Bill Rutherford Oral History Interview, March 16, 2018

RUTH KORNBERG: What we're really interested in, Bill, is a history of your life. Can you start out by telling us something, telling us about your childhood? Where you were born, what kind of family you were living with, in? Just kind of start from the beginning and let us get some idea.

BILL RUTHERFORD: Do I start with once upon a time? [Smiles].

RK: Sure!

BR: Alright, I was born in Portland, 1937, the first Black to be born, Wilcox Memorial, Good Samaritan Hospital. Dr. [unclear] delivered me. I went to schools in Portland. I went to Highland Grade School. My dad had gone to Highland Grade School. His brother had gone to Highland Grade School. They've change the name of Highland School to Martin Luther King Grade School. I went to Jefferson High 00:01:00School one year. My dad went to Jefferson High School one year. I had the same English teacher he had, and I came out of high school in 1954. I came to Eugene to go to school. I wasn't there a year and a half, and I went into the service. There's probably some other things about my life that nobody cares about.

RK: Well, let's go back a little bit to your family. Did you have siblings? What was your early family life like in terms of who you lived with? Who took care of you?

BR: Basically, the neighborhood I grew up in, when I grew up there, was basically German. World War II a lot of the German people became Irish, and they were garbagemen. My brother, my sister, myself-I'm the oldest. We were raised in 00:02:00the same house, in different neighborhoods, though. By the time my sister came along, 10 years later, the neighborhood was basically Black. We don't have a whole lot to talk about in that regard for us, because I was gone by the time she was coming up. The neighborhood, I don't know how to-whether you're talking about the social part the neighborhood, the racial part of the neighborhood? Portland, Oregon, raised one child at a time. My brother was 5 years younger than I am. My sister's 5 years younger than that. My brother, Earl, he was kind of a sick little kid. He didn't really run with me, because I was 5 years older, you know? We, as a family, we were really living in my grandfather's house. He was still alive. He was a barber. He had a shop, until '34 and then he was 00:03:00working on somebody else's shop.

My dad at that time worked on the railroad. He was a waiter on a railroad, on a streamliner, as a matter of fact, going to Chicago. He would bring back records that were popular in Chicago. They hadn't gotten to Portland yet. I just went to a regular grade school. Basically, there were 9 Black kids in the school. There were close to 500, 600 kids in the school. Now, I'm talking about basically before World War II. At the end of the war, because a lot of people came to Portland to work the shipyards, a lot of them were in the northeast. By that time, it was definitely more-the neighborhood was starting to change by that time. By the time I went away to high school-I started high school, I was 5'1". Even the stairs were too big, and there were people in high school that looked like adults to me. I went to Jefferson one year, and then I transferred to 00:04:00Benson because I want to think I wanted to be an architect. They had architectural drawing there, and I did that. We didn't have AutoCAD in those days. You had pencils and rulers and straight-edges, T-squares. I wasn't big enough to be an athlete, but I ended up being a musician. I don't know, I'm really kind of stuck here on where you want me to go.

RK: Well, let's go back, again.

BR: Okay.

RK: When you were a child, when you were younger, when you were in primary school you were saying that there were only about 9 Black kids in the school.

BR: That's exactly right. Correct.

RK: So, how were you treated? Was there any difficulty in making friends? What was-?

BR: Not in school. No, grade school was fine. The church my folks went to was 00:05:00not in the neighborhood where we lived. I went to a Black church, AME, a Methodist church. There was a certain hierarchy in the church, but that's a whole other kind of-you're a scientist. You know about those kind of... and I would say my parents basically were, I would say Easter Christians. My grandfather went to church a lot. My parents only went a couple times a year. I think basically I was treated okay. My parents were kind of influential in the city, so there was a certain amount of attitude from a lot of people about my family, because they had been in Portland so long, and they're kind of prominent citizens in the neighborhood. No, no-in the community, not in the neighborhood. I have a hard time comparing my life with a lot of other people I knew at the time.

RK: Why is that?

BR: Because the family had been there so much longer than a lot of other people. I didn't get along that well at home, because I wanted to get out in the street and my parents didn't really appreciate that. When I was a high school student I started playing music. I can't really talk about the house, because it wasn't that big of a deal. That's just where we lived. That's how we lived.

RK: When you were saying that your parents were prominent people in the community, can you tell us more about that?

