text: UFDC Home | Help | RSS TABLE OF CONTENTS HIDE Copyright Interview Title: Interview with Spirit & Substance - Barton, et al. (March 18, 1974) CITATION PAGE IMAGE PAGE TEXT Full Citation STANDARD VIEW MARC VIEW Permanent Link: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00008193/00001 Material Information Title: Interview with Spirit & Substance - Barton, et al. (March 18, 1974) Alternate Title: Spirit & Substance Barton, et al. Physical Description: Book Language: English Publication Date: March 18, 1974 Subjects Spatial Coverage: Lumbee County (Fla.) Notes Funding: This text has been transcribed from an audio or video oral history. Digitization was funded by a gift from Caleb J. and Michele B. Grimes. Record Information Bibliographic ID: UF00008193 Volume ID: VID00001 Source Institution: Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, Department of History, University of Florida Holding Location: This interview is part of the 'Lumbee County' collection of interviews held by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program of the Department of History at the University of Florida Rights Management: All rights reserved by the source institution and holding location. Resource Identifier: LUM 190 Table of Contents Copyright Copyright Interview Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Full Text COPYRIGHT NOTICE This Oral History is copyrighted by the Interviewee and Samuel Proctor Oral History Program on behalf of the Board of Trustees of the University of Florida. Copyright, 2005, University of Florida. All rights, reserved. This oral history may be used for research, instruction, and private study under the provisions of Fair Use. Fair Use is a provision of United States Copyright Law (United States Code, Title 17, section 107) which allows limited use of copyrighted materials under certain conditions. Fair use limits the amount of materials that may be used. For all other permissions and requests, contacat the SAMUEL PROCTOR ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM at the University of Florida. LUM-190AB Transcribed: 7-21-75 03-18-74 Karen Johnson SUBJECT: Spirit and Substance, P.S.U. program Topic: Journalism and Mass Media Recorded by: Lew Barton B: This is March 18, 1974. I'm Lew Barton, recording for the University of Florida History Department and the American Indian Oral History program. This afternoon I'm at Pembroke State University for program number five of Spirit and Substance is about to begin. The program for:this after- noon will be Journalism and Mass Media. There will be dinner at 6:30 at the University Cafeteria. At 8'00 PM the for rh program begins in Moore Hall Auditorium. Bruce Barton and Willie French-Paul are among the speakers. The panel leader will be Bruce Barton, and discussants will be Grace Gibson and three others. I also understand that Roy Thompson, prize-winning reporter of the Winston-Salem Journal will also be present. I am supposed to listen in tonight, and take part in the reflection part of the program at another time. The reflection part of it, I understand, is recorded on video-tape. It's my understanding that Professor R.J. Rundes, Chairman of the Department of English at Pembroke State University has been very instrumental in helping to bring this program about. I also understand that one of the purposes of this program is to help establish a better rapport between Pembroke State University and the Lumbee Indian community. Well, here we are at Moore Hall Auditorium. #1: Welcome to the fifth program of Spirit and Substance, sponsored by Pembroke State University and the North Carolina Committee for Continuing Education the Humanities. Ton''ht's topic for discussion is the contributions of Indian families of Robeson County to journalism and mass media. We have a tremendous array--of interesting personalities to speak to you tonight. Our emcee for the program, Mistress of Ceremonies, is Miss Rita Lowry, P.S;.U. Language Depart- ment. Also featured as speakers for this evening are Mr. Bruce Barton, whom, LUM-190AB page 2 #1: as you know, is the editor of the Carolina Indian Voice. We also have Mr. Roy Thompson, who has come down to us today from Winston-Salem. We also have Mr. Richard LeCourse from the American Indian Press Association in Washington, D.C., who flew down especially to speak this evening. And finally, we have Mr. Willie French-Paul, who will be speaking tonight on his experiences working in the television and motion industry for a number of years in Hollywood. Later on in the week we're going to have a panel discussion, a reaction panel, to tonight program. The participants in the panel discussion are as follows: Mr. Bruce Barton, again, will be serving as our panel leader, or moderator; and amongst the speakers for the reaction panel we have Mr. Lew Barton, poet and historian from Robeson County; we also have Mrs. Grace Gibson, from the Depart- ment of Communicative Arts here at P.S.U.; we have Mr. Jack Sharpe, the editor of The Robesonian in Lumberton; and also, Mr. Bruce Brown, from Fayetteville, who will also be working on the reaction panel to convene later this week. I'd like now to turn the program over to vlo tonight to Miss Lowry, who will be introducing each of the individual speakers. Thank you. L: Welcome to this, our fifth program of Spirit and Substance. Our first speaker tonight is from out of town. He's Mr. Roy Thompson, _of the Winston-Salem Journal. He is a native of Winston-Salemo..reading from a little sketch that appeared in The Robesonian, we find that Mr. Thompson has won a number of N.C. Association awards, and was Honorable Mention in national compe- tition for a story he did for the Ku Klux Klan. He covered the famed 1958 clash between the Lumbee Indians and the Klan near Maxton, in which the Klan was rooted. Thompson has also written several stories about the Lumbee Indians. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In talking with Mr. Thompson this evening I learned a secret about him that hej-oesn't share with everyone. We find that he has written a book about gorillas. Now he's not LUM-190AB page 3 f L: going to talk to us tonight about gorillas. He says his book is not very good, but we would like to read his book and we would like to know more about it. The name of this book is _...he has made this special study. But he has also done a much better production, I'm sure. That is, his writings about the Indians of North Carolina, particularly of Robeson County. I'm not going to take any more of his time, but will call Mr. Thompson now, to speak to you. Mr. Thompson... T: I was invited to speak on Spirit and Substance, conditions in transition, things like that. Frankly, I don't know anything about such matters and I have a speech that is very scholarly and you wouldn't last for it. I'm going to make tell you a last minute switch and just talk. I would like toA first something of my E'veri 1(ia credentials. In addition to writing lousy books about gorillas, I have a rather unique experience. I am one of the few people you will ever see who was an Indian until I was 35, 36 years old. I'm not sure what I am now, I was an Indian until then, and I'd like to explain. When I was little I was very little, had no mechanical abilities and sports things. We had a baseball game, and choose up. sides I would be the last. If the kids played cops and robbers I was the robber...cowboys and indians, I was the Indian. And the reason I was an Indian was that I got...I was so easy to beat up and push around that they made me an Indian permanently. Now I conned my father, eventually, into buying me a pistol, and I took this because I figured with a pistol, then, you know, I could be a cowboy. You know what they said? They took it away from me and said Indians don't have pistols. Since that time I have, because of this early position as an- Indian, I have been very interested...I have watched elderly women from East Berlin sitting in West Berlin making Plains Indian war bonnets that they stamped "made by the Cherokees", ( Cherokeer)jr North Carolina, and they were shipped over and sold as genuine stuff. I have spent some time with the LUM--190AB page 4 r T: Papagos, the Navajo, the __ Cherokee _..' ...'I. there and I think this will be _tr_, _+ what I am saying, I think this is difficult. They-have a sayg in Cherokee, Chief Henry Lambert. Chief Henry is a chief because he makes a living being a chief. It was about the time of year for Chief Henry to take an annual migration to the sea. He goes to the ocean sometime around the first of April each year, and stays until he is dark enough 'iM Qi it(C/4 Ak/ to be an Indian so the tourists will know at-d tee*ag-.e that he is an Indian, and pay him money-to take his picture. I kept on being an Indian, one way or another. I finally got fat, I never got husky, and finally reached a p6int I meeta man named UT FtiC._ Thompson, who was a Cherokee. told me once that he was a full-blooded Cherokee, and you know, my name is Thompson and he was a full-blooded Cherokee, and I am an Indian, so I figured well maybe at Indian. And I said, well what else can you do besides being a full-blooded Cherokee? He says I'm a Baptist minister, and I said there ain't no way there's any Baptist minister in my family. So I began to question my Indian heritage. I also wondered about being a full-blood named Thompson. It just didn't sound much like a full-blood, way back name, and we have people here who are experts. I first came to this area in the early 1950's. I came here because I had spent some time with other Indians and I wanted to find out something about the Indians in Robeson County. I came here and I found...I was not naive enough to come here expecting a Mtll) tiC ... I didn't expect to I didn't know exactly what to expect, and what I found was just ordinary people, that most of the people in this state didn't know existed. And I circulated around and talked and went home and wrote a story about people who were Indians. Then, we're talking tonight about mass media. It became a magic night, August, 1958, which not nnlx the people in North Carolina became aware of the Lumbees, the Indians, the people, LUM-190AB page 5 T: but the people of the United States, the people of the world, heard about it. Now, I talked to Lew Barton before coming on, and as I said, I had another speech to make. ButAI became concerned about that time. Number one: I don't know to this day exactly what an Indian is. I know a lot about people who are said to be Indians. I know that Indians, the people so-called Indians, dis- covered America, discovered it a long time before Christopher Columbus. The time which they discovered it when I was first interested in Indians, was estimated to be about 2000 years ago. That is now pushed back in this state to barely 10,000. In a few more years I suspect it will be 15-20,000, but the Indians were named by Columbus, and they have stayed with this name. Why, I don't know. He was just a man he had to borrow money to go somewhere and he didn't know where he was going. He got there, he didn't know where he was, he went home, he didn't know where he'd been and he said the people there sobbed 4kit were called Indians because he thought he'd been to India. I 8aid Ouei:-: this: it's not a very good name for whatever people, and those of you who are Indians, in Ireland ev it makes no sense to me. I've discovered a thing,Aa few years ago, that aeneye, if you subscribe to the fact that Christopher Columbus was the first European to come to the New World, which I do not, Christopher Columbus sailed in the |WO't wBay a few years before he came to the New World, and he heard of a strange curiosity that was found out in the Gulf Stream. He went and looked at it. It was two men who were dark in color, looked vaguely Asiatic, very strangely and very inadequately dressed for an ocean voyage, and in a little fragile canoe that was made am6 of some kind of bark. These men had died. Some people believe now that these two men were Indians. There's no other explanation hu s e for them. Somehow they got into the Gulf Stream andBkept going. You can do that and come within a very few miles of the coast of Ireland. Now, we know that our history books have been written by people who are oriented toward the LUM-190AB page 6 T: English. If not the English then certainly to Europeans. Tier-e is ie "eor4 that Columbus discovered this place. There are those who say that during the time of Nero, about the time Nero started taking violin lessons and hunting a match-to burn Rome, that some Christians decided to leave Rome and head west. They weren't looking for India\, they were just looking for something that wasn't going to be burned down over their heads. There are those who say that these people came through our Outer Banks in the Albemarle Sound and spent some time on the northern side of Albemarle. Most CtMpe. AIido(iU the -atry say there's nothing to it. We know that the Vikings came