Belva Davis: Interview #1

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: Let's start by asking you about your life now, and we'll go back later, what it is your assignment is and where you are working, because this is oral history. People will not know any of that background. Let's start there.

Davis: I have the title of urban affairs reporter or specialist. I wish I knew what it really meant. I can only give you just a little background on how I got the title. When I first went to work at Channel 4 [KRON-TV], I was working at Channel 9, at the time they discontinued the news, and I thought, "This is it. I'm going to get out of broadcasting. It's all over with for me." The one place I thought I'd never get a call from to go to work was Channel 4. I was president of the broadcasters union, and just preceding this, we had had one of the longest and most bitter performers union strikes in the history of the city.

Biagi: Is that AFTRA [American Federation of Television and Radio Artists]?

Davis: Yes. I was the president, and I had been walking up and down picketing outside of the station. So I thought, "They're certainly never going to give me a job." But that was the very first phone call asking if I wanted to come work for Channel 4.

Biagi: What year was that?

Davis: That was in 1981. So I said, yes, I did, but I didn't want to be a news anchor anymore. I just thought it was too stressful. I have this blood pressure problem. I wanted to keep reporting, but I didn't want to do that anymore. So they said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I like reporting on the city and city government, and I love politics. I'm one of those people who find planning committee hearings fun." [Laughter.] "I feel the most important job we do is keeping people informed about what government is doing and what government does and how government action impacts our lives. The news director, Mike Ferring, said, "What do you want to call that?" I said, "I don't know what to call it. All of the things have to do with urban issues one way or the other." "What about urban affairs? Okay, that's what we'll call you." [Laughter.] So that's how the title came about.

Later, I was renamed the city hall reporter, and for a few years, in addition to my office at KRON, I had an office in city hall, and I reported to work there every day and reported on San Francisco government until something else struck my fancy.

Then I got a news director that didn't like San Francisco, so I continued to be responsible for San Francisco city government and was the resource on stories to do with government, but I wasn't given the time to go out and really sit in and spend two or three hours listening to people debate whether they should close off some one-way streets or not.

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Biagi: Since you're choosing your own stories in many cases, what do you think it is in your background that makes that story important to you as opposed to all the other stories that day or that week in San Francisco?

Davis: Early in my career, I used to try to pretend that I'm just like everybody else and I approach a story just like everybody else, and I'm this unbiased blank sheet of paper that came to this job with no history, no background, and I'm going to approach it like every college-educated white guy that's got a journalism degree. Not so. [Laughter.] Not so.

I come from a very poor background where I lived in the housing projects as a child, where my first years in California were spent with my entire family of eleven people who shared two rooms together, where the biggest deal that happened to us was that I graduated high school. So my background is totally different from my colleagues. And because I was the first black female reporter, I wanted to be one of the guys when I started in the business. I didn't want to stand out. I wanted my work to measure up to be as good, if not better, than theirs. Therefore, I wasn't crying out for some special privilege or special look because I was this disadvantaged kid. I'm sure I'm just coming to terms with that, of denial, probably, when I first started to work. But later on, I realized that one of the reasons we need diversity of media is because there are a lot of people out there that share my background, and I don't put it in front of my story, but I shouldn't try to erase it from the background of the story and how I look at things.

I guess when I look at a story like that, I'm looking at people who are powerless to get their message across to decision-makers or even voters who can make a decision about whether they're helped and how. I think that is the wonderment of my good luck in life, is that I can be an instrument to do that.

Biagi: Let's start with your background and go back to the very beginning, the date you were born, the precise date.

Davis: Only this year am I dealing with the date I was born, and I've got to tell you, it's funny, because I can remember the comedies like "Lucy" and the silly things of women in the bygone era before the fifties, you know, about women and their age and how women always lied about their age. Well, to a point, I never did. Then to a point, I decided, "If you want to keep working, you'd better start going soft on this age stuff."

Biagi: How many years did you lose?

Davis: Actually, never more than one. Isn't that stupid? I just thought later that's why I'd finally start 'fessing up. It was so stupid! Why didn't I take five years off or ten years off or something like that? It was just a one-year difference. My colleagues don't like it when I say this, but doing this work is like an addiction, because it does give you so many unexpected highs and charges and really a sense of being at the center of what's important, that the idea that you're not going to be there and you're not going to know all that stuff you used to know gets a little frightening.

So I decided that when it was getting the time that I should leave the business, I would talk about it as much as possible. [Laughter.] If I said it enough, I'd believe it, you know. "You're not going to be doing this next year." I started doing funny little things like I don't always put my press card in the window and park illegally as much as I used to. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Slow withdrawal. [Laughter.]

