Tape 3, Side A

[Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Okay.

Ain’t no country I know.

[Laughs] Here we are. It’s 9/22/[98] and we are out on the deck here at the Moffitt Library, overlooking the beautiful campus of UC Berkeley. And I’m talking to Michael Conkin once again. He’s got his ceegar goin’; it’s gettin’ kind of funky by now. [Laughs] There’s . . . [A coworker, Alvin Pollock, happens by and Michael talks to him about the dead bird Alvin has told Michael was up on the deck]

. . . I didn’t see that--I didn’t see any dead birds.

ALVIN: You didn’t? Did you go over there and look?

Yeah.

ALVIN: Come look again [Unclear] and pet it.

So we were talking about the institution--about whether there were father figures and mother figures or what kind of emotional relationships the kids at the institution in St. Louis had with the adults there. And you mentioned that the Matron implied that there was something or could be something between your father and her.

Right. Yeah, she was always talking about that, in one way or the other, and I think it had to do with correspondence that they were getting, that she was getting back from, from ah, ah, Daddy.

So she had her own line of communication, letters . . .

. . . Evidently, yeah, evidently, and maybe telephone conversations. That’s right, he would call from time to time from Turkey. Yeah, I remember, yeah.

Who was he working for?

Workin’ for NATO; yep, doin’ construction work over there of some kind. He was some kind of a . . .

. . . So NATO actually was employing the workers on the pipelines?

I don’t, you know, I don’t know all the details, but that was the way, yeah, that was the way--it was a NATO project. And Turkey was in NATO, still is, and, you know, during the Cuban missile crisis Turkey came into play because one of the things that the Russians were complaining about was that we had missiles--the United States, West, had missiles, in Turkey, pointed at the Soviet Union; so why couldn’t they have some missiles in Cuba pointed at us? I mean . . .

. . . Apparently the missiles in Turkey were actually closer to them than the Cuban missiles were to us.

Sure, it was right across their border. Ninety miles, that was nothing. He must have been over there then.

Yeah, that’s where Kennedy faced them down and just about cooked us all.

Yeah, that’s right, yep, I remember. We were there. We were there hiding under our desks.
So, I don’t know who did what or what the real arrangements were, but it was always portrayed to us as a NATO operation. I guess he made money.

You think he was making quite a bit of money?

Yeah, because when he came back, you know, bought a house and all that stuff.

So he was pretty well fixed?

Yeah, seemed so, for a while.

Do you have any idea whether the home was expensive, what it cost?

No, but I think it was, I think it was; I mean there weren’t that many kids there, and maybe some of them were like wards or something like that, maybe there expenses were taken care of by, you know, some Masonic chapters or something like that; so it wasn’t total charity, and like I say, it was a pretty lavish operation, with all the fine linen and the huge staff and stuff like that, but, you know, we got allowances and stuff like that too.

Oh really?

Yeah, we got money. Sometimes they--I guess the money came from . . .

What could you do? What could you spend it on?

You weren’t supposed to go outside but occasionally they had supervised trips. We could go to the movies, every Saturday, sort of, almost unescorted; and they gave us car fare, ‘cause it was a far piece down the road, but usually we didn’t take the bus or the trolley or whatever--we walked, so we would save the car fare, yeah.

So were you much influenced by movies that you saw then?

[Dismissively] No. They showed movies there at the ah, they had movies, there was a little chapel there on the grounds, and they showed movies there too, but real old movies--nobody--I mean you did it because that was all that was happening then, but you went and saw Drums Along the Mohawk or something like that, some real old movie that ah--and they keep showing the same ones over and over.

Did they actually own them maybe?

No. They got them from somewhere. Yeah, no, they shuffled them in and out.

You didn’t become much of a movie buff in those days?

Not really, no. It was just another thing to do, just another activity, something to get you out, get you out; but by then I was already out and I was escaping, escaping and running, you know, sneaking out and sneaking back.

‘Cause you mentioned trouble and their thinking you were a bad boy . . .

. . . That was one of the things, yeah. I was bad . . .

. . . So escaping, was that sort of your first gesture at . . .?

. . . Well I didn’t, I wasn’t trying to be bad. There were kids there who were, trying to be bad, and they really got into trouble. They got beat, there were beatings and, you know, severe punishments, ‘cause they would get involved with ah--I mean they would really run away for days and get involved with thugs lurking around the community, you know, like poolhall guys.

You said that this area, where the institution was, eventually became a real ghetto, but at the time was it?

Pretty close.

