Hubert Edward Webster | Interview 1 | December 12, 2002

DUNNING: Good Morning.

WEBSTER: Good Morning. [laughs]

DUNNING: Today is December 12, 2002, and I'm interviewing Mr. Hubert Edward Webster at his home in Richmond, California for the Rosie the Riveter project. My name is Judith Dunning.

WEBSTER: What?

DUNNING: My name is Judith Dunning.

WEBSTER: Thin.

DUNNING: Dunning. With a D. D-U-N-N-I-N-G.

WEBSTER: Dunning.

DUNNING: So I'm going to start out by asking you some questions about your family background. What is your full name?

WEBSTER: Hubert Edward Webster.

DUNNING: What year were you born?

WEBSTER: Nineteen twenty-two. July the seventeenth.

DUNNING: And where were you born?

WEBSTER: [Chuckles] I was born in {Bitvine?} but most peoples call it {Gina?}

DUNNING: And is that in Louisiana?

WEBSTER: Yes.

DUNNING: Oh, okay. And do you know where your parents were born?

WEBSTER: Oh, in the same place, except my mother; my mother was born up in Woodworth, Louisiana.

DUNNING: Okay. And how about your grandparents?

WEBSTER: Mmm, let me see. I don't know much about my mother's grandparents. They were born, I think somewhere around Woodworth, Louisiana.

DUNNING: Oh, okay, so most of your family came from Louisiana.

WEBSTER: Yeah.

DUNNING: Do you recall any stories that your parents or your grandparents told you about life, about what life was like for them when they were growing up? Did they talk about their childhood?

WEBSTER: Very little.

DUNNING: Now, when I was speaking to your daughter Katherine last night, she mentioned that you had some stories about your great-grandfather and slavery. Do 00:02:00you recall those?

WEBSTER: Well, that wasn't too much of a story, he told us about when he was born, he hated it. Because ah, his father was white, and his mother was black. And he wouldn't use his father's name, he named his own self. I don't remember what his name was, my father's name, but I know he changed it to Webster.

DUNNING: Oh, okay. And do you know the origin of the name Webster? Do you know why he chose Webster? Was that a --

WEBSTER: Because he didn't like the name that his father -- his birth father had -- about it.

DUNNING: Right. Now, was his birth father a slave owner?

WEBSTER: No. I don't know.

DUNNING: You don't know. Okay.

WEBSTER: No.

DUNNING: Well, Katherine said you might have some pictures about that, and maybe 00:03:00later, another time, we can look through those pictures.

WEBSTER: That's just, no, they back in Louisiana, I don't have any of them out here. Cause I don't even have a --

WOMAN'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND: Grampa over there does.

WEBSTER: I don't even have a picture of my mother, do I? No, my mother and father both -- their pictures are back in Louisiana, I don't have any of their pictures. My youngest sister have all those.

WOMAN'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND: Didn't your grandfather have twenty-seven children?

WEBSTER: Well, he had twenty-three by one woman. [Laughs] He did have some by -- he had some by other women, but I never met them.

DUNNING: Wow, that's a lot of children. Now, how many brothers and sisters did you have in your family?

WEBSTER: Oh, one brother and two sisters.

DUNNING: Oh, okay. And what was your place in the family? Where were you in the family?

WEBSTER: I was the last one.

DUNNING: Okay. So you were the baby of the family. What do you remember about your childhood home? Would you describe it for me? The rooms, and the furnishings --

WEBSTER: Well, the rooms the house -- It wasn't a shotgun, it was a box. And it had a gable roof, wood shingled, they made they own shingles. They had -- I don't think it was the one that -- it didn't have over three glass windows, the rest of 'em was open windows, wood windows.

DUNNING: So you could open and shut them, then.

WEBSTER: Yeah.

DUNNING: And do you know who built the house?

WEBSTER: It was a cousin of mine -- of my father's -- was the first owner; no it 00:05:00was his brother's house, and he died, and later his wife dies and all the children dies. Common back then losing all the family with disease was common, it -- I forgot what all they had, they had all kind of fevers and stuff --

DUNNING: Oh, okay, could have been the influenza period?

WEBSTER: It was [laughs] that was back --

DUNNING: Nineteen-seventeen, nineteen eighteen maybe.

WEBSTER: Yeah. Could have been further back than that.

DUNNING: Mmhm. And what do you remember about your neighbors?

WEBSTER: They were all cousins. [laughs]

WOMAN'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND: [Inaudible] They got -- they had their own cemetery, all that --

WEBSTER: Yeah.

DUNNING: Oh, okay, and the cemetery was close to the family house.

WEBSTER: I guess about five acres from the house. No, from my grandmother's 00:06:00house, and we was about almost a mile from it -- where I lived at.

DUNNING: Did most of your social life revolve around your family and your cousins?

WEBSTER: Yes, we all went to the same church.

DUNNING: And what church was that?

WEBSTER: Morris Hill Baptist Church.

DUNNING: And was that a Sunday ritual or did you have to go to church --

WEBSTER: Yes.

DUNNING: More than once a week?

WEBSTER: Once a week was enough. [Laughs]

DUNNING: Okay. Now I'm going to ask you a few questions about your mother. First, what is her name?

WEBSTER: Delia.

WOMAN'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND: Della, wasn't it?

WEBSTER: Well, Delia Della {Millent} Webster. She was the {Millents?}.

DUNNING: And how would you describe her? What did she look like, and what was 00:07:00she like?

WEBSTER: She was almost as light as I am, long hair, hard-working woman. We had about forty acres of land that we tended -- could have been more, but some of it Dalmane tended but she'd have some land she'd just use it to graze the cattle and the horses on. That's all you raised it for. {Grow?}crops you don't work it at all.

DUNNING: Oh, so that was the same. You didn't work the crops.

WEBSTER: We worked some of them. The cotton, the corn, the potatoes -- that'd be sweet potatoes and white potatoes. And you worked your sorghum sugar cane, and you only laid it by and very little ribbon cane did we use. That was to make 00:08:00syrup out of and let it turn into, by Christmas time it'd turn into sugar -- rock sugar.

DUNNING: And do you remember having those chores on the land from the time you were very young?

WEBSTER: Yes. My chores was mostly -- draw water, from the well, and feed the horses, spread hay for the cattle, for the cows, cause the wood cows, they didn't get nothing until after your first snow. Then you start feeding them. The rest of 'em is out in the woods.

DUNNING: Did your family own the cows, or were you holding them for somebody else --

WEBSTER: No, we owned our own, but everybody owned their own or probably had cows.

DUNNING: Oh, okay. About how many cows did you have?

WEBSTER: I think we had six or seven milk cows, and the calves, after they wean 00:09:00'em, they just turn 'em in the woods -- brand them, and mark 'em and turn them in the woods with the rest of the cows. You didn't see them until after -- a little before Christmas or after Christmas, you round up for the first dipping. Do you know what dipping cattle is?

DUNNING: No, I'd like to hear about that.

WEBSTER: [Laughs]

DUNNING: I think I know, but I'd like to hear it in your own words.

WEBSTER: Well, you have one section of the field that you're private in, but everybody in the family would herd their cattle in, and they would stay there until the first dipping. Well, that would be -- January, February -- about March or April, that's when the cold weather stops. And everybody dipped their cattle sometimes three times, according to how many ticks in the woods. How many ticks 00:10:00would they come up?

DUNNING: Okay. I'm still unclear about what dipping is.

WEBSTER: Well, they got a vat. Oh, about -- almost as long as this from here to the back door. It's a trench about no more than four and a half feet wide and about. And the deepest part of it wouldn't be over six, no about five feet. And at the beginning, it's about six feet, seven feet but that only lasts about four-five feet. Then it -- close to where it's getting to the end, where they come out at, it would get shallow. And they could walk out. That way you wouldn't -- it's deep when they first go in it; you push 'em in, actually, and you have your yearlings and calves all in there together. You see, if it's too 00:11:00deep, or too far for them to swim, they drown. You use about five feet, maybe four feet. Just enough of the shoulder to get their head wet. Then they walk all the way out, and they got -- when they come out the dipping vats, I guess there was about a hundred feet, out of the vat, about the the pen where they come out would be about a hundred feet, and that's concrete. So when the cows come out they're soaking wet, see and they let them drain there, and all the dipping stuff drains off and runs back into the dipping vat. And after they dry for a while you turn 'em loose. They wouldn't -- they don't carry them back home, they find their way back home.

DUNNING: Oh, okay. And they would be used -- they would be milking cows.

