Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Frank Fisher

Frank Fisher: Trumpet Player, Songwriter: A Long Career with Junius Courtney, Raiders, and 49ers Bands

Interviews conducted by Caroline Cooley Crawford In 2016

Copyright © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley ii

Since 1953 the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Frank Fisher dated September 23, 2020. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

For information regarding quoting, republishing, or otherwise using this transcript, please consult http://ucblib.link/OHC-rights.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Frank Fisher, "Frank Fisher: Trumpet Player, Songwriter: A Long Career with Junius Courtney, Raiders, and 49ers Bands" conducted by Caroline Cooley Crawford in 2016, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2020.

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley iii

Frank Fisher (Photo Courtesy of Frank Fisher) Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley iv

Abstract

Frank Fisher was born and raised in Huntsville, Texas, where his parents operated the only African-American hospital in the city. He took up the trumpet at age twelve and played in school bands. In the oral history, he remembers summers in Galveston with relatives, singing in a youth choir at Saint James African American Methodist Church, and discrimination in the South. He majored in music at Prairie View A&M and served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the postwar occupation. He moved with his wife to California in 1947 and settled in the East Bay, where he worked for decades as an electronics systems mechanic at the Alameda Naval Air Station. He eventually moved into Parchester Village in Richmond, where he raised his children. He was active in Bay Area jazz for seven decades, playing such famous Fillmore clubs as Bop City, hotels in San Francisco's Nob Hill district, and venues in Oakland and Richmond. On one occasion, he performed with Duke Ellington's band, which he calls "about the most memorable thing that I can think of." He discusses Bay Area venues where African Americans could not perform, clubs that had separate performances for white and African-American audiences, and the musicians' union merger that helped with employment. Fisher wrote and recorded many songs such as "Ape Shape," "Obama Do Swing," and Grandpa's Thing." He performed with Del Courtney and the Oakland Raiders band and the 49ers band from 1968 to 1981, and claimed that when Lou Rawls sang the national anthem the Raiders always won. He performed with and wrote songs for the Junius Courtney Big Band until 2017, when he retired at the age of ninety- two. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley v

Table of Contents

Interview History by Caroline Cooley Crawford vii

Interview 1: March 8, 2016

Audio File 1 1

Early years in Huntsville, Texas, 1926-1945 — Family business: operating the only black hospital in town — Summers riding horseback on a family farm — Father's work as a chef; mother's work in a beauty salon — St. James African American Methodist Church — Segregation in Huntsville, Louise Fisher's false arrest — Huntsville city jail — Playing trumpet in high school with second-best instruments — Listening to Duke Ellington on the radio and performing with the Ellington band in Crockett, California — Performing at a prisoner-of-war camp near Huntsville — Segregation — Long hours working at Brown and Root Shipyard in Houston — Majoring in music at Prairie View A&M — Remembering Clora Bryant — Serving in the U.S. Army; training at Fort McClellan, Alabama, 1945

Audio File 2 23

Serving as communications sergeant in an anti-aircraft outfit in occupied Germany, 1946 — Returning home to segregation, 1947 — Marriage to Evelyn, a move to California and a job at the Naval Air Station, Alameda, as an electronic systems mechanic — Flying in the P-3 Orion, 1955-1981 — Playing at Slim Jenkins: Raincoat Jones and the Oakland scene — Remembering the Fillmore, 1950s — Bop City and Harlem of the West, race restrictions — Performing with the Del Courtney and Oakland Raiders Band, 1968-1981, and the 49ers band

Interview 2: March 29, 2016

Audio File 3 40

Military service in Germany, 1946 — Rapport with Germans — The 644 Anti- Aircraft C Company Club — Harassment from Quartermaster outfit and socializing with German girls — Purchasing a Volkswagen with cigarettes — Visiting Dachau — More about settling in California and working at Alameda Naval Air Station — DeFremery Park and housing restrictions — The unions and finding work — Assignments at Civic Center, San Francisco, with Sarah Vaughan, Stevie Wonder, and others — Family life with four children, 1948-1968 — Living in Parchester Village, Richmond — African-American musicians and performance restrictions — A gig with David Hardiman's All-Stars at the St. Francis Hotel to celebrate Wounded Knee — More about Harlem of the West Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley vi

Audio File 4 59

Five decades with the Junius Courtney Big Band — Playing with Dave Hardiman and the San Francisco All-Stars, 1975-2016 — Composing: "IBAR," "Ape Shape," "Grandpa's Thing" — Segregation in California clubs — Breakfast clubs, compositions and life in retirement

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley vii

Interview History

Frank Fisher is handsome and vigorous at age ninety-two, and until a few months ago was still performing with Junius Courtney's Big Band at Yoshi's and elsewhere in the Bay Area. He agreed to participate in an oral history interview in 2016, and interviews were scheduled at his home in Parchester Village, Richmond.

Fisher grew up in Huntsville, Texas, where his father was a chef in a local hotel and his mother had a beauty salon and ran the city's only African-American hospital in the family's backyard. He began playing trumpet at the age of twelve, performed with high school bands, and eventually majored in music at Prairieview A&M. In the oral history, he remembers summers in Galveston with relatives, singing in a youth choir at Saint James African American Methodist Church, taking up the trumpet, playing at a nearby concentration camp for German and Italian prisoners and school dances, and discrimination in the South up until the time he returned home after serving in the U.S. Army in postwar Germany. He felt African Americans were more welcome in Germany than they were in their own country.

In 1947, Fisher moved with his wife to California and worked as an electronics systems mechanic at the Naval Air Station in Alameda. He was active in Bay Area jazz for seven decades, playing in San Francisco's famous Fillmore clubs such as Bop City, hotels in San Francisco's Nob Hill neighborhood, and venues in Oakland and Richmond. Fisher also had many standby gigs that featured artists including Stevie Wonder, Sarah Vaughan, and Rosemary Clooney. He discusses Bay Area venues where African Americans could not perform, clubs that had separate performances for white and African American audiences, and the musicians' union merger that helped with employment.

Fisher played with Del Courtney and the Oakland Raiders Band and the 49ers band from 1968 to 1981, and claimed that when Lou Rawls sang the national anthem the Raiders always won. He wrote and recorded many songs such as "Ape Shape," "Obama Do Swing," and "Grandpa's Thing." Asked about his most important performance, he said, "Playing with Duke Ellington was about the most memorable thing that I can ever think of." Fisher's friend, the great trumpet player Allen Smith, asked Fisher to take his place in an Ellington performance in rural California. Fisher has a robust sense of humor. His typical response to questions about his health is: "I'm fine, but if I don't wake up tomorrow, I'll call you."

Caroline Cooley Crawford Berkeley, California June 2018

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 1

Interview 1: March 8, 2016

Audio File 1

Crawford: March 8, 2016, interview with Mr. Frank Fisher, jazz trumpeter and composer, for the Oral History Office. Let's start by my asking you about the band you play with, and have for many years. I think they call you the Godfather.

01-00:00:25 Fisher: That's right. Can you hear me now?

Crawford: Yes, very good.

01-00:00:27 Fisher: Okay, good. Yes, well, at present, I'm playing with the Junius Courtney Jazz Orchestra. Before then, I was also with the David Hardiman San Francisco All Stars. This is local, Bay Area. That's just to name a couple. I'm presently playing with the Junius Courtney Big Band right now. I still play with David Hardiman. I have to give him credit because we had about a thirty-year run with each other.

Since he's not playing regular now, I'm playing regular with the Junius Courtney Big Band. In fact, we just played Yoshi's in December, and we have coming up on April 9, Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.

Crawford: Let me ask you when and where you were born, and then we'll talk about your family.

01-00:01:30 Fisher: Okay. I was born. [he laughs] That's a joke. In Huntsville, Texas, October 18, 1926, back in the old days. And I'm still here. I'll be ninety this year, which is 2016. October, 2016, I'll be the age of ninety. I didn't think I'd get to be fifty.

Crawford: I think the music keeps you going. What do you think?

01-00:01:57 Fisher: It probably does. That, music, and I still work out at the gym three times a week.

Crawford: Good for you.

01-00:02:05 Fisher: That keeps me active, from being a total couch potato. At least I go to the gym, then I'm a couch potato. [laughter]

Crawford: Okay, tell me about your parents. Who were they? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 2

01-00:02:17 Fisher: My dad was born in 1889. My mother was born in 1899. They were ten years apart. My dad, he was a chef-cook in the only hotel in my hometown. We only had one hotel in my hometown. My dad was a chef-cook there, and my mother was a beautician. See, my hometown, we only had one hospital. When there were too many white people in the hospital, they'd move what few black people they had out in the hallway or either outside, under a tree.

So the doctor that birthed me, his name was Dr. Black, the one that birthed me. He birthed me at my house. He told my mother if she would take a course in practical nursing, that—. My dad had built two houses in our back, and she could turn one of them to like a nursing home. She said whenever there was an overflow at the white hospital, they would bring the black patients to our house. Not in our main house, but the house that my dad had built in the back. It'd hold at least six patients.

In the summertime, it was brother and I's job to—. We had a big old black pot in the backyard, to wash the sheets, and rinse and dry them and hang them on the line. We didn't have a dryer, so we'd hang them on the line. Every day, the doctor would come by and check on the patients. My mom couldn't give them injections, but she'd give them pills and change linen and feed them and like that, and she'd get paid for that. So that was what we called—it wasn't registered, but—the first black hospital in my hometown. It might've been in the whole state of Texas, far as I know.

Crawford: Well, that's extraordinary. Did they do surgery at your house?

01-00:04:22 Fisher: No, no. They did the surgery at the hospital.

Crawford: Patient care.

01-00:04:26 Fisher: When there was not enough room at the hospital for the black patients, they would bring them over to my mom's place, and the doctor would come by there and visit them. There was only about two or three beds in the hospital for black patients at that time. When there was more than that, they would bring them over to our place and my mom would take care of them, and the doctor would do his regular visits there.

Crawford: And how many years did they do that?

01-00:04:57 Fisher: Oh, let's see. I must've been a teenager. See, I was ten in 1936, it was between that and 1940, I guess, because I was in high school in 1940.

Crawford: So a few years then— Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 3

01-00:05:14 Fisher: Few years, yes.

Crawford: —you were the only black hospital in town.

01-00:05:18 Fisher: Right. Then the first black doctor that came to my hometown stayed with us. The first black dentist that came to my hometown stayed with us, also because my dad had another little house in the back. The doctor stayed in our house, inside the house, the big house with us. The dentist stayed in the other house in the back, until he built his practice up, and he bought a house right next to us. The dentist there bought a house down a block away from us. That was his office.

Crawford: You were a medical center.

01-00:05:50 Fisher: Yeah. In fact, the doctor was at my house when my father passed away. My mom, all she had to do was go knock on his door and tell him to come in to check on my dad, and he passed away. He had pneumonia. At that time, penicillin hadn't come around yet, I don't think.

Crawford: How old was he?

01-00:06:09 Fisher: He was only forty-six. My mom passed way in 1949, and she was only fifty. They were ten years apart. My dad went first, in 1935. I was nine years old when he passed. And my mom passed in 1949. I was twenty-three. I'd just got out of the Army. Got out of the Army two years and I moved to California and I had to go back to Huntsville for the funeral.

Crawford: What about siblings, brothers and sisters?

01-00:06:39 Fisher: I had one brother and a half-sister. My half-sister, she was much older than I was. I think I was about twelve when she passed away. I think she was twenty-eight. She had married and they lived on a farm outside of town. In the summertime, me and my brother would go there, so we'd get to ride the horses.

Crawford: Did you work?

01-00:07:05 Fisher: No, no. I was just still a teenager. We'd go out to their house to spend the summer—not all the summer, but maybe a couple weeks in the summer—at her house, out at her farm. Her husband's farm, rather.

Crawford: What did they grow? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 4

01-00:07:20 Fisher: I don't know. All I was interested in was riding the horses, at the time. I don't know what he grew. I don't know if he was a sharecropper or what, but I know they had a horse and some cows and pigs and dogs and chickens and all that kind of stuff. But we'd go out just to get to ride the horses, most times.

Crawford: Did you ride bareback?

01-00:07:39 Fisher: Yes. No saddles, just bareback. Just like the Indians.

Crawford: That's the best. And bridle? Did you have bridles?

01-00:07:45 Fisher: Yes, and a bridle. Bareback and a bridle. No blanket or nothing, just bareback.

Crawford: That's wonderful.

01-00:07:51 Fisher: My brother-in-law, my sister's husband, he chewed tobacco. It looked like Hershey bars to me and my brother. We knew nothing about tobacco. So it looked like he was so militant when he would bite off a char and go sit on his front porch and chew his tobacco. So we stole his tobacco, got on a horse and rode down to the creek. I bit off a chew and he bit off a chew and we were chewing it. My brother didn't know you weren't supposed to swallow it. He got sick as a dog while we were down there and I had to put—. I got sick, too. 'Course, I didn't swallow nothing, but I still got sick. I wasn't used to that tobacco in my system.

So I had to put him back on the horse and I walked him back to my sister's farmhouse. My sister looked at him and said, "What's happened? What's wrong with him?" Said, "We stole Tommy's tobacco and we was chewing it down by the lake." So she put us both to bed. We went to sleep and it wore off in some time like that.

Crawford: Did you ever smoke after that?

01-00:08:57 Fisher: I didn't start smoking until I was in the military. I started smoking in the military. Because everybody else was smoking, so I did, too.

Crawford: Will you tell me the names of your family?

01-00:09:10 Fisher: My dad, Frank Fisher, Sr. My mother was Louise. Her maiden name was Appelin, but she was Louise Fisher. My brother, James Fisher, my younger brother. I only had one brother. And my half-sister was Zenobie Randall, because she was married at the time. I only had one brother and one half-sister Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 5

in my family. My dad had four brothers. My dad's oldest brother, he was born in Huntsville, but he moved to Galveston. He was a porter on a Pullman.

01-00:10:00 Fisher: A Pullman porter on a train, for years and years and years, till he retired and passed away. The other three brothers, I don't know what happened to them.

Crawford: You were all living close.

01-00:10:12 Fisher: I never knew my dad's other brothers. The only brother that I really knew was the one that was a Pullman porter. The others didn't live in our area so I never knew them. I don't know if they had passed away when I was born, but my dad's oldest brother was the one that was a Pullman porter.

He lived in Galveston, Texas. We used to go to Galveston at times, in the summer, and spend a weekend with him, because we're close to the beach. Galveston's right on the Gulf of Mexico. We'd go to the beach in the summer. We'd go down for a weekend. My dad's brother, his name was Emory. He had twin boys, William and Emory, Jr., and Raymond. Raymond was our age, but the other two boys were way ahead of us. We'd all get together and go to the playground and go to the beach, because he was familiar with the directions, how to get there. So it wasn't about five or six blocks from the beach, where he lived, and we'd just go down in the summertime. Every day, we'd go to the beach until it's time for us to catch the bus and go back home.

Crawford: How long a trip was that?

01-00:11:24 Fisher: I'd say from Huntsville to Houston is about an hour and ten minutes, and to Galveston is another, I'd say, forty-five minutes or less.

Crawford: So you went on the train?

01-00:11:32 Fisher: No, on a car. We'd go in a car.

Crawford: What kind?

01-00:11:37 Fisher: It was a 1932 Chevrolet, I think. Yeah, 1932 Chevrolet. I'm not sure if that's the correct year. But we would drive down, and my dad would take off during his vacation from the hotel. He would take off and we'd do that, because he'd go down to see his brother on his vacation, and naturally, we went with him. My mom and the two of us would go down to see him.

01-00:12:06 Fisher: He used to each take a couple or three days, then he had to come back and go to work. If we'd go down on a Thursday night, we'd come back Sunday night, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 6

so he could go back to work and my mom could go back to work in the beauty shop.

Crawford: What were his hours like?

01-00:12:19 Fisher: His hours was five in the morning—. He was off at one o'clock, one-thirty. The chef doesn't have to sit around and do dishes and all that kind of thing. After the dinner hour's over, he's home. He'd be home at least by one-thirty or two o'clock.

Crawford: Did he do the home cooking or did your mother?

01-00:12:43 Fisher: Both. Both. Because when he was at work, my mom did the cooking; and on his off days, he would get cooking, because she was working in the beauty shop.

Crawford: Well, you must've eaten very well.

01-00:12:52 Fisher: We never did have a lack of food. I know a lot of people that were poorer than we were had trouble with food. But they would give my dad stuff to take home for your [family]. He said, "Frank, you take this home." A roast or a turkey or a chicken or whatever it was, he'd take home. So we never did have food problems, where other people did, at that particular time. They was eating that government cheese or whatever they call it. But we had good food all the time. We were never in the lack of not having a meal. We ate every day.

Crawford: What do you remember that he cooked for you that was special?

