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Pauline Young and Sylvester Young, Jr. Narrators

Philip Kretsedemas

Interviewer

Minneapolis, Minnesota

February 27, 1997 PK: This is Philip Kretsedemas. This is an interview for the African-American Community exhibit taking place on Thursday, February 27, 1997. I’m talking with Mrs. Pauline Young, who operated the Satin Doll beauty shop. We’ll be talking about the life story of Mr. Chubby Young and also Mrs. Young, too. PY: Just what is it that you wanted to know? PK: I was thinking maybe you’d like to start with how your family moved to Minnesota. PY: My husband, Chubby—everybody called him Chubby—his name is Sylvester, but they called him Chubby—this was his home. My home was in Mexico, Missouri. His aunt raised me, so I met him through his aunt. We became friends and engaged over the years. Then, when he asked me to marry him, I came to Minnesota and married him on August 31. We made our home in St. Paul, Minnesota, at that time. SY: In 1936. PY: Then, over the years, of course, we moved other places. We lived with his parents at first. I would say his barbering started at his home, when he started cutting his brother’s and his dad’s hair. When we moved to Minneapolis, we moved into the Project. He used to cut people’s hair there in our apartment, to try to make some extra money, because he wasn’t making very much at the jobs that he was at. He decided to go to barber school. He thought, if I’m going to do this, I might as well go to barber school, so that’s what he did. He came out of barber school in 1945. Then finally, he went into shops with Reverend Battle. The first shop that he went to was in south Minneapolis with this lady barber. PK: Her name was Brownie, wasn’t it? PY: Brownie, right. He left there, and came to the north side, and he worked with Reverend Battle for quite awhile. After that, he got his own shop. He would open up his own shop in different areas over on the north side.

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PK: The Reverend Battle—was he the Reverend of Mount Olivet Baptist Church? PY: Yes. PK: Is it the same Battle? PY: Reverend Walter Battle. SY: He had a weekly Sunday show on TV for years until he died. PY: Over the years, he had his own shop. Of course, I stayed home and raised the kids. After they got into school, where I didn’t have to be home all day with them, then I did day work. I got tired of that and I wanted to do something different than that, so a friend of mine—her name was Juanita Gray—was going to beauty school and she knew that I liked doing hair, too. She talked me into going to beauty school. I thought, why not? So, I did. I went to beauty school. My son, John, was in beauty school and he talked me into it also. After I went to school and finished, I worked a year for a lady to get my license, for Dorothy James. After that year, when I could get my manager’s license, then my son, John, and I opened a shop of our own. So, we had our own beauty shop, the Satin Doll. After quite a few years that we worked there, my husband had to move. He built his own shop on the Olson Highway after awhile. Then, they said he had to move from there. He decided to build another shop and we would combine the shops together, the Young Brothers Barbershop and the Satin Doll Beauty Salon. We moved there together on Nineteenth and Plymouth Avenue North so that’s where we were. We moved in that shop in 1971 and we stayed there until we sold the shop to Jones and Jones in 1991. PK: In one of the interviews—I’ll paraphrase—I think both you and Mr. Young were talking about how you got into the business. I remember there’s a story that I thought was interesting. I guess you must have been working, doing handiwork around. PY: Right. PK: You mentioned one incident—I wonder if you would retell it—where something occurred where his employer asked him to pick up a fork and he’d just had it at that point. He was tired of— PY: He was working as a chauffeur for a family and also he did everything. So, this night, they were having dinner guests and he went in to clear some of the dishes off of the dinner table. His hands were full, and a fork fell off, and he couldn’t stop to pick it up because his hands were full. Mrs. Heller told him, “Pick up that fork. Sylvester, pick that fork up.” He just kind of kicked it out of the way so he wouldn’t step on it. He didn’t like the way she had said it. It was very embarrassing for him and that he couldn’t do it at that time. She said, “Pick that fork up now.”

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So, he just went on out in the kitchen, put all the dishes down and the plates, and he got his coat and hat on, and just walked out. That was the end of that job. PK: Did he make the decision to go into barbering shortly after that? PY: That’s kind of when he decided to go on to school. We were still living in the Project when that happened. SY: He also worked as a Pullman porter. How long did he do that? PY: He didn’t work there but about a year. It was all right, but he didn’t like being away from home. He said he never liked really being out on the road. He was out seven days a week. He was out more than that really because he was only in about three or four days and then he’d have to get right back out on the road, so he didn’t like the road. He worked at it for about a year and then he quit that. PK: His dad was a porter? PY: His dad worked in a private family like he did. SY: Grandpa was a chauffeur for a white family in St. Paul so that’s how my dad got started chauffeuring as well. PK: Did his dad move up here or was his dad born here, too? PY: No, his dad was born in Macon, Missouri. They lived in Macon, Missouri, and then they came to Minnesota many years ago. He had a sister that lived here, Mrs. Herod Hall. Then, they came to Minnesota. I don’t remember what year that was. It was before the kids were born. They had all of their children between St. Paul and Minneapolis. They had nine children. PK: There were several brothers that were barbers? PY: They were all barbers, yes. PK: Did they all have their own shops or, at one point, they all worked at his shop? PY: Chubby was the beginner. He was the first one. After him, came his older brother, Johnny. He went to school and had taken it. There was Dickie—Richard—and Raymond. They came out of school and they went into barber school also. Then, the last one was Fred and he did the same thing. So, Fred came in with Chubby in his shop on the north side. Dick and Raymond were on the south side. John and Merle were in St. Paul. SY: Wait, Ma. Dickie and Raymond were in St. Paul and Johnny and Merle were—

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PY: On the south side, that’s right. Dick and Raymond was in St. Paul, yes. PK: The impression I have is that there were quite a few black barbers from the 1920s on up. Was that your impression around that time? Were you the biggest barbering family? SY: The Young brothers were, yes, the biggest barbering family in Minnesota. There were big emporiums where they had eight or ten barbers all lined down back in the early 1900s, 1890s. I saw some pictures that dad showed me of these big giant barber emporiums where they had ten or fifteen barbers all lined down in a row. PY: Where was that at? SY: He showed me some pictures that he had down at his shop, when I was a kid, that I remember. PY: Here in Minnesota? SY: Yes, in fact I think it was in St. Paul. After awhile, they kind of closed down. These were only for white people. Black people weren’t allowed to come into these black barbershops and get their haircut. It was strictly for white folks. The black barbers were like porters. They served white people in those days. But when dad got started, that was the time that black barbers started cutting black people’s hair instead of white people’s hair and had their own personal shops. PY: I don’t think there were too many of them around. There were a few black shops, but most of them were in little storefronts and not too many. SY: I think there was Reverend Battle and then one other. I forget—dad said his name. There was one other barber that worked and then my dad, so there were three barbers in Minneapolis at the time, in the early 1940s. PK: Most people just got their haircut at home or something or they went to those three shops? SY: There weren’t many black people here in those days. Everybody knew almost every other black person in Minneapolis in the early 1940s because there just wasn’t many here. They hadn’t started moving up here yet. PY: Not only that but there was also what they called bootlegging barbers. They barbered at home, kind of like with my husband the way he got started. He barbered in the Project. All the little kids and even the dads were coming there and getting their haircut for twenty-five cents a cut. So that kind of helped us with our living until he decided to go on to school and make a business out of it.

