Abstract
Leo Martin grew up in Glenville, living on Empire as well as East 120th Street before eventually moving to Beachwood. He met his wife through friends at Glenville High School, and they have been married for 42 years. In this interview, Martin talks about his experiences in public schools, including persistent segregation and the institution of busing to promote desegregation. He discusses white flight from Glenville, East Boulevard as a racial boundary, his memories of businesses along East 105th Street, Forest Hills Park, racial hostility toward Blacks when they passed through Collinwood on their way to and from Euclid Beach, and visits to University Circle. He discusses the pervasive messaging of white supremacy in popular culture, how he resisted his high school guidance counselor’s effort to steer him into the Army at the time of the Vietnam War. He relates how at age 11 he unknowingly saw the murderers of Herman Scatter Stephens as they left the scene of the crime. Martin also describes and reflects on the significance of the Hough uprising of 1966 and Glenville shootout of 1968. He speaks at length on how he tries to educate those who are oblivious to why conditions are as they are in the inner city. The interview offers numerous insights into Black life in Cleveland in the 1950s-60s.
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Interviewee
Martin, Leo (interviewee); Martin, Debra (participant)
Interviewer
Gabb, Julie (interviewer)
Project
Project Team
Date
3-13-2014
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
144 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Leo Martin interview, 13 March 2014" (2014). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 999117.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1043
Transcript
Julie Gabb [00:00:01] Okay, so we are interviewing Leo Martin in Beachwood, Ohio. Today is April 10, 2014. And, Mr. Martin, could you tell me about yourself?
Leo Martin [00:00:13] I sure can. I’m 64 years old, grew up in Glenville, 10415 Empire Avenue. That was in zone eight at the time. Now it’s 44108. We moved to 676 East 120th off of St. Clair. And we lived there from 1964 to 1968, when I went to college. And I lived on Empire going back from 1950 till we moved over there, ’64, so, and I went to Ohio State. Did not finish. I graduated from Glenville, participated in sports, and I grew up– I had a wonderful time growing up. It was a great neighborhood. We had a lot of things that we did, a lot of things that people will never experience that we did. It was wonderful. So, and I had an aorta dissection three years ago. That’s where my aorta tore. And I almost left the world, but I didn’t, and I didn’t have surgery because I was healthy. So I’m here. I am, and God is good, and I’ve been blessed. So I like to dance. Ballroom, Chicago-stepping, Detroit-style ballroom. Played Pinochle, a lot of golf, and that’s it. And I’ve been married for 41 years, going on 42 years to the same woman, Debra Handy Martin. We met in high school. She went to one high school, I went to another. And we have three wonderful kids, Sarah, Victor, and Amanda, 33, 31, and 29. And they are all doing well. No grandkids. And I have a sister, Diane Gibson. Diane Martin Gibson, who went to Glenville, came out in class of ’66, January ’66. And I have– And that’s it.
Julie Gabb [00:01:59] Okay, so you said that you grew up in Empire. What was your impression of Glenville as a child?
Leo Martin [00:02:09] You are speaking of the neighborhood or the school or what?
Julie Gabb [00:02:13] The neighborhood itself.
Leo Martin [00:02:14] It’s the only thing I knew. So I thought it was great. Glenville was a wonderful neighborhood. It was just wonderful. It was all I knew. It was fun, safe, very, very homey, very villagey. Everybody knew everybody where you lived, you know, people took care of you. You took care of– It was just fun. It was wonderful. Children were fun. The schools were good. The schools were as good as we knew it. The more you get educated, you find out the flaws. But as we knew it, asking me as a child, I thought it was just perfect. You know, there’s nowhere else for me to live. I didn’t think anybody else had a better neighborhood than we did. Nowhere in the city. That’s just how it was.
Julie Gabb [00:02:55] So what elementary school did you go to?
Leo Martin [00:02:57] I went to Columbia. I lived right across the street.
Julie Gabb [00:03:02] What were your experiences at Columbia?
