Bill Graham (promoter)

In the early 1960s, Graham moved to San Francisco, and in 1965, began to manage the San Francisco Mime Troupe.^[1] He had teamed up with local Haight Ashbury promoter Chet Helms to organize a benefit concert, then promoted several free concerts. This eventually turned into a profitable full-time career and he assembled a talented staff. Graham had a profound influence around the world, sponsoring the musical renaissance of the 1960s from its epicenter in San Francisco. Chet Helms and then Graham made famous the Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom; these turned out to be a proving grounds for rock bands and acts of the San Francisco Bay area including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin,^[2] who were first managed, and in some cases developed, by Helms.

Early life[edit]

Graham was born on January 8, 1931, in Berlin.^[3] He was the youngest child and only son of Jewish lower middle-class parents, Frieda (née Sass) and Jacob "Yankel" Grajonca,^[4][5] who had emigrated from Russia before the rise of Nazism.^[6][7] There were six children in the Grajonca family. His father died accidentally two days after Graham was born.^[8][5] Graham's family nicknamed him "Wolfgang" early in life.^[9]


Due to the increasing peril to Jews in Germany and the death of Jacob, Graham's mother placed her son and her youngest daughter, Tanya "Tolla", in a Berlin orphanage,^[5] which sent them to France in a pre-Holocaust exchange of Jewish children for Christian orphans. Graham's older sisters Sonja and Ester stayed behind with their mother. On July 4, 1939, he was sent from Germany to France due to political uncertainty in his home country.


After the fall of France, Graham was among a group of Jewish orphans spirited out of France, some of whom finally reached the United States. Tolla Grajonca came down with pneumonia and did not survive the difficult journey.^[10] Graham was one of the One Thousand Children (OTC), mainly Jewish children who managed to flee Hitler and Europe and come directly to North America, but whose parents were forced to stay behind. Graham's mother was murdered in Auschwitz.^[10]


At age 10, he settled into a foster home in the Bronx, New York. After being taunted as an immigrant and being called a Nazi because of his German-accented English, Graham worked on his accent, eventually being able to speak in a perfect New York accent. He changed his name to sound more "American". (He found "Graham" in the phone book—it was the closest he could find to his birth surname, "Grajonca". According to Graham, both "Bill" and "Graham" were meaningless to him.) Graham graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and then obtained a business degree from the City College of New York.^[8][11] He was later quoted as describing his training as that of an "efficiency expert".


Graham was drafted into the United States Army in 1951, and served in the Korean War, where he was awarded both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Upon his return to the States he worked as a waiter/maître d' in Catskill Mountain resorts in upstate New York during their heyday. He was quoted saying that his experience as a maître d' and with the poker games he hosted behind the scenes was good training for his eventual career as a promoter. Tito Puente, who played some of these resorts, went on record saying that Graham was avid to learn Spanish from him, but only cared about the curse words.^[12] He also mentions in his bio-pic Last Days At The Fillmore working for Minnesota Mining.