John Boucree interview recording, 1994 July 05
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| Kate Ellis | One second. Okay, would you state your name and when you were born? | 0:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | My name is John Harold Boucree. I was born June 30th, 1923. I just had a birthday. | 0:10 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:00:20] very soon. | 0:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 0:20 |
| Kate Ellis | 1923? | 0:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 0:20 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 0:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I get in trouble with everybody because I use the full name rather than J. H. Boucree. If you say, "Hello, John", I won't answer you, because all my life I've been called by my middle name. But now everything you do has to be first name, middle initial, last name. | 0:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 0:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | So— | 0:44 |
| Kate Ellis | But you're one of those folks who would be J. Harold Boucree? | 0:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. I put it that way. I sign it all kinds of—Officially, when anything comes, I put the whole thing because sometimes I'll put J. Harold, sometimes it's J. H., but most people who known me all my life, it's just Harold Boucree. | 0:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Just Harold. | 0:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | Because I had somebody recently who just says, "Where does the John comes?" "It's been there all along." | 0:54 |
| Kate Ellis | "It's on my birth certificate." All right. For the record, Mr. Boucree spells his last name, B-O-U-C-R-E-E. This is Kate Ellis with Mr. Boucree on July 5th, 1994. Okay. So were you born in New Orleans? | 0:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | I was born in New Orleans, raised, but mind you, most of my education was in New Orleans. Graduate school was away from here, but I've lived all my life in New Orleans. Yeah. | 1:19 |
| Kate Ellis | Where did you grow up? | 1:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | In the uptown section, as a matter of fact, I was born within about 15 blocks. 15, 20 blocks from here, in the uptown section of the audience. | 1:31 |
| Kate Ellis | Where? On what street? | 1:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | On Galvez Street, South Galvez. | 1:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 1:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | 3700 block on South Galvez. | 1:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 1:45 |
| John Harold Boucree | And that's where the family home is. And I was born and raised there, and lived there, with some moves during The Depression and things like that, really, until I was married and moved here. But all my life in that area, in the uptown area. | 1:45 |
| Kate Ellis | You mean moved here to this house? | 2:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, to this house. | 2:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, okay. So you've stayed very rooted? | 2:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. Yes. | 2:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 2:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, yes. | 2:12 |
| Kate Ellis | Can you start by telling me about your community around South Galvez, what your neighborhood was like, what you considered your neighborhood? | 2:15 |
| John Harold Boucree | We grew up in an area, when you talk about race, it was a little small pocket of Blacks that was completely surrounded by Whites in that area, there was a portion. My father and his father bought property in that area, oh, before I was born. One that was swamped and wilderness and whatnot, and they built in that particular area. So it was a little pocket of about five or six blocks. And around that pocket, Whites built and grew up in that area. People were very friendly in the area. | 2:25 |
| Kate Ellis | People meaning Whites? | 3:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | Whites, and Blacks, right. | 3:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 3:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. We did not know that many because as a child, you were not supposed to, you know, you stayed along the straight path. You did not deviate, were not supposed to deviate, into the predominantly White areas unless you were working or something like that. But you knew some of the people in the area that would've been there. And the persons of Blacks who live in the area got to know each other very well as a small little community in there. And we were not too far from church in school, about 10 blocks from St. Monica School, which was our parish church. | 3:10 |
| Kate Ellis | St. Monica's? | 3:43 |
| John Harold Boucree | St. Monica, M-O-N-I-C-A. | 3:45 |
| Kate Ellis | School? And that's where you went? | 3:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's where I went to elementary school, at St. Monica. And— | 3:49 |
| Kate Ellis | That was also the church? | 3:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, it was also the church. We were only about six blocks from St. Mathias, but that was a White church. But we went about 12 blocks to what was a Black church, Catholic, of course, in that area. And that was the area that we grew up in. All of us, my brothers and sisters, and sister also, went to St. Monica School. And really, I still have strong affection for the church and the parish. And my parents were instrumental and worked very hard for the actual building of the church. Had a lot to do with setting the pattern of which directions were going to go and things like that. And both were there and members of the parish until they died in there. I don't know what else. | 3:56 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm just thinking a couple different things. Oh, I know. This is a basic thing. Who was in your household when you were growing up? | 4:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | My mother and father, I had one older sister and there were three boys. I have an older brother and a younger brother. My grandmother, my mother's mother, would live with us periodically. She would move from there after her husband died, and years, she would live sometime with one of her daughters and other times with others. But she lived with us for a while. But basically, that was what our family constituted. We had relatives who lived out in the country someplace who would come in some time and spend time with us, but they did not live with us as such. So basically, it was my mother and father and the four children with us. And I said, my grandmother with us periodically, she lived with us for, let's say, maybe two or three years at a time. And then she would live someplace else and something like that with family. But it was a stable family. | 4:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | Mother and Father both worked very hard. They had ideas and ambitions for us, and they were concerned with doing whatever they could that would enable us to take care of ourselves and have a profitable future life. They were caring parents. They were with us and concerned about us with everything and anything that we did with it. And I think back now on my childhood, and comparing that to some of some others, so my mother worked, domestic work, every day. And I say, I can never remember my mother having my sister stay at home from school because one of us was ill, or having one of us stay home to go pay a bill, even though it would cost her money, because she was paid that little small sum to work. She took time off herself to take care of what we had to do. | 5:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I remember her going to the hospital with us and sitting in a chair at the hospital all day for service and things like that. And she went her own self to take care of all these things. And she felt that getting to school and getting an education was most important. They themselves had them. My father went as far as fourth grade, and my mother went as far as fifth grade in school. But they realized that would be the path to success in getting ahead in life, and that they were very strong. They were very close-knit family. | 7:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | One of the things that we learned also was that dinner was a time for family to eat, well, everybody had to be there in time for dinner. And then Sunday morning breakfast was a big affair at our house. We had breakfast together on Sunday morning. We had dinner together at night. Every night, and along we've been that way. We went to church together. The children went together as a family. My mother and father went together because they would go to a mass, an early mass and we would all go together to another mass. | 7:48 |
| Kate Ellis | So you greet them later on? | 8:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, yeah. Well, we'd come back home by the time we got back home after mass. So, because they would go to six o'clock mass and we'd go to eight o'clock mass, so by the time we got back home in the morning and after mass, then we would have breakfast together, and then Sunday dinner. And then, because they worked every day just about, we would have dinner together in the evening after mother and father got home. | 8:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Who did the cooking? | 8:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | My mother did when she got home, or when my sister was old enough. And then we learned also to cook with it. And my sister would sometimes when she'd get home in the evening after school, she would get started with dinner. But my mother would get home from work about four o'clock in the evening, and she would start cooking dinner. So we had dinner about 6, 6:30, something like that in the evening. | 8:49 |
| Kate Ellis | She was hardworking. | 9:15 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And the kind of work she did was domestic service, she did and such. She washed and ironed, and she did housecleaning. I guess you'd call her a maid today, but it wasn't at the same place. I think there were about three families that I know of that she worked. She was at one place for one or two days and another one down there, but they were in the neighborhood. | 9:18 |
| Kate Ellis | In your neighborhood? | 9:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, yes, yes. | 9:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 9:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. So she didn't— | 9:41 |
| Kate Ellis | She was in that sort of surrounding—? | 9:42 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, yes. She did not have to go out of the neighborhood for it. Yeah. | 9:43 |
| Kate Ellis | She didn't have to ride the street cars, or ride the—? | 9:46 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, no, no, no. And because my father was a carpenter, and at that time, carpenters, then you have a lot of building going with individual houses. So we had problems. Carpenters then were not paid the kind of salaries, their money, that they're paid now. Plus with New Orleans, when it rained, and you're being paid by the hour, you don't work, you don't get paid. So now, need I say more? | 9:49 |
| Kate Ellis | No. Yeah. | 10:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | The kind of things that we did with them, but we managed, we survived. | 10:19 |
| Kate Ellis | And you had your own house? | 10:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. Yes. | 10:27 |
| Kate Ellis | That he built? | 10:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 10:27 |
| Kate Ellis | So he was able to buy the property really cheap, when it was spawned, basically? | 10:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. I remember as a little boy on the house, that was a little small two room house that was there. I assume that it was on the property when they bought it. Go back, that's a long time ago for me to remember it, there was a little small tool house on there. | 10:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, on the property of that? | 10:51 |
| John Harold Boucree | On the property, yes. And then I know that later on that they started building to replace it. And this was kind of in the front of the lot, and it started building from the back to this. And then when they got enough in the back just to move into the back, then they tore down the front and built it here. | 10:51 |
| Kate Ellis | I see. | 11:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | And of course, that house is the typical New Orleans single shotgun kind of house. So you used to those, you know what it is there, yeah. | 11:12 |
| Kate Ellis | I mean, that's what he built, to move into that. | 11:17 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. Yeah. Yes, yes. So that's what it is. And his father lived about three or four doors further down the street right here. | 11:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, I thought he had bought and then he had built here. | 11:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, he built out. But his house was built a little different from that because his father was a contractor in the contractor business. So he was able to do a much larger house with it and his two-story house, and was built a little different than what ours was. | 11:31 |
| Kate Ellis | So the contractors made—I mean, are you saying he was able to do more because he had the cash? | 11:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, he had more money coming, the funds coming in for it, see, in there. And that's the way I'd say they had it at that time, was it. | 11:53 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 12:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | My father is, was it dated? No, as a matter of fact, he was born in New Orleans. My mother was born in St. Mary Parish. | 12:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Where is that? | 12:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's Convent Union, Louisiana. Up on the way, let's see. It's on the river road. How shall I—? It's about 70 miles from New Orleans going towards which direction? Toward Baton Rouge. | 12:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 12:51 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, in that area. If you go up Highway 90 toward Baton Rouge, you'll see something going off to the river road and you'll pass the place of Gramercy and Lusher, those kinds. She was born in that area. And they moved to New Orleans. As a matter of fact, I think my mother said to me one day when she first got married, she lived in one of the houses somewhere else. It's a nice area, because she was living with some cousins who were in this area. And then my father was born up in the uptown area. So I guess that's why we've always lived in the uptown area with them. | 12:51 |
| Kate Ellis | That's really home then. | 13:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, yeah, yeah. | 13:32 |
| Kate Ellis | How did your mother decide to come to New Orleans? | 13:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, I really don't know. | 13:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? | 13:42 |
| John Harold Boucree | I never thought about it. | 13:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 13:42 |
| John Harold Boucree | But I could assume that probably to get work or something like that within there. And she moved because her sisters, she had one sister who moved to New Orleans, who lived way downtown. And the other two sisters stayed in the country area. Her brothers moved to New Orleans also with her. And eventually her mother and father moved to New Orleans when I was smaller. I remember my grandfather, he died when I was very young, so I don't remember him too well. But I assume that, being from the country after a while, there was just nothing to do, and she had to work or something like that. So the opportunity just to work were better with coming to New Orleans. So I assumed that why they would, but I never thought about it. | 13:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 14:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | So I really don't know. | 14:44 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you know your grandparents, what their life was like? | 14:45 |
| John Harold Boucree | Not too much. So I don't remember too much of what my grandfather did. I know that he did some farming work before he came to New Orleans. Now what he did after he was here, I really don't remember, my grandmother did domestic work. | 14:49 |
| Kate Ellis | Once she got here? | 15:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Once she got here, from what I remember, she did domestic work, and she worked for two families. And they lived in what is now the West End area, somewhere that's out there, because she had to get the—she carried a bus now to get to work at that time. And she worked, oh, quite a while. I really think that's when she stopped working. Yeah. | 15:13 |
| Kate Ellis | What about on your Father's side? | 15:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | On my father's side. | 15:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Your father's father was a contractor. | 15:52 |
| John Harold Boucree | My father's father was a contractor. He left New Orleans. Let's see, my grandmother did not work. He left New Orleans and moved to Chicago. Oh, when was that now? The 30s, something like that, 40s. And my father's brother had three brothers who lived in the Chicago area who were in the Chicago area. I don't think it was there, it may have been in Chicago itself, but I think as you probably know from hearing the history of that, there was a migration from Blacks, right? Straight up to Chicago, for job opportunities and things like that. So they would— | 15:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Jump on the train. | 16:46 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, yeah. So there were three brothers who moved to Chicago. And my father had two sisters who still lived here, and my grandfather decided that they were going to go to Chicago, because all of his sisters—Yeah, his sisters lived in the Chicago area also. Now, how they got there, why they left New Orleans? Well, I really don't know. But then he moved and my daddy's two sisters moved to Chicago also with them. And by that time, I think my grandfather had kind of retired from working, was at the end there. And I have one of my father's sisters, is still living, she's what? 92 years old. She lives in Chicago, and we talk with her often. And that's the oldest relatives to living. No, my father's cousin is still living, who's 96 years old. My father's first cousin, and he's 96. | 16:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Where is he? | 17:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | He's here in New Orleans. | 18:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 18:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | He's in the Lafon nursing home, in there. You'll probably hear the name of Father Boucree. It's his father who's living, Father Boucree is a priest in this area. | 18:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 18:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | But it's his father who is a first cousin with my father. And he's in the Lafon nursing home. Has been there now for about a year, two years, or something like that. But we saw him not too long ago, and he still old, kind of remembers things like that, but it's rapidly fading. | 18:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 18:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | But my aunt's memory is—She knows us. We talk with her all the time and visit with her. And it's only within the last two years that she's kind of stopped traveling. But she came down to a carnival. She came down for her weddings and things like that. | 18:34 |
| Kate Ellis | Wow. Yeah. | 18:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | Funeral and everything within that. | 18:51 |
| Kate Ellis | So as far as your grandfather, now, this was the grandfather who lived on the same street? Yes. | 18:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, my father's father. | 19:00 |
| Kate Ellis | So what did he do once he left? I mean, he left a house and—? | 19:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, they sold the property here and moved up to Chicago. And as a contract in the business, I assume that he probably did some of the same kind of thing. | 19:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 19:17 |
| John Harold Boucree | Work up there in terms of contracting businesses. | 19:17 |
| Kate Ellis | And you said that your grandmother didn't | 19:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | She did not work, no. And she died, oh, before he left. She died sometime in the 30s. My grandfather taught—Let see, how shall I phrase this now? Have you come across the name of the Sisters Of The Blessed Sacrament? An order of nuns. Katharine Drexel, founder of the Order of Nuns. That's the order of nuns that found Xavier University and Xavier Prep School. | 19:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 20:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | Xavier Prep School, it still stands on Magazine and Soniat Street. My grandfather taught industrial arts at that school for a while. And he was also one of the smaller contractors, some of the smaller building, for the building of Xavier University as it stands now in its present. Occasionally there within that. And I don't know how long he taught at the prep, for a short period of time he taught industrial arts there, I know that was going on. And that was with the Sisters Of The Blessed Sacrament. Sisters Of The Blessed Sacrament, whose mission was to provide for, and things that constitute Colored people and Indians. | 20:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | And they established missions and schools all over the south, and for the Indian population west out in Arizona and things like that, was in there. And a lot of us, without the Sisters Of The Blessed Sacrament, would not have been able to get where we are now, because of the kind of things that they did in terms of schools and financing schools and enabling us to go to school in very cheap rates and things like that with it. But that order founded the school. And then they had supplied teachers for a lot of the Catholic schools in this area with it also. | 20:49 |
| John Harold Boucree | So he taught at the prep for while and then was in the contracting business. I have a standing joke to say that I am the Black sheep in the family. They say, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, my daddy's daddy was a contractor. My daddy was a carpenter. He has one brother who's a bricklayer, another who was a mason, a brick mason, and another who was a carpenter. My mother's brother, one was a carpenter and the other was a painter. I have an older brother who's a carpenter. I have a younger brother who's a carpenter. What am I? I wanted an education. So no, I— | 21:30 |
| Kate Ellis | What went wrong? | 22:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, no. When I finished elementary school and wanted to go to the high school, I wanted to go to Xavier Prep, of course, the family says, "We can't afford it." So I said, "Okay, if I can find some way to get there, can I go?" "Yes." So I tell kids all the time, I said, "I used the only thing I had, my brains, and got a scholarship. So I went to Xavier Prep." And when I came out of high school, my father, as fathers do, and as I quote in the White establishment, the father brings the sons into their business, this million dollar—My father's a carpenter, so he brought his sons in the carpentry business. But when I got in, I said, "I don't want that. I can't do it." I mean, I know things. I said, "Daddy, I just don't want it." "Oh my God, I can't afford it." "But if I can find a way, can I go?" "Yes, you can go." | 22:23 |
