My name is Kay Kemble, and at one time the radio people called me “The Lady with the Gold Baton.” I still get mementos from people now and then. See this pin? I used to go out and give talks to schools and such, and they had an organization, The National Federation of Student Musicians I believe it was. A little gal just stopped by a week or so ago at Swing City and she’d saved her pin from the Class of ‘49, and she wanted me to have it.
I put it on my jacket here, and this other one, the music note, is from the Gold Pearl Glee Clubs. When we took the band around the country on the Gold Pearl Shampoo tour, we’d stop in the different cities, and we’d ask around at the ladies’ clubs, and Red Cross, and churches and synagogues, and YWCAs till we found a singing group, and we’d invite them to come along to our show. We’d put them on risers in front of the stage, and they’d all wear a navy blue suit. In those days, about every woman had a navy blue outfit, and those that did not, we put them in the back row. And they'd join in on our Satute to the Nation. This was when things were going badly in the Pacific, and France was occupied and so on, and spirits were low.
So we’d do “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Anchors Aweigh” and “America the Beautiful," and anywhere we went, the people could sing those. And each participant would be issued one of these gold-note pins to show that they had dome their part to help raise morale.
And yon know, I think there was something to that. Now that the war’s been over for 50 years, everyone knows that our side won, but in 1944 we couldn’t see the future.
And yon know, I think there was something to that. Now that the war’s been over for 50 years, everyone knows that our side won, but in 1944 we couldn’t see the future.
I had joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942. after quite a long time of teaching music and reading skills to young women who were about to be released from the prison system. Well, I was supposed to be teaching sewing, but I didn’t actually know much about sewing at that time.
I had started out as a band director for a high school after their regular director had died in the middle of the school year, and because of the war, they couldn’t find a man to take the job so I had gotten it. But the high school kids were just silly, the young people just weren’t ready to settle down and learn anything. The boys all wanted to either go off to Hollywood and making talking pictures or join the Army and fight, and all the girls seemed to care about was how their hair looked.
I wanted to find some students who would really learn, and my sister was a social worker over helping the gals that were about to get out of Evans Women’s Correctional Institute. I went over aed talked to them about whether they might be interested in having music programs for some of these gals, and they didn’t have money in their budget for that, but they were interested in finding a sewing teacher.
I told them that I really did not know about sewing, I could hem a little bit or put a button on. But one thing led to another and soon I was spending the afternoons with these teenagers and young women and women more my age, all of us together in a room full of big old gray steel commercial sewing machines, the kind really made more for sewing parachutes or tents or something. So I figured out quick that these women couldn’t follow a sewing pattern anyway, because none of them could really read. So that’s what I concentrated on to begin with. We would take the canvas covers off the machines, in case somebody came in and wanted to see us using the equipment.
But we could also rig ourselves up some desks pretty easily. ff the the right of the machine w as a metal table extension for holding up a lot of heavy upholstery or canvas or some such, and we would use these extensions for desks, and we practiced writing. Quite a few of the relatives of these gals got the first letter from them they’d ever received.
In the evenings, we would push the machines on their trestle tables over against the wall, and set up folding chairs. This building was a quonset hut, detached from the rest of the vocational center, and so we didn’t have to worry about noise as long as we were finished by 9 in the evening. So from 7 to 9, four nights a week, our little band would get together. I had a number of old band instruments that came from my old high school job -those young people were rough on the equipment, and w e’d had a large stock of trombones with bent slides and clarinets missing a key. I had a friend who did instrument repairs and so when I left my old job, I bought the lot of junk
instruments for a hundred dollars, and I had Frank them up. He could take the slide off one trombone with a Imaged-up bell and put it on another instrument with a bad slide and I ended up with a good inventory of working instruments and Frank kept all the pieces and parts for his use later on. But I still didm’t have enough instruments for all the gals that wanted to play. At first we didn't have too many interested, but since they were all on probation a.i d were required to be supervised by staff after the dinner hour, and there was no television in those days, a lot c f people came around because they were bored. A few _ ed in their rooms and listened to the radio or set their ba r r used am ink pen to tattoo their boyfriend’s names on the inside of their wrists. But one by one, our group w as growing and I needed more instruments.
The Readjustment Center had plenty more instrument is the inventory room that the Salvation Army Band had donated when they got some new equipment for then s he but there was a lot of rigamarole we were supposed to go through to get items out of inventory. You w ouldn it. So I’d just wait until another instructor w as going mwr to get typing paper or Tampax and such and I would w er with her and come back w ith a saxophone or a ctnet And of course we were supposed to be sew ing like crazy and they’d issued me just bolts and bots of muslin and tulle and all this, ^nd so for the weight, I w as putting the bolts of cloth into the empty instrument cases. All the other teachers knew what was going on, and they thought it was just fine -just the bigwigs that would have blow n their tops if they
B-/
Then something awful happened. There was a gal in my band that had sent another woman a love letter, and it got found and all kinds of trouble started up. The brass all turned on me, I think because I had a short hairdo and I smoked and played jazz music. When anything goes wrong in the military, they find somebody to pin it all on, and they picked me.
