I mean you have to realize that Vanport was a place where people from all over the country were thrown into this huge housing project. Many of those people had never been around Blacks. Many of those people had never been around other Whites, other than just like them.

Vanport, as a seven-year-old kid was a very exciting place. For me, leaving the South, we had a house. We lived in a house. We never lived in an apartment. We never lived in a project. So, in a project, when you're thrown into a large project with about 30,000 other people . . . I mean you know it's a city. It's a self-contained, prefabricated city. It had stores, you know . . . shopping centers, icehouses, because we didn't have refrigerators. School nurseries. Everything. Everything in Vanport was numbered. Icehouses #1-50. Schools, 1, 2, and 3; shopping center 1, 2, and 3; recreation center 1, 2, 3, and 4. So, everything was numbered.

I mean, as far as if you had a wagon, you could go to the store and haul peoples' groceries home for them. Or you could go to the icehouse, and people would ask you to go and get ice for them . . . you know, because everybody had iceboxes. So, you could make a lot of money as a kid in Vanport. there was a lot of money being made during the war. A lot of that was passed on down to us. You didn't get rich but you made . . . if you went and got somebody a twenty-five pound block of ice, they gave you a quarter. A quarter would go along ways in those days. So, it was a very exciting city . . . it was a very thriving city. In addition to the fact that you had 3 or 4 recreation centers, every major neighborhood had a rcreation center. Every major area had schools and it was just . . . it was a federal school system. It was just an amazing place to grow up as a kid.