Earnest Stamps, April 8th, 2006
Title
Earnest Stamps, April 8th, 2006
Description
In this interview, Earnest Stamps talks about growing up in Detroit, where he watched his parents work and raise him. In doing so, Stamps was inspired to stay in the city and continue working in his community.
Publisher
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Detroit Historical Society
Language
en-US
Video
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
Earnest Stamps
Brief Biography
Earnest Stamps lived in Detroit for over thirty years and worked as a pharmacist until his retirement. At the time of this recording, Stamps was eighty-two years old.
Interviewer's Name
Diana Cher
Interview Place
Detroit, MI
Date
4/08/2006
Interview Length
22:06
Transcription
Diana Cher: It is April 8th, 2006. The interviewer is are the interviewee is Ernest Stamps. The interviewer is Diana Cher. We were at Mary Grove College. Mr. Stamps, could you tell me a little about yourself in the background?
Ernest Stamps: About my present self. Are you going to go back in?
Diana Cher: Why don't you say a little bit about your present self?
Ernest Stamps: I'm a retired pharmacist living in Southfield after having lived in Detroit for 30 plus years. No much longer than that. Now that I think about it, having lived in Detroit all my life, except for ten years, shall we say. I'm now 82 years old and. I'm enjoying life and I'm fortunate to live this long.
Diana Cher: So And you've prepared something for the Association of Black Storytellers?
Ernest Stamps: Oh, yes. I haven't mentally prepared nothing that I've tried to lay down, but I speak from my memory.
Diana Cher: Could you share some of that with me?
Ernest Stamps: Yes. I can go back in my memory to a very early age. I seem to have a good recollection. Some people seem to think I do, but I can remember things as early as when I was six, five, even four years old. Really? And we were in Atlanta, Georgia. I had a sister and brother older than I rather than my grandparents before us. And I guess about that time, which might have been in the late 1920s, word must have come to you that there was a great deal being offered in the North, that that exceeded the self esteem and people were working a dollar for a dollar a day. Hard, backbreaking labor men in the fields picking cotton, blowing women doing housework and laundry for a dollar a day. So $5 a day sounded pretty good. And many families, black and white, left the South. My father left first. No, my grandparents left first. They came north to Detroit and must have sent word back. And my father left with my older brother and sister to Detroit, and my mother brought me up later. We were the last to leave in the immediate family.
Diana Cher: How old were you when you came? How old were you then?
Ernest Stamps: I always I must have been about 4 or 5. I must have been. I can remember riding the train very excited by it and afraid of it because the train was so learned and the wheels were so big and the steam was shooting up from between the wheels. And as I as we walked toward the train, all this noise and I was hanging on to my mother's hand and it was an exciting time. So I do remember we had the usual shoe box and they let us out with the chicken and the biscuits and sweet potato pie. And by the time we got to Cincinnati was where people changed trains. They were going north. They got off the Jim Crow coach and got into regular coach. They were going south from Detroit. They got off the train, got out of the railroad coach and went and got under Jim Crow. Coach.
Diana Cher: Could you explain the Jim Crow coach?
Ernest Stamps: Well, Jim Crow is where all the black people had to go. They couldn't sit in the regular coaches in the South. And of course, they certainly couldn't sit in the podium and have a Pullman coach where there was a bet. So Jim Crow was what it was called when it was designated for black people only. So we changed coaches. And I remember I thought the the porter or whatever he was there was very kind to me because he gave me a candy bar. And little did I know that the mother had paid for it, but he did give it to me. And I think I talked about that for a while after we got North that this nice man and the folks that gave me the candy bar anyway.
Diana Cher: Nice mother.
