Chapter 01: A Childhood in Rural Texas and Dallas During Segregation
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Identifier
BrewerCC_20061406_C01
Publication Date
6-14-2006
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS, Oral History Interview, June 14, 2006
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Personal Background; Personal Background; Educational Path; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Experiences Related to Gender, Race, Ethnicity
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Lesley W. Brunet:
I wanted to ask you first where are you from originally?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Well, I'm originally -- actually I was born in a small town in North Texas called Rosser, Texas. It's a small, farming community of --
Lesley W. Brunet:
Spell Rosser?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Rosser. R-O-S-S-E-R. It's in Kaufman County. It's about oh, 25 miles southeast of Dallas. And in my early years I grew up there in a very rural area. My father worked on a farm. And he passed away in 1960 from lung cancer. And we moved to Dallas, Texas. So a lot of my early life has been on a farm. So I acquired a lot of work ethic, and a lot of my family values from -- and a lot of my I, would say creativity from being around a lot of different things on a farm. Anything from milking cows, to working with pigs, and chickens, and ducks, and hunting wild animals, and fishing in ponds, and swimming in lakes. And all of the things that you would do as a kid or a young person in a rural area and exposed to a lot of things where we had to grow a lot of our product, our own food product. So being able to appreciate life as far as the necessities, as far as the basic things such as how you grow your own food, how do you survive with a little physical resource, but a lot of family resource. So after I grew up in a small town, I went to school there until I was in the seventh grade. My father died of cancer and I think I was 12 years old when he passed away. And by that time, I was already driving a car, and driving tractors. And now I'd been driving those for since I was probably the age of 9 or 10 years old, I was already driving a car, driving a tractor because that was just the mode of work. And you know, riding horses and all those type of things.
Lesley W. Brunet:
It sounds like a pretty good childhood in a way, but I'm sure you had to work a lot too.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Yeah, it was work. I guess in those days, work was not -- work was also play, and but you know, and at a young age, you know, when you're still in adolescence, you don't really know what the work really is, but you -- it's just a necessity. So after growing up in the area, we moved to Dallas, and after my father passed away. And my mother, and two other brothers, and a sister, we all moved together to Dallas. And I started my middle school or my junior high school type of days in Dallas, Texas. And I in Dallas, what did we do? In Dallas, I --
Lesley W. Brunet:
So you moved there in 1960?
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Yeah, 1960. And in 1960, I enrolled in middle school. I guess my best subjects in school at that time were math and sciences. I was a pretty good little athlete, so I played you know, quite a few sports. Starting in -- and probably about my eighth grade. My seventh grade I was still making a transition from a small town, to a large town, to a new environment, and making all those adjustments. But in the eighth grade, I began to play a few -- a lot more sports, but also my grades were pretty good. And and after middle -- and then also, being in a single parent home at that time, I had to work. Do small work, you know, small type of jobs like a paper boy; throwing a newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, that type of thing. I always had some type of odd job regardless of the time. I always had an odd job. Whether it'd been the seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade whatever. I always had some type of odd job. After middle school, I attended Lincoln High School, which is one of the four -- at that time, we only had four high schools in Dallas, and they were all segregated. So the days that I grew up, I grew up in at segregated educational system. And not only in the small town of Rosser where we -- you know, you had one common room that may have had three or four grades in one room because the size of the classes were not that large. And then transitioning to Dallas where you've got a major metropolitan area with large classes of 30 kids or so. That may have been the total composite of the four classes that were in the small town. This is just one homeroom.
