George Fendel

Feldman:  Hello again, George. This is Ruth Feldman recording you for the Oregon oral history project, and it’s a pleasure to be here, and thank you for your time.
FENDEL: Thank you, Ruth. I’m very flattered even to be considered to do this.
 
Feldman:  So, let’s start out with some of the basics. I think you are a native Portlander, but please tell us where and when you were born, and maybe a memory or two of your earliest childhood. 
FENDEL: I was born August 29, the same day as Charlie Parker and Diana Washington. I have to bring that up. They’re both August 29th babies, different years of course. 1942. It’s hard for me to get these words out, but I’m 75. I’m not supposed to be, but I am. We lived in northeast Portland, which was kind of the Jewish area at that time. We then lived in California just for a year or so, and moved back to Portland when I was eight, and by the time I was nine, my parents bought a house on NE 35th and Knott St. It was a dead end into Grant Park, a wonderful place to grow up. And I lived there until I was in my young 20s when I moved to California because I wanted to marry within the faith. At that time the Jewish population of Portland was very small and I knew all the girls either weren’t interested or they were taken.

So, I moved to Los Angeles and I met Laurie on a blind date. I should tell this quick little story: We’ll be 50 years in December and I tell people, “It’s worked out well so far.” I had a rule at that time, being very interested in the art of jazz. I wanted to go hear music, but in Los Angeles (and everyplace else virtually) you have to be 21. I was a not-so-sophisticated 25. My rule was I didn’t date ladies who weren’t 21. And I was fixed up with Laurie on a blind date and got to her house in the San Fernando Valley. 

I said, “I don’t know your neighborhood at all. Is there a nice place where we can go and have a drink and listen to some music?” And she said, “Um, um, um.” After four or five “ums” I said, “You’re 21, aren’t you?” And she said, “Not quite.” She was twenty years and seven months old, and had I known it—George’s Rule—I wouldn’t have called her. So, actually, the first coffee date went very nicely, and here we are. On December 28, it will be 50 years married.

Feldman:  And when did you come back up here to Portland?
FENDEL: You know, to be honest it was kind of “mission accomplished.” We got married there, at Temple Beth Am, in West Los Angeles, and I got homesick. 50 years ago, I was growing weary of the congestion and the traffic, and I missed four distinct seasons of the year. Portland was my home. And we made the announcement to her parents. I think what was at work at that time was there was a little bit more of, “wither thou goest, I will go.” Things were a little different then. Husband wanted to go home to Portland and little younger, little five-years-between-us wife cried for a thousand miles. I even took the coast route, so she would see beautiful California and beautiful coastal Oregon. It didn’t help much. It was just a wish to return home. I didn’t have employment all set up. That followed, of course. But that’s the way it happened.

And she thanks me now. She came from an immediate family that was problematic, so after getting used to the fact that she was away from them, because they were her family, it turned out to be the best thing we could have done, to be not quite so close to a not-good situation, which she readily admits, and admitted a long time ago.
 
Feldman:  Let’s get back to some of your early childhood memories. So, tell me a little bit about your parents and what they did, and your early growing up.
FENDEL: All right. My father went to Reed College. He moved to San Francisco for a while before he was married. He met my mother. She was from a small town in northern Minnesota—Grand Rapids, Minnesota, not to be confused with the one in Michigan. Grand Rapids, Michigan is the big Grand Rapids. This was population (when she lived there) of about 2500. Her father was the Jewish merchant in Grand Rapids, they were the only Jewish family in the town. He had a clothing store. She came out to Portland in 1938 or ’39. She was in nursing school in Minneapolis, and she came out to Portland to visit relatives who happened to live here. And on a date at Yaw’s—are you a long-enough Portlander to remember Yaw’s? 
 
Feldman:  No.
FENDEL: Yaw’s [Top Notch] was the place for casual food, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, after theater. Best hamburgers in town. Nobody has ever come close to Yaw’s. You can mention Yaw’s to any native Portlander and they would know where it was. It was in the Hollywood District. So, my mom got fixed up with a date, and my dad was there with a date, and the dates happened to know one another, so they introduced my parents. And my dad thought “She’s cute. I need to give her a call.” So, he found out from a friend where she was staying and gave her a call. They knew each other for one week, and she had to get back to Minneapolis to nursing school, but I think the love letters went flying between Minneapolis and Portland, and a very short time after that, he took a train to Minneapolis and married her, having known her for one week. Person to person for a week. And they had about two weeks short of 50 years together when he passed away.

Growing up in northeast Portland with a younger brother and an older sister was ideal. We were half a block from Grant Park and the pool and the tennis courts, and the summer activities and the baseball fields. My dad was in sales. He had a few different sales jobs not all of which went real well for him. I think that’s why we moved to California for a year, and then moved back. Eventually he ended up selling furniture at a company called Standard Furniture, not related in any way to Standard TV and Appliance—you see all their commercials. Standard Furniture was in southeast Portland on Foster Road. It dealt with kind of a blue-collar clientele, but it was good, solid, American-made furniture at a reasonable cost. So, he went to work there, and after a period of time, the owners, for whatever their reasons, wanted to sell the place and they offered it to my dad and one other salesman. It was the biggest break my father ever got in his life. He took advantage of that, and over a period of time he became a half-owner and then eventually a third owner—a third partner came in. So during the last 25 years of my dad’s life, at least until he retired, he had…. They could do more things, let’s just put it that way. They had season tickets to the Blazers for a number of years; they could do a little more travelling than they had been able to do. It was a real blessing for him, and he really loved that aspect of his working years. It was a good thing for him. 

My mom was a registered nurse, an RN. She worked in nursing homes. Each of the nursing homes that she worked in needed somebody to be in charge of the rest of the nursing staff, keeping the records and the books, and all the detail that is necessary on the other RNs and the licensed practical nurses, which is the lower level of nursing care. So, my mom split her time between three or four nursing homes. She worked at each part time. She probably worked about three and a half or four days a week—not quite a full work week, but she had three kids to raise. We didn’t question it. She put her white uniform on in those years, and her white nurse’s cap, and went to work. And we lived in northeast Portland and we left the back door unlocked so the three of us could get in the house after school, because she might be working on any specific day. And we didn’t worry about leaving the back door unlocked. Nobody ever gave it a thought that there would be ever any problem, and of course there wasn’t. So that’s what they did. 

Feldman:  May I have the names, please, of your brother and sister and mom and dad? Just for the tape.
FENDEL: Sure. My father was Joseph Fendel; my mother was Gladys Lieberman Fendel; my sister is Betty Lynn Fendel, Betty Lynn Menashe now, married to Portlander L. Albert Menashe. And my brother was named Richard Michael at birth, but my parents wanted to name him Michael Richard, and my grandmother, rest in peace, didn’t like the name Michael, because she thought people would call him Mike and she thought that just didn’t fit. So, at a certain age in his adult years—he loved his grandmother very much but he didn’t feel that she should have had the decision-making process—he went to the Multnomah County courthouse and switched his two names legally. That’s why he is Michael to new acquaintances and Rick to old ones. 

Feldman:  And when were they born? Your brother and sister?
FENDEL: Betty Lynn in 1939 and Michael Rick in 1945. And George in ’42.
 
Feldman:  What schools did you go to as kids?
FENDEL: Well, you know we went to a few schools in the very early years. But we didn’t spend much time at any one of them, like the California school we went one year. When we moved back to Portland, we went to another school for one year, and then my parents bought their house in 1951, when I was nine, so that’s probably the best place for me to start. We all went to Fernwood Grade School on Northeast 33rd, which is now a middle school. And five houses out of Grant Park, we all of course went to Grant High School, and we went to various colleges: The University of Washington and Portland State. 

Feldman:  Were you around here in Portland in May of 1948 during the Vanport flood, and do you have any memories of that?
FENDEL: You know, I was only six.
 
Feldman:  Right.
FENDEL: But I was here. That was just a little before we left for southern California. Chula Vista, California. But I don’t have clear memories of it. I think at the time I knew of it. Probably my parents talked about it at the dinner table and that sort of thing, but, being a first grader, my mind was more on being a good, responsible first grader. [laughter] Yes, I was here, but too early to have vivid memories of it.

