Steve DePass, Elected in 1960
Only one Lamb has been a member for sixty-six years and has visited every clubhouse since 1960. He has known twelve shepherds and watched the world change. Of course, we can only mean legendary Lamb Steve DePass. I conducted an oral history interview with Steve in the summer of 2023, my first year as shepherd. Now that we are publishing regular issues of the Script, the time is perfect to share these memories of his incredible life and career.
Steve’s Story
My father Noel DePass was born in Jamaica, the former British West Indies, and graduated from St. George’s College. Ironically, now I function largely on a stipend from the St. George’s Society, which is directly connected with St. George’s College. It was a largess of Queen Elizabeth. King Charles III has taken over that charity and it rewards people who have some connection with the College. My father was the youngest graduate of St. George’s. From there he went on to Oxford. He studied languages and eventually came here to America. He married my mother, who’s also from Jamaica, though they met here.
Her name was Enid Louise Schloss. Her mother was Black Jamaican. Her father was German, so she was mulatto. My mother had seven children. I was the fifth boy, then two girls. I was born in Queens, December 5, 1932. I was born in the Depression and I was an extreme preemie. I was only 26 ounces at birth, and they were sure I would never make it through that vicious winter of 1932. They packed up and took me back to sunny Jamaica at two months old so I could survive.
I returned to New York to perform in 1938. I was a prodigy and I was performing at local fairs. I found my way on Broadway at five years old in the Palace Theater. I was in a Vaudeville revival. I was the original Little Stevie Wonder. I was with Clayton, Jackson, and Durante. I did songs, improvisations, and patter with Jimmy Durante. My older brother, Howard, served as my chaperone and took care of me pretty well. I was with a studio children’s company. I did minstrel shows. They all did blackface and so on. I sang Stephen Foster songs and I danced. I was in the original Carmen Jones at ten.
I went to parochial schools, Our Lady of Sorrows in Queens, and I was taught by the good Sisters of St. Joseph, which accounts for my sterling character even today. I went to Flushing High School and NYU. I was a Phys Ed major and graduated in 1954.I had a penchant for creating lyrics and songs and improvisation, which later on became my hallmark. I always performed. Always. Even in high school, I did a lot of writing and performing. In the Forties, I did a couple of Broadway shows. I did a lot of the traveling with the Vaudeville revivals and the minstrel shows. And it was not only the minstrel shows, but it was also called entr’acte (“between the acts”). I was paid for it all. Professional stuff.
Back then when you left New York City, everything was segregated. You went over the bridge to Newark, it was like the Deep South. And this is the way it was. Even the theaters in which we played in different places in Washington, D.C., it was totally segregated. Everything was segregated.
The environment for the traveling thespian was perilous for Black people. You could not get a hotel room. There were Black-owned establishments where you could stay if arrangements had been made, or the YMCA, things like that. It was perilous out there. You had to be careful not to show up unannounced with your Black selves in a white environment where you might be exposed to dangerous hostilities. Among the performers, it’s very emotional. The white performers, when we closed out on a given night, they couldn’t wait to get all their things back as they had to proceed onto the next city to make arrangements. We would cook and eat in the theater itself, where they would prepare separate meals and things. Everything was done in the theater because the white performers protected you, particularly the children. It was like a conglomerate of one family, all equal.
But the white performers, they were the protectors. They looked out for your welfare, they embraced you and protected you, and there was a lot of love, a lot of sharing, a lot of caring. But you were aware of the perils outside of the theater, where you went, how you went, and so on. They had to make arrangements with the local police departments to see that the Black entertainers were protected. This is how it was.
Childhood
I had a proficiency with languages. My mother had a wonderful way of teaching through songs and symbols. My mother invented flashcards, I always liked to think, believe it or not. Nobody even knew that I were dyslexic until I was a senior in college. But I learned to follow my mother’s finger from the top of the page on the left across to the right and back.
Remember, when I started, I was five years old. I remember the performers for one thing. There was no vulgarity in comedy. There was no profanity in comedy. There was nothing vile or the kind of thing that they get away with today. And what people don’t realize, they talk about “the hook.” There was a real hook. If an entertainer did something untoward in front of a family audience, they put a physical hook and pulled him off the stage. There was a real hook. They would reach out and pulled you off the stage. You can’t do that when they talk about the hook, it’s metaphorical. But there was a hook, and I remember what fun and comedy was.
