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1950s / 60s & Civil RightsNorfolk & the NavyI graduated high school in 1955 Milwaukee and joined the Navy. After Boot Camp and Class A Fire Control (Weapons) school in Bainbridge MD, I was stationed in Norfolk assigned to a Navy Destroyer. I soon discovered that the Bible Belt South did not live according to the Golden Rule, they had legalized racial segregation, supported enthusiastically by the Southern churches, enforced legally by the police, with violent hanging tree enforcement by the Ku Klux Klan, and they treated blacks or any non-whites ethnics terribly.Aboard ship, I had made friends with many sailors, including Blacks, and when we went to Norfolk, we would experience a totally segregated society. On the ship regardless of race we all got along fine but we could not hang together on shore. There were many Blacks living in Norfolk, and they were cordoned off into very poor areas of town. Norfolk's main downtown, 'Granby Street' and the entire city, with all of its parks and beaches, were available only for Whites. Blacks were allowed only in designated 'Colored' - run down - sections and a downtown area called 'Church Street' which actually had the character of a New York City street, colorful and full of its crazy itself. Even the rowdy East Main Street sailor Bars, known infamously throughout the world, were for Whites only. Bus stations, water fountains, hotels, taxi cabs, movie theaters, restaurants, city parks, swimming beaches, everything and everything were separated by race. The whites had all the best, the blacks - by law - all the worst. What fool invented this madness? What a sick bunch of idiots thought this one up. This can't be the USA! But it was and I would have to learn to deal with it!I didn't like the south. It was a dreary and dreadful place, segregated, filled with crazy Bible thumping haters, all Dixicrat conservative with bloody Civil Rights Battles going on. I spent my weekend liberties in Manhattan and loved the ambiance and personal freedoms. Liberty in Norfolk involved three streets - the Whites went to Granby and the World's most infamous East Main, and the Blacks went to Church Street. Norfolk has that dark dismal look of poverty and of a dismal stagnating prison about it. I didn't think anyone raised in the North would want to live here; it definitely didn't have that highly Technicolor warming appeal of the North. In the South, it was cheerless, where African Americans walk around stooped and looking depressed, as Jim Crow segregation laws and rampant racial prejudices enforced by a psychotic police force held them down.Life aboard a WW II DestroyerMy first months aboard my WW II Destroyer were a roller coaster ride. They had returned from an extended deployment from the Middle East but soon we were at sea constantly on Anti Submarine Warfare (ASW) exercises. ASW was a high, shooting the guns, was exciting too, but chasing down a submarine was the biggest "Cat and Mouse" game in town and it was fun what with the chase, the anticipation and closing in for the kill. We practiced on American submarines and were ever watchful for the Soviet subs tracking our carrier and chased them too. The gun system albeit accurate and deadly on a propeller driven aircraft, was World War II technology and it was not on Jet planes that could fire on us from outside our gun range.Like the crew of every ship afloat today, the compliment of a destroyer is a cross section of America itself. A Bosun's mate is a soda jerk from Detroit, and a machinist mate is a former factory worker from Pittsburgh and a fire control man, like me, from Milwaukee. There's a farm hand from Kansas who hadn't been more than twenty-three miles from home until he enlisted. There are Blacks from Southern cotton fields, and wheat farmers from North Dakota. There's a milkman from California and a dental student, a policeman and a nightclub operator from New York City. The destroyer life has made ex civilians real sailors. It was soon after World War II and we had many veterans on the ship. Like all other Tin Can sailors, I always thought the Cans were the best Navy duty a man could want.However, Tin Cans were a rough life, full of thrills and spills and anyone whoever rode Destroyers has earned my everlasting respect as to what navy duty is all about. One day, I was high lined to a heavy cruiser as an observer for a fire mission with the USS Iowa. Standing on the cruiser deck, I realized how tough the Destroyer sea duty was. While the cruiser was steady through the sea, my Destroyer was bucking and heaving, rising up 40 feet to the level of the carrier's flight deck and I could see the forward sonar dome on the bottom hull rise above the surface, then diving 90 feet below into the froth.There didn't seem to be much distinction between blacks and whites on the ship. It was during the Cold War and we were in it together, our guns being manned and ready by both black and white. Heck, James, the best bar room brawler I ever met, who saved my ass many times when I was on Military Police trying to break up Bar Fights in Europe, was black as the ace of spades, small but tough as a Red Oak, and scarier than a grinning Godzilla with gold teeth! Another friend of mine was a homicidal maniac dark colored Puerto Rican from Brooklyn who tipped the scales at around 5'3", had muscles in his breath and who I'm sure stayed up at night thinking of ways to dismember anyone who looked cross eyed at him and make it look like an accident. Other blacks were Cousins, he and I manned the Main Battle Gun Director together and Jack Hawkins who was the best three-inch gunner we had. We had tough blacks in Naval Infantry and when I was on desert patrol in the Persian Gulf, Eddie Duncan from Boston was my best friend and fearless war fighter, and he was a great gunner and could handle himself in hand to hand. I felt safe with him by my side.Yes, I had lots of black and brown friends while in the Navy even dated a few black girls who I met at Roseland when visiting New York City and never gave it a second thought, but I dared not admit that in the south and kept my mouth shut. There were no real racial attitudes on my ship, unless of course, you were an ignorant racist redneck looking for a dentist to replace missing teeth lost in a fight after throwing around the "N' word. Destroyer sailors got along and were ready to die for each other, well, except for those thieving scaly wags who begged off their shipboard responsibilities - black, white or any person, didn't make any difference, you were going to get your comeuppance. But when we went ashore in Norfolk on liberty we went to different sections of town as directed by Jim Crow laws. Maybe that was a good idea to keep the murder rate down when red necks harassed northern blacks and thought they could get away with it.It was like a Greek Tragedy, when a southern redneck dipshit used to bossing around passive southern blacks who were basically uneducated field hands keeping their heads down and mouths shut in the segregated south, calling them "Nigger" and having them grin and walk away, but when they tried that with a northern black from Brooklyn or Philadelphia with a "Don't Fuck With Me Retard" attitude, all hell broke lose. The northern blacks would grin too, and then proceed to change the religion of the redneck, or at least make him wear diapers for a week because a beer bottle got shoved up his ass. What did these southerners know about tough Red Dog Irish battling it out for big city territory with tough Blacks and crazy Puerto Ricans on the streets of Boston, New York and Philadelphia? My God, they were a trained militia capable of massive destruction on loud-mouthed racists. The same happened to those who called the Irish "Paddy" or Puerto Ricans "Spics." You got some recompense which usually was some violent action against your body and for sure, back on the ship, your toothbrush will find its way into a slightly used toilet to add flavor. I mean, didn't these ethnic name callers know that inner city Irish had no common sense, they loved to fight, drink and sing Irish songs (in that order).There was nothing to do in segregated Norfolk. How in the Hell can southerners live this way? Well, what they do is have private clubs, just for whites that also serve booze and have bands and dance floors. What was available for sailors was East Main Street and I know you heard this one before - "Most have the vice and inappropriate conduct in the Western Hemisphere was invented on East Main. When East Main was in full swing, all the breweries on the east coast worked three shifts… It raised the standard for hellholes. The world's infamous section of East Main Street was only (maybe less) three blocks long and lined with Bars on both sides of the street with names such as "Virginian," "Golden Palomino," "Rathskeller's," "Ship Ahoy," "Paddock Lounge," "Red Rooster" and etc. The Bars served only 25-cent lean draft beer.If a Bluejacket's couldn't find it on East Main, it had to involve gay penguins or nympho sea turtles.' Our typical liberty usually wound up on East Main Street. It was famous throughout the world, they wrote books about it and you could find every sin covered in every religion in the world, all in three or four blocks. The place was a veritable Kasbahs of Carnal Delight. The place was so bad; it didn't even register a blip on the Morale Richter Scale. East Main was right up there with Sodom and Gomorrah. It was the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' and the lowest level of the largest outhouse ever built. East Main was the K-Mart of whoredom. If you had twenty bucks and you couldn't satisfy any particular lust desire you were hauling down there, you had to be into something involving baby ducks and penguins.East Main was a five-star hell whole where you could buy passion in fifteen-minute increments from women whose panties went up and down like a tin can's signal flags, where you could drink cheap beer and pee in the street. Fleet sailors warned us recruits that sooner or later, we would be rolled on East Main Street. Just hope that she was kind enough to stick your ID and liberty card in your sock before she vanished with what was left of seventy bucks and your wallet? If Guinness had a record for the sleaziest bars per square inch, it would read. 'East Main, Norfolk'. They sold enough draft beer on a Saturday night to fill the New London diving tank, and most of it got pissed away in the adjacent alleys on the way to the bus stop up on Granby Street. While on East Main Street, it would often be our goal to drink a few beers at each bar, starting at the upper end of one side of the street, and drink our way down the street, then come up the other side. Needless to say I never successfully accomplished this goal. As a young man not used to alcohol, even though the beer was lean reduced to 3 per cent alcohol, I would get drunk before the round robin tour ended and wind up puking my guts out in an alley.After drinking ourselves silly on East Main Street, we were ready for some coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. A [White only] Christian Mission offered these amenities if we would listen to their "save my soul," preaching first. One time we tried this and listened to well mannered young men try to convert us to being 'Born Again' with sweet talk and using words like "anointed." But it was for Whites only; anyone one else was going to Hell. I thought - Christians, Huh? To this day whenever I hear that "ANOINTED" word I get a nauseous chill up my backbone! The bus ride back varied in quality depending on the time you left, a late return meant ridding with a large group of sailors in various states of drunkenness with random puking. If you missed the last bus back to NOB which left around 2:00 A.M.We had the NOB Gym at our disposal and I as a fitness freak I went there often to work out. I met James at the NOB naval base gym working out; he was a small diminutive Black man muscled all to the core of his 150-pound frame, but he could do 250lb. presses like they were just ten pounds. If the gym had heavier weights, I bet he could do 300 pounds plus. I had done a little Golden Gloves and James was the best fighter I had ever met. I watched him before he gets into a sparing fight he stands there with his hands on his hips calmly observing, looking for what the opposition has to offer. I had expected somebody bigger and, frankly, more chiseled a square chin and all and machine-like, like those Hollywood charactures of tough men, but James looks remarkably ordinary and I sure didn't expect a Black man in this segregated South to be the best fighter around either. James was a killer, or he could be, but he played Mr. Nice Guy. One time at the base enlisted club we were lifting weights and he took his shirt off and all we saw were rippling muscles beneath his ebony Blacks skin. He was bench pressing more than 350 pounds and jerking 400 pounds.He had muscles and fast hands and must have been professionally trained in the sweet art of boxing. One of the Rednecks, who had been saying nasty things about Negroes, stopped and shut his mouth when he saw James, but we wished James had shut it with a right cross. James seemed to be passive and willing to take a lot of racial crap from racist Whites, something I would never have stood for, but I didn't really know what it was like to be Black in the South, where you got absolutely no protection from the police who would send you to long terms in jail no matter how justified you were in defending yourself against attacks from White racists.James is the Redneck's worst nightmare, as he can easily tear a new ass hole into men twice his size and with multiple assailants at the same time. Of medium height and build, he has an open, friendly face with laugh lines in the corners of his eyes and mouth and he looks "Nice and Friendly" When he walks over cat like, to say hello it's with a slight swagger that strikes me as distinctly military and damned dangerous. He smiles brightly as he introduces himself. I made sure to be friend him and little did I know then that I would meet him all over the Mediterranean saving my ass in bar