Martin Easton | Interview 1 | March 30, 2011

ARBONA: This is March 30, 2011. This is tape number one. My name is Javier 00:01:00Arbona, and I'm interviewing Mr. Martin Easton. We are at UC Berkeley today, at the Bancroft Library. Usually, you can just talk in my direction. That's why we usually make the camera sort of sit to the side. Basically, just like we've been 00:02:00talking about in the last couple of minutes, you've been telling me a little bit about your life. I was going to just ask you to rewind a little bit more and tell me where you were born and tell me about your childhood, and we can begin there.

EASTON: Oh, sure, sure. Okay, I'll begin now. I was born in Martinez, California, before they had a Martinez Community Hospital. In fact, I lost a bet one time. I told my mother, "I bet somebody ten bucks--I'm going to make that money easy--that I was born in the Martinez Community Hospital." She said, "No, you lose. You lose." There wasn't any hospital then. We went to a lying-in home, up in the upper part of Martinez. [Microphone falls off]

ARBONA: Sorry about that. Microphone came off. You can just put that on.

EASTON: We can pause.

ARBONA: I'm going to just his pause here. [audiofile stops & restarts] Okay, 00:03:00sorry about that.

EASTON: So anyway, I was born in a lying-in home, midwives home in Martinez. That's where all the doctors took their patients, and I was born there, July 17, 1927. You'll note, for the purpose of our video, that July 17 is my birthday and also the birthday, the anniversary of the Port Chicago explosion--

ARBONA: That's true.

EASTON: --which happened on my seventeenth birthday, July 17, 1944. So from Martinez lying-in home, I moved into a home at 1500 Grandview Avenue in Martinez, occupied by several relatives, grandparents, and my mother and father, newly wed a year or so before. From there, my dad worked at the Avon Refinery, with the Associated Oil Company. So he bought nine acres on San Miguel Road in 00:04:00Concord, which was quite an acquisition at that time. They bought a house, because my mother's pregnancy began about six months after they were married. They bought a house that arrived, from what I heard, in a railroad car from something like Sears Roebuck. They paid somebody five dollars a day to put it all together, San Miguel Road. One bedroom. It did have a nice laundry room. It had an interior bathroom. They had a wash basin in there. We still used the outhouse, though, during the construction of the house. My grandparents also moved to that same ranch. It was purchased from a sheepherder who lived in a sheepherder's shack, with the wheels gone. So my grandparents lived in this sheepherder's shack. We had two outhouses on the property, one for them and one 00:05:00for us. We opened the door, and there were holes in a piece of wood that you sat on. Now, that was an outhouse. So I remember when I was a year and a half old, I would walk up to the sheepherder's shack and knock on the door and say, "Open the door, Nana." Everybody's grandmother then was called a nana. So then I would trail my grandfather around, who was planting walnuts there. He chewed tobacco, which he kept in his back pocket, and he would spit this brown stuff every once in a while. So I got my grandma, when I was year and three-quarters old, to give me a couple of ginger cookies. So whenever my grandpa took a bit of his tobacco--dry, right out of his pocket--I'd take a bite of ginger cookie. When he spat that brown stuff, I'd spit out some ginger saliva. [Arbona laughs] My mother said, "Okay." My mother was in the house--it was finished by that 00:06:00time--and she would see my grandpa and me down there. She said everyday, Grandpa came back, she had to put a pair of boots on me. I was stark naked, my grandpa trailing the diaper, because he didn't want to bother about taking diapers and changing them. So I went naked most of the time. Grandpa, of course, dragged the diaper back home. I remember I played with my dog Skippy, that was killed on the highway. I remember him being killed.

ARBONA: Oh, no.

EASTON: Yes. My mother's fourth cousin actually used to drive pretty fast on the road there. He was an auto dealer in Walnut Creek, one of the first ones. My dad stopped him one time. I remember, saying, "If you keep driving fast here and you hurt anybody else--I think you killed my dog." He denied it. He says, "I am going to take it out of your hide," see? [chuckles] So anyway, that was a memory that I had from about age two. My father got a promotion. My father was a 00:07:00stenographer, clerical stenographer--typing, shorthand and everything--commercial.

ARBONA: This is exactly what I wanted to ask you, what your father did before working at the refinery.

EASTON: Yes, well, before working at the refinery, my father was raised in--he was born June 15, 1900, in Almy, Wyoming, A-L-M-Y, which is about thirty or forty miles away from where they settled. My grandfather was raised in Stirling, Scotland. His name was Andrew Easton, named after St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. His first son was named Andrew, also. Second son, my father, was named George. St. George, patron saint of England, you see. After that, the men 00:08:00came along at-- John, St. John; and then the last one was Alexander, and I don't know where that--anyway, there were four sons in this Mormon family. My Grandfather Easton never went to school. He was the boy that did messages in the coal mines in Stirling, Scotland. He'd carry the birdcage down there with a canary in it. He took pints, gallons of beer down to the miners. Did everything in the mines, never went to school. Came to Wyoming. My Grandmother Easton was raised in the slums of London. Never went to school. Started to work as a laborer in a laundry, major laundry somewhere in the slums of England. No 00:09:00schooling, either, you see. She was five-feet-five; I imagine she weighed about 150 pounds when they were married, and my grandfather was the same size. So my other grandfather, Matheson, was five-feet-seven and weighed 135, the one that I spent a lot of time with, the one that dragged the diaper back. So people were amazed when I started growing and to be six-feet-one and 190 pounds by the time I graduated from high school, at age sixteen. So that was a little bit of an amazement.

But anyway, from there, at Avon, my father was a payroll clerk. He actually started in the oil fields, in Taft-McKittrick, when they were first being developed. To go back in history a little bit, he didn't finish high school. He got into some altercation, was kicked out of high school. He didn't finish his 00:10:00senior year. Also my grandfather was a foreman of the mine. He was the bishop of the Mormon Church. My father was what was called a deacon then, in the church, which is a kind of a janitor in the church. So my father, at age thirteen, was a deacon, a worker in the church. My grandfather caught him smoking, and that Sunday, did a complete sermon on firing my father from this job of deacon. So my father maintained his relationship with my grandmother, who was kind of a bystander in Mormonism; she went along with it. She had ten kids. She ran the boarding house, raised ten kids--six girls and four boys. They had cattle, and they had cows. He milked the cow and various things like that, in Oakley, Wyoming, where the mining town was.

ARBONA: Wyoming. Can I ask you a quick question?

EASTON: [over Arbona] Right near Kemmerer. Yes.

ARBONA: Your grandfather, then, converted, I suppose. Because hearing all the Catholic names, at some point, he made that decision, I suppose.

EASTON: I think the Mormonism came along probably--see, my Grandfather Easton was born in 1856, approximately, pretty close. We can do the arithmetic. He died at eighty-one, in 1937, so whatever that amounts to. I went to the funeral, the body lying in state in the living room of the house for ten days, for the observation. It rained every day, except the morning of the funeral. The funeral procession was a mile long, all these cars. Every person in there thanking the Lord for making the weather better, in honor of my grandfather. Then it rained 00:12:00after that, too. After the ceremony was over, it rained again. So I listened to this, and of course, I pretty much identified with my father, who by that time had abandoned the church himself. Didn't abandon his relationship with his mother, which was disciplinary, strong, honest, square. I knew her a little bit. So then my father, during World War I--Of course, he read about it in high school. Dropped out of school, kicked out, dropped out, whatever it was. What he told me was that a girl fell down on the stairs of the school, going up the stairs. He ran over to pick her up--this is what he told me--and the principal came out and said, "You knocked that girl down. I'm going to throw you out of school." So he got expelled from school on something, of which I only heard one side. That was the reason, being accused of knocking this girl down. So that was why. He was hotheaded in those days.

ARBONA: And that's in Wyoming, so he's still in Wyoming.

EASTON: He's in Wyoming, Kemmerer, Wyoming. So he got out of school, and he had a chance to go to work in JC Penney, store number one. JC Penney Number One. He knew J.C. Penney. Kemmerer, Wyoming.

ARBONA: Oh, wow!

EASTON: But he told me that J.C. had his merchandise up on apple boxes and all that. Whatever the crate was that came with his merchandise, he used that to stand it up in the store. He didn't have any shelves or anything. So my dad didn't like that. He had a chance to go to work for the hardware store, which was the post office and the bus stop and the coroner's office and everything, this going hardware store in Kemmerer. So my dad went there. In fact, my dad was actually-- I forget the name of the county there, but he was the youngest--and illegal--county coroner in Wyoming.

ARBONA: Really?

EASTON: Because the regular coroner got killed. My dad had done all the embalming, at age eighteen, nineteen and twenty; worked in the store; sold furniture, sold gas and all that stuff. But he did the embalming. They went out and rescued people frozen in the snow and everything. So he knew that. The coroner died or was killed somehow, and they thought, "Who in blazes are we going to submit to Cheyenne to be coroner?" So they faked his age; he was underage. They called him twenty-two or twenty-three or something. So he was coroner [chuckles] for quite a while there, illegally. That's the way they did things in Wyoming. Of course, when I was sixteen, about ready to get a drivers license, I said, "What kind of a license did you need for Wyoming?" He said, "License? All you needed was a lot of guts to drive in Wyoming." [they laugh] I said, "What about your first car?" He said, "Well, I ordered it without seats or anything in it, and I drove it away from the dealer." He showed me. He said, "You turn this thing on and it makes it electric. You get out, and you crank the 00:15:00thing in the front, that makes the engine run. If it stops, then you open up--you're sitting on the gas tank. You take this cap off and look, see if there's any gas in there and all that." So he bought it that way.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: Then through the hardware store, he ordered some seats and some fancy wheel rims that had circles on them. When you're driving along, it looked like the circle disappeared, going around and around. See, it got to be forty below there. He learned that if he knew it was going to be pretty cold, he'd take a big pan of water out, put it right under the engine. So on the latent heat of fusion of ice, similar to phase change in water, or the latent heat of condensation of steam, or creation of steam, see. He'd go out in the morning, and the water inside of his engine--which really didn't have any water pump on it; it just kind of sloshed around in there--was all fine, but the pan was 00:16:00frozen solid. I've done [this] on the ranch out in Clayton once in a while, put a pan of water under some machine that didn't have antifreeze in it. I don't know how much of this history you want.

ARBONA: Well, I was going to try to figure out how your dad then ended up in California.

EASTON: Okay. Well, what he did was, he bought that car; he went into the Marines in October, 1918. They went down to Salt Lake; a bunch of them got together. I think they might've had conscription then. Rather than do that, they wanted to go down, join in to whatever they want. So they went down there to join the Army. Well, the Army had about thirty people in line, and the Marines, who were up the block a little ways, the Marines had nobody in line. So they went and joined the Marines, the three of them. They just went there to get in. Then he was sent to Mare Island [Vallejo, California] boot camp, Marines, October, 1918. He went through the flu. They had to wear a flu mask. There were 00:17:00millions of people dying in Europe; I think three-million Americans died in the flu epidemic of 1918. He had to wear the flu mask all the time. But in Mare Island over there--foggy and wet all winter long--the weather was so beautiful there--compared to 6,500 feet at Kemmerer, Wyoming, with snow drifts ten feet tall sometimes--he had to move to California. He almost moved to Detroit, because working there in that store, he saw some cars being sold. He thought, "Boy, Detroit. Henry Ford." But then he got to thinking, "Detroit, they have all this snow; I'd rather go back to California." So he had some money; he went to Los Angeles, got a room in a hotel there and just kind of tried to figure out what to do. He went half-heartedly here and there to try to find a job. His only work was this clerical stenographer. He had done that until they kicked him out 00:18:00of school, see. Or whatever they did to him that he didn't finish school. He was good at that, though, you see. So he bummed around there, and he went to a chiropractor because he had some tiny back trouble. It wasn't debilitating or anything. He thought, well, I guess I've got to buy a job. So he went to the employment agency. Clerical, man. They said, well, the only place that you could go to work is up in this dismal place up here, where the oil fields are there. Nobody wants to go up there, but we've got a job there, if you want it. Because they needed payroll clerks and all. They couldn't get anybody to work down there.

ARBONA: To come work up here in the Bay Area.

EASTON: In Taft-McKittrick, see, because they were drilling there. The oil wells were just coming in, see. So anyway, he went up there in 1923. He worked there.

ARBONA: To Martinez?

EASTON: In Taft, Taft-McKittrick, which is about 200 miles south of Martinez, 00:19:00you see.

ARBONA: Oh, okay.

EASTON: So then, I know from history, other history, that in 1915, an oil pipeline came all the way from Taft-- no, to Martinez, to Shell. Also there was another one that went up to Tidewater Associated. So they were building pipelines. Eight-inch pipes, which were pretty small, but it was getting the refineries into operation. So he went up there, and he worked three years, and finally he just went in, and he went to quit, around 1924 or '5. He probably started to work there in 1921 or '22. But anyway, he went in to quit. He said, "I can't stand being way out in this desert." They said, "Well, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. They're hiring up at Avon, for clerical. You want to go up there?" Well, he didn't know where Avon, Martinez was. He didn't know that, see. It's about two miles from Martinez. In fact, it's called Martinez now; the Avon, 00:20:00in fact, is called the Martinez plant. He says, "Okay." So anyway, he came up, I think, on the train. He got a room in Martinez and went to work there. But see, that's when people began to realize what a brain he had, really. He went in, and he was a good stenographer. But they had a job called chief oil dispatcher. See, they had tanks--tank farm--and they had the different plants, and then they had the docks. They had rail coming in. And no one had been able to handle this job of chief oil dispatcher, which handled products, raw and finished, going from one part of the plant to the other--in from the docks, in from the railroads--well, they had a few tank cars by then--in from the pipes, and then go back out. Nobody could handle it. So he told me the boss said, "Well, let's 00:21:00try that young guy over there, the clerical guy. We've tried everybody else, roustabouts and all this stuff. Let's try a completely new kind of a guy." Because he has no trouble remembering anything. All this stuff is underground. Nobody painted it. Some valves sticking up. Who knew where they went, see? No wonder they passed out. My dad was a natural. He was a natural. Because I'd watch him play three-handed pinochle, forty-eight cards. He'd remember all forty-eight cards of each hand!

