Rosa Rojas: Hello my name is Rosa Rojas. Today is August 17, 2010. Today we are interviewing Marialyce Sunami. The interview is being conducted at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio as part of an oral history project by the Ohio Historical Society to preserve the stories and experiences of service members and their family members for future generations. For the record, would you say and spell your full name.
Marialyce Sunami: Yes, my name is Marialyce Norman-Sunami. The first name is spelled M-A-R-I-A-L-Y-C-E. The last name, S, like Sam, U-N-A-M-I.
R: And the member of your family that was in the service?
S: Was my father, Henry Arthur Norman. And he was a career Army officer who served during the Second World War and the Korean War.
R: When did he join?
S: I think that he joined the service around 1940. I’m not sure of the date, but I remember that he was drafted, and at the time that he was drafted, he was the principal of a school in Gallipolis, Ohio. So my guess is it was somewhere around the beginning of the war, so it could have been 1941, but sometime around then.
R: Is your family from Gallipolis?
S: Yes, actually, my parents were from there, and I was born there although I lived there only very briefly because my father was always being moved, and we were always being moved with him.
R: How old was he when he was drafted? Do you know?
S: My guess was he was about—well he was born in 1916, so he would have been about 34 I think, something like that. Is that right? Do the math.
R: What was his highest rank?
S: His highest rank was Major.
R: He was drafted, and he was a principal, you said?
S: Yes, he had completed his college education and had been teaching school. That’s why I am a little fuzzy about the dates. He had been teaching school in a rural school and was principal there, and then he was teaching in Gallipolis at the time he was drafted. And he went into the service as a Private, but because of his college education, he had an opportunity to get a commission as an officer, and he did that. I don’t know whether that was directly related to his training as a pilot, but he was trained as a pilot at Tuskegee Institute, and he was a part of what was called the Army Air Corp. It was quite new at the time, and it’s distinct from the Air Force. I don’t know whether the Air Force existed at that point, but there was something called the Army Air Corp, and that is where he was placed.
R: Now do you know if he ever considered coming back to teaching, or have you ever talked about that? Did he just decide to…
S: No, I don’t know what the decision making process was for him. He did teach in later years. He taught Military History at Morgan State College as a part of his Army service. I think that was maybe a three year assignment. He did that in Baltimore, Maryland. So I think that he always maintained an interest in teaching. I don’t know enough about the economic environment for African Americans in the post-war period, but I think the armed services was a good career choice for him.
R: How old were you, do you remember, when he was drafted?
S: I wasn’t born yet. I was born in 1947, and at that time, he was serving in the immediate post-war service as part of the Army of occupation in Germany. My mother, sister, and I eventually went to Germany. So my first memories are being in Germany. I must have been maybe three when we went there and five or six when we came back to the States.
R: Was that the first time that you remember, then, spending time with him? Or had he been back in the States?
S: The first time I really remember him at all was in Germany.
R: Did he come back often, or did you, at that point, just go and stay?
S: We just were there and lived there for four years. My mother had to come back for an emergency because her mother was badly injured and subsequently died, and my mother came, and I know she brought my sister and me, but I don’t remember any of that. We were fairly young. I think my sister was still an infant. I was probably a toddler. And that’s the only time we were back, but I do remember the ocean voyage when we actually returned to the United States permanently.
R: Did he come back with you, or did he stay?
S: He came with us at that point.
R: Then he continued his career?
S: Right.
R: Again, how old were you at that point?
S: I started first grade the first fall that we were back, so I was six.
R: What did you think about your father being away?
S: That’s an interesting question because we moved about every three years, so for the family, that was our life that we were constantly sort of pulling up stakes. Often my father was assigned some place where the family couldn’t go, or where it would have been difficult to be. There were periods of time that he would be gone for most of the three years. He might come back for a brief visit, but he would be away for lots of time. I particularly remember when he was doing his service in Korea because he didn’t get to come back. He was doing something that was fairly covert, so he couldn’t communicate a lot about it. But he was really always very interested in what was happening to us. He wrote letters. He would send pictures. He sent dolls and books, and he encouraged us to read. We were supposed to get a dollar for every book we read, which was probably a lot of money in those days. He would send us regularly these ten dollars for having read books.
