In our last Portland Anchor, we featured highlights from Ed “Nardie” White’s young childhood in Portland, based on a series of oral history interviews conducted at the Portland Museum. Nardie is a member of the museum board and has been involved in many organizations in Louisville, most notably the nationally-renown River City Drum Corps.
We pick up Nardie’s story as he graduated from Shawnee High School in 1970 (“which was 75% white” at the time, he said). He capitalized on a phenomenal scholarship opportunity to go to the West Kentucky Technical College in Paducah, where he lived in a dorm with around 500 other students.
And White didn’t study drums or art or photography, but rather the paint and auto body trade. It might have been a functional career path, but his lungs couldn’t handle the fumes, and he never considered continuing in that industry. But the time in Paducah is when Nardie said he matured and learned about the world outside Louisville, meeting other students from southern Illinois and western Kentucky who had many of the same experiences. He looks on these years fondly, relating many tales of youthful misbehavior.
“I knew I wasn’t going to Vietnam War to get shot at, and fortunately my number was 364. Anything under 100…you was gone. 364. I knew I had to get out of Louisville, and I could go to West Kentucky Vocational School. Tuition was crazy. $4 a month. Room and board was $4. I got a check for $75…I was out the next day smoking (laughs). The state had a scholarship called vocational opportunities program where they would pay $75. Tuition, all across the board, was only $4 a month. So it was a known thing, if you want to study a vocational trade as an African American, you could go there.
“My instructor eventually died of lung cancer. Yeah, he was 79 when he died. I think his brother got lung cancer too. I know people that either that, or you get COPD from all that paint thinners, and, you know, it’s like, no. And I can’t imagine what I’d be like now, all the inhaling of that dust and, you know, the varnish. And that’s when they was using non-EPA chemicals.
“By the time I got there, shoe repairs was gone. But they had auto mechanics, electricity. In fact, my roommate was an electrician. He went there, came and went on work study and never came back, because when he went on work study he got in the union here. You had tailoring, you had commercial foods, drafting, business administration, like a business school, cosmetology, barbering. Brick laying, carpentry. So it was a full-fledged vocational school.
Man, we would do things. My first experience with a juke joint was, we would go…we went to Sikeston, Missouri. And I had a friend, I wonder if he’s still alive. Riley. He had been in the Navy, and he had these old, hopped-up cars. (another big laugh). I’m gonna tell you this story. So we’re going to Sikeston, Missouri, because that’s where he lived. I was very green. You know, living in Portland and living a sheltered life. So I meet these guys. He took us to Sikeston, Missouri, and the black section was just like going back into something you see in the ‘20s, ‘30s. It was a boardwalk. And so we would go there. I mean, it’s a juke joint. You hear me, it was like, oh my god. Live bands. So this one time, just I and Riley went, so he’s driving fast. He’s driving fast. And he looked back and so the police came, and he said, “Can you can drive a stick?” I said, yeah. So I climbed over the seat and he switched seats, and because I was in the back seat asleep. When the officer gets there, he said, “I saw you climb over that seat”. I said, “No, I was driving”. He said, “I saw you”. “No, I was driving.” So the only thing that saved us was that Riley’s family was a prominent Black family. Do you hear me? Oh, man. And when I think about it, imagine being locked up in one of the country ass towns. You hear me? Back in the early ‘70s, it was like, man, what the hell, Riley? Riley didn’t even have no license. I didn’t know he didn’t have no license. So I’m saying, oh my god, the hell you even got yourself into. I wonder if he’s still living, you know, the lifestyle he was living. I’m gonna say he’s probably not, because that that drinking and smoking and fighting, you know, you just don’t get old doing that.
That’s the first time I’d ever seen cotton. Miles of it…just like we see corn. That’s how cotton grows, and when it grows, once it comes out of the field, they put it on these big wagons that are open at the top. And you might see a tractor pulling seven, eight of them. When you see the cottonwood trees open up, and all of those things start to float, and that’s what it was like. When that wagon is going, it’s like it’s snowing because of the loose cotton just flying. It’s just like snow.
“There were these guys from Hoptown, and they all could drink. Big guys, six two. And I wasn’t a drinker. And my roommate, and he has since passed, said, ‘I told you about messing with them Hoptown boys.’ They used to drink this stuff called mellow corn. And so it was Thanksgiving, and we always had a party, and we always had a big dance at the Civic Center. I got so drunk…I sat at the table and I was passed out. My friend woke me up, said, ‘Man, I told you about messing with them Hopkinsville boys’. And so he took me to the dorm, put me in my bed. So funny when I think about it. I ain’t been that drunk too many times since then, you hear me. I was in the bed, and the bed was just spinning and spinning and spinning. You think you put your feet out of bed and stop the bed from spinning. And then I just finally went on to sleep, and my roommate woke me up the next morning, said, ‘Get your ass up out of this bed’. He cussed me, called me all kind of m-f… ‘Get your ass up. Look at your ass’. I had vomited in my sleep, all down the side of my face, all in my hair. ‘Get your ass up. I done told you about running them damn Hopkinsville boys. I told you, dumbass.’ My head was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…”
The West Kentucky Technical School was eventually shuttered and absorbed by various branches of the Paducah and University of Kentucky Community College systems in 1998, thereby closing the chapter on a fascinating piece of Kentucky African American history. His education continued years later, at Jefferson Community College, but our next chapter will focus on his early working-class career as a factory worker, and then a commercial photographer. Stay tuned next month to see where Nardie’s life’s twists and turns take him next!
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