A Jazz Romance: Ethel Ennis, Baltimore & Me by Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries

Romance A EARL ARNETT

ETHEL ENNIS, BALTIMORE & ME

ARomance

A

Romance

ETHEL ENNIS, BALTIMORE & ME

EARL ARNETT

Arnett

Published 2025 Baltimore, Maryland

Design by B. Creative Group

Printing by Black Classic Press Digital Printing

ISBN: 979-8-218-62097-4

Unless otherwise noted, all photos reproduced courtesy of the Ethel Ennis and Earl Arnett Collection, Department of Special Collections, Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries.

Cover photo © Dean Alexander, courtesy of Dean Alexander

To Mama Jeanne Arnett (1918–2021), who supported and encouraged Ethel and me throughout our fifty-one-year marriage

PREFACE

The idea for this book came from Ethel, who was always more intuitively wise than me. She felt that our story should be shared with a wider audience. I was initially skeptical. “Memoirs” were plentiful and egotistical, I thought, usually mere records of social accomplishment, interesting only to the author’s friends and professional historians. But then I considered myself as a reader, always interested in people and families. Because of our occupations, Ethel and I had moved fluidly up and down social ladders outside normal categories. Maybe, if I could write it well, our story would be interesting and useful. You have the result here and will be the judge. I began research in 2010, gradually realizing how little we know about ourselves. Even our memories are part fiction, and we seldom know the context in which we live. Most of life, even that small portion we personally experience, is an unfathomable mystery with hidden currents and energies. During the writing, I debated how personal this book should be. Should I include my father’s considered manifesto against “interracial” marriage? How private should I be in sharing my fifty-one-year partnership with Ethel? In my father’s case, the decision was easy. He had written for publication and still represents a sizable population who think his way. (We reached a pleasant rapprochement in his later years, although he never acknowledged he might be wrong.) In most other instances, I’ve followed personal details wherever they led. As Ethel sometimes joked, “You tell everything you know,” and she was right.

I stopped writing in 2017–18, the two years when Ethel suffered increasingly debilitative strokes, and took it up again after her death on February 17, 2019, as a form of grief therapy. Ethel never read the manuscript, but I think she would be pleased. We’ve shared our story with the world. Now it belongs to anyone who wants or needs it.

It was Philip Arnoult (1941–2024), a talented theatrical entrepreneur, who first persuaded Ethel and me that we possessed “archives” with cultural value. Through his intercession, we met Sylvia Eggleston Wehr (1940–2023), then associate dean of the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, where we established an Ethel Ennis and Earl Arnett Collection. Ethel had received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Hopkins in 2008, and we were pleased to have our accumulated papers and collections join the university’s archives. When Ethel died, Sylvia helped me arrange a private luncheon and public memorial concert at the Peabody Conservatory and she subsequently became a good friend and champion of this book, raising funds for its publication and to sustain me as its author.

Writing is a solitary enterprise, but a book represents community. Robbye Apperson made possible not only Ethel’s memorial luncheon but also the publication and launch of this book. I am grateful for her continuing commitment to sharing Ethel’s legacy and our story with Baltimore and the world.

Richard J. Stephenson, my fraternity brother and longtime friend, contributed generously through his family foundation, enabling me to consult on the processing of the archive and complete the manuscript.

I am also grateful to Philip Arnoult, Richard O. Berndt, Perry and Aurelia Bolton, Margaret Burri, Connie Caplan, Al De Salvo and Susan Thomson, Kenna Forsyth, Beth and Mark Felder, William P. Gillen, Walter and Penny Haney, Paul Hildner, Janet and William Pickett, Carl Streuver and Barbara Wilks, and Susan de Tournemier for their support.

Thank you to Robert J. Brugger, former history and regional books editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, who volunteered to review and comment on the first draft of the manuscript, as did assorted friends

and family. Thanks to my copy editor, Megan Stolz Rogers, for her meticulous eye and to Kerry Skarda at B. Creative Group for her superb book design. Needless to say, any errors that remain are mine.

Thank you to the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, especially Gabrielle Dean, William Kurrelmeyer curator of rare books and manuscripts, and Africana archivist Tonika Berkley and to Raynetta Wiggins-Jackson, curatorial fellow for Africana collections with the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts at Johns Hopkins. Their combined talents, efforts and enthusiasm resulted in the landmark exhibition, Ethel’s Place: Celebrating Ethel Ennis, Baltimore’s First Lady of Jazz, which ran October 22, 2023, through April 24, 2024, at the George Peabody Library, and for which I gladly served as a consultant. Thanks also to Dean Emeritus Winston Tabb, Dean Elisabeth Long, Associate Dean Beth Miller Ryan and Communications Director Heather Stalfort.

In the course of a narrative that spans more than five decades, many extraordinary people didn’t fit the story being told. With appreciation, here are a few not mentioned in the text: my sister Carole McMullen, her husband Rob and daughter Stacey; Stan Mosley and his remarkable family; friends Phil and Sandy Johnson, Burt Kummerow, Ruby Glover, Barbara Mann, Linda Emory, Nevitta Ruddy, Paul Iwancio, Nita Callaway, Russ Moss, Bob Adams and George Young; former Baltimore Sun colleagues Ike Rehert, Antero Pietila, Fred Rasmussen and Jacques Kelly; and Ethel’s Place employees Joe Kearns, Robert Ford, John Lankenau and Alexis Schofield.

What you will read here is not a family history or a memoir but rather a general map of two journeys that melded into one, told as truthfully and honestly as this author is capable.

Exchanging vows, August 29, 1967

LOVE & MARRIAGE

In 1958, when I was a senior at Tokyo American High School–Narimasu, singer Ethel Ennis, newly married to a Baltimore attorney, toured Northern Europe with an all-star Benny Goodman band prior to concerts at the Brussels World’s Fair. I was white, a transplanted Hoosier born in Muncie, Indiana, and she was Black, born on the third floor of a Baltimore row house. If someone had told us that within nine years, we’d be married and spend the next fifty-one years together, we’d have said they were ridiculous. No way.

When Ethel divorced in 1965, she said she’d join a nunnery before remarrying, and I was a confirmed bachelor who considered marriage a possibility only after 40. But there we were on August 29, 1967, before a judge in Aspen, Colorado. The late Werner Kuster, then owner of the Red Onion Restaurant and Bar and now a member of the Aspen Hall of Fame, gave the bride away. The Joe Kloess Trio (Joe Kloess, piano; Paul Warburton, bass; Mike Buono, drums) served as witnesses. We walked beaming onto the courthouse steps, and that evening Ethel sang at the Onion, where she appeared twice a year. The day wasn’t that special since our real marriage and honeymoon had already occurred in Los Angeles a few months earlier when we spent three weeks together at the Sunset Doheny Motel while Ethel sang with Joe’s trio at the Hong Kong Bar (now defunct) in the Century Plaza Hotel.

That same year—1967—the US Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia invalidated the anti-miscegenation laws in sixteen states that prohibited our legal union;1 Maryland had just repealed its own 275-year-old law. Ethel’s parents weren’t particularly disturbed. Her mother, Arrabell Ennis, said, “I don’t mind you marrying a white man, but why ain’t he rich?” Her father, Andrew Ennis, a one-legged barber, shrugged his shoulders and said all men were brothers ’til proved otherwise.

My father, however, was another story. Clyde Arnett Sr., a retired Army lieutenant colonel, reluctantly searched his soul and composed a single-spaced, eleven-page typewritten manifesto that he first submitted to the Reader’s Digest. 2 He concluded that our marriage was wrong, and when the Digest didn’t publish his tome, he sent me a carbon copy with the concluding sentence, “We are not gaining a daughter, and we are losing a son.” I remember telling Ethel, “Oh, don’t worry about my family. We’ve lived all over the world and are used to having all kinds of people at our house.” She looked at me skeptically and said, “We’ll see.” My mother was quietly mortified, and my brother and sister were embarrassed by her husband’s attitude. I was genuinely surprised and replied that his reaction was his problem, not mine. I was in love.

How did this improbable, problematic romance begin? Our paths first converged when I came to Baltimore in late 1962 and saw Ethel sing at the Red Fox, a Baltimore landmark in the 1950s and early ’60s.

1 The term miscegenation for interracial marriages was invented in 1863 as a hoax to embarrass President Abraham Lincoln and abolitionists.

2 See Appendix A: Dad’s Letter

THE RED FOX & A FIRST MARRIAGE

In the summer of 1953, George “Foxie” Fox had walked down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Red Fox, his new bar and lounge at the corner of Fulton Avenue and Pennsylvania, to the Casino, where a young Ethel was playing piano and singing, accompanied by Montell “Monty” Poulson on the upright bass.

Foxie was a short, profane, coarse Jewish man who drank quarts of scotch, smoked cigars, and tipped the scale at about 300 pounds. He was also a New York refugee, a gambler who claimed he’d been a millionaire by the age of nineteen. When he had money, he spent it on women, booze, clothes, and the horses. He was also generous with the comedians and singers who hung around Broadway when their money was low. He specialized in college basketball games until, he claimed, the Mob forced him out of business. So Foxie packed his bags, held a party at Lindy’s where he bought the players free food and booze for the last time, and headed south for Baltimore, a slower moving town, to lay low. There he met Reba, a department store buyer; they got married, and his fast life slowed. In late 1952 or early 1953, to keep life interesting, he bought a liquor store and Rictor’s Red Fox Room at the top of Pennsylvania Avenue, the great entertainment and commercial center of Baltimore’s Black Belt. During the ’50s, it was among the few places in Baltimore where white and Black

people openly socialized in a sophisticated joint. Lou Bennett at the piano and organ was a fixture the first few years. Once in a while, someone like Miles Davis would walk through the door. The ponies at nearby Pimlico and “whoores” in Washington also kept Foxie entertained while he and Reba measured their bottles, counted receipts every night, and raised a family.

Foxie sometimes embarrassed his wife and her sisters with coarse, ribald stories told in the style of Myron Cohen, a favorite comedian. “How many pages in the Bible?” he asked my brother’s first wife, Sallie Weissinger, when they were introduced. “I don’t know,” she replied. “How many lives does a cat have?” he continued. “Nine,” she replied. “My Lord,” Foxie responded with a twinkling wink, “this girl knows more about pussy than the Bible.”

Foxie and Reba saw in Ethel “a Persian Room act”—she had a sophisticated voice that “sounded white” and a rhythmic sense that communicated “Black.” And she was “nice,” a protected church girl with lively good humor and a quick mind. Ethel and Poulson, supplemented by an assortment of other local musicians, soon became a mainstay at the Red Fox, center of a multicultural scene that included Johns Hopkins students, Avenue habitués, doctors, lawyers, steel workers, gay folks, teachers, soldiers and civil rights activists. Jazz music provided the catalyst, and the Red Fox became a “spot.” Ethel could play chords behind a bebop band, but her heart lay in church-based rhythm and blues, so the weekend crowds who jammed the small room at Pennsylvania and Fulton got a rich dosage of intelligent, rhythmic music that made them feel good. Jazz purists would tease Ethel about her pop songs and changes, but she just laughed. What good was music if people didn’t enjoy it? Besides, for her music was just a hobby that paid off.

Foxie enjoyed the crowds, but he also heard something special, particularly when Ethel hushed the room with warm, artful ballads. This was more than a local attraction, he thought. So he became her first manager on a handshake and began thinking on a larger scale. In the summer of 1955, he drove Ethel to New York and had her audition with four other singers for a two-week gig at the Patio, another cocktail lounge,

once classy and now long gone. She got the job, and the Red Fox arranged a send-off party for the “gate to stardom” that Foxie envisioned for his new protégée.

Ethel had visited New York City several times as a girl but was never enthralled by its fast rhythms, ambitious people and excitement. Her grandmother had sometimes called the shy girl a “ninny,” unadventurous and timid, but she preferred her own tempos, often slowed jumpy pop songs to ballads and kept her Baltimore pace—slower, more Southern, cautious. Her mother, who had never entered a nightclub until the Red Fox party, accompanied Ethel with Foxie and Reba to New York. Presumably, the gig went well. Foxie took her to see Dorothy Donegan perform, perhaps to illustrate how a woman at the piano could be outgoing, entertaining and exciting as well as a good musician. He arranged and paid for an all-day recording session on November 25 at the Bell Sound Studio with Hank Jones (piano), Kenny Clarke (drums), Albert Hall (bass) and Abie Baker (guitar). The result was the album Lullabies for Losers, released on Jubilee along with the singles “Off Shore” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

All but one of the songs was a ballad, and there were a few standards (“Blue Prelude,” “You Better Go Now”), but the rest were relatively unknown, including some she sang at the Red Fox. It was not an auspicious debut for jazz-infused tunes most people had never heard of. Charlie Parker died in 1955, signaling the decline of bebop; Elvis Presley and his new manager Col. Tom Parker were beginning to make a noise. Little Richard recorded “Tutti Frutti,” and Ray Charles had his first hit with “I Got a Woman.” In the South, Emmett Till was murdered and Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus. It was a beginning time for shoutin’ music, rock and roll, and protest.

Although Lullabies for Losers has since been re-released in many forms, Foxie never received any money from the Blaine brothers, who controlled the label. For the musicians, all of whom worked in the New York studios, the session was just another day’s work with an interesting new singer. Ethel continued to work in New York clubs like the Beau

Brummel and the Apollo Theater, coming home to work at the Red Fox or traveling to places like Pittsburgh and Syracuse. She and Foxie never had a formal contract; he watched over her like a father (in fact, she referred to him as her “Jewish father”), keeping aggressive libertines away, and she accepted what he paid her in cash. On one occasion, when a rich New Yorker offered Foxie $5,000 to sleep with his singer, he replied she wasn’t for sale. “Everyone’s for sale,” the playboy replied. “Not this one,” Foxie responded. “She’s not like that.” In return for such protection, Foxie had excuses to travel away from home, play the ponies, visit a few whorehouses and dabble in show business.

Still, the 1955 venture to New York and the Jubilee album must have drawn attention. The following year, Ray Ellis directed an orchestra for a single released by Atco, and in 1957, Capitol Records under Al Livingston signed her for a two-album deal. Producer Andy Wiswell hired top-flight arrangers to orchestrate a collection of Broadway-based standards that highlighted Ethel’s abilities to sing on key, clearly enunciate lyrics and swing—all qualities that were quickly going out of fashion. Ethel didn’t select the songs and, in many cases, had never heard them before arriving in the studio. She simply performed them to the best of her ability and then promptly forgot them.

All during this time, when she wasn’t traveling to the East Coast clubs or recording in New York, Ethel returned to Baltimore to perform at the Red Fox and live with her mother and brother in a small, nearby second-floor apartment on Whittier Avenue. They had had to move out of publicly subsidized Gilmor Homes because Ethel was making too much money. Ethel had already decided that New York wasn’t her cup of tea, and she had strong reservations about the show-business life. She didn’t mind performing on stage but disliked the schmoozing, striving and manipulating aspects of the music industry. When she asked her mother for advice, it came back as “get the money, honey.” Something had to give.

On November 23, 1957, after recording her first Capitol album with Neal Hefti, she married Jacques Leeds, a charismatic Baltimore attorney who had just divorced his second wife. The ceremonies were performed by

a minister in someone’s house; Ethel didn’t even recall where or who was there. Jacques was a Red Fox regular with flashes of brilliance that sustained his legal practice. He sometimes drank too much and occasionally beat his women. Ethel thought she married more to get away from her mother than to live in love with Jacques. He thought he was marrying a flashy entertainer rather than a church girl who stumbled into professional music. The young couple moved into an apartment on Druid Hill Avenue across from Union Baptist Church and tried to make it work. Ethel said he had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality when they were together: brilliant and charismatic when sober, violent and jealous when drunk. When I occasionally drank too much, she would shake her head and wonder how she ended up with two crazy Hoosiers.

Born in Peru, Indiana, in 1927, Jacques came to Baltimore as a child, the offspring of a white father and Black mother. I heard colorful stories about his father, a merchant seaman who had apparently escaped from a chain gang and maintained two families—one white in Philadelphia and another Black in Baltimore. Jacques had graduated from the University of Maryland Law School in 1954, one of only three African Americans in his class. He was among the group of Baltimore lawyers who started making inroads against discrimination and segregation after World War II.3 He didn’t actively participate with other lawyers from the Baltimore-Washington region who pioneered civil rights cases in the 1950s and ’60s, but he performed a lot of pro bono work for poor folks who couldn’t afford legal services. His fourth and last wife, Polly Ware, recalled that “sometimes he was paid with chickens, corn or tomatoes.”

Always interested in politics and acknowledged by his peers as a smart attorney, Jacques did achieve a number of firsts. He was appointed assistant city solicitor and in 1962 became the first Black Maryland assistant attorney general. He later ran for state senator in a primary against Verda Welcome, and Ethel recalled stuffing envelopes and helping with the secretarial work

3 See Appendix D: Segregation, the Color Line & the Law

of the campaign, but then in some “backroom” deal, he withdrew his candidacy, and Welcome became the first Black woman to serve in the Maryland Senate.

Maybe his erratic behavior had something to do with his withdrawal from politics. Jacques was a sportsman who loved to hang out at clubs and racetracks with gamblers, boxers, hustlers and entertainers. More than once, he would disappear on binges while his law partners covered for him. He had charm, brains and talent but in those days wasted his gifts, much to the disgust of fellow attorneys who later became distinguished jurists. After his marriage to Polly, he seemed to become more serious and ended his legal career as a respected judge on the Maryland State Workers’ Compensation Commission. Jacques and I always got along but never became friends. We would occasionally see each other, and Ethel and I attended his retirement ceremonies in 1997, where she described herself as “wife number 3.” He died in 2018 at the age of 90.

However, in the spring of 1958, married only four months, Ethel was in New York recording Have You Forgotten?, her second album for Capitol, arranged and conducted by Sid Feller. “Popsie” Randolph, a photographer and Benny Goodman’s band boy, was around and happened to mention that Goodman was auditioning for a female singer to accompany an all-star band booked to tour Northern Europe before appearing at the Brussels World’s Fair. Ethel showed up at the audition site, sat at the piano and sang “I’ll Take Romance.”

Goodman smiled, and that was that. She returned to Baltimore, thinking no more about it; life was complicated enough. She was trying to be a lawyer’s wife, keep house, cook, sing, commute to New York for recording sessions and live with a tempestuous man. Jacques had already changed her professional relationship with Foxie and seemed to resent the attention she received. But a few weeks later, Goodman called and asked her to start rehearsals.

Suddenly Ethel was in the national spotlight, the newest Goodman singer in a line that included Helen Ward, Martha Tilton, Helen Forrest, Peggy Lee and Billie Holiday. Ebony magazine came to Baltimore and did a

large photo spread before the band departed for Europe on May 3. They had rehearsed for three weeks in New York and would perform in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands before arriving in Brussels on May 25 for the fair. During the weeks of travel, twenty-five-year-old Ethel was the only female in a band that included such luminaries as Arvell Shaw, Roland Hanna, Billy Bauer, Roy Burns, Taft Jordan, Seldon Powell and Zoot Sims. Jimmy Rushing, the veteran blues singer known as “Mr. Five-By-Five,” acted as informal chaperone and father figure.

All the reviews were favorable, and when Ethel returned, Capitol released the second album. During a concert at Morgan State College in her hometown that summer, Louis Armstrong invited her onstage to sing with him. Ella Fitzgerald called Ethel her favorite young singer, and Billie Holiday telephoned from New York in the middle of the night to offer encouragement to “the new bitch from Baltimore.” What was the “new bitch” thinking?

Ethel said she wasn’t thinking of anything; she was simply going along with the flow. She continued to work at the Red Fox and tried to build a married life. Sometimes she showed up for work with a black eye. When an opportunity arrived to work for six months in New York at a club called the Toast, she took it—a dead-end job at a piano bar shared with another from 8:30 p.m. to 4 a.m., six days a week. On Mondays, she returned to Baltimore to iron her husband’s shirts and straighten up the apartment. Battered and bruised, she sometimes fantasized about murdering Jacques in his sleep, and her mother suggested going to a conjure woman in South Carolina to work roots to tame his demons.

Jacques and Foxie didn’t get along, so there was no longer a manager to look out for her interests, Jacques was jealous of her limited fame and Ethel wasn’t seeking success. The Capitol album didn’t sell enough to lead to others. Music had changed. Iran banned rock and roll in 1958 as a health hazard, but everyone else was rockin’. Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald still hit the pop charts, but Bill Haley and His Comets were flying. As one of Ethel’s biographers put it, “it was a case with nowhere to go and no commitment to getting there.”

So, Ethel took what some would call a hiatus. Unlike Billie Holiday, she didn’t have a victim’s addictive mentality; even Jacques couldn’t subjugate her the way he would have liked. She was not “his woman;” she belonged to herself despite the occasional battering. Eubie Blake, another Baltimorean, had often told local musicians that they should “swim in the big sea” of New York rather than float in “the gutters of Baltimore,” but Ethel had no career ambitions. If someone called her for a performance and it felt right, she packed her music bag with notepads of lyrics in shorthand and traveled. If not, she still sang weekends at the Red Fox and lived. She didn’t think she was happy, but her family remained in Baltimore. She had fans. She enjoyed cooking, TV soap operas, pinochle, animals, infants, fellow musicians and some of the assorted characters Jacques brought to their lives. She was cheerfully active, not entirely passive about a music career but reluctant to “go against her grain for gain.”4

That was the Ethel I saw sometime in late 1962, early 1963—gowned and sitting at a small piano on a cramped stage in the corner of a bar, belting rhythm and blues, pop tunes and slow ballads that quieted the weekend patrons. Usually, a bass player accompanied her, sometimes a drummer, guitarist, vibraphonist or even a guest singer. I was mesmerized and grateful to discover what the locals regarded as a cultural treasure, hidden in the bowels of a segregated city.

I was a new college graduate, a soldier just out of basic training and a private in the student battalion at the US Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Maryland—a twenty-two-year-old who knew nothing of Baltimore, the music business or Afro-American culture. One of the few Black soldiers there invited me to visit this great music club he’d heard of. It featured an extraordinary singer married to a local attorney who appeared there on weekends.

I had never been to Baltimore before. Born in Muncie, Indiana, in 1940 and subsequently an Army brat after my father enlisted in 1944, I had

4 Sallie Kravetz, Ethel Ennis, the Reluctant Jazz Star: An Illustrated Biography (Gateway Press), 1984.

lived and attended schools in suburban Virginia, California, Indiana, Austria and Japan before enrolling at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, my father’s alma mater. I graduated in June 1962 as a commencement speaker with no immediate prospects.

After my speech, a youthful appeal for new definitions of freedom, I recall standing underneath a tree near the college chapel. The dean, an Ivy-League-type with deep roots at Princeton, walked by and remarked, “Arnett, we would have liked to give you an award, but you didn’t fit any of our categories.” I had no advice or connections to the wider world beyond a letter my father had written from Okinawa the previous month. It was an unusually long, handwritten message from a man who usually bottled up his emotions and personal feelings. He wrote:

I’m enjoying my work here. I’m the chief of the Counterintelligence Department in the school. I teach and also supervise other instructors in my department. I teach officers from seven Southeast Asian countries. They all speak English with varying degrees of fluency, but they are very intelligent—very well-informed people. We get only the best officers from Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, etc.

It’s a pleasure to instruct them or just to talk to them. It’s an odd sensation once in a while though. About two weeks ago I was sitting with a group of Thai colonels in a Chinese restaurant in Okinawa, eating Japanese food and talking about Italy in English. It occurred to me to wonder what a good Kentucky hillbilly was doing there.

We are accomplishing something here. We are making friends for the United States, and I feel myself a very distinct part of it because my students seem to like me. We are treating these people like brothers and like the equals that they are. This is something that the British and particularly the French did not do in this part of the world. These people recognize it and appreciate it. I’m perfectly frank with them. If I don’t know something, I just say so and go on from there. I eat with them and drink with them, so they confide in me and ask

my advice. We are good friends with no ulterior motive involved. We are turning out these trained friends as fast as possible, and they are going back to their countries and spreading the word. Americans are people and human and they’re here to help—not take something away from us. Believe me—America needs friends. The next war will start over here. So, lest I get carried away, I feel that I’m doing something worthwhile and I’m being repaid in more than money.

In the same letter, he also offered assistance to me, his first son, for whom he hoped much. If I wanted to fulfill my military obligation (the draft was still omnipresent for young men) and was interested in Army intelligence, I should travel to Fort Holabird soon and talk to a Major Taggart, who would set me straight.

What were my options? I had accepted a night job in a local plastics factory, a position that would enable me to continue thinking about “freedom” and write. I jumped into my used Studebaker, a departing gift from my parents before they moved to East Asia, and drove to Baltimore in much the same spirit as the young Miles Davis, who traveled from St. Louis to New York to find Charlie “Bird” Parker. For both of us Midwesterners, the journey was an opportunity and a danger. Miles finally found Bird, flew musically and became addicted to drugs. I found Major Taggart, joined the Army and discovered that I didn’t like the military. I remember marching next to a klutzy recruit in basic training and the sergeant shouting, “What you trying to be, shitbird, an individualist?” Yeah, I thought, that’s exactly what I’m trying to be!

Both my grandfathers had served in the Army, one in the Philippines and the other in France; both uncles had fought in the Pacific during World War II. Arnetts had fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War, so the military seemed engrained in my DNA. Major Taggart outlined a comprehensive plan: go to basic training and the Army Intelligence Center, then Officer Candidate School. After becoming an officer with enlisted experience, I could advance to further schooling and fast promotions. My father would retire as a lieutenant colonel, but everyone I contacted seemed

to agree that he should have been at least a full “bird colonel,” above the rank of lieutenant colonel, except for his stubborn, withdrawn personality. Major Taggart’s plan would almost certainly have made me a general officer. So I called my brother in Crawfordsville and asked him to take care of my meager belongings (mostly books), parked the Studebaker in a vacant lot outside the fort and boarded a train on June 11 for Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to begin basic training. For six weeks I sweltered in the summer heat as a lowly recruit and then made my way back to Baltimore for intelligence training. During this six-month period, I decided that Major Taggart’s plan wasn’t for me; I didn’t want to advance up the military ladder. Joseph Heller’s book Catch-22 had become our bible at the intelligence school, and I had adopted The Good Soldier Švejk’s view of the Army—any army—after Jaroslav Hašek’s 1930s satirical stories.5 When the promised slot at Officer Candidate School opened up, I refused it and decided to learn what I could during my three-year enlistment. I graduated first in my small class in March 1963 and was sent to Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California, to work in civilian clothes from a field office as a special agent conducting personnel security investigations. I was in California when Ethel moved to 3113 Leighton Avenue with her brother on August 28, 1963, the day that Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.

5First published March 1921 in Czech as Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války, the entire collection of short stories has a 2005 edition in English, published by Penguin Classics and translated by Lumír Nahodil and Cecil Parrott.

EARL’S MILITARY, EXPATRIATE & EARLY NEWSPAPER YEARS

(1963–66)

For three years, I neither saw nor heard of Ethel Ennis. I had started listening to jazz in college after hearing Miles Davis’s album Sketches of Spain on a late-night radio station in Indianapolis. I had never heard such free but controlled expression of passion. It appealed to my repressed sexuality at an all-male college in much the same manner as flamenco guitars. I had met Dizzy Gillespie in my fraternity’s living room and danced to Duke Ellington’s music at a Panhellenic event, never realizing I would encounter them much later as an adult whose wife had sung with both. Perhaps the music had seeped into me before I even knew what it was: While I was in utero, my twenty-two-year-old mother, who then almost never went out by herself, attended an Ellington concert in Bloomington, Indiana. She had been captured by “Mood Indigo” just like the Englishmen who met him on his first European tour.

During my year in California, I shared an apartment with two roommates in San Pedro on a bluff above Cabrillo Beach. When not investigating and writing reports, we explored our surroundings. One roommate, John Madden, a forest ranger who’d been drafted, introduced me to the forests and mountains around the LA basin; the ocean was omnipresent. On my own I visited The Lighthouse nightclub in Hermosa Beach and haunted

small flamenco and mariachi bars. Gwinn Vivian, a drafted anthropologist/ archaeologist who worked out of our small office, introduced me to the magic of the Southwest, His wife, Pat, a talented printmaker and painter, accompanied us on majestic trips to Navajo country.

In the early ’60s, San Pedro, or “Peedro,” had a distinct multi-ethnic, semi-bohemian atmosphere, with small food and wine stores, cafés and assorted characters. It was a harbor town different from tonier nearby Palos Verdes and the Hollywood areas to the north. It gave me room to explore music, food, wine and literature during off-duty hours. I was content to serve out my Army years there and then head to the High Sierras to hike, fish, remove the frustrations of military life and figure out how to be a writer.

Then I received orders for Germany. My father suggested that I stop in Okinawa to visit the family beforehand, so I unpacked my military duds, sewed on sergeant stripes and found space-available flights to East Asia from Travis Air Force Base. The flight from Hawaii to Okinawa was filled with a combat-ready unit sitting at attention with rifles under the command of a young lieutenant who looked at my rumpled uniform with disdain.

Welcome back to the Army, I thought. My idyllic Southern California days were over.

It was my third trip to Japan, although in 1963 Okinawa technically was still under military occupation. I had lived in Tokyo as a high school senior and then returned for a summer in Kyushu after my freshman year in college. Now I was briefly part of the small community around the US Army Pacific Intelligence School, where American instructors taught their Asian counterparts in counterinsurgency and counterintelligence methods. This was only a few months after President John Kennedy’s assassination, and the new Johnson administration was desperately trying to figure out how to prevent the spread of communism in East Asia.

I had already argued differences between democracy and Marxism with students at the University of Tokyo and subscribed to Graham Greene’s cynicism in his 1955 book The Quiet American but listened intently as these military men engaged in friendly discussions about how to bring “freedom” to their countries. After three weeks, I re-donned the uniform and made my

way back 10,000 miles to Germany. I arrived in civilian clothes and was promptly informed to report in uniform, at least until they decided what to do with me. This was no longer the Counter Intelligence Corps in occupied Austria that I remembered as a boy.

The CIA and other agencies had taken over the heavy lifting. When I was assigned to a field office in Mainz, we mostly drank beer with the German police and occasionally performed minor security investigations. Since I spoke passable German, headquarters soon sent me as part of a small team to a war game in Bavaria. Our job as part of the occupation force was to locate the special forces units who parachuted into the rolling countryside and hid out until time to “attack” key targets. We rented cars, received currency and headed into the picturesque landscape to locate the bad guys and recruit “spies.”

In Kochel am See, I recruited a deputy mayor named Hans Demleitner, who also acted as a Hochzeitslader, a master of ceremonies for traditional Bavarian weddings where old songs are performed, jokes told and guests try to steal the bride. He knew everyone in the area and had served in a mountain unit on the Eastern Front in World War II, so he was an ideal “spy,” the best of several I developed over the course of the three-week exercise. We almost caught one “enemy” unit hiding in a farmer’s barn and in turn became a target. In Oberammergau, I had rented a room and tried to recruit the pretty daughter of the main hotel’s owner. He turned out to be the town’s most notorious anti-American and reported me to the German police, who also began searching for my suspicious character.

Fortunately, I had another room in Füssen, an ancient town near the Austrian border, and was able to avoid all pursuers. If the rest of my Army experience in Germany had been as interesting and challenging, who knows? I might even have been tempted to return to Major Taggart’s original plan for my military career. Unfortunately, everything after this initial experience was downhill.

I returned to Mainz in “civies” speaking better German and settled into an office routine limited by a sergeant’s pay. All went reasonably well until the Christmas holidays when I spontaneously decided to grow a

mustache. After all, I reasoned, we were “agents” who weren’t supposed to look like Americans. Right? Wrong, according to the new lieutenant colonel in Kaiserslautern, who had commanded truck companies before graduating from the US Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird. During a tour of field offices, he took one look and ordered me to shave it off.

I didn’t imagine I’d ever see him again and so blithely ignored the order. However, our paths crossed again a few months later, and I found myself back in uniform at attention in front of his desk where he gave me a direct order to eliminate the mustache. Then began a mental calculus: I only have a few months before my enlistment expires and I plan to be discharged in Germany. This man represents all the aspects of the military that I dislike and obviously doesn’t understand the intelligence game. I politely told him that my mustache was none of his business. Several of his Black officers had mustaches; why shouldn’t I?

I spent my last few months in the Army at the German headquarters in uniform as training sergeant with other assorted duties, including, ironically, reenlistment sergeant. The lieutenant colonel, who wanted to court-martial me, became a laughingstock, and I was a hero among the enlisted men.

On June 11, 1965, I walked out of headquarters a free man and moved into the Darmstädter Hof, a resort hotel in Rüdesheim am Rhein, inherited by Hedi O’Steen, pregnant wife of a former colleague for whom I sometimes bought items at the Post Exchange. Bill O’Steen was much more a spy than I. He had a romantic, manipulative mind and carried a monologue from Cyrano de Bergerac in his wallet. We were friends, and he offered me his hospitality.

Thus began my adventures as an expatriate. I had less than $1,000 in cash, a portable typewriter, a record player with about 100 LPs (Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Big Bill Broonzy, Mozart and assorted others), twenty books, a backpack and sleeping bag, a few clothes and a mandolin I couldn’t play.

For three weeks I was a friend to Bill and the neurotic Hedi as they tried to operate the rundown hotel during the tourist season. Then my San

Pedro roommate John Madden, who had also been sent to Germany, arrived from Bonn with his American fiancée to pick me to witness their wedding in Switzerland. We spent a few days in Paris and then drove to Basel, where I observed the nuptials. When they went their separate way, I trained down to Gmunden in the Salzkammergut region of Austria to visit Fanni Schmitt, who had been my family’s cook and maid from 1950 to 1953. She had a small apartment in her brother’s 250-year-old farmhouse at the foot of the Traunstein on the Traunsee, a cold, deep mountain lake known for its swans. She wasn’t living there, so she invited me to stay as a guest of the family. At that time, her niece Margaret Schmitt, whom I had known as a boy, also lived there with her parents, husband and son. In the summer they rented rooms to English, Austrian and German tourists, especially from Munich and Vienna.

At the end of July, I received a telegram from Bill urgently requesting me to return to Rüdesheim to assist him. Hedi had given birth but had postpartum blues, and both needed help. I returned to a difficult situation, where I consoled Hedi, carried hotel guest bags, chased chambermaids and even briefly operated a small bar in the lobby. In the meantime, to make money, Bill sometimes worked as a contract employee for the CIA, running agents in and out of East Germany. Several weeks later, I had an argument with Hedi and was politely asked to leave. Once more, I packed my suitcase, visited a fraternity brother in Brakel and revisited the Rhineland before boarding a train on August 26 to return to Gmunden.

With very limited funds, I spent my days reading, swimming in the lake, writing in notebooks and plotting my next move. Did I want to be a permanent expatriate? How does one become a professional writer? What was I going to write? In early September, Evelyn Unsinger and her mother arrived at the Schmitts’ from Munich for their annual vacation. They were transplanted Berliners with a tragic family history, and we quickly became friends. Then I fell in love.

Evelyn was a thirty-year-old secretary, neat and efficient, who lived with her mother in a small apartment. Both had been traumatized by the Soviet occupation of Berlin; her mother had been forced to remove dead

bodies from the streets, and the question of rape lingered but was never spoken. Evelyn had been disappointed in love at age 26 but saw me as a Goldstück, a lucky charm, another chance for children and a life apart from her mother. It was a late summer romance—quick and intense. Perhaps too quick because by the time the Unsingers returned to Munich, we were talking of marriage and children.

Did they calculate the affair? What did I know? I was a naive twenty-five-year-old German-speaking American expatriate with vague ambitions to become a writer. Love and desire pushed me forward into an engagement party in Munich. I commuted regularly by train between that city and Gmunden while making plans for Evelyn to come to the United States in 1966. I finally left Gmunden on December 23 to spend Christmas and New Year’s in Munich, then traveled north to Bremerhaven to board the USNS General Simon B. Buckner, a troop ship headed to New York.

At the time, the Army provided free transportation back to the United States within a year of discharge in Europe. I was part of a small troop of civilians aboard the Buckner who occupied the lower levels along with the enlisted men. One of us was a poet found destitute on the streets of Copenhagen. Another, Fitzpatrick, was an amiable Irishman who spent six months a year crab fishing in Alaska and then caroused the next six months in Italy. He had gone broke in Monte Carlo and was unable to reach his fishing partner for funds.

As an officer’s dependent, I had sailed the Atlantic and Pacific on several military transport ships but was unprepared for enlisted troop life below decks. Using the large, common latrine in the bow on a tossing sea was surreal. But we laughed at the sergeants who had no control over us, suffered the discomforts of a winter Atlantic crossing, shared stories and arrived in New York City on February 2, 1966.

I immediately made my way to Baltimore, where my father served his last military assignment as chair of the tech department at the Army Intelligence School. My parents and sister were living in a modest apartment in nearby Dundalk, where I arrived with my mustache looking like an Austrian mountaineer. My mother did a five-second double take

before letting me in. Back in my own country, I faced a familiar question: “Where do I go from here?” This time I had a German fiancée and had persuaded myself to have children but had no idea how to support a family.

One Army buddy had written to me to stay away from America as long as I could. Gwinn and Pat Vivian offered the use of their Navajo hogan, built in rolling ranch country in east-central Arizona near the Zuni reservation. My father suggested that the new Office of Economic Opportunity, a centerpiece of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society,” was hiring.

Vic Powell, one of the few Wabash professors with whom I’d stayed in touch, wrote that if I were interested in newspapers, I should contact Peter Edson, a syndicated Washington columnist and Wabash trustee. This last option offered a path to writing, so I wrote the letter, enclosing several letters of recommendation. Edson replied that the Sun Newspapers were hiring and I should write his friend Price Day, the editor in chief. So I wrote a two-page letter, explaining how I would make a good newspaperman, and one day in March I received a phone call from Paul Banker, then the city editor, asking if I could come down for an interview. I put on my only blue suit and went downtown from Dundalk.

“What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?” Banker asked.

“I’d like to do for the Sun what James Reston does for The New York Times,” I replied.

“That’s very ambitious,” Banker said.

“Ten years is a long time,” I said.

Then I took a perfunctory general information test, rewrote a three-paragraph story from the previous day’s issue and was offered a job.

The Baltimore Sun had just recovered from a bitter labor strike, and I was hired as one of the first non-union reporters allowed under the new contract. Naturally, this made me a subject of interest for members of the Newspaper Guild, including Arnold “Skip” Isaacs, a good reporter and union man. He and Richard Levine, who had just done a major exposé of the police department, worked on me to join. They taught me how to report.

The newspaper in those days was much like what Russell Baker described in his memoir The Good Times.6 Charles “Buck” Dorsey was the aloof managing editor who seemed to control all the Maryland strings from the governor’s office to the street corner. Clarence Caulfield, or “Caully” as everyone called him, and Bob McDowell were the assistant city editors. Scott Sullivan, who flaunted his Yale Phi Beta Kappa key, covered city hall. Tom Fenton, who later made a mark with CBS News, was the best dressed among a crew that ranged from boozy old timers with bottles in their desk drawer to young Ivy Leaguers on a quick upward path. I was the greenest among them.

The newsroom was one open space and filled with voices shouting instructions, arguing with the editor and rewrite men or calling for copy boys who grabbed sheets as they came off the typewriter. Tickers clattered in the background with news from the wire services. Deadlines produced intense periods of activity, when reporters proved their worth, followed by lulls between the news, which came sporadically and often unexpectedly. If it didn’t come, beat reporters created their own news by calling parties who disagreed or disliked each other. The new hires participated in a rotation system that included periods in the police districts and district courts, general assignments and writing obituaries. A man at police headquarters, usually Fred Hill at the time, coordinated our activities around the city. We called our police, fire and court news into rewrite men who created the story read in the next morning’s newspaper.

The most capable man in this system, who arrived a few months after me, was John Carroll, who would later become editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Sun and the Los Angeles Times. He had a newspaper background and knew instinctively what made a story. We district men got to know each other well as we traveled around the city, sometimes meeting for dinner to compare notes. We participated in a friendly competition to get off the rotation and acquire a real reporter’s job. Carroll had ink in his veins;

6 Russell Baker, The Good Times (New York, William Morrow & Company, 1989) (original edition).

I was still trying to understand the news world and wasn’t even sure I liked it. The Sun to me was a mysterious word factory run by men in the background who didn’t talk to young reporters. All was very laissez-faire; if you weren’t criticized, you must be doing OK. I remember once coming to work Sunday morning for general assignment. No one was in the newsroom, the machines were clacking and I had no clue what to do. A passing copy boy said that the reporters sometimes checked the wire services in case a big story developed. As I was floundering, Caulfield walked in and took pity on my situation. He gave me a few guidelines and shared a few memories—a nice man.

Not long after I started, the hierarchy shifted. Banker became the managing editor when Dorsey retired, and Sullivan took his place as city editor. We were never simpatico, and I began to look elsewhere for some kind of stimulation. The paper, I thought, was about as exciting as an insurance company. Since I was a police reporter, I thought I’d try to find something out about organized crime in the city; everyone was saying we didn’t have any and I didn’t believe it. A federal attorney told me that if I was serious, I should investigate Congressman Samuel Friedel’s facilitation of Teamster funds to local investors in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Sounded interesting, so I asked my Sun editors if they would let me pursue the lead. They promptly closed the door; it was inconceivable, they said, that a respected Jewish congressional representative from Baltimore would have any connections to crime. So I never knew.

It was obvious—even to an inexperienced reporter—that the newspaper had no interest in political economy beyond a surface level. So I asked to be permanently assigned to the Western Police district, an unheard-of request from someone on the rotation. At least I might learn something and develop leads to stories worth writing. The city’s African American community had traditionally been underreported by the Sun. In addition, as a returned expatriate, I found Baltimore’s Black citizens generally more interesting than their white counterparts. The music was more vital, the heritage deeper and the people more fascinating than the white reporters knew.

Within a few months, it was obvious that marriage to Evelyn wouldn’t work. My passion, including the idea of fatherhood, had faded, and I still had no idea what I was doing. When I wrote her guiltily with the news, she replied coldly with a bill for our engagement dinner. I sent the money, and we never communicated again.

The other important character in this newspaper narrative is Martha Schoeps, who has unjustly been left out of Sun official histories. She began in the library and timidly worked her way under Dorsey to become editor of the “Women’s Page,” eventually to be expanded as a separate feature section. Schoeps was an overweight, mysterious spinster who hinted of a lost love and seldom mentioned her background, but she supported the arts as well as young writers. She was sensitive and kind, much different from most of the hard-bitten characters in the newsroom. I contributed several stories to her section and wrote a few articles about the jazz music I was hearing in small clubs after my police reporter’s hours ended. Schoeps was a friendly, supportive presence in the newsroom who had a feature writer’s slot on her small staff. Carroll called it the best job on the paper, but it was filled, and I was getting tired of the Sun, Baltimore and the East Coast. I told my editors that I would leave in the spring of 1967 and head west to visit my friends and their hogan in Arizona. By this time, my father had retired and the family had moved to Tucson, Arizona, so the West beckoned even more.

ETHEL’S MIDDLE GROUND YEARS (1963–66)

While I was pursuing my life as a soldier in California and Germany, Ethel’s life changed considerably since the time I had first seen her at the Red Fox. Her records for Jubilee and Capitol had produced some followers and supporters, who heard something quite distinctive in her voice, a blend of sensibilities unique to her. In one phrase she sounded like an English duchess with perfect diction and intonation;7 in another she tapped African American rhythms that white singers could only imitate. “If you were only Jewish,” some fans told her. She didn’t belong to anyone’s elite based on her background or education, but she sounded like fine cognac and champagne.

Ray Errol Fox (no relation to George Fox), an aspiring songwriter and showman from Philadelphia, first heard this voice on the radio when he was a freshman at Boston University and “flipped,” he said. While in law school in Philadelphia, he discovered he didn’t want to be a lawyer but was good at contracts and criminal law, qualities that might be useful in the music business. Ethel’s name came up in conversation, so when he left law school, in late 1962 or early 1963, he came down to Baltimore to hear her at the Red Fox and announced, “I want to manage you.”

7 Nellie Lutcher was surprised when she first met Ethel: “I thought you were an ofay chick,” she said.

“I was in my early twenties and have never managed anyone before or since,” he recalls. “But Jacques was very supportive. We drew up a contract and began a relationship that must have lasted at least a year, year and a half.”

Ray Fox used his Philly base to showcase his new client at radio stations and nightclubs, including one on City Line where she performed for weeks while staying at a local hotel. “I’ll always remember Jack Pyle introducing her there,” he recalls, referencing the Philadelphia radio pioneer. “He said there were five great female jazz singers in the United States. Ella Fitzgerald was first in her own category, and you could put the remaining four in any order: Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Edie Gormé and Ethel Ennis.”

Ray Fox’s aim was to get Ethel back in New York, the city she tolerated but never loved. He took Ethel and three other Baltimore musicians (including Jimmy Wells on vibes and Donald Bailey on bass) to a New York studio and sent the tapes to Andy Wiswell at RCA, the same A&R (artists and repertoire) man who had guided her as an artist at Capitol. He got an enthusiastic response and persuaded Wiswell to come hear Ethel live at the Latin Casino in New Jersey. Wiswell brought Gerry Purcell, a manager with strong contacts at RCA, and a relationship was forged. RCA would sign Ethel if she had capable, experienced management, so Ray Fox sold his contract to Purcell for a reasonable price, and in 1963, a new “career” began.

Following her grandmother’s advice, Ethel figured she might at least use this new opportunity and her failing marriage to buy some property, something tangible as a way of advancing in a segregated society. She bought the row house at 3113 Leighton Avenue, next door to one of Jacques’s long-standing girlfriends, named Bernice, at 3111. Fred Weisgal, a pioneering civil rights attorney and an outstanding amateur musician, had lived at 3111 for a few years in the 1950s, when the neighborhood was almost exclusively Jewish. Due to outrageous block-busting tactics, the neighborhood had become almost exclusively African American by 1963, and only a few scattered Jewish families remained. Bernice was an earthy,

fun-loving, light-skinned woman with her own family who had known Jacques since high school. She and Ethel were friendly, so the proximity worked—at least for a while. When she came home one evening and found Bernice with Jacques on her side of the bed, something had to give. Her first RCA album This is Ethel Ennis came out in the fall of 1963; she filed for divorce in 1964 and swore off marrying again.

In 1964, Ethel began feeling familiar doubts about show business. Ray Fox had catapulted her back into a New York–style career, just as George Fox had done in the 1950s, but the New York tempo bothered her. She was an emerging “new star” on an old, established label not known for promoting many Black artists. Purcell had placed her with the William Morris Agency, a premier talent agency run by Abe Lastfogel.

Purcell had a well-traveled formula for building a pop star that had succeeded with Eddy Arnold, his most successful client: Showcase at the right gatherings, work the media, book the right venues. He also had his own personal formula for breaking in female artists, suggesting to Ethel that a few weeks in his intimate company would eliminate whatever inhibitions prevented her from being a sexy singer. Ethel recorded two more albums in 1964, lavishly produced products with strings in the famous old RCA studios, but she resisted the other blandishments. What did she want with a connected Italian when she was getting rid of a more interesting African American?

Like any genuine artist, Ethel didn’t fit formulas and resisted categorization, but she tried to cooperate as much as possible. She realized the white folks were helping her, so she went along for the sake of a career until she felt that she was going “against my grain for gain.” But RCA in those days was a pop music factory, and her manager regarded jazz as sordid, so she was steered to music that appealed to a general audience with an emphasis on production values and artisanship instead of originality and artistry. When Ethel suggested she could do more with a song, the arrangers, producers, engineers and A&R men simply smiled and told her that perfect intonation and diction were enough. She only knew five of the

first twenty-four songs selected for her, most from Broadway shows and Hollywood films she had never seen. Producers knew she read music, so the lead sheets would be mailed to Baltimore, and she would arrive prepared at the New York studio to do her part with musicians and arrangers she also didn’t know. She never saw original contracts—just booking sheets and statements from Purcell’s office. On the few occasions when she was privy to insider conversations, she was appalled at the basic dishonesty of the music business, where multiple sets of books were common and performers manipulated like pawns.

To their credit, both Purcell and RCA invested money in their singer; they believed in her potential for show-business success and gave her advice based on what they knew. Purcell wanted her to sell the house she had just bought and move to New York. He hired Cholly Atkins, a well-known choreographer, to teach her how to move with the lyrics—part of an effort to groom her for big showrooms, where appearance and personality were at least as important as the music. He was also concerned about her nose and overbite and suggested cosmetic changes. RCA heavily promoted the first albums, lighting the photo sessions so that she wouldn’t appear too dark and highlighting her wholesomeness. They placed her own image on the album covers instead of white models, as Capitol had done, but the result was still whitewashed—a bland, in-between look, neither white nor Black, which fit the lush but empty arrangements. Well-known arrangers like Sid Bass, Dick Hyman, Claus Ogerman and even Clyde Otis worked on her recording sessions along with top-notch sidemen. Everything was professional, first class and ultimately middle-of-the-road mediocre. No pop hits nor entertainment “breaks” emerged from the first two albums. The music business was changing in the 1960s: rock and roll was ascending, Black musical roots were emerging and what people knew as jazz was on a slow decline.

When Ethel made a splash at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival, the record label quickly released Eyes for You, which featured a small group with Ethel singing songs she knew with experienced, jazz-oriented musicians. They followed it in 1965 with My Kind of Waltztime, another small-group

project with Ethel singing familiar standards. A few singles like “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” briefly got extensive airplay, but the only song I ever heard from RCA that had real pop chart potential was a duet arranged by Gary McFarland with singer Brook Benton. It was never released.

Purcell complained that Ethel didn’t have the all-out commitment for success; she wasn’t willing to sacrifice enough and said “no” too many times to his efforts to persuade her to participate wholeheartedly in the show-business life. He placed her with Matt Monro in Las Vegas, booked her at the Crescendo and other clubs in Hollywood and scheduled her on national media shows like The Bell Telephone Hour, The Tonight Show with Steve Allen and Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas, Dave Garroway, Arthur Godfrey and many others. She followed Newport with the Monterey Festival in 1965. Most of the time she showed up, did a good job and went home or to a hotel room with a television. Not too many people realized she was a battered woman with low self-esteem and deep suspicions about human motives, particularly men. She was happy singing songs with good musicians and on a few occasions fired house bands in order to hire players who knew what they were doing.

By 1966, she was still signed to Purcell, but both agreed that she would be a “semi-star”—someone not willing to take risks or make the sacrifices he believed necessary for popular acclaim but nonetheless “a talent deserving wider recognition.” The year before, she had met John Powell, a booking agent and manager based in Spokane, who heard her at Slate Brothers in Hollywood, where she shared the bill with comedian Pete Barbutti, one of his clients. They began an informal association that developed into engagements in Canada, the Northwest, California and Aspen, Colorado. Sometimes his gigs interfered with Purcell, and more than once she chose Powell, who got nervous when Purcell threatened him for messing with his “property.”

Ex-husband Jacques still visited Bernice next door, but Ethel was on the road almost nine months a year. When Purcell or Powell called with a job, she packed up her music bag and gowns, jumped on a plane and flew

around the country. In London, she became friends with Erroll Garner and shared rice and beans with Johnny Hartman. Musicians admired and respected her. Some fellow singers like Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Della Reese thought she might be stuck-up because she didn’t hang out with the entertainment crowd. She sometimes went out for Chinese food with the guys after a gig but usually kept to herself. There might be an occasional man, but the church girl didn’t shack. When she wasn’t out of town, Ethel still sang weekends at the Red Fox.

RCA never found the hit that might have moved Ethel into the upper echelon of the entertainment business, where people actually made money and lived well, and she never found “the song” that uniquely identified her to the public. Purcell’s efforts to make her a conventional star were doomed to failure from the beginning. Ethel occupied a very tenuous middle ground in a business where there is no middle ground: You’re either on top or at the bottom. She was interested in making a career and realized that she needed an act but found no one willing to put in the time and energy required. In some music industry quarters, she became known as a difficult artist: Someone who sometimes said “no” when the desired answer was “yes.”

The American music scene of the mid-1960s belonged to The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, The Monkees, Herb Alpert and Motown. Dionne Warwick had a hit with “Message to Michael,” but with a few possible exceptions like Nancy Wilson, there were virtually no new, jazz-oriented Black female singers with R&B roots who attracted much public attention.

five THE RED FOX AGAIN

In early 1967, Martha Schoeps’s feature writer decided he had enough of “soft news” and wanted to move on. She offered me the job: three stories a week and I could make my own hours. I couldn’t refuse. I thought I would write a few stories in advance so that I could hit the deadlines running. One story would be about Ethel Ennis and those few occasions when she still sang at the Red Fox. As a police reporter who listened to music while sipping a beer after work, I had gotten to know the performers at Henry Baker’s club Peyton Place across the street and sometimes walked over to the Red Fox to hear her. On one occasion, I brought a female friend from New York, and she remarked that there seemed to be an attraction working. I wanted to find out why this special person was still singing in a place that had already seen its best days. So after several attempts, in March 1967, I made an appointment for an interview. The neighbors said it was an awfully long interview. I kept returning, not so much to ask questions but to enjoy Ethel’s company. I had never met such an accomplished artist who was so completely natural—friendly, funny, earthy and unaffected by her art. Her gifts had developed naturally, she said, and she wanted to respect the talent. She hadn’t studied to become a singer, and her ambition had never been to become a professional entertainer. Her musical life had evolved organically, and like me, she was following where her skills led. She was naturally sophisticated and graceful and had experienced the wider world.

