Steve Runkle

GEORGE GILLIAM: [00:00:01] Right.  It is Thursday March 24, 2022.  With me is Steve Runkle and Lorenzo Dickerson.  Steve, what is your date of birth?  

STEVE RUNKLE: [00:00:17] August 1, 1942.  

GG: [00:00:25] And where did you go for high school?  

SR: [00:00:28] I went the last three years at Lane High School in Charlottesville.  My eighth grade year and my ninth grade year we lived in Appomattox and I went to Appomattox High School.  

GG: [00:00:43] To Appomattox?  

SR: [00:00:43] Yes.  

GG: [00:00:52] And who were the colleges that recruited you?  

SR: [00:00:58] Well UVA primarily but [00:01:00] I had contact with South Carolina, William & Mary briefly I think.  It’s only been sixty-two years ago.  (laughter)

GG: [00:01:25] Everybody who recruited were they interested primarily in football or baseball, basketball?  

SR: [00:01:30] It was all football.  Anybody that recruited me was for football, yeah.  

GG: [00:01:43] And then UVA was the only college you attended.  

SR: [00:01:47] Correct.  

GG: [00:01:53] Did you know two people, a boy named John Bailey and a [00:02:00] girl named Suzanne Frederickson?  Do those names ring any bells?  

SR: [00:02:10] No, but I’m horrible with names.  

GG: [00:02:15] I am too, Fred.  (laughter) 

SR: [00:02:21] I don’t remember them.  

GG: [00:02:23] There are two people who were sent -- in your junior year they were sent up to New Jersey to go to a school for a week to see what it was like to go to school with Black kids.  And they were to come back.  We’re trying to catch up with them because that’s a pretty interesting assignment.  

SR: [00:02:46] Yeah, it really is.  Yeah.

GG: [00:02:49] But we haven’t found anybody who knows them or knows where they are.  

SR: [00:02:53] Interesting.  

GG: [00:02:54] Yeah.  

SR: [00:02:57] So they were a year ahead of me?  

GG: [00:02:58] Yes.  

SR: [00:03:00] Okay.  I don’t have that -- has anybody looked up in the yearbook and --

GG: [00:03:07] Yeah.  No, we’ve got -- 

SR: [00:03:09] You see them but you can’t find them.  (laughter)

GG: [00:03:13] We’ve got a researcher who’s hell on wheels and she goes, you know, everything, tombstones.  What about your parents?  What are your mother and father’s names?

SR: [00:03:26] My father was Herbert Walker Runkle and my mother was Mary Katherine Runkle, her maiden name was Nunn.  

GG: [00:03:45] And what did they do?  They both worked?  

SR: [00:03:49] My dad, who was born in 1895, his primary -- he had a couple [00:04:00] of jobs.  He grew up in Greene County and he had eight siblings.  I think there were eight total counting him, him and seven siblings, I’m sorry.  And he ended up running a survey party group for the highway department, Virginia Highway Department.  That was not his first job, he lived in Greene County, and he lived on a farm in Greene County, so initially at age fourteen, he was the oldest remaining male in the family there, so the length of his school lasted till he was about twelve years old, thirteen years old maybe.  

GG: [00:04:54] But he became a surveyor?  

SR: [00:04:56] He became a surveyor not by [00:05:00] an educational process, just by doing it and learning how to do it with people who knew how to do it.  And then from that -- as a matter of fact they surveyed Route 33 over the mountains and many other places.  So they spent a lot of time, in their surveying work, they spent a lot of time camping out where these new roads were to be and they just -- so they worked through the mountain and did it in various places.  All in Virginia, but most of them kind of in the Central and Western part of Virginia.  

And my mother was a -- he ultimately became a resident engineer.  He first as a resident engineer, [00:06:00] took over the Martinsville area, a couple of the estates, most of the residences had two or three estates that the resident engineer would cover.  His first assignment was in Martinsville, his second one was in South Boston, and the third one was in Appomattox.  

GG: [00:06:29] That’s why you got to school in Appomattox.  

