Cleveland and the Great Racial Facial Divide

Perhaps it was the pressures we had been through in the previous year or perhaps it was we had fallen into a rut, but something began to bend in 1964, something was reshaping our little suburban Harriett and Ozzie World. I was gradually entering a new phase of my life. It did not happen overnight. It takes a bit to change a nice suburban couple into Hell-bent hedonists, more than just getting your car smashed by a rogue rock. (By the way, we were driving up to my parents that night with our wash because our basement was full of water.)
You know, it's interesting people use "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett" as some representative icon of the 1950s. That show was about as realistic to its time period as Jules Verne's A Flight to the Moon and a Trip Around It was representative of space travel. Here is this cozy little family living in this nice home where Harriett is a housewife and Ozzie is a...what? It was never said what Ozzie did, but he seemed to hang about the home wearing argyle sweaters and mooning about Rocky Road Ice Cream most days. My life at no time resembled Ozzie and Harriett's. And in fact, neither did the real Ozzie & Harriett resemble their TV fiction.

The rock hit us on January 23, 1964. February and March passed in the usual mundane way of everyday life. I took the car in for service on February 1. We both had routine physicals at Dr. Mann’s on March 1. We were up to my parents a lot. We were up to my folks’ house 15 times between January 25 and March 25, mostly bumming a meal, although I was bringing our trash up there to dispose of. I had probably cancelled our trash collection to save the cost now that Lois had left her job and money was tight. The rest of my life was get up, go to work, go to evening college, come home, take care of any needs about the house, do my homework, try to write for an hour or two and then talk or you-know what with my wife into the wee hours. It was a somewhat typical and dull life punctuated with much stress over our finances and an incredible lack of sleep.

And so we decided to take a little ride to Cleveland. That is a picture of Cleveland in 1964 at the top of this chapter.  It was Easter weekend and we headed out on Thursday night. I must have been given Good Friday off, not so unusual then; rarer now. When I was growing up everything used to close between noon and three o’clock. Those were the hours Christ hung on the cross, so everything shut down out of reverence and respect. Today people don’t respect anything and reverence is pretty much a thing of the past.

Why Cleveland?

Why not?

We didn’t really plan it you know, we just said, “Let’s take a ride to Cleveland.” We’d never been there. It was straight across the state, not far over Pennsylvania’s western border, about a total of 410 miles as the crow flies. The one caveat in our spur of the moment trip was I had no spare tire. I’m not sure why I didn’t, but I didn’t. Perhaps a tire was damaged by the runaway rock and I had not replaced it, who knows? Oh well, what are the odds I would get a flat? I was a lot more daring in those days, so spare or not, we went.

I barely recall anything about the journey. I remember driving through the tunnels on the turnpike and that they made Lois nervous. She is claustrophobic. I recall actually being in Cleveland, traveling through its blocks and how the streets kept going up in number, 100 Street, 150 Street, 168 Street. I thought this was a small city, how can it have so many streets?

The other thing I remember, and this is the one that made the biggest impression upon both of us, was going over some rumble strips. This was the first drive I ever took and went across rumble strips. Brum-be-brum-be-brum! Scared me to death, what in the world is that? Again, Brum-be-brum-be-brum! We had never heard anything like this before. I thought the drive shaft had fallen out of the car. I pulled off the side , got out and looked underneath. Everything looked in place, so we drove on, wondering what was wrong with the car.

We were safely home by Easter Sunday, car apparently intact, we had heard no more of those strange noises, and no flat tires. Life went back to routine again, trips up to my parents bumming meals, borrowing the lawnmower and dropping off my trash. By June I started to “borrow” money from my parents to supplement our needs.

The only break in the everyday action was on May 2. That was the day I reported in at a

classroom at temple  with about 15,000 other young hopefuls and finally took my SATs. I don’t remember my scores, but I did well enough to be accepted as a matriculating student; Sociology Major, English Minor.

On June 18 we were on one of our regular begger’s visits to my parents when Lois complained of being ill. The next day she was sick enough I took her to the doctor in Philadelphia.
She was pregnant.

Meanwhile, back at Atlantic Refining, I was still in Addressograph. Granted I was technically the boss of the unit, but I was beginning to fear the curse of the Service Department, that like Ron Paul I would languish in this job until time made me obsolete. It had only taken me 8 months to move from my Junior Clerk in Sales Accounting position to the job in Addressograph. That meant I had been in this unit since July of 1960 and here I was still there in June of 1964. I was coming up on the four-year anniversary of cutting plates and stamping envelopes. I had gotten the unit running smoothly to the point each day was routine, meaning each day was boring.

