Legacies Project Oral History: David Elsila

Mon, 08/29/2022 - 11:48am

When: 2022

Transcript

[00:00:11] MALE_1: [OVERLAPPING] Unless you add a break-time if you feel like you need a break.
[00:00:38] INTERVIEWER: No, it's fine. Sounds good. [OVERLAPPING] Can you see this at all?
[00:00:45] FEMALE_1: No.
[00:00:45] FEMALE_2: Do you guys need any other assistance with anything?
[00:00:49] INTERVIEWER: Do you think everything looks good?
[00:00:51] FEMALE_2: Everything looks good to me. The audio is working? [BACKGROUND] [OVERLAPPING].
[00:01:23] INTERVIEWER: We've already talked about your primary fields of employment and how you got started with that, but what specific training did you need to get involved in your job?
[00:01:33] David Elsila: Well, my specific training was getting a degree at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, where I got a teaching certificate and I majored in English and Social Studies. I was the editor of the Eastern Echo, the college newspaper. I got a lot of training in writing and editing, doing the college paper and before that, the high school newspaper, Redford Union High School, and Redford County of Michigan, I was the editor of their paper. Right from the time I was a high-school student through college, I got a lot of training in journalism and that became my career.
[00:02:12] INTERVIEWER: What was the newspaper company you worked at, again?
[00:02:14] David Elsila: I worked at the Livonia Observer Newspaper and then afterwards became the editor of the American Teacher and Solidarity Magazine with the United Auto Workers.
[00:02:25] INTERVIEWER: What got you interested in those specific newspapers?
[00:02:28] David Elsila: Well, I was a teacher for four years and got involved in helping to organize teacher unions under the Michigan Teacher, and then the American Teacher were the publications of the American Federation of Teachers, and that's what got me interested in my career and my appreciation for the labor movement, for unions, got me involved.
[00:02:54] INTERVIEWER: What did you value most about working at a newspaper company?
[00:02:57] David Elsila: I enjoyed the editing. There was a review in Parade Magazine many years ago that asked what are the two most stressful jobs in America. The most stressful one was waiting on tables, servers in restaurants. Second one was editing. When you're editing a publication, you're always up against deadlines because you've got one deadline folding into a next and a next. It can create a lot of stress and a lot of anxiety to make sure that you've met those deadlines.
[00:03:31] INTERVIEWER: What do you think the biggest difference that you see from working at a newspaper back when you did verses what life is like working at a newspaper now?
[00:03:39] David Elsila: Well, I haven't worked on a publication for 20 years. I've been retired for 20 years. It's really hard to say, but I think today most of the media are involved in digital, with social media, with websites. There's probably a lot more skill involved in writing and reporting to keep up with the news on almost an hourly basis.
[00:04:08] INTERVIEWER: If you had the option would you go back and do the more older newspaper-styled articles or would you do an online thing?
[00:04:14] David Elsila: I think probably I'd go back to the original way. I like print journalism. Every morning, I spend about an hour and a half, two hours reading the New York Times at home and I do it not online, but with the actual newspaper. I guess I'm used to them, I'm used to the print media. I worked on two magazines so I'm more attuned to print than I am to websites.
[00:04:40] INTERVIEWER: What was a typical work day like?
[00:04:42] David Elsila: Typical work day was getting into my office and scanning the daily newspapers to find out what was going on, and then being in touch with local unions around the country, either with the Teachers Union or with the Automobile Workers Union, finding out what they were doing in terms of bargaining or striking or leading delegations to other countries, and trying to develop an idea of what the content of our next issue is going to be. We would gather together, all of our staff people, once a week and we would plot out what the publication was going to cover. We always tried to get a really good balance of bread-and-butter issues of social issues, illustrations, book reviews, movie reviews, and try to pull all of that together at our story conferences.
[00:05:37] INTERVIEWER: What was your favorite thing to write about?
[00:05:39] David Elsila: I think my favorite thing to write about was what was happening in the broader social movements with the civil rights movement, women's liberation and the issues of workers problems in other countries. We would send reporters to Mexico and to Korea and try to learn something about the problems that were being faced by people in other countries. Those are the kinds of things I liked to edit and write about.
[00:06:15] INTERVIEWER: How many places did you go to visit?
[00:06:17] David Elsila: I visited probably four or five different countries over the course of working and I enjoyed writing about them.
[00:06:29] INTERVIEWER: Do you remember which ones you visited?
[00:06:30] David Elsila: Yeah, I went to Mexico, I went to Chile, I went to Cuba, France, and Germany, and Austria.
[00:06:38] INTERVIEWER: Which one was your favorite?
[00:06:40] David Elsila: I enjoyed my trips to Cuba a lot. I had probably four or five trips down there over the years and made some good friends and learned about the culture and the music and the politics of that country.
[00:06:57] INTERVIEWER: Talking more about where you've lived in your life and how you've traveled, tell me a little bit more about the moves that you've made. Have you lived mostly in Michigan? Have you moved out of Michigan?
[00:07:07] INTERVIEWER: Have you been somewhere for a short period of time?
[00:07:10] David Elsila: Yeah, but it was born in Detroit, northwest Detroit near Finkell, and Wyoming streets, and was there until I was about five years old. Then my parents bought a house in Redford Township, which is the first suburb west of Detroit, and grew up there, went to Roosevelt Elementary School, Redford during the high school, and live there for going to school in Ypsilanti. I lived in Ypsilanti at Eastern Michigan University. Then stayed around Detroit Livonia for four or five years and then moved to Chicago, where the American Federation of Teachers was headquartered, and then after two years the AFT moved its headquarters to Washington DC. So we moved our whole family to DC and lived there for 10 years, and then a job offer comes at the United Auto Workers in Detroit. So we were able to pack up and move back to Detroit where our kids could get to know their grandparents. So we've lived in Detroit all of the rest of our lives.
[00:08:15] INTERVIEWER: How do you feel about living in Detroit?
[00:08:17] David Elsila: I enjoy it. There's a lot going on, the city is coming back. I think after a downturn, down period, there are a lot of challenges left, and so I'm very happy to be here.
[00:08:30] INTERVIEWER: What do you think those challenges include?
[00:08:32] David Elsila: Well, the challenges include mostly jobs. Finding income opportunities for the population, the unemployment rate in Detroit is much higher than it is nationally. Part of the reason is that so many factories moved overseas or moved to other parts of the country, and they left the jobs here, or they left the workers here without jobs and so finding jobs and finding economic opportunities, I think is the one big challenge for Detroit.
[00:08:59] INTERVIEWER: Have you had any trouble finding jobs or economic opportunities in Detroit?
[00:09:04] David Elsila: For myself, no.
[00:09:06] INTERVIEWER: Do you know someone who has?
[00:09:08] David Elsila: Well, I don't know anybody personally, but I know that looking at the statistics and the reports and the publications, there are thousands of people out of work would love to have jobs and they just can't find them.
[00:09:22] INTERVIEWER: So what's your favorite thing about living in Detroit?
[00:09:24] David Elsila: My favorite thing about living in Detroit is the vibrancy and the vitality of the community. If you drive into downtown Detroit these days, you're liable to get into a traffic jam and gridlock on the streets. I remember going to an event to downtown Detroit a couple of months ago and spending an hour looking for a parking spot. It's really crowded and it's so much different than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
[00:09:52] INTERVIEWER: Talking more about your family. How did your family life change when you retired?
[00:09:58] David Elsila: Well, my kids were college graduates at the time, and they had jobs of their own, and they moved out of the city. One moved to California, and later from there to Maryland and one moved to Philadelphia, one moved to Cleveland. So we were empty nesters. Our kids were gone, and we have this big three-story house in Grosse Pointe Park, and it just was too much for us. So about a year ago we decided to downsize, and we got rid of a lot of our things and moved into a much smaller place also in Grosse Pointe Park. That's where we've been living for the past year.
[00:10:42] INTERVIEWER: So what is your typical day like now for you?
[00:10:43] David Elsila: Pardon me.
[00:10:44] INTERVIEWER: What is a typical day like now for you?
[00:10:46] David Elsila: Typical day for me is working on the projects of the Michigan Labor History Society. Right now we're trying to put together a book that will have a map of Michigan with all of the important labor history sites, ranging from the Upper Peninsula where there was a big copper strike in 1913, to more recent events in Wayne County in Detroit in Southeastern Michigan. So I'm spending a lot of time putting together material, photographs, stories for that publication. We hope to publish maybe 50,000 copies of it and provide for schools and for museums and for libraries throughout the state. So that's what I'm spending a lot of time doing. In addition to that, we're still doing a lot of traveling. We are lucky enough to have a small place in Manhattan in New York, and so we go there pretty often, maybe about four months out of the year, and spent time in New York seeing friends and seeing Broadway plays and enjoying life in the city.
[00:11:52] INTERVIEWER: So how did you come about really liking New York City and getting a place there?
[00:11:57] David Elsila: Well, my son, Michael, got a job in New York as an organizer for the musician's union for the locally there were two of the American Federation of Musicians. He was offered a job as editor of their magazine Allegro. So we started visiting him, and we helped him get a place to live in Manhattan. He fell in love and got married and moved to Philadelphia. He had this apartment there, and we decided we were going to hang on to the apartment and use it as our urban cottage and use it several times a year. We go back and forth. It's a fast trip, you can fly from Detroit to New York in about an hour and 45 minutes, which we did two days ago.
[00:12:47] INTERVIEWER: You're going back tomorrow?
[00:12:48] David Elsila: I am going back tomorrow, yeah. I had come in for the interview and medical appointments and things.
[00:12:56] INTERVIEWER: What are some things that your family enjoys doing now?
[00:13:00] David Elsila: Right now, we love to spend time every summer for a month we rent a cottage on an island in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine. That becomes our family type where kids and our grandchildren, and my wife and I all gather together and have a good family time.
[00:13:18] INTERVIEWER: That's a lot of fun.
[00:13:19] David Elsila: It is, yeah.
[00:13:20] INTERVIEWER: What are your personal favorite things to do for fun?
[00:13:23] David Elsila: My personal favorite things probably seeing movies, and enjoying their time in Maine and walking through Central Park and walking around Manhattan, and just enjoying the cultural events there.
[00:13:41] INTERVIEWER: Do you still write at all?
[00:13:42] David Elsila: Oh, yeah. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm writing this book, this guide to labor history in Michigan. That's what's taking up a lot of my time right now.
[00:13:53] INTERVIEWER: So what made you interested in writing a book?
[00:13:57] David Elsila: Well, I've always been a partisan of the labor movement and I know that it's really important for people to know some of the background of labor. How did we get a 40-hour workweek? How did we get paid vacations? How did we get health care was largely through the labor movement. I would like to help people understand how these deeds in their lives came about, and they're doing a book on labor history, I think is a really important thing. This is the third book I've worked on. About 10 years ago, friends and I put together a book called the Working Detroit, which is a history of the labor movement in the city of Detroit. It's been published by Wayne State University. It's gone through a couple of different editions, and it's pretty popular book. Then about four years ago, friends and I wrote a book called The Color of Law, which is a biography of Ernie Goodman. Ernie was the premier civil liberties and civil rights lawyer in Detroit during the 1950s, 1940s, 1950s, and '60s. So we had a great deal of interest in his life, and a lot of fun in interviewing people like you're doing here today. Interviewing a lot of folks and putting together about a 350-page book.
[00:15:26] INTERVIEWER: What are the past books that you have written?
[00:15:29] David Elsila: Well, the Color of Law and Working Detroit.
[00:15:32] INTERVIEWER: So what do you think is different about this in your book compared to the other ones?
[00:15:36] David Elsila: Well, I think this book will be more popular, re-written. It will be aimed for high-school students and teachers, and to help them understand labor history. You'll be able to use this book for a road trip. You want to go off on a weekend or a week-long trip around Michigan and you can go up to the various highways in the sail all the way up to the Upper Peninsula, and stop and learn about what struggles went on in each of these areas.
[00:16:09] INTERVIEWER: Why do you think it's important that high schoolers to worry about labor history?
[00:16:13] David Elsila: Well, so much of our lives, so much of what we enjoy in living has come about because of the struggles and the labor movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and people need to understand that the only way you make progress, and you create a better life is through getting active in a movement. Among young people today, right now, the movement against gun violence is so important. There were those kinds of movements back and against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, for women's right to vote, for the abolition of slavery. All those things are so important for us to realize this as we're growing up and developing into citizens. I think that's one of the reasons for this book on labor history.
[00:17:03] INTERVIEWER: Do you have any plans for any upcoming books after this one?
[00:17:07] David Elsila: No.
[00:17:09] INTERVIEWER: We came back towards your life. We've talked to us a little bit. What are some events that you're particularly proud of doing a part of writing?
[00:17:23] David Elsila: Good question. I think the first social movement event that I can remember, it was fun. I was maybe 21 years old living in Redford Township Michigan, which was an all white community and trying to build a movement to promote racial justice and equality. Friend of mine, Ethyl Schwartz and I organized the repertory of citizens for better Human Relations. We started gathering people for regular meetings to talk about to about integration and discrimination. We ended up having a match in Redford Township within five mile road to promote open housing. We invited people from the NWACP, and Detroit to join us. We have this integrated March that ended up with a rally on the steps of the local Township Hall. That was the first opportunity I had to gather forces to help build a social movement. A few weeks after that, I was lucky enough to be in downtown Detroit when Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at after a huge match of 100,000 people, don't Woodward Avenue calling for civil rights and justice. He gave the first version of his very famous I Have a Dream speech there. We gathered at Cabell Hall and 100,000 people in downtown Detroit. Then on August 22nd, that year, two months later, I was able to go on a train from Detroit to Washington along with many, many other thousands of people from all over the country. We gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial and Dr. King gave the same speech there that he had given in Detroit. Those were probably the two earliest examples of how I was involved in building social movements. Then later on during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, I attended a lot of anti-war demonstrations. More recently, I guess the last thing that I participated in was the Detroit newspapers strike when for five years the reporters and advertising people at the Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press went out on strike over cutbacks and takeaways and I was actually arrested during that strike. I sat down doing peaceful civil disobedience and front of one of the Detroit News offices and a policeman came and gently lifted all of this away, took us down to a bus and to the local police station and had us booked and we were charged with disorderly conduct, even though we were very peaceful and we didn't do anything except block the entrance to Detroit News offices.
[00:20:38] INTERVIEWER: Did you go to trial for that?
[00:20:42] David Elsila: No the charges were eventually dropped.
[00:20:45] INTERVIEWER: Why do you think that is?
[00:20:46] David Elsila: I don't know. Good lawyers. But when I went out and the jury duty a few years after that, the judge goes around and says, Have you ever been arrested? I said, Yes, I was arrested for peaceful civil disobedience, reading the newspaper strike and the prosecution politely, excuse me from serving on a jury.
[00:21:09] INTERVIEWER: Now you have a past. Has your wife ever been involved in any kind activism?
