AT FIRST GLANCE, there’s nothing fancy or extraordinary about Southill Drive in the south end of Kitchener. Plain-looking bungalows and three-storey walkup apartments of red brick and beige built in the late 1950s and early 1960s line both sides of the street. Just around the corner sits Howard Robertson public school and a short distance away cars and trucks roar along Highway 8 on their way south across the Grand River to Highway 401.
It’s a landlocked island of suburbia shoehorned between the cacophony of trucks and cars on one side and the tranquility of trees and hills on the other rising up to the summit of Chicopee ski hill. Nothing hints that this unremarkable section of town once boasted a home owned by a rock and roll musician—not just any rock and roll musician, but one of the most famous and influential of the 20th century. The house is still there, a triplex at 391 Southill, and tenants still occupy its three units. Built of white brick and siding, the modest structure features bay windows on the front and a bulky, wooden fire escape at the back.
Chuck Berry, the legendary singer, songwriter, and guitarist from St. Louis, Missouri, composer of such timeless rock and roll hits of the 1950s and ‘60s as Maybellene, Johnny B. Goode, and Sweet Little Sixteen, quietly purchased 391 Southill in 1966. Into one of the units he moved his Kitchener-based girlfriend Rona Pfeffer and their eight-year-old son Charles Wayne Pfeffer. Rona’s father lived there for a time too, as did one of her brothers, Wayne Pfeffer and his family.
It’s one of Kitchener’s best kept musical secrets. According to land registry records, Berry owned the property for 25 years and made occasional visits if he was playing in the area, always without fanfare. The singer’s comings and goings, successes and failures, loves and breakups, real estate acquisitions and holdings over the many years of his career have been told in articles and books, including one by Berry himself, but there’s hardly a mention of a Kitchener connection in any of them.
The details of how Rona Pfeffer and Chuck Berry met remain a mystery. Rona died in 2005 at the age of 69 while Berry passed in 2017 at the age of 90. Other relatives of Rona’s generation who might have shed light on how they first connected have also died.
Graced with long red hair, pale skin and a slim figure, Rona was “quite beautiful,” says her
niece Valerie Kehn. She liked to have a good time, enjoyed music and wasn’t afraid to flaunt her attributes. “She was just a groupie,” Kehn adds. A photograph likely dating from the 1960s shows Rona posing provocatively by the pool at Berry’s country estate outside St. Louis, dressed in a black one-piece bathing suit and white fur coat. Rona had “a very sexy look,” says Ray Vizza, her long-time Kitchener hairdresser. She liked to dress in leopard-print dresses and high heels. “She knew how to please men.”
Kehn isn’t sure how Rona met Berry, speculating that she went to one of his concerts in Toronto. Their son was born within the first five months of 1958, so it would have occurred sometime in 1956 or 1957. Born in Toronto in 1936, Rona and her two younger brothers Wayne and Larry grew up in Kitchener and likely attended Kitchener Collegiate Institute. After their parents split up, Rona lived with her mother in Peterborough for a short while. While attending KCI, she was injured in a car accident. Coming home from the prom, Rona was riding in a car driven by her boyfriend when the crash occurred. She suffered scarring to her face and leg, Kehn said.
Riding the wave of his first hit, Maybellene, Berry was invited to join a package tour of artists that rolled through the American south, Texas, the Midwest and eastern Canada in the summer of 1956. Joining him in the entourage were Carl Perkins, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Al Hibbler and others. With Little Richard signing on for a one-time appearance, the show hit Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on July 14, 1956, drawing a record crowd of 13,084.[1] It’s possible that Rona met Berry at this show. She would have been 20 while Berry was a decade older.
All these years later, it’s easy to forget how popular rock and roll suddenly became in the mid-1950s. After Elvis Presley made his first appearance on national TV in February 1956, this new style of music took the teen world by storm. Demand was so strong for tickets that riots and near-riots broke out in cities such as Boston, Hartford, San Jose and Minneapolis. Police had to be called in and parents were up in arms over media stories about this dangerous new type of music. It’s not hard to see how Rona Pfeffer got swept up in the excitement and attended a concert that would change the course of her life.
If Rona missed Berry’s 1956 show, she didn’t have to wait long for his next appearance in Toronto. On Feb. 18, 1957, the St. Louis troubadour was back at Maple Leaf Gardens as part of another package tour of 13 artists that included Fats Domino, Lavern Baker, Charles Brown and others. The same tour also played Buffalo on Feb. 19 and Ottawa on April 18. Berry was not the headliner of the 1957 tour—that distinction belonged to Fats Domino—so he often played earlier in the show. That left him time to scout the auditorium for women while the other bands played, according to R.J. Smith’s 2022 biography of the singer, Chuck Berry: An American Life. He was observed kissing a white woman after a show in Little Rock, Arkansas, on March 27, 1957, and found in the backseat of his car with another white woman in North Carolina in April of that year. In both cases, nervous tour operators talked police out of arresting him.[2] Berry didn’t always ride on the tour buses with other artists. At times he brought his Cadillac so he was free to roam around and meet women between gigs. [3]
Another opportunity for the couple to connect happened April 11, 1958, when Berry performed in Kitchener for the first time. Once again he was part of a package tour that included Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, the Crickets and the Chantels. At this point Rona and Berry were already well acquainted as Wayne was born early in 1958.
More than 5,200 fans poured into the Kitchener Auditorium to see the show. Though there was some shrieking by the “bobbysoxers,” police managed to keep the crowd at bay, noted critic Cec Scaglione of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. He was clearly not a fan of this new form of entertainment. “The music was as abstract as modern art,” he wrote, “and the tones produced were as relaxing as a kick in the head.” “Oh baby” moaned over and over again by Frankie Lyman didn’t have quite the same impact as the “Hallelujah Chorus,” Scaglione wrote sarcastically. He did note that the only performer to earn an encore was Berry. [4] For Berry, the encounters with women on the road took place against a backdrop of wedded bliss back home. In the fall of 1948 he married a black St. Louis woman named Themetta Suggs—his nickname for her was Toddy—and together they had four children, three daughters and a son, born between 1950 and 1961.