I think I should explain how the addressing machines operated. Metal plates were cut on a graphotype and stored in long trays in alphabetic order (in our case). When I began in the unit the plates after being cut were unreadable since they were sort of upside down and backward. You cut the plate, slid it into a metal frame, printed out these strips of stiff yellow paper , snipped out and slid the printed piece into slots atop the frame. This allowed you to read the information on the plate.

On the original machine that I operated you did it all manually. The tray fit down into a hopper on top. You hit a foot petal and one plate (or frame actually) was fed into and through a track. When the plate was centered beneath a cutout on the top of the machine and beneath an ink ribbon, you would place an envelope there and hit a foot petal that brought a heavy roll of metal, called a platen, down hard against it. This imprinted the address on the envelope. You would then place the envelope aside in a box and feed in the next plate and so on and so forth. Get a bit out of sync and kerboom, you’d smash a finger or two.  The used plates would continue down the track and line up inside an empty tray. Once your initial tray was empty you’d put the now full tray of printed plates away in a cabinet, move the tray that once held plates to that location and drop in a new full tray. This went on and on until a specific job was finished.

The Speedaumat looked and worked essentially the same, except it was a smaller footprint and more importantly, you could read the plate, meaning no frame and no label was required. Where the Speedaumat really differed was it had an envelope feeder. It was a long framework on wheels with a series of feeder rollers on top. You could stack a couple or so boxes of No. 10 envelopes up on the feeder and they would automatically go under the series of rollers and line up beneath the platen. You could drop a couple trays of plates in the hopper on top of the machine and they would also automatically feed through and then drop out into empty trays on the other side. This feeder worked very well with the standard envelope, but if you had oversized envelopes not so well and things like gummed labels, well forget it, jam up city. For anything a little oddball it was back to manual hands-on operation; just watch those fingers because the Speedaumat was faster, thus its name.

This last photo has absolutely nothing to do with the write up. It is just here to see f you are still awake and paying attention.

Dave Claypoole had posted out in the Spring and now worked in Payroll, which put him back into a clerical department where there was opportunity for advancement. (On the right is another sketch I did of Dave.) It fell to me to hire his replacement and I choose a young man named Ed.

Ed was a piece of work. He was a Black man, something Atlantic had not many of, but was now considering hiring more as the Civil Rights Movement heated up around us. He was very dapper and very fastidious about his dress, always checking the cut of his jib and the shine of his shoes; however, he immediately had a problem. As nicely as he dressed, it was wrong for our Unit. Ours was a dirty job. We spent our day in printer’s ink and sometimes blood, very bad stuff to get in your clothes, plus neckties were strictly forbidden since they could easily get caught in the equipment and strangle you.

On the first day he reported for work, all spit and shine and perfect creases, I handed him a packet holding two Atlantic Service Station uniforms. These were generously provided to us by our employer to allow us to preserve our own civilian wear.  Actually they were a little nicer looking than those on the right. The pants were a deep blue and the shirt was a lighter blue shade. It had a patch over the right pocket that said Atlantic. We didn’t need nor get the hat and bowtie. We got two uniforms so we’d have one to wear when the other was in the wash.

I wore mine to work each day. I never felt embarrassed about riding the commuter train in it.  Hey, I was working an honest job, I wasn’t ashamed of it. I’ve never been very fussy about my clothes anyway. For Ed it was a different story. At first he refused to take them, but when I put the emphasis on the danger to his own clothes he acquiesced. He never wore the uniform outside of the building. Each morning he showed up as natty as ever and went in the men’s room and changed into the uniform, carefully hanging his clothes up on a hanger out of the danger zone. In the evening he would reverse the procedure and take off the uniform before showing himself in public.

I had not much contact with Black people up to then. I had my secret friend back in grade school into junior high when I lived in Downingtown. It was a secret because mixing of White and Black people at the time in that area was not encouraged. Actually, my other friendships were not so socially acceptable either. My two non-secret best friends were Stuart, whose family was the lone Jewish one in the town, and Ronald, who was a homosexual. I didn’t know that at the time, no one did, because Ronald kept it secret since that was not a particular welcome thing to be either.