BR: Well, let me-it's easier to say is my folks were really involved in the NAACP in the late '40s into the '50s. They were trying to pass legislation in Oregon about fair employment, fair housing: FEPC. I got out of high school my junior year to go to Salem and watch them vote. Senator Hatfield was one of the 00:07:00sponsors of the bill. That's before he went east. That's before he was a governor. We were in the galley, what do you call upstairs in the city, state government? I don't know. We clapped for all the professionals when they did pass it. Black entertainers, or people of importance, come to the city and they start staying in the hotels and not in homes. I mentioned before, I think, Louis Armstrong came in 1947, he came to play in Portland, at a concert, and he couldn't stay in a hotel. He had to stay in someone's home. He gave the person who, he gave them a trumpet for letting him stay there. As far as a household's concerned, basically my grandfather kind of decided how things went because it was his house. I don't know if these are the kind of things you want to know?

RK: Yeah, go ahead.

BR: He was a Victorian. I mean, he was a small man and the world had to pay for it. He didn't look at all like his brother. My grandfather looked like a little Jew: straight hair, straight-his brothers were big, dark, and muscular. My dad was much bigger than his dad, so I don't know. As far as the family's concerned, our neighbors basically were white. They sent me to preschool to a Catholic school up the street. When I came back sounding like up there they took me out and I went somewhere else. I went to, well, I went on to grade school, Highland. I don't know-I was a kid. I was just another kid in the neighborhood. There were some issues if I went other places, that's true. Blacks could not go to Jantzen Beach and swim. Bands would come, they couldn't-Black people couldn't go to bands there. That's the way the city was set up. It's still that way in a lot of 00:09:00respects. I seem to be losing my voice... Am I alright? Okay. The neighborhood, we didn't have a lot of racial problems in the neighborhood because basically my folks, my dad and his brothers they ended up fighting every day. There were issues to begin with, but it never got any worse.

RK: What were those issues to begin with?

BR: They got called a bunch of names. Because a lot of the kids were, their parents had come to the states after World War I, there were, in the neighborhood there were, as I said, Germans and there were Latvians, a few Greeks, and a lot of Scandinavians. I played with the kids next door, which were 00:10:00Swedish, basically. When we did something wrong, we got hit. Kids were kids. They didn't have-nobody said anything else. You mess up, you got hit [chuckles].

RK: What about your parents? From what I understand your mother, part of her life was staying home and taking care of the children.

BR: That's exactly right.

RK: Was she friends with the neighbors?

BR: Yes.

RK: With the other mothers?

BR: Yes, the other mothers around, yes she was. We had neighbors down the corner that were Black, and we knew them. I was small for my age. I never got much bigger, and for me I was really light-complected. That's a whole other issue. I'm not even going to get into that, okay? Because that's a whole discussion unto itself. Anybody who's going to see the program, knows what that means. Anybody who doesn't know what it means, they're not going to get it if I tell them. Because we're going to the-that's a whole other discussion. It didn't 00:11:00really apply that much to me in grade school. In the seventh grade we had dancing, ball room dancing and square dancing and all that stuff. I was just another kid in the class. But, when I got to high school, I ended up going to a boy's school, so that wasn't an issue anymore. Racially, in the neighborhood it was okay. My brother would have probably married a girl across the street, if my brother would have allowed his kids to be married in Catholic school. The old man across the street, he didn't care what color my brother was, but he wanted his grandkids in Catholic school. That was a rub. That's a different kind of an issue. As far as my sister's concerned, I said she was grown. She grew up in a different neighborhood, even though it's the same house.

RK: So, describe that.

BR: My sister would always like to think she was Angela Davis. That goes somewhere else altogether. My sister didn't care for my wife or my family or me. That's fine. That's her call. I had more problem with that in my own house than I did in the neighborhood. To this day. As I said, if you interview her, you wouldn't think we were related in any respect. That's fine. That's her call. So, I didn't really know my sister because she's 10 years younger than I am. I was gone by the time she was up and around. That's basically the family stuff. What else can I tell you about that? It's not very interesting stuff, you know? My folks drove big cars and wore nice clothes.

RK: So, while you were a child you started playing music?

BR: Yes. I took piano lessons. I learned to play, you start with things like "Bill Grogan's Goat," or whatever it was, and "Blue Bells of Scotland." I took piano for a couple of years, and then I was playing baseball and my hands would be swollen. The teacher would come and I didn't practice, so that stopped music. There was always music in the house. There was jazz music in the house, but there was also classical music in the house. They used to have a radio program called "Piano Playhouse." Do you remember that? It was classical. Then they would bring in somebody who played other styles of music. There was music in the house all the time. My father tried to play piano some. He thought he was Earl Hines or somebody, but he wasn't. My grandfather had been a drummer when he was a young man, but that was all Two Beat. Yes, there was music in the house. There 00:14:00was art in the house.

