33 - John's Life After Nan

The “Golden Eve” of a Long and Adventurous Life

John Albrecht on the doorstep of his home in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, c1967. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

John Albrecht survived his wife Nan by four decades. After her death in September 1950, John initially continued to live between Stony Rapids and his cabin at Selwyn Lake, tending to his trap lines and doing some prospecting. Duane Studer, a prospector from La Ronge, Saskatchewan, recalls staying at John's cabin on Selwyn Lake when he worked there in 1974. "I constantly saw evidence that his 'trapper' was really a prospector at heart," Studer later commented on the La Ronge History group's Facebook page. "[Albrecht] funded several people to work (stake) ground for him."

During the 1950s, Albrecht visited his son John in California once a year (read story here). He was also involved in a six year legal battle to acquire ownership of his deceased wife's land near Sioux Lookout, Ontario. (read story here)

In the late 1950s or early 1960s, John settled in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. He lived in a 16' by 20' house at the end of a boardwalk on Boardman Street not far from the lake shore, across from the present-day Conexus Credit Union. John made many good friends in La Ronge. Among those friends was Dr. Klaus Lehnert-Thiel and his wife Sigrid. "Many of us will remember John forever for his natural gift to tell stories in his thick German accent, his humour and his ability to teach children about things important to survival in the north," Lehnert-Thiel wrote in his obituary / tribute to John in The Northerner on October 16, 1991. Albrecht helped Lehnert-Thiel build his log house in La Ronge, and became a surrogate grandfather to the Lehnert-Theil's teenaged sons. "The many outings we had with John and other friends during the winters and summers will be forever etched in our minds. He, John, lived his 'golden eve' of his long and adventurous life and he shared his experiences with all of us."

1967 - Prospecting with Bob Lee

S. E. (Bob) Lee, Manager of Northern Co-op Trading Services Ltd. in La Ronge from 1964 to 1967, was also good friends with John Albrecht. "At least three nights a week, during the long cold winters he'd come unannounced for supper, and later sit and talk about his forty years in the North" Lee writes in his unpublished memoir, The North Called Softly (1977). "His small brown eyes behind his black horn-rimmed glasses would light up in his long, lean face as he unraveled stories of hardship and glory, conquest and defeat, happiness and despair."

In John's small home in La Ronge, Lee reports seeing Nan's scrapbook from her radio days, and a few yellowed copies of Chatelaine magazine in which Nan's articles appeared. (It was likely MacLean's magazine that Lee saw, as I have not been able to locate any articles published by Nan in Chatelaine.) Lee also writes that a large, framed black and white portrait of Nan, with a black veil partly covering her face, hung on the north wall of John's house. (I have not yet seen a photo of Nan in a black veil.) I would love to see all of these items, but so far my requests to family members who may now possess them have been unsuccessful.

In his manuscript, Lee provides a good description of John's physical appearance. "Ahead of me I could see John's wide back and broad shoulders, even for a man that was quite short – about five feet seven inches. His long arms and large hands swung at his side, and his parted, well-groomed hair on his hatless small head was dark with not a grey hair – in spite of his sixty-nine years! The North had preserved him well. …His small brown eyes behind his black horn-rimmed glasses would light up in his long-lean face…"


Ottawa Citizen, April 25, 1946

In the summer of 1967, John and Bob Lee headed out prospecting after securing a grubstake of $10,000 from a company in Vancouver, BC. They packed a rock drill, John's 9' x 10' tent, a 30-30, a 22 rifle, a flat tin stove, compasses, fishing rods, aerial photos, maps, and insect repellent. They had both ordered foam mattresses and camp cots. John said, "I've slept on spruce twigs long enough!" Lee writes that he'd never forget John's light plywood grub box. "It was bruised and chipped in many place, and the brown-coloured varnish was almost gone," Lee recalls. "Proudly it wore the wounds from many portages, many canoe trips, and many flights throughout the north. In it was all the cooking utensils and his beloved Presto Cooker [shown at left] - a must for fast cooking in the bush." [See a photo of John's grub box, aka "northern ice box," hanging outside on his cabin wall at Selwyn Lake here.] "John was truly an expert with the pressure cooker," Lee later wrote. "and I marveled many times that summer at the tender, gourmet meals he produced from that hissing, homely utensil."

On April 30, 1967, John and Bob chartered a La Ronge Aviation Services Beaver aircraft, piloted by Sid Nelson, and headed north to an island on the Harriott River, about ten miles southeast of Deep Bay on Reindeer Lake. From there, the twosome prospected along the Reindeer River.