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PK: Did he encounter any problems getting into the business, given that there weren’t many other black barbers at the time? PY: No, he didn’t. He went to Moeller Barber School. He got along real well there in the school. In fact, one of the owners there liked him real well and even after he came out of school, they still kept in touch with each other. PK: Something else I wanted to ask about is your impressions of the neighborhood, having come into St. Paul and then moving to north Minneapolis. Do you have any memories of those two neighborhoods growing up at that point in time? PY: When we moved from St. Paul into the Project there, it was great because they were new. It was like—I guess you’d say it was like heaven, because that was the best thing that we had at that time. We didn’t have an awful lot when we moved in there. The Project was a great place to live, because there were so many people in our same condition. We kept things up. It’s not like today. People will move into places and they don’t care—it’s their home, but they don’t keep it up. They’ll say, “It’s not mine.” We didn’t have that attitude when we moved into the Project. It was a beautiful clean, brand new place, and we treasured it, and we kept it up. We kept it clean. Even in the areas, we would ask the managers if we could plant flowers, so our whole building was like that. We would plant flowers out in the front. We treasured what we had there and tried to keep it up nice. It’s so different now. In St. Paul, after we left his family’s home, we just lived in rooming houses until we got over here. That’s why I was saying that it was just great because it was something of our own at that time. SY: Also, like I wrote in the article, the Project had tennis courts. It had a place for playing horseshoe. It had swings and sandboxes. It had a big equipment building that we called the warming house. In the wintertime, they’d flood the area and we could go skating. There were big fields where we could play football and baseball and it had a swimming pool, a wading pool is what it was. Kids would come down there and swim in the summer. Sometimes, in the summer, they would have outdoor movies for us to see. It was right next to Phyllis Wheatley [Community Center] so we had crafts there and a boxing class with the Golden Gloves. It was literally perfect for a growing child in that day. That’s why I wrote about it in this article because they’re tearing down those Projects and I wanted to tell people what it was like growing up there. It was a wonderful place. It had everything. They had, even, rose bushes all around the entire Project. It was just that beautiful. I can’t talk enough about it. It was just a wonderful place to grow up. PK: In your memory then, do you think that the major migration of African-Americans to north Minneapolis was about that time or was there already a big community in that area? PY: At that time, it was predominantly black in the Project then. SY: On the east side of Dupont [Avenue]. On the west side of Dupont, the Projects were all white. The Projects weren’t segregated, but the white people just kind of moved into that section

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on the other side of Dupont and the black people moved in closer to Phyllis Wheatley, so they could be close to Phyllis Wheatley on the east side of Dupont. It appeared segregated, but it was just the way they wanted to live. PY: It was predominantly black though. It was more blacks than whites at that time. Minneapolis, the north side, during that time was so different than what it is now. You never had the problems then. We could go like in the summertime when it was so hot in the apartments, we’d take our blankets, and go down in the park, and lay there in the park, and sleep half the night in the cool. You couldn’t do that now. That’s how different it is, back then than it is now. PK: I know this is hard to pinpoint because there’s a broad stretch of time, but are there any particular things that occurred that really marked that change in your memory, where you saw things beginning to change? SY: As far as I’m concerned, it was when the welfare system started to change. I remember people were calling down to—what’s that suburb of Chicago? PK: Is this in the 1950s or 1960s? SY: In the mid 1960s. The welfare—they were calling down to people that lived in Gary, Indiana, those places like that and telling them to come up because the welfare was so good. That’s when the real black migration started coming up to the Twin Cities. PY: Yes. SY: Back in the 1950s and the early 1960s, there were very few blacks. I used to like to tell people that—when I went in the Navy, I was stationed in Washington, D.C. for awhile—Minneapolis had so few blacks that if I was downtown and saw a black person, we’d just wave because there were so few of us. When I went to Washington, D.C., it was almost all black. I couldn’t believe the difference. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the real big migration of blacks started coming up here for the welfare and everything. It just completely changed the whole town really because they were basically poor people. It’s kind of been made a big slum, the whole north side. [unclear] all Jewish in the north side in those days. PK: Are there any comparisons you can make between the old St. Paul neighborhood and north Minneapolis? In my readings—of course, I wasn’t around then at all—the impression I got was that most of the older middle class were sort of in the old Rondo area. A lot of the newer migrants sort of ended up in north Minneapolis. It wasn’t quite as old a community or established and maybe there were some class differences in the people there. Do you ever feel that or think there were different social networks between those two places? PY: I think in St. Paul there was a difference. Minneapolis and St. Paul kind of always clashed a little bit. In St. Paul, Rondo was the lower part of St. Paul and St. Anthony—they called it the

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Upper St. Anthony—was where you had, what I guess you would call, your upper crust. I don’t know if that’s the word to use or not. They always had that conflict that one felt that they were a little bit better than the other. The higher of St. Anthony and the lower of Rondo—there was kind of a clash a lot. It’s the same way with Minneapolis—the north side and south side. The south side has always felt that they were better than the north side. That has been an ongoing thing for many years. Now, I think it’s completely changed. I think it’s according to how you live. SY: Since the migration of the blacks from Gary and other places, there aren’t those distinctions anymore about the immigrants because nobody knows anybody. PY: St. Paul and Minneapolis—they always had the rivalry between the two cities. Of course, when Minneapolis would go there, maybe the St. Paul people didn’t particularly want them over there in some of the places. It was the same way here. St. Paul would come to Minneapolis and it would be the same thing. There would be just kind of a clashing back at that time. I don’t think it’s so much that way now, over the years. PK: You mentioned Phyllis Wheatley, but were there any other sort of organizations or groups that you belonged to or that people in general in your neighborhood belonged to, like citizen’s groups or church groups? PY: Wheatley was really the backbone. SY: Yes. Phyllis Wheatley in Minneapolis and Hallie Q. Brown [Community Center] in St. Paul were the two community organizations totally devoted to black people in the city. Everybody went there for something, whether or not it was for—I started out in the Phyllis Wheatley Nursery School. I was enrolled there when I first got ready for school. They had crafts and, like I said, everything else devoted to nurturing kids, even movies on Saturday. We’d go and watch movies, old cowboy movies, and cartoons, and things. PY: Wheatley was kind of the backbone of children growing up because they tried to help children get on the right track and gave them something to do. There were always activities going on there that they could get into. I remember his first piano lesson. He started at Wheatley when he wanted to take piano. They always had that kind of nurturing towards children. St. Paul, at Hallie Q., that’s the same way they were. Now, I don’t know of anyplace that really can pull the children in—and it’s too bad because they do need that. They really need a place where children can go when they come out of school and, instead of being on the street, be someplace where they have all kinds of activities and interests for them. PK: Were they any churches in this area? The other thing I think of is churches and maybe Civil Rights organizations.