SR: [00:06:31] Yeah.  I was born in Martinsville, I think we moved to South Boston when I was about four or five, something like that, and then Halifax is a mile or two away from South Boston and that’s where the residency office was, so then we moved over to Halifax, and that’s where I started school.  [00:07:00] 

GG: [00:07:03] And you survived it.

SR: [00:07:05] (laughs) 

GG: [00:07:11] Were public affairs ever discussed in your house?  Were people paying attention to what was going on in the state or -- because being a highway department in many places is considered a political job.  

SR: [00:07:29] It wasn’t discussed in our household very much but he had discussions with other people who wanted things done for them basically or as part of the job, but it didn’t carry over much to home.

GG: [00:07:48] So when Brown v. Board of Education came down in 1954, was that discussed at home at all?

SR: [00:07:55] The what?  I’m sorry.  

GG: [00:07:57] When Brown v. Board of Education was -- [00:08:00]

SR: [00:08:01] Well my mother was a teacher of course in high school.  Maybe I didn’t tell you that, but she was a teacher, and she taught in Appomattox -- because we left there in 1957 so we lived in Appomattox and there was a lot of discussion among people pro and con about --

GG: [00:08:31] I’d say most of it was con probably.  

SR: [00:08:34] Yeah, right.  As a matter of fact, she and the principal’s wife, who was also a teacher, they made some -- they got in some trouble with people who didn’t think there ought to be any integration.  (laughs)

GG: [00:08:57] Oh really?  Was a cross [00:09:00] burned on their lawn or something?  

SR: [00:09:02] No, no, nothing like that.  My mother was very headstrong.  She didn’t care what they thought, she would still say what she thought.  (laughs) 

GG: [00:09:22] What sort of -- did it break up a friendship?  

SR: [00:09:29] Not that I’m aware of.  We still -- as a matter of fact, the superintendent of the schools there would have us over for dinner now and then.  So they could at least communicate with each other even though I think he was -- didn’t have the same attitude that she did.  (laughs) 

GG: [00:09:55] Did you pick up on any of that?  Did you feel the tension that was --

SR: [00:09:59] No, I can tell you that [00:10:00] while we were in that area I went with my dad, I would travel with him frequently when I wasn’t in school.  

GG: [00:10:15] With your father?  

SR: [00:10:16] Yeah.  And we also at one point there was one of the hurricanes -- not hurricane, but what do you call it?  All the stuff that happens in the fall, the weather-related stuff.  He took me with him when they had bridge issues because of the weather, and it was raining, and storming, and all that kind of stuff, and actually I have another story after this one, I ended up as probably ten [00:11:00] maybe I was about twelve years old, I was helping the crews, and the crews at that time, a lot of them were prisoners, and I was working on the bridge doing stuff with two Black prisoners working with me, and so he didn’t have any issues letting me do that.  (laughs) 

GG: [00:11:35] Was that the first contact really that you had had?  

SR: [00:11:38] No, no.  The first contact of significance -- we lived, as I said, in Halifax, and there was a Black family that lived relatively close to us.  They were on somebody else’s land with a second house, [00:12:00] but I got to know their kids somewhat.  I just forgot the thing I was going to say.  

GG: [00:12:17] That never happens to me.  

SR: [00:12:18] No, no.  (laughs) It happens to me every day.  (laughs) Maybe that will come back to me.  

GG: [00:12:30] Yeah, we can come back.  You were an outstanding student.  You were in more groups -- can you give me the groups that you joined when you were in high school?  

SR: [00:12:41] If you really want that info, I got the -- I can go get one of the --

GG: [00:12:50] The yearbook?  

SR: [00:12:50] -- yearbook.

GG: [00:12:51] We’ve got all of that.  

SR: [00:12:51] Oh, you’ve got that?  

GG: [00:12:52] Oh yeah.  

SR: [00:12:53] Okay.  If you’re looking to -- I would just look at [00:13:00] my senior year, which would be the 1960 yearbook.  Not hard to find me in all (inaudible).  (laughter)  I don’t think I was the most -- there were people who were involved in more things than I was.  But I was involved in five or six of them at least, yeah.  

GG: [00:13:29] You played varsity -- what were the varsity sports that you played?  

