Interview with CHARMIN 65

Oral history recorded for the Bronx Aerosol Arts Documentary Project on February 29, 2024 with CHARMIN 65, the first female graff writer to get her name up on the subways. In her oral history, CHARMIN 65 speaks about her family's history and background in the Carolinas, how her parents ended up in The Bronx and the story of their meeting on Union Avenue, her experience growing up in the neighborhood around the Simpson Street subway station, games she would play outside as a child and the cohesion of her neighborhood, food she remembers eating, music she was exposed to in her home and the wider neighborhood, the public and parochial schools she attended through junior high and her time at Bronx High School of Science, her first forays into tagging in the bathroom of St. Athanasius School on Southern Boulevard in the sixth and seventh grades, the origin of her tag "Charmin 65," graduating to tagging a billboard at the Simpson Street station c.1970, her experience of racking and "bogarting" markers and spray paint cans in her neighborhood and around New York, her experience tagging as one of the only females at the time, doing pieces on subway cars with her neighborhood crew, how they would get into layups, subway lines she would frequent and their specific characteristics, her brief involvement with United Graffiti Artists (UGA) and her apprehensions about it, various places she would hang out with other writers, and why and when she eventually quit writing and her impressions of the increasingly elaborate pieces that came out in the later 1970s and 1980s. She also sets the record straight about being the first female writer and shares her thoughts on the meaning of The Bronx to her. The interviewers are Steven Payne, director of The Bronx County Historical Society; STAFF 161, who has known CHARMIN 65 since the early days of writing; Kurt Boone, prolific documentarian of urban culture for the past 40 years; and BOT 707, another legendary Bronx writer. The Bronx Aerosol Arts Documentary Project is a project of The Bronx County Archives at The Bronx County Historical Society Research Library.