Betty Reid Soskin | Interview 2 | November 7, 2002

SOSKIN: --Because they were suddenly sort of giving me permission, when I didn't feel permission was necessary. So the people that were offering to give dinner parties to introduce me to the neighborhood were being rebuffed. So that all of this was deepening my black consciousness. So by the time the sixties came around, I already had been forced into a position of being strongly politically black.

WILMOT: Today is November 7th and we're interviewing Betty Soskin, and what I'm thinking is that for now, because we're going to sit down and talk to each other, could I just turn off the music?

SOSKIN: Sure, do.

WILMOT: Okay. Just hold this for one second. [goes to stereo system, turns off 00:01:00jazz music]

SOSKIN: The bottom far left.

WILMOT: We've been talking a little bit about your family, and also we've been talking about the fifties and the sixties when you moved out to Lafayette. Just to start off today, I was hoping that we can start off where we left off last time which was in highschool.

SOSKIN: Oh! I don't remember where we were last time! [laughs]

WILMOT: That's where we were, we were talking a little bit about high school and you were at Castlemont, Castlemont High School in Oakland. You were living there on 83rd Avenue.

SOSKIN: Yes.

WILMOT: It's really interesting when you describe your parents and your mother. Was your father's attitude toward education pretty different than your mother's? Or was his expectation the same, that you kind of just need to get married and that was the--?

SOSKIN: I think that was true for the both of them. I don't think my father, when I look back, I don't think he was ever comfortable with having three girls. Our relationship to him was very formal. He grew up with seven brothers, and there were several sisters, but my dad spoke rarely about his sisters so I think that he was just not particularly comfortable with girls because I remember him 00:03:00as a very formal being. I don't remember many intimate conversations with my father, though he was certainly loving and he did all the things a good father is supposed to do. I don't remember him--I remember only being playful in the context of being with other playful adults. I don't remember him being playful with us as children, which I think is important because I've since seen parents who are playful with children. But he was loving and I did love him.

WILMOT: You told me that at the close of our last conversation that you actually met your husband when you were--the boy who was to become your husband when you were thirteen?

SOSKIN: Yeah. I used to-- my grandfather, my mother's father, now here was a playful man. He may not have been the world's most accomplished male, I remember 00:04:00working in my grandfather's truck garden out on 76th Street, and digging in the soil with him and he his always singing little funny songs that I now recognize as the kind of blues and folk things that come on record from Laughton Hawkins and Jimmy McCracken and people like that. I remember my grandfather as singing these little songs that had no meaning anywhere outside the context of that gardening thing that we did together. I didn't hear his songs on the radio, for instance. But I only know that looking back. But my grandfather, who was known as Papa George, we lived in his home at that time. But we lived in his home as a tiny, sort of--the house was built like a railroad car, all the rooms were in line. And surrounded by fields. In fields where there were--Mr. Mueller who had 00:05:00the dairy around the bend on 75th pastured his cows there, and this was before the iron foundries came up. But my grandfather lorded over a family in that household with my Aunt Vivian, my Uncle Lloyd, my parents and their three children, and his third wife. We were all living under that one roof. This is when we came to California, left as a very small child.

My grandfather remained my closest adult friend for a lot of years, and I suppose he was the only one in the family with the kind of time that other adults in the family didn't have. He would pay me a quarter to cut his hair, and he was bald, but I can remember doing that from the time when I was a little kid. This all transfers into meeting my husband, because every Saturday night, 00:06:00Papa George and someone called Daddy Joe, who was my cousin's father, played penny ante. They got together every single Saturday night of their lives. And I would go with my grandfather to my cousin's house where she lived on 27th Street in Oakland-- I guess East 27th and 27th Avenue. But we would go and I would play with my cousins as my grandfather and Daddy Joe played this card game. That was every Saturday night. But every Sunday, through my childhood, I went with Papa George to San Pablo Park in Berkeley where we would watch the colored leagues that would come through, baseball. And the man who was later to be my husband, I 00:07:00met at a baseball game where he came and he was on his bicycle and delivering papers. I was there watching the baseball game with Papa George.

Now later, Mel, who was my husband, who lived around the corner from San Pablo Park on Acton Street became a player with the California Golden Eagles who was part of the black leagues. So now, Mel was a part of that inner circle of black families who were sort of kept together. Our parents would take us across town for lemonade parties on Sundays and skating parties and all sorts of things, were kept together as a social group. Mel was a part of that group.

WILMOT: How would you get across town?

SOSKIN: With Papa George on his little {Flavor?}, which was a terrible little Ford.

WILMOT: Ford Flavor?

SOSKIN: Fliver, he called it a "Fliver." And we would stop at every third or fourth stop sign and I became adept at--there was a spark and, what, two levers that you pulled. He would get out because the motor would die and he would crank it. And then I would work the spark and whatever this other thing was until it's fired up again and then we would start off. Sometimes it would take us an hour to get across town to get to Berkeley, but my grandfather was always available with his little Ford. It was a Model T, I suppose. But we went everywhere together. He was the adult in my life and he was kind of a scandalous character according to my mother. She was very embarrassed by him.

WILMOT: That was her dad.

SOSKIN: Yeah, but she was embarrassed by him. They didn't have a good 00:09:00relationship. He was very close to her younger sister, but I think that comes from the fact that my mother was sort of abandoned to my grandmother as a baby and then he brought back these other children from another marriage and they never really reestablished a relationship.

WILMOT: When you say he was scandalous?

SOSKIN: My grandfather? He was a womanizer of the worst kind. I only know that--and I don't know whether or not that's true, now it's filtered through my mother's prejudices. When he was in his eighties--because I got this family of long lives--and his third wife had died and he was rumored as supporting some woman across town on his pension and that my mother's younger sister, Vivian, was supporting him in this life of sin. It was that kind of thing. I don't know 00:10:00now whether that was anything or not, except that he always had a wink in his eye and he was always somebody I was a little apprehensive around, which means I don't know whether he was-- I don't know. But there were reasons why my grandfather was kind of scandalous, and I'm sure I was prejudiced by my mother. But it never did turn me off enough to back away from him because he was my grownup friend. [pause]

But at that time San Pablo Park in Berkeley was the center of social activities for the black community. It was the place where there was a tennis club that played. And the YWCA in Oakland on Linden Street was a great place for people to 00:11:00gather. The black community came together both at San Pablo Park and at YWCA and that was--what was her name? Chapman, Lucille Chapman, I believe. There was a woman there who was the director there for years and years at the YWCA. My husband, Mel, later became the playground director at San Pablo Park. His great hero was someone name Dutch, who was a red-haired, white director at that park when the black leagues played there. The colored leagues, I'm sorry, they were not black at the time.