to at least Connecticut, New York State. There are a few people who believe that the Vikings came to this coast, came to Albemarle, and Eric the Red's sister, who was not a very nice ladyT put on the first streaking in history down there and scared the S \ICA IS ,_____ as the Vikings called the Indians. Took her top off, went topless...the men ran, she got a sword, took her top off, attacdc1 the s6 iir'o _, did away with them. We know that there were many people. The Irish think that St. Brendon may have come to this country. The Cherokee have legends that are remarkably similar to some of the Irish legends. We know that eventually the white settlers came to this section and they found a curious thing. They found some people who, some of whom had lighter hair than they should have, lighter skin than they should have, blue eyes, they understood some English, they lived in European type houses, they built roads, and in many ways they were superior to the people who were coming into Salem, for Christianity- and whatever. These first settlers took one look at these people and said, this cannot be. How can that be? It can't be. Since that time the people of this Cool c's area who consider themselves Indians have been called many names: FeIhentarS, Hatteras Indians, Robeson County, Cherokees for two years. These things were done by the legislature, and by acts of Congress. More recently, Lumbees. I LUM-190AB page 7 T: think you should know that it's not just the Lumbee Indians who have been per- secuted and fouled up by acts of Congress and the legislature. It happens to - L cJ I l Tr - all of us. This is what I came in here and found and after the riot 4 *--ehght I'm going to write a history of the Klan one day and I'm going to have a chap- ter that will be called "The Battle of the Indian Tribe." I came back and found out about the people and I found some things that were disturbing. I have warned a couple of people that perhaps what I say will not sound too good. I am not impressed with color. I don't know what a white man is and I am one. My background is English. It is fashionable to say, if you're English, that you were descended from the royal house and you were illegitimate so you came to the New World. I'd rather be legitimate anyway, but all the English were supposed to be great people. The truth is that most of the early settlers in this state were not of the gentry. They came here because somebody said you go to the New World or we will hang you. You go to the New World or we will put you in prison. Some of our people came here as indentured servants, which is part time slavery. Some of them came in here because the sheriff in Virginia-was right behind them. Not a very noble thing to look back on. I came in here and I found a very in there strange thing. I found a place in a stateAwhicltwas supposed to be two races, and then three, and I found here four. White people, Indian people, black people, and the One family theater in Lumberton had four A aObml wc places to sit. This is terrible. I wondered then and I wonder now...I've looked,., came here early this afternoon, I drove around here and what I see in this place is something that I hope represents true progress. I see this Univer- sity...the first time I saw this place, those of you whovareAqtukents) if there's a student here, you wouldn't recognize what I saw when I came here twenty years ago. I see building going on here, I see evidence of some affluence...the country is supposed to be affluent. You've got your part of it. I check around and I LUM-190AB page 8 T: find that the IN4iaN vo-. which didn't really amount to much. I never did get into the details of it, I don't know whether you got Oiu Coun.sel at the courthouse or what happened but you y \/ouCr v o t amount to a whole lot. This seems to have changed. Personally, I am delighted to find that Pembroke State University, I see people whose color Ae&tf hy ability. The Census Bureau can tell perhaps, the Bur-eau Of Indian Affairs can say...I don't really know. I eventually, after going along,Iiu said I was an Indian for approximately 35 years, I eventually discovered I was not. I tried to eat buffalo meat. I presume T you're a real, red-blooded Indian you can eat buffalo and I could not do this. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Lew Barton can check it, the last time I heard anything about tUe( r rCu[irq they said that the Lumbees were not legal Indians. And what a legal Indian is, I don't know. If there are legal and illegal Indians, Ht1h there -w illegal and legal whites...I don't know. I do know this, *.at their discussion, the Bureau of Indian Affairs- said that the Lumbee could not be legal because they've never had a treaty with the United States government. Now, I started looking into this and I found that most people who had a treaty with the United States government are either dead now or gathering dust in the Southwest. Last year when I heard that the Lumbees were saying that they were Tuscaroras, and excuse me if there are any Tuscaroraspresent, bear with me, I sat there and I looked and I said, Tuscaroraj? Now, let me get out my book and look this up. In 1711 the Lumbees fought on the side of the white colonials against the Tuscarora 4 collected sixteen bushels of corn, whichltis mighty cheap labor. You do a little bit better now when you go to w you get the same trc as every else. I would like to see if there's a way to do it, find out, I think it's a real mystery how the first people here had blue eyes and spoke English. If there's a way to find out I'd like to find out, settle this thing, see who you are, if you really LUM-190AB page 9 T: care. I'm just curious. Apparently there are people here who feel that this is vitally important. If it is vitally important, let's find out, let's start something and see what we can learn. A I warn you, I had an uncle,,Uncle Clayton Stevens, he made a certain amount of money running a general store and overcharging people in Virginia. When he retired he decided he would do some investigation& into his family tree. He was going back to the royal house. He got back as far as one horse thief, it discouraged him, he quit. I know a little boy in Winston-Salem who has been very excited about the Civil War. His mother remembered a family heirloom. Great-great-great grandfather, or some such, had been in the war, and somewhere she had the buttons from his uniform. This kid was delighted, he was out of his mind. The mother turned the house inside out she finally found the buttons, the kid w crushed. Great-great-great-grandfather was a Yankee. I have a friend I mentioned Ursjn, orOfN The first time I saw hor-aing I invited her by my motel room to sit and talk for a long time. The man who owned the motel, which waste Cherokee, told me later he would appreciate it if I wouldn't bring any more Indians into his motel. I looked at him and I said would you get my check, please, I'm leaving. If the people who own this place can't come into it, I don't want to stay here, I'd rather sleep in the street. I later came to know this man a little bit better. I found that in addition to being against Cherokees and black people and wops and spicks, he was also anti-Semitic...hated Jews...they were even worse than all the rest put together. I used to lecture him on this subject. He wouldn't let a Jewish person into his motel. MmA I.mlU 4 h i5 l. ae night his wife called me and said please meet her at.tL.,e 'n-?lville and let's have dinner. I got up there and this man was shaken, he was really torn up He drank like I'd never seen him drink, and be > at taL i im I eventually found out what the problem was. There had been a question about a 4eej LUM-190AB page 10 T: that had called some lawyers in and found that his mother and father were Jewish. It's a risk you run if you have prejudices. I think it's typical...the man, I keep in touch with him periodically and I find he's just as anti-Semitic as ever. He says there must have been a mistake. I would like to see an effort made to find out who the Indian people in this county are...settle it, and get on with the business of being people. As you start a search, and I hope somebody will, I would recommend to you, if you possibly can, trace your ancestry back to an Arabian prince. Maybe you can rip off some Saudi Arabian oil. That would be the good thing. On the other hand as you search for your ancestral identity, if you run into a horse thief who lives in Virginia~ call me. Maybe I'm a Lumbee instead of a Cherokee. Thank you very much. L: Thank you very much, Mr. Thompson, we're so happy to have you with us. Now let's travel from Winston-Salem to California, to Hollywood, to Pa_ _NAi '1 '"''<; to Florida, and back to Pembroke again. Willie French-Paul is the loe. founder of A4fl"nl-e International Pictures. He now lives in Pembroke after traveling around so much. We read jr a recent paper:"Paul has produced pictures for television, received his training at &_S_____ Playhouse in California, and has appeared in motion picture productions; he knows many of the Hollywood stars." And in another recent eiartl article we find: Willie French-Paul of Pembroke is shown on location the 9ite of the movie r Wrote Uutle i&tor 1 nt'J or which ts filmed on and in the vicinity of the St. Johns River, Florida. Paul is associate producer of the movie, which is to be released through Universal International. Paul has been in the movie industry since the age of 18." I would like to...I'm just so happy to introduce Willie French because of my personal relationship with him. When I was directing plays here, a Old Main had been in this building I won't say how many years ago, Willie French, when he was here at the Univer- LUM-190AB pagell to Try omit L: sity was the first person to comeAfor every play, he was the first person here for every rehearsal, and he was the last person to leave, because he always saw to it that everything was taken off the stage, and everything was in order. I Noi OA OM was nmlest surprised when Willie French asked me one day if I would write a letter for him for the Pasadena Playhouse, because he wanted to go there. And I wasn't at all surprised when he was accepted for the Pasadena Playhouse, then nt on to Hollywood, and I kept receiving these different autographed pictures from movie stars that I still have and I'm very proud of. Then I heard he was in Florida and now he's back in Pembroke. But I won't take any more of his time, I'll let Willie French tell you his own story. Willie French Paul... P: It's et4 difficult to go through 27 years of experience in Hollywood in twenty minutes, but I'm going to try to do so. In Hollywood today the bright lights and the big marquees, the lights are dim and the marquees are small. The Trocaderas, Ciros, Mocambo and the Sunset Strip just don't exist anymore. ro-l CA^tol/ and his Sixty Fabulous Girls, when I first went into Hollywood, was the most fabulous thing I think I have ever seen as the stage revolved. Now Hollywood, and at a big premiere that I saw when I first went there, the lights flashing over- head, 4aws vanished almost. Now let's go back ten, twenty, thirty years ago b before I left, when I was studying under Mrs.jLowry, and incidentally, ae fl was a wonderful drama teacher, I worked also with Miss DeLorei here, and appeared as more or less a bit player actor, that's what it was considered in Hollywood, and there was a night that I left When I decided to leave the Pasadena Playhouse, it was through a friend of mine whose name was Gladys She came to the front of Old Main and S re she said, Bill you've always been interested in Hollywood. There-s a brochure of the Pasadena Playhouse that doesn't only train you for the stage, it trains LUM-19OAB page 12 P: you for motion pictures, it trains you in directing, it gives you a complete business training of the i4. nge Why don't you enter the Pasadena Play-house. And ) Mis ;. i% I4a0s wrotpe- *-rtC leth WerT that's when Mrs. Millsap, at that time, wrote the letterAto the Pasadena Playhouse for me, and also I received a letter through Paul Green, through the... ..i. ...turned out to be a Mardi Gras Affair with Lucille Ball. I've never known such a vivacious person in all my life as Lucille Ball. At that time she was reaA(y just a simple little commedienne under contract to MGM. Nobody thoughtt too her much of ar, o Ye +3 IcN she ws co,.t-ci But this particular set was a lavish set, it was a set of Canal Street, Bourbon Street, in New Orleans. It had a tent covering the entire three block set. I wondered why they hkd covered it with a tent, this was to control the lighting, control sound,"and so forth. This tent was suspended, and I couldn't see how it was suspended. I later found out there was some kind of air current or air that they pushed through the top to make it stay up like a balloon. Anyway, -_ going on that set I was supposed to have just a simple bit part with Lucille Ball running into a little shop down