07/23/2000

By Beatriz Terrazas / The Dallas Morning News

An orphan comes home

It took a lifetime for Jim west to make peace with his childhood. But a gesture of love welcomed him home.

Late one Sunday morning, Jim and Liz West prepare for an outing. They're off to visit their horse, which is boarded in Argyle.

Liz waits on the edge of the bed while Jim delivers her motorized wheelchair. He drives it through the bedroom door, maneuvers it between the bed and TV, then inches it over to where she sits.

He asks her if the chair is close enough. Liz scoots herself toward the chair. "Oh, you're running amok," she says.

When the chair is positioned just right, she braces herself with her hands, then slides herself along a wooden board and into the chair. And he follows her out the front door, leaving behind an apartment cluttered with the disarray of a recent move.

In the living room, books are stacked in piles on the floor. Framed oil paintings lean against the wall. Papers are stacked on a table.

Through the window, there's an idyllic view -- a green, crisp lawn that spreads around a pond.

This outdoor scene is much like one imagined long ago by a young boy in an orphanage.

The boy looks out the window first thing every morning and has just one wish: That when he looks outside, his very own pony will be there, waiting for him.

THE ORPHANAGE

The boy was born with music in his blood. Not surprising, considering that his father, Sam West, was music director for MGM Studios. His mother, Sadie, played piano professionally.

As a baby, Jim stood in his crib and sang in the morning. On his birthdays, he was serenaded by 10-piece bands.

But in 1928, just before Jim turned 4, his mother died of breast cancer. Sam West was left to care for their three children: Lucile, Maxine and Jim. At the time, they lived in California.

The next year, the stock market crash wiped out the family finances. For two years after Sadie's death, Sam boarded his children with families. Jim saw his father only during weekend visits. Then one day, Sam simply disappeared.

An aunt took custody of Lucile. Jim, 6, and Maxine, 8, were put on a train bound for an orphanage. In a last-ditch effort to avoid being sent away, Jim ate his train ticket.

The kids were sent to Bellefaire Jewish Orphan Home in a Cleveland suburb. In an ironic twist, they later found that this was the same orphanage where their father grew up. They had never known about his childhood or their Jewish heritage.

The people at Bellefaire were kind, but it wasn't home. Every morning the children boarded a bus and went to public school. The town children knew they were the "Home kids." A social line divided the groups.

In junior high, Jim had a crush on a town girl named Marion. He daydreamed about her during class. He longed to hold her hand. But at the end of the day, she went home to her family, and Jim returned to the cluster of red-brick buildings that was Bellefaire.

Fantasy was the only way to escape the orphanage. Jim dreamed that he would wake up one day, look out the window, and find a pony waiting for him. Perhaps on his birthday.

When they took the streetcar into town for a Sunday outing, Jim and Maxine played make-believe: Maybe Mother and Dad will have things ready for the party when we get home. Do you suppose Charles, the chauffeur, is waiting at the end of the line?

But wishing changed nothing. "We knew there was a jitney at the end of the line," Jim says.

Sunday afternoons, the children gathered in the gymnasium to watch a movie. The loneliness that followed afterward was unbearable.

"It was despair," he says. "Because I had just come from the movie ... and it was amazing. We'd usually seen a happy film of some kind." But after the movie, he always had to come back to reality.

Sunday evenings, he often walked around the orphanage alone. "There was nobody to whom I could talk about [the loneliness], nobody I wanted to talk to about it."

In 1938, Sam West reappeared and tried to reunite his family. Maxine was first to join him in California. Jim followed two years later. But it was too late for the kind of relationship he had dreamed of having with his father.

Nevertheless, Jim and Maxine vowed to put Bellefaire behind them. "We were going to change our lives," Jim says. "We were going to obliterate, for ourselves and anybody who entered our lives, any mention of the orphanage and anything it portended."

THE MUSIC

Jim had developed his musical talent at Bellefaire. There, he sang and played clarinet. Later, during World War II, he played baritone sax and string bass in the Army.

His degree from the University of California-Berkeley was in speech and dramatic arts, but music became the mainstay of his life. The attention given to a handsome, dimpled musician gave him a sense of being somebody.

Jim and Liz rest under a painting of Liz with their children, Steve and Claire. Of his lonely childhood, Jim says he's made his peace with it: "I've moved on."

While he played one night at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel, his life changed again. The Jack Ross Quartet performed in the Cirque Room while musical legends such as Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald played on the main stage in the Venetian Room.

A close friend, Bill Sparks, came to see Jim perform. Knowing that Jim had just broken up with a girlfriend, Bill had brought a salve for his wounded heart -- a short-haired beauty named Elizabeth Parker. She, too, had just left a relationship.

They had a rocky start. Liz made a remark that offended Jim, and he later told Bill, "I think she's a smart-aleck Eastern broad. She's a pretty girl, but I've got all the girl troubles that I need for now. I don't need any more women or anything, and certainly not one that is a smart-ass."

A few days later, Liz showed up at the Cirque Room to apologize. And they began to date.

Liz had grown up in a well-to-do family. Her hobby was horses -- hunter jumpers and show jumpers -- and she was a champion rider. When she met Jim, her father, Wesby Parker, was vice president and general manager of Post Cereals. He would later would take the reins of the Dr Pepper company in Dallas.

Despite the differences in their backgrounds, Jim and Liz married on Dec. 1, 1956.

VEGAS

They spent the next few years on the road: Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Vegas again. Not only did Liz accept life on the road without complaints, but Jim soon found that his wife met life's toughest hurdles head-on.

In 1958, their first son, Christian Robert West, was stillborn. Yet, as she was wheeled out of the operating room, Liz turned to her grieving husband and asked, "Are you all right?"

In 1960, Steven West was born. Claire would be born four years later.

After Steve was born, Jim had an epiphany: This was the family he had longed for while he was in the orphanage. He had to give them the normalcy he never had. So he made one of the toughest choices of his life. He turned his back on Vegas and a deal for a solo album with Capitol Records, and moved his family to Dallas.

At first, he sold used cars during the day and played the clubs along Greenville Avenue at night.

But within a year he had discovered the growing market for jingles and voice-over talent. He worked successfully for two music production companies until the late '70s.Then, in 1977, he decided to go out on his own. He launched the Jim West Company Inc., doing voice-over work for commercials, political campaigns and documentary films.

continued in part 2...


janet paterson
53 now / 41 dx pd / 37 onset pd / 44 dx cd / 43 onset cd
tel: 613 256 8340 url: "http://www.geocities.com/janet313/"
email: "[log in to unmask]" smail: PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada