Russell Blunt interview recording, 1994 June 09
-
Download
- Rights
- Files (4)
-
MP3
Part 1
-
MP3
Part 2
-
MP3
Part 3
-
MP3
Part 4
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
- Share
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| Speaker 3 | Testing, 1, 2, 3. Testing, 1, 2, 3. | 0:02 |
| Tunga White | Before we get into your history, I'd like to start with a little history about your family. Do you remember your grandparents? | 0:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I do, yeah, vaguely. My grandfather and grandmother lived in Sunbury, North Carolina, and we used to come down to visit them, oh, several times during my lifetime. And I was at his funeral when he died. I wasn't at the funeral when my grandmother died. But that was a long, long, long time ago. | 0:19 |
| Tunga White | So was that your mother's parents? | 0:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's my mother's parents. I did not know my father's parents. He was born in Hillsborough, North Carolina. And all I remember his having as an aunt, my aunt Martha, everybody called her auntie. And we were very, very close to her. And my mother and my auntie, they were close friends. And when my father died at the age of 39, our family still stuck together real close. And she died, my auntie died at 103. So that's pretty good. Yeah. | 0:55 |
| Tunga White | So how often did you see your auntie? | 1:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Did I see her? | 1:48 |
| Tunga White | How often did you see her? | 1:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, we lived in the same area. I grew up—I was born in Massachusetts. My mother went there when she was 16. I think my father went up there when he was 19. So Brittany, I think everybody in my family was born in Massachusetts. And so she lived and died up there. My auntie did. My mother did too. My mother died in '91. My sister died in '91. | 1:50 |
| Tunga White | So how many siblings did your parents have? | 2:22 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, including me, there were four boys and two girls. Yeah. | 2:34 |
| Tunga White | When did you first move down South? What year was it? | 2:42 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | To come down I came South in after finishing high school. In 1927 I came South. I finished high school in 1926 and I came South. I wanted to be a printer and while I was going to go to school in a place called Wentworth Institute in Boston, but I waited too late to get my application in, so I couldn't get in. Then I met this minister up in the mountains where I was a bellboy, and he was up there seeking funds for our school. That was St. Paul's College now, but it was then known as St. Paul N&I, Normal and Industrial Institute. And they had printing there. And so as a result, he found out at this hotel up in the Berkshire Mountains when he was talking to the rich people up there, and I was bellboy there. He found out that—I mentioned to him that I wanted printing and he said, "Well, we have printing down there." So that's how I came South in 1927. Then I finished printing there in 1930 but I couldn't get a job. | 2:46 |
| Tunga White | You came alone when you moved downtown? | 4:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, yeah, I was 19 years old. Yeah, I came to St. Paul. | 4:22 |
| Tunga White | Being that at that age, did you notice a lot of differences between the ways of life in the South as to— | 4:31 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. It was a rude awakening for me. Yeah. | 4:37 |
| Tunga White | In what kind of way? | 4:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, I can recall one time I went over to the drug store and I wanted an ice cream soda. And I was told they didn't serve Colored people. And that was a real rude awakening. | 4:41 |
| Tunga White | And so that's the first time [indistinct 00:05:04]. | 5:00 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | First time that had happened to me like that. I was naive. There was no problem I had, it didn't, because what it brought to my attention was that small town I was born in had very few Blacks and no businesses, no Black business. And the thing that woke me up was that there were Black businesses, people, cleaners and grocery stores and drug stores, such things as funeral parlors. So this when I really began to see that we as Blacks were doing okay. So I fell in love with the South then, and that's it. | 5:03 |
| Tunga White | And you stayed here, right? | 5:57 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's right. | 5:58 |
| Tunga White | Good. What town did you say you moved into when you first moved here? | 5:59 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Lawrenceville, Virginia. That's [indistinct 00:06:08] St. Paul College now. But at that time it was a normal and industrial school, teachers and trades. | 6:06 |
| Tunga White | Where did you live? Did you live— | 6:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | On the campus. | 6:19 |
| Tunga White | On campus. | 6:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. | 6:21 |
| Tunga White | Describe campus life for me. When you were there, how was it living on campus? | 6:23 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, I had finished high school and they had sort of drilling, it was in uniform. You had your sergeant of the day and your lieutenant of the day, and you wore uniforms. It was patented after Hampton. And so they drilled so many days a week. But I didn't because I had finished high school and that wasn't required of me. You had your inspection of the dormitory, had a certain way you made your beds, otherwise you kept it. You just didn't cover it over. Every day there was inspection. | 6:29 |
| Tunga White | Who would be doing the inspection? | 7:24 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, the headman of the—Well, it would be more or less Dean of men, that type. But Major Whitehurst, that was his name. Yeah. He had been in the army. He was quite a man. And he had his captains. He had his lieutenants. Had his sergeants. And they had to report to him. He had office in the building. Only had one building, boys dorm. That was the only one. And they would come in at certain time and inspect your own room, and take the fingers across the top of it, see if it was good. But yeah. | 7:29 |
| Tunga White | That was tough. | 8:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah, it was tough. But if you didn't pass it was inspect, you got so many demerits. I think it was like 10 demerits and would be a suspension or expulsion. Yeah. Because I don't think, depends on the severity of what you did, but that wasn't clean, that afternoon you'd be punishment, which would be drilling on an area we had up there. So you'd drill. Yeah, that [indistinct 00:08:58]. | 8:20 |
| Tunga White | Thing. What were involving the drilling? What? | 8:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Marching, just a lot of marching. And the sergeant at arms and the officer of the day, that sort, also of the day would be in charge. You might have six, eight people out there. Depends on who had messed up during that day. | 9:06 |
| Tunga White | So did you do a lot of lengths in that, did you get a lot of demerits? | 9:20 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, I didn't because I was 19, I finished another year and I wasn't a normal student, when I say, but no, I wasn't in the academic side wanting to become a teacher. But I was in the trade though. I was special. Not special in terms of being special, but in a category that called, because there was several others of us came down from New England and different from Pennsylvania, and they were in the same category. But it was the high school kids who were the ones who were being drilled and yeah, they're the ones. We were— | 9:25 |
| Tunga White | More serious. | 10:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, we were a little old, let's say on that pack. Yeah. So no, I didn't get in any trouble up there. Yeah, I guess I got—I don't remember getting any demerits. I'm not saying I didn't. I don't remember it. | 10:20 |
| Tunga White | It must have been a few. | 10:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Very few. Yeah. | 10:38 |
| Tunga White | So you said that there were trades and there were teaching. What other trades did they have? | 10:39 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, had they had tailoring and plumbing, electricity, carpentry, brick laying, printing. Now those I remember, they might have been something else. Then the girls had dress making and home ec and this type. Now you take the 20s, that was trend there anyhow. And there wasn't any integration there, you know that. Yeah. | 10:46 |
| Tunga White | And you said they were training them to be teachers. Were there any other academic training they were doing? | 11:22 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. Yeah. If you wanted to go in any other fields. See, it was the high school. See, you could be taking the college prep course or whatever you wanted, the business courses, whatever those, you could do that. And then if you wanted to go into teaching, then you'd go to your normal. Around that time, the whole country was full of normal schools, even up in Massachusetts. Young lady I almost married, finished a normal school up there. Almost married. Yeah. That was two years. That they'd go to this normal school. So that was a trend, more or less then. Especially in Massachusetts, they had all kind of normal schools, two years. And the teachers were teaching. Down here, it was the same thing. But up there, the regulation was a little different. When I came up, if you were a teacher, you got married, you gave up teaching. Yeah, in my town, Massachusetts. | 11:28 |
| Tunga White | Why is that? | 12:44 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't know. All my teachers, growing up, elementary teachers, miss Ms. Bravo, Ms. Duval, Ms. this, Ms. that. Very few. So we had a lot of old maids up there. In high school there was Ms. What's her name? Ms. Fores she's taught. She taught math. She married one of the teachers there. But I don't know, someday I should try to really get back into it and find out, because maybe I'm hallucinating. Because I mentioned about this young lady, if we had married at that time when I went back there, she would've had to give up her job. | 12:48 |
| Tunga White | Now [indistinct 00:13:45]. | 13:42 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Charlotte. Yeah, Charlotte Winfield. | 13:45 |
| Tunga White | She was from the same town? | 13:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, about 10 miles. 10-12, yeah. [indistinct 00:13:55] towns were right close together. She's from a place called Haverhill. Yeah, yeah, she was was okay. | 13:51 |
| Tunga White | So you never went back? | 14:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, I always go back. To [indistinct 00:14:10]? | 14:07 |
| Tunga White | When Charlotte was there— | 14:10 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, when I got out in 1930, I couldn't get a job then. I was a bellman, bellhop in Andover in this particular town. And Charlotte lived 10 miles away. We started courting. So I decided I wanted—Well a friend of mine encouraged me to go back to school. So that's how I went back and finished my education, see? And so when I left, I came home. You want to hear all this? | 14:12 |
| Tunga White | Yes. If you'd like to tell me, I'd like to hear it. | 14:57 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. | 14:57 |
| Tunga White | I'm interested in it. So it's a friend of mine interest me to go to Bluefield State. That's in Bluefield, West Virginia. Yeah. Bluefield, well, let's say Bluefield College. It's Bluefield State College. It's integrated now, but it was Black. I was a fairly decent athlete, so I went there. | 15:06 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | What sports? | 15:26 |
| Tunga White | I had played football, basketball, baseball. Yeah. No specialists then, you played everything. You did it all. Now we go in the specialty. So I had played three years there, and I had one more year left. So I went to Bluefield. So I played in several non-conference games up there. But then I found out I wouldn't be able to play there, that's my last year. Anyhow, get back to Charlotte. I drove home. I had a piece of Ford, drove from West Virginia to Massachusetts in there, Christmas time. | 15:26 |
| Tunga White | And so I [indistinct 00:16:19] everything seemed to be all right. Came back and finished there that year. Went back home, went to a dance. And so I hadn't seen Charlotte. And came up, I went over there, dance. Dance. I just got in town and this guy comes up there, taps me to cut in. And I said, "Hello." I don't know his name. And he just stood there. Things were kind of tense. And I was green. I didn't know what was happening. My mother didn't tell me or anything that they had started courting. And that was it. And I said, "Well." | 16:16 |
| Tunga White | I didn't see that girl again for 33 years. | 17:15 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | 33 years. | 17:20 |
| Tunga White | That's right. 33 years, I didn't see her again. | 17:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So what was she doing? | 17:25 |
| Tunga White | Well, they married. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. And she's still living and he's still living there, living in New York. And I got a friend who keeps me posted and tells me about him. He was a policeman up there. And I don't know what she did. But we'd go home every summer, I was married. After I got married, I'd go home every summer, take my kids every summer, go home. And we had a place called Salem Willows, that's where that witch hunt, all that in Salem. And all the Black folk there, Black churches around Boston and some from Rhode Island, some for New Hampshire. They started congregating at one place the third Saturday in July. And that's when you would get to see everybody [indistinct 00:18:33]. A few churches started, then other churches joined in there. And so it became a big thing. | 17:27 |
| Tunga White | So one day I was down there, my wife was there, and so I ran into some old friends there. They said, "Russ, Charlotte's here." I say, "What?" She says, Yes," said, "Charlotte, not only here." I said, "[indistinct 00:18:59]." So you know what they did, my gang? They tricked both of us to the point where we met. I think they invited me over to someplace to eat. You have your lunches and picnic lunches and everything. I said, "Okay, I'll be over there." And then she was over there. And they were standing up, cotton picking here, looking down, having a ball when she and I met at this particular place. I gave her a hug and kissed her. And that was it. Haven't seen her since. | 18:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Never wanted that telephone number. | 19:37 |
| Tunga White | No. No. I don't think I wanted. Had she given it to me, oh, I would've called. Yeah. Yeah. Because we were pretty serious. But I laugh about it, but that's the way my life has been. I haven't worried too much about too many things. Especially if you were my daughter and you were going to on your way to Mississippi or Alabama somebody to drive, and I didn't hear from you, or if I'm supposed to hear from you when you first stop, I were like mad there. Those types of things. Yeah. Yeah. For care. But probably the best thing ever happened to me. Yeah. | 19:39 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's all you have to look at. | 20:37 |
| Tunga White | Yeah, that's exactly the way I look at it. I had a fine wife, very good wife. My wife's dead. And I was talking to her even while I was in school at St. Aug over here in Raleigh. That's right. But it wasn't anything serious. But after I got the cold shoulder that summer, I talked a little more seriously. She found out she could put up with me. So we started going along together. We courted for seven years. | 20:39 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Seven years. | 21:18 |
| Tunga White | My wife, yeah, before I got married. | 21:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | How did you meet her? | 21:22 |
| Tunga White | At St. Aug, St Augustine’s . That was when I came from Bluefield, I went to St. Aug. And I finished from there. And so we were in the same class. She was much younger than I was. She swore she was a child bride when we got married. | 21:24 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | How old was she? | 21:38 |
| Tunga White | She about eight years younger than I was. See, I had been out of school and I still think her certificate was wrong, birth certificate was wrong. I don't think it was that much difference. But she swore it was. She thinks it was. | 21:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, yeah, yeah. | 21:55 |
