Where Leonard Nimoy Learned His Craft--And What We Can Learn, Too
Leonard Nimoy, who died Friday at 83, and whose funeral was held yesterday in Los Angeles, will, of course, always be remembered for his Star Trek role as Mr. Spock. But Nimoy himself never forgot were he first honed the skills that would eventually lead him to stardom: Boston's West End, where he grew up in the 1930s and 1940s—and, more specifically, and significantly, in an institution there called the West End House.
The West End was a quintessential working-class immigrant neighborhood of narrow streets, pushcarts and three-story tenements. Long after he'd become a star, Nimoy continued to consider himself a “West Ender.As he would recall for an oral history project, he named his house and boat in Lake Tahoe “West End”. There's a great deal to be learned from his life in the West End—that “slum” neighborhoods were wellsprings of the work ethic (his father ran a barber shop; his grandfather used leftover scraps from his job as a leatherworker to make wallets and small briefcases in the small apartment the whole family shared), and bastions of natural tolerance: Nimoy recalled the Italian iceman who spoke Yiddish.
But key to his future as an actor was the West End House, a prime example a type of an institution once common to American poor neighborhoods: the settlement house. Most often associated with Chicago—where Jane Addams started the first in the U.S.—settlement houses, beginning at the turn of the 20th century, spread throughout the country. Originally, as at Hull House or New York's Henry Street Settlement, they were places where affluent volunteers (the Teach for America equivalents of their day) would live in, or settle, in poor neighborhoods, to provide a range of assistance to the immigrant poor—notably teaching English but also offering a range of youth recreation, instruction, summer “fresh air camps” and what we'd called today adult life skills: from cooking and nutrition, citizenship classes and yes, even community organizing. (Jane Addams famously led a sanitation campaign aimed at forcing Chicago to improve garbage pickup on Chicago's Near West Side.). At Hull House, Benny Goodman was given his first clarinet—and music lessons.
By the second decade of the 20th century, as I've written here, there were more than 400 settlement houses across the U.S.—providing what we'd now call social services to the poor through private, generally local philanthropy—led by boards of local leaders and financial supporters, some of whom had made their way up and out of poor neighborhoods themselves. That was the settlement house ideal: Americanization and upward mobility. Leonard Nimoy recalled vividly not just the joys of youth basketball and a runners' club at the neighborhood house—but how the West End House provided him the means to learn the skills that helped him craft the Mr. Spock character—most notably in a public speaking class. As noted in the Spring, 2006, West End House newsletter, “His first year in the annual declamation contest he came in fourth place, but the second time he entered he won first prize. “
As Nimoy himself put it: “This was something I was particularly inclined to do. The experience helped me in my career because it taught me how to select appropriate material and then perform in front of an audience.”
So it was at settlement houses across America helped lift the children of immigrants into the middle class and beyond through time-tested means: recreation, education—and competition. What's more, the settlement house movement created what amounted to a national program—it “went to scale”, to use today's jargon—without any act of Congress or federal appropriation. Settlement houses, in other words, actually won a war on poverty—supported by local philanthropy, overseen by local boards of directors, staffed, in part, by volunteers. Would that we had such a national network today, helping to Americanize a new wave of immigrants roughly on a par with those who arrived a century ago.
Sadly, Boston's West End is long gone, except for a few streets, a Catholic church and a museum. The neighborhoods was bulldozed to make way for luxury high-rises, in one of the most infamous examples of misguided urban renewal policy, as brilliantly discussed in the Herbert Gans sociology classic, The Urban Villagers. (It's likely that, had it not been, its tenements would today draw hypsters—and be far more valuable than the aging ‘60s-era high-rises.) T he West End House, however, survives—relocated to Boston's Allston-Brighton neighborhood, itself today a magnet for Asian and South American immigrants. Indeed, in 2006, Leonard Nemoy headed its centennial celebration. Star Trek fans who want to honor his memory should consider a donation to his alma mater, the West End House.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes
This piece originally appeared in Forbes