this
time, I was feeling chased around by everybody, and I was discouraged. But Gold Pearl Shampoo came through for me. On one of the WAC tours, we had gone through Lawrence, Kansas and while we were there I had met Joe Phillips, who made the radio commercials for Gold Pearl Shampoo. Joe had gotten the idea for an all-girl band, and he did not really care how qualified the musicians were. What he was interested in was that they had to have long pretty hair, in all different colors. The Gold Pearl theme song was “Blondie, redhead, or brunette, When you use Gold Pearl, you join the Smart Set.” He wanted something called the Gold Pearl Shampoo Smart Set Orchestra, and if a girl had good hair, she was in. I thought to myself that I had already had experience with girls who were more interested in their hair than in knowing that the B-flat scale has two flats in it, not one, but the situation being what it was, I agreed to conduct the orchestra for the commercials. They were moving out of radio, and the experimental advertisements were to be like film shorts that would play in the theaters between the cartoon and the double feature. But back in those days, it turned out people wouldn’t pay good money for a movie ticket and then Lave to sit through commercials before the show, so the idea was a dud. So there I was in 1945, signed to a contract with Gold Pearl and all these gals who had been signed and no
commercials to do. So the shampoo company decided to send us out on a tour of the United States, which I really didn't want to do. There wasn’t anything I could do about that, but I did put my foot down when they wanted to dye my hair gold. The} thought since I was the “conductress,” I would be standing in front of the orchestra with my back to the audience, that I should have big waves of golden hair cascading down my back.
I argued and said What did I look like, Veronica Lake? And nobody really has gold hair. And it would take months for it to grow out. And what I didn’t tell them is that when I was a girl, I was one of the Sun-Rays in Sunny Sue and Her Sun-Rays, which was me, my sister Dottie, and our cousins Mildred and Opal. We had sung on the Ma-Flow Syrup Hour and had our photographs made for magazine advertisements, and there was a woman whose only job was to keep our hair dyed sunny yellow, There was something especially strong in the dye, because our hair had to shine under the photographer’s light, and we only got to stop when the whites of our eyes turned sunny too because we had something close to jaundice. Both Opal and I had to stay in bed for six weeks and live on a liquid diet till our livers recovered. So I was not going to back down, and even though Gold Pearl Shampoo didn’t know why, they could see that they’d hit a brick wall on this. So instead I agreed to use a gold baton, though I was very annoyed when my package of gold batons arrived as they came C.O.D. and each one was 16 inches long. I’d never used anything but an 11 inch baron, because the musicians never look at it anyway. When my gold baton got famous, Artie Shaw criticized my sloppy technique, but that wasn’t really fair to me, using a 16 inch model is like conducting with a stick of stove wood.
seemed to satisfy everybody, so I signed up in 1942. For a long while, nobody in the military had any idea what to do with me, because at that time the military bands were either special bands for the parades and ceremonies, the separate bands for the specific technical units and training units, and then there were organizational bands that did double duty playing music and guarding supply trains and things of that nature. None of that was suitable for women at that time, so for five or six months, I was put into a basement boiler room with all the WAAC items jumbled together, including sheet music and army cookbooks with recipes for 800 and discontinued uniforms and heaven know what else. I spent my days digging through it all and finding the music and putting it in manila folders, which there were hundreds of
Then in early 1943, things took a turn for the better, because Glenn Miller joined the Specialist Corps, even though he was too old and wore glasses and had kids at home, and they made hima Captain and put him in charge of the Army bands, and he puf a swing to the Sousa marches and everybody was crazy about it. Then he switched over to the Air Force and he started doing a radio show called “I Sustain the Wings” which recruited and sold war bonds, and I guess that might have been what got women enlisting with the WAAC, but all I know we had a big jump in the women’s bands and we had the 400th, 401st, 402nd, 403rd, and 404th Bands, all female bands. Somewhere in there the WAAC turned into the Women’s Army Corps, and we were busy, busy, busy.
Despite my baton work, the Gold Pearl Shampoo Smart Set Orchestra turned out to be a wonderful band, because over time, all the gals who the company had picked for their hair turned out to be an expensive proposition, as they tended to get married and have young ones, or they skipped the marriage partner and went right to motherhood. Then we’d have to stop touring and find new players and rehearse with them, while we were still getting paid but not doing Gold Pearl shows. Now I happened to know a lot of gals that weren’t interested in marriage or young ones, and they were free to travel. After the Gold Pearl people had been through several elopements and pregnancy tests and all this, they started asking me if I could find more of the type of gal I was friends with. They called them “less expensive” girls, and that’s what they’d ask me for. “Kay, can you find some less expensive girls to work for us?” and I always could, because the same thing which had happened to me in the Women’s Army Corps had happened to a number of gals I knew, and they were all looking for work. The only thing that came up is that some of these women didn’t want to grow their hair long for the performances. They asked me couldn’t I work it out for them, as some of them had never been anyplace but a barbershop for a haircut for years. But I told them it was a shampoo company so what else could they expect, and the only concession I got from Gold Pearl was that they let some of the women wear these big loose lounge trousers, like Marlene Dietrich had worn in the movies, because the gals had to sit up on a stage in front of these men in the audience and if you had to play something large like a
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The Lady with the Gold Baton
Page 2 of 7
from them they’d ever received.