| Kate Ellis | To college? | 23:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. So I said, "Okay." I had only one thing to do, was brains. So I found out that they were doing the examination for scholarships. So I took examination, I got scholarships. And I worked in the office and whatnot and— | 23:14 |
| Kate Ellis | At the—? | 23:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Xavier University. Yeah. | 23:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 23:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I worked during the summer with things, and I worked with academic scholarships and well, they had government jobs, funded stipends and things like that, and I was able to get through college. They were able to help a little here and there, but I knew I could not depend upon it. And I can always remember when I came out of college, got ready to graduate, my daddy says, "Well, I guess I'll have to give up on you. I won't make a carpenter out of you." I said, "Daddy, I gave up on you a long time ago." So I went into the education. It just wasn't for me. And they agreed to let me go the direction that I wanted to go with it, and that's how I broke the mold. | 23:29 |
| Kate Ellis | And then you became a teacher when you got out of Xavier? What did you do? | 24:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | When I finished college, I went into service immediately. | 24:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 24:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | World War II. Yeah, I finished college in 1944. | 24:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 24:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | And that was in the midst of World War II. As a matter of fact, I had been called before that, but the dean was able to get a stay of induction because I was in my senior year doing student teaching and whatnot, and I had one semester to finish. So they were not giving deferments, but they were giving a stay of induction. So she was able to get a stay of induction. Convention was on May the eighth, and on May the ninth, I had a letter in mail says, reading this, "Uncle Sam, wants you." See? | 24:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | So I spent two years in the service here in the States in Europe and Okinawa, and came back and I started teaching then. And I taught at Xavier Prep for about eight years, and then went into the public school system. And I taught at junior high school for five years, four years. Senior high school for two years, became principal of an elementary school for one year. Went back to principal junior high school for five years, principal of senior high school for 10 years. And I says, "You can have it." | 25:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | And then I went to central office and worked for the next eight or nine years as supervisor of programs dealing with behaviors and problems and staff developments, and you having all kinds of things where I had some knowledge of organization and administration until I retired in 1986, I retired. And I retired then because of illness, I became critically ill and was out for a whole year, and after that I retired. I had enough timing to retire. So then I've been retired now. I do one class now, I teach a class at Southern University New Orleans on Saturday mornings. | 25:47 |
| Kate Ellis | What do you teach? | 26:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | It's a class. It's a psychology course called Test Wiseness and— | 26:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Test Wising? | 26:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | Test Wiseness. It's designed to help repair students for taking the NTE exam and some of the other national exams. And fundamentally, you give test taking skills, teach them those, and then do a final review of basic mathematics and vocabulary building, reading process, and sentence building. Concentrating primarily on analogies, which helps you to build your vocabulary and things like that, yeah. And I do that just during the year on Saturday mornings. And I tell the dean, I say, "Anytime you want somebody to have this class, I say, "You can take it." | 26:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? | 27:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | I don't know how much longer I can do, but I do it now in there, but that's the only thing I do in terms of teaching, education wise. | 27:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, going back, a few years— | 27:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | Okay. | 27:37 |
| Kate Ellis | There's a series of—This always happens to me, I have all these different questions and it's like, "What makes sense to ask next?" | 27:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | Okay, great. | 27:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Since we're on the topic of school, can you tell me what you remember about your schools? I mean, in your teachers? | 27:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Okay. | 27:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Particularly elementary and [indistinct 00:28:00]? | 27:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | Elementary school was St. Monica, it was a Catholic school. It was operated by the Sisters Of The Blessed Sacrament, and the sisters were all White. We saw them as being colorless. We saw them as teachers and did not think of them as White and Black or nothing else. We saw them as teachers. There were lay teachers who were Black in that area. | 28:00 |
| Kate Ellis | They were, I'm sorry? | 28:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | Black teachers, lay teachers. | 28:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 28:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | In terms of religious and lay. | 28:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 28:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Meaning they were not a part of the order, but they were regular teachers who taught in the school. And I felt that they provided a very good education for us who were there. | 28:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | I can't remember any overt kinds of segregation thing other than that. You grew up in a segregated area, in a segregated society, so you kind of knew where, and you kind of stayed away in those days, from things that would be controversial. You knew where you were going to go and things like that. | 28:49 |
| John Harold Boucree | For example, the movie theater was on Washington near Broad, there's a funeral home now in that building, the Rhodes Funeral Home, and that was a Tivoli Theater, T-I-V-O-L-I. And that was a neighborhood movie theater, and admission was 5 cents. But you would go to the theater and the main entrance was all White, and as a Black, you went around the side, to the back and upstairs into the upper balcony within there. And we would go to the movies on Sunday evenings, primarily. Most of the time we would go. | 29:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Your whole family or your brother and sisters? | 29:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, not necessarily together, no. When I say we, children generally in the area. We would not all necessarily go together to the movies, we would go with friends or sometimes we would go—Not the whole family together, not for it. When you went to stores, and of course as children growing up, we did not have the freedom to run around the city as you do now. Number one, transportation was not as forth—We did not have a car. And finding money for a street car, for something that was not necessary, where you needed that money for something else, so you did not go to those areas unless you just had to. So going to Canal Street, to me, is very vague. I don't remember going to Canal Street as such. | 30:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | There were shopping areas in the Broadmoor shopping area, which was close to home where you walked and frequented. The Dryades Street area was a shopping area, and a lot of the Blacks in the uptown area shopped on Dryades Street. And that's the area now from, let's see, I would say from Jackson Avenue on down to—I would guess, Erato, Thalia, something like that. | 31:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | And if you pass that area, you see all, it looks like a ghost town now. But that was thriving areas in that. So those were two areas that really provided a lot of what you needed in this. As a child, I really don't remember going to Canal Street for the big stores. I know my mother would go to the Canal Street area, but I may have gone with her as such in it, but I don't remember going there. | 31:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Could she try on the clothes in the stores on Canal Street? | 32:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, no, no, no. In those days, they made their clothes pop dresses, primarily. I know that my mother sewed, she has always had a sewing machine. And I know that she sewed. We had an aunt who sewed. There was somebody else who used to make clothing, for my father, yeah, but they were not able to try on the store, the clothing, as such. And as I said, I'm unfamiliar with what happened at that part of my— | 32:16 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, let me ask you about that. Did she, or your parents, talk about that very much? Was it a subject of discussion in the family? | 32:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | It was just a way of life. | 33:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 33:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | So there was not that much said about it as such. And I don't remember. To me, there were other more important things that they talked about other than something you could not change, you could not do something about with it in there. And I don't remember any incidents coming up with it. I know that she would go to the downtown area, I know that, in paying some of the bills. And of course in my early childhood, we did not have electricity. We used a lamp light. | 33:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I teased my grandsons over during one of the hurricanes, so when the lights were out, we had the lamp, I said, "Matthew, this is what we studied by." He said, "Grandpa, uh-huh, uh-huh." I said, "Yes, yes, yes, this lamp." And of course we had indoor toilet and bathroom, just pictures and whatnot. But electricity was something that, you just couldn't afford within there. And as I said, a car was out of the question within there. Most of the shopping was local. Groceries were in the area, there were a number of groceries within the area. | 33:53 |
| Kate Ellis | Were they White owned shops? | 34:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 34:39 |
| Kate Ellis | The grocery shops, or—? | 34:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, some of them. There were one or two Black owned. Very few there. Most of them were, but White owned. I know of one where we shopped frequently was owned by Italians who were in the area, it was in there. And it served both White and Black in the area for years. And no problems at all when you went into the store. Now peculiar, as you said, now going into the store, whereas in some of the larger stores, if a Black and a White went up at the same time, then they would always serve the White first. | 34:42 |
| John Harold Boucree | But I know, and I think about it now, at this little store, when you went in, you were served as you came in, regardless of who or what it was. They did not distinguish one from the other in there. And I can't recall anything in that store that was prejudicial as a child growing up. DiBartolo's was the name of the store. | 35:23 |
| Kate Ellis | DiBattos? | 35:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | DiBartolo's. | 35:57 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, DiBartolo's. | 35:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | D-I-B-A-R-T-O-L-O. | 35:57 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 35:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | And it was a little small family owned store, and husband and wife owned the store, and that's where she did most of the shopping. And there was another store where most of the time she would go to get meats and things like that with it. And also in the Broad Street area, I think, I went to a wake service. I think it was a wake service. | 36:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, no. The church had a bicentennial endowment program here, The Archdiocese Of New Orleans, and the Archbishop had a mass on Thanksgiving, in which people from the various parishes who had worked were invited to this mass. | 36:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | And at the mass I sat behind—There was some Whites who were sitting in the pew in front of me. And during and after mass, as people are greeting, and I happened to hear the lady's name being called, and I turned around and looked at her and I recognized her. Her name was Mrs. Stassi, S-T-A-S-S-I, and they owned a meat market on Broad Street, and I turned around and she smiled and said, "Hello." And I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, but I just have to stop and say hello to you." I said, "You were Mrs. Stassi, who owned the Stassi Meat Market on Broad Street." | 37:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | And she looked at me and she says, "Yes, vaguely, I remember you." I said, "Yes. I was a little boy in that area at that time." I says, "My mother used to come all the time to the meat market." I got the warmest greeting from her. And then people stepped back and looked. But we started reminiscing about the things that went on in that store at that time. Very friendly with it again there. And they had excellent meat with it. And it is just one of those things that comes up with it. And then she says, "Thanks for saying hello to me", and went on after that with—So yeah, while there are a whole lot of negatives, there were positives that occurred within there, within it. | 37:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | As I said, some of the things in during early childhood are rather vague because we were kept close as a family. I guess my parents knew the problems with Jim Crowism and all that kind of stuff. So they kind of shielded us from some of the kind of things. | 38:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | Now, if they were involved in it, they did not let us know about it as such. And I would assume that they did. I assume my father did meet a lot of it with them. But his major concern was working to find money to take care of his family. And my mother's concern was, as a mother, a homemaker, to see that the kids were well taken care of and things like that. And we were not rich, far from it, but we were healthy. We had love, they worked with us and things like that, to give us a kind of foundation that we needed within there. | 39:01 |
| Kate Ellis | So when you said a minute ago, "We didn't talk a whole lot about segregation or race," and that in a sense there were more important things to discuss than something that was felt, at sort of at that point, not to be changeable. | 39:49 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, right. Yeah. | 40:08 |
| Kate Ellis | Those sorts of things might have more to do with putting food on the table and making sure you were going to school? | 40:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, right. Yeah. And whom you were playing with. What happened in school? What's coming up next week? When are you going to go here? Well, the other things that were happening in the family and things like that, within there. As I said, they took care of the things that a lot of parents, some sometimes not, and I guess I'm conscious of keeping kids home to babysit them because being in education, that just bugged me to no end. That you keep somebody out of school because somebody else has to do something. That's a parent's responsibility, that's not a child's responsibility. And I guess because I grew up that way, that I'm so aware of that. But to keep a child home, to go and pay a light bill or to go and pay, that's— | 40:18 |
| Kate Ellis | So you saw that happening when you were teaching? | 41:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | As a teacher, yes. Yeah, in the public school. And I could never understand that. Why do you have to keep a child home through that? And to me, there are things that are more important than that with it. As I said, I can't recall either parent relating any instances of Jim Crowism to it. They probably did have some experiences with it, but I really don't remember them as such with that. | 41:23 |
| Kate Ellis | And when you—? Oh, sorry. | 42:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, go ahead. | 42:01 |
| Kate Ellis | And as far as your own experience with it, again, it sounds like to some extent you were shielded. I mean, you were certainly aware of it. I mean, there was certainly an understanding of, "This is where you go and this is where you don't go." | 42:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, yeah. | 42:14 |
| Kate Ellis | When you did go into the public areas where Whites and Blacks would share space in some way, like a movie theater, did you ever talk about—? You and friends, or siblings, ever talk about having to go upstairs or go into the side entrance or anything? | 42:15 |
| John Harold Boucree | As we grew up later on, and when you left elementary school, and you got in high school. That's different. | 42:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, tell me about that. | 42:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's different. Oh, yes. There were questions of, "Why can't we go here?" Because then you got to be personally confronted with that, so then you questioned it. And you did things to circumvent it. Of course, you knew that there were some things that you could not do. And I know that sometimes for the heck of it, couple of us coming from college would go to the drugstore or something like that and sit at the counter, if they weren't going to serve us, then we'd just go and sit, and so— | 42:39 |
| Kate Ellis | You don't [indistinct 00:43:20]? | 43:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, and we didn't make a big scene about it, you know, "You can't be served here. You go over there", "No, no, we don't want to sit over there", "Well, I can't serve you", "Okay, goodbye", and leave and things like that. I guess I was not basically militant as such with it, in terms of kind of pushing for things. I know there was an occasion, which I felt very keenly of the problems with Jim Crowism, at the university, singing with the University Chorus. We were invited to sing for something at the Fairmont Hotel, at that time it was Roosevelt Hotel, and Xavier had accepted to sing, I really don't know what the convention was. | 43:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | And Sister Elise, who was the director with us, with another nun to sing, and we went to go to the hotel and went up to the front and they stopped her at the front door and said to her, "You can't come in." So she says, "Well, we are a program for singing." So they said to her, "Well, you two can come in, but they can't come through the front. They've got to go around the back to the freight elevator." So she says, "No, we will not come through the front door. We're going where the students are going to go." | 44:14 |
| John Harold Boucree | So it created a little scene there, and they insisted that the nuns come through the front door and the nun says, "No, if the students can't come through the front, then we will not go through the front." So there was a little meeting or something like that, and they decided, "No, the students will not go through the front." So Sister Elise said, "Well, since we're contracted to sing, we will go with the students." | 44:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | So they went and came with us through the freight elevator upstairs. And of course we heard the apology to the nuns about it, and they were very adamant, says, "No, you invited us here. We belong with the students, and if the students can't come in. We won't come." "Well, sister, when you left—" She says, "Well, whichever entrance the students leave—" "Well, the law won't let us let them go through the front door." | 45:08 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Huh. | 45:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | So they left with us in that kind of event there. | 45:39 |
| Kate Ellis | And was that early 40s? | 45:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, that was in the early 40s. As a student who was a lover of music, I was an education major. My major was mathematics with a minor in Latin, and I was certified to teach mathematics, Latin, English, social studies and music. All that kind of stuff. But a lot of people thought I was a music major, but I just liked music. And for the operas, I mean, the concerts, philharmonic concerts, at the auditorium, the university, Xavier, Loyola, Tulane and Dillard, were asked to provide students to serve as ushers for the program. At that time, they did not have paid ushers. So the students, you got a chance to hear the concerts by serving as an usher. | 45:48 |
| Kate Ellis | This was at the municipal auditorium? | 46:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. Yeah. No, this was at the Orpheum Theater. | 46:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 46:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | Was it the Orpheum? | 46:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | We were assigned areas to serve as ushers in the area, and of course the upstairs area was for Blacks who went to the concert. There were quite a number of Black people who went to the concerts, so the students from Xavier and Dillard were assigned in those areas naturally with it. If there wasn't enough, then they would assign some of the White students there. | 0:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | I got to know a couple of the guys from Tulane who were going to the concert. You got to see each other and said hello and talk with each other. There was one young man who lived in the uptown area and we would get the bus at the same time to go so we would strike up a conversation. | 0:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | Of course the street cars, that's said the buses, but there was a street car really. You had the segregation on there with, you've heard of the screen moved back and forth. What we would do, we'd get on the street car, you'd have a street car that was practically empty. I couldn't sit up here and he couldn't sit back there, so what do we do? We would stand. | 0:58 |
| Kate Ellis | You stand in the middle? | 1:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | Stand that place and talk the whole time. The conductor would say, "You can sit down." I says, "Can I sit up there?" "You know you can't sit there." I said, "Well, can I sit back? Okay then we'll stand up." We would stand and talk with each other. At Tulane University, on one occasion went to McAllister Auditorium for a speech program, and I was teaching then. When we went into the auditorium, they were seating the White students over here and the Black students over here, and as a teacher, I objected and I put my kids and sat them over here. | 1:26 |
| Kate Ellis | With the White students. | 2:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, and somebody came and objected to it. I says, "Well, if they can't sit here, then we're not staying." Of course I created a commotion, so they decided to ignore that fool. | 2:23 |
