seven• Lucky 13

I always suspected that the white family who owned KSAN never actually listened to it. But seemingly resigned to the need to give their San Francisco station its initial “black” voices, they made two cynical moves:

The first was to put their own black handyman on the air, introducing him as “Rockin’ Lucky.” The poor man had no experience or training in radio, and he spoke in a broken English that left black professionals cringing. But “Rockin’” became locally famous for his live remote broadcasts—usually done sitting in the window of a small business in a black neighborhood—in which he invited passersby to stop and chat between records.

The second move was to place in the prime afternoon-drive slot “Ole Jumpin’ George Oxford,” a polished DJ who spun rhythm-and-blues platters and percolated through his show with a patter of soulful slang. Acclaimed the most popular DJ in local Negro broadcasting for more than a decade, he would sign off with, “I love everybody—’specially you, baby!” Many listeners automatically assumed he was black, but he wasn’t, although he was always completely at ease at black events. In person, Oxford bore a resemblance to Walt Disney. He was KSAN’s hottest star until January of 1960, when rival Oakland station KDIA shrewdly hired him away. The desperate KSAN sued to preempt him from using either the name “Ole Jumpin’ George” or his signature sign-off on KDIA, insisting those were KSAN trademarks. Ultimately KSAN agreed that he could occasionally use “ole” on the air as a word, given that the guy did have a natural Southern accent and thus couldn’t stop himself.

I became a new black voice on KSAN, and its only female. And I was, of course, a complete novice. But mellow DJ John Hardy took me aside and gave me a million dollars’ worth of advice in only a minute: “Take your copy and a tape recorder, go stand in front of a mirror, and practice reading,” he said, making it all sound so simple. “But when you look in the mirror, watch the way your lips and tongue interact with your words. Make sure you enunciate properly, so you can distinctly hear each syllable.

“And when you’re done—and this is very important—listen to the tape to hear your phrasing and your breathing pattern,” he continued, placing his hand atop his stomach. “Most of all, you should talk from the diaphragm, not the throat.”

I practiced and practiced until my reflection in the bathroom mirror seemed to be saying, “Ah, you again?” But my delivery grew clearer and stronger. I heard that management liked the sound of my voice, and occasionally I would receive a pittance to cover my gas bill or bridge toll. Otherwise, my compensation was in experience rather than dollars.

For years I had gotten along by gluing together the chips and pieces of parttime and freelance paychecks into a mosaic that did not quite yet depict a career. Then one day my friend Odessa Broussard phoned with a job offer. Odessa was the traffic manager at powerful KDIA, with its mixed-race listening audience and celebrity DJs, including Oxford and basketball star Don Barksdale. Resting at 1310 on the AM dial, KDIA billed itself “Lucky 13” and was a grab bag of offerings—from the nightly saying of the Rosary to the calling of the horserace results. The station played soul, jazz, rhythm and blues, church services; and news director Louis Freeman even pulled double duty as a gospel DJ. The station’s goal: to offer something for everyone, every day.

Odessa was expecting a baby, and she wondered whether I’d consider taking her place. “You should do this,” she said. “First off, I’m not sure I’m coming back from maternity leave. Second, you just might be able to talk your way into an on-air spot. You know, women are our biggest block of listeners in the mornings, and we’ve got nothing special for them right now. Think about it.”

I didn’t need to think about it, I said yes. But I had one question for Odessa: “What is a traffic manager?”

She laughed. “First, it has nothing to do with the traffic on the streets. It would be your job to control the traffic of commercials that air on the station. You’d schedule them in the time period the salesman promised the clients. You’d make sure competing products aren’t advertising next to each other. And that’s how you might get your own show.

“Those salesmen are gonna need you to get their commercials aired in the best time slots, especially during drive time,” she continued. “I’m sure one of the new guys would be very receptive if you approached him about finding a lead sponsor for a new women’s program. As I said, they need you.”

