Curtis Zahn, student at Williams School of Authorship

I'm not sure why people always mention Irving Wallace when namedropping esteemed participants of the Williams school of authorship. Curtis Zahn attended as well. He seemed pretty interesting.

"Poet and playwright Curtis Zahn (1912 – 1990) may not be a well-known name, but his legacy lives on through the work of the Pacificus Foundation, a literary arts group he founded in 1959 that not only preserves his work but offers financial support to emerging talent in the fields of poetry, short fiction and drama.

Born on November 12, 1912, he was the son of Oswald and Edith Zahn. His paternal grandfather had been a doctor serving Southern California prior to the Civil War, and his father was a businessman. Raised in Los Angeles and Coronado, Zahn briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State College (now University) and the Williams Institute and School of Authorship in Berkeley. Inheriting his father’s love for sailing, he served as an able-bodied seaman on an oceanography expedition in 1938 and parlayed that experience into writing a fish and game column for the San Diego Tribune-Sun . He served at that paper throughout World War II, except for one year during which he was incarcerated in a federal penitentiary for declaring himself a conscientious objector to the war.

Zahn began his literary career concurrent to his journalistic work, founding a group of short story writers in San Diego. In the mid-1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, and began contributing poems and plays to various publications like Cross Section, 1945 (L.B. Fischer, 1945) and Experiment Theatre Anthology (University of Washington Press, 1950). By 1951, he had acquired oceanfront property in Malibu, California, on which he built a villa-like home of his own design along with adjacent studios that served as a venue for writers’ workshops attended by such notables as Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and Christopher Isherwood. Around the same time, Zahn became a professional painter and collagist and served as chairman of the Malibu Art Association. In 1959, he founded the Pacificus Foundation and he dispensed typewriters or small amounts of cash to assist new writers.

By the 60s, Zahn was earning attention for his stage plays, many of which were first produced in Los Angeles. His one-act satire, Conditioned Reflex, was produced Off-Broadway in 1967. Like many, Zahn lost his home in the Malibu fires of 1969, but undeterred he found a new location for his writers colony, designing and building a redwood home in a hillside near Los Angeles. That dwelling, which contains Zahn’s original furnishing, framed family pictures and his art work, serves as the headquarters for the Pacificus Foundation, which annually presents the Curtis Zahn Poetry Prize in its founder’s honor."

Curtis Zahn died at age 78 on September 24, 1990.


(Retreived 11.20.11
http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/archives-cc/app/details.php?id=8844&return=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bu.edu%2Fphpbin%2Farchives-cc%2Fapp%2Fbrowse.php%3Fletter%3DZ)


"The Reactivated Man" is but one of his plays. "A nightmarish black comedy about a man being operated on by two possibly insane doctors for the removal of his guilt complexes. Originally produced at the Edward Ludlum Theater, Los Angeles."

Alfred Adler, 1937

Flyer for August, 1937 Seminar
Scheduled for the Williams Institute in Berkeley, California
Proposed Western Headquarters for Adler in the U.S.

(Retrieved 11.30.11 http://www.adlerian.us/Page1b.htm


(Alfred Adler was important to Williams College for a number of reasons.  But he also had famously and locally published his reminiscences of World War I.  In a second S.F. Chronicle article, dated February 10, 1929, Adler is quoted extensively describing the suffering in post World War I Austria. He speaks of the 100,000 Viennese who are unemployed; of the psychologists, medical doctors, social workers, and teachers who are staffing the clinics for the children of poor families; and of the lack of money to pay these professionals. He is quoted as having said," I felt throughout the War as a prisoner feels. The only solution to the problem of future wars is for science to organize the world so as to make war unnecessary, and to educate mankind to become more socially adjusted and more interested in each other." (2)


from: http://pws.cablespeed.com/~htstein/adler-sf.htm

Understanding Volume 6 Number 9
September 1961
VISTA unit #4: John W. Hopkins of Williams College lectured to this unit during July, on "The Music of the Spheres."

(all issues of Understanding newsletters scanned and posted by Sean at Danielfry.com)

The Spring Mansion

(The Spring Mansion as it appeared in the Spiral, yearbook of the Williams Institute, 1927 [BAHA Archives, gift of Larry Leon]
http://www.berkeleyheritage.com/berkeley_landmarks/spring_mansion.html

Darryl Henriques was the instigator behind bringing "It Can't Happen Here" back to stages across the US recently.


