Interview with Mr. Ray Hill - page one of four

Date: October 5, 2010

Place: Houston, Texas

Equipment: Sony HDR-FX7 Handycam

Recorded on: Sony mini-DV cassettes

Interviewer: Maurice Chammah

Videographer: Kimberly Ambrosini-Bacon

Transcription: Nancy Semin Lingo

Reviewed & edited: Maurice Chammah, October 27, 2010

MAURICE CHAMMAH: Thank you. We’re here at the K.P.F.T. radio studio in Houston, Texas. The voice that you’re hearing is Maurice Chammah and on the videography is Kimberly Ambrosini-Bacon. And we’re here with Ray Hill. I guess if you just want to start by telling us a little bit about where you’re from, your background.

RAY HILL: Well I’m native Houstonian. I was born in the Heights of Houston, which is kind of inner city and my father at the time worked for Jesse Jones, Houston’s big multi-millionaire magnet who at the time was only as Secretary of the Treasury for the Roosevelt administration and Raymond was starved off of the farm in the 30s by the depression and he my Frankie—I was raised to call my parents by their first name—we’re funny people that way - And he and Frankie came to Houston and he went to work for Jesse Jones as a janitor and it was just this big old honest farm boy who had a little snap and a couple years of college and so Jesse put him in a coat and tie and made him general manager of the Gulf Building, which at the time was the tallest building west of the Mississippi, which was fine, except all that stress—that old farm boy wasn’t built for that, so it gave him ulcers which took another forty years to kill him, but ultimately he would die of those ulcers.

And then the war came, and Frankie was so politically involved that she wanted to make metal things to chuck at Nazis. So she wanted to go move where she could go work in industry, and so they moved out east of town. Frankie went to work for Fort Houston Iron Works as a blacksmith. My little bitty 5’2” mother ran a major steam hammer to make metal things to chunk at Nazis. And my father went to work for Brown & Root shipyard. Now Raymond had organized the grange as a farmer. Didn’t work—didn’t save him, small farmers were being trampled during the depression and so he continued organizing, by organizing the shipyard workers for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Frankie would ultimately try to organize nurses for the Teamsters.

So I grew up in a household that talked about great leaders of unionisms past—John L. Lewis, Samuel Gompers, Saul Alinsky—all of the great names of activism in the labor movement were like the cereal on our breakfast table. And so I studied all of that and I took a little leave to become a teenage Baptist evangelist. Raymond would call himself a skeptic. Frankie would of called herself an atheist and here their son was a fundamentalist Baptist evangelist, which they didn’t like that very much except the money was so good that they stopped complaining. So we had better refrigerators and stoves and I drove a nice Studebaker when I was sixteen years old. Made good money. At seventeen I decided that was basically fraud. I had a crisis in my faith and I said, I’m going into small communities usually. My last revival was in Colmesneil, Texas. And I’d go into town and entertain for four days, and leave with a lot more money than anybody in that town would make in a year. Why shouldn’t you feel guilty about that? So I gave that up as dishonest, although I would later become a burglar. They would punish me for being a burglar and reward me for being a preacher and obviously it should have been the other way around.

But I came back, finished high school and went into college. I went to college in 1960. Two years prior to that when I was still in high school, I was the secretary of one of the Houston chapters of the N. DOUBLE A. C. P.. There again my parents leftie leanings kind of thing. I was the only white person in the room, busily making notes and publishing a complete set of minutes for that year, in 19 and 68—1958. Then in the 1960s, here integration came more slowly than other parts of the country, so I was involved in that kind of activism and I was in Houston, but I spent a lot of time on the road as kind of a professional college bum.

And I first went to Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches, then Tulane University where I was a perpetrator of fraud and taught composition and rhetoric to Newcomb women-strange in those days we didn’t call them women at all. We called them Newcomb girls, but they were women.

Then I left there and went to Columbia University to study economics under a visiting professor under the name of Salvador Allende. He would go on to become quite well known for his presidency of Chile.

And while I was there I ran into this big ol’ bear of a man who said, “No son, the revolution is not economics. The revolution is psychoanalysis.” That was C. Wright Mills and so I transferred from economics to psychoanalysis and I studied under him for a while until he got to the point where fraud [Freud] turns to Alpert [Jung] and says, “We must make a dogma of psychoanalysis” and after that teenage evangelist crap, I didn’t want to have anything to do with dogmas.

So I dumped that, and still trying to figure about this gay stuff, although I had been out of the closet since Galena Park High School, 1959, and I’m some years into college, there’s just not a lot known about homosexuals, so I got to the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana and study under John Money and Clarence Tripp and Karen Horney, and the really greats of the waning years of the institute. Dr. Kinsey was dead before I got there, but the rest of the staff and faculty that made the nucleus of that—and I studied there, kind of found myself there and returned to Houston and was the—rode shotgun on Jim McCary, Dr. James Leslie McCary’s human sexuality classes at the University of Houston.

