2 Memories of Jerry: Nancy Schimmel

  

   I remember hearing the windshield wiper story, and also one about Jerry and Lynn making an entrance to a costume party. Jerry, wearing a top hat, sat piggyback on Lynn, who wore overalls: Capital Riding on the Back of Labor.
   It makes me think of the memorable 40th birthday party Jerry’s mother threw for him at her house. It was to be a surprise party. Most of the guests were late, so the party itself wasn’t a surprise, but Gene had gotten in touch with old friends Jerry hadn’t seen in years. Each entrance was a surprise. Maybe Jerry got his love of hosting parties from his mother.
 
   I met Jerry in 1956 at a folksong evening organized by his ex-girlfriend, whose father was a friend of my parents. She had invited my mother, who brought me along. Jerry was more interested in jazz than folk music, but he was there hoping to find a new girlfriend, and he did.
  He was in social work grad school. We went out for a semester, then he went to a village in Mexico to work for the summer in an American Friends Service Committee work camp. We got married in January and graduated in June of 1957.
   We worked and saved our money and went to South America for five months in 1959 with a couple Jerry had met in grad school. Otto was a botanist and a refugee from Peron’s Argentina. With Peron out, he wanted to show his American wife his homeland. We set off together and travelled through Peru, Bolivia and Argentina by bus and train, meeting Otto’s friends along the way.   
  Jerry brought his banjo, and struck up conversations with people everywhere — he was good at that — so when we left our friends in Buenos Aires and travelled on through Paraguay, Brazil and Trinidad, we still made connections with the local folks. 
 
I think Jerry’s ability to make connections and to size people up made him a good social worker as well. He worked in the adoptions unit for Sacramento County, then worked with kids in the Juvenile Hall and on probation in San Francisco. We moved to Potrero Hill in 1960, got involved in the peace movement, and helped start a little peace center there, the Olive Branch. We were helping organize peace marches—again with the American Friends Service Committee—and Jerry got a little band together to play music along the way and at fund-raising parties, and another group to lead singing at rallies. In 1963, he and some friends hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney. I would have gone, but Women for Peace sent me to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
 
Jerry’s last social work job was running a small neighborhood house on the north side of Bernal Heights. We bought our first house on the south side, and got involved with the neighborhood association there. We parted amicably in 1974. Jerry kept the house, got interested in neighborhood history, and was living in that house until his last illness.
 
Former children’s librarian Nancy Schimmel is a singer, songwriter, and storyteller (Just Enough To Make a Story, Sisters Choice Press). She is working on a biography of her late mother, Malvina Reynolds, folk-song composer of “Turn Around” and “Little Boxes.”
 
Berkeley
2021