on Canal Street or something, but I was instrumental in working my way in to become g.a stand-in. I was eighteen or nineteen years old at the time. QOis oAeo. and I don't know why they = that I had the same physical appearance of Joien 4 Oa'______at that time, but they did. If there was a fall that he was doing, if he had a fight scene on the balcony, and this is what we call a break-away. There was a guide, 4r 7-ose) r aRiow be ar ___________ a railing, and this railing was made of balsa wood and it was already broken so that it would break away. They asked me if I could do the part. Well being young I'd do anything to get in the movies so I'd fall over anything that they demanded to do the picture. So I consented to do the part, and they shot the scene up to the point where John Hook__ LUM-190AB page 13 P: was to do the fall. Then they removed John -Hola I went in front of the camera, I fell on the banister, the banister broke, and I fell into a net down below, and they photographed that scene. Well that was the first film that I did in Hollywood, 'fMardi Gras Affair." Then later on I got a call for Samuel Goldwyn Studios. That was the second half of Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer. They had)opened their studio/ many- years before I came there and that was the division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was "Kir From Brooklyn," Janny Kaye's first film, Vera Allen and Virginia May-e. M4ay of you probably don't even remember these stars They were quite big years ago. So we were doing this scene and the thing thatI'm trying to bring in now, motion pictures doing this scene and the thing thathI'm trying to bring in now, motion pictures that we did where something happened, interesting-, because I worked in a lot of hea'~ ON .j ,C, 7 e \crec4or films, but this particular one with the Jayi.a...tb ___announced ] _._____ Day while we were shooting this film, and the extras and bit play-ers literally tore the set to pieces. So the director, of course, dismissed us. We left and we were all ready for the great celebration of V, 5i Day. I have never in my life and I never will again, I don't thinkAanyone in Hollywood will ever witness such a thing as this was. How the stars ever put it together and put it together so fast I don't know, but there was over at least 500 spot- lights there, colors all over the sky, floats and all kinds of interesting cars going down the boulevard with stars in them, and I had a little friend with me from the Pasadena Playhouse, and of course we'd been celebrating a little bit ourselves and so I turned around and I noticed a familiar face from the screen. And I don't know whether you know Bella Luguosi or not, but Bella Luguosi back when I was a kid was a Batman, and he i r e.... the motion pictures VOt mtke A-C \e t ____ ...of removing the blood from human beings. So I turned to Bella Luguosi and I said here-my friend, take the blood out of him. Well that was a e i t the a I t me and he said hat little incident then and I waetvd Bella Luguosi te- lookat me and he said What LUM-190AB page 14 P: are you kids doing? I said we're having a big celebration tonight. Well that was Hollywood Boulevard, it was just as friendly as could be. He said, come to our house, we're going to have a big celebration tonight. So I went to his home and we had a ball that night. Now the next film that we did, and I had not experienced the temperament of stars up until this point, or the next interestJ thIat I .lglt consider, was LaT e/w Sti!;. at Universal. Now Universal was a very small studio at that time. They hadn't maybe two or three or four stars but Deanna orb, __, she was the ruler of the roost. She made sure she gof her way. So I was called on this film, "Can't Help Singing." It was a small part, and Deanna _uri ___ after we were shooting for a couple star, of days, we went on theA system--the extras get a box lunch, the bit players are allowed to go into the cafeteria and eat, and the stars have a special dining room So I was in the cafeteria part, and something went wrong, I don't know what, I'm still trying to find out, among the stars. Evidently, for people tkay hfa told me later,Athat Universal had borrowed a star from some other studio and Deanna PuriblSr didn't like the way things were being run so she walked off the setiand she was gone for three days. So here we extras and bit players )dAw tehlNiCMNS' nrL ________- and everybody was just sitting around waiting three days. Well back then the studios could afford to have people sit around because it wasn't so costly like it is today. But then I wondered how could one person control a studio and control it so firmly. Then I was told that way before I came into Hollywood that Deanna 'Ourb' ___ did a film somewhere around 1929, around the Depression and this picture was called "One Girl and a Hundred Men." This motion picture netted over two million dollars in the middle of the Depression, and Universal was about to go under. So then I knew why- Deanna ul N ___ran Universal and not the president of Universal. "Centennial Summer" was another film that I did with Cornell Wilde, and I was playing a rt LUM-190AB page 15 P: ...my mother and I, the woman that was playing the part of my mother...this was 1800 and they wore long, flowing dresses, and this was the first time I really made a big blunder in front of the camera. She was walking along and somehow, I don't know how, but I stepped on the back of her dress and tore part of the back of it out, and they had to reshoot that scene a few times. Well in Pasadean we had a radio station...we were trained in radio...of course, there was no TV back then, we had...there were even no tape recorders. We had a wire recorder which I think was about the only wire recorder, one of the few wire recorders in the country which we did our a g on. But anyway, getting back to the radio station, I did have radio training, and I was instrumental in getting on the Lo So Now mow oc\4l Ay ,i!t i heb VisJeo ow r I was on the Creq*. A asoC,. show, I met many radio stars and two or three of them that was interesting, one was Orson Welles. He was directing the Q-e Arkc I c.sQiNe ShOj kind of a dramatic show, and of course I'd heard of Welles. I remember when the incident of 1939 when he came on the radio and said the country wa being invaded by Martians. Of course, he made it so dramatic and people didn't wait to listen to see what it really was. When they announced it at the last they brought out the fact that it was just a dramatic presentation, so it caused mass hysteria in this country. There was actually people that jumped out of buildings, and Mr. Mao_ _l who was the president of the college here at the time, he come running over to my father, I lived across the road here in front of the college, and he Tr1 ha&'W" ) was trying to tell my father about what was happening.A Theyndidn't wait to listen, to the end of the show, but my father had and he knew exactly that it was some...he called it a phony situation, at it was a dramatic thing that Welles had done. And so when I finally met Orson Welles he was exactly what strange, I thought he was--a weird character. He had a o _____ that was his valet, and he'd walk around with a glass of iced tea;as tall as he was. LUM-190AB page 16 P: Of course, I knew that iced tea was spiked because Welles didn't work without a little bit of toddy for his body, or his mind, I guess. But he was a terrific director. And at that time I met Rita Hayworth, which was his wife at the time. I don't know whether most people don't remember Rita Hayworth but she was a big musical star at Columbia. Right after that I worked with Rita Hay- worth in a film called "Down to Earth." This was one of...I did a lot of dancing in films. This is one of the most difficult dance routines I think I've ever done. It was the Greek mythology, the life of , and it was supposed to have been sort of a dream sequence, and they had like mountains of plastic, mountains, little plastic mountains. They had to put resin on the bottom of your feet and you had to dance without shoes, and this resin would stick on your feet, and it was really difficult. I almost broke my neck before that production was over. Now, I...there's Qn__r__ceC that I didn't mention in radio that I found to be very interesting when they were doing the Luj show and many other shows that I was connected with, and that was Jimmy Durante and Fanny Bright. And when they were rehearsing CBS had to prepare their...prepare them a special script. Jimmy, he couldn't... Fanny Bright couldn't see too well, even though with her thick glasses she was wearing, and Jimmy he sort of would get mixed up on his words and he just...he'd read the script over and over and then by the time you were ready to do the script he would still make mistakes. But Jimmy was really great. He'd walk up and down out in the parking lot trying to read his script, and Fanny Bright would always kid him about being illiterate, but there was never a finer performer than Jimmy Durante. He had his own style about putting things over and you couldn't beat him as a comedian. "The Bride Wore Boots" at 20th Century Fox, and the first time I met Barbara Stanwyck. Of course, this was a film that I just considered exhausting, the part I was doing, it seemed like I never got nothing LUM-190AB page 17 P: but bit parts and extra parts, and it was alright, it was enjoyable, I didn't wantAthat much connections, that much money behind me. And back in those days it did help your father owned stock in Columbia or at 20th Century Fox, or (>ps W if you had a big time agent that you could pay money to --- you into the busi- ness, but anyway I made it on my own, and as big as it was, it still was enjoy- able to me. But this "...Bride Wore Boots" was made on location for 20th Century Fox, and it was a group of people, well, we was run over the hill and on the other side of the hill was a race track, I think it was supposed to have been Kentucky, it's been so long ago. But shooting this thing, I don't know whether I was doing the harm, the lighting was wrong, the extras wer wrong, or what, but I was supposed to run over this hill and Barbara Stanwyck was sitting on a bench, I was supposed to pull her boots off. I ran over that hill a whole day and the picture still wasn't right and I got exhausted and I sat down on the other side of the hill, so the extras, they were all running over the hill and then the director saidkwhere's the actor, where's the man who's supposed to take the boots off of Miss Stanwyck? So I come hobbling over the hill, pre- tending that I have sprained my leg, and she knew I hadn't, but she protected me and called first aid, and she talked to the director and said let's try to the Dia re shoot it tomorrow. So the next day we did two takes and 4b 4 e Ad- was fine. I never did see the film, I don't even know what the scene was supposedeto be. Everybody has a favorite actor, and I had one. Her name was Judy eaulnrd. It was an act, a sister act, Rita 6pfiwm and Judy ian we iN 'h VQAivJllItN o~S long before I got to Hollywood they had the rkum C 'IlJ the Hippodrome tkat IJ they'd show a motion picture and in between they'd have an act. These girls became quite famous and they appeared at.Cyro's and at that time Louis was looking for someone to play the Wizard of Oz. Judy was...Judy GaGland was just the right person, the one he selected to play LUM-190AB page 18 P: the part. Judy starred in "The Wizard of Oz" and made "Over the Rainbow" one of the most famousAsongs ever known, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Judy Garland Judy iui is Judy Garland, I'm sure you all guessed that. Then the first...I'd wanted this opportunity all my life when I saw him in Laurel and Hardy shows tto -r tpr Mi Cketoo00 j and I think I saw the picture right here in Pembroke. So I alwa-s wanted to meet Judy Garland. S "Meet Me in St. Louis," they were casting it. And I managed to get a little dance routine in "Meet Me in St. Louis". Of course Judy, she didn't know how I felt about her, I was just another bit player, extra, just somebody they'd hired to work with her, so I worked with Judy, talked to her, and even at that time, the method in Hollywood When they get a star and the star is a grofs ANCc , and like a hundred million dollars or so that you can make by the end of the year, is to push her, and make all the movies you can and all the money you can. So MGM had a practice with their stars, especially in the case of Judy, of giving her a pill to go to bed and a pill to get up on. So at that time I could tell that Judy was, she was very very nervous. And I didn't see her again until she was going to be summer stock and I was called in on summer stock. Judy worked for about a week on summer stock, she walked off the set, and the MgM suspended her for six months. I didn't see Judy again for a while. I had n several gpodj arts in films thatsreally nothing interesting happened