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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 IV

I mentioned in part III of this series that I can date the handwritten drafts of Long Days Short Nights because of a passage about Frankie Newton. I am posting that passage here, though it was not intended for publication. It is an unpolished prose sketch, written in one shot, to get the material down on paper. The passage begins with some garbled and embarrassingly sentimental sentences, which I omit. The first sentence in the omitted passage is "Nine years ago he stopped breathing," which dates the writings in 1963, since Frankie died in March of 1954.

[Prose sketch from Long Days Short Nights ms., summer or fall, 1963]

by Paul A. Greenberg

My first memory is not music but tennis. I met Frank when I was barely in my teens. I don't remember whether it was at a friend's house or at a record shop but he was looking for someone to play tennis with the next day. In my youthful exuberance I exaggerated my prowess and we arranged a date. You may recall that Newton was a big man and athletically well developed. After 5 minutes it was obvious that this was a tennis lesson not a game. Newton: "It's a good thing you are nice because you sure ain't a tennis player." He invited me to the club he was working in. My memory fails but I believe it was in the Fenway in Boston. I do remember Vic Dickenson and Horsecollar Williams and Pete Brown were in the band. And I do remember that it swung. Lord it swung. I brought my clarinet but Frank said no he would not be embarrassed but I might be if my playing was equal to my tennis. He was right. During the next few years I saw Frank every time he was in Boston which was frequently. I learned a lot of music by the osmosis of listening. We established a man-boy relationship that was fatherly without being paternal, brotherly without being filial. We explored sports, books, politics and mostly people. 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. I had thought about his being paranoid then. It was later that I found out there was wisdom in his approach. I still don't know if I would have run like hell or not.

The summer of my 17th year 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 roommate—uninvited. He goddamned me and told me to go home but took me in. Times were tough. Frank's jobs were infrequent but we shared what he had. I remember some of the dates. Some of the people who played those dates were Sandy Williams, Pete Brown, Art Hodes, [Bill?] Pemberton, Pops Foster, Hank D'Amico, Ike Quebec, Roger Ramirez, Frank Orchard, Bob Casey. The places? Webster Hall, a club in the Bronx, organization dinners in Brooklyn. What was the music like? Moody! Some nights it was terrible, a fight all the way. Others it swung. By now Frank was playing the flugelhorn. It's a shame we don't have records. He played it with love and what music. The horn had belonged to Boston friend, Doc Kiley who died in the army and left it to Frank who treasured the friendship and the horn. Several years later a fire destroyed the apartment and in the remains he found a twisted piece of the horn which he made into a piece of jewelry which hung around his neck. What are the real memories? I learned about girls, drinking and fun. I found out what shuffling meant. I learned anti-conformity. Some of the memories are clear. I can't always distinguish what I saw from what I heard. There were three neighborhood youngsters, brothers. Frank called these little toughs Big Jazz, Little Jazz and No Jazz. He taught the kids in the neighborhood. He was always puzzled by the fee question. He felt playing was a good discipline. On the other hand he said, "How much do you charge a note." His attitude was that any kid that wanted to learn had a right to a good teacher. He was a great teacher even if the lessons were spasmodic and on a whimsical basis.

(This prose sketch was previously published in "The Search For Frankie Newton," by Jennifer Wagner, in The Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia Bulletin, Series II, No 39a, 2002.)

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.

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:

Lonesome Blues

[final draft from Long Days Short Nights ms., summer or fall, 1963]

by Paul A. Greenberg

Dear Boss,

I am tired of prophylactic assignments. Mo Bartel is dead and every newspaper will have the facts. LITTLE MO BARTEL JAZZ LEGEND DIES IN CHICAGO HOTEL ROOM. Or maybe another hipper headline will read LAST BLUE NOTE FOR MO BARTEL. The story will be the same. 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. They will remember that he got loaded sometimes and told audiences to shut up. Somebody will run a benefit and that will be that.

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.

I wrote the enclosed 10 years ago with a hangover. Mo was on his way to Chicago I was on the same train and we got loaded together in the clubcar. Mo had just quit The Prince after he refused to stay home while the band went south. You remember the time he was busted in Mississippi and you wrote a discretion is better than valor editorial saying his timing was bad.

Well we were commiserating—me with his jail pallor—he with the son of a bitch boss that I work for. I got loaded enough to ask a stupid question and hit the jackpot. I asked him when it all started that is the music. The elusive, non-personal blues wailer hero Mo Bartel told me and I wrote it down and sent it to you. You said it was too personal, too psychological and too dirty for our magazine or any other magazine and that was that except Little Mo is dead and I want you to print it now and make what amends possible to your own soul if you have one.

