John Cacavas

Cacavas was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1930. His father was an emigrant from Greece and his mother was born in North Dakota. He had a fraternal twin sister, Jeanne, and three other siblings: Peter David, b. 1928; Penelope, b. 1932; and Adrian G., 1933. Their father's younger brother Chris had also immigrated to South Dakota and lived in Aberdeen, where he married and had a family. John and his siblings attended local schools; he displayed an early talent for music, forming a local band at age 14, at 16 he started a school dance band named “The Golden Blues," he left after having a falling out with his band teacher after which he quit all school band activities. He studied musical composition at Northwestern University. During service in the military, Cacavas was assigned to Washington, DC where he was an arranger for the United States Army Band. There he met Charles Osgood, with whom he collaborated on musical compositions and recordings. Osgood later became a radio and TV commentator. ==Career==

After studying music, in the 1960s Cacavas and Osgood collaborated, including on US Senator Everett Dirksen's recording of Gallant Men, which won a Grammy Award for a spoken word performance. reunited him with Kojak veteran and friend Telly Savalas, and Cacavas also went on to score Savalas's made for TV Dirty Dozen sequel movies The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission (1987) and The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1988). His later television work included popular miniseries such as ''Jenny's War (1985), Confessional (1989) and Perfect Murder, Perfect Town'' in 2000. While Cacavas has extensive credits in television he has comparatively few credits for film scores. His most notable works in film are two entries in the Airport series: Airport 1975 and ''Airport '77. As well as Horror Express he also composed the score for the Hammer film The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), which also starred Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and his other scores included Hangar 18 (1980), Gangster Wars (1981), Mortuary (1983), and They're Playing with Fire'' (1984). Cacavas is also notable for his "Flute Poem", known by Canadian viewers as the opening to ''Hinterland Who's Who'', a series of public service announcements profiling various wild Canadian animals. Cacavas also composed and arranged many music scores for school bands and music students. There are many of his arrangements and compositions listed by music publishing houses such as Hal Leonard Corporation and Alfred Music Publishers. In his later years, Cacavas wrote and published his autobiography, entitled ''It's More than Do-Re-Mi: My Life in Music'' (2004). He lived in Beverly Hills, California and London, UK, with his wife, Bonetta Becker Cacavas. Among his pleasures was cooking and he was an accomplished chef. They had three children. ==References==