Wow, what was there not to like! And apparently the feelings were reciprocated. She and the Foxes thought I was “nice.” We had a date at the local Chesapeake Restaurant, and I accompanied her to the CBS building in New York on one of her dates at Arthur Godfrey’s show, then the only national radio program that still had a live band.

Because I was soft-spoken and gentle, Ethel figured I must be gay, but when I pushed the hotel beds together, she was quickly disabused of that notion. Our romance had begun, and I was introduced to show business. Peter Lassally—the nicest top show-biz professional I ever met—was still the show’s producer. By that time, the Arthur Godfrey Time radio program had been on the national airwaves for twenty-two years, and Godfrey in his sixties was not the powerful national presence he had been in the early years of television. A self- made New Yorker, he was an insecure, complex man— not the country bumpkin portrayed by Andy Griffith in the Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd. However, like Lonesome Rhodes, he was also not the genial everyman who sold products like no one else and made CBS untold millions of dollars. At the height of his popularity—as the biggest media star in America, a friend of presidents, corporate heads and generals—Godfrey considered running for president. But his womanizing and controlling, sometimes abrasive, personality gradually seeped into public consciousness through a few well-publicized incidents, and he faded.

I think he also mellowed, although he still chased women, had temper tantrums with his staff and irritated the network brass, who supposedly despised him. They couldn’t ignore him because he retained a national audience who bought products and attracted top talents. His concern for our natural environments was genuine, and he constructively used his remaining celebrity to conserve them, all the while harassing the young women in his office.

On his seventieth birthday, more than a year after the show finally left the air, Godfrey’s New York mistress invited Ethel and me to a private birthday party at his penthouse—just the four of us for intimate dinner and conversation. He pointed with scorn to a gaudy sculpture, a gift from

William S. “Bill” Paley, he said, who didn’t have enough gratitude for all the money Godfrey had made for him. At seventy, Godfrey was a lonely celebrity in decline. As a teenager he had once slept next to The New York Times newspaper rolls on the street, and now he was a millionaire with a penthouse, private plane and Virginia estate complete with stables. But he was still driven—by sex, power and the need for public acclaim—all with an amiable, man-of-the-people exterior.

When Ethel first started appearing on his show in 1964–65, he invited her to the same penthouse for dinner and tried to seduce her by emerging nude from his mirrored bedroom. Stunned and then angry, she stormed away and walked twenty blocks in the rain back to her hotel. From Godfrey’s perspective, he was merely following long habits of seduction. He once told me that every successful American male he had ever met—and he encountered a lot of them—needed to empty his seminal vesicles at least once every twenty-four hours. The only exception, he said, was General Curtis LeMay. (I realized then that I would likely never become very successful in America.)

For a long time after this incident, Ethel wasn’t invited back to tape more shows, but she gradually became a semi-regular along with Richard Hayes, the male vocalist. We traveled once with the show to Miami for a week and later to the Michigan State Fair. Ethel sang duets with Godfrey, and I even interviewed him for a Sun article. The musicians over the years were good company, most of them from jazz backgrounds: Remo Palmier, Lou McGarity, Gene Traxler, Hal McKusick, Sy Mann, Hank Jones, Johnny Parker and Gerry Alters. Most people around Godfrey didn’t last more than a few years, but a few did, particularly those who didn’t challenge his ego. Peter Lassally left Arthur Godfrey Time in 1969 to become producer of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, then David Letterman and Tom Snyder. We stayed in touch in the early years and had dinner with the Lassallys in 1973, when we flew to Los Angeles for Ethel to do The Tonight Show after receiving acclaim for singing the National Anthem at Richard Nixon’s second inauguration. Lassally is now retired as “a talk whisperer,” master of the talk-show format who learned from Godfrey how the host

should speak directly in personal conversation to that one viewer or listener on the air. I once saw Godfrey verbally abuse this man terribly in a New York theater and wondered how he could take it. Later I learned Lassally had spent two years as a youth in Nazi concentration camps.

After that first New York trip in 1967, Ethel and I returned to Baltimore and began spending more time together. By the time she traveled west again to sing at the Spokane House, another John Powell gig, I was in love. Ethel was skeptical. “What do you mean by love?” she asked, so I wrote her a two-page screed by a twenty-seven-year-old who, apart from his mother and sister, had loved only three women in his life: his high school sweetheart, German fiancée and New York girlfriend.8

8 See Appendix B: Love Letter

SUNSET DOHENY

After Spokane, Ethel was scheduled to sing for three weeks at the Hong Kong Bar in the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, so I decided to meet her there. I had vacation time before my new job started, and I wanted to know where our romance was going. So I flew to LA and made my way to the Sunset Doheny Motel, where Ethel had camped with her gowns, wigs, lingerie, shoes and music. This was a Powell gig, prestigious but low paying. Purcell would have had her staying at the Century Plaza for more money, a good portion of which would have gone into his bank account. The Plaza, opened in 1963 with great fanfare, had decided to make its dimly lit, 300-seat Hong Kong Bar into the kind of jazz room that once flourished on the Strip. It wouldn’t last long. Like Ethel’s musical career, the timing was all wrong. Show-business money, and the high rollers and gangsters who spent it, had migrated to Vegas, and musical tastes among the young had changed. Jazz didn’t speak to the rock and rollers. Even Hugh Hefner lamented that romance and sophistication had disappeared from the Strip. Purcell did send Stan Pat, his West Coast rep, to check on Ethel, but she was basically on her own with me as young lover to assist.

The Hong Kong Bar was the fourth LA nightclub for Ethel in three years. She first visited Los Angeles with friend and guitarist Walt Namuth in 1964 to perform at the Crescendo, a jazz-oriented show room where people like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Mel Tormé had recorded

and performed many times. It had been sold the previous year and was closing, so Ethel encountered a cold atmosphere with a house band that couldn’t play her music. She ended up paying off the band and bringing in different musicians, making a grand total of $12 for the week. There was some compensation in subsequent experiences. At The Scene, she held hands with Peggy Lee, who taught her how to drink brandy, and at Slate Brothers, she shared a bill with Pete Barbutti, who attracted such luminaries as Red Buttons, Allen Ludden and Betty White, and Ernie Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams.

May 1967 was the advent of the Summer of Love on the Sunset Strip. Most of the real hippies gathered in San Francisco, but the Strip had its share of youngsters who crowded its length to listen to music in the clubs and just “be” together. Six months earlier, police had clashed with about 1,000 youths protesting a strict curfew and loitering law designed to reduce the street crowds around the rock clubs, particularly Pandora’s Box at 8118 Sunset, about eight blocks east of the Sunset Doheny. Frank Zappa, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Sonny and Cher and other celebrity supporters of the counterculture were there to observe and encourage a peaceful demonstration that turned violent. Property was destroyed; protestors were arrested. A month later, Stephen Stills, a member of Buffalo Springfield, recorded “For What It’s Worth” at Gold Star Recording Studios in Beverly Hills, about two miles from our motel. It was still playing on the radio when we arrived. The Whiskey a Go Go, where Buffalo Springfield had operated as a house band for a while and which many consider the birthplace of LA rock and roll, was just up the street. So we were in the center of West Hollywood counterculture in the beginning years of its rock-and-roll era but didn’t know it.

Every evening we took a cab to the hotel. I assisted Ethel in the small basement dressing room, and she performed sets of jazz standards, sprinkled with songs from her RCA albums and supported by the Joe Kloess Trio. People like Buddy Greco dropped by to listen, and Variety, the traditional show-biz bible, gave her performance a good review. We enjoyed it, but Purcell probably would have hated it. There was no “act,” no

professional lighting and she gave the musicians too much time to solo. By the time we returned to the motel, the streets were relatively quiet, although there were always lingering crowds at the Whiskey, particularly on weekends. During the day we walked up and down the Strip and found good cheap places to eat as well as wine-and-cheese stores for provisions to bring back to the motel. One double bed acted as storage for all of Ethel’s junk; we snuggled and slept on the other. Scotty, a friend from Baltimore, took us around in his Cadillac, including jaunts to Compton joints where you could enjoy chitlins and champagne. On one occasion, a former Army buddy took us sailing. Sarah Vaughan invited us to lunch, and while the two singers exchanged compliments, I studied her white male companion. Ethel had already bought me some clothes to overcome my baggy newspaper look, and I was vaguely uncomfortable at the thought of being supported by a woman. Would I be a convenient “occasional man”? The Black/white combination wasn’t unusual in the entertainment business, where men and women often manipulated each other. Our love had nothing to do with skin color, but we lived in a society where the color line still mattered, and I knew our romance might have problems in America. The three weeks at the Sunset Doheny amounted to a “honeymoon;” we were together 24/7 and enjoyed every minute. Ethel then made her way to another Powell gig at the Spokane House, and I headed back to Baltimore to begin my new writing job on June 1.

At the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, 1967

SHACKIN’

By this time, our real marriage had already started, even if it wasn’t legal. We were bound to each other, each giving what the other wanted and needed, the whole bigger than its parts. When Ethel returned, I began moving my few belongings from a bachelor apartment on Bolton Street to her house near Mondawmin Mall. The late Gerald W. Johnson, one of the Sun’s luminaries from the H. L. Mencken era, lived in Bolton Hill then, and I was asked if I wanted to meet him. “Sure,” I replied. Johnson was a distinguished journalist and writer, and I might learn something. After more than fifty years, I still remember our conversation. Baltimore was a fine city, he said, until “the niggers” from the South arrived during World War II and caused its current ills.

I was shocked by his prejudicial language and realized that’s who I was about to join in West Baltimore. Baltimoreans, in my experience, were pretty much the same, Black and white. If anything, the Black folks were more vibrant and culturally alive than their white counterparts, who seemed locked into old social patterns and ethnic neighborhoods. My brother’s first mother-in-law, a grande dame from New Orleans, visited in 1966 and told me that with my manners and international background, I was a prime candidate for Baltimore society, which she seemed to regard as on par with her own. By that time, I was frequenting the jazz clubs and ignored her advice.

So I continued my move from Bolton Hill and became the only paleface on Leighton Avenue, where I’ve lived ever since. After a few months, Ethel said she didn’t like shacking and suggested we get properly married. All our reservations had disappeared, and when we arrived in Aspen, I discovered that getting married, if it’s the right person, is like walking across the street.

eight

THE HEART OF AFRICA

So here I was with Ethel in the city where she was born and raised. She had never resided more than three miles from the N. Calhoun Street row house where she was born. I had never lived more than five years in one place, and that was Muncie, Indiana, where I was born.

As a police reporter, I’d explored all sections of the city and thought I knew something. But once coming back from New York on a late-night train, I gave a cabbie my address, and he looked at me strangely.

“You sure?” he asked. “That’s the heart of Africa.”

“Yes,” I replied, “that’s where I live.”

This was 1967, a year of fierce riots in Detroit and other urban centers around the country. Baltimore—with a slowly growing Black middle class and tradition of protest in the courts— escaped the street violence that year. The city had started to lose population with a large white exodus to the suburbs and was still strongly segregated despite the pioneering civil rights laws of the ’50s and mid-’60s.

Ethel’s family, the Ennises and Smalls, were generally not marchers for justice or protestors against inequality. They were among the many Black people who applauded the work of lawyers in court, preachers at the pulpit and diligent organizers on the street, but they never picketed, marched or spoke to media. Ethel’s father stood with dignity on his one good leg and spoke about goodness in all people, Black and white. Her grandmother, Martha Small, turned to her Bible and told children that

when white people oppressed Black, they simply didn’t know what they were doing. Mother Arrabell was probably the angriest. She resented Jim Crow laws and whenever she saw a white tramp, she would mumble, “There’s a whole lot of white going to waste.” Ethel always remembered her storming into a “whites only” bathroom in a segregated downtown department store so that her little girl could pee. No one bothered her.

Ethel had neither the temperament nor the boldness to fight segregation openly, and her audiences were a mixture of Black, white, young, old, straight and gay who wanted to be entertained, not taught. With her songs and cheerfulness, she appealed to human commonality and universality— not protest and division. Even her blues were playful, never painful or resentful. But a different kind of blues began brewing in the country during the 1950s, a militant sound from long-suffering people who’d had enough of Jim Crow and its violent supporters. It was, as James Baldwin put it, a Blues for Mister Charlie,9 a new, angry assertion that a racist country had to change in order for people on both sides of the color line to heal. Baltimore moved slowly, but at least it moved, inching slowly since the 1930s to better days for its Black citizens. In more Southern locales, the pace was glacial, defended by “moderates” like William Faulkner, who didn’t believe integration could be forced on the South without violence from all sides. Slow down, he advised in the 1950s, as did the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s. “Cool off,” they said. “Trust us to bring about peaceful justice without boycotts, marches, demonstrations and bloodshed.” James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality and originator of the 1961 Freedom Rides, probably had the best reply: “We have been cooling off for 350 years, and if we cooled off anymore, we’d be in a deep freeze.”10

9 James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie: A Play (New York: The Dial Press, 1964).

10 Interview with James Farmer, conducted by Blackside, Inc. on November 1, 1985, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection.

The only Black face I saw at the Sun on Calvert Street belonged to Barney, the elevator operator, a holdover from the old downtown Sun building. He was obviously there for sentimental reasons since the elevators in the newer building were automatic. When a Black female librarian was hired, it made interior news. There were no Black faces in the city rooms of the morning, afternoon and Sunday editions. I knew from studying library clippings that the Sun Newspapers had a long history of amiable racism and condescending antisemitism, so when Ethel and I decided to marry, I told Schoeps, my editor, that I was willing to resign if that was a problem. In her timid manner, she checked with the higher-ups and reported that everything was OK. That was the environment in which I began to write about city life and people. When I was first hired at the Sun, I had imagined becoming a foreign correspondent. Baltimore and its surrounding countryside proved more interesting, and I didn’t have to speak a foreign language.

Ethel with her parents, Errabel and Andrew Ennis, and brother Andrew Jr., early 1940s, photo by E. Victor Wright

ENNIS FAMILY HISTORY

Ihad never lived long in a large American city, let alone as a new in-law with African American families. The longer I lived and followed my curiosity in Baltimore, the more I discovered the city’s significance as one of America’s oldest cities, home to a very distinctive African American population quite different from Philadelphia, New York and Boston to the north and Charleston and New Orleans to the south. Located just below the Mason–Dixon Line on the Chesapeake Bay in a former slave-owning border state, the city had fostered the largest population of free Black folks before the Civil War. Frederick Douglass, a Marylander, had escaped from slavery here.

After that fratricidal war, despite opposition and resurgence of white supremacy, Baltimore Black folks—not that much different from their white counterparts and often related to them—increasingly distinguished themselves in segregated churches, courtrooms, schools and the arts. The “Heart of Africa” was not a bad place to live.

Ethel was the first in her immediate family to be actually born in Baltimore. Her father was born on a farm in rural Calvert County in southern Maryland, and her mother came from Marion, South Carolina. Both were part of the first “Great Migration,” a wave of African Americans who flooded from the South during and after World War I. As a port and manufacturing center, Baltimore became a mecca along with Philadelphia, New York, Chicago and Detroit.

Andrew Ennis, born in 1896 and died in 1985, never talked about his early years in the city or how he lost his leg, but the matriarch in Ethel’s family had vivid memories. In 1909, Martha “Honey” Garrison had married Samuel Small at the age of fifteen. Both had roots in the South Carolina plantation slave system. I taped some of Honey’s early memories before she died in 1977. Most of her family stories consisted of what her mother told her as she was growing up in and around Marion, a county seat in the northeast portion of the state, not far from the ocean and the border with North Carolina. I had imagined it as a tiny rural hamlet, but when Ethel and I visited the place during a trip to Hilton Head, we found a substantial little town with brick buildings and a notable history. A statue of Brigadier General Francis Marion, the famous “Swamp Fox” of the American Revolution, stands in the village square to commemorate the brutal skirmishes that occurred in this area among Patriots, Loyalists, British soldiers and the enslaved people who worked and fought for both sides.11 Honey’s taped memories provide counterpoint to official histories that celebrate Marion’s “better class of people” who were victimized after the locally called Confederate War by carpetbaggers, scalawags and a “horde of ignorant negroes.”12

Honey was a Garrison. Her mother, Eliza, told her that her father, Preston, known as “Press,” who died a year after she was born, was a woodcutter, handyman and sharecropper. His father, Shiloh, had been enslaved on an unknown plantation during the Civil War. Family lore told how he rescued the master’s daughters, Judy and Mattie, from Yankee marauders, took them north and had families by each. Press was allegedly Judy’s child. Shiloh took Mattie to Philadelphia and then went off with a Lilah to “Coconut Grove,” wherever that was.

11 As in so many American communities that celebrate their heritage, the “truth” behind the General Francis Marion statue contains stories of murder, greed and lust as well as courage, honor and duty. The British described Marion as a terrorist, who massacred the Cherokee, raped enslaved women and butchered captives. But the British side, led by the infamous Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, was equally cruel.

12 W.W. Sellers, A History of Marion County, South Carolina, from Its Earliest Times to the Present, 1901 (Columbia, SC: R.L. Bryan Co., 1902).

Eliza’s family came from the Darlington area of South Carolina, about thirty miles northwest of Marion. Her father was an enslaved wagon driver on a plantation who drove to the coast to boil sea water for salt. Eliza was born on April 12, 1861, the day the cannons fired on Fort Sumter. After the war, four of the sons returned to the plantation with coats for the family. Press and Eliza met and married in Darlington. Honey, a surviving twin, was only nine months old at her father’s untimely death; then Eliza remarried and had a son, Walter, whom the family called Uncle Son.

When Honey encountered Samuel “Sam” Small in Marion, he was working as a butler in a row of houses where all the white women “was running with the butlers.” According to Honey, a particularly persistent woman called Miss Helen “was to the point of having him [Sam] lace her corset and attach her stockings to it.”13 When Sam told Miss Helen he wanted to marry the fifteen-year-old Martha and needed the money she owed him, she objected and slapped him in the face. He slapped her back and then came to blows with “Mr. Johnson, the fairest white man that was.” The incident came to trial, she said, and there were people talking about lynching, but Mr. Johnson let it go. The couple married the next week, and Sam got a job at one of the four sawmills outside town.

“Nearing the war [in 1916], things commenced to going down,” Honey recalled, “and you couldn’t make a dime a day. Sam had been making $1.50 a day, and I was doing some washing and ironing. Sam heard at the sawmill they was hiring people in Baltimore, so some men at the mill lent him money, and I gave him a little, and he got a job at Sparrows Point for $14 a week.” He sent for her in August, and Honey came to Baltimore with Ethel’s mother, Arrabell, born 1910 and died 1979, and Honey’s little boy, who died of pneumonia the following year.

I’ve never been able to confirm any of Honey’s memories and stories from South Carolina. She knew nothing of her husband’s background except that his enslaved grandmother had worked in a house. Eliza and

13Any unattributed quotations in this chapter come from personal interviews with Martha “Honey” Garrison, recorded in the 1970s.

Uncle Son joined the couple in Baltimore in December 1916 for Christmas, and five years later, Eliza, the repository of Southern lore, was dead. When World War I ended in 1918, both the Ennis and Small families had become urban Americans.

The Smalls first rented rooms from a lady on Biddle Street near Johns Hopkins Hospital and then moved to “Henman’s Avenue,” undoubtedly Henneman Avenue, a one-block alley street with two-story Federal-style brick houses built in the 1840s between Biddle and Chase. Honey came to Baltimore with a bit of Southern gentility; ladies dressed and behaved modestly and learned to sew, cook and play the piano. On Henneman Avenue, shared by poor Black folks and immigrant “Hunkies,” “women with their heads tied up would sit on the steps drinking beer from buckets,” she said. “I wasn’t used to that in South Carolina—I hated it.” She continued:

On Blue Monday, the colored people didn’t work. Now I don’t know about the white folks, but on Monday, they’d roll beer kegs down the cobblestones. One house had a piano, and they’d beat and play and dance and sing all day long. About three o’clock, they’d start singing hymns, and then there’d be cussin’ and carrying on—they’d fight up and down the street ‘til the Black Mariah come. I closed the shutters and use to cry.

It didn’t take long for Honey to move from that alley to Stirling Street, where she found “decent people.” After several addresses, she moved her family in 1921 to the city’s west side, “where you could find better places to live.” Sometime after that, the Ennis and Small families converged at Ames Memorial United Methodist Church at the corner of Carey and Baker streets.

“What you want with that little man?” Honey asked her daughter before she married the older man. Arrabell never gave an adequate answer, but Ethel later suspected that she believed Andrew Ennis had money. He was dapper and dignified, presented a good appearance at Ames, worked hard and seemed substantial. But in 1929–30, very few in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods made much money. Haircuts were

twenty-five cents and sometimes free if business was slow. Perhaps because of his disability, Andrew didn’t have much ambition. He had been raised on a tobacco farm, the youngest of eleven children. He had once liked to dance and was possessed with a quick wit that served him well in checker games at the three barbershops where he worked.

For years he was a fixture at the barbershop on Harlem Avenue near Carey Street. When I met him, he had long been separated from his wife and lived with his brother Harrison in a dingy second-floor apartment on Stricker Street around the corner from his last shop on Laurens Street. I visited him once in that inner-city shop, which typically filled with customers and other regulars who came for conversation and laughs. A local wino came in, pointed to his missing teeth and cracked, “See, I got the cleanest teeth in Baltimore—you can see right thru ’em.” Not long before someone had tried to grab money from the register; Andrew shut the drawer on his hand, saying, “That don’t belong to you,” then chased him from the shop with an antique revolver he kept near his chair. He was in his early seventies then, always dignified, but walked to work every day with a characteristic lope, lifting his heavy artificial limb at every step. Eventually, his hands became too shaky, and he had to retire.

There was nothing complicated about Ethel’s father, Andrew. He worked hard, fulfilled his obligations and wanted nothing more from life than what he was given. He respected people, loved “his Jesus,” liked baseball, chuckled and smoked his daily cigars. The first time I saw him genuinely upset occurred when we moved him from his roach-bedbug infested apartment to a senior citizens’ high-rise unit both for his comfort and safety. He cried briefly but couldn’t get upset with his daughter. The new setting was probably lonelier since his apartment was perched high above the street. In the old one, during warm weather, he could lean out of his second-floor window and watch the passing parade. He started drinking more beer and bourbon, boon companions to his radio and occasional visitors. Even though we were busy with a business during the 1980s (Ethel’s Place), we visited him as often as we could. Ethel cooked his favorite Sunday meal of fried chicken, rice and greens. The roaches apparently

accompanied him from Stricker Street, and one of my jobs was to spray the cupboards and corners. Andrew appreciated my efforts but didn’t really mind their presence. They were company, and he admired their “little beady eyes.” He said he never wanted to hurt anyone. Occasionally we played checkers, and I recall winning only one game, the result of a bold move; he played with more caution and strategy.

His pleasures were also simple: an ordinary cigar and occasional female companionship. Once we took him and Honey (his mother-in-law) to Fort McHenry for an afternoon outing. He always called her “Miss Small,” although she was only two years older. When he mentioned his need for women, she said, “Andrew, at your age, that’s only in your head.” He looked at her quizzically and replied, “Yeah, both of ’em.” I met several of the women who sometimes visited him. They were always younger and seemed nice. I’m sure they came for his “tips,” but they weren’t hookers and treated him with respect. He needed their touch, and if they performed other services, no one knew about it.

Besides us, his frequent visitors included his son Andy and his nephew Ralgia Green, a big, gregarious man who was presumably the illegitimate son of his brother Joe. We all took him six packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, bottles of bourbon (usually Henry McKenna) and El Producto cigars. On the occasions when we offered better fare (an imported lager, cognac or Caribbean cigar), he thanked us but preferred his own. When all of us were together, the little apartment filled with laughter, cigar smoke and barbershop philosophy, often to the accompaniment of an Orioles baseball game on the little radio or TV. He didn’t get upset if the home team lost. “The other team plays baseball too,” he’d say. He just liked the game. At one time or another, he kicked everybody out of that apartment except his daughter, for whom he had special feelings. As long as you agreed with him and appreciated his routines, he was a feisty, fun old man. But if you presented or suggested any dramatic alternatives, out you went. He liked things the way he liked them, and that was it.

On more than several occasions, we took him down to Aquasco in Charles County to visit Elasker Ennis, another nephew who had remained

in Southern Maryland. Elasker, a marvelous mechanic with threedimensional imagination, once took us over the Patuxent River to Calvert County and the location of the old Ennis farm near Plum Point. Here Ethel’s grandfather, Joseph “Joe” Ennis, and his wife, Julia Harrod, raised eleven children. Andrew was the youngest and always fondly remembered the country. He recalled his father as “the hoss,” a man respected by all his neighbors. I sometimes wondered how a Black man with property could survive in such a segregated context (southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore were as racist as Mississippi), but apparently Joe Ennis had no problems. Like his son, he must have approached life with quiet dignity and tolerance. He insisted on fair treatment and kept to himself, presumably never challenging the color line.

Family lore told that the first Ennis arrived in the county from a French ship containing an extended European family, enslaved people and servants. The leader likely bought land and bequeathed it to the Ennis family. There seems no way to verify this legend, but we know that in 1793, more than fifty ships sailed up the Chesapeake from Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), fleeing from a slave revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. This party would probably have included French, Spanish and English among the Europeans, Black enslaved people from Africa and free mixed-race Creoles descended from Europeans, Africans and the Indigenous people of Hispaniola. Andrew always said that his ancestry included French, African and Native American.

Sometime during the Depression, the family lost the farm, possibly contributing to the fortune of the Goldstein family. Louis Goldstein was Maryland’s colorful comptroller from 1959 until his death in 1998. His father had operated a general store in Prince Frederick, the sleepy Calvert County seat where he was born. In addition to its retail functions, the store served as gathering point for politicians, credit union and rural delivery. Bright, shrewd, energetic and gregarious, Goldstein was one of those politicians who disarmed people with folksiness and laid-back charm. When he said, “God bless y’all real good,” beneath the language was a clever lawyer who knew how the money flowed. He had an interest in state

history, and we encountered each other from time to time during my newspaper days. When you met him, chances were he remembered your name and had mentally cataloged your significance in the current political economy. Like most successful politicians, he was “likable” and genuinely interested in people.

Andrew was proud of Goldstein as a Calvert County native in the same spirit as he sometimes bragged that A. D. Anderson, a successful Baltimore Chevrolet dealer, was also a county native. But like them, he moved to urban areas to find opportunities for work. I suspect that he came to Baltimore during or just after World War I, when city industries had job openings and the old ethnic patterns were in flux.

In contrast to New Orleans, the port city of Baltimore had no viable Latin population (with the possible exception of the French refugees from the 1790s) during its first two hundred years. Officially incorporated in 1797, the city had begun earlier as a small tobacco port on the estuary of the Patapsco River. It became a boomtown after the American Revolution —raw and bumptious, the homeport of privateers and a center of patriotism for the new republic. According to the first United States census in 1790, only 13,503 people lived in Baltimore, including 323 free African Americans and 1,255 enslaved people. We can assume that the bulk of the population came from the British Isles with a smattering of German citizens. By the 1820 census, the city’s population had increased almost five times (62,738) and 70 percent of the African Americans (10,326) were free. At the beginning of the Civil War, Maryland had more free African Americans than any other state, and Baltimore had the nucleus of a nascent Black middle class that would play an important role in the Civil Rights Movement. By the time Andrew reached the city, it also had a thriving German heritage, personified by H. L. Mencken, the iconoclastic journalist who described himself in Happy Days as “a larva of the comfortable and complacent bourgeoisie.”14 The Germans had come in numbers during the

14 H.L. Mencken, preface to Happy Days: Mencken’s Autobiography: 1880-1892 Volume 1 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

1840s and 1850s and created an identifiable culture defined by singing societies, beer halls, sports clubs and German language schools, churches and newspapers. When America entered World War I in 1917, German phobia started a slow decline in this rich heritage, and by the time I came to Baltimore in 1966, only a few restaurants and beer stubes survived to mark what had once been a thriving English-German-African city.15

At 4 p.m. on November 28, 1932, on the rented third floor of a brick row house at 525 N. Calhoun Street in West Baltimore, assisted by a midwife, “Baby Girl” Ennis, entered this world. According to family lore, she wasn’t breathing and had to be shaken to life. Then she started to cry and vocalized from then on.

It was a terrible time to be born (is there ever a good time?). Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World was published that year,16 warning of a propagandized world where individuality had been eliminated. The Great Depression had reached its nadir. Some fifteen million unemployed men wandered the streets. Soviet-stimulated famine in Ukraine, then part of the USSR, had approached the level of genocide. Hitler was on the verge of coming to power in Germany. And Baltimore was probably more segregated than it had ever been, its African American population hemmed and oppressed by Jim Crow laws fostered in slavery and perpetuated by civil authorities.

The little girl would be named Ethel after Ethel Wise, the Douglass High School English teacher who owned the house on Calhoun. Her middle name, Llewellyn, came from Llewellyn Wilson, the famed Douglass music director who trained and nurtured so many noted musicians of the 1930s and ’40s (Cab Calloway, Anne Wiggins Brown, Avon Long, even Duke Ellington from nearby Washington).

15 I’ve sometimes thought the city would have been enhanced with more French and Spanish residents, but the presence of Poles, Italians, Bohemians, Greeks, Lithuanians and Russians on the east side provided an ethnic spice that has faded away over the past fifty years. Only a growing Hispanic presence in the old ethnic neighborhoods has given new flavor to the urban stew.

16 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).

Some years ago, I stood in that little room facing the street and wondered about the unusual couple that had lived there. Arrabell, born in 1910 and died in 1979, was twenty-two when Ethel was born and had already suffered the loss of a female infant named Arlene. She was depressed, poor and unhappy with her husband Andrew. Wise later told me that she offered to adopt Ethel to ease the pressures on the young couple, but Arrabell denied that she ever considered that option.

In 1935, the young Ennis family moved to 1208 Riggs Avenue, two doors down from Andrew’s sister Alice. A year later, Ethel walked across the street to begin first grade at Public School Number 111. Honey was undoubtedly not too far away since her daughter never strayed too far from the family matriarch. Her last child, Charlotte Garrison, was only two years older than Ethel, and the two grew up together like sisters. Ethel was the one who listened to Honey’s homilies; Charlotte rebelled. A brother, Andrew, often called Andy, was born in 1938. Because his son’s skin remained light for such a long period of time, his father questioned his paternity, but the family hung together.

An upright piano stood in the parlor and was kept tuned for Arrabell, who played at Ames and sometimes worked at home with choir members. Although her family had always been poor, a piano at home symbolized the religious, lady-like propriety that Honey honored. Honey’s younger brother, Walter, struggled to play the violin because his large, rough workman’s hands didn’t fit the instrument.

A noteworthy contrast to Ethel’s family is fellow Black Baltimore singer Anne Wiggins Brown, a contemporary of Arrabell who had a different, more privileged household. Wiggins Brown’s father was a physician and she and her light-skinned mother could “pass” as white and attend symphony concerts at the Lyric theater.17 The talented Wiggins Brown received singing lessons from conservatory faculty at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University but couldn’t attend the segregated institution. At

17 She felt badly for her darker-skinned father, she later said, but he told her not to pay attention; he preferred the blues.

age 16 she moved to New York to attend The Juilliard School with private white support. There she met George Gershwin with whom she created the role of Bess in his new opera Porgy and Bess, which premiered on Broadway on October 10, 1935. The famous song “Summertime” was written at her request since she thought Bess needed an aria. When the production toured the country the following year, she and Todd Duncan, who played Porgy, insisted that the National Theater in Washington be integrated for the performances. Ethel and I spent an afternoon with Wiggins Brown in her Oslo apartment when visiting Norway in 1990. The two Baltimore singers sat the piano and compared notes while I videotaped the event.

When Ethel was seven, Arrabell grew tired of teaching her daughter piano fundamentals and sent her to her own teacher, Lovey E. Husketh, who operated a music studio at 425 N. Caroline Street. Sometimes with Charlotte and sometimes by herself, young Ethel would take the No. 22 bus and travel across town with her fifty cents for the lessons. Husketh, a stalwart of the now defunct Baltimore Music Guild, whose meetings were reported by the Baltimore Afro-American, rapped Ethel’s knuckles with a ruler when she hit the wrong note on the grand piano and told her that she’d never be a singer. That was all right with the little girl, who was there because of “parental domination” and dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer.

Fifteen-year-old Ethel was playing hymns on an upright piano for the Sunday school at Ames when approached by eighteen-year-old Abraham “Abe” Riley, an exuberant musician who wanted to put together a band. Riley’s Octet consisted of Riley on trumpet, bass and multiple instruments; Sylvester Coles on drums; Fred Bailey Jr. on guitar; Tignor Douglas and Johnny Manning on alto sax; “Jinkey” Jackson on tenor sax; and Ethel on piano. The group played jazzy rhythm and blues, whatever was popular on the radio, rehearsed at each other’s houses and sought jobs wherever they could find them. Riley assured Arrabell and Honey that the band would protect their virgin pianist. Surprisingly, the older churchwomen agreed. One night, while performing at a local roadhouse, a customer asked the group if they knew “Romance in the Dark,” a Lil Green blues hit tune from

1940 that had been covered by many other singers. Ethel knew it, not from the church but from the Saturday night parties hosted by Gertrude Cooper in the lower unit of 1619 Balmor Court in Gilmor Homes, where the family had moved in 1942. She and brother, Andrew, would press their ears to the floor to hear the bass pounding from below, and this way they both learned the blues. Ethel sang the song, the band earned a big tip and an idea clicked: maybe she could earn money singing at the piano. “I hung out my shingle as a singer,” she said.

Riley’s Octet worked mostly on weekends and in places where ages wouldn’t be questioned. The older band members had day jobs; some were married, and at least one (Douglas) was a college student. In that 1947–50 period, the pace of American city life had quickened. Discharged veterans were buying cars and houses in the suburbs; more than a million African American vets were returning home and challenging the laws and customs that still made them second-class citizens. They had fought organized racism in the name of freedom abroad but still encountered prejudice and racism at home. In this chaotic, confusing postwar world, the band attracted attention from white folks who controlled the larcenous music business with some assistance from gangsters, gamblers and other assorted characters from the demimonde.

In June 1950, seventeen-year-old Ethel graduated from Frederick Douglass High School, although she never studied under the famed Llewellyn Wilson, the music teacher after whom she was named. But her gigs with Riley’s Octet had given her a musical reputation. She wasn’t known as a soloist with a brilliant right hand, but she chorded with infectious, joyful rhythms from the church that fit the blues and pop tunes that the band covered. She didn’t get in the way of the horn players, who also occasionally played the postwar bebop of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. People would gather from the sidewalk outside the houses where the band rehearsed to listen.

In August, probably encouraged by band members, Ethel entered and won a local talent contest sponsored by WAAM, the forerunner of WJZ, Baltimore’s current CBS television affiliate. She sat at an upright

piano and sang “The Man I Love.” When she moved on to compete on the Paul Whiteman’s TV Teen Club in Philadelphia, the producers made her change the song selection, and the applause meter seemed rigged. Thus began her introduction to competitive show business.

The teenaged Ethel had no particular interest in the music business. She liked to sing and dance and played enough piano to work with Riley’s Octet. Her church experience covered the blues and pop songs, and she studied the band’s bebop arrangements to get the flatted 5th, 7th and 9th notes right. And it was nice to get paid, usually a few dollars in cash at the end of the night. A five-dollar tip was big money.

She listened to other women who played piano and sang, ranging from the sophisticated Hadda Brooks to Camille Howard and her boogie-woogie. Then there was Nellie Lutcher and Rose Murphy, Savannah Churchill, Faye Adams, Martha Davis and Hazel Scott. She also liked the clear voice of Doris Day and admired Ella Fitzgerald from whom she’d obtained an autograph while a student at Booker T. Washington Middle School. Among the male singers, she followed Ivory Joe Hunter, Amos Milburn, Charles Brown, Wynonie Harris and Bull Moose Jackson. Most of the music came from records and jukeboxes rather than the radio, and all of it was segregated. This was the era of “race records;” white stations didn’t play Black music, which they considered too primitive, sensual and sordid. Black performers like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole and the Ink Spots had crossed over to white audiences, but Ethel preferred rhythm to harmony, songs that jumped and melodies that swung. She would become known as a ballad singer, but jitterbug was also in her playful, musical soul. In a household where dancing, snapping your fingers and gutbucket blues belonged to the Devil, she was a semi-apostate. Her mother tolerated and even supported her shy but ebullient daughter, and when possible, the two visited the Royal Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue to hear these performers in person.

It’s difficult to appreciate the professionalism of the Black performers Ethel admired. They dressed well, knew their craft and delivered first-class entertainment to appreciative audiences. You could still find dirty dives

where the music was raw, raucous and untutored, but the performers who appeared at the Royal Theater and established clubs in Baltimore were sophisticated, trained and talented.

William Everhart, an aspiring songwriter from Dundalk who needed someone to arrange the music, sing, play and record his songs, once came knocking on the Riley’s Octet’s door accompanied by a 300-pound bodyguard called “Tiny.” I never met Everhart, who seems to have disappeared from sight, but he must have looked strange in Gilmor Homes, where residents didn’t see many white folks apart from the police and bill collectors. Ethel’s mother didn’t like him, but he represented potential money, and she liked that. So with her approval, Everhart encouraged Riley’s group to go downtown on East Lombard Street to Henry O. Berman, who owned a radio store and small recording studio. The band did at least two singles on acetate: “Don’t Ever Feel Blue” and “Honey Hold Me Tight,” bluesy pop songs that fit the moment. The other Everhart tunes included “It’s So Wonderful,” “Here Is My Love,” “My Baby Left Me in This Town” and “When I’m Gone, You’re Gonna Be Sorry.” The latter three were copyrighted by Ethel and Everhart in 1950, and at least two (“It’s So Wonderful” and “When I’m Gone…”) were forwarded to Herman Lubinsky, who had founded Savoy Records in New York in 1942.

Lubinsky was another old radio man, who had operated a station in Newark during the 1920s and then sold and repaired radios as well as records. He and Berman, who were around the same age, probably knew each other. Savoy went national in 1948 and built a reputation for its jazz, blues and gospel recordings, including early ones by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. I later heard of Lubinsky as a loud, profane, cigar-smoking record man who pinched his pennies and notoriously cheated his artists. He must have heard something from the Baltimore acetates because he sent his talent scout Lee Magid to find Ethel, who recalls an Italian-looking fellow in a sharp suit standing at the corner of Presstman and Gilmor asking people how to find the Ennis family. Ethel was still seventeen, so her mother signed a contract that gave Savoy control of the songs.

Lubinksy and Magid changed the title of “When I’m Gone…” to “Little Boy,” which became Sylvia “Little Sylvia” Robinson’s (née Vanderpool) first minor hit with the Haywood Henry Orchestra in 1951,18 later covered by Evelyn Knight, Martha Tilton, Little Richard and Karen Rich with the Tommy Tucker Orchestra. Ethel and Everhart never received any money from the song.

18 Lee Magid went on to manage Al Hibbler, Della Reese and Lou Rawls. Sylvia Robinson became a record producer and label owner, famous for R&B hits and Sugar Hill Records, which introduced early rap/hip-hop hits.

Ethel and her brother making music, late 1940s

AMES, EUB & METHODISM

All during Ethel’s childhood and teenaged years, Ames Memorial United Methodist Church stood at the center of her family life, part of a tight-knit Black community where one saw very few white folks. The congregation has occupied the stone church at Carey and Baker streets since 1900 but traces its origins to the 1860s, when a group split from the Orchard Street United Methodist Church, which dates to 1825.19 When Frederick Douglass High School opened across the street in 1925, this small area called Sandtown became one of Black Baltimore’s cultural hubs.

Honey, who preached as an evangelist at Ames and served in her white dress on the Usher Board, stood at the center of the family as religious matriarch. No one argued with her, and if you blasphemed or questioned the Bible, you risked a blow. Her husband, Samuel, also called himself a preacher, but Honey ruled. I never saw her at Ames but later found one of her handwritten sermons tucked in the Bible that Ethel carried in her purse after Honey’s death (transcribed verbatim on the next page):

19 Dr. Ernest Lyon, former United Methodist minister and counsel general to Liberia and one of the founders of Bowie State College, pastored the church from 1922 to 1938. He also chaired the commission that laid the cornerstone for Frederick Douglass High School. Lyon was part of a long line of African American pastors with Liberian connections who helped make Baltimore’s Black community one of the most vibrant and historically significant in the United States. See Appendix C: Rev. Daniel Coker.

I am but a little child. I do not know to go out or to come in. These was the words of one of the wisesest men the world ever known. After King Solomon had built the house of the Lord, he felt his littleness. He was at the end of his understanding and felt his lack of knowledge, being a king son with all the meterel education that was needed. Yet he was worried and lost because he was without the True Knowledge and Wisdom of God.

Our meterel eduction is a key to knowledge but there must be some power to turn the key. And that power can only be obtain through preyer, so after Solomon had prayed, God granted him both Wisdom and Knowledge. And we have been given the privelidge to ask for what we would in Jesus name and if we would believe, it would be given us. To receive Knowledge we must pray.

Honey practiced what she preached and prayed on her knees three times a day. Ethel’s brother, Andy, remembers that when she came home from work at 6 p.m. every day, the Ennis family would kneel on the dining room floor to pray. Neighbors asked her to pray for them too. Andy and Ethel joked that her prayers seemed interminable. If a fire engine’s siren sounded in the distance, Honey would pray for the firefighters and the victims.20

I can only imagine the services at Ames. Ethel remembered the rhythmic stamping of feet on the wooden floor and Honey’s ministrations at the “healing chair.” This was a Methodist church, so the services must have been more restrained that the Baptists and Pentecostal Evangelicals who emigrated from the South and gave the city its current religious flavor. The style was still African American with sing-song preachers and fervent conversions, but people didn’t speak in tongues or fall on the floor. They raised their hands to God and talked back to the preacher but sang traditional hymns and anthems.

20 When Honey moved to New Jersey in the early 1950s, she bought some property outside Glassboro and built a simple house on prayer. The door jams might be crooked, but she received enough answers and “knowledge” to construct a livable dwelling.

Ethel’s mother, Arrabell, played piano and organ at Ames and later at various churches and revival centers. She was also attracted to assorted prophets, conjurers, mediums, faith healers and readers who promised avenues to health and wealth. Her father, Andrew, disdained the “spiritualists” and stuck to the old-time religion. Virtually everyone played the numbers and looked to the church for luck, solace and weekly relief from political and economic oppression.

Though Ethel played piano for the Sunday school, she never experienced the “cleansing of the blood” that comes from the Christian conversion experience. When Honey left Baltimore in the 1950s, the Ames connection faded. Tired of praying on her knees three times a day and devoting all day Sunday to the Lord, Ethel left the church when she could, and so did Andy. A city girl carefully raised by praying Methodists, she found meaning in inward meditation, signs, omens, astrology and tarot cards. Not bookish, she was an intuitive reader of people and enjoyed Bible studies. To her credit, she claimed she could never get out of the Garden of Eden where Eve was subjugated to Adam and a vengeful God. Her first husband, years after their divorce, once looked quizzically at her and said, “I never knew you were so spiritual.”

Perhaps a similar religious upbringing was one of the reasons we were attracted to each other, for I had been a fervent church boy during my early teenage years in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Like Honey, I preached from the pulpit, prayed zealously and even saved a few souls. At sixteen, I dreamed of becoming a minister in the Methodist tradition. From 1954 to 1957, I faithfully attended Christ’s United Methodist Church, formerly the Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) Church that later merged with the Methodists in 1968. My mother had joined this congregation in 1926 as an eight-year-old and thereafter made churchgoing a consistent habit. As a Wabash student, my father had attended services here, primarily to meet girls. He even dated the mother of Pat Rhode, my first serious girlfriend, whom I also met in these sacred halls.

The EUBers paid little attention to matters of doctrine or theology. Their emphasis was personal salvation. We didn’t indulge in fainting, speaking in tongues or other aspects of the backwoods, snake handling, Pentecostal religion that permanently alienated my father from churches, but we shed tears of joy after bathing in the blood of the Lamb. No Wabash professors worshipped here. The leading intellectual light of the congregation was Estelle Heeter, a seventh grade mathematics teacher who led Wednesday night prayer meetings to fathom the mysteries of the Book of Revelation. I smile at the memory of our serious attempts, assisted by various concordances, to decipher John’s second-century visions from Patmos. Ambrose Bierce defined Revelation as “a famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing.”21

Rev. Bennett Fulp preached at EUB in my days. He was a big, friendly man with a petite wife and three children, two daughters and a young son. He worked hard, agonized over his shortcomings and wept with emotion when his sermons touched on human sorrows and joys. After conversion and baptism, I had announced my intentions to follow a personal “call” to become a fellow preacher. We prayed together, and I asked him questions. What would happen to decent, unconverted people like my father when they died? Were they damned? What about other good people in the world who happened to be non-Christians? Why didn’t we share worship services with people from the small Black community nearby? To this last question, Rev. Fulp replied, “They have their own church.”

His reply echoed the historic, social segregation of Crawfordsville and the rest of Indiana. Southern slave owners, including William Henry Harrison,22 had controlled the early destiny of the state. Indiana law before the Civil War denied basic rights to Black Hoosiers and forbad interracial marriages. An Indiana Senate report in 1842 stated that “the opposition of

21 Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary (New York and Washington, Neale Publishing Company, 1911), 292.

22 William Henry Harrison, the ninth US president, served as territorial governor of Indiana from May 13, 1800, to December 28, 1812.

the large majority of our people to any thing like a close intimacy with the African, is too well known to need comment.”23 The Constitution of 1851 banned any new African American migration into the state.

My mother remembered the Ku Klux Klan marching in the streets of Crawfordsville in the 1920s, when Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson controlled the Indiana legislature for a few years before going to jail in 1926. Even in the 1950s, although the high school was integrated and a few Black athletes achieved fame, the town’s small Black population lived in social isolation from the white residents.

Rev. Fulp had no answers about how to live in America except to have faith, pray and follow the biblical injunctions. When I entered Wabash and stopped coming to his church, he sorrowfully thought I preferred a more intellectual religion. When I told him that a year in Japan had forced me to question my faith, he had no response apart from expression of personal sadness.

A few years later, I wrote him the following letter, probably from Mainz, after I had passed through Indiana on my way from Okinawa and California to Europe:

Wednesday, March 4, 1964

Dear Rev. Fulp,

I stopped briefly through C’ville on my way to Germany. I decided to retrace some old paths and ended in a cold rain at the church. I wanted to tell you that some roots are deep, that the boy always remains with the man.

Crawfordsville was a shock for me when I arrived at age 13. I was too young and confused to integrate this new experience with the life in Austria which had immediately preceded. I resisted

23 Indiana General Assembly Senate, Journal of the Senate, 1842-43, 27th session (Indianapolis: Dowling and Cole, state printers, 1842).

for a while and then accepted what came without too much question, taking on values, which weren’t really mine, and chafing under pressures of a society I didn’t understand. During this process I learned the words of the Christian faith and came into the church with adolescent emotions. (I supposed this is the practical way—establish the religious habit first and then pray for the grace of God, which all too often does not seem to happen.) At any rate, when the adolescent began to disappear, so did the religion—an event that you have witnessed with heartache in more than one circumstance. For the voice of God is hidden and few of us ever expose ourselves enough to hear Him.

(I make no judgment about the validity of the conscious conversion attempt or its result. All I know is that for me the results did not last, and that the conversion came not from a thirst for God but from the desire to be accepted by the community.)

Now I’m a man, and I’ve heard God’s voice and seen His revelation. The life of love, the life of faith against the suffering caused by love, is not an easy one. It doesn’t translate into giving old ladies church bulletins as I once thought. These actions may be good, but they’re not central, not truly indicative of the man naked and shivering before God. I suppose that all who love, who give themselves in compassion to others, are crucified. But Christ’s message is that suffering caused by love is worth it, that there are rewards. I know nothing about the so-called life after death, but I do know that there are rewards in this life, that there is a kingdom of God. This knowledge can’t be taught—it has to be personally learned by putting yourself on the line—by standing as naked and as helpless before the world as you were born and as you die.

This knowledge is full of fear and trembling. But if we are truly open and do not tempt Him, God gives us His grace to live.

You may use all the words, but they’ll usually fall on insensitive ears. For men have taken the wondrous words of religious

experience as written and tried to make them true and universal. They are poetry and consequently only symbolic and personal. If they don’t lead us to encounters with God, if they don’t open our frightened spirit, then they are merely noises in the wind.

I wanted to tell you these things and press your hand, for you first taught me the words. They meant little until God revealed Himself. He couldn’t find me in the chaos of adolescence, but He met me as a man. This is what I wanted to tell you.

As I walked back from the church in the cold, biting rain, I felt that I had done penance. I was finally reconciled to a life which had always confused me. I doubt that my destiny will lead me back to Crawfordsville except for visits, but we are now reconciled. The confusion is gone—the affection and nostalgia for boyhood friends remains.

Love, Earl

I’m not quite sure what I meant about hearing “God’s voice and seeing His revelation.” At church camp in the summer of 1955 or 1956, I had rowed out on a lake and suddenly felt the cosmos open, filling me with incredible, timeless joy. I stood in the rowboat and sang extemporaneous praises to a mysterious, yet deeply personal divinity that totally infused my being. Later, in the Navajo country of the Southwest, I had experienced unified power from the landscape, a harmonious presence that transcended self. This latter experience had nothing to do with churches. The EUBers had always religiously supported missionary work to the tribes of the Four Corners region. When I first traveled through this fenceless, magical area in 1964 with my friends Gwinn and Pat Vivian, I remember seeing a roadside “Jesus Saves” sign. I asked the Vivians to stop and tore it from the ground as a sacrilege.

Ethel performing at the Red Fox, early 1950s

Ethel performing on WAAM (Channel 13), August 1950, photo by O. Shattuck

Ethel with Louis Armstrong at Morgan State University, July 1958

Ethel with Benny Goodman and Jimmy Rushing, 1958

Ethel departing for the Benny Goodman Orchestra tour, 1958

Ethel with Duke Ellington on The Bell Telephone Hour, 1965

Ethel with Arthur Godfrey on The Mike Douglas Show, late 1960s

Leaving the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, Colorado on our wedding day, August 29, 1967

MARRIAGE PARTNERS

In 1967, my and Ethel’s first order of business as a legally married couple was to get Ethel’s financial affairs in order, including severance of her contract with Gerry Purcell. We hired a New York attorney suggested by George Fox, and I found a local attorney to straighten out her unpaid taxes. Purcell was conciliatory, even suggesting that RCA would do another album. He had not received any return on his investment in Ethel, he said, and still hoped to see a payoff—but she was adamant.

“We believed in her, and we were killing ourselves on her behalf,” Purcell later told an interviewer, “but she took it for granted that we’d always go out of our way for her. Clearly she wanted her career to play a smaller role and she opted for a happier personal life.”24

For a small amount of money, the relationship ended, and Ethel’s career horizons narrowed—John Powell on the West Coast, the Godfrey show, a few supporters here and there—but she was free from a business that made her uncomfortable. All she wanted to do was sing when opportunities arose, respect the talent given her and live a life. That was fine with me. I didn’t know anything or care about show business. An attorney friend even advised me never to get involved in the entertainment field. Get a manager for Ethel, if you can find one, he said, but don’t ever become her manager yourself.

24 Kravetz, Ethel Ennis, the Reluctant Jazz Star.

Our marriage occurred not only during a Summer of Love with hippies openly searching for alternative lifestyles but also “the long hot summer” of civil unrest. The Watts riots in 1965 had sounded the alarm. In 1967, the country endured 159 riots in almost 170 cities in thirty-four states. Detroit was the worst during July 23–27 with forty-three dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. Detroit had been a “model city” touted for its urban renewal, but obviously not all of its citizens were happy and satisfied. When the Detroit Free Press surveyed citizens after the riot, they reported police brutality as their number-one problem, followed by poor housing.

Immediately after Detroit, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation and declared that “the only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack—mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions—not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America.”25

Johnson also appointed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission) “to guide the country through a thicket of tension, conflicting evidence and extreme opinion.”26 When the commission released its report seven months later on March 1, 1968, it concluded that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.… What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”27

25 Lyndon B. Johnson, “The President’s Address to the Nation on Civil Disorders,” July 27, 1967, available at The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ node/238062.

26 United States National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders (University of Michigan, 1968).

27 Report of the National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders.

The most fundamental cause of the riots, the commissioners said, “is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.… White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”28 Any serious effort to remedy this situation would require a massive social effort, the commission concluded, which would probably require new taxes.

Most politicians, particularly the conservatives, were appalled; they wanted to blame the victims for the riots and invest in more efficient policing, including intelligence work to identify the radicals whom they believed must have instigated the disturbances, people like H. Rap Brown (later known as Jamil Abdullah al-Amin), arrested after a fiery speech that preceded the 1967 riot in Cambridge, Maryland. President Johnson ignored the report; he was in the middle of an escalated war in Vietnam. No one wanted to talk about more taxes to change poor conditions for predominantly Black neighborhoods. Martin Luther King Jr. called the report “a physician’s warning of approaching death with a prescription for life.”29

A month later, on April 4, 1968, King was murdered in Memphis, and riots erupted in more than 100 cities, including Baltimore, which shared many of the conditions in Detroit. Some locals were genuinely surprised; they believed that Baltimore had escaped the anger and frustration of the times and that the city’s historic Black community was too stable for rioting. Between April 6 and 14, six people died, 700 were injured and more than 5,800 were arrested, with property damage estimated at $12–14 million. Task Force Baltimore, a combined command of Army and National Guard troops, had about 11,000 troops on the streets at the peak of rioting and looting. In nearby Washington, almost 14,000 federal troops occupied the city, the largest number since the Civil War. Estimates

28 Report of the National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders.

29 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “Dr. King Calls for Action Against Poverty and Racism Cited in Riot Study; Poor People’s Campaign Starts April 22 in Washington,” March 4, 1968.

of damages there were in the $15–27 million range. In Chicago, eleven citizens were killed and forty-eight wounded by police, who suffered ninety injured.