WEBSTER: Oh, the milk cows and beef cattle too.

DUNNING: Okay. And would you milk the cows? Was that one of your jobs?

WEBSTER: No. [Laughs] I would always bring the cattle up to be milked, but I 00:12:00didn't milk them, my sisters and my mother did the milking.

DUNNING: Well that leads me to another question. Would you describe a typical day for your mother when all the children were living at home, things you remember her doing the most?

WEBSTER: See, that goes from different parts of the season. At the end of the -- ah, we had plenty fruit trees, and she would do lots of canning. We'd pick peas, butter beans, and corn, okra, and she'd can it. When you come from school, you had a job. My job was to uh, throw the shucks away, the pea hulls away, and the butter beans, they all husks and you put it in a trough, maybe fifty feet long, 00:13:00you dump it in there and the cattle would eat the duff. And they get through. And my older brother, and my father, they had us something they called a slip. You ever heard of a slip? [Laughs] She looks like it was a --

DUNNING: No, I, I -- But I'd love to hear about it.

WEBSTER: [Laughing] Cracks me up.

DUNNING: I've heard of a slip, but I think a different kind of slip.

WEBSTER: What kind of slip?

DUNNING: The slip that you wear, or the slip that you put a boat up to.

WEBSTER: A slip is something that uh, makes something similar to uh, a chill like that, but it's about two feet high. It's made out of steel. They buy 'em, they don't build 'em themselves, and right through the pasture where you keep the pen, where you keep up the cattle -- you put your horse on it, or a pair of 00:14:00horses, and they go around and you tip all the bowel movements up off the ground in it, and go out to the end out of the gate and dump it.

DUNNING: Oh, okay.

WEBSTER: Mmhm. According to what patch of field you are in, how far you are, you would take it out there and dump it. You see -- and come back. You flip it completely over, after it's emptied, then on the way back to the pen -- the fattening pen or the feeding pen -- you have it upside down and I'd like to ride back on the slip.

DUNNING: Well, it sounds like you led a very seasonal life.

WEBSTER: Huh?

DUNNING: It sounds like your family had a very seasonal life --

WEBSTER: Well, farming is seasonal.

DUNNING: And what about your dad? Tell me about him.

WEBSTER: Well, he farmed and he worked in the sawmill. One, two -- they had three sawmills.

DUNNING: Right in the town, or close by the town?

WEBSTER: Right in the -- they was a quite a ways apart, about a mile, one of them was about two miles away. But if you see it, it would look like it was all one town. You see, in between the two sawmills, that's where they stacked the lumber. The green lumber, when they first saw it, and they had people that bring it out there with a -- on a, what they call a -- I guess you would say it's a wagon, but it's not, it's a -- what they call the -- I done forgot what they call the first part the mules is hooked up to -- that was different from the lumber, they put a -- they had a two-wheeled cart that they stacked the lumber 00:16:00kind of on the green chain, and it had two mules and a guy would thump to ah, the green chain, that's when the lumber comes out of the mill. See it's green, and it's heavy stuff, they have mens on this pulling it off and they put it on these wagons, two-wheeled wagons, and they would carry it off out in the yard, actually it's a field, they got it lined up and that's where they would stack that lumber up, they'd stay there for about a year to dry. They would put ah, some of the boys, most of the lumber would go to long, then they would have three to four of 'em boys go cross apart, about six -- eight feet apart, 00:17:00according to how long the lumber is, and that when the wind's blowing, through the sill up that dries it -- it almost stayed there a year.

DUNNING: And did -- during most of childhood is that where your dad worked, in the mills?

WEBSTER: In the mills. He very seldom worked in the woods.

DUNNING: Well, a number of people that I've -- seniors that I've interviewed in Richmond, they worked in the sawmills and before they came out here, so that was steady, was that steady employment for your dad?

WEBSTER: Well, sometimes, no, because in the wintertime they couldn't get the logs out of the woods. You see, they would take the train, sawmill by train, to the woods, and there's, before, they had something they call a rehaul. It's something like a big, ah, winch, built on the flatcar, and it can be a hundred 00:18:00or two hundred feet away from the logs, and there was a cable, they call that ah, the man that's driving the ah, dry belt, it was built on a flatcar, he could throw that block and tackle about a hundred feet, so he was with a chute so he could pull it straight ahead, he bring this machine around, and he goosed the motor, and it turns around and he release it, and throw it off maybe a hundred feet away from the tracks. Then they hook a mule to it, or a big horse, and they would drag it to the lumber, they'd have somebody pulling them a horse up five hundred feet away from the track.

DUNNING: It sounds like you must have watched this process quite a bit. Would you meet your father at the mill, and sort of see what was going on?

WEBSTER: Sometimes, if it was a good day.

DUNNING: And what was your father like? Could you describe him?

WEBSTER: He was a hard-working man. Sometimes he was grumpy, and he had asthma and wet and asthma don't work. Somedays asthma'd be so bad that he'd have to -- I can't remember. It was something like turpentine. They would pour it in a hot bowl of water, or a pan, and he would sit over it, like this, with a towel over his head. And this would come up, what's in this hot water would come up and he 00:20:00would breathe that, to release the asthma. It was mostly, I think it was turpentine.

DUNNING: Yeah, I think I've heard that, it opened him up. Now, do you think he got asthma from working in the sawmill, or --

WEBSTER: It kind of run in some parts of the family, on my grandmother's side. I don't know how they get it. My daughter have asthma. And I don't know. And not any of my mother's people have it.

DUNNING: Well, they do say it is, it can be, inherited.

WEBSTER: Well, they say that. I don't know.

DUNNING: Are there important things you think your father tried to teach you? Or hand down to you?

WEBSTER: Well, the most important thing they would teach -- would install in me, education. We would go to school everyday, but the schoolhouse burnt down. They 00:21:00say somebody [laughs] -- they fired his wife, she was the teacher. And they said he set the schoolhouse on fire 'cause his wife didn't ever get a job with somebody else. Another lady.

DUNNING: Now, was it a small school, was it one of the one-room class, one-room schools?

WEBSTER: Two-room. Them {bina?} kids was on the back end, and from the third or the fourth grade, fourth grade, they were all the way up on the other end.

DUNNING: So the school went from the first to the fourth grade?

WEBSTER: No, all the way up to ninth grade, or the tenth grade.

DUNNING: How many years did you go there?

WEBSTER: Five, or four and a half, five, about four years.

DUNNING: And at which point in that did the school burn down? Did the school burn down when you were a student there?

WEBSTER: Yeah.

DUNNING: And what did you do for a classroom after that?

WEBSTER: I went to, I guess it was Good Pine, a school, but it was built between Good Pine and Tall Timber in {Trout?} and we all must move from that area and we went to school up at Trout or Good Pine. They only had one black school, and after that one burned down up at Morris Hill, they all the kids went to Good Pine.

DUNNING: All the black kids went to Good Pine. And was Good Pine also a black school.

WEBSTER: Yes, we didn't go to school with the black and the white. They all had separate schools. Then the Latinos and the Indians and -- I forgot what there was. They were dark, like Indians. They didn't want them to go along with the white -- there was some nationality in America came from somewhere else and they had long hair, the mens did. But they made them cut it off, or you don't go to school. Theirs was longer than yours. They made them cut the hair off. They forced them to. And so they cut the hair off and said we won't be able to pray 00:24:00to God without hair and he said, well, if you don't cut your hair off you don't go to school. That part of the world was controlled by one man, Will {Buchanan?}.

DUNNING: What was his name?

WEBSTER: Will.

DUNNING: And who was he?

WEBSTER: He was the owner of three sawmills.

DUNNING: So, he also controlled the schools.

WEBSTER: Controlled everything. Who gonna be mayor, who gonna do this, and who gonna work here, who gonna be sheriff, and all that.

DUNNING: Did you get to know him, or know of him?

WEBSTER: I knew of him, I knew one of his sons. We used to have to pass one of his son's houses to get to the commissary. You know what a commissary is?

DUNNING: Mmhm.

WEBSTER: We'd see him. We'd keep us real friendly. He had a boarding house. And 00:25:00his house was across the road from the boarding house. In the woods, they caught squirrels, and they had a pen, I guess as big as this room, and a top and everything, and they kept squirrels and he'd bring 'em in and he'd put 'em in there, and we'd pass by there going to the store, commissary store, and we'd watch the squirrels playing, running, jumping, all that. He had the red squirrel, the black squirrel, and the gray squirrel.

