[Claudis:] Okay, I never ate at the back door.
I didn't know. Matter of fact,
I didn't even know I was poor
because I had everything I needed, most of the stuff I wanted.
We'd go to department stores and you knew that you couldn't use the restrooms.
You'd have to wait till you got somewhere where you could,
or you got home.
You knew where you could eat, where they would serve you.
I wasn't allowed to experience that.
They refused to
go in the back door support a business that didn't support us.
I was raised like that.
But it was everywhere.
You sit in the back of the bus,
no matter if there were seats up front,
you stood if there was no seats in the back.
The schools were segregated.
There was a Saint Peter Claver Academy,
Douglas [inaudible] on the west side, Grant
Booker T over here on the east side. Those are schools,
in the [inaudible] high school,
that's where all the black folks graduated from if they've graduated school.
And it was like a big deal, man. You graduated,
that was a big deal,
and when they destroyed that they destroyed a lot of heritage in San Antonio's
black community. But
Black folks were educated man.
They believed in education. My mom was a guard in college
[inaudible] she was a guard in basketball man. She played basketball in college.
My Dad went to college. My
dad was a great athlete.
One time I was racing in the street with some friends and he came out and he
beat me. I said, "Do that again", a foot race.
He'd beat me even farther the second time. And he was laughing.
I would in the house, man. I just...
and years later when I had my restaurant,
one of his friends came in and we were talking about that.
He gave me this look like stupid. Didn't you know? I go, "No. What?" He says,
"Your daddy ran a nine 500." I'm going,
"What is this?" "Your daddy ran a nine "500." I said
"In 1941? '42? He right nine..., Jesse "Owens,
one of the Olympics ran a nine, 500." He said, "Well,
your daddy ran a nine 500... and you thought you could beat him[laughs].
But my dad never told me any of that.
He just did what he did.
My mom,
she taught me my basketball shot.
One time she took my basketball cause she gave me a basketball and I went to the
playground and they wouldn't pick me.
So I took my basketball and came home and she asked me why. I said,
"Because they wouldn't pick me." She took "me back to the playground and gave
them my basketball and then she said, "If you want to play the game,
learn it." And she taught me my shot man.
No, but she can, she could.
She was a [inaudible] fan till the day she died, man. Yeah,
she [inaudible] from the first day that got here, man until she died.
But I didn't play basketball. I played football. [Steve:] In high school?
[Claudis:] Yeah.
[Steve:] Well, let's talk about school. Where did you go to elementary school?
[Claudis:] Oh, elementary school... I went... first of all, I started...
Holy Redeemer, going to kindergarten.
And then in about the third or fourth grade,
I went to Saint Peter Claver,
which was a parochial school
for Black kids. And
then I went to Poe, going into the public school system.
Then I went to Brackenridge High School.
[Steve:] Okay. Saint Peter,
what was a school like for you there.
[Claudis:] It was all black. It was great. It was good. It was all black
and they had veterans that were coming back from the war and they were going to
school and stuff. But Saint Peter was, it was... all
I knew it was good. And we could all read and write. Even
the dumbest kind of class could read and write[laughs]. [Steve:] And
your teachers? Were they... [Claudis:] They were nuns.
There were nuns and they were white nuns.
At [inaudible] there were African American nuns, out of New Orleans,
all of them had French accents.
The nuns at St Peter were white.
And then I went to Edgar Allan Poe,
which was a integrated school, middle school.
Then I went to George W Brackenridge. From there... at that time,
you could go to any school you wanted to inside of the school district,
and I chose Brackenridge cause I was having fun.
I met some people that had enjoyed it, so I went.
[Steve:] What was it like to be an African American in public school?
Did the teachers treat you differently? [Claudis:] Sure they did.
[Steve:] Can you describe that for me?
[Claudis:] You never got the benefit of a doubt[laughs].
If somebody did something man, it was either you or you knew who did
it. But yeah,
they didn't give you the same encouragement and nurturing.
I remember this one
guy, they kept encouraging him to do better in math than me.
This guy was dumb as a rock man, and...this is hard,
but he was a good kid,
and they were trying to push all these academic programs on him to get a higher
education. But one of the kids that wanted to become a lawyer,
they put him in shop[laughs]. They wouldn't listen...
But none of your people are lawyers. So they put him and his sister
into home ec and shop. [Steve:] He's African American? [Claudis:] Yeah.
Last time I talked to him, he was a judge in DC.
So when they say it took about five minutes to get from his house,
and his wife was a judge also,
he was living in DC.
But he went on and became a lawyer, did what he wanted to do. And they did that.
I know one of the guys,
they wouldn't let him take the college prep
classes. So his girlfriend at the time was friends
with another kid that they were prepping and she [inaudible],
so he took them and he ended up going to Oklahoma state.