RK: When you, again, go back a little bit, but when you were in school, so you went to a boy's school? How come, was it a private school?

BR: It was technical high school.

RK: A technical high school.

BR: City wide.

RK: And that school had Blacks and Whites in it?

BR: Yes.

RK: So, basically were your friends some Black, some Whites? Did your social life was more limited to the African Americans in the school?

BR: In high school-the technical high school that I went to there were athletes and there were others, like most schools. Jocks stick together, and they would break separate, at that time, even racially, even when they were on the field together, once they get off the field it's a different life. I didn't really 00:15:00hang that much with anybody, the truth be known. The only reason I was a musician, I guess, because I didn't happen to belong to a gang. I was too small to play athletics in high school. I tried to go out for track, but I wasn't fast enough. As far as the only social part in high school, as I was concerned, was usually sitting on a wall out front for school, then starts, and then went to class. Most Black guys didn't have that much to do with me in high school because I wasn't a jock, and because I was in the architectural department instead of out in those shops and down working on a car. I don't know if I answered your question or not.

RK: I think so.

BR: I didn't belong. I've been outside my whole life. I accept that. High school was a waste of time. They would take a whole year to teach you something you could learn in a day.

RK: Okay, so now let's proceed from high school and start going and tell me, 00:16:00then, what did you do when you finished high school?

BR: I came down here to go to school. My folks, well, my dad in particular said you really ought to decide what you want to do before you go off to college. I said, well, I'm 17. What can you tell me? So, I came down here and played. At that time, I think Eugene stopped about Chambers. It was 1954. I stayed in Unthank dorm the first year. I took some basic training course. I think I took an anthropology class, Ruth Benedict and Benedict's Patterns of Culture, or whatever it was. It was all very foreign stuff to me. I wasn't a very good student. I was bright, but I wasn't very disciplined. So, I made a mess of that, and came to the Fall of the second year and I just finally got involved in, I just dropped out and went in the service. Eugene, I was staying in Holekani [?] 00:17:00my sophomore year, with Hawaiian students. Everybody thought I was Hawaiian anyway, what the hell? I've been all sorts of things. The university was a good design school. At that time, they were still-there was a lot of lawn. Where there's structures now it was all lawn. I don't know if I can really talk about an academic career, because I really wasn't that-I was here.

RK: What about your social life at school? What kind of friends did you have? Were there other African Americans, or who did you hang with?

BR: Well, at the university the athletes, once again, the athletes that were Black pretty much stick together. First of all, they didn't live on campus. They weren't Greeks. Two of the guys from Portland, Black, we lived-one of them was a 00:18:00jock. The other was going to be a musician, and I really didn't socialize all that much. I went over to the architectural school. I forgot where it was. It was across 11th somewhere. I should have made-I'm not really prepared. I should have done more research before we did this to help give you rational kinds of answers to things. But, no, I had an interest in design, but I really didn't have an interest in a whole lot of other things.

RK: So, you had some friends, did you have some friends?

BR: A few. I knew a few.

RK: Were they Black or White? To what degree does the fact that you're a very light-complected African American influence the way that you had friends and so on?

BR: Ah. Well, that's another... okay, I had probably two or three Black friends. 00:19:00They came from Portland. I already knew these guys. Anybody down here was African. They didn't have anything to do with African Americans, Black Africans anyway, because we're all bastards, you know. There was a couple of other guys I knew, a couple of fellas who lived in a co-op. I knew them. I knew them in class. I didn't run with them though.

RK: Were they White?

BR: Yeah. They were White.

RK: Did they just accept you as you?

BR: I hope so. [Chuckles]. We didn't really discuss it. For me-let me say this, for me, for race, I never bother to talk about it. If it's important to somebody else they usually bring it up, and we take it from there. But I'm an old man now, so. This applies all the way back, even in the service.

RK: Okay.

BR: I'm not much of an interviewee.

RK: Well, tell us about, okay, so now you finished high school.

BR: Yeah.

RK: You went to the University of Oregon.

BR: Right.

RK: Didn't work out so well.

BR: No.

RK: Then what happened?

