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AI: When, you mentioned how important that lesson was that your parents gave you about racial tolerance, can you remember any particular examples or words they might have used or what it was that they impressed on you so deeply?

PI: I don't remember so much words, I remember things that we did. For example, even when we lived in Richland, Washington, where there were very few black people, we had, there was a woman -- and I think she worked for my mother in the house -- who had two kids about our age. And they lived in a, literally a little shack on the Columbia River. And we would go visit them and play with them, with their kids. And this, I was about nine or ten years old at the time. And this was something that most kids of my age at that time didn't do. There was hardly any interracial experiences the kids had. But my parents made a point of having the kids in my family visit them and play with them so that we would get to know them.

I don't remember any specific lessons like, you should think this or you should think that. It was just the way we lived, the way we behaved. And there were places that we lived, particularly in Cincinnati, that were racially very segregated and very intolerant. And I became aware, in fact, I went to a high school that, during the time of the Little Rock incidence, in 1957, when federal court in Little Rock, Arkansas said that nine black children had to be admitted to the public school, Central High School. And I remember on, in the newspapers and television at the time there were riots in Little Rock because the people there, the white people tried to keep the black kids out. In fact, they had to call in the army to get them into school. And in my school, my high school in Cincinnati, there was a tremendous amount of prejudice against them. And people would say things -- the governor of Arkansas at that time was Orval Faubus, who stood up to the federal government until the, he was forced to back down. And I remember kids in my school saying things or putting up little notes like "Faubus for President." And there were black kids in my high school, fairly small number. It was an almost all-white community, but there was a very small black neighborhood on one edge. And the black kids in my school did not mingle socially with the white kids. I don't think I ever went to a dance or a community function -- we had a community center in Wyoming, Ohio, which is a little suburb of Cincinnati. I don't remember a single one of those where any of the black kids came. So that...

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.