Milton Quigless interview recording, 1993 October 12
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| Milton Douglas Quigless | Then he went down to this White fertilizer they had. And he said, "Okay, I was going out there. Doc going down to the bank, get the money and tell the cashier to send me a blank note. I'll fill it out. You can take it back tomorrow." That's the confidence he had in me, see. I got the damn money before I got the note filled out. And of course the next thing, I needed a place to practice. He didn't want me on Main Street. | 0:01 |
| Paul Ortiz | Who didn't want you on Main Street? | 0:32 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Some of the guys didn't, some of the commissioners didn't want my ass on Main Street. | 0:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | Some of the people in the Tarboro City Commission there. | 0:36 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That's right. Okay, well we looked all over town. The only thing we saw anywhere was this fish market. It was all boarded up and every damn thing. So the town owned it. I went up to city hall, said, "What do you want, boy?" | 0:41 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Said, "I want to rent that fish market down there, open my practice." | 1:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "Hell, we don't want to rent it to anybody. Everybody leaves owing us. God damn, you'll be the same way." | 1:03 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "You know, I'll be here." | 1:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "No, no." So went back over to the man who loaned me the money. | 1:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | See, he told me, "If you have any trouble, come see me." Said, "What's the matter, Doc?" | 1:14 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "I want to rent that place down there. They won't let me rent it." | 1:19 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "Give me that phone." Called the city hall, town hall, say, "Let this doctor have that damn place down there. Don't you charge him any rent for six months. You hear what I say?" He was a big man in town, yes, sir. That's the way I got in here. | 1:20 |
| Paul Ortiz | And why did he loan you the money? | 1:41 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well see, I went to half the guys here. I didn't have the money, and I told this pharmacist and drug store owner that I would need some money to open my business so to start practicing. And he say, "Well I'll help you borrow some money." And he directed me to go to this man who had come to Tarboro just as a clerk in a store. And he ended up with a big fertilizer business, and he made loans to the people in the country, all the farmers and everything to pay off. And helped a whole hell of a lot of people, because when I signed, took the note back up there, so he took me to his office. All around the wall they had pasted up there notes that he had to pay off. Said, "Doctor, I don't want to put you up there. All these guys, I helped them. And look, I had to pay it off myself." He was just a nice man, see, a good man. | 1:44 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I say, "Well he won't put me up there." That's the way I got started, and it was bad that year. Went around to the hospital, wanted to get privileges. | 2:33 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Say, "Well Doctor, you know how it is. It's all right with us, but these White women wouldn't want you to be walking in there and in the bed and every damn thing. I tell you what. We're going to build another hospital. We'll let you go." | 2:49 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So every year I went around there, asking the same thing. Every year they put my ass off. So at the test, actually well I was out in the country. I was operating on people across the bed, any damn kitchen, anywhere, as long as it had electricity. Electric lights, I could pour ether, because that's what we used there in Sanford. | 2:58 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I said, "Well, I got to do something about this." So I went to the bank, local bank, applied for a loan to build this place. So went and tried the local bank first. | 3:18 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | They said, "Hell no, you don't know how to run no damn hospital." Cussed the man out, he went there to ask for me to have a loan. So Security Bank had—out of Greensboro, but they had a branch here. I went in and applied for the loan. The cashier was a very nice man, and he was sympathetic and everything. I sent in for the loan, and three weeks later we got a letter back, a long letter explaining why they couldn't let me have the money. | 3:34 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So he was reading the letter. I said, "Mr [indistinct 00:04:09], wait a minute. Say they don't want to let me have this money, do they." | 4:06 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "No, looks that way." Said, "Well you want to build that hospital?" | 4:11 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "Yeah." | 4:17 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "I'll tell you, how much you got?" Shit, I've been here 10 years. I had about $10,000 cash and basically didn't have no damn money, see. People didn't have no money. | 4:17 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And I said, "I got $10,000 cash. I had plans for this place and everything." | 4:25 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So he said, "Go put it in the foundation. I'll help you borrow the money. I'll get you the money." | 4:32 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "Wait a minute." | 4:36 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "Damn it to Hell, go do what I tell you. You want to build it, go on, put it in there." So he said, "I'll help you get the money." So with misgivings, I went on, started the foundation. And he was on the board of directors at one time of Building and Loan Association over at Rocky Mountain. And he went on and told them the story. They say hell, they'll help you. He talked to folks over there, and they loaned me, they say they're going to lend me $37,000 to build the damn thing. | 4:38 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So they started to say, "Well we'll let you have 17,000 now, and use that up, we'll let you have the rest of it." Well you see, the reason they did it, they had this location down here on the river. And if I messed up, they still had the building. See what I mean? That's the way I paid the building. | 5:09 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well anyway, they did it. Nobody else would do it. And I was supposed to pay back $500 a month. I never missed a payment paying it back, because 10 days after I opened this place here, I had 25 beds. 20 of them were filled. Most people didn't have any damn money. And if they couldn't now, they were all sharecroppers and whatnot, see. | 5:27 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I remember this lady, she was in labor. And her husband ran in one day, said, "Doctor, come out right quick, see about my wife." They lived about 10 miles out in the country. So I went out there, the lady had a precipitous labor. That is, the baby just burst out every damn thing and lacerated the vagina, lower part of the intestine and uterus, every damn thing. And blood was just squirting, just shooting out. I put a sheet up there and called my receptionist to come out with some ether. She pulled the damn ether, and I had to sew on that lady about a hour and a half to get her healed up— | 5:57 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well, she healed all right except for one little thing. And she got along very well, no blood transfusion. Hell, wasn't no blood bank or nothing in those days. Good Lord just wasn't ready for her to go. Anyway, she healed all except one little place, and I knew about it too. And I heard about the OB/GYN man over there, obstetrics and gynecology man. So I wrote this Dr. Carter, Dr. B.R. Carter, the chief and told him about what had happened. | 6:39 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So he said, "Send the patient over here." So I sent the lady over there. He read the letter again and looked at her. And he called me, say, "How in the hell did you ever do this in the country?" Said, "How were you able to do that?" | 7:12 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I say, "Nobody else was able to do it. I was here. I had to do it. She would die." | 7:25 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well he said, "Send her on over here. And if you get any cases like that, just send them on over to us. We'll manage it." And he gave me encouragement, and he helped me out all the way along. So I just got started from that and then went on and on. Of course as I said, all the landowners around, you had sharecroppers, very few Black-only owned, the farms. So one man who had several farms in this area, he had overseers to watch over them, manage the farm and everything. | 7:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So one of the overseers called me in the middle of the night once. "Doc, they got a lady out there, one of the tenants' wives having a baby, and she's in trouble. She's bleeding like everything. Will you go see about it? I'll see that you get your money." So I went out there, and I saved her. Everybody was enthused about it. | 8:06 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So the landowner called me and said, "Just go out and see me tenants and come back the end of the year, and I'll pay you just one time at the end of the year, in October." So I went up, I saw these patients out there, coming in here. And out in the woods and everything until October, and I had a bill over $900. So I took it to the landowner. He said, "Well Doc, see, my son looks after these things. Just take it over there and see him. He'll take care of you." But in the meantime, another White man in town knew about this, knew I was coming along and everything. And in fact, I had bought a house from him. | 8:25 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So he said, "Doc, I want to tell you something about these folks. I like you, and I'm trying to help you, see. But everybody is not in your corner. So now certain people around here, they'll have you work on their tenants, and then when you take the bill, they want to try to Jew you down." He said, "Don't you let them do it. Don't you let them intimidate you like that." He said, "It's all right to give them 10%, but don't let them go any lower than that." | 9:05 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So sure enough, when I took this bill over to this guy, he said, "My son takes care of that." | 9:30 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Took it to is son, he said, "Well Doc, you got a big bill here. It's over $900, and you know this is all cash." | 9:35 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "No, it ain't cash. I've been 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, snow, sleet, every damn—" I said, "Rain, I've been going out. This isn't cash, man." | 9:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "Well you know you're getting it in one piece, so let's see, can we sort of knock this down to about $700?" Then he came back to me, which this other man had said. | 9:51 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "Look, there it is. Give me any damn thing you want, because I don't give a damn. Just whatever you want to do." I said, "Don't want to give me nothing, just tell me. I'll get out of here, won't bother you anymore." | 10:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "No, Doc, it isn't anything like that." So he paid me my money, less 10%. Everybody, going and coming, that's the way they got everything. He charged the tenants 25% for lending them the money. And whoever does the way to charge them 10%, that'll be 35% on every dollar they loan the tenant. See what I mean? That's the way they got all these damn farms. Okay, well that went on like that. I didn't have no more trouble like that but everything. | 10:11 |
| Paul Ortiz | So you started your practice in about 1936. | 10:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | 1936, and as I say, I knew what I wanted to do. Ever since I was about six years old, I wanted to be a doctor. And as I say, backtrack a little bit, I've always been skinny. I was skinny, so always first thing I remember is people always poking food in my mouth, see. [indistinct 00:11:09], because everybody, anything I said, any time I made a little whimper, everybody looked to everything I did. I could get my way at everything. So yeah, well okay, up until I got my way with everything, if I didn't want to get out of bed, I didn't have to. If I wanted to get into bed, I got in, whatever I wanted to do. Okay, here I come. I've got six years of age, go back, go to school then. | 10:49 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I didn't like that damn school at all, because they had to walk three quarters of a mile. It's all right, weather like this. But when you're getting hot and getting cold, raining, sleet everything down there in Mississippi. | 11:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | What town was that? | 11:50 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Port Gibson, Mississippi. | 11:50 |
| Paul Ortiz | Port Gibson. | 11:53 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Port Gibson, Mississippi. I got all this and some left up there. Anyway, I started going to school. I didn't like it, had these little, hard benches you sit on. And this just started, A, B, C, D, didn't have all the shit they have now. They didn't have any of that stuff back then. A, B, C, and then the first day, I learned the ABCs. Second year, you started reading. "This is a dog. That dog is named Spot. Come here, Spot." | 11:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Look, got to go all the way to all these kids that were saying the same thing. I got tired of that stuff. In the meantime, the benches were hard on my little, narrow butt. So I always looked forward to recess and time to go home. Okay, I hated it so bad, I just started complaining about it. I done had something wrong every damn day. So a lot of the times they say, "Well you don't have to go. Take it easy." | 12:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | First grade, second, third, every year I was complaining more and more. I got in the middle of the fifth grade. I was complaining so much that they called the local doctor in, local, White doctor in. So he took one look at me, took my folks outside, say, "Don't make him go to school. He's too puny to live. He's going to die before he gets grown." | 12:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So Ma and Pa came in, said, "You don't have to go to school unless you want." | 13:21 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "I don't." Shit, man, I got out of school. I quit going to school. There were three or four other little, five or six little gang of little boys around there whose parents didn't make them go to school. So we had a little gang. | 13:23 |