01-00:13:30 Fisher: One of his specialties, it's called pig taters. Now, everybody say, "What's a pig tater." Pig tater is a regular white potato. You cut the top off of it and core it out and stuff ground pork sausage down in the potato, put the top back on with a toothpick, and bake it like you would bake a potato. When it's done, you take it out, open up your potato, and the juice from the meat that you put in there—ground beef or sausage, whatever you put in there—. All you had to do was add a salad to it. That was one of his specialties. I remember telling my wife, when she was living—. She belonged to a sorority, and they would come out here to have meetings sometimes. My wife had told them about pig taters and they knew what it was. She said, "Well, Frank knows how to fix it." So I went and fixed about five of them for them. I didn't get to taste any of them; they ate all five of them.

Crawford: They liked them okay. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 7

01-00:14:29 Fisher: They liked them okay. Because I asked some of the guys in the band, said, "You guys ever heard of pig taters?" They said, "No, what's a pig tater?" But I told them how it's made and they said, "It sounds like it's good." I said, "It is." Because you season the ground beef really good with Worcestershire sauce or whatever you use for your seasoning, salt and pepper or whatever it is, and stuff it down in the potato—. The potato can't be too thick and it can't be too thin, because when you stuff the beef down there—. You can stuff the ground beef in there, or either take a sausage and put it in there, and put it in the oven and stand it up. Put butter all around it, stand it up. Put them together, where they all stand up. When they're done, you take them out and there's the potato and your ground beef is already cooked, already seasoned. All you need is some salad to go with it, and whatever you drink.

Crawford: Sounds good to me. Well, what did you do in your family when you were small? Was there churchgoing?

01-00:15:24 Fisher: Oh, we went to church every Sunday.

Crawford: What was the church?

01-00:15:29 Fisher: Saint James African American Methodist. It was right around the corner from my house. We only had to walk about a block and a half to church. We'd take our Saturday night bath on Saturday night, like everybody else, and grease our little legs, put our white shoes on, and walk around the corner to the church. We had Sunday school in the mornings, and then when the regular service started, we'd stay for the regular service.

Crawford: A few hours.

01-00:15:56 Fisher: Church, at that time, used to start around about eleven o'clock, and we were out about twelve-thirty or one, because Sunday school and then the main service for the church.

Crawford: Did your family do music in the church?

01-00:16:14 Fisher: No, my mother didn't play. At that time, I didn't play, not in—. Because I just started playing the trumpet when I was about twelve. I was twelve in 1938. That's when I first started playing the trumpet. Our pianist at church was the pastor's daughter. So we had a little youth choir, so we sang in a choir. It was about ten or fifteen of us that sang in the youth choir. Then they had an adult choir. We would sing certain Sundays and the adult choir would—. We sang at least one Sunday out of a month; the adult choir would sing the other three.

Crawford: Well, tell me about your neighborhood. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 8

01-00:16:56 Fisher: Where I lived was where the black neighborhood stopped and the white neighborhood started. I was the last house on my street. To my left was a white neighborhood. White people lived from our left on up, because a white family lived directly across the street from us. From there on, to my left, was the white part of the neighborhood.

Crawford: What do you remember of segregation as it was?

01-00:17:30 Fisher: It was terrible. I'll tell you an incident that happened. The white lady that lived directly across the street from us was named Miss Honey. Miss Honey came over to our house one day. Me and my brother had come home from school and we were having lunch, because we could walk to school from where we were, or either ride our bikes to school and back.

She came over and asked us, "Where's your mom?" Said, "She's back in the beauty shop." My dad built a little part on the back of the house for the beauty shop. She had two operators. My mom had two operators. Then she took care of patients in the hospital, also. She came and asked my mom, did she want a radio? She said a little, small radio. She plugged it in, where they could listen to music while they were in the beauty shop. So she sold it to my mom for fifty cents.

About a couple days later—me and my brother were home for lunch—the sheriff just walked in the house—white sheriff, of course—and wanted to know where your mom—. "Boys, where is your mama?" Said, "She's in the beauty shop." So he walked around and in the door. He opened the door and told my mama, everybody—. Her name was Louise and everybody called her Lou. Said, "Lou, we're going to have to put you under arrest," with the Southern accent. My mom said, "For what?"

Said, "For receiving stolen property." She said, "What stolen property." He said, "The radio that you got from Miss Honey, it was stolen." She said, "Well, I paid Miss Honey fifty cents for the radio. I didn't steal it, I bought it from her. I paid her for the radio."

So he took my mom to jail. My brother and I, we didn't know what to do so we called my mom's sister. Her name was Frances. We told our Aunt Frances that they had arrested her, took her to jail. The sheriff said it would take ten dollars to bail her out. So my auntie said, "I don't have the ten dollars." The doctor, the first doctor that came to our house, he lived with us. We went by his office and told him the story. He said, "Here's fifteen dollars, because when you go there to get her out, they're going to raise it, because they know you don't have that much money." Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 9

So my auntie got the money from Dr. Richardson, and my aunt and me and my brother went down to the jailhouse. And we heard about what they do to black women in the jail after dark. My mom had heard others ladies that come to the beauty shop talk about how they treat black women at the jail. They take advantage of them, and wouldn't be nothing done, nothing said.

Crawford: In the jail.

01-00:20:16 Fisher: In the jail. So we didn't want that to happen to our mom. So we got the ten dollars, my auntie and my brother and I went down to the jailhouse. She told the bailiff or who it was we talked to that they had the ten dollars. He said, "Well, it's going to be a little bit more than ten dollars. It's going to be fifteen." So she pulled out the fifteen and they couldn't change it at the time. So we got out, and after that, never heard any more about it. Miss Honey and my mom were good friends. She told her. But said, "That's ridiculous. See, I didn't steal that radio. I don't know why he told her that it was stolen property." See, the sheriff said Miss Honey had stolen the radio and she sold it to my mom for fifty cents. And they never said anything about it after that.

Crawford: They were friends.

01-00:21:10 Fisher: They were friends. Because Miss Honey had a milk cow, and you wasn't supposed to have milk cows in the city limits, because we lived in the city limits. She kept the cow in her backyard. Her house was like this. There was a slope that went down in the backyard, where the cow could graze. It was like, I guess, a so-called barn. It wasn't built like a barn, but the house was high and a slope, so the cow could stay [there]. And we had a storm there one time. The storm was so bad the back of her house fell on the cow and killed the cow. They had to tear her house up, almost, to get the cow out, and then rebuild her house.

Crawford: Very rural then, wasn't it, where you were?

01-00:21:56 Fisher: Yeah. It was a small town. When I left, it was 5,280 people at the time, at this one time I'm talking to you about now. We used to call it a mile, because 5,280 feet is a mile. 5,280 people was the population of the city. The main industry was the prison, the state prison. Just like the state prison for California is San Quentin, the state prison for Texas was Huntsville, Texas.

Crawford: I know.

01-00:22:31 Fisher: Right, was Huntsville, Texas.

Crawford: What was your first impression, your first memory? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 10

01-00:22:40 Fisher: Well, I went to kindergarten before I got in first grade. There was a lady called Miss Justice. She was our kindergarten teacher. She would pick us up, take us to school. Because her son worked, and before he went to work, she would go around to everybody—it was only about ten of us in her class— she'd go around and pick up whoever she could pick up. People that was close to the school, they could walk; but the people that had a distance between their home and the school, she would go and pick them up. And when kindergarten was over, she would walk everybody home. She had a long way to walk with some people, too. She would walk every student home.

Crawford: That's some memory.

01-00:23:29 Fisher: Yeah. Then after I went to the high school, that's when I started playing music. This guy I was telling you about before, his name was Wendell Baker. In fact, he just passed away last year. He was like a senior and I was a freshman or sophomore. The principal called us all in the assembly and told us that we had new instruments from the college. There's Sam Houston State University, there's Huntsville High School, which was for white, and Sam Houston High School was where we went.

When they got new instruments, they gave us the old instruments. Because before then, we didn't have a music teacher. We had a music teacher that came from—. He went to Alabama A&M, came from Alabama A&M, all-black school in Alabama. His name was B.G. Moore. Then after we got the music teacher, they gave us the instruments. They got new instruments and gave us all the old instruments. So the principal came in and said, one day at assembly, that anybody that wants to join the band, come down to 303 or -2, whatever room it was, if you want to join the band. So I was late getting there because my class wasn't out till like three-thirty. When I go there, everybody was sitting up with an instrument. Nobody could blow a damn thing, but they're sitting up, holding their instruments. They picked the instrument they wanted to play.

Crawford: What was the range of instruments that you had?

01-00:25:11 Fisher: Well, they had trumpets, trombones, French horns, clarinets, drums, snare drums. The guy that was sitting in front of me was named Wendell Baker. He had picked up the trumpet. When I got there, it was nothing for me to pick up. So I was sitting behind him, while the teacher was going through what to do and how to play this, and how to play the clarinet and how to play the trumpet and all that. So Wendell played the trumpet. But see, Wendell had to leave at a quarter to four. His dad had a farm out of town. He had to leave, catch the bus that takes him back home to his dad's farm. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 11

So when he put the trumpet down, I picked the trumpet up. Eventually, he didn't want to play the trumpet no more, see? He wanted to play the French horn. So he switched to French horn, so I got the trumpet. I started from trumpet right there.

He came to California. Oh, this was back in '89, because I was playing over at the club in San Francisco, on 5th and Harrison. We had played together with the Junius Courtney band before. He knew me and I knew his wife. He asked her, "Is Frank still playing?" Because they lived in Berkeley. She said, "Yeah, he's playing." So he called me. I told him, "Yeah, I'm playing." So he wanted to know where. So I told him. It's a place called Milestones, on 5th and Harrison. So his niece brought him over to Milestones. Just before we took intermission, I told the audience the same story I just told you about how he left and I picked up the trumpet, and I had him stand up so everybody could see who he was.

Crawford: Still playing the French horn?

01-00:27:12 Fisher: No, he didn't play French horn any more, he went on to play something else. Because he went off to college and became a school teacher, and he came back to my hometown and taught school there, and he was also a radio disc jockey. We only had one radio station, and he was a disc jockey at that radio station, during, I guess, his teaching period. I told the audience that story. I told the audience this. "Hadn't been for this guy, no telling what I would've been blowing." They just cracked up. You know how they took it. [laughter]

He just passed away last year. I think he was ninety-something. Ninety-four or ninety-five. He was at least four years older than me, so he had to be at least ninety-three or ninety-four when he passed away. Because my daughter, who still lives in Huntsville, she would always see his wife or see him. He would always ask, "How's your dad doing?" She would tell him. I said, "Well, give me his number, so I can call him." My daughter had told me that he was ill. I said, "Well, I'll call and check on him, see how he's doing."

So I called the number and his wife answered the phone. Said, "Could I speak to Mr. Baker, please?" She said, "He's in bed right now." I said, "Well, you tell him that Frank Fisher called." She said, "Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute." She went back and she said, "This is Frank on the phone." I could hear her talking, said, "It's Frank on the phone, you want to talk?" Said, "Yeah, give me the phone." So I talked to him briefly. This was the first part of last year, and about the middle part of 2015, he passed away.

Crawford: Good that you could be in touch. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 12

01-00:28:41 Fisher: Yeah. I'm glad I had a chance to talk to him before because I always told my daughter, "This is the guy that started me playing trumpet. All he had to do was go home." [laughter]

Crawford: Did you have a good band teacher?

01-00:28:53 Fisher: Yes, we had a very good band teacher. He was a trumpet player. He was a graduate of Alabama A&M. He was very influential on all the musicians, because he knew everything that we didn't. When you don't know nothing and the teacher knows everything, he's brilliant to us. And he was a good trumpet player himself.

Crawford: So was there music in your family, apart from that?

01-00:29:19 Fisher: No, nobody played music in my family but me. My brother tried to play cymbals, but he gave that up. He wasn't musically inclined. I was the only one that played music in my family.

Crawford: Did your parents think that was a good idea?

01-00:29:35 Fisher: They loved it. My dad never got a chance to hear me play, but my mom did. Because my dad passed away in 1935. I was only nine years old when he passed, and I hadn't started. I started after he passed away.

Crawford: When did you first hear jazz?

01-00:29:51 Fisher: On the radio and records, from Louis Armstrong, way back. And movies. Mostly on radio and records, because my dad, he loved music and he always had records. We had a Victrola in the house and he'd bring records home, of different bands. Like the Ellingtons, the old-time Ellingtons. I had no idea that one day I would play with Ellington. Played with Ellington one night, and I'd been listening to Ellington since I was ten years old.

The way it happened was Ellington had played in Seattle, and he came to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. But Willie Cook, who was one of his main trumpet players, got sick in Seattle. So they left him in Seattle, where [he] could get medical care. When they came to San Francisco, they were short one trumpet. So there's another brilliant trumpet player in San Francisco named Allen Smith, who was a good friend of mine. We knew each for a long time.

Crawford: Yes, I worked with him on his biography. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 13

01-00:30:58 Fisher: Well, me and Allen Smith have been knowing each other for a long time.

Crawford: He was a great man.

01-00:31:02 Fisher: Yeah, he was. We were about a year apart. So Allen called me one day. I had been home, practicing on my horn. He called me, he said, "Hey, Frank. I got a gig for you." I said, "What? Where?" He said, "In Crockett." I said, "Crockett, California." He said, "Yeah." I said, "With who?" He said, "Duke Ellington." I said, "Oh, come on, Allen. Don't give me that malarkey." He said, "No, I'm not kidding." See, I came because Allen was the principal at his school, where he taught in San Francisco. He said, "No, you go out and talk to Mercer Ellington, who's Duke's son, and tell him that I sent you." So when I got there, it's the Ellington orchestra, with about a fifty-voice choir. They was doing Ellington's sacred concert.

Crawford: Oh, yes.

01-00:31:50 Fisher: That was the thing they did. When I got there, they had finished rehearsal. So when I reported to Ellington's son Mercer, he said, "Well, there's Cat Anderson over there. He'll tell you where the music is." So I just looked at it. I looked at it. See, this is what we'll be playing. I had to sight read it, because I missed the rehearsal. Here I'm sitting in the band with guys I've been listening to since I was a kid—Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Cat Anderson, Cootie Williams, all those guys, Bootie [Mitchell W.] Wood and all them guys in the band.

I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I was sitting next to Cootie Williams. I was playing third. Cat Anderson was playing first, Mercer was playing second, I was playing third, and Cootie Williams was playing fourth. I was looking for Mercer. Said, "Don't worry about it. I'll guide you."

I was looking for nice pretty sheets of music, and they was all crumbled up and ugly-looking. They had a mark that said stop here and go over here, stop here and go over here. Mercer said, "Don't worry about it." We're playing and playing and Mercer's over there. So he kept me on line because the regular guy knew all of this, but somebody new in the section wouldn't know where—. They would cut off parts and skip over to another. Like they would play letter A and wouldn't play letter B, but go to letter C. They'd have a big arrow going over to letter C. If you wasn't on the ball, you'd miss it.

Crawford: You could read well. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 14

01-00:33:32 Fisher: I'm just an average reader, at the time. I'm still an average reader. I played lead trumpet with David Hardiman's band for a long time, till my chops—. Playing lead is very strenuous. I thought other guys could play lead better than I could. George Spencer and Paul Giachetto and all those guys, they've got good chops, so I moved myself down a little bit with my eighty-nine-year-old chops. But anyway, after the concert was over, the principal of Crockett High—John Ford High School anymore--knew Duke Ellington from way back. He'd been trying to get Duke to come play at his school in Crockett, John Swett High School.

After he played Grace Cathedral, Duke came over to Crockett and rehearsed with their choir. They had about a fifty- or sixty-voice choir. I got a picture of it; I'll show it to you. That's how he ended up in Crockett. You'd say, "What was Duke Ellington doing in Crockett?" I said, "Well, this is the reason why he came to Crockett, to play John Swett?

Crawford: He was like that, wasn't he? He was loyal.

01-00:34:45 Fisher: Yeah. He liked to—. I can't remember if I got paid or not.

Crawford: What was he like as a leader?

01-00:34:55 Fisher: I never got to talk to him. Never got to talk to him.

Crawford: How was he in front of the band?

01-00:35:00 Fisher: Oh, brilliant, as usual. But see, after the affair was over, we went back in the faculty room and they had coffee and cake for faculty and the band members. I sounded more out of breath than the regular band members, and I was just filling in. I can show you the autograph, too, when you're finished with this.

Crawford: Gildo Mahones, who sat in for Duke Ellington on piano one time, said that when he was playing and Duke Ellington was gone, it was just chaos. But when Duke Ellington came back, there was a lot of reverence.

01-00:35:38 Fisher: Yeah.

Crawford: He never disciplined the band, never told them they were misbehaving, but they behaved for him.

01-00:35:45 Fisher: Yeah. Well, me as a sit-in, I wasn't around long enough to observe anything like that. For me, it was smooth sailing. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 15

Crawford: Had you had music lessons and learned how to read that way?