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Biagi: And popcorn was how much?

Davis: I don't know. I just remember on Saturdays it cost a dime, and I know that in the summertime you could go for milktops on Wednesdays. You saved up. Everybody was encouraged to drink as much milk as possible, so when you got milk out of the bottle, you saved the tops. You just took them to the theater and you got in on Wednesday matinee for milktops.

Biagi: What a deal! That's pretty good.

Davis: I was really great at saving milktops.

Biagi: Junior high was at Lincoln?

Davis: No, I went to Hoover Junior High. Now I truly was living sometimes with my parents and sometimes with my aunt, but I stayed at Hoover. Even when I lived with my aunt in Berkeley, I took the bus into Oakland.

Biagi: Where were your parents living?

Davis: My parents were living still on Poplar Street in the housing project, and that was when the divorce came.

Biagi: That was when you were roughly how old? What grade were you in, do you remember?

Davis: That must have been when I was going into the seventh grade, I guess. I either was just ending the sixth grade or going into the seventh grade.

Biagi: But you still stayed at the same school?

Davis: Yes. Once I enrolled there, I made a friend who's still my best friend.

Biagi: Who is that?

Davis: A woman named Rosemary Prince. Her name is Rosemary Towns now. I'll never forget, the first day of school we both wore glasses. [Laughter.] That was our commonality. We were both scared to death and both loners, and we somehow just migrated. She was an only child living with her mom, and we didn't live very far apart. We just migrated together and we've been friends ever since.

Biagi: Are you nearsighted or farsighted?

Davis: Right now I'm both! [Laughter.]

Biagi: Well, we're talking about early, thirteen or so.

Davis: I've never known how to translate that.

Biagi: Did you have thick glasses or thin glasses?

Davis: Thick glasses.

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Biagi: Was she from the South?

Davis: From Texas. She spent a lot of time with the whole group of us.

Biagi: How many kids?

Davis: She later married a man who had a daughter, so she had a stepdaughter. Then there was a woman who lived downstairs from Rosemary who was about our age, so that one. Then there were two other friends who came along later, who joined this group, who we're still friends with, Rosie and her sister, who didn't live that far away. So it was just a whole group.

Biagi: All girls?

Davis: All girls that she sort of would look out for us, take us places, try to arbitrate our fights with one another, and things of that sort.

Biagi: What kind of places did she take you to?

Davis: Sometimes to the movies if we were going to get out after dark, sometimes to concerts that we wanted to go to. I remember one big excursion, once we went to Santa Cruz. That was a big excursion.

Biagi: On the train?

Davis: We went in a car, in two cars. We went to Santa Cruz for the day. It was a lot of planning.

Biagi: Did you go to Playland?

Davis: Yes, because we wanted to go to the beach. I think Rosemary's stepfather worked for the railroad. My mother worked for the railroad. So we had train passes, which is just amazing to me. We had these train passes, but we never went anywhere except to Los Angeles. We could travel anyplace free. So our big deal was—I called her Miss Anna, my name for her—would arrange for us in the summertime to go down to Los Angeles to visit her cousin, so we would get on the train and take overnight trips to Los Angeles. That was our big summer vacation, to spend a week or two with her cousin.

Biagi: Would you say you spent more time with her than you did at home?

Davis: Oh, yes, as I began to grow up. I spent lots of time at her place.

Biagi: Where did you go to high school?

Davis: Berkeley High.

Biagi: What year did you start there?

Davis: I graduated in 1951.

Biagi: '47, you started?

Davis: '48.

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Davis: Well, yes. I could have graduated a half semester before I did, but I wanted to stay in school. I went to summer school every summer. It was something to do. I went to Tech, because Berkeley didn't have summer school. All the Berkeley students went to Oakland Tech to summer school, so every summer I went to summer school. I had a double major. I wanted to go to college, but I was never sure if I'd be able to go, so I thought I'd better learn to really type just in case. Good thing I did, because by the time I was graduated, it was not possible for me to go.

Biagi: Did you have a business major and what else?

Davis: And college prep.

Biagi: So that was overall college preparation, which meant algebra, geometry?

Davis: Yes. I got accepted at San Francisco State. There was no money to go.

Biagi: Had your mother remarried by this time?

Davis: Yes, she had remarried and probably divorced by now.

Biagi: Again? She remarried and divorced. Did this stepfather have a part in your life at all?

