O.B. Hill

OB Hill Transcript
Interview by Cheyenne Davis and Faith Wau
Time: 77:38
Also Present: Audience Members, Arlie Sommers

0:00:00.0

HILL: Hey ya’ll, what’s happenin’ man, what’s goin’ on?

UNKOWN: It’s cool, it’s alright, dude.

HILL: Looks are deceiving…we are taught in this society to judge a book by its cover…you can’t always do that. If you live by the golden rule, how do you know what the golden rule is? Could someone state it for me?

[Someone raises their hand]

HILL: Stand up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: So you want me to say it?

HILL: State me the golden rule.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Okay, um, treat others the way that you want to be treated.

HILL: Thank you. Do onto others as you would have others do onto you. Treat the other person the way you would like them to treat you. That is a very, very good standard to live by. Since I don’t want you to judge a book by its cover, I am [inaudible].

0:01:26.2

HILL: I’m Bobba OB Hill, the community historian. My roots are all over the world, but my people originated on the richest continent in the world, AKA or also known as Africa. I live in the United States and I descend from a whole line of people who were brought here. Do any of you know Lewis and Clark? Have you heard of Lewis and Clark? Can someone tell me who Lewis and Clark is? Uh, have you heard of Lewis and Clark College?

[Members in audience start to catch on, saying yes]

HILL: Have you heard of Clark College? Community College? Hmm? But have you heard of York?

[Background members respond]

HILL: This is a book, ‘My Name is York,’ that say books can be deceiving. There are some, and by no means [inaudible]...but I have a role of distinction in this community whether you know it or not. And unlike a lot of other people who [inaudible]….I have one little proposition: As people have said, if I could light just one little candle, the whole world may be able to see. I’m not gonna light it because I know there are regulations and rules, but I will strike a match to use your imagination, and we will sing a song that most of you have heard.

                  This little light of miiinnnnnee, hah!

                  I’m gonna let it shine, whooaaaa!

                  This little light of miiine, I said I’ma gonna let it shiiine,

                  This little light of MIIINNNEEE, IIII’MM GON’ let it shine!

                  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shiiiiine.

                  LISTEN! Hide it unda a bushel? NO!

                  I’m gonna let it shine, hide it unda a bushel? No.

                  I’m gonna let it shine, hide it unda a bushel? No.

                  I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

                  Phewwwww

                  I won’t let Satan blow it out, I’m gonna let it shine!

                  I won’t let Satan blow it out, I said I’m gonna let it shine.

                  Woooooooo I won’t let Satan blow it out, I’m gonna let that light shine!

                  Let it shine, let it shine, let it shiiiiiiiiine!

[applause]

HILL: Yes sir, you know, looks can be deceiving, and so can people. The role of the community historian is to record the history of the community. Unlike the regular historian who goes into the archives and finds bits and pieces to put together and try to put a picture of what that community is about, the community historian is FROM that community. He LIVES in that community and he is in and of the people. He has to know them by name, or at least know part of them by name, and know the permanent people as well as those who are not well known. Um-

SOMMERS: So, Mr. Hill before you go on, are you going to um, we’re doing an interview too, and so should we begin the interview and then go through all the artifacts?

HILL: Yes, we will do that.

SOMMERS: Would you like to share your artifacts at the end maybe?

HILL: I think what happens here is that I have brought an assembly of newspaper items, and books relevant to the experience in Oregon of people of African descent all the way from York who came here with the Lewis and Clark expedition and in the back of this, I even have a chart which is a time table of black history in the Pacific Northwest. And so those persons who are interested in this type of thing, there is not a pedigree chart. That traces me, all the way back to a lady 5 generations back by the name of Polly Williams. Now, to answer your question, yes I’m ready for questions because in order for people to ask you a question, they want to know that you know what you’re talkin’ about. About two more minutes. Most historians go and try to find out how is it I can prove or disprove what someone is claiming. Now in school we are taught different things, but most of the time we’re taught what people want us to believe is important. Last night there was a basketball game on, did you see it?

[Commotion, a few say yes]

HILL: You saw that game?! Anybody know the final score? Somebody knows the final score, right? You know who won too? Do you know a play by play account of who made the baskets and when? I do. On the first quarter, I could tell you who made the first shot, how many times they shot, first quarter all the way through, and what time they took out, because it is important to know the facts. Now most people will get them from the Oregonian or the Journal, however the Journal no longer exists. Now, I’m ready.

