Leroy Upperman interview recording, 1993 July 20
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| Karen Ferguson | All right, Dr. Upperman, if you could begin by telling me a little bit about where you grew up and the community in which you grew up. | 0:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | I was born in 1913, January first, in Jersey City, New Jersey. This was across the river from New York City. It was an industrial area. It was an integrated community. Most of the people were of mixed-business background. There was a lot of Irish people there. My father was a Pullman porter. He left school at the fourth grade, and migrated north for the purpose of seeking a job. He got employment with the Pullman Company, railroads. He was married. He had five boys. | 0:09 |
| Leroy Upperman | And his wife, our mother, died when I was about eight. He raised the children the best he could. He was basically a good, hardworking man. Very conservative. Saved what little money he had and invested it in a few houses and so forth. Of the five boys, all of them did something. The oldest became a lawyer. The next one was an electrician. The next one was just a hired hand at a garage. I was the next one, who became a doctor, and the youngest one was an undertaker. Our life was basic, simple. Meat and potatoes and that's it. We never had any basic trouble. And well, that's that. | 1:10 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now you said your father came from the South. Where— | 2:13 |
| Leroy Upperman | Came from Raleigh. | 2:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | From Raleigh. Okay. | 2:20 |
| Leroy Upperman | He lived in Raleigh. His father was a carpenter. During that time, I understand a lot of young people migrated north for jobs. My mother came from Columbia, South Carolina. Don't know much about her background. | 2:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. So do you know anything more about your grandparents? Your grandfather was a— | 2:41 |
| Leroy Upperman | On my father's side, there is limited knowledge. Very little. I knew his brother, who was Pullman Porter, and his sister who used to live in Winston-Salem. Well, she just worked. And another sister of his, who lived in New York, who did domestic work, New York City. | 2:45 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did you know your grandparents at all, your gran? | 3:19 |
| Leroy Upperman | I didn't know any on the paternal side. I knew my mother's mother and a few aunts on her side. They were from South Carolina. They were very, very fair in complexion. My uncle was very fair. You could hardly tell him from White. | 3:22 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Did that affect their job opportunities or anything? | 3:50 |
| Leroy Upperman | I don't think so. No, at those time, there were no real racial problems as we see them now. The racial problems were probably in the sense that you knew that you were inferior and certain things you could do, but certain things you couldn't. But my father was dark complexioned and my mother was moderate complexion. And the five boys had variations of that complexion, but that never played an important part. We knew that in general, that White people were in a better position than we were. | 3:58 |
| Leroy Upperman | I have never had any racial problem. I've never been called nigger. Once in a junior high school in Jersey City, some White boys cornered me and they said something about, in a joke, "Nigger, nigger, never die." But I've never been outright called a nigger or anything. My father was very conservative. He respected the position between the Blacks and Whites, and I remember he said that as a Pullman porter, he was told that if a White woman fell from the train, "Don't touch her." And this stuck in his mind, but we never had any racial problems. I do know that he had a rifle that he kept at home. Well, he never used it except to fire it to celebrate the end of World War I, but I knew that he had that. | 4:41 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, did your mother work at all? You said your father was a— | 5:49 |
| Leroy Upperman | Actually, I don't remember much about my mother. If she were to walk in here now, I wouldn't know her, but I'm sure she did not work. She had five hard-headed boys to take care of, but she did not work. My father was industrious. He saved his money and he bought several houses that he used to rent out. He wasn't wealthy, but he was tight. And when he died, he was able to leave each child a house. He sent all the boys to whatever education they wanted. | 5:53 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, were you a bit better off than most people in the Black community in Jersey City? | 6:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | I was better off in the sense that my father saved his money, and we were meat and potatoes. He never embellished a lot, but we always had food in the house. We always had a home. He saved his money. He bought him a car, then he had a few suits. But so far as most of the people I know, the people didn't save their money like he did. | 6:42 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Right. Could you talk a little bit more about the neighborhood in which you grew up? | 7:11 |
| Leroy Upperman | I don't remember the house I was born. Jersey City was the place right across the river, the Hudson River from New York. A lot of people, White and Black, came for maybe not rural, but suburban dwellings. And they would live there and then go to New York and so forth. New York was a railroad center and so forth. To me, I remember two— | 7:18 |
| Karen Ferguson | I'm sorry. Okay. | 7:49 |
| Leroy Upperman | You all right? | 7:49 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. | 7:57 |
| Leroy Upperman | We lived on Cedar Street. This is the old Dutch name, and these were the typical row houses, with two windows in the door and so forth. And on that block, about eight of the houses were occupied by Black people. And on the other side of the street, there were White people. There never were any racial conflicts. We just knew they were over there and we lived on our side. We moved to Virginia Avenue, one of the houses that he bought, and this was similar. But it was, I guess about— They had a big street there, Jackson Avenue, which was the commercial street to there. But three or four blocks there were mostly Blacks, but even half of those blocks were White. So it was a ghetto inside of a little rent thing. | 7:59 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. All right. So it was never integrated, insofar you never lived in an area where there were Black people and White people living right next door to each other? | 9:00 |
| Leroy Upperman | Oh, yes. | 9:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 9:11 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. And I went to an integrated school in Jersey City, when all the schools in Jersey City were integrated. When my mother died and I was in the fourth grade, my father married again and we went to Asbury Park. And Asbury Park, which is about forty miles from Jersey City, a Seaco summer resort. They had an unusual situation there. They had a Black grammar school, and the Black kids that lived in the district that served that school went to the Black grammar school. Now, there was one other grammar school, which is more in the White section, but one or two Blacks who lived in that section went to that school. | 9:12 |
| Leroy Upperman | This school was called Bangs Avenue School, and it was divided into two sections. The north section was for the Whites, and the south section was for the Blacks. And the principal was White. The White school was a little bit larger and a little bit more elaborate. The Black section had twelve teachers. Wait a minute, from the first to the eighth, I had four. Well, had eight teachers, and the eighth grade teacher was the principal. He was Black. The schools were separated by an auditorium. The auditorium was used by both sides as they needed it. | 10:12 |
| Leroy Upperman | As far as I know, the Black principal was responsible to the Board of Education, and so forth. The only difference I know in geography of the school was that the White playground was much larger, but that didn't mean too much. I understand later on, after talking with folks, that at the time of setting up that school, there was objection on the part of White people, of Black teachers teaching White people, White students. And of course, after the Civil Rights Act, they integrated the whole thing and it was all mixed up. The high school was integrated and so forth. | 11:10 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, the neighborhoods in which you grew up, were they close-knit neighborhoods? | 12:01 |
| Leroy Upperman | In lifestyle and so on? | 12:08 |
| Karen Ferguson | In terms of people caring for one another and looking out for one another, being close. | 12:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | I think it was a typical small town neighborhood. We might have known some Whites who we went to school with or something, but there was always a difference. This was a typical Southern town up north. The railroad track separated the better side, which is the beach direction, from the lesser— | 12:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, this is in Asbury— | 12:44 |
| Leroy Upperman | Asbury Park. And on the ocean side, the wealthy side, that's where the hotels were and the big business was. We had some White people that we knew, but not too close. There were a lot of immigrants. Italians and all who came in and they settled the area. | 12:47 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, these immigrants, did they live in the Black neighborhood or did they— | 13:13 |
| Leroy Upperman | Oh, yeah. Next door, across the street. One guy had a macaroni factory, and another lady on the other side had a little store and her little bootlegging place. And the Black neighborhood comprised about six blocks. That's where the Black churches were and all that. And early on, if it was expedient for some White business to be in there, it would be. But eventually became mostly Black, and then— | 13:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now, these Italians and recent immigrants, now would you be closer to them than— | 13:53 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. You could go, and most of them had these macaroni factories or they have a place where they sell Italian food or wine, or beer or something. You could go. Racial incidents were very few, but you felt that you could go in. It was all right. There's no big problem. So far as interracial dating and all that, this didn't take place. | 14:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Who were some of the people in your neighborhood to whom you were particularly close? Were there adults whom you looked up to, who lived in the neighborhood or— | 14:34 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, of course it's always the preachers, whatever they stand for. We talked about that. School teachers, principal. The doctors. We had a couple of doctors and they were role models. The dentists. That's about it. We had one man who was an outstanding businessman. He was an electrician. Name was Knuckles, and he came there and set up his business. He had problems, but he was successful. Because he had trouble with unions and all that type of thing, but he was diplomatic enough to make a good living and have a good business. He was a good role model. One of my best role models was a scout master. He was from Mississippi. He was a very fair-skinned fella, but he came from Mississippi. His name was William Steele. And we had Boy Scout troops, and he was just a fine person. | 14:53 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Now, would all these men live in your neighborhood? Would they be living right around where you— | 16:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | All the people I described lived within, I would say, the six to eight block encompassment. | 16:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Okay. Now, you talked a little bit about church there, or you alluded to the ministry. Was your family church-going? | 16:31 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yep. Now, how much of that you want to hear, I don't know. My father was a member of the Presbyterian church. A Presbyterian church among Blacks, they don't have many members. They're small congregations, like Episcopal churches and all that. But I think honestly his going there was more of a status quo for his family. He was not a religious fanatic or anything. He would go and he would take his wife and his five boys and parade them, and this was good. I don't remember my mother's attraction to it. I think it was closer than his. | 16:39 |
| Leroy Upperman | When she died, he married somebody who was a Baptist. This was in Asbury Park. And of course, she was a Baptist. And we used to go to Sunday school. And as I say, on the religious thing I got my own personal views. A lot of this was emotion and stuff like that. And they'd get you in there and they'd get you to the point that you're supposed to get excited, and get the spirit and all that stuff. Anyhow, I joined the church and so forth. In Asbury Park, we used to go to church for social reasons, to meet the kids and all that. And is that enough, or— | 17:25 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now, so you joined the Baptist church? | 18:13 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, I joined it because I was tired of being embarrassed. Everybody stand up and then all the church members sit down, and left all the sinners standing and all that. But I've never been— Oh, at that time, and this is important to me because I'm not highly religious per se, but former religion, but I'm more philosophical. But at school, they had a course in the Bible, teaching the history of the Bible. And I got more from that than I got from the thing. And the two didn't mesh. So religion as such, that was passed down to me, did not mesh too well. That's the story of my— | 18:15 |
| Karen Ferguson | And did you always feel this way about the church and about this church? | 19:08 |
| Leroy Upperman | I think I've been sort of a self-thinker all my life. My oldest brother who was a lawyer, he was a philosopher and we used to talk a lot of things. And I was curious, and dubious about the religious perspective when I was, well, not so much in the Presbyterian, but when I was in the Baptist church. And if I had questions for the people in the church, they'd run up a wall. Whereas, what I was learning in school about the story of the Bible and all, made more sense. So when I came to Wilmington, I had family. My wife and two children. And just for the family's sake, I joined the Presbyterian church. I'm still a member there, but I'm the best member they got because I send them my money and tell them to go. And you understand? And that's that. | 19:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, when you were growing up, did you ever go South to visit your relatives to all? | 20:20 |