Davis: Not much at all. Those are very, very turbulent years. Very, very turbulent years.

Biagi: Did you live with your mother at this time mostly?

Davis: I think during the last part of junior high years I lived with my mother a little bit, because I know two big huge tragedies of life were then. My mother lived in a studio apartment with my stepfather. Where my brother lived, occasionally we ended up there together. One of the things that happened is that one day I remember coming home and trying to light the stove, which is what heated the apartment, and I had the burner on, on the top, and I was trying to light the oven, and I opened the oven to see if it was lit, and the pilot hadn't caught, so the stove blew up. My face got singed and my hair got burned. That was pretty bad. I ended up with no real scars, no lasting scars.

Biagi: What about the apartment?

Davis: Actually, it just blew up; it didn't catch on fire. By now I couldn't see anyway, so I don't know.

Biagi: But it didn't do a lot of damage, as you remember?

Davis: No. It did damage to the kitchen area. I can't recall.

Biagi: Then the other tragedy? You said there were two.

Davis: My brother and I are not close at all, never have been. I think that was the beginning of the total deterioration of our relationship. My brother was angry at me and threw a skillet of hot grease at me, burned my arm pretty bad.

Biagi: How old were you?

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Davis: No, because many of us who came from West Oakland knew about Berkeley's reputation and what a great school it was in terms of preparing you for admission to the University of California, so everybody cheated and lied about living in Berkeley.

Biagi: They all went to Berkeley High?

Davis: Many of them did who were in this group. Five of them lived in Oakland and went to school in Berkeley.

Biagi: So at home it was turbulent, but at school you had this circle of friends at that time?

Davis: Yes. I think this must have come right at the end of my schooling, because I spent the first two years at Berkeley pretty much by myself, and I would spend my weekends with Rosemary.

Biagi: And summers?

Davis: I went to summer school and I worked. I got a job when I was fourteen.

Biagi: Your first job?

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: Which was?

Davis: Working at the Berkeley Five & Dime. I worked there till I graduated from high school.

Biagi: Did you work after school?

Davis: Yes, worked after school and summers. I went to summer school. I kept very busy.

Biagi: And the money you got there, did you have to contribute that to the home?

Davis: Some of it, yes, I did, and some of it I kept to buy my school clothes and books.

Biagi: Thinking about it, when your mother moved in with your aunt [Pearline Lindsey] and you were there, you were working at the Five & Dime, your aunt worked off and on, but you had your mother's salary.

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: So that helped.

Davis: But by then my uncle [Ezra Lindsey] was disabled because of the back injury. He was not working. So they got some sort of disability. They bought a house, which was a big deal. So my aunt worked sometimes. My mother worked all the time. I contributed some of what I earned. Basically it [the money] was used to not be a further burden.

Biagi: Did you have any household responsibilities?

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Biagi: This has not factored into the discussion before. Who was this fellow that you got married to?

Davis: The next door neighbor.

Biagi: His name was?

Davis: Frank. That's where the Davis comes from.

Biagi: I know how you met him, because he was next door. What was his claim to fame at that point?

Davis: He's a little bit older than me. I think he had graduated from San Francisco State and he was in the military. He joined the air force after graduating from college, so he had a job. He was in the military.

Biagi: He would be about twenty or twenty-one, twenty-two?

Davis: About twenty-two. I think he had graduated. He must have, because he was way ahead of me in school. He was out of Berkeley High when I started, so that meant he would have been out of college. He'd gone away to military. I was sort of out of my friends' lives by then, because you know how exciting it is your first year of college. I really felt like a third shoe. I didn't have any other friend that wasn't going to college.

I got a job, though. If I can remember where I was working, it would be very good. I should remember this. I remember that summer trying to get a job, or maybe it was in the fall. Whatever it was, that was a terrible, terrible time, because it was very difficult for black people to get clerical jobs, and all of the companies had routines. For the phone company, the routine was you always got this great interview and everybody was always very nice, but they'd always tell you that you were overqualified. "You're wonderful, but you're overqualified." Here you have this little kid right out of high school who had only worked at a dime store, and she's overqualified for work at the phone company. So that didn't work. The other big place to get a job was at Metropolitan Life, and they had just the opposite. You had to get more experience. And those were the two places that you could go to apply for work.

So I think what I did is I took the government clerical test and got a job as a GS-2, at the bottom.

Biagi: A typist.

Davis: I must have been to pass the test. So that's what I did.

Biagi: Where did you work?

Davis: I think that's how I got the job at the Naval Supply Center, where my dad had worked.