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: He knew what everybody played. He got known for that around the plant, see. His memory was just fantastic, and people would come and ask him, "what about this and that. It's unpainted, I don't know what's there. I hear it whamming underground, the valves there. What is it?" He remembered all that stuff.

ARBONA: He was a good manager, because--

EASTON: On a place half as big as this campus.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: Huge. The refinery, at that time, it was a hundred acres. Huge.

ARBONA: Yeah. I've seen what it looks like today.

EASTON: Huge, see? So he had this brain. He had this brain, which I have. I'm eighty-three. In the better homes, really, where I work, I'm the backstop of memory, how to interpret documents. Well, I digressed a little bit on my history momentarily, to show my dad's. I was in real estate for nine years. And I decided that things are just too slipshod. I've got to get down to the ethics, professional standards of this real estate association, Contra Costa Central. So I got onto what's called the court of ethics, you see. So I went in there, and I was a maverick, I'll tell you, because this was the good old boys making decisions. One of the first things I did--we had seven men; two people from the same office were there. So I walk in, and everybody's listening, everybody has 00:23:00one vote. So before we took a vote on the second or third thing, I said, "Hey, wait a minute. There are two people here in the same office, Mason- McDuffie, right?" "Yeah." "Who's the boss?" "Well, I am. I'm the sales manager." I said, "Well, Brantley, what are you?" "Well, I work there." I said, "Oh. Would you ever vote against him?" Ah. Silence. I said, "If your supervisor makes a little speech here, and he has a position, would you vote against him?" Well, there was silence and then, "mumble, mumble, mumble." I went and complained. I said to the directors, I said, "Get one of them off of there." That's the way I work. You can't have one person controlling two votes; there's only seven, you see. Wow. That started to wake people up. And then another example is one came through--we had testimony before us around a table like this, seven of them, lawyers on both sides and all that stuff. It went six to one. I was the negative vote, see? What 00:24:00I could do, see, if they knew I could walk right out of a meeting, go to the secretary and dictate the decision, even though I wasn't chairman at that time, see? In fact, in later years, they wanted to get me to fill in. Oh, "get Martin; he can just dictate the decision." I'll go back to work and come in and sign it. And the staff got to know that, too, see?

ARBONA: We might want to close that door. Sorry to interrupt, but I want to close the door so--.

EASTON: Before the chairman could go in and hum and haw, and the girl's still around and all that stuff, I went back and dictated a letter of dissent--I was the one of six--to my secretary, and I marched it right back in. I said, "I ask for an appeal. I appeal."

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: I went back, they reheard the case, and I won it four to three. Same people. So anyway, when it came time to be the first grievance committee chairman, it was by acclimation. They pestered me for two months. They said, "No, no; everybody says that it must be you. You're over twenty-one, right?" I'm 00:25:00going to use a little dirty word here. Okay. I said, "Well, let me tell you, what you see is what you're going to get." I said, "I've got a motto. You can either love me or you can all be shared shitless. I'll take either one, because you're going to treat me the same in the end." I became so square-headed and so famous for just--Farmer's decision. I said, "You're talking half farmer and half football player.

ARBONA: What era were you talking about here? What year is this?

EASTON: '69 was the first grievance committee chairman, see? Which received all the complaints. In four years, I got 600 complaints in. Well, one-third, I dismissed; they were without merit. Up in the public--should've gone to a termite company or should've gone to the state or gone somewhere else. About one-third, I mediated. I was the investigator, mediator. I mediated them by 00:26:00phone. When it got right to the end, I would say, "Come on, now. Seeno versus Rawls. Come on, now. That doesn't belong here. You've got the power to go settle this. Go tell that woman you're going to put in some new cabinets. Get her out of my office." That's the way I would talk to Rawls and Seeno and all the rest of them.

ARBONA: They're pretty famous real estate names.

EASTON: Yeah, big guys. Why are you letting this complaint hang around in there? Well, about one-third of them, I settled. Mediation. And about one-third went to hearing by the professional standards mail. So anyway, I did that for four years. I was putting in about one-third of my time free, and I said, "I can't do this." They said, "Well, okay. We don't want to lose you. Be a professional standards hearing officer." Then for eight years after that, I was chairperson, and fill-in for summers. I was always available to fill in.

ARBONA: And that was a county job?

EASTON: It was a California Association of Realtors, Central County.

ARBONA: Oh, for the association.

EASTON: National Association of Realtors.

ARBONA: Yeah, I see.

EASTON: So then for eight years, I was the hearing chairman, lawyers appearing before me. I dictated the decisions. And once in a while, I would fill in, just be a panel member. I'd go right out and dictate the decision. They all knew, let Martin go dictate it, because I could just go in there--bing, bing, bing, bing, bing--and nobody ever changed anything, because I'd walk right out of the meeting, dictate the decision.

ARBONA: And you could remember it.

EASTON: I remember everything, sure. No lawyer ever wrote to me. Because you had lawyers that were tough. We had famous lawyers, famous around Walnut Creek and all that, who were--sometimes, boy, I coached a lot of them into not leading their client into more charges, because they would start to use part of a defense and start to incriminate their own clients. I said, "Oh, my Lord."

ARBONA: And these are all committee hearings?

EASTON: Well, there was broker versus broker, on commission. See, that was money only. That was called arbitration. Then it was public versus broker. Or it was 00:28:00public versus associate member--title company, Seeno, and all these big builders. The associate members were builders, because they wanted to get in good with the real estate board. And the termite companies, they're all associates, see. So anyway, after twelve years of that, I became hard-headed. I was chair over 150 hearings of professional standards and all that stuff. Once in a while, I would be a maverick there, too. I got a request in; there's going to be a complaint against a certain broker that had advertised to hire people. He was a broker, needed employees. Okay. So I got it in, and it was from some important brokers, too. They said, "We want the board to file a complaint against this guy for solicitation of other--" Because the bylaws said you 00:29:00weren't supposed to go try to hire people from somebody else. Contract didn't make any difference; you just weren't supposed to go and hire anybody. It's in the bylaws. So I thought, "Well, that's bad. The bylaws shouldn't say that." So we started to trade. I made that decision on my own. So I dropped it. I said, "We'll see what happens." I said, "No, this doesn't rise to the level of hearing." So they wrote back again, and they said, "Yes, we want you to do this." This is the same two brokers. They were on the board of directors, too. They were important and all that. But they had never tangled with me before, those two guys. So anyway, they wrote back in, with stronger language, "We wish to file this complaint." I wrote back again and said no. I was testing. I wrote back in and said, "No, this still does not rise to the level. I think it's wrong that the bylaws say this." They wrote me a formal letter, ordering me, under the 00:30:00bylaws, as chairman of the grievance committee, "Upon our say so, you must prosecute this case." And they cited the bylaws, blang, blang, blang, blang, blang. I wrote back and said, "I accept the case. Under the bylaws, I will win." [Arbona laughs] Which I did. I got the guy in there, and I demolished him, based on the bylaws. I knew I would, but I wanted to make a point. So on the way out, I told the guy--because we walked out together. He wasn't my enemy; he was dumbfounded, but he wasn't my enemy. So I said, "I beat you. I know they're going to go against you. They're going to try to penalize you for something. But when January comes around, and I have openings on my grievance committee, I want you to apply." And I got him on my committee the next time. But in the meantime, Moses Lasky, the general counsel for the California Association of Realtors, he 00:31:00put out an emergency, "You must change your bylaws"--exactly like I had said it should be. "It's a restraint of trade. Case number so-and-so in San Diego ruled against the real estate board. You must get it out of your bylaws." So I walked in for two or three people, I said, "See? I told you." You see? Because there're two ways. Either the salesperson has a contract with his broker or he doesn't. If he has a contract, and you try to hire him with the broker, the broker's got a cause on the contract. They don't have to go to the bylaws. If he has no contract, well, he's got no business trying to keep him there, anyway, if somebody wants to have him improved. It was that simple. That's what I told everybody, after I knew I had demolished this poor guy. I got him on my grievance committee. He's a heck of a guy. He wanted to hire people that wanted to go to work and improve themselves. What did he care about reading the forty-page bylaws, that he was violating something? So that's the kind of stuff 00:32:00that I came through.

ARBONA: And it sounds like a lot of the sort of suburban--

EASTON: Right.

ARBONA: When the county was developing more housing and everything. I think that's maybe a topic that I didn't know about when we talked on the phone earlier, that you had been--

EASTON: Well, to go a little further, see, I kind of retired because I had granddaughter Sandy here and her sister there to raise on the ranch and all that, and I had enough funds and all that to where--the Christmas tree farm and a few cattle and some rentals and other stuff, all that. So I let my license expire in 1984. I was licensed from '60 to '62 as a salesperson, '62 to '84 as a broker. From '78, I closed my office. But for six years, I stayed in the board so I could be on there. So anyway, 2001, my wife had passed away, I put these two granddaughters through college; they were living somewhere else.

ARBONA: Your granddaughters.

EASTON: Yeah, and I'm rattling around in the house, so I thought, "Well, okay, I'll go back into real estate." So after I'd been in there five years, back in real estate, I said, "Well, I'll try to get back on the grievance committee." So I had to go through the orientation. So in walks this fellow named Phil Deutscher, committee chairman, see. Well, my dissent six to one, that I won, his uncle was the plaintiff. It was Deutscher versus Riggs. I forget what it was about now, but I know that I was the dissenter. I explained to him at the break of orientation--he was giving all the orientation--I said, "I was the dissenter on this case, Deutscher versus Riggs." I said, "I had your uncle here on my first grievance committee, too. Remember?" Well, he wasn't in real estate then; he was too young. See, part of his closing speech was, "We have Martin Easton here. He was four years, chairman of the grievance committee; and for eight 00:34:00years he was a professional standards panel co-chairman. And when the California Association of Realtors decided to revamp the entire real estate ethics and professional standards system for the state of California, they came here and used Martin's model he started in 1969." He announced that to fifty new people coming into real estate. So that was thirty-five years later, he made the announcement that when the state reorganized every real estate board in California--I think it slopped into the national, too--they used my model of you can either be scared to death or you can love me; I'll take it the same. [Arbona laughs] They didn't use that exactly, but they saw how somebody that's half farmer and half football player-- See, when I worked eighteen hours a day on the hay press, we started at four-thirty in the morning. Soon as we could see, we 00:35:00worked. We ate five meals a day. People dropped out because they couldn't stand it. I got to be known the next year. I went into another line of work, because it's hard. But I was the model on the hay press, too for--

ARBONA: Can you explain that to me, what that is, what that means?

EASTON: The hay press?

ARBONA: Yeah.

EASTON: Well, okay. See, back in those days, before they had all the automatic machinery, the farmer--we have volunteer hay, wild stuff, out there. The farmer would mow it, usually with horses. Some of our people had horses, and they prepared the land. They wind row it. They have some whirligig things that push it over into rows, and then when it gets to the right dryness, they push it all up into shocks, maybe half as big as this room, about as high as this room. I'm leading up to the hay press. The laborer goes around and trims the shocks, so 00:36:00that the outer layers are all down. Like if you live in Livermore, you know the fog comes in at night. The fog will come out, and the dew will be on top. Well, you trim the shocks--that's a hard job, hard, with a pitchfork, going in all these shocks that high--so that the dew will run off all these stalks that are down. The dew will all run off, and preserve whatever dryness is in there. Okay, then along we come with the hay press, which is a sixty-horsepower engine, and there's a table about five feet high, where the feeder stands. There's an opening there. There's a ram, goes, wmm, wmm, wmm, hammering on the hay, out this long chute that goes up to the bale pile. The chute is set with wrenches to squeeze a certain strength. Then on the other end of this fulcrum that's going 00:37:00like this--there's a racial no-no, used these days, which is not a dirty word, but it's called the Chinaman, because it's bowing. That's what they call it. Up there, they have two horses with a big pusher on the front of them. So they're trained for this. They push the shock, chh, chh, chh, two giant horses--dapple grays or, formerly, coal mine horses, living three months underground--pushing the hay over pretty close. Then this hay press has a great big boom up at the top with a cable going out and we say "another Portugee" out there. We talk ethnicity to each other. I'm Irish. I'm one-fourth Irish. Try not to hurt anything, see? [they laugh] That's what I would say. That's what I'd say to the 00:38:00Irish. Anyway, there's a guy out there with this clamping fork, and another guy running the winch. And on this table, there's a ramp coming up. They drag the hay up, and they watch to see how much hay--I was feeder. I was so strong, I could feed more bales in a round. See, everybody rotated, because some of the jobs are hard, some are easy. But they'd watch to see how much hay was up on the thing behind me, or whoever was feeding, and then the guy in the spool would pull it up. The guy loading the fork out there, he had a trip thing. So he'd put the hay up part way; bang, he would trip it, the hay would drop; and the other guy would raise the forks up out of the way of the Chinaman, so it wouldn't bang into the back of me, see. I had to plan all that out. Meanwhile, the guy that tripped the fork, he's right there waiting for it to come back down, because then he drags it all the way out, clamps it in. Now, he's tending the shock. 00:39:00He's seeing how it's coming out. So if you get interrupted in the middle of the day, you still want all those straws to be down, in case there's-- There's way more to this than most people think. So anyway, as an example, Lloyd Duncan was only twelve years old. Well, he was always on the winch, because he wasn't big enough to do anything else. The other guys resented that because they wanted the rest of sitting on the winch.

