Oral History: Ed Gillen (Emanuel Spain-Lopez)

Abstract:

Ed Gillen reflects and talks about his views on race and the Civil Rights. He was in transportation for the military shortly after the Korean War ended, for 3 years. He talks about where he lived and how he grew up in an ethnic neighborhood. Where the only biases were between different European ethnic groups like Italians, and the Irish. He ends the discussion on his view of the recent events dealing with police officers killing unarmed black men, and how that can be connected to race.

Research:

The Korean War began in June 25,1950 and ended in July of 1953. Casualties reached up to the 5 millions by the end of the war. Unlike WWII and the Vietnam War, the Korean War got little media attention in the U.S. The most popular representation of the war is the TV series “M*A*S*H.”   The U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb ever only 5 years earlier in Japan. Once the Korean War started, many assumed that an atomic weapon would be used in the conflict. 

Sources:

www.mentalfloss.com

www.history.com/topics/korean-war   

YouTube: The Cold War: Crash Courses U.S. History #37 

Transcript:

Interview with ED GILLEN

MAY 9 2015

E: I'm just gonna start with just asking you when you were born and stuff like that. Then we'll start getting into like, the meat of it. So... whats your name?

P: Ed Gillen

E: When were you born?

P: November 2, 1935. I'm not thinking I'm just talking.

E: Ha ha. So my first question is, do you actually know what the Civil Rights Movement was?

P: I remember a lot of them, yeah.

E: Where were you at the time, around 1960? When it was really starting to become a topic of discussion?

P: 1960.... Many years ago..I was 35, married, two children.. I think I was living in ah..Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

E: Lancaster, Pennsylvania?

P: Yeah.

E: Were you in the country or were you serving?

P: Uh, I was out of the service at that time.

E: Um..what did you actually do while in the service?

P: OK, I graduated college in 1958. Went into the air force for 3 years and in that time I spent about a year in Korea and uh spent a lot of time in Japan, because I was in transportation.

E: So you weren't in any of the fighting or anything?

P: No. No it was pretty much over by then, the Korean War was over..

E: OK... So I know that, at least to my knowledge, like back in that time there was a lot of segregation...What was your perspective on race, just like then? Were you cool with segregation or were you like, you know we should treat everyone equally?

P: Well being up north, I wasn't really around it at all. And uhh yeah, I went to a public high school and we lived in ethnic neighborhoods back then. It was like the Polish neighborhoods, the Irish neighborhoods, the Italian, Hispanic, and there didn't seem to be a black neighborhood around at all. (So you weren't really around segregation?) No but the public schools had all the kids from all the races and there never seemed to be any problem or I would think of, you know, no one seemed to be against each other.

E: So it was like everyone was the same?

P: Yeah, it seemed to be.

E: So you didn't grow up with, aw this race is bad, and stuff like that? (No) Did you ever feel like any of that stuff ever affected you, or were you completely isolated?

P: I was isolated from it, or just it just never came up.

E: It was like everyone is the same. Cool, so have you ever been in the south, during that time? Did you ever see segregation?  

P: Well, I remember when during college, we use to go for spring break, down to Miami. (Yeah) And so there would be four or five guys that would pile onto a car. drive down there and when we would drive through Georgia to get to Florida, we would past a lot of the segregated parts. We would stop off at a gas station, we would be seeing signs like uh, colored water fountain. That kind of things.

E: Seeing that, did it ever bother you or did you not pay any mind to it?

P: ...I didn't pay any mind to it.

E: Alright, how did you feel towards the civil rights, were you for it, were you against it, or were you just neutral?

P: I'm just like today, very neutral about..everything. Ha ha ha. I don't make raise and I don't even watch the news anymore, I just wanna keep my head in the sand, kinda thing. Just uhh let everybody get by in the world.

E: You were in pretty neutral territory all throughout your life.

P: Yeah, I never....That was way before any kind of agitation on college campuses, for anything like the Vietnam War and things like that. I was basically out of all that. When i went to college you had to wear a shirt and tie and a suit jacket. The seniors, they would wear hats because they were ready to get a job.

E: You were in service, but you weren't in the fighting, at all.

P: When I was in the Air National Guard, the Atlantic City Air National Guard I was there for about 4 years. And I liked that because it was one weekend a month in Atlantic City, and I enjoyed that. But then what happened when the "Pueblo" got captured president Johnson activated the Atlantic City Air National Guard. And uh activated our unit, and I went to Korea another year. Ha ha ha ha. I went to a Korea air base, lived in tents and.. just like Mash. We were very similar to a Mash unit. Lived in tents, worked in tents, except that they were the ones during the war. We were just there during, just to be there. We were the tac-fighter squad but we had no airplanes to support. They took the airplanes and sent them to Vietnam. They sent 25 pilots, and they sent men to school, learning to fly another aircraft. An then the 900 work troops, which I was one of those went to a Korea air base just to sit there, in case war broke out. we would be there in place, and they would send us airplanes to support.

