From Redlands to the Kennedy Center Honors
At the Kennedy Center Honors, broadcast Sunday on CBS, the honorees included folk singer and occasional column subject Joan
Baez. Sturgill Simpson performed “House of the Rising Sun,” which Baez had recorded for her first album, and Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmylou Harris sang Baez staples “Diamonds and Rust,” “Miracles” and “We Shall Overcome.”
No less than Sen. Joe Manchin could be seen singing along to “We Shall Overcome” from the audience, possibly while thinking about the filibuster.
Other honorees were country singer Garth Brooks, actor Dick Van Dyke, one-named violinist Midori and choreographer Debbie Allen (no relation, darnit).
Is Baez the first Redlander to get a Kennedy Center Honor in its 43 years? I’m going to say yes.
Now 80 and retired from singing, and a longtime Bay Area resident, Baez spent six years in Redlands as a girl before launching her career on the East Coast while in college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Baez started performing as a college freshman in 1959,” declared a CBS interview with her the other day. 1958, actually.
And depending on how you define “performing,” the teenage Baez may have started with a talent show appearance at Redlands High circa 1955, or in her role as Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Redlands Bowl in 1954.
Also, a reader swears to me that Baez came to San Salvador Elementary School in Colton to perform one day circa 1956. Christine Irish-Ré remembers it vividly.
A teacher, Mr. Martinez, lived in Redlands and knew Baez’s father. Through them, Joan, then about 15, visited the four-room school. The accordion wall separating the classrooms was folded back so she could sing to the school’s 40 or so students in a sort of assembly.
“She wore a white dress. She was very dark-skinned. She played her guitar and sat on a stool. On a piece of paper she drew a cartoon of her face, signed her name and gave her phone number,” recalls IrishRé, who was then 10 and is now 74.
“Of course it really resonated for me because I am Hispanic,” she adds. “Her being Hispanic and coming to sing for us was something special.”
A few years later, when Baez was putting out records, IrishRé saw one and exclaimed, “That’s the lady who performed for us!” Tragically, her mother had long ago thrown out the slip of paper, as mothers will.
If Joan Baez’s first concert was in that classroom, that’s a coup for Colton. Correct?
Moving on to other letters of the alphabet, but not from the topic of Baez, reader Ed Avila also shares a story about the singer.
He and Baez were classmates at Redlands’ Franklin Elementary when they were
10. One day the classroom question from Mr. McIntosh
was “What nationality are you?”
“I froze!” Avila admits. “But when Joan Baez answered, she was very confident and named her nationalities without hesitation” — which were Mexican, Scottish and English.
“I credit Joan Baez for giving me that inner confidence to state that my heritage was Mexican,” Avila says.
More than 60 years later, Avila got to thank her. He attended a concert of hers in San Diego on her farewell tour in October 2018.
“I took our elementary classroom photo and asked security to show it to her to see if she would allow me to meet her after the concert. It was that photo that made it possible,” Avila says. “When I met her and she looked at the photo, she remembered me and of course Mr. McIntosh!”
Baez signed the old photo and posed for a fresh one with Avila and his wife. Sounds like the visit with the singer ended on an up note.
IE on TV
“I watched the Kennedy Center Honors program,” says reader Ann Servin of San Bernardino, “and noticed a ‘California' theater featured in a Blue Shield ad. Was this our historic theater here in San Bernardino?”
It was.
The inspirational ad, titled “Together We Rise,” intersperses wordless scenes of solo dancers in empty places — a diner, an intersection, the beach, a living room and the sidewalk under the theater marquee — while “California Dreamin'” is played slowly and wistfully on piano.
That the marquee says “California” in neon was the likely selling point for the choice.
Blue Shield spokeswoman Erika Conner not only confirms that the San Bernardino theater was used, she tells me the scene in a crosswalk was likewise in downtown Berdoo on Fourth Street, and that the scene in a diner was in Rialto at Chris' Burgers.
That's a lot of Inland Empire love.
As Blue Shield says of its intent behind the ad, the idea was to “use dance to express the emotional journey of this past year.” The result is lovely and affecting.
On a personal note, while I have no current plans to perform an interpretive dance under the California Theater marquee, it's nice to know it can be done.
brIEfly
Paging through the 1965 Ganesha High yearbook, the Pomona Public Library's Allan Lagumbay was startled to find these two grimly named English teachers pictured side by side: John Ax and Martha Coffin. Rarely was high school English this deadly.