00:00:00FUREY: It is November 12, 2002, and here we are with Howard Thor. This is
interview session one, tape number one. So, Mr. Thor, why don't we just start
off with where you were born, and talk a little bit about your parents, and
where they're from.
THOR: Yes, I was born in San Francisco, lets see, in 1923. We moved from there
when I was still quite young to San Pedro. My father was a deck officer on the
steam schooners at that time. So was my uncle. San Pedro was one of the ports
00:01:00for the steam schooner lumber trade. I got sick down there with celiac sprue and
tuberculosis, and was in a sanitarium for about six months down there. Then we
moved up to Oakland--oh, I was about four years old--for a short time around
62nd Street and Sacramento Street, with some friends who lived next door. They
owned the house. Captain Lervik owned the house. He worked on Mare Island. Then
we went to Berkeley, built a house there, 1616 Stannage Avenue, Berkeley. Lived
00:02:00there until the war. I guess we moved out of there in 1941, after I graduated
from Berkeley High School.
FUREY: Could you talk about where your parents are from and maybe how they met?
What their background is, religious, kind of a quick summary?
THOR: Well, my father was born in Finland, I think in Helsinki, the capital. He
had a couple of sisters, but I've never met anybody in the family even though
I've been to Finland, briefly. My mother was born in England. There was about a
ten-year age difference between them. She worked on a farm; her father was a
sharecropper, I think, a tenant farmer in England. I lived on that farm for
about six months when I was about seven years old. Neither one, I think, went to
00:03:00school after about the age of 14. My father went to sea. And my mother, I guess,
became a housekeeper for some of the rich estates in the area.
FUREY: She went into service.
THOR: Yes, that was customary. During the war she worked in a munitions plant
around London, and after the war she became a conductress on the double-decker
buses there in London. I guess my father was on shore leave. I'm not sure if he
was on an American ship, probably an American ship. In fact, he was in the
American Navy during the First World War. Then she came over here around--I'm
00:04:00not sure, shortly after the war and they got married. In any case, I guess the
first place they lived was in San Francisco, where I was born.
FUREY: So you came back to live in Oakland. How old were you?
THOR: I figure about four. I got some pictures in the family album. Yes, about four.
FUREY: So, you start school before the Depression. Can you talk a little bit
about your education years and then how the Depression affected your
young--because you must have been coming into your teenage years during the
Depression, and what that experience was like.
00:05:00
THOR: Well, the Depression hit in October of 1929, October, November. I think
kind of a strange thing; my father wanted to have my mother and my sister and I
go to England for a trip. I think he bought the tickets and made the
arrangements before the Depression hit, because a few months after it hit we got
on a steamer, left San Francisco, through the Panama Canal, went to New York and
then on another ship to England. It was early 1930. We were there for six
months. The whole trip was six months long. We stayed on my grandfather's farm,
and the Depression was just getting under way then. My father was having a hard
time making ends meet, and probably I wouldn't have made the trip had it been a
00:06:00little later in the Depression. My father was a longshoreman, and of course, my
mother was a housewife. We went over, by the way, on the Oceanic, which was the
sister ship of the Titanic. It was built just a couple of years before the
Titanic, almost identical, except for a few minor changes. I had a bunch of
postcards of the Oceanic at that time. I was only seven years old when I made
that trip. I lost all the cards of course, when I was a little kid, but since
that time I started collecting postcards of pictures of ships.
When we came back, I think I probably had to repeat a grade in grammar school
because I was away for six months, kind of a vague memory there. We lived only
00:07:00half a block away from Franklin Grammar School. That was really a key area for
recreation for us, a lot of activity there, athletics, et cetera. Went to
Burbank Junior High, which is now I think the West Campus of Berkeley High. It's
around Chestnut and University Avenue. I had a bicycle by then, so I biked
there. Then I went to Berkeley High, which is a little ways further. Biked up
into that area.
But my father died right in the middle of the Depression, 1934. He was a
longshoreman. He quit going to sea, I think, when I was born.
FUREY: How did he die?
THOR: He died of a heart attack, but it was on the picket line in the big
longshoreman's strike, actually The West Coast seaman's strike and
00:08:00longshoreman's strike of 1934. He died two days before Bloody Thursday, July
5th, 1934. He died July 3rd of a heart attack. He had all kinds of health problems.
FUREY: He was active in the organization for the--?
THOR: Yes, he ran for the executive committee of the longshoremen's union. It
was called the ILA then, later became the ILWU [International Longshore and
Warehouse Union]. He was one of the radicals, of a radical persuasion,
politically. Didn't see eye-to-eye with Harry Bridges, because they were on
opposite ends of the radical spectrum, you might say. We had meetings at our
00:09:00house. People like Jack London's daughter, came to the meetings, and [Barney
Moss?], who later changed his name to Barney Mayes, and some of the other people
who were identified at that time as Trotskeyites.
FUREY: What were some of your memories of those meetings? Would you just kind of
play around?
THOR: Well, my mother was kind of out of it. Like I say, she was not politically
active, but my father was very politically active. Probably started on the West
Coast ships. A lot of the West Coast ships had a large Scandinavian crew and a
lot of the seamen and also workers in the lumber camps, joined the Industrial
Workers of the World, the Wobblies. I think he might have gotten his early
background from the Wobbly experience on the ships and went on from there. He
00:10:00did a lot of reading and, I thought, was well-educated, even though he hadn't
gone to school since the age of 14. He had three inventions. Took me to an
inventor's convention in Oakland at {Hotel Leamington, I remember, when I was a
little kid. He had, as I say, these health problems. I inherited similar health
problems, like this celiac sprue. At that time, that disease had not been
identified by medical science. He took a lot of Chinese herbs and things like
that. He did have a heart attack. They thought it might have been through
something connected with the strike, because the strike went on quite a while.
FUREY: I can imagine. Probably not sleeping that much during the strike.
THOR: Well, two men were killed two days later, shot by the police in front of
00:11:00the union hall in San Francisco. I think over twenty were wounded. In other
ports also, there was a lot of gunplay. So it was a very violent strike. That's
why the longshoremen's union still celebrates Bloody Thursday. I try to get to
their celebrations every year. But the Depression really didn't affect us until
that moment, until he died, because even though the amount of work longshoremen
got during the Depression slacked off considerably, he still made a living.
