Jeffrey Dickemann | Interview 2 | October 27, 2011

DUNHAM: This is David Dunham with Jeffrey Dickemann on October 27, 2011. This is our second interview, and this begins tape four of our interview. I think when we talked about getting together again, you said there were a couple of things you wanted to clarify from your first interview, so let's start with that.

DICKEMANN: Good, good. Well, I felt I wanted to make a point about each of these experiences, the farm experience and the New York experience, and I guess I got distracted. So I want to go back to the farm and talk a little bit about our working conditions. Just to recap, you remember I mentioned that the only pesticide they were using was nicotine. Actually, I forgot Bordeaux mixture, 00:01:00which was also very popular in those days. Don't ask me what it was composed of, but it was also a very powerful pesticide. But those two were the primary pesticides used all over the states at that time. So that is a great change from today, obviously. Whatever their downsides were, they can't possibly compare with what we're doing to the population today.

The other thing's about our living conditions. I did ask my sister what we paid, because we were paying room and board. And she didn't remember, but she told me that she wasn't able, with her picking or harvesting, to pay the whole cost of 00:02:00her room and board, and that that was one reason she went home halfway through the summer and our mother had to help bail her out. I don't remember any of that, and I don't remember having any trouble paying, so I don't know how to resolve that. But in any case, we were paying room and board. As for the meals, I remember breakfast and dinner being quite satisfactory, but we all joked about the lunches that they made for us. We got potato salad sandwiches, I remember that. And we got spaghetti sandwiches. So it was clear that this outfit, this family, was making money off of us.

DUNHAM: Now, is that who served the breakfasts and dinners, as well?

DICKEMANN: Yes, we ate in the farmhouse, breakfast and dinner, and then we 00:03:00helped wash the dishes and clean up. I remember the breakfast as being very generous and varied and good. But anyway, I don't know. But it was certainly sufficient. Of course, I've already described the barn that we were living in. It was extremely well built and warm and clean. It was a dormitory, but still it was a very satisfactory living condition. I mention all that because it is such a change from today's farmworker situation. I don't know if you know this, but sometime after World War II -- I can't give you the date -- there was government 00:04:00legislation creating a guest-worker program in this country.

DUNHAM: The Bracero Program.

Dickemann: That program required that housing be provided, and I don't know what other perquisites were required under that program. In fact, you may remember seeing that movie of the farmworkers, during the war, or during the Depression. The Steinbeck novel.

DUNHAM: The Grapes of Wrath?

DICKEMANN: Grapes of Wrath. And they lived in very simple, but wood-frame 00:05:00houses. Well, see now, what happened was that corporate agriculture did not want to pay for those perquisites, the housing, et cetera, et cetera. That is why we now have this large number of illegal immigrants in this country, because they prefer to bring in the illegal immigrants rather than pay the cost of the guest-worker program. So it's hardly used at all anymore. I don't know if you follow all this, but nowadays, we have people living in culverts, living in culverts. And we have people living under trees, in the open air. Nothing, nothing. You may have remembered the young woman who died for lack of water, the pregnant young woman in the fields, who died -- I don't know, what was this, six months ago? -- because she had no access to water while she was picking in the 00:06:00Central Valley, in 110-degree temperature, she's pregnant. Well, we were never in a condition when we didn't have access to water. So I want to emphasize the degradation of our farmworker situation, as compared to what I knew and what I saw.

And there's another aspect to it. As I mentioned, all of these farms were serving New York City, all right? Those farms, they were small. So small that one man and a crew of volunteers could do all the summer work. Some of them were bigger than others, of course, but they were what is called truck farms. Are you 00:07:00familiar with that expression?

DUNHAM: No, explain it to us.

DICKEMANN: I didn't think so, because that expression has died out. A truck farm was, in those days, a normal-sized farm, which was dealt with by trucks, which picked up the produce and took it into the city, whatever city. I told you the case of the tomato grower who had to dump all his tomatoes.

DUNHAM: Right.

DICKEMANN: Yeah. That was New York City. So truck farms, of course, still exist, but there are many fewer now, because they have all been bought out and scooped up by these huge combines of corporate agriculture. So that also is a reflection of the changes in the way that agriculture works and the way that they use workers, hired workers.

DUNHAM: Right. Including the tremendous issue of the patenting of seeds and then 00:08:00seed contamination and --

DICKEMANN: Sure, sure.

DUNHAM: -- farmers unwittingly getting the seeds into their crops.

DICKEMANN: That's all made possible by the size of the ventures. So food, water, housing -- all of those things were supplied.

DUNHAM: Have you ever talked with other folks who were in the Women's Land Army in other locations, and compared experiences?

DICKEMANN: I've never met anybody.

DUNHAM: Okay, just curious if you had.

DICKEMANN: Never met anybody else, no. I don't know about other locations, either. That's a very interesting question, what the -- it was supposed to be national, but I don't know what the distribution of --

DUNHAM: Yeah, well, there are some books on it and I've done some research, but not extensively. But yeah, I was just curious if you'd ever come across other experiences.

DICKEMANN: That talked about the Women's Land Army? Really?

DUNHAM: Mm-hm.

DICKEMANN: Oh. It never occurred to me to even look in the library. Well, that's 00:09:00interesting. Anyway. Of course, this corporatization means long-range trucking of food, too, rather than this close-to-market service, which meant fresher food, less need for refrigerated trucks, and less need for all of those things they do to preserve food, like spraying fruits with wax and all the other things they do to food to make it less like food. So I wanted to make that point. Yeah, I think that was the point I wanted to make. Now, I don't know, there are other 00:10:00stories. What's that?

DUNHAM: I'm just shifting the mic to improve it a little. We're doing fine. Yeah, we got all that.

DICKEMANN: Okay. But I mean, the rest about being on the farm is just memories, and I don't know that they're really relevant to the war. Oh, I should say --

DUNHAM: Well, it might be. Go ahead.

DICKEMANN: One other thing was that the farmers were very grateful that we were there. We used to, on the weekends, go up to the nearest larger town up the Hudson. I think it was called Hudson. I meant to look that up and I forgot. But anyway, it's the next one up the Hudson from Germantown. We'd go there and maybe 00:11:00go to a movie or something. Saturday, we'd do that. We also always had a banana split, ice cream sundae. But the farmers, when they saw us on the road, they would always stop and pick us up. They were delighted to give us drives, because we were their lifeblood. Without us, they would've all tanked. Of course, there were no other people to employ. So that's all. Oh, speaking of truck farms -- I don't know if you garden -- there's a variety of collards called Vates, V-A-T-E-S. It's probably the most widely-planted commercial collards in the country. VATES stands for Virginia Agriculture and Truck Experiment Station.

DUNHAM: Oh, really?

DICKEMANN: VATES, yes. So there's that truck word again. It was obviously developed long, long ago, when most farms were truck farms.

DUNHAM: Well, you mentioned that you'd jotted down some memories. Would you care to share some of those?

DICKEMANN: Well, if you want. I don't know what they're relevant to. There was a fellow next door, at the farm next door. I don't know what he did for a living, except he raised goats. They saw us as a money maker, and they started selling us goat ice cream in the evening, every now and then. It's perfectly good. It sounds strange, but goat milk is perfectly good. But he was a brute. He liked to 00:13:00kill things, really. He was a sadist. He had a little baby billy goat that was playing around the female, and he came and just chopped its head off, because he enjoyed that. He had a son who was maybe seven or something, taking after him, torturing the cats. It was quite terrible. It was terrible. Nasty man. But he had a Percheron horse. Why, I don't know. Maybe long ago, he'd use it to pull something. But basically, it was just sitting in the yard. So my friend Tuey and I, we went over there all the time, made friends with this horse. And this horse was so glad to have attention, and extremely affectionate. And we rode it, but we also would wash it off and just play with it. Lovely animal. They're big, 00:14:00Percherons. But it was a lovely animal, so we played with it.

Then I don't know if I talked about the Italian who grew green beans, and my sister says he grew currants, too. I can't remember that. He was a Sicilian and he had an accordion, which he didn't play very well. But he always played the same song over and over again. It was some old Sicilian thing that obviously made him homesick. He would invite us into his house, all of those who were picking the green beans that day, at lunch. His house was a big, beautiful wood-frame house, but it didn't have a stitch of anything in it, nothing on the walls. I guess there were some benches that we sat on. Maybe there was a table, 00:15:00but I don't even remember that. It was bare. Then he would offer us cheese. Well, this goat cheese was not what you'd call a success. [they laugh]

DUNHAM: Not as good as the ice cream?

