If you found anything of interest in my previous autobiographical post, A Taste of War.... here is a continuation. It is not in any way about jazz or blues (although, perhaps, tangentially, the latter), but all this stuff from my memory bank somehow comes together—at least for me—and is readily skipped.

When the Godafoss sailed up the East River and docked, I saw none of the marble structures, fancy people and glitter that had summed up New York in my little mind, but I did see tall buildings and a grimy waterfront. I was disappointed yet excited, because our arrival was attracting a lot of attention. A hoard of gum-chewing, loudmouthed newspaper reporters and photographers stormed aboard and flashbulbs seemed to be going off everywhere. You have seen this in old movies—Hollywood really got it right.

As I said in the previous post on this subject, it was not until many years later that I realize what had sparked the interest in our little tub: we were, as one paper put it, survivors of a “Hell on Atlantic,” a 5-day cat and mouse game that had killed 100 sailors and cost the U.S. Navy its first casualty of the European war. Of course, Pearl Harbor changed things exactly a month later.

There were two press people aboard the Godafoss on this trip, one a newsreel cameraman, Neil Sullivan, the other a reporter, Larry Kennedy. I recall one of them being pulled down and given the old “Women and children first” admonition as he attempted to scramble into a lifeboat. Our situation was not to be taken lightly, but I think the grown-ups were more aware of that than Kanda and I.

Our first New York residence was an apartment in the Raleigh, a fairly luxurious hotel building on West 72nd, just down the street from the Dakota. During the month that we stayed there, Adda, our maid, was taking Kanda and me for a walk in the park when an effusive lady stopped us to say that she had just seen us in a newsreel. We headed straight for the newsreel theater at 72nd and Broadway and—sure enough—there we were, filmed on deck, peered through one of the ship's lifesavers. I wonder if that footage still exists?

We had not yet left the Raleigh when the news of Pearl Harbor hit the streets. Remember, this was an era of shouting news boys, so it really did hit the streets, as an Extra! Extra!. At first, I didn't quite catch the significance of that news, but I soon became as wrapped up in WWII happenings as any American kid. By Christmas of 1941, we had moved to a fairly large rented house at 115-27 Union Turnpike in Forest Hills, not far from Queens Boulevard. The house was still there last year when I took a camera along for my first visit to the neighborhood in 65 years, so was our second house, at 66 Beechknoll Road.

Both looked exactly as I remembered them. We didn't stay long at the first house, perhaps because the neighbors complained. Stella, I soon learned, was an alcoholic and there were constant loud arguments. It didn't take long before our maid, Adda, called it quits and ran off with a Finn named Bruno. I never saw her again, but she later spearheaded an effort to "rescue" me—more about that in a future post.

Here Adda poses with me and Stella in front of the house. The picture was taken in 1942—same eaves over the front entrance.

Kanda and I pose in the same spot with my father in June of 1944.

When I was enrolled in school, at P.S. 101, my English vocabulary couldn't fill a file card, but it was growing every day. Of course I could not attend the class my age called for, so they assigned me to a class where I towered above my classmates. Kids have a knack for absorbing in a short time any language that surrounds them, but Lisa Clausen, a little English-speaking Danish girl seated at an adjoining desk, gave me an added advantage.

As my English improved, they moved me to a more age-appropriate class, but it didn't really make much difference, because the standard of education at P.S. 101 was deplorably low. From January 1941 until the summer of '44, all I learned was how to make a papier maché puppet head, weave patches for a wool blanket, recite from memory Joyce Kilmer's Trees, and sing patriotic songs. Yes, I could hold a simple conversation in English by the time I left, but there were no lessons in grammar, so I knew no rules and—as you may have noticed—I still don't, neither in English nor Danish or Icelandic.

At P.S. 101, we spent much time marching around on the auditorium stage in our military uniforms from Woolworth's on Austin Street, proudly waving the stars and stripes, and singing about the caissons rolling along from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli—you get the picture. I caught the spirit, started a little Victory garden, bought War Bonds with what little pocket money I had, wore a button that showed a hanged Hitler (when one pulled a string), collected photos of war planes, and drew my own patriotic comics. When I look at my crude home-made comic books, I realize how quickly I learned rudimentary English and how intellectually handicapped I was. This comic book (I don't know how it survived all these years) also reminds me that I desperately wanted to distance myself from my father, which is why I credited myself as "Gunnar Broberg." Gunnar is my middle name and I used to be known by it, but Broberg is my Danish family name. Silly, in retrospect, but my stay in the U.S. had become somewhat of a nightmare.