Berry’s affair with Rona was not his first relationship with a Canadian woman. In the late 1940s, while he and Toddy were living in four-unit flat in St. Louis he met a white Canadian woman living in one of the other apartments. She took a liking to the handsome young Berry and dropped hints she was willing to sleep with him. Growing up in racist St. Louis, Berry knew taking such a leap was taboo and dangerous, but the woman was persuasive, explaining that Canada had more liberal attitudes towards interracial sex. Berry eventually succumbed to her advances. The move nearly had a catastrophic end when someone saw Berry visiting the woman in her room and told police. Berry was arrested and taken to the police station where he was threatened with a baseball bat. The singer denied having sex with the woman, apologized profusely and was released with a warning to stay away from white women.
“Thinking about it afterward, I realized they really could have killed me and said anything to justify the slaying with no witness in my behalf,” Berry relates in his autobiography. [5]
"Uncle Chuck" Before KW
WHAT WAS IT about Berry’s music that propelled him to international stardom? As is often the case, it was a mixture of passion, hard work, ambition, timing and luck. He grew up surrounded by music. His parents sang in a church choir that often practiced at his home. While singing in a musical review in high school, he was impressed by the guitarist who accompanied them and decided to take up the instrument. Young blacks in those days were encouraged to try music as a way to supplement their income. Well-paying jobs were reserved for the white world.
He studied a book on guitar chords, then learned more from a guitarist who lived at his barber’s house. In the summer of 1944, Berry set out with two buddies on an ill-fated road trip to California. Running out of money before they hit Kansas City, they started robbing stores and landed in prison for a three-year stint. There, Berry honed his musical chops with a fellow prisoner who played guitar and saxophone. Released in 1947, he started doing carpentry work with his father, then landed a job at the Fisher Body auto assembly plant in St. Louis. To boost his income, he kept playing musical gigs, purchasing his first electric guitar in 1950 and a used wire recorder to tape songs and experiment with different styles. In the early 1950s, an old high school pal invited him to join a local combo. His playing impressed a blues and jazz pianist named Johnny Johnson whose band had a regular gig at an East St. Louis nightclub. Berry was invited to join the trio, which included drummer Ebbie Hardy, when a band member took ill in late 1953.
Soon Berry began to take a lead role in the band. Johnson and Hardy didn’t move around on stage, but the energetic Berry couldn’t keep still. He was a natural showman. While playing guitar, he developed different moves including his trademark duck walk where he hopped across stage with his knees bent. He paid close attention to songs and moves that drew the biggest reaction from audiences. The band was rebranded as the Chuck Berry Combo.
He also started writing songs influenced by the disparate blend of artists he heard on radio—Muddy Waters, Harry Belafonte and Nat King Cole. Diction was important. He wanted listeners to hear what he was saying so he could create images and stories—driving flashy cars, hanging out at diners, flirting with girls, skipping out of school. His goal was to cross racial lines and appeal to white and black audiences.
The electric guitar was a relatively new instrument at this point. Berry did things few others had done. He took the driving, machine-gun style of boogie woogie piano common in the 1930s and ‘40s and adapted it to an electric Gibson or Gretsch. Larger forces were at work too. Independent radio stations exploded in number in America from 45 in 1945 to 916 in 1950. In 1949, the seven-inch 45 rpm record hit the market as well, making it easier to broadcast singles.[6]
In 1955, Berry drove to Chicago to see one of his heroes, blues guitar legend Muddy Waters. Waters pointed him to the scrappy independent label where he had a recording contract—Chess Records. Leonard Chess, the boss of the label, saw something in a hillbilly number Berry had recorded called Ida Mae. With the help of the studio’s talented bass player, Willie Dixon, it took 36 takes for the Chuck Berry Combo to come up with something Chess thought would work. They called it Maybellene. [7]
From there, the well-connected Chess took the record to New York City deejay Alan Freed, whose radio show was heard across the country. Freed loved Maybellene and began playing it. By the fall of 1955, it broke into the top five on the pop charts. [8] It was the first song by a black artist to outsell cover versions by white artists.[9]
How popular would Chuck Berry eventually become? In their early days, the Beatles recorded at least eight cover versions of his songs.[10] It could be argued that the Rolling Stones might not exist without Berry. One day in 1961, Mick Jagger spotted a fellow teen carrying a Chuck Berry record under his arm at a train station in Dartford, England. A fan of Berry’s music, Jagger struck up a conversation. His fellow Berry fan was Keith Richards.[11]
Between Berry Park and Chuck Berry Town
“MUSIC WAS ALWAYS big in our family,” says Valerie Kehn, speculating on why her aunt Rona would go to a rock and roll show, especially one featuring Chuck Berry. Rona’s father, Albert, played saxophone in a band for a while. It’s how he met his wife Rholeen. The family always had plenty of albums around the house, including K-Tel records packed with hits by stars of the era, recalls Kehn.
Born in 1961, she isn’t sure where Rona’s son Wayne was born three years earlier but they were the closest cousins in age so they hung around a lot together. “I was very close to my cousin. We were good little pals.” For a while after Charles Wayne was born, he and Rona split their time between Kitchener and the St. Louis area, Kehn recalls. Busy with touring and tending to his own family, Berry wasn’t around much to care for his Canadian kin. He became even less accessible in February 1962 when he went to prison in Missouri for having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old prostitute he had met at a bar in Juarez, Mexico, while on tour in nearby El Paso, Texas in late 1959. The girl told him she was 21, so Berry invited her to join his tour, then offered her a job at his nightclub back in St. Louis. Bored with her job, the girl eventually left, then contacted police who learned of her real age. Berry would not be released until October 1963, and parole regulations restricted his travel for some time after that.
