Wade Tremblay

[Extraneous material redacted.]

GEORGE GILLIAM:  September [00:01:00] 14th.

WADE TREMBLAY: [00:01:04] (inaudible).

GG: [00:01:04] -- 2021 at the home of Wade Tremblay 

[Extraneous material redacted.]

GG: [00:03:52] Wade, what’s your date of birth?

WT: [00:03:54] October 28, 1949.

GG: [00:03:58] So the [00:04:00] civil rights movement in the United States was heating up in the run-up to Brown v. Board of Education.  And then after that dealing with the changes that were part of the Supreme Court, [you were a youngster?]. 

WT: [00:04:19] Yeah, grammar school.

GG: [00:04:21] When did you enter high school?

WT: [00:04:42] Uh, I began my eighth grade year at Lane High School in the fall of 1962.

GG: [00:04:32] And then you were there for which years?

WT: [00:04:35] I was there for three years.  So my final semester was the spring of 1965.

GG: [00:04:43] And then for the 1965-’66 year, you went to a different school?

WT: [00:04:49] I had moved to Fork Union Military Academy.

GG: [00:04:54] And what was the reason for going to Fork Union?  Some kids were [00:05:00] sent there because they’d been overactive as a young adolescent.

WT: [00:05:05] Well, consistent with that I was underperforming, shall we say.  I knew I was underperforming.  And I’d had a buddy who lived nearby me who had gone to Fork Union the year before I did, who came home espousing all of its glories and fun, which I found later to be less the case than he had portrayed it to be.  At any rate, I knew I was underperforming.  Based on my buddy’s recommendation, I went to parents and said, “What do you think about me going to Fork Union?”  And they thought that was a pretty good idea because they, too, knew I was underperforming.  And my grandmother happily was able to underwrite the tuition for that.  So that’s what we did for a couple years.

GG: [00:05:51] How many years did you spend at Fork Union?

WT: [00:05:53] I spent two years at Fork Union.  Was marginally in line to graduate from there, credit-wise, [00:06:00] but was advised to take an extra year of high school.  I was relatively young for the year I was in and was advised to take an extra year of high school.  So I came back.  At that point my parents had moved to the county, to the house next to us here.  So I attended Albemarle my last year and graduated from Albemarle in spring of ’68.

GG: [00:06:21] So you went Fork Union, then Albemarle.

WT: [00:06:24] Yes.  So I tried out all the various school systems.

GG: [00:06:30] And then you left the area to go to college.

WT: [00:06:34] Went to college in Vermont, pursuing an interest in skiing primarily.  Had not discovered the West at that point but had skied some with my dad, who was from New Hampshire.  In Vermont and New Hampshire.  So I had circled a map of northern New England and said, “Let’s find schools inside that circle.”  So I went to a little school, Saint Michael’s College in Winooski, Vermont, and had a great four years up there.

GG: [00:07:00] Did you do any sports in high school?

WT: [00:07:03] I played baseball when I was at Fork Union, but that was the only time.  I played baseball all the way through those years, but it was more the summer league stuff, Junior League, Senior League, and so on.  I did not play at Lane on the baseball team.  And I found out in the eighth grade that I have a small birth abnormality meaning I’ve only got one kidney.  I had another brother that had some illness related to his.  So they tested the rest of the family and determined I only had one as well.  And it’s mislocated to the middle of my abdomen, which was an area that was thought to be susceptible to injury should I take a blow to the midsection.  So contact sports were ruled out just as I was thinking I wanted to play football.  And this was at the beginning of the golden era at Lane High School.  In fact, when I started, the golden era had not yet begun.  But it was soon to commence.  [00:08:00]

GG: [00:08:02] We’ve had a great interview a couple weeks ago with the coach.