The Toigos, Adolph and Lucy, lived in the house that adjoined 66 Beechknoll Road. He worked for one of the big advertising agencies (his boss, Milton Biow, brought us "Johnny," the Philip Morris bellhop, and radio's $64 Question). Their two sons, Oliver and Alfred, were around my age, so we became very good friends. Adolph had become the head of Lennen and Newell, one of the top ad agencies by 1954, when my wife and I came to New York on tourist visas. I looked the Toigos up and found them living in the Waldorf Towers. They also owned a farm in Connecticut and had held onto the house in Forest Hills. Lucy, whom I remembered as a floor-scrubbing, apple-candying housewife, now looked as if she had just stepped out of a society page photo, but she was still the warm and wonderful next door neighbor who so often had taken me in for the night. Let me explain that in a sequel post.

Lil Hardin's memories...

More of Lil Armstrong's recollections (from an unpublished, copyrighted manuscript). This part covers her six-month stay with the King Oliver band at San Francisco's Pergola Ballroom, in the summer of 1921. It is interesting that San Franciscans found it difficult to dance to the band, but rather liked it as a concert attraction.

We were staying at a hotel on the edge of Chinatown and we laughed a lot at the funny music which we heard the Chinese play. Joe and his wife had a room just up the hall from me and I thought nothing of going to the room to talk to Joe, whether his wife was home or not. One day she told me to stay out of the room and not to talk to Joe if if he wasn't home. I was both hurt and humiliated for I had been accustomed to talking to the musicians at any time and it never occurred to me that it should make any difference whether their wives were around or not. It was Johnny Dodds' wife who finally straighten things out. She told Mrs. Oliver how the band men treated me and assured her that I was a nice girl and not Joe's girlfriend.

Mrs. Oliver finally invited me to have dinner with them one day and from then on she proved to be one of my best friends through the years. Joe often gave me a strange look and I knew that he was afraid I'd let something slip about his double life and extra girlfriends, but I never said a word about that. I was so happy to have Mrs. Oliver like me that I hung around her, trying to learn how she coped and did things in general. The only thing I did learn was how to cook rice the way they did in New Orleans.

Minor Hall and I lived in adjoining rooms and we decided to pool our money and eat together. I could only cook bacon and eggs, but one day I made up my mind to have red beans and rice, as I had seen Mrs. Oliver cook. The meal didn't turn out too well, the beans were slimy and the rice wasn't quite right. That meal ended our partnership, Minor told the guys in the band about it and I came to the conclusion that cooks and piano players were miles apart.

Our engagement at the Pergola ballroom didn't turn out too well, either. The people didn't understand our music and claimed they couldn't dance to it. We sounded fine to the boss who had come all the way from Frisco to Chicago to hear us before he hired us. We tried everything to please the people. The boss, who was supposed to be a great authority on music, even at a man bring in a metronome for us to play by! Thinking all of us were musically limited, he began to expound the wherein and wherefores of music tempo and the like, and to tell us just why our music was not right. We let him talk and when he finished, I finally put in a word or two. I let him know that the metronome was no strange or foreign object to me, and I proved my point by playing some Bach and an étude by the metronome. The musicians were elated and the boss we convinced that we were right and that the patrons were wrong. However, business continued to be bad and the boss lost money on us. Still he paid as every week, kept us there for the full six months and then gave us our transportation back to Chicago.

While we were at the Pergola, we got a week's engagement at the Frisco Theatre, where we packed them in and the people really enjoyed the music. It seemed that our music was good to listen to but impossible to dance by. One day, Mrs. Dodds came to the theater to see the show. On her way out, she overheard a man say "call themselves Creoles, ain't nothing but plain niggers." We all laughed when she told us about it, we couldn't have cared less.