| Leroy Upperman | No. The first time I left New Jersey was to go to school in Pennsylvania. And when I crossed the Delaware River, I really thought I was going somewhere, but never had I been South at all. I hadn't been anywhere. Maybe New York City, and just the environments in North Jersey. | 20:25 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. When you said that there weren't very many racial incidents in your neighborhood, was there any problem with the police or with any— | 20:57 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. In any community, you're going to have problems. But so far as Black on White, we didn't have them. Most of the police were Irish. And if you understand, you're not Irish, so it doesn't matter. But the Irish was something else, and they were the police. And this guy up there, this great politician, he just died not so long ago. I'll think of his name, but he was the kingpin. And we knew that the Irish cops were hard on people and harder on Black people. But so far as police brutality per se, we just knew that the cops— This was not a big problem like it is now. Although, the cops would beat head and we would stay clear of the police. They didn't have any Black police in those days. So, I was probably well up in college before they had any Black police. | 21:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, did you stay in your own neighborhood, or where did you do your shopping and that kind of thing? Did you just stay— | 22:12 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, it was neighborhood shopping. We were relatively poor. When I say that, my father's meat and potatoes, and grocery shopping was in there— Maybe on a big occasion, and I was too small to remember that. They might go somewhere for Christmas shopping. Maybe downtown or something, or maybe to New York. It was 6 cents to New York on the subway, five cents. | 22:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, were there many Black-owned businesses in your area? | 22:49 |
| Leroy Upperman | Undertakers. | 22:54 |
| Karen Ferguson | Undertakers. | 22:54 |
| Leroy Upperman | Other than that, I don't know of any. | 23:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 23:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | I'll tell you something else funny about— When I was a kid, and my daddy, he'd work on the railroad and stay out Tuesdays and come back. But my mother knew when he was coming back, and she would give me the beer pail to take to the saloon to get beer, so it'd be cold for his dinner. | 23:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | I see. | 23:34 |
| Leroy Upperman | Anyhow, that's something that people just don't fit in. But anyhow, I don't remember any racial things at all. I don't remember any. | 23:36 |
| Karen Ferguson | So your father was away for days at a time? | 23:51 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. Of course, after he got a better job and got seniority. But I guess being a Pullman porter, he probably went all over the country. But he had seniority before too long and we'd go from New York to Philadelphia, and maybe Atlantic City or something like that. He'd work on the buffet cars and all. And he did like everybody else, he— I'm sharing his secrets, but he wouldn't mind. He would hustle. And they served steaks on the cars, and he would buy steaks on his own. And then when he was on the car, he'd sell several of his steaks and keep the money, but that was making a living. | 23:54 |
| Karen Ferguson | So he would sell the raw steak, the raw meat? | 24:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | No, he's on a buffet car. | 24:51 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 24:52 |
| Leroy Upperman | And if somebody said, "I want five steaks," so four would be his. | 24:52 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. Okay. | 24:58 |
| Leroy Upperman | But anyhow, he was basically a good man. He was never in any trouble. So, that's that. | 25:00 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, but did people hustle like that? Was that something that people did— | 25:06 |
| Leroy Upperman | Everybody hustles in business. I don't care where y'all at. They still downtown and all that, but that was his hustle. And I share that, showing how a lot of people do. | 25:10 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Okay. Now, you said he owned several homes in that kind of housing, the different— | 25:22 |
| Leroy Upperman | He owned several buildings. And at this time, I guess it was around the recession in the '30s. The late '20s and '30s, a lot of buildings were up. Banks had them and they let them go for small fees, and he would get them. Pay a little bit for them and then rent them out, and pay off the little mortgage and so forth. And he owned several. Now, during certain parts of the Depression, he caught it hard because some of those people couldn't pay the rent. But he didn't put them out. He would let them stay just to keep the house occupied, and then he would forgive the old rent and so forth. | 25:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, was it difficult for Blacks to buy houses in that period, do you think? Or do you know— | 26:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, there weren't many who were buying, because they didn't have the money. But I don't think there was any problem about buying into certain places, because these were old apartment houses and things of that nature, that somebody had lost to— Failure to pay the bank. Black people didn't have enough money to buy into any fancy place. | 26:21 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. What was the attitude of Black northerners towards the South? What did people think about the South? Most people came from the South originally, if you could— | 26:44 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, I think they had a natural response to what the South was. Not only from the history of slavery, the post-slave situation where there was Blacks against poor White, competing for business and jobs and so forth. And then the groups like the White supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, all of these things. Then in the South, the jobs were limited, and some few would go north and they would compete with the immigrants for jobs. In those days, I remember that in the big buildings, the people who were mopping the floors down on their knees were White immigrants. And the Blacks, they did something, but they didn't do much. They would group together. | 27:00 |
| Leroy Upperman | The idea was— I guess it's screened by the information that they get, that the South was a bad place to live. And Lord knows it had its own problems, but the north had the same problems. The Irish, they hated Black people. They had to take it out on somebody. So my gut feeling is that we've got what came to us. I remember picking up a little flyer one day, some kind of a news something, and it says, "Why Jim Crow is flying north." Well, I didn't know who Jim Crow was, and I thought he was somebody taking the airplane. But this was suggestive of the problems that were coming to the north, and there was competition in the north between the Blacks and the immigrants over jobs. | 28:01 |
| Leroy Upperman | But I don't know of any. We didn't have the outgoing situation that they had down here. I remember growing up with the idea that there was prejudice in the north and in the South, but down here was open and overt. You could see it, but up there it was more subtle. | 28:58 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right, right. Would you agree with— | 29:18 |
| Leroy Upperman | I do. Yeah. | 29:19 |
| Karen Ferguson | What kinds of things did you experience, this kind of subtle discrimination? Can you think of anything? | 29:22 |
| Leroy Upperman | Up there? | 29:27 |
| Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. Or your father? | 29:28 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, I think he knew there were certain things that he could do or he couldn't do, or things that he should do or shouldn't do. I remember we were going to Trenton from Jersey City one day, and we were driving and we stopped at a corner. He wasn't sure which way to turn. So young me, I rolled down the window and there's some White people standing on the corner, and I started to ask them which way to go. He said, "No, don't do that," because he was concerned about how they might react. But I don't know of any overt things, any bad things. We just knew what to expect from White folks. We had the general idea that they were in a better position, and maybe they were better off than we were and probably better than we were, because they were the better students. They applied themselves more, and they had more money and so forth, in that attitude. | 29:33 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, did your father ever experience, or anyone you know, did they ever experience any discrimination because they were successful? In other words, did White people ever try to hold them back from success or keep them from getting too successful? | 30:41 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, success then, I guess, was survival. I can't recall as a child looking out to anybody Black who was rich or who was in any fanciful position. We looked up toward the doctors. We don't know how much money they had. And some of them were probably as broke as we were, making a house call for a dollar or something like that. But in my case, or in the case of my father, he knew what he had and he was a rather close liver. And the only thing that he used for exhibition was his automobile, which he liked, and a few suits. But other than that, he didn't flaunt his money. | 31:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now, was that a good idea, not to flaunt your money too? I mean, do you think there was a reason behind that? | 32:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, that's in his genes. That's the way he's made. He's just conservative. And as I get older, I find that I've got a lot of that in me. I'm tight and stingy and all that. Whereas some people, if they have some money, they got to have a big Cadillac, "I got to have this and that," and so forth. But he never did that. And he used to say, "I'm just everyday Bill Upperman, and that's it." | 32:09 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Got it. Now, when you were a boy, what did you do for fun in your neighborhood? What kinds of things did you play? | 32:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | Not too much. Again, we were meat and potatoes. In school— Well, before, in grade school, when my stepmother had a hotel in the Black community, and my fun was helping her run that hotel. And she taught us everything. How to make beds, wash clothes. I can iron a shirt better than you can. I'll bet you $50 on that. Empty the slop jars, iron, sweep tables, and do all that. And sometimes, we'd go and play ball or join the Boy Scouts, and we'd go camping sometimes. | 32:46 |
| Karen Ferguson | With the Boy Scouts or— | 33:40 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. They had a camp up there at, oh, shucks, some historic place. I'll think of the name of it. But they used to let the Boy Scouts camp there. And this scout master, Mr. Steele, would take us down there and we'd camp sometimes. And one incident, it was more funny than anything else. Wasn't funny. But they had segregated Boy scout troops. It was 44 and 52, but all the facilities were open. | 33:42 |
| Leroy Upperman | And one night, Mr. Steele took us down for maybe Saturday night camp over, and there was some other White Scouts there from somewhere else. You can imagine what boys talk about at night. They talk about everything. And Mr. Steele was a fine person. He was a good man, church man and all that. So the boys started talking that night and the White boys' talking, and one of them said the wrong thing. I'll share it with you. They were bragging about things, he said, "Man," said, "You ain't done nothing till you fucked a nigger girl." Mr. Steele got up and took off— (laughs) | 34:21 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, this was a White Scout who said this all during— | 35:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. See, just like we got a group there and all. And I don't hold that prejudicial— I know what boys and girls were saying, but he couldn't take it. He took us home at two o'clock in the morning. | 35:06 |
| Karen Ferguson | Mr. Steele did? | 35:16 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. Because, well, he was older and he just didn't think that that— But this was just not the scout program. And you got bad scouts and all of it. I remember that. We used to go down to the river, Shark River. Now, Black people didn't have any place to swim. | 35:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. So the beaches and things were segregated? | 35:37 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. I'll tell you about the beaches. The only pools would be maybe at the YMCA or something. We didn't even have a Y. They had a pool on the boardwalk, which the boardwalk is about, oh, ten blocks long. They had a pool. They had the aquarium, but Blacks couldn't go in that. And in the ocean, they had a section of the Black beach, which was, well, just about a half a block wide. And they had to go there to swim. They had to pay, buy a ticket, but that's where you had to go. | 35:39 |
| Leroy Upperman | So one day I was working at a hotel down there and we decided we'd go swimming. Now, the adjacent town, they had a different program for swimming. In Belmont, people who lived there got passes, so there were no tickets sold. So this day, a buddy and I decided we'd go to Belmont and go swimming. And by damn, the cop came and put us in jail, and charged us and fined us for swimming, for undressing under the boardwalk. But we didn't undress and all, but this was the way they would— It wasn't so much Black against White, but they were trying to control access to the ocean. They fined us four dollars and all that. | 36:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | How long did you stay in jail? | 37:09 |
| Leroy Upperman | We got arrested about three o'clock. I was washing dishes at a cafeteria. It was the night of the Dempsey-Heeney fight. And I stayed in jail till about nine o'clock, when the boss man came and got me and took me back. And I'm telling you, I never saw so many dishes my life. But I mean, it's just one of those things, and that's no big problem. | 37:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. So you think that if you'd been White and you hadn't had a pass, the same thing would've happened to you? | 37:43 |
