PORTLAND, MULTNOMAH COUNTY; 1940s:
Sammy Davis Jr. once called Portland home
No audio (podcast) version is available at this time.
By Finn J.D. John
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This did not work in the Army. Fellow draftees and drill sergeants and officers in the Army came from all over the country, including parts of it where segregation and racial roles were so locked down that even meeting a white person’s eyes and smiling at him (or, worse, her) was evidence of a kind of insubordination punishable with attempted murder. And attempted murder — the kind where the person administering a beating clearly doesn’t care if it’s fatal or not — became a part of Sammy’s life, for the first time, in the Army. His father’s pocket watch was smashed, and so — several times — was Sammy’s nose. It ended up permanently flattened. Eventually the Army figured out that Sammy would be more valuable as an entertainer than as a combat soldier, and after that he got better protection. He still never got promoted, though, and mustered out of the Army at the end of the war holding the same rank he had coming in: Private. It was all somewhat ironic. It was the Army that taught a whole generation of white American men to question their racist views, which they found hard to square with what they learned of the quality and character of Black soldiers who fought beside them and occasionally saved their lives. But for young Sammy, perhaps because the people he encountered weren’t real combat veterans, the experience was much different. It was a harsh way to lose one’s innocence, and it left an unmistakable bitterness that took a long time to fade. But it left something else, too. There is an old saying that the fire that burns the straw also purifies the gold. Sammy left the Army more determined than ever to use his talents to change the world in whatever way he could. But there was no denying that he was profoundly demoralized. You can’t mistake the bleakness in his prose when he writes in his memoirs about that time in his life. Where once he’d been a proud show-biz man, feeling like his life was glamorous and going places, now he felt the rut he was in. And by now it was definitely a rut. The fortunes of the Will Mastin Trio were fading like the Vaudeville era they were part of — fading to a starvation diet of bad-paying shows in different towns, to occasional grueling strings of one-night stands, to the dreaded day when they’d have to give it up and start “pushing beans” themselves. Some of Sammy’s old friends had made it big, though — really big. One of those people was Frank Sinatra. The Will Mastin Trio had performed with him in 1941, when Sammy was just 15 and Old Blue Eyes was 26, and the boy had struck up a strong friendship with the legendary Chairman of the Board. Back then, Sinatra had been just another promising young singer, but now, in the wake of the war, his star was rising like a rocket. It was good to have successful friends, but that didn’t pay the bills. Sammy’s group played on. Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston … Portland. The Will Mastin Trio was in Portland for two years, playing regularly in the Clover Room nightclub, among other local hot spots. Sammy and his team were one of Stumptown’s hottest draws, but still, it wasn’t exactly a prestige gig. Although it had a sizzling jazz scene at the time, Portland was not an A-list town, and it was on the way to almost nowhere. Portland has to have been one of the lowest points for the trio. It’s certainly among the least important cities they performed in. But Sammy was a showman. He loved to be loved. And there’s no question but that Portland loved him. Plus, there may have been racism in Portland, but at least it wasn’t a back-of-the-bus-boy kind of town. He doesn’t talk about this in his memoirs, but it’s at least possible Sammy was planning on sticking around a while, settling for being a big fish in a small pond. And, that’s where he was when that fateful telegram arrived from Frank Sinatra. Significantly, Sammy stuck around Portland for several years after his big break, basking in the glow of its audiences and hanging out with its show-biz people, as his career started lifting off — stuck around well after his roster of options had expanded to include much more prestigious cities. After 1947, the Will Mastin Trio was on its way … with a little help from an old friend. Life for the three of them would never be the same. And for fans of Frank Sinatra’s “Rat Pack,” it would be remembered as the dawn of a golden age.
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