Ernest Stamps: Whatever. I don't remember the exact time it took the time that it took to get to Detroit. But I do remember we got off the train and walked through what was then the Michigan Central Station and more. That big place with the high ceilings and the walls and the marble floors and the benches and whatnot in the back, a grand place to me. And I do remember we got on a streetcar with white love, and we had. Rolled into the downtown area. And my mother told me years later that when after two days or more on the train, when we got in the streetcar, I said, Oh, we're going to have a girl right now. And she was tired. She could be, but I wasn't. Anyway, we took the we changed the streetcar somewhere in downtown Detroit and rode out to where my father had a house He had rented a place on. Russell and Mullet, I seem to remember, was 1444, a Mullet. There was a row of what was called cottages, very small houses, two rows, in fact, facing Mullet Street. And the court behind the first row of houses was a second row. Maybe 6 or 8 cottages, houses to a row. My father and mother and I, we lived in the first house in the first row. My grandparents lived directly behind us in the first house in the second row. So I was just a hop, skip and a jump to go across the yard where they lived for whatever reason. And my father had secured a job not not with Mr. Ford, as he was called, but. Michigan copper and brass, I seem to recall, was the name of the place where he was hired. And. We were in an area that was called Black Bottom. If anyone's been around Detroit, I probably have heard of Black Bottom from years gone by, and we did pretty good for a year or so. But apparently the stock market crashes. The economic picture got very bad. So much so that I know now. That was the start of the Depression, which must have been around 1929, 30, 31 through in there. And my father was young and his hormones flowing wildly. He didn't take care of home very well at all. A lot of arguing between him and my mother as to what he did with his money because he certainly wasn't bringing it home. And in time he just abandoned us. And my poor mother had three children to raise and no skill. So for him there was a welfare and a red lines and we were in those, if I remember very well, we would go to this what was what was referred to as a kitchen on Monroe, near Shane, near Duffield School. We'd go there for breakfast in the morning and that's where I learned to hate shredded wheat, among other things, shredded wheat, chocolate pudding. And I figure I was something else I didn't like. The shredded wheat would never get soft, and the milk was like a mouthful, strong. And I would complain about it. My mother would say, Shut up and eat it. So I shut up and I never learned to like it until I got grown. And when we would leave to go to school, we would have our breakfast there in the morning before school and see all our friends and relatives and Lord knows who else there because everybody was in the same boat. Wasn't it a disgrace to be poor? Because everybody we know report on just just the facts, why and when we would leave to go to school, they would as you went out, they would hand you a sandwich and an apple sandwich. Always turned out to be I didn't know at the time what it was, but it was apple butter smeared on two pieces of bread. And that was that was supposed to be your lunch if you couldn't do any better. But my mother somehow and we worked together a day or two and she would say, come home for lunch and we would go home for lunch instead of staying at school. And we should have tomato soup or some such thing and crackers for lunch. And it was fine. So I was all right, was fine. And we'd go back to school anyway as time went on. Oh, I forgot to mention that the activities of the area where I was sort of centered around the UNI Hall, which was the United Negro Improvement Association. Where the Marcus Garvey movement was very dominant. Every Sunday we went there for whatever was happening. I thought it was church, but it was. A meeting of the various influential people, such as they were in the area in which we talked about going back to Africa. And right now I can't remember why we would want to, but other than to recall that Marcus Garvey was the head of the middle man, it was his desire. And a lot of people thought it was a good thing that we go back to Africa. But as you may know, it didn't didn't happen anyway. They had lots of meetings there for. The kids and things to keep the kids busy. And down the street from that was the Christian center was calm and there we really had fun. They had a big gymnasium like a room that we could play on a on a gym floor with a basketball or what have you. And we enjoyed going there and had all kinds of seasonal programs for Easter and Thanksgiving or what have you. But we went to school and caper and school, which is on May 4th and started kindergarten there. But we went there until we got to the second grade, then went to the went to Duffield. And I recall I was double promoted from the second grade to the third grade there. And then I went to Barstow and it so happened the. Economic picture got so bad. And my mother, we were already on welfare. She had to apply for even greater assistance and we children were put into the foster care situation. Children's Aid Society came into our life and we were placed in foster homes because mother just couldn't make it. She had no skill and couldn't make enough money to feed three children. So we were all put in foster homes. But my sister, who was almost 12 or 13, almost 18 year age, and my mother thought it better to go back and get my sister out and she could tell she had been better with just one child and with two. And besides, this was a girl and she didn't want our way from from her care. So my brother and I were left in our homes. You stayed in foster homes, various