“Ahmet was eyeing up good musicians all the time, and they could see he knew a lot about the blues. So the only way he was able to sign artists was by becoming friendly with them, ’cause he sure couldn’t give them more money or even as much as most of the other companies because he didn’t have it in those days. So it was due to personal contact and through friendship . . . It was really through a personal relationship. Ahmet’s ‘personal touch’ extended to some artists he’d never met. For instance, one night he was in Washington, this would be in the late 40’s, forty nine or so, he went to a club and there was an unknown girl singing, it was Ruth Brown. Immediately he said, ‘Look I just started a company called Atlantic and I’d like to record you.’ She’d never received a recording offer before, she was very young, she said fine, great, and they made a deal right there and then in a small club in Washington. Anyway, she was involved in a bad car accident on her way to New York to record, and Ahmet took care of her, made sure she was okay before she eventually recorded in New York, and she became very big.”
—Nesuhi Ertegun
Both Ahmet and Herb Abramson knew the next step in building Atlantic was to find, sign, and then develop an artist who would give the label staying power in the marketplace. Much like the motion picture industry in Hollywood, the record business had always been all about stars and the best way to ensure a label’s enduring success was to have as many of them under contract as possible. Atlantic’s first great star was Ruth Brown. Although even she never seems to have known who created the phrase, the label became known in its early days as “The House That Ruth Built,” a play on the well-known nickname for Yankee Stadium.
Between 1949 and 1961, Brown cut nearly one hundred sides for the label. Five of her records went to number one on the rhythm and blues charts. Eight more made it to the Top Ten. Onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1955, Ahmet and Abramson presented the singer with a plaque to commemorate the sale of five million of her records. When Ruth Brown joined the label in 1948, Atlantic was ranked twenty-fifth in the R&B field. By 1951, in her words, “and from then on, Atlantic was the undisputed number one.”
Ahmet would later describe the relationship between a record label and an artist as being very much like marriage. While there was always a great deal of excitement at the beginning and that went on for a while, it did not last forever. Eventually, the artist would leave to record for a richer company or the label would find someone younger and the two would part company, often not on the best of terms. In every sense, this was the nature of the relationship between Ruth Brown and Atlantic.
The daughter of a dockhand who directed the local church choir, Ruth Brown was born Ruth Weston on January 30, 1928, in Portsmouth, Virginia. Inspired by Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington, she began singing at USO shows and in local nightclubs. At the age of seventeen, she ran away from home with trumpeter Jimmy Brown, whom she then married.
By the time Ruth Brown joined the Lucky Millinder Orchestra as their second female vocalist in 1948, the band was playing hard-driving rhythm and blues powered by saxophonists Clarence “Bull Moose” Jackson and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. After spending a month on the road with the band, Brown performed for the first time on July 4 at Turner’s Arena, a two-thousand-seat venue in Washington, D.C.
As the singer was signing autographs after the opening set, one of the saxophone players asked her to bring the band some sodas. After she handed them to her fellow musicians, Millinder came to the edge of the stage and told her, “I hired a singer, not a waitress. You’re fired! And besides, you don’t sing too good anyway.” Twenty years old, Brown found herself stranded without any money in the nation’s capital. She then, in her words, “got a job at a little club called the Crystal Cavern on 11th and U Street.”
Founded in 1926 in a drugstore basement, the Club Caverns, also known as the Crystal Caverns and later as the Bohemian Caverns, was where “Washington’s elite would come in droves dressed in the most formal attire, to be entertained by the likes of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.” A curving replica of a black and white piano keyboard ran along the building’s facade above the club’s front door. Inside, elegantly dressed guests sat at tables beneath a low ceiling made of swirling concrete designed to look like the roof of a cave replete with stalactites.
In 1948, the Club Crystal Caverns, which still billed itself as the “Rendezvous of the Socially Elite,” was owned by Blanche Calloway. The older sister of Cab Calloway, whom Ahmet had first seen perform at the Palladium in London in 1934, she was “a gorgeous lady, tall, graceful, and statuesque” who as a singer shared her famous brother’s “high energy performance style.” Calloway let Brown audition for her and then offered the singer a one-week engagement for $30 so she could earn enough money to go back home.