After that, of course, my mother was left pretty well destitute and was quite
upset with the people that used to come around for the meetings, because they no
longer came around. She was left alone. She waited on tables at some Berkeley
00:12:00restaurant, and then cleaned house for some of the richer people in Berkeley,
then, wherever she could find a job. Finally got a job as a cook for the
Franklin Grammar School, and at that time they only had one person that bought
the food, prepared it, cleaned up, and collected the money and that person was
my mother. But of course, we got the scraps and were able to survive, but it was
tough until she remarried about four years later. Married another former seaman;
he had been a chief engineer. He had quit going to sea during the First World
War when he went from the British Merchant Marine to the British Army and got
00:13:00wounded at the end of his career. He went into real estate.
FUREY: He was Finnish?
THOR: He was part Finnish. He was part American Indian. His father was this
famous--I shouldn't say famous--but notorious Western shootist that is
associated with the Earp brothers, Wyatt Earp and his brothers in Tombstone, Arizona.
FUREY: What was his father's name?
THOR: His name was Buckskin Frank Leslie, and my stepfather's name was John
Leslie. I've never been able to really certify the fact that that was his
father, but everything fits. Everything I've read about Buckskin Frank Leslie,
00:14:00it fits. He was of Scottish descent.
FUREY: He was born in America.
THOR: Yes, his mother was probably American Indian and Finnish, a combination of
the two, so he was part Scottish, Finnish, and American Indian. But he looked
Indian, quite a bit like an Indian. But he spoke--he was brought up mainly in a
Finnish mining community near Tombstone, so he still had a very strong Finnish
accent. But he evidently went to Cornell University and graduated as an
engineer, became a licensed chief engineer on British merchant ships. And then,
when the war came along in this country--well, my mother met him in Berkeley at
the Finn Hall, the radical Finn Hall, the one on Tenth Street. The other one
split off, the one on Chestnut Street, the non-radical Finns. They're the
00:15:00people, I think, that started the co-op movement in Berkeley. Perhaps the other
Finns had something to do with it, also. I'm not quite sure. Come to think of
it, it might have been the Tenth Street Hall that started it, it would stand to reason.
FUREY: You said your mother was very much left alone during the Depression.
THOR: Then, she remarried around 1938, I would say, about four years later.
FUREY: Did she feel a lot of shame for being a single woman, or was it just the
fact that it was so hard to get by?
THOR: Oh, it was hard to get by. She was really struggling and alone. I was only
00:16:00eleven years old. I can remember a lot of the friends, especially the married
friends. My mother was a nice-looking woman and she was only thirty-six when my
father died. And a lot of these women would get upset when she came around to
visit bringing two kids--or despite the fact she brought two kids [laughs]--some
of the women would get upset because they thought maybe their husband would take
a liking to my mother. It happened several times. It was upsetting to her, so
that made it even worse as far as loneliness. Of course, a lot of my father's
friends were Finnish; she couldn't speak the language. She continued to see a
few of them, but that part was the first part, and trying to make ends meet, of
course. We almost lost the house; the house wasn't paid for, we had a veteran's
00:17:00loan. I think we were able to make arrangements whereby we paid only the
interest on the loan at that time until times got better. So we were able to
keep the house, but people all around were losing their houses. I remember as a
kid seeing whole families on the streets with their belongings, thrown out of
their houses in Berkeley, things like that.
Then, my father had built a house in the back. I guess the intent was to use it
as a playhouse for my sister, but it expanded and then he decided to build a
complete house and rent it out, but he never finished it. My stepfather, when he
came along in 1938, finished it, and rented it out. But then they bought a bar
00:18:00on University and Tenth Street, where there were already two existing bars.
Competition was very stiff, and it was still 1938, so they lost it. I think they
took a mortgage on the small equity we had in the house and used that for
starting the business, but they went broke. It was only the fact that the war
had started in Europe in late '39, and I think we were making some efforts to
build ships before that.
So, we were coming out of the Depression slightly and as they started building
00:19:00the Richmond shipyards and other industries around there in Richmond, he had the
idea that he might be able to buy some property there. He looked into it and
found this rooming house and bar on the corner of West Richmond and Railroad
Avenue, across from the Natatorium. By some fancy financial dealings--I'll never
know how he did it [laughs]--I don't think he had a down payment even, but
because the shipyards were starting and because maybe he had some real estate
background, he was able to buy that property. Well, at least get a down payment
on it. Fixed up the bar and he fixed up the rooms, which he rented out to
shipyard workers. My mother helped in the bar.
00:20:00
FUREY: Where were you living?
THOR: Well, this was in probably the middle of '41 when I graduated from
Berkeley High, and then almost immediately after that we moved there to that bar
and rooming house. Then I started UC [University of California, Berkeley] in the
fall semester of '41 and commuted from Point Richmond to Berkeley daily for a year.
FUREY: In '39, what was Richmond like?
THOR: Well, the population was relatively small. Point Richmond was very small.
It was a stable community.
FUREY: Point Richmond, at least now from what I see of it in the architecture,
was kind of more of the upper class or middle-class.
00:21:00
THOR: I had a friend through the tunnel there, on the other side of Nickle Hill.
His father had a little boat facility where they had a winch and they'd take
boats out for repair. They would do a little repair work. There were a lot of
people that worked at Standard Oil; they had a lot of working-class people
there. Of course, Standard Oil was the big industry there at that time, about
the only industry. The Ford plant, of course, was up on Tenth Street.
FUREY: Which later they used to build and make tanks, right?
THOR: I forget exactly when they shut that Ford plant down, but that was going
for a long time. Maybe during the Depression they had problems, but it was
mainly Standard Oil that ran the city, more or less. Downtown Richmond had
00:22:00department stores and they had a big theater there. Point Richmond had a little
theater there, called "The Point," which was just around the corner from me,
couple doors down. They had quite a few bars. They had {Schwartz's} Ballroom on
Tenth Street near Macdonald, which sprang up when the shipyards started to build.
FUREY: What was the pre-war Richmond? Because, you got there in '39, right before.
THOR: Middle of '41.
FUREY: Oh, you moved there in the middle of '41, but he bought the house in '39.
