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Tour of duty:
Winnipeg band played for U.S. troops
in Vietnam
For most Winnipeggers, the Vietnam War was
a distant conflict that appeared on our
nightly national news broadcasts but
remained remote from our reality.
And yet, at the height of the conflict, in
which more than 50,000 Americans and
several million Vietnamese were killed,
Winnipeg-born singer Fern Rondeau
entertained war-weary American GIs only a
few kilometres from the fighting. Along
with her husband, Pete Turko, and several
local musicians — collectively known as A
Touch of Class — Rondeau witnessed the
horrors of war in the eyes of the
soldiers.
“Onstage, you would look down at these
young guys, many of them with their faces
still covered in paint from being in the
bush, and you could see the sadness in
their eyes,” Rondeau says. “We’d
sing happy songs to try to cheer them up.
That was hard. My job was to make them
feel better. They’d watched their buddies
die in their arms and were feeling bad
enough.”
Was she ever scared on her two tours in
Southeast Asia?
“I guess I was too naive to be scared,”
she says. “The generals and the
majors, who were more my age, treated me
like a queen. I felt protected, so I was
never scared.”
Born in 1943 to a single mother in the
North End, music came into Rondeau’s life
via television.
“When I was about 12 years old we got our
first TV, black and white, and I used to
watch Brenda Lee, Teresa Brewer and Connie
Francis. That’s when I started singing.”
Leaving school in her early teens to look
after her baby sister, Colleen, Rondeau
began working at Oretski’s department
store on Selkirk Avenue at age 16.
“I loved to sing, so I would be walking
down the aisles straightening things up,
singing Connie Francis songs,” she
recalls. “The manager was a nice man, but
he used to tell me to keep it down.”
At age 19, she accompanied a friend to the
Lincoln Motor Hotel on McPhillips Street,
where she met singer Pete Turko, the son
of Ukrainian opera singers. Not long
after, the two began performing in clubs
around the city — including the Gordon
Hotel chain, Club Morocco, the Viscount
Gort, Pierre’s Club 76 (now the Palomino
Club) and Chan’s Moon Room — and
travelling as far east as Thunder Bay and
as far west to Vancouver. Rondeau also
sang on several CBC-TV productions and
travelled to Churchill for a gig with Ted
Komar’s Orchestra and the Guess Who.
“To sing at the Club Morocco, that was
like going to the moon!” says Rondeau.
“That was such a thrill, the girl who
worked at Oretski’s singing at the Club
Morocco. I thought I’d made it.”
As younger sister Colleen Titanich
remembers, “Fern was a star to me. She was
so beautiful. I used to watch her put on
her false eyelashes and makeup before a
gig. The smell of hairspray permeated the
room. I would just stare at her. I would
pray to God to take away my freckles,
because Fern didn’t have any freckles and
I wanted to look like her.”
Out west, Rondeau and Turko appeared at
Calgary’s Petroleum Club and Palliser
Hotel, Edmonton’s Klondike Days, opened
that city’s elegant Chateau Lacombe hotel,
and performed at Vancouver’s legendary
Cave nightclub. By the latter 1960s, they
had married and relocated to British
Columbia, where work remained plentiful.
At an appearance at Dean Martin’s club in
Hollywood, Martin dubbed Rondeau “Miss
Perpetual Motion” for her onstage
performance. “I’m a singer that
dances,” she explains. “I love to move
when I’m onstage. I didn’t want to just
stand there like a statue. I was
entertaining people.”
Spotted at Vancouver’s Bayshore Inn by
American promoter Herb Fallis in 1968, A
Touch of Class was offered a Southeast
Asian tour, including performances in
Hawaii, Manila, Bangkok and Saigon, along
with an extended stint for U.S. troops in
Vietnam.
“That first tour we played mostly for the
generals, the higher-ups,” says Rondeau.
The group would return again in 1970 for a
second tour, this time playing more for
the GIs on remote bases, accompanied by
veteran Winnipeg bass player Bob (Moose)
Jackson and drummer Jim Wales.
“They would drive us out in army trucks or
jeeps to where the bases were,” Jackson
says, “or we’d fly out in helicopters
along with guys either going out or coming
in from the jungles. We would hear
shooting from a distance. The Viet Cong
rockets had a 20-mile range, so we would
travel out and perform within that 20-mile
radius, but no further.”
“One time we were in jeeps travelling to a
gig when we were fired on from the
ditches,” says Rondeau. “We had to jump
into the ditch while the soldiers fired
back. Those GIs protected me.” She
was then escorted back to safety in
Saigon.