| Kate Ellis | They decided to what? | 2:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | Ignore that fool. | 2:37 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh. | 2:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | They just ignored that I was there and let the students, they wanted a [indistinct 00:02:43] students with me so we stuck it. | 2:40 |
| Kate Ellis | That was in the late '40s? | 2:46 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, that was after I came back. Came out of service in '46, late '40s, early '50s, something like that where things started happening because it was after the war when you came back and the movements began in earnest. | 2:49 |
| Kate Ellis | What difference did you notice in New Orleans once you got back from the war, and did it also change how you thought about things? | 3:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | At that time there were not that many changes, but gradually you started getting changes where the city started to, at the lunch counters and going through front entrances, those things began to happen. Then you began to find that the screens on the buses and street cars would just disappear. You'd get on and see people sitting. You have to sit behind the screen. What screen? Where's the screen? Things like that with. They started changing in that way with—Olympia. | 3:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 4:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | Will it take it out? | 4:08 |
| Kate Ellis | It won't hear it too much. We can hear it I think more than the tape recorder can. | 4:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh. | 4:13 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:04:17] | 4:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | But there were things like that that began happening with it. Little by little, you saw things occurring that integration was coming with it in there. The strangest things with activities that were held at the Black colleges, Black institutions were always non-segregated. | 4:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | Where Whites came, there was no section for them. You sat where you wanted. When you want to the other way, there was always a section for you there with it. I guess a number us got around, but just not going to places where you know you were going to be segregated and you felt that you just didn't want to put up with that kind of inconvenience so you just don't go. Consequently, you maybe missed out on a lot of things. | 4:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | As a teacher, when I was first started teaching at Xavier Prep, knowing, I don't know how familiar you are with New Orleans and the different shades of complexions, and there are people who are supposed to be Negro you can't tell who they're White and things like that with it. At Xavier Prep, there were a lot of, this is a Catholic high school, private school. There were a lot of students in class who were very fair. I was teaching a speech class, and we would say something about there was a play going on. There was a movie going on, so we'd say, so-and-so would you go to [indistinct 00:06:35] this week and see that play for us report? Okay. | 5:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? Because that was a place that I wouldn't allow any Blacks. | 6:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. We'd say to them, I would say, "If nobody asks you don't say anything, but don't deny who you are." | 6:35 |
| Kate Ellis | That's what you'd say to them, the students. | 6:43 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. Go up and present you money, buy your ticket, and they take you at face value. | 6:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Literally. Yeah. | 6:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | They would go and the kids would all the time who were fair enough there was something worthwhile they'd go with it. They would come back and report to the class and all the things that had happened and things of that nature, but there were many opportunities that you just could not get. Of course when you went to the stores downtown, the drinking fountains, you had one over here it says White only, over here for Colored only, that kind of thing. | 6:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | Of course, there is a thing that's sat in my mind. There's a playground in the area I grew up in, it's on Washington Avenue, bounded by Derbigny and Roman and Fourth Street. It's a huge playground. Playground still there. Taylor Playground. | 7:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | Taylor Brick Playground was all fenced in. One side of Washington Avenue in that area was White, the other side of Washington Avenue going to Canal Street was Black and you have this playground there. There was this gate, it stayed closed. There's this big sign on the gate and it says "White only. No dogs are allowed." Now you read what you want into that. I don't think—All of us who grew up in it that area remember that sign and that White only, no dogs, in other words, you're a dog. | 8:03 |
| John Harold Boucree | That sign stayed on that fence until really integration [indistinct 00:08:52] the playgrounds were all integrated before it came down and they kept it on there with it. | 8:45 |
| Kate Ellis | You were surprised it wasn't torn down. | 8:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, I think that there were not as many incidents of racism and things here as in other places because of the way that New Orleans I think is populated. People were, in some areas, lived next to each other, so close to each other. They got to know each other as individuals. I went to school, at high school. I went to Xavier Prep in high school and my teachers were the nuns, the White nuns. We had White female teachers, White male teachers, Black female teachers, Black male teachers. The faculty was integrated. I guess I grew up in that atmosphere, and when I went to university, it was the same thing with that. It didn't bother me. It didn't disturb me at all. I got used to it with it in there, so there was no problem with it. | 9:00 |
| Kate Ellis | What didn't disturb you then? | 10:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | Of being with Whites and knowing how to act and somebody coming in and things like that with me. I've been told on occasion, someone will say something about stereotypical type of Blacks. I said, "Oh, but you're different." I said, "No, I'm that different." Said, "I'm the same" because I'm comfortable with it. I've gotten used to being the only Black in a place, it doesn't bother me. I'm aware of it. | 10:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | Working one day, superintendent sent me to a meeting, represent the school system, which was a part of my job that I would frequently go some places. I came back—superintendent was a White female. | 11:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | I came back to her office and I says, Dr. Boudreaux, I'll go to any meeting when I say but never send me to a meeting like you did today. She said, "What happened?" Said "You didn't want me what I was going to." She says, "Oh?" I said, "When I walked in and I saw this room full of young, White, pregnant, Jewish women—" She mad. I says, "Here comes a Black male walking in." I said, "When I walked in, every eye turned." That was nothing. Just a joke with her— | 11:17 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm sure. Right. I see you have a sense of humor about these. | 12:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, it was a meeting that she would nominate. She said, "I never thought." I said, "I thought about it." | 12:08 |
| Kate Ellis | I noticed. | 12:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | It was, I think a meeting in the junior league or something like that, and it was one of the school system had to rep, and she could not go so I went as representative. I had no problems at all with it. It just hit me because most of the time when I go to, I wouldn't think about, excuse me, but I just didn't expect that kind of an audience within. I went back, and I looked down [indistinct 00:12:42] and there was another Black male, and we happened to coincident. He said the same kind of shock hit him. Didn't expect it. It was the same thing you go to a meeting as a man, you're walk in and see nothing but women, but there was no problem with anything. | 12:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | I think that personally, I probably have not had as many negative experiences with racism as other people have. Maybe because I stayed away from places where there were going to, knew there were going to be problems. | 13:03 |
| Kate Ellis | Where would those be? | 13:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, if I know that this was going to be segregated and I was going to have to be relegated to go here, I just didn't go. We mentioned to you over at Our Lady of the Village Church, when you went to Our Lady of the Village Church, there was a little small section in the back over on the side where all the Blacks sat. I went there once. I said, "I'm not going to sit here, so I'm not going. Period" I can go someplace where I can sit where I want to go. That kind of thing with it. | 13:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | If there were places that I go where I know I couldn't get around it and I had to put up with this, then I did it. But generally if I didn't have to, then personally I just didn't with it because I didn't want the embarrassment and I didn't want to feel uncomfortable and things of that nature with it. I just didn't go with it. | 14:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | And of course the matter of the street cars and the buses and things like that, you had to use those with it. You had to sit in those areas. There was nothing you could do about it in that, and you had to comply with it. The times that I rode the buses and the street cars for example, before I had a car and going back and forth to work in a morning, they were all crowded so there were no seats to sit anyhow so you stood on the thing until you got off the bus and things like that with it. That was it. | 14:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | We missed out on a lot of things, but being at Xavier, I was able to probably get to more things than if I were not a student at a university that the average person could not have gotten because it went under the name of the university. University provided a whole lot of things for us, knowing the circumstances that you can't go. Xavier did operas there, so I learned the opera, I sung in the operas, and we got tickets to the operas so we went as a group. We knew that you have to sit in this area with it, so fine. | 15:11 |
| Kate Ellis | The municipal? | 15:49 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, yeah. You go— | 15:51 |
| Kate Ellis | But you went as a group together, in the sense it sounds like that would— | 15:52 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, | 15:57 |
| Kate Ellis | I mean the same way when you go with your friends to the movies, it sounds like that was another thing where it's you're together as a group for the purposes of this entertainment. | 15:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | Things like that with it now. I don't remember going to the operas before integration as such, as an individual. | 16:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, by yourself? | 16:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | By myself, going down to buy ticket. No, no. Now since I did the symphonies, I went as an usher to the symphonies. When you went to the movies downtown, if you went. Yes, I'd go out and went to the movies, you had to go through the side, all the way upstairs into the balconies. That was, let's see, the Orpheum Theater and Loew's State, [indistinct 00:16:45] could not get into it. | 16:22 |
| Kate Ellis | You couldn't go. | 16:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, in there. You were able to do that, so you are aware of that kind of thing. In terms of stores, in buying clothing, I stayed away from the large stores where you could not fit things on. You would go to some of the other stores where you knew that you could fit clothing on, which were not the major. I couldn't afford to go to some of the major stores. I didn't have that kind of money see, so you went to those places. The same thing with my trying on shoes and things like that with it. | 16:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Personally, a lot of other people probably would not have had the same kinds of experiences with it. I guess I'd be atypical rather than typical of some of the things with that being. There are a lot of things I think that if there had not been segregation with the kind of ability that I had, I probably would've been able to do more and get more without as hard a struggle for if it were as open and available to me now. | 17:29 |
| Kate Ellis | Like what? | 18:18 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, in terms of opportunities to go places, to travel, to see things, and freedom to function for example, when we listen to now Back to Pontchartrain Beach and we sit and laugh at that commercial, we were aware of Pontchartrain Beach. Pontchartrain Beach was the area across from UNO on the lake where rides and concessions and there was a beach area. Well we couldn't go there, so now you're going to tell me how celebrate to go back to Pontchartrain Beach? | 18:20 |
| Kate Ellis | I see. Right. Nostalgic commercial. | 19:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Who did they get to? | 19:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Never opened to. | 19:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | Who did they get to sing those commercials? Irma Thomas and whole lot of Black performers now, because they're the leading performers. Back to Pontchartrain Beach. | 19:07 |
| Kate Ellis | Wow. | 19:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | That means nothing to me. Couldn't even look at Pontchartrain Beach. What are you doing in that area? Not supposed to even be in that area. | 19:24 |
| Kate Ellis | That might be dangerous. | 19:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, yeah. See, so you just don't. The segregation, the Jim Crow stopped a lot of opportunities there. They did do Lincoln Beach was opened, and that's way out on Haynes Boulevard, out in New Orleans East. The only way you got there, you had to have a car to get there. There was a huge swimming pool there, and rides, and concessions. Well, we did go out there for a while after it was opened, but it was a distance that you had to travel to get out there. No public transportation at all to that area. The hours, no, the hours were okay. It was not as elaborate as Pontchartrain Beach with them. | 19:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | The other big thing that you talk about with schools, as you know here in Louisiana, students don't buy textbooks. The state provides books and you've got secondhand books in the schools and you would get a textbook, let's say a ninth grade algebra. When you'd look on the inside cover, I believe you've seen this book so you write names and you see a kid's name or [indistinct 00:21:09] and then three or four other White high schools name and it comes, now you got them after they no longer have them. We are giving you something, we're complying. The state says that the new books went first to the White schools. You suffered from that indirectly. As I said, I did not go to public schools, and I guess that's probably why I did not feel the brunt of some of the things that other people did in it. | 20:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | My two brothers went to public schools, high school. My sister finished high school in public school because it was an out of finance. My family just couldn't afford it [indistinct 00:22:05] As I said, if I had not been able to get the scholarships, I would not have been able to go either. | 21:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Did they go to McDonogh 35? | 22:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | My sister graduated from McDonogh 35. My older brother went to McDonogh 35. My younger brother finished at Booker Washington. | 22:14 |
| Kate Ellis | It had been built by. | 22:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. It had been built by that time. | 22:22 |
| Kate Ellis | When you were referring to the books, your books didn't come from the state because you? | 22:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | All the schools, private and- | 22:28 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, private. | 22:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | Everybody, regardless of where you were, you still got. Louisiana's a peculiar place because New Orleans has been so heavily religious involved that whatever the public schools got, the private schools, the Catholic schools got the same. | 22:31 |
| Kate Ellis | I see. | 22:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | Same thing with it and they're talking about it now. There's just now cutting back on some things that they did with it. When I was in high school, there was only one public high school, that was McDonogh 35. Then you had Xavier Prep, which was a Catholic high school, [indistinct 00:23:16] High School, which was Episcopalian, Gilbert Academy, which was Methodist I think. | 22:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | There were only four high schools for Blacks, but then you had about five or six public high schools for Whites plus private schools with it. You got the textbooks and things in the schools. You got the things that the state said all schools should get, but they were not firsthand. You got them secondarily. | 23:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Definitely separate and unequal, | 23:52 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. Yes. Yeah. | 23:53 |
| Kate Ellis | Again, when you're a child or an adolescent, how did you make sense of that? | 23:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | You tell a child "No, don't touch that stove because you're going to get burned" and you see that child go at the stove, you grab his hand, "Don't do that because something's going to happen to you." Family's at home, you don't do this because this, you don't do this because of this. | 24:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | You try it out once, you know, go down, here's this thing that says White only I'm going to drink out of White, so you go in and you drink out of them. Somebody comes grab you behind the neck, and they cuss you out and everything else and kick you out this door. Okay, I can't do that. See what I'm saying? That's why. You knew from family background from trend what you could because parents and they were trying to shield you because we were special kind of unit. | 24:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | Now I can't speak for other families, but I know my family was that kind of a family orientation. When I say with my family, this is the same thing with families. My cousins, my mothers brothers and sisters family, my father's the same kind of thing that had been instilled from that. | 25:06 |
| Kate Ellis | That's how the knowledge has been planted. | 25:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Yeah. You get used to that kind of thing. Let's say you get on the streetcar as a child, and as I was an adult before the screens were removed from the bus, you'd see a little child get on with his mother and the mother's paying the fare and the child runs at the front. "Come back, you can't sit there." "Why mama?" "Because you've got to sit behind the screen." "Why?" You tell them that, and when he gets on the next time and he sees this, he knows that mama said I can't sit up there. Same thing, the White's getting on, the child gets on and sits here and the White mother says telling her, "Get up, you can't sit there." "Why?" "Because you've got to sit up in the front." | 25:30 |
| Kate Ellis | There's something about when the children ask, it always seems to point out the absurdity because who can give a good answer? | 26:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | Because you've got to sit up there. | 26:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Because I said so. | 26:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's how you learn this. You then learn that where it says, you look at a entrance to go in and it says, "White only," if you go into that entrance, somebody's going to insult you. Then if you want to be insulted, if you want to show out, then fine. But eventually, they're not going to serve you. You can probably get hurt or something like that. | 26:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | It all depends what kind of mood you're in. If you want to be insulted, you want to fight, you want battle, then totally. I'm going in here. Now if you don't want that, if you're in the hurry, then you find out where's the other. | 27:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | The other thing, I says, "If you had to go to a toilet what'd you do?" You held it. There were no restrooms for us to go in. White restrooms. Now you want go around the back to something that they had, but there were no restrooms in some of the areas for Black to use. You learned what to do. You go before you leave home and you hold it until you get back. I mean, that's something as basic as that, you don't stop to think about it. | 27:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Right [indistinct 00:27:56] approach to the world. | 27:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | You get a drink of water. Now maybe if you can find the, they might show you where the facilities for the people who worked in the store, the Blacks who worked in the store maybe had some little hole in the wall, someplace well in the back and you had to go. | 27:59 |
| Kate Ellis | Had to. Right. | 28:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | But that's the kind of thing with it. In the area that we grew up, there were Whites in the area. One or two occasions they would come to Galva Street because it was a large open area and they would mix in a little bit for a ball game for a while. | 28:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Mix in with people living in your little? | 29:03 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. If you think of, look at this table here. Where I grew up in, this street would be Delachaise. This street is the next block, General Taylor. This is Tonti Street, this is Johnson Street. Now on this side of Delachaise, it's White. This side of Delachaise was Black. This side of General Taylor was Black, that side was White. On Tonti, both sides here were Black. On Johnson, this side was Black, the other side was White. | 29:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | You had Johnson, Galvis, Miro, Tonti, this little island, Black families surrounding it totally, they were all White in it. A number of the people in this area of Black families were there because they had bought the property earlier. Some of the other rental property was owned by Jewish people, who through a corporation or something had invested in it so it was rent, but most of the people owned the property. | 29:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | I know that for a while, as we were growing up and we were able to afford a telephone, as things got better later on, we would get a telephone call, my mother would answer the phone. Somebody would want to buy our property with. They would go through, they wanted to clear this area out of Blacks who were living in there and they couldn't do it unless they bought the property owned by the Blacks. Now the other property owned by the White investors, fine. All they had to say was move out period, so they have to work on those. They would start a blitz to the property owners in there to buy your property. "We'll make you a good offer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." | 30:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | One day, I happened to listening and mother answers telephone and somebody was off and she said, "No, my house not a for sale." She said, "If I sell you my house, where am I going to go?" He says, "Oh, you can go and shack up with somebody else until you find another place." She said, "Well, you go and shack up who that person is" and hung the telephone. But that's the kind of thing that they felt with it, and after a while then they stopped calling. As the White flight took over— | 31:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Then what? Then did more of the surrounding area? | 32:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. It's all the whole area. | 32:03 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:32:05] wouldn't leave the White folks. | 32:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. They started building further out, various areas. We moved here, my father died. Well, when I got married, lived with my mother and father and my father died, and so we stayed with living with my mother and we had two children. Then the third child came, we needed more room, so then we start looking for someplace to move. Baby was, Michael was a year old then. We saw, we were out of town and we saw in the paper, guess we had an agent looking for us. That's another trip looking for in those days, house to buy. | 32:08 |
