[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

CLAY EAST:

One thing that we talked about in particular last night was organizing the union to begin with when we all went out to the schoolhouse at Sunnyside, right?

SUE THRASHER:

Yes. Tell me again how that meeting came to be. You were telling me that somebody had organized it in a car.

CLAY EAST:

I told you that Mitchell and myself and I know that there were two other guys that was in the car and I think one of them was Ward Rogers, but we was just driving around there at home, and Mitchell had this thing all planned out even before we got in the car. And I was to be the president and Mitchell was to be the secretary. And the balance of that, now, we didn't have E.B. McKinney as vice-president at that time and I wouldn't say for certain whether he was elected that first night or not, I can't remember for certain about that. But anyway, he was vice-president… E.B. McKinney…

SUE THRASHER:

At that first meeting at Sunnyside School did you elect officers?

CLAY EAST:

Well, before we even had that meeting, it was understood. Mitchell had this all set up and planned even before we had that meeting. Now, the way he tells it in his meetings and speeches and so forth, was that this meeting was, uh, we gotthere late an all. That meeting was all planned and we all got out there when we was supposed to. I never was a person… I'm not the type of person to be late and I'm sure that Mitch rode out with me and [unknown] was

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there and I have forgotten now, we had to have a secretary and I don't know if that was brought up at that meeting or not, but what we decided that night was that we was to have a union and it was to be a mixed union, all one people. However, that wasn't decided until that night and, Mitch tells about some of these other guys getting up and proposing or discussing as to whether we should have a mixed meeting or not and I told him at the time that it was the only way to work it… that we couldn't have a black and a white outfit. All of them was working under the same conditions and they was all got the same kind of [unknown] and there was no occasion for having two… and another thing, we was always having speakers coming there from some-place and they couldn't speak to one group at one spot and another… they'd have to have two different occasions for meetings and generally just like Mary Hillyer when she came in there to [unknown] and we [unclear] to have a mixed meeting, she only had so long to be there, see

SUE THRASHER:

Mary Hillyer was from the Socialist party in New York?

CLAY EAST:

Yes, she was on her way to New Orleans and stopped off in Memphis. Now I don't know what the occasion was for her stopping. At that time Norman Thomas was very active and, uh … in fact when Mitch sent Brookins and this other guy down into Crittenden County

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while I was gone, which I would have been against. If I'd been there, I would have told them not to do it. But Mitch in my opinion, didn't have much feeling for the other guy. He didn't care what they got into, see, long as they got something started. So, he sent those guys off there down into Crittenden County… it was bad.

SUE THRASHER:

What is the county seat of Crittenden County?

CLAY EAST:

Marion. Howard Kurten was the sheriff and they had the roughest, toughest bunch of gangster officers that they could collect. Those guys had a press… uh, not a press… but a commercial appeal. A reporter came out to West Memphis… and that guy's name was Bragg, the big guy down there, and he went up to his house to see him and took his pistol and beat him up. And a man that was a brother to the Governor of Arkansas, it wasn't Futrell, it might have been the lieutenant governor's borther, but they stopped him on this Harahan Viaduct that was going into Memphis. The Harahan Viaduct was put into there and they had a toll on it and when this toll was collected it was supposed to be a free bridge across there, see, but after it was all collected and supposed to be closed up, the local government was in there. In Crittenden County, the officers kept collecting the toll off this thing. And the United States government had to go in there and put signs up that this was a free bridge. Crittenden County was an outlaw outfit, I'm telling you, the law was.

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They didn't pay attention to the government or anyone. And I was fixing to tell you… they stopped this man on the viaduct. They had a fifteen mile speed limit on this bridge, which was unnecessary. Of course, it was narrow and they put a guy on there in an unmarked car… well, there wasn't anything such as a patrol car then, they was all unmarked. And, I passed one of them on there, just drove fast enough to pass him, he was driving fifteen miles an hour. And they had some sings that was more or less confusing and I passed this guy and he stopped me and gave me a ticket and I was fined twenty-five dollars for speeding and I only drove eighteen miles an hour, just fast enough to get around this deputy. Now that was the condition that Crittenden County was in at that time. And after Mitch sent these guys down into Crittenden County…

SUE THRASHER:

Now, who were the guys that went into Crittenden County, do you remember?

CLAY EAST:

Yes, Brookins was the one…

SUE THRASHER:

A.B. Brookins?

CLAY EAST:

A.B. Brookins was the one that Mitch sent down there. It was the first trouble that we had had and it was the first time that anyone had been sent into Crittenden County.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, is Brookins a black minister?

CLAY EAST:

Yes.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, where was he from?

CLAY EAST:

Tyronza. But after…

SUE THRASHER:

And who went with him?

CLAY EAST:

I'm almost certain it was some white man. But they wasn't rough on white men, but they beat Brookins up and put him into jail. They made a practice of that. They made a practice of beating the guys up in jail… theyhad a big leather band, I've been in their jail.

SUE THRASHER:

You've been in their jail in Crittenden?

CLAY EAST:

I've been in jail and seen this big leather strap there… they didn't try to hide it or anything. And you couldn't get a reporter, nor a lawyer out of Memphis to go into Marion. They wouldn't take a case of any kind. You couldn't get them to go in there. They'd say, "Naw, we won't go in there, not to Crittenden County." And Mary Connor Myers, when she was sent down there from Washington, Roosevelt sent her down there when there was so much stirred up over it and that was the report they would never publicize it because it was too hot to report.

SUE THRASHER:

She went into Crittenden County?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah, she went into Marion and Crittenden County and all and she helped to break up the Capone Gang in Chicago and all, so she

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knew what rough stuff was, and she said that Capone and them boys was sissys beside this bunch down in Arkansas. And that's the report she come out and made in Memphis, see, after she'd been over there. But, the full report was never published. They never made it public after she went back to Washington.

SUE THRASHER:

What happened to Brookins and the other guy that went to Marion? Were they put in jail and beaten?

CLAY EAST:

Brookins was put in jail and beaten, yes. I was in Memphis at the time and when I came home, Mitch told me that they had him up there in jail and we knew that we was going to have to do something to try and get him out of jail. So, we went to Marked Tree. I knew C.T. Carpenter personally, been knowing him for years of course. I might also add that C.T. Carpenter was a Sunday School supertindent. He taught a class in Sunday School and was I think at one time, I think, figuring on being a minister before he became an attorney. And my Dad told me about C.T. Carpenter. He said that in these J.P courts, he wasn't no good. He used words that they didn't even understand and …but anytime he carried it up to a higher court, he beat them every time. And he did, he was a fine lawyer and I don't know whether you knew about it or not, but he wrote a series of articles in a popular magazine at the time. Did you know that?

SUE THRASHER:

No.

CLAY EAST:

Yeah, he wrote a whole series at that time about the Southern Tenants Farmers Union.

SUE THRASHER:

Do you remember what the magazine was?