Lesley W. Brunet:
Quite a change.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Yeah, quite a cultural change. So over to Lincoln High School. I think my grades were still quite well -- quite good. I liked again, doing well in my math and sciences. I began to play -- favorite sport was basketball, and I played some football. But after about a year of playing football, I didn't play anymore because I broke my ankle, and then that changed my course of athleticism into just focusing on basketball. I developed a real niche for mechanical drawing. I wanted to eventually maybe do some type of construction engineering. That was one of my exposures. And I believe -- you know, I strongly believe that, you know, environment and exposure kind of has a great influence on your life. My -- a lot of my family and my brothers, they were -- they worked construction jobs. They were like foreman type of people, lead type men on major construction sites in Dallas, and had big skyscrapers they were building in Dallas and the airport, et cetera. So that's when I was around, so I really wanted to do that. So I focused a lot in high school on the different types of mechanical drawings and shops, worked along with a map. And actually, entered a contest at Texas A&M and got honorable mention in my -- in the project that I submitted for the type of drawing I was doing. And so that was another focus of my secondary type of education. And so in high school, coming up towards graduation, really my focus was construction engineering or something of that nature. It wasn't healthcare related. Because in the '60s, early '60s, and I'm talking about in the '60s -- '62-'66 when I was in high school. Well, first of all, only nurse you ever saw was the school nurse. And so there wasn't a lot of exposure to healthcare professional, black physicians. We had black physician we call it. Those were primarily the only physicians that you could go and see. And definitely not male nurses cause male nurses was something very, very rare in the early '60s. So the only exposure that I had to a healthcare profession was the physician, dentist, or nurse in the black community. And I grew up in what was called south Dallas at that time. And now south Dallas is a different type of geographic area. But in that -- at that time, it was the any neighborhood south of downtown was considered south Dallas. And in the way, Dallas was segregated, you had were segregated in pockets. East Dallas, south Dallas, west Dallas, north Dallas. And that's where your pockets -- that's where the -- you know, blacks at that time lived. And then also during the '60s, you know, we transitioned from using the word “colored” to “black.” So we did -- I was exposed to the segregated signs of “this is only for white” as far as water fountains, and bathrooms, and things like that. But I wasn't in the heat of the battle because I -- part of that late '60s -- late '50s and early -- and definitely the '60s, early -- I was still in the rural area. And the rural area, you always knew where you belonged. Because you, you know, you didn't have a lot of amenities, if you will. A lot of stores, restaurants, and you didn't have any restaurants at all, so you didn't have to worry about having to go into a white restaurant. But if you did want to get a hamburger or something, you've got to go round to the back of the store to get that. Or if someone who wasn't black, or so white, was in front of you -- you were in front of that person, you get out of line and let that person get in front of you. We all went to -- we all had segregated schools, and I do recall in the late '50s, at the Brown vs. Board of Education.
Lesley W. Brunet:
Board of education.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
That was a school that the whites had gone to. A new school was built in light of -- in the mid -- in late '50s. So the blacks moved from the wooden building on the south side of town, and we took the nice, little, square brick building that the whites had left. And they went to a newer school. And so that was just kind of the way it was, you know. A sign of the times. And but anyway, but from my perspective, my people influenced me at that time. My father definitely influenced me because he was a hard working person, he was very hard working at -- you know, being a laborer on a farm, and -- but he also had prestige in that area because he didn't -- the people depended on him because he was more the bookkeeper type of person for all of the -- for the owner of the properties. You know, and fields -- there was thousands and thousands of acres of cotton, and corn, and maize, and alfalfa, and cattle, and he was more the bookkeeper for all those type of things for the owner. And so my exposure to a lot of that came from watching him do the work, the book work, working with the math. It wasn't a sophisticated math, but it was math, and organization, and just being able to hard work to provide for us, his family. I'm the youngest of 10 children. And there were six sisters and four brothers, and you may also say probably that didn't add up. Well, one of my siblings --
Lesley W. Brunet:
I was wondering.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Yeah, one of my siblings was -- we raised one of them -- my mother raised one of my -- her daughter's siblings. So I'm just going to say it's my brother, you know. And so influence was -- people who influenced my life early, early on in my life were like I said, definitely my family: my father and my mother. My mother basically was a homemaker, you know. She stayed home while everybody will go to work, and she -- and this was a typical rural environment. Everybody worked in the fields, they came home for lunch, they ate, they rested, they went back to work, and they came home, they ate. And so the -- my mother was, you know, staying home to keep the meals going cause you might have had how many people working; six, seven people in the home going to work and coming back, going forth. And so she maintained our home. So I got to watch -- that was the family lot, that was the family unit that you got to see because you all ate together, you all talked together, there were no TVs, and there were radios. But back in the '50s, you can imagine what the radio was. I don't think we got our first TV until like 1959 or '58. I think that's when we first got our first television. And we wanted to watch television, there was only one person in this little section of houses where -- in the community where we lived, which was about I don’t know, less than 10 houses where one person had a TV. So if you want to watch TV, you --
Lesley W. Brunet:
I remember my parents talking about that.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
You had to go watch TV there. And so a lot of your time was spent talking or listening to the elder people tell stories about the past, or play music on guitars, or -- and it kind of goes back to some of the old, African type of folklore that, you know, the families used to sit around a fire and talk, and share stories, and that's how you learned about your ancestry, and that type of thing.
Lesley W. Brunet:
Oral tradition.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
Yeah, that was true. That's what we did. We, you know, didn’t have electrical components. You see, I'm going back now when I'm less than five years old or six. And at that time I don't think we necessarily had electricity, but we did have electricity that I can recall. But some of the folks didn't, so there was a lot of congregation of people in the evenings and nights, sitting around in circles, or a fire, or something like that talking and sharing things, and telling stories, and just having good old, plain fun. And they learned a lot about what had taken hold in the past. Remember, the past that day, in the '50s the past was the '40s, and that was post-war. And then the Depression of the '30s, prohibition of the '20s. And since my father was born in like 1898, and then his father was born in like 1867. So my roots to pre- and post-slavery is pretty close as far as in my immediate genealogy on my father's side, and my mother's side too. My mother was born in 1905. And so as you could see, when we start reaching back into history, then we start -- and I've also -- I've become like the genealogist or the family genealogist if you will. I'm the family his --
Lesley W. Brunet:
I'm not surprised, I'm sure.