Needing a place to house Rona and their son back in Canada, Berry decided to purchase the triplex at 391 Southill in December 1966, according to land registry records. The price of the transaction was not disclosed on the title. The building itself was erected in 1962. Berry considered real estate a good investment. By 1970, he owned 23 properties stretching from Los Angeles to Kitchener at a total cost of $677,000 ($5.4 million in 2024 dollars), according to his autobiography.[12] The mention of his Kitchener property in the book is the only clue offered by the singer that he owned real estate in the area and was a Kitchener taxpayer.
At one time or another, members of the Pfeffer family occupied all three units. Kehn moved there with her parents and two siblings in 1967 and soon after Rona’s father Albert moved into the basement. Kehn’s father, also named Wayne, acted as superintendent, cutting the grass and looking after the building. When Kehn’s family moved out some years later, Berry was not happy, persuading Wayne Sr. to come back and look after the building for a while after that.
Rona was away a lot, visiting Berry in Missouri, following him on tour or living in Toronto. “She was kind of a wandering soul,” says Kehn. Her absences eventually prompted the family to move Wayne Jr. in with his grandfather Albert in the basement of 391 Southill. At some point, Wayne became too much for his grandfather and Albert arranged for the boy to live for several years with the Brubachers, a Mennonite family who lived north of Waterloo. Known as the “peeler man,” Albert had met the Brubachers at the Kitchener Farmers Market where he sold homemade potato peelers. Wayne, who would have been 10 to 12 years old at the time, “loved it” at the Brubachers, says Kehn. The Brubachers adored their new guest as well and eventually asked Albert if they could adopt Wayne. Albert was not keen on that idea, so Wayne moved back to Southill Drive.
Despite her absences, Rona cared about her son, says Kehn. “She loved Wayne, but wasn’t good at being a mom.” Neither was Berry much of a father emotionally to his Canadian son. “I always felt sorry for him (Wayne). I knew his dad didn’t take care of him,” adds Kehn. Even so, Berry wasn’t completely absent as a father, says Kehn. The singer allowed Rona and Wayne to live at 391 Southill rent-free, and Wayne was always well dressed, she noted.
Kehn recalls Berry coming for a visit to Southill Drive around the time of her sixth birthday in April 1967. It was during the evening and she was already in bed. Berry came into the room, sat on her bed and sang “Sweet Little Six,” to the tune of his megahit, “Sweet Little Sixteen.” Then he kissed her on the side of the head. “He really liked me,” says Kehn, noting that she looked like a young Rona. She recalls him being well dressed. “I never saw him in jeans.”
Berry was always friendly and polite when he visited. “We called him Uncle Chuck.”
When she was 7 or 8, Kehn’s parents packed up the family and drove to Berry Park, the singer’s sprawling country estate in Wentzville, Missouri, just west of St. Louis. It was the end of the school year in June, and she got out of classes early. At some point during the visit, Berry performed at the park’s bandshell. “Wow, he’s good,” Kehn recalls thinking.
Berry purchased the 30-acre rural property in the late 1950s as a resort and place to live so black and white people could mix, unlike the segregated environment in St. Louis.[13] Even so, Kehn felt like they were the only white people there. She recalls her mom asking a black woman if their kids could play together. “Hell, yeah,” said the woman.
Rona took Wayne to Berry Park as well. The boy would have been 7 or 8 at the time. Photos of the visit show Rona sitting on Berry’s lap, and hugging Wayne beside a car. Rona is wearing tight blue shorts and a sleeveless white blouse. Berry is dressed stylishly in brown pants, white jacket and shirt and a dark tie. Clad neatly in brown pants and matching sweater, Wayne looks like he just got out of school.
Wayne looked like his father only with fairer skin, says Kehn. He had curly hair, which he grew into a big afro in his teens. “He was very handsome.” As for his personality, Wayne was soft-spoken and “a very kind soul.” He liked to write poetry, and Kehn still has some of his poems and pictures passed on to her when Kehn’s dad died in 2022.
Wayne was “Way better looking than Chuck,” says Barb Kirk, who lived at 391 Southill from 1973-77. “He was gorgeous.” Kirk lived in the top apartment with her husband and two young sons. Wayne lived in the basement with grandpa Albert. Kirk doesn’t recall how they found the place, only that they rented it from “old man Pfeffer,” as he was sometimes called.
It didn’t take long for them to learn their landlord was a famous rock and roll singer. Rent cheques were made out to Chuck Berry. “I thought it was sort of cool,” says Kirk. She remembers Rona being there “on and off.” Although Kirk never met Berry personally, he would occasionally come to check on his family and the condition of his building. “Rona told me, ‘Chuck was here. We knocked on your door but you weren’t home.’ ”
Occasionally Wayne, who was a teenager by this time, would babysit their two young sons. He would sometimes bring a guitar and sing songs. “He was quiet and sweet.” Even though he had a famous father, Wayne didn’t boast about it, and Kirk got the sense that he didn’t have a lot of friends. Although she respected Berry’s accomplishments in the music world, she was not a fan of the way he treated his son. “He neglected him,” says Kirk. “It caused me to dislike him (Berry) immensely.”
She still has their eviction notice. Dated April 15, 1977, it says “we are renovating this building for owner occupancy. Notice is now given.” It is signed by Fran Gilliam, Berry’s long-time office manager and jack of all trades. Below her signature is the line, “C. Berry, owner.”
In bold print at the top of the notice is the letterhead, Berry Park Country Club. Just below in smaller print is the address in Wentzville, Missouri. It notes that guests can “lodge, swim, play, dine and dance.” Also still in her possession is a postcard sent to Kirk and her husband at 391 Southill from St. Louis. “Weather very hot. Hope to be home in a week or two.” It’s signed by Rona and Wayne.