Feldman:  Tell us a little bit about your Jewish background. Did you go to services? Temple? 
FENDEL: A fairly typical Conservative Jewish family. My mother was not raised with very much Judaism at all in small-town Minnesota. They traveled to go to High Holidays and maybe Pesach, and that would have been about it. I think there was some candle lighting in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, on Shabbat. If that, that would be about as much. So, the children were all aware that they were Jewish, but really didn’t have much knowledge of it.

In my father’s household, it was a different story. My grandmother was the treasurer of Neveh Zedek synagogue for 40 years, and Rabbi Philip Kleinman was the rabbi when I was very young there. And a little side note: He officiated at my bar mitzvah, but by that time that congregation was really declining, and there wasn’t much young membership there, and not much young vitality for children there, for kids. Not much social opportunity. So, my parents wanted to move over to Ahavai Shalom, and they were very nervous about telling my forty-year-treasurer grandmother, Annie Fendel, about this wanting to move, because she was very dedicated obviously to the Russian shul, and they wanted to move to the Polish shul. That’s the way it was then. 

And finally they got up the nerve to tell her, and in her little remaining Russian accent—this would have been about a year after I was bar mitzvah, so about 1956—they wanted more social opportunity for their three kids, so they went to her apartment, and they said, “Mom, we’re going to make a move to Ahavai Shalom,” nervously. And she said, “I think that would be a very good idea.” 

So, despite the fact that she was very dedicated to her own synagogue, she put up no defense at all. I went to Sunday School. I was bar mitzvah. I went in one of the earliest years of its existence to Camp Solomon Schechter, before it moved to Whidbey Island, when it was on Aurora Avenue North, in the north part of Seattle. Very primitive. Either the first or second year of the camp’s existence, I think it was the second year, and it was held in a place called the Holiday Motel, which was an abandoned motel on motel row, Aurora Avenue in Seattle. They rented this facility, and I think we slept in motel rooms, or—I can’t remember for sure—I know there were some tents put up for the facilities that they didn’t have, but I loved it. Then the next year they moved to Whidbey Island, to Fort Casey on Whidbey Island.

I was in my early teens, so I really couldn’t be a camper very long. But I think I was a camper for one year in the Machon program, which meant I was there the entire summer, the teenage special program for one year; that would have been ’59. In 1960, I was the dishwasher because I was too old to be a camper and a little too young to be a counsellor. That was ‘60. In ’61 I attended Brandeis Camp Institute in southern California, and by ’62,’63, and ’65 I was a counsellor there at Whidbey Island, and I have the fondest memories. And I still return occasionally, and they are long gone in their own beautiful campsite now, and for many years now, near Olympia, Washington. But I still go back to Whidbey Island occasionally—it’s right here in my heart. Great years there.
 
Feldman:  Did you happen to play music then, any musical instrument?
FENDEL: I started studying piano when I was either six or seven. I have to admit I was not a great practicer. I played a lot by ear as the years went by, and I’d hear a pop tune on the radio and invariably I’d be able to play it. Well, that’s great at parties, but it’s not so good if you want to be able to really read music well, because you don’t get much practice at it. But in those earlier years I was already playing piano, and fairly decently well, but I was also playing guitar in the camp, leading the campfires and the singing, and those were the folk music years with Pete Seeger and The Weavers, whom I loved. And The Kingston Trio, whom I loved a little less. And Peter, Paul, and Mary, whom I really didn’t much love at all. But those were big folk music years, so I learned a lot of that material. And I learned a lot of funny songs from—I don’t know whether you know who Tom Lehrer was. I loved Tom Lehrer, and I would … because you could sing them to anybody. They weren’t off color and they were cute, and at the time politically relevant, and they were fun. So, we would do Tom Lehrer material, and I played six-string guitar and led songs at Camp Solomon Schechter.

Feldman:  Wonderful.
FENDEL: It was great fun.
 
Feldman:  So that takes us up to the ‘60s then, and what were your experiences around the ‘60s, and the ‘70s. I know times were a little turbulent here in Portland. There was the rise of the Black Panther Party in the Albina neighborhood; there were civil rights issues; Vietnam…
FENDEL: The Columbus Day Storm.

Feldman:  The Columbus Day Storm.
FENDEL: I can start there. I was working in—this was like a school job—I was working in a pharmacy called The Irving Street Drug, in northwest Portland. And I was…what was the year of the Columbus Day Storm, ’62 or ’63?

Feldman:  I will have to look it up. [1962] 
FENDEL: So, I was working behind this counter; they had this fountain in that pharmacy, as the old pharmacies had. And I would heat up the sandwiches and stir the Bromo-Seltzers for the inebriates who would walk in the door in the mornings, and I would file the large deliveries of prescriptions before they would go through them and process them, and I would deliver prescriptions. And one day it was the Columbus Day Storm, and phone lines were down all over the place. And in these old brick apartment buildings it was so severe that bricks came out of sides of buildings and were on the sidewalk.

I wasn’t going to go deliver prescriptions during the Columbus Day Storm. And the owner asked me to do it, and I said, “With all due respect, Mr. Olson,” I knew his daughters from Grant High, they were friends of mine, it was hard for me to say this, “With all due respect, Mr. Olson, I’m not going to go out in this, and I know people are on maintenance prescriptions, but I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to risk my life.” And I think two or three weeks later he fired me. But it had a good ending. I replaced that with another school-type job in a record store, so I got to do what I loved, part time. So, actually, it turned out that he did me a favor. 

Feldman:  Did you ever do service in the military?
FENDEL: Oh, yes. Vietnam was going hot and heavy in the ‘60s, and I was teaching a seventh grade Sunday School class at Neveh Shalom. It was a Sunday morning, and I’m having a little coffee in the morning, and just before I was going to leave for Neveh Shalom, a friend of mine calls me who in is the National Guard in Portland. And I’m getting a little older and running out of excuses, and he calls and says, “George, get out here to the Clackamas Armory right now. We’re taking in two people.”

It was very hard to get in the Guard then; everybody wanted to get into the National Guard, because it kept them out of Vietnam, or very likely would. So I poured into my clothes and drove out to Clackamas, and by the end of the morning I had my right hand up in the air. I served six months obligatory basic training at Fort Lewis, Washington, which was, if there can be a good place to go, that was it, because it was so close to home. And when I moved to California, I served at the Glendale Armory and at a summer camp at San Louis Obispo on the California coast, peeling potatoes on a back porch of a kitchen. That’s what I did for two weeks, I peeled potatoes. That was great. I didn’t love the military. That’s putting it very kindly. But peeling potatoes in 72-degree weather [telephone ringing] is about as good as it gets. So that’s a six-year obligation [telephone ringing, pause] 
 
Feldman:  Now we’re working. Sorry.
FENDEL: That’s alright. I’ll go back. I was called by a friend of mine who was employed by a title insurance company, and I interviewed with the county manager and was hired. I kind of moved up the ranks there in the marketing aspect of the business. I called on realtors, both residential and commercial realtors, as well as lenders, mortgage lenders, builders, developers, real estate attorneys—anybody who could control where a real estate transaction or a title order would be placed.

Did I hate it? No. Did I love it? No. It was like people working for the bank. The salary was okay. We got the bills paid. It was five days a week. I could put a tie on and look like a mensch. Even if I wasn’t one, I could look like one. The “benies” were pretty good—a couple of weeks “vacay.” And if you were there long enough a little longer “vacay” and some other benefits. And I worked mostly for nice people. I never loved it. I just did it. 

Feldman:  And how long did you do that?
FENDEL: One of the accounts that I had called on said, “George you could triple your income. You need to get a real estate license. You know everything that you need to know about real estate.”

So, I did that. I went to real estate school, got a real estate license, went to work for a small company and about four, five, six months after I got a license interest rates hit 18 per cent. And we couldn’t sell anything unless it was by contract, by private contract. So, I stayed in it a couple of years. I did okay but not great in it. It was just very hard to maneuver in those kinds of waters. So, hat in hand I went back to the title company, not the one I had worked for, but another one, and they knew me as a competitor and the owner knew me and he hired me immediately because I had experience. I did it from—with the exception of those two years—from about ’72 until ’99. That’s about that. I might be off on the earlier number, but the later number is accurate. 