Biagi: He was, by that time, gone, and he was a carpenter.

Davis: Right.

Biagi: Did you get work just before you got married?

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Davis: Then my mother and I moved out and took an apartment together.

Biagi: In Berkeley?

Davis: Yes. What I'm trying to recall, by now I had a brother and sister by her other marriage.

Biagi: She had remarried.

Davis: The same one that I told you about when I was getting all mixed up. The quick marriage. They were married long enough to have two children that are eleven months apart.

Biagi: Seventeen or eighteen years younger than you.

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: Their names are?

Davis: Gregory and Althea.

Biagi: So it's Gregory, Althea, you, and her new husband?

Davis: No, he's gone now. He was very short-lived. The two children and that was it. That was it, and he was gone.

Biagi: And in the apartment.

Davis: Yes, but that didn't last that long, because I soon left.

Biagi: Your husband had left to go to Washington, D.C.

Davis: What I'm trying to remember is where did we stay together. I don't know. I cannot remember. He was only home on leave for a few days, and I don't know.

Biagi: Did you have a honeymoon?

Davis: That's what I mean. Where? That's what I'm trying to remember. I'll remember soon, I'm sure. I think that's why we got married on New Year's Day, because I think he had so many days off for Christmas and New Year's, and I think he may have left two days later.

Biagi: So he went to Washington, D.C., and then you followed him?

Davis: He went someplace else, Texas, I think, and then by the time he got settled at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, that's when I joined him.

Biagi: That would have been, say, June of '52?

Davis: Yes, I think it was. It could have been a little bit later. It was about six months.

Biagi: And you had never been further than Los Angeles.

Davis: That's right.

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Davis: Clerk.

Biagi: Clerk, as a GS-2, again a government job?

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: With what agency?

Davis: It was a regulatory agency that had to do with wage regulations. I want to say wage stabilization. It was something like that, but I know John L. Lewis [was involved], and regulating what people could charge and couldn't charge.

Biagi: Did you stay there a long time?

Davis: I stayed at least a year, because my son was born in June of '53, so I stayed there till he was born.

Biagi: That's what date?

Davis: June 15, 1953.

Biagi: And his name?

Davis: Steven Eugene. I gave back the Eugene. [Laughter.]

Biagi: His last name is Davis.

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: You say you stayed till he was born. Did you go somewhere else?

Davis: When he was born is when I discovered I had hypertension. My mother had come out, because I was kept in the hospital for quite a while after he was born. I don't remember going back to work. I don't know. The next thing I remember clearly is that Frank was transferred to Hawaii.

Biagi: In late '53?

Davis: As best I recall, by the time I got to Hawaii, Steven was walking. That wouldn't be that much longer, would it? Kids walk at a few months. I don't remember very much about that. I can't really tell you.

Biagi: A year or two later. So you went to Hawaii with Frank. Did you go to work in Hawaii?

Davis: No, I never could get a job. It was almost impossible for offshore people to get jobs in Hawaii. You just couldn't get a job there. I got a job for a quick minute in a five and dime. That didn't last long.

Biagi: You had that experience.

Davis: Yes. It didn't last very long. I didn't work at all.

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Biagi: So he was commuting.

Davis: Yes. I had a job at Naval Supply Center again. Actually, I was working at Treasure Island, back to the navy. It was a relatively calm period in my life. I was in a unit called forms and publications.

Biagi: Typing?

Davis: No, it was a little more interesting. I was handling secret documents, the manuals for using weapons, all the weapons guides, new systems, and I had a top secret government clearance, issued all of the manuals to everybody out in the Pacific. That was what I did. It was a very small, little group of us that worked because of the sensitivity of it.

Biagi: Had you gone back to a government employment office to find that job?

Davis: I must have. I must have taken another test, because by now I was a little higher up on the GS level. So then I did that. Then that unit was phased out of Treasure Island and transferred because of the Supply Center—I could never get away from Naval Supply Center—and transferred to Naval Supply Center, and I hated it, because I loved working on Treasure Island. It was such a wonderful place. I could drive over near the waterfront and have my lunch, watch the Bay, and there were very few people there. It was a very nice experience.

Biagi: Did your family take care of your kids?

Davis: I had just my son. What did I do? I don't think so. I always had hired babysitters.

Biagi: Then when your daughter was born, did you stop working?

Davis: When my daughter was born, my marriage really had fallen apart before she was born. As many couples, you get pregnant when you're having real troubles in a marriage, you know. When she was born, I had already made very elaborate plans to leave, extremely elaborate plans to leave.