BR: A friend of mine said let's go in the service. I didn't have a job. I was in a mess, a social mess. So, we went down to be inducted in the service, and I walked down various branches of service had their own recruitment place and they would all, you know... and I said, well, I'll go in the Air Force because I don't have to crawl around in the dirt and that so I went Air Force. I went to basic training in Oakland, because the Parks Air Force Base was where the Air Force was training then because they closed Sampson because Walter Winchell's son had caught meningitis there and died. They closed Sampson Air Force, which was in New York State. Everybody was either here or Texas. I decided maybe I 00:21:00wanted to be a pilot. So, I took a bunch of exams for that. After they told me I was going to be a radio operator and they were going to send me to Biloxi, Mississippi. I got red lined off of that. Now, this is in the '50s. Ultimately, I didn't make it for one reason or another, so I got what's called a casual. I was in basic training and they were saying to me you have to train somewhere. You can't be here for your entire enlistment. So, I said to them, give me some cities. They mentioned a bunch of different cities. They said Washington, D.C.-actually Fort Belvoir, Virginia. I said, send me there. That's where I went to mapping school. They assigned me, I spent a summer in Washington, D.C., played in a club, as a matter of fact called maybe Bennie's Rebel Room, I think, was the name of the place. There were a couple of clubs where GIs went to. In 00:22:00Washington you could drink beer at 18. if you got to have drunk then they'd send you whiskey after that. But, you know, they'd close everything up. I went to school there. I finished my schooling there. I came to Portland, cleaned up some messes I had made. Then I went to Nebraska, and there it was no good.

RK: Let's go back to Washington. What year were you in Washington?

BR: Summer of '56.

RK: Summer of '56.

BR: Yes.

RK: Washington was a very segregated city at that time.

BR: Yes. It was.

RK: Tell us about that.

BR: Most of the Black stuff at that time in the city was out South 7th. Does that sound right?

RK: Mm-hmm.

BR: Okay. There were some clubs out there somewhere which were on level and some were down below. I did see, now, I know were segregated, but I went to Olivia's Patio Lounge. It was a club. Basically, it was a white club. Maybe somebody said 00:23:00I was passing because I was in there. I don't know. I just went. I saw the Modern Jazz Quartet there. I saw them stop playing when the people were talking. That said, John Lewis said, we will listen to you talk if you'd rather hear that than hear us play. I'd never heard that sort of thing before. I remember a friend of mine, who happened, at that time, to be White. We took two interns who had come from the state of Oregon, my folks knew the politicians in Portland, we took them to dinner out on Connecticut, the Italian dinner out there. it was just a date. It was nothing serious, you know. That was about the end of my social life in Washington, D.C., in terms of interacting with anybody who was not in the service. You're right. They still, at that time, they still had cold water flats, within walking distance of the White House. I remember we ran to 00:24:00the top of the Washington Monument and there was no drinking fountain up there. I remember Washington. There was no mall then. Washington and Virginia, to go down to Virginia you'd change buses in Alexandria behind a waffle shop. If I get this right, the Black Cat was the name of the place. These places you probably don't know.

RK: I don't know Virginia. I've been in Virginia, I have experiences there, but I don't know about the place specifically, but go ahead.

BR: This is so long ago, come on. How do I remember these things? As I said, it was basically an engineering school, Army engineering. It's an Army base, and I was-but Air Force we still went to their schools. Washington, D.C., though, was, as you said, segregated. My mother was back there visiting relatives one time, 00:25:00and would send stuff to Portland and they'd ask him, do you have to take a ship to get to Oregon? She said, no. We took a train. So, I don't know. We went to the Smithsonian when it was only one structure, the castle. It was the first time I'd ever been on the East coast. I had to be, I guess, made aware of the fact that because of segregation things you had to know where you were going if you had business there. There were no race riots there, that I recall, at that time. I saw some in Nebraska, though, on the base. They don't make the paper. Washington was, I went there in the summertime, so I wasn't used to that kind of humidity. You live there, you know. The temperature's 95 and so is the humidity.

RK: How would you compare, then, and I will talk about, will ask you to talk about the racial situation.

BR: Sure.

RK: Compare that racial situation in Washington, so that was 1956.

BR: Right.

RK: Compare that to Portland.

BR: In '56? It was about the same. Oregon was about the same. People think it's the great out west, but no. Oregon was different. It still is. Segregated housing, both places. The homes, there were probably more people in Portland, unless they worked for the federal government in the east who had their own homes. As far as entertainment's concerned, in Washington, D.C., basically you had White clubs and Black clubs. In Portland, you had White clubs and Black clubs, but the Black clubs had a lot of white clientele. There was a place in 00:27:00Portland called the Dude Ranch, and the mayor, a woman at that time, Dorothy McCullough Lee, in the late '40s closed the place because there was too much interracial activities going on in the club. Portland is still unique. I can't talk about now, because everybody there is from somewhere else.

