Of Pez, Beaneaters, and a black Aida, Vol. III

By David "Chet" Williamson Sneade

Opera singer Estelle Pinckney Clough was born in Worcester in 1866. She began performing in town in the 1880s. A decade later, she appeared in venues throughout New England and New York. Clough’s big break occurred when she signed with impresario, Theodore Drury, who founded his own opera company – one that presented standard repertory performed largely by African-American artists.

Writer Lucy Caplan noted that working within “the context of pervasive Jim Crow segregation, Drury became an unparalleled advocate for the performance of grand opera by and for African-Americans, creating opportunities for black singers at the turn of the 20th century when mainstream venues and audiences remained hostile to their participation.”

Theodore Drury

In a 1903 New York production, Drury cast the dramatic, coloratura soprano Clough in the title role of Verdi’s Aida. The following year, another great opportunity happened when she was enlisted by the renowned English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to perform his work, The Childhood of Hiawatha.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

In the Croydon Citizen, writer Samuel Ali recounted the performance, “Most of the 3,000-strong audience for Coleridge-Taylor’s inaugural concert on 16th November 1904 in Washington’s Conventional Hall were black. Amongst the white audience members were President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary – and Coleridge-Taylor would subsequently be invited to meet the President.

At the concert, Coleridge-Taylor conducted his popular trilogy of cantatas, Song of Hiawatha, alongside the 2-300-person black members of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society. Amongst the soloists were a soprano, Estelle Pinckney Clough, and Henry ‘Harry’ T. Burleigh, a renowned African-American baritone singer and composer. The orchestra was provided by members of the military’s US Marine Band.”

After a successful career of touring, Clough settled in Worcester where she opened a voice studio. She died in 1929. The singer is buried in Hope Cemetery.

Baseball player William Edward “Kitty” Bransfield was born in Worcester in 1875. Although no Hall of Famer, Bransfield collected his share of memorable moments. He gathered his portion of high numbers as well. For instance, in 1900 he led the Eastern League with a .371 batting average. The following season, he was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates and batted .295 helping the team win its first National League pennant.

That being said, the best-told tale of his -- ultimately checkered career -- happened off the field. Evidently, Kitty was as a man of intractable integrity. A teammate by the name of Red Dooin recalled an incident after Bransfield was traded to the Phillies.

Red Dooin

Sometime during the pennant race of 1908, a bunch of thugs tried to muscle the team into losing games to the rival New York Giants. “[G]amblers opened up a satchel, must've had over $150,000 in it, told our pitchers to help themselves," Dooin recalled. "At the first game at the Polo Grounds, a big man handed me $8,000, told me there was $40,000 more waiting for me. I called big Kitty Bransfield, who threw him down the stairs."

The great sportswriter Dave Anderson wrote a lively profile of Bransfield. He said that the smooth-fielding, hard-hitting first baseman began his career as an outfielder with shop teams in Worcester -- “that baseball-crazed city. … His original nickname was ‘Kid,’ but a reporter with bad hearing heard it as ‘Kitty’ and the name stuck.”

There is so much more to tell of the colorful Bransfield. Thankfully, the story is well-documented. He left baseball in 1925. According to Anderson, he became “a supervisor of public playgrounds in his native Worcester and he later worked as a night watchman for the Parker Manufacturing Company.”

Kitty died in 1947. He is buried in Saint John’s Cemetery.

Artist Dorothy Stratton was born in Worcester in 1909. She began painting and drawing at an early age. While still in her teens, she moved to New York to study at the Pratt Institute. She also took classes at the Brooklyn Museum. In the early 1940s, Stratton moved to Los Angeles and took a job a Warner Brothers, painting film cells for “Tom and Jerry” cartoons.

According to a website dedicated to the artist, Stratton’s “vivid abstract paintings gained attention in the early 1950s. Studying with Rico Lebrun at the University of California in Los Angeles, her first major solo at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1959 signaled a deliberate shift to abstraction.