| Tunga White | How old were you? | 21:59 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | When I finished, I finished in 1936, 10 years after high school, so I was 28 years old, and she was 20 or 21, somewhere around that. And so, we continued to see each other until 1940. And then we got married. And then we were married for 49 years. So if I add that up to eight, I knew her for 57 years. And I think she died at 70. I think she was 74, something like that when she died. | 22:00 |
| Tunga White | So did you all get married at church? | 22:42 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, I don't do anything normal. | 22:51 |
| Tunga White | You sound like me. | 22:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Sound like you? | 22:54 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. | 22:55 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Good thing we didn't meet then. I don't do anything normal. Yeah. My first, well—I got out of school in 1936. I couldn't get a job. I worked in a factory, a rubber factory. And this particular factory, this might be interesting, was in Andover, Massachusetts, a place called Tire Rubber Company. But I had played baseball around there and I was a fair catcher and they needed a catcher in this particular mill factory. Because they had a lot of factories up there in that area, in large Massachusetts. Cotton mills and wool factories and stuff like that. And each of these would have a team. So they'd have an industrial team, industrial league. So they needed a catcher. And I had caught all through high school and I had a fairly decent rep there. So one of the kids said, he said, "Russ," he said, "We need a catcher." I said, "Okay." "So how about I talked to my uncle?" I said, "Okay." I didn't have a job. I was in school at this particular time. | 22:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So he talked to his uncle and his uncle talked to the rest of the people in there. So they told me to come down. And I met the big boss and my immediate boss and some other supervisors. | 24:25 |
| Tunga White | Do you remember any of their names? | 24:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Joe Holland was my immediate boss. Sam Hibbert, H-I-B-B-E-R-T was another person in there. Henry Porter was the coach. And I can't remember the big, big boss at all. But I met with all of them. Now I'm naive. I don't know what's happening, see. And so they told me to come into work the next day. And so I went to work at Tire Rubber Company. Pretty soon it was all over town that Tire rubber had a Black person working here. Now, I'm in Massachusetts. I'm supposed to be the first Black that ever worked in Tire Rubber Company. I'd born in the town. I grew up in the town. I did not know that until about 1933. Yeah, that's the first time I knew it. And I was the first Black who has been hired in there. Now, that's a discrimination in the north. Now, I experienced that. I didn't know it. I knew there was no—I hadn't seen anybody there, but I hadn't known that Blacks were not hired. | 24:45 |
| Tunga White | How did they treat you there? | 26:24 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, I loved it. I had no problems. High school, playing basketball, on the baseball teams in the town. All our teams were integrated. And I was fairly good. And I could get on any team I wanted. So that's the way I grew up. I didn't see any of this. White boys sleep at my house. I didn't sleep in any White boys' houses though, I noticed that. I didn't notice that. But a very good friends of mine, and as my sister said, we were lucky to grow up in this town. She's always said that because—But the thing that we didn't know, we didn't know that there were some of these things there. But growing up as kids, you don't know those things. I know that most of the people who worked there were Black folk there were housemen, or some worked in some of those mills. There were some mills they worked in. And cut grass and bellboys and stuff like that. Just one or two businesses in there. No barber shops, no stores. One dry cleaner place and one little store. That's all I knew in the Black. Town was small, anyhow. | 26:24 |
| Tunga White | So it was predominantly Black or predominantly White? | 28:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Predominantly White. I don't think we had over a 100-150 Black people in the whole town. | 28:12 |
| Tunga White | So in the Black neighborhood, was it a total Black neighborhood or were Blacks and Whites kind of living together in the same neighborhood? | 28:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, the street I lived on one of the richest men in town lived on there. | 28:27 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 28:33 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | But see, I lived at this end and he lived way down the other end, where he had his houses and stables and he had his footman. And I'm talking back in ancient days now. We had the footman. And this man, he had his driver, who was White. And then when they got cars and it was a chauffer. | 28:33 |
| Tunga White | Now, who was he and how did he get all this money? | 28:55 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, his name was Cross and his daughter and I were in the same class in high school. We graduated same. Did Julie and I? No, we didn't graduate the same. But in about sixth, seventh grade, we were in the same class, Julie Cross. | 28:57 |
| Tunga White | So everything was basically integrated. Except that job, until you got on that. | 29:22 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Until that job, I did not know about it. And my mother took washing. And like I said, my father was a good yard man, a good waiter. When he had waiting tables, I did a lot of that. And he was very well thought out. We were poor. But he was honest. My mother was honest. And he was very well thought of. So when he died, some of the people he had worked for, took care of us, helped us. My mother would receive a check, no matter how small it was, but it was a check from two sisters who were not married, but they had jobs. My father worked for their auntie and they thought so much of him, that they, when he died, did send my mother a small check every month for years and years and years. Yeah. And my mother was so close that I had a sister that was born named after one of these ladies, who had a sister named Bertha Strong. | 29:23 |
| Tunga White | So Who were these two ladies? Remember their names? | 30:56 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, one was Bertha Strong and I can't remember the other. But Bertha strong taught in one of those lady [indistinct 00:31:12] colleges in Pennsylvania. BrynMawr. I don't know if you ever heard that. B-R-Y-N, and capital M-A-W-R. That's in Pennsylvania. And everybody looked after us in there. They'd help us with, like you get food stamps now, well they had people having problems, who needed help, you'd get coal. And so we would get so much coal every year. Now you get my life history, aren't you? | 30:59 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. | 31:55 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Don't get bored now. | 31:57 |
| Tunga White | I'm not. It's interesting. | 31:59 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | All right. And we lived right across the street from Baptist Church. So that's where we went to Sunday school. And we were the only Black family in it, because we were Colored then we weren't Black. Didn't use it until—If you called me Black, then I'd fight. So it took me a long time to accept the term Black. But we were the only Colored in there. And I was baptized there when I was 14. Was how the Father— | 32:02 |
| Tunga White | How old were you when you started that? | 32:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I was five years old and my brother was seven. And so we'd go to Sunday school every Sunday. And so when they had Father and Son backwards and the superintendent who was White would take us. And yeah. And I'll never forget his name. He was the city architect and his name was Perly Gilbert. So that was our church until we got a little older. Then we went to about four miles away in another city and joined a Black church in another town, this Third Baptist Church. And about that time we started looking at girls and you know— | 32:44 |
| Tunga White | So the whole family moved their membership? | 33:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, yeah, yeah. That church in Lawrence was—Lawrence was a larger city, but still we didn't have a lot of great many Blacks. But they were coming from the South and they'd go in the South and they'd go out in the country areas and they were buying homes. Then we had a lot of people who worked in these mills and things, and they lived in these tenements and these housing areas. So many of us up there did not have homes or buy homes, we rented. And I think a lot of that rubbed off on me. I was never in much for buying homes. And in the South, that's what you do. Now, the people who bought homes up my way, were people who had moved from the South and would move out in the country, I will say, and where they had some room and eventually they'd buy the land and they'd build a house and so forth out there. | 33:51 |
| Tunga White | So the people who moved from the South, did you know any of these families? | 35:10 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. | 35:15 |
| Tunga White | What places did they come from and did they ever tell you why they decided to move up north and why they chose that particular area? | 35:16 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, my mother, she came up there because her sister was up there who went up there and was working for some White people up there. And she came up at 16 and she was taking care of people's kids, I guess you want to call them a nanny or that type of thing. I had never heard of it, that phrase really from my mother. | 35:25 |
| Tunga White | What did she call it? Did she give it a name? | 35:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, no. Just taking care of these for some of these White folks. Stayed there. Then she met my daddy and they got married. | 35:55 |
| Tunga White | How did she meet him? | 36:08 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Same time, I don't know how. No, she never did tell me how they met. But they met him. And he died at 39, so I didn't know him too well. But he was a very, very, very well liked man in there. And Frank Blunt was somebody in that town. Yeah. And it helped us kids growing up because our father was that well liked. And my mother was a very strong woman. Yeah, she was a very strong woman. | 36:10 |
| Tunga White | So after your father died, how did she help keep the family together? | 36:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Washing and ironing. Yeah. | 36:53 |
| Tunga White | Now while she was out washing and ironing, where were you all? | 36:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, she was— | 36:56 |
| Tunga White | She was taking it in. Going, getting it and bringing it back. | 36:56 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | They brought it to her. She was real good. And taught all of us too. I don't know. My wife has never, I shouldn't say never, I don't think my wife, very seldom had she ever iron a shirt for me. I iron all my shirts, I do all that. I was brought up to do it. | 36:59 |
| Tunga White | So you had to take a lot of responsibility? | 37:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. | 37:29 |
| Tunga White | What kind of chores did you have to do when you were growing up? | 37:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, everything. And I tell my daughter right now, I says, "The things that I did there, we don't do." Every morning, every day, I say, probably in the morning, we had to dust the furniture in the house. But you can get over here. I know you can see. So it might have been 10, 12 years since. But we had to do that. The front room had to be dusted. I'd make the oatmeal and stuff like that. And do certain chores. We wash the dishes. I think of the times when we had to, on the faucet, we would polish it up and shine it up. We don't do any of those things here now. We had to bring in the wood, the coal, make up the fires. Take the coal out, sift the ashes. We got upstairs. And my sister and I would sit around the stove in there and read because we always liked to read. | 37:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And we didn't have no upstairs toilets. They had a pot underneath the bed. And you had to take it down the first floor and then down what we call the basement and dump it into what we call the water closet. But it's a type of a toilet bag. You pull cord, the water's up here, you pull the cord and it comes down like that. That's a water closet. Yeah. Yeah. In my hometown at that time, those tenements would have water closets. Now, you have it right here and you get it like that uh-huh, it's on a chain. You pull down the water coming in. And then some of it flowed back and fill up again. Yeah, well we had all kind of chores. I can't think of—We didn't have any grass around the house, but I cut grass, waited tables. Always had something to do. But washing and ironing, I didn't do too much washing. But I had a certain amount of ironing, even when I was in high school. | 39:12 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And guys would come in there and say, "Hey, Russ, ready to go to practice?" And I had a little door. I'd go down there so they wouldn't see that I was ironing. And I'm going up here, playing football and basketball and baseball. Here, I'm up here ironing. Yeah. My mother just had started a little box up there. So I can iron, and I still do. Yeah. | 40:38 |
| Tunga White | So I'm sure all that chores that you had to do helped you when you went off to school and had to be so particular about your room cleaning there. | 41:08 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That was no problem. Yeah, we had to teach some of our kids now how to sweep, how to handle a broom. Some kids have never swept in their life. | 41:19 |
| Tunga White | That's true. | 41:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Say, "Boy, you don't even know how to sweep." | 41:30 |
| Tunga White | I had my mother tell me that too. She said, "Girl, you don't even know to sweep this floor. Let me show you how to sweep the floor." | 41:41 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. And that's that's true. Yeah. And so I had a nice life up there. | 41:41 |
| Tunga White | Now let's move you down to the South. After you got out of school, you said that you couldn't find a job, so you had— | 41:51 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | In printing, I couldn't find a job. Well, that was right under depression. '29 was the depression. I got out in '30, and I stayed right on in it until almost World War I. Because I went to the school and graduated from St. Aug, got here in Raleigh. You've heard of St. Augustine’s , have you? | 42:01 |
| Tunga White | I've heard of it, but tell me some more about the school. | 42:28 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, we love it and we call it the greatest, the biggest secret on the East Coast. It's the type of school it is. Yeah. It's tremendous. And so, I finished there and later came back and coached there. But I had traveled a lot of places. But St. Aug is Episcopal school. And I remember the day I went there in 1933. I didn't have a $50 and I was going to play football. They promised me a job and my job was to clean the boys' dormitory. There was four floors of it, every day. Room and board was $20 a month at that particular time. And I'd get part of that. Then I would rake leaves while there to make some extra money at 15 cents an hour. That was in '33. I would get little jobs like cleaning the dining room floor and stuff like that to make a little extra money. So that's what I did over there. That's when I met my wife. I was raking leaves when I met her. | 42:33 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 44:16 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. She looked kind of good. And so I got fresh, started talking and we were in a couple of classes together. | 44:16 |
| Tunga White | What was she going to school for? | 44:26 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Just going to school. | 44:26 |
| Tunga White | Just going school. | 44:31 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. Back then you went to school, teaching would probably be the only thing that you were looking forward to, some of us were. | 44:31 |