more than hard work until I met Jaue Russell. LI was under contract to Howard Hughes and did a lot of editing and Y'ter roP3 Hughes' small operation...I wouldn't say it was a small operation because he had Se "The Outlaw" and made a fortune on "The Outlaw" and pulled publicity tricks like having blimps fly all over Hollywood on the priemere night, I was there, where the lights would flash on in red on one side and green on the other intro- ducing Jayne Russell in "The Outlaws." Well this at that time was a sensational LUM-190AB page 19 P: thing. So when I talked with Ja 4,e Russell, Ja Xe told me, said, what are you trying to make out of your life? 831 says you run around her doing bit parts and extra parts and doing this, that, and the other thing. St said why don't you try to organize a little something for yourself? Well I realized that in that day and time the motion picture industry was a cut and dried thing. The major studios like MGM had a stable of stars. Any time they needed money they- could go to the Bank of America and they had that they 6orrow called "bankable stars"...they could t all the money they wanted. Not only that, like 20th Century Fox, MGM, Warner Brothers, they had theaters all over the world. They didn't have to show their motion pictures...or worry about where they were going to.show their motion pictures. It was cut and dried, they knew where they were going to show them. So why should they. interested even if I would have had a couple of million dollars to produce a film, why would they go to me and say Bill we want you to produce a film,we're going to release...the operation was just too big. But then I sat down and began to think. I knew a man by the name of Fred Quimby who was head of the short subject department of MGM. He'd become a very good friend of mine. Now why eiouldn't I do some short subject or maybe do something that MGM could release as a short subject? And that would give me a start in the business. I talked to Fred Quimby about what I wanted to do, that I wanted to go into Florida and produce ..explore the old St. Augustine. They had shot St. Augustine before but they had no story to it. I wanted to make sort of a story out of it. And my father had retired at that time ~AdOra-.-z? City, Florida. So I went back and I established a company called Seven Pictures Corporation. Fred Quimby was interested, that's just about it, he was interested. I got a man by the name of Colonel Wardell out of Orlando, who was a photographer from World War II, and we organized a little company. And with, although I did bit parts in LUM-190AB page 20 P: motion pictures, I did a little dancing here and there, but I was making some money. So I backed my own little production and MGM looked at the film and they released it, "Exploring Old St. Augustine." After that I had a little money to work with,so I did 27 featurettes, Colonel Wardell and I and the company. We went to C Gress Gardens, and we used a lot of Granton Wright, I don't know whether anyone remembers Granton Wright, but Granton Wright did a lot of short subjects at Silver Springs at that time, and we used a lot of his old props. One of the pictures that seems to me to be very interesting was a carnival that we had underwater that Granton Wright had used before. Well they had a school around Silver Springs where they would train children to swim. Some of them could almost swim before they walked. So of course they could stay under water just so long, but the way we made this motion pic- ture it looked like they were fish, like they had gills instead of lungs. We'd take a seene and they could be under the water just so long and we'd take the same scene over and over until it looked like they were really performing under water and it was a carnival and on the merry-go-round with little kids, on the ferris wheel with kids, the whole thing was done underwater. And that was just one of the subjects. And then we rent into Cypress Gardens so did a lot of water-skiing things andwused _ skiing without skiis. Of course after we came in about that time they started doing a lot of big musical things in this area. Now at this time television was beginning to...just beginning to tg.a little bit. It was just beginning to grow a little bit. And I got an offer for these films through Astor Pictures Corporation. Bob Savane met me in Atlanta, Georgia, and he bought the 27 featurettes. I told him the reason he bought tflasm is because they had nothing at that time on TV except Hopalong Cassidy, Johnny Mack Brown, and all the old films and peo- ple were getting pretty bored with that. They didn't have any television series LUM-190AB page 21 P: like they have today, that was just beginning to start. So I sold these films and although it wasn't a million dollars it was a lot of money to me. I got a little bit wild, I built a nightclub outside of Daytona Beach, lost a lot of money, and I said, Well, I think I'll try home. So I came back here and I built the Circle Drive-In Theater. Well I was here for less than two years, I was beginning to a little bored again, and then it came out headlines that Judy Garland had tried to commit suicide. She had tried many times with sleeping pills. This time she cut her wrists and I had a little magazine that we were publishing, I don't think I have a copy of it right here, called "A Star is Born" we published it in Florida, and I wrote Sid Luck, who was her manager at that time, and husband, of course she was married to Vincent Minelli first, and whether Sid left, took my advice on this magazine that I sent, I don't know, but I had suggested that he do a musical based on the old Janet Gaynor movie. To me the Janet Gaynor movie depicts Hollywood completely. So he did ao this musical and I was called back in as a choreographer on the film, and this gave me another opportunity to see Judy, and to work with Judy Garland. This film was a -,ery difficult one to make, aid once completed, Judy almost won the Academy Award. She was up for the nomination of the Academy Award. But I could was beixa tell even in this motion picture that Judy pushed too hard,she was extremely nervous, and she might try it again. So Sid Luck, in organizing Judy after they had done this, he wanted her to make a tour throughout the entire United States and And through this tour she made an enormous amount of money. She came back to Hollywood and she was at the Greek Theater, and these are words that I can't say. When I saw Judy behind the scenes at the Greek Theater she was raving and using a lot of vul- garity. She said she had made three, pardon the expression, g.d. million dollars, and she didn't have a penny to show for it. She had just completed LUM-190AB page 22 P: a run at the Sands Hotel at $100,000 a week for two weeks, and she had no money to show for it. She was almost a raving maniac behind the scenes. These are things that usually people don't talk about, but I could understand how a woman so talented could be used, and how the money could be made and misappropriated. Now Judy almost moved into obscurity after this. That was about when I went into Las Vegas, Nevada, and we established Globe International Pictures. VeJe th+ worked. wji+hv had a man who was Head of the Health Department of Nevadan Rk Corwin. We had a director, Oliver Drake, and I am sure this man must have directed 500 films at least. He started with Randolph Scott and Johnny Mack Brown, he started k'-W0e e. CaFrl I can't name the stars that he worked with and he started in the motion picture business when he was nineteen years, and actually was directing when he was twenty years old and the man is now in his late sixties. So we organized this company in Las Vegas, Nevada, and something happened in Vegas, of course a man that's Head of the Health Department, and especially dealing with clubs like the Tropicana, The Sands, The Hacienda, all these large night clubs, would have a lot of power. He could make them do most anything, you know, to rebuilding their buildings and all kinds of things. So he managed to get some interest in buying a studio in Hollywood. Well I thought that was some kind of a joke. We sat in the Tropicana Hotel, we had a meeting with everyone. Of course Mr. Oliver Drake was head of this meeting, he had better knowledge of the business than I did, and they- decided to buy the old Allied Artists Studios, and they called it Colorvision Studios. We starting making low budget films, and I was instrumental inhan agency called Actors' and Artists' Agency. We had many people under contract, nobody with any name, and we had two people in particular/that -we worked awfully hard with. I believed X Michael Landon very much. In fact I believed in him so much that we had a building on Sinclair Avenue, and I kept the upper LUM-190AB page 23 P: part of the building and Mike stayed in the lower part of the building. Mike didn't have any money at that time, very little. I was able to get him in a few television things, and then we...I had a deal with American International, nothing more than just a releasing company, Nicholson and Arkoff, who were two businessmen out of Chicago, that was worth an awful lot of money, decided they wanted to make-movies but they knew nothing in the world about making movies. All they wanted was something with action, a lot of girls in'it, and what have you. Well we came back with the idea of the teenage werewolf, which was sort of sensational..'.'I Was a Teenage Werewolf'.'..and we used Michael in the film, Rodney Corman produced it, I was the associate producer. Well of course Michael was instrumental and I was in getting the appointment for NBC's "Bonanza." They had a script, and NBC was producing this script "Bonanza" and of course, a network is not...it's not tcoo hard for them to get a sponsor, and I knew this was a winner, so there must have been a hundred young men they were con- sidering, and how it ever happened that Mike got the part, I'll never know, but he was a good actor, a natural actor, and he seemed to be the thing that they wanted. So Mike, as I said before, didn't have too much money at that time and we had him under contract and he did the unforgivable, which has been done by many actors in Hollywood, he sold his contract to about 25 or 30 people all over the Boulevard. Anybody that had money, or anyone that had a couple of few thousand dollars, he was selling them a part of his contract. He didn't tWtk Ve ant ,^ Ni Cto sell t'h tell us about it, _____ but he just went outkand said I've got to have a house, I can't stay in this place, I've got to have something better, so he wanted him a better house, so he moved down the road, he's got $ bel se'N }) to have him a 35,000 home, and yet he had very little money so he sold Cornell Wilde some of his contract, he was selling everybody his contract. So when we tried to hold Mike under contract we were sued by about fifty people. Our LUM--190AB page 24 P: agents, it was a very small agency, we couldn't fight the lawsuit, only thing we could do was give up Michael Landon, and of course William Morrison was just sitting waiting, so William Morrison got Michael Landon. The other was Donna Douglas, Ellie Mae. It was a little bit better situation, and when we made the pilot, "The Beverly Hillbillies," William Dozierpwas head of Filmway, 'IN and it was the first time I had ever seenAHollywood where the state allowed them to sell stock.. He went on the television screen and actually sold stock. The picture only cost, or the pilot only costs around $30,000, and when I saw the pilot I said Donna that thing will never sell. The public is not that stupid to go for a thing about the hillbillies moving into Beverly Hills. I said that's just plain stupid, nobody will ever buysthat thing. Well I was just about right, because it took three years to sell that pilot. Well William Dozier's mother had worked for William Randolph Hearst, and they were pretty powerful people, ... ...industry, back then it really was lively. He built her a castle outside of Berkely, California, that was equal to anything in England. It's a tourist attraction now. I went into the castle and the...if there was two hundred rooms there was three hundred. In the back was a pool that looked something like part of the Pacific Ocean. There was a statue that had never been uncrated and I wondered why this happened. Then I realized in 1929, somewhere during the Depression, that even the Hearst chain of newspapers were in serious trouble... The Times Now this is what makes me think in olden days that maybe the M__im __iOte Si_ f were more dedicated to people who helped them, because somehow, I don't know how, the banks did crash. But Marion Davis was able to dig up two million dollars and loan William Randolph Hearst two million dollars. I thought this little story might he interesting, and the way that he publicized LUM-190AB page 25 P: her in his newspapers throughout probably the country, and I don't know whether she was