“She turned to printmaking in the 1960s in La Jolla, studying at the University of California at Los Angeles while traveling to Tunisia and Morocco to visit her family. In 1966-7 she worked as an assistant to printmaker Paul Lingren at the University of California at La Jolla and within a few years, her mastery of etching, aquatint, drypoint, engraving, soft-ground collagraph, and mezzotint reversed her role from student to teacher.”

Stratton is credited with making “distinctive contribution to the southern California modernist movement from the 1950s through the 1970s.” Her work is part of permanent collections of the Georgetown University Fine Print Collection, the former Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

She died in Arlington, Virginia in 2007.

Guitarist John “Jack” Clemente Pezanelli was born in Worcester in 1948. He was a child of destiny -- given the fact that one of his uncles was the “Godfather” of Worcester guitarists, that being Pete Clemente. Another was Paul Clement, an early jazz banjo player.

Jack gained early notoriety on his own recording of a couple of 45s with a local, teenage band called the Spectors.

In the late 1960s, Jack moved to Florida and found his way into the band of Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders. An early bandmate and friend was the legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius. In his active career, “Pez” toured and worked with such notables as Sammy Davis, Jr., Lou Rawls, Cleo Laine, Shirley Horn, Rebecca Parris, Maynard Ferguson, Richie Cole, and close personal friend, Larry Coryell.

Young Jaco

Pezanelli studied privately with Jimmy Giuffre and as a long time educator himself, he has been an associate professor of guitar at Berklee College of Music for many years. He also has a series of instructional books and videos to his credit.

He has recorded with the Bebop Guitars, Greg Abate and Herb Pomeroy among others. His recordings as a leader include Pleasured Hands and Songs and Dedications.

Pez now resides in Northampton.

Actor Walter Crisham was born in Worcester in 1906. He began his career as a song-and-dance man and stage actor before making a name for himself in the world of film. His theatre credits, both stateside and in England, are quite prolific. He appeared such shows as Nymph Errant at the Adelphi in London in 1933, Careless Rapture at Drury Lane in London in 1936, and Sweet and Low at Ambassadors Theatre in London in 1942.

Gertrude Lawrence and Crisham

In the musical Crest of the Wave, Crisham played Freddie Layton. He and actress Dorothy Dickson scored a minor hit recording the song “Why Isn’t It You” from the show. The book and music were written by Ivor Novello with lyrics by Christopher Hassall. It was recorded for RCA Victor’s The Master’s Voice label, with the Drury Lane Theatre Orchestra.

Crisham gained further notoriety in the notorious gangster thriller, No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948). Based on the bestselling novel by James Hadley Chase, it stirred a small sensation for its stark look at the sexual attraction between a virginal heiress and the gangster Slim Grissom.

Walter Crisham, Katherine Kath, Tutte Lemkow, and Muriel Smith in Moulin Rouge (1952)

Crisham is also known for his appearance as the dancer in Valentin le désossé in Moulin Rouge, the man called Angus in Joe Macbeth, and Charlie in They Met in the Dark. Other films to his credit include Opening Night (1956), Her Favorite Husband (1950), The Little Foxes (1951), Love in Pawn (1953), The Captain’s Paradise (1954), and Crime a La Carte (1955).

Crisham died in 1985 in Granada Hills, California. He was 79.

Artist and writer Hildegard Woodward was born to Rufus and Stella Woodward in Worcester in 1898. Best known as an illustrator of children’s books, Woodward also penned works in humor and fiction.

She was educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She went on to become an award-winning illustrator who collected two prestigious Caldecott Honor awards for her children’s books, Roger and the Fox (1948), and The Wild Birthday Cake (1950), written by Lavinia R. Davis.

Lavinia Davis

Woodward’s best-known illustrations were done in watercolor, but she also painted in oils and had done portraitures as well. In 1953 Woodward painted a mural on the wall of the Center School cafeteria in Brookfield, Connecticut near her residence in Hawleyville.

One of her first published by Ginn books in 1928, it was written by Elizabeth Ellis Scantlebury and called Little World-Children. A few of her books that she has illustrated include, Alice Dalgliesh’s The Blue Teapot: Sandy Cove Stories (The Macmillan Company, 1931), Frances Gaither’s Little Miss Capo (Macmillan, 1937), Valentina Pavlovna Wasson’s The Chosen Baby (Carrick and Evans, 1939), Lee Kingman’s Philippe's Hill (Doubleday, 1950).