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PY: Zion Baptist was one of the main churches. They took a lot of interest in the children back then. I didn’t belong to Zion, but I used to go to a lot of things there. I had friends that went there. I’m a Methodist. Zion was the stronger of the churches then. SY: Then, they had Border Methodist Church, which we belonged to. Later on, we merged with Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church, which was an all white church at that time. In fact, that was probably the first white church in the city that was integrated with blacks in the early 1950s. PY: It was, yes. SY: Like I said, the place where we grew up was totally devoted to family life. It wasn’t just the Phyllis Wheatley and our church but the housing— PY: Yes, families watched out for other people. SY: Yes, we all watched out for each other. We used to go in the wintertime and they’d flood the whole area, so we could ice skate. In the summertime, they had all kinds of games that the kids could go to at the warming house. We called it the warming house; it was an equipment building. We could get horseshoes, or beanbags, or baseball bats, or footballs, or whatever we wanted to do. They’d have the equipment there. They even had bicycles for awhile that we could rent for fifty cents a day because most of us couldn’t afford bicycles back in those days. We could rent those. It was really a place devoted to seeing that kids had a wonderful growing up. There was no crime. There were no drugs that we had to worry about. PY: I think back then, even other parents took more interest in each other’s children. If they saw somebody else’s child into something that they shouldn’t be, then they would reprimand them or tell the parents, so they kind of looked out for each other’s children. Between the churches and the Wheatley, I think it gave them a lot to do. PK: Something else I was curious about, too—this in one reason why we even became interested in barbershops and hair salons—is that it seemed to be places where people came together informally and talked. It just seemed that even before you had the Phyllis Wheatley Center and the churches, they were one of the few buildings where people got together publicly. I could be wrong. Do you have any memories of how the shops were used as community places, where people hung out in them a lot? PY: Only the men. SY: Yes. PK: So, it wasn’t so much a thing for women to hang around salons the way men hung around the barbershops?

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PY: No. SY: I used to go down to my dad’s when he was working with Reverend Battle before he became a minister. I’d go down there, and sit down, and just listen to the guys tell stories. They’d go down there and they’d be talking about things in the neighborhood or telling jokes. It was a meeting place kind of like Floyd’s Barbershop on the old Andy Griffith Show. People would come in there and just talk about what was going on and things. It was so interesting that I would sometimes stop my playing, and just go down to see my dad, and sit around and listen to the guys talk. They’d be telling jokes. I’d be laughing. Of course, Reverend Battle would be preaching half the time, because he was already getting started to get into his ministry. He didn’t allow cussing or anything in the shop. I could go down there and listen to all kinds of stories, and I did quite often, and enjoyed it. PY: That’s the same way with our shop, with both of our shops, my husband’s shop and my shop. We didn’t allow any kind of bad language—somebody would say something and we would politely say that we don’t like to hear that in here. Actually, both sides were that way. You did have children coming in there to get their hair cut. In his barbershop, he had children sitting over there so you didn’t like all that cursing and everything. We did have men come into our shop. I can remember this one fellow that was up under there and he was talking to some other guy there. Of course, he got to saying a few choice words under there. I just went over, and raised the hood up, and I said, “I’m sorry but we really don’t allow that kind of language in here.” He apologized. They really respected the shop when they would come in. He apologized for that. You do have to kind of keep that under control. PK: You mentioned though that it wasn’t just men, that there were children in the shop and, in the early days, women were also in the shop? PY: Yes. PK: It wasn’t just the men. PY: Ladies would come into the barbershop to get their haircut. At that time, I don’t think there was a lot of beauty shops, so if it was convenient in the neighborhood for them, they would just go into the barbershop and get their haircut. There would be women as well as children. I think it was kind of a community thing. There were some men in Chubby’s shop that came there almost everyday and would just sit around and talk. SY: Also, both men and women usually. Was his name Mr. Milan? PY: Yes, the shoeshine.

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SY: They had shoe shining as well in the shop, so men and women came down and got their shoes shined. It was an important thing in those days to not only get your haircut but they’d come down for a shave and to get their shoes shined because it was so cheap. It really didn’t cost that much. Nowadays, you don’t see people coming to the shops to get shaved and a shoe shine anymore. PY: Or just to sit around and talk. SY: Yes. It was kind of a communal meeting place. People just would come down and talk about what’s been happening in the neighborhood the past week or whatever. PY: I don’t know of any other community places for the black people to go at that time except for in their own neighborhoods. Like I was saying, it would be the church, whatever they would be having, or Phyllis Wheatley. It was a daily thing there that you could go over. They had all kinds of little classes. They had what they called mother’s classes and different things. But, as far as any other places, even white places, I don’t know of any that was open to the blacks at that time. SY: In fact, even in the early days when TV first started, most of the people in the Projects didn’t have TVs, but Phyllis Wheatley did. So like if Joe Louis was fighting or something, you’d find everybody in the Projects would be down to Phyllis Wheatley watching the fight on their TV. It was that kind of a communal thing. It was a lot of fun. Also, I remember Cedric Adams. He was a local personality, radio and early TV, mostly in the papers, wasn’t he? He did an article in the papers. PY: Yes. SY: I remember they used to have like a Bob Barker kind of thing down at Phyllis Wheatley where they gave away prizes. They had contests and they gave away prizes to women, washing machines and things like that, really expensive. Not only blacks, but the whites that lived on the other side of Dupont . . . It was a kind of Bob Barker kind of thing where local merchants around Broadway. Broadway was a well-known place for—a lot of Jewish merchants were around Broadway then and they would donate washing machines, or refrigerators, or whatever to advertise their stores and Phyllis Wheatley—they would come down and have these contests for all the women from both sides, the white section on the other side of Dupont, and the black Projects people would all be in there and be screaming and yelling. Mom, doesn’t remember that, but I used to go down there and watch this stuff and really get involved in it. PY: When I put my finger up . . . SY: Yes. [Laughter]

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PY: I think that the north side really started changing in the 1960s, around 1965, when all of the racial thing— The Jewish people were moving out of the north side and, then, when they had that burning and everything, that was in 1965, I think. SY: They burned Plymouth Avenue down. PY: That’s when it really started changing over. Everything kind of just started going down after that. That was a real bad time. Then, most all the Jewish people moved out of the area. When we first opened our beauty shop—not going in with Chubby’s shop—when my son, John, and I had our shop, we had a lot of Jewish trade. We had a lot of Jewish women who came into our shop, but then as things got worse and they moved out of the area, things really kind of started changing then, back in the middle 1960s, I would say. SY: That was also with the large influx of blacks moving up from the south and from Gary and things to get the welfare. Then, the neighborhood just really kind of went down and changed. Of course, most of the blacks that grew up in the neighborhood, they moved out to the suburbs themselves, so the whole north side just changed tremendously after that. PK: Did the barbershops, in terms of the feel of the barbershops, the social life, change also? SY: Yes. I think it was the time when the Afro started coming in. PY: Yes. SY: Blacks were growing their hair long in big Afros, so they didn’t go to the barbershops anymore. I remember dad’s business started going down really bad. PY: Yes. I was going to say that there were a lot of barbers that went out of business during that time. We hung in there, but a lot of them did go because Afros were in, so they weren’t doing that much business and they couldn’t keep things going. SY: Later, on with the jheri curls and everything, dad didn’t want to learn how to do all of that. He was a barber. PY: The beauty shops took over that. SY: Yes, right. [Laughter] PY: Beauty shops did all of that. PK: I think you mentioned that they didn’t have the same kind of conversations in hair salons. Was there any kind of thing similar to that?

