Transcript of interview with Tom and Donna Martin by Claytee White, January 31, 2013

AN INTERVIEW WITH DONNA AND TOM MARTIN An Oral History Conducted by Claytee D. White The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas 1 ©The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2012 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV - University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editors: Barbara Tabach, Joyce Moore Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers and Project Assistants: Barbara Tabach and Claytee D. White 2 The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of Dr. Harold Boyer. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project. ' Claytee D. White, Project Director Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas 3 ORAL HISTORY RESEARCH CENTER AT UNLV Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Rancho High School Class of '62 Use Agreement Name of Narrator: Name of Interviewer: H fitters We, the above named, give to die Oral History Research Center of UNLV, the recorded intcrvicw(s) initiated on yd'//. 3 along with typed transcripts as an unrestricted gilt, to be used for such scholarly and educational purposes as shall be determined, and transfer to the University of Nevada Uis Vegas, legal title and all literary property rights including copyright. Tliis gift does not preclude the right of the interviewer, as a representative of UNLV, nor the narrator to use die recordings and related materials for scholarly pursuits. I understand that my interview will be made available to researchers and may be quoted from, published, distributed, placed on die Internet or broadcast in any medium diat die Oral History Research Center and UNLV Libraries deem appropriate including future forms ol" electronic and digital media. There will be no compensation for any interviews. Signature of Narrator Date Library Special Collections 4505 Maryland Parkway, Box 457010, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-7070 (702) 895-2222 1 Preface Hailing from Indiana and California, Donna Guiffre Martin and Tom Martin came to Las Vegas in the early 1950s as their parents sought new opportunities. Donna's father, Gus Guiffre, quickly established himself as a local television personality, while Tom's father took on a variety of entrepreneurial opportunities. Like many of the young people in Las Vegas, Donna and Tom enjoyed riding around town; horse-back riding; football games; Helldorado - and, of course, Rancho High School. This interview covers both Donna and Tom's early years before their moves to Las Vegas, as well as their memories of first homes, childhood experiences, early adulthood and their current lives. 2 This is Claytee White. I'm with Tom and Donna Martin. They're going to give your full names and they're going to spell those for you in a few minutes. It is January 31st, 2013. So how are both of you today? I'm fine, Claytee. Great. Great. So first, Tom, give me your full name, the name that you gave me earlier. Okay. It is George Thomas Martin, the third. And everything is spelled normal? Just normal, correct. Okay, good. Donna would you please do the same thing. And then if you will start after that tell me something about your early life. Okay. My name is Donna Giuffre Martin. The Giuffre I will spell; it's G-I-U-F-F-R-E. I was born in Frankfort, Indiana in 1944. My father was a city fireman. But because of a lot of ill health in the family, the doctor said we needed to move to a warmer climate. People had told my dad with his voice and his personality he should have been in radio and television. So we packed up the car and headed West and we stopped in Phoenix, Arizona to see my grandmother, and my dad went to one of the radio stations there and they told him if he was serious that he needed to go to school and get a first-class engineering license before he could become a disc jockey. So we moved on to Southern California and he used his GI Bill and went to radio school. We came to Las Vegas for Helldorado. My mother fell in love with it and said why don't you see if you can get a job. There were only three radio stations in town at the time and no television. So he called it was KRAM then, K-R-A-M radio—he called the owner at his home 3 and the man liked his voice and hired him over the telephone. And told him, he said, you'd probably like a contract or something. And my dad said, well, yeah. So he said come to the house. And he wrote something out on a paper towel. So he went back to California and packed up. We could not find a place to live in Las Vegas. So my mother, my sister Toni and I stayed in Glendale, California. And my dad slept on army cot at the radio transmitter and pleaded every day on the radio for someplace for his family to live. Finally, a family called and they said we're going to be out of town for three months; you can live in our house for three months. So we packed up and moved to Las Vegas and that was in 1952. So where was the house located? It was in North Las Vegas. So we stayed there for three years. Three years or three months? No. Three months. I'm sorry. We moved around quite a bit in that time. There was very little in Las Vegas, a lot of dirt roads, very few