Nation-Wide Reading of It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/)

| November 2, 2011

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE (CAN IT?): Fascism in America? Nah, it can’t happen here, people said. But Sinclair Lewis, Nobel Prize–winning author (and a Nation contributor), challenged that shibboleth in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian fantasy in which a folksy, Huey Long–style demagogue is elected president and soon becomes an American Hitler. In 1936 the WPA Federal Theater Project mounted twenty-two simultaneous nationwide productions of the novel, which Lewis and John C. Moffitt adapted for the stage. In October, in commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of those productions, about twenty-two theater companies and universities across the country staged readings of Lewis’s play.

The instigator was California actor and comedian Darryl Henriques, who calls the Federal Theater Project “the greatest flowering of theatrical talent the country has ever witnessed” and says his idea for the revival “had everything to do with what’s going on in America.”

“We have a form of fascism that hides behind the illusion of elections, a government that is wholly owned by the corporations and consistently ignores the well-being of its citizens in order to enrich the rich.”

Most of the readings took place on October 24—the date of Black Thursday, the 1929 stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. In Seattle Arne Zaslove mounted a lavish reading with the Endangered Species Project, dedicated to putting on “the great plays you seldom see.” Producing director Mark Seldis of the Ghost Road Company in Baldwin Hills, California, says of its performance, “It was clear from audience reactions that It Can’t Happen Here certainly resonates today.” Mike Smith Rivera of Burning Clown Productions, who held a reading in New York with the WorkShop Theater Company, says “much of the discussion was centered around” Lewis’s prescience “in foreseeing many of society’s present-day problems”—problems currently dramatized by Occupy Wall Street.

As Federal Theater Project director Hallie Flanagan once put it, dictatorship comes in “an apparently harmless guise with parades and promises…[but] the promises are not kept and the parade grounds become encampments.” RICHARD LINGEMAN


https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nation-Wide-Reading-of-It-Cant-Happen-Here-by-Sinclair-Lewis/152921454785776

Everyone who resided at Williams College had a job to pay the rent, and were generally fairly active people when not at work. Darryl had a part time gig at a cheese store on Vine Street, close to the Shattuck Co-op, which had just expanded their imported cheese section and was now offering budget blocks of Finnish lappi, muenster, and gouda.

Leading up to a quieter side street away from from the busy parking lot of the Coop where Volvos and Volkswagens and other small imported cars vied for parking, the corner of Vine Street and Shattuck offered a popular laundromat on one corner where the tubs and driers constantly revolved, one Maytag always had a quarter stuck in the slot, allowing for a perpetual free wash. Across from the laundromat was a large restaurant called Pantry Shelf. The waitresses wore pastel uniforms and the hovered behind a real soda fountain in the rear that served a bit of NY, a deli menu including chocolate egg cremes and celery spritzers. That was a very friendly place which welcomed every customer, and the waitresses remained working there for years.

The cheese store, where better heeled patrons shopped, was just down the street from the original Peet's coffee. Because Darryl was well liked at the cheese store, he was able to take time off work when touring with the Mime Troupe. Darryl would work in the back and sometimes behind the counter in a white apron slicing off orders from huge wheels of imported cheese. Within a few years, the cheese store became a worker's collective.

His friend had a part time job as a temporary employee delivering mail for the post office, and would drive around Oakland with her dog in the truck and delivered mail. One time, her dog ran off while she was around the corner delivering mail. She knocked on every door enlisting neighborhood aid to locate the missing animal. She tapped at one door and saw a flutter of curtains like someone was peeking out. She tapped again, and a gruff voice barked loudly, "Whaddya want?" She explained the circumstances through the closed door and the door was opened by a large man sporting a huge Afro dashiki. She'd interrupted what she said looked to be a Black Panther meeting, with guys in large Afros sitting in large African basket chairs, the walls of the entry decorated with an animal skin with African shields and arrows on top. She did find her dog that day. When budget cut backs arrived she was temporarily laid off with a muttered promise she would likely be rehired down the road, so in between she snagged a job walking horses at dawn at Golden Gate Fields.

Ed Leddy toured more often than not with the Marine Band.

Gene Schoenfeld maintained a medical practice in addition to his publishing and busy social life with other famous icons of the sixties and he was not around the estate too often. The man residing in the peacock house, which was an immense single floor space with kitchen and bath below a rehearsal studio, though from a fairly well-heeled family who owned a music publishing company, relied on a student stipend and worked as a teaching assistant while finishing the dissertation for his PhD.