Leo Martin [00:03:06] Well, I went there in the kindergarten. I remember my kindergarten teacher, her name was Mrs. Travis, and I was in love with her, obviously. And then she had– She did– She got pregnant and had to leave, and I was hating her husband, you know, as a little boy. But it was fun, you know, I knew all my teachers there. I can name them all. But Columbia was wonderful. We had a lot of experiences. We had rag day sales where we had– We collected rags, I’m sorry, newspapers, and we had contests for classrooms. We put them on in the playgrounds. We had little contests, sales tax stamp contests, and we had these little red pins, I think they were called red, some kind of pins, red feather or Red Cross pins. You did it to sell something or do something. You got these little red pins. They always had us hustling for some money or something for your classroom. But the teachers were very good, very strict, and they were fun, but not as fun as I thought they should have been, because I thought teachers were a different breed. But I was a little boy, you know, and it was. It was very nice. Columbia was– It served us well as we knew it. But as I got older, I found the educational process was a whole lot different and a whole lot worse than what it should have been. So that’s it.
Julie Gabb [00:04:21] So did you participate in any, like, clubs or intramurals at Columbia?
Leo Martin [00:04:25] It was an elementary school, so we didn’t have teams, so to speak. But yeah, I participated in whatever they had going. We had races, we didn’t have clubs. I sang in a little glee club. They had, you know, and I was– They had little one little play. We acted in the fifth and sixth grade, and I was a banker. We used to bank on Thursdays. They had a teller and somebody else, and you would come in, the kids would come in on Thursday with a little bank book from Society for Savings bank, which is no longer, and it’s part of. What’s the bank? It’s part of Key Bank now. Society for Savings use bank on Thursday, and I was a bank teller. And you come in with your 50 cents or your dollar, whatever you put in your bank book, and that was your savings. Every kid had a savings. That was one of the things I participated in. And then I was like a projection boy. I walk around the rooms bringing movies to different rooms. We had a schedule for a movie that was wonderful. And I got in trouble, you know, I did have to stay after school a lot. And I got swatted and got notes sent home, and I never missed a day of elementary school. I had perfect attendance all the way through school. If I had to make a claim to fame, that’s what it would be. Seemed like I always got the mumps, measles, and chicken pox in the summer. I never got them during school time. And if I had a sore throat or something, my mother would wrap a towel around me, throw a lot of Vicks on my neck, and send me to school. And– Cause they didn’t want to break that perfect attendance, but she didn’t care who she infected. I was gonna get that perfect attendance, but it was fun. It was very nice. And our gym teacher taught us how to dance, how to be polite to girls, tell us how to ask a girl to dance, how you bowed, and that kind of thing. We did those kind of things and small things that we did then that I don’t think the kids learn now how to do. And I remember my principal, she was tough, but she was kind and the secretaries. It was just nice. It was very nice. And I did– I was in those clubs. So, yeah.
Julie Gabb [00:06:31] What sort of dances did you learn in Atlantic school?
Leo Martin [00:06:35] We learned nothing modern. We learned whatever the gym teacher taught us. Had to be like the two step and those kind of things. Just, you know, nothing that I could put a name on. But it was just kind of like a traditional style, couple dances that wasn’t too complicated for us to learn. It was a gym class, you know, and he basically was teaching us how to interact, how to touch a girl, how to girl touch a boy, because we wasn’t touching each other. That was like the fifth grade and sixth grade classics, because our elementary school went from kindergarten to sixth grade, and they’ve all changed since then. So fifth and sixth grade were the older kids, and primarily the fifth and sixth graders did these things, you know, and it was interesting, but I couldn’t put a name on them. It’s just little two-step dances, you know, and there were no videos back then, so I couldn’t even refer to anything or go to anything.
Julie Gabb [00:07:25] Where did you go to junior high at?