Feldman:  So, let’s get back to your married life. When you came up from California, where did you move with Laurie? 
FENDEL: We had left a lovely little apartment on Burbank Boulevard in Van Nuys, California, just north of LA city limits. It was $135 a month (sounds impossible now) and it was two-bedroom, two-bath, and it was very nice, very pleasant. Figuring that we should be able find a place for less in Portland, because this is not LA, this is Portland, we agreed on a limit of $125 a month. Couldn’t find anything. And we found a place—there was a place on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway for years and years called Kissler’s Bike Shop. And this was just on a little private road behind Kissler’s Bikes, which is in kind of the western segment of Beaverton. Almost Raleigh Hills, but not quite. And it was a lovely apartment. It had cathedral ceilings and a pool, and nice kitchen. And, anyway, we were there a couple of years, and then this same friend who found the National Guard for me and called me about the title company called me a third time, this earlier starter. And by this time, he was buying rentals. He said, “George, I found a little rental, and if you don’t buy it today and get started with homeownership, I am going to buy it myself by the end of the day. And one year from now, you’ll be eating your heart out.”

That’s exactly word for word what he said, I remember so clearly though it’s a long time ago. So we went over and saw this little house in the woods. We called it “Poor Mountain Park,” because it was north of Mountain Park, and it wasn’t in Mountain Park at all. I mean it was a real motley area with potholes and gravel roads. I don’t think this house had ever been lived in by an owner. I think it had been rented its entire life. There were dead cars in the front yard. There were little kids wiping their noses, running around, three or four dogs. It was a dog, this house. And I’m not terribly handy, but there was a guy that worked for my father—we called him “The Messiah” because he was religious. He wouldn’t work on Sundays; he would work on Saturdays. So we hired him to come over once a week and make this dog of a house into something that we could quickly turn and make a couple of bucks on.

We were in the house 16 months. It was on SW Vicuna Avenue right near what used to be a high school (I can’t remember the name) [transcriber note: Jackson High School]. south of Barbur Boulevard, in that Portland Community College area, but pretty remote at the time. We bought it for $11,700 can you imagine? That wasn’t the down payment. That was the purchase price. 1972. And we fixed it up. And 16 months later we sold it. We moved to Vermont Hills, to SW Idaho Street—54th and something and Idaho—we thought it was the Taj Mahal. It was about 1250 square feet. It had three bedrooms and—strangely for a house of that vintage (1950 or so)—it had two and a half baths, which was pretty nice.

We had Baby One at the first house, Baby Two at the second house, and by that time the 1250 square feet was pinching us a little bit. We could have stayed there, but Laurie called me one day, and she said that the Budners—Diane and (what was his name? They were congregants at Neveh Shalom)— said they were about to list their house. It was on 34th a little bit south of Vermont. Just at the top of the hill near Gabriel Park. Nice area.

She said, “They are about to list their house. They’re going to move. I want you to see it.” And she told me how much they were asking—$45,000 or $46,000 or something. So I got my calculator out, from working at the title company. I figured out a payment. I knew these things. And I called her back and said “There’s no way we can afford to make that kind of a jump.” She said, “Well you figure out a way.” So I did.

We bought that house in 1976 (sounds right to me) and we were there 30 years. Thank goodness. We bought that house for $45,000 and sold it for over $400,000. And that house of course paid for this condo, got us into this condo completely, mortgage free, of course. So that’s the housing story. 

Feldman:  So in your first house, you had your son Marc?
FENDEL: Yes.
 
Feldman:  And the second house? 
FENDEL: The second house. I think Aliza was born in the second house.

Feldman:  And the third?
FENDEL: The third was Reyna.

Feldman:  What were your feelings about raising your kids Jewishly at this point?
FENDEL: All three of my kids went to Camp Solomon Schechter. We would have observance in our home for all major holidays, maybe not the real minor ones, but my kids were aware that they were Jewish. This was before the advent I think of what is now called the Portland Jewish Academy, so they couldn’t go to private Jewish school. And I don’t know—my wife was a teacher, an elementary school teacher; they don’t become wealthy. And you don’t become rich working for the title company. So if there had been a private school at that time, I don’t know that we could have afforded it. With my piano drops, we probably could have scraped it together and made it work, but it wasn’t there for us to do. So, my kids went through religious school, belonged to the USYs of the world. They weren’t, as I was when I was a teenager, very active in both USY and AZA (B’nai B’rith Youth). They just chose USY, the synagogue affiliated rather than B’nai B’rith affiliated organizations. That was their choice. So there was a strong feeling of Judaism, and now as adults, Marc does not keep kosher, which is his choice. And my two girls are strictly kosher and shomer Shabbos, totally shomer Shabbos, and that also is their choice and I certainly respect that.

Feldman:  You at some point, I understand, were on the board of Neveh Shalom. Is that right?
FENDEL: Yes, when I was teaching seventh grade for a few years I was on the board.
 
Feldman:  I guess once those two synagogues combined, that was your home.
FENDEL: Sure. 

Feldman:  Now let’s talk about what I perceive is your love, which is jazz.
FENDEL: Yes. I’ll tell you about music lessons for a little bit, and kind of evolve into how the jazz craziness happened to happen. I started to study kiddie piano music, simple classical music with a wonderful teacher who lived in Mount Tabor. I was a lazy student, but I guess I was good enough so enough rubbed off, where eventually I wanted to start playing some popular tunes, some Gershwin tunes, and some Duke Ellington tunes, and what have you. And she really wasn’t fit to teach those things and she knew it. I think at age 15 we changed, with her blessing, to what was then called the Portland School of Music. And it was in a gorgeous building, an old, old, old brick house up the hill from the Multnomah Athletic Club, and all those beautiful homes up there. It’s now a country and western radio station, which just makes me shake my head in wonderment. The music that evolves from that place is all cowboy music now and has been for 45 years. But when I was in that beautiful home it was the Portland School of Music. And they gave me a teacher who was very comfortable with the Gershwins and the Cole Porters, and the Ellingtons, and all of those. So I studied with him from the time I was 15 until I was 19. When I started college, I stopped taking lessons, but for years thereafter I said, “One of these days.” You know the old “one-of-these days” routine.

After my kids got so they were a little more independent, I was lucky to get a half-hour lesson from the jazz piano teacher in Portland. His name was Gene Confer [spelled out]. Gene had a studio in the Fine Arts Building downtown. The Fine Arts Building wasn’t that fine. It was a dumpy old building, but it was fascinating because there were all kinds of music teachers in there, and when you walked in—there was no waiting area; you just waited outside the door until the student who preceded you was done. So, while you were waiting, there’d be a flute player down the hall; there’d be an opera singer across the hall; there would be somebody playing violin. All this music would sort of flood the person that was waiting to take the lesson.

I studied with Gene for four more years and would have stayed with him longer, but he got a quick-acting cancer, beat it for a while, and then came back and taught. I got four years in with him, and I am so glad that I did. He helped me so much. That was really very important to me.

I will switch to radio, because I did 28 years of hosting a jazz radio program. I always loved radio; I loved good radio. I was never a rock and roll guy. I was an Elvis guy for about a month and that wore off real quickly when I was 14 years old. By the time I was 15, 16, through playing the piano I was being introduced to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, and pianists like Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, and Bill Evans, and the Basies and Ellingtons of the world. So my taste began to really evolve and to mature, but I never really envisioned myself doing a radio program.

I got a call from a friend who did Friday nights for OPB when they had music—they used to have classical music and jazz—and he said, “The management is in the midst of a budget problem, and they have asked all of their once-a-week hosts if, for an undetermined period of time, they’d do their shows voluntarily, without being paid. And one of them said, “No. Pay me or I’m gone.” So she was gone, and he told Patricia Joy, who was the music director there—Patricia also had been an anchor on KGW news earlier in her career—he told her about me, that I would probably love to do this on a volunteer basis, that I had a crazy (at that time) LP collection, that I had a lot of music, and that I was reliable, I’d be there every week.

