Tearing Down the Wall of Sound Read Online Free

world, a new life and, very often, a new identity. Arriving at Ellis Island, after a voyage that usually entailed extreme discomfort and hardship, new arrivals would mount a staircase to the registration hall, where medical examiners would cast an appraising eye over them, separating the halt and lame from the apparently able-bodied. Long lines would bring them at last to the immigration officials who would check their name against the ship’s manifest. There, the new arrivals would often find their European names transformed at a stroke to an Anglicized spelling.
    Apparently, such was the fate of Bertha’s father, whom American naturalization records would name as both “George Spektar” and “George Spektor,” and who was born in the province of Podolia in southwest Ukraine in 1883.
    Clara, the woman whom George took as his wife, was also born in Russia, although it is not known when they met or married. But by the time of the birth of their first child, Doraine, in 1906, they were living in France. Bertha was their second daughter, born in Paris on July 15,1911. She was barely four months old when her father left to make a new home for the family in America. George traveled first to England, and on November 17 set sail from the port of Liverpool on a steamship of the White Star line, the
Adriatic,
docking in New York ten days later. His immigration forms listed his occupation as tailor.
    In April the following year he was joined by Clara and their two young daughters, who had sailed on the liner
La Touraine
from Le Havre. George and Clara would go on to have two more children. By 1923, when George signed the last forms of his petition for naturalization—swearing like all new immigrants that he was neither “an anarchist, a polygamist nor a believer in the practice of polygamy”—George Spektor or Spektar had finally settled on the name “Spector.”
    The family of Phil Spector’s father, Benjamin, would replicate this same journey to a new life, and a new identity, a few years later. Immigration records show that “Gedajle Spektus” or “Gedajk Spektres,” was born in 1871 in Odessa, Russia—Ukraine’s main port city—and arrived in America in June 1913, having sailed, third class, on the steamship
Cleveland
from the port of Hamburg in Germany. He brought with him his wife Bessie, five sons and a daughter, all of whom had been born in Russia. (A second daughter would be born three years after the family’s arrival in America.)
    Benjamin was the third son, but there is some discrepancy in the official records as to his exact date of birth. The coroner’s report on his death in 1949 records his birth date as January 10, 1903. However, the petition for naturalization signed by his father records Benjamin’s birthdate as June 4, 1902. This certificate shows that the transformation of Benjamin’s father to American citizen was completed with his acquisition of a new name: Gedajle Spektus or Gedajk Spektres now signed himself “George Spector.” His occupation was recorded as “dry-goods merchant.”
    In later years, Spector family legend would have it that Benjamin enlisted in the armed forces when America entered World War I in 1917, and served overseas. But as he would have been at most sixteen years of age at the time of the war’s end, this seems unlikely. However, census records show a Benjamin Spector, born in 1903, enlisted in the U.S. Navy at St. Louis in 1920, and was assigned to a destroyer-minesweeper, USS
Eagle,
based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Why Benjamin should have enlisted in St. Louis is not known; nor is it known for how long he served in the navy. But it seems that by the late 1920s he had made his way to California, where he found work in the construction industry. By the early 1930s he had returned to New York, and it was there, in 1934, that he married Bertha Spector.
    Were Ben and Bertha