Oakland | 1962
James Lee’s reputation was built on his physicality. His legacy, by contrast, would be based around his intellect.
The brick breaking didn’t help to clarify this paradox. Steadying himself in the quiet solitude of his two-car garage, James focused on the short vertical stack of carpenter’s bricks that were arranged on the table before him. A seasoned practitioner of Iron Palm technique, James had developed a knack for pulverizing dense objects with his bare hands. It was an impressive sight, though one that probably failed to accurately convey the full extent of his mental acumen.
In an instant he struck down with his left hand, the impact rendering a sound that was percussive and blunt, like the heavy thump of a well-swung sledgehammer. As the broken pieces fell away at their center, James stepped back to catch his breath. His upper body was rugged and muscular beneath a white tank top, with powerful arms that implied an imposing force well beyond his mere five feet seven inches. At forty-two his physique not only belied his age but gave testimony to the achievements of his youth, as a bodybuilder, a gymnast, and a street fighter.
James arranged a new stack of bricks, feeling their friction as they pressed together atop one another. A welder by trade, he had fashioned his own custom “breaking table” of appropriate height and width to handle his Iron Palm practice, just as he had employed the skills of his day job to invent other types of equipment to suit his training needs. These odd-looking devices populated his garage, such as the spring-loaded punching board, the choke-hold training device, and his homemade incline bench. Collectively, these inventions gave the workout space a peculiar air, hints of a mad scientist’s laboratory.
James spent a lot of time down there in his garage training studio below his family’s home on Monticello Avenue. After dinners with his wife and two children, he’d descend the steps to put in dedicated hours lifting weights and perfecting his fighting techniques. In the process he had a lot of time to think, quiet moments when he got his blood pumping and contemplated his latest plans for new contraptions, training strategies, and books to write.
Though an unlikely candidate to run his own publishing company, James began producing his own titles after realizing that there were scant few martial arts books available to enthusiasts. A few years back he had published his first work, Modern Kung Fu Karate: Iron, Poison Hand Training; Brick Break in 100 Days. He advertised it in the classified sections of national men’s magazines, such as Popular Mechanics and The Ring. In short order, packages and envelopes began arriving from all over the country (and the world) with payments for his book, solidifying James’s opinion that the obscurity of martial arts in America was poised to give way to a substantial popularity.
While considering a title for his first book, James had done something interesting. He found the term gung fu too unwieldy and hidebound for the Western mind. So he tweaked it by applying the Wade-Giles style of pronunciation, effectively anglicizing it slightly to kung fu, which resonated more like the term karate, a word that Americans interested in the martial arts were beginning to use with some familiarly. He could hardly have known it at the time, but James was playing a key role in bringing the term into the English lexicon. It was one of the many places where he would quietly put his mark on the foundations of martial arts in America.
Born and raised in the city of Oakland, James had attended the city’s Technical High School, where he excelled in boxing and gymnastics. At the local YMCA he broke weight-lifting records for his age group and then fell in with a local muscle crowd that pursued bodybuilding with dedicated zeal. Most notable was the reputation James had built for himself as a street fighter, known to be as fast as he was fearless in using his fists. The rumors and urban legends of these brawls, which still persist, put his fight tally north of one hundred.
After school he took a welding apprenticeship in the Pearl Harbor Shipyards in Hawaii. It began on December 1, 1941, a week before the Japanese attack. Over the next few years he learned his trade in the urgent atmosphere of repairing the Pacific fleet. In his free time he studied judo and jujitsu in the islands’ thriving martial arts scene. He entered the service toward the end of the war and contracted a case of malaria in the Philippines so grave that the medical staff moved him into a tent housing the bodies of the recently deceased. The same grit that saw him through so many East Bay street fights somehow got him out of that tent as well.
After returning to Oakland following the war, James struck a balance between his hobby and his career, muddling their definitions even as he found near equal time for the two. Between marriage and kids James continued his enthusiastic pursuits of martial arts, studying Sil Lum kung fu under T. Y. Wong in Chinatown. As a star senior student, James eventually proposed a book project to T.Y. Their resulting collaboration, Chinese Karate Kung-Fu: Original “Sil Lum” System, for Health and Self Defense, was among the very first books by a Chinese master in English. The project proved both groundbreaking and deal breaking, as James’s relationship with T.Y. quickly went sour after a misunderstanding over publishing costs. James abruptly stormed out of Kin Mon and headed back to the East Bay resolved to start his own school.
