And I worked for Sir John Lewis Partnership, was the name of it … very successful retailers, even now, in fact the major department store retailers in England. formal education … so I started in this department store when I just turned 15, and they called it an apprenticeship, you know, that was just cheap labor, you know, a name for an excuse … for very little money. LONGSTAFF: My education finished before I was 15 years old. LONGSTAFF: That was the Royal Air Force, and they stationed me then right by Cambridge, just outside Cambridge.ĪNGLIN: Had you gone through high school in Cambridge? And so I went and joined the Air Force, I think just to get away from home. I was a very difficult teenager, and so it’s difficult. I stayed in Cambridge, didn’t on too well at home, I think because I had an inkling, back then, that I was gay, and I think that made it difficult. My family, my father, and his father, and most of my uncles, were all from the Merchant Marines … what we called the Merchant Navy, and my brother eventually went into that, too. LONGSTAFF: No, I had a brother … about 18 months older than me. But it’s just odd snatches of memory you get from a very early age. So I was less than three years old when that happened. I think Germany ran out of bombs, or planes, I’m not sure which. You know you can remember certain things even when you were very, very tiny, and I do remember … you know, and I was only … I think the air raids finished in about 1942. LONGSTAFF: Yes, in 1945, was when we had VE day. But, anyway, so I was raised there.ĪNGLIN: Were you about six or seven when the war was over? We did have a lot of air fields around us, especially as the war progressed. They were after factories and ports and air fields. Cambridge never really got bombed because there wasn’t really a lot of industry there. So, anyway, that was in Cambridge and the grocery store was called “Longstaff’s” and, my parents had that … and, anyway, then of course, I remember the war … We had our own air raid shelter at the time, in our stock room, and I remember being dragged down in the middle of the night, twice. LONGSTAFF: But that’s all we have in common. We both were raised, you know, above a grocery store … So, just like Margaret Thatcher and I, we both had similar rearing. My parents had a small grocery store, something about the size of a 7-11 type store … about that size … and we lived above it.
LONGSTAFF: Well, I was born in Cambridge, England, in 1939 just prior to World War II starting. Obviously you are from the United Kingdom in some locale, so tell us where you came from originally. So they always say the best place to begin is at the beginning. So, Richard, thank you for agreeing to participate in this project with The Dallas Way.ĪNGLIN: Thank you. Richard and I have been acquaintances for many years, and he has agreed to give an interview and answer some of our questions and talk about history for a while. Richard, now retired and living in Florida, takes us through his own personal life story, both in England and the United States, his public life as a retailer in Oak Lawn, his deep involvement with the Dallas GLBT community, the torment of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, his humiliation before the American courts in a futile struggle to become a citizen of the United States, and his hopeful view toward the future.ĪNGLIN: This is Mike Anglin, and I’m acting as the interviewer here on behalf of The Dallas Way, and this is March 31, 2014, at about 2:15 in the afternoon.
Mike Anglin interviews Richard Longstaff, the legendary godfather of Cedar Springs and the owner of popular clothing store Union Jack.