| Leroy Upperman | Probably no, because they wouldn't have spotted me. You see, they knew no Blacks lived there, so this was easy. And they had been looking out for the guys, because in the group there're about six people and some of the other guys had been going. So, it was a setup. I didn't feel good about it. The biggest problem in my mind was I didn't want my old man to know I'd been in jail, because I figured he might get my fanny. But anyhow, he never found out about it. | 37:49 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, how old were you when this happened? | 38:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | I guess I was in my teens, 16 or something. | 38:21 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. So you went camping with the scouts or you'd go swimming where you could, and you worked in your stepmother's hotel. Now, so she owned a hotel for Blacks? | 38:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. She had, I guess, about 20 beds. It was the best hotel of that type then. But this was across the track, in the Black section. | 38:46 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Yeah. And what was her clientele? Were they Black tourists or— | 39:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, in those days, North Jersey Shore was a very popular place for people from New York and the environments to come down. North Jersey Shore isn't anything now. People are flying all over the world. But that was very popular, from Asbury Park on down to Atlantic City. And that's where people would come. And some Black people would come and sometimes they'd have dancers down there. The dancers during those years, some of the big-name bands that you heard, I'm getting forgetful now, but the Black bands used to come down to Asbury Park. And the White bands that used to be playing on the ocean front would come over and listen to them, and that's how they started learning the Black River. | 39:07 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. So you can't remember any of the names of the people you saw and— | 40:00 |
| Leroy Upperman | And I didn't go to those. I was too small. But I know that that was— | 40:06 |
| Karen Ferguson | Were there ever any tent shows that— | 40:11 |
| Leroy Upperman | Racial tension? | 40:15 |
| Karen Ferguson | Tent shows or— | 40:16 |
| Leroy Upperman | Tents? | 40:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. | 40:18 |
| Leroy Upperman | You mean like— | 40:18 |
| Karen Ferguson | Like minstrel shows, that kind of thing. | 40:22 |
| Leroy Upperman | No. Not that I remember. | 40:27 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, did your stepmother make a good living at this hotel or— | 40:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | I don't know. Every year she'd remodel. I don't know how good a business person she was. But my father, they stayed married for about six or seven years and then they split. So I finished high school by staying with an aunt of mine in Asbury Park. | 40:46 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Because your father moved away? | 41:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, his home is Jersey City. And even when we were living in Asbury Park, he would just come down once or twice a week just to visit and see us. But after they split up, he went on back to Jersey City and got him another spouse. So, that's that. | 41:06 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now, her business, were there many Black business women like that or did— | 41:31 |
| Leroy Upperman | A lot of them had boarding houses, which are borderline things, but they were hustlers. And then they would cater to a lot of people who worked at hotels across town, and the maids and the bellhops and all would stay. But it was just a summer hustle, from June to Labor Day. Labor Day everything closed up. | 41:39 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Could you tell me a little bit about your father? What kind of man he was and just talk a little bit. You've said a little bit about his conservatism and his— | 42:06 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, he was a quiet man. He was a pretty good-looking Colored man. And when I say that, he wasn't a beautiful man, but he was attractive and he dressed well. He went to the fourth grade. He liked his simple fun. When I say that, he didn't have to go to big things. He liked a group of folks, having a party or getting around and just shooting the breeze. On his days off, his biggest thing was to put on the suit, get his car out the garage after we washed it and cleaned it up, and maybe give us a nickel. | 42:16 |
| Leroy Upperman | But he'd sit on there and watch it, and then he decided he would drive somewhere. And maybe once a year he'd take his wife off for a two or three-day vacation. That's that. Occasionally, he would go to church when we were young. After he married again, I don't think he ever went. But I think he was a basically honest person. He never gambled. He liked his Cream of Kentucky. He'd nip every once in a while, but I've never seen him drunk. I never remember his missing a day from work, and he was just a quiet man. | 43:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | I remember you talking about religion. When he died in his— I guess he was in his 70s. He had carcinoma of the esophagus, but he had a good sense of humor. He had a gastrostomy. But the last Christmas, we all got together and he couldn't swallow. So he'd take his food and all through his tube, and he'd put a little cocktail through there. Sense of humor. | 43:57 |
| Leroy Upperman | And my oldest brother, the one who would philosophy with me all the time, he felt bad about the old man. And he used to get to him and said, "Dad, you want me to read to you from the Bible?" He said, "No, I don't need that." In other words, he had his convictions, but he was not one of these folks that, "I'm going to die, and save me," and all of this stuff. But he was a good person, and I think he gave all the kids all the education they wanted. And he'd kick them out the nest, and got up and got married. That's you. So, that's it. | 44:25 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. What kinds of values do you think he instilled in you? | 45:03 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, I'm about tight as he is. I think I might have a few dollars more than he had, but anybody in the line. But I was thinking about this the other day, how genetics can play a part in making a person very conservative. And I'm a very conservative person. And that's why some of the things you're asking me about the changes that are taking place, I'm not a guy to get up on soapboxing because of my conservative things. They would not be popularly accepted. | 45:06 |
| Leroy Upperman | But there's some things that I believe deep down within that, that are basic. And I thought then, and I think he thought then, and I really think now that there's a way out for Black people if they want to do it. But right now, most of them are in school and, damn it, they won't study. They just drop out. In this Black school that I attended, there were twelve of us who graduated and went to high school, and I'm the only one who finished high school. And this was true then, in 1930, and it's true now. | 45:51 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. So this was your high school class? Your— | 46:30 |
| Leroy Upperman | No, this is my grammar school. | 46:33 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. Oh, I see. Okay. | 46:35 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. I told you I went to all-Black— | 46:35 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Okay. Right. | 46:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | Twelve of us. And to finish high school, I'm the only one who finished. So that ratio was about the same as it is now. But then in school, the kids, they take— | 46:40 |
| Karen Ferguson | You were talking a little bit about the values your father instilled in you. What was he like at home? Was he the boss at home? Was your mother and your stepmother — | 0:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | My mother, as I say, I don't remember her. My father was — I think, I'm not sure, I think that he had a kind of traumatic life at home. | 0:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 0:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | Most kids left home either because their old man beat the hell out of them or else they wanted to get a job. He was not a brutal person. | 0:29 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 0:38 |
| Leroy Upperman | He was generally tolerant. Once in a while, he'd put his foot down. | 0:39 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 0:43 |
| Leroy Upperman | I know once we did something that wasn't quite right, stayed out too late or something, and he took us in the garage and I think my stepmother wanted him to beat us and he told us to make a lot of noise or something. He might have hit me. I don't remember him hitting me but I took some offense and some hostility and for a while, I just thought those big arms were made of cream cheese but that didn't [indistinct 00:01:14]. | 0:45 |
| Leroy Upperman | Another time, some challenging stuff was going on and he knew I was wrong but he grabbed me by the arm and — by the collar and held my head up between those rafters and I saw his big fist down and I didn't need to see anymore, but beating and all that stuff, he never did that. I think he was a good man. | 1:14 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Something else I wanted to ask — He made all the decisions about money and about when to move and that kind of thing, huh? | 1:39 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yes. That was it. Now he always paid my school bills, if I was going to come home for Christmas holiday, he'd give me three dollars to do all my socializing and go to New York, all that stuff, but he was just thrifty, that's all, whether he was too thrifty, I don't know or if my mother had lived, you know how women inserted a different dimension into things but I have no regrets. | 2:02 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. What did he teach you about being a man? | 2:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | I guess we never had many head to head things. I guess if I learned anything, it was by example of what he did. He was practical. We were free to come and go pretty well as kids. He would be going a lot of time — We didn't abuse things. We never got in any awful trouble. | 2:43 |
| Leroy Upperman | We had one man-to-son talk you know how little boys get up and so forth, I had a black suit and that was my suit. One day, I was dressed up to go somewhere, Sunday school or something and he saw a little white stain on the front. Well, he just sat me down and told me that you need to be careful with yourself, because a lot of problems out there but he didn't fuss about it or anything like that. That's that. | 3:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | What did he say? He said there were a lot of problems? | 3:58 |
| Leroy Upperman | He knew that I was going out with girls. | 4:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. I see. | 4:01 |
| Leroy Upperman | That's the type of thing. | 4:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | All right. | 4:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | So far as sitting down and beating this in your head or anything like that. | 4:05 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now did he ever sit you down and tell you how you had to behave in front of White people in order to get along at all? Have you ever had to do that? | 4:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | No. I gather that he had a place for White people in his economy, as they had a place for Black people in theirs. | 4:27 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 4:40 |
| Leroy Upperman | The many jobs — On the job, of course, there are always people that giving the employer hell or employee hell. You know? He used to talk about the different things on the job, how that would happen. And I knew he knew how to handle himself and take whatever abuse had to be, and so forth. He was very pragmatic in that. He never setup any parameters of the White man is better or you're worse or anything like that, but just how he handled his problems made me feel that there is a way to do it. | 4:41 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Maybe we could talk a little more about school now. Now you said this segregated school that you went to — | 5:18 |
| Leroy Upperman | The public school? | 5:34 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Did you enjoy school? | 5:35 |
| Leroy Upperman | Fairly well. Of course, in school, you got all kind of teachers. The first teacher in this school was fourth grade teacher and she was pretty nice. She got along well with the kids. | 5:42 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 5:59 |
| Leroy Upperman | The fifth grade teacher, Miss Jacobs, she was a mess. She was an old maid and she was every bit of that. I think she was trying to be herself and trying to be a good dedicated teacher. | 5:59 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 6:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | The only time she ever broke down was [indistinct 00:06:21] was at the end of school, she gave the kids a party and got some ice cream but before the party was over, some guy who was cutting ice cream made a mistake in his English and she gave him hell. We got out of Miss Jacobs' room. Later on, I understand she did pretty well. Sixth grade, Miss Frisbee, she was something else. She was a little old dried up something. Had an old brown coat that had a grease stain around the collar about an inch thick. She was a strong disciplinarian. I think that she was trying to do a good job and she did. | 6:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 7:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | She carried a stick with her. | 7:07 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 7:11 |
| Leroy Upperman | She was a strong disciplinarian and a lot of things that she taught us, I still remember. Seventh grade was Miss Douglas. She was — Good to get out of Miss Frisbee and get in Miss Douglas. Miss Douglas was very fair, in complexion, but she was nice and she got along with everybody and if the boys were acting up, she'd [indistinct 00:07:35] come out, she'd grab them by the arm and pinch them and tell them what they did wrong and so forth. Eighth grade was Pop Murray. He was the principal and all. He was dedicated. He did the best he could and he applied himself. He knew the kids that came through, because he had taught their parents. | 7:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Okay. | 7:57 |
| Leroy Upperman | They instilled in us the principles I think that were valuable in trying to make something of yourself and these principles were things of being good, clean, and get your work and so forth. | 7:58 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 8:17 |
| Leroy Upperman | There was no direct thing saying, "You're Colored, do this" and do that and all but you read into it, that this was necessary. | 8:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Right. Now these people were role models for you, these teachers, do you think? Did you respect them when you were at school? | 8:26 |
| Leroy Upperman | I respected each one. You don't like the school teachers when you get out there after class, especially if they're strict on you. As you look back, there are a lot of things that they taught you that are really important. They had better discipline than they have in schools now and so forth. | 8:36 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now all the teachers that you had in Asbury, were they — They were all Black teachers in the school? | 8:57 |
| Leroy Upperman | In the — | 9:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Segregated — | 9:07 |
| Leroy Upperman | In the grammar school, yeah, but in the high school, they didn't have any Black teachers. | 9:07 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now what was that like? What was the difference between having all Black teachers in an all-Black school and then going to an integrated school with White teachers? | 9:12 |