DAVIS: Um, my name is Cheyenne Davis, I’m 13 years old, I’m at the Boise Eliot School in the Eliot neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.

WAU: My Faith Wau, I’m 14 years old, I’m at the Boise Eliot School in the Eliot neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.

DAVIS: Mr. Hill, for the record, would you please state your name, age, the year you were born, and where you were born?

HILL: My name is Orenton Bantie Hill, also known as OB Hill. I was born on July the 10th, in 1941 in Birmingham, Alabama. On my next birthday, I will be 69 years old.

DAVIS: When did your family come to Portland?

HILL: My family came to Portland doing what we know as a second world war in the 1940s. First, my father-

[tape cuts off]

HILL: But my younger brother, Clarence, he didn’t know, he thought they said ‘sookie anne’ and so Clarence and I had a great time together, uh, and my older brother, who is 3 years my uh, senior, took care of my little sister while my mother worked along with my grandmother so that we could, in addition to what my father was on, make enough money to take the train back out here. So those early years were sort of difficult years. After we came back, uh, we lived in a place called Vanport, Vanport City, which is north of here. Now out there is the Expo Center, Delta Park, and the International Raceway but at one time that was the largest project housing, one of the largest ones in the United States.

DAVIS:  What made Vanport City special?

HILL: Well, Vanport was uh, housed the largest number of black people and on Memorial Day in 1948, uh, a dike broke and there was a flood, and so that whole city was wiped out. I remember that very vividly, I was 6 years old. My brother Clarence and I, as well as my older brother, James, we wanted to go to the movie show, but my mother wouldn’t let us go because she heard there was some possibility of a dike breaking, and so we were basically outside poutin’ when uh, a policeman drove up on a motorcycle blowin a whistle telling everybody to evacuate, so we ran back in the house and told Mama, who was cookin. She was cookin’ on memorial day this large ham and it had pineapples on it and you could smell the aroma. She gotted all of us together and my father was still in bed, he had been out on one of his drinkin binges the night before. It was a long weekend, so this was one weekend that he wouldn’t have to work two jobs for 16 hours. And so we left, uh coming out there was a bus that was pullin up, one of the last ones. And the guy opened the door, the bus driver, and water was runnin out and we got in and he drove us up to a place called Kenton, which is out in North Portland, you know Kenton because there’s a big statue of a big lumberjack out there. You know Kenton? [Davis nods] Okay.

DAVIS:  So how long did you guys stay up there?

HILL: From there, there was a lot of emergencies going on of course. All of those people needed housing now. Fortunately, the city of Portland opened its arms up and the various agencies like the Sunshine Division, the Red Cross, and churches came together to help in any way they could. We ended up stayin’ in a place called Mountain Villa with mrs. Thompson who was a (Edit: Member) small church out in SE Portland in the area of 82nd and we lived there for a while until we were able to find other places and for the next several years we moved from different projects including Giles Lake, Fessenden homes, St. Johns Woods, [inaudible]. We lived at 7720 N. Oakley Place and 10722 N. Mapleleaf. That’s out now in the vicinity of Pier Park in North Portland out near St. Johns.

DAVIS:  So what was in like going from place to place to place?

HILL: Lemme say, although a rolling stone gathers no moss, it covers a lot of territory. One of the best experiences, and the reason I do what I do today is because of the ability and flexibility to travel and go everywhere. Now, there are some drawbacks to that, but you do get a chance to experience a lot of different areas and territories. In the case of the majority of the people who lived in these projects at the time, there were some options. You could either go back home where you belong in some sense of the word, or you could stay here, and a lot of the African American people at the time posed the question of, go back to what? And so this like, in Claude Brown’s book, ‘Manchild in the Promised Land,’ as the moved to New York from the south. You either go back to the south where you weren’t being treated very nice, or stay in a place where at least you could get occupation to work and make some money. And so a lot of people chose to stay up here, and my family was one of those.

DAVIS:  So how was, where you lived, how has it changed now?

HILL: Most of those places don’t exist anymore. I have a program that’s called ‘Let’s read, walk ‘n talk,’ and I take tours to these various areas. On this past Monday, which was Memorial Day, I did one of my walks, and I went down Polk Street down to Columbia and passed Mrs. Whitney’s house who lived right across the street from where we lived in the Projects. I know Mrs. Whitney very well, that house is still there because my father had a garden over behind her house. The projects themselves are not there anymore. It’s been rezoned, it’s an industrial area now, and unless you knew it was there you would never know. Walking from there to Vanport is a very good walk. It takes a little energy, and now what’s Vanport, you catch the MAX yellow line. At the end of the MAX yellow line, that’s one of the northern borders of what was Vanport.