SR: [00:13:34] I played football as a sophomore here because that’s the year that we moved here.  My first year here as a sophomore I played on the varsity football team and was a starter on the defensive side.  

GG: [00:13:54] In tenth and twelfth grade, and then eleventh grade, you were -- it was -- 

SR: [00:13:57] Tenth I was a sophomore, [00:14:00] I played -- I was primarily on defense playing cornerback.  My junior year for a while I was primarily a wide receiver and also played defense as a cornerback.  Halfway through the year they put me back at running back where I should have been all along.  Then the last year I was a full back and again played defense.  That was football.  

GG: [00:14:38] But you were voted the Most Valuable Player -- football.  

SR: [00:14:43] Yeah, I was for the -- when you held for the various schools.  I think I tied because Rock Hill had one that we kind of tied.  They wanted to make a selection from each of those schools as the most valuable player [00:15:00] but I was voted as the most valuable at Lane.  But Dwayne Bickers was the best, you know, we played different positions but he was the best player there.  

GG: [00:15:15] Basketball?  

SR: [00:15:16] No, at football.  Dwayne (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)

GG: [00:15:19] No, but you played basketball.  

SR: [00:15:20] I played basketball as well, yeah.  I was talking about football just then.  Yeah, I played basketball my freshman year, not my junior year, and my senior year.  But I played baseball all three years.  And primarily I really didn’t play much baseball until my junior and senior years.  I was on a team but I didn’t get as much play as I did -- otherwise I played all the time.  

GG: [00:15:51] You did have a team that was playing in 1958.  

SR: [00:15:57] Yeah.  

GG: [00:15:59] I thought that’s when the school [00:16:00] was closed.

SR: [00:16:01] It was but we had to play every game away from home.  

GG: [00:16:05] Okay.  

SR: [00:16:08] As a matter of fact, we beat Albemarle 35-0 I think.  (laughs) Actually that was the senior year it was five wins four losses, but that was the first time in six years that they’d had a winning season.  But my junior year we were four and five.  Of course all those years, those three years, all of them, we were playing Richmond teams for the most part.  Even the last year we had about 120 students in the high school and because everything was splitting up, kids were going to Rock Hill -- anyway, I can’t remember the exact number, but it wasn’t a very big class group, [00:17:00] and we played Thomas Jefferson and they had 2800 in three grades.  (laughs) We played Hermitage, they had pretty healthy sizes too.  We were playing teams that -- and we were in that conference but they -- 

GG: [00:17:19] Now who was your coach?

SR: [00:17:23] Of course Tommy Theodose was our senior year coach.  Ralph Mane was the head coach for my sophomore and junior year.  His son is a lawyer in town here.  The other guy, I’d have to look in the book in there.  He coached, he was an assistant coach, [00:18:00] he had played football at UVA.  He opened up some dry cleaning stores in town here and they still do a bunch of stuff.  He’s dead now, but they still -- the company that he started did a lot of cleaning of rugs and stuff like that.  For the life of me I can’t think of his name right now.  But I can tell you if you’ve got the books.  You’ll find it.  (laughs)

GG: [00:18:33] And then you were on the Honor Code Committee, tell me about that.  

SR: [00:18:36] I did what?  

GG: [00:18:37] On the Honor Code Committee?  What was that all about?  

SR: [00:18:44] You need to ask me some questions I know the answers to.  (laughter) I was looking in there because I knew I was going to get some of these questions.  I was looking in there and I was thinking the saying, “What in the hell [00:19:00] (inaudible).”  (laughs) I’m going to look in my book and see what it says real quick.  Oh lord.  (leaves room)

[Extraneous material redacted.]

SR: [00:19:42] Yeah, that was my junior year and this was -- I think this was the one the Honor Code thing was, in this thing.  There’s our football stuff.  [00:20:00] (paging through yearbook) Player’s Club, Debate Society.  (inaudible) I wasn’t in the choir.  I know darn well it’s in here somewhere.  Monogram Club, I was in that.  

GG: [00:20:53] And the Key Club?  