THOR: He bought the house just before we moved. He was fixing it up while we
were still living in Berkeley, see. Then once he got it fixed up we figured we
could live there and he could operate the bar, and rent the rooms out to
shipyard workers. It was probably six months later.
FUREY: So by the time you moved out there, had all three shipyards been up and running?
THOR: No. I started work in Yard Three in the summer of '42. I had put in a year
00:23:00at UC and figured I'd be drafted, I had to get into something. Pearl Harbor had
occurred six months previous to that. So I went to work in the yard, figuring
that I had to earn some money doing something. Went in the yard as--I guess my
title was "Shipfitter's Helper," but my job was actually to take these large
hull plates for the ships on flatbed railroad cars, get a crane, take them off
the flatbeds and put them in big wooden racks, then paint the numbers on the
edge of each of the plates to determine where they are going to be located on
00:24:00the ships. It was a day job, to begin with. An easy job. I finished the job in a
couple hours, and then I could read if I want, as long as I wasn't in an area
where a lot of supervisors were walking around.
I did get into trouble there once, though. I walked around the yard--it was very
interesting. Didn't even have a fence around it yet, it was that new. In places
it didn't have a fence. It was fascinating, because they were building the ships
in these huge cement basins, and when the ship was finished, they'd flood the
basin, open the gate, and launch the ship. It was fascinating. You could see all
the work going on by just walking around these huge basins. So that's what I did
00:25:00after I finished my job. One day, a supervisor asked me what my job was, and I
told him what it was and that I'd finished. And he wanted me to go back, get the
same crane crew, take all the plates off and put them from one end to the other
end, and when I was finished with that, put 'em back where they belonged. I
refused to do it. I didn't tell him that I wouldn't do it, but I walked away. It
might have been another couple of occasions where I was reading after I finished
the job, not wanting to walk around anymore.
But in any rate, I was there for quite a few months. My stepfather, in the
meantime, had gone to work for Yard One as a chief engineer at the trial crew.
00:26:00They were building Liberty ships for England I think, at that time. He told me
that there was an opening, so I went down, got a job as an oiler on the trial
crew, which was a fascinating job compared to the one I had quit in Yard Three.
This was Yard One. He helped a lot of the oilers get their engineers' papers,
because later when I got mine, I saw some of them at the Marine Engineers' Union
Hall. They told me about how he helped them. Some days we didn't have a lot to
do. I'd bring some marine engineering books down and we'd study marine
engineering, that kind of thing.
But on the day of the trials, we were extremely busy because for some reason
00:27:00they wanted to run these engines near full speed. Not top speed, but nearly.
They'd be running them very fast for four hours ahead and four hours astern.
Well, with the kind of an engine like that, reciprocating engine, the backing
guides, the guides that take the brunt of the force of the crosshead, when
you're running astern don't have the surface area to take all that force, so
they'd start heating up. So we'd have to get one of these squirt guns like a
turkey baster and squirt oil on the guides, keep them from burning up and that
kind of thing. That part was hectic. When we weren't actually testing a main
00:28:00engine, we would go up on deck and adjust the bearings on the winches. They were
steam winches, cargo winches, and also the anchor windless and the steering
engine, equipment like that, and make sure the bearings in the shaft alley had
oil in the oil sumps and all the things you have to do to get ready for a trial.
So we kept fairly busy, much busier than I was on that other job in Yard Three.
About half of the crew really didn't have experience on ships, but they were
00:29:00breaking in, like I was. I guess that was true with most of the jobs in the
Yard. There were probably more experienced people on the job I was on, because
they had to have a fireman who knew what he was doing with the boilers and this
kind of thing.
My stepfather, who was chief engineer, pointed out one day that a lot of some of
the higher position jobs were politically influenced. He said, "Watch this
fellow coming down the ladder in a white boiler suit." He said, "He's an
inspector. He works for the government. Watch what he does." And of course, all
00:30:00he did was go down all the way to the bottom and look in the bilge with a
flashlight and walk up. He was supposed to approve the whole thing. I think he
got his license from the ferryboats. He was probably a ferryboat engineer at one
time, but he had been selling real estate since the First World War, probably.
FUREY: And they hooked him up with this job to be in the war industry.
THOR: Came up with that job as inspector because of some political dealings. I
know he was a big wheel in the Masonic club, but I don't know whether that was
the key reason why he got the job. There was that type of thing going on,
probably always will be that type of thing going on. But he was no help at all,
as far as building ships.
FUREY: So by '42, there weren't many blacks working in the shipyards?
THOR: I remember in grammar school, for instance, we only had one black, and
00:31:00that was West Berkeley. Franklin School's right on San Pablo Avenue, just about
five blocks north of University Avenue. I think there was just one black in that
school. There was a Filipino family around the corner and there were about three
Scandinavian families and about three Italian families, a Puerto Rican family
all in that same block. We had a mixture, but even in Burbank Junior High there
were only a couple of blacks. What few black families there were in Berkeley
were mainly around Ashby Avenue, kind of a steady community there. But in the
shipyards at the beginning, very few, of course. A lot came in, just a lot of
00:32:00people from Texas and Oklahoma, Arkansas, states like that came in, whites and blacks.
FUREY: That was right before you left to go in the Merchant Marines is when
people started coming. It was men like you who left and kind of vacated, so
there were lots of jobs.
THOR: Well, even before that when shipyards were starting they actively
recruited them in the Midwest. So I guess the word had to get out. Also, the
shipyards had to be built and word had to get out, but there was certainly room
for all of them.
FUREY: You said before, when we chatted, that during the summer of '42 is when
all these young men were going out in droves. What was the feeling among young people?
THOR: It was a funny feeling, to see all your friends leaving. [laughs] I
00:33:00expected to leave; we put in our applications in the summer of '42 for the
Merchant Marine Academy. We looked at many different options. In fact, when I
was looking through my photo album I noticed that a couple of them went into the
Air Force. One was killed in training, and the other one didn't make a career of
it, but he was in for quite a while in the Air Force.
FUREY: So that was a big wake-up call for you, when you saw your friend--.