Leo Martin [00:07:29] Well, it’s funny you asked that question. There was 105th Street. That was like the line that divided the school districts at the time. So I lived on Empire, which was on the west side of 105th. If you lived on the west side of 105th in Glenville, you went to Empire. If you were on the east side of 105th address, you went to Patrick Henry. So I went to Empire and lo and behold, when I went to Empire, they built another school called Harry E. Davis. So that broke that line up. So I went to Empire in the 7-B, which opens a whole nother can of worms. And then we moved to 120th of St. Clair. And I went to Patrick Henry because I crossed to the east side of 105th new district, so, but there was Harry Davis. But Harry Davis was on the south side of the neighborhood. In other words, it was even south of Superior. If you know the neighborhood, you have St. Clair and Superior are the two main east-west streets. And then you have 105th is a north-south street. So Superior is south of the neighborhood. And Harry Davis was south of Superior. So it cut our dividing line. It cut our school dividing line. So people who lived on the southern ends of Glenville went to Harry Davis. So we lost a lot of our friends that junior high school. And then you have this A and B situation. You notice I said I went to empire in the 7-B. Once you leave elementary school from the sixth grade, you go to the seventh grade, A or B. We had this thing called, well, I thought it was a good system. It probably don’t work now, but the A and B. Have anybody spoken this to you?
Julie Gabb [00:09:11] I’ve heard people refer to their seminary or some people never win in death.
Leo Martin [00:09:16] Well, I’m gonna tell you what it is. The A and B depends on how your birthday fell. And I don’t know exactly the dates, but I’m gonna give you a general if your birthday fell before or by, let’s say October 1 or September 30, then you can go to school in September. We always start at school the day after Labor Day. And then if your birth– So you can go to school then. But if your birthday fell after that, then you can start school in January. That’s why it was A and B. So if your birthday fell by January 30, you can start school in January. Now think what I’m getting ready to tell you. So let’s say your birthday today. Let’s say your birthday fell October 6. Today. This time you have to wait, what, a whole year to next August to go to school, right? Am I right? Correct. So, but we had A and B. If your birthday fell on October 6, you had to just wait till January and you go to school instead of waiting till next August. You see? So they broke the K, they broke your, they broke your graduating year up into two halves. September and January. Or as we said today, August and January. So that’s A and B. So the B started in the– B started in September or the fall, and the A always started in January. So if I’m saying it right– I might be wrong. Okay, so I– So wherever you fall is still your calendar year of graduating. In other words, I might have said it wrong. The B starts in– Yeah, the B starts in August or September, and the A starts in January. But whatever it is, like Leslie Jones, he graduated in June. I graduated in January. Whatever. Whatever you start is when you graduate. I start in January. I graduated in January. He started in September. He graduated in June. That’s that year. You don’t go all the way through the summer. So he graduated in June. But we all are in the same year graduating class. His class was June, mine was in January. But we’re in the same year, so we’re basically in the same graduating class. It’s just broken up by half a year so that no one gets pimped. A whole year. In other words. Today, parents hold their kids back, which I think is an awful thing to do, but we don’t have to back then because they had A and B, you know, well, I want to hold my child back because he’s not mature enough or she’s not mature enough. There’s no five-year-old mature, you know, so what do you want? You want to be ahead of everybody? That’s what you want. You don’t want him to get mature. You just want to be ahead of the kids behind you. That’s the deal. So they shouldn’t allow it. They just shouldn’t allow it. It should be a test. If they think something’s wrong with the child, you do that. They don’t want that. So you understand my point? So that– That’s the A and B deal. So I went to school in January. I graduated in January. You go to school in September, you graduate in June. That’s how it worked. So and so after I went to. Get back to your question, you don’t mind me expound like that? Okay. So after I went to Empire for one half a year, I ran track for them. I was on the seventh grade relay team. It was a fun time. I liked Empire. We moved, and I had to go to Patrick Henry. Now, you gotta think about this when you’re in a neighborhood like Glenville. Well, back then, everybody lived in their