| Paul Ortiz | Where was this? | 13:38 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Port Gibson, Mississippi. We'd go down and find scrap iron and sell it for cookies and candy and stuff like that, run little errands. All of us out of school, my age up around 10 years, five to 10 years old to 12 years. So we picked up all the scrap iron, everything we could sell. And then they started doing a little stealing. That's when I quit. | 13:39 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So there I was around there, walking around. I was just telling a lady the other day, while I was running around with that little gang, every other week, Mama would have to delouse me. I'd have lice, have lice, man. Anyway, so I got worried then. I say, "Well the gang, I quit the gang." All I could do, walk around town. I'd go and watch them repair automobiles and do this and do that and do the other just around. Everybody knew the poor little boy. They were always sorry for me, because I was going to die before I got grown. | 14:04 |
| Paul Ortiz | So everybody, your parents told everybody you were going to die. | 14:34 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That's right, yeah. Everybody knew about it. But anyway, I hung around the drug store. One of the drug stores caught fire and burned down. And that was a big thing, and I was there, around there. I watched them clean up everything. Every day I'd go up, and they were rebuilding the thing. And they got their showcases there and everything. Then they were all smudged on the inside. I was so little and skinny, I was the only thing could get in there. So the druggist got me to get in there and clean them up. I cleaned about eight showcases. I'll never forget it. He gave me 35 cents when I got through. So he said, "We're going to need a little delivery boy. You want to work for us?" | 14:38 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "Yes, sir." | 15:22 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "Okay, you come on and work." So he paid me $3 and a half a week. I was the delivery boy. In the meantime, I was just happy go lucky. But as time marched on, they had an old man come to town there. All this is in my story. I had the damn story all written up. He came in, and he was a bricklayer, what he told my mother. Mama had a boarding house, didn't have no hotels. It was a Black boarding house. So Mr. Brooks came to live right there. He had a room there, boarding. | 15:22 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So he said, "Mrs. Quigless, why ain't that boy in school?" Say well, she told him the story. Said, "Mrs. Quigless, ain't a thing wrong with that boy, but he's just damn lazy." He said, "Let me have him." | 15:58 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | This guy took me fishing and everything, started talking to me about his granddaughter, blah, blah. She was such a pretty thing, and she's so smart. She played the violin and everything. In the meantime I got to thinking I'm in the damn—The school I went to, the graduation school only went through the ninth grade. And this bunch that I started out with, I should've been finishing that year. All of a sudden it hit me. Damn, I messed myself up here. They going, and here I am. So I got to worrying then. And then when he got to talking about his granddaughter was so fine and everything, I made up my mind. I'm going back to school. I'm going to have to be a doctor. That's all there is to it. One guy was real smart. I got him to tutor me. | 16:07 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Knowing that I finished the fifth grade, I remember start reading in the meantime, reading everything I could. Knowing I finished the fifth grade, I didn't want to go back to school with sixth grade. These kids all going to college. The state college for Blacks was down there, 14 miles from my home, from Port Gibson. We'd go down there to the baseball games. I got to talking with some of the students, grown men now. I say, "What class are you in?" | 16:51 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He'd say, "I'm in the sixth grade." | 17:18 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "You in the sixth grade?" He tell me the story then about how he came out of the woods illiterate. He didn't know a thing. They came, they put them all in sixth grade. They keep them there until they could go forward. And you could stay about 15 years, you'll get your bachelor's degree. See what I mean? But anyway, that thing intrigued me, and I got to thinking about it. So I had this fellow to tutor me, knowing I didn't know a damn thing. I finished the fifth grade, so we tried to talk about it, said, "I hate to be going back to the sixth grade." So he tutored me all the summer. He done all the parts of speech, the little fundamentals of arithmetic and all that crap. I didn't know shit. I didn't know anything. So we decided, he decided that I'd take the examination for the ninth grade and flunk it, they'd put me in the eighth. That's what happened. After a couple years down there, I talked to the doctor in charge, the school doctor, and I told him my situation. | 17:20 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And he said that well, he had done the same. He said he had trouble getting through. See, he didn't have no money, so he got a job as a sleeping car porter, Pullman porter. That's the way he got through Meharry, Black medical school. So he said, "You got any kin in Chicago, any kin?" | 18:27 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "Yeah, I got a brother and a sister. My brother is a bellhop. My sister is a maid, works for a surgeon." | 18:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "They ought to be able to help you. You contact them and see what they can do. I think you'd make a good doctor, always asking so damn many questions all the time. You ought to make a good doctor." So I contact my brother and sister. So my brother said he'd give me a place to live. He say if I got a job when I got up there, he wouldn't mind doing that. My sister worked for the chief surgeon of the Milwaukee [indistinct 00:19:16]. She talked to him about her little brother who wanted to be a doctor, needed a job. | 18:51 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "He's coming here, let him come on up here. I'll get him a job." So this doctor advised me to finish the third year of high school down in Mississippi, go to Chicago and catch my class, finish high school in Chicago. I could get free pre-med training at Crane. | 19:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | At Crane? | 19:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | At Crane Junior College in Chicago. Okay, well here I go. So I told all these, I had some teachers from Morehouse College down in Atlanta, Georgia. You know about Morehouse. I told them what I wanted to do, so this one teacher, Joe Brooks said, "I tell you what I want you to do. I want you to sit down." I had some pages that I had taken out of the old journal, while he was down in the alley, looking up stuff. And the old journal, got through with it and threw it in the alley. I had to cut out those blank pages about that long, about that wide. So Joe Brooks said, "Just write. I want you to write this damn thing." | 19:43 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "What you want me to put on it?" | 20:18 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "Anything you're thinking about, you write it. I want you to fill a page every night and give it to me." So he read all this stuff I wrote. Anything, I didn't even think about it, cat and dog, any damn thing, trees, monkeys, everything I thought about. So after about a week he said, "Now I'm going to outline what you have to do. You're going to have to take Latin." I was taking French and English, all that crap, grammar and all that crap. So he outlined what I have to do. Says, "Now you got to study for yourself and not for these teachers. So when you take the hardest teacher, don't get the easy teachers." I took his advice. And man, when I went to Chicago, finished third year down there. When I went to Chicago, I was head and shoulders above all my classmates. Got through that year, in the meantime, a whole lot of things happened to me in the meantime. | 20:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | Can you tell me a little bit about your family in Port Gibson, you parents? | 21:20 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Yeah, well there were six of us, three boys, three girls. My father was working at an oil mill. That's the only thing they had down there, was cotton compresses and cotton seed mill and what like that. So he was working there, and well, he'd fuss about my mother. She was one of five children, and her mother died when she was about 12 years old, and she had to take care of the other members of her family, brothers and sisters. A White man, he'd been a captain in the Confederate Army. They had several children. They needed somebody to help take care of them. And he knew my mother's father, so he asked them about getting Agnes, that was my mother, to help with his children. She agreed, so Mama went out there to work for the Joneses and the children about her age, her age and a little older. So they had a tutor work with their children, and Mama was right along there with them. They tutored Mama too. They learned to cook and so learned all the niceties that they should know, Mama right along with them. | 21:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | They were Episcopalian. Back in those days, they had this balcony where all us Blacks had to go up in the balcony when they go to church. They'd take them to church and make them go up in the balcony. | 22:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | Segregated [indistinct 00:22:55]. | 22:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Yeah, so Mama didn't have to go in the balcony, and he said, "You're going to sit in the pew with us down here, our pew." So Mama got a lot of knowhow as she came along. And when she married my daddy, quit working, she was about 18 years old. And he was working at the oil mill, and he was assisting the—He had to oil the machine and everything. He was up high. He say he was up there, oiling some machinery, and his foot slipped, and he reached back to grab something, lost the three fingers of his right hand. And of course he couldn't work, so he didn't. Now Mama had to go to work, so she decided she'd open a little restaurant. Opened a little restaurant, caught on. What you going to do with it? See, Mama could cook so well, she knew what the White folks wanted to eat. So she'd specialize in cooking dinners for them. She'd cook the dinners, and Pa would [indistinct 00:23:52] boxes, put some hot bricks in there and some paper and then put your stuff there. | 22:56 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | She delivered the dinners between 12:00 and 1:00, between 12:00 and 2:00. And that was a regular thing. She had that right on, right on. So when we were growing up, Pop and Grandpa had a lot of horses, mules. Pop took the old Kate, the mule and one horse, hooked them to a wagon, and he had a job hauling freight from the depot to all the different stores. That's the way it went along. Mama worked herself down into ulcers, and she had to quit. When she got better, she decided to open this boarding house. So that's the way it started. Mama was the mainstay of the whole damn family. That's the way it was. And as I say, my brothers, I had two. I had three sisters. My two older sisters went through school, through ninth grade. I tell you how bad it was down there. You go through the ninth grade, they could take the examination, pass the examination, you go out as teachers. Both of them went out as teachers. And of course you just got $30 a month teaching. | 23:57 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And my oldest sister wasn't satisfied with that, so somehow she got in touch with somebody up in Vermont and got a job up waiting in Vermont. These White folks, so she was making about $75 a month. That's the way they made it, Mama made it all right. So we never were destitute. We never went hungry. We never did have too much, though. You understand. | 25:12 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But I say after I decided to go down to Alcorn, I kept on from there, went on through medical school. After I finished there, I went to Crane. I got this job as a sleeping car porter, and during that time, they'd take students on, Black students to take these parties out, vacationing parties, tour parties and whatnot. So they had this group. You got to go to Seattle and then Tacoma and over the Canadian Rockies and back into Chicago, a two-weeks trip. I got hooked on that that summer. And I thought and got to worrying. I say, "What the hell am I going to do now? I'm going to school here." So I decided to stay there. | 25:36 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I went to sign out [indistinct 00:26:29] all you guys going back to school to turn your keys. I said, "Wait a minute. I'm going to be in school here in Chicago. Could I keep this job, working around the station and whatnot?" | 26:27 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "Hell no, we don't need you. Turn in your keys." I said, "No, I tell you what. I'll keep my keys. I'm going to make myself a damn job." So what I did, I'd go down to trains, go out around, had a group going out between 5 and 9 o'clock at night, 5:00 and 8:00. I'd go down back to the station, load the passengers. I'd go down the line. "You need anything? You need anything? I'd inspect the damn cars and everything." If they needed towels, toilet tissue, anything, I would supply it. | 26:43 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay, talking about your work as a sleeping car porter, what was the difference now? It was quite a leap to go from Mississippi to Chicago and then Seattle. What was it like, the difference between Mississippi and—? | 27:19 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well you see now, when I got this job as sleeping car porter, they kept me around there. I said during the fall they told me to turn in my keys, but I made myself a job. I'd find something wrong and then correct it. After the train leaves the station, I'd go back and tell the [indistinct 00:27:55], "So and so was missing. You needed this, that. You needed a so and so. There wasn't a porter was on there. I called so and so to get on the train." | 27:33 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "What? Why didn't you let me know?" | 28:03 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "You know I'm not working here." But man, at the end of the two weeks, I got a paycheck right along with the rest of them. And I kept that job. Now see, I'd have to get up around 6 o'clock in the morning, make my own breakfast, get to school at 8:00, where I was going to high school. It'd be at 8:00. And then when I go out to Crane it was the same way. And I get through, get out of school about 2:30 right to the railroad station and put on a uniform, watch these trains come in and inspect them going [indistinct 00:28:41]. And we'd get some food over to Thompson Restaurant. That'd be my dinner. I worked at the railroad station from 3:00 to 11:00. 