fights. James became my friend and we had a symbiotic relationship, he rescued me from some real bad bar fights. He was one hellish street fighter and rescued me a couple of times when I was on Shore Patrol trying to break up a bar fight.We spent every week at sea. I myself was a cross between a good ole boy southern Red Neck and Classical liberal. I loved guns, hunting, and horses and was also classical music and was a Leonard Bernstein fan and loved his Broadway style music. In fact on my trips to NYC I went to lots of Broadway plays including his West Side Story. When we pulled along side another ship at sea for refueling, the music blared from their and ours speakers. It was usually some country - western thing but I liked the tempo of John Phillips Sousa march. I set our speakers to play John Phillips Sousa marching tunes followed by some hip Johnny Cash country music. When we refueled from a carrier, the Carrier's Marine Band stood in the lowered hanger deck and played tunes such as "Come to Papa Do" and the Marine Corps hymn. But we had speakers too, and on one occasion, we responded by playing the Army Air Corps song. What I really liked to do was educate sailors to some of the good stuff, so I set up a record player with classical music, Brahms, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Lizt, and my favorite, Tchaikovsky in the IC room, and played my classical music to large audiences from the mostly Southern crew, who never heard anything but shit kicking music. I even got the IC men to hook up and play my classical music on our ship's loudspeaker system when we went along side another ship for refueling. Believe it or not, it was always well received.In my early Navy days in Norfolk, when I didn't have a car or a ride for weekend liberty, I would take a Trailways interstate bus to New York City. When the bus stopped for bathroom or food in the South, we left the bus and parted company into separate racial facilities, but when in the North we shared all facilities together. If you were pissed off at Jim Crow and thwarted the segregationist pattern, like entering a "colored" rest room, you could be arrested and put in the local jails, where you would be treated horribly, being crammed into tiny, filthy cells and fed salt without water and sporadically beaten. In the South, the police didn't take kindly to whites that sympathized with the blacks. On one trip I met Mary Thomson, a young pretty Black girl who lived in Manhattan, and we became good friends. She was very smart and had a great personality and I wished I could date her when she visited her parents in Norfolk, but as things are in the South, I knew that was impossible. We could only breathe the fresh air of freedom when we crossed the Mason - Dixon Line.Once in the City, I would get a room at the YMCA in Times Square and explore the city, hitting the bars and night clubs like the Latin Quarter or Copocabana and the mid town dance emporiums, all places racially and ethnically integrated with beautiful women looking for hungry sailors. One of our favorite places was the Roseland Ball Room on 52nd Street. They used professional orchestras playing every kind of ball room music and even dance clubs from Harlem came down to jitterbug and swing dance with us. Sometimes I stayed at the decrepit and worn out Lincoln Hotel on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. It was full of retired actors and musicians riding our last days sitting in the lobby and commiserating about the good-ole-days. It was perfect for sailors looking for a cheap room on weekend liberty in the Big Apple. We ate at Greek Diners most of the time, there was almost a classic quality to the New York diner experience - singing musicians/waitresses en all - and they are all over the City offering burgers, eggs and full meals at cheap prices. They all feature all-day breakfast specials, steaks, pork chops, southern fried chicken and of course, a bottomless cup of coffee, the real surprise about the menu here is that they offer every demographic - Jewish, Italian, Irish and everything else under the sun, including enormous desserts, all baked fresh on the premises daily.I loved Greenwich Village where folk music blossomed, where clubs and coffee houses showcased singers like Pete Seeger and Odetta and nurtured a generation of newcomers, including Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Peter, Paul and Mary. Two of the most exciting American movements were calling Greenwich Village their home, the Abstract Expressionists, and the New York School of Poets was sharing the same bars, restaurants, and lofts. In the fifties, the most popular places were ice cream parlors, pizza parlors, drive-ins, bowling alleys, coffee houses and record shops. Pre-marital sex was considered sinful. "Going steady" was a stage young people took only if they were seriously on the path to marriage. Virginity was still a virtue in the fifties; and sailors on the prowl had to behave themselves. I loved the 1950's in New York City. I got to see the original West Side Story on Broadway and had coffee with the beatniks in Greenwich Village who read poetry out loud to jazz.At 20 years of age I had become a motorcycle bum. There were several Harley Motor Cycle Clubs in our Destroyer Squadron and I was invited to ride with them. I rode with my buddy as a passenger on his Road King for the next year before deciding I wanted the view from the front seat. There was a biker bar south of Portsmouth, called El Chico's that a bunch of us would frequent. A lot of the ragged civilians who drank there were members of the "Outlaws" motorcycle gang and some were real animals. My ride thru the El Chico's was one of my more exciting memories. Miss Vicky, one of better looking "Big Mama's" was tending bar that fateful day. It was a Saturday afternoon, warm and humid, and kind of quiet. Suddenly a first class Torpedoman told me, "You don't have a wild hair on your ass until you have ridden a bike thru a bar." It was a crowded place and like I said a lot of them were my shipmates. I burned rubber going out the door and left a 5-foot skid mark that lasted for a long time. I went sideways across the sidewalk into the street and zipped around to the bike parking area. The gate Marines later said it was a sight to see, one big red Harley come sideways out the door, rear wheel burning rubber, and a drunken sailor hanging on for dear life.We completed our shipyard duty and went to sea for shakedown. It was Friday evening, we had just come back from two weeks at sea checking out our weapon systems and conducting vigorous anti submarine war games, found the Soviets trying to interdict our battle group with their attack submarines, chased them across the Atlantic, suffered through never-ending General Quarters in cramped battle stations, through cold and rough 30 foot seas, were tired and salty, and now we were back in Norfolk at the D & S Piers. I had weekend liberty and was driving to New York City, and was loading my Cadillac up with sailors going in my direction. I had my "New York City" sign on my window and got a few and drove up Hampton Blvd. to Willoughby Spit, a peninsula at the end of Ocean View that operated a ferry service. This was also home to the 1690 foot long Ocean View Fishing Pier, which is the longest pier in North America. The main ferry route ran between terminals at the end of Hampton Boulevard near the Naval Base in Norfolk to what is now the small boat harbor near downtown Newport News.The ferry ride took half an hour each way and cost $1.25, plus an additional 20 cents for each passenger. The total daily traffic between the two locations averaged only about 2,500 vehicles. We waited in line as the cars lined up and finally boarded the S.S. Princess Anne Ferryboat. I found more sailors on the ferry and my Cadillac was loaded with five passengers all going to Time Square in Manhattan. We got off the ferry, picked up Route 17 through Virginia, Route 301 through Delaware, Route 40 through Maryland, then across the Delaware Memorial Bridge and onto the New Jersey Turnpike which was a 100 mile fast drive to the Lincoln Tunnel and Manhattan Times Square where I would drop everyone off. We stopped on a RT. 40 diner for a bathroom break and some food. The waitress came over and said they could serve the White sailors but not the Negroes sailors in our group.We were dumbfounded! Maryland was supposed to be north enough that you didn't have to worry about this crap, but Maryland was actually south of the Mason Dixon line, albeit a border state. I asked to speak with the manager and said something about sailors fighting for your country shouldn't have to go through this treatment.The manager enjoyed our disgust with him as he sneered and said smirking, no "Niggers" would be served. This incident was obvious to the other diner patrons who were looking at our discomfort, with approving grins on their faces and I heard those muttering things about Niggers knowing their place.I stood up and he put his hands on me. Well, I mean to tell you, we blew a shit fit. With a strong overhand right, I popped the manger in the face, broke his nose and definitely knocked out some front teeth whereupon he fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. I tipped over the table, threw the chairs, and invited anyone else in the diner to stand up and get theirs. Now they weren't smiling but running scared. Bunch of cowardly bastards! We tore the place up! Those fucking God Dam Red Necks, we could have killed every one of them. Thinking the State Troopers would be on their way by now, we jumped into the car, sped onto the high way, and shouted "New York here we come." One thing you could say about New York, nothing like Southern segregation was practiced there. Not those Blacks didn't have a hard time anywhere they went, but in the South it was so blatant and cruel and enforced by the police. The lowest White Trash scum relished in giving Blacks a hard time knowing they would get away with it; this Redneck scum reminded me of the Waffen SS Nazis in Hitler's Germany. I bruised my hand hitting that racist fucker in the mouth . . . Next time I will use my marshal arts training, an open hand and use the heel into the nose.I was 5'11? 150 lbs in great shape and was trained in boxing, street fighting and some martial arts. I had been in lots of fights and always did well; actually I kind of like them. My Shore Patrol and Military Police duties had got me involved in plenty of bar fights and some very severe street fights with communists who were trying to kill me. You wouldn't think a skinny guy like would be so ferocious.I was at sea for 3 years fighting the Russians and sailing into more than 40 ports in the USA, Caribbean, Europe Mediterranean, Middle East, and the Persian Gulf. Once we pulled into Miami and I had two disturbing racial incidents. The first, in Miami Beach, was when a bus stopped right in front of me. I stepped aside and let an elderly colored (that was the term for black people at the time) woman gets on before me. The bus driver made the woman and me get off so I could get on first. The second was in Norfolk when I got on a bus gone to the back where there were plenty of seats. The driver came back and told me the buss would not move until I got into the white section where I had to stand because it was full. Southern trash! I hated these people and their bigotry.Norfolk & IBMI saw an add from IBM looking for an engineer in Norfolk's Star Leger newspaper and said "What the Hell? I interviewed, took dozens of aptitude, electronic, mechanical and IQ tests, which placed me they said in the top ½ of 1 per cent of all IBM employees - I had a 135 IQ. IBM offered me a job as a Main Frame Engineer. They had interviewed more than 250 candidates and picked me. Over the next seven years I spent 3 1/2 years in IBM school in Upstate NY and gained a reputation I could fix anything, angry customers or broke computers. During this time I got involved in Democratic politics, advocated liberal social causes, did voter registration for Jack Kennedy and met him in 1960 when he visited Granby High School in Norfolk on a presidential campaign visit and again when he visited the Norfolk Naval Base in 1962. I was promoted into Product Support and went on many assignments around the USA and taught various computer courses at IBM’s educational centers in downtown Washington, D.C. and Mid Town Manhattan. I was doing well with IBM and going to advance mainframe schools as new technology came out. I supported special events like the CBS Presidential Election, Kentucky Derby, Disney World and Cape Canaveral rocker shoots.I wound up sympathizing and getting involved in the Civil Rights movement, which caused great consternation among my friends at work, neighborhood, and church. I also became active with the Jr. Chamber of Commerce, Volunteer Fire Department, Masons, and hung out with the ‘Good Ole Boys’ deer hunting in Dismal Swamp and fishing on Chesapeake Bay. Although very successful at IBM, having won many awards, going on coveted special assignments and attending years of advanced IBM Main Frame training, I was never really happy with an organization that tried to mold your soul to their image of a Dudley Do Right good guy.If you loved IBM, sold them your soul and sang their Whip' in Poof songs, IBM loved you back. What IBM did not appreciate were strong individuals or energetic personalities and they hated renegades, entrepreneurs, and nonconformist . . . like me!I really loved my job albeit I had to fight the War of Northern Aggression a.k.a. Civil War all over again while I was in the south. With my manner speaking, it was no trouble for these racist Southerners to see I was from the North and they took special glee in baiting me, trying to provoke a reaction that would get me in trouble with my IBM bosses. With much diplomatic trepidation, I kept my mouth shut and did not make any comments they could take offense at, like their attitudes toward Blacks and race separation. Otherwise, I would have had massive amounts of grief from the ever-present racist red necks. Many of my assignments were in the north, particularly New York City, and race issues never came up.What