| Tunga White | Can you describe the campus for me, the building, [indistinct 00:44:50]? | 44:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, the building that we were on. I can't think. Yeah, it must be the Long Island building. I think that's the name of it. I'm not so sure, I've forgotten. It was an old building, been there for years. School's a hundred and some odd years old. And the biggest thing that I remember is the fire escape. Now the building, there was only one way out if it had a fire, down the fire escape. And it was galvanized iron and it came around in a circle from the top floor all the way down. So you would come down, this is the way you would've come out. That's the type of fires escape. And I know sometimes when we were hazing somebody, we would get some freshmen come in there and come up the top floor, put them down there, then we make him come down, then we get a bucket of water and pour it in after him. He's going down, and then we dump water behind him coming on down. | 44:49 |
| Tunga White | So did y'all do a lot of hazing to freshmen? | 46:05 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Not too much. You had to get your hair cut off. They'd give you a baldy and things like that. We weren't supposed to be doing what we were doing. But up there cutting the hair was all right. Yeah, but not that other thing. Yeah. You making me think back some of the devilish things that I did. | 46:08 |
| Tunga White | I want to hear about those devilish things. | 46:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | But that was part of it. Now St. Aug has a place, what they call the Angle. | 46:33 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | As you go around, you come on the campus and you're driving around and you come on out. At that time it had a very, very good library. Yeah. And not too many buildings, probably about five or six buildings at that time. The boys dormitory, the hunter building, which where most all the classes were in. Then they had the biology building, that was three, they were right in the line. And then the library, there was four of them right in the line. At the end of the Angle, was girl's dormitory, I can't think of her name right now. | 0:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Then you come around, there was another girl's dormitory called a Thomas building. Then you'd come, all this is around this circle, this area, oval. Then there was the dining hall. Then up the stairs of the dining hall was the music studio up there. And then you come around, the right would be the president's house. Just past there was the Bishop Tunnel, school social service. Right across from that was a what we called our gym. And we held dances in the gym and [indistinct 00:01:34]. And then you come right on out. | 0:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | To the left of it, and another street that you could come in very close to it was the chapel. And that was real unique. And then there were a few houses where faculty stayed. That was what we had there. And they had a dairy, we had cows and some guys made their money by milking the cows and delivering the milk. | 1:38 |
| Tunga White | Did they serve the milk at your cafeteria? | 2:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. | 2:13 |
| Tunga White | What kind of food they serve at the cafeteria? Typical? | 2:13 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Typical food. Yeah. Thing I remember most is liver. Liver with plenty of gravy and potatoes. Sweet potatoes. 'Cause they had a farm too. They did a lot of that. Rolls, in the morning with your cereal and maybe some of those sausage kind of big ones. | 2:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I lived, I guess it wasn't the greatest food in the world, but then you'd get your fish and they had some salmon once in a while, but nothing to elaborate. But we made it. Yeah, the sausage was one of the main things breakfast, you know, grits. That's when I started eating grits for the first time. See, I didn't know what grits were. Yeah, when you go talk about grits in the north, it's the big, what they call the hominy grits. But the grits that we have down here, I met down here. That was the first time. | 2:57 |
| Tunga White | So which grits do you like better? | 3:47 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Down here. I won't eat those, them big things up there. | 3:51 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I know big thrill I got when I came south, first time at St. Paul. I got in here about, I came down by train and got off to the station and officer of the day and was there to greet anybody who was coming in. School had already opened and it was October 1st, but he told me as President, Arch Deacon Russell told me that I could—He'd be glad to have me come down there. So that was, mealtime was over. So I went to the dining hall at six o'clock. And when I walked in there, I had never seen that many Black girls in my life. I'll never forget, heaven forbid, I just look around. I say wow. | 3:55 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I'd never been satisfied since, you know, Uh-huh, you couldn't—I've had jobs off and up there and you just can't pay me. You couldn't have paid me. By the way, this girl Julie Cross that I'm talking about, her daddy was Richard. She was on the school board. She's written me several times. So Russ, when you coming home? Because I coached quite a bit and I could have gotten into the school system. I'm glad I didn't, but 'cause I've had a better life down here than I would've up there I think. But anyhow, that's how St. Aug is. Now it's got everything. It's got track, baseball fields, new dorms, student unions. I mean it's really something that you ought to see. And excellent track team. And they won the Division II track championship two weeks ago. | 4:52 |
| Tunga White | That's right. | 6:04 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And by beating Abilene Christian and those other Texas teams all come from all over here. Yeah. It was a week ago Saturday I was over there. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my school. | 6:05 |
| Tunga White | So what kind of activities did the students do when they weren't in school? | 6:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well that's why I mentioned about that Angle, they had the Angle. That's where you courted. They had strict regulations there, you know. | 6:26 |
| Tunga White | What kind of regulations? | 6:36 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well you couldn't go off to campus or anything like that. | 6:37 |
| Tunga White | Did you have a curfew for being in the dorm? | 6:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | We didn't. The guys didn't, but the girls did. Yeah. So we could go out on the town and see a queen out there if we wanted to. Y'all be stuck in a dorm, see? So most of us had a girl out of town. We had one on the campus and try to keep them apart. | 6:44 |
| Tunga White | Didn't want to get yourself in trouble. | 7:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's right, yeah. But we had Angle. We'd sit out there, especially well free during the day and talk with your girl that it was real tight on there. And yeah, she had a few dances, Easter Monday dances, and belong to clubs. There was no sororities or fraternities on there at that time. But you had the social clubs Acie's Club and Sojourner Truth Club. | 7:05 |
| Tunga White | Tell me about those clubs. What did they do? How could a person become a member? | 7:44 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well they selected you. Has to become a member of those type things. And there was rush for you, if they thought you were somebody that they wanted in there, you'd be between this one and that one and that which one you would choose. Just like sororities in there. And you had initiations and stuff like that. | 7:51 |
| Tunga White | Were you in any of those clubs? | 8:31 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, I was in one. They called the A-C-I-E-S, Acies Club. I was in that. Then later on when I went back there to teach, we had our first fraternity, Kappa was in there. So we formed that along with Shaw University. I mean Shaw students and St. Aug could join that one. So that team later on, but it was social clubs. And I wish I had really had chance—I had a lot of pictures, not pictures, but I had a lot of, what do you call that big word, memorabilia, yeah on that. Because I'm a fanatic on keeping junk. | 8:31 |
| Tunga White | I'd love to see it. I don't think it's junk. | 9:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, well if we have time. I'll show it. It might tell you more about me than what I'm saying about me. But that's— | 9:34 |
| Tunga White | Both of them are important though. | 9:44 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 9:50 |
| Tunga White | Talking and showing pictures and other things. | 9:50 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, well I like to talk about my experiences because when you get a certain age, that's where you live. You live in a past. I'm happy. I've never made any money. I'll tell you that right now. We live normally and comfortable. We're nothing elaborate that just—I had a very good wife and she had to be good as they say, to stay with me for that long and don't complain that much say. She was great. | 9:50 |
| Tunga White | I don't think you ever told me about your wedding. | 10:31 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh I sure didn't, did I? But we were courting and we finished in '36. She taught in South Carolina, a place called Blaney. And I think it was two teachers in the school, and she taught there. But we were still courting. I'd go see her and that type thing. So I got a job in 1938 at Southern University. And so the same person who interested me in going back to school, and by the way, his son is the same man who Clinton has a name as—Am I right in saying the N boy, the Haiti, Bill Gray, yeah. | 10:37 |
| Tunga White | So his father was sort of like a mentor to you. | 11:42 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. We played basketball and baseball together at St. Paul. | 11:46 |
| Tunga White | What was his name? | 11:51 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Bill Gray. Yeah, William H. Gray. And I followed this guy, the Blue Field, he was a senior there 'cause I was older than he was. But I stayed out of school 'cause he was in high school when—He was a junior in high school at St. Paul. And I had already finished and then he got me this job down at Southern. He, the president was Southern—Felton Clark was the president. He was in Philadelphia. He called me up, I was a busboy and an eatery up there. And he says, "The president's down here, I told him all about you and blah blah. Can you get here?" I says, yeah. So I got on a train and got down there the next morning I met the president and he says, "You'll be hearing from me." So about a week or two I heard from him, I was hired. So now I'm going to go to Southern University. And I went down there in 1938 and I was assistant football coach, assistant basketball coach, assistant track coach. | 11:52 |
| Tunga White | You were assisting all coaches. | 13:20 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I was what they call a proctor over the boys, one of the boys dorms. The one I was over was for freshman. And they used to call that Boystown and I was, they nicknamed me Father Flanigan, that particular year. Then they following year, they had a athletic dorm. So I was put in there and I was charged of that. I was there four years. This boy, Bill Gray was still was the man there. But she said—We decided for her to come down to visit me during the Easter, Christmas holidays. So she came down and we met and she stayed with the Grays' at their house and a few days. | 13:26 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So I proposed, I said, "Let's get married." She said, "No, no, no, no." I said, well, I said, "We've been courting seven years." I said, my mother told me, said, "Now you're not going to do right, turn her loose. Let somebody else, said no [indistinct 00:14:48] you, because pretty soon as old as you are, nobody better get along with you." That's what my mama had told me. So we got on the boat, went across the Mississippi, ferry boat, to a place called Port Allen. And went up there, got a license. That's how quick it was. Came back. And that night we got married. And Bill Gray's wife stood up with us. | 14:31 |
| Tunga White | It was in their home? | 15:25 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, no. We went to the preacher, we found a preacher's house. So his daughter and his wife, they were the witnesses and stuff like that. That was on New Year's Eve. We spent the night together on New Year's Eve. She got out, we went to New Orleans the next day. I put her on a train. She came back to Camden, South Carolina. Supposed to be secret, see? Yeah. Her parents didn't know about it. | 15:26 |
| Tunga White | Why is that? | 15:56 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, I don't know. I say we do things differently. Don't try to figure out any answer then. But I think they suspected it. I didn't see her until the 10th of August. | 15:59 |
| Tunga White | The 10th of August? | 16:13 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's right. | 16:16 |
| Tunga White | That's a long time. | 16:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. So like I say, we do things a little different than anybody else. And that's the way it was. That's how we got married. We went on our honeymoon in August. I had almost had an entourage. Had a friend of mine who's had never been too far, no, he's from Texas and his wife is from New Iberia—No, where she was, you mentioned New Iberia, where was she from? I don't know, so many of those little places down there. Might have— | 16:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't know if it was Crowley off the looses, or whatever. Anyway, she's from, she had some French in her, Creole in her. So I rode with them. We stopped the Tuskegee one night and the next night we stopped in Camden, South Carolina. Picked up my wife, spent the night there. And then we went north to take her to my mother's. We stopped in a place outside Ocean City and spent two or three days there with a lot of friends of ours that we had met. | 16:56 |
| Tunga White | And what state is Ocean City in? | 17:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | New Jersey. | 17:40 |
| Tunga White | Okay. | 17:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. And so when we decided to leave after we left there, two couples they, Texan and his wife, and I were going to Massachusetts. So we stopped in Ocean City and went into a place to get something to eat. And we sat there, sat there, sat there, and sat there. And so finally called waitress over and she said, "I'll be right back." She went back, came back and she said, "We can't serve you here." Now this is Southern New Jersey. And that was another shock to me, here, I'm supposed to be up north now. And my friends I said, say Bluntz, said, "I thought you were taking us up where everybody's free." | 17:41 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so we walked out there and I'll never forget that that happened and spent some time up at my wife's—At my home and everything. And then we came back. | 18:44 |
| Tunga White | Now I want to know, how did you all break the news to her parents that y'all had gotten married? | 19:00 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | She did it. | 19:07 |
| Tunga White | She did it? | 19:08 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, she did it. Yeah. Yeah she did. That's some— | 19:08 |
| Tunga White | How long after y'all had gotten married? | 19:12 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh she told them probably about five months. About four or five months after that. | 19:15 |
| Tunga White | So how did they react to that? | 19:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | They thought I was great. | 19:23 |
| Tunga White | Oh, that's good then. | 19:24 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, it was very, very good marriage. And Cora said, "They seem to love me," mother and father, just great. And my mother, who had remarried now, and my sister, they just loved her. So it was one of those things that, that's why my mother said either marry her or turn her loose, 'cause nobody be able to stay. I was 32 and at 32 it's time to do something if you're going to do it. And after she told me—And so they've always loved her. The whole town, they didn't like this other girl, the first one I had, Charlotte. Charlotte had a jealous streak in her. My wife Cora, she act like she didn't give a damn. That's right. That's why we could make it. She's never got on me about anybody or any. She said that's just one of his girls. That's just one of his girls. I know she likes you things like that and forget it. | 19:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I mean I've never had to say one word to her about, you take up too much time with this guy, or you dancing too close or never. We never been, like I say, I've never worried too much. I've never, I guess I'm normally jealous of somebody, but I never had that problem. I never worried too much about them. | 20:40 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:21:12]. | 21:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | You are? We should have met. But that's true. | 21:13 |
| Tunga White | A person's going to do what they're going to do. | 21:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, that's my conclusion. That's why I lived as long as I've lived. I believe that's the way. The man there was congratulating me on the championship we won about three weeks ago. | 21:21 |
| Tunga White | I saw your write up in the paper. | 21:39 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh you did? | 21:39 |
| Tunga White | Congratulations. | 21:39 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, he played football for me, and he ran track for me,. And everything and he was, tell me about it. And like I said, I never worry it. There's nothing much you can do. And I can say this, in a lot of time we were married I don't ever remember a day, a 24 hour day, that we weren't speaking. | 21:41 |
| Tunga White | That's good. | 22:08 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | She got mad. That's rare. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | That's real rare. | 22:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. I can't remember it. Maybe we did, but I don't—She never threatened to go home. | 22:13 |
| Tunga White | That's very rare. | 22:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Her daddy told me said, "You can't treat Corey right she can always come back here." I said, "I'm going to treat her right because I want come back here myself." But that's how we got married. We got married. | 22:24 |
| Tunga White | So when did you all finally live together? | 22:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | All right, She got a job. | 22:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Let's see. | 22:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. The same guy, Bill Gray, used his influence to get her a job. Yeah, up in northern Louisiana. Lincoln Parish Training school. That's in Ruston, Louisiana. Yeah, about seven miles from Graham, am I right? Okay. So he got a job and the principal's name was JK Haynes. And so she taught up there. That was about 1941 to '42. Yeah, that was it. After she finished teaching South Carolina and she—'41, he got her a job. That's was, that's how, it's not what you know, it's who you know. | 23:00 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So now that was about 200 miles from where I was. So the only, I'd see her probably once a month, maybe twice if somebody was bringing her down there. Occasion that she could get down, because I didn't have a car and she didn't have a car and that type of thing. So I'd always see her at least once a month and somebody coming to the school, various principals. And there's another man whose wife, who on the faculty, his wife worked up there. And so they find some way to get down probably about 11 or 12 o'clock down here in the boys dormitory where I was, I said, "There she is." | 24:06 |
| Tunga White | They come right on in. | 25:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yes sir. Come right on in here, ain't nobody else in here. And so we did that for a year. Then I said I can't do this all the time. So JK Haynes wanted to hire me as his football coach. So I'm all ready to go up there. And Bill Gray, in the meantime, gets a job, gets a position that's president of Florida Normal and Industrial, Florida N&I, that's down in St. Augustine, Florida. And he says, "Russ, I want you and Cora to go with me." | 25:03 |
| Tunga White | And this was in '42? | 25:51 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | 42. Yeah, "Russ, I want you and Corey to go with me. We going down there, we going to build this school up. Baptist school." Like I say, I always like challenges. I've always liked to move as you can see that. So we went down there. It was this first year I was the dean of men. And what is she? She was a librarian? She was teaching health and we were doing everything down there. Just any and everything there. I was physical ed, I was a football coach, basketball coach, all that. | 25:55 |
| Tunga White | So the school was just opening up on the ground floor? | 26:41 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, no, school [indistinct 00:26:47] it had been there a long time. | 26:45 |
| Tunga White | Long time? | 26:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And the president had died, so it was open. And Bill Gray was, his daddy was a big preacher up there in Philadelphia. So he had a—He wasn't a preacher then. He had a tendency toward that. And he was great speaker. We've had some great Black speakers, when he was one of there, he could use those words. And so I worked with him ,like coach the football. We played Tuskegee that year. We played Morehouse that year. We played Ed Waters, we played Bethune Cookman. I think that was about all we had, those four. It was during the war years at that time. During this time, in January, I was got my greetings from the government to go to the—You have been selected for selected service. So here I am. I'm in December, I think when that happened, I got 30 days. So January I'm going. So I at the camp landing there in there and I left. | 26:49 |
| Tunga White | Where is this camp there? | 28:06 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | It's like in Florida. I don't know really. It's not too far. So I went there and funny thing about it is, had a little party, go away party. And there were coal stove where we were, and this sulfuric aromas come out of it. And so I choked up real badly. And so one of the people that said, "You got asthma, don't you?" I said, "No, not I know." I said, "I did as a boy, I had it." And so I really choked up. And so one of them said, "When you go there, you tell them you got asthma like that." And sure enough, when I went up there, when they put me through, "You got a illness?" I says, "No." They said, "But I do have asthma." I hadn't given it any serious thought. Do you know I was rejected on a count of have asthma. And they exam me once, it was a foreign doctor and he said, "We're going to examine you again, tomorrow." But the weather was bad, nothing. I stayed out in that weather, everything. When I went in the next day, it was no better. It was worse. | 28:07 |
| Tunga White | Oh yeah, definitely worse. | 29:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so I was rejected. The guy I was hanging around with was right from St. Augustine. He'd had cuts of his face and everything else. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:29:57]. | 29:56 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, I haven't seen him since. If I hung around with him—He was rejected. | 29:58 |
| Tunga White | What was his ailment? | 30:04 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | His ailment was incrimonism. He had such a criminal record that the army didn't want him. The army doesn't want. And when I found that out, wherever he went, I went because none of those GIs up there, none of them bothered him. | 30:08 |
| Tunga White | What kind of record did he have? What did he do? | 30:26 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't know really. I didn't ask him. I's afraid to ask him. Oh yeah. And he was right, we were right down there in St. Augustine and we rode up together and we rode, came back together. And I never saw him again. Say never saw him again. So when I came back that night, wrapped on the door, she opened the door and here I was. She had hollered. | 30:28 |
| Tunga White | I know it was a big deal. | 30:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I was real—But I knew I was gone. See I had tried to get in the—What you call it, OCS, Officer's Canada School. I had tried to get in, but I waited too long. And at that time they had closed it out, being Black too. | 30:56 |
| Tunga White | Well they didn't allow them in? | 31:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | They allowed them, but I guess they might have limited number I guess. I believe that's what had happened. And I was late applying for this particular one I wanted. And so my induction papers came in that doctored all out then. They couldn't take me. So I finished a year there. And then Bill Gray said, "Why don't you go back to school and get your Master's degree?" So I decided I would. So that's one of the years that I lived in the north. I came back, went to Boston. | 31:23 |
| Tunga White | So your bachelor's degree was in what? | 32:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | It was in History. | 32:03 |
| Tunga White | History? | 32:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And was a minor in physical ed as well. And well believe it or not, and French and I can't say a word French. But I've had all the French you're supposed to have. But at that time they did not require you to speak it as much. They must have a reading and a reading type thing. Reading and writing was French. Yeah. I went to Boston and I finished there the year. | 32:09 |
| Tunga White | What made you choose Boston? | 32:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well that's home. I mean, well I only lived— | 32:48 |
| Tunga White | You didn't to want stick around? There was no places to go in the south? | 32:50 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | There were, but I go home every summer anyhow. Why not go to Boston? I was 25 miles, my home was 25 miles from there. My sister lived right there in Boston. So we went up there to, I went up there summer school, I wanted to be get home too. And that I decided to stay on. And the professor there they liked me. It was at a time when they had a hard time to get students. So I was, yeah, come on, come on, come on. So I worked for them. I was working on the playground. | 32:56 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I got a job on the playground and a lady came by and she recognized me and she says, "What you doing here?" I said, "What you doing here?" She was from Florida Normal, but she was out in the field side of selling the school and this type thing. And she had heard about me and I had met her. And so she said to me, she says, you know she, "What you doing?" I said, "I'm up here in summer school, graduate school, and I think I'm going to stay up here." So she says, "Well what are you doing?" I said, "Well right now I don't have anything to do except this playground that I'm working on." She said, "Well I know a man who looking for a couple." And she said, I said, "Yeah." She said, "You think you and your wife be interested?" I says, "Yeah, we would." | 33:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | There was a man there named Slade. Mr. Slade was a Black man who had brought himself up, but a real, working hard. And he had a Slade's barbecue up there on Tremont Street. And it was the first time that I had seen—Have you noticed down here what they call the Boston Rotisserie? Okay. Now I'm going back to 1943. He had his rotisserie up in the front, out where the chicken is going around and around. And I learned a lot from him, because then I'd see his chef come out and bast it and all that type of stuff. | 34:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So I went to see Mr. Slade. He admired a younger woman and they had a couple of kids and she had run off to Albuquerque, New Mexico, or someplace where—So he said, "I'd like to have somebody look after me 'cause I'm moving out 20 some odd miles from Boston and a place called Stolen. And I have these two girls, Donnie and Vanessa. One was six and I think one was nine. So would you be interested?" I said, "Yeah." So here's the chance to go to school. Place to stay. Station wagon at your disposal. And I forget what he was, what little bit they were going to pay us. I didn't care. Didn't care at all. | 35:44 |
| Tunga White | All these benefits. | 36:36 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | All I need around there. And at the time when you couldn't get bread, I mean you couldn't get butter. Then he had access to anything we want 'cause he had a restaurant. And so we went out there, we moved out there and we stayed out there a year. | 36:37 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Then I finished and when I graduated, he wanted me to stay. The school wanted me to stay, work up my doctorate. Now I hadn't come back south. I had missed the south. All that snow, I'd come on sometimes snow up that high on the—So I said, "Let me get out here." So we did that. And I in the meantime, he had to put his daughters into another home in there. And they had a fire in there. And one of the daughters was burning up, Donnie—I mean, yeah, Donnie, the nice one. One of them was a stinker and the other was nice. The nice one got burned out and her sister finished Fisk. So everything, but I'm saying that that was the luck that we had in there. We ate well, lived well. I took care of his pigs. He had a horse and out there | 36:55 |
| Tunga White | What was the name of the lady that you said told you about Mr. Slade? | 38:00 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I can't think of her name at all. Her husband was also tied up with Florida Normal. And so that was— | 38:03 |
| Tunga White | You just recognized each other? | 38:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, I was on the street in this area in there. And she drove by in the playground. And somehow she stopped and looked. She thought she saw, she knew me and did. I can't think of her name. And so that's how I got through up there. And then left there and came to Baton Rouge again. | 38:13 |
| Tunga White | What year was this that you came back to Baton Rouge? | 38:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | '44. And I had—They needed to coach at the high school. So I came back, dragging my wife with me. And then we got back there after a while, found out she was pregnant. | 38:47 |
| Tunga White | Good. | 39:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So my oldest daughter was born on May 28th in 1945. | 39:10 |
| Tunga White | What's her name? | 39:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Frankie, I remember her—. I remember that day. Because that was commencement day down there. | 39:19 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 39:25 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. And my wife got the first maternal leave that they had ever given down there. | 39:26 |
| Tunga White | So she was teaching at the school too? | 39:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, she was teaching at a elementary school. Yeah, I forget the name of it. | 39:39 |
| Tunga White | So where was Frankie born? In a midwife? | 39:44 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, she was born in a Lady of the Lake Hospital, in Baton Rouge, 8:30 in the morning. And so she's a native Louisiana. And so my wife didn't work that year. And then I got offer to come back to St. Aug the next year. So I'm ready. I'm up and moving again. So I moved over there. | 39:46 |
| Tunga White | So this was in '46? | 40:28 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | '46 yeah. Down there two years. Well the salaries were—I was working for $120 a month. | 40:29 |
| Tunga White | This is at St. Aug? | 40:42 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, at, this is Baton Rouge. | 40:44 |
| Tunga White | Baton Rouge. | 40:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | $120 a month. I got $60 a month for my coaching activities and all that kind of stuff. $180. The assistant principal didn't get but $180. I don't know what the principal got. My wife has worked that one year, 120, around 120. And so this job treated me a little more rewarding, financially, not much more. She never did like it that far away from her home and up. So I decided to leave again. So I went to St. Aug and I stayed there for a year. | 40:47 |
| Tunga White | So did you have your first home in Louisiana? | 41:33 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This is the first home, it's the only home I ever had. | 41:36 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 41:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. I've never bought a home. | 41:39 |
| Tunga White | You— | 41:41 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, I'm a renter. | 41:41 |
| Tunga White | You just rent? | 41:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I'll rent, rent and then I pick up and fix my suitcases and get up there and move. That's the way I was. | 41:44 |
| Tunga White | Me too. I'm like that too. I sure am, have never stayed in one place too long. | 41:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, I have never have. So I was over there four years. | 41:58 |
