Recollections of Pine Hill by Julie Obenreder

Julie Obenreder came to New Port Richey in 1945. She was a nurse and a midwife. She recalled that she delivered at least 50 black babies, usually at no charge, at residences in the Pine Hill section before West Pasco Hospital opened and admitted black patients. The following is a transcription by Joseph Arnold of recollections she gave to him. At the time, Mrs. Obenreder was 74 years old.

This is Julie Obenreder talking to Joseph Arnold. What date is it Joseph? July 14, 1987.

We came to New Port Richey in August of 1945. We lived on East Trouble Creek Road, where Roy’s parents had some property. They had several acres out there, and we lived there because we lived in their house for a while when we first came down, before we built our house next door.

I never had heard of Pine Hill before I came to go out there, because they came after me and that’s the first I ever knew about Pine Hill.

And I didn’t then even know what it was called — the Colored Quarters. Everybody called it the Colored Quarters. Even the black people who lived there called it the Colored Quarters.

And the impression I had of it — well I’ll tell you, it was quite an impression, because I went out there in the middle of the night and we went in on an old sand road. It was so deep, it was like sugar sand, and we plowed through that in a truck and we got out to the church. And then the man I was with, Mr. Lee Winthrop, he had come after me to go out and deliver a baby for his wife Ellie Mae. And he said, now we got to get out and we’ve got to walk. So we got out and we walked through the graveyard all across there, and you can imagine how that felt to me, a white girl, never been around any black people, going through a graveyard in the middle of the night.

But he was very, very polite and he kept saying, no harm come to you, nobody’ll harm a hair of your head. He called me a his “white angel.” And there we go, walking through there, tripping over stones, you know, tombstones.

And it was a terrible thing. Roy was with me. He went with me. He remembered that. We went out there to the house. And when we got to the house, the houses were all built up on pillars, like way off the ground, 3 or 4 feet off the ground. That’s probably why they never got taken away in a hurricane, because the winds could just go around them, you know. And so there wasn’t any step that I could get up on, and Lee said, now wait and I’ll get a box for you to get up on. So he went across the yard and he came back with an orange crate. Those crates held a bushel on each side, I believe, and they were divided in the center with a wooden divider. They were pretty sturdy and pretty heavy. So they put it down there and I crawled up on that to get into the house.

That was about a month after we came to Florida. We hadn’t been here very long. In fact, I wondered how they even knew I was here. I never did find that out, how they knew that I was here and that I was a nurse. I don’t know how they found that out.

They didn’t have any medical care. You asked how they received medical care. Well, they didn’t have any. It was nonexistent for the black people because if they did come to the doctor’s office where I worked later, when I worked in the doctors’ offices, they had to go to the back door.

And I have seen them go back there and sit for 4 and 5 hours in the sun out on the step to wait to get in and see the doctor. They weren’t allowed to come in the waiting room and they weren’t allowed inside the building until the doctor would go and bring them in the kitchen in the back door. And then they could come in there and the doctor would talk to them, and sort of more or less fluff them off with a couple of pills, you know.

He never really gave them any care and they never ever paid a bill. That was something they never did. They had innumerable insurance policies, the black people, that they paid 2 and 3 dollars a week for, through these insurance agents who would go out there and sell them insurance which was really worthless. But they sort of took them for that, you know. They did pay that insurance because they felt like it was a good thing but it wasn’t. It wasn’t worth anything really, and there wasn’t any place for them to use it anyway.

There was no hospital. They weren’t allowed in the hospitals. Of course there wasn’t any here anyhow but there was one in Tampa for real serious surgical things. If they had to go to the hospital they could go to Clara Frye in Tampa, which was an all-black hospital. But it closed shortly after the, I think in the early 60s it closed, and it was around ’64 or ’65 before the hospitals were integrated down here.

If there was an extreme emergency they could go over to Dade City to the hospital there, I think it was called East Pasco Hospital. They would give them emergency treatment there for real serious things but they couldn’t go in to have a baby or anything like that. So they just had to fend for themselves, really. So that’s when they got a hold of me, they used all of my abilities as much as they could, you know.

The houses were basically two-room shanties. At that time out there in the quarters, they were really filthy, dirty places. They had no furniture. They had stoves, little wooden stoves, two-burner jobs, you know. And usually they had three legs on. One leg would be off and set sideways, tipped on a couple of bricks or something like that or stones that they’d have under it to keep it sitting up so they could sit a pan of water on it to heat. And then there’d be an old dirty table in the kitchen.

And usually they just sat on boxes or wooden chairs, no legs, no backs, you know just things like that. They had no sanitation, no water in the houses or anything like that. They had wells outside and dragged the water in. They had one kitchen, one bedroom, that was it.

In all the places that I saw, all the buildings I was in out there when I was there in the ’40s, they just had the two rooms, and there was always only one bedroom and one bed, and I never could figure out — there’d be 8, 10, maybe 15 people living in that two-rooms and only one bed and I don’t know where they slept.

There’d always be a great big pile of dirty clothes in the corner. They had no clothes closets. When they took off their clothes, they threw them down on the floor, I guess. And, like Roy said, their clothes were always nice and white. That was one thing they liked to do, was wash. And they washed and they hung things out in the sun. I suppose that’s why they were so white, you know, because they scrubbed them on scrub boards and then they hung them out in the sun and it bleached them.

