Cooper School Oral History Project s1

COOPER SCHOOL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

EDITED DRAFT

Pat Schille & Darlene Allen

Videotape

[This is an interview with Pat Schille and Darlene Allen on June 13, 2003. The interviewer is Ann Copeland. The transcriber is Jolene Bernhard.]

[Tape begins as Ann is explaining the interview process to Pat and Darlene. The women are sitting in Pat’s living room.]

AC: We’ll start all over again from the top. Introduce yourself please.

PS: My name is Pat or Patricia Jane. The name is Schille. But in 1947 when I started school, it was Patty Jane Conlan. Darlene?

[Pat raises her hand in Darlene’s direction.]

DA: My name is Darlene Allen and my name at the time when I was at Cooper School was Darlene Sekella. S-E-K-E-L-L-A.

PS: We lived next door to each other in kindergarten. I don’t know whether or not we walked to school the first day. [in response to the interviewer’s question before the tape began] What happened was I got taken by Harlene. [to Darlene] Remember Harlene [White]?

DA: Oh. No.

PS: No? OK. Harlene was a friend of my sister, Ruthie Conlan. My sister had just graduated from Cooper the year before. Harlene was a year younger, and was still in eighth grade at Frank B. Cooper. At that time it was from kindergarten through eighth grade. It was her job to hold my hand and take me to school and make sure I got to where I needed to go.

AC: What was the neighborhood like around the school back then?

PS: Back around the school?

AC: Yes.

1 PS: We lived, what, about... eight blocks? [questioning Darlene]

DA: Eight blocks to school.

PS: The neighborhood around Youngstown at that time was pretty bad. The steel mill was the main employer. The homes in that area were older, run down. It was pretty densely populated in the immediate area. And as I recall, I think back, if you looked west and tried to go to West Seattle from the school itself, then it got to be real bad quickly because in between was kind of like a gully — the golf course was not developed at all. There were people that had burros and goats. Even in our own little neighborhood, my neighbors had chickens. This guy up the street had chickens.

DA: We had chickens.

PS: Nobody even blinked about having that wildlife in the city at the time.

DA: The actual neighborhood down below Cooper, too, had a, what you called, a little neighborhood grocery store and meat market. And then eventually, later on, there was a soft ice cream stand that went in that triangle intersection. We had little neighborhood stores. There was one there and then one further up Delridge Way. That’s where most of the families did most of their shopping. There was no such thing as a supermarket.

PS: Because a lot of people didn’t have cars. They didn’t drive them.

DA: Yes, you walked to the store.

AC: No cars?

DA: Yes.

PS: Milk and bread at the grocery store, at the corner grocery store —

DA: Five cents, loaf of bread.

AC: Were you there during the changeover from Cooper to Youngstown?

PS: It was Youngstown, I think, initially. My understanding was that Frank B. Cooper, the school itself, was built in 1917, I thought. I didn’t know that it was ever called Youngstown.

DA: I didn’t either. I didn’t know that either.

PS: If it was, it was.

2 AC: What was the school itself like, the feel? I’m assuming it was a small school.

PS: We didn’t think so, we thought it was huge.

DA: All I can remember is great big wide staircases. How wide they are now, I don’t know. And I remember shiny, leather-type floors — or linoleum floors.

PS: And oak desks.

DA: Oak desks. A playfield out back.

AC: That’s what I was going to ask, a playground.

PS: An inside court, a rainy day court. We had the boys on one side and the girls on the other, and the two should never mix. We used to play hopscotch. And the game with the ball, what was that called? Handball kind of game. We each had our own special little rubber ball that we played with.

AC: Like ping-pong?

PS: No, it was a little rubber ball and you’d bounce it against the wall or something. Two bounces and then three bounces. We used to play that across the street at Mrs. Baroumes’s garage. She tolerated it for about forty-five minutes.

AC: So, the school was like a new thing coming into the neighborhood?

PS: No, no, no. If it was, we had no sense of that. The difference in our generation was that we were born during the war. Nineteen forty-two. When we started school, that whole understanding of baby boomers was hitting. But they were probably still two or three, four, or five years younger than what we were. We were on the cusp of it, if you will. There was a lot of postwar housing in the area that was built.