SR: [00:20:55] I was in the Key Club.  [00:21:00] Honor Code Committee.  Well the Honor Code was altered this year, that being 59, I guess we would call it 60 since that’s when the graduation was.  “All students became automatically part of the system, the Honor Code Committee retains its function of issuing cards to those who (inaudible) infractions after the offender has been indicted by the Rules Committee.”  I guess we just kind of like UVA, we made sure somebody wasn’t cheating.  (laughs)

GG: [00:21:49] Was that a problem?  

SR: [00:21:51] I don’t remember.  I don’t remember ever hearing about anybody cheating.  (laughs) [00:22:00] But I certainly don’t remember talking to -- being involved with anybody that had violated the Honor Code.  Maybe I did but I don’t remember it.  

GG: [00:22:23] So was your relationship with the coach, particularly when you got to your senior year, was [Tommy] Theodose, did you have a good relationship with him?  Did he talk to you about sort of where football was going to go and did he appear to --

SR: [00:22:48] I didn’t have any prob-- I got along very well with Tommy [Theodose], yeah.  I thought he was a good coach.  Of course [00:23:00] Joe Binger I liked a lot too, who was the assistant coach.  I didn’t -- no, I mean, there was by far in my judgment my best experience at least at Lane High School.  Yeah.  

GG: [00:23:22] I guess what I’m trying to figure out is you were obviously a student leader, you were highly respected and liked, and I was wondering if anybody in the administration, and I would include Tommy in that, talked to you, and said we’ve been ordered by the Court to make this change to have Black kids, and it’s going to be a different culture, and we’d like your help in --

SR: [00:23:57] That’s kind of what I was saying before, remember when we talked at your home [00:24:00] before.  I thought that, but I can’t swear absolutely, that I met with -- or that there was a group of people, four or five, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t -- not that I was in when the conversations were made.  I don’t think there would have been any more than three or four people at the most that I would recall.  My sense was, and what I was trying to convey the last time we talked about it was, that they thought maybe the athletes would have a -- particularly some of the senior folks, would have the ability to at least say leave that person alone, yeah, that kind of thing.  But after seeing that, that’s why I said what I said [00:25:00] when you first got here, that I’m pretty sure that either it might not have been a formal meeting, but I thought I had talked with the -- but I can’t swear that I did that.  But nevertheless, I know I personally, and I’m sure at least some of the other people felt like, that we ought to be protective of if there were some things going on that shouldn’t be going on, we ought to at least do what we could to stop that.  I did a few times tell people, hey, just cool it, don’t -- but it wasn’t like I pinned them down and did anything.  (laughs) [00:26:00] It was very traumatic for the poor kids that were there.  I wouldn’t have wanted to be in that position, I can tell you that.  

GG: [00:26:15] You mean for the new kids coming over.  

SR: [00:26:18] Yeah.  I think a couple of times on the stairs between classes and there were some things going on that I said things to people, said, hey, just cool it, and move away, kind of thing.  But I wouldn’t say that somebody was getting ready to push somebody downstairs or something.  

GG: [00:26:45] It just occurred to me that if I were the principal and I had a student in your position of respect, I would go to you and say, listen, we’re participating, it’s going to be tough.  

SR: [00:27:00] That’s kind of where I was and that’s kind of what I thought happened, but now I started feeling I’m not so damn sure.  As I said, I’m pretty sure I had some kind of conversation like that as well, but I don’t remember well enough to be 100% positive.  I do know that I tried to help in terms of making it easier for people so to speak.

GG: [00:27:39] Just about everybody we’ve talked to from Lane talks about two things.  One is there was a lot of tension.  

SR: [00:27:48] Right.

GG: [00:27:51] And number two, it required at some points, there was so much violence [00:28:00] or at least threats of violence that they had cops in the school on a regular basis.  Do you remember that?  

SR: [00:28:14] I don’t remember the cops being in the building but I don’t dispute that that didn’t happen, but I don’t remember that.  I tell you what, I am going to talk to Peyton [Humphrey] after -- you know and see if I can’t -- first, if he’d be willing to talk to you, if you’d like for me to, and two, what did he remember in that regard.  I’ll have to say I do think though that there were times when I said cool it to somebody.  But I do think there were a few times when [00:29:00] I kind of isolated him or her, more likely a him than her, and said, hey, I’m not going to get in a fight, but I’m -- you need to change your behavior or not do what you just did or something like that.  But a lot of times I think I just said hey guy or person, let them go on their way and you don’t need to harass them.

