Audio File
Transcript
My name is Brenda Tate. I am 68 years old. I am born and raised in the Hill District. I live in the same block that they brought me home from Magee Hospital and I live in the house that I went to high school in and graduated in 1966. My mother and her sister bought that home. They scrub floors in West Penn Hospital and paid for that house. So I moved back in that house after my mom passed. So now I’m literally in the same block that they brought me home in 1949 in the same place. My childhood was extremely exciting. Matter of fact, where we’re sitting right now, this used to be an old Catholic Church. It was called, I think, St. Bridget and right where the parking lot is used to be a huge yard and most of the young kids went to preschool, the Catholic School right in the area here.
We spent most of our childhood in the summer time in this area playing tag and jumping off this high wall here where the playground is, we spent most of our lives in the summer in that playground and in the winter and fall we spent our time down the street in a place called the Kay Boys Club. My life has been literally in this block. The Kay Boys Club is the same as the Jeron Center is. It was a place for young people to go after school after we did our homework. If you were under 16, you went in the daytime and you had to be home by 6:00 and when you became a teenager, you were able to stay in the teenage lounge at the Kay Boys Club. It was like a Community Center. In this area they had several but if you lived in a certain block in this area, I lived in a 1900 block, so I went to The Kay Boys Club. If you lived further up the Hill and the 2000 block, you went to the Hill City and if you were in the blocks further up the Hill, you went to Ammons Center. So we all had our own little niche here in the community.
There were characters in this community. It was a character in this community named Dingbat, and he would walk around with dreadlocks, a stick, a bandana around his rip, tore up jeans and he used to look so weird. Today you can Google the name Dingbat he was one of the most prolific artists in this community. There’s art pieces that he’s done, in this community, I think there’s a young lady, Terry Baltimore has a few of his pieces, but when I was young he was just a weird guy. August Wilson was my neighbor. Georgie Benson was my neighbor. He was a famous jazz guitarist. There were so many people, community that was so artistic and every summer and 4th of July we would have street dances and people were able to get on the stage and do their thing. We had in this Community parades two or three times summer like every month there was a parade that went through the Hill District and all the talent would come through the Hill and you’d see them women on parade and the majorettes in the community and the young girls, the patons.
The mentors I had, there was no such thing as if you were did anything wrong, you couldn’t be chastised. Everybody in the community chastised you when you were out of line. There was no such thing of getting on the buses and raising your voice or running up and down the bus because somebody on that bus knew you. They knew your parents and they were very, very strict about how you carried yourself near the house or away from the house. So I think today the biggest problem is you don’t have people around you to make sure that you’re doing what you need to do when you’re away from home. So I think it would benefit quite a bit today if they had those people in their lives.