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PY: I would say yes. The women did their gossiping. That’s what you would call it. They had their own gossiping, but I think the men’s shop was a lot more so than the women’s. When we got our shop together, I was always in the office, and I could sit back in the office, and I could hear what was going on. You couldn’t hear what was going on over in the beauty shop, because it was a lot quieter. The women just didn’t do like the men do. The men would be over there and you could just hear everything that they were saying. I would sit there and laugh sometimes listening to the men. They say men don’t gossip, but they are the biggest gossipers there are, in the barbershop. [Laughter] PK: You could listen into their conversations next door? PY: Yes, because they get loud. Men have a tendency to get loud because they’re trying to get their point over and, maybe, they’d get into arguments. They weren’t bad arguments but arguing, so one would get louder than the other. I would just sit there and I could hear everything that was going on. SY: That’s probably the one thing that stayed constant from the 1940s through the 1980s is that the barbershop was still a place to meet and talk and talk about the neighborhood and whatever is going on. They didn’t see each other anyplace else, so if you get a bunch of men together in one place, they’re going to start talking about the good old days or whatever. PY: I think the barbershop was more a community situation than the beauty shop. The beauty shop—the women would come in and they would do a little talking, but they’d get their hair done and they’re gone. The men would come in and get their haircut but they’d stay. They might sit there and talk for two or three hours. It was just kind of like having a community thing, waiting for the next one to come in. I think they had a lot more conversation than the beauty shop did. I think all barbershops have been kind of that way. It’s kind of like a meeting ground for the men. PK: Once hair salons began to pick up, you didn’t see as many women? SY: Women didn’t come in anymore after that. PY: No. The women were going into the styles and they could go to the beauty shop and get different hairstyles and cuts from the beauty shop. Where you could get a haircut at the barbershop, but it wasn’t always a styled type of a haircut unless you had a barber in there that was into that. Most of them were not. My husband used to cut my hair a lot when I was wearing it short in the back but it was just one type of cut. But then, when I started changing my hairstyle, wearing it longer or whatever, they didn’t do all of those different styles. The beautician learns how to do all the different types of cuts where the men don’t. They just learn how to cut the man’s hair mostly. There was a difference. As you had more beauty shops, then, I think, the men lost a lot of the women customers.

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PK: Did you ever try to make the transition into other kinds of businesses, too? I know sometimes barbershops were a stepping stone into business, did you? PY: We were. When we built the shop, we had plans made up and it was supposed to be four different units there. We were going to have the barbershop, a Laundromat, and a health program, exercising and what not, but it was so hard for us to get the money just to build those two shops. We had a hard time getting finances to build those two shops as it is. Over the years, we just never were able to get the finances to add on to do the other things. We felt—at that time, there was not a Laundromat in the area—that that would be something good to come into there and there was no place for the blacks to go for exercising equipment, where they could come in and everything. Those were our plans for that. In fact, when we sold the shop, we gave Mr. Jones those plans because he’s got the room there, the lot, that he could still add on to the shop if he ever wanted to do that. He was very glad to get those because he thought that was a good idea. PK: Mr. Jones continued barbering? PY: Yes. He is not a barber. He’s the principal of the Lincoln School, I think. He rents it out to the barbers and the beauty shop. It still has remained as a barber and beauty shop. SY: It’s super hard for blacks to get a loan anyplace in this country for a business, even today. So you can imagine what it was like back in the 1960s trying to get a loan for anything. I can understand why they were unable to do their dreams. PY: When we first went to get our loan for our shop, we had a hard time. Twin City Federal was the first place we went and they wouldn’t give us the loan for the shop. Then, the bank that they built there—was that the First National Bank? SY: Do you mean on Plymouth? PY: John Warner was the president. Yes, on Plymouth. When that bank was in there, we went there and they were doing predominantly black loans. SY: It was built there on Plymouth specifically for black people, so they almost had to give them the loan. PY: We did go there and John Warner, the president of the bank at the time, and we told him our problems, so he loaned us the money to get started. That was how we did get started. I can remember, one time, we had missed a payment because we were struggling. We did miss a payment, and they sent us a notice, and we went over to the bank and—I can’t remember his name—this white officer there at the bank told us, “You don’t have any business having that place in the first place.” In other words, we couldn’t afford it, so we shouldn’t have attempted it. Of course, I went off on him. But we did, we paid him. I told John Warner about it and we never had any problems after that and we stayed in there long enough to pay them off.

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PK: When you were going for the loans for the businesses, was that the same bank that didn’t give the loan or the bank wasn’t there at the time? PY: It was there before our place went up. When we went to get the loan, the bank was there, but we went to Twin City Federal because we had had our loan with Twin City Federal for our home. We thought that we would be able to—still because we always kept up our home payments. We thought we could get it, but we couldn’t get it. I guess they felt that we had a mortgage with them already and that maybe we wouldn’t be able to afford to pay them any more. That’s when we went to the bank on Plymouth and they did give us the loan. PK: This is a loan to get originally into barbering? This isn’t for the Laundromat and the health? SY: No. PK: When you went for the Laundromat and the health club, that was later on? PY: When we went to get the loan, we wanted to get the loan for all of it. PK: Everything? PY: For everything. PK: But they only gave you the loan for . . . ? PY: The loan for the barber and the beauty shop. When we went to get the loan, we wanted to do the whole thing at one time. They would not give us the loan, except the bank on Plymouth would give us the loan for the barber and beauty shop. PK: Just in general, do you see any changes in the black business community here or black small businesses since the 1940s to now? PY: Yes. You do have more black business now. The blacks are getting into a little bit more. There’s quite a few black businesses on Broadway. SY: Yes, in fact, especially in terms of barbershops and beauty shops. There’s really a glut of both now. I know a lot of people are going out of business because they can’t get enough customers, because there are so many of them now. PY: That’s true. SY: They kind of ran themselves out of business by opening up too many different shops. Broadway is full of black barbershops and beauty salons.

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PY: We do not have in Minnesota—we still have a lot more blacks than we did years ago—enough blacks to carry over all of the businesses that are here, like in some of the other cities where there are just really predominantly black. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, you have a lot, but they’re not that run over with the blacks to carry so many of the businesses. Like on Broadway, there is a lot of barber and beauty shops so some of them are not making it because there just isn’t enough blacks. Not only that, there are a lot of blacks that are going to white shops now. Where we couldn’t go before, we can go now, so there are a lot of the blacks that do go to the white shops. I can remember when Chubby had his shop, and it’s a lot of his customers that he’d had over the years, and he kept them, but when white shops started taking black, there was quite a few that left him and went to the white shops. PK: Do you know about what time that really began to happen? PY: I would say that was in the 1980s. PK: That’s actually pretty late. PY: Right. SY: Yes. Before that, it was almost like a tacit agreement that blacks went to black shops and whites went to white shops and never the twain shall meet, but after awhile, blacks started going to stylists and barbers in white shops and I know dad had a lot of white customers that came to him to get their haircut. That happened quite often. Like I said, in the days where he was pretty much the only barber in town, the white guys came to him as well. I remember going down to the shop to sit around and listen to people’s conversation and I’d see just as many white people in the shop as I did black people. It was pretty much an integrated kind of thing back in the 1940s and 1950s. PY: At the time that we opened our shop, it was the nicest black shop that had ever been opened, so people didn’t mind coming in because it was really nice and it was clean. We both had white customers. Then, as times kind of changed, we lost a lot of that. SY: They started moving out to the suburbs. PY: When the area started to change, I should say. SY: Again, that was when the big influx of blacks was coming up from Gary and places and the whites were moving out to the suburbs. Then, it just all changed after that. PK: Another question [unclear]. SY: [Laughter]

