Here is a piece based on a poem by a second Irish-American poet, Ethna McKiernan, who before her death in 2021 would host a reading every St. Patrick’s Day. I can’t say I knew her very well as a person, though as mentioned last time she was a long-time participant in the Lake Street Writer’s Group with myself, Parlando contributor Dave Moore, and the poet featured last time, Kevin FitzPatrick. I’ll next be going off on a short tangent, as is my nature, but it any of this writing displeases or tires you, just skip to the bottom. I quite like the piece that is the occasion for writing this today, and you are excused to go there and just listen to it.
I don’t think Ethna liked me much as a person, and I can imagine any number of reasons why that might be so. Let me leave most of those guesses behind for today’s purposes. In my old age I’ve come to the realization that I am often a careless and inappropriate person. I suspect that’s for neurological reasons, but who can say, it may be a defect in my soul as would have been said in the old ways.
One peculiarity that I had in writing groups is that I was prone to writing long responses to drafts shared by other members. I’d often get quite detailed with noticing what works, and at least as much so with what I thought didn’t or had alternatives to be considered. The audience of this Project know that I have a broad appreciation for styles and approaches. I don’t hold to a narrow poetic style and down-rank anything that doesn’t follow it, but just as I do with editing audio or trying out compositional ideas in music, I tend to look closely, and over the years of doing this, I’d notice how zoomed in and nit-picky some of my responses were — and I wasn’t at all sure my suggestions for alternative approaches were actually improvements. It’s been a few years since I’ve done that, but I still cringe at some of the things I wrote, particularly in response to Ethna’s poems. After all, here was a poet with several published collections, a grant-winner with a distinct cultural connection to a great poetic culture, and who had taken advanced academic creative writing study. Me? I’m a high-school graduate from nowhere, who has no distinct poetic style to trumpet, who last was published in the 20th century. And need I add one more kicker — I would be in Etna’s case a man writing to a woman poet. Women poets reading this know how that often goes.
So in summary: matters of technique and poetic tactics vs. being emotionally myopic. A lot of the first only emphasizes the second.
My reactions to Ethna’s poems continue to trouble me because, at her best I considered her to be an excellent writer, but one that left me tantalized by another poet within her — a far stranger one, one that only materialized from time to time, and seemed to be constrained by her internal editor and self-anthologist.* Yes, it’s a writer’s prerogative to choose what to present or emphasize, but I wonder if other writer’s group respondents, creative-writing seminars, or outside editorial preferences/fashions kept that element down in McKiernan’s writing. Those things have standing, and it may be me who’s out of step, whose taste is questionable or unlikely. But that’s how I felt when reading the poem “Barn Burning” used to make today’s musical piece. I was compelled to do something that may be regrettable. I strongly thought that a developed image just past the midpoint of the poem was not quite as vivid as possible, and that the poem’s ending was short of how sharply spoken it could be.**
Ethna is some years dead now. Poets have trouble finding audiences when alive, and once they cross the Lethe, our forgetting often matches the dead’s. Improper, inappropriate, imperious, presumptuous — convict me of the lot. I’m taking the risk that I’m damaging the poem, though that’s not my intent. It’s done out of love for the poem and in hopes of bringing forth this element of the poet who might be condemning me from the other side.
If the worst is the case, take the performance below as damaged, counterfeit goods. If the best of the case is so, enjoy this poem’s mystical experience with my best efforts at adding music to it. I’m not Irish, I just hung out with some Irish-American poets, and it seems consistent to make this offense out of admiration.
*I remain puzzled why her poem “Letting Go the Wolves” was not included in her own final new and selected collection Light Rolling Slowly Backwards. While it’s a fine collection, well worth reading, to my tastes that’s a pluperfect anthology piece, one I’d say any poet could be proud of having be the one poem others know of their work. Of the poems included there, poems as strange as “Stones” and “Barn Burning” display moods not widely indulged in, even though her other poems have their virtues too.
**Should be? Let me say again, I don’t know. I’m just one reader, but one who chose to perform it, and who wants to maximize its impact. Here are the last six lines of “Barn Burning” as McKiernan had them in her final collection: “The outline of the lit barn/and its lean bones;/the world changed suddenly/as baptism, my life changed/forever with the knowledge/of fire.” Here is what I performed: “The outline of the barn,/the eager edges of its light/surrounding reluctant bones./The world, now sudden as baptism./My life forever with fire knowledge.” And as evidence of how zoomed in my suggestions sometimes were: I think the poem’s title is stronger with a comma in the middle.
Nearly 50 years ago when I moved to the Twin Cities I fell in with a group of Irish-American writers — only they didn’t call themselves that, they called themselves the Lake Street Writer’s Group, and when my friend Dave Moore wanted to roughly categorize them back in those days he’d say many of them worked as bartenders. And so, at first, their monthly meetings would be at a bar table, I think the first one I attended was at the Artist’s Quarter, a bar and music venue.
Time and writing changes one, and so it changes groups of writers. Over the years some wandered off to other pursuits, or to other cities, and one or two died. In its last decade of existence, the group winnowed down to four people. Dave Moore and myself, and two other poets: Ethna McKiernan and Kevin FitzPatrick.* None of us remainers were bartenders. Dave worked for a co-op grocery after working in bookstores. I worked for a public radio network. Ethna ran an Irish-Arts store until it needed to close, and then worked as a social worker. Kevin had a job with the state labor department, but he spent every non-workday at his life-partner Tina’s farm across the border in rural Wisconsin.
The poet I perform today and his last book.
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Kevin was a healthy seeming guy, able to handle the manual small-farm work in contrast to his desk job. During that decade our little quartet of poets would hear Kevin recount his latest news from the farm, and then we’d hear what he’d transformed out of that when he showed us drafts of poems about the odd turn his post middle-aged life had taken. In this series of poems an office-worker who grew up in the Cities was encountering country labors, mores, and situations, being befuddled or making sense of them.
Kevin’s poems were narrative, and he had a real knack for that form, particularly in his talent for drawing characters in a few words and letting you get a sense of them in a stanza or two.** One of the charming characters we met as the series of poems spun out was the farm dog: an incongruous poodle named Katie — not a Collie or German Shepard, not any other breed you’d naturally think of protecting the flock and farm. The poet didn’t invent that detail of the farmstead’s dog, but the poet knew a symbol when he came upon one.
Farm dogs are pets with job descriptions, but I don’t think Katie was a herding dog in a professional sense, any more than Kevin was a professional farmer. Still, there were in the poems a sense of Katie being an intermediary between the livestock and the bipeds, and she was portrayed as a useful watchdog and companion when Kevin needed to return to his workweek office job.
In Kevin’s poems we learned that Katie had gotten sick; and though it strained budgets, she had gone through some veterinary treatment. Then, at one month’s meeting, we learned that the poodle farm-dog had succumbed to her illness.
The Kevin FitzPatrick poem I perform today came shortly thereafter. For me, this poem works well, even though intellectually it could seem maudlin or sentimental if summarized. We should be wary of such reduction — poems are much more than AI summaries. Kevin undercut the merely weepy here with his dry sense of humor and understated anger — and then too there’s the poem’s sensual detail: a man at work with the remains and memories of a working dog, the corpse as light as a cardboard cutout, the unthawed March cold.
The poem’s ending has extra poignance for me: it was not that long after the poem was written, and the collection that contained it, Still Living in Town,*** was published, that Kevin unexpectedly took sick and died. I think I remember talking with Kevin — before that knowledge on either of our parts — about liking the final part of the poem, how it implies that when the fear and final of death might come to the poem’s speaker, that the dog’s spirit, preceding over the hill, that hearth and home animal in-between livestock and us humans, would be there faithfully there to assuage the fear of what may be nothing in an empty darkness. I call the piece today “Kevin FitzPatrick’s Farewell” because to me its writer ended up making that statement while writing a poem about a farm dog.
Kevin heard a couple of my performances of his poems, and his feedback was that I overstated them — and my performances were certainly different from his. He had that drier Robert Frost reading tone down whenever I saw him do public readings, mixed with the kind of Irish wit that evidences just a slightest eye twinkle and unvocalized “a-ha!” while it spears some folly with an off-hand brickbat or dagger. So, to honor that contrast between us I had to fire up the electric guitar and make the speaker in his poem a little shoutier than Kevin. You can hear that performance of mine with the audio player below. No audio player to be seen? Listen: Katie is barking that you can use this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Kevin and Ethna took to hosting a poetry reading every St. Patrick’s Day. The last ones not at some Lake Street dive bar, but at a more tony academic site: The University Club near St. Paul’s Summit Avenue. I’m not Irish, but personally I don’t favor the mandatory cute intoxication elements endemic to that celebration, so I preferred a spotlight on that culture’s poetic side. As the holiday approaches this year, I’m planning to get to Ethna’s poetry too in time for St. Patrick’s Day.
**I admire conciseness. I’ve sometimes compared Kevin’s poems to the narrative poems of Robert Frost. While Frost’s longer blank-verse narrative poems have their power and richness, it’s not the mode that I read for pleasure. Kevin’s rural life poems take more after Frost’s shorter narrations like the “Mending Wall.” And Kevin’s poems make more use of humor than Frost’s do.
Today is International Women’s Day, and I was fortunate to be able to complete this recording of a new musical piece setting a poem by Alice Dunbar-Nelson before the day ended.
