Journey of the Tapes: Getting into College in the 1940s 2

We travel our life paths, picking up experience, finding teachers and lessons everywhere.  And sometimes if we have been attentive to  the lessons they pay off in unexpected ways.  That is part of the story of my father getting admitted to the University of Chicago after the end of World War II.  I asked my father how he got into the University of Chicago in a time when few African-Americans were being let into the nation’s non-Black colleges and universities. (Please note that I am redacting these tapes with editing for clarity but being true the tapes and what and how my father told his story.

Oh, two things got me into the University of Chicago. The first was a Reader’s Digest piece on the University that I read before I went into the service. It looked like the school for me. Bright dudes… You gotta understand now that I had dropped out of high school, so I said I really like that idea. Then when I got to Chicago I met a girl who had some connection to the university. She took me out there and it looked good, ivy and such. It looked good to me so we talked and they had aid and I wanted to go.

Then I was in Okinawa and I wrote to the University and said I wanted to go and they said I would have to fill out this form and they wanted pictures. I said I was serving my country in Okinawa and there were no pictures out here in the foxholes. Not quite that, but pretty damn close. I didn’t tell them I hadn’t graduated from high school.

I got out of the Navy June 6^th. The following week I was taking tests. I had to take the Regents. I took all the tests. But the entire time I was in the Navy I was reading. And there again dumb luck, but it’s not dumb luck. A part of the test was on opera. My mama listened to the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday. One of the things I’ve always wanted to write and never could was the Duchess and the opera. Madame Butterfly was the best one; I remembered that distinctly. But she knew them all! She was for the opera, but Milton Cross was the radio announcer and she loved his voice.  And so she walk over coals to hear him. Every Saturday afternoon, she’d be ironing her sheets and whatnot, and there is this aria “One Fine Day” and my mama would say, “Don’t listen to that man, girl, he’s gonna break your heart.” So she knew all of the plots and she would comment on the plots but she would comment as if she watching a soap opera.

“I want all you Negro children to sit there next to the window so I can tell you apart.”

Then I had been to PS 10. I had this seriously racist teacher, Miss Kenny. Miss Kenny scared the shit out of all of us. We integrated that school. When we went in and integrated it Miss Kenny said, “I want all you Negro children to sit there next to the window so I can tell you apart.”  That’s how we came in.

Now Miss Kenny, it was her thing that Black kids were just incapable of learning. Black folk were just mentally inferior, but that she wasn’t going to let that mental inferiority get in our way. She would teach us the best that she could considering our mental inferiority. Which meant that she rode our asses. She had my ass in the library every other day. She had me doing all sorts of crap and she was vicious. So what she did was she gave the Black kids a better education than the white kids. A mistake that we would make was evidence of our stupidity.  It was just terrible.

Frick Museum entrance

This woman decided we were short on aesthetics, colored people didn’t know nothing about aesthetics. And she sent me to the Frick Museum Years later I took your mother there and she fell in love with it. And she took us to the Cloisters. I took you guys (my brother and I) there. That was Miss Kenny. Ms. Kenny made sure that I would get this European education. And when I got there, both the Cloisters and the Frick, I liked it. I just liked the ambiance. There was a dude down there, the guard he just let me in. I was supposed to pay ten cents but he’d just show me in. I went to the Frick they had a Turner and an El Greco. The El Greco was Christ tossing the money changers out of the temple. It was such a powerful piece and it wasn’t until I was went back with your mother some 20, 25 years later that I realized it was a miniature.

So when the exam came up they had paintings I had seen in the Frick and opera I’d heard, The Magic Flute was one of them. I was weak on math, incredibly, but I got by on English skills and these were two substantial sections the art and music parts and I passed the Regents. The Regents is a statewide test you have to take, and it was so rigid a lot of states accept the Regents in lieu of an entrance exam. I got a high up Regents score and I went in. I caught them on the patriotism and that’s the long and the short of how I got into the University of Chicago.

If you have a story on learning you unknowingly accomplished that paid off  in an unexpected way or place, please comment on it.