But Mel's ambition was to become two things, because the limitations on where 00:12:00blacks could go and what blacks could do were pretty well understood. He wanted to be a bakery wagon driver like his--and work at Wonderbread where his father did, but the unions weren't accepting any non-white workers so he was outside that. And he wanted to be a playground director, which Dutch was. That was also a white job at the time.

WILMOT: Was his father part of the union?

SOSKIN: No, his father could never be in--. His father worked, at that time which was Wonderbread Bakeries but later became Continental, was loading one hundred-pound flour stacks from the dock, from the railcars to the dock. He started when he was about fourteen or fifteen, retired still doing the same thing, loading a hundred-pound flour sacks from the railcars to the docks. Because that's all a black man could do. So no, he was never allowed in the union.

WILMOT: So when you met Mel, he didn't go to the same high school as you.

SOSKIN: He was at Berkeley High School.

WILMOT: He was at Berkeley High School.

SOSKIN: But he was four years older; he was my older sister's age. So the young men in my life were in high school when I was in junior high school, but my social connections when I was in high school were at the university, or at Berkeley, or they were people in Alpha Phi Alpha or they were at San Jose State or they were at the colleges around. So that was my social life in high school. And Mel was going to USF, or I guess he was going to Sacramento State and they went from Sacramento to USF in San Francisco. But it was important that men be educated at that time. And a few pioneer women were also being educated, but I wasn't one of them.

WILMOT: Did Mel join a fraternity when he was Sacramento?

SOSKIN: I don't think he did. Mel was in school on a football scholarship. He was All-State, All-Guard, all-everything, you know, all-star when he was in high school and in college. And he later went on to play for, what was it, the Oakland Giants, which was the first pro team before the NFL was organized. He played for the Honolulu Warriors for some time professionally, but that was before the big leagues were actually formed. He was a very, very well-known athlete; he wasn't much of a scholar. He was really much, much better as a--and he went to school on an athletic scholarship. And all he had to do was to play.

WILMOT: So when you were in high school, do you have any memories of any teachers who especially influenced you? And you told me that at one time you were reading a lot, I'm wondering--

SOSKIN: I was aware of racial prejudice when I was at high school.

WILMOT: Uh-huh.

SOSKIN: That's when it really began to dawn on me that we were separate people. It came to me through classes that I took, it came to me through my parents in one way, because the fact that when I was talking to my mother about taking a language--I guess that was in ninth grade--I wanted to take French because French was so dominant in my household, and my mother wanted me to take Spanish because that's what I looked more like. That was the beginning when I began to that the limitations were placed on me. There was a suggestion that I was going to have to pass if I was going to do anything of importance. That was the first hint. When I got into high school, there were things I didn't do partly because 00:16:00of fear of being isolated by the few black kids that were there, because I was lighter-skinned, and so you don't want to put your neck out too far because you need real friends. And not really feeling a part of white high school social life, because my social life was being taken care of outside. And if anything, I felt superior, because the little girls I was going to school with were going with the guy who pumped gas at the corner and I was going to parties at the International House at Berkeley on the campus. So there was a real split. I didn't talk about that in school, I mean you don't talk about those things, but I really was satisfied with my own social life outside.

But academically, there was a teacher in public speaking who did tremendous things for me. I can barely remember his name now but I remember him lighting up 00:17:00when I get up to contribute, anyway. He was a wonderful, wonderful teacher. He, I guess, introduced me to all kinds of concepts that were beyond the limitations that I was facing in other classes. I mean we were going to New Orleans and coming back and not being prepared, because I never had to work in high school. I wonder sometime what I could have accomplished if I'd ever been challenged, because I wasn't in any way. I bounced through high school because no one ever asked for a report card, I always signed my own. My parents never participated when I was in school in any way. They were satisfied that I was going and that was it. I was a good girl, so no one had to deal with me in any way, you know, I was not a problem. So I sort of blandly went through school without being 00:18:00challenged at all.

This one teacher would light up, and I could see his face light up when I'd come down the hall and he would ask challenging questions. And to this day, I can remember a long debate in that public speaking class about euthanasia, and I can remember that the kids went off, as people do, into the fine line between euthanasia and murder and people being eliminated. I remember raising my hand and waving it around trying to get his attention and having him ignore me for a long time and knowing that he knew that I knew but that it wasn't time yet to let this in to the room. And I was aware, even as--I guess I was a sophomore at the time--I can remember being, having a sense of being on the same level with this teacher, because somehow we both knew that I knew. Also that I was 00:19:00cooperating with his game about not saying it yet, and finally toward the end of the debate of having him--or at least it wasn't a debate it was a discussion--and having him point to me so that I could say, "But you're no longer talking about euthanasia, you're talking about murder," and having him say, 'Ah-ha.'" And having this sense for the first time of being at an adult, intellectual level and how freeing this was for a kid. I look for those moments in my own grandkids, look for those moments in time when they hit something that we can relate to as equals, that are new for me and are breakthroughs. I wonder sometime in teaching how often people are aware how great that is when you hit it. He's probably the only teacher besides my drama teacher that I really remember now. I'd know him if I saw him in the hallway.

WILMOT: Your drama teacher?

SOSKIN: My drama teacher, I remember for other reasons. Because she was so frightened by the fact that I might get roles that were inappropriate, that I remember her as being trapped by something that she didn't believe in, because I felt that she really and truly was good and knew that I was doing it well but that she didn't have the courage to step beyond the limitations of what she thought might be the limitations of the school society.

WILMOT: What was her name?

SOSKIN: I cannot remember her name, I blocked it out.

WILMOT: And your public speaking teacher?

SOSKIN: It was Mac- something, I cannot remember now. I don't think it's because I don't remember it, I think it's because I'm having a lapse in the moment.

WILMOT: Did you have a sense that the other young people you were in school with were on a college-- You mention that they were much more working class. Were 00:21:00there people who were on college tracks?

SOSKIN: Yeah, but those kids were all white and I didn't have, that was not within the realm of possibility. So I was on a track for commercial training, typing and that sort of stuff. I could do that stuff with my hand tied behind my back. That's where I was supposed to be. I can't remember resisting this. I can't remember resisting this, which I wonder about now as an older person. Maybe it was because that was before I was politically aware in any way. And it's hard not to stamp my mature more sophisticated self on that time. But I 00:22:00tried to remember, and I find myself now, knowing this interview was coming up, trying to figure out what I remember and why and how. I don't remember being resistant at all.

WILMOT: In so many ways it makes sense. It makes sense, because you were just fulfilling the expectations of those around you and surpassing those expectations without resisting. In some ways it makes sense it's just kind of where you were at. You were a young person.

SOSKIN: I was being good, real cooperative.

