harold a. katz memoir volume 1 - University of Illinois Springfield

A: Oh yes, these were battered frame houses. If anybody were surveying it for the Twentieth
Century Fund, they would have concluded that this was life at the poverty
level. Fortunately, we never viewed it that way.
The way the blacks were treated used to bother me. They were in the neighborhood, and
if they kept their place, they could be treated in a friendly way. When we went to the local
theater downtown, the blacks sat in the upper balcony. White Nashville would sit either
on the main level or in the first balcony. But in the far upper balcony, there was a separate
place where only the blacks would sit. And if we got on a bus, well, the blacks had to go
to the back of the bus. I played with blacks in the neighborhood. But if you went to the
theater together, they had to go up to the upper gallery, or if we got on a bus, they had
to go to the back of the bus. You just couldn't be together. And there were drinking foun-
tains - the blacks would have their drinking fountains in public places, and the whites
would have theirs. It is just unbelievable that things were like that in Nashville, but they
were. There was some kindliness between whites and blacks, as long as blacks did what
they were supposed to do. Let them get out of line, and they would be treated brutally. My
parents were not typical of the community. But, in any event, that's the way life was.
Q: Did any of the blacks work at the store?
A: No, we had no outsiders working in the store. It was a small store. And that's why I
would not want you to get any exaggerated ideas of my father as being part of the mercantile
class, Nothing like that. It was a very meager existence. The Depression was a disaster
even to that meager existence. It was a Ma and Pa Store. They would stay open long hours
and in some way manage to get enough money so that they could provide sustenance for
the family.
Q: Let's see, how many brothers and sisters?
A: I had one of each and I was the youngest of three. I have a brother who is about five
and a half years older than I, and a sister about three and a half years older than I.
Q: What's your brother's name?
A: Sam. He left Nashville in the Depression. Sam was intellectually motivated, what you
would now call college material. But there wasn't enough money to send him to college,
so he went to Washington to take a job as a junior messenger with the Veterans
Administration, His pay was six hundred dollars a year.
He went to school at night in Washington and gradually picked up his formal education. He
became a government person and moved into professional areas. He was an advisor at the
Federal Reserve Board, and then he became editor of an International Monetary Fund
publication. Now he's on the faculty of Georgetown University. At that time, in the Depres-
sion years, there just wasn't money to send a child to college. By the time I came along
the Depression had eased just a little.
Q: It had?
A: Not very much, but a little. When I entered Vanderbilt in 1939, the tuition was two
hundred and seventy-five dollars for a year. My parents did not have that much
money. And I remember that the university agreed to take three postdated checks from
my father so that he could write out a $100 check and date it two months ahead, and write
out another for $100 and date it four months ahead, and then a third one for $75 and date
it six months ahead. By the time each check became due, he and my mother - she tried
to keep the store going after he went to work for the Metropolitan - would try to scrape
up enough money so that each check would clear.