Biagi: Such as? What were they?

Davis: I had just decided what I was going to do. My husband did not want a divorce. By then I was just beginning to grow up.

Biagi: By now, close to thirty.

Davis: Yes. I had already started to write somewhat, and my very first writing job had been—this has always been the irony—working for then what was the first weekly black magazine in the country, Jet magazine. That was my very first job. It really wasn't writing as much as it was sending information. A stringer, that's what I was. I was the Northern California stringer for Jet magazine.

Biagi: How did you find that job?

Davis: Good question. What was I doing that got me that position? How did that work out? I think that was the first paid position I had.

Biagi: In Berkeley?

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This is out of sequence, but at that paper I met a guy named Darryl Lewis, who had been the AP [Associated Press] bureau chief in the Far East for many years. Really a good writer, ran out of places to work, and ended up running this little black weekly newspaper. The problem was, he wasn't black. [Laughter.] I became his face. So he worked very closely with me, shaping what writing skills I acquired at that time.

Biagi: He couldn't go out and report on these things necessarily.

Davis: He could, but by now we're getting close to the sixties, and the civil rights movement started really in the fifties. There's black consciousness that's just ebbing and flowing, so we just found that I got better stuff than he did. I just didn't know how to write it, so I'd go out and do it and he'd help me write it.

Biagi: Where were the offices?

Davis: On Turk Street in the Fillmore [District].

Biagi: Was it a very big place?

Davis: No, a small, little office. Darryl was the one full-time person outside of an advertising sales person and the publisher, and I was the part-time person.

Biagi: It was a weekly?

Davis: Yes.

Biagi: How large a paper was it when it came out?

Davis: Maybe ten or fifteen pages.

Biagi: They went out and they sold the ads?

Davis: Actually, later on, by the time I quit my job with the navy and decided to concentrate and try to get into journalism, I did everything. I did more than social news. I covered whatever news there was for the paper. I took the ads, I picked up the ads from Safeway store, I took the copy to the printers, and sometimes I even picked the papers up after they were printed. [Laughter.]

Biagi: You were the distribution department, too.

Davis: Yes. All that the publisher didn't do, I did.

Biagi: Did you ever sell ads?

Davis: No, I never had any skill at selling anything.

Biagi: Obviously this was hot type, you were working with a printer.

Davis: You bet. I can go back in time now and say, "How did I get to this point?" I'm still working at the navy and I started doing this column. That somehow got me in touch with a man who was the editor of Jet magazine. He needed this help, but didn't want to pay very much.

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Davis: I was still living in East Oakland.

Biagi: Where was your former husband?

Davis: He was still working at Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard.

Biagi: And you were still living with him?

Davis: Yes, the beginning of all of this. As I began to get more and more into this whole business of journalism and so forth, we just grew further and further apart. But I have to admit that I changed an awful lot, because we had this kind of relationship where he didn't think when we went out to dances, I should ever dance with anybody. He didn't like seeing women dance in public. Really just a creep. I don't like conflict in my private life. So I just decided I was going to move.

So months in advance, I had arranged to get my retirement from the government, I purchased a car, arranged for movers. He went to work one day, the moving van came and moved my stuff out of there, and I picked up my kids, got in the car, left a note, and said, "Goodbye."

Biagi: You moved where?

Davis: Actually, I knew that I'd have a really tough time of it, so we just took to driving California. I did that for about two months.

Biagi: Is that right? With the kids?

Davis: Yes, in the back of this huge Dodge. The little baby was like two months old, and my son was just a little kid. We drove. We stayed in the Monterey-Carmel area and drove into the Central Valley, stayed outside of Bakersfield, and finally moved down to L.A. He had detectives looking for us. I didn't want to go through a big bad scene, and I thought, "Well, after I go away for a while, things will cool down. He will be much easier to deal with." That was my logic.

Biagi: So you weren't really looking for work on that trip.

Davis: Oh, no.

Biagi: You were trying to stay away.

Davis: I was trying to stay away.

Biagi: Did you stay with friends?

Davis: No, no.

Biagi: Just drove.

Davis: Just us, the three of us. Our biggest thing was to keep Darolyn from falling out of her crib. [Laughter.]

Biagi: I suspect your accommodations were modest.

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I used to be in terror that the movers would call to check on some small detail or that that day he'd come back home while the truck was there. Oh, god, I had so many visions of absolute tragedy, that I don't know how I pulled it off.

Biagi: When you came back, you went to the newspaper.