you would notice as one traveled the South was the terrible condition of the Black people, being separated from White by legalized and police enforced racial segregation and treated like dirt. Blacks didn't have good jobs and didn’t live in nice neighborhoods and you only saw them working in the lowest form of jobs as labors, dishwashers, and street cleaners. When you went downtown, they were not allowed to work in the department stores or banks; all those jobs were reserved for Whites. No matter what education a Black person had, they couldn't get a good job, they would have to travel north for good employment and for any respect. Even the Black Doctors and Lawyers professional class lived so far outside town in the country they couldn’t be accused of spoiling a White neighborhood.When I moved to Virginia I hunted in Dismal Swamp; the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia / North Carolina and Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia (the biggest swamp in the USA), were both full of escaped slaves. Today’s inhabitants were descendants of escaped slaves and convicts, renegades, Indians, and those who wanted to be free away from white mans’ civilization. Today the swamp is filled with semi toothless, grinning, bib overall, gun toting, guitar playing, alcohol crazed swamp rats who raise pigs and corn stills on small farms on little islands living in tin roofed shacks with outdoor water hand pumps and two seat shit houses. They don’t have money and use the barter system, use mules and horses, have no vehicles, usually have at least six kids and get their hard stores from the General Store out on the highway. We got to them by Jeep and trekking. They have excellent swamp survival and bootlegging skills and take absolutely no shit from outsiders. Rule number one in the swamp is “Be Polite.” No AND” talk or disparaging remarks ever allowed. Rule number two is get permission. Rule number three is learning what the word “Respect” means. Or pay! In the hot, humid, fetid snake filled swamp water, where insects rule and are as big as you fist, where flesh eating swamp critters are everywhere and shot gun blasts are heard only for a few feet and disregarded. A disrespecting body will decompose into nothing, bones en all, in less than a week. In North Carolina there were hungry alligators too.We had a Black girl named Hattie Jackson working as a secretary in our IBM office. She was exceptionably beautiful and smart, but she had to live in the poor black section of town in terrible conditions because Blacks weren't allowed to live when their salary dictated they could afford better housing. Two of the accounts I took care of for IBM were the City Halls of Norfolk and Portsmouth. I listened constantly to the politicos on how they schemed to keep the Black man down. There was a Poll Tax and rigged tests you had to pass to vote. It asked impossible questions to ensure Blacks could not pass it. Of course if you were White, you automatically passed it, really didn’t have to take it. Unless you were a white racist, it was impossible to get elected in the South, as the populace feared racial integration and social modernity more than the plague. I thought most White Southerners were stupid and racist and I disliked racist types immensely.I belonged to the Sweet Haven Baptist church pastored by Reverend Wyatt and what a God-fearing, Bible-toting, sugary-sweet and loving bunch of racists most of them were, including Reverend Wyatt himself who was the worst racist of all, and a Baptist Pastor at that. They were all bible thumping died in the wool segregationists and hid behind the scriptures for the worst sins man perpetuated on another man. I heard all about Negroes was this; the Jews that, Yankees were worse for trying to change the South, and even the Catholics had special nasty names. Bible thumping - sweet scripture talking - bigots, it was a very hateful society. Again, I paid little attention to all these horrible attitudes.My Mid Western family all belonged to the Masons and I joined the Portsmouth chapter and did my various catechisms to become a Master Member. But my chapter didn't accept blacks, they said Black people weren't considered free born, but were slaves in the USA or had a slave history, so they didn't meet the free born requirement for membership in the Masons. Blacks joined their version of the Masons called the Prince Hall organization. I couldn't believe such stupidity and reminded them that in the ancient world, the whites were slaves to the Greeks and Romans. They didn't know what I was talking about. It was like I was in a different world of full of organized and accepted prejudice. During these formative years, I was involved in the Civil Rights struggle for Blacks and was disgusted with these ignorant views. I refused to be part of an organization that discriminated like that.It's wonder how small little happenings in ones life can endure major changes, but a good example was my learning how to rebuild car engines. I had this old 1948 Plymouth whose engine had conked out and I was going to try to rebuild it, learning as I went. I figured, "What could I lose, the car was junk anyway." I had the head off and was trying to get the pistons out and was over at the local Car Parts dealer getting some tools and asking for advice. Another customer standing there, a Black man, offered some expert advice, in fact he came to my house, but as was the custom for Black people coming to a White person's house, came to the back door. ("What" I thought) I learned that he was a Baptist preacher in Churchland living in a shanty town off of Route 17, which was not too far from my house on Hatton Point Road. I will tell you this that man knew his cars! That was the beginning of a relationship with him where I took him as my mentor in learning about car engine repair.One day I am at his shanty house getting some advice and sitting at his kitchen table having a cup of coffee. He asked me if I could take his teenage daughter to the grocery store to pick up something and I said sure. She got in the front seat and off we went it was only just around the corner at a shopping center on Route 17 in Churchland. As I pulled onto a highway, a State Trooper pulled us over. With his pot belly and strong Southern Accent, he said, "What are you doing with this Neegra woman in your front seat?" I explained I was taking her to the grocery store. "Boy, don't you know that you never ride a Neegra woman in your front seat, looks like your taking her out, and you know that is illegal in Virginia." "By the way, you talk funny, are you a god-damned Yankee?" This went on and finally he let me go after the girl got in the back seat. Do I have to tell you how I felt?The stores along Granby in Norfolk and High Street in Portsmouth, specifically, their lunch counters and the city itself was the site of a battle that also played out in dozens of other cities in the South. They were segregated and Blacks were forbidden to sit at 'White only' lunch counters. The fight pitted black college students and a few of their white peers against the city's white power structure and its downtown merchants over the right to sit down and eat lunch. One day I was going to service a Bank Proof machine on Portsmouth's High Streets second floor bank. I walked up to the entrance, which was right next to the Woolworth entrance. There was a sit-in going on and the Police Vans came with their dogs and started beating the demonstrators. I was standing there in my blue IBM pin stripe and they set the dogs on me and beat me with their batons. I was tossed into the van and pushed to the back, all the while being called 'Nigger Lover." Eventually I was sorted out as an innocent bystander and set free. It was that day I became an activist for civil rights.I joined the Portsmouth Jr. Chamber of Commerce and became quite active. There were many worthwhile causes we participated in. Meetings were held once a month and were accompanied with famous speakers. Being a Military town, many of these speakers were Admirals, but many were local politicians who openly advocated segregation in the face of the Civil Rights movement being conducted at the time. I associated with all the local politicos and military types. I got involved in many projects, like distributing Bubble Gum Machines throughout Portsmouth. The Chamber sponsored the local Miss America beauty pageant, which afforded me the opportunity to participate in several Miss America Pageants as a Judge and organizer. We had a meeting to discuss what we were looking for, young women with poise, looks and talent. So, what I was supposed to do was audition perspective candidates and sends them on. There were several ladies I interviewed, one was black and really had the talent and personality and figure.Then the organizers chewed me out - didn't I know that Ms America was for white women only? Those fucking racists really pissed me off - I had to tell the black girl she didn't qualify for the contest because she was black. I will never get used to southern racism. One time I made speech on an HUD project being considered for downtown Portsmouth on Effingham Street outside the Naval Hospital, which was nothing but shacks inhabited by poor Black people. Whites were against raising this ghetto and replacing it with decent housing because they did not want conditions for Blacks to improve. I was for the project and was threatened with a ride out of town and a beating by the Ku Klux Klan. I invited them to try it now and I was prepared to beat the Holy loving shit out of them on the spot but they declined and left saying they knew where I lived. I started packing my 25-caliber automatic or P38 then. “Fucking Southern White trash cowards!The March on WashingtonI was teaching peripheral course in IBM’s Washington, D.C. education center on August 28, 1963, when over a quarter‑million people—about two‑thirds black and one‑third white—held the greatest civil rights demonstration ever held and Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” oration. And just blocks away, President Kennedy and Congress skirmished over landmark civil rights legislation. I skipped classes to attend the event and since I left early, found a spot on the Washington Mall close to the speakers stand. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators walked down Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The March on Washington represented a coalition of several civil rights organizations, all of which generally had different approaches and different agendas. The stated demands of the march were the passage of meaningful civil rights legislation; the elimination of racial segregation in public schools; protection for demonstrators against police brutality; a major public‑works program to provide jobs; the passage of a law prohibiting racial discrimination in public and private hiring; a $2 an hour minimum wage; and self‑government for the District of Columbia, which had a black majority. Nobody was sure how many people would turn up for the demonstration in Washington, D.C. Some traveling from the South were harassed and threatened. But an estimated quarter of a million people—about a quarter of whom were white—marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, in what turned out to be both a protest and a communal celebration. The heavy police presence turned out to be unnecessary, as the march was noted for its civility and peacefulness. The media, with live international television coverage, extensively covered the march. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King evoked the name of Lincoln in his "I Have a Dream" speech, which is credited with mobilizing supporters of desegregation and prompted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The next year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.Jim Crow – Mississippi StyleThe American Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and 1960s represents a pivotal event in world history. The positive changes it brought to voting and civil rights continue to be felt throughout the United States and much of the world. Although this struggle for black equality was fought on hundreds of different “battlefields” throughout the United States, many observers at the time described the state of Mississippi as the most racist and violent. In 1955, Reverend George Lee, vice president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and NAACP worker, was shot in the face and killed for urging blacks in the Mississippi Delta to vote. Although eyewitnesses saw a carload of whites drive by and shoot into Lee's automobile, the authorities failed to charge anyone. Governor Hugh White refused requests to send investigators to Belzoni, Mississippi, where the murder occurred. In August 1955, Lamar Smith, sixty-three-year-old farmer and World War II veteran, was shot in cold blood on the crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for urging blacks to vote. Although the sheriff saw a white man leaving the scene 'with blood all over him' no one admitted to having witnessed the shooting” and “the killer went free. Mississippi's lawmakers, law enforcement officers, public officials, and private citizens worked long and hard to maintain the segregated way of life that had dominated the state since the end of the Civil War in 1865.The method that ensured segregation persisted was the use and threat of violence against people who sought to end it. On September 25, 1961, farmer Herbert Lee was shot and killed in Liberty, Mississippi, by E.H. Hurst, a member of the Mississippi State Legislature. Hurst murdered Lee because of his participation in the voter registration campaign sweeping through southwest Mississippi. Authorities never charged him with the crime. A coroner's jury, held in a room full of armed white men, the same day as the killing, acquitted Hurst. Hurst never spent a night in jail.” Rifle wielding white Citizens Council member Byron De La Beckwith from Greenwood, Mississippi gunned down NAACP State Director Medgar Evers in 1963 in his Jackson driveway. Perhaps the most notable episode of violence came in Freedom Summer of 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Scherer