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ARBONA: Today is February 6, 2012. This is our Interview One, Tape One, with Mr.
Kenneth Tye. T-Y-E. This is the interviewer, Javier Arbona. Today, we are going to be covering a lot of home front, Port Chicago topics. I was going to begin by asking you to tell me a little bit about your childhood, who your parents were, 00:01:00what they did for a living, and you can take it from there.TYE: I was born in Concord, California, but my family lived in Port Chicago. So
I was in Port Chicago from the time I was born until I left in 1947. I went to San Francisco State, but I came back to Port Chicago after finishing my BA degree at San Francisco State and my teaching credential. I taught in what is now Bay Point, but then was Ambrose, for two years and then moved on. After that I left the Bay Area and went south to southern California. So my childhood was 00:02:00in Port Chicago, totally. I'm not sure what else you'd like to know about it.ARBONA: What did your parents do for a living?
TYE: My step-father worked in the Shell Oil refinery in Martinez. He was what
was called an operator. He worked in the catalytic cracker. My mother was a housekeeper; she did not work. When we first were in Port Chicago we lived in a little tiny house that had one bedroom, and my father added one bedroom, which was my brother's. I slept in the front room. There was no hot water. There was 00:03:00gas for cooking. Also, my mother, when she did the dishes, she would heat the water in a tea kettle on the stove and then use that in the sink. My step-father would bring in for baths--we would all take a bath on Saturday night--he would bring in hot water from the water heater in the garage, which was a separate building, put it in the bathtub. Then we would take our turns. Father went first, mother went second, and as the oldest child I got to have the water third. And my little brother Bill, who was eight years younger than me, was last. [chuckles] That was the routine for bathing. In the early fifties my 00:04:00parents bought another house that had been repaired after the explosion, and it had gas and hot water and two bedrooms. It was much bigger and much nicer. It was right across the street from the Bay Point Elementary School.ARBONA: Sorry, one thing really quick. I can't recall if I got your parents' names.
TYE: No, you didn't. My step-father was Ralph Tye, and my mother was Cecilia
Tye, nee Zawatsky. She was part of the Polish group in Port Chicago. He came from Oakland. He was driving a truck in the thirties, and he met my mother after my father had committed suicide. She remarried, and he adopted me legally. So I 00:05:00was legally adopted by Ralph Tye. Ralph was the Fire Commissioner in the town. He was quoted in Ken Rand's book. He was interviewed by Ken Rand.ARBONA: Port Chicago's Not There Anymore But We Still Call It Home is the name
of the book.TYE: That's right, yes.
ARBONA: Just to get your father's last name.
TYE: Tye. I was born Christian. Kenneth Christian. Nancy Colchico was Nancy
Christian; that was the Christian family. As it ends up, I was the only boy left. They were all girls; all my cousins were girls. When I changed my name there were no more Christians in that particular clan. 00:06:00ARBONA: In Port Chicago there was a Christian Clan?
TYE: For a little while. They moved out after my dad committed suicide my
grandmother stayed there for a few years but ultimately moved to Martinez. So there weren't a lot of Christians in the town, and there were no other Tyes. His family, they were in Oakland.ARBONA: Your step-father, then, became a Port Chicago native, so to speak.
TYE: Yeah. He was somewhat of a leader in the town; he was the Fire
Commissioner, for one thing, which was an elective position. It was a volunteer fire department. He knew a lot about the town; he was very active.ARBONA: Stop me if this is a difficult question, but what year did your birth
00:07:00father commit suicide?TYE: 1933.
ARBONA: Any idea if that was related to the Great Depression?
TYE: It was. There were two things involved. One was the Great Depression.
Second thing is, he drank a lot. He mistreated my mother. He didn't physically mistreat her, but psychologically he did. And she left him. And one night, when he had been drinking, he came to the house and was kind of wild, and she wouldn't have anything to do with him, so he took arsenic and killed himself. His father, my grandfather Christian, had just died too. He died in an accident. 00:08:00My father was the oldest son in the family, and he just gave up the ghost. He had been laid off by the Coos Bay Lumber Company. So that was part of that. So had my grandfather.ARBONA: The Coos Bay Lumber Company was pretty much the main employer in--
TYE: The biggest employer--
ARBONA: --in Bay Point.