| Leroy Upperman | I don't know that it made that much difference. Except that going from grade school to high school anywhere is a transition. I think the teachers there, they were generally good. I didn't see overt racism. | 9:26 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 9:46 |
| Leroy Upperman | I know that a lot of things took place that made me feel that they were interested. I was in the geometry or something or one of the courses, math, I didn't do so well, and the guy would try to tell me, "You go ahead and see if you can't do better, because we know you can." | 9:47 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 10:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | Even the principal, I think I was getting ready to graduate, seniors, you know, sometimes they get careless and the teacher sent me down to him and he said, "Well, Upperman you ought to do better, you got some nice people in your community." Pointing out the doctors and all that. | 10:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 10:28 |
| Leroy Upperman | We had one teacher, names forget me now, but they used to have these programs in the auditorium and this teacher after one program — They were discussing it, so one of the Colored fellas got up and said, "We can do that well." She said, "We'll have a program with you and your associates" or you Colored children can have a program, and they had a program, it was a hell of a program. It was not the idea of one thing being wrong or one thing being right. It was just nice. They didn't have many Black athletes. | 10:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | None? They had no [indistinct 00:11:16]. | 11:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | They had a few. Not many but they had two guys, Tucker and White [indistinct 00:11:23], boy, they were big and rough and all. They came and they tore that Neptune team up. The reaction to that was so bad that the schools which had been rivals for long, they broke off relationships for twenty years over this type of thing. It wasn't so much racial as the idea that — well, [indistinct 00:11:45]. | 11:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. When you talked about this program, the program, Blacks and Whites would do things like that together. | 11:47 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, mostly, the program, if it was any type of intellectual program, very few Blacks were a part of it. Different clubs or different agencies of a school would underwrite it, but, here, they had a nice quartet, they had a girl who could play the piano well. She had some piece that she played with one hand and had a gold bracelet up there, so you can see. They had a lot of things. It was a good program. It was all right. | 11:55 |
| Karen Ferguson | When you said that these intellectual activities of Blacks didn't participate in, why do you think that was? Why didn't they participate? | 12:30 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, the concern was sports. Glee club, no, debating club, no, art club, no. What else? Science club, no. It's the same way out here at New Hanover High School, the Black kids are not in any of those programs, one or two but they ain't in many others. Cheerleading and all — | 12:41 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Why do you think they weren't — Were they not welcomed? | 13:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | I just don't — To me, most of this goes back to the home environment. | 13:09 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 13:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | You have to — The trouble with schools then and the trouble with schools now, the home bleeds over into the life of the child and so forth. We're getting more Black kids into the mainstream but that's because of the input of the parents to the children and to the Black kids, what do they want to know about history and all that stuff? | 13:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. Yeah. | 13:40 |
| Leroy Upperman | Go ahead. | 13:43 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now your White teachers encouraged you. Were they encouraging you to go to college? | 13:44 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah, but you can't go to college if you take just Spanish and those easy courses. As I say, just one or two of the Blacks would take math or things of that nature. They'd take the easy courses. | 13:51 |
| Karen Ferguson | You were often the only Black in your classes in high school? | 14:06 |
| Leroy Upperman | Sometimes. | 14:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | But they did encourage you to go to college? | 14:13 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, yeah, but, you see, they had five curricula there. They had the classic, the scientific, they had a general, and then they had a business and something else. Depending on what curriculum you got in, those first three were college entry but a lot of them wanted to come out and be secretaries. | 14:15 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. When did you decide you wanted to go to college and you wanted to become a physician? | 14:40 |
| Leroy Upperman | When I finished, was about to finish, high school, my brother who was an electrician and he was my role model in the family, he was a real fine fella, he took sciences and all, he became an electrician — I liked sciences and mechanics and all that. And I was not sure whether I'd go to college or not. I thought I wanted to do like he and be an electrician. But I don't know — I still don't know. You'll find it in there, I don't know why went to college except that I went. When I got there, I did right well in sciences and all and in there, I wasn't sure why I went to medical school. I don't know sitting down and talking to a doctor about medical school or anything like that. It's just one of those things. | 14:48 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now was education important to your father? | 15:38 |
| Leroy Upperman | Going to the fourth grade, I think he wanted us to get all the education that we wanted, but he knew that you can't make a racehorse out of a Negro and if you go and apply yourself, he'll make it possible. | 15:41 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. He wasn't on your case to go to college? | 16:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | No. As a matter of fact, he spent more on me than he spent on all the rest of us, sending me to school. The oldest boy he sent to college and Walter, who turned out to be a lawyer, but I guess in those days, a parent scuffling to send a Black kid to college is going to send him someplace where he can make a living. | 16:08 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 16:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | Now in those days, Black people didn't have any money for lawyers. | 16:29 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. | 16:32 |
| Leroy Upperman | A preacher, a nurse, a teacher or a doctor could make it. My oldest brother told my daddy that — He said that he didn't like science and he said that the professors saw great capability in him to become a lawyer. | 16:32 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 16:55 |
| Leroy Upperman | He finished Howard and he came out and went, took a job up at Penn Station red cap, and went and became a lawyer. When I came along, as long as I said I wanted to go to school, he never quipped about it. The only time he kicked me out the nest was when I came here to finish my residence training and there was a woman, who wanted to setup an office, and there was a house across town I wanted to buy. The house cost twenty-two hundred dollars. I asked him to lend me some money for a down payment. | 16:55 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 17:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | He said, "Son, you got more education than I got and if you can't use it to some good, you're in bad shape." And I will always remember that. He could have done it, he had plenty, but he did the right thing. | 17:37 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now where did you go to college? | 17:49 |
| Leroy Upperman | Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Now Lincoln University in Pennsylvania was the Harvard of Black colleges. You know something about that and it's the only Black school during the time, during post-Civil War or the Reconstruction that was able to keep its program of academics and not bring in trades. | 17:54 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 18:23 |
| Leroy Upperman | Hampton and the rest of them brought in trades but Lincoln was the only one that didn't. For many years, they had the best pre-medical program leading, sending folks on a special train to Howard, making more doctors than anything else. | 18:23 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now how did you get there? How did you pay for this, for your college? Did your father pay? | 18:40 |
| Leroy Upperman | It didn't cost much. My father paid. He paid every penny. There was some government, I guess some government subsidies and all that but he paid every penny of my — You had on-campus jobs and little self-help but he paid it. | 18:50 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now was this a big transition for you going away from home and away to college? | 19:09 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, I guess — Again, it's like going from grammar school to high school to college. When I crossed the Delaware River, I thought I was going somewhere. Hell, I didn't know where. I adjusted to it very well. I had a good educational background. Here's something interesting, when I left Asbury Park High School, I had to go by and the man squeezed out some points for me to graduate and I went to Lincoln and I was the best math student in the class. It was all right. | 19:18 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now what was the — Who were the students? Where did they come from? What did their families [indistinct 00:20:03]? | 19:59 |
| Leroy Upperman | Most of the students came from the mid South, some from New England, some from the deep South. That's mainly it. | 20:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Did you join a fraternity when you were there? | 20:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | Kappa Alpha Psi. Want to go to heaven when you die — | 20:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now why did you join — Why did you become a Kappa? | 20:25 |
| Leroy Upperman | All right. That's a good question. When I went to — This is good. When I went to Lincoln, I didn't know anything about fraternities. My brother was a Kappa but I didn't know it. On campus, they kind of rush you near the end of your first year. One of the most outstanding fraternities was the Alpha Phi Alpha. That was supposed to be the top one. Somehow they got me into the pledge club. I had a buddy who — He and I hung out together pretty good. He was from Washington. Gaskins and I were close, but Gaskins was very fair. He was almost as fair as you are. Anyhow, Gaskins and I got into the pledge club. | 20:29 |
| Karen Ferguson | For the [indistinct 00:21:21]. | 21:19 |
| Leroy Upperman | For Alphas. Okay. Now when it got around to picking people, traditionally, the Alphas during that time was known for picking all the red bones. | 21:21 |
| Karen Ferguson | What are red bones? | 21:31 |
| Leroy Upperman | Folks like you, light skin. | 21:32 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 21:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | Dark folks didn't get in there. Gaskins got in and I didn't. | 21:37 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 21:42 |
| Leroy Upperman | Alphas used to tell us in the pledge clubs, "Now you're going to be Alpha and we want to see y'all stick together and we'll see you on the campus, see a bunch of people together." Well, he got in. I didn't like that. It didn't bother me too much but another friend of mine who was dark and all that, but a much more practical person, "Upperman," says "don't pay much attention to that, those are the Alphas." He said, "Now you look at the Kappas and they're just the opposite. Everywhere you go, you see Kappas into everything and they're working." | 21:42 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 22:16 |
| Leroy Upperman | I found my home in Kappa and that was it. This shows a clannishness of people and this is true in the Alphas. They're not that way now, because after the war, they opened up but to find a Black Alpha in those days, that was a hell of a — | 22:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. | 22:32 |
| Leroy Upperman | It's worse than your sororities. The sororities did the same thing. | 22:32 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Now this color consciousness, now did this exist in other areas of your life? How about in high school? Did teachers favor lighter skin students and that kind of thing? | 22:40 |
| Leroy Upperman | I didn't notice it so much in high school. In college, it was maybe a little bit but when I heard it most was in medical school in Washington. Now Washington, if you don't know it, that's a hell of a place, because Washington, historically and geographically, is the filter, the place to which the out children or these White folks down here went to find a free state where these out children could get an education and an expression. | 22:52 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 23:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | The segregation in Washington between the red bones, you got my term, the red bones and the other Colored people was awful. | 23:33 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 23:43 |
| Leroy Upperman | That's true. It's filtering out now but it was a hell of a thing. | 23:44 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now how would that affect someone? Somebody like you, who was — Or somebody who was even darker, wanting to go to medical school, what kinds of things — | 23:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | Socially, darker people were ostracized. | 24:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. You wouldn't be invited to parties? | 24:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | That's right. That's right. It's just that it's over-prejudiced. I have a sister-in-law who lives in Washington and I guess about — Less than seven, eight years ago, she was invited to a bridge club. My sister-in-law is fair just like you, and she went there and when she left, all of these red bones were around the table, so she told everybody, "Listen, damn it. Next time you have me to a club, you invite me where some Colored people are." Because this is a hangover of that type of thing. It's dying now, because the things resolving but that's true. | 24:07 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 24:50 |
| Leroy Upperman | There's a place up in here in Ahoskie. You know where that is? | 24:50 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. | 24:55 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. I had a roommate up there in medical school. I used to visit him and most of his relatives are red bones. | 24:55 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 25:03 |
| Leroy Upperman | There was a classmate of mine who married a woman up there who was a red bone, and he came to Ahoskie, he couldn't stay at her house. | 25:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Because he was too dark? | 25:11 |
