At first glance, the place might seem like any other real estate office, with phones ringing, secretaries typing and salesmen cutting deals.
But at the center of the maelstrom at Travis Realty, on East 87th Street, the firm’s president is holding forth not on commissions and tax breaks but, rather, on the way Duke Ellington changed the course of one young man’s life more than six decades ago.
“I remember when Duke came to the Oriental Theatre, in 1931, and my mother took me down to see him,” remembers Dempsey Travis, a South Side real estate developer and author.
“I was 11, and I saw that Duke was so real, so free. He was a man who didn’t have any handicaps, he wasn’t fenced in, he was articulate, good-looking and suave.
“And immediately my mother and my father both started psyching me, saying, `You can be a Duke Ellington,’ `You can be a Duke Ellington,’ over and over again, until I believed it.”
Travis never did become the next Ellington, even if he did begin toiling as a jazz pianist and bandleader on the South Side at age 13.
Yet today, at 76, he believes that his non-musical success has been largely based on Ellington’s model: a black man utterly in charge of his world, free to do as he wished and admired for it by audiences around the world.
As if to bid a personal thank-you to Ellington, Travis has written a loving, anecdotal tribute to the man and his music, “The Duke Ellington Primer” (Urban Research Press). With its reminiscences from Ellington sidemen such as trumpeter Clark Terry and singer Herb Jeffries, as well as its explorations of forgotten Ellington gems (such as the 1941 musical “Jump for Joy”), the book enriches our understanding of Ellington’s milieu.
In addition, the volume’s information on Ellington’s appearances at the Oriental, Chicago and Regal theaters, as well as minutiae on lesser-known South Side venues and musicians, helps document this city’s rich musical legacy.
Little wonder Samuel Floyd, director of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago, has called Travis’ work “a book that must be read.”
Yet the Ellington volume also should be viewed as part of a remarkable collection of books that Travis has written over the last 15 years. Together, Travis titles such as “An Autobiography of Black Chicago,” “An Autobiography of Black Jazz” and “Harold: The People’s Mayor” represent a vast oral history of black life in Chicago covering most of the 20th Century.
Because of Travis’ passion for local lore and his encyclopedic knowledge about the black experience in Chicago, he has become, without intending it, a kind of Bard of the South Side, documenting its history in the words of the people who lived it.
“This whole writing career came about almost by accident,” says Travis, whose original dream of becoming the next Ellington began to fade once he enrolled in DuSable High School.
“I was going to school with Nat `King’ Cole and Dorothy Donegan and John Young, and when I heard them play piano and compared it to what I was doing, I readily could see I just wasn’t in that league.
“And yet I probably had had more opportunities than they had had as a young musician, because my mother would send me to hell to get a lesson if she thought it was going to make me a good musician.
“But hell didn’t do the trick.”
After a stint in the Army, Travis returned to Chicago hoping to attend college and was stunned to be rejected by DePaul, Northwestern and Roosevelt.
“I couldn’t read or write at a college level, I couldn’t do math well enough,” he once recalled. “I had slid through school, figuring what I was doing outside (playing piano) was more important. And there I was, a 26-year-old man with no skills.”
A remedial reading course at Englewood Junior College changed all that, and Travis began to immerse himself in books. Late one night, while reading Theodore Dreiser, Travis suddenly noticed that “the phrases rolled together into sentences, and the sentences rolled into paragraphs of thoughts and ideas.”
Entering Roosevelt University at age 27, he graduated at 29, thereafter establishing a real estate business that has made him one of the wealthiest men on the South Side. But it wasn’t until Travis was 60 that Dollars & Sense magazine tapped him to write a series of articles, and from that point forth, Travis began compiling his books.
“After the magazine series, I just started to think that the story hadn’t been told, that there was important information out there that should be shared, and that there was a need for guys of my generation to leave some footprints,” says Travis. “I wanted people to know, for instance, what the South Side used to be like.
“On Garfield Boulevard alone, there were about 15 nightclubs. Whites came from all over the world to go to the South Side, to places like the Grand Terrace Ballroom, the Rhumboogie or the Club DeLisa when I was growing up in Chicago.
“And before that, it was places like the Lincoln Gardens and the Elite No. 1 and the Elite No. 2.”
Because Travis could find no publisher willing to print the work of an untried, 60-year-old black author who wrote on black themes, he simply created his own small publishing company, Urban Research Press.
The result has been a mixed blessing, for although these volumes contain priceless information, they also cry out for professional editing and production. If some worthy Chicago publisher were to re-edit and reissue the series, it surely would represent a boon to research on black life in the city.
“Dempsey’s books avoid a lot of the scholarly paraphernalia, such as footnotes, index, cross-references, which make some people cautious about using the books as reliable references,” says Richard Wang, professor of music at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“But I’ve found that Dempsey’s `Autobiography of Black Jazz,’ for example, has proven to be reliable and eminently quotable. What’s more, the stamp of his ebullient personality is everywhere in that book.”
No sooner had Travis finished the Ellington book, last year, than he began work on his next one, an examination of resurgent racism in America. He expects to release that volume next year.
“I think the fact that my mother and father made me practice the piano three and four hours a day after school, when everybody else was out there playing, really gave me the discipline to sit down and write books,” says Travis.
“But so did the fact that even though my father never made more than $50 a week in his life (in the stockyards), the guy next door was a doctor, and down the street was an actor, and around the corner was a banker.
“When I was a kid, you could walk around the South Side and see Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, you could go to a concert by Duke Ellington, and that made you realize that anything is possible.
“So I guess you’d have to say I owe quite a lot to people like Duke.”
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THE FACTS
Dempsey Travis
What: Reading from “The Duke Ellington Primer,” with orchestral accompaniment
When: Congress Lounge, 2nd floor of Roosevelt University, 430 S. Michigan Ave.
Admission: Free
Call: 312-341-3617