paved streets. We eventually lived in the Crestwood area for a while and then we eventually moved up to Twin Lakes and we lived there for a while until—I always liked horses and my dad always talked about his family on television. So for Christmas one year one of his fans sent me a horse. And so we boarded her at the Twin Lakes stables for a while and then my parents bought a home not far from there, but where we could have her in the backyard. Do you remember how much the home cost? Twenty-eight thousand five hundred dollars. It had a half acre of land. It was a big home. It was right almost back to back with Jim Gans that you interviewed yesterday. So we lived there. My early, early days I did a lot of horseback riding, rode in the Helldorado Parade, did a 4 few—I wasn't a real good cowgirl. I tried barrel racing, but I wasn't great at it. But I had my horse until I went away to college. And then nobody else in my family rode, so we gave her away. And your sister never learned? No. She would get on her once in a while when we would have company come to town. But the horse took off with her one day and she said, wait a minute. My dad said you're supposed to go whoa. So because no one was exercising her when I wasn't around, I said I'd rather give her to somebody that will give her a good home than sell her. So I gave her away. Do you know who gave the horse to you? I cannot remember her name. Her husband was an executive at the Sahara Hotel is all I can remember. And my dad had never met her. We didn't meet her until she decided to give me the horse. Then we went to her home. They didn't tell me at first they were going to give me the horse. They said that the lady was ill and would I take care of the horse for a few months. So we brought her out to Twin Lakes. Then about three months later at Christmas they told me that she was mine. But early on I would ride anybody's horse that they would let me on. James Cashman Senior had two horses. And one of my best friend's father, in his job working for Mr. Cashman, was to take care of those horses because he had a horse. So I used to ride Mr. Cashman's horses all the time. Mr. Cashman had a silver-mounted saddle that he kept on display in the dealership showroom and he had another white show saddle. He had my girlfriend and I convinced that if we cleaned those he would let us use them in the Helldorado Parade. I mean it was slave labor; we spent hours and hours and hours cleaning that silver. I've got some pictures over there with the saddle. He let us use his things when we were riding in the parade. Oh, that's wonderful. Now, I'm going to come back in a few minutes because I want you to tell me more about your father and his career. So Tom, would you like to tell me about your young years? Sure. The first part is kind of short and sweet. I was born in Hollywood, California, February nineteenth, 1944, and lived there and started school until 1951 when we moved to Las Vegas. The school I attended was Michael Teraina Elementary; we've seen it [name has changed]. It's right on Sunset Boulevard. I was kind of surprised it's still there, but that was the grade school. But then when we moved to Las Vegas, my dad came up and bought a home. My mother had never seen it or anything; he just bought the house. We were on Mesquite Street, which is the third street south of Bonanza. We were at Nineteenth and Mesquite. Our house faced the north out toward Sheep Mountain. It had a big picture window. And there was nothing between our house until you got to Nellis Air Force Base. We would get up early to see the glow from the "A " bomb tests at Mercury. Off to the east a little, the Davis Ranch was there; that's where Davis Nursery is down about 25th and Bonanza now. It was just a house and kind of an out building with animals and that. But we lived there until just about high school age and then we moved just a block over and two blocks down to the corner of 23rd and Walnut. I went to Sunrise Acres Elementary School here and then to Rancho. Sunrise Acres started at first grade and went to? I don't know that they had kindergarten, but they had first grade. So I started there at second grade and went through to the eighth grade. Sunrise Acres School is still there, but it's not on the same piece ofproperty; it's further to the east. When I went to school there, they had some temporary portable buildings. They were kind of rectangle shaped and I remember that they had crossing guide wires overhead with turnbuckles to hold them together. We had oil for heat; we had an oil furnace with a Lyca face front. When the wind blew real good like it does here, the chalkboards would actually move on the walls. But in those classes, I think I spent about three years in those buildings. Then they had some cinderblock buildings, as well. I think the two lower grades and then the upper grades. Then they finally got rid of those. But that was Sunrise Acres back then. Wow. Amazing. When we went to Rancho there were only three high schools in Las Vegas at the time. It was the original Las Vegas High and then Bishop Gorman, the Catholic school, and Rancho. So I went to Rancho. Good. And we're going to talk about Rancho in a little while. But before we get to Rancho