By ANNE KAZMIERCZAK
Register Reporter
When Bob Lane was a teenager, movies at the Iola Theater cost a quarter.
“My, we loved to go to those shows,” Lane said. Problem was, if Lane wanted to go with a group of friends, only five of them could sit in the theater at one time.
“You could stand up there if you wanted,” Lane said, “but you couldn’t sit.”
There were only five designated balcony seats for people of color, and once they were filled, the theater wouldn’t let any more sit down.
Still, Lane has no bad feelings for the people of the past, who enforced or instilled those segregation laws.
“That’s just the way it was.”
Lane has a wealth of memories of Iola’s segregated past. He tells of a light-skinned football star who could play in games against teams that didn’t realize he was black. In towns where they knew, he wasn’t allowed on the field.
“Kansas was kind of strange,” Lane said. “It depended on what town you lived in.”
Iola schools, for instance, weren’t segregated, but Coffeyville was. In fact, Lane said, “I was the first black male to graduate from the Iola Junior College.”
“Other boys started, but they didn’t finish. Some girls went through, but I was the first black man.”
Lane was graduated from the college in 1941, which he attended after a year of trade school in Kansas City.
“But I didn’t get any more from the trade school than I did from high school,” Lane said, “so I came back here and went to the junior college.”
Despite the non-segregated schools, there were other aspects of life that were still off-limits.
Even in Iola, Lane said, if you were black, “You couldn’t go to the restaurants, you couldn’t drink from the water fountains.”
“If I went to Cook’s Drug Store, I couldn’t even sit at the counter and have a Coca-Cola.”
Even the Mason lodges were segregated.
“Oh, yes,” Lane said. He was a member of the Golden Square Lodge 71. “It was a fine lodge.”
“You had to be pure of heart to get through that time,” Lane said repeatedly. He said not all people were bad, but rules of segregation reigned.
Segregation didn’t stop the draft, though, and in 1942 Lane was summoned to armed service.
Army trains and troops did follow segregation laws, however, making for convoluted travel.
“If I was going to Leavenworth, I could sit anywhere I wanted” on the train, Lane said. “But if I wanted to go south, I had to move.”
Even Army busses required black servicemen to move to the back.
The United States Army did not integrate its troops until ordered by President Truman in 1947.
“All the black units had white officers,” Lane said.
“We had one black officer,” Lane said. “He was the chaplain.”
Even movie theaters on military grounds were segregated, Lane said.
Lane was a First Sergeant in the army, and an aviation engineer, and though he was offered officer’s training due to his skills and intellegence, he declined.
“I chose to stay with the guys I came in with,” he said.
That sense of comraderie was proven later, when the men were waiting to be shipped out from Boston, Mass.
“It wasn’t too long before we were told we were going to be shipped out the first part of February,” Lane said.
Being just before the holidays, though, “The next morning, those guys had scattered everywhere.”
Lane was in charge of his troop, and knew his men well. So he declared them all “present or accounted for,” which in Army parlance meant he knew where they were if they were not physically present.
His commanding officer chided him, warning his head would roll if the men were not back by the time they were scheduled to ship to Europe.
“Oh, they’ll be back,” Lane told him. And sure enough, by February, all the men had returned from their families.
Lane said the men boarded a ship — also segregated.
“We weren’t three days out fromthe U.S. coast, and those boats started rocking.” The men were under fire from German U-boats.
After docking in Bermuda, the men continued on to France and North Africa, where they were under the orders of Gen. George C. Patton.
As aviation engineers, it was Lane’s unit’s job to build runways, fix bridges and secure downed planes.
“The Germans were everyhwere,” Lane said. “The first runway we put down, they blew up.”
All the men in Lane’s unit were black. “There were black pilots, black fighting troops, black engineers,” he said.
“They weren’t integrated ‘til after World War II,” Lane said.
After the war, Lane returned to Iola. Despite the achievements of the black troops, the world he had left behind was still segregated.
“When I got back to the United States, I was bringing 10 guys back to Camp Chafee, Arkansas,” Lane said. Five of those men were white. Even though he was the officer in charge, when “we stopped at those different restaurants, I had to go to the back, or I had to go outside to the toilet, or I couldn’t drink water out of the fountains.”
“In Camp Chafee, I couldn’t be with my men,” Lane said. German prisoners of war housed at the camp could attend the local movie theater, but Lane and the other black soldiers could not.
“I couldn’t even buy a train ticket to go to Kansas City,” with the group, he said.
Blacks were not allowed to purchase advance tickets, Lane said, but only board the train when it came in, provided there was room. The six black soldiers in the group were thus cut off from their fellows.
“Some of the white guys bought us tickets so we could go with them” as a troop, Lane said.
Now, though, Lane said, “That’s water under the bridge.”
As he watches a changing nation, about to usher in its first black president, Lane said “I figured down the road it would happen. I never did think it would be in my time.”
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