R: How old was your sister?
S: She was eighteen months younger than me. Our ages were very close.
R: From traveling around so much, what were some of the places you guys traveled to?
S: Well, I lived in Washington D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland and Fort Meade, Maryland. We lived in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I think those were the major places during the time I was growing up. His last post was here in Columbus, and he was the commander at Fort Hayes before it was decommissioned. I think his absences probably were difficult for both my mother and perhaps for us as children. I remember him coming back and sort of rejoining the family on a continuous basis when I was 12, 13. That sort of teen thing, of like “What’s he here for? What do we need him for? We’ve been fine all these years without him,” kind of thing.
R: How did he react to that?
S: I don’t know how aware he was of the kind of resistance that I was feeling, but he was always a very kind person. I think it was probably somewhat difficult to come back and sort of find your way back into a family that’s kind of done without you for a good bit of time.
R: Is your mother still…
S: No, she’s not living any more either. As an adult, when I look back, it’s remarkable to think of how often she had to pack up a whole household and move it and start over again and get us, as children, into schools and deal with illnesses, family tragedies, and so forth, a lot of times, alone.
R: Did you ever discuss any feelings with your sister?
S: I don’t think so. Not about that. Army life was the life we knew, so I don’t think we consciously felt resistant of it. It’s just, that’s the way we lived. What I did find out as I grew up into young adulthood is that I was more used to saying goodbye to people than I was to making long-term relationships and that sticking to things more than three years was something I sort of had to consciously focus on because I’d be ready to move on from whatever it was. So that was kind of a psychological thing that I lived in three year blocks.
R: Do you feel you were able to transition from that state of mind?
S: Over the years, definitely, but when my father retired, I was ready for college. I graduated in 1965, so again, it was just another move, and after I got out of college, I went into the Peace Corps, then I moved to Philadelphia, then I moved to New York. It was a while before I actually settled down. I’ve lived in Columbus for quite a long time, and it’s still somewhat of a marvel to me that my children have this very long stable connection with one place. They are very rooted in this city. And they are very rooted with the friendships and relationships they had over a long period of time, which is wonderful. I was really happy that they had that; it was just something I had to learn.
R: Now your father was African American, true?
S: Yes
R: And was your mother also African American?
S: Yes
R: Did he ever talk about that experience, what it was like to be…
S: I do know some of those things. I know that his promotions were slow because African Americans didn’t get promoted as quickly, so even though he had a long career and quite a distinguished one, his highest rank was Major. That wouldn’t probably be the case in today’s Army. I also know that as African Americans in Europe right after the war, they were oddities. I can remember some stories about them talking about people staring at them. When the African American soldiers first went into Italy and Germany—which is where my father served, those two places—they not only were oddities to the native population, but rumors were circulated about them by their white counterparts in the U.S. Army. So there was some negativity intention that was there just because of the way that the prejudices were dominant in our society were transferred to this other environment. The thing I remember the most strongly was that when we lived in Fort Meade, Maryland, the schools in Maryland were still segregated; and so I was bussed a fairly long distance out into the country to a school that was, like, just a school building in the middle of a field. So I would come home; there would be burrs all in my socks and everything because we were really just sort of underdeveloped area. But I fell one day at school, and I think I sprained my wrist. So when I came home, my wrist was swollen and so forth, and my father took me to the dispensary on the post, and the doctor said, “Well, her wrist is sprained. Why did you take so long to bring her in here?” And my father was just in a state of controlled rage, and he just said, “Because they bus my daughter miles out of town, and this was the soonest I could get her to a doctor.” He was so angry that it frightened me. He didn’t say anything that would have created a problem, but it was really clear to me as a child—I’m sure it was clear to the doctor—that he was very upset by the doctor’s comment and by the situation that we were in. I remember because it caused me to have such an emotional response because I remember saying, “Daddy, daddy, it’s okay, it’s okay.” It really wasn’t okay, and I didn’t really understand all the ramifications of it, but I remember that quite strongly.