neighborhood. I don’t care where you lived. It was your neighborhood. You took ownership. You can almost look at someone and tell where they live just by how they moved and stuff. I don’t care where you are. You can move to another neighborhood or walk to another neighborhood, and they can tell you didn’t belong in that neighborhood just by your swag. So Patrick Henry was out of my wheelhouse. I wanted to go. I was an Empire man. Then we moved to the Patrick Henry district. So now I’m out of my element, and I go to Patrick Henry. I gotta figure it out. So it didn’t take me long. Cause I wanna, like, in Patrick Henry just cause I had to. I lived there when my folks bought a house. We’re not moving no time soon, right? So I got– I wound up playing basketball for Patrick Henry and running track for Patrick Henry, and playing on a football team with Patrick Henry. And I was in a glee club. I was in the choir, and I stayed in trouble. I did stupid stuff and nothing that required me going to jail or anything. Just bad boy stuff, you know, we did stuff and went to dances and, you know, I had girlfriends and that kind of thing. Got little fights here and there, but nothing extreme, not like these kids do. So it was just part of growing up being a teenager, you know, and it was fun. We had days where they had– I had perfect attendance all the way up to there. Then one day they had a– When they were trying to build all these schools to keep segregation where it is, they had a day where we boycotted. Everybody boycotted all over the nation. So we didn’t go to school one day. And that was the first day I officially missed a day of school, because we boycotted the schools, because we were protesting. And during that time, they had building Stephen E. Howe and these other schools, and we were protesting all these schools being built. They needed the schools built, but they were designing the neighborhoods to keep all the Blacks in the neighborhood and not have them integrate. And there was a white preacher, pastor, or a minister who got run over by a bulldozer trying to stop them from building a school. There was protests everywhere at the same time. That was during the time of the Civil Rights movement in the mid sixties. And not understanding, because I was a teenager, I didn’t understand what was going on, but I still was out there doing what I did, you know, and doing all the riots and things like that. That’s what all that stuff was, all part of it. It’s just tremendous amount of things that happened that. Had I known then what I know now, I would have done a whole lot of things a lot different. But I probably wouldn’t be alive now either, because I would have been so angry. So Patrick King was really fun. We had a prom, and I got swatted a lot, and I got super good grades, and I got some not so good grades, but I was a good student. I did some good things, made a lot of great friends, a lot of girlfriends, a lot of boyfriends. Fun. We just have fun. It was a fun. It was some of the most fun time of my life, going to Patrick Henry. It was just fun, you know? So I enjoyed my education, but like that, I enjoyed the schools, but looking back at it, it could have been so much more beneficial.
Julie Gabb [00:15:36] So, like, you’re saying that about the schools, how they weren’t as good as you were thinking? Like, later, looking back, what were some of the shortcomings that you see looking back now?
Leo Martin [00:15:52] Okay, so Paul Briggs was our superintendent of schools. Paul Briggs was superintendent of schools for a long time. I can’t recall the mayors, but I do know this. They had the east side and west side of Cleveland. What they have right now, that they have right now. And the dividing line was the Cuyahoga River. Okay. And the west side schools got everything fresh. The east side schools got everything from the west side schools for the most part. Not all the time, but for the most part. And to be specific, we would get books that would be stamped West High School or Lincoln High School. Why would that even be? And they were halfway new. They were better than the books that we were replacing, but that’s what we would get. And I’m thinking, well, it didn’t dawn on me what was happening. What was happening is they were getting new books on the west side. We were getting their seconds. Okay. That’s one example to compare my folks and everybody’s folks in the neighborhood, in the Glenville neighborhood, my friend’s parents, most of them were migrants from the South, and probably a good portion of them did not have a high school education. They were blue-collar workers, hardworking people, and they only did what they were shown to do. And they were influenced by things that probably wasn’t as good as they think they were, but they were doing the best that they can, so you can’t knock them for what they didn’t know. And the politics was what it was in Cleveland. So you remember whole Paul Briggs