publicized throughout the world. Now going back to Colorvision Studios, we did I have a whole list of films here and there's no need for me to go through mentioning them all, but we did do quite a few films. tK He. (o te i" Silver *guiii'htr-r ] liSprings, and we had Burt Vanderbilt, I had under contract with qolrl u A A N Silver Springs, Florida. Then we did fPeNoweNo0 7 __with Dr. Frank Stranger. We did "Tiger Ueuar\it)R^ Island" with Wanda Holmes, who became one of my dearest friends, and I found out the way, now after television got a big hold on Hollywood and was dragging the big motion picture people down, the independents then had a chance. So Wanda had...she was married first to...I don't know whether you remember, I'm sure you remember 'The Most Decorated Soldier Audie Murphy, then she was married to Jim And Wanda said well BillWif you want to promote some friends and get some people together we'll try to get them together at my house, she had a pool there and everything, we'll get together and talk to them and we'll put up what you call a package together, we'll get our stars together, because sometimes Cet i' the stars take a -percentage of the film, and we'll just take them over to the house and we'll get some money together and we'll make a film at Colorvision Studios... TAPE IS INAUDIBLE HERED .... ...and they had money and they- wanted to make two films, one was "Push- Button Honeymoon" and the other one, let me see, the other one was, one was "Push-button Honeymoon," it's been so long now, and "Lucifer's Road." Now this money was predicated on the fact that she was going to star herself. I+ wtan 4t before She had to star in it, aevT-eSten in s film in her life but rit she had tb star in the production. The worst wasn't to come. That was bad enough that she had to star in this picture, but now Ronny Sinclair, my writer that had LUM--190AB page 26 P: written a script, he had promised all of his girlfriends that he was going to put them in the film too, and most of them couldn't act their way out of a wet paper bag. So here comes this beautiful raven girl that he has promised to appear in the film and I thought, well now, she's alright if she can read A GsolU-II the script. She was aewll' the worst. I have never heard such a reading in my'life. So Ronny bays well no, you've got to use here, you've got to her. I said why do I have to use her in this film? What are you talking about? Standing over to the side was a man that was connected with the Mafia. That was her boyfriend. I didn't realize that he had threatenedto shoot Ronny if he didn't use her, and then when I said I wasn't going to use her, that's the first time I ever had a gun pulled on me and he was going to shoot me if I didn't use her in the film. Well there was more action behind the camera than in front of the camera in this production. The leading lady, the doctor's wife, was chasing the leading man. The doctor himself, he was chasing all the pretty girls in the studio. It turned out to be the biggest mess and when we finally got the picture and we got some sense of continuity *a~ the picture and got the thing edited and scored and it looked like a motion picture I said well Ron, and Eric who was the director, maybe we can sell this fiasco. We...at that time, as I said before, television was buying a lot of bad Ijm and we were able to sell the picture andAmake a little profit on it. But by this time the doctor's wife thought she had an Academy- Award and she wouldn't sell the picture, so that turned out that both films went into th vault, and was never seen again by anyone. Well about tat time, let me get back to Judy, as I remember, they were writing Judy's life story and Ed Fisher, a friend of mine, had a bunch of friends over, r. him. And of course, I knew Judy, it was impossible for her to sing again, her voice had just really gone, but Ed kept telling her, now, Judy, you can do it again, LUM-190AB page 27 P: you can go on the road again. You can do as well as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, they're doing specials on television, they're doing just marvelous. You know you can do it. Well Judy would smile. She knew the liquor, the pills, the dissipation, everything had really put her out of it. Anyway, after she wrote this story and she seemed...I'll never forget how sad she looked. She then went to England and I didn't see her again but I read in the papers of some 4-t E iu4 hippy that she had that went along with her .fen...she was singing in some little dingy nightclub in London. All the people came out to see...it was just the Judy of the past, the name. Any resemblance in the voice was purely coincidental. Then I read in the headlines that Judy had took pills and she was dead. So ended, to me, one of the finest talents that ever lived. At that time we were getting ready to make...I've done a few X films but I've never done nothing like what I was about to go into now. A man came up with money and he wanted to do a film, he had a script, and Oliver Drake was willing to go along with it, the whole production crew was, it was on location, it was called "Vicky 3ab ." In the old days when you had a drinking scene in a motion pic- ture it wasn't liquor. It looked like liquor but it wasn't liquor. On this particular set everybody was drinking beer. They weren't drinking beer, they were drinking vodka, they were doing something...drinking something, taking something. It was done on location, so the man that was supposed to play the father got drunk and he couldn't play the father part, so the man that was supposed to play the guard, we had him play the father. So the guard's costume was about twice as big as I was. So the director, said, well what are we going to do? We've got to have somebody play their parts. Now who in the technical group around here has ever done any acting on the screen? So he said Bill Paul, you're the one. I said oh no, no, I don't want to go in front of that camera, I'm not interested, I don't...I'm not interested LUM-190AB page 28 ~: inthis part. So anyway I put the costume on. The costume was twice as big as I was. I knew what the scene was going to be, so I did this scene and the complete scene was a rape scene. The guy was raping the woman and she was isl tS s i" Tih e NucDe and he was too. So that was one of my last pictures in Hollywood, "Vicky Baby" so I headed back home, realizing that television had just about took over Hollywood, and I'd have to figure another angle. Well four years previous to that my step-father passed away and I hadn't been with my mother too much. I'd come in and I'd stay here for a short time and then I went back to Hollywood and I wanted to be with my mother for a while and I got to doing a little produce farming and then my mother passed away. But before she did I went in to see my sister, and John who has done Johnny Tiger that was done, I imagine, about five or six years ago with Robert Taylor, just before Robert Taylor passed away. I had worked with him on "Johnny Tiger and when I went into Orlando he said, we're going to do another film, "Throw Out the Anchor...What Anchor?" Jeanna Merle., Richard Eagen, Phil Locke...He said, now Bill this is one of those thi-ngs that you just got out of. He says this is going to be a fine, wonderful comedy. So we went on location and the most ironic part of it all was Sanford, Florida, the location. My father had retired in Orange City, and that's where I lived when I was doing the Cypress Gardens and Silver Springs shows. Sanford is only ten miles from the home where my father had retired. Many times I swam in the St. Johns River very near this location. We produced this film, or John he was the producer, I was the associate producer, and it was a beautiful film. It will be the next release, supposed to be released now, he sold the television rights just recently, and I'm sure it will be on television very soon. I found Jeanna Merle, to be the most charming person in the world, :tl- Ir-d intthe Academy of Arts, but the one thing that the news media does to her that I think is LUM--190AB page 29 P: injust is the fact that they bring up her wealth. Now Jeanna MertsSi mother is Mrs. Post, who has the P ost cereals General Foods and is one of the weat(h wealaeiest women in this country, and Jeanna Merle- herself has Merle-Norman Cosmetics, which is quite successful. But she likes to talk about her acting. She doesn't only talk, she is a actress. So after this X returned home, I started writing a teleplay thing that I hope will be a pilot some day based on the Lumbee Indians and linking them with the disappearance of Governor White's colony, following in to Henry Barry Lowry, and a hundred outlines in which I've written, and I hope some day to produce that as a pilot. lo a I L: Thank you very much, Mr. Paal. In 1947 a 1LL paper, The Pembroke Progress, was born with Cox, of Lumberton, the founder. The first editor was Lew Barton, a wonderful feature writer and a wonderful poet, and he sprinkled this paper with the features and Wi4 4 he poems, and produced a very interesting paper. The following year, in 1948, it fell the lot of my husband and me, __Lowry and I, to continue to work with this paper, which we did from 1948 to 1951. By the way, when Lew was editor of the paper he permitted me to write a little weekly column called "Of Various Things" and I got a little to Fa= 4.4 bit of training right there for the job that I was^undertakig the next *w years. But at that time little did we know that the son of Lew Barton would be again an editor in Pembroke. Bruce Bartonis the editor-publisher of the Carolina Indian Voice of Pembroke. We read, "Barton, a graduate of Pembroke Senior High School, attended Pembroke State University, and has edited the Carolina Indian Voice since January, 1973. He formerly was employed in Chapel Hill for four years and has toured the nation. Bruce is the son of Laet Barton, Pembroke author, poet, newspaper columnist, and historian." But I have a little bit more personal interest in Bruce, in that he attended classes of mine LUM-190AB page 30 P: in Spanish, and he was by far the best student in the class. I'm very proud to introduce to you Bruce Barton. B: Amazing grace...they tell me that gospel singing is the only thing that will draw a crowd, and I'm ...I thought I'd try it but I can't sing. My name is Bruce Barton and besides not being able to sing gospel music, I love it, I'm gloriously happy and I'm the editor and janitor of the Carolina Indian Voice., I just thought I'd try it, that might sound really terrible... people tell me I have no voice but I have no idea. I was born and bred here and I had a lot of trouble putting things together and putting them in per- spective and trying to find out sst exactly what the worth of my life was and why I was on this universe and after completing a little schooling here I w*nt away to find out and I met the trauma so I came to some realization of my worth as a human being and some spiritual understanding of thle universe and the part I play, and a little while ago I came back home after being away for twelve or thirteen years and the idea had been in my head for a long time, I suppose it was planted iyv m'. father, Lew Barton, and I guess that's where Indian journalism began in Robeson County. I grew up in the kind of home where journalism was the by-word and my father wrote frequently or infrequently, according to his temperament, for The Robesonian, primarily, and he has a very warm relationship with Mr. 3ack Sharpe, who is the editor of The Robesonian, who is in the audience. I think that SOy$, something well for both of them, that they were able to relate to each other, and that my father was able to write and address himself to some of the problems that exist in the Indian view- point. And I think it speaks well ca Mr. Sharpe that he allowed him to prac- tice his WI(ts within the pages of The Robesonian. I guess that kind of background gave me the idea that maybe one day I hi be a writer, and that's always been a dream of mine, I've always been a frustrated writer, LUM-190AB page 31 B: so after a lot of these varied experiences and traumas that I exposed my-self to in life, and some good times and some bad times, I did come home. And being a pugnacious sort, being aggressive, and being foolhardy, I began a newspaper last January 18, 1973 without any prior knowledge of how to put a newspaper together, without any understanding of what I was really doing except that I wanted to write and a newspaper seemed to be a nice way to do it.A I began the newspaper in the dead of winter and initially, myself, Howard Brooks, Brenda Brooks, were the primary architects of this undertaking in the dead of winter and I found out later that you shouldn't try to begin a newspaper from scratch in the dead of winter. I'm glad no one told me because if I had known all these things we probably wouldn't be in our second year of publication. I found out a lot of things about