By Raul Hernandez
When I first heard the story about the four young men, I had a hard time wrapping my head around it.
I was a 6th grader in Ms. Malecki’s class in Baumholder, Germany, and the story was mind boggling.
Why were certain people being denied the right to sit at a lunch counter in the United States of America?
It didn’t make sense.
Ms. Malecki told us the story during a history lesson:
Four black college students sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina on Feb. 1, 1960. As the story goes, they politely asked for service. The were refused and ignored. They were asked to leave. But stayed seated. The incident triggered a peaceful-sit-down
I later learned that some black people were actually beaten for sitting at segregated lunch counters. I also read about Rosa Parks and Jim Crow Laws.
Why were people so hateful?
Our family lived in El Paso, and there weren’t too many black residents in the city. But we weren’t raised to believe that we were better than others.
Fast-forward many decades later, no doubt, the country has made a lot of progress in the civil rights arena. Segregated lunch counters, drinking fountains and Jim Crow laws are things of the past.
But there is still a long way to go as indicated by a report last week from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which states that there has been an increase in hate and extremist groups in America.
“While the number of extremist groups grew in 2015 after several years of declines, the real story was the deadly violence committed by extremists in city after city,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Povery Law Center and editor of the Intelligence Report. “Whether it was Charleston, San Bernardino or Colorado Springs, 2015 was clearly a year of deadly action for extremists.”
Hate groups increased from 784 groups in 2014 to 892 last year. Antigovernment “Patriot” groups grew from 874 in 2014 to 998, the report states.
The hatred and racism being passed off as politics is unbelievable.
The search for scapegoats to blame for America’s woes whether it is Muslims or Mexicans has been legitimized at the expense of the weakest among us.
Mr. Hernandez’s Neighborhood
I lived a sweet life as a boy in Baumholder, Germany. My father was stationed at the U.S. Army base there.
My multi-colored neighborhood was a huge military family housing complex called Faulenberg.
There was a forest nearby that went on for miles where we’d play, have pine-cone fights and explore the woods. I owned a sled that was put to good use in a place where the hills were long and plentiful and began at the edge of the apartment complex.
The kids, many of them playmates and friends, came in all sizes, shapes and colors. We were a rough and rambunctious lot.
My first best friend was a tall, black kid named Gregory Gray. A streetwise 12-year-old boy who taught me the fine points of hustling to earn money. We washed a lot of soldiers’ and dependents’ cars that were parked at the 60 or so apartment buildings.
Each building housed 18 family units.
There were no hoses to use to wash the cars so we had buckets. We would go into the buildings’ laundry rooms and down in the basement to fill the buckets with water.
It was hard work but we would knock on doors and ask people if they wanted their cars washed. There was always a lot of dirty cars, especially during the summer.
He also kept a can of car polish with him so that after we finished washing the car he and I would “touch-up” the car with polish on the hood and some on the side. That way when the owner would look at it, usually from the balcony, the car sparkled.
This would sometimes get us a fat tip along with the $1.25 we charged.
In the winter with all the snow, we’d go our separate ways and knock on apartment doors and asked people if they wanted us to throw out their trash for a quarter. We would take the trash downstairs and walk to the end of the building to dump it into garbage cans.
Some of our best customers were wives of soldiers who were on TDY (temporary duty) and away from home.
Gregory and I earned a lot of money. Money to burn on candy, movie tickets, records, baseball gloves or comic books.
Sometimes kids would take a stack of comic books and knock on doors to trade comics with other kids. I loved to sit in my room and read a fresh batch of comics.
Gregory’s Mom
Gregory was always out in the streets or somewhere in the woods.
His mother spent a lot of time at the hospital. His father who was also in the army was never home. He loved to party with the ladies and drink. Gregory had several siblings including his crazy, younger brother Daryl who thought it was funny to light a firecracker and toss it into my winter coat pocket while I had it on.
The coat smelled like gunpowder after that. I only had to say, “Daryl did it” and explanation enough.
Baseball Season
During baseball season, car washing took a backseat.
Gregory and I were on the same Little League Baseball team.
I remember to this day, the kids on my team: The three blacks kids on the team were Gregory, Rudy Johnson and John Carter; the white boys, Rocky Newman, our pitcher, and Jerry McBride and Kenny Stover. We also had a German kid named Danny Cates whose family had enrolled him into our military school so he could learn English. Danny played third base. The other two starters and hispanics, Joey Lopez, and moi, playing shortstop.
We won the Baumholder Little League championship.
I recall that before the championship game, the commander of the 27th artillery unit that sponsored our team got dozens of his soldiers to march into the field just before the game started to cheer for us.
It was fantastic to hear the roar when we scored.
The Saturday Matinee
My girlfriend was a lanky, white girl who was taller than me. Teresa Cameron, she was very bright and a bookworm. She was the first girl I ever kissed, the girl I loved to go with to the Saturday double feature matinee where I tried to muster the courage to hold her hand.