[00:21:14] David Elsila: My wife has always been with me. It's civil rights marches and peace marches and yes, very much so.
[00:21:21] INTERVIEWER: Have your kids gone with you to that?
[00:21:23] David Elsila: Oh, yes, yes. In fact, remember once across the breakfast table in Detroit while the kids are growing up, they were maybe 13, 14 years old. My son looked across the table at me and said, Dad, why are we the only kids in our school who go to the Labor Day parade? I have to explain that to everybody. It became a real activist. In fact, Michael was arrested at the Detroit News as well. A group of students from the University of Michigan, which he attended the residential college, all participated in a sit down at the at the news during the newspaper strike and he was arrested.
[00:22:05] INTERVIEWER: Did they try him?
[00:22:06] David Elsila: No. Charges were eventually dropped.
[00:22:11] INTERVIEWER: How do you think activism has changed your life? How do you think your life would have been changed?
[00:22:17] David Elsila: It's really made me aware of the problems in our society and the fact that we have an obligation as citizens, as human beings to do what we can to protests bad things and to help create a better world.
[00:22:32] INTERVIEWER: I think a lot of our generation is really stepping up to that. I think a lot of things change when we come up to vote. Do you see that as a positive thing?
[00:22:41] David Elsila: I think it's a real positive thing that the number of signs I've seen around and around Detroit. Big billboards saying vote, vote. Well, tomorrow, November the sixth. I think there's a tremendous amount of interests and enthusiasm among young people to register to vote. I know you're not quite old enough yet to vote, but another year or two or you'll be out there voting and hoping to create a better society as a result.
[00:23:16] INTERVIEWER: What do you think is the best thing is for people our age should do to get our voices heard because we can't vote so we don't have that representation?
[00:23:23] David Elsila: But I think you can demonstrate, I think you can participate, I think can write letters to the editor. Certainly what the kids in Florida did after the school shooting down there and helped me to create a national movement against gun violence is a really good example of what kinds of things young people can do.
[00:23:45] INTERVIEWER: What advice would you give to young activists?
[00:23:47] David Elsila: I think the advice I would give to young activists is to study, learn, and act, and act on your principles and eventually find a job that reflects your values and your passions. When you decide what your career is going to be, when you decide what you're going to be studying in college or university, find something that really reflects what you believe in because having that kind of a job, as I was lucky enough to have, is really can make a big, big difference in your life. You don't want to be a drone and going into work and doing the same old thing every day. But you want to feel a passion for your job and what you're doing.
[00:24:33] INTERVIEWER: What advice would you give for your younger self?
[00:24:36] David Elsila: To my younger self? That's a very good question. I think, what I would tell my younger self is the same thing I just told you is to really find a, find something that you believe in and act on it. I was fortunate enough to be able to do that. I once heard a singer, Barbara Dean of Detroit blues and jazz singer, came in for a concert and I was much younger and she looked around the audience and she said, I will have one piece of advice for you and that is to find a job which reflects your values. Which is what I just said to you. I think that made a big impact on me and I was very happy to be able to do that.
[00:25:26] INTERVIEWER: Who do you think in your life have been the most influential people?
[00:25:30] David Elsila: I think Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, obviously. Whenever I get depressed about situations, about the political life and the struggles that are going on right now, I pick up a copy of, I'm trying to get the title. Howard Zinn book, People's History of the United States. He goes through chapter and verse of all of the struggles that have gone on over the years in the United States of small gains being made, big gains being made. The movement to get women the right to vote, the women's movement against slavery, all of these things over and over and over again. Recent same-sex marriage equality. These gains have been made over the years because people have struggled and people have been part of the movement to build a better life.
[00:26:35] INTERVIEWER: How has Martin Luther King Influenced your life?
[00:26:37] David Elsila: Well, I heard him twice in person, at least twice in person. And being able to go down to the south. I did in Mississippi during the battle for equal voting rights so I went down to Mississippi and covered that story for the American teacher magazine. And so was the words of Martin Luther King Junior who said, you've got to struggle and you can't just ignore things. You've got to be part of movements.
[00:27:11] INTERVIEWER: What was life like down in Mississippi compared to Urban Detroit?
[00:27:16] David Elsila: Well, I was only in Mississippi for a short time, but I was in a rural area. There was a lot of poverty. People were working on farms. But people who have the courage to come together, even though groups like the Ku Klux Klan were threatening their lives If they, if they dare to register and dare to vote. I was struck by the courage that those folks had. At least many organizers were shot and killed for their activism than they really put their lives on the line. That impressed me and showed me how important it is to be courageous and to act on your principles.
[00:28:05] INTERVIEWER: What do you think is the most courageous thing you've done?
[00:28:13] David Elsila: I don't have an answer to that.
[00:28:17] INTERVIEWER: That's fine. What is your strongest memory about the place that you grew up?
[00:28:24] David Elsila: I grew up in a small working class suburb, rent for township. It consisted of a lot of working class people who had jobs in industry, a few professionals. I remember just going off to school every day with students, my elementary school or high school. In my high school getting involved with the high school newspaper. Those are the memories I have.
[00:28:59] INTERVIEWER: What do you think is the way that you have influenced other people?
[00:29:04] David Elsila: Well, I hope as a classroom teacher, I influenced some people. I know that many years ago when I was working at the United Auto Workers at Solidarity Magazine, I got a letter from one of my former high-school students. Probably, this is probably 25 years before. She wrote me a letter and said, Mr. Elsila, I just want to thank you for taking me and other students in her class. I did hear Dr. King speak at Cabell Hall, and that really influenced my life so much, it changed my life. I was very proud of getting that letter and thinking that maybe I did have some influence on the students who I taught.
[00:29:52] INTERVIEWER: You've seen Dr. King, have you seen any really influential speakers?
[00:29:59] David Elsila: Well, there's a guy who maybe your grandparents used when they were raising their children, Benjamin Spock. He wrote a book called Baby and Child Care. For many years it was the Bible for taking care of young people. If you had a child and I had the chance to meet him once. In fact, when our son was just a few months old, he was speaking in our neighborhood in Washington. I took him over there and said, get a picture of you holding our son and I had a photograph of Dr. Spock holding my son.
[00:30:39] INTERVIEWER: Did you agree with his teachings?
[00:30:41] David Elsila: Well, he everything he said sounded at the time like the right way to treat your kids.
[00:30:54] INTERVIEWER: What was your ancestor like?
[00:30:57] David Elsila: My grandparents were all immigrants. They immigrated from Finland sometime in the late 19th century. And they came across in ships to Canada. Then from Canada they went to Soo, St. Marie, Michigan, into the Upper Peninsula and developed lives in the far Western reaches of the UP, near the towns of Kent, we've met in Cheso. They had a small farm, Then just 60 acres, and they were fishers. The Great Lakes, they fished for trout and white fish and had a small blacksmith's shop. I never was really able to communicate with them because they never learned the English language. They spoke Finnish at home, and they're store keepers. The shopkeepers in the neighborhood spoke Finnish so they didn't feel a real need to learn English. They had initial language, newspapers and radio programs. Unfortunately, I could not communicate with them.
[00:32:10] INTERVIEWER: Even though you couldn't communicate with them, do you think they had any influence over your life?
[00:32:14] David Elsila: Well, they certainly influenced my parents lives and ensuring that they influenced my life.
[00:32:19] INTERVIEWER: Do you have any siblings?
[00:32:19] David Elsila: Yes, I have a sister and I had a brother who passed away.
[00:32:26] INTERVIEWER: How was your relationship with your sister? Do you guys still talk?
[00:32:28] David Elsila: My sister lives in Western Michigan. In fact, we just visited her and her kids about two months ago and they're coming in for a family event two weeks from now. We do get together quite frequently and we email each other and play Words with Friends.
[00:32:51] INTERVIEWER: Is Words with Friends a game you play a lot?
[00:32:53] David Elsila: Oh, it's fun. It's a good way to wake up in the morning to see who has added something and gets your brain working.
[00:33:05] INTERVIEWER: One thing that I just asked at the beginning that I totally forgot about is when you went home to [inaudible 00:33:09] were there any stories that came to mind that you wanted to share?
[00:33:15] David Elsila: I think I've shared almost everything I can remember.
[00:33:19] INTERVIEWER: Could you do [inaudible 00:33:19]
[00:33:19] INTERVIEWER: Twenty minutes. Is there anything you want to talk about, anything specific to your second questions?
[00:33:32] David Elsila: I think you've done a really good job and asking questions and all of you have done a really fine job in interviewing. I think it's really helped me to remember things that I don't think about very often. But you've really picked my memory very well.
[00:33:51] INTERVIEWER: I don't like this part I think it's a lot of fun. Were you nervous coming in?
[00:33:57] David Elsila: No. I have an hour and 15 minute drive from Grosse Pointe Park from the east side of Detroit of here. That gives me an opportunity just to think about things in my life that you may or may not be interested in and help me prepare for answering questions.
[00:34:16] INTERVIEWER: I was nervous. What do I do if I can't think of a question? [OVERLAPPING] Because you have to think [inaudible 00:34:22] questions.
[00:34:23] David Elsila: You're doing a fine job. This is a really great way to learn interview skills and to learn the videography.
[00:34:32] INTERVIEWER: When you worked at a newspaper did you guys have anything like this?
[00:34:35] David Elsila: We didn't use a video but little report is notebooks and, you do a little background reading. You try to get as much information as you can, ahead of time, and then you ask questions. I don't think we ever used tape recorders in our interviews, but we learned very quickly how to write very quickly the answers and responses that people gave us.
[00:35:00] INTERVIEWER: We got a tiny little paragraph about you two guys, remember what it said?
[00:35:03] INTERVIEWER: Oh, a long time ago. I don't remember that.
[00:35:05] INTERVIEWER: We got a little caption, good to know. [OVERLAPPING] I think it said something about you working at a newspaper and being interested after this interview.
[00:35:17] David Elsila: That's a fair evaluation for sure, a great assessment. [LAUGHTER]
[00:35:24] INTERVIEWER: Do you guys have anything? No. Do you guys want to end there or do you guys want to go in?
[00:35:39] David Elsila: I mentioned I think last time or the time before, that it would be great to have you come down to downtown Detroit and take a look at the labor legacy landmark, and I'll give you a little tour. Maybe a couple of other places in downtown Detroit where we take people for labor history tours like the Woolworth's sit-down strike occupation from 1937 and the Grand Circus Park where Occupy Detroit took place and Central Methodist Church and Cadillac Square. A lot of really interesting sites down there. But the labor legacy landmark is magnificent. Really would like to give you an opportunity to see it.
[00:36:20] INTERVIEWER: So excited. I think you're planning on maybe sometime in the spring with a little bit more.
[00:36:24] David Elsila: Yeah. For sure.
[00:36:26] INTERVIEWER: I can get it so you can read how many cameras and video.
[00:36:31] David Elsila: Yeah. Good. Also, if you're ever interested, I've got some documents on my Red Squad file. I was accused of being a radical and a communist and all of the rest of that stuff during the McCarthy period. When there was a freedom of information, sue to get your files, hundreds of people around Detroit got their files. It's interesting that even our wedding photograph was in their files.
[00:37:03] INTERVIEWER: What was some stuff that was in there?
[00:37:05] David Elsila: Let's see. I was active in the Fair-play for Cuba Committee after the Cuban Revolution. Obviously, there was a government spy in the meetings and they would write down things about the different people who were there. They said David Elsa was sitting next to a brunette women who appeared to be his date. I don't have any idea.
[00:37:31] INTERVIEWER: Your wife?
[00:37:32] David Elsila: No, it wasn't my wife. No. This was before I was married to I was very young.
[00:37:36] INTERVIEWER: That's funny.
[00:37:38] David Elsila: Strange things like that.
[00:37:39] INTERVIEWER: Did you take a date to the meetings?
[00:37:40] David Elsila: Yeah, I don't know. But there were spies in the various meetings that I went to, the activities and the demonstrations, marches.
[00:37:49] INTERVIEWER: Did you ever figure out who they were?
[00:37:51] David Elsila: Pardon me.
[00:37:51] INTERVIEWER: Could you tell who they were?
[00:37:53] David Elsila: No. I have no idea who they were.
[00:37:55] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 00:37:55].
[00:38:00] David Elsila: I remember one. Yeah. This is interesting. When I got my Red Squad file, the guy who was handing them out said did you know Edward Elsa and I said that was my dad. Well, would you like his file? I couldn't figure that out because my father was a very conservative Democrat. No inclinations to activism or radicalism. But because I had borrowed his car to go to a meeting in Detroit where Paul Robeson, the famous singer, was singing in Hartford Baptist Church, Hartford Memorial Baptist Church. I parked the car outside the church. And so the Red Squad was going around taking down the license plates of all of the cars parked around the church to see who these dangerous people were who were going into hear Paul Robeson sing. Because that license plate belonged to my father's car, he got a file.
[00:38:56] INTERVIEWER: Did he ever find out about it?
[00:38:58] David Elsila: No, he passed away. He was dead at the time I got my files. But it was really strange.
[00:39:05] INTERVIEWER: Do you think he would have been mad if he found that he got Red filed because you drive his car?
[00:39:10] David Elsila: He would probably be really angry that the people in the Red Squad were doing such really stupid things. [LAUGHTER].
[00:39:19] INTERVIEWER: That's funny.
[00:39:20] David Elsila: Yeah. That was one thing I thought of afterward, I guess.
[00:39:24] INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Okay.
[00:39:28] David Elsila: Then one other thing that was interesting then I found out much later in my life, I think I mentioned in [NOISE] 1913, there was a big strike of copper miners in the Upper Peninsula in the Q&A area. My uncle's father was a minor and he was on strike, and the union organized a Christmas Eve for all of the children of the strikers in what was called the Italian Hall in K Unit. Somebody opened the door and yelled fire. Dozens of people caved on these steep steps and they were crushed to death because they couldn't get the doors open. My uncle and his brother were 10 years old and eight years old at the time. They were able to escape out the window of the second floor. But he lost his two little sisters, who would have been my aunts had they lived. They were just seven and five years old and they lost their lives. They were 73 people who were killed in that Italian Hall tragedy. You can Google Italian Hall and find out more details about it.
[00:40:43] INTERVIEWER: That's sad. First, we're laughing about the Red File and then we're talking about that. Was there anything else in your Red File?
[00:40:52] David Elsila: It's been so long since I've looked at them, but when I first looked at them, they obviously were following a lot of people, not just me but hundreds of people in the Detroit area. I worry sometimes that those kinds of activities could continue. Or right now, we're living in a period where there is a lot of invasion of privacy. If you are active is considered a dangerous movement by people in power, they may be watching.
[00:41:34] INTERVIEWER: What would you consider a dangerous movement nowadays?
