Vivian Boarman (1914–1982) was one of the early and ongoing supporters of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Revival. Her expertise in jazz records provided an introduction to, and education in, the music for both her record store customers and her radio listeners over the course of more than one musical generation.

In the course of preparing this article for publication, several other acquaintances of Ms. Boarman’s, including a couple of her ex-employees, were contacted in an effort to provide additional details. The editor thanks Hal Smith, Earl Scheelar, Marilyn McGwynn*, Bill Raynolds, Phil Elwood* and Bill McCarty for their patient assistance. Those with asterisks following their names worked in Vivian Boarman’s Yerba Buena Music Shop.

Author Pat Watters was married to trumpeter/bandleader Lu Watters during the Revival and afterward, and was (and is) an enthusiast of the music in her own right. Following are a few of her recollections of her friend.

(For other perspectives on Vivian Boarman, please see the April 1988 issue of the NOJC News, which features articles by Dick Oxtot [another erstwhile Boarman employee], Bill Raynolds and Kay Rochester Bachrach. Oxtot also talks about his Yerba Buena Music Shop days in his book with Jim Goggin, Jazz Scrapbook [Berkeley, California, Creative Arts Book Co., 1998].)

I first met Vivian in 1939 when she was Vivian Child, working at the Berkeley Music House on Telegraph Avenue half a block below Bancroft, and I was going to Cal. My girlfriends, Marjorie McCabe and Gene Wycoff, and I went in there searching out old stock, Vocalion reissues of Bessie Smith and others from the old Brunswick-Columbia catalog. The days of finding mint condition Gennetts were long gone. The Bay Area’s top jazz record collectors, Lu Watters (whom I hadn’t yet met) and Forrest Browne, had been there before us. (Music stores were loaded up with records just before the bottom dropped out of the market when the Great Depression hit. Many were driven out of business. Some who survived still had closets full of Oliver Gennetts and red-label Okehs. Lu made major scores in Reno and Richmond. I used to say I married him for his record collection!)

Vivian and the Berkeley Music House became a center of the tiny group of jazz lovers at Cal. She later met her husband, Ray Boarman, at the Dawn Club, and spent the war years with him at the University of Illinois in Champaign. She wrote Lu and me long, long letters from there, pages and pages of very small handwriting.

After the war, she and Ray planned to open a jazz record store, and she spent some time fretting about whether or not it would be successful. She especially worried that they really did not have enough money to swing the building on Grove Street in Oakland, pay for necessary renovations, and buy the stock for the store. It ended up that my brother John came up with the rest of the money and became a silent partner. The shop did not make a fortune but Vivian carried on for a long time, even after she and Ray were divorced.

Vivian also had a regular radio show on KRE where she played jazz, talked about jazz, and educated another generation to appreciate jazz. She was very influential.

From the time that Hambone Kelly’s closed on January 1, 1951, until I returned to Oakland in 1967, I was pretty much out of touch with the music scene. In 1967 Vivian’s friends wanted to hold a benefit concert for her because she was too sick to work and could really use the money. Vivian was too proud and too self-effacing to want to have anything to do with it and was refusing to appear. I was asked to help convince her that she really must show up—so many loyal friends wanted to show their appreciation of all she had done for them and for music over the years.

I found Vivian living in a very dreary old flat, dark and depressing with a distinct smell of leaking gas. No wonder she was sick, living in such a poisoned atmosphere! She was in a very depressed state, worried about her mother, to whom she was very attached, who was in a nursing home. I called on Vivian several times, visited her mother whom I had met many years ago, and finally persuaded Vivian that it would be a relatively painless ordeal if she came to the party.

The benefit was held at Earl Scheelar’s New Orleans House on San Pablo Avenue and was a big success. Bob and Kay Helm attended, also Wally Rose and probably Harry Mordecai. I think even Lu came down from the country but didn’t make it as far as the New Orleans House. All the self-styled “Second Line”—P. T. Stanton, Bob Mielke, Bill Napier and others—must have been there too, as I believe it was really at their instigation that the benefit was arranged.

I think the big turnout and all the good wishes did a great deal to bring Vivian out of the hole that she had burrowed into. I believe she had a much more comfortable and secure life thereafter.