TYE: Right.
ARBONA: In some of the interviews, layoffs, and trying to work in San Francisco,
having to commute or live part time in San Francisco but coming back to Bay Point on the weekends, is a theme that comes up a lot. It was a very traumatic time, it seems.TYE: My step-father didn't get on at Shell until 1935. He worked for a little
00:09:00company out of Oakland that was owned by his brothers. He would take gasoline around in a small gasoline tank truck and distribute it to gasoline stations in Contra Costa County. That's how he met my mother. My mother had gone to work at the--Walt's Inn is what it was named later, but I think it was called the Bay View Inn when she was working there. He met her there; she was waiting table. And they got married.ARBONA: Do you have any recollection, or have you looked up where--you must know
where they lived, what street in Port Chicago?TYE: Yeah, sure. I lived on Poplar Street. That's the first house. The second
00:10:00one was Fleet Street, right across the street from the Bay Point Elementary School. Poplar was--well, two doors down from us was someone who was fairly notable in the history of the town. It was Keith Grover, who took all the pictures for Dean McLeod in his book.ARBONA: Images of Port Chicago?
TYE: Yeah.
ARBONA: Yeah, the name rings a bell. Could you tell me a little bit about
everyday life in Port Chicago? Maybe the family went to church, or what you would do for special holidays, certain details like that.TYE: I went to church. My mother had been Catholic. Her mother had divorced her
00:11:00husband, and the Catholic Church would not recognize-- when she died she wasn't given last rites, and my mother quit the church. I went to the Congregational Church, which was sort of the people who thought they were the elites. Most of them went to that church. Later on in my young adult life I worked with the youth group there, and I had kids all faiths come to the youth group for things. And some of the "elites" were unhappy with that; they didn't like those Catholic kids coming to our church. But I stood my ground, and the minister backed me up, so that was okay. It was a good place to grow up. I think a lot of the writing, Rand's in particular--I can't think of the word right now, but there's this sort 00:12:00of glorifying the town. You never see any of the bad side of it through his writing or some of the other things that are written.But it was a good town to grow up in. We played a lot of--the theme that you get
from the Rand, for example, and I agree with this--we used to play ball, for example, all summer long. And you would go down to the ballpark, and you'd play, and if you had to go home, you'd go home, leave your bat, your ball, or whatever you had, your glove, and come back and get in the game again. So there was a lot of that. Then in the evenings we played a lot of things like kick-the-can, hide-and-go-seek, big games, a lot of kids playing, boys and girls. 00:13:00In school I started first grade there, and I did pretty well. I actually
skipped--when I got into fifth grade, I did fifth and sixth grade in a year, and that was kind of nice. My recollection is, I went into the fifth grade--I was a pretty good student, and I'd get the fifth grade work done, and then I'd pay attention to what the sixth graders were doing. And the teacher gradually moved me into sixth grade.ARBONA: Because it was a pretty small school, so everything under one roof.
TYE: Well, you had first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, and
then fifth and sixth in a room, and seventh and eighth in a room. I don't know how many kids that totaled up to because I think the average was probably around thirty, maybe a little less, in the classrooms. There was no kindergarten when I 00:14:00was there. That was in the thirties. I went to Mt. Diablo High School in 1943 after I graduated the elementary school. I got a scholarship from the Royal Neighbors--I don't remember what it was--twenty dollars or something like that--to use when I went to high school. And when I graduated high school I got a scholarship of $140 to go to San Francisco State. So I did well academically.It was a good place. We played a lot. There were fights sometimes. One of the
famous families, the DeMarcos. Bino [Albino "Bino" David DeMarco] and I used to 00:15:00fight all the time. But we were good friends, actually. Where we played ball was right in front of the DeMarco house. What else? The childhood stuff?ARBONA: Could I interrupt you for a moment?
TYE: Sure.
