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Biography

Mr. Beverly George Taylor was born and raised in Iowa. After graduating from Iowa State with a chemistry degree, he went to several other places for work, settling in Freemont, California as an Air Traffic Controller. Since Iowa is in his roots, most of his grandparents were born here, he returned home for his retirement. He states, “Coming back home and having lived a life away from here, some of the significant things about Cedar Rapids and about Iowa have become quite apparent. This is a good place to live; I’m proud I came from here.”

Transcript

Date of Interview: July 9, 2009

Darious Pledge: Hi. My name is Darious. You spell that D-a-r-i-o-u-s, P-l-e-d-g-e-e. Today I’m with Bev

Bev George Taylor: My name is Bev George Taylor.

Darious: Today is July 9th, 2009 and we are going to get started here. OK, where were you born?

Bev George Taylor: Ok. I was born here in Cedar Rapids, in Mercy Hospital. And incidentally my family, also have roots here in Cedar Rapids and in Buxton, Iowa. My grandfather, George Taylor, was born in Buxton...well actually Muchakinock which preceded Buxton in 1883. And my father was born in Buxton in 1910. And, in addition to that, my mother’s side, her maiden name was Miller and her parents also....my grandmother, my mother’s mother was born in Muchakinock. And my mother’s father was born in Washington D.C., but he was also recruited into the Buxton mines, in the late 1800’s. So, basically almost my entire family root system does originate here in Iowa, but I was born here in Cedar Rapids.

Darious: Where did you go to school?

Bev George Taylor: I went to grade school; I went to Harrison school in the Time Check area. And I graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1956; it was a high school then. And then I went from Roosevelt High School to the State University of Iowa. I took up chemistry and I was there for four years. From there I got into the work world. My first job was at Collins Radio, which is now Rockwell. And I was fortunate enough to get hired in a semi-professional position as a chemist in the chem-lab at Rockwell Collins. I stayed there for several years and then I left Cedar Rapids and went to Chicago. I worked in Chicago at an electroplating company for a year. And from there I went to Minnesota to St. Paul and I worked at the 3M Company for a year. From there I went to California, to El Segundo, California in the Los Angeles area and I worked for the Aero-Space Corporation. I was there for five years and after five years there, I took the federal exam for Air Traffic Controllers. I was an Air Traffic Controller in Oakland Center, in Fremont, California which is in the Bay Area. And I stayed there from 1970 until 2000 when I retired. So I spent 30 years as an air traffic controller.

Darious: What did you do for entertainment in your younger days?

Bev George Taylor: Pretty much the same thing as everyone does today. When I was coming up, the Jane Boyd Community House was one of the centers of...sources of our entertainment. Pretty much the same as it is today. The YMCA. I started out as a youngster in the YMCA, that’s where I learned how to swim. The city recreational department had a lot of programs in the summer. I remember there were playgrounds scattered all throughout the city of Cedar Rapids that provided our entertainment for the summers. Each playground had a baseball team. Then they had an inner league between all of the playgrounds within the city. That provided a source of recreation for all of the kids within the city. I frankly don’t know what’s happened to that program. It seemingly was one that worked when I was coming up, because it provided the kids in all the neighborhoods; there was a playground at Harrison. Basically there was a playground at almost every school. And the kids in that particular neighborhood would go that playground throughout the day. There were activities that they would have for you throughout the day, plus the softball teams that each playground had. So that was pretty much the source of my rec...and then during the school year, of course Jane Boyd Community House was quite a center.

Darious: How has the Civil Rights Movement affected you?

Bev George Taylor: Coming up in my era, the Civil Rights Movement was definitely important. If I go back to my grade school years, I was fortunate, I guess you can say in as much as that, as far as segregation and integration is concerned, Cedar Rapids was one of the areas in the United States that simply did not practice institutionalized segregation. The school system as far as students were concerned was totally integrated. When I went to Harrison of course there were other blacks within the school, but in my class, I was the only black kid in my class from Harrison all the way through Roosevelt. I had one incident in Roosevelt where I sat in class with another black person in the 11th grade. But throughout my entire lower education, elementary school and high school, I can recall being the only black kid in my class. In as much as that was the case, I don’t really recall much in the way of any negative racial overtones. Racism at that time was an institutionalized thing. My experience was, was that the kids that I grew up with and their families didn’t really express any racial animosity, but there were institutions that ... how can I say? There were institutions in the society in Cedar Rapids and in Iowa that did practice discriminatory actions. One I can remember was that when I came up there were no black teachers. I had an uncle who graduated from Coe College with honors, who had a real desire to stay within the Cedar Rapids Public School System, and they simply, at that time in the late, in the ’50s were not hiring black teachers. So we didn’t have black teachers. So that to me indicated that somewhere, in another level of our society, there was some discrimination. But as a child it wasn’t evident.

