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My stepmother sent me this. It's something my father wrote: I don't know when he wrote it, or for what, but it has a footnote in the middle of it and an introductory sentence.
My father was much cooler than me.
I tried to put it behind a cut, but lj doesn't honor them apparently.
Luis Kemnitzer was born November 13, 1928 in Los Angeles and is now a retired anthropology professor living in San Francisco.
I was a juvenile delinquent during World War II. During the last two years, I was living by myself. My mother was in the hospital. My dad was in Europe. My sister was in boarding school. I didn’t have anybody. Mostly I was siphoning gas and getting drunk and collecting records and playing jazz and body surfing. I played the piano, and we went cruising in Los Angeles where the jazz music was. I always went to school. So my surfing was mostly during the summertime and Easter vacation. That’s all I did. I was a blot on society.
I turned 13 years old on November 13 of 1941. On December 7, I was washing the car when I heard the news about Pearl Harbor. It was really dramatic, and the general attitude was, “we’ve got to get those dirty Japs.” Just like that.
But that attitude had been programmed out of me because during the Depression, my parents had sent me to live the summers with my Aunt Marge and Uncle Jack on a farm outside of Sacramento. There were a lot of Japanese people farming around there. There were Portuguese and Scottish and German people farming, too, but there were a lot of Japanese farmers in that world.
Shortly after the War started, the Japanese were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. My Aunt Margie and Uncle Jack were close friends with these farmers, and they were upset about what was going on. There wasn’t anything they could do for their Japanese friends; they couldn’t stop the relocations. So they made what difference they could. The Japanese families brought all their stuff over to my aunt and uncle who kept it for them, and it was all there for them when they came back. When Aunt Marge died in 1967, there was a regular funeral service, but all these Japanese came and did a Buddhist ceremony, too.
I was a Marxist sympathizer. I was only nine years old when I found out about the Spanish Civil War and became a sympathizer for the Republicans in Spain. I was sympathizing with the Spanish Civil War and with the Ethiopians because that was about the same time. My friends and I were shocked at the world’s lack of interest in the plight of Ethiopia, invaded by Italy in 1935, and the atrocities committed by Japan, especially the Nanking (China) Massacre in 1937.
I organized our own little Soviet friendship group in 1942. There were about five of us eighth grade weirdos who would keep track of what was going on by reading the newspapers and watching newsreels and movies. We saw the ski troops on the eastern front in the wintertime, we read about the Spanish Civil War, got into discussions about the necessity for a “Second Front” to take some of the pressure off Russia and tried to learn about labor history.
My mother was in the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF). That was started back in 1915 during World War I. They were a peace activist group like the Quakers. She never discussed it with us. We knew she was in it, but she never discussed it. But WILPF may have rubbed off on me, just not explicitly. I may have heard her talking about Ethiopia and Spain. I still have an album, a set of three 78’s, called “Six Songs for Democracy,” that was put out by the sympathizers with the International Brigade. The records were made in Spain. I bought them myself at a record store when I was 12 or13.
During the war they had this drive. For some reason we couldn’t beat the Nazis without the shellac from all these old records. So there was this big drive to bring in all your old records to these record stores.
Then they would turn these old records into something that would wipe out the Nazis and the Japanese. So my mission was to divert as much of that shellac as I could to my own record collection. I did get a lot of stuff – old time country music, old blues…1
I owe my passion for music to Mrs. Dorland. My parents paid this woman to give me music lessons. She had been the accompanist for Madame Schumann-Heink who was one of the great contraltos, one of the Lieder singers. Mrs. Dorland was teaching piano. Her husband worked on a greenhouse project for California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena. He was gay, and they had a boarder who was also gay. The boarder was one of these old premature jazz collectors. This was in the 30s, and he was collecting jazz. He turned me on to all those fine musicians; it didn’t take much. Sometimes he and Mr. Dorland would invite me to stay after the music lessons. Mrs. Dorland would invite selected people over in the evening and they would play these jazz records - King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Meade Lux Lewis, Montana Taylor, Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Ma Rainey and other greats. That’s also when Cuban, Mexican and Tahitian music were opened up to me. They got me started, and from then on…
There were a number of other kids my age who were doing the same thing, listening to music, collecting records and playing jazz. We were a half dozen or so who were doing this, and you get to learn from other people who play jazz. We played gigs for motorcycle clubs and groups like that. I wasn’t the best piano player, but we played. We got this started, but it didn’t take long before other people did the same thing.