                                                      Your (ex?) Jazz critic?

(enclosure)
Notes from the childhood of a drunk jazz musician artist hero as remembered by a scurvy critic.

At 15 I was a quiet, skinny, intense and scared kid. My father had split 5 years earlier and my mother wanted me to grow up to make a lot of money and take care of her. She didn’t know what went wrong in her life and tried to compound the same stupidity into my life. I didn’t rebel I withdrew.

We lived in Boston and I worked at a drugstore to help pay the rent and cheated my mother out of tips so that I could go to Boston Symphony Concerts.

The job was fine because I thought people noticed me. That is at first. I liked it when some asked me “please give me a coke” or “may I please have a drink of water.” They were asking me. I was their agent for receiving pleasure and I hoped the girls would notice me. They did and I didn’t like it because I was JewBoy.

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. Except when Keefe Riley played he was human.

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.

After it finished I got up walked upstairs and out down the hill and with tears in my eyes I ran down the hill my clarinet case in front of me covering the fact that I had an erection.

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 Round to Satchmo

Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"—all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite desert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes you're behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That's what you hear vaguely in Louis' music. (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)

It's still Independence Day a few more minutes, which means it's still Louis Armstrong's putative birthday. My father was passionate about many things, perhaps most so about music, especially jazz music from the 20s, 30s and 40s. So July 4th seems a good occasion to say a few things about my father's love of music and how in a certain sense it all began with Pops Armstrong.

All through my childhood my father tried to excite me with music that was important to him. As a little boy, I danced around our living room to Woody Guthrie's children's songs. Dad also got me listening to Pete Seeger's Children's Concert at Town Hall—with those renditions of work songs and of old ballads like "Henry My Son" (aka "Lord Randall"):

What did you eat in the woods all day,
        Henry my son?
What did you eat in the woods all day
        my pretty one?
Eels, dear mother. Eels, dear mother.
Mother be quick I got to be sick and
        lay me down to die.

What color were those eels, Henry
        my boy?
What color were those eels, my pride and joy
Green and yeller. Green and yeller.
Mother be quick I got to be sick and
        lay me down to die.

For the longest time, those lines "Green and yeller. Green and yeller. / Mother be quick I got to be sick and / lay me down to die" were about the funniest things I'd ever heard.

The other song Dad taught me to love from that children's concert was Seeger's adaptation of Abiyoyo, the South African lullaby. In Seeger's version there's a father and son pair who both are always getting into trouble. The father, a magician, can make things disappear with his magic wand. He goes around playing practical jokes, making chairs disappear as folks were about to sit down, zapping a log out of existence right while a worker was sawing it in half. In the meantime, the magician's son went around with a ukulele, playing it wherever he could and disrupting whatever might be going on. The townspeople got frustrated with these two troublemakers and made them live on the outskirts of town.

Then one day a huge, scary monster called Abiyoyo came marching along, swallowing sheep and cows and people in one bite. Everyone was running for their lives. The magician said to his son, "Oh, son. It's Abiyoyo. Oh, if only I could get him to lie down. I could get him to disappear."

The boy said, "Come with me father." He grabbed his father by one hand. The father grabbed the magic wand, and the boy grabbed his ukulele. Over the fields they went, right up to where Abiyoyo was.

People screamed "Don't go near him! He'll eat you alive!"

There was Abiyoyo. He had long fingernails, 'cause he never cut 'em. He had slobbery teeth 'cause he never brushed them. Matted hair, 'cause he never combed it. Stinking feet, 'cause he never washed them. He was just about to come down with his claws, when the boy whipped out his ukulele.

Abiyoyo, Abiyoyo Abiyoyo, Abiyoyo Abiyoyo, yo yoyo yo yoyo Abiyoyo, yo yoyo yo yoyo Abi. . .

Well, the monster had never heard a song about himself before, and a foolish grin spread across his face. And started to dance.

ABIYOYO, ABIYOYO, The boy went faster.

ABIYOYO, YO YOYO, YO YOYO ABIYOYO, YO YOYO...

The giant got out of breath. He staggered. He fell down flat on the ground.

Zoop, zoop! went the father with his magic want, and Abiyoyo disappeared.

People streamed out of their houses, and ran across the fields. They said: "Why, he's gone, he's disappeared!"