In the evenings, we would push the machines on their trestle tables over against the watt and set up folding chairs. This building was detached from the rest of the vocational center, and so we didn’t have to worry about noise as long as we were finished by 9 p.m. So from 7 to 9, four nights a week, our little band would get together. I had a number of beat-up instruments that i’d, bought for a hundred dollars when I left my band director job. But I still didn’t have enough instruments for all the gals that wanted to play. At first we didn’t have too many interested, but since they were all on probation and were required to be supervised by staff after the dinner hour, and there was no television in those days, a lot of people came around because they were bored. A few stayed in their rooms and listened to the radio or set their hair or used an ink pen to tattoo their boyfriend’s names on the inside of their wrists. But one by one, our group was growing and i needed more instruments.
The Readjustment Center had plenty more instruments in the inventory room.that the Salvation Army Band had donated when they got some new equipment for themselves, but there was a lot of rigamaroie we were supposed to go through to get items out of inventory. You wouldn’t believe it. So I'd just wait until another instructor was going over to get carbon paper or soap and such and 1 would walk over with her and linger til! she was gone, then come back to the sewing room with a saxophone or a cornet. And of course we were supposed to be sewing like crazy and they’d Issued me just bolts and bots of muslin and tulle and all this, and so ! was putting the bolts of cloth into the empty instrument cases for the weight. ! think the other teachers knew what was going on, and they thought it was just fine -- just the bigwigs that would have blown their tops if they knew.
The band was shaping up very well, and now most of the girls could write home and teii what thef were learning in music class, and we had a couple of ready good numbers, a very snappy "Chattanooga Choo Chco" and a decent "Apple Blossom Time" and we were working on "Perfidio" but Xavier Cugat was a little advanced for some of these beginners. But we’d go over to the main prison building and play for the female population and they were so happy to see people. We could have played on some tin cans with a washtub bass backing us up and they'd have clapped and asked for more.
I wouldn’t have had any problems except for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I felt quite betrayed as i had voted for him three : mes already and even after whahhe did to me, I still voted for him again in 44. But n telling you, he ruined things for me in '41 He started out with the CCC and WPA and aii this to gsve jobs to the people, and I was giad for it. but then some of these new appointed people came over to the Readjustment Center to straighten up the inventory room. After one of them opened a eupnonium case and found 19 yards of dotted Swiss, there was a brou-ha-tia about how I hadn’t requisitioned the instruments property. There were threats of s{ very unpleasant nature, and fora short v,- e it ooKsc -\<e I might be not be gang none nights after 3 day n prison
http://garbowrites.com/id 17.html
2,1/2008
saxophone and wear a skirt, there could be an unwholesome image there. So if the gals wanted to, they could choose the trouser outfit if they paid for it
MEMORIES OF THE BAND MEMBERS. . .
The best baritone saxophone player we ever had was Teeny Stockton. She wasn’t a bit teeny, you need a big girl to hold up a big horn. And she was the hardest working gal we had in the band. The rest of them, the minute rehearsal was over, boom, they were out the door to the bars or wherever, but Teeny would stay and we would work on arrangements. She was a wonderful arranger. She was a wonderful dancer too, and one thing led to another, and during the winter months when the band wasn't touring, she and I made our home together in Chicago, where Teeny’s sister lived.
There was a gal named Marcia Lucas, and she had kept company with Teeny and when her mother died, Marcia got religion. And that was when things went downhill for us P.D.Q. Marcia got into her head that she was here on Earth to help others on direct orders from somebody in Heaven, either her Mom or God. I don’t believe she meant harm by what she did; I think she really wanted to help turn us from the wrong path of life.
I never did get out of anybody who Marcia talked to, exactly, but I do know that she had taken one of our
electric bills out of the mailbox - which I thought was against the law, but I guess Marcia thought God’s law was higher than federal regulations and so forth - and took it in to somebody at Golden Pearl’s advertising division. Now this is the part that burns me up - if the company had just said, like the Army did, that they did not care for our type of person and that we were a poor influence on the youth of America and all that, you know - at that time, there was more people that felt like that than not. So we could have just blamed it on plain common ignorance and let it go.
But that’s not how they handled it. They started in on Teeny.