The Baltimore-Washington riots set both cities back economically, increasing white flight to the surrounding suburbs to create the current situation: poor, undereducated, predominantly Black cities with high crime rates surrounded by rich, prosperous, predominantly white suburban counties with lower crime rates. The 1968 rioting also altered the local and national political equations.

As a journalist, I seldom ventured into political and economic realms except to make fun of them. One of my general assignments in 1966 before I became a feature writer was to cover the Democratic gubernatorial primary election night at the Belvedere hotel, where the eventual winner, George P. Mahoney, had his headquarters. He won with a subtle racist advertising slogan: “Your Home is Your Castle—Protect It.” It was yet another sign that public relations and media manipulation had overcome any serious discussions of real issues. Mortified that this perennial candidate defeated more moderate opponents, many Democrats and their institutions, including the Sun Newspapers, supported the Republican candidate in the general election, Spiro T. “Ted” Agnew, who was inaugurated as Maryland’s fifty-fifth governor on January 25, 1967.

I knew nothing of Agnew, who had served four years as the third county executive under a reformed government in Baltimore County. Postwar suburban development had overwhelmed the old commissioner system, and the county was awash with new money and politicians in control of public spending—a condition ripe for corruption in a state that had always been “corrupt.” Maryland was one of the original thirteen colonies with families who had lived here for generations. Politics was historic, ethnic and intertwined with economics like a clinging vine on a rose bush. I put “corrupt” in quotations because the process is a slippery moral slope, and I have compassion for those who slide down it—once started, it’s hard to get off, something gangsters and conmen have known for centuries. I recall during my first year as a newspaper writer, a PR flack for a local

racetrack took me to an Annapolis bookstore and bought a book about racing for my “research.” I felt strange, just as I had when Ethel bought me clothes, but accepted the $15 book for my library. The bookseller looked at me when we came to the counter and asked, “Do you need to be paid to write a story?” His look and my feeling that something was wrong stayed with me, and I never again accepted gifts, even when apparently well intentioned. Imagine you’re a basically honest public official with good intentions trying to live on a modest salary, surrounded by wealthy men who need you for their own ends. It’s relatively easy to justify slush funds, private favors and expensive gifts—particularly if you have a family to support.

Businessmen who operated in Maryland’s one-party political sphere (contractors, pavers, engineers, architects, bankers) knew that you often had to pay to do business. Payments took the form of campaign contributions and bribes, sometimes disguised in land deals and stock options but often outright cash in envelopes. That was the system, and business was booming. Baltimore County’s population increased 300 percent between 1940 and 1970 with a big spike during the 1950s, when white families began fleeing the city. Baltimore’s population peaked in 1950 and has declined ever since, becoming increasingly Blacker and Browner.

Ted Agnew—who admitted to receiving expensive gifts, including cash, but always denied he took bribes for public works—came out of this system. Ethel and I would later come to know him and his wife, Judy, a charming lady, but he first came to my attention after the Baltimore riots, when as governor he criticized about 100 “established” Black leaders for not opposing the radicals he believed responsible for the looting and violence. He had been in office only a few months and knew virtually nothing about African American communities but presumed to lecture people who had just been in the streets trying to prevent further outbreaks. Agnew had already become a vocal opponent of the Kerner Commission report, and now he lambasted Black moderates who might be expected to bridge the racial divide. It was an extraordinary performance that attracted national attention and the notice of Richard Nixon, a Republican candidate for president who was calculating how to neutralize George Wallace, an openly

racist candidate who attracted Southern law-and-order voters. Nixon selected Agnew as his vice-presidential running mate in the 1968 elections, and they won a narrow victory. Wallace almost won the Maryland Democratic primary in 1964, and four years later got more than 13 percent of the US popular vote but was unable to force the election to the House of Representatives.30

In those days, when Nixon and Agnew came to power, I wasn’t interested in the system. Ethel had opted out of the entertainment mainstream, and I was trying to understand what Americans in Maryland had created since 1634, when the first Europeans arrived in St. Mary’s County. The state was a social laboratory where one could study more than three centuries of development from the English Calverts and Piscataway Conoy/Wee-So nation to H. L. Mencken and W. E. B. Du Bois. I dove into my new job, looking into interesting characters, city neighborhoods, county seats, artists, musicians, teachers, businessmen, scientists—the whole spectrum of human life apart from the politics that dominated the front page. I quickly discovered, however, that I couldn’t avoid the entertainment business and slowly became a de facto manager. Ethel continued to travel to New York to tape Godfrey’s radio shows. Powell got her jobs on the West Coast, particularly the Great Northwest, where she appeared frequently in Spokane, Seattle and Vancouver as well as on college campuses throughout the region. Locally, people kept calling for concerts, club dates and media appearances. Others wanted to make records. Someone had to assist in hiring and paying musicians, checking contracts, making travel arrangements and evaluating songs and gigs. Fortunately, the Sun had a laissez-faire approach

30 Within eleven years, Agnew had risen from being an obscure lawyer on the Baltimore Country Board of Zoning Appeals in 1957 to the nation’s second highest office. He was incredibly lucky, the recipient of special sets of circumstances, but sometimes seemed to think that his own virtues and principles had caused it all. A postwar self-made man from the suburbs, he had become part of the Establishment and relished his position. His perch in the Nixon administration (lofty but removed from the power centers) enabled him to live as one of those he thought had “made it.” Like my father, who had also struggled to become an officer and gentleman, Agnew had little tolerance for those who challenged “the system” that made him successful.

to its reporters in those days, and as long as I wrote three stories a week, I could make my own hours. In addition to writing features, I also developed into a jazz critic, reviewer of popular entertainment and even wine columnist. (Elvis fans still resent my coverage of one of their hero’s last public concerts in 1977.) We were busy, but when you’re in your twenties and thirties, you have lots of energy.

There were many opportunities to combine activities. When we went to New York, while Ethel did her thing, I interviewed Sherman Fairchild, an aviation pioneer who had a factory in Hagerstown, Maryland. When we traveled for a week to Miami, while Ethel taped Godfrey shows with luminaries like Raquel Welch, I did feature stories on Orioles spring training activities. While Ethel sang at the Spokane House, I wrote about the Spokane Tribe of Indians, living under the federal poverty line and isolated in the mountains above the town. It was a juggling act but possible, and we constructed an intertwined life together: Black and white, music and journalism, fame and anonymity.

There were a few hiccups. We almost got arrested when I smiled at a Philadelphia traffic cop while getting lost en route to The Mike Douglas Show and I made an illegal turn on a freeway. “You people are all the same,” he snarled. “No respect for the law.” My father still stewed in Tucson, and we occasionally received hostile stares, but overall we were just fine. My Black neighbors on Leighton Avenue accepted me (with a few exceptions), and white liberals adopted us as a local “power couple,” active and visible in music and media. We weren’t rich, had little influence and no power to change anything, but we were honest, truthful and in love. That won’t take you far in America, but you can get by.

1970: A KEY YEAR IN BALTIMORE

In 1970, still smarting from the riots of 1968—which destroyed the 2700 block of Pennsylvania Avenue where I had drunk beer and listened to music as a police reporter—a group of private citizens aligned with William Donald “Don” Schaefer, then president of the city council, started promoting a City Fair. It was an audacious idea that first bubbled in the underrated administration of Mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro III: create the equivalent of a county fair in an urban setting, give ribbons to neighborhoods and their home-grown products and celebrate city life. Schoeps bought into the idea and asked me to write a series of stories about the city’s distinctive neighborhoods, something that hadn’t been done since Lee McCardell in the 1930s. When I met with two of the fair’s touters, Hope Quackenbush and Sandy Hillman, the subject turned to entertainment, and they said, “Gee, we’d love to get in touch with Ethel Ennis.” I smiled and told them that I might be able to arrange that, and once again journalism merged with entertainment. We had connections to the military bands based around Washington and approached the US Army Field Band to work with Ethel for a free downtown concert. The Musicians’ Association of Metropolitan Baltimore didn’t like the idea, but the fair had no money and this was the only way for Ethel to sing with a big band. Under threat of injunction, the association

backed down, and on a Saturday night in Hopkins Plaza, a diverse crowd of about 10,000 people came together to hear music from a native daughter. It was only two years after the riots, and officials worried about Black and white folks pressed together downtown. Pessimists had predicted trouble, and media hounds gathered for anticipated violence, but nothing happened. Everyone enjoyed themselves; Hope Quackenbush cried because the fair obviously worked, and the concert didn’t make the evening crime reports.

The Baltimore City Fair marked the beginning of a long period of Ethel’s involvement in civic festivals and public affairs, and beginning in 1970, we became involved with the personalities that would play later on Baltimore and Maryland stages. Over the next few years, the stages would get even larger, including a return to New York as well as the White House. Schaefer, who became mayor in 1971, called Ethel his “singing partner,” and we both participated in the Schaefer administration’s support and encouragement of the arts. Like Agnew, who was three years older, Schaefer was born in Baltimore, attended public schools, served as an officer during World War II and then became a lawyer. But unlike Agnew, who enjoyed a meteoric rise within the Republican Party while the Democrats were split, Schaefer served in the Baltimore City Council for sixteen years, six of them as council president. Similar to Harry Truman, Schaefer was a plainspoken, often profane politician with a sense of history who owed his public life to a political boss, in this case Irvin Kovens. He had studied how to be an efficient mayor within the system and, when given the opportunity, served four terms with remarkable energy, humility and enthusiastic disregard for the rules when he wanted something done—usually right away. I wrote extensively about his festivals and PR events, all designed to boost civic morale, and Ethel participated in many of them, including city fairs and Baltimore Artscapes.

We were on the periphery of Schaefer’s loyal band of followers and never had an opportunity to criticize him, something he apparently didn’t take well. He could be hokey and obsequious to the rich and famous as well as thin-skinned, but he was also sincerely interested in the arts and sports as

essential elements of city life, and he knew how take projects from the visionaries and turn them into practical realities. He also knew how to surround himself with talented people who were often smarter than he but needed a ramrod to keep the herd moving. With Charlie Benton as secretary of budget and fiscal planning, Marco “Buddy” Palughi as public works chief of special services, Robert C. “Bob” Embry Jr. as commissioner of the Baltimore Department of Housing and Community Development and a core of dedicated women in his office, Schaefer built buildings, painted murals, cleaned streets, created festivals and revived the city’s Inner Harbor with gusto. We were never the objects of his wrath, so he was fun to watch, and we supported him. He was happy as mayor, although he always professed to be unhappy and impatient and probably should never have become governor of Maryland, where he was truly unhappy and limited.

Since 1966, Ethel and I have known, to varying degrees, eight mayors of Baltimore,31 and Schaefer stands out as the most colorful, effective and caring of them all. During his tenure, the term “two Baltimores” came into being—one poor and Black, the other affluent and integrated; one centered around the harbor, the other in west and east neighborhoods. Schaefer was accused of ignoring poor neighborhoods while spending millions of dollars on the Inner Harbor and its tourist attractions. I think it’s an unfair charge, still heard today, as the city struggles. One of the reasons Schaefer ran so hard, cheered so loud and spent money on the visible is that he knew the invisible factors of race, migration to suburbs and growing disparities between rich and poor were winning the war. Baltimore in the 1970s and ’80s was declining even as the new buildings arose, and he sensed that it would require imaginative uses of money and loud promotion just to stand still.

Against his wishes and better judgment, Schaefer became Maryland’s fifty-eighth governor in January 1987. As provided by law, he was succeeded as mayor by the city council president, Clarence “Du” Burns—a simple,

31 During the development and operation of Ethel’s Place in the 1980s, we would deal with three of these mayors, William Donald “Don” Schaefer, Clarence H. “Du” Burns, and Kurt L. Schmoke, in a project that involved sophisticated financing, conflicting philosophies and how to turn a vision into reality. See chapter 17.

likable African American man from East Baltimore who, like Schaefer, had toiled in the council for sixteen years. He served only eleven months before losing to Kurt L. Schmoke, the smarter, Ivy-league-educated lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, even though Burns knew city streets far better than Schmoke. Burns was a “roads scholar” with an old-fashioned political machine, but he still only lost by 5,000 votes.

Schmoke represented a new Black Baltimore: educated, middle class and tired of white political domination, even if the rulers were white liberals with good intentions. It was old ethnic politics with a familiar succession: first the Irish (Theodore McKeldin) and then the Italians (D’Alesandro) followed by the usually dominant German/English (Schaefer). Now it was the African Americans’ turn. Unfortunately, America’s historic racism prevented much integration. People continued to flee to the suburbs, and Schaefer didn’t like Schmoke. He would have much preferred Burns whom he regarded as “an old-time, caring politician;” Schmoke, in his opinion, had not paid his dues and didn’t know the city well enough. If the two had gotten along well, they might have made a unique team, playing the federal government at state and city levels to everyone’s advantage. But that was not to be.32

In the midst of these political changes, in 1970, while I pursued my neighborhood and people stories, Ethel performed in Vancouver, Canada, and for six weeks in Zurich and Basel, Switzerland. That was the longest absence in our marriage, and we vowed never again to repeat it. We needed to be together.

32 Ironically, neither man was in a position where he could put his best talents to use. History may well record Schaefer as a great mayor and average governor; Schmoke may be regarded as a great man and only above-average mayor.

GLADYS & TED

In 1971, when Ethel appeared on The Tonight Show and The Mike Douglas Show, we met Gladys Shelley, former showgirl and songwriter who had married Irving Rosenthal. Irving and his brother Jacob were born into a Russian Jewish family and emigrated to New York’s Lower East Side in 1902. Both musicians, they were the youngest of nine children and apparently born salesmen—Irving was making money selling souvenir pails and shovels at Coney Island by age ten. The easy cash money must have been seductive because they were soon in the amusement business. They operated a second-hand carousel in Connecticut and, in 1927, built the famous Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Irving also operated a boxing arena at the Golden City Park in Canarsie, and in 1934, the brothers bought the Palisades Amusement Park from the Schenck brothers, two of the richest men in America.33

The Rosenthals weren’t as wealthy as the Schencks, but they did all right in the entertainment business. We first met Irving when Gladys took us to their Fifth Avenue apartment on the Upper East Side. He opened the door, a tiny Jewish man in his underwear, and said with a twinkle that he had dressed up for our visit. I’ve since regretted that I never interviewed him; what stories he might have told.

33Nicholas Schenck, whom Louis B. Mayer (film producer and co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios) called “Mr. Skunk” in private, owned MGM, among other things.

Gladys must have married Irving in the late 1930s when she was in her late twenties (he was sixteen years older). She was born on Long Island next to Queens and then moved to Manhattan to become an actor and dancer with a flair for words. She had written lyrics as a girl and submitted poems to the New York columnists, including Walter Winchell. Following the advice of her friend Anita Loos, she also married a millionaire. Irving’s wealth enabled her to write the lyrics of more than 300 songs. “How Did He Look?” became a hit in 1940 and “Just Like Taking Candy from a Baby,” written around the same time with Fred Astaire, was recorded by Benny Goodman with Astaire on lyrics and taps. She also wrote a musical in 1946, The Duchess Misbehaves, which became one of Broadway’s most expensive flops, closing after five performances. Her song “Come On Over,” the theme song to Palisades Amusement Park, played on the radio and TV for years until the park closed in 1971.

When we met Gladys, she had just turned 60 but was still skinny, wore miniskirts, had long blond (probably bleached) hair and obviously had had surgery that pushed her breasts up and close together. She talked fast, laughed a lot and pushed her song catalog at every opportunity. She had written lyrics for a tune, “Call Me Young,” with music by Eddie Breuder, then Arthur Godfrey’s music librarian. When she heard Ethel sing it on the radio, she sensed that she had a new interpreter, and for a time we became immersed in her New York world, which included Sol Abrams, an old-fashioned publicist who had worked the Palisades account for twenty-two years, including eight for Irving as vice president of PR. Abrams had once put an elephant on water skis on the Hudson River to promote the park, and he had mastered the fine art of New York hype. When the park closed, his only work in that period was for Gladys, who drove him up a wall. She belonged to a show-biz tradition that roared full blast for recognition, fame and money. From her perspective, Ethel had no ego and we were babes in the woods.

Ethel recorded a couple singles for Spiral Music, Gladys’s music publishing and record company, and the resulting airplay encouraged her to think of an album of her songs. The problem with Gladys’s songs is that

most of them sounded the same. Some had clever lyrics, but the majority were mediocre; if Irving hadn’t indulged her passionate pastime, I doubt she would have stayed in business. Most of us don’t realize just how difficult it can be to write a successful song, let alone a show tune that’s catchy and says something. Sondheims don’t come along very often. We agreed in 1972 to do an album of Gladys Shelley songs provided we used local musicians, arrangers and facilities. We convinced Gladys that we could do it cheaper in Baltimore, and the process would give us experience as producers. So in addition to working as journalist and de facto manager of a singer, I became a record producer.

Around the same time, in early 1972, we received a phone call from the vice president’s office. Ethel asked the operator, “vice president of what?” When the operator replied, “of these United States,” she handed the phone to me and said someone was playing a joke. Ted Agnew was calling to ask if Ethel would perform at a dinner he was giving for the country’s governors in Washington. Frank Sinatra would be the emcee, and Danny Thomas the other performer. As we would discover, Agnew was a fan; he had Ethel’s records and thought he was in a good position to get her “some ink.”

When he was governor of Maryland, we had no contact with Agnew and knew nothing about him except that he was a moderate Republican and, if anything, we were liberal Democrats. For this occasion, we picked up the big-band charts and motored over to the District of Columbia to rehearse for the dinner. In his introduction, Sinatra called Ethel “my kind of singer,” and she did a brief set, followed by Thomas, who performed part of his Vegas act. After the show, a slick piece of professionalism, we adjourned to the Agnew apartment at the Sheraton Hotel for drinks. It was a strange group. Sinatra, who had just retired at 57, seemed down—a balding, middle-aged man afraid to die. Jilly Rizzo, cold and snake-eyed, accompanied Sinatra and never said a word, looking like a gangster right out of central casting. Our hairdresser friend Edward “Sherry” Baker, once known to Baltimore’s gay community as “golden jaws,” was with us. Thomas

was by himself and seemed ill at ease. The Agnews were pleasant hosts. Ted and Ethel sat at the piano and played standards.

Over the next months, we had several intimate dinners with Ted and Judy Agnew, just the four of us, and he proved to be just what he said: a fan. He had absolutely no curiosity about me and never intimated that he knew I was a newspaperman, let alone someone from the Sun, which had supported his rise in Maryland politics. We never discussed issues or ideas but rather wine and its storage, music and other accoutrements of success. Agnew had no sense of American history; he was floating on his good fortune and seemed happy to be part of an establishment. His wife was the nice one—very pleasant, maternal and genuine. Agnew seemed shallow, likable and bland—self-satisfied and on the rise. That was OK; he wanted to bring public attention to Ethel, and that was fine with me.

I discovered that as friends of Agnew, we were now part of a Republican effort to enlist celebrities for the cause. When the Republicans held a fundraising Agnew salute at the Lyric theater, hosted by Sinatra and Bob Hope, Ethel was also invited to sing, and we became part of an entourage bused to the occasion along with Lionel Hampton, Charlton Heston, Zsa Zsa Gabor and others. As we departed the bus and walked into the theater, Mayor Don Schaefer glad-handed each guest like a maître d’.

This event wasn’t so bad for me because I could stay backstage or on the sidelines. I had a delightful conversation with Ray Bolger next to his old vaudeville trunk and sat with Nelson Riddle as we listened to Ethel rehearse with his band. “She could be a big star,” he said with some surprise. I just shrugged my shoulders. Hope was aloof; we weren’t part of show-biz royalty, and I suspect Ethel was the wrong color.

In August 1972, we concluded work on the Gladys Shelley album, which we entitled 10 Sides of Ethel Ennis. We gave special treatment and style to each song, attempting to place it in its own musical framework created by Ethel and arranger Dave Wolpe, who had conducted the US Army Field Band with Ethel at the City Fair. We used twenty-four different musicians, ranging from string players in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

(BSO) to Ethel’s brother, Andy, on tenor saxophone and Leroy Cooper, Ray Charles’s bandleader, on baritone. The other players were also first rate, and many had great musical reputations. I felt we were limited by material, but given the circumstances, our first production was a good effort. While Gladys listened to the results, we flew down to Miami Beach so that Ethel could sing the National Anthem at the Republican National Convention, another Agnew invitation.

I sat next to Sinatra in Agnew’s personal box the night he was renominated. Ethel’s a cappella version of the anthem had stirred the delegates, but I was in the uncomfortable position of cheering a candidate for whom I had no enthusiasm. I could see Price Day, the Sun’s editor in chief, across the convention floor. Norman Mailer walked by, peering at the box, a fighter circling his prey. Sinatra wondered what was wrong with me and started to get pissed, so I weakly applauded, trying to muster energy. I should have been with the observers, I knew, but here I was in glaring light being observed. From that experience I knew how politicians become actors; they’re almost forced to perform on stage; some are better than others.

Ethel’s rendition of the anthem in Miami led to an invitation by the Nixon inaugural committee to perform the song at the president’s second inauguration on the Capitol steps on January 20, 1973. An Army major picked us up in an official car for a rehearsal and then the actual event. Ethel’s approach to the National Anthem, which had been composed in her native city, was not martial or even patriotic in the traditional sense. She slowed it down almost to a lullaby, a lament for the country’s mistakes and shortcomings, for the soldiers who were then dying in Vietnam. The US Marine Band was there, if necessary, but she sang a cappella at the end of the ceremonies, and those who were leaving suddenly turned around to listen. Walter Cronkite, commenting on CBS TV, remarked, “That was something.”

Sinatra mentioned to me with a tinge of envy that few singers ever get to perform on such an occasion. I should get “our people” to obtain a copy from one of the networks, he said, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him

that we had no “people.” It was just the two of us as we drove back to Baltimore with the major. Ethel cleaned out the refrigerator, and I sat down to write a story about the occasion—the only time any of my stories appeared on the front page. A few diehard purists complained that the Sun should have identified me as Ethel’s undoubtedly biased husband, but no journalistic damage was done. Other singers may have sung the anthem without accompaniment, but Ethel’s version certainly had the highest profile to date and spurred a wealth of imitations over the years.

The performance briefly brought her more national notoriety. In February, we flew first class to LA for The Tonight Show and reunited with the Lassallys, who were living in a sprawling modern home above the basin. We joked that their old New York apartment would probably fit into one of the closets. Abrams went into high gear and booked Ethel onto a variety of TV shows, telethons, parades and special appearances, including a New York game of the 1973 World Series. We also met a few other Republicans, including Jacob Javits, who invited us to lunch in the Senate dining room back on the East Coast and then to a New York cocktail party, where I had an opportunity to talk with Abe Lastfogel, a folksy Russian émigré who had run the William Morris Agency for decades. He reminded me of Irving.

On February 6, we attended a state dinner for King Hussein I of Jordan at the White House, a reward of sorts for Ethel’s success at the inauguration. Neither of us had ever visited the presidential mansion, and I was slightly awestruck in the beginning, a feeling that slowly turned to irritation with the military pomp and circumstance that accompanied the affair. Trumpets announced breaks in the evening, including presidential arrivals; aides in formal uniform circulated among the guests to make them comfortable; helmets gleamed. I thought of John Adams and wished that the president’s house had retained its original simplicity instead of the trappings of empire.

The president’s daily diary shows that after dinner and entertainment, Ethel and I spent thirteen minutes with the Nixons in their second-floor residence. This unusual break in an ordinarily tight, scripted schedule

occurred after Ethel was asked to sing the anthem before the Mike Curb Congregation entertained in the East Room. I mentioned to an aide that someone should give the song an introduction appropriate to the occasion. I would be willing to say something if that was all right. So I stood before the seated crowd and talked about how the anthem had been written in 1814, after the British unsuccessfully attacked Baltimore and later burned Washington, including the White House. It was a song of survival and fortitude, qualities certainly that a king of Jordan could appreciate. Then the audience stood, and Ethel sang. Mike Curb’s group—a bland ensemble of young singing and dancing patriots—seemed anticlimactic. After the show, as people mingled over drinks, another aide came up and gushed that Ethel’s performance and my extemporaneous remarks had been terrific. The president remarked that he wasn’t surprised since “these people” knew how to improvise such things but invited us to come up to the residence for a few minutes after he and Pat Nixon left the party. Trumpets sounded, and Nixon escorted Ethel up the staircase with the First Lady behind. An aide quickly became the First Lady’s escort, something I should have done, and I tagged behind. As we passed through a sitting room, Nixon pointed to a small desk and told Ethel that’s where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. We didn’t know whether or not to genuflect so continued on to the living area with its comfortable couches. While Ethel talked with the First Lady, Nixon showed me a small room with a comfortable chair and lamp, record player, books and records. This is where I came up with the China initiative, he said, his sanctuary where he could think, read and listen to music. He invited me to browse his record selection and even asked if I had any suggestions for additions. The records were mostly middle-of-the-road orchestrations of standards and show tunes, nothing very challenging: no small jazz ensembles or string quartets, symphonies or folk or blues or rock groups. There were a few Ellington albums, however, and I wondered how a man who seemed to think in categories was attracted to a musician who consistently rejected them.

Ethel remembered Nixon for his soft hands, and I recall a physically awkward man, ill at ease but very self-contained. Like Agnew, he had no curiosity about the person in front of him after he’d categorized him. He seemed hollow—used up by the political process and no longer a master of his own destiny but a master manipulator. After several more moments of small talk, Ethel and I were escorted out a back entrance and driven back to our little row house in Baltimore. We never saw the Nixons again.

In the meantime, Gladys had managed to sell Ethel’s album to BASF Records, an international German label, and enlisted an old friend, Bill Burnham, to book Ethel for the month of April in the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel. Burnham had a one-person office on one of the top floors of the Empire State Building, walked with a fancy cane and rode in a Bentley. He had once worked at William Morris but then was flamboyantly semi-retired, a New York bon vivant. The Persian Room was also semiretired. When it opened in 1934 and for decades thereafter, the room attracted the city’s glitterati and top entertainers. When Reba Fox told Foxie in 1955 that they had a “Persian Room act” with Ethel, she was singing her highest praises. But by the time we arrived years later, the room was getting shabby (it closed in 1975). I tried to spruce it up with limited theatrical lighting from New York theater techs who had friends at Baltimore Center Stage, but even this effort fell short. I gave backstage lighting cues to an old gentleman who still pulled levers on an antiquated system that had seen better days, similar to a system at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom. As with many things in New York, the town had superficial glamour and famous landmarks, but underneath the veneer, there was often a little man pulling old mechanical levers. We also had to use the small house band, which was adequate but not able to handle Ethel’s custom-made, jazzy arrangements very well. But performance in this case wasn’t paramount. This was a PR event for virtually everyone except Ethel and me, who were swept up in the Gladys cyclone. Opening night included Agnew, Godfrey (who had gone off the air the previous year), Earl Wilson, Gladys and her

friends, BASF executives and other luminaries attracted to the show. Gladys wanted Ethel’s entire set to include only her songs, but we managed to persuade her otherwise. One of her tunes that Ethel did sing, “Clown Town,” matched the occasion:34

“Clown town, the world is a clown town. It’s wild, you wonder what it’s all about. The constant parade’s here, We all masquerade here, Where there is love, there’s jealousy and doubt…

That’s it, but who wants to exit.

We sing and swing but don’t ring the curtain down. Once more, more tinsel we’ll pay for. But who wants out.

We’re mad about clown town.”

Another song that Ethel threw in for comic relief was entitled “Growing My Own,” a ditty about cultivating your own pot plant. Ethel had sung it occasionally in clubs to no great effect, but it made the New York papers, and Burnham and I were summoned the next day to the hotel manager’s office. Burnham was nervous and said he would do the talking. I don’t remember his name (the Plaza had many managers), but this particular gentleman was the stereotypical, officious snob that one associates with world-famous hotels that cater to the rich. Such a song was entirely inappropriate to the hotel, he said, and Ethel was only tolerated because of her recent fame with the anthem. If I had been PR smart, I would have made his attitude an issue, packed our bags and returned to Baltimore. The PR value had already been achieved. Ethel wasn’t being paid very much, although we did have a free room at the hotel. The manager deserved a punch in the nose. But I stayed quiet, let Burnham talk, and we agreed to drop the song. For Ethel, it wasn’t a big deal.

34 The song “Clown Town” was written by Gladys Shelley and was first released by Steve Clayton in 1963.

With Abrams in tow along Fifth Avenue, I stopped at a pay phone to call Agnew and apologize if he took any offense. The song was a playful, innocent part of a musical set, designed to do no more than entertain. He took it all in good humor, and my stock with Abrams jumped considerably. He had never seen anyone call the vice president of the United States from a pay phone, he said, and wondered if we might employ his services. Gladys was paying him, but it wasn’t the same as when the park was operating, he said. He needed to make more money, and he was working his ass off for Ethel. We certainly couldn’t afford a publicist, but I mentioned it to Gladys, and we never heard anything more. (Abrams later went into real estate.)

For the month of April 1973, I commuted at least several times a week between Baltimore and New York. The Plaza Hotel didn’t mean much to Ethel (some rooms had roaches), but I enjoyed the Palm Court and Oak Room, two signature old New York locations that evoked memories of former sophistication. However, people forget that the Black and white perspectives on the American past can be quite different. I can sometimes forget our heritage of slavery, oppression and prejudice. For Ethel, that heritage always lingered in the background, a haze that clouded any appreciation of this country’s history.

Gladys paid for a half-hour television show that aired locally, entitled “Ethel Ennis Live at the Persian Room.” It was taped in the afternoon, and Gladys had invited all her friends to appear in the audience while dressed in their finery. The lighting was terrible, and the final product had a faint greenish tinge that gave the entire production aspects of a horror show. I saw it only once and cringed, happy that it never made it to national distribution, as Gladys had planned. I’m sure that Ethel sang well—she always did—but the audience of begowned and bejeweled middle-aged to elderly women with an occasional swain looked like a decadent French court.

In June, we traveled to Bedford, Massachusetts, to talk to BASF Record executives, who wanted to make Ethel their first exclusive North American artist. Negotiations proceeded through the summer, and it looked like Ethel

might finally have an opportunity to work with a company that had the resources and intelligence to present her talent in the best light. Then something happened; I never knew quite what. We were scheduled to visit a New York lawyer in September to finalize the contract when BASF suddenly decided they weren’t going to enter the North American market after all. The deal was off. The next month, on October 10, Agnew announced his resignation as vice president, pleading no contest to a single charge of tax evasion and denying charges in a 40-page prosecution document that he had received payoffs while in office.

We were stunned. I knew that Maryland ranked among the more corrupt states of the union, known for its cronyism and venality. I also knew that Agnew enjoyed the lifestyles of his wealthy friends and was not above accepting expensive gifts, including cash. But I thought he would draw the line at accepting bribes for government services. He always insisted he did draw that line and claimed that he was forced out of office under duress and veiled threats from the White House against his life. Who knows? We also had met I. H. “Bud” Hammerman, the bagman who testified against him in a plea bargain with prosecutors. He was an obvious wheeler-dealer who knew how to manipulate and bend corners. Was Agnew naive enough not to know his friends were shaking down architects, engineers and contractors who did business with the state? Unlikely.

We never spoke to Ted Agnew after his resignation. Several years later, Judy Agnew came to the Maryland Inn with a friend to hear Ethel sing, and we were happy to see her. I murmured that we hadn’t known how to respond to his resignation, and she said with understanding that it was OK. She had a family, and they had to carry on. Should we have called and said with Sinatra that we were loyal friends no matter what? I don’t think so. Ted Agnew and I were never friends. I appreciated him and his family because they were nice to Ethel. He probably tolerated me because Ethel and I were married.

By the end of 1973, all the furor and hype of our excursions into national politics and the New York entertainment world had run its course. Irving died on December 27 at the age of 78, and Gladys disappeared from

view (she recovered, however, and lived to the age of 92, a familiar New York character in mini-skirt and blond wig walking her chihuahuas down Fifth Avenue). Agnew was no longer vice president, and Nixon would resign in August 1974 (Ethel sometimes joked that she sang them out of the White House). Godfrey would live until 1983, but we never saw him. I thought of an Irving Berlin tune from the 1920s: “The Song is Ended (But the Melody Lingers On).”

fourteen MARYLAND INN

We “retired” in 1974 to Baltimore, where I continued to write stories and Ethel began a long-standing association with the King of France Tavern at the Maryland Inn in Annapolis, where Paul Pearson had hung his shingle as entrepreneur, historic preservationist and jazz aficionado.

Pearson took a circuitous route before he landed in Annapolis as a creative, energetic real estate developer. He grew up in the Washington area in the 1930s, where his uncle Drew Pearson had become the most famous syndicated columnist in America with an estimated readership of sixty million for “Washington Merry-Go-Round” and millions more listeners on network radio.35 The male Pearsons were controversial and active, people who changed things and took risks. Paul’s grandfather Dr. Paul Martin Pearson, a Swarthmore College professor of rhetoric, had been the first civilian governor of the US Virgin Islands and subject of a congressional investigation. Drew Pearson had worked a few years for The Baltimore Sun but was fired after writing his first “inside Washington” book on which his column was based.

35 The columns have been collected and published in: Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1969, edited and with an introduction by Peter Hannaford, foreword by Richard Norton Smith, (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books of the University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

President Franklin Roosevelt called Drew Pearson a “chronic liar” in his gossipy columns, which caused a few congressional representatives to go to jail and occasionally leaked classified information.

With this background, which included attendance at the elite Sidwell Friends School and Harvard University, Pearson lived in Paris for a few years after World War II, where he met and married a French modern dancer named Nicole. The couple lived briefly in New York, where he worked as a writer for The Tex and Jinx Show radio program, a forerunner of the modern talk show, and then moved to Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1951 to manage his uncle’s sod farm. A few years later, he bought his own farm and at one time managed 1,800 acres of agricultural land right outside the District of Columbia.

Around 1968, he first visited Annapolis and saw its potential for redevelopment. With the US Naval Academy, Maryland State House and numerous eighteenth-century buildings, the town was already special. The historic colonial town was built for pedestrians, not automobiles, and possessed genuine charm. But it had become dowdy and unfashionable, threatened by retail development that would obscure or obliterate its remarkable heritage. George Washington had resigned his commission here; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison walked its streets.

Anne St. Clair Wright, the formidable daughter of a Navy admiral and wife of a captain, had already seen the town’s potential, particularly after she and her family settled permanently in Annapolis in 1949. She was the guiding light of Historic Annapolis Inc., founded in 1952 to save the town’s eighteenth-century heritage by doing the historical and archaeological research necessary to identity and preserve important buildings. I met her in the early 1970s, when a historic district had already been established and she was acknowledged as the grand dame of historic preservation. Her crowning achievement was the restoration of the William Paca House and its extensive eighteenth-century garden. She raised the money and supervised the recreation of the garden, a labor of love and rigorous intellect. Paul Pearson was the developer she had been waiting for, and the

two of them worked closely together on a number of projects with occasional disagreements that stemmed from the inevitable tensions between cost and authenticity.

Pearson’s first project was restoration of the Maryland Inn, constructed between 1772 and 1782 as a “house of entertainment” by merchant Thomas Hyde on land that had been designated in the late seventeenth-century for the town drummer. Basement excavation exposed what had once been an eighteenth-century tavern. The subterranean area became what he called the King of France Tavern, and a separate, intimate dining room he labeled the Treaty of Paris restaurant (after the treaty ratified by Congress in the Annapolis State House in 1784, officially ending the Revolutionary War).

For more than a decade thereafter, he worked to restore the inn’s guest rooms, one by one. At the tip of the triangular, three-story brick building facing State Circle, he placed his real estate office from which he developed condominium projects in the Eastport district.

The King of France Tavern opened in 1972, the year guitarist Charlie Byrd moved to Annapolis, and quickly became a home base for this laconic, slightly cynical son of Virginia. Byrd was very honest and unpretentious about his accomplishments, which included development of the acoustic guitar in jazz (a mix of Django Reinhardt, Andres Segovia and Sophocles Papas) and introduction of bossa nova to the American general public with Jazz Samba, the first jazz album to become number one on Billboard’s pop chart in 1963. I played it to death while I was in the Army, never knowing that I’d come to know both Byrd and bassist Keter Betts in later years.

The history of this album, recorded in Washington, has strong regional roots and says a lot about the hazy, shady nature of the music business. The late broadcaster Felix Grant began introducing Brazilian music to the Washington radio audience in 1958-59, particularly after the soundtrack of the film Black Orpheus by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim became world famous. He expanded the list when a Brazilian counterpart,

Paulo Santos, brought some records with him to play on Grant’s show. João Gilberto had made two albums by that time, and Grant became an enthusiast, eventually receiving Brazil’s Order of the Southern Cross for his promotion of Brazilian music. Grant had already spurred the interest of his friend Byrd in the new bossa nova sounds by the time the Charlie Byrd Trio departed in February 1961 for a three-month State Department–sponsored tour of Central and South America that included Byrd’s wife, Ginny, and his bandmates (Keter Betts on bass, Buddy Deppenschmidt on drums).

When they reached Bahia, they were warmly welcomed by Brazilian families who had embraced Gilberto’s new approach to the samba: intimate and quiet with an infectious beat on the guitar that had to be learned. This was the new style: the bossa nova that was bringing increased international attention to Brazil. Betts and Deppenschmidt in particular became enthusiastic, bought Gilberto’s records and started to rehearse the music in their hotel rooms. By the time they returned to the United States, both felt they should make an album. It took them six months to persuade Byrd that the music had commercial possibilities; the enthusiastic audience response to the Brazilian music at the old Showboat Lounge in Washington, DC, probably convinced him, although his label (Riverside) had passed. Byrd recruited Stan Getz as a guest on the project, and Getz’s label (Verve) approved. So Byrd enlisted engineer Ed Greene; they selected an acoustically friendly hall at All Souls Unitarian Church in DC and in three or four hours on February 13, 1962, produced Jazz Samba. Byrd selected the songs and added his brother Joe on bass and rhythm guitar; Bill Reichenbach, from the trio, provided added percussion. These were the days before multi-tracks. Greene mixed the songs on the fly in his stereo headset and then edited the tape in the hallway for a finished album. Creed Taylor, the Verve producer on site, probably didn’t know what he had; he simply grabbed the tape and went back with Getz to New York the same day.

In a little more than two months, the album was released. It had begun as a Charlie Byrd Trio project with Stan Getz as guest artist; the Verve product was Stan Getz accompanied by the Charlie Byrd Trio.36 As the album slowly became popular, Verve released a single of “Desafinado” (“Off Key”) that dropped solos by Byrd and Betts on the longer album version and featured Getz exclusively. He won a Grammy in 1963 for that single as the year’s best solo jazz performance. The album itself sold at least 500,000 copies in the first year, unheard of for a jazz instrumental, and the single became a number-one hit on the pop charts. The bossa nova craze in American had begun. Sidney Frey, the president of Audio Fidelity, worked with the Brazilian government to bring Jobim, Gilberto, Bonfá, Sergio Mendes and others to New York for a Carnegie Hall concert on November 1962, and they stayed in the United States. Taylor produced Getz/Gilberto in 1964 with Astrud Gilberto singing Jobim’s “Girl from Ipanema,” and it outsold Jazz Samba.

Within a year after the release of Jazz Samba, Byrd fired both Betts and Deppenschmidt, who never understood quite why. Betts, who had worked with Byrd for seven years, thought it was the old story that the ones who built the music never cash in when it becomes popular. Deppenschmidt thought that maybe Byrd wanted to take the credit for the album’s success. Byrd had his own problems. He didn’t particularly like Getz’s Grammy for a song that had cut out his contribution, and he wasn’t getting his share of the royalties. He had to sue in 1967, when a jury agreed with him and awarded him cash plus a larger share of future royalties. Decades later, Deppenschmidt, who had earned $150 for the session, sued Verve in 2001 for a share of the success of a project he felt he had conceived and nurtured.

Neither Deppenschmidt nor Betts received recognition for their contributions. It irritated him that Byrd, Getz and Taylor were getting all the credit for introducing bossa nova to the general American audience.

36 I’ll always suspect that if he didn’t do it at the session, Taylor made sure in the mastering that Getz’s horn was more in the forefront than Charlie’s acoustic guitar.

Deppenschmidt, who moved to Pennsylvania and became a teacher, settled in 2004 for undisclosed compensation. Betts didn’t join the suit; he had simply gone his way, always a gentleman who figured the truth would eventually be known. He joined Ella Fitzgerald in 1964 and for the next twenty-five years worked with her around the world.

Jazz Samba invigorated the careers of Getz and Byrd and helped establish Taylor as a premier jazz producer. It also introduced some very talented Brazilian composers and performers to a wider world. If fairness had prevailed, all parties would have participated in the album’s success, but there’s no such thing in the record business once money kicks in. Music is one thing, and selling records is another. Jazz Samba would never have been successful without Betts’s and Deppenschmidt’s input, but it probably never would have sold so many copies without the marvelous horn of Stan Getz. Thanks to the Charlie Byrd Trio and Ed Greene, Jazz Samba ranks as the finest record achievement from the Baltimore-Washington area in the last fifty years.

Neither Ethel nor I had any idea of this musical history when we met Pearson and Byrd in November 1973. Over the years, Byrd and his manager Pete Lambros had operated several clubs that served as his home base in the Washington area (Showboat, Showboat II, Villa Rosa, later Charlie’s Georgetown). Now that Byrd was beginning a new life in Annapolis, Pearson wanted to establish the King of France Tavern as his performance home. And he wanted Ethel to be the other anchor. Between the two of them, he could guarantee audiences and build from there. That was the plan, and for the next ten years, it worked—at least musically. Pearson always lost money with the tavern, but he attracted some of the world’s greatest musicians to the small space (Earl “Fatha” Hines, Teddy Wilson, Johnny Hartman, Gene Bertoncini, Great Guitars, Monty Alexander, the Hard Travelers, among others) and supplemented his business life with wine, women and song. With an ascot, a glass of

champagne and a prayer, he brought a bit of Paris to Annapolis for twenty years. Ethel performed there fourteen weekends in 1974; we became nightly commuters, only rarely staying overnight in one of the inn’s old rooms. Ethel and Byrd also began occasional collaborations in concerts and performances that always attracted large audiences.

I liked Byrd, who described himself as “a country boy from Virginia” but who was also a cosmopolitan citizen of the world who worked very hard to be a world-class musician. He died in Annapolis in 1999 at the age of seventy-four, a victim of lung cancer. True to the pattern of all great musicians, he performed until he was physically unable. He loved sailing, and his records reflect that spirit.

I also liked Pearson, who had remarkable energy and used his agile mind to keep various enterprises afloat. He always seemed to owe people money but, in true entrepreneurial fashion, kept the cash flowing and often spent it well. Eventually, investors stopped supporting his visions, and he had to declare bankruptcy, losing all the historic properties he had developed in Annapolis. He suffered a series of strokes and died, unable to speak, in a care facility in Arnold, Maryland, in 2011 at the age of seventy-six.

At Maryland Public Television, mid-1970s

fifteen

JOURNALISM, MUSIC, TV, FOOD & WINE

While all these musical associations were developing in Annapolis, I continued to work for the Sun in Baltimore, searching out people to talk to, issues to investigate and places to explore. Baltimore’s African American community was rich, relatively untapped territory for a journalist. Western and Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore were like foreign countries. I wrote a series about towns in all of Maryland’s twenty-four counties as well as one on interracial marriages. At various times I was a jazz and wine columnist as well as a philosophical reporter interested in complicated ideas. I remember that after one of these esoteric articles, a grizzled, veteran reporter who kept whiskey bottles in his desk grumbled that I should get my PhD and leave the real reporters to their straightforward, factual tasks.

Some of the stories led to friendships that endured beyond the interview and even led to joint projects. The first time this occurred was early in my stint at the Sun. In 1969, I wrote about Daniel C. Joseph, then eighty-one and still active as a lawyer who had been legislator and judge during a distinguished career as a member of “the legal profession, not the law business.” Joseph, who had an international practice and once represented Gertrude Stein, also had a Jewish-Irish sense of humor. After the article appeared, we continued to meet, and in 1972, I edited a small book of his recollections and stories that we self-published as Send Me Up a

Blanket. The title came from one of his European trips, at a time when a request to the hotel clerk for a “blanket” produced an attractive woman at your door. I smile whenever I think of him and always remember the following story as relevant today as ever:

Whenever a big corporation came down to the legislature to “protect the public,” I immediately went on my guard. I never heard of a corporation yet which looked out for the interests of the public. All of them are like the company, which sent its lawyer to Europe to settle a dispute. After the business was completed, the lawyer wired back, “Justice has prevailed.” The company replied: “Take an appeal.”37

The first extraordinary spirit I found at Morgan State University was Benjamin A. Quarles, then one of the country’s leading historians on the life of Frederick Douglass. That encounter led to an expedition to the old Lloyd Plantation outside St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore, where Douglass had spent part of his boyhood and adolescence. Amazingly, the property was virtually unchanged, and I remember standing in the Lloyd family graveyard, musing about historical continuities. Then one of the family descendants told me she couldn’t stand the touch of a Black hand; the thought repelled her. I thought of my wife’s tender touches and just smiled—no point in trying to change that continuity. Much of Maryland in the 1970s was like that—it didn’t take much imagination to place yourself in an eighteenth-century environment. There were still muskrat trappers in the Baltimore County marshes, and in Baltimore City, you could find broom factories and other small industries that had been forgotten. Fifty years later, a great portion of that physical landscape is obscured beneath an ugly suburban overlay.

37 Daniel C. Joseph, Send Me Up a Blanket! A Lawyer’s Recollection, ed. Earl Arnett (Peregrine Press, 1972).

The same complicated racism endures, however, and this unchanging fact drove my friend and artist James Lewis to despair. Most of what remains of his memory is his name on Morgan’s James E. Lewis Museum of Art and a few local sculptures (Frederick Douglass at Morgan, Negro Heroes of the United States at War Memorial Plaza), but during his life (1923–97) Lewis had a profound influence on Baltimore culture.

W. E. B. Du Bois had lived in Morgan Park near the university and engaged in dialogues with leading Black scholars, particularly Carl Murphy, editor of the Baltimore Afro-American and, like Du Bois, someone who had studied at a German university. Lewis concurred wholeheartedly with what Du Bois wrote in 1934: “Compulsory separation of human beings by essentially artificial criteria, such as birth, nationality, language, color and race, is the cause of human hate, jealousy and war, and the destruction of talent and art.”38

Lewis, a connoisseur of African art, also liked to quote from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We Wear the Mask”:39

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the day is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!

Until his death, Ethel and I occasionally visited Lewis and his wife, Jackie, for meals and dialogues over wine. Once he brought his friend Romare Bearden to hear Ethel at the King of France Tavern, and he also introduced us to Elton Fax, who used to visit us every time he returned to his native Baltimore. Fax, who lived in New York and had traveled extensively in the

38 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Postscript,” The Crisis, 41 (3), March 1934, 85.

39 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1913).

world, was an old-fashioned “progressive” in the spirit of Paul Robeson. As illustrator, cartoonist and writer, he’d been treated well by the Communist countries and consequently saw America through different eyes. We liked the soft-spoken artist who shared his experiences with us, and Ethel always tickled him with her maxim that “being aware keeps your ass busy.”

My writing inevitably attracted the attention of Baltimore’s gadflies and eccentrics. Chief among them was my friend B. Floyd Flickinger, a thinker who like Socrates had foolishly embraced all knowledge for his province. His house in the Homeland neighborhood contained thousands of books, valuable eighteenth-century manuscripts and a pornographic library that must have embarrassed his conservative wife, Geneva, if she even knew about it.

Altogether the books and manuscripts constituted his collection, over which he devoted intensive hours of concern, even establishing a foundation for its protection. I first met Flickinger when I started writing about western Maryland and discovered that he was a scholar of the region. He had written his master’s thesis on Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary War general and hero of the Battle of Cowpens, and taught at a number of colleges in Virginia and Maryland but never earned a doctorate. Flickinger liked to talk more than write, and he probably thought more than either. Surrounded by his collection and stacks of current periodicals, including newspapers, Flickinger tried to find patterns in life’s myriad facets, and when he found one, he’d call you up. Flickinger’s calls were long-winded, and I’m sure he lost more than one friend because of his garrulity, which got worse as he got older. That didn’t seem to matter because he had many friends, ranging from esoteric artists (Bob Hieronimus) to Pulitzer Prize winners (Felix Morley).

More than once, the two of us drove over to Gibson Island to have a “session” with Morley, then in his early eighties and using a wheelchair. As a former editor, college president and founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, Morley was an internationally known libertarian whose

mind spanned oceans and centuries. We talked about the wisdom of James Madison, the fate of the American Republic, state of the world and the meanings of conservatism and liberalism. Both had had similar conversations with Baltimore-based libertarians like John Dos Passos and Garry Wills; I was seeking to clarify my own jumbled ideas. Flickinger had high hopes for the American Bicentennial Celebration, even serving on the Maryland committee. He thought the yearlong event presented a unique opportunity for public understanding of our past and renewal of our ideals. Then he was bitterly disappointed to discover that few Americans were interested in their past, let alone new perceptions or perspectives. Like many of his friends, I had to distance myself from our lengthy dialogues; they went in circles and didn’t produce action—not even a paper or book. In his last years, he became a poet of sorts and produced a long “Ode to the Potomac,” a sentimental but evocative song to the river that had meant much to him as a boy. I quote part of its epilogue:

Reckless men – Thoughtless men – Selfish men

Shamefully, disgracefully Desecrate you, defile you.

The effluents of affluence pollute you.

No longer can youths swim in your waters.

Ignorant men ignore

The lessons you can teach. Knowing you enables one to know one’s self.

Flickinger grew isolated and disoriented in his last few years and died in a Pennsylvania nursing home in 1992 at the age of eighty-seven. His beloved collection went to Hood College.

Another historian of sorts who makes me smile was Arthur G. “Whitey” Mansberger, a self-described “connoisseur of junk.” He had worked at the Sparrows Point steel mill for decades, and, when he retired, decided to visit

demolition sites to collect what seemed interesting. His closets, attic and front yard were filled with debris, some of which he managed to sell. He also collected ginseng or “sang” in the woods near Conowingo Dam, where he had a primitive cabin complete with pot-bellied stove. We spent some delightful hours around his stove telling lies and laughing.

The bicentennial also sparked a few stories from me and led to another New York expedition with Ethel. Jay Chattaway was a very talented arranger with the US Navy Band in DC, and after his discharge, he teamed with Sydney N. “Chip” Stokes to create a small record company that wanted to produce a bicentennial album. The music was first-rate, featuring some of the top session players in New York. Ethel’s version of the anthem was included as well as an original version of “America the Beautiful” and her rendition of “Garment of Brightness,” based on the Tewa poem “Song of the Sky Loom” and set to music by Don Swartz, music director at the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting. Regrettably, they were unable to sell it. Stokes moved to Australia and raised sheep; Chattaway moved to Hollywood and composed some scores for Star Trek movies.

As if all these activities weren’t enough, Ethel and I also became involved in several productions at Maryland Public Television: Book, Look & Listen and Critic’s Place. The former was a children’s show produced by Jerry Byrd for instructional television, where for eighteen months Ethel played a rabbit named “Ethel Earphone” who cavorted with “Hector Projector” (played by David Landsberg) and “J. Worthington Book III” (played by Doug Roberts). The three performers donned hot, foam rubber costumes every week and dubbed their dialogue, which sometimes included original songs. Ethel loved the show and was sorry to see it end in 1975. Doug continued to work as a professional local actor and has appeared in numerous films. Dave moved to LA, formed his own production company and co-starred in several TV series. Book, Look & Listen won several awards and still exists in the memories of adults who watched it when they were three years old.

Critic’s Place endured from 1974 to 1986, and I was involved in about eight of those years as a “critic-at-large” and theater critic. Mike Styer, an amateur actor and producer, conceived of the show in his shower, imagining a set where critics gathered every week to review current films, books, dance, visual arts, theater, television and music in the Baltimore-Washington region. People active in local media auditioned for the show, and the cast—an assortment of rarefied egos, including a few prima donnas—was often more interesting than what they reviewed. One critic for the Sun, who went on to a career at The New York Times, wondered how I, who seemed intelligent in my printed work, appeared like a “cretin” on TV. I don’t think I was that bad, but sometimes, when you had three minutes to review three performances that ranged from excellent professional productions to horrid amateur efforts, the result was a mish mash. We all became performers, actors on an interesting stage, and often it was fun.

Frank Getlein and Lou Robinson, both Washington media mavens, added spice to the show. Judy Bacharach, who later moved back to New York and wrote for Vanity Fair, had a sharp wit that cut if you weren’t careful. Our hostess, Alfredine “Alfie” Parham Brown, was a serious actor with wide contacts in the theater. Radio hostess Elaine Stein had interviewed virtually all the famous people who had visited Baltimore in the past thirty years. Dance critic Jane Murray had danced for George Balanchine. Calvin “Cal” Lampley, who reviewed classical music, had been a record producer at RCA when Ethel recorded there and told me that his colleagues felt she was mishandled, placed in the wrong musical molds. “They didn’t know what to do with her,” he said.

