Abstract
Bernadette "Bernie" Rose, a lifelong Detroit Shoreway resident, relates how her neighborhood was on unsteady ground in the 1960s-1980s. But from the efforts of three community members it was transformed into the vibrant place it is today. Since the 1990s the community feel, which closely resembles a big family, has gradually returned to the streets of Detroit Shoreway. The empty store fronts, commonly found lining Detroit Avenue in the 1980s, are now occupied. The only hope is that more affordable options are established for low-income residents to continue to participate in the ever growing neighborhood. Rose ends by reminding us that to protect your traditions you must embrace the new.
Loading...
Interviewee
Rose, Bernadette (interviewee)
Interviewer
Nemeth, Sarah (interviewer)
Project
Detroit Shoreway
Date
6-22-2017
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
69 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Bernadette Rose interview, 22 June 2017" (2017). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 955032.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1096
Transcript
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:01] Hi, my name is Sarah Nemeth. We’re here at Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization offices. It is June 22, 2017. I am here with Bernie Rose for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Could you please state your name for the record?
Bernadette Rose [00:00:19] Bernie Rose.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:21] And when were you born?
Bernadette Rose [00:00:22] I was born August 3rd of 1947.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:26] And where were you born?
Bernadette Rose [00:00:27] Cleveland, Ohio.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:29] What side of town?
Bernadette Rose [00:00:31] Well, west side.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:34] West side?
Bernadette Rose [00:00:34] Yeah. I was born at the old Grace Hospital down on 14th down in the Tremont area now.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:39] Okay.
Bernadette Rose [00:00:40] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:00:40] Is that where your family lived?
Bernadette Rose [00:00:43] No, actually, that I can remember. They were- My mother was living with my grandmother over on 22nd and Carnegie, which is now an off ramp for the freeway. Right where juvenile court is at right now. The old juvenile court. That’s where I lived for the first like four years of my life.
Sarah Nemeth [00:01:04] And what did your mother do?
Bernadette Rose [00:01:07] Nothing. She was a stay at home.
Sarah Nemeth [00:01:10] Stay at home?
Bernadette Rose [00:01:10] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:01:11] And you lived with your grandparents or just grandma or grandparents?
Bernadette Rose [00:01:15] Grandparents.
Sarah Nemeth [00:01:17] What did they do?
Bernadette Rose [00:01:19] I don’t really remember what my grandfather did. And my grandmother was, you know, of course, a stay at home at that time. They pretty much stayed home, right? Yeah. So, yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:01:31] Were they have an ethnic background?
Bernadette Rose [00:01:34] Actually, yes. What’s funny is my grandmother and my grandfather were actually cousins. Not close cousins, but they were cousins, which back in the day, I guess didn’t- And they both came from Syria. Yeah. So but when they split the country, we wound up to be Lebanese instead of Syrians. Whatever. But they were both 100% pure blooded Lebanese, my grandmother and my grandfather.
Sarah Nemeth [00:02:02] So even though you were technically Syrian, they embraced Lebanese.
Bernadette Rose [00:02:06] Yeah, it’s kind of like the same. It was just when they split the country, it was kind of like where they were from was more the Lebanese side than the Syrian side. So. Yeah. And then my Dad’s grandparents were 100% German.
Sarah Nemeth [00:02:21] Oh, that’s a fun mix.
Bernadette Rose [00:02:23] Yeah, yeah, it is.
Sarah Nemeth [00:02:26] Did you cook? Did they cook anything? Any ethnic-
Bernadette Rose [00:02:30] Oh, yeah. I can remember being eating Lebanese food, especially with my grandmother. Stuff like kibbeh and baklava and something they called batale. And then the pita bread, you know, the olives, that kind of stuff.
Sarah Nemeth [00:02:43] And you know, was there a Lebanese community here?
Bernadette Rose [00:02:49] Not here on the near west side, no. But I know there were a lot of our family was here on the west side. So, you know, like I said, I only lived with them till I was four. I even understood Lebanese back then. But after that, that was it. It was gone.
Sarah Nemeth [00:03:07] So they spoke it in the house?
