Manny Baer

Born in 1886, the only child of George Baer (1828-1892) and Emma Reinacht Baer (1857-1921) he studied piano with Rafael Joseffy and Paolo Gallico. His mother had remarried Alexander Hartman when he was in middle school years. He married Henrietta Knopp in 1909 and began to work for Hugo Riesenfeld and Paramount Pictures in the late 'teens, becoming Riesenfeld's (who was music director at Paramount) assistant. He traveled with films and conducted the Paramount Orchestra for their premieres composing appropriate scores as background. Some of the Paramount films he worked with were The Covered Wagon and The Vanishing American. When sound developed in the late twenties he wrote several scores for films including Marriage By Contract and With Byrd at the South Pole. At this time he also had founded the Olympia Theater Orchestra in Miami, Florida. During the 30s he elected not to move his family to California to continue film composing and instead began to work in Max Fleischer's studio in New York where he synchronized the music for the cartoons which were created: Out of the Inkwell, Betty Boop and Popeye. He retired from active work in music during World War II in order to spend more time with his family and to manage real estate investments. He had four children: Gladys, Alfred, Marjorie and Eugene. He died in 1970 at 84. His wife survived him by four years.