Every kid on the base, it seemed, showed up at the Saturday matinee while the parents took a break. Sometimes, the theater looked like a prison riot with hundreds of screaming kids, running wild, throwing popcorn and candy at each other.
When it reached insane-asylum heights, the theater manager would walk up and stand in front of the theater and scan the faces with a menacing look. This guy had the ultimate power. He could throw any kid out of the place.
So everybody froze. The roar of shhhhhhh, some kids ran back to their seats and the place was peppered with “shut up” in low voices.
Then, stone-cold silence.
Nobody wanted to get tossed out. The manager said nothing and stood there for a few seconds. Once in a while, he clicked his finger, point to a kid and sternly say, “hush” or “sit down.”
After he left, we sat quietly. We knew that the movie was about to start. As soon as the cartoon came on, there was cheering and clapping.
The New Girl in Town
Teresa broke my heart one day. She heard that I was too friendly with a California hottie Vivian Olay, a Latina, who had just moved into the neighborhood.
Teresa’s friend Carol Cadema, whose parents were Portugese American, gave me back the ring I bought Teresa for a buck.
Weeks later, Teresa got a new boyfriend, John Collazo, a Puerto Rican boy who loved to showoff and brag a lot.
Collazo loved to make me jealous. He told me that Teresa and him went down to the laundry room in the basement, were “making out” and swore that he had kissed her on the lips “22 times.”
I was pissed. I never asked her about it. But I found out that it wasn’t true. Teresa wasn’t allowed to kiss boys on the lips.
But then, again, I already knew that.
Teresa had a brother named “Mikey” who was six-years old and had a bad habit of sucking his thumb. Her father was a master-sergeant and a paratrooper, and her mother was a sweet, country woman.
Her parents who were from South Carolina never said a word about their daughter’s boyfriends.
Teresa Dumped Collazo.
When Teresa finally came to her senses and dumped Collazo, we were soon boyfriend and girlfriend again.
One day, Collazo was across the street with playing tackle on a large patch of grass with a large group of boys.
Teresa and I were sitting on the apartment steps trying to ignore Collazo’s hotdog moves and big mouth. I knew he was trying to impress her.
I’d rather sit on the steps with Teresa and talk to her about school or music than go play another game of tackle football. There would be plenty of other games. Besides, Collazo and I would probably end up in another fistfight during the game.
That evening, Teresa’s father showed up from work and saw the two of us on the steps.
We greeted him. As he made his way up the stairs, he stopped to watch the tackle game, and saw Collazo running with the football and showboating and faking out defense players as he ran for a touchdown.
“Go Collazo! Go!” Mr. Cameron said and grinned.
Teresa turned red and said, “Daddy, stop it!”
She looked at me after he left and said, “Sorry. He’s just trying to be funny.”
I pretended to shrugged it off: “That’s okay. He probably likes Collazo.”
“No, he thinks you are a nice boy.”
Damn.
I was floating on a cloud.
Snowball Fights
In Baumholder after the snow fell, hundreds of kids would show up for a snowball fight on this humongous field between the upper and lower apartment buildings.
It was serious .
The kids from the 25 or so apartment buildings up on the hill were called the “Uppers,” and those living on the apartments below the hill were the “Lowers.”
“Uppers go to heaven. Lowers go to hell,” the Upper kids would shout.
That would get our blood boiling, and soon the field looked like two Civil War battlefield with hundreds of snow balls flying.
The rule were simple: You could capture a kid. Getting captured meant being put up against the wall where there was no way to escape. There, the prisoner could be used for target practice until he was let go. Or the kid would get snow shoved down his clothes or dragged across the field until the screams brought reinforcements or somebody’s mother screaming from a window or balcony to let the kid go.
My Family’s Soldier Friends
In Germany, my father often brought young G.I.s to our apartment on weekends, mostly Hispanics. My mother would feed them, and it would be like a family party with Mexican music. Most were just homesick and enjoyed talking about their families and lives back home.
One evening, my dad invited a black soldier whose last name was Fincher, he was massive.
It seemed like Fincher had to duck down to get through our doorway. I remember he was friendly and polite and had giant fists.
Another time, my dad brought home a white guy who they called “Smitty.” He loved pulling pranks on people. He was from the south and his dream was to fix old cars.
Smitty kept coming back, and one day, he brought his Johnny Cash albums to our apartment, and I soon I learned to love Johnny Cash’s music.
I am still a Johnny Cash fan.
The Hate Report
If more kids would have grown up in neighborhoods like the one in Baumholder, Germany, there would be less hatred.
In the 5th grade, it was so hard to understand how some people could be so cruel and hateful to humiliate and hurt these young men simply because they wanted to sit down and order a lousy cup of coffee at a lunch counter like everybody else.
Many decades later, I still can’t wrap my head around the politics of hatred and the evil of racism that continues to linger and put a dark stain on the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free.