WT: [00:08:09] Coach Theodose, yeah.  Coach Theodose was a phys. ed teacher as well, as I’m sure you know.  As was Dave Cooke, Joe Bingler, and Willie Barnett was the athletic director.  Those guys were all and continue to be icons as you look back at the history of high school sports in the area.  Remember them all well.  But I knew them as phys. ed teachers and not so much as coaches.

GG: [00:08:36] Did you know about Burley High School?

WT: [00:08:39] Yeah, there was some conversation at the time about Burley.  What I remember most is people talking about a) the marching band and b) the football team.  The marching band was thought to be top drawer, absolutely.  These guys had the style, which was perfected by Black marching bands [00:09:00] at the time with the I guess it’s the drum major leading it with the head way back.  And I mean high-stepping.  They had style.  I think I only saw them in action once, but I remember that I agreed they had style.  I didn’t know much about the athletics there, but there were stories about Roosevelt Brown and the other folks that played on those teams.  I really didn’t know till later about the year they were setting a record which I guess can never be surpassed if you’re undefeated, untied, and unscored upon.  How do you improve on that?  And you still played a schedule.  I was coming from a small Catholic school at the time.  This had nothing to do with the current Catholic school.  It was Holy Comforter Catholic School, where I had gone to elementary [00:10:00] school, kindergarten through seventh grade, which out at Branchlands.  We had had I think I remember a couple of young Black students that came during the troubled times, so to speak, when the schools closed in the city out there.  But there really was no significant representation there.  So it was an all-white school.  And I arrived at Lane High School in the fall of 1962, having come from this small, quiet enclave relatively speaking to Lane High School, which if memory serves me at the time, it was eighth through 12th.  I think there was something to the order of 1,700 students in that building.  Changing classrooms between classes.  So a bell would ring at the end of class, and you’d go out.  Then all of a sudden, 1,700 students would be in the hallways moving wherever they were moving.  It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.  [00:11:00] The boys’ rooms were dens of iniquity.  I remember walking in the -- they got progressively less troublesome the further up in the building you went.  So everything is stacked or was at the time in Lane High School.  So the boy’s rooms were all above each other.  But the one on the ground floor was the famous den.  And you walk in there -- first of all, it was full of cigarette smoke.  You got guys over there matching quarters.  You got guys shooting dice in the corner, playing various other games.  If you came in and for whatever reason you were not known, you were subject to being flushed, which was a technique that I won’t go into great detail.  But it was not something you wanted to have happen to you.  So it was -- for a youngster -- and I was not small.  I was a big kid.  But I didn’t know anybody to speak of initially.  I felt like very much a fish out of water [00:12:00] during those early days at Lane High School.

GG: [00:12:02] So you went to an all-white school during the early ’60s.

WT: [00:12:09] Fifties primarily up until the early ’60s, yeah.

GG: [00:12:12] Right.  And then Fork Union.  And then Albemarle.  But you were aware of an all-Black school.

WT: [00:12:21] Yes.

GG: [00:12:22] What had you been told about that?  What did you understand -- did your family discuss?

