Transcript of Oral History Interview with John Pegg
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project Copyright Notice: © 2019 Minnesota Historical Society Researchers are liable for any infringement. For more information, visit www.mnhs.org/copyright. Version 3 August 20, 2018 John Pegg Narrator Kim Heikkila Interviewer May 7, 2018 John Pegg -JP Kim Heikkila -KH KH: This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Minnesota in the Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. It is Monday, May 7, 2018, and I’m here with John Pegg. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to John about his role in the anti-Vietnam War movement, including Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Veterans for Peace and CALC [Clergy and Laity Concerned (CALC)], I understand as well. So, thanks, John, for taking the time to sit down and talk to me. I appreciate it. JP: Sure. Glad to. KH: Okay, I know I just said it but if you could start by stating and spelling your name, that would be helpful. JP: Sure. I am John, J-o-h-n Clark, C-l-a-r-k, Pegg, P as in Peter, e-g-g, formerly John Thomas Pegg. KH: And when and where were you born? JP: I was born December 27, 1941, on Long Island, New York; the town of Manhasset [Manhasset, NY] is where I grew up. KH: Did you graduate high school there? JP: I did. KH: And how do you identify yourself racially and/or ethnically? JP: A mutt, American, white, predominant heritage is Scottish. My mother’s parents came over from Scotland. KH: Okay. And I know, again, I just identified some of them, but if you could identify some of the major efforts or organizations, groups, events, that you were involved in during the Vietnam War era, the marine corps, of course, being one of them that I didn’t mention. 10 JP: Right. Goodness. I had a lot of eye-openers or a number of significant ones while I was in the marines, part of it related to Vietnam but also I was stationed in the south, in North Carolina, and I had my first epiphanies about race and civil rights during those years while we were in North Carolina. My wife and I were married in 1964, and she came with me to Camp Lejeune [Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, Jacksonville, NC]—in—we got married in June so came down June ’64, and were there until I got out and ultimately were active in a church—should I go into this now or just an overview? KH: Just an overview and then we’ll go— JP: Okay. Yeah, anyway, we were active in a church and youth group leaders and related to a black church in a neighboring community and wanted to do a youth group get together. It was an eye opener. Plus the south in those years—I mean, if you traveled through the south, it was blatant segregation. On the other hand, that is part of my family history, too. My mother was from Kansas City, Missouri, with her Scottish parents and my father grew up in northern Florida and Georgia, Savannah. So he had family there and his father was in Savannah and had to travel fairly frequently, like once every couple of years, so we’d drive down there in the south. So I was very familiar with the segregation of the south growing up as well. KH: All right, and what are you doing now? Granted, there’s a lot of years in between here that that doesn’t— JP: I’m retired. I retired in 2005 and continue to be active as a volunteer in various community organizations. That’s been a large part of my life. I was fortunate that most of my work life I was in a field where I could do volunteer work or civic engagement and peace work, justice work, both as a minister in the church and then I ran some nonprofits after I left the parish. So I continue—my wife and I both continue as active volunteers around issues of justice and peace and spend our time between Minnesota and Florida. KP: All right, thank you. So those are kind of the preparatory questions. I’m going to start from the beginning as they say and just ask you to tell me a little bit about growing up in Manhasset in Long Island. JP: Well, it was a very white-privileged community. It was a suburb of New York City, commuter’s suburb, twenty-six miles on the Long Island Railroad and virtually all the fathers who lived there commuted in on the railroad, as did my father. My father was trained as an attorney and originally graduated from the University of Missouri, but after a few years of clerking for a judge, he was offered a job with Shell Oil Company [Shell Oil Company, Houston, TX] in their legal department and ended up heading the legal department and then being offered to get into the business part of it and he became the youngest vice president of Shell back in the late forties. He was named a vice president. So the community itself was for executives and professionals and white and not a lot, although there were some Jewish people, and there were some Catholics, but, you know, very WASPy [White Angle Saxon Protestant] in orientation. Good school and I did reasonably well in school. I was a second child to my parents but there are eight years between myself and my sister. 11 KH: Is it just the two of you? JP: Just the two of us and she graduated in, I don’t know, 1951, I think from high school, and she wanted to get out of the house. She—my father, downside of the executive life, was the pressure in the fact that he didn’t really want to do that. He wanted to be more of a country lawyer, so he was not a happy man. He drank and was an alcoholic and led a lifestyle of entertaining and he died when he was only forty-five years old and I was just thirteen. And my step—that comes from my saying my sister wanting to get away from the house. I had great admiration for my father and love, but also pain from that experience. KH: What did your mother do? JP: She was typical of women in those days, a housewife, homemaker, but she was a college graduate, an English major, well read, loved reading and literature. KH: So you were born in ’41 so that means you must have graduated what? Fifty-nine? JP: Fifty-nine. KH: So you were growing up, your high school, junior high years, probably in the thick of post-World War II American culture. JP: Absolutely. KH: So tell me what that meant to you. What did it mean to you as a kid to be an American? JP: Well, it was pretty simple and straightforward in those days. My father had been more Republican, but he was a Nelson Rockefeller [US Vice President Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (1908-1979)] Republican and, you know, life was fairly simple, of course, until he died and that made life difficult for us. So I wound up in my community being one of the poorest kids around and had to work after school, all the way through high school. KH: What did your mom do after he died? JP: Grieved and stayed at home and ultimately the community offered her a job as a clerk. I think it was a token kind of a thing, keeping records for the town so she did do that, yeah. So she was a single parent with me and I was a rebellious and angry kid. KH: Because of your dad’s death, do you think, or just a normal teenager? JP: In large part. I’m a very emotional person so my emotions tended to rule my life rather than my head so I did a fair amount of acting out as a teenager and I’m very fortunate that I survived and was able to get on with life in a positive and productive way. I feel like I got good values from my parents and my dad took the lead on that. I mean, around race, I can remember 12 celebrating the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and, you know, very strong on that. KH: So, yeah, you said that your family had connections, had come from the south. JP: On my father’s side, yeah. KH: And that you had traveled there so you were familiar with the segregated south but yet, your dad and your family celebrated Brown v. Board. Tell me a little bit more about your dad’s, or your dad’s family’s maybe even, position in the Jim Crow south. JP: Well, he left the Jim Crow south and didn’t want any part of it really. He was pretty clear about that. Again, we had—oh, his mother died when he was young. I think he was like eighteen. She was killed in a car crash and his father was a kind of a fortune seeker, scalawag type guy, who gambled and drank. My grandfather, his father, was an alcoholic and so what he had was— were sisters to his mother; my great-aunts lived in Savannah, who were total characters. I knew them when they were in their eighties and nineties, more as an adult.