ARBONA: I was going to ask you to elaborate a little bit more about what you
said about the glorification of the town. If you were to paint a more real picture, let's say, how would you accentuate the story beyond what's often remembered in a more romantic light?TYE: Well, first of all, there was a lot of bigotry in the town. Blacks were not
welcome. Even when the blacks came with the war and worked at the base, and Knox Park was built, and the blacks all lived in Knox Park, the town was segregated. 00:16:00The twains never got together. I went to work in the butcher shop at about fourteen as a clean-up boy and stayed working in it even--I came back after I got my bachelors degree and lived with my parents for a couple more years and taught at Ambrose. I still worked in the butcher shop. Most of the black customers came--I was in the food center store, the big relatively new one, and most of the blacks shopped in there. But there were no black kids when I went to school up to 1943. A big event would be when the gypsies came, and everybody 00:17:00would hide and be afraid of the gypsies. My step-father, who I suppose was English by birth or heredity, always looked down on all the rest of the people, even my mother, whose family was Polish. He looked down on the Polacks and the Italians. He was a real bigot.One time--this is not part of Port Chicago--but one time, much later, when my
first wife and I drove up to his house--they lost their house in Port Chicago, of course, like everybody else and they moved to Rancho Cordova near Sacramento. I had my two youngest kids and went up to the front door--we'd driven up all the way from San Diego--knocked on the door, and he opened the door, and first thing 00:18:00he said to me is "How are all your nigger friends?" Because he knew that I was a liberal politically and was somewhat outspoken. I gave him a hard time about his bigotry. But at any rate, there was that, and I think that was common in the town.But on the other hand, the fire department was a volunteer fire department, and
that was represented by all ethnic groups, the Italians, Portuguese, the Polish, et cetera. Andy Palubicki was active in that. Of course, my father was. My uncle was, Nancy's father. And a lot of other people from different ethnic groups. But 00:19:00my childhood memories are fairly pleasant. I did well in school. I played ball. Do you have other questions?ARBONA: Sure. What I was thinking about right now is, you were talking a little
bit about the issue of race relations, and I was wondering if you could walk me through what it was like when the Navy said, "We're going to open; we're going to build a naval magazine here." I know you were maybe twelve years old at the time.TYE: Yeah. I don't remember much of that. I don't really remember that. I don't
remember any negativity about that. I think people were coming out of the Depression. I know some of the people in the town went to work there at the Navy 00:20:00base. So I think people probably weren't afraid of the Navy base, none of the conspiracy theories floating around about atomic weapons or anything like that in the early days. They were accepting of it because it meant jobs, and it was good for the economy too because it brought people who were working there. My recollection of the sailors who were there, both black and white, some of the white sailors you would see around the town, and there were some girls that they would date in the town. But by and large, both groups would leave Port Chicago and go somewhere else, particularly the black sailors. There were two clubs not far from the Navy base, down by the railroad tracks, that were for the blacks; 00:21:00they were black night clubs. And I went down there when I was a young guy. But mostly that was all separate, and that's about all. Otherwise the black sailors went to Oakland or to Pittsburg or other places. Now, how much I remember that or how much I've read it, I don't know, because I've read a lot about the history of the town too. And even the white sailors wouldn't stay in Port Chicago. There wasn't a hell of a lot to offer there for the sailors. They would go somewhere else.ARBONA: Could you walk me up to the time of the explosion?
TYE: Sure.
ARBONA: How do you remember the Port Chicago explosion?