CLAY EAST:

I can't think right now, but Mitch should know that very well, because it was one, it could have been Harper's. But, I wouldn't say positively that it was. But he wrote a whole series of articles. I saw all of those articles. Had the magazines myself. But, I think it was his father that went to school with Robert E. Lee. Yeah, C.T. Carpenter's father. I know one of them went…couldn't have been Carpenter. I know it was his father that went to school with Robert E. Lee. But, we went to see Carpenter and when we asked him about getting these folks out of jail up there and when he come up with eight hundred dollars, he'd take the case and…

SUE THRASHER:

Who came up with the eight hundred dollars?

CLAY EAST:

We did?

SUE THRASHER:

C.T. said you'd have to come up with eight hundred dollars?

CLAY EAST:

Well, he didn't tell us that. He said that's what his fee would be see, and we just asked him. He didn't tell us you'd have to come up with it, but we asked him if he'd take the case and he studied the thing over and inquired into it and said that "Well, his fee would be eight hundred dollars."

SUE THRASHER:

Now, this was the case of who?

CLAY EAST:

Brookins. Brookins and…there might have been several other guys in there. Well, this, I'll give credit to Mitch for this. If it'd been left up to me, why I'd have taken Carpenter and gone up there, but Mitch says "Get a whole down load truck of folks and we'll go up there." So, we all went up there and more than that, I had a damn big long six-shooter. I never would carry it out, but on this day I did. And I also had some warrents in my pocket so that even an officer from another county can't take a gun into another county unless he has an occasion for it see. He has to has an excuse like a warrent or something. So if you've got a warrent for some guy and you can say that the last you heard, he was up in Crittenden County and you wanted to see about it, but of course that was never…but I was careful about it, I didn't want to take any chances, because I knew what we was getting into. Well, when I went in and told Carpenter what we'd come up there for, not Carpenter, but Howard Curlin, the sheriff. Of course, I knew Howard damn well, me being an officer in an adjoining county. But I went in there and told him we'd come up there to get those guys out of jail. I think there was more than one, but Brookins was the main one. I think even then we understood that he'd been beat up. But Howard looked at me and he told me, he said, "you're sure playing the wild." And I told him that every man had the right to his own opinion and "I think that maybe you are." Well, you might not know it, but Howard Curlin died on the witness stand.

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From a heart attack. Internal Revenue was after him. And one after another of those guys… now I had the papers… Bunch, the man that led the group on me at Forrest City, led this mob on me, said "Why that's the guy that started this whole thing," and went ahead and told a whole bunch of lies to these people for to get them all stirred up, and they was stirred up, too. They really took to me right now. And I got them to put me in jail and they didn't know what else to do. I said," If I've done anything, violated any law, which I hadn't, I said put me in jail." I knew I'd better get in jail, with that damn mob. So, they got me into the office of the jail there at Forrest City. And, the whole damn mob, it's a little, uh, maybe twelve by fifteen or something of a small office before they put you into lock-up. They had a whole bunch of guys in there… union men.

SUE THRASHER:

Now this is at Forrest City?

CLAY EAST:

Yes, this is at Forrest City?

SUE THRASHER:

O.K. Let's go on, I wont to get that story straight somewhere else on the tape.

CLAY EAST:

All right.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, what happened that morning when you went to Marion? Other than your run-in with Curlin? Is that where the men acted as if they were crippled? and had all sorts of walking sticks with them? You remember that?

CLAY EAST:

I don't remember anything about an occasion like that.

SUE THRASHER:

It might be something else.

CLAY EAST:

It must of been. We had a whole truck load of guys out there anyway. And I guess that Mitch was correct in doing that, but I don't know if it did any good, because I think Carpenter and myself could have gotten those guys out. But anyway, we showed a little strength.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, was Carpenter actually needed to get Brookins out of jail down there?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah, and we was lucky to get him out.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, did Brookins remain active in the union for awhile after that?

CLAY EAST:

So far as I know, yes. He went ahead and did the best he could. But as I remember, he was crippled up.

SUE THRASHER:

Tell me where else the union had locals during that first year it was being organized. And how were those locals organized? Would you send out organizers and people hear about them and come in, or what?

CLAY EAST:

No, we would set up for a meeting at some church house. Generally it was a colored church house or a old school building or something like that and this was all in around Tyronza to begin with. I never did ever tell Mitchell what my ideas were, but I felt that if we would build a strong union in Tyronza and let these other people come into that from outside and go back and organize their own people, it would

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save these guys…now, that was the first thing that commercial appeal started hollering was…that we was outside agitators. Well, of course, there was a few outside agitators that come in there once in awhile, like this Debbs guy from up in Washington. I know where he was from, but Mitch called him the Arkansas Debbs and he was a stranger. Well, Butler wasn't right there at Tyronza or anything and neither was Kester, see? But the two main guys in this was Mitchell and myself, when we started this.

SUE THRASHER:

How about Alvin Nunally?

CLAY EAST:

Alvin Nunally, yes, he was very active and right in there with Mitch and I.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, was Nunally a sharecropper?

CLAY EAST:

Well, he was a renter, see. But he didn't own his farm. As long as a man owned his own farm, he wasn't eligible to get in the union.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, how soon did Ward Rogers come down?

CLAY EAST:

He came down right at the beginning of this thing.

SUE THRASHER:

And he had a church somewhere in Arkansas at this point?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I'm not positive that he did. Now, Claude Williams did have. I believe he had a church at Paris, Arkansas, as well as I can remember. But, he was put out of his church on account of this.

SUE THRASHER:

But Claude didn't get active in this for awhile, did he? It took him a couple of years, or did he…was he active from the very beginning?

CLAY EAST:

Yes, he…well, I wouldn't say…he came in there, I would say when Norman Thomas made his talk, see, and that was before the union. He was a socialist see? And that was the work he was interested in. And after he came in there and got acquainted with the rest of us, well, he followed through with the union members. But, he didnt did have a great deal to do…Now the guys that was actually active in there was Nunally and Butler andMitch and myself. And even Ward Rogers, the biggest thing he did, it looked like to me, was to stir up trouble.

SUE THRASHER:

You never liked Ward Rogers, did you?

CLAY EAST:

I did not.

SUE THRASHER:

Why didn't you like him?

CLAY EAST:

I thought he was a smart aleck and I don't like smart alecks. I thought he was a show-off and I still think so. I think that's what he did at Marked Tree, when he got up and made an assertion there, that was the damndest thing I know of when he got up there and made an assertion that we could go out there…that we could get a bunch and go out there and hang these planters. That's the poorest damn thing I know of a man…well, would you approve of that? Well, you're not on the tape, but you see what I mean? And I could tell you something else. I don't even like to put this on the tape in particular, because I might be wrong, but do you think I should?

SUE THRASHER:

Sure.

CLAY EAST:

It was talked around that Ward fooled with Mitch's wife. and that's another thing that I approved of in a big way, because

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he was staying at Mitch's.

SUE THRASHER:

Mitch's wife didn't like this union, did she?

CLAY EAST:

She never acted that way around me, of course, I wasn't around her a great deal, unless I go down to the house to she Mitch or see her around or something, but she was a very nice person. And I understood that her people didn't like Mitch and his socialist ideas.

SUE THRASHER:

Let me go back a little bit. The first time that you ever heard you ever heard of socialism, was it the time you had that conversation with Mitch at the gas station?