John Albrecht on left with supplies dropped off for his prospecting expedition with Bob Lee, spring 1967. The man in white coveralls is likely the pilot for La Ronge Aviation Services Ltd. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

On the island, Albrecht and Lee constructed a platform for their tent as well as shelves for groceries and dishes, a table, and a wash stand. John was a stickler about personal hygeine. "If you don't wash, you'll sink into your own dirt in the North," he told Lee. A full dish of water, soap and a clean towel were always ready in the tent after visiting the outhouse, and once a week they would each take a sponge bath in the tent while the other went for a walk.

John washing up on a lakeshore, 1967. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

John had also rigged up a clothes washer using a tin can with holes in the bottom attached to a peeled, one-inch stick. "When used with a plunging action, it was a very effective washing machine," Lee observes. "On the downward plunge, water was forced through the clothes up into the can. Just another of John's northern inventions."

Near the end of July, 1967, John and Bob moved their base camp to Dumont Lake. There they staked a large claim on land containing molybdenite - "molly" for short. They recorded their find with the provincial Department of Mineral Resources and sent samples to their financial backers in Vancouver. Unfortunately, the Vancouver firm did not honour their agreement over the molly claim, so the two partners engaged the services of Morris Schumiacher of Regina who got them their property back. In the end, however, they were never able to sell the Dumont Lake property.

In 1973, Lee writes, Albrecht went prospecting again, this time with Tom Hamilton and Jim Olsen in the Northwest Territories. There they found a rich copper-zinc showing at Snowbird Lake which they quickly optioned to a major mining company. Later, another big mining company bought an interest in the property for $500,000. John and his partners' option payments rolled in. [Source: S. E. "Bob" Lee. The North Called Softly, unpublished manuscript, 1977. Bill Smiley Historical Archives, Prince Albert Heritage Museum.]

1968 - Reunited with Sister Anna and Niece Margaret

Circumstances of two world wars separated John from his family for decades, yet the family ties remained strong – strong enough to miraculously bring them back together after almost 40 years of unimaginable challenges. This reunion was brought about in the mid-1960s thanks to the efforts of a Prince Albert resident, Bob Lee, and the German embassy in Toronto.

Bob Lee brought this incredible story to the attention of the Prince Albert Daily Herald back in 1968. An account of John Albrecht’s reunion with his sister, Mrs. Anna Gumboldt (or Gumpolt), was published on April 16, along with a photograph of the two siblings, Anna’s daughter Margaret, and Bob Lee. The newspaper devoted almost a full page to the stories of the brother’s and sister’s lives. Both siblings experienced adventure and adversity, yet their experiences could not have been more different.

John Albrecht reunited with his niece Margaret Gumbolt (on left) and his sister Anna Gumbolt (on right) in 1968. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

John’s sister Anna escaped death several times during the Second World War. She and her four daughters endured 13 years in a Russian forced labor camp. Anna told the Herald reporter that her children suffered the most. Starvation was always with them. Her daughter Margaret was hit in the head by a Russian rifle butt, leaving her with a permanent scar. Her daughter Sigrid lost some of her toes to frostbite. With the children of other families in the camp dying one after another, Anna refused to give up. “I’d steal, beg and do almost anything to get something for the children to eat,” she recalled. “If I had been caught, it would probably have been Siberia.” Anna returned home from the fields one evening to discover that her mother and two of her daughters, 4-year-old Margarete and 5-year-old Bridget had been taken away on a forced march to Poland. That night, Anna and her two remaining daughters slipped away from the camp and began what became a six-month search. When she found them, her mother had died and neither of her daughters could walk. Carrying the young girls on their backs, Anna and her older daughters travelled back to the family home in Lithuania. By the time they got home, two of the girls required stomach surgery due to the horrors they had endured.

Fast forward to 1968, when Anna Gumboldt, along with her daughter Margaret, reunited with her brother, John Albrecht in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. “It’s a miracle we ever found John,” Anna said to the Herald reporter. “We all thought he had died in the wilderness of northern Saskatchewan where we got our last letters from him.” “Yes, you thought I was dead,” John replied, “and I thought you were all dead in the war. Now we find that almost the whole family is still living.”

Family reunion at the Lee home in Prince Albert, 1968. L to R: Margaret Gumbolt, Connie Lee, Eva Lee, Anna Gumboldt, John Albrecht, Curtis Lee. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

Margaret eventually moved to Canada to live with her uncle, first in La Ronge, and later in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. John moved to Maple Ridge in 1977 to live with his niece and passed away there in 1991 at the age of 93. To date, Margaret has not responded to my requests for an interview.