GG: [00:29:35] Yeah, that’s what I would have figured because you would be the type of person that could handle it.

SR: [00:29:41] Right.  But yeah, you know, it wasn’t like -- I think in some cases people think that Rock Hill was formed, Lane was -- I think in some cases they felt like [00:30:00] that that was -- that they didn’t think there would be issues here because these people thought this way, and these people thought that way, and these people all get along where they are, and these people all get along where they are.  I don’t think that was the case at Lane.  I think there were people that were not going to Rock Hill, they were going to Lane, and they still, you know, some of the kids had issue about it.  

GG: [00:30:29] N-word thrown around?  

SR: [00:30:32] Pardon?

GG: [00:30:32] The N-word thrown around?  

SR: [00:30:37] It probably was.  I don’t remember that frankly.  I tell you, had I heard one, I know I’d’ve had something to say.  But I don’t -- and maybe I did, it’s just again, I can’t remember all of it, exactly [00:31:00] what -- most of my interaction with people because of something like that was between classes, it probably was before classes in the morning or maybe after school, but it was when movement was going on, (inaudible) going up the steps, and you had this going on, stuff like that.  That’s when I did a lot of walking around in the school just to make sure it wasn’t getting -- trying to help, but not getting to the point where people were beating up on each other or something.  

GG: [00:31:41] Were you afraid of that?  

SR: [00:31:45] Of that happening?  Well I don’t know if it would be fair for me to say I was afraid of it.  I think I was concerned that if it did I needed to be ready to do something about it if I could.  [00:32:00] And maybe even get help with people that I knew that would be helpful along with me.  (laughs)

GG: [00:32:10] So what did you do for education during the fall of 1958?  Did you go to one of the basement classes or what did you do?  

SR: [00:32:19] My first class was at the Greek church.  That was physics for five hours.  

GG: [00:32:27] Ooh, how exciting.  

SR: [00:32:29] (laughs) The second -- now, I did physics there.  I’ve got this written down back in my office because I knew you were going to ask me that question.  I took physics, I did geometry, that was on a Friday and that was at one of the churches on Park Street or East High Street up here.  I think I did English [00:33:00] at the Episcopal Church.

GG: [00:33:06] On High Street there?  

SR: [00:33:07] Yeah, on High Street.  I think three of the churches on High Street were used.  But I did physics, geometry, English, Spanish, so I only did five because -- but I can’t remember offhand what the hell I did -- Spanish, English, geometry, must have been an easy class.  (laughs)

GG: [00:33:45] The delivery of knowledge was done a little bit differently.  

SR: [00:33:49] I’ll tell you what, now imagine -- oh, biology was probably one of them maybe or something like that.  But at any rate[00:34:00] -- and all of them were five hours long.  So you had a class -- you only got physics one day a week, the same thing on every one of these other classes.  So yeah.  I can just tell you I’m horrible at languages and sitting through Spanish for five hours?  I took Italian when we went to UVA.  I was so bad at languages.  I went to UVA, I went in, I had to take three years of language, and I took Italian because I was told by some of the athletes that’s the easy one.

GG: [00:34:49] That’s almost English.  

SR: [00:34:51] Yeah.  Well, I’m horrible at it, I mean, I’ll tell you, the first year I had all -- [00:35:00] on all the stuff I had -- in the first semester I got an A, but it was an older guy that had been teaching that there forever, and when we came back after Christmas, he had a party for the class in one of those classes off of Fontaine where some of the educators were there, and he had a big party for us, and about three or four days after the party he died.  So I get back in Italian in this second semester and they had a new Italian teacher who was from Italy, but he had moved here some time ago, moved down here and started teaching, and I never got higher than [00:36:00] a D on Italian for the rest of my two and a half years.  (laughter) And I still had a 3.4 grade point average overall with those four, it’s three each year, two each year, six.  

GG: [00:36:34] Did you think about going to Rock Hill?  