ARBONA: Were you also twelve years old?

EASTON: No, I was twenty.

ARBONA: Oh, okay.

EASTON: Twenty. Yeah, I was twenty.

ARBONA: Now, sorry to interrupt you a second, but it sounds like you must've been learning to do this stuff since you must've been very young. You were learning this since childhood?

EASTON: Well, my grandfather, see, he came to Sacramento Valley in 1872, all dry wheat farming. He was asthmatic; he couldn't really do hard work, my Grandfather Matheson. So he told me about steam engines, how they worked, how they pushed. They had tremendous fires. They'd have a thousand acres of volunteer hay ready 00:40:00to mow, and the steam engines would set it on fire and they'd watch a thousand acres burn down to nothing, burn to the river. Things like that. He taught me, when you're carrying a sack of grain or wool or something, don't saunter along with it, run with it; because it takes a lot of strength to hold it up. The longer you hold it up, the more tired you get. So don't just dawdle around and take yourself real slow. You pick up a sack, run with it. If you come back empty and you have time to rest walking back, okay. Stuff like that. And about winches. The first tractor I drove was as big as this table. Fifteen horsepower.

ARBONA: You were maybe twelve years old?

EASTON: I was eight.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: I was eight, yeah. It was all steel.

ARBONA: Back in Sacramento, with that grandfather?

EASTON: No, this is when he came down here. He came down, and they moved into the land that my father bought, the nine acres plus the Sears Roebuck house and 00:41:00all that, see? He made a walnut orchard out of the nine acres, which was really successful. But I learned walnuts, I learned hulling, I learned how to dry them. With this one tractor, he would say, "Some day, I'm going to let you drive it." So I got to be eight, and he says, "Okay. Here we go. Plow. Don't turn too much, because the plows will go double depth, and there's not enough power. It won't go forward to pull them out. It doesn't have a lift on here to pull them out of the ground. You've got to dig the plows out with a pick and shovel. Don't turn too sharp. And watch that one tree." There was one tree out there. He says, "Now, go ahead." So I go out there and I look back, he's watching me, he's watching me. So what do I do? I turn double depth and crush the only tree within two acres. [they laugh] He never got mad at me. See, that's part of my 00:42:00personality. They were never bad enough to get mad at. But the idea of causing pain of my progeny is just beyond me, any of my kids. I can't inflict pain on purpose on a child. Who would do that? I can't do it. If I see any lady, if I see a lady walking on the street, and she looks sick, my stomach feels funny. I have women in a different category. Some people call that being a sexist, but for what it's worth, it's to their benefit. It bothers me to have a woman be injured. I saw a woman one time upside-down, flying a Navy aircraft. They said, "Eject, eject, eject." For some reason, she didn't and she died with the airplane. I don't like that.

So anyway, the thing that happened on this hay press thing, that's how most of it works. Now, I don't know if you remember Bernie Duncan or not. No, he died 00:43:00before. But anyway, he was the one that owned this hay press thing. Well, Alvin Joaquin, out--everybody's dead or old age there. But anyway, here I'm up feeding, and I hear all this screaming, "ah, ah!" I look all around, and here comes a load of hay, up the ramp, and no Portugee, no Alvin back there to jerk it loose. It's just loose. Lloyd, behind me, the twelve-year-old, is bringing a load of hay up, rack and all, going to hit me. I could've gone down in that chute and been baled in twelve seconds. I could've been part of a bale, being knocked in that chute. I jumped back. Fortunately, I got out of the way. On this Chinaman going down, that thing hit just right. It hit with the Chinaman coming up. Boom, it knocked it away, instead of taking it down in, which would've wrecked a lot of machinery.

ARBONA: From everything you're telling me, what's really fascinating is that you 00:44:00were right at the cusp of this whole region changing from a very agricultural or rural place to being industrialized, and working in Avon and all this area being--do you have some thoughts about that?

EASTON: Well, I wrote a letter. See, I write letters to the editor. About twenty of them per year get printed. They print about one-third of what I write. But they printed a good one on the PG&E explosion over there in San Bruno. You see, I wrote in there--because I worked on these industries around. I didn't actually say I worked at PG&E, but I did; and I worked at Shell in Martinez, and I worked at Standard at Maltby, and I worked at Associated in Avon. Whenever there's a foul-up coming along, the middle-level guys, they know what's going on. They're there. The brass come on TV, they cover everything up. They do. I wrote that, and it was printed. See, if the Contra Costa Times editorial page has some big 00:45:00thing, I try to write on their exact subject because they're more likely to print it, because it's something they want to put up. The only trouble with them, they've got a four-day lapse between the time my letter comes in and the time that they print. That's too slow. The Chronicle prints immediately. I haven't had many. Except the last one I did, two months before the NASDAQ-dot-com crash ruined everything. I wrote a letter, and they gave me my own little headline, "Crash About to Happen." Two months later, crash. But they put my letter right up at the top with a--in fact, I'll dig it out and send it to you. It's way in the back of my files somewhere.

ARBONA: That sounds good.

EASTON: But that's the kind of stuff. Now, PG&E, I wrote and said, "These higher ups, they're covering everything up. You should go to the working people," I put in there, "because I worked in these places, these industries. I know when it's time to haul out of there." And they do. We knew, at PG&E; we knew when things were going wrong.

ARBONA: So as a young teenager, you started working in--

EASTON: Age fourteen.

ARBONA: --at Avon, the Avon Refinery.

EASTON: I worked at Standard Oil. That was Avon, because Standard Oil pump station was right by Avon, too. It came through Avon. So I worked over there. A good Mormon family over there hired me. Well, I don't know how good they were; they were Mormons, and my dad knew of them from having a common background, but he didn't go to church or anything. But anyway, they said, "Come on over. We've got a wheat cutter's job." I said, "Well, I'm fourteen." They said, "That's okay." I said, "Well, there are rules saying you've got to be eighteen to work for Standard Oil Company." They said, "No, no, put down eighteen." So I worked all summer. I was fifteen during that summer.

ARBONA: Was your feeling that these places were pretty safe? Beside the fact that they were hiring young teenagers, was there a feeling that the place was a 00:47:00safe industry? In contrast to San Bruno, let's say, or PG&E and what not.

EASTON: I never felt that they were safe, really. We kind of expected to have to look out for ourselves. Pick and shovel and stuff.

But one more thing on the hay. In this chute coming out, each bale is separated by this oak or maple block. It's a piece the same size as a bale of hay, that's got lath on each side of it so the wires can go through, hand poking up the wires. Three wires on each bale, on the one we were on. So anyway, what would 00:48:00happen, the wire poker, on this one block, would put the finishing wires on one side, because the other wires were already in up the line. Then the wire tier--I did that quite a bit, too; it's tough on the hands, though--you tie the wires with the right slack, so that when they expand coming out of the chute up there, why, they're tight. Then on the other side of the bale, you put in the first wire, see. Well, it's up to the guy up there feeding to flip the thing over to put a block in, because he's right near where the ram is. It's getting pretty technical; I remember this stuff. But when you feed in, you put as much charge in as you can each time. But you want it to be the same, if possible. Except for the first one and the last one, which is where the blocks are. If you put a normal charge in there, and it gets rammed in, it shuts those slots where the 00:49:00wires are supposed to go through. The reason you put the same charge in--it depends on how much of a pro the farmer thinks you are, because when the farmer goes to take the bales off, it's nice for him to have the same slices of hay to take off so he can feed them, keep track of how many he's got. That gets pretty precise. I got to be known later as pretty good on this. A good feeder can make them all the same size, put a half a charge in there so the wires can get tied, and it comes out real-- Farmers like that. Because they look at the bales ending up in the pile. They go up and look and see. See, if you've got a couple of stupid guys feeding, you have one charge that's that big and another one that's only tiny, half. Well, they can't keep track of how much hay they've got. So what? But anyway, I was down tying the wires coming through. The poker pokes it through. They had trouble poking them because the slots were covered up. So 00:50:00finally, it was too slow. I told Frankie Rossi up there, "Stop, stop. Don't feed anymore because we've got to get the wires through." The poker couldn't get them through, see? You've got a ram, you've got a big, long steel rod, like a needle, with a thing in the end; they'll ram them through. They were having trouble, trouble. I said, "Frank, stop, stop. Don't feed any more." Because the last block was getting out of sight. It would've been a wasted bale all the way out because it would've fallen all to pieces. So I hear some noise up there, and here Frankie's up there. He's dancing around. This is funny. He's dancing around, playing the pitchfork like a banjo. He's looking, everybody else has stopped, see? Nothing's happening because he screwed up the blocks. The poker and I are trying to get the wires tied. So I hear this, da-da-da, and I look up, here Frankie's doing this dance. All of a sudden I see kind of blue flashes. Then I fell down. See, what happened was this Chinaman--see, the handle of the pitchfork is slick. He got it over in front of the Chinaman; the Chinaman goes 00:51:00wham! Hits it right on the end. That pitchfork came down, hit me right in the head. Every morning when I comb my hair, I think of Frankie Rossi. I've got a little dent right there. Fortunately, the one tine hit right smack in the toughest part of my head. But owner Bernie Duncan, he could swear for ten minutes and never repeat a word. He came up, saw my hat impaled on the pitchfork; I'm down on the ground with this bloody spot on my head.

ARBONA: Oh, good God.

EASTON: He would've killed Frankie right up on there, if he had a chance. So that only happened once, but--that was 1949. So anyway, so much for the hay press. [Arbona laughs] These days, they have a wind rower. Your wife could go out there with all the machinery, and she could wind up with a nice pile of bales, all tied and everything. It's all done that way.

ARBONA: It's just much more mechanized.

EASTON: Yeah, it's all mechanized now. But anyway, as far as that goes, I was 00:52:00kind of raised working on the farm. One time they took the bottom off of one of those huge units there at Avon, and the bolts were two inches. Two-inch bolts. So we had a whole bunch of high school guys, had to put this huge steel cap back up on these bolts. They jacked it up there with a huge jack. It must've weighed a ton. Here are these two-inch bolts sticking out, and the nuts were about that big. You know what a jackhammer's like; b-r-r-r-r, through the cement. Well, they had this wrench, which was a socket wrench with a socket big enough for these bolts. Okay, pick that up. Well, we had about eight high school guys there. I was the only one that could pick it up over my head. It weighed 105 pounds. [chuckles] To put the bolts back up. God! So finally, it wore me out. 00:53:00Everybody else was just sitting there. I couldn't do it for very long. So it was primitive at the oil companies in those days, too.

ARBONA: The work conditions, you mean.

EASTON: Yeah.

ARBONA: We still have a little chunk of time before the tape runs out on this one, but I wanted to also ask you, what was your mom doing that whole time? It sounds like you're working on the farm, your dad's working at Avon, and she's raising also your siblings? She's at home?

EASTON: Yeah, I had one sister, that's all. Well, my mother did go to work at Avon during the war because of the shortage of employees during that World War, starting in 1942.

ARBONA: What did she do?

EASTON: Secretary. She worked at Shell. See, my mother, she was kind of unusual, 00:54:00kind of a bit of a maverick on education. Mount Diablo High School started in 1906. She was born in 1901. So she went to Mount Diablo High School when she got old enough, which was about 1913. Miss Romaine was there, a very famous principal. So my mother went two years there. She got permission from Miss Romaine to come down to University High School here. There was a high school on this campus.

ARBONA: In Berkeley.

EASTON: In Berkeley. A training school for teachers, see. And she knew people, and she got permission to ride what was called the Oakland-Antioch electric train, from Concord down here. It came right through Berkeley. So she rode down here for year, to University High School, which was really something for the 00:55:00school district in Contra Costa County to allow a student to do that. Miss Romaine gave permission for it. Then the next year, after that one year here at University, she got the right to go to Oakland Tech, on Broadway. Came down, same thing. So she graduated from Oakland Tech. They had good commercial stuff. So she went right to Shell Oil in 1919. [Sound of cell phone vibrating] Oh, this is my phone, which I will turn off so we can do this. Well, it's a kind of an important--

ARBONA: Don't worry. You can even take it, if you need to.

EASTON: It's an emergency, yeah.

ARBONA: Oh, okay. Go ahead. I'll just stop the tape. [audiofile stops & restarts] Okay.