myself and I found out a lot of things about Robeson County and about the Indians of Robeson County. I found out, probali.y- that I'm as godd a janitor as ever came down the pipes because I found out that I have to sweep the floor and do all these other things, so probably if I have a real calling, it's as a janitor, I'm damn good at it. I'm not bad as an advertising salesman. I can service my newsstands fairly well, I'm still learning how to write, but I think my father imparted some of his sensitivity to me and I think I feels some of the grievancesof Indian people and I think I'm able to address myself to some of these grievances without losing my restraint and without beigg injured spiritually, because going away gave me a perspective of life in Robeson County that I didn't have before I went away, and I'm glad I went away because you certainly need a perspective because things get kind of exciting in Robeson, especially withIN the Indian camp. Because we find ourselves sometimes now addressing ourselves to an Indian audience made up of seven or eight different political persuasions, and a lot of times demon- strations are going on here and there, people are saying things, and sometimes LUM-190AB page 32 B: they really doi't know what they're saying or what they mean to say, but they (CJ of say them, and we find ourselves trying to address thesehthings that are going on and in the beginning we addressed ourselves to them very pporly because we knew little about what we were up against, but I think we've gotten better as time has gone on. My father helped me some in this when we were beginning, he certainly has given me a lot of advice, some I/re tJew wafd and some I didn't take but probably I should have taken, but he's been helpful to me as far as advice goes, and he certainly can write well and I hope that one day I'll be able to write as well as he. I found out early what the power of the pen can do, because Daddy wrote a piece one time about the _e- \ia,__io_'_W of Old Main, and that was sort of the catalyst of the whole Save Old Main move- ment, because they were beginning to make plans to raze her and tear her down and build some more glass and mortar there and this one article, I think, prompted a movement among the Indian people, and needless to say, though she is much the worse for the wear, she still stands and plans are well under way to rebuild Old Main as a monument to Indian people and hopefully it will have a museum and hopefully the videotape of the series of these programs will be housed therein so that fifty years from now people can come in and see how we felt and talked back then. I think a lot of credit has to be given to my father for writing that article. I know another time there was a guy that was called Spaghetti who hung, that sounds strange, but he hung upon the wall of the mortuary over in Laurenberg and people-used to say let's ride over and see how Spaghetti is doing. And they tell me that the fellow was a corpse that was left here when a circus was playing and was Italian, and that accounts for the name Spaghetti, and that no one would pay for this guy's funeral so they just put embalming fluid in his rear end and hung him up on the wall and he hung there for, I under- stand, 61 years, and my father sometimes is late to respond to things but after LUM-190AB page 33 B: 61 years, he suddenly got incensed about it and decided that Spaghetti should have a decent burial, so he began to write articles and the next thing I know Congressmen of the United States...Congress was talking about what a terrible thing it was that this guy named Spaghetti was on the wall in Lauren- berg and tat he should have a decent funeral and he should be buried properly with all due respect. Needless to say, after it was picked up on the AP wires and and some Italian Congressmen got involved and a little comment Asome give and take in the news media, Spaghetti, God rest his soul, is now laid very deep in the sod somewhere, I don't know exactly where, but he's no longer hanging upon the wall. Those two things have given me an idea about the po @ r of the press. That also carries with it an accompanying sense of responsibility that you shouldn't use this thing without a great deal of care and you should be very judicious about printed matter because the printed page can be a good and a bad thing. When we began The Carolina Indian Voice the first edition was published in January 18, 1973. We put out a four page edition and who worked here on campus, I th"nk he worked in the room where they do all the printing supplies, and he had some rudimentary knowledge of printing, so he helped me put this first one together. God knows, Mr. Sharpe, that we didn't know, that if we really got in a tight that we could borrow things from you and other newspapers and fill up a page if we got in a tight, so we put out that first issue and we had big blank spaces like this and I took it down to the printing house and I was excited about it and the guy says, what the hell's all these empty spaces doing here and I told him that well, that's all the news we could get together, and he began to tell me about you can cut things out of other news...don't dare tell this, y ou know. And Mr. Sharpe asked me about it afterwards...I'll deny that I said it, but you can borrow from other newspapers if you're very careful, and fill up blank spaces. So we have learned as we've LUM-190AB page 34 B: gone along. I can't reiterate too much my feelings right now, but I'm gloriously happy. I have a spiritual nature that gives me comfort in bad times and good and I have some of both. Even when I put the issue out on Thursday and I sit down by the telephone Thursday afternoon because somebody's going to call and curse me out and call me a lot of things that I'm really not. I'm just a mama's boy who has a pot belly today. I'm gloriously happy and I feel that there's a need for journalism, no expressed reflection oni The Robesonian, but I really believe there's a need for a newspaper from the Indian perspective and that's the nedj I'm trying to fill. Now sometimes in the heat of battle I talk about the 1860 Democratic Party mentality emanating from The Robesonian but I really don't mean it most times. Except when I'm incensed about one thing or another. But I feel that I'm not in valid competition with The Robesonitt, that they're a daily-, and they fill a need and they certainly have a number of Indian subscribers who are faithful to them, but I would like to speak about the happenings in Robeson County from the eyes of a Lumbee Indian who was born and'bred here, and I would like to certainly 1iMfed' share the reading audience with The Robesonian and any other newspaper that would like to publish. I always say people threaten every once in a while to come in and start another newspaper and I say the water's fine, come on in. It's a free country. But I would like to live to see the day when Indian people are able to think for themselves and not react to something that's in the media, and I hope that the Carolina Indian Voice can help in this area to give people some idea of theit worthiness and 9iat a tremendous experience it is to be a Lumbee Indian of Robeson County or even Tuscaroras, I also think that's a right that belongs to my- Tuscarora brothers to call themselves that if they so wish. I certainly respect them and agree with them in principle on a lot of things, and of course there are some things that I don't agree with them on, but I cer- LUM-190AB page 35 B: tainly agree with them on the principle that they have the right to identify themselves as they so choose. I want The Carolina Indian Voice to be a res- ponsible organ and I want The Carolina Indian Voice to be economically sound and able to publish a newspaper in the true American sense, without being beholden to any interest other than the search for truth as we see it. I want The Carolina Indiit Voice to be the kind of newspaper that Indian people of Robeson County are proud to say that I'm a subscriber to that newspaper and if you read something in The Carolina Indian Voice, chances are it's probably right because they have a record of responsibility behind them, and that they try +o aren't so wild-eyed that they can'Abe objective and try to see the other fellow's side. I would likeAto be the kind of newspaper that can build a communicative bridge between the campus of Pembroke State University and the community, and God knows they need a bridge, because a lot of things that go on on this campus that isn't very- lice and it offends me very much, for instance, to see something called the Pembroke Braves fielding athletic teams and there be no Indians. Maybe one day when we get strong enough I can encourage people to bombard them with petitions to change their name to Pembroke Trojans or Pembroke Custer War- riors, or whatever they would like, or to do something about the Indian enroll- ment here, which is pathetic. I understand that Universities and colleges all across America are begging for enrollment, and I have a market that Pembroke State University might look to, and that's all the Indian kids who are graduating from Prospect High School, from Magnolia High School, from Pembroke Senior High School, and Fair Groves High School, which are, incidentally, predominantly Indian high schools, and they graduate seniors every year. So it seems to me that P.S.U. might look to this possibility for increasing the enrollment here and keep the thing going. I want to be the kind of newspaper that will be able to say something, even if it's negative, about Pembroke State University without LUM-190AB page 36 B: being run out of town or being ostracized or being blackballed or being denied services of public relations department here. I don't like to feel like I have to write things, certain things so that I'll get cooperation. I'm building a newspaper and it's not going to be asking so much as demanding that they %3S k LApk be treated -I*k second citizenS by PS.U.'s public relations department, just like they treat anyone else. They don't ask any less and we don't ask any more. We just want to be the kind of newspaper that's responsible, works hard, puts out a newspaper, and we want to be treated as first class citizens. I think if The Carolina Indian Voice can become that kind of responsible organ, then it will get Indian people, who.are our primary reading audience, thinking in the same vein. When I go to Lumberton, or I go to any place in town, that I'd be treated as a first class citizen. I don't think I'm any less than anyone else and I certainly...I don't think I'm any more than anyone else but I certainly don't think:I'm any less. I like to treat ay man, black, Indian, and white with respect, and I would like to be treated, in turn, the same way. I want The Carolina Indian Voice to be that kind of organ and that kind of place where Indian people can write letters to the editor and the Indian people can verbalize their frustrations. I won't talk much longer because my- father and I have a lot in common. We're both em ioll and we get to talking about these kind of issues and then we start jumping around and threatening to steal the toilet paper and throw it up the trees and things. There's one issue in the news right now that I'm proud to have been a part of, and that's the movement to break double voting. Some of you might know and some of you might nolt know that there are six separate and distinct school systems in Robeson County, aiid God knows Henry Hall Wilson dropped by the office the other day, just like candidates drop by because they are beginning to find that Indian people do read The Carolina Indian Voice and the Indians do have LUM-19OAB page 37 B: the vote these days, thank God, and I was telling him about having six school systems and a littlelabout what we call double voting and he says, God, that's unbelievable. And I said well I hope I'll see that in some politics statement that you put out. So if he don't do it, don't vote for him. that's all I'm saying. But if he speaks strongly about the evil of double voting then may-be you should vote for him, I don't know. But double voting is one of those issues w here a newspaper finds it very difficult to be objective, and I frankly have spoken editorially. ; The Carolina Indian Voice has about the evils of double voting and that we would like to see double voting broken. I wouldn't want anyone to misunderstand me on that issue, and I think I speak for my associate ,^m ;sre ) editor, my sister Mrs. Connie and probablynfor my father too, and all the people who have an interest in the Carolina Indian Voice tbat double voting should be broken and broken forthwith and we have played apart in +;s in publicizing what's going onet whole area, the whole movement to break double voting. It's something that I'm very proud of. We've been to-..they had a hearing in Federal District Court in Raleigh last February 15, and things are looking