The Gold Pearl people never mentioned Marcia’s part in it, and I know that’s what started it, because they knew, right from the very start when Teeny came to play in the band, that she was a Negro. Everybody knew that - all you had to do was look at her, for Heaven’s sake. But if you can believe it, I got a call to go to the company’s lawyer’s office, and some man I never saw before in my life started asking me if Teeny was Italian or Puerto Rican or what. There was some kind of ordinance or something, he said, that came from the professional musicians’ union and the radio networks and the government working together, that the races weren’t supposed to work together for commercial purposes - oh, I can’t remember all of it now. So if Teeny was just dark-skinned Italian or even Puerto Rican, we were all right. Also if she was a legal immigrant from Brazil or Venezuela or someplace like that, we’d still be okay. They didn’t say what wouldn’t be all right we all
understood what that was. And I said, “You know perfectly well Tenny is a regular plain American Negro woman from Birmingham, Alabama.” And they said that we needed to tell everybody she was from Venezuela, and they would get someone to come around and interview her and Teeny would put a scarf on her head and talk with an accent or some such, and that would probably take care of it.
And I said, you know, I think there are quite a few people that are going to know Teeny is not from Venezuala, like all the people in Venezuela, and all Teeny’s relatives in Birmingham - it’s a big family. And also anybody with a brain in their head.
And the lawyer said in that case, I had broken the Gold Pearl contract because it said in there I wouldn’t do anything illegal or immoral, and I said, “Well, how come you can do immoral things?” because you know you are. And there was a heated discussion, I guess you’d say, and even with the door closed, people told me you could hear us down the hall and out in the street. Or hear them, would be more accurate to say, as I didn’t raise my voice as I had already given up. I knew what was coming.
Well, that afternoon I went over to see Ernesta Collins, who had been a good friend of A’Lelia Walker’s at one time, and A’Lelia’s mother Madame C. J. Walker had made a lot of money with specialty hair products. Ernesta Collins had been watching the Walker company and she'd
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gone off to develop her own products, including Enchanted Nile Pomade. I hadn’t been sure that Ernesta’s products were safe for the human head, but Teeny used Enchanted Nile Pomade and she said it was much better than chemical straightener and with the pomade you didn’t need a heated metal comb. So after I left the law office, I marched over to Ernesta Collins’ operation, as she had been after me for quite a while to quit Golden Pearl and come promote Enchanted Nile Pomade.
So we reformed the band as the Enchanted Nile Evening Orchestra - Ernesta wanted the “Evening” in there and it was her nickel - and I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Ernesta had told me that they were going to kick everybody except Teeny out or make all the white gals say they were from France but she didn’t do that. Ernesta didn’t seem to care about anything except whether the band could play. She had a very strict standard; I have never worked harder in my life. It was difficult to meet Ernesta’s expectations, especially because she tired of our songs very quickly and always wanted new arrangements done,. Teeny and I stayed up very late on many, many nights creating new arrangements, and this began to take a toll on Teeny's health, as she was diabetic and had trouble with her kidneys to start with. The overwork and the late nights were affecting her, and the doctor said Teeny just couldn't keep those type of hours and expect to stay in good health.
We had to turn the band over to Ernesta, who promoted Edith Keefer, the first trombone, to bandleader, and they
went on to do very well, traveling to many states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Teeny and I went back to our Chicago apartment, where she got a job at the Post Office and I took work teaching sewing at East Vocational High School. I told them I had lots of experience, and fortunately for me the Truman Administration had long ago cut off the funding for the prison Readjustment Center so they couldn’t check my references. And I must say that having served as banker, nurse, and seamstress for the gals in the bands over the years, I had learned a little something about sewing. If I had been required to explain how to put a zipper in a skirt while reclining in the upper berth of a
They had up-to-date equipment, and the rooms were clean and nice. They had a good supply of textbooks, and I could teach myself from those, so that I was a lesson ahead of the students. I taught there for 16 years, and then when Teeny took her early medical retirement from the Post Office, I had put in enough time and was old enough that I could leave with a half-pension, and since I’d put most of my earnings into government bonds, we had enough money, if we were careful.
By this time, we were raising Cecily and Raymond, who were Teeny’s sister’s teenage children. Teeny’s sister Antonia had been killed in a car accident, and they had come to live with Teeny and me. By this time, it was about 1970 and people of different races could live in the same
moving train car, I would have been fully qualified. Eastern Vocational was the nicest place I ever worked.
apartment without causing too much consternation. That’s one of the reasons we felt safer about moving someplace else, and also my feet were bothering me a lot. I suppose it was all the hours spent in band rehearsal, but my feet were becoming very sore and painful, and the Chicago weather was becoming unbearable. People complain about Chicago winds, but it was the constant snow and slush and icy puddles that did me in. Teeny bought me any number of fleece-lined boots and Dr. Scholl’s shoe inserts but if you step into a half-frozen puddle that’s up to your ankle, there is no boot on earth that is going to keep your foot warm and dry.
