REMEMBERING JAMES D. HOUSTON
November 10, 1933 – April 16, 2009
Jim Houston in 1987
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Photo: Jana Marcus
Novelist, essayist, biographer, memoirist, journalist, screenwriter, teacher, lecturer, bassist, guitarist
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Go to the Santa Cruz Sentinel original
Friends, admirers gather to remember James Houston
SANTA CRUZ — From mournful Scottish bagpipes to a moving Hawaiian chant, the spirit of writer James D. Houston was celebrated Saturday in a remembrance that attracted an estimated 500 people.
Houston, who died at the age of 75 on April 16, was one of Santa Cruz’s most celebrated literary figures and his memorial service reflected the essence of a man who was of Scottish ancestry, with Texas roots and an abiding love for Hawaii, but who was above all a man of California.
Writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn, a close family friend, hosted the memorial that also featured such leading literary lights as novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, Hawaiian musical legend Eddie Kamae and former California poet laureate Al Young.
“We’re here to honor the life of a radiant spirit,” said Dunn in his opening, stressing that the gathering was a “celebration.” In that spirit, many of the attendees came dressed in aloha shirts and other festive flower prints.
Houston’s influence encompassed his work as an author of eight novels and numerous essays and non-fiction books, many of them reflections on California history and culture. He was also a teacher and workshop leader at UC Santa Cruz and several other universities and was a long-time board member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. He and his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, lived in the East Cliff Drive house that once belonged to Donner Party survivor Patty Reed.
Santa Cruz arts patron and Houston friend
George Ow Jr. reflected in wonder on Houston’s many blessings, including his three children, his career and his house. “He had it all,” said Ow. Guest speaker Jeannette Paulson is the director of the Hawaiian Film Festival, which was the direct inspiration for the Pacific Rim Film Festival in Santa Cruz, founded by the Houstons and Ow. She remembered her first meeting with the Houstons. “My life was never quite the same after meeting Jim and Jeannie Houston.”
Kamae, the Hawaiian ukulele legend turned documentary filmmaker, collaborated on seven films about Hawaiian life and culture with Jim Houston. He and his wife Myrna flew in from Hawaii; Eddie, his voice croaking with emotion, sang a song called “We’ll See You at Home.”
Music was a central facet of Houston’s life — he earned a living as a guitar teacher and played in a jug band in Santa Cruz in the 1960s. Kamae’s song and the haunting bagpipes of Santa Cruz piper Jay Salter were the only scheduled musical events, but there were impromptu moments as well, as when poet and friend Al Young began singing Hank Williams’s “Hey, Good Lookin’,” adding later of his relationship with Houston, “We loved each other and that doesn’t end.”
Hawaiian chanter Kalae Miles closed the service with a chant titled “A Love Chant for James,” which capped an afternoon of friends, family and admirers trying to express the legacy of a man of wide-ranging passions and interests. Novelist Kingston, who shared the stage with her husband actor Earll Kingston, left the audience with the reminder that Houston’s influence continues.
“Right now, Jim is hearing us,” she said, “and if we listen carefully, we can hear him, too”
© 2009 Santa Cruz Sentinel
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CONTINUING
for Jim & Jeanie Houston
Take time as lubricant or
time as deterrent, it can
either oil my gears or stop
me right here in my tracks for
snow or grass to cover up.
Green leaves, red leaves, fallen leaves
—a matter of time, distance,
room for change to happen in.
Death’s as much a happening
as birth, a process, a move,
a moving forth always, the
end never in sight except
perhaps to the gifted blind.
How much distance does the heart
cover in one lifetime of
beating? How much love is killed
in its final wising up
to the sad ways of the world?
If I’ve ignored time for months
in order to concentrate
on getting by & basics,
it’s because a light within
me that once flashed red or green
is gradually yellowing,
casually mellowing me
for lifetimes of vigilance.
– Al Young
©1975 and 1992 by Al Young
Composed for good luck in seven-syllable lines for Jim and Jeanne Houston, this poem appears in The Song Turning Back Into Itself, the poet-novelist’s second poetry collection (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1975).
