Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts

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.

 

NEXT: John's Life After Nan - Click here

PREVIOUS: Nan and John: A Marriage, a Birth, and a Death - Click HERE

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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved. 

22. Richard Writes a Book - Part 2

Wolves, Forest Fires, Romance, and the Ojibway 

 

Book cover from first printing in 1952.

“Particularly in the second half of the book we wish that he would forego the easy work of telling us about the evil spirits known as wendigos, philosophical French Canadians, remittance men, and similar stock characters of the fake bush, and given us more of the keen observation and sensitivity which he shows in his earlier descriptions.” 

    - Robertson Davies, “A Bushman by Choice,” review of Crazy White Man for the New York Times, October 26, 1952.

  

Richard Morenus filled dozens of pocket-sized notebooks with stories he had heard about life in the northern Ontario bush. Once he ran out of material about his own adventures, he turned to those notebooks to fill approximately half of his book, Crazy White Man (1952). 

 

 

Illustration by William Lackey
 

Richard writes some disturbingly exaggerated things about wolves which he calls “the bush’s most cunningly treacherous killers” that will kill “solely to satisfy their lust for murder.” He tells the story of the brave Anna Olsen who, in the 1920s or 1930s, saved herself and her two babies from certain death in a forest fire while her husband Ed was away working. “Her one chance was the lake. But Ed had taken the canoe, their sole craft. Again she looked at the axe in her hands and then at the pile of logs by the shore. The logs. The lake. The axe.” He tells the story of a romance between trapper Charlie Blaine, “one of the lonesomest men I have ever seen,” and Pearl, a Winnipeg bakery worker who, on the “wildest impulse,” had inserted her name and address into a box of saltine crackers that ended up at the trapper’s shack. And, he wrote in a condescending and racist manner about the region’s Indigenous peoples.

 

About a week after Richard and Nan arrived at their island home, Richard wrote a long letter to his former boss Lewis Titterton, manager of NBC’s Script Division. In that letter he describes his first impressions of the Ojibway people of northern Ontario:

 

Canoes filled with Indians are passing the island every day. They are busy now trading in their furs for their supplies for the summer. When these give out (the supplies) they’ll go hungry until the next fur season. I went up the other day to one of the little trading posts some miles up the river and watched the Indians do their buying. They are utterly shiftless and thoroughly impractical. They were buying great quantities of cheap candy, bright colored cloth, and things they would never possibly use. The candy they’d eat before they got back to their camp, and the other goods would be kicked around in the filth of their teepees until it is past all usage. Thus is the sturdy race of the aborigine. – Letter from Richard Morenus to Lewis Titterton, May 15, 1941. (Source: Wisconsin Historical Society, National Broadcasting Company Records, 1921-1976: Central Files, 1921-1976, Subseries: Correspondence, 1921-1942, Box 85, Folder 35, Richard Morenus, script writer.)

 

Over the course of the next six years, during which he spent a great deal of time among the Ojibway, trading with them, learning their language, Richard’s opinion of the Indigenous people evolved. Throughout his book Crazy White Man he leaves no doubt that, while he continued to believe that Indigenous peoples were inferior to white men, his understanding of them had grown. 

 

Richard was initially uncomfortable around the Ojibway. When he was a child he had read stories in which, he recalls, “the villainous red man was portrayed as a liar, a cheat, a thief, and a killer.” The people paddling by the island in their canoes, however, did not look particularly bloodthirsty. Still, he found himself imagining that the Ojibway people he encountered on his trips to Sioux Lookout were staring at him and talking about him in “uncomplimentary terms.” He decided to overcome his paranoia by learning more about the Indians themselves, including their language.

 

Illustration by William Lackey

In Crazy White Man, Richard uses terminology commonly used in the 1940s and 1950s that is jarring to today’s readers – words like “squaw” and “buck” and “savage.” One can, however, discern a softening of Morenus’ views of his Indigenous neighbours. His relationship with the old Ojibway chief Wa-she-ga or Jim Chief, the man who Nan wrote about in her article for Maclean’s [Click HERE], likely facilitated his change of attitude. He (and Nan) eventually befriended the old chief and his wife, visiting them in their wigwam on at least one occasion. “Over the years that I knew them I became very fond of the old Wa-she-ga and his tiny squaw,” Morenus writes in his book. “I hoped I might be able to express [in his writing] the sincerity of my respect for this fascinating yet pitiful old reprobate and his indestructible wife.”

Morenus’ portrayal of the Ojibway people remains racist and patronizing throughout the book. On intermarriage he writes, “No, the lone white man living on an equal basis will not raise the squaw to his level, but the squaw, with passive aboriginal certainty, will inevitably reduce him to hers.” He did research into the traditions of the Ojibway which he called superstitions, saying these were being combated through the “process of evangelizing” in residential schools under the joint control of church and government. He attempted to acquire some understanding of their language which he called a “confusing collection of grunts, groans, wails, and hisses.” 

 

Richard concludes: “In a sense it is the utter simplicity of the Indian that makes him difficult for the white man to understand. The white man, dealing with his own kind, looks for complexities in thought and reasoning. I found none of this existing in the Indian. He is of single thought and purpose. There is nothing involved about his mental processes. Whatever has been acquired by him of this nature he has certainly learned from the white man. On his own, deep in the bush, the Indian is simplicity itself.”  