TYE: I've got some stuff there. Let me tell you first about the bombing of Pearl
Harbor. I was down the street playing football with another group at the house 00:22:00of the principal of the elementary school, Roy Lee. And his wide came out and said, "The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor." So I immediately ran home and told my parents. They didn't believe me. They thought I was listening to a radio program or something. But they realized that it was true. That was very much in my mind, indelible.As far as the explosion is concerned, we were all home. I had gone to the
circus, or carnival or whatever. My recollection is more of a carnival than a circus, but everything I read said it was a circus. I've gone to carnivals too, so maybe my memory is not correct. But anyway, I came home from that, probably 00:23:00nine-thirty or so, and went to bed. My father and mother were sitting up in the kitchen. He was going on the graveyard shift that night to go to Shell to work. And the explosion occurred. Everything lit up, and he was knocked off his chair, sitting at the table, and fell on the floor into a box of plums that my parents had gone out and picked so that my mother could can them that day. And she looked down, when everything lit up, and there was Ralph rolling around in all this red. She thought he was bleeding. So she was screaming. But he calmed her down; he was okay. He got up out of the plums. My brother--my step-father had 00:24:00built a little bedroom for him off of the kitchen. All the windows blew in except where I was in the back in the living room. The window was on the south side; it had blew out. All the others came in--there were no windows on the east or west; they were all on the north or south. My brother was in bed, and he had scooted down under the covers. And this is indelible in my memory too. His window blew in, and all of the glass was in his pillow, but he was down under the covers, so he never got any damage. He was lucky; he was lucky.I remember that in the Christian house where Nancy grew up, she had a little
00:25:00sister, Marjorie, who was just a baby. The weights out of the window--there used to be these iron weights when you lifted the window up--one of them came out of the window and was wrapped around the edge of her crib. She never got hurt, Marjorie; she was fine. I never knew anyone who really got hurt, but I've read that several people got paid as a result of claims they made. We didn't have any problems.ARBONA: How did the town, then, recover?
TYE: Well, there were claims filed with the Navy, and some of those claims were
paid so that the Navy helped to--this is not memory; this is what I've read--the 00:26:00Navy helped to give people money to do that. The Red Cross also did donate lumber for reconstruction. And it turned around pretty quickly; the town got rebuilt pretty quickly within a very short period of time, six months, maybe. Things seemed to be okay and back to normal.I told David [Dunham, ROHO] another issue about the Red Cross. There are all the
claims about what the Red Cross did. But a lot of us in the town--and Rand's got this in his book too--but my stepfather was particularly unhappy about this, that the Red Cross set itself up at the elementary school. If anyone wanted 00:27:00anything they had to go down there and go through a bunch of rigmarole, and the Red Cross might help them. The Salvation Army came around door-to-door and asked people what they needed. There was a real sentiment in favor of the Salvation Army as opposed to the Red Cross. There were stories, and this is from memory, that the Red Cross even asked for donations from the people in the town. Now, David said you guys are going to interview someone from the Red Cross about their experience; that will be interesting.ARBONA: Yeah. He might have a contact person, but I don't know who that is. But
I have also heard that there were issues about segregation in the Salvation Army versus Red Cross, but I've never been able to confirm very much of it. I don't 00:28:00want to misrepresent it, but I think that maybe the Red Cross wouldn't serve African Americans--TYE: I don't know. I've neither read that nor knew anything about it. I do know
that Robert Allen's book [The Port Chicago Mutiny] is fairly complimentary to the Red Cross. It talks about the footage of lumber that they contributed to the reconstruction effort. It's a very brief segment in his book; he didn't spend a lot of time on the town. He was fairly complimentary, for whatever that means.ARBONA: Not to switch gears here, so back me up if there's anything that I'm
just missing. You were fourteen at the time of the explosion, so I suppose you 00:29:00lived in the town for another four years before going to San Francisco State?TYE: I went to State in '47.
ARBONA: Okay, so about three years later, more or less.
TYE: Yeah. My first semester at State I was taking the bus back and forth from
Port Chicago to San Francisco. After that I moved into the city and had a job there. I just came home on weekends once in a while. But I did go home on weekends. I had a lot of friends there; we did a lot of things together as teenagers, played a lot of pool, drank a lot of beer.ARBONA: In the town.
TYE: In the town, in Port Chicago.
ARBONA: In the saloons in the town.
TYE: Not in the salons; they wouldn't let us in the saloons. But we still drank
a lot of beer.ARBONA: At that point, did the town grow quite a bit in terms of the number of people?
00:30:00TYE: Because of the war.
ARBONA: Returning veterans and whatnot?
TYE: Oh, at the end of the war?
ARBONA: Yeah, at the end of the war.