But they did have nice white clothes, but the kids were always filthy dirty. They had loads of worm problems, with what do you call them, not tape worms, ring worms. They had loads of ring worms. They’d get that out of the sand, you know. And the kids would sit in the sand and play and they would eat in the sand and everything. And of course they had other worms, too. They had pin worms.

Every time we would get a sample at the lab on any of the kids when they were sick, it would always come back just infested with worms. And so they had loads of worms but they’d get these out of the sand.

They would put a bunch of grits or food, whatever, it was usually grits, just cold grits, in a tin plate like a pie tin, and they’d go out and sit in the sand and eat with their fingers, so of course you know they got the sand, they got the worms from the sand and all that stuff in their system. They were all infested with worms.

One little girl out there had asthma so bad, that she just doubled up to the ground to get her breath. We used to give her shots of aminophylline and those were intramuscular. So the doctor gave me a standing order that if he wasn’t in town and she had one of those attacks, I could give her aminophylline. So I used to go out there, even in the middle of the night, and give her shots and she couldn’t breathe.

She grew up and she got married. She outgrew, as they often do, they outgrow that asthma, you know, sometimes when they get older, and she did. I saw her when she was about 25 years old one day, and she had married and had two kids at that time of her own. She had married a real nice fellow from Tarpon Springs and they had a real nice home out there. And she outgrew her problem.

I never knew of any other nurse in this area at the time that I was doing the work, that went around here and did anything. There must have been some nurses somewhere but if they were, I don’t know where they were because they didn’t any of them make any appearance.

And there was a nurse in Elfers that eventually we got a hold of that came in and took care of the patients at night after we started the clinic there at the Richey Clinic on the corner of Delaware and the Boulevard. Dr. Sprankle had that. And her name was Anna Gaines, and she came in and helped nights after we started the clinic. She was related to the Gaines that you’ve read about. Basil Gaines was the sheriff here, and she was related to that family. She has passed away now, because she was older then too.

There was lots of segregation. There wasn’t anything but segregation. The school was segregated, and they had signs around the town in certain places that said, n***** get out of town before the sun sets. And there just seemed to be an unwritten law that they knew. Come sundown, they had to go home. You’d never see a black in this town after six o’clock at night.

The women worked in town here, and the men worked in the packing house, basically. And Butler Laundry down here hired a lot of blacks from the Colored Quarters. She used all-black labor in the laundry there, and all the affluent people in town had a maid and they’d walk in.

I remember one black woman, her name was Maggie. And she was crippled. It looked to me as if she’d had in her youth maybe a broken leg. It was never set. That’s what it looked like. And she walked real crippled. And she used to walk all the way from Pine Hill in every day to work in one of the houses of one of the women. And I delivered 3 or 4 of her daughter’s children out there.

I don’t know how Pine Hill ever got its name. It was just always called Pine Hill. I would think it was because there were so darn many pine trees out in that area, you know, when the blacks came there and settled. They probably named it themselves, Pine Hill. I don’t know.

And I have a lot of friends out there, I think. I think Laura Burch is one of my friends. In fact I see her in the store and she always hollered at me and says hello. And they call me Miss Obie. And they all talk to me. And Ellie Mae has always been a friend to both me and my husband. He did a lot of things for her. He used to fix her tires on her car, stuff like that.

The kids went to Clearwater if they wanted to go to high school, you know. After they got out of that school out there, they had to go to Clearwater. And Ellie Mae drove a bus. Well, it was a so-called bus. It was a station wagon. It held I think 6, 7 kids, and she used to take them back and forth every day to Clearwater in that station wagon-bus to school. I suppose she got paid for it. I don’t know. I imagine the school board probably paid her, because that was when she was always forever having trouble with that old bus. ...

We had plenty of those. We had plenty of babies born at Pine Hill. I had one born that was a stillborn. I had only one stillborn in all the time that I delivered babies out there. And that was Dr. [deleted]’s patient. He was out on the Gulf that day and he wouldn’t come in. He was fishing and he got word that he was supposed to come in but, you know, they didn’t care whether they came or not. He didn’t bother to come so I went out with Ellie May and had the stillborn and that was the only one I ever had that was stillborn. And I tried so hard to save that baby and did everything I could, you know. I did artificial respiration. It looked pretty good when it first was born, and I did everything. When I got home I called the doctor and told him he should go out there. So he went out and he told me the next day, he said, there wasn’t anything you could have done or that I could have done had I been there. He said it definitely had been dead probably two or three days. So we were just lucky that she went ahead and had it, you know. But that was the only stillborn.

And then Ellie May had one that was a preemie. It only weighed about, I could hold it in the palm of my hand, you know. I don’t know what it weighed, maybe just a couple pounds. And I was afraid that it would never make it. And I said to her, now I’m going to run in town and get some things to help with this baby. And I said, you keep it warm. I laid it on her chest and I said to her, now you keep this baby nice and warm and don’t do anything till I get back. And I rushed in and I got some hot water bottles and a little thing that I could feed it with, you know, a dropper. And I got things to make a tent so I could maybe keep it warm and things like that with blankets. They didn’t have blankets or anything else. And I got some nipples and things. I could give it some sugar water if I got it around them where it could be anything.

And when I got back out there she was sitting up in the bed nursing it, and it was just glub, glub, glub, glub, eating like a little pig! And I sad, “Oh, my gosh, what are you doing, Ellie May?” She said, “He was hungry! I was feeding him!” So she fed him, and he’s about 6 feet 6 now. He weighs probably 195 or 200 pounds! He grew up to be a great big, tall black person (laughs).