But at that time, because the neighborhoods were set up in Portland Black people were basically here and that was it. My grandfather had bought a house from a white realtor. That's why we lived where we lived. We didn't live at [unclear]. There wasn't really that-to this day I don't think there are 25,000 people in the city of Portland, Black. The neighborhood is pretty much gone, not where I lived, but where most Black people were. Where the coliseum was, now it's-I 00:28:00don't know where they call that, where the basketball player is. What is it? Bark-I forgot the name of the sports center. They didn't have a basketball team in '56. Everybody on the east coast thought we still had dog sleds out here and canoes. Portland, Washington, D.C.,--how do I compare that? Well, as I said, basically the weather's different. The attitude's pretty much the same. In Portland people could roller skate on a couple nights and a couple places. The rest of the week they couldn't roller skate there. You could swim in the parks. The parks were integrated. The park pools were integrated. The schools were integrated. The social part-that's completely different.

RK: We are now-you've been in Washington.

BR: Right.

RK: You've gotten some education.

BR: Yes.

RK: In the Army, was it?

BR: Air Force.

RK: In the Air Force.

BR: Yes.

RK: Now what?

BR: The kind of work I did they sent me to Omaha, Nebraska, headquarters of Strategic Air Command. My work there as a map maker, a Photogrammer, I was in the 544. We're going to say that's military intelligence. Part of the strategic air command. At that time it was Colonial LeMay-I'm sorry, General LeMay. General LeMay was a very famous warrior and he put the SAC Headquarters in the middle, because that was the center of the continental United States. At that time Russia was an enemy. Russia was the biggest enemy. General LeMay was 00:30:00keeping the world in order, his own rules. Had I talked to anybody-I played music in downtown Omaha. I saw people come in in brown suits and nobody dresses like that. They were seeing what I was doing. They would probably write reports on me, too. I did not hang out with the musicians downtown. I just went to town to play music, and I went back to base. At that time, that was the Cold War. Most people are too young to remember that part of history. It was a serious time. I worked for the people who could destroy the earth in 47 minutes. Most of the things I, the work I did, I couldn't talk about. My family knew I made maps in Nebraska, but they didn't know what they were maps of or anything else about it. If anybody asked me that was outside of my family, I'd tell them I worked in 00:31:00supply. It was easier. Omaha, Nebraska, was segregated at that time. There was all other kinds of segregation, too, within the ranks. Generally, just Airmen didn't really associate with those people who were non-commissioned officers, and they didn't associate socially with people who were officers. These officers didn't associate with these officers, because these were the hierarchy, you know, even though everybody listened to who's above. I spent 38 months in a hole, in 544, in my time in the service. They sent me to some other schools, too, in St. Louis, for mapping. The social thing, well, it's the same. The same thing about segregation-it existed. Did it exist for me? Yeah. A lot.

RK: How did you deal with that?

BR: I accepted it. If you didn't accept it you got more problems. You couldn't get anything done. Clubs, social clubs that people came to town to, the base, to have social things to have social things and there would be White women and Black women and there were Black sailors and Black Airmen and White Airmen and sometimes there were problems inside the building. Sometimes there were problems outside the building. Generally, it was racial, more or less inflamed by alcohol.

RK: So, describe that a little bit more.

BR: It'd have to be edited. Describe it how? What was causing problems?

RK: Yeah. Okay, the alcohol, the racial, the women, the Black women, the White women-I imagine all of that is involved in there in some way. Give us an idea. 00:33:00Give us that picture.

BR: Okay, that picture. If the women are coming from Omaha, if they are local to Omaha, then they already know about segregated societies. If they're coming to the base somehow, that had, in some instances, its own kind of morality, even though they had segregated housing for married base personnel. It would start out friendly enough. They're all serving beer in the service club there. Well, things, I can't give you-I could talk about specific incidents, but I can't give a universal answer to that kind of question.

RK: Give us a couple of examples of specific incidents.

BR: Oh, maybe somebody stepped on somebody's shoes while they were dancing and that's an excuse to start a problem. Young people do things like that. Used to. 00:34:00I have no idea what they do now. You would end up with a knot on your head or something, and that's about as far as it went. Now, you might be dead. I don't know. I cannot compare my time to now. I can't compare my time-I'm not making excuses for this, but I'm just saying it's just different. The rules are different. Maybe the attitudes are the same, but the limitations are different.

RK: Tell us more about your time.

BR: My time. Maybe my time was exceptional. Because I did pretty much what I wanted. I don't say that arrogantly, but I just did. Did I have the same rules apply to me? Probably. Did I ignore them? Often. I didn't go out of my way to do anything different than I had been doing before, and somebody'd have to tap me on the shoulder and say well, you can't do that. I'd go, oh, okay. I can't do that.

RK: Give some specific examples of these things.