SR: [00:36:36] No.  No.  I wouldn’t go.  It doesn’t have anything to do with -- I mean, we lost several guys off the football team.  But I had no interest.  And then actually some of my [00:37:00] good friends Todd Allen and Steve Henderson, who have both died now, but Dwayne Bickers, and Todd Allen were all -- the guys that I -- the Hellman Boys went there and I liked both of them too.  I don’t know how you can tell -- if it had been strictly up to the kids who was going to go where, who knows what would have happened.  It would probably be somewhat different.  But I’m sure some of them got pressured this or to go that way.  

GG: [00:37:43] Had the football team or any of the other teams that you played on played against any teams that had Black players?  

SR: [00:37:52] No.  There wasn’t any integration yet in any of the [00:38:00] -- as far as I know any of the -- there may have been some in Northern Virginia for my senior year, I can’t remember.  And if not, it was soon after that that they had (inaudible) to the schools in Northern Virginia.

GG: [00:38:25] What did the Lane athletes or their parents, their fathers, think about the prospect of getting a number of the Burley players?  Was there a feeling that a Burley player is going to come in and take my son’s position?  Was that a factor that people were worried about?  

SR: [00:38:48] I don’t know.  I don’t think any of the guys that I played with even the previous year [00:39:00] -- and of course the previous year the schools were shut down for the first half of the year, but we still played, we just couldn’t play in Charlottesville.  I don’t think that there was much concern.  I could be wrong, I didn’t have any concern, I figured well, I think I’ll be able to keep playing.  If I can’t, too bad, right?  

GG: [00:39:33] I expect Theodose was pretty cold blooded about -- he was going to take the best players.  

SR: [00:39:39] No question, I don’t blame him, that’s his job.  Yeah, and since it’s -- let’s face it, since it has been integration, that’s where a lot of the athletes come from and [00:40:00] they should be rewarded for that.  I’d tell you right now, I think I could have played high school football and my dad had no problem playing.  

GG: [00:40:27] Were there any efforts that you were aware of to prepare the kids for this cultural shift?  

SR: [00:40:47] I don’t think I did anything that would -- I just tried to make sure that people were not going to be -- if I could.  I never gave [00:41:00] any speeches about hey, you need to do this, you need to do that, I just if I did anything, if I heard things that I didn’t think were appropriate or saw acts that I didn’t think were appropriate I would say you need to stop doing that.  

GG: [00:41:21] Did you discuss this with your parents at all?  It sounds like you were real close to your father, did you discuss with him sort of what you were envisioning as your responsibility to try and be a peacemaker?  

SR: [00:41:39] Actually I think when it came to that I think my mother was probably more -- it’s just like as I was saying earlier in our conversation that when she was at Appomattox she had -- she was adamant about [00:42:00] the issues that Black folks should have the ability to go to school where they wanted and whatnot.  It would have been interesting if I would have been around in 1962, 1963, 1964, or maybe a little bit longer than that 1965, and see what -- but I mean the reality is in 1958 and 1959 the fall, in terms of athletics, it wasn’t -- we weren’t in that situation yet.  Now in 1959 we were in a situation saying we’ve got four kids, I think, that aren’t going to be playing athletics [00:43:00] but that there could be some other issues.  We shouldn’t let things happen that shouldn’t happen.

GG: [00:43:10] I imagine it must have been quite different for the 1967 crowd because we’ve talked to both groups and everybody was nervous.  

SR: [00:43:25] Then, yeah.  

GG: [00:43:26] Yeah.  

SR: [00:43:27] Well I could see that.  I mean you look around college football anymore.  What was happening in colleges then, it was like the Northeastern colleges had lots of Black kids playing, you come down in the same conference, Syracuse comes down to play West Virginia, West Virginia wouldn’t let the Syracuse Black guys play.

GG: [00:43:58] They wouldn’t?  

SR: [00:44:00] West Virginia wouldn’t.  Well they raised hell with them.  Thank god we didn’t have that kind of situation going on.  We did have one at UVA, we had -- and I don’t know if it was my freshman year or my sophomore year because I only played football there for two years.  My first year you couldn’t play varsity back then.  But there was a Black kid playing in practice and he basically got run off by a bunch of the guys, which was a shame.  But I don’t know that the coaching staff did anything to change that.  

