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Biography

Thomas Levi has faced a variety of storms. His father died when Thomas was nine. He faced job discrimination and Jim Crow regulations in the South. Then, as a member of the World Famous Hurricane Hunters he sought storms and ways to defeat them. Now, through his involvement with the African American Museum he seeks to instill pride in his culture and heritage in future generations facing the storms of discrimination and discouragement.

Transcript

Date of Interview: July 15, 2009

Darious Pledge: Hi, my name is Darious Pledge. You spell that D-A-R-I-O-U-S P-L-E-D-G-E. And today we’re with Thomas Levi. We’re going to ask you, could you spell that for us?

Thomas Levi: Yes, Thomas, T-H-O-M-A-S Levi L-E-V-I.

Darious: Okay, and today is July 15, 2009. We’re going to go ahead and get started. Where were you born?

Thomas Levi: In Detroit, Michigan

Darious: What town is home now?

Thomas Levi: Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Darious: How long have you lived here?

Thomas Levi: Since 19, November of 1978

Darious: What brought you here?

Thomas Levi: A job with Rockwell Collins

Darious: How long have you worked there?

Thomas Levi: I worked there for about ten years before I had a, before I experienced a heart attack and was no longer able to work.

Darious: Did you have any other jobs before you moved here or anything?

Thomas Levi: Well, I was in the Navy for twenty years and six months, eleven days. That was basically the only job; before that I was a paperboy. I had a couple of, two, paper routes that I used to help my mom with.

Darious: Where did you go to school?

Thomas Levi: In Detroit, Michigan, at, my grade school was Sherrill. My high school was Chadsey High School.

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

Thomas Levi: In my youth, for entertainment, we played basketball, baseball, football with the guys in the neighborhood, things of that nature. That was about it; we didn’t have too much television at that time. I’m not too old, but I’m not too young, either.

Darious: Did you ever have any problems with segregation?

Thomas Levi: Not too much, until I entered the service and then I experienced it for the first time. I had run across it while I was coming up but my high school that I went to was pretty much integrated and so there was no problem there. But, when I joined the Navy, that’s when I really ran into it. It hit me square in the face really; so I realized from that point on that I was going to have issues and problems.

Darious: What was your part in the Navy?

Thomas Levi: Well, I was a aviation electronics technician. I went to a Class A and a Class B school for those and several Class C schools while I was in the service and all to enhance my understanding of equipment and things of that nature, and electronics.

Darious: Was there any certain reason you chose to get involved?

Thomas Levi: As far as in the Navy? The main reason was the fact my father died when I was nine years old. My mother had to raise four kids by herself and she had never been employed in her life prior to that. My father was like thirty-six years old when he died. It created quite a problem. That’s why I ended up working two paper routes and everything to help support my mom raise all of us and when I got through high school I was a draftsman. I thought I was a pretty good draftsman, but that’s another time, excuse me, that’s another time when I did run into segregation, segregation, really, was when I tried to get a job in Detroit, Michigan in, this was in 1958 and was unable to. My drafting teacher, he was the one who tutored me more or less all through high school. He took me under his wing so to speak in the ninth grade and he was like a counselor to me, let me know what courses I needed to take to be a good draftsman and things of that nature, and things such as machine shop and the type of math that I needed to take and things like that. I followed his direction and he knew what caliber of draftsman I was. It was the first time I ever seen a grown man cry because he was truly shaken by the fact that nobody would hire me because he knew my capabilities and abilities, so he found it earthshaking to him that nobody would hire me and they hired other people who were less qualified than myself. He knew directly what it was about and that’s when I first encountered that also.

Darious: How has the Civil Rights Movement affected you?

Thomas Levi: Well, being in the service it kind of somewhat affected me but I’ve seen, when I got some shocks, cultural shocks, while I was in the service. But going back to the previous question, the reason I left home, like I say, was to help my mom. I joined the Navy because I couldn’t find a job and couldn’t get a job so I joined the Navy when, it was like two weeks before my eighteenth birthday. What I did was, I made an allotment out to my mom so she got a check every month. Then I tried to, I went into a process of trying to get her as, to become my dependent and which I did, but it took about a year and a half for that to happen because of a lot of paperwork that you have to go through in the service. But I was able to get that accomplished. She became my dependent; so the government then kicked in a portion of the allotment so she that was getting more money then because of her being my dependent. But, now, can you rephrase that last question you just asked?


Darious: Oh, I said, how has the Civil Rights Movement affected you?

Thomas Levi: Well, like I say, it had affected me in several ways. One time I can remember when in 19, I think it was 65, going into, I rode a bus into, and then I was in uniform, military uniform, Navy uniform, rode a bus into Jacksonville, Florida and I got the shock. The shock came when I walked into the bus station and they had a sign that said whites and colored and the bathrooms were set up that way or whatever. I felt very hurt by that because here I am willing to give up my life for my country, a country that would not allow me to sit any place I wanted to sit down or things of that nature. So, it did affect me and I did understand the restraints and the things that affected us at that time, at that point in time. It was quite a shock.