01-00:35:57 Fisher: I just learned mostly on my own, because our band teacher, Mr. Moore, it was so many of us, he couldn't take individual students to teach them how to play clarinet or teach them how to play trumpet. He was a trumpet player himself. I think I took about two or three lessons from him and I think he became ill and he had to move away, and we got another band teacher. His name was Mr. Belcher. I didn't get a chance to take trumpet lessons with him.

I'm just kind of, I think, self-taught, mostly. It's like my arranging. When I went to college, I only had one semester of music, and it only contained notation and terminology. I was never taught how to write or arrange or follow chord changes or any of that. I was never taught. I just kind of learned—

Crawford: You have a good ear.

01-00:37:05 Fisher: Yeah—as I went along. Arranging, somehow I just would think. But from playing with different groups for so long, you kind of know what it's like and how to voice different instruments, how to voice the trumpets and how to voice the trombones. Saxophone was the hardest thing for me to learn how to do, was how to voice the saxophone. Trumpets and trombones were easy. I still have trouble with the chord changes, naming the correct chord changes, but they come out. I'll give you a CD, so you can see what some of my writing sounds like.

Crawford: I would like that. I'm just going to take a break here. [interview interruption] When you were in high school, you started playing trumpet. Did you play publicly? Were there places to play, clubs?

01-00:37:51 Fisher: We played for our high school dances, and there was a recreation center, where we had mostly after-football dances, after-basketball dances, and regular high school dances, like junior-senior proms and stuff like that, we would play.

During World War II, the first part of World War II—I think this has to be in like 1942—there was a prisoner-of-war-camp just outside of my hometown, for the German and Italian prisoners that were captured in North Africa. So they had a prisoner of war camp right outside my hometown. My mom got a job out there, in the prison hospital.

One of the guys asked her, did she know where we could get some music? We want to give a dance for the soldiers. She told them, "Yeah, my son plays in his little high school band." They said, "Well, get him out here, because we're giving a dance on a certain date and we're going to need some music." So she Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 16

told us about it and told us what time to be there and when it starts and all that kind of stuff. We got a trailer and put the piano in it. They didn't have the little keyboards like they do now. No, no, no, no, they had a piano. That's the way it was. They had a piano there, so we got our horns and—.

The drummer was the only guy to put it in the trailer, because he'd take his drums out there. We didn't have an individual car, so we got this man, he was an auto mechanic, to drive us out there. We went to the auditorium where they were going to have the dance, and the guy said, "Where can we get some refreshments?"

There was a canteen about maybe 200 yards from where we were playing. So we went into the canteen. There were some German and Italian prisoners in there, sitting at tables, drinking soda pop and eating. So we ordered what we had to go and we went to go sit down. The guy says, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't sit with them." We said, "Why can't we sit there?" He said, "Because you're not white." Said, "Well, you have to go outside." So we had to go outside. We couldn't even sit with the German or Italian prisoners of war, so we had to go outside.

Crawford: Of course, they wouldn't have had black-white segregation in their countries. They wouldn't have noticed, would they?

01-00:40:34 Fisher: Well, the Germans probably would, the way they hated the Jews. Is that segregation? But anyway, we couldn't. Now, they're German prisoners and we're Americans. We couldn't go in and eat with the German prisoners, so you know how bad that would make you feel. So anyway, we played the gig and went home. They paid us. I think we got a dollar apiece. Now, they didn't pay too much for musicians back in those days, because I know after I finished high school, I worked at the shipyard in Houston. I just was seventeen years old.

Crawford: What was it called?

01-00:41:13 Fisher: Brown and Root. Brown and Root Shipyard. They had them all over the country, but this happened to be in Houston, in the Houston Ship Channel. We got hired as laborers, because we had no specialties. We was just out of high school. The white laborers got seventy-three cents an hour and we got fifty- three cents an hour. We'd come home on the weekends, and there was another guy from Huntsville that lived—. He would come home and we'd get a ride with him, from Houston back into Huntsville.

We were getting something like fifty-seven dollars a week, and we were making more than the teachers were. I think they was only getting about $200 a month at the time, if they were getting that much. At fifty-seven dollars a week, we were getting about the same as they were or a little bit more. They Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 17

wouldn't pay us the same. They wouldn't pay labor. One laborer should be paid the same as another laborer. Shouldn't be no difference whether you're white or black. At lunch time, there was a line at the canteen, or ten lines. We only had one line. We had the tenth line. So many of us would be late, because we only had one line to go to. They couldn't feed us all within that length of time, because our line was longer than theirs because they had nine lines to go to get food in.

So then the boss would chew us out because we were back late. We told him, said, "We can't get back no faster than they feed us. Lunch time is over by the time we get there." We told the boss the situation, he said, "That ain't got nothing to do with it. Get back here early." So we ended up bringing our own lunch, because we didn't want to get fired. I used that money, the money that I made working at the shipyard, I used that my freshman year in college.

Crawford: Where did you go to college?

01-00:43:14 Fisher: Prairie View A&M. My mom didn't have to send me a quarter. I had made it all that summer, working at the shipyard. I had about $400 from working at the shipyard.

Crawford: That took care of tuition then?

01-00:43:26 Fisher: That took care of my maintenance fee and tuition for that first year. While we were working at the shipyard, they had a storm. The storm was so bad they had to close the shipyard down so everybody could go home. Said, "Get out of here. Go on back where you come from, the storm's so bad." We had a truck that would hold about five of us. It was like a van. We started back into the city. We lived in the Fifth Ward, at the time. Just me and my brother; he was younger than I was.

The ages made no difference back there. I was seventeen. I think he was fifteen at the time. Our truck got flooded and we couldn't go no further, so we had to walk. Power lines were down. We had to go around the power lines. They were sparking and clicking and jumping up and clicking around. We had to dodge power lines. We found this—we called it a roadhouse because it was like a restaurant. A bar and restaurant and stuff like that. So we were going to go inside to get out of the weather. But it was full of people. They were all white people and they wouldn't let us in.

So there was an outhouse in the back of the club, so we ended up getting in there. There was about five of us getting in one outhouse. It was a two- stooler. It was getting so miserable in there, so the guy that was the driver of our little van that we went back and forth to the shipyard in said, "Let's get out of that stinking place. We can't stay in here. I'd rather face the storm." So we got out of the outhouse and walked up on the road, and a tree fell and crushed Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 18

the outhouse, just after we left there. We'd have stayed there another five minutes—. We weren't three minutes away. It took us a little while to get to the main road, because this juke joint or roadhouse was kind of off the main highway—the main road; it wasn't a highway. By the time we got to the road to start walking down toward Fifth Ward in Houston, tree fell on it and crushed it.

My mom had heard about it and she called the lady—. We were staying with one of her former operators in the beauty shop. She had moved to Houston and set up her own beauty shop. So we were staying with her in the summer, that summer that we worked in the shipyard. She heard about the storm on the radio, so she called the lady, who was named Miss Utley. She called Miss Utley, said, "The boys okay?" She said, "They're not home yet." She said, "What?" She got all excited, because she'd heard about the storm and she knew we were working at the shipyard. So when we finally walked back that whole distance from Brown's Shipyard to where we lived at in the Fifth Ward, by the time she saw us, she called my mom and told her we were okay, because we just came in. It was almost midnight at the time.

Crawford: Oh, my goodness.

01-00:46:24 Fisher: We left about two-thirty, trying to come home and all that tragic stuff that happened in between.

Crawford: Can you tell me more specifically what you were doing when you were working in the shipyard?

01-00:46:44 Fisher: Picking up scrap metal that the welders had welded off and put aside. If they'd weld a piece and it was too long or too short, they'd cut it off and stack it away. Then the laborers, all we had to do was pick it up and take it to a place where they were storing it or using it, for it to be recycled or whatever they did with it. Any dirty job, the laborers did it. Clean up over here, clean up over there, take this metal over here, or move those boxes over here, something like that.

Crawford: What were your hours like?

01-00:47:22 Fisher: From six o'clock until four-thirty, I think.

Crawford: What a long day.

01-00:47:30 Fisher: We'd leave home at six-o'clock, so it must've been something like seven until four o'clock. Seven to four or something in that area. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 19

Crawford: And you were playing still. Did you play for the prisoners anymore?

01-00:47:44 Fisher: No. No, that was the only time.

Crawford: Just that one time.

01-00:47:46 Fisher: Yeah, that was the only time.

Crawford: What was the prison like?

01-00:47:49 Fisher: We didn't get to see any of it. The only prisoners we saw was the ones that I was telling you about at the canteen, when we went to try to get something to eat. When we played for the dance, it was only for the guards and their wives.

Crawford: I see. Oh, so you never saw the prisoners. Did you have the impression that the prison was okay, the facilities were okay?

01-00:48:13 Fisher: I have no idea what was going on up there.

Crawford: You don't remember.

01-00:49:15 Fisher: Oh, no. We could see, sometimes they would bring prisoners into town to work on bridges and clean out—. They'd work on people's farms, pick the corn or cotton or whatever was growing. They would use them to do that. I know there's a bridge that we had to cross when we were going to school. Under the bridge, they was cleaning it out, where the water would flow. They would wave at us and we'd wave back at them, as we were going to school. That's the closest we came to the prisoners. We had no contact with them, no conversations with them.

Crawford: When you went away to college, how old were you?

01-00:48:56 Fisher: I was seventeen.

Crawford: What was that like?

01-00:49:02 Fisher: It was strange. From high school to college was a big difference. It was a big step, just like a rookie from college getting to pro football. It was really strange. You meet a lot of people that—. You thought you was smart and so many people was much smarter than you were. There was a girl trumpet player. Her name was Clora Bryant.

Crawford: Chloe? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 20

01-00:49:26 Fisher: Clora, Clora Bryant. She was from Denison, Texas. She was in this documentary called Girls in the Band. Google it sometime and see Clora Bryant, because she—. When we first went to Prairie View, naturally, I was a music major, and she was a music major, from Denison. We always told the musicians from Houston that we thought we were kind of hot stuff. We had a big jam session there at the music hall one day, and Clora came in and cut our heads. We thought we were hot stuff. Clora came in and out-blew us all. So I said, "Where'd this woman come from, knows how to play that good?" She eventually played with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. I don't know if you've heard of them or not. She played with them.

I left in '45. After school, May of '45, I got drafted. I never did know what happened to her until I got out of the service, found out she was living in Los Angeles. She played with Dizzy Gillespie and a whole bunch of people. She was in a couple movies, too, as a singer.

Crawford: Why was she so good?

01-00:50:38 Fisher: Well, it depends on how she was raised in her hometown, who her music teacher was and how well she was taught. See, and some people are just talented. Certain things they can do, whatever they want to do. She was one of those kinds. She picked up a trumpet like she'd been playing it all the time, I guess.

Crawford: She made her career in music.

01-00:50:59 Fisher: She just played so great.

Crawford: I guess that would've been unusual in that day?

01-00:51:03 Fisher: It was. In our college band, we'd have personnel change every two or three weeks, because guys were being drafted and going in the Army. When school started, we never had the same—by Christmas time, we didn't have the same personnel in the band, because they'd get drafted and go away. But the girls, at summertime when they left, they'd go to Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and play all over the country. The boys' band, we kind of stayed put because we were taking in new people all the time. If the saxophone player got drafted, the next guy up would take his place. Then he'd get drafted, the next guy up would take his place. A lot of guys that played in the marching band didn't play in the jazz band. We'd move all over the place. They'd move all over the place because they'd get drafted, like I did in 1945. I was in ROTC. I turned eighteen in October of 1944. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 21

Since I was in ROTC, they could've took me right away, but they let me go until May of '45. I got drafted in June of '45. The war in Germany was over, but they were still fighting the Japanese. So I got drafted in May of '45. They sent me to Fort McClellan, Alabama, for basic training. That's where the segregation really set in, because we were an all-black outfit with white officers. There was eight training regiments in Fort McClellan. The 1st and 8th were black. I was in the 1st Regiment. The other black regiment was the 8th Regiment. You got about 3,000 men in each regiment, so you can imagine how many people were down there. But we were all black. The 1st Regiment was all black and the 8th Regiment was all black.

Crawford: So there was strict segregation, in terms of facilities.

01-00:53:06 Fisher: There was. Some places you'd go into town, you just couldn't go. If you'd go to a restaurant or something, you couldn't go in there. Don't care if you were a soldier. I'll tell you what happened. When I was on a troop train, we were leaving from San Antonio, going to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. There was a nine-car troop train. Us forty-nine blacks, we were in the first car, right behind the engine, and it was a coal-burning engine. We had khakis. Our khakis looked like this [points to a black object] when we got off. We got to Lynchburg, Virginia, and the train commander, who was a white colonel from Boston, said, "We're stopping."

They put us on the side. We got there about two in the afternoon and we were supposed to leave—. We was to stay off the tracks until midnight. So we went to the restaurant at the train station. We thought they were going to start at the first car and go in, but they started at the last car because all the blacks was in the first car. They started at the last car. When they got to the car directly behind the engine, where we were—. There was forty-nine of us in that particular car.

So we march up to the restaurant, to go into the restaurant to eat. By the time we got there, everybody had eaten and gone back to the train. So the guy that was in charge of—. I guess you'd call him a maître d'. When we marched up the front to the restaurant to go in, the guy said, "Where in the hell you think you're going?" So my train commander, who was the colonel, he said, "We're going to eat." Said, "We don't serve monkeys in here." He said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "These guys are United States soldiers. They wear the same uniform that those guys are in there." He said, "Yeah, but we don't serve monkeys with uniforms on." He said," Are you kidding me?" He says, "No, sir, I'm not kidding you." Said, "You got to take them niggers someplace else." So one of the guys in my group saw one of the Red Caps. Red Caps are the guys that take care of your luggage at the train station, back in the day. They all wore red caps, because they were the luggage handlers.

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 22

01-00:55:28 Fisher: He called one of the Red Caps over and asked him, said, "You know a restaurant we can go to?" He says, "Yeah. Of course." He said, "Just follow me." So we all got in formation, walked right down the middle of the street in the city. He was on the sidewalk, so we just followed him. When he make a left turn, we walked it. We stopped traffic. We were walking in the middle of the street in Vicksburg—. No.

Crawford: Lynchburg.

01-00:56:03 Fisher: Lynchburg, Virginia. We marched up to this restaurant. We were in formation. The Red Cap went inside and asked—I'll just call her Miss Minnie Mae—asked Minnie Mae, "Can you feed forty-nine black soldiers?" She said, "Lord have mercy, yes, we can." So we went in.

Crawford: You were hungry by that time!

01-00:56:26 Fisher: Oh, I'm telling you. And they had the kind of food that we liked. They had the greens and the cornbread and the black eyed peas and all that kind of stuff that black people like. The Red Cap went on back to the train station and we stayed there until about—. She didn't serve alcohol. All it had was a jukebox and soda pop. We were there fifteen minutes and somebody told the women of the town that there's forty-nine black soldiers down at Miss Minnie Mae's café.

About fifteen minutes after we got there, here they come. We ate, we danced. We just had a good time. Our sergeant in charge said, "Okay, it's a quarter to twelve. We got to be back at the train station at twelve o'clock." So he said, "Let's go." So we got outside, got in formation and walked back to the train. Everybody was there, already there. We got there before twelve, and our train commander was standing outside waiting for us. All he said was, "Did you guys get a place to eat?" "We did." He said, "Let's get the hell out of this low- life town." So we did.

Crawford: Was the worst you ever experienced?

01-00:57:33 Fisher: That was one of them. That was one of them. We got back on the train and went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, and then from there, they sent us to—. When I was in Fort McClellan, we were training for the invasion of Japan. Because the war in Germany was already over, but they were still fighting the Japanese. So when we got there, it was an infantry replacement center. That's what Fort McClellan was. The training was seventeen weeks. They had cut it from twenty-three weeks to seventeen weeks. They said MacArthur cut it down because then when you get over there, they're all washed up. They'd Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 23

been training so long they couldn't hardly do nothing. They'd cut it to seventeen weeks, and I thought that was still long, to me.

When we went out on the machine gun range one day, up on a hill, we saw a cloud of dust. A Jeep coming down the road, cloud of dust coming down the road. He was bawling. So my first sergeant told the lieutenant, "Better go down and check on that and see who that is. Might be our battalion commander." So Lieutenant Renfro—he was a country guy, lieutenant from Kentucky—he went down the hill. Sure enough, it was our battalion commander. He was driving so fast, when he got to where Lieutenant Renfro was, he jumped out of the Jeep, the Jeep went over in the ditch. He picked Lieutenant Renfro up and started dancing. There was dancing and hollering and shouting going on.

So we was up looking down, what's happened? We didn't know what was happening. So Lieutenant Renfro turned around and says, "Come on down. Come on down. Y'all come on down here." When we got down there, he told us, then we started jumping and hollering. The Japanese had just surrendered. So that means that we didn't have to go. We finished our training in November. We started in July and finished in November, and they sent us to Germany for the occupation, because they had pulled most of the troops from Germany to the South Pacific, to prepare for the invasion of Japan. We replaced an anti-aircraft outfit that had moved to Germany to the South Pacific. So when we get to Germany, we were in the 644 Anti-Aircraft Outfit.