I had an eclectic taste in music. It was not only blues and jazz and country music, but also Bach and Tchaikovsky. I had the great honor of seeing Katherine Dunham. She came to Pasadena one time. That was
1Mr. Kemnifzer won a Grammy in 2001 for the liner notes he wrote on The Smithsonian/Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music.
an amazing thing. Then I got to see Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Kid Ory, Barney Bigard and people like that.
My father tried to join the Navy during WWII, but his eyesight was too bad. So he joined the Army. Like many others who were anti-war, he put his feelings aside for the greater good of stopping Hitler and protecting the freedoms of the United States. He was not looking for adventure or glory, and during his tour of duty he remarked on the sordidness of military life. He couldn’t say anything in the mail; large hunks of his letters to us were blacked out.
In 1943 the Army sent him to a military government school at Stanford University. The school was training people to go to the Balkans, to follow as the Army conquered Yugoslavia, and to set up displaced persons camps and set up the local government. Native experts from the various regions such as Croatia and Bosnia were supposed to be teaching the future military governors about the history and politics of the region, but my father reported to us examples of how the “experts” would almost get into fistfights with each other over something that had happened in the eighth century!
So we all moved up to Palo Alto, and I went to Palo Alto High School. I worked in the biology lab in the biochemistry department at Stanford, washing test tubes and bottles. In fact my boss, George W. Beadle, later got the Nobel Prize, and I’m sure it was because I washed dishes for him!
When my father finished the training, they sent him to England. Then, they sent him to France right after D Day, and finally he wound up in Germany. After he was sent overseas and I finished the school year, my mother, sister and I went back to Pasadena in the spring of 1943. They wouldn’t let me back into school until I told them that I wasn’t going to organize communist friendship groups. When you’re 15, you’ll say anything to shut them up.
My father was in London during the Blitz and heard the missiles and the rockets. He said it’s when you don’t hear them - when it is quiet - that you worry. Then after the war ended, he ran a displaced persons camp in Germany. Every now and then there would be an eruption because the people in a D.P. camp would find a Nazi who was hiding among them. They would recognize him as one of the torturers and so they would tear him apart. My father said the only thing you could do was let them do it because the Army didn’t have enough people to keep order.
As the War goes, only one of the guys I hung out with went into the service. He was a couple of years older than I was and he always said, “They’ll never take me. I’m not going to go in the Army.” He was another drunk like me. But they did take him, and I thought, “oh, god, this is going to be terrible!” And the next thing you knew he came back and he’s a paratrooper. He became the biggest macho military paratrooper you ever did see. He was the only one of the guys who was in the military. The rest were too young or 4F.
We had earthquake drills after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake devastated a lot of Southern California. Every school in Southern California had to go through periodic earthquake drills. We were already used to that, so when the air raid drills came along it was just another drill. We also had to black out. Every night at home we had to put drapes over the windows to block out any light, and there were air raid wardens on the block who went on patrol and would knock on your door if they could see any light. I remember one day we had what we thought was a real air raid, so we all went outside to watch! We were on the coast. Blackouts meant no fires on the beach.
If I wanted to get down to where my favorite surfing was, I had to have a car or hitchhike. Sometimes I would take the car because it was there at home, and my father was overseas and my mother was in the hospital and there wasn’t anybody else. Because of gas rationing, I siphoned gas, and we knew where to get bootleg gas. Being a teenager, it was very important to get around and in Southern California cars were the only way to get around. Well, it was true in a way, and it really wasn’t. In those days the Pacific Electric line had electric streetcars all over Los Angeles County. But you couldn’t go everywhere. I couldn’t get to the best surfing by streetcars.
The summer after we moved back from Palo Alto my mother was in the hospital, my sister was in boarding school and I was living by myself, working in a restaurant and sleeping under a bridge to be near the surf. I would get up real early in the morning and wrap up my gear and take it to the restaurant and work the breakfast shift. I’d do breakfast until about 10:00 and then I’d leave my stuff and go out and surf all day, quit about 5:00, and go back to work from 6:00 until 10:00, then go out and surf some more at night. It was really cool because of the phosphorescents - little organisms that glow in the dark - and when you’d roll your hand across the water or the surf would roll, the water just glowed in the dark. It was just fantastic. That was one glorious summer, the summer of ’44, nothing to do but surf and surf. That was the last.
When my mother was dying, the Red Cross brought my father home. She had lung cancer. He got home about a week before she died. She died on VJ Day, August 15, 1945. So that is how I remember what I was doing when I heard the War ended. People didn’t know my mother had died, and they wanted me to come celebrate. I said, “nah, I really don’t want to…” I was 16 years old.