Cecil C. Brewer, RN, BSN, MS:
I study the family history, so I don't want to get into the family history too much there because then we get into a whole different realm of discussion about tracking your ancestry through the slavery and all the way up through the current day. So and also, my early instructors influenced me, or my early teachers. We only had like four -- no, three teachers in this -- my elementary school in the countr -- in the rural area, country we called it. Albert Davis and Betty Davis, and so you really clung to your teachers because they were your mentor, they were your hope. And they taught me every -- you know, the basics. Everything you learn you learn it in, you know, in kindergarten. Well, I didn't go to kindergarten, but I did go to elementary school. And so they taught us a lot of basic values of life, and how to be good to one another, and to your neighbor. And you know, to and they stayed on us. So I still visit those individuals when I'm in the Dallas area, I always to make it an opportunity to go back to Rosser to visit with Mr. and Mrs. Davis because they had that kind of impact on me. You don’t know that impact until later in life. Early in life -- some people might know it early in life, but it really doesn't strike you until your adult years. That you know, who really influenced it? You start thinking about who really had influence. And my influence comes from those early days in the rural area, being exposed to my teachers, Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Gray. There are things that I could remember that they did for me like just as clear as yesterday. It was small things, you know, nothing major. It was something as simple as buying you ice cream or taking you to a softball game, or teaching you how to tie a bow -- tie a tie. You know, because the male -- he was the only -- Mr. Davis was the only male figure in the school, so he talked to me and the boys how to be men, or how to respect women, and how to dress, and how to act appropriately. And those are very basic values that just hit you every day. I know guys now who can't even tie a tie, but this was something he said was very important to learn how to do. And we were like -- I was like I don't know, I was seven years old maybe? Eight? And you know, and how to sit, and how to -- no, not little basic things. In other words, he would have just a chat with the boys, and then the female teachers -- women teachers would have a chat with the girls. And those things, they are deep seeded in me as a person as far as who influenced me early in life. And that's besides my immediate family, my father, my mother, my brother, and my sisters, and immediate family members, cousins and things like that. But back to Dallas again, Dallas influences in high school…I think some of the -- the impression I get in high school, probably my drafting teacher -- mechanical drafting teacher who had a lot of influence on me because he encouraged me and he taught me a lot of basics that right now I can -- I've become very visual in life. I'm very visual. I can -- you can -- I can look at that building across the street one time and I can draw it. I mean just snap it -- you step in my mind, I can put it together. And so he taught me those skills, you know. And even now, when I'm working on design issues with the architects here at MD Anderson, I can visualize what things look like. You know, if -- without the building blocks there. And I think that was something that comes from -- I think it's deep seeded. I think it comes from being able to have to be creative as a child, create my own play from scratch. You know, like building my own reeling rods, my own fishing poles, my -- you know, my own play things. You know, without having the riches of the -- going to a store to buy it. We did it, we made those things. So even today, after I did my -- after I've invented my first invention, when I go out and talk to kids now, I always go back to my roots and say -- and tell, show kids how you can build -- this is being an inventor, you have to be able to see things that other folks can't see. But you could, you know, being novel. And I usually take like a stick, I have a stick over here, I can take a spool of threat, I take a nail. A nail, and I create a fishing pool. It looks like a reeling rod right in front of their eyes. You see how simple that is, you know? It's -- and then today, they call it -- they have a game on TV called survival. Well, I can do that. I mean it's all how to live off the earth. But going back to Dallas again, I keep jumping around. So I -- my influence in school were like I said, mechanical drawing teacher. They have -- a lot more of my teachers were -- had an impact on me as far as you know, my math teachers, and some of my social science teachers. But after -- during high school, you know, I had you know a typical high school of a typical kid. Like I said, I worked. I did a lot of work in Dallas as far as in my primary life, you know, worked in a lot of different restaurants so I learned how to cook, and do things. At one time, I thought I wanted to be a culinary artist because I worked in so many restaurants during my high school days, and working around town, and that I thought that was pretty impressive to see the chefs, and not want to be the dishwasher and the bus boy all the time, or the fry cook. I thought I could be the chef. So at one time after high school, I started thinking should I go to culinary arts school was a possible venture in my life. But I soon, you know, ventured away from that. But that was a thought. It was a thought. How did I move from high school -- after high school, what did I do? Well, after high school I --
Recommended Citation
Brewer, Cecil C. RN, BSN, MS and Brunet, Lesley W., "Chapter 01: A Childhood in Rural Texas and Dallas During Segregation" (2006). Interview Chapters. 897.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/897
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