Mother's Expectations

Lucy: Even when I grew up, long after the war, my mother still didn’t want us to work. Her ideal was that her three daughters get married and have children. I still hear it. It’s amazing for that to carry into the ’70s and ’80s and even up to today. Yet Rosalie’s mother wasn’t concerned that her daughter was going off to a job, even a non-traditional one. Betty, did your mother have concerns?

Betty: I was no longer living at home–I was newly married. My mother had three girls. Getting us married before we got pregnant was probably her ambition. To have gotten us through high school was the height of her expectations. There was never any thought of college. The fact that I was engaged to a young man in his senior year there was the greatest thing my mother could have wished. Going to work was my contribution to the war effort. All of my friends were doing it–that’s what was important. I lived an untypical life because my family came here as refugees from the New Orleans flood of 1927, when I was six. My husband’s family came here during the Civil War. We were part of a small African American community spread throughout the Bay Area. Although the war changed our lives drastically, we remained in that insular group. Our friends were the ones who became the Tuskegee Airmen, the guys who fought with Patton and the 761st Tank Battalion. These were young, educated African Americans who in some cases moved into officer training school, where they met others in segregated units. So my social life did not change, except in that way.

Lucy: Rosalie, you dated a man you worked with. Did it change your social life to be working with men?

Rosalie: I dated him for a short while, and there was a man who drove me to work. Then I met my husband, and he said, “Get rid of your driver. I’ll drive you to work.” “Well, why?” “Because I’ll drive you to work, and I’ll pick you up.” He used to pick me up at a statue outside the gate. I went to look for it a few months ago. It’s not there. I heard it was moved to what’s now called Franklin Roosevelt Park.

Lucy: It sounds like a very traditional protective role. Your boyfriend, then fiancé, was concerned about your working there.

Rosalie: Yeah, he was. When I got the flash in my eye, I had to wear glasses for six months. I’d come out of the yard without them on and he’d say, “Why don’t you have your glasses on?” “Because I don’t like them.” “Do you think the men want to look at you?” “No, that’s not the reason.” But everybody knew each other. I had six brothers, and the men would say, “Are you Charlie’s sister?” When a truck came with box lunches–that was the best part because the sailors would want to treat us. Everybody was friendly. I had wonderful– they call them “bosses” but we didn’t–I had wonderful leading men.

Betty: I’m listening to Rosalie–how different our lives have been. My life was not changed by the war. I went in during the day to file cards and collect union dues, and went home at night to my small apartment with my husband. So I didn’t have a connection to the war.

Lucy: Did any of your sisters work, Rosalie?

Rosalie: One in a bank, the other in a tailor shop. I said, “You’re so gorgeous. You should get a job with Heinz. So that’s where she went– her and her girlfriend–and she married her boss. They moved to Phoenix, and he became president of U-Haul Company.

Emily: Did you ever work again?

Rosalie: I sold jewelry and worked at Ritz Crackers and Keebler’s. I didn’t work while I raised my son, but from ’62 to about ’89 I worked at an exclusive dress shop on Broad Street, where I became the manager.

Lucy: Betty, tell us about your life in the Bay Area.

Betty: My experience was pretty bitter. My husband tried to volunteer, and lasted only three days. He didn’t talk about it to anyone except me. He was told he would make a wonderful sailor but they couldn’t put him on a ship because it might spell mutiny. He was a leader of men–a college quarterback, a well-known football player. They sent him back on a train with mustering-out pay and an honorable discharge. He felt like a failure. He then went to the shipyards and got a job as a second-class workman. Meanwhile, I briefly worked for the Air Force. I left after they found out I was African American. I didn’t know that they didn’t know. I was light-skinned.

I’d been transferred from a wartime job at San Francisco’s Federal Building, where I was filing cards in the basement, and they had not asked my race. Then, a week or two after I was with the Air Force, the lieutenant was notified that I was nonwhite. I went up to his desk. He told me it was okay, that he had talked with my supervisor and I could stay and “the other women were willing to work with me.” I walked out, and this was around the time my husband came back. As a young western couple–without the background to prepare us for this kind of second-class citizenship–we were unable to cope. Here we were, my husband working as a trainee and me filing cards in a segregated union hall. I decided, at the end of it, that we would never work for anyone again. We opened a little music store on Sacramento Street in Berkeley, and loved it. But during the war no one gave any credit to people like us, who had migrated here earlier. We were buried in a city that grew overnight with people from the southern states, people who brought with them the complete system of racial segregation, people who would not share drinking fountains, schools, public accommodations, even cemeteries for another 20 years. We were right in the middle of that.

Emily: It wasn’t just the South. Restaurants were segregated in Washington and New York, too. The military itself was segregated.

Betty: Our young men were going to war on the back of the bus. Even now, it’s difficult to think of myself as a “Rosie.”

Emily: Lena Horne, a popular African American singer, was asked to give a show at a military base. She performed in the evening for the white soldiers–her show was a nighttime thing–and was told she had to repeat in the morning for the African Americans. The next day she looks out into the audience–in this awful place, not the nice place of the night before–and sees three rows of white men in front. She says, “Who are they?” And they say, “The German POWs.” She walked out.

Betty: I can remember traveling in the South. In El Paso, my parents warned me to move into the Jim Crow car, behind the baggage car. I found myself sitting with white prisoners in handcuffs and shackles only half a car away. They were apparently en route to some prison– separated from the white passengers. I was absolutely terrified.