They said: "Come on back to town. Bring your damn ukulele;
we don't care."

A little while back I discovered that the "Children's Concert at Town Hall" had been reissued on cd. I went out and bought a copy and started listening again. Seems to me now that in 1962, when the record came out, Abiyoyo must have been to my dad—and maybe to Pete Seeger, too—an apparition of all the violent social and political forces he was fighting against—segregation, nuclear proliferation, economic injustice, anti-communist witch hunters. Dad's activism was driven by amazing idealism but also by profound feelings of loneliness and a deep need for attention, not for fame but for a kind of recognition that comes only in the moment. In my childhood, as Dad's intense involvement in political movements was moving into the past, I think he had this romantic feeling that I'd be his ukulele playing sidekick who'd finally make his own strivings come right.

Before I really knew what they were all about, I was also hearing the songs of the Civil Rights Movement. There were the versions Pete Seeger had brought up from the South at his 1963 Carnegie Hall Concert. Even more important was a record that you can't get anymore, though I have the original from Dad's collection, the SNCC Freedom Singers' We Shall Overcome, with those amazing renditions of "Woke Up," "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around," "We Shall Not Be Moved" and, of course, the title track.

And then there was Jazz. There was an AM station in Albany, New York that played all the jazz Dad had grown up on. When we'd go places together in the car I often took control of the radio to hear the top 40 or classic rock stations, but sometimes Dad would have me to listen to the jazz station with him. It all sounded the same to me then, but he'd call out the artists and song titles as soon as a song came on, and then he'd start telling me about who the drummer was or the clarinet or trumpet or bass player. I couldn't keep straight who any of them were, but the names became familiar, Cozy Cole, Fats Waller, Sara Vaughn, Pee Wee Russell, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Bix Beiderbecke , Billie Holiday and many, many more.

Later on, in my mid-twenties, when I was a little more open to learning about some of the things that were important to Dad, he would occasionally buy me jazz recordings whose greatness he wanted me know. We'd be out somewhere, and I'd lobby to stop in at a record store. I'd head off to the rock titles and he'd browse the jazz. And then he'd be at my elbow, holding Miles' "Sketches of Spain." Did I know about this one? Would I like to have it? Um, sure Dad . . . Or the Billie Holiday Commodore Master Takes or The Benny Goodman Sextet, featuring Charlie Christian or Lionel Hampton's small band recordings.

Or Satch Plays Fats.

Now to my dad, just the fact that Satchmo Armstrong made an album interpreting his favorite titles by one of the other great jazz virtuosos from his generation, Fats Waller, was enough for this to be a momentous event in my musical education. Even then, the clear highlight of this, to me, uneven record was Louis' performance of (What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue. Not much more to say about it than Ellison did. Sloe gin over vanilla ice cream. Sloe gin, that liqueur made from blackthorn plums—a densely spiny shrub with succulent fruit far too bitter for human consumption, except as flavoring. The 1955 recording is emotional and elegant, a glistening timeless object with vapor ever rising off its surfaces.

I've since learned to like even better Armstrong's 1929 recording of "Black and Blue," which must be the one Ellison was writing about in Invisible Man, since the novel was published in 1952, before Satch Plays Fats. The earlier version of the song sounds dated, with a tinkly piano introduction, the band nowhere near the same caliber as Armstrong's later All-Stars, the performance slightly mechanical and melodramatic, the swing less pronounced. But against that unremarkable backdrop, the song tells what you already should have heard beneath Stach's earlier vocal style. In those vocal performances from the late 20s and early 30s, Louis does this thing where he seems to be pushing great quantities of air through his lungs while at the same time biting off the ends of his phrases. The singing has a brooding edge and an energy that seems uncontainable.

But this isn't how Louis Armstrong got my father going. We have to go back even a little earlier to those brilliant recordings he made with his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, back to one song from 1926, with Louis on trumpet and vocal, Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on Clarinet, Lil Harden Armstrong on piano, and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo. The song is Lonesome Blues [RealPlayer]. The story comes through my father's alter ego Mo Bartel in Long Days Short Nights, the novel Dad never finished. Most of the writing isn't much more than unedited notes or bare bones narrative sketches. What follows, however, is a teaser from the segment he completed, which he titled after the Armstrong song in question. The rest comes later, after we get through with Birmingham.

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.

Mother's Day

In honor of Mother's Day, I'd like to make some mention of my mother, who married my father in 1951. When he died in 1997, they were married almost 47 years.