THOR: Right. We got our draft notices and we had to make a decision. Some went
in the Army; a couple of them tried to get in the Merchant Marine Academy. One
of my friends got in the Merchant Marine Academy, got to the basic school,
almost immediately flunked out before I could even get down there. Because I
00:34:00didn't get called until April of '43, even though I signed up in the summer of
'42. Another friend of mine signed up quite a bit later than I did, but he got
called the same day I did. In fact, we were in the same class and we were on the
same ship together. In fact, we were on three ships together. Another one, he
tried to get in the Merchant Marine Academy but they didn't process his papers
in a timely manner, so he joined the Navy, became part of a gun crew on merchant
ships. So he did end up on a merchant ship. Of course, he was in the Navy, and
the gun crew is not quite the same thing. Another went straight Navy on a
destroyer. I joined the Navy as an apprentice seaman so I wouldn't get drafted.
But the Navy did promise that they wouldn't call me immediately. They gave the
00:35:00Merchant Marine Academy three months to call me, because once you're in the
Merchant Marine Academy you're a midshipman, Naval Reserve. So if the Merchant
Marine Academy called me, I'd still be Naval Reserve.
FUREY: So you were exempt from the draft.
THOR: Right, exempt from the draft and also the Navy people would be satisfied
that I would be performing more of a needed function. The Merchant Marine
Academy needed engineers more than the Navy needed apprentice seamen. But it was
touch-and-go. I even quit my job in the shipyard in March of '43, because they
had given me word that I was going to be called any minute. Then I wasn't really
called until April. I had about a month there at home before I was called.
00:36:00
FUREY: Kind of like the Marines now.
THOR: I was reading a lot of marine engineering. I figured I'd be one step up on it.
FUREY: So you told me before that there was, around the Schwartz Ballroom and
the boarding house there, this whole culture that was going on, nightlife in
Richmond. I'm wondering also about the feeling of the summer of '42 when all
these young men were about to go away. Did that have an influence on--I imagine
it was kind of romantic for young men, they're saying good-bye to their
girlfriends, "I'm leaving, I'm going--." What was that social scene like?
THOR: I'll give you an example. Schwartz Ballroom on Tenth Street near
Macdonald, founded by the Schwartz family and the orchestra, or band was made up
00:37:00of members of the Schwartz family. It was on Saturday nights, mainly. I went
there once I moved to Point Richmond. We moved there some time in the latter
part of '41 and I had to commute to Berkeley, of course. But it didn't really
get going until after that, after the shipyard workers started moving in. I
remember before my leaving in April of '43, the ratio of women to men was
fantastic from the point of view of all these men and boys had gone and here we
were, left with all these women straight out of Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas.
It was fantastic.
00:38:00
FUREY: [laughter] Were you active--did you date a lot of women?
THOR: Oh, Yes. I met quite a few. But one I saw quite often. In fact, I invited
her to our dance down at the Merchant Marine basic school at Coyote Point. We
only got two overnights on liberty. One, we had to give a pint of blood and we
got an overnight liberty, and the other one was after the dance, since some of
the girls lived out of town and we got an overnight to drive them home. So out
of the ten weeks, I only got two overnights. Some of the bars, too. This one,
this girl named Tilly, [chuckles] she was an usherette in the Point Theater,
which was around the corner.
FUREY: In Point Richmond.
THOR: Yes, in Point Richmond, just around the corner from our boardinghouse and
00:39:00bar. My room was just on the ground floor, on the end on Railroad Avenue. When
the box office closed, she'd come over and knock on the windows and let me in
for the last show. Of course, I had to drive her home at night. She lived down
the other side of Macdonald. Her uncle owned a bar up on San Pablo in Richmond.
But there were quite a few bars there and I can't remember the name of it. I
only went there a couple of times. The last time was when we finished the
round-the-world trip, just after the war. She was the barmaid there.
Some of the theaters were open all night. Some of the shipyard workers, of
course, slept in the theaters. Rooms were at a premium. And of course, in cars
00:40:00and things like that, too. Before the war, we used to go out to Sweet's Ballroom
in Oakland. It was all the big bands, Louie Armstrong, all those people were
there on Saturday night. It was a fantastic place to go. That continued, of
course, right up through the war, but the last time I was there was April '43.
That would be the last time I went there until after the war, because all during
the war I had only a couple days home. I was mostly in the Pacific. As far as
the other recreation was concerned, people went out of town. A lot of people
that had cars could go out of town, if they weren't satisfied with what Richmond
00:41:00had to offer in terms of entertainment.
FUREY: Where would people go?
THOR: Mainly I would say that the people that liked to drink, went to those
bars, all along San Pablo. There was a gambling place that Blackjack Jerome had,
where the mall is now in El Cerrito. There used to be a racetrack and they had
gambling, casinos. There were some bars that had slot machines behind a curtain
in a back room. They didn't have a lot of them, but they had a few. There were a
lot of bars and some had underhanded gambling.
Of course, the Natatorium was a big attraction, people swimming. Still is, I'm
00:42:00told. Recently it closed, lack of funds for remodeling. I was gone during a good
part of the war, so I can't really tell you.
FUREY: I think this might be a little bit later when a lot of the newcomers,
migrant workers, come in, where lots of social problems occurred. A lot of
vagrancy, bar fights, stabbings, was there much of that going on? Were there
ever fights?
THOR: Well, in Oakland at Sweets Ballroom, there used to be a few fights, but
not many. Nobody had any guns; it was unheard of. In fact, if somebody used a
knife that would be really an extreme case. I don't remember ever locking my
00:43:00door. In fact, when I was living to Cloyne Court Co-op, when I was going to UC
after the war, we never even locked the front door on it. When I went to visit
my son, who was at Cloyne in the 1970's, I couldn't get in. The door was locked
in the daytime! That kind of surprised me. But in Richmond, I don't remember
ever locking up. In Berkeley, I don't remember locking the door. Now, you better
put a couple of double locks on there. [laughs]
FUREY: Is it '42 when the Alien Land Act happens? Then, later the Japanese were
relocated to camps. You said that you had some Japanese friends; can you talk a
little bit about that?
THOR: Yes, at Berkeley High, a couple of them were very good friends of mine.