That was what I did during the War.
My father was much cooler than me.
I tried to put it behind a cut, but lj doesn't honor them apparently.
Luis Kemnitzer was born November 13, 1928 in Los Angeles and is now a retired anthropology professor living in San Francisco.
I was a juvenile delinquent during World War II. During the last two years, I was living by myself. My mother was in the hospital. My dad was in Europe. My sister was in boarding school. I didn’t have anybody. Mostly I was siphoning gas and getting drunk and collecting records and playing jazz and body surfing. I played the piano, and we went cruising in Los Angeles where the jazz music was. I always went to school. So my surfing was mostly during the summertime and Easter vacation. That’s all I did. I was a blot on society.
I turned 13 years old on November 13 of 1941. On December 7, I was washing the car when I heard the news about Pearl Harbor. It was really dramatic, and the general attitude was, “we’ve got to get those dirty Japs.” Just like that.
But that attitude had been programmed out of me because during the Depression, my parents had sent me to live the summers with my Aunt Marge and Uncle Jack on a farm outside of Sacramento. There were a lot of Japanese people farming around there. There were Portuguese and Scottish and German people farming, too, but there were a lot of Japanese farmers in that world.
Shortly after the War started, the Japanese were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. My Aunt Margie and Uncle Jack were close friends with these farmers, and they were upset about what was going on. There wasn’t anything they could do for their Japanese friends; they couldn’t stop the relocations. So they made what difference they could. The Japanese families brought all their stuff over to my aunt and uncle who kept it for them, and it was all there for them when they came back. When Aunt Marge died in 1967, there was a regular funeral service, but all these Japanese came and did a Buddhist ceremony, too.
I was a Marxist sympathizer. I was only nine years old when I found out about the Spanish Civil War and became a sympathizer for the Republicans in Spain. I was sympathizing with the Spanish Civil War and with the Ethiopians because that was about the same time. My friends and I were shocked at the world’s lack of interest in the plight of Ethiopia, invaded by Italy in 1935, and the atrocities committed by Japan, especially the Nanking (China) Massacre in 1937.
I organized our own little Soviet friendship group in 1942. There were about five of us eighth grade weirdos who would keep track of what was going on by reading the newspapers and watching newsreels and movies. We saw the ski troops on the eastern front in the wintertime, we read about the Spanish Civil War, got into discussions about the necessity for a “Second Front” to take some of the pressure off Russia and tried to learn about labor history.
My mother was in the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF). That was started back in 1915 during World War I. They were a peace activist group like the Quakers. She never discussed it with us. We knew she was in it, but she never discussed it. But WILPF may have rubbed off on me, just not explicitly. I may have heard her talking about Ethiopia and Spain. I still have an album, a set of three 78’s, called “Six Songs for Democracy,” that was put out by the sympathizers with the International Brigade. The records were made in Spain. I bought them myself at a record store when I was 12 or13.
During the war they had this drive. For some reason we couldn’t beat the Nazis without the shellac from all these old records. So there was this big drive to bring in all your old records to these record stores.
Then they would turn these old records into something that would wipe out the Nazis and the Japanese. So my mission was to divert as much of that shellac as I could to my own record collection. I did get a lot of stuff – old time country music, old blues…1
I owe my passion for music to Mrs. Dorland. My parents paid this woman to give me music lessons. She had been the accompanist for Madame Schumann-Heink who was one of the great contraltos, one of the Lieder singers. Mrs. Dorland was teaching piano. Her husband worked on a greenhouse project for California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in Pasadena. He was gay, and they had a boarder who was also gay. The boarder was one of these old premature jazz collectors. This was in the 30s, and he was collecting jazz. He turned me on to all those fine musicians; it didn’t take much. Sometimes he and Mr. Dorland would invite me to stay after the music lessons. Mrs. Dorland would invite selected people over in the evening and they would play these jazz records - King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Meade Lux Lewis, Montana Taylor, Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Ma Rainey and other greats. That’s also when Cuban, Mexican and Tahitian music were opened up to me. They got me started, and from then on…
There were a number of other kids my age who were doing the same thing, listening to music, collecting records and playing jazz. We were a half dozen or so who were doing this, and you get to learn from other people who play jazz. We played gigs for motorcycle clubs and groups like that. I wasn’t the best piano player, but we played. We got this started, but it didn’t take long before other people did the same thing.