Crawford: Well, let's stop here, because we've finished an hour.

01-00:59:51 Fisher: Okay.

02-00:00:00 Fisher: It was in April of 1946. We got a troop transport, crossed the Atlantic to Le Havre, France. From there, we went on forty-man boxcars. The incident that happened on the boxcars--there's no bunks or anything. You sleep on the floor or only with your duffle bag. There's a coal heater in the middle of the car.

Crawford: No blankets?

Audio File 2

02-00:00:40 Fisher: You had your own blankets and your backpack. But there was a coal-burning heater in the middle of the boxcar. It took us a little while to get from Le Havre, France, to Erlangen, Germany. That's down near Nuremburg. At nighttime, we'd pack it so it would stay warm during the night. One particular night, it starts smoking and it filled the boxcar with smoke. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 24

One guy got up to open the door, where the smoke could go out. Another got up and was going to do the same thing, and the door was already open and he fell out. It took us till the next day to locate [him]. You couldn't go from one boxcar to another, and there was no communication from your car to the next car. So you had to wait till daytime to let the train commander know that we lost a person during the night. I don't know if they ever found him or not.

Crawford: There was no communication.

02-00:01:49 Fisher: No communication. You couldn't communicate from one boxcar to another.

Crawford: So the train was underway and nobody stopped.

02-00:01:54 Fisher: They was on their way. Couldn't stop. We didn't stop till early that morning, and this had happened maybe two or three o'clock in the morning and we didn't stop till the next day. We had to report the guy was missing and they wanted to know what happened, see. He went to open the door to let the smoke out.

Crawford: And it was open.

02-00:02:10 Fisher: It was already open. He fell out through it. But anyway, we finally got to Erlangen, which was the replacement depot. We were in Erlangen, which was near Nuremburg, and that's where they were having the war trials, during that particular time.

Crawford: You are now in Germany, 1946. They were already having the war trials?

02-00:02:31 Fisher: They were having the war trials. This was in '46 now. I was over there when Göring took poison. We didn't have nothing to do with the trials, but we just were at that particular place.

Crawford: What were you doing?

02-00:02:43 Fisher: We were in transit. We'd go from where we landed to Erlangen, and then they decide where they're going to ship you. They determine what outfit you'd go to. We went to a little town near Kassel, Germany. That's where we were based the whole time we were there. We took care of a displaced persons camp. Wasn't nobody for us to shoot at because the war was over in Germany, and we didn't have to worry about IEDs or snipers or nothing like that. They'd been fighting since 1938. They were just tired of it. We didn't have to worry about the Germans. They thought we were the greatest thing since sliced bread, especially the black guys. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 25

Crawford: There wasn't segregation there.

02-00:03:36 Fisher: Well, we were segregated, but the German people were not used to us. Hitler told them all kinds of stuff about [us].

Crawford: You'd been through ROTC, but you were not an officer.

02-00:03:54 Fisher: No, no. I had to go through the ranks like everybody else. I was communications sergeant for my battery. We had halftracks with fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on rotating turrets. They were antiaircraft guns. We could move anywhere we would go, without having to dig in and all that kind of stuff. But we didn't have nobody to shoot at because the war was over in Germany.

There was a displaced persons camp near us, where all the people that had been separated from their families in Germany, Poland, whatever it is, they'd come to this displaced persons camp. They'd try to match up the families and send them back to where they're supposed to go, where their hometown was. A lot of times, they'd get there and it wasn't there anyway. We'd try to match up people. If Frau Gutenberg was looking for Herr Gutenberg, they'd have names all on plackets and boards and everything. If you were there, they could locate Frau Gutenberg with her husband, if he was still alive. And if he wasn't, she was just on her own.

Crawford: You were doing that, or you were just close by?

02-00:05:11 Fisher: No, no. That wasn't my MO. I was a radio man, communications sergeant for my outfit. All I had to do was make sure that all the radios were working in each halftrack. That's all I did. That was my duty.

Crawford: What was the purpose of the military command where you were?

02-00:05:33 Fisher: To take care of that displaced persons camp.

Crawford: Oh, to take care of that, and to relocate them.

02-00:05:38 Fisher: Yes.

Crawford: How long did you stay?

02-00:05:40 Fisher: I stayed from April until December, 1946.

Crawford: And then you were discharged? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 26

02-00:05:45 Fisher: Came back to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to get my discharge. There was an airline called Veterans Airline that ran from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. It would take you to your state. We left Philadelphia and anybody that was going to Ohio would get off in Cleveland. Anybody from Cleveland to Kansas City, anybody in that area would get off in Kansas City and catch the bus home. They were supposed to go to Dallas. But when we got to Oklahoma City, the pilot said, "The weather was bad over Dallas, so we have to let you guys off in Oklahoma City." Okay.

When I was in Germany, I went to radio school. There was another white boy from Houston. They put us in the same room. Four of us in a room, two blacks and two whites. This is at the radio school in Germany. We got acquainted with each other. One guy was from Nebraska and one was from St. Louis, I'm from Huntsville, and the other guy was from Houston. The guy from Nebraska, he had never been to school. He thought that we all went to school together in Texas. But the white guy—I can't think of the name now; I'll call him Jameson, said, "No, we don't go to school together." We got along good, the four of us in that room.

So when I came back to the states, and there was another guy that was going to Dallas, we were all good friends. One black and two whites, we were all good friends. So when we got to Oklahoma City, the pilot said, "We can't go into Dallas. Come inside to the restaurant and I'll give you your bus fare, equivalent from Oklahoma City to Dallas." Because we had money from Dallas to wherever we were going. So we all came inside. There was nine of us in line. I was the only black in line. The other two guys had been paid, so they were waiting for me on the outside.

I noticed the guy behind the counter. He just kept looking and looking and looking, walking up there and pointing, pointing. I knew he was pointing at me. He got so mad he took his apron off, slammed it on the ground, jumped over the counter, came over to the pilot. Pilot had a little cashbox sitting at the table, and were in line waiting to get paid. Came over to the pilot, said, in essence, "What's he doing in here?" The pilot said, "Who?" Said, "The nigger sergeant back there? What's he doing in here?" He said, "I'm paying these guys off. We just come from overseas. They're going home."

He said, "Well, give the nigger his now so he can get the hell out of here." So I heard him talking, so I got out of line and walked up to him. I said, "Okay, captain." He was a plane captain. I said, "Just give me my money and then I'll go. I know what the problem is." So I went outside and the two other guys, the two white boys was waiting for me. They were going to Texas, too, the one that we'd gone to radio school together.

So they [said], "What was that all about, Frank?" I said, "It's nothing. I'm just back home." So we got a cab. We got in the back of the cab, the three of us. I Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 27

was in the middle and [two others] on both sides of me. I had my duffle bag up like this and I got tired of holding it, so I just let it slide down. The cab driver looked and saw me. He didn't see me when I got in the cab. He didn't know he had a black guy in the cab. He looked in the mirror and saw me and had a fit. Pulled the cab over, side of the road.

Now, between Oklahoma City and downtown, it's nothing. Just snow and ranch houses. I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "I can't drive him. He's supposed to take a nigger cab. I can't drive niggers in my cab." Said, "They'll fire me if they catch me coming into Oklahoma City with a nigger in my car." Said, "He got to get out." So one of the guys said, "He's not getting out. Anybody getting out, it's going to be you. So you just drive your ass on back into Oklahoma City." So he cried all the way back to Oklahoma City. When he got into town, he went around to the back of the bus station so his buddy wouldn't see me getting out of his cab, because he would've got fired if they'd seen me getting out of his cab.

Crawford: And you were in military uniform?

02-00:09:58 Fisher: I was still in uniform. We had been discharged and were on our way home. Had just come from overseas now, serving our country, and you're back home and you get treated like this. They don't think nothing of you. That uniform didn't mean a thing to those guys. We got back to the bus station and there was a colored waiting room and a white waiting. We had our tickets and I went back to the colored waiting room, wait for my bus to come so we could both get on it. And the two, Jameson and his buddy, they came back where I was. The waiter or somebody said, "You guys can't sit back here with him." Said, "You get in the white section." They said, "We ain't sitting in the white section. We're sitting right here with our buddy."

They stayed right with me till we got on the bus. Then we got on the bus. The bus was almost empty. Those buses got a sign says colored from here back, then white there up front. The back seat was empty. I wanted to get the backseat so I could stretch out and sleep until I got to [my] hometown. They came back there. Jameson and his buddy came back and they were sitting there. So the bus driver got up and came back and said, "You guys can't sit back there with him." He said, "Why not?" Said, "We went overseas with him." He said, "But you ain't overseas now, so you get your ass back up in the front, past the sign." So they did what he said and got past the sign.

Anyway, when I got to my hometown, it was December 31, about ten minutes to twelve. Between the bus station and my home, it became midnight 1947, because they start shooting the guns, like they do on New Year's Eve. It was New Year's Eve and went into the first day of 1947. So when I got home, the weather was bad. There was ice all over the ground. So on my front porch, I had to go about four steps. I got to the top step and there was ice on my steps. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 28

I got to the top step and I fell, fell back. Luckily, I fell on my duffle bag, because I still had it strapped on my shoulder.

My mom, I had told her I was coming home and she heard the noise. She came to the front door and I'm laying down on the ground, trying to get up. She said, "Junior, what are you doing on the ground, son? Can't you get up?" Said, "Yeah, I can get up, Mom." So it'd been tragic if I'd gone all that time overseas and got back home and fell and broke my back. If it hadn't been for my duffle bag—. That [was] the only thing that saved me, because I had a lot of soft stuff in there.

Crawford: What a welcoming home for a veteran—hard to believe. Well, you hadn't been part of a band in the military at all?

02-00:12:40 Fisher: I met two guys from Philadelphia, one a piano player and one a drummer, and one trombone player that used to play with Erskine Hawkins. We happened to be in the same outfit. No, they had a USO not too far from us, and we'd go to [the] USO and jam all the time. So all we did was a lot of jam sessions with other musicians there at the USO. They were from different outfits around the country.

Crawford: But because the military had been integrated during that time.

02-00:13:12 Fisher: Integrated didn't occur until 1948. Harry Truman signed the executive order.

Crawford: I thought it was earlier.

02-00:13:18 Fisher: Yeah. Executive order in 1948, eliminating discrimination in the military service. But when I was in, it was totally discrimination. We had four platoons. We had two black lieutenants and two white lieutenants. Our captain was white and our executive officer was white. The battalion commander was white and everybody else in that—. The highest ranking black man in my office was a chaplain, and he was a captain. He did the Sunday services. He was the highest ranking man in our outfit. They had a German girl that got raped, and she said it was somebody from my outfit.

So my battalion commander has us all fall out in dress uniforms, in the motor pool parking lot. He brought the girl on base, and he would go to each company, for her to pick out the guy that was supposed to have raped her. So there was A, B, C, and D companies, four companies.

She got to my company. I was in C company. She's walking down the aisle and my captain and my battalion commander was walking along with her. She got two guys before me and she said, "Das ist him." This guy, he was black, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 29

but he was very light and he had blue eyes. He was from Beaumont, Texas. She said, "Das ist him."

So my captain said, "Are you sure." She said, "Das ist him." So he turned to my colonel, my battalion commander, and said, "The bitch is lying." The colonel said, "Why?" He said, "Because he was in charge of quarters last night, and I was the officer of the day. They were both in the office at the same time. So it couldn't have been him, because we were both in the office."

Charge of quarters is an enlisted man, and the captain was an officer of the day. Somebody's got to be in the office at all times. If that's your duty for that night, you have to be there. And they see each other; they're right next to each other. So he looked at this woman and said, "Get this B off the base." They took her away. Found out there was a white quartermaster's unit about two miles down the road from us and it had to be one of them. It wasn't this guy.

Crawford: So no charges.

02-00:15:55 Fisher: No. No. We had to get in dress uniform for all that to happen. She picked the wrong guy anyway. They got her off the base really quick.

Crawford: When you were in Germany or France—well, you really were a short time in France—but in Germany, did you find people you had known?

Fisher: Yeah, I ran across a saxophone player that I went to school with in Prairie View. He was stationed in another outfit. My high school football coach was in the 761st Tank Battalion during World War II. He was with Patton. And he was still over there. After he got discharged, he stayed in Germany. He stayed over there and married a German girl. So I knew he was in Germany, but I didn't know where. So I wrote back to tell my mother to find out from his ex- wife where his outfit was. He might've been close to where I was. But I found out he wasn't that close. We wrote each other, but we never did get to see each other.

My football coach. In fact, when we were in high school, we had a little high school band. Three trumpets, four saxophones, a bass, and a drummer. No, I mean a drummer and a piano. Our football coach, when he was going to college, he played saxophone. So he wanted to play with us. So we let him. Yeah, he'd come in and play. So he played. We had four alto saxophones.

Most of the time in a band, you have alto, tenor, and maybe a baritone. But nobody in my hometown played bass, nobody in my hometown played tenor saxophone. We had four alto saxophones in our band, and he was on the bottom. He was the last one. He played all of the low notes. We contacted each other by mail, but I never did get to see him. I had come back home and in fact, he stayed over there. He would come back occasionally to visit. He Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 30

had kids that lived—. In fact, his son came to be a doctor, and one of his sons went to school with my daughter. But he passed away over there.

Crawford: He stayed there.

02-00:18:05 Fisher: Yeah, he stayed there.

Crawford: For the rest of his life, he stayed there.

02-00:18:07 Fisher: Right. Rest of his life. Married and had kids, German kids.

Crawford: So when you came home, what did you start to do?

02-00:18:16 Fisher: When I came home, I started to work at a flower shop, because my mom was ill. I was going to come to California. My brother was in Los Angeles and my wife's mother was in Oakland, so we had decided to come to California. But I got home in January of '47 and we stayed until June of '47. Then we caught the train and came to Los Angeles.

Crawford: When did you get married?

02-00:18:44 Fisher: I got married in '45, June of '45.

Crawford: Tell me about your wife.

02-00:18:55 Fisher: My wife was from Galveston, Texas. Her name was Evelyn. We got married in Galveston, at her mother's house. It was a hot day and sweat was running down my face, and they thought I was crying. Said, "Is he crying, Mom?" Said, "No, he's not crying. It's just sweat running down his face." After we got married, we moved back to Huntsville, to my hometown, and I stayed there until I was drafted. In fact, we had met in Prairie View, at Prairie View A&M. We met in Prairie View at the dormitory. Or not the dormitory. The lunchroom. What do you call it?

Crawford: Cafeteria?

02-00:19:55 Fisher: Cafeteria. We met in the cafeteria. We got married before I got drafted. I got drafted and they told me when I was going to leave, so we got married a month before I left. She stayed in school while I was in the service. When I came back from the service, so we was coming to California, she dropped out. She never did graduate. She had a year to go. I said, "Well, we're going to California." Of course, she wanted to go because her mother was in Oakland. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 31

My brother was in Los Angeles. He eventually moved to the Bay Area, moved to San Francisco. So when I got here, we stayed on 8th in West Oakland. I moved in the projects in Alameda. It was only thirty-seven dollars a month, and it was close to my job. I worked at the Alameda Naval Air Station, as an assistant electronics helper.

Crawford: Was that 8th Street Alameda or Oakland?

02-00:21:00 Fisher: Alameda. Naval Air Station in Alameda. It's still there, but it's closed. They closed it in '97, I think it was. I worked there from '47 until '82. I was an electronics systems mechanic. Worked on aircraft. We'd do the insulation, make all the electronic checkouts on the ground. When the plane flew, we'd have to fly with it. So I got a lot of flying time in a P-3 Orion. That's ASW, anti-submarine warcraft aircraft. I got a lot of flight time in those. Alameda was the overhaul and repair base for the P-3 Orion. P-3 Orion is an anti- submarine warcraft patrol bomber.

Crawford: P-3 Orion.

02-00:21:50 Fisher: Right. United States had a mutual agreement with different countries for that particular airplane. In fact, Australians had it, the Norwegians had them, United States Navy had them, English had them. But any time they had to be repaired or overhauled, they'd fly back to Alameda for their general overhaul. They take the wings off, the wheels off, all the electronic equipment off, and send them to the electronics building to be checked and repaired.

We would install it back, when the plane was ready to go, after it had been for flight tests, we'd install all the electronics—the radar and the sonar and the navigational aids and all that. We'd check all that on the ground. But when the plane flew we'd have to fly with it. If it was my crew, I had to fly with it. The Norwegians was the most particular ones. They would fly the plane here and the Navy would put them up in quarters at a hotel someplace, because it took about a couple, three months for a plane to go through a full overhaul. They'd bring their families sometimes. When the plane's ready to go, we'd have to flight test it. If anything's wrong while they was flight testing it, we'd come back. We'd have to fix it and fly it again. Then they would fly with us to do the same check that we were checking, because they wanted it to be exactly like they wanted it to be.