There was one guy I remember, he was a little bit portly and jolly. He was a comedian, and his shtick was, his suit was a little too small, so it was exaggerated, it didn’t fit. So he burst out on stage at a complete trot with his arms open and embraced the audience, a big smiling guy. And he would slap his hands together and he opened and said, “You want to hear a joke?” And now in hysterics, and he hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t used the F word. He hasn’t. And he goes on to explain it. He’s telling a joke, but the joke that he’s telling is indecipherable. It’s a jumble of words and references, which he constantly is changing, and he’s trying to tell this complicated story. Meanwhile, while he’s telling this to you, he’s getting confused himself, but he’s amusing himself so much that he is laughing and he’s laughing, and the laughter interferes with the clarity of the words. And he’s constantly correcting himself and going, and he gets lost in his own rhetoric, and he’s going on. Meanwhile, the audience is hysterical. And so finally now with this joke, this alleged joke, he’s working his way up to the punchline, which is so funny in his mind, he can’t get it out, and he’s trying to get it out. Finally, he belches out this punchline, which is indecipherable, which kills him. And everybody is laughing. So he’s really hadn’t said anything. And then he’s got to catch his breath. He caught his breath and said, “I got another one.”
The 1950s
Military service? I had a murmur and I missed the Korean War. My brother, Conrad, was involved in the Korean War.
In the Forties and Fifties, I did radio and TV. I got lost in athletics too. Football. I was a boxer. And I started back pretty much full time in the Folk era. That was in the Fifties. And then I hooked up with Harry Belafonte and I worked for him, and I wrote songs for him and so on.
I got a call because I wrote a lot of pieces and I was performing and people were telling him about me. He was a great guy for encouraging talent and so on in the course of the years that I knew him. When I set out on my own with performing, I worked second for him as an understudy. I went on for him several times, particularly at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I wrote some pieces for him, and I learned a lot from him. Intellectually, a great man, great man. And also, the music and the professionalism. This was the means to his real profession, which was the involvement in helping people, particularly disadvantaged Black people and talented Black people. He helped a lot.
He discovered Odetta. I worked with Odetta and Miriam Makeba. I was on “The Garry Moore Show” for a couple of years, and one of the times that I worked, she was on the bill. You know who Miriam Makeba was, right? Great African talent, African princess who sang native songs with this unusual voice. And she danced and she moved, and she was gorgeous. And he discovered her in Africa and brought her over here. As he discovered Odetta, discovered a lot of people and helped them. He created the Belafonte Singers. I toured with the Belafonte Singers when I was the headliner, and they were the backup.
The Calypso craze
I performed college concerts all over, from coast to coast. I was doing folk music mostly in the Fifties. I went to Scranton, Pennsylvania. I took some courses at Loyola College, and I was in a beautiful lounge, a nightclub called the Hilltop House. It was owned by a Greek family. It was a gorgeous and very popular. This was at the height of the Calypso craze.
You know Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O”? In the Fifties, Irving Burgie (Lord Burgess), a great songwriter and intellect who did incredible research on island music. He tapped into the rhythms and the style, and he wrote a lot of wonderful pieces, including “Jamaica Farewell” and “Day-O,” what you call the “Banana Boat Song,” and all those albums in which Harry was featured. They became worldwide hits, and they launched the Calypso craze. I thrived on the Calypso craze, and I have an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient calypsos that are no longer in print because of my retentive mind and because I was raised on it.
So, I gained some popularity. While in Scranton, I stayed there for a year or so, I started writing jingles for a car dealership called Shorten’s. My jingles were very, very popular and everybody used to sing them, and it brought more and more people to the Hilltop. I stayed there for a good part of a year.
The 1960s
So that was up until when I came to The Lambs in 1960, I was doing community organizational work for the Democratic National Committee, and I was working to get out the Black vote in Black churches and so on and doing all of that. I got an invitation to sing at City Hall for then Senator Kennedy.
This is how I came to The Lambs. That was in 1960, and I was busy doing my community work, and I was still performing club dates here and there and so on like that. I was approached by Tommy Dillon, Harry Hershfield, Ed Herlihy, a group of people prominent in The Lambs at that time in the old clubhouse. And they invited me to come to The Lambs. And on the day that I was invited there, I had a conflict because I was to go sing Downtown. So, Senator Kennedy dispatched a driver to deliver me from City Hall to the 44th Street clubhouse. That was my first experience with The Lambs.
Question: Steve, were you the first black member?
Well, I didn’t see any others. Later, I was with Gene Steede, who also became a very prominent Lamb whom nobody ever remembers anymore. An exquisitely talented guy who became my conductor and my accompanist all over the world for 12 years. He was with me at The Lambs. We both became Lambs and we were two black guys. You see, I don’t remember at The Lambs seeing others, but there was never any question of race.