| Tunga White | So were you all renting like a home by the school or were you in a neighborhood, another neighborhood? | 42:01 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | On the campus. Whether we had a home on the campus. Yeah, that was part of the contract. Yeah, they would feed me. I could eat them down all any time I wanted. They didn't pay enough money though. They had the salaries in the south that time were different. They had the salary for the White man, salary for the Black. | 42:07 |
| Tunga White | So how much of a difference do you think it was between the two? The White and the Black? | 42:32 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | White and Black? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Oh yeah. Cause I had a friend in New Orleans who was making $360 a month. | 42:36 |
| Tunga White | The White person? | 42:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No Black. | 42:45 |
| Tunga White | Black person? | 42:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. Because they had it in New Orleans. | 42:46 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. | 42:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Baton Rouge don't. I was making 180 and my wife was making 120. Two years later when I went back down there, the girl who got my wife's job was making 311. And the guy—They got on me, people got on there, "Told you not to leave, told you not to leave. Tell you not to leave." Got new coaches. And it was just fantastic. It jumped way, way, way up with my coaching and everything. It'd be around $500. And that was a whole lot of money then. Anyhow, I went to St. Aug, spent four years there, coaching. Then I heard the president recommended me for a job. Recommended me to another president for a job. And when I heard about it, rather. | 42:48 |
| Tunga White | Now, who was the president of St. Aug at this in 1946? | 43:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Harold Jrigg. Okay. J-R-I-G-G. So I worked with him three years. And so that recommendation sent me to St. Paul, where I had gone 1927, I went right back to same school. Now I'm going to coach and teach. So I'd come all the way around and in the night back up to that. | 43:58 |
| Tunga White | Full circle. | 44:27 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so there I am. So I stayed there '53 to—No, '50 to '53. Then when my other daughter, the daughter I was talking on the phone that was born in '53. | 44:28 |
| Tunga White | And her name is? | 44:44 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Linda? Yeah. | 44:47 |
| Tunga White | Where was she born? | 44:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Richmond, yeah. | 44:51 |
| Tunga White | In a hospital? | 44:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. I don't know the hospital. No, I was in '53 when she was born. When I left there, they were living in Lawrenceville. I was here, I was teaching at the Central. I had a for one year. | 44:55 |
| Tunga White | And what year was that, that you taught at Central? | 45:16 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | '53, '54. So when I did that, they were up there and I go up there every weekend. | 45:24 |
| Tunga White | So how far is it? | 45:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | About 90. Between 90 and a hundred miles. | 45:32 |
| Tunga White | Okay. | 45:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So I'd spend the weekend— | 45:36 |
| Tunga White | You had a car by then? | 45:37 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. | 45:37 |
| Tunga White | You had a car. Who was your first car? | 45:37 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | My first car was a—I think it was a Ford. Yeah. | 45:43 |
| Tunga White | When did you get? | 45:51 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Wait a minute. Wait a minute now. Yeah, in '51 I think. Yeah, 1951. I had a Ford Special. Didn't have any chrome or nothing on it, just a car. I bought it new. And it was up, I bought it in Lawrenceville and then I came to Central. And so I could run back my last year, weekends— | 45:51 |
| Tunga White | So a lot—On the campuses you were living at, a lot of the Black people. | 46:27 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't even remember where we were. | 0:01 |
| Tunga White | We talking about your car. | 0:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. So I would go up—I'd spend the week out there, then I'd leave there in time for my 9:30 class. | 0:05 |
| Tunga White | Now where were they living? There? | 0:14 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | They were living off the campus in an apartment. | 0:17 |
| Tunga White | In an apartment? | 0:18 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. But since she was pregnant and my wife was diabetic, they did not want her to leave us. We had lost a son and since she was diabetic, the doctors in Richmond said they would like for her to stay, yeah, because they had to come down here. And so she did. So they had to stay up there for Christmas. My daughter was born in September, 29th. | 0:20 |
| Tunga White | So the loss of your son, what had happened? | 0:57 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well I think it was traced to diabetes and so forth. I was in Massachusetts at the time. | 1:01 |
| Tunga White | That was the first child? | 1:08 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, that was the second one. Yeah. And we were in St. Aug at that time. We were in Raleigh. So we rarely talked about it because I wasn't going to do a whole lot of good to be mourning too much about it. So she rarely mentioned it. I rarely mentioned it to her. But anyhow, that's what happened. My daughter was born up in Richmond. I found a chance to get a house here. And so I brought them down here in December. | 1:09 |
| Tunga White | So this was December of '54? | 1:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | '53. | 1:49 |
| Tunga White | '53. Okay. | 1:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. 53. I was only going to be here a year. It wasn't this house. We was going only be here a year, so after that year we went to—I was out of a job and I didn't know what I was going to do. I was going to help a man close up his hotel up in Montauk Point up in New York, if necessary. And I went down to a tennis match, tournament down here, Black. And I met a guy from Winston-Salem who I knew down in Florida and way back there. And he remembered me and he said, "They need a coach down there." I said, "Well give me the address, give me the—Who's the dean?" So he gave me the dean's name and I wrote down there—Wrote the president of the dean. I wrote the president. The president's name was Perrier. | 1:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So I wrote down there and said who I was. And I had heard that been an opening and I'd be interested and so forth for what I found out. The dean had been a student there when I was there in 1942. He was the dean. And so immediately I had a job. Great. Just like that. And so I went down there for a year. And so we had—Having worked here at Central and there was a high school right across there, the high school over there. We ran our track meets over there and I had to put in the application in there and had written the principal over there. Well we ran on his track as I call it, over there. And so he got to know me. The coach over there, I knew real well, but I didn't know he was going to leave. | 3:10 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so when they found out that he was going to leave, whether they going to kick him out or not. I didn't know. I won't get into that. But anyhow, they wrote me in April. [indistinct 00:04:29] April. See would I be interested? I told them I would. And so I set application in there and they sent me word back and they'd like to have interview. And I told him I just couldn't get up here until summertime. And because it wasn't a must as far as I'm concerned. He said, "We'll wait until you come up in summer." I told my wife, I said, "Shucks, they want to give me the job. I better go now." So I left there, came up here, got trained, came up here, got an interview, signed the contract. Hadn't even told my other boss. | 4:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, Usually, I'm always thinking about something else and I procrastinate and I won't do it. I said, no, I better do this right now. I went back and I told him. He accepted all right. So then we were down there only one year. We turned around, came back up here. Both my daughters were there then. And the living quarters were terrible. We were living in what you would call these barracks, the army barracks that had been transferred to these—Some of our colleges, Black colleges. | 5:12 |
| Tunga White | So they did a lot of that? | 5:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yes, indeed. Because that's all it was, a barrack. We're here then the next one you are there. And all the way around. Barrack type thing. I didn't think it was—I was always afraid of fire. And that side of it. | 6:00 |
| Tunga White | So how did they look? What was in them? | 6:24 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | It is hard to describe it. They was so inadequate. You had your kitchen of course. And you had your bathroom in there and (phone rings) you had your kitchen, your bathroom and bedroom. Oh, that's it. Well— [INTERRUPTION 00:06:55] | 6:30 |
| Tunga White | We were talking about the barracks. | 6:47 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. Well if you've seen any of those army barracks, the cheaper army barracks, not these real solid ones. That's what it was. The barrack type structure. The faculty were living in those type things. So it wasn't an ideal place to live in. | 6:49 |
| Tunga White | Especially with family? | 7:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's right. And here I had my daughter. My daughter was not a year old then. And my other daughter was in the fourth grade, I think it was third or fourth grade. So you can see eight or nine. | 7:22 |
| Tunga White | So what kind of, how many bedrooms did you have, what kind of [indistinct 00:07:48]? | 7:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Kids had a room and we had a room. We had a bed. And it was crowded with furniture we had. Was crowded in there. It was just a, when you say barrack type thing and a poor barrack type thing. You have to really visualize. It's hard for me to describe it. And there was difficulty with heat, but water wasn't that bad. But I was afraid of the heating apparatus, you know the stoves. They had oil stoves. Oil heater, I didn't like that. But that's all they had and all the features. Families, they were going around in the same type of area. | 7:53 |
| Tunga White | How many barracks do you think there was? | 8:50 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, it was enough to take care of probably—Well where I was, family of maybe about 20 families. Then they had some another barrack section for students, married students and people who—Yeah, more or less married students. And then they had people who were living in the regular dorm, had a regular dormitory in there. That was filled up with students, see. And that's where we were the first time we were in this building. But second time we wanted to be in the building with kids. [indistinct 00:10:10] in that dormitory, so we had these barracks—That was the second time around. But the housing wasn't the best in the world. Not even for the president. Yeah. Well you know how poor Baptist schools or poor church schools are at that particular time. And that's why I can appreciate what they have now more than the kids can appreciate what they have. That was that. So that was the sleeping corners. That was the type of thing down there. So then we just left that day in June. | 8:57 |
| Tunga White | And do you know what year was this? | 10:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | '54. That's when we got here. And that was in '54. And so we've been here ever since. | 10:58 |
| Tunga White | This particular home? | 11:14 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh no. Yeah, no. We lived in another section over here for about three years. So I've been here since '59. | 11:14 |
| Tunga White | Yeah, you've been in his house since 59, but you lived in the area since 54? | 11:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | '54. Yeah. | 11:26 |
| Tunga White | So what area were you living in when you first came here? | 11:27 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | A Black area over here in by Hillside. About a mile from Hillside, the same road that goes by the school. And during that time I didn't have any bus transportation. The street we lived on wasn't paved and small houses, but we were renting it and then we got a chance to buy. This man moved out. I wasn't too anxious to buy it, but we did. So I moved in here 1959. Been here ever since. | 11:33 |
| Tunga White | So here in Durham, were there any—What was it? Bad areas, rough areas in the city? | 12:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, in Durham, as far as I know you had sections. There might be some bad blood between sections. Like there was a section called North Durham. Then there's a section called Walltown. Then there's a section called Crest—No, not Crest. Hickstown. That's where they had the name. Then you had another section called Pearsontown. Then you had a section called Hayti. H-A-Y-T-I. I think like that. Then you had another section called the Bottom. | 12:27 |
| Tunga White | Yeah, I heard of that. | 13:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 13:12 |
| Tunga White | Now have you ever heard of a Mexico section? | 13:12 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Mm-mm (negative). But there is one here? | 13:18 |
| Tunga White | A lady told me that. But no one else. I tried to ask other people about it, but no one else has even heard of it. | 13:20 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I know Hayti. Yeah, but I've never heard of Mexico. | 13:24 |
| Tunga White | So which section were you all in when you first got here in '54? | 13:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This is just a subdivision where people were moving up, Blacks began to buy a house. But there were small houses out there. Well, I was in the county at that time, but I don't know really what section it was. I just know it was out there. I call it the Red Oak District, that's all right there. Because that's the street we were living on. You think '59, people just beginning to buy homes and stuff like that. That's really developed out there now. But fine houses out there. As far as bad sections, I didn't know too much about them, but I didn't go into them. I had coaching, I had kids from all these sections. I could go through anywhere I want. I had no problem. But now, you don't go out to this section right over here, McDougald Terrace. Has gotten awful rough. Yeah, lot of dope and stuff over there. And I drive to it. I see a lot of my boys over there. I've been here so long. I don't have no—My wife, there's a Branch Library. She ran that for years. Branch Library. | 13:50 |
| Tunga White | Do you know the name of that branch? | 15:33 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | McDougald Terrace Branch Library. That's still in operation. But she retired of disability about '74. So that's when she stopped working there. But she taught here. And then she was also librarian in public—Stanford Warren Library. | 15:33 |
| Tunga White | What school did she teach at? | 16:08 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Shepard Middle School. There was a junior high school there. | 16:12 |
| Tunga White | What did she teach? | 16:16 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Her major was English and history down there. She only taught there one year. She found— | 16:20 |
| Tunga White | She was a librarian and a teacher or she—? | 16:27 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, she was just a teacher there. | 16:32 |
| Tunga White | But she did work as a librarian at these libraries, right? | 16:34 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Right, at the libraries. Yeah. But the public libraries, yeah. | 16:39 |
| Tunga White | So I want to know more about your home life. | 16:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Where? | 16:53 |
| Tunga White | While you were living here in Durham, in either one of the two locations. Who was the disciplinarian in the family? | 16:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I guess I was. Yeah, my wife was easy. | 17:06 |
| Tunga White | She was? | 17:12 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Easy as far as kids were concerned. She was real nice. I wasn't. | 17:13 |