DAVIS:  Where did you go to college?

HILL: I am a graduate of Portland State University. Now, it’s very interesting because Portland State University was originally Vanport College.

DAVIS: So what did you study in college and why?

HILL: Uh, I have a degree in Sociology, I also have certificates and distinctions in Black Studies and also in Administration of Justice and Law Enforcement.

DAVIS:  Why did you decide to write more about Portland’s history and document it?

HILL: I have been studying this all of my life. Historians are born, they actually aren’t made and you may not know it at the time, but you begin to accumulate a lot of things that you collect. For instance over here, I have newspapers dating back 40 years and there’s a Jet magazine I think from about 1965. In that magazine it tells about Malcolm X and his death and assassination, so I keep that along with others so that I can share it with people because most people have never seen, you hear about these people, but they physically have the documents from that time. I learned that I was a historian at Portland state. I began to take history classes and also the Black Studies program started during the time I was there and I was able to buy one term, I got the second certificate at that time in Black Studies at Portland State University and that let me know that I was a historian.

DAVIS:  How is Portland’s history unique?

HILL: Compared to what for instance?

DAVIS:  Um…. like-

HILL: Some other city?

DAVIS:  Yeah.

HILL: Okay, now keep in mind you gotta be able to go to these other cities to be able to make a comparative analysis. Portland is a very, very well kept city because relatively speaking it’s modern. The housing isn’t as old as in some of these older cities like back east. It’s in a beautiful valley, with the confluence of two major rivers, the Columbia and the Willamette. Beautiful geography, the Columbia gorge is fantastic and then you got the mountain ranges, the coastal ranges, so it’s unique from the standpoint of its beauty, physically. Now what is different about Portland as a relation to people of African descent and African Americans is there have been, ever since I’ve been here, measures to make sure that certain segments of the population were sorta isolated or kept in certain areas, or not being able to move as what you would call a de facto segregation. It wasn’t legal like de jure segregation by law, although it was because at one particular time when this was a territory, the law meant that people of African descent couldn’t stay in this whole territory and after it became a state, for 6 months if you came here for 6 months and you had to move on a person for instance like George Washington Bush, who is the founder of a place called Centralia, Washington had to leave the Oregon territory and moved north of the Columbia River because of these laws. Some of these laws were still on the books when I was here as a child. I think in about 1954 there was some decisions by the Supreme Court and others to take these laws off the book. So, it’s unique in the fact that it’s been able to isolate and move black people at will. In fact right now, there’s a lot of discussion about gentrification of this area that we’re in now. When I first moved here, when you cross the steel bridge, you entered what was then as the black community. Then they built the memorial coliseum and they had urban renewal projects that moved the people northward and eastward so we began to see all of these changes. As a child, there was no freeway system. Union Avenue, now known as Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, was a major highway system on the east side along with Interstate. There was no I-5 freeway, so during my lifetime, during my early years, we saw the freeways being built, now I-5. At that time we referred to it as the Minnesota freeway because it stopped right at Minnesota and took out about 3 to 4 blocks of housing and guess who lived in those houses?

DAVIS: You?

HILL: Uh, a great portion of the people who lived in those houses were African Americans. And then they had to relocate again. So all of this urban renewal at the local and federal level has made it possible and necessary that black people have to continually move around, and I’ve seen this happen over and over again and it’s happenin’ right now. You probably recalled two years ago, the Wonder Bread Bakery was right up the street. Now what’s up there I refer to as Wonder Bread Park, which in any other community, that would not be tolerated, where a major bakery leaves a big hole in the ground with old trees growing up. That is not tolerated in any way, in fact, a real good walk would be picketing around there and insisting that those people gravel that end so it’s presentable in this community. What that is, is an eyesore and it drives the prices down and then makes it convenient for bigger people to come in and garble up the property. At the time after the coliseum, then the black community hub moved up to about Williams and Russel, Unthank Plaza and other places are up there now. The Urban League still has an organization in that although I don’t believe they own the building. The Elks club on Tillamook, you know where that is? That still exists from that time. If you go one block over to Vancouver, you’ll see an old building sitting there, that used to be the Cotton Club. That was owned by Paul and Geneva Knowles who now operate Geneva’s barber shop. And I know about both of those places because at that time I was an aspiring entertainer, and I had bands and groups and someone would tell me now that I wouldn’t have been a big record makin’ superstar I would have told them no. But, fortunately that career ended when I went to school.