TYE: Yeah it did grow. I don't think that much. I've seen some of the numbers in
the books. I know in the fourth grade I had a real progressive teacher. She was outstanding. She didn't care for me very much, but she was a really good teacher. We did a census of the town, and there were eight hundred and some people in the town, and that would have been '39. So the number would have grown to--I don't know--1,200 or something like that. And I would suspect--this is out of my own memory--I would suspect that the town did grow after the war, not just 00:31:00because of the veterans coming home, but there were houses built, and people lived there who worked in other places. A lot of people worked in the refineries or the steel mill in Pittsburg. I did. During the summers I worked both at Tidewater Associated two years, Shell two years, and the steel mill one year. At the steel mill I was called "the walking industrial accident."ARBONA: The place itself was called "The walking--"
TYE: I was called it. I was in the tin mill, and the tin was always--it was my
job to shear the tin and put it a thing that went back to the open hearth. And I fell on that and cut my hand very badly. And the second thing is, one time I got 00:32:00tin caught in the shearing machine. I pulled it out, cut my nose, almost took it off. The third time, after everything was rolled up the crane would take it back across the mill, where they would take it somewhere else. Once I was picking up scrap off the ground, and one of the things came off the hook and landed behind me. So they referred to me as "the walking industrial accident." Lucky I wasn't killed.ARBONA: Yeah, and on the other hand, you were pretty lucky. "Walking luck," also.
TYE: Well, those guys were good for the kids at that point in time, hiring us
during the summer. That was even after the war. I worked up till one year--after I was at San Francisco State I came back, worked there during the summer, and 00:33:00lived at home. The other thing about the war as far as work is concerned, kids could get jobs. At thirteen I was working in a gas station. And I was a clean-up boy in a restaurant. I went to work in a butcher shop fairly early. There was always work. A lot of kids worked. And we had money during the wartime. So that accounts for some of our activities.ARBONA: What was college like in those years?
TYE: Well, San Francisco State was college, not a university. It was before Lake
Merced, San Francisco State's current location. It was down by the US mint. You guys have that campus; Berkeley has that campus, there. I don't know, Extension, maybe. Or they used to.ARBONA: I'm not too familiar with it, but I'm familiar with the neighborhood.
00:34:00TYE: It's not far from the Haight-Ashbury. That's where the university was. At
first I lived in a house where I worked and got room and board for my work. Then I moved to what was called the Rock. It was the only dormitory owned by the university, or the college. I worked there cleaning up. I had to work; I didn't have money. My family didn't have money, particularly. Ralph was pretty stingy anyway.ARBONA: There must have been, I suppose, a lot of returning veterans kind of
going back to--TYE: Oh, when I was at the Rock there were only two of us who were young kids.
They were all veterans. They were good to me. They took me under their wing, a lot of them. They were good guys. I was in a PE major at first, and they I 00:35:00transferred to Elementary Education. Ultimately, I got a Masters degree in School Administration at San Diego State and then did my doctorate at UCLA.ARBONA: I see. In Education also?
TYE: Yes. An EdD. Did a semester at Yale in African History and Ethnology. I
worked in Liberia for a while, in the summer in the sixties. We welcomed the Peace Corps. The group I was with welcomed the Peace Corps. They came and we welcomed them.ARBONA: When you were at Yale?
TYE: No, no. I was at Yale after I was in Liberia. I went to Washington as a
00:36:00Washington intern in education, worked in the Job Corps in 1966. That summer I had an NDA grant at Yale, and took my family--sold my house in San Diego. We went to Connecticut for the summer and then down to Washington DC, where I worked for the Great Society. That was a good experience too.ARBONA: There's a lot to dig in there. And I'm also just a little bit confused.
When did you go to Liberia?TYE: 1963.
ARBONA: With the Peace Corps.
TYE: No. The Peace Corps had just been developed.
00:37:00ARBONA: And you welcomed them.
TYE: They came after we were there. The Peace Corps flew in. I had my
students--I was teaching teachers, and as one method to teach them I had them do a newspaper. And one of the big stories was the fly-in of the Peace Corps people.ARBONA: That's fascinating.
TYE: I've had a good career. I've had a good life.