And during that time, I was talking about homosexual movement which did not exist in the 66-67 era--or ‘67 I took a little time off and went to Vietnam as a journalist. I used French papers, landed in Hanoi. Came down the trail and came out, traded sides at Da Nang, and came out through Saigon. So while I was over there, everybody was shooting at me. At the first half of the trip the Americans were shooting me, the second half of the trip the North Vietnamese were shooting at me, but I got a lifetime’s fill of war, and so I came back and got involved in the anti-war movement.

So I would get active in the student mobilization committee to end the war in Vietnam and wound up being basically the national chair of that, for the moratorium march on Washington in 1968. At that time it was the biggest demonstration in the history of this country.

And I learned a lot about national marches and movements there. If it’s time to have a march, you can’t screw that up. If you don’t call for it, somebody else will and it will happen. If it’s not time for people to go to Washington to scream and yell, ain’t nobody coming and you’ll get to visit with your friends when you get there and have a free weekend. So you can’t lose with a deal like that, but that gave me some cred as an organizer on my feet activist.

In 1970 we came—well 1968, while I was still at the University of Houston as a substitute teacher, a group of us got together and decided we needed a radio station. Pipe dream if there ever was one.

So we started organizing and there were four of us, Larry Lee, Don Gardner, Don is still alive, he’s in the Austin music scene, myself and Debra Danburg. And we got together and of course there were other people involved, too, but we were the nucleus. And we got together and decided we needed a radio station and then Don and Larry went to California and found out about Pacifica. So we decided rather than completely to reinvent the wheel, what we would do is we would attach our wagon to the team at Pacifica and thus Houston has a Pacifica radio station that has endured since we went on the air in March of 1970.

In November of 1970 I went to prison because I—the police had been watching me for years, because of the anti-war stuff, civil rights stuff, all of this activism and gay stuff is kind of spooky so they were watching me—they had no idea how I was making a living, and how I was making a living is I was a burglar. I didn’t like break into people’s houses and steal their cutlery, number one, there’s no money in cutlery, number two you go into somebody’s house and steal their stuff, they’re going to be seriously mad at you for virtually ever, and you don’t need a bunch of enemies out there. So I was a commercial burglar. I stole things that queers know about: antiques, art, jewels and electronics, such as they were in the sixties.

And I did that from about ’65 until early in ’70 and I got busted in ’70 in an income tax investigation and they figured out that the guy who had been pulling these massive—that they were calling organized crime thefts in Houston was actually the gay activist guy. And so then—so of course that was fascinating to the news media, so it was headline after headline after headline, which was so embarrassing because all my friends in Houston were learning about how I was paying for all the things I was paying for, driving nice cars, going to gay holidays, opening of the beaches in Fort Lauderdale and Mission Days in San Diego, and Splash Day in Galveston and Mardi Gras.

All these gay holidays, I was always there and always had a suite of rooms and always entertaining, plus the fact I could afford to reach into my pocket and pay for buses to go to big demonstrations against the war and all of that. That was very impressive. Then they found out I was actually stealing for all of that.

But, by the time I actually got to prison, and I was sentenced to twenty consecutive eight-year sentences, or I was sentenced to prison to be there 160 years. And so—but my headlines, which I was worried about because they kept reminding people I was queer, which may not be a lot of status in prison.

As a matter of fact, being queer in prison at the time was not only low status, it was negative status, and you hear all kinds of tales and all the mythology of that, but it also said “Four and a half million burglary ring busted.” It also said, “Leader refuses to identify co-conspirators.”

So when I got to prison, I was a hero. Texas prisons are full of people who haven’t stolen 200 dollars in their lifetime and actually got away with it. And here comes this four and a half million-dollar guy waltzing through the door.

And if you’re a hero to the inmates, you’re also a hero to the staff, because prisons are not two societies, they’re one society. Those people are all the same people. Prison guards come from the same socioeconomic, educational levels that the convicts come from. And you don’t know that until you wake up in the middle of the belly of the beast and just look around, and all of a sudden, all of these people look a lot alike. Some of them wearing gray uniforms and some of them are wearing coats and ties and some of them are wearing white, but they’re the same people.

They speak the same rough, kind of interestingly caricatured language, and see, since I’m in broadcasting and I used to teach composition and rhetoric, I just loved the language in prison. All you have to do is forget what M and F stand for, and the rest of it is just real colorful and fascinating and it can come up with some pretty interesting imagery if you’re into broadcasting where words being image-creators.

I mean, that’s how this thing works. You don’t have to paint the whole picture, but if you start creating the image, it happens in the imagination of the listener. And so that was excellent training for all this. And I did that for about three years and I prospered there. Well, when you go to prison for 160 years, you’re not worried about “how to survive until I got out,” because with 160 years there is no getting out.

So how I survived means, “How do I live here? And I had that figured out in about a week, and then the next question is, How do I prosper here? Well, since everybody knows I’m gay, they’ll take advantage of that and gay people make great bureaucrats. They used to call us eunuchs you know, so we’re very good at manipulating power that other people have for mutual advantage, so I became the bookkeeper of the maintenance department.

