Remembering Bob Ringwald: Sacramento musician, 80, lived the sounds of a good life

Jazz musician Robert Scott Ringwald, known to most as Bob, and to a lucky few as Dad and PopPop, died Tuesday, Aug. 3. He was 80.

Bob was born Nov. 26, 1940, in Roseville to Ferman and Aloha (neé Jensen) Ringwald. It was immediately clear that there was something wrong with his vision, and he was considered legally blind as an infant, becoming totally blind as an adolescent.

At 5, he began taking piano lessons, which became his main instrument along with guitar and banjo, and at 13 he formed his first band “The Rhythemaires.” Four years later, at the age of 17, he was able to grow enough of a beard to be able to pass for an adult to play in nightclubs as a professional musician, an occupation he held for the next six decades.

As a preteen, he attended the California School for the Blind in Berkeley. After a couple of years, he returned home to Citrus Heights and graduated with the Class of 1960 at San Juan High School. That same year, he married Adele Frembd, his wife of 60 years.

Although Bob was first drawn to modern jazz, performing at local Beatnik spots such as The Iron Sandal, it was the music of Louis Armstrong that inspired him to shift his musical focus — instilling a lifelong passion for the performance and preservation of “traditional” New Orleans jazz.

In 1961, he worked at one of his all-time favorite gigs, Capone’s Chicago Tea Room and Pizza Joint, a club on Fulton Avenue in Arden Arcade inspired by the ’20s speak-easies. To enter the establishment, a customer had to go into a fake telephone booth, turn the crank on an old phone and push on the rear wall to reveal the club’s entrance. Bob and the other members of the band used to go outside on breaks just to observe customers trying to figure out how to get in.

Anyone who knew Bob also knew his mischievous streak, and his ever-present, slightly ribald sense of humor. If you didn’t sufficiently beg to get off of his email joke list, you would have received one just a couple of days before he died.

By the 1970s, with a family of five (having lost their firstborn son, Robert Scott Jr., to leukemia at age 3), Bob played piano seven nights a week, including playing piano at intermission for Turk Murphy at Earthquake Magoon’s in San Francisco. He formed The Fulton Street Jazz band, which performed at the first Sacramento Jazz Festival in 1974, a local cultural mainstay that Bob helped organize as an original board member — although, in his typical modest fashion, he always claimed to be “just the guy who said it would never work.” (The festival took place every Memorial Day in Old Sacramento and its environs for the next 44 years.)

In 2012, Bob was honored by the festival as “The Emperor of Jazz,” which both touched and embarrassed him. Despite having been a performer for nearly his entire life, he was never comfortable having attention bestowed on him unless he was on stage with a piano. Nevertheless, Bob drew attention wherever he went. His natural charisma, authenticity and sense of humor made people fall in love with him and want to be around him.

Some of the many bands he performed in include “Sugar Willie and the Cubes,” which he joined in 1968; “The Great Pacific Jazz Band,” which he formed after having moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s; and “The BoonDockers,” a comedy band he originally played with in the early ’60s and reunited with years later. During his time in Los Angeles, he hosted a radio program on KCSN-FM called “Bob Ringwald’s Bourbon Street Parade,” featuring jazz artists mostly from his extensive record collection.

In addition to his music, Bob was a licensed ham radio operator (call letters K6YBV), communicating with people from all over the world in Morse code, long before there was such a thing as the internet.

He was also an avid baseball fan, never missing a game for his beloved Dodgers — he even once served as guest announcer, during which he read the lineup in Braille while standing on the field. Though he never wanted to be defined by his blindness, he couldn’t help being an ambassador for changing the perception of what is possible to do while living with a disability. His dignity, humor, strength of character and courage will always be remembered and cherished by everyone whose lives were touched by his. A lyric to the song “Old Bones,” which he performed often in his later years, summed up his philosophy around a full life well-lived.

I love life, I’d like to live it again ...

Just to have the chance to turn back the hands

And let my life begin

Oh yeah, I’d like to do it again

It never failed to bring down the house. Again and again.

In addition to Adele, his wife of 60 years, Bob Ringwald is survived by his sister, Renée Angus; daughter Beth Ringwald Carnes; son Kelly Ringwald; and daughter Molly Ringwald; two grandsons; two granddaughters; two step-granddaughters; one great-grandson; and one step-great-grandson.

A memorial service is pending.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made either to the Foundation Fighting Blindness or to CURE Childhood Cancer.

This story was originally published August 7, 2021 at 11:48 AM.