Interview with Charles Pohl Click for bio
Charles Pohl
Topics:
Olivia Webster: This is Olivia Webster and I am here with Charlie Pohl, my step father over Zoom. It is Saturday, September 21st. I am at my home here in Moscow, Idaho and Charlie is at his home in Boise, Idaho. So, we are going to start off with our first question: in the year 1960, how old were you and where were you located at the time?
Charlie Pohl: To tell you the truth, I lived in a house in eastern Pennsylvania, in an area outside of Allentown. It was in the heart of the suburbs, but back then, we were at the end of one dirt road at the end of another dirt road so it was pretty isolated gowing up. We had a couple of neighbors we ran with in the summer, but it was pretty much just us [speaker, two older brothers, and their parents] in the house. I would have been about 6 or 7 in the year 1960.
OW: Could you tell me more about your parents and what your family life would have looked like at the time?
CP: To begin with this, you would have to understand Pennsylvania Dutch culture, which my mother was. It's a very stoic and not a particularly warm and fuzzy culture. So, I didn't really have much of a life until 1970 when I moved away to go to college and later I was going thorugh some encounter group training and I worked up the nerve to ask her, you know, why it felt so cold and lonely in the house. And she gave me the most wonderful gift of honesty a mother can give she said, "Well, the truth is, I never did like children", so that explained an awful lot growing up. On the other hand, my father was just a second generation American and he fought in WWII and apparently had a rather harsh and abusive father who ditched the family in the middle of the Great Depression and I thnk this left an impact on that that lived till the end of his days. I can't tell you how many nice meals we had where we had to hear about how little they [speaker's father's family] had to eat growing up, he talked about having bean soup and if they were lucky, they would have a ham bone in it for flavor and whoever ate fastest got the most. So, I almost never saw my father eat, because by the time I'd be getting my plate arranged and get stuff on it, he was wiping up the bowl with a piece of bread.
My father was a truck driver and my mother didn't work till later, I think after I got into college. So, my father was gone a lot, worked long hours and he was an alternately kind of checked out kind of guy. Althought he didn't ever drink, he was given to period of rage and some violence towards us kids so it was kind of a scary household and a very isolated experience growing up in that house. And with that being said, the one saving grace for me was church because it was the one place I never got hit and it was the one place I never got yelled at, so it felt like my little safe place at the time.
OW: What kind of television shows or movies or media in general were prominent to you, specifically in your childhood during this time?
CP: Well, this is where it gets real interesting, because we didn't have a TV until I was like 9 or ten so I did not grow up on TV. I think by the time we got a TV, we were limited in how much time I think it was like an hour a day or something like that. So I think the first TV show I remember watching with any regularity was "Combat" with Vic Morrow. Sometimes, I would go over to my granmother's house since they lived right next door, and watch TV over there. I remember watching the first epsisode of "The Flinstones" there. I mean, I never saw my parents watch the news, I'm not even sure if they read newspapers or not. I remember when JFK was killed and when my father found out all he said was "good". He hated almost any public figure and because I didn't know any better, I would repeat his phrase about JFK being killed and saying "good".
OW: Concerning the Vietnam War, how did the war affect your community? What kinds of feelings did you harbor about the war at the time?
CP: You know, I remember having disagreements at home at the Vietnam War. I must have been hearing stuff in school, I think and kind of turning myself against the war, plus I'm pushing toward age 18 so this going off to war thing is getting pretty damn serious. To be honest with you, it never did impact me personally. I think they had paused the draft for a little bit around that time as well....
My older brother Mike got picked somewhere in the 20s so he enlisted in the Navy, spent some time on the destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. I do remember the fears, because you would hear about ships being attacked by ground fire from the shore and you know, feeling a little anxious like "did his ship get hit? is he okay?" But he was never particularly in harm's way.
Looking back and at the Vietnam War Memorial since then, it's just tragic to see the number of people you might find in a small town phone book, just name after name listed of dead people and I'm sorry, I know we want to honor these people, but I mean, in the back of my head I can't help but say/ask "You died for what? What did this prove?" All of it just confused me at the time there were so many stories and different narratives going on at the time about what was happening over there. You know, one of the things I have often though of is, if you're having trouble with how somebody else's government is working, instead of starting a war, why don't we invite their brightest people over here to attend our universities? Let them see what our culture's like. Let them hear what the ideology informs American freedoms. But you know, we never want to go that reasonable route. We can never afford to pay for peace, but damn can we afford to pay for war?
So, I mean, the Cold War I remember, I was pretty cut off from my own feelings growing up. I remember doing the drills, where you're either climbing under your desk of you're going out to the hall and putting your hands over your head, leaning against the wall in case of a nuclear attacked. I'm not sure I understood what nuclear attacks were or how seriously to take it, but when I look back in later years, if there's a nuclear bomb being dropped within how many miles of your school, you ass is grass, no matter what desk you're hiding under. But you know, sometimes when people are scared, they develop these little rituals that help them feel just a little bit safer.
OW: Well, changing topics a bit to something else: how did it feel personally to watch the Civil Rights Movement unfold throughout this decade?
CP: This is where it gets into a pretty weirdly warped in terms of where we lived, like I said, out in the country. I remember the first time I ever saw a black person live. We were out for a Sunday drive and all of a sudden, I don't know what prompted it, we went for a little drive down Lawrence Street. Allentown has kind of two plateaus, and there's a river valley in the middle that's probably half to three quarters of a mile wise. And I was blown away that as we drove down this street, all I saw were black faces with white eyes and sometimes white teeth showing and they were all just sitting on their stoops or in their front yards looking down at us. And it's funny, you know, my family didn't talk about anything so there was never an explanation or "what was that like for you" or "Here's where the black community is". And it only dawned on me probably in my 20s that this little valley was probably three blocks from my church growing up and there was never a black person in our church. Originally, Allentown had a lot of Pennsylvania Dutch people working in manufacturing, trucking, textile mills, stuff like that very blue collar. So to suddenly discover that there was this community that apparently had a whole bunch of black people living and working nearby was mind blowing to me.
I remember going off the college and you know, we had a group of black people also attending. I remember talking to my friend, and you know, there were probably 15 black students in a school with around 1300 students and I remember talking to my friends and we were always wondering why they were so clique-ish. And now I think that it's like, how the else would they have been? Yeah, the feeling of being strangers in a strange land. Of course they stuck together, there's power in community and power in numbers and sticking up for one another.
OW: Well, Charlie thank you so much for your time and your answers were very thoughtful and insightful and I really appreciate you doing this and being so open to answering these questions to the best of your ability.
CP: Thank you for considering me for this project, I feel honored to have been asked and hopefully my answers will help you and the rest of your class out some.
- Title:
- Interview with Charles Pohl
- Date Created:
- 2024-09-21
- Description:
- Interview with my stepfather, who was born and raised in Pennsylvania during the 1960s. This interview is about his childhood, family dynamics, and his introduction to American politics.
- Subjects:
- family parents crm media tv JFK Vietnam war Cold War community communism
- Location:
- Moscow, ID
- Type:
- text
- Format:
- record
- Preferred Citation:
- "Interview with Charles Pohl", The Long 1960s - 2024 Fall, Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL)
- Reference Link:
- /thelong1960s/items/pohl.html
- Rights:
- In copyright, educational use permitted. Educational use includes non-commercial reproduction of text and images in materials for teaching and research purposes. For other contexts beyond fair use, including digital reproduction, please contact the University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives Department at libspec@uidaho.edu. The University of Idaho Library is not liable for any violations of the law by users.
- Standardized Rights:
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/