EASTON: So anyway, my mother actually was a housewife, mainly. Let's see, I was born 1927, and my sister was born 1929. So in those days, housekeeping and raising kids was kind of what women did. My grandmother was a teacher, also. 00:56:00They didn't have kindergarten where I went to school; it was a company school, one-room schoolhouse. They had the first five grades in there, see? They didn't say your parents had to go to school, so I went with an older kid that lived right next door to us, Audrey Penn. So they sent a note home to my mother, the first day of first grade, that they wanted to see my mother. So my mother brought me the next day and they said, "Well, he already knows arithmetic and how to read. We're putting him in the second grade." So I did the first grade in one day. That could've been detrimental. See, that's what put me so far ahead, entering college at sixteen, barely sixteen. I was seventeen pretty soon. See, the teacher in the one-room school had five grades, and she could only teach one at a time. So because I was so far ahead of the other first graders I was moved into the second grade. I became, actually, the spelling person and the pronunciation and the reading-aloud person for grades two and one. Arithmetic, too. So we had a substitute teacher one time that came in. She knew something was really unusual. She had everybody read aloud, stand up and read aloud. Man, did she make a speech about me. I was probably about the third grade. The inflections and pausing for the comma and all this stuff. Because that's what happens when Grandma's a teacher and starts with you at age two. So what? So that was helpful. So then from there, sixth grade, I went over to Concord Grammar School. But I had kind of a mental block there because I was accustomed to this one-room schoolhouse, where I was kind of the surrogate teacher, all the way up to the fifth grade. The teacher would assign me, especially when I was in 00:57:00the fifth grade, especially to each the first and second grade kids there. My degree here is in the Education Department, physical education.

ARBONA: Here at Berkeley.

EASTON: Berkeley, yeah. I had some misgivings about going to high school. They talked about Latin, they talked about this and that. So I had little misgivings about going into high school, just because my peers, older, got me so worried about taking Latin and stuff like that. But getting back to my mother, she was good in Spanish. The railroads had had quite a downturn in their employment. Shell was hiring Chinese, but also Mexican, Indian--Shell wouldn't hire Chinese, no. They wouldn't. But they were hiring Mexican and Indian laborers. She got in 00:58:00the personnel department, hiring the Spanish-speaking guys from the railroad.

ARBONA: So she learned to speak the language.

EASTON: Right. She learned in high school, to speak it. So I remember she said they asked what money they made at the railroad. Dos, noventa y seis. They made $2.96 a day. They all made the same thing. So anyway, that was what my mother did. But she went to work; she became chief secretary for the engineering department at Avon Associated Oil Company.

ARBONA: Oh, wow.

EASTON: Then she left there when my sister got married and dropped out of San Jose State. I had the GI Bill. How do you like that? I was eighteen years old, I was approved to be a junior here, I had an honorable discharge from the Navy, and the GI Bill.

ARBONA: Yeah. This is a big topic. That's one that--

EASTON: Isn't that something?

ARBONA: --we want to talk a lot about, so maybe we should stop this tape here.

EASTON: Okay. Do you want me to read my list of things that I have to talk about?

ARBONA: We're back with tape number two. This is Javier Arbona, and I'm here with Mr. Martin Easton. His granddaughter, Sandy Tesch, who also works at Berkeley, is with us today. We were just talking about a lot of interesting family stories, but you were telling me over the break that you wanted to talk about Port Chicago and before the explosion, working at the Avon Refinery, right? What that was like.

EASTON: Yes, I did work there. Yeah, I worked at the Avon Refinery. One of the things about it that's correlated with Port Chicago is that, as is well known, 01:00:00the ammunition handlers, the ones that actually handled the ammunition, were almost all black. The supervisors were of other races. I'm not sure, but they were probably known as Caucasian, or we'd call them white. The strange thing that happened early was, when I was sixteen--my sixteenth birthday was in the summer of '43, and I was old enough to work in the refineries then. Shell and Avon did not go for lying about your age like Standard did, see. In fact, I thought I might go to work at Standard, where I had worked at age fourteen, in 1942 summer, age fourteen and fifteen, by lying about my age. I think I found out over there that they didn't go for that lying about age anymore. Somebody caught on that I was fourteen and my friend Eddie was fifteen, and we were both working there all summer. I was driving pickup trucks around the Standard Oil 01:01:00station. So anyway, my mother had worked at Shell and knew the personnel manager there. Even in 1943, when she worked there in 1918, it was still the same guy; George Honneger was still there. So I went and applied to George Honneger to work there. It was July 17; it was only about six weeks to go before school started again. During school time, we could only work weekends or holidays or times off like that, see? So I went to work at Shell on July 18, 1943. I was to be a senior in high school that year. It was hard work. Shell was very difficult to work for. No resting at all. You did have some time to eat lunch, half an 01:02:00hour, but Shell was very strict, very strict. For example, you couldn't just 01:03:00sign in on your timecard at Shell by the stamping machine; you had to be where you knew you were going to work. I was assigned to work inside the stills, which were almost a mile away from the check in, where I would stamp my stamping card. They almost fired me because I didn't get to where we had to go to work until about seven minutes after eight, even though my timecard said I was in before eight o'clock, because it took me about twelve to fourteen minutes. I could walk a mile in twelve minutes in those days; I used to time myself. So it took me about twelve minutes to get there. Shell was very difficult to work for. So my folks decided to go on a vacation. I thought, "Well, I could just as well work at Avon, so I'll quit Shell." They got pretty upset because the rule at Shell was if you once quit, you would never go back. Also they never hired relatives. They wouldn't hire two brothers, only one. Wouldn't hire two close members of 01:04:00the family.

ARBONA: Because of dangers?

EASTON: I guess they just didn't want cliques to start. Now, some people did take a letter out of their names and work there. I think it was known to the personnel department, too. There was one famous one. A person named Robinson worked there. I didn't know him, but I knew a classmate here at the same time, a football player from Alhambra named Robison, R-O-B-I-S-O-N. Well, I knew from childhood, earlier, that his real name was Robinson, but he went by Robison, so that his father could work at Shell. So that's the way Shell was. They were really difficult. They were known, of course, with some prejudice, as a foreign-based company, Royal Dutch Shell. And they still are. Most of the names you ran into in there were German, Dutch, of that nature. Not Dutch Indonesians, because they weren't really welcome anywhere back here. They were prejudicial 01:05:00both ways. Indonesians didn't like them, and the Dutch didn't like them either, the half-breed people. That's a little bit of an aside.

But anyway, so I quit there and was threatened I could never go back to work at Shell. What do I care, at age sixteen? How do I know what's going to happen. Went on vacation, came back, went to high school. As soon as football season was over, which was--because football season was very grueling and difficult, especially in September, when you had full pads and you were out there practicing, regardless of the weather. So when football season was over, November 11, I went and applied to Associated, because we lived right there at the refinery. That's when I went to work at Associated. For example, here's a little bit of the economics of World War II. When I was a laborer there, I lived right at the plant, which was easy just to walk to work. Other kids may not have 01:06:00had a ride to work, so they didn't work all the time that they could. Kids from Pleasant Hill or Concord may not have had transportation, but I could just walk to work. So they said, "Do you want to work on Christmas Day? Time and a half." I said, "Well, yeah. Sure. Sure." Laborer. Pick and shovel, sweeping, labor. So I said, "Yeah, I'll go to work. Sure. Time and a half? You bet." I was living there anyway. So I went to work. I had three foremen. I was the labor gang. Three labor foremen who reported for work, for time and a half. So they all played cards in the tool room. They told me, "Take a broom and go sweep." So I did. I had the broom all day. I don't remember what I did. I probably did something. They played cards all day; I know that. So I asked my dad, "How does that work? Why will the company have three foremen and one laborer?" He said, "Well, I'll tell you. The government pays cost plus. On the war effort, there's 01:07:00no bidding. Everybody produces as much as they can. You don't bid on constructing a steel mill or an airplane or whatever. They build them, and they bill the government. They bill the government for cost of doing business, plus. So your pay and the three men there at time and a half will be submitted to the government. It's just a tiny part; they submit the huge billions of dollars worth. But the government pays the time and a half that you earned, because that's a cost. They pay the cost, plus a 10 percent bonus, you see?" So that was pervasive all the way through. Now, the reasoning, of course, is you can't have things stalled for bidding, and you can't have strikes for more wages and all that. They raised wages just by discussion, mainly, and all that.

ARBONA: Was there a union over there?

EASTON: No, there was no union at Avon then. A union came later. Well, there 01:08:00were potential strikes when I was about seven or eight years old. We lived in Avon, and there were protestors who appeared. But they had what was called a company union. They didn't have Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union yet. They did have unions back east. John L. Lewis was famous on the coal miners. Portal to portal was his main thing. He wanted the miners to get paid from the time they reported to work. Well, just like I did at the Shell Refinery. The company wanted them to report when they picked up the tools to load the coal cart, way down in the mine. They wanted to get paid for the elevator time and all that. So that was John L. Lewis' main thing. The unions weren't strong then. FDR came in 01:09:00and promoted the union thing there quite a bit. So that's where I went to work with Avon, and I was labor gang. But also, you see, a strange thing happened. It's on my list here. The Navy at Port Chicago provided--privately--they provided black sailors to work for regular pay at Avon. I worked with those black sailors. They would appear in their dungarees. Not white hats, they had some other kind of hats, but they wore their work clothes. They had lunches provided by the Navy. They came on a Navy bus, both to Avon and to Martinez, both Shell and Associated. I worked with them. I got to know many of them. They worked in the same ditch, alongside of--maybe I would be the only white person, 01:10:00with twenty blacks. They talked to me about everything. I said, "Aren't you tired?" The main thing I thought was, "Aren't you tired?" Because it seemed to be so busy over there. None of them ever complained of being tired. They said, "No, the work's not that much. It's not that hard." They didn't complain about that at all. Maybe they were trained not to complain, or maybe it was between ships or whatever. But see, in those days, during the war, we didn't ask a lot of military questions. But I did wonder why the guys weren't tired when they showed up there.

ARBONA: You said those guys were getting paid the same?

EASTON: They were getting paid $6.72 a day--a day--like I was. When I worked over at Standard the year before, we got $6.77, and Avon only got $5.72. We got a dollar more a day over at Standard, see. So those were the pays per day. I 01:11:00asked the guys, and as far as I know they liked the pay. They said something about they missed their people back home. They were married men, with children and all that. Some were young, asked me about girlfriends and all this stuff, and I said, "Well, I've never been out with a girl," and all that, which was true. So anyway, then they talked about that. They pointed at the hills there. They said, "Boy, I bet that land will go pretty cheap after the war, huh?" I said, "You mean that hill land up there?" I was accustomed to the walnut farming there, level ground, Ygnacio Valley, topsoil ten feet deep. I said, "Well, look at that. It's just got some hay growing up there, volunteer." He said, "Yeah, I know, but I don't have any money for bottom land. I can't buy bottom land." See, back where they came from--Louisiana or Texas, Mississippi--the big difference between bottom land, which had topsoil and could grow crops, and where the black 01:12:00people could afford to be, way up in the hills, where the topsoil might've been four inches deep, and they just had poverty grass on it. So they asked me about land values, [laughs] thinking about after the war. Because you have time to talk about anything. See, a lot of times, I would just be a listener. I would almost say nothing, because they were all black, and I was the only--I couldn't really ask much, in a way, unless it was just one on one. As a bunch, they wouldn't really talk to me. There wouldn't be four or five of them all talking to me. One on one, we would talk, but they wouldn't risk four or five or whatever you want to call it, having me in the middle of it, see. They were very deferential to me. Not like slavery would've been; they were just nice. They were nice to me. I was nice to them, too. I never tried to look down on them at all.

Well, anyway, what happened twice, I remember vividly, was they described men at the station handling ammunition, that were rough with it. They were rough. They didn't follow the rules. And twice, on different occasions--I forget their names, but--they said, "Boy, that Smith, that guy, he is going to get it. He is going to get it," because of the way they rough handle the ammunition." The last sentence my letter to the editor said was, "I didn't think they thought the whole station would blow up." They didn't. If they had known that, if they had known it was in danger of two ships just about disappearing and a locomotive out in the middle of the river, if they thought that could happen, they probably would've done something about it, if they thought that one rough guy could set off the whole station. But I didn't know what would happen, either. I didn't know the whole thing was going to blow up. But I know they talked about rough handling of ammunition.

ARBONA: Did they say anything about their commanding officers?

EASTON: No, no. No criticism, nothing, no. No criticism of the work conditions. The only criticism was missing their people back home. Well, my mother used to go to Stoneman. She was called a gray lady.

ARBONA: To Camp Stoneman?

EASTON: Camp Stoneman. They had gray ladies there that would go and talk to the soldiers. See, Camp Stoneman, at its peak, it had 250,000. Everybody that went to the Pacific went through Camp Stoneman. They had 250,000 Army men there. They all rode a huge ferryboat down to the Embarcadero to go. We used to see the ferryboat going up and down. But my mother used to be a gray lady, and her job was to help the black guys or whoever they were write letters. She said, "I felt 01:15:00sorry." Many of them, you'd hand them the pen and all that and say, "Well, what do you want to say to your--" "Well, I don't know, I just can't quite handle this pen right now." Then she would realize that they were not literate. So then she would let them describe, and she would write. She wrote a beautiful hand, and she was good at writing, too, so she would write the letters for them. They loved that, too.

ARBONA: So I had never heard of this before.

EASTON: Gray ladies, yeah.

ARBONA: She would volunteer?

EASTON: All volunteers, yeah. They were named that because they were gray-haired ladies.

TESH: Gray uniforms.

EASTON: Oh, gray uniforms? Is that what it was? Yeah. Because there were some younger people that said they went over. They had dances for soldiers and all that. Some of the high school girls really went to there. So pretty well controlled, but--

ARBONA: And she'd write the letters for them to--

EASTON: Yeah, she would write for them.