WT: [00:12:32] I don’t know that there was a lot of family discussion.  Yes, I was aware that there was a all-Black high school.  I guess at some level aware that there were Black elementary schools as well.  There were not middle schools at the time.  So you went straight from elementary to high school typically.  The high schools were eight through 12.  There was not a lot of thought given to the Black community at that point despite -- [00:13:00] I would say my dad in particular was a pretty progressive guy.  He’d been in the military.  He didn’t broach much foolishness in regard to -- I remember coming home using the N-word one time.  This was in the fifth or sixth grade.  And thinking that was kind of cool because I’d heard it at school.  He took me aside, and we had, shall we say, a pretty candid conversation about how inappropriate that was and why it was inappropriate.  I think he explained the facts of life to me right there.  But again there was very little interaction, Black and white in the community at the time.  I’m trying to think -- up until the early ’60s Blacks still had to ride on the backs of buses in Charlottesville.  We were still very definitely -- they could not sit at the lunch counters.  Separate water fountains.  The whole drill was still in place.  I remember it.  So as a result even when you had parents who were pretty progressive in their [00:14:00] thinking, there was not a lot of conversation yet about this isn’t right, the way these folks are being treated.  So there wasn’t a whole lot of that.  Again, to be candid, there was a lot of feeling of we’re better than they are if you were white, Black.  Obviously it was wrong minded.  It took a while for those thoughts to begin to go, wait a minute, why are we thinking that?  That was the case growing up.  I remember riding the city bus because I lived on Jefferson Park Circle at the time.  In the eighth grade and on I rode the city bus to and from school.  And remember there were Blacks on the bus regularly who -- by the time I was in high school, I think the back of the bus thing had disappeared.  But I remember thinking they’re different just because I had not spent any time.  I knew where Vinegar Hill was, which was the [00:15:00] business center of the Black community then and really one of the biggest residential areas.  But there was really no interaction to speak of.  I take that back.  There was one significant one.  And I always think of this very positively.  My grandmother had a woman by the name of [Edwina Sellers?] who lived on Ridge Street.  She and her two sisters shared a house on Ridge Street.  I could walk you to the house tomorrow or today.  She was my grandmother’s cook/housekeeper.  And she came every day.  She was typically picked up by one of my grandfather’s -- my grandfather was a home-builder as well as built apartments.  He had a construction company.  He still at that point -- there were still several employees.  There was one -- and I can’t remember [Pete’s?] last name, but Pete would typically pick up Edwina and bring her over to the house.  Then he would take her home at the end of the day.  I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house, which is just around Jefferson Park [00:16:00] Circle, where I grew up.  Edwina was always a fixture there.  So I spent a lot of time around her and always admired her.  A) she was a great cook.  I won’t say there was a huge amount of communication between us, but spent a lot of time around her.  So I got used to that and Pete picking her up and so on.  I remember Pete swearing he was a vegetarian, but that didn’t include fish or chicken, which he loved.  But anyway.  It was kind of a mixed bag of messaging, if you will.  On the one hand, very little interaction other than Edwina and Pete and a couple of the other employees.

GG: [00:16:44] So did you go to the football games for whichever school you were at -- 

WT: [00:16:50] Yes.  Yes.  They were a big deal at Lane at the time.  At the beginning of my time at Lane [00:17:00] some of the names that you’re going to be talking about -- guy by the name of Mike Colo was the starting quarterback.  Well, Mike had gone to Holy Comforter.  So I knew -- he was older than I, but I knew who he was.  Like any athlete who ends up being a star, you remember them.  And particularly if they’re older.  So I knew Mike Colo and later got to know names like George Foussekis and David Thacker, and I think [Jimmy Dunn?] and [Slate Dabney?] played on those teams.  He wasn’t maybe as big a star as some of the ones I’ve just mentioned, but these guys were all beginning.  So this golden era was just getting ready to start.  But it got to the point where there were 6,000, 7,000 people at a Friday night football game at the old Lane stadium.  I mean the place was packed, just absolutely packed.  So it was an event.

GG: [00:17:55] Did you ever go to see the Burley teams?

WT: [00:17:57] Did not.  [00:18:00] There was this -- it’s funny.  These memories are very distant now, but this sort of unwritten thing that that wouldn’t have been the safest place to go if you were a white guy at the time.  I think the sense was they were very protective of their turf.  This was their place, their team.  You weren’t necessarily welcome there.  Don’t know that there was any truth to that at all, but that’s just my vague recollection of the sense that some of us had.

GG: [00:18:29] I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole, but we’ve heard from a couple people that in the Black community the word was don’t ever, ever go into Belmont area.  The whites there hate Blacks.  There’ll be trouble.  And so there was fear and respect on that issue.