GG: [00:44:59] So looking back [00:45:00] sixty-two years.  

SR: [00:45:05] (laughs) Really.

GG: [00:45:07] Looking back sixty-two years, what could have been done differently?  

SR: [00:45:17] Well they should have taken it back 150 years instead of sixty-two years.  (laughs) I don’t know.  I think people were just -- peoples’ attitudes hadn’t changed enough, for one, they still hadn’t.  I think you mentioned when I met with you before that [00:46:00] they wouldn’t let Tommy play some of the Black kids once the integration began, I think that was a bad decision.  If they’re going to be part of the school, why can’t they participate in whatever the hell they want to participate in?  I mean that was crazy when I heard that as far as I’m concerned.  They wouldn’t have won forty-some games or whatever the number is, I forget now, fifty or something like that, if -- I think they had one tie, a couple ties I think, and a big number without any losses, they wouldn’t have done it unless they had to let them start back then.  (laughs)

GG: Lorenzo, do you have some questions?  

LORENZO DICKERSON: [00:47:00] I do.  I have a couple.  I’m curious, you mentioned going to the schools that were in churches when schools closed.  I was curious, how did your parents feel about schools closing during that time?  Did they talk about it when it was coming up?  

SR: [00:47:20] Again, my mother was more adamant about it but they were -- she was pretty upset that they had closed the schools.  (laughs) And she was teaching here, but she was teaching at McIntire School, which was -- it’s on the bypass, and it was all -- but that was a county school at the time.  That’s when we moved here, that’s where her first teaching assignment was.  But yeah, I think she [00:48:00] wasn’t happy with the whole business of -- you know.  The other thing that’s interesting from my perspective is how do you finance this.  I mean, the schools close, you get these places to use churches and other facilities, Fry Springs for Phys Ed, how do you do that?  How does that all get paid for?  

GG: [00:48:46] I don’t know.  But the judge finally, the federal judge who was supervising the desegregation of Lane made it [00:49:00] very plain that no public funds were to be used during the time the schools were closed.  

SR: [00:49:11] Somehow, I don’t know, some -- privately funded somehow.  

GG: [00:49:17] They tried to use the teachers from the schools, they tried to use them, and the same judge said not unless you have Black students getting the same --

SR: [00:49:29] Well I can tell you now, in 1958, the first half of the year so to speak, or the semester, every teacher I had was somebody that was teaching me in the same class in Lane.  I don’t know how that was --

GG: [00:49:53] I’ve seen some comments that said that some of them at least did not want to -- I mean, they felt they had an obligation to continue [00:50:00] and they didn’t get a paycheck.

SR: [00:50:07] Interesting.  Well that’s a -- sorry, go ahead.  

LD: [00:50:19] During the 1960s a lot was going on during that time, Dr. King, Kennedy assassination, what do you remember of that time?  What was it like in the area and does anything stand out for you in particular?  

SR: [00:50:36] Well, you know, I think certainly the assassination of Kennedy was a -- you know, the potential war, the whole screw up in Cuba, I mean there were a lot of things.  We were on the [00:51:00] verge of being in a war again.  Kind of like now.  

GG: [00:51:08] Sort of feels like today.

SR: [00:51:09] Yeah, yeah, exactly.  The same players to some extent, to a large extent actually.  In Charlottesville there was some -- there used to be significant crowds on the streets up at UVA, I mean, blocking the streets, and there were people almost running over people up there.

[Extraneous material redacted.] 

And it’s not totally different, it certainly wasn’t GGuite the same as what happened in -- when all the dingbats came here and raised hell in Charlottesville three or four years ago.  But you had a lot of things going on in the neighborhood.  I don’t know much about what was going on in the high schools as that -- now I knew more, I mean Farmville, hell, that county closed down the public schools, which is [00:53:00] crazy.  They still educated their white kids somehow, but there were no open schools for Black kids.  How’d that happen?  I don’t know, I wish I had been smart enough to figure it out.

GG: [00:53:26] Don’t we all?  

