<Begin Segment 11>

MR: I don't remember that. [Laughs] Good heavens, it's probably true, but I don't remember. What were you doing?

LG: You mentioned the Yellow Seeds group?

MR: Oh, the Yellow Seeds, yes. Yellow Seeds, I think I sort of joined up with them, let's see...

LR: That would have been the late '60s.

MR: The late '60s. They were kind of, that was fun. There was a community organization in Chinatown, but they were also, tended to be rather left-ish. They were sort of real interested in Mao Tse Tung.

LR: Well, not in the beginning.

MR: Not in the beginning. They got that way.

LR: They got that way [inaudible].

MR: But mainly they were a community organization. And I remember, I think Lucas remembers this, too. They were going to be, Vine Street expressway was going to come through Chinatown, and they were going to tear down the local school, the elementary school. So the Yellow Seeds had climbed up on, were protesting and they climbed up on this big pile of rubble and put up signs and everything. I don't think I climbed up, I think Lucas climbed up and were protesting, demolishing the school. And they did just pick the school up and moved it. Now, if it's still there, I don't know.

LR: It is.

MR: Is it still there? Oh, okay, so it's still there.

LR: But it also saved, it also kept Chinatown from being demolished.

MR: Yes.

LR: It was very important, it was also, they galvanized the community in Chinatown to stand up and fight against it, despite the fact that there were many different factions, and this was a very left-wing kind of movement within the Chinese population of Chinatown, tended to be, you know, they tended to be... you know, many were Taiwanese, many were from Hong Kong, so their politics didn't necessarily, they didn't necessarily like Yellow Seed's politics, but they were able to galvanize the community nonetheless to totally fight this. And they say that they "saved Chinatown," saved Chinatown by being part of the, by organizing the folks on the ground.

MR: Now when you walk down in Chinatown, or as I walked to some places, doctors, and I see signs in Chinese. But what they're talking about is they want to build a stadium, and I noticed that was probably against, they're protesting against, well, these signs are probably "stop the stadium." And I notice even their own members, there's a church right as I head towards Trader Joe's, it's on... must be Broad and Arch, I guess, there's a big church there, big sign, "No stadium." "No displacement." So those issues continue. "No stadium," "No stadium."

LR: One of the memories that I have is you did a lot of community work, started with Yellow Seeds, and it was outreach. You guys did a lot of stuff, and one of the things that I remember is there were older Chinese men who had no families and were very poor, and you guys would go and visit them and take care of them. I remember visiting.

MR: Did we take you? Did I take you? Oh, my goodness.

LR: And I remember very old Chinese men sort of sick in bed in flophouses. Yeah, and these very kind of like single-room occupant kind of things that they had set up for folks, and I remember you guys would bring food to them, help them get their medical care and all that kind of stuff. So you did a lot of that kind of work as well. And I learned to play guitar.

MR: That's right.

LR: They also taught classes.

MR: And ping pong.

LR: They taught classes in mechanics [inaudible].

MR: What?

LR: Yeah, a good guy was a Black Panther, I can't remember...

MR: Oh, yeah, yeah.

LR: So they also made connections to other marginalized groups as well as those groups do. And I remember he used to, he was a really cool guy, he rode a motorcycle, I thought he was amazing because he was in a black motorcycle gang, and he would come over to Yellow Seeds, I think they teach all the young folks that had motorcycles how fix their motorcycles. And then David Toy, who was one of my favorite people, he started teaching guitar, and then Dad found a guitar in the trash.

MR: And then you learned to play guitar.

LR: Yeah, he found this guitar in the trash and he was always good with his hands and sort of revamped it so I could play it a little bit and then they taught local folks in the neighborhood how to play guitar. Ping pong tournaments, all this kind of stuff was going on.

LG: It sounds like a really great community [inaudible].

MR: Uh-huh. And it was that guy, I don't remember his name, the Black guy, you said? He was a machinist or something or other. Somehow, that's how I got myself, I got myself... because folks hadn't come back from Vietnam yet, so I was able to get training in machine work, and that's how I got into being a drill press operator out at Philadelphia Gear. [Laughs] Maybe cue the working class kind of thing? Whatever.

LG: Yes, it was.

MR: Yeah, I know it probably was, but anyway, wow, the pay was fantastic and it was also a lot of fun. It was very dirty work, but it was an awful lot of fun.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.