WT: [00:18:52] Yeah.  No, I am sure that those fears were well founded and to some degree in reverse, which [00:19:00] is why you didn’t go to the Burley school area and probably didn’t spend a lot of -- it’s interesting.  At Garrett Street, in that community, which essentially abuts Belmont -- so these two neighborhoods were right on top of each other.  But there was a lot of intolerance at the time.  I mean it was not a -- you look at today, and we talk about all the progress we haven’t made.  Just need to contrast then and now.  You see there are two different worlds that are going on.

GG: [00:19:32] Did any of your friends go to Burley games?

WT: [00:19:35] Not that I recall.  Again, there was conversation about them but always under the sense of that’s not a place you really want to go.  You’re not going to be welcome there.

GG: [00:19:50] Were Blacks welcomed at the Lane games just from what you could see?

WT: [00:19:56] I would say no.  And again I was trying to refresh my memory [00:20:00] over the last few days, anticipating this question.  I can remember very few Blacks at Lane High School during the three years I was there.  I don’t think the integration thing had taken full -- there were a handful maybe, but there were no Black athletes that I can remember during this period, the three years I was there.  As I recall, Burley did not officially close down its high school aspect until, what, ’66 or ’67?

GG: [00:20:27] Yeah.

WT: [00:20:28] And I think there was very little migration away from there until that happened.

LD: [00:20:36] Can you describe to us where Lane Stadium was then?  Because right now there’s no field at that -- 

WT: [00:20:43] Right.  Well, the big parking lot just adjacent to the county office building was Lane Stadium.  And it was both a football field, and then adjacent to it was a baseball field, which is not where the current one is.  That was kind of an open, additional space [00:21:00] down there.  The baseball field was closer to the county office building today as was the original Lane Stadium, which was on one side a concrete bleacher, which was the home team side.  And on the other side was a metal set of bleachers.  And that was the standard quarter-mile cinder track that surrounded the football field.  But in order to get six or 7,000 people in there, it was standing room only and parking was everywhere because the lots just couldn’t handle that sort of thing.

GG: [00:21:37] Even though the Lane teams and presumably the Albemarle and Fork Union teams were whites only, did their teams ever play schools that had Black players or were the Black players on the opposing side?

WT: [00:22:00] Not to my knowledge.  Again, Lane would have played other public schools.  And I think most of the public schools during that era were still probably very segregated and in fact almost certainly were.  I’m trying to remember.  In fact, Lane may’ve been the first place that had some Black athletes on its team after I had gone.  I think when they showed up at a couple of games, so I’m told, there were some issues by the other team because they had Black athletes on their team.  But those are all hearsay.

GG: [00:22:35] Did you ever witness any acts of violence?

WT: [00:22:38] No, I did not.  Again, there was -- I don’t remember a huge amount of interplay.  I mean obviously you would see Black folks on the street and that sort of thing, but most of my recollection of them was from the foot of Vinegar Hill is where the Black business community began.  [00:23:00] Most of the Black activity was there.  There were two fish markets, Bibb’s and City Fish Market.  They were right there across the street.  One was more Black-oriented than the other.  I think City was more white-oriented.  Bibb’s was more Black.  But my grandmother shopped in both because she felt like they had good produce, and she was happy to go both places.  But in terms of actually being afoot and at the edge of the Black community, that’s about as close as we got.  I don’t remember ever walking up Vinegar Hill, for example.  That was kind of out-of-bounds.  And I don’t remember anyone ever saying that, but it just -- and this is a very distant memory, but that’s kind of how I remember it.

GG: [00:23:43] So Kent Merritt was just getting started in ’65 at Lane.  Graduated ’70.

WT: [00:24:00] He probably wouldn’t have started till ’66, which was the year I wasn’t there.  That fall.  So I would have missed him by one semester -- 

GG: [00:24:09] So was he regarded as hometown hero?

WT: [00:24:12] Well, I remember him more from his time at the university when he was looked at that way.  I really wasn’t particularly aware of him when he was at Lane.  I mean I guess I read something.  But I was at Fork Union then.  It takes a long time for news to get to Fork Union from Charlottesville.  You’re relying on the Pony Express, and it wasn’t a quick -- 

GG: [00:24:29] (inaudible).