“Odessa,” I whispered, “that sort of sounds like blackmail.”

“Well...,” she said with a conspiratorial chuckle that propelled both of us into giggles.

Odessa did not return to KDIA, although radio had been good for her. She had once fielded an inquiry from a prominent attorney seeking free airtime for some worthy cause; and while nobody remembers whether he got the airtime, he certainly got Odessa. Allen Broussard was yet another Louisiana transplant who had graduated from UC Berkeley’s law school; he opened a private practice with my divorce attorney, Carl Metoyer, and Lionel Wilson, who would someday become Oakland’s first black mayor. As for Al, he was destined to be the first African American president of the California Judges Association and an associate justice of the California Supreme Court. And he was ultimately eulogized for his commitment to civil rights, his intricate legal mind, and his smoking hot gumbo. But back then, he preferred that his wife stay home with their baby, so that’s what she did.

Just as Odessa predicted, it was our newest salesman, Bill Morrison, who enlisted the first sponsor of The Belva Davis Show—Beauty Pleat Drapes, located on Thirtieth and Broadway. My show aired for two hours on Saturday mornings and for one hour on weekdays. As for the format of this unprecedented “women’s show,” the men at the station shrugged and left it totally up to me.

So I incorporated every stereotypical concept of women’s programming available in the early 1960s: recipes, childcare tips, interior decorating advice. Although my manic work schedule guaranteed long days into night, I insisted on having dinner with the children every evening. Their weekends took them wherever our schedules demanded—sometimes to places they should have been, sometimes not. I was almost never home and scarcely had time to take care of myself, but my listeners would never have guessed reality from the opening of my first show:

“Hi—welcome to the premiere of The Belva Davis Show, a program designed for the woman with an interest in making herself and her home more beautiful,” I cooed, my voice clear and confident while the violins of my theme music faded away.

Only a few minutes into that inaugural show, my audience heard from Beauty Pleat, which I characterized as “designer of the world’s finest draperies” with its “sixty thousand yards of quality fabrics” and a patented system eliminating the need for drapery pins and traditional rods. Another commercial featured a dialogue between a fictional married couple—“John and Mabel”—about why Mabel had hung Beauty Pleat drapes not only on the inside of her windows, but on the outside as well. Her reason, of course, was that she wanted even the neighbors she didn’t know to see how beautiful her drapes were!

My first guest was none other than Ella Fitzgerald, who made a brief appearance to promote her show in the Venetian Room of the Fairmont Hotel that week. It gave me an excuse to play some of her jazz classics. I also spun “Release Me,” a cover by Little Esther Phillips that had just topped the R&B charts; “Work Song,” by Oscar Brown; and “Trouble in Mind,” by a hardly known vocalist who would in the future be crowned the “Queen of Soul” and the first female inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Aretha Franklin.

I plugged an Ebony-sponsored fashion show to benefit the Booker T. Washington Community Center. I profiled some of my nominees for Ebony’s “Most Eligible Bachelors” feature. And I shared my recipe for holiday “spirit balls”: crushed vanilla wafers, nuts, and liqueur, all rolled in powdered sugar. “Serve them,” I urged, “and watch the spirits rise.”

As I settled in behind the studio microphone, I realized that I wasn’t a bit nervous. This felt natural. Actually, this felt fun.

A parade of budding singers and comedians made live appearances on The Belva Davis Show, typically on Saturday mornings after opening a run of local performances the night before in San Francisco or Oakland venues. Our Saturday show was broadcast in front of a live audience in the largest KDIA studio, which featured seating for one hundred and a grand piano. My studio guests included jazz crooners Nancy Wilson, Mel Tormé, and Diahann Carroll, and comedians Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby. Cosby was frequently booked at clubs like the hungry i, and came around so much that he recorded a promo with my daughter. “Hi, this is Bill Cosby. Listen to The Belva Davis Show,” he intoned. And then Darolyn’s toddler voice chirped, “’cause that’s my mommy!”