in your mind. So I go like this. I’m 64, and I do understand that our tax dollars are equal. No matter what side of the tracks you are born or you come from or where you work. When they take your taxes, the government says, equal representation, your taxes are equal, but they don’t get equal representation. Looking back, knowing what I know now, it wasn’t happening. And that’s just one example of education, okay? If they wanted to give us a good education, they could have. We did not get a good education. We got the best that we could. All things being equal, we could have got a superior education. And in spite of what we did not get, we succeeded anyway. When I say we, people from Glenville, people from Huff, people from Mount Pleasant, people from parts of Collinwood, people from all over the minority parts of Cleveland, and that’s just the facts. Paul Briggs, Superintendent he was a big part of that segregation process because he had to know what was going on. He was in charge, and he let it happen. And if you ask my parents or people’s parents, they would have thought Paul Briggs was the super superintendent. And he was a rat bastard, to put it blankly, to put it mildly, because he wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t right. And then they brought in busing. Why would they bus? To keep control. To keep everything in control. If you go out and look at busing, I know it’s another topic you’re probably going to bring on, but you ask about the education, why? I didn’t think it was bad. I didn’t think it was good. You know, here’s a funny thing. I’m gonna give you another example of what happened. So Garfield Heights. There’s a whole section of Garfield Heights that was in the Cleveland school system when it should have been in the Garfield Heights school system. It was a minority section. There’s a whole section of Cleveland that was in the Garfield Heights school system, but it should have been in the Cleveland school system. Slavic Village. South High school. I didn’t even know South High School existed. When I found out, I thought it was in Garfield Heights. They should have been competing against us. And they were running, they were working, they were participating with Garfield Heights. How can that even be a possibility here? To go to the Supreme Court to change that, state Supreme Court to change all that. That happened about 10, 15 years ago. They changed all that. But South High School’s been in the system a little while now, but it should have never been in the first place. That’s politics. That was crooked politics, just not fair. And the worst part about the whole deal is all the people that thought they knew, black people, the politicians and things, they couldn’t affect a change with that because either they were afraid to lose their power position, or I can’t say they didn’t know. They didn’t know because they had to know, but they didn’t. I think they were more afraid about what would be the repercussion. That’s what I think, not knowing. I’m only looking back at what I see as an older man now, and I’ve seen all these politicians work now and I’ve seen how the results of some of the things, I’m not going to knock them. They did the best they could. But you ask the question, those are some significant flaws that affected our education, period, you know, and we just got penalized in every way. I don’t think we probably got the best teachers. We thought we did, but we don’t know what they got on the west side because we never got exposed. But we do know if they can give us their secondary books, what else are they doing? What do we know? What don’t we know? We should have gotten for our folks tax dollar. They pay property tax just like the guys on the west side. They take property tax where they take those taxes for those photo for education. It comes out of our taxes came out of those folks on the west side and we didn’t get the same. We did not get the same, so we got penalized. Then somebody will ask me, well, how come you guys don’t succeed? How come you guys didn’t get the education? How come you guys didn’t get this? Why does the neighborhoods run? Well, you’re not looking at the real picture ’cause you don’t want to. The real picture is we didn’t get the same. We didn’t get the same shot, we didn’t get the same chance. We didn’t have the same opportunities. I don’t care what someone says, we didn’t get the same opportunities. And you never hear what I’m telling you brought up, really. And the only time you hear it brought up is usually from people like myself who know, who really know. Like I’m gonna tell you about Scatter’s, so go ahead.
Julie Gabb [00:21:51] The other thing that you mentioned was busing. And that was something that even though busing like occurred shortly after you graduated, correct?
Leo Martin [00:22:01] Yeah, it was after I graduated.
Julie Gabb [00:22:03] What are your opinions of busing, just from living in Glenville?
