The apartment of Woody and Marjorie Guthrie
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Kendra explores the life and demolished apartment of Woody Guthrie. His story started in Oklahoma and ended in New York. He wrote about his experiences and his music became a record of events.
Access playlist of songs referenced in the episode here:
Music by Tim Cahill.
Below is a transcript for season 2, episode 2 of Someone Lived Here at the demolished apartment of Woody Guthrie in Coney Island. If you have any questions about the show or suggestions on how to make it more accessible please reach out at someonelivedhere@gmail.com.
The Coney Island apartment has been torn down and replaced with a 20 story building of yellow brick. But in the 1940s, Woody Guthrie, his wife Marjorie and his kids lived in a small apartment on the first floor at 3520 Mermaid Avenue. Just like Woody’s life, the home saw a lot of love and good times, but it also had some of his darkest moments. Although his story starts in Oklahoma, we’re starting at the apartment 2 blocks from the beach, beyond the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone.
Welcome to Someone Lived Here, a podcast about the places cool people called home. I’m your host Kendra Gaylord. This season we will be learning the stories of homes that are no longer standing all from my still standing apartment in Brooklyn.
Woody first met Marjorie in Greenwich Village 1942. She was 24, a modern dancer for the Martha Graham Company, and married. Her friend Sophie was also a dancer and wanted to do a show to Woody’s famous Dust Bowl Ballads. He agreed to do it, but the rehearsals didn’t go smoothly. Sophie had choreographed to his recordings and Woody did not play like his recording. He explained “If I want to clear my throat, I play a few chords and do it, and if I want to think of the words for the next stanza, I play some more chords while I’m thinking about it, and if I want to leave town, I get up and leave town.”
But he didn’t leave. During the multiple rehearsals, Marjorie and Woody became close friends and then more. Woody was married too, but that never stopped him in the past. This time he took things slowly, to him Marjorie was different. She was smart and political. Her parents were both refugees from Romania, they met in Philadelphia. Her mother was a published Yiddish poet.
Woody was 29 and had spent the previous 10 years singing and writing songs. A lot of them are called protest songs, but they’re also records (not the album type) but the type that memorialize an event or a person. Be it a mine collapse, a dust storm, a farm’s eviction, or a migrant workers death. Some of these were the stories he experienced and some where the stories he saw and heard.
Woody Guthries full name was Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, he was born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912. His childhood and teen years had a few ups and a lot of downs. He moved around a lot and ended up in Pampa, Texas.
At the age of 21 he married Mary Jennings. She was Woody’s best friend, Matt’s little sister. And was 16 at the time.
The country was in the midst of the great depression. Woody and Mary lived in a “shotgun shack” right near her parents (they disapproved of the marriage since he wasn’t catholic). And since we are a podcast about houses a shotgun house is the same style as a lot of the houses you see in New Orleans. They’re usually less than 12 feet wide and have a similar layout as a railroad apartment with the rooms lined up behind each other.
Both Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle where caught in a 3 year drought and severe dust storms were a part of life. The worst was called Black Sunday. It was mid April when Mary and Woody stuffed wet newspapers around the doors and windows and still the air filled with fine dust, and you couldn’t see a person sitting right next to you. He wrote many songs about the Dust Bowl in the years that followed many focused on this event. These are a few lines from The Great Dust Storm:
The storm took place at sundown, it lasted through the night,
When we looked out next morning, we saw a terrible sight.
We saw outside our window where wheat fields they had grown
Was now a rippling ocean of dust the wind had blown.
It covered up our fences, it covered up our barns,
It covered up our tractors in this wild and dusty storm.
Woody and Mary became parents of a baby girl, Gwendolyn, a few months. [November 1935]. Less than a year later, Woody would be traveling. It was always with the goal of getting work since Pampa had little prospects, but he was always as his wife Mary said, “restless.”
Woody was also self aware. He wrote in a letter to his brother Roy’s new wife. “Your new husband isn’t impulsive and high strung like his brother me. He takes everything orderly, decently, and in polished order. He is making his life, and I am letting my life make me.”
