Samuel Proctor Oral History Program College of Liberal Arts and ...

Samuel Proctor Oral History Program College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Program Director: Dr. Paul Ortiz

Joel Buchanan Archive of African American History:

241 Pugh Hall PO Box 115215 Gainesville, FL 32611 (352) 392-7168

AAHP 162 Mae Islar African American History Project (AAHP) Interviewed by Anna Brodrecht and Ryan Morini on March 1, 2011

2 hours, 33 minutes | 76 pages

Abstract: Mae Isabel Vesta Islar grew up in Tampa, Florida, on the fringes of Ybor City. In this interview, she discusses her family history and their connection to Tampa, as well as her own memories of growing up there. Unlike most Southerners, she went to Catholic school growing up, despite her family attending Baptist and Methodist churches. Her grandfather was a cigarmaker, and her great-grandfather worked as a shrimper in Pensacola. She also was told that her grandmother, from Key West, had a mix of African American, Native American, and Spanish ancestry. She states that her great-grandfather was involved in the founding of Florida A&M University, which she attended for her undergraduate studies. Ms. Islar describes typical daily and weekly life from when she was growing up, and the community in Tampa, which was rather complex. Mrs. Islar's first teaching job was at Euclid High School in DeLand, Florida, and she escorted a student on a field trip to Cuba just before Castro took power. She then taught at Blake High School in Tampa, then in Newberry, Florida, and then at Lincoln High School in Gainesville, Florida. She also talks at length about her life experiences and adventures overall.

Keywords: [African American History; Alachua County, Florida; Volusia County, Florida; Hillsborough County, Florida; Education]

For information on terms of use of this interview, please see the SPOHP Creative Commons license at .

AAHP 162 Interviewee: Mae Islar Interviewers: Anna Brodrecht and Ryan Morini Date: March 1, 2011 B: All right. So, do you want to start with your long term history? What can you

remember about--just, you can just make sure it's clicking. M: Yep; no, it's good. B: We're good. Okay, do you want to start with your grandparents? What can you

remember about your grandparents? Where were they from? Any stories you can remember? I: My grandfather was the most interesting person I have ever known. He was pretty special. He told me stories of things that happened to him. In fact, let me start by saying he was probably one of the earliest pioneers of Tampa. And he moved to Tampa from Bartow. And I thought it was so interesting at the time because we had a fireplace, and in that day and age you didn't have television. And you sat around the fireplace--it got warm all in front and cold in the back-- and you listened to the older people talk about their lives and things that happened. So, it was really almost like storytelling time. And we were allowed to listen, but you didn't dare interrupt! And so, I found out a lot of things about my grandfather. [Laughter] And then, of course, all of this was documented by all of the pictures that were in our living room. And I don't know whether you've seen any of the earlier pictures back in the early 1900s; some of them were pictures, some of them were portraits. And their eyes always seemed to follow you. And as a kid, sitting in that room, I could always feel like those eyes were constantly on you. It was the most eerie but interesting feeling. And then of course we had a very interesting house. My grandfather moved to Tampa, as I said, just as Tampa

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was getting started. I think he said there was a two-room house that he built as a bachelor. And then, of course, like Pops it grew, so that by the time we came along we had a full-fledged two-story house that--I'm not kidding--kind of reminded me of Gone with The Wind? My friends were pretty impressed with that. But, you know, there's such a thing as you look at a house and you think someone has money? I'm sorry, that was not the case at all! [Laughter] We lived very frugally. But unlike a lot of kids, we owned our property. It was a pretty substantial piece. And the kids all had their own bedrooms, which was kind of unusual for that time when you think about the Depression. We didn't ever go hungry, but I don't think we had anything fancy: snacks were unheard of. We had a lot of fruit trees in our yard. Granddaddy had just about every fruit imaginable he'd planted in there. We had grapefruit, oranges. We had avocado pear. We had pomegranates, we had mangoes. We had guavas, we had plums, dates. Three or four different varieties of mangoes. And so, as kids we ate a lot of fruit. And my sister and I were talking a couple of weeks ago, and she said, "You know, maybe that's why we were so healthy." Because candy was unheard of, snacks were unheard of. You ate a substantial breakfast, you snacked off that fruit, and then maybe you got a really good-sized meal at night. We were pretty much, coming up, confined to our own home. We were not allowed to roam the street. It just wasn't--my grandfather and my father after him were very protective of us, you know? You didn't go visit the neighbors unless you asked your parents, and your parents had to ask the neighbor's parents whether or not it was okay to go over. And then of course, you went and you played out in the

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yard. Everybody sat on the front porch. So, you were pretty much observed and watched the whole time that you grew up. If you went to the movies, you went as a group. My dad was probably lurking in the background. I can recall going to a parochial school in Tampa, and the schoolyard was fenced. And I might look up at recess and see my daddy standing at the fence, looking, observing. [Laughter] I always felt like we were under observation. There were three of us: my older sister, Flora, and my brother, Wendell. And I was the youngest. And there were about three or four years between us, and I thought, "Oh, gee, that's wonderful family spacing!" But there was child who died between each one of us, so that accounted for the three to four year spacing among us. And we were, racially--I mean, not racially, I don't want to put that--we were, in terms of religion, a mixed bag. Everybody on my mother's side was Baptist. Everybody on my father's side was Methodist. My grandmother, who was a mixture of Indian and Black and probably Spanish, was a beautiful woman. But she had been married before and she had five children before she married my grandfather. And then she had two children with my grandfather. And of course, her history was very interesting, too, because they came to Tampa by way of St. Augustine, Key West. I mean, we used to pretty much travel with them all the different places that they had been. My grandmother was kind of really the matriarch of the family. My grandfather kind of pretty much left the running of the house to him. He was, even back in that day, kind of--how do I want to put it? He was a man about town. He wanted to know what was going on. He walked everywhere he went until he died at the age of ninety-three. Actually, he died at ninety-four. Ninety-three, he stopped

