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Longtime neighbor Selma Heraldo bequeaths her house to museum
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Selma Heraldo at a Louis Armstrong birthday celebration hosted by the Louis Armstrong House Museum in August 2007. With her, from left to right, are former New York state Sen. John Sabini (holding a photo of Satchmo), Queens College president James Muyskens, Queens College official PHOTO BY WALTER KARLING Sue Henderson, and Michael Cogswell, the museum’s director.
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If it hadn’t been for Selma Heraldo’s mother, jazz great Louis Armstrong might never have moved to the modest two-story house in Corona where he lived for almost three decades until his death in 1971. Heraldo, who spent her whole life in the house next door, died there on Dec. 2 at the age of 88. It was Heraldo’s mother, a friend of Armstrong’s wife’s family, who tipped the Armstrongs that the house at 34-56 107 St. was for sale — they bought it in 1943, leading to a lifelong friendship between Heraldo and the jazz legend. When Armstrong’s wife, Lucille Armstrong, passed away in 1983, Heraldo helped look after the house. She eventually became a member of the Louis Armstrong House Museum’s advisory board in 1995, according to Michael Cogswell, the museum’s director. With Heraldo’s passing, a living connection to Armstrong is gone. To her, Armstrong was as much a friend as a great musician. “Selma had her own unique relationship with Louis,” Cogswell said. The stories she would tell were “not about Louis’s innovations as a trumpet player,” Cogswell went on, but about more human moments, like the time Armstrong walked into Heraldo’s house and asked her to make him an egg sandwich, because he was “tired of ... filet mignon.” After it opened to the public in 2003, Heraldo came to the museum almost every day, where she would “enthrall visitors” with her stories. “She was a real character and a real charmer,” Cogswell said. “We all miss her terribly.” Heraldo’s funeral was held on Dec. 9 at the Corona Congregational Church and she was buried at Flushing Cemetery. She died
of congenital heart failure, a condition she learned she had only a few days before her passing, according to Cogswell. Heraldo, who worked for more than 30 years as a phone operator for American Telephone and Telegraph, traveled across North America with Armstrong’s band in the late 1940s and early 1950s, according to the museum. Though many believed she was born in Corona, she was actually born in Baltimore — her mother, Adele, was visiting the city when she went into labor. In recent years, Heraldo spoke about Armstrong around the country. She was a guest at a symposium on the trumpeter held by the Smithsonian Institute in 2000, for example, and attended the Satchmo Summerfest — an annual festival celebrating Louis Armstrong’s birthday in New Orleans, where he was born — three times. Cogswell recalled talking to Heraldo, who in later years probably survived on only a modest monthly pension, about how she could make money by selling her house. Heraldo refused. In fact, she bequeathed her home to the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In an age when rapid development has drastically changed neighborhoods throughout Queens, Heraldo requested that the museum preserve the character of her home. “We’re preservationists,” Cogswell emphasized. “We’re not going to raze it or build a parking lot.” Instead, the museum, which is set to begin building a new visitor’s center across the street next summer, will most likely have its offices in Heraldo’s home, something Cogswell said would be studied further before plans are finalized. Referring to Heraldo’s decision to give the museum her home, Cogswell noted, Q “her generosity is just overwhelming.”
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Page 33 QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, December 22, 2011
A friend to Louis Armstrong dies
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