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PK: I heard that during this time, basically, whites could go to black shops, but the blacks just couldn’t go to the white shops? SY: Yes, exactly. But that was still left over from the early days, back in the days where blacks were barbers. Just like blacks were porters and blacks were chauffeurs, they were also barbers. It was a job that blacks had to serve white people in some of those earlier shops. Blacks couldn’t come in those black barbershops to get their haircut. It was strictly for white men. So, even back in the 1940s and the 1950s, the white people still had this idea that I can go to a black barbershop and get my haircut, even when the blacks were also coming into black barbershops and getting their haircut. There was time kind of like where there was a melding of the races, where they would both come into the black barbershops and get their haircut. Then, about the time I went to barber school, there was starting to be a bunch of white barbers around, so then the whites started going to the white barbers because there were a lot of them and then it was just strictly black patrons going to black shops and white patrons going to white shops. In the early days, the only barbers were black for both white and black people. PK: That’s what I was finding a little bit in research—that blacks really dominated barbering. SY: Right. It was like all porters were black in the early days and all chauffeurs were black, well, all barbers were black in those days. It wasn’t until later on that whites started becoming barbers. Before, it was a black profession in the early days, from slavery on really. That’s what they used the slaves for, to cut their master’s heads. PK: Barbers owned their own shops though at the same time? SY: Yes, right. PK: About that melding that you were talking about—I imagine most of these whites didn’t meet with blacks that often? SY: At any other—right. That was probably the only venue they had of meeting blacks and talking with them. I would come into the shop, and I’d see them there, and occasionally they would talk to each other, the customers. The white customers and black customers would talk to each other, but mostly they just sat there and read a paper or whatever until they got their haircut and left. PY: I don’t think they entered the conversation very much. SY: Yes, there was very little conversation between white and black customers at that time. Again, it was kind of like the Cotton Club in the early days . . . PK: The Cotton Club in New York?

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SY: Yes, in New York. It was all black entertainers, but it was all white patrons. Blacks weren’t allowed to come in the Cotton Club. At a certain point in time, there were black barbershops, but they were for white customers in the very early days and there were black barbershops for black customers. After awhile, they started integrating the shops, but again, they just kind of sat there and did their own thing until they got their haircut and left. PK: The men from the black community—like from the north Minneapolis community—would they sort of edit their conversations when white customers were there or would they just keep going anyway? SY: From what I remember listening to them, they still told their stories and things. In fact, a lot of the white customers that wouldn’t ordinarily talk to them, they’d be sitting there listening and laughing along with them because they enjoyed the stories, too. There wasn’t any antagonism that I remember. Like I said, there was very little conversation between the white and blacks, but the whites would listen to what they had to say and kind of laugh. They were interested, in other words, but the blacks did most of the talking almost always. PK: This might be hard to remember, but were there any really important discussions that you remember occurring, maybe important events in the community or even nationally that generated a really important discussion in the shops? SY: No. PY: I don’t know what you mean by important. They would get into, let’s say, this O.J. [Simpson] thing. That would be an important discussion that everybody would have their own ideas about it, so it would be the same way if it was a big fight on. That would be a discussion. Or even the presidents running—they would have their choice. Maybe you would be going for [Bill] Clinton and I’d be going for whoever else. Those kinds of discussions would get to be very riled up sometimes. SY: Later on, too, after the whites had their own shops and it was just mainly black customers, the conversations almost always would get into how badly blacks were treated by white people. I can remember there would be always somebody talking about how the white man stomped him down and he can’t do this or he can’t do that because of what the white man has done. It was kind of like a venue for releasing all this venom that they’d built up over the years of mistreatment that they’d gone through from white people. The barbershop was a way, because the next customer sitting next to you was black and, almost certainly, he’d been discriminated against as well, so he was going to get a willing listener for all of his venom that he had to spew out. You’d see a lot of that as well as talking about the fights or what so-and-so has been doing, running around on his wife or something. Black men were just as—probably even more so—willing to gossip as women were. That’s why I enjoyed going and sitting down. I’d just be listening and looking, yes, oh yes. [Laughter]

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PY: Gossiping up. SY: Yes. PK: Even though the women didn’t talk as loud or maybe as long, did they talk about the same kinds of things, do you think, as the men or were there certain subjects that women really seemed to be more interested in when they got together? PY: Women—I guess they didn’t talk as vigorously as the men do. I think most of them would talk between the customer and the operator. Their conversations were more based on that, not an all-over conversation like the barbershop does. Maybe my customer would be talking to me about something and there might be some confidential things that she’d be talking to me quietly about. That’s more or less like it was for the beauty shop side. They weren’t as loud. The only thing they would get loud on is if some of them were interested in those soap operas. Then maybe two or three people would be looking at the soaps and then they would be discussing it, but as far as them holding an all-over conversation like the men did—not too much of that. [Tape interruption] SY: . . . instead of music. I used to go down to Olson Highway during the days when they still had bars and nightclubs along Olson Highway there before Hubert Humphrey became mayor. He’s the one that cleaned up Olson Highway, closed all the stuff down. PK: Was that in the 1940s? SY: That was in the late 1940s, around 1948. Before that, I remember going down to some of those clubs and I saw big name jazz musicians like Lester Young and Flip Philipson, all these guys. Sometimes, they’d play in the Minneapolis Auditorium. They’d have these Saturday afternoon jam sessions and we’d go down there and listen to them play. They’d stay at Wheatley, by the way, because there were rooms. They couldn’t stay at hotels in Minneapolis in those days because whites wouldn’t let them stay there. So, they stayed upstairs in Phyllis Wheatley. So on the weekends, sometimes, they’d come down to the tennis courts in the Projects and have jam sessions. That’s what got me interested in playing because I heard these guys play down there and I’d just go crazy. I said, “I want to do that.” So, I started taking lessons over at Phyllis Wheatley and then became a jazz musician myself. I went to the Navy and the Navy band. Then, when I got out, I got my own band and I played around town for quite awhile. Jazz was a big thing back in the 1940s. I remember seeing Ella Fitzgerald down at the Radio City Theater in the matinee. PY: A lot of that was going on.

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SY: Sarah Vaughan . . . I remember Dizzy Gillespie came to the Flame Bar down on Nicollet Avenue downtown before it became a country western bar. They used to have big name jazz musicians coming down there. One of my friends, David Goodlow, Jr., his dad played down at the Flame in between sets with the big name musicians, so they’d let us come back stage and I would play with Dizzy’s horn because he’d have it sitting up on a stool. I’d sit there and say, “Oooh, I’ve got Dizzy Gillespie’s horn.” That was when he still had the horn sticking up in the air. I was just in love with these jazz musicians and I wanted to be like them so bad. When I went in the Navy, I had a chance to officer’s candidate school and turned it down because I still wanted to be playing in the big bands. The Navy had these big bands like Count Basie and things, so I was really into that then. PY: One of the things—the jazz that you’re talking about as you came along was more in the 1950s and 1960s—in the earlier days in the 1940s and the 1930s, you found all that jazz on Olson Highway and Sixth Avenue North. SY: Yes, that’s where I said Lester Young was playing. PY: During this time, you were little. SY: I was still sneaking in there listening to them play though. [Laughter] PY: I’m not going to argue. You weren’t born until 1938. [Laughter] Back in the 1930s and the early 1940s, all the black music that would come, they would have to play in joints and places on Sixth Avenue North—that’s what they called it then—or there was a place on Washington Avenue that they used to go to. They played there a lot. It was a nightclub. Then, the Cassius Bar—they played in places like that, in the black places because they couldn’t go into a lot of the white places when they came here during that time unless they were hired to come in there. If a band came to the city, this is where they played in the black area. Like, he was saying, if they had to stay someplace, they couldn’t get into the hotel, so Phyllis Wheatley had the rooms and a lot of them stayed there or in people’s homes that they might know here. They had a lot of blacks that come into town, into Minneapolis and St. Paul back in those times. It was always in the black areas that they did it. PK: Early on, the first jazz places were along Olson Highway? It wasn’t down in St. Paul? PY: No, it was down on Sixth Avenue North. SY: Olson Highway was a wide-open, Wild West type of place. We would go down there just so we could see what the wild side was like. I remember there were a lot of white guys coming down there looking for black prostitutes in the evenings. I remember one of the kids—he was looking for ways to make money so he’d pick up an old whiskey bottle that he found in the alley, and fill it half with coffee and put piss in the other half, and sell it to some drunk.