“I Sit and Sew” is likely Dunbar-Nelson’s best-known poem — it’s certainly the first one I knew of. I’d encountered it as a poem written amid WWI during the years this Project was noting that conflict’s centenary. “I Sit and Sew” still comes up fairly often in regards to war and destruction, or because it mentions domestic, woman-associated work in the context of the greater world.
I noticed one other element in re-reading it this week: it seemed to me to relate to another line of woman-associated work: medical nursing. Having spent a couple of decades doing nursing work myself, the poem’s focusing-in on the trauma and injuries of warfare really made me think Dunbar-Nelson wasn’t just thinking generally, writing something that could be paraphrased as “War is terrible, and yet here I am peacefully making or mending something with needle and thread, as women have for millennia.” There’s nothing wrong with experiencing the poem that way, as a companion-piece perhaps to Hardy’s “In the Time of the Breaking of Nations” — but I’m a person who often asks questions while reading.
While the poem can stand on its own, I wondered if Dunbar-Nelson herself wanted to serve as a nurse.* Short answer: this issue has additional complications. Currently in the United States we’re suffering from numerous outlandish statements and acts snuffing out complexities of diversity, but historically women’s wartime work, including nursing, is tightly connected with increasing respect and civic equality for women.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson was an Afro-American woman. The U.S. armed forces were segregated during WWI, and the roles available to the non-White military were limited along with that, based proximally on rules about race-mixing no-doubt supported by a pervasive background of racial superiority. A few years back, while learning about another poem, I came upon the case of Col. Charles Young, a Black West Point educated officer with experience in two foreign deployments who couldn’t get himself utilized as America mobilized for WWI. The situation for Black Americans who wanted to work overseas as nurses was also exclusionary. I’ve found out Dunbar-Nelson was working as a national organizer, a member of something called the Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense, and her focus was on Afro-American support of the war effort. She published today’s poem in 1918, and after the war she wrote up a summary of Black women’s WWI efforts.
We Wear the Mask Dept. I found this ad here in another post mentioning this poem. In her article linked above, Dunbar-Nelson mentions, in passing, (pun intended) that some lighter-complexion Afro-Americans snuck through the overseas nursing service ban.
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No long post today, that’s a start for anyone who wants to dig deeper.
The song I made out of her poem came together more efficiently than many, partly because it began before I knew I was making a song. This week I remodeled a nearly 30-year-old Squier Telecaster that I had put a Bigsby vibrato bridge on a decade or so ago. This guitar and that bridge just never worked out. I couldn’t get the neck angle and string height right, the saddles rattled, and the strings slipped sideways when I bent strings. After some looking, I unearthed the guitar’s original non-vibrato bridge and put it back on.** The guitar was transformed. Back when I put on the Bigsby I’d also installed a set of upgraded replacement pickups, and with the string-path mechanics sorted out, the guitar played and sounded great! While I was resetting the action/intonation etc., I quickly made a short musical piece on my recording computer that would let me play strummed chords, arpeggiated chords, and single-note lead lines over three separate sections — just so I could have fun while seeing if I’d eliminated all issues.
Funny how fast you can compose, if you’re not composing. I saved the drum pattern, the bass track, and the keyboard noodling after testing the guitar, thinking “Hey, I like that groove, might be useful.” This morning, I had about an hour when I could open a mic and record. I loaded the saved rhythm tracks, worked them into a longer song-form, recorded the guitar parts using the transformed guitar, and found that I could sing Dunbar-Nelson’s poem to this.
You can hear it with the audio player below. No player? It’s not hiding under a box, it’s just some ways of reading this blog suppress the player gadget. This highlighted link will open a tab with its own audio player.
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*”Nursing” is a very broad word covering a wide range of caring work and levels of technical knowledge. Dunbar-Nelson’s write-up seems to indicate the women’s war work she was promoting covered a range of things, not just licensed medical nursing as we know it this century.
**One difficulty was that the original — like the Vibramate-brand vibrato bridge I took off — was a non-standard bridge. When I finally found the original bridge, it was sitting underneath a storage box in my studio space. Luckily, like most Telecaster parts, it’s not a fragile thing. By the way, I’m not knocking Vibramate’s hardware. I’ve used Vibramate products to add Bigsby vibrato bridges to other guitars with good results, and their “Spoiler” accessory for Bigsby bridges makes restringing or replacing a broken string a much calmer experience.
A friend of the blog noticed today I used a particular phrase when I wrote about late-night work on the musical piece you can hear below. I’ll try not to take too much of your time, but I thought I’d expand on my explanation to him, and at the bottom you’ll be able to hear a 2-minute song made from a poem by Alfred Kreymborg.
The early years of the Parlando Project benefited from several things that are not in as great a supply now: I had multiple days in each week when I could work on finding and making these musical pieces. I worked regular workday hours on this, beginning after my morning bicycle ride for breakfast. I was eight years younger then, and those days were filled with rewarding creative work as I learned more about musical composition and recording technology. Shortly after the public launch of the Parlando Project, we had a consequential election in America,* but that (if anything) increased the energy I found most weeks.
Those who happen upon early posts here might notice a tone that isn’t as common in recent years. Without announcement, I was writing back then with my child in mind as an audience. They were going to be entering the 6th grade, and I vividly recall from my own youth how a great vista of complex, connective, and evaluative thought opens up around that age. I wasn’t going to make it a point to them to read this — adolescents aren’t looking for that sort of thing from parents — but rather more, I thought others in their peer group might come upon this Project and find some interest in my promotion of discovery and enjoyment. Working from that aim, as my child grew, I gradually changed the age group I was aiming the blog writing here at — though I don’t know if I ever achieved an adolescent audience.
Then a few years ago my family went through a series of crises, and it was only after a period of distress that the wise and resourceful members of my little family met those issues and managed them. I tried to be supportive — I probably was, to my imperfect degree — but that work was largely their doing. I’ll say that in that year or so of the greatest distress, my time spent here was a tonic for me from the stress and worry. How much of that was (in the modern terminology) “self-care,” and how much was temporary flight from responsibility? I can’t say, my perspective is too close-in.
But now in the past year or so, the time I can devote to this Parlando Project is constrained by external and internal factors. By choices outside my control, days go by when I’m restricted from recording, and even the blocks of assured time to compose or research are harder to come by. At the same time my energy endurance is lower as I age. As grateful as I remain to have the opportunity to do this Project, I guilt and grumble as an old codger when an opportunity comes — time when I can play or record — and at that moment my body is saying: take a nap instead. If I could schedule creative time, if I was to ask for concessions to schedule it, I’d probably face complex outcomes and reactions when my old body can’t be assured the energy levels and ready fingers like my 70-something self could.
Let me be complexly-clear about that though: that frustration doesn’t outweigh the gratitude. To have the opportunity and resources to do this Project remains a blessing! I just have to work with this, that’s all.
Here’s one “how” of that: after everyone in the house has gone to sleep early, or is at work on an evening shift outside our home — I can do my work, as long as it’s in silence. Knowing this, I often get a “second-wind” after 8 or 9 PM or so. I might spend this time researching or writing early or final drafts of these posts. There’s even limited music-making that can be done without making noise. I can go over the things I have been able to record, evaluate if they are worth using, perhaps adding additional parts silently using my little plastic keyboard, and mix the results into something suitable for releasing to the public. So: the hours between 9 PM and 1 AM have increasingly become working hours for the Parlando Project.
I’ve come to call that time “burning the midnight lamp.” As I told my online friend this morning, that phrase is taken from two particular sources — ones you might not guess could be combined.
“Burning the Midnight Lamp” is a song, a lesser-known “deep cut,” by Jimi Hendrix. The song had a long gestation, Hendrix struggled to complete it. It was written early in his Jimi Hendrix Experience career, while living in London. Hendrix was a young man who previously had been in the care of a succession of childhood relatives, foster homes, and then a short Army barracks stint followed by couch-surfing until this point. For the first time he had his own place, shared with a woman in what sounds like an equality of love.** That Hendrix London flat has been restored to appear as it did then, and when I visited it some years back I thought of what a special place it must have seemed to him. I imagine his thoughts: my own place, paid for with my own money, living on my own recognition, work done under my own name. In anyone’s life (not just a “rock star”) the time when one has achieved that — that’s something.
Here’s an odd connection: when you visit the site it’s a joint institution. Hendrix’s apartment is upstairs, but the main floor is laid out to reflect another emigrant musician of another era: this address was also George Frideric Handel’s London home.
When Hendrix was searching for the extra sound needed to complete his “Burning the Midnight Lamp,” he found the recording studio he was in had an odd instrument present: a harpsichord. Comparing Hendrix’s guitarist skills to my own would be laughable, but things even out in naivete when at the musical keyboard. Today’s song uses piano, but I had to play separate right and left hand tracks to realize the simple part. Likewise, Hendrix hacked out a little harpsichord part for his song. Was Hendrix tipping his hat to his downstairs ghost with that harpsichord?
Why did Hendrix write his tune about working late within the endemic uncertainty of creatives using the image of a lamp? No guess. But another lamp, elsewhere, in another visit: something I recall when visiting Emily Dickinson’s bedroom was the little table that was her writing desk. On the small top of the table was a whale oil lamp. Dickinson, living with her family in a household, with household tasks and human needs that would take the daylight hours, had this little mid-19th Century, middle-class luxury of a warm effective light to work by after the busier-with-others’ hours.