BR: Some specific examples. Alright, here's a specific example. Six of us decided to rent a house down in the woods two miles from the base. How do I do this? So, we used to have parties down there. Now we're GIs, alcohol. Sometimes the girls are from the base, sometimes they're from town. Some of the guys who were in the house with us were from the south and they were white, but we're all in the same group. We did the same kind of work together. Now, had they been doing other kinds of work there might have been a lot of problems, but we all agreed on, it was unwritten. This is where we are. This is what we're doing. We're not supposed to be here, because we're not married but we all agree on what our own rules are. Racially, that would have been a problem for the city of Omaha. But it wasn't a problem for us because we had our own rules because we 00:36:00weren't on property that belonged to the government or the city. We weren't doing anything that was illegal, but it might have been frowned on. How did I do? That's as far as I'm going to go with that, because the rest you can guess. Maybe I'm not the right guy to be interviewed here. I don't know.

RK: So you were there for a while. Then what?

BR: I would come home at week-ons. I was there for-I came home at Christmas-time. I met Martha in December of 1956.

RK: In?

BR: In Portland. I went home for Portland. Then, I don't know, we just started corresponding and that's kind of how that went. I'd come home on leave and I'd see Martha. We'd go to the beach or whatever. But, I never-there were a lot of 00:37:00problems with that. Her parents had a problem it. My parents had a problem with it.

RK: Tell us more about that.

BR: Did you ever see the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I lived it way before it made a movie. Her parents weren't accepting of me and my parents-my mother did. My dad wouldn't accept her. Ultimately, her parents accepted me after Martha started to have Shannon, who you just saw. Shannon was a very cute little baby. Suddenly, they were grandparents and they wanted to see what our grandkids looked like. Apparently, they came out okay. I don't think nobody wants to hear all this. This is how the real stuff went.

RK: Well, that's what we want to know.

BR: Okay. The real stuff.

RK: The real stuff.

BR: The real stuff. I never took my kids to Black church, but I didn't take them 00:38:00to White church, either. I figured when they grow up they can decide how they want to do that, which they have done. My younger girl is very involved in her church in Portland. My older girl, who you met, she doesn't bother with any of that stuff. My kids are, my kids know they're Black. My grandkids know they're Black. It says so on their certificate, I guess. I don't know. Mine says negro, doesn't it? You saw. We have lived basically outside of all of that stuff. We have friends that are Black or White or otherwise. People accept us or they don't. There's no club, as far as I know. As far as Portland, we have friends who, Martha primarily had friends who she couldn't talk to anymore because of me. She lost jobs because of me. We stayed in Portland until we moved to 00:39:00California in '65.

Okay, about our marriage. We're probably the oldest Black-White marriage in the state of Oregon. We first were going to get married, Martha had a friend whose husband was an Episcopal priest. They were going to counsel us on getting married, but it was, I forgot what do you call a person who's a-was he a bishop? Whatever, not the minister himself. Not the priest himself, but somebody was going to counsel us in marriage counseling. He says, I don't think I can do this in the state of Oregon. I said, well, miscegenation, now that's 1951. This is 1960. You can do this. So, there you are. We got married, we went to the County Courthouse to get the license and we went through that. We got married at a 00:40:00church at a church that was Episcopal Church, and we had our reception at my folk's AME church, which they had moved because they built the coliseum and tore it down and they went to the other church. That was kind of a compromise, or an agreement. I guess in fact we had two services, huh? How am I doing with all this? I don't know. Where is this going?

RK: We're just, it's going.

BR: Okay.

RK: So, you had the two services. At the reception at the-

BR: Black church.

RK: At the Black church.

BR: Yeah.

RK: So, were all the guests that came there from your side of the family and your friends, or, not your friends or your parents'? Were they basically then, that was the Black one and then-?

BR: Yeah, the congregation of the Black church was there. The minister was upset because he didn't do our ceremonies, because we had that done on the west side. 00:41:00I didn't go to church anyway. It didn't matter. As a, concession wouldn't be the word... for the sake of my folks we had the reception there.

RK: Then for Martha's folks?

BR: They weren't there.

RK: Did you have another type of reception or gathering for them and their friends?

BR: No. That didn't happen. Martha had a friend stand up for her at the wedding. I didn't know her parents until Martha was about to have a baby, and a medical doctor who was a doctor of my father-in-law's decided, he said, you really need to straighten this out, because my father-in-law is from Missouri. He came to Oregon way back when. It ended up being, it all ended up fine. I got along better with him than I got along with my own father. We did the whole thing. We 00:42:00are history.

RK: So, now we're probably getting to the part where you start having more work and I know you have a very complex, interesting work history.

BR: [Chuckles].