homes for three years until around 1937. So it must have been around 1934 when we went in. And it was a good thing for us. Looking back on it, I can say that it was really a good thing because it gave us a structured life. Who had the time to go to bed, the time to get up. We had to do our homework and show that we had done it. Of course, we went to school every day and grades and looked after we were in church. All of that on Sunday from before, I think before, and it's called until after evening church. But it turned out to be a good thing because it certainly kept us out of trouble or we did have a free hand, more or less, when before we went into the homes. And my father was nowhere to be seen. When he abandoned the family, he abandoned the family. He was definitely out of the picture. I found out later and he was in Detroit all the time, but we kids never saw him. And I don't think my mother did either. She didn't have a very happy married life with him, and it had caused me a lot of traumatic reactions. A stammer. I went to bed and things that I had no idea was causing it, but the insecurity of the life that I had there, I must have felt it. And I showed it in that way. And not being being as poor as we were, my clothes weren't the best. And, oh, and I had a physical deformity too. I had to cost. I saw what the cost. I. Mean the clothes looking like they had come from the women, probably. And they did. My mother couldn't buy shoes. She couldn't do what needs to be done. So for healing, when we went into foster home, the first thing they did, they gave me a pair of glasses which corrected the crossed eye long as I had glasses on and they gave us some decent clothes and I never been so dressed up in all my life. I didn't know what a suit was. And water called Zealand. And so we went to this foster home and we were well, we were treated like we were their children, which was a great thing. And I said before that was a good thing for us. I didn't realize it at the time, but anyway, I stayed in the foster home until 1937 when Roosevelt, I think, was the new president, and the NRA came along and a number of races occurred within the wages of the working class. And my mother, oh, who had a security job at Kern's at $8 a week. One of the maids in their countries department store in Detroit was the when the NRA came along. Somehow Rose's took it took if they went, the government subsidized them. I don't know what they had to raise from $8 to the magnificent sum of $14 a week. And what happened? We came home from school one day and the lady whose home we were living in announced that the worker would be coming for us the next day to take us to our mother. We were glad to go back home to Mother, wherever she was. Sure enough, the next day our things were packed up into. Just three bags or what have you. And my brother and I got in the car and he took us over to where mother was. The mother wasn't home. This is a boarding house like she had come in from work and. He just left us there. So we'll just have a seat. Your mother be Armstrong. Turns out we didn't know. Didn't know we were coming. They hadn't told her. She got that 14 bucks a week. That meant from now on, baby, it's your responsibility. And that's why we were dumped on her. Unceremoniously. We were happy, but I guess she was overwhelmed anyway. This is a. She was living in Palmer near near both school. But I was just starting the seventh grade, so both she and I went to the sixth. Instead. We had to go to Garfield, right? That's where Garfield was. And we were enrolled there and had a very hard time because a mother making 14 bucks a week. I was the youngest and I think I was 11. My sister, who was then about 16, maybe 15 brother was like 14 or 15. So I was a baby. And we were we all had to go to school. They rarely dropped out. Neither one of them finished, finished high school. My brother dropped out in the 10th grade, Sister dropped out in 11th so they could help at home. My mother wasn't making enough money and I stayed in school. I had no desire to drop out and I was encouraged to drop out and for which I'm glad. But I was fortunate in that I learned to read At an early age. My sister would come home from school and we would play school and what we should learn in school during the day with your teacher. And I was learning and didn't realize that we were having the fun, didn't have TV, radio. And I learned to read and to and to love books. I remember that when I discovered the main library on what was there, I thought that was the grandest building. And that there was an inexhaustible supply of books. And I remember I would spend a lot of my time reading when one of the when the other kids were out playing ball or any physical activity. I played ball and I ran up and down the streets, too. But I like to read. And I discovered there were there were other worlds besides when I was growing up in force, I never got in trouble. I never felt that. I figured I was smart enough to get out of any job. But my God, in contrast, I had a brother who figured that way out of anything. But. I would. I never skipped school. I used to hear the kids talk about skipping school and what they did. While I couldn't see any sense in me skipping, casue I didn't have any money and everybody I knew would be in school. If I skipped school, what would I do? You just walk the streets and some of the kids would walk around downtown. That never made sense to me, so I never skipped school. And as I said before, I didn't think I could talk one way out or anything. So it kept me from and I figured if one person get caught, it was going to be me. So whatever I thought I wanted to do, I never did it anyway. I eventually said in school, of course. And that's how far we'll continue with this.
Diana Cher: Well, we're. And eight-teen minutes remaining. You got him.
Ernest Stamps: Until you told him.