“Ready for the same old explosion/Going through my mind…” A small writing table and lamp in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom (photo from the Emily Dickinson museum)
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Looking at Dickinson’s lamp, I thought of the whole system that represented: the swimming mammals of the dark, cold sea, the diverse Moby Dick industry which captured, killed and deconstructed those massive bodies — and so, extra hours glowing with North Atlantic juice opened for a woman to scribble and sew little booklets. If I’d try to tell these thoughts and feelings when looking at the lamp to the average person, they’d sense a disproportion. Someone might even harrumph to me “It’s just a lamp — an unexceptional, domestic thing.” Readers here? You’re not that sort of person — and on her part, Dickinson too, she had further thoughts.
And so I continue, to burn the midnight lamp. Alone.
Today’s results came after a week of disappointing myself as I looked for some words to express what I was feeling, words that would ask me to sing them out even with my inexact and unprofessional voice. I was seeking words that would add something hopeful in a time of extraordinarily slipshod callousness carried out with motives of punishment as a virtue. It was this short poem by early American Modernist poet, editor, and publisher Alfred Kreymborg that captured me.
As I often say here under these chord sheets: someone out there can likely sing this song better than I can.
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Last post here was a series of inspirational maxims carried by a Jazz musician. Maybe Kreymborg’s “Credo” seems a little too hopeful, too earnest for some of you. It’s probably not the sort of poem you’d first think of as an early text of American Modernist poetry from a colleague of William Carlos Williams, Man Ray, and Mina Loy. Little matter, I felt I needed to sing it. That’s enough for now.
You can hear my performance of “Credo” with the graphical audio player gadget below. No gadget? It’s not that you didn’t keep your lamplight trimmed and burning, it’s just that some ways of reading this suppress showing the player gadget. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Decades before, longtime Parlando contributor Dave Moore and I started the LYL Band just before Ronald Reagan’s election. Then too something that wasn’t very good for the country paradoxically encouraged creativity as contrast.
Early this morning, I was reading a blog of a modern avant garde poet who has lots of philosophic theories about prosody, and there this quote of Walter Benjamin’s is brought up: “To write history is to give dates their physiognomy.” Well, yes, I thought, that’s what I’ve been doing in this Black History Month series. This scrapbook, its photographs, ephemera, ads, and clippings from newspapers — all a picture of the history of an American Black man: Lawrence Kasuth “Hank” Hazlett, a musician and singer who lived from 1911 to 1990. That scrapbook that had come into my hands portrays his nation-touring time in the 1940s and a residence in South Minneapolis in the 1950s. When it comes to civil rights or diversity, we tend to see change, or the preceding things that needed to change, from a later vantage point. The scrapbook documents such a preceding time, and the sort of things that musician Frank Zappa liked to call “mutations” — the tiny breaking of norms. But, isn’t it just a scrapbook?
There are pieces in the scrapbook that may give us a glimpse into what its maker noted and selected to save. In the last post, we saw a picture of Hazlett playing on stage with a white bass player with the hippest of truncated neckwear — but overall, the performance photos show black musicians with him, playing (as far as I can see) to black audiences. Yet, here’s a photo from the scrapbook that stood out from that segregated norm:
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In this photograph two black men (the one on the left appears to be Hazlett) are sitting on a cheap enameled-bedstead bed eating. Sitting on the same bed is a white woman and behind those three, a white man in a dark suit is standing. Black and white, men and the woman are smiling. It looks like an inexpensive hotel room, and maybe they’re all on tour.
On the back of the postcard they wrote: To Edith and Hank. So nice meeting you, it’s a pleasure to be an entertainer along with you. Jeannie Bill and Don
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The scrapbook also collects this promotional picture postcard for an act called Jennie and her Boyfriends, who issued a single 45 RPM do-wop style record in 1959. Jeannie in the promo picture has a completely different hairstyle and hair-color, but it’s plausible this is her and one of the members of her trio in the bed-sitting photo.
Also in the last post in the series, we showed some clippings in the scrapbook of Black entertainers working to defeat limiting stereotypes, but one thing that struck me was that the scrapbook also contains clippings showing white entertainment figures. Ephemera in the book, like that MGM W2 form from ’44 and Los Angeles addresses for Hazlett make me think that he might have had at least tenuous connections with some of them during the 1940s. Here’s a page from the scrapbook showing a clipping featuring Lana Turner, which may have been included because its caption says Turner likes Duke Ellington records.**
Lana Turner isn’t into vinyl, she’s spinning shellac.
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These are old clippings, sometimes from lower-res reproduction, and occasionally I’m misled by the ambiguities of race in the photographs. Take this one of Jean Parks found on this page with both white and Black entertainment figures. I figured she was white.
Find the second Afro-American woman on this page.
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Those who’ve followed this blog will know that I was immediately saying to myself “Who’s Jean Parks?” The story outlined from asking that is as rich or richer than the story of Bruce Dybvig from earlier in this series. WWII military service put a crimp on the supply of male musicians — so just as with other occupations, there soon arose a number of female bands — Rosie the Riveter, only with saxophones. Popular pre-war bands often enough had female singers, and there were a smattering of woman pianists (and small-group guitarists) — but women playing horns, reeds, drums in big bands— important featured instruments in those ensembles — I can’t think of one. Then came the war and mobilization. All of a sudden there were groups entirely made up of Black or white lady musos sprung full borne from the brow as it were.
One of those was Eddie Durham’s All-Star Girl Orchestra. OK, now we’re studying history, so we have to do dates. It’s Victory over Japan Day, the war is over. In NYC a sailor grabs a nurse in a crowd without her consent, starts kissing her in front of a cameraman, and everything thinks this is splendid because the immense horrors of world war are over — and the, you know, sissy stuff of regular old living is to return. The All-Star Girl Orchestra are in the middle of an engagement on the opposite coast, in Oakland California. The link above says that manager Durham sees that the men are going to return — and just then, dissolves the act. Well, sort of. Some remainder is rebranded around singer Jean Parks. As it turns out, the post-WWII years will be tough for all big bands — and all-around, the all-girl band thing doesn’t survive the peace.
And here’s what happens when Parks meets the world of The Fifties. Just look at the bad-girl triple-double implied and indicted in this paragraph: Black, caught with a 6-foot-tall platinum blond “friend”/roommate, sex-work — and drugs? We got’em all: reefer, opium, cocaine. Other than a Communist Party membership card signed Mr. and Mrs. and documents linking her to a plot to cancel Howdy Doody, this is complete “All-Star” material.***
Seeing that other headline on the Jet cover, and suddenly I’m a teenager in the back row of the classroom muttering to a classmate “I must be drinking the wrong kind of booze.”
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Two other pictures in the scrapbook seem to tell some kind of story about connections between the races, likely in Minneapolis in the ‘50s. There’s this snapshot, pasted on the same page as the similarly posed picture I speculated last time might be of a child of the Hazletts. I have no idea who Maxine is, or who’s Chuck. But as with the other pictures and accounts in today’s post, I’d reckon that mixed race connections like this had elements of risk beyond just social disapprobation. White school integration riots, Emmett Till, the beating and burning of the Freedom Riders buses, all were contemporary with the scrapbook.
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Then there’s this picture, inscribed to Hank’s wife Edith and so presumably from the early 1950s. So many of us have awkward school-picture-day photos, but I found this one more arresting than awkward. This is hard to detail, so I’m going to be more awkward than the picture, where after all Loretta is smiling and seems comfortable with themselves: Loretta looks quite masculine. Unattributed, it could easily be a 20-year-later photo of a mullet-head male guitar player in someone’s high school rock band. Burn-out the long-point blouse collar and retouch the long tresses in the back and it would be a 1950s boy who wants to grow up to play in Elvis’ band.
Loretta.
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There’s no other context other than the inscription and being in the scrapbook. Looking at Loretta’s photo this month I immediately thought of “Get Back,” the Beatles lyric. Some of you may be singing the applicable verse in your head now that I’ve said that. My second thought: I’d love to know Loretta’s story, but there’s next to no chance I ever will.
And now a transition that may or may not be apt. There are several pictures of Hank Hazlett, and Hazlett with his Trio, dressed in drag. I can’t place the club stage shown in most of the pictures. The Telecaster he’s playing says this is likely during the Fifties when he’s largely working out of Minneapolis, and it may be a Minneapolis club. Everyone looks like they’re having a good time, and dressing in drag is a multivalent act that can be meant to convey different things.
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Everyone seems to be having a good time. Of course, right now we know it’s supposed to mean danger to children, and therefore we must let rich folks get richer so they can stop those goings on, because…religion. That’s a very serious opinion, mandate and all — you ought to pay attention to it instead of looking at this approaching 20,000 word series on — what? — a scrapbook about a Black musician who few have even heard of. And the scrapbook is mostly pictures, where’s the meaning in them? Of course, then there are these other Walter Benjamin quotes: “Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future” and “We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them, when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.” Benjamin’s life, which we know more about than Hank, or Edith Hazlett’s, or Loretta’s life, could be called in to rebut those quotes. In a corporeal sense, he had little future, books didn’t extend his human, breathing, skin-coated living. But Benjamin did have his quotes, groups of words that might work like poems to let us see something new, and there are even some who will read philosophy at length.
There’s a new musical performance today, taken from a piece of folded and unfolded paper that was pasted into the Hazlett scrapbook. Did Edith carry it? Did Hank? On it, in faded pencil, are written 6 quotes, 6 maxims that someone wanted to carry in order to carry on. They are from a mixed-bag of writers, numbered 1-6 on the page, and in which order I read them in this performance: M. B. Whitman, H.D. Thoreau, Lloyd C. Douglas, Helen Keller, Herbert Kaufman, and Ambrose Bierce.