Bernadette Rose [00:03:08] Yeah, yeah, yeah, they did. And like I said, I can remember you know, a couple of things, but if you don’t use it all the time, you lose it. So as I got older, it just kind of drifted away.
Sarah Nemeth [00:03:25] Do you remember any of the smells or anything being in the house when they’re cooking?
Bernadette Rose [00:03:32] Not really. A lot of that time just, you know, it don’t remember, you know. You know, like, the stuff that I really remember the most was, like, from the time I was five and up, because that’s when, I guess you could say, was a life change. My mom and dad wound up getting divorced. For whatever reason, my dad got custody of us, and we wound up in a foster home. So I lived in a foster home from the time I was five until I was 12 with my brother, who was one year younger than I was. And then my dad remarried, and we wound up going and living with him and my stepmother and stuff. So it was kind of like anything that happened before then, it’s just kind of like I really don’t remember real clearly, you know? Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:04:25] So was it common for people to get divorced at that time?
Bernadette Rose [00:04:28] I don’t think it was common, and I know it wasn’t common for the man to get custody, so I myself never wanted to delve into it any farther to see what was going on, why my dad got custody instead of my mother. So I just left it. They got divorced and he got us, and that was that.
Sarah Nemeth [00:04:53] Did you go into a group home or did you go into a foster.
Bernadette Rose [00:04:57] Well, it was a foster group home. There were. I think there was about 12 of us that lived there. They had a big dormitory style upstairs and stuff. And I remember being just. They had four boys of their own and then the foster kids. And I remember that when I was there, there were only two of us girls, so we had a private bedroom, you know, but there was only two of us girls. But it wasn’t a nice place to stay.
Sarah Nemeth [00:05:27] Where was it?
Bernadette Rose [00:05:29] It actually was on West 81st street between Lorain and Madison.
Sarah Nemeth [00:05:33] Interesting.
Bernadette Rose [00:05:34] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:05:34] Do you know what it was called? Was it called.
Bernadette Rose [00:05:37] It was a private home. It was a private home. Yeah. I remember the address was 2100 West 81st Street. And the family’s last name was Olin. I remember that. Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:05:49] And what, did you go to school from there?
Bernadette Rose [00:05:54] Yeah, I went to. I actually went to Lawn Elementary School, which, I mean, it’s closed now, but I went to Lawn Elementary School from kindergarten to the fourth grade. And then when my dad got married again and got custody, you know, took us out of the home to go live with them. I wound up going to St. Stephen’s Elementary School, which is over on 57. And I went there from the fourth grade to the eighth grade.
Sarah Nemeth [00:06:25] At your. I mean, you don’t want to talk about your time at the foster care. We don’t have to. But do you remember maybe, like, going out into the neighborhood and what it looked like around there?
Bernadette Rose [00:06:37] Weren’t allowed to.
Sarah Nemeth [00:06:38] You weren’t allowed to play outside?
Bernadette Rose [00:06:40] We were allowed to play out in the driveway in the backyard. That was it. My dad had bought it, even bought me a bicycle. I wasn’t even allowed to ride it out front on the sidewalk. I had to stay in the yard. And they, to me now seems to me that they were strictly in it for the money. They didn’t really care about the kids, you know what I’m saying? The way you see some foster parents embrace the kids and try to. They weren’t like that. They weren’t like that.
Sarah Nemeth [00:07:11] Well, when you leave at 12, what was that day like when you got taken out?
Bernadette Rose [00:07:16] Oh, I was happy. I was happy. But then it was like. It was like going from the frying pan into the fire because my stepmother and my dad would drink on the weekends and stuff, and they would fight, and it was like the neighbors, oh, they’re fighting at the Bergenstein house again, you know, and it wasn’t pleasant. So I actually only stayed with my dad and my stepmother until I was 15. And I only stayed there until 15, because at that time in the state of Ohio, you could request a change of custody at the age of 14. And I waited for my brother, who was a year younger than me, to turn 14 so that we could go together. We wound up running away one night. And at that time, we lived on 40th and Bailey, over by Greenwood Playground at that time. And my mother lived on, trying to remember. I think she lived over on Lawn avenue off of 65th Street. So that’s as far as we ran. But once we did that, it kind of got the attention of everybody, and we asked if we couldn’t come live with my mother instead. And my dad wound up letting us go, you know. So at the age of 15, I moved in with my mother.