| Tunga White | So what kind of forms of discipline did you use? | 17:25 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, I only even whipped my oldest daughter once and that was—She was six years old and we were over at St. Paul. And she supposed to come home. She didn't and it was dark. And yeah, she's going to campus, six years old and I can't find her and went all over the campus looking for her and everything. She was right next door, but she hadn't told us. So I got a little switch and switched her a little bit. Not bad. She swear I killed her, but I didn't. I didn't. So that's all the switching that I have ever done to either one of my girls. But they're pretty sharp tongue and they respected it. They never sass me. My wife, each time she had the child, she stayed home for a year or two years or something. It was one of those things. Now my daughter has a child. Short time. Boom. Next door was taken care of. And I think they missed something within that manner. Yeah. | 17:30 |
| Tunga White | So who handled the money? | 18:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I did. My wife would prefer me handling. And we had a system where we combine our money and she had a checking account and I had a checking account. My checking account was the family checking account. But she had a checking account. And so I put the check. She says, well how much money do you put in there for me? And we had agreed how much she thought she needed and that she wanted. And then I'd pay all the bills. She never had to worry about bills. She wore me to death. She'd have a bill down there. She said, "Have you sent the check to Beverly Shop?" I said, "No." "Oh, when you going to send it?" I said, "Don't worry, it'll get paid." "Sent the money to the wee shop?" She stay on me till I paid her bills. But that's the way we did it. And it was no problem. And I'm pretty good at saving and I did all the shopping. | 18:56 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 20:14 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah. Food. You know all that. I did all that. | 20:14 |
| Tunga White | What store did you all do grocery shopping? | 20:25 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I'd go to any other—A&P, Krogers, Winn-Dixie. I'd go to most any of them. I would get bargains. I couldn't send her because if she go, first thing she'd pick up if she wanted, she'd pick it up. That's what she going to put in the basket. And she didn't look for no prices or anything like that. She said, "Well you go ahead and do it all." Yeah, she loved that. So I did. I was responsible for a lot of the things. Now she'd do things like—Christmas would come, she'd send out all the cards and she'd do all the Christmas shopping. I mean she loved to shop. I wouldn't go with her shopping. | 20:27 |
| Tunga White | She'd stay all day? | 21:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | All day. And my daughters didn't like to go with her. | 21:22 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 21:23 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 21:25 |
| Tunga White | Now your daughters shoppers now? Do they like to do a whole lot of shopping now? | 21:26 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't know whether they do or not. I don't know whether they do or not. My daughter dresses the kids well, but my wife just like to shop, just get in the mall and that would be it. Just stay in there and see—I said, "Girl, I'm not—You go ahead and shop. I want to sit down somewhere. Since she didn't drive. But she liked to shop. But that kind of shop. She didn't want to shop down in grocery stores or anything like that. So I make our list or she'd give me a list, what she wanted to do, I'd go ahead and do it. I did that. | 21:30 |
| Tunga White | So did you share chores too around the house? Or how did y'all do that? Was it inside and outside? | 22:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That wasn't any problem. I'd cut the grass and she'd sweep the walk. She was fanatic about that. And I couldn't care less. She would cook. She did the real cooking. But I've always been independent. She didn't have to cook my eggs or bacon if necessary. I could do my own. And if I'm going out on a trip to track or something, going to leave here early in the morning. She liked to sleep. She said, "Okay, when you leave in the morning, don't slam the door." That was her favorite expression. "When you leave, don't slam the door. You going wake me up." But she was well liked and I mean she was fine person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. | 22:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Everybody liked her. That's how we made it. But we made it because we would share. Like I said, she never did any ironing for me. Well I guess she did some washing, I guess she did. Have a wash, put it in there. But that's what they say, I'm too independent and doing things for myself. I have problems with that sometimes. I want to cook. The daughters get there. "Daddy, get out." "I don't need y'all. Get out of here." Do what I want. If she don't see me three or four days, she'll call me. It's not one of those things that I expect her to call me every day or that type of thing. [indistinct 00:25:03] didn't call me for three or four days, try to get a hold of me. That's why I told you to call me. Because I forget in a minute. | 23:42 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:25:13]. (Blunt laughs) I do the same. I have to write everything down. | 25:13 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, well I do too. I had listed there that you were coming, time. So I wouldn't jump up and go off and leave, "Gosh, I forgot she was coming." | 25:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So that's as far as cleaning up, she would keep the house clean. I'm not too much on that. And furniture and stuff out she wanted, I was a little tight on that. So we never argued much about it. We never had anything too elaborate. I guess being brought up like I was, I wasn't looking for showboat stuff. Showcase. Yeah. And she was well brought up. I don't know. We never made any money. So we had to watch our pennies. We had to watch it. But she was never broke. And I was never broke. We've never been hungry. I don't know. I don't owe a thousand dollars. | 25:32 |
| Tunga White | That's real good. | 26:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't believe I owe $800. And it's been that way all the time. Our credit's good. But again, I say if we were lucky, we would've made some money. We always get out about the wrong time. Oops. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. | 26:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | My kids were—Well they used to fuss about me about—They used to say that—I think Saturday she saw a guy she hadn't seen—I was at Charlotte. And he helped me with track. And so he was down there and I happened to go down, had a chance to ride down there since she lives in Charlotte. And this lady said she works with the track teams. The town track team, strider program. She said, "Well, want to ride down there?" I said, "Yeah." And I'm her godson to her two kids. And so she picked me up, we went down to him and she hadn't seen this guy, all of 10 years. And they were talking about his school and he was laughing. He says, "Yeah." He said, "Frankie, oh, the guys wanted to come around your house, but they're scared of your daddy." | 27:13 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So that thing tickled me. He was laughing about it last night. He was up at the fair. He said, "Frankie was all right, but that daddy." I said, "Well I had a way of, you want to come see my daughter? You come to my house, you take her. Wherever you going, you go, you bring her back." I said, "That's all I ask you." I said, I'm not concerned with anything else about it." I said, "But she's not going to meet you on the corner. She's not going to do this or do that." That's just what. I said. "She might say she's going to church and darling end up in a honky tonk." I said, "That's not the point. I know where she said she was going. I'm just not going to turn her loose out there on the street." They say I was tight, but I guess that's the reason why I have never been able to get her come back home to live. Never. | 28:17 |
| Tunga White | Where does she live now? | 29:33 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | In Charlotte. She's a teacher's aide now. But she—I've had all kind of opportunities for her to get jobs here because she was very freezing personality and everything. She lived in Charlotte 25 years. She's about 49. Yeah. The time she finished Central down there. She been all over the state, you know. She was in social—She took sociology and stuff. She was work with employment manager, supermarkets. She was married, divorced, widowed, got a daughter. But she's a good girl. Yeah. She won't come home, she won't come home, stay with daddy. (laughs) | 29:34 |
| Tunga White | Just come to visit? | 30:34 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Come to visit, won't stay with daddy. (laughs) | 30:35 |
| Tunga White | I'm the same way. I go home and visit but I just— | 30:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. You and Frank somewhat alike I guess. Well she said well just like you daddy. I want to— | 30:41 |
| Tunga White | Yeah, she's probably a very independent person. | 30:44 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah, yeah, she's great. Yeah. Both my kids are real nice kids. When I say nice, I mean they don't jump every time I say do something. I mean, they'll argue with me some stuff. But I mean there's love there. | 30:44 |
| Tunga White | Love and respect? | 31:15 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Like they say at school. One of them says, Yeah daddy, I just really know who you are. She says. Because in high school—She tells stories like this, some girl, girls would come up and say, "You got a nice daddy." She said she could never really realize it. And she said, a nice daddy. Because they didn't have a daddy see? And over at school, if she needed a dollar, a quarter, a nickel, I was right there. I wasn't in her hair all the time. And none of the girls at that time could say I was fresh. So she didn't have to hear that. So my rep there was pretty fair. Now she says, now she understands. | 31:16 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. It takes time. | 32:31 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. Because so many girls, so many kids out there, parents, didn't have them. She knew tennis shoes. She got them. Anything she needed. But they don't ask for much. That's the thing about it. They don't ask for anything. | 32:32 |
| Tunga White | Well, they're independent. | 32:50 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, that's right. So I give them what I want to give them, but they don't ask. She's 49. So when I went on down there. I gave her a $50 bill. I said, "This is for each of yours years." Like that. Like that. But she wasn't looking for anything. 50 years is an awful lot. But that's more than she had. You see? | 32:50 |
| Tunga White | One last set of questions. It pertains to race relations and the experiences you had while in the South dealing with Whites and, you know, information on any racial biases, any kind of discrimination or anything like that? On friends, or relatives? | 33:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | My experience in the south has been very pleasant. I don't know whether the way I came up or not. I can cite a few instances. When I retired in 73, the picture was in the paper, apparently. And I got a telephone call from these people over in Chapel Hill. And they wanted if I'd be interested in working in a boys' camp. So I told the lady, I said, You know, I'm an old man now." I said, she said, "We want somebody with maturity." And the camp is in West Virginia. She says, "We'd like to talk with you." And she said, "We can come over to see you or you can come to see us and just talk to see what's what." So I said, "I'll come over to see you." And they gave me directions to their house in Chapel Hill. So I went over there and I talked with them. They told me they wanted somebody with maturity and that my record as a coach seemed to be all right. Here, they're White and I'm Black. | 33:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so I asked some questions. "How many you have, pretty many Black kids in there?" They said, "We've had a few, one now and then, two and there." She said, "Because we come out of Washington." And it cost a lot at that time. What I would call a lot. So I said, "Okay, I'd go." So I went up to the camp and there were three or four Black kids up there. And so I went there off and off for six years. And they treated me like a king. | 35:15 |
| Tunga White | Really? | 35:57 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh yeah, I would. Coach Blunt was somebody else up there. I've been lucky. You can die of my ego. You can feel it. I've been lucky. And because I can mix with White, Black—And we had White, Black, German, Scotch, we had everything up there. And so I just got along. The Black kids, the White kids, the Jew kids. Didn't matter. The big shots, the little shots. I've always been able to talk to anybody. And so every year you here, "When is Coach Blunt coming up? Is he coming up?" All like that. So that was my experience there. Here in this town, I've coached a lot of White girls. | 35:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I coached in the county. White guys. Something's in me in the paper. I'll get calls, I'll get invited out. Let's go eat. My wife and I and the kid. I've gone there. I've gone to UNC basketball—I did this. I hated I'd never do it again. I went with a daughter of a professor over there. I had coached his children track with our summer program for a couple years. And they kept asking me to come to a game, but I thought I was going to go with the family. There was no one but the daughter. And when I got there to go in there, she grab my arm. No children, don't do that. So I sat up there in that thing and I sweated the whole night. | 36:57 |
| Tunga White | The whole night? | 37:59 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Whole night, I'm sitting up there. Here, I'm sitting over there with the faculty, their section and with her and she's attentive and [indistinct 00:38:09]. I guess she's about 20, 21, like that. And I brought her home. Her daddy brought her over there. I met her then. And I was to take her home. And I brought her home and I don't know where she is now. She and her sister. But anyhow, that went on for—That's family. My wife was diabetic. Her mother had come and bring food that they had cooked, some bread. This little thing. Little thing like that. | 37:59 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So that's been my—That's just one of many instances when the Duke team had had their reception in the Cameron Stadium over there, this lady calls me and said, "Coach says Lenny can't make it to the Duke reception to the championship team. You want to be my date? I said, "Yeah, yeah, I'll go." I said. She said, "I'll come, I'll pick you up." Drove over here, picked me up. Took me over there. We walked in there and yeah, yeah. She got ahold my arm. I don't know about White women. (White laughs). And I sat at the desk table with a couple of the doctors over there and the track coach Al Buehler and all my best friends there. This has gone all the way a long time. And it was traced back when I was substitute teaching and I had her daughter over at one of these schools. | 38:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so in the substitute, I'd be in this class, that class. But it was integrated. So this day they raised a lot of sand. "So y'all going to come back after school?" Because I guess I was the only substitute teacher who ever brought kids back after school. And the fact the principal had to tell me, "Don't keep them so long." And so I kept them back. Everybody came back except Lisa. So I said, "Well where's Lisa Thunderbirk?" I think she had something—She had a piano lesson or something that she had to get home, blah blah blah blah. So after a while I came about 45 minutes. So I'm on my way out. Here comes Lisa running. | 40:05 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I said, "What you doing?" She said, "I come back after school." I said, "Well we're leaving now." I said, "What happened?" She said, "When I got home, I told my mother that I was supposed to stay after school and I didn't because we had a substitute teacher." Her mama put in the car and brought her back. That's right. Now that was the first time I had ever met them. And a friendship started there. A relationship with that whole family just like that all the way through. And Valentine day, she brought her two daughters over here and brought probably some cookies, stuff like that. She