I was born in Omaha, Nebraska on February 21, 1935. However, until I was about twelve, I celebrated my birthday on February 23 because my mother remembered that the date was one day off from Washington’s birthday but didn’t remember the direction. Malvina didn’t choose to be in Omaha; that’s where my father’s work took them. She had never lived outside California and had no friends or family there except my father, who was born and bred in the Midwest and probably settled in just fine. My father’s name was William, but I always heard him called Bud. He had been Bill in his youth, and sometimes old friends called him that, but it seemed strange to my ears. He was the second oldest boy in a family of ten, so the nickname “Bud” fell naturally to him. Bud wanted to name me Malvina, my mother wanted to name me Susan. Bud won, and lost. The name on my birth certificate is Malvina Reynolds but my mother called me momseleh (little bastard in Yiddish), and the woman who ran the rooming house where they lived thought she was saying Nahncy. Others picked it up, and Nancy became my name. Technically, I was not a little bastard, even though my parents were not legally married, because my father claimed me as his, and his name was on the birth certificate. I probably earned the name, though. Later, when we were in Berkeley, my father had to put window sash weights on the underside of my crib so I wouldn’t tip it over when I stood, holding onto the side, and rocked it back and forth. The story I heard from the Omaha days concerned another Michigander whose name I think was Mike. Unlike my dad, Mike came from a well-to-do family. They had disowned him when he got active in the Communist Party. Despite the ban, his sister came to visit him in Omaha. She had never to her knowledge seen a Communist before except her brother who was, after all, her brother. He took her to a Communist Party party. She asked him “Are all these people Communists?” He assured her they were. “But that man over there,” she said, pointing to my father, “he can’t be a Communist.” Mike said that he was. “But he has a baby, and he seems to enjoy it!” My parents took me to Detroit in their Model A to visit dad’s family, then when I was still crawling we moved to California in it, me using a potty that was strapped to a bumper and rinsed out at gas stations. I took my first steps when my Aunt Jenny (actually my great-aunt) was taking care of me. She was my mother’s favorite aunt, and she was the one they sent me to summers when they were both working during the war. In one of her interviews of me, Ellen asked if I ever just wished my mother weren’t a performer so she could pay attention to me. This question would never have occurred to me. My mother did say that while she was working on her doctorate I would cry whenever she sat down to type or picked up a book, but by the time she started performing with any regularity at all, I was in junior high school. With Aunt Jenny taking care of me while my parents settled in in Berkeley, her teen-age daughter Shirley taking care of me while my mother wrote her dissertation, and a neighbor being available for a milk and cookies check-in after school when Mom worked in a bomb casing factory during the Second World War, I learned that I would never have my mother’s constant attention, and in retrospect I’m glad I wasn’t her sole concern. In her song “I Wish You Were Here,” my mother does express regrets about being into her work and not paying attention to the people she loves, and I expect I am one of those people..  “I Wish You Were Here” 1962 I did gain some advantages from my parents’ political and performance activities. They threw a dinner at our house in Long Beach for a bunch of folks--I don’t remember who, except for the guest of honor, Paul Robeson. I knew he was famous and had heard him in concert, but I had no idea then just how long his list of accomplishments was. The local political meetings and fundraisers often included music—Sir Lancelot singing calypso songs like “Always Marry a Woman Uglier than You,” Slim Gaillard playing piano (he impressed me mightily by flipping his hands over occasionally and playing with the backs of his fingers). Then my mother started performing a song or two in hootenannies in Long Beach or Los Angeles. Sometimes these were held in legitimate theaters after the play was over, so I got to stay up way past my bedtime. Pete Seeger played in them when he passed through town, and we heard Woody Guthrie once, and Josh White once. One day we were in somebody’s house in Los Angeles when Pete was making a recording. He had to take his shoes off because he couldn’t stop tapping his foot, which was messing up the recording. My mother took guitar from Earl Robinson (he wrote the music to “Joe Hill” and “The House I Live In”) and she met with a group of left-wing songwriters in Los Angeles that he was part of. Sometimes I went along. The highlight of those years was a party we went to at Earl’s house, attended by the Weavers (their first 78 had come out, but they hadn’t hit it big yet), Cisco Houston (a singer who died relatively young and is now remembered as a side-kick of Woody’s), Vern Partlow, who wrote “Talking Atom” (Let me tell you a story ’bout old man atom/I don’t mean the Adam in the Bible datum/I don’t mean the Adam that mother Eve mated/I mean that thing that science liberated...Einstein says he’s scared, and when Einstein’s scared, I’m scared...) People took turns around the circle, singing, and the Weavers got us all singing “Wimoweh.” Soon after that, one of my high school friends said, “You know that song you learned at that party? It’s on the radio!” My mother’s kind of music had hit it big. © 2006 by Nancy Schimmel http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/robeson_p.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Gaillardhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Whitehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Robinsonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Houstonhttp://www.lyricsdownload.com/vern-partlow-old-man-atom-atomic-talking-blues-talking-atom-lyrics.html
My father, my mother and me.
Thursday, December 7, 2006
I WAS BORN IN OMAHA