Jackson remembers seeing a wounded
GI. “He had tripped a
booby-trap wire, and his whole group was
killed,” he said. “The medics were keeping
him alive, but there wasn’t much
hope.” He also recalls the realities
of guerilla warfare.
“If you were out in the bars at night in
Saigon, you never knew who you might be
sitting beside. You never knew who was the
enemy. We had to pass ourselves off as
Americans. Canadians wouldn’t have been
welcome on the U.S. bases.” Each of
them was issued an identity card from the
British Embassy that allowed them to
travel freely in Saigon.
“When we were in Da Nang,” says Wales,
“there was a strict curfew, and if you
violated it or were found on the wrong
side of town, you could be shot on sight.
Your life really becomes worth not much
when you’re in that world. I thought it
was going to be a two-week gig, but it
ended up being a lot longer, and I was
convinced I was never going to get out of
there. We surrendered our passports when
we arrived in Saigon.”
Ironically, the band had to perform the
Animals’ hit We Gotta Get Out of This
Place at every gig. “That was
the big song for all the GIs, and they
would all sing it loudly,” Rondeau says.
“It was like their anthem.”
At one mess-hall gig, a distraught soldier
threw a Coke bottle at the stage.
“I was dancing, so he missed me,” Rondeau
recalls. “The other GIs were so upset
because they kind of looked after me like
I was their mother or girlfriend or
sister. So they took this guy outside, and
I don’t know what happened, but I’m sure
it wasn’t good.”
The Winnipeggers found the heat and
humidity oppressive. They also were taken
aback by the Vietnamese lifestyle.
“I came from a poor family, but when we
went to Vietnam it was a whole different
way of life,” says Rondeau. “It really
made me appreciate our life in Canada.
Even a bar of soap was a luxury for those
people. It was such a culture shock. We
ate well on the bases and were treated so
well, but we also got to see the squalor
the Vietnamese people lived in. Sometimes
we went out to where GIs were stationed
and slept on a mattress in a tent or a hut
and showered in cold water. But that was
still better than most Vietnamese.”
On the second tour in 1970, Rondeau came
to realize the GIs were hungry for hard
rock, not pop standards.
“We didn’t do that kind of music. We were
more versatile. We were a bit older than
the GIs. They wanted to smoke weed and
listen to hard rock. The times had
changed.”
During that tour, Rondeau was informed of
her mother’s death and cut the tour short
to return home to Winnipeg, cancelling an
Australian leg. Rondeau and Turko
continued to play across Western Canada
through the ’70s, sometimes touring with
Mandrake the Magician, and even tried
cracking the Nashville scene. Rondeau also
worked with actor/musician Gene Andrusco.
Her often-troubled marriage to Turko came
to an end a few years after the birth of
what Rondeau calls her miracle baby,
Celeste. Shelving her singing career,
Rondeau worked as a house cleaner. She
remarried in 1995. In recent years, she
has returned to performing at seniors
residences in B.C., where she always goes
over well.
“I’m old-school,” she laughs. “I sing the
songs they all know and love. I’m a
smorgasbord of styles, not just one
style.”
Rondeau only made one recording, a 45
issued on a small independent label in
Vancouver in 1968. Songwriter/producer Tom
Baird wrote both sides of the single.
Baird went on to become a big name in the
music business, penning hits for Rare
Earth and Diana Ross and co-writing Bobby
Taylor & the Vancouvers’ Motown hit Does
Your Momma Know About Me with Tommy
Chong.
Baird had a song he had written for Vicki
Carr, but as Rondeau remembers, “Pete
convinced him to give the song to me
instead.”
A smoky cool-jazz number reminiscent of
Julie London’s torchy Cry Me a River,
I Never Had a Chance was
well-suited to Rondeau’s style.
“It was one of the most beautiful songs I
had ever heard,” she admits. “Red Robinson
was playing it on the radio in B.C.”
Unfortunately, the label failed to secure
wider airplay and distribution.
“My mother had all the family members
phoning Winnipeg radio stations every hour
requesting the record,” says Titanich.
Rondeau could have been a contender, but
remains circumspect about her career.
“I never got to be rich and famous or buy
my poor mother a house or a diamond ring
like I had always wanted to,” she says,
“but I got to touch peoples’ lives.
That’s what God put me on this Earth to
do.”
Reflecting on her stint in Vietnam, she
says, “We were serving an important role
for the soldiers, to make them feel good
surrounded by the awful realities of war
and taking them away from those realities
for maybe a few hours. It broke my heart,
but I understood my role and tried to make
them happy.”
John Einarson
As published in the Winnipeg
Free Press June 7, 2015
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