DICKEMANN: It was rubbery, beyond belief. I don't remember that it stank, but it was rubbery beyond belief. Anybody who ate it was only doing so out of politeness. Then he'd play this accordion for us. He obviously was pretty lonely, and all by himself.

Then the only other thing I remember is that Tuey and I decided to learn how to smoke. We got a package of Wings, which was the cheapest tobacco on the market, 00:16:00in those days. I don't know if they're still on the market; maybe not. They were until fairly recently. Terrible stuff. We went up in the farmhouse, to the second floor, which was kind of vacant and where nobody could see us, and tried to smoke these things. Of course, you know what happens the first time, you're overcome with coughing. So we didn't really learn.

DUNHAM: Okay, so you didn't master smoking that summer?

DICKEMANN: No. No, I --

DUNHAM: You tried and failed?

DICKEMANN: I mastered smoking when I was a freshman in college. But we tried. So that's all, I think.

DUNHAM: You mentioned -- it's interesting -- a couple of the males. Now, I don't even know how much older they were or anything. I know we talked about some of the female-female relations. Was there much dating, also maybe between some of 00:17:00the women and men in the town?

DICKEMANN: I don't remember any of it. I don't remember any dating. Now, there was a wedding during this summer, but that was a wedding of a girl who was a local girl. Some of us were kind of involved in that; we'd gotten to know some of these locals. But that was local. Then during the summer, there was a fair. It was down the street, someplace, I don't know where. Down the road, I should say. It was a kind of typical fair, for those days. It had something to throw things at, and I guess there was a whirly-gig machine; I can't remember. But I do remember that somehow, Tuey and I got fixed up with two guys, who were, I 00:18:00guess, our age, which -- fifteen-year-old boys. They took us walking away from the fair, to the cemetery, which they knew where it was, and they thought would be a good place to make out, I guess. All I remember of that is some slobbery kisses and that's the end of that. [laughs] Neither one of us were impressed. They could've been local boys; I don't know who they were. There wasn't any other dating that I knew about. But I might not have been paying attention to it.

DUNHAM: Sure.

DICKEMANN: A lot of the women were older. I was one of the youngest ones there. Those older women from New York City, who were buyers and so on, what would they 00:19:00be doing dating anybody up there? It's just utterly out of their ken or interest. So I don't think there was much.

DUNHAM: Would most of them, being such city folks and professional, did they seem to enjoy the experience or feel like they were doing their patriotic duty, doing it, or what was it like?

DICKEMANN: I don't know. Because I didn't ever really get to talk to any of them. I looked at them with admiration and -- I don't know what's the right word. I looked up to them, as very sophisticated women who wouldn't have given me the time of day. Who was I, at fifteen? This little fifteen butch, right? I 00:20:00remember only one of them very well, because she was suffering from a breakup and she would sit on the bench. I don't know if she was really crying, but she was in a deep depression a lot of the time. I wanted to go over and comfort her. What I could do at fifteen, in comforting [laughs] this mature woman -- . So I never approached her. But she made a big impression on me, as somebody who was suffering, and a very attractive and sophisticated woman. That's the only one that I remember as an individual. The people that I made friends with, I've already told you about, that couple of college girls and so on.

DUNHAM: And Tuey, most of all, yeah. Was Tuey? your age, or a little older?

DICKEMANN: No, she was my age. I think exactly fifteen. I think so, yeah.

DUNHAM: So then you also wanted to clarify some things about your teenage experience in New York?

DICKEMANN: Yeah. New York, I don't know, maybe I've said most of it. But I think that New York really was two things. One was: New York for me, which I've already said, was that a young person who knew a great deal about the US but nothing about big cities, nothing about sophisticated life -- that's not the right word -- cosmopolitan life. Even though we had lived in cities like San 00:22:00Diego. But I guess San Diego was a small city when I was there. And it certainly wasn't sophisticated. New York had this attraction, to my mother, that I've already mentioned, because she had been there before, as a young woman. Although she was not sophisticated, by any means. But something about the glamour of the big city made a big impression her. But when my sister and I landed there, it was kind of like eating candy. There were so many things there that we could never possibly have found in any other place -- Salt Lake or San Diego or 00:23:00whatever, or Honolulu -- that we didn't even know existed.

Now, one thing I forgot to mention was that we happened to be in New York during those four years when Balanchine had come from Europe and before he started the New York City Ballet. He was working for the Ballet Russe in New York. My sister and I had never seen ballet. We knew it existed, I guess, but I'm sure we'd never seen it. Well, we just went constantly to see Ballet Russes, during those great days of Alexandra Danilova and others, and Balanchine doing all of the directing and choreography. I mentioned the fact that there were two French film 00:24:00theaters in Manhattan. These things were just unheard of. There were artists and writers living in our neighborhood. We used to look out of our windows in Brooklyn -- this is Brooklyn Heights -- and see Sigrid Undset walking her dog up and down the street. I don't know if you know who she is. Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist. She wrote a long trilogy about a woman named Kristin Lavransdatter. That's her most famous writing.

DUNHAM: Now, were you reading these at the time?

DICKEMANN: No. My sister might've been. I didn't do so until much later.

DUNHAM: But you knew of her notoriety.

DICKEMANN: Oh, we knew about her, yes. And then did I tell you that we were 00:25:00living in the apartment where Wright had written Black Boy? [Narrator addendum: A detailed listing in an edition of Wright's Pagan Spain indicates that he lived in Brooklyn Heights but not in our apartment.]

DUNHAM: Yeah, you did mention that.

DICKEMANN: Okay. So that. There are other people --

DUNHAM: But you knew at the time?

DICKEMANN: Oh, I was told by the people who were downstairs. There was a photographer and his wife, who was a painter, just below us. They were very nice to me. He wanted to help me learn photography, and I never could combine it with my school. He wanted to take me on jobs, and I would be his helper, holding the lights. But I couldn't go without cutting school, so I never really -- . But aside from that, they were very supportive and they told us that Richard Wright had lived in the apartment we were in. There were other artists, whose names I've now forgotten, who were living on Brooklyn Heights. [Narrator addendum: Sculptor William Zorach is an example.] So that kind of being in the milieu was 00:26:00totally new to us.

Then there were publications. Now, we got the Herald Tribune every morning. I don't think I'd ever really looked at a newspaper before. And partly, we're talking about my age. I'm coming of age and waking up, but I'm waking up in this place which is just drowning in new world exposure, let's put it that way. Norman Cousins put out a little magazine that I subscribed to, and I can't remember the name of it now. It was a social-commentary magazine. I don't even know how I discovered it, but anyway, I did subscribe to it and read that for a 00:27:00long time. I mentioned the two radio stations. Now, again, that's incredible, even today. One of them was WNYC. It was a city radio station. A city radio station. The mayor was on WNYC, from time to time, talking about the city, Mayor LaGuardia. There was a woman named Dorothy Kilgallen, who had a breakfast program that we often listened to. She was a commentator who was considered quite effective then. I don't know what we'd think now.

DUNHAM: Was it a very eclectic program?

DICKEMANN: Oh, it was news and commentary.

DUNHAM: Local news?

DICKEMANN: Yes, local and national and commentary about things that were going on. I don't know. But she had the breakfast program on the city station. The 00:28:00other station represented something else that was happening at that time, and I do want to kind of get into things that were happening. WQXR was a music station, and they played a lot of classical music, which was something I was also beginning to be interested in. But they also played folk music. Now, this was the period when folk music began to exist, if I can say it that way, in the US, as a valid interest. Now, of course, there had been people in the thirties and forties who'd -- well, we're in the forties, but in the thirties --

Dunham: Remind us what year you arrived in New York and what year you're really talking about, finding all these things.

DICKEMANN: Oh, gosh. Well, gosh.

DUNHAM: Or about. We may have covered it before, but --

DICKEMANN: Well, let's see. '41, '42. Let's see. I graduated from high school in '46. Spring of '46. Yeah, because then I went through my first year of college in the fall of '46. So it ended in '46 and it began -- I don't know -- three and a half years. Three or three and a half years was our period.

DUNHAM: So just after the start of the war.

DICKEMANN: Oh, no, the war had started in '41.

DUNHAM: Right, okay. So '43.

DICKEMANN: Excuse me. The war had started in 1938. [laughs]

DUNHAM: I'm sorry. Certainly, certainly.

DICKEMANN: But we entered the war -- I don't know why we all say "we." The US entered the war in '41. We had been in 00:30:00Salt Lake and then in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and then in Rhode Island. And it was from Rhode Island that we went to New York.