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PY: I don’t think they want to hear that on there. SY: That’s what they did. That’s the way it was. It was really a rough and tumble place down there. I actually saw a guy get killed down there. In fact, one of the bars was called the Bucket of Blood, because there were so many knife fights, and people would be getting killed, and there’d be blood all over the place. That was one of the reasons why Hubert Humphrey closed it down. It was like a Wild West street. PK: Was this mainly frequented by the blacks in the area or was it like everybody came here? SY: It was mainly by blacks but, like I said, a lot of whites came down there looking for prostitutes. That was the only reason they came down there. PY: You did find, though, even when a lot of those name bands would come here, whites in them, too. They would come into some of those black clubs because they wanted to hear them. SY: Hear the jazz, yes. PY: They did frequent the black clubs. PK: I’ve read a little bit about the history here. I guess after a certain point in time, white clubs began to hire black musicians. SY: I started playing back in the 1960s myself. Very few clubs would hire black bands, but jazz was starting to get popular then. I remember one of the few white clubs downtown Minneapolis . . . it was almost impossible to get a job downtown, but there was one jazz club that was right down below the Foshay Tower and they hired us to play. They were kind of a progressive club and they wanted to start bringing in black bands because they never did before. We were one of the first black bands that got in down there. We played down there and at another club on Hennepin and Ninth for awhile. Then, it started opening up. It was kind of like black jazz was becoming popular with white people then. So, they started hiring them in a lot of different places. There were just a few jazz clubs. I remember one that they called the Mendota Club. That was right under the Mendota Bridge. At the Triangle Bar out near the University of Minnesota, we played and then those two downtown. That was about the only clubs that would hire black bands in those days. PK: When you came out of the Navy, did you continue playing in the Navy band? SY: No. PK: Were you the same ensemble in the Navy or were you . . . ?

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SY: In the Navy, I played in big bands, kind of like Count Basie or Duke Ellington, eighteen-piece orchestras. When I got out, we had like a five-piece, quintets. It usually was just me on sax and then bass drums, a piano, and a guitar. We played mostly like Junior Walker and the All Stars. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. It was a mixture of R&B [Rhythm and Blues] and jazz. We played that kind of music because that was what they wanted in those days. Also, I played at those fleabag joints where you had to have a place down behind the stage in case they started shooting. You had to have a place to get down and hide until the fight was over. Over in St. Paul, there was a bar like that, I remember. We played mainly rhythm and blues over there. I played all different kinds of music. PK: Did you even play at a place called Treasure Inn? Was that around when you were playing? SY: No. PK: I interviewed this guy, Richard Mann, and he said he used to run Treasure Inn. PY: Yes, that was one of the old . . . those were back in the days that he wouldn’t remember. SY: Yes. PY: There was another club called the Opex Club. They had a lot of blacks that would come there with their music and play. There was another place that they used to go to. It was like an out of town— PK: Would that be in the 1930s . . . the Treasure Inn? PY: Yes, the 1930s and 1940s. SY: It would have had to have been because I’ve never heard of that place. [Laughter] PY: I got married in 1936 and all of those places were going in full force when I got married. PK: In terms of social life, just going out, were there other places besides the restaurants and jazz clubs, the black-owned places that you’d go to or it didn’t really matter in terms of just going out? PY: That was it, yes. SY: One place, Ma . . . remember in the Projects? They had a Party Room in the Projects. In fact, I wrote about that in the story I wrote in the Star Trib [Minneapolis Star Tribune]. I remember sitting out on my bedroom window in the evening on the weekend, a Friday night or a Saturday night, and I’d see these black women and men coming up dripping in furs, and high heels, and the 40s hairdos, the flips of the 1940s. They’d be going to the Party Room for a dance. I

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remember being so fascinated by the finery that I saw these people wearing right there in the middle of the Project. When blacks couldn’t find a place to go to, they made their own parties. They just rented the Party Room and had dances there and played records. They kind of had their own little society where they did their own thing. They had to. It was kind of neat. I loved it. PK: I don’t get around in the Cities as much as I want to. It doesn’t seem like even today that there’s . . . SY: No. PK: Of course, now people can just go to anyplace they want to, but there aren’t that many places that are black-owned. SY: There are still a few black-owned places, but you wouldn’t want to go there without a gun or a knife to protect yourself. In fact, my old stomping grounds—that place down on Plymouth, the old Elks place—that used to be a place where all the blacks went. PY: Elks Rest. SY: But, it’s so dangerous now. If you go down there, you’ve got to watch your back. The same thing, Kato’s Lounge, that’s another black place up on Golden Valley Road and Penn, I think. It’s kind of dangerous. I had been working in a school system and one of my students was going to this place, Johnny Baker Lounge, a bar over in Minneapolis, out south on Thirty-Eighth and Third Avenue. He got killed by some guy in the bar that took offense to him for whatever reason and just blew him away in there. I stopped going to these bars. PY: I don’t know of any really nice open black place that you could go to anymore. SY: Probably the one place that’s still kind of nice is Jimmy Fuller’s place, the Riverview over there near Plymouth, the Riverview Supper Club. It’s right on the Mississippi River. In fact, he’s the one that gave me my first job when I started playing. He’d have these big name musicians come up when he had his club on Plymouth and he knew I was a tenor sax player. I guess Louie Jordan came up here and was playing one night and somehow his tenor man didn’t show up or whatever. I don’t know if he fired him or what, but Jimmy called me and I had a chance to play, and so I came down and played with him. He liked me so much, he wanted me to go to Chicago with him that same night. Of course, I couldn’t. That was the time I was just starting college, so I didn’t go with him. I kind of wished I had sometimes just to see what it would have been like to have been on the road with a well-known musician. Jimmy Fuller had a lot of well-known musicians come up. PY: Jimmy Fuller used to be, years ago, on Broadway. Then, when he got this place over by the river, it was really quite popular then. He would have lots of name bands and people to come in there. It stayed full and crowded all the time. And then again it was the same situation. Over the

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time, it appeared then, you would have a few people that would come in there and then want to start fighting and cutting and shooting and all that kind of stuff. So it really—and he had a lot of white trade, a lot of white people used to come to all of those things and the blacks. But then when it got to be where they were fighting and all those things, then the whites stopped coming. Then a lot of the blacks stopped coming because, you know, they didn’t want to be in that kind of a situation. Because I know we used to go all the time but we got to the place where we really didn’t want to go anymore. So his place has changed, he still has it. And he still tries to make a go of it, and try to bring in something every once in a while. It’s not the same as it used to be. That is, if you want to say, is one of the better places to go. I think he has a little band in there on the weekends. SY: Also, back in the 1950s, they used to have a place called the Labor Temple. It’s on the northeast side of Minneapolis near East Hennepin. They used to have a lot of black groups in the early days, black rhythm and blues groups, like the Clovers and these kinds of groups that come up and have a dance for this one night. They would come in for one night and almost everybody in town would be there. They’d all crowd in this place, six or seven hundred people. They did that for quite awhile until, again, they were starting to fight, you know, get somebody rumbling over here and then they would go over to the other side and run everybody out, so they stopped having those. But, for quite awhile, that was one of the most popular things that blacks did on the weekend was to go to one of those dances over there with these recording artists like the Clovers or Mickey and Sylvia, those kind of groups back in the 1950s that they had. Until it got really messy, it was a lot of fun. [Laughter] PK: The Labor Temple, was that owned by a union? SY: Yes. It was the union hall right on East Hennepin and . . . It was a white building. PK: [unclear] SY: But, they allowed the black groups to come in there. PY: They allowed people to come in there. It was a place to go. They’d have nice bands, but, again, the same thing would happen. When the fighting started, then, it just cut off and cut down. SY: Yes, they stopped it altogether after that. PY: Actually, a lot of the places that we used to have—this is what happened to them. Once that type of situation comes in there, then, they lose business. Most of the time, they had to go out of business. SY: There used to be a big ballroom on Lyndale and Olson Highway, too. I remember going in there seeing those big, mirrored balls that they’d shine lights on and it would make it look like stars were going around the whole room. They used to have dances there. I don’t know when

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they closed that place down. They tore the whole building down. That was at the same time when Hubert Humphrey was cleaning up Olson Highway. I think they tore that building down then, too. It was a huge ballroom where people could come for big dances. They would have bands there. Like I said, the whole place changed after Humphrey’s cleanup. There was just no place to go anymore after he closed everything down. PK: The impression I get too is that it seems that there are more black businesses now, but there are less public spaces that are sort of black-owned and folks could go to. SY: Right, exactly. PK: It seems like there were more of those back at least in the 1950s. SY: Yes. PY: I don’t know what happens to our black businesses. Some of them do get real nice places, but, we as black, don’t seem to quite know the business angles of it, how to keep it going. When you have a place of business, you’ve got to put your money back into the business to keep it going, but most of us want to spend, and buy, and do big things, and let the business go, and it goes down. Then, you lose it. This is the hard part about it—that we need to learn how to take care of our business so we can keep it going. SY: What ever happened to that roller skating arena they had down there on Plymouth and Fremont, I think it was. PY: The same thing. SY: It’s the employment office now. PY: The fighting . . . SY: They built this big roller skating rink there. It was a beautiful place to come rollerskating, but they’ve closed down. PY: You’ve got some more questions there? PK: No, no. I’m not even reading off of this anymore. PY: Okay. [Laughter] We have to give you a chance to get in here to ask a question. PK: I’m just going to go on that topic a little more. Aside from the fighting, do you think that the community supports black businesses or is the problem still also getting the loans?

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SY: I could tell you right away that we’ve gone to so many new black restaurants that have opened up and they start out fine, but all of a sudden, they’ll shoot the prices sky-high and then the blacks stop coming. I remember this rib joint on Broadway. It was a beautiful place. It was kind of like Famous Dave’s out there on Hennepin and Lake. They had the big barbecue pit right in there, and you could go in there, and order your ribs and take out or eat it in if you wanted. I remember people were coming in there and getting stuff like mad all the time. Then, all of a sudden, the prices shot up and people stopped coming. The ribs would sit around and get old and dry, so nobody came in and the business failed. That seems to have been what would happen with most of the black business. They overcharged, and people would stop coming, and that would be the end of it. PY: And in a lot of cases, not only that, they change food-wise. You go and they’ll have real good tasting food, and everybody keeps coming, and then as the business kind of goes down, then they’d start cutting off as a way of fixing their food. It changes completely and it ends up that they fold up. PK: Another thing I can think of is –it isn’t a question so much as it’s just a topic that maybe you want to comment on and that is the role that black businesses seemed to play as community resources. It just seems that when people could go to spaces like barbershops or restaurants that they served more of a community role, as a gathering place. SY: I can tell you they lost that when they had that big influx of people coming in from a lot of different places. That sense of community was lost. When dad had his barbershop, everybody came and everybody knew everybody. It was kind of like “Cheers,” everybody knew everybody’s name. They had good conversation and they were talking about the neighbors, and their friends, and whatever. As soon as you had this big influx of blacks from other cities, they didn’t know each other, so you lost that cohesiveness of the neighborhood. That’s what happened and that’s the reason why you see so many different black businesses around here, but you don’t have that neighborhood feeling in any of them anymore. It’s just a place to go get your food and take it out, or go down and get your hair fixed and go home, or whatever. You don’t see that community spirit anymore because nobody knows anybody. They’re all from someplace else. I think that’s what it is. I knew everybody and my dad knew everybody when I was a kid and you felt that sense of community. PY: That’s when there weren’t so many blacks. SY: Yes, there weren’t that many blacks anyway. That made a big difference. We kind of like stuck together for comfort because we weren’t that many. Kids would run around and like I said, if I was doing something bad in one part of the neighborhood down by Phyllis Wheatley, mom would get a call saying that her son is down here doing something bad. She’d come home and tell me. I’d say, “Boy, I can’t get away with nothing.” [Laughter] That’s the way it was in the community back then. Everybody was close knit and we’ve lost that since the influx of so many people coming up here for the welfare. You don’t have that sense of community anymore.

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PY: Like Skip’s place—it used to be Skip’s Barbecue. He had a beautiful place right over there on Lyndale and right off of Broadway. In the beginning, Skip was doing just great because he had lots of white trade that would come in. It’s so funny, during the day, the place would be full of people, black and white, and then in the evening, when he’d have the evening meal, you couldn’t hardly find a white in there. You might have the black that would come in. Again, it was the area. The white people, in some areas, would seem to kind of steer clear. That’s the same way it was with Jimmy Fuller’s place. He had big names come, but it got to the place that they didn’t want to come over because the area had changed so, so his business went down, too. SY: Yes. After that riot on Plymouth in the 1960s, I think that’s when everything changed because the whites moved out and they were afraid to come into the north side anymore because they didn’t want to get killed. Everything seemed to change. PY: It just gave the north side a bad name really. SY: Yes, it just gave the whole north side a bad name after that. PK: Was anybody killed in the riot? SY: No, it was mainly property damage. PY: Burning. SY: Yes, burning up buildings and things like that. PY: Our shop was sitting right in the middle of it. SY: Yes. PK: Did your shop get . . . ? PY: No, they didn’t bother us at all. SY: They knew that we were part of the neighborhood, so they didn’t touch the shop. They burned down all the Jewish shops though so the Jews moved away. They moved out to St. Louis Park and they never came back. There are a few diehard Jews still living around here, but they’re mainly older people that that’s their home, and they’re not leaving for anything, and they’re retired, so they don’t have to have shops or anything around there. That’s when it changed mainly from a mixed black and Jewish neighborhood and Scandinavian, too. There were a lot of Scandinavians. Mom said her friend knew the Andrews sisters who were a big time group back in the 1940s. They lived up on Plymouth Avenue back in those days. PK: [unclear] know that.