DA: Project housing.

PS: It was very inexpensive and they put it up on any empty lot. Across the street from the school, there was postwar housing. There was postwar housing all over. There was quite an influx of people in the area. In our little neighborhood, they put up three buildings right between her house and my house.

DA: They were so run down.

PS: Across the street, there were two more and half a block up, there were like five more.

DA: We called them project houses and then they eventually tore them down.

3 AC: What was the student body like? I looked at the photo and from my understanding, there were some other nationalities.

PS: Not in the kindergarten age. But during the early [19]50s, the Estonians and Latvians were refugees. A picture of the sixth grade, you’ll see that we had some Latvian people that attended.

DA: We had one Polish gal, Kazja. Her family immigrated from Poland. She was the only one that I know of.

PS: We’ve forgotten Ann Pickering. And Satsu. Was that her name? What was her name?

DA: Well, the only reason I remember Kazja is because she spoke broken English. You think about nowadays with the immigrants but she was the only one, she had to learn English. She was actually two years older than we were. They put her in sixth grade class and then she was kicked up. But she was the only... And very few people of color.

AC: I’ve seen that. Do you remember there was one black schoolteacher which was —

PS: Mrs. Dewitty. She was my favorite. [big smile] Second grade.

AC: Yes!

PS: I already told Darlene the story but I’ll repeat it for you. My mother was really active in PTA at that time — we had five kids in our family. She was involved in the teacher PTA group that decided to throw a fundraiser, a talent show. My mother could sing fairly well. She wanted to make it fun and so she sang Eddie Cantor, “Dear Old Mammie.” She sang the song in blackface and after the talent show was all over —

AC: Oh, in blackface?

PS: In blackface. This was 1949-50 time frame. Mrs. Dewitty kindly pulled my mother aside, at another PTA meeting, and explained to her why that would be offensive. My mother was horrified, she had no clue. We came from North Dakota and I can think back, things that my mother said to me. In those projects, there were some black families. We had lots of fun playing with the kids and stuff. My mother told me: You don’t go to their house. Now, I didn’t know why I couldn’t go to their house. I could play with them. I could go into a white kid’s house. She would have probably thought of herself as being very liberal and open-minded but those kinds of prejudices stay with you up to adult.

4 The first time I went into a black person’s house, I was in my twenties — my mid-twenties. I was told never to go and I never went. When I went, I was scared as hell. I wondered what was going to happen.

AC: Yes, you do grow up with that. You do.

PS: Yes. So, that was my understanding as I became an adult — how bigoted I was without even knowing it. Mrs. Dewitty was just a lovely lady. I mean, very good teacher.

AC: OK, so that was your favorite teacher. [looking at her list of interview questions]

PS: Well, I liked all of my teachers.

DA: We had good teachers.

PS: Yes, I think we all did. There was never any discussion about incompetent teachers back in grade school at Cooper.

DA: You never challenged.

PS: Your parents never talked about teachers not being good. Just like PTA was very active. The principal, there was a like sense of community about the whole thing. Kids behaved because if you didn’t behave, someone in the neighborhood would tell on you.

DA: Everybody knew everybody.

PS: So, you just behaved. If you got out of line, word got back. It was kind of like a vast type of a family. Each family, there were lots of kids, too.

DA: The other thing that happened in school then — there is a billboard in West Seattle — is we used to have bank days. You used to bring a bank book and your little dime or your nickel. It was to teach us how to save.

PS: Washington Mutual.

DA: Yes. There was a bank day and we’d bring our dimes. And somebody’d be the banker.

PS: I was a banker! The other thing you got to do was sell tokens. One of the things at that time at Cooper School was there was no pedestrian overpass. When we were in kindergarten, I believe, or first grade — there was a little girl that was killed in a car accident right after school. I don’t know if she was in one of our pictures even. She could have been. I don’t even know remember who the child was.

5 That was just awful. And that kind of brought the PTA all together and neighborhood to get better safety in that area. There was no street light at all. You’d cross and sure hope. All the way from Youngstown clear up. I mean, there were none!

AC: And you said that you got to school being walked by your —

PS: In kindergarten. But I think after that —

DA: We walked by ourselves.