DUNHAM: But you were in all those places within two years. You arrived in New York --

DICKEMANN: '41, '42, '43. Yeah. In about three years, yeah. Yeah.

DUNHAM: Okay. Well, I'm sorry; I didn't mean to interrupt your story.

DICKEMANN: No, that's all right.

DUNHAM: Just wanted to make sure we were reminded of what year we were in.

DICKEMANN: Right, right, yeah. So we're talking about that period, '43 to '46, yeah. But the folk music phenomenon was part of something that was much larger. And I was really only exposed to it, as we've just said, in this brief period of 00:31:00time. The interest in folk grew out of the progressive turn in the US. We think maybe of college students running off south and collecting banjo music. But there's the background to that, to the fact that college students would even think of doing that. And that was this whole progressive movement, which turned to the people as valid human beings who did valid things. And of course, that was all the New Deal. The New Deal was -- I don't know how you separate these things -- a manifestation of it, or it was a manifestation of the New Deal, however you decide your cause and effect. So we even heard, in our school, which 00:32:00was a presumptive Christian school that had chapel every morning, we had John Jacob Niles come in there and give a concert of folk music. Maybe that would happen today, but the context is entirely different, because that was new. WQXR played people who became famous singing folk music that they had picked up from around the world. In the jazz scene, it would be called covers, right? Again, I wish I could remember their names. Theo Bikel and Oscar Brand were two.

DUNHAM: Sure. Well, were these musicians mostly grown up local in New York, or had many of them come to New York? I understand they took music from all over the world, but do you have a sense of that? I'm just curious.

DICKEMANN: [chuckles] I have no idea. That's a wonderful question, but I don't 00:33:00know. I suspect they came from Podunk, Iowa. So many people came to New York to find their way. So that music. Now, I think I mentioned Paul Robeson. I think I mentioned the fact that we saw him in Othello. But Paul Robeson did something else that I forgot to mention, which is part of this whole progressive scene. He made a recording with another guy, whose name I have forgotten, called Ballad for Americans. You can still find it floating around. I had a copy of it; I played it constantly. Of course, what it was was a celebration of Americans. But 00:34:00very much, the emphasis was on the people. And it talks about truck drivers and miners and people like that. Whole lists of those good working people. Right? This is an expression of a very serious political moment in our history, which of course, is long, long gone. So that Ballad for Americans was an expression of this progressive moment.

DUNHAM: And very much of the people of working class, but without mentioning race explicitly, it sounds like.

DICKEMANN: Oh, that's a good question.

DUNHAM: Well, you can go back and listen, but --

DICKEMANN: I think it did not. This is maybe over-interpreting, but Robeson 00:35:00spent the first half of his public life being very much a spokesman for American progressives. He later turned off, because he felt, precisely as you've asked, that racism was being shoved under the carpet, and he became disaffected. So I don't know. A wonderful question. Wonderful question. But it manifested this moment of progressive interest. I know that that had a big influence on me, because how else would I have ever heard about any of this stuff in Honolulu or 00:36:00San Diego or any of those other places? It just was sweeping over you, all of these ways of looking at reality that you'd never ever even thought about before. I'd been introduced to wildflowers by my mother and we'd driven all over the country looking at rabbits in the desert; but Paul Robeson singing Ballad for Americans? It was just, wow, there is a world out there and it's about people and people's positions in life. I didn't understand anything about socialism or the New Deal or any of that; but I had all these influences coming at me. I know that they were very, very important in framing me.

DUNHAM: Do you think that many others of your age -- I know you were mature for your age, but even within New York -- that many others were taking all this all in as much? Or that it was more for the college and older that was really --

DICKEMANN: [laughs] It's a wonderful question, again; but the only people I have to compare it to are the girls in my school in Brooklyn, Packer Collegiate Institute. You can tell by the title that it had the flavor of a finishing school. Of course, I was always considered a little rebellious in that school, partly because of my gender disconformities. But I remember that one day there was a discussion, formal discussion, about should we have an army which is a 00:38:00volunteer army, or should we have a draft? Sound familiar? I argued that we should have a draft. I was the only one.

DUNHAM: Wow.

DICKEMANN: Well, because these girls all came from upper-middleclass families, and they, repeating their parents, of course -- they were not sophisticated about this issue or anything else -- they didn't want to have to associate with the hoi polloi, and that's what'd happened in World War II. Again, what we're talking about is the continuation of this progressive mode into World War II. If 00:39:00you look at the books and films that were made about the World War, or written about the World War right afterwards, you find over and over and over again, the author or filmmaker is talking about a group of guys, and one is a Jew and one is an Irish Catholic, and one is of German descent. It's just so classic. They are saying, this is an important aspect of our culture, of our country. Right? Not anymore. That issue's been decided. We'll never have a draft again. Unless these kids that are occupying change things.

DUNHAM: There are a number of us who still agree with you that it would be the only way and that we'd really take stock of whether or not we should be going into war and all of that.

DICKEMANN: People learn so much about other people, just by being in the barracks together. Well, and fighting and dying together, too.

Dunham: Well, this -- I'm just going to interrupt again for a second -- brings me to a question I had kind of wanted to ask. Maybe it came up in our past interview. And I know you were a little young, also. But did you have a desire, a strong desire to be in the military?

DICKEMANN: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. [chuckles] Well, I want to say this. I understood -- wrongly, I'm sorry to say -- that the only thing women did in World War II in 00:41:00the military was type. [laughs] Be secretaries, that kind of stuff. And I didn't want to do that. Of course, I would've chosen the Navy, without question; but I couldn't stand that awful uniform they had for ladies, [Dunham laughs] and that silly little hat they invented. It doesn't look so bad to me now, but then it looked awful, obviously, because I wanted to be in blue jeans or in men's uniform. [laughs] So that's really why I never did. I was thinking of that even after the war was over; I still had that kind of fantasy that I might do that. 00:42:00Later, much later, when I saw a film about gays and lesbians in the military, I discovered there were women doing airplane repair, all kinds of stuff. I don't know how they got into those positions.

DUNHAM: And flying, too, yeah?

DICKEMANN: No. Oh, no, no. No flying. Oh, flying didn't start until, I think, the first Gulf War. Women flying was very, very late. You know why. It's the most prestigious thing you can do. That's why you get to bend your hat that way. That's super-masculine, right? So no, women flying was very, very late. But they were on the ground, and they were in their togs and their work overalls, 00:43:00repairing planes and doing all kinds of other stuff like that. I don't know how they found those roles. But I could've maybe found a niche that I would've enjoyed.

DUNHAM: Well, related to that, were you aware of other non-military but defense work that women were doing? The whole Rosie the Riveter campaign?

DICKEMANN: I really don't remember thinking about it. I really don't. I didn't learn about it, I think until -- now it looks very recently, from what we're talking about -- when I came out here and I got involved with a woman who had done war work in Chicago, and her sister also had done war work in Chicago. Then I learned about it.

DUNHAM: What kind of work did they do in Chicago?

DICKEMANN: I don't remember. It was factory line work, and that's all I know. It was assembly-line work. I don't know.

DUNHAM: So both those realizations of that, the civilian defense work and that there were some opportunities for women in the military beyond secretary, came after the war and after --

DICKEMANN: Yes. Yes, after, much after the war. So I abandoned my fantasy of going into the Navy. Yeah.

DUNHAM: Did you ever have a fantasy, still, of being able to go in as a male, as a man?

DICKEMANN: It was out of the question. You have to undress.

DUNHAM: Yeah, sure.

DICKEMANN: So it was out of the question.

DUNHAM: Did you not, then, in a realistic way -- but did you just kind of play 00:45:00at that, I guess, if you will?

DICKEMANN: You mean when I was younger, or after my transition?

DUNHAM: When you were younger.

DICKEMANN: Oh, when I was younger, I dreamed about being a sailor. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I just thought sailors were the cat's meow. I used to draw pictures of them and fantasize about totally unreal notions about world war, right? About people being on a tropical island and watching the planes come in and -- pfft. Then destroyers. I loved destroyers. I just thought they were the best ship of them all, because they were so graceful and agile and brave and beautiful. [chuckles] So yeah. I wrote a poem about destroyers, in New York. 00:46:00Maybe I told you, I used to stand on a fire escape and watch the ships coming up the East River. Most of them were destroyers. I don't know why, but they seemed to be mostly destroyers, coming up the East River to the Brooklyn Naval Yard. [Narrator's addendum: In speaking of fantasies of masculine roles, I should add that there was also the Boy Scouts.]

