Norbert was born at 6:15 a.m. on May 18, 1936, at St. Joseph Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is the second child of Hildegard Augusta-Victoria Ann Schoettke of Essen and Achim Michael Kammer of Gnadenfeld, Germany.
Norbert’s parents were married in Gelsenkirchen-Horst, Germany, on May 20, 1933. Five months after, they arrived at the Port of New York on November 6, and settled in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Norbert’s father, a chemist by training, was invited by the Berghoff Brothers Brewery Inc. of Fort Wayne to be brew master of the first new brewery built after the end of Prohibition, which had been repealed by the voters of Indiana just five months before they arrived. Norbert and his older brother, Joachim Felix Kammer, were born in Fort Wayne, nineteen months apart.
In 1937, at the age of one, Norbert and his family moved to Pennsylvania, where Norbert’s father became brew master of the struggling Fort Pitt Brewing Company in Sharpsburg. The Kammer family first resided in neighboring Aspinwall borough, also in Allegheny County, where Norb and Achim (as Norbert and his brother were then known) later attended Aspinwall High School together.
Norbert’s gregarious personality and spirit of civic engagement was evident from an early age. From 1950 to 1954, throughout his four years at Aspinwall High School, Norbert was an active member of various clubs and organizations, including the Latin Club, Biology Club, Riffle Club, Pep Club, Science Club, Camera Club, Speech Club, and Hi-Y Club, which was affiliated with the Y.M.C.A. In April 1953, during his junior year, Norbert starred as Gerald Kelly in his high school’s production of “Clementine,” and in November 1954, Norbert played the leading role of Sidney Huntington in the comedy, “The Little Dog Laughed.” He was the consummate thespian—both on and off stage. In 1954, Norbert was one of the few students invited to a Student-Teacher Assembly to share their experiences in foreign counties, which he attended donning the traditional lederhosen of his parents’ native Germany.
During his senior year, Norbert served as Organizations Editor of the school yearbook, Cavalier, and he was inducted as a charter member of the Aspinwall Chapter of the National Honor Society. At the time, classmates recalled that “Norb can always be seen racing around the countryside in his famous jeep,” and that he was “always willing to lend a helping hand.” Indeed, Norbert had a lifelong love to help anyone in need. It is not surprising that his ambition at the time was to work in the hospitality industry.
From 1955 to 1958, Norbert pursued his dream to become a hotel manager by studying at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration, the world’s first four-year intercollegiate school devoted to hospitality management. Norbert continued to flourish as an active member of his community, joining the Charleston Club in his freshman year. In 1958, he graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. degree in hotel management from the Nolan School, regarded as “the world’s premier hospitality school.”
On September 22, 1959, Norbert was inducted into the U.S. Army as a Private (E-1), and from November 1959 to February 1960, he studied to be a clerk typist at Fort Knox in Kentucky, where he reached the rank of Private First Class (E-3) on January 10, 1960. On September 21, 1961, Norbert received an honorable discharge after the expiration of his two-year term of service, while stationed at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, and he remained in the U.S. Army Reserve until August 31, 1965.
On April 21, 1963, Norbert became a member of the Bahá'í Faith. The Bahá'í Faith teaches the oneness of God and religion, the oneness of humanity and freedom from prejudice, the fundamental equality of the sexes, the harmony between religion and science, and the progressive revelation of religious truth. As Norbert once recalled, “my Blessing after finding the Faith…was home-front pioneering to Carmel-by-the-Sea, where I was able to build a house into which I moved my parents to care for them until they died.” Norbert too remained in his adopted home of Carmel for the remainder of his days.
When Norbert offered to “lend a helping hand,” he always went above and beyond any expectations. In 1967, at the age of 30, he was invited to go on pilgrimage to the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa, Israel, but he surrendered his place on the long waitlist so that Nell Rutan Applegate, who became a Bahá'í at the age of 86, could go in his place. On February 13, due to a last-minute cancellation, Norbert and Nell, who was then 89 years old and blind, departed for the Holy Land together. A few months later, on October 1, 1967, just two days after he prepared a large 90th birthday party for Nell, Norbert accompanied his nonagenarian friend on another international trip, this time to attend the groundbreaking ceremony of the Bahá'í House of Worship in Panama City on October 8.
Norbert was extremely dedicated to his Faith and was an active member of his local community for most of his life. In May 1968, he was elected recording secretary of the Carmel Assembly of Bahá'ís, and in August 1968, he attended the first Bahá'í Oceanic Conference and Centenary at Palermo, Italy and Haifa, Israel, together with Laura Smithson, then secretary of the Carmel Assembly of Bahá'ís. In May 1969, Norbert and fellow Bahá'i, Jana Stroessler, with whom he founded House of Peace on Dolores and Fifth, sponsored a benefit performance of “Oliver” for the first peacetime hospital ship, S.S. HOPE, operated by global health and humanitarian aid NGO, Project HOPE. In 1972, he served as Assembly Secretary for the Bahá'í Assembly of Monterey County.
In June 1975, Norbert earned a certificate in teaching and counseling from the United Latino Students Association, and throughout the 1970s he frequently gave public lectures on the Bahá'í Teachings to various local communities throughout the county. Norbert also taught courses to seniors at the Carmel Valley Manor on human relations, nutrition, and problems of aging, and he was known to hold parties twice a year at home for his students, who ranged in age from 80 to 95. In 1978 he also served as a representative and spokesperson for the Monterey County Citizens Coalition Against 6 (California Proposition 6, known as the Briggs Initiative, was a failed attempt to ban gay schoolteachers in California public schools). On April 8, 1980, and again on April 13, 1982, Norbert ran for Clerk in Carmel municipal elections.
In June 1975, Norbert made headlines in the Carmel Pine Cone by salvaging the Carmel Foundation’s original Town House, which had been slated for demolition. A slow-moving truck transported the wide load in three cumbersome pieces up Eighth, north on Dolores, across the Ocean Avenue intersection, to its new home on Norbert’s property at Third and Lincoln, which journalist at the time described as “the most exciting thing to happen in Carmel all year.” The Town House had been a center of senior citizen activity since 1952, and “moving the building is our way of keeping a beautiful, old Carmel house going,” explained Betty Plank, then director of the Carmel Foundation.
Norbert intended to move the Town House onto a foundation and attach it to the main house that he designed and built himself in the early 1970s. That project remained unfinished, much to the chagrin of some neighbors. It is said beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While some considered the building to be an eyesore at best, for Norbert it was a lifelong labor of love, which he designed and built with his own two hands, and which reflected his unique character and eccentricities. As his neighbor of 30 years, Mike Starring, recalled in his letter to the editor of the Carmel Pine Cone in October 2012, “it was a rustic project throughout, inviting the existing trees indoors, as well as the natural light via the most ingenious skylights. Once inside, explorers truly witnessed every boy’s dream of a grandiose treehouse. The home at the time was incredibly eccentric, built by the ‘Typical Carmelite,’ the artsy type, and was a product of what Carmel was once famous for.” Indeed, Norbert even designed its A-frame roof to precisely match the angle of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was not just a house; it was his sanctuary.
Facing mounting pressure from City Council, he eventually sold the property in July 2012 and purchased a new home four months later at the Hacienda Carmel Community Association, an independent senior community in Carmel Valley, where he spent the final decade of his life.
Norbert could be frequently found reading newspapers in the lobby of Hacienda Carmel, working on a jigsaw puzzle, or playing a game of Scrabble with neighbors, and for Christmas he performed the role of Santa Clause for the amusement of his retirement community. In the last decades of his life, Norbert in fact developed a striking resemblance to Father Christmas, from his bushy white beard and portly stature to his jolly nature and deep-throated laugh that could fill any room. Such was his resemblance that every Christmas elderly ladies at Hacienda Carmel lined up to get their photographs taken sitting on his lap.
Norbert also continued to frequent the Carmel Foundation on Eighth and Lincoln, now as a senior citizen himself, where he enjoyed using the Technology Center and writing letters to the editors of the Monterey Herald on contemporary subjects, ranging from the injustice of racial profiling, and the need for universal health care, to the benefits of municipal natural water collection, and a proposed parking option for homeless in Monterey. In between making his views known to the editors of local papers, he was quick to regale staff and patrons alike about how forty some years ago he once saved the original Carmel Foundation and made the building part of his home.
Throughout his time in Carmel, Norbert held various and sundry vocations, including hospitality management roles at La Playa Carmel, Del Monte Lodge (now The Lodge at Pebble Beach) and the Pine Inn. He worked as an accountant for Love Antiques from 1976 to 1978, and he helped countless private clients file their taxes. But his devotion and true passion—second only to his Faith and the people he loved—was the theater. As his neighbor of 30 years prophetically mused in 2012, “I hope Norbert Kammer is remembered for his dedication to Carmel arts and his lifelong dedication to Children’s Theater.”
For decades, Norbert was an integral part of the community theater scene on the Peninsula, especially the Children’s Experimental Theatre (CET) in Carmel and the Tantamount Theater in Carmel Valley, but he also showed his support by attending performances at The Wharf Theater at Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey, as well as the Golden Bough Playhouse and the Pacific Repertory Theatre in Carmel, to name a few.
Since at least 1979, Norbert served as business manager of CET, a position that was originally funded by the California Educational Theatre Association (CETA). He was then one of only three fulltime staff, together with Marcia Gambrell Hovick, who founded CET in 1960. By 1969, CET was incorporated and received tax exempt states and relocated to the Indoor Forest Theatre, owned by the City of Carmel. That same year the Staff Players Repertory Company was formed, a performing troupe made up of adults, mostly CET staff, including Norbert. In March 1983, Norbert and his lifelong and beloved friend, Dennis Hunter (1943-1988), played tailors to Jourdain in “The Would-Be Gentleman.” In September 1997, Norbert was also commended for his “thoughtful performance” in “The Dresser,” which opened to a full house at Carmel’s old Cherry Hall.
The core of CET programming centered around the children’s productions and included a touring company called Traveling Troupe, which provided the experience of live theater by children and for children, free of charge, at elementary schools throughout the Monterey Peninsula. As Norbert told the Carmel Pine Cone in 1985, on the silver anniversary of CET, “this is a very, very culturally rich area. We go to the peninsula last. We take the show to the poorer areas of Salinas and North County first because these children have no access to cultural activities. It’s all for the benefit of the children.”
As business manager, one of Norbert’s primary responsibilities was to write grant proposals, typically requesting 18 to 25 grants per year. Still, CET often struggled financially, but as Norbert said in his 1985 interview, “we’ve always paid our creditors,” and this was made possible in part by Norbert voluntarily taking a 50% pay-cut to his salary for three years. To many theater patrons, Norbert was perhaps best known for his delicious brownies, which he baked himself and sold during intermission, providing another modest revenue stream to support the theater.
In 1988, Norbert oversaw the badly needed renovations of the Forest Theater on Santa Rita Street and Mountain View Avenue, known as the oldest outdoor theater west of the Rockies. Originally built in 1910, it was deeded to the City of Carmel in 1939 so it would be eligible for federal support as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project.
Norbert retired from the theater in July 1990, listing his new role on LinkedIn as “Enjoys helping others with whatever need arises, within my capabilities and physical strength.” This truly captures the enduring, magnanimous spirit for which he will always be remembered by those who truly knew him. Norbert is a real Carmel character, known for his colorful personality by all who met him, and cherished for his unconditional kindness by all who loved him, as so many did. Norbert cared for his parents in Carmel during their old age. His father passed away in 1990, followed by his mother in 1995. Norbert was preceded in death by his brother and is survived by a nephew.
Norbert Peter Kammer was buried at the California Central Coast Veteran’s Cemetery at 2900 Parker Flats Road, Seaside, California, on Monday, August 29, 2022, at 11:00 am.
“The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.”
— Bahá'u'lláh
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