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AI: I would like to bring you back in time to just the year before camp, and the year when you were attending College, Sacramento junior college, and you were working for the Garritty family in Sacramento, and you were working with them as a domestic, and ask you about the race relations at that time and -- for example, these days, some people are not familiar with the term "color line." When, at, at that age, when you were just beginning college, were you aware of that term, "color line?"

EH: No. I didn't, I didn't become aware of the term "color line" until we got ready to buy a house, 'til, when Ralph and I... and you know, Ralph was going to the university, I was working at what was called Northeast YMCA. That YMCA is still at the same location, but in a totally different kind of building. And so we decided that despite our limited incomes, we should buy a house, it would be a good long-term investment, and when we went to real estate agents, they wouldn't show us anything -- they wouldn't even show us anything north of Montlake. I think the, I think the first house, Clifton Albright and I don't know about Hardcastle, Hardcastle handled a piece of property later for us. But there were one or two of -- oh, Tom Coppage, who was on the YMCA board, and I would've expected him to, because he kind of knew me, that as a board person that would've helped. But when we went to places like this, they would not show us anything. The first house they showed us was just off of Madison. And that's about as far north as they came. And that was '50, about 1950 when we were looking for that house.

AI: And so how did this, did this phrase come up? "Color line." How...

EH: Oh. Well, I learned... we were active in a small church, a unique church called Church of the People, that we just kind of dared to stop in and see what it was all about. It was on the corner of University Way and what's now Campus Parkway. The building is still there. And that was a very education, educating, broadening, socially broadening small church. And the housing discrimination and issues like that certainly came up, but, you know, we knew we were not, we were being withheld from coming north of the canal, north of Madison even. And what happened at the Church of the People was a white couple from Berkeley, Walt Hundley and his wife, were supervising the dormitory, particularly. The church built a twenty-nine room house, a dormitory, for particularly foreign and minority students because the campus had no facilities, they couldn't even -- blacks couldn't even get into co-op housing which was fairly common at, on big universities, but not here in UW. So the church took it upon themselves to build this twenty-nine room dormitory, and built a social area and kitchen, dining area on the ground level with a kind of a sunken garden. It was very pleasant. And when Walt Hundley and his wife left that position, there was another couple that came in from Berkeley, Handleys, Mary and... can't remember the husband's name. But they purposely were going to buy a house in Central Area, because they wanted to counteract this color line. And the bank almost wouldn't sell a white couple a house in Central Area. And they argued and, you know, studied the situation and they were liberals, ACLU probably was active by that time. And that's when we, when we started discussing housing problems, the term "color line" came up.

The banks were very insistent -- in fact, I'll jump ahead a little bit. When we went to buy the house that we were in, we bought it from a Franklin High School teacher who was buy-, who was teaching with Ralph, Ralph was Social Studies department head at Franklin in late '60s into -- no, mid-'60s to late-'60s he was at Franklin. And Marie Brannon overheard Ralph saying he had to get a bigger house, and he didn't -- when we had the house in Central Area, he was afraid that the, he didn't want the kids to go to school where he was teaching. And so we were determined to go north. We were also becoming after... after the Church of the People kind of broke up, a block of us joined University Unitarian and so I was teaching Sunday School there, we were also doing, being a little bit active there, and it would have been more convenient to live closer to that church, for one thing. But when Marie Brannon heard Ralph saying he had to find a bigger house, Marie said, Marie Brannon said, "Come and see my house, I have to get out of there," because her husband was going blind and he couldn't take care of the hedge in the garden, and she, they wanted to move to Tri-Cities where daughter was. So we went and it was just a very appealing, great double lot house. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright cohort-built house, Andrew Willetson. And had the planes, lines, and 3,500 square-foot, great house. So we ended up there, but we had paid a down payment on the house before we left for -- Ralph was on sabbatical in '65, '66 at Berkeley, so we paid the down payment and left, and that gave time for the Brannons to be able to move, and in April -- we left Seattle in June or July of '65.

In April of '66, United something, loan company, on Forty-fifth, a major... I don't know whether it was a bank, but anyway, they sent us a letter saying -- and a check, with our down payment back to us in Berkeley and, and saying that they couldn't proceed with this. And, you know, here it was... in April we were, we would have had to, we intended to be back in Berkeley, I mean, in Seattle by June, maybe a little later, but the kids had to be in school by September, and for us to find another house was (going to) be deadly. So we took spring vacation off and came back to Seattle and we stayed various places, Kuroses' for one, one place, and two other kids scattered to other places, but what had happened -- oh, it was funny 'cause the Brannons, Mr. Brannon was a real estate agent, and he was furious because he says he's given United a lot of business, so they took it upon themselves to go to Pacific National, I think. That was the bank, name of the bank on Forty-fifth and U Way. It's now a Wells Fargo, I think. But anyway, they went to the bank directly, and the bank agreed to help them by collecting the monthly payments from us, which included the normal interest rates and that kind of thing. So that's how we managed to solve that problem.

But it took every bit of time to get that through the system. So that summer when we came back, Ralph had been hired by Upward Bound at UW campus, and CAMP daycare, or CAMP, Central Area Motivation Program, was waiting for me to come back and take ov-, do the daycare business. So we were pressed for time, but we didn't have a place to stay, because that house wasn't available. So various people allow, and we end-, at one point we ended up at Victor Steinbrooks's house, Victor Steinbrooks had divorced his wife Elaine, and Elaine had the house, but it was an enormous house, so we stayed. We stayed at Kuroses' for part of the time, and we had friends in Green Lake and we stayed there the last month. But that's when we also discovered that this was a red-lining issue, that... but when, when an individual takes it on and it doesn't go through a loan situation, they can't, the bank can't withhold the service, and thank heaven Pacific National was willing to let us pay them. I don't know that they got any commission out of it. But those were severe issues all over the place.

AI: And that was in 1965, as you say. Where because of you and Ralph, because of your race, that you were being denied this opportunity to have your loan serviced and purchase the house.

EH: We also wanted to do it because GI bill was available to veterans, and that was incredibly low interest, and if we didn't take advantage, I mean, we didn't know how long that was (going to) last so we wanted to take advantage of that. I was pregnant with Larry and as we were going, we eventually did get -- oh, at our initial house in Central Area, even, it was about April or May, and I was pregnant, and Ralph said, "Don't you dare take that coat off; no matter how hot it gets, keep that coat buttoned." And so we survived.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.