11 o'clock, I got back home about 11:30. I'd sleep until 6:00. That was the routine. Now when you're steady, but you see, this train would come in between. They'd leave out a bunch of them from 5 and 8 o'clock. | 28:05 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And the next would leave out around 11:00, and I had two or three hours to study on the job, except for Thursday. I took Thursday off to catch up with my things, all the paperwork I had to do in school, see. And that's the way it happened. That's the way I worked for them. And these tourists, I said it was a two-week tour out of Chicago. Well Chicago, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, from there you keep going out through Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana. They had a station out of Montana, out Galveston Gateway, gateway to the national park, Yellowstone Park. From there we'd go on to Seattle, go onto Seattle/Tacoma. Well the people would have an overnight, over day to Spokane. And on from that is Seattle. We would discharge them in Seattle on Friday, and they would take a boat up in Alaska and come on back and meet us again in Vancouver on Monday. In the meantime, the train would, cars would be taken over on the boat over to Vancouver. And we'd pick the people up there, passengers up there. | 29:07 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And we'd go the Canadian Rockies. It would take us five more days, six more days to go through Canadian Rockies and back into the states at Saint Marie on into Saint Paul, on into Chicago. That was a two-weeks trip. Well now I'm out here. I've got to give them some money. And when I'd take my passengers in my train, in my car, I'd always give them a little talk leaving Chicago. I'd say, "We're going here for two weeks, going to have a good time. I'm here to see that you do it," blah, blah, blah. "Now some things I'd like for you to see, I think you'd enjoy seeing the sights I'm going to point out to you." And well, get out in South Dakota, North Dakota, I'd point out the Badlands and everything and tell them about the Black Hills and all that crap. And we'd go into Montana. We'd put them out, we'd let them off into Yellowstone Park. They had a gateway out there, and during the day, they'd go to the park and come back to the train at night. We'd go on from that to Spokane and have a day off in Spokane to see the city and everything. | 30:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Seattle/Tacoma, that's where we discharged them. And on the way back out of Vancouver, I'd tell them the same story, say, "Now we want to watch these Indians spearing salmon here, go out to Crazy River Canyon." And next morning, we'd be up in the Canadian Rockies. Train would stop at Mount River slow about 4 o'clock in the morning. It'd be dark down here. Mountain, we're over the beautiful mountain, and the sun would be shining on top of the mountain. So I'd tell my passengers, say, "Now if you want to see this beautiful sight, you'll never see it like that again in this life." I said, "I'll wake you up, if you want to see it." Well they always wanted me to wake them up, and they would just marvel at the sight. We'd go up to Lake Louise. You heard of Lake Louise? Yeah, they have a day off in Lake Louise. And when I was at Lake Louise, I'll say we'd be down there sleeping. And then we'd get further over there, want to go through Banff. We'd just stop at Banff, Alberta, go up the Canadian Rockies, up in there. | 31:46 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And we'd be there a whole day and then on into Saint Marie and then to Chicago. In the meantime, you're doing pretty good, but at that time it was during prohibition. And we could smuggle cigarettes into Canada. We could buy them for 10 cents a pack in Chicago, get 50 cents a pack for them in Canada. | 32:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And my brother was a bellhop in a hotel in Chicago. And the bellhops are getting liquor for the guests. And of course you got this moonshine liquor. They had a way they could get it there. And my brother told me, well in fact I know what happened was, the guests had ordered this liquor. Now the bellhop bring it in, a lot of people going blind from the methanol alcohol. So they'd make the bellhop drink the poison off. Now my brother was a Teetotaller. He was a Teetotaller, but he ended up being a liquor head. See what I mean? That's what happened. They'd make him drink you couldn't just turn your mouth and spit it out. You got to drink that damn stuff. | 33:13 |
| Paul Ortiz | Why? | 34:07 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | To prove to the guest that it's not poison. See what I mean? See, a lot of people—Anyway, he got to be a liquor head. | 34:07 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And while he was doing all this, I'm still going on into Canada. One of the other bellhops says, "Hey, why don't you bring us some scotch over here, man? We could make a lot of money with that damn stuff." I told my brother, he said, "Don't you be doing that damn—Don't you get it no damn bootlegging." | 34:16 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But I went on anyhow, see. Get over in Vancouver, I could get a case of scotch for $60. And I could get $20 a pint for it when I got back to Chicago. So I made four trips and got four cases of scotch. I had a guy to meet me when I got back to Chicago. We would go out of one station and come in the other one. He'd meet me there. All he wanted out of the meeting was just you pay him a quart of Rocky Rye Whiskey, and he'd do anything I asked him to do. So I borrowed the man's Gladstone bag, a good bag. And I'd get this liquor in Vancouver and stash it in sacks of soiled linen. Inspector would never look in soiled linen for it, see. And when I got to St. Paul back on the [indistinct 00:35:31]. They'd have a day off in St. Paul. While they were gone, I'd get the stashed liquor out of his bag and put it in the suitcase. | 34:34 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And when we got to Chicago, porter would come and say, "Mr. Jones sent me after his bag." I'd say, "Yeah, he told me he was going to do it." I'd give him the bag. But nobody ever thought about no railroad detective. He did that for four damn times. The last time, they caught him! Scared the hell out of me. | 35:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And my brother found out I had all the liquor stashed in his basement. He cussed me out and threw all the liquor in the alley. Just imagine four cases of scotch in the alley in Chicago. | 35:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Yeah, I had to stay out of medical school. He wouldn't give me any money to help me go. So I had to go back to work all those years. That's what happened to my bootlegging. That's just one of the aspects of it. Maybe I'm talking too damn much to you, man. | 36:07 |
| Paul Ortiz | How did people, how did the passengers treat you as a porter? | 36:27 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Everybody treated me as a porter, I was treated very nice by all the—Because as I say, with tourists, they want to just raise the seasoned travelers, businessmen, anything. They treated me very nice. They got along very fine. I had two teachers from Mississippi there, and they didn't tell, didn't have to tell them I'm from Mississippi, say "how are you," blah, blah, blah. So one day, one of them say, "Porter, where you from?" | 36:33 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "I'm from Chicago." | 37:02 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Said, "I mean, where were you from before you went to Chicago?" They knew me too, see. But I never had any trouble, because they all treated me very nice. And one time I was leaving Chicago, and I was leaving one Sunday. And my birthday was the next day. I just happened to think about it, anything, get on with the passengers, go and get a little extra money. I say, "You know one thing, tomorrow is my birthday." | 37:03 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | One passenger said, "Sure enough," never say anything more about it. So the next day I was Minneapolis. Next night, they kept me busy as hell, blah, blah, blah, do this, do this, do that. And they had a recreation car on the train. So we'd go up there and play cards and listen to music and whatnot. So finally, called me up there about 9 o'clock one night. That night, I went up there, and everybody said, "Surprise, happy birthday." Man, look here, I got about $50 in money and a lot of different presents, candy. Oh, this is nice. Next trip, believe it or not, I said, tomorrow is my birthday. (laughs) I had that regular routine, see. | 37:29 |
| Paul Ortiz | With the tourists? | 38:09 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Every time I went around, I had a birthday every time. | 38:11 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay, now time marches on. Next year we start out again with the same crew. So, different conversation. Tomorrow is my birthday. Lady was visiting from another car. She said, "That's funny. My porter's birthday is tomorrow too." | 38:14 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "Which car are you in?" She told me. I said, "God damn it. Let me tell you, that's my damn racket. You cut that." (laughs) I said, "You can't have that racket. That's mine." So that's where, anywhere to it, I got some money. | 38:29 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But as I say, I interned out in St Louis, when I was there, I was still skinny there. [indistinct 00:38:53] this old, dilapidated building [indistinct 00:38:56] dilapidated, and it had a lot of clinical material. I say, "Well wait a minute there." | 38:46 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So he took looking at the building, went up on the sixth floor. They have three doctors, three interns up there with TB. Say, "Oh shit, this ain't good." And I saw three guys on the sixth floor with TB. And the TB was just about twice the size of this room. They had 40 beds in there this close and everybody coughing, vomiting, vomiting blood and everything, dying, praying and everything. So they said, "Now this is TB ward." I was in there, but I stuck my head outside the door and said, "Lord, look, just let me stay here one year, and I'm getting out." | 39:07 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But I made it. I had to stay one year. I wanted to, so I wanted to see what I could get that one year. And I had the nurses teach me everything. I wanted to learn to do every damn thing, giving enemas and everything, dialysis and everything else. And I did extra work all the time. I didn't just do all the way along. I tried to find out everything I could, learn about everything, because I made up my mind. I wasn't going to stay but one year. These graduates at my school were having trouble getting residences. They said he wasn't as well prepared as guys who went to Howard University in Washington. And they couldn't get residences, but we knew we were ready. The whole damn—There was 12 of us in Meharry. We knew we was ready, and we should have residences. | 39:49 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So next thing, well we want to all apply, see. Somebody ought to get it out of the 12 of us. Somebody ought to get it. I said, "Well I don't want to apply, because I'm not going to stay here." | 40:39 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "What the hell? You got to apply. See, if you don't apply, they'll say well, they would have gave it to you, if you had applied." Well I applied anyway. I finally applied. And when it came to the day when they were giving out the residences, they called me in, because I say I was doing extra work all the time. I was doing that for me. I wasn't doing it for the patients or nobody else. I was doing it for me. I was trying to learn everything I could, see. They called me in and said that they had decided to give me the residence in surgery. | 40:53 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Then I had to tell them, see. "I'm just as sorry as I can be, but I can't accept it, because I promised by God I wouldn't stay here but one here." I say, "I'm just afraid I'll get TB and die." Well the [indistinct 00:41:36] did everything to try to persuade me to stay, but I wouldn't stay. | 41:23 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And when I came back in, the other guys say, "What happened? Did he give it to you?" | 41:38 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "He offered it to me, but I turned it down." [indistinct 00:41:46] kick my ass all over the place, beat me up and everything. | 41:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "You didn't? What the hell [indistinct 00:41:52]?" Well I promised, but in the meantime I still didn't have much money to pay $20 a month. The end of the month, the Brinks truck would drive up there with guards all around it. We'd line up and get $10 each. They'd pay us $10 and keep $10 back so that at the end of the year, you'd have $120, so you get the hell out of town. Anyway, I still didn't have enough money to start my practice. | 41:50 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So they teach the physiology down in Meharry I done pretty well. As I say, I was looking out for myself. So after my internship, Dr. Roth in Meharry, he's a professor of physiology, needed an assistant. And he wrote me a letter, asked me to come back, because I done so good work when I went in as a student, see. As I say, I was looking out for me. | 42:26 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I would write any time we had an experiment, say, "How would you apply it to," blah, blah, blah. I'd write a whole half a page, a whole page on it. See, the other guy just zoom. But now when he need an assistant, he called me up, wrote me there. And I went on back down to Meharry. And I wasn't quite satisfied as to what I knew, what I all the way through medical school, a lot of things, a lot of the conditions we had the no treatment for. And so I said, "Well now if I know more about the normal activity of the normal human body, I'll know when I see the abnormal." That's the attitude I took. So when I got out here, but I didn't have a diagnosis, never seen this damn stuff before. Let's see how the body is abnormal. I treat the abnormalities. [indistinct 00:43:45] did all right. But see, I have no reason. I went on back there, stayed there a year, and that's when I came out here. | 42:56 |