CLAY EAST:

That's the first time. Frankly, my brother, Joe, was playing ball around over the country and at that time, he was playing in a league at El Paso Texas. And Joe wrote to me and he…well, after the ball season he was trying to get a job down there and he sat on the Texaco steps out there day after day and he couldn't get anything. And he told me that if this dumb country didn't get into better shape, the whole country was going Communist and I didn't even know what the hell he was talking about.

SUE THRASHER:

Where was he in Texas?

CLAY EAST:

El Paso. Of course, he'd been around quite a lot and picked that up somewhere. And as far as socialism, at that time, I'd never had an occasion to even read anything about socialism. Now I would say this, my daddy, now he was sort of on my type…he was

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independent and figured to take care of himself. And ordinarily, people who are strong union people, want the union to help them along see? They realize it's hard for an independent…it's people working for the people…I was an individualist, and so was my dad. He was in business for himself and I was always in business for myself, so I wasn't much interested, myself. But, my Dad, he was always hiring some carpenter, he'd hire some old man that couldn't get a job in Memphis and all of them had been good union men. Well, I slept up in the store, the back of the store. To protect the store, that's what I stayed there for. The damn folks out there would break in your store and…

SUE THRASHER:

Now where was this? What store is this?

CLAY EAST:

My Dad's store in Tyronza. So, I had a room back there. They'd built a room on the store for someone to sleep in. These guys would back a wagon up there and haul all your groceries off.

SUE THRASHER:

Was it a grocery store, or a general store merchandise?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah, it was general merchandise, that's what it was, it was a small store and he had the only market in town. So, even the other merchants and all, they had to buy their fresh meat and all from Dad. And my dad had a lot of fancy groceries that the other stores didn't carry, they didn't have any demand for it, but my Dad was one of the best merchants I've ever seen. He had been on the road in Texas for eight or nine years selling groceries and he had picked up all these items and so forth. But, he had an exceptionally nice small store. He handled clothes, shoes, whatever we

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had a demand for. But ordinarily, these stores there, plantation stores, they'd have a big store and handle everything. My dady, not only did he have a store there, he had several farms down in the country and we handled cattle. We killed most of our beef and in fact, we killed all our beef.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, I think I asked you the other day, but I'm not sure we got in on tape…what your dad thought of you being in the union. What did your parents think?

CLAY EAST:

Well, my mother knew we was right, but naturally, she was worried about me, because it was a dangerous thing.

SUE THRASHER:

How old were you then, in 1932?

CLAY EAST:

I was thirty-two years old. I was born in 1900.

SUE THRASHER:

Were you married then?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah.

SUE THRASHER:

Did you have any children?

CLAY EAST:

One.

SUE THRASHER:

Your wife was a teller at the bank?

CLAY EAST:

Right. And that was one cause of me getting my money caught in the bank when the banks closed…I knew I should go get my money out of there. They was closing all over the country and I knew within reason Ishould go get my money out of that bank, but I thought, no that if I did that, they'd say I had inside information

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and that I'd start a run on the bank. Of course, it could have been I'd done that, if I gone and got my money out, but I waited too long anyway and got my money caught in there. But I knew better and I wanted to get it out and if my wife hadn't been working there, I would have.

SUE THRASHER:

What did your wife think about your union?

CLAY EAST:

Well, my wife's apt to think about things like I do, if you just want the straight of it.

SUE THRASHER:

You insist on it.

CLAY EAST:

I don't insist, no, I see that they do. But, of course, she'd never had any occasion…in other words, we was with the top bracket of people in town…the Emricks ([unknown])…neighbors, we was closer to the Emricks than any other family by far, see. And all of the parties and all of that stuff.

SUE THRASHER:

You were fairly well respected in the town, because you came from what was considered an old-time Tyronza family.

CLAY EAST:

Right and not only that, after I grew up, I had a hell of a reputation as a boy, I was one of the worst in town, always into something. Even when I was in school, when I'd come home from school…oh, this would sound like I was exaggerating, but I…another boy and myself, his daddy had a store there, his name was

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Smith, and [unknown] and I was the two worst boys in school and we'd try to get a whipping every day. We'd keep count of them, we'd put them in our tablets, mark down like you do for dominoes, you know, four marks and then a mark across it. And, I beat him, I got one-hundred, fifty three and I don't think he got but one-hundred, fifty one.

SUE THRASHER:

In one year, you got one-hundred, fifty three.

CLAY EAST:

Uh-huh. And the teacher was Miss Overalls, she just whipped us for anything.

SUE THRASHER:

Was that her name, Miss Overalls?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah, she was a beautiful gal and she finally married a man there who had a store named Perkins. But when I would go to town, the first things the guys there would ask me was "How many whippings did you get today?"

SUE THRASHER:

How old were you then?

CLAY EAST:

Oh, I must have been around thirteen or fourteen. And I'd think up all sort of things. One time, Ihad heard a clown do this, but anyway, I put up my hand and Miss Overalls said, "What do you want Clay?" and I said, "Miss Overalls, I got to go home." She said, "Are you sick?" I told her, "No, ma 'am, my little brother's got an itch and I got to go scratch him." Well, she give me a whipping for that.

SUE THRASHER:

I don't blame her.

CLAY EAST:

Of course, all the kids in the school was a hollering and laughing and she was trying to straighten them out. I could think of more things to do. Well, was pretty good, he was right up with me, but he had a brother named LePrell ([unknown]) and we'd get outside and they had an opening in the stove where the air was pulled through it, they had a coal stove…I can't remember just what the room was, but we get up this thing and listen to it. We'd get up there and LePrell got a whipping and she give him three hundred and twelve licks. He was switched, of course, the switch wore out when she got through. Well, done something there one day and …

SUE THRASHER:

Let's go back to the union. That's what I need to get. Tell me, besides Brookins…we were talking earlier about having meetings at Negro churches in the area. Now how did you organize those things, by using black ministers in the area, or did you just make contacts with black sharecroppers, and going to meetings, or did…?

CLAY EAST:

No, we'd just get word out. Word gets around that country fast…you'd wonder. Dr. Amberson and all of us went down on Oscar Johnson's plantation and we'd drive five miles down through the farm and when we'd get there, they'd have a house and a desk in there with a guy sitting in there with a tablet to get all the information down. And Dr. Amberson would ask how they knew we

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was coming down here and I told him, "Man, they got a telegraph deal here somehow, I don't know how word gets around, but…"

SUE THRASHER:

Now was this when you were working on the report with Dr. Amberson?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah, on the survey. We made the survey see, on that.

SUE THRASHER:

Were you making the survey at the same time you were organizing the union? Is that the way you organized the union?

CLAY EAST:

No, the unionists had already started and we was getting this information to try and get some relief for these people in there.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, tell me about the meetings, if you can remember. What happened, and how did you get them started?