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JACKET COPY
Go to Carolyn Kellogg’s original Jacket Copy reflection at the L.A. Times
Photo: Susan Gilbert
James and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, 1984
Novelist James D. Houston Dies at 75; Explored California in His Works
Known for writing fiction and nonfiction, Houston was considered a leading author in the literature of the West. “Few writers have more consistently addressed the enduring issues arising out of the California experience than James D. Houston,” said Kevin Starr, historian and author of the seven-volume California Dream series. “He set standards by which the rest of us judged our own efforts.”
“Jim epitomizes what we think of as a California writer,” Alan Soldofsky, head of the creative writing program at San Jose State, where Houston, an alumnus, was recently writer-in-residence. “He had a consummate awareness of place and of the effect of both the natural and human communities on the writer’s psyche living on the edge of the continent.”
Born in San Francisco, Houston attended the city’s high-achieving, ethnically diverse Lowell High School. He went to San Jose State in 1952, where he met Jeanne Wakatsuki; they married in 1957. They moved to England where he served as an information officer with the Air Force. After three years and travels through Europe, they returned to Northern California, where Houston earned a master’s in American literature at Stanford, studying with Wallace Stegner.
His first book was “Between Battles” (1968), a humorous novel about Americans on an Air Force base during the Cold War. His second novel, “Gig” (1969), set in a piano bar on the California coast, established his literary reputation.
He and his wife had been married 15 years before he learned that she had been interned with her family during World War II. “He was my shrink. He helped me get it out,” Wakatsuki Houston said Friday, about the genesis of “Farewell to Manzanar.” “He’d write a draft, I’d write a draft. It was a true collaboration.”
With Jack Hicks, Maxine Hong Kingston and Al Young, Houston edited the omnibus “The Literature of California,” helping to give shape to the idea of a writing tradition unique to the Golden State. He also wrote books about surfing and Hawaiin ukulele legend Eddie Kamae. He was a longtime and well-regarded writing teacher.
His family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
© 2009 L.A. Times
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James D Houston – A California voice lost
By Gloria Nieto
California just won’t be the same without the melodious voice and glorious words of James D Houston. He died yesterday at his home in Santa Cruz.
Through some sort of a magical stroke of good luck, I have been a close friend of his oldest daughter Cori, for over 30 years. We played soccer together for years in Santa Cruz. We connected one afternoon after finishing a tournament in Sacramento, sitting on a dock at the river next to the field where we had played.
We discovered that we were both literate, had actually thought about life, struggles, what we wanted to do with ourselves, kind of grown up, adult things. A special friendship was born in the steamy heat of a summer afternoon.
She opened her door to her family who lived in a special house near the water on the east side of Santa Cruz, explaining the architecture of a cupola, a widow’s watch, the outdoor shower and what’s that, what the heck is a hot tub? Why is this room full of a room full of typed index cards and a typewriter. Oh, both your parents write books. Like what kind of books?
Now almost all of these books are in my bookcases: Farewell to Manzanar, Snow Mountain Passage, Bird of Another Heaven, and Hawaiian Son. One of my favorite opening lines in a book was in one of his. Unfortunately you have to go to the link at my personal blog to read it otherwise my normally easy to get along with editors might not be so easy to get along with anymore.
He was always Mr Houston to me because he was Cori’s dad. Not in that Eddie Haskell kind of way, “Oh hello Mr. Cleaver.” But more out of respect for my friend’s father. Or maybe because he was an award winning local author, someone I aspired to emulate. As someone recently graduated with a degree in journalism from Chico State, I was impressed with his graciousness and easy going manner. Why was he like that? Was it his time in Santa Cruz and Hawaii? Or his confidence in his writing skills? A combination things or some other variable I had no knowledge of at age 23? I know, it was the old Mercedes and the Panama hat with the Hawaiian shirt!
Both Mr and Mrs Houston were always friendly and open to me, answering questions about how they wrote, how they got ideas for books, what drove them to complete books. Their writing styles were completely different, as different as they were as people and as different as a Japanese American and Anglo guy could be. What a surprise. Together they wrote one of the first books about the Japanese-American experience, Mrs Houston’s experience in internment camps, Farewell to Manzanar.