While she lived at 391 Southill nearly 50 years ago, memories were rekindled in a strange way for Kirk in December 2020 when a former Kitchener friend, now living in Los Angeles, asked her to come and look after her two dogs for a few weeks while she was away on an important work assignment. Airfare was included in the deal. After her arrival, Kirk was told by her friend that a neighbour was holding a New Year’s Eve party in a few days and she was welcome to attend. Shortly after arriving at the party, Kirk struck up a conversation with a man in his late 50s. He said he was a music journalist, critic and author of a biography on the singer James Brown. He was currently at work on another biography, this one about Chuck Berry. Startled by this news, Kirk told him she used to live in a building owned by Berry in Kitchener, Canada. The journalist, R. J. Smith, was incredulous. “You said you were from Toronto,” he replied.
When Kirk insisted she was telling the truth and related details about Rona and Wayne living in the same building, Smith was flabbergasted. He had done extensive research on the principal girlfriends in Berry’s life but knew nothing about this Canadian lover and son. Smith contacted Kirk a few days later and got more information. He subsequently inserted a paragraph in his excellent 2022 book about Berry’s relationship with Rona, their son and the apartment building he bought for them in Kitchener. In the footnotes, Kirk is listed as the source of the information.[14] “It was a freaking weird coincidence,” Kirk says of her encounter with Smith in L.A. “It blew his mind and mine too.”
In his autobiography, published in 1987 when he was 60, Berry writes in considerable detail about the handful of women with whom he had significant relationships besides his wife. Rona makes a few brief appearances, but Berry makes no mention of any kind of amorous relationship with her, calling her his Canadian friend.
Rona first appears in the book in February 1969. Fran Gillium, his business manager, quits in a huff over his dalliances with other women and in desperation Berry summons Rona from Canada to answer the phones and sort out the mail at Berry Park. By this time, the singer had expanded the park into a country club and recreation area featuring such amenities as a guitar-shaped swimming pool, dance hall and 24-room lodge housing paying and non-paying guests. In April of that year, Berry buys a trailer to serve as a permanent home for Rona. She appears to have spent much of 1969 working at Berry Park, moving into the lodge at some point until a major fire on Dec. 1 destroyed her quarters as well as other parts of the building. Berry does not mention her after that. [15]
Rona is back at Berry Park in the early 1970s along with her mother Rholeen. They’re cited in a feature on Berry in Gallery magazine, an adult publication of that era. The writer gets a tour of Berry Park where he meets “Rhoda (name spelled incorrectly), a well-endowed Canadian lady,” and her mom who puffs on Player’s cigarettes and wears Bermuda shorts. [16] At times, Rona also travelled with Berry when he was on tour. Kehn recalls Rona talking about meeting the Rolling Stones and other rock celebrities in England when Berry toured there. Berry’s wife Toddy appears to have tolerated his infidelities but the couple had not lived together for years. Toddy preferred staying at their home in St. Louis, while Berry spent most of his time at rural Berry Park. But the family did come together for holidays and special occasions and renewed their vows on their golden anniversary in 1998.[17]
In August 1979, Berry began serving a 120-day sentence in the Lompoc Federal Correctional Institute in Lompoc, California, for income tax evasion. During his time behind bars, Rona wrote letters to Berry. Kehn has a letter from the singer sent to Rona at 391 Southill. Addressed to “Ro Pfeffer,” Berry compliments her on her stories and says how much he misses her. “You’re doing ok baby on the stories. You know what I like,” he says. “Make ‘em six pages long. I’m a little older now. Takes me longer.” It’s signed “Love ya. 86 more days mama. I’m going to come up an fuck ya, revive ya, clean ya out.” The 86 days refers to the amount of time left in his sentence. It’s not clear what the stories were about or why they had to be a certain length, but they could have been related to his autobiography. Berry started work on the book while at the Lompoc prison.
In another letter, dated Oct. 24, 1979, while Berry was still in prison, Gillium tells Rona, “I spoke with Charles last night and he said to tell you he appreciates your letters very much and please mail all rent receipts to me here at Berry Park office.” It’s signed simply, “Fran.”
In a third letter, Berry apologizes to Rona for not being able to meet her in Vancouver because the TV show he was appearing on didn’t finish in time. “Ro, the fairest of them all,” he starts off. “They didn’t clear the Vancouver BC TV show until today Thursday April 30 so I couldn’t send for you. Have fun anyway!! Go shopping.” It’s signed “Me!!” and is written on Berry Park stationery. The letter is not dated, but was likely written in 1976 when Berry performed on Peter Gzowski’s short-lived TV show 90 Minutes Live on CBC. Gzowski can be seen dancing in the background with audience members as Berry bounces around the stage.
Kehn also has a copy of tax bill from 1983 showing a total levy of $1,228.36 for 391 Southill. The bill includes a cheque to the City of Kitchener for $804.68 signed by Charles Berry to cover the remainder of the taxes for the year. At the bottom is a note from Berry to Rona indicating that the bill doesn’t include property insurance. “You and Albert (Rona’s dad) should bare (sic) some of this expense,” Berry says.
With Rona Ready to rush off at the slightest nod from Berry, a meaningful career back in Kitchener was difficult. But she did find work as a waitress and as a secretary at the YWCA when she was home, Kehn recalls. Her lengthy affair with a famous singer, with whom she bore a son, must have seemed odd to her family, but they accepted it and even embraced it. “Everyone supported my aunt,” says Kehn. In particular, her grandfather Albert, who was a big music fan. “Grandpa was thrilled about Chuck.” Rona’s brother Larry lived in an apartment building behind Fairview Park Mall in Kitchener with his wife Diane. With no children at the time, their flat became “a place to gather” when Berry came to town, Kehn recalls.