WILMOT: You know something that you really mentioned was that your family was Catholic.

SOSKIN: Very much so.

WILMOT: And I just wanted to ask you a little bit more what that meant for you growing up. We talked about it a little bit last time.

SOSKIN: I can't remember intellectually thinking my way out of Catholicism, but 00:23:00sort of flunking Catholicism. I think if I'd been a good Catholic I would have wound up a nun because I was a purist as a kid. I think about that now that if I really had believed that I'd have gone pretty far and pretty deep into it, but that somewhere early on, somewhere maybe even as early as eleven or twelve, it began to not ring true for me. It was a place where I became more fascinated with questions than answers, because at that point, all of the growth was happening in the area, for me, of questions. The answers provided by the people around me didn't suffice, and it was not that I thought they were wrong as much as that I think at a very early age I became aware of how much there was to be 00:24:00known. That became a handicap for me, because the people around me knew. Does that make any sense?

WILMOT: The people around you were aware of your precociousness?

SOSKIN: No, that the people around me didn't have the same questions, that I was aware of how much, how great to sea of things to be known was. I felt that the man I married, Mel, in the first place, was not nearly as unsure as I was, but it wasn't because I knew less. That became a real problem for me even in my spiritual life that I didn't have to confront it until I was a young married. I 00:25:00was married in the church and I had to do that to--I had to go back and become, to accept Catholicism because I was not married unless I was married in church as far as my family was concerned. In order to do that, because marrying a non-Catholic, we had to go through, what is it, three or four weeks of instruction of some sort. And because Mel had no religious affiliation at all, he was intrigued by becoming Catholic and I was had moved out of it. So that it was a very rough period for me, because I was being married into a faith that I had outgrown. And I kept him from taking it too seriously. I kept him from being Catholic because I didn't honor it myself, without arguing about it, I just 00:26:00didn't do it. But then when I was married for three years and had no children, I decided to adopt our first child. And that child came to us through Catholic Charities. Now, in order to adopt Rick, I had to agree to bring him up Catholic, because of his mother's wishes. So as a young adult now--I'm maybe, what, twenty-two, twenty-three--I had to go back now and retrace those steps because I took my promise seriously that no matter where my thinking was, I was going to raise this child Catholic. So, then I had to go back and re-examine as an adult what I had walked away from and why. So I went to the priest in our parish, this was in Berkeley, and I said to him that I had made this promise, that I wanted 00:27:00him to help me to understand better my religion, because--and I was still saying "my religion," I hadn't taken on anything else. And after two meetings with him he said to me, "The problem with you Mrs. Reid is that you're trying to be, you're trying to be intelligent about a faith and the Catholic religion is a gift from God, and as such cannot be questioned." This was the end of the road for me. I walked away and felt that somehow, as I had known with the teacher in the public speaking class, that I had hit one of those places where I was talking to someone who didn't have an answer and that we somehow, even though he was a priest, I had hit a weak spot and that he didn't know any more than I did 00:28:00and that he was giving me a pat answer that I couldn't accept. When I walked out of that building, I didn't feel that the priest had anything on me.

WILMOT: Uh-huh.

SOSKIN: Until Rick was seven and I had to deal with first communion and then it came back up again: You know, "What am I going to do?" Because there was this mother who said this child has to be brought up Catholic and I revisited this and I took him to register for first communion at the local church, though I had not connected with it at all. I had not connected with the local church. He came back from about the third catechism class and said to me--no, the nun had met with me when I went to pick him up and she said that I needed to have a talk with him, because when she had asked the usual memorization of the 00:29:00catechism--"Who made you?" "God made you." "Who made the world?" "God made the world."--and I can go through that even now. When she said, "Who made you?" Rick had raised his hands and said that his mother and dad had made me. She said that she couldn't accept that, and he couldn't accept anything else. So then I got him home and I couldn't support the Church's position with him. I kept trying, I sent him back, and then he came in one day and said to me, and this was a kid who was extremely bright in terms of science, he was way out there. He was building crystal sets when he was eight. He said to me, "Mom, if it takes light so many light years to get from this planet to that planet, how long does it 00:30:00take an angel to--" and I thought that this kid's not going to make it, [laughs] we're not going to make it in the Catholic Church. I walked away and that was the end of it.

And I became a Unitarian because I was taken to a service in someone's living room before there was a church in Walnut Creek. I went there and sat and listened to Reverend Ray {Cope?} who I think was the pastor in the Berkeley Unitarian Church on Durant, it's no longer there. I listened to this man with all of the emphasis on the questions, and none on the answers and here was a group of people who were agreeing on nothing except the right to search and this was a place that me and my kids could grow. And if they said, "Why is the grass 00:31:00green?" I wouldn't have to say, "Because God made it green," and I could go further. I've been on that path ever since. [laughs] It's a long answer to a short question.

WILMOT: No, no that's a great answer. You have this marvelous way of referring to, saying, "When I was a young married," which is this way of talking being married that I haven't heard very much before. I just wanted to ask you about when you did become a young married, when you were nineteen, maybe a year out of high school, how did your life change in terms of the logistics? Did you and Mel move in together, did you have a job?

SOSKIN: No, because at that time that choice wasn't open to women. You married and then you had your child, and I was a complete failure when I was married three years and had no children. I think it's interesting that my younger sister 00:32:00and my older sister, who were, by now, all married because my younger sister married at seventeen and my older sister married at nineteen, and my older sister had deliberately waited to have her first child. So they were both pregnant and I was not. So, at something like twenty-three, I was out adopting a baby, because I'd not done my job, I'd not fulfilled my role as a young married. Now when I look back, that really says a lot about the milieu in which I grew up, in that world, and the way those rules were laid down and how demanding they were. At that point there was no choice. I was married in 1942, the War started in 1941, and I was at home and I was to support my husband in what he wanted to 00:33:00do, and that was my role.

WILMOT: And what did he want to do?

SOSKIN: He wanted to go into business at that point. Yeah, at that point he wanted to go into business, which we did, early on. I stood behind that counter in that crazy little record shop that we converted out of a garage in our duplex while he went off and worked his job at the shipyards, worked with a man who serviced jukeboxes as a second job, and then I with Rick--Rick was born in 1945, so I did nothing until 1945. No, I worked, I guess, in San Francisco, I worked for the Air Force for a short period. I worked in the shipyards for a short period and we both quit at the point where we were disillusioned. That's when I stayed home. But then I had no children, and Mel was very, very disappointed 00:34:00that we had not had kids. And he was really pressing hard, and I thought it was a physical failure on my part that I could not have children and simply had been trying since I was married. Fifteen minutes after I was married I was going to have a baby nine months later and this just didn't happen. So at that time, I just saw myself as sterile, so I was sort of allowed to do other things. So I had worked in the shipyard, no, in the auxiliary union hall. I had worked for the Air Force. It seems to me I had another job and that was when I was in high school, I had a short job, that was about it. Then, when we opened the record shop because we were both disillusioned at this point, I worked there.