DUNHAM: Is that when you wrote your poem?

DICKEMANN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

DUNHAM: Do you remember it?

DICKEMANN: You're not going to get me. [they laugh] Terrible. Terrible, sentimental stuff, by somebody who had no real understanding of what war was really like.

DUNHAM: But an adolescent perspective of the war, during that time.

DICKEMANN: Yes, yes, that's what it was. Dramatic and -- of course, that's what gets young men to enlist, isn't it? Right? That fantasy land. Well, now, just 00:47:00let me see what else I've forgotten. Oh, yeah. Well, the museums. I don't know if I mentioned the museums. We went to the museums all the time there. The Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum. We went to those.

DUNHAM: Now, was this father or mother encouraging? On your own? Other mentors?

DICKEMANN: The father wasn't there. He was only there for visits, right? I think that the museums were mostly my sister and I alone. I'm pretty sure that mostly, the -- Well, I don't know. Maybe sometimes with my mother. With my mother, I used to go to the art galleries. My sister didn't do that. But my mother, being a painter, she was interested in what was happening in the art 00:48:00scene, and she always subscribed to a couple of art magazines. Of course, she was subscribing to The New Yorker, too; I don't know if I talked about that. The New Yorker was always in our house. But I would go to the galleries with her and look at all the stuff that was on display for sale, whoever was being shown there. So I got a, I don't know, kind of good superficial education in art. She had followed modern art from the beginnings of its appearance in the US.

Then another thing, which seems quite different, but also reflects an interest 00:49:00of mine, is a couple of my friends in school -- they were older, junior-college girls -- and I somehow discovered the Society for Psychical Research. They had an office in Manhattan, downtown in some scrubby little place, and we went down and explored it. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in England. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but there was a period, more in the twenties, in England, when everybody was interested in psychic phenomena and clairvoyance and moving tables and all that stuff. People have proposed that that was a response, partly, to the tremendous losses in the First World War, 00:50:00and so many people had relatives who had died in the war and wanted to make contact with them.

DUNHAM: As a coping mechanism.

DICKEMANN: A lot of very famous English people got involved with that. Do you know that play Blithe Spirit? Well, that's whatshisname, that fun --

DUNHAM: Noel Coward?

DICKEMANN: Noel Coward's representation of people he knew who were into that psychic business. [Narrator addendum: Blithe Spirit was modeled after Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness and an acquaintance of Cowards, who became very involved in psychic activities later in life.] So of course, we were very young, and we just were curious and didn't really know whether to believe in all of this clairvoyant stuff or not. So we went down there. They had publications. I think I had a book at that time, about all this stuff. I don't 00:51:00want to entirely ridicule [laughs] this stuff, because I had one experience in my life, which absolutely convinced me of telepathy. But I just realized that I'm being a little trivial about this. I've always been curious and interested in non-Western religions and forms of enlightenment.

DUNHAM: All right. So you were open to it, but you had a healthy skepticism, it sounds like.

DICKEMANN: [laughs] Yeah. Well, I think the Society for Psychical Research is kind of on the edge.

DUNHAM: Okay. [laughs]

DICKEMANN: But there it was, in New York. Where else in the universe of America would it have had such an office? No place. It was an oddity that New York could 00:52:00support, let's put it that way.

DUNHAM: Did you want to share your experience with telepathy?

DICKEMANN: I don't mind, but it's much later.

DUNHAM: Okay, well, I'm just curious, since you --

DICKEMANN: I'd be delighted to because it happened right here in Berkeley.

DUNHAM: Oh, sure. Do tell.

DICKEMANN: You're familiar with the Berkeley co-ops. At the very end of their [chuckles] tragic demise, they opened a book store. It was on -- I don't know if I'm pointing in the right direction -- University and Shattuck. On University and Shattuck, and it was on the northeast corner. There was a big building there. Later, there was a See's Candy in there. It's gone now, too. Then there 00:53:00was a Mexican restaurant. But it was a huge building. They opened this bookstore, and it was run by a little round, chubby Jewish woman, whose name I can't remember. But this is all in my diary, I have to say, so if we ever need to dig it up. I had discovered -- and this really requires that you kind of throw yourself back in history -- I had discovered Howards End, by Forster. At that time, that book was utterly unknown. All that people knew about Forster was the one about India, Passage to India. That was assigned in all the college courses and everything; everybody knew Passage, but nobody knew anything about 00:54:00Howards End. This is long before the movie was made. But I had discovered it and I wanted another copy to give to somebody. I went in there and I said, "Where's Forster?" Well, it's way on the back wall. This was a long ways into the back of the store. So I went back there and I looked and looked and there was no Howards End. I came back and, to this lady -- there were two clerks standing there, a young man and a young woman. I looked at her and she looked at me. She says to me, "We're out of Howards End." I said, "How did you know that was what I wanted?" She said, "I read it on your forehead." I looked at these two clerks, and they said, "She does that all the time."

DUNHAM: Wow.

DICKEMANN: Now, I don't know how to contradict that. I don't know how to dismiss it. It happened. That's what she said. I ran home and wrote it down in my diary, because I couldn't believe it. And nobody's explained it to this day, and anybody who you ask about clairvoyance will say it's crap. But it wasn't crap. It happened. So that's my story.

DUNHAM: Why will anyone you ask about it say it was crap? You mean people who believe in clairvoyance would say it was crap? Or you mean people who don't believe?

DICKEMANN: Oh, no, people who don't. But most people don't. Most people don't. No, people who believe, that is clairvoyance, of a kind; there are many kids. Yeah. Okay. I'm looking down here and I see Porgy and Bess. We went to musicals. 00:56:00Mother loved musicals. She liked Showboat. But you see, there was Porgy and Bess and there was Gershwin, and Gershwin was trying to take jazz and move it into the American mainstream. He didn't succeed, because all he did was make himself famous for what he produced; but he didn't create a new form of music, except his own creations. But there was Porgy and Bess, a black musical, first black musical. And blues was coming on. As Tin Pan Alley was the white music, you might say, and at the same time, blues was getting appreciated for the first time. All of this stuff was -- . Then there was the city, walking in the city, 00:57:00and the Central Park and Greenwich Village and the beaches. We used to go to the beaches all the time.

DUNHAM: Now, since you came out to California, you've never lived back in New York? Or did you ever have the desire to move back there again?

DICKEMANN: To move back? No. I visited it and I love to visit, and I'd like to visit it again; but I'm pretty schizophrenic about the country and the city. I love New York, but if I had a chance to move, I wouldn't move to New York, I'd move to the country. That has become more and more important to me. Especially 00:58:00since I left Berkeley, where I had a very large garden, and now I don't have much. It's not much of a city, I'm sorry to say. Getting better, but not fast enough to suit me. [laughs] There is that strain of me that is a frustrated farmer.

DUNHAM: Are you able to have a garden, some garden now?'

DICKEMANN: Oh, yeah. Well, I don't have any right now, but yes. All this time that I've been in Richmond, I have about five raised beds and grew a hell of a lot of my vegetables. Yeah. Saved a lot of money doing that.

DUNHAM: Good. Well, any last thoughts about New York? Then I have maybe some questions for later. 00:59:00We'll switch the tape.

DICKEMANN: Oh, God. [pause] Restaurants. I don't think we talked about restaurants.

DUNHAM: No, I don't think so.

DICKEMANN: Well, one could exaggerate that, because my father, I think it was mostly, was always taking us out. I don't mean this in any expensive or impressive way. But the first restaurant I remember going to is when I was a little, little kid, five, six years old, we used to go to a Chinese restaurant. Outside of San Diego. It was up on La Jolla someplace, on the cliffs. Then we went to a Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, a famous one that we used to go to, Wo 01:00:00Fat's. So of course, in New York, there were others, right? There was a famous German restaurant downtown called Luchow's, my father took us to. Then there was the Russian Tea Room. The Russian Tea Room always advertised itself as just left of Carnegie Hall. Just left of Carnegie Hall, yeah. And we went there. I remember having a delicious meal there. Then on the other hand, there was a Horn and Hardart's, which was a place where you got a real quick -- do you know about that?

DUNHAM: That name, I don't recognize.

DICKEMANN: Horn and Hardart's. You walk in there and there's a whole bank of little glass-covered cubbyholes, and each cubbyhole has some food in it. You 01:01:00open it up and you take it out. Of course, it's immediately replaced by somebody back in there. Like if you want some pie or some oatmeal or whatever, it's all in these little cubbyholes. That was Horn and Hardart's. It was an early attempt to rationalize food service, I guess. I guess there were tables there to sit in. We didn't really patronize the place, but it was famous, and you went. Then when I was working -- did I tell you about working at American Express?

