<Begin Segment 16>

TI: What was your father's reaction during this one month? Did you talk to him about being drafted?

FF: Oh, yeah. No, he had no problem with that. Yeah, he had no problem with that. Of course, he didn't like it, but he had no problem with my going when I was called.

TI: So he felt that you should do this rather than resist and...

FF: Yeah, oh yeah. No, he never counseled me to resist. In fact, he did say, "This is your country, you gotta do what you gotta do."

TI: Okay, after you were drafted, where did you go and what did you do then?

FF: I was inducted at Camp Douglas, Utah, which is right outside of Salt Lake City. And we took a troop train down to Florida. And that was really quite an experience. It's not all that far but it took us all of five days to get down there. Because at every turn, they just, they just unhooked your car and leave you on the spur someplace until somebody comes by that's going in your direction and then they pick you up and haul you maybe a couple more cities down the line. It was a really a slow train, but I finally got to Camp Blanding in Florida. And that was kind of an eye-opener for me, because we had a... it's the first time I ran into real segregation. Even as we were going down, we stopped in places like Memphis and Amarillo, and every time we got out of the train, you went to the bathroom and drinking fountains and jeez, there were "black" and "white" drinking fountains. And that's something that, in spite of all the badgering that we had in Washington; we never saw white and black drinking fountains and toilets. But, this was really, it left us in a little bit of a quandary because we didn't know whether we were white or black. [Laughs]

EG: How did you work it out?

FF: Oh, we had a lot of difficult learning experiences, because when we got down to Camp Blanding, the camp was separated. They had a white camp and then the blacks were segregated in another impoundment, and you couldn't go in there. But the same bus picked everybody up through the camp and we, we sit where there were seats so we, if there was a seat in the back, we used to go sit in the back. And jeez, we used to catch all kinds of flack. I mean, people, the bus driver wouldn't move until we got out of the back seats and up front where we belonged. Cripes, I don't know, I don't know if the white guys thought we belonged up front, but that's the way it went. I know some guys that got in pitched battles with the bus drivers because somebody tried to kick them out of an open seat in the back and tried to make them stand in the front.

TI: But it sounds like, then, you were, down there, although you were non-white, you were classified as being in the white section of the bus.

FF: Yeah. Well, we were non-black. [Laughs] Yeah, so we learned how to behave as non-blacks. But the blacks themselves didn't like you in their area, some of them.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.