So I started doing this with an engineer because I didn’t know how to engineer radio stuff. She told me a couple of things. She said, “We’ll give you an engineer for 60 days, for two months, eight programs, and by then we expect you to be able to engineer by yourself because we don’t really want to pay an engineer for any longer. And secondly you’ll be on probation for 90 days.” And her exact words were, “If for some reason we are not happy with what you do, we hope there won’t be ill feelings, and if we do like what you do, why that’s good for both of us.”

So I was there for ten and a half years, until they dropped jazz and classical music. And I was paid for about ten of those ten and a half years; whatever their budget problems were, they solved them quickly. So I was always grateful that this woman who proceeded me went off into Never, Never Land someplace, because I got a modest little check in the mail once a month that would take my family to the beach or something now and then. But I loved doing it.

During that period of time, there was another jazz station that came on the air for a very short time. It had everything going against it. It was on AM in an era when FM was starting to dominate the radio dial. It had a very weak signal. You drive down to Salem, the station was gone by almost Wilsonville. It was a daytime-only station—that’s an FCC regulation—so it was one from sun-up to sundown. And it was playing mainstream, beautiful, effervescent jazz, which, like classical music, there’s a very small calling for, so it was very hard to sell advertising for it. But they called me and said, “Do you want a shift?” because I was established at OPB by that time. And I said, “Yeah, if OPB will let me do it.” And to my surprise they said yes.

So, I ended up doing weekday mornings for this station, and eventually they hired me to be their music director, so I was doing double duty. We had three locations in two and a half years, because it was a struggle to get advertising. The last location was in the window of the Imperial Hotel downtown on Sixth and Stark. We looked right out there at downtown. I’d get there at 5:45 in the morning to get on the air at six, and all the homeless, God bless ’em, and the people with alcohol problems, who were street people would peer in the window and wave at me when I was speaking into the microphone. The station lasted two and a half years. We didn’t know it, but we were babysitting that station until they could find a new owner. 
 
Feldman:  What was the station?
FENDEL: It was called KKUL, and the KUL part of it kind of spells the word “cool,” so our logo and our station ID’s were “KUL Jazz Radio, 1410 AM, Cool Jazz Radio.” And it was artistically a wonderful station—I say that having been the guy that programmed it—but it was. But financially it was a disaster. And eventually of course it sold after two and a half years and became KBNP, K Business News Portland at 1410 AM. And they were thousands of dollars behind in my salary. They couldn’t pay me except occasionally, and I had to settle for a fraction of what they owed me. If I had hired an attorney, he would have gone through all of that and more. So, it was a life lesson; it was a tough row because of the financial part, but it was an artistic wonder. I have no regrets and Laurie was a champion about the whole thing. It was tight for a little while. 

I was off the air completely in 1997, when KUL went off the air in 1988. But OPB changed format to their current format—news and talk—in 1995. So, I was off the air half of ’95, all of ’96, and in late ’96 the manager of KMHD called me at home and said, “There’s some controversy about this, George. I’ve talked to my staff. Not everybody is in agreement, but most of them would like to have you.”

And the reason there was controversy was because I was writing a weekly column for Our Town—the little free paper out of downtown—it was called “Jazz Matters” and I was very critical of early KMHD because in their earlier years they were just playing stuff that wasn’t jazz. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t jazz. They were playing the Ames Brothers and Johnny Mathis, and a lot of much worse music than that, so I took them to task in my column, not every week, but occasionally. So I was surprised when the manager called me and offered me a stint there.

I went to Laurie and I said, “Here’s the deal. It’s a drive from Vermont Hills to Mount Hood Community College once a week, and it’s voluntary. They don’t pay.” OPB had paid me for a long time and KUL had tried to. So she said (I remember it like it was yesterday), “Well, you know you want to do it.” I started there in January of ’97 and I stopped in January of 2013, because of my vision, because the macular degeneration forced that.

I have to tell you my funniest radio story, because this needs to be on this archive.

Feldman:  Okay.
FENDEL: One night when I first started for KMHD, it was in 1998—I started there in ‘97—and initially they gave me Wednesday nights when no one is listening to the radio, and I knew it. People are at Blazer games or they’re at home watching TV or they go to a movie, or if they’re in their car maybe they’re listening, or maybe they’re listening to any of 20 other radio stations; I knew it wasn’t a good time slot. And I didn’t have to do it for very long. I got Sunday afternoons eventually, and that’s a very coveted timeslot—two to six on Sundays.
 
So, one night on a Wednesday night I get a call from this lovely young lady who unfortunately had her best friend die. She and her husband were having the best friend’s husband—the widower, if you will—over for dinner. So she calls me on Wednesday night, and she says, “Can I make a request?” And I said, “Sure.” She said, “Could you play ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee,’ the religious song, by clarinetist Pete Fountain?” 

I don’t know if you remember him, but he was a very talented, mostly Dixieland clarinetist. He played in Lawrence Welk’s TV orchestra for years. Talented guy. But number one: he’s a Dixieland player, and that’s not what I did on the air; that not what any of us did on a jazz station. And number two: we didn’t play religious music. So what am I to do?

What I did was I told a white lie. I said, “I’ll look for it, but I very much doubt that we have it in our library. Here’s my suggestion to you. Give me 15 minutes, and if I don’t find it, you might be better advised to call one of our Christian radio stations” of which I think, to this day, we probably have two or three. I extended my condolences. I thanked her for calling, knowing I wasn’t even going to look for it. The phone is now hung up and she’s listening for the 15 minutes, and I go back to my duties.

During my whole time in radio (28 years), I used to have a feature that I called a “double play,” a baseball term, where I would play the same song, one version instrumentally and one version by a vocalist. So I have that set up, just as I’m talking to her. With one hand I can do the CD part—the LP is a little more technical—so while the CD is playing, I can fix that. And I had them both ready to go, and the song is two versions—while she’s giving me 15 minutes—you can’t make this stuff up—is from the Wizard of Oz—“Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead.” [laughter]

So I’m sitting there—of course we’ve hung up the phone—I’m screaming and laughing at the same time. I’ve got Shorty Rogers and his big band playing “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead” and I have a vocal version by a group called The Group—they were a terrifically good jazz singing group, they made one album—one album wonders—and were never heard from again—but they were ready to go. So, while whatever preceded “Ding Dong” was playing I felt like the guy who is trying to find the right color wire so the bomb doesn’t explode in the movie. And my digital counter is not going 8-7-6-5, but it’s going a minute and 11, a minute ten, so I knew I had a little, but not a lot, of time, so while that record or CD was playing, of course I hit the button for the CD drawer, pulled out version one of “Ding Dong,” put it on the table, and inserted whatever was going to be the next tune, and while that was playing, of course I pulled off the LP version of “Ding Dong” and put something else on the LP. But absolute, swear-to-God, true story. Thousands and thousands of songs out there that could have been next—this woman has lost her best friend—and I’m going to play “Ding, Dong the Witch Is Dead?” No way. [laughter] That’s the funniest thing that ever happened to me on the air. There are other things, but that was by far the best.

So that’s radio. I had a chance to meet and interview a lot of my heroes. I interviewed Oscar Peterson, who is one of the swingingest, greatest pianists of all time at the ’86 Mt. Hood Festival of Jazz. I interviewed Carmen McRae—a great singer—at that same event, and a little less known but a virtuoso guitar player named Joe Pass at that event as well. And then my son and I started going to the Otter Crest Jazz weekend. It was a very straight-ahead jazz thing; it wasn’t far-out stuff. And it was not electronic. Smooth jazz hadn’t been invented yet, and I got to meet a lot of others. I should tell you my Ira Gershwin, too. 

Feldman:  Yes!
FENDEL: This is an aside from radio, but to put a little capper on radio, I did it from 1984 to 2013, and I loved every minute of it, and I to this day miss it very much. So, but it is what it is. I was fortunate in that nobody ever once told me I had to play any certain artist. I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted, both from a standpoint of individual musicians and creativity of putting together program ideas, like tenor saxophone players from Europe, or My Fair Lady done in jazz versions, or whatever I wanted to do, or an Irving Berlin songbook or a Henry Mancini songbook, or whatever I wanted to do, I had complete freedom all those years; I was very lucky.