Drugs were sometimes an issue with Rona. She liked to smoke pot, but she also did stronger stuff, Kehn admits. “I don’t know what drugs she did.” “My aunt was a fun person. I can see why he (Berry) fell for her,” she says. Berry didn’t drink or do much in the way of drugs. “He just smoked cigarettes a lot,” says Kehn. “Rona liked her partying. We were partiers too,” says Gord Bryant who lived at 391 Southill with his sister in the 1970s and 1980s. “She was a cool chick.” Rona liked to go out to the clubs, says Bryant, and sometimes used cocaine, but booze was her stimulant of choice. “There was always alcohol around.”
He remembers Rona fussing to get ready for a visit by Berry. Wanting to put on a good show, “she always wore dresses or tight, tight jeans.” The singer arrived in a fancy vehicle. Bryant’s memory has dimmed, but he thinks it was a Lincoln Town Car. Berry was tall, had slicked-back hair and wore a belt with a fancy purple buckle. Bryant, about 14 at the time, was keyed up. “He introduced himself to me and shook my hand.”
Wayne's World
Even though Wayne was a bit older, Bryant would sometimes hang out with him. They would meet at the community centre on nearby Morgan Avenue. “We used to smoke a doobie with him here and there,” Bryant says. “He was a laid-back guy. He didn’t talk very much. I think he was troubled.” Wayne’s big afro was the subject of some amusement. Bryant and his friends would joke about it. “You could hide an ounce (of pot) in there,” he recalls, smiling at the memory. Neither Rona nor Wayne would brag about their relationship with Berry, says Bryant. “They kept that quiet.”
In the late 1970s, Berry played the Western Fair in London, ON. The whole family went including Kehn, her father and grandpa Albert. At one point during the show, the singer called his son up on stage. Wayne was so excited he ran. Berry handed him a guitar. “He was pretty good,” says Kehn, noting Wayne briefly played in a band. Kehn’s father was so moved, he cried.
Despite living for a time at 391 Southill, the Waterloo Region District School Board has no record of Wayne attending nearby Howard Robertson elementary school or any primary school in its system. Rona and Wayne spent quite a bit of time in Missouri during the boy’s early years, said Kehn, and Wayne also lived with the Brubachers north of Waterloo, so that could account for the absence of elementary school records locally.
But Wayne did attend Sunnyside middle school briefly from May to June 1971. In September 1971, he entered Eastwood Collegiate and stayed until March 1973. He then missed an entire school year before returning to Eastwood in September 1974 and staying until December of that year when he withdrew at the age of 16, according to records obtained from the Waterloo board through a freedom of information request.
For a time, Wayne worked at the Uniroyal tire plant in Kitchener but got into a fight with a co-worker who called him a racist name. Kitchener-Waterloo was much less racially diverse during this time. The fight cost him his job, says Kehn.
Wayne did have a few girlfriends over the years including one named Anne, Kehn recalls.
Having parents who weren’t around much, one of whom was famous, must have been a burden to him, she speculates, and he kept it bottled up inside him. “Wayne never talked about who his dad was.”
Though Kehn recalls Berry being polite when he visited, the singer was a notoriously moody man. He once kicked Keith Richards off the stage for playing too loudly at a concert in Hollywood in 1972 and punched the Stones guitarist in the face backstage at a show in New York in 1981.[18] Who knows if Berry’s fiery temper sometimes surfaced when Rona or Wayne were around?
All the same, Wayne did pour out some of his thoughts, feelings and frustrations in poetry. Perhaps it was the influence of his father, who paid strict attention to the words in his songs, but many of Wayne’s poems could double as song lyrics. Before she died Rona passed on a thick envelope of his handwritten verse to Kehn’s father Wayne. He kept it until passing it on to Kehn just before he died in 2022.
Many of the poems are about romance, girls and lost love:
Well, I been thinkin’ about you baby,
and your always on my mind,
such an ever lovin’ woman
are you always on my mind.
Won’t you talk with me baby,
Won’t you walk with me baby …
I’m feeling cold right now baby,
I’m feeling old right now baby,
Maybe my baby isn’t ready,
Sure feel like goin’ steady …
One of Wayne’s poems, called Blue Feeling, goes on for 28 pages. In one of the passages, he appears to lament his absent mother:
I want to hold you baby once again,
I want to hold you baby once again,
Look at that, the trouble I’m in,
Momma’s boy he’s on his own,
Momma’s boy he’s on his own.
Kehn knew something was seriously wrong when she and her boyfriend Jim, now her husband, arrived home from camping on the May long weekend in 1982. They walked into her parents house on Westheights Drive in Kitchener to find everyone stunned or crying.
Rona looked in the worst shape. “She was laying on the bed sobbing.” Kehn was equally shocked when she heard the news. Rona’s son Wayne was dead at the age of 24. He had been found hanging from the wooden fire escape at the back of 391 Southill over the weekend. “It was all my fault,” Rona said between sobs.
Details are sketchy after all these years. Kehn thinks it was someone walking their dog who first saw the body. Bryant recalls seeing Wayne hanging with an extension chord around his neck after returning from hitting golf balls with a friend in nearby Morgan Park. Relatives were quickly called and Kehn’s father Wayne rushed to the scene. When he saw his nephew hanging, Wayne Sr. broke down in tears. “When Wayne was going through all his tough times, he always reached out to my dad,” says Kehn.
The obituary, published in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record on May 25, 1982, said Wayne died suddenly at his residence, 391 Southill Drive, age 24 years. Rona, his grandparents and two uncles were listed as relatives. Chuck Berry, the father, was conspicuously absent from the notice. A private family memorial service was held the following day with no visitation.
Wayne was a troubled person in his last few years. He got involved in drugs, then began to suffer from mental health problems, even schizophrenia, says Kehn. At one point, he threatened grandpa Albert with a gun. Wayne Sr. was called and managed to defuse the situation. “He was on a trip, some drug,” says Kehn. He was admitted to the London Psychiatric Hospital where at some point he made his first suicide attempt. A few days before his death, he was released from hospital and returned to Kitchener. He tried to call his girlfriend and other friends, but they weren’t around. He went to 391 Southill but no family were around. Everyone was away for the May 24 weekend. Alone and deeply depressed, he took his life, says Kehn.
