The Great Depression; Interview with Fay Blake. Part 2; Interview with Melvin Belli. Part 1

INTERVIEWER:

...how he betrayed, you know, the kind of principles, or beliefs that he stood for as a Democrat? Are we ready? OK.

FAY BLAKE:

I felt anger at Roosevelt's failure to endorse Sinclair's campaign, because I felt that it was a betrayal of what Roosevelt had put forward as his, as the principles on which he was governing this country.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, great, one more time. And maybe \"a betrayal of the New Deal\"? Was that what it was?

FAY BLAKE:

Yeah, OK. When it became clear that Roosevelt was not going to endorse Sinclair's campaign, I felt anger at Roosevelt. I felt that he was betraying the principles of the New Deal, and that Sinclair's campaign would have been an occasion for him to further the ideas of the New Deal.

INTERVIEWER:

Good, OK. Great. Let's go back to the oranges.

FAY BLAKE:

INTERVIEWER:

Tell me the image of Californians, you know, picking oranges off trees, and then go, then make that leap to the fact that they were picking oranges like they were picking solutions, political solutions.

FAY BLAKE:

I felt that Californians were, never had to deal with the real problems that most human beings have to deal with. If they got hungry, they picked an orange off a tree, and if they needed, felt they needed a solution to a political or social or economic problem, they plucked that off a tree too, or out of the sky somewhere.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, great. Did you ever go the movies?

FAY BLAKE:

I went to the movies constantly. When I wasn't in the library, I was in the moviehouse, three times a week, usually.

INTERVIEWER:

What did you think about, what did the movies mean to you, what did you think about it?

FAY BLAKE:

The movies were an escape from the problems of everyday life. I believed utterly in the kinds of lives that were betrayed [sic - check this], that were portrayed in the movies-

INTERVIEWER:

OK, start again.

FAY BLAKE:

Yes. I believed utterly in the kinds of lives that were portrayed in the movies, at the same time as I didn't believe anything. I knew that secretaries weren't living in penthouses, and that girls working on assembly-lines were not dressing in Chanel dresses, but I wished they could, and I loved the movies.

INTERVIEWER:

What did you love about them, was it the sound, was it the images, what was it?

FAY BLAKE:

Well, I started before there was sound in the movies. I started going to the movies when they were silent. The images were entrancing...when I first started going to the movies, it was with my parents, who were immigrants, and who were learning English from the captions of the silent films, who would, somebody in the theater would read out the captions, and everybody else would follow and mouth each of the captions. So movies were a part of my life from when I could first remember anything. Then they became, when I was a young teenager, an adolescent, the movies became a glimpse into worlds that I had no other access to. Rich people were on the screen, and people from Africa were on the screen, and it meant lives that I was not much aware of. I began to be a great reader, I was reading constantly, and many of the movies were dramatizations of stories that I had read, so they came very close to home, too.

INTERVIEWER:

Did you ever, did you ever, in the fantasies or in the escape, did you ever want to be a part of that life? Did it ever, did it hold an attraction to you?

FAY BLAKE:

No, on the contrary, I knew, first of all, I never believed that I could live that kind of life, but I never really wanted to, either. I didn't, I didn't feel that the lives that were depicted there as glamorous and as rich and as fabulous, as they were made out to be, really were what I, how I wanted to spend my lifetime.

INTERVIEWER:

You talked about your parents being immigrants. Did, did, was, were movies also an experience of inculturation, to know kind of what the...

FAY BLAKE:

To my parents, the movies were an essential part of becoming more like Americans were supposed to be. We never were exactly sure what that meant, but, that they were important for the language, they were important for customs, the way you dress, the way you moved, when you said, \"Thank you\", when you sat down, when you stood up, what kind of relationships between classes were indicated, even though we knew they were all fake, and that they really had nothing to do with our real lives.

INTERVIEWER:

Great. So do you remember what kind of movies that came out that were kinda \"Golden Age\", or

FAY BLAKE:

Well, I, it's interesting, when I see movies from the 30s, even today, I find them an important artistic experience. They were very well done, and I find them, I begin, I look at them now as...

INTERVIEWER:

No, what do you remember of them then?

FAY BLAKE:

I remem--, in the 30s, some of the great films ever were appearing. To a young girl, a film could mean the difference between being a part of this country and being an alien outside of it.

INTERVIEWER:

Do you have any particular titles that you

FAY BLAKE:

I saw all the Charlie Chaplin films, and loved every one of them. I liked the Powell/Loy films. The Laurel and Hardy films were essential to my life at the time. Some of the dramatic films...I can't...