So, we’re going to go back now a long way, because this is important. And I’ll show you the proof of this because it’s right near you, where you sit right now. When I was 19, I had the pleasure of going to Brandeis Camp Institute, and it was in Santa Susana, California, north of LA, small town. And it was a month-long experience in religious aspects, social aspects, academic, co-ed. There were pretty girls there, which we liked, and I hooked up with one, this was before Laurie. Brandeis was a wonderful experience Jewishly for me; I really loved it.

And after Brandeis was over, those of us from places other than LA stayed with some of the local campers, to have parties at night and to tour and go to this and that and this and that, Universal and International, whatever, other places and events. So I’m staying with one of the local campers, and my mom calls me and she says, “You won’t believe this, but while you were gone, (this is August 1961) I was lucky enough to get the home address in Beverly Hills of Ira Gershwin. And I wrote him a letter asking if he could send some memorabilia” George Gershwin is by far my favorite composer. He sent a handwritten letter to my mom, which—I can’t quote it word-for-word, but this is close, “Dear Mrs. Fendel, I am sorry that I cannot provide you with the materials that you require. (She didn’t require anything.) But I enclose with my compliments a photo of my brother and myself, which I hope will please him. I also enclose a cancelled check of my brother’s, which, if he likes, he can cut the actual holographic signature and paste it on to the photograph.” 

Fortunately, at age 19, I knew that you don’t do that to a cancelled check of George Gershwin’s from 1932. You keep it intact. So glad I didn’t destroy that check. 

So, I am right there in LA. So, I say to my mom, “What’s Mr. Gershwin’s address? Don’t you think I should go thank him?” She gives me his address on North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, and this girl that I met down there and I drove up to Ira’s house one late afternoon. We rang the intercom button. It’s by now early September 1961. After I explained why I was there the guy on the other end says, “Mr. Gershwin has some guests right now, but if you could come back in about a half hour, I’m sure he can see you.” And I’m shaking like a leaf. 19 years old. Longest half hour of my life.

We came back, and Ira obviously had been told that there were two young people who seemingly knew who he was, and something about his contribution to the music world, and he, I think, put two and two together because sending these materials to my mother had just days before had happened. So we rang the doorbell this time, and Ira Gershwin answered the door and introduced himself, and we introduced ourselves. And we didn’t get any further than the foyer, but we talked for ten or fifteen minutes. And I hope I thanked him—it’s all gone, I was so excited—for Porgy and Bess, which I’ve seen four times in my life and it makes me cry every time I see it. And I hope I thanked him for all of his beautiful lyrics that he wrote to dozens and dozens of shows. And I’ve often thought that if George, who died in 1937 at the age of 38 from a brain tumor—which I had also one. I don’t know if you know that about me but I did. I’m 16 years out now; that’s another story; I can get to that. I often think that if George Gershwin hadn’t died young at 48, you and I and the rest of the world would have gotten ten more years of his song writing and music writing genius.

A few days ago my brother picked me up to do some errands, and I happened to be—I think I had an appointment with my eye specialist; I have them every six weeks. And I happened to be wearing my Porgy and Bess shirt because my eye doctor also plays violin in a little community orchestra, so I thought he’d like to see that. I get into my brother’s car, and what is playing on KQAC, the classical station? An American in Paris.
 
Feldman:  Oh.
FENDEL: American in Paris was playing and I had my P and B shirt on. It was just meant to be. The three items are right behind you. Please feel free to take a look. It’s the black and white photo, the letter just to the right, and the check above the letter. The last piece, the painting of the young George Gershwin, was done by a family friend of ours for my 70th birthday, which was very sweet of her, so we added that. But those three items—the photo, the check, and the letter—all date from 1961. They are in museum-quality frames because I would never want them to fade. There’s some value to them—I’ve looked them up and I would jump from the Markham [Bridge] before I’d part with them. [Laughter]

Feldman:  What got you started in jazz as opposed to classical music? I mean…
FENDEL: Good question.

Feldman:  I mean, what about jazz grabs your heart? 
FENDEL: Good question. I think it was a combination of people in my life. My second music teacher—the guy at the Portland School of Music when I was 15—started to introduce me to things by George Shearing, but they were all standard American songbook tunes, the Gershwins, Porters, Berlins, Richard Rogers; they were all classic Americana songbook tunes, and I liked them. So that was an influence.

My father was an influence. My father was a violinist—pretty good. Pretty good. He could have played in a community orchestra. When he started working, he’d take the violin out once in a while, and he and I would have some fun playing duets in the house, or for relatives or the other kids. He knew what was good and what wasn’t. Sometimes I’d be studying upstairs, and I’d be in eighth grade or a freshman in high school and he’d say, “C’mon down here. I want you to hear what’s going to be on after this commercial.” 

And I’d say, “What are you so excited about?” And he’d say, “There’s a guy that’s going to be on Gary Moore’s show or Jackie Gleason’s show, named Joe Williams. He’s a great singer.” Or “There’s a guy named Sammy Davis that you gotta hear.” Or “There’s this husband and wife team named Steve and Edie.” So that was all American pop music, but it was very much jazz related. My dad definitely was an influence. I think my first experience with Ella Fitzgerald was because my dad loved Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, and people like that. 

So, a teacher, my father, just listening to the radio. There was a DJ here—I had no conception, no idea that I’d ever do radio. It didn’t even enter my mind. But I loved good radio. I loved it when it was well done, and by the time I really started getting interested in it, I was all done with the rock and roll stuff, the kiddie, the kissing good guy stuff. Nothing against them, but Bill Haley and Chuck Berry and Elvis and all that stuff—sounds pretty good now. But back in the day my taste had already matured beyond that. I was listening to Peggy Lee, and to Chet Baker, and to Louis Armstrong, and all these great artists.

There was a DJ named Bob McAnulty. He was a diminutive little guy, probably five foot five, but he had this beautiful radio voice. It just flowed out of him. You hear me talking. I don’t have any radio voice. I just did it for all those years with some knowledge, and some love, and some appreciation of music, but I had no great radio baritone chops. Bob did, and I admired him. And he broadcast from a very nondescript dumpy little building right in the middle of Oaks Park in southeast Portland, near the Sellwood Bridge.

One time I drove over there and knocked on the window, and I had brought a record with me. I think I brought a Frank Sinatra album or something like that. He opened the door and invited me in. We got to talking. I was just a new driver by that time, at 16, and this delightful friendship ensued. Bob McAnulty became a huge influence on me and introduced me to much more obscure jazz people, names like Mark Murphy (who is a great singer, strictly a jazz singer, so he never climbed to the top of the mountain), a husband and wife singing team called Jackie and Roy (same story with them. They did a lot of records on very well-known labels, but their constituency was small). The people that admire jazz, it’s always been said in this country, is about 3% of the United States. Classical music—we’d love to have their numbers, and they are very small too—at about six percent. But at six percent they can fill the Schnitz and we can’t. That’s just the way it is.
 
So, McAnulty became an influence; there was another DJ on KGW radio from midnight to 6:00. I went down a few times to visit him, a guy named Ross Davis, and that was his real name; that wasn’t a radio name. He was young and I admired him because he was 20-something and had his own all-night radio show. He and I became friends. But Bob was just a peach, and about a year after I moved back to Portland from California with a brand-new wife, Bob perished in an auto accident. I remember going to his funeral in a Catholic church in Lake Oswego. Bob McAnulty was the epitome of what he did. He did it so well. He was funny, had a big listening audience for jazz.

So, all of those people and more. I think all my piano teachers influenced me. And then when I got on radio, the other radio hosts broadened my taste a lot. I found myself listening to a lot of people that I had just kind of never opened my horizons to, a few of which never quite resonated for me, but many of whom did. And I also started writing CD reviews for the Jazz Society of Oregon, and that’s how much of this crazy collection came to be.
 
Feldman:  I see.
FENDEL: I started being sent promotional copies because I was doing radio and writing reviews, and the labels, both big and small, the Columbias, the RCAs, the Atlantic Records, the Verve Records, the big labels—and the small little boutique labels that were—some physician in an office someplace who’s a jazz lover and has some local friends in jazz and he makes six albums a year. Those guys have always been very important in the art form, the daubers and dabbers of jazz. They started sending me their stuff as well. And to this day I still get them because, while I am not writing reviews for the Jazz Society anymore, I am still writing for my own blog. The blog is a link on my son’s website; he has a website called Music Education for All, and he’s gotten over three million hits on it in ten years. And I’m a link, so these people like that and I still do it.

