Ingenue magazine Girl Friday To The Kingston Trio Being secratary to these three great folk singers is a glamourous job, but Charlotte Larson must be ready to type at midnight and keep her dates waiting hours. Photographed by Peter Breinig	August,1964
NOTE: place you curser over the images in the article to read the captions as they appeared in the magazine.

"Every morning when I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge on my way to the office, I feel exhilarated. I wonder what's going to happen today? Most jobs are routine. Not many girls on their way to work do so with the feeling that this day is going to be different from the others. But I do. That's the big bonus in my job as secretary of the Kingston Trio."

Charlotte Larson, a tall, slim, bright-looking girl with a long straight bob and gray laughing eyes which look out frankly from behind glasses, wouldn't change her job with anyone else's. The Kingston Trio call this attractive, twenty-six-year-old their "den mother." "We couldn't function without her," says Nick Reynolds, the short, blond member of the Trio.

"The truth is, I couldn't live without this job," says Charlotte candidly. "I could exist, but not live as I do, with zest and excitement. Anything can happen - and usually does in my job."

There was the time, not long ago, when she'd no sooner settled herself behind her desk then she received a call from the Trio's road manager in Honolulu, where the boys were appearing at the Waikiki Shell.

"Come over, as quickly as you can," she was told, as though she were being asked to go around the corner A business meeting had unexpectedly been called there, and Charlotte had to bring certain papers and also be there to take notes at the important meeting.

"I tossed my bathing suit and the papers in a suitcase, picked up my traveling bag which I always have packed for such emergencies, and I was off," explains Charlotte. "That evening I had dinner in Honolulu."

Although Charlotte works out of the Kingston Trio's headquarters in a charming white and blue office on the top floor of a Victorian building in San Francisco, with a superb view 'of the bay, she sets up offices wherever the boys are. She totes a portable typewriter, pad and pencil backstage at the "Hungry i" night club when the Trio play a date there, or in their luxurious dressing rooms at Harrah's Club in Lake Tahoe, and even under a beach umbrella, poolside, at one of the Vegas hotels.

"I catch up with the boys wherever they are. But if my place of work is variable, my hours are even more so. I never close my typewriter at five-thirty and feel that I'm through for the day. I have a twenty-four-hour job. It's usual for me to get called in the middle of the night. Wherever I go, even when I'm on a date, I leave word where I am. Many times I've had to leave a boy friend in the middle of dinner and rush to the office to handle some crisis. It's something that has to be done immediately.

"I was having dinner with a boy friend the other night, and just as we were about to leave the restaurant for the theater, the waiter came up to me and told me I had a call. It was Bob Shane calling from Columbia, Missouri. He'd left a certain guitar behind at home and he needed it -- right away! l told my date I had to dash off and that I would meet him at the theater when I was through. He drove me to my office and told me he'd go back to the restaurant and wait for me.

"Getting that guitar off wasn't as simple as it seemed. Bob's wife, Louise, was at their farm in Georgia and I had to locate her in order to find out where the keys to their home in San Francisco were. She told me the housekeeper had the key. Then I had to track down the housekeeper, who was not living in the house. After that, I searched the house to find the right guitar. Then I got it packed and on the plane minutes before the last flight.

"In between I kept in touch with my boy friend every half hour. 'Have another cup of coffee; I'll see you soon' I kept telling him. When I finally joined him, it was after midnight. He'd tarn up the theater tickets, and we ended up at a little coffee house. "He was very nice about it. He happens to be a fan of the Trio. That helps. But also, like most of my boy friends he realizes the responsibility of my job and knows I would never leave the Kingstons in a spot. If any boy friend sulks when something arises to interrupt our date, I wouldn't care to see him again, anyway. It takes the right kind of man to realize the urgency of any of these calls.

"You may wonder," added Charlotte, "why a secretary has to be on call around the clock. You see, the Trio is on the road most of the time, playing one-nighters, mainly in college towns where they are so popular. I have to make an intensive study of airline schedules and set up an entire itinerary for them that takes in a different city every day. I have to check not only the airlines, but the hotel or motel closest to where they'll be playing. It works with precision timing. If the boys cancel just one date, the entire itinerary is invalidated.

"One night, Julie Stewart, John's wife, called and told me their baby was sick. Shesounded distraught, and I knew she needed John by her side. I contacted John, who was somewhere in an Eastern college town. He flew back that night. Nick and Bob remained behind to wait for John to rejoin them. Meanwhile, the following three dates had to be cancelled. Then when John was ready to return, I had to work out a complete new itinerary for them.

"Seemingly simple things require a lot of juggling. When the boys were in Boston, they decided at the last minute to drive to the next town because they were tired of flying. It sounds like a little thing, but because canceling one leg of the journey kills all the other legs, I had to get into action.

"But I love every bit of it, the arranging and the rearranging, always the unexpected. I'm working with colorful human beings, not a row of figures. When the boys hit an emergency on the road, it becomes my emergency. When they experience challenges and triumphs, as they do, I experience them, also. My work jumps."

Last revised: February 23, 2006.