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JF: But I, all the schools, of course, were segregated. I was, I went to school with, white as your, your sweater. It was just, there was no -- the only time we saw black people was when we went into town, and, but usually on Halloween the black people would come up from wherever they lived up into where my, my Aunt Mary and my Uncle Joe lived, and so we would see all these black people in costume. But that was about the only contact I ever had with them. In the row houses, my mother's sister and brother lived side by side. My Uncle Joe, who was, no, my Uncle John was the oldest. But my Uncle Joe bought that house in, I think 1913, something like that. He lived there just about all of his life.

SF: Did your parents ever comment on black folks or make some sort of remark, I don't know, offhand or casual that you recall?

JF: No, not really. I mean, there was no -- it was out of sight, out of mind, actually, is what it really was. On the newspaper which I worked, no stories about black people unless a horrendous crime of some kind. I think Joe Lewis, I think the fighter, was the first black man whose picture was ever in the News Post, so I mean, there was, I can remember I'd be in the city room, and somebody would say, well, such-and-such has happened, and the immediate question was, "Where?" "Oh, that's in, that's in a part of town we don't cover." That's all there was to it. It's kind of a strange, strange way to operate. I mean, the line, we felt the line was just there. I don't know who had drawn it or why, but it was just there. And breaking that down was no easy, no easy task. I remember, oh, we had this, when we wrote a, if there was an occasion, I think we, I think we referred to black people as "Negroes" with a capital N, "Negro man," but that was few and far between. But there was no particular reason for my folks to mention any black people at all because we never, we never saw them.

SF: At that time were there other groups that were perhaps not as isolated as blacks from being covered and so forth, but were further down on the pecking order, maybe I don't know, Poles, Russian immigrants, Italians, I don't know. Was there kind of a pecking order of like the European immigrants, and how did people sort of see that?

JF: If there were, or if there was I was pretty much oblivious to it. [Pauses] I think there was a certain -- I mean, everybody took their lumps at one time or another, the Irish and the Italians, and in some places, just prior to my coming into this world, in Boston, for instance, which became a very Irish city, why, there were signs all over the place, "No Irish Need Apply," no matter what you were looking for. And I think the, my father would take exceptional, would get exceptionally angry if somebody used the word "wop," W-O-P, which apparently means "without papers." And I don't know just how it came to stigmatize Italians, but like, "Kraut" for Germans and so forth. But those things for me, as a, growing up, teenager, they were so far out of my realm that I never paid very much attention to them.

SF: Were there any notions about going into a particular neighborhood or that you shouldn't go into this neighborhood because it was mostly X or Y, something like that?

JF: Well, see, I really, really don't know because we moved out, we moved out of, out of that intensely populated area, those areas in the deep city when I was, just as I say, about three years old. So we were out there in the open spaces, and the neighborhoods were few, we figured that, we lived in a place which was called Raspeburg, named after a Raspe family, R-A-S-P-E, and that's where I lived, on Raspe Avenue. But the next community was Overlea, which, but there was no, things were so spread out, it seems to me that there wasn't no real tight-knit sense of, "this is my territory." But whether or not my cousins felt that or not, living in town, I, I don't know, but I don't think so. I think that they would certainly stay away from the areas in Baltimore where, which were mostly, mostly black neighborhoods.

But then again, I'm, that's just something I'm, seems to me would've been a good idea. But I don't know whether people living at that time actually thought, "We'd better not go down Jackson Street," or, "We'd better not go down so-and-so," because I mean, you have the same thing here in Seattle. I mean, we don't just go down through what they used to call "The Hollow," and it just made some common sense, it seemed to me. Although our kids never seemed to be bothered.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.