Books written by Woodward include Everyday Children (Oxford University Press, 1935), Jared's Blessing (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942), and The House On Grandfather's Hill (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961)

In 1942, after many years living in New York, Woodward moved to Hawleyville, CT where she resided for more than 30 years. According to Angie Jeffrey, one of the painter’s favorite public works is a mural located on the cafeteria wall of the Center School in a nearby town. “Longtime Brookfield resident, Deanne Sniffin was just seven-years-old when Woodward painted the mural, and she remembers watching the artist at work,” Jeffrey said. "We used to sit there and watch her paint while we ate lunch.”

In 1960, Woodward began losing her sight. Undaunted, for nearly 20 years she carried on with her painting developing a technique known as “painting by touch.”

She died in the town of Brookfield Connecticut in 1977.

Note: I am looking for a photograph of Hildegard.

Journalist Normand Poirier was born in Worcester in 1928. His French-Canadian parents were Raoul Rene Poirier and Therese LaPointe Poirier. Normand – often called and spelled, Norman – was celebrated and reviled as one of the first journalists to report on the infamous My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War. The New York Times reported that Poirier’s 1969 Esquire article, “An American Atrocity” was published three months before the news of the tragedy broke in the press at large.

Poirier was a highly respected reporter, essayist, and editor, who graduated from Cornell University. His early writing appeared in the Pottstown Mercury (Pennsylvania). His byline would later appear in the New York Post and Newsday, as well as such magazines as Life and the Saturday Evening Post.

When fellow reporter Chuck Treleven first encountered Poirier, he noted that his colleague “had visions of criminal skullduggery in high places just waiting to be unearthed and spread across the pages of our newspaper. It was also evident that he was a man of razor-sharp intellect and acute powers of observation – an ideal mix for a newspaper reporter.”

Last night at the Head.

By most accounts, Poirier took his cue from Damon Runyon's book on hard-drinking writers who worked relentlessly and lived even harder. He and many of his fellow writers and friends are said to have popularized The Lion’s Head, a legendary bar on Christopher Street in New York City. After grinding out their front page stories, articles and columns, Poirier and his circle would regularly gather nights to talk about the day at the Head. In his memoir The Drinking Life, Pete Hamill chronicled many a boozy night at the bar. Hamill called Poirier an early influence.

Poirier’s Esquire article, “An American Tragedy” was related in The American Experience in Vietnam: A Reader. “Normand Poirier used the files of the judge-advocate-general of the Navy in Washington to compile a story of how a squad of nine Marines gang-raped a young Vietnamese mother at Xuan Ngoc on the night of September 23, 1966, and gunned down her entire family.”

My Lai Massacre Memorial in Quang Ngai

Normand Poirier died at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City on February 3, 1981.

Note: I am looking for a photograph of Normand.

Firearms designer Daniel Baird Wesson was born in Worcester in 1925. He was the son of a farmer who made wooden plows. His older brother Edwin manufactured target guns in Northboro. After graduating from high school, Daniel became an apprentice at his brother’s factory.

Partnering with fellow gun-maker Horace Smith in 1854, the younger Wesson became one half of the successful team that would become a household name in the world of firearms, Smith & Wesson. Along with a Courtlandt Palmer, the duo made its mark with the development of repeating rifles and the first lever pistol.

Revolver from the 1854-55. 

The company was originally called Smith & Wesson, but went through a series of name changes before returning to the tag that made them famous. A year later with investment from people like Oliver Winchester – as in the Winchester rifle, the company became the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, based out of Norwich, CT.

Young Theodore Roosevelt with his Winchester

According to Wiki, Smith & Wesson began to produce “a small revolver designed to fire the Rimfire cartridge they had patented in August 1854. This revolver was the first successful, fully self-contained cartridge revolver available in the world. Smith & Wesson secured patents for the revolver to prevent other manufacturers from producing a cartridge revolver – giving the young company a very lucrative business.”