I want to know more about your parents and what they did for a living. So Donna, let's go back to you and talk about both parents. Did your mom ever work outside the home? Yes. When we were in Indiana, she was a secretary. When we moved here she worked at the Horseshoe Club for a while. She would sit in a booth and call the jackpots, ten dollar jackpot on number fifteen or twenty-dollar jackpot on number twenty. She did that for several years. But because of ill health she had to quit working and she was a housewife for most of the years that she was alive. So what was the purpose of having someone call the jackpots? I believe they just wanted people playing to know that people were hitting jackpots so you would continue playing hoping that you would hit one. And that was what she did all day? Yes. Eight hours. 7 I have never heard of that job before, so I really appreciate that. Yes. I think that was pretty common back then. So all of the small casinos had them? Uh-huh. And you could see the entire floor from where she sat? Yes. She was a little elevated and she could see the floor. But I think the floor men would tell her what machine because somebody would yell, but she wouldn't necessarily know exactly what machine it was. So they would tell her what machine and how much the jackpot was for and she would give it over the loud speaker. Interesting. I don't know why no one has ever said that. And your father, tell me more about what he did. Well, when we first moved here he was a disc jockey. Channel 8 was the first TV station to go on the air in 1953 and he did the first newscast and they paid him five dollars a night. They wanted him to shave off his mustache and he said for five dollars, no way. He was known for his mustache; everybody remembered his mustache. Then he became what they called a local personality because Las Vegas was too small for the networks to come in. So they would have local people host. He hosted the afternoon movie for eighteen years on Channel 8 and five years on Channel 5. He was the captain of the Showboat on Saturday nights and hosted a movie for the Showboat Hotel, which is no longer, for several years. And he did a lot of local and some national commercials, appeared in a few very small parts in some TV series that they filmed here in Las Vegas. He was very, very involved with the community. When we were young the hotels did not set off fireworks for the Fourth of July. So the firemen had a big fireworks display at Cashman 8 Field, the original Cashman Field. Daddy would emcee that every year and he did that for thirty years. After he had his heart attack and couldn't work any longer, they had him as their guest of honor and they had a firework display made on his profile; that was very touching. But for thirty-odd years he did the Jerry Lewis telethon, the local segment; he hosted that. For many years he hosted telethons for the Heart Association. One year they put him in a jail in February, the Helldorado jail, and put him in a striped suit on Fremont Street doing his radio show to raise money for the Heart Association. It snowed on him, he got pneumonia, and they had to take him out in an ambulance. But he was very involved in the community and people really loved him. Give me his full name. Well, his legal name was August Anthony Giuffre, but he went by Gus Giuffre. On my mom and dad's 30th wedding anniversary, which was in 1969, to show their appreciation for all he had done in the community, they had a huge party for them at the Sahara Hotel Convention Center. I was looking at a newspaper clipping this morning; it said there were twenty-five hundred people there. That's where they first told him that they were going to name a street after him, but they didn't do it until many years later. But there is a street named after him close to the airport and nobody can pronounce it. Nobody ever spelled it right. Even the newspapers and everything, for as many years as he was on TV, they always spelled our name G-U instead of G-I-U. But he was very, very involved in the community. He was a real people person. When he had his heart attack, he didn't have any insurance and people started sending money. They said you found my dog for me twenty years ago or twenty-five years ago and they'd send a little check instead of flowers, which made my parents feel really good because he had just gone into a new job at a new radio station and hadn't been there long enough to have medical insurance. But he was so loved in the community. He was in intensive care for a month, so the hospital bills were mounting up. And Jerry Lewis hosted a golf tournament and then did a special show at the Desert Inn to raise money and paid off my dad's hospital bills for him. Wow, what a town. Yes. So he was very loved. Wonderful. Tell me what it was like being the child of a celebrity in a small town like this? When I was young I went to a new show every week. They may still do it; I don't know. But whenever a show would change at the hotels, they would have a big press opening. So I would go with my mom and dad all the time. I was always at shows and things. I got to see shows when they had big name entertainment, which was wonderful. It was nice because my dad was so well