Leo Martin [00:22:08] Well, you understand, what was the purpose of busing? The purpose of busing as I know it, and I don’t profess to know it to be exact or right, because I wasn’t really paying attention to those things when they came up because I was– My focus was on everything else but that, but politics and that kind of stuff. But I think the purpose of busing was to integrate the schools because there was a federal mandate, just like Boston. Most of these segregated cities had to bus. If they had done– If they had done what they’re supposed to do, this would have never been, you know, they had just done what they’re supposed to do. We never had the bus. Do you know how much money has gone away from education just to bus? That’s a waste to run those buses up and down the street. So my opinion of busing is negative, obviously, but the purpose of busing was to integrate the schools. As soon as they start busing, what happened? Just like in the neighborhood’s white flight, all the white folks started sending their kids to private schools, primarily Catholic schools. Well, whoever would take them, so long as they didn’t have to go to school with the Black kids from the east side. That’s how I looked at it. So you stand on the street, once busing got started, and you look at the buses, what did you see? Black kids going from the east side to the west side, Black kids going from the west side to the east side. You saw Black kids going across town, Black kids going to uptown, and who was getting penalized? The Black kids could have to get up early, get home late, had to maneuver. Right. And all those things always worked against Black kids. And you say, well, that sounds so negative. Well, we weren’t. The white folks weren’t that bad. Well, I don’t say you’re bad, but look at what happened. You guys are in power, so why didn’t you do it the other way? Once you saw the inequity of the busing program, it should have immediately been adjusted or stopped. They’re still doing it now for the name. They do it in the name of specialized education. Schools have names or whatever. This kind of school, that kind of school. So I want my child to go to this school, that school. You lose that neighborhood camaraderie and that village, you lose it. So consequently, other things that, there are other fallouts from that. You know, there’s other fallouts when you, before you just get in, you get up in the morning, you have breakfast, and you walk to school, you walk with your friends, you walk to school. There was Everybody knew where everybody was going safe. Now, kids get on buses, kids get in cars. Kids don’t go to school. Buses have accidents. Kids get lost on buses, and they expense of the buses. You got crime on buses, this and that. I’m not saying it wouldn’t happen walking to school, but I sure think it’d be a lot better if you had neighborhood schools, period. The funny thing is, when the white flight got out. When the whites got off the buses and got out of the neighborhoods, you know, the schools get tax dollars based on how many students they have in the system. All of a sudden, that just dropped because they took those kids out of the school system. And then a funny thing, when white people took their kids out of the schools, then black people started taking their kids out of schools because they said they didn’t want their kids to go to the inferior schools, too. So they started doing the same thing. So what did you have left? You had people who couldn’t move their kids or didn’t want to move their kids. So they’re at a school system now. The school system is failing because the money’s not going to the schools. And then you have still bad politics in the school, on the school, in the school system, and in the city, and the school is penalized. I think Cleveland has one of the. It’s probably one of the weaker school systems in this whole area, and it shouldn’t be. It just should not be. These kids in Cleveland should not have an inferior education. How is it that a school system can lay off teachers every summer and then hire them back every fall? That makes no sense to me. Just unbelievable. Teachers don’t even know where they’re gonna be, if they got a job, or kids get bused. They don’t even know if they got a teacher in the room. They don’t know their bus schedule until the week before school starts or this or that or this or that. You know, it’s just incredible. And then you can’t say they’re not building schools because they put very nice schools out there. But, you know, four walls don’t make a school. You know, that’s how I see it. You know, busing was not good. It was not good, but it did affect the change, but it wasn’t carried out all the way. Answer.
Julie Gabb [00:26:31] You mentioned about white flight with living in Glenville. In growing up, you know, from your childhood to your adolescence, did you see the neighborhood change composition?