| Kate Ellis | In those days, we're talking the '50s now. Am that right? | 32:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, a little later than the '50s. We bought, yeah, late '50s. Late '50s because we moved here in 1959. | 33:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 33:06 |
| John Harold Boucree | We bought this. We had two girls and a boy. We start off by saying we will not even look at anything but less than three bedrooms, so three bedrooms, living room, a dining room. We'll settle with one bath, two baths if you can but the one bath would be fine, and a kitchen area. That's what I started off. | 33:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | The agent knew, now don't show us anything that doesn't have three bedrooms, living room, dining. That's basic what we wanted. He would not show us some places because he knew that they weren't there. We got calls from some agents who found we were looking for them, they would show us. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We came and looked at this house. | 33:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | There was a Black family who lived directly across the street on this corner who had been living there for about five or six years. On the other corner, there was a Black family who had been living there, oh some 15 years or so. | 33:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | The man who lived there was Nathaniel Burton, who was one of the great chefs of New Orleans, worked at Pontchartrain Hotel and they had been living there. There were Black families on Soniat Street over there in other areas, but the rest of the house is in this block all White. Now, I'm not sure about the other areas. | 34:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | We came and looked at this house was up for sale and we liked what it had and the possibilities. We've done a lot to it since we've been here. But it had potential, basically what we're looking for. | 34:43 |
| John Harold Boucree | At the same time, we looked, the lady next door saw us coming in so she asked the agent to have us come in with this house. She and her husband, they were elderly people there. It had what we wanted there, but it was a corner house and it wasn't particular about the corner house. She said to me in the backyard, she says, "You can even turn that garage into an apartment in the back." I just looked up and says, "Why don't you have an apartment in the back now?" She says, "I don't want anybody living in my backyard." I said, "Well, why do you think I would want somebody living in my backyard?" She said, "Well, that would help you to pay the notes." I said, "What makes you think I need help to pay the notes?" She turned red as a beet. | 34:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | We looked at that house, looked at the next one, and then the agent got a call one over here. These were people were living in houses and they knew that we were looking, and then the next down the street, they were all looking. We finally decided to get this house. Within the first year after we moved here, house next door was sold, across the street was sold. Within five years, everybody left. | 35:59 |
| Kate Ellis | All the Whites. | 36:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | All the Whites left. They sold. They left within five years that they left here. It's a subtleness that people say to you, and it's a belief that Blacks are not supposed to have culture. You're not supposed to want better things. You're not supposed to want to do this. | 36:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | We looked at a number of houses. I told you the kind of thing we want, so we would not look at it. We saw houses that had much more than what we wanted. We had told the price range that we were looking for also in there. We went to one house and this was a two story house, very nice. | 37:17 |
| John Harold Boucree | There were some faults with it, but when we looked at it, we saw the potential in it. The woman who was there, the agent for that house, and we made an appointment to see it about nine in the morning. She was there and showed it to us and whatnot. She was saying to us that you can close this wall off. I said, "Wait, don't tell me about putting anybody else in this house. I'm not looking for somebody to move into my house." I says, "I'm looking for a house for me and my family only. Now if you're going to tell that, I'll leave right now," so she shut up. | 37:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | Then she went on to say, when she saw we're really interested, she says, "I have somebody waiting also to make a decision, so if you want to get to his house, you'll have to let me know by 12 and get your down payment." I said, "By 12 o'clock? It's nine o'clock this morning." I said, I don't make those kind of decisions." "Oh, but you want it, don't you?" I said, "I'm interested," but then to be sure to get it before these other people come in. | 38:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | My wife looked at me, she said, "Let's go." We left. About 1130, we got a call from her. "Have you decided?" I said, "No, we haven't decided." "Well, you still have a little time to go yet before the other people come in." I said, "Thank you." She called us two days later, were we still interested in the house. I said, "Oh, you said that we had to get by 12 o'clock. This is too late." "Well, I just thought maybe I was helping you out by helping you to make it in mind." I said, "No you didn't." I said, "If I were interested, I'm not now. Goodbye." | 38:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | Any number of places that we went, they wanted to show me how I could use less or how I could take the house and cut it up, put my family a small portion of it, and then rent out the other part. I says, "I don't want to live with somebody else." I says, "I want something for myself and my kids." Said, "We know they want." I said, "No, you can't show me what we have no matter what." | 39:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | Since we bought this house, we enclosed the porch, we took out walls in the back and made a different kind of kitchen, we added a second bathroom onto the back, we've done things outside. We put air conditioning and all that kind of stuff and made it the way we want it see in there. That's what people don't understand. When they see you coming, they put you into this little box. He comes, I got him now. But you don't have me now. I know what I want. I'm going to do that with it. It's changed somewhat now with it. | 40:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | But at our stage now, we're not looking for things so we probably don't see it. I know we just bought a car recently and we bought a Lincoln and there was no question about. They asked us what did we do, retired and whatnot. Fine. There was no question, "Can you afford it? You can't afford it." | 40:46 |
| Kate Ellis | "Are you sure you want a Lincoln?" | 41:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. No, there was no question of that at that time. We knew what we wanted. We had had a Capri, and '86 Capri, that little driving. We talked with him and we said that's what we wanted. I said, okay, let's do the paperwork. What do you want to pay down? I wrote the check, zoom, no problem with it. See? That's some of the changes that have. They find out that you have something. | 41:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | There's a friend of mine who had an incident recently with his daughter. She married a football player with the Patriots. She came back to New Orleans and I think they living here and there. She went to Maison Blanche to open credit account. He says they were asking what did she do and blah blah, and what's your husband's yearly salary? She's said six million. Said to him, looked at her, you have a mistake, don't you? Said, "No, the salary's six million." "You people don't own that kind of money." Said, "I'm sorry, I can't do it," so they sued the company. They didn't go through with it, but I understand the person was fired. An apology. Okay. Guy's a young football player, Patriots, you're making six million. | 41:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | But she just wanted, wouldn't have to care. She said running around. She had a credit card for MB says growing up she didn't have, she used her mother's credit card all the time. Now mama told her, "You can't use mine. Get your own. Let your husband pay for it," but he says that's the kind of thing that they assume, and that's part of the stereotype that goes on that you're not supposed to know. | 42:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | I get told sometimes, and it's not as much now as it used to be, I don't talk Black. I says, "What do you mean talk Black?" I said, "I've been speaking this way all my life." Of course, I've had some people with some surprises and I'm just full of these anecdotes. | 43:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | In the school system, I was working with the counseling department, I was supervisor of guidance and counseling. We're talking and dealing with registration to one of the schools. Benjamin Franklin, [indistinct 00:44:07] Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin is one of the magnet schools, but whatever had to come to my office. | 43:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | My secretary was Mexican-American, and this woman called and she went on, Margarita has a very slight accent, not too much. Woman called about something about Ben Franklin. I heard Margarita tell her, she said, "Wait, let me let you talk to Mr. Boucree." I got on the telephone with her, and I talked with her about what she wanted and then she went on to, "We've got to protect ourselves. We've got to let all these other people come into our schools." I said, "Oh? Well, who you talking about?" I just let her on. I told Margarita to pick up. | 44:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? | 44:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | She picked up, and Margarita sitting there just going, laughing away with her. I said, "You want to come on pick up?" "I'll come in and pick up the others from your secretary." I said, "Fine." I told her where the office was and what time. Fine. Hung up. | 44:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | When the lady came, she said, "Oh, I know you want to meet Mr. Boucree. Wait a minute. Well, he has it in his office." Margarita called, Mr. Boucree, Ms. So-and-so." I said, "Oh." I went out with all smiles and whatnot and the woman looked at me and turned red, her mouth open. She said "Thanks" and turned around and walked out. | 45:15 |
| John Harold Boucree | You can't tell what I am on the telephone, and I don't put on cell phone, the same. I told somebody, well, I've had a lot of speech training also. Someone said one day wanted know whether or not I had ever gone to school in the East because they detected some phrases, the As and have a harsh sound sometimes. One of my speech teachers was from New York. Said, "Oh, okay." That's got it. | 45:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | You're supposed to split for, supposed to not know what it is and slur and everything. I said "No." I said, "I've done a lot in speech as a student, participated in speech contest, I taught speech, I taught drama in school and it's just a part of me." | 46:20 |
| Kate Ellis | Can I ask you something about that? Have Black people ever told you that you don't sound Black? | 46:43 |
| John Harold Boucree | As principal of junior high school, I would call parents sometimes and I— | 46:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 0:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | I called the parent and I said, "May I speak with Mrs. So-and-so?" Someone said, "Who?" I said, "May I speak with Mrs So-and-so?" "Mama, the White man on the phone wants you." And any number of times I've been taken for White. Now in terms of Blacks, no. I mean, generally the people I know and whatnot, they know that I have a trained voice and so it doesn't bother. But there are a number of people when they've seen me, hearing me on the telephone first and then seeing me in person. | 0:04 |
| Kate Ellis | You look. | 0:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | I've been told, somebody said to me one time, "You don't sound like someone with all the experience. You don't sound that old." I said, "What do you mean? How does old, what does that have to do with it?" "I don't know, but you just don't sound like it." And it's shown up several times. I've talked with people on telephone and then I've gone and I've seen the expression on their face. You don't have to say anything, but I'm not whom you were expecting. | 0:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | See, and it's the same thing over and over. It doesn't bother me, as I said with it. And I just try to be me and keep going with it. I have not, as I said before, overtly personally had a lot of incidents as other people may have had with them because of the nature of what I've been doing and how I've been doing with it. So maybe I've been put on a pedestal. Maybe I've been shielded or something like that. I don't know. People will say, "Oh, but you're different." People start talking about Blacks, or this Black. I said, "I'm not." "Oh, but you're different." "I said, no, I'm not different." | 1:35 |
| Kate Ellis | Whites tell you you're different. | 2:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | "Yes, you're different," would tell, "but you're different." I said, "I'm not different. My blood is the same. Color is the same. Everything." "Yes, but." "But what? I just had opportunities and I made use of those opportunities." Other people have not had the opportunities so they have not been able to. But I learned because of my background that I knew my parents couldn't afford some of the things I wanted and some of the things that they wanted for me. So I had to make use of the opportunities as they came open. And I used every opportunity that I had to get ahead in terms of what I wanted to do. I have an uncle who told me, he says from a little child, he always knew I was going to be a teacher. I said, "How do you know?" He said, "Because you were always telling people how to do something and you wanted to do it better. You had to do this. You were telling them this, it's wrong. That's wrong." | 2:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | When the grandkids come here and they know that I'm going to stop them, if their English in a hurry. If you say something wrong, I'm going to correct it. My son is a doctor now and he had, when he was in school, he used to have papers to write. If he wanted it for content in terms of whether what he was saying was so, particularly in the science area to give it to his mother to read. If he wanted it grammar sense, he would give it to me. He wanted something typed one time, "Daddy, you a typist? But please don't change it." So I typed it as he had. Said, "Michael, you got a big mistake in this sentence right here after this." "Why?" "You told me don't change it." "But Daddy, you can see that that's wrong." "But you told me don't change it," see? It's out of that. It's a matter that they tease me in the club, that. | 3:36 |
| Kate Ellis | What club? | 4:52 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, I'm sorry. I belong to a club called the Original Illinois Club. | 4:57 |
| Kate Ellis | The Original Illinois Club? | 4:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | Original Illinois. It's a carnival club. You've heard of that? | 5:02 |
| Kate Ellis | Uh-huh. | 5:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Okay. I happen to be secretary of the Original Illinois Club. For the balls, I've been serving as narrator, master of ceremonies, and whatnot. And usually in doing the script and whatnot, they will tease me because I look at it with a red pencil. And when we correct it, it passes my red pencil test because there's only one way to do something, that's the right way. | 5:06 |
| John Harold Boucree | What do you need? | 5:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, so you're this. | 5:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | I was saying in terms of, I insist that people do things correctly and I've been called a perfectionist. I said, "Well, just as easy to be a perfectionist as someone who makes mistakes all the time, and let's get it done the first time with it and go that way with it." So with the Illinois Club, as I said, usually I work closely with the tableau and the skit for the balls, and I insist that people are very accurate in what they do and things of that nature. | 5:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Can you tell me a bit more about, it's called the Original Illinois Club? | 6:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 6:33 |
| Kate Ellis | What is it? Just briefly. | 6:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | It's a carnival club. | 6:35 |
| Kate Ellis | Which means what? | 6:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | There are many organizations in New Orleans that are all-Black because you are not able to join the White organization. So they started, you wanted it to better yourself. You want other kinds of things. So you won't let me get in yours and let's start our own. The Illinois Club goes back, the oldest all-Black carnival club here in the country and its history goes back to 1895 when a man came from Chicago to New Orleans and he felt that the kids needed some social graces. He was a dance teacher and he moved to New Orleans and he opened a dance school for boys and girls, and taught them ballroom dancing and things like this, all Black with it in there. | 6:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | And they decided that they wanted to have a carnival ball, carnival dance. So they put on a carnival dance and then they went over so well, so well that they then formed themselves into a club and the idea was that they would find people and present them, train them how to do the social graces and then show them off publicly with it. And that has been the tradition of the club. Our job is to find young Black girls. | 7:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | Of course, if a White girl comes to our club, then fine, we have no problem. But I don't see why she'd want to come to us when she can go to [indistinct 00:08:14]. If you come to us, that means then somebody doesn't want you. That's being brutally frank, why would you come to me? Yes, we are the best there is in there, but you have a choice of going someplace else with it. Why would you associate with all-Blacks where once you're finished you're not going to be with these, you're going back to your own society. So nobody has ever come, but I'm just saying with that. | 8:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | So these girls, by application they apply to and our purpose is to find the girls. They're taught social graces, how to stand, how to walk, how to greet people, how to dance, and through a series of parties and whatnot. And then at the ball, they're formally presented to the social world with it. That's the primary purpose of the club. Secondarily, it's a social club for the members and their wives do meet also with it in there and that's the whole thing. | 8:41 |
| Kate Ellis | So it sounds like it's multi-generational as far as when you find the girls, it's the elders teaching the younger women. | 9:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. The girls are usually seniors in high school, and usually they're juniors or seniors in high school. We've had some freshmen and sophomores in colleges with it. And they are taught, the wives of the club members work with them. There are three of the ladies who are in charge of the debutantes who teach them the things they need to know. Plus, there's a special dance that the club has called the Chicago Glide, which is written for the club that they do that. | 9:27 |
| Kate Ellis | And that's a special dance. | 9:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, yeah. We've got a tape of the whole thing there. You would enjoy. If I get it back, I might think about lending it to you. | 10:00 |
| Kate Ellis | I would love that. When did you become a member? | 10:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, I've been a member about 16, 17 years. Yeah. It's expensive and you have a membership dues and whatnot with them, and there are the kinds of things that you do. And it gets to the point where you decide where you want to spend your money, what you want to do. And we have been involved generally with community projects, community. To me this is another kind of community project to do. And I've heard some people say that, why don't you take your money and give it to scholarships? And things like this. That's fine. I have no problems with it. I contribute to scholarship funds also. But then you have other things that need to be done with it. You need to provide outlets for these girls, you need to provide some other kinds of things with it, so each thing has its own place. Some of the people who make the criticisms aren't doing anything themselves, but they see where you can do something else with in there for. So that's the Original, that's the social outlet that we have with that in there. | 10:12 |
| Kate Ellis | There was something like you've got a thought. | 11:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | No. | 11:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Were you going to say something? | 11:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | Uh-uh. | 11:31 |
| Kate Ellis | You sure? | 11:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | No. | 11:31 |
| Kate Ellis | I always wanted to get back to some things you said earlier. You were talking about when you were teaching Xavier Prep and you had some light skinned students and you'd tell them, go to movies. But you said to them, if they ask you who you are. | 11:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | Tell them who you are. | 12:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Don't deny it. | 12:03 |