Johnny Dodds constantly kept an eye on me to see if I erred socially. I claimed to be such a nice girl at all times, but once he thought he'd caught me wrong. A comedian named Brown, who was playing the theater in Frisco, took me out to dinner. After dinner he insisted that I go by his hotel and have a drink with him. I told him that I didn't drink, so he told me that he'd have one and then take me home. I felt that he had other plans, but I also knew that Jimmie Palao and "Montudi" Garland lived in the same hotel as he did, so I felt safer. Sure enough, as soon as we got to the hotel, he became all chummy and lovey-dovey. I pretended to like it and I asked him to show me where the bathroom was. He told me that it was down the hall and I asked him to leave the door open. Then, down the hall I went and up the steps to Montudi and Jimmie's room. They were surprised to see me, but I told them what was up and that I intended to spend the rest of the night with them! Well, they were both upset but it didn't bother me, I just slept with them, on the outside of the bed. Later, they told me what a hectic night it had been for them, and when I came to work the next night, Johnny was waiting for me. "So, where did the nice girl spend the night?", he said, "don't tell us you stayed at home." I let him finish and then told him what had really happened. It was a big laugh on Montudi and Jimmie, but Joe said I was crazy and that I must never do a thing like that again. I saw nothing wrong with staying with a member of the band, but staying with a rank stranger was definitely out. They all gave up on me and said that I was sure "way off".

With the place empty, everybody's nerves were getting on edge. One night, Joe and Minor got into an argument, because Joe had decided to replace Jimmy with another instrument. Minor gave in his notice and Joe sent for Baby Dodds, Johnny's brother, to come and play drums with us.

Baby started playing the drums and doing the shimmy at the same time, he may quite a hit when he joined the band. Business picked up a little and, for a while, we thought we had it made, but Baby wasn't enough and business didn't improve enough. I was fascinated by Baby's drumming and watched him very closely. I thought he was the cutest and youngest looking of the New Orleans fellows, but I also noticed that he was stuck on himself, so I decided to keep him at a safe distance. It wasn't hard to get him to talk about himself, he told me that he had wanted to play the drums when he was a kid, so he stripped three rungs from a chair to make drumsticks, which he played with on tin cans. It didn't take him long to find out that the base board of the Dodds family's outhouse had the sound of a bass drum, so that kept him busy. When his father bought a clarinet for Johnny, annoy insisted on a drum for himself. His first job was with a guy named Willie Hightower and they played it various white folks' homes on Sundays. They weren't paid any money, just ice cream and cake. Later, they had a chance to work at St. Catherine's Hall and then Baby got to play with the Eagle Band and Celestine's Tuxedo Band. He was still a minor when he finally had a chance to play in a cabaret, but he just put on long pants.

Baby got around to playing all the tonks and saloons, and he told me some pretty tall tales about them. Some places had gambling and tonk on the second floor, to piano and drum accompaniment, while there was a saloon on the first floor. He played in one saloon that was famous for its oyster loaves and girls. The chicks ordered the loaf, the customers paid for it, then shoved it to one side and finished their business.

Years later, Baby played with Fate Marable on the steamer "Capitol", out of St. Louis. He was playing there when Joe sent for him to join us in Frisco. His arrival turned into quite a reunion, for Johnny and Baby hadn't seen each other for a long time. Johnny had no idea that his brother's drumming had improved so much, and Baby seemed to think that Johnny was annoyed because of it. That I couldn't understand, and I still think that Baby was wrong on that score.

David Jones came along with Baby Dodds, to replace Jimmie. He played a mellophone, which to me was a new instrument, but he played it real well and it added a nice new sound to the band. He was a fairly good musician and he could read music real well, so, naturally, we started to talk about music, and the like. Soon he told Joe that he was going to be my sweetheart and Joe told him to just go ahead and try it. Well, he didn't get any more consideration from me than the other musicians had. I just felt that they were all my big brothers and I love them in that way.

Finally, our six months at the Pergola Ballroom were up and I returned to Chicago while the rest of the band went on to Los Angeles, where they stayed another six months.