I worked closely with one of the show’s staff stalwarts, the late Margaret Sullivan, who was also an actor with a wicked sense of humor, and enjoyed the associations with Styer, his director Don Thoms and others. Don Swartz, a composer who ran the sound studio, was involved with both shows and became our personal friend and occasional music consultant. Several of the theatrical people on the cast resented my amateur status as a theater critic, a role where I was more journalist than professional insider; they also didn’t like the poker game I initiated with the men while

we bided time during rehearsals. But here’s where I came to know John Goodspeed, a former Evening Sun reporter who reviewed books for the show. Goodspeed had come to Baltimore from Texas in 1941 to work in the city’s defense industry and ended up a reporter after the war. Cynical, hard drinking and somewhat grizzled, he also had a soft side and played a mean ragtime piano. He had left the Sun Newspapers before I arrived, but he was still much more a newspaperman than I ever was, and I liked him. He also thought that Ethel was “one of the great voices of our time,” so I really liked him.

In 1979, Goodspeed and I did a pilot for a PBS book-review show that Maryland unsuccessfully tried to sell to other stations around the country. A special set was built, and I recall that Garry Wills, whom I admired for his mental clarity and thorough scholarship, was one of the guests. If that show had been produced, we would have become the Siskel & Ebert of the book world, a fate that perhaps we thankfully avoided, although we would both have enjoyed it. After Goodspeed retired, he moved to Easton and lived in a converted chicken coop with his fourth wife, Anne Stinson, a flamboyant, fun-loving writer who did a personal garden column for the Star Democrat. We visited them from time to time. Goodspeed and Ethel played the piano; we drank and laughed a lot.

While I wrote my stories in the 1970s, appeared frequently on Critic’s Place and coordinated Ethel’s local performances, she continued to travel around the country. John Powell kept her busy in Spokane and Seattle and points between, particularly the colleges in Washington and Oregon. Both of us enjoyed the Great Northwest, so I traveled with her whenever I could.

In 1977, we flew to Los Angeles to talk to Jack Ackerman and Billy Preston about a record project. Ethel had met Ackerman in LA in 1965, when Tony Bennett gave her a tour of the set of The Oscar, a film in which he had a role. Fast-talking and frenetic, Ackerman was part of the Hollywood scene around filmmaker John Cassavetes, for whom he acted and also wrote music. He was talented; his songs had strong melodic invention, but he was

also frantic, operating at an intensity that fit Cassavetes but seemed bizarre outside the movie world. The amiable Billy Preston was between albums, hanging out with his friends, getting high on a small horse ranch in one of the canyons outside LA. Tagging along with Ackerman was Barney Fields, a mild-mannered record man who tried to keep him under control. This oddly matched team wanted to make records of Ackerman’s songs with Ethel and Preston. They didn’t have much money, but so what? It was a reasonable Hollywood dream—this was a place where dreams could make you rich. With Fields in tow, worried about his mounting credit-card debt for airfares and an 8-track tape recorder, Ackerman plunged ahead. Ethel eventually made four round trips between LA and Baltimore before the year was over, and nothing happened. We saw them in December in Ackerman’s native Philadelphia, where he had presumably gone to escape creditors. Then we lost touch. I think that Preston may have eventually recorded some of his songs. Fields went on to more secure activities. Ackerman died in 1991 in LA from brain cancer at the age of 59.

Ethel’s brother, Andy Ennis (1938–2024), also returned home in 1977 after nine years on the road with Ray Charles. He was in sad shape, hallucinating on PCP, a dangerous drug, and unsure what to do next. Ray had offered to make a record of his energetic saxophone, but Andy demurred. Although he was a featured soloist and occasional bandleader, he still preferred to remain in the background and never wanted to be a star. Like his sister, he had star qualities combined with an infectious sense of humor that endeared him to fellow musicians, but he was never that serious about music. He was a player, someone who could jam with the best, but he’d rather chase women or get high than practice for hours. When we first got married, Andy was still living with us on Leighton Avenue. The women paraded through our house at all hours, and I always remember him heading out the door into the night around 2 a.m., saying, “Sleep is the second cousin of death.”

The best place to hear Andy the musician was in a small club, when he’d had a few drinks and snorts and was ready to make the music flow. He and Mickey Fields had a spiritual affinity, and when the two of them played together, other musicians sat down for a master class. Both had perfect

pitch and had grown up in musical families; they were better with sharps and flats than English, and they’d learned how to use the saxophone as an extension of their voices. When you listened, you could hear the church, street blues and a sweetness that neither dared to show without the horn. Mickey was a family man, Andy a rolling stone, but both could swing hard and fast in all keys.

Andy always says that he survived the hazards of the road because his grandmother Honey prayed for him. Perhaps that’s true because after she died on September 14, 1977, his life became more settled. He tried to make a home for his mother (with limited success) and even married after 50 (it didn’t last). He eventually found a comfortable job in the motor pool of the Baltimore Police Department and occasionally played in local clubs. He never again went on the road and remembers his world travels, cheerfully endures his various operations and sometimes dreams of writing music.

Music was always a part of my fourteen-year-old “career” at the Sun . I wrote about the groups that still performed in the remaining small clubs around Pennsylvania Avenue in the late 1960s and regularly covered the Sunday concerts in the Famous Ballroom sponsored by the Left Bank Jazz Society in the 1970s. My editor Martha Schoeps encouraged this activity, so I became an ad hoc jazz columnist for a newspaper that had always subscribed to Mencken’s dictum that “jazz, with its relentless thumping in four-four time, is no more, at best, than an expanded drum part, with an accompaniment for wind machines, most of them defective tonally.”40 We experienced many musical moments in Baltimore too numerous to list. We helped produce a concert at Peabody for Eubie Blake’s ninetieth birthday, where Ethel sang, Eubie performed and Blanche Calloway (musician Cab Calloway’s sister) attended. Ann and Isidor Saslav became our friends, and Isidor played with Ethel on a few occasions, one a benefit concert where

40 H. L. Mencken, “The Library,” The American Mercury, vol. 14, 1928, quoted in Louis Cheslock, H. L. Mencken on Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).

Ethel attempted a Schubert song and “Izzy” jazzed the violin. We continued to commute many weekends a year to Annapolis, and Ethel made her annual visits to the state of Washington.

By 1978–79, I was running out of stories and energy in a newspaper environment that had changed radically since 1966. In 1972, Schoeps had been eased out as editor of the new feature pages that evolved from the old woman’s page; the editorial powers chose Charles Flowers, a likable but unimaginative professional who sometimes didn’t like what I wrote. He was replaced in 1978 by a younger editor with a talent for layout who wanted more flash in his writers. I was becoming predictable and less involved in the whole process. In 1978, I visited the state’s thirteen budding wineries and interviewed the pioneers, including Philip Wagner and Dr. G. Hamilton “Ham” Mowbray. Wagner, a sensible Sun editor, had turned a hobby into Boordy Vineyards, nationally known for producing drinkable Maryland wine from hybrid grapes. He had written a standard winemaking tome that became a bible for winegrowers and was urbane and aloof. Mowbray, a scientist, was the first to make acceptable wine from the traditional vinifera grapes, something that skeptics said couldn’t be done in the Maryland climate. He bought a 200-year-old farm in Carroll County and was saltier and more down-to-earth. I liked both but became good friends with Mowbray. Ethel and I sometimes visited him and his wife, Phyllis, at Montbray Wine Cellars in the Silver Run Valley. We enjoyed the food and wine and praised the French; I smiled as Mowbray danced with Ethel on their enclosed back porch to the accompaniment of one of her CDs. But despite the wine stories and the tastings I organized at Schellhase’s and Restaurante Tío Pepe when visiting winemakers came to town, I knew my future wasn’t with the Sun Newspapers. I’d had a good run and had long ago forgotten about any ambitions to become an editor or foreign correspondent. Douglas Gordon, an attorney who helped preserve Mt. Vernon Square from destruction, once told me that it would take another Balzac to describe Baltimore adequately. I was no Balzac. To pad my writing quota, I wrote reviews of small, local theatrical productions based on my TV work. The players were happy to receive serious attention, but the

newspaper wasn’t interested. The Sun had a long-standing theater critic who covered the major professional productions in the area and generally ignored the amateurs. In the meantime, I was becoming increasingly involved in musical production—it was more fun, I discovered, to make something original and let other people write about it.

In 1979, I was writing newspaper stories, reviewing theater for Critic’s Place, teaching at Peabody and writing a monthly column for Maryland magazine.41 Then I determined that we should make a live album of Ethel singing at the King of France Tavern. Why, I’m not exactly sure. For years I had preached in newspaper columns that artists should control their own destiny as much as possible and that the Baltimore-Washington region had possibilities as a music production center. Maybe we could take the people who had gravitated around Ethel and turn that energy into something tangible—a product. Certainly I wasn’t going anywhere at the Sun, and I had no books to sell. Ethel had always said you could “blossom where you’re planted,” and we had no desire to relocate to New York. It was time to venture forth. I resigned in September 1980.

41 Maryland magazine was established in 1967 as a quarterly published by the Maryland State Department of Economic and Community Development. Margaret E. Doughterty was the editor when I wrote for the publication in the 1970s. The state sold it in 1991-2.

One of the people attracted to Ethel was a New York character named Bobby Robinson Jr., or Paul Matthews or Morgan Robinson or any of the several other aliases he used while buzzing around the entertainment business. His father, Bobby Robinson, was a Harlem legend who owned a record store on 125th Street, just west of the Apollo Theater. He came to New York from South Carolina, allegedly at the request of gangster Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, another South Carolinian who ran Harlem’s numbers racket among other criminal ventures. Like his Baltimore counterpart William “Little Willie” Adams, Bumpy also financed business ventures, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his money were involved in Bobby Robinson’s record businesses. Baltimore Bobby looked just like his father, so the paternity was undeniable, but he was also illegitimate and shuttled back and forth between the two cities. When he got older, Bobby began claiming that he was responsible for all his father’s and uncle’s famous achievements in Black music after World War II: hit records like Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City,” early songs of Gladys Knight and the Pips and a host of others on small labels like Red Robin Records, Whirlin’ Disc and Fury and Fire.

His father disowned him, and old-time Black record producers and promotion men considered him an outsider, but Bobby Robinson Jr. had a phenomenal memory, had obviously worked in the record business, knew some of the key players and may actually have done some of the things he

claimed. He was a likable, knowledgeable con man with contacts, so we took him with us to New York to talk to industry people to prepare for establishing a production company. Once again, we were babes in the woods, this time accompanied by a wolf.

Ethel was a respected, peripheral member of the music business, and Bobby told everyone he knew that I was rich, so we were received politely by agents and record executives, but realistically, we had nothing to sell. For the next two years, I traveled around the country—New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Atlanta—to convince people that Baltimore could become another Detroit, Nashville or Muscle Shoals. Ethel could forge a unique sound that combined ’50s rhythm and blues with jazz flavors and international sophistication. Beyond a few believers in the Baltimore area, we had no takers. All we had for people to hear was a live album from the Maryland Inn that cost almost $10,000 to produce and never turned a profit. O’Donel “Butch” Levy—a musical friend and, like Ethel, Andy, Charles Covington and Chester Thompson, a product of Gilmor Homes in Sandtown—came back from LA where he was hanging with drummer Thompson and members of Genesis and recording for Groove Merchant. He, Covington (keyboards), Bob Wyatt (drummer who later moved to Brazil), Jon Nazdin (bass) and Wiley Porter (guitar) all squeezed into the King of France Tavern on September 13 and 14, 1979, to make a live recording with Ethel. Engineer Don Barto had the difficult task of operating an 8-track tape recorder in an upper room of the Maryland Inn to capture the sounds. The results weren’t perfect, but they were something to work with, a calling card. Levy went back to LA, and we bought our own 8-track equipment to set up a basement studio with a Baldwin concert grand piano and early Polymoog synthesizer. We were in the record business again, only this time with our own money, raised from first and second mortgages on our little row house. The decade of the ‘80s began with Ronald Reagan on the ascendant, a man never known for concern about America’s blighted inner cities or their inhabitants. Instead, he spoke of a mythical “shining city upon on a hill,” blessed by God and teeming with people living in harmony and peace. He

more than doubled the national debt with expenditures on the military and downsized federal aid to urban areas. It was not a good time for new ventures in Baltimore, a city in the swamps, but nonetheless, there we were. Levy came back again from LA at the end of 1979 and moved into our basement studio for the next six months, during which we mixed the live album and designed and ordered record covers, a poster and other assorted PR materials. I also tried to organize the people around us into what we called ENE (for Ethel and Earl) Productions, a partnership where we shared resources with “associates” who would contribute their skills to a common effort. It included Levy (still under contract to Sonny Lester), Bobby (whom we thought we could reform), Sallie Kravetz (public school media specialist and photographer), Kirk Fancher (former marketing specialist for the Rouse Company and employee of Antisia Music) and, in the beginning, Don Swartz. We later added Ed Rosen, a local theater director and actor. For seven months this group sat around our dining room table every Sunday to discuss how to get ENE Productions off the ground. If we had had more resources or projects, the concept might have worked. Levy felt that our focus should have been on his music; he argued that he had more mass appeal than Ethel. He returned to LA in our second car, a well-used Volkswagen Bug that we gave him. Bobby eventually cashed a bad check, and we had to dismiss him. Swartz left early when it became obvious there was nothing for him to do. Fancher wanted a full-time job in the entertainment business, but we had none. Kravetz complained that we weren’t businesslike enough for her taste but hung on to the end out of loyalty to Ethel.

During this whole process in 1980, Bobby and I attended a convention in DC of the newly formed Black Music Association, spearheaded by Kenny Gamble to promote Black artists and record professionals in a business still tainted by racism and exploitation. At the convention I met a promoter, whose name I can’t recall, famous for selling bottled air in LA. He brought Robert “Bumps” Blackwell to our house after the convention to meet Ethel and listen to music. At this point in his life, Blackwell was legally blind and

his best work with Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Sam Cooke and Little Richard was behind him. He had produced “Tutti Frutti” in the 1950s as well as Cooke’s “You Send Me.”

He talked about the three “D’s” necessary for success in music: discipline, dedication and desire. We had elements of all three but not enough of any to make a difference.

Blackwell joined an eclectic list of well-known musicians who had talked and listened in our basement studio, including Albert Dailey, Oscar Brown Jr., David Amram and David Fanshawe. Fanshawe was an English composer who visited Baltimore to promote an album called African Sanctus, which placed tribal music and English formal music equally together in an integrated composition that could be called planetary music. I’ve always thought that this hybrid approach had great possibilities, like the hybrid wines of Phil Wagner and Ham Mowbray, but I’m still in a small minority. Ethel attempted something along these lines with Isidor Saslav at an AFRAM festival in July 1980. Audience members razzed her for sounding like Barbra Streisand and yelled up to Isidor, “Hey Fiddler on the Roof.”

What gave hope to ENE Productions that year was a proposal by a short, bald physician who told us at the Maryland Inn that he had a million dollars and wanted to build a music club in Baltimore around Ethel. At first, I paid him no attention, but he was persistent in the idea of an “Ethel’s Place,” and I discovered that Dr. David Miller had the resources to back it. So with the help of city officials, I began looking for downtown locations, including space in the then-vacant Pratt Street Power Plant in the Inner Harbor, and an iron-front building that was later incorporated into the Holiday Inn. No downtown commercial site was available, but Philip Arnoult, founder and director of the Baltimore Theater Project, suggested his building as a possibility, the old Heptasoph Hall across the street from the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in the city’s Mount Royal district. I was intrigued about the notion of a performance space built around Ethel that could also serve as a production center and cultural meeting place. Thus began a four-year process that would eventually produce a real Ethel’s Place, an adventure in musical entrepreneurship (see Chapter 17: “Ethel’s Place”).

Shortly thereafter, Bobby and I flew to Atlanta for the fourth Jack the Rapper’s Family Affair, a musical convention created by one of the founders of Black radio. Such an assemblage! Rev. Louis Farrakhan, a former calypso singer and violinist familiar with Black radio, gave a rousing speech at the convention, which was later released as a record.42 I was one of the few white faces there, even more noticeable because Bobby told all his contacts that I was ready to spend money on a new venture in Baltimore. I briefly met his father, who wanted nothing to do with his son, and had an opportunity to talk to some of the pioneer Black promoters, like Joe Medlin and Dave Clark, who had “broken” many Black records in the segregated days of the 1940s and ’50s. These weren’t jazz folks; they were blues, rhythm and blues, gospel and soul folks who had reached the Black masses. Like Jack Gibson, the “Jack the Rapper” who was also known as “Jockey Jack,” they had jive talked and pushed their way against great odds to success in the record and radio business, racist enterprises not known for ethics or sobriety.43 I wanted to learn from them.

I had been impressed with Joe Medlin at the convention, so Bobby and I went to see him in New York the following week. Medlin, a big, friendly man, had been a singer with a few hits before he went into record promotion and production for a variety of big labels. He remembered Ethel as “the Dionne Warwick of the ’60s.” The best part of his advice to me in private was not to have too much to do with Bobby, referring to him as “a mule in a thoroughbred race.” With this admonition in mind, I returned to Baltimore and Annapolis, where we had a promotion party for Ethel (Live at the Maryland Inn). Then we completed a second mortgage on our house, and on September 5, 1980, I walked out of the Sun Newspapers building

42 I shook Rev. Louis Farrakhan’s hand at the convention and attended a service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, where the message for the week was that “loving, gentle, kind, unselfish and pure thoughts are right beginnings, leading to blissful results.” When Ebenezer recognized me as a guest, I told the congregation that I was there on pilgrimage.

43 Jack Gibson dictated a book to Walker Smith entitled Mello Yello: The Incredible Life of Jack the Rapper (Sonata Books, 2015) that is worth reading and captures the man’s rap style accurately.

for the last time. There was no fanfare, no goodbye story or citation for work well done. I walked away at the age of forty with no secure future ahead; it just seemed the right thing to do. I traveled once again to New York to talk to George Butler, a suave, well-dressed jazz producer at Columbia, and in November, Ethel and I had breakfast with Gerry Purcell, her old manager. He no longer occupied a suite on East 53rd Street but instead had a solitary office above an Italian restaurant about thirty blocks away. He was cordial and even apologetic that he’d never been able to identify a hit song for Ethel the way he had with Eddy Arnold. We shook hands, wished each other well and brought the New York experience full circle. We also held our last ENE Productions meeting later that month and faced life as we always had, “just the two of us.”

ETHEL’S PLACE

Ethel began the new year of 1981 at the White House. She had taken a group including Charles Covington (keyboards) and Gaynell Colburn (percussion) to perform at Charlie’s Georgetown, the last club that Byrd and Lambros operated in the Washington area. A group had been scheduled to perform Ellington music for President Jimmy Carter and guests but had to cancel. The staff apparently knew that Ethel performed a few of Duke’s standards, so at the last minute, a concert was arranged—this time for a Democratic president. In contrast to the previous visit, I stood in the background and listened. I don’t think I even shook the president’s hand—not by choice, that was just the dynamic.

While Ethel performed at Byrd’s, made her semi-annual trips to Spokane and did occasional concerts in Baltimore, I worked with Arnoult and the Theater Project board to determine what kind of place an Ethel’s cabaret might be. Arnoult, a bearded impresario from Memphis, blended esoteric, hippie sensibilities with a brilliant, manipulative mind that was more appreciated outside the country than in. His bushy appearance was a convenient actor’s mask that he used to promote free, ritualistic theater as old as time yet new in America. Miller, a much more conventional character, wanted to build a profitable nightclub and assured me that if I stuck with him, I too might be able to drive a new Cadillac. Arnoult wanted to leverage his building to create a sustainable theater—one that wasn’t on the verge of financial failure every year. I wanted a performance home for Ethel, a

meeting place for the city’s segregated communities and an audio-video production space. The good doctor bowed out of the project in mid-1981; Arnoult and I pursued our joint visions. Ethel, who still regarded music as an enjoyable hobby, went along for the ride.

In contrast to the motley crew we assembled for ENE Productions, the Theater Project board, refined since its founding in 1971, was an extraordinary group of lawyers, developers and quasi-public officials who believed in Arnoult’s artistic visions and sought to make them practical. The board hired Mik Flood, who had founded and directed an arts center in Cardiff, Wales, as development director, and we began to design a center following European models. In the meantime, I continued to work for ENE. In May, I flew by myself to LA for the Black Music Association’s third annual conference and had an opportunity to talk with several substantial record executives, including LeBaron Taylor, CBS Records vice president, and Kenny Gamble, founder of Philadelphia International Records, as well as listen in on seminars led by people like Quincy Jones. This time I was staying at the Century Plaza Hotel; the Hong Kong Bar was long gone and the Sunset Doheny far away. Dave Landsberg, who portrayed Hector Projector in Book, Look & Listen, stopped by with an attractive assistant, and we stood on my balcony surveying the LA scene. He had formed his own production company (like practically everybody else in that town), he said, and had several projects afoot. I went out to the hills to have drinks with Peter Lassally and his wife, Alice, and probably bored them with my plans for ENE. The talk was all about money, music, marketing and empowerment, how to blend art and commerce into successful ventures. Peter wished us well, and I flew back to Baltimore with hope but no support.44

That summer, as discussions continued, Gary Dailey came to Baltimore to work as Ethel’s music director and assist us in organizing our budding music business. We had met him when he was a trumpet player

44The ambitious Black Music Association itself folded within a few years for lack of support, and its energies were absorbed by other groups. It was revived as the Black American Music Association in the late 2010s.

with the US Army Studio Band, and then he went on the road with the Buddy Rich and Maynard Ferguson bands. Gary had arranging and music copying skills and became the second musician to move into our basement studio.

Complex creative projects usually undergo several transformations before becoming reality, and Ethel’s Place was no exception. Flood realized that the Theater Project didn’t have enough resources and eventually returned to Europe. Peter Behringer, the board’s president, became intrigued with the project and decided to take it over himself. How and why Behringer came to Baltimore, I have no idea. He had been a yogi, and I recall seeing a photo of him sitting with long hair and robe in lotus position. Somehow he turned his meditations into money, and when I met him, he was dressed as a business person and married to an attractive young lawyer. He had transformed himself into a multiunit housing developer and mortgage banker with offices above the old Louie’s Bookstore Cafe in the 500 block of North Charles Street, across the street from the offices of Struever Bros, Eccles & Rouse, then one of the city’s key developers of historic properties.

As dialogues continued, I found myself in an intricate web of personal and business relationships: Bill Struever and Cobber Eccles had been r oommates at Brown University and moved to Baltimore to renovate houses in south Baltimore and become developers; Bill’s brother Fred and James Rouse’s younger son, Teddy, joined them. Jimmy Rouse, the older brother, established a restaurant in a building he renovated to make money to support his real passion: painting. Bill’s former girlfriend, Amy Gould, did architectural work for the group and established her own business on the top floor above the restaurant. She later married Matt Polk, one of the founders of Polk Audio, who designed a custom sound system for Ethel’s Place. On the middle floor was Behringer’s business, where Al De Salvo, former director of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, was a partner. Behringer and De Salvo were members of the Theater Project board. All these people knew each other, socialized together and had

intertwining business associations. In 1983, I moved into Behringer’s offices as a consultant to facilitate the project and represent ENE interests. In retrospect, I had little idea what I was doing.

I knew something about music and musicians. Ethel and I participated in the first planning sessions for Artscape, an ambitious free arts festival that began in 1982 and has grown over decades to become one of the nation’s largest. Ethel performed as a highlighter in the first festival, along with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and Ray Charles. And in the third one, I acted as consultant to produce a tribute to Clarence Mitchell Jr. that included Duke Ellington’s orchestra, Nathan Carter and the Morgan State University Choir and Tony award–winning actor Trazana Beverley. The orchestra and choir performed “Freedom” from Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert. And I knew something about clubs from Ethel’s performances at the Red Onion in Aspen, King of France Tavern in Annapolis and Charlie’s Georgetown in DC. In each of these instances, I knew the owners, shared information about operations and had a sense of how difficult it is to operate a small music club. However, I knew nothing about real estate schemes, mortgages, banks, internal rates of return, public and private financing schemes, tax implications or the legal sharks that swim around potential deals in search of blood.

Although we had been around politicians and knew a few fairly well, I also knew nothing of Baltimore’s political economy. One sensed a well-hidden flow of money that moved fluidly over criminal lines and nourished a private group of individuals, ranging from gangsters to governors, but we were out of that loop. We had no money of our own— never did. Without a hit record and out of sync with pop music, Ethel had always operated in the very tenuous, almost non-existent middle ground of show business, where you’re either rich or poor. I never made extra money at the Sun or asked for it. For me it was enough to be left alone. So one of the loans in the Ethel’s Place package was to Ethel and me for operating money. This one would later be criticized by a Sun columnist as gross personal favoritism from the mayor, but in actuality it merely established an ownership position for Ethel in a corporation that had obvious benefits to

the city. None of the loan money went into our pockets; the funds were used to buy kitchen equipment, furniture and audio-visual equipment.

Years later, when I told Don Schaefer that I never paid myself a salary from Ethel’s Place out of respect for the public money involved, he expressed surprise. Financially, all we ever received from this project were court judgments for personally guaranteed lines of credit, inflated IRS tax bills and my eventual personal bankruptcy. Artistically, socially and spiritually, Ethel’s Place was a success during its brief life. Financially, it was a personal disaster.

But in the development phases of the project, 1980–84, I wasn’t focused on our personal situation. It became increasingly obvious that we had an opportunity to create something truly special, an artistic complex that could add another layer to the city’s cultural life. Neither Ethel nor I was interested in a night club, but we both had enthusiasm for a musical space that brought people together. I had always been struck by the ingrown character of Baltimore. Historically segregated and dominated by conservative families, the city was comfortable for those who lived here but hostile to strangers and suspicious of novelty.

In contrast, when we passed through Cleveland in 1994 while on a record promotion tour, we met with Robert Bergman, former director of The Walters Art Museum, who had become the fifth director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. He had been in Cleveland about a year, he said, but already knew more people in that city’s African American community than in all his twelve years in Baltimore. Social, racial and financial lines have seemed harder to cross in this balkanized city than in many other American places. With Ethel’s Place, built around a person who always attracted diverse audiences, we thought we had a unique opportunity to break down social barriers and contribute to racial harmony.

It all began with a building, Heptasoph Hall, constructed in 1896 at the corner of Preston and Cathedral Streets. The Order of Heptasophs was a secret fraternal society for white men over 18 founded in New Orleans in

1852.45 The Heptasophs (Greek for “seven wise men”) established a Zeta conclave in Baltimore, which true to American fashion split from the original order in the 1870s to form the “Improved Order of Heptasophs.” The Baltimore-inspired group offered insurance for its members and widows and prospered enough to build a three-level, brick meeting hall complete with a stage, dance floor and large walk-in safe. Stained-glass windows with the intertwined letters “IOH” adorned the upper level. Across the street was the elaborate, brick structure that housed The Bryn Mawr School, which later became the Deutsches Haus ratskeller and headquarters for German singing societies, and then demolished to make way for the Meyerhoff.

The Improved Order of Heptasophs dissolved in 1917, perhaps because many members were German and all things German became anathema after the United States entered World War I. But the insurance business remained under new names, and the hall had various uses, including, in 1963, as the first home of Center Stage, Baltimore’s professional regional theater company. The Theater Project acquired the abandoned building from the city in 1977 in a complicated loan deal that gave the theater a home and the city an artistic tenant.

In 1983, Behringer began to cool on the project. Financing was difficult. The city had already approved transfer of the property to a new partnership, but other funds were needed for historic renovation and reconstruction. In addition, his own business in cooperative housing was declining under the Reagan administration, so we turned to Bill Struever, who had experience in transforming old structures to new uses. We now had our third private partner in addition to the city. Struever had, and still has, a talent for innovative financial packaging; the key in this case was a successful application for an Urban Development Action Grant, assisted by

45 Certainly the country didn’t need another fraternity with its own mythology, rituals and uniforms. De Tocqueville had noticed that ninteenth-century Americans created more associations than almost any other people. Perhaps it was fear that motivated these men—fear of illness, death and isolation in a landscape that until relatively recently had been a “wilderness” inhabited by pagan “savages.” There’s psychic comfort in numbers, ranks and levels of initiation into life’s mysteries.

Karen Ball and others at the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development, then directed by Jay Brodie. With financing in place, the property was transferred to yet another realty partnership, and we moved ahead with construction. We knocked a hole in part of the first floor to create a multi-level performance space with theatrical lighting and a custom-made sound system, added a first-class commercial kitchen and turned the rest of the first floor into a bar and restaurant with an adjoining greenhouse addition. The Theater Project occupied the renovated space above us. It wasn’t quite what Arnoult and I had imagined in 1980, but it was there—original, complicated and risky.

During the construction process in 1984, thieves made off with the stained-glass windows and tried to peddle them at an auction site on the Eastern Shore, so I turned into private detective and worked successfully with city police to recover them. There were other glitches, including a search for a restaurant operator. Ethel and I had been in many restaurants and bars in the United States and other countries, but neither of us knew how to operate one. Not only did we need someone sympathetic and experienced, but we also needed a business partner with capital. Struever and I searched hard, knowing that this was potentially the weakest piece in the puzzle, but we were unable to find the right person. We compromised with Ken Tipper, a young head bartender at a successful Harborplace restaurant, who’d made some money in the stock market. He was a bit of a twerp, who would bow out of the project within nine months of operation, but he was all we had.

Although the work wasn’t finished, and Struever was still connecting wires, to meet the financing requirements, we opened for business in 1984 on New Year’s Eve with fresh paint still on damp drywall. Our operating capital (about $30,000) was much less than what we estimated we needed, but Ethel sang, supplemented by Gaynell Colburn’s group, and Ethel’s Place was launched.

Ethel continued to sing on weekends while the building was being completed, and we had a grand opening on January 28, 1985, but quickly discovered that the development process hadn’t ended. The business model required that we pay the real estate partnership a $10,000 monthly rent. We figured that in the first year we would try to break even on entertainment in the 175-seat cabaret; that meant that we had to be a profitable food-and-beverage operation to survive. Within three months it was clear that we didn’t have enough money. We had two bars and three restaurant areas (counting the cabaret) with a kitchen that could handle virtually any task. When the performer was well known, we usually made money; people paid for an opportunity to sit comfortably in an intimate atmosphere with special lighting and acoustics to hear good-to-great artistry. But when the performer was less famous and the nearby theaters were empty (which they usually were during the week), the Mount Royal area became a desert. We often had overflow crowds on the weekends, straining our ability to serve customers well, but weekdays were often slow, sometimes even when the performer was world class—and the economic model required us to be at least moderately busy seven days a week. The bar and restaurant operation apart from the separate cabaret space never became a successful point of destination, the meeting place that I had imagined.

We discovered early that affluent metropolitan audiences, the kind that supported the BSO across the street, were not interested in rubbing shoulders with “the help.” When we first opened the sophisticated, sexy cabaret with its neon and aluminum accents, we saw big spenders from surrounding counties, the fashionable people that made Tipper’s mouth water. When they discovered that other people—Black, brown, gay—were also attracted to the space, they quit coming. Welcome to America—we’re still not ready to meet each other on an equal basis. Musically, I knew we were OK when Jimmy Witherspoon walked into the cabaret in a big fur coat and announced his presence. Ahmad Jamal had already blessed the room, and future performers told us that it worked. Pianist George Shearing,

who was blind, could feel and hear the ambience we had created. I told people that we were a jazz-oriented music club—not exactly a nightclub or bar—but something relatively new on the American scene: a cultural multiplex. That first year, we hosted, to name a few:46

• Charlie Byrd

• Toots Thielemans

• Joe Williams

• Mose Allison

• Paquito D’Rivera

• Azymuth

• Liz Story

• McCoy Tyner

• Stéphane Grappelli

• Carmen McRae

• Shirley Horn

• Astrud Gilberto

• New Grass Revival

• Cris Williamson

• Milt Jackson–Ray Brown Quartet (with Cedar Walton and Mickey Roker)

We climaxed in 1985 with a New Year’s Eve celebration that Maryland Public Television (MPT) syndicated on PBS around the country. It featured Ethel, Joe Williams, the Jackson-Brown Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, Phil Woods and Toots Thielemans. I never had to worry about finding musicians. They and their representatives found us. My time for music was spent fielding phone calls from around the country and Europe.

Unfortunately, the bulk of my time was spent trying to get effective management for the bar and restaurant operations and an ongoing search for sufficient operating capital. And the building itself was never really finished. We spent months trying to create a sound barrier between the cabaret and the theater on the third floor. In contrast to many such establishments, the interiors looked pretty good in the daytime, but the light also revealed imperfections in the finishings. There had been rumors of Heptasoph ghosts, but our apparitions were more tangible. When resident mice, which had hidden during the renovation process, began to reemerge, I knew we would have an ongoing struggle with the old building.

46 See Appendix G: Performers at Ethel’s Place, 1985–88, for a full chronological list of performers during the club’s history.

There were moments, however—when Ethel and I sat in the balcony with a custom-made meal and a special bottle of wine and listened to wonderful music—that I knew the experience duplicated or exceeded whatever was available in the world. Such moments were counterbalanced by problems in the kitchen, complaints from customers, temperamental outbursts from musicians, stopped-up toilets, thefts by employees, ringing phones, early-morning alarms and myriad other interruptions that accompanied a 24/7 schedule. I compared it to having a baby that never grew up; it cried and demanded most of the time, and once in a while it smiled.

As if opening a new, complicated music club weren’t enough to keep us busy, we also became involved in international, city-to-city diplomacy in 1985. Baltimore and Rotterdam had just become sister cities, and the former had been invited to participate in Hart voor de Stad, a summer festival to celebrate Rotterdam’s rebirth after its center city was destroyed by Nazi bombers. The two seaports had and still have a lot in common: commercial harbor, ethnic diversity, famous medical center, symphony orchestra and museums and a reputation as a working-class town in comparison to nearby affluent cultural centers (Amsterdam, New York). The Dutch were also interested in Baltimore’s efforts to rebuild the Inner Harbor. Ethel was invited to perform at the festival (we brought Charles Covington along as accompanist) and quickly became a popular export, particularly with Rotterdam’s young mayor, Abraham “Bram” Peper, and his staff. We hosted a dinner for them in April 1986 at Ethel’s Place and when we were asked to return to Rotterdam with a large Baltimore delegation in October, Ethel sang at an official dinner in city hall, one of the few buildings that survived Nazi bombing in 1940. We would return two more times during Peper’s long administration, in 1989 and 1995, and developed a fondness for the hospitable, unpretentious Rotterdammers.

In the meantime, we had a business to run. I managed to find four investors, headed by Leonard Homer, a smart, irrepressible attorney with a national health law practice. He joked that if he didn’t invest $50,000 in

our project, he’d just piss it away. His group added a total of $100,000, enough to keep us running but not enough for sustainability. In June 1986, we hired a chef and general manager from a successful downtown Italian restaurant, hoping their experience would turn the food and beverage operation around. And the musicians kept coming:

• Wynton Marsalis

• Flora Purim and Airto Moreira

• Leon Redbone

• Horace Silver

• Les McCann

• Richie Cole

• Yellowjackets

• Roland Hanna

• Clint Holmes

• David Grisman

• Dizzy Gillespie

• Taj Mahal

• Koko Taylor

• Monty Alexander

• Della Reese

• Ira Sullivan

• Kevin Eubanks

• Kenny Rankin

• Béla Fleck

• Art Farmer’s and Benny Golson’s Jazztet

• Great Guitars (Charlie Byrd, Barney Kessel, Herb Ellis)

We also brought in some comedians: The Second City troupe from Chicago, Henny Youngman and Pete Barbutti. That year we programmed the cabaret six or seven nights a week with jazz, folk, bluegrass, classical and pop music to increase volume and widen our musical appeal.

We had hoped to end the year with another PBS broadcast, but MPT was unable to raise the money, so Ethel rang in the new year, which opened with the return of Wynton Marsalis. Many other performers returned in 1987 as well as the following for the first time:

• Doc Watson

• Gary Bartz

• Betty Carter

• Pat Martino

• Andy Narell

• Freddie Hubbard

• Marlena Shaw

• Jon Hendricks

• Pierre Bensusan

• Ellis Marsalis

• Clifford Jordan

• John Abercrombie

• Paul Horn

• Modern Jazz Quartet

• Gene Bertoncini

• Cabo Frio

• Claude Bolling

• Jan Garbarek Group with bassist Eberhard Weber

I spent increasing amounts of time in 1987 trying to find the right combination to make the restaurant and bar operations profitable. I reorganized the kitchen to reduce high food costs and simplify the menu. We cut back entertainment to five nights a week and closed on Mondays. In May we hired John Allen, former general manager of Phillips Seafood–Harborplace, a highly successful restaurant, to examine our operations and suggest improvements. He concluded that we were basically sound but needed to tighten employee training, bookkeeping and management supervision. Our primary problem was that we were not generating enough volume to cover high operating costs. Even with food and beverage costs reduced to industry standards or below, our economic engine continued to sputter. Our original aim was to break even on entertainment, which we did, but I never had time to tailor a booking scheme for the Baltimore market that would generate profits. We were slowly becoming a regional attraction. People would travel from New York or the Carolinas to hear performers like Joe Williams, and the word had spread among musicians that Ethel’s Place was a premiere, intimate venue in the United States. When Béla Fleck left New Grass Revival and began moving into jazz, he brought a group from Nashville to develop the sound. The Modern Jazz Quartet, usually a large concert hall attraction, came to Ethel’s to craft sounds for their next album. In July, I hired another general manager under Allen’s supervision as well as a full-time bookkeeper. Then I added Reid Vogelhut, an eccentric Baltimore friend of Dizzy Gillespie and son of a local attorney, as a restaurant consultant. Nothing worked; the ship was slowly sinking, and people dropped out when the money got tighter. Allen disappeared at the end of October and by December, I had assumed the daily bookkeeping chores in addition to multiple other tasks, which included the ongoing

effort to find additional investors. A local doctor, Burt D’Lugoff, brother of the man who owned the former Village Gate in New York, seemed a likely prospect. He suggested that Chris Crofoot, manager of a successful restaurant in Ellicott City, would be a good candidate to run the restaurant. While bankruptcy loomed, we made plans for another New Year’s Eve show with MPT, which had obtained funding for a more elaborate event that included the BSO and Harborplace fireworks. Mel Tormé and Harry Anderson, star of the NBC comedy series Night Court, hosted the three-hour event that was broadcast live across the country to more than 300 PBS stations. This time, we did little more than provide a space and make recommendations to a production team that seemed committed more to commercial show business than artistic music. I never liked Mel Tormé, who had performed with Ethel on several previous occasions and always seemed to regard himself as a superior entertainment figure above the locals. He certainly had credentials as writer, composer and music director as well as performer but, in my opinion, was best admired from afar. The musical portions of the show from Ethel’s Place included returning Ethel’s Place performers McCoy Tyner, Stéphane Grappelli and Wynton Marsalis as well as Diane Schuur.47 For me, the best musical moments occurred after midnight when Ethel, Tyner, Grappelli and Marsalis performed together. Tyner and Grappelli, who had never met, later recorded a CD.

We began 1988 with Chris Crofoot as restaurant manager in anticipation of new investment spurred by D’Lugoff, whom I accompanied to New York to talk with his brother and explore possibilities. Bill Struever in the meantime was talking to John Bunyan, then owner of Blues Alley in Washington, DC, about selling the Ethel’s Place portion of the overall complex. Ironically, Crofoot was probably the best manager we ever had and was showing signs of generating profits from the restaurant. The cabaret had become internationally known and was expanding its audiences to the region. Despite the financial difficulties, great music continued at Ethel’s

47 Why they selected another female vocalist was beyond me. Ethel knew the blind Diane “Deedles” Schuur from her concerts and appearances in the Northwest and had taught her how to eat ice cream.

Place, then entering its death throes. Marsalis opened for a week in January, followed on January 8 by a champagne supper featuring Yo Yo Ma and seven members of the BSO performing Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat Major. Conductor David Zinman and his sister were among the string players, who sat informally on chairs on stage with glasses of wine at their feet. It was the kind of musical occasion that we cherished in the cabaret: intimate, informal and high caliber.

It’s impossible to count exactly, since the musical groups at Ethel’s ranged from solo performers to 15- to 16-piece bands, but I estimate that more than a thousand musicians passed through Ethel’s Place during the three years and four months that it existed. To describe all of them, each distinctive in their own way, would require a book in itself, but some images stay in one’s memory. Ahmad Jamal, who had helped to open the place in 1985, played again in 1988 as it was closing. His fluid grace at the piano and musical colors across the keyboard were never duplicated. Unlike Claude Bolling, who initially refused to play the Baldwin concert grand on stage, Jamal, a Steinway artist, made his adjustments like most others.

Roger Fritz, the tuner, and I worked with that piano over the years to accommodate myriad styles and touches; the keyboard was rebuilt at least once. We had taken it out of our home studio, and I was sorry to sell it. So many famous musicians had played those keys and made them sing:

• George Shearing

• Dick Wellstood

• Phineas Newborn Jr.48

• Mose Allison

• Marcus Roberts

• Cedar Walton

• Hilton Ruiz

• Liz Story

• Monty Alexander

• Walter Davis

48 Phineas Newborn Jr., who had made his mark in the ’50s, was on a comeback from a mental institution under the orchestration of Adam Markowicz, who convinced us to participate. He showed flashes of original brilliance, but when he started spitting on the floor, rearranging chairs and chasing the waitresses, Leo McLaughlin, our sound engineer, turned to me and said, “I think the medicine’s wearing off.”

Because of his work with John Coltrane and subsequent records, I had imagined McCoy Tyner flowing into the cabaret in esoteric robes, but in walked a blues man in dapper pinstripes. Subsequently, Tyner demonstrated he could do anything with the piano, including sensitive accompaniment for a singer.

Les McCann, an irrepressible hedonist, liked to eat bowls of whipped cream at the bar and chase waitresses. When I picked him up at BWI—one of many airport runs—I was driving a vintage Mercury Marquis that had seen better days. As we were driving up Calvert Street in downtown Baltimore, the muffler fell off and the car was clanking. McCann leaned out of the window and yelled to the looking passersby, “We just got married.”

Carmen McRae, who had a reputation for being “difficult,” taught me a valuable lesson when she summoned me to her dressing room after hearing my introduction to her set. I had mentioned something about her temperament and how we thought she was great. “Just introduce my name,” she said. “I don’t want to be defined. Let the audience make up their own minds.” Naturally, she lived up to her reputation on a busy Saturday night, when her LA piano player refused to play. He was just as good as she was, he said, and he wasn’t going to work with the “prima donna bitch.” After several diplomatic trips between bar and dressing room, the show finally went on.

Most of the performers presented no real difficulties, but there were some exceptions. When Freddy Hubbard played his first set on opening night, everything was fine. He was a brilliant trumpet player with fire and energy. The last set became wobbly and erratic, and I wondered what happened. The next morning, I heard that he’d been kicked out of town by the police—something about women and drugs in a hotel room—and was on his way home to Chicago. After numerous phone calls, including some to his wife, he returned and thereafter performed impeccably. His friends later told me that Hubbard was occasionally prone to such incidents; otherwise, he was a great musician. Paquito Rivera, another remarkable player, still had his family in Cuba when he appeared at Ethel’s Place and

managed to persuade a server to lend him money to get them out. She came to me with a story about needing money for tuition, which she would repay quickly, and my soft heart prevailed. When I found out she lied, I had to fire her. Rivera of course was long gone; his family eventually joined him, and he created an outstanding career in the United States.

Whenever singer-songwriter Cris Williamson came to Ethel’s, she drew a packed crowd of lesbians who were popular with the servers because they tipped well. Williamson herself was a wonderfully warm person who was always welcome. Gay people had always supported Ethel, and we wanted to be a place where all people felt comfortable, regardless of the social stereotypes they endured outside. Other songwriters, particularly the folk artists, found the space conducive to their art. Mary Chapin Carpenter developed into a national solo artist before our eyes.

With the exception of Claude Bolling, who may have had a bad day, the European artists were appreciative of what we were doing. Toots Thielemans, whom we had met on Arthur Godfrey Time in New York, was always a delight. He brought a twinkling humor to his music (harmonica, sometimes guitar) that complemented Ethel’s own playfulness and had unmatched “ears” to hear how to blend with others. Stéphane Grappelli was approaching eighty when he performed at Ethel’s. Sometimes off stage he seemed like an old man but, like Lionel Hampton, became young on stage. He evoked generations of songs from cafés and a European swing that began with Django Reinhardt. Like Thielemans, he had a gentle smile and impeccable musical instincts. Younger artists like saxophonist Jan Garbarek brought the vast loneliness of Scandinavia to the stage and painted musical pictures. He had German bassist Eberhard Weber with him, a treat for Ethel and me because we had bought his records and admired his unique sound. Out of appreciation, I bought him a bottle of wine after the show, and we talked.

After-show talks at Ethel’s were sometimes as special as the performances. Arnoult will always remember talking with Doc Watson ’til five in the morning. I remember sitting with Ellis Marsalis and Clifford

Jordan, listening to stories from Marsalis’s vast musical experiences and hearing from Jordan about his recent adventures in North Africa.

Thus far, I’ve mentioned only those musicians who established national or international reputations, but we made a concerted effort to serve local artists as well, people and groups like Moon August, Tim Eyermann and the East Coast Offering, Ichelle Cole and Strykers Posse, Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson, Karen Goldberg, Aleta Greene, Lady Rebecca and Deanna Bogart. They appeared multiple times and developed audiences for their work. Some of the music was just fun, played with gusto and abandon with no particular expertise. I think of a group called Mambo Combo, composed of local musicians and recording engineers, including our sound engineer Leo.

And I can’t forget Sunday brunches with classical musicians from Peabody and the BSO, people like our friends Ann and Isidor Saslav, Wall Matthews and Stef Scaggiari. On occasion, we also filled the cabaret and jammed the stage with big bands from the nearby military in DC (the US Army Blues and Jazz Ambassadors, US Navy Band Commodores) and colleges (Towson State University under Henry J. “Hank” Levy). Gary Dailey, Ethel’s former music director, also maintained a rehearsal band that performed there.

One of my key musical memories dates to New Year’s Eve 1985, when Ethel sang “Lover Man” with Gerry Mulligan and Thielemans. Mulligan had worked with Billie Holiday, who’d made the song famous, and when Ethel threw in a phrase with Billie’s voice, Mulligan’s eyes twinkled in recognition—one of those moments that only happen spontaneously in live performance. There were many of them in the cabaret, and everyone has their own recollection.

But it all came to an end in 1988. By February, Struever had negotiated a deal with Blues Alley, and D’Lugoff’s efforts to attract major investors failed. We met with Schmoke, by then mayor, who told us that the city was satisfied with Blues Alley as a new tenant; otherwise, he might have considered a last minute “rescue.” That month, Ethel traveled to the

University of Idaho to participate in the annual Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, the first of many trips there, while I supervised the winding down of Ethel’s Place. Our liquor license was seized for a day because of delinquent taxes, and the IRS had given us a 60-day grace period to operate. The last big-name performer to appear in the cabaret was the great drummer Louie Bellson, a nice man and pillar of the jazz establishment. At the end of his engagement, I offered to pay his $6,000 fee in cash, but he said that he preferred a check. By the time he attempted to cash it, the IRS had seized our bank account, so it bounced. I was mortified. In the middle of all my financial juggling, I had always paid the musicians, so who became the only one to get stiffed? Bellson—one of the most talented and pleasant musicians ever to play at Ethel’s. There was nothing I could do. Ethel and I were broke. I had never paid myself during our forty months of operation, and Ethel received minimum fees. For more than a year, I received phone calls from Bellson who sounded like the Italian Mafia, demanding his money. We never had $6,000 to spare, so he finally gave up.

Ethel’s Place died in a bulk sale to Blues Alley and closed on April 10, 1988.49 The sale did not include more than $60,000 in back employment taxes due to the IRS or personally guaranteed notes to food and beverage vendors for more than $30,000. All told, including penalties and interest, we left the project owing about $150,000 that we didn’t have. I was the responsible one, who signed all the checks, so there was nothing to do but

49 We tried to warn the Blues Alley management that the Baltimore market was different from DC, but they had their own ideas. John Bunyan, the owner, admitted that the main reason he went into the club business was to meet women; the music was secondary. The first thing they did was remove our tables and chairs and replace them with smaller versions in the old night club model—don’t make them too comfortable, move ’em in and out, push the drinks and collect the cover charge. Blues Alley lasted less than a year and was replaced by another music club that lasted even less. A restaurant, Spike & Charlie’s, finally made a food operation at this location work. We liked the two brothers who kept the corner alive. As their operation became more successful, they put back the floor, eliminating the cabaret space, to make room for more dining tables. The Theatre Project has remained on the third floor, and another restaurant currently operates below. The music and production space exists only in fading memories.

fall on the financial sword and figure out how to survive. Ideally, we would get on our feet, pay all the bills incurred by the defunct corporation, including Bellson’s fee, and move on. That never happened.

In September, we were asked as cultural ambassadors to represent Baltimore at a sister-city arts festival in Xiamen, China, and thus began a new phase in our lives—one characterized by traveling, writing, teaching, recording and concertizing.

Holding the trophy given to Baltimore City from sister city Xiamen, China, September 1988, photo by C. B. Nieberding

eighteen

CULTURAL AMBASSADORS

While we were developing Ethel’s Place, Philip Arnoult originated the idea of Ethel and me being “Baltimore cultural ambassadors.” The notion hadn’t occurred to us, but we were traveling around the country representing the city in various capacities, so it seemed a logical idea. Mayor Don Schaefer made it official by writing letters designating us as unpaid but acknowledged representatives of city culture. We became part of the city’s burgeoning Sister City Program. During a ten-year period, we made four trips to Rotterdam, and, in 1988, we traveled to China.

Ethel and I arrived in Hong Kong on September 5, 1988, accompanied by Charles Covington on piano and Drew Gress. Gress had brought his upright bass in a large “mummy case” that proved to be a hassle during our travels but was worth the trouble. After a brief night at an airport hotel, we made the hour-long flight to represent Baltimore in the first Xiamen International Friendship City Art Festival. Three other cities—Cebu City, Philippines; Wellington, New Zealand; Sasebo, Japan—participated.

The Wellington delegation, headed by its mayor Sir James Belich, was a combined business and cultural group of more than twenty people, including a group performing Māori songs. Sasebo was represented by its mayor as well as singers and dancers. The Cebu delegation included a twelve-member ensemble from the University of San Jose-Recoletos, specially selected for an original presentation of Filipino songs and dances.

We were the smallest group, selected at the last minute when Peabody violinist Berl Senofsky was unable to attend. The Chinese were quite familiar with Western classical music and instruments, but in Xiamen they had never heard live jazz.

We knew almost nothing of Xiamen (formerly known as Amoy), a seaport on the southern coast of China opposite Taiwan. The China we encountered in 1988 belonged to Deng Xiaoping. His fellow survivors of the Long March, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, had been dead for twelve years. No longer was China a Communist dictatorship that denounced its Confucian heritage; a more pragmatic spirit pervaded, particularly along the southeastern seacoast, where four “special economic zones” were created in 1980 to stimulate international trade and business.

Xiamen, long associated with foreign trade, was one of these zones. In 1984–85, the Chinese Embassy contacted Baltimore officials about the possibilities of establishing a sister-city relationship with Xiamen and in November 1985, Mayor Schaefer visited that city during a three-week official journey of exploration in China. He signed a memorandum of understanding with Mayor Zou Erjun, who returned the visit with a delegation in 1986, and the relationship was born. Henry Topper had preceded us with his family the previous year, teaching English in Xiamen, and would later help organize student exchanges, but our little group was among the first Baltimoreans to spend any time there.

Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, a military defender of the Ming dynasty and active pirate and smuggler, first put Xiamen on the map in the seventeenth century when he used the port as a base of operations against the Manchu emperor on the mainland and the Dutch on the island of Formosa (now Taiwan).50 More than a century later, in 1842, the British

50 In 1662, Zheng Chenggong ended Dutch hegemony in the area, including Taiwan, where he is now worshipped as a god. He’s honored on mainland China as a patriotic hero who defeated the imperialistic Europeans. A large statue on an islet near Xiamen shows him in erect military pose gazing across the strait toward Taiwan.

forced the port open after the First Opium War, which allowed them to legally export raw opium from India to balance silver payments for all the Chinese tea shipped to their empire. In addition to tea, Xiamen exported people, the so-called overseas Chinese who emigrated to places like Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for economic opportunities as well as “coolies,” semi-slave laborers contracted to work on United States railroads (until 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act), Peruvian guano islands and Cuban sugar fields.51 Around 1930, after the Chinese Revolution (1911–12), Amoy changed its name to Xiamen, thus going from local dialect to Mandarin but essentially meaning the same thing: “lower gate” or “gate of the grand mansion.” The Japanese, who had occupied Taiwan as a colony since 1895, controlled the port of Xiamen throughout World War II (1938–45), and then the area became a pawn in the greater Cold War.

The old port of Xiamen is an island now connected to the mainland by modern bridges, surrounded by other islands, including Gulangyu (where the European concessions were located) and Quemoy (which is slightly more than a mile away). Quemoy and the Matsu Islands, a small archipelago to the north, became hot spots during the Chinese Civil War of 1949 and the Cold War conflict between the United States and Communist China.52 Only after President Nixon visited China in 1972 and after the deaths of the old adversaries (Chiang, Mao, Zhou) in 1975–76 could the area gradually develop free trade again. The area still makes the news whenever the Chinese government makes threatening gestures toward Taiwan.

51 Interestingly, Baltimore was the leading importer of Peruvian bird guano for Southern agricultural markets from 1844 to the onset of the Civil War.