Conclusion

This blog has revealed a few things about Nan Dorland – the actress-turned-writer-turned-prospector from New York City. We learned how she embraced life in northern Canada – first on Winoga Island near Sioux Lookout, and later in Saskatchewan. We learned that her first husband Richard Morenus misrepresented his six years on Winoga Island in his book, Crazy White Man (1952), writing falsely that he was there alone when in fact he had been there with Nan. And we learned that Nan’s short, second marriage to Saskatchewan prospector John Albrecht produced a son who lived until 2015.

But, I am still trying to find the answers to many other questions. For example:

- Where is Nan’s writing? Nan published two articles in MacLean’s magazine during the 1940s which I have located. Any of her other writings have disappeared or remain to be uncovered.

- Who was “Joe,” the man who accompanied Nan on her canoe expedition north of Sioux Lookout during the summer of 1948? I asked 94-year-old Dorothy Maskerine, who had known Nan in the northern Ontario town, if she knew who Joe was. “Oh, everyone knew Joe,” she replied in our phone conversation in June 2021. “He just kind of turned up in Sioux Lookout and hung out at the Hudson’s Bay Company store with his dog.”

- Where did Nan go after she left Sioux Lookout in 1948? I have not yet been able to determine her whereabouts from August of 1947 until she turned up in northern Saskatchewan in the autumn of 1948. Dorothy Maskarine told me that she heard Nan went to Edmonton, Alberta, possibly with the man named Joe. Another source, Bob Lee, wrote that Nan had gone to Squamish, BC.

With the passing of time, so much of Nan’s life story has gone missing. My journey in writing her life story ended up being a complex stitching together of fragments of her life, constructing a portrait both from what remains and what is missing.

Portrait of Nan Dorland, c. 1935. Courtesy of Rabeea Shhadeh.

Thank you for reading Discovering Nan Dorland! I hope that by publishing Nan’s story, more information about her will come to light. If you have any photos or documents about Nan or Richard Morenus or John Albrecht that you are willing to share, please contact me at: joanchamp@shaw.ca

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32 - Nan's Son John Danke

"The kindest, most generous person imaginable"

John Danke ca. 2010. He strongly resembled his father John Albrecht. Photo courtesy Rabeeh Shhadeh.

John Ernest Albrecht was born August 18, 1950 in Stouffville, Ontario (near Toronto). His 38-year-old mother Nan died three weeks later from complications of childbirth. [Read previous post HERE.] His father John Albrecht, a 52-year-old trapper and prospector from northern Saskatchewan, decided it would be best to have his son raised by Ernest and Ida Danke, Nan's father and stepmother, in southern California.

John told Berry Richards in a 1975 interview that his in-laws came up to Toronto from California after Nan's death. "John, do you want to go prospecting and wouldn't the boy hamper you?" John quotes Danke as saying, "How would it be if you let me and my wife raise him?" John agreed, and on September 10, 1950 three-week-old John crossed the Canada-US border at Port Huron, Michigan with his father and his maternal grandparents.

Card Manifest for John Ernest Albrecht, Sept. 10, 1950. They had to present many documents, including papers relating to Nan's first husband, Richard Morenus, who for some reason was cited as deceased. (Morenus living in Michigan at the time.) Source: US National Archives Microfilm Publication M14687-1.

After getting his infant son settled in with Nan's parents in Yorba Linda, California, John Albrecht returned to northern Saskatchewan with Nan's ashes. [Read previous post HERE.]

Ida Danke with her step-grandson, John, 1951. Courtesy Rabeea Shhadeh.

Ernest and Ida adopted Nan's son, renaming him John Danke. In 1954 they procured "derivative" American citizenship (citizenship granted to foreign-born children adopted by United States citizens) for the boy.

Albrecht continued his life of trapping and prospecting but visited his son in California every year until John was about 10 years old. "Pretty near every year I went, you know, to California," Albrecht told Berry Richards. "There I stayed from October to March. They had a 35-acre orange grove."

Nan's blond, blue-eyed boy at about six years old. Photo courtesy Rabeea Shhadeh.

John Danke as a teenager. Source: Rabeea Shhadeh.

John Danke attended Vista High School, a public school in Vista, California where he was a member of the swim team and a diver during his junior and senior years. He graduated in 1968.