The King Oliver band heads for Frisco

Text is from an unpublished copyrighted manuscript

Lil Hardin had not yet met Louis Armstrong when she joined King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago. She was still very young and new to the entertainment world and all that it brings with it. Here she talks recalls the days before the band made its historic trip to California. A subsequent post will contain her California memories. I hope you find this interesting and don't hesitate to post a comment. (The above photo was taken during the band's San Francisco engagement. Click on it for a better look)

Ollie Powers, Billy Ledman and Ralph Delaney were working with us at the Dreamland and Snow Fisher, the greatest of all the cakewalking dancers, often came in and broke up the house. Olive Hickman, a singer from Denver, Colorado, came to work with us later on. She was a nice-looking mulatto girl with a high soprano voice. She sang with such keys and she could be heard above all the noise in the room. It was her singing that inspired me to write My Heart Will Always Lead Me Back To You, a ballad that Louis later recorded, cutting the title so that it is now known simply as My Heart. It was a beautiful ballad in waltz tempo and I can't say that I like it as much in the form that was recorded by Louis. I also wrote Sweet Lovin’ Man while I was at the Dreamland, and Alberta Hunter sang that one for me.

No matter how smoothly things were going, somewhere a problem would always creep in. Johnny, my boyfriend, was my biggest problem. He was very possessive and wouldn’t allow anyone to even take me to a show. Everyone thought this was a shame and people began to tell me things about him that I hadn’t known. It turned out that he not only had as many prostitutes is the other pimps around there, but he also had a wife and three children! When I heard that, I immediately began to figure out some way of getting from under this guy.

I couldn’t tell Decie for she would have made a scene and then there would have been serious trouble. I must admit that Johnny was just what I needed at the beginning, but by now I knew my way around and all the education that I had gotten from the musicians had just about given me all the answers. In a way, I think my romantic life was ruined forever in those days. I never really believed what any man said, probably because I was in constant contact with older people and I saw all the different methods that men used to get women, and how they discarded them soon after getting them. The musicians used to say that they pitied the man that married me, probably because they didn't think I'd be an understanding wife. Nearly all of them had back-door romances and some of them were even keeping two households going. I remember one time asking Joe about his love for his wife, and when he indignantly replied that he loved his wife, I asked him how he could have an outside woman, rent a house for her, and lead such a double life. He just laughed and said that I didn't understand. Dewey and Ed Garland weren’t as gullible, they both had prostitutes and thought that guys like Joe were crazy.

Things were really in the groove at Dreamland when we got an offer to go to San Francisco and play for six months at the Pergola Ballroom at 949 Market Street. Joe accepted the offer and now I had to figure out how to go without Decie and Johnny being able to figure out where I was going, or for how long. I finally told them both that we were going to New York to make some records, and I told the guys in the band to tell the same story. I was a nervous wreck those last two weeks before we left, but Johnny Dodds was the most worried of all the guys in the band. He told Joe that he was a fool to think that I could pull such a stunt, but I made it. On May 30, 1921 we left for San Francisco and I was one happy and relieved gal when the train finally pulled out.

Johnny and Joe brought their wives along on the two women snored so loud on the train that no one else got much sleep. When we arrived in Frisco, we were met by a misty penetrating cold that froze our very livers. You never heard such mumbling and complaining about the weather. Joe yelled, “Sunny California, hell, this must be Alaska,” and all of them made a beeline for the store to buy warm coats, having left their heavy coats in Chicago, because we were going to “sunny” California. Well, it never got warm or sunny enough for me, I stayed cold all the time and had to sleep with a hot water bottle at my feet. I also bought a camel hair coat and an oil stove for my room, but the real trouble was that I was anemic and had poor blood circulation.

After a few weeks I was sure that I had TB, and so I went to a doctor to be examined for an awful pain in my chest. This pain turned out to be nothing but a form of indigestion and the doctor prescribed toast, stale bread, and lots of fruit and vegetables from then on.

Lil talks about the band's stay in San Francisco in the September 4, 2009 post—Lil Hardin's Memories.

Life on the road after Louis

Just in case you wondered how Lil Hardin Armstrong passed the time after she and Louis split, here is the 1932 to 1960 overview she sent me. The photo is from a 1950s appearance in France. She had a great time in France, saw a lot of Sidney Bechet, and carried on a brief romance with a Frenchman. Please click on the images to make them readable.