A “French Connection” Pottsville can be proud of

Last November, my nephew Louis Graup from Auburn paid his first visit to New Orleans. Doctoral candidate in environmental science at UC Santa Barbara, he was there to participate in an international conference on water and the environment. Yes, it was a good conference, he told me. Yes, participants reacted well to his presentation. Yes, all very interesting, but how could any conference compare to the excitement of the French Quarter of New Orleans!

Louis drank French coffee, ate French food, but mostly he listened to music in the famed New Orleans jazz clubs. When I told him the most famous of all was founded by a man born and raised in Pottsville, at first he didn’t believe me. After doing a quick search on his phone, finding the facts to corroborate my words, as we used to say: “it blew his mind.”

In September 1961, Allan Jaffe, son of Harry and Fanny Jaffe, who owned a paint, wallpaper and art supplies store on Centre Street in Pottsville, took over Preservation Hall in New Orleans, and the rest is history. Today Preservation Hall Jazz Band is known throughout the world and has performed on nearly every continent. It is a New Orleans institution and a monument to American jazz.

In 1961, Allan and his wife Sandra, born in Philadelphia, were wrapping up a long honeymoon. They had just spent three months in Mexico and heading, home, stopped off in New Orleans, where they discovered “the most foreign place you could go where they still spoke English,” as Allan Jaffe told William Carter, author of Preservation Hall: Music from the Heart, published in 1991.

Allan and Sandra were jazz lovers. They were seeking the true New Orleans sound. Following musicians through the streets, they ended up at an art gallery run by Larry Borenstein, an art dealer from Milwaukee, who had set himself up at Preservation Hall. From time to time, he invited musicians in to play, a venue with no stage, no food, no drinks, a formula that stuck. The Jaffes showed up and loved it. Soon they got involved. A few months later, they took over the lease on the hall and began running the place.

Musicians and a young Ben Jaffe outside Preservation Hall

                        

Allan Jaffe was destined for a career in business and had a degree from the Wharton School of Philadelphia. Sandra Jaffe had studied journalism and public relations. After one evening at Preservation Hall, they were hooked. New Orleans jazz got under their skin and, in a matter of months, they embarked on a completely new life. 

That took guts, and the Jaffes had plenty, but mostly they were moved by a love of jazz and their new “hometown.” When Allan Jaffe was asked if his business expertise helped him set up the band and keep the operation running, he answered in the negative. What counted most, he loved what he was doing and he was having fun.

Allan and Sandra quickly set up a division of labor. Allan worked with the musicians, listening and smoothing over differences between them. Sandra posted herself at the hall’s front door, holding out a hat for donations because, in the early days, there was no entrance fee. Both rolled up their sleeves and took care of the upkeep of the place. Allan also played tuba with the changing groups of musicians who eventually became Preservation Hall Jazz Band, “the most mythical of traditional jazz orchestras,” as it is known here in France. 

Allan and Sandra Jaffe outside Preservation Hall

 

Allan Jaffe’s love of music was born at home. His father Harry, before coming to Pottsville to open his store, was a teacher of stringed instruments at the Settlement Music School of Philadelphia, founded in 1908, today the largest community school of the arts in the United States. He continued an amateur musician all his life and Allan remembers his father playing with two paper hangers in their living room. They had a mandolin, a banjo and a violin and simply passed them around, all three man playing all three instruments, picking up polkas and popular tunes by ear.

Allan began playing the tuba in eighth grade. He became a member of the Third Brigade Band and the PAHS marching band. For his junior and senior years in high school, he earned a tuba scholarship to Valley Forge Military Academy. The school’s orchestra of scholarship students played for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Later, with Preservation Hall, Jaffe played for all US Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan.

Allan Jaffe died of cancer in 1987. During his 25 years in New Orleans, he became “the spark plug of traditional New Orleans music,” according to William Russell, a good friend, the first curator of the Jazz Archives of Tulane University, and a record-store owner in the city. Thanks to his wife Sandra and son Ben, tuba and double bass player and creative director of Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the band played on. Today it is thriving, having weathered Katrina and the covid pandemic.

Ben Jaffe in gold at left with PHJB

Last month, on December 27^th, Sandra Jaffe died at age 83 in a hospital in New Orleans. In the early days at Preservation Hall, when laws mandating racial separation were still in force, she was arrested for flouting them because her Preservation Hall was integrated from the start. In the early days, her cohorts were jazz pianist Sweet Emma Barrett, who could sing and play a mean “Bill Bailey,” and brothers Percy, on the trumpet, and Willie, on the clarinet, Humphrey.

Emma Barrett with PHJB

Today the band is interracial, as it has always been, and intergenerational because, according to Ben Jaffe, “you get more out of life when you believe in building bridges.” In 2018, he and PHJB released the prize-winning documentary “A Tuba to Cuba.” This is a tribute to his father Allan, a musical journey in search of the missing pieces of the sounds of New Orleans jazz. The band, playing and dancing their way across the island, found the music’s roots in the streets of Havana and in the port city of Santiago de Cuba.  