00:44:00Some of them went to Cal with me, UC, that first year, '41-'42. Then, of course,
I remember Pearl Harbor, hearing about. I was studying in Point Richmond and
eleven o'clock, I remember having the radio on. I heard the news, and a couple
of months later, they were rounded up and taken to different camps, relocation
or concentration camps. I got letters from about three of them who were later
shipped off to different parts of the country. One went to an all-girls school
back East. He was probably quite happy there.They thought he was Filipino
instead of Japanese, I don't how that--. This is what he told me later. But the
00:45:00other one went to the University of Chicago later, studied architecture, is
still an architect in San Francisco. I lost track of the third one. But, it was
kind of devastating to all of us. These people, some of them were more American
than I was. You'd go over to their house, I remember this one had a big jazz
record collection, both he and his brother. They were more up on that than I
was. Their folks, of course, couldn't speak a lot of English; they were born in
Japan, but the kids were 100 percent American.
FUREY: Your mother obviously spoke English; she was from England, but your father--
00:46:00
THOR: Yes, my mother had problems with grammar and things like that. When you're
brought on the English farm area, you don't have the opportunities and all that.
FUREY: The Cockney, or--
THOR: Not so much Cockney, but you hear a lot of grammatical errors. My father,
he had a pretty good accent. Not as broad as my stepfather; my stepfather had a
really broad Finnish accent.
FUREY: And he was from America.
THOR: He was from America. Born in Tombstone, Arizona, evidently. Brought up in
that Finnish mining community, you see.
FUREY: Insulated.
THOR: He didn't speak much English, whereas my father from the age of 14 on,
00:47:00went on ships with different nationalities. In fact, he could speak a lot of
German, a lot of French and taught himself English. In fact, he was teaching my
sister and I French for about six months before he died. We had a full notebook
and each day we'd put a new phrase in there. Had a little French book with
pronunciation and all that. In fact, I was taking violin lessons, too. They were
paying for me to have violin lessons some place on University Avenue. When these
radical groups came over for meetings, I remember I had to play the violin for
them, to demonstrate that their money wasn't being thrown away. [laughter]
FUREY: [laughter] Did you remain friends with a couple of those Japanese guys
after they had come back?
THOR: With one of them; I lost track of the other two, but one of them I still
00:48:00see. He lives in the area.
FUREY: Did they feel--did they resent it a lot?
THOR: They don't like to talk about it, and I don't like to talk about it with
them. This one, he invited me to a talk at the Oakland Museum last year. The
person giving the lecture was talking about this, but other than that, very
seldom do we talk about things like that. Just probably something that's painful.
FUREY: I can imagine.
THOR: I don't like to bring it up. A lot of people think that because they got
twenty thousand dollars by this act of Congress, that it's justified, the action
00:49:00taken then. Other ethnic groups are using that as a model, saying that because
they got it, we should get it because of this and that. But its, not quite the same.
I was in Japan right after the war. In fact, this year we were in Hiroshima, my
wife and I. But right after the war, I made a trip to Japan. It was devastating
to see what bombing can do. I was in Yokohama and Tokyo, and they were leveled.
Just about like Hiroshima.
FUREY: Cities were just completely flattened.
THOR: Yes, mainly by firebombs.
FUREY: We should get back to your work experience in the shipyards. Could you go
00:50:00into a little more about being an oiler and what some of the memories you have
of that experience? Things that kind of impressed upon you?
THOR: My stepfather taught me a lot of things about how they did it on British
ships at the time of the First World War and before the First World War.
Actually, the Liberty Ship engines were designed back in the 1880s for British
tramp steamers. We adopted them because there was an engine-plant down in the
00:51:00Peninsula, for one thing, that was equipped to make these engines. Joshua Hendy,
I think. Also, they were relatively simple to repair, and to operate. They were
low pressure boilers that didn't require the care for operating that
high-pressure boilers did. High-pressure boilers, of course, are very sensitive
to impurities, salinity, this kind of thing. You have to be very careful to
operate them properly, otherwise you get massive leaks. Low-pressure boilers
have the same problem but not to the same degree. So that was another reason,
they were easier, in that sense, to operate. A lot of the people that came off
of ships didn't have experience with high-pressure boilers. Some of them didn't
have experience with turbine engines. They were used to these reciprocating
00:52:00engines. So that was another reason that that type of engine was used.
I remember my stepfather saying how on British ships during that First World War
period, they kept track of how much oil the oilers would use. You had to use oil
very sparingly. They kept track of that. He made me a little oil can that I
could hold in my hand, made out of sheet metal, copper, I guess, peened. You
could use that to get the oil in the cups as the cups were moving on the engine;
you could squirt that oil in those cups. Showed me how to feel the bearings of
the cranks as the cranks were coming around. You can get your hand in there--you
00:53:00can't have any loose clothing, or anything like that would catch so that you'd
be thrown into the pit. It was easy once you had done it a couple of times, but
it looked frightening when that engine is going full speed to have that huge
crank coming at you. Then to get your hand in there to feel how it is, if it's
getting hot. There were a lot of little things like that involved with the job
of oiling on one of those.
As a fireman, you had to watch for the water level in the boiler, make sure that
you always maintain proper water level, this kind of thing. They weren't
automated. The turbine ships usually had some sort of automated device which
00:54:00would maintain the steam pressure fairly constant, except on the Victory ships.
On the Victory ships, you often had to do that by hand. Same thing with the
water level in the boiler. On the Liberty ships, you had more time to react;
everything was happening much slower. You could usually set your steam pressure,
set your water level and it would he maintained, unless you were going to change
the speed of on the engine. But you had to be alert and watch those things.
FUREY: Now both the Liberty and Victory ships, at least in Richmond, they were
built in this new prefabrication system, right? Before, ships were built--
THOR: Yes, [Henry J.]Kaiser, I don't know if he innovated that, or started it,
but he certainly put it into extensive practice. I was at Yard Three first and
00:55:00we made the C-4 type of ships. Again, instead of using a lot of rivets, welding
was done predominately. And the ships were built in sections and they had these
huge cranes. They lay the keel first, of course, and then they put the double
bottoms in by sections, and then your steel plates, and then your houses.
Section by section. But we mostly welded; there would be a few rivets for the
framing, internally, but almost all welding. Prefabricating, of course, made it
possible to turn one of those ships out I think in four and a half days. That
was a record.
FUREY: And the deckhouses were built, and they would bring the whole deckhouse
in on a crane. Before, they would--kind of like you're building a house.
00:56:00
THOR: They did that with every part. The double-bottoms were built in sections,
and the hulls were built--they put the huge bulkheads in as a bulkhead. They'd
weld them ashore and put 'em in by crane. The same with the decks and then the
houses, and the mast houses, also. All prefab, period.