R: So other children did not have to be bussed?
S: No, just the black children. Yeah, just black kids were bussed. There was no school in Baltimore where we would be able to attend with white students at that time. I remember when they desegregated the schools in Baltimore.
R: How much longer…
S: I was in first grade when this incident happened, and I think I went to an integrated school in seventh grade.
R: (I feel like I need a moment. I get so emotional.)
S: Yeah, for people who had served and put their lives on the line, it was not something that they were unaware of at all.
R: How many other black families were there?
S: Well, we knew black families all through the years of service, and in Germany, that would have been the only families that I knew—families of other black officers.
R: Why?
S: I would just assume that that was the social group that my parents would have been accessed to, would have been comfortable with.
R: So the situation here in the United States still transferred over?
S: Right, I think, for instance, in Baltimore, probably the families I knew on post, they were sending their kids to the same school that I was going to, so those were the children
that I knew. And the same was true with going to school when we were no longer on the post. The thing is, he was often stationed in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, and I think it had to do with his flying. Because he flew a variety of officers between the different posts and things like that; but none of this do I know for sure, Rosa, because I didn’t ask those kinds of questions. So I was not aware of. And you have to remember, this was the very beginning of civil rights movement. My cousin, who was a college student, was one of the people who sat in and picketed in Baltimore to open up lunch counters, department stores, things like that. They were really in the very forefront of civil rights, so this was something that we didn’t really talk about that much; it just was, that’s the way our lives were. And I went to school in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where the segregated society was very much in evidence there; I think it was the first time I was really aware of it. I also went to school in Gallipolis, Ohio, which was an integrated school.
R: At that point,
S: Yeah, that school had actually been integrated when my mother was in high school.
R: So Ohio is actually ahead?
S: Yeah, right, especially in a small town like that. I would go from different places and be in different environments. I started school actually in Columbus, and it was an integrated school. Then I went to Washington D.C., and it was segregated. Then I went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and it was even more segregated, I mean the whole town was. Then we came back to Fort Meade, and that situation, I think we lived in Gallipolis after that, but we went to Baltimore, and as I said, I remember when schools were desegregated.
R: Do you remember how your life was different after your father came home? Were there responsibilities that changed for you?
S: I think, after he came home, he was always very present for us. He was really a wonderful parent during my junior high and high school years, I remember because he was very supportive of any kind of scholarship that we were engaged in. So he always was the one that would help me with my science projects, would get me supplies, would be my partner in working through whatever these things were. Nothing seemed to be too sort of ridiculous. I remember him helping me build a solar cooker; I’ve never ceased to be fascinated by solar technology. He bought me a solar cell; I don’t even know where he got a solar cell in 1960, ’58. He got me a telescope; I was interested in Astronomy. In those days, we used to do science projects, and we would maybe get to go to the District [competition] and so forth. I almost always got to go to the state, and he would always be the one who took me, helped me with my posters. And he did the same thing for my girlfriends. I had a lot of girls that I was close to, and he would always be the one who transported us places. I could remember him taking us to lunch or dinner after one of the science fairs, and there were like five of us. We were all focused around those kinds of things. He came to school. So he was very present after he kind of rejoined the family, and he was very much a family person. That was his basic upbringing of him I think also—his personality. He was always very conscientious about helping his brothers, his father, and things like that. So he was very present after he was able to be with us.
R: Was his extended family here in Ohio?
S: Yeah, actually, his extended family lived in Columbus, and I wasn’t familiar with Columbus until we moved here in 1960; I think I was 13. So it was a chance for him to sort of get reconnected to them after having been away a lot. And I think he lived in Columbus at some point before he went into the service because I remember I think my parents talking about when they were dating, he worked at Islay's on Long Street, and she would go there, and he would give her ice cream, things like that. I remember. I think she was a college student at Ohio State [University] at that time.