WILMOT: Disillusioned with what?

SOSKIN: The extent to which we were crashing into segregation. Because up to then, we had not been confronted with it in quite the same way, or there had 00:35:00been some sort of gentleman's agreement, we understood where the lines were. They were subtle lines and they weren't restricting us terribly because we were balanced with our own lives and had a sense that we were together because we wanted to be and not because we were separated out. And then suddenly, when the Second World War started, and the tremendous migration of African Americans and people of color and white southerners, suddenly all those things which were true of other parts of the country in the South were true here. So we were confronted by blatant racism, and one of the ways to get around that was to go into business ourselves.

WILMOT: So you're saying that segregation and racism really increased with the movement, the migration of African Americans--

SOSKIN: I'm not sure that it increased with that in-migration, or whether it became overt with that because it was always there. You know, it was there. 00:36:00Certainly Mel's father had lived with it. Mel's family had come here after the Civil War, so that they were here in the Bay Area all since I guess 1860-something. One of the members of my first husband's family had been the first African American to register to vote in the state of California and that was 1885. So it was always here, it simply blossomed and became overt, became something we could no longer ignore. I think that's what it was. I don't think it was any different before then. Certainly Mel and I had run into it as kids. 00:37:00But not to the extent that our parents did. Our parents ran away from it in the South--at least my parents did, I don't know about Mel's--came here, I think, protected their kids from it by not even talking about it.

WILMOT: So they didn't tell you stories about racism in the South?

SOSKIN: Yeah, but they were privileged, they were Creoles, they were related to both sides so they brought with them as much anti-black racism as I think that was coming from whites to blacks. I think they saw themselves as being somehow between. I think that, it gets muddy here, it's hard to put that on my folks, but I think that was true.

WILMOT: When they did arrive in the Bay Area, you were firmly part of the black community.

SOSKIN: They had a social group that they moved right into.

WILMOT: I have so many questions for you, Betty, right now. I have so many questions about what you just said. To go first, I want to firm up my understanding of your young married life. Young married. I'm enjoying that word so much, young married. So that meant--where did you live?

SOSKIN: Mel was an accomplished guy. He had saved his money for getting married. He had money to put down on the little duplex.

[interview interruption]

WILMOT: I could to talk you all day, Betty.

SOSKIN: You're getting what you need?

WILMOT: Oh, I think we're doing really good work together. How's your schedule 00:40:00look tomorrow?

SOSKIN: Monday's a holiday, are you going to be around, because I will be here all day.

WILMOT: Tomorrow's a good day then.

SOSKIN: We are sort of behind in our office because we were all out working on the campaign and our guy got elected mayor and now we're planning our inauguration and all that stuff.

WILMOT: Inauguration?

SOSKIN: Sure, Tom's got to have his party.

WILMOT: I'm a new, you know, new--this light is doing interesting things so I'm just looking around. This light is doing some really interesting things here, so I'm moving. I'm a new resident of Berkeley.

SOSKIN: You're a new resident?

WILMOT: Uh-huh.

SOSKIN: Berkeley is so fascinating.

WILMOT: To the extent that I actually voted in Oakland, because all my heart is in Oakland and I had to vote for that "Just Cause" measure. It was really important to me.

SOSKIN: Sure, sure.

WILMOT: But I am, in my work, really learning about--

SOSKIN: Berkeley is fascinating. Berkeley is really the edge of political change, almost in the world. It's fascinating.

WILMOT: What do you mean when you say that?

SOSKIN: That things tend to start here and then move out. If you keep in mind that the UN started in the Bay Area, the atomic bomb started in the Bay Area, I mean all these things that were the basis for social and fiscal change, even the environmental stuff, so much of this has started here. We live on the edge of the ocean; we live on the edge on everything. It's the cutting edge of so much. 00:42:00I miss Berkeley, I miss Berkeley. I may go back.

WILMOT: That's too dark.

SOSKIN: There's a light over would that help.

WILMOT: Wait a second, I'm sorry. I'm attacking your fish with a tripod.

SOSKIN: There's lights you can play with. Just push that button in.

WILMOT: Okay, interesting, let me come back here and try not to get you this time. I think that's a little bit better.

[interview interruption while Nadine continues to set up camera]

SOSKIN: Where did we live, right? I think that's where it was. Mel was as locked into his role as I was in mine, my ambition to be a young married woman with a 00:43:00husband and a child and having this prescribed life on my side that I felt I was failing in. On his side, he felt the obligation to be a provider, to take care of a wife and children. So that when we got married, he had with his paper routes and his--he would help assist his father sometimes on weekends--he had worked when he was in school to be able to support a wife and family and had enough money saved up to put a down payment on that little duplex on Sacramento Street. The interesting thing was I think that the whole cost of that duplex was, I think, 4250. I'm not saying $42,000; I'm saying $4,500. So that the down payment was $750 or something of that sort. At that time salaries were almost nothing so that it's all relative. But at any rate, we moved in as a young 00:44:00couple into a place that we were buying.

WILMOT: Right after your marriage?

SOSKIN: We went home to our own place after the wedding.

WILMOT: Did you guys honeymoon?

SOSKIN: No, we got very busy being husband and wife and getting ready to produce children, that was our role. [laughs] But I think now that was exceptional, at the time it was what one did. We were lucky to be able to do that, so that was fine.

WILMOT: While he was in college, was he ever part of a fraternity?

SOSKIN: I don't think he ever pledged. He was an athlete and that's how he lived his life.

WILMOT: And that was San Francisco State?

SOSKIN: That was USF, the University of San Francisco.

WILMOT: Okay. Do you know what course of study he major in?

SOSKIN: He majored in history, I think.

WILMOT: History.

SOSKIN: I think that he majored in football. I don't remember Mel having the 00:45:00intellectual capacity to do much other than that really. No, it's true, I shouldn't--Cut it out of the tape! [laughs] But I really think that when I looked back, Mel used to ask me to help him to learn to read better. I've never even said this to my children, so I shouldn't be putting this on tape, but he never--like my mother, and that's why it wasn't strange to me, because it wasn't a given, there were adults in my life who didn't. So I didn't notice it particularly, but it wasn't very long into the marriage when I began to realize that I had satisfied all the requisites of my parents and none of my own. Because we could hardly--there were things I couldn't talk about with him. There 00:46:00were questions I couldn't discuss, there were--and to sublimate the stuff that was churning inside me--I eventually had a mental breakdown, actually, when my youngest daughter was two-and-a-half or three. It was at the basis of all that, ending up with the dissolution of my marriage, had to do with the fact that I had not found this place where I could be whole and use all that I was. I overcompensated; I married a professor from the University of California. [laughs] Fifteen minutes after I was divorced. So that hunger certainly was there for something more.