DUNHAM: I'm not sure. I'm trying to remember. But on the restaurants, the main thing is the tremendous diversity, ethnic diversity?

DICKEMANN: Yes.

DUNHAM: Now, were the restaurants also open? Was it a twenty-four-hour town, like we think of it now? Were restaurants open extremely late?

DICKEMANN: Oh, sure. Sure. Well, I was going to say that when I was working at 01:02:00American Express, they would often ask me if I wanted to stay after hours and work, I don't know if you'd call it -- the evening shift, let's call it that. Of course, I often wanted to. Not only the --

Begin Tape 5

DUNHAM: This is interview two, tape number five, with Jeffrey Dickemann, on October 27, 2011. We're going to pick back up. Jeffrey was working -- or Mildred then -- at American Express. You were saying that they asked you to stay for the night shift. This was after working a full day shift?

DICKEMANN: Yeah. It was my last summer, because the next-to-last summer was when I was on the farm. The last summer, I got this job. We all lied. Did I talk 01:03:00about it?

DUNHAM: Now I do remember. Because you were going to go to school.

DICKEMANN: Okay. Yeah. When I say lie, then you remember.

DUNHAM: Right. [Dickemann laughs] Well, it was because of your integrity that it was hard for you, right?

DICKEMANN: No, we're not going to college. I haven't a clue about college. We lied to get our jobs. But some of the people working there didn't have to lie; they definitely weren't going to college. But anyway, they'd ask me to stay, because I was a reliable worker, if I wanted to. So then I'd call my mother and say, "I'm staying for another," whatever it was, three hours. So then I would go and eat dinner. This is another little New York place that was unique. The place was called Chock Full o' Nuts. They had all these things made with nuts, like 01:04:00nut sandwiches -- whatever, walnut or whatever you choose, sandwiches -- and they had some kind of soup with nuts in and so on. I loved that place. I always went back there. I had always some kind of nuts and cream cheese sandwich; I can't remember. Then I would be out on the street at sunset, and look up. I don't really remember what street American Express was on, but they all go straight up the peninsula. You could stand there and look straight up and watch the sunset because, in fact, New York isn't like that; it isn't north and south, it's like that. You could watch the sunset, down these streets. It was so dramatic. So that was just another end of the restaurant scene.

DUNHAM: Yeah, yeah. By the way, there was no overtime for working the night shift, right?

DICKEMANN: No. No, we were just getting some kind of flat rate, but I don't remember what it was.

DUNHAM: I had a few other questions from post-war stuff that I thought we'd check in on, just because you've had such a rich history. I know you've written extensively and you have your diary, but I don't know that you've been interviewed so much. You've talked a lot about your Cal years in the area, in your Gay Bears interview with Bill Benemann. But I was wondering about after Cal. I guess first, you went to teach at Lake Merritt? Was that where you went directly after Cal?

DICKEMANN: Not Lake Merritt, Merritt College.

DUNHAM: Excuse me, Merritt College. Excuse me.

DICKEMANN: Well, yeah. But when I first went there, Oakland Junior College, it 01:06:00was called first. Of course, that was too demeaning, so then they changed it to Oakland City College.

DUNHAM: Oh, I see.

DICKEMANN: It became Merritt, actually, after I left, when it all moved up into the hills. Because when I was teaching, it was down on Grove Street. They moved it up to the hills to get away from all those black students. Well, this was after the Black Panthers, that were founded there, you know? That's where they were founded.

DUNHAM: That's part of what I wanted to ask you.

DICKEMANN: So the Peralta College administration, who were a bunch of racist ninnies, they moved it up there. At that time, there were no buses going up and downhill in Oakland. They all went this way, north-south. They all went north-south. So any students had to find some other way to get up, other than 01:07:00the buses. However, the buses were not stupid, and they immediately put some buses in, [laughs] and Merritt College now is just as black as any other school in Oakland. But yeah, when I was there, it was mostly Oakland City College.

DUNHAM: And what year did you go there, and what were you teaching?

DICKEMANN: 1960 to '64. Then I went to Kansas, and then I came back and I got a job there again, for one year. But they wouldn't take me on permanently. I should thank them for that, I guess, because the teaching load was terrible. But yeah, I was trying to get my foot back in the door. Actually, I interviewed with a whole lot of other junior colleges in the area, too. But I finally ended up at 01:08:00Sonoma State.

DUNHAM: When you were at Oakland City College then, is that when you began to become more interested in civil rights and race issues?

DICKEMANN: Yes. [Narrator addendum: I had read Richard Wright's Black Boy and Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma in New York.]

DUNHAM: Did you meet Bobby Seale and Huey Newton there?

DICKEMANN: There are certain moments in your life when you have a prepared line that actually doesn't tell the truth at all, but people think it does, and it's just a wonderful line. Huey Newton was a student of mine. Now, the truth is, I cannot remember him as a student at all. I can't remember what class he was in, I can't remember what he looked like as a student, or what he did or what he said or anything. I knew him in two other ways, very well; but I can't remember him as my student. But he was my student, so I can just floor people by saying, 01:09:00Huey Newton was a student of mine, even though it makes absolutely no difference and is totally irrelevant.

DUNHAM: What were the two other ways you knew him?

DICKEMANN: I was teaching anthropology, cultural anthropology. I don't know how to say this, but anthropology is, in spite of some silly claims about its history, a non-discriminating field. Students always know this. So the minute you're teaching whatever you're teaching -- whether it's human biology or prehistory or whatever -- it's very clear that there's a kind of encompassing attitude toward the human race. So students tend to be attracted to 01:10:00anthropology, as a progressive field. I went even further than that, because in cultural anthropology, you usually choose one book, which is a study of a group, an ethnography; but it doesn't have to be that formal, but it's some sort of study of an individual group. I chose, at one point -- Jomo Kenyatta had written a book called Facing Mount Kenya. It was autobiography, but also lots about his society. Well, the black students were just taken with that. They went out [laughs] and went down the street, to a little store that made t-shirts, and they had, not a t-shirt, but sweatshirts made, with Jomo Kenyatta's face on it. 01:11:00And damn it, they all sold out and I didn't ever get one. [Dunham laughs] They should've given me one. But anyway, that was just an expression of their excitement, that they existed.

Well, then a funny thing happened. One day I'm in my office, and here comes this little troupe, a little band of white kids. I don't know, maybe five. They say to me, "We want to start an interracial club." You have to kind of put yourself back in time here. Although there were laws, the racial discrimination, even in Berkeley, was very open and intense. So they wanted -- . "Okay. That's 01:12:00interesting, yeah." "Would you be our faculty advisor?" "Sure." Not more than a week later, in comes this little group of black students, maybe five of them. They say to me, "We want to start an interracial club." They didn't even know about the white kids. It was just total coincidence. I said, "Sure." So we started an interracial club. We did things like we had an interracial dance. First ever. Right? Some of the faculty who'd been there since the year one, because it used to be a business school, they were -- .

But then at this time, there was something else happening in the US, in the 01:13:00South, which we didn't really keep very good tabs on, initially. But those kids, black kids, who were being active in the South, wanted to recruit other students. And they would come to our interracial club and give a speech about "join the movement, come south." Okay? We did other things. We had Herbert Aptheker come and talk. He had written a book called The New Negro, in which he showed how every generation, white people in the US thought that Negroes were changing and so on and so on. It was an important book at the time. He was a communist. So that also got everybody excited. I think that Huey was quite involved in inviting him, as I remember.

Well, Huey and Bobby Seale both came to this interracial club and sat there and participated for a while. Then they decided it was too funky. It wasn't radical enough. And that's when they left and founded the Black Panther Party.

DUNHAM: There was another group in between, wasn't there? Let's see if I wrote it down. Or maybe it was a reference to the interracial club. But there was Afro American or something other that I'd read, that also wasn't radical enough, before. But maybe that was the same time. Not ringing any bells, that.

DICKEMANN: You're not speaking about this later period, when the --

DUNHAM: From what I had read, it was directly before the Black Panthers, so it should've been in that same timeframe. But anyway, I don't think it's --

DICKEMANN: I don't know. I don't know. Gee, let me know.

DUNHAM: [chuckles] Okay. If I come across it, I'll let you know. I also told you I was going to send you some of those links that I had, I realized too, when we spoke last.