[00:41:38] David Elsila: Well, people who are speaking out against what's going on in Washington. I think there may be people in DC who are saying that's dangerous. You can't organize. We're going to be watching you and yeah, it happens periodically throughout history. I remember reading in the newspaper this morning a story about the Japanese Americans who were interned into concentration camps in this country after the start of World War II. People who were of Japanese ancestry, like for citizens of America, if you lived on the West Coast, you were picked up, rounded up, and put it into concentration camps because your patriotism was suspect because you happen to have Japanese ancestors. That went on in the 1940s, the McCarthy period in the 1950s. What we're going through right now, I think there's a lot of, particularly people who are on the extreme right, who are attacking of folks because of their color or their faith. I think we're living in a dangerous time and I hope it doesn't get as bad as it did back in those days, but we got to always be on guard. We always have to be militant to make sure that whenever we see those things cropping up, we deal with them
[00:43:15] INTERVIEWER: When you come in next in the spring, you might have what we call a scanning party. Pretty much what we're going to do is you can bring documents or pictures and we're going to do some photo scanning. There's going to be doughnuts, I think.
[00:43:34] David Elsila: Okay.
[00:43:36] INTERVIEWER: We're just going to scan them all in and we can add them to the video. Do you still have your Red File?
[00:43:41] David Elsila: Yes.
[00:43:41] INTERVIEWER: Would you bring that?
[00:43:42] David Elsila: Sure.
[00:43:42] INTERVIEWER: That's really interesting. Thank you.
[00:43:44] David Elsila: Okay.
[00:43:45] INTERVIEWER: Any other things that you think about bringing, just bring all of it.
[00:43:50] David Elsila: Yeah. I'll bring some of the Labor History Society Publications. Then we'll set a date to go downtown and check out the Labor Legacy Landmark.
[00:44:00] INTERVIEWER: Bring your books if you have copies.
[00:44:02] David Elsila: Sure.
[00:44:02] INTERVIEWER: Yeah, anything you've written that's interesting.
[00:44:05] David Elsila: Pardon me.
[00:44:05] INTERVIEWER: Do you have things you've written?
[00:44:06] David Elsila: Yeah, sure. Be happy to bring copies of Solidarity Magazine and The American Teacher, which I edited. It's funny. I was editor of the American Teacher for 10 years and we had bound volumes of each issue each year. I say to myself, I've got my whole life, my whole career in five linear feet in all the bound volumes together.
[00:44:33] INTERVIEWER: That's funny. I think we're just about out of time
[00:44:38] David Elsila: Okay.
[00:44:39] INTERVIEWER: Anything else you'd like to share?
[00:44:40] David Elsila: Hey, I think this is a wonderful experiment and you folks are doing really good job of interviewing. I'm sure you're going to do a great job with the videos that you're doing. How many people are you doing this with besides me.
[00:44:56] INTERVIEWER: We have 15-20.
[00:44:59] David Elsila: 15-20, that's great. That was really good.
[00:45:02] INTERVIEWER: Yeah. I'm trying to get my great Grandpa to do it. I think it's really special.
[00:45:06] David Elsila: Yeah.
[00:45:06] INTERVIEWER: Something for your family to keep. You mentioned wanting.
[00:45:10] David Elsila: When I told my kids about this, they said they would look to see the roughs.
[00:45:17] INTERVIEWER: We can give them probably a USB or a CD that has all of it.
[00:45:19] David Elsila: Good, excellent. Well, thank you very much. This is great. We'll see you in the spring. Do you know yet what date or what month it's going to be?
[00:45:29] INTERVIEWER: We don't know. I'm not sure.
[00:45:31] David Elsila: Okay. But if you can give me like a month's notice or so or I'll just clear my schedule and make sure I'll be in town [OVERLAPPING]
[00:45:42] INTERVIEWER: Thank you.
[00:45:43] David Elsila: Thank you very much.
[00:45:49] INTERVIEWER: There we go. Can you see the mic in it?
[00:45:55] MALE_2: Yeah, that's fine. Sure. This is a class to teach and learn interviewing techniques and videography. Yeah. So it's already good.
[00:46:09] INTERVIEWER: Last year we did public policy.
[00:46:11] David Elsila: Yeah. [OVERLAPPING].
[00:46:29] INTERVIEWER: [BACKGROUND] We're just missing one person, but it's fine, we can just start. Let's start with this introducing line. Just to start, can you please say and spell your name?
[00:46:59] David Elsila: Sure. It's David Elsila, that's E-L-S-I-L-A.
[00:47:05] INTERVIEWER: Awesome. What is your birthday?
[00:47:08] David Elsila: My birthday is February 7th, 1939.
[00:47:11] INTERVIEWER: Awesome. How would you describe your ethnic background?
[00:47:17] David Elsila: Well, self-worth, my grandparents immigrated. They're immigrants. They were immigrants and they immigrated from Finland and I guess the early part of the 20th century and they came in through Canada. From Canada they crossed at Sault Ste. Marie into Michigan, and moved into the far western part of the Upper Peninsula, which is Keweenaw, and that's where a lot of Finnish immigrants settled. It was really interesting, they never learned English and I went through my whole life not being able to communicate with them because I didn't know what the Finnish language and they had a whole widespread Finnish community up there and with their own daily newspapers, they had two daily newspapers. They had a radio program later on, so they never felt the need to learn English, and so consequently, I could not communicate with them.
[00:48:19] INTERVIEWER: Awesome What is your religious affiliation if you have any?
[00:48:23] David Elsila: Well, I grew up in the Lutheran Church and I taught Sunday school for a while, but I think when I went to college, I drifted away and right now, I guess I call myself an agnostic.
[00:48:37] INTERVIEWER: What is the highest level of education that you've completed?
[00:48:41] David Elsila: I got a Bachelor of arts degree at Eastern Michigan University and did some postgraduate work there too.
[00:48:48] INTERVIEWER: What did you do after that? What work did you pursue?
[00:48:53] David Elsila: Well, I became a classroom teacher for about four-and-a-half years. It's where I my wife, I was teaching eighth grade in Livonia public schools and my wife was teaching seventh grade. And she was across the courtyard from me and I was over on this side, she was on the outside, and so we eventually met and started dating and got married in 1965.
[00:49:20] INTERVIEWER: Awesome. Then did you have kids? If so, how many kids do you have?
[00:49:25] David Elsila: Pardon me?
[00:49:27] INTERVIEWER: You're saying you had kids, right?
[00:49:28] David Elsila: Yeah. Right. We have three children and six grandchildren. I taught for about four-and-a-half years and then there was a period of time when teachers were organizing into unions and the state legislature in Lansing passed a bill that provided collective bargaining rights for teachers and the right to strike for public employees, so I got very much involved in organizing the union and became editor of the Michigan teacher, which was a monthly statewide newspaper for American Federation of Teachers members in Michigan. I used to write the stories, edit it, lay it out, take it to the printer down in Flat Rock, Michigan, and pick up the copies after they were printed, and took them out to presidents of local teacher unions around me, Southeastern Michigan, and dropped off bundles there. And the presidents of the locals would then distribute them in public schools to their members. I did that for about three years and then I was hired as editor of the American Teacher and we moved to Chicago and then from Chicago to Washington DC. The American Teacher was the national publication of the AFT of the American Federation of Teachers. I did that for about 10 years and then I had a job offer to come back to Detroit to work as editor of Solidarity magazine for the United Auto Workers and was editor for Solidarity for 22 years. We moved back here, not just for the job, but also, because we wanted our kids to learn where their grandparents were and my parents and my wife's parents both lived in the Detroit area, so it was a good chance for our kids to know their grandparents.
[00:51:30] INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you a few question about your childhood. What was your family like when you were a child?
[00:51:37] David Elsila: Well, I had a brother and a sister. I was born in Detroit, lived in Detroit for the first five years of my life, near Finkell and Wyoming Streets in the Northwest part of the city. And 1945, I guess when I was five or six years old, my parents moved out to [inaudible 00:51:58] Township, which was the first suburb west of Detroit. That's where I spent most of my years, went to elementary school and junior high school and high school there. That was my childhood.
[00:52:23] INTERVIEWER: Just one thing. For the rest of the questions, can we look a little less at the camera and look a little more at me,m
[00:52:29] David Elsila: Look a little more to you?
[00:52:31] INTERVIEWER: A little bit more at me, a little less at the camera.
[00:52:33] David Elsila: Sure. Absolutely.
[00:52:40] INTERVIEWER: That's okay. What were you like growing up, and into high school, what were you most interested in? What was your passion?
[00:52:45] David Elsila: Well, my passion was writing and editing and so I became editor of our high school newspaper and did that for a couple of years when I was a junior and a senior. That was always my passion. English and writing were my favorite classes. I was on the debate team, I was in a couple of school plays. One of the most interesting parts of my high school life was when I was a senior. Our student council had a monthly assembly program and I had heard this folk musician, Pete Seeger, was well-known singer. I invited Pete to come and sing for an assembly. I was on the student council program committee. Pete came and it was the height of the McCarthy period where people were being suspected of being communists and subversives and Pete could not get a job any place, even though he's this great singer. He sang at Obama's inauguration along with Bruce Springsteen, but back then, these dark days of the McCarthy period, he was being blacklisted, so he would make a living by going to high schools and colleges and singing for $60. The interesting part of the story is, the next day two government agents, and I don't know whether they were from the FBI or wherever, but they came and they demanded to know from the principle of our school, what were the words to the songs that Mr. Seeger sang. They we're looking for some fruits of influence, I guess, but that's an example of how bad things were in those days.
[00:54:59] INTERVIEWER: I'm trying to think about like you're writing, like how do you think pursuing writing like impacted your life?
[00:55:10] David Elsila: Well, I'm not sure I read a lot when I was a kid. When I was in kindergarten I could read, and in fact it remember the principle of our elementary school, yanking me out of kindergarten class and taking [LAUGHTER] me to the first and the second grade classes and saying this kid can read and he's only a kindergartener and if he can read then you can learn to read. I did a lot of fiction mostly and some non-fiction, but we have translated into writing. I used to do family newspapers. When I got to high school, I started writing for the school paper and eventually became the editor. I just have always enjoyed it. That's what my career ended up being editor of two publications, the American teacher and solidarity magazine.
[00:56:03] INTERVIEWER: You were telling us about how you were helping with that thing on the river front?
[00:56:09] David Elsila: Since I retired from the UAW, I've gotten involved with the Michigan Labor History Society, which is a group of people from the Detroit area who were very much interested in studying the history of unions and workers and labor, and so we do bus tours all around Southeastern Michigan to the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn to early automobile factories to places where there were sit-down strikes in the 1930s. We tell these really exciting stories. One of the stories I think I mentioned last time was when you go by the old Woolworths Five and dime department store in downtown Detroit, Woodward Avenue. There was a place where in February 1937, 108 young women as young as 16 years old, 17-years-old who were working there, decided that they had had enough. They were not getting paid very well and they have to buy their own uniforms. They decided we're going to demand some raises, and they are very gently ushered all of the customers L, 11:00 on Saturday morning or very busy time. They put big posters in the windows of the store on Woodward Avenue that said, all we want as a living wage, and for six days, they locked themselves inside refusing to move until the management gave them a raise. They put up sleeping bags in the aisles. They gave themselves hairdos, they cooked for each other, and they had dances. This is an interesting part of it. Some of the women said, I can go on strike and stay here. I've got a date on Saturday night and my boyfriend is really going to be upset if I do this, and so the union organized what they call it a loved Booth, the curtains up an area, and you can have five-minutes and privacy with your boyfriend, and that was enough to encourage everybody to purchase of eight. But anyway, you asked about the labor legacy landmark on the Detroit River. One of the things we did, starting about 15 years ago during Detroit's, 300th anniversary or 300th anniversary of the arrival of French explorers. Led by Cadillac we decided we wanted to give a gift to the city of Detroit, honoring the 300 years of the city, so we collected donations from individuals, from unions and for mothers. And we built this huge 62 foot high arch right now, the Detroit River at heart plaza. It's called the labor legacy landmark, and it's surrounded by bronze sculptures that tell the story of Detroit, its workers and its history. We have a central platform with quotations from the labor movement, civil rights movement, religious leaders and others about human rights and civil rights and worker rights, and so that's a very popular tourist destination. Now if people come to Detroit and circum, really an icon of the city, labor legacy landmark. Go down and visit it to maybe get your teachers to do a field trip, and I'll be glad to go down there and meet with you and take you around the walkways.
[00:59:58] INTERVIEWER: I just didn't know what was happening. Sorry. Because we teach even on the outside of one side. Just went down and read it. Sorry.
[01:00:06] INTERVIEWER: No, that's okay. She's going to take over. What was the last time we kind of went off script? We have been talking about lots of stuff and Detroit. [OVERLAPPING] You can go off do you want me just ask that it wasn't he he doesn't want to ask.
[01:00:29] INTERVIEWER: You guys already. Cities on the ice needs to know. Do you know any stories about my family name.
[01:00:41] David Elsila: Do I know any stories about my family name? I know that it's a finished name. And I went on Google a few times and looked it up. Elsila, E-L-S-I-L-A it's not a very common name, and I found some probably long-lost relatives in Finland who are on Google, and actually, I found a person on Facebook as my identical name David, Elsila, even my middle initial it turns out that he lives in Milwaukee and does in the military and did a little bit of genealogical research and found that his grandfather and my grandfather were cousins, and so they split up and they eventually got married and named their children, David, A Elsila. Never just total coincidence. I never have met the guy, corresponded with him briefly on Facebook, but that's the only thing I know about Elsila is not a very common, even Finland, but there are a few people with that name. There.
[01:01:55] INTERVIEWER: Are there any like naming traditions?
[01:01:58] David Elsila: Naming traditions? We named our son Michael with a K, M-I-K-E-I which is a Finnish spelling of the name Michael, and he didn't like it at first, but he's gotten used to it. One of our daughters, we have twin daughters and one of them we named Kari, which is K-A-R-I, which is a Finnish name also. Those are the only traditions like we have.
[01:02:27] INTERVIEWER: All your family is from Finland?
[01:02:27] David Elsila: My grandparents were born in Finland and were immigrants, immigrated here in the early part of the 20th century and settled in the Upper Peninsula. My wife's family came from Russia and from Hungary. They were Jewish settlers who came to this country and settled in Cleveland and Detroit, and then some of them in New York City as well.
[01:02:56] INTERVIEWER: Why did you answer [inaudible 01:02:57] ?
[01:02:59] David Elsila: Well, it's an interesting story. The family lore is that my grandmother on my mother's side got sea sick on the boat over here from Europe. And she bought you would never go back on the ocean. And of course there was there was no airplane travel at that point. If you're going to go back home, you had to go by sea and she wouldn't go. But I've done some research since. I think what happened, I think are the real story which I never heard from my family is Finland was under the control of the Russian czars. At that time. The czars, we're redrafting men, young men to the Russian army and a lot of young Finnish men didn't want to serve, and so they decided they were going to immigrate. And a whole bunch of them immigrated to North America, to Canada into the United States, and I think that's probably what brought my grandfather here with his wife.
[01:04:02] INTERVIEWER: Do you know how your grandparents were living?
[01:04:09] INTERVIEWER: Where they were originally or?