| Leroy Upperman | He was dark. | 25:13 |
| Karen Ferguson | He was married to her? | 25:13 |
| Leroy Upperman | Sure. | 25:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | And he still wasn't allowed to — | 25:17 |
| Leroy Upperman | That's right. Now my wife, my late wife, lives — Aas born up here in Bolton and all of them are red bones and they find the Blackest man in town, so it's different. Anyhow, that's — | 25:18 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Right. Now what is the reasoning behind this, you think? What do people — Surely, in Ahoskie, why wouldn't your friends' in-laws let them stay in the same — | 25:38 |
| Leroy Upperman | These are not my in-laws. | 25:52 |
| Karen Ferguson | No, but your friends — | 25:52 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. It goes into psychology, I'm sure, about preferences. There's no question in my mind that one of the worst things of the slave situation here in America was not primarily the slavery but was the emasculation of the Black man, and with these values, the White being better and all, and that's the thing that has gotten deep ingrained in a lot of Black people. It's very difficult to eradicate it. But Washington was something else. You ought to write a book about that. | 25:54 |
| Karen Ferguson | What was I going to ask? I had something else that was important. Oh, yeah. Now did you ever know — Among these red bones, did you ever know anybody who passed for White? | 26:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | I'm sure I have. If they have passed for White, I have lost contact with them, because they went the other way. | 26:55 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right but you knew of people in that — | 27:09 |
| Leroy Upperman | In my wife's family, there were one or two of the fellas who married White people and they passed for White. My wife is very fair. That's my daughter in the center and she's very fair. But a lot of them they couldn't. | 27:13 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. | 27:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | In the Black people, there is — It's not in the genes but it's conditioning that White is right. In your psychology or — I'm not getting too far but the concept of white is cleanliness and all this stuff and even in art, I'm not an artist but if you want to bring something out, you brighten it. If you want to shade it — So we in bad shape. (laughs) | 27:34 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Now you joined the Kappas, now could you tell me who joined the Kappas? What makes a good — What's a Kappa man? | 28:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | It's just like any sorority or fraternity, a bunch of guys getting together, growing young people want an identity and so forth, chance to socialize, and so forth. That's primarily it. Then they dream up these ideas about doing good and we're better than you and all that stuff. It's youthful. The only thing I like about the Kappas most is that they mix well among all others. | 28:15 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Okay. | 28:44 |
| Leroy Upperman | But, frankly, a good Kappa is no better than a good Alpha or Omega or something like that. | 28:46 |
| Karen Ferguson | You're not — Have you continued to be active in the fraternity? | 28:53 |
| Leroy Upperman | No. I used to be very active and then I became a man and put away childish things. | 28:56 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, okay. | 29:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | But I just grew out of it. | 29:03 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. What kinds of — You've been talking sort of more objectively about these fraternities. On a pragmatic level, what do you think — On a pragmatic level, what purpose did they serve for people? | 29:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | I think it's just a step of growth. People like to be identified with something, they can socialize. Some people use it maybe for political things but except for that stage in life where people need to be bonded together, young folks growing up, you know that, they need to belong to something. | 29:27 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 29:45 |
| Leroy Upperman | I don't know anybody who is serious — Well, I do know some people take their fraternalism too strongly. To me, it's just an embellishment and that's all. | 29:47 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did your fraternity connections ever help you get a job or anything like that? | 29:59 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, once in a while it might help but it wouldn't help too much in the big world, because there are not any White Alphas and in the Black world, it'd just be coincidental. | 30:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Did you enjoy college? | 30:19 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. It was nice, easy living. You never know until you left it. I never — I enjoyed it. I think it was an important stage in life and living. It was just putting something in the stew to season it. | 30:26 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Did you have some professors who were outstanding in your mind? | 30:51 |
| Leroy Upperman | You mean that I remember? | 30:54 |
| Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. | 30:58 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yes. Prof Grimm. Years ago, Professor Grimm was a White man. He came — I don't know where he came from, maybe Chicago or something, but he came to Lincoln years ago as the science professor, biology, and he taught all the biology. He was good. Not only at teaching it but indoctrinating people. And in the class, he would emphasize things, like he'd tell us that you rise or fall as you aim high or low, this is a challenge. He used to — Somebody asked him one day, he only had a masters degree, they said, "Well, Professor Grimm, how come you're not a doctor?" He said, "I don't have to be a doctor. At Lincoln, we make doctors." He emphasized those guys going through. If he's still living, he's about a hundred but he left his imprint there. | 30:58 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 32:08 |
| Leroy Upperman | We had several others coming through but he was the most — | 32:08 |
| Karen Ferguson | People who were in the science courses, they were going to be doctors? | 32:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. Let's put it this way, they had a good biology department there, which made it easy for people to qualify for pre-medical. | 32:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 32:31 |
| Leroy Upperman | The physics department wasn't nearly as good as the biology and the chemistry wasn't nearly as good. The bunkum courses like history and all that mess. They were fair. | 32:33 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you remember there being any kind of political activity on campus? People talking — You know, just talking, maybe not acting on what they were talking about but talking about the need for equality. You know, reading W.E.B. Du Bois or doing things like that. | 32:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | Not too much in those days. We used to have bull sessions. | 33:07 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 33:09 |
| Leroy Upperman | But the type of thing we're talking about, civil rights and all, this was dormant then, the age of activism. I guess one of the most impressive things that happened to me when I was in college, it bears out now. I was in the glee club. Doesn't mean I could sing but I made every rehearsal and all. One year, we came to North Carolina and Chapel Hill. We were invited by folks from the campus. We stayed in the Black community of folks' houses and all that but the bus driver was from Pennsylvania and the crackers down here gave him hell. He was a White fella. Anyhow — | 33:13 |
| Karen Ferguson | Because he stayed with Black people? | 34:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | No. He caught hell among the White people because he was a Yankee. | 34:13 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Okay. | 34:16 |
| Leroy Upperman | This is way back in 1933. | 34:16 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Okay. | 34:20 |
| Leroy Upperman | They hadn't gotten over the Civil War. The impression I got then was that Carolina was a deep, sincere institution with a very broad perspective. Somehow in the back of my mind, I developed the idea that it would — I don't know. I didn't have any trouble. If I had a son, we would go to Carolina, and this came about. It shows the breadth and you take Duke, because I didn't know anything about Duke until I interned and up there, the guys from Duke used to come over, Duke and Carolina, they'd been arch-rivals but one's a state school, Carolina, you know all that crap. At that stage in school, we didn't have any — All this stuff was dormant. | 34:23 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Okay. You finished up at Lincoln. You went straight into med school then? | 35:21 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. | 35:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | Where did you go to med school? | 35:31 |
| Leroy Upperman | Howard University in Washington. | 35:32 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 35:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | In those days, they only had two medical schools. | 35:35 |
| Karen Ferguson | [indistinct 00:35:39]. | 35:37 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. I'm going to share something with you that you probably have to stumble on. I had an article that I threw away the other day but it had to do with the perspective of training the Black doctor early on and at the time I went to medical school, there are only two medical schools for Blacks, Howard and Meharry. They had about five others but they closed them up, because they were inadequate. But these other schools were based on the precept that the Black doctor should be more of a public health worker than a doctor, so they could hold down disease. You're aware and that's the story. | 35:39 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. Now who thought this — Who decided that this should be the way that a Black doctor worked? | 36:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | You mean earlier? | 36:40 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. | 36:41 |
| Leroy Upperman | Judging from the article, that was the approach. They didn't think that Black doctors had the background, the breadth of thinking or the capacity to be medical, so to approach the medical problem with your public health diseases, the best thing to do would be make public health specialists out of them and then leave the real medicine to the — | 36:42 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right, but that was before your time? | 37:06 |
| Leroy Upperman | Oh, yes. But even then, now when I was in medical school I remember Dr. Pointdexter, who was quite a bacteriologist, he was concerned about the grades and he was concerned about whether the education we were getting was adequate to that in the White medical schools, and he got to the point, he said, "I'm going to see to it that an A at Howard is equal to an A at another place." This is a carryover of that. I wish I had that. | 37:10 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now how was — You were talking a little bit about being in Washington but how was Howard? What was Howard like? | 37:44 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, Howard was known as the capstone of Negro education. Of course, in medical school, you're down here, you don't see campus life, you just visit up there once in a while and you get your butt down to — It was all right. I didn't see much life on campus. | 37:51 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did you feel — Now as a medical student at the capstone of Negro education, did you feel you had a certain mission? Was that instilled in you? What kinds of things did the faculty instill in you in terms of your responsibility to the Black community? | 38:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | Again, they didn't have this devotion that we're talking now. They knew that the Black doctor had a very difficult task in making it. A lot of them were hybrid doctors, remember, they came from the cross between what I told you earlier, the turn of the century and now, so they're catching up. They taught us the best that we could. Charlie Drew was one of our teachers and the Poindexter and several others. They got their leadership from association with some others or limited association with staff from other hospitals but we were still isolated. | 38:41 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 39:27 |
| Leroy Upperman | When it comes to idealism of medical practice, of course, that didn't exist because they told us that when you finish medical school, you were in such a state of confusion, it'd take you twenty years to unravel it, because you don't know what's what. | 39:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | But later on, it develops and you get the idealism, you get a certain amount of idealism, but after you go a little bit — Like when I left Howard and went to Durham to intern, I lost my idealism, a whole lot of it right quick, because coming into Durham, I came through some street there in the center of town and we made a bad turn and went through the ghetto section. I said, "Wow. Look at all these people, these are people that I'm going to cure and do all this to." By damn, about one week later, Saturday night, every Saturday, they come in all cut up and shot up and — | 39:46 |
| Leroy Upperman | One night, I took a long time to sew up a person's face and do a perfect job. I took pride in that. I didn't get paid for it, but the hospital was supposed to charge something, maybe fifteen dollars, so the nurse came, the woman with the bill, and she threw the damn thing on the floor cussing at us. I mean, this is your entrée to realism. | 40:31 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 41:00 |
| Leroy Upperman | That was interesting. Another thing, for not going astray at the same hospital, talking about people — | 41:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | This was at Lincoln? | 41:08 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. | 41:09 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 41:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | One night, they brought a man in, a Black man who was a sharecropper on a White man's farm, and he had acute retention, so the man who brought him in was sitting there waiting for him. This was at night. He took the patient in and checked him out and finally realized what we had to do, and went back to the man, the farmer, and said, "Mr. So-and-so, your patient has so-and-so." And within a little while, the people from Duke are coming over and we're going to handle him. "If you want to go home, he's going to be all right." He said, "No. John has been on my land for twenty years. I'm going to stay here until I know he's all right." Now Colored folk, Yankee, north didn't hear that, all that. | 41:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now did you think you were going to make a good living as a doctor? | 42:07 |
