Audio File
Transcript
My name is Trevon Moore, 13 years old. I live in West Mifflin.
My name is Rahmod Robinson. I am 13 years old and live in Hazelwood.
I interviewed…
I interviewed Keith Robinson on June 27th, 2012.
You guys probably know Allegheny Academy. I was a counselor there. I attended Ohio University in Ohio, Athens, OH. I was a football and track star, but growing up in Hazelwood was a…to me was a great experience. There wasn’t any gangs or any type of trouble running through the neighborhood. You never heard of anybody going to jail or anything like that until I got into my mid 20s when, you know, we got rap and I… actually seeing how that took toll on our community.
I come from a large family. I mean, if you’re from Hazelwood, you would probably know the Robinsons that live in the neighborhood. I come from a family of actually 16, 10 boys and 6 girls. It’s a big family, and the first five or six of my brothers, they all worked hard, really hard in the steel mills and I grew up in that era where the steel mill was the community. Everybody worked in the steel mill. My brothers, I’ve even had a sister to work in it. My father was the one who put it in me. He told me. He said “I was a carpenter. Go be a carpenter and see how it is.” I went in the military. I became a carpenter. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. But you know, I learned every phase of carpentry to, you know, to use with my mechanical and architectural design things. I’ve done some work with people and build buildings and stuff like that, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to, but maybe it was my dad. My dad, was it, you know? And plus, he was a crane operator in the steel mill, which at that time, they didn’t have a lot of black males as a crane operator and he had, like really good job. He was making top money in in the mills. So, I never knew about welfare or food stamps or anything like that because my father, at that time, was making really good money, and he supported his family. My mother never worked.
In the 70’s, man, it was, to be honest with you, man, I-I, you guys, I mean like I have to give a lot of you guys some respect because a lot of you guys are growing up with single parents and single parent families. We didn’t do that. I knew everybody in my community at that time. I knew their mom and dad, your mom and dads were there. It was when the steel mills started saving jobs out and you’ve seen Hazelwood just go down. I’m a man that raised my last two kids. My older daughter was from somebody else, but my last two, I raised them. I raised them on my own. Really hard because my kids had became latchkey kids. I mean, they were going to elementary school. I had to be to work at 6:00, so I left my kids at home. We put the clothes together at night, I left at 5:30 to get to my job, and when I got in, before anything or any meetings took place, my managers knew that at a certain time my alarm is gonna go off on my watch or whatever, and I had to make the phone call home so I could be on the speakerphone telling my kids what to do, put their food in the microwave, getting dressed, they arguing “Dad! this and that” when they’re going out the door, I’m screaming, you know, at them “lock the door before you go” or “put the key in and then say bye and then lock the door” and I’ve done that for five years.
Yeah, I have two girls and one son and now all three of them were in college. All three of… the older one is in school to be a paralegal and my daughter, the middle child, she’s a six foot two girl, played basketball, had an offer to play for UCLA. She plays at Cal State Northridge basketball. She’s also a pre-law major. And my son graduated from Gateway and he’s a pre-law major at Mercyhurst College, straight A students.
I remarried about 10 years ago. Happily married. I love my wife to death, and if you can find you a good girl in your life. Man. You stay committed to her and make sure you find a girlfriend that’s a friend. Don’t go out there trying to find one of these girls that you just met-met on the street. Because if you got a girlfriend that’s a friend, she going to be in your corner regardless. She going to know your struggles.
My twin brother spent eleven years, yeah, 11 years in prison. But every time he went down the Wall down there in Pittsburgh, he ran into probably half the kids that I council at Allegheny Academy. Don’t end up there, man. You gotta live by example. So keep a lot of positive people in your life. You’ll go far. So that’s something that I’ve always told my kids. You still with the negatives. You gonna get negative out of it. You know, if you’re stay with positive people, you get positive out of it.