[01:04:09] David Elsila: Well, they settled in the western part of the Upper Peninsula in the copper mining area in what's called the [inaudible 01:04:15] . They got a 60 acre farm just outside of the city of Calumet. It's on Lake Superior. Their two sons became fishermen and they head boats that they would take out on Lake Superior and they would fish for trout and for whitefish. They did that for a while. Then a lot of the people up there, I think some of my relatives were miners in the copper mines. In 1913 there was a huge strike of copper miners in the Calumet and heckle mining company which was the big mining company throughout that part of Michigan. On Christmas Eve in 1913, the Union, the Western Federation of miners held a Christmas party for the kids of the strikers. They held it in a place called the Italian Hall which was on the second floor of a building on 7th Street in Calumet. Everybody was having a good time. There was a big Christmas tree and there was music and there was singing, they were passing out gifts to the kids of the strikers. Then somebody opened the door down on the street level and yelled fire. There was no fire, but somebody yelled fire and really panicked the people who were up there and kids just piled down this very narrow staircase to the street level. They suffocated, 72 people were killed that evening, that Christmas eve evening. They couldn't get the doors open at the bottom of the staircase, they just piled up on the staircase. My uncle Ted was in the other party. His father was a striking minor, my uncle Ted was at the party with his brother and two sisters. He had his brother who were 10 years old at the time, 10 and 8 years old. Were able to get out the second floor window and escaped. But the two little sisters who would have been my aunts, they were killed in the crush.
[01:06:38] INTERVIEWER: Was there a pilling up?
[01:06:40] David Elsila: A piling up, yeah. They just piled up. There are a number of books about this and if you google Italian Hall disaster you'll find a complete description of it. Let's see. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the Italian Hall massacre and was quite an event. About 10-15 years ago I was on a road trip in Detroit and we ended up in Calumet doing some research on labor history around the state. We read a bar in Calumet. I heard a couple of guys talking about the Italian Hall and I beckoned them over and I said, what do you know about the Italian Hall and he said, well, we're opera singers and we've just written and performed an opera here about that Italian Hall disaster of 1913. I said, my two relatives would have been my answer, they were in that hall and they were killed. They said, what was their last name and I said their last name was [inaudible 01:07:48] and they immediately began to sing their names. It was a really moving experience because they had incorporated the names of all 72 victims into the opera.
[01:08:04] INTERVIEWER: That's so cool. I'm just going to go on a different page.
[01:08:11] David Elsila: Sure.
[01:08:14] INTERVIEWER: I don't know if you guys already ask these questions [inaudible 01:08:17] [OVERLAPPING]. This one?
[01:08:23] INTERVIEWER: On topic. I'll leave it as well.
[01:08:29] INTERVIEWER: Well, one question was, when we were talking about your grandparents, we'll be off the subject in a second but do you know how your grandparents met?
[01:08:36] David Elsila: No. [OVERLAPPING] As I mentioned earlier before you got here, they never learned English. They could only speak Finish because so many Fins moved to that part of the UP. They had two papers, opossum, [FOREIGN] and later on they had a Finish radio program. The merchants in the grocery stores could speak their language so they never felt a need to learn English and so consequently I could not speak with them because Finish is a very complicated language and I never learned.
[01:09:14] INTERVIEWER: Now we're going to go on to [inaudible 01:09:15].
[01:09:17] David Elsila: Okay.
[01:09:19] INTERVIEWER: Where did you grow up?
[01:09:21] David Elsila: Pardon me.
[01:09:24] INTERVIEWER: What is one of your favorite memories from when you were a child?
[01:09:27] David Elsila: My favorite memories from when I was a child.
[01:09:31] INTERVIEWER: Really biggest memories.
[01:09:33] David Elsila: Well, I think one of the earliest memories I had was during World War II. My father had contracted polio as a young person so he had problems walking and so he was not drafted into the army. What he was able to do though was become what was called an air raid warden. Whenever there was a potential of an enemy aircraft in the US borders air raid wardens would go out and make sure that all of the host lights in the neighborhood were turned off or were covered with the blackout shades. He would go up and down the streets and our neighborhood in northwest Detroit and make sure that there were no lights showing which could be visible to pilots of would be bombers. Never really happened. It was a precaution and Detroit was never bombed. I think there were some enemy activity on the East Coast and on the West Coast but Detroit was called the arsenal of democracy. That was where the automobile plants have been turned into building airplanes and tanks and syllogism vulnerable areas so it was a very important thing. That's one of my earliest memories. I think I was about three or four years old when my father would go log on air raid duty. Another interesting thing that happened is we didn't have a lot of money. Our family was was not prosperous, we were pretty poor. On Christmas one year we wanted to get a Christmas tree and my father had waited until the last minute to go out to buy a Christmas tree and all he could get were two little Charlie brown [LAUGHTER] tiny trees. He actually took them and put them together on top of each other to create a larger tree. I remember that when I was maybe about four years old, five years old.
[01:11:32] INTERVIEWER: Did you have any siblings?
[01:11:34] David Elsila: I had a brother who passed away and I have a sister who lives southwestern part of Michigan.
[01:11:41] INTERVIEWER: One of the questions is, what different languages are spoken in your household [inaudible 01:11:47]?
[01:11:48] David Elsila: Different languages?
[01:11:49] INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
[01:11:49] David Elsila: English and Finish. [OVERLAPPING] My parents were Finish because they grew up with Finish parents. They were fluent in English and in Finish.
[01:11:59] INTERVIEWER: But they were born in America.
[01:12:00] David Elsila: They were born in America, yeah. They were born in the UP and they immigrated to Detroit in about 1920s, 829 degree Great Depression and when they wanted to say something to each other that they didn't want us kids to understand they would speak to each other in Finish and we didn't know what they were saying.
[01:12:21] INTERVIEWER: [LAUGHTER] What work did your father and mother do?
[01:12:28] David Elsila: My father was a worker up the stimulants company on Woodrow Wilson in Detroit, Woodrow Wilson Avenue and they made small dental toothpicks to clean your gums and your teeth and you can still buy them at CVS or at Walgreens, they're a popular product. I continue to use them. He helped develop the machinery and looked for the right word to use in developing the product and my mother worked as a waitress at places like Masonic Temple in Detroit. Then eventually she got a job in the school cafeteria of my elementary school.
[01:13:20] David Elsila: I found an old 1929 poke directory that listed everybody's name who was living in Detroit at that time and my father had just come down from the UP apparently and he was listed living in Highland Park, Michigan and working at a Briggs manufacturing company plant on the east side of Detroit, and his occupation was listed as a nickel polisher. Which a guest nickle was used as a metal that was used in a lot of parts for automobiles and so his job was to, I guess polish it.
[01:13:59] INTERVIEWER: [LAUGHTER] Did you have any favor when you were younger like favorite toy and favorite games to play?
[01:14:10] David Elsila: Yeah. I mentioned earlier I like to read a lot. It's mostly a reader, but we play the usual child with games like monopoly. Eventually I got a little older and a little more adepted at spelling just I played Scrabble and I still play Scrabble to this day.
[01:14:36] INTERVIEWER: Did you have any special family traditional that you do with holidays?
[01:14:41] David Elsila: Yeah. We had Thanksgiving meals together and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The typical holidays. Then every summer, when we were kids, we would go up to the Upper Peninsula to my grandparents farm and we would spend 4-6 weeks up there living on the farm and swimming in Lake Superior and picking blueberries and thimble berries, which are very rare kind of berries found only on the UP.
[01:15:14] INTERVIEWER: This is a lot of questions about regarding your preschool. Do you remember anything from preschool?
[01:15:21] David Elsila: I did not go to preschool. We didn't have preschool on those days.
[01:15:24] INTERVIEWER: Really?
[01:15:24] David Elsila: No, they didn't know.
[01:15:26] INTERVIEWER: They had none of that.
[01:15:27] David Elsila: Preschool is something that's been developed just in recent years.
[01:15:34] INTERVIEWER: Where did you go to high school?
[01:15:36] David Elsila: I went to high school or Redford Union High School in Redford Township.
[01:15:40] INTERVIEWER: Is it a public or [OVERLAPPING]
[01:15:41] David Elsila: Public school? Yeah. Only 700 students, pretty small.
[01:15:48] INTERVIEWER: Did you go onto any career training after that or college after high school?
[01:15:53] David Elsila: Yeah. I got a Bachelor of Arts degree at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and then became a classroom teacher for both four-and-a-half years and the Livonia Michigan Public Schools. From there, I got active with the teachers union movement. I became editor of the Michigan teacher, and later on the American teacher in Chicago in Washington. Then later on for solidarity magazine at the United Auto Workers.
[01:16:28] INTERVIEWER: Did you play any sports or engage in extra curricular?
[01:16:30] David Elsila: Extracurricular activities, verbosely, academic, was on the debate team at our high school, didn't play these sports.
[01:16:40] INTERVIEWER: Now we're going to go on to popular culture for when you were young.
[01:16:43] David Elsila: Sure.
[01:16:45] INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the popular music of your time?
[01:16:48] David Elsila: Popular music of our time was.
[01:16:50] INTERVIEWER: Your favorite music.
[01:16:53] David Elsila: I don't think I have a real clear recollection of that. There standard pop music, if you listened to 1950s music, you'll get a sense of what was popular. Can't think of any tunes right now. But I gravitated toward listening to a lot of folk music and listen to Pete Seeger and the Weavers and the people who saying about social issues, topical songs. Those are my favorites.
[01:17:29] INTERVIEWER: What were the popular clothing, or hair style?
[01:17:34] David Elsila: Oh, I don't know, sweaters and genes and nothing special. You know what? When I was very young, probably 7-8 rather the boys would wear these knickers. That came down to about here. Then there was an elastic. Those didn't last. Those were not in style for very long but, everybody wore them at the time those are the mid 40s.
[01:18:05] INTERVIEWER: Well, the questions is can you think of any slang terms or phrases words you guys used that are used today. [NOISE] [inaudible 01:18:20]
[01:18:20] David Elsila: [LAUGHTER] I can't think of any I'm sorry.
[01:18:22] INTERVIEWER: I got those from music, it's okay. What was the typical day like for you when you were younger? It doesn't matter that you can say when you [OVERLAPPING]
[01:18:29] David Elsila: It's a typical day, was getting up and getting dressed for school and getting on my bike and for elementary school, I could just walk across the backyard and it'd be right at Roosevelt Elementary School. When I got to high school, we didn't have junior high schools in those days. You went straight from elementary to high school and I would on the bike and ride to my high school which was about maybe mile and a half away. One interesting thing, I think what got me involved, what got me interested in the labor movement and workers issues and social issues was getting dressed for school one morning, and I switched it on the radio and somehow I got the different stations, and what I normally listen to it was radio station CKLW from Windsor from Canada. The broadcast was called Eye Opener, and it was a news and commentary program sponsored by the UAW, the other workers. The guy was talking about human rights and civil rights and economic justice and social justice, his name was guide none. He had a very gravelly voice he was educated in Britain, and a lot of what he said, made a lot of sense. I started gravitating toward a progressive political and social point of view as a result of that radio show. I think it was maybe one reason why I went into communications, into newspaper work, and magazine work was important to communications where it is and what you're learning here and doing videography is a direct continuation of that a process.
[01:20:29] INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
[01:20:29] David Elsila: Then another interesting [NOISE] story is one of my assignments in high school was to work as a Library Assistant. I would work in the library for an hour every day. We had a rather conservative old teacher, librarian. She kept a folder in the stacks in the back, it was labeled Communist Propaganda. Essentially, if that's interesting, what's inside there. When she wasn't looking, I opened it up and I found copies of the New Republic Magazine and the Nation magazine, neither of which were communists, they were liberal progressive publications. I started reading those and that was what I had heard on the UAW radio program, persuaded me that I'm going to be a part of the movement for social justice and for human rights and for civil rights. I ended up in 1963, go into the March on Washington where I heard Dr. Martin Luther King give his I Have a Dream speech, which he had given two months earlier. I had heard it in Detroit. He spoke down at Cabell Hall and he gave his I Have a Dream speech there when I went to Washington on the train two months later in August of 1963. There he is giving this speech. I said, yeah I've heard that speech before. It struck me that I had heard him give that speech in Detroit two months earlier.
[01:22:10] INTERVIEWER: That's amazing that you found that passion to your maze. That's so cool you went to Washington and saw that.
[01:22:18] David Elsila: We have one other interesting thing along those lines. They telling us grew up in Redford Township which is the first suburb west of Detroit was all white. We organized a group called the Redford's citizens for better human relations, very moderate sounding name. We decided we should be open housing here. We should invite people from every ethnicity and race to live in this wonderful community. We held an open housing match, though in five-mile road, the main drag in the city, and we ended up on the steps of the Township Hall. We invited the N.W.A CP from Detroit to come and join us. We had an integrated match for open housing and the reaction from the right winners in the conservative in the township was really viciously plastered or photographs over one of the local newspapers and, harassed us, but we persevered. Today many years later, Redford is probably about 35-40% African American. I think hopefully helped pave the way for that change.
[01:23:36] INTERVIEWER: That's cool. Sorry, I'm just trying to find one because all of these are the something.
[01:24:02] INTERVIEWER: So how did you and your wife meet?
[01:24:04] David Elsila: Well were both teachers at Bryant Junior High School in Livonia when you're six mile in Merryman road and I taught 8th grade and my wife Katie taught 7th grade and that was a courtyards separating the 8th grade wing and the 7th grade wing so our classroom spaced to each other across the courtyard and we met as teachers and started dating and in fact she asked me on the first date. She said that her uncle had given her tickets to Fisher Theater in Detroit and would I like to go to a play with her? We did and that started a long-term relationship and we got married a few years later and we had three kids, six grandchildren.
[01:24:55] INTERVIEWER: Did I already asked what the name of the school was that you taught?
[01:24:59] David Elsila: Bryant Junior High School in Livonia.
[01:25:02] INTERVIEWER: What are your kids names?
[01:25:04] David Elsila: Our son is Michael and our twin daughters are Jamie and Carrie.
[01:25:11] INTERVIEWER: Did you guys know you're going to have twins either way?
[01:25:14] David Elsila: No we found out about two months before the due date and the doctor ordered Katie to sit on a coach and don't move for two months, she could move a little bit around the house but not going outside or anything, you have really had to conserve your energy and the twins came without any problem. Michael, our son was two years older and the twins were born two years after him.
[01:25:43] INTERVIEWER: Can I ask a question?
[01:25:46] David Elsila: Yeah
[01:25:47] INTERVIEWER: Was your wife also involved in activism and social justice [inaudible 01:25:51] ?
[01:25:53] David Elsila: Not probably in as much as I was but as we talked we learned more about each other and she became understanding of a progressive social values and she came from a family that were members of the Birmingham temple which was a synagogue or a temple that was led by a rabbi who was an agnostic given an atheist the traditional Jewish values and views but not necessarily very religious so she didn't have that kind of the observance religious background.