PS: There were little clusters.

AC: It was safe?

PS: There was a bad element. There was a creepy old man and all those kinds of things.

DA: I remember walking by this one house that had a huge hedge and I was scared to death every time I walked by. But you always walked —

PS: With partners.

DA: You usually walked with people. We walked all over the neighborhood. We walked at nighttime. We walked down alleys to and from one another’s houses. We never thought anything about it.

AC: It was a different era.

DA: Well, it wasn’t as fearful.

PS: There was a certain amount of fear. I think we did that as we got older. In grade school, I remember we square danced when we were like in fifth or sixth grade in the school gym on Thursday evenings. We would go by ourselves down there for that.

DA: Yes, you’d have to walk down.

PS: But even in the community center, when I was little, they had movies that you could go in for twenty-five cents or something like that. See a movie, buy popcorn. It was all free, I think it might have been all free. I got to go with my brother. I don’t remember that you were there.

DA: No, I don’t think I ever was.

PS: That was kind of a fun thing to do.

DA: Right across from Cooper, there was like a community building on that one corner. Then there was that huge park.

6 [Pat bursts out laughing]

PS: It’s not huge anymore.

DA: We used to go over to that park. I remember there was a little wading pool and tennis courts. There were big clumps of trees and we used to make the camp under the trees. This was part of recess. Now, how we got over there —

PS: Lunch.

DA: Lunch, yes. I remember that we used to hide in the trees. And then I used to outrun the boys because they’d try to chase you and kiss you.

[Pat laughs again]

DA: I used to always outrun them. [She recalls.] Because of the trees being such clumps. They’re now all cut up and there’s no hiding place.

PS: Oh, yes. There got to be weirdos hanging out under those things and grabbing little girls. So, they had to tear all that stuff out. But in our eyes, it was just a huge, huge park. That building that’s currently directly across the street wasn’t there. The community building was where the other one is, it may have been across the street. That was on the corner of... Evans? I can’t even remember the street. Anyway, there were patrol boys in order to get across the street. They didn’t have patrol girls. They had patrol boys. In our opinion, it was a little discrimination. My brother and her brother were patrol boys, too. I think they had to be the smart boys. They had to be the good students and the ones that I think had some little bit of leadership qualities or something. There were specific areas. If you lived on the other side, you needed to cross the street right at the school. Then they had another patrol that had the yellow flag that warned traffic to slow down.

DA: There were the two ends to get the kids across.

PS: Yes. But that pedestrian overpass didn’t get built, I don’t think, until we went to high school.

AC: What happened if someone got hurt?

PS: At recess?

AC: Was the process, was it the nurse, the school nurse, and then...

DA: I remember if you got sick you called home, and they came and got you. Other than that...

7 PS: One time, I got sick — and I’ll never forget this — the nurse insisted on walking me home. I didn’t feel I needed to be walked home and I resented her walking me home. She tried to touch me and I was like, get your hands off me. [indignantly] I was like, I am not a child. She could just send me home.

AC: What age were you?

PS: I don’t think I was very old. [enjoying the irony] I was six, seven. You know, we also had a blizzard and they sent us home.

DA: [nodding] I remember that.

PS: I got separated from whomever and I started following this family. A mother had come to get her kids. What was the... Shoot! They lived in the projects. We went to school with them.

DA: The Stobers.

PS: Stobers, Duane and Dick and? There was three of them. Anyway, so I followed them home and that was fine, but all of a sudden, they went into their house. I still had probably another hundred yards to go. At that time that snow had... [drawing a line across her waist]

DA: It was a horrible blizzard.

PS: Meanwhile, my dad was at home and he had decided that they must be sending those kids home. Or my brother got home first or whatever, and I didn’t come home. So, he headed out the door to find me. I’ll never forget, I looked up and there he was heading towards me. I only had to take like three steps in that deep stuff. I was scared to death. It was so scary. He picked me up and carried me home the rest of the way. Oh God, was I glad.

