the specific kind of song that is associated with a performer so completely that the song and the performer can no longer be

separated in the listener’s mind. The song that was his, that meant him, that was what people meant when they said his name in the context of music. He sang it differently on June 14th, 1967. Not in its tempo or its arrangement or its lyrics. These were the same. The difference was in something that performance contains that is not in its technical elements.

 The thing that happens when a song is sung in the specific direction of a specific person for a specific reason. He sang it looking at section 14. Not performing the looking. Looking. The orchestra played behind him with the specific quality of musicians who understand that they are accompanying something that is larger than the song and who adjust accordingly, pulling slightly back, giving the voice more room than the arrangement usually provided.

 The voice itself carried what voices carry when the person speaking has put something real into the syllables rather than the performance of something real. The distinction is audible to any audience willing to listen for it and 16,000 people are composed of a very large number of individuals who know how to listen for it. They listened for it. They found it.

In row J, section 14, seat 22, Emily Caruso was 9 years old. She had her mother’s hand. She had not been told about the letter. She had not known that Dean Martin knew her name or that Dean Martin knew about the song. She had come to the concert because her mother had said they were going and she had put on her dress and come.

 When Dean Martin said her name into the microphone in front of 16,000 people, she did not immediately understand that he meant her. Then her mother pressed her hand. Emily Caruso looked at the stage. Dean Martin was looking at section 14. She was 9 years old and sick and from Phoenix and she had been listening to Everybody Loves Somebody for 18 months and a man on a stage in Las Vegas was singing it while looking at her.

 She held her mother’s hand. The song lasted 3 minutes and 40 seconds. Emily Caruso did not let go of her mother’s hand for any of it. The 16,000 people who were in the Las Vegas Convention Center on June 14th, 1967 have been described in the various accounts that exist of that evening in different ways by different people who were there.

 A woman named Patricia Hendricks, who was sitting in row R, section 11, has said that she became aware that something was happening when the people in the rows ahead of her began to change in a way she could see from behind but not describe precisely. A slight shifting, a slight settling as though the audience had collectively exhaled and not yet decided to inhale.

 A man named George Tarquinio, who was in the standing section at the back, has said that he looked around at some point during the song and realized that the people near him were not behaving like a concert audience. They were behaving like people in a church or at a graveside. Not the formal behavior of those places, but the specific interior quality of people who have been given permission to feel something privately in a public space.

A journalist named Richard Aldeman, who was there covering another story and who happened to have a notebook, wrote the following in his notes, which were found in his papers decades later and have been cited by researchers studying the history of Las Vegas performance. The singing stopped being singing around the second verse.

I don’t know how else to put that. It became something else. Whatever he was thinking about while he sang it, it wasn’t the performance. What all these accounts have in common is an inability to fully describe what the 16,000 people experienced. They describe it in terms of what it was not. It was not the ordinary concert experience.

 It was not what the evening had been before the announcement. It was not something that any of them had anticipated when they bought their tickets. What it was, stated plainly, was this: a man who sang for a living stopped singing for everyone and sang for one person. And 16,000 people felt what it means to be the one person a song is meant for.

After the concert, Phil Barker brought the Caruso family backstage. Emily was in her dress, holding her mother’s hand, tired from the drive and the evening, and the specific tiredness of being 9 years old and sick in a way that most 9-year-olds are not. Dean Martin was in his dressing room.

 He crouched down when Emily came in. The specific crouch of a tall man bringing himself to eye level with a child. Not a performance of the gesture, but the actual gesture. He said, “You’re Emily.” She said, “Yes.” He said, “I heard you’ve been listening to my song.” She said, “Every day.” He was quiet for a moment.

 He said, “You know what I think about when I sing that song?” She shook her head. I think about people who make other people less alone, he said. That’s what the song is about. People who make you feel less alone. Emily looked at him. She said, it does that. Dean looked at her. He said, I know.

 He reached into the pocket of his jacket. He took out the program from the evening, the printed concert program with the set list and his photograph on the cover. He wrote something on it. He gave it to Emily. She held it in both hands. He said, you come back and see me when you’re feeling better. Emily said, okay.

 Catherine Caruso, standing at the door of the dressing room, did not say anything. The Caruso family drove back to Phoenix the following morning. Emily lived for seven more months. She died in January of 1968 in Phoenix with her parents beside her. She was 9 years old. Catherine Caruso kept the concert program. She kept it the way people keep the specific objects that have accumulated the specific weight of specific moments.