Crawford: And that was for military aircraft.

02-00:23:20 Fisher: Right. It's a Navy aircraft. Going into their Navy, right. So the Norwegians would come, the English would come, the New Zealanders would come, the Australians would come, if they had that particular aircraft. That's kind of a mutual thing that the United States had with some of its allies; they shared Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 32

planes with them for their own configuration. But the plane was built here by Lockheed. Any repair that has to be done on a plane, if they couldn't do it for general overhaul, they'd send it back to Alameda, where we'd do everything.

Crawford: You did everything.

02-00:23:55 Fisher: Did everything.

Crawford: So you were very skilled in that area.

02-00:23:57 Fisher: I was an electronics system mechanic, doing all the electronics on that particular aircraft. Anything wrong, they would call me and my crew. I had a crew of three guys. The four of us would go from head to toe and fix everything they got that was wrong on it, before it flew.

Crawford: How long did that operation go on?

02-00:24:22 Fisher: Working for the Navy, yeah. It was Civil Service, working for the Navy. I flew from 1955 until '81. Anybody in my section [who] was on flight status would have a physical every year at the flight surgeon. In 1981, my flight surgeon told me, "You got high blood pressure." I said, "Yeah, okay." He said, "Well, you go to your doctor and get medication for it, and check with me once a week." So I went to my doctor and got the medication for it and checked with him. When it became okay, he said, "Okay, I'm going to put you back on flight status."

So when I came back to my office to my supervisor, he said, "What'd he say?" "He said I'm cleared to fly." I said, "But I'm not flying anymore." He said, "What?" I said, "I'm retiring next year, so I don't want nothing to happen between then and now." Because I'd had a couple of close calls. We were doing a regular communications plot stabilization. We'd drop sonar boards and plot them. There was two Russian fishing boats off Eureka. So we did a lot of our plot stabilization flights in that area. I was at the radar, checking out the radar, and I told a pilot, called him and told him, I said, "I got two ships outside, just on the twelve-mile limit." I could pick it [up] on the radar. They were just on the twelve-mile limit.

He said, "Well, we'll go down and see who they are." It was two Russian fishing boats. They were fishing boats, because there was a thousand seagulls behind them, where they was throwing all the fish over, but they had antennas up. When they saw us—we came down to 200 feet and flew right between the two of them—their antennas was folding in and clapping in, and automatically, they turned west to make sure they were outside the twelve- mile limit. Nothing we could do to them anyway, but just keep them just outside the twelve-mile limit. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 33

So we called the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard came up and took care of whatever had to be done, made sure that they stay outside the twelve-mile limit. That wasn't a close call, but the real close call was we had a pilot come from Pax [Patuxent] River, Maryland. That's another Navy base on the East Coast. He was going to be the new flight test officer. So he wasn't familiar with the West Coast, so on our next test flight, my pilot told him to come along so he gets familiarization, to see what we were doing.

So we went out and did our plot stabilization and all that kind of stuff. He said, "Well, what do you want to see?" He said, "I hear a lot about Yosemite." He said, "Oh, we'll take you to Yosemite." I was at the navigator station. He told me to plot in a course for Yosemite, and we went in that direction. My pilot had a cabin up there, someplace near Bear Valley. I'm not familiar with it. But he said, "I got a cabin up here."

So he went down to altitude. When you get down to altitude over the mountains, things get rough. The air from the mountains will affect you above the mountains. It got rough, so he showed him. He said, "My cabin's in that area over there. Watch. You see, I'm going to try to go close as I possibly can." So he did. The guy said, "No, I don't see it." We were in the back just cringing, saying, "See the thing, so we can get out of here." Because if you threw up on a plane, you had to clean up your own mess when you got back, and that'll make you throw up. But anyway, he finally found it. That particular time, when he said he wanted to go to Yosemite. You've heard of Mount St. Helena, that blew up in 1980?

Crawford: Yes.

02-00:28:18 Fisher: We used to go up to Mount St. Helena. Mount St. Helena was 10,000 feet, and we'd go about 11,000 feet and circle it and look down in the volcano. That's where we wanted to go. After we finished our work, we wanted to go. He said he wanted to go to Yosemite. So when we got back, the ground crew rushed out, put the ladder up so we could get out of the airplane. First thing they said, "Did you see it? Did you see it?" We said, "Did you see what?" Said, "Mount St. Helena just exploded."

We would've been there. All that soot and ash. We had four turboprop engines on that, and that soot and things would've probably conked our engine out and we'd have probably crashed. But we thank that guy for wanting to go to Yosemite that day, and we told him. Of course, he didn't know nothing about Mount St. Helens, but we'd been going up there a lot. After we finished doing our regular job, we'd always go to Mount St. Helena and watch the smoke come up out of the crater.

Crawford: Go have a look. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 34

02-00:29:17 Fisher: Have a look at it. That's where we knew we were going, but he asked the pilot where he wanted to go and he said, "I heard a lot about Yosemite, so I want to see it." So we went to Yosemite that day instead of Mount St. Helens.

Crawford: Whew.

02-00:29:28 Fisher: Which is a lucky day for us, I believe.

Crawford: I should say so. Now, you had married and you were settled in Alameda. Was there music?

02-00:29:40 Fisher: Yes, I played. When I first got here, I didn't know any musicians. One guy told me that they have a jam session at DeFremery Park, down in West Oakland. You know DeFremery Park? So I would go, take my horn and go down to DeFremery Park and get in jam sessions. The guy'd get to know you and they'd have a gig, say, "Well, come on, Frankie, we want you to play with us." So that's how I got to become familiar with the musicians around here. Pretty soon, everybody knew me and I would get calls for gigs all over the place. When I started playing with Junius Courtney was back in the sixties.

Crawford: Did you play on 7th Street?

02-00:30:20 Fisher: Yes, Slim Jenkins.

Crawford: Slim Jenkins!

02-00:30:23 Fisher: Played with Slim Jenkins on 7th Street. I had a quintet. We went for two weeks. Started for two and we stayed six.

Crawford: Tell me about Slim.

02-00:30:39 Fisher: Slim was a really strict fellow. Slim was a gambler, too. There was a gambling house right next to the club. The proprietor was named Raincoat Jones. Whenever Slim would get in trouble, he'd borrow money from Raincoat Jones to get out of trouble financially.

Crawford: Raincoat Jones was a legend.

02-00:31:05 Fisher: Well, I don't know too much about [Raincoat]. He was the chief gambler on 7th Street, at the time. It probably was illegal, but everybody knew where the gambling house was. You go to Raincoat Jones and you could either lose or win. He was the big man, money-wise, on 7th Street at the time, because he Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 35

supported anybody. Any of the club owners that wanted to borrow money, they'd get in a hole, they wanted to borrow money from [somebody], they would always go to Raincoat.

See, I played at Slim's for quite a while. I got some pictures around here of my band when we were playing at Slim Jenkins'. We played there; it was 1951, I think it was. Because I know how we got on this picture of Harlem of the West, John Handy played with my group. When I came out here, John Handy had just got out of high school.

Crawford: Oh, is that right?

02-00:32:02 Fisher: I hired him out here. We played at the enlisted men's club on the Army base. That was our regular Saturday night gig.

Crawford: What's the name of that?

02-00:32:14 Fisher: The enlisted men's club, at the Oakland Army Base. They were operating at the time. This is back in the fifties. One night, John, after we finished our gig at the Army Base—or at Slim Jenkins', one of them—says, "Let's go to Bop City." So we drove over to Bop City. Bop City had everybody play there. They opened at 2 a.m. and they came over after playing at the Fairmont, or wherever.

Crawford: On Fillmore.

02-00:32:36 Fisher: In the Fillmore. And Jimbo [Edwards], the owner of Bop City—. They had a house band, rhythm section—piano, drums, bass. Anybody in the audience that played, Jimbo would pick three or four guys to come up. That particular night, he picked John Handy, me, John Coltrane, and Pony Poindexter.

Crawford: They're all on the cover!

02-00:33:03 Fisher: That's the guys on the cover of Harlem of the West. That picture stayed in the hallway. As you come into Bop City, there's loads of pictures on the side. That picture stayed in the hallway for years and years and years, till they moved. I think Bop City closed in '65, I believe. The lady and the guy that wrote Harlem of the West found that particular picture, and he decided to put that on the cover of Harlem of the West. At first, they had my name spelled wrong. They had me Frank Foster.

02-00:33:36 Fisher: I said, "Frank Foster plays tenor saxophone." No, no, no, we're not Frank Foster, we're Frank FISHER. They finally got it corrected. Other than that—. So from there, I played with just about everybody. I played with Tony Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 36

Bennett; with David Hardiman's big band, at the Fairmont, when they did a celebration for the Wounded Knee Indians. You know the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Well, Marlon Brando was there and a whole bunch of—. I never saw so many Indians in all my life. They had their headdress and their little teepees, and on the dance floor, there's a lot of the Indian dancing. And Tony Bennett came from New York. In fact, he sent the music about two weeks ahead of time, so we had a chance to rehearse his music. We got a string section from San Francisco Symphony and the David Hardiman big band, orchestra, and we played behind Tony Bennett.

Crawford: Where was the concert?

02-00:34:43 Fisher: I don't know what room, but it was at the Mark Hopkins or the St. Francis.

Crawford: Or the Fairmont?

02-00:34:48 Fisher: It was either Mark Hopkins or the Fairmont; I'm not sure. It's been so long. It was in that area.

Crawford: To remember Wounded Knee.

02-00:3 02-00:35:00 Fisher: Right, right.

Crawford: Marlon Brando supported their cause.

02-00:35:02 Fisher: Yeah, he was there. Marlon Brando was there. He didn't perform; he was just contributing, to show his presence for the occasion.

Crawford: So that was kind of extraordinary, that you would play at one of the big hotels on Nob Hill.

02-00:35:17 Fisher: Right. Right, hotels. We played the Fairmont. I played behind Billy Eckstine. I don't know if you know him or not.

Crawford: Oh, yes.

02-00:35:34 Fisher: We played behind him O.C. Smith. Remember O.C. Smith, the Little Green Apples?

Crawford: O.C., of course. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 37

02-00:35:39 Fisher: Yes. We played behind Lou Rawls, at I think it was the Fairmont. And who else did we play with? The King Sisters. I played in the Oakland Raiders Band for thirteen years. Whoever was singing the national anthem, we rehearsed them before the game. They loved Lou Rawls, because every time Lou Rawls sang it, they would win.

Crawford: Is that right?

02-00:36:08 Fisher: Del Courtney, who was the leader of the Oakland Raiders band—. Because I played with them from '68 until they moved to Los Angeles. Every Sunday, I was at a football game. When the Raiders were out of town, I played with the 49er band. When the 49er band was out of town, I played with the Raiders band. Twice a year, they were in town at the same time. Well, I played with the Raiders band, because they were the first ones to hire me. Of course, most of the guys that played in the 49er band were in the Raiders band, also. So that was a funny thing.

Crawford: Did you know Gildo Mahones, piano player for Lester Young, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, O.C. Smith and Lou Rawls and others.

02-00:36:45 Fisher: No, I didn't.

Crawford: He was here from '65 on, I guess, or '70 on. But he was mostly in New York City.

02-00:36:54 Fisher: Okay. Because I played with them from '68 until '81, at the Oakland Colosseum and the Kezar Stadium and Candlestick.

Crawford: And Candlestick. Oh, that must've been great fun.

02-00:37:07 Fisher: It was. Because see, when the 49ers first had a band, they only had two blacks in their band, Allen Smith and a trombone player, Ike Bell. There was no Raiders and there was no A's, there was no baseball, Giants or A's, at the time. When the Raiders came out, they first played at Candlestick. I mean they first played at Kezar. Then they moved to Candlestick; then they moved to Frank Youell Field.

Then they built the Colosseum, and that's where they are to this day. Allen Smith and I had a gig together one night; I've forgotten where it was. Up on 9th and Market. He had been playing with the 49er band when they were in Kezar. And when they moved to Candlestick, he said, "Frank, you'd like to play in the 49er band?" I said, "Yeah." No, the Raider band. He said, "I'm going to call Del Courtney and tell him about you, and a couple days after that, I want you to call him." Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 38

So I was waiting, and Del Courtney called me and said, "Allen told me that you want to play with us." See, because at the time, there was only two blacks in the Raiders band. I think I was the third one. And Del Courtney called me and said, "Allen told me that you're interested in playing in the Raiders band." I said, "I certainly am." He said, "Well, can you make all the gigs?" "I can make every one you got." Because he said, "We play two home exhibition games and eight home games." For thirteen years, I missed one game.

Crawford: What a record!

02-00:38:54 Fisher: Because my job had sent me out of town, to Point Mugu, to work on some airplanes. That's the only one I missed. Out of thirteen years, that's the only one I missed.

Crawford: Wasn't that hard, to hold both gigs?

02-00:39:07 Fisher: No, it wasn't that hard. Wasn't that hard. Because I worked eight hours at my job, and on the weekend, if we had overtime, I'd work the overtime and then go play the gig at night. During the Korean War, we worked overtime a lot, Saturdays and Sundays. We couldn't work more than thirteen days in a row. If you worked thirteen days, you'd have to take off three days, because you [don't] want to be overworked.

Crawford: Your work had to be precise.

02-00:39:36 Fisher: Had to be really precise with what you were doing. You couldn't be sluggish or tired or sleepy or nothing like that. You'd get sleepy. But you'd have to take three days off if you worked thirteen days straight. We would go on field trips. We had to go down to Point Mugu—that's down near Oxnard; there's a Navy base there—and do some work on some airplanes, put in some IFF systems. That's Identification Friend or Foe. We had to install that, because they were going back to Vietnam or Korea. That's the time that I missed playing with the band, while I was down there at Point Mugu.

Crawford: You had a pretty darned good record.

02-00:40:16 Fisher: Yes. But it was thirty-five guys in the band, and there must've been eight trumpet players, so you wouldn't miss nothing. It was different if you was playing with a regular jazz band, but thirty-five, thirty-seven guys in the band—. Al Davis, who was the Raiders coach at the time, owner, whatever you want to call it—. Del Courtney asked Al Davis, said, "The band needs some new uniforms." Al Davis said, "You don't need no uniforms. Nobody comes to see you. They come to see the game. You don't need no new uniforms." Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 39

They'd been wearing those uniforms since—. See, I started playing with them in '68. They'd been wearing them since '62 or '3 or something back in there. He didn't authorize new uniforms. But we had black pants, you wore your own white shirt. All they had to buy was the jackets and the hats, because we had special hats and special jackets, with the Raiders patch on them, and he didn't do it. But anyway, Del Courtney was married to one of the King Sisters. That's a four-girl singing group. They were all sisters. Whenever Del Courtney's wife would sing the national anthem, we would win. It took all day to sing, and she took the longest, because she'd go [he sings] O, say can you see? Looked like it would take her half an hour to sing it.

Crawford: You won!

02-00:41:46 Fisher: Yes. Lou Rawls and Del Courtney's wife, we always won when they sang the national anthem. Del Courtney got sick. He had no lubrication in his eyes. And without the lubrication, he would scratch his eyeballs. He would scratch his eyeballs till he'd go blind. He had that kind of illness. They said the chances of recovery was one in a couple of hundred-thousand.

He had that. He was married to one of the King Sisters. He took off and Al Del Simone took over the Raiders band while Del was in the hospital. His wife stayed with him. When Del got out of the hospital and went home, he had a male nurse to give him eye drops all the time, so many times a day. When he got better, she left him and he moved to Hawaii. Every Christmas, he would send the band a Christmas card, back to the Oakland Colosseum.

Crawford: Oh. I remember him.

02-00:42:58 Fisher: You remember him? Because I know when I was a kid, we used to turn on the radio and the radio announcer said, "This is Del Courtney, coming to you from the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California, overlooking the San Francisco Bay." I had no idea that years later, I would be playing with Del Courtney at the Oakland Colosseum.

Crawford: Oh, that's a great story. Well, that might be a good place to end today.

02-00:43:22 Fisher: Okay.

Crawford: Thank you.

02-00:43:24 Fisher: All right. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 40

Interview 2: March 29, 2016

Audio File 3

Crawford: We're recording now. I wanted to ask you some questions about the war. You said that there was kinship with the Germans. How did that happen?

03-00:00:16 Fisher: Well, we were there in 1946, a year after the war in Germany was over. Because when they dropped the atomic bomb, I was in Fort McClellan, Alabama, doing my basic training. Our basic training was seventeen weeks. So we started in July. The war in Germany was over in May, but the war was still going on, because they were still fighting the Japanese. Well, about halfway through my basic training in September—. It was supposed to go from July until November, which is seventeen weeks, but they dropped the A bomb and the Japanese surrendered.