DA: Now the way I got home is the neighbor across the street — Faler? — he drove his car down and saw my mom. My mom was walking to the school to get us because she knew that something was up. So, she was walking by the school to get me. We got down there and then we all piled in that car. All I can remember, as a child, is he drove across this big lot. I mean, I thought it was just a vacant lot but who knows what? He had that car so stuffed with every neighbor person in the neighborhood.

PS: Maybe that's how my brother got home ahead of me. He was in that car.

DA: It’s possible. All I can remember is that he picked up my mom. Said, c’mon and we’ll go get [Darlene]. And that's how I got home that day.

AC: What year and grade was that around? Do you recall the name of that blizzard?

8 PS: Forty-nine, I think.

AC: Was it just a major thing for the whole Seattle area?

PS: Seattle area. It wasn’t just isolated. We were just little kids.

DA: One of those freak storms.

PS: Around that same time was when we had the big earthquake, as well.

AC: What about holidays? Did you celebrate holidays at school? Christmas?

PS: Oh, Christmas. We sang real Christmas songs. We even sang “Jesus Is Lord.” We didn’t even think about any other denomination. If it existed, we knew nothing about it.

DA: Well, it seemed like everybody was a Christian. Everybody went to the same church. We all went to the Lutheran or whatever. Presbyterian?

PS: Methodist.

DA: Methodist. Whatever was down there. There were little tiny churches around in the community.

AC: If you could sum up your experience at Cooper with one word or three, with the school —

PS: Well, what I remember about school is the whole sense of community. We started in kindergarten together and we went all the way through high school together. Same kids. The core group and there were some that came in. In fifth grade, they had brought the kids down from High Point. They joined us for just one year because their school was being remodeled. We saw those kids again when we went to junior high. A lot of the kids that were in our kindergarten, first, second, third grade — as the projects closed down, they bought homes in other parts of West Seattle. They attended Denny and Sealth High School. So, we really had this core group of kids that we grew up with. The transition of people coming and going really wasn’t that much. On our block where we lived, no one moved or sold a house. That’s the difference. You had that consistency in a neighborhood that makes kids behave and do well in school.

DA: And only until we were old and graduated from high school did our parents move out of the neighborhood.

PS: Right.

AC: There were lifetime friendships.

9 PS: Yes. And the school was central to the socialization of our family because people were working poor. They were blue collar workers and they were making whatever people made. We didn’t know we were poor... or we all thought we were poor. There was not a class system per se. We were unaware of it. It was real subtle.

DA: Some people had prettier clothes than others. Like Marsha.

[Pat chuckles]

DA: She was always dressed like a little Kewpie doll but the rest of us were just...

PS: But I think that she was over the top and we were more mainstream at the time. The school was entertainment. PTA was very strong. We always performed for PTA a couple times a year. Those were performances we practiced real hard for. Then we had our performances after school and the whole neighborhood showed up! Christmas concerts and spring concerts. Then, like Memorial Day... my memory is that we carried fresh flowers every Memorial Day and brought them to school. Everyone brought fresh flowers.

DA: And May Day, you always made things and hung them on your neighbor’s doors. I remember doing that.

PS: You brought flowers from home for that, too. We brought the flowers and then we brought things home. There were always special occasions. We did a production for sixth grade — sixth grade graduation — that we practiced for months on together. We tap danced. Were you in fourth grade class? Because it was the centennial for Seattle that year. We did this whole production about what Seattle would have been like a hundred years earlier. I was a can- can dancer. We did this little dance and stuff.

DA: I could have been.

PS: [waving her hand in dismissal] You don’t remember.

DA: She remembers everything. I remember taking some big beautiful dress from the neighbor and going down and being in some kind of performance, some kind of on stage. That's all I can remember.

PS: Ah! You don’t remember which grade that was in?

DA: No. All I remember, I was very, very bashful.

PS: Oh! We used to have talent shows every spring, too. Everybody sang. And we practiced.

10 DA: Probably not me.

[Pat grins]

DA: The one thing I do remember about Cooper is that they had a showcase. The offices were over on the left as I recall and there was a little window showcase where things were put in there. One time I drew a picture — or we water colored. I painted a picture of a horse and it got put in that showcase.

PS: My art never got showcased.

DA: That’s the one memory that I have of the hallway, this special thing happened for me as a child.