ARBONA: That's really wonderful. I really want to try to wrap my head around all
of those topics, but before--TYE: Port Chicago. [chuckles]
ARBONA: Yeah. And the other thing is, before we go too deep into that era of
your life I'm still thinking that I'd like to go back to when first the Navy started to spread rumors, or the word got out that the Navy was looking to 00:38:00condemn the town.TYE: I was gone at that point in time. I heard that from my parents because they
were bought out. I don't have personal memories of that because I wasn't there. I had been married and moved on.ARBONA: Could you tell me just a parenthesis there about meeting your wife and
getting married?TYE: I met her in Yosemite. I worked in Yosemite a couple of summers, and she
was from San Diego. I was teaching. At that point I left teaching in Contra Costa County and went to Modesto for a year; I had a really nice job there. I got extra work doing recreation because the big salary--I had $300 a month, and that was tremendous. [laughs]ARBONA: You were teaching high school?
00:39:00TYE: Junior high. Anyway, back to the thing about the Navy, my father is quoted
in Rand, my step-father. He asked him about would he--if he could, would he go back. And he said something like, "You're damn right I would." So he was on the side of the people who were opposed to the takeover. He wasn't one of the first to sell, but he sold. This I think I probably picked up from Rand; there were the people who were divided during that period of time who wanted to--or maybe it was Allen, I don't know--the people who wanted to sell, get out; the people who didn't want to sell at all; and then there was a third group who wanted to 00:40:00see if they could jack the Navy up a bit and then sell. So all of those divisions were among the townspeople. But basically my recollection of my father's position was he was among the people who were very negative about it. It was a good life for him. His childhood had been fairly rough. He'd settled down and made a lot of friends. He was a bigot, but he still had a lot of friends. It was prominent; he got a lot of strokes. He was barely literate. I think he graduated McClymonds, the high school in Oakland. It's now pretty much 00:41:00a black school. But he was there; he dropped out at tenth grade.ARBONA: He dropped out in tenth grade.
TYE: That's right. He was a tenth-grade dropout. So he was very proud of his
oldest son, who went on to get his degrees.ARBONA: This is going to be a very speculative question, and it might draw from
a lot of your reading and research over the years. In Ken Rand's book he explores sort of three theories or hypotheses about why the Navy really wanted to condemn the town because they always used the "safety buffer" explanation in Congress, but there were always a lot of other reasons behind that. And people sort of could discern that there was something else going on beyond the safety buffer. Why do you think the Navy in '53-'54 and the years after wanted to 00:42:00expand the base and remove the town?TYE: I'm not into the idea about the explosion being connected to atomic
weaponry. But atomic weapons were shipped out, going to Korea during the Korean War, so there may have been the notion that they were going to have that kind of weaponry, and they needed the buffer zone. I'm also aware of--I have a copy of this; I don't know whether you want it; and I'll come back to this to answer the question. This is a copy of Rand's original interview of Danny Colchico. 00:43:00ARBONA: Wow!
TYE: You want a copy of that?
ARBONA: I would love it.
TYE: I'm not going to leave this because I don't remember whether I made
this--I'll send it to you, though.ARBONA: We have a copier in the other room.
TYE: Then you can copy it. Yeah, that's Rand's interview of Colchico. At any
rate, one of the things that Dan was very upset about is the Navy condemned his uncle's property, not down on the water; that was in the inside part where still the headquarters are right now. There's natural gas there. The Navy took that over, condemned it, gave him a little bit of money, and then ultimately made a big profit, selling it off to PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric]. So there might have been some of that kind of thing. And then the other suspicion--and certainly my 00:44:00step-father was very outspoken about this, and we shall see; this may still play out yet--is that was a lot of the business people in Concord wanting to move in that direction, toward the water, were somewhat behind the whole issue of condemnation. When the Navy pulls out, ultimately, it may still end up being the grandsons of the entrepreneurs of Concord who end up with the land.ARBONA: So sort of turning it into business zone land, manufacturing and whatnot.
TYE: Yeah, and a port. It's still a good deep water port; there's no question
about that. It was before the Navy came. There were warehouses down there early 00:45:00on, during the time of Bay Point. So all of those things are there. Again, I'm suspect of the idea that the explosion was connected to atomic weapons.ARBONA: Yeah. As far as I can tell, it's been explored, and it's not been
verified in any way, shape or form. Do you think there are still a lot of people who believe that?TYE: McLeod.