Diana Cher: Yeah. You found a you find a good stopping point for yourself.
Ernest Stamps: Oh, yeah. Well, anyway, I did stay in school. I. Went to Cass after Garfield. And at the time, I thought I wanted to be a poet. I used to write a lot of poetry, and I thought I wanted to be a poet. Thought I wanted to be a writer. I thought I wanted to be a scientist. I remember I am home on Christmas. My mother got a Christmas bonus from Kerns. Couldn't have been too large, but anyway, it caused her to give the kid some money. She gave me a dollar a whole dollar. That was my whole life. So they had a lot of toy toy lands. They called them downtown and Crawlers, Hudsons and Herons. I got on there and I had money and I just go from one floor to another looking at all the toys. So I remember when I was in Kern this time, and I'm looking over the microscopes and the telescopes and always fascinating to look for. A microscope magnified some of the look. And I was looking at the scales on a butterfly's wings or some I knew something and I asked the young man who saw them how much the microscope sets were. they were in a set. I said she was something like $10, or he might have said a thousand. I said, Oh, no. He said to me, Don't you have any money? Have $10 as well. How much do you have as well? That's sort of right. Come on. How much have you got? I said I've got a dollar. I have known for a while. He said, Well, I'm sorry. Okay, go on. Is it. Wait a minute. Don't go away. So one of the bad things came. I had this microscope and it had been broken, but it was still usable. And he said, Well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll let you have his microscope. He gave me some slides. Some were already prepared and specimens were already mounted on them. He gave me a number and a book explaining use of the microscope and what not. And here you have a sit down. Oh, boy. I was tickled to death. I think I ran all the way home. When I got home, I sat down in the kitchen and started looking at what had given me. And I told it all, the gang in the neighborhood. Everybody was coming into our house to look on my microscope And the only specimens I could get were the bugs that were around and never the usual butterflies and the roaches. And I would learn the scales on the butterflies wings, and then I'll catch a fly, magnify the head, you know, And you see all the flies have compound eyes as you know. You see all the various hexagonal shapes. And I thought that was really grand and that started me wanting to be a scientist. So. When I got to Cass, oh, I was in science curriculum, and that's where I started toward my fulfilling my desire later on to become a pharmacist. That occurred after I got in service. And I realized as a writer a couple of years after I got out of serious before I could write a great American novel and make $1 million. So I'd better pick something that I could make a buck at a reasonable period of time. And I'm scientists to chemists, to pharmacists, which I am today, retired.
Diana Cher: Thank you so much for sharing the story that you have with us.
Ernest Stamps: About my present self. Are you going to go back in?
Diana Cher: Why don't you say a little bit about your present self?
Ernest Stamps: I'm a retired pharmacist living in Southfield after having lived in Detroit for 30 plus years. No much longer than that. Now that I think about it, having lived in Detroit all my life, except for ten years, shall we say. I'm now 82 years old and. I'm enjoying life and I'm fortunate to live this long.
Diana Cher: So And you've prepared something for the Association of Black Storytellers?
Ernest Stamps: Oh, yes. I haven't mentally prepared nothing that I've tried to lay down, but I speak from my memory.
Diana Cher: Could you share some of that with me?
Ernest Stamps: Yes. I can go back in my memory to a very early age. I seem to have a good recollection. Some people seem to think I do, but I can remember things as early as when I was six, five, even four years old. Really? And we were in Atlanta, Georgia. I had a sister and brother older than I rather than my grandparents before us. And I guess about that time, which might have been in the late 1920s, word must have come to you that there was a great deal being offered in the North, that that exceeded the self esteem and people were working a dollar for a dollar a day. Hard, backbreaking labor men in the fields picking cotton, blowing women doing housework and laundry for a dollar a day. So $5 a day sounded pretty good. And many families, black and white, left the South. My father left first. No, my grandparents left first. They came north to Detroit and must have sent word back. And my father left with my older brother and sister to Detroit, and my mother brought me up later. We were the last to leave in the immediate family.
Diana Cher: How old were you when you came? How old were you then?
Ernest Stamps: I always I must have been about 4 or 5. I must have been. I can remember riding the train very excited by it and afraid of it because the train was so learned and the wheels were so big and the steam was shooting up from between the wheels. And as I as we walked toward the train, all this noise and I was hanging on to my mother's hand and it was an exciting time. So I do remember we had the usual shoe box and they let us out with the chicken and the biscuits and sweet potato pie. And by the time we got to Cincinnati was where people changed trains. They were going north. They got off the Jim Crow coach and got into regular coach. They were going south from Detroit. They got off the train, got out of the railroad coach and went and got under Jim Crow. Coach.
Diana Cher: Could you explain the Jim Crow coach?
Ernest Stamps: Well, Jim Crow is where all the black people had to go. They couldn't sit in the regular coaches in the South. And of course, they certainly couldn't sit in the podium and have a Pullman coach where there was a bet. So Jim Crow was what it was called when it was designated for black people only. So we changed coaches. And I remember I thought the the porter or whatever he was there was very kind to me because he gave me a candy bar. And little did I know that the mother had paid for it, but he did give it to me. And I think I talked about that for a while after we got North that this nice man and the folks that gave me the candy bar anyway.
Diana Cher: Nice mother.
Ernest Stamps: Whatever. I don't remember the exact time it took the time that it took to get to Detroit. But I do remember we got off the train and walked through what was then the Michigan Central Station and more. That big place with the high ceilings and the walls and the marble floors and the benches and whatnot in the back, a grand place to me. And I do remember we got on a streetcar with white love, and we had. Rolled into the downtown area. And my mother told me years later that when after two days or more on the train, when we got in the streetcar, I said, Oh, we're going to have a girl right now. And she was tired. She could be, but I wasn't. Anyway, we took the we changed the streetcar somewhere in downtown Detroit and rode out to where my father had a house He had rented a place on. Russell and Mullet, I seem to remember, was 1444, a Mullet. There was a row of what was called cottages, very small houses, two rows, in fact, facing Mullet Street. And the court behind the first row of houses was a second row. Maybe 6 or 8 cottages, houses to a row. My father and mother and I, we lived in the first house in the first row. My grandparents lived directly behind us in the first house in the second row. So I was just a hop, skip and a jump to go across the yard where they lived for whatever reason. And my father had secured a job not not with Mr. Ford, as he was called, but. Michigan copper and brass, I seem to recall, was the name of the place where he was hired. And. We were in an area that was called Black Bottom. If anyone's been around Detroit, I probably have heard of Black Bottom from years gone by, and we did pretty good for a year or so. But apparently the stock market crashes. The economic picture got very bad. So much so that I know now. That was the start of the Depression, which must have been around 1929, 30, 31 through in there. And my father was young and his hormones flowing wildly. He didn't take care of home very well at all. A lot of arguing between him and my mother as to what he did with his money because he certainly wasn't bringing it home. And in time he just abandoned us. And my poor mother had three children to raise and no skill. So for him there was a welfare and a red lines and we were in those, if I remember very well, we would go to this what was what was referred to as a kitchen on Monroe, near Shane, near Duffield School. We'd go there for breakfast in the morning and that's where I learned to hate shredded wheat, among other things, shredded wheat, chocolate pudding. And I figure I was something else I didn't like. The shredded wheat would never get soft, and the milk was like a mouthful, strong. And I would complain about it. My mother would say, Shut up and eat it. So I shut up and I never learned to like it until I got grown. And when we would leave to go to school, we would have our breakfast there in the morning before school and see all our friends and relatives and Lord knows who else there because everybody was in the same boat. Wasn't it a disgrace to be poor? Because everybody we know report on just just the facts, why and when we would leave to go to school, they would as you went out, they would hand you a sandwich and an apple sandwich. Always turned out to be I didn't know at the time what it was, but it was apple butter smeared on two pieces of bread. And that was that was supposed to be your lunch if you couldn't do any better. But my mother somehow and we worked together a day or two and she would say, come home for lunch and we would go home for lunch instead of staying at school. And we should have tomato soup or some such thing and crackers for lunch. And it was fine. So I was all right, was fine. And we'd go back to school anyway as time went on. Oh, I forgot to mention that the activities of the area where I was sort of centered around the UNI Hall, which was the United Negro Improvement Association. Where the Marcus Garvey movement was very dominant. Every Sunday we went there for whatever was happening. I thought it was church, but it was. A meeting of the various influential people, such as they were in the area in which we talked about going back to Africa. And right now I can't remember why we would want to, but other than to recall that Marcus Garvey was the head of the middle man, it was his desire. And a lot of people thought it was a good thing that we go back to Africa. But as you may know, it didn't didn't happen anyway. They had lots of meetings there for. The kids and things to keep the kids busy. And down the street from that was the Christian center was calm and there we really had fun. They had a big gymnasium like a room that we could play on a on a gym floor with a basketball or what have you. And we enjoyed going there and had all kinds of seasonal programs for Easter and Thanksgiving or what have you. But we went to school and caper and school, which is on May 4th and started kindergarten there. But we went there until we got to the second grade, then went to the went to Duffield. And I recall I was double promoted from the second grade to the third grade there. And then I went to Barstow and it so happened the. Economic picture got so bad. And my mother, we were already on welfare. She had to apply for even greater assistance and we children were put into the foster care situation. Children's Aid Society came into our life and we were placed in foster homes because mother just couldn't make it. She had no skill and couldn't make enough money to feed three children. So we were all put in foster homes. But my sister, who was almost 12 or 13, almost 18 year age, and my mother thought it better to go back and get my sister out and she could tell she had been better with just one child and with two. And besides, this was a girl and she didn't want our way from from her care. So my brother and I were left in our homes. You stayed in foster homes, various homes for three years until around 1937. So it must have been around 1934 when we went in. And it was a good thing for us. Looking back on it, I can say that it was really a good thing because it gave us a structured life. Who had the time to go to bed, the time to get up. We had to do our homework and show that we had done it. Of course, we went to school every day and grades and looked after we were in church. All of that on Sunday from before, I think before, and it's called until after evening church. But it turned out to be a good thing because it certainly kept us out of trouble or we did have a free hand, more or less, when before we went into the homes. And my father was nowhere to be seen. When he abandoned the family, he abandoned the family. He was definitely out of the picture. I found out later and he was in Detroit all the time, but we kids never saw him. And I don't think my mother did either. She didn't have a very happy married life with him, and it had caused me a lot of traumatic reactions. A stammer. I went to bed and things that I had no idea was causing it, but the insecurity of the life that I had there, I must have felt it. And I showed it in that way. And not being being as poor as we were, my clothes weren't the best. And, oh, and I had a physical deformity too. I had to cost. I saw what the cost. I. Mean the clothes looking like they had come from the women, probably. And they did. My mother couldn't buy shoes. She couldn't do what needs to be done. So for healing, when we went into foster home, the first thing they did, they gave me a pair of glasses which corrected the crossed eye long as I had glasses on and they gave us some decent clothes and I never been so dressed up in all my life. I didn't know what a suit was. And water called Zealand. And so we went to this foster home and we were well, we were treated like we were their children, which was a great thing. And I said before that was a good thing for us. I didn't realize it at the time, but anyway, I stayed in the foster home until 1937 when Roosevelt, I think, was the new president, and the NRA came along and a number of races occurred within the wages of the working class. And my mother, oh, who had a security job at Kern's at $8 a week. One of the maids in their countries department store in Detroit was the when the NRA came along. Somehow Rose's took it took if they went, the government subsidized them. I don't know what they had to raise from $8 to the magnificent sum of $14 a week. And what happened? We came home from school one day and the lady whose home we were living in announced that the worker would be coming for us the next day to take us to our mother. We were glad to go back home to Mother, wherever she was. Sure enough, the next day our things were packed up into. Just three bags or what have you. And my brother and I got in the car and he took us over to where mother was. The mother wasn't home. This is a boarding house like she had come in from work and. He just left us there. So we'll just have a seat. Your mother be Armstrong. Turns out we didn't know. Didn't know we were coming. They hadn't told her. She got that 14 bucks a week. That meant from now on, baby, it's your responsibility. And that's why we were dumped on her. Unceremoniously. We were happy, but I guess she was overwhelmed anyway. This is a. She was living in Palmer near near both school. But I was just starting the seventh grade, so both she and I went to the sixth. Instead. We had to go to Garfield, right? That's where Garfield was. And we were enrolled there and had a very hard time because a mother making 14 bucks a week. I was the youngest and I think I was 11. My sister, who was then about 16, maybe 15 brother was like 14 or 15. So I was a baby. And we were we all had to go to school. They rarely dropped out. Neither one of them finished, finished high school. My brother dropped out in the 10th grade, Sister dropped out in 11th so they could help at home. My mother wasn't making enough money and I stayed in school. I had no desire to drop out and I was encouraged to drop out and for which I'm glad. But I was fortunate in that I learned to read At an early age. My sister would come home from school and we would play school and what we should learn in school during the day with your teacher. And I was learning and didn't realize that we were having the fun, didn't have TV, radio. And I learned to read and to and to love books. I remember that when I discovered the main library on what was there, I thought that was the grandest building. And that there was an inexhaustible supply of books. And I remember I would spend a lot of my time reading when one of the when the other kids were out playing ball or any physical activity. I played ball and I ran up and down the streets, too. But I like to read. And I discovered there were there were other worlds besides when I was growing up in force, I never got in trouble. I never felt that. I figured I was smart enough to get out of any job. But my God, in contrast, I had a brother who figured that way out of anything. But. I would. I never skipped school. I used to hear the kids talk about skipping school and what they did. While I couldn't see any sense in me skipping, casue I didn't have any money and everybody I knew would be in school. If I skipped school, what would I do? You just walk the streets and some of the kids would walk around downtown. That never made sense to me, so I never skipped school. And as I said before, I didn't think I could talk one way out or anything. So it kept me from and I figured if one person get caught, it was going to be me. So whatever I thought I wanted to do, I never did it anyway. I eventually said in school, of course. And that's how far we'll continue with this.
Diana Cher: Well, we're. And eight-teen minutes remaining. You got him.
Ernest Stamps: Until you told him.
Diana Cher: Yeah. You found a you find a good stopping point for yourself.
Ernest Stamps: Oh, yeah. Well, anyway, I did stay in school. I. Went to Cass after Garfield. And at the time, I thought I wanted to be a poet. I used to write a lot of poetry, and I thought I wanted to be a poet. Thought I wanted to be a writer. I thought I wanted to be a scientist. I remember I am home on Christmas. My mother got a Christmas bonus from Kerns. Couldn't have been too large, but anyway, it caused her to give the kid some money. She gave me a dollar a whole dollar. That was my whole life. So they had a lot of toy toy lands. They called them downtown and Crawlers, Hudsons and Herons. I got on there and I had money and I just go from one floor to another looking at all the toys. So I remember when I was in Kern this time, and I'm looking over the microscopes and the telescopes and always fascinating to look for. A microscope magnified some of the look. And I was looking at the scales on a butterfly's wings or some I knew something and I asked the young man who saw them how much the microscope sets were. they were in a set. I said she was something like $10, or he might have said a thousand. I said, Oh, no. He said to me, Don't you have any money? Have $10 as well. How much do you have as well? That's sort of right. Come on. How much have you got? I said I've got a dollar. I have known for a while. He said, Well, I'm sorry. Okay, go on. Is it. Wait a minute. Don't go away. So one of the bad things came. I had this microscope and it had been broken, but it was still usable. And he said, Well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll let you have his microscope. He gave me some slides. Some were already prepared and specimens were already mounted on them. He gave me a number and a book explaining use of the microscope and what not. And here you have a sit down. Oh, boy. I was tickled to death. I think I ran all the way home. When I got home, I sat down in the kitchen and started looking at what had given me. And I told it all, the gang in the neighborhood. Everybody was coming into our house to look on my microscope And the only specimens I could get were the bugs that were around and never the usual butterflies and the roaches. And I would learn the scales on the butterflies wings, and then I'll catch a fly, magnify the head, you know, And you see all the flies have compound eyes as you know. You see all the various hexagonal shapes. And I thought that was really grand and that started me wanting to be a scientist. So. When I got to Cass, oh, I was in science curriculum, and that's where I started toward my fulfilling my desire later on to become a pharmacist. That occurred after I got in service. And I realized as a writer a couple of years after I got out of serious before I could write a great American novel and make $1 million. So I'd better pick something that I could make a buck at a reasonable period of time. And I'm scientists to chemists, to pharmacists, which I am today, retired.
Diana Cher: Thank you so much for sharing the story that you have with us.
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Citation
“Earnest Stamps, April 8th, 2006,” Detroit Historical Society Oral History Archive, accessed October 9, 2024, https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/839.