DICKEMANN: Yeah. Well, anyway, so the interracial club was where that recruiting went on, and the students would always be saying to me, Dr. Dickemann, when are you going down? I just said, "I don't know." Because I was too scared. I was scared. We were hearing about what was happening. I was too scared.

Then when I went to Kansas, I found myself with two other faculty members, who started a branch of CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], and we started doing 01:16:00local stuff in the town of Lawrence, around racial issues. We also organized the Vietnam sit-in for the University of Kansas. Then CORE sent down -- I don't know down, over from someplace -- a trainer named Mike Lesser, and he trained us in nonviolent techniques and got ten of us to volunteer to go to the South. The other two faculty did not participate. I was the only faculty member; but the rest were students.

DUNHAM: So this is in '64? '65?

DICKEMANN: '65. '65. Summer -- spring, excuse me. Spring of '65, we went to Bogalusa. Then I went back in the summer of '65, to Baton Rouge, where the CORE 01:17:00office was.

DUNHAM: So what were those experiences like?

DICKEMANN: How many more hours do I have? [laughs]

DUNHAM: Well, I've read a little bit, but I at least want to hear how you became a member of the Deacons for Defense. Is that right?

DICKEMANN: Oh, yes. Oh, where did you read all that?

DUNHAM: Where did I come across that? I'm not sure. I'll send you some links.

DICKEMANN: Golly! Yes --

DUNHAM: But that sounds like quite a story.

DICKEMANN: -- send me some links.

DUNHAM: Will do.

DICKEMANN: Well, it is long, so I'll try and make it short -- even though it was only one week, which is just incredible. But there had been one CORE worker in Bogalusa, a young man who was very brave and very persecuted. There was one 01:18:00point when he was in his car and they were beating on his car, trying to get in there to beat him up. I think he did get beat up once. But it was clear more troops were needed. So part of our ten-person group went to Monroe, because there had been a church that had burned down there, and they were helping to rebuild the church. And the rest of us went to Bogalusa to --

DUNHAM: Sorry to interrupt. Was your group all Caucasian or was it mixed?

DICKEMANN: No, no. Jesus, was there only one black woman? I only remember one black woman with our group. Her name was Pamela. I got quite close to her, and I 01:19:00can't remember her last name. She later came out here and went to San Francisco State, and was very active in the San Francisco State rebellion. Then I heard she married an Irishman. [they laugh] This is all the information I have about her. She was a wonderful girl. She was from the North. But anyway, so I don't know.

DUNHAM: That's fine. I just was curious.

DICKEMANN: Yeah, yeah. It's a good question.

DUNHAM: But the ten of you went down.

DICKEMANN: Anyway, so we were located in black people's homes around the town, and there were Negro quarters, which of course were remnants of the old slave quarters. But they were still Negro quarters, and if you were an ordinary white person you got out of there by nightfall because you wouldn't have been safe after dark. Unless you were somebody's friend, which didn't happen. But anyway, 01:20:00so we were located in various places around and I was -- well, first they put me in a home where a woman and her teenage son were living. She was so scared. They took me out of there; she just couldn't deal with it. She was just scared to death. So then they put me in the home of Mary and Mirt Elzey, wonderful couple. That town was owned by Crown Zellerbach at that time. It was, and still is, a town where paper is manufactured. That is one of the most chemically disgusting, stinking, lousy processes you can imagine. There was a river running through the town and it was just totally polluted and stank.

DUNHAM: Were there a lot of health impacts for humans as well, I would guess?

DICKEMANN: Well, I don't know. I didn't do a survey, but one can guess. Now it's 01:21:00some other paper company; Crown Zellerbach has sold it. But they ended that. Okay. So Mert had a night shift at Crown Zellerbach, and Mary was a maid; she worked for a dentist in town, a white dentist. They were wonderful people. I didn't really get to know Mert, but I got to know Mary very well. Well, how do I say? During the day, we met in what was the Negro labor hall. That was where we were fed and we'd group and decide what we'd do today, get our assignment. And then we'd get spruced up by some incredible gospel singing. There was one young woman in town, who had the most marvelous gospel voice. But we all sang. Very important.

Then we'd go out, and mostly what we were doing was canvasing people because we were there to do voter registration. The Voting Rights Act had just passed. We'd go up and down these streets, with the asphalt sticking to your shoes because it was so hot, and knock on doors and say, "Are you going to reddish and come to our" -- reddish was the local colloquial for "register; this was a new word to many of these folks. Again, the Negro union hall, that we would meet people there. There would be days when we'd just all sit there and help people fill out the registration forms and practice what they were going to say, so that they would be allowed to vote.

DUNHAM: What types of things did they have to say? You couldn't just submit your card?

DICKEMANN: Well, they had to know where they were from. We were even getting people from Mississippi, which is just across the river. And they had to know what county they were in. It's not something an ordinary illiterate person pays much attention to, what county. And how do I spell it? I had one woman I remember vividly. She was from Mississippi. I never could find out how to spell her county. I don't know what happened to her. Maybe she never could vote. We didn't have any encyclopedias of counties; I didn't know how to look it up.

DUNHAM: So if you brought your registration card but you couldn't pass the oral test, they just were denied.

DICKEMANN: Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. So we were doing that. It got a little dicey. Sometimes there'd be some white people in a car who'd come racing down one of these little roads and try to scare you. But then it got dicier. There were 01:24:00about three other workers who were living in houses near mine. So we needed to go home together at night, and others going other places. Well, I had this Volkswagen van, so it became my duty to ferry these folks home, when they were near my house. We had to go down a main street in Bogalusa. Every time we went down there, there was a guy on a flatbed truck, holding a big iron rod. He'd hold it and threaten to bash in our Volkswagen bus. Now, that was an overt 01:25:00threat. But what I didn't know, and what the Deacons all knew, was that we were being followed because they wanted to know where these houses were that we were living in, so they could attack them, right?

So I'm driving. On my right -- these Volkswagens have kind of a bench seat -- two members of the Deacons riding shotgun, literally speaking, with shotguns. We get through town and there's a kind of little wooded area and the road turns into a dirt road, and I'm supposed to drive without my lights, as fast as I can go. You really can drive when your knees are knocking. [laughs] I can guarantee 01:26:00you that you really can drive. I was terrified. But I did it, night after night, just as fast as I could go. So they never did find our houses.

I don't know how much more I should go on. Then people started appearing with Molotov cocktails and waving them at us. Finally, it got so scary. I guess this is what happened next. Oh, yes, you asked me about being -- what's the word?

DUNHAM: Well, did you become armed at some point?

DICKEMANN: Yes, yes. What's the word?

DUNHAM: Deputized, as a deacon?

DICKEMANN: Deputized, thank you. Yes. That was already when we were walking, canvassing people. Yes, they gave me a gun. I was wearing -- I don't know if you 01:27:00remember what dirndl skirts where.

DUNHAM: No, I saw description and I didn't know.

DICKEMANN: [laughs] They're just really, really full. Really full. They're supposed to be some Eastern European or something.

DUNHAM: Like a square-dancing skirt? I don't know. Anyway, go ahead.

DICKEMANN: I don't know what that's like.

DUNHAM: A full skirt, okay.

DICKEMANN: They're just really full. And they had pockets. My mother had made me several of them. So I could put that in a pocket and you wouldn't see it, because there's too much fullness there. So yes, I was carrying this gun. Never used it.

So then they decided they needed to do something to distract these Klansmen, we'll call them, although they weren't necessarily all members of the Klan; they 01:28:00were just all cooperating racists. They'd do something to distract them. So what they did was they borrowed my Volkswagen bus because everybody knew who was in the Volkswagen bus; it was the CORE workers, right? Then they quickly shuffled us home on the floor of a car. They snuck us out of the labor hall, and we snuck in there after dark, and then they drove us home that way. Then they took the van and they drove it up to the home of the labor leader, the Negro labor leader, Robert Hicks. [Narrator addendum: Lance Hill, then-professor of history at Tulane, wrote The Deacons for Defense, Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), in which he inaccurately describes this incident. He did not respond to my letter offering a correction.]

There was a shootout there. Now, I don't really know what happened with the 01:29:00shootout. There are all kinds of statements and rumors, and I can't be for sure. All I know is that somebody broke the back out of my car, the back window, I believe with a brick. I don't think it was shot out. In fact, Hicks' wife and I spent hours looking all over their front lawn, for bullets or casings or something that would indicate what had happened. We never found anything; but they said there had been shooting into -- we then heard from black nurses who worked at the hospital, that there was a white man who was killed. I don't know.