left their base in Meridian, Mississippi, to investigate one of a number of church burnings in the eastern part of the state. The Ku Klux Klan had burned Mount Zion Church because the minister had allowed it to be used as a meeting place for civil rights activists. After the three young men had gone into Neshoba County to investigate, they were subsequently stopped and arrested by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. After several hours, Price finally released them only to arrest them again shortly after 10 p.m. He then turned the civil rights workers over to his fellow Klansmen. The group took the activists to a remote area, beat them, and then shot them to death. Dittmer suggests that because Scherer and Goodman were white the federal government responded by establishing an FBI office in Jackson and calling out the Mississippi National Guard and U. S. Navy to help search for the three men. Of course this was the response the Freedom Summer organizers had hoped for when they asked for white volunteers.BirminghamCivil Rights were afoot and then came along Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, who was a driving force in the push for racial equality in the 1950's and the 1960's. In 1963, King and his staff focused on Birmingham, Alabama. They marched and protested nonviolently, raising the ire of local officials who sicced water cannon and police dogs on the marchers, whose ranks included teenagers and children. The bad publicity and breakdown of business forced the white leaders of Birmingham to concede to some anti segregation demands. King adhered to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. In 1955 he began his struggle to persuade the US Government to declare the policy of racial discrimination in the southern states unlawful. The racists responded with violence to the black people's nonviolent initiatives. Martin Luther King dreamed that all inhabitants of the United States would be judged by their personal qualities and not by the color of their skin. In April 1968 a white racist murdered him. Four years earlier, he had received the Noble Peace Prize for his nonviolent campaign against racism. The battle lines are drawn in Birmingham, Alabama, that was, in 1960, "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States." Although the city's population of almost 350,000 was 60% white and 40% black, Birmingham (as most southern cities) had no black police officers, firefighters, and sales clerks in department stores, bus drivers, bank tellers, or store cashiers. Black secretaries could not work for white professionals. Jobs available to blacks were limited to manual labor in Birmingham's steel mills, work in household service and yard maintenance, or work in black neighborhoods. When layoffs were necessary, black employees were the first to go. The unemployment rate for blacks was two and a half times higher than for whites. The average income for blacks in the city was less than half that of whites. Significantly lower pay scales for black workers at the local steel mills were common. Racial segregation of public and commercial facilities throughout Jefferson County was legally required, covered all aspects of life, and was rigidly enforced. Only 10 percent of the city's black population was registered to vote in 1960. The Civil Rights plan called for direct nonviolent action to attract media attention to "the biggest and baddest city of the South," with a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including sit-ins at libraries and lunch counters, kneel‑ins by black visitors at white churches, and a march to the county building to mark the beginning of a voter‑registration drive. Most businesses responded by refusing to serve demonstrators. Some white spectators at a sit‑in at a Woolworth's lunch counter spat upon the participants. A few hundred protesters, including jazz musician Al Hibbler, were arrested, although Connor immediately released Hibbler. President John F. Kennedy later said of him, "The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln."My Personal Issues with SegregationI met Bettie (my wife) in 1967 while teaching a computer course in Stamford, Connecticut. At Audio Tape. Bettie walked into my class with this red skirt and the biggest smile, grinning ear-to-ear, and swishing in like a Hollywood debutante on the Red Carpet. When she smiled at me my heart went pitter pat and a huge chemical reaction occurred within me and she took me by storm with her looks, appearance, personality, and obvious sexiness. Bettie obsessed me and every day I went out of my way to talk to her. I wanted to see Bettie and prayed she would call. In fact, when she called, I was praying, Bettie, please call now. Just then the phone rang and it was Bettie. I asked her to come over to my room. When she got there, I immediately hugged and kissed her and it was the most beautiful experience of my whole life. We immediately fell into a passionate and loving relationship and saw each other whenever we could, which were very often. I would make special trips to Stamford to see Bettie and we would meet in New York City. While in Washington, D.C. My baby was the love of my life! Bettie and I have been together ever since we met.Later, along with a retired Navy man from Florida, I went to 6600 schools in Minneapolis for 8 months. . Jim was a real hateful segregationist who never stopped ragging me about my personal relationships with black people. He never stopped calling black people “Niggers” but I remained clam in his presence. So many Southerners I met were haters and racists, and I avoided them like the plague. This 6600 school was quite a feather in my cap as many of the instructors wanted this assignment because it was the latest technology and would guarantee a great future with Control Data. I was chosen because of the course development and creative writing I had already done. I also had written several training manuals that were published throughout Control Data. The 6000 series of computers were then the largest and fastest computer in the world and designed by Seymour Cray who was the foremost computer designer in the world.One day, JD Bronson, one of the other instructors from Virginia, an avid segregationist and first class bigot of blacks, Jews, and Hispanics, made some very nasty comments about Bettie, my girl [later my wife], pointed his finger at me, said I was a “Nigger Lover” and called Bettie that “black Nigger bitch” and dared me to do something about it. I almost killed him then! I knew just how I was going to do it too with a hand strike to his throat and then watch him suffocate on his own blood. But sanity won and I just turned away from him and stormed away afraid for what I was about to do. I was exploding with anger and was capable of violent actions against Southern segregationists.Control Data was opening a new School in Manhattan and they offered me the job of Main Frame instructor and I jumped at it. Living in the south was a losing battle for me and I went gladly to my Shangrila. New York in 1968. The moving truck came, packed me up and I transferred to Manhattan the same day Martin Luther King was assassinated. The King assassination riots, also known as the Holy Week Uprising, was a wave of civil disturbance which swept the United States were the greatest wave of social unrest the United States experienced since the Civil War. His death led some people to feel angry and disillusioned, as though now only violent resistance to white racism could be effective. Mrs. King, my next-door neighbor and the black couple told me later downstairs from me, that black rioters broke into my apartment looking for an easy kill, but that morning I had left for New York. What luck on my side . . . but the whole area was torn down, Burned, and all stores broken into and cleaned out. I left Washington and drove to Manhattan and got a room in the Holiday Inn. Bettie came to see me often, she was my love and I missed every minute away from her . . .Life was good! I was in heaven! I was in Manhattan teaching Grad School in Greenwich Village.P.S. The south has changed and no longer suffers those old racism ways.

My Southern ExperiencesIntroduction to the SouthIt was 1956 and I was in the South now assigned to a Navy Destroyer in Norfolk which was an ugly and mean city. Was this what the south was like I asked? I found everyday social life was very different from my home of Milwaukee. While Milwaukee was an open minded working man’s society, liberal and socially generous, with thousands of things to do, the South was backward and low brow nasty, with nothing to do and racially legally segregated. If you had to make a comparison between good and evil, the south was definitely evil. Us northerners wondered how anyone could live here in this colorless and dull witted society, hypocrites - full of Bible belt evangelical religion but hateful to the core. Whereas in Milwaukee segregation between the races was social and very much class oriented, here in the South the races were separated by law which was vigorously enforced by the police and they seemed to relish harassing Blacks, military or civilian. By civilized Milwaukee standards, these southern police were psychopaths, escaped guards from Nazi Germany prison camps. Any type of non whites, including Asians, Puerto Ricans, Caribbean's, etc., didn’t get any respect and were treated terribly. If your skin was darker, you were legally separated into a lower class and discriminated against. Even the Jews, just like my childhood buddies from my old neighborhood, were held in low esteem and treated like garbage.The week I arrived in Norfolk, the State of Virginia closed down most of its public schools to avoid racial integration, and they remained closed for the next two years. Based on Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that the South had to integrate its schools. Virginia refused to comply, instead, they set up private schools for whites across the state and established "Massive Resistance" to any integration plans from the Federal Government whom they hated. What are these Southerners? Evil incarnate or just misguided and stupid? I would never understand them! Aboard ship, I had made friends with many sailors, including Blacks, and when we went to Norfolk, we would experience a totally segregated society. On the ship regardless of race we all got along fine but we could not hang together on shore. There were many Blacks living in Norfolk, and they were cordoned off into very poor areas of town. Norfolk’s main downtown, ‘Granby Street’ and the entire city, with all of its parks and beaches, was available only for Whites. Blacks were allowed only in designated ‘Colored’ - run down - sections and a downtown area called ‘Church Street’ which actually had the character of a New York City street, colorful and full of itself. Even the rowdy East Main Street sailor Bars, known infamously throughout the world, were for Whites only. Bus stations, water fountains, hotels, taxi cabs, movie theaters, restaurants, city parks, swimming beaches, everything and everything were separated by race. The whites had all the best, the blacks - by law - all the worst. What fool invented this madness?! What a sick bunch of idiots thought this one up. This can't be the USA! But it was and I would have to learn to deal with it!The Southern ManifestoBy March 12, 1956, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia had convinced 101 of the 128 congressmen from Southern states, representing eleven states of the old Confederacy, to sign "The Southern Manifesto on Integration." The document claimed that the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racially segregated public education unconstitutional, constituted an abuse of power in violation of federal law. The manifesto accused the Court of jeopardizing the social justice of white people and "their habits, traditions, and way of life" and claimed that the Brown ruling would "[destroy] the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races," referring to the era of racial terror and a Jim Crow legal caste system that had been reality for most black Americans since the end of Reconstruction.Norfolk Liberty - yuck - Pugh - ugh! America's Hell HoleNorfolk’s claim to fame was not its military bases but its seedy and infamous water front, a hell hole called East Main Street. In days long ago, you weren't allowed to call yourself an East Coast sailor until you had treated yourself to a wallow or two on East Main . . . And old timers hauled around sea bag‑loads of stories about the place. As long as there are American blue jackets, there will probably be a market for sex and beer, whores, barmaids, taxi drivers, and shoeshine boys . . .In the annuals of bad ass sailor towns, they wrote books about it and Norfolk's East Main Street was famous all over the world. The place was a veritable Kasbahs of Carnal Delight. The place was so bad; it didn't even register a blip on the Morale Richter Scale. East Main was right up there with Sodom and Gomorrah. It was the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta' and the lowest level of the largest outhouse ever built. East Main was the K-Mart of whoredom. The street was so bad, it way off the Morale Richter Scale. East Main was Biblical, right up there with Sodom and Gomorrah. It was the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta' and the lowest level of the largest pissy outhouse ever built. East Main was the K-Mart of whoredom.The world’s infamous section of East Main Street was only three blocks long and lined with Bars on both sides of the street with names such as "Virginian,” "Golden Palomino,” "Rathskeller,” "Ship Ahoy,” "Paddock Lounge,” "Red Rooster" and etc. The Bars served only 25-cent lean draft beer. You did not order brand names in Norfolk and the Bars featured fat tattooed barmaids who would (if you were lonely) sit with you and listen to your sad story, however, the cost of listening was buying them a drink which consisted of ice tea at a cost of $1 which was equivalent to four beers and could those Bar Maids drink fast! Most sailors fell for this little game only once but there were some who never learned! If you had twenty bucks and you couldn't satisfy any particular lust desire you were hauling down there, but you had to be into something involving baby ducks and penguins.East Main was a five-star hell whole where you could buy passion in fifteen minute increments from women whose panties went up and down like a tin can's signal flags, where you could drink cheap beer and pee in the street. Fleet sailors warned us recruits that sooner or later, we would be rolled on East Main Street. Just hope that she was kind enough to stick your ID and liberty card in your sock before she vanished with what was left of seventy bucks and your wallet? If Guinness had a record for the sleaziest bars per square inch, it would read. 