You can hear that performance with the audio player below. What? No player to be seen? Well, there’s injustice, carelessness, and cruelty we don’t see, and that’s a bigger deal than a couple of minutes of me dressing up in weird Jazz-band drag and reading some inspirational quotes — but you could use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Marv Goldberg mentions that the Cats and the Fiddle might have had some involvement with the 1945 MGM Judy Garland film The Clock, which would have been several years and lineups past the original Cat’s quartet burst of Hollywood film appearances in 1938 — those all even before they had made their first appearance on recordings. A 1945-released film would have overlapped the time that Hazlett was in the Cats, could explain the 1944 W2. Mysteriously, I distinctly recall seeing a clipped advertisement for that movie when I first looked into the scrapbook years ago, thinking I should check the film out — but for some reason it isn’t in the scrapbook now.
***Like The Clock ad, I also distinctly remember seeing an article about someone in entertainment arrested for prostitution when I first looked through the scrapbook years ago. It too is missing now. The scrapbook was part of at least one move, and when I look at it now, I have to take care, as it’s falling apart. I now suspect that might have been more on the Parks case. The All-Star Girl Orchestra could have shared bills with the Cats in Hazlett’s time — they played the same theater circuit during WWII.
My feature this February has been centered around an Afro-American scrapbook entrusted to me after it was found in a crawlspace at a former South Minneapolis rooming house in the middle 1970s. This series has taken me away from the usual Parlando focus, which is combining literary poetry with original music in differing styles. If you’ve been missing that, look to the bottom of today’s post — I’ll have something new for you today.
This exploration has taken a tremendous amount of time and effort, and I sometimes doubt how many readers will share my level of interest in looking back at what’s in and surrounding that scrapbook. It seems worthy of notice to me, and that supports my mind and heart work in this month’s effort. I did warn at the start of this series that what I’m writing here is coming fresh from an examination of the scrapbook, and some of my findings will be preliminary or subject to better evaluation — even little things in this larger than usual collection of writing. I just finished fixing a handful of typos on the previous episode that escaped my eye last night before I went to sleep, and now it’s time for the next one.
As a document the scrapbook spends a lot of time in the World War Two years. The book’s leading man, guitarist and singer Hank Hazlett, got his big show-business break then with the Jazz quartet The Cats and the Fiddle,* and the scrapbook evidences notice of the war in the things its maker chooses to include.
Here’s a Roy Wilkins column collected by the scrapbook maker rejecting racial prejudice in the US armed forces published during the war.
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And here are a few more war related clippings in the scrapbook.
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Another war-related story included in the scrapbook is a newspaper clipping that tells us of the Hank Hazlett era Cats opening for and then backing Lena Horne in a musical appearance in front of a hospital’s wounded soldiers. The Cat’s opening set was “Stomp, Stomp,” I Miss You So,” “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” with “Another Day” as their encore. With Horne at the mic, the combo supported her singing “Sometimes,” Stormy Weather,” and “Honeysuckle Rose.”
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Having this dated letter from 1944 pasted next to the baby picture opens a theory regarding a possible child of Hank and Edith that I wrote about yesterday. A 1940s child could be part of Hank’s deferment, could be the right age to write Felicia’s letter to Daddy a few years later quoted in yesterday’s post, and later yet could also be a young, teenage woman, the subject of another picture in the scrapbook. That the thank you letter is addressed to Hank indicates to me that he might have been the de facto bandleader for the Cats and the Fiddle during his time with them. He was likely 6 or 7 years older than the other Cats in addition to taking the place of their regular lead singer — so, that role might have fallen to him.
A strong theme throughout the scrapbook is Afro-American pride and their struggle for equity in the arts. Many clippings demonstrate that the maker of the scrapbook was concerned with the stereotyping and constraints on Black entertainers and some clippings celebrate their achievements in overcoming that. Here are a few of those items from the scrapbook:
Did a bronze man create this? Yes. A.C. Hollingsworth created Bronze Man in Blue Beetle #42. As in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous poem, he was to “wear a mask.” Publishers changed things though. See this link.
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I wondered about a series of cartoons in the scrapbook. All white characters, nothing about music. What was the reason the scrapbook took note of them? The cartoonist E. Simms Campbell. was the first Afro-American cartoonist published in the big time U.S. “slick” magazines. His Wikipedia page says his work appeared in nearly every issue of Esquire magazine from 1933 to 1958, and in many other publications.
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Dialectic, but make it funny: the clipping tells us Timmy Rogers was a Black comic who wanted to move beyond the blackface fool stereotypes. More info on Rogers. I can find nothing on Crackshot, though he’s given his clipping in the scrapbook too.
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The entire multipage program for this landmark stage production starring the multi-talented Paul Robeson was pasted into the scrapbook.
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Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Butterfly McQueen. Three black women in entertainment who needed to struggle for non-stereotyped parts in the ‘40s. And keeping with our WWII subject, here are the Cats jamming with a white G.I. on bass. The armed forces may have been segregated, but music has established a beachhead. I note too, the scrapbook maker is paying considerable attention to women in the arts.
I knew about Lena Horne and Paul Robeson.
I knew about Robeson, Horne, Dandridge et al. I’d never heard of Pearl Primus before this month’s examination of the the scrapbook. Her Wikipedia entry tells what she did. This, Robeson’s Shakespeare, and the comics artists above are examples of how the scrapbook’s maker wasn’t just interested in music, but had a broad interest in the arts.
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Our summary today: not all warriors carry a gun. We’ve had war today, and prejudice, and stereotypes — and me writing a bunch more words (with maybe fewer typos). So, let’s have a little music, and poetry — and love not war. Here’s a poem by Afro-American poet Alice Dunbar Nelson written in the last decade to be called The Twenties. This may be Black History Month, but all I read next to my breakfast each morning this month is telling me that the nonsensical denigration of Black American military and cultural contributions along with a side-helping of gay panic isn’t history, just as it wasn’t history to the maker or makers of the scrapbook. To hear Dunbar-Nelson’s poem “You! Inez!” as I sang it to music composed today in-between typing this, you can use the audio player gadget below. No player? Elon hasn’t fired it, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*A founding member and most often featured singer of the Cats and the Fiddle was drafted. The scrapbook doesn’t deal with this, but I did wonder why Hank or other members of that quartet weren’t drafted. Hank Hazlett was born in 1911, and in 1940 he’d have been 29. The WWII draft was different than the Vietnam draft I’m most familiar with — in my day, most called up were younger than 27. In WWII draft men up to age 35 were commonly drafted. I only know the age of one of the original Cats quartet, but the bass player would have been 22 in 1940, and since the original quartet all knew each other from high school, I’m assuming they were near the same age — yet, as far as I know only Austin Powell was drafted. This is a complicated subject and we know so little about the men in the Cats. There were classes of deferments for various reasons, and even stories that some draft boards didn’t want to draft Afro-Americans for Jim Crowish reasons — this even though the Armed Forces were segregated throughout the war. There were also stipulations for physical condition that histories tell us bedeviled the system during WWII. One oft cited report had it that in the draft first year, 1940, “nearly half the men drafted were sent home” for not being fit enough for service.
Or course a great many Afro-Americans did work in war-industry, or were drafted or volunteered for the military, despite the Armed Forces still hewing to the Jim Crow segregation/white superiority regime of mid-century America.
Last time an Afro-American 35-year-old singer and skilled guitarist named Hank Hazlett had left The Cats and the Fiddle, a swing Jazz quartet made up of Chicagoans, when that group’s founding and featured singer returned after serving in the armed forces during WWII. Hazlett had been standing in for that man, and though he never recorded with the Cats* he got experience touring the best Black-oriented entertainment venues of the 1940s and interacting with other acts that the Cats shared bills with.
Hazlett must have decided he was comfortable fronting a band. In the scrapbook that is the centerpiece of this series, we can find two posed large-format glossy promo photos taken at a professional studio in Chicago of his next act: The Hank Hazlett Trio.
Interesting pairing visually. One with all black suits against a white background, the other all white against a black background. Could be simple use of contrast, but the poet in me sees metaphor.
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That photo studio location indicates they were formed in Chicago. The trio was touring in 1947, as the scrapbook contains a letter from a San Antonio radio station thanking the group for an appearance there. I’ve also found this ad for a 1949 Trio appearance in Denver.
The Cats and the Fiddle had played Denver more than 10 years earlier in an early gig before Hazlett joined up. By now this venue says it’s in “The Heart of Denver’s Harlem.”
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Unlike the scrapbook material from Hazlett’s Cats in the Fiddle stint, there are no clipped-out ads for appearances by the Hank Hazlett Trio pasted into the scrapbook. We don’t know who sang in the Trio, and I can’t be certain what kind of music they played either. The rapid, chopped chord-change swing Jazz of the Cats was morphing into what was renamed as Rhythm and Blues, a term invented by music journalist soon to be Atlantic records principal Jerry Wexler to replace the previous music business term “race records.” R&B could include former Jazz band vocalists who now fronted small combos, vocal harmony groups like the Cats or their more successful and smoother contemporaries the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots, and the newly plugged-in Black rural and southern singers who had moved north to play a gruffer, harder-edged electric Blues. Basically R&B was rock’n’roll, just not named that yet, and with a much smaller white musician contribution when the term was coined.
