Daddy and Millie fought all the time. They’d have regular knockdown-drag-outs nearly every day. And Junior would get underneath the sink and sit there and scream bloody murder. It’s no wonder he grew up the way he did. He never did have a normal childhood. Only with Grandma, and she wasn’t affectionate enough. And he was Italian, and so, you know, he needed more affection than other people.
Millie and Daddy separated half a dozen times. It was on-again, off-again. She’d leave every whipstitch. Then, when she found the going too rough, why, she’d come back. And Daddy always took her back because, he said, to his way of thinking a child needed its mother. That was a strong point with him, even though he got to the point where he actually disliked her intensely. Still he thought that she would be better for Junior than somebody else.
There was one time when Daddy and Millie separated—I think Junior was only about nine or ten months old. Oh, well, she left him before that. She left him when Junior was only a few months old. She left the baby with Irma, Dick’s wife, and she went home to her aunt (Mrs. Bartold), and the aunt promptly brought her home to Arthur the next day. That’s when all this buisness came out that we had never heard of before. The aunt give Daddy a real dressing down. She told him, “When you married Ida,” that’s what she called her, “When you married Ida you assumed responsibility for her because she was a ward of the court before that. So no matter what she does, she is your responsibility until she’s twenty-one years old.” Daddy knew he was licked.
There was another time that they were separated for nine months, and Daddy and Junior lived with Grandpa Joe and Grandma in Watts. Grandma took care of him then, and that’s when he made the most progress physically. Because he didn’t have this upheaval all the time. He was just a little fellow then. He ate regular and had regular hours, and he was a pretty happy baby. Millie’d come to see him once in a while, but Daddy forbid her to take him anyplace. Then after nine months they got back together again. They finally broke up once and for all when Junior was seven. And that’s when he went to live with his grandmother permanently.
At that time Grandma had a chicken ranch over here in Nuevo. Grandpa Joe had died, and she had her brother helping her out there. She had traded her house for the ranch. Then she couldn’t make the payments on it, so she traded her interest in the ranch for a house on Eighty-third Street in Watts.
Sandy was the man that Millie was going with while Daddy was off fishing, while they were still married. And he didn’t like Junior at all. But she went to live with him after she and Daddy separated for good. She used to tell me all kinds of things: when Daddy’d get paid, he did her like he did me, too, later; he’d give her all the money he brought in. So she was buying up pillows and pillow slips and sheets, towels; she was fixin’ it all together. Then, when she got what she wanted, she told me, she intended to leave Daddy and go with Sandy. And she kept this stuff at my house.
Well, I knew what her plans was, but I think Betty Ward told Daddy ’cause he knew everything she did. Everything. So, one day, here comes Millie in Sandy’s car. She came to get the suitcases with all these towels. And here comes Daddy. Nobody expected him. He looked around until he found the suitcases in my boys’ closet, and he took each one of them towels and just ripped it in half, and they had a knockdown-drag-out fight right in my house. Well, that was the last time they were together. When she got back over to Grandma’s house, she picked up Grandma’s iron and threw it at Daddy and it just missed him. Would have killed him if it didn’t. She went to stay with Sandy after that.
Now, Sandy wanted to marry her. Daddy was in the L.A. County Hospital for an operation on his head, some polyps or something. He was always having to have operations. Then, while Daddy was there, Sandy had a stroke and they took him to the hospital, too, same floor. I met Millie at the elevator, you know, and she told me she was hoping that Daddy would die so she’d get Junior. But Sandy wouldn’t have Junior; he wouldn’t even consider takin’ him. Still, she thought if she married Sandy and Daddy died, she’d get Junior. But Sandy died. That was poetic justice for you, I guess. Sandy died right there in the hospital.
Grandma used to tell me how sorry she felt for Junior. Like one day, she told me she found him just sittin’. She thought he was reading a book, but he was just sittin’ there, not making a sound, and the tears just rolled down his face. She asked him what was the matter, and he said he wished he had a mother and a father and sisters and brothers like other children had.
Junior was just little when he got interested in music. Mr. Parry was his first teacher, and I’m sure Junior remembers him. He was about nine years old, and they were living in Watts, and Mr. Parry recognized immediately that he was very gifted. In fact, when they moved to ’Pedro, Mr. Parry was so impressed with his talent that he made the trip from L.A. every week to teach him.
Grandma was proud of Junior’s talent. Oh my, yes! She’d talk about it, too, to other people. She might not have bragged to him, but to anybody else who would listen she would brag to high heaven about Junior’s talent. Because she knew in her mind that he was going to be very rich and famous when he got grown. Junior kind of took the place of the children she lost. But she never was lovey-dovey, even with her own kids.
He could do no wrong, Junior couldn’t. She’d get out of patience and angry with him sometimes: he liked to aggravate her; he’d bait her—instead of using a spoon, he’d slurp his soup out of the dish. He’d put his head way down. Hahahaha! And Grandma firmly believed that when he grew up he was going to be an outstanding musician, and she used to tell him, “You’re going to be in society. You’re going to be in a position where you’ll need to know manners!” And I remember him making the statement “I’m going to be such a great musician that it won’t make no difference if I have manners or not!”
John and Millie Noble
(John) I can’t say why it took place; I was only six or seven. I just went into their house there on May Avenue in Watts to get Art Junior to play. We were always climbing trees. And here were Moses and Moham [Art Senior and Millie, Art’s mother] going at it hammer and tongs. They were battin’ one another around, calling each other all the names in the book. Art Junior was squalling and a-wailing underneath the sink, and I was afraid to try to run for the front door to get out again, so I just went down on the kitchen floor with him. I was as scared as he was. They were bangin’ one another around. She hit him with a pot or pan; some doggone thing clattered down on the floor. Moses had a very explosive temper, and Moham was like a wildcat; she’d fight anything and kinda kept us kids a little bit away.
We called him Moses, Art Senior. Art Junior made up that name. Him and I talked about it. He said, “He’s as old as Moses and he’s as wise as Moses.” And from that time on it was Moses.
He was a self-educated man, very intelligent in quite a few ways because he educated himself in the field of diesel engineering, and he was a machinist, first-class. He had fantastic tools, and he was very meticulous. His greatest love, of course, was the labor movement. He started in Seattle. It was the IWW, the Wobblies, and he progressed in that field for as many years as he could until they finally kicked him out of Washington State, and he became acquainted with Harry Bridges and became an organizer for him to create the ILWU.
Moses was very one-way about his thinking. He researched what he was interested in and then that’s the way it was in his mind. I learned a lot from him, and I’m quite certain that everyone that was around him did. He was a hard person to forget. You either loved him or you hated him. There was no middle road.
My next vivid thought about Moses was during the ’38 strike, when he had a small Plymouth sedan, and they were going to go out and get some scabs. And they did a good job at that time on those people who were trying to break that strike.
He was about six foot tall, and he was lean, and he had that bad eye, and he had his right thumb cut off, let’s see, by an accident in a machine shop after that ’38 strike. He was there because they were trying to run him off the waterfront. He had to get off the waterfront there for quite a spell.
(Millie) What about that rumor