Brown was performing at the club one night when Duke Ellington walked in with Sonny Til, the lead singer of the Orioles, and Willis Conover, the bespectacled, professorial-looking white jazz disc jockey whose nightly broadcasts on the Voice of America radio network would make him a cult figure throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. After dedicating the song to Sonny Til, Brown began singing “It’s Too Soon to Know,” a hit the Orioles had just recorded for Jerry Blaine on Jubilee that was rising on both the R&B and pop charts.
Getting up from his seat as Brown was singing, Conover went to a pay phone in the coat check room, called Western Union, and sent a telegram to Atlantic Records in New York telling the partners, in Miriam Abramson’s words, “There is a girl in Washington who is a cross between Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. You must come and hear her.”
According to Brown, a promotion man and talent scout named Blacky Sales who worked for Atlantic went to see her perform, followed by Abramson and finally Ahmet himself. As Abramson would later say of Brown, “She was, at that time, as good as she ever was. I mean, she was a finished performer, one of the best we had ever seen. . . . Ahmet and I not only wanted to sign her up, which we did, but also have control of her career and try to build her. We had great faith in her because she was great.”
Nearly sixty years later, after Ruth Brown had gone toe-to-toe with Ahmet in a very public controversy over royalties owed her by Atlantic, he would say, “Ruth Brown was kind of a shitty singer but she had good rhythm and she thought of herself as a pop singer. The reason I signed her up was that she sang this song ‘So Long’ imitating the way Little Miss Cornshucks used to sing it. I couldn’t find Miss Cornshucks, who had sort of disappeared, but Ruth Brown must have heard her singing that song and she would imitate her.”
Although the partners clearly had differing views of her talent right from the start, Brown was then a pop singer whose repertoire included hits by mainstream white artists like Vaughn Monroe, Bing Crosby, and the Andrews Sisters. Her biggest number at the time was “A-You’re Adorable,” a song that had been a hit for both Perry Como and the Fontane Sisters. In Ahmet’s words, “Ruth Brown wanted to sing like Doris Day and I wanted her to sing like Little Miss Cornshucks.” Believing no other label was interested in signing her, Brown made a verbal agreement with Abramson to record for Atlantic.
In Miss Rhythm, the autobiography she wrote with Andrew Yule that was published in 1996, Ruth Brown said Blanche Calloway had never told her Capitol Records, a major label for whom Nat “King” Cole was then a star, also wanted to sign her to a recording contract. In 1973, Ahmet told rock writer Charlie Gillett, “Capitol also wanted her. Blanche was her manager and they had to choose—Capitol had Nat King Cole—but all our friends were there to persuade her to take a chance with us and she did.” Ahmet would also later say Calloway had gone to Waxie Maxie Silverman for advice and he persuaded her it would be better for Brown to be on Atlantic.
In her autobiography, Brown insisted she had learned for the first time in the spring of 1994 that “The well-established Capitol Records . . . had come talent-scouting at the Crystal Caverns at the same time as Atlantic. They had offered a contract and been turned down, completely without my knowledge, in favor of Atlantic, a company with no track record to speak of. Why would Blanche have come to that decision? You tell me. All I can say is that I was nineteen years old, trusting and just glad to be getting signed by anyone at all.”
Calloway, who in Abramson’s words was now Brown’s “ ‘manager’—in quotes,” extended the singer’s one-week engagement at the club into a four-month run. On the strength of the Atlantic contract Brown had not yet signed, Calloway persuaded Frank Schiffman, the owner of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, to book Brown on a show with Billie Holiday. Because Lady Day did not want another female singer on the bill, Schiffman delayed Brown’s debut a week and she was scheduled to appear there on October 29, 1948, with Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra as the headliners.