FUREY: So everyone, even the people who had experience, was not used to building
ships in the way that Kaiser was. So even the experienced people were kind of new.
THOR: I'm sure, almost all of them. Maybe a few people had done this before, but
in the upper levels, the managers and engineers, this kind of thing, but I don't
00:57:00think any of the lower echelon people had any experience doing this.
FUREY: Did you ever see Kaiser around?
THOR: My wife did. My wife was a nurse in his hospitals and he came around to
visit. She worked in the Oakland hospital quite a bit, in the emergency room.
FUREY: In Herrick?
THOR: She worked in Herrick first until the big strike in 1951. They all got
fired after going on strike, and so she went to Kaiser Oakland and stayed there
until she retired. My son worked for Kaiser for 12 years as a doctor, and my
daughter is a nurse. She's still there, at Kaiser. But I'm not sure. My wife
00:58:00talks about seeing Harry Bridges in the hospital. He had ulcers and he was one
of her patients at one time out there. She asked if he knew my father, and oh
Yes, he knew my father very well.
FUREY: He's the ILWU head.
THOR: Yes, head of it.
FUREY: So, going back to Kaiser. From what I've read, he's sort of looked at as
this fatherly figure. There was a lot of patriotism going on one side, and then
there was a lot of trust that was put in Kaiser. You know, "Kaiser can do it."
What was the motivating factor? You talk to a lot of people--and this may lead
to the later period because you're kind of in the pre-migration period--where
00:59:00they say that there was this patriotism and they felt like they were being a
part of this.
THOR: You mean the people that worked there.
FUREY: Yes, people who worked in the shipyards--welders and--
THOR: I was generally on-board ships. The people I saw during the war didn't
have to be there. I mean, there were some fifteen-year-old kids that they didn't
ask for their age, or I guess let them go. Or they had lied about their age or
whatever, but they were young kids. Quit high school and went out as wipers. I
took pictures; some of them were on my first ship, a tanker. Then I had a
fireman who had one eye and an electrician who had only one eye. They didn't
have to go. They weren't going to be drafted.
01:00:00
FUREY: This is in the Merchant Marines.
THOR: Yes. In the shipyard, of course, you had mainly women working there when
it ended.
FUREY: I think it was in June or July of '43 when the Boilermakers union opened
up to blacks and women.
THOR: Yes, '43.
FUREY: That leads me to the whole union question: what union were you a part of?
THOR: Marine Engineers. In the shipyard, Shipfitters Union. I was an apprentice
in the Shipfitters Union.
FUREY: In the hierarchy of unions, is that one above Boilermakers?
THOR: I wouldn't say that.
FUREY: It's just different.
THOR: Yes, different, that's all. As far as discrimination goes, during the war,
discrimination still existed in some of the Maritime unions. Where they did have
01:01:00blacks, they confined the blacks to the stewards department. They couldn't
become members of the engine department or the deck department. Other maritime
unions brought in blacks or let blacks become members, and could work in any of
the departments.
FUREY: Shipfitters was also--
THOR: I'm not familiar with it.
FUREY: By that point, there probably wasn't that much of a question about it
because there weren't that many blacks or women that were trying to get in.
THOR: Yes, before the shipyards started there weren't. That's one thing I would
say the shipyards did, is--well, it brought in the migration--but it opened up
jobs and trades where they couldn't work before, blacks and women.
01:02:00
FUREY: Do you remember any incidents where blacks were working?
THOR: No.
FUREY: You don't remember any blacks working in the shipyards?
THOR: No, I can't remember any at that time, in the two jobs I had. But I can
remember incidents on ships where blacks got into the union, even though the
union was discriminatory. I remember one in particular--
FUREY: We can start this in a minute, because I need to change the tapes.
[Interview interruption]
[begin file Thor2 11-12-02]
THOR: The incidents that I mentioned, I was on a ship. It was right after the
war, and I remember going down in the engine room and instead of having one
oiler down there, there were two oilers. They were both black. It seemed kind of
01:03:00strange, but these two, I guess, had gone to court, were able to get by the
discrimination by some sort of court order. But they were so afraid of maybe
doing a wrong thing on the job that both of them were there together instead of
having one on the 4 to 8 watch and the other on the 8 to 12 watch, they both
were standing the watches together. It was very strange. I felt sorry for them,
because they were terrified that they were going to do the wrong thing or that
somebody was going to frame them. I don't know what happened to them. But in my
own union, the Marine Engineers Union, I witnessed discrimination.
FUREY: During World War II, or after?
THOR: During World War II, of course. Right up until the 1950s, I remember going
01:04:00into the union meeting, one during the 1950s. Usually when somebody applies for
membership in the union, he fills out an application, of course, but then at the
next meeting the members vote on that. They have a little box with white balls
and black balls in there and they ask the members to act on the application.
Usually, in almost every case, one or two people come up and put a white ball in
there and then the members then accept him. The member doesn't attend that
meeting, of course, that meeting. This had been going on for years, this type of
thing. Finally I went to a meeting during the '50s and somebody said, "There's
01:05:00going to be a special case during the voting on new members." Word, word of
mouth, got around that a black engineer was involved. I'm not sure what license
he had then, but he later got a chief engineer's license. I hadn't met him; I
didn't know who I was voting on. No words were said, just his name. Instead of
one or two going up there and putting a white ball in, 35 people lined up! I
counted them. It was a close vote. I think he lost by only a couple of votes,
but then he went to the New York local and he got in there. They probably had a
similar system, but it had a different outcome. Later he sailed and became chief
01:06:00engineer of a ship. I met him and we talked about what happened. He turned out
to be very nice, and a skilled engineer.
That more or less broke the ice, and as time went on and other things happened.
There were a couple other blacks that got in. Some got in through the New York
local and then because they lived out here, transferred to our local. But there
were only a handful, three or four. Most of them turned out to be very good engineers.
FUREY: Now the Merchant Marines are not predominately white anymore. Lots of
01:07:00Filipinos and a lot of--
THOR: No, there's no effort that I'm aware of now to keep out minorities. Of
course, a lot of them come in through the Maritime Academies. In fact, my union
had its own cadet school for a while. That was the gist of my lawsuit, that they
were discriminating against Maritime Academy graduates. My union later
discontinued the cadet school entirely. It's now an upgrading school. Now
members can go for additional courses, upgrade their license. But discrimination
now in my union might be on a personal basis, but I don't think it's on a union basis.