Are we talking about East St. Louis? What part of St. Louis is this?

Oh no, it’s not East St. Louis, which is on the other, you know, close to the river, in East St. Louis, Illinois. This is ah--it’s not downtown St. Louis, it’s sort of out, out there, but ah, it was pretty . . .

. . . Was it already getting kind of rough?

Oh yeah, well, it wasn’t rough, that I know of, it was just black. There were, you know, there was a shoe repair place, and that was run by an Italian guy, and there was a drug store right near the corner--that was Katz’s drug store, Jewish guy--so, you know, it had some of that basic big city Midwestern ethnic diversity; but the people who lived there, especially off the main street there, more and more black families. And when I was going to school that was probably my first experience with lots of black people, lots of black kids, black teachers--never seen such a thing before--we didn’t have that in Olathe, Kansas, or even in Colorado. And I think probably--’cause I started there like in sixth grade I think--probably they were in the majority.

Was it black teachers, or black kids?

Black teachers, black kids, yeah.

But there was still a lot of segregation and everything, right?

I don’t know, I just, I’m not sure because it didn’t make a big impression on--I don’t think on any of the kids. It didn’t--it was just background stuff--it didn’t--maybe when they talked to their parents, or maybe when the higher ranking Masons came around and took a look at things. Then maybe it became evident to people what was happening and some changes would have to be made for the kids in the home--all white--all the kids in the home were white, or at least, you know, not, not swarthy [laughing], not--’cause all the Masons were, you know. These were relatives of Masons, and the old people were all white too.

I gather that now there are some black Masons, but I think in those days . . . did you ever encounter any black Masons?

Not that I know of. I don’t think it was ever ah, it’s not like the [thinking], there’s another group, gosh [recalling]--No, I think there were some problems now; I think I remember reading later that there were some problems the Masons had in integrating, but it wasn’t overt. There was nothing overt about it at all.

You mean problems, what, in the sense that they had qualms about the whole . . . ?

. . . That they were trying to keep black people out of--or Jews--out of Masonry. I didn’t see anything like that, but then I probably wouldn’t have noticed at that age. But the schools were all--I mean later on it turned out that we had to be bussed out into the suburbs because somebody--they took a look at my eighth grade grade school graduation picture, and there was just me and one other girl, the rest, you know, all the other dozens and dozens of kids were all black; and what I heard, the way I heard it was they didn’t like that.

How were you with that? Do you remember what your attitudes were in those days?

No, it was just ah--I mean I remember but it wasn’t anything, it wasn’t that--it didn’t mean anything, I mean I was cognizant that these kids were different than me and than everything I’d been used to . . .

ALVIN: [Walking by] He’s still there. He’s not as soft as he was yesterday but you can still get a few good pets out of him.

Okay, I’ll have to go down there.

For the listener’s benefit, this has to do with a dead bird out here on the deck that our fellow worker Alvin says is really worth petting.
So they had a problem. They didn’t like the Masonic kids in a sea of black faces.

Well, they did, yeah. The kids didn’t. The kids, as far as I know, didn’t have a problem. Ah, you know, for me it was a whole different experience, but the kids that were already there at the home and had already been there when I got there . . .

Uh oh, we’re having this problem again. [Testing equipment] I guess we’re rollin’.

Okay. So there wasn’t anything overt. Nobody cautioned us not to play with the black kids or not to do anything, but there were several incidents that made it clear how they felt. You weren’t supposed to bring your outside friends into the home unless you cleared it with people, so, anyway you weren’t supposed to do that, but I did, I brought a little buddy of mine from school home, and he was black, and they didn’t like that at all. And they told me--they wouldn’t exactly say why though, I didn’t figure it out until later; I suppose I suspected but I either didn’t believe it or wasn’t paying any attention again. But by then there were lots of other things that I couldn’t do or wasn’t supposed to do or shouldn’t do, but I didn’t know about them until I did them and then got into hot water or something like that.

So the rules weren’t commonly known or posted or…?

No, there was nothing like that. You found out—I mean the big ones you found out about pretty quickly; they would tell you those you know: when you’re supposed to do things or how your supposed to—when you’re supposed to take your bath or when it’s time to eat and what you have to wear and how to keep your room and all that sort of stuff and where you could go and where you couldn’t go: those were all clear, but lots of the other ones weren’t, and possibly lots of them weren’t because they were just making the stuff up as they went along.

So basically they would have sort of an ad hoc response to something: Well we don’t have a policy on bringing kids from the neighborhood in but—

Right.