Leo Martin [00:26:42] Absolutely, I did see neighborhood change composition. I was born there. I was born in 50, so I was a little baby. We stayed on one street empire till I was, I don’t know, 11, 12 years old or something like that. Okay. And when I was a little boy, it was primarily Blacks and Jews that lived in the neighborhood. There was, I don’t think there was five Italians or anybody else in there, just jewish and black, and that lasted about two blinks of an eye. Okay. I would say probably by the time I was about eight years old in ’58 or so, almost all the Jewish people had moved out. And they really lived in the neighborhood all over, you know. And where did they move to? They moved to Cleveland Heights. They moved to wherever they moved to. The ones that had money probably tried to move to Shaker. And if they could get to Beachwood or something like that, great. But most of the– And white folks move in ghettos, too. The Italians move where the Italians live, the Polish people move where they live. And the Jews move together, too. But they never get called ghettos. They never get called ghettos. Ghetto is synonymous with rundown, poor, negative, not positive. A ghetto is just a group of people living in the same community. That’s what a ghetto is. But we don’t see it that way. Am I right? I’m just trying to remember my history. Okay, so we lived in the ghetto. Once the white folks moved, it was called a ghetto. Yes. I saw a white flight and didn’t know what was happening at the time. I just thought they were just moving. No, because we moved in, they moved out. Why did they move out? Why was there space for us to move in? They moved out. And the funny thing is, when we moved in, we were renters. We moved into a two family. It was nice, very nice. The homes were very nice. And we cut the grass and everything. We did nice things. The neighborhoods were beautiful. I mean, sycamore trees, elm trees, oak trees. People had lawns. They would just tell you. We knew not to walk and ride our bikes on anybody’s lawn. We knew it. They raked the grass. They burned the leaves on the curbs in the fall. You could just smell the leaves burn. That’s what we did. We didn’t have– We didn’t have the machine come by and suck the leaves up like they do now. That was not even in the wheelhouse. We had a– Yeah, I did see white flight, and I didn’t know what was going on. I just thought the white folks moved out and it’s all a Black neighborhood. That’s all I knew.
Julie Gabb [00:29:01] You’re saying about, like, the neighborhood upkeep and all. So were you aware of the so-called Glenville Plan, where their goal was, you know, to keep things nice and clean, to attract, you know, to increase, like, housing value, things like that?
Leo Martin [00:29:20] Back in the fifties and sixties? Never heard of it. Never heard of it. I never– I never thought it was necessary. Why? Because all the neighborhood houses were up. Were nice. I mean, they were nice. I cannot recall in the fifties and early sixties. Probably all the way up to probably when I went to college. I cannot recall a rundown house in Glenville. People scraped and painted. They cut their grass, they repaired their homes. We sat on the porches. They fixed their sidewalks. The city did their part. It just seemed like it was very nice. Maybe I was looking through rose-colored glasses, but I didn’t see a flaw in Glenville. It didn’t seem like a poor neighborhood, didn’t seem like it was lacking of anything, you know what I mean? The streets were smooth, not like they are now, chuckhole city, but they were very nice. You know, I was not aware of the Glenville Plan at all. You know, I wasn’t really getting myself involved in community activities, really. But I did notice that the community, that the neighborhoods were very nice. You know, the playgrounds were good. We could play safely out in places, you know, we had city gardens, we had city parks. We had to park down by Rockefeller, by Liberty Boulevard as you know it now, Martin Luther King Boulevard. We had the lagoon where the art museum is. That’s on the edge of Glenville. We had all that. And we had– We had Forest Hills Pool. It was beautiful. We had a pool called Filter Bed, which is now called Glenview. It was beautiful, right in Glenville. We had playgrounds everywhere, and people would just manicure their yards. We had block– We had neighborhoods, clubs, block clubs, what do you call them? Street clubs. People vote for who’s going to be president, vice president. And I swear to God, these people had contests to see whose street could be the prettiest street, you know. Cause everybody had flowers, and grass was cut and greeny, and they’d be out watering their grass. And the dads would come home from work and they would get the hose out and water their grass. The dads watered the grass. You know, everybody had one car. It left at five or six o’clock in the morning. Dad went to work. Mom hung clothes, washed clothes, whatever they had to do. And at four o’clock dads come back home, watered the grass. We eat dinner just like anybody else. People don’t believe that, but that’s how it was, you know. Most of the time, your dads went to work, your mothers were home. If your mother had a job, it was some kind of job in the neighborhood somewhere, some little part-time job to supplement the income, you know? And we knew, and the kid
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