After Brown’s husband showed up in Washington and announced his intention to accompany his wife to New York, Calloway changed her plan to make the trip by bus and decided instead to go “in her powder-blue convertible” with her barman and his girlfriend sharing the driving as she navigated in the front seat with Brown and her husband sitting in back. After Brown’s last show at the club, they set off at three in the morning only to run into a tree outside Chester, Pennsylvania. Suffering two broken legs and a back injury that put her in traction, Brown spent the next eleven months recuperating.
On January 12, 1949, Brown’s twenty-first birthday, Ahmet and Abramson came to visit her in the hospital. With them, they brought an Atlantic Records contract, which she signed. Because Brown had told them she wanted to learn how to read music, they also gave her a book on how to sight-read, a pitch pipe, and a large tablet “on which to scribble lyrics.” Less the $1,000 provided by an insurance company to cover her extensive medical costs, the partners also paid Brown’s hospital bill. Although her “love of Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson began right there in that hospital,” Brown would later say that by the time she joined the label, she was “already in their debt.”
In an era when nearly all independent record company owners treated their artists like hired help who could be easily replaced, only Herb Abramson and Ahmet (as well as John Hammond and Goddard Lieberson, both of whom were then working at major labels) would have extended themselves in such a manner for a singer they had not yet recorded. In Brown’s words, neither partner then even knew “what I would sound like in the studio.”
Still on crutches, Ruth Brown cut her first side for Atlantic on April 6 at the end of a John “Texas Johnny” Brown session. “Ruth Brown wanted to sing like Sarah Vaughan,” Ahmet would later say, “but did not have the range and so we recorded her doing bluesier things. . . . I said, ‘Let’s sing some blues.’ And she told me she didn’t like the blues. So I had artists like her sing one blues song for me as a favor.”
On May 25, Brown returned to the studio for her first real session. The way in which she came to be there demonstrates just how clever Ahmet had already become in drawing attention to his new label. Eddie Condon, a white Dixieland guitar player and band leader who had his own jazz club in Manhattan, had just hired Ernie Anderson as his publicist. Formerly Louis Armstrong’s promoter, Anderson had persuaded Time magazine, which was then producing a documentary newsreel series known as The March of Time that was shown in movie theaters all over America, to do a segment during which the theme song for the series would be recorded by Atlantic.
“For us,” Ahmet said, “this was a huge thing.” After Ahmet had expressed surprise his label had been selected for this great opportunity, Anderson hit him with the catch. “He said, ‘Yeah. But you’ve got to record Eddie Condon’s band. We want him on the thing.’ So I got Eddie Condon’s band to back up Ruth Brown on her first single. They were totally unrelated.” Killing more than two birds with a single stone, Ahmet came out of the session with Brown’s version of “So Long,” a moody ballad he had first heard Little Miss Cornshucks sing that had been composed by band leader Russ Morgan, who used it as his closing theme. Backed with “It’s Raining,” the record became Atlantic’s second hit of the year, going to number four in the R&B charts and remaining there for nine weeks. Brown’s next four releases, in her words, “went nowhere.”
For Brown, the initial period of excitement that characterized an artist’s early days with a label lasted for quite a while. Ahmet and Herb and Miriam Abramson took her with them to all the leading clubs in Harlem as well as to a new restaurant each week to eat foreign food until she felt as though “I had tasted the world.” Whenever she liked, Brown could pick up the phone and call Ahmet and be put straight through to him. To teach her about the blues, he played her records by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.
Although Brown “loved and respected” Ahmet, whom she considered “the more forceful” of the partners, she felt closer to Herb Abramson. During this period, he was in the studio producing her while Ahmet and Jessie Stone, who later wrote “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “made many of the decisions regarding” the material she was given to record.
Brown would later remember songwriter Rudy Toombs coming into Atlantic one day with “Teardrops from My Eyes,” a song he had composed “especially” for her. Recorded in September 1950, it went to the top of the charts and stayed there for eleven weeks. The side also became the first Atlantic record released on seven-inch 45 RPM vinyl as well as the standard ten-inch 78 shellac.