• We needed to find a place that was reasonably warn and where the kids could go to a good school and where Teeny and I might find someplace to do a little music if the chance came. We settled on New Orleans, where Teeny enrolled Raymond and Cecily at St. Mark’s Academy, where they hated the uniforms but we knew they would live to adulthood. Their mother’s life insurance policy paid their tuition all the way through, plus a little bit to start a college fund for each of them. ,
• Not too long after we got down there, I was walking in the French Quarter when I ran into an older gentleman who knew my name. I didn’t recognize him, but it was Joe Collins, the man who had first hired me to do the Gold Pearl commercial films. He had bought a junk shop in the Quarter and had turned it into a replica of a US O canteen and he was calling it “R & R” but later he changed that to
Swing City. He invited me to get some musicians together and come down and play, and so Teeny and I looked up WOMEN MENTIONED EARLIER and they were all around except Jolene Hamilton, who had died in 1965. In fact, Elise Gordon was living just outside New Orleans, and Tess Wasserman was retired to Florida, just across the Gulf of Mexico.
We put together a little ensemble of the old-timers and some of their younger relatives and friends and a couple gals who I don’t know at all but play very nicely.
I sit at the piano for the group, which fills in the gaps because we never know how many trombones and clarinets we are going to have. We play on Friday and Saturday nights, and call ourselves Pearls of the Enchanted Nile. Of course the Nile is a river and doesn’t have any pearls in it, but after you’ve had a couple of drinks, as we had the night ' we thought it up, it sounds good. And WE sound good; Cecily sits in on tenor sax now and again, and when she and her Aunt Teeny get going, the tip jar on the piano fills up fast. We are saving the money to get our roof fixed, as the last hurricane that moved through New Orleans took a lot of shingles off and bent the rain gutters all out of shape.
We may need to pick up some weddings and funeral dates to pay for it all, but New Orleans is good for that.
FINISH WITH SING-A-LONG OF “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time”
instruments for a hundred dollars, and I had Frank them up. He could take the slide off one trombone with a Imaged-up bell and put it on another instrument with a bad slide and I ended up with a good inventory of working instruments and Frank kept all the pieces and parts for his use later on. But I still didm’t have enough instruments for all the gals that wanted to play. At first we didn't have too many interested, but since they were all on probation a.i d were required to be supervised by staff after the dinner hour, and there was no television in those days, a lot c f people came around because they were bored. A few _ ed in their rooms and listened to the radio or set their ba r r used am ink pen to tattoo their boyfriend’s names on the inside of their wrists. But one by one, our group w as growing and I needed more instruments.
The Readjustment Center had plenty more instrument is the inventory room that the Salvation Army Band had donated when they got some new equipment for then s he but there was a lot of rigamarole we were supposed to go through to get items out of inventory. You w ouldn it. So I’d just wait until another instructor w as going mwr to get typing paper or Tampax and such and I would w er with her and come back w ith a saxophone or a ctnet And of course we were supposed to be sew ing like crazy and they’d issued me just bolts and bots of muslin and tulle and all this, ^nd so for the weight, I w as putting the bolts of cloth into the empty instrument cases. All the other teachers knew what was going on, and they thought it was just fine -just the bigwigs that would have blow n their tops if they
B-/
Then something awful happened. There was a gal in my band that had sent another woman a love letter, and it got found and all kinds of trouble started up. The brass all turned on me, I think because I had a short hairdo and I smoked and played jazz music. When anything goes wrong in the military, they find somebody to pin it all on, and they picked me.
this
time, I was feeling chased around by everybody, and I was discouraged. But Gold Pearl Shampoo came through for me. On one of the WAC tours, we had gone through Lawrence, Kansas and while we were there I had met Joe Phillips, who made the radio commercials for Gold Pearl Shampoo. Joe had gotten the idea for an all-girl band, and he did not really care how qualified the musicians were. What he was interested in was that they had to have long pretty hair, in all different colors. The Gold Pearl theme song was “Blondie, redhead, or brunette, When you use Gold Pearl, you join the Smart Set.” He wanted something called the Gold Pearl Shampoo Smart Set Orchestra, and if a girl had good hair, she was in. I thought to myself that I had already had experience with girls who were more interested in their hair than in knowing that the B-flat scale has two flats in it, not one, but the situation being what it was, I agreed to conduct the orchestra for the commercials. They were moving out of radio, and the experimental advertisements were to be like film shorts that would play in the theaters between the cartoon and the double feature. But back in those days, it turned out people wouldn’t pay good money for a movie ticket and then Lave to sit through commercials before the show, so the idea was a dud. So there I was in 1945, signed to a contract with Gold Pearl and all these gals who had been signed and no
commercials to do. So the shampoo company decided to send us out on a tour of the United States, which I really didn't want to do. There wasn’t anything I could do about that, but I did put my foot down when they wanted to dye my hair gold. The} thought since I was the “conductress,” I would be standing in front of the orchestra with my back to the audience, that I should have big waves of golden hair cascading down my back.