Davis: When we came back, at first I didn't do anything. I just tried to be quiet and not be seen till we got an apartment and got settled in.

Biagi: Was it in Oakland?

Davis: No, we moved to Berkeley. I wanted to be near my mother, but not with my mother. After that is when I went to work for the paper full time.

Biagi: At the huge salary of?

Davis: Oh, God, I think it was like forty bucks a week or something.

Biagi: Which is not enough to live on, still.

Davis: No, so I got that, I got a little bit of money from Jet magazine, and I worked temp. Then I eventually added on doing what's called the social part of the news on radio.

Biagi: How did that come about?

Davis: The original KSAN radio station was a black station, and the offices were on Market Street. At that time this town had five newspapers. It had the News, the Call, the Bulletin, the Examiner, and the Chronicle. There were lots of newspapers. So news-gathering consisted of knowing when the newspapers were going to be out. [Laughter.]

Biagi: You'd go and get the newspapers. [Laughter.]

Davis: Picking up the papers, running to do clippings, gluing them or stapling them to a piece of paper, and running into the microphone and reading the first two paragraphs or whatever it was. Sometimes every now and then you'd get a rewrite. I would go to the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] meetings, rallies, church gatherings, and all that stuff. Then I would report and read what I had written, basically various items that were going to be in a column. It all became the column. So I did that.

Biagi: How did you get that job?

Davis: Just by approaching them. I didn't know anything about broadcasting at all.

Biagi: Were they in San Francisco?

Davis: Yes. I hung around the station, had everybody tell me fifteen times how I really didn't want to do this, but finally I pestered and pestered enough, a few guys—some are still around, John Hardy, in particular, who was really quite good, he knew the business and he had the educational background, etc.,—just gave me some tips of going home, reading before a mirror, watching my enunciation, tape recording what I said, looking at my expression and remember that even on radio, though nobody could see me, carry through my facial expressions because it helped

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Biagi: You talk about the golden age of radio in this city, that was really a time, a wonderful radio time.

Davis: A great time. When I finally got my show on the air, my Saturday broadcast was a live broadcast, and we brought jazz artists like Horace Silver in, who played the piano on the show. We'd have an audience in. It was so hokey, it was like you dream it up and then you do it.

On my show, one of the main sponsors was Foster Farms Chicken and Del Monte Cling Peaches, so all of our lunches, I would get the chicken from Foster Farms, I would fry the chicken. This became an al fresco lunch with Coke or Pepsi that we'd get free from the sponsors, and Wonder Bread would do the bread. This was the lunch we'd serve people. You could come down and sit. Remember this was exciting stuff! You could sit in the radio station and watch us eat chicken and cling peaches and Wonder bread and drink Coke. [Laughter.]

I don't know what else we'd do. I'd spin records, and we'd always have guests coming in, whoever was in town. By now I was branching out. Whoever was at Enrico's, at the Hungry I, wherever people were appearing, the Jazz Workshop, they'd be invited to be the Saturday guest. I'd interview them and sometimes they'd perform. I mean, that was how I met Bill Cosby, when he was at the Hungry I, when he was just starting out.

Biagi: Let me back up a little bit now. You're at KDIA handling traffic. Are you badgering everybody to get on the air? What was happening?

Davis: I was unrelenting! Because I was handling traffic, I really was blackmailing the salesmen, because I was the one who placed their spots on the air. I was the one who gave them avails [available time periods] for spots. I determined whose spots got the best placement. [Laughter.] I did the logs. I did the continuity. I did it all. I was a one-person operation. Even before Bill and I were married, he'd have to come in for the weekend logs or holiday logs. The kids came, and we all did the logs. Well, I say the kids. Deedee was too little to do anything. She went to sleep. That would keep Steve busy.

So anyway, I did that until finally the new salesmen, who could never get good times, finally sold me and a show to a company called Beauty Pleat. They became my sponsors. They made drapes on a wire thing that went like this so they always hung right. They were sort of wavy like that.

Biagi: So they weren't pleated at the top.

Davis: No. A woman owned the company. We remained friends for many years after that program. She moved.

Biagi: What was her name?

Davis: I can't remember her name. She moved to Contra Costa County, finally. At the beginning of all this, her shop was on Telegraph Avenue. You think about women. I never thought of the gender connection or anything like that until later in life, and I realized that it was a woman-owned business that gave me my start, and I don't think we were smart enough, or our consciousness was raised enough, to even think about it in those terms, but that's what happened.