During that time I had been going over there and just whining about every little thing. Drama, drama, drama, whine, whine. I read that book and was just embarrassed that I had complained so much to Mrs Houston after what she been through, imprisoned for years by her own government. I told Mr Houston about it once and he just smiled in a very knowing way, clapped me on the back and moved on.
Over the course of knowing a friend and her family for over 30 years there are vignettes, meals at the Santa Cruz wharf discussing politics, the unexpected death of Kathy Akao, Jeanne and Jim’s niece, Cori’s cousin, the weddings and always in the background the Hawaiian music. The Houston family, especially Mr Houston, was close friends with Hawaiian musician Eddie Kamae who came over to play at Cori’s wedding. Mr. Houston wrote the book, Hawaiian Son, about Eddie. I have managed to compile stacks of Hawaiian music thanks to the introduction by James D. Houston.
The tears many of us shed today are for a man who had a life well lived. Aloha Jim. Mahalo for all the gifts you gave us while you were here.
| April 17 2009 at 02:23 PM
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Kent Crockett
Hello, Al –
Ed [McClanahan] just wrote me of Jim’s passing, and I am deeply saddened to hear of it. We had a lot in common in a left-handed sort of way. We both bumbled through the ROTC, and the Air Force, and we both got through it all thanks to our love of the language; our fathers were both country musicians, and we were both big white boys with Texas roots. Jeanne was living in Ocean Park when she was rounded up and shipped out; I lived at the same time in Venice, not more than a mile away. I haven’t seen him in years, but I sure will miss him. Â I know that you and he were very close for a very long time, and you have my deep sympathy. How is Jeanne? When you see her or talk to her please offer a sympathetic word to her from me.
Regards, KC
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Katherine Shirek Doughtie
… Jim Houston. He was a great writer, an excellent teacher, and a fine human being. He was my advisor at UCSC and, because of him, I graduated with honors. Why? (I don’t brag about this, but it’s a funny story.)Â Because he forgot to come to my orals exams. I think a couple other people were there (I hope!), but he spaced it out or something. So I kind of mentioned that I did really well and he kind of graduated me with honors. I love that.
I’m going to donate a little something to Squaw Valley.
Hope you’re well.
Kathy
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Books by James D. Houston
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Books by James D. Houston & Friends
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About James D. Houston
James D. Houston’s official website
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Lisa Alvarez: James D. Houston Farewell | The Mark on the Wall | May 2009
Gwendolyn Alley: James D. Houston: Mentor, Friend, Teacher, Novelist, Essayist | art predator | April 29, 2009
Wallace Bain: The writer as hero: Remembering Jim Houston | Santa Cruz Sentinel | April 19, 2009
William Grimes: James D. Houston, Chronicler of a Diverse California, Dies at 75 | New York Times | April 18, 2009
Braddah Timmy:”Ku’u Home O Kahalu’u” – In Memory of James D. Houston
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Clickables
Video of the 2007 Friday Night Follies performance at Squaw Valley
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Courtesy photo
MC Michael Kowalewski hosts vocalists Al Young on credit card and Jim Houston on guitar at the Western Literature Association Conference, Sacramento 1999.
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LISTEN NOW | James D. Houston in conversation with Andrew Tonkovich at KPFK’s Bibliocracy |  30 mins (give or take)
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WATCHING BAGHDAD BURN ON MSNBC
Commentary by citizen-journalist James D. Houston, blogger. This commentary, published in Metroactive in the spring of 2003, originally posted at the now defunct Al Young’s Net.
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Excerpt
” … Our bombs blacken the sky over Baghdad, while in the corner of the screen the numbers keep rolling, like lemons and cherries turning on their rollers in a slot machine. These two tracks play together, charting the progress of an infamous day: the relentless rain of weaponry, the billowing smoke, the fires reflected in the waters of the Tigris, the Shock and the Awe, side by side with the NASDAQ, the S&P 500. Somewhere offscreen the casualty rate is already beginning its climb, but we don’t see that yet. The screen reminds us to keep our eyes on the fortunes of the Dow, up 235 points when the market closes, to cap the biggest one-week gain in 20 years.”
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Jim Houston, Lurie Professor of Writing, at San José State University, his alma mater, in 2006
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston at their Santa Cruz home, 2007
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Continuing