| John Harold Boucree | Don't deny it. But they were never asked. | 12:04 |
| Kate Ellis | They were never asked. But I'm interested, I mean I think that the whole, it seems like the whole issue of passing is, it's very meaningful here. It's not sure how controversial it is or it was, but something that I think it seems like a lot of people thought about. | 12:06 |
| John Harold Boucree | There's a lot into some of the cliches and things. You've probably heard the, I don't know whether if you're White, you're right. If you're Black, step back. That has a lot of meaning to it because that's actually what happened. If you're White, the thing was no matter what you did, and you're White and you got it on, you were always right. But if you're Black and you are in line, you step back, let the White go first. That's the significance of that kind of thing with it. And people used their color to get things which were rightfully theirs. It becomes wrong when you deny who and what you are where other people are concerned. See, that's where other. I have in my family history, my grandfather has a brother whose whole family says they're White. | 12:25 |
| Kate Ellis | They left the family? | 13:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, yes and no. They moved to California within, we knew they existed, but they had nothing to do with the other parts of the Boucree family. | 13:34 |
| Kate Ellis | The darker part. | 13:49 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, yeah. And only within the recent, one brother made an effort to come back, find out who the family was. | 13:49 |
| Kate Ellis | One. | 14:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | One, I'm sorry. One of my uncle's sons did make some contact and we visited them in California and we visited his sister also in there. Now it is not as advantageous now to say that you're White as it was then. See, because there were a lot of things that you could get as White that you could not get then, but they spelled their name B-O-U-C-R-E with an accent over the E. | 14:01 |
| Kate Ellis | So how do they say it? | 14:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | Boucre. That's the way they did it, see? So it separated a little bit there with it. But they're very fair. When you get into families, it's all, my mother's mother was just a shade darker than you with long silken black hair. Her background came from Indian, White French, Negro and she carries that down with her. On my daddy's side, my grandmother, his mother was very fair. She has relatives. She has a brother who has a family. Some of are fairer than you, live here in New Orleans. | 14:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you see them? | 15:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, yes. They're not passing for White at all. They have never have. Other people think they are and call them. | 15:43 |
| Kate Ellis | Call them White? | 15:51 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. But they will tell them no. So when you get into this mixture and blend here in New Orleans, there's so many cross references and so much mixture here that you really don't know. And unless you ask sometimes, you just wouldn't know. There was a radio show, Keith Rush. It's like the Limbaugh show. What's his name? | 15:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Rush Limbaugh? | 16:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | Rush Limbaugh now. | 16:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 16:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | You heard his show? | 16:31 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, I've heard of him. | 16:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, he's way out in left field. Well, there was a local television called Keith Rush, a talk show, and it was pure racism and he was along that line and whatnot. And these little old ladies. I would sit, usually at lunchtime, I would eat lunch at my desk. My secretary was White, and her office right next to mine. And I would turn the radio on while we were eating lunch and Brenda would say to me, "You're going to turn our favorite program on." And we'd sit and laugh at what's going on. And we were listening one day. And you know that Morial, the present mayor is the son of Ernest Morial. Well, we know very well his father. As a matter of fact, my wife taught him in school and things like that. | 16:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | And this was after he was elected to mayor and whatnot and they were talking about the election and whatnot, and this lady called and she was talking about elections and about them being elected and them being this and that and the other. So he was in that behind. She said, "I learned that the mayor ain't White." Said, "No, he's not White, he's Black." She said, "He sure don't look like it." So Keith Rush said, "No, he's Black, he's Black." Said, "Mr. Keith, I'll tell you what they ought to do. If you're going to put a Black up for office, they ought to say he's Black so I wouldn't lose my vote by voting for him." Brenda goes, she said, "That woman didn't say that!" I said, "Yes, Brenda." | 17:34 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes, she did. | 18:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | She did. She said, "I can't believe it!" Yeah. Oh, we had some interesting experiences sometimes. She said somebody asked her, "What's it like working for a Black man?" She says, "Same as working for any other man. Why?" I said, "Brenda, you're supposed to pick up, got a whole lot of stuff and tell them." | 18:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Make something up. | 19:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | She says, "Same with anybody else. He knows what he's doing. He tells me what I'm supposed to do. I do it. We work, so fine. No different working from nobody else. I'd rather work with him than for Mr. So-and-so," who was White. I knew who she was talking, okay Brenda. Okay, okay. But that's the thing that, and it's the subtle kind of things that come up. And some of the secretaries, when I was in the schools, because they were segregated, the staff was primarily Black. It wasn't until when they started integrating the schools that you got some White staff in the public schools so my secretaries were all Black. Then when I went down to central staff, then they started integrating and I've had both White and Black secretaries with it. So I had no problems working with them. They had no problems with me at all. They had some problems sometimes with other people who came in and would not look at them as a secretary working for a supervisor. Looked at as a Black girl, working for a Black man. See. | 19:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Wait, what do you mean by? | 20:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | A secretary working for a supervisor. Fine. | 20:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 20:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | But they came and here's this Black girl working for this Black man. How does he treat you? What does he say to you? Does he make approaches to you? Does he do? Said no. Is he supposed to? | 20:28 |
| Kate Ellis | So they didn't expect a professional relationship with him. | 20:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right, they did not expect it. See. | 20:43 |
| Kate Ellis | This was White. | 20:46 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. And I would get it because they would say it to me. The secretary would say it to me. | 20:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, right. It's so funny that the secretary wouldn't. | 20:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, yes. That's how the relationship we would have. They would come out and say it. See, and it's the subtle kind of things that you have to put up with. | 20:58 |
| Kate Ellis | As opposed to the signs saying for Colored only or whatever. | 21:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. And those are the things that kill you. | 21:17 |
| Kate Ellis | The subtle things. | 21:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | The subtle things that come up with it in there. Let's see if I can get a—No, I can't think of anything right now. No, I can't think of anything offhand. My son is a doctor, the one right in the middle with the beard and goatee. That picture is about, ooh, eight, nine years old. That was the one when he finished medical school. We have the whole family. Those are my two daughters and their husbands, and my son and two grandchildren. When he went to St. Monica School, and then from there we moved, well not moved, he went to Our Lady of Lourdes. And from there to De La Salle High School, De La Salle was White high school. | 21:24 |
| Kate Ellis | De La Salle? | 22:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | De La Salle. D-E L-A S-A-L-L-E. | 22:29 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 22:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | And that's one of the White high schools. Him and Michael did exceptionally well at De La Salle. As a matter of fact, he became a drum major and in his last year, he did the Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue concerto with a band. Well respected, well liked. | 22:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | From there he went to Xavier University, pre-med, and then he went to Tulane Medical School. When he was leaving Tulane, he had to go. He was getting ready for his internship. He had to be interviewed at several places. And he went to one of the hospitals in Chicago. And he says he found it interesting because they didn't know what he was, and they were afraid to ask the question. Said he could tell by the questions who or what he was. And he says there were three doctors who interview him, all White. And he says one of them thought he was Asian or something like that. You can see, look at him. And of course he's done a lot of speech club also. | 22:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I was on his time also. You've got to dot your i's and cross your t's and things like that. And one of the other doctors when he said he graduated from Xavier, well, that's Xavier, Ohio. So there, you're White. So he went on to talk about Xavier, and he said Xavier is founded by Katherine Drexel. So one of the doctors looked at him and says, "Oh." See, when he said that, then the man knew, not that it made any difference, says but then he knew about Xavier University, knew about Katherine Drexel and whatnot. He says about that time the interview was almost over, I mean it had nothing to do with it in there. And the doctor said to him later on after what they were trying to figure out what he was, because nothing on the application said race or anything at all. But he went through and said, "Yeah, you can't tell well who or what it is." | 23:54 |
| Kate Ellis | It's funny how people need to know sometimes. There's this sort of, what are you? | 24:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | And it goes back to the thing, if you know, they don't expect Blacks to be able to hold their own. And he knew in addition to what he'd gotten there. I had taught him here, we had taught him here how you go through, what do you do, how you act, what do you say, and things like that. And how you respond, what kind of body language you use. I've done this so I know, and I taught him so he knew what to do. And he also know what to do to give the people what they're looking for. You're looking for a certain kind of stereotype, so okay, I'm going to give you that whether it's true or not, so he knows. So he knew how to interview with them, but he said that that stands out with him. And so he's doing fine with it, but he does not have the problems that we had in terms of door because many doors are open already for him. And his credentials, when you look at it on paper, his credentials are there already so you don't have to have to worry about that. | 25:04 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm curious about this, and it's not a question I normally ask because I think a lot of times, in some ways it's not always a really fruitful question, but just as far as what you're been saying, it sounds like you feel that there are more opportunities open to Black people. | 26:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 26:34 |
| Kate Ellis | Now than there were when you were growing up. But it also sounds like there's a form of racism that, as you say, kills you. I mean, not literally on, or sometimes literally, but I'm just wondering if you can. | 26:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | Here's where the subtleness comes in sometimes with it. And if you've got a position that's open and two people apply, same qualification, one's Black and one's White. And it depends upon who the interviewer is. And you've got to make a decision. They're both equal in every respect. Whom do you select? Then what you need to do is go back, get some other criteria to separate the two. But invariably, it's going to come down to a color. That's the subtleness of it. And so you've got to go and be one step ahead in your preparedness. You've got to be able to answer one question a little better. | 26:53 |
| Kate Ellis | So that it doesn't come down, so that the final deciding factor isn't? | 27:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, but at least you have the chance to go in and compete for it. | 27:55 |
| Kate Ellis | And that's the difference. | 27:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's the difference. You could not compete for it before. You could not do it. Once you get in and they find out that yes, you can hold your own, then that makes it easier for somebody else coming behind. That barrier then disintegrates if that same person or that same group comes up. But if you change that format, and somebody else comes in there who has not gone, then you go back to the same kind of thing. If they have not come through and have seen you, that's it, see. So it's a matter that you've got to be overly prepared, better prepared in order to get where you've got to go with again. | 27:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | But the chance of getting through, the fact that they would at least let you apply is where some of the opportunity is. And I say by the same token, while it's there, you have got to be prepared. I don't think you have to get it just because I'm Black. Uh-uh, no, you've got to offer people something. Now you may have the edge because if you're going to do something there where we want to get a Black in, fine, but you have to get in on something also. What you know, and you've got to know it. And if you don't know it, shame on you. I've been on interview committees, and I've been criticized because I refuse to hire some of the Blacks because they weren't prepared. | 28:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | I was on an interview committee not too long ago and they wanted a Black. I said, "I'm sorry, I cannot have you hire that Black person. Yes, we need a Black in this position, but the ones who came in are not prepared to do the kind of job that needs to be done. And I will not vote for them. Now you want to throw everybody out and go back and start all over again. I'll buy that. But if you say to me that we've got to make a selection here and now, then I will not accept, I'll vote against this person." And that's, yeah, you've got to have something to offer. I don't care who you are. And if you don't have anything to offer, then you need to go back and get yourself prepared. And it's fine. Yes, we've had the struggle, we've come the long way but the struggle is not over. But you got to do something in the struggle to help getting it by yourself prepared and going on with it. | 29:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | My three kids have had no problems wherever they've gone for anything because we've made sure that they were prepared. My older daughter is in med tech. She finished at UNO, that's the University of New Orleans in med tech. And she did exceptional. She went to the Dominican High School, which was an all girls White high school. That's the school she wanted to. We had our reservations about, well, that's why she wanted to go. Okay, go ahead. And when she finished at UNO, Baptist Hospital had no Blacks working in that tech. So they said to her, we want you to go to Baptist Hospital for your internship. She said okay. She went, and she didn't have to worry about the knowledge of how you do this, how you do that. She could concentrate on the other kind of subtleties putting other people in their place, and do this routinely. So she set the example of people coming says yes, Black can do this. | 30:49 |
| Kate Ellis | So she took on two jobs. | 32:03 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, and that's what you do. And that's the job where you're the first. That's what you've got to do. | 32:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Not the job. | 32:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | And you've got to be so prepared that you know what you're doing, you don't have to think about it. I look at this class that I teach on Saturday mornings, there are people in there who are in education, all kinds of things. And I say to them that as a teacher, I don't have to worry about whether I know how to do this problem. My concern is looking at you to find, do you understand what it is? Now I've got to spend all my time finding out how to work the problem that I'm not going to teach you. So I can do this routinely because I know it and I know I know it. That I'm looking at the other kind of things that are not as tangible. | 32:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | And that's where this whole racial thing comes up. And it hurts me to see the kids who are not being challenged, where parents have just wiped their hands of them, and they're just out there in left field dangling, doing nothing. We fight. My grandson, "Grandpa, you old-fashioned." I said, "Well, I'll tell you what, as long as you come around here, you're going to have to put up with this old-fashioned grandfather. Now if you don't want to put up with this old fashion grand grandfather, then don't ask me for anything at all." So we have a truce and there are some certain things that he just want. Yeah, okay. But he's beginning to see, now. He's learning. He just graduated from high school. | 32:59 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 33:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | And he's finding out that some of the things we told him, he didn't do it. He went on his own, and didn't work that way. So he won't admit yet that it wasn't so. But somehow in order to make this country go, we've got to get people to start way down young. Pre-K, kindergarten. And when I see some of these girls, children having children, they having the slightest concept of what's going on in this world. And they don't know what to do with the child, they don't know all the things that they can teach their child from a baby. | 33:49 |
| John Harold Boucree | We were in education and I remember when Michael was the baby, my son Michael was about four years old, four or five years old. And you've heard the expression reading readiness? I don't know whether you heard that in education. It means being ready to read. There's a certain stage at which a child is ready to read. And I never knew what it meant in, I've heard the term, but I was not in elementary education, I was in secondary level. We left from here by car and went up to Chicago, across from Chicago to Detroit, from Detroit to Niagara Falls, down to New York, to the World's Fair when it was there way back in the '60s. From New York to Washington. And we had the three kids. And I remember in the Smithsonian in holding Michael's hand, little five-year-old hanging onto him, and we're going through, he says, "Do not touch." | 34:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I says, "Where do you see that?" "Right there." And he says, "Exit. Right there." And something else he says. And I started pointing, what is that? "This way?" What is that? "Do not." I said, "Michael, how do you know what that is?" He said, "Well, we were up Niagara Falls and some other places and that sign was there. And you said, 'Don't touch that.' And I asked you why. And you told me to look at that sign." And I said, "How do you know that's exit?" He said, "That's how you get off the highway." So what about that door? "That's where you get on the highway." | 35:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I started listening to things that he was doing. And in Washington, we came back. My wife was from Opelousas and we were going to visit her parents in Opelousas. And just as on the highway, just as you cross the Atchafalaya into Krotz Spring, there's a huge, there's a place called a Capitol House or White House Capitol building, something like that, a restaurant. And we got to this place and Michael speaks up. "White House. That doesn't look like the White House we saw." What is it? "There is right there." And I got the newspaper. | 36:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | I said, "Michael, read this." And he started picking out the words. Now, I know you are ready to read. Because we talked to him. We told him it. It was just the kind of thing that we did as a part of growing, and that's what they need to do. Don't tell me, I don't have time for you. You spend time with them. The other, you heard me say that growing up, we had dinner together. Here in our family, dinner was always at six o'clock. I don't care where you were. Well, my wife and I both worked at six o'clock. We had dinner at six o'clock, whichever one that came in first, you started dinner. | 36:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? Yeah. | 37:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | When the kids would get home, there were some things that they could basically do. Or on the weekends you'd fill things up like that with it. But six o'clock we tried to have dinner on the table, or you had to be here for dinner. Was a time where you talked, you found out what happened during the day, what went on with it. We were at two different high schools were rivals, right? It was at Clark High School. I was at Booker Washington High School. And the kids knew that our football teams were rivals, so they would try to get us into the argument at the table about the two teams. But we talked about everybody, what happened during the day, what's going on. When Rosalie got into med tech, and she started at the table talking about the dissections and "Rosalie, hold it a minute, let me swallow this first." | 37:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | But they got used to the learning process and things like that. And that's the kind of value that you need to, you've got to sit with it instead of just you're on your own. There it is, go get it. Sit and talk with them. What happened today? What did you do? What's going on with it? And that kind of thing. And my grandsons come here, we sit at the table and we talk. And that's the way that you get them with value, you get them across, you know what's going on. And it was no holes barred at the dinner table. You talk about anything you wanted at that table. You might clean it up a little bit. | 38:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. | 39:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | But it was a kind of thing. And that's the kind of values that somewhere, people have to start with it and get it across with it and go from there with it. You've heard me on my pedestal all morning. | 39:12 |
| Kate Ellis | No, it's great. I have a couple more questions. | 39:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | Sure. | 39:31 |