WT: [00:24:32] But I again remember Kent and remember him being a remarkable athlete and being recruited by the university and so on.  But I don’t remember a whole lot about him during his high school years.

GG: [00:24:46] Did you belong to any other clubs, any other extracurricular?

WT: [00:24:50] I was thinking back, and part of my underperformance was related to being, upon reflection, pretty immature.  I was [00:25:00] not bright enough to join clubs and get involved.  I look back and go, what a dummy.  Because that’s the way to begin to build into a community.  But I don’t recall doing much beyond the least that was expected of me at the time.  I seemed to be focused on that aspect unfortunately.

GG: [00:25:22] I think one of the, or maybe more than one of the yearbooks from Lane has you down as a member of the Drama Club.

WT: [00:25:32] That would’ve been a stretch.  Lord knows that to put me in -- I don’t have any recollection of being involved with the Drama Club.  I think I vaguely did that when I was at Albemarle, mostly because there were some attractive young ladies who were involved in it.  Seemed like a good place to hang out.

GG: [00:25:53] So how do you think the effort to desegregate high schools [00:26:00] has fared?  What’s the atmosphere now as far as you can tell?  Is desegregation pretty well accomplished or?

WT: [00:26:15] Yeah, it certainly seems to the uninformed eye -- and by uninformed I mean I’m not very involved in the school [system?].  I’m not involved at all.  So it’s just purely anecdotal what I’m picking up.  But, yeah, the schools certainly seem to be fully integrated in that regard.  One of the stories I’ve heard about Charlottesville High School is really this two-tiered system of education there.  There’s one tier that’s set up for the aspiring primarily white students, and the other for those that really don’t have aspirations perhaps beyond high school or don’t have any significant ones.  So if that’s true -- and I have no firsthand knowledge of that -- that would be unfortunate.  But [00:27:00] yeah, I just really don’t have a whole lot of other insight into how effective that whole process is in terms of fully integrating the student body.

GG: [00:27:14] When Kent Merritt and the other three Black guys were the first to get athletic scholarships in 1970, did you follow UVA football at that time?

WT: [00:27:30] I did from afar.  I was in Vermont.  But took some pride in where I was from and followed the athletics.  So I knew that we were beginning to have a bit of an awakening.  I think this was during the Frank Quayle era as well, was part of that.  There was some success where there hadn’t been a whole lot of success.  When I was in high school I guess, maybe late grammar school we went through a -- UVA [00:28:00] went through a 27-game losing streak that was renowned at the time as being the longest in the country.  Not exactly what you want to be known for.  But that era was passed.  I think we had some occasional flashes of competency.

GG: [00:28:21] What was the [challenge?] about integration of the races?

WT: [00:28:28] Well -- and again I wasn’t here during that late ’60s, early ’70s and after that for about a 10-year stretch.  But I recall is it was a bumpy road.  There were those that were accepting of it.  When did UVA stop playing “Dixie” as their fight song at the football games?  That went on a long time, well into the ’70s if not into the ’80s.  So when was the feeling, [00:29:00] let me say the old-fashioned feelings about they’re really not a part of us put aside?  That probably didn’t happen till the ’80s or ’90s.  And, George, as you and I both know living in this community, you don’t have to dig very deep to still find vestiges of that.  I think it is largely papered over and largely behind us with most folks.  But there are still -- it takes generations to put these kinds of feelings behind and have people come to grips with the idea that, wait a minute, that way of thinking is just mistaken, wrong, whatever other adjective you want to put on it.

