Adele Ferguson

THERE WAS “scattered applause but also bewilderment from many in the Los Angeles crowd” when Quincy Jones, at his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month, said, “To me, that journey (in music) began in Bremerton. You know Bremerton. Washington, don’t ya?”

Jones gave a long, emotional speech about his childhood here after his introduction by Ophrah Winfrey but the newspaper didn’t run any of that. It told of his hanging with Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, Lena Home, Ray Charles, Joe Louis and a lot of other greats when he became famous worldwide as composer, director and producer.

SO I’LL FILL YOU IN a little on when he was one of ours, thanks to his 2001 “The Autobiography of Quincy Jones” which I picked up back then.

According to his brother Lloyd, Quincy was ten and Lloyd was eight when their dad loaded them on a Trailways bus in Chicago bound for Seattle and their eventual destination, a job at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. That would have made it about 1943. Their mother was institutionalized off and on all her life and kept showing up wherever they went for short periods of time.

“At one point the bus stopped in Idaho, and the white people on the bus went into a restaurant to eat but they wouldn’t serve blacks so Daddy took me and Quincy to some black people’s house near the restaurant and he paid them to feed us. We rode on that bus for what seemed like forever and finally got to Seattle. When we got off the bus, we took a ferry over to Bremerton, about an hour’s ride, and from there we took another bus and got off that bus and started walking up a long hill.

“THIS HILL WAS about two miles long and the three of us struggled up dragging our duffel bags and Daddy’s heavy wooden chest with his tools inside. When we got to the top, we saw newly built little wooden houses in the middle of a wooded area. They looked like bungalows. It was wet and muddy and the place was empty except for a couple of bulldozers sitting in the drizzling rain. All about were huge pine trees. We had never seen so many trees before.

“Behind the bulldozers and trees was a tall fence with barbed wire, and behind the fence was a huge Army base with antiaircraft guns pointing at the sky. It was right across a pond of rainwater from our house. That was Sinclair Heights. It was still being built at the time. It seemed like the end of the world.

“Daddy took us to a little bungalow at 5453 Linden Place, set our bags down, gave us fifty cents, put on his gray felt cap and said, ‘Get something to eat. I got to go to work.’ Then he grabbed his toolbox and walked down that long hill we walked up to catch a bus to his new job in the carpentry shop at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

“Quincy and I were all alone in this little house. Inside was a coal stove, running water, no insulation, no phone, no furniture, just a big mud pond out back. No stores, no humans, nothing but that fifty cents. I went out and picked up a couple of oranges one of the construction workers left, but we were still starving. Quincy went to find a store and came back with some Luden’s cough drops. We were so hungry they tasted like mustard greens, sweet potatoes and fried chicken all at the same time.”

I’ll tell you more about Quincy next time when he left Bremerton in 1947 and moved to Seattle, but took two buses and the ferry Kalakala back weekdays to finish junior high school at Coontz and then entered Garfield High in Seattle.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)