Audio File
Transcript
My name is Terry Baltimore. My childhood was fun and complicated? So when I was little, I wasn’t in the care of my parents. I grew up with my great grandmother until I was about 5 years old, and I had a great grandmother until I was 20, and I thought everybody had a great grandmother. And when I was able to, I was back with my parents, and I was there with my mom and dad and a younger sister. We lived on a small street called Renfrew Street. When I think of growing up, I think of all the fun we had on that street. I feel like I was blessed in the space that I grew up in. I think back at all the stuff that we used to do, and kids right now would probably think “That wasn’t fun.” We like played dodgeball and hide and seek and softball with the boys against the girls. We didn’t have a ball, so we actually wadded up like some aluminum foil. The group of kids that I grew up with, we did everything together, so it felt like we explored the world together, we learned together, and in many ways, some of us are still connected.
Growing up, I was incredibly shy. I was the kid with the book in the corner, like, my sister was a whirlwind. She would walk in the room, and she knew everybody and everybody know her, and I was the complete opposite. I started to do things that pushed me to not be quiet. I took jobs as a community organizer, because it would force me to have to stand up in front of people I didn’t know. I took classes in public speaking because I wanted to talk, and I was afraid to, and so the only way that I could get out of that fear with to just find places that would force me up against that fear.
I went to Duquesne University. I wanted to be a journalist, and I learned a lot being on that campus. But one of the hardest things that I experienced was Duquesne was a place that had very few black students. And so, it was a place that taught me some hard lessons about what it meant to constantly be the other, to constantly be among the students that stood out. It was so hard that when I was finished with class, I would come back to a program that was based at Hill House, just so I could be around people who would look at my brown face and see me. I had to go someplace almost every day so I could feel like the people who were looking at me knew me as a whole person and not just as a box.
I think I’ve had a number of inspirations. My great grandmother was my first inspiration. She was a woman who moved to Pittsburgh with four children, and she moved here on her own. She came here not knowing anybody, not having any community ties, not having any family ties. Consequently, she made a way for the rest of us, so she was a big inspiration. My mom and dad were also inspirations. So my mom taught me the value of being respectful and quiet. And quiet, you get to listen to other people before you jump in and say something, and I’ve always appreciated that as a gift. And my dad was the storyteller. When I was a kid, I used to hate the stories. Like, “Oh my God, is he gonna tell that story again?” But as I’ve grown up, I realized the value of those stories. Well, he was telling us these stories over and over again because he didn’t want us to forget them because they were the things that we were supposed to pass on, and so my dad gave me this gift of storytelling, which actually, for the last 25 years, I have been a tour guide in the Hill District. I became a tour guide by accident. I was joining a group of college students shortly after I came to the Hill on a walkabout of the neighborhood, and I realized that these young white students came to the Hill District with this sense that they knew what this place was and the way they described it was that the Hill District was dirty, and it was old, and it was a place they couldn’t believe that they were made to come, and it was in that moment that I knew I didn’t know a lot about the neighborhood, but I felt compelled to learn a lot, and little by little, I became a tour guide, starting out with a few groups of students, and now I do like 50 tours a year. So my goal is to hand over becoming a tour guide to another generation of Hill District residents because they grow up in the Hill District, not understanding what an amazing place this is and that people come from all over the world to be in the Hill District, and I think young people should own the legacy of their community and tell the stories of the community.