| Kate Ellis | And then I think we should start on the family history portion, because you're going to get hoarse after. I bet. What were those questions? Right at the beginning of the interview that I wanted to ask. You were saying earlier that your father brought your brothers, a couple of brothers into carpentry and they did that. Why didn't he go into contracting with his father? | 39:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | There was some family discord. Now, what it was, I really don't know. But I don't think when he went into the carpentry with it, there was not the opportunity to go into the contracting business. Plus, I'm not sure what kind of education my grandfather had, but I think he had more than my daddy had. | 40:14 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm curious about that. | 40:46 |
| John Harold Boucree | That may have been. Yeah. | 40:46 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm curious about why that is. | 40:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | I really don't know. | 40:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 40:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | I really don't know. But when my grandfather went into contracting, it was sometime later on where he went that way. But I think my daddy was more interested in the actual building rather than all the other problems that came on with it. Plus, with the contracting, you need a certain amount of capital to start off with. That may have been with it, I really don't know. | 40:49 |
| Kate Ellis | I'll tell you why I ask and it's just something that I'm struck by. It sounds like your father had less money than his father. | 41:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 41:38 |
| Kate Ellis | And I think that some that goes against how, had heard things would go where if your parents had a certain amount of money, then you would equal that or you might be able to. And what they talk about now is that this current generation isn't able to do that. And what strikes me about it is I wonder how much race or Jim Crow segregation, racism, made it difficult for one generation to necessarily get what the parents had. Do you see what I'm? | 41:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | There was not. | 42:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Asking about? | 42:14 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 42:14 |
| Kate Ellis | It's not as easy to transfer. | 42:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. | 42:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Those. And I'm, just a hypothesis. | 42:18 |
| John Harold Boucree | My father left us nothing other than a house that was not paid for, but in terms of he was not able to earn enough money to accumulate that you could save and whatnot. And the opportunities were not there for it. Now I don't know what other opportunities my grandfather had had, but I assume that education wise, my grandfather had more by virtue of the fact that he taught industrial arts at the high school. So I'm assuming that he had that, and I'm assuming then that he probably had some other kinds of assets that he acquired somewhere along the line. I really don't know with there that. I know that these other sons did not go, they stayed in the trades as a person with it there. But it could be that when they were growing up and they had, each one of them had these different kind of specialties. | 42:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | He used them as a, I'm assuming something. I don't know that that was so. See, because I know my daddy's brothers moved to Chicago when I was a very early age. Only one of them I knew of here in New Orleans where he moved. But the other two brothers, as far as I knew, were always in Chicago from what I knew. Now, before I was born, it could be that he used them as a family business with it in there. And then when he stopped his business, they were already entrenched into what they were doing into that. Especially because with the contract, you've got to know other kinds of areas with that. That could be an answer. I really don't know. | 43:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 44:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | I really don't know that then. | 44:24 |
| Kate Ellis | I have a little question. I guess it's just, again, these are all little questions. You had mentioned, I think you had started to talk about at one point, Whites in the surrounding area would occasionally come in to play ball with people in your neighborhood? | 44:45 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 45:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Were you going to say anything else about that or about that, just that they did? That there was— | 45:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | It was just. Yeah, there was sometimes. | 45:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Sometimes, and then you would go your separate ways. | 45:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 45:12 |
| Kate Ellis | And that was the social time. | 45:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | This little island right here, there was a space in here. So some of the guys who lived maybe over on this street. | 45:12 |
| Kate Ellis | The White guys would come in. | 45:15 |
| John Harold Boucree | Would come in and they would mix in with them, or from the other, would mix in with them and play for it. That's the only thing with it. | 45:17 |
| Kate Ellis | And am I right that Dryades, is that how you pronounce it? | 45:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, Dryades. | 45:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Dryades Street. Were there a lot of Black owned shops on that street? I know it was a prosperous. | 45:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. The businesses were primarily operated by Jews. | 45:34 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 45:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. It was a Jewish. | 45:39 |
| Kate Ellis | But it was an area that was open? | 45:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Well, Blacks primarily shopped there. It was open to everybody. | 45:43 |
| Kate Ellis | I see. | 45:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | But it was the uptown area for shopping for Blacks. You didn't have to go all the way to Canal Street. | 45:47 |
| Kate Ellis | And you didn't have to worry about being turned away or not being looked upon. | 45:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. Yeah. | 46:00 |
| Kate Ellis | And then you had full access to the merchandise. | 46:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | There was still some segregation, racism there, but it was not as, these were not the Holmes, the Dillards, that type of stores. You had shops, small shops there, what you call mom and pop shops, things like that with it. There was Woolworth there. There were dress shops. There were men's stores, all kinds of things in that area. | 46:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then the second area was in the Broadmoor area? | 0:03 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. In the Broadmoor area. That's the area on Broad Street between, let's say, Washington and [indistinct 00:00:14], where there were markets. There was grocery hardware store and what we refer to as a—Ever heard the expression of dry goods store? | 0:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 0:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Okay. There was that there. Hardware store, shoe shop. There was a uniform shop, Bond Motor Company, automobile shop. | 0:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Again, those were mostly owned by Jews as well, was it? | 0:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | Not those. Some of them were Jews, some were other nationalities. Very few of them were Black owned in that area. There were some stores that were Black owned, but they were not concentrated in the shopping area. There may have been a corner store here or something. Those kinds of things. I knew a pharmacist who had a drug store who was Black, the shoe repair, who was Black, auto mechanics were Black, a grocery, but they were not concentrated together. So you had to go to them and you'd find them and you would patronize those stores on an individual basis and go to them for certain kind of things for it. Because there was one store my mother used to like go to because they had live chickens at one time. A frozen chicken? No. A dead chicken? No. You got a chicken and they'd ring the neck off, bring it home. You don't know those days. | 0:38 |
| Kate Ellis | No, I don't know those days, I've heard of them. | 1:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, yes. But they have nice fresh chickens, they're alive. You go in and look at the chickens and you pick the one you want. You feel the breasts, see if it's full. Take this and only ring his neck or chop his neck off and dip in that hot water and pull all the feathers out. | 1:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Sort of like what you felt like when your daughter would tell you her dissection stories at the dinner table. | 1:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, yes. | 2:07 |
| Kate Ellis | And there's another thing I wanted to ask you about when you were growing up, what was it? I guess, the almost final thing that I would just ask you about, it's striking to me in a sense how, at least before World War II, there was a sense that these segregation laws for the moment we're not going to change. I get a sense of almost a sort of pragmatic resignation, not passiveness, but is that right? I'm not actually sure how to phrase this as a question, but I'm just wondering if that sounds right to you, and if you could talk about what that kind of feeling was about it or perspective on it? | 2:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I'm using this as an example. If you live on this street and it has some of the things that you need, maybe not the best things, but you are not totally unhappy. You're able to put things together over here, but over on this street is a utopia. But you have never had access to this street over here. So you don't know that there's something else over here. And you feel that this is it. You have no way, you can't dream about it, you can't guess about it, you can't read about it. So you don't know what's over there. But it so happens one day you get lost and you go over and you'll see this over here. Oh, then why don't I have that? I've got some of these things, why can't I do this? Then I'm going to work to get that. Does that kind of— | 3:19 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. And you've mentioned that in high school, that's when you started asking those questions. | 4:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, yes. | 4:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Did you ever bring those questions home? | 4:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, yes. Yeah. | 4:28 |
| Kate Ellis | What would your parents tell you about when you started asking? | 4:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's the way it is. It was not a denial, but it was a means that knowing that it's almost at this time of hitting your head against a brick wall trying to break it down and that. And they felt that you've got to have something to offer. You've got to have something better than they have. So go out and get something better. And that's the way they did it. | 4:33 |
| Kate Ellis | And then you said certainly before World War II, before you went into the war, which I didn't even ask you about, both experiences. | 5:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | I'll give you just one example. I just finished college, a bachelor's degree, major in education, I went into service and I was put into an engineering company, engineer general service company, which I knew absolutely nothing. This was an all Black unit who's supposed to do the dirty work and whatnot. Well, I was put there because of my educational background and I was assigned immediate to headquarters to work in the statistics area with problem things there. And I didn't have to do all the other kinds of stuff that they had to do, the building and all that. But mine was purely clerical and administrative working there. I used to get in trouble with the—I wouldn't get in trouble, they would get in trouble with me, with the White lieutenants. | 5:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | There was particularly a captain who was from Georgia who had had a cotton farm in Georgia and he's used to having people working around and whatnot. I remember one day riding from [indistinct 00:06:49] area back to the headquarters because I had to go back and forth, and he had a typical Georgia drawl. | 6:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | "Sergeant, where you say you from?" "I'm from New Orleans." When he starts that way, whenever he talk, I would clip, pull my top level English off and they used to laugh. I'd do it intentionally with him. "Where you say you're from?" I say, "From New Orleans." "You sure you're from New Orleans?" "Yes, Captain." Very clipped. "How come you don't talk like these other southern boys? You sound like them damn Yankees." I said, "I don't want sound like you Georgia crackers, Captain." (laughs) He looked at me, "You'll be glad damn glad you ain't in my company." I said, "I sure is." (both laugh) He would've nothing to say to me after that. | 7:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | And a lieutenant would come in the office, I had to do reports that had to be accurate and with my background, I could spot an error in a hurry. It was my job where lieutenants would just come out of engineering school and knew nothing about records. All kinds of mistakes. | 7:45 |
| John Harold Boucree | So what they told me to do when there was an error, call the company headquarters immediately and tell them that they're wrong. And this one lieutenant came into the office one morning and started about, "How dare you call me and tell me I'm wrong." And the personnel officer was a captain, just put his pen down and he just sat while this lieutenant started giving me hell about it. | 8:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | So the captain says, "Lieutenant, you have a problem?" "Yeah, this Sergeant calls me and tells me my report's wrong." "Boucree, what's wrong with his report?" I said, "He's got so many men on it and he's not accounting for them. I don't know where they are. And his figures are wrong. He's showing one one place one day and next day they're someplace else." | 8:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | "Did you tell him what's wrong?" "Yes, sir." "Lieutenant, what did the sergeant tell you, it's wrong? Fix it. I don't ever want to hear you tell him he doesn't know." And he was a White lieutenant. This is a White officer. "If I ever catch you do something wrong, I'm going to court martial you." I said, "Lieutenant, if you ever catch me in a court martial, I'll type the court martial for you." | 8:49 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 9:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | See, because I was determined and I knew what I was doing. See? And I'm not going to let them. I got all kinds of stories in the army. | 9:13 |
| Kate Ellis | You do? | 9:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. You had all White officers with it, but most of them you got along well. I got along well with them because I was not out in the field. I was in an office in headquarters where I knew what I was doing. I had assigned jobs to do. And they knew that you knew what you were doing and they had to depend upon you for it. So it was the folks who came in and you had to tell them what to do. They resented it because he's got the bars on, I've got the stripes on, so I'm White and you're Black and I got the ball unit, so you're not supposed to. So, but in my job, that's what's supposed to be done with it. So they soon learned that kind of thing with it. | 9:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | But the army was segregated very much so. We had a chaplain who was Black. We had a warrant officer, and I never know what the warrant officer did, tell you the truth, who was Black, but all the other officers were White with it in there. And as I said, I got respect from them, I gave them respect. And I demanded that you treat me as an individual. I know what I'm doing. I'm doing my job. Period. Now, beyond that, no. | 10:07 |
| Kate Ellis | Beyond that, no? | 10:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, no, no. I'm not going to socialize with you. I'm not going to entertain you with any kind of conversations about anybody. No, this is my job I'm going to do. If it has to do with the job, then fine. | 10:41 |
| Kate Ellis | And we can function. | 10:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. I'm not going to bow down to you because you White, I'm not going to do all the other kind of things that you want. If it has to do with the job, then fine. | 10:50 |
| Kate Ellis | Did you hear stories from the field about White abuses of power and you know? | 10:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | At the time I did not hear any at all. I didn't want to be there to begin with. Didn't know where I were going and things of that nature, so I kind of just steer clear of all the kind of controversial things and kind of stayed within the confines of what I had to be concerned with. | 11:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | Here in the States, when we were assigned—I was here in Louisiana in boot camp and then went to Europe. We were kind of isolated as headquarters company from the rest of the things. So you had work to do. | 11:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | And the same thing in Okinawa where the headquarters had certain kinds of areas. So you were kind of away from the rest of the companies. So you didn't get to meet them. And then the people who worked in the office and headquarters are people who were the company clerks who knew what they were doing. They had experts in their area. The technicians had expertise in their areas, so they knew what they were doing and everybody did his job in that area. | 11:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, so just to finish off this big question, and then again. Before you went into the war, you had talked about being in college and occasionally you'd sit at a lunch counter where you weren't supposed to sit and they'd say, "Well, we're not going to serve you." But again, in its own way, that's a form of resistance. I know you weren't going to stay there until the shop closed and wait for somebody to arrest you, but it just sounds like something that you would do occasionally. | 12:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | Occasionally we would do that with it, and just with a heck of it sometime, you would get on the street car, whole pile of you and the screen was way back here. Nobody would move it. | 13:02 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. | 13:14 |
| John Harold Boucree | And you have 8, 9, 10 rows. So the screen is way back here, you had no empty seats. So you would just sit. The conductor would get up and then move it. | 13:16 |
| Kate Ellis | And you'd let him. | 13:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | Let him do it. That kind of thing. | 13:27 |
| Kate Ellis | It's more important to him, right. | 13:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | And things of that nature that you would do. Little subtle kind of things that you would do. | 13:32 |
| Kate Ellis | And again, sorry, we talked about this already, but after World War II, slowly you saw more it sounds like, of that kind of action? | 13:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. There was much more. When I came back, I got involved with the teaching aspect with students and things like that, and not as involved with the actual movements of the people who were going in for the sit-ins and the marches and things like that. I never did go into those with it. I contributed financially to things that were going on, or if there were programs sponsored for something or you needed some signatures, I did those. But to actually go into the marches, to go into the city or to go to the place, I did not go with those as such. Talked you dry, huh? | 13:47 |
| Kate Ellis | No, no, no. That's not at all what's going through my mind. We can go to the form. Is there anything else that stands out or that I haven't asked you about as far as your remembrances of Jim Crow segregation? | 15:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | There are two things that disturbed me. In this little pocket that we lived, I remember one evening getting off the street car on Napoleon Avenue and walking home and being stopped by the police questioning, what am I doing in this area? "I live in this area." And being called all kinds of names with it and showing identification and wondering what was going to happen because it's just about dark and I'm only three blocks from my house and being told you don't pass this. "Well, how can I get to this area? Well then, nigger, move to another area." So what do you say to two policemen? Here you are a teenager and being stopped. That kind of thing gets to you. And eventually they stop and then go on and the police car follows you to see where you're going to go. | 15:15 |
| John Harold Boucree | The other one was somebody had robbed a house or something had happened about two blocks away. And I happened to have been sitting on my porch. A police prowler car came by and they stopped and, "Where do you live?" "Right here." And he gets out, opens the door, "Get in the car." And I say, "Why?" "You don't ask questions." Now nobody knows where I'm going, but they push me into a police car. But they drive two blocks away and they get out. "Get out of the car." The usual language. And when I got out and walked to the man and police say, "Is this him?" They say, "Oh no. Uh-huh. That boy lives right behind the street that he passed by here every day going back minding his own business. Why you stop?" The White folks said that to them. | 16:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | But he looked, "Uh-huh, no, no, no, no, we know him, we know his momma." That kind of thing. And I said, "Will somebody took," "You mean that?" I said, "They just pulled me off my porch." "Look, go home, boy. Go home." And that woman raised hell with them. It's a White woman. | 17:23 |
| Kate Ellis | The White woman? | 17:46 |
| John Harold Boucree | With the police, for taking me off the steps like that. I'll never forget that. | 17:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Wow. | 17:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | But what does that do to— | 17:52 |