And the life that was making him was unpredictable. He traveled around Texas Oklahoma and New Mexico, often hitchhiking or train hopping. He would sing on street corners and saloons, paint signs, and in one more consistent job repair railroad tracks. What he seemed to like most was all the people. He wrote in a letter later, “I had a crazy notion that I wanted to stay down and out for a good long spell, so’s I could get to live with every different kind of a person I could.”
Mary was pregnant with their second child when Woody headed for California. He left the money saved from his time working on the railroad. He said that once he got a job there they would follow. He left with his paintbrushes and his guitar and but when he got to California he didn’t have either. The guitar was traded for food, the paintbrushes stolen. His prospects in California weren’t any better, especially without either of the instruments that made him money.
A few months later he met up with Jack Guthrie, also known as Oklahoma. Jack was Woody’s cousin on his dad’s side and he wanted to be a famous singer. They had similar faces, but everything about them was different. Jack was a western singer, influenced by popular music, he had taught himself how to yodel. He was tall and wore well fitting cowboy attire. Woody was 5 foot 6 and very thin. He wore clothes that didn’t fit and usually didn’t own more than what he had on. Woody sang in an older country style and felt Jack’s songs were a little too sweet. Despite all that, they made an act together and head to LA.
Jack was a natural salesman and got them shows and live performances and by the summer they had a short unpaid slot on a radio station. As the producer saw it Jack would appeal to a young female audience, and Woody would appeal to an older crowd. The cousins styles were so different that they didn’t sing together beyond the theme song.
A family friend, Maxine Crissman joined Woody on the radio show a few times. The two harmonized similar to an old church tradition called shape note or sacred harp. Woody providing the tenor harmony and Maxine with the alto melody. As soon as they started performing together, letters started coming in and soon they had their own radio show, the radio station offered them a year contract for $20 a week and they would get $15 for every 15 minute sponsorship.
Less than a year after Woody left Pampa, TX for California he sent his wife ten dollars for her brother to drive her and the kids to LA. It was November 1937. The show was successful and on a clear day the radio signal would cover much of the country. Maxine said they received around 10,000 pieces of mail in 10 months. That was the only way to show your support or your frustration with a show. The songs reminded listeners of the homes they’d left behind. They received an encouraging postcard from Woody’s music idols the Carter Family, whose tunes he often adapted.
After performing a harmonica piece, a song with the N-word in the title, Woody received a letter, “No person, or person of any intelligence uses that word over the radio today… I, for one, am letting you know that it was deeply resented.” Woody apologized over the air, no longer played the song under that tile and no longer used the word.
The show would end almost a year after it started. Maxine had anemia and would be out of breath after 30 minutes of performing. She loved music, but had never wanted to be a public performer.
The radio station owner asked Woody to write for their newly formed liberal paper. He would write essays as he traveled around California reporting on what he saw. And what he saw altered his perspective. He saw intense poverty, hunger, starving children. Agriculture associations continued to distribute pamphlets in Oklahoma and Texas promising higher wages in California even though the jobs didn’t exist, but having more hungry people ensured the cheapest labor possible.
One of his pieces in the Light read “The constant dread of the wandering worker is to be arrested by some city officer, charged with idleness or vagrancy and sent in almost chain gang style to the bean patch to work without pay.” [September 1938] When he returned to Los Angeles he was changed by the injustice he had witnessed.
His radio show only paid if he had sponsors, and he had a lot less without Maxine. At the station he befriended the host of a news commentary show, Ed Robbin. Ed and his wife Clara were well connected and politically active. They became close friends and Woody would spend much of his time at their house, working and using their typewriter.
Ed’s friends would come by and Woody would perform. On one occasion the writer Theodore Dreiser came by. You might remember him from the Sailor’s Snug Harbor episode, he’s the writer who interviewed the sailor’s who had retired there. When Theodore met Woody, he said, “Ed’s been telling me about your songs, but I don’t think I’ve ever caught you on the radio.”
Woody responded “Then we start even, Mr. Dreiser, ’cause I ain’t read any of your books.”