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walking. He was probably down for about maybe five or six months before he died. But he walked, and I mean at a very brisk pace. It was difficult to keep up with him! [Laughter] And he'd walk, and he'd stop and observe. I think he marveled at how much the city had grown in his lifetime. And he loved property. He would look at property, and if a bargain came along he would buy. So we might have been property-rich, but we were money-poor. But Granddaddy's comment was, "One day." We never got birthday presents, by the way. At Christmas we might have gotten maybe an orange. Not an orange. A candy, rather. Orange candy. The hard kind with the soft centers. And I remember the first present I got from my godmother was a book--but then, well whatever. A book was really not something to be prized, because we had a whole library. If you can recall the lawyer libraries with the glass cases, and each one sat on the othe,r and then you opened them up? So, we had all these books. I can recall there was a safe in that middle room, and there was also a sewing machine, and then there was a hall tree that had a seat. And the seat lifted up, and there were books in there. And so, there were books all over the house. And you can imagine growing up and wanting to know what was in those books. I wasn't just satisfied to look at the pictures; I wanted to know what they said, and what was there. I remember Granddaddy saying something about that was Livingston, and that was something that happened in Africa. And, I mean, I just worried: "Everybody read to me," "Read to me!" And I guess I was so anxious to learn how to read. My sister was in school, she's six years older than I am. And I decided one day I was going to show up in her classroom. And so, I wandered

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away--my Granddaddy wasn't there. [Laughter] Wandered away, went to the school. Kind of crawled in, stealthily, and kind of got there between the aisles. And she looked out and saw me, and she was about ready to just--ah! She was ready to--she was furious. But she couldn't say anything. And, of course, this is a Catholic school. And so I sat there, and I'm sure the kids started sniggling, and finally the teacher looked over, and say, "Well, what do we have here?" But, surprising enough, I wasn't asked to leave. I guess that my sister was so embarrassed! And, of course, I remember afterwards as we were going home, she says, "Don't you ever do that to me again!" And I thought, "Okay." I thought it was pretty cool. But then, somehow people started taking a little bit more interest in me, and making sure that I did get read to and that, you know, I got my intellectual curiosity satisfied. Ironically enough, I started Catholic school--and I know that would've been the worst thing could happen today. I probably started school at about four or five. And they had primary back in those days. And I remember that was the most exciting thing: to go to school. And I loved all of my teachers. I didn't think it was anything unusual that they all wore these black dresses--the nuns' outfits and everything. [Laughter] And they were very stern. But it was a wonderful learning environment. I can remember skipping a grade. Because I mean, I got bored pretty quickly, starting so early. And so, I hated when I had to leave parochial school in eighth grade and start the public school. And I thought, "This is terrifying!" There were twelve kids in my graduating class, and they were all from families that really were very caring and protective of their children. Suddenly, I'm in with all of these children, and it was just like, I was

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spellbound. I was struck absolutely speechless. So much so that I remember sitting in the History class, and I was afraid to open my mouth, because we had been taught you spoke when you were asked a question. And I never volunteered. And, of course, back in those days the teachers would go down the aisle, and they'd say, "Well, okay Mary, what's the answer?" And when they got to me, I'd always answer the question. And I guess she looked at me and said, "Hm, something's wrong with this kid or something." She was nasty! I'd always do well on the written tests and so forth. But then, too, as large as Tampa was, it was a small village. So everybody knew everyone else, and so they'd say, "Oh, that's Warren Vesta's daughter." And throughout my entire life I was labeled "Warren Vesta's daughter." I had no idea what that meant, but I knew one thing: most guys were terrified, because my dad had a little lasso in him, and he could lose his temper in a heartbeat. Especially when it came to his wife and his family. Oh, he was just absolutely very, very passionate about that. I remember one guy came who was working with my father, and he looked at us and said, "Warren, you have some beautiful daughters." Why did he say that? My dad went in a rage! "Don't you look at my daughters!" [Laughter] And of course, my stepmother by that time came in, and she said, "Warren, he didn't mean anything." And I think Daddy almost was about ready to fire him. I never that guy anymore, by the way. Just to give you kind of an idea of what it was like: we had friends who went to school with us. Everybody who came to the house, you had to give you background: Who are you? Whose child are you? Where did you come from?

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That sort of thing. So, everything was very monitored, censored. That was back in the time where books were banned in Boston. B: I don't know about that, tell me about that. I: You didn't know about that? Oh, if a book had anything immoral in it--remember now, I came from a very strict Catholic background. Only because my aunts and insisted that we go to a Catholic school. They paid for our tuition. They are all northerners and everything. But they insisted that the three of us would be given a Catholic education. Now, I don't know how much you know about Catholic education, but you're given a lot of religion as well as academics. And, naturally, church was a very much a part of it, as well as prayer. So, we came up very religious, very moral. You know, sin was the worst thing in the world. And so, there were books that we were not allowed to read. If it was on that list of books, you didn't read those books under penalty of sin. So a lot of people didn't read those books. If it was banned in Boston--which was kind of like the archdiocese, as such, of the Catholic Church--it wasn't something you were supposed to read. There were passages in there, whatever, that were not appropriate, so you didn't read them. B: So, how was your family? Your family was Baptist and Methodist, and you went to a Catholic school? Was there any kind of debates? I: That was because all of my aunts and uncles by my grandmother's previous marriage were all Catholics. And they were all northerners. And they were all, I guess, pretty well situated for that time. And so, they insisted not only that we go to school, but they sent the money, they sent the clothes, they sent everything.

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