Darious: Have you been involved in any Civil Rights Organizations?

Thomas Levi: Well, I’m a member of the NAACP, and have been for years. But active, well I guess you can say that’s somewhat active, but it’s not active as what most people would consider being active. But I support our movement as a people to have a better quality of life in our country and be respected in our country.

Darious: What was one of your biggest accomplishments?

Thomas Levi: Hard to say. The biggest one really, was, it came about when I was on the board for this museum here and we had, we struggled for basically ten years to get people to believe in what we were doing and the cause we were trying to affect because we saw that our young people, our young men, boys and girls both, were suffering from low self-esteem and things of that nature. And then also the fact that white students in school were not understanding and had no curriculum to better understand our cultural differences. So we wanted to be able to hopefully, instill in our, a curriculum in our public schools in Iowa the fact of our black heritage and things of that nature. So, these were some of the things that motivated us to do what we did.

Darious: What role were you in the African American Museum? What were you trying to do for it?

Thomas Levi: Well, again, we were just trying to basically, improve the lives and to allow our youth to really see the fact that we do have a rich culture and a rich heritage. And to, and that hopefully, we hoped that, them discovering that, that they would realize they don’t have to have that, they don’t have to be despondent or displeased with themselves and they would have more respect and more pride in themselves and want to do better and want to do the best that they could. So, hopefully, we want to instill this, some pride in them. We also wanted to introduce to the white population, the white youth, the fact, some of the cultural distinctions of our heritage and our culture, so that they would understand who we are and what we are about. And we’re not, basically, we’re not hateful or despiteful or whatever. However, they’ve been told, ’cause I think some of them have been told various things about us as a people, you know what I mean, and we, there are a lot of myths so to speak, revolving around us as a people, but we hoped to dispel all of that and wanted to dispel all of that in their lives so they wouldn’t, as they were coming up, they would learn to respect us as a people and respect our heritage and our culture.

Darious: What was your happiest and saddest memory?

Thomas Levi: My saddest memory was when my father died. Like I said, again, I was nine years old and he was only thirty-six years old when he died of a heart attack. So it really hurt me because I felt he was, it deprived, I felt it deprived me of a father that I wanted to really get to know and enjoy, also the fact that it created a void in my life because I believe every young man should have a male to look up to, to emulate, to be able to emulate potentially that male and that image that they see before them. And so, that really hurt me. But now, my best moment you say?

Darious: Yeah.

Thomas Levi: was when they opened the doors of this museum. We accomplished, I felt then at that time, that we had accomplished what, part of what, we wanted to. There were some other things that we wanted to accomplish also, in that but I think this is moving quite along in the right direction anyway from where we started. And just to have a sense of finalization on something is just a, it’s just a joy in itself. It really, it really impacts you in such a way, in a positive way. And so, you see the potential that’s here and hopefully our youth can see it and expound on it.

Darious: What would, is there anything you would change about what you did?

Thomas Levi: The only thing I would probably seek to change would be to get more people involved, and more of our people involved, in a way not just monetarily, but physically as voluntarism and things of that nature. And also a lot of our families have artifacts that we don’t, that we may not consider artifacts that would help our museum tell our story. We’d like to, I would have liked to, being able to encourage others to be involved as much as we were, or to see what we saw in this, the potential.

Darious: What is the most important thing to remember about this?

Thomas Levi: is our history, I think. And the fact that we’ve come a long way, and we always haven’t understood our forefathers and the things that they’ve done for us. There were a lot of things I really came to know by doing some of the research for our museum, come to understand some of the things that others have done before, that have been before us that have done things that, for our country, not just for our people but for our country, they’ve done things and they really excelled at what they did. And it caused great, it helped me with a lot of pride in myself, you know what I mean, to realize that I was a product of a culture that was, is just very beautiful and very rich in its heritage.

Darious: What would be the best ending to this story?

Thomas Levi: to see our history being shown across the county and across the nation. And that our nation, we’ve seen now that we’ve had our first African American president elected. We can take great pride in that, but the best thing I would see that we as a nation would be able to be unified in our efforts to live together and to promote harmony amongst races and things of that nature, and amongst cultures, the various cultures. Our country is very rich in the cultural area. We have cultures from all over the world coming into our country and we have to learn to live together because, I’m a religious person also, and I believe that God made all of us to fellowship with one another.

Darious: Is there any other questions you would like to answer or that need to, any stories you would like to tell us?

