Thank You Jesus for Johnstown, Pennsylvania!

By Charles E. King

This proclamation is for the black students who are destined to fail in life because their city, state, and general government have failed to give them a first-rate education.
Therefore you must come to your own rescue and dont be a victim of this crime against your human rights.
Here is a guideline that I submitted to the schoolchildren of Martin L. King High School back in 1996.
I will be sending a copy to the Phila. school president. Help yourself because no one cares about your plight.
At least, teach the children how to read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 10, 2008
• ISBN: 9781453594452

Book preview

Chapter 1

How much is enough? When do you know that you have had enough? Enough of what? Food, money, life itself, love, drugs (for high blood pressure, sugar diabetes, obese, etc.) narcotics, homes, automobiles, TVs, and radio ads, credit cards, stuff.

The reason I am trying to measure and gauge the reason for my lifespan of seventy-six years. I am thinking about my beginning and how far I have come and what my values are. I like being called Mr. King. My granddaughter wrote me a letter, and she addressed me by my first name. This made me very angry. I had to reflect back and think about my anger; it took me a long time to answer her letter.

My lifetime has become a large picture, and I am forced to look at what has gone with the wind in my past.

I will be seventy-seven years old come April 8, 2007. I can think back to crawling around on a sawdust ground, which was the kitchen of this two-story-high shack with an outhouse about twenty feet away from the back of a side door. Since I was the seventh child of this family of fourteen, including Mother and Father, that meant there were about nine people trying to move around in this crowed box. The family at this time consisted of six boys and one girl.

I was five years old, and I knew my ABCs, and I knew how to read. My oldest sister had taught me how to read. I remember this scene as though it was yesterday. We lived on the hillside of this town called Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Looking down the hillside, one could see the rushing water race by and cover the whole town below. All I could hear and see was this steady roar of rushing water carrying a lot of things in the water below. This was the 1936 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It was the cold month of March; I am not sure of the date, but I was in kindergarten. It is amazing to me how much I remember. My oldest brother, Clifford, was fifteen years old at the time, and I remember him bringing me home a toy car that I winded up mechanically; it was a cop car that Pat in the Dick Tracy comic strip rode around in as chief of police.

I was not aware of it at this time, but a lot of people lost their lives. Nobody from Prospect Street lost their lives. We lived like the Indians lived for centuries, along the hillside of the flat low grounds below and left, the low grounds that were in a valley to the pioneers. The Indians must have known something about the lowlands. In this century, there have been three major floods in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I guess we have lost about three thousand people.

The floods of 1898, 1936, 1972. Whenever I start thinking back on my lifetime, I see the beginning starting on a hilly street that was the first street after coming off the bridge from downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I don’t know when they built it, but it was a quarter-mile long. We lived on the first street to your right as you come off the bridge. Every step one made was either up or down, not too many steps to be made when living on a mountainside. The top of the bridge was like a bridge on a ship where you could see in all directions, and as you climbed higher on the mountain, your view got clearer. My landmark was to look toward the west and see the world-famous steepest incline. I will explain more about the incline and the part it played in my life as a child, later.

After coming off the bridge going downtown, it was another scene change. It was like a scene out of a Western movie. After coming over the mountain from Southmont, Westmount, or Prospect, there lies the town called Johnstown, Pennsylvania, founded in 1848 by German settlers. In 1875, the Europeans came to America. The free slaves began leaving the South and making there way north, east, and west. I don’t know if my grandfather’s father, who was a slave, helped my grandfather to make his way to Johnstown. My grandfather and grandmother were born on an Indian reservation. My father was born in Americus, Georgia, in the year 1889.

My father was sixteen years old when my grandfather sent for him. My father got a job on the railroad, and together they sent for the rest of their family. My father got married to my mother in 1915; then he helped his wife bring her brothers and sisters from the South. Fifteen years later, on April 8, 1930, I, Charles E. King, was born.

Chapter 2

After fifty-eight years of being away from my hometown and away from the fair play that I received from the people of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, it makes my heart beat a little bit faster. This is why I am writing this book. I want to pay homage to the good people of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Many ethnic groups of people lived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. What I recognize now is how great our educational system was. You graduate from Johnstown High School, and you could get into any college in America. I was taught by German teachers from kindergarten through high school. That type of school system is needed in all of America. There was no separation of the people because of color; we all belonged to the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I think this type of reasoning came from the coal-mine leader John L. Lewis. He was looking for unity and brotherhood, which was not found in other parts of America. Here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, they still have the close-shop type of thinking, and it runs through the whole community; the people stay divided, and if you don’t communicate with each other, there is no hope. My first eighteen years of my life, I consider myself the all-American kid. After high school, I went into the U.S. Navy; what a rude awakening. I really saw the mean side of white America; it’s bad when your own shipmates are plotting against you. I was in the Korean War, and in my case, the enemy was my own shipmates. My upbringing from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, saved my life. I wasn’t afraid of these bullies, and I was a little fellow and still am, but I had put on some weight. I knew how to box, and I always had my knife with me, and the main thing was that I was smarter than any of those cocksuckers, and they knew I thought so. I spent five years with these lowlife motherfuckers, but I prevailed, and when my time was up, I got away from those pieces of shit. I was lucky that I didn’t get tossed overboard.

I sailed on aircraft carriers and LSSLs, which were small landing ships and only had twenty men to sail it. I was safe on the carriers because there were other black sailors aboard, but on the small ships, I was the only black. I was the communication officer even though I was only a third-class petty officer radioman. I guess they didn’t throw me overboard because they needed me to get us back to port. I joined the U.S. Navy in June of 1948. President Truman had desegregated the services in 1947, and the top commanders didn’t want any bullshit, but it took awhile to calm down the white shit-eating crew. I was the third black radioman to graduate from the radio school in Norfolk, Virginia. I was part of a twenty-men crew that ferried these small landing ships to Japan. Before I could get away from these bastards, I lost my third-class stripe, and they court-martialed me at a captain’s mast. Reason, sleeping on guard duty. It was a frame-up, but I was young, and they promised me at captain’s mast that I would only receive loss of liberty, but the drunkard LTJG we had as captain took my stripe. We were tied up in the port of San Diego at the time, and I could have made them give me a lawyer from the base, but I didn’t know any better, so I accepted it. I only had nine more months to go before I was discharged, so I just wanted to get away from these sorry-ass white people. I had never met white people of this sort before. I was from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and we were like a family of human beings.

Chapter 3

I will talk more about my stay in the navy later on in the book. I think I was about seven years old when I made my first trip across the Prospect Bridge. Every place that I went to were in Prospect. I went to school, church, my friend’s house, the playgrounds, etc. There was a forest on the end of my street that changed into paths, which connected to small, little towns three to five miles away. When I became older, I would sneak out at night and visit girlfriends that I knew in these little towns. I will speak more on this subject later on in the book. I was a little fellow but very alert and sharp as a tack mentally. Each morning was a new day for me, and I couldn’t wait to get started. In the beginning, I became the leader; the kids would come looking for me when the day began. I made the plans for what we would do that day—build a cardboard house, find a bunch of rags and make a ball, or use tin cans we used for basketballs, and that was not all we did with the cans, we passed them off to each other like the Globetrotters did when they came to town to play a game. I make that comparison now in my life, at seventy-six years old; I can’t wait to get started each day.

This group of shacks was called home, if you can imagine how houses looked in the early twentieth century and the nineteenth century. Our house was one of these shacks. I was born in a four-bedroom house, but I think someone bought the house, so we had to move in to these shacks. We did