Two years later, Brown would have her second number one record on Atlantic with “5–10–15 Hours.” Also written by Rudy Toombs, the song featured sax player Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson, with whom Brown was then keeping company and would later marry. In 1953, “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean,” a song Brown did not like until it became a hit, became her third number one record on the R&B charts.
Paid about $70 to record a side, the highest fee Ruth Brown ever received for a session at Atlantic was $250. As she would also later say concerning what was then standard practice in the industry, “They were charging you for everything. The studio, the musicians, the charts, all records given out for PR purposes, you paid for everything. If you needed something, you could always go to the record company and get a couple of hundred bucks.”
Like all musicians during this era, Brown made her real money by performing, earning as much as $750 a night on the road, which even she conceded was a lot of money at the time. But what Ruth Brown did not know was that Ahmet and Herb Abramson were also her managers.
Nearly forty years later, rock critic and writer Dave Marsh, who became one of the founding members of the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, came across a one-paragraph article in the July 30, 1949, issue of The Billboard, as the weekly bible of the record business was then known. Beneath the headline “Calloway Assoc. Formed,” the article, dated July 23, read, “Herb Abramson, president, and Ahmed [sic] Ertegun, vice-president of Atlantic Records, have joined with Blanche Calloway in forming Blanche Calloway Associates, an artists management organization. The first artist pacted is Ruth Brown, vocalist, currently appearing at Cafe Society. Miss Brown records for Atlantic.” In Marsh’s words, “I actually called Ruth and told her about it myself and she didn’t know about it until then. Absolutely not. Because for Ruth at that moment, a lot of things fell into place. She talks about it in her book.”
“What did it mean?” Brown wrote in her autobiography. “Only that every time I had sung my heart out on the back of a tobacco truck, suffering slings and arrows while making far from outrageous fortune, the boss men in New York, not content with giving handouts instead of proper royalty accounting on my records, had systematically been collecting their pound of flesh from the road as well. Who do I blame? Blanche, for surrendering two-thirds to Herb and Ahmet of the ten per cent I paid her? Certainly she could and should have told me, for the association raises all sorts of questions of conflict of interest. I tell myself she had to play along, for who would voluntarily accept one-third of her due? Let me put it this way: I think we can be fairly sure the suggestion of the ‘Associates’ did not come from Blanche. As for Ahmet and Herb, well, at least with the likes of Morris Levy [the owner of Roulette Records] you knew going in to expect statutory rape. With Atlantic it was a case of date rape.”
That Blanche Calloway might have welcomed an infusion of cash from the record label to which she had signed her only client seems never to have occurred to Brown. Nor did the fact that neither Ahmet nor Herb Abramson would have allowed the announcement to appear in Billboard if they had intended to make money under the table by paying themselves from both ends of the deal.
Before Brown’s autobiography was published, Abramson, who by then had long since ended his association with Atlantic, told Chip Deffaa, the author of Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues, “Blanche Calloway diplomatically agreed to become co-manager—we were the co-managers. So Ahmet and I were managers of Ruth Brown for a period of time. However, before the hits started to come in, I would say that our function as managers really consisted of laying out money for gowns, arrangements, and transportation—everything to try to build her. But we never took a cent in commission.”
“I was Ruth’s manager for a while,” Miriam Abramson would later say, “and I used to get these calls from her in the middle of the night. ‘You know, it’s five hundred miles to the next gig,’ and that kind of stuff. Ruth Brown’s manager was Blanche Calloway and I don’t remember why it was I got involved in it but it was not for long. Ruth Brown got a lot of attention from us. She really did and I don’t think she was ever grateful at all. I can’t tell you how many people thought they built Atlantic Records. Everybody built Atlantic Records.”
In truth, the house that Ruth Brown built at Atlantic had a foundation so shaky that sixty years after it had been laid, the principal architects still could not agree about how it had been put together. As Miriam Abramson would later put it, “The whole thing is Rashomon.”
