OT: History be Damned

I grew up in New Orleans. We were poor, but I had a few rich friends. The rich folks had black servants, and the kids had a black mammy who took care of them from birth. If a kid got hurt, or something good happened, they ran to mammy first. Mammy's kids were their playmates. When the Feds integrated the South, there were riots and arson and dogs is a lot of the south, but the people in New Orleans mostly said sure, it's OK with us I guess. My high school was the first integrated school in Louisiana. Three black girls and a dozen armed Feds showed up one day. The girls were welcomed, nurtured, tutored.

Yep. Those in the North, with the heads thoroughly immersed up their assholes, have no clue how things really were... or at least pretend so.

My family was poor also... a real treat was buttered macaroni ;-)

But, while in high school, I tutored a number of the rich kids in town... all those houses facing Ritter Park in Huntington, WV. The sons of the chairman of the Island Creek Coal Company (*) and the chairman of West Virginia Steel (he an MIT grad) come to mind.

(*) Game room in basement with billiard tables (plural ;-) and pin-ball machines... I was stunned at the opulence.

I also tutored the not-so-rich kids attending the parochial Catholic and Jewish schools... those families who valued education no matter the cost. (I actually made $10/hour in the summers of 1956-58 ;-)

I cannot recall *any* racial conflicts... ever.

(As it all comes back to me I was actually in *many* opulent homes... my father was a TV repairman, and I often went along on service calls... to help carry the sets to the truck... though some designs, you could just slide chassis and CRT out the back as a unit ;-) ...Jim Thompson

We had "salt and pepper segregation", mixed, adjacent black and white blocks. New Orleans didn't have large-scale neighborhood segregation until the Great Society projects came along.

Things could have been a lot different.

We could seldom afford beef or pork, so we ate shrimp and oysters, which were dirt cheap until people started flying them out to New York on 747's.

Well, we had black and white restaurants, schools, doctors, and drinking fountains.

We did have some of that sort of neighborhood separation, though very little, except that driven by the Federal-induced "projects".

The "projects" were where virtually all the crime took place... black-on-black. (My favorite was where a black gal killed her husband, cut him up, and packed him in a freezer, then reported him "missing" ;-)

We had peel-and-eat shrimp once a year... New Year's eve. The only time my father ever drank (Tom Collin's). (I introduced him to wine when he was in his 80's ;-)

We had pot roast on Sunday's... slow-cooked to make it chewable... chicken otherwise... can't remember ever having a steak until I got to MIT and took to going to Newbury Steak House every few weekends.

We didn't have that... I suppose because we were a "border" state, just south of the Mason-Dixon Line... sort of a North-South mix. ...Jim Thompson

I'm sure there will be more films banned. It started with the "Birth of a Nation."

:-( ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

I'm looking for work... see my website.

Thinking outside the box...producing elegant & economic solutions.

Luxury, sheer luxury...We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

-- Kevin Aylward

I had to walk 4 miles to school... it was uphill thru the snow *both* ways ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Conditions most of us lived in as kids would be unthinkable now.

NT

Unbelievable, anyway.

Studyhall was such a waste. In senior year I wanted to take a 2-hour electronics course from the trade school section. Denied because I would have no studyhall.

But it turned into luck... I then chose to take a French class... where I met my wife-to-be ;-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Antifa's war cry, "No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!" Victory for Antifa would be the destruction of society.

-Hector Morenco (@hectormorenco) August 28, 2017

Most years I only had one or two hours a week that couldn't be scheduled for a class. I was forced into a College Prep course, but I took every shop class that I could, including being the Teacher's aid for the Electronics One course, my senior year. They kept trying to push me into law or medicine and they would harp that I was wasting my time in shop classes.

Then they would try to get me to open an envelope to show me how high my IQ was. I didn't care. I routinely got the highest scores on the never ending string of aptitude tests. Many times, I received the highest scores for the entire school system, but the only classes that didn't bore the shit out of me were the hands on shop classes.

For instance, my project for Physic class, where I made a professional grade CRT degassing coil. The GC model sold for bout $80 at that time. I had enough wire left over to make a dozen of them, and I sold them for around $25, each The switch was mounted inside a curved piece of aluminum,that was then mounted inside the coil, and they had a

The wire was 17AWG double enameled, double cotton covered that was made for Picker Xray machines' power transformers. I bought it at a large surplus store, by the pound. I made a winding jig with pieces of round plywood form a couple spools of Belden coax, and I used a spent rifle shell for the handle to turn it. It took about 15 minutes to build each coil.

I made well over $100 from my class project. ;-)