She’s not sure what sparked Wayne’s downward spiral, how he went from a kind, soft-spoken soul to someone in the grips of a mental-health crisis. Having parents who weren’t around much, one of whom was a famous singer, getting bounced around between different homes and schools, being bi-racial. The list is long of potential causes. With his behaviour growing more erratic and unpredictable, her parents had discouraged her from seeing him. Kehn regrets that now. “I feel sad that I didn’t get a chance to help him.” Other questions remain. Why was he released from hospital in such dire straits? Who was he hanging around with in his last dark years? The answers are lost down the pop music memory hole.
In her files, Kirk has a copy of a poem that appears to have been written by Rona. It’s titled In Memoriam, Wayne 1958-1982:
“Baby dark brown eyes,
Baby light brown face,
Come meet the other guys,
you’ve joined the human race. …
Tall teenager, full of grace,
sad brown eyes in a solemn face,
come on guy, play your guitar,
get off the dope, don’t give up hope …
Rona and Wayne Sr. called Berry to break the news. Likely, he was shocked and saddened, given his financial support over the years and his occasional visits to 391 Southill. Wayne was his only child outside his immediate family. Yet he did not come to the funeral. Nor does he mention Wayne in his autobiography published five years later. Rona is described as his “Canadian friend” even though they had a serious relationship stretching over many years. Other girlfriends with whom he had significant affairs are described in the book. Could Rona’s and Wayne’s absence be related to Berry’s shame and guilt over Wayne’s suicide?
After Wayne died, the correspondence dropped off between Rona and Berry, but not entirely. Rona was still living at 391 Southill along with her father Albert in 1983, according to the tax bill in Kehn’s possession. She’s not sure when they moved out but Berry eventually sold the building in 1991 for $165,000, according to land registry documents, so it’s likely they had moved on by then.
Lemonade from a LuLu Lemon
On Aug. 14, 1985, Berry played a concert at Lulu’s Roadhouse, a cavernous nightclub fashioned out of a former K-Mart department store in the south end of Kitchener. With a capacity of 3,000 and boasting the world’s longest bar, the club traded on nostalgia, featuring big-name acts and one-hit wonders from the 1950s to the 1970s who were past their prime or in a temporary lull but could still attract large crowds. It was a touch of Las Vegas transplanted to southern Ontario with the glitz and kitschy decor to match. Acts ranging in magnitude from Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King and James Brown to Dennis Yost and the Classics IV and the Sir Douglas Quintet darkened the boards at Lulu’s. The club was tailor-made for the likes of Berry. By 1985 he was definitely past his prime but could still dazzle the locals in mid-size centres such as Kitchener-Waterloo.
The Pfeffer family came out in force to see their favourite entertainer. “Quite a crowd went,” recalls Kehn, including her parents, husband and sister and Rona, of course. At one point during the show, Berry called out from the stage, “Where’s my family?” A spotlight was pointed toward the Pfeffers’ table. After the show, they went backstage for 30 minutes of socializing with Berry. A picture from backstage shows Berry wearing a colourful shirt of stripes and triangles snuggled up on a coach beside Rona who’s dressed in a white summer outfit and holding a cigarette. Other family members sit on the other side of Berry looking giddy and happy.
The show itself was nearly a disaster.
Berry had a long-time habit of performing for the most part with local musicians rather than his own touring band. In his autobiography, the singer explains that he jettisoned his original bandmates, Johnnie Johnson and Ebbie Hardy, in the late 1950s because they drank too much on tour. Berry, who grew up in the grinding poverty of the Great Depression, was also tight-fisted about money and wanted to keep as much of it as possible. At times in the early days, he even travelled with a hot plate so he could cook meals in his room. In his view, most local musicians knew his hits anyway so there was no need to bring his own band.
He wore his frugality like a badge of honour. When he was a nobody Bruce Springsteen and his band opened for Berry at a show in Maryland in the early 1970s. Arriving five minutes before the show, Berry launched straight into the set with no warning of what he was going to play or what key he was in. Springsteen and his band were in a total panic, but their bass player somehow figured out the key and they hung on for dear life as Berry led them through the show. It didn’t seem to matter. The audience was so awed at the sight of Berry, they cheered anyway. Springsteen’s account of the performance, shared in a 1986 documentary on Berry, is re-printed in the foreward to Berry’s autobiography. [19]
In his memoir Keith Richards pulls no punches about what he thought of the practice. Berry “had been playing with slouches for years, with the cheapest band in town, just going in and out with a briefcase. To a musician, playing below your mark is soul destroying, and he had been doing that for ages, to the point where he was completely cynical about the music.” [20]
Yet if Berry was matched with a talented backup band, “the results could be breathtaking,” writes Bruce Pegg in his 2002 book about the singer, Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.[21]
This appears to be what happened at Lulu’s. The show got off to a shaky start, according to music critic John Kiely, who was covering the show for the Waterloo Region Record. “Berry spent 20 minutes out of tune, out of touch with the audience and walking a thin line to no tomorrow.” What turned the show around was the audience. His clumsy opening drew no boos or catcalls and when fans began singing along to his mediocre rendition of Carole, one of his hits, Berry could sense their desire for something special. At the same time he and Kats, the local backup band, finally clicked. Throwing off his flowery shirt to reveal a black tank top, he let it rip.
“The 45 minutes that followed were likely the best Chuck Berry anyone is going to hear this year, anywhere,” Kiely wrote. “The endings, with a pickup band (that deserves full marks for surviving), were still erratic, but the music was played with genuine feeling.”[22]
Randy Rollo had a ringside seat for the Lulu’s show. His group, the Roadhouse Band, warmed up the crowd before Berry went on. “It was an incredible night,” he recalls. Berry didn’t even tune up his guitar before the show. “His guitar was constantly out of tune. It sounded awful,” said Rollo, who watched from the side of the stage. The St. Louis rocker was extremely fussy about the kind of amplifiers he would play with. If they weren’t Dual Fender Showman amps, the promoter had to pay Berry an extra $1,000. Those kind of amps are “huge and pretty rare,” said Rollo.