But there was a writer Woody really respected and it was through a friend of Ed that he met John Steinbeck. He had just published Grapes of Wrath and Woody Guthrie felt like Steinbeck was writing history while it was happening. Woody wrote a summary of the book, “is about us pullin’ out of Oklahoma and Arkansas and down south and driftin’ around over the state of California, busted, disgusted, down and out and lookin’ for work.” After reading Grapes of Wrath the books characters worked their way into Woody’s songs.
[Feb 16 1940] After traveling with Steinbeck in California and performing at migrant worker camps he returned to LA. His radio show was soon canceled, so Mary and Woody packed up their things and went back to Pampa, Texas. He then found himself working at the same drug store he had as a teen. Mary wanted him to settle down and find a job, he didn’t stay for long but while he was there he visited a friend from his high school days.
Evelynn Todd was a librarian. As a teen, Woody didn’t care for school but he read all the books on physchology, Western religions and Eastern philosophy that the library in the basement of city hall had to offer. After his research he wrote a book on the fundamentals of philosophy and donated it to the library. Evelyn Todd put the handwritten manuscript on the shelves under Guthrie, Woodrow Wilson.
Almost 10 years after he donated the book he came back to tell Evelyn about his travels and about John Steinbeck.
The library in Pampa is no longer in the basement of City Hall, and his hand written psychology book didn’t survive after Evelyn retired, but there is a book by Woody Guthrie on the shelves, his autobiography, Bound for Glory.
Woody’s friend, the actor Will Geer told him to come to New York, so he did. But he almost didn’t make it. He got a bus ticket all the way to Pittsburgh, but from there he set out to hitchhike. It was February. A forest ranger found him on the side of the road in a whiteout snowstorm. The ranger brought Woody to his parents house. His feet and hands were tingling and he said “I had really given up all hopes of ever seeing any human beings alive on this planet any more.”
Not long after getting to the city he got a room at a hotel near Bryant Park. [Febuary 23, 1940] At that time Irving Berlin’s God Bless America was having a resurgence, Woody did not like the song and felt it was earnest, overly sincere. It was in his room on lined paper that he wrote “This Land is Your Land, this land is my land. From California to the New York Island.” He wrote six stanzas. Most of them you’ve heard before, but there is one that you probably haven’t.
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.
Woody didn’t do much with the song until 4 years later when he recorded this original version along with 75 other songs [it was lost until a digital transfer in 1997.]
In those 4 years he was very busy. He recorded folks songs for the Library of Congress, he got a sponsored radio show called Pipe Smoking Time which he promptly quit, he went to Oregon to write songs about the Colombia River for the Department of the Interior. Mary had joined Woody in New York and then to the Northwest, and when he wanted to go back to New York again she decided to stay in Portland. After 7 years together, but mostly apart they both knew it was over.
He came back to New York and joined Pete Seeger’s Almanac Singers. The two had become friends when Pete was working as an intern on the Library of Congress project. The group lived at 130 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. To raise money for rent they would throw parties in the basement, Jackson Pollock was one of the regulars. It was here where he worked on his autobiography and when he met Marjorie.
It was right around then that he met Marjorie, the modern dancer who amazed Woody. They were good at keeping their affair secret, but Marjorie was pregnant and her husband found out. He wanted to raise the baby as his own. Marjorie ended up leaving her husband. On February 6, 1943, Cathy Guthrie was born. Woody showed up to the hospital with his guitar and serenaded the staff. He was instantly enchanted by his new daughter.
Marjorie rented a 1-bedroom apartment at 3520 Mermaid Avenue. She wanted to be financially self-sufficient and started the Marjorie Mazia School of Dance.
Woody’s wife Mary was doing the same. Woody sent her a copy of his autobiography. She and their kids were not mentioned in it. She responded with divorce papers. She was a waitress in El Paso, Texas and was providing for herself and her children.