PS: What I remember is in fifth grade in Mrs. [Nina] Bonnell’s class, we did murals. We were studying Indians, Northwest Indians, we did the masks and all that kind of good stuff. We had this great big huge mural. Maybe it was more of Columbus probably, 1492, and we had the three ships and all that kind of stuff. She divided up the class and we had sections of mural, and we painted it. She took pictures the whole time that we did all this. Then at the end, she put them on slides and she showed them. They all teased because I think I was in every picture that she’s taken. I had braids in the back. I always got my hair cut in the spring, so that in September, I had these little itty bitty braids. As the year got, they got longer and longer. As soon as school got out, I got the whole braids cut off.

DA: [pointing to her head] My mom used to divide her hair here and she did French braids all down the side. French braids right down the head. The other thing that also happened in our childhood there, was we were always fearful of being bombed.

PS: Oh, yeah!

DA: Because it was wartime.

PS: No. Postwar, Cold War.

DA: Postwar, Cold War. Boeing and everything, they had camouflage on top of Boeing. We were trained to be [aware that we were living in a defense area].

PS: Duck and roll.

DA: [to Pat] They had shelter. You know, that shelter, they were yellow and —

PS: Civil defense.

11 DA: Civil defense, yes. Even when you went downtown Seattle, took the bus to downtown Seattle, you always scoped out to see where one of these shelters was. We grew up with that.

PS: Fearful.

DA: Fearful of being —

PS: Good old fifties. My mother always said, because you had to have your routes, your know-how-to-escape route. My mother said: “Hey kids, get your ass... [she claps her hand over her mouth, a little embarrassed] Just get home. Get home because we’re not going anywhere. We wouldn’t be able to get to a highway or an arterial if our life depended on it. So, we’ll just all come home and be here together.” Not to worry. We just want to be together. That was the main emphasis.

AC: What was the path to get back to Seattle, the city, back then?

PS: It’s the same as it has been.

DA: Spokane Street.

PS: Spokane Street. Of course, it was a lot different. We didn’t have a high bridge. You had to cross the street from the transfer at Riverside, you would not even know where that is today. That was hellacious and scary. Especially for a little kid to cross that street. We went to Lincoln Park all the time as kids — in the Gulch as we called it. We played lots of times on the golf course.

DA: Creek.

PS: Never even blinked about spending our time on the golf course or spending our time in that creek as kids.

DA: We would play on the vacant lots. We had vacant lots everywhere because those projects that were built were torn down. So, we as children played on all these vacant lots.

PS: The whole neighborhood. We played “Kick the Can.”

DA: Yes, we played “Kick the Can.” The whole neighborhood was —.

PS: All ages. It was fun. I had older sisters and their boyfriends or husbands would come over, and they joined in. Even starting when I was very little, we were always included. You had some adult helping you. [pretending to swing a bat] Someone would drop the ball at first base. You could always make it to first base. We played “Five Hundred,” I don’t know, for years with the kids. You know, a pick-up game.

12 AC: So, it was a special, close experience going to Cooper? It was highly memorable and favorable.

PS: It must have been for me because I remember everything! We also belonged to Campfire Girls, I mean Bluebirds. And then we were Campfire Girls. Most of the girls — not all of them—belonged to the Bluebirds or Campfire Girls. I don’t understand why all of us weren’t there. At least half were. We spent overnights at Camp Long. Do you know where Camp Long is? You probably don’t. It’s not too far away but we thought we walked a hundred miles.

DA: Oh, yes! We walked up there from down on Twenty-Fifth.

PS: We walked from the field house, girl. You had to get there first, then we walked. Oh, that was interesting. And I’ll never forget being up there probably in third or fourth grade, and we were going to have our little cookout and spend the night. I looked down and could see my dad sitting on the front porch! I thought, oh!

DA: Your dad?

PS: Yes, you could see through. It must have been early spring probably. You could still see from Camp Long to the house.

DA: Oh. Down to your house.

PS: He was sitting on the front porch. I was just devastated because I thought we had walked a hundred miles. Even then, we lived on Twenty-Sixth, so that’s probably equivalent to Thirty- Second or Thirty-Third. Six or seven blocks but I could see him sitting down there.