So this poor guy, Bill Morrison, who had come to work there, because KDIA was a black radio station, but we always had at least one white salesperson besides the sales manager and the

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Davis: Yes.

Biagi: It had been on since '62, maybe?

Davis: Yes. I wasn't there very long before I was on the air. It was a matter of months.

Biagi: You were holding everybody hostage. [Laughter.]

Davis: It was just a matter of months before I was on the air.

Biagi: "Get this woman out of traffic."

Davis: No, no, no, I still had to do traffic.

Biagi: You did traffic during the week, and then Saturday. So you still had that job.

Davis: I was still doing that, and I was still doing the column. I never gave it up.

Biagi: For the newspaper.

Davis: I didn't quit writing that column until I went to work for KPIX in 1966. The winter, December of '66, I quit.

Biagi: At KDIA, what year did you start the daily program?

Davis: That I have not been able to reconstruct. I don't know. I've thought about it for other occasions, and I don't know when it went from one to the other. I think there must not have been much of a gap, because there's no period where I could see fighting to get on every day once I was on; it just sort of like flowed one into the other. My memory of it is of working six days a week on the air.

Actually, that's not true. What I did was an hour during the week and two hours on Saturday. I got that mixed up. I had one hour every day and then two hours on Saturday.

Biagi: And you still did traffic?

Davis: I still did traffic.

Biagi: You didn't work on Saturdays other than the radio show?

Davis: Excepting to finish up all the work I hadn't done the rest of the week. [Laughter.] Actually, without traffic and the continuity books, you can't stay on the air. You don't know what you're doing. So I had to finish, and I had to have it ready for Monday to start to sign on.

Biagi: Did you have a handle?

Davis: Actually, no. I was very straight, very straight. Bill's a big jazz fan, so I played a lot of jazz. I love introducing new recordings. At that point you could play anything you wanted to play. It didn't make any difference.

Biagi: Did you voice-over the ads, too?

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people. We put these things on. I wrote my own rules for it, so it was a beauty contest, but it had all these funny titles, like Miss Refreshing Smile, which was for the friendliest, kindest, nicest girl. We had a talent winner; that was just for talent. There must have been like five different kinds of scholarships, and so there was something for everybody.

The big deal was that women who thought they wanted to be in film or TV, our winners from here would end up going to L.A. to compete. This was my first exposure to Hollywood, because part of the winnings was to get the girls a screen test, and get them into studios on tour, introduce them to people who were film stars, all of that.

When I think about this, I think, God, if a psychiatrist gets hold of this, "This woman is really nuts." [Laughter.]

Biagi: Why would they think that?

Davis: Because it was true. [Laughter.] Anyway, getting back to the Sun Reporter, I'm women's editor.

Biagi: Where is Miss Bronze in this?

Davis: I'm doing that all the time, all the while I was at KDIA.

Biagi: Was it just one contest here?

Davis: Oh, no. It took months, because you're holding them all over the place and they're all functions that attracted anywhere from five-hundred to a thousand people.

Biagi: And you're getting paid by—

Davis: I wasn't getting paid. [Laughter.]

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Biagi: So here we are, you're doing all this work.

Davis: Here we are. We're running these contests. Now when I finally get to be women's editor at the Sun Reporter, a lot of these women want to be models. So I think, "Aha!" I approached stores like Macy's, the City of Paris. I can't remember the major stores downtown. I'd say, "We're doing fashion spreads in this magazine and we reach this many people."

Biagi: Which magazine was this?

Davis: In this weekly newspaper. "We're going to this audience, and this is the median income of these people and they're shopping in your stores. I'd really love to do fashion spreads on what you have and feature stories and other things about your company, but I can't do it unless you're going to use women of color in your ads as models for you." It actually worked. Finally, they hired a few black women. So the women from Miss Bronze pageant who wanted to be models, I sent them on to interview for these positions.

Biagi: They would be in the ads in the publication?

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but we got by okay. Actually, on the surface it looked like we were leading a fabulous life. [Laughter.] It really did.

Biagi: Going to the hotels with the kids, traveling.

Davis: Yes. Every now and then I'd get fifteen dollars from Jet, or maybe even forty or fifty if it was a really big story. I sold a couple of things to little teeny publications. Never a lot of money. It was just a year of growth.

Biagi: Were you writing?

Davis: I was writing all the time, all the time. Constantly writing something. Not anything great. I mean, not real writing. This is like reporting of events writing. It actually couldn't have been that bad, because along with this Miss Bronze thing, we also published a catalog, a book with it, so we had these books that we were constantly putting out also.