52 When Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War of 1949, they also claimed Quemoy and Matsu. Throughout the ’50s, the islands were flash points, as Chiang dreamed of returning to the mainland, and his adversaries occasionally lobbed shells from Xiamen to Quemoy. The guns pointed both ways: the US Seventh Fleet patrolled the Formosa Strait and during the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon argued over the value of the small islands. Despite Dwight Eisenhower’s attempts to persuade Chiang to retreat, he stubbornly maintained troops on the islands, and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff even suggested nuclear strikes on the mainland to keep the Communist regime in check.

At the festival’s opening ceremonies, I gave the following brief speech:

Distinguished Guests, Honorable Citizens of Xiamen,

We bring you greetings from Baltimore, an old American city with historic ties to China and new, exciting connections with Xiamen.

In 1785, before the United States became a nation, a ship owned by an Irishman, John O’Donnell, arrived in Baltimore’s harbor directly from Canton.53 Its cargo included teas, porcelain, silks and satins. George Washington, later to become the first president of the United States, sent a friend to Baltimore to buy some of these items. It is possible that this same Baltimore ship stopped in Xiamen. Its crew included Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Moors and Europeans. The Maryland newspaper that announced its arrival wrote that “it is a pleasant sight to see the crew of this ship… employed together as brethren. Commerce binds and unites all the nations of the globe with a golden chain.”

That was more than 200 years ago, less than a year after the very first American ship docked in China. So Baltimore can claim with few other American cities to be a pioneer in the trading relationships between our two countries.

Now we are together again. Commerce still binds us together with a golden chain. And in a larger sense, we are all brothers and sisters on the Ship Earth united by common bonds.

Thank you for inviting us to participate in your festival. Xiamen is a wonderful place, and we look forward to building many golden chains between our two cities.

53 John O’Donnell named his Baltimore plantation Canton, now a Baltimore neighborhood on the harbor. In April 2021, a statue of O’Donnell was removed from Canton Square because O’Donnell enslaved people on his plantation.

Our week in China was filled with dinners, tours and performances. Faculty from the Music Department at Xiamen University assisted Ethel with the lyrics of a popular folk song (lan lan de tian shang bai yun piao…), which she performed in addition to jazz standards, a blues, a Broadway pop tune and “China Gate” from the 1957 film of the same name.54 Charles Covington and his close-up magic tricks were a hit with the children. We enjoyed a vegetarian meal at the Buddhist South Putuo Temple and toured Jimei Village on the mainland, an educational complex created by Tan Kah Kee, a native son who created a fortune from Singapore and spread his philanthropy throughout Southeast Asia.55

As cultural ambassadors, we remained active in the Sister Cities Program. In 1989, I helped organize an exhibit of Xiamen art at Towson State University; we both participated in fundraisers for Xiamen, Rotterdam and Genoa, Italy, and I traveled to New York several times to argue for a Heineken-sponsored jazz festival in Baltimore that never materialized. I guess all this activity led to an invitation to be the keynote speaker for the national meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Baltimore. I accepted because it gave me an opportunity to share a global vision with 3,000 geographers from around the country.56 I tried to follow through in 1990 by working as a consultant for the city to organize and host the first (and only) International Mayors’ Roundtable. We invited the mayors of Bologna, Italy; Cardiff, Wales; Mindelo, Cape Verde; Zushi, Japan, and the leading members of the Lancashire County Council, Britain’s Association of County Council and the Council of Europe to come to Baltimore to discuss public issues around housing, AIDS and the environment. The

54 Samuel Fuller, dir., China Gate, 1957, 20th Century Fox.

55 Like many overseas Chinese, Tan supported the early twentieth-century revolutionary movements in China and resisted the Japanese during World War II. Disillusioned with the Kuomintang, he supported the Communists after the war and was given a state funeral by the government after his death.

56 See Appendix E: Earl’s Remarks to American Geographers, 1989.

weekend event, hosted by Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, was a promising beginning, but the idea fizzled and was never repeated. Lee Tawney, then director of the now defunct Mayor’s Office of International Programs, and I had imagined that we could develop an ongoing series of discussions and shared ideas among public officials around the world, particularly with Baltimore’s sister cities, but we never found money to continue.57

Ethel and I continued our own efforts to create new international dialogues. That same year, in 1990, we visited my brother, David, in Oslo, Norway. While we were there, as public affairs officer at the American Embassy, David had arranged for Ethel to sing the National Anthem at a commemoration in Dombås for the first American soldier killed in World War II. During our weeklong stay in Oslo, we also spent an afternoon with Anne Wiggins Brown (1912–2009), a native Baltimorean who originated the role of “Bess” in Porgy and Bess. Wiggins Brown had gone on to an international career as an opera singer and concert artist, married and divorced a champion Norwegian skier and at the age of seventy-seven was still giving vocal lessons. I videotaped an interview during our visit to her apartment, where she described growing up in Baltimore, and returned to Peabody with the idea that it would be most appropriate to honor her.58

Our next four overseas trips as ambassadors were also initiated by my brother at the State Department. On April 8, 1996, we departed for a month-long visit to Türkiye (formerly spelled as Turkey), where David had become counselor for public affairs at the US Embassy in Ankara. He had been first assigned to Ankara in 1983, and during four event-filled bachelor years had fallen in love with the country. In 1995, he returned with his wife, Vivi, to

57 Baltimore continues to be a major international port, but its award-winning Sister City Program has lagged, and the city remains constricted by wealthier surrounding counties that distrust its poor Black population. Despite advances in communications technology, public money continues to be misspent on problems that remain without solutions.

58 I gave the Peabody Institute a copy of the tape, lobbied for months and then waited for eight years before they finally gave her the George Peabody Medal for outstanding contributions to American music.

head the US Information Service office, an assignment he requested to culminate his career with the State Department. When our father died on February 5, 1996, the arrangements had already been made for Ethel to sing at the International Ankara Music Festival. So we knew that we were traveling to the fabled Asia Minor, the Anatolian peninsula where so many cultures had risen and died, where Abraham had lived, Saint Paul had preached and Rumi had danced. This knowledge, combined with my father’s two-month hospital stay and eventual death, fueled an intuition that the trip would be extraordinary. I told Ethel and other friends that something momentous would happen to me there—maybe good, maybe bad—but significant. The thought occurred that perhaps I would even die there.

I already had some romanticized pictures from this land. Ever since Sir Steven Runciman visited Wabash College in the early 1960s, I had known of Byzantium, a historical Greek world virtually ignored by the Latinized liberal arts education we had inherited. I had even imagined the intense anxiety and wails from within the Hagia Sophia as Mehmed the Conqueror’s army finally overwhelmed Constantinople on May 29, 1453, a date we had memorized as schoolboys imbued with vague suspicions of ferocious Turks and fanatic Muslims. Much later, I discovered the Sufis, mystic Muslims who laughed and danced, giving a human face to the Quran and new meaning to the Christian dictum that we should be in the world but not of it. And I knew I wanted to visit Ephesus, a sacred shrine where the Eastern Goddess had been worshipped and where Saint Paul had established an early church.

David picked us up at the Ankara airport, where we arrived around dusk. As we drove into the city, the urban sprawl along this rolling plateau country revealed the harshness of contemporary city life here. When the provincial town of Angora became Ankara, capital of the new secular Republic of Türkiye in 1923, it had a population between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants clustered around a Byzantine citadel on a hill. In the 1920s and ’30s, the new government led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk hired German planners to build wide boulevards and public buildings. Swamps were cleared and reservoirs built for a population estimated to be 300,000

in 1990. At the time we arrived, more than three million people lived in a constantly growing urban complex that spread across ancient hillsides. Hundreds of thousands had left their villages and constructed gecekondu, the so-called overnight houses built to present the authorities with spontaneous suburbs on public land. We found the automobile traffic horrendous, and the infrastructure constantly lagging behind the burgeoning populace. Construction, marred by rampant inflation, was everywhere, and the constant presence of armed guards reminded us that the country has experienced two military coups in the last thirty-five years as well as several extended periods of martial law, the last ending in 1984. Terrorism and student unrest occasionally created incidents of violence. But underneath the confusion, noise and dust lay tremendous energy and pride, personified by the ubiquitous statues of Atatürk, often inscribed with his saying: Ne mutlu Türküm diyene (How happy is the one who says I am a Turk!).

David’s guarded apartment building was located two doors from the Greek embassy across the street from the presidential complex in the Çankaya district of Ankara. I had first read of this neighborhood in Catherine Gavin’s book The House of War. 59 It had seemed oddly coincidental to discover this book in September 1995 in Chestertown, Maryland, an Eastern Shore college town, following our return from Rotterdam. The book, set in the Türkiye of 1922 just before the success of Atatürk’s War of Independence, centered on an imagined romance between an American reporter and Atatürk, but many of its descriptions and characterizations rang true. Atatürk lived at Çankaya during the early days of the Republic. His house, donated by local muftis, is now a museum located in the enclosed, guarded gardens around the presidential complex. No longer an isolated estate, Çankaya is now a fashionable neighborhood, studded with embassies and diplomatic residences elevated above the rest of the city. From the living room of David’s elegant apartment, you could see the

59 Catherine Gavin, The House of War (New York: William Morrow, 1970). Gavin wrote this historical novel during her sojourn in Angora, Constantinople and Smyrna (officially changed to Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir in 1930).

extended city spread over miles almost to the circling mountains in the distance. When the nights were clear, it was easy to pick out the lighted Atatürk Mausoleum (1944–53), Kocatepe Mosque (1970s) and Sheraton Hotel (1990s). Each building rose above its surroundings as a symbol: the first of a heroic past, the second of the resurgence of Islam and the third of an intense desire to modernize.

We arrived on a Tuesday night, almost unconscious from jet lag, the novelty of the country and our new surroundings. The next day we prepared for an evening dinner party, where we would meet some of Dave and Vivi’s friends as well as people associated with jazz and the music festival. At dinner, a formal affair with place cards and three tables, we met Alan Ginter, the contracted bass player, and his wife, Valerie. Ginter, a forty-nine-year-old native of Newark, headed the Music Department at the Bilkent University Preparatory School. With wide experience in a great variety of musical idioms and knowledge of Ankara’s music scene, he proved invaluable in making the concerts successful. We determined that night that we needed a drummer other than the one selected by the TurkishAmerican Association. Ginter suggested a young Turkish woman, Çanan Aykent, with whom he was working; we asked him to make the arrangements and talked over logistic details. Scaggiari, Ethel’s pianist, was due to arrive from Maryland the next day, and we needed adequate rehearsal time for a trio that had never played together.

The next day, Abram, a young rock musician working for the festival, came by the apartment with a car and driver, and we drove across Ankara, a 45-minute trip, to the airport to pick up Scaggiari in mid-afternoon.

During the drive, Abram—an unkempt bearish man—expressed his contempt for the police, government, Islamic fundamentalists and former villagers who lived in the hillside gecekondu clusters. The conflicts between modern Greeks and Turks made no sense, he said, since both came from the same region and heritage. He belonged to a new, free generation, united by music and technology, which had no sympathy for past conflicts or barriers. The driver, less radical, made his living as a tour guide and was experienced

with driving foreigners—Germans, English, Americans and Italians— around the Turkish countryside. Both knew how to manipulate the officialdom and make end runs around the bureaucracy.

The Turkish-American Association had planned to have a small concert in their own building, but by the time we arrived, the event has been moved to the Kavaklidere Ballroom of the Ankara Hilton Hotel, a new, plush, five-star facility. What developed was, for us, a standard after-dinner hotel-ballroom performance for about 300–400 people. We arrived early Saturday afternoon to set up and rehearse. Language was a barrier; the technician spoke no English, and we eventually arranged the stage the way we wanted after he left. The hotel provided us with a room. Alan and Valerie Ginter also checked in and planned to spend the night. After rehearsal, Scaggiari and Aykent joined us for dinner from a delightful buffet. Apparently, the Turks hadn’t seen this kind of performance for a long time, perhaps never—at least in Ankara. Ethel performed a variety of songs for about forty-five minutes, talking to the audience, emoting, getting them to clap and participate, using Turkish words. Halfway through the event, the hotel even managed to find a spotlight (after promises and delays), so the concert became theatrical as well as musical. It worked; the American ambassador and his wife attended, and people enjoyed themselves. After the show and the usual autograph signings, Ethel changed in the room, and we drove back to the apartment with Dave and Vivi. Our biggest concern prior to the trip had been alleviated. The music would be OK.

The following day, Monday, April 15, was devoted to Ethel’s primary concert for the Thirteenth International Ankara Music Festival. We took a taxi to the Hotel Stad, where we met Scaggiari and Ani Kusmenoglu, our escort, a young Turkish woman who had attended high school in Virginia and wanted to return to the United States for her MBA. The four of us taxied to the Congress Hall of the Ministry of National Education for rehearsal to meet Ginter and Can Kozlu, a drummer from Istanbul who was arriving that day by air. Kozlu, who studied at the Berklee College of Music, taught at Boğaziçi University, composed film music and recorded with Türkiye’s best jazz musicians. The rehearsal went well enough; Kozlu had

the experience and knowledge to run the music down quickly but seemed to have a typical jazz musician’s disdain for some of the arrangements’ simplicity. Aykent, the less experienced one who donated her drums for this concert, played with more feeling. The evening concert went well too with enthusiasm from the audience and favorably reviewed in the Turkish Daily News (now Hürriyet Daily News). We later learned that some in the audience had expected more “classic” jazz in the style of Ella Fitzgerald. Ethel surprised them with her special blend of standards, pop tunes and original songs—all treated with musicality and humor—including one in Turkish, which the reviewer said sounded like bad French with an English accent.

By Tuesday, April 16, we had been in Ankara a week. The concerts were over, and for the next three weeks, we explored the country: the ruins of Hattusas, capital of the Hittites; the Christian monks’ cells and churches and underground cities in the Cappadocian tuft; Konya during Kurban Bayram; ancient thermal waters and travertine terraces of Pamukkale; tombs of Hierapolis; sculptures and theater at Aphrodisias; Apollo’s temple at Didyma, site of Miletus; and the well-preserved ruins at Priene and Ephesus. Ethel, who considered herself a futurist, wasn’t very excited by all this debris from Western Civilization, but I was spellbound. I spent a day by myself in Istanbul, wandering the streets in the spirit of Orhan Pamuk. We returned to Türkiye the following year to spend another month with Dave and Vivi in Ankara, where Ethel performed with local musicians. Then we headed to Antalya on the Mediterranean Coast, highlighted by a trek to Termessos, an unexcavated city in the Taurus Mountains.

The two months in Türkiye during 1996–97 provided more profound moments for me than Ethel, who was never much interested in ruins. She was always forward looking, impatient with the pace of evolution. I was melancholy with the notion of Heraclitian flow, where nothing lasts; gods and men die, and the follies of “civilization” repeat themselves over and over and over. In this part of the world, you can stand on layers of human culture that go back to the Neolithic revolution, when human beings

invented agriculture, domesticated animals and built walls around their permanent settlements. They also invented divinities to explain nature, built shrines, sang epic poems and made sacrifices, sometimes including their children, to the mysterious universe around them. Then came kings and their palaces, priests and their temples, armies, slaves and wars. One can stand on multiple layers of human culture—Anatolian tribes, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Christians and Muslims—and realize that all their hopes, dreams and passions are gone, disappeared in the dust. What remains are their bones, stone walls, temple columns, cave frescoes and ruined cities, stripped by time of their colors and fabrics.

Since Türkiye, I’ve asked myself: How can we live without gods and sacred books, kings and wars, without hope of immortality? In the last 500 years—since the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Einstein and their scientific colleagues—a relatively few people have tried. For more than a century, Europeans have grappled with no satisfactory answers to the Dostoyevskian question of how morality is possible without God and Christian hope. We had the most destructive war in human history more than eight decades ago and knowledge of the human genome bears the same destructive possibilities as the discovery of nuclear fission. Yet we still resort to the three world religions that acknowledge Abraham as a patriarch and prophet. But when you strip him of his sacred aura, Abraham is appalling. As an old man, he has a child by a slave girl and then sends them out to die in the wilderness. He almost sacrifices his favorite child to a god who tempts him. He pimps his wife to Egyptians and Canaanites; he circumcises himself as an adult in obeisance to a god who speaks to him in dreams, who tells him he is chosen over others, will defeat his enemies and produce many children. Yet this hypocritical, ignorant man is still admired as a model of faith, one who submits to the divine. I submit we have to do better.

With David’s assistance, we continued our roles as cultural ambassadors with trips to Germany—in 1999 to Bonn, where Ethel gave a free public concert for several thousand people, sponsored by the US Embassy before

it moved to Berlin, and the following year in the latter city for the annual convention of the RIAS radio network. For Ethel, the trip to Berlin was the first time since 1958, when fifteen thousand people jammed a concert hall to hear Benny Goodman, and she forgot the verse to “My Old Flame,” never called to that point during the tour. So she mouthed the words for a few seconds, sending the technicians into a frenzy, and then came in strong with the refrain. Goodman never knew until we told him years later at a Peabody dinner in Baltimore honoring him as a medal recipient. He smiled his enigmatic smile.

We concluded our roles as international ambassadors in 2002 with a trip to Saluzzo, Italy, organized by Jeff Silberschlag and his merry band of classically trained musicians based in St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Ethel and I arrived early for a festival that never materialized as planned. Neither of us spoke Italian but managed surprisingly well in a country where food, wine and music are universal languages. We had expected to use a symphony orchestra, but the fates had other plans.

A small, fourteenth-century church, the Confraternita della Misericordia, was being lovingly restored, but its guardians were suspicious about jazz. Would the music be properly respectful? We had a meeting and passed the test. So we had a place, but we needed the music and musicians. A jazz bass player came in from Turin; we had Scaggiari on piano, and Silberschlag modified Ethel’s large arrangements to fit trumpet, bassoon, oboe, violin, viola and cello. So, on Sunday, May 26, the mayor, assembled guests and curious citizens gathered in the church for a performance that was actually recorded by an engineer from Turin. Perched in the balcony amid dusty parts of the restoration, I made a videotape. The next day Ethel and I returned to Baltimore. I don’t know what happened to the recording. Silberschlag and his partner, Guiseppe Nova, would later win 2011 Prizes for Artistic and Cultural Activities from the European Union of the Arts. We never saw either of them again.

Ethel ended 2002 by doing two concerts with Dr. Billy Taylor at the Kennedy Center. She had first met Taylor in 1964, when his trio (Slam Stewart, bass; Jo Jones, drums) and guitarist Walt Namuth accompanied her during an acclaimed afternoon set at the Newport Jazz Festival. He was one of the great gentlemen of jazz, an excellent pianist, composer and scholar who promoted the music on a wide variety of venues, ranging from national television and radio programs to special concert series, college classrooms and print articles. I had written about Jazzmobile, his innovative program to bring jazz to neighborhoods, so it was a pleasure for both of us to renew the association. Ethel did a concert with Taylor at his alma mater, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and participated in several seminars; we both had dinner with him and his mentor, Frederick C. Tillis, a saxophonist and composer who had written a textbook on jazz theory and improvisation and directed the Fine Arts Center at the university. Tillis was also a poet, who had written that “jazz is a cornerstone of the twentieth-century American heritage… America’s international cultural ambassador.”60

Ethel would perform six times with Taylor, including three occasions at the Kennedy Center in Washington and twice in New York: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998 and the 92nd Street Y in 2007. Each time it was a mutual give and take, each serving the music in a sincere effort to share its magic with audiences.

60 Frederick Tillis, In Celebration (Washington, DC: E Publications, 1992).

TEACHERS

As we got older together, Ethel and I increasingly became teachers like Billy Taylor, me in a more overt way than Ethel, who taught mainly through her song lyrics and musical spirituality.

Both of us were involved in the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival at the University of Idaho, a weeklong event of concerts, competitions and seminars that draws high school music students from all over the Northwest. We first met Lionel “Hamp” Hampton in the early 1970s during our brief dance with the Nixon administration. Hampton had made a reputation in the 1930s as one of the stalwart figures in jazz and established the vibraphone as a viable instrument in the genre. When he joined Benny Goodman’s trio in 1937, he and pianist Teddy Wilson created the pathway for Black and white musicians to perform together in public, and the music thereafter remained integrated. After several years of touring, he left Goodman amicably and established the Hampton Orchestra, which endured in various sizes for sixty years. I remember the excitement the band generated at a college prom in the early 1960s; no other group could quite match the energy inspired by its leader.

After an appearance by the orchestra in 1984, the University of Idaho, located in Moscow, Idaho, near the Washington state line, renamed its jazz festival after Hampton in 1985 and then its entire School of Music in 1987. Lynn “Doc” Skinner, the festival director, found in Hampton a friend and perfect fit for the festival’s emphasis on youth education. By the

time Skinner retired in 2007, the festival had become the largest of its kind in the United States and received a National Medal of the Arts. Ethel first sang there in 1988 and then again in 1991, 1996 and 1998 before a fiveyear run from 2000 to 2004. Most of the time, we were together, and I chaired a couple seminars, including one about Ethel’s Place. Hampton suffered a major stroke in Paris in 1991 and thereafter was in declining health. He confessed to Ethel that he was just “coasting” musically but until the end of his life summoned remarkable vitality to front the band on stage. In 2000, we became part of an inner circle of musicians who appeared every year and participated in various receptions and fundraisers to support the music school and the related festival. I remember one in particular in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, hosted by former governor Dirk Kempthorne on the indoor tennis courts of real estate tycoon Duane Hagadone’s elaborate estate. Ethel sang with a small orchestra that included famed Brazilian trumpeter Claudio Roditi, bassist Christian Fabian and drummer Jeff Hamilton. For the next four years, we annually spent about a week in and around Moscow for concerts, receptions and workshops with students and intense conversations with a wide variety of musicians. It was a treat to have dinner with people like pianist Hank Jones, who had played on Ethel’s first album in 1955, and bassist Ray Brown, who had played at Ethel’s Place and virtually every place else in the world of jazz. We watched prodigies like Eldar Djangirov develop and veteran musicians grow old and continue to play until their bodies ultimately failed them. The last few years, Hampton was barely able to rise from his wheelchair and stand in front of the vibes; he died in August 2002 at the age of 94, and Ethel sang in tribute to the maestro at the following year’s festival while images from his life were projected on a large screen behind her.

I started teaching at the Peabody Conservatory due to a friendship with the late Elliott Galkin, who headed the music department at Goucher College and became the Sun’s music critic and then director of the Peabody

Conservatory. Galkin and I met late at night as we returned to the newsroom to write our reviews of the evening’s performances, usually symphony or chamber music concerts in his case, anything from the circus to Duke Ellington or Elvis Presley in mine. I appreciated his international background and cosmopolitan knowledge of music. He was a fan of Ethel’s and thought I should be writing for magazines in New York.

Galkin was born in Brooklyn and played country fiddle to make money while in college. He studied music in Paris under Nadia Boulanger and came to Goucher in 1956. With his help, I interviewed an extraordinary number of world-famous classical musicians, including Yehudi Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich, and Ethel began several performances with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Galkin became a scholar of conducting, a leading light among classical critics, and when he became Peabody’s director in 1977, he envisioned himself as an arbiter of taste in the style of the Paris Conservatory. Unfortunately, he discovered that he was merely a dean of the Johns Hopkins University with administrative demands for which he had no talent. He encouraged me to start teaching part time at Peabody in the late 1970s, and I began a course entitled Writing About the Arts in America, but he had difficulties with the faculty and was replaced in 1985.

At the time of his death in 1990, he was developing a master’s degree program in music criticism, the first of its kind in the United States; the only other such program in North America was at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, outside Toronto. With his usual flair, Galkin had persuaded a rich friend to endow his program with $1 million. Galkin had started the program because he felt that many music journalists lacked the knowledge to comment insightfully on what they heard. Why not teach trained musicians to become critics? That was his idea. It’s a questionable one. Most composers, vocalists and instrumentalists aren’t very good critics; they’re too involved in what they’re doing and lack objectivity. And most critics I knew were more interested in themselves than in what they reviewed, and if they served anything beyond that, it was an academic

preconception of good and bad that often had little to do with the immediate subject. But there are exceptions, and musical knowledge and experience are useful along with writing skills.

Peabody didn’t know what to do with the program that Galkin had created nor its endowment. Martin Williams, a musically literate writer and editor of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, was hired to continue the program, which had only had one student, and I was asked to assist, particularly after Williams himself became ill. As a newspaperman, I had written numerous reviews of jazz and pop performances and interviewed musicians of all varieties and styles. As Ethel’s husband, I had also produced record albums and booked the hundreds of musical artists who performed at Ethel’s Place. Despite this background, I was always vaguely uncomfortable in the role of critic. I considered myself a writer with curiosity, aided by experienced eyes and ears, married to a musician. But critic? I could write about anything, but did I have the right to judge?

However, I was looking for an academic home, a collegial place where I could address questions such as: What is good and bad music? How do you write and talk about it? Is some music better than others? What do we mean by the liberal arts or the liberating arts? How do you select and teach them? What deserves to be preserved and shared from the cultural attics of the world, and what should rightfully be discarded? So, despite my reservations about criticism, I made some suggestions about what to do with Galkin’s program. Thus for two years, I became a full-time Peabody faculty member, acting director of the music criticism program and teacher in a two-person liberal arts department organized by Dr. Paul Griffin. The year before (1990), I had joined the adjunct faculty at the University of Baltimore, teaching sections of Arts and Ideas, a required course in the College of Arts and Sciences headed by poet and friend Dr. Wayne Markert.

For me these first few years of college teaching in the ’90s represented a mind-stretching, intense period of discussions, proposals, meetings and challenges that eventually produced no results. I discovered there was little collegiality at Peabody, which had become a part of the Johns Hopkins University but still resembled a trade school for accomplished musicians

rather than a center of musical culture. With some notable exceptions, people in the various colleges at the University of Baltimore hated and distrusted each other. Markert and I spearheaded an effort to establish a common liberal arts program for Peabody, the University of Baltimore and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Our basic idea was to select a cultural artifact—a book, piece of music, work of art—and examine it in all its facets, including history, current relevance and future value. It would be an interdisciplinary approach involving students and faculty from all three institutions. We went as far as applying for funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which rejected us, we suspected, on suspicions of “multiculturalism.”

On the music criticism front, in 1991 I traveled to a music convention in Chicago to explore recruiting students and talk to Dominique-René de Lerma, a pioneer in the study of Black music and friend when he taught in Baltimore. That same year, Roger Brunyate—an Englishman who headed Peabody’s Opera Theatre program and was a newly appointed assistant dean for academic development—and I visited McMaster University to attend a seminar in music criticism. It was an event heavy with academic papers that focused on technical and philosophical issues in the field; “hermeneutics” was the fashionable term then, and we both wondered how to translate this complex notion into a practical degree program. I remembered that Hermes, messenger of the gods, was known for playing tricks and laughing at mortal attempts to interpret divine oracles.

At the same time, I signed a contract with the Johns Hopkins University Press to write a second edition of Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State, 61 itself a revision of the 1940 guidebook published by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The original, anonymously written by the staff of the Maryland Writers Project, was part of a well-regarded series of WPA guidebooks to the contiguous forty-eight states. I thought that the

61 Earl Arnett, Robert J. Brugger, and Edward C. Papenfuse, Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

book would be a fitting summary of my newspaper days and readily accepted, not realizing how demanding and time consuming it would eventually become.

While I was easing into the academic world, Ethel continued to teach in her own fashion. She had always resisted offers to teach on music faculties or have private students since she had never studied apart from her seven years of juvenile and adolescent piano lessons. Her gifts came naturally, and she preferred to teach by example. During this period, she began performing as a vocalist with the Great American Music Ensemble, conducted and arranged by Doug Richards, a music faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University. Richards, an Ellington scholar, presented original big-band arrangements of American jazz composers in the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center in DC. Ethel was an ideal interpreter.

My forays into the academic world eventually fizzled—I didn’t fit anyone’s categories—and Ethel continued to sing familiar and original songs that contained teaching moments.

Customers at Ethel’s Place and the Maryland Inn sometimes exclaimed, “Ethel, I don’t whether I’m in a night club or in church.” As a teenager who liked to dance, she had written songs in an early rock-and-roll style and then allowed herself to sing songs for major labels with lyrics that she didn’t feel or believe. As she aged, she paid more and more attention to lyrics and preferred songs that told stories, that had something to say about life, living and dying.62 Ethel could hold her own in any conversation but always professed not to like interviews or public speaking. She very seldom spoke negatively about fellow performers and never presented herself as an expert about anything—even singing. “To hold myself up on a pedestal, to be a star, that’s not me,” she told me once. “I just like to sing, but I like other things too— cooking, handicrafts, TV.” She could talk for hours on the phone, counseling friends in trouble.

62 See Appendix F: Song Lyrics.

Following in her mother’s footsteps, she rarely read a book except the Bible and sometimes turned to astrology, tarot cards and other signs for direction. She always said she “prayed me up” and then joked that she had to “dummy me down.” Both she and her brother, Andy, in early adulthood visited Ms. Moses, a Sandtown character who dispensed numbers and blessed oil and assorted remedies for the soul. Ethel brought me to Ms. Moses once, and I must have passed her scrutiny because she said nothing. She said that Ethel was a reader too, and I later teased her that she could hang out a shingle as “Sister Ethel” and give spiritual advice. She often laughed and spoke in aphorisms.63

Despite her modesty, Ethel could claim the title of “Dr. Ennis” since both MICA and Johns Hopkins University conferred honorary degrees upon her, the latter in 2008. The Johns Hopkins citation reads:

You were once called “one of jazz’s best kept secrets,” though your magnificent voice, astonishing artistry, powerful performances and celebrated recordings are far from undisclosed here in your hometown.

Growing up in Baltimore, you captured the jazz world’s ear with a 1955 album released with a classic title: Lullabies for Losers. Before long, you were touring with Benny Goodman and, over the course of a bravura career, performing with the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Wynton Marsalis and Ray Brown.

Your stirring rendition of the National Anthem at the Presidential Inauguration of 1973 is widely recognized as having legitimized the a cappella performance of the anthem on formal occasions. It was your exquisite solo projects, however, that earned your permanent residence in the jazz pantheon. Your

63 See Appendix H: Ethelisms.

debut album was followed over the decades by such classics as 1964’s This is Ethel Ennis, 1998’s If Women Ruled the World and 2005’s brilliantly titled Ennis Anyone.

You have always remained a Baltimore resident. Touring relatively rarely and resisting pressure to relocate for the sake of your career, you have insisted that “you can bloom where you’re planted.” Baltimore is the soil that nurtured you, and you have indeed bloomed here. And you have given so much to our city in return.

Ethel Llewellyn Ennis, an artist, local hero and national treasure once called “my kind of singer” by Frank Sinatra, the Johns Hopkins University is proud to confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

In contrast, I cherish two honoraria, the first of which was from Louis Cheslock. Cheslock was the last surviving member of Mencken’s “Saturday Night Club,” a convivial group of men who met regularly to play music, drink beer and enjoy each other’s company. For sixty years he taught violin and composition at Peabody and developed an appreciation for Duke Ellington as a composer. We first met after I wrote a story referring to the “late Louis Cheslock.” The next day I received a note from him. We met for lunch at Schellhase’s, the last club meeting place, drank beer and became friends. One Sunday, I took Cheslock to a Left Bank event to meet Ellington and ask him to sign a medal, part of his collection of famous composers. We sat in front of the band near the rhythm section, and every once in a while, the bassist Joe Benjamin leaned down and said, “How’d you like that, professor?” Cheslock had a great time, and we later went backstage, where Duke graciously signed the medal’s box. I smiled and remembered Mencken’s snide, Germanic remark that “someday a composer of genuine talent will put a jazz scherzo into a symphony. A hundred years hence that is all that

will be remembered of jazz.”64 When Ethel and I had dinner at Cheslock’s home, cooked by his wife, Elise, he asked me to sign a parchment lampshade in his living room that contained the signatures of various luminaries, including Mencken’s, the first to sign it in 1950. I figured that after a multi-year apprenticeship, I had been accepted into the only club that mattered to me in Baltimore.

The second honoraria I received as a journalist was election as an honorary member of the Baltimore City College Class of 1908. I wrote a story about the survivors, all in their eighties, and they presented me with a handwritten resolution that I kept on my office wall. They joked that in a few years, I’d have to have a reunion by myself, and they were right. Every year, I raise a glass in their memory and also remember Cheslock.

64 From 1925 letter from H.L. Mencken to Isaac Goldberg, as quoted in Louis Cheslock, H. L. Mencken on Music.

twenty COMMUNITY

For our entire married life, Ethel and I lived in the same brick row house, built in 1946, on a one-way, two-block street in West Baltimore near the Mondawmin Mall. This was the same house that Ethel had bought in 1963 when she and Jacques were still married, conveniently next door to Bernice, his long-standing friend.

A lot of people, including me, couldn’t understand Ethel’s motivation. She and Jacques would divorce in 1965 and her new association with Gerry Purcell kept her away from home for months. Maybe she had given up on love and preferred to live with the familiar and convenient. Certainly she and her cocker spaniel, Lady Day, showed signs of psychic damage and physical abuse, but somehow she maintained a basic cheerfulness. When I came along, she finally had someone who would love her freely and unconditionally. So we began as a community of two. We sometimes joked that we gave parties but didn’t invite anyone.

Our work, however, involved a greater community ethic. In her songs, Ethel constantly emphasized our common humanity and the universality of love. In my newspaper writing, I consciously sought to foster community in the spirit of the late Martin Buber, a religious philosopher, whom I studied and admired in college. Our experiences had proved the inadequacies of categorizing people by skin color, religion, nationality or language. We knew that human beings were the same everywhere you found them and lived accordingly.

When I arrived in Baltimore in 1966, I knew nothing about urban neighborhoods. The closest I had come was doing personnel security investigations in the Los Angeles basin, and then I was learning nothing beyond interviews with neighbors, employers and teachers. As a novice police reporter, I appreciated the complexity of city life, how people cluster on streets according to the way they’ve been classified by skin color, ethnic background, income, social status and gender. I was the first Sun reporter since the late Lee McCardell to explore neighborhoods systematically— their histories, ethnicities, people and cultures—and later expanded the concept to include Maryland towns throughout the state. I think I was also the first reporter to write extensively about Black communities, historically ignored by the Sun, as well as the remarkable people who inhabit them. My work brought me to the attention of Barbara Mikulski, who was rising to political power in the Polish neighborhoods of East Baltimore. We became friends and allies, and I discovered she was also an Ethel fan. Thereafter, we periodically had lunch, and I followed her progress to the US Senate, where she became the longest-serving woman in Congress in US history.

In 1976, when an umbrella group, the Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council (GMCC), was established, the organizers asked me to join, but at that time I was still a reporter and professional observer, and I felt I should stay in that role. I was also the wrong color in a significant African American section of West Baltimore and felt that leadership in this part of the city should come from Black folks. Ethel often volunteered to sing at public events where we mingled with politicians, but both of us had a deep suspicion of politics, preferring to live in society but not of it. We were comfortable in our little neighborhood where people knew each other, respected their property and generally accepted me as a neighbor. A few wondered why Ethel married a white man, but most were cordial.

The Mondawmin area in northwest Baltimore was where modern Black Baltimoreans achieved their first political independence. The late Judge Harry A. Cole broke the color barrier in 1954, when he defeated a

candidate for the Maryland Senate backed by James H. “Jack” Pollock, the longtime Jewish boss of northwest Baltimore, who lived on nearby Anoka Avenue and worshipped at Shaarei Tfiloh, then the largest orthodox synagogue in the city, located within walking distance at the corner of Liberty Heights Avenue and Auchentoroly Terrace. Cole paved the way for Verda Welcome, the first Black female state senator in Maryland’s history, who lived with her physician husband near the synagogue. Cole was a music lover who used to visit the Red Fox to hear Ethel sing and became her lawyer when she divorced Jacques. He later became the first Black judge on the Maryland Court of Appeals. He visited us one afternoon after he retired, and we spent a few hours sharing memories.

However, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, our neighborhood situation had changed. Many educated African Americans with skills had followed their white counterparts to the surrounding counties. It didn’t make so much difference what you looked like—the area needed all the help it could get. So this time, when asked in 1998, I volunteered to write and edit a newsletter, the GMCC Courier. I had learned the importance of newsletters from Grace Darin, a veteran reporter for the Evening Sun, who founded The Charles Villager and thus gave a nondescript neighborhood both a name and an identity.

While Ethel continued to perform concerts, I surveyed the Greater Mondawmin area, where we had lived for more than three decades, and planned on how to make it blossom. Then I became the GMCC secretary. I’ll always remember going to the state office building to reinstate our corporate charter and telling the jaded clerk, “I’m the new secretary of a community corporation.” He looked up at me and replied caustically, “You have my condolences.”

In retrospect, I don’t why I became so absorbed in nonprofit work, which was neither profitable to me nor ultimately that beneficial to the community. I should have been concerned at age 60 with repairing our tattered financial situation after the sale of Ethel’s Place, but community work roused my curiosity, compassion and energy much more than self-interest. It seemed to me there was an opportunity to make a real social

difference if our neighbors could be sufficiently organized and motivated. All the ingredients for positive change were here: stable but declining neighborhoods, schools, parks, two colleges, a historic shopping center and active churches.

One of our immediate problems, although we didn’t realize it, was that we were already too late. Despite nationally known projects like the Inner Harbor, events like the City Fair and the city’s reputation as a “renaissance” city, Baltimore’s neighborhoods were already declining in the 1970s. White migration to the surrounding suburbs increased after the 1968 riots, and the Black middle class joined them in increasing numbers in the 1990s, when the city’s African American population declined for the first time since the Civil War.

Federal funds for cities dried up in the Reagan and Bush administrations, when the city experienced a crack cocaine epidemic. When Bill Clinton was inaugurated at the beginning of 1993, Mayor Kurt Schmoke had already begun a Comprehensive Community Initiative in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. Schmoke and urban visionary James Rouse had partnered to focus millions of dollars in a holistic effort to transform what had become a poor, blighted area into a beautiful place. Schmoke said, “I know we can do it,” and Rouse echoed, “We can make it work.”

Despite the brilliance of these two men, it didn’t work and neither did my smaller vision for Mondawmin. In both instances, you could point to physical improvements and organizational successes, but infusions of money and human energy failed to turn West Baltimore areas into models of urban success. William Schaefer thought he knew why the Rouse vision failed for Sandtown-Winchester, telling an interviewer:

His theory was—I was hoping he was right—we’ll make this great and it will radiate out. I don’t think it can do that.

Schmoke can’t keep the area clean. That to me is an insult to the black community. That’s saying you’re willing to accept the trash, the needles, the people that don’t work. I think that’s a tragedy. I think that’s the wrong thing to do to people. That’s this idea of the black culture versus the white culture. What we tried to do was make it one culture. You don’t need trash. You don’t need rats. You don’t have to have vandalism. And you don’t have to accept them.… My theory was and will be that black people deserve to have a good clean community.65

The problem is that no politician or cash infusion can “keep the area clean.” Only concerned residents, properly led and organized, working with public officials, can positively change a neighborhood for the better. And then they have to work to maintain what they’ve gained. Visions have to become practical in order to become real, and they often fail because people lose hope, succumb to despair or deliberately betray their neighbors.

In my active years, I insisted there was a spiritual dimension to the work, which transcended money and politics. Without faith and love in our neighbors, we were building on sand, I said. So we began our executive committee meetings with a brief, non-sectarian prayer. I’ve always believed that we need to acknowledge the Great Mystery around us as we proceed from birth to death and that such undefined faith is eminently practical, but it was obvious that many in community work only pay lip service to such notions. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when after 10 months as president of the GMCC, my ally and vice president subverted what had been growing success. Discouraged and deflated, I resigned, and although I would return to serve another term as president and then secretary with a reorganized corporation, the momentum had passed.

65 C. Fraser Smith, William Donald Schaefer: A Political Biography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

After more than ten years, much to Ethel’s relief, I left community work altogether. But despite my own disappointments, I’ve always admired community visionaries who sacrifice their own interests for the common good. You find them everywhere in all shapes and sizes, in business, politics, the arts and elsewhere. In 2009, I met the late Richard Holley, a former Army captain and middle school principal, who chaired the Frederick Douglass High School Governance Board, and we worked together with others to turn around this historic school, Ethel’s alma mater. Like the GMCC, the board had members who didn’t see the evidence before them. In 2008, the previous year, Douglass been the subject of an HBO documentary: Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card, directed by Oscar award–winning filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond. They recorded footage from the 2004–05 school year and documented all the struggles of deprived children from all over the city thrown into an eighty-year-old, increasingly dilapidated building without adequate resources or inspired leadership. Board members thought the film was much too negative and still had fond memories of a Douglass that had produced Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, Anne Brown and Ethel Ennis. Holley and I both realized that the old Douglass was no more; what was needed was new leadership and a radical transformation of the school. After many discussions and meetings that year with school administration officials, concerned alumni and numerous others, not much happened. Ethel and I produced a concert event called “Musicians for Douglass” with student assistants in the school auditorium and raised $10,000 for an exterior, electronic sign. The inadequate principal stayed in place; and our recommendations, which included an expanded partnership with Coppin State University, were shelved. Dr. Andres Alonso, the overworked school superintendent, who had expressed interest in our work, departed a few years later, and Baltimore’s school system still lags miserably behind the rest

of the state. Holley died in April 2010, partly, I think, due to his stressful concern for Douglass. I didn’t speak at his memorial service but sat quietly in a back pew and cried.

Creating, building and sustaining any community requires a rare combination of vision, practicality and hard work. The process is easier on a micro scale and becomes increasingly more difficult on macro scales. The “beloved community” that Martin Luther King Jr. preached seems impossible in the commercial, polyglot United States and has failed in Baltimore despite billions of dollars of public investment. However, like Camus, I believe it’s worthwhile to keep pushing up the Sisyphean hill. We have to “stir the waters” and improvise with the waves just as jazz musicians look around them and go with the flow. You won’t get to any promised land, but you’ll make a difference.

twenty-one

THE WEST

Before I met Ethel, I was headed west to live in a hogan on ranch land in Arizona. I had grown to appreciate the Chesapeake region and excitement of nearby New York City—even the quirky, segregated city on the Patapsco—but if I hadn’t met Ethel in Baltimore, I’m sure I’d now be somewhere west of the Mississippi. Baltimore life seemed too narrow and confining for my taste, worthy of Balzac, but I was more a reader of Camus, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. The stark landscapes of the Southwest have always invigorated me, and California has stayed in my blood since boyhood days in Pacific Grove. If I had become a full-time academic, my focus would have been more on the Pacific than the Atlantic. For Ethel too, the West was more open and friendly, qualities that fit her cheerful disposition.

She sang numerous times in the Pacific Northwest as well as California, and it was her choice for us to get married in Aspen. For more than forty years, we traveled at least once a year to visit family and friends in Tucson, Arizona. We even considered that somewhere in the West might be the place for us to die. Ethel came West to sing; I traveled there to seek.

We made three cross-country road trips to the West, partly in search of that mythical place. The first began in 1993, when Paul Hildner, a drummer who’d worked regularly with Ethel, asked us to work with him to produce and promote a new album. It would be simple and intimate, he said, quite different from the productions into which she’d been inserted with major labels. Ethel agreed, and we spent a week in New York in the

summer for the recording work—an intimate, chamber piece with Ethel and a sophisticated trio that featured her talent for ballads and gentle swing. The recording resulted in a CD that probably captures her musical skills more than any other studio work. Entitled simply Ethel Ennis, it features a combination of four musicians (Marc Copland, Stef Scaggiari, piano; Drew Gress, bass; Paul Hildner, drums) playing eleven popular songs written between 1933 and 1993. One song, “When You’re Around,” was written by Scaggiari and one, “Night Club,” by Ethel, who also played piano on one cut, “Something Cool,” and did all the arrangements around which the musicians improvised. The New York sessions went smoothly; everyone checked their ego at the door and worked toward a common end during a remarkably clear, mild summer weekend. Ethel was sixty and had been recording for almost forty years. I turned fifty-three the following Monday and was still entranced with Manhattan. I imagined the sounds of “Save the Best for Last” wafting over its skyline on a midnight radio program—a vision that would become true the following year.

The next year, 1994, while working on the Maryland guidebook, I assisted Hildner with plans to promote the CD. He had met with executives of the new Borders Group, a chain of book and music stores that started in 1971 with Tom and Louis Borders’s store in Ann Arbor, acquired by Kmart in 1992 and spun off to a separate corporation. They were rapidly expanding with new stores around the country and were interested in Ethel making personal appearances. We tested the concept with six stores in the region (Baltimore; Washington, DC; Hartford, Connecticut; and Philadelphia) and then took our show on the road from June 7 to July 8, visiting thirteen stores over 32 days from Cleveland to Seattle. During the trip we visited friends in Chicago; St. Louis; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and El Paso, Texas, and made a number of visits to radio stations. Ethel had once done the same thing in the ’60s with RCA picking up the first-class airfares and hotel bills. This time we were on the cheap with Hildner’s and our funds, improvising as we traveled.

The Borders corporate officers were very interested in our trip, and when we had dinner with them in Novi, a suburb of Detroit, we promised to keep them informed along the way. Some of the Borders stores had wine-and-cheese receptions; we were the first artists to visit them. Others didn’t know what to do with us; a few had just opened and were figuring out how to promote themselves. A few others were more familiar with visiting performers and consequently more blasé. Later, as such visits became common, all the stores took personal appearances as a matter of course. The Borders chain eventually went out of business and closed all its US stores in 2011.

I had rented a comfortable Lincoln Town Car for the cross-country journey, and when we stopped in Tucson for a few days’ rest, my father looked at me strangely and said, “You always said you wanted to be a traveling sage. I guess that’s what you’ve become.” I smiled but didn’t feel like a sage. I was still smarting from the business failure of Ethel’s Place, which wiped away all our personal equity and left us deeply in debt. A sage would somehow have done better, I thought. Maybe I was a Sufi, deliberately seeking out the difficult-to-obtain hidden spiritual rewards. Or simply a lover and a fool. From Tucson we drove to San Diego and worked our way up the West Coast to Seattle-Tacoma. I showed Ethel the apartment overlooking Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, where I had lived with two Army buddies in 1963–64.

We also visited Bernice Petkere in her Beverly Hills home. Petkere, a former vaudeville performer whom Irving Berlin had nicknamed “Queen of Tin Pan Alley,” was ninety-two then, living alone in an apartment dominated by a grand piano cluttered with various memorabilia from her life as a songwriter. A patron had bought her condo and allowed her to stay there rent free, a gift for which she was grateful. “Close Your Eyes,” written in 1933, had been recorded by a wide variety of artists ranging from Ruth Etting to Peggy Lee, and she was curious to hear what Ethel had done with it. Still feisty and alert, she reminisced about Berlin and her New York days while she and Ethel sat at the piano and reviewed some of her other songs. We spent a delightful afternoon with the gifted old woman and left inspired.

By the time we reached Seattle, we had traveled almost 6,000 miles and visited twelve major markets in the United States. None of this effort was ever reflected in CD sales, but the odyssey itself was worthwhile. I had crisscrossed the country many times by car, train and plane, and Ethel had journeyed across by plane several times a year for years, but this was our first road trip together. Where possible, I avoided interstates and chose slower routes that enabled us to appreciate this country’s varied landscapes, foods, wines and towns. We visited friends along the way and in some instances spent a night in their homes. There’s nothing like an open road in the West, where the vistas seem endless and full of unexplored opportunity. The land is often harsh and unforgiving, but wild and beautiful.

The only auto roundtrip we made occurred in 2007, this time more for personal reasons than business. We stopped in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where for the first time Ethel saw the small college town where my mother grew up, met my father and got married. She and my brother, David, were both graduates of Crawfordsville High School, where I studied from eighth grade through junior year. David and I followed our father as graduates of Wabash, where our grandfather and uncle had also attended. If my family ever had a home base, this was it (to be followed later by Tucson). I had helped organize my college class’s forty-fifth reunion, so we had dinner with two favorite professors, a custom every time I returned to Wabash, and the next day Bert Stern, a former English professor, and I conducted a colloquium on the topic of “Journeys.” At the 1962 class dinner, Ethel sang “It’s All Right” at the piano and led a group sing of “Celebrate Life.” The next day, June 3, we were on the road to St. Louis, ending up in Tucson for several weeks before returning via El Paso and Abilene, Texas; Memphis, Tennessee; and Asheville, North Carolina.

In 2010, we made our last two Western pilgrimages apart from annual family trips to Tucson. I turned seventy, and Ethel celebrated her seventy-eighth birthday that year. I calculated we were getting older and poorer, and we might not have another opportunity to savor those stark, evocative landscapes. I wanted Ethel to experience Yellowstone National

Park and see the Arizona hogan where I was headed before we met, and I wanted to visit Taos, New Mexico, to explore what was left in one of the country’s spiritual epicenters.

Our first stop was Bozeman, Montana, where Bob Martin, an old friend and Ethel fan, and his wife, Renee, met us to serve the next day as experienced guides to Yellowstone, one of the world’s magical and sacred places. There were crowds; it was the peak of the tourist season, but Bob and Renee steered us expertly through the ecosystem, and we spent a day and a half in the country’s first national park, encompassing more than 2.2 million acres, larger than either Rhode Island or Delaware. One can only visit such a place and appreciate its changing wonders, never seeking to know or understand all its mysteries. You could spend a lifetime and never know it completely—like living with a wonderful woman.

Ethel had never visited Yellowstone but as with the Grand Canyon didn’t seem suitably impressed with the park’s spectacular attractions. She had never found spiritual inspiration in landscapes, although she loved the Colorado mountains. I used to tease her about getting nervous when the last signs of “civilization” disappeared from view. “Where are the golden arches?” she would exclaim with a laugh.

In contrast, as a boy I had exhilarated in the woods of Indiana, the salty wildness of the Monterey Peninsula in the late 1940s, Austrian mountains and rugged Japanese islands in the 1950s. As an adult in California, Gwinn and Pat Vivian introduced me to the powerful landscapes of the Southwest, particularly Canyon de Chelly, where we spent a memorable few days camping by the talus slope of the ancient ruins at Mummy Cave. Awestruck on a rim above the canyon, I felt the religious power in this land and admired the connection that I imagine traditional native people felt to every rock and rill—the rivers sang and trees danced.

As we drove through the historic Roosevelt Arch at Yellowstone’s North Entrance, I thought of all the people who’ve visited this dynamic place. Paleo-Indians mined obsidian here. The Nimiipuu, Shoshone and

Crow were here when the first European explorers and trappers wandered around in the early 1800s. No one believed trappers’ tales of steaming rivers, boiling mud holes and geysers until after the Civil War when organized expeditions investigated the landscape. The 1871 Hayden Geological Survey included two of the Vivians’ heroes: photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran.

Gwinn wrote me in 2001:

Jackson’s connection for me, in fact, is largely linked to his having been at Chaco during this same period of time. He failed to become the first person to photograph Chacoan ruins because he was using a new type of glass plate—which he did not have time to experiment with before leaving Santa Fe. You can imagine what happened—none of the plates would print. Mostly, I am impressed by the fact that he returned to Chaco in 1936 at the age of ninety-three and walked all over the place with the young students of the University of New Mexico archaeological field school who were there that summer. I intend to follow his lead when I reach 93—though probably sans students.66

Yellowstone takes you immediately back to the earth’s basics, far from the human animal’s sacred books and ceremonies to times when the planet boiled over from its interior magma and succored only bacteria. The ground beneath ferments, releasing gas, steam and water from multiple holes in the surface. The Yellowstone Caldera is one of the world’s forty “hotspots,” where the planet vents its heat, belching and farting in more geysers than anyplace else. Numerous small earthquakes (1,000 to 2,000) occur here annually, and the ground constantly shifts. One of these days a volcano will

66 Before he died at the age of 99, William Henry Jackson had taken about 80,000 photographs of the West, many of them the first ever shot. Gwinn never made it to ninty-three. He died in New Mexico in 2022 at the age of eighty-six.

explode again, darkening the sky and leveling mountains. The last time was more than 600,000 years ago. We’re surface creatures, evolved to live on the planet’s crust, which is indented with life-giving rivers and pocked with oceans. From this perspective, it’s absurd to believe that we somehow own or control Planet Earth. The caldera reminds us that in the future, the planet will simply scrape us off like pesky ticks or lice, and life will evolve to another consciousness, hopefully less simian and more harmonious.

From Yellowstone we drove down to Grand Teton National Park. Bob, always a considerate and understanding guide, stopped the rented SUV at the Jackson Lake Lodge, where we could look across an expanse of wetlands to the lake and beyond to the peaks. As a mountaineer, he has climbed all of them, including the highest, Grand Teton itself, which he has ascended more than 100 times. He spoke of the hidden lakes and tricky ascents, as I scanned the expanse for moose. We later walked up a small hill to an overlook and examined a plaque dedicated to John D. Rockefeller Jr., a key player in the complicated political history of the park.

We sometimes forget the struggles necessary to preserve even a small portion of the original American landscape for posterity. The European settlers—desperately believing in the Bible’s description of God’s covenant (“dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”67)—assumed this land was for the taking—for gold, other minerals, timber, grass, crops, wealth, social status. To leave it alone was a waste. To leave it to “savages” was a sin. So they took it, and they still take it—if they can.

After a night in Jackson Hole, we said goodbye to Bob and Renee Martin, rented a car and headed south to drive the length of Utah along old Route 89 to see some of the original Mormon towns, little Midwestern-like

67 Genesis 1:26

farming islands set in the arid West. Between 1846 and 1869, more than 70,000 Mormons from the East Coast, Midwest, England and the Scandinavian countries traveled to Utah in wagons, on horseback, by foot or pulling handcarts. Hundreds died along the 1,300-mile trail, but the majority arrived in the “State of Deseret,” a new Zion where a saint could live free while waiting for Jesus to return. The Mormons have been the most organized spiritual seekers in the West. In contrast to others, they came not to learn, be inspired or make money but to escape persecution by “gentiles” east of the Mississippi. They constitute an intriguing study in perseverance and religious belief—even in a manifestly absurd revelation.

