When June Pass was a young woman, she shook hands with Eleanor Roosevelt at a fundraising luncheon.
“I will never forget that handshake,” said Pass, a Danville resident. “Her spirit came through her eyes.”
Now Pass is assuming the roll of Eleanor in a production by On Your Stage, a touring project that takes theater to schools where the students otherwise might not experience live drama.
“Remembering Eleanor,” written by Pass and based on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt, will be presented at Mt. Diablo High School in Concord on Dec. 8. That date was chosen because Dec. 10 is the anniversary of the Ratification of Human Rights sanctioned by the United Nations in 1948 when Eleanor Roosevelt was the first American delegate to the U.N. It affirmed universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms when the world was reeling from the lack of humanity exhibited during World War II.
The theater project is the outgrowth of J & L Center Stage Inc., a nonprofit theatrical educational organization started in Danville by Pass and her husband Lowell Pass, who died in 1998. “My husband was concerned about the void in the curriculum being offered to students,” recalled June Pass.
She and her brother were raised by their grandmother in New York City. “We would go to the movies and dream of California,” she said. When she was 16, she moved to Los Angeles, as did her brother. He took the stage name Bobby Baum and was active in television and comedy. Pass became a legal secretary and then married a lawyer. They had three daughters.
“It was a fascinating time, in the mid to late ’50s,” she recalled. When she was widowed, she married Gil Russell. “My second husband was a fabulous professional singer and performer,” she said. She was also a singer. “I was really an actress who sings,” she said. “I sang here and there.”
Russell also taught singing, and they became friends with many of his movie star pupils. “George Chakiris is a good friend of mine, also Shirley Jones, Anne Archer, Celeste Holmes, Natalie Wood, Dyan Cannon,” Pass listed. Many of the actors took singing lessons not because they wanted to sing but because it improved their voices for acting, she explained. She remembered when Peter Faulk called about singing lessons and said Gil had been recommended by Frank. June and Gil wracked their brains to think of a friend named Frank and suddenly they realized he was referring to Frank Sinatra.
“It was an exciting world,” she recalled, “just lovely, warm, gracious.”
After her divorce from Gil, she became involved with a theater workshop in Santa Monica where she met Lowell Pass, a singer and actor who became her third husband. They traveled all over the country performing in theatrical productions. They also built their own non-equity theater in Los Angeles called the Liberty Bell Playhouse, where they performed and conducted actors’ workshops.
She also worked on screen and was in one movie, “Lepke,” starring Tony Curtis, in 1975. “I play his gun moll,” she said. “It was fun.” She also appeared in television shows, including the Dinah Shore Show.
June and Lowell Pass moved to Danville in 1990 to be near her daughter, Susan Simms, who teaches at Greenbrook Elementary School, is a speech therapist and also writes children’s books.
“When we moved here, we wanted to do theater, of course,” June Pass said. “My husband had an indomitable spirit. There wasn’t anything he believed couldn’t be done. We walked in the Regional Center for the Arts and asked to see the manager, Scott Dennison.” He helped them form J & L Center Stage, a nonprofit theater group to enhance education and arts for youths and families with plays that reflect humanitarian values.
“We started out with Eleanor,” said Pass. “I started to write a one-woman show.”
But Lowell Pass had bad health and after six-and-a-half years of struggling with illnesses, he passed away in 1998. Her daughter Carol, a ceramic artist, passed away around the same time, and June reeled from the double loss.
Then she received an equity call at the Dublin Little Theater. “Usually I hold back,” she noted, “but I said to myself, ‘What would Lowell do?'” She called the theater and spoke with a young Englishman named Charlie Marenghi. That changed her future, she noted, as she began to assist with his production and he went on to help out with J & L Center Stage.
“We met with the Danville mayor, Newell Arnerich at that time, who was interested in our plans and the town sponsored a program called Teens Act!,” she recalled. “Charlie guided teens to write their own scenes as to what bothered them in their lives.” She considered the program a success but said there was not enough support to continue. “Parents didn’t want their kids to be expressing their feelings and their problems with parents and sex,” she said.
Meanwhile she had collaborated with Ruth Glean Rosing, an established writer in Los Angeles, and her Eleanor Roosevelt project became a full-length play. Marenghi directed “Remembering Eleanor” in 2000 at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts.
“I’d discovered that many Roosevelts live in San Francisco so I wrote to them,” June recalled, but she said she didn’t expect to hear back. “One day the phone rang and a lovely voice said, ‘This is Janet Roosevelt Katten.’ She is a niece, the daughter of Eleanor’s younger brother Hull.” Pass told her she would have a ticket waiting for her at the box office.
Katten attended the play on opening night and Pass introduced her to the audience. “She’s so beautiful, in her early 60s, tall and blond. She came backstage for about an hour,” said Pass. Just this year, Katten became a member of the advisory board for J & L Center Stage.
“Remembering Eleanor” has been cut to one hour for the On Your Stage presentation at the high school, said Pass, and she credits Target Stores and Wells Fargo Bank for their support of the project.
Another play in the On Your Stage repertoire is “We Drew the Sky,” written by Charlie Marenghi. This play is based on the life of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who took it upon herself to teach art to the children of Terezin concentration camp, 60 miles outside of Prague, which was set up by the Nazis as a showplace for the Red Cross.
“Friedl was an art therapist in Prague,” said Pass. When she was told to report to Terezin, she was instructed to bring one suitcase. “She knew there were children at the camp so instead of clothes she packed charcoal and paper so she would have material.” She could have escaped, said Pass, but she would not leave the children.
Of the 15,000 children of Terezin, only 100 survived; most of them were deported to Auschwitz. Dicker-Brandeis, too, died at Auschwitz. “When she knew she was leaving, she packed 5,000 of the children’s drawings and hid them in the crack of a wall, and someone found them,” said Pass.
When Pass first produced this play, also at the Dean Lesher center, she invited Ela Weissberger, who was one of the children of Terezin and now lives in New York. Ela was 11 years old when she arrived at Terezin in February 1942 and became one of Friedl’s art pupils. She had talked a long time to Marenghi when he was doing research for the play.
“She stayed with me and we talked until 2 in the morning,” said Pass. “It was like I’d known her all my life.” Ela was pleased with the portrayal in “We Drew the Sky.” “Ela said this is the Friedl she knew,” recalled Pass.
The third play in the series is “This One Thing I Do,” the story of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The fourth is “The Setting Sun,” which deals with drug abuse, teen suicide and dysfunctional families.
“It’s a very powerful play,” said Pass. “Each person in the audience felt it pertained personally to them. It was not entertaining but very meaningful.”
In early December, the students at Mt. Diablo High School will be exposed not just to live theater, but to Eleanor Roosevelt. “She was very shy,” said June Pass. “She had to rise up and be by his side, and she would speak all over the world.” She noted that one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s greatest achievements was the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. “It never would have come about without Eleanor,” said Pass.
And the theater group is carrying out the vision of Janet Roosevelt Katten after seeing the first production of “Remember Eleanor.” “I hope you have the opportunity to carry it into the schools,” Katten said. “It’s so important for the young to understand human potential.”
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
–Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948
