Audio File
Transcript
My name is Michael Mosley. I’m 12 years old.
My name is Davon Hamlin. I am 13 years old.
My name is Maxwell Martin. I’m 12 years old.
We interviewed Mike McGinnis.
We interviewed Mike McGinnis on June 22nd, 2016.
My birth date is January 23rd, 1959. My childhood was very good. We grew up in Garfield, and Garfield was a close knit community. Very close. Everybody knew one another. Everybody helped one another. So we grew up with a lot of love. My family was large. My grandmother had 15 kids. I have a brother and a sister. My brother’s name is Bernard the Second, and my sister is Yvonne, and she’s the oldest. I’m the youngest. My father made sure that he took care of his family, but he was not particularly around the house a lot.
I didn’t play any high school sports or anything like that because I was so small and little and they wouldn’t let us play and think I can handle it. I only weighed like 100 lbs in high school. You believe that? 100 lbs. I was small.
I didn’t get in trouble as a teenager. I was too scared of my parents to get in trouble. You know, we hung around with guys who may have done some bad things, like stealing cars and stuff like that. I witnessed a whole lot of that stuff, but I was smart enough to not get into the peer pressure. So just because you stole the car, I’m not gonna steal a car, you know? So you guys don’t let nobody talk you into doing something you don’t want to do, or don’t do something that you know that you shouldn’t be doing.
I played on a Garfield softball team, and today that team is still around. My father and them played on Garfield’s softball team growing up, so I enjoyed growing up playing softball with all your friends and stuff like that. That was a nice time in the community and for the community. Everybody came up and watched the game. You would have hundreds of people come up to the field and watch you play softball.
I remember when we grew up, my mother and father telling me, “You can live here, you can eat here, you can sleep here, but don’t ask for no money, cause you had graduated from high school.” So I remember playing outside in these streets and I went into a corner store. I guess I was 17. I was so thirsty. I wanted the juice, so I reached in my pocket and I didn’t even have a dime. It was like a huggie back then. I didn’t even have a dime to buy juice. And that’s when I decided to get my job. I was probably, like, 18 years old. My first real job. I was flipping hamburgers. Yes, I flipped hamburgers at Hardee’s. And about at 20-21, I worked for PennDOT. So I was a laborer, and then I advanced myself. I became a truck driver, so I did that for about 6 years before I went to the post office. I started off carrying mail, and I carried mail for like 8 years and the nice thing about the post office was like, you could start at the bottom and you can become the postmaster general if you put your mind to it. So you can go up that corporate ladder as high as you want to go, and I landed as supervisor. Like I said, I did 8 years of being a mailman, and the last 22 as being a supervisor for the post office, and I didn’t have any more eagerness just to go further up. I was happy. I worked with my sister, so I seen her every day. I did 30 years in the post office so… I just retired and my sister just retired.
I just looked at the struggle in the world and I always wanted to have something. I thought my father provided for us. Even though we grew up in the 60s, I never wanted for nothing, so I didn’t want my kids to want for nothing, so I tried to provide very well for my family.
The best day of my life was probably knowing that I married my wife and had my children. Those probably the best days of my life. I met my wife, Donna. Her name is Donna Johnson. Met her in Garfield. Believe it or not, we probably met in this building. It was called the Garfield YMCA, and she was on the volleyball team up here. So we came up here and the Y always had little after school programs that we could come up here, we could play cards, and there was ping pong tournaments, just after school programs like that, and this building’s been around for a long time. I have three kids. I have two girls and a boy and also raised two boys and I was about 20 when I had my first child.
You guys have to be smart in school and get your education. I advise you guys to get everything you can out of school, try to know everything you can because it’ll help you graduate. Get a degree. And if you don’t go to college, try to get electrician or auto mechanic, you know, work on something. Learn how to build houses or, you know, be good with your hands.