Feldman:  High Standard Jazz [http://www.highstandardsjazz.org/] is the blog?
FENDEL: Yes. That was the name of my OPB radio program and my KMHD radio program. My KKUL radio program was called Breakfast Jam, which we thought was a cute double meaning—I didn’t come up with that name—one of the other people did. And High Standards is kind of a double-meaning thing too. 

Feldman:  What is that?
FENDEL: Well, to have high standards about anything and to play the standards on the radio. All those great composers are the composers of standard music.
 
Feldman:  With you and your son Marc—I know he plays the alto sax—is he a jazz musician as well?
FENDEL: The poor kid grew up with this, or at least a portion of it. I tell people the poor guy never had a chance. He started playing alto when he was about 12. And I took him that first year to the Otter Crest Jazz weekend, which was a wonderful festival. By the time he was 13 (by the way, he was small; he was 13 and he looked like he was 10) they started inviting him up on the stage to play with these heavyweight professionals from New York and LA, and he was just blown away by it. So by the time he was 13 he knew that somehow, someway he was going to have to pursue this music and this means of making a living, which is not an easy one. And he kept studying so that by the time he was at Wilson High School, under the direction of a very competitive and very loving band director, Greg McKelvey, who was just a miracle man, the pied piper type of guy, and he loves these competitions where one band goes up against another, just like two teams on a football field or something; he loves winning; he doesn’t like losing. The kids would get to high school at 6:30 in the morning to have orchestra practice before their first class, and they would do it willingly. He was responsible for one great big band after another, and by the time Marc got involved in his freshman year, he was working with Greg privately and working with the late Thara Memory, a trumpet player who was much beloved in Portland, worked a lot with kids, was kind of a slave driver, very direct with kids, but the kids knew that he [Greg] was awfully good at what he did, and they didn’t mind his rather rough-hewn manner.

By the time it was Marc’s junior year in high school, they had earned, through winning local competitions, a chance at a national competition in Philadelphia. They flew east to Philadelphia, and in the entire nation they finished third, which was a great honor. Greg recognized that it was. Marc was not the primary soloist, there was—Marc was a junior and he had a friend in the saxophone section that was a senior, who was also a great soloist, so he was kind of the main soloist in the orchestra. When he graduated, and Marc was in his senior year, he took over that responsibility. Once again they were invited to a national competition. This time it was in Oakland, California, so much closer by, so quite a few of the parents of the band got to go. And I’ll tell you the short version of how this happened, of how this worked out.

There were three classifications: small school, medium school, big school. Wilson was a big school. So, we played our three or four selections. They were very dense and very complicated and difficult arrangements, but we had played those in local competitions before with judges who didn’t understand, who thought that high school kids should be playing “ba-da-da-da-la-ta-da”—Glenn Miller, you know. There’s nothing wrong with Glenn Miller, but our kids were playing Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, and Bill Holman, and these are all jazz guys and very, very challenging arrangements.

So, we played our things and hoped. While the judges were comparing notes, we were out having a soft drink or a coffee, and then they called us all back in, and the emcee for the event comes on stage and he says, “In the large school division, in third place, the bronze award goes to Berkeley High School, Berkeley, California.” So now we know we finished second, first, or the judges didn’t get what we did. Then the guy comes out and he says, “In the second place, the silver award goes to Agoura High School, Agoura, California.” Okay. It’s win it all, or lose it all. And then he said, and this is all we heard: “The gold award, from Port…” There was no other “Port.” That’s all we heard. The screaming started, and we had won. It was a great thrill for all of us. I was a big, big moment. Marc, I think, in his mid-senior year, he went to a college—what do they call them—where the representatives are all gathered in one big auditorium? College…?

Feldman:  Conference. Convention. Whatever.
FENDEL: Yeah. There were maybe fifty or a hundred different colleges represented, and they all have a booth at a convention hall.
 
Feldman:  I see.
FENDEL: One of them was Berkeley College of Music in Boston, which is kind of to jazz as Julliard is to classical music; it has been for a long time. Marc noticed that they were there, and he wanted to talk to them, hoping to get a scholarship. So, we flew him down to California to meet with a woman, and he’s on his own. This woman was pleasant and business-like, and not terribly interested in him, until she asked, “What instrument do you play?” And when he said alto saxophone she lit up, because she just was thinking it was going to be one rock-and-roll guitarist after another. When he didn’t say guitar, all of a sudden she was really interested. So, he applied for the scholarship, and thank God he got it. And he went a fifth year. He got two degrees from Berkeley, one in music performance and one in music education. That was a great experience. I remember his telling me that he enjoyed his secular classes as much or maybe even more than he did his music classes. To graduate, you have to have English, and a little history, and some sciences, and whatever the liberal arts courses are that are not music courses. He enjoyed those faculty members. He liked that and was challenged and enjoyed that as much as he enjoyed his music classes.

He was a very lucky guy. He lives in Seattle now and plays every chance he gets. He and his partner of 20 years [Jayne Simmons] —there’s been no marriage and I don’t think there will be—she’s just as delightful as can be. I think we’re as close to her as…. She’s not Jewish but she comes to every Passover seder; she participates; she’s interested. And they are sweetheart and honey and together; they’re great together.

She leases about an acre of ground on Vashon Island and grows natural substances and herbal products. She founded a little a company called Sister Sage—very clever name—and makes products for insomnia, for mosquito bites, bee bites, for tension, for anxiety, for this and that—it [started as] kind of a hobby. She has about eight or ten products. Now one of them has marijuana in it; it’s perfectly legal. It’s the most expensive one. About four or five years ago, she applied at Pike Place Market, which is only for farmers. Since she leases a half-acre, she’s a farmer. She got a booth at Pike Place Market, and what brought her about $1,000 in 2012 is now hovering about $100,000.
 
So, Marc is working of course for and with her probably two-thirds time. They have eight employees now. They have warehouse space. They have internet orders, and they are in Pike Place and two other farmer’s markets, like at Hillsdale and Portland State, and that kind of thing. For the first time in his life Marc has more security in his life. He has an income which, while it’s not huge, allows him to do a few things. He had his horn completely revamped just recently. It’s very expensive. It’s almost $1,000 to do that—new pads, new buttons, new felt, new finish on the exterior. It’s a three or four-week job. He can do some of these things now, when he doesn’t have to watch every penny. Also, I should tell you one other non-musical thing about him because not many people knew this. In I think it was 2012 he decided he wanted to walk the Pacific Crest Trail. Are you familiar with it?

Feldman:  Yes.
FENDEL: So in five and a half months he walked from Mexico to Canada.

Feldman:  Wow.
FENDEL: [He went through] three pairs of shoes. All the planning for changing climates in California, Oregon, and Washington during the spring and part of the summer. And he did it. I’m very proud of him. And he has since walked from Glacier National Park to the Washington coast as well. From Montana. That one is a piece of cake compared to Mexico to Canada. And he plays every chance he gets. He played for me.

I should also tell you. I’ve started into my ninth year of producing a series of jazz concerts at Classic Pianos, which is right next door to the Aladdin Theater, on Milwaukie and Powell. About almost nine years ago, my favorite (living) jazz pianist in the world, Alan Broadbent…. Alan’s not a household name; he’s probably pushing 70 by now. He was Woody Herman’s music director at age 22. He’s just brilliant, raised with classical music and always wanted to play jazz, originally from New Zealand. He’s been in the States since the ‘70s or so, since maybe even the ‘60s, late ‘60s. He also went to Berkeley.

Anyway, I heard him play at the Otter Crest Festival, and all I knew about him was that at that tender age he had been Woody Herman’s guy. So I’m settled in a comfortable chair, and he walks out to do a matinee performance, probably with a bass player and a drummer. And after I (figuratively), after a few bars, picked my tongue up off the floor and put it back in my mouth, I thought, “George, you’ve got to use radio to your advantage. You’ve got to nuzzle up to this guy and get to know him.” This was about two years after I started doing radio, about ’86.