As I've been doing this research about my father, I've been fortunate that I can ask my mother questions. She can add historical information, details about people whose names come up, and interesting stories. Sometimes when I start asking her my questions, though, she gets a little impatient. "I couldn't pay attention to all of that," she says. "I was taking care of your sisters. I had to keep the household together while he was doing all those things."

When Dad met Mom, she was 18 or 19, a pretty college student attending Sarah Lawrence College. She'd gone to the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School. She also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her family, though firmly rooted in Jewish religious culture, was quite cosmopolitan. My maternal grandparents had a subscription to the New York Philharmonic for decades. They had a small art collection. They were politically progressive. My maternal grandmother was a member of the teacher's union in the 40s and requested teaching positions in Harlem. My parents met in the late 1940s through my mother's brother, who was a labor organizer, like my dad, and involved in the same radical circles.

My dad's radicalism and bohemianism were certainly things that must have attracted Mom when she first met him, but she was never really an activist: she was a "fellow traveler." Still she attended enough left wing political meetings and had enough friends who were radicals that she had trouble with McCarthyism when she was working as a teacher in the New York Citiy public schools in the 1950s.

At least as significant as my mother's background and her sophisticated, progressive family was that her family was tightly knit and financially stable. This was a stark contrast to my father's rocky family situation. His father, after whom I am named, was an irregular presence in his life. His mother, Gert, was under a lot of stress, with four sons to take care of and, at best, intermittent support from her husband. She was from the philanthropic Swig family, but their support was limited because they didn't trust her husband. The youngest of the Greenberg brothers, my dad lived alone with Gert during his teenage years in Brighton, MA. In addition to the obvious problems associated with having an absentee husband, Gert had other problems that led her to be cruel to Dad and to demand his emotional support in inappropriate ways. It was under these conditions that my father ran away to NYC when he was 17 years old and wound up as Frankie Newton's roommate. As one of my dad's sisters-in-law said to my mom at a recent Greenberg family reunion, "it's terrible what happened to Paul."

When it became evident that my mother and father would marry, Gert, said, "With Esther, Paul will be fine." To Gert it was clear that my mother could provide my father with an anchor that, to a point of negligence, his own family did not offer. The stability in my mother's family was clearly a big part of what drew my father to her. Once he found her, he pursued her relentlessly.

Despite all of the deficits he had in his upbringing, my father did remarkably well for himself. He was an autodidact who never finished high school and attended Columbia University for two years under the GI Bill. Without ever completing his formal education, he held good jobs and accomplished a great deal in his work life. Without good models from his own family, he nevertheless became a responsible, loving husband and father.

As a boy and as a teenager, my father suffered deep emotional and psychological wounds. There were basic social skills that he never developed. He was prone to fits of rage throughout his adulthood. He earned regular paychecks, and he took part in and relished his family life, but he never learned how to be an equal partner in running the household. He relied on my mother for a great deal and probably never entirely understood the toll it took on her when she was young or as she grew older. On some level, however, he knew very well how much he needed her in his life. Even during times when their relationship was very difficult, he maintained a deep romantic feeling for her.

On this Mother's Day I'd like to honor my mother for how she (and her parents) held our family together while my father did many of the things I am writing about in this blog. I'll end this with a short piece, which Dad wrote in 1994, to call up the romance that brought my parents together.

On a summer night in 1949 we were at a left wing rally. At the conclusion of the planning committee we marched through the crowd in a dramatic attempt to demonstrate a democratic spirit and to further whoop them up. I was carrying the red flag while the music blared the Internationale. I spotted her off to the side, took her hand, and we marched out together. Without having asked I had a "date" for the inner circle party after the rally. At the party the usual beer and pretzels and wild schemes for a non-existent revolution combined with guitars and folk songs.

The song leader started us on the Scottish ballad I Know Where I Am Going. When the song ended a comrade began to harangue: the song was "white chauvinist" because of the line "some say he is black but I say he is bonny." We were still holding hands. I leaned and whispered, "should we leave?" She put her head on my shoulder and said yes. Outside in the warm city night, in the light of the moon and a lamppost I looked into her pretty brown eyes and saw a place I had never been before. I kissed her forehead and then we were heading toward the subway. I could not speak. "Don't blow it" roared through my head. As we entered the subway my head stopped aching from the roar. We started to chatter about revolution. The words of the song were in my head now. "I know where I am going and I know who is going with me."