I had an eclectic taste in music. It was not only blues and jazz and country music, but also Bach and Tchaikovsky. I had the great honor of seeing Katherine Dunham. She came to Pasadena one time. That was
1Mr. Kemnifzer won a Grammy in 2001 for the liner notes he wrote on The Smithsonian/Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music.
an amazing thing. Then I got to see Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Kid Ory, Barney Bigard and people like that.
My father tried to join the Navy during WWII, but his eyesight was too bad. So he joined the Army. Like many others who were anti-war, he put his feelings aside for the greater good of stopping Hitler and protecting the freedoms of the United States. He was not looking for adventure or glory, and during his tour of duty he remarked on the sordidness of military life. He couldn’t say anything in the mail; large hunks of his letters to us were blacked out.
In 1943 the Army sent him to a military government school at Stanford University. The school was training people to go to the Balkans, to follow as the Army conquered Yugoslavia, and to set up displaced persons camps and set up the local government. Native experts from the various regions such as Croatia and Bosnia were supposed to be teaching the future military governors about the history and politics of the region, but my father reported to us examples of how the “experts” would almost get into fistfights with each other over something that had happened in the eighth century!
So we all moved up to Palo Alto, and I went to Palo Alto High School. I worked in the biology lab in the biochemistry department at Stanford, washing test tubes and bottles. In fact my boss, George W. Beadle, later got the Nobel Prize, and I’m sure it was because I washed dishes for him!
When my father finished the training, they sent him to England. Then, they sent him to France right after D Day, and finally he wound up in Germany. After he was sent overseas and I finished the school year, my mother, sister and I went back to Pasadena in the spring of 1943. They wouldn’t let me back into school until I told them that I wasn’t going to organize communist friendship groups. When you’re 15, you’ll say anything to shut them up.
My father was in London during the Blitz and heard the missiles and the rockets. He said it’s when you don’t hear them - when it is quiet - that you worry. Then after the war ended, he ran a displaced persons camp in Germany. Every now and then there would be an eruption because the people in a D.P. camp would find a Nazi who was hiding among them. They would recognize him as one of the torturers and so they would tear him apart. My father said the only thing you could do was let them do it because the Army didn’t have enough people to keep order.
As the War goes, only one of the guys I hung out with went into the service. He was a couple of years older than I was and he always said, “They’ll never take me. I’m not going to go in the Army.” He was another drunk like me. But they did take him, and I thought, “oh, god, this is going to be terrible!” And the next thing you knew he came back and he’s a paratrooper. He became the biggest macho military paratrooper you ever did see. He was the only one of the guys who was in the military. The rest were too young or 4F.
We had earthquake drills after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake devastated a lot of Southern California. Every school in Southern California had to go through periodic earthquake drills. We were already used to that, so when the air raid drills came along it was just another drill. We also had to black out. Every night at home we had to put drapes over the windows to block out any light, and there were air raid wardens on the block who went on patrol and would knock on your door if they could see any light. I remember one day we had what we thought was a real air raid, so we all went outside to watch! We were on the coast. Blackouts meant no fires on the beach.
If I wanted to get down to where my favorite surfing was, I had to have a car or hitchhike. Sometimes I would take the car because it was there at home, and my father was overseas and my mother was in the hospital and there wasn’t anybody else. Because of gas rationing, I siphoned gas, and we knew where to get bootleg gas. Being a teenager, it was very important to get around and in Southern California cars were the only way to get around. Well, it was true in a way, and it really wasn’t. In those days the Pacific Electric line had electric streetcars all over Los Angeles County. But you couldn’t go everywhere. I couldn’t get to the best surfing by streetcars.
The summer after we moved back from Palo Alto my mother was in the hospital, my sister was in boarding school and I was living by myself, working in a restaurant and sleeping under a bridge to be near the surf. I would get up real early in the morning and wrap up my gear and take it to the restaurant and work the breakfast shift. I’d do breakfast until about 10:00 and then I’d leave my stuff and go out and surf all day, quit about 5:00, and go back to work from 6:00 until 10:00, then go out and surf some more at night. It was really cool because of the phosphorescents - little organisms that glow in the dark - and when you’d roll your hand across the water or the surf would roll, the water just glowed in the dark. It was just fantastic. That was one glorious summer, the summer of ’44, nothing to do but surf and surf. That was the last.
When my mother was dying, the Red Cross brought my father home. She had lung cancer. He got home about a week before she died. She died on VJ Day, August 15, 1945. So that is how I remember what I was doing when I heard the War ended. People didn’t know my mother had died, and they wanted me to come celebrate. I said, “nah, I really don’t want to…” I was 16 years old.
That was what I did during the War.