| Leroy Upperman | I never worried about that part, because I didn't know of any doctors that were broke. | 42:10 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 42:17 |
| Leroy Upperman | I know some doctors that apparently had a lot of money, but the financial side didn't bother me. I was primarily concerned with becoming a surgeon. When I was in medical school or left medical school during the '30s and the '40s, they were very few resident programs open to Blacks, Harlem, St. Louis and one or two but most of these programs for surgery or specialties didn't exist. | 42:18 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 42:55 |
| Leroy Upperman | The only way that the Blacks could get anything was to go to one of these little hospitals like we had here, like the Lincoln Hospital and all that but they sprung up during the '30s, because the Black doctors had no place to practice and they were sort of intermediate hospitals and all, but if you went there and spent a few years, you could get it. I spent two years and struggling every operation. | 42:57 |
| Leroy Upperman | Anyhow, I wanted to be a surgeon, and that's what I did, when I finished they gave me privileges to do operations that I had [indistinct 00:43:35]. So far as making money, I didn't know what making money was. The shipyard was opening and the war was coming, so I stayed here. Some doctors went to big cities and all, and they did fairly well, but some of them didn't. I was encouraged in surgery. | 43:24 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. By the time you finished, you were doing your residency in Durham, were you married? | 43:56 |
| Leroy Upperman | Internship. | 44:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, your internship. I'm sorry. | 44:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | I married when I finished my internship, that's the first marriage. | 44:05 |
| Karen Ferguson | Where did you meet your wife? | 44:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, this is one of them Washington things. | 44:13 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. | 44:15 |
| Leroy Upperman | I was a senior student at Howard and they were short of an intern, so they gave me an externship where I would work with an intern at the hospital and still complete my senior year. | 44:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 44:34 |
| Leroy Upperman | The housekeeper at the hospital had a daughter, who she wanted to marry a doctor. | 44:35 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. | 44:42 |
| Leroy Upperman | I was the victim. | 44:42 |
| Karen Ferguson | You met her through the housekeeper? | 44:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. Nancy, she fixed that up. Anyhow, that was that. | 44:49 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. When did — Okay. When you finished your internship in Durham, where did you — Did you come to Wilmington then? | 44:55 |
| Leroy Upperman | Came here then, just opened up the community hospital, which was a prototype of Lincoln Hospital and I came here in '39 and stayed until '41. | 45:03 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now you say these smaller places, these smaller hospitals started sprouting up in the '30s? | 45:16 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. In the '20s and '30s. Except for a big city like Mercy Hospital in Philadelphia, Harlem Hospital, whatever, the one in Chicago, St. Louis, those smaller communities didn't have them and the Black doctors were concerned with doing things in the hospital range. Communities got the idea of — A lot of doctors, Black doctors started their own and then the communities took them over, that's what happened here, so we developed Community Hospital. | 45:22 |
| Karen Ferguson | How did you get your job here? | 45:56 |
| Leroy Upperman | One of the founders of the early hospital and the promoters of this hospital, Dr. Burnett, came to Lincoln Hospital and recruited me. | 45:59 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now what was — I guess I haven't asked you about this either but here you are, somebody who grew up in the north coming south to do work, why did you decide to stay in the south? | 46:11 |
| Leroy Upperman | The hospital, and after I spent two years there, I had no city that I wanted to to go. The shipyard was opening up. | 46:23 |
| Karen Ferguson | In Wilmington? | 46:30 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. All I had to do was just — | 46:31 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right. Right. Were there more opportunities in the south for Black doctors than in the north? | 46:32 |
| Leroy Upperman | I can't answer that. There are different types of opportunities and I think the southern doctors — | 46:43 |
| Karen Ferguson | I assume that the healthcare in the North would was integrated to a large extent? | 0:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | No. | 0:06 |
| Karen Ferguson | No? | 0:08 |
| Leroy Upperman | In most areas it was segregated. The Black doctors treated folks in their general Black area, but more resorted to just office practice. And some had hospital practice. And then during that time, especially when I was in medical school, the doctors in the city in Washington joined the staff at Friedman so that they could get their skill and expertise in. Instead of teaching us how to do tonsillectomies, they're in there practicing, doing it themselves. | 0:09 |
| Karen Ferguson | Right, okay. Because they'd never had the opportunity— | 0:47 |
| Leroy Upperman | That's right. | 0:47 |
| Karen Ferguson | —to do it. So you moved here. Now did you set up a practice or were you just a staff [indistinct 00:00:58]— | 0:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. When I finished in 1941, I quit the hospital as a house doctor, or a resident, and I opened an office. I bought a building on Seventh Street and opened up and I had a position on the community hospital. | 0:58 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, was it easy to build up? Did patients come to you readily? | 1:16 |
| Leroy Upperman | I think it was just a natural thing. Times were good then with the war coming and the shipyard and all. I don't remember not having had adequate work, until, well, a few years ago and I just cut down. But there was always plenty to do. | 1:25 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you think that there was an attitude within the Black community that people wanted—Did people want Black doctors or did they want White doctors? | 1:55 |
| Leroy Upperman | It's in there, but that's an interesting story. There's a dichotomy back to Redbones. The Black people have a distant feeling towards Whites. They feel that they've kicked their butts and all that, but to turn the page over, they feel that they are smarter in some ways than Blacks. So in medicine, like any other thing, just like in business, people go where they can get perhaps the best deal. Now in this area, a lot of people would come to Black doctors, because maybe they could work a better deal financially or something and they would maybe have a reasonable associated with them. On the other hand, by the same token, a lot of them would go to the White doctor, because the woman they work for is served by Dr. so-and-so. And this is an entree to get it back and forth. Then there's there's some patients who when they get mad at a doctor, they will go to another doctor. | 2:03 |
| Leroy Upperman | But in there, there's a situation where some Black patients, when they get mad with a doctor, they say, "I'll go get me a White doctor." This is an entree to their thinking. You understand? So it's a dichotomy. Another thing that was bad or unfortunate, when the Black people all were poor, school teachers making $80 a month, they would come to the Black doctors because they didn't have any money. And the White doctors mostly didn't want to be bothered with them, because they didn't have any money unless they worked for Madam so-and-so. But after they started getting insurance and all, then they started going over to Preston. | 3:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | To the White doctors? | 4:01 |
| Leroy Upperman | So it's a human thing and all, I'm not mad about it, but I'm talking about the human market, that's all. | 4:02 |
| Karen Ferguson | But you yourself never had problems with having—you always had enough patients? | 4:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, you don't know. If I'm interested in surgery and somebody's doing more surgery than I am, then either he's a better practitioner getting to his patients, or maybe I'm not. Or if I'm busy or if I'm the most popular surgeon, then I'm happy if I'm doing a reasonable amount, that's it. So you have to decide what is what. And I think generally the Lord's been good to me and that's it. | 4:15 |
| Karen Ferguson | Again now, when you came down to Wilmington, did you have any trouble adjusting to the racial situation here? | 4:42 |
| Leroy Upperman | No, because as I said, I'm a son of my daddy's. I'm practical and I knew my place. One day I had to go to court to testify on a case, and I just walked in and walked and walked around in the main floor, and had a seat. So some very kind elderly White gentleman came up and says, "I'm sorry, but I'm have to ask you to go upstairs." So I got my butt on upstairs. It didn't bother me. I just knew that that was it. I've found here, and again, people are people, you've got some good White folks and some of them ain't worth a damn. You got some good Black folks and not with a damn. And I've found some White people in this community that I wouldn't trade for love or money. And that's it, that's just being practical. | 4:54 |
| Karen Ferguson | As somebody who was probably much more prosperous than the majority of Black people here, did you ever have a sense that you couldn't appear too prosperous? Did you have a sense that you had to sort of hide? | 6:03 |
| Leroy Upperman | No, this again is another thing that's important in the Black structure. The typical Black doctor, in the typical Black community's got the biggest house, the biggest car and everything is big. This is the name of the game. It's just like the Redbones. It's a show thing. You don't see many doctors that are just reserved and sit back, but that's the name in most of the areas. | 6:17 |
| Karen Ferguson | So there was no problem. You never experienced any problems that way? | 6:56 |
| Leroy Upperman | Jealousy over how much money you had? | 7:00 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah, or White people feeling that you should stay at your place, not appear too prosperous. | 7:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | I don't think that bothered too much because somehow, again, in communities when they wanted to use the doctor as a role model, they'd use in that area, and they became role models, not only in financial ways, but often in politics and so forth. They assume that type of leadership, which is stupid, because doctor thinking, people are lousy politicians, but they're out in the front. And then they go to churches. They used to go to churches and line up all the people and get all that money. Go up there and put a great people $5 bill in there. Okay, you see that. | 7:10 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now the community hospital, it was public hospital when you— | 7:52 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah, it was owned sometime by the county and sometime by the city. It was primarily for Blacks. Later on, one or two Whites got in there, but this was near the end of this program. | 7:57 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, what kind of facilities were you provided with? Was it an adequate place for—Were you— | 8:12 |
| Leroy Upperman | This tells about it, but briefly, I can tell you. The old hospital was a two-story wooden building, just like somebody's house. And the early doctors, Dr. Bennett and them, they furbished that up and they had an operating room and a delivery room and some beds and all that. In 1938, the group got together and got with the city or some politicians and they decided to build a Black hospital over there near the school. And that's what they called the community hospital. They had 50 beds and this was in '38. | 8:19 |
| Leroy Upperman | About three years later, when the war was beginning to come, James Walker Hospital, which was a predominantly White hospital, got a government grant for expansion. Now, that was a private hospital and the politicians. The Black politicians, all got up in arms and said, "If they got some money, we ought to get some money." Bottom line, they pulled some wires and we got a grant that gave us a nursing home and 50 more beds. So we had 120 beds. That's more than we needed. But anyhow, they had a space that was adequate. | 9:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | And how about supplies? | 9:45 |
| Leroy Upperman | I think we had a good hospital program. We had a director of nurses, Ms. Salome Taylor, who came down here. She came and set up the old hospital. She did her work in New York City and came down here and she did a wonderful job. And she stayed with this hospital for many years until she died. But they had about what they needed to work with and we did quite a— | 9:48 |
| Karen Ferguson | Were you frustrated in not being able to get supplies or equipment? | 10:20 |
| Leroy Upperman | I think we had had about everything we needed. The only problems you'd have, when you were dealing with people and when you're dealing with people and doctor people, you've got something on your hands. But these are just people problems. But most everything we needed. And the White doctors on the staff, they came in and they helped us a whole lot. | 10:28 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay, so there were White doctors who worked there? | 10:47 |
| Leroy Upperman | Oh, yes. Got a staff picture outside I could show you. | 10:49 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, what role did they play? I mean, when they were working the hospital, were they treated any differently than you were? | 10:54 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. They were only about five Black doctors at the most. After the wars, now after first World War, a lot of doctors came back from the service and settled here. And then after the other wars that came in, they would get a staff position at the James Walker Hospital. But they were at the end of the line, then they would come over to community hospital and get a staff position where they could treat patients or if they were surgeons, they would get cases and all that. And this would help them in their surgical skills and all that. They competed with us in a sense. But they brought to the staff, they held office and a position, and sometimes they brought some of their patients here. Most of them they took to the other hospital, but in most cases, they were helpful. They didn't cause any awful problems. | 11:02 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did you have to treat them differently? Did you have to defer to them? | 11:59 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, again, they're people. Some of them were pretty good rascals and some were PMS. You know what that is, don't you? Poor, miserable asshole. But most of them were worked with. Those that didn't come, they just stayed away. | 12:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | And there was a nursing school at the hospital right? | 12:17 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah, the way the nurses were trained, they were trained in connection with the hospital. They weren't trained with universities like they got out where you are. And they would have to spend a couple of years doing not only practical work, but book learning and all that. Doctors would teach them certain subjects and all. And then they'd have to pass the state board. And this was the source of nurses. And many of the big hospitals or the hospitals that I mentioned had nurse training schools. We had a good one. | 12:19 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did you have any sense of rivalry with the Walker Memorial Hospital? I know they had a Black ward over there. | 13:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, its only rivalry is a racehorse and the mule. That was the main line. And if the White doctors—of course, they didn't bring any White patients over here. And if they had Black patients, they would make the decision as to whether to take them over there or over here. Now, there were some who never came to community, they took all their patients over there. Those who came to community, sometime they would bring theirs over to community. And sometimes, the patient had the choice. But the fact that many brought them here and were satisfied, would indicate that we had a good working program. | 13:13 |