They had moved most of the troops from Germany to the South Pacific for the invasion of Japan. They sent us to Germany for the occupation, but the war had been over for a whole year when I got to Germany. The war was over in May of '45, and it was over in September, when they dropped the A bomb on [the] Japanese in September.

Crawford: How much exposure did you have to people in Germany?

03-00:01:35 Fisher: We did a lot of communication with them. In fact, we had a battalion laundry that we would send our laundry to; but the German people would come to the fence, the surrounding area of our encampment, and we'd give our clothes and stuff to them. For a pack of cigarettes, they'd have them ready the next day.

Crawford: They were happy to get the cigarettes.

03-00:02:06 Fisher: Yeah, they're happy to get the cigarettes, or any kind of fruit or any kind of food, canned food. We had a lot of canned food. You'd give canned food—we called it a ten- pack—of bacon and eggs. We'd give them a ten-pack of any kind of canned food or fruit or something like that, because they had trouble with food at that time, after the war was over.

Crawford: There wasn't much of it.

03-00:02:31 Fisher: There wasn't much food.

Crawford: Did the children gather around as well? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 41

03-00:02:35 Fisher: Children came, too. If their mothers or fathers came to the fence, we'd give them the food and we'd give them the clothes, and they'd have them back the next day, starched and ironed better than they would do it at the battalion laundry. They didn't get much work in the battalion laundry because they were so slow. You'd put a pair of pants in, a uniform in today and you might not get it till Friday. You'd give it to the Germans, they'd have it the next day for you. That's the kind of communication we had with the German people.

Crawford: Did they ever bake for you or bring you any kind of treats?

03-00:03:10 Fisher: Food? No. They were short on food, so any food they had, they would keep for themselves. We had one little German boy that worked in our communications unit, like the telephone operator. We became good friends. We called him Fritz. Called all German s Fritz. And Fritz invited me and another one of my soldier friends to his house for dinner. We were saying to ourselves, "How is he going to feed us? They don't have much food." He said, But he said, "Well, you just come anyway." So we got in the Jeep and we took some food, just in case. We took some canned food just in case they didn't have anything. We got in the Jeep and drove over to the farmhouse. He had two sisters. One of his sisters could speak very good English, but the mother couldn't. Their father was in Russia somewhere, in a prison camp. His brother had been killed in the war, because he fought on the German side. We went to Fritz's farmhouse. He was about the same age we were, nineteen years old. Yeah, because I was nineteen when I went over. I made my twentieth birthday when I was over there. She came up.

Everybody had a wine cellar. And they put wine on the table and what looked like Cream of Wheat. It looked like Cream of Wheat, but it had sprinkles—I guess it looked like parsley—inside. So my buddy, he was a picky eater. He looked at it and kind of frowned. I punched him, said, "Oh, come on, come on, man. Don't embarrass me. Eat it." And Fritz would translate what we said to his mother and sister. His sister would translate to us, because she was the only one in the family could translate for his mother.

Crawford: Go ahead.

03-00:05:12 Fisher: Any time we had any information, he would translate it to his mother. He was kind of reluctant to eat what he saw in front of him because it didn't look right to him. I said, "You just pick it up. Don't embarrass them. Eat what they give you." They had two big bottles of wine on the table for us. I ate it, and Fritz[sic] just ate a little bit of it and was complimenting how good it tasted, but it wasn't tasting good to my buddy. We finally managed to get through the meal. Good German bread and this stuff that looked like Cream of Wheat. My buddy said it looked like they had sprinkled grass on it, but it wasn't grass. It looked like parsley. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 42

03-00:06:03 Fisher: When we left, when we got ready to leave, we walked out to the Jeep. We had some canned food that we had brought with us. We gave it to his mother and she cried and hugged both of us as we left. That was about the end of that particular story.

Crawford: I like that.

03-00:06:20 Fisher: Of course, we would see Fritz every day because he was in the operating room, the telephone operating room—because every company had a telephone—like the central complex for all the telephones. All the calls would come into the switchboard, and Fritz would direct it to wherever it was supposed to go. [audio file stops, restarts] —a village next to where we were stationed. It was always cold. Even in the summertime, it was cold in Germany. Because we were there from April—.

Crawford: Where were you, exactly?

03-00:06:58 Fisher: This place was south of Kassel, a small village. We had a little club in the village, and we had a sign out over the door, to let them know this was the 644 Anti-Aircraft C Company's club. When we were off duty, we'd go down to the club and have German beer. One of the guys would be the bartender and we had little disc recordings.

Crawford: Would you play a little?

03-00:07:30 Fisher: No, no horn playing. We had a little small group that we played with, but we would just go to the club to have fun for ourselves, to have some beer and some relaxation. They played records. They didn't have a jukebox and so we just played records, the big twelve-inch disc, they called it back in World War II. Had all American, the big bands. Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, all the main jazz musicians' recordings that we could come up with.

When we were off duty, we'd always go down to our club and we'd have some beer. There was a brewery in Kassel. On the weekends, like on a Friday, we'd make what we called a beer run. We'd get a Jeep or a truck and drive into Kassel, to the brewery, and pick up a barrel of beer for our club and bring it back to the club. Everybody wanted to always go on the beer run, because there was a big keg of beer on the loading docks. You'd bring your canteen cup, and it was all for free. Just fill your cup up and drink what you wanted, before you drove back to the club. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 43

The bad part about it was there was a [white] quartermaster outfit about a quarter of a mile from where we were stationed, and they would have to come through the village where our club was to go wherever they were going. It was a little, small village, maybe about 400 or 500 people. They saw our sign, "Cold beer. Come in." So they came in, two of them. They didn't like it because the German girls would always come to the club and dance with us. They liked the American music and so they'd dance.

When they came in to dance, there was about four or five guys on the floor dancing. These two white guys, I don't know where they were from. They were American soldiers, probably from the South or whatever. They were bigots, prejudiced. They didn't like it that the German girls were dancing with us. So one of the guys made a remark about "you niggers enjoying yourselves with these white girls because you're in Germany. You couldn't do that back in the States. You know that, don't you?" We put them out and said, "If you don't want to come in our club, you don't have to."

Crawford: Where did they come from?

03-00:10:13 Fisher: There were in another outfit, not too far from us. There was a quartermaster outfit. They come raising hell, because they were prejudiced, because the German girls were dancing with us. We had American music. They didn't have a club where they were, so—. It was no bigger than this house. Just a jukebox, a bar where the bartender stood, and a little dance floor, and we put our own records on. On the weekends, when we were off duty, we'd always go to the club and have a beer and do some dancing with the American-type music, the music that we were familiar with.

Crawford: Were you ever tempted to stay there because there was no prejudice?

03-00:10:53 Fisher: There was prejudice there.

Crawford: Well, not among the Germans, was there?

03-00:10:57 Fisher: No prejudice against us from the Germans, but against—.

Crawford: Why? Why, do you think?

03-00:11:00 Fisher: Well, they didn't look at us as being offensive toward them. Some of the other white outfits were very negative toward them, I guess. I don't know why. Of course, they'd been fighting the Germans so long. But they were still negative toward them, but we weren't negative toward them.

Crawford: You were welcoming. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 44

03-00:11:23 Fisher: We were welcoming. They would welcome us because we would welcome them. We always had good rapport between the American black soldiers and the German natives. We had trouble getting fresh milk. There was a farmhouse not too far from where my outfit was stationed. We went there. Said, "We need some fresh milk," so we went down to the farmhouse. This German farmer, his son—he was a teenager—could speak English. We had a tin can. We would say, "We want some milk." He told his papa what we wanted, and he went and filled our little tin can up with fresh milk. We gave him two, three packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes. That's all he wanted. We brought it back. If it's in the wintertime, we buried it in the snow to keep it cold. When we went down to breakfast at the mess hall, we'd bring our own fresh milk.

At one time, we had fresh milk that came all the way from Denmark. It was in bottles. That particular morning, we went to breakfast, we saw these milk bottles on the tables, and there was a riot. It was seven hundreds of us in our battalion, but we'd eat in different shifts in the morning. We'd go from six to seven, and the other guys would go at seven to eat and so forth, till all four companies had been there. But we were the first ones to go that particular morning, my company was. We saw this fresh bottled milk. We didn't know where it came from, but we knew we hadn't had any before. We had all dehydrated milk, which was terrible, and dehydrated eggs, which were terrible, also.

We went in and saw the fresh milk. Guys didn't eat breakfast, they just started getting milk off the table. So it was about four guys in my hut, and we all brought back a pint of milk apiece, and we buried it in the snow to keep it cold. My battalion commander said, "We're not bringing you guys milk no more because you guys started rioting over fresh milk." He said, "I can understand, because you haven't had any since you've been over here." And we never did get any fresher milk after that.

Crawford: You couldn't buy it on your own?

03-00:13:49 Fisher: No, no, we couldn't buy it. We'd either go to a farmer, a farmhouse, and buy some milk from them, or we could trade cigarettes or food for whatever they had. I bought a Volkswagen for a carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes. The farmer had the Volkswagen parked in his barn, and it was workable but he didn't have no petrol, no fuel, no gas. Me and my buddy went down to the farmhouse to get some milk and we noticed it in the barn. We asked him, we want to buy it. Said, "What do you want for it?" His son would interpret. He said, "Just give me some cigarettes."

So we gave him a whole carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes. We had to go back to our base and bring some gasoline. I had plenty of gasoline in my unit Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 45

because all my radios were gasoline-powered. Took a five-gallon can of gasoline down and poured it in and the thing started up. Started up, I brought it back to my outfit. But I couldn't bring it inside, because only military vehicles were permitted to be inside our area. I'd park it outside the area.

My company commander came up to me one day, says, "Son, your Volkswagen running good?" I said, "Yes, sir, it is." He said, "Well, I'm going to borrow it on the weekend." Said, "I'll give you a three-day pass if you let me use your vehicle." I said, "Of course." So I gave him the keys to the Volkswagen, gave him a five-gallon can of gasoline, to use for wherever he was going, because there was no service stations or nothing around where you could just go to the service station and ask for gasoline. So I gave him some extra gas and he gave me a three-day pass. Any time he wanted it, he'd always give me a three-day pass and I'd give him a five-gallon can of gasoline to go wherever he wanted. Wherever he wanted to go, he could go.

Crawford: What did you do with it when you left?

03-00:15:53 Fisher: I left it. I told the guys that I was coming home. He said, "You guys take it over. Do what you want to do with it, because I can't bring it home with me." At that time, Volkswagen hadn't come to America yet. They didn't come till '49. So this was in '46. I was telling them about the Volkswagens that were oil-cooled. No water. You didn't have to put water in them. What are you telling us? You crazy or something? I didn't know if they were coming over to the States or not, but Volkswagens have been here since 1949.

I told the guy that I bought one in Germany for a carton of cigarettes and I used it most of the time, about half the time I was over there. I'd only been over about six months before I got one. We'd get a pass, we'd just jump in. A bunch of us [would] get in the car, go where we wanted to go.

We went to this former prison camp called Dachau. We saw the ovens and the gas chambers and all that kind of stuff that the Germans had been using to kill all the Jews and Poles and whoever, prisoners of war and everything. They kept it open for visitors. Of course, there was no bodies there at the time, because the camp had been liberated during the last part of the war. But we could visit, just like you'd go to a museum. They had a guide to show you all the things that {inaudible}. Because the guide was telling us about they were trying to get rid of the Jewish bodies or whoever. Jewish or Polish or Russian prisoners of war or whoever. He said that they put a layer of wood, a layer of bodies, a layer of wood, a layer of bodies, until it was about fifteen or twenty feet high, and they'd pour gasoline on it and burn all the bodies.

Crawford: These were Jewish people?

03-00:17:56 Fisher: Jewish people, mostly. Mostly were Jewish people. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 46

Crawford: Not American troops?

03-00:18:00 Fisher: No, not American troops.

Crawford: That's okay, keep going.

03-00:18:03 Fisher: So he showed us where they were burned. Then they went to the gas chambers, where it was like a warehouse, a small warehouse. They put so many people in it at a time and gas them. They'd strip them buck naked and gas them. Then they had the ovens, where they would burn the dead bodies. They had mass graves, where they would shoot people and then—. Dig a trench fifty yards long and just shoot the bodies and then cover it up. This was discovered.

Crawford: What was the attitude of the guide who showed you around?

03-00:18:36 Fisher: He was a German, but he laid it right out to us like it happened during this. People in the village at that time, they claimed they didn't know that was going on. Of course, a lot of people in the States didn't know. Americans didn't know until they stumbled on it during the process of defeating Germany.

Eisenhower and all the rest of the guys, they came to see it for real to make sure that it wasn't a rumor. Then they found out there was several. Dachau and a whole bunch of other camps. Auschwitz. There was dozens of camps all over the country, in Poland and Germany, that the Germans were doing the same thing with the Jewish—. They were supposed to have eliminated maybe six-million people. Jewish and Polish people and whoever else. They didn't know that was happening. Most of the guys that were fighting during the war didn't know that was going on. That had been going on before the Americans got into it.

Crawford: Did you know about it before you went?

03-00:19:46 Fisher: No, I did not.

Crawford: So it wasn't publicized.

03-00:19:52 Fisher: No, it wasn't publicized. I had heard before we went over. This was in the first part of 1946. Everybody knew about it then. But during the war, most American people didn't know about it. See, I went over there after the war was over. We already knew about it by then. But during the war, when they would stumble upon one of the camps, they let the news out and most everybody Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 47

knew about it then. All the head people, head muckety-mucks, they knew about it by then.

Crawford: In your view, when did our president know about it?

03-00:20:33 Fisher: When they discovered them. In the defeat of the Germans, they discovered these camps. The war was still going. Before the Germans surrendered, everybody knew about it, because Roosevelt was president then. See, Roosevelt died in May of '45, and the war in Germany was over in April of '45.

So I guess he knew about it before he passed away, because they found out about it during his time in office. So he died a month before the war was over, and everybody knew about it before then. I'm sure he knew about it by then. Churchill and Russia and the United States. Churchill, the British prime minister, Winston Churchill at the time.

Crawford: You were married a month before you shipped out.

03-00:21:40 Fisher: Right. I got married in June and I shipped out in July.

Crawford: Tell me more about your wife.

03-00:21:47 Fisher: We met in college, my freshman year in Prairie View A&M, which was a secondary school for Texas A&M. It was supposed to have been one of those colleges that were supposed to have been separate but equal. They were separate, but it was not equal.

Crawford: How so?

03-00:22:07 Fisher: Because we were [an] all-black college. Texas A&M, we could not attend. So Prairie View A&M was supposed to be the separate but equal college for blacks. But it was separate, but it was not equal. They had more facilities and things to work with students than we did. Because the president of Texas A&M was our president. Our head muckety-muck was a principal. They'd call him a principal. Instead of a president of a college, he was the principal of the college. That's how that prejudice stuff worked back in that time. I met her my first year, in September of 1943. I was a freshman at Prairie View, and we happened to sit at the same table when we went to breakfast at the—.

Crawford: Dormitory?

03-00:23:08 Fisher: Dormitory. I'm trying to call—. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 48

Crawford: Cafeteria.

03-00:23:10 Fisher: Cafeteria. We happened to sit at the same table and we kind of hit it off. She was from Galveston, Texas; I was from Huntsville. We kind of hit it off in school, and then we—. My first year, I was in ROTC. I was a music major my first semester at Prairie View. Then my second year, I didn't have enough money to get back in the music, so there was another system they called—. It wasn't radio engineering; they just called it radio. I got into radio class. I had three semesters in the radio class. 1944, I turned eighteen.

So since I was taking ROTC at the time, in October of '44, they let me slide until the school was out in '44-45. '45 was when they called me, when they drafted me; they called me to report to the induction center. I had gotten married in July of '45. School was out in June; I got married in June 24 of '45. They called me into service July 9 of 1945. We'd only been married a month. But she still stayed in school. She didn't get to graduate because when I got out in '47, we decided to come to California. She had done two and a half years as a music major in Prairie View. So we came to California. Her mother was in California and my brother was in California. I was glad to get out of Texas. I would go anywhere except stay in Texas at the time, because they were so prejudiced it wasn't even funny.

Crawford: What were your first impressions of California?

03-00:25:17 Fisher: When I first got here, I thought finding an apartment would be easy. My mother-in-law helped us out finding a place, because we stayed with my mother-in-law for just about a month. I got a job about a week after I got here, at Alameda Naval Air Station, as a radio helper.

Crawford: You lived in Alameda?

03-00:25:43 Fisher: I lived in Oakland at first, and then moved to Alameda, in the projects in Alameda, which was only thirty-seven dollars a month. We had kerosene stoves. I moved in there in 1948, from Oakland.

Crawford: What was your address in Oakland? Did you live close to the music district, close to 7th Street?

03-00:26:09 Fisher: No, I lived on 8th in Oakland, when I first came here.