DUNNING: And was it for entertainment or did they eat the squirrels, or --

WEBSTER: No, this was just for entertainment.

DUNNING: For fun.

WEBSTER: They'd just be there. And when I left there, they were still there. My mother came and got us and carried us to the river, my mother and father had separated.

DUNNING: How old were you at that time?

WEBSTER: About seven.

DUNNING: You were pretty young. So then did your life change after your parents separated?

WEBSTER: Yes. After I moved to the river, it changed more. I could work, during the summer months.

DUNNING: What was your life like in your new town?

WEBSTER: It was fun. We had a playground, we could play baseball, and basketball.

DUNNING: So you didn't have that big acreage around anymore.

WEBSTER: No. And we could go to the movie.

DUNNING: So, it was a town. A little more action going on?

WEBSTER: Like what?

DUNNING: Than your previous town? Where all the cousins lived around you?

WEBSTER: No, there wasn't too much action there at all. But they had a movie, a movie house, but I never went, and so, and after I moved to the river, we could go to the movie for three cents. [Laughs] That day is gone.

DUNNING: Sure is.

WEBSTER: And on the way, we'd buy a Bit O' Honey and a Baby Ruth, and we'd take the other three pennies and go to the movie. And your girl friend, these weren't cousins. Before, they all cousins, but they were still courting. [Laughs].

DUNNING: You could afford to go to the movies then.

WEBSTER: And we'd go get whatever we want. She had a choice to take whatever one she wanted, she'd tell you, seeing it, says whatever kind of candy she wanted, Baby Ruth, Bit O' Honey, Peanut Patty -- there was something else, I forget what the name of it is. They would be all of them separate. You could get a penny one or two for a penny.

DUNNING: Can't beat that.

WEBSTER: No, you could, if you could get the money. [Laughs] That was a long job, getting money.

DUNNING: I want to ask you a little bit more about your schooling. Did you have favorite subjects?

WEBSTER: History. And I got very little schooling. At {Marshfield?} back in Good 00:29:00Pine, it covers the Marshfield community, that's where the black school was at. Well, they had two. Marshfield was one school in the black community. They were about a mile and a half, two miles, from Good Pine or Trout, and further than that from Jima. They had three towns. But the three sawmills at Trout, Good Pine, and Jima. But somewhere another one. And they had old Jima. That was the first sawmill. I wonder, how did they get old Jima. It was there. And most of the people lived in old Jima, it was white.

DUNNING: And how about your teachers? Were they black, or white?

WEBSTER: Oh, black. But you couldn't tell them from the white.

DUNNING: What do you mean?

WEBSTER: [Laughs] Oh, they were as light as you, or lighter. They had red hair, blond hair. Their parents were white. The men -- but one was in slavery, and they said, that it was the white woman. She couldn't get no work. And they getting ready, I guess they had to walk about a quarter of a mile. I like that. Maybe a mile. And they would get some black kid to go along with them to carry their groceries for them, to bring the groceries back to the house. I don't know 00:31:00if I should tell you this, but [laughs] --

DUNNING: Well, that's okay.

WEBSTER: We'd have about a mile, mile and a half to walk. And coming back, they'd killed all the trees down along the road. And I had a sack of sugar, and a sack of flour, and she told me to "turn your back and look across the road." I looked at her and she said "turn." I turned around and she hoist her dress and [makes urinating noise] [laughs] and, that was funny. She said "Are you crazy?" 00:32:00I said "I ain't never seen a white woman pee before." I guess all women did back then, they'd wipe themselves with the dress tail and we picked up the groceries and took off. [Laughs]

DUNNING: And you've never forgotten it.

WEBSTER: No, it was too funny.

DUNNING: It made a big impression. Well, did you have a particular teacher that you really liked, or that you feel had a big impact on you?

WEBSTER: I had one. She was -- I think her name was Mildred Keys. She was a distant cousin. I never knew how, but the Keys and the {Watleys?} and the Websters were all mixed up, where you marrying the second cousin, and third cousin and some of 'em first cousins, and all that way. And most of 'em you 00:33:00couldn't tell them from the white. That was about the only favorite one.

DUNNING: And whose decision was it for you to leave school, to finish your education?

WEBSTER: Well, I didn't get a chance to finish it.

DUNNING: Could you tell me the circumstances of why, why not?

WEBSTER: My mother and father separated. She moved to the river and he didn't want to leave his hometown, Good Pine, where his father owned about five hundred acres. The sawmills there, we had sawmills on the river but he had sawmills on the river but he stayed there, he wouldn't come up where we was at.

DUNNING: After you were about seven you weren't able to go to school?

WEBSTER: Yeah -- had more chance to go to school, because they had one school, 00:34:00two schools, the one in Marshfield burnt down and we could go to the one at Good Pine, Tall Timber one. The school was actually at Tall Timber.

DUNNING: How long did you go to school at Tall Timber?

WEBSTER: One, two, about two years.

DUNNING: So you were under ten when you stopped going to school?

WEBSTER: No, back then, but the school wasn't but four months.

DUNNING: Cause everybody worked? All the kids worked?

WEBSTER: Four months, and one teacher would teach all, from the fourth grade back. All of us in one room. I guess the primer, the first grade, and second 00:35:00grade, third grade, fourth grade were all in one room.

DUNNING: I've talked to some people who weren't able to go to school in the winter because they had a long walk and they didn't have the right shoes or jackets, so sometimes the parents tried to home school them, so they'd have some books at home. Did that ever happen with you?

WEBSTER: No. Momma worked, and we worked. We was able to help with the cold winter shoes. In the summer time we had tennis shoes. And after that I had to work, so I just -- it was rough, I think I was getting a nickel an hour.

DUNNING: Tell me about the first job you got paid for.

WEBSTER: Picking cotton.

DUNNING: Would that be the nickel an hour?

WEBSTER: No, that would be about two cent a pound, picking cotton then. And then it went up, after the WPA, and the NRA, and there was another one in there, I don't know what the heck it was. The price of cotton picking went up, and the price of cotton went up. Then, nobody knew it, but maybe the big wheels did. Hitler start, not Hitler, Kaiser, then Hitler, started buying all the cotton they could get their hands on, and the price they sell the cotton at big sale 00:37:00went to Europe. That's when the price of cotton -- you get ten cent a pound for picking cotton, but you had to bust your butt to [laughs] -- and back. Very seldom you get cotton that high unless you go on the bottom -- that's the land where the rich land at. And you'd get cotton as tall as I am. And you didn't get a chance if the people is sharecropping. They didn't let the people come out of the woods pick their cotton up there cause they'd let the people live on the land pick it. And you could get that hill cotton, you'd have to work like hell to get fifty pound.

DUNNING: Most children growing up today wouldn't have a clue about what it's like to pick cotton. Could you tell me what a day was like for you as a child picking cotton? Your schedule.

WEBSTER: You would try to start as early as possible, before seven, or around six. You'd be raising hell if you got a hundred pounds. Cotton is about that tall. You'd break your butt crawling around and bending over, picking it, and the rows is about an acre long, and just a regular sack that they chops corn in, that's what they use for picking cotton.

DUNNING: So you'd be carrying that heavy sack all day.

WEBSTER: Dragging it.

DUNNING: How did it affect your back?

WEBSTER: So far, I have a pretty good back. I guess I was to young even to worry about the back. And after I left Good Pine we come to the river, and we started 00:39:00working in the fields, but we lived in town. I think we chopped corn and cotton until they came out with a cotton chopper, or something. They would block it. So, some guy got a horse and built a slide, and we'd haul wood scraps from the mills, where they cut the bark off the trees, and we'd sell it to the people in the quarters. And during the winter months, we would cut some of what they call clearing the field I'd say five acres where they will farm it next year. Then we would cut the trees down, about eighteen inches for the wood, and 00:40:00sell it. But you didn't sell it. Me. The old man would care to sell it, my father. He'd give you what he wanted -- you didn't get -- oh, you'd be raising sand if you got twenty cents. That's a nickel for the movie, and a nickel for somebody else, and then a nickel more for candy.

DUNNING: So when you made money it went back into the family pot.

WEBSTER: When my mother passed, we moved to my mother, we kept our own money and we'd give Momma so much money. And she did what needed to be done. But when there was the daddy, you didn't hardly get a nickel. According to how he feel, that's what he'd give you.

DUNNING: You mentioned before that he was kind of grumpy.