Thomas Levi: Well, I could probably tell you, I found that in the Navy, when I went in, I went in to help my mom, basically. But, when I did go in, like I said, I was very young; I was, it was two weeks before my eighteenth birthday and I spent twenty years and six months and I think eleven days and some odd hours, but I used to know all of that. But what I remember was the fact that it was an education to me. I really, going around, you don’t realize but that going around the world and seeing other places and other people and how they live and things of that nature, couple of things happen. You get to appreciate the liberties that we have and you really, it really shows the liberties that we have and the fact that by seeing these other countries and how these other people live-it’s an education in itself. And I never could have paid for it with my own money or anything to go all different places. ’Cause I’ve been virtually all over the world. I’ve been to Japan, Hong Kong. I’ve been all over Europe, to Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Britain. Even down South I was, when I was in, just stationed in Jacksonville, Florida, I was, one of the squadrons I was in was a weather recognizance squadrons. And we were called the World Famous Hurricane Hunters because we flew into and out of hurricanes to track them, to see if that was possible because they change course so many times. And we also plotted their direction, like I say, and we also measured their strength and there were various ways we could do that, and things of that nature. We were, like, trying to help people on the ground and various places prepare and realize the ferociousness of these storms. They’re very ferocious. A lot of times you’d be out there flying and one of the things we had to do when we started a penetration run in on a storm, the eye of the storm, we flew right into the eye, one of the things we had to do was to keep the water in sight the whole time. We started out at a thousand feet above water and eighty miles out and we would fly into the eye that way. One of the criteria that we had to have was that we had a meteorologist aboard. We had to, he had to keep the wind right on our wing tip to more or less push us into the storm. The meteorologist had the con, or control, and he told the pilot what heading to raise so that he made sure the wind was right on the wing tip because if, what happened if we were to have that wind go behind us we’d lose our lift and we’d go right into the drink, or into the water. So we couldn’t have that so you had to make sure, ensure that that was right on the wing tip and more or less pushed us into the storm. While you were flying in, I was able to see out of one of our portholes, or windows, the raging, what we called, feeder bands. And those feeder bands had, you’d see water, what you’d call water spouts, on land they would be called tornadoes. Sometimes you’d see four or five in a, at a run that you went in, in any particular feeder band. Those were the feeder bands you had to stay away from because they were very ferocious. Like I say, they had those, that kind of, weather and so we stayed away from those. But going into, flying into the eye and then, that was the uniqueness of it. One of the things that it showed me was in the eye, when you were in the eye, I could look up and I could see blue sky above and look down and the sea state was calm, but all around us was a raging storm and we had to pick our way out of that. And so that’s what we had the radar for, and we utilized that to pick our way out of the storm. And we’d penetrate about three times in eleven hours. We had a flight time normally about elev, somewhere between ten and eleven hours depending on our flight pattern, things that we flew. But, that was one thing, then, there was something else.
Oh, the heart attack that I experienced was really traumatic, also. And it was life changing, really. I had it when I was like forty-seven years old. And I really, I spent about twenty-nine days in the hospital and it was unusual to spend that much time in the hospital. Then four years after that, I went in with quadruple by-pass and only spent five days in the hospital. So you can see the difference between the two. I really came up with, I think, double pneumonia, also, because of the fluid back up into my lungs and it had nowhere else to go but to the lungs. It caused me to come up with double pneumonia; so they didn’t think I was going to live at all. But I was able to do that.
Then another thing though that in researching history, I was curious about my own family because of the way I look. As you can tell, I’m a little bit different, but I am, I know what I am, and I know who I am. But I am a little bit different, so that caused me to be a little bit inquisitive about my family background. And on my father’s side, his mother, she came from a family out in New Jersey, and I researched that through a book that I found in the library and was able to contact people back there, was able to go back there, too. The town is called Gouldtown, New Jersey and it’s near Bridgeton. And I went there and met some of my relatives and things there. And they told me stories about how there were, and this book also told stories about how there were, five families that intermarried to keep the complexion like mine or whatever, you know. And they did that in those times and they said, she, this one woman, she told me that some of the people moved away, in those years. You got to understand in those years, early nineteen hundreds, segregation; it didn’t behoove you to be black in our country. So she said, some of the family members would move away and the purpose of their moving away was that they would pass for white and they would disown their own people. I couldn’t do that; I couldn’t understand how they could do that, but they did. This is how, it was amazing to me how, the lengths that people will go to just to, you know do, you know, to keep a complexion or whatever. You know what I mean. And I, to me, that’s not the most important thing in life. The most important thing in life is how you feel about yourself and how you take pride in yourself and are able to take pride in yourself. And we want to ensure, and that was a, one of the purposes or ideas that we worked on with this museum was that we wanted our people to realize that, and take great, and be able to take great pride in themselves and some of the realize some of the direction, some of the past that we, and honor and not to ignore the past but to expound upon the past so that we can better ourselves for the future.

Darious: So is there any other stories you would like to tell us?

Thomas Levi: No.

Darious: We, thanks for having you, we appreciate it.

Thomas Levi: Thank you for having me, appreciate it. Thank you so much.