CLAY EAST:

Now, I can't even remember who set this meeting up, but there was a little old building they used for a church, they called it the Dead Timber ([unknown]) church and it was about three miles from Tyronza. And I was to hold a meeting there on this certain night at a certain time, seven or eight o'clock, whatever it was…probably seven. And that was the time that the mayor of Tyronza, who was a close friend of mine, …anyway, he made a trip over to Tennessee, I was in Tennessee, and had a station over in Bartlett, Tennessee at that time. And, he made a trip over there and told me that those guys were laying for me. He didn't tell me then that they was laying for me, but I learned later that they stayed down there five

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nights setting there with the gun…there was five of them.

SUE THRASHER:

When did you move to Bartlett from Tyronza?

CLAY EAST:

Well, after we started this union… 'course, most of my customers were the planter boys and big business. Well, the first guy after we got it started, Jim Prestige ([unknown]) the big farmer… and had a bad reputation, he's from Mississippi and they said he killed several people in Mississippi, but Jim Prestige liked me and traded with me. Practically all the business done was on the credit, see, but he come in and paid off…he had plenty of money. And, he come in and paid off once a week or whenever he took a notion or anytime he wanted. But, he come in and told me, "I want to pay up my account. I'm quitting you." Well, he didn't like the other two stations, but he had to go trade with them. He was the first one, then his son-in-law, Cecil Justice who was a school teacher there, he came in and quit me and ask me why in the world, he said, "Why have you gone against your own class of people?" Well, I told him, I said, "Well, Cecil, this is America, I didn't think we had classes. I thought this was a classless society over here." This made him mad, that's all, and those guys quit me one after another. I noticed that they didn't come in and tell me they was quitting, just quit. And I could see that my business…I had to have business to operate. Of course,

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I owned my own home and I had really good business in that station. So, I saw that I was going to have to get out of there. And, I believe that Mitchell and the rest of the boys had already gone.

SUE THRASHER:

To Memphis?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah.

SUE THRASHER:

Do you remember exactly when the union moved to Memphis? Was it quite early, Thirty-three or Thirty-four?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I'd say it was sometime, yes, I think it was sometime in Thirty-three and it could have been the early part of Thirty-four.

SUE THRASHER:

So, you really never had a headquarters in Tyronza, other than your and Mitchell's little places of business? And then, when you actually set up an office, it was in Memphis?

CLAY EAST:

We didn't actually have an office there. That hall that we had in Marked Tree…

SUE THRASHER:

The Odd Fellows Hall?

CLAY EAST:

It wasn't the Odd Fellows, that was in Tyronza. That was the Socialist Party that had that. But the hall that the union had in Marked Tree was the only building that the union ever had there, and I don't know if you could actually call it an office. Mitch's place was used as an office. He kept up the books, he was the secretary, see, and he kept the books and everything on it. And, of course, they did Mitch just like they did me, only they did him first. And, he wasn't well liked in town to begin with and boy they cut out that dry cleaning.

SUE THRASHER:

Was there another dry cleaner in Tyronza?

CLAY EAST:

There didn't have to be. They had a cleaner come out there from Memphis, see, and there was also a cleaner at Marked Tree, four and a half miles away, probably more than one. So, they had no trouble getting their clothes cleaned, so they just dropped Mitch and not let him have them. Mitch wasn't actually too hot on the cleaning anyway. His clothes…you could tell that they had been to a cleaner when you got them, 'cause the fumes would let you know. I'm just telling you this, it's a fact. Now, Mitch studied that stuff and he knew how to spot clothes and he bought quite a bit of equipment. All he had to begin with was this presser, but a great part of his work was done out behind his building. He had a…I remember kind of a little bench of an outfit and he'd lay this stuff down and scrub it with this cleaning fluid and it was pretty hard to get all that out of there. Of course, he had a dryer and all that stuff, but well…things at that time, people weren't as frank as they would be today about their dry cleaning and so forth.

SUE THRASHER:

You were telling me about when you were living in Bartlett and you were going to a meeting and you heard about five men who were waylaying to meet you.

CLAY EAST:

Oh yeah. Well, I know…the mayor, Bob Fraser, who was a friend of mine, come over there and told me, says, "Clay, if you

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don't come back over there, they're going to kill you.

SUE THRASHER:

He was the mayor of what town?

CLAY EAST:

Tyronza.

SUE THRASHER:

Tyronza?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah. And he told me, said "I don't know what they'd do to me if they found out I'd come over here and told you about this, but I just couldn't set there…I'd felt like I had my blood on your hands if I'd set there and not told you. But they're fixing to get you." And I told him, "Well, Bob, I sure appreciate your coming over here and there's one thing you can rest assurred about, no one will ever be told by me that you was over here and told me. Of course, he's passed away now, so I don't have to worry about him, about them getting him yet. But, that night, I got in my car and drove over there and where I was going to hold this meeting and I turned off before I got to Tyronza…two miles before I got to Tyronza, at Beasley Spur they called it. And, it was only a mile or mile and a half to this schoolhouse. In other words, Tyronza was up here, and Beasly was down here about two miles and this little old school was over here. Well there was a road that run around this way from Tyronza and this road here went out from Beasly. Well, I went over there and I was the only one there. I held the meeting and I never held a meeting that I didn't get a whole bunch of members signed up. I'm not bragging or anything

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but I got the first members who ever signed a card in the union. I was the man who made a talk and told them that if you come out here to farm…

SUE THRASHER:

Now where was that?

CLAY EAST:

That was at the little Sunnyside Schoolhouse at Tyronza where we had our first meeting. That's where the union first started.

SUE THRASHER:

How many people signed up for the union that night, do you remember?

CLAY EAST:

I would say, maybe say it was thirteen or fourteen, around fifteen. I think that everyone there, there wasn't a big crowd there. Now, I might mention another thing in here. We had an old man by the name of Payne, and he was an Englishman from England and he was a sharecropper and his wife died when hisdaughter wa young. He had a daughter and she was about grown this time, Georgie, and she was…and everyone in the country knew old man Payne. He talked like the English. I couldn't tell a little dirty joke on him here, could I?

SUE THRASHER:

Feel free.

CLAY EAST:

Well, it isn't too bad. Ritter and Emerson had the big store up there, see, and they had a clerk in there, George Wier ([unknown]) and old man Payne went up to Ritter and Emerson and said, "George, give me another box of those cathartic pills, I broke wind last night and it smelled awful." Well, they told that all over Tyronza.

SUE THRASHER:

This was Mr. Payne. Now was he a member of the union.

CLAY EAST:

He was a strong member and a good talker and he was really worked up over the way sharecroppers…and all…well, he had been in a union in England and he had a lot of experience there. In the mines, as I understand it. And, he was a real union man and he took an active part in that. He made all the meetings. I was thinking that he was set up as some kind of an official in the union. I can't remember what it could have been. I have never heard Mitch mention payne at all. He talks about Nunally, but well, of course he was active…Nunally, Mitch and myself were the most active in the union by far…until Butler came in, and Butler was a real strong man and a good talker.

SUE THRASHER:

Do you remember when Butler came down, how long you'd been working on the union?