| Karen Ferguson | Did you deliver many children at community hospital, or were people still using midwives? | 14:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | No, we didn't have much midwife problem here. Apparently, the old hospital took care of that. That's in there too. | 14:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | How did they do that? | 14:22 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, rather than have midwives, they would just go to the hospital and just come up there. But right now, I can't remember any midwives. I'm sure they had some, but we delivered them. | 14:23 |
| Karen Ferguson | And you delivered them in the hospital, not in people's homes? | 14:38 |
| Leroy Upperman | Some delivered at home and some delivered in hospital. But we had pretty good OB service. We've done cesarean sections. And I had one procedure that I was very happy about. I delivered an abdominal pregnancy and the lady lived. | 14:40 |
| Karen Ferguson | Man, what's that? An abdominal pregnancy. | 15:06 |
| Leroy Upperman | That's a pregnancy where the baby grows outside of the womb in the abdominal cavity. Sometimes have ectopic pregnancy, but when the baby just slips out into the abdomen and the placenta and all is attached to the peritoneum, that's unusual. But I did that over here the little hospital. | 15:08 |
| Karen Ferguson | Was there a problem with illegal abortion? | 15:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | With what? | 15:36 |
| Karen Ferguson | Illegal abortion. | 15:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | Where? | 15:38 |
| Karen Ferguson | Like people coming in with having had— | 15:39 |
| Leroy Upperman | At the hospital? | 15:41 |
| Karen Ferguson | Yeah. | 15:42 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, I'm sure there were, the abortion thing now is interesting, because I guess like prohibition, they can't go back to the old days. And women are going to do that anyhow. Just that's mother nature. But they used to have quite a bit and septic abortions. | 15:43 |
| Karen Ferguson | So they would have come in, having tried to abort their— | 16:03 |
| Leroy Upperman | Somebody would take a coat hang or something and mess them up. | 16:06 |
| Karen Ferguson | So that was something that did occur? | 16:10 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, it did. I don't think it was an epidemic of them. I'm sure that it was a reasonable amount. Much less than you have now, because you can get them legally. | 16:15 |
| Karen Ferguson | There's so many things to ask— | 16:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | That's all right. | 16:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | —a doctor. How about payments? Now people, when they came to the hospital, nobody had insurance, I would imagine. Or did they? | 16:31 |
| Leroy Upperman | Okay. This thing about whatever goes around comes around. Years ago, the community hospital, and most hospitals are owned by the county or the city. And the welfare department would determine if a patient was able to pay or not. If they could pay, the patient was required to pay the hospital bill and they became a private patient. They could select a doctor and then they could owe the doctor or pay the doctor. | 16:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | If they were certified as charity, then they could go to the hospital and the welfare department would pay the hospital bill and the doctor could not charge them. And that's what happened for a long time. Of course, you can understand a lot of these so-called private patients became that, until they left the hospital or until something was done. And then they never paid the doctor at all, so that was a mess. Then came Medicaid and all that stuff, which is the same type of thing. And nowadays, they just take them in and try to choke the money out of them. But if they don't, then they overcharge the others. So it's the same thing. But back there they had that program. | 17:32 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, with my experience, the biggest thing was to get paid for a delivery. A lot of people come at the last minute, and if you accept them and all that, of course they never pay you for it. But that was a big problem. | 18:20 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, so people, if they needed medical care, they could get it? | 18:38 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. They've always been able to get it. And again, that's a new problem. There's a difference between the medical care that patients need and what they want. Now we used to run clinics out to the hospital for the charity patients, and people would come and you'd give them the same prescriptions, same medicines, issue this to them, that you'd give a paying patient in your office. And if you go by the house, sometime you'd see five or six different prescriptions there, that they didn't use. Or they can go from one doctor to another doctor, to another doctor, to another doctor. Just like somebody who has a pocket full of money. That is a problem. Then there's some people that they know more than the doctor, and they won't do what the doctor tells them to do. But that's the problem. | 18:43 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, at somewhat time in here, you met your second wife? | 19:44 |
| Leroy Upperman | Mm-hmm. | 19:47 |
| Karen Ferguson | And where did you meet her? | 19:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | At the hospital. My first wife, we separated. She was basically a good woman, but she was her mother's child and her mother wanted her to marry a doctor. Her mother worked at this hospital up at Freedmen's Hospital, and she sent two babies down there. I don't know how the hell she got them off of pediatrics, but sent them down for us to adopt. Anyhow, she— | 19:51 |
| Karen Ferguson | So, did you? | 20:19 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, we adopted one and then the welfare department wouldn't let us adopt the other. So she kept the boy and she decided that we were incompatible and she left. Then my second wife was a nurse. She was from up here in Bolton, one of these Redbones, and we hit it up right there. And she was a good mother. She was one of 13 children, and they treated me very nice. And she did all right. We had two kids, that's my son, the one with the beer, with the mustache and all the hair. He went to Carolina. He died about three years ago. And this is my daughter. She's in California. She's a psychiatric social worker. | 20:20 |
| Leroy Upperman | And that's, my daughter who's married to her second husband. He's a judge out in California. These are her two sons. This one on the left finished— | 21:19 |
| Karen Ferguson | Berkeley? | 21:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | —Berkeley. And this one is a Princeton, the one I told you about. But my wife, we had two kids and did very well. She was a nurse, but she worked for me for a little while and then she just became a housewife and she did it all right. About 25 years ago, she had a stroke and went her way, but that was that. She was reasonably active in the community. She worked with some hospital programs and some social programs. She was all right. | 21:34 |
| Karen Ferguson | So what was your courtship? Where did you go? What did you do when you came to Wilmington to have a good time, that kind of thing? | 22:18 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, I came here to Wilmington to work at the hospital. | 22:28 |
| Karen Ferguson | But in your leisure time? | 22:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | What more men folks usually do. Well, when I came here to Wilmington—Let me get this line straight now. I married my first wife when I finished my internship and we came to Wilmington and she stayed in a house across town. | 22:35 |
| Karen Ferguson | Okay. She and you lived together? | 23:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | And I stayed at the hospital and then I would go home periodically. And then after a while, she went back to Washington. And then when I finished my residency, she came and we bought a house, an office together in the same building and did that. And after while she decided to fly. And that was that. Between marriages, I just did like anybody else did. But I stumbled on my wife. It was natural and a good thing. We married, we did various things that people do in a small town, nothing spectacular. | 23:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | We married and I bought the house next to my office and we fixed that up. And then how women do, she talked me in the building this barn. And I did that. And then she talked me into building a place on the beach, summer home, down on the beach. So that's it. But she was good person though. | 23:55 |
| Karen Ferguson | Where was your summer home? What beach was it on? | 24:19 |
| Leroy Upperman | On Ocean City. | 24:21 |
| Karen Ferguson | Oh, in Ocean City? | 24:21 |
| Leroy Upperman | You know much about this area? | 24:24 |
| Karen Ferguson | Well, I know a little bit about the beaches. When was this that you built the house? | 24:26 |
| Leroy Upperman | '54. You remember Hurricane Hazel? | 24:30 |
| Karen Ferguson | Mm-hmm. | 24:32 |
| Leroy Upperman | You wasn't born then. | 24:32 |
| Karen Ferguson | Well, Hurricane Hazel came through Toronto where [indistinct 00:24:36]— | 24:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | Oh, okay. All right. Well, I built the house in '54 on the beach and went in there in the spring of Hurricane Hazel. Fixed it up in the fall, but we rebuilt and it's real nice beach down there. | 24:36 |
| Karen Ferguson | That was a Black community? | 24:53 |
| Leroy Upperman | All right now, that's another good story. Ocean City beach is the only beach like it in the world. And it used to be, if some of the old White people saw it, they'd say it can't be a Colored beach because it's clean. It's neat. There's no joints down there. It's real nice. And we got it because a good friend—I mean he wasn't a friend then, but he later proved that he was a friend, Ed Yowel. He used to be in politics here. But down on that beach, the army used to have a training program for coast artillery. And then they did some other things, and then they closed it up and sold it to the public and Ed Yowel bought a piece of it. And the piece that he bought, he decided that he was going set aside a piece for the Black people, which he— | 24:55 |
| Karen Ferguson | Was he White? | 26:03 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. Yowel and Yowel, he's dead now. But anyhow, he set aside a section and he got a group of us together and told us that he was going to develop it, and that he would sell any of us as much as we wanted. Well, I was naive and I thought that he was some White man was trying to take advantage. So I didn't buy, but several others did. And then the rest of it that he didn't sell, he and some other folks got together and formed a real estate thing. Anyhow, they developed Ocean City Beach and they restricted the lots. All the lots were supposed to be residents and they restricted businesses to the fishing pier and one other thing, one motel. The rest of it had to be residential, which was unusual. I didn't get in, because I had an interest in South Carolina, a Colored beach down there. | 26:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | And I almost built down there until, I got a chance to buy out somebody's lot at this beach. And I did. This was nearer. Make a long story short, it's developed to one of the nicest beaches that you'd ever want to see. I got to learn Ed right well, and we became very close. And one day I asked him, I said, "Why did you and the White folks down there give them help for building that beach there?" Said, "Why did you do this?" He said, "Well Doc—" he came from up in the mountains somewhere. He said, "When I was young, Colored people did a whole lot of nice things for my family. And I thought that I owed it to them. But that's it. That's how that got there. | 27:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, how would Ocean City compare to Sea Breeze? | 27:58 |
| Leroy Upperman | I'm trying to find a nice way to say it. You can't make sugar from hockey can you? Sea Breeze was a typical Black beach. It was designed to the ordinary expression of Black people who were out to have a good time. And they did everything they could to do that. And everything went. This is just the opposite. This was designed to be as far from Sea Breeze or Atlantic Beach, South Carolina as it can be. And it is. Do I make myself clear? | 28:08 |
| Karen Ferguson | Well, a bit. It would be nice if you could be a little more— | 28:50 |
| Leroy Upperman | Booze, women renting rooms, raising hell, you name it. Need I say more? | 28:52 |
| Karen Ferguson | No, that's fine. But were there other places in Wilmington that were like that, that were rough, sort of? | 29:08 |
| Leroy Upperman | No beaches like that. | 29:19 |
| Karen Ferguson | No, but other areas? | 29:20 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well over in town, yeah, over on Nixon Street, that used to be the bad place. Now it's moved over to Castle Street, but Nixon Street used to be the hell hole. | 29:21 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, you were talking a little bit before about the Black politicians in Wilmington, working to expand community hospital, when James Walker got to expand, what did you mean by politicians? Were these office holders? | 29:39 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. This was— | 29:57 |
| Karen Ferguson | [indistinct 00:30:00] office holders in the '40s? | 29:59 |
| Leroy Upperman | You see in every community there, the pros and the cons. There's the liberals and the — What do you call the others? | 30:02 |
| Karen Ferguson | Conservatives. | 30:11 |
| Leroy Upperman | Conservatives. And the Black folks had friends here, some friends downtown, and they pulled the strings to get some of this federal money for the hospital. | 30:12 |