DAVIS:  Why did you open a book shop?

HILL: I opened a bookstore because a few people got together and at the time, prior to that Walnut Park retail center, it used to be a Fred Meyer’s. And so Fred Meyer’s vacated that place, and the city of Portland took over it, and they put the police station there and they had retail spaces available. A group of us got together and uh, a lady had a vision of what she would like to see and one of the components was a bookstore. One person was interested in a coffee shop, the other one was into a flower shop, and uh etc. and basically I had no intentions of opening or running a bookstore because at that time I was a contractor and I went in there as an investor to invest the money in there and I ended up managing a bookstore and shutted my contracting business down.

DAVIS:  Can you recommend any books for someone my age?

HILL: I could recommend a lotta books and it depends on what your interests are. What you’ll find out, or what I found out is different people… what’ya say… different strokes for different folks, you’d have to tell me what your interests are and I could sorta match your interests and then recommend books. So what are you interested in?

DAVIS:  Uh… I don’t know, like… I like drama books.

HILL: Okay. Now you gotta keep in mind that most of my attention was paid to adult books. I got into this thing and I was realllyyyy interested in political type of situations. History and uh, but I was required to have varied interests, so I would let the customers come in and tell me what they needed and then by that and experimenting, so I was learning how to own and manage a bookstore through trial and error. I could recommend books but what we set up was a sort of uh...mechanism whereby a younger person then would be able to recommend books that we could buy. Right now I do a monthly show on KBOO called Black Book Talk and we’ve been doin’ that for… oh my goodness… probably 15 ye… 14 or 15 years, but I do it in conjunction with Emma Jackson Ford who is a specialist in children’s books, and Patricia Welch, who is a librarian over at the Library up near Jefferson. She’s over that, and she recommends fiction and that type of thing. When it comes to history and politics, then that’s my job. So I sorta specialize in that and I would be able to… I brought this book on York because it’s a history related book but it’s for children, and anybody who’s interested in history could learn from that.

DAVIS:  How did you meet Mrs. Flowers?

HILL: Wow. When she was a little girl I knew her brother, her older brother. And, John Thornton…am I right or am I wrong…and this guy in terms of our relationship, we never had any problem but he was a bully. But once a person know that looks can be deceiving, they leave you alone because who would want somebody to say that he got his butt kicked by Bantie? Here he is almost two hundred pounds and he has this 90 pound weaklin’ struggling with him, even if you lose the fight, he loses his reputation, you see what I mean? Ya’ll know what I’m talkin about? That’s if you wanna fight, but the best weapon that I found to fight with is the mind and spirit. So Mrs. Flowers wasn’t Mrs. Flowers at the time, we referred to her as Evelyn, and I’ve known her since she was very small whether she knows it or not. I knew her during the college years and I knew her husband, very, very nice gentleman. We’ve done some business from time to time.

DAVIS:  How many friends can you remember from your childhood?

HILL: WOW. This is a very good question...friends. Okay. If you really talk about friends and you think about it really carefully now, there are friends…. I’ll tell you what I do. When I go to bed, and I say my prayer, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Now god bless my family, my extended family, and friends, and peace-lovin, compassionate, caring, considerate, comprehending, and comprehensive people the world over.’ Within that context are friends, family, and would be friends. Now, in coming, growing up usually you have friends who you have things in common with. It may be a person just because they lived next door in the same apartment or something and you go to school together and all of a sudden maybe you’re walkin to school together. When I was in high school I lived in the Lair Hill district as an example. My brother, Clarence, the next door neighbor, Marvin, and I would walk to Lincoln High School. Now we walked because that way we could save our money and then we could buy lunch and then we could buy desert. There was another, Norah Patterson who lived there but because of his family and how they felt about the distinction of their affluence would ride the bus, so we would meet him up there but he was also a friend too. But in the meantime, my brother Clarence and I would get up and we would walk down to Lincoln Street. Then we would stop and pass Norah’s house cause we knew he caught the bus and we’d get Marvin and then off we’d go to Lincoln High School. Our friendship developed, the three of us, and it’s like the life. Um, my brother, Clarence is now deceased. In fact he lived in this neighborhood about two blocks away from here, right on the corner of Fremont and Vancouver. His family and some of his children went to this school. I have another daughter who is here with me and she went to this school in kindergarten and her grandfather lived on Cook street, not two far from here, about 8 blocks from here. Friendship is something that’s really hard to explain. You don’t select your friends. All of a sudden you look around and you’re a friend. And you really know how it is when things get tough. Who’s there with you when things aren’t so glossy and rosy? Who stands by you when you’re really down? One of my best friends I knew all the way from St. John’s Woods, and he was a couple of years younger than me, his name was Charles Cruz. Now, during the crack epidemic that came through this community, he got hooked on that to the extent that when he died from an overdose, at his funeral there was only one pallbearer. Guess who that was? Me. His sister came to me and asked me if I would do the honor because no one else would go there and say ‘this is my friend.’ So to stand by a casket, and you know you can’t lift it all yourself, but your friend is layin there. That’s when people know who your real friends are. That’s friendship.