WEBSTER: He was pretty rough. He didn't mind snatching up a stalk of cotton and whipping you on your butt. And you'd look at him and wonder why. He'd pull his belt off and whop you. And you'd say "What the hell he hitting me for?" [laughs]

DUNNING: Did he ever answer you? Did he ever give you an answer?

WEBSTER: Mm-mm.

DUNNING: When you were a child growing up, did you ever have an idea of what you wanted in your life, or did you have a vision of something outside Louisiana?

WEBSTER: Education. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to go to school. But, it just didn't come around. We left Good Pine, the mills were shutting 00:42:00down, we got to the river, and we weren't there a year before they shut down. They had a planer that's for hardwood. That's where they making flooring, and furniture, stuff like that. I didn't get a chance to work there, because all the men that came from these other sawmills then started working in the planer, kids didn't have a chance. I'd cut yards, dig up gardens, and stuff like that for extra change. The older men that got too old to work, they done took the job and would do it for less, cause they had to help feed the grandchildren, and 00:43:00children -- there's older children. It was pretty rough.

DUNNING: Have you told your own children about how your life was so different than their childhood?

WEBSTER: Not too much -- in sketches.

WOMAN'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND: You have said a lot.

WEBSTER: Sketches, yes

WOMAN'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND: One thing you always appreciate, nobody gives you anything for nothing, you have to work for it.

WEBSTER: Yes, that's the way I was brought up. You didn't get something for nothing, you worked for it

DUNNING: Do you remember how old you were when people stopped treating you like a child? Or when you considered yourself grown-up?

WEBSTER: I guess I was about twelve. Or eleven.

DUNNING: You mentioned that you always thought a lot about education. If you had had the opportunity to be trained in a certain area, what do you think it would have been.

WEBSTER: History

DUNNING: What is it about the history that attracts you?

WEBSTER: I always liked horses and cows. When we had a veterinarian, I used to be able to hit round him, he would tell you about different breeds of horses, where they came from, how they got to be like this, different cattle, where they cross-breed and all that, and why, because milk cows, you haven't got nothing 00:45:00but a bunch of bone, but if you inbreed 'em with a Brahma, or a Hereford, or something like that, you get more meat on the bones, and you can get more money from the calves. They sell pretty good because they sell 'em for veal. But if you didn't have no meat on the bone, the buyer didn't want it, because he didn't have nothing to sell but a stack of bones. Then, they brought the Brahma in, everybody looked at it was scared of it, cause they were mean. Then back then, because they wood cattle. And they started breeding them, and the price of beef went up -- everybody was taking their milk cows and breeding them with the Brahma. And they could get more money from the calves. They weren't worried about the milk, they got a milk cow too, but the calf, they'd sell it for veal, 00:46:00most of 'em keep it up for about a year and a half, and sell it for beef. They got more flesh on the bones.

DUNNING: Sounds like you would have been a pretty good breeder, too.

WEBSTER: I always liked cattle. The way to breed them, and the way they bred horses. They had saddle horses, then you had a farm horse, plow horse. A saddle horse is thin, it's something similar -- actually, a saddle horse and a race horse came out of the same stock. And if you had enough mares, then you would breed 'em with the saddle horses because all the rich people had saddle horses, even the women. Now, that's a funny thing [laughs], to see a woman get off a 00:47:00horse with her dress on. (Laughs)

DUNNING: Wouldn't they do some sidesaddle thing?

WEBSTER: Sidesaddles were gone, when I came along. At least my mother had one, though. But they didn't use it, women would straddle the horse when I came along.

DUNNING: After you left Louisiana did you ever have horses?

WEBSTER: No, I've never owned a horse. Or a cow. That wouldn't probably work.

DUNNING: When did you first hear about California? When did you get in your mind to come to California?

WEBSTER: I had a cousin who came out here, Earl Webster. He was a first cousin, 00:48:00and his father was in World War I and his father and his mother never married, he was born out of wedlock. He started messing around with public work and they moved around, he got a chance to get a pretty fair education. He said "In California they force the children to go to school. I said "Why not? They make your kids go to school out here." And they have never got a chance to come.

DUNNING: When did you first consider coming to California?

WEBSTER: After service. After I got out of the Army. In my home town, and state too, there wasn't no work, 'cause they'd shut down all the army camps and they 00:49:00stopped, shut down the army and shut down the railroad, 'cause there wasn't nothing to be moved. Everything was in place.

DUNNING: Tell me about your -- were you drafted into the service?

WEBSTER: Yes.

DUNNING: Will you tell me what you remember about that? Your service years.

WEBSTER: They herd you around like a bunch of cows. All of us met at an unemployment office. That's when I heard about employment.

DUNNING: In Louisiana. Near your home town?

WEBSTER: {Dirilla}. But I was born in Good Pine, Louisiana, up there, and they had three sawmills and when the sawmills went dead the town went dead, and when they left Jima there wasn't nothing in there but gas stations. I left there 00:50:00early, though. I left there in about thirty-six. Yeah, about thirty-six when I left that neck of the woods and moved to the river. I was in the river until I went in the service.

DUNNING: So you were a little over twenty years old when you enlisted, when you were drafted?

WEBSTER: No, I was seventeen.

DUNNING: Oh, you were only seventeen.

WEBSTER: About seventeen -- sixteen? Seventeen.

DUNNING: And did a number of your friends or townspeople also join up in the army when you did?

WEBSTER: I don't think it was one person volunteered to service out of the parish. Yeah, one. The rest of 'em were drafted. Right at the peak of building 00:51:00all those camps and railroads, they run tracks where there had never been a track before, and that was good money. I think they got twenty-six cent an hour. The old mens didn't want you out there, say "You work too fast, you'll be out of a job before you get a job." [laughs] Yup. And that's the {only?} thing about the railroad, I liked to drive spikes. You set four spikes, but it looks like two mens to one spike, but it's only one man to two spikes, to one spike. And it was fun, we'd race with the hammers.

DUNNING: This is when you were in the service?

WEBSTER: No, this was before I went in the service. We did that -- we worked all between the river and Lake Charles or {Fedourida?} and ah, Texas, I forgot the first time in Texas, or Louisiana, all the way up the {manner?} I don't know what the name -- Marysville. I don't remember what that Texas town there -- we worked all along that track -- new track is good, but repairing the old track (whistles) the ties that rotted, then you have to dig it out, then to put the new ties in you have to redig it, so to fit under the track, and by the time you get under the track, four or five ties down, the track has got a belly in it, 00:53:00like that. So you've got to bring that up, maybe they brought in gravel, and they fill up under the ties that's something to raise the ties with rocks, you didn't put dirt in it.

DUNNING: So, my guess is the army was probably pretty happy to get somebody like you who grew up working.

WEBSTER: Well, ninety percent of the people that came went in service grew up working because there wasn't anything else to do. Very few of 'em got a chance to go to college and get a college education, they that want it did go to college got the best they got was school teaching, and some of 'em was lucky enough to be technicians in the medical field, and some of 'em got to be technicians stringing telephone wires, putting in telephones. Most of those had 00:54:00one or two years college.

DUNNING: What was your job in the service?

WEBSTER: I was in the ammunition, ordnance, hauling, carrying, we didn't carry, we handled it, but we didn't carry it, they had trucks, they'd truck it in. We had trucks to move our company with, and the kitchen and stuff, but to bring the ammunition, that was a quartermaster. We was in the ordnance and the ones that moved the food to you was quartermaster.

DUNNING: And where were you stationed?

WEBSTER: My first camp was Camp Rucker, Alabama. Then I went overseas to Camp Shanks and from Camp Shanks we went to {Shillingstone, England.} It was just 00:55:00about like it sounds. [laughs] Did you get the sound?

DUNNING: I think I got it. So, you were in the service three years, or?