'East Main, Norfolk'. They sold enough draft beer on a Saturday night to fill the New London diving tank, and most of it got pissed away in the adjacent alleys on the way to the bus stop up on Granby Street. Good-ole boys loved it and we civilized sailors hated it.While on East Main Street, it would often be our goal to drink a few beers at each bar, starting at the upper end of one side of the street, and drink our way down the street, then come up the other side. Needless to say I never successfully accomplished this goal. As a young man not used to alcohol, even though the beer was lean reduced to 3 per cent alcohol, I would get drunk before the round robin tour ended and wind up puking my guts out in an alley. After drinking ourselves silly on East Main Street, we were ready for some coffee and a plate of bacon and eggs. A [White only] Christian Mission offered these amenities if we would listen to their “save my soul” preaching first. One time we tried this and listened to well mannered young men try to convert us to being ‘Born Again’ with sweet talk and using words like “anointed.” But it was for Whites only he said, anyone one else like Blacks were going to Hell. I thought - Christians, Huh? To this day whenever I hear that “ANOINTED” word I get a nauseous chill up my backbone!“I Will Never Drink Again” Drunk as a skunk on 3 per cent lean beer, I ended up in the "Trade winds" where the SPs' (Shore Patrol) told one of my new found drinking buddies to walk me around the block a couple of times - after which I threw up on his shoulder. Soon, I was in the men's room puking my guts out, thinking I was going to die, and promising God if I didn't die I will never drink again. Welcome to Norfolk, VA. . . . Ugh!One of the eateries we frequented on East Main Street was Eddie's Texas Chili. I usually ate chili somewhat on the mild side. My first time eating the mild chili, I said Holy Shit, what the hell is in this stuff, as a fire burned my mouth out? You could remove dried paint from your driveway and it took me two beers to put the flames out. Actually, it didn’t take me long to get used that mild stuff and soon I tried the next hotter chili which made my nose feel like it was snorting Drano. Well, everyone knows the routine by now; get me more beer before I ignite. Laughing, the Barmaid pounded me on the back, now, and my backbone is in the front part of my chest. I'm getting frog-faced from all of the beer. I felt something scraping across my tongue, but was unable to taste it. Is it possible to burn out taste buds? Sally, the barmaid, was standing behind me with fresh refills. That 300-lb. woman is starting to look HOT . . . just like this nuclear waste I'm eating! Is chili an aphrodisiac? When I eventually tried eating the middle hot chili, it made my ears ring and sweat pour off my forehead and I could no longer focus my eyes. I farted a misty smoke screen and four people behind me swooned and needed paramedics. I told the Barmaid that her chili had finally given me brain damage. Sally saved my tongue from bleeding by pouring beer directly on it from the 24-oz pitcher and I wonder if my lips are burning off. It really irked me that the other sailors asked me to stop screaming. Dang those Rednecks, my intestines are now a straight pipe filled with gaseous, sulphuric flames. I messed myself when I farted and I'm worried it will eat through the chair. Where’s the men’s room?New YorkI didn’t like being stationed in Norfolk, a southern segregated Navy town full of evangelicalism, hate and racism, they were fighting the Civil Rights movement to the death, a Bible Belt town that didn't really believe in the scriptures, and one of the worst things is they didn't have real civilization like Delis, good Pizza or Chinese take-out, but actually because it just felt mind-numbingly slow, full of under educated ignorant people in a town that was just boring. Norfolk was a one horse segregated town with nothing to do unless you went to private clubs for social activities and booze. New York had everything for everyone, multi dimensions of activity and people, a no holds barred town, and that was both good and bad - you had to be discriminating in what you choose to do because there were so much good and discontenting activities all around you in the streets of Manhattan. I guess that if you're a REAL New Yorker, born and raised here, you're going to be bored stiff anywhere else, places with few or no choices and limited freedoms and opportunities that could never match New York. The rest of the country seems like it's moving in slow motion on some heavy tranquilizers compared to New York.We were all young Navy men looking for love; go to sea for weeks chasing Russian submarines then come back to Norfolk looking to find that elusive femme fatale that must be somewhere nearby looking for a nice good looking young Destroyer sailor man like me. I soon found that not only was she elusive, but was non existent. Hell, we were in segregated and backward Norfolk, and they had signs around town that said “sailors keep off the grass," so where does a sailor go to meet women in a dry and segregated backward place where there are no dance clubs or night clubs and only a few dingy fast food restaurants with lousy Pizza. So, we went to Manhattan for weekend liberty searching for feminine companionship in Times Square - which we found in spades . . . The Big Apple was alive with all kinds of women, dance clubs and spicy night club adventures.In my early Navy days in Norfolk, when I didn't have a car or a ride for weekend liberty, I would take a Railways interstate bus to New York City. When the bus stopped for bathroom or food in the South, we left the bus and parted company into separate racial facilities, but when in the North we shared all facilities together. If you were pissed off at Jim Crow and thwarted the segregationist pattern, like entering a “colored” rest room, you could be arrested and put in the local jails, where you would be treated horribly, being crammed into tiny, filthy cells. Fed salt without water and sporadically beaten. In the South, the police didn't take kindly to whites who sympathized with the blacks. On one trip I met Mary Thomson, a young pretty Black girl who lived in Manhattan, and we became good friends. She was very smart and had a great personality and I wished I could date her when she visited her parents in Norfolk, but as things are in the South, I knew that was impossible. We could only breathe the fresh air of freedom when we crossed the Mason - Dixon Line.Once in the City, I would get a room at the YMCA in Times Square and explore the city, hitting the bars and night clubs like the Latin Quarter or Copocabana and the mid town dance emporiums, all places racially and ethnically integrated with beautiful women looking for hungry sailors. One of our favorite places was the Roseland Ball Room on 52nd Street. They used professional orchestras playing every kind of ball room music and even dance clubs from Harlem came down to jitterbug and swing dance with us. Eventually, I bought a 1952 Cadillac Deville and ran a Taxi service to New York, dropping sailors off at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on 49th Street or Penn Station on 34th Street. Going back, I just sat in front of the Port Authority bus terminal with a sign and pick up sailors who are all around looking for a ride back to Norfolk. They paid my expenses plus a profit and it never cost me a cent for my New York trips, in fact, they helped me pay for my Cadillac.I had some friends from New York and they took me to their homes for weekends; Ted, my Jewish friend, lived in Mount Vernon and I went there many times. His dad, a German immigrant with one leg thanks to medical experiments in Hitler’s Jewish concentration camps, escaped anti Semitic Germany and opened an 8 X 15 foot newspaper and candy stall on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx; he put his children through college on his earning and bought a big house in Mount Vernon. Ted and his family loved the performing arts and they took to many performances at the Ballet, Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. We attended works by Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, The New York Philharmonic, The New York Ballet, and the Metropolitan Opera. It was all a great a great education for me since I had never been exposed to such entertainment before. Sometimes I stayed at the decrepit and worn out Lincoln Hotel on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. It was full of retired actors and musicians riding their last days sitting in the lobby and commiserating about the good-ole-days. It was perfect for sailors looking for a cheap room on weekend liberty in the Big Apple. We ate at Greek Diners most of the time, there was almost a classic quality to the New York diner experience - singing musicians/waitresses en all - and they are all over the City offering burgers, eggs and full meals at cheap prices. They all feature all-day breakfast specials, steaks, pork chops, southern fried chicken and of course, a bottomless cup of coffee, the real surprise about the menu here is that they offer every demographic - Jewish, Italian, Irish and everything else under the sun, including enormous desserts, all baked fresh on the premises daily.On one of my trips to New York I had a guy in my car who grew up on Coney Island and he said if I drove him home to Coney Island in Brooklyn he would treat me to a weekend on Mermaid Avenue and all carnival stuff that go with it. Herb told me about growing up on Coney Island that it was the best place hang out . . . Every thing was there on Mermaid Avenue; the Coney Island rides, The Cyclone Roller Coaster, Nathan’s, Steeplechase, the beach, the fishing pier, the Lowe’s on Surf Avenue, the Parachute Jump, the Wonder Wheel, Cotton Candy, Jelly Apples, Buttered Corn, Shatzkin’s Knishes, Faber’s, Playland, The Magic Carpet Fun House. We had Delis, Pizza Joints, Diners, and Italian Bakeries, Chinese restaurants, luncheonettes, Ice Cream shops and department stores.” Herb took me there and we did it all.New York City was a major port of call for freighters, cruise ships, and foreign navies. Consequentially, it had many bars geared to the tastes of salty sailors and our favorites were unlike no other watering holes or dens of iniquity inhabited by seagoing men. They had to meet strict standards to be in compliance with the acceptable requirement for a sailor beer‑swilling dump. The first and foremost requirement was a crusty old crossed anchors tattooed gal serving suds. She had to be able to wrestle King Kong to parade rest, be able to balance a tray with one hand; knock sailors out of the way with the other hand and skillfully navigate through a roomful of milling around drunks. The establishment itself had to have walls covered with ship and squadron plaques. It had to have the obligatory Michelob, Pabst Blue Ribbon and "Beer Nuts sold here" neon signs. An eight ball mystery beer tap handles and signs reading: "Your mother does not work here, so clean away your frickin' trash." "Keep your hands off the barmaid." "Don't throw butts in urinal."The bar had to have a brass foot rail and at least six Slim‑Jim containers, an oversized glass cookie jar full of Beer‑Nuts, a jar of pickled hard-boiled eggs that could produce rectal gas emissions that could shut down a sorority party, and big glass containers full of something called Pickled Pigs Feet and Polish Sausage.Only drunk Chiefs and starving Ethiopians ate pickled pigs’ feet and unless the last three feet of your colon had been manufactured by Midas, you didn't want to get any where near the Polish Napalm Dogs. Liberty bars were home and it didn't matter what country, state, or city you were in, when you walked into a good liberty bar, you felt at home. They were also establishments where 19-year-old kids received an education available nowhere else on earth. You learned how to make a two-cushion bank shot and how to toss down a beer and shot of Sun Torry known as a "depth charge."Whereas NYC had everything, from tough water front bars, girls of every color and ethnic type everywhere anxious for attention from loved starved sailors, to ritzy nightclubs, the south had no social life, just military bases, guns and churches. And the Civil War which was like a mountain range that guards all roads into the South: you can’t go there without encountering it. Specifically, you can’t go there without addressing a question that may seem as if it shouldn’t even be a question - to wit: what caused the war? One hundred years after the event, the Confederate Flag still flies south of the Mason Dixon line and southerners don't think the Civil War had anything to do with slavery - regardless that Jefferson Davis and all the seceding states stated slavery was the reason for the war. It was the 1960s and African Americans were waging epic struggles for civil rights that altered white Southerners’ worlds who reacted with hostility. They feared social and political change, and grappled uncomfortably with the fact that their way of life seemed gone for good.While many of our high school classmates were attending college, we were getting an education in the rolling seas in the North Atlantic or the exotic ports in the Mediterranean experiencing the orgasmic rush of a night cat shot, or the gut wrenching on a pitching deck. Our fate was the hours of tedium, experiencing the periodic discomfort of turbulence, marveling at