Sarah Nemeth [00:08:43] So you had kept contact with your mother that whole time?
Bernadette Rose [00:08:47] Not close contact, you know, but I talked to her even when we were in the foster home. We talked, and she was able to take us out for the day or, you know, or anything, you know, something like that. But wasn’t real close contact. There was no, you know, long visits or going to spend the night or, you know, anything like that.
Sarah Nemeth [00:09:08] Where would she take you?
Bernadette Rose: We would go, like, I remember, like, she always. She loved Chinese food, so we’d go out to eat Chinese or. Or, you know, go to the movies or something like that. Just, you know, little things.
Sarah Nemeth [00:09:22] What theater did you go to when you went to the movies?
Bernadette Rose [00:09:27] I remember going. She liked this one Chinese restaurant that was downtown. And at that time, the Hippodrome Theater was there, so. And the Chinese restaurant was like, kind of like underneath the Hippodrome. So it was kind of like one, you know, one stop the movies and go downstairs and have something to eat. And at that time, I hated Chinese. I had never tried Chinese food. So I’m going to a Chinese restaurant, ordering a hamburger. But gradually she got me to try this, try that. And I did enjoy some things, but it was funny going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering a hamburger.
Sarah Nemeth [00:10:04] Do you remember what the Hippodrome looked like inside?
Bernadette Rose [00:10:07] Not really, no. I know it was a big old theater, you know, but I don’t remember. And at that time, I remember, and I may be confusing my theaters, but I think there was a stage and a lot of times they held different kinds of nights, like bunco nights and different things where you could win prizes and, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, right. Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:10:32] Bring people together.
Bernadette Rose [00:10:33] Right? Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:10:35] Okay, so you go and live with your mom, and how long do you stay with her?
Bernadette Rose [00:10:41] Wound up being there for two years.
Sarah Nemeth [00:10:46] Okay, so we’re at 17.
Bernadette Rose [00:10:48] At 17, actually, after I moved in with my mom, I wound up getting pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption. Well, let me go backwards, because I actually wound up getting pregnant when I was with my dad. And of course, it was 15. I was almost 15. And it was like, give the baby up for adoption or don’t come home. Where are you going then? You know, so that happened there. Then when I got with my mother, I wound up getting pregnant again, and I gave the baby up my own, because what kind of a life could I give him, you know? So I had two sons back then. And then when I was 17, I wound up getting pregnant with my oldest daughter. And at that point in time, I said, you know, I’m not doing this again. So I became an emancipated minor, what they called it back then, and that day. And I wound up being able to get the apartment right next door to my mother. So that’s where me and my baby girl moved into. Yeah, So I was right there by my mom. Because when I moved in with her, we had developed a friendship where at times, some people thought we were more like sisters than we were mother and daughter, you know, so. But I was able to move right in right next door to her.
Sarah Nemeth [00:12:14] And where was that?
Bernadette Rose [00:12:15] That was on 65th and Lawn. We were right across the. From the side door of St. Coleman’s Church.
Sarah Nemeth [00:12:23] Okay.
Bernadette Rose [00:12:23] Yeah. House isn’t there anymore that I lived in. My mom’s house is still there. As a matter of fact, my youngest sister and her husband and them live in that house still. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, they’re actually. They’re actually living there.
Sarah Nemeth [00:12:40] Do you remember what the neighborhood used to look like?
Bernadette Rose [00:12:41] Up there? You know, it’s still. To me, it still pretty much looks the same because they haven’t really done a lot of improvements up in that area. I mean, there are some, you know, like, they redid the Rapid Station before. It used to be a dark, scary kind of place that you didn’t want to go to, and it was right at the end of our street, but you didn’t really didn’t want to go. Not even across the bridge to go to Madison Avenue. It was a very scary place. Now that they modernized it and everything, it’s a lot nicer. But the street, actual Lawn Avenue right there between 65th and 61st street, really hasn’t changed that much. I mean, different people living there. They’ve torn down a few of the houses, but basically, it seems to be pretty much the same as it was then.