| Paul Ortiz | How were race relations in Nashville? | 43:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | [indistinct 00:43:57] in Nashville. I mean in Nashville back in those days, hell, man, 1930 relations, segregation. I remember once I went downtown in Nashville. Went into the school, they had parking and parking for 10 minutes. The policeman was standing outside. I said, "Is that right, 10 minutes? I'm going to be in here." | 43:58 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "Yeah, boy." I went in there. I stayed about six minutes. I came out, he said, "Boy, didn't I tell you, you could stay in there more than 10 minutes? Get that damn old piece of car out of here before I break your—Get out here, before I kick your butt. Get the hell out of here. That was Nashville. Nashville was a bad place in those days. So was Tarboro. | 44:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | How about Chicago now? For so many people in those days, it seemed like Chicago was an oasis. As that reality? | 44:38 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well you see now, when I was a little kid down in Mississippi, I was born in 1904. 1910, '12, along in that, guys were leaving Mississippi, escaping to Chicago. I tell people, back in those days, you didn't leave Mississippi. You escaped from Mississippi. But anyway, you'd come back down there and tell about how good they're getting along. Guys were all dressed up, knee-high buttons, tan shoes, high collar and everything. Everything was just the promised land, if we just get there and could get a job. Well back in those days, they could get jobs. The stockyards were there, do the menial jobs, cleaning the streets, blah, blah, blah. Really did you well back in those days. But you still had high echelon segregation in Chicago. | 44:47 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | See now, I went out to Crane. I had some rabid teachers out there. I did it to where I got a minor subject in medicine, histology, where you make these slides and whatnot. They had little, minor stuff. We'd take it there in pre-med, so we wouldn't have to be bothered about it in medical school. You know what you're going to anyway. But anyway, I was taking a lot of stuff, doing all right. I thought I was doing real well with stuff. I'm making these slides. Guy gave you a section of pig skin to make some slides to teach about dermatology. So I made it down slides, and I was so very happy with them. They were the best slides in the whole damn school. So at the end of the year, at the end of the course, they had to turn them in. I turned in to him, and he looked at them and said, "These are not showing what I want. You're going to have to make some more." | 45:45 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I say, "Well I took the tissue you gave me." | 46:40 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He said, "But damn it—" | 46:44 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well you see, when I finished Crane, they customized it to these class pictures at the end, the graduates got all dressed and that. And when I finished, the class picture hadn't been finished, so they told me to go on out and they'd send it to me and my mother down in Mississippi, and I was in Chicago. Anyway, at that time I was in medical school. I got out of Mississippi about two years later just to see my parents, I saw the picture. And there I looked at the picture. I was so fixed that all the—Before that, the pictures had always been in alphabetical order, White and Black, Filipino, whatever it was. It was in alphabetical order. Well this particular time, the whole of Black folks were in a line at the top of the picture. There was a space between the Blacks and the Whites, about one-inch space so you can cut them off if you wanted to. | 0:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I thought it was segregation. I thought very much of Crane until I ran into that, because when I saw that and I saw the powers of that, I let it go through. I just decided that I didn't ever want to see Crane again, so I never went back to Crane. That was a bad thing, but I thought—Well now, the teachers were very good to me. They made no difference whatsoever except for that guy Andrews and he started it. All my day experiences were very good. They helped me in every way that they could. Well now, I always wanted to go to Northwestern University Medical School because I first went out there, they took us out there from a class from Crane to just looking over the medical school. And it was a spanking brand-new medical school, everything was evened out. They had the cadavers and stainless steel bolts and everything. Everything was just fine. And I wanted to go out there badly. So the first time I got ready to apply for medical school admission, the first place I applied was Northwestern. | 1:09 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | You see that blank? In the blank, they had a place for my picture. I sent a picture in there and then boop! Notified me, the next week that the class was filled. Well at the same time, my classmates out at Crane were receiving notices that they had been accepted two months after they told me the class was filled. And that they didn't want my little nerve back put out there. Okay. | 2:24 |
| Paul Ortiz | They what? | 2:45 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | They didn't want me out there. | 2:47 |
| Paul Ortiz | Because your classmates were White? | 2:48 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Uh-huh. Yeah, that's right. I applied at Minnesota, Illinois, Northwestern and Meharry, the Black school down in Tennessee. Well after they turned me down, the Northwestern, I said, "Well, I'll go to Minnesota." It was right out from Minneapolis there, and I liked that very well. So I applied to the University of Minnesota and they accepted me. And well now, before I had to go out there, I was in Chicago. I would go to Chicago every weekend. I would go to Minneapolis every two to three weekends, then I would go to Minneapolis to sleep in carpools for the whole night round and then back to Chicago. This particular time was mid-winter and I went to Minneapolis. | 2:48 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Got there on Sunday morning. I had to go about three blocks up the street to get my breakfast. And on the way up there, my ears was tingling a little bit, but I didn't pay them any mind. I was sitting up there eating my breakfast, which by the way, it then about thirty-five cents. I got two eggs over a whole slice of ham, toast and coffee. Thirty-five cents. That's what it was. But anyway, a man came and delivered some supplies, and I turned to him just to say, "How cold is it out there now?" He said, "It's warming up a little bit, it's just 27 below." I said, "What? Twenty-seven below? Oh, my." I nearly froze to death getting back to Chicago. So that was out, Minneapolis was out. I couldn't stand it no more. | 3:35 |
| Paul Ortiz | Did you think about Howard? | 4:29 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | No. No, I didn't think about Howard. Never applied to Howard, I'll tell you why. You see, as a sleeping car porter, there was students during the summer I came in contact with. There was a lot of Howard students and Meharry students. I like the attitude of the Meharry students, so I decided I'd apply to Meharry Medical at Tennessee. Okay, 27 below. Well, that's out. Well, I'd already applied at University of Illinois and had been accepted there. I said, "Well, I'll go to the University of Illinois, that's right there in Chicago. It'd be a better thing anyway." And I'd talk to one of the fellows from out there and said, "How's it out there?" He was just troubled, he said "Well, I made it all right." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "University of Illinois, they had 75 in the freshman class. They would admit 150 and weed them down to 27." Now he looked at me. I knew damn well I'd be weeded down. | 4:29 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So that only left me with Meharry down in Nashville, Tennessee. The Black school. I didn't want to go back to Nashville because I knew it was segregated and everything, and I'd got a taste of what it was like around Chicago. But I had to go, Minnesota is too cold, Illinois I'd be weeded, and Northwestern turned my butt down. It was the only thing left for me, so I went down there. It's the only reason I went there. As I said, it was the best thing I ever did do, to go to Meharry. Now, she would have me there. That's teaching my son over there. He wanted to study medicine like I did, and they were coming, but that's another story. I don't really want to bother about that right now. | 5:25 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, everything went bad when they were coming up. The kids were growing up and I said, "You have to go to school." The school system was nothing. Uncle Tom was around. I went down to the school to check him one day. I just really wanted to see somebody or something. The kids were working on the blackboards, they had crayons this long. I said, "Well, what's going on. I can't write with this stuff like that." He said, "Well, we requisitioned chalk and that's what they sent us." The principal told me, "You don't need that. And Negroes children can't use that chalk." He told the White folks, "Don't send them that good chalk, just send them what's leftover." | 6:15 |
| Paul Ortiz | The teacher said that? | 6:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That's right. That's the principal who told him that. And that was just one thing. | 6:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | And this was in the 1950s? | 7:19 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Oh no, hell, that was in the forties, 1940s. And that was just one thing down there. Every damn thing was wrong. And they told us we were all bad in every damn thing. So they requisitioned some new toilets, and now this delivery man told me that they took him down there, the principal said "Were you taking those things? What you got there?" He said he got some toilets to put in place. He said, "Look, tell you what you do. You take them back to the White school. And I'm going to call the White school and tell them we got some toilets down here, but I think whatever you can send us your old ones up there and you can put new ones up there and send us the old ones. We can use the old ones." That's the attitude they had. As much as Uncle Tom told me, they had to look out for the White students. They hadn't to please the Black folks, yes sir. Okay. | 7:19 |
| Paul Ortiz | And this was in Tarboro? | 8:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | At Tarboro High school. Okay now. My kids getting up there got to go to school, and that when the Black priest, when he first came here way back in the day, I don't know, in the Reconstruction days, she opened a little episcopal school teaching kids. That school had [indistinct 00:08:38] as a start-up, and all these kids came up, even by the time when I got a kid. Now when a kid got big enough to go in there. When they got four years old, we send them to the school. Just like what you have now, you got the preschool and stuff here. They were starting all this stuff and we didn't have anything like that. And Ms. Weston taught them for two years, and one day, first two years at the pair school, they were admitted to the second grade of public school. Okay, well no matter how bad it was, see, it wasn't that bad. See, my wife was from Washington, she had been a teacher in Washington. | 8:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | Washington DC? | 9:26 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That's right. And her stepmother knew a lot of people. She was in the service there too. She worked in the public service there. So she was in contact with a lot of different people, but the children were sent up in Vermont, did a public school up in Vermont. They were looking around for these kids, Black kids, that they want to send up to Mexico or up there, see. So they had a lot of scholarships open for these kids. So my kid would come along and I wanted him to go to preschool. He went down to elementary school and the teachers there were all right. But when it came to high school, oh shit, no, no. In a class, they had one microscope that wouldn't work in chemistry. The teacher did an experiment [indistinct 00:10:26]. So see, I wouldn't want to send the kids on and—We had a scholarship up in [indistinct 00:10:36]. It would cost $1,000 a year with the scholarship. So the first one was a girl, Helen. And he came along and there was a girl. Anyway, they went up there and they did very well. | 9:26 |
| Speaker 3 | Mrs. Ruth Phils wants to know if it's too late for her to come to see you. | 10:52 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Yeah, tell her it's too late to come and see me. | 11:08 |
| Speaker 3 | But tomorrow between 12:00 and 1:00. | 11:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That's right. Mm-hmm. | 11:08 |
| Speaker 3 | But she said she can come at 2:00 tomorrow. | 11:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | At 2:00? Well, if I can get here. I will do the best I can. Can't she come at 2:00? I'll be going— | 11:09 |
| Speaker 3 | It'll be okay? | 11:10 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Yeah, it's all right. | 11:10 |
