Willie Brown Interview (page: 3 / 8) Former Mayor of San Francisco	Print Interview

How did you decide to go to college and become a lawyer?

Willie Brown: I actually went off to college to become a math teacher. I was determined that never again would a Charles Gregory be burdened with having to teach black kids, my friends, my relatives, from the perspective of a coach.

In part, I was motivated because I'd gotten such great grades in math, not realizing that I really didn't have the skills. Frank Crawford was number one, I was number two in the class. I picked up a couple of "Bs" in deportment. That separated us. Otherwise, we were both straight-A students. Math was our strong suit. We scored 100 on every paper involving math. This math teacher, my coach, had so inspired me, that I was coming back to teach math. I also knew that I could get a job doing that.

Once I got to California however, at the behest of my uncle, I tried to enter Stanford University and could not, because I didn't have the grades, nor the previous academic exposure, nor the money. I entered San Francisco State and, almost instantly, all of that altered and I became more interested in philosophy, logic and political science.

I had rejected the ROTC, and when I was about to graduate, in order to avoid instant induction into military service, I had to go to graduate school and get an exemption. That's how I entered law school. I didn't start out to be a lawyer. I didn't leave Mineola headed for law. I didn't leave Mineola headed for graduate school.

I was going to go to college so that I didn't have to work at the pea house all of my life. That's a pea processing plant, and it was the only job that I'd ever witnessed any adults in Mineola really having, unless you worked on the railroad, which is what my father did. You didn't have any other jobs. You couldn't even be anybody's chauffeur. The town was so poor that the white people didn't even have chauffeurs, as such. So, there was nothing there that would inspire you to want to pursue it. The undertaker seemed to be okay, but the undertaker also had another job, I think he was a lawn mower, or something. So there was not enough people dying to even want you to be an undertaker. But teachers got paid. They got paid a lot less than the white teachers, but they got paid. And they worked nine months out of the year.
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Most of the teachers didn't live in Mineola, and most of the teachers had cars, and they had the nice houses when they did live in Mineola. All of that said to me that if I couldn't be my uncle, then I was going to be my teacher.

I loved literature. I loved the theatrical side of that. I acted in all the plays, but all of the kids were doing that pretty effectively. You could only have one or two English teachers, or Lit teachers. I wasn't going to be a Home Ec teacher. There was no science department as such, so math was the only other subject. I was obviously not good enough in athletics to want to become a coach. So by default, math became my tool. But by the time I was though my first semester at San Francisco State University, I knew that my verbal skills would ultimately be my ticket, either in the world of broadcasting, or in something other than that. Law came as an afterthought.

When did you know what you wanted to do with your life? Was there a defining moment?

Willie Brown: Not that I can point to. I really don't recall the turns that I took and why. In most cases my turns in the road were not planned, they were me taking advantage of the circumstances that presented themselves with the most optimum prospects. Long range planning for me was, "Where do I eat dinner?"

What kind of a kid were you? Did you get along with your classmates?

Willie Brown: I got along really well with my classmates. All of the after-school activities centered around the house in which I lived. We played football on the street in front of my house. I built a high-jump and pole-vaulting pit on one side of my house, the only pole-vaulting pit the kids had ever seen.

I had three sisters that were the attractive girls around that little town. They had lots of friends and lots of boys hung out there. My family were bootleggers. I didn't realize that was also an attraction.

Before she had her heart trouble, my grandmother owned the only night spot in the town, The Shack. One of my uncles ran that for her, and bootlegged the booze. So, my house was kind of the center of that little town's after-school activities.

We had the only piano that any family had, because it had come out of The Shack. My sisters all played piano. One of my sisters was an accomplished singer, she was ultimately dubbed, the Songbird of Texas. With that collection of attractive people, my family appeared to have a little more resources than some of the other families. There was nobody in my family that worked except me, later on. My grandmother was too old to work. My mother worked in another town, so there was no visible working person. The father had left the family long before I ever knew him, so there was no male involvement.

My grandmother was pretty much the pillar of that community. Everybody knew her. She was not a church lady. The church people resented the fact that she did not go to church under any circumstances, because of that honky-tonk that she ran, and the bootlegging. I didn't understand all of that as a little kid, but on reflection I know that my family was what you call an on-the-edge family.

My grandmother clearly had a relationship with the hired sheriff. Because she was never raided, she was never busted, or anything else. She could always fix it if somebody else had a problem with the law. I benefited from all of that, because everybody zeroed in on Mamma Anna Lee. If they had a problem, they checked in with her.

My uncle was such a playboy in those days that he had children by women around the town, and when my uncle would come to town, they'd come to visit. I benefited handsomely from being the kid with the only football, the kid with the only baseball. Nobody had a baseball glove. I was also probably more inept at all of that than any of the other kids.

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