We’ve been very good friends for many, many years. He calls me one day from his home then in Santa Monica, near LA, and he says, “George, I’m going to be in Portland, but not for music reasons.” He says, “It’s a series of meetings regarding my son’s education. Do you want to go to lunch?” You know, he’s a friend; he’s a personal friend by now. Not only my heart-throb piano player, but good friend.

So, I said, “Yeah, of course I want to go to lunch, but if I could find you a real good piano someplace, wouldja, wouldja, couldja, couldja?” He said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” He’s not a hustler. “I’ll just do it for the door after your expenses.” Because he just does contracts and stuff; they’re not important to him. He doesn’t want to bother with such things. So, on a week and a half’s notice, after I was referred to Classic Pianos, we filled the place, and I thought, “Boy, if I can do this once, maybe I can do it again.”

And I have been doing it every two to three months. I have brought pianists—almost entirely pianists—out from New York, from LA, from Michigan, from Seattle, and some locals from Portland. The way it works is some of them will draw very well, some of them I’m really disappointed. We seat 100 there, and they let me use their facilities without charge, which totally makes it possible for me to do this. They’re very smart business people. I don’t take a dime out of it, totally a nonprofit; it’s a labor of love (the arts usually are) The ones that fill the place pay for the ones that don’t fill the house, that draw 43 people in a room that seats 100. And that happens fairly frequently. But I’ve been able to do it and keep my head above water. On May 10th we’ll start our ninth year.

And for me, I just get on the telephone. I’m not very good on the computer because of my vision. I call, tell them what I do, and in some cases now they are familiar with me, a few of them. And sometimes people that I’ve had call me up and say, “George, I’m going to be in Portland. I’m going to be in Seattle. You want me? But this time it will be with a trio and not just solo.” 

What am I going to say? “No?” He’s a great player. 

But Alan, who was my favorite, was the beginning of this. I’m particularly grateful to have this, especially since my vision went bad. It’s just another music activity that I can do, and I still do something for the radio station. They get in tons of CDs by musicians that don’t make the cut, the wannabes, non-jazz. Some of them are really bad, really untalented, and some of them are quite good. But this is a jazz station and maybe they are doing New Age music, or pop stuff, or they’re doing world ethnic music, so they’re never going to get on the air. The station manager and I have had this agreement since before I had to stop doing radio there, and I’m still doing it five years later. He just lets these accrue for a couple of months and I stop in the station about every other month and pick up 50 or 60 or sometimes more of them, put them in a big bag, take them over Everyday Music, where they don’t allow very much (maybe 50 cents or a dollar a piece on them) and I trade them for things that the station will play on the air. So, alphabetically, we’re talking names like Adderley, Baker, Coltrane, Davis, Evans, Ellington, Flanagan…blah-blah-blah through the alphabet…Coleman Hawkins.

So, everybody wins. I enjoy doing it. I have a little booklet that tells me some of the musicians that their library is weak in, and those are the ones that I trade for…

[recording is paused while they are distracted by the dog] 
 
FENDEL: When my grandparents came here from Russia in (we think) 1906, they originally went from Ellis Island, as so many Jews did. They went to St. Paul, Minnesota. They went to St. Paul, Minnesota, and stayed there about a year, because they had some kind of Fendel contact there, which is the usual reason people go to any of hundreds of places. After a year my grandfather had a contact in Portland, Oregon, and came here (we think) in 1905 or ’06. He was asked why he came to Portland, and he said, with his Russian accent, “One winter in St. Paul was like being back in Russia.”

They actually lived on Corbett Avenue, the same street that Laurie and I live on—totally coincidentally—and we went looking one day for their house, because a cousin of mine did some research, probably at the Oregon Jewish Museum, to find out their address on Corbett Avenue. This was years after we moved here. We went looking for it and we just got completely “farshimmeled” and confused because when the city did away with much of old south Portland, and Arthur Street came in that went to the Ross Island Bridge, Corbett Avenue was sliced, was kind of cut in half. There was still a portion of Corbett Avenue on the other side of Arthur Street and here we were checking all and up and down the current main part of Corbett, and we couldn’t make any sense of my grandparents’ address. 

Finally, after about an hour we crossed the street, and we got into this small section of Corbett, which still exists over there. I was hoping to find one of these beautiful Victorians, you know, my romantic idea of my grandparents in this beautiful little Victorian house. What I found instead (it wasn’t the same address but it was where the house would have been according to the addresses that surrounded it) was an industrial building. But we did find it and at least I was able to think, “On this corner of Corbett and whatever was where Harry and Annie Fendel lived.” 

So, the one thing I didn’t get to was my piano playing.

Feldman:  Yes.
FENDEL: For dollars. Not too many of them usually. Where do I start? I always did things like being hired to play for weddings and bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvah receptions, and private parties. I did a fair amount of that. I never depended upon it for a living. We’ve gone through the whole title company thing; that’s what I did. But it was always fun, and I made a few extra bucks doing it.

So, one night I get a call from a commercial realtor that I knew from having played at Portland Board of Realtors’ lunches as an employee of the title company. They loved for me to play while people were schmoozing before the luncheon and having their cocktail or whatever. I was just playing background music. One of these attendees, who had heard me play at these functions over the years, calls me out of the blue (I hardly knew the guy). He says, “George, my name is Hal Gerking. I play the trumpet, and I want to know if you would like to play with the Columbia River Yacht Club Band for New Year’s Eve, just for New Year’s Eve.”

You know, I wasn’t used to reading [jazz] charts; I didn’t do that stuff. So, I questioned him. I said, “Well how do I know the music you play?” And he said, “It’s all old-time music. It’s Ain’t She Sweet and all that stuff. Satin Doll. You probably know all that.” 

And I did. So, I asked question number two, “But, Hal, what if it’s in a key that I don’t play well in? I’m not one of these guys who can play anything in any key. And I’m not a good reader.” He said, “We don’t care. You name the keys. We can play any key anywhere, wherever you want it.” 

So, question number three was, “Well when, Hal? Will we have the time to rehearse?” He says, “Rehearse? We don’t rehearse. We’ll send you a list of the tunes we play, and the key that we tend to lean towards, but if you want to change any key to any other key, that’s fine. We’re with it.”

The reason he called me was their piano player apparently “drinketh a little too much”, and as the evenings would wear on, he would become less and less reliable at the piano. So, they called me to pinch hit for him one time, New Year’s Eve, 1971. December 31st, of ’71, [I remember] because Aliza was born in ’72. I remember we were very pregnant with her.

So, I drove out Marine Drive to the Columbia River Yacht Club, right on the river, and I did the gig, and it was fun, and it worked out well. And sure enough they were able to transpose to whatever key was most agreeable to me. I thanked them, and they paid pretty well, and I went home. New Year’s Eve. And he called me again, and again, and again. And what started out as New Year’s Eve lasted for ten years. I was the Columbia Yacht Club piano, playing all these little ditties. It really wasn’t a jazz group at all. It was a little dance band—saxophone, trumpet, guitar. The guitarist also had an electric gizmo that kept the beat. It was like an electric drummer, which I just don’t like at all. I don’t like electronics in my music. But that’s what they could do, and that’s what they did.

Anyway, that was a real fun gig. And then I did other things. I played at Salty’s on the Columbia—solo piano. You see, jazz is my first love, but I am not a jazz pianist. Sometimes I am very flattered when I am introduced that way, but the improvisational part never…. Those chicks never hatched. I can kind of take a song and do some little frosting on the cake. I can put some of myself into it and decorate it a little bit. But to play with a bass player and a drummer would be just impossible for me, because I am not a strong improvisor. I’m a decorator.

Anyway, solo piano gigs were ideal for me, not other things. I played at Salty’s on the Columbia for several years. I played at a lovely little dining place in Salem, called the Park Plaza Restaurant. It was linen tablecloths and black-tie waiters—kind of expensive for Salem—and it was a lovey place to play. Then I started playing at the Multnomah Athletic Club. I alternated with another guy. He did, I think, Friday night and I did Saturday night. Again, it was solo piano for diners. They paid well, they fed us wonderfully well, and they allowed us to put a tip jar on the piano. And because it was the Mac Club we usually did pretty well in tips. We had Baldwin or Steinway pianos to play, too, which was great. 