RK: Tell us more about that, and maybe as you tell it where racial issues come into it. Tell us where they really had nothing to do with anything. Let us know that, too.

BR: Okay. I decided I wanted to go to the Art Center in Los Angeles. That's before they moved to Newhall or wherever they went. So, we had, I was working in a hotel. I was going to Portland State some. I was working in a restaurant. 00:43:00Sometimes room service. Sometimes serving wine downstairs, sometime bussing, whatever. I wasn't a bartender, sometimes waiter. I needed to make enough money to go to school out of state. So, I was out of the service. I went to the Urban League, and they issued me had I been a graduate from college they could get me a job as a school teacher. Well, one, I didn't graduate from college. Second, I had absolutely no interest in education. I interviewed for a job, well, I got some jobs, I remember. Martha was working, before kids Martha was working at an employment agency and they got me a job working in a machine shop. But ultimately, this is out of sync here, but it doesn't matter.

I ended up going to Carnation Milk Company, they had advertised a job for a driver for a firetruck they wanted to do for a promotion. I went to interview for that job, and I think. I called them and I told them I didn't want the job. They said, why don't you want the job? I said, because kids are going to be climbing on this fire truck. If they fall off, I'm going to feel responsible for it, so what other kinds of jobs you got? They said, well, we have route sales. I said, what's that? They said that's a milkman. I said, well, let me apply for one of those jobs. I went down there and I told Urban League I'm going to apply for a job as a milkman. They said don't set your sights too high. I went to Carnation Company and they hired me. I got a route. I didn't get a route in a black neighborhood. I got a route in southeast Portland. Other milk companies 00:45:00were trying to get my customers because they said why do you want a Black man bringing you milk to your house for? My argument was, if you had a Black waiter in a restaurant, would you care? And I'm not selling black milk. I had the inside serves, which means I had the keys to the people's house. Early serves go and put it in the refrigerator. In those days, the milkman was kind of an extension of some families. I had no problem with customers. I lost customers because I was Black, but customers come and go in that business anyway. I had customers who-matter of fact, one of my customers taught me geometry in high school. We would chat. So, racially, I didn't have any problems with the company. I didn't have any problems with basically my business part with my customers. It was okay. When we got ready to go to California, they gave me all 00:46:00kinds of stuff. Christmastime, they gave me stuff for my kids. My youngest one was like this, I said Shannon was about like this. I didn't have any problems racially there. Then after, of course, I was there the Urban League was sending all kinds of guys out there for jobs, but that's okay. So I didn't-I don't know.

Then we went to California and I don't you I got there they were having lots of riots August 19, 1965. I'm trying to find a place to live with my family. In California, I went to work for Carnation Company, because I'd worked here. It was easy. I wanted to go to school but I still needed to make money. I worked at the Black plant in Los Angeles. If you're familiar with LA, it was off La Brea, right where Hughes Machinery, well that doesn't matter. We were north of LAX in 00:47:00Los Angeles. The Black branch had all of south central LA all up into Beverly Hills. I had a route that was half upper middle class Japanese and some middle and lower middle class Blacks. Being a milkman, I don't know how to explain it about LA. As a milkman in LA, the racial thing was not an issue because when I first went there I didn't have a route. I was a called a stubman, which means I built routes. Then I would put in the new stops, feed them into existing driver's route, re-route him. That's typology, right. The science of routing. I 00:48:00had people slam doors in my face because they were afraid I was going to rob them. I'm wearing a white uniform with Carnation over my chest, on my chest, driving a white truck with red letters on it. I'd knock on somebody's door and they're going like this [bobs head]. They're afraid. Okay, they can be afraid. It had nothing to do with me. I'm just the milkman. I didn't wear a hat and a bowtie, but I had a white uniform. I learned Los Angeles from that perspective. I learned Los Angeles from, oh, once again, it was-the city was in transition, not because of racially. People were going to the valley. People had been moving into what had been Jewish neighborhoods on the west side because at that time there was a time in which you could not go western if you were Black, unless you were domestic up in those houses. So, the racial part of it in LA, Martha can 00:49:00talk to some of that if you're going to talk to her about it. I just went to work. Then I went back into mapping business after I got out of milk. Did I ever go to school? I took some course at UCLA. I never went to Art Center. Where do I go from here? What do you want?

RK: Well, let's, after what you have become, the process to, just continue on with the rest. In terms of-

BR: Okay, I went back... okay, from LA I went back out of the milk business I went back to mapping. I hired, because I had been educated in that business as a cartographer and photogrammetrist, I was hired at Rural Service Corporation, which had been Fairchild Arial Surveys. One of the jobs that they were working when I got there was Afghanistan. That in the mid '60s.

