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Transcript
My name is Davon Hamlin. I’m 13 years old.
My name is Maxwell Martin. I’m 12 years old.
My name is Michael Mosley. I’m 12 years old.
We interviewed Fred Dingle.
On June 23rd, 2016.
My birth date is March 28th, 1958. Grew up in Garfield. Garfield is one of the smaller communities in the city of Pittsburgh and our name rings out just as much as the larger communities. It’s like Peyton Place. Everybody knows your name, your face. So that’s pretty close knit.
When I was young, I had a two parent household up to a certain point. My dad got sick when I was around 10 years old. I was forced to grow up real fast and be the man of the house. Spiritually, I was well grounded. When I was a child, my mom, she was in the church. My family has a church on the north side called Victory Baptist in Manchester. And a real strong spiritual seed was planted in me when I was young. I was banging on the coffee tables and stuff like that. My mom said, “No, no, no, we gotta do something about this.” So she bought me a snare and a cymbal, and I’ve just accumulated drums to my set from that age. Singing is like one of my passions. There was a God-given talent. I think I was hearing harmonies when I was in my mom’s womb. When I was like 6, I lived on the North Side. My partner’s name was Carvey Lynch, and I played drums, and he played guitar, and we made music. I was rocking out at that age.
I have a lot of happy thoughts about my childhood. Up until my high school years when I started kind of rebelling from what I was taught and I started making some bad decisions for myself, I’m still dealing with some of those decisions I made then right now. I didn’t excel too much academically because I was like a class clown. Didn’t stay focused and messed around. I was so goofy in my senior year, I flunked music. All my shortcomings were my own fault. I didn’t stay focused, but I should have. Education comes first. That’ll take you so far in life and right now you got a great opportunity to make the best of that.
I quit the band in 1980, and at that point, I went on to work, and my girlfriend’s father was a general contractor, and that was my first job. I was a general contractor. I was like 19. Being in a band, being like a rock star, so to speak, it started to affect my life from that point on. I struggled with drugs and alcohol in my life and at this point right now I’m coming about five years clean.
I was taught when I was younger, “If you never seen a man, you can never be a man.” So I had mentors. They weren’t called mentors, but in actuality, that’s what they were, like my dad, like my uncles. I had older cousins. My granddad. I actually took a little bit of all of their characteristics and made myself who I am today.
I didn’t go to college. Education is king. Now I’m in a situation to whereas if I would have went to school, I could have been a dictator of my employment. I love history, I love black history and I would have liked to have gotten to a field to whereas I can work with people and help people in the community, like a social worker or something like that. And if you don’t have the opportunity to go to college and stuff, make sure you go get you some job training, like a plumber, or a carpenter, or electrician, because there’s a demanding work field for those people who do that type of work. There’s always a need for houses and stuff to be built. You’re not going to something that you want to do and you’re passionate about and you like doing, man, and you just ride it until the wagon wheels fall off because before you know it, when you get out of high school, years are gonna start popping past you like this, man. You don’t wanna have no idle time on your hands. You wanna keep yourself resourceful every year of your life, and you wanna make progress.
You have to have respect to receive respect. You have to have respect for yourself, for others, for elders, for everything and everybody. And I think that that would, like, help mellow out some of the violence that’s going on, especially among ourselves. And then a lot of times when you get down to the root of the problem, it’s just something so minute that there’s no way life should be taken behind the issues that are going on. There’s nothing that you can’t obtain. You have to just persevere and fight through all obstacles, and you’re gonna come through a bunch of obstacles in your lifetime. But it’s gonna be nothing but a test of your faith, bro. Whatever you wanna do, you can do, man.