Second Video Begins

Bev George Taylor: One of the other things that I really remember is the black ball players that play; like the kernels team they have now? They’ve always had that professional team here. In the ’50s I was like in junior high school and my grandmother had a relatively large house, at least at that time I thought it was large. (When I look at it now and it seems like somebody shrunk the place.) But at any rate, to make a long story short, the black and the Hispanic ball players that played for the professional baseball team that’s synonymous with the Kernels now; it’s the same organization. They could not stay in the hotels downtown, so they stayed with my grandmother. And of course the ballplayers, the people who went to the ballpark; they all loved these black and Hispanic guys who came here to play, but for whatever reason and I still wonder what it was all about, as to why and who was it that was saying that they couldn’t stay in the hotels down town. So they would stay with my grandmother. And I can remember some of the entertainers of the day, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan, Katherine Dunham, those entertainers would come here and play like in the Paramount and play in entertainment venues in town, but they couldn’t stay in the hotels. So they stayed at my grandmother’s house. And I remember one guy in particular that ended up playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers and stayed in the major league for years, Johnny Roseboro. He stayed with my grandmother. When I look back at that now, I wonder at what level was this type of segregation being applied in the city and at the same time we’re going through a school system that was close to being totally without any bias. It’s amazing to me that those things occurred. It was the Supreme Court decisions that were made in the ’60s,’63, ’64 that changed all this. And I think from my point of view what happened, was that whoever it was at these higher levels that were making these decisions about discrimination going on in a state like Iowa, who really lawfully had laws against it could have resided in the Chamber of Commerce or higher levels like that where people were saying, we don’t want this to happen and once the federal laws were passed, then they had to step aside. Another side was real estate. Blacks have lived just about in every quadrant of Cedar Rapids as far as I remember. But, I do remember my dad wanted to buy a home from our old neighborhood. And the person that was wanting to sell him his home, was a white contemporary friend of his. As they proceeded in trying to make this happen, they were refuted at some other level. And I can’t remember what my dad said about it, but as I look back at it, the realtor board and the Chamber of Commerce, I think, were responsible for this institutionalized racism. That was erased by the Supreme Court decisions. So they were very important. Of course, you guys probably know about the Supreme Court decision in reference to school integration. That completely changed things. I remember once going to vacation in the south. I had an aunt that lived in Kentucky, in Harlan, Kentucky. This was 1954 and I went down there to spend the summer. Like I say, all through my life, I’ve always sat in class with white kids and they were just beginning to have to go through integration. There was a black school that was about a block from where my aunt lived. And I can remember, down there in Kentucky, sitting talking with the kids that lived there and they were quite curious as to how was it, to actually go to school in an integrated situation. I can remember sitting and telling that we were already there. That illustrated for me the differences in different parts of the country. They were just beginning to have to integrate their schools and they were quite concerned. And here all my life here in Iowa, we had always had that advantage.

Darious: So in your childhood from ’till now, have you ever had, like any, like have you ever been able to go in any restaurants without telling them you couldn’t eat there or anything?

Bev George Taylor: You know, that’s a good question. Growing up here, I do not really remember any instances of being refused entry anywhere. When I say that the ball players couldn’t stay in the hotels, I knew adults who worked in those hotels. They worked in the hotels as service employees. So there were blacks, adults, who worked in these hotels, but as a child I had no reason to ever want to go rent a room. So I really, I guess it was childhood innocence, because I didn’t realize, that because they worked there that I wasn’t welcome there. So I never really was actually refused any service at any point. Now I do remember very distinctly, there was an all Iowa Fair that was held at Hawkeye Downs each year. It was second to the state fair in how large it was. I had this friend of mine, white guy I grew up with, buddy of mine all my life. We went out to the fair and they had these set-ups of course and the fair, the people who ran the carnivals and stuff, you know the carnies, all came from someplace else. We went to do something and one of the carnies said to my friend, “This is not for the blacks. This is not.” And he didn’t use the word black, he used the “N” word. I remember my friend and I were just kind of like, [makes head gesture of being astonished] and we just walked away. Now that was one thing, but to me at that time, I looked at that as that this was just some carnie from down south somewhere that didn’t know any better. I think it bothered me more as I thought about it as an adult, than it did at the time that it happened. Now one thing I do remember is I played a trumpet from 4th grade on. I played in the marching band and the high school orchestra. I had a lot of friends that belonged to the Moose, I believe. It was either the Moose of the Elks, Drum and Bugle Corp, which was a big thing and for the most part it was all white. So as a junior in high school, because I knew all these guys, they all said, “Bev, come and join the drum and bugle corp.” They were all excited and I remember going down to the YMCA for a meeting. And this was to, you know for me to initially join. One of the adults came up to me and he said, “I want to talk to you.” And he explained to me that, “Someone above said that this can’t happen.” Now I recall that and I never found out where it transpired from. But it was again indicative of, all of the people within the group, all the guys that were members, all were all friends of mine. But someone above said that they didn’t want that to happen. Basically what I’m saying is that they didn’t want me as a black to join the drum and bugle corp. That’s the other instance of refusal because of race.