Talking with his close friend and business partner Al Novak after their split from T.Y., the two of them both seemed to know a lot of guys—cops, bouncers, construction workers—who would be interested in a less traditional martial arts curriculum. With this in mind James figured he would devise a more modern training environment—and would even call it as much: the East Wind Modern Kung Fu Club—essentially applying a boxing-gym setting to martial arts instruction. No months upon months of horse stances or forms. They would work out hard, they would spar, and his students would be able to handle themselves in real-world encounters beyond his school. As James would explain it, what his students would learn that day, they could use that day. After trying to make a dilapidated space in Hayward work as their headquarters, Novak and James retreated back to the two-car garage, where they seemed to be the most comfortable anyhow.
Poising himself now for the new stack of bricks, James took a deep breath. With a shift of weight, he snapped a backfist to the bricks. Again the bludgeon-like thud reverberated through the garage as the bricks fell apart.
James soon returned upstairs. He had a fair amount of mail to open and orders to fulfill. He also had to put in a call to his friend Allen Joe. The two of them had gone to high school together at Oakland Tech and still remained close, sharing interests in both martial arts and bodybuilding. Allen was set to take his family to Seattle for the World’s Fair, and James wanted him to look up that Bruce Lee kid and scout him out. Again and again people were mentioning the guy to James. First, his brother, Robert, who took dance lessons with Bruce, and then George Lee, who also caught him a few years back at the Chinese Citizen’s Alliance in Oakland. Just recently, his friend Wally Jay had visited Bruce in Seattle while traveling with his judo team and returned with a glowing impression. Wally was a nice guy, but he wouldn’t gloss up his assessment of somebody’s martial prowess to James.
If a more modern approach was what he was seeking, James figured, then maybe this Bruce Lee guy had something to offer. He picked up the phone and began to dial.
Allen Joe ordered a single malt Scotch and settled in by the bar at Ruby Chow’s. The hostess told him that Bruce was off for the night, but was likely to resurface after 11:00 p.m.
Allen had spent the day navigating his family through the colossal crowds of the Science Exhibition and Twenty-First Century Pavilion. The entire city of Seattle was in the midst of world’s fair mania, which included long lines, traffic jams, and sold-out hotels. As luck would have it, the hotel Allen had secured for his family was half a block from Ruby Chow’s restaurant, where Bruce worked as a busboy. This proved conducive for the scouting mission that James Lee had asked of him.
Allen had grown up with James attending Oakland Tech in the late 1930s. Thinking back on those rambunctious days, Allen remembers gathering in a screaming mob—on numerous occasions, actually—to watch James fistfight after school. The guy was a different kind of tough: not big, just powerful and wholly fearless. His fighting abilities were exhilarating to witness, though fairly unnerving, as well. Little wonder that they elected James to be the student body president.
James and Allen had come of age at an interesting time in Oakland, the two of them swept up in the tide of a burgeoning physical-fitness scene unlike anything else in the country. In 1936 Jack LaLanne opened what is widely considered to be the first modern health club in America, on Fifteenth and Broadway in Oakland. A native of nearby Berkeley (the next town up), LaLanne had suffered acne and mood swings as a junk-food-obsessed teen. Exhausted by his eating habits and erratic behavior, LaLanne’s mother took him to a lecture by nutritionist Paul Bragg, who successfully inspired the teen toward a healthy diet and physically fit lifestyle.
After the opening of Jack LaLanne’s Physical Culture Studio, criticism arose from the medical community, branding LaLanne a charlatan whose fitness program could (by their assessment) result in such adverse physical side effects as sterility, hemorrhoids, and heart attacks (and that women would suffer a grotesque “musclebound physique”). Later when he began a weekly fitness show on ABC, LaLanne not only had to pay for his own airtime but was derided by critics who gave the program a few weeks at best. Instead, it aired for thirty-four years, and LaLanne was proven a visionary, a fitness icon who changed the American lifestyle.
But for the East Bay around the war years, LaLanne was hardly the lone fitness guru, merely the best know. The “friendly competition” that soon arose in the form of other local gyms produced many other notable figures as a unique (and now, widely forgotten) Northern California “muscle beach” scene began to thrive.
Although Allen would eventually become a close colleague with LaLanne (running the Fremont location of his fitness chain years later), his mentor during this time was Ed Yarick, a six-foot-four, 250-pound longshoreman of Swedish descent who ran a gym on Oakland’s Foothill Boulevard for rugged characters interested in serious bodybuilding. Yarick would produce four Mr. America winners out of his space in Oakland—Steve Reeves (later famous for his silver screen role as Hercules), Jack Delinger, Clancy Ross, and Roy Hiligan—not to mention Olympic Gold medalist Tommy Kono.
