Straight Life by Art Pepper; Laurie Pepper Read Free Book Online Page A

an outstanding musician, and she used to tell him, "You're going to be in society. You're going to be in a position where you'll need to know manners!" And I remember him making the statement "I'm going to be such a great musician that it won't make no difference if I have manners or not!"
    John and Millie Noble
    (John) I can't say why it took place; I was only six or seven. I just went into their house there on May Avenue in Watts to get Art junior to play. We were always climbing trees. And here were Moses and Moham [Art Senior and Millie, Art's mother] going at it hammer and tongs. They were battin' one another around, calling each other all the names in the book. Art junior was squalling and a-wailing underneath the sink, and I was afraid to try to run for the front door to get out again, so I just went down on the kitchen floor with him. I was as scared as he was. They were bangin' one another around. She hit him with a pot or pan; some doggone thing clattered down on the floor. Moses had a very explosive temper, and Moham was like a wildcat; she'd fight anything and kinda kept us kids a little bit away.
    We called him Moses, Art Senior. Art junior made up that name. Him and I talked about it. He said, "He's as old as Moses and he's as wise as Moses." And from that time on it was Moses.
    He was a self-educated man, very intelligent in quite a few ways because he educated himself in the field of diesel engineering, and he was a machinist, first-class. He had fantastic tools, and he was very meticulous. His greatest love, of course, was the labor movement. He started in Seattle. It was the IWW, the Wobblies, and he progressed in that field for as many years as he could until they finally kicked him out of Washington State, and he became acquainted with Harry Bridges and became an organizer for him to create the ILWU.
    Moses was very one-way about his thinking. He researched what he was interested in and then that's the way it was in his mind. I learned a lot from him, and I'm quite certain that everyone that was around him did. He was a hard person to forget. You either loved him or you hated him. There was no middle road.
    My next vivid thought about Moses was during the '38 strike, when he had a small Plymouth sedan, and they were going to go out and get some scabs. And they did a good job at that time on those people who were trying to break that strike.
    He was about six foot tall, and he was lean, and he had that bad eye, and he had his right thumb cut off, let's see, by an accident in a machine shop after that '38 strike. He was there because they were trying to run him off the waterfront. He had to get off the waterfront there for quite a spell.
    (Millie) What about that rumor about Pancho Villa?
    (John) That wasn't a rumor. That was a fact. Moses and a friend of his took a boat out from San Pedro, and they were supposed to be going out fishing. Well, this friend-Moses never mentioned his name to me-headed due south when they got out of the harbor, and it wasn't until they were at sea that Moses learned that they were going to Mexico with a load of firearms for Pancho Villa's revolution.
    There was another occasion in '29 or '30 where Moses had to leave the country because of his union activities, and he went to the Philippine Islands and ran a bar in Manila. When he came back, which was after the big depression had already set in and settled across the country, he came back with quite a little bit of money, and he was back commercial fishing again. He made several trips down to South America. I recall he brought back tuna fish, and being as the whole family was there-Grandma and Irma and Dick Pepper and us kids-well, he salted up some tuna in a big barrel and he put too much salt in it and it burnt the tuna up to where we couldn't eat it. But he tried. He wanted to do it on his own. And he was always out to help anyone. That was one of his big things. Even if he didn't like you, he'd try to help you. Later in life