| Kate Ellis | What does that do? | 17:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | You're Black, so you're wrong. No questions, not supposed to ask questions. And if you ask a question, you'll get hit. "That's for resisting arrest," and things like that. | 17:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | I've had an incident as a principal in junior high school, I really don't remember what the incident was as such, but I called police headquarters for police to come over because I had to report. At Spencer, you've got to document all this stuff that goes on where vandalism in school or something happens. | 18:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | So I remember calling the third district to report the incident and ask will they send police over to investigate. So these policemen came, White heavyset police and another guy with him. And he came in, "What you want? I got more to do than to come to this nigger school all the time." I said, "What did you say?" "You call us?" "Yes, I call the third district." "What you want?" I said, "Hold it just a minute. What's your name?" I looked at his thing and I picked up and dialed the telephone and I asked for the Captain and told him who I was, a principal of the school. | 18:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | And I says, "I have two policemen who have come in who've been discourteous, who are using kind of language I don't want to hear. And they're talking to me as if I'm some kind a criminal. His name is so-and-so." "Mr. Boucree, put him on the telephone now. I said, "The Captain wants to talk to you." I don't know what he told him, but he slammed the telephone down and left. Two more policemen came out. | 19:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | And the other two policemen came out saying, "Mr. Boucree, what did he do?" I said, "He came in treating me as if I'm dirty." I said, "I'm doing my job. I've got to have a police item number. I've got to report this to report to the superintendent. And he came in calling this a nigger school and looking at me and what I'm going to do about it." I says, "Uh-huh, I'm not going to tolerate that." He says, "Well, third district sure know you're not going to tolerate it." Said, "That's the third complaint they've gotten about him from one of the Black schools in the area, from the Negro schools in the area." | 19:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | So I don't know what they did to him, but that's the kind of thing you were subjected to with some of the police that came in with it in there. And I says, "You got a job to do. I've got a job to do." But that's the attitude that they had. When you're Black, you're wrong. Regardless of what it is. | 20:27 |
| Kate Ellis | And they could do anything, say anything. | 20:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. And you're supposed to take it. And I was a [indistinct 00:20:52], I'm not going to take it. And as I said, if you're right and you know you're right, then you stand up for it. I don't care what it's going to cost. And anybody who worked with me knew that. When I says, first be sure that you are right. Be sure that you are right. Then if you are right, then that's it. And then I go from there. There have been, as I says, changes, overt changes, but some of the subtleties that still remain now. And you can't always see them. And it's not a blanket thing, it's individuals who have not been able to see and do things with. | 20:50 |
| Kate Ellis | Seems like there must be a certain price you pay just for having to wonder who's thinking it and who's not. Who's acting in that way, who's not? | 22:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. After a while, I guess mine is because of my age and because of experience and because of working with people, I've learned how to separate, see through some of the shams sometimes with some of the things that are going on with it. You can't always be sure, but then you can see through it when it comes up. Because basically it turns out to be the same kind of patterns that will be done with it. | 22:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | We had, and we laughed about this, we were talking with the kids about color and race and taking a person on face value and whatnot. And we were sitting at the dinner table and Rosalie, my older daughter who was at Dominican, well, they were talking about the kids, and she said something about one of the girls in school. And my wife said to her, "Is she White or Black?" And when she said it, she wanted to take the words back. Rosalie looked up and said, "Why does it make a difference?" We looked at each other. She said, "No, I just was wondering." She said, "Oh." Well we went on and she never did say it. | 22:57 |
| Kate Ellis | She wouldn't. | 23:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | They are just some things that Black kids do that White kids don't do. Something like that. And what she said, we thought the kid was Black from what she was saying. But it turned out, if we met the girl, she was White, very liberal, much more liberal than some of the other girls. But it's the kind of thing that you grow and you say it. Here you are trying to teach this and unconsciously you say it. | 23:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 24:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | But it passed over, so it didn't matter. Now, Jeanne, my other daughter, went to Xavier Prep and she did not go to college. She was with—Let me get a glass here. When Jeanne finished high school, she done did not want to go to college. There were a series of incidents that happened. I was principal of a senior high school and someone was coming in to—they wanted to find some students, high school graduates or prospective graduates who were not going to college. Who knew, let's say, that their social graces, I shall put it that way, were acceptable, who could take pressure from the White community. Who had ability to learn but would be taught what to do. | 24:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | So I talked with the interviewer and whatnot, and we must have talked for a while because he was talking about the students at the school and gave some names. Then when he finished, I said to him, I says, "Now, I got a daughter who doesn't want to go to college, I'm looking for a job for her." He said, "Why'd you let me sit here and go through this thing the whole time? Send her to us." So she went to Shell Oil Company and they trained her. She worked for Shell Oil Company for 21 years to be a buyer for offshore. And Shell Oil Company has moved all of its things away, so you know what's happening to people who work there? | 25:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. | 26:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | Severance pay and whatnot. So that's been about three years ago. So in the meantime, she went back to school to take some—What she take? Medical coding, something like that. And she's now working at LSU Medical School in the field of of medical coding. And she's very happy with it, but it's a matter of starting all over again with it in there. And Rosalie, she lives in Miami and that's the older daughter. She's works in VA Hospital and she's supervisor of the blood banking in the hospital there. And of course Michael is practicing medicine in Flint, Michigan. I'm not going to move forward. | 26:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, wow. | 27:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | He's doing well there. That article was featured in the Flint Journal for his work in that area. | 27:43 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, boy. That's really kind of a work working with HIV. | 27:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. So that's— | 28:21 |
| Kate Ellis | That's what he's doing. That's incredible work. | 28:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | We just got this. | 28:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Are they there? | 28:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. So that's where the family is. My wife is retired. She's a working retiree. I'm a retired retiree. Educational wise, I have a Bachelor's Degree from Xavier University, Master's from University of Michigan, plus 30 graduate hours from UNO, plus graduate hours from Tulane and Loyola. My wife has a Bachelor of Science from Xavier, Master of Science from Xavier, an EDD from Peabody College in Vanderbilt. She taught in high school and then she was supervisor of mathematics for the New Orleans Public School system until she retired. She teaches on staff at Southern University in the evening division and does a whole lot of other stuff. | 28:25 |
| Kate Ellis | She's going. | 29:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | She's recently worked with Metropolitan Area Committee as coordinator for the mathematics collaborative. This was a project with a grant from Rockefeller Foundation to bring together high school math teachers, university math professors in the business community, to show the relationship with math with the businesses, in terms of saying to the teachers in high school what you need to teach the kids in high school. University, what you need to teach the teachers, and business, what the people need to know when they're coming into business. That kind of thing. | 29:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, she was coordinator of that within it. And she's worked with several other kinds of things. So we've both been involved in education. Between the two of us, we had what, 80 years of full-time teaching and supervision, things like that. And we have a standing joke that we're going to buy another house so we can live in it because we got too much junk in this. | 30:16 |
| Kate Ellis | It will become a storage house. Right. | 30:45 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's why we are in the process of trying to throw out. How do you get rid of stuff? Everybody laughs when we say we're going to—"Are you going to buy a new house?" "Yeah." "Where you going?" "I don't know. But we need one." | 30:53 |
| Kate Ellis | Doesn't matter. Just somewhere with some space. All right. I'm going to start asking questions. And we can keep the tape rolling and that way if anything comes up we just have it all on tape. So, I know how to spell your last name. Your first name is John. | 31:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | Is John. | 31:27 |
| Kate Ellis | And your middle name is Harold. | 31:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | It's Harold. | 31:29 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And your street address. Your two— | 31:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | 2431. 70115 | 31:37 |
| Kate Ellis | And you were born in New Orleans? | 31:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | In New Orleans. Born at 3723 South Galvis Street. Those days with a midwife. | 31:59 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, yeah. So your principle occupations, should I say school principal? | 32:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | Usually we use educational administrator. | 32:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 32:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | Because that covers principal plus supervisor and some of the other kind of things. | 32:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 32:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | Because I did the administrator work for 10 years after I left the principalship. And really, the title of that was supervisor. | 32:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. How would you like your name to appear in written materials? | 32:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | If they can use the full name. | 32:58 |
| Kate Ellis | John Harold Boucree? | 33:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 33:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Sure. | 33:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, if they can't use the full name, the middle name, last name. J. Harold Boucree would be the— | 33:12 |
| Kate Ellis | The second. Okay. | 33:17 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 33:18 |
| Kate Ellis | I think there's no problem with the John Harold Boucree. | 33:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | Somebody told me, he says, "Oh, you want to be John Harold just like Betty Sue from the south?" | 33:30 |
| Kate Ellis | And you say, it's not quite what I had in mind. Okay. And your wife's name is, her full name? | 33:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | Olympia. O-L-Y-M-P-I-A. | 33:47 |
| Kate Ellis | Does she have a middle name? | 33:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | Eaglin. E-A-G-L-I-N. That's her maiden name. | 33:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 33:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | E-A-G— | 33:56 |
| Kate Ellis | L-I-N. | 33:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | —L-I-N. | 33:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And what's her birthday? | 34:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | December 20th, 1921. | 34:04 |
| Kate Ellis | And where was she born? | 34:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | Opelousas. | 34:11 |
| Kate Ellis | And so should I call her an educational administrator as well? | 34:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. | 34:21 |
| Kate Ellis | And then what was your mother's full name? | 34:33 |
| John Harold Boucree | Rosalie | 34:35 |
| Kate Ellis | Rosa— | 34:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | R-O-S-A-L-I-E. | 34:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Now, what was her middle name as opposed to her maiden name? | 34:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | Marion. | 34:46 |
| Kate Ellis | Marion. | 34:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. I had to stop and think. | 34:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then what was her maiden name? | 34:51 |
| John Harold Boucree | Raymond. | 34:54 |
| Kate Ellis | R-A— | 34:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | Y-M-O-N-D. | 34:57 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And her birthdate? | 34:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | December 14th, 1892. | 35:03 |
| Kate Ellis | And when did she pass? | 35:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's a good question. She's been dead for 10 years. I think April the 30th, 1984, I think. | 35:16 |
| Kate Ellis | And she was born in St. Martin's? | 35:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | St. Mary's Parish. | 35:31 |
| Kate Ellis | St. Mary's. And she was a domestic worker? | 35:32 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 35:42 |
| Kate Ellis | And your father's full name? | 35:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Joseph Albert. | 35:50 |
| Kate Ellis | And his date of birth? | 35:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | May 11th, 1891. | 36:08 |
| Kate Ellis | And when did he pass? | 36:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Wait. You have to listen to this logic. Rosalie was born on March the 21st, 1951. That was on a Wednesday. He was buried on, let's see, the 21st. He died the Tuesday of the week before that. So that's Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday, Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday. Nine days before that. 21st 20th, 19, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13. March 13th, 1951. | 36:22 |
| Kate Ellis | All right. So, 1951? | 37:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, '19. He was looking forward to his granddaughter's birth and didn't quite make it. | 37:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Didn't quite. And then he was born in New Orleans. Did you say? | 37:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | He was born in New Orleans. | 37:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Now, are you the second born? Are you the third born? | 37:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | I'm the third. | 37:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Can you tell me the oldest? | 37:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | My sister is oldest. | 37:36 |
| Kate Ellis | What was her name? | 37:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | Helen Rose. She's one of those Betty Sue's. | 37:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, god. Oh, Helen Rose. | 37:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | Rose is her middle name. | 37:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. And then what's her last name? | 37:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Edwards. E-D-W-A-R-D-S. | 37:51 |
| Kate Ellis | And her birthday? | 37:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | May the seventh—Wait, wait, let me see now. I think it's 1918, I believe. | 37:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And all your siblings were born in New Orleans, right? | 38:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes, yes. | 38:20 |
| Kate Ellis | And she's still living? | 38:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 38:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then your brother? | 38:24 |
| John Harold Boucree | Edgar Joseph Boucree | 38:26 |
| Kate Ellis | His birthday? | 38:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | February 7th, two years later. | 38:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. All your siblings are still living? | 38:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 38:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then your— | 38:45 |
| John Harold Boucree | My younger brother is James Albert. March 17th, '19, oh, I think it's '25. | 38:49 |
| Kate Ellis | There's just four of you, right? | 39:18 |
| John Harold Boucree | Mm-hmm. | 39:19 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then the name of your children. Start— | 39:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | The oldest is Rosalie. You need what? First name, middle name? | 39:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Yes. | 39:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | Rosalie Ann. | 39:31 |
| Kate Ellis | What's her last name? | 39:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | Her name is Gross. G-R-O-S-S. | 39:37 |
| Kate Ellis | And she was born? | 39:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | March 21st, 1951. | 39:41 |
| Kate Ellis | And then? | 39:46 |
| John Harold Boucree | The next is Jeanne. | 39:52 |
| Kate Ellis | How do you spell that? | 39:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | J-E-A-N-N-E. Get your French out now. | 39:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Uh-huh. | 39:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | Her middle name is Patrice, P-A-T-R-I-C-E. Eddington, E-D-D-I-N-G-T-O-N. March 16th, 1952. And they have fun because five days, they're the same age. | 39:59 |
| Kate Ellis | And then Michael? | 40:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, Michael Christopher. | 40:25 |
| Kate Ellis | And his birthdate? | 40:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | July 28th, I think it is, or was it the 29th? Doesn't make that much difference. Put the 28th, 1958. | 40:36 |
| Kate Ellis | And how many grandchildren do you have? | 40:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | Two. | 40:55 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Now I need to list all the places where you have lived and the dates. And so you lived in New Orleans from 1923 until you went to Michigan? | 40:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well— | 41:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Or until you were in service? | 41:15 |
| John Harold Boucree | Well, now, when you say lived, I was in service but my home was still here. | 41:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Yeah. | 41:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | See, even when I went to Michigan, the school, I was still here. I was there studying. I did not move. My place of residence was always here. | 41:24 |
| Kate Ellis | Then I'll say New Orleans, 1923 to present? | 41:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 41:34 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then I need the names of each of the schools that you have attended starting with- | 41:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | Elementary? | 41:42 |
| Kate Ellis | —elementary. | 41:43 |
| John Harold Boucree | St. Monica. | 41:44 |
| Kate Ellis | From what year to what year? | 41:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh. | 41:55 |
| Kate Ellis | This is really good year. | 41:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | The last year I finished in 1936 and go back seven years. | 42:02 |
| Kate Ellis | You finished St. Monica in 1936? | 42:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 42:12 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Seven. So '29. | 42:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | '29. Yeah. | 42:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then? | 42:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | Xavier Prep. It was 1936, 1940. | 42:18 |
| Kate Ellis | And then that was your high school? | 42:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's a high school. | 42:31 |
| Kate Ellis | And Xavier— | 42:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | Xavier University. 1940, 1944. That was a BA degree. | 42:37 |
| Kate Ellis | Then? | 42:49 |
| John Harold Boucree | I did the University of Michigan. | 42:49 |
| Kate Ellis | Which is in Ann Arbor? | 42:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | Ann Arbor. Now that was done over an extended period of time. It began in the summer of 1947, and I got my degree in August of 1950. | 43:03 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And that was a Master? | 43:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | Master of Arts, M.A. | 43:16 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then should I put the other schools where you have graduate credits? | 43:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Well, basically what they call the plus 30 hours. It's 30 hours beyond the Masters. The University of Michigan. I mean, University of New Orleans, UNO. | 43:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 43:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | Now, when was that now? That was 1971, '72, I think. I was on sabbatical that year. That was the plus 30 hours. | 43:37 |
| Kate Ellis | I'm sorry, say that year again please? | 44:06 |
| John Harold Boucree | 1971, '72. | 44:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And it's called? | 44:06 |
| John Harold Boucree | Plus 30. | 44:07 |
| Kate Ellis | Plus 30. | 44:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | 30, Graduate of Arts. | 44:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 44:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | Now, I had some other post-graduate work at Tulane, but I don't remember the years that was in. | 44:20 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. I can just put need Tulane and Loyola. | 44:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 44:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Post-graduate work. Okay. Now, I need to list the most important jobs that you've had, sort of going forward from the present, or the most recent. | 44:31 |
| John Harold Boucree | Most important, or all of them? | 45:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Most important. The ones— | 45:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | All of them were important. | 45:03 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Well, for you, I believe that. | 45:06 |
| John Harold Boucree | It's hard to say. | 45:08 |
| Kate Ellis | Can it be going from the administrator, principal, teacher? | 45:14 |
| John Harold Boucree | Let me put it this way. The most self-fulfilling were those that I spent at the Prep. The most challenging were those I spent at Booker Washington. See? | 45:38 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, we can list a bunch. We can list a number. So I think when it says most important, I think it's addressed for people who may have waitressed for six months. | 45:52 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, no. | 46:05 |