R: So did your mother have a career as well?
S: Yes, she did. She was trained as a teacher, and was I think studying at Ohio State to be a guidance counselor when I was born, so then she stopped going to school at that point, but she had her Bachelor’s degree and she had already taught school for maybe five years or so before I was born, so she did that. Then she didn’t work outside the home again until I was in high school, but my brother had Down’s syndrome, and my sister had been crippled by polio, so my mother was very much needed at home and sort of kept everything going, from the beginning. She kept things going through all the years that my father was gone, and then through these years when there were just a lot of health issues that had to be dealt with. But she went back to work as a teacher—I think I was in high school. And she got her degree as a guidance counselor. She got her PhD, and she was a part of a special project where master teachers were pulled out of the classroom to create a team of elementary guidance counselors, and they went to a special program at Ohio State—they kind of created this program, and they were sent out into the Columbus public schools, and I used to say they were like circuit writers because they had a docket of schools they had to go to, but they were the people that you called when there were crises. And they did some pretty miraculous work; it’s too bad that we don’t have anything like that now. They did really wonderful work. There was a corps of about ten or 12 of them, all master teachers, one of whom I still know, who is still living here in Columbus. So for probably a period of ten or more years, they did that work, and then she served as a guidance counselor at Ohio Avenue Elementary School, at East High School, and finally at Douglas Elementary School. And then after she retired, she served Douglas as a volunteer guidance counselor for years, I don’t even know how long—a long time.
R: Now you mentioned the health problems that your other siblings had? Did your mother have any help with that when your father was away?
S: Well, yes, there was a very good friend, and this was a couple; they were also an Ohio couple. I know they were friends from the time that my parents were in Germany. I don’t know if they knew them before they went there—that’s not a question I ever got to ask. The husband was a close friend of my father; the wife was a close friend of my mother. They didn’t have any children. Often times, when Major Thomas was deployed somewhere—my father might be in the same location—the two women would make a joint household. So we used to call her “Momma Mame,” “Moma Mame” was like the other mother; she was particularly devoted to my sister. And so she was with us a lot of the time, like when we lived in Gallipolis, she was there. My mother was really good at finding help. The help tended to just be maybe somebody who could help her look after my brother and sister, or maybe help her sometimes with just getting through the housework and things like that. She had the most help when she was in Ohio, because those were the people that knew her—the people she had grown up with. I think it probably was much, much harder in some of the other places where we were. Sometimes we were with relatives; we stayed with my father’s brother at one time when we were living here in Columbus. We stayed with my mother’s uncle when we lived in Washington. So I think she sought out the networks that helped us to have a sort of safer environment to live in.
R: Where was your mother from?
S: She was born in West Virginia but grew up in Gallipolis.
R: So her family was also here then?
S: No, they weren’t in Columbus; they never came here.
R: But in Ohio?
S: They were in Ohio, but both of her parents died fairly young. Her mother died when I was like two, and her father died when I was ten. But she had a brother, and her brother and his family continue to live in Gallipolis. All the kids grew up there, and we were very close to them. I can tell you a little bit more about my father.
R: Yes, please.
S: One of the interesting things is that he was a pilot. He was what was called an artillery spotter, which was a fairly sophisticated task; you had to understand Calculus because you had to radio back the coordinates for bombing and artillery fire, and so that was his job. He flew a small Piper Cub over enemy lines and signaled back the coordinates for the firings, and that’s what he did in the war. He also talked about once, that he was in the forward party for the U.S. [United States] troops that were coming into Italy, and he was supposed to go and find lodgings for the commanding officer, and he said he almost got there too soon because the fighting was still going on, and almost ended up right in the middle of it when he arrived in this town where he was supposed to be finding quarters for the troops that were coming in, so that was an interesting story. He had some stories—I can’t remember them well enough to describe them. He had a great sense of humor, and he was a real story teller, so he did tell a few things. He didn’t talk much about the war until his later years, but he had a funny story about an Englishman who was part of—what’s the British Air Corp—who went out, they were doing a bombing raid, and I guess it was very, very close because his plane was injured, but he managed to hit his target and get back to the air field, and my father loved his line because he said the guy said, “I guess we spoiled their tea,” as far as the German troops were concerned. So that was something Dad loved—he loved stories, and he loved these little, there would be little phrases that would become things we use around our house because you might say, “Oh, I guess they spoiled your tea,” because we have all these little tales to tell.
