OXNARD : Black Families Gather at Park for Reunion

When Viola Windom Jackson and Renomia Lee Pleasant were teen-agers growing up in Oxnard, back when Harry S. Truman ran the country and 8,000 people lived in the little seaside town, they’d play post office at parties on weekends.

“Oh, we were always chaperoned!” Jackson, now 62, recalled Saturday at the Oxnard Black Family Reunion, held at the Oxnard Community Center Park. “Our parents knew who went into the post office, who came out, and who was in there receiving mail!”

The two women broke up in laughter.

“And we were careful who we went in the post office with, and who we kissed,” added Pleasant, now 60. “Because if they didn’t brush their teeth, there was no kiss. We’d send that letter back!”

Jackson and Pleasant were some of the earliest arrivals at the reunion of Oxnard’s oldest black families. By midafternoon, about 150 people--from newborns to elderly--thronged around the barbecue tables.

Among those attending the reunion was Oxnard City Councilman Bedford Pinkard, 62, who moved to Oxnard at age 7 from Jacksonville, Tex. The black community in Oxnard goes back to the early 1940s, when families moved out to work on local military bases, Pinkard said. When he and his friends grew up, there were only 35 or 40 black families in the city, and everybody knew everybody, he said.

“When people went on vacation, we’d always have a house party for them, and then another when they returned,” he said. “Church was the gathering place. Everybody went to church on Sunday, no exception.”

The other teen-agers knew Pinkard for his “hot rod”--a pink 1949 Ford, and one of the only cars owned by one of the teen-agers. “I painted it pink because I wanted something very different,” Pinkard said. “I took it into Los Angeles to get it painted. Boy, if you went to L.A. to get something done, you were uptown!”

Though white and black kids mixed in the schools, black adults faced discrimination when they went out to eat at certain restaurants or tried to buy a home, Pinkard said.

But in the main, older blacks say they remember the area as a safe, sheltered place to grow up and raise a family.

“I was stationed here in 1951, working on the USS Norton Sound,” said Bob Pleasant, 61, Renomia’s husband. “I’d planned to live here for a few years, but then I fell in love and raised three kids here.”

On Saturday, in honor of those days and those families, Bob Pleasant helped barbecue 150 pounds of tri-tip beef and 100 chickens--enough, he hoped, to feed all the old residents and the many children and grandchildren they were sure to bring. Each attendee paid $10 admission to the barbecue.

The reunion is the first gathering the group has held since 1975, said Tesha Johnson, 48, who handed out name tags to all the visitors.

“I got involved cause my mom can’t hear too well anymore,” said Johnson, whose mother, Elizabeth Johnson, was Oxnard High School’s first black majorette. “I’m doing this all for her.”