9/12/2023 0 Comments Eddie van halen hairHis high school friend George Perez explains, “At Muir, you had militant Blacks, who had Afros and Angela Davis posters in their lockers. Even Roth, who had grown up around Black people and had a longstanding affinity for Black culture, likely felt unprepared for the cultural immersion that awaited him at Muir. Roth, the Jewish son of a successful ophthalmologist, would be bused from the city’s south side to Muir in 1969, his sophomore year. While the Van Halen brothers would remain enrolled in their neighborhood high school, David Lee Roth, who’d moved to greater Pasadena from Massachusetts in 1963, would have a different experience. To address this inequality, the city developed a busing plan in which students of color shifted to the majority-white Pasadena and Blair high schools, and white students transferred to the heavily Black and Latino Muir High School. In practice, this meant that Pasadena Unified School District needed to rebalance the demographic makeup of the city’s schools, including its three senior high schools: Pasadena High John Muir, about three miles west of Pasadena High and Blair, on the south side of Pasadena. The court ordered that by the start of the 1970 school year, no student body at any city school could “reflect” a majority of “minority students.” Months later, a federal district court issued a momentous decision, holding that the Pasadena City Board of Education had violated the 14th Amendment rights of students through its segregation policies. “When I did see him, he was jamming at a party.”īy the fall of 1969, Eddie and Alex had enrolled in their neighborhood school, Pasadena High. “We never played football or rode bikes together, and to be honest I rarely saw him in class at school,” he tells The Times. Childhood friend Tom Broderick remembers that Eddie quickly became obsessed with his instrument. In their new residence, the Van Halen brothers forged a tight musical partnership, with Eddie on guitar and Alex on drums. in a heavily white neighborhood, just north of the 210, in the central part of Pasadena. As Eddie put it, that drove her to “crack the whip” over lessons.ĭespite their mother’s best efforts, Eddie and Alex soon became enamored with hard rock, a shift that roughly coincided with the family’s purchase of a compact two-bedroom home at 1881 Las Lunas St. Her dream for her sons was for them to become classical pianists. Eugenia, who knew her husband’s career struggles better than anyone, wanted to assure that if her sons were going to follow in their father’s footsteps, they’d pursue a more respectable and stable musical path, one that would keep them out of nightclubs. Their mother was a strong advocate for this musical education. Eddie and Alex, who’d begun taking piano lessons in Holland, continued them in America. These experiences bonded the brothers and the family. They would tear up my homework papers, make me eat playground sand and all these things, and the Black kids stuck up for me.” Eddie later emphasized the character-building aspects of this bullying, saying that for him and his brother, these soul-searing moments “made us stronger because you had to. “It was actually the white people that were the bullies. “My first friends in America were Black,” he said. In a 2015 appearance at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Eddie recalled how his initial days as a second-grade student in Pasadena were “absolutely frightening.” As a Dutch-speaking immigrant, Eddie was, in his words, considered a “minority” and grouped on the playground with his Black classmates as part of his elementary school’s de facto segregation policy. Eugenia worked hard as well, cleaning houses to supplement her family’s income.Įddie’s first experiences in America were similarly bracing. Years later, Eddie would remark that his father’s conception of his family’s new homeland initially turned out to be a “crock of s-.” With big band music out of fashion, his father’s first job in America was as a dishwasher at Methodist Hospital in Arcadia. According to Alex, they moved because his father believed “America was the land of opportunity” that would provide him ample musical prospects. Then after nearly a decade in Europe, they left Holland for the United States. In 1953, they migrated to Amsterdam to escape Indonesia’s political instability. Jan Van Halen, a Dutch big-band musician, had in 1950 married Eugenia Van Beers, a Eurasian woman whom he met while on an extended tour of Indonesia, in Jakarta. They spoke no English, making the trip with a few suitcases, about $15 and the family’s treasured piano. That year, the Van Halen family - 7-year-old Eddie, his older brother, Alex, and their parents, Jan and Eugenia - emigrated to America from Holland. The Pasadena chapter of the Van Halen story begins in 1962.
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