[01:26:41] INTERVIEWER: That's exactly how my rabbi is?
[01:26:42] David Elsila: Yeah
[01:26:42] INTERVIEWER: Is it like more of Jewish morals. We talked about traditions you and your family of your mother and father have, do you guys have any traditions like you and your wife and your children?
[01:26:57] David Elsila: Well as our kids were growing up we had a secular home and we celebrated our Passover, Hanukkah and Christmas as secular holidays, nothing that had religious connotations to it. Then it ended up that my son Michael has become quite observant. He lives in Philadelphia. and he and his wife met at an event sponsored by a group in New York City called Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, JREJ and they got married eventually and they belong to a congregation in Philadelphia that is a feminist congregation that's called the reconstructionism and so they're very active in the Jewish community there and they observe the Sabbath and it's quite interesting to watch them raise their children that way.
[01:28:07] INTERVIEWER: I know you and your wife go in New York a lot?
[01:28:10] David Elsila: Yeah.
[01:28:11] INTERVIEWER: What are the favorite things do you guys do there while you're in there?
[01:28:15] David Elsila: We tried to see as many places as we can and we have friends there and we belong to this Theater Development Fund where if you're a retired person or an educator you can get half-price tickets for Broadway shows so we take advantage of that lot and see a lot of Broadway shows.
[01:28:38] INTERVIEWER: I'm going to read this.
[01:28:41] David Elsila: We walk in Central Park a lot. The apartment we have is just a block from Central Park and we walk down there and sit in strawberry fields in hear of singers doing John Lennon songs and Beatles songs and occasionally Yoko Ono shows up sits at the park bench and we come across her.
[01:29:05] INTERVIEWER: When thinking about your life after retirement and when your kids left home after the present time, what important social or historical events were taking place and how did they personally affect you?
[01:29:17] David Elsila: Well, this is before our kids left home but the war in Vietnam was probably the biggest event of our time and we were marching in the streets and we were protesting and we lived in Detroit at that time and we would take buses to Washington DC and peak at the White House and took part in many activities like that. Eventually in 1976 we ended up moving to Washington and so whenever there was a demonstration there we were right there and our friends from Detroit would come in and sleep on the floor in our apartment and that was one of the big activities and of course the Civil Rights Movement the same way we marched in many civil rights demonstrations over the years and actually I was working at one point for the American teacher and we set up what we called Freedom Schools in Mississippi and volunteer teachers would go there to help provide an education to African-American kids who were not being treated very well in the public schools and so during the summers we would be there to help teach them.
[01:30:45] INTERVIEWER: When did your kids moved to?
[01:30:48] David Elsila: Let's see. Well our son moved to New York after he graduated from the University of Michigan and he got a job with the American Federation of Musicians. He's the editor of Allegro the musician's union magazine in New York although he lives in Philadelphia he is able to telecommute to New York and do his job. One of our daughters Jamie joined the Peace Corps after graduating from Kalamazoo College and she was in East Africa for about two-and-a-half years, came back went to Stanford and got a job with NASA and she is a scientist for NASA in Greenville, Maryland at Goddard Space Center where she analyzes Moon rocks and space dust looking for signs of life out there in outer space. Just saw the movie last night called First Man which I recommend tell about the Neil Armstrong first trip to the moon. Our other daughter Carrie lives in Cleveland Heights and is working for a group that writes grants for funding for non-profit organizations.
[01:32:12] INTERVIEWER: Your kids sound like somewhat the most successful people I know. What family [inaudible 01:32:23] do you posses?
[01:32:27] David Elsila: I think of of panting my mother-in-law, my wife's mother painted and a couple of signs and the pieces of art that were in my parents homes but not too much in the way of family heir rooms.
[01:32:52] INTERVIEWER: That's cool, if they're passed down to you.
[01:32:55] David Elsila: Yeah.
[01:32:57] INTERVIEWER: Thinking back on your entire life, what are you most proud of that you got done and succeeded?
[01:33:04] David Elsila: What I'm I most proud of? Well, having a family for one thing you know and helping to raise three kids who have gotten into non-commercial work, the outside of the private sector I'm very happy about the career paths that they have chosen and I guess looking back I think that being part of social movements that try to effect change in our lives and the economy and the way our country is governed in the way our world is searching for peace, being involved in social and political movements I think I'm very proud of that.
[01:33:50] INTERVIEWER: Good.
[01:33:52] INTERVIEWER: We have that camera that's running battery so we can have two more minutes and then one more question we can wrap it up.
[01:34:04] INTERVIEWER: What advice would you give to my generation? Because I know that we protest a lot in my generation. I didn't know that back then people were still protesting for their rights, that's really cool. To my generation, what advice can you give them?
[01:34:20] David Elsila: Well, the advice I heard from Barbara Dean, who is a Detroit blues singer on the West Coast, snow in the Bay Area. But she came back and did a concert here several years ago. From the stage, she said to all of us in the audience, and I think it applies to everybody no matter what your age is. It is to live your life with passion and find a job, find a career that matches your values and what you really believe in. Don't go out and just get a job for some company just to make money, but try to incorporate your own values in what you do for your life.
[01:35:03] INTERVIEWER: Do we have more time?
[01:35:09] INTERVIEWER: I was going to say die [inaudible 01:35:10].
[01:35:10] INTERVIEWER: Is that good?
[01:35:13] David Elsila: Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Good. Right. Okay.
[01:35:18] INTERVIEWER: That was great. Thank you so much.
[01:35:19] David Elsila: Good. I guess I'll see you Monday at 10:30, 27th?
[01:35:24] INTERVIEWER: I believe. We have a water [inaudible 01:35:28].
[01:35:28] INTERVIEWER: We have a few questions.
[01:35:31] David Elsila: Sure.
[01:35:32] INTERVIEWER: But not a lot so we'll discover.
[01:35:39] David Elsila: Good. Okay.
[01:35:40] INTERVIEWER: Let's see. Oh, yeah.
[01:35:41] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 01:35:41] speaking.
[01:35:45] David Elsila: Hi. Sure. All right. Testing one two.
[01:35:47] INTERVIEWER: All good?
[01:35:47] David Elsila: Okay.
[01:35:48] INTERVIEWER: Okay. Just so you know we're, for your video, we're taking a theme of your activism and what, I'm passionate about that in writing and stuff.
[01:35:59] David Elsila: Okay.
[01:36:01] INTERVIEWER: That's like why these are.
[01:36:03] David Elsila: Okay.
[01:36:04] INTERVIEWER: Our first question is, how did your love and skill of writing help you make an impact?
[01:36:09] David Elsila: I think I started off writing when I was a high school student and I became editor of the high school newspaper, and I saw that as an opportunity to express views and to pull together thoughts and ideas and encourage my fellow students to get active politically and socially. It carried out when I went to college at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, I became editor of the Eastern Equitable, the college newspaper, and from there started working at the observer eccentric newspapers in Livonia and Plymouth, and from there ended up just naturally going to work as the editor of the American teacher of the AFT National Union publication for teachers and from there to Solidarity, the magazine of the UAW, the United Auto Workers. My love of writing carried me into a lot of these other areas of political and social interests, and I was able to use my writing skills to advance those political programs.
[01:37:19] INTERVIEWER: All right. Just run the next question is like trying to like [inaudible 01:37:22].
[01:37:22] David Elsila: Oh, sure. No problem.
[01:37:27] INTERVIEWER: We noticed that a lot of the things that you did too, activist things you were sticking up for things that didn't necessarily think you personally.
[01:37:35] David Elsila: Yeah.
[01:37:36] INTERVIEWER: Can you explain the importance of sticking up for things even when it doesn't affect you?
[01:37:43] David Elsila: Well, I think that I look around at society and I see so many social problems, and for some reason, I feel very strongly about dealing with those, and so those feelings took me to the the march on Washington with Dr. King in 1963, to anti-war demonstrations in Detroit and in Washington, and I felt that my responsibility as a human being is to look out for people who are struggling for their rights and to do what I can to support them, and that was through both demonstrations and organizing and writing for publications that have social impact.
[01:38:35] INTERVIEWER: Awesome. What do you think was the most influential or most important piece or magazine or whenever that you're like, well then, what do you think was the most impactful report?
[01:38:49] David Elsila: Well, I think looking back at the Civil Rights Movement, as I said, being involved with the demonstrations and marches and sit ins really had an impact, I think. I hope it had an impact on society and did what I could to move forward in those areas, and certainly I would write about all of those issues in the publications that I edited for teachers and for auto workers.
[01:39:27] INTERVIEWER: Awesome. With all the work you do, obviously, it's like you want to make the world a better place for people. What are your visions or dreams for the future of the world? [LAUGHTER]
[01:39:40] David Elsila: I guess I would like to see a world or a society in which we recognize the humanity in each of us, and the ideas of building walls to keep out immigrants of discriminating against people because of their religion or their race just does not hold the water in a due democracy, and so I'm hoping that we can create a society in which we respect each other, and I know being here in this school at Skyline, but I've seen a little bit of it. There seems to be a lot of cohesion and a lot of efforts being made to promote goodwill and tolerance and respect for each other among students.
[01:40:27] INTERVIEWER: Awesome. In your life when you were trying to do things, obviously probably things that got you down or got in your way, how did you keep yourself going and keep yourself motivated to keep proceeding?
[01:40:42] David Elsila: It's easy to get discouraged. When you have wars and bombing and people being put in jail for their political views or being fired up because they have unpopular views or being stopped at the border because they are trying to flee oppression in their home countries and are coming to this country. Yeah, you can get discouraged. You can easily get discouraged. But I just think that it's so important to keep in mind the goal that we have of creating a better society. One of the things I do is from time to time, I pick up a book that was written by a historian named Howard Zinn called People's History of the United States, and in that book, the author looks at small victories that have taken place over the years. A strike or even big victories winning the right to vote for women, winning the Civil Rights Act and those things keep going over and over and happening over and over and over again in American history, and you look at those struggles and you see that with a lot of work and a lot of efforts we can win and we can make this a better country, and we certainly have done so. The women's rights movement, the gay rights movement, the fight for immigration justice. All of these are happening and, you got to look at the bright side and the possibilities.
[01:42:18] INTERVIEWER: [OVERLAPPING] Can you explain the time when you were discouraged and how you picked yourself up?
[01:42:25] David Elsila: Well, I think the best way to pick yourself up is to get active. If you find yourself in a situation where things look very gloomy and we're not winning, you just have to pick yourself up and get together with other people who share your views and organize. It's a process of organizing and marching and demonstrating that really brings back the energy and the inspiration to keep going.
[01:43:01] INTERVIEWER: I guess this is like has been in the last part. Can you just give an overview? I know you made that magazine and you made that monument on a river. Can you discuss what you do now acting like your labor history?
[01:43:16] David Elsila: A big project right now is to create this labor history of map and the magazine that I just gave you. Our goal now is to try to get that into the schools and classrooms and community organizations, all over the state of Michigan to help people understand that the struggle for labor rights has been going on here for decades and we need to help newer generations understand that it's through struggle and organizing that we can make social change. That's my job right now.
[01:43:55] INTERVIEWER: Then this is just off-topic but we were looking on your Wikipedia page and it said something about a labor history opera. Did you write an opera?
[01:44:08] David Elsila: No, I didn't write an opera but I produced it. A good friend in Kensington, Maryland, Steve Jordans is a singer and songwriter and he had heard in his family for many years that one of his great uncles had been killed mysteriously at the Ford Rouge automobile plant in 1937. Nobody ever knew why or how he died and Steve wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery. So he came to Detroit and he did some research and he got a copy of the coroner's report from his great uncle's death and discovered that the coroner had ruled that this should have been treated as a homicide. He discovered the possibility that his great uncle, who was working at the Ford Motor Company and who was organizing workers, had been killed by a company agent, a company goon. He got this story and it inspired him to write this folk opera called, or jazz opera called Forgotten, The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant, and it's a wonderful production with 24 songs, really great music. We produced it three times in Detroit. Once at the Amir Grove college theater, once at a theater in McCone County, and one is out in the Southfield. We had at least 3,000 people, 4,000 people come to see it and we used the combination of professional actors, Equity actors and singers, and local union members who sing at the church choir or who have a talent and thus we pulled the professionals and the amateurs together and did a great production, three productions. I've forgotten. I've got a CD of it. I should give it to you. I'll send it to you.
[01:46:10] INTERVIEWER: I always find that very interesting.
[01:46:12] David Elsila: But it's all based on what happened in the 1930s. The great uncle was also a radio host and he created radio program on radio station WXYZ Detroit called The Forgotten Men's Radio Hour. He invited people who are unemployed, who were living in poverty to come and be interviewed once a week on his radio show. That became the chief goal of his life, that plus working at the Ford Rouge plant with the two things that the opera focuses on. It's a jazz opera, folk opera, jazz opera, and really hope you have a chance to see it sometime.
[01:47:01] INTERVIEWER: Next time we see you it's going to be a scanning party, which is going to be when you bring in all like family photos and we are going to scan them in so we can insert them into our video.
[01:47:11] David Elsila: Sure.
[01:47:17] INTERVIEWER: Sorry because I stopped you. Try to look for some things that you have that maybe some pictures of you at protests. We're really interested to see a file. File when you were labeled as a communist. I'd like to see that and I'm sure we should met video as a fun thing. They were also looking for a time to go to your tour in Detroit.
[01:47:42] David Elsila: I don't know what your schedule is like, but we're doing a tour of the labor legacy landmark for 75 people who are coming in from around the country for a National Park Service has places called heritage areas. There's a heritage area that encompasses Michigan, including Neon Arbor and Detroit, and 75 people from various heritage areas around the country will be in Detroit on Tuesday morning, April 23rd, at 08:30 in the morning. I'm going to be doing a little walk-through there with them and if you can get down there, that would be fine. [BACKGROUND] Tuesday morning, the 23rd of April at 08:30, and it'll take about half an hour and I'm willing to stay a little bit longer with the group from here to show you around. Results of the Underground Railroad monument, which is right there on the riverfront as well. They said Hart Plaza and West Jefferson right at the foot of Woodward Avenue, right downtown. If that doesn't work out, we're going to be doing another one on May the 5th, which is a Sunday at 11:00 A.M. for labor lawyers from around the country who are coming in.
[01:49:09] INTERVIEWER: At the noon?
[01:49:11] David Elsila: At 11:00 A.M. on May the 5th. It's April 23rd, which is a Tuesday at 08:30 A.M. or Sunday, May 5th at 11:00 A.M. I live very close. I live only about 10-15 minutes from the monuments so I'm happy to meet you down there at any time that's convenient. For the April meeting for this gathering of information, I'm going to be gone a lot of the month and I've got a calendar here. I don't know.
[01:49:45] INTERVIEWER: The scanning party [OVERLAPPING] Next week we have spring break. The week after that is when our scanning party or will you be in town for it?
[01:49:55] David Elsila: No, I'm getting back into town on April 20th.
[01:50:00] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 01:50:00].