| Speaker 3 | Okay. | 11:10 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay. Well, I seem to have put it down. Now, Brother wanted to be a doctor, wanted to be a physician. So they advised him to go to Tufts, you know Tufts out in Boston? He went there, but he didn't like it because, see, now he liked all the fellowship with the all White kids there. So he all came here, they've been in class together, he said, "Okay, see you tomorrow." He go that way and he goes nowhere for him to go but to his room. So he said, "Dad, I don't like it there. I'm going to quit if I can't go someplace else where I can have some social relationship with somebody." I had a classmate, one of my classmates from Atlanta. He was from Morehouse. So I said to him, "Good." We called him Good. I said, "Good. I want to send Brother down there in Morehouse." He said, "Does he play football? Do he look like you?" I said, "Hell no." So he said, "Send him down here." | 11:16 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I took Brother down on Thanksgiving Day down there. And we went to Atlanta and he got around in Atlanta and drove some of the guys out, told me how they were having their sons down there too. They took them out to the good school out there. In the underground, they had a big time, all night long, all day. So Brother said, "Dad, I'm ready to come here now." So we went to Morehouse and saw the Dean, the Dean said, "Yeah, you can come on down." He didn't worry about taking everything. He said, "Can I come on down here tomorrow?" I said, "You need to take your time." He said, "Can I take the examination here?" They said, "Yeah, come on." He went on down there, man. He's already been in Tufts and he was in a good company anyway. And he's down there with good students and he went right on with it. So at the end of his sophomore year, he was admitted to Meharry. They had this program two years at Morehouse. He spent two years in there to get his bachelor's degree. He went in that program and went zoom, zoom. | 12:22 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I had a classmate down there when I finished named Matthew Walker. He was having this surgery. He said, "I could go anywhere, so I decided to come out here and practice." Now he had a surgery. He was from down in Louisiana [indistinct 00:13:57]. So I said, "Matthew, he wanted to study surgery under you." He said, "No problem." I said, "Would you do me a favor?" He said, "What's that?" I said, "What the hell? Put him here." So Matthew said, "Okay, I'll do that." Matthew, got him an internship there and went into surgery for him. And Matthew had an interesting case midnight or mid-morning, he called him in there and rub his head about it. "Quick, come on in here. We're going to do so and so this morning. Tomorrow morning, be ready." And as he was operating, he'd be quizzing the hell out of him all the time. So Matthew had this program. | 13:38 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Two years in surgical residency, he sent him to Africa, to Monrovia, Liberia. The Kennedy family had given them a hospital there, and Matthew's job was to keep the circular program up. Now, we went down there and got the runaround with one of those— | 14:37 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | See, I'll tell you about Liberia. You know how Liberia is—In short, I'm not going to take your time, I'm going to tell you about it. See, back in those days, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, all those guys, they have all these bastard children, these Black children. They didn't want to sell them into slavery, they'd have them around their house. | 15:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So these Black bastard children, the Black ones, they worked in the fields. I don't have to work in the field, boss man or cabinet. You got to wait to laugh. It was embarrassing. You feel like washing everything in the Hamilton area, so they sat by this face down there. And Africa sent over these guys out there, so they did it. That's the way Liberia got started. My great grandpa was one of them. He's down in Mississippi, and he was half-half too. So they said him, "Now, if you want to go to Africa, we'll send you back to Africa." They were giving you a pass way back on the boat. They would allowed him 250 acres after he got there. So great grandpa said, "He got the money and he ran off in the woods. He got off the boat and left." And he came out of the woods and bought a farm down in Mississippi. | 15:26 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, anyway. Whenever you go into Liberia, you don't find them with these foreign names like Ubuwat and Baba and Boboba. All the big shots down there are named Smith, Williams, Chief. My ancestors came back and she was like, "Now, how did it happen?" Easy. When they got over there from America back in those days, they knew American ways. He got to a poor African chief drunk and got over the land away from him. So my brother went around there and he got to knocking around with this little girl, her name was Sherman. Her dad had a rubber plantation, 50,000 acre rubber plantation. She was an African, named Sherman. Know damn well we'd moved there. | 16:31 |
| Paul Ortiz | When you were growing up, did your parents or your grandparents ever tell you any stories about Reconstruction? | 17:20 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well, yeah. Grandpa was telling me about Dexter. See, during the war, they marched over down to Vicksburg. You remember, they had a big battle in Vicksburg right down through Port Gibson on down there? Anyway, great grandpa was grown then, but every time they'd get a gun run, he'd jump up too. Yeah, yeah. And when the old boss man get him like that, so they'd beat the hell out of him. So when they got to going down through Mississippi, going through Vicksburg, all of them ran off into the woods, and passed through Port Gibson. Now Port Gibson was a pretty, little town. And see, it was scorching all the way to down there, but they didn't burn it because it was too pretty to burn. Well, that's one thing that went down, they didn't do it. | 17:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, as I said, my great grandpa bought a farm down there after he did the man. He told me how bad it was. He said, "Look, if we didn't get out of the way when we go down the street, they'd beat the hell out of you. You say good morning to White woman and they beat you." They spoke to him no more. Nobody said a word about it. | 18:24 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And about the Ku Klux Klan. I never did hear a word down there, but they called it the White Caps. You know how the White Caps, would get to folks, would beat the hell out of niggers that tell them all freedom. And then I remember The Birth of a Nation. I remember seeing that film. And see, around that time you knew your place. You Black, you knew your place. You had to say yes to all the White folks. They're children when they get 10 years old, you got to call them Ms and Mr, all that sort of stuff. The Birth of a Nation, I'll never forget it. I really saw what it was all about through that thing. And, man, they got mean as hell. White people got meaner. | 18:45 |
| Paul Ortiz | After the movie came out? | 19:43 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Mm-hmm. The movie came out. You better not smile. Don't smile them White folks but it's cool now. When you went to the theater, you had to go up the alley and up the back stairs there. | 19:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | So as a Black person watching Birth of a Nation, how did you feel when you watched it? | 19:47 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I felt mean, evil, rebellious. I said, "One of these times, I'm going to get out that damn thing." And we were up in the balcony, you had to be quiet up there. You try to laugh, but somebody says, "Shut up, nigger." That's right. When you turn around and meet somebody, they'd all cheer them downstairs. But six months after Birth of a Nation, it was hard to get along. You couldn't walk near them. The White folks got mad off then. | 19:58 |
| Paul Ortiz | So you had that movie worsened the relationship? | 20:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Yeah, it sure did. See, I've finished my book already. Okay. I'll head out in California, try to get somebody to buy it then. But I definitely had in there about how I felt about all those things. Yeah. | 20:31 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. | 20:49 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | It was bad. So you'd have to have—Of course now, all the Blacks didn't take it like that. I will tell you this story. I have to tell you this one. Well, after Civil War, the carpetbaggers came down and got everything from the White folks, and they're still mad about it. Anyway, there was one family, Pages family. They got a hold of, I think they had about 600 acres of land, Pages. And of course now, the White folks didn't like the Pages, but the Pages didn't give a damn about the White folks. | 20:59 |
| Paul Ortiz | Yeah. The Pages were carpetbaggers? | 21:37 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | No, the Pages were Black folks. | 21:39 |
| Paul Ortiz | Black folks. | 21:40 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay. All right, here we go along now. Oh, I see they have run-ins every now and then. And one particular Page's name was Hamp Page. He was a bad man. He said, "Don't fool with me because I ain't nobody. But if you fool me, I'm going to get back at you." And he packed boxes in a ship, threw a dime on him, if it pissed him, you'd never see that dime anymore. He was that damn good. So one day when I was in town, Port Gibson Avenue, they plantation was just about eight or nine miles from Port Gibson. One of them, they had to run-in with a White man and the White man slapped him. So he beat the hell out of that White man right there. The White folks said, "We can't have that nigger beating him like that. We're going to decide themselves now. We ain't had no beating like that. We going to fix them all right now. Let's go with them tomorrow and fix them." | 21:41 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So they went out in the country and they dug a trench, kill all these Page niggers and put them in that trench. So they went down and called him out, "Hamp, come out here." Said "What you want?" He said, "Come out here." So he came out and one of them took a shot at him and he started. So they killed about 12 of them. They never got back to town. They buried them out there. They didn't want everybody else to know. They buried him in that hole that they dug for the Pages. And Hamp—and Uncle Josh, I remember him, he was crippled in one leg. They shot him in the hip. Hamp got away, they didn't catch him. I understood from them, he put on a dress and caught the train. And when they came along, the White folks got the farm. Got the farm. They steal it. I remember it was called Oaklawn Plantation. But every now and then, somebody would call it The Pages. | 22:39 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Now, these Pages, some of them did run off. See, Uncle Josh, he was Hamp's brother. He was shot in the hip and he limped around there all the time. And some of the others, their nephews, uncles, aunts, nephews around there were coming on. Okay. I heard about this thing, they came along, she never did find Hamp. Oh, I ain't lying to you. I didn't make this damn stuff up. I'm telling you right the way it was. | 23:40 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay, here I go out to St. Louis and intern out in St. Louis. One more about 3:00, they said, "Doctor, come over here, I want to talk to you." I said, "Yes, ma'am. Do you need treatment?" I said, "You from Port Gibson?" she said, "Who do I look like?" I said, "Yeah, I've seen somebody who look like you." But now I thought his cousin's name, he was a Page, Bob Page. She looked just like Bob Page, but I didn't realize because I wasn't putting the two together. She said, "Do I look like any of the Pages?" I said, "You look just like Bob Page with a face of a girl." She said, "Who are y'all people?" I said, "Hamp Page was my daddy, he just died two years ago." She said, "What? Hamp?" So she told me the story. | 24:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Hamp Page put on a dress. Caught a train, went out to St. Louis. He lived in St. Louis a full life. He married and had 2 or 3 children in St. Louis, and he died. "They hadn't try to come to him. Nobody tried to get Hamp Page because he's too damn bad. He's too bad with the pistol." Now, this thing happened to me. Well, it sounds farfetched, but it sounds like I picked up a good lie, but that's God's truth. | 25:09 |
| Paul Ortiz | And this was during Reconstruction? Around that time? | 25:37 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | No. Yeah, this was during Reconstruction when all that happened. Well, I think it happened to Hamp now. I put it about 1885 to the nineties. Somewhere in there, just when that happened. Because he was still leaving there, in 1804. Uncle Josh was about 60 years old at that time. Now, can you figure out this thing here? There was one girl down there who wrote a page about her. Bob Page married this lady, had a daughter named Rosa Leslie, and they belonged to one of the churches there. I'll never forget that. But anyway, Rosa came up with me and my brother, and all came right along. Rosa went off to school at a little Christian school down there near Jackson. And she finished. And she had a beautiful voice. And her school would put up a run by. This church, some White place up north got attached to Rosa. They knew she had such a beautiful voice, she have to get voice training. Now Rosa gets out and she teaches. Her voice was so good, she got singing all over the country. It all goes back down in Mississippi. She met a guy named Welsh. | 25:43 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, I think Rose is still living. But anyway, she came back home and she can verify all this stuff I'm telling you now. She wrote a book, Rosa Sing or Rosa Sings. I tried to get a copy of that book, but you see the stuff I'm telling you, it's right in there. Every damn thing is there. | 27:25 |
| Paul Ortiz | Mm-hmm. | 27:43 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So that's true. Now you talk about. Oh, yeah. Now, that was one case. Another case. See, all the Blacks didn't take that beating up because of the kid. It started out with that kid, but this Page. There was another family that I remember about this one. He lived in Grand Gulf, this little town. They had a battle in Grand Gulf too. Anyway, this guy lived down there and he was a Mulatto, but they were always tagging after him. He had some property down there. And so he got in a squabble again with some White folks in town, they got him. So he came out with his Winchester and got shooting. And then one guy who lived right there in Tarboro, he was going to shoot him. He went to get this guy, but he came out of the house, he was aiming at this guy and he cracked down and shot him through both legs. And then they went through the muscle, they didn't went through the bone. And anyway, he fell back and threw his gun up, and shot another guy in the foot, this Black guy. I know that happened to all the brothers in Tarboro. They didn't have any hospital in Tarboro. Mama had this boarding house, they placed him downstairs. | 27:46 |