 Not displayed, not stored carelessly, but kept in the particular way of something that is both too important to look at frequently and too important not to keep. She gave an interview in 1991 to a researcher working on a history of Las Vegas entertainment. She talked about the letter and the tickets and the evening of June 14th, 1967 and the dressing room.

 The researcher asked her what Dean had written on the program. She was quiet for a moment. She said, he wrote for Emily who makes someone less alone, Dean. She paused. Emily read it in the car on the way back. Catherine said, she read it several times. She didn’t say anything about it. She was quiet. She didn’t need to. That was always how Emily was.

 She received things completely and quietly. The researcher asked, “Did you ever contact Mr. Martin after Emily died?” Catherine said, “I wrote him a letter. I told him what had happened. I told him about the seven months. I told him that she played the record until she couldn’t anymore, and that the last time she asked me to put it on was about 2 weeks before she died.” She paused.

 “He sent a card,” she said. “Two weeks after I wrote. A card with three sentences.” The researcher asked what the sentences said. Catherine was quiet for a long time. She said, “He said he was sorry. He said she had given him something that night that he hadn’t expected to receive, and he said he would sing it differently from now on because of her.

” She looked at the researcher. “I believe he meant that,” she said. “I had heard him sing it before that night, on the radio and on the record. I heard him sing it after, once, on the television.” She paused. “It was different. I couldn’t have told you how, exactly, but it was different.” The concert program is in a box in Catherine Caruso’s home in Phoenix. She is in her late 80s now.

 She does not play the record anymore. She does not need to. The record is inside her the way things get inside people when they play them every day for 18 months. Not as something separate that requires a turntable, but as something continuous, something that has become part of the interior landscape, the way certain places and voices become part of it.

 Everybody loves somebody for Emily, who makes someone less alone. 16,000 people on a Wednesday evening in June of 1967, and one 9-year-old girl from Phoenix who held her mother’s hand for 3 minutes and 40 seconds and never let go. That is the whole of it. Now, if this story reached you the way it should, subscribe to this channel because this is what we do here.

 We find the moments that prove who someone really was when the cameras stopped recording what they were supposed to record. Hit the like button. It costs nothing and it means everything to the people who make this. Share this story with someone who needs to hear that one ordinary act of attention can change what 16,000 people feel simultaneously. Leave a comment.

Tell us, has a song ever found you at exactly the right moment? We read every word. And hit the notification bell because the next story is waiting and it matters. Some things are too true to let go of. This is one of them. There is one more piece that belongs in this accounting. The journalist Richard Aldeman, whose notebook contained the line, “The singing stopped being singing around the second verse.” kept the notebook.

 He went on to cover entertainment in Las Vegas for 11 more years. In his final column before retirement in 1978, he listed the five moments across his career that he believed had been genuinely unrepeatable. Moments that could not be recreated or engineered or planned for that had arrived because of the specific coincidence of specific people in a specific room at a specific time.

June 14th, 1967 was the first on the list. He wrote, “I have seen many performances in this city. I have seen singers and comedians and illusionists and all the varieties of entertainment that Las Vegas produces in quantity. Most of what I have seen was excellent. Some of it was extraordinary. One evening was something I do not have a professional category for.

 A man sang a song for a 9-year-old girl from Phoenix who was dying. He sang it looking at her for 3 minutes and 40 seconds. 16,000 people sat in the specific silence of people who have been given permission to feel what they actually feel. I wrote in my notebook that the singing stopped being singing. I meant that it became something else, something that the word singing is too small to contain.

 I have been trying to name it ever since. I have not found the name. The name is probably not available in the vocabulary of entertainment journalism. The name probably belongs to some other vocabulary, the vocabulary of the things that people do for each other when they are being what they are actually capable of being without the performance of it.

 He did not name Dean Martin in the paragraph. He didn’t need to. The people who were in the Las Vegas Convention Center on June 14th, 1967 did not need the name. The 16,000 people who could not hold back tears knew exactly what they had witnessed. One man, one song, one child, 3 minutes and 40 seconds, and the specific quality of 16,000 people simultaneously discovering that they were capable of feeling something they had not known they had brought into the room. That is what happened.

 That is what Dean Martin did when no one told him to do it and no script required it and no camera was specifically pointed at the child in row J, section 14, seat 22. He looked at her. He sang for her. He made her less alone for 3 minutes and 40 seconds in a room of 16,000 people, every single one of whom was also in that moment less alone.

That is the whole of it. That is still the whole of it. That will always be the whole of it.