He helped entertain the troops

In a small house on DuBois Avenue, Valley Stream resident Philip Bontempo, 92, gets around pretty well with his cane. His mind is still sharp, and he can recall all the Hollywood starlets and A-list entertainers he met as a musician with Bob Hope’s United Service Organizations tours during World War II — and the gravity of playing for soldiers returning with limbs missing, or who were about to ship out and might be dead weeks later.

“I used to cry, seeing some of those poor guys,” Bontempo said, recalling the bandaged and traumatized men his band would try to cheer up as they returned from the fighting.

Bontempo was 19 in 1943, when he was drafted into the Army. He was already an accomplished saxophone and clarinet player, having started when he was 14. He was first chair solo clarinetist in New York’s All-City Band under the direction of Leonard Bernstein as a teenager, and traveled the country with a touring troupe of musicians.

“I learned from older showmen,” said Bontempo, who at 16 started performing with bands that played the summer resorts in the Catskills.

Bontempo was assigned to the post band at Fort Benning, Ga. in late 1943. For the next two years, he was transferred from base to base as the bands’ needs changed. His skill level made him a commodity. “We were shuffled around like ball players,” Bontempo remembered.

He trained for deployment several times, once in preparation for D-Day, once for the Battle of the Bulge and once for the invasion of Iwo Jima. He learned how to use a bayonet, knives and jiu-jitsu, but he would never use the training — he was too valuable as a musician.

One of his assignments took him to Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., where he and his friends would watch high school boys play baseball. One boy’s batting power caught Bontempo’s eye. “He was a 17-year-old sandlot player,” he said. “We used to go watch him play on weekends … I used to say to the guys, ‘That little guy who catches and hits left-handed, he’s a monster when he hits that ball. It goes a mile!’”

The little guy was Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra.

“He was a little Italian boy,” Bontempo said. “We met him and we bought him some pizza. He liked to hear me play the clarinet. He was a small guy for a ball player, lemme tell ’ya.”