DAVIS:  Can you describe your life now?

HILL: If I had more blessings, I wouldn’t even be able to count ‘em. I have been truly the recipient of so many great tides of joy that sometimes it amazes me even now just how fortunate I have been. But you know, now let me give you an example of life not now but earlier. In 1977 there was the second world festival of African art and culture in Lagos, Nigeria and a group of us said ‘we have to be there.’ I mean if you’re an artist, and a world festival recognizing African artists and entertainers from all over the world and if you really are one, you will be there. I am an artist. Actually I can paint and draw. That was something that happened to me early in life. A friend of mine who lived in Vanport, his name was Isaac Allen. He’s known as Isaac [inaudible] now. He’s the most noted black artist in the State. You can see one of his posters up on King Blvd right at Shaver on the right hand side. Actually they took the one on that side, but looking the other way going south you will see a big mural up there and he drew that. Are you familiar with that?

DAVIS:  I probably am, I’m not sure.

HILL: Okay. Well Isaac [inaudible] was and still is a friend as well as his family. Now, I will move back to friendship because he was a friend because his mother and my mother were the best of friends and because we were the sons of two friends, we automatically has no choice but to get along with the other so he’s a friend for life. A couple years ago he brought me outta retirement as an artist and I had an exhibit down at Portland State along with him and other artists but most people don’t know that I am an artist. Just like most people don’t know that I sing and entertain. When I was in 8th grade over in the Lair Hill area, Mrs. Williams, my 8th grade teacher, got together with Mrs. Harrison who was a Portland School superintendent and my distinction as an artist has followed me from George school out in North Portland. George School was a school we went to when we lived in St. John’s Woods. It’s still out there. In fact, there was two George Schools. There was an old George and a new George, now the old George is but they call it George Park now. It used to be a big 3 or 4 story building for kindergarten, first and second and then you went down to the new George and I passed by there the other day on my way out to Vanport but this place provided me with an opportunity that someone saw, that’s Mrs. Remich who was the principal there. One time I was dating a lady whose aunt was Mrs. Law who was really high up in the Portland Public School Echelon and we went to an event and an old lady walked up to me and she says, ‘Bantie, Bantie, is…’ I say, ‘Mrs. Remich!’ Now things like that are recognizing people and being recognized by people throughout your whole entire life shows you your blessings. Now getting back to 8th grade, so when we moved to Lair Hill, we went to a school called Failing Elementary School. The school is there but it’s no longer part of the school system. Yeah, they got uh… it’s some type of medical college. I was in there two weeks ago again on one of my walks to the Lair Hill district. She told Mrs. Eliot about my ability to paint and stuff, so I ended up with a one man city wide art show when I was in 8th grade. Now that spoiled me so that when I got into explorer scouts, that’s why I was doing these murals and things. When I went to Lincoln High School, Mrs. Danley, my art teacher, in first grade she gave me a B, and I would not tolerate that. There was no way in my bigness that someone would give me lower than an A. So I made sure that whatever it was that the other students were doing at that time, I was gonna do the same thing but also let her know that from then whether I did good or not, I got straight A’s all the way through high school at Lincoln High School. We’ll be having the 50th anniversary of the class of ’60 in August and I will definitely be there. So you get blessed and you know that your life has been charmed so it’s not just now. When you look back in retrospect, most people who are fortunate enough to have made the type of decisions or have had the type of people around them to make sure that they stay on the straight and narrow path have nothing to really worry about.