the creation of St. Elmo's fire, and sometimes having our reverie interrupted with stark terror from crashing seas. But when we came ashore on liberty, we could rub shoulders with some of the finest men we would ever know, in bars our mothers would never have approved of, in saloons and cabarets that would live in our memories forever.1960s - BirminghamCivil Rights was afoot and then came along Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, who was a driving force in the push for racial equality in the 1950's and the 1960's. In 1963, King and his staff focused on Birmingham, Alabama. They marched and protested nonviolently, raising the ire of local officials who sicced water cannon and police dogs on the marchers, whose ranks included teenagers and children. The bad publicity and breakdown of business forced the white leaders of Birmingham to concede to some anti segregation demands. King adhered to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence. In 1955 he began his struggle to persuade the US Government to declare the policy of racial discrimination in the southern states unlawful. The racists responded with violence to the black people's nonviolent initiatives. Martin Luther King dreamed that all inhabitants of the United States would be judged by their personal qualities and not by the color of their skin. In April 1968 he was murdered by a white racist. Four years earlier, he had received the Noble Peace Prize for his nonviolent campaign against racism.The battle lines are drawn in Birmingham, Alabama, that was, in 1960, "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States." Although the city's population of almost 350,000 was 60% white and 40% black, Birmingham (as most southern cities) had no black police officers, firefighters, sales clerks in department stores, bus drivers, bank tellers, or store cashiers. Black secretaries could not work for white professionals. Jobs available to blacks were limited to manual labor in Birmingham's steel mills, work in household service and yard maintenance, or work in black neighborhoods. When layoffs were necessary, black employees were the first to go. The unemployment rate for blacks was two and a half times higher than for whites. The average income for blacks in the city was less than half that of whites.The Civil Rights plan called for direct nonviolent action to attract media attention to "the biggest and baddest city of the South," with a variety of nonviolent methods of confrontation, including sit-ins at libraries and lunch counters, kneel‑ins by black visitors at white churches, and a march to the county building to mark the beginning of a voter‑registration drive. Most businesses responded by refusing to serve demonstrators. Some white spectators at a sit‑in at a Woolworth's lunch counter spat upon the participants. A few hundred protesters, including jazz musician Al Hibbler, were arrested, although Hibbler was immediately released by Connor.A significant factor in the success of the Birmingham campaign was the structure of the city government and the personality of its contentious Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor. Described as an "arch‑segregationist" by Time magazine, Connor asserted that the city "ain't gonna segregate no niggers and whites together in this town [sic].” He also apparently believed that the Civil Rights Movement was a Communist plot, and after the churches were bombed, Connor blamed the violence on local blacks. Birmingham's government was set up in such a way that it gave Connor powerful influence. In 1958, police arrested ministers organizing a bus boycott. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated a probe amid allegations of police misconduct for the arrests, Connor responded that he "[hadn't] got any damn apology to the FBI or anybody else,” and predicted, "If the North keeps trying to cram this thing [desegregation] down our throats, there's going to be bloodshed." In 1961, Connor delayed sending police to intervene when Freedom Riders were beaten by local mobs. The police harassed religious leaders and protest organizers by ticketing cars parked at mass meetings and entering the meetings in plainclothes to take notes. The Birmingham Fire Department interrupted such meetings to search for "phantom fire hazards.” Connor was so antagonistic toward the Civil Rights Movement that his actions galvanized support for black Americans. President John F. Kennedy later said of him, "The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln."Portsmouth, VAThe stores along Granby in Norfolk and High Street in Portsmouth, specifically, their lunch counters and the city itself were the site of a battle that also played out in dozens of other cities in the South. They were segregated and Blacks were forbidden to sit at 'White only' lunch counters. The fight pitted black college students and a few of their white peers against the city's white power structure and its downtown merchants over the right to sit down and eat lunch. They held mock sit-ins, learning not to respond if attacked. Many black parents feared for their children's future — and their lives. Angry white youths heckled, beat and spat on them. They went to Woolworth, made small purchases, then sat down at the lunch counters and asked to be served. "We don't serve Neegras here." They waited, as other shoppers stared. The students sat for a few hours, then left. They returned again and again over the next two weeks, adding a fourth store, Grants, then a fifth, Walgreen's. For the white community, there was shock, anger, overwhelmingly negative feelings. The business community adopted a very steel-backed approach, rigid and very negative. Their numbers grew with each subsequent sit-in. After a few weeks, the city had decided to crack down and Portsmouth police arrested 81 students. However, after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, Woolworth, Grant's, Walgreen's and Cain-Sloan served black customers at their lunch counters for the first timeI joined the Portsmouth Jr. Chamber of Commerce and became quite active. There were many worthwhile causes we participated in. Meetings were held once a month and were accompanied with famous speakers. Being a Military town, many of these speakers were Admirals, but many were local politicians who openly advocated segregation in the face of the Civil Rights movement being conducted at the time. I associated with all the local politicos and military types. I got involved in many projects, like distributing Bubble Gum Machines throughout Portsmouth. The Chamber sponsored the local Miss America beauty pageant, which afforded me the opportunity to participate in several Miss America Pageants as a Judge and organizer. We had a meeting to discuss what we were looking for, young women with poise, looks and talent. So, what I was supposed to do was audition perspective candidates and send them on. There were several ladies I interviewed, one was black and really had the talent and personality and figure.Then I got chewed out by the organizers - didn't I know that Ms America was for white women only? Those fucking racists really pissed me off - I had to tell the black girl she didn't qualify for the contest because she was black. I will never get used to southern racism.One time I made speech on an HUD project being considered for downtown Portsmouth on Effingham Street outside the Naval Hospital, which was nothing but shacks inhabited by poor Black people. Whites were against raising this ghetto and replacing it with decent housing because they did not want conditions for Blacks to improve. I was for the project and was threatened with a ride out of town and a beating by the Ku Klux Klan. I invited them to try it now and I was prepared to beat the Holy loving shit out of them on the spot but they declined and left saying they knew where I lived. I started packing my 25 caliber automatic or P38 then. “Fucking Southern White trash cowards!It’s a wonder how small little happenings in ones life can endure major changes, but a good example was my learning how to rebuild car engines. I had this old 1948 Plymouth whose engine had conked out and I was going to try to rebuild it, learning as I went. I figured, “What could I lose, the car was junk anyway.” I had the head off and was trying to get the pistons out and was over at the local Car Parts dealer getting some tools and asking for advice. Another customer standing there, a Black man, offered some expert advice, in fact he came to my house, but as was the custom for Black people coming to a White person’s house, came to the back door. (“What” I thought) I learned that he was a Baptist preacher in Churchland living in a shanty town off of Route 17, which was not too far from my house on Hatton Point Road. I will tell you this that man knew his cars! That was the beginning of a relationship with him where I took him as my mentor in learning about car engine repair. One day I am at his shanty house getting some advice and sitting at his kitchen table having a cup of coffee. He asked me if I could take his teenage daughter to the grocery store to pick up something and I said sure. She got in the front seat and off we went, it was only just around the corner at a shopping center on Route 17 in Churchland. As I pulled onto a highway, a State Trooper pulled us over. With his pot belly and strong Southern Accent, he said, “What’s you doing with this Neegra woman in your front seat?” I explained I was taking her to the grocery store. “Boy, don’t you know that you never ride a Neegra woman in your front seat, looks like your taking her out, and you know that is illegal in Virginia.” “By the way, you talk funny, are you a god-damned Yankee?” This went on and finally he let me go after the girl got in the back seat. Do I have to tell you how I felt?Civil RightsSegregation was the way of life in the Southern States. Segregation, enforced by Jim Crow Laws’ passed in state legislatures meant separate restaurants and entertainment facilities, separate waiting rooms in bus stations, separate launderettes and drinking fountains. More serious, was the segregated education system. As a result, Schools for black children were inferior to those for white students. Black pupils never had equal education opportunities. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Enforcing segregation was the job for the KKK. It was a racist terrorist group. Rioting, threats, bombings, arson, beatings, lynching and murder were their methods and flaming cross was their ‘calling card’. One key job they did was to intimidate blacks from registering to vote. As a result millions of black Americans were too scared to vote.The lynching of Black people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method used by racist whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy. In the South, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to lynch law as a means of social control. Lynchings open public murders of individuals suspected of crime conceived and carried out more or less spontaneously by a mob seem to have been an American invention. Most of the lynchings were by hanging or shooting, or both.However, many were of a more hideous nature, burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture. Lynching therefore was a cruel combination of racism and sadism, which was utilized primarily to sustain the caste system in the South. Many white people believed that Negroes could only be controlled by fear. To them, lynching was seen as the most effective means of control.The nineteen sixties began with the election of the first president born in the twentieth century -- John Kennedy. For many Americans, the young president represented a spirit of hope for the nation. Kennedy then asked Congress to enact a law to guarantee equal access to all public accommodations, forbid discrimination in any state program receiving federal aid, and outlaw discrimination in employment and voting. Because they were for racial segregation and Kennedy was working for racial integration, Southerners were massively switching from the Democratic party to the Republican party.The most influential and well known of the Black leaders that emerged in the sixties, Dr. Martin Luther King, was president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He and his followers organized numerous marches, rallies, and strikes to call attention to the systematic discrimination against minorities that was endemic in American society. His belief was in nonviolent confrontation with the authorities and a prodding of the conscience of the white majority to effect social change. The white South was on fire and fighting back against integration. There were assassinations or murders of black civil rights leaders such as Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi state NAACP. In the south there were formal, organized groups known as White Citizens Councils dedicated to repulsing the spread of integration and voter registration campaigns for black people. Aside from hurdling opposition from White Citizens' Councils, blacks had to worry about being assaulted, shot or even lynched. Folks tabulating such data in Tuskegee have reported that over a 65-year period, 1882-1947, there were 3,426 lynchings in America, the vast majority of which occurred in the South.One of the first major events in the sixties was the attack on the Freedom Riders, a groups of black and white citizens who rode busses across the south in order to test laws enforcing segregation in public facilities. As they rode across the south, they were met by angry mobs and police brutality, who would beat them severely, sometimes to death. Another event, which happened in 1963, was the killing of Medgar Evers, the field secretary for the NAACP, who was murdered in his driveway.Because of all the beatings of the Freedom Riders and the frustration of blacks wanting their rights, many riots broke out in various cities and states, such as Los Angeles, New Jersey, Chicago and Philadelphia. When these riots broke out in the 1960's, the police would use any methods necessary to exert their power, such as the use of clubs and physical force. Sometimes, when black protesters would try to enter restaurants, stores or any other "White" facilities, they would be sprayed with large fire hoses. The photos of Birmingham in 1963 are evidence of these events.In 1962, President Kennedy dispatched troops to force the University of Mississippi (a state institution) to admit James Meredith, a black student. At the same time, he forbade racial or religious discrimination in federally financed housing. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and President Johnson continued the battle. King convinced President Kennedy and later President Johnson to push for legislation to end discrimination and was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1964. President Johnson prodded Congress into enacting (August 1965) a Voting Rights Act that eliminated all qualifying tests for registration that had as their objective limiting the right to vote to whites.The whole USA was on fire: From 1964 to 1968, more than a hundred American cities were swept by race riots, which included dynamiting, guerrilla warfare, and huge conflagrations, as the anger of the northern black community at its relatively low income, high unemployment, and social exclusion exploded. At this violent expression of hopelessness the northern white community drew back rapidly from its reformist stance on the race issue (the so-called white backlash).Moving to New YorkI had been visiting and thinking about moving to New York City, the Cultural Capital of the World; the City that Never Sleeps; the Big Apple aka Gotham City. Whatever the name, for many it is summed up best as simply the City of Dreams. In April 1968, I had it living in the segregated south and took the big plunge and moved full time to Manhattan to teach Computer Technology at the New School in Greenwich Village, lived in the Consulate hotel in Hell’s Kitchen and later Jamaica, Queens.I found the big Apple is expensive, has lots of crime, the subways are full of graffiti, but New Yorkers love it the City. Why? They all say one thing! ... NYC is a fantastic city. Yes, the cost of living can be expensive . . . but there is so much to do there. They don't call it "the city that never sleeps" for nothing. It's true. There are a thousands of great restaurants, shopping, bars, museums, Broadway, Central Park, night clubs, statue of liberty, etc. It's a very beautiful place, the skyscrapers will leave you in awe. You walk everywhere you possibly can and your wallet and your waistline thank you over time. You don't waste time comparing yourself to the version of NYC life you assumed you'd be living - there are thousands - and just figure out a version that makes sense for you. Anyone who moves here and isn't rich has to have a high tolerance for tiny spaces, weird apartment layouts, and barely functional kitchens. In a nutshell: That asking for directions really isn't scary, and people are happy to help! And remember, there are a million people (and more) here who are smarter than you. It's pretty clean for being that busy. In spite of the crime I feel safe there, just stay out of the bad neighborhoods, behave yourself, and have situational awareness. In Midtown there are cops all over the place. Central Park is outstanding, you won't believe how in the middle of NYC there is such a place. Not to mention world class museums, food, and SHOPPING! It's really the greatest city in the world. there are so many millions of people walking around, many of them tourists. there are so many things to do: tour, shop, walk, museums. there is something for everyone, and you can go to NYC a million times and still not see it all. So many people who visit New York City end up falling in love with it – so much so that they decide to stay here for good. After all? NYC is full of activity, culture, and diversity. There is always something to do, to explore, and to visit in this famous city.I rode the subway, worked in Greenwich Village and hung out in Times Square, Washington Square and Union Square. I have to tell you, I never, not once, ever had bad things happened to me, even though New York had that ‘Wild West’ adventure happening thing about it, all I ever experienced were good times and great people. Bottom line, NYC in the 60s and 70s was fantastic (maybe it helped if you were in your 30s made the difference). Yes, there was a sense of titillating danger in the air, it seemed like anything could happen and a wild grittiness permeated everything and I loved it.But think about it! If you come from a place that I did, the barren segregated hate fermenting South, that was insulated from its sins by evangelism, racist to the core, exhibited violence to protect its close minded culture, and devoid of things to do, you could definitely have an epiphany in - everything goes 24 X 7 - Live and Let Live - New York City. It was Paris compared to Calcutta. I saw it happen all the time, some people visited NYC for the first time and got hooked. They just can’t get enough of the city, it get's in their blood, they dream about it, look at it as heaven personified on the Hudson. Of course you could have a heart attack too, all depending on your open mindedness to cultural change and tolerance factor. I came to NYC to work coming from an environment that was the total opposite, socially restrictive, hateful and judgmental, found a new world I fell in love with and made it my home. I learned my way around town by getting on the subway (50 cents) choosing a line & station at random and getting out and walking around. I guess nobody thought I was worth mugging. But I met so many interesting people in the process.What Was Manhattan Like in 1968?“Moving to New York has always been an act of optimism. To come here you must have faith in a better future, and courage to seek it out; you must trust the city to give you a chance, and know that you’ll take advantage when it does. You must believe in investing in your future with hard work and ingenuity. You must, in short, believe in accepting a challenge.”There were thousands of delights, with tens of thousands of people walking about, and no question about it, the best girl watching in the world was available in Manhattan - particularly in midtown along its many avenues, lined with skyscrapers, building ledges and street cafes to sit around. A particularly good area was in the fifties on Sixth Avenues where many water fountains abounded and granite veranda patios filled with tables, chairs and sitting ledges. Whatever your fancy, blond, brunette, redhead, Asian, White, or Black, the woman of you dreams would pass by every five minutes - or oftener! The beautiful people of the world came to Manhattan for fame, fortune, and excitement. Careers in show business and the business world topped the list as reasons so many bright and attractive people moved to Manhattan. And for some like me, it was for freedom! For lunch, every kind of food is available, with hundreds of Delis, street cafes, ethnic restaurants, Halal street carts, and fast food eateries every two blocks. Eat a New York pizza and you are doomed to never be satisfied for a slice anywhere else. Manhattan is also the Happy Hour and dance capital of the world, and everyone loves to party heartily in one of those 12,000 some odd night clubs, juke dance joints and dive bars in the City, the Irish ones being the best. So after work, Happy Hour is a must to relax and become acquainted with someone new while you search for your heart’s desires of a soul mate. There is so much to choose from, every type and color hue that making up your mind is a problem, but choices are stimulating, and Manhattan has tens of thousands of personal prerogatives, and a neverending supply of life styles are available. Nothing in the world beats the night life in New York, which includes various types of hang out places like Bars, Cocktail Lounges, Billiards, Comedy Clubs, Dance Clubs, Hotel Bars, Comedy Clubs, Music Clubs, Sports Bars, Piano Bars, Jazz & Blues Clubs.Yes, in New York you can always hear any type of music, from plenty of jazz, pogoing punk to thumping hip‑hop on any night of the week the live music scene very well reflects New York’s diversity. If you are looking out for some dance clubs with Caribbean, Brazilian, African tastes, or even cheesy numbers or hard‑hitting drum tunes, you can get that too. Crazy things happened all the time. I bought beef jerky sticks from a street cart, an Amish man, in Union Square park on a gorgeous sunny day in Gotham after a business meeting. There were hundreds of people milling about enjoying the day as I was. As I sat eating my jerky sticks, I saw an attractive big busted woman wearing absolutely nothing above her low cut jeans; her beautiful breasts on full display. It made my day. What a delightful vision of splendor! All the New Yorkers pretended not to notice but, I like to smile and luxuriate in spiritual feelings so, I was most happy she walked by, breaking up the routine of another day chasing a buck in New York. Now you see the bold and the beautiful, the famous and discover they are just like you, scared of the notoriety and needing a small space to hide in. That is the biggest lesson you learn in Manhattan that we are not so different, all the races, colors, ethnicities and religions types are so much the same. Yes, the best time of my life was working in Manhattan; the total freedoms, the people and place were perfect for me, all exciting and highly glamorous. It was all for me! But to be honest, I moved to Manhattan in the last innocent time, the time without AIDS. Like many of the adventures in the 1960’s and 1970’s it was “risk on” as no sexual act, no sexual conquest, no ethnic adventure was taboo – as it had been for generations before. In the 1960’s the call to arms: “If it feels good do it” became the credo to live by for millions of us who grew up listening to the music and the message. The rebellion of Woodstock and social revolution in Greenwich Village permeated the American scene. All the old fears were thrown aside.Moving South From New YorkI worked in NYC for more than 30 years, lived there and commuted there from upstate, took semi retirement and for another 15 doing route sales in the upstate mountainous lake laden state. It was time to retire to a warmer and heap place and the south looked good . . . it had changed since its bad ass Jim Crow days.There are both good and bad things about anyplace. For example, my home, New York, is the land of opportunity and modernity, and also the land of frustration - cold snowy winters, high heating bills, and neverending Go Go, high taxes, high densities of people, places and things. The south is antiquated, hung up on its very one dimensional conservative religious and political culture and is very backward compared to the rest of the USA. But it is also the land of comfort, low speed ease, warm weather, tradition, good friends and hospitality.Yes, the south does have a troublesome past, Slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, it elects extreme right politicians and practices very judgmental religion an all that nervous stuff that scares people. And they hate the modern 'Other World' especially Yankees and their enemy of their 1860s Civil War to this day. In fact, one time years ago, when I got some eggs and bacon at the local Waffle House, a guy sitting next to the cashier whispered "Damn Yankee." I asked him “I barely said five words. What indication could you possibly have that I am a Yankee?" "Well, we could start with the words 'what indication.' Someone from south of the Mason-Dixon would have said, 'Who the hell are you calling a Yankee?' Then we would have fought.” Makes me wonder the attitude toward northerners - Yankees work to pay the vast majority of US taxes, which are then used to pay the welfare and disability rampart in the south that allows them to sit on their front porches and do nothing but dream of incest and racism. It also pays for their alcoholismI have traveled the south since the 1950s, back when it was racially segregated and violent. Today it's different, more normal, but always so hot and humid, and everyone is so polite, they say "Bless your heart" which makes it OK when followed by a verbal bomb, like "Your breath stinks. " But while it is all giving with warm fuzzys on the surface, I still felt underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. There is so much 'anti' feelings exhibited toward people not like them. I felt southern culture was kind of ridiculous. Sweet tea. Lots of churches. Religious judgmental attitudes out the wazoo. Ugh It just seemed so phony. But every corner I turned, there was an voluptuous white or black woman in a spring, floral-print dress with big hair and too much makeup, smiling and telling me, “Bless yer heart.” I kinda liked that! Made me feel good and welcome. Yes, Blacks and whites get along fine today in the south, maybe better than the north. I guess after 400 some odd years of slavery and Jim Crow, practicing the same kind religion, living together and getting to know each other, they discovered there wasn't that much difference in the races. But that doesn't mean the South in general doesn't have a serious problem confronting its deeply embedded culture of racism.However, I always felt the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and fear. Look at who they elect to office, all fear mongers and isolationists. I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. And if you want to see what life was like years 50 years ago, go south, everything happens in the south later than in the rest of the civilized world. It is backward and behind the curve on modernity . . .I think southerners are really different that northerners, coming from high anxiety - highly educated - competitive and diverse New York, you notice it right away. Southerners have a wonderful sense of rhythm and charm, lots of that charm too, they are un ambitious, uninformed and they like it that way, superstitious, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the us northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable relaxed lives - envied, that is, by us work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners.2019 - Living in the SouthPresently I live in the Atlanta metro