GG: [00:29:42] From what you could see, did having Blacks on the football field, on the basketball court, do you think that made it easier for the rest of the community to accept what the courts [00:30:00] were -- 

WT: [00:30:02] I think absolutely.  That’s been probably the single best uniter.  Most of us want to have a winner.  We want to be involved with winners.  As more and more Black athletes got to Lane High School and to UVA, our performance improved.  All of a sudden, wait a minute, we’re better.  And these guys are the stars in many cases.  Let’s put our arms around them.  We’re all friends now.  Wait a minute, these guys are good.  Yes, I think that was probably a great impetus in terms of accelerating the process of acceptance.

GG: [00:30:43] Lorenzo, do you have questions?

LD: [00:30:48] I’m curious.  So 1963, I guess you were shortly into Lane -- 

WT: [00:30:56] Right.

LD: [00:30:56] -- at that time.  Dr. King came to [00:31:00] UVA.  And the March on Washington happened that year and whatnot.  What do you remember of just the racial climate in the area during that time?

WT: [00:31:10] I remember it being contentious.  But not as contentious as it had been during the period when the schools were closed.  I think that was sort of the peak of the troubles, if you will, when people just didn’t quite know what to make of it.  The courts had said one thing.  The Virginians were saying -- white Virginians were saying something else and resisting and so on.  By the time -- and I don’t specifically remembering Dr. King’s visit to UVA nor the immediate surroundings of that.  But I think things were beginning to move in a positive direction as we got into that range.  But it still took obviously until ’66 or ’67 before Lane and many Virginia schools accepted that they were going to [00:32:00] have to fully integrate and did finally.  So it was a long struggle and one I was really -- I don’t remember having strong feelings about it one way or the other, nor do I remember a huge amount of disruption in the Charlottesville community.  I think there was one year there was a young Black man known as Cherry Pie.  I don’t remember exactly what happened with Cherry Pie, but there was a big thing about Free Cherry Pie, which -- 

GG: [00:32:35] Well, I was the assistant commonwealth’s attorney then and got a lot of that given to me.

WT: [00:32:43] I bet.  I don’t remember the circumstance, but -- 

GG: [00:32:47] I don’t remember -- who was Cherry Pie?

LD: [00:32:50] Yeah, I don’t remember the details on Cherry Pie, but I remember hearing about it was Free Cherry Pie was spray-painted on like a bridge or something.  

WT: [00:32:58] And this was an individual who was known as [00:33:00] Cherry Pie.  And what the issue was, he was I guess arrested for doing something.  There was some unrest that was associated with that whole time period.  But I don’t remember there being -- there may have been some disruptions and riots, but I don’t particularly remember them nor being concerned about going downtown or anything and -- 

GG: [00:33:27] (inaudible) rocks and bricks at passing vehicles.  There was what we’ve heard small amounts of that, enough to be irritating but not enough to do any real damage.

LD: [00:33:46] And he’s still in the community.

WT: [00:33:48] Really?

LD: [00:33:49] Yeah, from what I’ve heard.  Yeah, Mr. Alex Zan was good friends with him at the time.  Yeah, he’s still somewhere in Charlottesville.

WT: [00:34:00] As I said, it would be interesting to have somebody go back and dig up what was the story surrounding that.  I just don’t remember the details.

GG: [00:34:07] Do you have anything you want to add?

WT: [00:34:11] George, just from an old guy’s perspective as we look at where we were in the 1950s when I was first aware of the community makeup and how I thought of it at the time versus today, is the amazing strides that -- and it’s not just this community -- that have been made in this country.  I think I look back and you go, where did that start?  I think in many respects it started during World War II.  It always seems to happen in wars, particularly when we were still a very segregated military at the time.  But my dad was a Marine pilot.  So I’m very focused on aviation and became aware of the Tuskegee airmen and what they [00:35:00] did in Europe and how they changed people’s minds about, would the Black man fight?  That was the thinking is if they did, they wouldn’t be effective and so on.  And the Tuskegee airmen showed baloney.  Not only would we fight, but we’re damn good.  And they were.  Another lesser known fact, again most of the Blacks with the ground troops in Europe -- and this is true in the Pacific as well -- were in the supply end of things.  They weren’t necessarily fighting units, again, for the same reasons.  Battle of the Bulge, there are at least two units -- similar to that bulge -- that were thrown into combat and performed admirably.  Again, stories that haven’t been told as well as they might.  The Tuskegee airmen have gotten a little more notoriety, a lot more than many of the others.  But my point in all of this is beginning then the realization that [00:36:00] wait a minute, these folks are not only just as good as, in many cases perform better than we do in these circumstances.  I think that’s part of the reason why my dad jerked my chain when I came home using the N-word, to say wait a minute, I fought with these guys.  I’ve been out there with them.  I know they’re capable.

