| LBighorn, I was fortunate to have had any racial prejudice removed from my mind when I was 6 years old. The January after Pearl Harbor, my Mother moved to Houston to find a better job in the war effort, and was an executive secretary at Hughes Tool until 1950. When we first moved there, we stayed with my Grand Mother that had a rooming house near down town, and behind that was a 3 car garage with an apartment over it. An old man, at least he seemed older than the hills to a 6 year old, lived in that apartment and helped as a handy man with the rooming house. In the evenings, he would sit on the steps to his apartment smoking his pipe, and just looking at the sky as if in study of the universe. Soon, I would go sit with him and we would talk. He treated me like another person and not a kid. He was half Black, and half Comanche, and he was wise to the ways of the world, or at least his part of it, and the most impressing thing he said to me, that lives with me still is that "the color of the skin is not the measure of a man". |