| Paul Ortiz | Now, this happened in— | 29:05 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | In Grand Gulf, a little town about six, seven miles before [indistinct 00:29:12]. | 29:06 |
| Paul Ortiz | And that was where it all happened? | 29:12 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Mm-hmm. As I said, these things happened. Now this guy, after he shot the guy through the leg, they didn't kill him or anything like that, but they arrested him and put him in jail for shooting a White man. He stayed in jail five years. He got out and went on back there. He lived till he died over there. But they went down to get him. He shot the guy in self-defense. You still have to pay that five years in jail. If you didn't do anything down there at that time, they go tell. So mama, see, she had that boarding house, and that's what she did. Now, my daddy was then doing business, and then later on, he got to preaching. So when he died, he was big. | 29:22 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And my sister and brother are in Chicago, and they all got a good job. And my mother, she did pretty well. You didn't have anything to worry about as long as she lived. Because when I got out there and got going out, I'd always send her $100 a month. And my sister was married. The guy wasn't worth a damn. My sister needed some money. Oh, as soon I got back, I got tons of checks, about $1,200 checks. Mom had kept all that damn checks and gave it to my sister. And a whole year later, I said, "Where's the damn checks." Mama was doing all right for herself. As I say, she was self-minded. She knew how to get along by herself. | 30:12 |
| Paul Ortiz | So when you were growing up in Mississippi, was there institution for you growing up that the Black community rallied around or had activities with? | 31:05 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well, one thing was the churches. As I said, Port Gibson was a unique town. Okay. They had one guy there who was good in music, they developed a Black brass band. My dad was playing in the brass band. They had a brass band. And somehow, I don't know how they held it down. They liked to operate everything, I remember that? They performed light operas, and Pinafore and stuff like that. I knew about that. | 31:19 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And I went down to Alcorn. I could always sing, and they let me sing. And I played my trombone. I got that. Anyway. My second year down there, I tried for the choir and got in there, and they wanted to put on Pinafore, all that stuff and Sullivan operetta. So I went back home and I was telling mom and pop about it. I said, "They're going to put on Pinafore down there. I'm in it. I play Dick Deadeye." Pop started singing Dick Deadeye, and mama started singing Buttercup. You know what I'm talking about? Buttercup. She was Buttercup. Well, we did that a long time ago. | 31:56 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay. What happened was that the guy at the music, he directed the band. He got them going in Port Gibson. And when they got off from college, he was having that right after that, after the Civil War. They had the University of Mississippi for the Whites, all right, but this had to go to the Alcorn, they had this school down there and near the river, Oakland College. The landowners had all the big. The landowners built this place out there, it was five miles from the river and five miles from the railroad, and 14 miles from from Port Gibson. | 32:45 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, after the Civil War, they had abandoned the whole damn thing because the eastern plantation had a big house out there and the antebellum house you heard about. But after the Civil War, the big landowners lost everything, they abandoned the school down there. There was a school opened right out in the middle of the woods. They had a big chapel and everything. I wish I can show pictures around it. | 33:31 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, he bought this for the Black folks, and that's why the Alcorn was there. They had that developed. Now Alcorn, it was Alcorn mechanical college. That's what it was. Agricultural and mechanical college. And all the boys had down there for the Good Center for Domestic Science. And then they taught shoemaking, carpentry, painting. And as I say, they had this other stuff. Well, of course you could be a teacher, you could take stuff for education to do that. But all the boys had signed up for agriculture. Of course, I signed up for shoemaking when I went down there. I never wanted to no damn shoemaker. In fact, they got out there and they had started making harness. They had to push all through there. They'd thread through that both ways and pull it tight, and do it again. And I didn't know they had this thing where you push through leather and it's pulled to grasp it in your hand and push it like that. But I was pushing it from here, and it went in hand and it swelled up that big guy. And I never wanted to be no shoemaker. | 33:58 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But anyway, I was doing the music, playing the trombone. I just picked it up and started playing, that's where I was. But now this same guy who got the band together in Port Gibson and established Alcorn needed somebody to take care of the music. So he went down to the music director. He had a double job with a music director and coordinator the food there. Because now my dad was with him, and when I went down to Alcorn when he was down there with music, I had called him Uncle George. He was so close to my daddy. Another thing, I was playing the trombone pretty good when I went down there. And Uncle George, he had a little orchestra students in the dining room. It'd take them too long to get in there for the meet up, so he developed the trombone, trumpet, bass valve, trombone, guitar. Something else, I don't know what they are. | 35:15 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, when I went down there, the guy who had been playing the trombone and down at Alcorn had finished. Another guy knew he was going to get a job but Uncle George gave me the job. So I did pretty good. I thought I was damn good. That being another story which I won't—But see, the Rabbit's Foot Minstrels had their home base with Port Gibson and Mama would run the boarding house. | 36:20 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And in the winter when he came and got ready to go out on the road. They had performed a new show with all the married couples along with my mother. And she had a boarding house, and boarded there too. But see, the single guys raised all the hell, they were out in the city—Mama didn't bother with them at all. | 36:48 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay, here I go. Down to Alcorn two years. I thought it was pretty good. Well, I knew Mr. Walcott. I knew the only guy who owned the damn minstrel show. And one of the fellows down there had been going with the show for three years, playing the trumpet. I said, "Buck, do you think I can get a job with him?" He said, "Yeah, sure. you'll be able to make it." So I saw Mr. Walcott and I said, "Mr. Walcott, come down, I'm around playing trombone. See, I'd like to get a job with you show to make a little extra money." He said, "Who are you?" I said, "Buckingham knows me." "You've talked to Buck?" I said, "Yeah. I would be able to make the tour." He decided to get nagged about the job. So the show went on the road about the middle of March. The school was out until the middle of May. But Mr. Walcott sent two teachers down there for Buckingham and myself. | 37:13 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I'd meet him in Greensboro, North Carolina. We met him there. Train got there about 3:00 in the morning. So we looked for a place to stay and got to see that boarding house over there, an old boarding house. A young girl came to see us. We said, "We are looking for a place to stay. We got to stay here." She said, "Okay, come on in." Signed her name in the book. "Hey, what are you doing in Greensboro?" I said, "We came to join the minstrel show." "Say what?" Mama, come here. Come here. Mama, these two guys want to come to join the minstrel show. They want to stay here tonight? You know it ain't no good." But you see, that one single guy, the minstrel raised all the hell everywhere they went, stole and everything. "Mama, you're going to let them stay here?" I said, "Oh, shit." She said, "Where are you from?" We told her where we are from. "Okay, let them stay. You'll stay till tomorrow anyway." We had to stay until the show the next day. | 38:20 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So next day, they said, "Well, I don't know about tomorrow night." We said, "Well, can we leave our instruments here?" "Yeah." There are many colleges in Greensboro, that's all girls school now. Anyway, coeducational back in the old days and the guy teaching music out there was from Alcorn. We knew him, so we said, "Well, we'll go out and see what Joe has to say today." We walked all the way up to school, saw Joe. Joe said, "I'm so glad to see you guys. You came just in time. See, today it's commencement and I need the trumpet player and I don't have a damn no trombone player at all." So we knew he was going to play in every damn thing, because he'd been down at Alcorn. But we came out and got instruments, came out to play. And the graduates. The first girl on the first row was the one that wanted to put us in the street the night before. She apologized and said, "I didn't know you. If I'd known you knew anybody out here, I never would have done that. Please excuse me." | 39:25 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well now. Okay, they had a dance at the A&T College, that's in Greensboro too. A&T did a dance? Got cutting the rug around there and a cute little girl just danced. She said, "Where are you from?" I said, "I'm from Mississippi. I'm from Alcorn." "Oh, you went to Alcorn? So what are you doing out here?" I said, "I'm with the minstrel show." "Say what?" That's a bad word to say. She had a headache. Everybody had a headache then. | 40:36 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said to Buck, "What's the matter with this girl?" He said, "What did you tell her?" He said, "What did you say to her? Somebody stop him." I said, "She asked me what I was doing here, I told her." He said, "Hell, you never should have told her you with the minstrel show. That's the worst bunch in the world. Scum of the earth is minstrel shows." So now then that I was not a hot number. | 40:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And then on the next day, the show got there. The guy stepped off. He was the band director and said, "Boys, I brought you guys some news. We're going to play on the way downtown." I asked him, I said, "When are we going to practice? He said, "What you say, son? Son, we don't practice. We practice stuff when you see it." See, now here I got this. I'm in the middle of a mess here. I've never seen this music before and I was going to do it. We started down the street, trombone was in first row. I was getting about every third or fourth note. And all of a sudden, it just got a little faint. And I looked around, this band had gone this way and I was still going that way. I didn't see the drum major when he did that. So man, I knew damn well I wasn't going to be here that long. I lasted two weeks before he fired me. Oh, that's the other day. Okay, well, I guess I run off at the mouth enough. Now, what do you want me to talk about? | 41:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | No, that's really interesting. We can move to 1935 when you were coming to Tarboro. | 42:33 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Mm-hmm. | 42:40 |
| Paul Ortiz | There's no Black doctor. | 42:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That's right. Mm-hmm. | 42:44 |
| Paul Ortiz | You come in. You look around. Where did Black people get medical attention? | 42:47 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well, you see now, there was a hospital right on the other street over here at that time. And there were about five White doctors in town. And they had a clinic up there on St James Street before the Tarboro Clinic. It was a building. It had an open front door like this. Inside the front door foyer, they had a door here marked Colored and one over here marked White. You have to go in there like that. And of course, in the hospital, they had a Colored ward and a White ward. And the Colored ward, the sheets were all patched up. The gowns were raggedy, old, patched everything. Everything had Colored stamped on it. Yeah, They had to have Colored stamped on sheets and pillowcases, and all of them cheap coats. They had no White folks wearing Colored gowns. And I remember when I first got to [indistinct 00:43:54]. I went to the drugstore, but I wanted to meet the doctors. So I went to Tarboro Clinic. I went into Colored doors. | 42:54 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I met Dr. Roberts, he was the first one I met here. He was started the same time I was. We sat there and talked about an hour and a half. And when I left, he said, "You don't have to go through that door, you can go out this door. The white door." I said, "Oh, well you get this one, I'm going to have this one here." That day when I first came here, I started finding the things right there. Not making a lot of racket about it, but we were actors. Everything we had White ward and Black ward. Even down to textbooks. I went to the textbook store one day and all these had W all written down. Back when they had to move with C all the way down. The textbooks were segregated, everything. | 44:02 |
| Paul Ortiz | So how was the medical care for Black people at that time? | 44:49 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | As I said, a while back, those were the sheer crappers. And if you got sick out there in the country, the boss man didn't agree to pay for your medical bills, you were on your butt. People were having babies out there and have an infection from them and dying. | 45:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Now one lady I saw after I had been here about a month, went to call me out to see this lady in the country. And she had a baby, and retained the placenta, afterbirth didn't come down. And then at two weeks, that damn thing got an infected, and she had septicemia. She had it so bad she had abcesses in her eyes. Now I got it out, but it was too late, because she died. And that's what was happening. She couldn't get into hospitals. | 45:19 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Now folks in town, you waited for the White folks to go. The houseboy, working two to three little things around here. They didn't have a good job. They did stuff like that, they didn't have a good job, they had to sweep the floor and everything, but White folks did all that way. And there was nothing much he could do. Going wage was, if you made a dollar a day you're doing fine. We didn't have any Black doctors. A lot of folks would just do home remedies on everything. Of course, you got bad and had to go to a White doctor. It was bad and— | 45:50 |