WEBSTER: Something like that. Until the war ended. I was there when they first invaded France from England. I went on the third day. They had picked up the dead, and look around. "What you looking at me barehead, I'm not stinking, that's that truckload of dead people over there." And you'd look at him like he crazy. He said "If you don't believe me, go look." That was pretty crummy. Then 00:56:00you got used to that. Then I went up a little further at St. Lo, that's where hell on wheels. You couldn't unload. Everything was cooked on the truck -- and you get started eating, then you had to run. And the bridge at down side of the railroad track, 'cause Hitler got lucky and let a couple of bombers. The United States got two helpers from the Air Force, and he'd sneak in a bomber or a fighter plane, and he'd come in shooting. Cause the pilot, they wasn't looking to go back home. Then, don't know who it was, Marshall I believe was the head 00:57:00man, or Eisenhower, so well he beat Hitler, they would send I think it was Eisenhower, he would send every plane that would fly, they don't look for it to come back, and bomb everything in front. And they started shooting for the bridges. You couldn't run backwards, you could run so far to the river, lake, or whatever you want to call it, and they couldn't get across. And this big -- what's this big tank Hitler had? It wasn't worth a damn unless you could get off the road, they couldn't get in the field, they'd get in the field, they'd bog down. This'd be a target. As long as it was on the highway, it's hell, but if you force it off in the field, he was in big trouble. They would sink up, get 00:58:00stuck, and they guy to start using them as a play pretty. They'd run off in the field trying to take a short cut, and they couldn't go no further after they bogged. And they only could see out of the front of the tank, they can't see out of the back and the side. You could see it, as long as he's looking one way, you crawl from hole to hole. You get up and you could make him open the top, you throw a hand grenade, or a hand -- what do you call this kind of thing? -- it was like a hand grenade, but it was TNT. You used the same fuses, all but similar that you use on a hand grenade. You throw it under the tank, the tank 00:59:00has got nothing but a thin sheet of steel under the bottom. You throw it under there and it'd go off, and he's got to come out. He come out, you shoot him. But most of that was did by your infantry or your supply, because the front line and big tanks, they only could carry what they could get on the tank. A truck, they'd come up quartermaster behind. We was close to the quartermaster, but we was ordnance. Quartermasters caught hell.

DUNNING: We're running out of tape. Are you okay to go on for a few minutes, or would you rather have us come back another day to finish up? How are you feeling?

WEBSTER: I'm feeling pretty good. Let's finish it. You got enough to finish, or do you want to put a new tape in there?

DUNNING: He's just going to change the tapes around. You have a good memory.

WEBSTER: Well, there's lots of it that as you as you talk comes back.

DUNNING: Well, that's kind of why I like to start people at the beginning, because then they can kind of naturally go up.

DUNNING: You were describing your time in the service, and being abroad. That 01:00:00must have been such an enormous change for a young man from Louisiana to suddenly be in a war situation. Did you think about home much? Did you want to be home?

WEBSTER: Well, I tried not to, because -- You never think about it much until you come up upon a dead person. Then you think, "Will I make it?"

DUNNING: But you made it back. Did you go back to Louisiana?

WEBSTER: Mm-hm.

DUNNING: It sounds like you were probably a different person when you came back. [Pause] What happened when you came home?

WEBSTER: Practically everybody I knew in my hometown was gone. And it was close to Christmas. My brother came home for Christmas. I came back out here with him. Christmas in Louisiana, New Year's out here.

DUNNING: About 1945?

WEBSTER: Yeah. I was out here for New Year's, forty-six. And the only work out here during that time was through the service work, 'cause all the shipyards were shut down, and the only thing left was. working -- it was hard, you had to be skilled, it was submarines steel working on submarines. We've got one of the best fleets in the world, the United States, submarines. Long-range stuff.

DUNNING: So you had your discharge from the army. Did you have any idea what your life would be like in California?

WEBSTER: That's when Hell came in, but what are you going to do? For three-four years you knew nothing but the army, ammunition, guns. And when you got out you 01:03:00were as lost as a newborn baby. Then all the army bases were shut down, all the supply houses were shut down. They hadn't -- no kind of work, at my hometown. They shut all the bases down, and everything. So my brother was coming back here, I got in the car to come on back. Kissed Momma, said "Momma, I'll let you know what's happening." I came out here, I think I was here about a week, and I got a job at the Naval Supply Center.

DUNNING: Oh, at Mare Island?

WEBSTER: No, at the Naval Supply Center in Oakland. I stayed there until they 01:04:00started laying off. {To someone wife} And I met you then. So, I went into construction.

DUNNING: Were you living with your brother at the time?

WEBSTER: Yeah.

DUNNING: And was this in Richmond?

WEBSTER: Uh-huh.

DUNNING: Well, you have a slightly different vantage point than the people who came during the height of the shipyards, when Richmond was a twenty-four hour town. You came at the end. What did it look like when you first got here, what was the atmosphere?

WEBSTER: [laughs] It looked like an army base; there were a whole lot of project houses. All the people who lived in them were about that far apart, the only thing between them was a four or six inch wall. If you hear a lot talking over 01:05:00there you could hear them, if you talked over here they could hear you.

DUNNING: Where did you live?

WEBSTER: I lived in a two-story apartment, we lived in the canals.

DUNNING: On Canal Boulevard?

WEBSTER: I guess so.

DUNNING: The main road?

WEBSTER: No, over in the projects.

DUNNING: The people who were shipyard workers, did they still live in the projects?

WEBSTER: Yeah.

DUNNING: Because they were allowed to do that for a few years?

WEBSTER: That went on for about six years -- then other work started coming in, construction work, furniture work, and factories. All the things people couldn't get during the war, that's what they started building. One place had more women 01:06:00than any other, where they was building fans, electric fans. It got hot here during that time -- I don't know what happened to the weather, it changed -- and everybody wanted a fan. And an electric iron that would last more than a week.

DUNNING: Who would you socialize with when you came out here?

WEBSTER: All of my brother's friends. And a whole lot of people from our home town was out here.

DUNNING: So there were a lot of people from Louisiana who came to the shipyards. Did you meet any -- were there people here that you knew from your hometown?

WEBSTER: Oh, yeah, hundreds of 'em. And later on there were some who came out of 01:07:00Texas, Alabama, New Mexico -- most of those that came out of New Mexico were the Latinos.

DUNNING: What was it like in terms of the ethnic composition after the war? Because prior to the war, there were only fifteen African-American families in Richmond. Some of them were long-time Richmond families. But there was a substantial Mexican population, Portuguese population, and lots of Italians. What did it look like when you arrived?

WEBSTER: Well, we socialized with them. Most of the bars were owned by Polacks, whites, after the shipyards and things, most of the blacks were able to get 01:08:00licenses to have a café or sell liquor, and that's when it kind of eased apart, 'cause the whites already had barrooms, and the blacks didn't. After blacks got hold of the barroom and cocktail license, they started spreading. But you still knew one another. You'd socialize if you met on the street somewhere, or some other bar. Before, you was jammed up in one bar.

DUNNING: I know there were clubs in North Richmond. And during the war, there were clubs all over Richmond. After the war, where were the black clubs?

WEBSTER: You mean, where did they go?

DUNNING: Where were they located?

WEBSTER: Any place where they'd sell them a piece of property.

DUNNING: So that would be North Richmond?

WEBSTER: No, they got property on that hill up there. Out in Pittsburgh -- neighborhood -- out in somebody's apple orchard. Would be able to buy the land and they'd build houses and the blacks, and sold 'em to the blacks. They mostly sold 'em to the white or Latinos and there were fruit pickers. They were Italians and there was another group that worked the fields.

DUNNING: There were Filipinos here as well.

WEBSTER: Yeah, but they wasn't Filipinos. Actually, you couldn't tell them -- 01:10:00they looked like you. I don't know what the heck they're called. It's been so long.

DUNNING: When did you first buy property in Richmond?

WEBSTER: When did we first buy -- ?

FEMALE VOICE: 1957

DUNNING: And I should mention for the sake of anyone watching this that you were asking your wife CECILE Webster, whom you married in 1955, she's making some additions on the side.

WEBSTER: Yeah. I didn't buy any property until I got married.

CECILE WEBSTER: '57 we bought a house in Richmond. Not this one, but we bought another house, and we lived there for like nineteen years.

WEBSTER: How long did we live in Berkeley?

CECILE WEBSTER: We only lived there a couple of years. From '55 to '57.

DUNNING: You lived in Berkeley. So when you came back here in '57, where did you buy your house?

CECILE WEBSTER: Up on Thirty-seventh Street. You know where the County building is?

WEBSTER: Behind the County building, on this side of the railroad tracks.

CECILE WEBSTER: Center Avenue. We stayed there about twenty years.

WEBSTER: For real?

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, we about twenty years, because the kids --

DUNNING: Did you ever meet a guy, Eddie Eaton?

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, he lived right across the street.

DUNNING: He was someone I interviewed about fifteen years ago.

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, he lived right across the street. This was Thirty-Seventh and he lived on that side and we lived on this side of Thirty-Seventh.

DUNNING: I remember him telling me he bought a MacGregor house, which was sort of a big deal at the time. They're not fancy houses, but they were from a 01:12:00certain era.

CECILE WEBSTER: That's my nephew's father-in-law. Mr. Eaton.