CLAY EAST:

Not very long, in fact he had to come before, because he was the man who went and got the papers over in his county. So, he was actually interested…most of these guys from the outside came in on account of the Socialist Party. See the papers were full of this stuff about these Socialists over in Tyronza. So, we had folks coming in there from all over the country. And, even these speakers, even this girl from New York, uh, Norman Thomas …was very active at that time and he told about all these things and I think he actually more interested after he came over and saw what was going on. And, we took him around and showed him conditions and so forth, and he got up and went out to Norcross's plantation

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and he went in there and Norcross had this barn with concrete floors and running water for his hogs. And then he goes out to these sharecropper houses and there was no screens on the doors and no screendoors and there was flies and holes in the floor and roof and everything. And, when he got up to make this talk at the schoolhouse and told about that they was treating the animals so much better…the cows and all too, he had concrete…

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

SUE THRASHER:

Clay, I'd like to go back and get some more about you and I'd like for you to tellme about your early life and where you were growing up. Did you grow up in Tyronza.

CLAY EAST:

No, I was born in Tyronza and we left Tyronza when I was about three or four years old and we moved to Greenville, Texas. My Dad went there to work for his uncle in his wholesale grocery business. And, we lived in Greenville until either 1910 or 1911 and we moved back to Tyronza. My Dad built a store and went into business there at the time and up until the time I left, I lived

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in Tyronza.

SUE THRASHER:

How many brothers and sisters did you have?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I had three sisters and four brothers.

SUE THRASHER:

And your father was a farmer or a merchant?

CLAY EAST:

Both. He had nice grocery store and then he farmed on the side when he first began. He had the only butcher shop in town. We killed our own beef, so of course, he bought a lot of cattle, and on Sunday, we'd get out and a bunch of us on horseback and buy up cattle. Many…quite a lot of the time, he'd buy a cow out there, never had seen it. Just ask them about it, what kind of shape it was in, what it would weigh. And when they told him, he'd say, well, I'll give you so much for it, and he'd buy it sight unseen. Then on Sunday, we'd get out and horseback and round these cattle up he'd bought and take them down and put them on the pasture on the farm, see, a woodlot he called it, it was all in timber…it hadn't been cleared up. Then, generally, over the weekend, we'd send the butcher and myself out and we'd kill the beef. That would generally be on Friday and that give the beef time to cool off. We'd have to kill them late at night to keep the flies off them, see. So, we'd go out and kill the beef. At that time I was only about fourteen years old.

SUE THRASHER:

Did you have refrigeration or electricity?

CLAY EAST:

Ice.

SUE THRASHER:

Ice. How about electricity?

CLAY EAST:

No, we had gaslights and that was furnished by gasoline that was underpressure…a hollow-wire ([unknown]) system. Now, in our home, we had carbide lights and had a big machine out back that put fifty pounds of carbide in at a time and lasted three or four months. Electricity, we didn't have any electricity in there yet, no one had electricity. The first electric light lamps that came into that country there, as I've told you, my cousin, Eli East put in the first, that was the Delco light plant, was just a small affair, was storage batteries and they'd run in there and build the storage batteries up and even then, they didn't use their electricity for anything except lights. All the rest of it was done byhand, such as separaters, a lot of the big farmers had separaters to separate the cream from out of the milk.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, you would kill the beef on when, Sunday night?

CLAY EAST:

On Friday. that would give it a chance…we would get it in and put it under refrigeration. And now, that ice was shipped in there by rail, see, by or in three hundred pound cakes. And they'd have an ice plant. At that time, they had an ice plant at Harvard, which was about two miles from Marion, which was about twenty some odd miles from home. But they used that ice for cooling and I'd say along about 1912 or something…that country was called swamp country and it was.

SUE THRASHER:

It was part of the Delta?

CLAY EAST:

It was Delta country, but they called it swamp country and they called the Arkies that lived there in that country" "swamp angels" and these guys come over there from Tennessee and around, they called them hillbillies. So, in the wintertime, they had no roads, they were impassable in the wintertime. They had mules until they run a dredge ditch in there through Dead Timber Lake, which had sunken when Real Foot had had an earthquake in that country and Real Foot Lake sunk and Dead Timber lake sunk. That's where it received its name, all these trees had sunk, there was a lot of big walnut trees in there and those stumps. They got out and cut this timber from boats. They'd get in boats, see, and water was around this big timber, so they'd get in boats and cut this timber and float these logs, drag them out …well, the sawmills, that was what opened up the timber country. Sawmills had what they called tram roads, which runned manybe five or six miles down through the woods. That's all that was in there and theyd drag these logs up to where they could get them loaded on to the carts which was iron-wheeled carts. And the rails on these tram roads were just wooden timbers and of course, those were flange-wheeled carts that they put on there and they was first drawn with oxen.

SUE THRASHER:

What's a flange wheel?

CLAY EAST:

Well, a flange wheel is like what a railroad has, has a flange on the side to keep it on the rail and they had the same type of wheel on those carts. They was drug in there, and these places they would drag them with those oxen, mules and all couldn't stand up, they'd just bog down. They couldn't use mules in there until that country was drained some…but where they'd drag these logs through, there'd be a rounded out place and they called those lizard roads. And they was all over that country, even up in 1914 or 1915, there was still traces of these lizard roads in the woods up there, where they had drug those logs out.

SUE THRASHER:

What was the town of Tyronza like then, did it have paved streets or anything like that?

CLAY EAST:

No, that was just before we came back from Texas, a mule bogged down there on main street and they couldn't get him out and he died in there. And that is approximately where the post office was built when my Dad had his last store there which was during the time he had it, which was when the union was in operation.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, how big was Tyronza? About how many people lived around there then? In 1930.

CLAY EAST:

I'd say around 500.

SUE THRASHER:

Around 500 families? Oh, it was a little community.

CLAY EAST:

Yeah, small.

SUE THRASHER:

And were there other groceries beside your Dad's store?

CLAY EAST:

Oh yeah. Ritter and Emerson was the largest store there, but it had been there for quite a long time and it was a big enough that old man Jim Chandler, who was the bad man in Tyronza, most of the stores back there, had a real bad man and Jim was the bad man in Tyronza. He'd get drunk and ride into town on his horse and he'd ride in through the door and buy his tobacco and stuff and they was afraid to say anything to him. On Sunday, everyone would meet the train on Sunday morning. They would get a paper from the train and they went up…no much other place to go… and they was always a big crowd at the depot on Sunday morning. In fact, there was generally a bunch of people that would meet the train, which ran twice a day. But old man Jim…

SUE THRASHER:

And get a paper? They weren't necessarily meeting somebody who was coming in?

CLAY EAST:

Oh no, no. They went up to see the train come in, just to meet it. Oh, there'd be maybe a couple of hundred people up there, just to see the train going through.

SUE THRASHER:

And they'd buy a paper from the train?

CLAY EAST:

Well, they'd buy a paper, yeah there was a guy who would get off the train with an armfull of newspapers, see.

SUE THRASHER:

Where were they from?

CLAY EAST:

Memphis.

SUE THRASHER:

Was the train going north?