| Paul Ortiz | Okay. Okay, talk about benevolent. | 0:05 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Because some doctors, they're benevolent. One doctor was very good. He was very benevolent. He's a good doctor and he'd do it. Offer his people $3 dollars. They went to pay his office. Of course, now, as I say, a lot of people in town, they'd have to be owing, they owed the doctor all the time. They owed the doctor all the damn time. But anyway, they had a hard time because, as I say, one doctor, knowed Dr. Ravy, I always talk about him, how he was. But anyway, he was a good type of guy. | 0:06 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Now, when I first got here, the hospital was—A lot of Black people know if you were going to hospital, there's most times they were too late anyway. That was synonymous with death, like I say. So I'd been here about two weeks the day the man called me. His grandson had eaten a lot of green fruit and was having the severe diarrhea. And had the White doctor waiting on him for about a week and still—all the time. | 0:41 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So they called me and I'm fresh out of St. Louis. Better treat the diarrhea with fluid and all that crap. I went around there and put the fluid, I had some fluid with me. Started him on fluid and he would just keep on doing it. He was going down, down, down. So his fever was so high, we were putting more hot packs on and all that sort of stuff, trying to cool him off. | 1:14 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So finally I told his grandmother, said, "Look," I said, "this child is going to die. I don't think I can save him." Said, "I need to see somebody else with this child." Said, "Who do you want?" I said, "I don't know. I just got here." And the house was full of these old women round there, so I said, "Who's been treating this kid? Children?" They told me Dr. Ravy. So I hadn't ever met Dr. Ravy, so I had to call him. | 1:40 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | In fact, I called him, told him to come down there, see what he thought about the child. So he came down and he asked me what I'd done. He started putting application on the child and everything he tried to do I'd done already. Everybody knew it, old women doing like this. | 2:06 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So finally [indistinct 00:02:28] said, "Howdy, see, this doctor know far more than I know. He done far more than I'd be able to do." Said, "I want to tell you one thing right now." Said, "This child's in bad shape and if this baby dies it's not the doctor's fault. So he done far more than I could have done. Good day." Now, all he had to do was just say one word. "Why the hell ain't this child in the hospital?" All he had to do was say one word against me, and all them old women in the house then, they would have gone, just like that. In other words, he saved my life there as a doctor in Tarboro. | 2:26 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That's right, okay. Now, there I told you I had trouble with the school board. With the school. Had a bunch of [indistinct 00:03:19] had to do everything the school board told me to do and, of course, the chairman of the school board was a White doctor. And, of course, he was right on my ass from the very beginning. I tried to get, for instance, there was one thing to have—end of World War Two, in the library out here, there's a tribute, there's to the White soldiers. Nothing to the Blacks. And I think, where in the hell we are in here? We paying our tax. They going to take our tax money to build this damn thing? I say, "We ought to have something." | 3:00 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So, [indistinct 00:03:48] had give us some land as a field, for recreations. Land out here in the country. There's your town. So I suggested that we ask them to build us a field house out there. See? Basketball in the middle, with all these [indistinct 00:04:05] round the side where you had a cafeteria and where you could have meeting, everything, round the side. So, I got this idea in mind, we tried to get it together, had an architect who was teaching over at North Carolina Central and come over here and draw the plans for us and everything. So we had a meeting and I took this up to the commissioners, and after we got it all tooled out and everything all fixed up. So I had this thing and I took up that commissioner meeting. | 3:46 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And several Black folks were with us, went up there with us. So, I started talking about this place, "We need this," blah, blah, blah. And I say, "Here, this thing here. Here are the plans, we'd like to have." So town say, "Where in the docks? Hey, lookie here, you turn us over this stuff here. We heard all this before. There somebody else come up with the same thing." Say, "Now, if we were going to have to do this, now y'all get together and come back." They throwing the whole [indistinct 00:05:11] things all over. At the same time, when he said that to guys in the back room said—Start sniggering. I looked round there and saw who it was. | 4:41 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | It was the principal of the school had gotten these folks together, counteract everything we said, had something [indistinct 00:05:26]. So the commissioner said, "Well, we don't know who to believe, so y'all get together." [indistinct 00:05:34] that man, that was bad stuff was that. And right now, it's a modern middle school now, you go there and look at that gymnasium, and the same damn prints that I had, basketball court in the center, rooms all round the side, it's right there, right now. Modern middle school, they built the same damn thing. What you going to do? Yeah. | 5:21 |
| Paul Ortiz | So you're— | 5:57 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Oh yeah, that's right. So now, okay, wait a minute, the school before I do that. So the chairman of the school board, right on, he told the principal, said, "You get anything on, you just let me know." So here comes a lady from out of town, she had a child was born out of town, so child wanted to be admitted to the first grade, had to have the birth certificate. So she had a photostated copy of the birth certificate but she had scratched out there for the child's [indistinct 00:06:33] put another name there. The young teacher had come to Tarboro, she didn't know about the ins and outs and everything, but when she saw that she said, "I can't accept this here, this been altered here." Woman started raising hell, said, "I know when my child was born." She said, "But look here what you got there." "They made a mistake, I didn't make no mistake, they made a mistake. You going to take my child." Said, "I'm sorry, but I can't." | 5:59 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And then she raised so much hell that she had to call the principal. Now, the old principal had retired by his son was acting principal then. But woman raised so much hell that he couldn't let it go like that so he told the lady, said, "I'm sorry, but it has been altered. You bring its proper type, we let your child in." So she said, "My child don't go in there, a lot of them go in there, because I know a lot of them wasn't born in time." If he's born after October the 1st, you couldn't get in. They had to wait another year. | 6:55 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well, the mean time, I had one child was born about October the 20th, and this child dad asked me to [indistinct 00:07:34]. Too bad, the child got to wait a whole year. I had to give him a certificate saying the child was born September 15th, see? And she won out. And all the rest of them had these certificate from the doctors. So they went up there and they told us, this teacher told the parents, "If my child can't go in there, a lot of them here, y'all of them got to come out, and I know, because I know when they were born," see? So she got, so. | 7:26 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I went back to this woman I had given the certificate, I had given the certificate for his daughter, and I told them, "If I get in trouble you're going to have to help me out." They say, "Uh-huh," just happened just what I thought. So I say, "Well, now, I want a list of all these kids that were born after October the 1st with the name, the child, the date they were born, name of the mother, name of the doctor." So I was uneasy about the whole thing. About three weeks later I got a letter from Raleigh. School board. Got ordered to meet them school board to discuss some irregularities. I said, "Oh, shit." | 8:00 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I called it. Asked him, I say, "What is this all about?" He say, "Oh, don't worry about it," he say, "Ain't nothing about it." Say, "Something about the school certificates, you don't have to worry about it." I said, "Oh, yes." So, I tell [indistinct 00:08:58] wife to go round, all these people, and get the names [indistinct 00:09:01]. So when I went to meet them in Raleigh, the chairman of the school board was from Rocky Mount. So, Dr. Bell. And I mean the medical board, see? They going to take my damn license away from me. Something. So he said, "What is this all about?" Say, "You've been charged with giving phony certificates out. That's defrauding the state. You can't do that." Say, "Tell us all about it." | 8:44 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I said, "Where the other doctors?" Say, "What do you mean?" I said, "I got a list here, all these doctors that gave those same certificates." Say, "If you're going to censor me I know you're going to have to do something with them." So, I say, "What the hell is this?" So Dr. Bell says he knew all about the whole damn thing there. He said, "Go on, doctor, tell us about it. Let him talk." So I told my whole, damn situation. So Dr. Bell said, "You know damn well you shouldn't have done that, blah, blah, blah, blah." I say, "But," he say, "Shut up, I'm reprimanding you now." | 9:33 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay. One more thing, I'll be through with this. How they messed me up. One man has a big farm out here in the country, about six miles out. And the overseer called me. You know, they had overseers to run the farm. | 10:10 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He called me and said, "Doctor, there's a lady out there, trying to have a baby and she's in a lot of trouble. Will you go out here and do something for her?" He ran like hell. So I went out there and I had to go way back in the woods, and I got out there and find his lady in labor. The hand was sticking out of the uterus and doing that. So I had to come back to town, got my receptionist, got some ether. Went back out there, hand still—The baby still living in the uterus, hand sticking out, grabbing at things. | 10:25 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I had to anesthetize the woman, put her in deep anesthesia, when uterus relaxed I was ready. See my hand, see how big they are? These are my forceps, see? I could reach in that uterus and turn that baby around, get it by the foot and pull it out there. And didn't have abnormality. Didn't mess up the arm or nothing. | 10:55 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay, I thought I'd done a good job there. Two weeks later I took the bill to the [indistinct 00:11:24] didn't have a laceration in her cervix, see. So she got well, then two weeks later she'd done all right. | 11:16 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I took the bill round to the man who owned the farm. He had a livery stable right across the street over here. And I took it round, took the bill round. He was standing in the doorway with a big walking stick in his hand, where he poked these horses and cows through the side, but when they want to move out. | 11:30 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He standing in the door, he say, "What do you want, boy?" I say, "I'm Dr. Quigless." Say, "You who?" I say, "I'm Dr. Quigless." Say, "You look like a yellow bastard to me. Why in the hell you come here talking like you a God damn—" He cussed me out. | 11:51 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But, see, I had a little pistol in my pocket. I wasn't—no, had to use—I was carrying it then all the time because I tell myself and everything, I don't know what's happening. It just so happened that I did have—I didn't mean to. I didn't do it, put it in my pocket because I was going there, just happened to be in there. | 12:04 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Anyway, he started cussing me out, he called me everything you can think of. I [indistinct 00:12:28] so I [indistinct 00:12:31] myself, I say, "Well, now, no need to get in trouble about this thing because if I do anything, see, I ain't going to let him hit me with that stick or I'm going to shoot the hell out [indistinct 00:12:40]." And I stand there until he finally stop talking. So I turned around, started walking off, and he started, "I said get out of here, if you don't, take my stick and break—" I turned around and he stop again. I did about three times. So I finally walked on [indistinct 00:12:55] raise hell. | 12:22 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I called the sheriff. I went to see the sheriff, I say, "Sheriff," told what had happened round there. Said, "Man cussed me out. The Black bastard, blah, blah, blah." So he said, "What time was it about?" I said, "About two o'clock it happened." "Shit. Two, the hell, he get drunk at 12 o'clock, he throw my ass across the street if I went there at two." Believe it or not. That man's grandson is a position in Tarboro right now. Windlow. And so I told Windlow about it, I was talking to a group once about my trouble that I have, and I told the story about it. He was sitting over there in the corner. And after I got through I said, "That his grandson sitting in the corner." I had experiences. Now, that's all right, I've seen them all. What else you want? | 12:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | So, that must have been quite a struggle. | 13:49 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Oh, boy. | 13:53 |