| Karen Ferguson | So these were White politicians who were helping? | 30:24 |
| Leroy Upperman | Oh, yeah. We didn't have any Black politicians of any statue. | 30:27 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now why did these White politicians work for Black people? Why would they represent Black people? | 30:31 |
| Leroy Upperman | They're just a little bit more liberal. That's all. And like I said, there are all kind of people and there's some people that are good White people and some ain't worth a damn. There's some good Colored people and some ain't worth a damn. And there's some few happen to get into certain positions. I often raise the issue—not an issue, but mentioned to a lot of young people since I've been here—I'm 80 years old and through my lifetime I've seen things come to pass that I never dreamed would happen in Wilmington. | 30:48 |
| Leroy Upperman | And this makes me more assured of my conservatism, that a lot of things, it takes time for some things to happen. Some things, if you do them too fast, they reverberate. Take the president and the gaze he has to—Back during the forties, Truman and integrating the armed forces, he did it in one blow, because the background had been formed. It was something that's ready to pop. So timing is an important thing. | 31:18 |
| Leroy Upperman | But there've been good White folks around here. And there's been some that ain't worth a damn. They had one guy here, Champ Davis, he was the president of the Coastline Railroad. He was the old cracker that came from nothing. He was just an office boy. But he worked himself up to the chairmanship president of the Coastline. And when he got to be up in his eighties and nineties, he saw a vision and where he hated Black folks before he just had a turnaround, and it came soon. And he recognized. He's dead now. But he would tell you, say, "Well, I just had a new vision." And a lot of people do that. So that's it. | 31:53 |
| Karen Ferguson | Let's talk a minute about the one White people who weren't so nice, weren't so good. How could they try to control the Black population? | 32:43 |
| Leroy Upperman | You ever read the morning paper? Had a guy called Rye Page, the newspaper is an important entity. And R page died—Well, I think he sold the paper. His airs might have sold it, I know they've sold it, but when Rye Page died, he still would not put a Black man's picture in the paper, unless he was accused of some crime. | 32:58 |
| Leroy Upperman | Wilmington was this—not arcade, but that term where it's hard to change. But some years ago, the story comes down to me that they invited somebody from away, to try to boost Wilmington in its outlook. And a guy from somewhere came and said, "What Wilmington need is more fires, more flowers, and more funerals." And up until the Coastline moved in the fifties, this was a dead end thing for industry and business. The old folks wanted the Coastline here. And this is a nice quiet place to be. Since they've got out, you've had a great influx, with better thinking and all. Rye Page was one. They had the sheriff, what the hell was that guy's name? He was the chairman or President of the Ku Klux Klan. What the hell was that guy's name? I'm trying to think of some others. You want to know the bad ones? I'm forgetful. I can't pull— | 33:27 |
| Karen Ferguson | No, that's all right. That's fine. | 34:53 |
| Leroy Upperman | But those two were— | 34:56 |
| Karen Ferguson | So what did the sheriff do? | 34:59 |
| Leroy Upperman | He acted like a stupid rascal who was in the Klan. And the sheriffs activities were typical of somebody who would be a Klansman. And showing the change, now they got a Black sheriff, he's one of the best they ever had. There's some others I could think of, if they'll come. | 35:04 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, when you came here to Wilmington, what kinds of civic organizations did you belong to? Did you join anything like the Masons? | 35:33 |
| Leroy Upperman | Well, you asked, I have to answer. I joined the Masons. I'm not sure whether I joined the Elks, but I found that they were not what I was—At the time, I'd been here maybe 10 or 15 years. And the people who were Masons now, they were good people. And I said basically honest, but the level of thinking and application was different from what I expected. Now historically, the Masons is quite an organization and it goes way back. And there's certain amount of study you do to go from level to level. But they wanted me in there, because they thought my name would add prestige to the thing. And within one meeting I was 32nd degree, which is wrong. And I just didn't bother. I think the Elks, I went to one place and had a drink of beer and that was that. Not that I'm against them, but I didn't think that I would apply. | 35:49 |
| Leroy Upperman | During the war, I had an interesting experience. They were trying to develop a program of security among the civilians. And they were trying to get people to ferret out any information that might be damaging to the enemy. And along that time, there was a big public issue issue about transfusions and the blood bank. Charlie Drew helped to develop that thing. And so we had this meeting, integrated meeting up there, and everybody's getting up saying all this stuff. | 37:04 |
| Leroy Upperman | And I remember, and I was glad I said it, I said, "Now this is really a force. All the stuff you're talking about, trying to have a good war effort, but rather than to take blood from one human being to another, a program that is necessary. Rather than do that, you take medicine made from the urine of a horse and put it in people. That's a damn thing." And this to me, was significant about the level of thinking and all. But during that time, they wouldn't let Black people drive the city buses, they would get a White woman to do it. | 37:47 |
| Karen Ferguson | During the war? | 38:40 |
| Leroy Upperman | Yeah. | 38:53 |
| Karen Ferguson | Now, so you didn't join the Masons or the Elks, so you didn't get involved in civic organizations here Very much? | 38:54 |
| Leroy Upperman | I'm a life member, the NAACP. I don't go to meetings, but I've been that for a whole lot of years. I used to have some civic clubs around here. But I'm not a club man, because people do some funny things. I was part of the program for integration of the schools. I stayed on there for a while and I got into a little hot water with that, because the so-called leaders—I don't go to church much, but I did go a couple of times to raise some money. And when I got up and told them in the meeting that I thought that they ought sending a thank you note back to them things, they had other things. So I decided that was lousy. I was on the committee when they were trying to integrate the hospital, closed community in James Walker. That was funny to me. The politicians who were heading that, we had a politician that I think was full of stew, he was self aggrandizing people and all. | 39:05 |
| Leroy Upperman | I didn't get along with him too well, because I spoke my mind, but I never, ever came out vocally against him. Rather than do that, I would—But during the time, he was a great civil rights leader and all, I remember him years back and he and I went to Miami, but that was back in maybe the forties or fifties. And went over to Miami Beach and he saw a suit he wanted to buy. And the man said, "If you come on in the back room, I'll sell it to you." And he went in there and he bought the suit and he came out and said, "You know if I really wanted something, I'd go in the back room to do it." And by then, he turned around the opposite way. And he's a great leader, see and all that crap. Well, he gets leadership, because he's vociferous and he appears to the people and all, which is all right if they're going to follow him. And the many things that he led them to do and to follow, that's up to him. | 40:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | And the hospital thing, one day, one meeting, the Black Medical Society agreed that it was important to keep the community hospital, because it meant something. And this was agreement. Next meeting, there was some vacillation. Next meeting, they made a promise. I stood up for the hospital, I was a man of heart. I said, "Don't do it." So they promised that they would not go against the community hospital. We had a hockey butt lawyer here that was sucking up to this guy. And in the meeting, the doctor was telling the lawyer what to do, instead of the other way around. Anyhow, the lawyer said to wait to close the hospital. "If we can close the hospital, then they'll have to put us in the other one." Said, "The way to close it is to go to the county and ask them to investigate it and show how bad it is." | 41:37 |
| Leroy Upperman | And I said, "Well, let's do that." And by damn, about a month later, here's the county doing that. Well, I think this is wrong. They could've at least done that. Anyhow, they did it that way. And this is your leadership. And this is the same leadership that led the suits for integration and this thing and that thing, and so forth. And as a result of whatever, he got local recognition, he got on the board out here and so forth, and so forth. And by damn, when he got ready and died, he got the biggest White undertaker in town to do it. Doesn't matter to me, but here's this leadership and all. So somewhere, I read that a lot of times people who identify themselves with leadership often end up—but that's the type of thing. | 42:46 |
| Leroy Upperman | When they were getting ready to dedicate the hospital, there were about three or four of us doctors left or something. So they were trying to get something—The medical community wanted something in the cornerstone, expressing ideas of the Black Medical Society. So they were sitting up there talking about, "Well, let's put in there how much we did for this in the way of integration suit, and that." I said, "I don't believe that belongs in there. There are many other contributions that have been made, that are much more worthy." And I said, "Frankly, like the guy say, y'all put in there what you want, because I don't give a damn," because I thought that it was out of place. | 43:52 |
| Leroy Upperman | But that's leadership and all. I never once have spoken openly about what they were trying to do. I used to belong to the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and I spent time there, working on programs and all. One time, they had a park over here, for Martin Luther King. Now everything's Martin Luther King, but the Chamber of Commerce, wanted to get the city to open the park, just to open it up to everybody. Blacks couldn't go there, because that used to be a good White section. Anyhow, this guy who was supposed to be leader, they had a—I forget the name of this church group, it was Black folks getting together and all this stuff. So it was important for the Chamber of Commerce to try to reach the community to get backing for the folks to vote on this part. | 44:36 |
| Leroy Upperman | And I went, I hadn't been going to the other meetings, but I just went there, because I thought it was a civic duty. And I got up and made an appeal for it, saying that it would be helpful. Because they do need a park, which they got. This rascal who had voted against it saying, "Instead of a park, they need to close up some sewers and all, around some property you own." He got up and asked me, said, "Dr. Upperman, who from downtown sent you here?" And he ripped me up from town to back. Well, I just like my father wiped my mouth and got my big butt out of there, and the hell with it. So we were talking about leadership, and all. We got some leadership now with some people in politics. | 45:45 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you think that the Wilmington Riot in 1898 has had any effect on the speed at which things changed here, and on the Black leadership in Wilmington? | 46:29 |
| Leroy Upperman | My— | 46:47 |
| Leroy Upperman | —after the turn of the century between the Democrats and the Republicans. And there were some people, whatever they call them, the populists and all that, they were outspoken about things. What they did, again, was revolutionary. It was traumatic and so forth. And like we say, sometimes traumatic things or revolutionary things can be damaging and it left an awful imprint. But I think most people now have forgotten about the— | 0:01 |
| Karen Ferguson | The riots? | 0:30 |
| Leroy Upperman | —the riots, I think so. Real thinking people probably were impressed by the riots because it's something that was done in the past that was wrong and it sets the way for the right. I might be wrong on that, but many, many things that have come to pass, like name calling, where they called folks niggers and waps and all that stuff. The general society is getting away from that. That's a growing up process. | 0:31 |
| Karen Ferguson | Do you think it had any longterm effect on leadership in Wilmington? Do you think that people whose families lived here during the riot, some of these older families, that they shied away from leadership because of the riots? | 1:02 |
| Leroy Upperman | I think it burned itself out. Now, some of those people who were in leadership, some of them, if they weren't red bones, they were pink bones and something. There's a dichotomy there. And most of those families, they've just about died out in their influence. The biggest thing, I think, has been the younger people who've been impressed by this violence of the groups like Stokely Carmichael and those type of people. Even Spike Lee, I've been impressed about his picture and his impression and of—What's his name? | 1:22 |
| Karen Ferguson | Of Malcolm X? | 2:09 |
| Leroy Upperman | Malcolm X, okay. Malcolm X had a pitch, but if you can't compare him with Martin Luther King, there's no comparison. Malcolm X, it appears to me, was still growing, and he was in the youth of his maybe program, and he was changing from stage to stage, and he was doing fist fighting, but the reason to me that Martin Luther King scored was because he hit society between the eyes, the conscience. And just like Gandhi hit the conscience of India, Martin Luther King hit the conscience of America. That's the difference. Most of these leaders are self-style leaders and they're opportunists. | 2:11 |
| Karen Ferguson | All right. I think I don't really have any other questions, except one that I always ask people at the end of the interview. I'm wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about what the system of segregation has meant to your life, whether you felt it held you back, if you think of how things would've been had segregation not existed in the United States. | 3:07 |
| Leroy Upperman | First, in many ways, I'm proud of my achievements from childhood to now. Like the professor said, you rise or fall as you aim high or low. Second, as a doctor, I think, if I had been exposed to the open market, I might have achieved more in more areas than I have. Now, this doesn't mean that, if I had been in the open area, I would've done more because there's some dumb White doctors out there, but this puts parameters, limits on what you can do. So within, I feel that I could've done more, I could've done better, but I don't feel better in my age that the things that I have accomplished and all are on the negative side. | 3:35 |
| Karen Ferguson | All right. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Opperman. I have a— | 4:36 |
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