If you really loved the music in those days, you had to go out on the road to find it being played in its original form in crowded, smoke-filled juke joints and roadside honky-tonks in the Deep South where the smell of spilled whiskey and beer and the overwhelming funk of sweating bodies on the dance floor made it hard even to breathe. For any record man worth his salt, this was the pilgrimage. It was the haj—the holy journey first undertaken in July 1933 by John Lomax, who after installing a 315-pound acetate phonograph disc recorder in the trunk of his Ford sedan went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he recorded Huddie Ledbetter playing twelve-string guitar.
As the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress, Lomax spent much of the next nine years on the road with his son Alan, recording hundreds of singers, some of whom no one but friends and immediate family had ever before heard perform. As music scholars, Ahmet and Herb Abramson knew Lomax’s work very well. As record men, they had yet to make the journey themselves.
In May 1949, the partners decided to set out on their first field trip down South. They went because they could not find, in Ahmet’s words, “any real funky blues singers or players in New York because that was not where they were.” Ahmet, who was also looking for distributors in the South to improve Atlantic’s sales, intended to end the journey by visiting his brother for the first time in Los Angeles.
“Unfortunately,” as Ahmet would later say, “neither of us owned a car back then. As luck would have it, a girl I used to date was given a Ford convertible by her parents for her graduation from Sarah Lawrence. She had no idea how to get the car back to Texas where she lived. So I volunteered to drive it to Fort Worth for her and she thought this was very kind of me and she invited us to stay with her and her parents on their ranch. Herb and I did eventually make it to Texas, but only after criss-crossing the south in that convertible, covering some ten thousand miles—looking for new music and making business contacts. To this day, I’m not sure she knows how important that car was to the beginning of Atlantic Records.”
In what Ahmet considered “the most incredible story of my whole career,” he was walking down a main street in the black section of Atlanta when he came upon a blind man sitting on a street corner with his back against a building singing gospel songs and “playing incredible slide guitar” as passers-by dropped coins into a hat. After handing the blind singer some money so he “could tell it was bills, not coins,” Ahmet asked, “Have you ever heard of Blind Willie McTell?” To Ahmet’s astonishment, the singer replied, “Man, I am Blind Willie McTell.”
Unable to believe he had actually stumbled on to the blues man with whom John Lomax had recorded more than two dozen songs in an Atlanta hotel room in November 1940, Ahmet asked McTell if he would cut some sides for his company in New York. When McTell asked how everyone at RCA-Victor was doing, Ahmet told him he was from another record company. “No man,” McTell replied, “if you’re from the New York record company, that’s Victor-RCA-you.”
Although Ahmet was convinced he had found a completely authentic backwoods bluesman, historian Sean Wilentz would later write that by then Blind Willie McTell had already “made himself into a successful, consummately professional entertainer, and something of an urban sophisticate” whose “everyday wardrobe” consisted of “a suit and tie and a fashionable billed cap.”
Later that day, Ahmet took McTell into a local studio only to have the singer tell him he would record only gospel songs. To get him to play the blues, Ahmet offered to release his material under the name “Barrelhouse Sammy.” Six months after he had recorded McTell in Atlanta, Ahmet released a single under the name Barrelhouse Sammy that did not sell. The rest of the session did not appear on Atlantic until 1992 when it was released under McTell’s real name. Still relatively unknown when he died at the age of fifty-six in 1959, Blind Willie McTell had by then become famous. The Holy Modal Rounders, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, Taj Mahal, and the Allman Brothers had all covered his “Statesboro Blues,” and Bob Dylan had immortalized the singer by writing and recording the song that bears his name.
Leaving Atlanta, Ahmet and Herb Abramson drove to New Orleans, where they heard about “a musical magician who played in a style all his own” known as Professor Longhair. After taking a ferry across the Mississippi to the Algiers section of the city at eleven at night, the partners found a white taxi driver who would take them only as far as an open field. Stopping his cab by the side of a road, the driver pointed to the lights of a distant village and said, “I ain’t going to that nigger town.”