WILMOT: Did you read a lot when you were little?

SOSKIN: Yeah, I read a great deal.

WILMOT: What texts do you remember being very important to you?

SOSKIN: Oh, I remember as a very little kid reading my way through the Ruth Fielding series of books, this would be like a series of girls stories. Then I went into poetry, I loved Edna St. Vincent Milllay when I was eleven or twelve and used to sing "Renaissance," I mean I loved it. That's when I began to use music. I would read poetry and then wonder how this would sound, and then I would sing it. All of this was in a very isolated life of a little girl, I don't remember doing this with anyone. I loved reading. I had a teacher, how old would I have been, someone had given me a copy of Aesop's Fables with wood carving illustrations, I guess it was Aunt Vivian who gave it to me for my birthday. I 00:48:00took it to school and the teacher was reading it to the class, and at one point--isn't it funny, I never thought of this--one point someone made a noise or did something they weren't supposed to and the teacher slammed the book down in rage, just anger but then she turned to me with her face very red. She was someone who spoke very, very softly and read very, very softly. She apologized for doing this to my book and she came back and gave, the next day brought me a copy of Little Women. So that, and I must have been in fourth or fifth grade I was very young at the time, and then I really spent a year in what was called a [preventorium] and that was when I was eleven or twelve, I was a lonely little girl in a strange setting very far away from home, Livermore, which was very way 00:49:00from home, because my parents couldn't get out there to see very often, every couple of months. So that then I can remember doing a lot of reading and so yeah, reading was a big thing for me.

WILMOT: I'm trying to think of today you can read the works of DuBois or bell hooks or different people and there is a real sense of race consciousness. I was wonder if you ever had any--

SOSKIN: Never. I was not introduced to black writers until I was an adult. In fact, I had never even heard the Negro National Anthem, "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," and I remember hearing for the first time and thinking it was subversive. How could this be? I'd never met people who had attended Southern schools, although my Aunt Vivian had graduated from Sacred Prep, but we did not talk 00:50:00about those things. I don't remember, I remember actually meeting James Baldwin at a reading at a local church at one point and hearing him read his work. That was when I must have been in my late teens or young adult, I didn't know black writers.

WILMOT: I wanted to ask you about marrying into Mel's family, if you could tell me a little bit about the family you married into.

SOSKIN: I didn't realize their specialness, either, until I began to meet some of the younger members of his family who were into history. I knew that Mel's family had been here for a great many years, but I had no idea what that meant. His predecessors were Parkers and {Gaults?} I believe out of Georgia, his family 00:51:00came here at the end of the Civil War. They settled in Angel's Camp and from Angel's Camp into San Francisco and from San Francisco into Berkeley. They'd been in the East Bay, I guess since the turn of the century or even before. Captain Gault, who was one of his predecessors, I think on his maternal side, was a captain in the state militia. He, I'm gathering, I haven't traced it all the way back yet, I think he must have worked with Thomas Starr King, that's my guess. That Starr King was the Californian, Unitarian minister actually, who managed to keep California out of the Civil War on the side of the South. He was 00:52:00the only Unitarian I know of. The only Californian in the Hall of Statues in Congress.

As I said, one of the members of his family was the first black to have registered to vote and that was five years after California was admitted to the union. You can imagine how long it was then for blacks throughout the country. That wasn't until the Civil Rights movement when the poll tax and other things were lifted. His family, I guess it was Charlie Reid has a tremendous history here as a youth worker in Richmond, North Richmond. That videotape--did you get to see that? Boy, I go to give you a copy of that, you've got to see that, it's just amazing. There was really a black community here, but it was separated out, it was a Jim Crow community. But Charlie, in the context of that--his family 00:53:00still exists there and the Reid in my name has some weight in Richmond because of Charlie Reid and his history way back before the First World War, which is great. Those people are gone now, the Reid family is still spread out throughout the area.

One of the Reids is the William Patterson, this is on his father's side, I think this would have been Mel's uncle, was the attorney who brought the case for Paul Robeson before the UN. He was a mentor to Paul Robeson, he has a book called--I had a copy of it but I don't--. It's We Shall--something [Patterson delivered 00:54:00the famous "We Charge Genocide" speech before the UN], it's not "overcome." But this was William Patterson. And figures very, very closely. He went to Russia with Paul Robeson. The family was very ashamed of him, and nobody spoke about him. I find him a great source of pride and rediscovered him during the centennial for Paul Robeson.

Actually there's an eerie, eerie side story to that. There was a series of black books that was given to me by a Unitarian minister who was one of my mentors. This was Aaron Gilmartin. He gave me a lot of books that he had gathered together during the sixties and among those books was the book of William Patterson. But I had never read it, it sat on my bookshelf. One day long after 00:55:00my son and I, Bob Reid, were involved in family history and finally got into doing his father's side, which was the Reid family, Bob called me one day and said, "Mom, there's a reference to this book and I think I saw it in your bookshelf." I said I just couldn't imagine that I would have that book. He said, "It's out of print now." So I went in and I looked and here was the book. I opened it and there's an inscription written by William Patterson that said "To an unknown cousin" and then signed his name. That inscription was written back in, way back. I gave that book to Bob and we were really struck by this, written 00:56:00in his handwriting.

So there's a piece of me that's walked away from Catholicism for intellectual reasons that were sort of retrospective. I went back and thought my way out of it, long after the fact. But there's a spiritual part of me that knows that there's the ability to leap time and space within me but is not unique to me. Everybody has it, but that it has not been civilized out of some of us. That it is out of those things that religions were formed, not the other way around. I want you to take the binder that has my son's death papers in it and read 00:57:00through and it'll blow your mind, because that thing of leaping time and space shows up there.

WILMOT: Do you want me to look at that or do you want to tell me?

SOSKIN: No, I think I want you to look at it. You can take it home and bring it back with you.

WILMOT: I'd be glad to. I'd be very honored to do that. I'm also wondering about something-- Oh, I'll get to that later. I want to focus on your time before you and Mel had it up to here with working for the other people and decided to become your own bosses. You said you were working briefly in a shipyard, briefly in San Francisco.