ARBONA: Oh, yeah?
TYE: I think so. He's sort of still on that. And Dean's a good historian, so I
don't know.ARBONA: But even Dean told me--I think he had a piece of shrapnel tested once
and couldn't detect any radiation.TYE: Well, maybe so. Maybe I'm misspeaking about him.
00:46:00ARBONA: But who knows?
TYE: But who knows? Anyway, those are my speculations about that particular era.
ARBONA: Could I ask you, also, a question about how your politics were shaped
because you described earlier in the interview how Port Chicago, 1940s, 1950s, was a very bigoted town. There was no reception or welcoming of African-American sailors or African-American families. But you had your encounters or arguments, I suppose, with your father. You mentioned something, I think, about how, maybe--TYE: My arguments with my father were later. In my childhood, I don't think I
had the bigotry because I played with all these kids from the different ethnic groups. There was none of that among the kids. I mean, really: Mexicans, 00:47:00Italians, Polish, whatever. Swedes, a lot of Swedes. The kids didn't have that. The parents did. And then, on the other hand, my step-father was a union steward at Shell Oil. In the great strike of 1948 he was terribly outspoken and active in that strike. I went to work that summer at Associated Oil, and I was assigned to work with a scab, a guy who had walked through the picket line. I wouldn't speak with him. He literally begged me to--oh, he had to work because he had children. Well, a lot of people had children. But anyway, so there was that union streak that was influential in me. And then I went to San Francisco State. 00:48:00At San Francisco State one of the first guys I had was a very left-leaning sociologist. .ARBONA: As a professor?
TYE: As a professor. And that shaped a lot of my thinking. Started to in an
intellectual sense. I don't know; I just ended up being a liberal Democrat.ARBONA: I see. How about in those years--you mentioned your professor, also. I
guess my mind is racing to issues like McCarthyism and the loyalty oaths. And even related to Port Chicago, there had been the trial about the so-called mutiny. Are some of those events sort of ringing bells for you or shape your politics in any way? 00:49:00TYE: No. I've got to be honest about that. I wasn't that aware of the trails and
tribulations those sailors were going through. I am now because I've read Robert Allen's stuff; I've heard Allen speak. I've just finished writing about that particular event. So I'm aware of what they went through, but I don't think I was aware when I was a youngster of what was going on. That's really honest. McCarthyism is another issue; I was aware of that. The loyalty oath thing was going on at Berkeley when I was at San Francisco State, and by that time my politics were liberal. So I was opposed to that. And then we followed the 00:50:00trials, the McCarthy things, on TV all the time. So that was shaped.There are a few other things that I took down that I should tell you about.
ARBONA: Yeah. We have about thirteen minutes on this tape. So let's just keep
going until we're almost running out on that, and if we still have a little time we can stick in another tape. Why don't you go ahead if you have some other recollections that you wrote down that you wanted to mention?TYE: Well, one of the things I did, and you've probably come across other
people, is that I worked on the aircraft warning service. There was a tower on top of the American Legion Hall, and during the war we would watch the planes 00:51:00come over, and they were plotted. So I did that. That was kind of fun. I worked with a neighbor woman; she very good to me. But I knew more about the planes than she did. So I did that.ARBONA: This is during the war.
TYE: This is during the war. So I must have been about thirteen, fourteen during
that time.ARBONA: How did you come to that position, or is that something that you maybe
did because of patriotism or service when the war broke out?TYE: I don't know. It just seemed like fun. Seriously. I suppose that I was as
patriotic as everybody then. I was part of scrap drives. We would go out--the kids would go from school out into the fields and pick up scrap. We rolled tin foil, did all of that kind of stuff. We bought war stamps in school. That was 00:52:00all part of what we did. I think all of those things were less important in terms of money raised or in terms of recycled metals for weaponry than they were in building patriotism. I think that was really what they promoted more than anything. In high school occasionally we were allowed to miss classes and go out and pick fruit. Particularly I remember tomatoes.ARBONA: In Contra Costa?