FUREY: Let's talk about your last few months living in Richmond before you
01:08:00shipped out.
THOR: I got awful lonely, I'll tell you that; awful lonely because by March, I
quit that job--
FUREY: '43.
THOR: Yes, and then left the next month of April to go to cadet school.
Everybody was gone. There was just this one friend in Berkeley who happened to
be called to the Maritime Academy at the same time I was. I mentioned we were in
the same class and we got on the same ship together right out of the Maritime
Academy in San Mateo. But everybody else was gone. It became quite lonely to see
all your high school buddies and people you knew from college leaving. Really a
funny experience. Of course, if you were in good health, and a lot of
01:09:00super-patriots looking at you kind of strangely and say, "What are you still
doing here?" That didn't bother me; I had signed up the previous summer.
[laughs] You couldn't go to the dances we went to. I went to Schwartz Ballroom
and there was predominately women there, hardly any guys I knew there anymore.
So it was kind of a strange experience.
Then, of course, the opposite happened, I think I mentioned, right after the
war, fall of 1946, the year following the war. People in the Merchant Marine, if
they were eligible for the draft, had to keep sailing for a year after the war.
01:10:00Otherwise they'd be drafted. Then the big Maritime strike occurred in the fall
of '46. That was another peculiar thing. As the ships came in and the people got
off the ships for the strike, you saw a lot of people that you hadn't seen for years.
FUREY: A lot more competition for the young women. [laughter]
THOR: Well--[laughs] It wasn't that so much. It was a peculiar feeling, though.
You see all these guys. You might have seen these guys in a seaman's club in
Yokohama a couple of months before for an hour or something like that, and a lot
of them you haven't seen since before the war. And all of a sudden, all of the
guys that were in the Merchant Marine--on this coast anyway--were off together.
01:11:00The strike lasted a long time, so you had enough time for a lot of ships to come
in and crews get off. During the war, though, that was a funny feeling. [laughs]
FUREY: I haven't touched on the boarding house. What was that like? Your mother
and your stepfather ran the house.
THOR: Yes.
FUREY: Who were the people that would come in? Were some of them migrants that
had just come?
THOR: These were relatively small rooms, so they were single men, for the most
part. Almost entirely migrants coming in from out of state and renting rooms,
working in the shipyards, I think in every case. My mother kept a bar and then
01:12:00once my stepfather went into the yards, I think she probably operated the bar
for a short time, but they sold it. And we moved up to South 13th Street, a
block away from the shipyard hospital. My sister graduated from Richmond High
School about June of '43 and got a job as a receptionist there.
FUREY: At the original Kaiser hospital.
THOR: Right. I mentioned that there's a nurse that my wife knows who also
started work there at Richmond Hospital as a nurse, on Cutting Boulevard and
14th Street. We lived on South 13th Street, just a block away. That probably
01:13:00happened at the end of '42, beginning of '43, when we made that move, got rid of
that rooming house and bar.
FUREY: Was it hard? Did your mother not like it?
THOR: Well, you know, she couldn't very well operate a bar herself. She used to
serve lunches there too, at the bar. Once my stepfather got the job, I guess she
couldn't handle it by herself.
FUREY: He also could support her. He had more income.
THOR: That's right, more income. I don't how much income they got from the bar
and rooming house, but anyhow they built up an equity in that, because they were
able to buy a small fourplex on 47th Avenue in East Oakland. They moved there
after I left. Must have been after I started going to sea, so it must have been
01:14:00the fall of '43 that they sold that little house on South 13th Street, and
bought that fourplex on 47th Avenue in Oakland. Then, my stepfather and my
mother and my sister moved there. My sister got married shortly after that and
moved to San Francisco. When my stepfather died, my mother stayed in Oakland
until '47, then she went over to my sister's house.
FUREY: Your sister, what was her experience in the Kaiser hospital like?
THOR: I talked to her this morning and I forgot to mention this, but she became
a model after she moved to San Francisco. And then later when she became too old
01:15:00to be a fashion model, she became a fashion show coordinator, worked for big
department stores. Did that for a long time, then she went into real estate and
became a real estate broker, or a salesman for some other broker and did that up
to fairly recently when she had a stroke. Lives at Dillion Beach now. I can't
remember; I was out at sea when she had that job as the receptionist at the hospital.
FUREY: We'll have to talk to her about that. We should definitely contact your sister.
THOR: You ought to contact that nurse, too.
FUREY: {Harriet Stewart?}
THOR: She's in the same pottery class as my wife.
01:16:00
FUREY: Maybe we could briefly touch on your experience at sea during the war and
then when you came back, during the Maritime strike. What were your impressions?
First of all, what was your experience at sea like and your war experience, and
then your impressions of how Richmond may have changed?
THOR: The experience at sea, as I mentioned I put in ten weeks at the basic
school. The first ship was a tanker up in Portland. The fellow I knew from high
school--he went to St. Mary's High--he was a deck cadet and I was an engine
cadet. There was another engine cadet from our class. The three of us went up to
01:17:00Portland and got this brand-new tanker out of the shipyard up there, Swan
Island. I guess we were all going from the train station, standing there with
our sea bags, and some girls come by in a convertible and picked us up and took
us to the ship. They invited us down to Maltanoma Hotel. The basement was a beer
garden. I remember that they had ten-cent glasses of beer about this tall. I'll
never forget that. [laughs] The first moment we stepped aboard that ship, I'll
never forget that either. They were eating lunch, I believe, and you know, the
officers have their own mess room. We go in the mess hall, the chief engineer's
01:18:00down there and the first engineer's there. 'Course, the two engine cadets were
supposed to report to the chief engineer and the deck cadets get to report to
the captain. They were all eating, and somebody said, "Well, that's the chief,"
so the two of us went down to talk to the chief. He was eating. [chuckles]
Before we got there, he said, "Who are those guys?" He was a little guy, worked
for Standard Oil for years as a chief engineer, was notorious there. His name
was "Snuffy" Smith. That was his nickname; his real name was Smith. There was a
little character in the funny papers called Snuffy Smith at that time, little
sawed-off guy. This guy was short, of course, bald-headed, and very gruff.