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SY: [Laughter] A lot of people don’t know that, but that’s where they came from. Like I said, it was a white neighborhood then, mainly Scandinavians and Jews. It was a beautiful area, too, then, but it just changed from the 1960s on when you had that big influx. PY: Yes, that’s when the big change started and after that rioting in the 1960s. Things just kind of went down. PK: Do you remember at all like after that riot happened and you knew your shop was right in the middle of it there, did you go to check it the next day? Did you open up? SY: Oh, yes. PY: We did. We would go and we’d open up. Of course, after it started, they had police all around. They had the National Guard—they came in. To get to our shop, to come through there, you would have to tell them who you are, that you had a business in the area. Then they would let us through, otherwise you couldn’t get through into the area. They was trying to keep it, I guess, cleared out of other than just the people that were in the area or if they were going to the business. So you would have to kind of identify where you were going. PK: I know, once again, this is a hard question to ask, but do you remember at all what happened in the barbershop those few days after the riot? Were people talking about it or were they just kind of shut down, which is quite as likely? SY: I don’t remember. PY: It’s kind of hard. They did talking about it, but it was kind of quiet like really. There wasn’t a lot of talking about it, because it was a scary thing during that time and I think they were all kind of at a loss as to what was really going on or what happened. It wasn’t too much hurrah in the shop at that time. SY: You couldn’t really talk against it because you didn’t know what persons were in the shop that, maybe, they were some of the people that burnt the place down. People tended to keep their mouth shut because you didn’t want to take one side or the [other]. [Tape interruption] PY: I can remember one time in the area when things were going on and there was a lot of stealing and robbing in places, they broke into our shop. One of the customers that came in there knew who it was that had done it and I guess he must have told this guy, “You don’t touch the Youngs.” They still had their picks in the neighborhood where you didn’t touch those places. I remember he told one of the customers that he knew who it was—he didn’t tell us who it was—and he said, “You don’t touch the Youngs’ place. They’ve been in the neighborhood for a long

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time and they’re good people,” is the way they put it. I guess they still had their picks, whose place that they were going to try to rob and whatnot. PK: This is what a person said to one of the guys who was thinking of robbing the store? SY: Yes. This was, again, about the time we started losing that neighborhood feeling. These were people that had come here from someplace else, so they didn’t have that same kind of a stake in the neighborhood that we growing up there had. To them, this was just an opportunity to steal something and they didn’t realize that the Young brothers had been here all these years, and that there were still some people in the neighborhood that thought of them as part of the community, and they just didn’t want to see them getting robbed because these people were the community. That was the reason why—they just didn’t know because they came here from someplace else. PK: Was there also like a generation thing, too? In a situation where you had maybe a lot of the younger people involved in the rioting and maybe the older men coming in the barbershops [unclear]. SY: Again, this was about the same time with the Afros and things, so they weren’t coming to the barbershop getting their haircuts, so they didn’t have that stake in it that the older people had that were getting haircuts every week. That’s another reason they weren’t interested. PY: My husband and the guy that worked with him, Charlie Brown, lost a lot of their business because of the young generation and the new styles that came in and they weren’t interested in doing those styles unless they had somebody that came in there that could do them. When all these cutting designs came in and the jheri curls, Charlie and Chubby didn’t want to do those things. Most of the time, it would be just the two of them in the shop and then, if they got another barber that came in that would do those things, they did those. When it got to be just Chubby and Charlie, their business fell off completely because they were not interested in doing all of that type of haircutting. They had just gotten too old, I guess, to want to change. PK: Just to go back to after the riot situation, I know you said people didn’t talk that much about it, but, in general, were they talking about the direction of the neighborhood and what was happening? SY: Yes. PY: That it was going down. SY: By that time, too, I remember a lot of my friends that I grew up with, this was about the time that they were moving out to California, or Arizona, or places like that. The people that had grown up in the neighborhood, they had all, practically, left so the neighborhood all of a sudden now became a neighborhood of immigrants from other parts of the country: Gary, Chicago, L.A.,

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or wherever. It lost all the flavor of being a community and was a place to avoid not only for whites, but even most blacks. You guys moved out here in 1958. PY: In 1958, we moved in here. We moved out here in 1954. SY: I think that’s what the Projects were for at the time anyway, especially the guys returning home from war and they needed a cheap place to live because they charged you according to your income. You had a nice place to live and you could raise your kids until you got on your feet and then you moved out into a home or whatever. PY: I want to throw this in there. We moved from the Project because, when my husband started barbering, then they said he was making too much money for us to live there, so then we had to get out. We didn’t have any place to go really at that time. So, we decided, we bought lots out here. We went down to the state and there were some lots open, so we decided to build. Then, a white customer of his—he used to do his hair all the time and he was a contractor—decided to help him to build the house. He and his brothers laid the foundation. They put all those bricks into that house. We had five lots over there where the school is. Then, the school finally came along and said, “We want the property.” So, there we were out of a place again. Then, we just rented a little house over here on Humboldt until we found some other property. We went to some areas that we wanted to go in and, again, it was the white situation, they wouldn’t let us in there. Then, we found these two lots empty, and we bought the lots here, and we built the house here, and we moved in here in 1958. Now, here we are getting ready to be kicked out again. They’re coming through here with a parkway. PK: Is it a highway? SY: They’re going to widen Humboldt. PY: They’re going to start down on Memorial Drive and come through. They’re taking both sides of Humboldt, Girard, and the east side of Irving, which would catch me. SY: It’s kind of like make Victory Memorial Drive. PK: This is a road that you’re talking about? PY: Yes, a road and what they call wetlands. SY: Victory Memorial Drive just down the way a little bit—they had built that after the war in memory of the soldiers. They’re going to kind of make it like that. They’re going to take out all the houses, and make a wide boulevard, and like a park or empty space on either side. PY: There’s going to be a creek running through—a wetland area.

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SY: Yes. PY: That’s what they’re basing it on. They call it the Wetland Project. PK: It must be some environmentally sound project or something? SY: I guess. [Laughter] PK: I’m confused. It’s a road, but there’s going to be wetlands on either side of the road? SY: Yes, basically. PY: What they’re going to do—see those houses on Humboldt, over there on the other side, they call them flat houses because there’s no basements in them. They say there’s water there. As soon as they move those houses and everything, the water will be coming up. So, it’s some type of a form of a wetland area that they’re going to run through. Then, they’re going to widen this up so it will be like a parkway with trees and stuff on each side. Then, they’re talking about building $200,000 homes back into the area. PK: I wonder who it is that’s going to buy this $200,000 home. SY: Yes. [Laughter] PY: Yes, that’s it. Why would I buy a $200,000 home over here and look right over there at all them little bitty houses? PK: When you first moved out here, it was mainly like a white neighborhood area? PY: It was country. We called it the country. SY: We had garden, and pheasants in the garden, and rabbits and everything. In fact, Earl Brown’s farm is just a few blocks north of here. He was a sheriff and had horses on there. PY: We didn’t have lights, sidewalks. The sewer had just been put in here. There weren’t really hardly any—none of those houses were on Humboldt when we moved out here. SY: Actually, we’re only two blocks within the city limits because Fifty-Third is the end of the city. You’re into Brooklyn Center after that. PY: It was just all country. PK: I think I’ve got plenty of stuff to start with. This is an interesting story.

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Thank you.

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