DUNNING: Mr. Eaton, Eddie Eaton?

WEBSTER: Yeah, he lived right across the street.

CECILE WEBSTER: My nephew married his daughter.

DUNNING: He's a neat guy. I remember him telling me the story that he was the first African-American in his neighborhood. He bought the house, he was a painter at the time over at Hunter's Point, and then the whites started leaving his neighborhood and the realtors did what they call block-busting. They'd say, a black has moved in, and other people -- he became pretty good friends with lots of people in the neighborhood, and very proud of his house. I remember him saying, "I paid cash for mine." He had a Cadillac, and I said, "I don't know if 01:13:00you want to say all this on the tape [Webster laughs] it's in my garage -- He's a really neat guy, he was a golfer. I think in a different period of time, he definitely would have been professional. He believed in taking a house, and fixing it up, and he and his son did buy property.

CECILE WEBSTER: He really improved his property. Mr. & Mrs. Webster talking at same time.

DUNNING: Oh, two people coming in. We'll see how it goes, we may have to pause for a few minutes, if --

WEBSTER: Out for exercise. Everybody fell out and couldn't walk, couldn't keep up.

DUNNING: We were talking, before your daughter Katherine came in, about your 01:14:00buying your first house in Richmond. Tell me about that process. Was it hard to find a house?

CECILE WEBSTER: It took us a while.

WEBSTER: We had a real estate seller.

CECILE WEBSTER: We didn't really know anything but Richmond. And we had one or two real estate people. Finally we found a house on Center Avenue, and we bought that one. It took us $500 dollars down and $59 a month.

WEBSTER: [laughs] Don't say what we'll do it. {?}

CECILE WEBSTER: It had two bedrooms and one bath, and it had a huge back yard, and that was it until the kids started getting --

WEBSTER: Until we got a son.

CECILE WEBSTER: It had two and a half bedrooms, and an attic over the garage. When the kids started getting older, they needed to be in a room by themselves, and that's when we started looking. They must have been fourteen, or thirteen. My son was about seven when we moved here, so we've been here over thirty years.

DUNNING: How would you describe this neighborhood? What is it called?

CECILE WEBSTER: It's called the Annex.

WEBSTER: Crescent Park.

DUNNING: It's still a part of the Richmond Annex?

CECILE WEBSTER: This is the Annex. Crescent Park is nothing but apartments over in that -- when they built them they called that Crescent Park. Then -- they'd already blocked all these streets off and you couldn't drive through. This is what they called the Annex.

DUNNING: And this is about the end of the Annex, isn't it?

WEBSTER: It ends at the freeway.

DUNNING: Right, and then it goes south all the way to El Cerrito.

CECILE WEBSTER: To El Cerrito on Carlson [Boulevard], along in there.

WEBSTER: It goes on the other side of the freeway.

DUNNING: Yeah.

WEBSTER: That's all the way down to Cutting [Boulevard].

CECILE WEBSTER: Across the main street, Portrero and it stops there, and then comes back almost to the Plaza, for the Annex.

DUNNING: Have you seen your neighborhood change much, since you moved here? You moved here in the '60s.

CECILE WEBSTER: In the 70s. '72.

DUNNING: What kind of changes have you seen?

CECILE WEBSTER: Well, most of the people who came here --

WEBSTER: Changes -- all this used to be white. Since the price of the houses -- 01:17:00now every time that a black person sells a house, a white family moves into it.

CECILE WEBSTER: No, mostly Asians or Mexicans.

WEBSTER: Yeah, Asians and Mexicans. There's a few white.

DUNNING: That's what's happening now?

CECILE WEBSTER: At first it was all white. Now, they're coming back in to the neighborhood -- the houses are not --

WEBSTER: That's the only way they can afford a house.

DUNNING: So was this neighborhood -- it was all white and then it was all black, and then --

CECILE WEBSTER: When they first built these houses it was black. And then probably the next street was white. You had some white in it, but that was it. So we came down here and looked at this very same lot, house.

WEBSTER: When they were building it.

CECILE WEBSTER: He refused to buy it. At that time, these houses were running around $11,000. He refused to buy it.

DUNNING: Because it was too much?

WEBSTER: No, it just didn't suit me. Most of the people that come down here looked at 'em while they building it. They didn't want it. A couple of neighbors of mine on this street, they looked at this and said, "Nah!" So they went somewhere else.

DUNNING: Now, what sort of turned you off about it, originally?

WEBSTER: This one in and one out. You see, you've got one street in and one street out.

DUNNING: And you're in a little cul de sac here.

WEBSTER: But we wind up in this cul de sac after all. We could have gotten it maybe five thousand dollars cheaper, if we'd bought it then.

CECILE WEBSTER: You don't know, it was $11,000 when we looked at these houses and we paid $26,000.

DUNNING: In the early '70s.

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, uh-huh.

DUNNING: Do you have much to do with the City of Richmond?

WEBSTER: I used to. But now I don't.

DUNNING: In what ways?

WEBSTER: I would go to City Council meetings, and other meetings, private homes, stuff like that. But all the people's that was in it now -- it's not into government, city government. So, all of them that's my age or older has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground. It's mostly new peoples from other neighborhoods, and the other towns, and they haven't got to be that tight with one another like we used to be, because all of us come out of the projects.

CECILE WEBSTER: We used to really --

WEBSTER: They knew one another back when there was projects over here, in Richmond. That's all they had in Richmond, during there, except down in Second and Third Street, and a few on the hill. There's San Pablo [Avenue]. All the rest of it was projects, and they had houses in North Richmond, but they had 01:20:00more juke joints than they had houses.

DUNNING: Do you remember when there was a real active downtown in Richmond, Macdonald Avenue?

WEBSTER: Yes. That was during the time we were married, or before we were married, back down the avenue with the main --

DUNNING: The movie theaters, department stores, restaurants. Do you remember that period during redevelopment when it just went -- it died.

WEBSTER: Yeah.

CECILE WEBSTER: All the big stores closed up. And then Hilltop came in --

WEBSTER: And killed it off.

CECILE WEBSTER: And took all that away.

DUNNING: A number of people I've spoken too, they felt really kind of lost when 01:21:00the downtown went, because it used to be a center for the town. Did that affect you?

WEBSTER: Right. Most of the community, you'd go to a café downtown and sit and talk to people. That you'd seen in church last Sunday, or you went over and visited a church and they would talk about "Yeah, you've been at my church 'til a couple of weeks ago," and all that. But now, you don't see nobody.

DUNNING: Well they're slowly trying to build it back up, but it went in what, twenty, thirty years being empty buildings and vacant lots.

CECILE WEBSTER: I guess it'll get there after a while, but --

WEBSTER: You used to get out of church and come downtown with your girlfriend, go by a café and after that go to Oakland, or ride to the beach, according to how the weather was --

DUNNING: Was your social life in Richmond, after you got married?

CECILE WEBSTER: Not too much.

WEBSTER: Well -- ask her. [laughs]

DUNNING: Do you want to bring your chair up a little bit?

CECILE WEBSTER: Well, mostly, we wasn't the party type, 'cause I had kids and my friends had kids, our friends had kids. If we had to go someplace we would take our kids with us. I wasn't a card-playing person, but he was, and that was all they did.

WEBSTER: Social cards and stuff.

CECILE WEBSTER: And after that -- that's all we ever did, til the kids -- all the kids grew up together, and went to church. Sometimes they had a -- they had the house, uh --

WEBSTER: Party.

CECILE WEBSTER: A club, and they would --

WEBSTER: That's when the [Oakland] Raiders was high, we'd all go to the football game together, and we'd come back by -- actually, very few how other people's houses we went to.

CECILE WEBSTER: Well, then they had a club.

WEBSTER: You used to belong to it.

CECILE WEBSTER: And every month they would meet, and you'd give them --

WEBSTER: One another's house.

CECILE WEBSTER: That's before I even had kids.

DUNNING: Did you belong to any organizations?

CECILE WEBSTER: I used to belong to this club, we called The Housewomen 'til I got pregnant and I just didn't feel like I was accomplishing much, it was getting too -- 'cause I had my baby, and I didn't have time for all that other thing. We still went to the -- then I belonged to the American Legion, and that's about it, outside of church, that was it. And PTA.

DUNNING: Which church would you go to? Would you both go to the same church?

CECILE WEBSTER: He didn't go, because I joined when I first came here.

WEBSTER: It was the North Richmond Baptist Church.