Berry’s demand set off a scramble all over town to find the right amps, and Lulu’s staff only managed to come up with one, he recalls. He’s not sure if they had to pay the extra $1,000.
The Roadhouse Band, one of Lulu’s house bands, didn’t back Berry that night because Lulu’s owner Karl Magid wanted them to focus on their opening act. Their job was to rev up the crowd before the main act came on. “We did pyro. We did dry ice. We worked them (the audience) into a frenzy,” says Rollo of their routine. “A lot of people used to say we were the best band of the night.”
Seeking an excellent house band, Magid went to the 33-year-old Rollo, who grew up in Kitchener and started playing keyboards in bands at the age of 17. Rollo put together a trio, but when their sound wasn’t big enough to fill the spacious Lulu’s he added two more musicians. “We came up with a really powerful lineup. At one time we were considered the best house band in the country.” Kats, Lulu’s other house band, consisted largely of jazz musicians. Also known as Double Exposure, they were more versatile and able to read music, so they were better suited to back up touring acts, notes Rollo, who played with the Roadhouse Band from 1984-88.
Berry’s policy of using local musicians was not unusual, says Rollo. If the singer was not a big name, they often toured solo. Mark Dinning, whose 1960 song Teen Angel topped the Billboard charts, didn’t bring a band when he played Lulu’s, Rollo notes. Bigger names, such as Roy Orbison and Johnny Rivers, brought their own bands. Orbison played Lulu’s four times and sounded better every time he came, says Rollo. Despite Berry’s stumbles, Rollo was still impressed. “It was a magical night.” He compared it to seeing Frank Sinatra at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. “He wasn’t that good, but it was still Frank Sinatra.”
A Style, a Trim, and a Little Rock & Roll History
RAY VIZZA WAS working on a customer at a hair salon at Fairview Park Mall in Kitchener in the late 1980s when he heard a sound that made him stop and look towards the doorway.
Clomp, clomp, clomp. It was the unmistakable sound of a woman wearing high heels. As the woman walked by she looked in and made eye contact with Vizza. The clomping continued for a few seconds down the hallway and then stopped. Turning around, the woman clomped back for another look. Then she was gone. About an hour later she was back dressed in a more fashionable outfit. “I want to make an appointment with that guy,” she said, pointing toward Vizza. It was Rona Pfeffer. To this day when Vizza thinks about Rona, the clomping sound comes to mind. It was the beginning of a professional relationship that would last until Rona’s death in 2005. When Vizza moved to another salon at a plaza across the road, Rona followed him. When he opened his own salon at Ottawa Street and Lackner Boulevard, Rona was there too.
“Sometimes you have a certain connection with people,” says Vizza. Every six to eight weeks, Rona would come in for a style and a trim. Every 18 to 20 weeks she would have highlights inserted. “She liked her hair a certain way. She was very fashionable.” The visits were as much social as they were professional. While some customers are quiet, Rona liked to chat.
At some point she started talking about her personal life and her relationship with Chuck Berry. Knowing that Vizza was a music fan, she just slipped it into the conversation. He was startled, but had known her long enough that he wasn’t skeptical. “I believed her. Why would someone just make that up?”
Rona wouldn’t talk about Berry every visit, but when she did it was mostly in a positive way. She told Vizza, she was at Berry Park when police raided the place looking for cocaine in 1990. Berry had a difficult relationship with the local authorities who were convinced the resort was a den of iniquity. No cocaine was found.[23] Rona also got hassled at the border while travelling to Missouri. One can imagine U.S. customs officials being skeptical when she said she was going to visit Chuck Berry.
Other stylists would hear the conversation. “They thought she was bullshitting,” said Vizza. To prove them wrong, Rona brought in Berry’s autobiography and pointed to the sections where she was mentioned. Vizza didn’t like to probe too much about her relationship with the famous singer. Nor did he talk about it much outside of work with friends or relatives. It was part of his professional code to respect a customer’s privacy. “You don’t like to ask clients too much.”
On one occasion, Rona came in for an appointment and extended her fist like she wanted to do a fist bump. When Vizza reached out his hand, she furtively dropped three joints into his palm. Vizza was surprised and a bit embarrassed. Pot was still illegal in those days. Fortunately no one else noticed. “She thought I might like them.” Rona didn’t talk much about her son Wayne who was deceased by this point. But she did show Vizza some pictures of him.
As the years went by, Rona’s health began to decline. A heavy smoker, she developed emphysema. Even so, she would still come in for hair appointments, parking in the handicapped spot. The medication she was on made her look “puffy,” said Vizza.
At some point, she stopped coming. When Vizza called, she told him she didn’t feel well enough to make the trip to his salon. He tried to visit her in hospital but she didn’t want to see him. One day on a hunch he picked up the newspaper and started scanning the obituaries. It wasn’t something he normally did, but on this day he did. Rona’s obituary was there.
It notes that she died at St. Mary’s Hospital in Kitchener on May 14, 2005, after a lengthy illness. Mourners were asked to donate to the Waterloo Region Lung Association.
When Rona died, Kehn’s dad contacted Berry’s office to pass on the sad news. There was no response from the singer. Nor did he turn up at her funeral a few days later. Kehn did not see much of Rona in her last years. “Aunt Rona was quite private as her health failed.” Through her troubled times and Wayne’s difficult years as a teen, she would usually contact Kehn’s father if she needed help. Kehn’s father, a successful businessman who owned Floyd Bast Printing, died in 2022 at 81.