I worked part time nights as a waitress in what I regarded as the hippest blues and jazz club in the East Bay and was enrolled as a fulltime student of history and literature at UC Berkeley while I lived below what was being used as a dance studio in the old gymasium on the estate. My boyfriend worked at Leopold's, also known as Leopold Stokowski Memorial Pavilion, which was primarily a record and tape store which was owned by the students of Berkeley and which was founded with the idea of distributing profits to support community endeavors.

A couple who rented the big two story carriage house almost no one ever saw -- he was a professional muscle builder and competitor and worked in construction, while his girlfriend worked as an exotic dancer. They were likely in residence the longest of any renters, surely from 1966 and to late 1974 if not beyond.

Altogether, the total rents each month collected by Dr Hopkins in the mid- to late-sixties may have soared to close to $1500 a month, out of which Dr. Hopkins paid the PG&E bill, water, and trash pickup for the entire estate (except for the carriage house as I recall which I believe was on a separate meter), material costs for repairs or improvements and maybe property taxes. As we asked little of Dr Hopkins in the way of improving the property, perhaps he and his aged father pretty much lived off what was left of those meager rents. Charles, the handyman, was given free room and board by Dr. Hopkins in exchange for working about the estate.

While people can argue the residents were the lively ones and existed apart and were most interesting all on their own, it was Dr Hopkins afterall who met and approved or selected residents from the rental applications and so he determined who would live on the estate.

Ed Leddy was a jazz trumpeter best known for his work with Stan Kenton, but Leddy also was a player at the Lighthouse and all the famous places that helped birth and nurture the cool jazz of the late 50s and early 60s known as West Coast jazz. He appeared on many lp's which were testaments of the shift from big band to be-bop. (The image on the right is Ed's own scrapbook of newspaper clippings of his music tours primarily those with the military.)

As one of the more curious coincidences, he'd played on one of the first jazz lp's I ever bought, West Coast Jazz in Hifi. At that early point in history in Los Angeles, my sister knew some jazz musicians, and coincidentally again was introduced to Ed Leddy who had given her a small can of rum babas, a confection that his aunt in New Jersey had mailed him on his birthday. This had to have been 1960 or so that I opened and ate the rum babas.

In 1968 or 1969, I didn't put together that I might have even heard of Ed Leddy until I saw Ed Leddy himself walking down from the manor house one day with a package. His aunt had sent him a birthday present, his favorite, a can of rum babas. What's more, the confection was put out by the same company, so it was an exact duplicate of the delight I had ingested nearly a decade prior. I was truly surprised when I saw that.

Ed had attended West Point Academy and played in the US Army bands. He toured around the world with them and played everywhere towards the end of WWII. Apparently he'd reenlisted after that as he was rumored in the mid-60s to be playing in the US Marine Band. He often traveled with them which is why he was so seldom seen on the estate. I remember seeing his scrap book on the table in Darryl's cottage once. His scrapbook is pictured above, purchased from Ebay by a military collector.

In 1969, a person Ed used to play with had recently died, and there was a record jacket near the turntable in Darryl's cottage. I noticed the title "Burrito Borracho" and Darryl and I laughed a bit about that as Borracho was the name of the character who Darryl was playing on a Mime Troupe tour.

Mostly the conversation drifted to Latins who make music and art, as "Latin" and "Mexican" was on the air with the Mime Troupe and an offshoot El Teatro Camposino as they were performing together at that time. And Darryl even was onstage once with El Teatro, back when the names of the characters were identified by signs hung around the necks of the actors. And Johnny's record aside from the copy we'd just listened to was nearly destined for the scrap heap drowned as it was in the oceans of rock music being released, as was a recording called Cuban Fire which was similarly doused and one which would likely never again see re-release until some music historian took interest. So the conversation that afternoon was something about the transience of art.

The West Coast jazz scene of the early 60s had nearly disappeared with the bursting popularity of rock and roll recording, with Los Angeles nearly as the hub. Most jazz players who wanted to continue with jazz relied on European tours, some relocating permanently to Europe in order to play jazz regularly. Other jazz musicians took on jobs playing television and sessions and tours with rock and roll bands who needed musicians to actually play the music. Ed survived by touring and playing with the US Marine Band.

Because we shared an interest in a particular delicacy, I told Ed about a wonderful restaurant called the Balabosta down on University near Mandrake's, the blues and jazz club. I had the idea he might want to stop into Mandrake's sometime to catch some of the major jazz that was pumping out of the club. I ran into him at the Balabosta one time, each of us seated at different tables covered with red and white checked cloths. We each had set before us a small dish of their famous chocolate baba a rhum.


http://www.jazzwax.com/2007/10/somethng-else.html
Retrieved: 7.30.11