Audio File
Transcript
My name is Marquis Carter. I’m 17 years old.
My name is Samuel Auman. I’m 13 years old.
We interviewed Cletus Helton on June 14, 2018.
I went to Mount Union Area High School in Central PA. I graduated in 1974. The school, to me, is the greatest, the greatest school ever, I think. The little town I’m from is… ain’t even as big as Hazelwood, but our school system that we had in that little town was probably one of the best systems anywhere. When I was growing up, I grew up with a pony, and chickens, and cows, and pigs in my yard. I mean it-it-it was like just pure living. To me, kids don’t play today. We played from the time the sun came up in the morning till it went down at night. We played whether it was in the playground, where… wherever, the swimming pool, we played. Today, the kids are in front of the computer or in front of that game all day, every day. So that’s the biggest difference, I think.
I was inspired by my grandfather, and my father. My grandfather, he couldn’t read or write, but he had numerous businesses, he was a deacon in the church, and he used to give sermons on Sunday that my grandmother preached to him on Saturday. So he would sit there, and he would listen to what she said, and the next day in church, he would give that sermon verbatim. So, that just showed me that this was a man that had a memory bank that was like second to none. After watching him do things like that, it was, like, totally inspiring to me. My father inspired me because he was big on work and learning. My father was the first black male to graduate from the high school in my town. He graduated in 1947. He just inspired us that education was the thing of the future. He also pushed us to do everything with our hands. But he was just the inspiration that gave us the foundation to grow.
Hazelwood has been excellent for me since we moved here. We moved out here in 1992. We came from South Oakland. So before they closed Gladstone, our older kids actually went to Gladstone. The first thing I would probably try to change is the perception that the rest of the city has of Hazelwood, like it’s a bad place to live, but I think it’s a great place to live. I live on Ashton. I’ve never had any issues at all and we’ve been living there 25 years. Actually, I think it’s gotten better, and I think it’s even going to get better, and it’s on us to make it better. We have to make it better, the people that live in Hazelwood, because we have to care about our community. We have to make it want to grow, make it want to strive, and make it nice for our children.
I used to work in the steel mill, and then in 2000, my company moved to Mexico. I worked for US Steel in Mckees Rocks. We made axles and wheels for trains, and they moved our division to Mexico. So I actually gave up working in the mill and started my own business of home remodeling, and that was something that I had been doing on the side years prior to that.
I have a wife and seven children. My wife has been in the food industry, most of her adult life. She was always in the cooking. Where I come from in the country, we were always cookers and-and then the cooking, so it was just a proper thing for us.
My goal was to have a business, a family business that we all could enjoy running and enjoy the, you know, the benefits of being successful. We have a business, it’s called Cee &Dee’s Kitchen and my name Cletus, my wife’s name, Denise. We sell a lot of soul food, but we also sell ethnic foods as well.
Anything that we can do to get the young men to educate themselves further than a rap video or something that might be going on in the streets or something like that, it’s a plus for our community. The only way our community can grow and continue to grow is that if our youth grow. The youth are very important. They’re the most important part. The future can only be what you build it to be. We’re all the same. We’re all from the same community. Neither one of us has more than the next one. Neither one of us. Whether we think we do or not, we really don’t. We should never fight one another because there’s too many other good things to do. We gotta get away from the fighting. We gotta get away from the jealousy and stay positive, stay in school, and learn. Learn. Because everything you see, that flashy and all that old stuff that you see, it’s so much better when you go get an excellent job, earning an excellent pay, and you can go buy all those things and you sit back and look and say, “Listen, I’m not gonna lose mine because I’m going to work every day for this.” Those other guys that get it from that street corner, they have it for a couple of moments, and then it’s gone. Because they got to go to jail or they’re going to get killed or somebody that’s going to take it. So in the end, what do they have? Absolutely nothing. So it’s always best to work and earn. Work and earn. To me, that’s the greatest thing that you can do.