High school: Jerry’s jalopy was, I think about a 1935 Hudson or Studebaker, without working windshield wipers. It used to rain back then. We looped a string out through the driver’s open window. We tied it to the ailing wiper blades, then through the passenger’s window (mine) and tied it to the end near the steering wheel. While Jerry drove, I pushed and pulled the string back and forth. We operated the first manual windshield wipers known to Marin County. We would be wet, but we would get there.
Marriage: We joined him in Mill Valley for his wedding in 1957 to Nancy Reynolds, daughter of Malvina Reynolds of “Little Boxes” fame.
Jazz: He played banjo with Earl Sheelar’s (trad) jazz band in Berkeley and yes, piano with Ted Shafer’s Merry Maker’s Jazz Band in a pizza joint in San Pablo. It was unique because the place had a hardwood dance floor, and many an octogenarian could be seen gliding across the oak on Saturday nights.
In the Fifties Jerry used to join me and almost anyone we knew who played an instrument of some kind for jazz parties at my father’s art school for adults in Jackson Square (the Patri School of Art Fundamentals). The "performance” was more like undulating waves of musical cacophony.
He would also join me and my wife Bobby at the Renaissance Faire in Marin County. We dressed in period costumes and would enjoy spontaneous musical groups trying to sound ancient. It must have been quite something to see, the two of us in baggy pantaloons and leather vests. I seem to remember, although Bobby disagrees, thay we slung our banjos around our necks hoping perhaps, to be asked to join in.
I joined him once or twice (two banjos) in the Sixties at the Upper Grant Street Fair (one of the first). He would also invite me at times to be part of a small group (three or four of us – piano, banjo, soprano sax (and maybe string bass) to play at fund raisers or other events for leftish or peace groups and causes. Once we drove all the way to San Luis Obispo. The performance was forgettable, but the drive was not. Our sax player, who was blind in one eye, drove the whole harrowing several hundred miles.
In recent years Jerry would to join Bobby and me for dinner on Christmas Eve. With my stepbrother from DC and his English wife, we would bemoan the state of the world and in particular the country under Trump. Then without the aid of spirits (none of us were drinking by then), and even though devoid of any trace of religiosity, we, some with a few tears of longing for a happier past, would listen in silence to the stirring voice of Luciano Pavarotti singing Antonio Stradella’s 18th Century gem Pietá Signore. We always looked forward to that. Jerry too would have done so, I’m certain, a few weeks from now.
Tito Patri, landscape architect in San Francisco, grew up in Sausalito and, like Jerry, attended Tamalpais Union High School in Mill Valley. The Class of 1951, remarkably, also included the late ragtime pianist Pete Clute and tuba player-trombonist Bill Carroll, gifted musicians who recorded and performed for many years with the Turk Murphy Jazz Band.
Tito Patri
San Francisco
2021
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