Crawford: Well, 7th Street was the big music center, wasn't it?

03-00:26:17 Fisher: Right. At the end of 7th Street was where most of the clubs were. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 49

Crawford: But you weren't close to that.

03-00:26:22 Fisher: It was in walking distance. It was in walking distance. Because I didn't have a car then, if I wanted to go somewhere, if it was in walking distance, I would go. [That's] where I met some of the other musicians. There was DeFremery Park, which is still in Oakland.

Crawford: Oh, you told me about that.

03-00:26:36 Fisher: I told you about that. They told me about it, so I started going over to DeFremery Park on Saturdays and Sundays, to meet some other musicians. They met me, I met them, because everybody was new to me. I didn't know anybody, any musicians here. When you play, if people like what you play, they start giving you—"Hey, man, I got a gig. I want you to play with us." That's how I got started playing in different groups around in the Bay Area.

When I got the job in Alameda, I had a job, I had a place to stay. Only ten dollars week for a one-room apartment. We shared the kitchen with two other couples. You'd have to write your name on what was yours, where you'd go to the refrigerator and get your food out, so you wouldn't get somebody else's pork chops or bacon or something.

So we stayed there until 1948. I moved to Alameda, because there was an opening for ex-veterans, ex-GIs. It was thirty-seven dollars a month for rent, which was high to us then at the time, because when I first got hired on as a radio mechanic helper, the pay was a $1.01 an hour. $1.01 an hour. That's like forty dollars a week. This was 1947 now. That was good.

Crawford: That was pretty good?

03-00:28:08 Fisher: Yeah, it was pretty good. Because as a helper, you have to work your way up, because the journeyman, they were paid a dollar and a quarter a week, which was another level. Then we finally started going up and up and up. Because when I retired in 1982, I was a full-fledged journeyman, as an electronics systems mechanic, where we did the electronics for all the aircraft. We installed all the electronics for the aircraft, and when the plane flew, we'd have to fly with it to check out the different parts while the plane was in the air.

Crawford: So you were pretty skilled—

03-00:28:49 Fisher: So far. With that. I knew what I was doing.

Crawford: You must've known what you were doing. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 50

03-00:28:54 Fisher: I knew what I was doing. You learn from being in that system for a long time. We got promoted. My highest pay when I retired was $14.92 an hour, where most other people were making three and four dollars an hour. So it was pretty good. They're talking about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars. Well, I was making that in 1984, when I retired.

Crawford: You were, weren't you?

03-00:29:22 Fisher: Yes. That was a good salary, at that time. It was better than that $1.01 an hour that we started with. I called my mother and told her I had a job. As soon as I got the job, I called my mother back in Texas to tell her that I had a job. She said, "How much are they paying you?" Said, "Forty dollars a week." My mother's a beautician. She told all the ladies in the beauty shop, "Oh, Lord have mercy, my son's got a job makes forty dollars a week. Lord have mercy!" [he laughs]

Crawford: That was good.

03-00:29:51 Fisher: That was good. So she didn't ever worry about me too much, because I had a job and I started playing music with different groups about the Bay Area. I was doing pretty good at the time. I eventually bought a car. My mother pass in '49, and me and my brother went back to Texas for the service. We rented our house that my mother was in.

We rented it out to one of her good friends. So we had rent money coming from Texas for a while, and I still had a good job. The lady that we rented the house to stopped paying us. She stopped sending us money. Some person in my hometown wrote a letter and told her—. This lady's name was Miss Lucy. "Miss Lucy just bought a new car."

We were saying, "If she bought a new car, ask why she's not sending us rent." So the only black dentist we had in my hometown was named Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson wanted to buy our house. So there was a real estate agent that was a classmate of mine. They contacted us, me and my brother, and we communicated between Dr. Johnson and the dentist. He wanted to sell it and we sold it for 4,000 dollars. That was high, at that time. Four thousand dollars for the house. It was maybe like a quarter of an acre or less. A little less than a quarter of an acre. My brother took his money and bought him a house, and I took my money and I bought a house in Oakland.

Crawford: How was that to buy? Did you run into any restrictive clauses or anything like that in Oakland? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 51

03-00:31:46 Fisher: In Oakland? No, because I stayed in the North Oakland area, where there were a lot of blacks. It's a black area. It's in North Oakland. But I couldn't buy a house in San Leandro or in—. What was the other one? San Lorenzo? I couldn't buy a house past Ashby in Berkeley.

Crawford: Past Ashby, toward the university.

03-00:32:13 Fisher: Going towards the university. Couldn't get a house up there. Because we had tried to get an apartment there at the first, but we ended up on 8th and West, which is almost in West Oakland.

Crawford: How was that presented to you? Were you just denied access?

03-00:32:29 Fisher: You'd call them on the phone, they'd tell you it was open. When you got there and they found out who you were. "We just closed it to somebody else. Sorry, sir." That was it. Because my granddaughter, her name was Crystal Darrinsberg. She lived in Los Angeles at the time. She tried to get an apartment and they said Darrinsberg; they just knew she wasn't black. When she got to the place, she said, " I came to see about the apartment that you had open." So what color she was, they just turned her down. She had to go someplace else. She was staying with her mother in Los Angeles.

Crawford: So that was widespread all throughout California?

03-00:33:14 Fisher: It was. It was. Because at the time, we had two separate musicians unions. We had a black musicians union and a white musicians union. White musicians was Local 6, and the black musicians union was 669. But we merged. We protested, and we merged in 1960, I think it was. So it's just one union, Local 6 now, all musicians.

Crawford: What was the difference, in terms of benefits?

03-00:33:43 Fisher: I really can't remember. The benefits was like if you passed away, you'd get 2,000 dollars. I think it's still that way. Even after we merged with Local 6, it's still 2,000 dollars for members. It's like Social Security. You don't get but 2500 dollars. What is it fifty-five dollars, what you get from Social Security nowadays? Benefits, if you pass away as a musician, they give you, what, 2500 dollars, I think it is now. Yeah.

Crawford: So the benefits didn't change when the unions merged?

03-00:34:28 Fisher: When they merged? No. They just stayed the same. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 52

Crawford: They found work for you? Or did you always find your own work?

03-00:34:33 Fisher: We had to find our own work. The union, if they had trouble with the owner of a club or a hotel, with the money, that's when the union would step in and make sure that we got our correct pay. Yeah, that's what the union was for. They would call you for a job, a gig. Say Rosemary Clooney, who was a popular singer in the time, would come into town and she'd play the Civic Center in San Francisco. Civic Center called for sixteen musicians. She'd come in with just a trio, like piano, bass, and drums, she would have to hire thirteen other musicians. We'd call that a standby gig.

So if you got the standby gig behind Rosemary Clooney or whoever came to town that didn't have sixteen people—. It depends on where they were playing. Each place would call for so many musicians. So I'm just saying the Civic Auditorium. We played there behind Sarah Vaughan once. Sarah Vaughan and Bill Cosby. You had to bring your instrument. There's twelve of us and thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen that came with Sarah Vaughan and Bill Cosby.

So they said, "Every time you get a standby gig, bring your horn." Well, a lot of times, the drummer, it's hard for him to bring his horn to a standby gig, because a lot of times, you never get a chance to play anyway. You just stand by and you get paid the regular scale for whatever the scale called for at that particular time.

Now, we were playing behind Sarah Vaughan at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, and Bill Cosby came back in the dressing room and said, "Okay, all you dudes get up. We're going to go out and play. You ain't going to bring your horn here and not play. We're going to make you play." So the drummer would use Sarah Vaughan's drummer's drums, and the pianist would use her pianist's piano, and we'd have a jam session. Bill Cosby would be out there directing the jam session while we play. "Play 'How High the Moon?'

We'd come and play, before the real show started. We'd play a couple, three tunes, and then they'd bring on the main attraction, which was Sarah Vaughan and her trio. We had a lot of standby gigs, from different people would come to town. If they would play at the Auditorium, which called for sixteen musicians, or if they played another place that didn't call for that many, say seven musicians, to make out whatever the number was supposed to be for that particular spot. It's what you call a standby gig. So we had a lot of those going at the time. We played a lot with Nancy Wilson. Well, we played behind Nancy at the Fairmont. But this wasn't a standby job; we had a regular orchestra. We backed her at the Fairmont. She was so nice. During the rehearsal, after we rehearsed for the job, we'd all sit in the middle of the floor, and Nancy'd sit right with us. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 53

03-00:37:56 Fisher: Nancy treated everybody to a drink and was telling us about her life with her dogs. She was crazy about her dogs. She was just nice. That particular night, after the rehearsal we played the gig. Nancy wasn't that popular at the time. This was in '62 or '63. Nancy was singing one of her recorded songs, and the people weren't paying any attention to her. They were just talking. Nancy says, "Wait a minute. Stop the music." She said, "Stop the music." Everybody stopped to see what she had to say. She said, "I'm up here singing, and you guys are not paying me no attention. So if you're not going to pay me no attention, I'm just going to stop." She said, "Hit it, boys," and she started. Then they started listening. They weren't paying her no attention at the time.

Crawford: That has to be so annoying.

03-00:38:44 Fisher: It was. Then almost the same thing with Stevie Wonder. I played a gig at the Oakland Auditorium. Stevie Wonder was seventeen years old at the time. We had a dress rehearsal on a Saturday. We were supposed to play Saturday night, an eight o'clock performance that Saturday night. Stevie had his musical director and his rhythm section, so they hired the other musicians from the local, from the union, to fill out the number of musicians that was needed for the gig.

We had a dress rehearsal that afternoon, and we had a problem. He passed out the music, the musical director there. Stevie's musical [director] passed out the music. "Let's hit it. One, two, three, four." The bass player had the introduction, and he stumbled through it. He said, "Wait a minute." The director says, "Wait a minute. You've got the first four bars." He said, "Okay. I know it. I know it." He said, "Okay, well, play it."

So he counted it off again, and he stumbled through the first four bars again. So he said, "Does anybody know another bass player?" So one of the guys said, "Yeah, I can call one." So he called another bass player. Fired him right off the bat, because he couldn't play what he had to play on the introduction of the tune. We made the rehearsals.

That night, at the start of the gig, nobody came. Only about ten, fifteen people came, and they cancelled it. But they paid the band and they cancelled it. That was when Stevie was seventeen years old. He had one hit out at the time, but I guess the information hadn't progressed to Oakland about Stevie Wonder as much as they thought it would have when they booked him. They cancelled the gig. Paid the band, and they went to wherever they were going after that.

Crawford: What are your thoughts about Bill Cosby? He's going through such a terrible time. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 54

03-00:40:43 Fisher: He is, he is. I don't know what to say about that. I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know, I don't want to comment on whether it's true or whether he did all the things [they say] he did or not. I'm not sure.

Crawford: He was lots of fun.

03-00:40:55 Fisher: He was. He was a nice guy to deal with, with us, for what we had to deal with at the time. He directed us before a Sarah Vaughan concert. He was always a lovable guy. I used to watch his show all the time.

Crawford: I did too.

03-00:41:10 Fisher: Yes.

Crawford: Well, you must've started having your children about now.

03-00:41:15 Fisher: When I came to California, I already had one daughter. My second daughter was born here, in 1954. My oldest daughter was born in 1944, and my second daughter was born in 1954. My oldest son was born in 1948, and my youngest son was born in 1958. The two daughters are ten years apart and the two sons are ten years apart. They're still around. Of course, my daughter was here yesterday, or a couple days ago. They always come by to see how I'm doing.

Crawford: Good.

03-00:41:53 Fisher: She does. She lives in Sacramento. My other daughter lives in Texas. So she was here in January of this year and stayed a couple weeks with me. I had the flu, and she waited on me. Then after I got better, she had the flu and I had to wait on her.

Crawford: I remember, because that's when we started working on this. You were having a hard time.

03-00:42:17 Fisher: My son, my oldest boy, he's a professor at a little college in Iowa. I think it's Merrill College. He got his master's at the University of Iowa, and he's been back there since 1987. He's sixty-eight now. He's almost getting ready to retire.

Crawford: Didn't you have a couple of children with advanced degrees?

03-00:42:42 Fisher: Two with master's. My granddaughter with a master's and my oldest son has a master's. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 55

Crawford: Where did they go to school, growing up?

03-00:42:53 Fisher: My son went to Richmond High. My oldest boy went to Richmond High. My youngest boy went to De Anza. My oldest daughter went to Contra Costa. Then she got a job with Xerox. She stayed with Xerox until she retired, about six years ago. My youngest daughter worked at AC Transit. She just retired about four years ago. My youngest son, he's still working, and my oldest son is still working. He lives in Fremont. He works down in Silicon Valley, as a maintenance personnel. I think that's what his job is, I don't know. He's been there almost twenty-some years.

Crawford: Would you talk about when you moved here? About Parchester Village.

03-00:43:39 Fisher: It was started in 1950. All the streets were named after black ministers. We heard about Parchester Village, we came out here to see it. They had a model house down on the corner. We said to ourselves, "This is too far," because we were working in Alameda at the time and I was living in Alameda at the time. So it's kind of far, because I could walk to work when I lived in Alameda. I said, "Man come way out here, it'd take us all day to get to work." But I ended up out here anyway. I got divorced from my first wife and I moved to the Berkeley YMCA for two years. Then I married my second wife, and we were married for forty-one years. She passed away in '99. So I've been a single guy since '99.

Crawford: So some of the children are hers, as well?

03-00:44:29 Fisher: My youngest son is hers and my oldest boy. My oldest boy is actually my stepson, because when I married her, I already had two daughters; she had one son. Then we had a son together.

Crawford: Where was the Berkeley YMCA?

03-00:44:45 Fisher: Right on Austin Way, by the post office, the Berkeley post office there.

Crawford: Sure. How was that? How was that living?

03-00:44:54 Fisher: It was okay. The parking was difficult. I stayed there for two years. After I was divorced from my first wife, I stayed there for about two years. Then married my second wife and I moved to Parchester Village, to here.

Crawford: Talk about moving to Parchester Village and what it represented. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 56

03-00:45:15 Fisher: It was an all-black community, with all the streets named after black ministers, and it was mostly all black people. Now it's half and half, with Latinos and black people. It's still okay. It's all right. Got a good neighbor next to me, good neighbors on both sides and good neighbors across the street. In fact, some of my neighbors are better than the neighbors that I had.

Crawford: From South America, you said, and Central America.

03-00:45:48 Fisher: Yes. My neighbor from here is from Nicaragua. I don't know where they are from, but they're Latinos. They're from all over. There was a great migration from Mexico up to California.

Crawford: I wanted to ask you about the demographics, because in 1950, in the Bay Area, the percentage of blacks was about the same as Latinos. It was about 5 or 5.5.

03-00:46:14 Fisher: But it's different now.

Crawford: But now, or a few years ago, when they took the last poll, it was 25 percent Latino and still few blacks. So what does that mean?

03-00:46:29 Fisher: I don't know. A lot of people lost their houses and a lot of people just moved out. When they would move out, Latinos would move in. I don't know how they got loans or how it happened, but all I know, all of a sudden it's about, I'd say, 35 percent Latinos here now. Because most of the neighbors that were here when I first moved in here were black. I moved here in 1958.

Crawford: The community was founded in '49, I think.

03-00:47:00 Fisher: Right. Right, '49, they started building the houses. Because this house was built in 1950. It was completely all black, except a few people that had white wives. A couple guys had wives they'd brought from Germany or Japan or wherever they were. There were a few of those, but mostly, I'd say 90 percent black at the time.

Since, oh, how long ago? Ten years ago, it started to change. Because my neighbors, they moved to Las Vegas, and my neighbors over here moved someplace else, the neighbor across the street moved someplace else. Then it was open for the realtors to do what they wanted.

The people wanted to move here. They'd get the loan and move here. So that's mostly how it happened. I don't know, I couldn't write it in stone, but they're here. It's all right with me because I've had no problems with them. It would be stupid for me to have a problem with them, when white people had Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 57

problems with us when we moved in their neighborhood. But there's no reason for us to have a problem from Latinos. But if we'd had, that'd been the same prejudice that we had.

Crawford: It's the same kind of thing.

03-00:48:15 Fisher: It's the same kind of thing. I have not had a problem with them since they've been here. They're all friendly.

Crawford: Is the racial situation better?

03-00:48:25 Fisher: I'd say it's the same. In the neighborhoods, you've got some knuckleheads. Regardless of where you go, you're going to have some knuckleheads. But it's less now, I think, than it was when it was all black.

Crawford: You being a musician, you play everywhere.

03-00:48:51 Fisher: I did.

Crawford: But I think in the forties and fifties, that wasn't the case, was it? Well, we haven't talked about the Fillmore very much.

03-00:49:03 Fisher: Fillmore, yes. Before the musician unions merged, we couldn't play the Circle Star Theater [in San Carlos]. You remember the Circle Star Theater?

Crawford: Yes.