CLAY EAST:

Well, the train was going to Kansas City…that was the Crystal Railroad ([unknown]) and it was called the Kansas City and Florida Special…the Cannonball that run through there. But, old man Jim, he'd take a mean streak every once in awhile. He lived just down across from the railroad, the dump there was up fifteen or twenty feet high on account of water coming in, the overflow and there was water all over that country at that time. When the train would go through, there was so much water and timber all over, you could here those things roar down through the woods there for a mile or two. But anyway, old manJim would get drunk and get on his horse and he had a kind of a squeaky voice and he'd get his pistol out and start hollering up there, "Stay out of there, you sons of bitches." And they would too, they all dig out and run. He never did shoot anybody, but they didn't know whether he would or not. And he get up there and ride down the track, he lived just down below the depot and shoot at the damn kids under there. They'd run under the house. Most of the houses then were built off

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the ground, because the water would come up see, and they had to build them up pretty high. At that time, Marked Tree, all those buildings up there at Market Tree…it was four miles from Tyronza…those things were built up ten or twelve feel up on well, you'd call them stilts more or less. The timber they'd set up there and the whole thing would be covered up with water in the wintertime.

SUE THRASHER:

From the Mississippi River"

CLAY EAST:

No, there was two rivers there. The St. Francis and the Little River. These rivers would all get filled up and it seemed at that time that they had more rain than they do now.

SUE THRASHER:

Now what county was Tyronza in?

CLAY EAST:

Poinsett County.

SUE THRASHER:

And what was the county seat.

CLAY EAST:

Harrisburg.

SUE THRASHER:

How far was that from Tyronza?

CLAY EAST:

Thirty miles.

SUE THRASHER:

And Marked Tree was in the same county?

CLAY EAST:

Yes.

SUE THRASHER:

And it was how far fromTyronza?

CLAY EAST:

Four miles.

SUE THRASHER:

Four miles. And was Marked Tree larger than Tyronza?

CLAY EAST:

Yes, it was about three times as large as Tyronza, maybe more.

SUE THRASHER:

And you ran a gas station?

CLAY EAST:

Right.

SUE THRASHER:

And how many other service stations were there?

CLAY EAST:

There were two other stations there. A brother-in-law of mine had one and the Fair brothers had the other one.

SUE THRASHER:

And then there was Mitch's dry cleaning plant.

CLAY EAST:

Mitch's dry cleaning plant.

SUE THRASHER:

And a couple of other stores? and a cotton gin?

CLAY EAST:

Right.

SUE THRASHER:

Was that about it?

CLAY EAST:

No, there was a drug store. And Dr. Mc Daniel had a little office there. There was also an Odd Fellows Hall. The town at one time was built, all of it, right along the railroad track, facing the railroad track with a road between the buildings and the railroad track. And that's the way most times back there were built at that time…built right up to the railroad track because all their supplies came in by rail and they wanted to be as near to that as they could, because they had to haul all that stuff by wagon.

SUE THRASHER:

Supplies were what? Tractors, farm equipment?

CLAY EAST:

Oh no. Groceries, flour, lard, sugar and everything that you'd sell out of a store.

SUE THRASHER:

Was cotton shipped out by rail, too, after it waspicked?

CLAY EAST:

Yes. It was ginned and baled there and it was shipped out into the compress and the compress would take a 500 pound bale of cotton and put it under this high pressure and when they got through with it…a bale of cotton at that time was about five, maybe, yeah about five or six feet long and it was three feet one way and about four feet the other and was baled with these steel straps, which they still use. They'd send it to this compress and then compress down into a round package that would be about one-fifth the size that it was when they received it.

SUE THRASHER:

Where was the compress? In Memphis?

CLAY EAST:

Well, yes, they was in Memphis at that time. Later on, they built a compress in West Memphis after it opened up …well, that was the time the union was going on.

SUE THRASHER:

You said there were 500 families in Tyronza.

CLAY EAST:

No, I didn't say that.

SUE THRASHER:

500 people?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I said there was between 500 and a thousand.

SUE THRASHER:

And around Tyronza, out in the rural areas, there were a lot of large plantations, there were a lot of sharecroppers and

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farmers?

CLAY EAST:

In the beginning, these farmers, such as my grandfather, who came from Tennessee over there, they'd purchase this land that had been cut over by the timber companies …lumber companies. And I suppose there was some in there that was homesteaded. But, the most of it was purchased from the lumber companies.

SUE THRASHER:

Your grandfather purchased his from a lumber company?

CLAY EAST:

I'm not absolutely positive, but I would say that's where he purchased it.

SUE THRASHER:

And where did your grandfather move from?

CLAY EAST:

Savannah, Tennessee. And he came there in a wagon and he made many trips backwards and forwards.

SUE THRASHER:

Is that your father's father?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah. He made many trips backwards and forwards in the wagon. They'd know people all along the road and they'd stop and spend the night with them…maybe stay a day or two. People would visit then and enjoyed themselves a little more than they do now, I think.

SUE THRASHER:

Why did he move from Savannah to Tyronza? To become a planter?

CLAY EAST:

Oh no. He was never what you'd consider a planter. He was just a big farmer. They didn't have planters in there at that time. Most of them were men who owned small farms. Maybe, ordinarily, anywhere from fifty to a couple hundred acres of land. And they worked this land themselves and had some hired help. And as the sawmills played out in there, it left…the sawmills used mostly colored labor, a big lot of it. The white guys was mostly bosses. The sawmills used mostly colored labor…there was a lot of the timber cutters, now, that were white guys… One thing that I wanted to bring out as we go along here, is in those days they had a world of bank failures and the bank was set up to take care of the big boys. If a bank was closed up…

SUE THRASHER:

This was along about 1929?

CLAY EAST:

Yes, along in there and even before that. There was always banks going broke, see? And when a bank went broke, they'd have an associate bank from whom they borrowed money and so forth. Well, if a bank went broke, all themoney…all of their assets would revert to the associate bank until that indebtedness was satisfied and then if any was left, then the little folks got it, the depositors, see? And that was the case when Roosevelt closed the banks and they changed them up. So, there's a lot of those things that people don't understand now about that bank deal. It was an odd thing. Canada had different set up and they didn't have bank failures and I guess China had the best system of all. When

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a bank went broke there, why they took the leaders in that bank and beheaded them, so they didn't have any banks fail.

SUE THRASHER:

O.K. Tell me more now about your grandfather moving from Hardin County. Tell me something about your grandfather.

CLAY EAST:

Well, he was a soldier in the Confederate army. He was wounded in, I believe it was his right arm here. He showed me the scar and of course, he's told me. Then, he was taken prisoner and spent a year or so in Rock Island Prison and at the time that he was in there, he said that a dog or a rat didn't dare come around there, because those guys were starving. The Northern people was really starving them out, see? As I understand, Yankee soldiers in the South weren't treated much better, but the Southerners didn't have the damn stuff to feed 'em with. So, the Yankees got it back on them by not feeding them. They had the stuff to do it, but they wouldn't feed them. They had an epidemic of yellow fever while my granddad was in prison and he missed it. He was just a small man, just 140 or 145 pounds, but he said that he was considered one of the strongest men in the Rock Island Prison.

SUE THRASHER:

Had he joined the Confederate army or was he drafted?