The first reports I can find of the Trio performing has them backing a Missouri-born by way of Chicago female R&B singer Donna Hightower which are collected on Marv Goldberg’s website.**
The Cats had played as a band for female singers, including backing Lena Horne with Hazlett on guitar.
August 1952 Minneapolis Spokesman (another Black newspaper) wrote this:
The musicians who are playing at the Key Club are Hank Hazlett, leader and Spanish guitar; Maurice Turner, bass fiddle; Buddy Davis, piano and vibraphone; Donna Hightower, Decca recording artist and vocalist. The musicians are all from Chicago and staying at the home of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Gray, 420 E. 37th St.”
That “staying-with” address is in the heart of Black South Minneapolis and would be two short blocks from a Portland Ave address we’ll meet just down the page. Goldberg has them playing at the Key Club in a long-term engagement until New Years Eve. Here’s what the St. Paul Recorder (the other Twin Cities Black newspaper) has to say (with Goldberg’s interjected corrections):
The Hank Hazlett Trio, composed of Buddy Davis, pianist and Maurice Turner, base [sic] drummer, along with the capable leader of the combo Hank Hazlett is now playing at the Key Club, 1229 Washington Ave So., every night and Sunday afternoon matinees.
The popular trio featuring Dinah [sorry Donna] Hightower, vocalist, got its start in Chicago in 1947 and has played successful engagements in many outstanding nightclubs.
Miss Hightower with her ultra modern version of popular music, seems to have a way with the patrons. The entertainers will be here through the holiday season.”
Don’t look for it now, this location was demolished for the I35 freeway.
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If you want more details about The Key Club aka South of the Border, the Twin Cities Music Highlights website has much to read. Many national Jazz and R&B luminaries played at this establishment in the Seven Corners portion of Minneapolis’ West Bank neighborhood. Lots of seedy goings-on too, as this era of the Minneapolis Jazz and music scene often finds stripper acts, guns, and likely mob connections intermingling with the musicians.
This YouTube video dub of an acetate (demo or proof record) is the only audio artifact of the Hank Hazlett Trio I’ve found. Donna Hightower sings backing vocals. The guitar and likely the lead vocal is Hank.
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Around the time of this extended engagement, it seems that Hazlett moved to the Twin Cities, setting up residency at 3648 Portland Ave in South Minneapolis, six blocks from where the scrapbook was found. Why there?
From what I can gather, Minneapolis has a strange and complex racial history, so please excuse these meager paragraphs that try to summarize the highlights of my incomplete understanding that follows. Minneapolis has long had some Black residents, and when it gathered more in the first waves of the Great Migration after WWI, there was white backlash. One instrument of that backlash were special clauses put into property deeds excluding transfer of those deeds to non-white or Jewish buyers. In theory government courts would need to be called in to enforce these racial covenants, but in practice these were often a silent exclusionary agreements, though they were sometimes enforced in breach by mobs of sullen whites who would surround an incursive Black occupied home with threats and vandalism against this blatant integration. This private customary segregation was later reinforced around mid-century by “red-lining,” a practice by home-loan issuers (including federal government loans) to exclude writing mortgages in Black areas. All of this, pretty rotten stuff — but perfectly “normal” and widespread in the United States, not just Minneapolis.***
In Minneapolis there were two sections of the city that became “Black:” one, on the north side of town (shared with a Jewish population that were often excluded by the same covenants and a higher than usual American level of local antisemitism), and the other, a vertical north-south strip in South Minneapolis. 3132 Park Ave was just on the borderline of these redline established sections. Even when I came to South Minneapolis in the ‘70s, you could see by the skin tones of the residents where those invisible lines sort of remained, to a fine resolution that could be almost block by block.****
Our 1953 musician Hank Hazlett lived in a house in the Black South Minneapolis area for several years, his only Minneapolis residence I can establish. I don’t know if he owned it, but the scrapbook maker was proud of it. There are a couple of photos clearly identifiable as his house, one with a new-looking or late-model 1953 Cadillac parked in front. I don’t know what his income was. The city directories continue to list him as musician, and at least in the mid-50s his local gigs were common. Even this late in the 20th century, when radio, television and recordings allowed music to be captured and transmitted on devices, live music was still a vital part of the experience of music. Perhaps for Hank the choice of Minneapolis went like this: I could tour from any city as my home base. The music scene in Minneapolis may be smaller than Chicago or LA, but on the other hand there are fewer Black bands competing for the club slots — and since it’s not a town to launch one’s new act to musical stardom, my middle-aged self may be able to settle down without having to directly compete with the most ambitious young acts.
One of the pictures of 3648 Portland Ave in the scrapbook. I’m assuming the car is Hazlett’s. The scrapbook has 1955 telegrams directing Hazlett and his trio to go from a gig at Williston ND to Sheboygan WI and that Scotts Bluff in Nebraska is cancelled. If they drove, that’d be a good car for this.
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The city directory records tell us that he had a wife, Edith. It could be that the marriage predates 1953, and there’s certainly lots of 1940s material in the scrapbook if she collected any of it then. There’s a possibility they have a child. The scrapbook is oh so scant on this. There are three photos of young children on its pages. The oldest by background clues may be as early as the 1940s, and it shows a young toddler standing in a quiet road that is not Portland Ave, and in pen on the bottom it says “Earl P. Jr. 2 years old.” Lawrence/Hank Hazlett isn’t Earl, and “Jr.” traditionally means a father’s name given to an offspring. And then there’s a pair of what looks to me like two snapshots of one child. One shot of this kid shows a smiling sub-1-year-old in their onesie. To the right of that photo is pasted another one of a young Black couple sitting in front of moon and stars backdrop. That man doesn’t look like Hank Hazlett to me, but not only are the two photos near each other, I can sort of see the baby looking like the child of that couple. It’s possible that the man in the moon and stars photo is a much younger version of the performer Hazzlett, who I have only older-age pictures of. And finally there’s a somewhat serious looking, slightly older child in a push stroller-scooter. The back of that last photo has a date: 1952.
This is the second set of baby pictures that I think may be the same child. The one in the middle is dated 1952. Do you think the moon & stars picture that’s pasted on the same page as the left-hand baby is a younger Hank? There’s another picture below of a woman that may be an older Edith Hazlett.
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There’s also a handwritten, child-like letter which I transcribe as:
Dear Daddy,
How are you? Fine I hope.
And all the others. We had a vary nice Christmas. Well today is the last day in the year and a new year is coming. Yvonne Dickie Gwen and myself are getting along fine in music. I love my fountain pen. We all like our fountains very much, our pens write fine.
Thanks for the money, Daddy. We were very glad to hear your voice. I have been over to whites ever since last Friday. White has a lot of Christmas cards. They are very pretty. Yvonne and Dickie White has a beautiful Christmas tree. I am glad you liked my present, and I know that picture is a good picture. White Chick and Marshall like there souvenirs very much. Well goodbye and good luck. With a lot of love
Felicia”
This could be an “on tour” letter to a traveling father from home — New Year’s Eve is always a prime gig opportunity. Or it could mean that the child doesn’t live with her father. Someone chose to put this letter in the scrapbook, and I believe the scrapbook was made by Hank, his wife Edith, or the two of them in collaboration. Knowing more would change the meaning of the letter.
Let me be clear: a musician’s life, particularly a touring musician, detracts from marital stability. Incomes change rapidly. Travel and late-night hours bring separation. Alcoholism and drug problems are endemic. Egos swell and are crushed and those changes can abrade a relationship.
The Minneapolis city directory tells us one more thing about Hank Hazlett’s home life. In 1958 the city directory records that Marian M. is now the wife at 3648 Portland. Marian is also listed as working for the Minneapolis Public Library. Hank is now 47, and the city directory doesn’t say “musician” next to his name — instead it says “banquet formn Dyckmann Hotel.” Same in ’59. In 1960 and ’61 Hank is shown at the 3648 Portland address, but he’s a musician and working at the Flame in Duluth, 150 miles north. In 1962 and ‘63 the musicians place of work is listed as the Manor House in St. Paul and the Downtowner Motel in ’63. Marian remains until the most recent city directory available listed as his wife.
The last Hank Hazlett Trio gig I have found a record of was at a strip club/lounge on Hennepin Ave called “The Copper Squirrel” in September of 1963.
Site of the last known Hank Hazlett Trio gig.
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I’ll admit, like someone looking at amorphous clouds in the sky I can picture these scenes: Marian isn’t necessarily up with the musician’s lifestyle. If Edith is the maker of the scrapbook or a collaborator in making of this document largely about her ex-husband’s life and music career she may have taken it with her. Out of spite or from fond memories of their days together? Maybe Marian didn’t want that scrapbook mostly about Hank’s earlier life around anyway? Who can say? Maybe it’s something else. There are no pictures in the scrapbook I can say for sure are post-1958. If Hank was the one making the scrapbook, maybe he had tired of documenting things.
Here are two picture which look like they could be the same woman found in different parts of the scrapbook. The man is Hank Hazlett, and I suspect that the woman would be Edith Hazlett prior to 1958. Edith may have been the person who made the scrapbook of her husband’s career, and may have been the one who put it in a crawlspace to be found in the mid-1970s.
Here’s a quartet of scrapbook photos of the Hank Hazlett Trio performing.
Hank with an Epiphone archtop in most of these photos, but a “blackguard” early ‘50s Telecaster in one. In the upper right there’s a woman holding down the pianist’s spot in the trio, and the white bass player there is crossing time and space with that tie he’s wearing to protest Donald Trump’s haberdashery sense and opinions about Black History Month.