03-00:49:16 Fisher: We couldn't play that, unless we were—. Like when Count Basie or Duke Ellington came, they were all black musicians. But locally, if somebody came out of town and they needed musicians to fill in the orchestra, Local 6 guys would always get the job. We couldn't play north of Market or south of Market, before the musicians unions merged. We couldn't play the Claremont or the Fairmont. The Claremont's in Berkeley. But the Fairmont or the Mark Hopkins or whatever hotels that were over there then, they didn't have black musicians playing there.

Even if you had an orchestra, most of the white orchestras had all whites. Very few had mixed. If you played with a white orchestra and you were about the only black in there, well, they couldn't turn you down if you had a gig at the Fairmont Hotel. But that's the way it worked. *We protested and got them to merge [Local 669 and Local 6 merged in 1960]. Then you could play at the hotels. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 58

I mentioned I was playing with David Hardiman and the San Francisco All Stars. We had a gig at the St. Francis, I think—we were an all-black unit— celebrating Wounded Knee. Remember the Wounded Knee massacre?

Crawford: Oh, yes.

03-00:50:33 Fisher: Marlon Brando came. Tony Bennett came from New York. He sent the music ahead of time, so we could rehearse it. We added strings from the San Francisco Symphony, because his music included strings. A full orchestra, plus a six-man string section. We brought the music out and we had it for about two weeks before he came. There was more Indians there than you could shake a stick at. In fact, they had a tipi in the middle of the dance floor. Indians with the headdress on and did a lot of Indian dances. Tony Bennett sang and we played and they danced, and we played and they sang. It was really a nice affair. It was 1976; come to find out Tony Bennett and I are the same age.

Crawford: Same month?

03-00:52:15 Fisher: No, that's a different month, but the same year. Same year. I think he's a month or two ahead of me.

Crawford: What was he like to work with?

03-00:52:23 Fisher: Easy. Very easy. Very pleasant guy. He just takes his time, really easy to get along with. "Okay, guys, let's take it from the top. Okay, here we go. One, two, three four," boom, gone. It was easy. We had the string section in to make it sound like his recordings. A lot of his big band recordings always have the string section in it, so we added a string section from the San Francisco Symphony.

Crawford: 1976. Did you ever play up there again, at the St. Francis?

03-00:53:19 Fisher: Yes, we did. We played there for a hypnotist convention. Because that's a medical field, I guess, hypnotists. Three things happened. The guy that was in charge was talking about hypnotism. He asked the audience to listen to him, and the band, we're just sitting, waiting and watching, too. So when we took a break, our trombone player didn't move. He stayed there and we all took a break. We was wondering why was he still sitting there. Guy said, "He's hypnotized." [he laughs]

Crawford: Was he? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 59

03-00:54:12 Fisher: I guess he was, because usually he's the first guy off the stand when we take a break.

Crawford: Oh, that's a good story. Well, okay. Now we're going to look at Harlem of the West. Would you talk about Harlem of the West?

03-00:54:30 Fisher: Okay. Jimbo's Bop City started—well, I guess it was here before I got here. I didn't get here till '47. It closed in '65. But it was a place where you could go and do your musical expressions with other musicians that you'd never played with or never seen. After they finished their engagement wherever they were playing in the city, they would always come to Bop City. It didn't open up till one o'clock in the morning.

Sometimes we'd stay there till ten, eleven o'clock the next morning. You'd get to play with people that you didn't know. Just like on the Harlem of the West picture, the photographer that particular night—. John Handy and myself, John Handy had played with my group. We were playing at Slim Jenkins' in Oakland.

That particular night, I said, "Hey, John, let's go to Bop City." So we got in the car and drove over to Bop City. Jimbo, who was the owner, had a house band. Bass, piano and drums was the house band. They would call up three or four musicians at a time for the front line. That particular night, they called up John Handy, Pony Poindexter, John Coltrane, and myself.

Now, I didn't know who Coltrane was, at the time. He didn't know who I was, either. They took this particular picture, and this hung on the walls at Bop City until it moved. I don't know who had most of the photos, because this was on the wall. You could see this picture on the wall when you first walked into the place. I never knew what happened to it. I know that the time I went, I saw the picture on the wall.

After Bop City closed, I think in '65, I don't know what happened to the pictures. But the lady and the guy that wrote this book found that picture somewhere, and they happened to put it on the cover of Harlem of the West. I think this book came out in about 2006. '6 or '7. They didn't get to interview me for this book. But there's a revised version coming out. They're working on a revised version right now. But she had an interview with me for about a couple hours, over in Emeryville.

Crawford: Oh, good. All right, we'll look forward to that. I'm going to close this tape.

Audio File 4

Crawford: How about your years with Junius Courtney? Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 60

04-00:00:00 Fisher: It was a sextet. Then we moved to big band. We used to rehearse at his house, when he lived over on Acton Street, in Berkeley. When we had small gigs, sometimes he'd have two gigs at one time, off of 80, one of those country clubs. There's several country clubs—Danville Country Club and some other country clubs. Sometimes he would take a sextet and give me a sextet to play one while we were playing two country clubs at the same time. When he'd take a break, he would come over to check on the group that I was in charge of. Then he'd go back and play in his, doing what he was doing.

Crawford: When did you first play with Junius Courtney?

04-00:00:58 Fisher: Back in the sixties. I can't tell you the exact date or anything, but I played from the sixties, off and on, until now. Between playing with Junius, I played with David Hardiman, who was a graduate of Indiana University. He came out and started a band in 1975. So I played with both of them. David Hardiman had a big band, also, and he collected some of the top black musicians in the area. He called them the San Francisco All Stars. I played with David from 1975 until now. Of course, he hasn't had a gig for a while now because he doesn't have the big band.

The drummer with the David Hardiman Big Band, ended up being the president of City College. He passed away the first part of this year. We're going to have a memorial for him with the big band and play some of his compositions that he wrote when he was with the big band. So at the same time, I'd have gigs with David Hardiman or I'd have gigs with—. Played with David from '75 until the next gig. I played with Courtney in the sixties, and our next gig is April 9th, at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley.

Our pianist with Junius Courtney Big Band has been with us for maybe twenty years or more. She retired last year. Medical reasons. When she left, we had to get another piano player. So our musical director, George Spencer, became our musical director with Courtney's band. When Courtney was living, he was the director of the band, out front. Then Roberta Mandel was our main pianist. Then when she retired last year, our musical director became George Spencer, and he switched to the piano. He plays piano, he plays trumpet, and he plays a little bass, and he plays some drums at times. He's going to be our pianist for the gig that's coming up. I wrote this tune that features him, called "Get Down Jorge." His name is George, so it's "Get Down Jorge." It features the pianist. I don't know if we'll play this on the oncoming gig, because we haven't rehearsed it enough to get it down pat yet.

Crawford: When do your songs come to you?

04-00:04:11 Fisher: Any time. I can be in the bed and think of something. I'll be in the car thinking of something. When I get home, I'll put a few notes on the piano and write a Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 61

few little—. So I won't forget what I thought of on my way home, from the car. If some music's playing, I have to turn it off, because it'll interfere with my thoughts.

Crawford: You come right in and write it down.

04-00:04:34 Fisher: I'll come in and write the first few lines that I think of, then I figure out how to finish it out and add the other part. You pick out the melody and who's going to be playing the melody and who's going to be playing the background and what the background players are going to be playing. You've got four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, and a rhythm section, and you've got to have something for everybody to do. That's what you do when you make an arrangement.

Crawford: What's the favorite song that you've written?

04-00:05:07 Fisher: One called "IBAR" It means it'll be all right. That's one of my—. I think I put more into that one than I did just about anything. I recorded that one. I got a little swing, rock and Latin and funk into it. Funk is a rhythm that makes it rock, the drums have a lot to do with it, and the rhythm section, and you put background tempo in to make it sound what you want. The bass player will know what to do!

Crawford: How about some more favorite songs? At the Yoshi's performance, your retirement date, you placed "Ape Shape."

Fisher: I named that when I had a sextet long time ago, and there was something wrong always with the piano player. He said, "When I feel good I'm in ape shape, bad I'm in gorilla condition." I got a tune called "Sink or Swim"—the copyist sends the parts back to me, I send them back to correct, then I put them together and take them to the band. There's one called "Letom," which is motel spelled backward. I come up with the melody, you always do that first. Wanted to name that "Motel," but he said no, so I said Motel Backward. There's "Grandpa's Thing." I won't tell you what grandpa's thing is, but after playing it, I say, "Now you know what grandpa's thing is! You heard "Obama Do Swing"—I wrote it when he first got to be president.

Then "Damned if I Know"—based on 12-bar blues. I heard a tune on KCSM with the tempo I wanted. Took the last four bars and I say if I take the 4 bars I can come up with the tune. I come up with the background behind any soloist and go from there. Play the melody twice for the soloist so they can get an idea of what that sounds like.

Crawford: I notice you notate fully. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 62

04-00:05:27 Fisher: Yes, I write the melodies and the background for the soloists. I don't write the solo; that's up to the person. You give them the chord changes to go by when you ad lib and improvise. If you've got a tenor saxophone player on a solo, you've got to give some background behind him to kind of help push him along a little bit; and you've got to write your shout chorus, if there is one, if it's a swing tune; and you've got to have an ending. You put it all together. You do some repeats and change from a saxophone solo to maybe a trombone solo, and give the drummer some, a bass solo, and then you put the whole thing together. You put the whole thing together and play it out.

Crawford: Are your songs recorded?

04-00:06:25 Fisher: I have several tunes that have been recorded. David Hardiman's band and the Courtney band.

Crawford: And what label?

04-00:06:40 Fisher: Can't remember. I remember one of them was recorded at Bear Studio in San Francisco, and we recorded one in Berkeley, at the—. What's the big recording studio in Berkeley? I can't think of the name. But I have a CD of my tunes, all the tunes that I recorded. Then there's a CD out with the Courtney band. It's called Us. And David Hardiman, I recorded with him, and it's called It'll Be Alright.

Crawford: Have you ever met a man named Chris Strachwitz?

04-00:07:21 Fisher: No.

Crawford: He has Down Home Records.

04-00:07:24 Fisher: I don't know him.

Crawford: In El Cerrito. Well, let's move on to something we haven't talked about yet. Your influences. I'm not just talking about music here, but in your early years, who influenced you?

04-00:07:44 Fisher: Far as musicians?

Crawford: Anybody.

04-00:07:47 Fisher: Anybody? Oh, let's see. That's hard to say. I'll just go with the musicians. Every trumpet player has heard Louie Armstrong. When I was coming up, he Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 63

was the most popular trumpet player around. Louie Armstrong, Harry James, Ziggy Elman—a whole lot of trumpet players. Then I started listening to Duke Ellington Orchestra and the Count Basie orchestra, Lester Young. Lockjaw Davis, saxophone player, was one of my favorites.

One of my favorite trumpet players—everybody would think he was going to say Dizzy Gillespie. I have nothing against Dizzy; Dizzy was the greatest. But my favorite trumpet player was Clark Terry, who just passed away last year. Stanley Turrentine was one of my favorite saxophone players. I got influenced from writing from playing with the Gerald Wilson Orchestra. I always liked the way he made arrangements. Then to top off, my most famous arranger would be Thad Jones. To me, he's the utmost. Thad [Thaddeus] Jones and Mel Lewis orchestra. Thad Jones was the arranger.

There was a dual leadership between Thad Jones and the drummer, Mel Lewis. But Thad Jones did all the arrangements. For singers, I always liked Billy Eckstine, back in the day, and Ella [Fitzgerald] and Sarah and a number of others. But I had a chance to play behind Nancy, and we did that little thing before Sarah's performance at the Auditorium one time. But when Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan was playing with Earl "Fatha" Hines' group, back in the forties, it influenced me.

Crawford: What was magic about that?

04-00:09:58 Fisher: At the time, the big band would come out on the stage and the singer would sit on the side, until they were called to do their particular number. First time I saw that was at the Civic Auditorium in Houston. It only cost ninety-nine cents to get in. They didn't care how old you were or nothing, just so you paid. But at the time, at the Civic Auditorium, they had a rope down the middle of the dance floor. Whites on one side, blacks on the other side. Then when I got to California, I found out that the ballroom, downtown Oakland, had a black night and a white night. Whenever a white band came—. I remember the Gene Krupa band came, and they played on Thursday night for the whites, and Friday night for the blacks. I didn't think that would happen in California, but it did.

Crawford: You didn't expect that.

04-00:10:56 Fisher: I didn't expect that in California.

Crawford: I think it was you who told me that often when you'd go to a club that was segregated in that way, the rope would come down.

04-00:11:10 Fisher: Well, not so much in a club. Either you could go in or you couldn't, at a club. But something like the city auditorium, like the Civic Center or Oakland Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 64

Auditorium—.I never saw that happen at the Oakland Auditorium. But [Sands] Ballroom. That's when they had the black nights and the white nights. But the Civic Auditorium in Houston is when they had the rope down the middle. That's down south. They had the rope down the middle and you could be on one side and the whites could be on [the other] side, and they had a policeman patrolling the rope to see that you stay on your side. But I never saw that in Oakland. Either you could go to it or you couldn't go to it.

Crawford: When you had a black night and a white night, would the players have to be all black or all white?

04-00:12:09 Fisher: If it was an all-white band. You had to go whatever night whatever night was your night. t was an all-white band, but they played on Thursday night for the whites and Friday night for the blacks.

Crawford: How long did that last?

04-00:12:35 Fisher: Oh, I don't know when it quit. That was in the fifties, so I guess by the time the seventies came around, everybody could go where—. Your money was the same. Because I know when Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington would come to the Oakland Auditorium, everybody was there. No segregation. No black night and white about it. A place like the Auditorium didn't have them. This is only the smaller clubs. That's when they had the black night and white night.

Crawford: When was it possible for you to play anywhere in the Bay Area?

04-00:13:25 Fisher: Well, after the two musician unions merged.

Crawford: 1960.

04-00:13:36 Fisher: After '60.

Crawford: And then you never saw that again?

04-00:13:40 Fisher: No. It's kind of halfway now, but it's not open like it was at that particular time.

Crawford: How do you mean that?

04-00:13:47 Fisher: You still have a lot of white bands with no black players in them. If they have, then maybe they've got one or two. One maybe trombone player, one saxophone player. But they play anywhere. You can go see them wherever Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 65

they are; it doesn't make no difference now. But you're either all white or all black, or all white with a few blacks to make it—. A little tokenism.

Crawford: Yes. Did you ever play in New York?

04-00:14:16 Fisher: No, never did.

Crawford: You never were tempted to go back east?

04-00:14:19 Fisher: No. After I moved to California, I did all my playing in the Bay Area.

Crawford: Did you play with Dave Brubeck?

04-00:14:26 Fisher: No, no. No, I didn't play with Brubeck.

Crawford: Because he was very strong against discrimination.

04-00:14:32 Fisher: Yes, he was. Because he had black players. I remember Woody Herman came to the Oakland Auditorium, and Dave Brubeck had a little ten-piece group. They were on first. Woody Herman was the main attraction at the time. Dave Brubeck's little ten-piece group was playing before, what you call—.

Crawford: Openers.

04-00:15:03 Fisher: Yes, they were the openers. They were so good that Woody Herman guys would come to the curtain, peep out to see what was going on. It was Dave Brubeck's group, which was very good. So then he reduced his number of players down to just piano, drum, bass, and saxophone player. The saxophone player, he passed away. Paul Desmond was his saxophone player. A very good, excellent saxophone player. That's when he came up with that "Take Five." "Take Five rhythm." That was the most popular five-four time music going at the time.

Crawford: I think it's the most often played on the radio of any tune.

04-00:15:45 Fisher: Yes. He played it all over. You could always hear it.

Crawford: Are your children musical?

04-00:16:23 Fisher: My daughter is, my oldest daughter. She's the choir director at her church, pianist at the church back in Texas. My son plays guitar, but he just plays for himself. He never played with anybody, he's just self-taught and he plays for himself, mostly. Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 66

Crawford: You celebrated your ninetieth birthday in 2016. How did you celebrate?

Fisher: They had a party for me at my church. The organist and I are the oldest at the church. Easter Hill United Methodist. I still sing in the choir. My Texas daughter is coming to celebrate my 91st. They had a surprise party last year for about thirty people. And the band gave me a party the day before with champagne. I just wanted to go and have some crab at Crockett, Dead Fish. I have a whole crab by myself. [laughter]

Crawford: You have mentioned a girlfriend with whom you go out, and I know you have breakfasts out often.

Fisher: We meet Mondays at Royal Café in Albany. I also go to Suki's Country Kitchen on Mondays after going to the gym. It's on San Pablo.

Crawford: What would you say is your most significant memory in music?

04-00:21:44 Fisher: Playing with Duke Ellington was about the most memorable thing that I can ever think of.

Crawford: What a great story. This is a good place for us to end.

Fisher: Okay, that's good. It was a pleasure.

[End Interview]