lives in Cary. So that's just one of many, many relationships that's on a higher level, a Duke level. Then some on other levels. Policemen. I have coached White policemen and I just haven't had any trouble at all. | 40:56 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I think it's because I grew up not having to awe at them. I mean they're just another human being. I don't have any hatred because they're White. I don't, and I don't have any inferiority because I'm Black. They're just another man or another woman. And so I've had tremendous luck here. The guy who writes the articles on me, most of them is White. Met him 20 some odd years ago. He came over here and wanted to talk to me. That's why I was in [indistinct 00:43:02] and I was trying to put him together with a girl, Terry Benson. I said, "Boy, I said, you sure mess me up when you didn't marry Terry." He said, "Don't blame me." He said, "It was Terry." He was crazy. He still—That was 20 some odd year—And he's still single. Terry's married and she sent me an invitation to her— | 42:16 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I'm out there, the predominantly White school with a few Blacks and they've treated me, the principal—They would entertain people, the coaches and whoever helped them out there. My wife and I for years, we went to the Angus Barn at the steakhouse down there, which he was in, the principal at the time. I haven't had—I can't recall a situation I've had here that has infuriated me. Because now I didn't march, but I stopped going to the baseball field because you'd have to go around the back. I stopped going to the movies. I don't go to the movies because you had to sit up there. I stopped going to any supermarket, A&P in which the boy all he did was—A bag boy. | 43:31 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I supported everything that was done except I didn't march. And I've had some of my boys down there say, "Coach, you never come into A&P, but a whole lot of them other teachers do." You know, kind of like that. And so as far as race relations, I haven't had anything. Now I know it's here because my daughter took her kids out to a place called Wood Lake for the elementary school, the one that was sick, went to fifth grade and she was furious. She was telling me how well they kept this spot, had everything, she would describe it. Daddy, "I want to take you out there." Because she's of the new breed. See? And she's never had the experience integration like I did. She's never had to sit in the back of the bus. She's never had to sit in a Jim Crow train up in the front with all the cinders coming in. | 44:41 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | She's never had to sit in the bus station. She's never had to go around and get served like I have. Different places. She's never had that, which is good. I'm glad she didn't, but I had it. And I can appreciate what we can do now by comparing it with what we couldn't do. Down at LSU down there in Baton Rouge, we'd go to the big football game where we'd go in the back gates. They were charging everybody else a big amount to get in. And we getting in for 50 cents. Sit behind the goal line. I said, "So what?" I said, "I don't care. I'm seeing the same big shots up there." Like I said, I've had some nasty things. Not too nasty. I've been refused. Yeah, I guess nasty. I've been refused service when my wife was pregnant. | 46:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I just look at a redneck and said, "Well, that's just the way he is." I'd driven down and stopped up here, just on the other side of North Carolina in Virginia to get gas. I sat out there, sat out there, sat out there. This was before your self service. | 0:01 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 0:20 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And the man didn't come out, so I went on in there. And he's in those khaki pants, you know how they dress up. He's dressed up in that. And he looked like he didn't want to come out. So finally I went back out. Took quite a while to come out, so when he finally come out, took off and I just cranked up and left. My wife said, "What are you doing now?" I said, "I don't want none of that cracker's gas." I said on there—But I just wanted to see if he was going to come out. | 0:22 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, I've had to go around places and I've gone places—I've gone in where I thought I was going to get it, and they'd tell me I'd have to go around the back. That's right up in there—Virginia was tough, you know? Oh, yeah. Virginia's tough— | 1:06 |
| Tunga White | What's the toughest place you've ever had to live in as far as race relations? | 1:20 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Let me see. I might say Virginia, up there. Yeah. Lawrenceville up there in Virginia. I think that was—Let's see, that was way back in the early '20s. But I've spent two summers in Tallahassee. But it might be because I've avoided it, see? If you didn't want me in there, I don't have to waste my time to go on into it. In other words, maybe I'm not a fighter to that extent, see? Now, then again, I want to say this because I have experienced being with Whites all my life, and the best thing that ever happened to me was to get down here with Blacks. And I'm just as happy as I can be. Yeah. | 1:42 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't know whether that is it or not, but my daughter Frankie is the same way. She's absolutely the same. Whites don't mean anything to her. Blacks don't mean anything to her. We're all the same, see? And my daughter, this one here, works out of Duke. When she goes to eat every lunch hour, it's a White girl with me working the office. And this one here, new. I don't know if this was a new one. I don't think this is the one that she goes out there, but there's another one [indistinct 00:03:21] and this friend that she goes out to eat all the time, her husband does not like Black folk, but Dawn, she calls her, they talk about it, about her husband and this and that, that he has had some bad experiences with them and that's the way he feels about it. But he likes Linda. Linda's all right, see? | 2:40 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:03:53]. | 3:52 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, like that. | 3:52 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 3:55 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And they'll talk about it. He'll say, "Well, yeah, Linda, but everybody not like you." And so he's had some with Dawn. And I went up there to take my grandson up there, and she say, "Daddy, I want you to meet so-and-so," up there. And the people, some girl, then they say, "I heard a whole lot about you," just like this lady here, this Dawn here. She's going to get with Linda and she wants to meet me. Well, I said no, because she's interested in track. And so she was talking that track, though. I just think that she's only Black when she's working with—She's working for the doctor. Her job working with the doctor is to deal with cocaine babies and mothers who are on cocaine. | 3:55 |
| Tunga White | Wow. | 4:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And when they do the experiment, they get these rabbits. They use rabbits and they impregnate them. And so she orders these rabbits and gets them in there. But she has to inject them. You have control group over here, another group over here that she injects. She inject these rabbits, then she has to deal with them about three times a day. And during that three-week period, she's working like a dog out there. | 4:54 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. | 5:28 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Then they will operate on those rabbits. Then they have to kill them afterwards. That's the thing that really, really— | 5:29 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:05:40] animal testing. | 5:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. It is, because they have to test the brain, the effect that it has on the brain. So it's a grant, and she's working with this doctor, Janine, she calls her. | 5:42 |
| Tunga White | It sounds like an interesting project. | 5:55 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | It is. But she's been out there I think for four or five years now. She worked with another lady. I forget what she was doing. She finished over here and then she went to Tuskegee and she finished school, veterinary medicine, down there. | 5:58 |
| Tunga White | Okay [indistinct 00:06:12]. | 6:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. She's a vet. | 6:11 |
| Tunga White | One of the guys that's on our team, he's at Tuskegee alumni. | 6:12 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, he is? | 6:12 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh (affirmative). The one that goes to Atlanta University [indistinct 00:06:23]. | 6:12 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 6:12 |
| Tunga White | And then one of my groups will be doing work at Tuskegee. | 6:23 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh. | 6:27 |
| Tunga White | So. | 6:27 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 6:28 |
| Tunga White | He'll go back to his old stomping ground. | 6:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's right. I haven't been down there since she graduated. I think she graduated in '59. | 6:31 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 6:34 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I went down there and I planned to send them back, to let them go back, give them some money to go back next year and run down there. | 6:36 |
| Tunga White | I am just—You just talk so well and so long, so all we have to do is this. | 6:51 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I'd be— | 6:56 |
| Tunga White | [crosstalk 00:06:58] it's lunchtime. Do you want me to bring you some lunch back? | 6:56 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, no, no, no. | 7:08 |
| Tunga White | Oh, we can. | 7:08 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | All right, this is a [indistinct 00:07:08]. This was an affair that they had, which dedicated a field to me. | 7:08 |
| Tunga White | Oh, cool. | 7:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And this was the principal of where the school's at. | 7:20 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 7:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This was, I think—There's my wife, my wife's there. Yeah, see, it was quite new that time. | 7:30 |
| Tunga White | Well, how long ago were these pictures taken? | 8:03 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | 1986. | 8:03 |
| Tunga White | Okay. Judge Johnson and this is his wife? | 8:03 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, see? | 8:03 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. These are more pictures from— | 8:03 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, that's a lot of— | 8:03 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:08:03]. | 8:03 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | You ever hear of Ben Ruffin? Yeah, you talk about an activist, he was something else. He was one of my basketball players, him speaking there. And he's great. Yeah. See, that's my daughter there. | 8:05 |
| Tunga White | Okay. | 8:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's my daughter. This is my wife. | 8:43 |
| Tunga White | Wife, yeah. | 8:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | At that affair. | 8:43 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 8:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This is right here. Oh, yeah, now that's that Lisa I was saying about. | 8:43 |
| Tunga White | Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. | 8:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, here's one that— | 8:43 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:08:44]. | 8:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 8:43 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:08:44]. | 8:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, see here's one that they brought back. Mother brought her back, so she was out of [indistinct 00:08:52], too. This is my assistant track coach. We'd been together 11 years. | 8:46 |
| Tunga White | Oh, wow. [indistinct 00:08:59]. | 8:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Mm-hmm. | 8:59 |
| Tunga White | Who is this, superintendent [indistinct 00:09:06] Henry, the superintendent of what? | 9:04 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Of the city schools. | 9:06 |
| Tunga White | Oh, city schools, okay. | 9:06 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. Yeah. | 9:07 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:09:08]. | 9:07 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 9:07 |
| Tunga White | Superintendent. | 9:07 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 9:07 |
| Tunga White | That's great. Is it predominantly Black school district? | 9:07 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, this is a whole city. This is Al Buehler, he's the track coach out at Duke. He's been there for years. And that was me. He's from Mississippi, Hattiesburg. | 9:17 |
| Tunga White | Oh, really? | 9:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 9:45 |
| Tunga White | What does he do in Hattiesburg? Oh, he's at USM? | 9:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, he's a businessman, I guess. CPA. | 9:45 |
| Tunga White | Oh, okay. Because I did my undergraduate work there in Hattiesburg, University of Southern Mississippi. | 9:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah? | 9:45 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 9:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, this is there. He used to live here, his kids still live here, but his family moved back down there. | 10:02 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:10:15]. | 10:10 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. Yeah, I do. | 10:10 |
| Tunga White | Oh, that's nice. [indistinct 00:10:21]. Yeah [indistinct 00:10:22]. | 10:21 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Uh-huh. But yeah, that's one of those boys and this one of the girls. This is Judge Johnson. | 10:21 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 10:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And he lived down the street. He's dean of men, one of the boys I coached. I coached him. This is a guy just called me, up here. | 10:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't think I've looked in this book since—It's been ages. And he was on the school board. | 10:30 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 10:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. This was the governor's representative. | 10:41 |
| Tunga White | Ooh. This is nice. That's a [indistinct 00:11:19]. | 10:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This is my Grace. | 10:49 |
| Tunga White | Oh, really? | 10:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, he's in Mobile, Alabama now. This young lady, the one I went to Charlotte with. She's a pediatrician. She's one of the few Black cardiologists. She's at Duke. | 11:25 |
| Tunga White | Wow. | 11:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, I got pictures of her and her kids. She's not married, but her kids, she's adopted them. Two boys. | 11:48 |
| Tunga White | That's good. | 12:03 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And one of the finest persons in the world. Yeah. Her daddy and mother are dead, and she— | 12:03 |
| Tunga White | What are these, some pictures from what? | 12:15 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Oh, yeah. That's some pictures that they—You've heard of North Carolina Mutual here. | 12:15 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm (affirmative). | 12:19 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, they had a reception there. And they've got some pictures and clippings and stuff that I had— | 12:19 |
| Tunga White | So do you have any of those pictures and clippings? | 12:27 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 12:29 |
| Tunga White | What is this? | 12:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, see, that the— | 12:32 |
| Tunga White | Dedicated to you? | 12:33 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, that was at the field. That's what they built. | 12:36 |
| Tunga White | Now, this is at the school? | 12:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This is down here, the middle school. | 12:40 |
| Tunga White | Oh, really? | 12:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 12:45 |
| Tunga White | I've not seen a picture of that. | 12:45 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Shepard of that. Uh-huh. That's down here. | 12:47 |
| Tunga White | But I would like to see these. Do you have these around? | 12:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | The what? | 12:51 |
