AL 153 Interviewee: Scott Camil Interviewer: Stuart Landers Date: October 20, 1992 L: This is an oral history interview with Scott Camil being conducted at his house in the southern part of Alachua County. Today is October 20, 1992, and my name is Stuart Landers. Tell me your full name. C: Scott Camil. L: Is there a middle name? C: No. L: Where were you born? C: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, May 19, 1946. I will also say that May 19 is also the birthday of Ho Chi Minh [1890-1969; Vietnamese Communist leader], Malcolm X [1925-1965; American civil rights activist], Augusto Sandino [1893- 1934; Nicaraguan guerrilla leader], and Kemal Ataturk [1880-1938; first president of Turkish Republic, 1923-1938]. I was actually born with the name Scott Abramson, but my mother remarried when I was four, so Scott Camil was always my name. I never changed it back to my original name because my name is who people know me by. L: Do you know anything about Abramson, your biological father? C: Yes. He lives here in Gainesville. He works for the state in the health department. He is a veteran of World War II. He has also done time in prison for marijuana. L: What is his first name? C: Sanford. L: You are Jewish, correct? C: Yes. I was raised Jewish, and I was bar mitzvahed. I had to go to Hebrew school because the family made me, but they said that after I was bar mitzvahed I would not have to go anymore. And after I was bar mitzvahed, I did not go anymore. So I am Jewish as a sort of a race, but I do not have a religious belief. I really consider myself a human being; I think that religion is one of the things that divides human beings from each other, and that makes me not happy with religion. When I was against the war and I tried to get help, I could not get help AL 153 Page 2 from the Protestants or the Catholics or the Jews. The only people that would help me were the Unitarians and the Quakers. Even in Vietnam, I wondered why they would give prayers for our guys that were killed, but they would not give prayers for the guys that we were killing. I thought that in religion we were all supposed to be the children of God. I just thought it was hypocritical. L: So you moved away from religion at a fairly early age, I guess. C: Right. I am proud to be Jewish, but it is not a religion to me. It is more like a culture; my culture. L: What was your stepfather's full name? C: Walter Camil. L: What was your mother's name? C: Gilda Hersh, later changed to Gida De Hersh. Her last name now is Peterson. L: So she has been remarried again. C: Yes. L: Where are your parents and stepfather from? What are their backgrounds? C: My real father, my stepfather, and my mother were all born in New York. Actually, all three of them were Bohemians in the Village. On my mother's side, my grandparents came from Romania and Russia. On my father's side, they came from what they called Russia-Poland. So my parents were first-generation Americans. I was a second-generation American, but my grandparents were born in Europe. L: Do you remember anyone speaking Yiddish? C: Yes. L: Your parents or your grandparents? C: My grandparents and my great-grandparents. L: I understand that you grew up mainly in Dade County, in Hialeah. C: Yes. AL 153 Page 3 L: When did you come to Florida from New York? C: I do not really remember the early time. I was told that we came here when I was four, but I was too young to remember stuff like that. I have a few memories of the tenement building in Brooklyn: a big, red building with an elevator, and we lived on the second floor. The milkman used to put the milk and the eggs and the butter by the door. Then I remember living in Florida, where we lived in different houses. We lived in Coconut Grove. I went to different schools. But I actually do not remember getting in a car and driving from New York to Florida. L: Okay. Do you have any brothers or sisters? C: Yes. I have a sister named Starr who is two years younger than me from my real father, and then my two brothers were fathered by my stepfather. Their names are Eric Camil and Clay Camil. They are both City of Miami police officers. My brother Eric is a veteran – not a combat veteran, but he was in the army. He is ten years younger than me. L: So your stepfather was in the Miami police force? C: Yes. He was a civilian employee of the Miami police department. He was an I.D. technician. He took fingerprints and photos at crimes. L: What do you remember about growing up in Hialeah and Dade County? C: I have talked to my brothers about this. When I left the house, I was like seventeen, so my youngest brother was seven, and my other brother was probably nine or ten. I remember growing up in a house with four kids, and the three boys shared one room, and my sister had the other room. But my brothers remember growing up in a house with two kids because my sister and I were grown up and gone when they were growing up in the years that they remember. I remember being able to go to the beach. I remember going fishing off the bridges. I remember that we were real poor and we ate potatoes a lot. A lot of nights we did not have food and went to bed without food. People did not like us because we were Jewish. Since my parents had trouble paying the rent, I remember getting kicked out of places all the time. The landlord would come, and there would be arguments, and we would have to pack up and leave. My grandparents would want to help out, but my parents did not want any help from them. Looking back at it now, one of the things that I remember a lot that disturbs me is that we children were not treated as human beings. We were more like property. [The attitude was that] children are to be seen and not heard. When my parents AL 153 Page 4 had friends come over, we could not address them. They had to address us first, and we always had to call them "sir" or "ma'am". Our ideas did not count. Our thoughts did not count. If my father or mother said to do something [and] you said, "Why?" you would get your ass kicked. I [sometimes] went to school with a bloody nose [or] with a black eye. HRS never came. The police never came to find out what happened. Beating your children was acceptable. L: We are talking about the mid to late 1950s, right? C: Right. At the time, it seemed normal because everybody got beat. You could always hear someone on the block screaming and yelling because they were getting beat with the belt. It was just normal. Now I have three kids, and I would never hit them. I mean, it is totally unacceptable to me. If I ask my kids to do something and they have a reason for not wanting to do it, if their reason makes sense then they do not have to do it. They are allowed to express themselves, and they are allowed to win. I was not allowed to express myself, and I was not allowed to win. I was just property, basically. I also remember, on the other hand, a lot of love from my grandparents and my aunt and my uncle. I ran away a bunch of times because I hated my stepfather and I did not like getting beat. L: Speaking of your stepfather, in some of these articles that I have read, you mention that he was a member of the John Birch Society. C: Yes. He made tapes. You would dial "FREEDOM" on the telephone and you would get a message about the communist conspiracy. I was real young then, and I did not know what any of that stuff meant. What I do remember about it was that they would have meetings at the house. When they would have meetings, I would have to go to my room. I also remember (I do not know why I remember this in particular) that they had pictures of Martin Luther King at a meeting, and they would say that he was a communist and that the meeting that he was at was communist and [the people] were communist. There were TV shows like "I Led Three Lives." On TV, you would see the map and it would be turning red, and it would be the communism spreading. In school, we would have air raid drills where we would have to hide under our desks. All of this had to do with [the fear that] the communists were going to bomb us and that the communists were trying to take over the world. The communists were the Russians. I would not have been able to tell you what a communist believed except that they wanted to take over the world and they were the bad guys.