Schlosser: singer, songwriter, ‘63 ‘Rock’ grad

As a student, Arthur Schlosser played piano and saxophone and sang in the chorus at East Rockaway High School. At Cornell University, he majored in Chemistry, briefly played saxophone in the marching band and concert band but then joined the Cornell Symphony Orchestra and chamber orchestra, where he played bassoon.

While attending the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, he played Beatles songs on the piano and started teaching myself some chords on guitar. In 1971 he wrote his first song during a year away from the stress of med school and he knew that I had discovered my lifelong means of self-expression.

He graduated from medical school in June 1972 and started my Pediatric internship at Oakland Kaiser Hospital that July. In 1975 he married Charlotte Dobbins in Berkeley California and soon adopted her maiden name as his stage name, Dean Dobbins.

After performing solo, then as a duo, then as a trio, he organized the Dean Dobbins Band in 1984, active in Los Angeles’s country music circuit for about 10 years. They opened for Tammy Wynette in Newport Beach, Rick Nelson at Big Bear, Johnny Lee at The Palomino and The Kendalls at The Mule Lip Saloon in Colton. The band was voted 1990 California Country Music Association Band Of The Year and Dobbins received several CCMA awards including Song of the Year (“One, Two, Three”), Songwriter of the Year (“Writers and Pickers”) and Male Vocalist of the Year.

In June 2012, Arthur and Charlotte and I drove cross-country with their dogs to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where they are enjoying their retirement.
Schlosser wrote and sang this song at the Class of 1963 East Rockaway High School
s 50th reunion recently: