HungryBlues

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My Father And The Peace Movement (Thumbnail Version)

Sixty years ago today the US dropped the nuclear bomb called Little Boy over the central part of Hiroshima, killing at least 66,000 people.

In honor of this year's Hiroshima Day, I am posting this excerpt from my father's Political Autobiography.

By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms on the left had taken a turn toward suicidal meanness. Then real disaster hit in the form of the Korean War. I got drafted, got married and had all my previous assumptions challenged. War was indeed hell. I was constantly one step away from a court martial. A full Colonel once told me that in his twenty five years in the Army he had never seen a man who was less of a soldier than I was. I thanked him and told him that I was only a civilian with a uniform on. I found myself in Japan after several small wounds and a massive case of dysentery that was written up in the Army Medical Journal. It was in Hiroshima that I had a profound religious experience. In the Hiroshima Museum there is a wall, all that is left of a building destroyed by the bomb. On that wall is etched the shadow of human beings which is all that is left of them. It was there that I came to understand that the distinction between just and unjust wars was blurred and that human existence was at great risk and that only a spiritual revolution would be sufficient if humanity was going to survive.

When I came home neither I or the left was the same. It was the time of the toad. There were no labor jobs open for me and I was sorting out my own thoughts. I did participate in electoral politics and the peace and civil rights movements but establishing myself in the role of husband and father took priority. I went to Columbia University School of General Studies and after a couple of years realized that I was too restless for academic life. As the fifties came to a close and the first stirrings of a new left emerged I was involved with CORE and the organizing of the Committee For A Sane Nuclear Policy. After several years of mundane earn a living jobs I went to work for the United Furniture Workers. I was Assistant President and functioned as the "staff intellectual" and as director of organization. I headed the research bureau, edited the newspaper and directed field organizing. I was often in the South and trying to organize integrated unions. The President of the Union Morris Pizer was one of the last of a vanishing breed of Jewish working class intellectuals. He was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the union hall. After a couple of years the business union element pushed Pizer into a kind of corner and complained that I spent too much on organizing the South. Meanwhile SANE had grown and I was asked to become Executive Director of the Greater New York Council. Here we had some success. We lobbied for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and got it. We established Hiroshima Day by organizing the first large peace march in America. It went from Princeton, New Jersey to the United Nations and 100,000 people assembled under the words from Isaiah "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and neither shall they study war any more."

It's Almost Passover (Rerun)

[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since then, and the post resonates differently—at least for me—with more life lived and more writing and research behind me. Chag samei'ach (happy holiday). --BG

As usual, while I'm here at my mom's house, I'm sifting through the documents and objects that fill the house. This time I'm looking through some of the documents from Dad's work on Proportional Representation (PR) in New York City. In the late 1960s, there was a move, ultimately unsuccessful, to bring PR back as the method of electing the New York City Council members. PR was the method used for NYC Council elections from 1938 to 1949. In the early 1970s there was a successful campaign to change the New York City School Board Elections to PR. Both of these efforts were spearheaded by my father, who was Executive Director of the New York Proportional Representation Committee from 1969-1971 and Associate Director of the Special Unit for School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York from 1970-1973. The work that he did around the NYC School Board elections was enormous. He used to refer to his 1973 testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections as his master's thesis. (For a description of the kind of PR that he worked to institute in NYC go here or here.) Before I can write fully about my dad's involvement in PR for NYC, there are many documents here in Delmar that I need to read and there's a lot more that I need to learn about this bit of NYC political history. Still I'm going to post a little from what I've been reading while I'm here on my Passover visit.

As I study my father's political life I've been interested in the diversity of his involvements and how they were related in his mind. In his resumé that I posted you can see that in the space of a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he moved from organized labor, to the disarmament movement, to the Civil Rights Movement. Then he was doing state legislative work for the Liberal Party in the mid to late 1960s. An then the PR campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One document that I found among the papers relating to the campaign to use PR in the NY City Council elections is a fact sheet, dated 1969 and titled "Proportional Representation (P.R.): A Proposal For Complete Representation In The New York City Council." In this 6 page pamphlet, which I presume my father wrote, there's a section called "P.R. And Civil Rights:"

P. R. is of special importance and usefulness for the advancement of civil rights. In the present transition to full and equal citizenship, in fact as well as in law, it means a great deal to the whole community, as well as to the people directly concerned, for Blacks and Puerto Ricans to be able to use their voice in government. This they can usually do, in district elections, only when they stay hived in "ghettoes" like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the dispersal of ghettoes to secure the integration of the community has been a major objective of the civil rights movement.

P.R. will make it possible for a minority candidate to live anywhere and get votes from anywhere in his borough, and if his supporters poll a sufficient minority of the borough's votes - e.g. something approaching a tenth in a ten member borough - he will be elected. Furthermore, P. R. Gives every voter a preferential vote so that if it cannot help elect his first choice, it can be used at full value for his second choice, or if necessary, his third or fourth. Thus nearly ever Black or Puerto Rican voter can help to elect either a trusted Black or Puerto Rican leader or some other candidate who understands his special problems. The last Council election gave us only 2 Black Councilmen out of 37 and one Puerto Rican.

Of course most voters who do not have the special problems of the ethnic minorities will not vote on ethnic lines, other considerations being of more interest to them, and they can all get representation on whatever basis they think best.

The amounts of support given to candidates of different parties are not likely to be greatly changed - they were not when we had P.R. before - for most voters could elect within their own parties candidates who appealed to them on other grounds as well. But if the parties did not offer candidates with a real appeal to the ethnic minorities, those minorities could elect independent candidates of their own who did appeal to them. (3)

This passage captures three important elements of my father's political interests. First, he believed deeply in the value of political process. Second, in PR, as well as in the disarmament movement, we see him drawn to political work that has the potential for broad appeal across various ideological lines. Third, and this follows from the first two observations, my father's political work was always driven by an idealistic yearning for radical social transformation. This was true when he was briefly a member of the Communist Party, USA in the late 40s. But it was also true after he broke with Communism and threw off the mantle of the revolution. For my father, being a Democratic Socialist meant working within the inherently conservative structures of existing political institutions and systems to bring about Utopia.

Another huge topic which I am nowhere near ready to approach is how my father came to Judaism from his life as a radical, secular Jewish Socialist. This journey of his began in earnest in the 1970s. By the time I was growing up here, in Delmar, my dad's sense of himself as a religious man was fully formed. In the 80s and 90s, he loved quoting from a book by Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. The book demonstrates that the Exodus from Egypt as recorded in the Torah has been the model for the four modern revolutions, the French, English, American and Russian. Walzer refers to Egypt by its Hebrew name, Mitzrayim, a word which literally means narrow place. I can't find Dad's copy of the book in the house right now, so I don't know if the quotation is accurate, but the way he always said it was that at the end of the book Walzer asks, "so what does all this mean?. . . Wherever you are it's probably Mitzrayim and you dream of a promised land. . . . and how do you get there? Organize . . ."

Hungry Blues III

In 1994 my father spoke during the week of Martin Luther King Day at Temple Gates of Heaven, a Reform synagogue in Schenectady, NY. In his speech, he commented on Black-Jewish relations in a way that illuminates his own relationships with Black folks.

I don't intend to raise the question of Black-Jewish relations in part because I think it has been addressed to little avail at length by our community and in part because I think what I will raise speaks to the question in a more meaningful way than the usual discussion that tries to rekindle a better past that I personally don't think ever existed. . . .

Simply put we who are conscious and actively Jewish live within two cultures Jewish and American. Our effort individually and collectively is to find a place of comfort and ease so that we can have both.

Let me say quickly and emphatically right here so that there is no misunderstanding. The Jewish American experience and the Black American experience are not the same nor can we find an easy equation between the two. I am indicating that we share this relationship to America. We want our own identity and we want to participate fully in our country's bounty and its decision making.

In the same speech, my father recalled the experience that first made him clearly aware of his Jewish identity and first made him conscious of living in two cultures.

I don't remember whether I was seven or eight but the scene is vivid in the feeling part of my memory. We were living in Taunton, Massachusetts. Until that day (it must have been summer because I wasn't in school) I was only vaguely aware of being Jewish. I had heard the family stories, I was somewhat embarrassed by my paternal grandmother's accent and I loved Bible stories especially the Exodus tale.

They were starting a baseball game. Sides were being chosen. I stood there expecting to be chosen around fourth or fifth. I was realistic about my ability. I wasn't the best but I was far from the worst. I made up in determination what I lacked in size. While waiting in pleasant expectation lightning struck. "Do you want Jewboy? I don’t want him on my side." It took several seconds for me to realize he was talking about me. JEWBOY! JEWBOY! JEWBOY! The word crashed through my being. My insides were raw with pain. "I am an American," I screamed in a tearful combination of fear and rage. "Jewboy!" " Jew cry baby!" "Mockie!" Christkiller!" "Scram, Jews can't play baseball." I stood my ground and yelled the most meaningful words I could find, "it's a free country!" I don't know who threw the fist blow but a general melee ensued. I was badly bruised and I would like to believe several of my tormentors carried home some effects of my frantic and violent surge of energy.

In the 1930s and 1940s antisemitism was still quite overt in the US. My father's tormentors may not have understood much about the culture he came from, but they stood ready to keep him out of theirs. Dad had a number of stories like this one, lessons in being on the outside. The most developed one, and the most fully fictionalized, is "Lonesome Blues", the story I posted in September, named after the song [RealPlayer] by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. In "Lonesome Blues," the high school years of a suicide jazz musician, Mo Bartel, closely mirror my father's.

The other live factor in my life was basketball. I was going to show them that a Jew could be as tough as anyone. I made the team by determination rather than skill. Years later I asked Tony Nucola, who was our coach, why he put me on his squad and he told me that any one who fought that hard to play was worth having on the team. I don’t know whether he did me a favor or not. I was always playing 9 men. The opposing 5 and our other 4.

This time around, he knows where he stands. His imaginative and intellectual powers are dominated by the activity of assessing boundaries, identifying gatekeepers and allies, and developing entry and exit strategies.

Do you remember my Tuesday to Saturday Blues? That's what it was all about. Keefe invited me on Tuesday and I had to wait until Saturday. I went and didn't over and over. I was sure they were putting me on. I would flunk the test and be the laughing stock of the school. They would remember I was Jewish and ask me to leave. One country indivisible with liberty and justice for all that crap and they would call me Jewboy and I would start a fight. I wouldn't know what to say. I hated popular music.

On Saturday I walked up the hill to Keefe's house like a car with a couple of spark plugs out. By the time I got there I was shaking, inside my stomach felt like mush. Mrs. Riley, pretty, friendly, lovely Mrs. Riley answered the door and told me "the boys are down in the basement."

Eight boys looked like an army and sounded like two. I was trapped. Eight enemies of my privacy were looking at me, surveying me. I was searching for something to say when Keefe made it easy—easy like scaling Everest easy like dying. "Hi Mo. Guys this is the clary man I told you about Mo Bartel. Mo did you bring any sides?"

"Yeah, two my left and right." I made it. I was in and still breathing.

Someone shoved a coke in my hand and I was able to ward off questions about how long I was playing or who my teacher is when Keefe shouted above the din "let's get organized and start spinning some sides first one for Mo, Pops Armstrong's Lonesome Blues featuring Johnny Dodds on clarinet."

Love on first sound? Three minutes on another planet. I mean it hit me like where have you been all my painful life. This was what I felt. The truth head on. It cried without the tears showing, it screamed pain without being sent to the nuthouse. It was all about being alone, alone, alone.

He was in and still breathing but in is a state of mind and out was still where he was, and Johnny Dodds was talking about it and

After it finished I got up walked upstairs and out down the hill and with tears in my eyes I ran down the hill...

I am interested in this complicated process of Mo Bartel née Paul Greenberg's identification with African American culture—among other things, that it occurred, at least in the story, in a room full of white high school boys. They knew about Louis Armstrong's mid 1920s breakthrough, modernistic refashioning of New Orleans jazz. Mo didn't, but they seemed to think he would. In their eyes a Jewish clary man had a touch of the exotic and was automatically identified with jazz rather than the classical music he was learning to play. They wanted to entertain him or prove they were in the know.

I am interested in the story's rough hewn prose style and in how Mo Bartel, and his foil, the narrator, fit into the literature of American Jewish urban experience, which should be familiar to anyone who has read Nat Hentoff or other jazz literature, like Max Kaminsky's forgotten classic My Life in Jazz. But when looking at this story as a text about my father, there is something else to know. The drafts of it, along with the other sketches and segments for the novel Long Days Short Nights it was to be part of, are handwritten on the backs of copies of the flier at right (click on image to enlarge).

Presumably Dad was the organizer of the event: William Douthard (aka Meatball) was his very close friend from when he was working for the SCLC in Birmingham, Martin Luther King was his boss, and James Farmer was a close associate, whom he revered. I don't know how well Dad knew Constance Baker Motley, but they were both part the Civil Rights Movement community in New York. My family lived in Co-op Village and Dad was highly active in left organizations on the Lower East Side. So the flier has my father written all over it in more ways than one.

During some of his most direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, his inner life was preoccupied elsewhere. He didn't treat the political fliers as documents to save for posterity, but as surfaces on which to write and fictionalize his life—as if his committed activism was only the backdrop for a personal journey. Of course the two things were not really separable. In fact, the suicides in "Lonesome Blues" may well be precisely what underlies my father's participation in the Southern Freedom Movement. From "Lonesome Blues," first paragraph:

They will say he was only 37 years old no one knew he was sick that he left a wife and two children and 300 records behind. They will find out he was broke and remember he was the first whiteman to tour with Prince Kingsley.

In the summer and fall of 1963 Paul Greenberg was thirty-five years old and a one time aspiring jazz clarinetist; he had a wife and two daughters, and kept a sizable collection of records, a large portion of which were jazz. I said suicides, in the plural, because there are really two. There's Mo Bartel who seems to have taken his own life in a Chicago hotel room, and there's the journalist-narrator, whose method of narrative transmission spells a kind of professional suicide, a sacrifice of his means of publication in exchange for the hope that his revelation of Mo Bartel's inner life will see the light of day.

I don’t want the assignment. I wrote the Mo Bartel story 10 years ago and you didn’t print it. Enclosed is the carbon copy of the story filed with you then. Print it and buy all of his records with my check otherwise forget it. I won’t interview his wife or any of the guys he played with. Fire me—get a new Jazz Critic for our lousy magazine but I won’t do that kind of story.

The narrator dies a professional death so that the biographical Mo Bartel, whose music is already immortal, can have life after death.

At my father's funeral, my girlfriend, now the woman I'm married to, said it's a good thing he couldn't carry a tune: otherwise he wouldn't have done all this important political work. Lack of musical talent had much to do with it, but for him jazz was "a way of walking, talking. / Had it in his soul." His story in politics was the story of a lonely, Jewish high school kid in Brighton, Mass. who was catapulted by Johnny Dodds' clarinet into Frankie Newton's apartment in Union Square and into the Communist Party, the unions, SANE, and the Civil Rights Movement. The jazz life was a fading, youthful dream, and Dad was at a painful threshold, a moment just prior to when loss translates the past into nostalgia.

The final thing to note here is that I can date the handwritten draft material for Long Days Short Nights with assurance only because there is an extended passage about Frankie Newton that locates the manuscript in time. That bit of prose will make up part IV of this series.

Hungry Blues II

Not long after my father died in 1997, I started collecting Frankie Newton's recordings myself. There's the core group of twenty some songs that were recorded under Frankie's name, with bands that he led. But then there's another fifty or so recordings with other bandleaders and in loose, pickup bands. As with any musical obsession of mine, I devoured liner notes and quickly formed interests in the other musicians on the recordings and what else they recorded and with whom, outside of the original Newton sides.

Through Newton, I came to know a fantastic constellation of jazz stylists who all came through the swing era, the era of big bands, and produced an exciting range of small group recordings that at various times:

• take popular forms to great heights of refinement and virtuosity -- e.g., Benny Goodman (cl.), Charlie Christian (g.) and Lionel Hampton's (vibe) 1939 "Stardust"; Edmund Hall (cl.) and Sidney (trp.) and Wilbur (trmb.) De Paris' 1944 turbo charged "I've Found A New Baby"

• explore directions outside conventional swing formats -- e.g., Rex Stewart (crn.), Django Reinhart (g.), Barney Brigard (cl.) and Billy Taylor's (b.) breathtaking and inspired 1939 performance of "I Know That You Know"; Pee Wee Russell (cl.), Zutty Singleton (d.) and Joe Sullivan's (p.) wild, dare I say primal, 1941 trio version of "Sing, Sing, Sing," known as "Deuces Wild"

• give direct and powerful expression to a blues or standard -- e.g., Sidney Bechet's bowl you over 1939 soprano sax rendition of "Summertime," with Teddy Bunn (g.), Meade Luxe Lewis (p.), Johnny Williams (b.), Sid Catlett (d.); Jelly Roll Morton's 1939 vocal performance on "Buddy Boldon's Blues" (doesn't really count as small group, since the band is just Morton accompanying himself on piano)

With each new find, and with each jazz reference book, I came back to the same frustration that there is terribly little biographical information about Frankie Newton. It was frequently the case that I knew more about him from my conversations with my father than I could find in published materials. I desperately wanted to know more.

At some point in 1999 I remembered how in 1991 my father had relished reading to me from a set of liner notes by an expert who did, in fact, appreciate Frankie's greatness. The record was God Is In The House, a collection of live after hours performances by Art Tatum. In the early 1940s, a Columbia University student named Jerry Newman, had portable disc recording equipment that he took around to private jam sessions. He captured priceless moments of jazz improvisation from a period when records were only three to four minute studio recordings, generally limited in their structure and scope. The recordings Newman collected are rare, often arresting documents of how the music was played in front of live audiences. God Is In The House captures Tatum at five venues in 1940 and 1941. Some of the performances are just him on solo piano, some include other musicians. The last two tracks, "Lady Be Good" and "Sweet Georgia Brown," are with Frankie Newton and Ebenezer Paul (bass) at Clark Monroe's Uptown House. The writer of the notes is Dan Morgenstern:

The two final performances . . . are sensational. Newton is up to playing with Tatum—his ear is sure enough not to be thrown by the unorthodox backing, especially on "Sweet Georgia Brown." On "Lady Be Good," Newton shows us where Sweets Edison comes from. A master of mutes (including the almost whispery one he plays here), he was one of the three great post-Armstrong trumpeters, along with Roy Eldridge and Lips Page. It's good to have these indications of his worth; he was under-recorded throughout his career.

The complexities of Tatum's accompaniments and solos are such that it is impossible to take these two performances in at even several hearings. You'll find yourself listening first to Art, then to Frank, then to both, again and again. "Sweet Georgia Brown," I humbly submit, is one of the most remarkable pieces of spontaneously improvised jazz music ever captured by a recording device.

When we did our Frankie Newton session in 1991, Dad read out the whole two paragraphs, giving that last sentence particular emphasis, as if it were vindication of all that he believed in. He explained that Morgenstern is a famous jazz critic, a professor at a university, maybe Princeton.

I wondered if Dan Morgenstern could help me find out more about Frankie Newton. A little googling revealed that Morgenstern is the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, housed not at Princeton but at Rutgers. I sent him a letter on September 7, 1999. More than a month went by. I'd just about given up all hope of receiving a reply when in mid-October an envelope arrived in the mail with "Institute of Jazz Studies" in the return address. A letter from Morgenstern! It began:

Dear Benjamin Greenberg,

I was both delighted and saddened to receive your letter. Delighted because for more years than i can remember I'd hoped in some way to find a man I could recall only as "Paul." We met somewhere in Greenwich Village--in a jazz joint, a bar, at someone's house party--and had an intense, wonderful conversation about Frankie Newton during which I learned some of the things your letter conveys about your father. (Our brief encounter took place so long ago that I had not yet begun to write professionally about jazz--I was just "hanging out" and absorbing all kinds of stuff--so your father would not have remembered when he later read my liner notes, but I'm so very pleased that he did so, and seems to have approved.)

. . . let me just note that I never knew Frankie--by the time I came to the U.S., in late April of 1947, he was already elusive, and it wasn't until about a year later that I really became aware of his true stature in the jazz trumpet pantheon--I knew only a few records. But one of those, "The Blues My Baby Gave To Me," had made its mark, so when I met and became friends with Nat Lorber, whom everyone called "Face," who played the trumpet and whose three heroes (after Louis, of course) were Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge and Frankie, I was ready to learn. I saw Frankie just once--not playing, but having a bite to eat in a little village restaurant and bar called Calypso-plus-something I can't recall--but was too timid (not quite 20 yet) to approach him. That was around 1950 . . . and then, in 1954, Frankie died, just on the verge of trying a comeback. But Nat spoke vividly of him, and then that moment with your father, and other recollections by musicians, almost make me feel as if I somehow knew him.

I was beginning to feel I somehow knew him, too. And getting closer to Frankie Newton was also getting closer to my father.

Hungry Blues I

The epigraph for this blog includes these lines:

Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
      anybody dyin'

The two existing recordings of these verses by Langston Hughes, set to music and played by James P. Johnson, are pretty obscure, so it's hard to say if my father would have known the lines. Be that as it may, these words are at the crux of what drove him to live as he did. In these lines and in my father's mind, the world doesn't have to be this way: poverty and racism can be eliminated. It's all a matter of making choices, choices that may well mean putting one's life on the line. Underlying my searching the life and times of my father is the question, what leads to this kind of commitment? The song's answer is them hungry blues—the real physical hunger caused by deprivation, but also a spiritual hunger, different in each person.

This blog started out as a vehicle for me to write about my father. Knowing more about his life and his times has changed me and has consequently broadened the scope of what I do here. Lately, I have been writing very little about him and instead posting a lot about race and racism in America. Learning more about my father's participation in the Civil Rights Movement, reading Movement history, and getting to know Movement veterans has made me much more sharply cognizant of what they fought for, the risks they took, and the gains they made for America. This awareness makes witness of the Bush administration's assault on low-income people and people of color disturbing to a degree that I could not have anticipated. My liberal sensibilities were certainly offended by programmatic racism before, but in the last year it has had a radicalizing effect on me. My father's own sense of his life's purpose was deeply wrapped up in the social transformation he and so many others made sacrifice upon sacrifice to achieve. As I have watched their successes unravel, I have found my own sense of purpose becoming much more closely aligned with my father's.

The process of aligning my purposes with my father's does not actually begin with the Southern Freedom Movement. The process began in 1991, when I made my first attempt to understand my father's relationship with Frankie Newton, the mostly forgotten jazz trumpet player, whose career peaked in around 1939, during the period when his band backed Billie Holiday at the Cafe Society in New York. If you know the original 1939 Commodore recording of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit", then you've heard Frankie. That's him on the melodramatic trumpet intro. If you also know Billie's 1939 version of "I've Gotta Right To Sing The Blues," from the same Commodore recording session, and you can remember the sophisticated interplay between the trumpet and Billie's voice (especially in the final verse), then you already have an inkling of Frankie's artistry.

I've written before about how circa 1944 my father, then a teenage aspiring jazz clarinet player, ran away from home in Brighton, MA to Frankie Newton's apartment on East 17th Street in Manhattan, just off Union Square. Frankie was an African American, political radical, who hung out with other artist-intellectuals like Paul Robeson, Beauford Delaney, Henry Miller, Canada Lee, and William Saroyan. On the trumpet, Frankie was a great and subtle stylist, a master of mutes and moods, who attracted a cult following of aficionados, critics, and musicians. It's hard to say what would have happened to my father if Frankie hadn't taken him in. During that year or so when they were roommates, Frankie introduced my father to life in the Communist Party and he taught my father to read James Joyce and John Donne and how to look at the paintings of Picasso and Matisse. And he taught my father volumes about what it means to be Black in America. Frankie was outspoken about race matters, often protesting injustice to his own detriment, losing gigs and being marginalized in the music profession. Being in Frankie's milieu got my dad his job at Jerry Newman's record store, selling records to likes of Pee Wee Russell and Cozy Cole and befriending them, and led to my dad's first union jobs, organizing tobacco workers across racial lines in North Carolina and textile workers in Massachusetts.

Frankie Newton died in 1954 at age 48, by then alcoholic and shut out of professional music. In those last years of his life, Newton painted and was politically active, and he was married to a white Jewish leftist, Ethel Klein. They lived in the West Village on Barrow Street, across from the Greenwich House settlement house, which had (and still has) a music school where Newton sometimes taught music to low-income city kids. Frankie died a poor man, under-recorded and largely forgotten by jazz history. To my father Frankie was one of the great heroes of jazz, as well as a stand-in parent, a brother, a mentor, a friend.

My oldest sister was born two and half years after Frankie died. Dad named her Francine, after Frankie. If Dad got your ear about Frankie, there was an urgency with which he had to communicate Frankie's importance, as an artist and as a human being. By the time I was in my twenties, my father was one of the few people alive who had such intimate knowledge of this national treasure whose life had not been documented, whose music had been stolen and undervalued.

1991 was the year I graduated from college. Home for the summer, before I moved out to Oregon for a while, I sat my father down with his Frankie Newton records and asked him to educate me. We made a mix tape of the tracks, and I taped him as he expounded on the music and reminisced about Frankie. I took the tapes with me when I moved out west, but I did not dwell on the music or what I'd learned. A year or two later, my first cousin Alan tracked down a British cd that collected most of Frankie's major recordings and sent copies to me and to Dad. But that was about it for me and Frankie Newton until 1997 when my father was dying of cancer.

My father died on Election Day, November 4, 1997. I had been driving from Boston to Albany, New York every other weekend to be there with him in the last months and support my mother who was his primary care giver. I was there the weekend before he died, but drove back to Boston on Sunday the 2nd, not knowing that was the last time I'd see him living. On Saturday night, we listened to Miles’ Sketches of Spain. “Music is the staff of life,” he said. On Sunday afternoon, I came into the sick room to be with him before I had to go back to Boston. As usual, he was in pain. I asked him if he wanted to hear some music. “I don’t know,” he said. I put on the Frankie Newton cd that Alan had found for us in England. My two sisters were there, too. We tried making conversation, hoping the blend of our voices and the music would lift him out of depression. But when The Blues My Baby Gave To Me [mp3] came on, we weren't allowed talk: that was Frank's masterpiece.

---
Photo: Frankie Newton & Sidney Bechet at Port of Harlem Jazzmen session for Blue Note, June 8, 1939 (Charles Peterson)

Some Notes On The Education of Paul Greenberg

My father graduated from the eighth grade of Public School 89, Elmhurst, NY (Queens), in June of 1941. Like other kids graduating PS 89, he planned to go on to high school about a half mile away, at Newtown High School. According to his 8th grade autograph book, my father's favorite author was Jack London, his favorite book The Sea Wolf; Stardust was his favorite song; he loved baseball and worshipped Mel Ott.

But before my father was out of PS 89, his father was out of his life. He would tell others his parents were separated, but in reality my paternal grandfather, whom I am named after, deserted his wife and three sons. Being a single mother was not easy for Gertrude Greenberg. She was from the affluent Swig family, however, so she moved to Boston to be near them and get their support. In Brighton, they lived at 90 Kilsyth Road, an apartment building built in 1930.

            
[Paul Greenberg w/his mother, Gertrude, 90 Kilsyth Road, c. 1943]         [Paul Greenberg w/his father, Benjamin, year and location unknown]

(Oddly, before he moved last month, my close friend Joe was living in the next building up the hill, at 100 Kilsyth Road, for the first eight or nine years that I knew him. A few years ago I came across the picture of Dad and Gert, above. Suddenly I recognized the scene in the photo and I could hear my father telling how he rode his bike down the hill from 90 Kilsyth Road to Beacon Street to get to the Savoy Cafe on Massachusetts Avenue, where he'd go hear Frankie Newton, Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, Bud Freeman and many others.)

[Photo: 100 Kilsyth Road, Brighton, Massachusetts]

Instead of Newtown High in Elmhurst, my father attended Brighton High School in Boston. His education at Brighton High lasted until he was seventeen. Once his three brothers were all fighting in WWII, life wife with Gert became unbearable for him.

"Don't you have any respect for me?"

Mother of the kitchen, mother of the laundry, mother deserted by my father. I wish I did. Lord where is respect for lonely mother. All I felt was fear that I would not escape.

Pity—yes, Loyalty—yes, Fear—yes, Respect—void.

            ***         ***         *** I never formulated a plan. It just happened. Even on the day I left I didn't decide to leave. I just went.

I took my clarinet and went for a walk and was on the highway beyond the circle and thumbing a ride—Destination New York—Destination freedom. Land of dreams, heaven on earth they call it 52nd street.

            ***         ***         *** I arrived in N.Y. with 65 cents, a clarinet which I played at best poorly, and the ill fitting clothes I had on and presented my self to Newton as his new roomate[sic]—uninvited. He goddamned me and told me to go home but took me in.

(Paul A. Greenberg, excerpts from sketches for Long Days Short Nights)

The year was 1944 when he showed up at Frankie Newton's place on E17th Street, just off Union Square. In his Political Autobiography, my father wrote, "My association with Jazz musicians in general and Frankie Newton in particular shaped my view of human possibility and what suffering was about. . . . Frankie Newton . . . gave me a vision of socialism and art as important components of the human spirit. Frank taught me how to look at Picasso and Evergood and to read poetry ranging from John Donne to Langston Hughes."

[Photo: (left to right) Frankie Newton, Sidney Bechet, 8June1939 (Charles Peterson)].

Earlier, in his sketches for Long Days Short Nights, he wrote:

I learned how to listen, doubt, and feel. I learned much about being human and some of the anguish of being negro.

I first became aware of the problem of friendships "across the wall" when we were walking in an area where Frank felt we were not welcome. He asked me to walk half a block behind him. I asked him why the parade? He said if we were jumped I should run like hell.

My father often said that living with Frank was "better than ten college educations."

From mid 1940s until the fall of 1950, my father did organizing work in several CIO unions. He then served 21 months in the US Army in the Korean War, September 1950 to June 1952.

In 1953 and 1954, he attended the Columbia University School of General Studies and earned about a year's worth of college credit. This was the last of his formal education.

In 1973, my father was Director of Special Unit For School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York. He used to say his testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections was his masters thesis. This was my father's official report on his oversight of changing the method of the New York City School Board elections to proportional representation.

In September of 1974, however, my father decided he would apply to attend the State University of New York's Empire State College, starting in the Spring Semester. He never sent in the application, and I have his written answers to some informational questions that were part of the application.

[Photo: Paul Greenberg, 1974]

1. What are your general long range educational, vocational, or professional plans or aspirations? How will a college education effect your plans?
My educational goals are to achieve formal degrees and to fill in the gaps in knowledge and theory that my professional career requires. This achievement will be self fulfilling and at the same time enhance my professional standing. I plan on going on to graduate school after earning my Bachelor Of Arts degree. If it is feasible I would like to go to Law School.

ANSWER EITHER QUESTION 2 OR 3

2. If your professional, vocational, or educational goals are clearly defined, please indicate which, Areas of Study you expect to include in your Concentration and General Learnings. Which of the Organizing Frameworks will you use? State briefly why this Framework is best suited to your needs.

3. If you do not have clearly defined goals, what are some of your major areas of interest? Indicate the area(s) in which you might begin your studies. In which of the Organizing Frameworks do you expect to start?
I would work within an interdisciplinary framework that includes Community and Social Services and Social Theory, Social Structure and Change.

My major interest is Government as an instrument for human service. I would like to explore the dynamics between large governmental units (Federal, State and Municipal) and community and individual needs.

I have spent a number of years in my professional life on legislative needs of communities and on developing democratic processes for community needs. I believe the framework I have chosen will enlarge my understanding of these problems and their solutions and improve my professional performance.

4. What Special Resources for Learning do you have available in your community to assist you in reaching your educational goals? Please indicate how you would use these resources. Some of the community agencies you might keep in mind are colleges, schools, social agencies, laboratories, business organizations, labor unions, government agencies, libraries, recreation groups and hospitals.
If my community is defined by the town I reside in the resources available are: An open non-partisan government structure which has open meetings of the Town Council, Planning agency and other departments. A good library with many services.

The observation and study of government as a case study is available and I could use these facilities for academic research and written reports.

If my community is defined as the Metropolitan Area the resources are unlimited. In New York City there are a variety of libraries and schools with every known resource available. My years of work in government makes it possible for me to get easy access to records and appointments with officials for academic investigation.

I could use these resources for development of written reports or for creative investigation.

5. What kinds of work experiences or other activities might your studies at Empire State College include?
My work as Director of the unit that conducts Community School Board Elections in New York City and my work representing government and social agencies at the State legislature could be excellent tools for academic inquiry.

6. Please list and briefly describe experiences outside of school or college or special circumstances which you feel are pertinent to your admission to Empire State. If you did not graduate from high school or attend college, please give evidence of your readiness to undertake college work.
My professional career which has included years of legislative work for social organizations and government agencies plus my years as an executive of various social organizations are pertinent to my admission to Empire State.

I have been the Research and Publicity Director of the United Furniture Workers of America AFL-CIO. I was a Special Assistant to the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I was The Executive Director of The Greater New York Council for A Sane Nuclear Policy. I was the Legislative Director of the Liberal Party of New York State. I have been the Special Assistant for Legislation andGovernment hearings for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. I have been either Director or Associate Director of all the community school board elections held in New York City since their inception in 1970. I am a consultant to The State Charter Revision Committee for New York City.

These and many more activities and jobs completed are adequate proof of my ability to undertake college work.

7. What were the reasons you chose Empire State College rather than another college? What were the alternatives to Empire you considered?
I choose Empire State College because of the special nature of the program which will allow me to continue working and fulfill any academic requirements.The system of advance standing may shorten considerably the time needed to achieve a degree.

I considered Ramapo College. My examination led me to believe Empire State was more suited to my needs.

8. What are your current family, occupational, and recreational responsibilities and interests? Which of these would you continue as you pursue your program at Empire State College? Which would you have to give up in order to spend 40 or 20 hours per week required of a full or half-time student?
I am a husband and father of three children. The children are two girls ages sixteen and fourteen and a boy age five. I am currently a full time consultant to the New York State Charter Revision Commission for New York City. I spend some time trying to achieve the level of artist in the photographic medium. I am active in local political and social organizations. I can not abdicate nor do I chose to abdicate from my family. I both enjoy and need the economic reward for my professional work therefore I by necessity will have to limit my photography and organizational work. I also will have to apply a sense of discipline to my time that is now best described as leisure time.

            ***         ***         ***My father did not end up going back to school to complete his B.A. in 1974; he did continue to work in the photographic medium. The photos in this final section of my post were all shot and developed by him in that year.

In 1974 we were living in Teaneck, NJ, at 130 Johnson Avenue, minutes from the George Washington Bridge and the route into Manhattan. The picture, above, of me and Dad all dressed up for my aunt Leah's wedding, is on the front steps of that house. This next picture is of me and my sisters in the living room:

Me and Gregory, my friend from across the street, hanging out in my bedroom:

I attended kindergarten at the Bryant School in Teaneck. I believe that's me and one of my school friends:

My maternal grandparents for many years had a summer home in the Mohegan Colony, near Mohegan Lake, in Westchester County, NY. We always went for visits. That's me in the lake:

Political Autobiography

by Paul Greenberg, circa 1991

Maybe it was 1937 when my oldest brother and I were in a local WPA theater production of Waiting For Lefty. I remember thinking that a union organizer was the noblest of all jobs even better than playing right field like Mel Ott. I also thought that Jewishsocialist was one word and that Jews who were not socialists were the exceptions even though my mother's family was among the exceptions.

We were a decidedly secular family. Judaism was some old fashioned thing that my paternal grandmother held onto and it was sort of embarrassing. I did love seders at my Aunt Beck's house because my Uncle Sam made Exodus come alive. To me Moses was a union organizer and socialist revolutionary and John L. Lewis all rolled into one.

When I was 10 we moved back to New York from Taunton, Mass. I don't remember who lent me a copy of Michael Gold's Jews Without Money. I am still in debt to him because I never returned the book and because I better understood where my father came from. Several years later and back in Boston I was suspended from Brighton High School for circulating this "dirty" book.

It was at Brighton H.S. that I joined the American Student Union and was part of the most left faction. I had two competing dreams. One was to be a great Jazz clarinetist and the other was to be a union organizer.

My love for Jazz made me acutely aware of racial injustice. I tried to be a professional musician but gave it up for the sound reason of not enough talent. My association with Jazz musicians in general and Frankie Newton in particular shaped my view of human possibility and what suffering was about. Buzzy Drutin and Ruby Braff both wonderful Jewish Jazz Men from Boston taught me the similarity between the blues and some aspects of Jewish music. May they both create for many more years.

Both Frankie Newton and Rex Stewart, who was a marvelous trumpet player in the Duke Ellington band, gave me a vision of socialism and art as important components of the human spirit. Frank taught me how to look at Picasso and Evergood and to read poetry ranging from John Donne to Langston Hughes. Rex turned me on to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Jack London's The Iron Heel.

In 1946 realizing that I wasn't going to make a living at music I got a job for 15 dollars a week with the CIO and went to Winston Salem North Carolina to help organize the Winston Salem Tobacco Company. It was a massive effort that failed. The company is still not union. It was here that I first saw and heard Pete Seeger. It was at the end of road when the National Guard had broken the Union that those who held the line were taught the adaptation of the spiritual I Will Overcome with the new words We Shall Overcome. It was Zilphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School who came and taught it to us. I can still hear her slightly shrill soprano with a tear drop in its sound and I can still feel the sense of power in defeat as we joined hands for our last walk on the picket line.

When I returned to New York I worked at odd jobs including a record store in Greenwich Village that was a hang out for Bohemia and the emerging Beats. I was the record salesman for Jazz friends like Peewee Russell and Cozy Cole and various artists and poets. It was fun and I learned a great deal but I was restless and soon found a Job with the United Textile Workers in Boston. I worked with a Black organizer named Jack Lee. He was an extraordinary man. He was light enough to "pass" and often did in order to organize in areas that would not welcome a Black man. He was steeped in Black history and introduced me to the work of W.E.B. Dubois. He was also something of a Jewophile and spoke a considerable amount of Yiddish and knew all about Jewish labor and socialist history.

Again I was involved in a losing battle. The post war recession was a full fledged depression in the mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell and Haverill. The sight of workingmen out on the streets looking at the shut down mills still haunts me. Every time I hear Woody Guthrie's "I don't want your millions mister... I just want my old job back again," I see those towns and those men and remember that even the movie theaters were closed except on weekends. We also worked on the Walter O'Brien for Mayor of Boston election campaign. This was the campaign that produced the song "Charley And The MTA" that had a resurrection in the sixties.

Soon I went back to New York and went to work for the UOPWA [United Office and Professional Workers of America]. I was organizing in the direct mail industry and got my first taste of gangster unions. The Senior organizer had been a seaman and organizer for the National Maritime Union. He greeted me on the staff by saying, "It's good to see a young buck like you. You ain't married and you ain't got no kids and you will take chances that old guys like me won't take." My chance time came soon enough. Every time we organized a shop a gangster union showed up with a "contract." It was of course a sweetheart contract and if we struck this tall skinny guy would lead some scabs in past our picket line. One morning around six A. M. there was Skinny ready to lead his scabs when they arrived. The Senior organizer said, "Paul go get him before the cops arrive." I crossed the street and was playing head on sidewalk with him when the cops arrived and arrested us both. At the trial our lawyer claimed I was minding my own business when Skinny insulted my mother and the next thing any one knew he had me on the sidewalk. His lawyer was arguing from somewhat nearer the facts. There being no other witnesses the judge dismissed the case with a lecture about unions getting together instead of fighting. Twenty years later, while moving, I was going through old papers and I found a clipping from a New York paper about that arrest. It stated that Paul Greenberg and John Dioguardi were arrested in a labor dispute. It was only then that I realized that Skinny was the later famous mobster Johnny Dio.

It was about this time that I met Esther Novogrodsky. This was a momentous event. She is of course my wife and aside from being my best and most constant friend she introduced me to her family who are the models of Jewish religious concern that began my wrestle with tradition.

By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms on the left had taken a turn toward suicidal meanness. Then real disaster hit in the form of the Korean War. I got drafted, got married and had all my previous assumptions challenged. War was indeed hell. I was constantly one step away from a court martial. A full Colonel once told me that in his twenty five years in the Army he had never seen a man who was less of a soldier than I was. I thanked him and told him that I was only a civilian with a uniform on. I found myself in Japan after several small wounds and a massive case of dysentery that was written up in the Army Medical Journal. It was in Hiroshima that I had a profound religious experience. In the Hiroshima Museum there is a wall, all that is left of a building destroyed by the bomb. On that wall is etched the shadow of human beings which is all that is left of them. It was there that I came to understand that the distinction between just and unjust wars was blurred and that human existence was at great risk and that only a spiritual revolution would be sufficient if humanity was going to survive.

When I came home neither I or the left was the same. It was the time of the toad. There were no labor jobs open for me and I was sorting out my own thoughts. I did participate in electoral politics and the peace and civil rights movements but establishing myself in the role of husband and father took priority. I went to Columbia University School of General Studies and after a couple of years realized that I was too restless for academic life. As the fifties came to a close and the first stirrings of a new left emerged I was involved with CORE and the organizing of the Committee For A Sane Nuclear Policy. After several years of mundane earn a living jobs I went to work for the United Furniture Workers. I was Assistant President and functioned as the "staff intellectual" and as director of organization. I headed the research bureau, edited the newspaper and directed field organizing. I was often in the South and trying to organize integrated unions. The President of the Union Morris Pizer was one of the last of a vanishing breed of Jewish working class intellectuals. He was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the union hall. After a couple of years the business union element pushed Pizer into a kind of corner and complained that I spent too much on organizing the South. Meanwhile SANE had grown and I was asked to become Executive Director of the Greater New York Council. Here we had some success. We lobbied for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and got it. We established Hiroshima Day by organizing the first large peace march in America. It went from Princeton, New Jersey to the United Nations and 100,000 people assembled under the words from Isaiah "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and neither shall they study war any more."

My relationship to the Torah was developing. I met and was awed by Rabbi Heschel. I read Mordecai Kaplan and began to hear rumblings of what was to become the Jewish Renewal Movement. I tried unsuccessfully to create an alliance between Sane and the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Greater New York Sane had grown from 3 or 4 chapters to 40 chapters. Success seems to bring competition and soon there was a power struggle in the organization. I moved on to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We were organizing the March on Washington and again I found myself in the South. This time in Birmingham, Alabama sometimes referred to as Bombingham. I was able to run the first large scale integrated show in the history of Alabama. We were first told we could use the civic center auditorium and then Bull Connor got the permit revoked. Instead we used the football field of a small Black college. We had to build a stage from scratch and we advertised "Bring A Chair For Freedom." I will never forget the sight of thousands of people in orderly array filing down the hill chair in hand to hear Ray Charles, Joey Adams and a score of other entertainers. We raised enough money to send anyone who wanted to go on to Washington. I also got to know Rabbi Heschel through my boss Dr. King. May their memories be for a blessing.

After the great march it was time to put my family life back in order. By now Esther and I were augmented by Francine and Jessica. I got a job as director of the Labor Committee for the Liberal Party. Among my responsibilities was lobbying for a group of progressive Union locals including the Auto Workers, the Garment Workers and District 65. I also was privileged to work with Alex Rose and David Dubinsky, two of the most legendary Jewish Labor Leaders.

I also became involved in many good government causes. We succeeded in ending, for the most part, Capital Punishment in New York State. We also opened up the political process by creating state wide primaries and at the State Constitutional Convention established the groundwork for the 18 year old vote. In these endeavors I became good friends with Dr. George Hallet who was the dean of good government activists. George became a pivotal influence on me. We were instrumental in bringing school decentralization to New York City. I had long been interested in Proportional Representation as a democratic method of election. George was considered by many as the world's leading authority and enthusiast. When PR was designated as the system of election for the 32 decentralized school boards they hired George and me to organize the system and implement the elections. In the course of these events Albert Shanker became frantic and went on a terrible power trip. He did more damage to Black-Jewish relationships than can ever be measured. He also threatened to make me the "Jewish devil of New York." I stood up to him despite much advice to the effect that he would destroy me. I am still here and he is still there so I guess it was a stalemate.

Families grow and by now Benjamin joined the family and I began to be concerned with the cost of college and other things that teenagers need. I found out that there were some people willing to pay real wages for my skills. First I helped establish the New York Health and Hospitals Corp. I was instrumental in establishing abortion by choice in the city hospital system and enjoyed working with Dr. Joe English who had been the medical director of the Peace Corp and was the President of the Hospital Corporation. After a couple of years we moved to Albany where I work for the state as an Affirmative Action Officer. It was early in this period that I met Gerry Serotta at the National Havurah Conference and he engaged me in the development of [New Jewish] Agenda. That involvement has completed my circle of development from Jewish Progressive to Progressive Jew. In short I now know that Tikkun Olam is the Tikkun of my life. What a joy.

Coming Soon: Paul Greenberg 101

Okay, this is supposed to be a site about my dad's life and times. There's a fair amount of stuff posted about him now, but I've posted it piecemeal, interspersed with all sorts of other, related things. This is both a weakness and a strength of blogging this project incrementally, as it develops, rather than laboring quietly in isolation until I have finished and published a book.

I'm realizing that the casual reader may get a sense of some of my dad's involvements and catch some impressions of his personality without having too much an idea of what he was like. To remedy this, I will, on occasion, supplement my microscopic views of detail with some broader views of my dad's life. Items that help with the bigger picture will get a brand new category, added to the blog today, Paul Greenberg 101.