Verdugo Views: Mom influenced Glendale resident’s entertainment career
Nami Ota-Donals credits her mother for her rewarding career as an entertainer.
Her mother, Miyo Takeguchi Ota, studied flower arranging, tea ceremonies, music and other classical arts in her native Japan before coming here as a young adult.
“She was a beautiful lady,” Ota-Donals, a Glendale resident since the early 1970s, wrote in a series of recent emails. “She taught me to play the ‘biwa’ (a Japanese stringed instrument) and to sing and dance.”
In fact, the young Nami, born in 1928 in Los Angeles, was performing on stage during Nisei Week festivals in Little Tokyo by the time she was 5 years old.
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She played the biwa and sang during a weekly Japanese Hour on KRKD, which began broadcasting from the Spring Arcade building in Los Angeles in 1932.
After a full day at school, she continued her Japanese language studies. Plus, she took classical piano lessons and performed at recitals and at two-piano concerts with her teacher.
During World War II, her mother became ill with tuberculosis and was confined to Hillcrest Sanitarium in La Crescenta, where she later passed away. Meanwhile, young Nami and her father and brother were sent to a relocation camp.
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After the war, Ota-Donals worked her way through Los Angeles City College, focusing on business and music classes before marrying and having two children, Steven and Nancy. The family lived in Long Beach and she kept working to make ends meet.
Around 1957, she accepted a position at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
“I loved my job, but my first love was music,” she wrote.
A friend persuaded her to get into the entertainment field. “He thought I would do well,” she wrote. She worked full time during the week and performed as an entertainer on weekends.
In the early 1960s, “Doc” Wong, of Grandview Gardens at 951 Mei-Ling Way in New Chinatown, asked her to perform in the Buddha Room, playing the grand piano and singing.
“It was a lounge with a living room atmosphere,” Ota-Donals wrote. “At the time, New Chinatown was a booming town.”
New Chinatown came into being in the 1930s after the original Chinatown was razed to make way for Union Station. The plaza — a “Hollywoodized” version of Shanghai, with walkways such as Bamboo Lane, Gin Ling Way and Chung King Road — became a popular tourist attraction, according to Wikipedia.
“Business was great. Celebrities, businessmen, old and new friends and businessmen from Japan always filled the lounge. At special events, I had a combo,” Ota-Donals recalled in one of her emails.
“I had to keep up with upbeat tunes, songs, new and old standards, cool jazz and Japanese songs,” she wrote.
If she knew someone in the audience could sing, she asked them to step up to the microphone and she accompanied them in a song. Her boss, Wong, was the best anyone could work for, she wrote.
During this time, she divorced and, after remarrying in 1972, quit the entertainment field and became a private secretary. She retired in 1997.
All those childhood lessons paid off for Ota-Donals, who looks back on her career with satisfaction.
“My mother was my mentor. She was a beautiful lady, a good wife to my Dad, good hostess to his business associates and friends, good cook, she wrote. “The best mom.”
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To the Readers:
Two emails in response to Don Meyers’ Nov. 5 request for memories of the “Tent Lady:”
From Trent Sanders of La Cañada: “She lived in a large cobbled-together tent on the corner, under an oak tree. It was right after the war. The story I heard was that her house had burned down, and she didn’t have the money to rebuild. We would pass her on the way to Indian Springs.”
Jeannine Cinelli Marvin of La Crescenta said she read “with interest about the woman who sat on a vacant corner on Canada Boulevard. As a child, my father took us for drives on Sundays, often to figure jobs for his tile business. My mother, sister and I eagerly awaited that corner to look for that woman. I remember the corner being either Wabasso or Opechee. She was always out sitting under [some] oak trees, as Mr. Meyers said, watching the cars go by.... She never seemed to move, but we were hoping she would be out when we passed by. We understood she was of Indian decent, but it was hard to prove for us as Daddy never slowed down enough for us to get a good look at her. Every time I pass by that corner all these years later, I think of that woman. So glad Mr. Meyers thought to write about it... memories of Glendale past.”
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KATHERINE YAMADA can be reached at katherineyamada@gmail.com. or by mail at Verdugo Views, c/o Glendale News-Press, 202 W. First St., second floor, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Please include your name, address and phone number.