DA: We had to walk all the way around to get there.

PS: And through the trail. We had nettles.

DA: There were a lot of outside activities but not a lot of sports. Girls, there were no sports for girls.

PS: Brother.

DA: If there was for boys, I don’t know.

PS: My brother played baseball the whole time.

DA: As far as organized sports, there was nothing for girls. Just Bluebirds, Campfire —

13 PS: Sports activity, there was competition at the grade school level. Athletics was never my forte. I remember Virginia Day could run laps. We had those meter runs, you know. She always lost me in the dust and I was so mad. I could never understand why she could run faster than I could. It didn’t make any sense that I was two or three inches shorter and probably twenty pounds heavier than she was. She was just a rail.

AC: It was a good experience. What did your families do for a living? Or most of the families at Cooper? Steel mill and then...

PS: I don’t think that in our particular area of Cooper, Boeing was such... it might have been an employer. I think my father worked as a machinist and ultimately went to work — when I was in second grade I think — for Kenworth. [pointing to Darlene] And her dad.

DA: Yes, my dad had always worked for Kenworth. That’s where he worked.

PS: And that was a very good job.

DA: It’s now Paccar. But it was Kenworth Motor Trucks.

PS: It used to be down right on East Marginal Way. Her dad and my dad carpooled to work together, along with a couple of other neighbors that worked there. Some worked at the steel mill, I know. Other friends —

DA: They were all laborers.

PS: My other friend Joan was here the other night. Her father was a longshoreman. Teri Catlin’s dad worked at Seattle Brick and when they went out of business — because brick was no longer being made... or being needed or something — he went into his own business in contracting.

DA: My mother was a homemaker. She stayed home all the time. [speaking to Pat] Now I think your mother worked.

PS: She worked. My mother was college educated to be a teacher. Yet, when she came out here, she didn’t have enough of the right education to teach in Washington state. I don’t think she ever had the drive to become a teacher to begin with.

AC: From North Dakota.

PS: From North Dakota. So, she picked up jobs where she didn’t have to worry about child care. She worked graveyard as a waitress. She worked at Crawford’s restaurant for years. Then I think she went to work at Boeing before because I did nursery school, too, which was community funded. A postwar kind

14 of thing. Darlene didn’t do that because her mom was home. And that was kind of traumatic for me, going to that little day care facility. I mean, I have vivid memories but I was only three. Then she worked in the waitress area, then she was a hostess at a restaurant downtown at a hotel.

DA: Hungerford Hotel.

PS: Hungerford. She worked from seven in the morning until one thirty in the afternoon so she could be home when we got home from school. It was important for parents to be home after school. No latchkey kids.

AC: The community was very involved in the school, what happened at school, the programs — like you said, the PTA. What about the actual school itself, the facilities?

PS: We square danced at the school. You mean like the auditorium? To us, it was huge.

DA: Wasn’t the lunchroom and auditorium all in one?

PS: I think that’s common in lots of areas. But we had movies after school that we would go see. Again, the boys were the projection crew. We never ran the projection.

[Darlene hoots with laughter]

PS: I think her brother was a projectionist. My brother was a projectionist. They were about the same age. That was like a real responsible assignment if you got to become the projectionist. So, they never would give it to a girl. Since my mother was in PTA, I know that I was asked to lead the PTA in Star-Spangled Banner and the Pledge of Allegiance a couple times. I think I could even carry a tune in those days.

DA: My mother wasn’t involved as far as I know but she was the back-up. Every kid in the neighborhood was in our yard.

PS: We belonged to like Campfire Girls and Bluebirds, and I remember one time we made yarn dolls and then we crocheted little things. And I asked my mother to come and teach the kids how to crochet. She told me years later that it was real easy to teach every other kid how to do it but she couldn’t teach me!

[Laughter]

PS: I was unteachable. And her mother... we always had little art projects. We had lots of things going on. We were kept engaged.

DA: We didn’t have TV.

15 PS: Well, we did but not until we were ten.

DA: Yes, there was no TV. I think I was out of grade school. We were the last ones in the neighborhood to get a TV. Our entertainment was radio, games, play outside.

PS: Imagination.