Somebody said, "Those are your new cadets." He said "I don't want any blah-blah
cadets on my ship! Get 'em out of here!" So then this great big hulking guy came
01:19:00over, all bent over, and said "Don't pay any attention. Come over here, come
over here." So, he gave us our own little table and said, "You work for me. I'm
the first engineer. Don't go near the chief." So we didn't see the chief.
We were up and down the coast. We had a lot of engine problems. A new ship often
has problems like that. They left these little welding rod stubs in the pipes
and they worked their way up under the valves and couldn't shut the valves, and
couldn't shut down the main engine there for a while, that kind of thing. Later,
we had massive condenser leaks which meant massive boiler problems. We burned
out the water wall tubes. That was in Australia a little later, but we had a lot
01:20:00of problems.
One of the biggest problems was the chief engineer had no turbine or
high-pressure boiler experience, you see. He was with Standard Oil, but he
always was in with these reciprocating engines and low-pressure boilers. We had
one engineer on there--they had four or five engineers--one engineer, the
youngest, had been with the high-pressure boilers but they wouldn't listen to
him, see, he was second engineer. The first engineer was similar to the chief.
He was an old-timer and he had been on what they called the Murmansk run, the
ships going across the Atlantic to Russia, around the northern end, where they
were bombed. Out of thirty ships in a convoy, maybe just a handful got through
because of the bombing and the torpedoes. It was a terrible trip.
FUREY: Bringing supplies to Russia?
THOR: Yes, around the northern end of Norway, into Murmansk. He had made that
01:21:00run, and I don't know if he was an alcoholic before that, but he turned into
one. It was a real experience.
FUREY: The submarine blockade in the Baltic.
THOR: This was before they ever got to the Baltic. They didn't go through the
English Channel; they went around the end of Norway.
FUREY: Of the north of Norway.
THOR: Up into the White Sea, right.
FUREY: But from New York.
THOR: From New York, Yes. It was the worst run of the war.
FUREY: The Liberty Ships went down in droves, but then the Victory Ship, by the
time they had broken the blockade, most of the submarines were isolated in the Baltic.
THOR: They had both submarines and bombers off the coast of Norway attacking
them. Anyway, he had been through that and he was okay when he was sober--
01:22:00
FUREY: Like all drunks--
THOR: Yes, he didn't have the experience for that type of engine.
FUREY: So your time was spent mostly out in the Pacific? What were most of your
runs? Where were you going between?
THOR: Well, the first run we went up and down the coast here on that tanker.
Then we had a trip to New Zealand and back. That was about a two and a
half-month trip, and then the trip down the coast, about a month and a half.
Then we made a trip to Australia, came down from there, went to about four ports
in southern Australia, then we went up to the Persian Gulf, to a big refinery to
get some high-test aviation gasoline. At that time, we carried airplanes on deck
too, with the wings folded. Carried them down to Australia. Not like some of the
01:23:00jet fuel you have now; this is high-test gasoline on this tanker. It was like a
floating bomb. And we had trouble coming back. It was a six-month trip all
together. Coming back from Australia to Panama took over thirty days. A lot of
time, we were dead in the water working on the boilers. We tried to arrange it--
FUREY: Waiting out there, and if any Japanese plane or submarine comes along--
THOR: Submarines. We were out of the traffic of the airlines or the bombers and
all that, but they had submarines there. Anyway, when we had both boilers going,
we could hit about eighteen knots which was beyond convoy speed, so we weren't
in convoy at any time. But, we were dead in the water or going slow with one
01:24:00boiler a good part of it. That's why it took us thirty days to get across. All
together, we were ten months on that ship. We came into New Orleans and that's
where I made a deal with the King's Point officer there to make another trip,
rather than go back to King's Point. I got home, I had two or three days at
home, and then they put me on a troop transport. I was five months on that. A
big staging area was Enewetok and we stayed in Enewetok, went to Guadalcanal. We
went to Guam, Tinian, Saipan, and went to Pearl Harbor. Out of that whole
five-month trip, the only shore leave we got was an hour or two in Pearl Harbor.
Five months.
01:25:00
FUREY: So you were out at sea the whole time.
THOR: Yep. Either that or waiting in Enewetok in that staging area waiting
to--we were troop transport. We took the First Division Marines out of New
Zealand. They came up on another ship and then we took them to Guadalcanal from
Enewetok. This was after we invaded Guadalcanal
FUREY: Did you ever come under fire?
THOR: Oh, Yes. Not there, but let's see--I got my license then, and then the
first ship on my license was a six-month trip with no liberty. No liberty on a
six month trip. We ended up at Okinawa with the kamikazes coming over. Most of
the kamikazes were picked off miles away by picket boats that would shoot them
01:26:00down, but a couple of them got through. I remember when the first one came
through, we'd only been there I think a day. We stayed there quite a while.
Heard all this really big racket on the deck, a lot of the shrapnel from our
antiaircraft guns was landing on deck. It would go up and come down; and when it
came down that's steel hitting steel. Made a nice racket, but after a while you
get used to that. You'd see a searchlight pick out a kamikaze and then everybody
would converge their antiaircraft guns on it before it could dive, when it
dived, it of course, tried to dive on a big aircraft carrier or some other big ship--
FUREY: They'd go up high enough so the antiaircraft wasn't hitting them, wasn't
as accurate.
THOR: They weren't skilled pilots, either. They were young kids. They learned
enough to get the plane off the ground, get up there and then dive on the target.
01:27:00
Two ammunition ships blew up while we were there, but they were not in the
immediate area. We didn't hear the explosion, didn't see 'em. But that was kind
of scary. Especially when we came home, we were coming up almost to the Gate
[Golden Gate Bridge]. We made a left-turn, started going up the coast. This was
after six months, no shore liberty, and on the previous ship, we had no liberty
except Pearl Harbor for a couple hours. But my fireman--the guy with the one
eye--was so upset about this that he wanted to jump overboard and try to swim
home from outside the Gate. He was just going crazy. We didn't know where we
were going, but it turns out we were headed for Prince Rupert, Canada to load
01:28:00ammunition for Okinawa, go back to Okinawa.
[end interview]