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JERSEY

JERSEY; Sinatra's First, Freed at Last

Bayonne - THE most valuable object the late Frank Mane ever owned spent decades in a jumbled drawer in the living room of his apartment here -- a heavy 78-r.p.m. disc of "Our Love" that he recorded in 1939, filed casually among newspaper clippings, sheet music, letters and other mementos from his long career as a musician. In the unlikely event that a listener couldn't recognize the unmistakable voice of the singer, Mr. Mane wrote the name on the label in his spidery black hand: "by Frank Sinatra."

The two Franks knew each other from WAAT, a small Jersey City radio station where they sometimes performed on live broadcasts. Mr. Mane was older, an alto sax player who had a car and lived in Bayonne. Sinatra was a newlywed, living on Audubon Avenue in Jersey City, which was on Mr. Mane's way home from the radio station. Both were veterans of the local nightclub circuit, and both were eager for the brighter lights elsewhere.

In March 1939, Mr. Mane had his eye on a job with Clyde Lucas and his California Dons, and he booked some studio time across the river in Manhattan to make an audition record. He assembled a 10-piece band and was rehearsing at the Sicilian Club in Bayonne when Sinatra showed up. "He said, 'Cheech, could I go to New York with you and sing with the band?' " said Mary Mane, recalling the way her husband always told the story. Mr. Mane died at 94 in 1998, just a few months after Sinatra. "So my Frank said, 'Sure, why not?' "

The band recorded four songs, including Rimsky-Korsakov's breakneck "Flight of the Bumblebee," an ideal showcase, Mr. Mane thought, for his lightning virtuosity on the saxophone. They still had some time left, so Sinatra stepped to the microphone and started a song that took its melody from Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" -- the first time he had ever sung solo in a recording studio:

Our love, I feel it everywhere,

Our love is like an evening prayer.

"You can tell it's him," Mrs. Mane said as the song played on a portable tape deck, filling the small kitchen of the rented apartment where she and her husband moved in 1969. "His phrasing is the same."

The record has finally left the living-room drawer and is now at Guernsey's, the New York auction house that has sold items from the estates of John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley and Mickey Mantle. It will be auctioned in early December.

"Will it go for $20,000, or $200,000, or some multiple of that? God only knows," said Arlan Ettinger, Guernsey's president. "What's so unique here is that it's the one and only first recording. With most early recordings, there are multiple copies. Something may have come out on an obscure label and only 20 have survived and are in collectors' hands, but that's 19 more than Mrs. Mane's."

Mr. Mane did get the job with Clyde Lucas and spent the next three years on the road, but he wearied of the travel and returned home to Bayonne, where for the next half-century he led his own more modest bands at ballrooms and nightclubs, weddings and dinner dances. He was still playing when he was 93, and his foot was too swollen to get a black shoe on it, Mrs. Mane said. He wore slippers instead, and put black rubbers on them, and went to the job on a cane.

Just a few months after recording "Our Love" with Mr. Mane, Frank Sinatra was singing with Harry James and saying goodbye to Hudson County. The two Franks didn't see each other again until 1979, when Sinatra convened a reunion in Atlantic City of some of his old musician friends from his days apprenticing in New Jersey.

"Every casino he played at after that, we were his guests, V.I.P.," said Mrs. Mane, pointing to an autographed picture of Sinatra among the dozens of photos that make the living-room wall a collage of her husband's career.

Shortly after the reunion, Mr. Mane made a cassette copy of "Our Love" and sent it to Sinatra, who hadn't heard it in 40 years. A 1980 thank-you letter from Sinatra hung for years on Mrs. Mane's wall and will be auctioned along with the record.

Mr. Mane "liked to play the recording for his friends," said Robert Mandelbaum, a friend of the couple who helped Mrs. Mane arrange for the auction. "He understood its significance, but he never tried to capitalize on it. He wasn't like that."

Mrs. Mane is 84 now, gregarious and quick to laugh. "There was always music here," she said, sweeping her arm across her apartment, where she lives alone, on Social Security. "Since he's gone, there's none."

But on a gray, soggy afternoon, "Our Love" was playing one more time. "That's my Frank," she said, her ear tuning first not to the voice that everyone else hears, but to the alto sax. "He had the warmest sound. Everybody told him that."

JERSEY E-mail: jersey@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section NJ, Page 14 of the National edition with the headline: JERSEY; Sinatra's First, Freed at Last. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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