New Year’s Day Jamboree at San Quentin State Prison
by Laurie Thompson
During the early decades of the 20th century show business entrepreneur Harry Ettling brought good cheer to San Quentin inmates on New Year’s Day.
In 1935, then San Quentin State Prison Warden James Holohan recounts:
Even as people on the outside look forward to the winter holidays with their resultant rounds of social activities, so also do the inmates of San Quentin welcome the coming of the New Year. Each January first, finds the Institution’s largest mess hall temporarily converted into a monster auditorium. A stage is erected and for practically four solid hours the entire prison population is entertained with a variety show unequaled by any theatre in America. Singers, clowns, dancers…all band together to bring happiness and forgetfulness for the day to six thousand incarcerates.
For twenty-one years Harry [Ettling] has been making the annual trip to San Quentin in company with the sterling band of entertainers he gathers about him for each New Year’s Jamboree. Out of the original group of men who made the first such journey to Quentin, he alone remains.
San Quentin ushered in 1935 with its traditional New Year’s show but never, since its inception…in such a grand and glorious manner…. Twenty acts!…. Made up of dancers, singers, musicians, whistlers, contortionists and sundry entertainers. The cream of the West coast theatrical circles, all woven into a beautiful mosaic: a four hour performance of laughs and thrills under the capable direction of that benign Master of Ceremonies, our old friend, Hitch King.
Source: 1935 Jamboree commemorative program. From the Harry Ettling Collection, Anne T. Kent California Room. Donated by Jeff Craemer.
Originally published at https://annetkent.kontribune.com.