I argued and said What did I look like, Veronica Lake? And nobody really has gold hair. And it would take months for it to grow out. And what I didn’t tell them is that when I was a girl, I was one of the Sun-Rays in Sunny Sue and Her Sun-Rays, which was me, my sister Dottie, and our cousins Mildred and Opal. We had sung on the Ma-Flow Syrup Hour and had our photographs made for magazine advertisements, and there was a woman whose only job was to keep our hair dyed sunny yellow, There was something especially strong in the dye, because our hair had to shine under the photographer’s light, and we only got to stop when the whites of our eyes turned sunny too because we had something close to jaundice. Both Opal and I had to stay in bed for six weeks and live on a liquid diet till our livers recovered. So I was not going to back down, and even though Gold Pearl Shampoo didn’t know why, they could see that they’d hit a brick wall on this. So instead I agreed to use a gold baton, though I was very annoyed when my package of gold batons arrived as they came C.O.D. and each one was 16 inches long. I’d never used anything but an 11 inch baron, because the musicians never look at it anyway. When my gold baton got famous, Artie Shaw criticized my sloppy technique, but that wasn’t really fair to me, using a 16 inch model is like conducting with a stick of stove wood.
seemed to satisfy everybody, so I signed up in 1942. For a long while, nobody in the military had any idea what to do with me, because at that time the military bands were either special bands for the parades and ceremonies, the separate bands for the specific technical units and training units, and then there were organizational bands that did double duty playing music and guarding supply trains and things of that nature. None of that was suitable for women at that time, so for five or six months, I was put into a basement boiler room with all the WAAC items jumbled together, including sheet music and army cookbooks with recipes for 800 and discontinued uniforms and heaven know what else. I spent my days digging through it all and finding the music and putting it in manila folders, which there were hundreds of
Then in early 1943, things took a turn for the better, because Glenn Miller joined the Specialist Corps, even though he was too old and wore glasses and had kids at home, and they made hima Captain and put him in charge of the Army bands, and he puf a swing to the Sousa marches and everybody was crazy about it. Then he switched over to the Air Force and he started doing a radio show called “I Sustain the Wings” which recruited and sold war bonds, and I guess that might have been what got women enlisting with the WAAC, but all I know we had a big jump in the women’s bands and we had the 400th, 401st, 402nd, 403rd, and 404th Bands, all female bands. Somewhere in there the WAAC turned into the Women’s Army Corps, and we were busy, busy, busy.
Despite my baton work, the Gold Pearl Shampoo Smart Set Orchestra turned out to be a wonderful band, because over time, all the gals who the company had picked for their hair turned out to be an expensive proposition, as they tended to get married and have young ones, or they skipped the marriage partner and went right to motherhood. Then we’d have to stop touring and find new players and rehearse with them, while we were still getting paid but not doing Gold Pearl shows. Now I happened to know a lot of gals that weren’t interested in marriage or young ones, and they were free to travel. After the Gold Pearl people had been through several elopements and pregnancy tests and all this, they started asking me if I could find more of the type of gal I was friends with. They called them “less expensive” girls, and that’s what they’d ask me for. “Kay, can you find some less expensive girls to work for us?” and I always could, because the same thing which had happened to me in the Women’s Army Corps had happened to a number of gals I knew, and they were all looking for work. The only thing that came up is that some of these women didn’t want to grow their hair long for the performances. They asked me couldn’t I work it out for them, as some of them had never been anyplace but a barbershop for a haircut for years. But I told them it was a shampoo company so what else could they expect, and the only concession I got from Gold Pearl was that they let some of the women wear these big loose lounge trousers, like Marlene Dietrich had worn in the movies, because the gals had to sit up on a stage in front of these men in the audience and if you had to play something large like a
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The Lady with the Gold Baton
Page 2 of 7
from them they’d ever received.
In the evenings, we would push the machines on their trestle tables over against the watt and set up folding chairs. This building was detached from the rest of the vocational center, and so we didn’t have to worry about noise as long as we were finished by 9 p.m. So from 7 to 9, four nights a week, our little band would get together. I had a number of beat-up instruments that i’d, bought for a hundred dollars when I left my band director job. But I still didn’t have enough instruments for all the gals that wanted to play. At first we didn’t have too many interested, but since they were all on probation and were required to be supervised by staff after the dinner hour, and there was no television in those days, a lot of people came around because they were bored. A few stayed in their rooms and listened to the radio or set their hair or used an ink pen to tattoo their boyfriend’s names on the inside of their wrists. But one by one, our group was growing and i needed more instruments.
The Readjustment Center had plenty more instruments in the inventory room.that the Salvation Army Band had donated when they got some new equipment for themselves, but there was a lot of rigamaroie we were supposed to go through to get items out of inventory. You wouldn’t believe it. So I'd just wait until another instructor was going over to get carbon paper or soap and such and 1 would walk over with her and linger til! she was gone, then come back to the sewing room with a saxophone or a cornet. And of course we were supposed to be sewing like crazy and they’d Issued me just bolts and bots of muslin and tulle and all this, and so ! was putting the bolts of cloth into the empty instrument cases for the weight. ! think the other teachers knew what was going on, and they thought it was just fine -- just the bigwigs that would have blown their tops if they knew.