Sarah Nemeth [00:13:33] You know, what type of, like, people live there.
Bernadette Rose [00:13:38] In that area? They were. I think it was a mix. There were a lot of Southern people, of course, there was us and families. And it was like, you would get a family that was living in a house, and as the kids got older, they wound up living in another house on the street. So at one point in time, it was like there was only, like, there might have been 15 houses on the whole street, and most of them were inhabited by maybe four families, because as we got older, like, I moved next door to my mother. My sister wound up moving in three doors farther down. She got a house and moved in, and my brother wound up moving into a place next door to her. So it was kind of like. We just kind of, like, spread out a little bit and occupied the street. And it was the same with a few other families on the street, too. So, yeah, it was. No, it was kind of, you know, it was kind of nice community-type thing to where you could let your kids out to play, and if they were doing Something you knew one of the neighbors was going to give them hell, you know, so it was kind of nice and kind of homey, you know?
Sarah Nemeth [00:14:52] Okay. And were they ethnic of any kind?
Bernadette Rose [00:14:57] We’re not. Not really. It was just, you know, normal. Yeah. Like I said, some were from the south, of course. My mom was Lebanese. My stepdad at that time was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And everybody else pretty much, you know, like I said, some of them had a Southern background and stuff, but there really wasn’t too many ethnic people in the neighborhood then.
Sarah Nemeth [00:15:24] Okay, well, when do you. So we’re 17 right now.
Bernadette Rose [00:15:30] Mm.
Sarah Nemeth [00:15:31] How long do you stay at that apartment?
Bernadette Rose [00:15:34] I lived there quite a while when I turned 20. Well, let me go back. The man I’m married to right now, we’ve been married almost 49 years.
Sarah Nemeth: Oh congratulations!
Bernadette Rose: Yeah. Thank you. I knew him because when I moved in with my mother, she opened her house up to the neighborhood teenagers, and we even made it into the Plain Dealer and the press and everything. Really? Yeah, because her and my stepdad, they enjoyed kids. They wanted me to bring my friends home, not be on the streets with them. And so they tore the carpeting up out of the dining room, and they put chairs in there, and they used to have big vats of Kool Aid there, and all the kids were welcome to come there and listen to music and play games and whatever, you know. And I met my husband when I was 15, and he was 13, and he was one of the kids that started coming to the house. And he really didn’t have a good family background, so he spent a lot of time there. And I hated his guts. I hated his guts. But we all hung around together, so there was, like, a group of us. No, we really didn’t pair off too much or anything. And I went through a lot of different, you know, ins and outs and everything. And even what’s funny is, my oldest girl’s father, we still saw each other. He came to the house all the time and everything, and we were actually going to go get married, and his friends talked him out of it, so we didn’t get married. But at the age of 20, and my daughter was 3, I ran into my husband, Bill. I ran into him at a bar. I had my- My mother used to take us out to this. It was more like a club type thing, you know, and it was down on 53rd and Clark. It was called Hernando’s Hideaway, and it was just a little bitty place, you know. But she took us there, and one day, Bill walk, came in and he had just come home from the service, and he was sitting at the bar. And I looked at my mom and I said, ma, you got to do me a favor. I said, I want to wind up with him. And she said, okay. Meanwhile, he goes and says, does anybody want to go out and drink some wine? So we all go out behind the bar, and we’re drinking Wild Irish Rose. I’ll never forget it. We’re drinking Wild Irish Rose and everything. So I went back in and I said, what can we do? I want to be with him. So when the bar was getting ready to close, my mother decided, hey, come on, guys, I’m going to take you all out to breakfast. She took us all out to breakfast. He came home with me that night, and he never left. So that’s the way we wound up together.
Sarah Nemeth [00:18:56] What a fun story.
Bernadette Rose [00:18:58] Yeah. And, you know, like I said, my daughter was 3, and he just moved into my house next door to my mom. And that’s where we’ve been, you know, we’ve been together ever since.