R: Let’s talk about today—war time. How do you feel about the antiwar protest?
S: It’s interesting because as an Army brat, I think I grew up with a very strong sense of patriotism. I grew up—we were on Army bases; we always were to stop when you get out of the car, you would salute when the flag came down in the evening, and these were just things that were part of our day-to-day life. During the Vietnam War, I did join some of the protests. The protests were always against the war, never against the soldiers. I felt that we were mistaken being there. I had cousins—three of them—who served in Vietnam, and truthfully, most of the young men that I knew in Columbus and Gallipolis were in the Army. They had been drafted, so there was a time when, as far as African American men were concerned, there weren’t any. If they weren’t in school, if they hadn’t been able to go to college and many people coming out of the small towns in Ohio didn’t have the money and the options to go away to school, and they ended up in the service. One cousin really was badly injured and also saw some of the worst kind of service on the ground and still has physical and emotional injuries that date from that time, so my sense of outlook—the Vietnam War and definitely about the current conflict—is that it’s morally wrong to send people into conflict when you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know why or how you expect to do that, and I’ve never been able to not be aware of the people on the ground, the people who are the ordinary day-to-day citizens who are suffering, particularly these wars we’ve had which involve civilians more than anything else. I guess what I would say is that I have great admiration for our troops but not for some of the reasons that people seem to put forward. American soldiers have been brave and effective in the past, and I think part of it has been that we’ve been more judicious about the conflicts that we’ve entered into. I think that if we hadn’t entered World War II, the world we’d be living in now would be quite different. I don’t think probably we should have gone to Korea. I’m sure we shouldn’t have gone to Vietnam. And I don’t think we should be where we are now, in Afghanistan and Iraq; I wouldn’t hesitate to say that to anyone. Also, I think my sense of what patriotism means might be different than other people. I have great respect for the flag and what it represents, and part of what it represents is our freedom, so people burning the flag, people dressing up with the flag, people wrapping the flag our their head—that’s what we can do here. And people getting sort of bent out of shape and wanting to tell someone else what they can do seems to me to miss the point. My father flew the flag every Fourth of July and Veteran’s Day outside of our house, and we still do it, particularly in memory of him. I don’t have any disrespect for our nation and its history, and I don’t have any illusions about it either. I know how we got here, and my father’s people came to Ohio as a result of the service of his great-great grandfather—it’s probably more greats than that, but just spare you—who served in the Revolutionary War and received land here, and that man was mulatto, who was an indentured servant and didn’t have his freedom until he was about thirty years old, and my father’s family has contributed soldiers to every war that this nation’s fought over the full course of its history. That’s one of the reasons I’m here today. It’s a proud heritage. I’m proud of him and what he did. I’m proud of the way he carried himself always. He was an officer, a gentleman, and a scholar, and that’s how we always think of him because his service was important to him. It was a part of who he was, but I don’t think he ever lost sight of the values that lay behind that.
R: As we wrap up, two questions, well maybe three. What would you like to say to soldiers and families of soldiers fighting today?