In our next post we’ll track back a bit and talk about how the scrapbook includes the home-front World War II experience and what else it shows about American mid-century race relations and Afro-American cultural pride.
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*The WWII years caused considerable interruption in recording activity. Shellac, the hardened resin that 78 RPM records were made from came from a residue produced by overseas insects located across a warfront Pacific Ocean, and there were strikes by musicians labor organizations as they tried to extract concessions from entertainment companies during this time too.
**I’ve mentioned Marv Golberg’s site multiple times in this series. It’s full of marvelous details about Jazz and R&B artists of this era. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Marv.
***Just after the end of WWII the practice of racial covenants was taken to court, and in an early post-war civil rights victory, they were struck down nationally, but redlining was not addressed, and “it goes without saying” agreements to hew to segregation continued. Yet at the same time in the late 1940s, a young Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey saw to enactment of an early law against racial discrimination in hiring, giving promise that more job opportunities would open up for Black residents.
****By these 1970s properties in these parts of South Minneapolis were affordable, assuming you could swing the finances, because it was still considered a “bad part of town.” This led to some kinds of mostly young white people to move in: gay folks, and Boomer “hippies” and political radicals. Some of that generation are still alive, and still live there, and there’s a new influx: immigrants from Africa and Latin America.
Let’s open the scrapbook we’ve been talking about this month and look to see what it shows us about the beginnings of its central subject: the guitarist and singer Lawrence “Hank” Hazlett who’ve we know was a sometime member of a Jazz guitars-with-standup-bass quartet The Cats and the Fiddle. From previous posts in this series we know the Cats started in Chicago with a group of musicians that knew each other from high school. In 1937, while group members were not yet out of their teens, they left Chicago for Los Angeles and Hollywood where they managed to perform in a couple of small movies as themselves while also snagging a few appearances as extras in larger budget motion pictures. In 1939, back in Chicago, they get a contract with Bluebird records and start recording their material, most of which are short, self-written and self-accompanied songs, featuring Swing-Era hep-cat outlook, humor, and slang. Signed to the William Morris talent agency, they begin touring nationally.
I have not seen this picture elsewhere outside of the scrapbook. It shows the act as still represented by William Morris. The shadowy photography here of a dark skinned face in the lower left doesn’t make it certain, but this could be a rare promo shot of Hank Hazlett with the WWII-era Cats without their leader Austin Powell.
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As far as the scrapbook’s scope goes, Hazlett barely appears before joining the Cats midway in the combo’s career. The earliest thing the scrapbook has on him is a well-worn U.S. Employee Service Applicants Identification Card for Lawrence Hazlett. The card gives his address as 5159 Prairie Ave, but there’s no visible city. That address exists in the L.A. area near Lennox and W. Century Blvd., but also in Chicago’s Bronzeville — so we could place Hazlett in either city the Cats were active in during the late 1930s. The card has him 5’ 10” in height, 147 pounds, and there’s a filled-in blank that has the number 24 — I’m guessing that’s his age. Given that Marv Goldberg has Hazlett as being born in 1911 in St. Louis, that would make the card’s issuance as around 1935, and from that approximate date the card could be a government form related to unemployment insurance or the New Deal WPA.* There are two blanks to enter in “ssification” which I read as classification, a P. and S., with that second filled in as a “Jr. Artist.”
Anyone know more about this kind of ID card?
So, here we have the earliest thing I know for sure about the scrapbook’s leading man: a slip of paper from before the Cats and the Fiddle existed that says Hazlett may have pursued a career in art circa 1935.
Histories of the Cats and the Fiddle tell us that in 1943, Austin Powell, the most often featured lead vocalist of the all-singing and all-playing quartet was drafted. This would be a serious blow to the group. Recordings were scant during the war years, but the act was touring and likely had gigs to meet. Hank Hazlett is selected as Powell’s replacement. Like Powell he played guitar, and evidence suggests he may have been at least Powell’s equal on that instrument.** I also assume he was a good singer with some on-stage showmanship. We don’t know where Hazlett joined up with the Cats, but it’s likely in Chicago or L.A. We have one other document in the scrapbook with a firm date around this time, a W2 for the year 1944 which shows Hazlett earned $125 from Loews Inc, M.G.M Pictures of California giving Hazlett’s address then as 912 E. 27th St. in L.A. This might have been for work as a movie extra or musician.
Extra in a movie? Soundtrack work? Movie theater appearance?
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There are clippings and a few photos documenting the 2-3 years Hazlett was a member and touring with the Cats and the Fiddle in the scrapbook. Here are a few of them.
Some of the places and bills as Hazlett toured with the Cats and the Fiddle 1943-46. In the upper-center photo that’s Hazlett on the left playing a guitar that may be the one in the promo shot above.
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The hypnotist Capt. De Zita’s work? Typo on the headline and dubious hype that the Cats and the Fiddle are appearing in person in L.A. for the first time in 1944
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In 1946, Austin Powell is mustered out and returns to the group that is still working though not breaking through to upper levels of fame. Having the original lead singer back doesn’t seem to revive their career fortunes, though the act will continue until 1950. As far as anyone knows, Hazlett’s tenure with the Cats and the Fiddle ends when founding and featured member Powell comes back.
Hazlett seems to remain a professional musician though. There are new promo pictures made, taken by a Chicago-based photo studio for a new act: upright bass, piano, and Hazlett on guitar: the Hank Hazlett Trio. What we can see of them in the scrapbook is our topic for next time.
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*I’m thinking more likely the WPA. The Works Progress Administration was a unique New Deal program to counter the Great Depression. In sites around the country it gave jobs to workers, writers, actors, musicians, and artists to produce or teach various projects and works of art. I know little about Hazlett’s family or situation growing up, even how long he was in St. Louis, his stated birthplace. His place of death was Los Angeles in one report I’ve seen, so he may have some connections there. It’s only a feeling, but I’m guessing he may have had a middle-class Black family with exposure to arts and culture before we find him in the scrapbook as a nationally touring musician.
If I hold to my current plan, there are going to be several more posts this February as I tie up this series dealing with an Afro-American scrapbook found at the house I stayed at when I came to Minneapolis in the 1970s. Those missing the Parlando Project focus on literary poetry combined with original music here should eventually get a return to usual service before the start of U.S. National Poetry Month.
So, that scrapbook, the thing in the middle of this series — I talked to Dave Moore who bought an old South Minneapolis house in 1975, about its discovery this week. As we learned last post, 3132 Park Avenue was originally built as the sort of house for an early 20th century businessman or upper-middle-class family: four large bedrooms on the second floor, spacious rooms on the first floor (two of which could be joined by opening a pair of large pocket doors) and a separate interior set of stairs to an attic third floor which may have been designed as quarters for live-in help. I summarized the house’s history last time, including that from the 1940s on, the house had a succession of tenants after its long-time grain-trader owner died in 1939, eventually becoming a rooming house catering to Black residents. Shortly after moving in, Dave was on that third floor, and he noted a small, about 3×3 foot, access door on one wall where the slope of the roof descended to less than full height. Opening the door, he crawled inside. It’s been decades, but Dave is pretty sure that the scrapbook was found there. “Anything else in there?” I asked him. “I remember an old carpet sweeper.”
The house still had furniture when Dave decided to buy it. By the time he took ownership the real-estate firm had taken all of that out, emptied the house — so for the scrapbook to have survived, it was lucky to have been secreted in a crawl space. Did its owner or creator hide it there? Who could that person have been? Today I’ll give you my best guess, and in following days you’ll get to look inside the scrapbook to see the clues that led me to that guess. In looking at what the scrapbook includes, you’ll get to look inside a particular document of what had the attention of a 1940s American Black person.
My initial guess, back when Dave gave me the scrapbook in the ‘70s: I figured it was made by a fan of Jazz music, then the popular music of the 1940s. Noting the movie and performing stars pictures clipped from entertainment magazines and newspapers — and that it was after all a scrapbook — I thought the greater probability was that it was a woman. Scrapbooking is not something that many grown men engage in, and so I imagined a young woman entranced by performers.
Later as I found out more about the Jazz-vocal-quartet The Cats and the Fiddle who figure prominently in what was chosen for inclusion in the scrapbook, I changed my theory. I learned that a man named Lawrence Hazlett (who professionally went by the name Hank Hazlett, and whose last name has been misspelled as Haslett and Hazelett) had been, during the 1940s, a member of the Cats and the Fiddle. I’d overlooked personal items pasted in the scrapbook connected to Lawrence Hazlett that a mere music fan wouldn’t have: his 1944 pay stub from MGM, a Department of Labor ID card. Hazlett was born in 1911 in St. Louis according to Marv Goldberg’s info. He may have lived at times in Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles.* I changed my mind. This was a musician who was scrapbooking his career, and Hank Hazlett was that musician. At the start of the month, that’s what I thought I’d attribute the “authorship” of the compiled material in the scrapbook to.
I’ve now changed my mind again, due to this month’s research and closer re-examination of particular items included in the scrapbook, and my plan is that you’ll be looking over my shoulder at items in the scrapbook as I examine them in the next posts. These items engendered feelings, hunches — my attempts, however imperfectly but empathically, to think of why certain things were chosen to be saved and pasted on pages.
