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 20^th 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.