Biagi: The pictures of the models?

Davis: The pictures of the girls and the histories of the girls and ads from the sponsors and all that. So we did that. Bill took the pictures, and my cousin then owned a charm school, and the girls, on Saturdays, learned how to walk, how to sit, how to get in and out of a car, basic things that many kids from poor neighborhoods don't learn, how to set a table, how to use silverware, how to order in a restaurant. And they also had to do community service. They had to do Candy Striper. They had to do some kind of volunteer work. I mean, what kind of beauty contest is this, you say, but they had to do community service, they had to go through all this charm school training, and all of this business to be in this. So it wasn't like putting on a bathing suit and getting into this thing. Where we dreamed all this up from, I don't know. We just decided this was a way to improve these young women. Fact is, last night two of them came up at this dinner where I was being honored, after all these years. They still have reunions, the Bronze girls do, and they're all fifty years old. They're not that old, but certainly many of them now are forty. So they still have their little reunions, they still see one another. It was really a bonding relationship for them.

So we were doing all of those things, so it seemed like a very exciting time, even though we were starving to death, practically. The next year I landed the job on TV.

Biagi: You say "landed." Is it like you walked in the door? No?

Davis: I told you how much I read. I was reading something in one newspaper one day, an interview with a woman named Nancy Reynolds, who was the anchor, along with John Westin, at Channel 5 KPIX. I had been reading all these things about the wave of the future in communications, television, and if you were making any long-term plans, this is where you needed to go, because radio was then going through these horrible throes of trying to decide what it was, and newspapers were crunching down. News and the Call and the Bulletin were merging, newspapers were going out of business. So the whole communications business was just going through an evolution, and so I'd read all these things about the future and decided my future, then, should be in TV.

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Biagi: What do you mean by pressure?

Davis: From the NAACP and other organizations in general, speaking out on the fact that the media had to diversify, it had to integrate, it had to have some diversity to it. But nothing was happening.

The place where they were writing to management, in touch with management most, was at KGO. I've got to remember the guy's name, because he's still around, the manager then. It's a famous name in broadcasting. He was the manager at KGO. I finally got an appointment after weeks of pressure to see him, and he looked at my material and I got this little curt interview, and at the end of it, his comment to me was, "Well, we're not thinking of hiring any Negresses right now, but if we ever do, we will certainly consider you." And I remember going home thinking, "He doesn't know that I'm not a tigress or any of those other animals, and he doesn't know that he's insulted me. So what do I do about this?" I just decided that anyone who was that insensitive, anyway, no matter what anybody did, I wasn't going to win that battle.

So I set my goals then on going to KPIX, and then my friends said, "They've got the only black in TV in the area. Why would you go there?" I said, "Because that happened and I know there's going to be this job." So I did, and that's why after I saw that thing about Nancy, I called the next day to say if she decided to leave, I was really interested in being considered. They didn't know what the hell I was talking about. Of course, they gave me the usual thing, "Why don't you write us a letter and fill out these papers."

So I had a little notebook, and I said, "Better yet, can you just let me come in and show you my material?" Nancy Reynolds is mad as hell at me, because I don't think she'd been offered a job. This was the day after the election. Before the end of November, they had offered her the press secretary's job, and we became friendly after that. I apologized. I wrote her a letter of apology for doing that.

Once they knew she was going, then they opened the job up, and I thought, "God, I'm never going to get this job." But I do remember getting a call from the guy who was the program manager, saying to me that he had sixty-seven applicants for that job, but I could come in and do a stand-up for them so they could look and see how I looked on film. So I show up at KPIX and I don't even know what a stand-up is. [Laughter.]

Biagi: You didn't go to the library again, did you?

Davis: I didn't, and I didn't know what it was, so I went up to this cameraman named Steven Pastzy and I said, "I have to do a thing called a stand-up." He was just a wonderful Hungarian character, and he had this great accent. "Don't worry, baybee, I take care of you. Don't worry, baybee, I do it all." [Laughter.] So Steven took me on and he told me, "You write something on the paper, you remember it, and I take care of the rest." And that's what we did. I did the stand-up.

Of course, that wasn't the end of it. Another few days go by, and then they said, "Come in. We want you to go in the studio. We want to see how you look on the set." They brought me in and I had different people come in and do role model, where I had to interview and talk to them. Then finally Lou Simon, the station manager, came in and I met him.

Then I went back and had an anxious, anxious time waiting. Finally, I got a call from George Moynihan, who was the program manager, who's still in broadcasting somewhere.