When Smith retired from the company he sold his share to Wesson, who became the sole owner of the firm. Just before the turn of the new century, the company introduced the .38 revolver, which became the standard handgun for military personnel and police officers throughout the country.

Wesson settled in Springfield. He also built a summer home in Northboro, which is now the White Cliffs. He worked at Smith & Wesson until heart failure forced him to call it quits. He died in 1906. He is buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in Springfield.

Writer Harrison Gray Otis Blake -- not to be confused with Harrison G.O. Blake, U.S. State Rep. from Ohio -- was born in Worcester in 1816. He was the son of lawyer Francis Blake. A precocious child, Harrison was accepted to Harvard at the age of 15.

He was a Divinity School graduate of the class of 1835. While at the school, he invited Ralph Waldo Emerson to speak at commencement whose Divinity School Address was said to have shaken "the foundations of Unitarian orthodoxy and was vigorously denounced by conservative Unitarian leaders.”

Blake was so moved by the speech that he encouraged Emerson to have the manuscript published. The two writers became fast friends and soon Emerson would introduce Blake to another friend from Concord, Henry David Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau

Blake taught at a private girls' school in Worcester and spent his summers at Amos Bronson Alcott’s Concord Summer School of Philosophy. According to Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Blake and Thoreau became lifelong friends, “exchanging frequent visits and often traveling together. Many times Blake invited Thoreau to lecture in Worcester, often in his parlor; where Henry and his wife Nancy gathered their friends to listen and converse.”

Edward Everett Hale

It was reported that after graduating, Blake further studied theology at Cambridge, but “on account of his radical views never entered the ministry.” By the 1850s, Blake would leave the ministry and become involved with a group of intellectuals back home in Worcester. His circle included Theophilus Brown, an admirer of the Concord Transcendentalists; Edward Everett Hale, pastor at the Church of Unity in Worcester; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a prominent abolitionist and “financial backer of antislavery activist John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry,” among others.

After Thoreau’s death in 1862, Blake edited and published a collection of his friend’s writings, including the quartet of Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), and Autumn (1892), which Blake also transcribed.

In later years of his life, Blake suffered poor health resulting in a stroke. He died in Sterling in 1898. He is buried in the Chokset Burial Ground.

Artist Paul Emile Fontaine was born in Worcester in 1913. His father, Elzear Fontaine, was an undertaker and his mother, Mary, was a singer. Both parents encouraged their son when it came to art. Paul says he knew he was going to be an artist by the time he was 13. He was aided and abetted in his pursuit by a fellow painter and Worcesterite, Leon Hovsepian, whom he met at the Worcester Art Museum (WAM).

Fontaine’s early medium of choice was watercolor. Naturally, he was influenced by John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer, whose paintings hung on the WAM walls. In the 1930s, he took a job with the Works Progress Administration painting murals on public buildings, one such image is in the Springfield Post Office.

According to a website dedicated to Fontaine, in the early 1940s the artist was working in a local factory but continued to paint. Along with Herbert Barnett, he founded the Worcester Artist Group and showed his work in Boston’s Grace Horn Galleries. In 1943, he was drafted and sent to Italy where he worked as an illustrator, painting commissions for the U.S. Army and Red Cross.

“Fontaine frequently painted semi-abstract watercolors of the Italian countryside,” the site added, “maintaining his commitment to a career as an artist. … Starting in 1945, Paul worked as an Army cartographer in Paris, finally settling in Frankfurt as the graphics director for the Army’s regional headquarters. … The Fontaines’ apartment in Frankfurt soon became noted for its continual parade of artists, writers, and musicians. From 1947 onward, Paul Fontaine remained committed to exploring the abstract in his art, with increasingly larger canvases and defiantly non-representational forms in oil, watercolor and acrylic paint, often with bold areas of color and naturalistic hues.”



In the late 1960s, Fontaine moved to Guadalajara, Mexico where he painted even larger works of even bolder colors. At the age of 75, he moved back to the United States and settled in Austin, Texas to be closer to his daughters. There he died at the age of 82.

This is a work in progress. Please send all suggestions, comments, and corrections to walnutharmonicas@gmail.com.   Thank you.