| Paul Ortiz | And you come here 1935 to open up a hospital for Black people. | 13:53 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | '36. Yeah. | 13:57 |
| Paul Ortiz | '36. First hospital for Black people. How many beds do you have and how did you get this going? | 13:58 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well, as I say, really, I did have 18 beds when I opened up, see? Well, now, it was shortly after World War II. A lot of surplus material. I got surplus beds. I got surplus autoclave that cost about $1,500. And I got it from Norfolk, they had naval supplier thing. They'd bought it for a new boat, new ship they were building, but the townsmen building the ship, and I got it for $150. And as I say, I got these beds and everything from the surplus beds, and I had a place that would advance me the stuff that I have just pay on it, they just let me go on it. So I didn't have no trouble getting started like that. | 14:08 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | And now as to the nurses, the same doctor I told you about that was chairman of the school board, in Tarboro, he had a private hospital up the street there. Dr. Bass. So I went to see him, I said, "Doctor, I'm thinking about building a hospital. Everybody need it. I'd like to know something about before I go into it." I said, "How do you get nurse to man your hospital?" He said, "The best way I could." I said, "Yeah." And I tried talking, everything, he give me negative answer right there. I say, "Well, how much you pay them?" He say, "Anything, I get them to work for." Every time he give me answer like that, so I [indistinct 00:15:39] this bastard, I see what he's doing here now. | 14:57 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That was before all this other stuff came up about the school board, but anyway. I say, "I certainly thank you." I say, "That's given some very helpful information." Because I had one, had a guy who'd finished [indistinct 00:15:56] and he was down in Florida. Fort Lauderdale. He'd gone down there and he'd done the same thing. He up and built a hospital there for Black folks in Fort Lauderdale. I knew about [indistinct 00:16:07], I knew him very well, so I called him one day, I said, "I'm coming down figure how you did this damn thing." I went there, took my wife. Me and my wife went down there. First child just about liked that, we all went down there. Stayed down there a week with him, helped him in the operation, I found out how he trained, he got his nurses, how he trained them. | 15:43 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Now, he had RN, but each one had two jobs. She had nursing job and she was either in the food service and the lavatory, anesthetist or something like that. See? All of them are trained for two jobs. That's the way we did that thing. So I got a lot of information about how to run the damn place from him. So came back up here and, as I say, I went to work. I got the building place, and here we go. So that's the way I had to get started. I had to do double things, get things started like that. And I had cooperation of all the people. And I always say this the thing about Tarboro, there's a nucleus of good people in Tarboro. Good White people. If it hadn't been for that, my ass wouldn't have been here. But they in the corner. They wanted to do more for Black folks but peer pressure kept from doing anything. | 16:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | See, when Martin Luther King got going round here, down in Williamston you know they start the marching? They never marched in Tarboro but down Williamston they marched, they tore the damn thing, town hall, to pieces. We didn't want no marching around here. You know that though. They didn't have an interracial committee. So we squawked about that. And Dr. Robertson, he was mayor of the town that time, so he appointed interracial committee. Dr. Hudsy was the chairman. All this stuff is true stuff I'm telling you. He was the chairman. Had about three or four Whites on there and three or four Blacks. | 17:22 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So we had a meeting and we told them what we thought about the White water and the Black water. And another thing that happened, about what happened at the [indistinct 00:18:09] store, woman went in there with a little girl, Black woman. "Mama," said "I want to doo-doo." She said to the clerk, say, "You got a place? My little child want to go to the bathroom, you got a place?" Said, "We ain't got no place for Black folks, for Colored folks." She say, "What am I going to do?" Said, "I don't know what you're going to do," said, "We don't have a place here." So she told the girl, said, "Put it right down, right there." In the middle of the damn aisle in [indistinct 00:18:33] store. Right down, that little girl squatted on the floor and doo-dooed all over the damn floor. And I bet you they fixed some place there. | 18:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | About the same time, out in Scotland Neck. They didn't have any bathroom, no facilities for people to relieve themself, and this man in Scotland Neck went up in the alley to pee. He peed out of his penis and some White women drove up and they got him for indecent exposure. Exposure. And put his ass in jail for six months. That's the way it was. Wasn't that nice. (laughs) | 18:41 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | [indistinct 00:19:13] in Harlem and marched them down the street but I just done my job. And as I say, a lot of good people in Tarboro appreciated it. If it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't have been here. From the very first day. | 19:08 |
| Paul Ortiz | When the hospital was starting, how did the Black community react? | 19:33 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | They were very glad. They were very glad of it. Very glad. I tell you now, I did a hospital again, way back there when I was [indistinct 00:19:50] I don't know, some part of it. I don't know whether the state was in. I think it was the federal government started a little program, taking care of these teenagers, Black teenagers, way back then. Let's see, now that was about four years after I got to Tarboro. And they picked Bricks out there as the place to have this thing. It was a summer camp thing. Summer camp thing. So they had a lady who was head of it, and they hired a nurse, and asked the McClains, Mr. McClain, thinking he had managing the farm out there, they asked him what doctor he should get. They would need a doctor too. | 19:38 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Now, these old guys, the four guys out of Rocky Mount, they knew they should, one of them, because they'd been here a long time. | 20:35 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But it just so happened that McClain was out there, getting ready for county fair. You know, we had county fairs in those days. But they always had the White part and the Colored part. McClain was helping them get things straightened out in the Colored part. He was in here, working late here in town, so he ate two or three hamburgers and a hot dog and thing, and he got gas, got a lot of indigestion. Having chest pain, he thought he would die. | 20:40 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So they brought him down and the whole of, I had this place, they brought him down there. And he didn't have anything but indigestion so I gave him something to knock the pain out, told him to lie down there a little while till he got straightened out. And the pain was gone about 10 or 15 minutes and he never forgot it. When they asked him what doctor they should get for this little summer camp, he recommended me. So that's why I got on out there, that was [indistinct 00:21:37] what the hell, he just got you and he just said, "Yeah, we don't get it." But it was due to McClain getting me on, you see? | 21:10 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Okay, I went out there and what I had to do, I had to talk to the kids about health and everything. Immunize them, or I had to give them vaccination against typhoid fever, stuff like that, so I'd be sure they had smallpox and things. | 21:44 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | That was my job. And they paid us. They paid us, how much did they pay? They pay about $250 a month. Never full month, [indistinct 00:22:12] nights. But I stayed out there with them. And during the times out there, they have it in Bricks out there, at that time, Mr. Inborden was still living but they closed Bricks School completely. And what did they have out there? Had two or three big dormitory-like buildings. Had a place, a diner, kitchenette. Kitchen thing, they had that thing there. And they had a building that they could use for administration building. There was everything was just nice. | 22:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So then when I got out there I said, "It's just a damn shame, got all this stuff out here, and nothing, going to waste." So I talked to the Black doctors at Rocky Mount. Said, "Lookie here, we ought to be able to build a hospital out there. We can get a hospital going." So we talked it over in a little meeting, the Black doctors having a meeting about once a month. Said, "Why can't we get together and do it?" That's been my mind, see? But what happened was they were a little jealous of me, I was going too fast, see? So one of the guys said, "Hell, if we build it, you going to make all the money." I said, "No." I said, "But it'd be for all of us. We can all get there and I think we can get started. Get Bill Kleid to come over here from Raleigh and get us started on a surgery and everything. And we can get going." And I said, "Look here, it's all right here." | 22:42 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | "Hell, you build it, dammit, the hell, you're the one that going to make the damn money out of it." I said, "But—" They the two that they had told me, and I hated to see it. They were big buildings out there, dormitories like them, everything. All you had to do was select any one of them. Any one of them. And they had [indistinct 00:23:50]. I got five [indistinct 00:23:51], one over here and one at the back. Tearing them damn building out there. Right now, they still out there. But when they tore the buildings down, they threw them up, going to sell them for scrap iron. Said, "Hey, hey, wait a minute here." So I got two, got a fire escape here and the one at the back, came right from Bricks. | 23:26 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So it's just bad, I hated the situation out there, but that place could have been just—I don't know what we could have had out there if they'd just cooperated but nobody wanted to cooperate with me. | 24:10 |
| Paul Ortiz | How many doctors and nurses do you have here? | 24:25 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Well, now, I always had—Another thing about the doctors, a lot of guys finishing internships and residences but hadn't opened their offices. Nobody had no damn money, you know? The internship didn't pay, they were on about four, five—About three or four Black hospitals didn't pay residents anything. St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, and I think they had one down—I don't think they paid anything down here, Charlotte, where they had a hospital. And then Nashville, I think they paid a little bit there, but the rest of them didn't pay anything. The internship, you wait for nothing. And you got your uniforms, and bull, that's all you got. | 24:28 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So, the fellows finishing their residence, they finished the internship for nothing. Want to get some money, they opened a practice and paid, I could get them to come out here and work for me a year. And if they got a little money, got enough money to get started, on their feet, they go out different places and go to work. So I had one fellow who was here with me. | 25:10 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | He would have been to St. Augs College in Raleigh, he came out here and he left here and had to go to the Army, and when he came back, said, oh, we got a contract with him now. "You can't start practicing within 50 miles of Tarboro." But he gets here, see, I give them a damn practice, they come and take it away from me, see? I put that my contract. He couldn't get any closer so he went to Rich Square. No, he went to Rich Square before he went to the Army. When the Army got him he came back and went to Williamston. See? | 25:37 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | I had guys come here, guy, Henderson now, he's in legislature now. Can't think of the name just now, but I had several of them. And whenever I had to leave town I could always get somebody to come in here. They'd save up their vacations and what not, if I wanted to leave town for two or three weeks, I had to get them to come in, had to pay them, they'd stay here for me, see? And I was able to get a guy who had finished his residence, internship, who had finished—Hey, how you doing? | 26:08 |
| Speaker 3 | Hi. | 26:43 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | For somebody who had finished from a second rate college, medical school, who couldn't get out and practice till they got their license. They could practice under me until they got their license. So I was always able to get somebody every year to take over. That wasn't any trouble. But that's the way we handling it. | 26:44 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | So I was here by myself. In the beginning I'd been rusty on surgery, anything like that. I hadn't had so damn much of anyway, but this, there was Bill Clark, Dr. Clark in Raleigh, St. Agnes Hospital, he'd done residency over there and he was general surgical practice, Raleigh. And for the first six months, before I opened the damn place, I get up at 6:00 in the morning to get to Raleigh, be about 7:30, 8:00, and assist him in operation, and get back in time to open my office. I did that for six months. Then after I opened up, I opened my place here, I had Bill Clark to come in, do the operation, assist me in the operations for six more months. Then I was on my own. | 27:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | But nowadays, for that you got to get trained. See, everybody could get on the grandfather clause or something like that. Ed Robson, the same way he came. He hadn't been in any residence in surgery. Back in those days you could do anything, you could do it, see? Where's [indistinct 00:28:01]. | 27:45 |
| Speaker 4 | He would like to know if you could [indistinct 00:28:04]. | 28:01 |
| Milton Douglas Quigless | Let me talk to him a minute. | 28:01 |
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