liked that people were always very kind. Great. Did you take advantage of the celebrity? I don't think so. I don't know. That's wonderful. Tell me more about, Tom, your father and mother and what they did. Well, my father never got married until he was forty years old and then I came along four years after that. But my mother had worked as a secretary when she met my father. She was working as a secretary in an insurance company in Los Angeles. My father had done a number of different things in his past. He had done police stuff. He had his own detective agency, I guess, for a while. He used to be involved in the automobile industry. I know he used to transport cars directly from Detroit out to Los Angeles where we lived. And he also was involved in an auto dealership or something. I was pretty young and really didn't pay any attention to that. But the thing that brought us to Las Vegas was a horse race track on Paradise Road where they 10 built the International Hotel and then it became the Hilton. Well, before that hotel was there, there was a racetrack, a horse racetrack, a very nice two or three-story cant-levered building. It was really, really nice. My father had the parking concession for that. So he put all the money he could get together and got some friends to go in with them. That was going to be Dad's big hoorah; he had the parking concession. I have a younger brother, seven years younger. He told my brother and I and the neighbor kids that we'd be out directing traffic on horseback and it was all going to be this big hoorah. But the track went bust. How long was it active? I don't know, but I think it was around a year or maybe only one season. The problem with that was at that time in the early fifties most of the tourists, not all, but most of them came from California, particularly Southern California. They would come to Las Vegas to gamble. But in Southern California horse racing was legal, so they had the big nice tracks, Santa Anita and all the rest of them. So people could go to the tracks down there, probably prettier and nicer tracks than what we had even though ours was new, but they wanted to come up and they wanted live gambling in the casinos. Also, our weather is not real conducive twelve months out of the year for horse racing as other tracks have tried here and didn't work. But anyway, so dear old dad went bust. Then he did a couple of different things. At one time he got involved with an oil additive for automobiles. It was called Formula 9. It was kind of a precursor to AMSOIL or some of these other additives they have. But it was the first one I had heard of. I remember two of the sales presentations. They'd dip a standard screwdriver in this Formula 9 and you'd try to hold the screwdriver by the tip between your fingers but you could not because it was so slippery. The other thing they did, was pour some of this motor oil in this cast iron skillet and put some 11 gasoline in and throw a match into it. The gasoline would burn off and the oil remained just as clear. I don't know if that was a gimmick or not, but I do remember that was part of the presentation. But anyway, then later my father put together or met someone, because he did not invent this machine, but he got with the inventor of the machine that would extract gold out of tailings. Originally in this state when they were doing gold mining they would extract the gold from the dirt and rocks with a cyanide process and ball mills. They would extract the gold. They knew they were not getting all the gold, but there was no way to get the rest of it out economically or easily. So there was still a fair amount of gold left in these tailing ponds. So my dad for a number of years was in Searchlight, Nevada, and they were working these tailing ponds. During that time, summers and weekends I'd be up in Searchlight with my dad. My mother did not work after I was born and then my brother for a number of years and then she did go back to work. And she worked for Mayflower, the moving and storage people, here locally. Then she found another job; she went to work for Deluca Wine and Spirits. They were down on Main Street at the time. She worked there for a number of years. It was after my father passed away my mother needed to do something so she would have retirement and better insurance, so she took a cut in pay and went to work for the state of Nevada. Anyway, so my mother had gone to work in Las Vegas and Dad was in Searchlight. And either he'd come home on a weekend or we'd go up there for the weekend. Then from there he went to Katherine's Landing over on Lake Mohave doing the same thing. From there he got a little house down on the Colorado River just south of Bullhead. There's another fellow, the fellow that helped us move to Las Vegas, Art Harris that had a barbershop in the Sal Sagev Hotel. But he and my dad got these two lots. There was a little 12 house on each of these. It was federal land, so you could never own it, but it had a ninety-nine year lease. So this little house had a kitchen, dining, front room thing in one half of it. The other half was the bedroom and bathroom. It had another little outbuilding for a tool shed. But when I was in high school we'd go down on the weekends