SOSKIN: I had worked in San Francisco in the Civil Service Commission. Actually, it was in the basement of the federal building and that was at the--I can't put 00:58:00that in time, it must have been--the War was already on. My job at that time was as a file clerk, very mechanical. You'd go in the morning and pick up a tray of cards that were pink and blue, I'll never forget this, and then you sit at long tables with lots of other people and these were called bar and flag files. Each of them would have findings that would demand barring and flagging of people. Flagging means look further before you hire them; barring means they could not work any longer, they could not work for the federal government. I didn't even wonder about the genesis of that stuff, because I wasn't sophisticated enough. It was a job and I was filing cards. When I would read the cards it would talk about "car license plate read within a block of communist cell meeting," that 00:59:00sort of thing. So this had to be FBI, CIA stuff. Obviously had to be maybe FBI stuff. But I didn't know really what FBI was, why would I even know that? I knew that there were these people, but I finally saw a card, a flag card, from my brother-in-law, my sister's husband, who was working in the shipyards of Vallejo and whose cards was seen parked, this is the car seen parked within a block of a known communist cell meeting, or a suspected communist cell meeting. But I knew my brother-in-law was in no way a communist, so at that point I became more interested in these cards and what they said. I began to find other people that I knew barred and flagged who had applied. You wouldn't get a card filed until 01:00:00you applied for a position in either the shipyards or any of the war plants. Of course the entire Bay Area was war plants at the time and people were not hired for all these reasons that they would never know.

WILMOT: Which weren't necessarily didn't have direct bearing on who was being followed.

SOSKIN: Absolutely not, absolutely not, no. But you'd have to sign to a loyalty oath to work in the shipyards, to work at any war plant, which meant that you'd have to swear not to work for anything that would overthrow the government, so that was the reason that they could throw you out. Because if you applied then you took a loyalty oath and you could not, you know. These were the things that said you were not who you said you were. So anyway I began to, that was the beginning of my awareness. I began to get aware of this level of government--that there was something here that I did not know about and had no 01:01:00reason to be aware of it until that job. Now, I don't know whether my experience as a Rosie came before or after that experience, that's what I'm not sure of, I can't put it in time.

WILMOT: That was in the first three years of your marriage or the second, or--

SOSKIN: All of this had to come within--yeah, because I didn't work afterward. This had to come early on.

WILMOT: Who was working there with you, who else was at the table with the pink and blue cards?

SOSKIN: I have no idea, just a huge floor, a basement floor of people, all kinds of people, but I can't even picture in my mind people in that building.

WILMOT: So it was many different races?

SOSKIN: I don't know, I don't remember! But I don't think I would have been 01:02:00aware then. Because I wouldn't have been aware that I could not have worked there if I were black, do you see what I'm saying? I would not have walked into that building and noticed, because there were people working on the war effort and until I actually confronted the problem personally, so it must have been--I know it was before I went to work for the Air Force; it had to be, because that was when I hit it straight in the face personally. Before that I'm not sure that I would have walked into that room and said, "Oh, there are no blacks here."

WILMOT: Where was this office again?

SOSKIN: It was in the Federal Building in San Francisco, it was on Macalester.

WILMOT: Macalester, okay.

SOSKIN: Okay, there was a basement--

WILMOT: How'd you get there?

SOSKIN: I have no idea how I got that job, because I probably applied as any other American, because at that point I was in American, you know

WILMOT: Do you remember having lunch buddies, people you would go and sit and have lunch with outside?

SOSKIN: I don't remember even anybody I worked with, but I also don't remember being set apart, so there was nothing extraordinary about that job.

WILMOT: Do you remember how you got there physically, like your transportation?

SOSKIN: Oh ,yeah! I got on--at that time the Key route trains ran across on the bridge, and I went across on the bridge.

WILMOT: And where did they let you off?

SOSKIN: At that terminal on First Street, First and Mission I guess it was, First and something. Then got on a trolley which went up to Macalester, yeah. So that had to be early on.

WILMOT: Do you remember why that job ended?

SOSKIN: I think I must have transferred--in fact, I was a transfer. I was a transfer from--that's why I got that job, no one bothered to tell anyone that I wasn't white because I was a direct transfer. I wanted to work on this side of the bay, and I transferred from the Civil Service Commission into the Air Force, 01:04:00because it was an easy transfer, because I was already sworn in and everything. So that when I went--and that job was on 20th and Broadway, or in what is now a hotel building that had been taken over by the Air Force. I think it's now offices, it's like in 19, 20th or something like that, just across from [Emporium] Capwells. When I went to work there, I was simply transferring, and again I was on a floor where the first time I got an inkling--and our desk, then, there were two desks backed up to one another, so I was facing the woman whose desk was abutting mine. [pause] And she and I got to be close friends. But I also ran into a friend who was African American, about my color, who looked 01:05:00like me, who was a part of my social group. I saw her several times, but each time I saw her she ducked away from me.

Now she had been a former fiancée of the man I married, so I didn't know whether she was being distant because of that or what it was, that's the way I read it. One day we met together in the restaurant for the first time, and there were no where for her to go, and she asked me, her name was Havens Newman, her father was a doctor incidentally, they lived in Kensington--she asked me what I was passing for. I said, "Nothing." And she said, "You have to be, because you can't work here." I said, "But I'm not," I said, "What are you passing for?" 01:06:00Well she said, "My name is Newman, so I assumed that was German." Then I became apprehensive and almost that gets within a day or two now with this sudden fear that I found myself in this position of passing and my husband had just volunteered and gone into the navy. This was all at the same period of time, and he had gone and was back at Great Lakes and was very unhappy. He only lasted three days. In the same time span I was suddenly passing for white and didn't know it. Within this two day period, the young woman whose desk abutted mine was called up to the lieutenant in charge of our section, and I saw her go and I saw her shaking her head and nodding and her face was very red and she was up in his 01:07:00desk and she came back. Now I know what it is. The sixth sense tells me that someone has reported me. Mind you, I never passed in my life. There was all the shame that was connected with having to do something I wouldn't have done if I'd had a choice. Because this was not a problem for me, my race may have been their problem, but it wasn't mine. It never had to be. So here I was in this position. So, when she got back I asked her what was that about and she kept her face down and wouldn't look at me directly. I said, "Is it what I thought it was?" and she was sharp enough to know that I knew and she said, "Yes." I said, "They found out that I'm not white," and she said, "Yes, but don't worry, because I told them it's not a problem." So I said, "But it's a problem for me." So I got up and I walked the length of that room and I got to the lieutenant's desk and I 01:08:00said, "Who told you that I was what I was? I didn't tell you I was white, because I came here and didn't fill out an application. I came here as a transfer. Didn't you know that I was colored?" He said, "Don't worry, don't worry, I'm told that it's not a problem, that you're okay, that you can stay." I said, "I'm in line for an upgrade and you say--he said, "Everyone here is willing to work with you." I mean think about that. Everyone here is willing to work with you. I said, "But are they willing to work under me, because I can be upgraded." He said, "You'll receive your level pay raises," but it was clear that I was not going to be raised, my status was not going to be raised so I walked out on the U.S. government and told them to shove it and that was the end 01:09:00of that.

