Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1996 11:15:45 -0500 (EST) Subject: M-I: Dinner with Fred Baker Last night I met Fred Baker for dinner. The two of us took his video camera and tripod and walked about ten blocks up 10th Avenue to one of his favorite Chinese restaurants. I was to interview him and he would tape me interviewing him. Fred is a short, plump 65 year old man who delivers non-stop patter in a pleasant New York accent spiced with Yiddishisms. Anybody who has heard Lenny Bruce will recognize the delivery right away. Since Fred produced and directed the award-winning documentary "Lenny Bruce Without Tears", his affinity with the martyred comedian comes as no surprise. Fred is an outgoing, passionate sort. As we walk up 10th Avenue, we run into a Latin-Jazz flute player named Hector Nieves who he has known for years. They embrace and Fred immediately starts talking up the possibility of setting up a gig for Hector's band at a nearby hotel. We next pass a group of homeless people on the street and Fred starts a friendly conversation immediately. He promises to stop on his way back from dinner and film them. He's making a movie about his life, he tells them, and wants to include them. They smile. Fred's mood stays elevated as we walk into the restaurant and he starts raving about how great the food is. Fred is a sensualist. His favorite topics are sex, art, food and politics. I share his interest in politics. We put in an order for a huge spread of food: watercress, duck, seafood dumplings, scallops. He then sets up the camera and we began the interview. Fred is the son of Harry Baker, a Romanian Jew who worked as a furrier. This trade was organized in one of the Reddest unions in the CIO. Harry Baker was a Communist and deeply involved in union affairs. Fred recalls speaking to his father in a hospital bed as the old man lay dying of arteriosclerosis in 1978. As he drifted in an out of consciousness, he spoke about preparations for a big union convention in Atlantic City as if it were occurring that day. The meeting had taken place nearly forty years earlier but it was still on his mind. There had been a big melee at this convention where the CP and its supporters fought it out with anti-Communists. Fred remembers his father and his comrades lurching out of the convention arena with their clothes torn and faces bruised. They paid no attention to their wounds and immediately starting caucusing to figure out what to do next in the fight. Fred, his two sisters and his mother stood outside on the boardwalk and tried to pass the time as the union faction fights continued inside. They struck up a conversation with a group of vacationing Midwesterners who soon joined them in singing the popular song "Roll Out the Barrel". Fred's mother was worried that the vacationers had stuck a new verse into the song, "Let's get the Jews on the run." It was 1938 after all. Everybody in the family was a Communist. The three children, Fred and his two sisters, were all members of the Young Communist League. His sister Esther was 6 years older than Fred, while Rosalie was 2 years older. Esther was the real spark-plug of the three. At the age of 13, she wore a Young Communist League uniform after school --a gray jumper with red stripes-- and organized the three of them to go out on the streets of their working-class Brooklyn neighborhood to promote the Communist cause. The three would begin singing Spanish Civil War anthems and as a crowd gathered, they would start to sell the Daily Worker. Theirs was a close-knit happy family. They shared political enthusiasms and a zest for life. Fred recalls the family trading sarcastic but good-natured wise-cracks over dinner. The Bakers were part of an extended clan of mostly Jewish Communist families in the neighborhood. Many of the men worked in the garment industry and shared political beliefs from an early age. Each had experienced the ravages of the depression and were deeply sensitive to religious and racial persecution. The neighborhood itself, called Bathbeach, was near Bensonhurst, the site of Jackie Gleason's memorable "Honeymooners" a TV show that commemorated the life and times of a bus-driver named Ralph Kramden. This was one of the few television shows in the 1950s that described working-class life in an honest manner. The Kramdens are always worried about money and dream of moving into the middle- class. I had relatives who worked in the fur-trade and lived in the neighborhood. Thinking back now I suspect that they were party members as well. When I was very young and visiting them once, I made the mistake of turning on "Amos and Andy". My uncle came into the living-room and asked me to watch something else. The show was prejudiced, he said. I was six or seven and it was the first time I had ever heard the