One conflict was common to all the Europeans who marched west: the land was already used and occupied by tribal cultures that knew nothing of Jesus, the Bible and Book of Mormon or the Last Days. They had their own prophets and myths. One reason Brigham Young chose the Salt Lake City site for his capital is that it was not occupied. The Shoshone were in the north, Paiutes and Navajo in the south. The Utes roamed in the center but mostly to the south of the first Mormon settlement. Joseph Smith had taught that the Indigenous people were “Lamanites,” remnants of scattered Israel under a curse. So the Mormons felt an obligation to give them special treatment, including the admonition not to kill them for stealing. However, Young felt the Indigenous people had no prior claim to the land; the Mormons were there “by the providence of God.” He later wrote that “we were prepared to meet all the Indians in these mountains and kill every soul of them if we had been obliged to do so.”68 When the Mormons expanded south, conflicts with the Utes developed, and by 1853 there were hostilities off and on until the 1880s, when all native tribes had been moved to reservations. The Lamanites had refused to be “civilized,” even though Young had approved his missionaries marrying Indigenous women in the effort. (He said nothing when Ute chiefs suggested their men might marry Mormon women.)

68Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

As we continued south from Utah into Arizona and Navajo/Hopi country, I began to feel at home. Why should that be? I remembered that in 1966, I gave my New York girlfriend a token of love: a hardback copy of Frank Waters’s 1963 book, Book of the Hopi. I didn’t speak the language or understand the religious symbolism, but I responded to the notion of Hopis as free and balanced people—free because they resisted European intellectual imperialism and balanced because they knew how to live in a natural world. From the highway, the Hopis are invisible under a modern overlay of gas stations and roadside signs. But inside the kivas, they’re still present, and I offered a silent “thank you” as we passed through.

We ended our traverse at the solitary, straw-bale house the Vivians have built on their acres of ranch land near the Zuni reservation, where they fulfilled a long-standing dream to live in an environmentally friendly, self-sufficient, personally designed space on their own land. The hogan, where I had once planned to live, still stood a distance away—now just a frame of weathered juniper timbers. Ethel looked at the rundown structure and raised her eyebrows. I was going to live “there,” she wondered. I explained that during the ’60s, many young adults in their twenties had wandered the West, establishing communes, living in tents, tepees, hogans and log cabins while searching for an alternative life in materialistic, ecologically deadly America. The Vivians and I weren’t exactly hippies, but we were sympathetic to the lifestyle. The city girl—raised in a segregated, wary fashion—must have thought of the dangers in such self-sufficient isolation. I reveled in the incredible night sky, where it seemed you could reach and touch the stars.

Later the same year, around the time of the winter solstice, we traveled for the last time to the high plains of the Southwest to visit Santa Fe and Taos—where modern automobile culture has almost obscured the old Pueblo civilization but a certain essence remains. For more than 100 years, Europeans and their American descendants have gravitated to this Native American–Spanish area in search of beauty and religious tranquility.

People as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe, D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Carl Jung, Niels Bohr and Edith Warner came to this area to find new views of the cosmos, to reimagine the modern world.

As we wandered around the 400-year-old Santa Fe plaza, I couldn’t help thinking that I was retracing Lew Wallace’s (former governor of the New Mexico Territory) footsteps—Crawfordsville, Baltimore, Istanbul, Santa Fe—convergences as mysterious as those that had brought Ethel and me together. After breakfast at the historic Santacafé and a brief visit to the O’Keeffe museum, we headed north to Taos.

O’Keeffe spent two summers, in 1929 and 1930, at Dodge Luhan’s complex in Taos, a period that changed her life and art. She wrote a friend, “I like what Mabel has dug up out of the Earth here with her Indian Tony crown—No one who hasn’t seen it and who hasn’t seen her at it can know much about this Taos Myth—It is just unbelievable—One perfect day after another—everyone going like mad after something.”69

I didn’t “go like mad” but hit the road to Taos in pilgrimage mode— open to learn and anxious to experience that landscape firsthand. The road was narrow, dirty and bumpy in the 1920s, when Dodge Luhan and her guests followed it along the Rio Grande to the valley below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Now it’s a smooth, paved highway, but even so, when you emerge from the stream bed and angle northeast, the sudden view of Taos Mountain is dramatic. Earlier pilgrims must have thought they’d reached Shangri-La.

From a Pueblo perspective, the new American pilgrims must have seemed brutal and nonsensical. They had invaded Mexico, occupied territory, stolen land, enslaved Africans, killed Indigenous people, engaged in a fratricidal Civil War and tried to turn everyone into white men. Then Mabel Dodge Luhan arrived in Santa Fe in mid-December 1917, eight

69 Georgia O’Keefe to Henry McBride, 1929, quoted in Lois Palken Rudnick, Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). I consider this to be the best scholarly guide to Mabel Dodge Luhan and her world.

months after the Americans joined the European killing fields of World War I. Her third husband, artist Maurice Sterne—much in the spirit of an age when white radicals thought they could “save” Black folks—had written her:

Dearest Girl—

Do you want an object in life? Save the Indians, their art— culture—reveal it to the world!…

That which… others are doing for the Negroes, you could, if you wanted to, for the Indians, for you have energy and are the most sensitive little girl in the world—and above all, there is somehow a strange relationship between yourself and the Indians.70

Mabel Dodge Luhan, born into Victorian wealth in Buffalo, had little sense of history and didn’t speak Spanish, but Sterne was right—she had energy and was extraordinarily sensitive to sounds, sights and smells. And she had money. Taos and its Pueblo would never be the same.

She quickly found a guide, Antonio “Tony” Luhan, an imposing member of the Taos Pueblo, and his wife, Candelaria, and family, who took Mabel to ceremonies and instructed her in the Pueblo way. He didn’t read but spoke fluent Tiwa and Spanish with enough limited English to communicate. Within a year, the two had become lovers and were living together. Sterne had returned to New York, and Dodge Luhan had found her first real contentment in an extraordinary life that included establishment of artistic and intellectual salons in Florence and New York. Dodge Luhan was bookish, active and willful. Tony Luhan worked his fields, sang and played a small drum. To Dodge Luhan, he was impenetrable and refused to reveal any of the kiva’s mysteries. But if the Taos magic were to be useful for a new culture built upon the crumbling

70 Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds.

old, it had to be expressed. Dodge Luhan determined that D. H. Lawrence, the sensitive, brilliant author of Sea and Sardinia, was the man for the job, so she lured him to Taos.

Lawrence, known as Lorenzo among his friends, came with his wife, Frieda, in the summer of 1922 but of course had no intention of being used by Dodge Luhan. He believed that strong-willed women were part of the Western cultural problem, and he didn’t feel comfortable with the darker-skinned people of the world. Lawrence read “reptilian” hatred, stupor and secret defiance in their eyes and believed that they lived with an “abdominal consciousness” devoid of mind or spirit. “Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian,” he wrote about his Mexican experiences. “The two ways, the two streams, are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of connection.”71

Not surprising that Tony Luhan didn’t like the frail, racist Englishman. When Dodge Luhan, Lawrence and most of the other visiting artistes engaged in intellectual conversations, he fell asleep or played his drum, comparing the talk to “flies buzzing.” He got along with O’Keeffe and Willa Cather, who thought him extraordinary, and Frank Waters later wrote about “the Chief” as his closest Native American friend and brother. Lois Rudnick, Dodge Luhan’s biographer, claims that after Tony and Mabel married in 1923, the former was removed from his role in kiva ceremonies, but Waters recalled once during his friendship with the couple, he spent forty days in his kiva, “working for the sun.” Tony Luhan frequently visited the Pueblo, attended ceremonies in other villages, bought parrot feathers and gourds in Mexico for Pueblo dances and served as adviser to his tribal leadership. One suspects he was as much a missionary to the white folks as they believed they were to Indigenous people.

71 D. H. Lawrence, “Indians and Entertainment,” in Mornings in Mexico (London: Martin Secker, 1927; repr., Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2009).

Lawrence was profoundly influenced by his experiences in New Mexico but never fulfilled Dodge Luhan’s purpose. She later thought that poet Robinson Jeffers would “give a voice to this speechless land,” but Jeffers had no such intention either.72 He and his family spent summers in Taos with Dodge Luhan, but Jeffers saw no redemption or basis for a new culture in the Indigenous people. From his austere, Olympian heights, this unusual seer saw only corruption in civilization and:

The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries

His terrible life.

He is beautiful beyond belief.

And we, God’s apes—or tragic children—share in the beauty. We see it above our torment, that’s what life’s for.

He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante’s Florence, no anthropoid God Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care and will never cease.73

Because of Mabel Dodge Luhan and her Tony, many artists came to Taos, and more than a few decided to stay. The light was clear, the landscape invigorating and the native people offered examples of other ways of living in the world. The underground drums beat not only for the Indigenous people but for anyone who would listen.

The Luhans built an adobe estate adjacent to the Pueblo lands, but neither one was very popular in the village of Taos, where Anglos resented the rich Native American who drove a big car and conservative townspeople were scandalized by Dodge Luhan’s unorthodox behavior.

72 Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932; repr., Sunstone Press, 2007).

73 Robinson Jeffers, “The Great Explosion,” in The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1963).

Despite their efforts to aid the Indigenous people and offer alternatives to what they perceived as cultural bankruptcy, the Luhans didn’t save American civilization. The Great Depression followed World War I and in turn was followed by World War II, which ended in an atomic explosion created in nearby Los Alamos. The Indigenous people nurtured, guarded and even worshipped the Sun; the “civilized” people harnessed its energies and vaporized the Japanese. Dodge Luhan was appalled and talked of leaving her beloved Taos.

Despite profound differences and disagreements, the Luhans stuck together for almost forty years. After the last world war, the dynamics were different. Disillusionment had become existential despair. Most people— numbed by the war’s horrors and prospects of nuclear destruction—focused on making money; artists turned to exploration of inner spaces. Dodge Luhan drank too much and became senile in her old age, looking at her husband and sometimes exclaiming, “Who is that Indian?” She died on August 13, 1962, and was buried in the Kit Carson Cemetery. Tony Luhan died on January 27, 1963. Family and friends from the Pueblo retrieved his body from the hospital and buried it quickly in a shallow earth grave near the old church where rebels resistant to American occupation had died more than a century ago. Frank Waters was the only white person present.

Dennis Hopper, flush from his success with Easy Rider, bought the Luhan estate in 1970 and turned it into his own version of a retreat for filmmakers, artists, musicians and visionaries. Books and poets wouldn’t save American society, he believed, but ritualistic films might expose social corruption and lead to a better society.

It’s interesting to compare The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence’s novel written from his Taos and Mexican experiences, to Hopper’s film The Last Movie, filmed in Peru and edited in the Luhan Big House. Both artifacts, forty-five years apart, were conceived and created by relatively young white men (Lawrence was forty; Hopper, thirty-four) who saw themselves as potential saviors of a dying world. Each was trapped in an old consciousness. Lawrence imagined “a new conception of human life, that will arise from the fusion of the old blood- and-vertebrate consciousness with the white

man’s present mental-spiritual consciousness. The sinking of both beings, into a new being.”74 Hopper, less articulate with words, talked about breaking down the American myth of the West, “a tragic legend of greed and violence in which everybody died in the end.”75 Neither had much understanding of the Indigenous people in whom they sensed the way to a new transcendence. Lawrence never found a home; Hopper lived off and on in Taos for nine years and almost killed himself with alcohol and other drugs. Both were misogynists who needed but distrusted women and sometimes beat them. Acutely sensitive, they both searched for ways beyond their mental anguish; neither could be satisfied with Silence or Mystery.

After asking for directions in the little town, we reached the Mabel Dodge Luhan House at dusk and checked into the Robinson Jeffers Room. I worried that our accommodations might be too primitive for Ethel, but the old adobe room was adequate. The walls had a faint musty smell, and I imagined that scratching noises in the corner by my side of the bed might be adobe beetles, but we slept well. No ghosts bothered us, and I felt that “Robin and Una” wouldn’t mind our presence. With a nod to all the seeking spirits who once cavorted here, we had a good breakfast and made our way to Durango and Sedona.

A few years after Mabel Dodge Luhan’s and Antonio Luhan’s deaths, beginning in the late 1960s, Taos began to attract another generation of white seekers, less disciplined than the expatriates of the 1920s and more removed from Victorian sensibilities: the hippies. They too looked to the Pueblos for spiritual nourishment, aided by an assortment of drugs that altered reality and changed consciousness. Native Americans in the Southwest and Mexico had used psychedelic plants—particularly peyote

74 D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (London: Martin Secker, 1926, repr., Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1995).

75 Dennis Hopper as quoted in Brad Darrach, “The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes,” Life, June 19, 1970.

and mushrooms—for millennia to aid their shamans in cures and prayers. Tony Luhan was a leader of the peyote cult at Taos Pueblo, despite his wife’s misgivings and objections.

Sedona also attracts people looking to expand their consciousness, so it seemed appropriate that I would eat my first “sacred mushrooms” there. As a young man in the ’60s, I never felt a need to experiment with peyote, LSD or other hallucinogens. I didn’t even smoke pot. The world available to my normal senses was interesting and mysterious enough. But I appreciated William Blake’s maxim: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”76 And years ago, I had read Aldous Huxley’s little book about his experiments with mescaline (the active ingredient in peyote).77

So in comfortable, controlled surroundings, we both ate dried mushrooms and within twenty minutes I began the following adventure:

Sounds slowly became dominant. I looked at my moving hand, which change into an old man’s gnarled hand with large, moving veins. Individual hairs danced on my arm; narrow swirling, red, green and blue energy lines flowed from my hands and robe.

The hands were energy centers, part of a flowing field where large transparent globules floated in the light and colorful room. I moved my hands back and forth and watched the field change; everything in the room was linked, particularly living objects. I looked at the Christmas tree and deconstructed it, watching it dissolve into fluid colors. I focused on the tree, which became brighter, more brilliant; then looked outside to a living pine, clearly outlined against the sky in a white aura. At first, I could only glimpse the aura but with concentration from my abdomen could see it longer. Then I noticed a mask-like, Native American face near the treetop. It turned to look at me in surprise.

76 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: In Full Color (London, 1790).

77 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London, UK: Chatto & Windus, 1954).

Most of the time, I closed my eyes and lay in Ethel’s lap, emptying my body and traveling to various colorful worlds, a spiritual being, honored and celebrated by others. I could hear others in the distance, even commented on their laughter, but continued the inward traveling. I passed through incredibly dark spaces of nothingness but forced myself through to more blissful, joyful universes. At one point I took my seat among bodhisattvas, lined along a celestial wall as in Blake’s angels on Jacob’s ladder. We waited for assignments and welcomed each other on return.

If I opened my eyes, I could see the flowing energy field and concentrate on the tree’s aura. Its mask now paid me no attention. I discovered you could consciously go in and out of the psychedelic state to compare notes. With eyes open, I saw energy fields and lines as well as auras around living trees. With eyes closed, the experience was like a traveling, colorful dream that took one to extraordinary places. The total experience lasted three to four hours, and I was left in a lingering state of bliss, relaxed and happy. Ethel saw the energy fields but had no visions.

So what does one make of that? Later I tried a second batch but experienced nausea and heard an inner voice tell me I’d seen enough. The door was now closed, so I’ve had no desire to continue eating mushrooms any more than I would want to imbibe marijuana every day.

However, both plants, used judiciously in a sacred manner, reveal sources of joyous energies in our cosmos that we usually don’t perceive. Can they help heal broken, unbalanced Western psyches?

Carl Jung, the Swiss scientist who investigated such questions, traveled to Taos in 1925 to talk to the Pueblos about their perspectives. Jaime de Angulo, one of those idiosyncratic characters in our cultural underground, arranged the meeting. He had met the Luhans in California and immediately seized upon Antonio Luhan as someone of importance. De Angulo was an unorthodox ethnologist, linguist, poet and musician

who never found an academic home but communicated with a wide range of original personalities: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac, Harry Partch, Henry Miller, Henry Cowell, Jeffers, Lawrence and many others. So when Jung showed up in the Southwest, de Angulo persuaded him to visit the Taos Pueblo.

Jung later recalled in his autobiographic notes his conversation with Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake) who asked:

Why do the Americans not let us alone? Why do they want to forbid our dances? Why do they make difficulties when we want to take our young people from school in order to lead them to the kiva, and instruct them in our religion? We do nothing to harm the Americans!… What we do, we do not only for ourselves but for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole world. Everyone benefits by it… if we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.78

Jung felt that such passionate connection to the cosmos through ceremony created serenity in the Native American, a person “in the fullest sense of the word in his proper place.”

78 Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Amiela Jaffe, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Vintage Books, 1989).

De Angulo also recalled this meeting, which confirmed his thesis that:

against all anthropological precedent… the white American must preserve the Indian, not as a matter of justice or even or brotherly charity, but in order to save his own neck. The European can always tie back to his own mother soil and find therein the spiritual pabulum necessary to life. But the American, overburdened with material culture, is threatened with selfdestruction unless he can find some way to tie himself to his own mother soil. The Indian holds that key.79

White Americans like their European counterparts have long refused to see anything of ultimate value coming from dark-skinned people. Jazz was designated as primitive music for decades, but now the music is recognized as one of our few original contributions to world culture. What if the hidden Pueblo ceremonials, fueled by the insights from psychedelic plants, actually did in some way keep the sun in its course? The mushrooms revealed energy lines that moved with my hands; I could influence energies in the room. Suppose there are other kivas in other galaxies where sentient beings direct energies to keep the cosmos in order?

79 Gui de Angulo, ed., Jaime in Taos: The Taos Papers of Jaime de Angulo (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1985).

Publicity photo of Ethel for her 1994 CD, Ethel Ennis, photo by Patrick Sandor © Hildner Productions

twenty-two

DEATH & DYING

One of the bittersweet aspects of a long, happy marriage is the realization that one day it will end. Ethel and I considered death part of life, inherited at birth, so we weren’t afraid to talk about it. She even incorporated dying into one of her original songs, “Hey You,” where she admonished the audience to “do what you want to do” because the “big erasure will get ya.” We thought our best scenario would be to die together, maybe in a plane crash, but we knew that the odds favored one of us having to survive without the other.

In her eighties, Ethel was still singing professionally before audiences. The phone didn’t ring as often, but occasionally something unusual would occur. For example, in 2012, we made an expense-paid trip to New York so that Ethel could participate in a tribute dinner for writer Gay Talese, sponsored by the Dutch Treat Club at the Harvard Club. Ray Errol Fox, who had briefly been her manager, had just been elected president of this venerable society, founded in 1905 by writers, illustrators and editors. When Ray learned that Talese liked Benny Goodman, he assembled three cabaret singers to perform Goodman songs and asked Ethel, the only remaining living singer to have actually performed with Goodman, to participate. He’s always been an Ethel fan, so it was easy to say, “Yes, we’ll be there.” We didn’t know Talese, but we liked Ray, and I was intrigued to stay at the private Harvard Club, a bastion of New York status and privilege since it was founded in 1865.

The dinner was held in Harvard Hall, a landmark New York room with oak-paneled walls, large stone fireplaces and 40-foot ceiling designed by Charles F. McKim and completed in 1905. Portraits of eminent Harvard men and Flemish tapestries adorn the walls as well as a once-controversial elephant’s head now considered part of the room’s personality. I sat at the head table between Talese, who seemed to regard me as not worth talking to, and his companion, the striking Carmen Dell’Orefice, then at eighty the world’s oldest working model. A native New Yorker, she first appeared on the cover of Vogue in 1945 and has worked ever since, sometimes retiring, marrying, losing fortunes and always returning to work. I found her down-to-earth, and we had an interesting conversation during dinner. Ethel sang four songs she had performed with the Goodman band in 1958: “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “The Song is Ended” and “There’s No Fool like an Old Fool.” The following year, returning from Tucson, we found in the pile of mail a parcel and handwritten note from French producer Gilles Pétard. Entitled Ethel Ennis, The Complete 1955-1958, the attractive two-CD package on Le Chant du Monde label included the two albums she made for Capitol during this period as well as performances in Brussels with the Goodman band that had been eliminated from the Columbia album Benny in Brussels due to contract disputes. These latter includes “A Fine Romance,” a duet with Jimmy Rushing. Alain Thomas, who wrote an attractive booklet in both English and French, concluded that “it is clear she ranks as one of the greats. Her life is that of a wise woman.” The product, obviously a specialty item for connoisseurs, was released exclusively in Europe and never noticed in the United States. I called Pétard in Paris to see if there was any interest in Ethel performing there, something she had never done, but he was noncommittal. Without a record contract and active management, there was nothing practical to be done. So Ethel performed again at the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland, where she performed once a year for more than twenty years. We had meetings and lunches with friend and supporter Robbye Apperson and Henry Wong, owner of An Die Musik, to explore musical possibilities. Nothing happened except for two concerts in November with pianist Cyrus

Chestnut in Wong’s petite establishment. It was just the two of them, two Baltimoreans, piano and voice. At almost eighty-one, Ethel sang some songs in the same key as fifty years ago, when Cyrus was born.

Ethel’s mother and grandmother had died from strokes, and she’d experienced three mini strokes (transient ischemic attacks or TIAs) in her early eighties. But at eighty-four she was still singing, and I suspected that she’d be one of those rare performers who’d continue into her nineties.

Then on February 16, 2017, she had her first major stroke, which affected her left side and speech. Thus began what I call the “Year of Strokes” after which she could neither sing nor play the piano and guitar.

After two weeks in the hospital, including rehab, Ethel returned home and seemed on the way to a good recovery. She was honored in April at a fundraising gala for the Sisters Academy of Baltimore, where she surprised everyone by leading them a cappella in her version of “Celebrate Life,” a song she often used as an encore or on occasions when asked to sing. “Celebrate life,” she sang. “Give yourself to life, and life will give to you.… The secret of success is finding happiness.… So celebrate life; do it before you die.”

Then on August 21, she suffered a second stroke that put her in the emergency room on the verge of death. She spent more than three weeks in the hospital during which she experienced great pain from bleeding in the brain and talked for the first time of dying. “I feel I’m being pulled apart in space,” she said, “and should just fade away.” But her natural cheerfulness soon returned, and she returned home with left arm and leg weakened but still strong in spirit. Three months later around Christmastime, she fell after another stroke and spent another three weeks in the hospital. Each time, her inner life dimmed a little, but she still shined with laughter, compassion and good will. She would jokingly talk of herself in versions when asked how she felt. “Which one are you talking about,” she asked. “Ethel 3 or 5 or 6?” (She counted the mini strokes.)

We began 2018 in the hospital, followed by home and outpatient therapy. We were happy with the physicians and staff of Sinai Hospital, who gave her world-class treatment, but I was beginning to think that her genetic clock was running down. The small, inaccessible arteries in her brain were failing her, and medications were not preventing the strokes. Ethel’s last public appearance occurred on October 1 at Maryland Public Television, where she received a star on the Walk of Fame outside their headquarters. As usual, she joked about her situation. “You know, strokes are no fun,” she said. “The left side of my face was numb. I had to learn how to swallow. I said, Oh, oh. My tongue didn’t work right. I said, ‘Well, I won’t get a job in a house of ill repute.’” Following the building laughter, she concluded with “Celebrate Life.”

Ethel’s fourth and last stroke happened on December 18, 2018, the day we arrived in Tucson to celebrate a family tradition of reunion at Christmas. That evening, she couldn’t move or talk and gave me the same silent look as her grandmother in 1977. It said, This is it; it’s time. I would deny that look for the next two months. The Tucson medical center reported that this time the stroke occurred on the left side of her thalamus, a complicated portion of the brain key to awareness, cognition and sleep. After five days we flew home to arrange therapy and recovery. By this time, Ethel was fed up with needles, nurses and hospitals, but she still ended up in the University of Maryland Medical Center for eighteen days after developing a urinary tract infection. There she became increasingly intractable, refusing medications, eating little and fighting growing depression.

I lobbied to get her closer to the doctors who had treated her the previous year, but the move to a rehab center didn’t produce much improvement. She had good days and bad days, periods when she was more alert and others when she appeared lethargic and semi-comatose. Clearly the fourth stroke had affected her cognitive functions. She spoke little, couldn’t explain herself well, continued to lose weight and was becoming increasingly incontinent. Appetite enhancers and antidepressants didn’t seem to make a difference. A doctor told me she was in imminent risk of

another stroke. After two weeks, I brought her home, where I hoped to create a more therapeutic environment. But when she refused to take medications or eat or drink, it suddenly became clear that she came home not to heal but to die.

“Why do you want to leave me?” I asked in some anguish but then realized that she had only endured the last hospitalization and rehab for my sake. She knew she wouldn’t recover but suffered for me, a very spiritual thing to do. Absorbed in my efforts to nurse her, I hadn’t seen clearly until we were home. If she adamantly refused anything in her mouth, there was only one outcome, I told her. If she wanted to die, I would travel that road with her, making her as clean and comfortable as possible. She looked at me very thoughtfully, quite aware of what I was saying, and smiled.

Thus for the next two weeks, with the consent of her doctors, I watched my beloved Ethel slowly die with stubborn determination. A hospice nurse came daily to check on her, but most of the time we were alone. I washed and massaged her, combed her hair, cleaned her body and bed and monitored her twenty-four hours a day. We couldn’t have a conversation but communicated nonverbally as only an old married couple can do. As the process began, for the first time I sobbed and cried.

On several occasions, she had what I called “mini-deaths” when she was so still for so long that I thought the end had come. Then she moved a leg or emitted a sound, and I knew the vigil would continue. I had set up a video camera in our bedroom and one day observed small balls of light swirling around her head. An optical illusion? Tricks of light from the window, or cosmic energies seeking her out? I’ll never know. In the last days, her breathing changed as her body shut down.

Early Sunday morning, February 17, I lay beside her on the bed, holding her hand, and dozed. When I awoke around 5 a.m., I heard a faint sigh and then the room was very quiet. Ethel was gone, and I was alone. Prepared, I washed her body and wrapped her in the sheet. The saddest moment occurred when two funeral home employees arrived and carried her body out the door in a bag.

Ethel’s body was cremated two days later, and a committee of friends and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University began planning a private luncheon and public memorial concert that occurred on May 24. Later I wrote the following poem:

The delicate gray bird suddenly appeared, Wings whirring, sipped nectar from purple flowers Growing in a pot on the porch railing, While Ethel lay hurt at Sinai, pulled apart by meteors Spinning in her head, Stroked twice and sucked cold with dreams of dying.

Close to me the quiet bird pursued its business, Careless in a parallel universe, Oblivious to Ethel sleeping and dying With stilled wings and spirit fading.

Then, quickly and aloof, the bird flew away. Enjoy earth’s splendor, it seemed to say. You have only now, the gift quickly gone. Ethel smiled, then frowned in pain. Celebrate our years, she seemed to say. We had each other, and now I fly away.

Together at home on our front porch, early 2000s

Ethel on stage at Vice President Spiro Agnew’s dinner, early 1972. Left to right: Frank Sinatra, Spiro Agnew, Ethel, Judy Agnew, Danny Thomas

at President Richard Nixon’s second inauguration, January 20, 1973

Participating in a charity cooking contest, mid-1980s

Ethel

Another

Celebrating my birthday in Tucson, Arizona, early 1980s. From back to front, left to right: My father Clyde, sister Carole, mother Jeanne, brother David, Ethel, nieces Stacy and Heather, and me. Collection of the author

birthday in Tucson, early 2000s. From left to right: My mother Jeanne, brother David, brother-in-law Rob, sister Carole, me, and Ethel. Collection of the author

Ethel in Ethel’s Place Cabaret Restaurant, around 1984

Photo shoot for Baltimore magazine, early 2011, photo © Dean Alexander, courtesy of Dean Alexander

appendix a

DAD’S LETTER

In June 1967, a year of urban riots, the Kerner Commission Report and my and Ethel’s marriage, I received this long letter from my father. My sister recalls him struggling over handwritten legal pads and then typing a word-for-word version that he submitted to the Reader’s Digest for publication. It would take nine years before he finally accepted Ethel into his family.

Dear Earl, “Mother, I’m in love with a colored woman and I think I’m going to marry her.” This, you, our tall, blond, blue-eyed son, said rather casually while we were sitting on our patio during your recent visit. Do you remember how I arose without comment and went into the house, ostensibly to attend to some chore? I was not ready to say anything. I had a chill. I felt compressed, as if my ribs were contracting and hurting me. I had a fullness in my throat. This reaction surprised me and I wanted to be alone to examine it. It was foreign to my nature and my usual unemotional stolidity. I knew you had Negro friends and I approved of it. I knew you had gone out with colored girls and although I did not think about it enough to approve or disapprove, I felt vaguely that this too was part of your total experience of living. You were reared in an atmosphere of freedom, disciplined when it was unavoidable, and encouraged to think for yourself. There was never any discrimination against ideas or people in your home. You were never

pressured to like or dislike this or that, to join anything, or to hate anything but ignorance. You were always surrounded by books, music, friends and whatever culture our means provided.

You had a good education and the opportunity to meet people of many countries during our travels. You saw your family associate on an equal basis with people of all races. In the United States and abroad, you saw your family entertain and be entertained by American Negroes. Your free association with colored persons was not a surprise or a matter of concern to me. Why, then, this sickness of soul when you announced you intended to marry a colored woman? This was something I would have to examine, to turn over and over, to dissect. It was something I would have to THINK about, not on the surface where I had casually accepted the equality of persons of other races, but way down in the depths of my consciousness, or even below it if I could get there. Why did I who had always prided myself on my liberal thinking, on my progressive outlook, on my sympathy for the oppressed and underprivileged, feel so strongly about my son mixing his blood with that of another race? Was there an atavistic core of race consciousness lurking beneath a pool of white complacency way down there in the depths somewhere?

I had to go over this question of race in the United States to see just where I stood. I found, surprisingly enough, I suppose, that I didn’t know exactly. I had never been forced to examine my position. Now, I was being forced with a vengeance. It was tearing me apart and I didn’t know why. Your mother, too, now that your visit is over and you are back East, presumably carrying on your association with your black fiancée, is sleeping poorly. I find her looking into the distance, detached, and sometimes unaware of her surroundings. She too, it seems, is upset and is searching for understanding. We can’t discuss it. By unexpressed mutual consent, it never enters our conversation. Maybe we must both understand ourselves before we can talk about it to one another.

Where do I start? Well, to get the fundamentals out of the way, do I believe in racial equality? Yes, I do! I do not believe that there is anything in the color of the skin or eyes, shape of the head, cast of features, or curl of

the hair which makes one race more progressive, more civilized, or more cultured than another. Equal opportunities, motivations, environments should produce results, presuming a large enough sampling. Individual differences, of course, but other things being equal, then there should be, percentage-wise, as many idiots, wise men, bullies, leaders and prophets in one race as in another.

What about the current problems of employment and housing for the Negro? Would I work with or for a Negro? Yes, I would and I have. However, I want him to have the job as coworker or superior to be on the basis of his qualifications for the job, and not because he was placed there to fulfill a quota for so many colored employees. I cannot see that reverse discrimination is any more right than the initial discrimination that raised the problem. Would I like to have a Negro family as my neighbors? I don’t care! I have had Negro neighbors and there were no problems. Persons of similar education, professional qualifications or economic status tend to congregate. I see no reason this should not include Negroes, as well as Puerto Ricans, French, Mexicans, English, Irish, Italian, Chinese or Martians, and not necessarily in that order. Property values? Property values do not go down because a Negro family of comparative cultural and economic standing moves into a white neighborhood. Such values do go down when one of the “quick buck” characters, white or Negro, “cracks” a white neighborhood by paying an exorbitant price for a house and then leasing a one-family dwelling to two or more families, or to a slovenly family who will allow the property to fall into disrepair, thereby permitting neighboring houses to be picked up ultimately for a fraction of their original values. And, incidentally, Negroes are no more slovenly than whites. Economics tend to determine the degree of slovenliness, not race.

Education? Education is the answer of course, but how is it to be worked out? Do I want my children to go to school with Negroes? Why not? They have for years. I know the answer given to this “Why not” by the white extremists, but I believe that any possible lowering of educational standards as a result of integration is a temporary thing only, and that in the long run both races will profit from it. School days are the best times for

children of both races to learn to live together. Equal educational opportunities? Of course. Haven’t we said that equal opportunities will produce equal results? Negroes have further to come because they started further back. This can be overcome in one generation if we work at it. A little extra effort is required. The whites cannot object on any logical ground to this effort or to the integration of schools. They can object, it seems to me, to unnatural or artificial situations where colored or white children are penalized by being required to travel great distances for the sole and only purpose of achieving an arbitrary distribution of color in each school.

What about our treatment of the Negro in the United States? Shameful? Yes! The Negro has been mistreated, neglected and exploited. Only recently, however, has there been enough publicity and widespread attention to bring it to the conscience of everyone in this country. The reaction, generally, has been one of shame and guilt, and amazingly enough, shock, that we have been living with it for so many years and never noticed just how unfair and inconsistent we have been.

The national conscience has been awakened and we are ashamed. This shame over what we have done to the Negro has grown and grown until it has “colored” all our thinking. The American people shame easily anyway when cause is brought to their attention. We grovel before criticism. All a foreigner has to do to obtain an audience in this country is to criticize it. We roll over on our backs and expose our defense-less bellies when thus attacked. We revel in a masochistic paroxysm.

So, I am ashamed that I reacted adversely to my son’s announcement. I am conditioned to thinking that because it’s a question of color, any adverse reaction must be wrong. I can say I don’t want my son to marry a Scandinavian, an Italian or a Venusian, but I can’t say I don’t want my son to marry a colored woman. This is heresy. I am thereby compounding the national wrong done to the Negro. I am discriminating, exhibiting Jim Crowism, and I should be ashamed.

We are expiating our sins when we don’t prosecute the colored high school student who steals from the school, when we don’t jail rioting Negro hoodlums, and when we alibi the Negro because he is colored. We are

atoning for our national error when we allow colored hate organizations dedicated to violence to flourish, and we accept taunts of “whitey,” “long, hot summer,” “burn, baby, burn” etc. etc., because of our guilt complex. The Negro is quick to learn and he is now beginning to take advantage of this to cry discrimination when there is no discrimination and to hide behind this shield of outraged righteousness to avoid his responsibilities and to cover his inadequacies. I hope he does not allow the moral pinnacle created by the rightness of his cause to be chipped away with the axes of hatred, Negro intolerance and Negro extremism.

To oppose the colored extremists we have the white extremists, who in white intolerance and ignorance raise their hate-filled cries like jackals baying at the moon. So to the shame already felt by the civilized man this additional load of shame felt for men of his own race must be added to his already unwieldy burden. So I have this double load of shame, not to eliminate, but to disregard momentarily, if I am ever able to consider my son’s announcement objectively.

I believe that I can eliminate any anti-Negro bias on my part insofar as Negro employment, education and housing are concerned. My conscience over our past treatment of the Negro has been examined. I believe that I have already shown you by my life and conduct that I feel no need for social discrimination. It is unnecessary to say that your mother and I feel no personal fastidiousness in our social contacts with cultivated Negroes, since you know that we have both attended mixed parties, danced with Negro partners, and joked with and about both races on a completely free and easy basis. You cannot claim that we do not know Negroes. I genuinely like and admire most of them that I have known. No Negro has ever detected “crow” in my conduct because it has never existed. But, I feel consternation at the idea of my son marrying one? The reason must lie elsewhere. I have read the literature, starting with the first saccharine attempts of thirty years ago to portray the hopeless sweetness of inter-racial love to the prolixity of modern novels portraying the viciousness of white objections to such marriages. It does not seem to me that any of these books has solved anything, but that they may appeal to those of both races who love to identify with unpopular causes.

Why am I so concerned about this proposed marriage of yours? It must be a compelling reason or I would not feel so strongly about it. Is it pride of race, deep, concealed and fundamental? Possibly. This implies the consideration of generations of ancestors and descendants stretching backward and forward into infinity like railroad tracks crossing a desert. Is it concern about the continuation of the race and of the personality—the spark of immortality that flows from father to son on and into the forever? If it is, and I think this may be part of the answer, then this is a deeply personal feeling concerned with any deviation from an established pattern. If I see myself in my children and in my children’s children, then I see a continuation of self. It is easier to see a continuation of similarity than a continuation of change. I see myself in my descendants. Will you deprive me of this? If I were permitted to see your part of my line receding into the midst of innumerable tomorrows, would I see it, not fading, but growing darker and darker?

My children, of whom I have always been so proud! Your brother, tall, strong, and manly, secure in a happy marriage to a woman of his own race. Your pretty sister, with her life ahead of her. And you, my son, your superior record in school, your success as a newspaper reporter and writer, your quick intelligence and charm that have afforded you quick entrée into any situation or society. You, who have been able to go anywhere and do anything you please. Do you know what you are giving up? What will this marriage do to your grandparents, retired in the Deep South? What about your brother, and his wife, daughter of the Deep South and a member of a numerous and proud family, rooted in the South for generations? You are not alone. You cannot say it’s my life; I shall do with it as I will. “No man is an island.”

You cannot say to hell with my relatives, friends and loved ones, if they are so ignorant, prejudiced and hidebound that they cannot accept this marriage, they are not worth associating with anyway. This is too sweeping an indictment. These are not unworthy people. Can you say, in your rush for martyrdom, that they are all wrong and only you are right? Suppose they

are wrong. Can you correct them overnight? If they are wrong in this, are all their other virtues thereby nullified and rendered valueless? Can any or all of these people welcome you and your bride into their homes and say to their astounded neighbors, here is our friend and relative, with his wife?

Disregard relatives. How many places in this country will be off-limits to you or illegal for you to live in? How many restaurants, hotels, etc. will be closed to you? This is wrong?

This is a reflection of our society? Yes, but I am not writing of things as they should be, but of things as they are. I would not have my son, previously so free and untrammeled, limited and fenced in.

This will, incidentally, not be applicable just to you and your colored wife. Your mother and I feel it already. Correspondence with our other son’s in-laws has stopped, and this apparently at just a hint of your intentions. This kind of thing will continue. I can hear the comments; “I knew no good would come of his letting his children associate with just anybody,” “This is what happens when you begin to let down the barn,” “He should have known better,” “I could have told him.” All right. I can take it too, but did you know you were letting this monster loose, not only on your father, but your mother, brother and teen-age sister?

Will this limit your sister’s choice of friends when it becomes known? How many white families will want their sons to marry into a family with colored in-laws and colored grandchildren, cousins, nephews and nieces? Or, perhaps you have a nice colored boy picked out for your sister to marry? This way, she wouldn’t have to worry about it.

Maybe we could just hush the whole thing up, keep it quiet and never mention it to anyone. When your name is brought up, we could just evade the whole issue by some casual comment, like, “He’s doing all right—we just never hear from him anymore.”

It won’t stop there, you know; because I will not, regardless of how I feel, permit anyone to insult you in my presence. It appears that willy-nilly, I will then alienate a good many people, and have a pretty strenuous life ahead of me. Is this what you have in mind for your family? Is this what

happens when you try to provide a liberal, unprejudiced home atmosphere for your children? Should I not better have been a hidebound, loud-talking, red neck?

Your intended, I have no doubt, is a woman of sterling worth. I must assume this since I do not know her. Presumably she is also a woman of intelligence, since I cannot see you associating for any length of time with a woman of low mentality. This makes me curious, however, because it seems to me that there is a paradox involved here. I must presume that she is in love with you, but the greater her love the less, it seems, she would be inclined to subject you to the limitations which would be imposed on you by a mixed marriage.

What kind of life does she want for you? Assuming that she has no racial pride and is willing to have children who will be lighter in color than herself, does she know what happens so many times when such children grow up? I have many times, myself, seen such children grow ashamed of, and try to hide, the darker parent. Is your prospective wife also willing to face this? Are you?

Ask her mother if she wants whiter grandchildren. If she does, then she and I are agreed, and if she does not want her line diluted, again we are agreed, and in either case, between us there is no conflict.

I have seen you, over the years, cause harm to yourself and concern to others by your deliberate flaunting of conventions, deliberate selection of the unpopular course of action, and by your almost pathological rigidity of purpose when you were being idealistically concerned with a cause. Do you think I don’t know that your compassionate involvement with the color question is directly responsible for placing you in a situation where emotional involvement with a colored woman was almost inevitable?

Yours is a spirit of sacrifice, of self-abnegation. I believe that you are never truly happy unless you are a defender of lost causes, and not even then unless you are made to suffer. Is the masochistic urge so deeply ingrained in you that you achieve happiness only in flagellation? Is this the secret of your character, and does this explain your actions even up to and including your present intention to ally yourself with a downtrodden race?

If this is so, does it not then alloy the love you feel for this Negro woman? Does she know this about you? Would it affect her feelings for you if she did? I have done much thinking, son. I have tried to discover what I think, and what I feel, and why. This has not been easy because I find myself, as most people do, thinking on a thalamic level, trying to justify logically what I have already subconsciously decided. What conclusions have I reached then, on whatever level of consciousness I have reached them?

I find that, as you have guessed by now, I do not approve of this marriage. Is this bigotry, prejudice, racism, unthinking white chauvinism? I do not believe it to be so. I have examined myself. I admit shame over the treatment of the colored people in this country, but admitting it, I recognize its existence and will not be influenced by it.

Because I have this feeling of shame and this weight on my conscience, I do not thereby feel that I must atone by approving my son’s union with the colored race. I will atone in any way but this. I will work for, sacrifice, and endure the howling hatred of both white and black races, to achieve better conditions for the black man because I believe this is but simple justice. This far I will go.

I have come a long way from the attitudes of my ancestors, and even from my own youthful attitudes of only a few years ago. But, this ultimate step I will not take. So, to the racial unifiers who scream that it is useless to come this far and balk at the last step, and to the segregationists who scream betrayal that I have come thus far, I can say only, “I have examined my conscience and my attitude, have you examined yours?”

Finally, I base my objections to this marriage on these things:

A deeply felt, perhaps sub-conscious conviction that miscegenation is wrong.

This marriage will limit you in ways you have not even conceived of, in ways beyond the most obvious limitations on social activities, travel, housing, employment and friendships. I see you exposed to the racial prejudices of both races. I see people making judgements about you based on nothing but this marriage, and I would not see my son looked at askance by anyone.

Next, this marriage will reflect adversely upon, and involve, against their will and without their choice, not only members of your own family, but your relatives and friends as well.

Finally, this marriage will affect directly our relationship with one another. If, upon mature reflection, I cannot reconcile myself to this marriage, can I then accept its consequences? Can I accept your colored wife and her colored family and their colored friends, and above all, my colored grandchildren, into my home and feel comfortable and happy about it? Must I perforce, because you gratuitously involved me, accept your ideas, your thinking, and your attitudes? If I cannot, can I continue to love you as a son from whom I had hoped so much? Realizing the position this would put me in, would you even put it to the test?

Would you not rather decide to go it alone, giving up our relationship, your family and your position in our hearts? In any event, are you not lost to us?

These are the reasons I do not look with favor on this marriage. To the best of my ability, I have tried to find out why I feel as I do when I think about it. Maybe, now that I have examined myself, I can discuss it with your mother, and your brother and sister. Perhaps we can find comfort in one another.

Your mother and I have done all that we can for you, son. We have made sacrifices for you and worried about you for nearly thirty years. Now that you no longer need us, you are going away from us and it breaks our hearts.

We are not gaining a daughter and we are losing a son. Love,

Dad (The original was signed simply “Edelweiss”)

appendix b

LOVE LETTER

Early Tuesday Morning April 25, 1967

Hi Sweetheart,

I just came from drinking beer and talking to a new reporter and his wife—they’re good people, you’d like them. They’re smart, young and care about things. I started a letter to you earlier but got tangled in the day-to-day cares of being a police reporter. So I tore that one up and am beginning another.

The first thing I have to say to you is that I love you—with capital letters. I LOVE YOU. That’s the way it is, and I have no hesitation about saying it to anyone. But the statement means different things to different people. We’ve talked before about what love means and over the phone you mentioned you were confused about Stafford because you thought you loved him. So here goes. What does it mean to love someone?

First of all, I think it’s risky. You have to be genuinely honest in love: there can be none of the barriers we traditionally build between ourselves and other people. You have to stand naked in front of the other person and say: “Here I am. I stand revealed.” And this ain’t easy for most of us. We’re usually too afraid of other people, which is simply another way of saying that we’re afraid of ourselves. But I believe that the rewards of love are worth the risks. The reward between a man and a woman is a transcending intimacy where our inner lives center on mutuality instead of exclusively

upon ourselves. We’ve only experienced the beginnings of this kind of intimacy, and I hope that we’ll live to see the flowering of what’s possible between us.

But love is not exclusively a mutuality. It’s a give and take with as much emphasis on the “take” as on the “give.” Our Christian orientation has fucked us up by insisting on a pervading altruism which is false to our natures. If love destroys the individuality of those who love, then I believe it’s a mistake. Every person is unique and bears responsibility for his uniqueness. So many people when they love seem to seek to lose themselves in the loved one. Such a search seems futile to me and a drastic mistake. So I love you but expect to be loved in return. If it doesn’t work out that way, I won’t stay in love. I’m not much of a “clinging vine” despite the verdicts of the horoscopes. Love to me is also a trust. I object to the barriers between men, however practical and utilitarian they may be. My feelings flow inside like a wild, free river and resist the efforts of society or other people to dam the flow into “acceptable” channels. In a world where so many men seem to calculate their pleasure, I choose to stand apart. I don’t want to bamboozle, to deceive or to manipulate to achieve happiness. I want happiness on my own terms—open, honest and without reservation—and am willing to sacrifice to achieve it.

I believe love also involves friendship. It’s one of the great mistakes of our time to associate love between men and women so predominantly with sex. But it’s an understandable mistake, simply a reaction to the times where people thought their bodies were shameful. Sex is part of it, but not the whole part of love. Genuine lovers are also friends and have something to share with each other after they get out of bed.

I also believe that love should be free. There should be no inhibitions except those that lovers freely impose upon themselves. Love is a great opportunity for experiment and enjoyment. You asked about “oral lovemaking,” a funny expression you used probably to avoid words you thought might be offensive to me. Don’t ever worry about offending or shocking me, dear Ethel; I’m a very durable and resilient person. I’m all for “oral lovemaking,” although I don’t claim much experience here. The reason for

that is fairly simple. I enjoy the traditional forms of lovemaking and haven’t been around one woman long enough to really experiment the way I would like to. With you it’s a different story. To you I quote the poet: “Come live with me, and we will all the pleasures prove.”

So now you know in a little more detail what love means to me. I can’t tell what it should mean to you. Like I told you on the phone: you have to discover that yourself. I’ve told you before that I believe from what you’ve told me, that you’ve been cheated in love. Many men have probably told you that they love you. Good ole Jack told me that at the Fox. “She’s my woman,” he said, “I love her.” I told him that I believe him but later thought, “Shit, the man really loves himself.”

I write you all this so that you’ll know what I mean when I tell you that I love you. So far I haven’t heard the same response from you but am willing to wait for a while. I may be nice, kind, gentle and all that, but I’m also a free, passionate man with full realization of just how short a man’s life is. I want you to love the way I love you and am willing to wait but not forever. I saw Donald Criss today, and we talked about music and the Muslims—quite a combination, nicht wahr? Later we went to the home of a man named William J. Jones. He used to be a musician, got cancer over a year ago and turned into a sculptor while recuperating. You may know him. We had an interesting conversation, and I plan to write a story about him in June.

I think I’ll go to New York today and say good-by to a few friends. I told you once about a woman there who has been sort of a part-time mistress for the past 6-7 months. She’s going to London in June and will probably stay there for a while. We’re good friends, but what was once between us flickered and then died. I want to tell her good-by and wish her well in the future. Another good friend in New York is a poet I knew in the Army at Fort Holabird, Germany and France. Sometime I’d like for you to meet him.

Do you wonder if my love for you will “flicker and die”? Well, that’s hard to tell. So much depends on what happens in the future. My feelings tell me now that they’ll last a long time and probably grow in strength and

depth. I long to touch you and feel the curve of your body next to mine. Words are such a poor substitute for the presence of a person. I know that I love you now and that this emotion is a predominant event in my daily life. I wonder about living with you, about marrying you, about all sorts of ways to be permanently near you with claims on you more legitimate than that of “reporter.” What are you going to tell people after I’ve written about you? How will you explain me to your friends who are deeply suspicious of white men and their motives?

I told you once that my love will complicate your life because it’s not a passing fancy. You should be prepared for that, particularly if what you feel for me is not a passing fancy.

I promised you a letter but not a book, so I’d better close. I’ll have talked to you on the phone by the time you receive this. But let’s not rely just on phones. I expect some letters back. Sing well and have a good time.

MUCH LOVE

Earl

appendix c

REV. DANIEL COKER

The elusive Daniel Coker was among the first Baltimore African American pastors to come to widespread public attention. The most accepted version of his life relates that he was born in Baltimore County as Isaac Wright, son of an enslaved African father and white indentured servant mother. Other versions have him born in Frederick County with a Black mother and white father. Like Benjamin Banneker, he educated himself, perhaps with the assistance of a white half-brother, but unlike Banneker, he was probably enslaved.

Coker presumably escaped to New York as a teenager and changed his name. Somewhere along the line, he also encountered Francis Asbury, who ordained him to preach as a Methodist deacon. Perhaps to reunite with his family, he returned to Maryland and settled in Baltimore, where he established a school and joined the Sharp Street Methodist Church.

By 1800, the Chesapeake hamlet named after Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, had mushroomed from a colonial tobacco port to a federal boomtown. With only 26,514 inhabitants, Baltimore was still the third largest city in the new United States with a 21 percent Black population, about half enslaved and half free. Spurred by revolutionary fervor, rising religious calls for abolition and a changing economy, increasing numbers of slave owners in the surrounding countryside had freed their human chattel—and they were coming to Baltimore. It was a trading seaport with jobs and access to a wider world.

For example, literate, skilled and multilingual James Hemings, brother of Sally and uncle to her four children by Thomas Jefferson, ended up as a cook in a Baltimore tavern after sojourning in Europe and other American cities during his five years as a free man. Frederick Douglass spent crucial, early teenaged years in Baltimore and then escaped from slavery in 1838 after working as a caulker in the city’s shipyards. Baltimore has been both a haven and an incubator for outstanding African Americans throughout most of its history.

Philadelphia and New York had larger free Black populations in 1800, but by 1830, Baltimore, then the country’s second largest city, had more free Black citizens than any place in the country and would remain the leading African American city for the next thirty years, until the Civil War ended slavery and disrupted the republic. Although relatively poor in comparison to Black elites in Philadelphia, Charleston or New Orleans, the city’s Black residents created the businesses, schools and churches that sustained a free community despite the presence of enslaved people who still suffered a cruel bondage.

In 1810 in Baltimore, Rev. Coker published a remarkable pamphlet entitled “A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister.” By this time he was a leader among Black Methodist preachers who had established Black congregations separate from white supervision and free to worship in their own manner. He had learned the polite gentleman’s language of the nineteenth century and was able to couch his objections to slavery in formal biblical terms that contradicted all the Southern white preachers who defended their “peculiar institution” with scriptures. He even addressed the hidden fear that haunted even white liberals, what was then called “amalgamation.” The minister asks in the dialogue:

Is it not surprising, that some of high rank, and who profess abhorrence to such connections, have been first in the transgression? But suppose it should be the cause of intermarriages (which I am far from believing) and the number of mulattoes augmented, you should recollect that it is too late to prevent this

evil; the matter is already gone beyond recovery; for it may be proved with mathematical certainty, that if things on in the present course, the future inhabitants of American will be much checkered.80

Here was the rub—there were too many multi-hued Cokers in places like Baltimore, free men who insisted on being treated like citizens and gentlemen. Their presence threatened slavery and white male supremacy in the republic. They belied Jefferson’s famous assertions in “Notes on the State of Virginia” that “the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” The best that fellow slave owners and friends like James Madison and James Monroe could foresee was gradual emancipation followed by removal of the formerly enslaved people to Africa, Canada, Mexico or any other place but the United States. Otherwise, “deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”81

The hypocritical Jefferson was being deliberately obtuse. At Monticello, he was surrounded by talented enslaved people, many of them conspicuously white in appearance, without whom he could never have constructed the domestic inventions that still attract tourists.

Preachers like Coker and scientists like Banneker belied notions of innate inferiority. Despite the example of Haiti and a few aborted slave rebellions in Virginia, remarkably little violence emanated from African Americans; most of it came from white folks and their “deep rooted prejudices.” Slavery had made many men rich up and down the Eastern

80 Daniel Coker, “A Dialogue between a Virginian and an African minister,” in Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860, eds. Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapsansky (New York: Routledge, 2001).

81 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” 1782.

Seaboard; the system supported Jefferson’s expensive tastes and, despite the Declaration of Independence, was embedded in the federal Constitution. Ten of the first fifteen presidents enslaved people, eight while they served as president.

Given such deep-seated denial of Black equality, people like Coker in Baltimore had a hard time. He traveled to Philadelphia in 1816 as pastor of Bethel church to help organize the new African Methodist Episcopal Church led by Richard Allen. One account claims that he was elected the denomination’s first bishop but was denied the next day because he was too light-skinned; the darker ex-slave Allen, who had participated in the founding of the Methodist Church in America (Baltimore, 1784), replaced him.