because we had a boat dock. In fact, even in the summer we'd sleep out on the boat dock. With that water coming down from the bottom of Davis Dam, you had to have a blanket on even in the summertime because the breeze off the water and that dropped the temperature. One of the times my father was home—this is before we had decorative rock—he had this idea on the side of the house to get rid of this grass. So he killed the grass with gasoline and stuff and he put down black tar paper and he put on just red cinders like they use for roadwork around the state. That worked out real good except when you'd walk on it, it would puncture the paper and then grass would come up on that side. So one of the times he was down and he was burning the grass. He'd have a coffee can, three-pound can, used to be a common size can, put gas on the grass and then light it and let it burn up. Well, he thought it was all extinguished and he had gas in a can and he put some more down and it flared up. And he jumped back and dropped the can and the gas splashed up on his lower legs and he got third degree burns. So he was laid up pretty good with that for quite a while. As a result of that, the trauma to him, he had a heart attack and passed away at home. So how old were you at that time? I was I believe twenty-one. I was gone from the house; my brother was not. And your mother was already working for the state by that time? Yes. Donna, you talked about a lot of the recreational type things you did, horseback riding and 13 all of that. Tom, what did you do for recreation during those early years, early teen years? When we were in Searchlight, that's where I learned to drive; I was fourteen and my dad bought this old Studebaker pickup. By the time we went to pick it up, I guess kids had broken all the glass out of it. No windows, no dash, glass, nothing. But it ran fine. So he taught me how to drive. My first paying job I was fourteen working at a parking lot for a local grocery store that was right behind Woolworth's. Woolworth's was on Fremont Street and I had to give people a ticket to park in there so they wouldn't just use that parking lot and go into Woolworth; they had to go into the store. But when I was in high school I worked as a box boy and stuff. With our situation, the family needed the income. So I would work, get my paycheck, give it to my mom and life was good. If I wanted to go to a basketball game or something, I had money for that. So I was working. I went to work our senior year. We took a class—what was that called? Distributive education? Yes. It was kind of on-the-job training and you got a credit for working. So I went to work at one of the movie theaters on Fremont Street. I left school our senior year at noon and went to work. They let you do that? Oh, because of that class. Because of the class, yes. And I got a credit for working. I had enough credits to graduate. So I would leave at noon, as quite a few of the kids did, and went to work at the Fremont movie theater. Did you go to any of those openings? No. My parents did, but I didn't get to go to any of them. I was too young. 14 With the DE, I was also in DE. So my half a day I took off I worked for the chamber of commerce. My job was to go around to the hotels and pick up different things like placemats and matches and brochures. People would write into the chamber of commerce from around the country and wanted to have a Las Vegas night party. So we put these things together—swizzle sticks and matches and that—and box them up and send them to them. And then when I was working at the chamber I learned to run their Multilith, which is a printing press. Then when I left the chamber of commerce I went to work for Granes Printing and I was a printer for a couple of years, a lithographer. And what kinds of things did they print? Office forms—letterheads, envelopes, fliers; that type of thing. So in my earlier life I was a printer. That's great. So I want to know about the dances at Rancho, like the Sadie Hawkins Dance, the proms. Any of those memorable ones that you remember? I loved the sock hops that we did in the afternoon. I remember one of the dances when we put dance wax all over the floor and I think I was the first one to fall. I mean people were just really hitting the ground hard that night. That was probably the most memorable one that I can think of. Back in those days it wasn't anything like the kids today; we didn't have limousines. My girlfriends and I would swap dresses; wear them to different dances so we'd look different, but it was all the same dresses. I really enjoyed them. I was never queen of anything. Do you remember the Sadie Hawkins Dances? Yes. I think I went and I don't even remember who I asked. But I went to junior prom. I guess they weren't memorable enough. 