RK: Is this still in LA?

BR: In LA. That company I worked for had taken over what had been Pathé, the company that made news reels. The studio's up on Santa Monica Boulevard between Mccadden and, I forgot the name of the other street. They still had the logo over the door, but we were in a warehouse. It was International Mapping Company. I said we were mapping Afghanistan at the time. There were a couple of domestic jobs they were doing, too, on the Ohio River. The Afghanistan job, racially you wanted me to talk about the company. There could have been 14 languages spoken there, because we have map makers there from all over the world, some of which had been athletes that had come to the United States, even though they did. 00:51:00They'd gone down to Patagonia and mapped that. They'd gone, the survey crews, and a lot of South Americans and Central Americans.

RK: When did you come to Portland?

BR: We moved back in 1971.

RK: Then what, tell us where you lived then. Where did you live then in Portland? What kind of neighborhood?

BR: We moved back to Portland in the southwest. Some people would say, it all depends on how old you are. They would have said, Corbett Terwilliger. Then they'd call it Johns Landing. Now I think they call it South Portland. We were in the house 42 years. My kids went to the neighborhood grade school. They didn't get bussed. It was two blocks from the house. No. That's not right. We 00:52:00lived in the neighborhood, but we didn't have the house. Ultimately, we had a rental, a few blocks away. I put in 42 job applications in Portland for the kind of work I was trained to do.

RK: Which was?

BR: Map maker. A friend of mine got me a job as a technical illustrator for a new company that had been spun out of a larger company. They built electron microscopes. I was an artist, but I was not a technical illustrator, so I got the job and I had a book in the drawer on how to illustrate that way and I started doing it for these exploded views of this device. I was there a couple of years until they went out of business, and my friend got me a job at Tektronix, an electronic draftsman. Ultimately, I was there to do their exhibits 00:53:00for them. I'd also be an exhibit designer for Tektronix. My family was still going to a neighborhood school. The neighborhood school was integrated. There were people who were professionals, a lot of people in the neighborhood worked blue collar jobs, whatever on earth that means, manufacturing. There were people in the neighborhood who had been there for a couple generations. The neighborhood now is completely different. It's all gone. Kids, the children, are bussed out of that school now because it's now a language school, I think, a private school. There were racial problems, not that I know about them. There weren't that many Black kids in the school, and those few kids that were there wasn't a problem, that I know. There were more class issues there than there was 00:54:00racial issues. When the kids from the neighborhoods where my children grew up were going to junior high school and high school they had to go up. They called the kids down where we lived carp town, because it's near the river. At that time before my kids were in school, back in my time they had mills along the river: lumber mills, French companies, things of that sort. They'd bring the logs right in and work them right there. That's Portland in the early '70s. We're back in, I said, then my parents became more active grandparents, as had Martha's parents became grand[parents]. There was never really a competition between the grandparents, but there was a very different social difference between the grandparents.

RK: Do you think that social difference had more to do with their own backgrounds or race? Or can that even be separated out?

BR: I think it's inclusive. I don't think you can separate them out. My in-laws, and my mother grew fine. My father never got there. They were very accepting of my children and me. My mother loved my wife more than she loved me, which is easy to do [smiles]. Yeah, I think, like I said basically we were outsiders.

RK: For your children growing up in those schools, did they have friends that were, were all their friends Black or did they have friends that were White?

BR: My daughters tried to date Black men. It didn't work. The expectations were 00:56:00different-what they wanted to do was different. Both my daughters married White men. A long time. Shannon's been married, what, 33 years? Amy's been married 28 years. Same guys.

RK: What was different that made it not turn out? In terms of the expectations that the Black guys had?

BR: This becomes my opinion and their opinion. Yeah. Face was a different issue-how you present yourself. Status was a different, was completely different. I can only conject on what young guys were thinking at that time. It wasn't anything intellectual. It was a disaster.

RK: Explain that.

BR: Explain it. Amy, the younger girl, cooked a dinner as I recall. I may not get this right. She did a very fine meal, and the guest who came had no idea what they were eating. I think the problems that matter is sophistication. Anybody can learn anything if they care. I don't think they cared. I don't think they wanted to learn anything different than what they were doing. Comfort zone. Is that what I want to say? They were out of their comfort zone. I don't think we made them feel any different in our own home. Matter of fact, we had some fireman come to the house one time that had gone to high school with my daughter. They're so busy looking at the art we had in the house they would take 00:58:00care of me. Yeah, I think it's a matter of sophistication. That's all. It didn't work.

RK: Okay.