Later in the same year in the District of Columbia, an elite group of white males (including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Bushrod Washington and Francis Scott Key) established the American Colonization Society (ACS) to sponsor the emigration of free Black people to Africa. In 1817, Robert Goodloe Harper, a dedicated Southerner and Maryland senator, wrote a long letter of support to the society’s secretary, in which he claimed that “a vast majority of the free blacks, as we have seen, are and must be an idle, worthless and thievish race.”82 Even the most respectable, intelligent and wealthy African American could never mingle as an equal with his white counterparts, he claimed. In the United States, “you may manumit the slave, but you cannot make him a white man.”83

By 1820, Rev. Coker, insolvent, previously suspended for a year by his own church—the largest in Baltimore—and discouraged by the racism around him, was ready to leave America. He sailed from New York along with approximately eighty other Black immigrants and three ACS agents on the schooner Elizabeth, bound for West Africa. Some called this initial

82 Robert G. Harper to Elias B. Caldwell, August 20, 1817, quoted in Eric Robert Papenfuse, The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery (American Philosophical Society, 1997), 94.

83 Harper to Caldwell, August 20, 1817, in Papenfuse, The Evils of Necessity.

voyage the Black Mayflower; the passengers even signed a compact that has since disappeared. They would make a new life on the African continent, convert the native tribes to Christianity and build a modern state based on equality, freedom and justice. While en route, the passengers quarreled and complained of white supervision. After they arrived on the island of Sherbro, south of the British colony of Sierra Leone, the three ACS supervisors and about a quarter of the emigrants died of fever. Coker took charge, had his own problems with the settlers and native tribes and eventually went back to Sierra Leone, where he established a mission and raised a prominent family. The Sherbro group expanded within a few years into the colony of Liberia, which became an independent state in 1847.

Coker was an exception. Most of the free Black people in Baltimore had no desire to brave the dangers of Africa. The Methodists continued to establish churches and by 1850, the city probably had more Black denominations (Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Catholics) than any other city in the country. Led by Richard Allen, the African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, church began to sponsor annual conventions, where opposition to ACS colonization efforts became a key topic. Despite its presence in a slave state, Baltimore with its many Quakers and Methodists quietly developed as a Southern center for abolition.

appendix d

SEGREGATION, THE COLOR LINE & THE LAW

Maryland in the seventeenth century was a wild colonial frontier, populated by Native Americans, enslaved African people, indentured servants, ex-convicts, religious fanatics, Catholic refugees, pirates and assorted European “adventurers” who depended on tobacco, a cash crop called the “sotweed,” which James I unsuccessfully tried to ban as an obnoxious drug.

Amid all this social novelty, fornication inevitably produced offspring who didn’t fit anyone’s acceptable categories. Thus the Maryland colony in 1661 produced one of the first North American laws to deter “divers freeborn English women” from intermarrying with “negro slaves.” These were “shameful matches,” the law stated, and deprived the slave owner of his property, the children of such unions, who thereafter would be enslaved.84

The laws obviously didn’t work well since people were increasingly born with many skin shades of brown and Black. Their presence was embarrassing to many white folks and a constant visual reminder that popular racial theories were flawed. By the end of the eighteenth century, it became increasingly obvious that the African was as much an American as

84 “An Act Concerning Negroes and other Slaves,” Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland, January, 1637/8-April 1774 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1883).

the European. Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker saddler, came to Baltimore with his family in 1824 to publish Genius of Universal Emancipation, a newspaper that condemned slavery and advocated gradual emancipation and colonization. Lundy estimated that he traveled more than 25,000 miles, 5,000 on foot, to deliver lectures in nineteen states and persuade slave owners to free their human property. His paper became a weekly during his four-year sojourn in Baltimore and aroused local slave owners to the point where he was assaulted on the street by Austin Woolfolk, a notorious trader who shipped Chesapeake-area enslaved people to the deeper South. During one of Lundy’s trips to Boston, he attracted the attention of William Lloyd Garrison, who would become the country’s most famous white abolitionist. Garrison had come to public notice on July 4, 1829, with a speech in Boston that indicted American politics as “rotten to the core.” The American Constitution sanctioned slavery, he said, and “such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice the annals of six thousand years cannot parallel.… We are all alike guilty. Slavery is strictly a national sin.”85 A month later, Lundy invited him to Baltimore to help edit his newspaper. Although he worked in the city less than a year, Garrison’s Baltimore experiences were pivotal in his developing role as social critic and crusading newspaperman. His Baptist mother, Maria, had worked and prayed in Baltimore for eight years before she died in the arms of the Black woman who cared for her in 1823. Within the city’s free Black community, Garrison found inspiration and proof that Harper and the American Colonization Society (ACS) were wrong. Black citizens like William Watkins, who contributed to the Genius, clearly were equal to their white counterparts and had no desire to leave their native country (although Watkins later moved to Canada). Garrison also attacked slave traders in the city and moved the political establishment to indict him for libel. After a pro forma trial, he was sentenced to the Baltimore jail, where he wrote:

85 William Lloyd Garrison, “Address to the Colonization Society,” July 04, 1829, available from Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/ document/address-to-the-colonization-society/.

A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws. I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned and bound for advocating African rights, and I should deserve to be a slave myself, if I shrink from that duty or danger.86

A philanthropist provided funds to spring Garrison from jail in June, and he returned in 1830 to his native Massachusetts, where he published The Liberator, which endured until 1865 as the nation’s foremost publication for antislavery, women’s rights and full citizenship for African Americans. Inspired by Garrison, Frederick Douglass later established his own newspaper, and the two would engage in unseemly quarrels for decades.

More than a year later, in October 1831, two Frenchmen—Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont—arrived in Baltimore, and they too were profoundly influenced by what they found there. It was the first time either had visited a slave state; the streets were alive with African Americans, enslaved and free, who could not be distinguished from each other. During the week they lingered in the city, the young French aristocrats interviewed Benjamin Latrobe and Charles Carroll and were feted by the best white society, but Beaumont in particular was fascinated by the color line. Even the hint of African American ancestry marked a person who otherwise would be considered “white.” In Philadelphia, they had observed an attractive white woman seated among Black theatergoers in the balcony. To their astonishment, American guides said she was Black while another woman who seemed more African sat with the white patrons—all because of what was known about their forebears.

When they returned to France, Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America while Beaumont wrote a novel, Marie or, Slavery in the United States. The former became a celebrated classic; the later wasn’t even translated

86 Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

into English until 1958. The novel’s chief character, a Frenchman, falls in love with someone passing for white in Baltimore. When her ancestry is revealed, they flee to New York to marry, but the celebration is prevented by a race riot. They escape to the wilderness to live near persecuted Native Americans, but Marie dies, and the angry European lover is brokenhearted and outraged, crying out:

So this is the nation that has been the object of my admiration and fellow feeing! Obsessed with liberty, while human bondage abounds! Discoursing on equality, among three million slaves, forbidding distinctions among men, and proud to be white as of a mark of nobility; with strong and philosophical mind condemning the privilege of birth, and with stupidity maintaining the privilege of color! In the North, proud to work, in the South, glorying in idleness; uniting in itself, in a monstrous alliance, the most incompatible virtues and vices, moral purity and base self-interest, religion and thirst for gold, morality and bankruptcy!

Race of businessmen who consider themselves honest because what they do is legal; prudent and virtuous because it is politic to be so! Their integrity is trickery countenanced by law, usurpation without violence, unscrupulousness without crime! You will not see them armed with murderous daggers; their weapons are guile, fraud and bad faith, with which they enrich themselves. They speak of honor and loyalty as merchants speak of their goods! They offer independence to a whole unhappy race; and on those Negroes whom they free they inflict, after striking off their chains, a persecution more cruel than slavery!87

87 Gustave Auguste de Beaumont, Marie, or Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America, trans. Barbara Chapman (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958).

No wonder he wasn’t translated. The words still sting and contain more truth than most Americans want to admit. Beaumont could see no political solution in sight apart from “a war of extermination.”88 Thirty years before the Civil War, he wrote that “the storm is visibly gathering, one can hear its distant rumblings; but none can say whom the lightning will strike.”89

Because of such fears, augmented by aborted slave rebellions in nearby Virginia (Gabriel in 1800, Chatham Manor in 1805, George Boxley in 1815 and Nat Turner in 1831), white Marylanders continued efforts to remove free Black people from their midst. The Maryland State Colonization Society, established in 1827 as a branch of the ACS and recipient of annual support from the General Assembly, continued to ship small numbers of African Americans to Liberia and the West African coast. When these efforts failed, racist politicians, many of whom were considered enlightened gentlemen, turned to the law to confine and control free African Americans. Even more significantly, a wave of Irish and German immigrants to Baltimore changed the ethnic composition of the city and increased economic oppression of its Black residents. The new arrivals added their own anti-Black biases to the English mix, prompting Douglass to remark in 1883 that “perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens.”90 Fleeing from political and religious oppression in their native countries, the Europeans contributed to tightening restrictions of the free Africans already here.

88 Marie or, Slavery in the United States.

89 Marie or, Slavery in the United States.

90 Frederick Douglass, remarks at the Civil Rights Mass Meeting, October 22, 1883, reprinted in Proceedings of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting held at Lincoln Hall, October 22, 1883: Speeches of Hon. Frederick Douglass and Robert G. Ingersol (Washington, DC: C. P. Farrell, 1883), Frederick Douglass Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/ms000009.mss11879.00440 (hereafter cited as Douglass, Civil Rights Mass Meeting).

The climax came in 1857 with the infamous Dred Scott decision by the US Supreme Court (Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford), which would prove to be a bastion of white supremacy for the next 100 years. Roger B. Taney, chief justice, Maryland slave owner (he would manumit them) and brother-in-law of Francis Scott Key, wrote the decision that claimed no enslaved person or their descendants could ever be considered an equal American citizen. The authors of the Constitution justified slavery, he said, and considered all Black people “as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”91

Taney believed his decision would resolve the controversy over slavery once and for all, but it merely intensified abolitionist outrage and contributed to the Civil War. The 25,000 free Black residents of Baltimore, 13 percent of the population, at the beginning of the war were caught in the middle. Some enlisted in the Union army; most continued to attend the many churches and struggle to get by at the lowest end of the economic scale. Even the successful end of the war would bring no real relief. Slavery had disappeared, but civil rights for Black Americans were fiercely resisted.

Congress passed a Civil Rights Act in 1875, but in 1883, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Morrison Waite labeled it unconstitutional, only the second time the court had done so since its founding. Douglass called the court’s decision “a moral cyclone,” which swept across the country “leaving moral desolation in its track.”92 The same year, the court declared that the federal government had no authority to penalize Ku Klux Klan terror (United States v. Harris) and that state laws banning interracial marriage were constitutional (Pace v. Alabama). The US Supreme Court also upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1889 (Chae Chan Ping v. United States) and decided that state segregation laws were legal as long as public facilities were “separate but equal” in 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson). White

91 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856).

92 Douglass, Civil Rights Mass Meeting.

supremacy was on the march in the United States, buttressed by the country’s supreme law, and Black citizens were on the defensive.

Only one voice on the courts that dealt with these basic issues of civil rights and citizenship, that of Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissented. Although some of his dissents contained racist attitudes, Harlan was the only justice opposed to Plessy and wrote “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind.…

In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law…”93 Harlan expressed the ideal, not the reality.

By 1910, the South, including Baltimore, was probably more rigidly segregated than any time in the country’s history. European colonialism had expanded in the latter part of the nineteenth century, particularly in Africa, so that only Liberia, Ethiopia and a few sultanates remained independent states at the dawn of the twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois had labeled the new century’s main issue as “the problem of the color line,” but few people believed him.

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of eugenics and scientific racism in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and elsewhere. The dark-skinned peoples of the world were the “white man’s burden” and needed to submit to Christianity and Civilization. Thus the United States connived to free the Philippines from Spanish control in 1899 and then denied them independence until 1946. Mark Twain, William James and a few other enlightened voices expressed outrage. Harlan argued that the acquisition of such territories would “engraft on our republican institutions a colonial system entirely foreign to the genius of our Government and abhorrent to the principles that underlie and pervade our Constitution.”94

Even Otto von Bismarck, the “iron chancellor” responsible for the unification of Germany, had tried to keep European rapacity in check, but his absurd

93 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

94 Hawaii v. Mankichi, 190 U.S. 197 (1903).

King Wilhelm II, envious of British, French and other empires, forced him to resign and competed enthusiastically in the race for colonies. Twain wrote in disgust:

The Head of Every State and Sovereignty in Christendom and ninety per cent of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fifty state Legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice, cannot do an unright thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right.… And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one—our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.95

Unfortunately, this brand of international piracy has a long history, dating at least to the fifteenth century, when the first Spaniards and Portuguese came to what they called the New World. Bartolomé de las Casas sounded the warning in 1552 when he wrote:

the Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep… like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard… that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.96

95 Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” North American Review, February 1901, available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/62636/62636-h/62636-h.htm.

96 Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1552, trans. unknown, 2007, available at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20321.

Of course the English and others seized on such descriptions to depict the Spanish as cruel villains while they ignored their own crimes against humanity. Over the centuries, the sufferings of the enslaved and colonized dark-skinned people of the world are beyond count—all justified in the name of universal church and superior state. Very few European or American voices spoke against subjugation of the “primitive people” or acknowledged their common, equal humanity. The French essayist Montaigne wrote in the sixteenth century of Indigenous people in the Americas:

We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them. Their wars are throughout noble and generous, and carry as much excuse and fair pretense, as that human malady is capable of; having with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy of valour. Their disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labour or concern, with all things necessary, in such abundance that they have no need to enlarge their borders. And they are, moreover, happy in this, that they only covet so much as their natural necessities require: all beyond that is superfluous to them: men of the same age call one another generally brothers, those who are younger, children; and the old men are fathers to all. These leave to their heirs in common the full possession of goods, without any manner of division, or other title than what nature bestows upon her creatures, in bringing them into the world.97

97 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals (Des Cannibales),” c. 1580, trans. Ian Johnston, 2017, available at https://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/montaignecannibals.htm.

William Shakespeare approached the same kind of universality, yet even he imagined Caliban, the inhabitant of a remote island that some interpret as being in the Caribbean, as belonging to a demonic “vile race” who longed to violate Prospero’s daughter in The Tempest Othello, Shakespeare’s most popular play among nineteenth-century Americans, outraged and shocked audiences, including members of John Adams’s family, who were staunchly antislavery but harbored racist sentiments. John Quincy Adams fancied himself a drama critic and, after he left the presidency, hosted actor Fanny Kemble at dinner. Desdemona deserved her fate, he told her; it “was a very just judgement upon her for having married a nigger.”98 Abigail Adams shared her son’s aversion to Desdemona.

Like the Supreme Court, the American White House with the exception of Lincoln had never been friendly to people of color during the first hundred years of the nation’s existence. Even the most liberal presidents after the Civil War subscribed to theories of white male supremacy. Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent imperialist, believed in distinct “races” with white people leading the vanguard of civilization. However, he recognized exceptional individuals and had the temerity to invite Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner in 1901, apparently the first time an African American had come there on a social occasion. The resulting furor from white constituents, particularly from the South, quickly curtailed the experiment, and the president retreated to a general indifference to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution.99

98 Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838–1839 (New York: Harper, 1863), available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12422/12422h/12422-h.htm

99 Madison Grant, Roosevelt’s friend and hunting companion, later wrote The Passing of the Great Race (1916), an elaborate description of “Nordic” racial superiority threatened by inferior “Non-Nordic” types unless they were controlled through eugenic programs, immigration restrictions and ghettoes. Roosevelt called it “a capital book,” one that showed “a fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corrosive falsehoods which few men dare assail.” One reads its influence in Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf.

Baltimore at the turn of the twentieth century was the country’s sixth largest city with slightly more than half a million inhabitants, about 16 percent them classified as “Black.” Neither Ethel’s father nor mother had moved there yet, but the city was already developing a recognizable Black section, “Old West Baltimore,” bounded by North Avenue, Franklin Street, Madison Avenue and Fulton Avenue with residents predominantly living on lower incomes. Pennsylvania Avenue ran northwest through the center and gradually became a retail and entertainment mecca. Two blocks to the east, Druid Hill Avenue, with its three-story row houses and churches, was slowly becoming what Du Bois later called “one of the best colored streets in the world.” Black people found refuge in churches, social clubs and theaters as Jim Crow laws hemmed in their opportunities for full participation in city life.

When Woodrow Wilson was selected as a presidential candidate by the Democrats at their Baltimore convention in 1912, Jim Crow ruled the city. Beginning in 1904, elements in the Maryland General Assembly had tried unsuccessfully three times to deny African Americans the vote. In 1910, the city council had passed a strict housing segregation ordinance that other cities copied until it would be declared unconstitutional in 1917. Thereafter block-busting and housing covenants continued white efforts to segregate themselves from any social contact with their Black counterparts. Public accommodations and services were segregated along with theaters, department stores, schools, funeral homes and restaurants. Interracial marriages were illegal. Police violence threatened Black men on street corners, and children risked beatings if they crossed North Avenue.

But despite the barriers, Black and white people continued to mingle. Sex was a common denominator and so was music. The new ragtime seeped from pool halls, brothels and dances. Hymns and spirituals rang from the churches. The blues sang from nightclubs. You may keep me down, the music said, but you can’t deny me. As Langston Hughes wrote:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.100

Wilson, a proper Presbyterian and native of Staunton, Virginia, who won the pivotal 1912 presidential election (beating Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Eugene Victor Debs), proved himself no friend of darker-skinned people. His father, a Presbyterian minister, had enthusiastically supported the Confederacy, and Woodrow believed with most fellow Southerners that federal Reconstruction after the Civil War was a disaster. When a delegation of Black leaders met in his office in 1914 to protest recent segregation in the US Treasury and Post Office departments, he told them “there is a great prejudice against colored people.… It will take one hundred years to eradicate this prejudice, and we must deal with it as practical men. Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen…”101 When Monroe Trotter, editor of a Boston newspaper, objected and accused Wilson of breaking promises, the president, never comfortable with Black people, dismissed the group, saying that Trotter’s “tone with a background of passion” offended him. The next year, the president allowed the White House screening of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s racist film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, adapted from the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, a former Wilson classmate

100 Langston Hughes, “I, Too” in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad, vol. 1, The Poems: 1921–1940 (University of Missouri Press, 2001).

101 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “Opinion,” The Crisis 9, no. 3 (January 1915): 119, available at https://archive.org/details/sim_ crisis_1915-01_9_3.

at Johns Hopkins University. The event confirmed his prejudices, and the filmmakers used it to promote their product.

The great civilization—the one touted by missionaries, colonial governors and racial theorists—collapsed with World War I. About ten million military people died in the Great War, perhaps two-thirds in battles in which men were torn apart by machine guns, cannons, tanks, bombs and mortars. There were no Homeric heroes, warriors who competed individually for glory and honor—just parts of muddy corpses. About a third died from disease off the battlefield. Perhaps as many as seven million civilians also perished. About 130,000 men recruited from twenty-seven European colonies in Africa and Asia were included among the deaths. Innumerable others would be included among the war’s victims if one counted survivors. Wilson, who knew little of foreign affairs when he was elected and nothing about war, had won a second term by promising to keep the United States out of the carnage. Five months later, the United States declared war on Germany, a conflict Wilson claimed would “make the world safe for democracy.” Major General Smedley Butler, a West Pointer with two Congressional Medals of Honor who knew about war, called it a “racket.”

“In the World War, a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict,” he wrote. “At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.”102

The war concluded at the end of 1918 with all parties confused, exhausted and questioning how to avoid another catastrophe. People were starving; monarchies had toppled, and a civil war raged in Russia. The victorious allies, afraid of Bolshevism and sick of war, had to reassemble a shattered, fragmented world from pieces that no longer fit. Wilson knew that the old imperialisms would no longer work, so his Fourteen Points included “a free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all

102 Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket (Round Table Press, Inc., New York, 1935).

colonial claims, based on a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty, the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.”103

Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, was an old, disillusioned man, deeply suspicious of humanity. He hosted Wilson in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference and thought his points were admirable but naive. Talking to the American president was “something like to talking to Jesus Christ,” he said.104 The United Kingdom and France wanted to keep their empires, eliminate the Bolsheviks and punish the Germans. Perhaps the common men, who had suffered in the trenches, looked to Wilson as a savior, but Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, his English counterpart, knew better. Political principles based on Christian morality sounded good, but the world marched to other music.

Lincoln Steffens, the sophisticated American journalist who followed revolutions like sporting events, was among the hundreds of reporters who gathered for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Du Bois was there too, and Ho Chi Minh and a wide assortment of other politicians, businessmen and revolutionaries—idealists and realists of all stripes. In his autobiography, little read or quoted nowadays, Steffens related an unconfirmed French story about Clemenceau and his fellow peacemakers. “You really want a permanent peace to end all wars?” Clemenceau allegedly asked. When they nodded, he outlined the costs:

If we give up all future wars—if we are to prevent war, we must give up our empires, and all hope of empire. You, Mr. Lloyd George, you English will have to come out of India, for example; we French shall have to come out of North Africa, and you Americans, Mr. President, you must get out of the Philippines

103 President Wilson’s Message to Congress, January 8, 1918; Records of the United States Senate; Record Group 46; Records of the United States Senate; National Archives.

104 Quoted in Norman A. Graebner and Edward M. Bennett, The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 40.

and Porto Rico and leave Cuba alone and—Mexico. Oh, we can all go to these and other countries, but as tourists, traders, travelers; we cannot any more govern them or exploit or have the inside track of them. We cannot possess the keys to trade routes and spheres of influence. And, yes, we shall have to tear down our tariff walls and open the whole world to free trade and traffic. Those are some of the costs of permanent peace; there are other sacrifices we, the dominant powers, would have to make.105

According to the story, the other powers were not prepared to pay such a price. “Then,” said Clemenceau, sitting up straight and fisting the table sharply once, “then you don’t mean peace. You mean war. And the time for us French to make war is now, when we have got one of our neighbors down; we shall finish him and get ready for—the next war.”106

A nice story, something out of Twain’s bag and probably the invention of journalists—but nonetheless relevant. Du Bois was right; the victorious powers did not want to abandon white supremacy at home or abroad. It was too profitable.

Wilson knew that the Treaty of Versailles was deeply flawed but trusted the new League of Nations, conceded to him by peace commissioners who didn’t believe in it, to compensate for the treaty’s injustices. However, the League’s covenant couldn’t even include the following statement:

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.107

105 The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, 1931), 780–3.

106 The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 780-3

107 Preliminary Peace Conference, Protocol No. 5, Plenary Session of April 28, 1919. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, Volume III, eds. Joseph V. Fuller and Tyler Dennett (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943), Document 7.

The Japanese lobbied for the statement, but the British demurred while the French laughed. The United States didn’t want to “raise the race issue throughout the world.”108 Wilson chaired the commission in which the statement came to a vote, and even though a majority voted for it, he said it couldn’t pass because of “strong objections.”

To the powers’ embarrassment, the only people who would have supported such a statement were the ones not in Paris: Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Early in the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau approved a secret mission to Moscow, headed by William C. Bullitt, which also included Steffens. They met with Lenin, who agreed on basic points toward peace in Russia. But the British later denied the mission ever occurred; the French didn’t want to talk to Bolsheviks, and Wilson worried that the 200,000 Black American soldiers in Europe would bring Bolshevism back with them. So nothing happened. Bullitt along with other young foreign service idealists resigned with disgust over the Treaty of Versailles. Steffens, who almost never wrote about the color line, married a young woman and enjoyed himself in Europe. Like many intellectuals who felt that liberalism failed with the Great War, Steffens thought that only the Communists had a blueprint for the future. Lenin, he wrote, was a navigator; Wilson only a sailor.109

While the peace commissioners agonized in Paris, the United States experienced a “Red Summer,” the term used by James Weldon Johnson to describe a yearlong series of lynchings, riots and racial conflicts in more than thirty locations throughout the United States. We tend to think of the Roaring Twenties in terms of jazz and dancing flappers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and H. L. Mencken, Louis Armstrong and Eubie Blake, the Ford automobile and Prohibition. The reality seems more somber. Everyone was looking for a way out from the ruins of war. The 1919–20 period in America was extraordinary. Returning Black veterans brought back not Marxist revolution but determination to resist white racism, violence and segregation. Still

108 David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 461–3.

109 The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 780-3.

seduced by the pseudo-scientific racism of people like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, most white Americans, including major media, couldn’t believe that Black unrest stemmed from genuine injustice. “Outside agitators,” probably foreign immigrants who imported their “alien” philosophies, had to be at fault.

So the Red Summer was also accompanied by the First Red Scare; in the latter case, the “red” referred not to blood but to anarchists, socialists, Bolsheviks, unionists and atheists—all lumped together in the popular mind. In 1920, A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general of the United States, traumatized by a bombing of his house the previous year, announced that a left-wing revolution would begin on May 1. It was like a prophet predicting the Second Coming. When the prophecy failed, as it always does, Palmer faded from the scene, but his subordinate, J. Edgar Hoover, would forever equate agitation for civil rights with communism.

Of course there were a few bombers and Communists on the scene, trying to take advantage of social unrest. Always in the distinct minority, they had plenty of company among an assortment of do-gooders, self-improvers, fanatics and genuine seekers for justice. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), established in 1909, doubled its membership in two years. The Communist Party in America was established along with a new Ku Klux Klan. Marcus Garvey led the first convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in New York in 1920. After unions struck US Steel in 1919, the company cynically imported 30,000 to 40,000 scabs, mostly non-union African Americans, to fill the jobs. While President Wilson traveled the country to promote a League of Nations that would prevent war and promote freedom, it seemed to many that his silence on such matters at home made him just another American hypocrite.

In 1920, Baltimore (733,826) was the eighth largest city in the United States with African Americans constituting almost 15 percent of the population, a percentage exceeded only by the nearby District of Columbia (25 percent). If one considered the two urban areas as one metropolitan center, the combined population of 951,990 made it the fourth largest in

the country with a total of 212,288 African Americans (22 percent), by far the largest urban concentration of Black people in America. Harlem became famous in the 1920s as an international mecca for African American culture, but the Baltimore-Washington area had its own vitality. Washington with its government jobs was richer with a deeper middle class; Baltimore had more working people with a patina of professionals. Both cities were segregated and inflicted Jim Crow indignities. The Garveyites in Baltimore had a clubhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue but never numbered much more than 300. The NAACP chapter, however, was growing and within a decade would become the largest in the country. H. L. Mencken, the most famous white Baltimorean in the 1920s, took pride in the fact that his city had never experienced a major race riot.110

Not much has been written in books about Black Baltimore in the 1920s. Most of the attention has been paid to entertainers. Billie Holiday grew up in the demimonde—the city of pimps, prostitutes, sportsmen— and left for New York in 1928–29. Eubie Blake had already left on the vaudeville circuit with his partner Noble Sissle and by 1921 had a hit show Shuffle Along on Broadway. The Royal Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue opened in 1926 and became the jewel of an entertainment strip with equivalents in Harlem, Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago.

In 1922, Carl Murphy became editor of the Baltimore Afro-American, the only place for more than three decades where a reader could get a sense of Black urban life. (The white newspapers, including the venerable Sun Newspapers, reported on Black criminals, but the rest of the population was invisible. Mencken produced caricatures of the “blackamoors,” and

110 During the Red Summer in the District of Columbia, white mobs, led by servicemen, attacked individual blacks on Pennsylvania Avenue within sight of the White House, and Black men armed for self-defense in their neighborhoods. After almost a week of rioting, seven people were killed and hundreds injured. Some city officials claimed that Bolsheviks disguised as soldiers and sailors had started the District’s worst riot, which was never officially investigated. Baltimore had a few minor incidents that summer but nothing to compare with places as diverse as Washington, Chicago, Austin, Knoxville, Cleveland and Omaha.

editorial writers groused about Black immigration from the South, but that was about it.) The old “colored high school” moved to a new facility in 1925 at Calhoun and Baker streets and was named after Douglass, Maryland’s most illustrious African American. Clarence Mitchell Jr. graduated from Douglass High School in 1925, and Thurgood Marshall followed him a year later. Both went to Lincoln University, a Historically Black College and University in Pennsylvania, since Black students were banned from Maryland colleges.

It was a decade of incubation. Baltimore would become a center of organized, legal resistance to Jim Crow laws in the 1930s. A new generation of educated, dedicated people would come into their own to fight the established ideas of “race” and challenge Plessy v. Ferguson. Most Black folks, including Ethel’s parents, applauded from the sidelines as they struggled to make a living.

appendix e

THOUGHTS ON AMERICAN CULTURE

Our return to Germany in 1999–2000 opened questions about the meaning of culture, just what we represented as unofficial ambassadors and what we meant by the word jazz. Prior to the twentieth century, in Baltimore, like the rest of America, “culture” referred to old Europe and its civilization.

The Peabody Institute opened in Baltimore after the Civil War to provide music, art and culture to a public widely perceived in desperate need of cultivation. The city was better known for its sensory pleasures— food, whiskey, horse racing, burlesque theater and pretty women—than what the Europeans called serious art or “aesthetic concerns.” Merchants, smugglers, financial pirates and slave owners weren’t known for their artistic sensibilities. A few Baltimoreans imitated the life of an English gentleman, and the Germans added a cultural veneer, particularly in music, but the swampy port city on the Patapsco cared more for commerce than art. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who would later lecture at the institute, visited Baltimore in 1843 and famously wrote to his wife: “there is no vision in the land.”111

Emerson had hoped that Euro-ethnic Americans would develop native arts, based on the sounds, sights and touch of the North American

111 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Lidian Emerson, Barnum’s Hotel, January 8, 1843, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph Rusk, vol. 3, 1842-1847 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941).

continent. Instead, following George Peabody’s lead, these European immigrants also imported European models based on centuries of the Christian religion, warfare, economic exploitation, royalty and peonage. Johns Hopkins established his university in 1876; the Enoch Pratt Free Library opened in 1886. Henry Walters built an Italianate palazzo in 1905–09 to house his family’s eclectic art and sculpture collection. The Baltimore Museum of Art was founded in 1914, followed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1916. Ironically, just as these institutions got up and running, the worlds on which they were based fell apart and exploded (some would say imploded). World War I, begun with enthusiasm, ended in unspeakable mass murder and cultural death.

After the Great War, an age of collage began, as artists combed through the ruins looking for fragments to recycle. Ezra Pound compared them to Isis gathering the limbs of Osiris.112 Classical orchestras and ensembles still played the great nineteenth-century symphonies, but jazz became the relevant music of the postwar period. The limits of harmony had been reached; dance rhythms and inventive melodies came to the forefront. With its improvisation and free experimentation, jazz reflected the immediacies and insecurities of daily life. The Europeans appreciated this new music first while most Americans couldn’t see it. How could Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington be as important as Beethoven and Brahms? Emerson didn’t see the cultural energies simmering behind Black faces nor as an apostle of high culture could he imagine that European empires and their colonies would die in a suicidal war, leaving untouched America with the pieces.

Strange that the young United States, blinded by racism, ethnic hatreds and the pursuit of wealth—the first big European colony to free itself from empire—would inherit the “Western tradition.” It was like turning over the family household to a young adolescent after the house burned down. Not understanding our own history, we gradually became

112 See Ezra Pound’s first important critical essay, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” serialized in the New Age from November 30, 1911, through February 22, 1912.

defenders of European classes and hegemonies rather than promoters of freedom and democracy, as we liked to tell ourselves. The “new man” that Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur saw in America joined the old men who controlled women, waged wars, subjugated and colonized populations and arrogantly sought to rule the world.113

The Founding Fathers had been concerned about how the new Americans could avoid what George Washington in his Farewell Address of 1796 called “the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice” that would eventually lead to World War I. Thomas Jefferson, optimistic about the advances of science, had hoped that free public education would produce enlightened citizens who would vote for the “natural aristocrats” of virtue and talents to govern them.114 John Adams, much more pessimistic about human nature, wrote to Jefferson in 1813 that “beauty, wealth and birth” trumped genius and virtue every time.115 The only way to prevent corruption was to limit the aristocrats and watch them carefully. The hidden serpent in all their dreams was slavery. Jefferson, a slave owner, feared that freeing enslaved people would precipitate civil war; Adams compared slavery to an incomprehensible dark cloud that terrified him. Despite their aversions to royalty, inherited wealth and family privileges, all of them basically adopted the British class system, including the idea of the educated gentleman who knew how to behave in society and govern the lower orders.

113 Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (writing as J. Hector St. John), “What Is an American?” Letter III of Letters from an American Farmer, written late 1760s–early 1770s, published 1782, available from America in Class, National Humanities Center, https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/independence/text6/text6.htm.

114 Jefferson to Adams, October 28, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959).

115 Adams to Jefferson, November 15, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

Ethel and I once drove with famous vibraphonist Lionel Hampton to Lapwai, Idaho, a small town that seats the tribal government of the Nez Percé Tribe as well as a high school where he had donated musical equipment.116 The students drummed, sang and danced for us in the gymnasium, and then we had a chance to interact with them and their teachers. With Native Americans, I’ve always felt their cultures could help the rest of us be truly free in an American landscape that few understand or appreciate.

The famous Nez Percé Tribe has been misnamed and misunderstood ever since first encountering the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805. They called themselves the Nimiipuu (the “real people”), but European American explorers thought they were Nez Percé, the “pierced nose” people, even though no one was pierced. They treated the Corps of Discovery well when the American explorers, virtually starving, straggled down the Bitterroot Mountains on their epic journey to the Pacific Ocean. The tribe fed them, the first large group of white men any had ever seen, shared information about the water route ahead and gave them the friendly hospitality necessary to recover from the overland journey across the mountains.

In many respects, the Corps embodied the promise and contradiction of the new republic, then only sixteen years old and, until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, confined to states and territories east of the Mississippi River. Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark came from Virginia lower gentry and enslaved people. York, Lewis’s enslaved valet who accompanied the expedition, caused a sensation among the Indigenous people, who had never seen a Black man let alone someone who impressed them with dance and strength. More than one Indigenous man along the route offered York his woman in order to receive some of his power; other expedition members also took advantage of such offers, thus spreading DNA and venereal disease as well as good will.

116 Lionel Hampton had a genuine love for young people that included members of the Nez Percé Tribe, which once lived and roamed in this Washington-Oregon-Idaho region that includes the Columbia, Snake, Salmon and Clearwater rivers.

Oral tradition suggests that Clark himself may have fathered a son by a sister of Nimiipuu Chief Red Grizzly Bear. Two privates, Pierre Cruzatte and François Labiche, were half French and half Omaha; another was born in Germany. The Corps, a US Army military unit, was about one-third Virginian with five born in Pennsylvania, two in New Hampshire, two in Massachusetts, three in Kentucky and one in Maryland. George Drouillard, one of the scout/interpreters, was half French and Shawnee, and then of course there was the family of Toussaint Charbonneau, the oldest member (47) in the expedition, a French Canadian of mixed descent who brought along his teenaged wife, Sacagawea, member of the Shoshone tribe, and their infant son, Jean Baptiste. The informal motto of the young United States—E Pluribus Unum—is much more relevant to our case than the official version of “In God We Trust.”

We tend to think of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as successful due to discipline, determination, skill and luck (some also credit divine intervention.) That’s only partly true. Without the aid of Native Americans, particularly the Mandan and Nimiipuu, the interpretive skills of the mixedrace French expedition members and the presence of Sacagawea, the expedition could not have succeeded. York also gave the Corps a special “medicine” that undoubtedly helped them with the tribes. The expedition also brought the duplicitous vision of Thomas Jefferson for an American West that would turn the United States into a continental world power. Jefferson had instructed Lewis, his private secretary for two years, to talk about trade and peace with the Indigenous people—not land. The land would come after the tribes became indebted and could be persuaded to buy and sell land like “civilized” farmers. Eventually, the Indigenous people could intermarry and become part of an enlightened populace in a cultivated American garden of free men. Implicit in this grand, naive plan was the threat of military force against dissenters and forced removal to reservations for the unrepentant.117 The Mandans and the

117 Jefferson, like most Americans, could not imagine intermarriage or integration into the body politic of Africans; they had to be removed or excluded from civil society.

Nimiipuu, who showed the expedition the most hospitality and support, listened to their message politely. They accepted medals with Jefferson’s likeness, the American flag and gift uniforms, never imagining that the new “Father” and his citizens from the east would eventually displace them on the land. Within thirty-one years after the Lewis and Clark visit, the Mandans would be almost eliminated from the Missouri River Valley by smallpox that had spread from the new steamboats that transformed upriver transportation. Only a few hundred are now part of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara) on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota.

Protestant missionaries Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding came overland with their wives to Nimiipuu country thirty years after Lewis and Clark and labored with limited success to convert the tribal bands on the Columbia River Plateau. They argued against Catholic rivals, thoroughly confusing the Indigenous people, and eventually turned their missions more into support centers for arriving settlers rather than spiritual outposts for the pagans who resisted them. The Whitman and Spalding names are now included among the honored “pioneers” and adorn colleges, buildings and municipalities.

Only one individual Nimiipuu, Chief Joseph, emerged from obscurity, and he is more mythological than real in the history books. In 1877, he and his Wallowa band had the audacity along with others to resist a peremptory US Army demand to relocate to the Christianized reservation at Lapwai. As the bands assembled in an effort to comply, a few uncontrollable young warriors killed some settlers along the White River, and the large group of men, women and children decided to flee from the soldiers they knew would come. Chief Joseph, a peace chief, kept the camp together while the war chiefs conducted defensive actions over a 1,000-mile retreat that attracted nationwide newspaper attention. They crossed the Bitterroots to seek refuge among the Crows, who rejected them, and then decided to head for Canada and join Sitting Bull, who had been there since May. When the relentless soldiers surprised them again, Chief Joseph and most of the others

surrendered, while a small group under Chief Looking Glass escaped across the border only forty miles way.

Like Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph became a “celebrity” Indigenous person. He didn’t join Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show like his Lakota counterpart, but he did travel to Washington and advocate for his band’s return to their native country. Instead, they were treated like prisoners of war and shuttled around until finally assigned to the Colville Reservation in Washington state, not too far from Hanford, now the most radioactive nuclear site in America. He was never allowed to return to the Wallowa valley, where he had buried his father with the promise that he would never sell the land. A memorial marks his father’s gravesite, but the bones are missing. His father’s skull once adorned a dentist’s office in Oregon. Another memorial marks Chief Joseph’s grave near Nespelem on the Colville Reservation. One presumes his bones are there but can’t be sure; Americans have a penchant for raiding and desecrating Indigenous gravesites.

Sitting Bull returned to the United States in 1881 and was killed eight years later on the Standing Rock Reservation, located on the border of North and South Dakota. He was buried in a coffin at Fort Yates, but that grave too was vandalized. In 1953, members of the Mobridge, South Dakota, Chamber of Commerce dug up the remains in the middle of the night and moved them to a site above their town on the Missouri River. A sculpted memorial was placed there, and that too was vandalized over the years. No one is sure that the bones there belonged to Sitting Bull. Perhaps his skull too is hidden away as a treasured souvenir. We shouldn’t be surprised. Little Turtle’s grave in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was looted, and the skull disappeared. King Philip’s skull was mounted on a pike by the Puritans in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1676 and stayed there for twenty years. Cotton Mather, Harvard graduate and Puritan minister, stole the jawbone. When you add such history to the thousands of bones stored in various museums, it appears that we’ve tried over the centuries to eradicate the Native Americans—even to the point of digging them out of the earth.

According to Luther Standing Bear, a Sitting Bull distant relative, such efforts are in vain. Too many bones have turned to dust and become part of the landscape. He wrote in his last book, Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933):

The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its fastnesses not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountaintops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent.

But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers’ bones.

Jacksonian democracy, the Civil War, industrialization and immigration transformed the agrarian United States into a budding empire with corrupt internal politics that would have astonished even Adams. America had joined the parade of nations that its founders had sought to bypass. The new American aristocrats were plutocrats, generals and demagogues; wealth was the measure of success and science directed to the technology that made money and increased political power. Adams wrote to Jefferson:

When I consider the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artiface, the low craft and meaning Cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice, the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling Cruelty of a majority of those (in all Nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence; and on the other hand, the Stupidity with which the more numerous multitude, not only become their Dupes, but even love to be taken in by their Tricks: I feel a Stronger disposition to weep at their destiny, than to laugh at their Folly.118

Coursing in our hybrid, polyglot national blood stream were cultural antibodies, including jazz, to combat the sickness, but our institutions, following the European models, rejected them. Then the models shattered in the Great War. Values like honor, patriotism and heroism became hollow compared to mechanized destruction that left pieces of men on the battlefield—not even intact corpses that could be buried with ceremonies like the Greeks at Troy. The World War I cemeteries with their neat rows of crosses are illusions.

Beneath the ground are the mixed, mangled and decayed body parts of numerous frightened individuals—not solitary heroes who died for the glory of God and country. American liberal arts colleges still adhered to the ideal of the gentleman, but he had died in the war. My grandfather, who had been a fun-loving student who loved to play the piano and sing, returned from France in 1919 and never played again.

The failed peace at Versailles, so filled with American idealism and European cynicism, produced an even more terrible war that destroyed more millions and left survivors with the lingering fear of atomic warfare. Since 1945, human beings have lived as cancerous growths on this fragile, beautiful planet, improvising to survive and creating temporary shelters to shield against impending death. One could argue that this situation has

118 Adams to Jefferson, November 15, 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

always been the case (Schopenhauer famously called the earth a cosmic penal colony). We just know more now; we can’t delude ourselves. What do we know? We know that “civilization” and “culture” have been too narrowly defined, usually to justify the exploitation of non-European people. We know that knowledge and wisdom are temporary, as changeable as the random chaos that seems to characterize the universe. We know that governments, including our own, are suspicious of freedom and seek to control it, supported by critics who define categories and criteria of judgment. We know that experimental science, the best source of our knowledge, can be perverted and misguided. This is terrible knowledge because it goes against our biology and the comforts of traditional religions. We’re tribal creatures, conditioned to band against external “others” and confined to sensory organs that block out most of the world around us. No wonder we seek the stability of institutions that claim to have answers and deny evidence in favor of beliefs that no longer make sense. The world revealed by our monstrous wars and sensitive instruments is brief and awful. Yet we also experience love, laughter and joy beneath the cultural ice onto which we’re born. It’s always there, a warm current that melts, reforms and rearranges the shifting formations above. We sense that some of the best responses to our planetary problems lie somewhere in the bloody American experience, where contrary energies, sexual tensions and free impulses have been gathered from around the planet to share time and space for more than four centuries. Americans are restless and experimental, improvisational and ignorant. As Mencken would say, this is the land of the mediocre and vulgar, home of the second and third raters, a poor place for the Superior Man. That’s our strength. We don’t have the answers; we’re always looking for them.

EARL’S REMARKS TO AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS, 1989

Yesterday, I watched the return of the latest space shuttle mission and thought about the necessity of what I call geographic thinking— how we live and move in space, how we perceive our position in space and how these perceptions influence our actions. In terms of Baltimore history, you could make the case that every time Baltimore citizens had a clear idea of their place on the globe, their relationship to land and sea, they prospered. Every time they lost track, closed their geographic imaginations, they declined.

Right now, we’re still trying to accommodate in our minds the significance of the vision of the earth in space. Returning astronauts describe the sight with almost religious language, how this clear, blue and brown orb in black space seems like a living organism. Our planet is beautiful and fragile, they tell us; it needs to be respected and revered. Their words remind me of those of the first Americans, the people who gave us names like Chesapeake and Potomac.

We know little about the Indian tribes who inhabited this area. But we do know that, like many other tribes, they revered the earth as a mother and considered themselves children of a mysterious cosmos. They considered their environment not as something to be “conquered” but as a nurturing place in which to live in harmony with other living things.

We have gotten used to thinking of ourselves as more advanced than the Indian tribes. But now we’re confronted with an image from space that defies one explanation—a totality bigger than its parts. The vision from space tells us that the age of discovery is far from over. Everything is not mapped. We are faced with the task of mapping and perceiving the whole planet, the dynamics of a turbulent, interacting, complex system arising from many different components.

It’s a task which isn’t limited to the macrocosm—we need a geographic appreciation of ourselves, perceptions of our own interior maps, sensory regions and mental landscapes.

In Baltimore, we’re beginning to deal with this challenge by starting to think globally. Baltimore declined as a boom town in the 1830s because the leading citizens failed to perceive the dynamics of a new international economy. Now we’re in the beginning of a world information economy, with 24-hour global financial exchanges via computer and electronic entertainment that swirls around the planet on digital links. The Pacific Rim countries are getting richer than we are. The European Economic Community begins in 1992. It’s a new game, and Baltimoreans are trying to figure it out.

We recognize that the game defies single answers. We’ll have to take an interdisciplinary approach, to use geographical thinking that combines the wisdom of many areas of knowledge.

One of our approaches is indicated by new interest in metropolitan solutions to problems. The 1990 census will probably list Baltimore and Washington as one standard statistical metropolitan area with almost 5 million people. The city and its surrounding counties, after years of flirtation and halfhearted efforts, seem to be more serious about cooperation.

Another approach is international. Baltimore will host in 1992 the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America. While celebrating this great explorer and geographer, we will try to grasp this new geography of macro and microcosmic space.

At the moment, Baltimore has nine sister cities in ports around the world. We’re starting to share information about common problems. Two

years ago, more than fifty Baltimore officials traveled to Rotterdam, Holland, to talk about this city’s urban renaissance and promotion efforts. Last month, the president of the Charles Center Inner Harbor Management organization traveled to Genoa, Italy, to talk to 300 businessmen about the same things. This past September, I was in Xiamen, China, to help further business and cultural exchanges.

All these efforts represent the city’s continuing work to solve problems by refining the geographic thinking that helped Baltimore grow from a small tobacco town to a thriving city of traders, merchants and manufacturers.

So we’re glad you geographers are here. Our common challenge is to develop interdisciplinary approaches to global problems that confront us now and in the foreseeable twenty-first century. We welcome you to this venerable old American city and look forward to your suggestions about how to keep on course.

Jazz Star, 1984, photo © Sallie Kravetz

appendix g

SONG LYRICS

Ethel began writing songs while a teenager in Gilmor Homes. Since she was still a minor, her mother had to sign the two-year contract offered by Lee Magid, a New York talent scout for Savoy Records. Little Richard and Little Sylvia recorded the tune “Little Boy” written by Ethel and her partner William Everhart.

During a musical life that spanned almost seven decades, she wrote music and lyrics for a handful of songs and others with lyricists. Two of her original songs have been recorded: “Night Club” on RCA and “Hey You” on Denon. Other titles include “(Don’t Be No Fool) Let’s Go Back to School,” “Write Yourself a Rainbow,” “Mr. Roachman Blues,” “Feeling Your Love” and “Love All the Children” as well as “Hocus Focus,” a theme song for a children’s television series. In the decade before she died, Ethel was working on inspirational songs to be included in an album called Ethical Ethel.

What follows are some of her favorite original lyrics.

Color us love, two figures in a color book, Color us love, please take a closer look.

We’re stepping from the page onto the stage of life, And all you’ll see is a man and loving wife.

Color us love, love, love.

Love is blind, it’s wisely said, whether we’re yellow, black, white or red. Love is important and essential; the color of the skin is inconsequential.

Love is deep as the ocean and the tenderness of mutual devotion.

Love is you as my lover and feeling for you has no other.

Color us love, love, love.

Hey You (Words and Music by

)

Hey you, are you doing what you want to do? Hey you, are you doing what you want to do?

Life’s a treasure; time’s a measure So why not to yourself be true?

Hey you, are you proud of the things you do?

I’m asking you, you, you, you, are you proud of the things you do? Search your being; uncover your worth, Believe in you, celebrate rebirth.

Hey you, you can do what you wanna do. You can do what you wanna do.

Truth time’s coming; we’ll all be summoned. Only the truth will see us through.

Soft Power

You’re searching for a song, walking through a symphony You’re waiting for a thrill, passing by an ecstasy.

You’re wishing on a star, living in a galaxy. Reaching for a dream, standing in a fantasy.

Don’t you know, you’ve got the power

You’re trying so hard to find. Look inside yourself, and you will see You had it all the time.

You go out to the sun hoping for a brighter day. You want someone to care but always look the other way.

You can’t understand why you’re never in the game. You stand in your own light, wondering why the dark remains.

Don’t you know you’ve got the power? What you seek is in the heart. All that’s true is inside you.

So there’s no need to tear yourself apart.

Soft power, so gentle, yet so strong.

Soft power, you had it all along.

Soft power, it’s something very real. It’s magic you can feel.

Can you smile in the sun from the good deeds you have done?

Or are you livin’ in the shadows of life?

Can you gaze at the moon knowing your dreams will come true soon, Or are you livin’ in the shadows of life?

Livin’ in the shadows is knowing the truth and lying.

Livin’ in the shadows is feeling the truth, denying.

Livin’ in the shadows is twisting the truth, defying.

Are you livin’ in the shadows of life?

Can you walk in the rain, knowing you’re not causing pain, Or are you livin’ in the shadows of life?

Can you watch the snow fall, feeling love for one and all, Or are you livin’ in the shadows of life?

Livin’ in the shadows is knowing the truth and lying.

Livin’ in the shadows is feeling the truth, denying.

Livin’ in the shadows is twisting the truth, defying.

Are you livin’ in the shadows of life?

Gold (Words and Music by

Here we are in the land of greed. The years have spawned a hungry breed, Here with us, cloaked in rich facade, Lovin’ gold in the name of God.

We’re so many in dire need, Trying to make a life governed by this creed. I say to you, recognize the nod To separate gold from God.

As I watch the young ones bleed, Victims of this bitter seed, I ask of you, with the bloody wad, Why worship gold in the name of God?

We know the way to succeed. Stand up, cry out and take the lead. Be a believer of the squad That takes the “L” out of gold to end with God.

appendix h

PERFORMERS AT ETHEL’S PLACE

1985

January 4–5, 9, 11–12, 16, 18–19, Ethel Ennis 25–26, 30–31, February 1–2

February 5 New Grass Revival

February 7–10, 14–17

February 19

Ethel Ennis

Mike Cross

February 20–24, 27–28, Ahmad Jamal

March 1–3

March 6–9

March 13–17

March 20–24

March 26

March 27–31

April 3–7, 10–14

April 16

April 18–20, 26–28

May 1–5

May 8–12

O’Donel Levy

Janet Lawson

Jimmy Witherspoon

New Grass Revival

Jimmy Witherspoon

Widespread Jazz Orchestra

Tony Trischka and Skyline

Ethel Ennis

Eclipse Nu

Joe Williams

May 14

May 16

May 17–18

May 19

May 21–26

May 28

May 29–31, June 1–2

June 4

June 7–9

June 11

June 14–16

June 16

June 19–23

June 26–29

July 5–7

July 10–14

July 16

July 17–21

July 24–28

August 2–4

August 9–11

August 14–18, 21–25

August 28–September 1, 4, 6–7

September 10

September 11–15

September 17

September 18–22

Peter Rowan

Wall Matthews

Lisa Rich

Jeffrey Chappell

Stéphane Grappelli

Liz Story

Carmen McRae

Julie Hall

Shirley Horn

Schooner Fare

Ronnie Wells

Kern / Mahonske Duo

Ethel Ennis

Mose Allison

Damita Jo

Phil Woods

Hot Rize

Ethel Ennis

Charlie Byrd

Lady Rebecca

Bill Harris

Ethel Ennis and Eclipse Nu

Ethel Ennis

The Pfister Sisters / John Mooney

Astrud Gilberto

Tom Paxton

Paquito D’Rivera

September 25–29, October 2–6

October 6

October 8

October 9–13, 16–20

October 21–22

October 25–26

October 27

October 30

November 1–2

November 3

November 5

November 6–10

November 10

November 12

November 13–17

November 19

November 20–24

November 24

November 26

November 27–December 1

December 3

December 4–8

December 10

December 11–15

December 15

December 16

December 19–21

December 26–28

Ahmad Jamal

James Ostryniec / Fitzgerald

Eric Anderson

McCoy Tyner

Azymuth

Charlie Byrd

Chris Ford

Christine Lavin

Gary Dailey Orchestra

Cris Williamson

The Second City

Freddy Cole

Freddie Hubbard / Rob Fetter

Self-Righteous Brothers

Toots Thielemans

Self-Righteous Brothers

Ethel Ennis

Ann and Isidor Saslav

Self-Righteous Brothers

Ethel Ennis

Self-Righteous Brotherss

George Shearing

Jonathan Edwards

Jackson / Larry Brown Quartet

Baltimore Improv Ensemble

Tony Rice Unit

Cissy Houston

Ethel Ennis

1986

January 3–5

January 7–8

January 9

January 10–12

January 14

January 15–19

January 21

January 22

January 23

January 24

January 25–26

January 28

January 30–February 2

February 4

February 7–9

February 10

February 11

February 12, 14–15

February 16

February 17

February 18

February 19

February 20–22

February 25

February 26

February 27

Ethel Ennis

Kenny Rankin

Fuzzy Kane Trio

Ethel Ennis

Self-Righteous Brothers

Widespread Jazz Orchestra

Bob Gibson

Carolyn Hester / Steve Gillette

David Mallet / Charles Neville

Kate Wolf

Norman Connors

Tony Trischka

Ira Sullivan

John Stewart

Ethel Ennis

Self-Righteous Brothers

Cowboy Jazz

Ethel Ennis

New Grass Revival

Self-Righteous Brothers

Cowboy Jazz

John Scofield

Roland Hanna

Cowboy Jazz

Fuzzy Kane Trio with E. R.