John Danke diving in high school. Source

John's real talent was as a pianist and organist. Like many other musicians, he got his start as a teenager in a rock-and-roll band. One of his friends from junior high school, Martin Kelley, posted the following story on the Tributes page of John's obituary:

In 1964 The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and within weeks a couple of friends and I were getting a band together. I found out that John played an amplified accordian (of all things) and that he had a really large amplifier. I convinced my friends that we should let him into the band and then we would get to use his amp! Lo and behold we found out that this guy was a genuine musician! ... You ain't heard nothin' until you've heard John playing the lead guitar riff of The Byrd's 8 Miles High on the accordian!! He was truly a wizard!! ... I was there when his mom (Ida ... God bless her) bought him his first rock and roll organ, taking him from vertical keyboards to horizontal. After that any popular song that had an organ part in it, we played! We were truly blessed to have John in our band and once we got to know him, we embraced him as a beloved and respected friend. ... He played in another band after ours broke up and played weekends in clubs aboard the Marine Corps Base at Camp Pendleton during the dark days of the Vietnam War. - Source

Nan's son John attended Chapman College in Orange County, California where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in music theory and composition. He then embarked on a career as a solo artist and accompanist, performing from Montana to Texas, and even giving a recital at the Rachmaninoff Conservatory in Paris. [Source: Desert Sun, Palm Springs, CA, May 16, 1975.]

John Danke in his early 20s. Animated portrait made using Deep Nostalgia on My Heritage.

When he was 24 years old, John Danke told the Yucca Valley newspaper that he was working to become a full-time performer in as many locations and for as many audiences as possible. "I believe the audience, not oriented in classical music, deserves a good entertaining program of this type of music in order to develop a greater appreciation of the great wealth and beauty this music offers to everyone," he said. [Source: Hi-Desert Star, July 11, 1974.]

John Danke Visits His Father in La Ronge, Saskatchewan

Albrecht's good friend Dr. Klaus Lehnert-Thiel lived in La Ronge, Saskatchewan from 1969 to 1979. He told me that during those years John never traveled to California to visit his son. However, in the mid-1970s John Danke traveled from California to La Ronge with his grandmother, Ida to visit his father. "They stayed a few days and I had them over for dinner at least once," Lehnert-Thiel recalls. "His son was a pianist and John egged him on to play more pieces on my old piano but his son somehow balked. The visit did nothing to strengthen the father-son relationship, at least that I could see." Lehnert-Thiel does not know if the two ever saw each other again after that. [Source: Email to author, Sept. 27, 2017.]

John receiving an award in 1977.

Throughout his career as a concert pianist, John Danke was the recipient of numerous awards in competitions sponsored by such organizations as the Friends of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Orange County Philharmonic Society. He performed and lectured in the United States Festival of Music in New York sponsored by Rutgers University in the spring of 1982. ]Source: Desert Sun, Palm Springs, CA, Dec. 10, 1983.]

VIDEO: Robert Wetzel, guitar, and John Danke play Carulli's Grand Duo Op. 96, La Mesa, California, 2002.. Source

John Danke at age 30. Source: Desert Sun, Palm Springs, Feb. 22, 1980.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Danke was living in Palm Desert serving as the pianist and accompanist at the College of the Desert and as the organist at the Palm Desert Christian Science Church. By the late 1980s John was back living with his step-grandmother Ida in Carlsbad, California. Ida Danke passed away in 1987 when John was 37 years old.

Friendship

John Danke with his Aunt Rosie (Roswitha) in Germany, 2015. Photo courtesy Rabeea Shhadeh.

Rabeea Shhadeh and John Albrecht in Israel, 2015. Photo courtesy Rabeea Shhadeh.

In 1991, John Danke met Rabeea (Robert) Shhadeh in Escondido, California. The two became close friends and traveled extensively together. Rabeea told me in a phone call that John visited Germany every year around Christmas. "He wanted to learn as much as he could about his German family," Rabeea said. In 2015, they went to Germany together to visit John's family and then to Israel where John met some of Rabeea's family.

Danke at the piano. Posted on the Forever Missed Tributes page by Patrick Anderson. Source

John Danke passed away suddenly from heart failure on New Year's Eve 2015, three months after he and Rabeea returned home from Israel. He was 65 years old. John collapsed while practicing on the organ at St. Patrick's Church and was discovered the next morning by church staff. He had devoted his life to music and had performed for over 30 years. It is no surprise, therefore, that when he passed away, the tributes poured in. "John was the kindest, most generous person imaginable," writes Patrick Anderson on the Forever Missed website. "The hole his passing leaves in our lives will be impossible to fill. I don't know what we will do without the music that he brought into our lives." Click here for more tributes.

John was interred at Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside, California. Georgetta Psaros, a mezzo soprano that John often accompanied, chose the words of Khalil Gibran for his headstone. "That which sings and contemplates in you is now dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space."

John's headstone.

John's friend Rabeea Shhadeh told me over the phone that John had letters and other documents in his possession relating to his birth parents, John Albrecht and Nan Dorland. These items went to a family member after John's death. To date, however, I have not been able to locate this person to request copies.

AUDIO: Listen to John play HERE.

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Discovering Nan Dorland