I attempted to coax performers into appearing in person by promising them more airtime, unedited. Some, of course, were nocturnal folks—as far as they were concerned, the crack of dawn didn’t arrive ’til afternoon—and they couldn’t be cajoled into a morning appearance for any reason whatsoever. In those cases, I hauled my clunky tape recorder to their clubs and halls, where I recorded interviews either before they opened or between sets. Not that I was always successful.

When trumpeter extraordinaire Miles Davis opened at the Jazz Workshop, I resolved to persuade him to talk to me despite his reputation for hostile press relations. I showed up, spotted him at the bar, and casually sidled up to the empty stool beside him. He failed to acknowledge my presence.

“Good evening, Mr. Davis,” I ventured.

Silence.

I swallowed. “You know, here’s a coincidence—my last name is Davis, too.”

A grunt.

Choosing to interpret any audible response as progress, I sucked in a deep breath and soldiered on. “Mr. Davis, I have a radio show on KDIA, Lucky 13 on the dial. And I know you don’t do many interviews, but I would so appreciate it if you would give me a break just for tonight and let me ask you just a few questions.”

He smacked his glass down on the bar and cocked his head my direction with a look that could freeze vodka. “Girl, what the hell’s the matter with you?” he rasped in a voice full of porcupine quills. “Don’t you know I don’t do no damn interviews?”

I felt the sting of such rejection more than once, but I refused to let it deter me. When Frank Sinatra played the Cow Palace, I hoisted my gear over my shoulder and joined the throng of white newsmen clustered outside his trailer door. As he returned from a preshow rehearsal, press photographers began snapping away, their flashbulbs popping in his face. He threw up a hand to shield himself and cursed the lot of us. Then he eyed me, raised his eyebrows, and crooked his finger as though to reel me in.

“Girlie,” he said, “you can come on.”

Trying not to look dumbstruck or starstruck, I followed him up the stairs and into his trailer. He took a seat, lit a cigarette, crossed his legs, and leaned back, scrutinizing me as I frantically fumbled to untangle my microphone cord.

“So how come you’re shaking like a leaf?” he asked me.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sinatra, I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling tears starting to brim at the rims of my eyelids. “It’s just that I’m terribly nervous. I know I shouldn’t be nervous, it’s just that...”

He raised a hand. “Stop. Let me tell you something.” He leaned forward and stared intently at me. “The day I walk out on stage and I’m not nervous is the day I quit. So you don’t ever have to apologize to me about nerves.”

I nodded and gave him a grateful smile, and he proceeded to give me one of my best radio interviews.

One of my worst was with provocateur comedian Lenny Bruce, who relished being as noxious as human ammonia.

He opened his show at Basin Street West by carpet-bombing the place with a slew of racial and ethnic pejoratives sufficient to insult virtually everyone in the crowd. I stiffened as he began a staccato repetition of the word nigger.

“Well, I was just trying to make a point,” he said, “and that is that it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. If President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, ‘I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet,’ and if he’d just say ‘nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger’ to every nigger he saw, ‘boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie’ and ‘nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger’ ‘til nigger didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-yearold black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.”

I was shocked speechless, which I suppose is what Bruce intended, but I wasn’t buying his rationalization either. I only lasted through part of his monologue before walking out. Still wanting the interview—if for no other reason than to demand a better explanation—I returned during the break. We spoke briefly on tape, sparks of antagonism flying like electricity between us. I asked him how he could possibly justify using such a hurtful word; and he pretty much said that he didn’t care whether he hurt anybody because that was his act, baby—take it or leave it.

Although Bruce was white, black artists have been deploying the word for decades since then in a misguided attempt to lance its hate. In 1964, Dick Gregory authored the book Nigger: An Autobiography, and he wrote in a foreword, “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.” Later, comedians from Richard Pryor to Chris Rock would build performances around what more polite society has come to refer to as the n-word, and rap artists would make it their mantra. Nonetheless, I would argue that a half-century after Lenny Bruce thought he was disarming the word, it has lost none of its lacerating power to wound.