ARBONA: --send back home, among other things.

EASTON: Yeah. I think that people back home really loved that, too, because they 01:16:00were able to understand what was happening to their people. But that's just kind of an aside. But I was surprised that the Navy would allow that, but it was part of the cost plus, I think. But knowing Shell, see, I don't remember any black people being worked there from the Navy. When I worked there during Shell, they might have just been somewhere else, because I spent most of my time inside of a still--which is like this thing, only it's a tank--chipping coke off of these distillation pots inside of there. We kids all broke out in pimples, too, because they had an exhaust fan there, but-- I asked the foreman, I said, "How come we're all getting pimples?" He said, "Ah, a lot of caustic in the air." Okay. Pimples went away when we went back to school.

ARBONA: Do you have some thoughts or feelings about how things changed after the explosion?

EASTON: Yes. Well, of course, we knew about the charges of mutiny. We knew they were convicted of that. There were mixed feelings there because in wartime, there were people on the front lines, Marines and the rest of them, that if they refused to work and went on strike, they could be shot. There was only one person ever shot that I know of. Only one shot as a deserter. But one thing that comes to mind here that may not fit in with what you're taking about, but when I worked at PG&E, there were lots of older veterans. They were veterans of landings at Normandy and landings in the Pacific. They said, "You've heard about friendly fire and mistakes." He said, "I had a rifle in landings. We went 01:18:00against the Japanese, for example. There were armed sergeants behind us, with automatic weapons. Any American that turned was shot." And they all knew it. They all knew if they turned in the face of the enemy--then under various circumstances, it was labeled as friendly fire, mistakes and all that. But I learned that at PG&E, when I worked there as an adult. I didn't know that.

ARBONA: Did you work at PG&E after Berkeley, after you did the GI Bill?

EASTON: Yeah. Well, okay, after Berkeley--

ARBONA: I just wanted to get that fact kind of clear, but we don't have to--

EASTON: Yeah, right. Okay, so the last part you heard was Berkeley. I worked on the hay press in 1949. I got married in 1949. I got married in 1948, excuse me. 01:19:00Got married in '48, and my wife and I lived in what's called the cardboard apartments over in Walnut Creek, because the walls were like they were made of a cardboard shipping carton or something. But anyway, I drove down to Berkeley here, to finish my last year. Actually, I had a lot of units. See, I'd gone to Stockton JC. Actually, it was the first two years of College of the Pacific; they were on the same campus. Then I went from there to Caltech. Then I went up to Berkeley, finished there. But at College of the Pacific, you'd only get two-thirds of a unit credit for each unit that you took there at Berkeley, because they didn't recognize them all. Although I had to repeat physiology because I dropped out in the middle of it to go into the Navy. And it was the same course here. I thought, wow. I took anatomy down there, too. I only got 01:20:00two-thirds of three units that I took for the anatomy course. It was the same here, same textbook and everything, so that was a little bit of an injustice there. By the time I graduated, I had 140 units. But in order to pull them into a major, I had to take home economics. I was the only man in the class. What a disappointment. I had a wedding ring on. [Arbona laughs] They all asked me, oh, we saw you before; what'd you do? You got married? Yeah. Then they'd stalk away. Men were kind of short there. Well, anyway, for some reason, the home economic girls were disappointed about that. So anyway, by the time it came time to pull in a major, I had to take Home Ec. So then what happened was I changed my address. We lived in Clayton, in an old house. I wanted to move out of the 01:21:00cardboard apartments and move into a vacant house in Clayton that belonged in the family. So I changed my address, but I didn't notify the university. I did all my figuring, calculated, and I was one unit credit short of pulling everything-- I had 140, but in order to pull into a major, you needed 120 towards your one thing, and I was one short. So I petitioned for graduation. Anyway, maybe I'll try because of all this. I didn't hear, and I didn't hear, and I didn't hear anything, moved to Clayton. I said, "Well, I guess it wasn't approved." So then I enrolled here. I took six units of educational psych and educational something else, because I knew that I was going to pull towards it. So I got six more units. Summer school, six weeks, six more units. I thought, okay, I'll go back down and re-register. I don't know how it's going to come out. So I come down here to re-register and they look it up. It was right there 01:22:00by Sather Gate. You could drive in, right in front of the administration office. I applied and they said, "Wait a minute." They went back and they came back. They said, "You already graduated." I said, "What?" They said, "Yeah." They said, "You didn't hear?" I said, "No, I didn't hear." So anyway, they came back, and they mailed stuff to me, but it came back; I didn't give them my mailing address, see. So anyway, instead of enrolling in September, they handed me my diploma, and I walked out of Sather Gate, into the cruel world--

ARBONA: That's how you were done at Berkeley.

EASTON: --with six extra units. Yeah. I came here and took six. I thought, they must recognize the six units. Must not be good enough. I thought they would keep track of all this stuff. When they saw the six units, that would've been enough. 01:23:00Because in my calculations, I knew I was one short, and I knew I took six more because I got the transcript. I thought, well, they still didn't graduate me. I thought the petition would still be good, see. I'd sort of still be within their committee. Well, it turned out that they gave me the one that I needed in June, and I didn't know. So all they said was, "Well, it was posted here. Didn't you read it?" I said, "Well, no, I didn't." Well, here I am, nineteen, twenty years old.

ARBONA: So all together, how long were you at Berkeley?

EASTON: Well, from March first of '46 until June 16 of '49, three years. My GI Bill ran out in all that, but I got married, and it was ninety dollars a month while I was married. But then it ran out January of '49, the GI Bill ran out. 01:24:00Because I had seven months and twenty-four days, and you got one month of GI for each month you'd been in the military. It ran out, and my dad--somehow we were talking, and he said, "Well, I promised to put you through college; the military really helped here." So he sent me $90 a month until I graduated, until summer. He paid me the $90 because he had agreed to put me through college because I told him I wanted to be a great running back. So believe it or not, I went down there to Coach [Amos Alonzo] Stagg's. Coach Stagg was the most famous coach in the United States. Boy, did I miss an opportunity, too, of publicity. But anyway, I went down there because my friends had been there. The year before, Coach Stagg had been declared coach of the year.

ARBONA: This is down where?

EASTON: In Stockton. So my friends had started going down there, my older 01:25:00friends from high school. One other aside, a little different. I told her [Tesch] about it once and she was kind of astonished. But see, I could drive a car or a tractor or anything, from age eight or nine. So I bought my first Model T when I was fourteen. An old guy drove in from where my grandmother taught school. The schoolmarm, who lived in the house closest to the school in those days, the county [inaudible several words]. He drove all the way down to visit her, said, "I want to sell my car." Well, I always had money, even in the Depression. Even when kids had nothing but cardboard in their shoes, couldn't afford underwear and all that, I always had some money because I worked. So I always had a few dollars, see. He drove his car down, Model T. I said, "How much do you want for it?" He says, "Ten dollars." Which was a good price. It was a fine price in those days. It was the going price. So I had ten bucks, and I said, "Here." He says, "Well, I've got the pink slip." So he signed it over to 01:26:00me, and I signed the pink slip, and I owned the car. My dad came to me pick me up; boy, was he surprised. He didn't know it. I said, "Oh, I bought that car." Dad: "Oh, no." But he was a good mechanic, my dad was, but he didn't want to get involved with me on the car. He didn't want to get out and get under, because he'd been through all that. In Wyoming, he had to repair, repair, repair. He could afford a new '41 Chevy. He actually bought a '40 Chevy and traded it in on a '41, see. No, he didn't want to help me. So he put up with it. But at any rate, I was driving a car when I was fourteen.

ARBONA: Can I interrupt a second? I think there's a gap there that I want to fill in, how you actually got your military service done. Which is something we had talked about on the phone, but I think we'd like to hear how you did the military service, and you went to Caltech and came here.

EASTON: Okay, okay. Yeah, well, I went down to Pacific. Coach Stagg was there, and I was a football player, see. I was all county, Contra Costa County football, selected by the Concord newspaper. I was all county baseball, too, first string baseball. Then I was what's called senior boy of 1944, which was--it was a bunch of crap. [laughs] You see, I never asked a girl for a date. They all asked me out, see. I think a whole bunch of girls got together and sabotaged the committee that figured this out, and did it, even though I don't think I deserved it. But anyway, what it was was sports and reputation and popularity and all this, most likely to succeed and all this crap. I was embarrassed because I thought, "Oh, I know a whole bunch of guys smarter than me, stronger and all this stuff." But anyway, I was selected that. So then I 01:28:00went down to Pacific. So I was well known all around the county, mainly. One thing I did, I probably injured a lot of people because at the time I went out for football, I wasn't getting along very well with my father. My mother was sick and all this stuff, and they were arguing a lot and all that, so I was kind of hostile. I thought, boy, football, I can put on these pads, I can hit some guy over there, who's there voluntarily. That's what I decided to do. Twice, I caused other teams to have delay of the game because they would call a play, and I would put their star player on his back, with his hat slamming. They'd call another play, and the halfback refused to run. One time I called to the ref, I said, "How long are you going to let them argue about running over here?" He says, "Oh, oh." [makes a whistle noise] He blows, five-yard penalty. Happened twice. The other team got demoralized. But anyway, I wanted to go down to 01:29:00Pacific. So Coach Stagg down there--the most famous coach in the US, coach of the year the year before--"A sixteen-year-old power running back for me?" he says. But anyway, I wound up leading them in rushing average, which is 4.75, aged seventeen years and three months. So anyway, from there, I earned that letter. Or I missed out. See, I got my picture in the paper two or three times, and they interviewed me. How come you came to Pacific? But the thing I missed was my grandfather, the one with the asthma, had gone to Pacific in 1880, when it was in San Jose. Look at the human interest story that would've been. Sixty years later, grandson leads the football team. See, he was born in 1860, and he couldn't work, so he went to college for a while there. So I missed out on that. 01:30:00But anyway, then I earned a letter in baseball. We beat Cal, who beat USC and UCLA, so we were crowned by our local athletic department as the champions of the Pacific coast. I got three hits, to bat in five runs, right here against California. So anyway, then what happened, I'd been going to school since September of '43. You know how kids need vacations. But I went right to Pacific. I was down there enrolling, after June 16, '44. School, school. In fact, I'd had three semesters a year. I finished two semesters, one full year of school, by March 1, and here I'm seventeen. I told her [Tesch] one time I was a seventeen-year-old sophomore in college--all her men friends were around--when I went and enrolled in the Navy. Later on she [Tesch] said, "They said, 'seventeen-year-old sophomore? How'd he do that?'" Well, it's just your grandmother's a teacher, you take the first grade in one day and that. So 01:31:00anyway, my girlfriend used to write me a letter every day. I just started going with her when I latched onto her right in April, when I was graduating and all that. So anyway, she wrote me a letter every day, sent me the Sporting Green. But as an aside for her, she was writing me a letter on July 17, when the Port Chicago blew up. She was right next to a French door, back door of her house, and a glass pane came out in pieces and sliced her forehead, right here.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: She said she dripped blood on the letter. She had to throw that away and start a new letter. That's where she was.

ARBONA: And how far from the explosion?

EASTON: She was at 625 Cowell Road, which would be-- Do you know anything in Concord I can compare it to?

ARBONA: I know the plaza and I know where the military base is.

EASTON: Okay. Well, from the southern edge of the military station, it would be 01:32:00half a mile.

ARBONA: Okay.

EASTON: It was close.

ARBONA: That's really close, yeah.

EASTON: It was close. There were windows broken, they say, in Alameda and Oakland and Vallejo. So she was really close. I can round up twenty or thirty people that were that close. Of course, some of them were old, and they've got Alzheimer's and all that. Half my class has died.

So at any rate, getting back to the football, I'd been going to school since September, and here we were around May of '45, and a little article in the Chronicle showed up, Chronicle sports page. My girlfriend used to mail that to me, the Chronicle sports page. It said, "Navy air opened up to civilians." Then my cousin, when Pearl Harbor hit, he was a Marine pilot. The top 10 percent, he 01:33:00said, of the Navy pilot trainees automatically go to the Marines for close air support and other very technical things. So man, I wanted to be a--because another friend of mine had gone into the Navy V-5. Wrote me a letter from North Dakota State Teachers College, because there were V-5 classes--oh, every college had them--and V-12. V-12 were line officers, not flight. So I came home, told my dad, "Hey, I want to go down and enroll in the Navy. It's open." Then I told my girlfriend I was going to go down there. She was still in school. She was a sophomore in high school, and by that time, I was a sophomore in college. So she told one of my friends, or told several of them, former football players I played with, and one of them decided to go with me down there, to apply.

So I thought, well, I'll drive, because I had my dad's '41 Chevy car. There were almost no '42 cars around because they stopped making them in '42, for civilians, because of Pearl Harbor, December 7, '41. My dad had a '41 car. There were quite a few of those around, but they were known as the new cars. So my dad let me do that. So I thought, well, Dave Nufeld and I, the son of a doctor in town, a very prominent doctor, we'd go down and enroll in the Navy. Or I thought we'd just go in there, there'd be a line of ten people, and we'd sign up. There was a traffic jam down there. I talked to him three or four years ago, he said, "Oh, there were 400 people down there. It was horrible. There were guys with letter sweaters from college and all that, so I thought, oh, gee. So they started testing us all right away. There were two days of tests. This is Navy air, see. I was assigned the physical the first day, and my friend Dave was 01:35:00assigned the mental test the first day. Well, we both passed. They spun me around, and they did this and they did that, examine, examine, examine. They told me, "You've got one set of eyes in 10,000. Wow, this is really something." I knew they were good because I could really hit a baseball. I led Pacific in runs batted in, too. We won fourteen games in a row, to wind up the season. We beat a lot of teams with with military guys. In football, I played against guys out of the National Football League, linemen. I've got two totalled knees, two totalled hips, a spinal fusion, a big screen in my chest, too.