Sarah Nemeth [00:19:11] That’s wonderful.
Bernadette Rose [00:19:12] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:19:13] Did going back to your parents opening, well, your mom and your stepdad opening up the house, was it. Did they call it anything? Did you guys call it anything?
Bernadette Rose [00:19:25] You know, everybody said, we’re going to the Foxes.
Sarah Nemeth [00:19:28] The Foxes?
Bernadette Rose [00:19:28] That was my mom’s last name then. Fox. F-O-X. Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:19:34] And when was it in the Plain Dealer?
Bernadette Rose [00:19:37] I’m not sure if it was a Plain Dealer or the press. I can’t remember. But you know what? I have the clipping at home still. The picture of me at the 15 and my husband’s in there, and the names of the kids that were. That were in the picture and everything. I’ve still got it at home someplace. Yeah, I do.
Sarah Nemeth [00:19:53] Well, that’s an interesting story, that if the kids didn’t come to your, your mom’s house, what would they be.
Bernadette Rose [00:20:01] Doing hanging on the street corners? Probably getting into trouble. I can remember that detectives even came to the house because people were talking about all these kids hanging around and everything. And of course, they see a bunch of kids, they just think, what’s going on? You know, so the detectives came and talked to my mom and my stepdad and everything and talked to some of the kids and stuff until they found out what was going on for sure. And, you know, then everything was okay, you know.
Sarah Nemeth [00:20:36] Right. It’s a good thing.
Bernadette Rose [00:20:38] Yeah. Right.
Sarah Nemeth [00:20:38] People out keeping out of trouble.
Bernadette Rose [00:20:40] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:20:40] You can just come and hang out, drink Kool Aid.
Bernadette Rose [00:20:42] Yeah. And drink Kool Aid. Right. But. Yeah. So Yeah, I can remember that they came there to see what was going on.
Sarah Nemeth [00:20:54] So would you say that the area was relatively. Was it depressed?
Bernadette Rose [00:20:59] I wouldn’t say it was depressed. I think it was like more middle of the road type middle. You know, middle America, you know, everybody knew everybody, you know, and felt very comfortable with the kids going out to play, you know, and stuff like that. It was very community, more or less, you know, on that street. That was nice. Yeah, it was. It was. And my oldest girl still has fond memories of some of the kids that she grew up with there. My youngest girl was actually born on that street in another house next door to the one where we were living. When I was 27, I had her. And it still, at that time was still very homey, you know.
Sarah Nemeth [00:21:54] What did you call your neighborhood? Like, I’m going to. Because now we have these. This is Detroit Shore Way.
Bernadette Rose [00:22:01] Right. You know, they really didn’t. They really didn’t specify an area. You know, somebody asked you where you lived. I live on Lawn Avenue off of Lorraine. There was no, like you say, Gordon Square or Detroit Shoreway or anything like that. I mean, what’s so funny about it is I had never been down on Detroit Avenue until my daughter started school in 1980.
Sarah Nemeth: Really?
Bernadette Rose: Yeah. My mother told me I wasn’t allowed down on Detroit Avenue because of the gang and stuff that hung around here. And at that time, they were called the Herman Ghetto Rats. Yeah. And they were all the Italian families that lived around here, all their kids. So I was never allowed down here until I got my daughter enrolled at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. My youngest girl in 1980, and I used to have to walk her down here and walk her back and everything. I never even knew There was a McDonald’s on Detroit Avenue until then. It was like, you know, we were protected. And my mom didn’t want us to expand our horizons out to the point that they even. The place faced 65th Street. It was a little storefront place that my mom and dad actually turned into a game room with all kinds of pinball games and pool tables, and they had a popcorn machine and everything, and they encouraged all the kids to come there. And to this day, some of these relatives of the Herman Ghetto Rats to this day will talk about going up to Poopsie’s Pinball Palace. Poopsie was my youngest sister’s nickname, and my mom and dad named it after her, and it was Poopsie’s Pinball Palace. And a lot of the kids that were raised around here still remember going there really.
Sarah Nemeth [00:24:06] And the gang members went there, too?