The Belva Davis Show was becoming a hit, and I was beginning to lead a life I could not have imagined merely a couple of years before. The show drew bigger sponsors, which inspired me to prepare and serve a free lunch to my Saturday studio audience.

Staying up until the wee hours the night before, I would fix batches of fried chicken courtesy of Foster Farms; potato salad with Best Foods spread; finger sandwiches made from Wonder bread; and for dessert, cobbler baked with Del Monte Cling Peaches.

My silent partner was my old friend Bill Moore, the good-hearted guy who had worked in Chuck Willis’s darkroom and delivered my copy when I was running late. In the intervening months, our friendship had only grown deeper. When I was struggling to learn radio, Bill was my listener. When my babysitter would cancel, Bill was my substitute childcare. And when I was utterly exhausted and the moon was full, Bill would pick me up in his Volkswagen Beetle convertible and drive us to the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma County, the wine-growing region of California made famous by author Jack London. Sometimes Darolyn would accompany us and sleep in the back while Bill and I listened to John Coltrane on the radio and drove with no destination whatsoever. It was magic, as though the silvery glow of the moon was washing away all my worries. Often I would fall asleep—the most luxurious sleep I had ever experienced.

Still I was astonished when sultry singer Nancy Wilson pulled me aside at KDIA and said, “That Bill’s a nice guy. In fact, he’s the best thing that’s come around in a long time. You should marry him and stop running around with these musicians.”

Nancy, then at the crest of stardom as a jazz singer, had become a regular visitor to KDIA; and we had struck up a warm friendship that would last the next fifty years. Yet, I was taken aback. First off, I had casually dated a few musicians but certainly did not consider myself “running around.” More to the point, I had never thought of Bill as anything other than my dearest comrade.

The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized that we had begun to function like a single organism—leading and following, challenging and supporting, understanding each other’s whims and idiosyncrasies. I was needy; he nourished. He needed someone to protect him from his own generosity of spirit; I protected. I had never before experienced true joy; Bill had a need to bring joy to everyone around him. He was everything that no man in my life had ever been.

Our relationship was like melting chocolate, changing so gradually that we didn’t even notice we had fallen in love.

It took a child to see it. Steven, loving the new father figure in his life, tugged on Bill’s sleeve one day and asked, “When are you gonna marry my mom?” He continued this somewhat embarrassing campaign until Bill and I applied for a marriage license.

Bill’s family had the stability my own family sorely lacked. His mother, Isabelle, could trace her ancestors to Ellis Island. His father, Edward “Poppie” Moore, had hopped a ship from the Caribbean island of Barbados to Panama, and then another on to California, where he settled but chose to remain a British subject for the rest of his long life. Our families’ sagas intersected at the Southern Pacific Railroad yard in West Oakland, where my mother worked so many years and where Poppie, like my mother’s boyfriend Nathaniel, “ran on the road” as a waiter. The Moores shared a successful marriage and four well-adjusted children.

Photography was Bill’s passion, having studied it at Laney College and apprenticed in Chuck’s darkroom. Photo supplies were pricey, so occasionally Chuck would collect the deposit for a client’s portrait sitting and slip the money to Bill, who would sneak out the back door to go purchase the film and flashbulbs required for the job. Unbeknownst to the client, Chuck would simply fake it, clicking away at his empty camera until Bill strolled back in and nonchalantly tossed him some “extra” film.

Each of us dreamed of bigger and better careers, and we determined to pursue them as a team.

Our first official step was tentative. We drove out of our home county of Alameda and over to Martinez, the seat of adjacent Contra Costa County, to apply for a marriage license. That would keep our names out of the Oakland press in case we decided to back out. Weeks passed. We were busy.

To say that our wedding was spontaneous would be an understatement. Looking at my radio log calendar one Thursday morning, I realized that our license was set to expire the next day. I called him with the update.