CECILE WEBSTER: I never liked that -- those churches are so big that I'm used to going to a smaller church, so I joined Easter Hill, which is right off of 39th Street, and then finally he decided, ten years later or fifteen years later, to join the church --

WEBSTER: But I was there just about every Sunday. Everybody actually thought I was a member. [laughs]

CECILE WEBSTER: Basically, aside from going to the PTA, and helping out in the schools and so forth --

WEBSTER: Right. In the community, things like that.

DUNNING: When did you have your children? In what years were your children born?

CECILE WEBSTER: Kathy was born in '59, and Kevin was 1965.

WEBSTER: We adopted Kevin, though. Our son.

CECILE WEBSTER: He was six years old. Kathy was six years old when I got Kevin.

DUNNING: How did that adoption happen?

CECILE WEBSTER: She wanted a brother. Everybody else had brothers, and she didn't have any. She didn't want a sister, so after I found out I couldn't have any more children, I said "We'll adopt." So we all decided to adopt. We went to the County agency up here at the County Building.

WEBSTER: Had they built the County Building then?

CECILE WEBSTER: Yes. That's where I got the -- the adoption center in there, and the woman took our application, so forth and so on, and it took us maybe about a year.

WEBSTER: I don't think is was a --

CECILE WEBSTER: No, it was a year. Because you know, she interviewed, and you look at pictures of children --

WEBSTER: And you go see 'em --

CECILE WEBSTER: And the -- I didn't pick anybody because Kathy was an asthma child, and I didn't want to go through that --

WEBSTER: Asthmatic.

CECILE WEBSTER: So I turned down three kids before I got Kevin, and then I wanted a baby, not --

WEBSTER: A child

DUNNING: He was six years old?

CECILE WEBSTER: No, he was a month old when I got him.

DUNNING: Oh, he was a month old.

CECILE WEBSTER: Kathy was six years old when I started that. He was a baby.

WEBSTER: What, he was about a month old?

CECILE WEBSTER: He wasn't even quite a month old when they gave him to me. So we had to go out there, you know, and see about him, and the next time I had to bring Kathy and see how she would like him --

DUNNING: Did she like him?

CECILE WEBSTER: She fell in love with him. Protective, protective, protective.

WEBSTER: She counted his toes, and everything.

CECILE WEBSTER: Everything worked out okay.

WEBSTER: She was in school, and nobody don't touch her brother. They'd fight over it. It was fun. But that's a hard job, adopting kids. Because we looked -- 01:27:00I went to San Francisco by myself, and this little boy, this kid, beautiful boy, and he had a heart murmur, something like that, and I thought -- I guess he was about three months old, might have been a little older, and I held his hand, and he had hold of my finger, and he starts chewing on it -- I almost cried when I had to walk away from him. We talked to our doctor, and told him what was wrong with the baby, and he advised us not to adopt it. And we went to see another --

CECILE WEBSTER: Who was that?

WEBSTER: Doctor {Lone?}

CECILE WEBSTER: No, we haven't never been to San Francisco --

WEBSTER: I went and -- you didn't go with me, I went by myself. Dr. Lone was our doctor, wasn't he?

CECILE WEBSTER: Dr. Mills.

WEBSTER: Mills. I went back one evening after work to talk to him and he told me 01:28:00about it, and he advised me not to adopt him. And you went to see another baby and they told us not to adopt him.

CECILE WEBSTER: No, they showed me pictures, I never seen any in person, and they'd give me a history of --

WEBSTER: I saw two of 'em.

CECILE WEBSTER: -- history of that child, one was asthmatic, another had something else wrong with it -- they were all boys, and I didn't want to go through that period where I had so much trouble with Kathy, being asthmatic. For a while, we thought we'd have to move out of the state because everybody -- every month she'd be getting sicker and sicker and sicker. So when I decided to adopt I wanted a normal child -- that might have been selfish, but I couldn't go through that period of sickness again. When we got Kevin, Kevin was healthy. 01:29:00Nothing was wrong with him.

DUNNING: Did Kevin and Kathy go to the Richmond public schools?

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah.

DUNNING: What schools?

CECILE WEBSTER: Kathy went to Martin Luther King, over there on 37th and 39th, and Kevin went there too until we moved over here. He went to Castro -- he went to Riverside first, that's up on San Pablo, and back to Castro, which is not too far from here, and then down to El Cerrito. And, oh, Stege he started with Stege in kindergarten there, then come on home. Kathy went to Kennedy, first she went to Adams, then she went to Kennedy, that's when Kevin went to El Cerrito. We were still living on Center Avenue, and Kennedy was right around the, two blocks down the street. That's where their schooling was.

DUNNING: What was your feeling about their schooling? Did you like the quality 01:30:00of education that they got?

CECILE WEBSTER: Yes, it was very good, very good. We had no problems in school.

WEBSTER: See, she's had all the schooling, because I was working, and the salary was about that high, and I had to two jobs, three jobs one time, to make it. And the people that I knew: "Man, you working all them jobs, why don't you give me and my cousin one of them?" I told him you better get up off his ass and go look for a job."

DUNNING: You mentioned that you worked in construction. Is that what you did for most of your career?

WEBSTER: No. Well, no.

CECILE WEBSTER: Up until we got married, in '55. I made him -- change to look for different jobs because I wanted to go back east, and he needed a type of job where he could come back --

WEBSTER: And get vacations.

CECILE WEBSTER: Vacations, so that's why he put in for the State of California Division of Highways, at that time. Soon as he got laid off from construction, the next day, next week, he'd have to go to work in San Francisco, and so he's been there ever since then for the last --

WEBSTER: For the State of California.

DUNNING: Okay, so you worked for the Division of Highways.

WEBSTER: Yeah. I retired from them.

CECILE WEBSTER: Now it's Caltrans.

DUNNING: How many years?

CECILE WEBSTER: Thirty-three.

WEBSTER: I don't know [laughs].

DUNNING: You just went to work.

WEBSTER: And she spent the money. [laughs]

CECILE WEBSTER: Thirty-three years. He retired in '85, and he's been retired ever since.

WEBSTER: Yeah. I had a '51 Ford. I told everybody, "Man, I'm going to drive it to New York, and New Jersey." She said "Man, you fool, that thing gonna fall to pieces." [laughs] And so -- there was a black mechanic down at High -- no, you 01:32:00was a kid -- you know where JC Penney used to be down on 67th and Magnolia?

DUNNING: Yeah. I've seen the building; it's been closed since --

WEBSTER: He got into the back of that JC Penney's, I don't know how they got tied in to it, but he worked it over for me, for $250.

CECILE WEBSTER: You talking about the Ford?

WEBSTER: That first Ford we drove to New Jersey.

CECILE WEBSTER: That was a '55.

WEBSTER: '55

CECILE WEBSTER: And nothing was wrong with that.

DUNNING: You're doing exactly what every husband and wife does.

WEBSTER: [laughs]

CECILE WEBSTER: It was a '55 Ford, and it was a minister's, nothing, a minister ever drove it home to church. He didn't go no where else, so it was perfect condition, so we went home in 1959, we drove -- Kathy was just a baby, Kathy was five months, not even five months old, when we drove across the States.

WEBSTER: And there were guys, "You gonna take your baby that far?" I'd say, "Yeah." "In that?" I'd say, " I haven't got a damn thing else, I'm going in that." It was fun.

DUNNING: I think I would like to ask you just a little bit more about Richmond. What do you think people's image is, of Richmond? And have you seen --

WEBSTER: Then, or now?

DUNNING: Well, let's start off with then. You know, when you first moved here.

CECILE WEBSTER: Then, it was more -- people took care, took interest in things.

WEBSTER: Everybody was interested in Richmond. Because they had a bad name about it. And everybody was -- lived here, was older peoples. At least, I called myself older, and I was about thirty, what?

CECILE WEBSTER: Thirty-three. But, it was just the timing, the timing was there. 01:34:00People knew one another, and they took care of everybody else.

WEBSTER: They'd visit one another. You'd meet one in church and they would talk -- what's happening around.

CECILE WEBSTER: Downtown. You'd see everybody downtown, and something like that.

WEBSTER: But now --

CECILE WEBSTER: Now, it's the whole --

WEBSTER: Different world --

CECILE WEBSTER: Atmosphere has changed -- what we live in, what's going on in town, so much drugs, so much this and that, and everything. Even to our own neighborhood, this neighborhood has changed quite a bit.

WEBSTER: From the time we moved here --

CECILE WEBSTER: Everybody took care of this property, took an interest in their stuff, and now, whoever comes in now is just a whole different, you know, 01:35:00they're not interested in keeping up or nothing like that.