Bernadette Rose [00:24:08] Some of them did, yeah. But there was no gang affiliation when you were there. You were just another kid coming there to play pinball.
Sarah Nemeth [00:24:20] How old were you when you get into a gang?
Bernadette Rose [00:24:24] Oh, down here, I don’t know how old they were. I mean, most of these kids were like my age back then. You know, they were like 15, 16 years old. You know, I can remember one trademark they had was they always wore black dress pants that were hiked up here somewhere and leather coats. I can remember that. Like greaser from Grease, kind of. Yeah, Kind of that back then. Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:24:56] Interesting.
Bernadette Rose [00:24:56] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:24:57] And did they. Well, I guess you didn’t ever come down here. No, but just from what you heard, did they ever. Did they run Detroit?
Bernadette Rose [00:25:06] They really. I think more or less it was just like a gathering of kids from the neighborhood. They were friends and. And to this day, some of they’re still lifelong friends. Friends, you know, and they weren’t into doing any kind of bad things or anything or gang fights or anything. I never heard about anything like that.
Sarah Nemeth [00:25:28] It was just a group of Italian guys.
Bernadette Rose [00:25:31] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:25:31] Okay, so there was a large Italian.
Bernadette Rose [00:25:35] Influence in the area down here. Absolutely. Yeah. In the beginning, it was Irish, this neighborhood. And there was even an Irish gang that lived on 69th Street called the McCart Gang.
Sarah Nemeth [00:25:51] Oh, really?
Bernadette Rose [00:25:52] Yeah. And they. Actually, 69th street was called McCart back in the day when they had street names and the gang lived there. And I guess they ruled things around here pretty much. And then slowly but surely, the Italians started moving in and settling. When Mount Carmel started their chapel and everything here, the Italian people started coming and settling in this area. And slowly but surely it turned. I’m almost positive that you could say that 69th, 67, 65th might have been. At that time, as it switched over, it had to have been close to 90% Italians.
Sarah Nemeth [00:26:35] Really?
Bernadette Rose [00:26:35] Yeah. Yeah. You never talked about anybody down here because you never knew who was related to who, so. Yeah. But. Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:26:49] What was. Well, I guess. How old are you now?
Bernadette Rose [00:26:53] When I had. I mean,
Sarah Nemeth: We just met your husband.
Bernadette Rose: I met my husband and we got married in 1960. When my daughter was, my oldest girl, was three years old, we got married and we moved into there. And then, you know, there was some rough periods and things that went on that, you know, I’d rather just not talk about. And we were wound up there until my youngest girl was about a year and a half old. My husband decided he wanted to go to mining school. He was from West Virginia, so we up and moved to West Virginia. I had never been out of Cleveland. We moved to West Virginia so he could go to mining school and meanwhile, mining school, he finished mining school while we were living in West Virginia. And then all of a sudden the mines closed down and there was nothing to do. And he started coming back to Cleveland to be with his friends. And I’m down there with the two kids, which wasn’t fun. I called my mom, I said, Mom, I’ve had it, come and get me. My mother packed up a few friends and a truck and everything and came down and moved me back to Cleveland. And the funniest thing is we wound up moving back in. We moved in originally to my mom’s basement when we got there and the place next door that we started out in became empty and I wound up moving back into that place again. So we were there. Yeah, it was like we moved into houses and they were all within a five house area right there for the longest time.
Sarah Nemeth [00:28:37] How long were you in West Virginia?
Bernadette Rose [00:28:40] Might have been about six months maybe. That was all.
Sarah Nemeth [00:28:46] My mom’s just from, she’s from Bel Air. It’s almost in West Virginia. So I hung out a lot down there.
Bernadette Rose [00:28:55] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:28:55] And sometimes it’s not that fun because there’s nothing to do.
Bernadette Rose [00:28:57] Absolutely nothing to do.
Sarah Nemeth [00:28:59] Nothing. Yeah, you can basically drink.
Bernadette Rose [00:29:02] Yeah. Or I mean we lived. We lived in a- We lived in a town kind of setting, you know. Yeah. I mean we could go uptown and there might be a Kroger’s and you know, a couple other things. But it wasn’t a big, you know, a big, huge place.