GG: [00:36:19] Your dad had a PT-109 tie clip.

WT: [00:36:23] There was a connection.

GG: [00:36:27] The first time I met your dad was at a meeting over planning a fundraiser for Bobby Kennedy in ’68.

WT: [00:36:43] Yeah, my dad had been a law school classmate of Bobby Kennedy’s, and they became close friends during that period.  As a result he got to know President Kennedy and helped with President’s Kennedy’s campaign for presidency.  He did a [00:37:00] -- he actually was away for about a month or six weeks out in Oregon and California -- Oregon and Washington, as I recall, working on the campaign out there for President Kennedy.  But also one of my dad’s close friends here, Bill Battle -- the Battle name is familiar to many people -- had also been a PT boat captain and had been one of the guys that rescued Kennedy after his collision with the Japanese destroyer.  Again, the connection between the Kennedys, Battle, my dad, were all having been Pacific veterans was a strong one.  My dad spent a lot more time with Bobby and Ethel Kennedy than he did with the President and so on.  But he was up in Hyannis on a number of occasions and saw him.

GG: [00:37:45] He was devastated after Bobby -- 

WT: [00:37:47] Yeah.  Bobby was a good friend.  And he was planning to do a lot more for his campaign as it got going.  It was cut off too early.  [00:38:00]

GG: [00:38:02] Well, thank you.

WT: [00:38:05] Glad to be part of this.  But one last point.  I just want to finish my thought about the progress that’s been made from the time I remember in the 1950s to today is remarkable.  I think it’s important as we as a community look at ourselves that we -- yes, we need to be reflective on where we’ve come from, mistakes we’ve made along the way.  But at times we’ve got to say “God bless you” for the progress that we have made and where we are today in terms of embracing, incorporating all of the folks in our community.  It’s a tough process.  Go back to the dawn of time with family and tribes, and that’s where your loyalties were.  So this tendency to distrust anyone outside of that close bubble -- and certainly color of skin is an easy way to differentiate and so on.  So it’s a particular [00:39:00] challenge.  I think the United States, this country through all of its troubles and issues has done a better job of embracing the true melting pot concept than anyplace else you can point to in the world, certainly on the scale that we’ve done it.  So I think we’ve got to step back and say we’ve accomplished one heck of a lot.  More to do.  But we’ve accomplished one heck of a lot.  And let’s always remember that.

GG: [00:39:25] Very nicely done.  When will you get a transcript?

LD: [00:39:34] We can have transcripts this week, for sure.

GG: [00:39:39] Yeah, what we want to do is to look at this tape with the transcript in front of us correct anything that needs to be corrected.  If there’s something that everybody agrees should be edited out, we can do it.

WT: [00:40:00] It’s interesting in one of these things, you realize you’re talking to a diverse audience.  You say, “How’s this going to come across?”  Particularly having grown up in this and having felt one way in the 1950s and ’60s and somewhere over here today, you go -- because a lot of the world today is -- 

GG: [00:40:22] I think your parents were a good influence on you.  You never to my knowledge got tangled up with the hardline white supremacists.