Tony Rice

February 28–March 3

March 4

March 5

March 6–8

March 9–10

March 11

March 12

March 13–16

March 17

March 18

March 19–23

March 24

March 25

March 26–27

March 28–29

April 1

April 2–4

April 5–6

April 8–9

April 10–12

April 14

April 15

April 16–19

April 21

April 22

April 24–27

Wynton Marsalis

Ichelle Cole and Strykers’ Posse

Fuzzy Kane Trio

Clint Holmes

John Sebastian / Steve Boone

Walt Michaels

Fuzzy Kane Trio

Della Reese

Self-Righteous Brothers

Ichelle Cole and Strykers’ Posse

Flora Purim and Airto

Dickey Betts

Ichelle Cole and Strykers’ Posse

Michael Johnson

Meredith d’Ambrosio Duo

Ichelle Cole and Strykers’ Posse

David Grisman

The Second City

The Wallets

Michael Tomlinson

Greg Brown

Taj Mahal

Adam Markowicz / Phineas Newborn Jr.

Teresa Trull

Karen Goldberg

Ethel Ennis

April 29

April 30

May 1–3

May 6–11

May 12

May 13–14

May 15–17

May 18–19

May 20

May 21–22

May 23–25

May 26

May 27

May 28–June 1

June 2

June 3

June 4

June 5–8

June 9

June 10

June 11

June 12–15

June 16

June 17

June 18–19

June 20–21

June 23

Karen Goldberg

Philip Auberg

Henny Youngman

Carmen McRae

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Cris Williamson / Tret Fure

Richie Cole

Leon Redbone

Banjo Jazz with Béla Fleck

Regency

Mad Romance

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Groove Holmes

Monty Alexander

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Cowboy Jazz

Schooner Fare

Ethel Ennis with Monty

Prophecy

Cowboy Jazz

Moon August

Charlie Byrd

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Cowboy Jazz

East Coast Offering

Azymuth

Steve G. / Mary Chapin Carpenter

June 24

June 25–29

June 30

July 1

July 2–6

July 7

July 8

July 9–12

July 13

July 14

July 15

July 16–20

July 21

July 22–27

July 28

July 29

July 30–31

August 1–3

August 5

August 6

August 7

August 8–10

August 12

August 13–14

August 15–16

August 17

August 19

Cowboy Jazz

Ethel Ennis

Aleta Greene

Moon August

Ethel Ennis

Aleta Greene

Moon August

Horace Silver

The Yellowjackets

Aleta Greene

Hot Rize

Art Farmer / Benny Golson

Aleta Greene

Les McCann

Aleta Greene

Karen Goldberg

Air Apparent

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Ichelle Cole and Strykers’ Posse

O’Donel Levy and Keter Betts

Self-Righteous Brothers

Norman Connors

Ichelle Cole and Strykers’ Posse

Smooth and Company

Tim Eyermann

Aleta Greene

Ichelle Cole and Strykers’ Posse

August 20

August 21

August 22

August 23

August 24

August 26

August 27–30

August 31

September 2

September 3

September 4–5

September 6

September 7

September 9

September 10–13

September 14

September 15

September 16

September 17

September 18–21

September 22

September 23–24

September 25–28

September 29

September 30

October 1

October 2–5

Dick Wellstood

James Williams

Barry Harris / Stef Scagiari

Walter Davis / Stef Scagiari

Hilton Ruiz / Aleta Greene

First Impressions

Ethel Ennis

Aleta Greene

Karen Goldberg

Ray Disney

C’est What?!

Mary Chapin Carpenter / Pete Kennedy

Lady Rebecca

Karen Goldberg

Moon August

Aleta Greene

Riders in the Sky

Rhythm and BLU

Mary Blankemeier

Kevin Eubanks

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Nathen Page

Dizzy Gillespie

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

First Impressions

Billy Kemp and Paradise Rockers

Flora Purim and Airto

October 6

October 7

October 8

October 9

October 10–11

October 12

October 13

October 14

October 15–18

October 19

October 20

October 21

October 22

October 23–24

October 25

October 26

October 27

October 28

October 29

October 30

October 31–November 2

November 3

November 4–5

November 6–8

November 9

November 10

November 11

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Lady Rebecca

Taj Mahal

Mambo Combo

Meredith D’Ambrosio

Aleta Greene

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Lady Rebecca

Great Guitars

Aleta Greene

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Lady Rebecca

Sue Fink

Tim Eyermann

Rhumba Club

Aleta Greene

Holly Near

Lady Rebecca

Moon August

Maria Muldaur

Richard “Groove” Holmes

Koko Taylor

Cris Williamson and Tret Fure

Mad Romance

Aleta Greene

Mambo Combo

Scott Cossu

November 12–16

November 17–18

November 19

November 20

November 21–23

November 26–30

December 1–2

December 3

December 4

December 5–7

December 8

December 9

December 10

December 11

December 12–13

December 15

December 16–17

December 19–21

December 22

December 26–28

1987

January 2–5

January 6

January 7

January 8

January 9–11

Joe Williams

Bond and Goddard

Moon August

Banish Misfortune

Jim Brock and Montuno Orch

Ethel Ennis and Tim Eyermann

C’est What?!

Power Play

Cabo Frio

Ethel Ennis

Aleta Greene

Art Monroe

Mary Blankemeier

Melissa Berman

Tim Eyermann and E. C. Jazz

Aleta Greene

Moon August

Pete Barbutti

Aleta Greene

Ethel Ennis

Wynton Marsalis

Paradise

Deanna Bogart

Karen G.

Lisa Rich

January 12

January 13

January 14

January 15–18

January 19

January 20

January 21

January 23–25

January 26

January 27

January 28–29

January 30–31

February 1

February 4–8

February 9

February 11–15

February 16

February 17

February 18

February 19–22

February 23–24

February 25–28, March 1

March 3

March 4

March 5–7

March 8

March 11

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Paradise

Cheryl Wheeler

Toots Thielemans

Billy Kemp

Paradise

Mambo Combo

Tim Eyermann

Steve Young

Paradise

Kenny Rankin

Stef Scaggiari

Aleta Greene

Ethel Ennis

Mambo Combo

Ethel Ennis

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Tony Trishka

Rhumba Club

Freddie Hubbard

Aleta Greene

Mose Allison

Mambo Combo

Doc Watson

Gary Bartz

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Mambo Combo + 4 Heads

March 12–15

March 17

March 18–21

March 22

March 24

March 25–28

March 29

March 30

March 31

April 1–2

April 3–4

April 5

April 8–11

April 12

April 14

April 15–16

April 17–19

April 22

April 23–26

April 28

April 29

April 30

May 1

May 2

May 6–10

May 13

May 14–15

Charlie Byrd

St. Patrick’s Day Benefit

Marlena Shaw

Jazz Commodores

Marc Cohen

Jon Hendricks

Tret Fure / Lisa Tremblay

Liz Story

John Scofield

Azymuth

Tim Eyermann

Army Blues

Pat Martino

Towson State University Band

Koko Taylor

Art Monroe

Moon August

Ricky Loza

C’est What?!

Mary D. / J. Edwards

Ricky Loza

Rush Hour

Rhumba Club

Mambo Combo

Dizzy Gillespie

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Leon Redbone

May 16–17

May 20

May 21–23

May 26

May 27

May 28–30

June 3–7

June 10–13

June 14

June 17–20

June 21

June 24–25

June 26

June 27–28

July 1

July 2–5

July 8–12, July 15–19

July 21

July 22–26

July 29–30

July 31

August 1

August 5–6

August 7–8

August 9

August 12–14

August 15

Stef Scaggiari

Spatz

O’Levy with Gary Bartz

Pierre Bensusan

Cabo Frio

Tim Eyermann

Les McCann

Ethel Ennis

Jazz Ambassadors

Horace Silver

Falstaff 5 + 2

John Scofield

Deanna Bogart

Special EFX

Deanna Bogart

Moon August

Ethel Ennis

Cheryl Wheeler

Ethel Ennis

Maria Muldaur

Positive Affect

Reverie

Deanna Bogart

Tim Eyermann

Beverly Cosham

Eddie Harris

All-Star Jam Session

August 16

September 2

September 3

September 4–5

September 6

September 9–11

September 12–13

September 16

September 17–19

September 20

September 22

September 23

September 24–26

September 27

September 30, October 1–3

October 4

October 6

October 7–11

October 13

October 14–15

October 16–18

October 20

October 21–24

October 27

October 28–29

October 30–31

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson

Mary Chapin Carpenter

Doc Watson (and Smith Sisters)

Moon August

Helicon

ECM Double Bill

Eclipse

Taj Mahal

Rebecca Parris

Tim Eyermann

Andy Narrel

Jan Garbarek Group

Ellis Marsalis

Limeliters / Dick Cerri

McCoy Tyner

Ethel Ennis

Tom Chapin / Steve Gillette

Joe Williams

Tret Fure / Lucy B. Tremblay

Ethel Ennis / Gene Bertoncini

Clifford Jordan

The Clovers (canceled)

Flora Purim and Airto

Warrior River Boys (canceled)

Deanna Bogart

Paul Horn

November 2

November 3

November 4–5

November 6

November 7–8

November 10

November 11–14

November 15

November 17–18

November 19–22

November 24

November 25

November 27–29

December 1

December 2–4

December 5–6

December 8

December 9–12

December 13

Claude Bolling

Reid, Silber and Baer

Kenny Rankin

Cris Williamson

Ethel Ennis

Mambo Combo

Astrud Gilberto

Shaw Bros. and Smith Sisters

Mambo Combo

Phil Woods Quintet

Mambo Combo

Mary Chapin Carpenter

Ethel Ennis

Carroll Dashiell

Modern Jazz Quartet

Stef Scaggiari and Aleta Green

Julia Nixon and Co.

Richie Cole and Emily Remler

Tim Eyermann

December 15 Moon August

December 16–19

December 20

December 22

December 23, 25–26

Betty Carter

Karen Goldberg

Moon August

Ethel Ennis

1988

January 2–6

January 7

January 8

January 9–10

January 13–16

January 17

January 20–21

January 22–23

January 27–30

February 3

February 4

February 5–6

February 9

February 10

February 11

February 12

February 13

February 14

February 16

February 17–21

February 23

February 24–25

February 26–27

February 28

Wynton Marsalis

Art Blakey and Jazz Messengers (canceled)

Yo Yo Ma and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra members

Neutron Band

Jimmy Witherspoon

Schooner Fare

Mambo Combo

JHF / Max Roach

Ahmad Jamal

Deanna Bogart

Sheila Ford

C’est What?!

Rhumba Club

Sheila Ford

Neutron Band

Sheila Ford

Scott Cunningham Blues Band

Ethel Ennis

Salsamba

Ethel Ennis

Rhumba Club

Gary Burton

Mary Chapin Carpenter

Karen Goldberg

March 2–5

March 9–13

March 15

March 17–19

March 20

March 23

March 24

March 25–27

Louis Bellson

Charlie Byrd

John Fahey

Pieces of a Dream

Julia and Co. Benefit

Doc Watson

Tony Trischka

Tim Eyermann

March 29 Rhumba Club

March 30

March 31

April 1–2

April 5

April 6

April 7

April 8–9

April 10

Diedre McCalla

Karen Goldberg

Stef Scaggiari and Aleta Green

Mambo Combo

Scott Cunningham Blues Band

Moon August

Ethel Ennis

World Folk Music Association

appendix i

ETHELISMS

• Remember when children were afraid of the first day of school? Well, here are the first days of teachers being afraid…

• One must be silent to listen.

• The more we care less, the more careless we become.

• A smile doesn’t always have an open heart.

• Keep your eyes bright with your dreams in sight.

• As Humans, we share the importance of life as One; as a civilized society, the One is divided.

• Look at hypocrisy dead in the eye until you look hypocrisy dead in the eye until you deaden the eye of hypocrisy being careful not to be caught dead in the eye of hypocrisy

• When being an ash, one must grow to glow again.

• Accessing the excess can lead to a mess of distress.

• Concealing can be revealing.

• The mystery of life is death.

• Why fall to your knees in despair, feelin’ forlorn? When you can fall to your knees in prayer and feel reborn!

• Life is like baseball, trying to cover all bases to get home and be safe. How come today, home ain’t safe?

• Here we are in Y2K. The economy seems to be OK. The lesson to learn for each day: Beware and be careful of DK.

• One can have all when trying not to do all. Just do and it will be done.

• This is that when that is this (Balance). Balance is being aware of everything being nothing and nothing being everything

• Being hoodwinked: Don’t support ‘the hood’ by allowing your ‘neighborhood’ to turn into ‘a hood.’

• When is nowhere now here?

• How do we know SANTA from SATAN? When is FBI, FIB?

• Oneness: Recognizing the sameness. Respecting the difference.

• Once we learn how to be, the better off we will be.

• How much of ‘it’ can you take before you feel the ‘hit’ of ‘shit’?

appendix j

LETTER TO AN UNBORN CHILD

When Ethel was in her late 40s, early 50s, she experienced a late pregnancy, just prior to menopause, an event that doctors said potentially endangered her health. We looked at each other and asked, “What do you want to do?” For me, the answer was simple. If there was any question of risk to Ethel, then we had to pass on this sudden opportunity to have a child. Hence, the following letter:

Your mother and I were married more than fifty-one years but never considered children as the primary purpose of our union. We loved each other and wanted to be together in a socially practical way. Ethel had serious doubts about bringing a child into this world. I never saw children as slivers of eternity designed to carry on a family name. We would have been good parents, I think, but we were too busy with each other to allow room for another. In this sense, we were selfish and self-absorbed.

We also deprived ourselves of the joys of nurturing a new life, watching you grow into a loving adult with gifts for the rest of us. I share Macbeth’s lament that we strut on a stage in a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, but amid the idiocy I know that life has rewards worth waiting for. You were one we missed.

The closest you came to a physical existence occurred in our 40s, when Ethel’s doctor warned her that a pregnancy jeopardized her health. So it was an easy decision to extract you from her womb and allow your budding life to die. Was it painful? I hope not. There’s enough pain in the world.

Thus another potential light in the world was extinguished like so many other of nature’s experiments. I won’t apologize or offer condolences—just mild regret we didn’t see your face emerge into being.

So, dear child, rest in the dark along with all our hopes, fears and dreams. Or perhaps you’re in an unseen realm of light, waiting for another day.

CHRONOLOGY

1932

Ethel Ennis is born on the third floor of the row house at 525 N. Calhoun St., Baltimore, Maryland, on November 28. She is named after Ethel Wise, the house’s owner and an English teacher at Frederick Douglass High School, and Llewellyn Wilson, head of the music department.

1936

Ennis family moves to 1208 Riggs Ave.

1940

Earl Arnett is born in Ball Hospital in Muncie, Indiana, on July 19.

1942

Ennis family moves to 1609 Balmor Ct. in the new Gilmor Homes.

1946

Arnett family moves from Muncie to Washington, DC.

1947

Ethel joins Riley’s Octet as piano player, her first professional job.

1948

Arnett family moves to Pacific Grove, California, while Earl’s father studies Greek at the Army Language School.

1950

Ethel wins local talent contest singing at the piano and competes in Paul Whiteman’s talent show in Philadelphia. Graduates from Douglass HS.

Arnett family moves to Austria, where Earl and his brother are tutored and later attend the Linz Dependents School.

1951–53

Ethel continues to perform and graduates from the Cortez Peters Business School, winning a prize in shorthand.

Arnett family sails back to the United States from Italy in 1953 and begins a four-year residency in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where Earl’s mother had been born and his father had attended college.

1955

Ethel goes to New York with her mother and manager to record Lullabbies for Losers on the Jubilee label, her first national record album.

1957

Ethel marries Jacques Leeds, a Baltimore attorney, and moves to an apartment on Druid Hill Avenue. Records two albums for Capitol Records in 1957 and 1958.

Arnett family moves to Tokyo, Japan.

1958

Earl graduates from Tokyo American High School–Narimasu and returns to the United States to matriculate at Wabash College in Crawfordsville.

Ethel tours Northern Europe as singer with Benny Goodman prior to concerts at the Brussels World’s Fair. She and Jacques are featured in a photo spread in Ebony magazine. She shares the bill with a famed Miles Davis Quintet at the Village Vanguard in New York and makes her first appearance at the Apollo Theater.

1962

Earl graduates from Wabash and enlists in the US Army as an Army intelligence agent, following in his father’s footsteps.

1963

Ray Fox briefly becomes Ethel’s manager and persuades RCA to sign her as an artist on the condition that she have more experienced management. She moves into her house on Leighton Avenue.

Earl is assigned to a small field office in San Pedro and conducts personnel security investigations in southern Los Angeles. Friends Gwinn and Pat Vivian introduce him to the Southwest.

1964

Gerry Purcell, who made country artist Eddy Arnold a successful pop singer, becomes Ethel’s New York manager and signs her to the William Morris Agency. She records two albums, appears on the Today and Tonight shows, does a Bell Telephone Hour and sings at clubs in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and Bermuda.

1965

Ethel records two more albums for RCA, makes an appearance with Duke Ellington on The Bell Telephone Hour, appears on The Tonight Show five times as well as other national television venues, sings on the Arthur Godfrey Time radio show and sings at the Red Onion in Aspen for the first time. She divorces Jacques.

Earl is transferred to Mainz, Germany, where he concludes his Army stint and begins life as a civilian expatriate. He returns to Gmunden, Austria, scene of his childhood and early adolescence and becomes engaged to a German secretary in Munich.

1966

Earl returns to the United States and obtains a job as reporter for The Baltimore Sun. Ethel performs “on the road” nine months a year and becomes increasingly dissatisfied and disillusioned with show business.

1967

Earl is offered a writer’s job at the Sun and interviews Ethel.

Earl and Ethel have one date in March, spend three weeks together in

May in Los Angeles and marry on August 29 in Aspen. They hire a New York lawyer to end her contract with Gerry Purcell.

1968–69

Earl settles into his work as a feature writer for the newspaper.

Ethel reduces travel, continues to appear on Godfrey’s radio show in New York and The Mike Douglas Show in Philadelphia and continues to perform with jobs in the Northwest from John Powell, based in Spokane, Washington.

1970

Ethel gives a free downtown concert with the US Army Studio Band at the first Baltimore City Fair and also sings in Vancouver, Canada, and Basel and Zurich in Switzerland.

Earl writes a series of stories on city neighborhoods.

1971

Ethel appears more on Godfrey’s show as well as Mike Douglas and Tonight shows. She turns down several appearances on the latter, saying she has nothing to promote, and meets Gladys Shelley, veteran songwriter in New York.

1972

Godfrey’s show goes off the air, and The Tonight Show moves to Los Angeles.

Vice President Spiro Agnew, a former Maryland governor and Ethel fan, invites her to perform at a dinner for the nation’s governors with comedian Danny Thomas, hosted by Frank Sinatra. She also appears with a big band at a fundraiser for Agnew at the Lyric Theater and sings the National Anthem at the Republican National Convention in Miami.

Earl continues his newspaper work, which now includes reviewing popular entertainment and musical events.

Earl and Ethel work together to produce an album for Gladys Shelley, featuring Baltimore-area musicians and facilities.

1973

Ethel sings the National Anthem a cappella at President Richard Nixon’s second inauguration, achieving new national notoriety. Earl and Ethel attend a state dinner at the White House for King Hussein of Jordan and get a personal tour of the living quarters by the Nixons. Later, both Agnew and Nixon resign, and Ethel jokes that she sang them out of the White House.

Ethel appears on numerous national TV shows. The Gladys Shelley album Ten Sides of Ethel Ennis, is picked up by BASF for national distribution. She sings for a month at the Plaza Hotel in New York and begins a long association with the King of France Tavern at the Maryland Inn in Annapolis. She receives honorary Doctor of Fine Arts with Grace Hartigan at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

Earl writes a series on interracial marriages.

1974

Ethel performs twice with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and performs fourteen weekends at the Maryland Inn in addition to assorted concerts. She begins performances as “Ethel Earphone,” a big rabbit, on children’s show Book, Look & Listen produced by Maryland Public Television (MPT).

Earl writes a series of stories on Maryland towns.

1975

Earl begins work on Critic’s Place, a weekly review of the arts produced by MPT, where he will appear periodically for the next seven years.

Ethel performs at the Maryland Inn and other local venues as well as Seattle, Spokane and Walla Walla, Washington. She records a bicentennial album in New York that is never released.

1976

Ethel finishes Book, Look & Listen, performs with the Spokane Symphony and at the Maryland Inn and Playboy Club in Baltimore. She records with Gerry Alters in New York and sings for IBM at the Greenbrier in West Virginia.

Earl continues work at the newspaper and MPT and writes a monthly column for Maryland magazine.

Ethel is finally welcomed into the Arnett family home in Tucson.

1977

Ethel commutes regularly to Los Angeles, once with Earl, for a music project with Billy Preston and Jack Ackermann that never materializes. She performs locally and at the Maryland Inn and in Spokane.

Her grandmother, the key family figure in her life, dies in New Jersey.

1978

Ethel performs in the musical By Strouse at the Bolton Hill Dinner Theater and at the Maryland Inn as Earl becomes more involved in her musical life.

1979

Ethel and Earl establish recording studio in their basement, and Earl makes trips to New York to talk to agents and potential managers. They produce a live album from the Maryland Inn and establish ENE Productions.

Earl and John Goodspeed from Critic’s Place host a pilot book review program, but MPT is unable to sell it to PBS. He begins teaching Writing About the Arts in America and also Aesthetics at the Peabody Conservatory for the next five years.

1980

Earl resigns from The Baltimore Sun after 14 years.

The live recording entitled simply Ethel is released independently. Ethel continues local concerts; Earl travels to New York, Washington, DC and Atlanta to attend music industry conventions and talk to professionals. ENE invites friends and associates in Baltimore to participate. The idea of “Ethel’s Place” is first considered.

1981

Ethel and her group, performing at Charlie’s Georgetown, are invited to the White House to perform for President Jimmy Carter and guests. She

continues to work at the Maryland Inn and give local concerts as well as sing at public events. Mayor Donald Schaefer calls her “my singing partner.”

Earl begins working with the Baltimore Theater Project to develop Ethel’s Place at the old Heptasoph Hall on the corner of Cathedral and Preston streets. He goes by himself to Los Angeles for the Black Music Association convention and meets with Peter Lassally.

1982

Ethel performs at the first Artscape, an event that both she and Earl consulted on. Earl and Ethel go to New York to talk to Ethel Gabriel about reissue of her RCA recordings.

Plans continue with the Theater Project and its board for Ethel’s Place.

Earl leaves Critic’s Place.

1983–84

Development of Ethel’s Place becomes more complicated, moving away from the Theater Project. Bill Struever puts together a complex public and private financial package with Earl and Ethel as his general partners in the real estate and owners of the business. Ground is broken, and Ethel’s Place opens on New Year’s Eve.

Sallie Kravetz writes a pictorial biography entitled Ethel Ennis: The Reluctant Jazz Star, published in 1984 with Hughes Enterprises.

1985

Earl and Ethel become intensely involved in the operation of Ethel’s Place, which undergoes several changes in management during its first year while providing music, food and beverage seven days a week. It quickly becomes internationally known among musicians but doesn’t produce enough volume to sustain operating expenses. After a year of operation, they work with MPT to produce a New Year’s Eve telecast on PBS that reaches 200 stations around the country.

Earl and Ethel make first trip to Rotterdam, a Baltimore sister city, and begin roles as Baltimore cultural ambassadors.

1986

Still a losing business proposition, Ethel’s Place continues to present internationally known musicians. Earl tries various combinations of personnel and makeshift financing schemes to keep the venture afloat.

Ethel and Earl return to Rotterdam with a large Baltimore delegation, and she sings at city hall. Ethel’s Place hosts a dinner for the mayor of Rotterdam.

1987

Ethel’s Place continues to struggle but shows growth potential as customers come not only from the Baltimore-Washington region but as far away as New York and North Carolina.

MPT produces a bigger New Year’s Eve show with Ethel’s Place and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra across the street; the live three-hour show is broadcast on 300 PBS stations.

Earl travels to London on an exploratory trip.

1988

Ethel’s Place closes on April 10.

Ethel performs at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho, for the first time, the beginning of a fifteen-year off and on association. Earl begins teaching part time again at Peabody.

Earl and Ethel travel to Xiamen, China, to represent Baltimore at an international arts festival with pianist Charles Covington and bassist Drew Gress.

1989

Ethel and Earl return to Rotterdam for a jazz festival and work to repair their tattered financial situation, including back taxes from Ethel’s Place.

1990

Ethel continues to work locally in Annapolis and travels with Earl to Seattle, Spokane, Boston and Jacksonville to sing.

The couple spends a week in Oslo, Norway, where they meet and talk

with fellow Baltimorean Anne Wiggins Brown. Earl works as a consultant with Baltimore’s Sister City Program to create an International Mayors Roundtable.

1991–93

Earl becomes a full-time faculty member at Peabody, teaching liberal arts and acting as director of the school’s music criticism program, founded by Elliott Galkin. He begins teaching Arts & Ideas part time at the University of Baltimore and starts research with Bob Brugger for Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999.

Ethel begins a twenty-seven-year association with the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland, where she gives an annual concert. She also begins performing at the Kennedy Center with the Great American Music Ensemble, conducted by Doug Richards. In the summer of 1993, she records a new, self-titled album for her longtime drummer and independent producer Paul Hildner.

1994

Earl leaves Peabody and ends his association with the University of Baltimore.

He and Ethel travel on a month-long 6,000-mile odyssey across the country to promote the Hildner CD at Borders bookstores and radio stations.

1995

Ethel performs three times at the Kennedy Center with the Great American Music Ensemble and sings for a month at Michael’s Pub in New York. She and Earl return to Rotterdam for the Heineken Jazz Festival.

1996

Ethel reunites with pianist Billy Taylor who accompanies her at a significant appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in the mid-’60s. They perform together at his alma mater at the University of Massachusetts and at the

Kennedy Center.

Earl and Ethel travel to Turkey, where she sings in Ankara and they tour the country for a month with Earl’s brother, David, and his wife, Vivi.

1997

Earl and Ethel return to Turkey for a month of touring and singing appearances.

1998

Ethel continues to sing locally and at festivals in Richmond and Newport News, Virginia, and the University of Idaho. She records and releases an album for Denon Records in New York. She performs with Billy Taylor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Earl makes a weeklong solo trip to Indiana, following the Wabash River. The two return to Aspen for a wedding and participate with Keter Betts on a Caribbean jazz cruise on the USS Norway.

Earl begins editing the monthly newsletter of the Greater Mondawmin Coordinating Council (GMCC), launching more than ten years of community work.

1999

Ethel and Earl return to Germany, where she gives a free outdoor concert for the citizens of Bonn before the US Embassy moves to Berlin. The two visit Gmunden, Austria, where he and his brother spent part of their boyhood.

Johns Hopkins University Press publishes Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State. Earl self-publishes Lovely Lady and promotes it in conjunction with the guidebook.

Ethel records with friend and bassist Keter Betts in Silver Spring, Maryland.

2000

Ethel and Earl bring a trio with Keter Betts and pianist Bill Charlap to Berlin for a concert at the historic Tränenpalast. Ethel participates in a

fundraising gala for the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, hosted by the governor of Idaho at the Hagadone estate in Coeur d’Alene.

Earl is elected president of the GMCC.

2001–02

Ethel performs twice with Keter Betts in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and appears several times at East Carolina University under the auspices of friend and bassist Carroll Dashiell. With these exceptions, two big-band concerts in Jacksonville, Florida, and at the University of Virginia and a weeklong stint with the Godfrey Radio Show in Miami, Ethel never appeared in the Deep South while we were married (she sang once at Al Hirt’s club in New Orleans in the mid-’60s with Ellis Marsalis and didn’t like it—he was OK, but the South wasn’t). Ethel and Earl spend several weeks in Saluzzo, Italy, with pianist Stef Scaggiari for a festival sponsored by St. Mary’s College. She concludes the period by singing with Billy Taylor at the Kennedy Center.

Earl resigns from the GMCC.

2003-05

Ethel continues to perform locally and at the Hampton Jazz Fest.

Earl works as a consultant for Reveal, a nonprofit entity dedicated to a clean Baltimore, and visits Indianapolis and Chicago to inspect their efforts. Develops a newsletter and begins three-year period of teaching adult jazz history courses at the Renaissance Institute at the Notre Dame of Maryland University.

2006

Ethel does three concerts of Vernon Duke songs with Bill Charlap at Lincoln Center in New York.

Earl works successfully as a consultant and lobbyist with the Citizens Planning and Housing Association to reform Baltimore’s eviction laws and practices. He is diagnosed with prostate cancer. Ethel is interviewed as part of the National Visionary Arts Project.

2007

Earl has successful prostate surgery and takes Ethel for the first time to Crawfordsville and the forty-fifth reunion of his Wabash College class. They then take a cross-country road trip to Tucson, Arizona, and back to Baltimore.

Ethel performs with Billy Taylor at the 92nd Street Y in New York and at the Silver Spring Jazz Festival.

Earl teaches the Jazz and the Visual Arts graduate seminar at MICA.

2008–09

Ethel continues to perform locally and rreceives an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.

Earl works with Richard Holley and the governance board at Ethel’s alma mater, Douglass High School, to improve the school; he and Ethel produce a fundraising concert featuring well-known graduates. Earl ends a two-year term as GMCC president and works as a consultant to improve Gwynns Falls Elementary School.

2010–11

Ethel performs locally, including three concerts at the Baltimore Creative Alliance.

She and Earl make two exploratory trips to the West, including Yellowstone and Taos, New Mexico.

Earl publishes Jesus and the Lamb: A Fifth Gospel on Amazon.

They restore and create a CD from live concerts at the Red Onion in Aspen in 1967.

2012

Ethel sings an occasional concert in the Baltimore area and celebrates her eightieth birthday at An die Musik Live.

Earl resigns for the last time from GMCC.

The two travel to New York, where Ethel participates in a Benny Goodman tribute as part of an annual dinner of the Dutch Treat Club honoring writer Gay Talese.

2013

Ethel is honored at several local events and does two recorded concerts with pianist Cyrus Chestnut at An die Musik Live.

Earl begins research on a memoir about their life together.

2014–16

Ethel continues to give her annual concert at Montpelier—the last on March 10.

Several mini strokes warn of Ethel’s health issues in the future. They continue annual trips to Arizona.

2017

Year of the Strokes: Ethel has three major strokes during the year with hospitalization and rehab for each one.

2018

Ethel suffers her final stroke while visiting Tucson. Earl brings her back to Baltimore for treatment.

2019

Ethel dies at home on Sunday, February 17. A private luncheon for friends and a public concert are held at the Peabody Conservatory on May 24.

Ethel and Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson

Ethel and Dizzy Gillespie

INDEX OF NAMES

A PAGE

Abraham (Hebrew patriarch of the 149, 154 Abrahamic religions)

Abram (a young Turkish rock musician) 151

Abrams Sol 86, 90, 94

Ackerman Jack 112–13, 294

Adams Abigail 236

Adams Edie 36

Adams John 90, 236, 249, 254–55

Adams William “Little Willie” 117

Agne w Judy 88, 95, 202

Agnew Spiro T. 76–78, 82, 87–89, 92, 94–95, 202

al-Amin Jamil Abdullah 75 (See Brown, H. Rap)

Alexander Monty 102, 133, 136, 272

Allen John 134

Allen Richard 224–25

Allen Steve 29

Alonso Andres 172

Alters Gerry 33, 293

Amram David 120

Anderson A.D. 52

Anderson Harry 135

Apperson Robbye x, 196

Armstrong Louis 9, 57, 69, 163, 242, 248

Arnett Clyde, Sr. (father of Earl) ix, 2, 10–12, 16, 20–21, 24, 63–64, 78–79, 149, 177–78, 204, 207–16, 289–90

Arnett David (brother of Earl) 2, 13, 148–50, 154, 178, 204,

Arnett 212–13, 216, 290, 298

Vivi (sister-in-law of Earl)148, 151–53

Arnold Eddy 27, 122, 291

Asbury Francis 221

Astaire Fred 86

Atatürk Mustafa Kemal 149–50

Atkins Cholly 28

Aykent Çanan 151–53

B PAGE

Bacharach Judy 111

Bailey Donald 26

Bailey Fred, Jr. 55

Baker Abie 5

Baker Edward “Sherry” 87

Baker Henry 31

Balanchine George 111

Ball Karen 129

Banker Paul 21, 23

Banneker Benjamin 221, 223

Barbutti Pete 39, 36, 133, 276

Barney (elevator operator at the Sun office) 43

Barto Don 118

Bass Sid 28

Bauer Billy 9

Bearden Romare 107

Behringer Peter 125–26, 128

Belich James 143

Bellson Louie 140–41, 283

Benjamin Joe 164

Bennett Lou 4

Bennett Tony 112

(Anthony Dominick Benedetto)

Benton Brook 29

Benton Charlie 83

Bergman Rober 127

Berman Henry O. 58

Bernice (Jacques’s long-standing girlfriend) 26–27, 29, 167

Bertoncini Gene 102, 134, 280

Betts Keter 99–102, 273, 298–99

Beverley Trazan 126

Biano Ochwiay 192

Bierce Ambrose 64

Blackwell Robert “Bumps” 119–20

Blake Eubie 10, 242, 244

Bogart Deanna 139, 276, 279–80, 282

Bohr Niels 184

Bolger Ray 88

Bolling Claude 134, 136, 138, 281

Bonfá Luiz 99, 101

Boulanger Nadia 159

Breuder Eddie 86

Brodie Jay 129

Brown Alfredine Parham 111

Brown Anne 53–55, 148, 172, 297

Brown H. Rap 75

(See al-Amin, Jamil Abdullah)

Brown Oscar, Jr. 120

Brunyate Roger 161

Bullitt William C. 242

Bunyan John 135, 140

Buono Mike 1

Burnham Bill 92–93

Burns Clarence 83–84

Burns Roy 9

Butler George 122

Butler

Major General Smedley 239

Buttons Red 36

Byrd Charlie 99–103, 123, 131, 133, 268–69, 272, 278, 283

Byrd Ginny 100

Byrd Jerry 110

C

PAGE

Calloway Blanche (sister to Cab) 114

Calloway Cab (brother to Blanche) 53, 172

Calvert Cecil 221

Carpenter Mary Chapin 138, 272, 274, 280–82

Carroll Charles 229

Carroll John 22, 24

Carson Johnny 29, 33

Car ter Jimmy 123, 294

Car ter Nathan 126

Cassavetes John 112–13

Cather Willa 186

Caulfield Clarence “Caully” 22–23

Charbonneau Jean Baptiste 251

Charbonneau Toussaint 251

Charles Ray 5, 89, 113, 120, 126 (Ray Charles Robinson Sr.)

Chattaway Jay 110

Chenggong Zheng 144

Cheslock Elise 165

Cheslock Louis 114, 164–65

Chestnut Cyrus 196–97, 301

Chief Joseph 252–53

Clark William 250–52

Clarke Kenny 5

Clay Henry 224

Clemenceau Georges 240–42

Coker Daniel 221–25

Colburn Gaynell 123, 129

Cole Harry A. 168–69

Coles Sylvester 55

Cooke Sam 120 Cooper Gertrude 56

Copland Marc 176

Covington Charles 118, 123, 132, 143, 147, 296

Cowell Henry 192

Crofoot Chris 135

Cronkite Walter 89

Cruzatte Pierre 251

Curb Mike 91

D PAGE

D’Alesandro Thomas J., III 81, 84

D’Lugoff Burt 135, 139

Dailey Alber t 120

Dailey Gary 124, 139, 269

Darin Grace 169

Davis Miles 4, 12, 15, 18, 56, 58, 290

Day Price 21, 89

de Angulo Jaime 191–93

de Beaumont Gustave 229–30

de Lerma Dominique-René 161

Dell’Orefice Carmen 196

Demleitner 17

Deng Xiaoping 144

Deppenschmidt William Henry “Buddy” 100–02

DeSalvo Al x, 125

de Tocqueville Alexis 128, 229

Djangirov Eldar 158

Dodge Luhan Mabel 184–89

Donegan Dorothy 5

Dorsey Charles “Buck 22–24

Douglas Mike 29, 71, 79, 85, 292

Douglas Tignor 55

Douglass Frederick 45, 106, 222, 229, 231–32, 245

Drouillard George 251

Du Bois W. E. B. 78, 107, 233, 237, 240–41

Duncan Robert 192

Duncan Todd 55

E

PAGE

Eccles Cobber 125

Edson Peter 21

Ellington Duke (Edward Kennedy) 15, 35, 53, 57, 71, 91, 123, 126, 159, 162–64, 248

Ellis Ray 6

Embry Robert C., Jr. 83

Emerson Ralph Waldo 247–48

Enlai Zhou 144

Ennis Andrew (father of Ethel) 2, 41–42, 45–46, 48–49, 54, 63, 237

Ennis

Ennis Ennis

Andrew “Andy” 6, 13, 42, 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, (brother of Ethel) 62–63, 89, 113–14, 163

Arrabell (mother of Ethel) 2, 5–7, 9, 19–20, 42, 45, 47–48, 54–55, 57–58, 63, 114, 163, 197, 237, 261, 291

Elasker (cousin of Ethel) 50

Ennis Joseph 51

Ennis Julia (née Harrod) 51

Erjun Zou 144

Errol Fox Ray 25, 195

Everhart William 58–59, 261

F PAGE

Fabian Christian 158

Fairchild Sherman 79

Fancher Kirk 119

Fanshawe David 120

Farmer James 42

Farrakhan Louis 121

Fast Life with Jimmy Wilson 139, 272–75, 277–78, 280

Faulkner William 42

Fax Elton 107

Fenton Tom 22

Fields Barney 113

Fields Mickey 113

Fitzgerald Ella 9, 26, 35, 57, 102, 153

Fleck Béla 133–34, 272

Flickinger B. Floyd 108

Flickinger Geneva 108–09

Flood Mik 124–25

Flowers Charles 115

Fonda Peter 36

Forrest Helen 8

Fox George “Foxie” 3–6, 8–9, 27, 32, 73, 92

Fox Reba 3–5, 32, 92

Frey Sidney 101

Friedel Samuel 23

Fritz Roger 136

Fulp Bennett 64–65

G PAGE

Gabor Zsa Zsa 88

Galkin Elliott 158–60, 297

Gamble Kenny 119, 124

Garbarek Jan 134, 138, 280

Garner Erroll 30

Garrison Charlotte (aunt of Ethel) 54–55

Garrison Eliza 46–48 (great-grandmother of Ethel)

Garrison Preston “Press” 46–47 (great-grandfather of Ethel)

Garrison Walter “Uncle Son” 47–48 granduncle of Ethel)

Garrison William Lloyd 228–29

Garroway Dave 29

Garvey Marcus 243

Gershwin George 55

Getlein Frank 111

Getz Stan 100–02

Gibson Jac 121

Gilberto Astrud 101, 131, 268, 281

Gilberto João 100

Gillespie Dizzy (John Birks) 15, 56, 133–34, 274, 278, 302

Ginter Alan 151–52

Ginter Valerie 151–52

Godfrey Arthur 29, 32–34, 71, 73, 78–79, 86, 92, 96, 138, 291–92, 299

Goldberg Karen 139, 271–74, 281–83

Goldstein Louis 51–52

Goodman Benny 1, 8, 70, 86, 155, 157, 163, 195–96, 290–300

Goodspeed John 112, 294

Gordon Douglas 115

Gormé Edie 26

Gould Amy 125

Grant Felix 99–100

Grappelli Stéphane 131, 135, 138, 268

Great Guitars 102, 133, 275

Greco Buddy 36

Green Ralgia (cousin of Ethel) 50

Greene Aleta 139, 273–77, 281, 283

Greene 100, 102

Gress Drew 143, 176, 296

Griffin Paul 160

H PAGE

Hagadone Duane 158, 299

Hall Albert 5

Hamilton Jeff 158

Hammerman I. H. “Bud” 95

Hampton Lionel “Hamp” 88, 138, 157–58, 250

Hanna Roland 9, 133, 270

Hard Travelers 102

Harlan John Marshall 233

Harper Robert Goodloe 224, 228

Harrison William Henry 64

Hartman Johnny 30, 102

Heeter Estelle 64

Hefti Neal 6

Hemings James 222

Heston Charlton 88

Hildner Paul x, 175–76, 297

Hill Fred 22

Hillman Sandy 81

Hines Earl “Fatha” 102

Holiday Billie 8–10, 139, 244

Holley Richard 172–73, 300

Homer Leonard 132

Hope Bob 88

Hopkins Johns 248

Hopper Dennis 188–89

Hubbard Freddy 133, 137, 269, 277

Hughes Langston 237

Husketh Lovey E. 55

Hussein I 90, 293

Huxley Aldous 53, 190

Hyde Thomas 99

Hyman Dick 28

I

PAGE

Ichelle Cole and Strykers Posse 139, 271, 273

Isaacs Arnold “Skip” 21

J PAGE

Jack the Rapper (See Gibson, Jack)

Jackson Andrew 224

Jackson “Jinkey” 55

Jackson William Henry 180

Jamal Ahmad 130, 136, 267, 269, 282

James William 233

Javits Jacob 90

Jeffers Robinson 187, 192

Jefferson Thomas 98, 222–34, 249, 251–52, 254–55

Jobim Antônio Carlos “ Tom” 99, 101

Johnson Ellsworth “Bumpy” 117

Johnson Gerald W. 39

Johnson Lyndon B. 16, 21, 74–75

Jones Hank 5, 33, 158

Jones Jo 156

Jones Quincy 120, 124

Jordan Clifford 134, 138–39, 280

Jordan Taft 9

Joseph Daniel C. 105–06

Jung Carl 184, 191, 192

K

PAGE

Kah Kee Tan 147

Kemble Fanny 236

Kempthorne Dirk 158

Kerouac Jack 192

Key Francis Scott 224, 232

Kloess Joe 1, 36

Knight Evelyn 59

Kovacs Ernie 36

Kozlu Can 152

Kravetz Sallie 119, 260, 295

Kusmenoglu Ani 152

Kuster Werner 1

L PAGE

Labiche François 251

Lady Rebecca 139 , 274–75

Lambros Pete 102, 123

Lampley Calvin 111

Landsberg David 110, 124

Lassally Peter 32–34, 90, 124, 295

Lastfogel Abe 27, 90

Latrobe Benjamin 229

Lawrence D. H. 175, 184, 186–89, 192

Lawrence Frieda 186

Lee Peggy 8, 36, 177 (Norma Deloris Egstrom)

Leeds Jacques 6, 290

Lenin Vladimir 242

Levine Richard 21

Levy Henry J. 139

Levy O’Donel “Butch” 118–19, 267, 273, 279

Lewis Jackie (wife of James) 107

Lewis James (sculptor) 107

Lewis Meriwether 250–52

Little Richard 5, 59, 120, 261, 264

(See Penniman, Richard Wayne)

Livingston Al 6

Lloyd George David 240, 242

Long Avon 53

Loos Anita 86

L’Ouverture Toussaint 51

Lubinsky Herman 58

Ludden Allen 36

Luhan Antonio “Tony” 185–86, 188, 190–91

Luhan Candelaria 185

Lundy Benjamin 228

Luther King Martin, Jr. 13, 75, 121, 173

M

PAGE

Madden John 15, 19

Madison James 98, 109, 223, 236, 243

Magid Lee 58–59, 261

Mahoney George P. 76

Major Taggart (soldier at Fort Holabird) 12–13, 17

Mambo Combo 139, 275, 277–78, 281–83

Mann Sy 33

Manning Johnny 55

Mansberger Arthur G. 109

Margaret (niece of Fanni Schmitt) 19

Marion General Francis 46

Markert Wayne 160–61

Markowicz Adam 136, 271

Marsalis Ellis 133, 138–39, 280, 299, 315

Marsalis Wynton 133, 135–36, 163, 271, 276, 282, 315

Marshall Thurgood 172, 245, 315

Martin Bob 179

Martin Renee 181

Matthews Wall 139, 268

McCann Les 133, 137, 273, 279

McCardell Lee 81, 168

McDowell Bob 22

McFarland Gary 29

McGarity Lou 33

McKeldin Theodore 84

McKusick Hal 33

McRae Carmen 26, 30, 131, 137, 268, 272

Medlin Joe 121

Mencken H. L.

39, 52, 78, 114, 164–65, 242, 244, 256

Mendes Sergio 101

Menuhin Yehudi 159

Mikulski Barbara 168

Miller David 120, 123

Miller Henry 175, 192, 242

Mitchell Clarence, Jr. 126, 245

Monro Matt 29

Monroe James 223, 224

Moon August 139, 272–76, 278, 279–81, 283

Moran Thomas 180

Morgan Daniel 108

Morley Felix 108

Mowbray G. Hamilton 115, 120, 315

Mowbray Phyllis 315

Ms. Moses (spiritualist in Baltimore) 163

Mulligan Gerry 131, 139

Murphy Carl 107, 244

Murray Jane 111

N PAGE

Namuth Walt 35, 156

Nazdin Jon 118

Newborn Phineas, Jr. 136, 271

Nicholson Jack 36

Nixon Richard 33, 77–78, 89–92, 96, 145, 157, 202, 293

Nixon Thelma “Pat” 90–91

Nova Guiseppe 155

OPAGE

O’Donnell John 146

Ogerman Clau 28

O’Keeffe Georgia 184, 186

O’Steen Bill 18

O’Steen Hedi 18

Otis Clyde` 28

P PAGE

Paley William S. 33

Palmer A. Mitchell 243

Palmier Remo 33

Palughi Marco “Buddy” 83

Parker Charlie 5, 12, 56, 58

Parker Johnny 33

Parks Rosa 5

Partch Harry 192

Passos John Dos 109

Pat Stan 35

Peabody George 248

Pearson Drew (uncle of PP) 97–98

Pearson Paul (PP) 97–99, 102–03

Pearson Paul Martin 97 (grandfather of PP)

Penniman Richard Wayne 5, 59, 120, 261, 264 (pseud. Little Richard)

Peper Abraham 132

Pétard Gilles 196

Petkere Bernice 177

Polk Matt 125

Pollock James H. 169

Porter Wiley 118

Poulson Montell 3–4

Pound Ezra 192, 248

Powell John 29, 34–35, 37, 73, 78, 112, 292

Powell Seldon 9

Powell Vic 21

Presley Elvis 5, 159

Preston Billy 112–13, 294

Purcell Gerry 26–30, 35–36, 173, 122, 167, 291–92

Pyle Jack 26

Q PAGE

Quackenbush Hope 81–82

Quarles Benjamin A. 106

R PAGE

Randolph Popsie 8

Raymond Alan and Susa 172

Reagan Ronald 118, 128, 170

Red Grizzly Bear 251

Reese Della 30, 59, 133, 271

Reichenbach Bill 100

Rhode Pat 63

Rich Karen 59

Richards Doug 162, 297

Riddle Nelson 88

Riley Abraham 55

Rivera Paquito 131, 137–38, 268

Rizzo Jilly 87

Roberts Doug 110

Robinson Bobby, Jr. 117

Robinson Bobby, Sr. 117

Robinson Lou 111

Robinson Sylvia “Little Sylvia” 59 (née Vanderpool)

Roditi Claudio 158

Roosevelt Theodore 98, 236, 238

Rosenthal Irving 85

Rostropovich Mstislav 159

Rouse Jimmy 125, 170

Runciman Steven 149

Rushing Jimmy 9, 70, 196

S PAGE

Sacagawea 251

Santos Paulo 100

Saslav Ann 114, 139, 269

Saslav Isidor 114, 120, 139, 269

Scaggiari Stef 139, 151–52, 155, 176, 277, 279, 281, 283, 299

Schaefer William Donald 81–84, 88, 127, 143–44, 170–71, 295

Schmitt Fanni 19, 314

Schmoke Kurt L. 83–84, 139, 148, 170–71

Schoeps Martha 24, 31, 43, 81, 114–15

Schuur Diane 135

Scotty (friend from Baltimore) 37

Senofsky Berl 144

Shakespeare William 236

Shaw Arvell 9

Shearing George 130, 136, 269

Shelley Gladys 85, 87–88, 93, 292–93

Silberschlag Jeff 155

Sims Zoot (John Haley Sims) 9

Sinatra Frank 9, 87–89, 95, 164, 203, 292

Sitting Bull 252–54

Skinner Lynn “Doc” 157–58

Small Martha “Honey” 41, 46–48, 50, 54–55, 61–63, (née Garrison) (grandmother of Ethel) 114, 294

Small Samuel “Sam” 46–47 (grandfather of Ethel)

Sonny and Cher 36

Spalding Henry 252

Spicer Jack 182

Standing Bear Luther 254

Steffens Lincoln 240–42

Stein Elaine 111

Stephenson D. C. 65

Sterne Maurice 185

Stewart Slam 156

Stills Stephen 36

Stinson Anne 112

Stokes Sydney N. 110

Struever Bill 125, 128–29, 135, 139, 295

Styer Mike 111

Sullivan Margaret 111

Sullivan Scott 22–23

Swartz Don 110–11, 119

T PAGE

Talese Gay 195–96, 300

Taney Roger B. 232

Tawney Lee 148

Taylor Billy 156–57, 297–300

Taylor Creed 100–02

Taylor LeBaron 124

Thielemans Toots 131, 138–39, 269, 277

Thomas Alain 196

Thomas Danny 87, 203, 292

Thompson Chester 118

Thoms Don 111

Till Emmett 5

Tillis Frederick C. 156

Tilton Martha 8, 59

Tim Eyermann and the 139, 273, 275–81, 283

East Coast Offering

Tipper Ken 129–30

Topper Henry 144

Tormé Melvin “Mel” 35, 135

Traxler Gene 33

Trotter Monroe 238

Twain Mark 233–34, 241

Tyner McCoy 131, 135, 137, 269, 280

U PAGE

Unsinger Evelyn 19–20

V PAGE

Vaughan Sarah 26, 30, 37

Vivian Gwinn 16, 21, 67, 179–80, 183, 291

Vivian Pat 21, 67, 179–80, 183, 291

Vogelhut Reid 134

von Bismarck Otto 233

W PAGE

Wagner Philip 115, 120

Waite Morrison 232

Wallace George 77–78

Wallace Lew 184

Walters Henry 248

Warburton Paul 1

Ward Helen 8

Ware Polly 7

Warner Edith 184

Warwick Dionne 30, 121

Washington Booker T. 57, 236

Washington Bushrod 224

Washington George 98, 146, 249

Waters Frank 183, 186, 188

Watkins William 228

Watson Arthel Lane “Doc” 133, 138, 277, 280, 283, 302

Weber Eberhard 134, 138

Webster Daniel 224

Weisgal Fred 26

Weissinger Sallie 4, 212

Welcome Verda 7–8, 169

Wells Jimmy 26

White Betty 36

Whitman Marcus 252

Wiggins Brown Anne 54–55, 148, 297

Wilhelm II 234

Williams Joe 131, 134, 276, 280

Williams Martin 160, 267

Williams William Carlos 192

Williamson Cris 131, 138, 269, 272, 275, 281

Wills Garry 109, 112

Wilson Earl 92

Wilson Llewellyn 53, 56, 289

Wilson Teddy 102, 157

Wilson Woodrow 237, 238–39, 240–43

Winchell Walter 86

Wise Ethel 53–54, 289

Wiswell Andy 6, 26

Witherspoon Jimmy 130, 267, 282

Wolpe Dave 88

Wong Henry 196–97

Woods Phil 131, 268, 281

Wright Anne St. Clair 98

Wright Isaac 221

Wyatt Bob 118

Y

PAGE

York (enslaved valet to Meriwether Lewis) 250–51

Young Brigham 182

Youngman Henny 133, 272

Z

PAGE

Zappa Frank 26

Zedong Mao 144

Zinman David 136

Sharing memories at Ethel’s memorial celebration, May 24, 2019

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Earl Arnett has been a dedicated storyteller, arts supporter, businessman, teacher, and community member in Baltimore, Maryland for over fifty years, but the role he has loved most is that of husband to the late Ethel Ennis, Baltimore’s First Lady of Jazz.

Romance A

“Earl Arnett’s book about his wife Ethel Ennis is much more than a wonderful portrait of the couple’s devotion to each other. It provides insights into the devotion they both had for the city of Baltimore, the struggles they faced as an inter-racial couple, and the challenges Ethel faced balancing her commitment to the music she loved and the demands of the music industry.”

FRED LAZARUS, president emeritus of the Maryland Institute College of Art

“A Jazz Romance is a powerful story of how a couple overcame this country’s racial divide to inspire us with their love of music and their love of each other. Read it with joy in your heart.”

KURT SCHMOKE, president of the University of Baltimore and former Mayor of Baltimore

“Earl Arnett hits the high notes and blues with his storied life with jazz singer Ethel Ennis—a great multicultural history as well as a compelling personal story about Baltimore and beyond.”

BARBARA MIKULSKI, former U.S. Senator from Maryland

“This gem of a memoir offers precious, personal insights into all of its subjects: Ethel, Earl, Baltimore, music, and race in America over the course of several profoundly significant decades in our collective history. Researchers interested in learning more can consult the Ethel Ennis and Earl Arnett Collection at the Sheridan Libraries, thanks to the foresight and generosity of its namesake creators.”

GABRIELLE DEAN, curator of special collections at Johns Hopkins University

“A Jazz Romance is the beautiful story of Earl Arnett and Ethel Ennis as they navigate a society and systems that challenged their relationship, their work as creatives, and their efforts as business owners. This book includes a treasure trove of reflections on the potential and pitfalls of the music business, the historical entertainment and culture industry in the city of Baltimore, and the value of community. With good humor, wisdom, and a few raw insights, Earl shares the evolution of his and Ethel’s love, hope, setbacks, and journey to create lives of happiness and personal success.”

RAYNETTA WIGGINS-JACKSON, curatorial fellow for Africana archives at Johns Hopkins University