And I want you to know, as soon as that took over, I saw to it that that was run with such efficiency you wouldn’t believe it. Everything on—there were only two Ramsey Units at the time, but everything was fixed and working well within weeks, and I had parts ready to repair anything that might break down in the foreseeable future, because I was running it. The guards didn’t know anything about the maintenance department.

I had an office. I had a telephone. I had an air conditioner. I lived very well. And I created this whole bureaucracy that ran with such efficiency that it was incredible and then the guy from the construction department came over, and said that he caught his bookkeeper pulling a young officer out of his bunk and they had to send both of them away and would I come over and help him get his office organized as well as the maintenance office was organized.

And I said, “Sure.”

But that job came with the keys to a pickup trunk and when you’re a convict and you can have the keys of your truck waiting at the front gate, you don’t ever give that job up.

So I continued at the Ramsey for another two and a half years, as both maintenance bookkeeper and construction bookkeeper, which was, you know, you have a lot of time on your hands so you can do two jobs. And that made me very popular with the inmates. Because I was in a position to hire people out of the fields. The cotton fields.

If you know anything at all about Texas prisons, if you looked at Alan [Pogue]'s pictures, you’ve seen inmates doing that backbreaking, grunt labor in the hot sun in the fiends, and Slim McGhee, who was the field major at the Ramsey at the time required large Black men to bring him 300 pounds of cotton a day. That’s half a bale of cotton per man. And if you didn’t do that, you were going to spend the night sitting in the hall at the unit, shelling stingy little goobers, too small to call peanuts, all night long, and then you had to get up the next morning and go out in the fields and get Slim 300 pounds.

And if I could give those guys jobs, then that would make me a hero among Black inmates. And see, I didn’t have these problem every other inmate had, every white inmate. Every other white inmate was invested into the racist system under which prison operated, but I had been secretary of the N. double A. C.P., so I hired more Black men for maintenance and construction than white guys because when I got there, the two bookkeepers preceding me in both jobs basically hired their friends.

And since it was a segregated prison system, their friends were all white. So I integrated those departments. And I had people not only would work just unendingly grunt labor, digging ditches, doing all kinds of things, but they were going to have a hot breakfast when they went out, they were going to have a hot lunch at noon, and they were going to have a hot meal, and they’d be sitting on their bunks when the fuel would be coming in the back gate. And that is worth working hard for. Anyway, I needed strong men.

I had to supply mostly Hispanic—Hispanics make great brick layers because they have smaller hands. And the key to laying standard sized brick is small hands. And so all of my brick layers were Hispanic, and the Black inmates that I got out of the cotton fields were carrying them—the mortar, the hod and the bricks up ladders to feed ‘em on those—and it was an amazing machine. I could build buildings in half the time anybody else could because I had a better allocation of labor than anybody else had. So I prospered there.

But then after about three and a half years of that, I decided, I really don’t want to do this the rest of my life. So I went to the law library and I drafted an eighth Amendment writ saying it was cruel and unusual to send someone to 160 years in the Texas penitentiary for nonviolent crimes against nature. And I had money left over from my stealing days. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t been there six months when the warden called me to his office and said, “Did you know they were investigating your income tax?”

I said, “Sure warden, I knew that and how much do I owe ‘em?”

“Well I got a check here for eighty nine thousand dollars that you’ve overpaid your income taxes.”

I said, “Thank you very much.”

“Do you want me to put this in your commissary account?”

I said, “No, sir. I don’t draw interest on my commissary account. My lawyer will be down in a few weeks and we’ll put it in the bank where I do draw interest.”

So I had money. And if you have money, you have lawyers. And so I had lawyers. I hired a lawyer to help me with my writ. So we come to Houston for a hearing before –it was supposed to be before John Singleton. John Singleton had been a labor lawyer before he was appointed federal judge by Truman.

And we thought, “Well, he doesn’t know me, he knows my father, but he didn’t know me, so he’ll be there and at least he’ll hear me out. But we got there and it was a visiting judge from East Texas. Some little hayseed looking thing. And we walked in and as we sat down, my lawyer, wonderful guy, leaned over and said, “You know, we’re pissing in the wind. There’s no chance we can win this case.”

I really appreciated his enthusiasm. I said, “Just follow along.”

The judge came in and he didn’t want to hear the motion. He wanted to go play golf. It was a beautiful day. It was kind of like today. He was visiting from East Texas. He told us how bad the golf courses were in East Texas, said you’ve got gophers, you’ve got holes and if you’re not careful the squirrels will run off with your balls. I don’t know why that was information that we needed, but that he could play on the nice courses down here because he was a federal judge, he’d just to show up and they would let him play, if he was a member of the club, or they probably wouldn’t even charge him greens fees. And so I listened to that and I didn’t know what was going on. So then he’d just get up and walks out.

And they put me back into custody and my lawyer goes to talk with the State of Texas lawyers and comes back and he says, “I’ve got it all worked out.”

And I didn’t know what that meant and this was like my life we’re talking about. And they changed one word in my sentence from twenty consecutive eight-year sentences to twenty concurrent eight-year sentences. So I only had eight to do and I had been a trustee since I got there, four years, four months and seventeen days later, I walked out of Texas prison a completely free man, having discharged myself.

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