snipe hunts

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> Kareem Abdul Jabbar (still Lew Alcindor at the time).

Speaking of pro ballers, Bob Ferry was a classmate of mine at Saint
Louis U. Since he no doubt predates you,

>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Bob Ferry


"Robert Dean 'Bob' Ferry (born May 31, 1937 in St. Louis, Missouri) is
a retired American basketball player and executive.

A 6'8" center from Saint Louis University, Ferry was selected by the
St. Louis Hawks with the seventh pick of the 1959 NBA Draft. Ferry
played ten seasons in the NBA with the Hawks, Detroit Pistons and
Baltimore Bullets, scoring 5,780 points and grabbing 3,343 rebounds.
After his playing career ended, he became an assistant coach and later
general manager for the Bullets, winning the NBA Executive of the Year
Award in 1979 and 1982.

Bob Ferry's son, Danny[, who graduated from Duke,] enjoyed a 13-year
NBA playing career and later worked as general manager of the
Cleveland Cavaliers."

His elder son, whose name escapes me, was captain of Harvard's b-ball
team for a couple of years.

Bob was a very friendly guy. He used to chat with me, back in the days
when it was quite unexpected that a white man would treat a black man
as an equal, under less-than-exigent circumstances, even in
relatively-Northern Saint Louis. The 'hoods in those days were
somewhat segregated, but the school system was rigidly segregated, to
the extent that, where necessary, busing was used to maintain
segregation, taking white students to white schools, if their
neighborhood school was black. The colored, being a docile people, did
not riot over this.

In a strange twist of fate, after we had moved to a new neighborhood,
we found ourselves living immediately across the street from the very
school, still Jim-Crowed, to which the white kids still living in our
former 'hood were being bused. Black kids in the new 'hood walked to a
black school in another 'hood.

IAC, though Bob is a Catholic, he had attended public schools. I may
very well have been the first black person that he had ever seen in
the flesh. OTOH, the dearth of black Catholics was and is such that,
even had he gone to Catholic schools, he still might not have come
across any coloreds.

IME, StL English and LA Spanglish dialects in which the usage, "(a)
colored, (some) coloreds," exists. In LA,
Chicano-Spanish _colorado_ has crossed with English _colored_ to add
the meaning, "black person, African-American with no reference to skin
tone," to the Spanish word, whose regular meaning is "red." Spanish
_negro_ "(colored) black, nigger (in _trabajar como un negro_ "work
like a nigger"), dear, darling," the historical source of English
"negro, Negro," and _prieto_ "dark-, black-skinned," don't quite match
the various English terms semantically.

OTOH, Chicanos don't hesitate to use "nigger," when speaking English,
as has been my bitter experience. And this was in the '60's, long
before the movement of Chicanos into South-Central led to gang-warfare
between the "Eses" and the the bruz and cuz. In fact, I was in Echo
Park, at the time, nowhere near the territory of any racial or ethnic
gang of the day.

Richard Pryor once joked that the INS operates a language school to
train non-English-speaking immigrants in the use of "nigger."

--
-Wilson

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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