E: They had you ready.

P: They had us ready, then after a year they deactivated the Air National Guard. And then I left the Air National Guard, I didn't want to re-up again.

E: Now I know that, I forget exactly, but you got in your truck and just went all over America.

P: Yeah, that was when I retired.

E: What year was it?

P: 1969...no wait take it back. Ha ha... I was 69 when it happened, so it was 10 years ago.

E: So like 2005?

P: Yes, 2005.

E: OK that's too soon, we need to go back some more. OK so I know that you lived in Germany for awhile.

P: I spent two years in Germany, my wife and I. (This was before..) This was just before I retired, I was about 62 or 63 and uh they moved uh I had a problem of moving our plant to Mexico. And then we closed up the plant in Pennsylvania. And I didn't want to go to Mexico or Gastonia, North Carolina, where we had a plant. SO uh they said, why don't you go to our parent company in Germany for 2 years, and work on a computer system they were installing a SAP, which is a German software manufacturer. So I sent two years and I came back, after two years and just hung around for a while, then retired.

E: So, um do you think that the way you grew up, like your childhood, just made you not have any bias against any race?

P: Back then the biases that I saw there the Polish against the Italians and the Italians against the Irish. It was Pre-Hispanic, it was all the European ethnic groups and they really didn't get along.

E: Yeah, so that's really the only bias you saw?

P: All our fighting was between (each other).

E: So you never saw like whites against blacks?

P: No, there weren't any blacks around cus we lived in ethnic neighborhoods. Elisabeth, New Jersey had Peter's Town which was Italian, Curry Head which was Irish and The Port which was Polish and uh some other groups in here ha ha ha. Yeah it was European bias or bigotry, European bigotry.

E: So you never got to see the full scale of what was going on.

P: No, it just never seemed to be that way.

E: With the stuff happening in the South, and MLK, did you ever hear about it and..?

P: Well you would read about it in the papers, but it was so far from us up here in Pennsylvania..

E: You never even felt like you were affected by it.

P: Exactly right. It's like now a days the way the media is, something happens in Afghanistan or some country you never heard of, Crackistan or something like that it makes the news. Back then I just never payed attention to it one way or the other.

E: Yeah, now uh....you're white, you're Caucasian, do you feel like just over all, and when you were traveling, have you ever felt like you had a stereotype placed on you, by another race?

P: No nope, never never...No matter where I went, Tokyo, Korea, anywhere I never felt out of place.

E: You got raised right. You didn't have to go through any of that. (I didn't have to, no.) You got it easy.

P: Well back then, I think, white people had no difficulties accept if you were in the Irish or the Italian neighborhood. You gotta watch (haha) cus there were small gangs back then. But the gangs were not violent gangs, it was more talk and then two guys would fight.

E: It was only like fist fights, because nowadays someone will pull out a gun and kill someone.

P: No that never happened.

E: Now with the, I don't know if you heard about it, but the stuff that happened in Ferguson and Baltimore right now, with the guy getting killed because of spinal injuries while under custody, and how a lot of people are linking that to race and every thing (Well it probably was.) Do you feel (I'm sure it was.)...you sure?

P: Yes, I'm sure it was, well you know there is no doubt in my mind that a black person with white cops, although some of them where different races too I think, I think the Mayor is gonna charge 6 policemen with murder. Yeah, and I think the mentality of cops isn't quite right to anybody. I think, you know the other one with the guy was running down the way and the cop shot him. (The was the thing in Ferguson) Yeah, there's been a lot of things like that.

E: Do you feel like we're just downgrading from what we've accomplished back in the day, when it was really serious, like when there was a lot of segregation? Do you think we're going back to that?

P: Well I think almost every ethnic group had fight to get ahead. Like when the Irish were digging the Erie Canal, I mean they were the lowest of the low, I mean they were lower than the Chinese. Cus they just thought the Irish people drank and uhh that was it. (Drank and fought.) So the Irish eventually became cops and I think they took it out on people who they thought were lower status.

E: That's actually just what I was about to ask you. Cus like with stuff happening now, do you think that cops back in the day had a similar thing?

P: Well look at ancient history, there was always some group beaten up on another group.

E: Yeah, well mostly it would be a group of authority too. Like a guard beating on the poor.

P: The ones who had the power were the ones beaten up on the ones without the power. There's no doubt about that.

E: Do you think that that's just always how it is throughout history.

P: Yeah, and uh given time the circumstances change, it'll be a different group if you know what I mean. (Yeah) During the war it was the Japaneses. You know what they did to them in California, they put them in concentration camps just because they thought that they still had allegiance to Japan.   

E: Well I think this concludes it.

P: Yeah ha ha good luck.

E: Yeah thank you. Well thank you for letting me interview you and all that.