Third video begins

Darious: When was the first time that you experienced segregation?

Bev George Taylor: The first time that I can ever remember being told that I could not come into the place, happened to me in 1961 in Chicago. Now this is just personally. Chicago at that time, of course, as it does now, has a large black population. Chicago basically, even to this day, is probably the most racially segregated city in the country. In the 196, in the ’60s, blacks had their own hotels, they had their own restaurants. The south side of Chicago was a Mecca. It was a wonderful place to live and that was my first place of choice to move to when I left Cedar Rapids. Incidentally, it was a Sunday afternoon; it was down on Halstead Street and Roosevelt Road. Well, once you leave the South Side of Chicago, and there was just a railroad track that divided this. It was on 47th Street and after I crossed the railroad tracks and I was going to catch the bus down Western, anyway down this avenue, that area became all white. As I was waiting on the corner for the bus, well the bus wasn’t going to come for another twenty minutes or so and there was a grocery store-restaurant kind of place on the corner and so I wanted some pop. So I walked in there and when I walked in that door the guy says, “You can’t come in here.” And that was my first, and of course this was in the ’60s prior to the federal laws that changed all of that. That’s not to say that Iowa was totally innocent of overt segregation, because I can remember stories of the generations in front of me, where there were instances of overt segregation, here in Cedar Rapids in reference to the swimming pool at Ellis Park and of course in real estate matters. My point is, is that Iowa was a little ahead of itself in recognizing and, not so much recognizing, but not being overt in their segregation policies. I think that historically, Iowa was one of the first places that removed institutionalized segregation from the school system. I think they did that in the 1800’s in fact, where they said that all children should receive an equal education. So in some instances Iowa was years ahead of the rest of the country. The other thing that I think the importance of it is that we need to document people’s feelings of the past. Our root system is one of the things that I’ve found to be important. I grew up, lived here, just through my college years and I left. I lived in a big city in Northern California and like all people in Cedar Rapids, you have this tendency to believe that, we’re missing out on things because this is not the big city, not the west coast, or the east coast, but what I can say is that I have had that experience, I have lived there. And coming back home and having lived a life away from here, some of the significant things about Cedar Rapids and about Iowa have become quite apparent. This is a good place to live; I’m proud I came from here. My Iowa background, when I moved to California presented itself time and time again. People would say to me....that...I‘ll say this. I remember one time I went to work at the car wash. This was before, when I first got to California, before I got the job at the Aerospace Corporation there was a period of time I wasn’t working and I was working at the car wash. And the positions at the car wash; the guy who puts the mats and stuff in after the car’s done washed and so on, just before the driver gets into the car, he’s the one that always gets the tips, right? So this guy that was the manager of the car wash said, “Taylor, I want you to work in that position, because you are the only one who knows how to talk to people.” And that became quite evident to me as the root, the sys, the schooling that I got in the Cedar Rapids school system made me even express myself differently, than some of the school systems that you find in these big cities. We speak the English language correctly. These are things that you guys will find when you move to other places. That you simply speak differently than some of these kids that come out of school systems in larger cities. And it will be to your benefit. I found that to be true.”

Darious: What will be the best ending to this story that you shared with us today?

Bev George Taylor: I think just the realization that the opportunities that young people have here in Cedar Rapids that they have in the state of Iowa, with all the drawbacks, with all of the sometimes roadblocks that seem to confront you, there are statistics that show that there’s an inordinate amount of black men that are in Anamosa and in Ft. Madison [prisons]. In spite of all these things, that if you just, just stick to the rules and get 50% of the educational opportunities that are offered here, that you’ll find that your standing in the world wide community will be a lot higher than what you may think now, that there’s a whole lot of things that are opportunities that you have here in Iowa, in Cedar Rapids that you will not find in some of the faster paced places in the country.

Darious: We appreciate having you here. It was a pleasure meeting you, talking to you.

Bev George Taylor: OK. Thank you.