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Do you remember _Our Daily Bread_, _Dinner at Eight_, any of those?

FAY BLAKE:

All of them.

But they weren't the ones that I was really... It's interesting, that

the films of the 30s that were most, that were closest to the kind of life I knew-

INTERVIEWER:

OK, go from where you were at.

FAY BLAKE:

It's-

INTERVIEWER:

Wait, wait-

FAY BLAKE:

It's very strange that the films that I considered to be closest to the life I knew, I remember a British film, _Life on the Dole_, which showed unemployed workers, and I knew about that kind of life, those were less important to me than the ones with, [NOTE Interview gathered as part of The Great Depression; Episode 314-40] with Ginger Rogers sailing across the screen in a beautiful, fluffy, long gown...

INTERVIEWER:

OK, I'm gonna ask you to start that again, just by saying, the films that dealt kinda with, I don't wanna refer to British films, that dealt with the unemployed, unemployment, the Depression, were less important.

FAY BLAKE:

The films that, strangely, the films that dealt with the kind of life I knew, the films that dealt with unemployment, the films that dealt with hunger, with lack of sufficient means, were less important to me than the films that depicted

glamorous, rich, important people,

and whose lives I had no idea about.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, one more time, but refer to Ginger Rogers.

FAY BLAKE:

Oh.

INTERVIEWER:

Yeah, so...

FAY BLAKE:

The films that depicted life as I knew it, that showed unemployment or hunger or disability, were less important to me than films that depicted a life I had no idea about,

but when Ginger Rogers sailed across that screen in a beautiful, haute couture gown, that,

I drank that in, that was life to a young teenager.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, I think we're done.

FAY BLAKE:

That's it? Ah...

[End of Blake interview; beginning of Belli interview]

INTERVIEWER:

Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences working as a hobo?

MELVIN BELLI:

One of the most interesting things about how I got the job, 1933, right in the midst of the Depression, the dean, Kip McMurry, called me into his office, and he pronounced my name correctly. He said, \"Belli, I've got a job for you\". Well, that was something, to be called into the dean's office at Boalt Hall and told that he had a job, so I was very proud of being called in, particularly by the dean, and I said, \"What is it?\" And he says, \"It's being a bum\". Well, that took me back a little, but when he told me it was, I think, three, four hundred dollars a month, my spirits were lifted, because you weren't getting more than three or four hundred dollars a month for a retired lawyer, or a lawyer for even Old Holy Grail Insurance Company in those days. So, what it was, was to go out and ride the rails, report back to some of the alphabetical agencies, for Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Roosevelt, and say what the people in the United States were thinking of at that time, \"the people\" being the bums and the hobos. So that's what I did. I rode the rails for about three months instead of studying for my bar examination. I took my bar examination, I damn near flunked it because I hadn't studied for it, but I, in no uncertain terms, told the people that were in Washington, if they didn't know, and never got their clothes soiled by going out and riding the rails, that the people of America weren't thinking of a revolution, they weren't thinking of overthrowing the government, as bad as it was at that time, or is at the present time, or has been in the past. They were the most patriotic of all Americans, even though they didn't have a job, even though they had to \"put the town on the stem\", which means begging, and going and asking for a butt of yesterday's bread or a piece of old meat, or something like that, which we did. I went into the stores and got these scraps of food, we brought them back and then we put them in a big pot under the bridges, and I ate with all of the other bums.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you tell me, were you surprised by—

INTERVIEWER:

Were you surprised by what you saw? Did you have different expectations about life on the rails?

MELVIN BELLI:

A little bit. I'd seen the movies, of course, and some of them, they categorized pictures of hobos or of bums,

these were ordinary people, these were people that had nothing wrong with them, except that they couldn't work because there were no jobs out there, and they wanted to work.