Meanwhile, Mel came back two days later having refused to go into the Messmens Corps, because Mel had been told by the psychiatrist there because he'd balked, he wanted to be a seaman but he was told that he could only be in the Messmen Corps. That's why he was sent from Fort Lewis or wherever he was in Washington State. All the blacks were gotten together and sent to Great Lakes to become cooks. And he wouldn't do it, so they told him that they would send him home, they mustered him out with mustering out pay. They gave him an honorable discharge and told him to go home. Then the psychiatrist asked him why he hadn't come in as white, because he could have avoided all this. Mel, who had never had to pass, and for whom his race was part of his pride. Sure he was light-skinned, as I was--but that's when we decided that we were not going to work for anybody. 01:10:00At this point we were going to go into business for ourselves, because the whole field had become muddied for us at that point and we didn't want any part of it.

He went back to being content, he went back to the shipyards, because there were lots of other blacks in the shipyards and he was working as a playground director where it didn't matter. Then I went home.

WILMOT: Let me ask you: You said he had two jobs, but actually first, at the Air Force, when you were working at the Air Force and transferred, what were you doing there?

SOSKIN: Just general office work. Not the same kinds of things, certainly not a file clerk, but nothing with any real responsibility. It was assembly line stuff, only clerical.

WILMOT: When you were at the commission before you transferred to that basement room, what was that? The commission of--?

SOSKIN: That was the Civil Service Commission.

WILMOT: Civil Service Commission. What were you doing there?

SOSKIN: I was just filing cards, that's all. That was my job.

WILMOT: How did you get that job?

SOSKIN: I can't remember how I got that job, except that everyone was doing their part for the war effort, and I'm sure that I must have applied in some pool to go to work. I don't remember how that came about.

WILMOT: They knew you were African American?

SOSKIN: I don't remember that ever coming up, except that I'm sure that I must have had to check a box of some sort, and that it must have been a slip-up because I would not have checked white.

WILMOT: Was that the kind of general atmosphere at that time, for the war effort let's all go and put it in for the war effort?

SOSKIN: Oh sure, I think we all had to find our role in it, somehow.

WILMOT: Was it accompanied by a real sense of patriotism?

SOSKIN: I can't say that, because as I keep saying, I like to apply my later 01:12:00sophistication to my person of that day, but at twenty-two or whatever I was, or nineteen or twenty, I'm not sure that I was doing anymore than following the crowd. I'm not sure at all that--I'd never seen a war, I was afraid of black outs and knew there was an enemy out there. That we all had to do something to protect ourselves from that enemy. It was also true that one of my best friends, Lillian [Onoga?], was hauled off to an internment camp with her parents, so that Japanese was not negative to me, so I was confused about the enemy. I'm sure a lot of kids were.

WILMOT: Can you tell me a little bit more about that experience with Lily [Onoga]?

SOSKIN: I remember Lily [Onoga?] from the time I was a little kid; I mean really a little, third and fourth grade. I suspect that Lillian's family were very high up Japanese although they lived in our community someplace because she went to our grammar school. They were very close to the Japanese culture, because on special days Lillian would come and do wonderful dances with her paper umbrella. The sun parasol in Japanese costumes with her obi and she was very closely identified with Japan and was therefore exotic to me. But she was also very much a little girl I had fun with and often shared lunch with. As we grew up, Lillian's Japanese identification continued, I lost track of her somewhere along the line, but she was Japan for me, more than any one in the world, when anyone 01:14:00said "Japanese" I thought of Lillian [Onoga?], I still do. The enemy of was ill-defined for me.

WILMOT: Did you hear of, when did you hear that she and her family had been interned?

SOSKIN: I had heard later, because that's the one person I knew. I asked in the neighborhood because my family continued to live in that same community house on Eighty-third, after I was grown up and gone. When I asked in the community, I learned that Lillian's family had been interned. I had no idea what the circumstances were, whether her folks were connected to Japan's politics in anyway, I don't know.

WILMOT: Did you know when she came back?

SOSKIN: No, she was lost to me, but she continues to be Japan. I've known Japanese people since, but the people you meet when you're a child stay whole.

WILMOT: Did you know what happened to their property?

SOSKIN: No, no, I can't place her in time and space.

WILMOT: Okay, so after--

SOSKIN: I can still see this girl with her obi and her beautiful costumes and her parasol but I don't know.

WILMOT: You don't know what happened to her?

SOSKIN: No I don't know what happened to her.

WILMOT: Were you aware of, with the war and the increase in migration, were you aware of your community changing around you?

SOSKIN: Oh yes, yes. Sacramento Street which is, that's the location for our property; our little shop is on Sacramento Street. The train tracks, the Santa Fe Railroad that was bringing people in day after day, two or three hours at a 01:16:00time with people hanging out of the windows, getting their first view of California and the Bay Area. Coming in by the thousands on these loaded trains, passed in front of our door day after day, day and night, there was hundreds of thousands of people coming in. The movement in the community was a physical thing for me. I was watching this happen and people fanning out, I was watching the construction of the war housing so that these people were being warehoused. The world was literally changing around us, just so fast that there was no way-- I look back now and I don't know how we survived it, except that it was like an avalanche. Our little community, our little African American community was just 01:17:00covered over by an avalanche of people, strangers; not necessarily black and white, but strangers. Our community physically changed within a matter of months and a few years. It's liked we moved out of the state into another state without even leaving home so it was just unbelievable.

WILMOT: Those images are so striking of the trains coming in right in front of the people coming. I have questions about where did they all go, and my first question is where did they all go?

SOSKIN: See, what I don't know because I didn't know Richmond at that time even though my husband had married into a family but had a very strong group in the 01:18:00Richmond community growing with it, there seemed to be a disconnect between the Berkeley Reids and the Richmond Reids, because I didn't know those people at all. So I'd not been into Richmond during those periods and don't know when they built all the war housing. There were all these, I mean just like dormitories, there were places where people literally slept in shifts, sharing a bedroom, eight and ten people because the shipyard were running day and night, three shifts. So that the people were living, just packing in like sardines every place. At that time Berkeley hadn't seen war housing to the extent that it later did. There was some down now where Albany comes in which is now student housing for the university. At one time that was all war housing, Cordonices Village was there. There were places in Albany, but most of those places were out of my 01:19:00eyesight, so I didn't see where those people were being housed. But I learned later that they were mostly black people being housed in North Richmond and down in what is the Richmond Annex, those places that have been largely torn down.