word. The neighborhood also included a big contingent of Italian- Americans. They tended to be less progressive as a group and even held racist attitudes toward the black families clustered in a near-by ghetto. The racism sometimes exploded into violent attacks upon blacks who strayed accidentally into Italian turf. But they also had their share of radicals, many of whom were Sicilians who brought socialist beliefs along with them as they made the boat trip across the Atlantic to New York. Camp Wochica in Peekskill, New York was where Fred discovered his talents as a singer and actor. This camp was a Communist Party institution that tried in its own way to suggest the possibilities of a future socialist and racially tolerant world. Each year busloads of children would be greeted at the gate by a camp chorus singing an anthem of black and white, working-class unity. Fred was to discover that the words of the song were set to an old Russian favorite "Moscow Mine". One of the counselors was famed African-American dancer Pearl Primus, who taught the children African dance. One day she noticed Fred tapping out some rhythms on a dining-hall table and she invited him out to the camp's playhouse and showed him a set of drums. She started teaching him the rudiments of drumming, an art that he has kept up with his entire life. Belief in racial unity was something that Communist children held to deeply. This extended into interpersonal relationships as well. Fred recalls going up to the Teresa Hotel in Harlem with a black girlfriend >from camp to make love. He was only 17 at the time and a little frightened and excited at the same time. His musical and acting skills were honed at the camp and soon he became part of the Communist Party's cultural wing. He remembers being the soloist before a chorus at a rally in Union Square in 1942 to build support for opening up a second front against Hitler. This was shortly after the German invasion of the USSR and the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. The chorus was led by legendary songwriter Earl Robinson who wrote "This is the House I Live in", a populist ballad that Frank Sinatra made into a hit in the mid 1940s. This and other moderately progressive deeds earned the superstar a reputation of being a fellow-traveler. To Sinatra's credit, he never became a red-baiter as the CP grew unpopular. It was Fred's rapid development as a performer in various CP dramatic skits and musicals that persuaded him to make a career in theater. He entered the University of Miami in 1950 as a theater major. He also had the intention of spending at much time on the beach and at parties that he could find time for. He remained an open communist during this time, but as the years passed, this became harder. After the war, tensions had begun to develop between an aggressive Western imperialism and the war-battered Soviet state. This soon led to a witch-hunt that drove CP leaders underground and the rank-and- file into apathy and submission. This process took a while to unfold. I was surprised to learn from Fred that many of the Borscht Belt hotels from my childhood had reputations as being progressive. It took some time for them to be turned into the mind-numbing voluptuaries of the mid-1950s. Hotels as famous as the Tamiment and Kutscher's were decidedly open to left- wing and artistic influences. Kutscher's made a point of housing works by the famed Jewish sculptor Jacques Lipschitz. One leftish hotel, the President, was run by Dora Eager, the mother of legendary Jazz saxophonist Alan Eager. Eager was a junkie who died earlier and who belonged to the same generation as other talent white musicians who were strongly influenced by Lester Young, the seminal African-American horn-player. This group included Gerry Mulligan, as well as three other Jews: Lee Konitz, Serge Chaloff and Stan Getz. They pioneered the "cool" sound, a style that defined the sensibilities of the 1950s. Dave Brubeck took this style and popularized it. It was 11:15 and I told Fred that I couldn't absorb any more information for the time being. My head was swimming with images of Communist bebop musicians in the Catskill Mountains in the 1950s. This was an apocryphal America that belonged to a Thomas Pynchon novel. I wanted to dig deep into this past and reveal it to others. I had discovered a parallel universe, one that was a lot more interesting and humane than the one that shaped me. It was the link between the great radicalization of the 1930s and the 1960s radicalization that I was a part of. I walked Fred back to his house, told him I would phone him to arrange our next interview, shook his hand and then grabbed the next cab back up to the upper east side. Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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