ARBONA: That you had to get?

EASTON: Well, football, I got knocked completely out twice. I had a little autism there. I got knocked completely out once. Crushed a shoulder pad. I don't know if you've ever worn any shoulder pads or not, but they're made stronger than blazes. I knew the guy I hit, from Alhambra. It was on a kickoff. Man, I 01:36:00always wanted to be the first one down there to make that hit. I saw Roland coming. I knew Roland. His dad worked for my dad at Avon. He worked there around Avon, too when I worked at Standard, see. I thought, ooh, ooh, ooh, this is going to be nice. Roland never swerved. He never tried to dodge anybody. He was mean. So I thought, wow, this is going to be something. I knew their blocking pattern, because I'd played against them from the JVs, Alhambra. And Silvestri was going to block me. I knew that. I knew that. This is the third year he was blocking me. He was their biggest tackle. Big, strong guy, see. They always put him on the fullback with the other team. So instead of letting him hit me at all, I hurdled him.

ARBONA: Oh, no.

EASTON: He didn't expect that, see. Usually, he would make a cross-body block. I hurdled him, didn't break stride. Fast. I thought, wow. I knew, because here came Roland. Fast, right down. Then--it's unbelievable--it was silence. 01:37:00Everything was black. I thought I was home in bed, and I wondered how the football game came out. Everything turned black. I thought, I missed Roland. Impossible. Then I started hearing some voices, way off. I kind of knew where I was in my bedroom, and I looked around. Two doors, bedroom like that, and another door. Nobody coming in my bedroom. Pretty soon the voices, I could hear what they were saying. They were saying, "Do you think we ought to move them?" Because Roland was out too.

ARBONA: Oh, boy.

EASTON: And I was out. I was right on top of Roland, and we were out. They didn't know the extent of the injuries. The coaches and the referees, they were 01:38:00trying to decide whether to move us or not. I opened my eyes, and there Roland's uniform is, right there. My head was right in his chest, see.

ARBONA: Oh, my goodness.

EASTON: So anyway, they took Roland away on a gurney. After the game, I felt horrible. I had a terrible headache. I was in shock. But I played the rest of the game. They stood me up, smelling salts. You never forget the plays. I heard all the plays, I did all the plays. We won the game. I did everything right. But I had this tremendous headache. I asked my dad when I got home, I said, "What'd you think when I hit Roland?" He said, "I almost cried. I thought you'd killed Roland." I thought he was going to feel sorry for me, but he said, "I thought you killed Roland." He said, "He went back like he was dead." He went back like 01:39:00that, see.

ARBONA: Did you expect at the time to be an athlete?

EASTON: Oh, I expected to be a pro football player, yeah. These injuries were bothering me, and I couldn't play football anymore, so I still had--I tried out here at Cal, but my back hurt so much and all that. So I couldn't really cut it here. I tried it, but--

ARBONA: To play the sport.

EASTON: To play for Cal. But they had a coach that the players finally ran out of town, Frank Wickhorst, and they got Pappy Waldorf in. But the players actually got together and got rid of Wickhorst and all that, and I didn't really-- I didn't feel good. So then in '47, I thought, well, I'll sign a baseball contract. Because I was actually figuring myself a little bit better as 01:40:00a baseball future than football and all that, so I tried out for the St. Louis Browns. They're in Baltimore now. So they signed me. But actually, it was just kind of a last resort. I didn't really have my heart in it enough to continue. I did fine. I was hitting right, I was doing everything fine.

ARBONA: You were playing baseball for them?

EASTON: Well, I went into spring training. My contract was Modesto, in the California State League. We started out in the minors.

ARBONA: I see.

EASTON: Then they traded my contract to Boise, another farm team. They said, "We've traded you to Boise. Will you report?" I said, "Well, I'll think it over." Well, there's no thinking over. The next day they said, "Now, Minor League players don't think it over." They gave my release, which is fine. So anyway, that's where I got married, and that was 1948. I still had the one year 01:41:00to go, and I commuted from Berkeley and Clayton, down to finish the one year here.

ARBONA: Were you happy not being an athlete, at that point?

EASTON: No, it was disappointing. It was mentally debilitating, because there was so much expectation that I had. But you see, being the kind of player that I was, I still had a pointy chin on all my pictures and all that stuff. See, I was still just a child. Stagg was eighty-three years old, my age now, and he wasn't really up to everything that happened, see. In fact, we played against St. 01:42:00Mary's pre-flight. It was the third game of the season. The first game of the season I played a little bit, because he was still worried about this young kid. They put me in on defense only. I did fine. I did fine. Then the second game, the regular fullback--and I knew I was better than he was. Nice guy and I liked him, but he was a guard. He had played guard four years in high school, and there were two years in college, before this. You can't take a guard that isn't accustomed to carrying the ball, where most people run away from them. It's an entirely different deal when there are eleven guys on the other team who are trying to kill you. You get the ball, it is--smash. I knew this poor guy. Tough. 01:43:00Twenty pounds heavier than me. But I had been a hitter and a runner and a tackle football player when I was eight years old, in the orchards. Crush. Just play until we dropped. Bloody. Just crush. That was my upbringing.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: Play hurt. Playing where there were rocks as big as your fist, tackle football, no pads. So when I put pads on, it was like I'd gone to heaven.

ARBONA: Did your heart land on anything new that you wanted to focus on, once you couldn't do sports anymore?

EASTON: Well, I started here in pre-dental, is what it was. Of course, pre-dental is life sciences, same as physical education the first two years, so 01:44:00it was easy to switch over when I kind of lost interest. I kind of lost interest in school, really. My schooling was pretty much a trauma. It was unsettled. See, I was a war person. The thing that really bothered me first was the draft. My father's older brother, Andrew, father's only brother, took two machine gun bullets in a trench in France. The Germans learned to strafe the trenches, see. He took two machine gun bullets. He was a good athlete, according to my dad; he was a better athlete than my dad was. But he always had a limp from then on. In fact, I saw the slugs one time. They both went into his one leg, his right leg, and he kept them.

ARBONA: What do you mean when you said you were a war person? That you wanted to go?

EASTON: Well, I knew about the war there, and my dad went in the Marines. He told about Marine boot camp. Tough, mean. They used to abuse the guys over there at Mare Island Navy. Then my mother's older brother, he was with the AAF. Non-combative Americans went over for Red Cross ambulance drivers. He got the highest medal that a foreign person can get from the French government. Made twenty-two trips in the middle of the night, no lights, during battle, with artillery shells going all the way over. Twenty-two trips in a Model T ambulance, in the dark, across the Marne, whatever the biggest river is there, and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for that. Then other guys older than me, I saw them graduate high school, they went to work at Avon, they went to work at Shell or whatever, they went in the military. They got drafted. They started the draft in 1940. Then Pearl Harbor. A guy across the street, Phil Baer, nice calm 01:46:00guy, really great. He had volunteered or been drafted. Well, he got killed at Pearl Harbor. 2,000 Navy guys, they're still in the Arizona, still dead. That's their coffin.

So this war stuff, my grandfather used to explain wars. The Russo-Japanese War, how the Russians sent their armada all the way around, got to Japan, and the ships were worn out, and the guns were out of use, and the sailors and soldiers of Russia were no good, and they got defeated. And we studied the Civil War in high school, World War I, Spanish-American War. Studied all of them. Of course, nothing has changed much since then, either. Here we've got three wars going now. So anyway, I was prepared for the challenges of war, and that's why I knew 01:47:00the Marine Air Force was the highest combination of--

But anyway, to get back to the tests at San Francisco, the following day, I went back--Dave and I went back together, and they wanted me to take the mental test all day, and Dave take the physical. Well, we weren't together, it was two different places, so I didn't know that Dave had failed the physical during the day. His father was a doctor. So anyway, in the afternoon, on the academics, you see, they had a lot of people in there, but I noticed it was thinner in the afternoon. In the afternoon, the last test, at one o'clock, there were eighteen of us left. So anyway, the WAVE, the clerical girl there, we handed our tests in or whatever it was, and she said, "Okay, I'll grade these. Come back in thirty minutes." So all eighteen of us came back. There were eighteen left, period. 01:48:00Eighteen left, out of 400, because they had eliminated everybody. So we came back, and she said, "The following men report to Lieutenant So-and-So, through that door." So one by one, she read off the names, and I kept hoping and hoping for my name and all that. Finally the door slammed, and the four of us, we started looking at each other. We started to walk out, embarrassed. She said, "The rest of you have passed."

ARBONA: Oh, boy.

EASTON: So out of the traffic jam, at the end of two days, there were four of us made it, see. It was known as the highest standards of any military enrollment. Which is fine. I was forty-six, thirty-two, and six feet, 190 pounds by then, so everybody always expected the big play. In fact, I saved two guys at once from drowning, and I wasn't scared one bit.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: God. Unbelievable. I wondered, did I do that?

ARBONA: What branch of the military were you expecting to serve in? Or what were you hoping to do, once you--

EASTON: The Marine Air Force. See, my cousin was five years older. When Pearl Harbor hit, he had already been out there. He had been flying for a year for the Marines. He's the one that told me that the Marine Air got the top 10 percent of the Navy graduates. So I knew that. Everybody always expected the big play out 01:49:00of me. I made the big play, and so what? I'm supposed to. So that's why I didn't have any qualms about picking what was known to be the highest particular thing. I knew that it was going to be a struggle to make it, because I knew the people thought I was much better than I really was. So going to PG&E was actually kind 01:50:00of a disappointment, because I had failed at a business. My favorite girlfriend of three years here, she eventually became vice president of the student body here. But by that time, I had left her because her parents tried to break up our relationship because we got started too young. In order to help break it up--her parents were both teachers, too--they enrolled her, along with the two of them, for a summer class at University of Nevada. Because the teachers got increases in their pay, by the number of units they took in the summer. They enrolled me, too, if I wanted to. Well, I didn't want to get that close to the family. They were trying to break us up.

ARBONA: Wow. What was Berkeley like after the war?

EASTON: Well, it was two distinctly separate male--as far as the males go--types 01:51:00of students. The returning veterans, of course, they could've been twenty-eight, thirty years old. Then there were the regular freshmen came in. Two entirely different groups. The veterans, including me, did not join the fraternities. I didn't join a fraternity. In fact, I thought, well, if I'm going to have to follow anybody, it'll be Larry Speiser, who I think turned out to have some semi-communist sympathetic dealings, anyway, though he's heavy communist lawyer anyway. But I kind of let all that go.

ARBONA: Who was that?

EASTON: Larry Speiser, S-P-E-I-S-S-E-R. [sic]

ARBONA: Is that something else on your list?

EASTON: No, I didn't put that on there.

ARBONA: Oh, okay. I was just curious. You said that instead of following a fraternity, you were going to--I didn't quite understand that.

EASTON: Oh, see, he was non-org, which means he didn't believe in the fraternities. The clichés, the favoritism. He wasn't a fan, either, of all this boozing on campus, with alcohol on campus and all that. He was the Mario Savio of 1947. Savio, of course, was in the Free Speech Movement in 1960, People's Park and that. That, of course, was due to two things. One is the military draft and the threat of having to be called to go to serve in Vietnam. We have no 01:53:00draft now; there are no protests. Well, there are protests, but they're not the takeover of the biggest campus in the world. That's the military conscription, in my view.

One other view I had, I made a mark at an economic meeting of experienced economic people. This may test your experience at thinking about economics. It won't test your intelligence; it may test your experience. Pro or con, either way. You're your own man. But at an economic meeting, the first question--there was a table this big, gray-haired people. I've got gray hair, too. But there were investors; they knew the market and all this kind of stuff. The leader said, "Why did so many people buy $40 billion in US Bonds at zero interest?" 01:54:00See, they go and they bid the amount that they will loan the money for, when the government sells the treasuries. They bid zero interest. Then they had to pay somebody to take care of their money here, some local person. They're getting zero interest. Why is that? Well, these smart people, none of them said anything. But here I am--I've never spoken to any of them before, first time I ever met any of them--I said, "They're parking their money." He says, "Right." The other people said, "Huh?" I said, "Yeah. Where is the safest place for their money? You have all this turmoil. You've got Iraq and Afghanistan; you've got bombings here in Spain, wrecks their underground rail system; the Russians, everything's blown up. People want to park their money. Where is it?" I said, "They park it here. And you know why?" Well, here was answer number two. The United States has the power. Now, don't give me the ethics of yes or no on nuclear weapons, first, last, never, give them all up, throw them all the way, 01:55:00shoot them all to the sun. Don't give me that. The United States has the power to be unchallenged, to make Afghanistan level, two feet of nuclear dust. [Barack] Obama, [Osama] bin Laden and all. They have the power here. With 5,000 nuclear weapons, you don't think they could do it? They could do it. There's been discussion that the dollar will lose its place as the reserve currency. I said, "As long as the US is the leader, and people know--and they can use their own figurative thing of Afghanistan that I just did--that that can happen and their money is in jeopardy, where are they going to park their money?" I said, "As long as the US has that leading power, the dollar will remain the reserve currency, period." I went back to another visit to that same office, and the 01:56:00guy--that I had met only that one time--he said, "Man alive, I should hire you." He said, "I've been quoting you to everybody, on the reserve of the dollar." Okay. Now, look what's happening. The nation is substantially broke, whether or not you want to solve the problem by abolishing all wars and paying the debt off because there are no wars. Sometimes people say that to me, and I say, "That'll take weeks." [laughs] You can abolish all wars; it'll take weeks. Which is a way to counter what they're saying. It's impractical. Wars are wars are wars. Look, I told everybody, "Presidents do not give up power." I'm going to vote for Obama, she said. I said, "He can say, 'no wars' or maneuver around. Presidents do not give up power. They build on what the previous presidents have done. They don't get elected by saying, 'I am going to give this up the first day.' They 01:57:00just say, 'I'm going to close Guantanamo.'" Yeah. How long has it been closed?