Outside the gym, they took to the surf and sand, becoming regular fixtures at local swim spots like Sunny Cove and Neptune Beach, where they would pass the time showing off their physiques with gymnastics and other feats of strength (multiple-person vertical balancing acts were the most popular). Allen’s Asian heritage never mattered within Oakland’s muscle culture. Still outsiders themselves, they welcomed him in his late teens when he was a scrawny kid still shy of one hundred pounds. Later, after his service in World War II, Allen returned to the scene with gusto, winning Mr. Northern California in 1946 within his height division, the first Asian to do so.
Working on a second Scotch there in Seattle, Allen looked up to see the hostess pointing a young, well-dressed, and bespectacled Chinese man in his direction. That . . . is Bruce Lee? Allen thought to himself, sizing up the guy’s neatly pressed gray flannel suit, the kid looks like a fashion model.
Allen introduced himself as Bruce came over to his side of the bar. He sensed that Bruce was suspicious of who was asking for him and quickly tried to put him at ease.
“I was told about you from Robert and Harriet Lee, they took dance lessons from you in Oakland,” Allen explained. “They said you are pretty good at Gung Fu.”
Bruce’s face lit up with excitement. Apparently those were the magic words.
“You practice Gung Fu?” Bruce asked with surprise.
“Yes, with Robert’s brother James,” Allen explained.
And with that . . . Bruce had made a new friend. “Come on, let’s get a bite to eat.”
The two of them made their way down the block to a hamburger joint, with Bruce talking excitedly about his life in Seattle. Bruce explained how after completing his high school education at Edison Tech, he had then transferred to the University of Washington, where he was now studying philosophy. He explained the informal martial arts classes he held around town and his plans for opening his own martial arts school, possibly by the end of the year. Bruce also recounted his meeting with Wally Jay, expressing admiration for the jujitsu master.
From there Allen clued Bruce into their scene in Oakland, explaining that James Lee was a serious practitioner who ran his own school, built his own equipment, and even published his own martial arts books. In the meager martial arts landscape in America, these credentials were impressive to Bruce, and the two of them began hashing out the possibilities of a meeting.
Walking up to the burger place, Bruce stopped Allen on the sidewalk.
“Before we go in,” Bruce told him, “I want you to try to hit me as hard as you can.”
A mile east across San Francisco Bay, happily withdrawn from the Pacific fog, the city of Oakland takes up the opposite shore with low-key moxie. Historically built and populated around opportunities of industry, Oakland—like Chicago or Seattle—is entirely unapologetic in its core identity as a working-class city, particularly as its peacock of an older sister across the Bay aspires to be America’s self-styled version of Paris. There’s a tidy balance to this, to the two cities teetering on fault lines along either side of the Bay: Oakland and San Francisco; small to large, humble and glamorous, east and west.
Driving his black Ford Fairlane “police car” south along 580, Bruce was in the final stretch of the twelve-hour drive from Seattle. Although born in the heart of San Francisco, Bruce Lee was poised to discover his kindred spirits in the city of Oakland.
Allen Joe had returned from his family vacation in the Pacific Northwest and reported his assessment of Bruce to James Lee. He kept it short and simple: “James, the kid is amazing.” Bruce and Allen had stayed up late into the night back in Seattle, exchanging techniques and talking fitness and philosophy. Back in the Bay Area Allen had successfully connected Bruce and James, who talked via phone. James invited Bruce to stay at his house in Oakland the next time he was down to visit. Now, with San Francisco Bay on his right, Bruce drove south as the East Bay hills rose on his left.
Two hundred years earlier those hills had been occupied by towering old-growth coastal redwoods. The tallest species of tree on planet Earth, the redwoods populating the eastern hills of the Bay were so large they were used as navigation markers by Spanish explorers during their Pacific excursions from Mexico in the eighteenth century. By the pre–gold rush days, just as the settlement of Yerba Buena was transitioning to becoming the city of San Francisco, those same redwoods would begin falling at the hands of squatters, deserters, and frontier opportunists who rowed across the water to pounce on the local market for lumber.
As San Francisco blossomed overnight in the wake of the gold rush, the price of lumber surged with it. Many workers who had initially deserted the lumber camps for the gold fields soon returned, realizing that a more dependable fortune could be made closer to the Bay. Logging camps evolved into sawmills, and by 1860 the redwoods that had lined the hills were cut clean; only the massive stumps of the old growths provided any proof of their existence. As the trees had rapidly fallen, the city of Oakland slowly rose.
Oblivious to the ghosts of ancient trees, Bruce continued south, anxious to reach his destination after so many hours behind the wheel. In the near distance, beyond the Bay Bridge, the Oakland shipyards broadcast an industrial identity. Oakland had grown with San Francisco over the years, maturing in an age of steel and transportation. In 1868 Oakland was chosen to be the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad, a key designation as the nation continued to revise its spatial boundaries. (At the time there was talk of incorporating Oakland into San Francisco as one large and unified Bay Area entity, yet the water between them ultimately enforced a permanent separation.)