SR: [00:53:27] To do something.  Unfortunately in some ways it’s better, in some it’s got a long ways to go yet I think.  Not just from a racial standpoint but from a political standpoint, what’s going on now in politics, as far as I’m concerned, is just a disaster.  I mean, I don’t know if we could develop a third [00:54:00] party so we could at least spread things out a bit.  

GG: [00:54:04] I mean as loyal a party man as I have been over the years, I would love to see a new party.  

SR: [00:54:10] Yeah, we’ve got two -- you know, we’ve got two extremes on both sides right now.  The republican side is a little bit more extreme.  

GG: [00:54:26] There’s some crazy folks.

SR: [00:54:26] Their scream is bigger than the other side.  (laughs) I was concerned about the whole Bay of Pigs issue, I was afraid we were going to get blown up here in 1962, 1963, in there.

[Extraneous material redacted.] 

LD: [00:55:14] I just have one more question.  I was curious, you went to UVA after Lane?  

SR: [00:55:19] Yeah.

LD: [00:55:19] Could you just walk us through what you did after UVA, your career, and did you stay in Charlottesville?  

SR: [00:55:26] Well at UVA I went undergraduate, four years, then I went to Darden for two.  I worked at -- it was called Highway Research Council, it was located at Virginia, and they did kind of scientific work or stuff like that.  As a junior in high school I started working there [00:56:00] and then all the way through college and a good hunk of Darden that way.  But when I graduated from Darden I went to Norfolk and worked for the -- oh, heck, the outfit that does the paper, had the paper in the TV stations and everything down there.  I would go -- that’s when the TV, the internet -- not the internet, what was it back in the day when they started putting the wire up for TVs and everything, you know what I’m talking about?  

GG: [00:56:44] Yeah, yeah.

SR: [00:56:47] They started that and they had systems in North Carolina, systems in West Virginia, systems in Alabama, [00:57:00] and I would go to the -- I’d go around and work with the outfits that were running those various systems.  Matter of fact I was in Selma the weekend before -- because when you go across the bridge into the town of Selma, on the first corner there was a building, on that corner, that’s where our company was located.  

GG: [00:57:36] Oh my goodness.  That’s where all the demonstrations were.

SR: [00:57:38] Yeah.  But I was there the day before all of the demon[strators]-- all that came, but I went there, I went to Opelika, I went to near Auburn, wherever Auburn is located, they have a system there.  

GG: [00:58:00] Eastern Alabama.  

SR: [00:58:02] Yeah.  But I did that for a little over a year and then decided that I really want to live here as opposed to Norfolk.  (laughs) That’s when I came back and went to work for this -- I don’t know what it’s called now but it used to be called the Highway Research Council.  I did a lot of -- and they did projects, and wrote papers, and presented them, and all that kind of stuff, and I did a lot of -- there was a lot of mathematical work going on, and I would develop for a lot of guys doing the work, and I did some of the projects myself, but most of the work I did was doing statistically analysis for them, to tell them how to set up, to prove what they were saying [00:59:00] was correct.  And so I did that for twelve or fourteen years.  

GG: [00:59:10] I didn’t know that.  

SR: [00:59:11] Yeah.  Then we would make presentations.  As part of that process I also went, there were three or four of us, that went around the country, and we went to all a lot of state government highway or transportation related issues, and gave presentations to them.  One of those was in Hawaii, that was a pretty nice -- (laughs) I did that for a year or so.  Then finally decided I would go into the real estate business and so I did [01:00:00] and started as a realtor, but I really got into the development business, so I was a partner at Forest Lakes north of town, and other multiple developments.  But I’ve been out of that now for eight or ten years.  Had some things I was still -- I was a partner at Forest Lakes 50/50 with Frank Kessler, and then he died, and a result of that I ended being 100% owner and paid for his interest and so forth.  That kind of summarizes what I do.  All I do now is clean the house.  [01:01:00] (laughter) Mow the grass.  

GG: [01:01:06] That’s fun.  (laughter) Well thank you very much.

SR: [01:01:13] Oh hey, wish I could have done better.  

GG: [01:01:16] You did great.  

SR: [01:01:19] Well good.  It’s been a -- I’m interested in seeing whatever the final product is here.