There was a certain amount of conformity in place at Atlantic, sometimes unofficially, but expected. Men, with the exception of those in units like mine, wore suits to work, suits and ties. Although not specified in the handbook, men pretty much wore one color shirt – white. Shoes and socks were normally black, usually laced and often Wing Tips. I wore a pair of black Wing Tips even with the uniform. God forbid a man wear shoes with tassels! Atlantic didn’t have much contact with Black people either in the early ‘sixties, but because of the public outcry for equal rights, they had begun hiring minorities. One of the odd crises of the time was facial hair. Ed, like a number of Black men, had moustaches. Part of the required look for male employees was no facial hair. You came to work clean shaven or you didn’t come to work. In the first round of hiring more minorities the company made a policy change. Black men could have facial hair, because it was part of their culture, but white men could not. This silly rule would eventually change.

I interviewed Ed. I liked him and I recommended him and he was hired. I really didn’t know about his work ethic and he didn’t have a long resume, but he was highly intelligent and we hit it off immediately. He not only replaced Dave on the machines, he also replaced Dave as my sounding board and friend. We soon were having lunch together and we did a lot of talking during the day. Addressograph was one of those jobs where you could work and chatter away with someone. Ed and I chattered away about a number of subjects, politics, religion, philosophy, history, what have you. We seldom agreed, but it didn’t matter. We could argue about subjects without getting angry and we could remin good friends no matter how far apart our opinion might be.

The only problem with Ed was his laissez-faire approach to work, not in any economic sense, but one of his favorite expressions was, “I cawn’t be bothered!”. It was in the lackadaisical way he did his job that showed me I wasn’t really cut out to be a boss. Instead of taking him to task or giving him bad reviews, I would cover for him. If need be I would step in and do his work so it met the deadline and was correct. This is not good management. A boss probably should never become friends with an employee. To indicate what extend his “I can’t be bothered,” philosophy went there was the day of the tray drop.

I was working on supplies and was behind these shelves that lined our work area. Ed was running a Speedaumat machine on auto mode. I had a clear view of him, but he could not see me behnd the shelves and boxes. There was no one else in the area at the time. He pulled a full tray off the back end of the hopper and swung about to slide it into the tray cabinet. He hit the edge instead and the the tray slipped from his hand to the floor. Many of the metal plates flew out and scattered about his feet. He should have knelt down and put these plates back in alpha order, the way they were stored, put them back in the tray and replace the tray in the cabinet. Instead, he looked around the area to see who might have seen him drop the tray. When he saw nobody he simply began kicking the spilled plates underneath the cabnet.

I was very disappointed in him, but concerned person that I was, later I scooped the plates out from under the cabinet, straightened them out and refiled them where they belonged. I just didn’t like to see anyone get into trouble, even at the cost of extra work for myself.

At the end of the year Ed left Atlantic to enter college full time. I kept in touch with him for at least another year. As for me, things needed to change, and change they would.
And as noted, Lois was pregnant.

Forbidden Friendship and Cracks in My World of White Innocence

This brings me to a subject that needs to be spoken about here, one of the other hush-hush realities of my childhood, something like sex, not to be recognized or talked about or engaged in, Racial Relationships.

There is no such thing as Race. When it comes to people there is only one Race, the Human Race,. We are mammals, primates of the genus Homo and the species Sapiens. There is no scientific, biological, anthropological or genetic difference between one human or another no matter what color the skin. This was established by an international group of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists and psychologists in a study to UNESCO in 1950. Race is a myth that remains upheld by those who study such things to this very day.

Despite the fact that the fallacy of Race was declared more than 65 years ago it remains a divide between people, even to the extent we can't talk about it openly and intelligently. Listening to what is often said today by politicians, the media, various activist groups and social commentators a person could think we were still living in 1860, that the Civil War never happened, nor the Civil Rights Act and that slavery was still the order of the day.
But much has changed in American society regarding Race in the last 60 years. If you think not, then turn on the TV and instead of the cable talking heads, watch the game shows. White and Black individuals, men and women both,

host game shows today. The audiences are a mixture of anything you can think of and so are the contestants. There are contestants of every skin tone you can imagine, and not only that, some of these people who are of different skin colors are couples, boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife. White hosts are hugging and kissing Black Contestants and Black contestants are hugging and kissing White hosts. The audiences are cheering for each and everyone to win their quiz or stunt and get the prize. 

You would not have seen this happening 50 years ago.