There was one time with Jimmy Joyce, a very, very prominent Irish comedian, very, very funny. He and Gene and I became very good friends. And back then too, it was less formal about the performances on stage. When there were performances such as Low Jinks, but they weren’t called Low Jinks, you were assigned a time to perform. You would do an act. They’d have Jimmy Joyce and myself and another person, or maybe four people altogether performing. That was the show for the night. But it was arranged in advance.
Sometimes the audience would tease the performers good naturedly, razz them and so on. Jimmy Joyce was onstage and he was on a roll, and he had the audience in stitches, and he was going fast. One after the other. And Gene and I were waiting to go on and he, in the rhythm of what he was saying, he turned and referred to us and said, ad lib, something about “the niggers in the wood pile waiting to go on.” And he couldn’t even get to his next sentence. Tommy Dillon, Ed Herlihy, and Peter Collins, they were on the stage and took him off. And he was immediately expelled from the Lambs. It was between 1960 and ‘65, I think.
At the time, I wrote comic material for other entertainers. I performed concerts all over and I broke into, this is my proudest thing, I worked for JFK. I worked for the Ford Caravan of Music. I performed at the White House for JFK. He gave me this job afterwards touring or working for him in different capacities but performing mostly. I worked college concerts. I was on “The Jack Paar Show,” that was the launching pad. I had a stint where–this is very difficult to share–but there was a time that started in the late Fifties when I hooked up with, let’s put it this way, connected to people, one person rather. And it became dangerous for me. I eventually had to extricate myself from that situation. I was lifted by them to a state of prominence, starting with the Paar show and doing many other television shows, and it gave me a name in the business.
“The Jack Paar Show” I think probably between 1958 and 1960 was my TV debut.
Family
My wife Elise died very young and she left me with the two babies. I raised them. Our families knew each other and she was living in Washington, D.C. I was performing in Washington and the families hooked us up together and we started there. That was when I played the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Rock Creek Park. And I think that was under Harry Belafonte’s auspices at that time. I can’t remember the sequence.
My son and my daughter were both born in 1962. One in December and one in January. Yeah. My son was born in January, my daughter in December. My son is Steven, and my daughter is Darlene. She writes under the name of Dee DePass. She writes for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She’s their chief journalist, and she won a Pulitzer for the work she did on the George Floyd case. She’s also won a lot of awards. Fantastic. Yeah, she’s a very good writer and she is a great achiever. My son was in show business for a while, but he eventually started his own business and he still occasionally does things, master of ceremonies, and that kind of thing.
My wife passed away in 1972. But you do what you have to do. And they both have done well. They both have a couple of degrees and they do well. They are bright kids and not bad kids or rebellious in any way. They’re very good.
The 1970s
My breakthrough was with corporate America. My proudest work. I was the breakthrough guy. There were no Black guys who got the jobs that I got. I was the first person of color in America who wrote for the Fortune 500 companies of America. I wrote, produced, and performed. You name it, but before me, no one. From Johnson and Johnson, I have some letters and things.
Did you ever hear of the IBM Golden Circle? It was internal within the company, and it was a way of communication directly to their captive group, their own people, and for rewarding excellence. And individuals who distinguished themselves by special endeavor had to be rewarded by that kind of recognition. But you had to reward them in front of their peers and in such a way that they were entertained and not embarrassed.
And it all tied in with the philosophy of the company, which you had to understand. That’s why I was so successful. I understood what they were trying to communicate and how to exalt the nobility of their intentions beyond profits, which had to do with that humanitarian aspect, which they like to claim. And profits were related as a natural consequence of their humanity by their large.
In 1976, I guess was a banner year. And in the Seventies, I created much earlier the Golden Circle of IBM. This was a special reward program for individuals who were assigned quotas in their particular jobs and who exceeded their quotas, not randomly once or twice, but consecutively year after year after year. And that entitled them to be exalted into their hall of fame. The Golden Circle, which I created, the Golden Circle represented a wedding band and the endless circle of loving and sharing and caring and personal endeavor.
In the last few years, they have been selling excerpts of recordings of me in that particular Golden Circle. And it was done in Bermuda. And they are selling the vinyl records to collectors. And if you go online, you’ll hear some of my best work. And I could say the same thing about Westinghouse and about Johnson and Johnson. I was so popular with Johnson and Johnson, that when they had that Tylenol fiasco in 1982 and they regrouped in Maui, I was the one person they chose to write that show and to perform it.
Stay tuned for Part II of the Steve DePass story.
Researched and edited by Shepherd Kevin C. Fitzpatrick (2026)