| Tunga White | Any of these clippings and things from the old days? | 12:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, I think I have some. | 12:53 |
| Tunga White | I'd like to see those if you could find them. | 12:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so there's— | 12:53 |
| Tunga White | I'm going to try to find them later. | 12:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 12:53 |
| Tunga White | Find me some time this afternoon we'll try and find the [indistinct 00:13:13]. | 12:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, it's just down from Fayetteville Street. You go down and less than a mile, and it's to your left down there on the field. Ask for Shepard School, Shepard Junior High or Shepard Middle School. | 13:15 |
| Tunga White | I'm going to find it. I'll take some pictures of it. | 13:28 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Okay. | 13:28 |
| Tunga White | Put it with the interview and everything. | 13:32 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Uh-huh. Yeah, they had the band, they had the— | 13:34 |
| Tunga White | Now, this is great. You still have this? | 13:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Let's see. | 13:42 |
| Tunga White | That's wonderful. Your degree? | 13:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. | 13:46 |
| Tunga White | Wow. That's great. [indistinct 00:13:58]. I'm going to make a note of it that you have your [indistinct 00:14:02]. | 13:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Let me get out of that, close that— | 14:09 |
| Tunga White | Okay. | 14:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:14:15]. Yeah. Okay. | 14:11 |
| Tunga White | Oh, my goodness. How old is this woman here? | 14:11 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That was my auntie that died at 103. That was my mother. And then my mother remarried, she married Reverend Mitchell. | 14:25 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 14:30 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So this is when—this is my sister when she was cutting the cake for my auntie on her, happy birthday. | 14:38 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:14:46]. | 14:39 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And that was the time when Jimmy Carter was the president. | 14:46 |
| Tunga White | President. Uh-huh. | 14:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And they sent—send those things. Yeah. | 14:48 |
| Tunga White | Yeah, and then they send people who turn 100, oh yeah. That's good. | 14:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That was my auntie there. Boy, she was sharp. She cutthroat, in her day. | 14:48 |
| Tunga White | Oh, yeah. What did she do? | 14:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Just like everybody else up there, housekeep, take care of housings, custodian. There's my wife there when she was Queen of May over at the St. Aug. | 15:04 |
| Tunga White | Those are great. Those are really nice. | 15:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, absolutely. | 15:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | There's my daughter getting married. She's 18 there. | 15:17 |
| Tunga White | Oh. Time flies, huh? | 15:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Time flies, yeah. That was the wedding time right there. [indistinct 00:15:49] husband, he was [indistinct 00:15:50]. | 15:17 |
| Tunga White | Oh. | 15:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | He's 10. | 15:17 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:15:58]. | 15:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | He's from Jamaica, her husband. Yeah. [indistinct 00:16:05] is a pistol, boy. | 15:17 |
| Tunga White | These are really great, especially the ones you've had [indistinct 00:16:12]. Well, is it possible for me to get a copy to you [indistinct 00:16:22] some of these pictures? I wouldn't have to take them out of the wrapper, the paper here. [indistinct 00:16:29]. | 15:17 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | What do you call a copy scanner? | 16:29 |
| Tunga White | I usually have to pay them to [indistinct 00:16:34] pictures and develop and then they copy. A copy scan is on a stand, if you put a camera on it, and the camera takes pictures of the pictures, but the pictures look just like they do here, without having to go to take the time to shipping something to a developer. | 16:34 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Do you have one? | 16:53 |
| Tunga White | Yeah, I have one at the center. Maybe if I can't come back today before we leave tomorrow— | 16:54 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, tomorrow, yeah. | 17:01 |
| Tunga White | Maybe I can tell one of the people at the center to come by here and bring the copy scanner and take some of these [indistinct 00:17:10] make some copies of these. | 17:01 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah. These are what you're talking about, the— | 17:09 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. Things like that, yeah, of this time period [indistinct 00:17:15] '30s. | 17:15 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Uh-huh. Yeah, well, it would be all right with me. Should've got started earlier over here. | 17:22 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:17:47]. | 17:43 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Amanda. Eliza. | 17:51 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:18:02]. | 17:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | A-E. | 18:02 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:18:05]. | 18:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | You want all her name? Goodman. That was her maiden name. Blunt, B-L-U-N-T. | 18:05 |
| Tunga White | No, give me all of them. | 18:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Mitchell. | 18:09 |
| Tunga White | Do you know her date of birth? | 18:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I have it someplace. I have birth certificates, but I couldn't locate it. My mother died at 91, and I think it runs very closely with—I'm 86, 10 years be 96, 106, 116, let's see. 1984— | 18:26 |
| Tunga White | How old did you say she was when she died? | 18:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | 91. | 18:35 |
| Tunga White | 91? And she died in '84? | 18:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | No, no, she died earlier. | 18:35 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:19:12]. | 18:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I can't remember the date, though. She died at 91, and she'd be 116 now. | 18:35 |
| Tunga White | I'll figure it out. | 18:35 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So you'll figure that out. | 19:39 |
| Tunga White | All right. Her place of birth? | 19:40 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I believe it was in Norfolk. Yeah, Norfolk, Virginia near [indistinct 00:19:57]. | 19:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:20:01]. And it was domestic work. | 19:53 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what it was. Domestic. They leave the south, and that's what they're doing. She said she was glad to get out of that field. That wasn't nothing for her. | 20:03 |
| Tunga White | I know, my family, they didn't [indistinct 00:20:19]. | 20:15 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | She did, too. I used to love it down there, though. I'd go down and do— | 20:23 |
| Tunga White | But you wouldn't want to live there. | 20:24 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Uh-uh. No way. | 20:28 |
| Tunga White | I didn't think so. Your father's first name and last name? | 20:42 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Frank Lester Blunt. | 20:46 |
| Tunga White | And do you know his— | 20:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I have no conceptions, just I was five when he died. | 20:46 |
| Tunga White | Well, I'll figure it out. | 20:51 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And I think he was 39 when he died. That's what I remember. | 20:55 |
| Tunga White | And do you know what city he was born in? | 20:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Hillsborough, North Carolina. Across the line, Orange County. | 20:58 |
| Tunga White | Is it Orange County? | 20:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, Orange County. | 20:58 |
| Tunga White | And what was his occupation? | 20:58 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | He worked in yards and that type of thing. Some people call that domestic work, house man or something like that. That type of—He didn't work in any mills or factories or nothing like that. That's how he got to know so many people in town cutting grass, so— | 21:31 |
| Tunga White | Okay, now I need to get some information on your brothers and sisters. | 21:49 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I don't know too much about them. | 21:58 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 22:02 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | If I could locate the one thing that I'm looking for, I can— | 22:06 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:22:09]. | 22:07 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:22:09]. | 22:07 |
| Tunga White | Why don't you get the names [indistinct 00:22:09]? | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:22:09] because of where [indistinct 00:22:09]. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:23:35]. (laughs) | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | See, my mother and father [indistinct 00:23:46]. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | Because he didn't [indistinct 00:23:53]. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This is kind of [indistinct 00:24:31]. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | This has Bill and [indistinct 00:24:48]. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:25:19]. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | Oh, yes. [indistinct 00:25:44]. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:25:44]. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | I could be here all day. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Let me know how [indistinct 00:25:50]. I guess [indistinct 00:25:55]. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | This is a gold mine. [indistinct 00:26:57]. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:26:59]. At least, I think that's where that was. [indistinct 00:27:06]. What does it say on there? This is— | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | This says Gretchen Common, great-granddaughter of Ella Goodman Moore, granddaughter of first cousin Ethel Moore. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Yeah, that's it. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | Daughter of second cousin Moore, Richie [indistinct 00:27:27] the third. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | This is a great. Ella's a great-granddaughter. Ethel here— | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | Is the granddaughter. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Granddaughter. Yeah, that's why they [indistinct 00:27:39]. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | And they are what to you? | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | These are my first cousins. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | First cousins. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | My mother's sister. | 22:09 |
| Tunga White | Okay, so these are sisters and that's the daughter there. | 22:09 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | These are sisters there. These daughters are first cousins. Okay? And so I'd be second cousin or third cousin to Gretchen and them, see? | 27:57 |
| Tunga White | Okay. | 28:04 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And that's all because they were—That family on that side were trying to do one of those roots things, they were— | 28:06 |
| Tunga White | And that's how they found them? | 28:16 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So they caught up with me, you see? So this is from Providence, Rhode Island. | 28:18 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. | 28:24 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | And so Freida and I, we've been in contact [indistinct 00:28:32] sister [indistinct 00:28:33]. So they were trying to find out if I had anything that would help on their side. | 28:25 |
| Tunga White | You have Rhode Island paper [indistinct 00:28:48]? | 28:46 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Mm-hmm. That's dealing with up in Massachusetts— | 28:51 |
| Tunga White | So your aunt Martha [indistinct 00:28:59]. | 28:55 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | That's right. She was everybody's auntie. She's the most lovable person in the world, see? So when I had more time, I went around and we started hunting up stuff, and she'd send me stuff and I'd see her out something. And so then we started up there in Massachusetts, checking up on what was happening up there, see, as far as Blacks are concerned up there. | 28:59 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:30:29]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Well, no, [indistinct 00:30:43] the way [indistinct 00:30:45]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | Uh-huh. [indistinct 00:30:48]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:30:54]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:31:11]. There's the town [indistinct 00:31:25] and the county and the state and how long you lived [indistinct 00:31:28]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:31:30]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:34:21]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:34:24]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:34:50] the name of the school [indistinct 00:35:04]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:35:10]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:35:29]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:35:29]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:35:29]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:35:29]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | So you got the [indistinct 00:36:47]. And then when [indistinct 00:37:06]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | I have no [indistinct 00:37:09]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | Yeah. [indistinct 00:37:11] and the dates [indistinct 00:37:36]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:37:46]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:37:59]. We'll talk about the only [indistinct 00:38:02] til now, the one that was [indistinct 00:38:02]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:38:10]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Right. [indistinct 00:39:16]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | Okay, well, when will you be doing the [indistinct 00:39:24]? | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:39:37]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | Okay. [indistinct 00:39:44]. | 29:48 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | Pancakes [indistinct 00:39:50] french fries and [indistinct 00:39:55]. | 29:48 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:40:40]. See, I had been here [indistinct 00:41:00] 54 and 55 [indistinct 00:41:03] here at 4 in the morning [indistinct 00:41:07]. | 35:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:41:33]. | 35:29 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:41:40]. | 35:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:42:04]. | 35:29 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:42:42]. | 35:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:42:52]. | 35:29 |
| Tunga White | And you were [indistinct 00:43:10]. | 35:29 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:43:24]. | 35:29 |
| Tunga White | Now you know your award [indistinct 00:43:31]. | 35:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:43:53]. | 35:38 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:44:58]. | 35:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:45:08]. | 35:38 |
| Tunga White | Mm-hmm. | 35:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | So if I don't go [indistinct 00:46:00]. | 35:38 |
| Tunga White | So you have to [indistinct 00:46:24]. | 35:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:46:23]. | 35:38 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:46:29]. | 35:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:46:32]. | 35:38 |
| Tunga White | Got it. | 35:38 |
| Russell Evans Blunt | [indistinct 00:46:54]. | 35:38 |
| Tunga White | [indistinct 00:47:01]. | 35:38 |
Item Info
Related Items
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund