C. Maurice Syndor

Deacon, First Baptist Church
B. 1946

I can remember mama needed some bread or some sugar, some flour. She’d go next door, across the street, leave a note on the table, 'cause nobody locked the doors. Half of them didn't have keys.

At that time, the firemen used the big nets. They had to physically hold the nets up. As children, we didn’t know that they had gone through our block and gotten permission for us to jump off the first floor into the nets. We thought we were being slick, mama didn’t know about it. But what can I say? Mama knew. We knew how to slide down and how to climb up the brass pole. We hung there so much that when the schools would come down for fire prevention week, the firemen would sit back—and we did the talk. A lot of my friends became firemen because of those experiences.

When my grandmother bought her first house, she bought it from Beckstoffers [& Sons]. At one point she went to the lumberyard to pay the rent and he told her, “Miss Bessie, your money is no good here. You own that house. You made sure that your rent was paid and paid it off. ” That was the house I ended up living in all my life.

Just about every corner had a Jewish store. And I remember when I was a little kid playing with [Jewish] kids—so the integration was going on, but you know, you didn’t notice it as much. I can remember eating bagels. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but “we’re gonna eat something, you want to eat, too?” We broke bread together. It was truly an integrated village that maybe did not know that we were a village.