My current theory is that the scrapbook was made by a wife of Hank Hazlett, likely a woman named Edith I. Hazlett, with his collaboration.** If, instead, it’s my previous working theory that it was Hank himself documenting his life, the choices made in collating the material in the scrapbook would make him even more fascinating to me. The author (or collaborating authors) are more deeply and widely concerned with Black artistic expression than I would think most musicians were in the 1940s. There’s an undercurrent of feminist thought that can be extracted from some items in the scrapbook,*** though that may be a reflection of the decade of the 1940s when so many men were mobilized and out of the country. And dare I say it, at times there’s the slightest hint of gender non-conformity there too.****
It looks like the maker of the scrapbook altered the brand name of the now tattered scrapbook to Hazlett. The TV Troubleshooter booklet won’t tell you how to block annoying YouTube ads, nor offer fool-proof password sharing schemes. The torn photo may be a South Minneapolis snapshot of Hank Hazlett. Someone has to take snapshots (no selfies then) so it could be a clue that Hank isn’t the sole creator of the scrapbook.
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Guitarist and singer Lawrence “Hank” Hazlett lived in the South Minneapolis neighborhood that the scrapbook was found in from 1953 to at least 1963. He worked steadily there as a musician, leading his own Hank Hazlett Trio for most of that time, and at least occasionally playing with other groups. Minneapolis city directories and some online histories of the Minnesota music scene document this information. But there’s a strikingly absent bit of data there: he’s never shown as living at 3132 Park Ave where the scrapbook was found. Instead, he was consistently recorded in city directories as living six blocks away at 3648 Portland Ave. Starting in 1953 and 1955 Lawrence Hazlett is listed as a musician at that address, and his wife is named as Edith. In the 1957 directory Lawrence Hazlett is missing from the directory listing, but a Mrs, Marian M. Hazlett is listed as living at that address. This continues in 1958 with Lawrence listed as the head of household and Marian as his wife onward to the last Minneapolis city directory in the Minnesota Historical Society collection, Marian is also identified in one directory of this era as working at the Minneapolis Public Library. So somewhere in the mid-‘50s, it appears that Lawrence has a different wife. There are no firmly dateable items in the scrapbook that can be fixed after the middle-50s. There are a couple photographs that could be estimated (from woman’s clothing styles) as early 1960s, so I can’t eliminate Marian the Librarian as the collaborating collator, but the masses of things from Los Angeles including current events clippings from the ‘40s indicate the book may have started before Hazlett or his wife were known to be in Minneapolis. In my ranking, Marian would be third on the list after Edith and then Lawrence/Hank himself. In this theory, Edith may have stopped using Hazlett as her last name and ended up at the 3132 Park address in its Black rooming house phase, carrying with her the scrapbook of her days in Hollywood and the following years in the musical scene in Minneapolis with Lawrence/Hank.
In the next few posts we’re going to take a ride through the crumbling pages of this scrapbook in detail. The details will go a lot of places. If you haven’t figured this out about me yet, I love that about details.
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*The scrapbook has material listing addresses in LA and the Portland Ave. address in Minneapolis, and no other cities are explicitly listed as residences for Hazlett there.
**One surmise: Lawrence/Hank had off-handily collected stuff during his career, and his wife, seeing the value of what her husband did, decided to use a scrapbook to organize and present it, melding him in with other national entertainers. This might explain why things like publicity photos for line-ups of the Cats and the Fiddle dating from before Hank Hazlett was a member of the group are in there. That could be read as expressing symbolically “Here’s my husband, he’s good enough that they asked him to join this nationally-touring Jazz vocal group.
***There are also elements of laddish/Benny Hill-type sexual stereotypes in some cartoons — items that led my switch of maker-attribution to Lawrence/Hank — but the history of the cartoons broadened my understanding of them.
****Better scholars than this amateur, Afro-Americans who know by living things I’m ignorant of, or anyone who may have known the now dead people in the scrapbook may know better. I’m just an open-hearted person looking at this stuff and writing of my experience of it. I’m going to share an opportunity for you to do the same as the series next continues.
One of the things about writing this series surrounding a scrapbook connected with a 1930-‘50s Afro-American Jazz combo is to observe the risk of writing here as an old white guy in the 21st century about a bunch of young Black Chicago musicians and what I might suppose about their lives. The Cats and the Fiddle in the scrapbook took their shot in the world of art and entertainment, but they’re not famous guys. They lived their lives, as I’ve lived mine, as you likely will live yours, with few persisting details or indelible marks. Perhaps I’m overly fixated with looking for those marks.
In today’s piece I’m going to look at the house where that scrapbook was found. It still exists: 3132 Park Ave South in Minneapolis. I’ve looked to see what I could find out about that inanimate place and the people who passed through it. I hoped any details might help me figure out who collated and left that scrapbook. I found what preceded the scrapbook’s discovery sustained my interest.
Back in the first part of the series I recounted that I lived there briefly in 1976 while helping a friend whose words, voice, and keyboard playing has appeared here over the years, Dave Moore. Dave and his then wife had purchased the somewhat rundown house at an attractive price for their planned little family and their small business. I helped a bit with their work in fixing it up and getting the business going.
The house had character, and this young couple, my friends, hoped to honor part of it by making it look a little more like it did in the house’s youthful years at the beginning of the century, looking for clues in old style books and in the “bones” of the house. Similarly, today’s post is going to start as far back as I can find information.
As Minneapolis started to grow as an upper-Midwest business hub, Park Avenue was a broad, tree-lined boulevard that ran north-south through the middle of the city from the southern neighborhoods to the rail depot and centers of government, business, and milling which were fast being established in Minneapolis’ downtown. Park Avenue became a prime site for the commerce titans to build their mansions. In the mid-70s you could still sort of squint and image that era: the trees were still there, elder elm branches arched much of the way over the wide street, and a handful of the mansions still remained.*
3132 was not one of the mansions. In 1902 it was built by an A. E. Rydlum (or Rydlun) who was a builder, and it was complete and offered for sale in the Spring of 1903 by Thorpe Brothers, who were an active real estate sales firm in this era of rapid growth and building of new housing in Minneapolis. Here’s how Thorpe listed it:
For Sale-Modern house, ten rooms, hardwood finish throughout; full basement, nickel open plumbing, hot water heating plant, sideboard, china closet, mantels, bookcase. Location 3132 Park Av; easy terms; will be sold soon.”
The next notice of the house I found was a birth announcement later that year. A Mr. and Mrs A. J. MacDougall were listed as living there in that announcement. Next year, 1903, they place an ad seeking “a nurse girl, 12 to 15 years old” for service at 3132. In 1904 they place another, similar, ad: “A nurse girl from 14 to 16 years old for 3-year-old boy.”
When I was working on the house, an attic servant’s quarters and separate stairway were part of the house. There was still a bell in the pantry off the kitchen that had a ringer button on the floor of the dining room. How many servants eventually lived there? How long did a 12 or 14 year old childcare worker likely stay an employee? The McDougall child had a theater birthday party at the downtown Orpheum Theater in 1908. The original Minneapolis Orpheum was a 1500 seat, ornate vaudeville house that had been built in 1904.
A recent Streetview picture of 3132 Park Ave S, servants quarters behind the three dormered windows at top.
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I pictured a somewhat prosperous young family, that kind that the house seemed to be built for in this location. So, I thought Mr. MacDougall, the first owner of a fine large house with its attic servant’s quarters, was perhaps a middle-manager, a businessman, or the like. Then earlier this year I began to look at the city directories that are available from the Minnesota Historical Society. It might be helpful to my generation to say that these Directories were like the phone books of their time, a combination Yellow and White Pages of a city’s residents, businesses, and organizations — but younger readers will find that obsolete image useless. So let me reset: they were large books issued yearly, or near so, listing alphabetically by name the head of each household in a city, followed sometimes by the name of their spouse, sometimes by the name of their company or employer, and almost always by a general classification of their job.
No one is just their job, but as a shortcut to figuring out, however roughly, where someone and their family was in the class structure, city directories are a data source for everyday people in the past. Here’s what a series of annual Minneapolis city directories say about our MacDougall (whose first name was Allan or Allen — the first spelling used in earlier entries, and then the other):
1903 not in the directory. Likely the directory’s data predates his moving into 3132 Park
1904 he’s listed as “miller” living at our 3132 Park Ave. house
1905 his occupation is “lab,” short for laborer, living at 3132
1906 the “lab” adds that he works at “Washburn C” — Washburn Crosby was a large milling firm in Minneapolis that is now the corporation General Mills
1907 laborer again, no mention of what company, still living at 3132 Park
1908 job now changed to “foreman,” continues living at 3132 Park
1909 looks like he, still a foreman, (and likely his family, though none of these listings mentions his wife) now live at 3436 Columbus Ave, about three blocks away
This scant info tells me little and makes me wonder. Does a miller or an ordinary laborer afford this large new house — much less, live-in help, and theater birthday parties for his kid? Does the later classification as foreman tell us he wasn’t just a line worker? Was there a blip in the market that caused Thorpe to sell under normal market prices, or would they possibly rent an unsold house? Mortgage terms were shorter then, but moving a young family from a fine house in a great location after only 5 years could mean it turned out to be only aspirationally affordable to MacDougall.
The next residents appear in 1910 from the records I’ve found. A Mr. and Mrs. Peter W. Campbell — leaving a gap, 1909 is unaccounted for. The 1910 city directory lists him living at 3132 Park, and his daughter Elizabeth is married at the home that year. The newspaper account lists 25 guests at the wedding. The house I later knew had a big dining room and parlor joinable by opening a large set of pocket doors. I imagined that many guests, the bride and groom, the officiant. It’d be a cozy affair, but they’d probably all fit.