S: That’s a good question. I think that the courage and sacrifice of soldiers and their families, and I think it cannot be separated—their families whether they’re married and have children, or if it’s their parents, whoever they belong to—have made a great sacrifice to send a man or a woman into that kind of danger. And they deserve the attention and respect of the nation, including much better care of veterans—those who come back, they shouldn’t have to struggle to get care; they shouldn’t have to struggle to find work; they shouldn’t have to prove that they’ve suffered either psychological or physical injuries to be in those places is to suffer. We need to take care of them the way we’ve asked them to take care of us. So my message, I guess, would be to have courage and to be proud, but I also am concerned about people who are willing to make certain kinds of sacrifices without being thoughtful about it. We have a tendency to get very gung-ho when it’s time of war and to simply make the fact of going seemingly to be the point. People want to go, stand up for the country. They’re not thinking about what that’s for. I think it’s important that we’ve always had a citizens’ Army because essentially our military is protecting our nation, and we have to be careful about that. That’s a resource that we shouldn’t expend thoughtlessly. We shouldn’t be Army adventurers. We shouldn’t jump into fights here and there for reasons that we’re not clear about. We do have to stand up for what we believe in, and we should care for the nation and its values, but there is no more precious resource than the life of a human being, and we have to be very careful with that.
R: How do you feel today in your own personal career, how do you feel your father’s military service has influenced what you’ve ended up doing in your lifetime?
S: Well, I think my parents were both people who were very conscious of community. I think it comes out of how they grew up, and I’m sure his service was also an aspect of that. So I had the example always of people who were committed to doing things for other people that had little or nothing to do with the benefit for them. Their value system was one in which money was never in the forefront. Certainly the work that they did wasn’t about what it brought to us in terms of monetary returns. Soldiers don’t make a lot of money. We did have some resources, and it might have been easier for my father than say, being a small town schoolteacher. But on the other side, the sacrifices were so much greater as well. So I think that I probably grew up with a heritage of service that necessarily effected what I’ve done. But the other thing is that the travel—going from place to place—was something that in the end, I valued a lot, and it’s something that’s still a part of the way I look at the world. I want to know about other people and how they live. I can never forget that their lives, however different they might be from mine, contain the same essential elements, and I feel that anything that we do that helps us to connect more positively to other people around the world, the better it is. So I worry about how we face the world now and what we can do to be soldiers of peace, and I think that would be very consistent with my father. He was never a person who was violent by nature or who would have selected violence as a course. He told one telling story, when he was in Italy, they were rounding up Partisans—the people (I don’t know if they are called Partisans) the people who had been supporting Mussolini—and they were like shooting them, not the Americans, but the Italians—collaborators. They were shooting collaborators, and somebody asked him “You want to go down and watch?” And he said no, that there was never any reason to take pleasure in another person’s suffering. And I remember him telling that and thinking—he was a very kindhearted person—that would never have been something that he would have thought was just or appropriate.
R: And can you state what—I know you’ve recently retired—can you state what you retired from?
S: Yes, I was the executive director of Southside Settlement House, which is a social service agency that’s over one hundred years old, and the thing that distinguishes settlement houses is that they are rooted in their community. They grow up out of a specific community, and they reflect that community. Their philosophy is one of working with people rather than for them, so it’s always a focus on how people can come together to address common problems and how, as a community, we can support each other. And it was a work that I was very happy and grateful to be connected with for a long time.
R: Finally, is there anything that you would like to add that I might not have asked or might have left out?
S: No, except for the fact that, this is something I didn’t know but learned in later years—I think it was from something perhaps like you all are trying to do, a PBS documentary about the African American troops and how their fight for America in World War II led directly to the Civil Rights Movement, as we know it, that was galvanized in the ‘50s [1950s] and ‘60s [1960s]. They came back to the States, and they were not prepared to suffer the same injustices that they had grown up with. And that provided a lot of the perspective, the energy, and the courage for the Civil Rights Movement, and I think that’s something that we need to be conscious of; it’s a message that we need to continue to share with all of our youth. I think it’s important as we frequently join together and overcome barriers in times of stress, in times of war. It’s important that we remember, after those times, the necessity for us to work together as a genuine community, even when we’re not faced with that kind of threat because there are just so many things that we need to try to solve in the world, and we need everybody as a part of that effort.
R: Thank you so much.
S: You’re welcome.