15 » Do you remember chasing the boys for Sadie Hawkins? [Laughing] I was dating someone that didn't go to Rancho, so I didn't chase very many around campus. But I remember I had long hair and I did braids and wired them so that they'd curl up. Oh, I bet that was fun. What about cruising Fremont Street? Oh, we did that all the time. And working at the movie theater, you'd stand in the lobby and some of the guys had like doorbells on their car. So right before they would get to the movie theater they would ring that doorbell and we knew they were coming and we'd run out in the lobby and wave as they drove by. Then when I would get off work, my girlfriend would pull up out front, I'd jump in and we would cruise Fremont Street and waste all of my dad's gasoline all the time. Yes, he didn't love that. That was fun. Nowadays you can't drive down Fremont Street. While she and the girls were driving in their cars, my buddies and I would be doing the same thing because that's what you did. For people that don't know Las Vegas, at the very top of Fremont Street where the Union Plaza is now was the train depot; it was Union station up there. There was a big loop. So you 'd drive up and you 'd come around the loop. Then you 'd go down twenty-five blocks to the Blue Onion and that's where the Rancho kids went. And if you went to Las Vegas High, then you went over to Sill's Drive-In at Fifth Street and Charleston. So they'd cut across that way. I mean, boy, if I had a dollar for every mile I spent on Fremont Street... that's just what you did. And you'd talk to your buddies and the girls were with the girls and stuff. Then got to go down to the Blue Onion and have a vanilla cream coke and French fries or onion rings and then you go do a couple more loops. So now, this was a weekend activity? Oh, no. 16 Oh, it was an everyday activity. Everyday activity. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. All the time. Oh, yeah. Too much studying is overrated. Oh, I didn't know that. Thank you. Oh, yeah, that was a nightly thing. Of course, weekends I'm sure had heavier traffic. But, no, you're with your buddies and cruise Fremont Street. So what do you think about Fremont Street when you go down there now? To me it's kind of sad because I remember how it was when we were young. When we just had our class reunion we had one night down on Fremont Street so that the people that had moved away and not experienced the Fremont Street Experience could be there. I guess because it was such fun times back then, I get kind of nostalgic for it. So how does it make you feel when you see it? Well, as we get older, I guess we get older. But it's like so much of the thing with the kids and their video games and their handheld games and all this stuff, it just seems like it's just more glitzy and showy. Now, I do like the overhead light show of the Fremont Experience; I think that's neat because it's one-of-a-kind. But the rest of it is kind of cheap and kind of gaudy and I don't really care for the atmosphere on Fremont Street. What about the new restaurants that they're putting in now? Have you been down there within the last four months? Yes. We've been to Oscar's. We were there in October for our class reunion. 17 So during the class reunion where did you go? Hennessey's. Oh, okay. So you were in the heart of it. Yes, right on Fifth Street. We've eaten at Oscar's a couple of times. And we've eaten at the steakhouse, Vic and Anthony's in the Golden Nugget. I've always loved Hugo's Cellar. Oscar's is the newest that we've been to. For years we would go to the California Club, which is off of Fremont, and they had a real nice steakhouse there. We haven't been there for years. There are so many other places to go. Now that we're in Henderson there are places closer and we like to patronize them. Great. They've started developing Fremont Street East, so east of Las Vegas Boulevard. Right. And they're also to the south trying to get housing in there, apartment style, studio housing and things. I think that can be successful; it has been in other cities. I think that area got just about as low as it could get and survived. So it's got to come back. Great. Have you been to the Smith Center? Oh, yes. We have season tickets. Yes. That's great. And we've been to the cabaret, as well. That's just a great, great venue. Yes, it is. Tell me about race relations at Rancho. When we were at Rancho we didn't have any racial problems. We had a Chinese class president and a black vice president. But there just weren't a lot of problems. A few years after we graduated they developed some very, very severe problems. So what was the change? What happened do you think? Well, I'm not sure. My brother went to Rancho, also. He is seven years my junior. So when we 18 went, like we said, it just didn't make any difference. There were the two high schools. So as far as the black population, about one half went to Rancho, about one half went to Vegas. I think there was more animosity between Rancho kids and Vegas kids than there were color lines. But when my brother went to Rancho he said that he was afraid to go to the restroom without a couple of his buddies with him because he was afraid of getting beat up, and it probably worked the other way around. So I don't know. He graduated in '69 and actually things overall with society should have been getting better racially instead of worse, but I guess not. But a lot of people don't realize in Las Vegas when we grew up Las Vegas was a segregated community, housing and everything else. I mean it was strictly segregated. And a lot of people don't know that. At the movie theater the black population had to sit downstairs on