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people are talking live from san Francisco today, colorful California politician, Willie Brown plus our gardener. Albert Wilson. Mhm. Mhm. Well, yeah, friday morning Welcome to people are talking and of course because it's friday, we have our wonderful gardener with us. Albert Wilson a little later on

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he is going to be talking about how to prune flowering spring shrubs, Something you wanted to know exactly. You know, when this morning's guest moved to San Francisco from Texas in 1951 it is said he had a goal to become a math teacher and earn enough

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to afford a comfortable living for he and his family. Now you might say he's gone beyond that goal for today. He's one of the most powerful politicians in the state of California. Some believe as speaker of the assembly, he can make or break a piece of

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legislation and he does it in style. Willie Brown is one of the shrewdest, most dapper and controversial men ever to grace the halls of the California legislature and in 1984. According to Playgirl magazine, he was one of the sexiest men in America. Would you welcome Assembly

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speaker Willie Brown. Right. No. So, okay. Yeah, yeah. How do you like that handle being one of the sexiest men in America. Well, my kids were embarrassed by it. They were, they did not think it was very accurate and my wife was flattered. It

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was something she had never known. You are from mineola texas. That's right. I spent most of your years there of course before you moved to California. Can you tell us what life was like in those early years for you? Well, I've tried to forget it. It

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was pretty bad. It was, it's a very small town in, in uh southeast texas and the oil country. It was the land that didn't have any oil on it. And It was a hard country. There was some 4500 people was totally segregated, totally and completely segregated

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and without any really redeeming social qualities about it. There was nothing culturally interesting about it. There was nothing entertaining about it. It was just a bare existence. It was nothing romantic about it. I don't think anyone would ever make a movie about it. And the only

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thing that you had in mind if you lived in Mineola on the side of town I lived and lived on was that uh, to get out as quickly as possible. So it was a very tough world. You're a tough, you were raised by your grandmother. That's

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right. That's right, mama, Your mom had to work. My mother and all of my relatives, all the adults in Mineola who had anything going had to leave in order to get a job. The only place you could work in Mineola on a consistent basis was in

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something called the p house. The p house processed black eyed peas and pinto beans and somebody had to pick those. The rest of us were the pickers and the suppliers and the growers of that product and you worked only when the crop was being harvest were

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sometimes the potatoes watermelons, uh cotton berries, all of those things and that was pretty much the extent of what anybody did. The rest of us mowed lawns and worked in people's kitchens or shine shoes as I did. Where was your dad? My dad was a pullman

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car porter. He worked on the railroad, he worked on the TMP line and he left the family and I don't even remember when he left the family, I don't remember ever being in a household where there was a male, uh, as a dominant figure, as a

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participant figure or as an ongoing figure. I don't remember my dad ever sleeping over in the facility in the house in which I lived, My mother left home and went to work in Dallas in somebody's kitchen. My uncles came out to California to work in the

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defense industry, some of the place and My grandmother was left with the responsibility to raise the five kids and she did that. Yeah, she must have been a great inspiration. She's an incredible woman. She's a very, very, she was an old woman. Even when I realized

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that that was it for me and everybody in the community knew knew her all the white people called her auntie and her name was anna lee and all of the black folk in town Children as well as adults called her. My dear. It was a short

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for mother dear. And that's what we all called her and her house was kind of the center for the city for social activities. She owned the only piano in around town. She was not a religious person, but she made everybody else go to church. She never

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went to any church at all in her life. She was very independent and fearless and she was the chief negotiator. If there was an argument between white and black, she handled the resolution of it. And I can remember when they would bring fish by to sell

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off the wagon. She would say that was just a light. You know what a politician, particularly with my list of enemies. She would they bring the fish by and on these wagons and they'd be selling the fish off the wagons. And um, I can remember my

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dear telling this old white man whom she did know what would you take for that. And I think he told us some price and she says that's the only way you're gonna get it. And he said, what did you say She is the only way you

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can get it and take it. Nobody would pay you that for that kind of fish. And I remember that one time we got three of my friends got caught doing something in a watermelon patch that didn't belong to us. And uh the fellow fired a shotgun.

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And of course we went down in the rose and my grandmother happened to be walking by the fields and saw us and walked right down the field and said, you boys get behind me and she walked directly into the guys shotgun, shotgun. Yes, right. She did.

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She walked through directly to the Baron. I really felt I would superwoman. So she was, she was a hell of a woman. Were you real ambitious as a kid? Um, on reflection? Yes. Clearly I had to have been ambition ambitious in order to even survive. I

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was, I ran around with three other kids. Uh, we, the fellow by the name of Edward Dickie, whom we called booty, a fellow by the name of Clarence, whom we called cookie, a fellow by the name of john, whom we call Jackie and they called me

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brookie. And so the four of us were inseparable all the way through school, all the way, you know, until we all left in 1951 we all went our separate ways and we were the competitors of the competitive types. We did all the plays, we lead the

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songs, We did all the sports activities. We got the best grades. We chased the best. We, we tried to dress the best. We were always, we always wanted to be better, a little bit better than everybody else. We tried to pick more barriers. We tried to

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pick more cotton. We tried everything. We didn't view it as in, you know, being ambitious then, but it was clear we all had some in mind because um, Jackie is now the uh, an administrator in the Kansas school system, highly rated Dickie Edward, Dickie is the

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visiting teacher and he teaches other teachers how to teach kids in the school system in Dallas texas and uh cookie Clarence is a retired military naval person. He now lives in oxnard California and of course I'm the least um, set of all. I'm still in a

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precarious electoral job here in san Francisco. And, and so clearly we all had ambition and we kind of fed on each other. We didn't really have any heroes though. We didn't have any images we didn't have, you know, Life magazine didn't mean a whole lot to

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us. What we had was a grandmother who oppressed us, that we really had to be better than everybody else to compete. And, and uh, and that's essentially what we did. We had a lot of people who cared about us with a lot of those teachers, they

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really cared about us. They really looked out for us. We had, we had a coach who didn't know a thing about geometry and mathematics, but he knew of our interest in it. And so he made us commit to book to memory. He had no idea what

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the concept was what the term was, what a triangle was or any of that. But he knew that if he apparently, if he taught us the discipline of being able to remember things that would stand us in good stead and somebody would tell us what those

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angles were and that's what he did and that's what we learned. We're gonna take a commercial break when we come back. Let's find out what brought you in 1951 to the San Francisco area. Be right back, mm hmm. Yeah, yeah.