The band was shaping up very well, and now most of the girls could write home and teii what thef were learning in music class, and we had a couple of ready good numbers, a very snappy "Chattanooga Choo Chco" and a decent "Apple Blossom Time" and we were working on "Perfidio" but Xavier Cugat was a little advanced for some of these beginners. But we’d go over to the main prison building and play for the female population and they were so happy to see people. We could have played on some tin cans with a washtub bass backing us up and they'd have clapped and asked for more.
I wouldn’t have had any problems except for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I felt quite betrayed as i had voted for him three : mes already and even after whahhe did to me, I still voted for him again in 44. But n telling you, he ruined things for me in '41 He started out with the CCC and WPA and aii this to gsve jobs to the people, and I was giad for it. but then some of these new appointed people came over to the Readjustment Center to straighten up the inventory room. After one of them opened a eupnonium case and found 19 yards of dotted Swiss, there was a brou-ha-tia about how I hadn’t requisitioned the instruments property. There were threats of s{ very unpleasant nature, and fora short v,- e it ooKsc -\<e I might be not be gang none nights after 3 day n prison
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saxophone and wear a skirt, there could be an unwholesome image there. So if the gals wanted to, they could choose the trouser outfit if they paid for it
MEMORIES OF THE BAND MEMBERS. . .
The best baritone saxophone player we ever had was Teeny Stockton. She wasn’t a bit teeny, you need a big girl to hold up a big horn. And she was the hardest working gal we had in the band. The rest of them, the minute rehearsal was over, boom, they were out the door to the bars or wherever, but Teeny would stay and we would work on arrangements. She was a wonderful arranger. She was a wonderful dancer too, and one thing led to another, and during the winter months when the band wasn't touring, she and I made our home together in Chicago, where Teeny’s sister lived.
There was a gal named Marcia Lucas, and she had kept company with Teeny and when her mother died, Marcia got religion. And that was when things went downhill for us P.D.Q. Marcia got into her head that she was here on Earth to help others on direct orders from somebody in Heaven, either her Mom or God. I don’t believe she meant harm by what she did; I think she really wanted to help turn us from the wrong path of life.
I never did get out of anybody who Marcia talked to, exactly, but I do know that she had taken one of our
electric bills out of the mailbox - which I thought was against the law, but I guess Marcia thought God’s law was higher than federal regulations and so forth - and took it in to somebody at Golden Pearl’s advertising division. Now this is the part that burns me up - if the company had just said, like the Army did, that they did not care for our type of person and that we were a poor influence on the youth of America and all that, you know - at that time, there was more people that felt like that than not. So we could have just blamed it on plain common ignorance and let it go.
But that’s not how they handled it. They started in on Teeny.
The Gold Pearl people never mentioned Marcia’s part in it, and I know that’s what started it, because they knew, right from the very start when Teeny came to play in the band, that she was a Negro. Everybody knew that - all you had to do was look at her, for Heaven’s sake. But if you can believe it, I got a call to go to the company’s lawyer’s office, and some man I never saw before in my life started asking me if Teeny was Italian or Puerto Rican or what. There was some kind of ordinance or something, he said, that came from the professional musicians’ union and the radio networks and the government working together, that the races weren’t supposed to work together for commercial purposes - oh, I can’t remember all of it now. So if Teeny was just dark-skinned Italian or even Puerto Rican, we were all right. Also if she was a legal immigrant from Brazil or Venezuela or someplace like that, we’d still be okay. They didn’t say what wouldn’t be all right we all
understood what that was. And I said, “You know perfectly well Tenny is a regular plain American Negro woman from Birmingham, Alabama.” And they said that we needed to tell everybody she was from Venezuela, and they would get someone to come around and interview her and Teeny would put a scarf on her head and talk with an accent or some such, and that would probably take care of it.
And I said, you know, I think there are quite a few people that are going to know Teeny is not from Venezuala, like all the people in Venezuela, and all Teeny’s relatives in Birmingham - it’s a big family. And also anybody with a brain in their head.
And the lawyer said in that case, I had broken the Gold Pearl contract because it said in there I wouldn’t do anything illegal or immoral, and I said, “Well, how come you can do immoral things?” because you know you are. And there was a heated discussion, I guess you’d say, and even with the door closed, people told me you could hear us down the hall and out in the street. Or hear them, would be more accurate to say, as I didn’t raise my voice as I had already given up. I knew what was coming.