This divorce left Woody single, which also meant in the midst of World War II, he was eligible for the US draft. He joined the Merchant Marine. He was a dishwasher and messman on several different voyages. He was on the SS Sea Porpoise when it was torpedoed off Utah Beach by a German submarine. 12 men were injured. Woody went below deck with his guitar to play songs for the men who were confined to their quarters.
After getting drafted to the US Army, Marjorie and Woody got married and their honeymoon was 5 days in the Mermaid Avenue apartment. He was stationed outside of Las Vegas and a month later he was released from active duty.
He had made himself at home at Mermaid Avenue. His clothes barely filled a drawer and his instruments were on the wall. There was a piece of wood that Marjorie nailed to the wall that just fit his typewriter. The apartment was on the first floor of a small 3-story brick apartment building. Next door was a kosher poultry market.
Woody loved his daughter Cathy. He kept a diary of her coos and burps. He would write down how she used words and turn them into poems and then songs. He would play the songs for Cathy and her friends and then he recorded two albums worth. One of those songs was called Goodnight Little Cathy.
Cathy who had just turned four, died in a fire at that Mermaid Ave apartment. Marjorie had gone across the street to get milk for Cathy’s dinner. The fireman said the a short circuit in the electrical cord of their radio had started a fire on the mattress. Their 16 year old neighbor who lived upstairs saw the smoke and heard her scream. He ran down stairs doused the flames. She continued to talk and babble until she slipped into a coma 8 hours later. Woody came home to a sign on the door to come to the Coney Island Hospital. [Feb. 10, 1947]
The loss was devastating. For Woody it brought back the memories of an event in Woody’s childhood that he had spent the last 3 decades trying to understand.
Woody’s older sister, Clara had helped raise him. Clara called him Woodblock. Their mother was often distracted and forgetful. When Clara was 14 her and her mother got in an argument. Clara said she put kerosene on her dress to scare her mother. The dress burst into flames and she ran around the house. The neighbors came over and smothered her with a blanket. She was still conscious but couldn’t feel the pain. She told Woody not to cry. She died later that night.
Woody saw how the tragedy affected his mother. In his autobiography he wrote “I dreamed that my mama was just like anybody else’s. I saw her talking, smiling, working just like other kids’ mamas. But when I woke up it would still be all wrong, all twisted out of shape.” After another fire related accident, his mother Nora Guthrie was sent to a mental hospital.
There was a part of him that feared that what happened to his mother would happen to him. The two grieving parents welcomed their son, Arlo Guthrie five months later [July 10, 1947]. In the following years they would have another son Joady and a daughter Nora.
Woody started drinking more and Marjorie and Woody started fighting more. Woody was 38 when he went to Pampa, Texas to visit his brother Roy. They noticed a change in him. “He was not so lively, didn’t talk very much and showed some signs of jerky movements in his body.”
When he returned to Coney Island there were more verbal fights and a physical fight that ended with Marjorie calling the police. She said in that fight she realized her husband was sick beyond alcoholism. After multiple different hospitals visits and stays, a doctor diagnosed Woody Guthrie with Huntington’s Disease, a fatal genetic disease of the nervous system. The symptoms are described as having ALS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimers all at once.
Although already divorced, Marjorie oversaw Woody’s care. After placing an ad in a New York newspaper she formed the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease which later became the Huntington’s Disease Society of America which still operates today. Woody Guthrie died at 55.
Bob Dylan visited Woody in the hospital in the 60s, that night he wrote a song to the tune of 1913 Massacre titled Song to Woody. The lines read,
“I’m singing you the song, but I can’t sing enough,
Cause there’s not many men that done the things you’ve done.
Here’s to Cisco an Sonny an Leadbelly too,
An to all the good people that traveled with you.
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.”
Thank you for listening to this episode of Someone Lived Here. I’ve put a playlist on Spotify where you can hear all the songs referenced in this episode and a few others that I like. The book Ramblin Man by Ed Cray was a resource for much of this episode. Thank you to Tim Cahill for our music.
If you want to support the show we just set up a Patreon where you can get a sticker and other bonus stuff. We’ll see you next, next Monday.
Sources:
Ed Cray’s Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory
NPR’s article “The Story Of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’”