 

 

NEXT: Richard Writes a Book - Part 3: What is Missing - Click HERE

 

PREVIOUS: Richard Writes a Book - Part 1: A Best Seller - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

 

 

©Joan Champ. All rights reserved.

20. Nan the Writer - Part 2: "The Woman's Bushed!"

Coming to Life Again

Nan's husband Richard Morenus figures prominently in her first article for Maclean's entitled "Jim Chief," published on October 15, 1946. There is no mention of Richard in her second article for Maclean's published the following year. By that time their marriage was over.

Nan had written "Jim Chief" in the winter of 1945-1946, finishing it in mid- to late April of 1946. I know this because the editor noted at the end of Nan's article that she had completed her article about six weeks after Jim Chief died on March 8. When Richard filed for divorce, he stated that Nan had deserted him on  February 22, 1946.

It is clear that Nan stayed on in northern Ontario throughout 1946 and into 1947. She was hospitalized in Sioux Lookout in late February 1947, likely for her chronic abdominal issues. She then went on a wilderness adventure which she chronicled in her second article published later that summer.


First page of Nan's article in Maclean's, August 15, 1947.
 

"The Woman's Bushed"

Nan's second article "The Woman's Bushed!," published in Maclean's on August 15, 1947, likely started as diary entries that were rewritten and then submitted to the magazine in a hurry. Nan's circumstances were not great. Her marriage to Richard was over and she was (perhaps) alone in Sioux Lookout. 

This article is another example of Nan's evocative writing skills. It provides an account of her canoe expedition north of Sioux Lookout with a bushman-prospector named Joe in search of "a rich vein of high grade." (I asked Dorothy Maskerine if she knew who Joe was. "Everyone knew Joe," she replied in our phone conversation of June 18, 2021. "He just kind of turned up in Sioux Lookout and hung out at the Hudson's Bay Company store with his dog." Dorothy is going to try and find out Joe's last name for me.)

The trek involved 240 kilometres (150 miles) of rapids and at least 20 portages. When Nan asked Joe, a man she said she had known for years, if she could join him on the trip., he exclaimed, “The woman’s bushed!” A week out of the hospital where she was lyin’ for months an' already she wants to go chippin’ rocks.” (By dropping letters with apostrophes, Nan was giving Joe's voice a regional accent or dialect. Was he from a specific area or race or social group? Because she never provides any background about Joe, it seems disrespectful.)

After a long illness in hospital, Nan saw this journey as a “celebration at being alive and back in the bush once more.” After a month of convalescing (“It took me all that time to get my legs moving one before the other again”), Nan and Joe shoved off from the lodge on Abram Lake. It was a hot July day.  “The memory of the months of fever, pain and the smothering confinement of sickness would be swallowed up in the stringent demands of the bush. I was coming to life again.”

 

The map above is my rather crude attempt to chart the route taken by Nan and Joe from Abram Lake to Spirit Lake and back in the summer of 1947.

Nan’s account reveals her strong descriptive writing skills. For example, here’s her description of running some rapids in a canoe:

“You have felt yourself slipping in the bathtub. That satiny slide beneath your feet. That flying contorted feeling in your limbs as you grip desperately at nothingness. It lasts for only a moment. Our rapids lasted much longer but the bathtub sensation endured. … A broad flat rock just beneath the surface. No time, no room to avoid it. Over it we slid. I felt the canoe’s agonized groan, felt the vibration as the flooring grated and the ribs contracted inward. There is that sickening pity for tortured live things. I felt it now for the canoe . . . that bush possession above all others that endears itself like a personality, a brave and eager partner.”

"Canoe in Rapids." Painting by Winslow Homer. Source

One interesting observation Nan and Joe make during their trek was that northern Ontario was becoming the "land of the vanishing portage." Several times as they travelled through the bush country they discovered that the places where portages were clearly indicated on their map were overgrown and unrecognizable. Much time was lost scouting the shoreline on foot looking for a usable trail, often uncleared and choked with windfall. "Nowadays most fellows go in by plane," Joe says. "Looks like no one wants the hard work anymore."

Nan and Joe never did find the rumoured high-grade vein. As they left behind the final and 27th portage of their trip and headed back to Abram Lake, Nan writes that it was somehow a letdown. “A world had closed behind us.” She had “caught a severe case of prospecting fever” and wanted someday to return, “come hell, higher water or more beavers.”

Nan was good to her word, although it wouldn’t be Ontario that she returned to. She had heard about uranium discoveries in northern Saskatchewan, and within two years she was back prospecting – and writing – this time with trapper and prospector John Albrecht by her side.

A Writer to the End

Nan never gave up writing, however. She took her typewriter with her to Saskatchewan, planning to write about prospecting in the North. Floyd Glass, a northern pilot based in Prince Albert, wrote in his contribution to the book Gold and Other Stories (1986) that the few times he dropped into Nan and John’s camp, she gave him some stories she had written for magazines to take down in the mail. Glass recalled that she sold a couple of stories but if she did, I haven’t located them yet. [Source: Gold and Other Stories as told to Berry Richards, W. O. Kupsch and S. D. Hanson, eds. Regina, SK: Saskatchewan Mining Association, 1986.]  

On August 18, 1950, Nan’s occupation, as recorded on her infant son's birth certificate, was writer. After she died 15 days later from complications of childbirth, her obituary states that Nan was a writer.

That would have been her wish. Now it is my wish to locate more of Nan’s writing.

 

NEXT:  Richard Writes a Book, Part 1 - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: The Morenus Marriage Ends - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

 

©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.