ARBONA: No, it hasn't closed at all.

EASTON: Yeah, see? They don't give up power. Okay. Now--and I still think that--the country is $14 trillion in debt. The government's talking about cutting $6 billion here, $40 million there or whatever, whatever you think about the cuts. Hillary [Clinton] and Obama and [Susan] Rice--not Condoleezza, but the other Rice that's UN advisor [ambassador], came out and said, "we have this unique power, so we're going to lead the US in here, and then we'll get out. Let the French take it over." Now, the unique power cost 200 cruise missiles.

ARBONA: In Libya.

EASTON: In Libya. See? Look at the demonstration that proves me right. Look at 01:58:00the demonstration to the world, what a broke US can do, in two days, substantially, two days, to Libya.

ARBONA: I see your point.

EASTON: 200 cruise missiles. And there are 500 more sitting around on these ships. Who else can do that? Hillary says "We have this unique power." Obama says 'We have this unique thing, and we're going to get out." [Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates says, "Whoa!" I told everybody that is pro-Obama, I said, "Man, I am glad Gates is in there. He's got some experience." Now, it's from the discredited [George W.] Bush administration, discredited among liberals. And I've had letters published against Bush, too. I'm an independent, I'm not a party person.

ARBONA: I see.

EASTON: The main purpose for that is when the far right started including me as a religious observer of known qualities, I got out of the Republican party. I 01:59:00don't want to talk religion. I don't want it to enter in. Catholics, that's good, that's fine; I preserve their right to do it. Muslims, as long as they don't say they have to kill infidels, let them do whatever they want, too. I'm for that.

ARBONA: We're really close to the end of this tape.

EASTON: I know it. I'm wrecking your--

ARBONA: What I was going to say is that we maybe have about four minutes, but is there something else that you--

EASTON: Okay, I'll read the titles--

ARBONA: Oh, we can put another tape in, if you want.

EASTON: Well, no, I can just read the titles I have here, so we don't--

ARBONA: We can even start a new tape if you want to do that, but I wanted to just--

EASTON: Okay, go back to where your gap is, yeah.

ARBONA: No, no. Where you said that you sort of broke with the Republican Party, that almost awakened a curiosity in me, in how that happened and when that happened, just to get a little more detail on that.

EASTON: Okay, well, I'll keep it pretty basic here. I am a believer in the fact 02:00:00that there are way more good people in the US, 99.9 percent, than there are people with violent conviction records, people un-convicted that are violent--the bad people, the bad ones, the ones that might knife you in the back, and if they had a gun, they might shoot some person randomly. So in my view, right or wrong, 99.9 percent of the people are fine. They don't do rash things. So that leads me to a very controversial spot, controversial in some ways, in that Rachel Maddow, for example, on a liberal station, talks about guns, guns, guns, guns. But there are 270 million firearms in the US. I believe in that. The constitution says that "A well regulated militia being essential to a free government, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be 02:01:00infringed." So anyway, I don't believe in the overthrow of the government by firearms. I don't believe that people should get together and try to damage an elected government. But let's step back to [Richard] Nixon for a moment. Nixon was accused of a lot of things. None of them were impeachable until we got up to something that Hillary worked on, which was impeaching Nixon. There was a movement towards that. Now, Barbara Lee, here in Oakland, was in favor of that, too. They can be in favor of that, that's fine. But Nixon actually would've been much better off if he'd said, "Oh, boy, yeah, I should've known about that Watergate thing, where they broke in. I should've known. Maybe I did know a little bit. Doggone it, it's stupid, it's crazy." But he tried to cover it up, see. I read the Watergate tapes. He said, "Well, I'll tell you what. Let's try 02:02:00to defend the four Cubans that were actually the break-in people at Watergate." There's no reason for you to remember all this exactly. You might, you might not. It's not essential to your life. It's essential to what I'm saying. He said, "If it takes a million dollars, I can get that." So where is Nixon going to get a million dollars? He would sell out the government. Nixon pardoned Hoffa, the Mafia-connection labor leader. He would've gotten a million dollars, and maybe the Mafia would have come in on that. Now, the Mafia's too smart. The Mafia knows very well that there are deer hunters and all kinds of people--

ARBONA: This is tape number three, on March 30, 2011, of my interview with 02:03:00Martin Easton. This is Javier Arbona on the mic. What you were talking about when we ran out of tape on the last one was you were telling me about your change of consciousness, in a sense, how your political consciousness changed. We wanted to finish that thought, because we ran out of time there.

EASTON: Okay. Well, I'll start on the abortion question. Overpopulation is difficult, and the fact that some babies might not be born into the exact circumstances is another thing to [that] effect. I have heard people say, well, you've never had a baby so you don't understand. The only people that talk about abortion are men, and they want to do all these horrible things. So my position on abortion is what I call viability. If a fetus will live outside the womb, 02:04:00after that, then it should go through to its regular term and be born. My position, not being a woman, not having experienced childbirth--I've caused four of them, caused four childbirths. I'm sure only four; not even close on any others. Anyway, that's my position, as a man. But before that, I must say that I changed over from no abortion under any conditions; just put the tools in the attic, or whatever the priests used to say--which I don't really follow any religion, either. I will say, prior to a live birth being probable--not possible, but probable--then I say, "Let the abortion take place." So anyway, 02:05:00that's not a very clear right wing position, so I didn't want to be identified with that stringent position.

ARBONA: I see.

EASTON: The other one is on religion. People presumed that because I believed in target shooting and self defense with firearms and things like that, that I must also be a strong, or even a minimum, religious believer. I just don't want to take any strong positions on religion. If somebody calls me up and says, "Are you a believer?" I say, "Well, I believe in the second amendment, I believe in free speech," things of that nature. If they insist in saying, well, "I'm a believer in a higher body" or things like that, then I didn't want to just be locked into a position like that, because of other issues. So basically, I think 02:06:00that there's a stabilizing force in the United States, which is so many firearms are out amongst law abiding people that wouldn't consider a crime. It's a very stabilizing factor. So that's the main reason that I changed over from Republican over to in the middle, independent. I would probably be called somewhat a little bit right of center, even yet. But that's the main reason I changed my registration, which has been about fifteen years ago.

ARBONA: I see. I see. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the timing of that. It's interesting.

EASTON: Yeah, it was about 1994 or somewhere in there that I changed over.

ARBONA: This is our third tape, which has been of a wonderful interview. I know that you still have some items on your own agenda that you also wanted to 02:07:00develop. So I was going to ask you what those were, if you want to look at your notes, so to speak, and tell us what those are and talk about them.

EASTON: The first one I put down was BIETS, you see. The reason for that is that a friend of mine and I were driving to Pittsburg High School to play baseball against them. That's the best I can recall. At the Shell Chemical plant, which is about one mile away, or less than a mile away from the military installation now--Port Chicago, now called Concord, less than a mile away--on the side, this huge building was painted white, and it had--and I remember this exactly and nobody else remembers it--it had big, black letters: BIETS, space, OHIOAN--O-H-I-O-A-N, like Ohio, A-N--and then a blank and then DIST, capital 02:08:00D-I-S-T, period, like it was supposed to be a district, a school, see. So a friend of mine, we were riding by. His father worked there. He had said to me before--his father told him the rumor was--that if somebody blew up Shell Chemical, everything within fifteen miles would die, every living thing, plants and everything else, because it was probably making some kind of military gas for reserve during the war or something like that, I don't know. So anyway, he said, "Yeah, no wonder they bomb the schools somewhere, something that looks like a school, because it might be a factory."

ARBONA: I see.

EASTON: So one of the first things I thought when I woke up, not knowing, at College of Pacific in Stockton, that Port Chicago had exploded at 10:20 the night before--a fraternity guy there, in the fraternity house where I lived--it 02:09:00wasn't a fraternity, as such, just a house--he said, "Do you live in Port Chicago?" I said, "Well, I live about a mile away." He said, "Well, it's gone. Disappeared. Blew up. Gone." I said, "Gone? Wow." So the first thing I thought was, "Maybe Shell Chemical blew up, because it was painted like a school." Then he said, "Some kind of explosion." So I thought, "Well, I've got to try to get ahold of my dad." I knew my sister and my mother were in Pinecrest, up in the mountains, where the Bears Lair is now. Pinecrest, Dodge Ridge. So my dad was the only one home. So I finally got ahold of him by phone, which was hard to do because they didn't have any direct dial from one city to the other. It was just you have operators and ask for the number and all that. I finally got through, 02:10:00found out that he wasn't injured. So then my roommate friend at Pacific had a car. I had a car, but it was out of action for some reason, or it was too early in the semester; I didn't want to take it yet, didn't know how having a car would be there. It was only seventeen days into the semester, from July 1, into my first schooling. But I did have a gas stamp, three gallons. We got three gallons a week for each car. Three gallons. I had that. So I talked my friend into driving me back to Avon, where we lived, which was one mile the other direction from Port Chicago. So I drove back there, and I saw almost no damage going in there. My friend said, "I'm disappointed. I want to see some wreckage." I said, "Well, I don't know." But went and found my dad and he said, "There's almost no damage here." But he told me what he saw. He was up on a ladder, 02:11:00painting the ceiling of the house, inside the house, and he felt the first explosion--there were two--and he heard it, and he went out. You could see; there was a big screened porch. He went right out, then he saw the second explosion come up. He said it was all sparks. So I said, "Well, you're okay. It's all fine here." So then my friend was disappointed, didn't see any wreckage. We didn't try to go in then because it was so close. I think it was the next day, after the explosion. Didn't try to get in then. Didn't ever try, because the military was important. They were around all over the place. We didn't take pictures of stuff, and we didn't go around asking a lot of military questions, because they said, "Loose lips sink ships," and all that kind of stuff. Don't try to do that, see. So then we went back to Stockton. Ran out of gas about twenty miles this side of Stockton. I was out of gas, his car was out 02:12:00of gas. It was old, and it was a gas hog anyway. So anyway, there was a farm thing there. I walked back. I knew that farmers could get truck stamps, so they could get gas for tractors and stuff. So I went back and knocked on the door, and it was pitch dark. Walked up this driveway, dogs barking and all this stuff. I went and knocked on the door, and I said, "Hey, we go to college. Out of gas. My home town just kind of might've been damaged. I had to go see it." He says, "Oh, okay." So I said something like, "I know my grandpa has gas on the ranch, but that's a kind of--" The farmer said, "Oh, okay." So he not only gave me the gas, he gave me a can. I walked away with a gallon of gas, at least a gallon. He gave me the gas.

ARBONA: You made it to Stockton?

EASTON: So we poured it in and went to Stockton and got home. That was just kind of an aside there. So then the first chance I got, which was about two or three 02:13:00days later, I came back and I thought, well, I'm going to go to Port Chicago, talk to my friend Don Gustafson. He's the one I told you that had the piece of steel. He brought this out. Look at this. Grandma's deaf. She sleeps out in the cottage. It went through the roof of her cottage; she didn't even wake up. So by that time, I knew it was time to make a speech about something in one of my classes. I think it was English; might've been social studies. So I took this piece of shrapnel, and I said, "Oh, you heard about the Port Chicago explosion." Boy, everybody was enthralled at that because people generally did not travel from Stockton just sightseeing. Gas was so short, see. Three gallons a week. So anyway, I made a point to go right back to my friend's house and give him the shrapnel back. Then I took him on video in a thing, two years ago, and he had forgot all about it. He said, "What shrapnel?" I said, "Remember? It came 02:14:00through Grandma's--" "Oh, oh, that one." He said, "I don't know, I guess my dad lost it or something." I said, "Well, I want it back." But no, it's gone. So anyway, that's what happened there. But when I was at his house, see, we couldn't have gone down past the railroad tracks anyway. You've probably been to Port Chicago.

ARBONA: Yeah.

EASTON: Okay. The railroad tracks were the kind of dividing line for the town. We couldn't have gone down Main Street anyway. But at his house, you could see daylight through the living ceiling and walls. Where it came together, it was all shaken to pieces.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: Really bad.

ARBONA: Well, of course, that's within the military.

EASTON: It is now.

ARBONA: You're talking about where I guess the tracks sort of bend around, and the town is within the base now, what is the military base.

EASTON: Yeah, well, it's where Port Chicago Highway came through and made its turn, headed directly east.

ARBONA: I see.

EASTON: But before it got to Division Street, coming up. And it was after that angle street, too. There's a triangle in there. My friend Donnie lived on the 02:15:00Port Chicago Avenue, south side of the triangle. That's where his house was. So that was my experience at actually going there. Okay.