Peter Campbell is confirmed to be living at 3132 Park in the 1910 directory, but there’s no Peter Campbell in the 1911 Minneapolis directory at all, and he’s a boarder elsewhere in the city in 1912. These listings don’t list his job. This short-term occupancy for someone that doesn’t seem clearly homeowner class testifies against his ownership.
In 1910, during the same summer as the Campbell wedding, 3132 Park is listed for sale again: “”Elegant 8 room all modern home, fine lot, reduced price $6,250.” The house isn’t yet a decade old. It’s a fine upper middle class home in a desirable location in a growing city, and in this time servants-wanted ads were placed, and then placed again, curious residents arrive and leave. If this was a Stephen King novel, I could see the haunted story potential, but I don’t really know the story, just these little points.
I can’t say when the house sold but by 1913 we have yet another servants wanted ad, “girl for general housework.” This ad is likely announcing the family that would be the home’s longest occupants, The McLeods: husband John, wife Elizabeth. I note there have been three Scottish names in the house’s history: MacDougall, Campbell, McLeod. John McLeod was certainly Scottish, born on the Island of Lewis, a very northwestern part of the Outer Hebrides. McLeod was said to have built several grain elevators in North Dakota, but his job now in Minneapolis’ downtown was as an “independent grain trader.”** The McLeod’s were a middle-aged couple when they lived there, and Mrs. McLeod was an active clubwoman, holding regular meetings for the Columbian Club and her Presbyterian church at 3132. In 1921 the Columbian Club agenda was a talk on “Greece, the Reign of Pericles, the Glory of Phidias.” Rather than thinking of cursed winds crying “Heathcliff” around 3132 Park, the next 21 years record the kind of stable middle-class life the house’s builders might have expected.
In 1934 Mrs. McLeod dies. Then five years later, in April 1939. this headline appears in the local paper “Trader Collapses at Grain Exchange.” John McLeod was 77, still apparently working as a grain trader. He died the next day in an oxygen tent at the Swedish Hospital in South Minneapolis.
This more-or-less ends the upper middle-class phase of the fine house on 3132 Park. In May 1941 it’s listed for sale as a “very livable home” and “interior in excellent condition….must be sold to close an estate.” I think of all the hardwood trim, doors, built-ins — much of which Dave and I were chemically stripping of layers of paint in 1976. It was likely still pristine then, and still echoing with talk of Phidias and perhaps John McLeod’s mumbles about the Non-Partisan League’s pressures on his trading margins.
Two years past McLeod’s death to settle an estate? You got me on that, but there are indications that the Great Depression isn’t the best time to be selling a big house. The house is listed again in August and September of ’41, this time in the for rental ads. Rent? $50.
Yet in 1942 someone else is having social club meetings at 3132 Park: a Mrs. Jewell Bliss is holding a meeting there for the Juline Burr Tent, DUV to be followed by a social hour and cards. DUV is probably Daughters of Union Veterans and Mrs. Juline Gales Burr (who died in 1906) was a Minneapolis resident and the first state president of the Minnesota Grand Army of the Republic (another Union Civil War veterans organization). Also that year a luncheon for “past president of D. of H.” hosted by Jewell again. D of H is likely “Degree of Honor” a Catholic female fraternal benefit society.
Yet the house on 3132 remains in a murky state in 1942 as I look for mentions. I’ve found records for Jewell Bliss, who was married to a Norland (who went by Noel) Eldred Bliss. Since city directories are alphabetical by head of household (often husband) I looked for Noel Bliss. Throughout the entire US WWII years he lived on Penn Ave North, not Park Ave, and Jewell is listed as his wife, same address in 1942, ’44, and ’45 in the city directory. Noel’s occupation is listed as “beverages” and his business address seems to be 2501 Marshall in Minneapolis.*** Bliss was in the news in 1936 for being a liquor dealer indicted for perjury in Minneapolis. He pled not guilty — but alas, I have no more information on this case.
Noel Bliss: liquor dealer three years after the end of Prohibition, but facing charges.
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But the situation at 3132 Park remains unclear. Jewell is holding meetings there, though she apparently doesn’t live there. In post-WWII years larger houses on Park Ave were used for offices of various organizations. Was 3132 Park being used at least temporarily in this way, or was Jewell an organizer using someone else’s home or apartment? Again, I think of the home’s two large main rooms, a good place to hold your social gathering.
1943, a short newspaper story about one of our house’s residents links to some fascinating details. A 14-year-old boy named Bruce Dybvig who lives at 3132 Park Ave stumbles on the shores of one of Minneapolis’ urban chain of lakes. He breaks his foot falling into Lake Nakomis where his injury inhibits his ability to swim. OK. I’m not trying to stress a 3132 Park Ave curse theme — and look, the newspaper story I found says a boy lifeguard, only 16 himself in these wartime years of military mobilization, pulls Dybvig out of the lake. Bruce is treated and released from a hospital, and surviving he soon goes on to become another teenage Jazz musician with a story comparable to our Cats and the Fiddle main thread this February.
A year after his accident, Dybvig takes up alto sax, and by 1946 he’s organizing Minneapolis high school students into a 16-piece Jazz orchestra to play the “books” of the hippest white Jazz big bands of that year: Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. What happens to Bruce and those kids? If I haven’t exhausted you with this thread about a house, you may be the kind to enjoy the Jazz-in-Minnesota side-trip to be found at this link.
Boy saved from drowning, the teenager then starts playing modern Big Band Jazz. Bruce Dybvig at the left of each picture. What’s with the Carnegie Hall sign behind him? I’ll tell you again, you might want to read that above link.
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By 1953 the Park Avenue house is on the market listed again as “Lge. Inc. home, full basmt, gas heat, partly furnished, in excel repair, Ideal for rest home.” Two elderly men with different last names died in 1950 with 3132 Park as their address. This indicated to me that sometime in the early Fifties it may have become a “rest home,” a midcentury type nursing home/elder care facility.
In 1956 another for sale listing: “3132 Park Av S. See this lg, well kept home, 8 BRs, 2 1/2 baths, completely furnished for income, has gas HW heat, nice yard & gar.” It appears that sometime in the mid-50s the house’s rooms were subdivided or areas in attic and possibly the basement became living areas. In the mid ‘70s Dave was told the place had been a Black-owned rooming house.
In 1963 a teenager, Roosevelt Gains, likely a son living with his mother, a hotel maid, at 3132 Park, gets convicted of robbery.
In 1973 I found one more appearance of a 3132 Park resident in the newspapers, Bill Wilson, a house painter doing a little frozen lake winter fishing. In Minnesota this sometimes involves big trucks and semi-elaborate shacks pulled out on sledge runners, but Wilson is equipped with just regional hardiness and a hand-auger. Dave Moore, and then I, will be arriving soon to the Park Avenue house. The scrapbook that’s the idée fixe of this series will be uncovered there. Did 3132 Park Ave have a curse, or is the nature of the place simply the nature of the struggles and reprieves of life? I will be returning to the Black History focus of this series next, but leaving today’s stories of inconclusive fates and historical lacunae of largely white residents who lived at 3132 Park Ave, I’ll summarize. I don’t know even the names of everyone who lived in that house: those teenage servants advertised for (likely newly arrived European immigrants), other old people who may have lived in a midcentury rest home, the transient renters. I’ll leave you tonight as I go to sleep, saying these clippings of life collected here, outside the scrapbook that started things off, are exhibits of working class people in my South Minneapolis — Black, white, Asian, Latin and Native American — saying that our histories have commonalities of dreams (and yes, blunted dreams) passing under all our shades of eyelids, closed in our place across time.
Bill Wilson, one of the last tenants at 3132 Park Ave S. in its rooming house days.
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If you want a short poem performed with original music after these decades, here’s the young Langston Hughes preparing to close his dark lids amidst his neighborhood in the last decade called the Twenties. Backup link in case you can’t see the audio player the rest of you will see below.
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*Rather shortly after I arrived, nearly all of the remaining mansions were torn down, as they had no clear commercial or residential usage by then. We’ll discuss South Minneapolis in the later 20th century later in this series, but in 1976 as it is now, this Park Ave area is a series of varied working class to under and unemployed ethnic mix neighborhoods. Over in the other twin city in the 1960s and ‘70s, St. Paul’s similar Summit Ave, was preserving their grand pre-WWI houses which became once again homes to upper middle-class owners.
A surviving Park Avenue mansion is now the Swedish Institute. It was built by a Swedish immigrant businessman in 1908. It’s five blocks from where 3132 went up a few years earlier.
As to the tree canopy, most of the old trees were elms, and Dutch Elm disease wiped most of them out after I arrived. The city’s urban foresters have tried to replant, but it’s trees, and old trees take time.
**Noting McLeod’s North Dakota and Minneapolis connections, I think of the history of the successful organization of the Non-Partisan League in the Dakotas. Farmers there rankled at the low prices they got for their crops, and high markup profits by traders and middlemen who owned the grain elevators, the railroads, and the grain processing mills. Those latter folks often worked out of Minneapolis, but the eventual NPL elected governing majorities in state government, built their own elevators, and pressed with more leverage and bargaining power to improve the farmer’s lot.
***As late as 2022 Bliss’ old business address was the location of Betty Danger’s Country Club, a hip and eccentric restaurant. The owner listed it for sale that year, citing the reason for the sale in this report: her mental health. However many levels this is removed from 3132 Park, it’s another reason for Stephen King to contact me about that gothic novel.
Frank Hudson 