CLAY EAST:

Oh, he joined it.

SUE THRASHER:

Did he live in Hardin County at the time he joined it?

CLAY EAST:

Yes.

SUE THRASHER:

His family was from Hardin County?

CLAY EAST:

Yes, and I don't know whether he was on a furlough or what, but he was home one time, and my grandma used to tell me about it. Said he was working down in the field or something and she saw a bunch of Yankee soldiers coming up on horseback, and she yelled at him. His name was Harstons, was what she always called him, or Hossy. And she hollered, "Harston, the Yanks are coming!" And they saw him or something. Anyway, he was always bragging about it, said he outran those damn horses and got away from them. They was chasing him horseback and he was running afoot.

SUE THRASHER:

How do you spell his name?

CLAY EAST:

H-A-R-S-T-O-N. John Harston.

SUE THRASHER:

Do you remember about what year he moved over to Poinsett County?

CLAY EAST:

I wouldn't know, but it had to be back before 1900, because I was born in 1900 and they lived there then and I know they must have been living there for some time. Because, my Dad built a home with my grandad. It was a store and half-house and was a good house.

SUE THRASHER:

Do you know how old your Dad was when he moved?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I'm not so sure about that. But, if I was born in 1900 and my mother was eighteen, and when my dad and her married, he was in Tyronza then, so he'd had to been there several years.

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He'd also put out an orchard for my grandad, so I guess that then he must have been in there at least four years before 1900, which would put it in 1896 or along in that section.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, when did you first leave home? You went away to school somewhere?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I, yes, I had dropped out of school. In fact, I had dropped out to work in the store. My dad was looking after the farms more at that time and I dropped out and I didn't go to school the last half of that year. And a teacher from Blue Mountain, Mississippi came by and I don't know why he ever came to Tyronza, but he came by and talked to my dad. My dad always wanted we kids to get an education, so anyway, he signed up for me to go to school in Blue Mountain, Mississippi and after that there was …old man John Emrick sent his boy, John and his brother Joe, they went to Blue Mountain after I was down there. But, I went to Blue Mountain one year and the following year I went to Gulfcoast Military Academy.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, is that the same Blue Mountain that is now a women's college?

CLAY EAST:

Yes. It was then, but Mississippi Heights Academy was a boys school and it was owned and operated by J.E. Brown, the principal there. Blue Mountain College was a Baptist college

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and a girls college. Blue Mountain college had about 150 students, which made it pretty nice, because they had 500 girls over at Blue Mountain College, five to six hundred, so we didn't have any trouble getting girl friends, see?

SUE THRASHER:

And you were at Blue Mountain. What was the name of the school again?

CLAY EAST:

Mississippi Heights Academy.

SUE THRASHER:

Was it a military academy?

CLAY EAST:

No.

SUE THRASHER:

Private.

CLAY EAST:

Private, yeah. Well, the war broke out…

SUE THRASHER:

World War I.

CLAY EAST:

Yes…while I was there. I know Professor Brown, he was an Irishman and proud of it and looked the part. He used to brag, said he'd had all his limbs broked and some of his ribs and he'd been shot through and through, I think three times. And when he was teaching school…of course, he had a deputy's card, which anyone could get back in that country. And he had a pistol in his pocket at all times. Carried a little old pistol in his right-hand hip pocket. And he had his finger off, right here on his left hand. I know, he reached up and grabbed me by the hair

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one time and I couldn't get my hair to comb down for two or three days. He was fixing to hit me and I shoved him, it's a wonder I really didn't get into it.

SUE THRASHER:

What did you study at Blue Mountain?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I was taking eight studies and I studied physical geography, plane geometry, grammar, …he put me back to take grammar A, because I couldn't remember how far I had been in grammar…and rhetoric and Brown was strong on the health problem and I took physiology under him. The book that we used in the physiology class was Martin on The Human Body and that was the first book that a doctor studied when he enrolled for an intern. And he went strong on that.

SUE THRASHER:

And the next year…how old were you when you went to Blue Mountain? Seventeen?

CLAY EAST:

Seventeen?

SUE THRASHER:

And then, the next year when you were eighteen, you went to Gulfcoast Military Academy?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah.

SUE THRASHER:

Why did you go down there?

CLAY EAST:

Well, the reason I went down there. I roomed with Enid Kennedy, a boy from Chevril ([unknown]) Mississippi and his daddy was a doctor and we got a hold of a pretty slick paged catelogue

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from Gulfcoast Military Academy and it showed all these pretty pictures in there and these boys in uniform and I was very anxious to get into the service, I wanted to get into the army. The reason I wanted to get in there, I wanted to show off my uniform and travel some and get to go to these other countries. And my dad, he had much better judgement. But I was going to mention one little thing that Brown brought out there…he said there. We talked about these Negroes going into the service and all and he said yes, they'd draft them in there and they're just going to use them for labor over there, said "Hell, they ain't going to do any fighting," which was pretty close to right. But I know that one of the students that had been a student at Blue Mountain the year before, they did have a Negro officer and he cut this guy out and they had him out about to court martial him and Brown got a bunch of signatures for this boy…and he was a damn no-good, but Brown after that, why he went in to this boy and he sure thought a lot more of him that he had before he had bucked up to this colored officer. So, I know that Brown was in reality a racist, but in Blue Mountain, I don't know if I ever saw a colored person in Blue Mountain, Mississippi. They was mostly in the Delta country.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, let's go back to when you went to the Gulfcoast Military Academy. You got in there the next year because you wanted to be in a military academy.

CLAY EAST:

Yeah. Well, that's one reason my dad let me go down there. He wanted to keep me out of the service. So, I went to Gulfcoast and well, the freshmen were referred to as rats for the first year.

SUE THRASHER:

Were you a freshman?

CLAY EAST:

I was a freshman. And these older men, they did what they called "ratted" these boys. In other words, you was in there and it was pretty cold down there and the company I was in, they had us in what they called the armory. And it was just a big wooden, open-frame building with cots down each side of it. And it was pretty cold in there and of course the older men would tell one of these "rats" to go in there and "warm that toilet seat up for me." Make him go in there and set on the toilet seat, didn't want to set on it while it was cold, see? And…

SUE THRASHER:

What did you study down there? Same kind of things you'd studied at Blue Mountain?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah.

SUE THRASHER:

Did you pick up any of what you'd call "radical" ideas at either of these two schools?

CLAY EAST:

None whatsoever.

SUE THRASHER:

You were still totally nonpolitical?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I was strictly independent and I didn't take any "ratting" see, so I dropped out at the end of the year and one

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of these guys tell me to go warm that seat, I tell them, "Yeah, I'll go down there and warm it for you, but I tell you one thing. You're going to have to come out of this school someday, and I'm going to beat the hell out of you when I can catch you out on the street." He said, "That's all right, I'll send old so-and-so." So, this other boy Kennedy and me, Kennedy was worse than the damned old men. These boys would come down there and this armory had all the older tough boys in it. And they had a big red flag up on one end there with a skull and cross bones on it and down on it it had "Beware of the Armory". And they wasn't joking too much, they'd get these "rats" in there and whip them around and so forth and old Kennedy, some of these new guys that would come in and he'd start in cussing them, telling them "Goddamned Rats so-and-so." He was a rat himself, see, but Kennedy and I thought we was both good men and we just didn't take any ratting.