WT: [00:40:34] No, I never did go down that path.  There were those that were very negative about Blacks when I was at Lane High School and spoke very disparagingly.  And that was accepted practice at the time.  The N-word was used regularly, daily, as a form of denigration.  There were just some guys [00:41:00] that that’s what they thought, what they believed and so on.  That always seemed a bit harsh, just to say the least.  You kind of go, “What is this about?”  But anyway, but again my view is it takes generations to get people’s heads to go beyond this tribal instinct of, it’s only us, and it’s us, and if anyone looks different than us, if anyone acts different, if they grew up in a different neighborhood, we don’t trust them.  So I think we’re getting there, but it’s a slow and arduous road to travel.

GG: [00:41:45] It’s a process.

WT: [00:41:47] And it will go on for -- it will to some extent always be ongoing because we -- 

GG: [00:41:53] [Probably outlive the toolbox?].

WT: [00:41:55] Likely.  We’re always reverting back to those things.  [00:42:00] Our natural tendencies are to revert back to the things we can feel comfortable in.  A little side note, I think I asked you earlier.  Do you know Quinton and Yolunda Harrell by chance?

GG: [00:42:16] Yes, yes.  I know Quinton and Yolunda.

WT: [00:42:18] Well, I’ve gotten to know them because Yolunda came and spoke to a Rotary Club I’m involved with, a little over a year ago.  She was talking about her New Hill project, Star Hill thing.  I followed up with her afterwards and had lunch with her and an architecture friend of mine by the name of Bob Moje, VMDO Architects.

LD: [00:42:36] Oh, yeah.  I went to high school with his daughter.

WT: [00:42:38] Yeah.  Which one, Ashley or Delaney?

LD: [00:42:40] Delaney.  She’s a little bit younger than me.  We ran track together.

WT: [00:42:43] Well, Delaney’s back in Charlottesville.  You may not know that.

LD: [00:42:45] Oh, really?

WT: [00:42:46] Yeah.  She married a Black man from the Virgin Islands, and they have a son who’s just -- he’s a prodigy.  So stay tuned.  This is a guy you’re going to hear about.  But any rate, [00:43:00] so we’re having lunch mostly to introduce Bob to Yolunda so that they could talk about the New Hill thing because Bob’s got a lot of information in that regard.  And she mentioned Quinton and said, “Well, he’s a golfer.”  I said, “Well, okay.”  And so I’m involved with the First Tee organization.  We’ve been having some challenges with getting our program in front of minority kids, be they Black, Spanish-speaking, Asian, whatever.  We wanted -- so anyway I said -- had an opportunity to meet Quinton and said, “Let’s have a little -- we’re going to have a group here” -- he plays golf at Meadowcreek.  So we had -- a bunch of he and his buddies come out and played Farmington.  And we went over and played with them at Meadowcreek.  And we’ve subsequently gotten together a couple of times.  But anyway, they came to the football game with us on Saturday.  We tailgated at our spot before the game.  After the game he said, “We always had the tailgate over here.  Why don’t you come on over?”  So one of the few times in my experience [00:44:00] that I’ve been with a largely Black group.  It wasn’t a huge number.  But maybe there were 10 of us.  And my brother and I were the two white guys in the mix.  So you flip the script a little bit here in terms of how things often work.  But we sat there and just had one of the great conversations with three or four of us that are old graybeards with the son of -- you know Antwon Brinson?

LD: [00:44:20] I’ve met him a couple times.

WT: [00:44:21] He’s a chef and does a lot of teaching in that regard.  His son was there, his 15 year old, I think is a ninth or 10th grade quarterback for one of the high school teams on the JV squad.  And he made the mistake of sitting with us.  So we were giving him as much of our wisdom as we could give over about an hour.  And he was patient enough to a) not fall asleep, or get up and leave.  But we were passing on all of the little tidbits that we could to him. 

[Extraneous material redacted.]

GG: [00:47:29] It’s really good of you to do this.

WT: [00:47:31] This was fun to go back into the historical archives.

GG: [00:47:36] Yeah.

 

END OF AUDIO FILE