<Begin Segment 31>

SF: With -- over the many years that you were in the newspaper business that things like the Civil Rights movement and the kind of changing American attitudes toward racial groups, how did that impact you?

JF: Well, that's pretty hard to answer because I, once again, I had to... of course, by that time I was in Seattle. And I had no, I had no particular feel for the, for the, the total picture that older cities represented or presented. I mean, the area containing black families at that time in Seattle was very, very small. You take a place like New York or Chicago or Philadelphia or even Baltimore where there were tremendous areas of black population, and I had no firsthand information, really. I'd never, well I'd barely seen the, seen the scratch on the surface of the black neighborhoods. And I had no idea how those people were living, so it was a, I guess I was about as naive to it as most, most people were, except that I saw it from the newspaper's standpoint all the time and saw it coming and the problems. By this time, our kids were in schools along with black kids, and we had black friends. It was very difficult to be able to see the anger that some people were coming from, and the hopelessness of some of the, some of the black people, trying to get justice. So it was, it was kind of a learning process for me.

I had had some very close contact with black people coming home. When we were still, when we were still in the jungle, we, those of us who were coming home were assigned to a black signal company that was coming home. I knew something about this outfit, but not very much. And all of a sudden, I'm assigned to this and we were surrounded entirely by black people. And that was kind of an eye-opener. The company commander was a southerner named Captain Miller, and he was, he was really a leader in more ways than one of this, of this black group of soldiers. I mean, it was, it was a real eye-opener to me the way, the way he handled these, these black fellows. I mean, they would come to him with, with their problems, and he would listen to 'em, and he would talk to 'em, just almost like a priest would to a, to a parishioner.

I remember one day this day huge black guy was being harassed by another pretty good-sized black fellow, and he got the captain aside, and I happened to be within earshot. And he said, "Captain," and he started to cry, this big, husky guy. And he said, "Captain," he said, "I've already killed one man," he said, "as a civilian." And he said, "I'm going to kill that guy if he doesn't get off my back." And, and I, but I couldn't hear what the captain was saying, but the captain had his arm around him, and they were walking up and down, and he was just consoling this guy about the kind of actions he could take and should take, but most of all not anything as violent as he was contemplating.

But I've never forgotten that that this fellow, he, Captain Miller was a tall, skinny guy, typical farm boy, but he was sharp. Mostly he, he had the greatest empathy for the fellows in his command. He had been with 'em for quite some time in the jungle, and there were stories were told about how they were afraid to go into the jungle and so forth and so on, but I don't know if that would be true or not. But he was, he was just fantastic with these guys, and I kind of learned, learned something from being associated with these fellows all the time. But they were pretty much like everybody else. So I had, I had that as kind of a criteria. Unfortunately, the only time I ever had anything stolen from me was when I was with this outfit. Somebody stole my watch. But I didn't know whether, who had done it or why, but it was a real eye-opener. But it was interesting in the fact that in their every day, the differences in their everyday life. I mean, I'm talking these fellows are all twenty, nineteen, twenty years old, and this is 1945, and the, we had to have, make sure everybody had full clothes before they were discharged. I don't think there was a pair of socks to be found in the whole damn company, or handkerchiefs. To me, that spoke quite a bit about the kind of people we were dealing with, their personal, personal habits. They did not wear, want to wear socks, and they did not have any training in the use of a common handkerchief, which is kind of a small thing, but still it was very striking, that we'd go through an inventory of these things, and everybody needed, needed a pair of socks or a handkerchief. That's kind of getting off the point, but it was just fascinating.

And again, there was, there were some of those, some of those fellows, just -- in almost every case where you get a group of men together, whether they're black or white, there's always a comedian, someone who can make you laugh no matter where you are. And it was exactly the same thing. There were one or two of these black kids who were just so naturally, just natural comics. And they were just funnier -- they could get anybody laughing. I mean, it was just amazing, the closeness of, of the association of humor to their fellow man. It didn't make any difference what color they were or what their station in life was. They just had that innate knack of coming up with the craziest situations and the right words at the right time. It was an eye-opener.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.