And I’m playing the piano over there one night, and out of the blue, like the macular degeneration thing sitting at the computer, playing the piano, I can’t form chords that I’d played for 40 years in my left hand. I couldn’t do it. So, I played short sets, took long breaks, faked it as well as I could, got through that one evening, and, to make a long story short, that ended up being a brain tumor. Senior moment. I’m glad I can’t remember the word. Not benign but the other word.

Feldman: Malignant.
FENDEL: Malignant. Thank you. It was a malignant brain tumor. What I discovered was that I was misjudging things on my left side, like the chords on the left hand on the piano. I’d walk through a door, and I’d brush my shoulder against—because I missed…I would drive, and I’d swerve into the next lane, which is very dangerous. Finally, after that happened, we saw a doc and they brought me in right away and, you can probably see the crease. Can you see the crease there? 
 
Feldman:  Yes. 
FENDEL: That’s where they got me. October 23, 2002. And they took this tumor out of my head and I had 48 chemos to the brain over the next year. Twenty-four. It was a monthly visit. I was in the hospital four days, and they’d do two chemo treatments in four days, and then I’d go home. And just as I was starting to feel a little bit better, as soon as my immunity factor started to cooperate with me and I could do radio again, I’d—boom—be back in the car going for the next treatment. And that was for a year. And then I had a relapse a couple years later in 2006; had to go through the same routine once again, another 24 treatments to the brain.

One jazz story I can tell you. I should tell you this because it’s a cute story. All of this was at OHSU, and they were great. They just in every respect couldn’t have been better. It’s a teaching school, as you know, and my specialist, whom I still see twice a year for an MRI to make sure it hasn’t come back, had students from all over the world, but mainly from Eastern Europe for some reason, Dr. Ed Neuwelt. He developed a means to deliver the chemotherapy to the brain and avoid the barrier to the brain, and he’s the first one in history to have ever done this. And he happens to live in the west hills of Portland, Oregon. He could have been anyplace. And he had patients who came to him once a month, like I did, from all over the country.

So, on one of those four-day stints, which were not too much fun, I’m sitting in the hospital bed, and daytime television is pretty bleak, so I’m probably reading or something, and I would always bring a stack of CDs, like this, with me to listen to during the day, and a little portable CD, like the one you see on the table. So, one day I’m listening to something, and one of his students from Romania, I think, or Hungary, one of those, comes in. And being from Europe he’s much more cultured than most Americans. They tend to be, you know. And so he knows a little bit about the jazz art. He’s thumbing through the CDs, and he says, “Oh, George,” he says, with his accent, “Oh, I like Stan Getz very much. Oh, here’s a piano…here’s a be-bop record by Dizzy Gillespie, I used to listen to him.” He knows almost all these names, which pleases me.

So, switch [scenes]; the next morning I am on the gurney, just outside of the OR where they administer this chemotherapy. I’m there at 7:30 in the morning, a little early, and Larslo, this trainee, who’s actually a full-fledged doctor by now, walks by, and he says, “George, on your radio program, to you ever play Art Tatum or Errol Garner?” I said, “Yes, Larslo, absolutely I do, and I’ll make you a deal. If you do what you’re about to do” (he was going to be the guy in charge of the chemotherapy) as well as you possibly can, I promise the next time my white cell count is sufficient for my being able to do radio, I promise I will play both Errol Garner and Art Tatum.” He stuck his hand out and he shook my hand, and he said, “It’s a deal. I am very good at what I do.” That was my favorite story from all those hospitalizations.

So, in October I will be 16 years since diagnosis, and I had a lot of roommates who didn’t make it, and six grandchildren later, all of whom have been born since I was diagnosed. The bad news is that none of them are in Portland—two in LA and four in Jerusalem—but it is what it is. We Skype with them all the time. But it’s not as good as doing this, as pinching those cheeks. So, I feel very lucky to be here, and there was nothing heroic about it, Ruth. I just told myself this is a serious deal and I’m going to win. I am going to prevail over this condition.

One of my girls said, “Dad, you gotta start reading Harry Potter books.” And I said, “Nah, that’s for kids. I’m not going to do that.” She said, “I’m going to send one of them up to you from LA. And just tell me you’ll read the first 25 pages. And if you don’t like it after 25 pages”—or two chapters, whatever she said—“put it down.” I read every single book and have seen every single movie. I just loved the stuff, and it passed a lot of time for me.

Feldman:  Is there anything else?
FENDEL: Well, that’s about it for my musical lifetime.

Feldman:  All right. Has there been anything in these 75 years, anything in particular, that you want to say about how either Portland has changed, or the biggest surprise in your life living here in Portland? Or, basically, anything you want, George.
FENDEL:Well, I think those of us who have lived here a long time have seen the population go crazy, you know. I remember when I learned to drive, my dad took me over to what is now the Pearl District in northwest Portland, which is the hot area of town. That was warehouses then, and they were all closed all day Sunday, so it was like a ghost town there. And that’s where I learned to drive. Right in those Irving, and Lovejoy, and Northrup, and Pettigrove, and Glisan and all those northwest alphabetical streets—[they] were a ghost town every Sunday. So how much has that changed? Every fashionable, highfalutin restaurant—Andina and all that stuff, that’s all located over there now. So that’s changed immensely. 

I am a big Blazer fan, so I was very happy in 1970 when they came to town and was our first major league franchise, and I felt like Portland had kind of arrived in that respect, when they came to Portland.

The rain has never changed. Never will. There’s this two-part forecast, which I think I heard once on KGW’s weather forecast. I’ve remembered it ever since. I don’t know if it was Matt Zaffino or somebody else, but this is a two-part forecast. You can use it 365 days a year and it is as follows: Part One: if you can’t see Mt. Hood, it’s raining. Part Two: if you can, it’s going to.
 
Feldman:  [laughter]So, thank you very much, George.
FENDEL: Oh, I should tell you one other quick little musical story.

Feldman:  Yes, indeed.
FENDEL: It’s about Bill Evans. I talk about Alan Broadbent, who is my favorite living jazz piano player, and I have to say that Bill Evans didn’t live long. He was, unfortunately, an addict. That is a story that was all too common in jazz and isn’t any longer, thank God. It’s not a problem anymore, except to a very, very, very small extent. Most of the players nowadays have a degree from college, like my son. They are very serious about it, and they don’t threaten it.

But back in the day, Bill Evans, as beautiful a player as he was, was a heroin addict who always made the gig. He was responsible in his musical life. He never missed an engagement. Very responsible. But he was a terrible junkie and he only lived to be 51. I had a few of his LP records in my collection before CD days. And one of my friends at the station said, “Go home and put your baby to bed.” At that time it was just Marc, who was about two. “Put on a Bill Evans record. Tell your wife if there are any calls, take a message. Listen to it, both sides, uninterrupted. Turn it over when Side A is done. Listen to both sides. And tell me tomorrow what you thought.” And I did exactly as he suggested. It really affected the rest of my life, this one piano player. Bill Evans. And you can see his name on the second shelf there [showing CDs].

Feldman:  Oh, yes, I can see that. The CD cases.
FENDEL: Well, from there to the end and for about half of the next row below that row is as much of Bill Evans as I’ve ever been able to find.
 
Feldman:  Oh, my goodness. Dozens and dozens.
FENDEL: Some of them are on labels that are totally pirated things—things that I’ve bought legitimately but things that I never should have found, but I look for that kind of stuff. So that really changed my life, that suggestion on his part. In fact, I was listening to Bill earlier today. I listen to a lot of people. We go to bed with pretty music every night. Not upbeat, because Laurie can’t fall asleep easily. But with ballads on a little portable CD player, and so often it’s Bill Evans or my other hero, Alan Broadbent, the one that I bring to Portland. So I guess that’s about it.

Feldman:  Thank you so very much. I really appreciate it.
FENDEL: Did I go on too long?

Feldman:  No, you did not, and we will be very happy to get this for the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.
FENDEL: Great.