SUE THRASHER:

How long did you stay at Gulfcoast?

CLAY EAST:

Up until Christmas time.

SUE THRASHER:

So you weren't there but about three or four months?

CLAY EAST:

Whatever it is from the time we started in, I guess it was in September or something like that.

SUE THRASHER:

And you didn't like it there?

CLAY EAST:

I didn't like it there and there wasn't but one decent man

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in there. And after we got down there, they had two of the men that was supposed to own the school, Hardy and McGee was great big six-foot, two hundred and fifty pound men and they was classed as colonels. Now they had a Colonel Palmer there who was retired United States Colonel. And he was in charge of the military and while I was down there, the war ended, see, but before it ended, this man was allowed to appoint, I think it was eighty, boys out of this school. I was eligible for the draft then, see. In fact, I had a notice to appear at the draft board in Arkansas. But, at that time, this colonel was allowed to appoint eighty boys out of this school and there was twenty-eight of us that passed. I was in the twenty-eight. It was a rigid deal that you had to go through. Physical, recommendations from home and I know that I was sworn in at Gulfport, Mississippi and we was to leave for Freemont, California for an officer's training camp on the fifteenth and the armistice was signed on the eleventh. So, all of us guys that had received this appointment, and we had a letter from the government that said to await further notice. And, that's the last I've ever heard of it.

SUE THRASHER:

Did you go back to Tyronza then?

CLAY EAST:

Yes.

SUE THRASHER:

And what happened when you went back? Did you go back to work in your Dad's store?

CLAY EAST:

NO, I went back and started running the farm.

SUE THRASHER:

Your Dad's farm?

CLAY EAST:

Yeah.

SUE THRASHER:

And how long did you do that?

CLAY EAST:

Up until I was…well in 1919 and I might have been there part of '20, but I doubt it, I was 19 and I left and wnet to California. That was the first time I'd left home. My Dad went over to Corinth, Mississippi to boy a carload of lumber. He was going to build a barn down on the farm and while he was gone, well, I got me enough money together to go to California. And, well, I caught the passenger train out of Tyronza and went to Kansas City…well, I went to Jonesboro and caught the fast train to Kansas City. And went I bought a ticket at Jonesboro for Kansas City, that guy shortchanged me five dollars. I didn't have enough to buy me a ticket for Los Angeles, or Long Beach was where I was heading. I had a cousin out there and so, I told …the train was due right then for the West Coast and I told the guy, "I said, just give me twenty-five dollars worth of ticket for out west." So he gave me a ticket to La Hana ([unknown]) Colorado and I got on the train and I got acquainted on the train and there was a bunch of Jews on there. There was fourteen in the family, with

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kids and all and I know they said that the tickets cost them fifteen hundred dollars. And this was when they was running two trains there together. They were running as Pullman train and a passenger car train and I was on the passenger train and I got acquainted with these folks and got towatching them and one of these old carpenters that used to stay up there in the store with me, we used to sleep up there at nights. And, I know now that some of those guys had some Socialist ideas…nearly everyone of them that my dad hired…andmy dad did too.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, who were the people that your dad would hire?

CLAY EAST:

These old carpenters that used to sleep up in the store with me. He was always building houses on the farms and first one place and then the other and he'd hire these old guys, see and they ate down at the house with the rest of us and they'd always stay up in the store with me.

SUE THRASHER:

And that was the first time you'd ever heard any Socialist ideas.

CLAY EAST:

Well, they didn't call socialism, but I know now from the things they said and the suggestions they made…and most all of those guys, I really couldn't understand that, they was more or less soured on the world and after I got into the Movement, I could kind of understand why. The thing looked so simple and

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made so much sense, yet people didn't have judgement enough to even look into it and I know that's what soured those guys on the whole damn set-up.

SUE THRASHER:

Now, how long you stay in California, that first time?

CLAY EAST:

Well, I was going to tell you about getting to California. It was a little rough, but it wouldn't hurt. One of these guys that stayed up in there, he had a little old small book in his …and he had a whole bunch of hatchecks in this thing that they used in the trains at that time to stick in your hat and it points to where you're going to see, you get on there and give them your ticket and he's got a certain point and a certain color hatcheck and all for the town you're going to. Well, I picked that up from one of these old guys and he said hell, he'd get on there and buy a ticket from Tyronza to Marked Tree if he wanted to go to Jonesboro and he'd get on there and he'd find out someone that's going to Jonesboro and he'd look through his book and get a hatcheck like the one that they was using for Jonesboro and stick it in his hat and ride on free. So, I picked that idea up from him and I found out that these Jews was going to the West Coast, so each time the conductor would come through and say that hell, he couldn't separate those things, so he'd give all these fourteen hatchecks to one guy and he'd distribute them out…and they was strung

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out all up and down the car and I stood up after we left Kansas City, I stood up there for one or two days, I don't know and the train was running eight hours slow, when I got off. I finally, well, I rode through two or three divisions on hatchecks and they pulled a car I was in, I was in the tail end and I'd swapped the hatcheck and I didn't want them picking up on me, so I'd gone way down at the back end of the train and this chaircar train had held them back, because they was having to stop and let people on andoff and it was slowing the whole thing down. So, they put one of these coaches off and put it on the Pullman and I was on that coach and that knocked me out, I didn't have anyone to get hatchecks from. So, I made me one out of a ticket…I plugged up the whole, I bit the corner off and chewed it up and waded it in this other hole over here and then I cut another one on this side and I knew that would carry me to the end of the division. I knew what I needed, but I couldn't find one, so the conductor come through. Well, I had a six-shooter, had it in my shirt, or under my coat. And, there'd been a guy in the penitentiary escape, I think it was in Utah and they was looking for him on all these trains and well, anyway, the conductor come through and I had stuck this thing way down in my cap there and he reached up to get it,

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and I thought, "Oh Lordy, he's gonna…" But, he couldn't see it, that was all. He didn't recognize that I'd messed it up. Well, it like to scared me out of my wits and I was going to put that gun on him and make him stop the train and let me off, because I'd talked to another guy on the train and he'd told me that if they caught me doing that, they'd put me in the lock-up. But, when we got to I think it was Alberguergue, I got that far. I got off at night and I know that there was lights up on the train and I got off though, and expressed my suitcase into Long Beach and I got on top on this passenger train…they had electric lights up over that train then, or gas lights one, I don't know which, but it wasawfully lit up and I sure was scared to get up there. Anyway, we pulled out of there and this was just before Thanksgiving and we got up in those mountains and that thing rocked around in those mountains and I'd heard about these guys freezing to death on those damn trips and so forth and I had on a, I think, two wool shirts and a wool coat over that and I was well wrapped up with a fur cap and so forth. But, I was getting pretty cold and had a big pair of leather gloves and some cavass gloves inside of them but, anyway, I got scared about that thing and I thought this ain't gonna do and I looked down

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in there and they hadn'