Over her long life, Fredi McComb met them all: musicians Kurt Elling, Dave Brubeck, Pat Metheny, Holly Cole and Wynton Marsalis.
First, she’d hook them with her baking. The jazz pianist George Shearing, munching on a Fredi-cooked delicacy, once growled: “Find out if she’s married.”
Yet it was this petite woman’s personality — her ready smile, her easy gregariousness, her passion for music — that transformed musical heroes into life-long friends. They included gospel singer Jimmy Carter, leader of the Blind Boys of Alabama.
“I didn’t know Fredi has passed away,” Carter, 81, told me on Friday. “I’m devastated right now.”
McComb, who died Dec. 23 aged 83, was Victoria’s super-volunteer. When it came to the gift of giving, she was Wonder Woman and Xena the Warrior Princess wrapped up in a five-foot-two, 100-pound package.
She lent a hand to scads of arts groups, including the Bastion Theatre, the Belfry Theatre and the Victoria Fringe Theatre Festival. She once billeted a tribe of out-of-town actors for six weeks. She helped with Christmas hamper programs, the Friends of the Library Book Store, the Downtown Tourist Association. This is just a partial list.
Miriam Frederika McComb’s first love (let’s call her Fredi, like everyone did) was music. Well into her eighth decade, she’d take the bus — or even walk — downtown from her Glanford home. She was the little old lady carrying trays of Bundt cake slices, chocolate, pineapple, coconut or lemon/poppyseed.
As a decades-long volunteer for the Victoria International Jazz Festival, Fredi carried her baked bounty into green rooms. In her later years, she needed help navigating the stairs. Touring musicians —weary of road food — would be touched that someone had taken the trouble to home-cook for them.
Over the years, I bumped into Fredi often at concerts. She’d reminisce about the shows she’d seen or chat about her family (Fredi had five children). While she loved jazz the best, the scope of her musical interest was surprising.
“She’d listen to everything,” said her son, Steve McComb. “She had an unreal CD collection, Everything including rock ’n’ roll. I think she had some heavy metal. Anything that was music, she listened to it.”
Her energy, to me, seemed boundless. Steve said she tried to walk everywhere, although if Fredi was returning from a late-night concert she’d hop on a bus. She’d haunt the Royal Theatre, Harpo’s nightclub, Skafest, the Blues Bash.
Fredi was spirited and vital, but never hyper. Like the Energizer Bunny, she made her rounds surely and steadily.
“You never saw Mom running around like a chicken with her head cut off,” said Steve. “She was always just on the same level.”
Her friendship with Carter is intriguing. Carter started singing in the late 1930s while attending the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in Talladega. This group of sightless singers performed on the Black gospel circuit for years before gaining wider attention in the 1980s and even winning Grammys.
Fredi was a Regina-born Canadian who grew up in Kamloops, where her father was a furrier and gas-station owner. It’s hard to imagine two more different backgrounds.
Carter, who lives in Birmingham, Ala., said he met Fredi at a Blind Boys concert in Victoria years ago. She’d brought her usual cache of goodies.
“I said, ‘I’m a smoker. Could you take me outside and let me smoke?’ ”
So she did. They chatted and soon became pals. When Carter was out of town, he’d call (when Fredi had her 80th birthday, her family arranged for Carter to telephone). When he was in town, they had dinner together.
“Jimmy Carter, the lead singer, had a particular fondness for Mom. I don’t know the whole extent of it. It’s a little scandalous,” Steve said with a smile.
Carter said the last time he saw Fredi was a few years back, when they dined at the Old Spaghetti Factory. “I said, ‘Fredi, I want me some spaghetti …’ We were really, really good friends.”
How do you sum up someone’s life in a few paragraphs? In her early 20s, Fredi took a solo adventure, travelling the United States by train for four months. It’s not the sort of thing most young women did in the 1950s. Afterwards, she worked box office at Toronto’s Jupiter Theatre, meeting folk such as Lorne Greene, Christopher Plummer, Timothy Findley (then an actor) and William Shatner.
“She told me one time Christopher Plummer had a thing for her. I don’t know how true that was,” Steve said.
Years later, Steve ran into Shatner in Victoria. The actor immediately remembered Fredi and launched into tales of wild partying — until Steve suggested there are some things a son does not need to know about his mom.
Fredi’s sister, Claire Drainie Taylor, was an actress who married famed radio actor John Drainie and then Nat Taylor, who co-founded Cineplex Odeon cinemas. Fredi, who separated from her husband after 28 years of marriage, worked for years as a provincial government clerk, retiring in 1995.
She was that person everyone seemed to know. When I phoned Victoria radio personality Ed Bain, he remembered Fredi instantly. “She was a nice lady who really loved rock ‘n’ roll. Yet to look at her, you would never have pegged her as that. She was conservative looking. Almost a mom-looking kind of person.
“She made the best lemon loaf that I’ve tasted,” Bain added. “She was wonderful.”