DUNHAM: By gunfire?

DICKEMANN: Yeah. During this shootout. Who knows? I don't know. But anyway, that 01:30:00was done to try to detract these Klansmen from our houses, where we were living. Then it was decided this was all too hot, and we needed to go to the next stage and have a march. So they put on a march. Most of the people marching, of course, were young black kids, because that's where the population was. They marched. I was not marching in that one because I was delegated to handle the telephone. So I sat in the house of this labor leader, by the phone. Except that his wife liked to talk on the phone. [laughs] I couldn't get her off the phone. Please leave the phone open. Well, no, she had to talk to all her friends about 01:31:00what was going on. So I wasn't very useful.

DUNHAM: You were there to answer the phone, in case of an urgent problem.

DICKEMANN: Yeah, of course. So I guess nobody called me anyway. But that's what I did the first march. All right. They got set upon by all kinds of thugs, and beaten. Nobody was killed, but it wasn't nice.

DUNHAM: While marching in the march?

DICKEMANN: Yeah. Yeah. So they, in effect, were routed. Then they decided, well, you can't stop there and be defeated; we have to do something else, so we're going to have to try again. So they set up another march. Only this time, they called James Farmer, who was the founder and director of CORE, to come down and march. By this time, the mayor of the town was getting a little worried, because 01:32:00this was messing up his reputation as mayor of the town. It wasn't nice. Anyway, it is '65; a lot of terrible things have happened. But the government is beginning to -- Robert Kennedy, who did a total turnaround, had come to the point of realizing that he had to defend the rights of black people. He was Attorney General. So Farmer came down and led another march. That one, I did march in. I have a picture of that, too, with Pam. Pam and I marched together. That one was peaceful. Boy, I'll tell you, it was scary, because there's Farmer, 01:33:00Pam and I were right behind him, and there are these not-very-tall buildings in this small town. Maybe two stories, and all these people on the roofs of these buildings, watching. You just think, it takes one potshot. Of course, they would aim for James Farmer; but they didn't, thank God. It was probably very stupid of me, but I made some joke to Pamela and Mr. Farmer, as we were marching, about what an honorable bullet it would be, if it hit me. He looked around and he laughed. He understood. But he was a nice guy. But that was peaceful. Then after that, the mayor declared something that I don't remember clearly, to kind of 01:34:00cool things. Later I got a letter from Mary and Mirt Elzey, telling me about all the things the Klan had done after we left. So I'm sure there were lots of ups and downs after we left. But I'm sure also that it was a little better.

DUNHAM: Was there media at both marches? Not the second one, even, when Farmer came down?

DICKEMANN: The only media that I am aware of was that they all got a picture of the back of my blown-out bus, and it was on TV all over the goddamned South. I was so worried because, as I say, I went back to Baton Rouge. Of course, I had it repaired as quick as possible, but still, they could recognize that damn bus. I was just sure somebody would recognize it. Nobody ever did.

DUNHAM: Was that being associated with the man who was killed, maybe?

DICKEMANN: Yeah, well, whatever. It was part of the civil rights movement.

DUNHAM: Oh, just even that. But what about if a man did die, a white man did die relative to that? You're not sure if that was part of the story. Because it seems it would make it a whole lot --

DICKEMANN: Riskier. Riskier, yeah. Well, that's what they said. That's what the nurses said, or so I was told. This is all hearsay, though Professor Lance Hill concurs in his book in the nurses' report of one white death. Anyway, I was scared about the back of my bus being on TV all over Louisiana, but nothing happened.

DUNHAM: So Baton Rouge was after that?

DICKEMANN: Yeah. After that, I came back to the University of Kansas. We all came back, because spring break was over. We all came back. The students at Kansas University, having learned what was going on, decided that they would 01:36:00have a sit-in. So they called a sit-in, and I happened to have a very big class at that hour and so I told the class, "I'm sorry, I have to dismiss class and join the sit-in." I guess I tried to explain to them why. So I did. Then when I went home that night, I wrote the President of the University, and I explained to him why I had to do this. He wrote me the nicest letter back. I still have it. He recognized my imperatives. Incredible. It wouldn't have happened here. Wouldn't have happened here. No. No. He was a great president, actually. But 01:37:00anyway, so there was a sit-in.

DUNHAM: Had he been sympathetic in other ways, to the Civil Rights movement?

DICKEMANN: Not that anybody'd ever heard.

DUNHAM: And subsequent to that?

DICKEMANN: Nobody was discussing that on campus.

DUNHAM: Was he subsequent, or an ally, beyond recognition in a letter?

DICKEMANN: He set up a process, which had people on two sides. One, the students. The students had two advisors, and I don't need to tell you I became one of them. Then somebody representing the administration. I know they had a faculty advisor, too. I can't remember quite who all those people were. Of course, I didn't know them; but I remember their faculty advisor. We were to put 01:38:00our heads together and see what needed to be changed. Of course, that meant that we on the student side had to ferret out all of the cases of discrimination that we could identify on this campus. Now, I won't go through them all, because there were lots. I'm talking about management and administration; I'm not talking about some individual person said this. That wasn't the level we were working on. We were reforming the institution, to get racist practices out of the institution.

DUNHAM: So when you say management, administration, you mean only employees? Or also with students?

DICKEMANN: As students and employees and administration, the whole schmear.

DUNHAM: What was the approximate diversity of the student population, and was there any diversity in the faculty?

DICKEMANN: There was almost no diversity in the faculty. I think there might've 01:39:00been one black faculty member. I don't have a figure for the students, but there was significant numbers, and there was both a black sorority and a black fraternity on campus. Actually, it was primarily the black fraternity who organized all this. But I don't know what the numbers were. Well, anyway, so let me try to give you that outline. So we went through all of these aspects, like hiring, advertising for jobs, advertising for jobs for students, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There was no resistance to making these changes. That is maybe the answer to your question about the President. But of course, he didn't 01:40:00meddle in this thing; he just set it up. As far as I know, as far as we knew, he just stayed out of it and let it happen.

So we made all these changes, and finally we got to the school of education. Of course, we're getting rumors from all of the students who are interested in this issue. We were let to know that when they placed students -- and of course, most of their placements would be in Kansas City, Kansas, because that was where there were a lot of schools; they were placing by race. Well, they said, "No, we never do that. Here is our form, and here is how it's filled out, and there's nothing on it that shows what race the student is. So how can it be that we're 01:41:00placing by race? It doesn't happen." We didn't know how to get beyond that because of course we knew it was happening.

One night, one of the students got a phone call from somebody in Kansas City. He said, "Look on the upper right-hand corner, for a little mark. We did, and we found it. We said, "Brother, you ain't telling the truth." So they had to reform that, too. So we really reorganized the school, in terms of that problem. But of course, we had the sororities and fraternities left, and we couldn't do a thing with them. We tried. We tried.

DUNHAM: What was the issue there?

DICKEMANN: Racial discrimination. I don't know what happens here, but if you're black you can't get into a white fraternity.

DUNHAM: Okay. That's what I just wasn't clear. I thought maybe, because you'd said there were the black fraternity and sorority --

DICKEMANN: Yeah, there were.

DUNHAM: -- so I didn't know if there was an issue of them not having access to whatever. But you're just saying, but allowing for integrated sororities and fraternities.

DICKEMANN: Right, right. Right. Well, we corresponded with the headquarters and all, but they are imperturbable. They are filthy rich, and they represent the upper class. So we just couldn't make any headway with them, and that was where the whole reformation stopped.

DUNHAM: Was there discussion of trying to bar those fraternities and sororities? Or did it never get to that?

DICKEMANN: I don't remember. I imagine somebody suggested that, but I don't 01:43:00really remember that. Yeah. Then I went back to Baton Rouge. CORE had opened an office there. Well, I don't know what I was doing there. I mean I was doing several things. I kind of turned into a jack-of-all-works. I put up an intercom system there, so that the director, Ronnie Moore, could talk to us over the intercom. Then the other thing I did was I ferried people around Louisiana, to places where CORE workers were needed. I was really scared again, because I'm 01:44:00driving in my old van again. So I got an old straw hat [laughs] and put it on, because I thought it would, and it did, make them think I was just an old cracker, right? Do you know that word, cracker?

DUNHAM: Sure.

