She brought Phoenix culture. What would she say today?
Jessie Harper Linde brought some of the greatest acts of the day to a rough-edged place like Phoenix; had no patience for discrimination or racism of any sort
One evening in about 1957 I was sitting next to my father in the darkened Phoenix Union High School auditorium, where the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra was in the opening movement of, I believe, a Beethoven piece.
It was about five minutes into the performance but latecomers had since the beginning been scurrying to their seats when suddenly the house lights came on, the music stopped and an elderly, white haired woman strode purposefully onto the stage.
My father uttered a low laugh, shook his head, and whispered, “That’s Mrs. Linde and it’s going to get hot!”
Mrs. Linde spoke without a microphone.
“When my husband and I came to Phoenix in 1920, it was a cowtown!” she said in a loud, angry voice. “I see tonight that it is still a cowtown, because I
see people without the good manners to arrive on time. In the future, wait for an intermission or stay home!”
Then she stalked off the stage, the conductor raised his baton and shook his head at a few orchestra members who were laughing, the lights went down and Beethoven resumed.
It makes me wonder how Mrs. Linde would react to the current effort to keep resentment and animus alive and yet again recount votes from the recent presidential election.
Jessie Harper Linde and her husband had visited Phoenix in 1920, hoping its climate would help her health problems, decided it would, and moved here. Mr. Linde opened a grocery store and Mrs. Linde, a highly cultured and educated former opera singer, art lover and a woman of immense energy, began trying to up the cultural level of a pretty primitive western town.
Mrs. Linde’s cultural activities over the ’20s and ’30s came to the attention of talent managers in the east who suggested she open an entertainment booking office. She had doubts but in 1936 opened Linde Box Office Productions.
Mrs. Linde, who had no patience for discrimination or racism of any sort, brought performers as diverse as Vladamir Horowitz, Mario Lanza, Marian Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Robeson to Phoenix. And since Phoenix’s segregated hotels would not admit African Americans like Robeson, Anderson and Fitzgerald, the Lindes insisted they stay at their home.
Valley culture thrived under the Linde Box Office, which sponsored more than 750 performances during Linde’s lifetime.
But Phoenix remained in some respects a pretty roughhewn place. Mrs. Linde reportedly had regular complaints from concert-goers about having to sit next to a minority person. She handed the complainers their money back and sent them on their way. And
Linde never stinted in her efforts to bring a highly diverse selection of entertainers to the Valley.
But the Valley did not readily give up old ways.
It was only when I was in middle school and high school that integration began to take hold in Phoenix. The all Black George Washington Carver High School closed in 1954, but of the about 4,000 students who attended West Phoenix High School when I went there in 1960, I do not remember one Black face.
I remember shock and disappointment over an eminent member of the Arizona Bar – and a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice – allegedly promoting efforts to harass minorities who only were trying to go to the polls.
I remember several popular Valley resorts maintaining “quotas’’ of minorities, including Jewish people, well into the 1960s.
I remember intimidation of journalists by thugish, sleazy land-developer types – culminating in the murder of my father’s friend and my acquaintance reporter Don Bolles – and I remember only too well my own days as a journalist watching terrified Hispanic hotel maids, bus boys and lawn workers being arrested in “illegal alien’’ sweeps and being led off to cells.
But clocks go forward.
I loved the Valley in 1951 when we moved here and I love it now, rough edges and all. I must admit, though, the last election and the behavior of some Arizona politicians in refusing to believe their candidate lost, makes me wonder just how much progress we’ve made in becoming a tolerant, something state.
I think I know what Mrs. Linde would say about the Senate’s election audit if she were still with us. She would, I believe, stalk into the Veterans Memorial Coliseum where the recount is going on and say, in that big, angry voice, “When my husband and I came to Phoenix in 1920 it was a cowtown!’’
Then she would really let them have it.