0: 37:02.8

SOMMERS: Okay we have just one more question from Cheyenne and then a question from Faith and then we’re going to open it up to the Audience.

DAVIS:  So you talk about Lair Hill, what is the changes from when you were a child now?

HILL: Last year, a group of us got together and we formed a corporation, a non-profit corporation and we had the 60th reunion for the Lair Hill African American families and as part of the exhibits over there, I brought a copy so you can look through that. Growing up over in that area during the 50s, now we moved over there in ’55, 1955 and I stayed there until I graduated. I graduated in ’60. My brother James moved in ’61 to San Francisco and I had an old Oldsmobile that he bought over at Burn’s car lot right up the street here. At one time where that multi-service center is, that used to be a whole car lot. In fact, and I’m sorta jumpin around but I’m also trying to bring this community into context of what was going on back then. At that particular time, uh, 82nd was playing 2nd hat to Union Avenue because that whole avenue was full of car lots and dealerships and if you wanted to buy a car you came over here. Vans down here right on that corner was a Flying A Station Odel Butler's Flying A Station. Flying A is a gas station, they no longer exist. My brother worked for Odel Butler and so he had a relationship with Van, so he was able to get this automobile, this 1950… Uh Olds ’76. At that time, he couldn’t drive, but I had a license and I volunteered to drive him around, so during those times, we had movies and radio and TV stations that had different programs, and one of the songs that was out during that time Frank Sinatra sang, was ‘Mr. Success.’ Part of the song is ‘when you put your head on my chest then I’m Mr. Success’ Now in order to court and get attention to girlfriends at that time, teenagers with cars was big stuff. You were in high school or right outta high school and you got a CAR? So you printed the name of some fancy slogan or something on the side of the car. That one happened to be ‘Mr. Success’ and I could do it in Old English lettering because I’m an artist so I was making money doing this on cars all around. ‘Mr. Success,’ ‘Bill West Butch,’ we had ‘Mr. Lucky,’ that was an old red, white hard top ’51 Ford. If you had something like that, then WOW, you would really be ‘in.’ Now, so now we’re livin’ over here in Lair Hill. The car [inaudible]. My brother had moved to San Francisco. I’m around there mopin’, here’s a car that broke down and I don’t have a job, so I guess through my mother set up a relationship that they sent me down to San Francisco. He was working in the Hunters Point Shipyard grocery commissary. Now this is a military complex down in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, so there’s also Sausalito, Presidio, Oakland, and alllll of the military from the whole Bay Area come to this store and they had about 8 registers and my brother had worked his way all the way up to the second register bagging groceries for tips. Now, we didn’t get paid. So a register came open so he sent for me and got me a job down there. So we were baggin groceries for tips, and they would on a heavy day got paid a couple times a month and man during those days by the time you left there after bagging these groceries you knew you had bad grocers but in the meantime you sit around and you did a number of things. I left there, I went to North Park one day. My brother and I was walkin’ around Army Street, and who did I look up, Here is Sanky Henderson, a person from Lair Hill who had moved during high school down to San Francisco. I didn’t know where him and Coco were. So now I’m running, this is my friend, I mean really, and so now I’m runnin with him. Down in San Francisco you have gangs at that time. Territories. We lived at a place called Hunters Point which is a big project house, and that was alright because we were used to projects, we grew up in the projects so we went from the projects down to the commissary, we bagged groceries, but after I met Sanky I started leaving and goin back and forth from Hunters Point to North Park, we didn’t have… well we did have gangs up here, for instance, the Bandana Gang is one I can keep in mind. Once I started going over to North Park, I had to make a decision: you can’t have a girlfriend in Hunters Point if you were runnin around with guys in North Park or South Park. SO, I leave there going on a vacation to Portland, Oregon and I was supposed to go back, but I’ve been here ever since and the next thing I know it’s 1962 and before I look up, I’m getting married. And I’ve been here ever since. Did I answer the question?

DAVIS:  Yeah.

HILL: In a roundabout way? Yes.

WAU: My question was about your music.