By the light of the moon, Ahmet and Abramson trudged across a muddy field toward the distant lights. With each step they took, the sound of a big rocking band grew louder, “the rhythm exciting us and pushing us on.” At last, they reached a nightclub “or rather a shack” that looked to Ahmet “like an animated cartoon” that kept expanding and contracting in time to the pulsing beat.
The joint was packed to the rafters, with people literally hanging out the windows as music blared loudly from within. Because “there had never been any white people there,” the big man guarding the door told Ahmet and Abramson they could not come inside. Ahmet was about to tell him they were from Atlantic Records when he remembered one of the reasons he had set off on this trip was because no one in the South knew the label. Making the story up on the spot, Ahmet said, “We’re from Life magazine . . . and we’ve come to hear Professor Longhair.”
Unimpressed by Ahmet’s imaginary press credentials, the man at the door still refused to let them in. “Just put us in a corner,” Ahmet pleaded. “Hide us, we want to hear the music.” When the man finally relented and began walking Ahmet and Abramson inside, people scattered in all directions “because they figured the law had arrived.”
From his seat in a corner of the room, Ahmet realized to his amazement that all the music he had been hearing was coming from a single musician. With an upright bass drum attached to his piano, Professor Longhair was pounding a kick plate with his right foot to keep time while playing his own idiosyncratic rhythms on piano against the beat. In Ahmet’s words, Longhair was “creating these weird, wide harmonies” while “singing in the open-throated style of the blues shouters of old.”
Insofar as Ahmet could tell, he and Herb Abramson had just hit the mother lode. Going where no white men had ever been before, they had found an unknown artist who could play the kind of authentic gutbucket blues for which Ahmet had been searching ever since he had first begun listening to music. Sounding like a cross between Jelly Roll Morton and Jimmy Yancey, Longhair was mixing the blues with jazz, ragtime, and Cajun music. “My God!” Ahmet told his partner. “We’ve discovered a primitive genius!”
When Longhair came over to talk to them after his set, Ahmet shook his hand and proudly informed the man born Henry Roeland Byrd, who had acquired his stage name for his long shaggy hair, that he was now going to be recording for Atlantic. “I’m terribly sorry,” Longhair replied, “but I signed with Mercury last week.” He then added, “But I signed with them as Roeland Byrd. With you, I can be Professor Longhair.”
Polished to perfection as Ahmet told the story again and again over the years, the saga of finding Professor Longhair became one of the set pieces of his repertoire. As funny as the punch line always seemed when he delivered it, the true import of the tale was that when it came to finding undiscovered talent in the hinterlands of America in the spring of 1949, Ahmet and Herb Abramson were already late. Sixteen years after John Lomax had recorded Huddie Ledbetter in the state penitentiary in Angola, this particular musical frontier had closed. The sweeping social and economic changes brought about by the Second World War had transformed the South, and it was no longer the isolated backwater it had been during the Great Depression.
Nonetheless, Ahmet and Abramson took Professor Longhair into the same studio in Atlanta where they had recorded Blind Willie McTell and cut three sides with him that were never issued. In October, they recorded him again at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M studio on Rampart Street in New Orleans and cut ten tracks, among them “Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” which along with “Tipitina” would become one of the artist’s signature songs.
Longhair, who had originally recorded “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” for Star Records in Dallas, Texas, as Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Hungarians, was billed on Atlantic as Professor Longhair and His New Orleans Boys. For an artist who at various times in his career was also known as Roy Byrd and his Blues Jumpers, Roy “Bald Head” Byrd, Roland Byrd, Professor Longhair and His Blues Scholars, and Professor Longhair and the Clippers, the name on the record never mattered as much as the music.
While none of the sides Longhair cut for Atlantic sold very well, his unique sound influenced seminal New Orleans musicians like Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, and Dr. John. After suffering a heart attack and dying in his sleep in 1980 at the age of sixty-two, “Fess” was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Although Ahmet and Herb Abramson had not been able to find an artist in the South who had not yet been approached to record by someone else, they had given it their best shot. As they drove from one city to the next in the new Ford convertible they did not own, they also had one hell of a time together. For Ahmet even then, this was always a good reason for doing anything.