With the turn of the century, the city’s population doubled in size as refugees from the 1906 earthquake departed the San Francisco peninsula. As Oakland historian Beth Bagwell explains: “There were those who thought San Francisco was finished, that Oakland would become the main Bay Area city. . . . San Francisco, of course, survived. Before a month passed, there were jubilant plans for resurrection. But not everyone wanted to go back. Whatever their reasons, tens of thousands decided to stay in Oakland. Businesses came, too; their temporary emergency quarters in Oakland became permanent. The U.S. Census figures tell the story. Oakland’s population grew from 67,000 in 1900 to 150,000 in 1910.”
With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915, the port of Oakland thrived, becoming a major West Coast hub for heavy shipping and shipbuilding. Aeronautics soon followed, and the Oakland Municipal Airport was constructed to feature the largest runway in the world. (Amelia Earhart operated numerous expeditions in and out of Oakland and held an office downtown at the Leamington Hotel.) By the 1920s the city was being dubbed the “Detroit of the West” as the automotive sector established satellite plants in Oakland. The industry and job opportunities brought by World War II brought a new gold rush to California, with Oakland benefiting the most. The shipyards thrived in this era (at times, running twenty-four hours a day), and many Americans migrated to Oakland for the work. The sum total of this industrial arc not only distinguished Oakland from San Francisco but also impressed upon the city some long-term and very distinguishing features in the form of a highly diverse and multiracial population, as well as a middle-class blue-collar identity.
For Bruce the view from the eastern shores of the Bay out toward the skyline of San Francisco inevitably stoked memories of his childhood in Kowloon, looking out toward Hong Kong Island. It was a subtle and nearly subconscious affiliation, but one more reason for his comfort in the city of Oakland.
If James Lee was searching for a modern take on the Chinese martial arts, it was now standing on his doorstep with a nervous smile. Bruce stood there a full two decades younger than James, a college student settling into adulthood greeting a family man years into a nine-to-five career. Even still, it was a fateful meeting and the beginning of a fraternal relationship that would mark the remainder of both of their lives.
For Bruce the trip down to the Bay Area was not entirely just martial arts whimsy. Juggling a variety of employment—Ruby Chow’s, his own fledgling martial arts school (still without a physical location), and a monotonous gig stuffing inserts into the Seattle Times—Bruce also had standing work offers in the Bay Area to teach dance lessons, including a fairly lucrative one that had developed with the renowned Arthur Murray Dance Company. He was planning a trip back to Hong Kong in the coming year (his first return since he had left on that ocean liner in the spring of 1959), and he intended to return home with gifts for his parents and money for his siblings, a Chinese tradition that would assert his maturation and independent success. In this sense the rich kid who grew up attended to by family servants and couldn’t hold the restaurant job his godfather had gotten him years earlier had developed an admirable work ethic in his early adulthood.
All that aside, Bruce was anxious to meet James Lee. Allen Joe had painted Bruce a vivid picture of their Oakland martial arts scene, with stories of bodybuilding, book publishing, and one-of-a-kind training equipment. Collectively, it resonated as the sort of martial arts future that Bruce himself had already been envisioning.
On Monticello Avenue he was greeted with warmth and enthusiasm, and it wasn’t long after meeting James’s wife and children over tea in the living room that Bruce was standing in the garage in front of the spring-loading punching board with mischievous intention. “So,” he asked with boyish zeal, “how does this thing work?”
As the entire house began to reverberate from the drum-like bursts of Bruce and James assaulting the various contraptions in the garage, not only was a long-term friendship taking shape but a new and formative chapter in Bruce’s life as well.
James Lee and his colleagues in the Bay Area represented a fresh opportunity for him. Already critical of the traditional masters, yet anxious to learn from experienced practitioners, Bruce discovered the next logical step in his martial arts evolution.
Having spent his teen years within Hong Kong’s rooftop fighting culture while also studying under Ip Man, Bruce then honed his skills by practicing against the raw toughness of Seattle street fighters. The colleagues Bruce was now discovering in Oakland via James Lee represented an entirely new dynamic. In addition to being older and formally accomplished, the East Bay camp embodied the kind of modern martial arts mindset that Bruce was seeking.
“Bruce was smart,” says James Lee’s son Greglon. “When he’s in his twenties he’s hanging out with guys in their forties, so he can gain their experience.”
Yet they would regard Bruce not as a student but as an equal and a colleague. Collectively, they would immerse themselves in an exchange of ideas that looked more to the future of martial arts, than to its past.
The following morning James Lee put in a call to his friend Allen Joe, anxious to report back to him on his time with Bruce. James kept his assessment short and simple: “Allen, the kid is amazing.”