HILL: WOW, music. Okay. When I came up, and I know this is hard to believe. We used to listen to radio stations because we didn’t have televisions at first. Now I’m gonna back up just a minute. When we lived in St. Johns Woods, you listened to the radio, and then when television came out, there was 4 television stations. KPTV, channel 27, which is now channel 12, KOIN channel 6, KGW channel 8, and KATU channel 2. And then a little bit later on they brought in channel 10, KAOP. If you got a television, you had company. There was no way you were gonna have a TV, people in the neighborhood, their children all went there. So the big thing at that time was boxing and singing. If we turned on the radio we could listen to the Eager Beaver Show and he spinned records of different singers. Oh Nat King Cole, a lotta people, the big bands, these were the stars. Musicians and boxers and then a little bit later on, basketball. So what do you wanna be? You wanna be an entertainer. Okay, can you play basketball? Yeah somewhat but that’s not wha…. Acting wasn’t even real big then. You had people like Buehler, Haddy McDaniels, you had Amos and Andy, mainly it was comedy, King fish and Andy. Have you heard any of that?

WAU: No. [Laughing]

HILL: Y'all need to hear some of this. Then you had singin groups, doo-wop, and music called bee-bop, music called jazz, then you had gospel and spiritual and rhythm and blues and that rhythm and blues, that was it. Now we could go to gospel because in gospel music, they used to come to the projects, it was Apostolic Faith sent a bus to the projects and pick us up and take us out to 52nd and Duke, southeast. And the also had a downtown on Burnside and 5th a place where they would take us sometimes and we would hear music and sayin spirituals and so I started singing right then. When I got up to be this young adult with this Mr. Success I already was singing. We were playing at the… well I got popular because at Lincoln in 1960 they had what they called a pop cycles, and I sang a song called ‘Birth of the Blues’ at the 1960 Lincoln pop cycles and became an overnight success. Out of that whole class, and I’ll be going to that 50th reunion soon, I was the only black male in the whole graduation class of ’60 and I’ll show you that picture. So coming outta that, now like an artist, not only am I an artist, I’m also a singer and I made the rally squad and so being popular really makes you wanna be who you can emulate and so those people singing during the time are the ones we were trying to be and so I went into music and I learned how…. When we were in school my brother Clarence and I over at Lair Hill in the 7th and 8th grade, we played the clarinet and so when I got married and everything, I was singing and learned how to play the bass guitar and then I began to write songs and then I began to learn business skills so I hired bands. For instance when I quit in ’68 it was like OB Hill’s soul review band and these skills are being passed onto other people. Now what happens with music is like with everything else: something you really like to do and you’re good at and you get a pat on the back for doing it and good grades and that’s what you become. So that’s how music goes. I really wanna thank ya for inviting me here and I hope I’ve shared a little information with ya that you can enjoy and I would really like to hear a copy of this tape when you get it available.

DAVIS and WAU: Thank you!

SOMMERS: Let’s open up for questions and you all can come down to the microphone.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Did you have any pets?

HILL: Pets? Yes. Now, I as a child loved dogs. When I was in 7th grade I had a little dog. At that time, we didn’t have the type of heating systems in those projects that we have now. We had like, wood and coal stoves and so finally they did bring electrical stoves into those projects so that required what you called coal bins. It was a big box that lifted up so the people could bring and drop loads of coal over in there, or you could chop wood and put it in there. So my dog lived in the coal bin and you could lift the gate up and keep him in there from runnin, well one day I was walking to George School and my puppy followed me there and unbeknownst to me that he was behind me, he ran across the street and got hit by a car. And this same Mrs. Remich that I was telling you about, the principal, in fact, she was one of the first female principals in the whole Portland School District. Mrs. Remich came runnin up, and there was nothing they could do for the dog. The Humane Society came and I’m hysterical hollarin and cryin and everything as they took him away and when I saw Mrs. Remich, she reminded me of that incident. Now when we moved over to Southwest Portland and I was going to Failing Elementary School in the 8th grade, I got another dog name Duke, but in the 8th grade I could be with Duke all the time but when I went to high school we had to walk to Lincoln and so Duke saw the straightaround and was sorta adopted by an old veteran who had about 3 other dogs, so I would have to go get Duke and what have ya. Eventually, Duke just stayed over there and I didn’t have the time to take care of him, and then one day I got a copy of… it was either the Oregonian or the Journal because I delivered both. I delivered the Oregonian in the morning and my older brother James, he wanted the Journal. But then he was in high school and I was in 8th grade so he didn’t have the time to do the Journal because you had to have that between 3 and 4:30 so I would get up at 6 o’ clock in the morning and deliver the Oregonian and then come home at 3 o’ clock and have to pick up his papers and so I was following in the footsteps of my father. He had two jobs. So Duke, my dog, came up missing and I looked in one of the newspapers and there was an article saying he must stay around here somewhere, but who knows. And it was Duke! It comes out that the veteran had passed and the dogs that he had were taken away, and so Duke was just left out there. So that was the last dog that I had. BUT, I have a daughter who took on that trait, and Angela, my oldest daughter, she LOOOVES dog. Also a goldfish, I used to have a goldfish. That’s my big secret, I won’t even talk about fish. And so when I got married and became an adult I bought this big ol’ fish tank and I had tropical fish in there and so between dogs and fish and birds. When I lived in St. John’s Woods in the 7th grade I had pigeons. There was Gary Beveridge and some other people raising pigeons so we would let our pigeons out and they would fly around the coup and so between birds, fish, and dogs, yes I love pets.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: What were you able to learn about Polly Williams?