“Well,” he said, “do you want to get married today or tomorrow?”

I thought I remembered that Odessa had gotten married in Carmel, the romantic seaside resort set on a spectacular strip of Pacific coastline south of the Bay Area. I phoned the Highlands Inn there and confirmed that yes, they had availability that night and could book a minister on our behalf—apparently not a lot of people scheduled their nuptials for late on a Thursday night.

Next I once again summoned Rose Mary.

“It’s Belva. Two questions: One, are you free tonight? And two, do you have something I can borrow to wear? Bill and I are getting married, and I’d like you to be my maid of honor.”

Rose Mary confirmed that she wouldn’t miss this for the world, and also that she could lend me a cream-colored brocade suit with a matching pillbox hat and small veil. What’s more, she could arrange for her boyfriend, Ralph, a wry-humored mathematician, to stand in as Bill’s best man. We were relieved, chiefly because Bill and I didn’t trust our cars to make the trip, whereas Ralph had a shiny new VW bug coupe certain to get us the eighty-three miles to Carmel and back.

The four of us piled in and headed across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, at which point Bill suddenly realized that he needed a proper bachelor party. So we pulled off the highway and into a South of Market neighborhood in search of a bar. Ralph parked, and the two guys headed inside, leaving Rose Mary and me joking about how much time would pass before we might see them again. To our amazement, they returned in no time flat. As we headed south, they kept looking at each other and cracking up, all the while refusing to share their inside joke with Rose Mary and me. Finally, after at least a half hour, we teased out the truth about the winks, smiles, and flirtations they attracted from other patrons in the bar—and our men’s dawning realization that there was not one woman in sight: Bill had just held his impromptu bachelor party in a gay bar.

The sun was setting over the Pacific when we arrived at the inn and I realized I had no bridal bouquet. The desk manager gave me permission to snip a few hydrangeas from the hotel grounds. A pallid Presbyterian minister arrived, and soon the chapel was filled with the off-kilter sound of an old 45 rpm record galumphing around the turntable as it blared Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” The ceremony was brief. Bill set up his camera on a tripod with an extended cable so he could snap a few of his own wedding pictures.

By this time we were famished, but the hotel’s restaurant had already closed. We had no prospect of a honeymoon: I had a babysitter waiting; we both had work the next morning; and we didn’t have the money to pay for a room at the posh Highlands anyway. So we loaded up the VW and headed back to the Bay Area. Ralph dropped Bill off at his family’s home in Oakland and then took me to my house in Berkeley. The next evening, we announced to the children that Bill was moving in. They were overjoyed.

Everything was going so well that at last I was willing to believe Lucky 13 had brought me good luck as well—that is, until the night I realized I might have just pulled the plug on my broadcasting career.

Late that night I had finished the weekend radio traffic logs while chatting with ad salesman Bill Morrison a couple of cubicles away. I was repeating some juicy gossip I’d just heard about temperamental soul star James Brown’s latest tantrum with his traveling band: Word was he had ordered some of them off his bus and left them on a desert road. “What a guy,” I said sarcastically. And then, recalling that Brown was scheduled to make a late night show appearance on KDIA, I called out “I got to hurry up and get out of here before that little old ugly James Brown shows up.”

At that moment I heard a man clear his throat behind me, and I whirled around to see none other than James Brown himself standing in the doorway. In an instant I could see myself joining his evicted band on that deserted road to nowhere. Brown’s music was incredibly popular with our audience. The station treasured his drop-in chats with our DJs and even sponsored his concerts. No doubt I would be fired for insulting one of our biggest stars.

“Oh, Mr. Brown,” the words rushed out of me, “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

As I stumbled through a profuse apology, a broad grin swept his face. For whatever reason, he had decided to be merciful.

“Aw, that’s all right darlin’—I know you didn’t mean no harm.” Then he added, with gold teeth shining, “You really don’t think I’m good looking?”