very- well and we said so in The Carolina Indian Voice, and that there's going to be a glorious day when The Carolina Indian Voice can put a big headline across saying Double Voting Finally is Broken. Now I might be far afield, I don't know too much about journalism, I do know and I try to be objective, but that's one that I won't even try to be objective about. In case anyone asks, you can tell them that The Carolina Indian Voice advocates the abolition of double voting in Robeson County. I can't really tell you how fulfilled I am seeing a need and working hard to fill it. I don't want you to think that I'm always taking pot shots at Pembroke State University, either, because I think they've done a lot of good things and when they do something good I'd like to be in a position to say so but when they do.3 something that's not so LUM-190AB page 38 B: good I think we should also be in a position to say so, And I think Pembroke State University can go ahead and join the 20th Century and like everyone else take their share of criticism because I get cussed out every Thursday after- noon. I don't think P.S.i'T. is any better than I am. I think you can learn from criticism. I'd like, if The Carolina Indian Voice has any Fart Nm presenting criticism in any area that we'll do it with a kindly spirit and we'll do it in a restrained manner and that we'll do it as objectiVetvyas we can and as kindly as we can, keeping in mind that all of us, black, Indian, and white have to live in this universe and that the best way to do it is to share our ideas, be kind to one another, and to love one another and to work well together, because I talked to a bunch of Indians the other night and they said they weren't going nowhere, they was going to stay here, and I understand...just got through reading To Die Again, and it made me mad as hell, if I must say so. As they began to kill off iri p eE._ / and his cohorts I got the idea that the whites aren't going anywhere. I talked to Reverend .oya Johnson the other day and he said he wasn't going anywhere, he hoped to go back to the North Carolina General Assembly, but I guess what we've got to do is learn how to work together and I hope that The Carolina Indian Voice is never accused of being negative and being anti-white or anti-black, because not only do we want to build a communicative bridge between the campus and the community, but also want to build a bridge across which people can share ideas and relate to one another between Lumberton and Pembroke, between all whites in the county and all the Indians and all blacks to have a good inter-relation. I'd like The Carolina Indian Voice, finally, to play a part in building the kind of climate that people live in where they can say what they would like to say, but say it in this kindly fashion and say it in a reasoned sort of way, and say it, hopefully, soft-spoken, without being answered with a negative feed back and shot gun blast as we have known it in Robeson County. Robeson County needs LUM-190AB page 39 B: to be the kind of place where people can live together and disagree but agree at the self-same time. For instance, Mr. Sharpe has a long history in the hefc publishing world here and hars done a lot of good. Some of you should look at the historical editions they put out, primarily the one in 1951. They did a very good job about the Ku Klux Klan. I think they editorially opposed them all the way and they did a lot of work on the Old Main issue, but every once in a while th1 publish something, or an editorial just offends the devil out of me, and if you ever read anything in The Carolina Indian Voice saying that so and so in The Robesonian is this and that, I respect )U very much, but I will disagree. God, it's good to see a man who wears a tie and smiles often and is soft-spoken and you can disagree with without getting shot. That's my.. .The Carolina Indian Voice, to me, is a jsOr __ If I could give anything I have to give it would be the feeling of fulfillment that I have. Though we work long hours and though we sometimes come close to starving and sometimes we wonder how we're going to pay the bills, I tell you I'm a happy man. I'm doing what I want to do and I think filling a need that needs to be filled in Robeson County, and that is to give the people, whatever color they might be, black, Indian, or white, or my smiling brother which we casually mentioned, a newspaper that they can be proud of, but a newspaper that6re~s given to them from the' Lumbee Indian perspective. Thank you very much. L: Thank you Bruce. Now let's leave Pembroke for a little while and go nation- He rr o yo"imo) wide. This handsome gentleman to my left is not from Pembroke. He's from the Yakima tribe in Washington state. He received his education at the Univer- sity of California and at the University of Washington. He is representing and he is also News Director of the American Indian Press Association in Washington, D.C. I asked him what this title means and he said, "American Indian Press Association is a news syndicate on Indian matters serving the American Indian newspapers in the nation." Without taking any more of his LUM-190AB page 40 L: time, because he talks nationwide, let's have now Mr. Lukawitz. L: Most of the remarks I'd like to share with you will not be personal, out of my own experience. What I waftt to do for you in a brief capsule this evening, is to portray the two centuries of the history of Indian journalism and what I consider a happening of the last four or five years, which is a massive communication and information explosion among the American Indian people our- selves. Prior to my entry into journalism, one of my favorite novelists, AO is the very well known and late novelist John Steinbeck. The night before Steinbeck died, he confided to a friend of his that the only people left in American whom he envied were the black people, because he said black people were-t le only people who, from a literary or journalistic viewpoint, who yet had an unexplored universe of experience. Reading those remarks, although they are some of the last recorded remarks of my favorite novelist, I see him departing into another life, feeling a sense of criticism on my own part. First, I disagree with him that there are not many e universes besides the black universe, which perhaps are unexamined. And secondly, I would hold up before John Steinbeck the three hundred years of the: terary tradition of the American Indian people, beginning in the colonial period, and theznearly 150 years of the experience and development of the tradition of journalism and news publications beginning here in the east, moving across into the midwest, and up into Alaska during the 1800's themselves, prior to our own time. Recently in New Mexico a federal judge, ruling on a critical land matter, said that there exists between the Indian people of America and the predominantly white society, what he described as "A turquoise curtain of misunderstanding." I respond to this kind of language emotionally and intellectually I recognize this curtain hanging amid the many communities, hanging around the Indian community, and constituting a barrier of understandings, misunderstandings, violence, and sometimes death. As a person trained in 'the fields of philosophy and literature LUM-190AB page 41 L: I began the formal employment in the so-called mass media in the very late sixties. I worked for the Hearst empire referred to a little earlier this evening. At that time, as an Indian person in his late twenties, I went through quite a bit of \'\^StN' experience, that being the collision with the mentality which governed what most people called the mass media In America;, and what I simply call the majority media. That would be the mentality which controls network output, which controls the focus and content of wire services, which controls the philosophy of magazines like Playboy, Cosmopolitan, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, from the very shoddy, the very tawdry, to the most excellent... ...were enabled to be carried across vast distances, and therefore larger human enterprises were becoming possible among the Indian people.. The first experience of Indian journalism in the 1820's in Georgia, is one of tragedy. There a 86 character, wiat's called an 86 character word system of the orig- inal Cherokee language was created by a young Cherokee in his thirties named Sequoia. He put into the hands of the Cherokee people the option and possi- bility of becoming the fate Indian tribe in America, and literate means simply 'able to sa letters for communication.' That news- paper, called The jherokee Phoenix, had a very short life of just over six years and the demise of the paper, the demise of the printing press in Cherokee country came out of the collision of the tribal interests of the Cherokee people and the state authorities V the state of Georgia. We have, in this case, a precedent for the Watergate situation, a president, perhaps, ignoring the Supreme Court ruling. The first instance in our collective American history of an American president failing to heed a Supreme Court decision was the case of Worcester vs. Georgia in 1832. The result for Indian people of the failure of the president to heed the Supreme Court decision was something we all know LUM-190AB page 42 L: called The Trail of Tears. The massive deportation and displacement of a large historic community of Indian people far into the American mid-lands. Their presses which had published in the native language for a period of six years were left in destruction, but not until for the last few weeks of that press the government took it over and began to print anti-Cherokee propaganda. That press was then dismantled and large portions of the press, the type-set, the _, much of its paper, today is rotting in the soil near Calhoun, Georgia, two miles outside in the old Cherokee cap -al of The center of American Indian journalism moved from the 1820's into the heartland of Oklahoma, where within a period of about 15 years most of the so-called five civilized tribes were producing free and weekly newspapers in their LMpa a 8 L-L a ll~. own languages. Partly in an Anglicized Cherokee language, or an Anglicized Shawnee, using the letters which we read in our contemporary papers, and partly in the old Sequoia alpha- bet. Today there are still Cherokee Indians who are able to read and write in this language. Like, perhaps, yourselves, in the 1820's in Georgia the Cherokee nation was the subject of a great wave of missionization and Christiani- zation. As a result today there are many Christian hymnals, all of the four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the whole of the New Testament, not much of the Old Testament, still available for reading in this 86 character Cherokee word system. These are the heirloom literary classics of many of the Cherokee people. Through the whole of the 1800's there was a total of 42 Indian newspapers published from _____, Georgia, up through Point Barr, Alaska. All but one of these were printed in the original native or tribal languages. Through the beginning of our current century, the 20th century, there was a great waning of the field of .ndian publishing because of the Federal policy.of what was called allotment of land and the assimilation of Indian peoples. The intent of the federal government, the intent LUM-190AB page 43 L: of Congress, the intent of succeeding presidential administrations was to annihilate Indian people culturally, and their means were to eCVct__ land into very small farming parcels, JeryiCes ajlieyteJ ~'o Indian UcNer various kinds of peoples and HI -treaties such asAgoods, various kinds of assistance were these , no longer delivered to trib-es so tribes could parcel fA out to their own members, but made directly to individuals, to individualize them like non- Indian or white people, so that largest period of psychological devastation for Indian people was in the period from around 1885 up to the period of 1934. This is rtalQ -4Ae deep and darkened spiritual ages of Indian people. The near demise of Indian journalism reflects that state of a strained psyche, a strained soul, the dying of the spirit, a belief that there will be no hope. The boom age of Indian journalism, which we're really on the crG todays ofsbegan during the period of the New Deal under the Democratic administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During that period a man named John Collier became Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Collier had despaired of the structure and the workability of American society and had spent some time in South and Central America, and then lived in the Pueblo country before F.D.R. was elected, in '32. Collier then became Commissioner, got Congress to call a complete turn-around of policy and orientation, and that began the psychological restoration and new kind of security possible among Indian communities. Collier's