DICKEMANN: Driving up and down the roads. One night I had a van full of volunteers, and we had instructions -- way out on some highway someplace, there was a place that was going to put them up, and then they were going to do some kind of action, I don't know what. Their instructions were so vague and the place was so badly marked that we were not sure that that was the place we were 01:45:00supposed to stop, and we just didn't know what to do. Because if it was the wrong place -- right? Finally, after conferring and looking and conferring and looking, we all just turned around and came home, because we didn't dare get out of that bus, if it was the wrong place. So that's what I remember.

DUNHAM: Now, was your gender identity and sexuality another -- was it an issue at all, during your time in the South, in Louisiana? Another level of fear? Or was it something that was more hidden, in that --

DICKEMANN: No, it wasn't another level of fear. I remember in Baton Rouge, I was always in blue jeans, which really wasn't unusual during the work day. But then 01:46:00we would go to a wonderful soul food restaurant at night sometimes, and I'd still be in blue jeans. I remember one of the guys getting down on me for not putting a skirt on. That's all. That's all. There were guys who tried to hit up on you, naturally. [chuckles] The first night I moved into, there was -- what did they call it? -- a freedom house. A freedom house was a house where all the volunteers shacked up. So the first night I moved into this freedom house, two young black kids came to see me. Now, now that you mention it, they did something interesting. They wanted to share with me, something by James Baldwin. 01:47:00And what did this fellow have in his hands but -- damn it, what's the name of that novel by Baldwin, about homosexual love? Giovanni's Room.Anyway, that was the one he wanted -- I don't think that really meant anything; I think that that was just what he had. But the point is that after they had offered me this book, and I said, well, I'd read it already, then she went away. And then he tried to hit me up and spend the night with me. But other than that -- that's just standard stuff. That's just standard stuff. You know, volunteer MDs who supported the Civil Rights Movement reported that the two most prevalent diseases were ulcers and gonorrhea.

DUNHAM: There was nothing exceptional about being in that environment. It was just the same, pretty much.

DICKEMANN: Yeah.

DUNHAM: So were you in Baton Rouge for most of the summer?

DICKEMANN: About half of the summer. I had received a grant to go to Berkeley and work on some materials, from my -- I don't know what. I guess they were from Oklahoma or something. I don't know, I may've got that -- I forget what the grant was for. But anyway, so I stayed half the summer, and then I figured I'd better hurry up and go back to Berkeley and do something. I rented a little room on Walnut Street. But I much would've preferred to stay in Baton Rouge, but I was feeling guilty about this grant money that had been given. They were getting sick of volunteers -- that is to say, white volunteers -- by then.

Our leader in Baton Rouge was a really wonderful guy named Ronnie Moore, who'd been in the action for a long time. He had an eye that wandered, because he'd been hit over the head. He could make it wander and scare you with it. But he was a fine man. I got to know a lot about what the whole scene was, from him. They just felt, finally, that they were giving educational tours to a lot of white kids. Now, that had a very good effect on our country, because how else would've these kids ever learned, or their parents learned, about what was really going on? But it's just intolerable to be there and having these waves of 01:50:00ignorant, naïve whites -- even hippiedom was beginning to start -- come down there and maybe do a little good, but you feel that your primary purpose is just some kind of weird education. That was really one of the things that brought CORE to an end. Of course, as you know, then it was succeeded by more black-oriented activist organizations. The Stokely Carmichael period came. So CORE then decided to chuck all its white members, and we were chucked out.

DUNHAM: What was that literally like then?

DICKEMANN: Oh, nothing. I guess I had a card, but they didn't say, send your card in. I just read about it on the news or something. Because we didn't pay a membership fee and we didn't get paid and there weren't any records, that I know of. I don't think there were any records of so-and-so people from Kansas joined or --

DUNHAM: Okay. This is after you had left Kansas?

DICKEMANN: Yes. Well, it was after Baton Rouge. See, my last years at Kansas weren't even spent in Kansas; they were spent in Oklahoma.

DUNHAM: Doing the research on the Indian schools?

DICKEMANN: That's right. That was '66, '67. So someplace in there. I don't know, you'd have to look up in civil rights books, when CORE chucked -- and of course, CORE died, in effect. Someplace in there, '66, '67.

DUNHAM: Okay. Well, I'm interested -- I know you've probably written more about it, but -- with the Indian education project, I guess just briefly, maybe, in Oklahoma. What was it like at that time? Was it a mix of tribes and languages? What was the educational approach there then?

DICKEMANN: No. The people who hired me were a couple, Murray and Rosalie Wax, one an anthropologist and one a sociologist, at Kansas. They had previously 01:53:00studied Indian education on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the education was supplied by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It happens that Oklahoma has no reservations. People are always surprised to hear this, because it has such a large Indian population. But there are no reservations there, and so the Indians attend public school. So they wanted to see what it was like with the public schools serving the Indian population, as opposed to the Bureau's schools. So they hired me, because we all were progressive in our views.

We went down to their headquarters down there, in Tahlequah, which is the former 01:54:00capitol of the Cherokee Nation, when it was a nation. The population we were looking at were Cherokees. He set up this sequence, which is kind of right out of the sociology books, in which we had a very rural situation and a small-town situation and an urban situation. He recruited a couple of young anthropologists to go to Tulsa for the urban situation, and I was allowed to choose the rural one, because I like rurality, and they stayed in the small town, Tahlequah, he 01:55:00and his wife. That's another whole story. I don't mind telling it, but it's a long one because that also got all tangled up with -- how can I say this? -- fears and discrimination and persecution of the Indians, which of course, had been going on for years. But we just scared the hell out of them, because what were we doing looking around at our Indians.

DUNHAM: You're saying the white administrators were scared?

DICKEMANN: The white administrators. Of course, there are many levels and aspects, but the state did get involved, because the state, they had a kind of 01:56:00state security office, which followed me, tailed me, tailed my Cherokee assistant Lucille Proctor, threatened her. Finally, it became clear that the schoolteacher who had rented my house to me, Harold Wade, was coming into my house and looking around. I never went anyplace without all of my field notes in a briefcase with me, ever, because I knew that's what he wanted to read. The schoolteachers, Harold and Freda Wade, were very welcoming to me when I came; but when it became clear that I was making contact with Cherokees who were not just the local ass lickers of the white school, they got very nervous, and 01:57:00eventually, very, very hostile to me. In fact, at one point, they threatened to kick me out of the house. Of course, the Cherokees said, "Don't worry, we'll put you up in our meeting house." So there are lots of ways to tell this story, and there are lots of ways I could've done that field work differently. But the truth is that I felt that what I needed to understand, in terms of what was happening in the schools, was what was happening in the community. I know other people would've kept their nose clean and just looked at the schools. Maybe they would've found out something useful. If you want to tell it differently, you could say I was sucked into the environment, because I felt strongly what I saw. 01:58:00It certainly wasn't like Louisiana, but it certainly wasn't good. So eventually, I was kicked out of that rural location and they sent somebody else in.

DUNHAM: How so? Who made that decision?

DICKEMANN: Well, I'm skipping the fact that all of this got so tense that the -- we had a grant, a government grant from the US government. I can't even tell you how they all found out about all these goings on. But they did a site visit. Now, nobody does site visits for anthropological research, ever. But they did. 01:59:00They hired some well-known sociologist, and he came down and reviewed all our notes and stuff, stuff, stuff. Then the locals had a big meeting with the schoolteacher there and a whole lot of other people there. And the schoolteacher, who was really just playing the game to get ahead -- he was a very obvious manipulator; he accused me of killing a cow. It was quite crazy. But at that point, the directors of this project removed me from that location. [laughs] They then decided they'd had enough and they wanted to go back to Kansas. So having decided that I had wrecked the whole thing, they appointed me 02:00:00as the principal investigator to continue, and I moved into Tahlequah -- where they had been, in the town -- and continued the project. Actually, it was fizzling, but I was taking over from them.

DUNHAM: You didn't advocate for that, that just --

DICKEMANN: No. No.

DUNHAM: -- came about because they were quitting.

DICKEMANN: No. So it was kind of crazy. There's lots more to tell about it, but yeah, I got kicked out and replaced at the same time.

DUNHAM: Well, we're almost near the end of this tape. There was at least one other significant thing I told you we'd talk about, which is sort of a follow-up to your Gay Bears story. Maybe it's worth, if you're up to it -- we've talked about the photos you might bring -- scheduling one more session. Would you be up for that?

DICKEMANN: Sure. Now, tell me what you want to talk about.

DUNHAM: Sure. Well, why don't we go ahead and wrap up today, unless there's anything else you want to add, particularly, today.

DICKEMANN: I can't think of anything.

[end of interview]