Growing Up in Rochester, 1935-1947

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

For the last few weeks I've been reading Blake McKelvey's history of Rochester. McKelvey, one of America's greatest urban historians, wrote, among many books about Rochester, his definitive four-volume study: Rochester: The Water-Power City, 1812-1854; Rochester: The Flower City, 1855-1890; Rochester: The Quest for Quality, 1890-1925; and Rochester: An Emerging Metropolis, 1925-1961. Fortunately for me, late in his life, McKelvey abridged his roughly 1600 page study into one 300-page volume, Rochester on the Genesee. I read this book up to his account of 1929, then turned to the original fourth volume, that I read from 1929 until mid-1947, when Adams left Rochester for Detroit. What I was after was a basic understanding of Rochester's origins as a city, but I wanted the specificity that the original study would give me about Pepper Adams' time in Rochester and how the Great Depression was navigated by its citizens beginning slightly before Pepper arrived.

I've learned much about the derivation and makeup of Rochester, but McKelvey's accounts of what went on during Pepper's boyhood is really fascinating. Even as a young grade-school student (ages eleven to fourteen), Adams wouldn't have been immune to all the things going on in Rochester on behalf of the war effort. Here's some of my notes about his Rochester experience, in no apparent order:

With Defense Department orders coming into Rochester factories in the late 1930s as a response to war in Europe, the last traces of the Great Depression ended. By late 1940, as the United States clung to its neutrality while Hitler invaded countries in Europe, Rochesterians were involved in numerous war relief drives, and the sale of defense bonds and scrap drives. According to McKelvey, "the first scrap metal drive collected over twenty tons of aluminum. A paper-salvage campaign quickly eliminated all danger of a shortage in that field. Awakening to the value of scrap metal, the City Council halted its plan to cover old trolley tracks with asphalt and undertook the more laborious task of salvaging them for scrap."

As a ten-year-old boy, Pepper Adams would have heard, observed, read or participated in all sorts of activity taking place around him in response to the war. Many citizens listened to President Franklin Roosevelt's "fireside chats" throughout the 1930s and Adams likely heard some of these with his parents as they continued throughout the war. 

Virtually every organization in Rochester was eager to help with the war effort. The Boy Scouts and Automobile Club helped itemize cars that could assist in an evacuation of the city, the Society of Engineers surveyed buildings suitable as bomb shelters, the League of Women Voters distributed information about various defense provisions and devised an example of a "blackout room," county staff drew up contingency plans for the evacuation of 20,000 Rochesterians, and school children were asked to fill out a questionnaire indicating if they needed special assistance in the event of an evacuation. A series of practice exercises took place in Rochester to test blackouts.

As per McKelvey: "The technical facilities of many Rochester firms attracted a flood of defense contracts exceeding $75 million in total value by the end of August, 1941. . . . Defense contracts brought a surge in employment." 

After the invasion of Pearl Harbor, many Rochesterians joined the military and, according to McKelvey,  "local officials hastily stationed emergency police at several vital points--notably the airport, the reservoirs, and the New York Central Bridge across the Genesee River. Defense industries increased their guards; 400 legionnaires voluntarily manned a series of air-raid posts; both the city and county defense councils engaged full-time staffs and prepared to operate on a war basis. When a hastily announced blackout demonstrated some of the inadequacies of the earlier civilian defense provisions, jittery residents readily backed measures for improvement; some called for an effective roundup of all enemy aliens. . . . With the outbreak of war, the President designated all Japanese, German and Italian nationals as enemy aliens and required them to turn in to the police all cameras, shortwave radio sets, and firearms. . . . The city and county war councils sprang quickly into action." 2600 volunteered for air-raid duty, 500 as auxiliary firemen, 1000 as aircraft-spotters, 1000 as auxiliary police and 400 for a civilian air patrol. The Red Cross were tasked with training nurses for possible emergencies. Volunteers prepared thousands of first aid kits and a blood bank was established. 

Unlike the war-bond drives in World War I that were intermittent, Adams would have recognized the incessant war bond drives of his era. As a citizen, he would have participated in the scrap-metal drives too, though it's not known to what extent school children participated. In 1941, Rochester collected of 20 tons of aluminum; in 1942 the city exceeded 1000 tons. Rubber salvage netted 300 tons. Rochester barbers collected in two months 240,000 used razor blades. Some 200 tons of tin cans were collected. Besides metal and other common scrap, housewives were also asked to salvage fats from its garbage.

According to McKelvey, "It was in the great scrap-metal drive of October [1942] that the community as a whole outdid itself. A skillful newspaper campaign, featuring the achievements of other communities, prepared the way. The Junior Chamber enrolled several hundred volunteer scrap sorters who turned out on five holidays to help speed the metal to hungry foundries. Because of the great number and generous size of the curbstone scrap piles, the scheduled collections, on October 24, was prolonged over a period of several weeks." 

Rationing was another effect of the war. Sales of tires and sugar were limited, as were the sale of meat, shoes, new cars, typewriters, bicycles and other scarce items. Ration books were distributed, and hundreds of teachers and volunteers scrutinized more than a half a million applicants for coffee, gasoline, building materials and other items. Because of gas rationing, bus traffic became more common as a form of transportation.

Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Year's celebrations were observed quietly at home, McKelvey writes, due to the continuing war effort and out of respect to returning servicemen.

Nine blackout tests took place in 1943.

The summer of 1944 attracted high-school students and teachers to help with harvest as labor for the war effort was siphoning off all able-bodied men, women and even POWs.

Even despite 7000 of its employees working for the war effort, Eastman Kodak expanded its operation during the war. By December, 1944 it employed 29,000 workers.

Red Cross and Community Chest drives were also successful in raising funds and collecting used clothing for war relief.

A victory-garden program enrolled 30,000 volunteer gardeners in 1943 and 1944 to alleviate any food shortages.

The Rochester park system, one of America's best, was maintained at full capacity during the war, even with a budget austerity in place, as seen in other city programs.

A severe snow storm, the worst in 40 years, took place on December 11-12, 1944.

Another winter storm paralyzed the city on Nov 29, 1945.

Rochester was very proactive and ahead of the curve regarding its unemployment situation after the Crash of 1929. In February 1931, Kodak and thirteen other large Rochester companies established unemployment insurance for its workers. Relief work for the unemployed was established in 1931 and again in 1932, with matching funds from the state. 250 acres were given to 2000 families as "self-help gardens" to grow food. The program was sustained the following year and for years to come. A large bond was supported by local banks for relief work and city services after Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933. All of this was established before Roosevelt's New Deal reforms were rolled out in the U.S.

                (Acclaimed historian Blake McKelvey.)

Letter to Noal

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Here's a post in the form of a letter. I sent it to Rochester drummer and author Noal Cohen, who has helped me with my research of early Rochester jazz. Cohen currently lives in New Jersey, but worked with Chuck Mangione and Ron Carter in Rochester when he lived there in the late 1950s. He's the esteemed coauthor of Rat Race Blues, the biography of Gigi Gryce.

Hi Noal: I'm making great progress on the early days. I'll be doing one last interview tomorrow night with 88-year-old Fred Remington, Dave Remington's first cousin. He was a Tatum-style pianist who became a psychiatrist. He knew all the cats in the 1940s, including Herbie Brock. I'm hopeful he can put a useful spin on that time and answer some of my remaining questions. 

With my various interviews, I now have a composite of those times, including how bop was slowly incorporated into Rochester's music. I'll be writing it up in a blog post. That post will also include some other research I've done about Rochester jazz in the early 1950s--not germane to my Pepper biography, of course--but it will include a mention of a clique of musicians, Jon Hendricks among them, and so forth.

It doesn't sound like the Frederick Douglass Voice covered the jazz scene. In my interview with saxophonist Ralph Dickinson, who read the paper then, he said that his six-month gig at the Elite wasn't mentioned in the Voice. Considering that, it seems doubtful it ever was mentioned during the time Pepper played in the band. Because of that, I've decided not to visit the Rochester Museum and peruse back issues. I have descriptions of the Elite from two different sources and that will suffice. The building and general area was torn down to build the Inner Loop [highway], so I'm not even visiting it to take photographs. I also get the sense that Howard Coles' radio shows were gospel oriented and inspirational in nature, plus I guess he relied on his sources and his newspaper work to also speak about affairs of the day? 

The radio shows that would interest me are Raymond Murphy programs on WRNY in 1946 and '47, if any exist, because Pepper had some input into their preparation and listened to them while in high school. I've been told that a large collection of old radio programs are housed at St. John Fisher College. I'm researching that to see if they possibly exist, but it's a long shot indeed. 

I've also been in touch with a blues harpist, Tom Hanney, who is on the faculty of RIT and is doing original research on the blues scene in Rochester. It looks like it doesn't go back that far, but, very significantly, Son House lived in obscurity in Rochester from the early 1940s until he was rediscovered by Alan Wilson of Canned Heat in the mid-1960s. I've asked Tom to try to determine whether House got any press or even occasionally surfaced to do a gig here and there when Pepper lived in Rochester. At this point, it seems doubtful but we'll see.

The series from the D&C [newspaper], "Whatever Happened to . . . ," gives me all sorts of color about what Rochester was like in the first half of the century. I'll be relying on that to give my chapter some more depth. There's a monograph written by Curt Gerling called Smugtown that was published in the 1940s in the American Journal of Sociology that I'd like to see. It measures the moral index of Rochester (disguised by the euphemism "Gorge City.")

An important urban history of Rochester was written in four volumes by Blake McKelvey, originally by Harvard U. Press. That's also something I'd like to check out. Volume 4 seems like the one I want. 

Lastly, I'll be getting a thumb drive of info from Doug Duke researcher Sheron Dixon Wahl with all sorts of data on it. Clearly, Duke was one of the pioneers of the jazz organ and important in that way. He played for many years at Squeezer's.

I'll write my last historical blog post about Rochester, then send you the link. I'd be pleased if you could add it with my other ones to your site. It will in some ways be the core of my RIT talk on October 21.

All the best,

Gary Carner

pepperadams.com

                                     (Drummer Noal Cohen)