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Jacket designed by IDEAS
I DIDN' FILIPINAS HERITAGE LIB R AR Y
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The Roderick Hall Collection in Memory of Angelina Rico de McMicking, Consuela McMicking Hall, Alfred McMicking and Helen McMicking
arrested in Manila and executed in January, 1945 by the Japanese Imperial Army
MANILA
PHILIPPINE EDUCATION COMPANY
BY WHITEY SMITH
IN COLLABORATION WITH
C. L. McDERMOTT
ANN AND HANK MILLER DR. ANNE W ALTER FEARN
Copyright, 1956
by WHITEY SMITH All righu renrnd
Printed in tlu Philippines
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PHILIPPINE EDUCATION COMPANY, PROPRIETOR.
MANILA
PHILIPPINE.
INTRODUCTION
THE first time I saw Whitey Smith, perspiration was running down his face . It was hot in the Majestic Hotel Ballroom and Whitey was so nervous you would have thought it was his own wedding. Generalissimo Chiang Kai~shek by contrast looked cool as a cucumber under all the photographers' lights, standing beside his beautiful bride, Soong Mei~ling . It was in Shanghai in 1927. Whitey was at the top of his career as a band leader. With his twenty~two young American musicians he had been asked to play at Chiang's wedding. It was the most pretentious social function of its kind in that year of years for the Generalissimo. Chiang had just come up from the south and taken over the city in the name of Dr. Sun Yat Sen. Whitey was a blue~eyed Danish~American with white~ blond hair and a boyish face. He was an institution in the entertainment world up and down the China Coast in the lush days of the nineteen twenties and thirties. At one time he had three bands in Shanghai and one in Hong Kong run by his brother Holger. The famous author Pearl Buck once said Whitey did China more good than a bundle of ambassadors because he taught the Chinese how to dance. Whitey was born Sven Eric Heinrich Schmidt in the little town of Vejle, Denmark. His parents brought him to America when he was just old enough to learn thirty words of English from the funny papers. He and his family were almost buried Vll
alive in the San Francisco earthquake. He has been a profes# sional boxer (once bantam champion of Oakland, California), a newsboy, golf caddy, pool ball racker, drummer, bartender, soldier, radio announcer, salesman, promoter, winner, loser, and married at least twice. He was christened Whitey Smith by a newsboy. He has two characteristics which have kept him in hot water a good deal of his life. He has a heart as big as a house and he always wanted like the devil to make a million dollars. When his &iends are in ne~d they come to Whitey, and they are legion. If he hadn't been so impulsively generous all his life he might have made-and kept-a million. I would not be surprised if he has made it, and given it away. Whitey has lived through and set down in this book a span of violent history that so far as I know has never before been compressed and brought to life. He was right at the core of night life in fabulous Shanghai in the days before World War Two. He knew more world celebrities than the rulers of the country knew. He played with celebrities and for them. They danced to his music and they became his &iends. All the international conflicts in Asia since the days of the war lords have exploded around Whitey's blond head and left him alive to tell about them. The Communist uprisings of the twenties gave him several narrow escapes from death. The repercussions of the Manchurian Incident in 1931 put him out of business when he was broke and struggling to make a comeback. He squeaked out of Chefoo on a U.S. naval vessel in 1937 one jump ahead of the Japanese war on China, a refugee. He was caught by World War Two in Manila and spent three years in Santo Tomas internment camp. From hob# Vlll
nobbing with the great and near'great he went to boiling banana roots to keep from starving to death. I will never know what kept Whitey Smith from being snowed under in the wild, uninhibited final days of Shanghai before the Bamboo Curtain dropped. Whitey has more bounce than a golf ball. Two priceless assets have remained to him through vicissitude and temptation. He has untarnished integrity and he has a sense of humor. When Whitey is happy everybody around him is happy. When he's low and broke you will never know it if he can help it, and he usually can. He told me that the three years it took him to set down the material in this book were among the happiest of his life. Maybe Whitey Smith dido't make a million dollars but he made a million friends and a million laughs. Lots of them are right here in the following pages. Now go on and enjoy yourself.
FORD WILKINS
Manila, 1956.
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Wl,itey Smith acting as best man at one of many Shanghai weddings