[01:50:05] David Elsila: I've got four or five dates that I've set aside. The other possibility, but they are all the last week of April.
[01:50:11] INTERVIEWER: That's fine. We'll probably just talk to our teacher and then send you an email.
[01:50:17] David Elsila: That's Ross Dunbar?
[01:50:18] INTERVIEWER: Do you guys have any other questions? Do you have anything else that you would like to say?
[01:50:23] David Elsila: I think this is a great project. I love the idea of bringing together older folks to learn something about what we've done and hopefully inspire the next generation. This is all going to be completed in late May?
[01:50:45] INTERVIEWER: Yes, and then it will be projected at the Michigan Theater. Are there any questions? You're just very thorough. [LAUGHTER]
[01:51:00] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 01:51:00] then I was, there's no follow-up questions, and very thorough, and your memory is amazing.
[01:51:12] David Elsila: Thank you. Good. Get in touch or ask Ross to get in touch with me and we'll work out something for the scanning party. I'll bring photographs and the Red Squad file, which I was accused of this and that, and publications maybe that I've worked on. Just like that. I can do well with that. Great. Okay.
[01:51:39] INTERVIEWER: Thank you.
[01:51:39] David Elsila: Good. Well, thank you.
[01:51:49] INTERVIEWER: [BACKGROUND] Well, thank you for coming in. [OVERLAPPING]
[01:52:02] David Elsila: Sure, okay.
[01:52:02] INTERVIEWER: I feel so bad they drove so far like 20 minutes.
[01:52:02] David Elsila: No problem.
[01:52:02] INTERVIEWER: Let's see, okay.
[01:52:02] David Elsila: Just so you have no more solidarity.
[01:52:04] INTERVIEWER: Awesome. [LAUGHTER]
[01:52:04] INTERVIEWER: You can't see it?
[01:52:04] INTERVIEWER: [inaudible 01:52:04]
[01:52:04] INTERVIEWER: So we're good?
[01:52:04] INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
[01:52:22] INTERVIEWER: I just didn't press it. That's why.
[01:52:23] INTERVIEWER: It's fine. Just go.
[01:52:33] INTERVIEWER: From your life, what do you think is the biggest job you've done for the longest amount of time?
[01:52:39] David Elsila: I think the longest job I had was as editor of Solidarity Magazine for the United Auto Workers. We had a magazine that went out to about one-and-a-half million workers and retirees made it into a family magazine reporting a lot of union activities, but also having book reviews and movie reviews and kid's activities. That was the longest part of my work career. I did that after 22 years.
[01:53:09] INTERVIEWER: What was your job within the company?
[01:53:11] David Elsila: It was not a company within the union with UAW, and my job was Assistant Director of Public Relations and Editor of Solidarity Magazine.
[01:53:23] INTERVIEWER: What made you get into that?
[01:53:26] David Elsila: Well, as I explained last time, when I was a high school student your age, I was getting dressed for high school one morning and I switched on the radio like I usually did, but we got a different station from Canada called CKLW. There was this gravelly voice that came across the airwaves talking about social issues and labor and economic equality. It turned out to be a program sponsored by the UAW, the United Auto Workers, it was called The Eye Opener. They also had one in the afternoon called Shift Break. The Eye Opener was a drive-time show that workers could listen to as they drove into work into the auto plants. I was really fascinated by what they had to say about civil rights and social problems. I started listening every day and that moved me into being a partisan of the labor movement. I was very impressed with what labor was doing or expanding its goals into talking about these broader issues. I became very active in labor and so I became a classroom teacher for four years and got involved with organizing the teachers' unions, got a job as editor of The Michigan Teacher, a newspaper, and then the American Teacher with the AFT and Chicago and Washington. The job offer came along to come back to Detroit and go to work for the United Auto Workers as an editor. I felt that was really a very wonderful offer. I think the important thing about that job offer is it gave me an opportunity to do as a career what I really believed and it reflected my values.
[01:55:23] INTERVIEWER: What do you think is the most important thing you've done within that job?
[01:55:28] David Elsila: I think putting out a really good magazine. As I said, we circulated to a million-and-a-half families every month, and we bent over backwards to provide the kind of information and news and opinion that reflected the views of the union. We would send reporters to South Korea to write about the living conditions of workers there, travel to Mexico to interview workers along the Mexican border about the problems that they were facing in these macula door plants that US companies set up inside Mexico. We did a lot of reporting like that and I felt really good about doing that kind of a publication.
[01:56:20] INTERVIEWER: What was living like in those areas that you were interviewing people from?
[01:56:25] David Elsila: The people in Mexico, particularly, which I saw firsthand, lived in substandard housing with raw sewage around them, and these were people who were building cars and parts for automobiles. They earned so little that they could never afford to buy the products that they were building. You go into a car plant, not a plant in Mexico, and the one thing you notice immediately is there's no parking lot because workers can't afford to buy the products that they build and so they are living in almost poverty.
[01:57:02] INTERVIEWER: What was your experience like when you went down there and saw how everything was?
[01:57:06] David Elsila: I interviewed a number of workers and talked with people in the Fledgling Union Movement down there and was able to take notes and come back and write stories and published photographs of what we had seen. Now, it was reminded that one of the things that was done in the United States in 1913 here in Michigan and Detroit was Henry Ford started building the Model T Ford the first mass-produced car in America. He set up first moving assembly line and he decided in 1914 that workers were going to get a doubling of their wage to $5 a day. Suddenly the number of cars that were being sold just skyrocketed because workers now were earning enough money to buy their cars. I thought to myself, why can't Ford and the other companies that are operating in Mexico learn that lesson from history? Why can't they pay their workers enough there so that the workers could buy the cars that they built instead of exporting them to the United States? I remember several years ago, I went to a car dealership on Mack Avenue on the east side of Detroit and my goal was to buy a car. I think it was a Plymouth Acclaim and there were two identical Plymouth Acclaims on the lot, both the same color, same features. One said it was made in Newark, Delaware, and the other one was made in Toluca, Mexico. I said to the salesman, ''Hey, this Toluca Mexico car, a car that's made down in Mexico, they only pay the workers very small amount of money compared to the wages at the Union plant in Delaware. How about giving me a break and the price?" He didn't know what I was talking about. [LAUGHTER] He couldn't figure out a proper answer to it, but it shows that by exploiting workers in other countries, the auto companies are making lots of profit off the misery of the workers in their plants.
[01:59:28] INTERVIEWER: Were you ever able to go talk to the people who made the plans and suggest things to them or talk to them about how things were in America when people had made different like what you were saying about Henry Ford having doubled their wages. Were you able to move and talk to them about that?
[01:59:43] David Elsila: I didn't talk to them directly, but I remember we created a big two-page ad in our Solidarity Magazine and we took photographs of the two identical cars that I had seen at the dealership and pointed out that these all look the same except that one is made in Mexico for a dollar a day workers and one is made in the United States for $17 an hour workers, and there's a campaign that we need to start to try to raise the wages of workers in other parts of the world.
[02:00:21] INTERVIEWER: You're talking a lot about wage equality?
[02:00:24] David Elsila: Yes.
[02:00:24] INTERVIEWER: Is that something that you were always really interested in or are there other things that got you into social justice as well?
[02:00:30] David Elsila: I think economic equality, the whole problem of inequality in this country right now is a very a major issue that I'm interested in. Civil rights, human rights, all of the things that spread out to war and peace, all of those kinds of social issues that I think are extremely important.
[02:00:53] INTERVIEWER: How do you think inequality was when you were working versus how it is now? How has it changed or evolved? Things gotten better or worse?
[02:01:01] David Elsila: I think it's definitely gotten worse. Back in the 1960s and '70s, workers were making a pretty decent wage in many industries and we saw the rise of the middle-class in this country. Today, the wages have not improved very much, but prices have gotten a higher and income has stayed pretty much the same. There is a great deal of inequality. I just read the other day that three individuals in this country own as much money as the bottom 50% of the population in this country. I think the inequality is definitely growing and we need to tackle that as a major social problem.
[02:01:47] INTERVIEWER: Have you seen that affect your life in any way?
[02:01:50] David Elsila: My own personal life, only in that it motivates me to get out and demonstrate or walk on picket lines. This last Saturday, two days ago, there was a big demonstration outside the Westin Hotel in downtown Detroit, Washington Boulevard Grand River Avenue. The workers there have been on strike for several weeks now, because their wages are really low, they have to work more than one job in order to make a living and support their families. One of the big signs that everybody was carrying was one job is enough, complaining that they had to work at least two jobs, three jobs. We had about 300 people out there marching with them in solidarity. Yeah, that's the kind of activity that I think is really important.
[02:02:51] INTERVIEWER: Have you ever pretested yourself?
[02:02:53] INTERVIEWER: Like all the protest or rallies, something like that.
[02:02:57] David Elsila: I've gone to many rallies throughout my life for anti-war rallies during the Vietnam War, civil rights rallies, I went to Washington DC for the Martin Luther King rally in 1963 steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he gave his famous I Have a Dream speech and he had given that same speech, by the way, two months earlier, at Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit and when I went to Washington and took the train to Washington with a whole bunch of Detroitors who went in and Dr. King started speaking, ended his speech with the I Have a Dream and I said I've heard that speech before. He had given it to this a warm up Cobo Hall Detroit in June, and the Washington demonstration was in August. But there are 100,000 people there from all over the country.
[02:03:51] INTERVIEWER: How did it make you feel to be able to go to that rally and really like support what you believed in? Because there's a lot of people weren't able to do that.
[02:03:58] David Elsila: I felt very good about that, just see bus loads and train loads of people from all over the country and a lot of the church groups so a lot of unions. There was a wide variety of people who were very much interested and motivated to do something like that and I've gone back many times to other demonstrations.
[02:04:21] INTERVIEWER: Did you ever get any criticism for support Dr. King's movement?
[02:04:28] David Elsila: Not particularly with Dr. King's movement that I can recall. But when I was a classroom teacher, living in Redford township was not white community and this results in 1963. A friend of mine and I organized a group called the Redford Citizens for Better Human Relations. We decided that we have to support open housing in our community and invite people from all colors and races to live in their community. We organized a march and a demonstration and a rally at the Redford Township Hall on beach daily road there five-mile and we invited members of the NWACP from Detroit to join us and so we had an integrated march into Redford, urging open housing and the next week, the local tabloid, newspaper, which was a really right wing racist publication took photographs of us and plastering them all over the front page of the paper and accused all us of sorts of subversive things so that kind of criticism. Back in the 1960s, being for racial justice was not popular among a lot of people who just as we have that same problem today, I think.
[02:06:05] INTERVIEWER: How did you guys react to that them putting you on this tabloid with your face on them?
[02:06:11] David Elsila: Well, I was pretty angry at the time, but there wasn't much we could do. But interestingly, about four years ago, I was invited back to a Redford to speak at a Dr. Martin Luther King birthday breakfast. I talked about those events that have taken place many years earlier and I was very happy to learn that the population in Redford Township is now about 30- 40% African Americans so there has been a real change that took place over the how many years was that? From 1963 to about 2015, 50 years.
[02:06:52] INTERVIEWER: Oh, I just came from there. [LAUGHTER].
[02:07:00] David Elsila: Changes have been made We've made progress, still a lot of stuff to do. But, I think that there are a lot of people of goodwill, millions of people of goodwill who are fighting marching and for economic justice and racial justice.
[02:07:18] INTERVIEWER: As a white male, have you ever got to backlash, people say that white men are like more privileged than other people. Have you ever got to like a criticism for protesting in a way saying, well, you're privileged, so you shouldn't be advocating for this.
[02:07:36] David Elsila: I never heard that criticism of the people that I've marched width and rallied and demonstrated with have been black and white and Hispanic and there's been a solidarity that brings us together, regardless of what color of our skin is.
[02:07:57] INTERVIEWER: When you were younger, where you grew up were there a lot of different races or was it just?
[02:08:03] David Elsila: No, it was an all white community.
[02:08:05] INTERVIEWER: Where I grew up?
[02:08:05] David Elsila: Yeah. That's Redford Township that's where I grew up. I was born in Detroit, Northwest Detroit and then when I was five years old, my parents moved the family to Redford so that's where I went to elementary school and high school.
[02:08:22] INTERVIEWER: Were you interested in like protesting for rights when you were younger? Like when did that start?
[02:08:32] David Elsila: I think I was. Well, when we had the 1963 demonstration, I must have been just about 24 years old so that was probably the first demonstration I went to.
[02:08:46] INTERVIEWER: So you've always been in the social justice?
[02:08:50] David Elsila: It stems back to that radio show I heard. I think people are influenced a lot by what they hear and what they read and it struck a chord with me. I was like a 13-year-old idealistic student. When I heard what the UAW was talking about on the radio show, I was influenced.
[02:09:15] INTERVIEWER: That's really interesting actually. We live in a community where we're allowed, like our school encourages us to protest and stand up for what we believe. Did your school encourage you or were they more against protesting and demanding?
[02:09:30] David Elsila: They were not encouraging. I think when I grew up, we were in the middle of the McCarthy period where there was a lot of repression. If you had views that were unorthodox, that were different from the mainstream, you were suspected of being subversive, of being a red. I remember, I think I told the story last time that for those 16 years old and 17 and a senior in high school, I had heard this wonderful folk singer, topical singer, protest singer named Pete Seeger. Pete was being blacklisted. He couldn't perform at commercial establishments. He could only go into high schools and colleges. And so we invited Pete to come and sing at my high school, at a school assembly in the middle of the day, kids paid a dime a piece and we were able to pay a Pete 60 bucks and he came and he had a wonderful program. All of the kids loved it. Then the next day though, two government agents. I don't know whether they were from the FBI or from another agency, but they came to the high school and they interviewed the principle of our high school, wanting to know the words to the song that Mr. Seeger had sung to the students. It was just a lot of repression.
[02:11:09] INTERVIEWER: Why would they want to know the?
[02:11:11] David Elsila: Because they thought here was a singer coming to subvert our kids and turn our kids into reds by the songs he's singing. None of his song were that. He sang about peace and freedom. I think the one song that got the greatest applause was This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie which is mainstream song right now. But back then, it was maybe seen as a little bit too subversive.
[02:11:42] INTERVIEWER: How did it make you feel when he came in and sing to your class verses when the police showed up and wanted to know why he was there and what he was doing?
[02:11:51] David Elsila: I didn't find out about that until much later and when I heard about that, I thought, oh my gosh, what is this country coming to if people cannot express their point of view in songs about peace and justice and equality. If that's considered subversive, that's really a black mark on this country.
[02:12:16] INTERVIEWER: Were your parents supportive of your involvement in activism?
[02:12:20] David Elsila: My parents were conservative. I think they voted Democratic, but they were pretty conservative and very religious. We were brought up in a religious household and eventually ended up teaching sunday school at my Lutheran Church. I think they were worried that I was getting out there too far, demonstrating him and getting my pictures in the newspaper and they were concerned about it.
[02:12:54] INTERVIEWER: What was your life like during your high school years?
[02:12:58] David Elsila: Well, I was editor of our high school newspaper and spent a lot of time on communications, writing and editing. Those days, we didn't have a printing press. We had what was called a mimeograph machine. I don't even know if you know what those are. But a mimeograph machine, you take a sheet of plastic sized paper and you type your copy on that paper, and you use a stylus to put the headlines in. Then you wrap it around the cylinder and there is ink inside the cylinder, and you crank and crank and you crank, and every crank, another sheet comes out and we had to do that all by hand and then staple it together and pass though to our students. That was one of the things that occupied a lot of my time while I was in high school. I had a lot of fun. I loved editing, I loved putting things together, and seeing the final product and watching everybody read the paper that came out. But it was a lot of work.
[02:14:14] INTERVIEWER: Were you able to express your emotions and your feelings towards certain things that happened at school through the newspaper?
[02:14:23] David Elsila: Yeah. We wrote stories about peace and justice. Whether it was school news, but we also occasionally, we're able to put in editorials or commentary about broader issues.
[02:14:39] INTERVIEWER: Did a lot of the students read the newspaper?
[02:14:41] David Elsila: Yeah. A paper was reprinted, I think 700 copies every weekend, and it got more to the students throughout the school.
[02:14:51] INTERVIEWER: When you went off to college, did you do the same thing, was there a collage newspaper you [NOISE]
[02:14:57] David Elsila: Yeah. I went to Eastern Michigan, in Ypsilanti, got a teaching degree and I became editor of the Eastern Echo, which is the student newspaper. I'm not sure if it's still called the Echo, but it was a weekly paper and an eight-page tabloid that we would write and layout and take to a printer in down town Ypsilanti and once a week got it distributed throughout the campus.
[02:15:32] INTERVIEWER: What's the article that you're most proud of writing?
[02:15:36] David Elsila: Let me think. I guess we did a special issue at one Christmas time where we talked about Ann Frick and the kinds of fear that she lived in. We did a story that connected that kind of fear with the hope of the Christmas season. That was one of the stories that I remember doing.
[02:16:05] INTERVIEWER: Why do you think that was one that you were most proud of?
[02:16:08] David Elsila: Well, because it took an international issue of the repression of Jews in Europe by the Nazis and brought it forward to help people understand that racism and antisemitism were things that we should fight.
[02:16:30] INTERVIEWER: Is that that you were involved in a religious household, what religion?
[02:16:34] David Elsila: I was brought up in the Lutheran household. My grandparents said immigrated from Finland, and the Finnish State Church was Lutheran church, so when they came to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, they brought their religious beliefs with them and that trickled down to my parents and to myself and my sister and my brother. But actually when I went off to college though, I drifted away from the church and I did not maintain our religious activities these days. My wife is Jewish. She grew up in Northwest Detroit, and our son Michael, has become a very active in the Jewish congregation in his neighborhood in Philadelphia and he has developed a strong connection with the Jewish faith.
[02:17:32] INTERVIEWER: Were you parents supportive of you as someone who was out of their religion?
[02:17:37] David Elsila: I don't think, they were not to upset at all. They will say welcome to Acadia, to our family, really. As we raised our children, we celebrated the Passover in Hanukkah and Christmas in a secular way, both the Christian and Jewish holidays.
[02:17:58] INTERVIEWER: What are some of the things that your family enjoy doing together when your kids are at home?
[02:18:03] David Elsila: What we like to do a lot was to go on family trips. Maybe on a Sunday, we would drive out to a place called the Old Dutch Kneel on five-mile road in the Volodya and sat for ice cream or we would take rides to Belle Isle. Over the Detroit River, we would go to Boblo, the amusement park in the Detroit River in Canada. Every summer we would travel to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to my grandparents farm outside of Calgary, Lake Superior, and we would spend probably with the kids, my brother, and my sister, and myself, would spend probably a month up there living with my grandparents, which was very challenging because my grandparents could not speak English. When they were immigrants, they had never learned the English language and the strong society of Finnish Americans in that area of the UP. The people who operated the grocery stores of the newspapers, they all communicated in Finnish language and so we never got a chance really to interact with them.
[02:19:17] INTERVIEWER: Why did your grandparents immigrate from Finland?
[02:19:20] David Elsila: It's an interesting story. The family lore was that they came across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada first. My grandmother, according to family lore, that so she said on the voyage that she vowed she would never go back to Europe. She would not go back on an ocean liner. Later on though, as I've been doing some research on why so many Finns emigrated to the United States, was that at that time, Finland was ruled by the Tsar of Russia, and the Tsar was drafting young men into the Russian army, and so a lot of young men escaped that draft by emigrating to North America. I don't know for sure, but I think that perhaps is why my grandfather migrated.
[02:20:18] INTERVIEWER: Did you ever learn how to speak the language of their land?
[02:20:22] David Elsila: No. I can say a few words.
[02:20:26] INTERVIEWER: How was the communicating with your grandparents because you had a language barrier?
[02:20:29] David Elsila: We couldn't communicate at all. Maybe a smile or a gesture.
[02:20:35] INTERVIEWER: You weren't really close with them?
[02:20:37] David Elsila: No. First of all, they lived 600 miles away in the UP and so no.
[02:20:44] INTERVIEWER: What were your favorite personal things to do for fun when you had your family in the house beside taking trips?
[02:20:50] David Elsila: I guess, games, sending up electric trains, decorating Christmas trees for the holidays. Those are the things that would occupied us.
[02:21:05] INTERVIEWER: Were there any special days, or events, or holidays, or family traditions that you guys celebrated?
[02:21:11] David Elsila: Sure. Christmas eve we all gathered together around the tree and Christmas Day, same thing for a big meal and Thanksgiving, the whole family came together for a turkey dinner.
[02:21:25] INTERVIEWER: Did that differ what your life was like when you were younger?
[02:21:29] David Elsila: I'm sorry. No, I was talking about when I was younger.
[02:21:34] INTERVIEWER: When you were older and had kids was there thing that was different?
[02:21:37] David Elsila: Yeah. We traveled a lot. I really felt that traveling is so important. We found an island in Maine, Squirrel Island that some friends invited us to 45 years ago. We went there for one day, the first year, next year for a week. We have been renting a cottage on this island every year for the past 45 years, and our kids have grown up there and now our grandkids come there. We spent the month of July together on this wonderful island which has no automobiles. You can walk around the island on trails, footpaths. There are a couple of beaches, but it's wonderful place and that's become very important family tradition for us.
[02:22:30] INTERVIEWER: When you were an adult, when you were in the workforce, what type of music was popular?
[02:22:40] David Elsila: I can't grab it I treated myself to a folk music listening to a group like the Weavers. Just ordinary pop tunes that were on the radio. There was television and radio program back when I was a kid called Your Hit Parade. Every week they would take the top 10 selling records in sheet music and different people would perform them on the radio and television shows. I can't remember any specific songs right now, but it was like 1950s pop.
[02:23:21] INTERVIEWER: Back to your work life, do you think there were any important social or historical events that took place?
[02:23:28] David Elsila: Yeah. When I was working for the American Federation of Teachers, when I was a teacher myself actually, the assassination of President Kennedy took place. Within a few years after that, the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Dr. King, those all had a profound effect, I think, on the nation's conscience. The whole civil rights movement, opening up the schools and social institutions in the South to black and white people equally was some major part of the experiences that I had when working.
[02:24:15] INTERVIEWER: Were there any events that affected you personally?
[02:24:20] David Elsila: Not I can think of, no.
[02:24:25] INTERVIEWER: Are there any slang words that you can remember from when you were younger?
[02:24:31] David Elsila: Well, not really. No.
[02:24:38] INTERVIEWER: How was your family life when you were younger? Could you tell us a bit about how you guys would travel a lot? Did you guys still travel to New York when you were younger?
[02:24:48] David Elsila: I went to New York for the first time when I was a college student. I was headed to the Eastern Echo. Every year there was a national conference of college and university publications. That was my first trip to New York, it was driving there. Then a few years later, I went with a group of friends to New York for a long weekend. One of the trips I took as a high-school students that was a lot of fun was three friends and I threw our sleeping bags in the trunk of a car, an old car, and we drove from Detroit all the way to California, stopping along the way to throw our sleeping bags on the ground, sometimes in the church parking lot, sometimes even in the cemetery, sometimes in the national park, Yellowstone Park, where we were visited by bears and had to retreat to the car for protection. But it was a great trip. We were gone for about a month and we ended up on the California beaches and enjoyed California and then drove back through the Grand Canyon, and it was a really wonderful road trip.
[02:26:06] INTERVIEWER: Do you still talk to them?
[02:26:08] David Elsila: I think I have one friend who I still talk to occasionally in that group.
[02:26:16] INTERVIEWER: Can you talk a little bit about your wife?
[02:26:18] David Elsila: Yeah, Katie? Katie and I met, we were both teachers in the Bryant Junior High School in Livonia on Merriman road between six mile and seven mile. No longer is there, but it was a pretty good new school and Katie was teaching in the seventh grade, I was teaching eighth grade and we had a courtyard between us and we could look at each other's classrooms across the way. She had grown up in Northwest Detroit, attended Mumford High School and then went to the University of Michigan and got a teaching degree. So we both ended up as teachers and she invited me out on our first date. She had two tickets to a production healthy Fisher Theater in Detroit. She said she had gotten them from her uncle, but she had actually bought them herself. We were done and we started dating and going to plays and travel together and we were married in 1965.
[02:27:28] INTERVIEWER: What was your dating life back when you were younger? How do you think it differs from how people are dating today?
[02:27:30] David Elsila: I don't know how people are dating today. [LAUGHTER] But back then we would often go to a movie and then out for something to eat afterwards, there was a great old Jewish delicate tasting on seven mile road in Detroit called Derbies. We would end up at Derbies most Friday night or Saturday nights after having seen a movie. That was our dating life. And then a lot of plays production set at the Detroit Fisher theater. Once we decided that we want to go to Washington and climbed the Washington Monument, and so we flew to DC and spent a couple of days there and is one of the activities we decided we're going to climb all the way up to the Washington Monument, the top of the Washington Monument and it was a memorable experience.
[02:28:28] INTERVIEWER: What do you think your favorite memory you have with your wife is?
[02:28:32] David Elsila: Favorite memory? I think is having children.
[02:28:37] INTERVIEWER: What was your engagement in your life like?
[02:28:41] David Elsila: The engagement lasted about a year and then we were married at a temple in the Palmer Park area of Detroit. And was really difficult to find a clergy person who would do an interfaith marriage at that time. But we did find a Rabbi, Daniel Syme, who agreed to marry us. We had a very nice ceremony in a small temple in the Palmer Park area of Detroit and reception with a lot of friends afterwards. Then we took a honeymoon, and our honeymoon took us to Europe. We wanted to go to the World Youth Festival. We were in our early 20s, mid 20s, and just as we were ready to take up, the festival was canceled. But we had tickets anyways, so we ended up going to Israel and Greece and Germany and the UK, and had a wonderful two-week trip throughout Europe.
[02:29:51] INTERVIEWER: Why do you think you struggled in finding [inaudible 02:29:53] that would marry you?
[02:29:54] David Elsila: Well, I don't know. I think back in 1965 when we were married, there were not many people who wanted to perform an interfaith marriage, either in the Jewish faith or the Lutheran faith, unless you converted to which neither of us wanted to do. But everybody was accepting, all our friends were accepting of it. One of the things I remember about our wedding was we had with a band and one of Katie's uncles would pride himself and singing at these weddings. He sang this old Stephen Foster song, Old Black Joe, which was pretty racist in its connotations. And so after he did that, I had the presence of mind to have sheet music. I knew he was going to do this for the civil rights anthem, We Shall Overcome, and I took it to the band leader and got him to play, We Shall Overcome at the wedding ceremony. Somebody looked at me kind of strange when he said, is that your fraternity song? But anyway, we were able to celebrate a wedding with that kind of music.
[02:31:19] INTERVIEWER: Was he any good at singing?
[02:31:21] David Elsila: Pardon me?
[02:31:21] INTERVIEWER: Was he any good at singing?
[02:31:22] David Elsila: Yeah, he had a good voice. That was just his choice of songs that didn't resonate.
[02:31:28] INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us a little bit about your children?
[02:31:31] David Elsila: Yeah. We have three children. Michael is our oldest. He graduated from the residential college at the University of Michigan in ethnomusicology. He's a musician, keyboard, and percussion. After he graduated, he went to Cuba to study music for six months and did work with some of the leading Cuban jazz musicians. Came back to this country, looked around for a job. He worked for a while with a neighborhood theatrical group in Southwest Detroit called Matrix Theater, which is a non-profit that educates everybody from kids to elders and play writing and stage management etc. He did that for awhile. And then he found a job as an organizer for the musicians union local A.2 in New York City. And so he moved to New York. We saw him off and got a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. After about three or four years as an organizer, the editor of their publication, Allegro, retired and they tap Michael to be the editor. He is now editing this really wonderful glossy 48 page magazine every month that goes out to thousands of musicians, professional musicians in New York. He lives in Philadelphia and telecommutes. He and his wife, Dina, have two sons. One of them will be Bar Mitzvah in November. And then we have twin daughters, Jamie, who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Kerry who lives in Cleveland Heights. Jamie has an interesting story. She went to Grosse Pointe South High School, and I think this is illustrative of how important the teachers influence can be. Whatever science teachers decided, we want to build a radio telescope on the roof of our high school. And so a group of kids got together and they call themselves the RATS, the radio astronomy telescope society. The RATS built this telescope and they were trying to communicate with outer space to see if there was any life out there. They got very much involved, for four years they operated this and that influenced Jamie. She went on to Kalamazoo College studying science and then took two years off in the Peace Corps and work in Tanzania, came back and because there was a demand for women scientists, so she got a free ride at Stanford University and got her PhD there and got a job at NASA in the Bay Area. NASA eventually transferred her to Greenbelt, Maryland and she works at the Goddard Space Center. Her job is to analyze space dust and meteors to look for signs of life in the universe. She says it's her dream job. She is very happy with doing that scientific work, and she and her husband have two daughters. And then Kerry, her twin has worked for a number of non-profits in Cleveland. Most recently she works with a company that does grant writing for non-profit organizations, and before that she worked for Planned Parenthood for a number of years. She has two kids, two daughters, one of whom, Maple, is really active in her high school, Cleveland Heights High School. During the protests after Parkland, Florida, was out speaking to hundreds of students on the school athletic field against gun violence. Just like you were saying earlier that your school encouraged kids to participate in protests. Well, she's in school that does the same thing in Cleveland, so very proud of her.
[02:36:01] INTERVIEWER: You are saying how teachers can have a lot of influence over students. As a teacher do you think that you had any influence over certain students?