Oh, one other thing. It's not Port Chicago, but my dad and I went shopping in a small store, Safeway store, that was small, in Concord. There were loud speakers up on the main street, Salvio Street. We came out of the Safeway store, and Hitler was talking in German, live, on the main street of Concord, broadcast live, in German. Hitler was talking. My dad said, "Yeah, that's Hitler. Doesn't he sound like a madman?" But nobody remembers that. Nobody even suspects who it 02:16:00might've been. The only person it could've been was Earl Radio. There was only one person that had any kind of speakers that went out anywhere. The National Socialists of Germany, Hitler, 1938. Because I remember that year pretty close. I was about eleven years old. Broadcast. But nobody remembers. Nobody remembers this Shell Chemical being painted like a school.

ARBONA: Why would somebody be broadcasting Hitler?

EASTON: Well, the town was a lot of pro-Germans. In fact, in grammar school--see, that was 1940, I got out of Concord Grammar School--there was one German family. The one, Alvin, he was in our class. He was a mean guy, too. I didn't like him. He would bet anybody that the Germans would be in Paris by 02:17:00June. He took the German side, see. I told you I was senior boy of 1944. The senior girl of 1944, she and her parents bragged about Mussolini. Because they had relatives in Italy. All they had to do was go down to the store and get light bulbs free, get soap, get all the household supplies, all free, all provided by this Mussolini she knew, see. So there were FBI came to some German families in Avon, where I was raised, and said, "We know who you are. You've spoken in favor of Germany." The book I read during study hall in 1940, when I 02:18:00was a freshman in high school, [Mark Tidd, Editor, by C.B. Kelland.] Before your time, but it had a thing about a small town in Kansas. Mark Tidd was the editor of the school newspaper. It had quite a long description about a person being arrested for having a shortwave radio and broadcasting to Germany, World War I, and stuff like that, see. But there were many, many German sympathizers. In fact, I told my girlfriend about that, about people taking bets. She said, "Oh," she said, "I was raised in St. Louis. It was half German." Half German sympathizers.

ARBONA: Because of a lot of certain national ethnic ties, they sympathized with--

EASTON: Well, they resented the Versailles Treaty, too.

ARBONA: Wow.

EASTON: The Germans never did pay much in the way of reparations. Hitler abrogated publicly the Versailles Treaty, probably in about 1936, somewhere in there. He met the French in that same boxcar that the Germans had capitulated in. But they called it just an armistice. They said the war was never over. In fact, the holiday was named Armistice Day, when I was small.

ARBONA: Right.

EASTON: I had a lot more to talk about than I thought.

ARBONA: There's a lot to talk about. This is the thing with these interviews, is that if you're interested, there's always a possibility to even go further and do another one, if you want to come some other day.

EASTON: Yeah.

ARBONA: I had one other question, and we can maybe leave it at that for today. But when you were talking about Port Chicago and the mutiny, it seemed like you 02:20:00told me--you started with a thought about it, and I remember that then we veered off into another topic, which is great. But I was wondering if you had any further thoughts about the perception of what the mutiny was, and what the soldiers did.

EASTON: Well, the best I know is that they were--now, I'm not sure--they were survivors of [the] Port Chicago explosion.

ARBONA: They were, yeah.

EASTON: They were transferred, somehow, I think, to Mare Island. I think they wanted them to work in Benicia, which was an arsenal. Or I think they wanted 02:21:00some to go back to Port Chicago, because it was still going. The war still supposedly had three more years, four more years to go, at that time. It was supposed to be 1948. See, when I joined, the war was supposed to be over in 1948, three more years that I looked forward to. So anyway, the general public compared those people to Marines going ashore in the face of machine guns and others. In real estate, I've told black clients--and this is pertinent--that any person my age, eighty, raised in California or the United States, that claims zero racist antagonistic feelings towards black people is either mentally 02:22:00deficient or a liar. I made that broad statement to pave the way for me to say, "I'm a recovering racist." One of the pertinent things that made me describe that is Willie Brown. Willie Brown was challenged early in his career in Sacramento. Some newspaper person, maybe an interviewer, said, "Well, can you expect to change people's thinking about race?" He says, "No, that's ridiculous. I have no expectations of changing their thinking. I intend to change their conduct." To me, that is kind of my model. I give credit for it, not to 02:23:00everyone, but I'll give it to you and to some few people, you see, because going back to my career after here, you see, the first year after here, I was unsure about whether I should've gotten married. We were plenty old; twenty, see. [they laugh] I was a father at twenty-one, see, so I was wondering, did we do the right thing? My wife did, too. We loved each other and all that, see. So anyway, I was a little bit at odds as to what career to pursue. So in her family, there was this Russelmann Park. A picnic ground, like Linda Vista or like Marsh Creek Springs, where people used to have to go because there was no television and no home swimming pools. In fact, there were no subdivision swimming pools. We all had to go out in the country, to someplace like that. Well, we had Russelmann Park. Oh. Well, so it was going to be vacant, nobody operating it. So Phyllis 02:24:00and I, my wife and I, decided, we'll run Russelmann Park. Which was good. We had big picnics and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty routine.

But then it was seasonal, so in September, I had to get a job. Well, I had done this labor work all over anyway, so I don't care what I worked, just some job. I had friends who worked in the county, road shoveling, pea gravel and stuff. So I went and applied to the county, roads. He says, "Oh, you went to school for four years, you got a degree." I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "You're applying for roads? Can you work?" I said, "Oh, yeah, I can work." So he said, "Well, here, we'll put down counselor at juvenile hall. You've got a degree, minor in social welfare." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." So I put down, okay, counselor to do with juvenile hall, because I didn't care whether I worked indoors or out. Social welfare, educational psychology and stuff like that, and physical education and so on. So anyway, I worked for about ten days on the road, and then the superintendent of 02:25:00juvenile hall called me up. He said, "Hey, we're moving from the old building, downtown Martinez, to a brand new building out on Arnold Avenue." I said, "Oh. Oh, really?" I'd kind of forgotten that I'd put down counselor at juvenile hall. He says, "Can you come in for an interview?" Well, it was raining and I thought, well, it's indoors; I guess okay. So I went to work. Then it stopped raining. But anyway, I told the boss--we were in some building--I said, "I've got to go to juvenile hall. Can I leave early?" He says, "Oh, yeah, okay." The county was real lax on that. So I went out there, and he said, "Can you come to work tonight, graveyard?" Well, the weather was still bad, so I went to work, by accident, at juvenile hall. But I fell in love with those kids. Oh, my God. It took me a while to get adjusted, but then I worked there two years. I worked at juvenile hall for two years. But racism amongst the counseling staff--and there 02:26:00were three black people in the staff--was rampant. They used the word nigger, and they would write some racial stuff in the log book. We kept a log book. I thought, "Ah, I can't do this." Because I would see kids coming in and I thought, just as a person, I thought, "Am I allowed to mistreat these people, like the others?" It really bothered me for maybe a week. Then I thought, "Well, here's what I do. The county has all races. My money comes from taxes. Some people of every race, all races, are paying my salary. So I personally am not allowed to discriminate [against] people, because I'm discriminating against people for whom I'm working." That's the way I rationalized it. It really was 02:27:00effective, in that I transmitted this covertly to the kids, of all colors. I'm telling you, within fifteen minutes of a new black kid coming in, they knew it. They knew. They knew who the bigots were among the staff. I never got any trouble at all for racial discrimination. The word just leaped, like mental telepathy. They knew it, see? So it sure helped me. So my recovering racism began then.

ARBONA: I see.

EASTON: Based on who pays me. Oversimplified, but it's sure effective.

ARBONA: Being a public servant, I guess is what you're saying, yeah.

EASTON: Yeah, right. Right.

ARBONA: And later on, working in real estate, did any 02:28:00of those sort of notions about recovering from racism somehow enter in?

EASTON: Yeah. See, in that case, I was trapped, again, by overwhelming public and real estate brokerage feelings. Mainly by the public. Terrible. People would tell me, "I don't want to sell to black people. No, no, no." I said, "Well, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. There are rules about this." I would discourage them. I said, "I can't put that in the listing." So there was a turning point there, also. There was a turning point--you just reminded me of it--that I had opened my own office. I worked in a big office of ten people. In fact, I was the 02:29:00manager there, but I was a selling manager. I was so good that out of ten people, ten experienced men, I sold two-thirds of the gross for the whole office. Nine experienced guys. Some of them quit because there couldn't be two stars in the same place. But I went out on my own. I participated in a prejudicial act--not blatant--on one occasion. Then after that, I changed. I changed back again, to recovering racism. But what it was is that I got a phone call on a listing that I had. Owned by a guy that--he was raised in the backwoods of Mississippi, white guy. Went to school to about the second or third 02:30:00grade. I just kind of hoped that the race problem wouldn't come up, because I didn't ask anybody. I knew, I could tell. I could tell. Well, sometimes they would make racial epithets, and I'd just skip it. I didn't want to open the subject. I'd just pretend that I didn't react, didn't hear about it, see. I knew that it would be trouble. So anyway, I got a call in. I had a one salesman at that time. Just me and one salesman. So I got a call, and I said, "Hey, there's a call on this listing down here," and all that. Then after the call, he says, "Yeah, they're coming out tomorrow to look at the house." So then the next day he's in his office, I'm in mine. Two separate rooms. All of a sudden he starts hollering, "I've got to get out. I'm leaving. They're black. Tell them I'm sick," and all this. So I thought, "Holy smokes. These people that want to see 02:31:00this house by the guy from the second grade in Mississippi are black. Ooh, ooh." So anyway, I proceeded slightly towards the sale. See, I lied. I told him that he--Mr. Bilden was his name--was sick. Wasn't true. And I said they must've missed it. This was '64. The first year of my office was 1964. So anyway, I told them where the house was. I told them a description of the house. I proceeded towards that, see, which was not complete. Because if they go down there, I thought, boy, the sparks are going to fly. And after that, nothing happened. I 02:32:00never heard back. Nothing happened. Except for one thing. The salesman for whom I covered on being sick said, "You remember those people that turned out to be black, that wanted to see the house?" I said, "Yeah." "Well," he says, "My best friend works out at the [Concord Naval] Weapons Station, and my best friend got a new boss." Says, "You know who it is?" I said no. He said, "The man is the black person that I refused to show the house to." So what does that add up to? Here a salesman that I respected, my equal, has a friend, his equal--we're all equal friends, supposedly--that friend got a boss at the Weapons Station. This 02:33:00is coincidental, the Weapons Station here--doesn't have anything to do with the Weapons Station, could've been anywhere. So I said, "Here we are, three people, we all think we're pretty good, we all think we're fine. And I discriminated against that man." I said, "That won't go. It will not work." So that, for me, was the turning point of the tax-paying public. After that, if I had a black person, I'd do my best. In fact, for black people, I wrote them letters, which I didn't always do for white people. I wrote them a letter saying, "Please come back, reconsider one of the houses that you said you didn't like. Or call me, and ask me if I've got new ones, and I'll call you." I did. I'd follow them all the way up, a little bit more so than I would if--you see the turning points that are there? Many people would just, "Oh, I'll quit the business." Or they get kicked out because of racial indiscretions, see. But that's how the race 02:34:00problem went.

ARBONA: And at that point, there were laws on the books against discrimination in the housing market.

EASTON: Yeah. There was a problem there, though. You see, the real estate industry got together and put what's called Proposition 14 on the state ballot, which said that anybody could sell real estate, or not sell, to anybody they wanted to, which is a free [inaudible]. That carried by the public of California, by a two-thirds vote. Pat Brown was against that initiative. That began the real push towards further strict laws. I think that was prior to your 02:35:00view of when the laws came into place.

ARBONA: I see.

EASTON: Because the laws came into place, in my view, as a reaction by Pat Brown, Governor Brown, Sr., to the stand of the real estate industry on--they were the sponsors of the initiative. Right now, the law says that discrimination, to some degree, can take place on one to four units, if the owner of the one to four is an occupant of one of the units. They can use that, to some degree. Or renting a room only, in a house, has more freedom for the actual owner. But it's not a problem anymore. We have black people, salespeople, mortgage people. One of the interesting things was that when I first started--in 02:36:00fact, 1960--Oh, B of A's [Bank of America] so big I can't hurt them anyway; not any more than they've already hurt themselves. Anyway, I was talking financing to the broker I worked for. He was really good at financing, really knew all that stuff. He says, "Well, the B of A has a rule where the local bank president has to see the borrower on a real estate loan." I said, "Oh, they don't believe the credit report, huh? They think they can find out something about this person that the credit report doesn't show or the background check and all that?" He says, "Well, no." He says, "If they're black, they don't make the loan." It was that simple, in 1960, that's why the B of A--There was only one B of A branch at that time that made real estate loans, and it was in Pleasant Hill. The president of that thing was the pillar of Chamber of Commerce; bankers within there. Some of these coincidentals are coming up as you're stirring up my memory.

ARBONA: Yeah. It's a natural process that happens during oral histories a lot, where that comes out. I want to kind of pause there and--

EASTON: Okay. I know it's past four-thirty.

ARBONA: Is it past four-thirty? Yeah, I think the front office people might be wanting to head home and would lock it. Maybe they would lock us in, I don't know. [they laugh] So maybe we should take a break there. This is certainly something we can always continue another day, if you're willing.

EASTON: Oh, yeah.

ARBONA: So I'm going to stop the tape right there, and thanks a lot for coming down and taking the time.