Singer Tommy Dix, 101, died on Jan. 15. The native New Yorker was singing on the radio by the 1930s (nicknamed “the Boy Baritone of the Bowery”), and was a special favorite of Major Edward Bowes. He sang "Buckle Down, Winsocki" in the 1941 Broadway musical Best Foot Forward, also appearing in the film version (as well as 1943’s Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble). Dix sang his own composition, “The March of Dimes” at President Roosevelt’s 1940 birthday ball, although a training injury kept him away from active-duty service. He sang in nightclubs till 1950, when the challenge of supporting his wife and two children convinced him to go into his father’s construction business (he continued to act and sing in community theaters). His family wrote that “Tommy was a bona fide intellectual, a lover of Roman/Greek literature and history. He was so enamored with physics that in his youth, he was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Science . . . Tommy was a superb conversationalist and a kind and gentle man.”
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