[02:36:11] David Elsila: Interesting that you should ask that I got a letter or just working out the UAW. I used a freelance graphic designer in Detroit. She was at work on the magazine when one day in her home and one of her neighbors came over and saw my name as the editor and said, Oh my God, I had Mr. Elsila is my eighth grade teacher. She wrote near this wonderful letter and said, when you took our class, don't Jacobo Hall to hear Dr. King speak. That really changed my life. She became a strong activist in a lot of social organizations. That really made me feel good that so many of my former students, many years later remember that and wrote me about this. I hope I had an influence. I know I did in that case and I hope with other students too.
[02:37:11] INTERVIEWER: Do think it's important that teachers encourage students to learn how to think for themselves when it comes to those social problems, and that they learned, teach students how they speak up?
[02:37:24] David Elsila: Absolutely. I think that it's really much more important than alerting of mathematical times tables or memorizing historical facts and dates. I think students have to be aware of what's going on around them and making up their minds flipped their values and doing activities that reflect their own values. I often told that people, I was teaching. Read everything. You read material on the left or the right in the middle and expose yourself to so many different points of view as you can and come up with something that feels right to you and then act at it
[02:38:11] INTERVIEWER: If you could go back to when you were teaching, would you encourage kids to have more of a voice when it came to politics or social justice issues? How did you do that at all?
[02:38:23] David Elsila: Absolutely. I think that I would encourage students to use their voice, use their power to go out and do the things that would affect society that they believed in. That's why it's been so encouraging to me to see the outpouring of young people all over the country are doing the match on Washington against gun violence and similar demonstrations all over the country. It's really important, yes. I do.
[02:38:57] INTERVIEWER: When you were teaching did you have anything somewhere to happen where your students, would you value or students who organized a protest?
[02:39:05] David Elsila: Not in my school. But one of my roommates at the time was a teacher in Pontiac, Michigan and in Pontiac they believed very strongly in empowering students. He encouraged their kids if they didn't like what he was teaching or how he was teaching to roll it out, strike and match around the school and protest. Actually, one of the times they did that. Yeah, I think I've seen it work and it'd be very effective.
[02:39:39] INTERVIEWER: How do you think that's going to shape them when they grow up?
[02:39:42] David Elsila: I hope it shapes them to understand that they have power, that they are empowered and are able to help big changes in their lives and the lives of the broader society.
[02:39:55] INTERVIEWER: Do you wish that like when you were younger, you had that teacher or that principle that motivated you to speak out or speak out about what you believe.
[02:40:04] David Elsila: I do. I wish I had that kind of teacher. I think maybe I had one or two teachers like that in English classes and Social Studies classes, History classes that were open to many different points of view. Yeah.
[02:40:22] INTERVIEWER: How did you think that would have changed your life?
[02:40:26] David Elsila: Well, I think that as I explained earlier, was not so much the teachers I had, but the exposure I had to messages on the radio and in publications. One teacher, Mrs. Gaither, who was the librarian at my high school. One of my tasks every day was to work in some library assistant for an hour and Mrs. Geithner was very conservative and she took any publication that she thought was subversive, just liberal publication, like the nation or the do Republic magazines. She's slipped them in a folder called communist propaganda. The cover of the folder, and I got very curious. What is this communist propaganda? I opened it up one day when she wasn't around and I started reading these progressive publications that resonated with me. That was an unintended consequence of her teaching style.
[02:41:34] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that what were some venue, events, or events that are going on high school that you wish you did rally for?
[02:41:42] David Elsila: In other words, any it was a very quiet period, unlike today where there is a lot of social ferment. The 1950s were extremely quiet, people were subdued, people did not get involved. They might watch sports, they might listen to music. But in terms of a social movement or political movement, the civil rights movement had not yet happened, the anti-war movement had not yet happened. It was a subdued existence.
[02:42:17] INTERVIEWER: What did you do for the anti-war movement you said you were involve with it?
[02:42:21] David Elsila: During the Vietnam War, I did allow matching both here detroit, and eventually we ended up moving to Washington DC, so all of the big anti-war demonstrations that brought out a quarter million people we were right there to be part of them. We would match and picket the White House, and a lot of our friends from Detroit to come in and crash on the floor of our apartment and go on with us for these demonstrations. That's what I remember of those years. Through the 1960s and early 1970s.
[02:43:02] INTERVIEWER: Why do you think it wasn't important that we didn't go to war?
[02:43:06] David Elsila: I'm sorry. But we did go to war. We did go to war in Vietnam and we were thousands and thousands of miles away from a country that did not pose any threat to us. We were trying to impose our views on this country and I guess some people in government thought that, Oh my God, if the communists in the North of Vietnam takeover the country. It's going to spill over and all of East Asia, all over the South Pacific. It's going to be inundated with communism. We knew that that was not going to have thousands of people were being killed, civilians who were being bombed, they were dropping napalm and villages. We just felt that it was immoral or moral duty to oppose the war.
[02:44:06] INTERVIEWER: Is there anything [inaudible 02:44:07] that's happening right now? Have you seen the [inaudible 02:44:10] America? Is there anything that you are protesting or that you rally for that is happening now?
[02:44:18] David Elsila: Right now for economic equality and for justice for workers. That's why we had 300 people rallying and matching in front of the Western Hotel in downtown Detroit this past Saturday to try to persuade the multimillion-dollar owners of these hotels to share some of your wealth with workers. The women who make up the beds, who serve the meals, who cook in the kitchen. Who check you in. There making maybe $10-$11 an hour, which is not enough to raise a family. I think one of the big movements that's going on right now in Detroit and all over the country, there's a movement to increase the minimum wage in Michigan to the eventually $15 an hour. I was very glad to see about a month ago, the Service Employees Union in Detroit was able to win a $ 15-an-hour wage of for the janitors and custodians who cleaned the office buildings in downtown Detroit and who worked at Metro airport in Romulus. That was a big step forward. Then of course, you've got all of the young people who worked at McDonald's and the other fast food places, and hospitals or whoever know, protesting and demanding higher $15 minimum wage, and even done one or two days strikes to make those demands. I think that's a big movement right now is economic equality and using your power to get the wage increase that you deserve.
[02:45:57] INTERVIEWER: What do you think that's going to happen to people whenever it doesn't increase to $15 now? Are there any positive or negative?
[02:46:04] David Elsila: Well, the positive thing is that maybe there'll be able to support their families, move out of their parents home and get the row in place and have children. I think you can't do that unless you're making a living wage for sure.
[02:46:21] INTERVIEWER: Are there any negatives to the $15 an hour?
[02:46:24] David Elsila: I don't know if there's a story in this morning's New York Times that analyzes what happened in Seattle, Washington after the $15 an hour wage was put into effect. The outcome of this latest study that's reported in today's times is that it has created better living standards. For most people, and there had been predictions that OD or the companies are going to lay off workers because they can't afford to keep them on, and still make a profit. But this study disproves that and it says that overall on balance, it's been a good thing.
[02:47:06] INTERVIEWER: Do you think that companies would increase prices if wages increased?
[02:47:15] David Elsila: I think, would hope that companies would be willing to take a slightly lower profit and share some of that profit with workers. But I'm sure there will be some company owners who will say, but keep making the profit I've always made, so they will raise the prices. But of course, if they raise the prices, they're not going to get as much business perhaps from the customers.
[02:47:39] INTERVIEWER: What do you think? How are you encouraging economic?
[02:47:45] INTERVIEWER: How are you helping support this cause?
[02:47:48] David Elsila: Well, marching and demonstrating, as I did last Saturday, and doing whatever I can to help candidates who are running for political office who are in favor of raising the wages.
[02:48:03] INTERVIEWER: Are there any certain changes that you are looking to really support?
[02:48:08] David Elsila: Yeah, I don't know if we wanted to get into political discussions in this interview, but I worked pretty hard for Bernie Sanders when he ran for president. In my community of Grosse Pointe Park, he actually beat Hillary in the primary, and then Hillary beat Trump in the general election, so this is a place where a Grosse Pointe used to be a very conservative community. In fact, there was a time when in Grosse Pointe, if you were African-American or Jewish or even had swarthy skin was on their list. You were given points that worked against you and you were not permitted to buy homes in Grosse Pointe a very conservative, right-wing, racist community. Actually, Katie became the director or Co-Director of the Interfaith Center for racial justice in Grosse Pointe. Today there is a much more progressive liberal community in the Pointes. I have said I worked for Bernie, and worked for a number of other donated money mostly are done canvassing for number of candidates who I think are going to help achieve more economic equality in this country.
[02:49:40] INTERVIEWER: Are there any specific organization that you work for to serving on purpose?
[02:49:42] David Elsila: Well, most of my volunteer work these days is for the Michigan labor history society, and we've taken several thousand people on bus tours, and walking tours to tell them stories about how people struggled in the 1930s, and set down inside of factories, and stores, and demonstrated in order to get to collective bargaining contracts, and improve their incomes, and their livelihood. We tell those stories today hoping that people will learn from the past about what we can do for the present. Here's a really good example. Back in 1930s during the Great Depression, a lot of people in Detroit were being evicted from their homes because they had lost their jobs, and they couldn't keep up their mortgage payments so they would be thrown out on the street, but their union brothers and sisters would as soon as the bailiff left, the union brothers and sisters would show up, and move the furniture back into the houses and the people could keep their houses going. Well, today, there are a lot of evictions taking place in Detroit because people have lost their jobs or reduce their income and they cannot afford to keep up their payments. Exactly the same thing. A friend of mine and others have organized a group called Detroit eviction defense, wherein people are threatened with eviction, they mobilize themselves and stand in front of the person's home and prevent evictions from taking place. Very creative thing happened in the North Rosedale section of Detroit. On Halloween night about four years ago on Halloween, a truck pulls up in to bailiffs go down and there were about to pull the furniture out and put it in their UL truck and take it away. Well, it happened that that same day was leaf collection day in that neighborhood. All of these people had swept the leaves up their logs and put them in plastic bags up and down the streets. The volunteers went out and picked up those bags, put them in the dump truck, so there's no room for the furniture to be put in stymied the bailiffs, they couldn't take the furniture anywhere because their trucks were filled with leaves. At the same time, the lawyer for the group was in court in Downtown Detroit getting a stay of the evictions. The combination of direct action and legal action saved those people's homes and they are still in their home four years later. That's one thing you can learn from the past to what's going on in the present.
[02:52:46] INTERVIEWER: Do you think when doing history, and you're educating people on what's happened in the past. How do you think that's going to shape their views on what's happening with Detroit now.
[02:52:55] David Elsila: Well, I think they are being encouraged to demonstrate and to use their power, another example, 1929, the Great Depression, people gathered in Grand Circus Park in Downtown Detroit and they stayed up, throw 24 hours, giving speeches, organizing for relief from the depression. Well, in 2010 or 2011, I think just a few years ago people occupied Grand Circus Park again. As part of that Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Detroit movement. They're allowed to be on people who took the lesson from what their grandparents, parents had done in the 1920s and use it today. They had a very successful occupation of Grand Circus Park to underscore the need for economic equality.
[02:53:54] INTERVIEWER: Awesome.
[02:53:55] David Elsila: All right, good. I'll see you again on Monday, November 5th at 10:30, I think is next day. I was telling my kids about this interview project, and they are hoping that maybe after you're all done, that they could get the raw footage?
[02:54:16] INTERVIEWER: I think [inaudible 02:54:16].
[02:54:19] David Elsila: Good. Because they would love to have this record.
[02:54:21] INTERVIEWER: Yeah.
[02:54:23] David Elsila: That's great. Well, thank you.
[02:54:25] INTERVIEWER: Thanks, thank you.
[02:54:43] INTERVIEWER: Thank you [NOISE] .
[02:54:51] INTERVIEWER: Let's see, in the sun there. Yeah. Actually in the sun a little bit more, and then I feel like that'd be good. [OVERLAPPING] Awesome.
[02:55:08] David Elsila: This is transcending, which is the largest work of public art anywhere in North America dedicated to honoring working women and working men. It was constructed in 2001, and it was a gift from the labor movement to the city of Detroit on the occasion of the city's 300th anniversary, the tricentennial when Antoine Cadillac and other French explorers landed over here in the Detroit River and set up for the project train, which became Detroit. We've been around to various unions and individuals and the other groups, and we were able to raise $1.6 million to build all these massive parks, which were designed by David Barr and Sergio Dejusti. This consists of several types of stainless steel, and there's sand inside to prevent any windstorm from blowing it down. David Barr who was the designer of these stainless steel arcs, he said, "I looked at the skyscrapers, the Detroit skyway, and I see that they're really in vertical, and I know that labor movement it's always been a movement of rebellious, and so I wanted to design something that would contrast with the symbols of industries capitalism." In fact, we got more from the Metro Times the alternative newspaper in Detroit, is the best new work of art in downtown Detroit, and they sit step back to the glee of water and look at the symbols of capitalism that labor built. Sergio Dejusti who is the other artist created probably 20 different sculptures. France believes they were here on the walkway and if you start going here, and you make your way from around, you would see the history of Detroit, the history of working people in Michigan, depicted each of the sculptures which the park reveals. For example, again, you see some chains being broken symbolizing the end of slavery, freedom that was won by African-Americans, and you see some hands over here. These are actually cast by young people, a symbol of the future. Folks, young people are looking forward to integrate new trains and using new technologies. Quotation underneath is we want more schoolhouses and less jails, more justice, and less revenge. This has really become an icon in Detroit. We were on the cover of the Detroit Road Atlas, we are in the table book of the National Geographic Society, we have been agent on television, and in many different publications. [inaudible 02:58:29] Here on the central platform quotations from many different labor leaders and civil rights leaders that eight hours from work. Our state leaders have been here. One of my favorite ones is women were in labor before men were born [inaudible 02:58:48] from many different people, men and women who are from [inaudible 02:59:14] There's one from Woody Guthrie, if some men rob you with the six-gun, others rob you with a fountain pen. But this has been the site of a lot of rallies and demonstrations. Much of it, it's a grading area. There were shipbuilders, there were fur Trappers, variuos tournaments of history. This here art of history bends towards justice Martin Luther King. The auto plants, the sit-down strikes, artists and patrons and guess what? These are symbols of all engineers, scientists. Over here is a memorial train 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King came to Detroit and over 100,000 people marched on Woodward Avenue calling for freedom and justice that had a big rally at Cobo Hall, this memory lives there. You google on, and you'll see many differences to the South.
[03:00:37] INTERVIEWER: Yeah, thank you. [OVERLAPPING] [BACKGROUND]
[03:02:53] David Elsila: [inaudible 03:02:53] Detroit is 300th anniversary. Detroit was one of these central termini and neither way to Canada in freedom. The most famous conductors on the underground with city of Windsor on the other side, at the heart, who was a longtime the town getting credit [inaudible 03:03:24]
[03:03:24] INTERVIEWER: We think you appreciate it. I hope everybody got a nice sense of the labor teachings. [inaudible 03:03:30] Like one shot, one second.
[03:03:38] INTERVIEWER: That's my visit. I love that. That's good.

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2022

Length: 03:03:55

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Legacies Project