DA: You created your fun. We didn’t have that. That makes us really sound old not having a TV. That’s hard to comprehend, isn’t it?

AC: The percentage from boys to girls was about...

DA: It was about equal.

AC: Were there like little fights —

PS: Well, the boys were always real rough, even back in those days. They used to have gangs — not gangs — there was going to be like a fight after school, grade school! They were outlawed, they weren’t supposed to happen. I remember being told, “Don’t you even go near those things. Stay away!” Then my brother. There wouldn’t be a fight he would miss. He had to be there.

DA: There were some tough guys. In fact, we were just looking at the pictures — we remembered who the tough guys were.

PS: Some of the families that moved in after the postwar, they came from all over —

AC: You said one Polish —

PS: No, those weren’t immigrants. They actually bought homes or lived near. This is the projects, when we were in the late [19]40s, early [19]50s. They were trash, a lot of white trash. Young. People had gotten married, then the men went to war, and they came home and they probably had no relationship with one another but they had a few kids. We saw lots of stuff. They moved out the rest of the homeowners because as soon as they built those projects, my parents put up a picket fence and I was told to play inside the fence. As time got a little more older, we got to go out. But they were pretty trashy. The influx of new people moving into the area, anyone that moved in was perceived as not real welcome. They were new. There was that sense of newness or something. If you lived here and you had your own house, then you took care of the place. You cared. Those people that lived in temporary housing, they were not well liked by and large, regardless. But a majority of those people ultimately became home owners and not that far from our houses. That’s the older part of West Seattle, very old. My dad came out six months ahead of time and he bought that house. And my mother came out with four kids. I was the fourth. He took her to see that house — she cried. Could you have found a worse neighborhood, a worse —

16 DA: It was affordable.

PS: Well, it wasn’t just affordable. He had relatives that lived in Burien, they had a little business in Burien with a common grocery store. On the corner of Ambaum Boulevard. It was that uncle actually that gave my dad the money to come out to Seattle. They lived over by Lake Burien. The only transportation that came from the town or whatever, it was not really convenient. I think that’s what my dad —

DA: He had to have bus transportation.

PS: He needed transportation. He didn’t have a car. So, he opted to buy down there because it was convenient.

DA: You guys didn’t have a car until well older.

[Tape cuts out]

PS: Mrs. Hartog? She was the school secretary. She was there the entire time we were there. She was a delightful woman. The only people that ever went to the principal’s office in grade school were the real bad. There were no girls ever that I recall in grade school that went to the principal’s office. I don’t think girls ever went to the office. And even in junior high, there were very few.

DA: The other thing at Cooper, we had a special ed teacher and children with disabilities went to the —

PS: From all over West Seattle.

DA: From all over West Seattle, went to the special ed at Cooper. They weren’t mainstream with the regular students but they were a special class. We had all of these, what were the “weird” children.

PS: They even put the kinds of children that are disabled today, the level of disability in there.

DA: We were talking the other night about this midget, we were wondering what ever happened to him. Mrs. Gerkin -- wasn’t that her name? xxx spell? xxx

PS: Uh-huh.

DA: She was the special ed teacher.

PS: My mother always had rave reviews about her. She said she was a wonderful human being.

AC: So, the Cooper School was very community oriented.

17 PS: You know, in terms of having problem students and low-income, and children not being fed before they came to school, I don’t recall — and it’s hard to remember everything — I think people sustained themselves enough. Because if they didn’t have the money, they had a goat and they made goat’s milk. I remember one kid drank goat’s milk. Somehow.

DA: They were survivors.

PS: The only time that I remember where a teacher had to get involved with a parent of a student, was a gal and we were in fifth grade, and she came from High Point. It was one of these big secrets. They had a number of different parent-teacher conferences in the afternoon. We were kind of left on our own while she was conferring with this woman. That was the only one.

AC: What was the school lunch? Did you go home for lunch? Or did you eat lunch at school?

DA: No. We ate lunch at school.

AC: What was it like? Was there a cafeteria?

DA: I always took my lunch, I’m sure.

PS: We had special days where we got to buy. Turkey day was like a... I don’t know why we loved Turkey Day.

