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| Louis and Lucille |
"Mr. Glaser, you must see to it that I have special
permission to smoke all the reefers that I want to when I want or I will just
have to put this horn down, that's all," the letter says, addressing
Armstrong’s manager. "I can gladly vouch for a nice, fat stick of gage,
which relaxes my nerves, if I have any...I can't afford to be ...tense, fearing
that any minute I'm going to be arrested, brought to jail for a silly little
minor thing like marijuana."
The incident that prompted Louis to write about his love for marijuana was the arrest of his wife Lucille on marijuana
charges in Hawaii on New Year’s Day, 1954. Lucille was nabbed by federal
narcotics agents at the airport where a US Customs inspector
found one cigarette and two stubs, totaling 14.8 grams of marijuana, in her
eyeglass case.
The bust was a big deal: Louis almost lost a charity gig for
the March of Dimes and was nearly barred from performing in Hawaii. Lucille
posted $300 bail and appeared at a day-long hearing on January 5 with Louis
sitting in the spectators’ section.
She pleaded guilty for expediency, she said, but protested her
innocence. It's been widely speculated that it was Louis's stash, but the small amount of pot found in Lucille's personal belongs makes me wonder if she was a Tokin' Woman herself.
The judge reduced Lucille’s fine to $200 owing to her
husband's good works. "At the start of 1954, he was at the peak of his
popularity and was already being touted as an ‘Ambassador of Goodwill’ due to
his tremendous popularity overseas," wrote Ricky Riccardi, who details the
incident in his book What a Wonderful World.
Both Armstrong and then-VP Nixon toured
Japan in late 1953, just before Lucille’s arrest. The courier caper most likely would have happened on December 14, the day Nixon left Japan and three days before Louis's first concert there.
The timing begs the question: Did Nixon or someone in his entourage figure out the Vice President had been used for a drug mule and fail to see the
humor in it, leading to Lucille's arrest?
Louis hadn’t been in trouble with the law since 1930, when
he was arrested outside the Cotton Club in LA while smoking a joint. That
incident and his subsequent jailing ultimately lead to Joe Glaser, an Al Capone
acolyte, taking over Armstrong’s career, and later suppressing his writings
about marijuana.
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| Lucille Armstrong in 1983 |
A former dancer at Harlem's Cotton Club, Lucille Armstrong became a community activist after Louis's death, drafted by Gov. Rockefeller. Deciding drug rehabilitation wasn't her thing, she chose an appointment on the NY Committee on Aging.
Riccardi, who is the archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, credits Lucille with preserving Armstrong's letter to Glaser, and his taped audio version.
"Can you imagine anyone giving Lucille all of those
headaches and grief over a mere small pittance such as gage, something that
grows out in the backyard among the chickens and so forth,” Louis emoted in his
letter. “I just won't carry on with such fear over nothing and I don't
intend to ever stop smoking it, not as long as it grows. And there is no one on
this earth that can ever stop it all from growing. No one but Jesus--and he
wouldn't dare. Because he feels the same way that I do about it."
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| The San Francisco hotel where Louis wrote about gage. |
Those events and others will be marked by a conference happening January 26 & 27 at Ft. Mason Conference Center in San Francisco, sponsored by
California NORML. The conference will take place at the 100th anniversary of cannabis prohibition in California.
It’s high time to
end the Hundred Year Weed War that has harassed and imprisoned so many of our citizens,
including some of our best and brightest.
