What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [122]
Mel, who worked part-time in the shipyards as a “chipper,” and Betty had by then moved into their own house, a duplex on Sacramento Street in a then-integrated neighborhood of Southwest Berkeley which they had bought from an Italian-American named Aldo Russo. When Mel had expressed an interest in getting into business for himself, Russo, who had a jukebox route, agreed to show Mel the ropes. While working for him, changing records in jukeboxes and making collections, Mel noticed how difficult it was to find so-called race music for the black bars, clubs, restaurants, and sandwich shops springing up in the Bay Area.
Soon, he and Betty were selling 78s out of their garage. When Mel was working his other jobs or off playing football (he was an MVP quarterback for the Oakland Giants in the pre-NFL Pacific Coast League), Betty ran the store. She did so while tending to Rick, the infant boy she and Mel adopted in March 1945, after she failed to conceive during the first three years of marriage. To stimulate the new business, the couple bought radio time on a local station, WKRE. In those days, radio stations had no black disc jockeys but some of the hipper deejays picked up on what the Reids promoted. One day, after the Reids played “Around the Clock,” a slightly risqué recording by blues shouter Wynonie Harris, other deejays kept replaying it and droves of customers began scouring the neighborhood for the Reids’ garage. “We sold out of it that day,” Betty said.
By the start of the next decade, the record business was lucrative enough for the Reids to buy a half-acre lot Mel had seen one day driving through the suburb of Walnut Creek. In 1950, Betty had given birth to the first of three children. To accommodate their growing family, the couple began designing a four-bedroom red-wood house, inspired by pictures of homes in House Beautiful and Sunset magazines. They were shocked when they were confronted by racially motivated threats. “We didn’t know we were moving into a hornet’s nest,” Betty said. “But pretty soon, we began to get letters from neighbors warning that if we tried to stack lumber to build our house, they would burn it.”
No overt acts of violence ever occurred, but unbeknownst to Betty and Mel, their adopted son Rick, the first black student in the elementary school, was regularly bullied with impunity. On one occasion, Betty learned that the Parkmead Elementary School was holding a minstrel show for a PTA fund-raiser. Betty was appalled by the vision of white people in blackface and kinky wigs, and summoned the courage to confront the principal. She went to his office unannounced. He wasn’t there, but his costume of baggy pants and polka-dot shirt was hanging on the door. “I could feel my chest tighten,” she recalled. “I knew this was terribly wrong, but I still didn’t know why I was so offended.”
When the principal returned, his face reddened. Betty asked if it was true that the school was having a minstrel show. He said it was, but he wanted her to know there was no intent to insult anyone. “We’re doing this to show how happy black people were,” he said.
“Do I look happy?” Betty said. When he acknowledged that she did not, instead of demanding that the show be canceled, she asked only that the principal inform the participants of how she felt and that she would be sitting in the front row for their performance. “It was a miserable night from which little was gained,” she said. “There was as much anger and resentment stirred by my act as there was enlightenment.”
Her metamorphosis into the person she calls “Betty the Defender” had its genesis in the mid-1950s, when she read about an improvement association at a newly built housing development in nearby Pleasant Hill that was trying to