--I don’t like it, so… What would happen? Would you actually get beaten?

No, I never got beaten when I was there. They didn’t do that. They didn’t really make a practice of doing that. Some of the adults did get into situations with some of the larger kids, but—

Like fights?

Fights, yeah, physical fights, and I remember there was one guy there, he was just a hothead. He would strike out, and then they would have to get people in to control him. And he smacked some of the adults around a couple times, and he got into trouble for that, and there were some rather unruly smaller kids who had to be disciplined from time to time, but it wasn’t like flogging or anything, an ongoing regime of punishment. There was one kid I remember, he was mentally disturbed; he shouldn’t have been there probably—i mean he would have fits, he would pass out at the dinner table; his eyes would roll back into his head and he would start—

You think he was epileptic?

Possibly. I don’t really know. Everybody had their own room. His room they had to put various kinds of wire on his windows, chicken wire—they tried everything--; he would always escape. He was always trying to get out of his room. And he’d crawl over the roof and get down and he’d be on the grounds. He wouldn’t leave.

But he wasn’t on the ground level, so he actually had to do some climbing.

He had to climb, yeah. I don’t know what they finally did to prevent him from… but you know they’d come around to wake everybody up and he wouldn’t be there in his bed; he’d have scratched or clawed or chewed or bent or muscled his way through the bars or mesh or whatever they had. He always escaped. He used to tell these stories. He felt he had to escape because there were things under his bed, things that he referred to as grizzles [laughs], and he was terrified of those grizzles and that’s why he had to get out at night. They could have left a light on.

Did some of the other kids start to think there were grizzles?

No.

That was his own thing.

That was his own thing. The other kids there… there were some unusual kids there, some kids like kids I’ve never seen. No kids I know. Yeah. And there were a lot of kids who had brothers and sisters there, just like I did, but some of them were alone; they didn’t have any. I mean there was one guy there, he was probably a junior or senior in high school; he never came out of his room. He never came out of his room, hardly ever, for the usual things, but most of the time he was in his room, and he’d never let anybody in his room. Once or twice I got a peek in there and the thing was just crammed with books and chemistry stuff and he just had all kinds of things going on all the time, experiments and who knows what he was doing in there, but he spent all his time in his room. And there were some of those ‘bad seed’ type of kids there too you know, they would be hangin’ around with the juvenile delinquents down at the pool hall, playin’ the pinball machines, and they would really get in trouble.

Now what was the nature of your getting into trouble? So you weren’t one of the guys who was physically confrontational but…

No, I only did one thing once, and it wasn’t that bad really, but by then I had used up a lot of my--any goodwill that was available.

How had you used up the goodwill, from running away?

No. The only time I ran away was then. Lots of things led up to it but… I don’t know, I don’t think there was—I think I had just discovered that it was pretty easy at the same time to get them all upset with me and to entertain the other kids.

Oh really? So you thought about…

Yeah, so I think the two things somehow managed to coincide. I don’t know, you know that chapel that I was talking about had a great big organ in it, pipe organ, and once or twice I broke into the chapel at night and pounded on the pipe organ. They didn’t like that.

[Laughing] Was it really loud?

It was really loud, yeah. And then…

You were again thinking of the entertainment value for the kids?

Yeah, plus my own reputation; you know I was starting to develop a reputation as somebody that would get into trouble, you know, and then other things like I discovered the whole concept of TPing. This other fellow… You know we were supposed to be in bed at nine o’clock but somehow I got out of bed and this friend of mine from outside, we got—I don’t even remember how this happened I just remember the results of it, I don’t remember doing it either; I know that I did it—we climbed up on that eight-story building I was telling you about and rolled toilet paper off of it after night, just roll after roll [laughter]. So in the morning all the toilet paper was streaming down, and I either got caught or they knew I did it or something like that. And then there was prowling about in all different places just to see what I could get into. They had a library in the children’s part of the home that was completely unused. Nobody even knew about it. Apparently in earlier days there was a working library, they had a librarian and they had old books—they had some great old books there—a lot of stuff on Masonry…

And there were still books in there?

Yeah, there were still books in there and you could get in there and there were mattresses and things like that and there were also lots of books, lots of books.

So the mattresses were just being stored in there?

They were stored there. The two or things I remember--I was interested in some of the books about Masonry ‘cause by then you know I’d been there a couple years and I was trying to figure out: what is it? What are these Masons? Because by then I’d also met--every year they’d have higher-level Masons from around the state come around and the kids would give them tours around the place, pick up a silver dollar here and there. So I was trying to figure out who these guys were, what was this all about; so I was looking at these Masonic books and there was this huge volume of Dante’s Inferno with all these wonderful illustrations—you know I’m sure it was a rare book. They had lots of things, some of it was just lying around unprotected.

Were you a big reader by then?

Well I guess I always was. I’d read anything I could get my hands on. I guess that’s one of the things, you know I was mentioning that other people started to think I was smart because I could read real fast and I could read stuff beyond my level. I remember at home they had, I think there was an encyclopedia set there, so I was always reading that. James Thurber, they had; that’s when I first started reading James Thurber and humorous stuff. They had Reader’s Digest…

Did you come upon all these things on your own or did you have any…?

Yeah, I mean they were just lying around.

Had you learned to read in school or did somebody instruct you?

Learned to read in school.

And then you just kind of took off on your own?

Yeah, yeah. And I started to think I was smart too because you know the other kids my age, and even the ones, like I say I was always a year younger than everybody else in my class at a given time, the older kids they weren’t reading that much. They had lives. They had kid lives. They were out playing, playing baseball and football and going out and stuff like that, so that was one of the things that made me start to feel odd.

So you spent more time on your own reading and…

Than they did. That wasn’t all I did but I was always surprised that the other kids didn’t read so much because there were so many cool things out there to read. Well there were also comic books. That’s a whole world in itself too.

Where did you get the books? Were there many books around your house growing up?

I guess so. There must have been. I remember the James Thurber books and the Reader’s Digest books, but that’s about it. I learned from my brother Gene that our mother was a big reader, and she’s the one that arranged the purchase of the big encyclopedia. I don’t know exactly what kind it was, but he had some stories about that encyclopedia set because by then he was old enough to remember what it took to get it—it was expensive, but she insisted on it and that sort of stuff.

And probably bought it from a door-to-door salesman?

I don’t know, probably. But I guess she had something to do with it, because Gene went into journalism; that was going to be his career after he got out of the Korean War. I think he got a journalism degree, and Bob, I’m not sure, but he became an accountant. So they were both sharp, smart, clever, you know. So when I hit that library I mean I was reading all kinds of stuff in there. There was this great—in fact I stole it from the library—there was a great two-volume set of Ben Hur. Some of the pages weren’t even cut. It had gold trim on the edges and illustrations and that real slick paper—ah….

So you snatched that one?

What ever happened to that? Yeah, I snatched that one and held onto it for a long time.

Was it hard to keep things in your room? I mean you said this one kid had lots of stuff in his room, so I guess…

They were pretty loose about that. Yeah, he probably had some stuff in there, he probably could have made some explosives—

Blow up the place! [laughs]

Yeah, right. They were loose about that. I don’t remember anything like searches. Of course you weren’t supposed to smoke, but everybody had cigarettes, and I had corncob pipes. But you could go out on the balcony, you know, at certain times. There were plenty of ways to escape the scrutiny of the people who were in charge.

So did you manage to keep getting into the library?

Yeah. I can’t remember how. I either discovered where the key was kept, because you could get into the matron’s office after dark or on Saturdays and Sundays, or you could get into the superintendent’s office, and you know there were keys to everywhere on the grounds of the home in there. And he also had all these free little packs of cigarettes in his desk.

He did?

He had all kinds of things: candy, cigarettes, you know, people would give him stuff and he would pass it out too.

Was it pretty daring though to be getting …?

Yeah, and I got in trouble for that too. I guess it was daring in the context and that’s probably one of the reasons why there were no rules against it because up to that point nobody had done it. I mean nobody had broken into the superintendent’s office and taken dozens and dozens of his little packs of complimentary Kents, with a micronite filter, or Belair. I love those menthol cigarettes.

So you were kind of trying to push the limits and see…?

Well I don’t know that I was doing it consciously but when I discovered that it was exciting and fun and that the trouble that I got into wasn’t that bad and also made me get some respect, gave me some respect and some attention. In fact that’s what I was accused of was being an instigator and trying to get attention, both of those not highly prized values in the Midwest [laughs].

It was a fair cop?

[British accent] It was a fair cop. Yeah, I remember that very clearly, they hauled me in and said: You’re an instigator. And I said: What does that mean?! But once I found out. Yeah!

Badge of courage [laughs].

Yes I am suggestible. I will be an instigator. I mean it got to be so bad, and I would act up at the meal tables.

Let me turn the tape over.

Sure.

[End Tape 3, Side A]