Having managed to avoid compulsory military service in the land of his birth, Ahmet was forced to register for the draft in America after Congress passed the Selective Service Act in June 1948 decreeing that all men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six would now be required to spend twenty-one months in the army. Busy running a record company that was not yet providing him with enough income to live as he would have liked, Ahmet had no desire to be subjected to the draft and so dealt with the problem in his usual manner.
Blithely, he ignored a written request from Lieutenant Colonel Walter S. Welsh, chief of the Manpower Division of the Judge Advocate General Division in Washington, to appear in Welsh’s office with his passport and visa so it could be determined if he would be exempt from registering as a “male alien who has not declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States.” If Ahmet could prove he had entered the country as a student, he would also not have to register.
Over the course of the next three months, Welsh sent Ahmet three more letters to which he also did not respond. When Ahmet finally appeared in Welsh’s office, he explained he had come to America under a diplomatic visa and remained in the United States to pursue his graduate studies at Georgetown University. Rather than solve his problems, this explanation served only to complicate them.
On March 29, 1949, Welsh wrote Ahmet that if he was “not now entitled to remain in the United States under a diplomatic visa or because of diplomatic connections,” his status would be reported to the Bureau of Immigration. Until the bureau reached its decision, Ahmet would be subject to Selective Service procedures like any other registrant, pending further clarification of his current status, “that is, your attendance at school or your employment, if employed.”
Although Ahmet was still writing his mother and sister in Turkey that he planned to return home at some point, the diplomatic visa on which he had entered the United States was no longer valid. Technically an illegal alien, Ahmet could not leave the country even if he had wanted to and was now subject not only to conscription but possible deportation as well.
Ahmet’s first problem was solved by the kind of good fortune he would enjoy throughout his life. During the same month Welsh informed Ahmet he was still subject to military service in America, the army declared an unofficial “draft holiday.” Due to the high rate of voluntary enlistments, just thirty thousand of the nine million young men who had registered had been inducted.
Ahmet however still needed to find a way to stay in America. In a handwritten letter to Welsh, he explained that he had remained in America after his diplomatic visa had expired to “continue my studies, and did so until recently when I finished my courses and began to write a thesis. I hope to be able to finish my thesis in a few months. Meanwhile, however, I have been spending much of my time with the Atlantic Recording Corporation . . . a company I started with some associates, in which I am a stockholder. It is my plan to return to Turkey in about a year, when I hope to have fulfilled all my business.”
Quite possibly to maintain the fiction that he was still a student in America, Ahmet did enroll two years later in a graduate course in economic theory at the New School for Social Research taught by Dr. Eduard Heimann, a well-known socialist who had emigrated from Germany to America in 1933 because of his political views. On January 30, 1951, Ahmet appended the following explanation in an examination booklet on the unlikely subject of Crops and Labor—“Dr. E. Heimann, I was unavoidably detained and arrived at the examination half an hour late so that I was unable to complete my answers. My excuses.” He still managed to receive a B on the exam.
Ahmet was far more successful in solving his immigration problem than his brother. Facing deportation charges with an actual warrant for his arrest having been issued, Nesuhi wrote a frantic letter to his brother in November 1953 telling him he had hired a very expensive immigration lawyer to represent him at an upcoming hearing. Nesuhi implored Ahmet to persuade the Turkish consul to issue him a new passport to replace the outdated document he had been carrying since 1946. “Please explain to him,” Nesuhi wrote, “that this is a question of life and death for me. . . . I hope to God it will not be impossible for him to issue a passport.”
Ahmet finally solved his own visa problem by hiring a lawyer who advised him to apply for permission from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to leave America so he could return as a “preference immigrant.” Following his lawyer’s instructions, Ahmet went to Montreal, where the American consul issued him the visa. On June 8, 1953, Ahmet was granted official status as a permanent resident alien.
In time, both brothers became American citizens. Having come to the United States under privileged circumstances, they had fulfilled the first task of every immigrant, which was to stay at all costs in the land where they had chosen to make their lives.