And he retired out of the Air Force as a Colonel.. Lieutenant Colonel.
It don't make a difference to me, it was more
that I got [laughs]. But there were ways you got around those things,
and you didn't see it at first, but then you realize,
oh yeah. Oh yeah.
But I was a football player, so I was away from a lot of that stuff.
But then you get... you saw it in different ways. When we played football,
we got death threats.
My senior year,
we won the playoffs with state championship and we were 1640 school,
which was the big boys in Texas,
and I think everywhere we went we got death threats. One time,
have a patrol stopped us and told us to turn around,
they were going to blow the school bus up and we had to go back and stuff.
The coach left and we went on man. We had a white
coach,
and our team was all African Americans and Mexican Americans.
And we never thought about what it must've been like for him to coach group of
kids that couldn't eat half the places we went.
And I'm sure that has to do with his career because he never went any further
than high school. I think he taught overseas somewhere for a while,
but under that, [inaudible] program he never went anywhere in Texas man.
But we kicked all that butt that year. We won a state championship.
[Steve:] Really? [Claudis:] Yeah, we won it. [Steve:] What was that like?
[Claudis:] That was good. [laughs] That was good.
We had guys on that team and that were just unreal.
A lot of them went on to play professional football,
become school administrators,
just do all kinds of crazy stuff and they just wonderful guys,
man. We still meet every Wednesday, last Wednesday of the month we meet,
we won't this month because we buried one of our fellow eagles.
So we'll do that instead of going to that. But yeah,
we still do. And that was really good. [Steve:] What position did you play?
[Claudis:] I was the long snapper in the office of tackle, and...
see that's kind of funny, cause we did everything.
Everybody played everything in those days. You played both ways.
There was some of our guys that never came off the field,
they just kept playing, kept playing, kept playing. It
was a wonderful team with some great,
great talent that overcame a lot of adversity?
The only way that didn't matter that we were black,
was some of the guys told me later how much money they made our first bid,
and they took Houston to the bank laughs].
You can only realize how much money we won off those guys,
they didn't know you guys and then we took them.
Every test we got,
and they did use big time guys with Galman and they...
I just realize that... it was the dog came back here,
but it
was what it was, and athletics has a lot to do with it.
But
I didn't go to school on an athletic scholarship.
I went to the military and then... [Steve:] What branch? [Claudis:]
Army.
[Steve:] What year did you graduate high school?
[Claudis:] '63.
crosstalk] When was it? Yeah it was '63.
[Steve:] And you went straight into the army? [Claudis:] No.
I fooled around for awhile [chuckles]. I worked on the railroad,
[inaudible] age [inaudible] graduate. I was a 16 year old senior,
so I played my last high school football game when I was 16 and I was 17 when I
graduated.
And all my friends were getting jobs...
some of these guys... on Southern Pacific Railroad laying rails in West Texas.
So I lied, and put my age,
told him I was 18 and went and that was out there all summer before they found
out and sent me home on the escort
laughs]. [Steve:] What was that experience like in West Texas?
[Claudis:] We went to this one town, man.
It was weird.
It was strange, but it was good because
we were being exposed to stuff that was over,
and
they always took our money when we went in town just to buy something,
they always took our money, but you couldn't linger long brother
laughs]. But it was good on pay day and you got paid.
Nigga extended you all kinds of credit and stuff, but it was good.
I met a lot of good people and I learned a lot of things out there.
A lot of the guys, one of the guys,
was going into the Kansas City Chiefs and he was just out there because his
cousin was out there. In those days you reported,
and then you got in shape and you made the team,
but now you stay in shape year round and in contact with the team.
But in those days they didn't. And he ended up playing for Kansas
City.
But San Antonio as a whole has more gifted athletes I think in any city in the
country,
we have more Superbowl rings from this area than any city in the nation.
We have some of the fastest athletes.
I remember one time at the Texas relays,
two teams from San Antonio,
their times were faster than the college times.
They had to go on to the University times before they got somebody faster than
them, incredibly fast kids man. As matter of fact,
the pastor of this church, his son was on one of those relay teams.
Incredibly fast kid.
So Joe Rector was one of those kids.
He was an outstanding athlete.
There are so many others that played for Kansas City.
They played for Cincinnati Bengals. They played for the Rams.
These kids were all over the place, playing football.
And that was before
things that opened up as much as it.
Some of the colleges you still couldn't go to.
They wrote a book about two of the kids. One of the kids [inaudible].
They went from here to University of Houston and it was segregated and they had
a big deal.
"What are they going to with this Black "kid playing football?" They worked it
out and it worked good.
And I was going to go to University of Houston and I already talked to Bill
Yeoman,
who was the coach when I was getting out of the army that I was going to go down
and talk to him. I said, not this year, but next year, we'll do that. He says,
"Come by and talk to me when you get out." "So I drove down. I was discharged.