HILL: Wow. You know, that bag I didn’t bring with me but I think I had my pedigree, a little paper here somewhere. Maybe I put it over there. In August and September, if things weren’t the way I had planned them, I’m going back to Birmingham and I’m gonna go and do the research in the state archives there and I’m gonna try to find out as much as possible about that. Now I also have a PHD brotha who also has done some research and he knows the place because as a child he was sent back to Birmingham and he actually was raised there from about the 5th grade one, so he is very familiar with Birmingham so I gotta meet him. Polly Williams I’m interested in finding out about. Now the people who were born were still alive at that time that time, that I know, was my great grandmother Emma. I had two great grandmothers born, Polly Williams would be my great, great grandmother. Mecky was her nick name and I was her baby. Now, my oldest brother, James Jr, that was my grandmothers baby, my father’s mother’s baby is my oldest brother. We had had two sisters who died as infants so my mother and father had 7 children, and although most people think that I’m the second oldest, I’m really the middle child, okay. But two of the first three, both girls, Gwendolyn and Wilma Jean died as infants. So the grandmothers were grabbing these babies and we were coming like this. So my great grandmother Mecky, my mother’s grandmother, grabbed me. And how I became Bantie, you wanna know that? Because these are very important questions. I walked early. They looked up and all of a sudden, here’s this little toddler walkin and one of the friends of my mother, of all names, her nick name was Girly, and with a name like that, I guess misery likes company. She looked at my strut, and there’s a thing called a Bantie rooster and as I walked, I had my chest out and she saw me as an image of a proud little rooster, and so she named me Bantie and that caught on. So, when I go back, not only do I wanna look up Polly Williams and the other people, I wanna also find out who Girly was and a whole lotta things people back there and my brother can help me with that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: I got a question, do you think that the Vanport flood was handled better than or in a different manner than the flood in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina? Because I noticed you said that they brought a bus there to take you out, they put you in a new housing project, but it seems like Hurricane Katrina is something that we would know from our generation that was a flood that we can relate it to. What was the difference?

HILL: Well, the flood was a little bit different. The hurricane has whatever territory it hits, it tears the whole place up, but Vanport was actually a lowland delta that had built up…. You’ll have to go on one of these walks with me and I can show you exactly where the dyke broke and you can see-

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: Yeah but similarities being the dyke broke in New Orleans which flooded the neighborhoods in the ‘black neighborhood’ and I wanna know the difference between the way that was handled and the way it was handled here in your opinion.

HILL: Okay, blacks weren’t the only ones in Vanport, in fact we were the minority, but at that time, we were the largest minority to stand in the city. Actually, the largest minority at the time were the Japanese but during that time, they took them and interned them in camps because the United States was at war with Japan and so all the Asian people, especially the Japanese, were taken into concentration camps and housed away so that made the black people be the largest minority in, not in the state, but near the city in Vanport because Vanport was a city in and of itself. Once that flooded, this city of Portland had to step up, they had no choice and so people were given the option to leave and they were paying peoples way back but the large majority of the people decided to stay. Katrina didn’t have… the city of New Orleans didn’t have a support system or a place to go so they were on their own, where Vanport was a city of itself. For instance, we moved among other places, to Swan Island. They used to have military barracks down on Swan Island but so after the war they moved part of the people from Vanport there. There was also a big project called Giles Lake over in northwest Portland, so they moved us over into these places that after the war were vacated anyway so there were places for us to go and that was basically the difference. With Katrina, I don’t think they had no one willing to say ‘come live with us.’

SOMMERS: Any other questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: Thank you for going overtime!

[applause]