Sarah Nemeth [00:29:19] But especially coming from here, I mean.
Bernadette Rose [00:29:23] And it was Princeton, West Virginia.
Sarah Nemeth [00:29:26] Okay.
Bernadette Rose [00:29:26] And it was close to Bluefield. And at that time there was Bluefield, West Virginia and the line and then Bluefield, Virginia. So we were right close to Virginia, you know.
Sarah Nemeth [00:29:42] So when you came back, did you have had the neighborhood changed at all or was it exactly the same?
Bernadette Rose [00:29:49] It was basically the same. You know, like I said, we moved back into the apartment we had started out in and the same people were still living in the neighborhood and everything. And it was kind of just fell back into the same, you know, same type of thing.
Sarah Nemeth [00:30:08] Right. What did people in the neighborhood do for work?
Bernadette Rose [00:30:14] It depended. My stepdad was a repairman and an installer of background music and pinball machines.
Sarah Nemeth [00:30:22] I never heard of that.
Bernadette Rose [00:30:25] Yeah, he worked for a company, you know. And my mother was a secretary. And my dad, that was his part time job, full time job. He was a Greyhound bus driver. And then I’m trying to remember the guy that lived in the front apartment of where we lived, worked in a machine shop. My husband was a chrome plater at first. And most of the other people down the other end, they were all like factory workers. It was- Nobody had a, I guess, what do you say, a professional-type job, right? Yeah, they were more factory workers.
Sarah Nemeth [00:31:11] Were there factories around?
Bernadette Rose [00:31:13] Not up at that end. I mean, down here, there actually were where a lot of people in this area worked. There was one place down on the end of 65th Street was called Harris Calorific that a lot of people worked in. A lot of the women in the area worked at Joseph and Feiss, making men’s suits and stuff. And a lot of women worked at, like, Tower Candy Company. That was across the street from Mount Carmel. That was my first job. When I was 18 years old, I started working at Tower Candy Company making 75 cents an hour and all the chocolates you could eat. But it wasn’t, you know, there were. There weren’t any white collar workers per se. Everybody was more or less blue collar workers and worked at the salt mines down, you know, down by the lake and all that kind of stuff. There weren’t, you know, a lot of white collar jobs.
Sarah Nemeth [00:32:15] Okay. But up to this point, it’s still basically a white working class neighborhood.
Bernadette Rose [00:32:23] Yeah.
Sarah Nemeth [00:32:23] When do you start to see, is there a shift? Do you start to see a change?
Bernadette Rose [00:32:28] I started to see a shift in the neighborhood, per se, believe it or not. When they started busing, when they started busing the kids, two or three different things happened. Number one, you had a lot of white flight because they didn’t want their kids going to the east side. I didn’t want my baby girl going to the east side to a school where I didn’t have access, you know, and that’s when I wound up bringing her to Mount Carmel to go to school. And at the same time, you had the east siders, the black people, moving to the west side because their kids were being sent to school over here, and they felt the same way we did. They didn’t. It wasn’t. I don’t think, because I wasn’t raised that way, that it was a black and white thing. I think it was the proximity of where your kid was going to school. You want to live in that neighborhood.
Sarah Nemeth [00:33:35] Right. The neighborhood school.
Bernadette Rose [00:33:37] Right. And be part of that school. And that when the busing started and you saw a lot of the white flags flight, the black flight, crossing, you know, sides of town and everything, I think that’s when things started changing in my mind. That’s when, you know, the big changes started.
Sarah Nemeth [00:33:55] What were the big changes?
Bernadette Rose [00:33:57] Like I said, you know, the difference in the neighborhood, the type of people who were living here. You kind of like, I don’t know, it’s kind of like you. You lost it. Sense of community. Because everybody was worried about themselves and nobody was worrying about, you know, what was going on as a whole. And I mean, to this day, some of these areas don’t have any community whatsoever. Every man for their self, you know. And that, to me, I was glad when I brought my kids up in an area where everybody knew everybod
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