DUNNING: To what do you attribute the change?

WEBSTER: The younger peoples that moved in --

CECILE WEBSTER: They're not interested in --

WEBSTER: They're not interested in keeping their property up, or painting their house, and all that kind of stuff. And they don't have time to talk to one another. You used to stand around and start talking to somebody here and -- five, four people -- they don't come up here to talk to -- they talk to sometimes.

DUNNING: It sounds like what you're describing is, you had a real sense of community.

WEBSTER: Right.

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, well, we had a nice -- we had a neighborhood council for the streets, besides going to the main council. Each block had a block person, 01:36:00and we had a list of telephone numbers in case anything happened and all that stuff, that's it, and then we belonged to the neighborhood council meeting over here, and where we did once a month discuss whatever needed to be done for the neighborhood.

DUNNING: Would this be in the 60s and 70s?

CECILE WEBSTER: No, this was in the 80s.

DUNNING: And it's not happening anymore?

CECILE WEBSTER: Well, we still have the meetings. This block, I know everybody's telephone number on this block. And next block, they're having the same thing. But I don't know about the other blocks. We try to keep tabs on whoever's here. We've got two or three that doesn't even -- don't want to be listed on the sheet. But they're newcomers. Most of these people here have been for quite a while.

DUNNING: Do you think that there are good parts of Richmond? Some towns, they say "This is the good side of town, this is the bad side of town." Have you seen that change over the years?

CECILE WEBSTER: I don't think so.

WEBSTER: It's about the same. It hasn't changed, because most of the children, when the parents die, they move in the house, and very few parents pass that the children didn't sell the house, most of them keep the house, and move one of their children in, or somebody who's a relative or something like that. From the father's side, or the mother's side, they -- you know, would have to split the house. If they sell it.

CECILE WEBSTER: Then there's a lot of drugs going on -- it's all over, we thought we was in by ourselves, but it's happening close by, and then further 01:38:00where we just live in, it's really gotten worse over that way.

DUNNING: Oh, Center Street?

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, back over this way it's gotten worse, and especially Crescent Park is -- you always had two, three, maybe two-three murders --

WEBSTER: They shouldn't have put that project over there. I voted for that bastard.

CECILE WEBSTER: Watch your language.

WEBSTER: You know what a bastard is.

DUNNING: I do, but I'm not going to say it.

WEBSTER: I'm going to tell it what it is, and then you won't be so -- It's a person that raises horses. And everything that one of his mares come up folded, and nobody on the farm know who the daddy of the baby -- the colt. And they just called it a bastard. And you couldn't sell it for that much price, because you 01:39:00couldn't tell the buyer who was the daddy. And that's where the word bastard was created. Look in the dictionary. It's a horse.

DUNNING: Well, now everyone looking at your video will know. [laughter] It's a new definition.

WEBSTER: Definition of a bastard. 'Cause the man own mares, he can't tell the buyer who's the daddy of a colt. And they call him a bastard. And you couldn't get the price for him as you did for the ones that you knew who the daddy was.

DUNNING: This conversation started because you were talking about the drug trafficking. Do you see any end in sight for that -- it's a big problem not just in Richmond.

WEBSTER: The whole country.

CECILE WEBSTER: But here we have police beats. They'll come around and check or 01:40:00-- we go to our council meeting first, and from there we go downtown, and that's where we get a lot of changes done, by going to your council -- your neighborhood council -- then you go from there to the council downtown, and that's where you get a lot of change. If something's going on in the neighborhood that you don't like, you fought it. They don't tell you who's doing it, but they'll come around --

WEBSTER: Just go and say what happened -- you can go and say such a street and see some people setting on the corner, like that, and if you want to go see if they're there, you go on that street and ride, drive through, you'll see it.

DUNNING: Have you found the police and firefighters responsive? Are you satisfied with the services? Don't you have a fire station that's pretty -- right around --

WEBSTER: Right back over --

DUNNING: Yeah, I knew one of the firefighters that was at -- I've actually had a 01:41:00tour of that station.

WEBSTER: What's his name?

DUNNING: Joe Pritchard. He's a long time. I remember visiting him one day, he's from an old-time family, and he invited me to the fire station, and then they got a call, and everybody left and I was the only one left. So I just got out before the doors automatically shut.

CECILE WEBSTER: My neighbor is the captain there.

DUNNING: Oh, okay. So, when you have a problem, do you automatically call the police?

CECILE WEBSTER: We call the police, or whatever, but if we have a bigger problem we go to our neighborhood council. And then, thereafter downtown.

DUNNING: They go in as a larger group? And how about robberies in this area?

CECILE WEBSTER: It used to be we had a rash of 'em. We was got broken into once, and then, used to be about four or five houses that were -- at that time, it was 01:42:00one certain family that was doing it, so that was solved.

DUNNING: Everybody knew who it was.

CECILE WEBSTER: Yes, it was somebody from the next block coming on this block, and that solved that problem. Nobody has had any complaints here lately.

WEBSTER: About robberies.

CECILE WEBSTER: Robberies, nothing like that.

DUNNING: Do you see Richmond as a historical place? You being the history buff?

WEBSTER: [laughs] Yeah, it's historic -- how you say it?

CECILE WEBSTER: Historical.

WEBSTER: Yeah, Richmond is historical. Because Richmond did all the cargo ships that was used in the West Coast, going to Japan, they built all the ships here. And some of 'em, they shipped 'em to the East Coast.

DUNNING: Do you think it's the shipyard era, the Kaiser shipyard era, that made 01:43:00it the most historical?

WEBSTER: Yes, mmhm.

DUNNING: Have you been down to the new Rosie the Riveter --

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, we walked down. We walked down to Miller Knox {?}

DUNNING: That's a nice walk.

WEBSTER: We'd go down there and park in the parking lot. We used to walk two or three rounds. But my knees don't -- I got artificial knees. And so she do most of the walking.

CECILE WEBSTER: And he just sit.

DUNNING: You do the talking and she does the walking.

WEBSTER: No, I do one round. And she gets slick see. You been around it?

DUNNING: Yeah.

WEBSTER: All the way around, where the water fountain, the last jaunt.

CECILE WEBSTER: Right by Rosie the Riveter.

WEBSTER: And you go all the way around to the last jaunt before you come back round take your car? She'll walk down there and then stop and then come back around the other way, say, "I want to see you get more exercise."

DUNNING: Would you ever go out to Point Richmond and then go through the tunnel?

CECILE WEBSTER: No, I'd rather go -- yeah

WEBSTER: Through the tunnel?

DUNNING: Through Garrard Tunnel.

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, through the tunnel and then Knox Park.

WEBSTER: That's the way we go.

CECILE WEBSTER: Yeah, I've been walking down there since '81. When they first built that park, that's when I first started walking there, it was in '81.

WEBSTER: But I was working then. I didn't walk.

DUNNING: Is there anything else you'd like to add today, about Richmond, or anything, or anything you'd like us to bring up tomorrow, with Mrs. Cotright?

WEBSTER: No, we'll let her bring that up. And I just left the army part that I didn't have a chance to say a thing about.

CECILE WEBSTER: She can say a whole lot more.

WEBSTER: Yeah, St. Lo and then the next one up was -- I can't remember it now, we laid everything down at St. Lo. I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't some 01:45:00bodies -- still looking for bodies. That was really flat.

DUNNING: Now, when your daughter came in, she did mention that she wanted it to be known that you got the R and R for a trip in Europe. Do you want to mention anything about that?

WEBSTER: No. Maybe we'll get to Willie Mays and I'll talk and maybe say something about it.

DUNNING: Okay. Well, anything else you'd like to add?

WEBSTER: Hm-mmm.

DUNNING: Well, thank you very much, and perhaps you should introduce yourself to the camera. You came in kind of late.

CECILE WEBSTER: Well, I'm Mrs. Webster, Cecile Webster --

WEBSTER: The better half.

DUNNING: Nice to meet you. Thank you for joining us during part of the interview.

CECILE WEBSTER: I told Kathy, I don't know anything during that time.

DUNNING: You knew a lot, and I appreciate what you added about -- from the '50s on, that's important. So thank you very much. It's been a pleasure for us to be here with you this morning. We learned a lot about cows, and boys and other things --

CECILE WEBSTER: That you'll remember

DUNNING: Okay, thanks so much.

WEBSTER: You going to turn it off?

DUNNING: Yeah, before you get addicted to it.