TYE: Yeah. Various kinds of fruit. And I know I knocked walnuts, but I'm not
00:53:00sure that was part of the school thing. I did that just to make money And later when I was teaching in Modesto--this has nothing to do with Port Chicago--just to make extra money I went out to pick Strawberries. It took me three days to recover from that. That's horrible work. I'm a big supporter of the United Farm Workers. It's just terrible work.Anyway, the rationing. And the butcher shop. I remember going through the coupons.
ARBONA: Because people would just have a limited amount of meat they could buy a week?
TYE: More than meat. Just all kinds of things. There were three different
rationing kinds of coupons for groceries. Yeah, even oils, meats, sugar, things 00:54:00like that. Then also, when I worked in the gas station, there were gasoline coupons. My father, because he worked at the Shell Oil, had a "B" classification, and then those guys who worked there would share rides. So they got more gasoline, but they also shared rides. So he used to go and visit his family in Oakland, take us. I wouldn't say frequently but maybe a couple of times a month. He always had the gas to do it because he was in "essential industry."That's about it unless you have other questions that can prompt--
00:55:00ARBONA: Sure. I also wanted to ask you about the protests because 1966-1967 must
have been a roiling time for Port Chicago. There was first the Vietnam War, and there was the Port Chicago vigil. I was going to ask if you had recollections of that or of you r father speaking of that. And then shortly thereafter the Navy made a new and final push, the final successful push to condemn the town. So all of these things kind of collided together.TYE: I was gone. In '66-'67 I was in Washington DC, and when I finished there I
went back to UCLA to get my doctorate. My chairperson had arranged for me to go 00:56:00to Washington and then knew that I was going to come back. I had started my EdD before I went to Washington, and then I came back and was full time.ARBONA: By the time you came back, then, the town was demolished.
TYE: It was gone, and my parents had moved to Rancho Cordova.
ARBONA: Could you tell me a little bit more about what that was like, to just
come back and your home town is gone?TYE: Well, I had sort of drifted away from that, from the town. The only time
I've ever been to the reunion is last year. I never really--I sort of left it behind. I'm not one of the people who's still clinging to the town. It was a great place to grow up for me. But once it was gone I had moved on. 00:57:00ARBONA: How did you then come back to write about Port Chicago since you've been
working on a kind of historical novelTYE: I've been throwing stuff in a drawer for years. After I retired from
Chapman I kept working. But two years ago, I just said, "No more." So I quit full-time working. My wife still works part-time. And looking around for something to occupy myself that I would enjoy, I starting going through the stuff I had put aside and decided, "I'm going to try one of those novels." So I just went after it. I've done a lot of research and spent a lot of time at the Contra Costa County Historical Society. I'm going up there after I leave Berkeley; tonight I'm going to Martinez. I got to know Dean. He was then very 00:58:00helpful, particularly with the Chupcan natives, Native Americans, where I started with my book. So I was not involved in that stuff personally; I followed it in the newspapers.My opinion of everything I've read over the years, and from what I've been told
by my parents and other people, I think the Navy really should be taken to task for what they did. I don't know; I don't know for sure. My father got good money, comparatively. He paid $5,000 to $5,500 for the house he bought, and he got $15,000. And that was only a matter of--well, it was fifteen, twenty years. 00:59:00But he got enough out of that to buy a house in Rancho Cordova. So he came out okay with that. So I guess their money was okay. But the town itself has a history of--in my book, starting with the Native Americans, who were destroyed by the Spanish, essentially--their culture was destroyed--to Bay Point, which was destroyed by the Depression, to Port Chicago, which was destroyed by the Navy. It's a story of these consequences, and then rebounding over and over again. That's sort of the theme I'm working on.ARBONA: Well, maybe that's an interesting and very optimistic and hopeful point
01:00:00to wrap up with this tape because we're right at the one-hour mark, so I don't want it to cut, and we can just talk off tape about anything else that we want--TYE: I have a couple things to give you.
ARBONA: Thank you so much, and I'm going to stop the tape here.
[End of interview]