Rona did marry later in life. In 1986 after a hasty courtship, she exchanged vows with a man named Bill. “We all thought, Aunt Rona is growing up now,” said Kehn. But it was a short union with some troubled times. After a brief separation, they got together again, but then Bill died of a heart attack. In a sense, Rona never moved on from her relationship with Berry. “She had her demons,” said Kehn.
Rona’s ashes are buried along with her son Wayne’s remains in a small plot in Parkview Cemetery in Waterloo. “Rona Pfeffer, beloved mother of Wayne Pfeffer,” says the gravestone.
“Even though she was not a great mother, she loved Wayne,” said Kehn.
Twilight of a Rock & Roll Idol
BERRY’S SUNSET YEARS were not entirely happy ones. Legal problems weighed him down, in particular two lawsuits over songwriting royalties and a disturbing predilection for voyeurism. On the latter issue, the singer seems to have picked up the bizarre habit of spying on women in revealing positions while learning photography as a teenager from an older cousin.[24] Over the years, the habit along with an unhealthy appetite for pornography degenerated to the point where he secretly installed cameras at Berry Park and a restaurant he owned nearby to spy on women in washrooms and bedrooms. More than 200 women eventually filed suit for invasion of privacy in 1990. The case of the “toilet videos” dragged on for five years before Berry settled for $830,000.[25]
The royalty dispute erupted in 2000 when Berry was sued for writing credit on more than 50 songs by his keyboard player Johnny Johnson. It’s an issue that has generated much debate. In his memoir, Keith Richards argues that much of Berry’s composing in the early days was a collaboration with Johnson. Berry would bring in the lyrics and Johnson would start fooling around with them on piano. Most of Berry’s songs were written in piano keys, not guitar keys, Richards notes. “Obviously, most of these songs started off on piano and Chuck joined in, playing on the barre with his huge hands stretching across the strings. That was a dead giveaway. ”[26]
Worse, Berry had not had a hit since firing Johnson in the early 1970s, Richards says. [27] After getting the boot, Johnson struggled with alcoholism for years to the point where he left music altogether and started driving a bus. His career was revived by Richards during the making of the 1986 documentary celebrating Berry’s 60th birthday. Johnson was brought in to perform at a special concert honouring Berry and continued playing successfully until his death in 2005.
In Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Pegg dismisses Richards’s argument that Johnson should share in the song royalties. Most of the keys used in Berry’s songs were commonly used in the country or folk music of the time. Though some were not traditional for guitar, they were well within Berry’s capability, Pegg writes. While Berry and Johnson collaborated on many songs, as the composer of the lyrics Berry was the driving force behind the music. Moreover, can any song be totally original when artists often borrow or steal riffs and chord progressions from songs they’ve heard in the past? Pegg wonders. “Partly the two were doing what all musicians and artists do: taking elements from different sources and synthesizing them to make an artistic creation that is at once new and derivative.”[28]
It can also be argued that Berry did all the leg work in finding Chess Records and getting their music published there. In the end Berry was willing to concede that Johnson should share in some royalties. He offered to settle with his keyboard player for a sizable amount, but Johnson held out for a larger sum and his day in court. Sadly a judge ruled that the statue of limitations had run out prior to trial, and Johnson died in 2005 without getting a penny. [29]
There were other troubling signs in Berry’s life.
During the making of the 60th birthday documentary in 1986, film crews noticed holes in the roof of the main clubhouse and recording studio at Berry Park, furniture and junk piled up in some of the rooms and muck and dead frogs in the guitar-shaped pool. [30]
As Berry aged, the only thing that seemed to make him truly happy was performing. On stage he could forget his problems and turn back the clock. In 1996, he started playing monthly shows at Blueberry Hill, a St. Louis nightclub, with a regular band that included his son and daughter. Fans would fly in just to see him perform. The shows continued until 2014. [31]
Even after turning 80, he kept touring, playing countries as far away as Finland, Russia, Turkey and Uruguay. In a concession to age, he brought the Blueberry Hill band with him.
But his body was giving out on him. A concert on New Year’s Day in 2011 in Chicago had to be stopped when Berry was too tired to continue. Weak performances during a tour of South America in 2013 prompted the media to accuse him of “ruining his reputation.”[32]
Unable to tour anymore, he holed up at Berry Park and started working on a new album using songs written years ago but never released. On Mar. 18, 2017, he died at the age of 90, three months before the album went public.
Called Chuck, the record doesn’t break any new ground but it’s a “lively late portrait of the artist,” Smith notes. And a revealing one. He dedicates the album to his long suffering wife Themetta, saluting her in a song called Lady B. Goode. In a second track called Dutchman, he admits to one great weakness—women. (33)
[1] Bruce Pegg, Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 62.
[2] R.J. Smith, Chuck Berry: An American Life, Hachette Books, New York, 2022, pp. 127-128.
[3] Pegg, p. 77
[4] Kitchener-Waterloo Record, April 12, 1958.
[5] Chuck Berry, The Autobiography, Isalee Publishing, 1987, p. 85.
[6] Smith, p. 62.
[7] Smith, p. 79.
[8] Smith, p. 80.
[9] Pegg, p. 42.
[10] Pegg, p. 163.
[11] Keith Richards, Life, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2010, pp. 77-78.
[12] Berry, p. 287.
[13] Smith, p. 164.
[14] Smith, pp. 269, 390.
[15] Berry, pp. 231, 244.
[16] Smith, p. 268.
[17] Pegg, p. 171.
[18] Pegg, p. 214.
[19] Berry, pp. x-xiii, 139-140.
[20] Richards, p. 468.
[21] Pegg, p. 164.
[22] Waterloo Region Record, Aug. 14, 1985.
[23] Smith, p. 331.
[24] Smith, p. 30.
[25] Smith, p. 336.
[26] Richards, p. 468.
[27] Richards, p. 466.
[28] Pegg, pp. 242-250.
[29] Smith, p. 347.
[30] Pegg, p. 216.
[31] Smith p. 345.
[32] Smith, pp. 354-355.
(33) Smith, pp. 358-359
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