| Kate Ellis | While they—Some people have a number of significant jobs. | 46:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | You can tell, I enjoyed what I did the whole time. | 46:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Well, starting with the job that you retired from. | 46:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | Okay. Supervisor. | 46:17 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, so the way we're going to list it is the job or the title and the employer, and the New Orleans and the dates. So it's pretty sort of— | 0:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, oh. Wait, wait, wait, wait. But the supervisor. It was supervisor of various programs. For example, one was a program called Adolescent Service Center. Another was intervention rooms. Another was alternative to suspensions. Another was staff development. Another was supervised guidance and counseling, and those kind of— | 0:18 |
| Kate Ellis | How about supervisor of various public school programs. | 0:44 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 0:50 |
| Kate Ellis | Are you comfortable with that? | 0:51 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. Yes. | 0:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. It's just got to be kind— | 0:52 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 0:52 |
| Kate Ellis | Public school programs. And I'm going to put in parentheses, such as, and just tell me a couple. One or two. | 1:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | Put guidance and counseling. | 1:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Such as guidance and counseling. | 1:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | Staff development. | 1:17 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 1:17 |
| John Harold Boucree | And just another, Adolescent Service Centers, and then put et cetera. | 1:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Service Center? | 1:32 |
| John Harold Boucree | Service Centers. | 1:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Centers. Okay. And then that was New Orleans Public schools. | 1:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. | 1:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Schools. And then the dates, not the dates of each supervising job, but the dates that you were in the—Was that when you were at the head office? | 1:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. But that ended, here, we have to go back now. I retired in 1987. And I was there for about nine years. | 2:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. So I'll say '78 to '87. | 2:19 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Yeah. | 2:21 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. And then the next thing, | 2:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | Was principal. And that was Booker T Washington Senior High School. Yeah. See, I was principal at a senior high school, a junior high school, and elementary school. | 2:28 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 2:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. So you— | 2:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Were you a principal, were they all in a row? | 2:42 |
| John Harold Boucree | What do you mean? What do you mean? | 2:44 |
| Kate Ellis | What I mean is once you were principal, say, at a junior high school, then were you anything in between the years that you were principal at a different school? | 2:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, no, no. | 2:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, so I'm going to say principal and then I'll the three different schools, and then we'll just do the dates. | 2:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | Okay. | 3:01 |
| Kate Ellis | I mean the overall date. | 3:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | Overall. Okay, okay. | 3:03 |
| Kate Ellis | The principal of? | 3:05 |
| John Harold Boucree | Washington Senior High. | 3:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Senior High? | 3:07 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 3:12 |
| Kate Ellis | The next one? | 3:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | Woodson Junior High School. Junior High. | 3:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Uh-huh. | 3:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | And then Rosenwald Elementary. | 3:21 |
| Kate Ellis | How do you spell that? Rosen— | 3:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | R-O-S-E-N-W-A-L-D. | 3:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Elementary? | 3:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Elementary. | 3:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. [indistinct 00:03:28]. | 3:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Now, that goes from, let's see. 1962, I think. | 3:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 3:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | Up to, what was that last date? | 3:58 |
| Kate Ellis | '78. | 3:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Mm-hmm. | 3:59 |
| Kate Ellis | '78. Okay. And then? | 3:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | Teacher. | 3:59 |
| Kate Ellis | And do you want to list the schools? | 3:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | Okay. Xavier Prep. Woodson Junior High School. | 4:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 4:18 |
| John Harold Boucree | And Washington Senior High. | 4:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Do you need more water? | 4:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, no. It's all right, yeah. I've got a sinus drip that— | 4:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, gets you. | 4:37 |
| John Harold Boucree | —gets down right. Yeah. | 4:37 |
| Kate Ellis | That was from, what were the— | 4:39 |
| John Harold Boucree | Now, Xavier Prep is not New Orleans public school, it's a private school. | 4:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Okay, but it's all in New Orleans? | 4:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, it's all in New Orleans. And that was from 1946— | 4:48 |
| Kate Ellis | To '62? | 4:50 |
| John Harold Boucree | Right. Mm-hmm. | 4:50 |
| Kate Ellis | All right. | 4:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | Now you got my— | 4:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Good. That was, oops. Okay. | 4:59 |
| John Harold Boucree | To try to separate which was, each one has its own little niche in it. Yeah. | 5:04 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. Have you received any awards or honors or held any offices? Or no? I know. What a question. So I'll let you sort of think about what stands out. | 5:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | Have I held any offices? That's a broad question. Honors and awards. No, I haven't received many awards. I received the St. Louis Medallion. That's for the church, work in church. | 5:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. So St.— | 6:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | Louis Medallion. And that's for work in church. | 6:23 |
| Kate Ellis | For work in— | 6:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 6:23 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 6:27 |
| John Harold Boucree | But you need to know when that was? Or no? | 6:32 |
| Kate Ellis | Actually, that'd be great if you have the year as well. | 6:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh. | 6:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Even an approximate year would be fine. | 6:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | Five, 10. It's been about 15 years ago. | 6:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, so around 1980? | 6:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, something like that. Yeah. | 6:56 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 6:56 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's the only— | 7:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. The only award. | 7:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | Award, as such, that I can think of. | 7:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Now, what about, have you held offices? Yeah. Well, what stands out? | 7:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Huh? | 7:15 |
| Kate Ellis | What stands, like which ones— | 7:22 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh God. I was president of the High School Principals Association. I don't know when that was. That was back in— | 7:25 |
| Kate Ellis | The seventies? | 7:53 |
| John Harold Boucree | The seventies. | 7:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Even just a decade like that, I think is fine to say. When you don't know, [indistinct 00:08:02] know. | 7:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. President of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish Council. That was in the eighties. Late eighties and early nineties. It must been about four or five years I was president of that. I am president now of the New Orleans Black Chorale. That's a music group. A-L-E. | 8:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Thank you. | 8:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 8:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Did you see that? | 8:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | Huh? | 8:54 |
| Kate Ellis | That I left out the E? | 8:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | E. Well, that happened a lot of times. | 8:54 |
| Kate Ellis | It's funny, I used to pride myself on my spelling. But— | 9:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | But believe it or not, that— | 9:04 |
| Kate Ellis | —every once in while— | 9:04 |
| John Harold Boucree | —word, a lot of people leave the E off of it. | 9:05 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. It's sort of I catch myself. | 9:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | The other way, it's choral. | 9:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 9:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Yeah. | 9:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 9:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | And that's, Ooh, what? No. I'm president now, about the last five years, something like that. Yeah. | 9:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. So I'm going to say about 1989 to present? | 9:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, uh-huh. I am secretary for the Original Illinois [indistinct 00:09:46] Club. And that's been for about, it's present for last 15 years or so. | 9:27 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. So about '80, '79? | 10:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | '79 to present. | 10:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 10:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | I was vice president of Associated Catholic Charities. Ooh, now when was that? The plaque's on the wall in the room. The early seventies, something like that. It was a two-year term. | 10:15 |
| Kate Ellis | I'll say early 1970s. | 10:42 |
| John Harold Boucree | I was chairman of the Commission of Supervisors. And this is [indistinct 00:11:06] of the National Alliance of Black School Educators. | 10:50 |
| Kate Ellis | Supervisors— | 11:16 |
| John Harold Boucree | Of the National Alliance of Black School Educators. That was in the seventies. | 11:16 |
| Kate Ellis | I think I'm out of room here. | 11:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | You're out of room? Okay. That's enough. | 11:29 |
| Kate Ellis | Is it enough? Okay. | 11:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | That's up to you. | 11:50 |
| Kate Ellis | Unless there's another one that—And then my guess is it's enough, unless there's something that stands out that you think should be included. | 11:55 |
| John Harold Boucree | No. No. | 12:06 |
| Kate Ellis | You're Catholic? | 12:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 12:14 |
| Kate Ellis | Your current actually church affiliation? | 12:17 |
| John Harold Boucree | Our Lady of Lourdes. | 12:18 |
| Kate Ellis | And she's not going to believe I'm still here. | 12:34 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, well, she knew you'd be here a long time. | 12:36 |
| Kate Ellis | She did? | 12:40 |
| Speaker 3 | Sorry. | 12:40 |
| Kate Ellis | You knew I was going to be here a long time. I said, "She's not going to believe I'm still here." | 12:42 |
| Speaker 3 | Okay. It's raining out there now. | 12:42 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. I [indistinct 00:12:43] cloud. What are your past church memberships? Well, what other church have you belonged to? | 12:43 |
| John Harold Boucree | St. Monica. We haven't been very mobile in terms of moving around, so we've been just kind of put in there, yeah. | 12:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, to stay. I see. | 13:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Mm-hmm. | 13:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. You need to list any organizations to which you have belonged or belong. And civic, community, educational, political, [indistinct 00:13:21]. So, again, what are the ones that most stand out? | 13:08 |
| John Harold Boucree | I have only one social organization, that's The Original Illinois Club. | 13:31 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Is it called The Original or— | 13:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 13:35 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. The Original. And that's been from about 1979? Roughly? | 13:41 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, it's about 17 years I've been in that. | 13:58 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. So I'll say 1977. Uh-huh. | 14:00 |
| John Harold Boucree | I have membership in the NAACP. Don't ask me how long, we just send a check in for years back. Yeah. | 14:06 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, so, okay. From the sixties, would you say? | 14:13 |
| John Harold Boucree | I would say, yeah, yeah. | 14:17 |
| Kate Ellis | So I'm going to say 1960s to present. | 14:18 |
| John Harold Boucree | To present, yeah. The Urban League. | 14:18 |
| Kate Ellis | Did you go to the big gala? | 14:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | The gala? Yeah, we were there for that. | 14:27 |
| Kate Ellis | You managed to get tickets to that? My little team. | 14:29 |
| John Harold Boucree | Ah, yeah. | 14:34 |
| Kate Ellis | [indistinct 00:14:36]. The Urban League, has that been a long time as well? | 14:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | About the last 10 years. | 14:40 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 14:40 |
| John Harold Boucree | NASSP, that's the National Association of Secondary School Principals. That was while I was a principal, I was a member of that. | 15:02 |
| Kate Ellis | So 1970s? | 15:21 |
| John Harold Boucree | It was in the seventies, yes. Yeah. ASCD. That's the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. | 15:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Of Supervision and Curriculum— | 15:47 |
| John Harold Boucree | And Curriculum Development. Ooh. That was in the seventies until in the eighties. | 15:51 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. 1970s and— | 16:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | The eighties. Yeah. And then the local organization is the Louisiana Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development. That's national, this is the local. | 16:03 |
| Kate Ellis | Same years? | 16:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yes. | 16:26 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. | 16:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | The two educational fraternities, I don't hold—Well, I don't pay dues in them, but I'm still Phi Delta Kappa and Kappa Delta Pi. Those are educational fraternities. | 16:41 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 17:03 |
| John Harold Boucree | And that was about '72, I guess till about '80 when I stopped paying— | 17:05 |
| Kate Ellis | For both of those? | 17:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Let's see, what else? Oh, I gave you National Alliance of Black School Educators, did I do that one? | 17:11 |
| Kate Ellis | Mm-hmm. Uh-uh. | 18:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | No. | 18:11 |
| Kate Ellis | That was, I guess you gave it to me— | 18:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Because I was an officer in that. | 18:13 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. | 18:14 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 18:15 |
| Kate Ellis | So I think it's fine. If they're listed here, but I don't think I need to list any— | 18:18 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, okay. Okay. It's one of them. I think we listed twice. | 18:27 |
| Kate Ellis | You do? | 18:32 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Original Illinois Club we listed twice. | 18:33 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, that's true. Well, [indistinct 00:18:57] consistent. One second. | 18:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | I've cut back on so many things, I can't think of some of these things that— | 18:59 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, that's— | 19:02 |
| John Harold Boucree | I listed the Chorale. | 19:12 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, okay. | 19:17 |
| John Harold Boucree | New Orleans Black Chorale. And, oh, I know another one. B Shop Music Club. | 19:17 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, are you? | 19:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 19:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. That sounds like a new group. | 19:26 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. Now, they tell me I've been in there about 27 years. | 19:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Really? So [indistinct 00:19:44]. 12 '67 or something? | 19:32 |
| John Harold Boucree | Something like that, yeah. Because they gave me something for 25 year membership so— | 19:45 |
| Kate Ellis | Did they? | 19:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 19:48 |
| Kate Ellis | Wow. | 19:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 19:48 |
| Kate Ellis | That's great. | 19:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, another Catholic org—Knights of Peter Claver. And I've been in that, Ooh, some 40, 45 years. | 19:51 |
| Kate Ellis | So about from 1950? | 20:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 20:10 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. | 20:11 |
| John Harold Boucree | And, of course, I've been in church choir. | 20:22 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah, but what would you call, just member of church choir? | 20:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah, yeah. Put it this way. Put church choirs. | 20:24 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Member of church choirs. From— | 20:38 |
| John Harold Boucree | And you go back to 1942. | 20:44 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, great. | 20:45 |
| John Harold Boucree | See, to present. | 20:47 |
| Kate Ellis | All right. | 20:48 |
| John Harold Boucree | Because that's way back when I started with those. Yeah. | 20:52 |
| Kate Ellis | So I'm going to say a member of various church choirs. You don't think it's an organization. | 20:54 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 21:01 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. I've run out of room again. | 21:01 |
| John Harold Boucree | Okay. | 21:05 |
| Kate Ellis | So unless there are others that— | 21:06 |
| John Harold Boucree | I'm racking my brains. | 21:09 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Okay. | 21:09 |
| John Harold Boucree | I can go back there and pull my feet out, but that's all right. | 21:12 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay, [indistinct 00:21:15]. I asked her to do this stuff on a [indistinct 00:21:18]. The labels have to be on the tape or else they will get lost. | 21:16 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Any other activities or affiliations, like military service, which we should write, I'll write down, labor unionizing, hobbies and interests, publications, et cetera. So first, as far as the military service, how should I write? What should I put down? | 21:23 |
| John Harold Boucree | I was a veteran of World War II. Oh, was that— | 21:39 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, I'm just thinking, should I say tour of duty? Or what do you call 1944 or 46 or something? Or what was your title when you were there? | 21:43 |
| John Harold Boucree | I'd say I was discharged with the rank of sergeant. Yeah, sergeant. | 21:54 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay. Well, I'm going to put, so sergeant. | 21:58 |
| John Harold Boucree | Sergeant, United States Army. | 22:00 |
| Kate Ellis | Great. 1944 to 1946? | 22:03 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 22:03 |
| Kate Ellis | Any other hobbies or interests? Or— | 22:12 |
| John Harold Boucree | Hobbies. Hobbies. Hobbies. Hobbies. Of course, mine is music. You know I have— | 22:15 |
| Kate Ellis | Right. And we have that. | 22:20 |
| John Harold Boucree | You have that in the other. | 22:24 |
| Kate Ellis | Yeah. | 22:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 22:25 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, I'm going to put piano and organ player. | 22:28 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 22:30 |
| Kate Ellis | Okay? I'm going to say piano, organ player, and singer. | 22:35 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. | 22:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Is that—All right. Okay. | 22:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | What's that title of that again? The— | 22:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Which? | 22:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | No, that we working on now. How's it— | 22:36 |
| Kate Ellis | Oh, oh. | 22:36 |
| John Harold Boucree | Oh, yeah. | 22:37 |
| Kate Ellis | List any activities or affiliations. In parentheses, military service, labor unionizing, hobbies and interests, publications, and/or, and I didn't say this part yet, include any comment the interviewee would like to make, like a favorite saying, phrase, or quote. You don't have to, but if there's something that you want to say. | 22:57 |
| John Harold Boucree | There was a motto that I had when I went to the senior high school that I used with the kids and the staff. And that was, don't tell me, show me. I haven't used that anyplace else with anybody else other than that. | 23:25 |
| John Harold Boucree | And that came back to me about a year or so ago. One of our neighbors down the street died. And had gone to bring some tables and chairs down, was helping in the yard [indistinct 00:24:08]. And a lady walked up behind me and she says, "Don't tell me, show me." And without turning, I said, "It has to be a Booker Washington graduate." She says, "Yes." And she pulled her son around. She says, "This is the man that got you in trouble." Said, "Mr, you don't know how my mama throws that out to me all the time." | 23:51 |
| Kate Ellis | That's great. That's funny. | 24:30 |
| John Harold Boucree | She said, "That one stuck with me." She says, "And I tell him all the time, 'Don't get me all that lip.'" So [indistinct 00:24:43], I said, "That's the first time anybody came back with that." But she remembered it, said, "You liked it in there." I can't think of any other. I got a past time where I spent a lot of time doing Crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles. I like doing Crossword puzzles. | 24:33 |
| Kate Ellis | You're a words person. | 25:10 |
| John Harold Boucree | Yeah. I spend time on my computer doing, well, most of it. Mine is not playing games, I don't play computer games and all that, but it's business. Family, keeping track of the organizations and whatnot, putting stuff in the computer and records and things like that. I can't think of anything else. | 25:12 |
| Kate Ellis | Well, that's a lot. That's great. That's it. Now— | 25:58 |
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