So get over this whole stupid Race baloney. The only reason we continue to have a racial issue is because it benefits certain people to keep stirring that pot, certain businessmen, politicians, activists and those who can build power by convincing others that one group of people are what stands in their way.
There was a song in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific" that contained this lyric:

"You've got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,"

Throughout that entire decade when I was growing up  I was taught there were three Races: Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid. Although the illustration says Caucasoid, I never heard it referred to that way. It was always Caucasian, which obviously was done for the purpose of setting the “White” race somehow apart from the other two “oids”.  It was always presented in the same order as Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid, too. You could argue this was simply alphabetic, but in my opinion it was a subtle way of suggesting a superiority of one Race over another.
Well, I'll give you my suggestion. We need to get rid of this emphasis on diversity, which only leads to adversity, and focus on our commonalities.
Okay, I have probably upset enough people, so back to my boyhood.

FORBIDDEN FRIENDSHIP

I began a forbidden friendship with a boy during my elementary school days. Whether he remembers me or what I am about to recount I don’t know. It was over 60 years ago and we did not carry on any kind of relationship in the years after, even though society changed some during what would have been our teen years. I see his picture at Downingtown class reunions and he looks well.

I’m not certain exactly how we managed to get together at all as children because in the early 1950s we were definitely from separated worlds. We met on the side streets clandestinely, for walks and talks together. We did not talk about Race, that didn't even cross our minds. We talked about movies or books or sports or whatever boys our age discussed. There was nothing different in our interests  than with any other of my friends. We just liked each other as buddies, even if it was kept secret.
I say kept secret because even such an innocent friendship was viewed with disapproval within the social mores of the time; it certainly would have been frowned upon by my family if they had known. He and I didn’t fraternize at school, we didn’t play in each other’s yard and we certainly didn’t visit in each other’s homes.

I lie, I was in his house one time and his grandmother treated me most kindly and offered me lunch, even invited me to come to dinner sometime, which I never did. I doubt he would have received such a warm welcome or invite from my grandmother at my house. In 1950s Downingtown there were places we could not go together, in fact for awhile, not even into the same classroom.

Given the circumstances of the times this was a doomed friendship from the start and it was short-lived, not surviving past elementary school.

SUBTLELY TAUGHT

A popular feature in magazines over the years has been “Can You Spot The Difference?” A page would show two pictures seemingly exactly alike, except one had some very subtle differences from the other. The viewer’s objective was to spot the differences. Here are two photographs. Can you spot the differences?

If you say there is no adult in the second photo, you’d be correct. If you also say there are more kids in the second and several look like similar, if smaller, versions of others, you would be right. If you noted some kids sitting up on the stone pillar in the second and not the first, this is so.  If you say you found Waldo you’d be wrong. Waldo was never in my class. All these things are true because the first picture is my Third Grade Class in 1950 and the second my Fifth Grade Class in 1952. But there is another more subtle difference. Did you spot it? I know it’s difficult with such small photos.

Maybe this will help.

The picture on the left shows the faculty of East Ward some years before I attended, but the  situation it illustrates continued well into my years as a pupil. Note in the photo the two ladies in the middle of the second row from the top. Is there something different about them? Yes, they are the only two Black teachers in the group, and when I say “Black” teachers here I am not only referring to their obvious race. They were truly “Black” teachers in that all the students they taught at the elementary school were also Black. Even though East Ward School was considered integrated, no Black student shared a classroom with any White student or was taught by any White teacher, nor vice versa for that matter. Those two Black teachers taught all the Black students for every grade level from Kindergarten to Sixth Grade together in one classroom.
I was never in any class with my secret friend before fifth grade nor did I see him at recess for we took our recesses separately.

So again, what was the difference in the two class photos shown earlier?

There are only white faces in the first, but a few black faces scattered through the second.

  

Different Photographers took these two photos in the year 1946-47. On the left is the East Ward School Kindergarten, the one I did not attend. It was historically the first kindergarten class at East Ward. On the right is Mrs. Helm’s, the private Kindergarten I attended. You will remember my kindergarten class photo from an earlier post and the little girl standing to one side. There is no one standing to the side in the East Ward photo because there is no one with dark skin in East Ward’s Kindergarten.

In this sense Mrs. Helms was a pioneer in school desegregation for enrolling Black children. However, what message does the class photo send to both Black and White? It clearly says to us that the little girl doesn’t belong. It is doubtful we five years olds made any distinction in sandbox or naptime or any other activity the group engaged in during the school year, but adults did.
These photos beg the question of another popular magazine and Sesame Street game, “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others?” Do you know the game? Photographs show several subjects all of the same type, but one. You are to select the odd one. You see a hammer, a screwdriver, a saw and a bottle of ketchup. Which doesn’t belong in our toolbox? This Kindergarten snapshot says Blossom was our bottle of ketchup.

It is an extremely subtle lesson, but effective. Eight of us are the same and a group. One of us is different and doesn’t belong in our group. They are ingraining that message just as strongly in the little girl. I wonder what she thought standing there off to the side from kids who had been her friends and playmates for nine months? I think you can see the question in her face.

Others had set me aside when I came back to Downingtown from the Swamp House. The question in my mind was why? I had played with most of those kids in the previous years, how come I wasn’t still a part? I was just a little boy, as she is just a little girl, why can’t I be included in the group?

INVISIBLE DOWNINGTOWN

My kindergarten reflected Downingtown at that time more than the East Ward kindergarten. Black people may be present, but barely acknowledged to exist.

Did anyone take much notice of this? No, I doubt many did. It was what things were; we children simply grew up within that culture of exclusion. To a certain degree Black people during my early years in Downingtown were invisible to the White community.

The Borough officially considered Downingtown public schools interrogated. Whites did not go to one school and Blacks to another like the South’s so-called “separate-but-equal” system. However, our classrooms were separate, but hardly equal within the same building until the 1951-52 school year. They segregated Black pupils together in a single classroom no matter what grade level prior to the year I entered Fifth Grade. The only Black teachers in the school taught them.

There were no Black families on my block. East side Black homes were grouped together, ironically, on Whiteland Avenue. They were one block over and one block up from 424 Washington, yet out of sight. There were other pockets of Black housing through the town, but it was rare to find a mixed street.

I recall riding with my grandfather out Wallace Avenue and then Route 282.  He turned off to the right somewhere at the edge of town and drove back a road passing through a dilapidated village of shanties. This was another alcove of Downingtown Black families. Pass the shanties not too far was a large dump. I can’t recall the name of the road. The dump may have been on the site of what is now Kardon Park and if so, it was toxic.

Blacks could shop in the same downtown stores as Whites, but I don’t recall ever seeing a Black clerk in any. Blacks went to Black Barbers and Whites to White Barbers. If you saw a Black man in a barbershop he was shining your shoes. There were White bars and Black bars. I seldom saw a Black person anywhere in my childhood world to tell the truth, except occasionally on the street. I didn’t see a Black doctor, dentist, cabbie or bus driver. I had no Black teachers. I had no Black classmates at East Ward until the second half of 1951. Even with that, none of the other things changed. There wasn’t much socializing of my White classmates with my Black classmates outside of school.

The situation in the Downingtown Schools did change the year I went into Fifth Grade. Someone did take notice of the injustice after all and Stuart Meisel says that person was his mother (pictured right). This is his observation from his memoir, My Story:

“I began my education in Kindergarten at East Ward School.  It was two blocks East, where Uwchland Avenue (Route 113) met the Lincoln Highway (US 30).

Either that year, or in First Grade, I noticed that all the blacks (Negroes at the time) were in one room.  I was particularly hurt and upset about it, and I asked my mother why they were all herded into one room.  Shortly thereafter, the blacks were moved into our classes.  I think it was because I asked my Mother, who confronted the school.”

My Story by Stuart R. Meisel, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 2011, p. 23.

Although Stuart says he noticed this in First Grade and the policy was changed shortly after he spoke to his mother, historically the integration of Blacks and Whites into shared classrooms did not happen until 1951, the year both he and I went into Fifth Grade.

I don’t know why the Downingtown Public Schools changed their policy in 1951, unless some members of the school board saw the handwriting on the wall and acted peremptory. In June 1951, three months before I entered Fifth Grade, a man named Oliver Brown filed suit against the Kansas City School Board over segregation, but that case wasn’t really tried and completed until 1954. Pennsylvania’s Governor Fine had integrated the State Police and some other state agencies in 1951. In Pittsburgh, Reverend LeRoy Patrick and Urban League Executive Secretary Alexander Allen led an effort to integrate that city’s recreational facilities, as effort that led to a brick and rock attack on Black children. Although Pennsylvania was slower integrating than neighboring New Jersey, Downingtown seems to have jumped the gun a bit. There wasn’t any violent reaction to a few darker faces in our classrooms, no brick or rock attacks I’m aware of.  

Perhaps it was because Kathryn Godgrey Meisel stood up against it.

In June at the end of my Fifth Grade year of 1951-52, my mother threw a surprise birthday party for me. I guess she considered turning 10 a milestone.  Mom went to the school and arranged with my teacher to invite all my classmates to the party, except for the Black ones. How the teacher handled that I don’t know, but not well. It certainly wasn’t kept secret from the Black kids. During a lunch time the last week of school one of the Black kids stopped me in the hall and told me about the surprise party, and he did it to be spiteful.   He told me he hoped that spoiled the surprise for me.

         It did more than spoil a surprise. I was very angry about it. I wasn’t mad about being told. I was angry with my mother. I was upset about whom was invited. I had Black friends in my class, Franny Henderson (right)  and Gracie Styer for example. There were Black kids in that school who accepted me for who I was. I would have been happy to have them come to my house just to play and certainly to come to my birthday party. There were White kids in my class I did not want at my party, such as Denny Myers and Jack Swarner (pictured left).  They teased me, bullied me, why would I want them sharing my cake? But of course that was how it was. This was the beginning of a tension over racial issues between my parents and I that continued throughout our lives.

My folks sometimes gave me money to go to the Saturday movie matinees at the Roosevelt. In the early days I walked to the theater and watched by myself. Eventually I would be going to movies regularly with Ronald and Stuart, but in this period there was just I. One day I ran into my secret friend entering the theater. We talked in the lobby and I thought, Good, I’ll sit with him and not be by myself for once. I started to walk up the balcony stairs alongside him, but before we had ascended very far someone tapped my shoulder and asked where did I think I was going. It was the usher, a short man and I think his name was Phil, but can’t swear to that anymore.

 “Where you going?” he asked.

I explained I wanted to sit in the balcony with my friend.

“Balcony is for Colored only,” and he would not let me go up the steps.

They required Blacks (or Colored as they were commonly referred to at the time) to sit in the balcony. They reserved Main Floor seating for White people.  This was the same arrangement at The Auditorium in Coatesville and The Warner in West Chester. It didn’t seem logical to insult a whole group of people, then place them in a place above where they could “accidently” drop popcorn or soda on your head. But logic had little to do with race relations then or now.

So I watched the film by myself yet again. I did not see any Black faces on the screen either, unless it was Willie Best (pictured left) popping out his eyes and uttering, “Feets do you’ stuff” at any perceived danger.

It is funny how my family surnames popped up in the news during these decades. There was Oliver Brown in Kansas and just over a decade later, James Meredith in Mississippi. And yes, my father use to tell people James was the “black sheep” of the family. My family had prejudices. They didn’t spew hatred. At best their attitude was one of indifference. I think they believed there really was a separate, but equal society. When I was a preschooler my grandmother overheard my friends and I using a common chant for choosing sides.

“Eenie meenie miney mo,

Catch a nigger by the toe…”

She immediately, literally pulled me from the yard. “That is a nasty word, we don’t use it in this house,” she said.

I was only repeating the rhyme I heard other kids use, but from then on I used, “Catch a tiger by the toe.” That other word disappeared from my vocabulary.

I seldom heard any derogatory slang for different ethic groups in my home as a rule. “Jap” and “Kraut” weren’t uncommon, but that was because of attitudes against the Japanese and Germans during World War II. Frankly, my family seldom spoke of different ethic groups in our house. During the building of the pink house next door, grandfather uttered “dago” more than once. When I painted my bicycle red and green my dad said it looked like a “nigger’s bike”. But such pejoratives were rare. If my folks referred to Black people, it was as “colored”. Most people used that term. Teachers or politicians in formal settings used Negro, considered the “polite” designation.

My grandmother’s reaction to my use of nigger did not mean she was an open-minded person when it came to race. Her view was White people were happy with White people and “Colored” people were happy with “Colored” people and never the twain should meet. She said this on occasions if the subject of race came up. She would say, “I think Colored are ugly; and I’m sure Colored think all White people are ugly, so it don’t make no never mind.”

Beyond a few, my own boyhood contacts with “The Colored” were not positive. I generally tried to avoid the Black kids exactly as I attempted to stay away from the Charles-Bird-Way Gang, and for the same reason. A number of my Black classmates would hit me passing by or chase me if they saw me out alone.  One of the Butcher boys jumped me in the field next to 424 that summer. It was one of the very few actual fistfights I engaged in as a child. (Not that I engaged in any as an adult.) There seemed to be a number of Black children from Whiteland Avenue named Butcher and Flowers who all hated me. The Butcher kids had an aggressive attitude toward we White boys. I guess a lot of us felt their surname fit.

Another world had intruded upon me as I reached the end of Grade School. This was not to be my last brush with prejudice, hate and stupidity.