Across the years, I’ve sought many “French connections” that could bring Pottsville, France, and French culture closer together. This detour by the way of the French Quarter of New Orleans is one of the strongest and most exciting of all. Pottsvillians should feel proud that a native son, his wife, and his son are “the spark plugs” of Preservation Hall, the greatest traditional jazz band of the United States.  

         

Merry Christmas and Joyeux Noël, Happy New Year and Bonne Année!

Dear Readers,

One day late, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and I thank you, as always, for reading. Those thanks, each month, are not openly stated, but they are always present in the care and love I take writing to you.

This is our second covid Christmas. In France, we’re still wearing masks and we’re still required to show our “sanitary passport” when we enter restaurants, bars or theaters. Many restrictions remain and when I go out masked, I look at the world through the fog on my glasses. I’ve tried everything to get rid of it, but nothing works.

Seen that way, the present looks murky. Time, then, to look back to Christmas past…

Mrs. Davenport is in charge of celebrations at Jackson Street School. Miss Holahan, our teacher, herds us into a classroom where the window shades are pulled down. She instructs us to sit two to a bench at those old-fashioned desks with a hole for an inkwell on top. Shh!  Stop the whispering! Mrs. Davenport, our principal, has threaded the film into the projector. The show begins with a whir, then a crackle, then “The Spirit of Christmas” is on the portable screen mounted for the festivities.

Each Christmas, from kindergarten to fifth grade, we watch the Mabel Beaton Marionettes perform the story of the Nativity and Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” We never get bored, we never cry out for a remake or a sequel. Each year, we are enchanted to watch the same film and still today, watching it on my computer, I feel the wonder I felt as a child. If you’d like to watch too, here’s the AT&T version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OB0Lf5CKDM .

On Centre Street, every store is decorated for the holidays, and Pomeroy’s Department Store, just like Wanamaker’s at City Hall in Philadelphia or Macy’s on Herald Square in New York, has its windows filled with music and animated decorations that we children love. But there are other sights to take in. One of my other personal favorites is the life-sized white horse in the window of Knapp’s Leather Goods, wearing a wreath for the season. Inside, the decorations are sober, but that store does not need much to convince me to enter. 

First of all, there’s the scent of leather. Then there are the well-stocked glass and wooden display cases. Each year I hope for a gift—a bookbag, a shoulder bag, a wallet—with initials embossed in gold. Best of all, there is Mrs. Knapp herself, who welcomes customers to her store. In fifth grade, my wish comes true. My Aunt Mildred gives me a red-leather book bag with a buckle-down flap. When I open it, I am greeted by my name in gold.

A few steps from Knapp’s, temptation looms large. I don’t dare enter Mootz’s Candies. I only have a few pennies and there’s no penny candy in there. I stand in the street like a waif, drooling in front of the display window at all those sweets. In French, window-shopping is called “lèche-vitrine,” window-licking, and that is just what I want to do. I love the barley-sugar lollipops—or clear-toy candy suckers as we call them, clear red, green and gold, in the shape of Saint Nick, a church bell or a Christmas tree. 

I also love the candy crabapples attached to a wooden stem. They are red and yellow on the outside, but become white as I suck to the core. Of course, I must not forget the peanut rolls: a creamy-white center dipped in dark chocolate and then rolled in chopped peanuts. One of my childhood dreams is to have a pound box all to myself!

I love to go Christmas shopping with my Aunt Mildred, a principal herself, of Yorkville School. She does not drive, so when we are loaded down with packages, we drop them at the office of the taxi dispatcher at Centre and Norwegian Streets, where everyone knows my aunt. Nor does she like to cook, which means our shopping expedition ends in the dining room of the Necho Allen Hotel. I order a Wimpy and have Neapolitan ice cream for dessert. 

I come from a family of working women. My mother is a teacher too and does not have much time for baking though she always makes a few batches of her specialty, Toll House chocolate-chip cookies. Each year our Aunt Nan brings us a tin of Michigan Rocks, a cookie that sets off waves of speculation in my young mind. I want to understand the origin of such a name and even see—or imagine—a blue Michigan rock stamped on each cookie. Otherwise, why call them that?

There is also a distinctive flavor, one I’m not sure I like. It’s the flavor of black walnuts, a “perfumy” taste, my mother says, much stronger than that of the “normal” walnuts my mother keeps in a green glass bowl for the holidays, along with almonds, hazelnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts. Next to the bowl, we keep a silver nutcracker. Part of the fun of eating is cracking each shell to get to the nut.

On TV, we always watch a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite.” This is before the creation of the Schuylkill County Ballet Theater, whose dancers put on their own “Nutcracker” each year. I love the music and the dancing and go to bed, just like the children in “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with sugarplum fairies dancing in my head.

Today, I miss those Christmases past. I miss Pottsville and Pennsylvania and the state’s rich heritage of Christmas traditions: the Moravian star, kielbasa from Shenandoah, the Polish Wigilia, the Lithuanian Kucios, the Pennsylvania Dutch Belsnickel, even some of the nation’s first Christmas trees, a German tradition brought to North America.

So I drink a cup of kindness to auld lang syne, while wishing you many more merry Christmases and a happy New Year 2022! Think of me on New Year’s Day when you dig into your first helping of pork and sauerkraut. Bonne Année!