area consisting of 28 small counties and like it. The south had changed, became a much better place, in many ways with more common sense than New Yorkers had. I was retired and looking for cheap and warm living, sick and tired of the high - really ridiculous - NY taxes that paid for a bunch of government guaranteed social programs and government employees with platinum be3neifts and security I didn't agree with. Well . . . there is very poverty in NY too. Besides, I couldn't pay NY taxes anymore on a retirement Social Security income. I would characterize the south now as warm, comfortable, cheap, Tea Party conservative, judgmentally religious and friendly. The first and most bracing difference is that the cost of living in the south is very low as compared to Upstate New York. A new house in the Atlanta region cost about 1/3 as much with 1/5 the taxes.The Atlanta region was booming with the 4th highest growth in the USA with new houses and commercial establishments were going up everywhere. They built a big shopping complex with a Wal-Mart and Home Depot in my small town plus lots of small shops, fast food and restaurants. You got to know that the south has tons of fast food available everywhere - it’s their signature icon that and being obese is too! A few years later they built a big hospital here. I particularly like the small town feel, it's poor but there are no slums, and the home grown Quality Grocery store here where all the good-ole-boys shop. Small towns around mine all had the same building going on. Every ten miles there was a strip of Wal-Marts, Home Depots, Lowe's, Kroger and Publix grocery stores and lots of fast food eateries. Most businesses are not mega corporations as they are in the Northeast. New York has more business oriented social amenities than the south. NY is more multi cultural, has tons of things to do, even the malls are full of food courts, bars and skating rinks. I have discovered there are some basic differences between the North and the South. New Yorkers are far different from Southerners, for one thing, the north is very diverse and better educated and more tolerant than Southerners. I don’t think you will get the level of intellectual rigor or critical thinking in the South. Southerners are not the open, spill your guts and go out their way to include you that New Yorkers do. New York is a far more diverse, intellectual and a tolerant place than anywhere I ever visited in the South.If you are retired and want to head south with your pension and social security you will be fine. Cheap taxes are great . . . ummmm yeah except you get what you pay for in the north. In the south, the schools generally are terrible and many parents have to put their children in a Christian school. The level of education here is just downright frightening. I honestly think my five year old great in New York is smarter than many adults I have met. The South has a cheap cost of living and you can buy a beautiful 3000 square foot home for 1/3 the northern price with 1/5 the taxes and have two brand-new cars. Here comes the BUT! Southern people are not as open minded as northern people and still have a lot of hang ups with race and class, are rigidly conservative Republican, and you will feel stifled with their extreme religious and political world views. Actually, in the south, religion and politics are the same thing. Another concern is transportation; there is no mass transit system in the south. In Atlanta, a traditionally more progressive area than the rest of the south, counties surrounding Atlanta (there are eight in the immediate metro Atlanta region) vote down public transportation EVERY TIME. In addition, more than 100 bus lines were recently eliminated or cut drastically. Some areas refuse to have public transport service because "they" do not want to “mix with other ethnic peoples” from surrounding neighborhoods.You just have to find your tribe ‑ which is true wherever you go. And you have to learn how to negotiate conversations, what topics are taboo (Civil War, Slavery, Jim Crow, evolution, abortion, Gay Rights, and any critical thinking on religion, politics, science and US history); what behavior is considered boorish and unacceptable - comparing New York to the South; loving everyone including immigrants, Gays, poor people and Mexicans; being a liberal or otherwise disposed to rational thinking. The list goers but you get the picture. Once you learn these things, you can blend in.

This may depend on the country of which you are a citizen. I would specify the citizenship you hold in your question details.For example, following are requirements for US citizens (Saudi Arabia):A passport with at least six months validity and a visa are required for entry. In May 2008, the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs agreed to issue five-year multiple-entry visas to U.S. visitors and students. Visas are issued for business and work, to visit close relatives, and for transit and religious visits by Muslims. Business visas DO NOT grant the applicant the right to work or to reside in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. All visas require a sponsor, can take several months to process, and must be obtained prior to arrival. Visas are not available at airports, land borders, or seaports. All Saudi embassies have the authority to issue five year visas, but only the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., and Saudi consulates in the United States appear to do so with some consistency for business visas. Avoid long layovers, as no transit visas are available.Women visitors and residents must be met by their sponsor upon arrival. Women who are traveling alone and are not met by sponsors have experienced delays before being allowed to enter the country or to continue on other flights. Women who are under their husband’s sponsorship and entered the Kingdom as “housewives” are not permitted to work and may have difficulty in transferring sponsorship to an employer. Male children reaching age 21 may be able to transfer their own sponsorship to an employer to work and continue to reside in the Kingdom.Travelers should carefully read and understand the limitations of their visas. People planning to enter Saudi Arabia by land should be sure that their visas are not limited for entry via air. For example, some first-time travelers to Saudi Arabia who have flown into Bahrain and expected to drive across the Causeway have been turned back when it was discovered that their Saudi visas were annotated “via air.”Women considering relocation to Saudi Arabia should be cautioned that married women, including non-Saudis, require their husband's permission to depart the country, while unmarried women and children require the permission of their father or male guardian. Many U.S. citizens have been prevented from leaving the country. Women and children who are considered members of a Saudi household (including U.S. citizen women with Saudi husbands, adult U.S. citizen women who are the unmarried daughters of Saudi fathers, children born to Saudi fathers, and U.S. citizen boys under the age of 21 who are the sons of Saudi fathers) require the permission of the Saudi male head of their household to leave the Kingdom. Mothers are not able to obtain permission for their minor children to leave without their father's permission. Children visiting their fathers in Saudi Arabia, even when there is a custody agreement by a non-Saudi court, may be kept there until the father consents for them to leave.A Saudi man who wishes to marry a foreign woman is required by law to seek the permission of Saudi authorities. A regulation, enacted February 20, 2008, requires Saudi men to sign a document giving irrevocable permission to their foreign wives and the children born of their union to travel in and out of the country without restrictions. In practice, however, authorities rarely require this document and it is not retroactive when signed. Even with such documentation, foreign spouses and their children may still have difficulty leaving Saudi Arabia freely. Also, if a couple consisting of a foreigner and a Saudi living in Saudi Arabia divorce, the foreign parent cannot under any circumstances leave the country with the children born of their union even if he or she is granted custody rights.Visitors who overstay their visits in the Kingdom are subject to a fine of up to15,000 Saudi Riyals (or 2,667 USD) for the first violation and incarceration pending deportation proceedings. The U.S. Embassy is unable to intercede, reduce fines, or prevent incarceration for visitors who violate Saudi immigration law. You should request clarification from Saudi immigration authorities upon arrival as to your permitted length of stay. A common mistake among visitors is confusing the validity of a Saudi visa with the permitted length of stay in the Kingdom. Dates are calculated in accordance with the Hijri calendar. The U.S. Mission in Saudi Arabia has received several reports of U.S. citizens fined for inadvertently overstaying their permitted time in the Kingdom. It can take several weeks to resolve such an error with Saudi immigration authorities. You may now check your permitted length of stay online at the Visa Validity Service website by typing in your passport number and Saudi visa number. The Saudi Passport Department has also recently launched an online service to issue and renew residence permits, which requires registration and a PIN to access. Visitors who have previously had problems with immigration or law enforcement can be denied entry, and detained until they are deported.Foreigners holding Saudi work and/or residency permits require exit visas to depart Saudi Arabia. Their sponsors must request exit or exit/reentry visas on their behalf from the Saudi Ministry of Interior Passport Office. It is generally not possible to leave the country without their sponsor’s approval. Persons involved in legal proceedings, or business or labor disputes, such as employment dismissal disputes, are generally not granted exit visas until their cases are resolved. Such cases may take months or even years to resolve. Saudi sponsors have substantial leverage in the negotiations and may block departures or bar future employment in the country. People in this situation are typically prevented from working as well. The U.S. Embassy is unable to intercede in court proceedings or issuance of exit visas.Visitors on a single-entry or multiple-entry visa do not need an exit permit. All travelers to and from the Kingdom carrying cash, transferable monetary instruments, or precious metals exceeding 60,000 Saudi Riyals (or 16,000 USD) are required to declare them to Saudi Customs. Customs forms are available at all Saudi ports or downloadable from the Saudi Arabian Customs Office website. Failure to declare or provide accurate information can lead to prosecution, legal penalties, and confiscation.Visitors to Saudi Arabia should obtain a meningitis vaccination prior to arrival. Hajj and Umrah pilgrims should check vaccination requirements at the Saudi Ministry of Health website. To obtain work and residence permits, foreigners are required to obtain a medical report or physical examination confirming that they are free from contagious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis. Any worker testing positive for HIV/AIDS will not be allowed to work in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia has not imposed HIV/AIDS travel restrictions on other categories of travelers. Please inquire directly with the Embassy of Saudi Arabia before you travel.Travelers transiting through Saudi Arabia are subject to the country’s laws and regulations. Persons suspected of violating local law may be subject to criminal prosecution as well as incarceration during the period of investigation.Note for Dual Nationals: Several U.S. citizens of Saudi descent have encountered difficulty leaving the Kingdom after entering on a Saudi Laissez Passer (temporary travel document) rather than a Saudi or U.S. passport. If a U.S. citizen has a claim to Saudi citizenship, Saudi missions abroad sometimes propose to issue a Laissez Passer to facilitate travel into the Kingdom. This only leads to difficulties when the traveler wishes to depart the Kingdom, however, as the traveler must first obtain a Saudi passport before leaving Saudi Arabia. Saudi citizens are required to enter and exit the country on Saudi passports, regardless of other nationalities. U.S. citizens of Saudi descent should understand that Saudi nationality is not confirmed quickly or easily, and documentary requirements encountered in Saudi Arabia may differ from those described by Saudi missions abroad. On average, the processing time for a Saudi passport in these cases has been six to 12 months and often longer. Obtaining a U.S. passport at the Embassy will not help, as you will not have a visa, and will be prevented by the Saudi government from leaving. We strongly recommend that U.S. citizens who also have Saudi nationality enter Saudi Arabia with either a Saudi passport or a U.S. passport and Saudi visa, and not with a Laissez Passer.For further information on entry/exit requirements, travelers may contact the following Saudi government offices in the United States:Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, 601 New Hampshire Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20037, tel: (202) 342-3800.Saudi Consulate General in Chicago: Apts. 3106, 3109 & 3110, The Ritz Carlton Hotel, 160 East Pearson Street, Chicago, IL 60611, tel: (312) 560-8298.Saudi Consulate General in Houston: 5718 Westheimer, Suite 1500, Houston, TX 77057, tel: (713) 785-5577.Saudi Consulate General in Los Angeles: Sawtelle Courtyard Building, 2045 Sawtelle Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90025, tel: (310) 479-6000.Saudi Consulate General in New York: 866 United Nations Plaza, Suite 480, New York, NY 10017, tel: (212) 752-2740.Visit the Embassy of Saudi Arabia website for the most current visa information.Information about dual nationality and the prevention of international child abduction can be found on our website. For further information about customs regulations, please read our Customs Information page.