Well, that afternoon I went over to see Ernesta Collins, who had been a good friend of A’Lelia Walker’s at one time, and A’Lelia’s mother Madame C. J. Walker had made a lot of money with specialty hair products. Ernesta Collins had been watching the Walker company and she'd
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gone off to develop her own products, including Enchanted Nile Pomade. I hadn’t been sure that Ernesta’s products were safe for the human head, but Teeny used Enchanted Nile Pomade and she said it was much better than chemical straightener and with the pomade you didn’t need a heated metal comb. So after I left the law office, I marched over to Ernesta Collins’ operation, as she had been after me for quite a while to quit Golden Pearl and come promote Enchanted Nile Pomade.
So we reformed the band as the Enchanted Nile Evening Orchestra - Ernesta wanted the “Evening” in there and it was her nickel - and I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Ernesta had told me that they were going to kick everybody except Teeny out or make all the white gals say they were from France but she didn’t do that. Ernesta didn’t seem to care about anything except whether the band could play. She had a very strict standard; I have never worked harder in my life. It was difficult to meet Ernesta’s expectations, especially because she tired of our songs very quickly and always wanted new arrangements done,. Teeny and I stayed up very late on many, many nights creating new arrangements, and this began to take a toll on Teeny's health, as she was diabetic and had trouble with her kidneys to start with. The overwork and the late nights were affecting her, and the doctor said Teeny just couldn't keep those type of hours and expect to stay in good health.
We had to turn the band over to Ernesta, who promoted Edith Keefer, the first trombone, to bandleader, and they
went on to do very well, traveling to many states north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Teeny and I went back to our Chicago apartment, where she got a job at the Post Office and I took work teaching sewing at East Vocational High School. I told them I had lots of experience, and fortunately for me the Truman Administration had long ago cut off the funding for the prison Readjustment Center so they couldn’t check my references. And I must say that having served as banker, nurse, and seamstress for the gals in the bands over the years, I had learned a little something about sewing. If I had been required to explain how to put a zipper in a skirt while reclining in the upper berth of a
They had up-to-date equipment, and the rooms were clean and nice. They had a good supply of textbooks, and I could teach myself from those, so that I was a lesson ahead of the students. I taught there for 16 years, and then when Teeny took her early medical retirement from the Post Office, I had put in enough time and was old enough that I could leave with a half-pension, and since I’d put most of my earnings into government bonds, we had enough money, if we were careful.
By this time, we were raising Cecily and Raymond, who were Teeny’s sister’s teenage children. Teeny’s sister Antonia had been killed in a car accident, and they had come to live with Teeny and me. By this time, it was about 1970 and people of different races could live in the same
moving train car, I would have been fully qualified. Eastern Vocational was the nicest place I ever worked.
apartment without causing too much consternation. That’s one of the reasons we felt safer about moving someplace else, and also my feet were bothering me a lot. I suppose it was all the hours spent in band rehearsal, but my feet were becoming very sore and painful, and the Chicago weather was becoming unbearable. People complain about Chicago winds, but it was the constant snow and slush and icy puddles that did me in. Teeny bought me any number of fleece-lined boots and Dr. Scholl’s shoe inserts but if you step into a half-frozen puddle that’s up to your ankle, there is no boot on earth that is going to keep your foot warm and dry.
• We needed to find a place that was reasonably warn and where the kids could go to a good school and where Teeny and I might find someplace to do a little music if the chance came. We settled on New Orleans, where Teeny enrolled Raymond and Cecily at St. Mark’s Academy, where they hated the uniforms but we knew they would live to adulthood. Their mother’s life insurance policy paid their tuition all the way through, plus a little bit to start a college fund for each of them. ,
• Not too long after we got down there, I was walking in the French Quarter when I ran into an older gentleman who knew my name. I didn’t recognize him, but it was Joe Collins, the man who had first hired me to do the Gold Pearl commercial films. He had bought a junk shop in the Quarter and had turned it into a replica of a US O canteen and he was calling it “R & R” but later he changed that to
Swing City. He invited me to get some musicians together and come down and play, and so Teeny and I looked up WOMEN MENTIONED EARLIER and they were all around except Jolene Hamilton, who had died in 1965. In fact, Elise Gordon was living just outside New Orleans, and Tess Wasserman was retired to Florida, just across the Gulf of Mexico.
We put together a little ensemble of the old-timers and some of their younger relatives and friends and a couple gals who I don’t know at all but play very nicely.
I sit at the piano for the group, which fills in the gaps because we never know how many trombones and clarinets we are going to have. We play on Friday and Saturday nights, and call ourselves Pearls of the Enchanted Nile. Of course the Nile is a river and doesn’t have any pearls in it, but after you’ve had a couple of drinks, as we had the night ' we thought it up, it sounds good. And WE sound good; Cecily sits in on tenor sax now and again, and when she and her Aunt Teeny get going, the tip jar on the piano fills up fast. We are saving the money to get our roof fixed, as the last hurricane that moved through New Orleans took a lot of shingles off and bent the rain gutters all out of shape.
We may need to pick up some weddings and funeral dates to pay for it all, but New Orleans is good for that.
FINISH WITH SING-A-LONG OF “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time”
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