Helene Mayer and Arthur "Art" Lane

Future fencing master Arthur Lane and world champion fencer Helene Mayer taking a break from fencing to pose for a photo. This photo was taken in 1946 when Art Lane came back home from the war (note his army uniform pants and shoes), and stopped by Hans Halberstadt's club in the Marina District in San Francisco. Helene Mayer, like Halberstadt, was also from Offenbach am Main, and after Hitler had taken over Germany, had settled in the Bay Area and was a regular visitor to Halberstadt's place. Art maintains that Halberstadt, a WWI officer who survived four years of trench warfare, had passed on his fighting instincts and skills to the young Mayer. Incidentally, on the wall top center is some type of Wilhelminian portrait: Halberstadt felt that his fencing space was a vestige of Imperial Germany and was nostalgic for the nation that had awarded him the Iron Cross. In Halberstadt's mind, the old era of Bismarck and the Kaiser had nothing to do with the Germany that had tossed him into Dachau. For reasons never fully explained, Helene Mayer, who by the standards of the Nuremberg Laws was Jewish, fenced for the Nazis in the Berlin, 1936 Olympics and returned to the U.S. After the war, Mayer went back to Germany and died there in 1952. Halberstadt preferred to stay in San Francisco where died in 1965. Halberstadt taught fencing and ran a fencing supply business that evolved into American Fencers Supply. Although Halberstadt lived under considerably reduced, one could even say impoverished, circumstances compared to his pre-war life, Halberstadt decided that he could maintain his fencing lifestyle by staying single, living in his club, and making use of the plum tree in the back. Art Lane eventually retired from fencing in 2008 and lived in Berkeley until he died in 2015.

Fencing Hints from Maestro Arthur Lane

Last year in autumn, my epee fencing master from my California days, Maestro Lane, drove up to Seattle from the Bay Area to visit his son and was kind enough to have dinner with me at Ivar's Salmon House and then to spend the evening at the club showing me how fleches work after doing combination footwork, either by advance or retreat followed by a ballestra lunge. He then coached my technique by providing excellent examples of his footwork tempo and lunge.

Afterwards we drove to his son's house in Kent where we spent the rest of the night and early hours of the evening discussing fencing. Eventually I became tired and had to excuse myself to go home and sleep. The following morning Art called me up, thanked me for dinner and the tour of the club, and said he regretted not being able to spend more time with me because he wanted to drive down to Ashland, Oregon, and see a lady friend and catch a play.

I was very happy to have seen him and had taken great delight in introducing Art to the Friday night crowd at the club. I don't think the fencers there realized, at least until I told them, that they were shaking the hand of a man who had shook hands with Aldo Nadi. Not to mention Hans Halberstadt. Art, in his mid-80s teaches at the Pacific Fencing Club, now in Alameda, and previously in downtown Oakland on 14th St., where I learned to fence foil under Maestro Harold Hayes. Art had learned to fence under Eric Funke, refined his tactics under Hans Halberstadt, and learned to spar by bouting with Helene Mayer. After the war, Art lived in southern California and studied under Aldo Nadi and, secretly, under Ralph Faulkner. I consider Art an incredible fencing resource, and if the U.S. were similar to the Japanese, Art would've been declared a national cultural treasure many years ago.

Art shared some of his fencing tips with me. They are:
1. When teaching tempo, use a three tempo exercise and always go forward.
2. Being alert is seeing ahead, thinking about what may happen next keeps you from being alert.
3. One may practice 1000 parry 4s, but a good parry 4 is one that has a riposte.
4. Most people parry 4 with two bones, upper first. Nadi parried with lower bone.
5. An early parry is done two inches, not two feet, more forward.
6. Beginners aren't prime-cut steaks, they're hamburgers with everything on it; so, if you prolong a feint on a beginner, beginners react with everything they have!