WILMOT: Did you personally have friends among the newcomers? The new--

SOSKIN: No. The ones I did get to know were some of the servicemen. One of our friends among the servicemen was stationed at Port Chicago and was blown up in that explosion. In fact, some of those young guys were at my house at a party the night before and they went home and we heard the explosion all the way from Berkeley from Port Chicago when that blew up, and we know that our friends had gone.

WILMOT: This was in Berkeley?

SOSKIN: This was in Berkeley, so that that explosion was felt and heard even 01:20:00from Berkeley. We knew some of our friends became Tuskegee Airmen, you know Buddy Hernandez and Francis Collier who were the people that were part of our social group who became--they went off to officer training schools. So a lot of friends from this community went off into OTS and became officers in the war. They were guys who were part of the fraternities that I'd known at the colleges around here who were now part of the officer training in New York. There were people that we knew who came into the area that we got to know. There was the phenomenon of the black church, which suddenly was very visible. The only black churches I knew as a kid would have been Allen Temple which was a little house Reverend [Wilby?] had on Eighty-fifth Avenue.

WILMOT: What was his name?

SOSKIN: Reverend Wilby was his name, Marion Wilby. That we could not go to 01:21:00because we were Catholic and it was a sin. But there was that church and there was downtown, Father Wallace's church on Twenty-seventh and Grove, eventually became the home of the [Black] Panthers. But the black church as a force hardly existed, there were just a few, the Third Baptists in San Francisco, and the handful of churches that existed but they were outside of Catholicism so I only knew those people if it wasn't Sunday. I never attended churches. Suddenly there was this force that was coming out of the black church that brought in a lot of fundamentalists, something I didn't know about. My mother referred to fundamentalist Protestants as "holy rollers," that's all I knew about that. She was almost contemptuous of holy rollers, like, they didn't know yet that anyone who had any sense became Catholic. I mean that is the way they looked at it.

So that, then we became to be buried by a whole class that grew up around us and over us, because for the first time--when we were growing up the social levels were not based upon race, I mean not based on money or degrees. Our fathers were barbers, and redcaps, and carpenters, and dentists, and doctors, and scholars, because we were together around the fact that we were all colored but that was it. But now following the migration lots and lots of other people there was a professional class that also came in. There was suddenly a lot more professional blacks who were also living here and our group became somewhat irrelevant and buried under this new class of people. Suddenly there were doctors and dentists 01:23:00and people to service the black community. So that we were covered by an avalanche and it was a people avalanche of outsiders, not necessarily just black and white, but outsiders.

WILMOT: Was there tension then, between the older, more established, the native black community and the incoming black community?

SOSKIN: I don't think we had enough time to develop a tension particularly. I don't remember because we were all busy in the war effort. There was this bigger thing outside all of us.

WILMOT: So there wasn't hostility?

SOSKIN: I don't remember there as being. Because there were a lot more of them than there were of us, I think they would have been not that much consciousness that there were even people like us here.

WILMOT: The way this has often, the way that people sometimes tell this history 01:24:00that there was a more middle class black community here that was then, that was suddenly faced with a mass of working class black people from the South.

SOSKIN: I think that that's true but to some extent I think that's stereotypical thinking. I think that it's more complex than that. I think that we were more impacted by outsiders than we were. I think that if you talked with a white person who grew up here in the same time period you'd get the same thing, that they were inundated by outsiders. I think that's a piece of what went on, and a refinement of that would have been a reshuffling of everybody racially and a whole new set of criteria set down for who was insiders and who was outsiders. At that point, there might have been some [stiffening?] up. Yeah, I can remember 01:25:00seeing colored things popping in, that there would have been a difference between old-timers and newcomers, that those things were refinements of that but that we were all preoccupied with the war at that time and of knowledge, essentially that were all needed, because we all really were. I'm not sure that I wouldn't have been resentful, because I certainly was resentful of what happened to me with the Air Force, but that being in the context of a Rosie thing, that was a war effort thing that was different, and I was working now with other blacks. I had not worked with only other blacks before then, and that was not a step down, but a step across because I don't remember resenting that.

WILMOT: I think I have this other question which is about you've talked about 01:26:00growing up very much in the heart of a Creole family that was a fish out of water, there was no Creole reference. Suddenly there was a community, there were people that were coming from Louisiana and Texas and Arkansas who--Louisiana certainly, who certainly had language for Creole and a cultural understanding of that. I'm wondering what that was like for you?

SOSKIN: There was a critical mass here when my parents came of people like them, there was, I'm sure, I can show you pictures of my mother and her social group. The pictures of her club and they were twelve or fifteen women who met together once a month on Thursdays to play bridge or whatever they did. There was a critical mass of Creoles here who preceded my parents. Lionel Wilson's family 01:27:00was one who later became the mayor of Oakland. There were lots of others. Now at the same time there were what my parents would call American blacks, actually my father would refer to someone who was not Creole but was also African American as American blacks. This would be Ruth Beckford's family. Very accomplished family, first one to do ballet and to later work with Katherine Dunham and to really accomplish. They were a part of that early group. There was the Ruth Acty who was the first teacher in the California school system.

WILMOT: Acty?

SOSKIN: Acty. A-C-T-Y. These were all people who were already here that were part of the group. The Newmans, you know, he was a dentist, he lived in Kensington, lovely home. Their family was not out of New Orleans Creole but were 01:28:00part of the same social group. There was a significant group here and enough of them were Creole. And they got buried and diffused into the general population and the professional class that moved in displaced a lot of those people. They came in with a lot more race consciousness from a positive way, I think, than my parents and their group did. My parents had escaped that stuff and were glad to forget about it, these people were people who came out of--my mother's Uncle {Raleigh?} Coker was the physician in New Orleans.

WILMOT: Hoker?

SOSKIN: Coker, C-O-K-E-R. Very high society, Creole. But Dr. Coker would have come here and from being a doctor only serving the black community because 01:29:00that's all he could serve in Louisiana and would have come here and would have served the black community without any-- that would have been his role. That's true, there were people who came here like that who were druggists who were doctors. There was suddenly this opportunity for an upper class of people where there had not been part of the criteria for social acceptance before. So we would have become irrelevant to some extent. In a lot of ways, a lot of us continued to make it, but we had to reroute the rulebook. And I shouldn't be using people's names, I think.

WILMOT: Actually that you're not--

SOSKIN: I'm not saying anything bad about people.

WILMOT: No, not at all. You're also just kind of defining what the universe was like. I had questions: as young married, where did you and your husband have fun 01:30:00and go out into the world? Did you go out, did you go out to parties? Did you go out to clubs?

SOSKIN: Oh sure, lots and lots. I should be showing you pictures, that's really what I should be doing.

WILMOT: Do you want to stop and get your album?

SOSKIN: Yeah.

[end of session]