Although known for years among jazz musicians from coast to coast, Billy Krechmer was hardly remembered by anyone outside of Philadelphia when he passed away on March 11, 2002, at the age of 92. Krechmer was born in 1910 in Millville, NJ, by the banks of the Maurice River near Union Lake. He studied music at the Curtis Institute and started performing professionally in 1926. During the late '20s and much of the 1930s he worked in bands led by Herb Gordon, Red Nichols, and Ted Lewis, touring the U.S. and Europe before settling down in Philadelphia, where he racked up many hours of experience as clarinetist in a burlesque house and in the orchestra pits of the ~Earl and ~Mastbaum theaters.
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