As a matter of fact, I was put in jail for vagrancy, which was a crime in those days, and I remember the judge calling me up, and saying, \"I'm going to find you guilty of vagrancy,\" and I said, \"Vagrancy, what have I done?\" He says, \"You don't have any visible means of support,\" and I said, \"I want to work!\" I mean, I was playing out the role of the hobo, \"I want to go to work, but I can't get a job.\" He says, \"Well, you're a vagrant if you don't have any money, and I'm going to give you six months.\" So I said I wanted a jury trial, this was down in San Diego, they picked me up off the street as they came into town. I told the judge I wanted a jury trial, and he said to his clerk, \"Give Slim Bacigalupi here a jury trial. What's the first date we can give him?\" This was, oh, this was about right after the first of the year, and they said \"Oh, we got a date in December.\" Well, they were going to keep me in jail without bail because I had no money until December, so I finally pleaded guilty to vagrancy. Of course, I pleaded guilty to a crime that was wiped off the book because it was held to be unconstitutional, and there's no such thing as vagrancy, state ascribed. The fact that you don't have a job, you can't get a job, that there's no money, you can't be guilty of something as nebulous as that, and how we went for so many years with the crime of vagrancy on the books, now I know, a lot of people, bums, if you will, or hobos, were convicted of vagrancy, and thrown into jail. Well, I got, finally, when I pleaded guilty to vagrancy, the nonexistent crime, rather than wait until December to go to trial, I got some six month's probation, or suspended. I went back two years later and I got the largest award that had ever been given in San Diego, for a hobo who had lost his leg in the railroad yard. I didn't tell the judge at that time that I had a suspended sentence, but I told him after the case was over with, and he was utterly and completely amazed. You know, from that I went to another job, I had almost the same type of people, people without money, the poor, the under-class. I became the lawyer for the priest, Fr. George Romera[?] at San Quentin, and I made about as much, no I didn't make as much money, I got a bottle of Vat 69 for every case that I defended. Well, they were all capital cases, because we didn't have, in those days, an appellate justice, an appellate lawyer, who would represent all of these people.

INTERVIEWER:

Can we just stay back, for the purpose of the film we need to stay back on the hobos, if that's OK. Many people used to—the idea that hobos or transients would come into a community, or would be coming into California, was often used as a scare tactic for people. Do you think people were afraid of the hobos, or what was your experience?

MELVIN BELLI:

No, I don't think so, I think that there were a lot of hobos that went up to doors and neighborhoods, knocked on the doors, and got a hand-out, and I think more of our people were compassionate than un-compassionate [sic], and they took care of the hobos. Maybe some of the hobos burglarized, but then there was burglary done by people who weren't hobos, who were professional burglars. I think that these were very patriotic, good American people, and I wrote in my report that these weren't people that were going to overthrow the government, they were very patriotic. I remember when I heard President Roosevelt say, \"There is nothing to fear but fear itself\", I was under a bridge, under a railroad bridge, and we were all sitting around there. We had put all the stuff that we'd begged in town in a big pot and cooked it, and we were having our evening meal, and we heard this wonderful voice come aboard there. So, in Congress, and out of place, there's this Harvard, Bostonian accent, \"We've nothing to fear, but fear itself\", and these people nodded their head, and they were the most patriotic people in America. And here, I felt a little giddy, guilty, I was put out on the road to scrutinize these people and report back to Washington. \"These people aren't going to overthrow the government,\" I said in no uncertain terms, \"These are the most patriotic Americans you've got. They believe in their country, and there should be no 'crime of vagrancy.'\" These people wanted a job.

INTERVIEWER:

From their point of view, from the hobos' point of view, what did, had Roosevelt's New Deal not done enough?

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Did they feel that Roosevelt and the New Deal was failing them?

MELVIN BELLI:

No, they felt that he was trying—

INTERVIEWER:

I'm sorry, but, when you answer, instead of \"they\", could you say \"the hobos\", or...

MELVIN BELLI:

The hobos all felt that he was trying, they felt that they had a friend in the White House, very much of a friend, but they just felt that it was something that couldn't be helped. I know there were rumors going around that Herbert Hoover had been captured, captured, I remember the word, and was being held prisoner in one of the big office buildings in New York, wild things like that. It was a thing of the times, that, well, like the Depression, it was cyclic, you couldn't help it. These were patriotic American people, I think they were just as much patriotic as the people in Wall Street at that time, and the people in Wall Street were all selling apples. I can remember down here in San Francisco, that stockbrokers were selling apples on the street, and other parts of the Unites States at that time.

INTERVIEWER:

Were you worried at all about your future in 1934?

MELVIN BELLI:

No, I wasn't. I was damn mad about it and I resolved to do something about it, but that took the resolve of, I guess, going into the part of the law that I'm in at the present time. I've been on the side more of the have-nots than the haves. That doesn't mean that I can't like a bank president as much as a poor man, particularly if he's got some bad injuries and is going to go for a big award, but I think I've done more for the have-nots than I have for the haves.