DA: All I ever remember eating is peanut butter and jelly. My [mom got sick of making the same thing.]

[Pat bursts out laughing]

DA: I was really finicky. I was a skinny little kid and finicky little eater. Anemic and everything else. But all I liked was peanut butter and jelly. I don’t think I ever bought my lunch.

PS: You’re kidding.

DA: I don’t remember ever buying because I didn’t like to eat that stuff.

AC: Was the lunch —

PS: It was good. It was made there.

AC: Homemade? Do you recall the cafeteria workers? Were there one or two? Just a couple?

PS: Oh, I don’t remember any of the names. You knew them all because they had been there the entire time as you. They were all women, I remember that, working in the grade school. However, I do remember that there were kids that had tickets for milk. And ice cold milk, too. You had to give them change or something.

18 We had to line up to go in the lunchroom. We were very military-like. I mean, there was just no — DA: You didn’t have the disruptive... everybody followed the rules.

AC: Were the teachers allowed to spank or paddle?

DA: Oh, yes! That’s discipline.

PS: It was discipline and I don’t think they had to do it very often. If they did, most parents, if you didn’t get it at school, you would get it at home. There was just no question about it.

AC: Was there ever, a teacher ever took it too far?

PS: No, not people we knew. There were a couple of students, like Bobby Bernhart for example, like he flunked a couple grades. xxx spell? xxx Was he mentally retarded or slow? He became a discipline problem. There were some children that were discipline problems but what the underlying issues were... they kept secrets.

DA: You didn’t talk about that.

PS: Kids today, this is something you’re going to learn about. You can ask all the questions until you’re blue in the face. You just didn’t know.

AC: You stayed in your place.

PS: Yes, and I called her mother Mrs. Sekella and she called my mother Mrs. Conlan.

DA: It was all formal.

PS: My mother referred to her mother as the first name — personally — but she was always referred to as Mrs. Sekella.

DA: You always addressed your elders that way.

AC: Were the teachers from the neighborhood?

DA: Not that we know of.

PS: They just kind of appeared.

AC: [rhetorically] Where’d they come from?

DA: If they lived in the neighborhood, we didn’t know it.

PS: I don’t think they did.

19 AC: What was the black teacher’s name?

Pat and Darlene: [in unison] Mrs. Dewitty.

AC: I don’t think she was from —

PS: She had not even been in Seattle all that long.

AC: That’s what I think.

PS: She was educated, I think, on the east coast.

DA: She worked up in the north, I read something about her. I think she worked in the north and then came down to Cooper. She was recruited someplace else. But she was the first black teacher there.

PS: Do you know what she had that no other teacher had? She had a little sink, a little basin sink. It was in the part of the room and there was a mirror. It was like: Wash your hands after lunch. Or after whatever. I was telling Darlene today, we were looking at the pictures and I said: that little girl that was so cute — Gail [Rydberg], that girl and I were fast friends but we got in an argument on the playfield. They [and Janet Nystad] were hiding in the bushes and running away from me I thought. Anyway, they hurt my feelings and I came back to class after lunch. I was crying. She made us sit down and talk about it, and kiss and make up. Then we went over to the sink area and she washed my face for me. That’s sweet.

AC: Aw, you remember that?

PS: Oh, yes. Sat in the front row of her class. I think I can remember just about everything we learned and how we learned it in second grade.

AC: What was the learning, the curriculum like?

PS: It hasn’t changed much in second grade. I think they still teach basically the same stuff in second grade. It was just, she was so calm and so organized and so thorough about everything that you just learned.

AC: Was it known as a good place of education or was it this medium... there’s no recollection?

DA: I don’t think we knew any different.

PS: I don’t know that we knew anything differently. I know when we went into junior high and high school, kids from our school competed with the best of them. I have to think it was good. There was none of this, like we didn’t know anything. It all seemed to be on par back in those days.

20 I didn’t even know when my own kids started school that there were different sorts of schools. I don’t think all that sort of discussion came into play until my children started school. If it did, we weren’t used to it.

AC: This has been very nice and informative.

[Tape cuts out]

END OF INTERVIEW OF PAT SCHILLE AND DARLENE ALLEN ON JUNE 13, 2003