philosophy is one which Indian people primarily in the West became beneficiaries of and today have largely built upon. That was the philosophy we hear of, self-determination, with sufficient funding to make that kind of takeover of community institutions possible. I spoke earlier of the "turquoise curtain of misunderstanding" which seems to reign all Indian people in America. I look on the sfL"nearly .150 years of the development of Indian journalism, which is really Indian people talking to other Indian people about current things, current problems, current beauties, LUM-190AB page 44 L: current tragedies, as the development of minority media in America as opposed to the majority media. I mentioned that it's my conviction, based on my own journalistic experience and based on the readings of most of the Indian news- papers of this 150 years, that there was a mentality governing the so-called mass media which is supposed to serve the total population of the country, and in my judgement failed largely, failed seriously, sometimes deadly, and tragically. The minority media have, since the 1960's, beginning in 1961 have produced a new wave of Indian publications country-wide, which now num- ber nearly 300. In addition there is the development of radio turned toward Indian interests, prepared by Indians, and serving Indian information needs, and entertainment needs. unlti in the last four years have we seen what you might think of as the electronicization of Indians: Indians becoming able to master the technology of television and the technology of cable television, and now making it available back into the heart of the Indian community itself. I think if we had to make a generalization about how the suburban press, the rural press, the county press, the daily or city press, sometimes the national press has treated the Indians, it might be something like this: they talk about us, namely Indians, to themselves. They describe us to themselves for their own utility. They do not have the well spring of existence which opens up the nature, the depth, the different kinds of Indian existence _, and therefore cannot peak our truths to themselves accurately. Either tbe Indian people are teN. to in what I think is a rather oeou'! fashion, or the massive Indian needs, Indian problems, Indian tragedies, Indian ecstasies are simply edited out-of existence. It is my experience, and I travel constantly) )e/tI- vt;U 0 I It in far western Canada in the province of...lberta, meeting yet other Canadian Indian newspeople who are attempting to start a new syndicate, that the treatment of Indian communities and Indian tribes country wide and internationally in our hemisphere is not Very different at all. LUM -190AB page 45 L: It seems that Indian people leave never quite yet been misunderstood. We are the invisible community of America. We're not considered, really, to be here, yet we are the aboriginal, historic, nearly eternal people of this continent. ...I am very pleased today to have had the opportunity to spend a number of hours with Bruce Barton and to come to know his father. I have almost an automatic- love in meeting these kinds of men who are able and willing to undertake the kind of lonely effort wh;ch is required, to try to portray, and as Bruce said, to search for truth, not to pretend you're delivering truth, OWS INWa(N2l but to search for truth and to bring it before the consideration of need i a- community. I have met other royal families of the word among Indian communities country wide. I thi'k that your work is immensely lonely. I think that your work is immensely...goes immensely unrewarded, but I think net 44$ that the- A effect of strengosening the word, the printed word, the journal- istic word, the literary word, among the Indian communities will have its net effects within 15 to 25 years. That means that what you have done feeds itself back into the educational process of a community, and what you are some providing is Avery rarefied lenses, very clear experiences very clearly articulated. Indian people today-working in the field of news, and I mentioned country wide there are nearly 300 Indian newspapers, about 57 radio stations, and about 12 television shows being prepared by Indians for the Indians today, are really first rough drafts of our collective Indian history in this time. And I think that as Indian journalists and that .occasional Indian who can devote the time to a full book on an aspect of Indian life who are providing the first rough .Se ti Se. of our own time, our own history. I am especially excited as I travel, and I do...I don't travel for luxury, I travel on news assignments to develop news stories, that I find Indian peopled are the only people who are te a themselves to themselves and to their experience and to the history in a serious fashion. I thtnk that the develop- ment of journalism in a newly enhanced information explosion is perhaps one of T,UM-190AB page 46 L: the most serious indicators all of us have that Indian people have come into a new maturity and a new self-assurance, a new self regard, anew self esteem today. There are things which are reflected in the content of Indian journalism from Point BarrsL, Alaska to the Alligator Times in Hollywood, Florida, to Notes up on the St. Lawrence Seaway that reflect things that most other people don't really realize that we live. These, as I mention, may be edited out of existence in the non-Indian press, or they may be distorted, and occasionally __4 4_r _jQ cq ~ fAfdA bout the Indians CNCefN& I like the way you .e..y. LV ',, I like eI.. yzr u_-- v-sibty at, your hvmility a:-d your honesty this evening. There are conflicts which Indian people undergo country wide which perhaps only Indians can really understand, and certainly only feel. I realize I've grown lengthy and I'll make this as my final sule ____ and I'll be very brief. There are deeply buried, fully complex, and very d 'ficult to understand legal conflicts tlhiat all Indian communities are i( today, of various intensities, which are not considered ne.worthy by most editors of county or city papers or Tle ,NTew ?ork Times and so forth. These conflicts currently have Indians tied up on practically every matter in the country, all of them having to do with slfvival. I can think of, this evening, about 15 cases which are critical cases right now which will not be in tomorrow's paper. For instance, there are 19 historic Pueblos which have been located in the southwest in their current location for over 3000 years. On next Thursday in federal district court in Albequerque, a decision will be made on whether the...% ere are two corporations, whether the corporations are entitled under law to reroute rivers which may ensure the ultimate death, after 3000 years, of these Pueblos in their current location. I can't think, as an Indian and as a person who can listen to a Pueblo tell me problems and as an intelligent man who can follow the proceedings of court, that this is not an almost apocalyptic event for 19 Pueblos. This is an instance of the kind of LUM-190AB page 47 L: the kind of legal conflicts which Indian people encounter country-wide which are deadly, which are serious, and which are edited out of existence. They're 6#Se not considered part of the public concern and the public agenda of America. There are cultural differences and cultural conflicts among Indian people and non-Indian people. The federal government, during its period of-assimilation and cultural annihilation of Indians prohibited all the exercise of the tradi- tional ways of being Indian, the customary ways, what on the inside of a culture you consider the true, the beautiful, the most ecstatic, the most meaningful, the most illuminati.0 way to be. These things were prohibited to be by the federal government beginning a second seige in 1921, not letting up until 1936. There are religious conflicts among Indian people and I don't think this evening I need to go into these. The last conflict that I can see among Indian people is a conflict of what I would call world views. jAat Indian writers are ultimately propelled by whether they work in the literary words or the journal- istic words is a sense of the ultimacyof reality itself. I would like to add to this gentleman., that most Indians aren't...most people described as Indians do not-call themselves Indians or native Americans. We call ourselves by our tribes. I'm a Yakima. I know San Juan Pueblo, I know _people, but none of us call ourselves Indians unless we're describing ourselves to other people. It's a convenient working tool for people who are not Indian, and I Lh.I fEoK _. So I would like to say, in conclusion, that there is an information revolution beginning to occur among Indian people in a depth and a dimension of which has never occurred before. My function as the news director of Ske American Indian Press is to preside over the news operations which-were began three years ago in Washington., D.C., which is the beginning of a news syndicate among Indian people, a nationwide syndicate based on the commonality of issues and problems Indian people face. In the Pe o io late all of 1974 we will be going into syndicated national Indian news radio, LUM-190AB page 48 L: In 1975 we will begin the transmission of television shows, perhaps by cable. Thank you. L: Thank you, Richard LeCour, representative of the American Indian Press Associ- ation of Washington, D.C. Thank you, Mr. Roy Thompson, Columnist of The Winston-Salem Journal. Thank you, Bruce Barton, editor-publisher of The Carolina Indian Voice of Pembroke, and thank you Willie :rench-Paul, founder bf Globe International Picij:lres. This ends our video-tape program. The mem- bers of the rOtQP) o4e_ _____ will be available for questions and answers. B: Following this video taped program in Moore Hall on Pembroke State University campus, we came together again several days later for the reflection part of the program. Present at that session were yours truly, Lew Barton; Jack Sharpe, J.A. Sharpe Jr., editor of The Robesonian; Dick Browne, of the Observer; Bruce Barton, who served again to direct questions; and Mrs. Ira Pate Lowry, the lovely lady who was mistress of Ceremonies on all i, these programs, in fact. None of us found anything about the program to criticize. It was very favorably received by all of us. Bruce asked Jack Sharpe, editor of The Robesonian, for comment regarding the relationship between him and me, a relationship that began prior to World War II, lQth his father, T.A. Sharpe, Sr.,, and which began between Jack Sharpe and myself, J.A. Sharpe, Jr. in 1947 following the death of his father. Mr. Sharpe replied to Bruce that the relationship I had with his newspaper which was more important even than the many stories and features the paper has carried by me down through the years, is my connection as what newspapers call a resource individual. That is, I am the liek between the Lumbee Indian.community, between the Indian commun- ity and Robeson County and The Robesonian, now in its 101st year of publication, which is the county newspaper, and publishes all the county-wide scope. These LUM-1.90AB page 4y B: things, needless to say, were very flattering to me, and I was certainly proud of my son, who was I felt, very humble indeed when the director of the American Indian Press Association came up to me prior to the meeting and he said, "I've been looking forward to meeting you all day long." I am flattered, I am humble, I pray to God that I may be able to live up to the enormous confidence people have placed i.n me over the years, and that I will be able to perform in a manner in the future that is comensurate with my calling. I also pray to God very earnestly that this work with the University of Florida and its American Indian Oral History program will go forth as a blessing and as the kind of bridge Bruce spoke of; a bridge of understanding between ourselves, between the university, and all people everywhere. The dream nearest to my heart has always been one of promoting human understanding. Pray for me, brothers. I realize that all this is addendi, but I would like to close this very successful tape recording with an original poem of mine: If everyone should say a prayer of blessing once for me Then blessings rare beyond compare Mine own would ever be. I'd never need a friend in vain, Nor want for anything. I'd never suffer so much pain, My heart refused to sing That prayer would tumble Heaven down With doting Cherubims _ Those cxies would rise into the skies Like Strains of dreamy violins. If everyone should say a prayer of blessing once for me Then blessings rare beyond compare Mine own would ever be. Contact Us | Permissions | Preferences | Technical Aspects | Statistics | Internal | Privacy Policy © 2004 - 2010 University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries.All rights reserved. Acceptable Use, Copyright, and Disclaimer Statement Last updated October 10, 2010 - - mvs