Oral History Program Myrtle McPhie Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 July 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Myrtle McPhie Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 July 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: McPhie, Myrtle, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 2 July 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Myrtle McPhie during WWII circa 1940s Myrtle McPhie 2 July 2017 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Myrtle McPhie. The interview was conducted on July 2, 2017 in her home in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Myrtle discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Sara Kamppi, the video technician, is also present for this interview. LR: It is July 2, 2017. We are in the home of Myrtle McPhie in Ogden, talking with her about her life and her World War II experiences for our World War II and Northern Utah project at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, and Sara Kamppi is with me as well. I just want to thank you again for your willingness and making it possible for us to come. Let’s just start with when and where you were born. MM: I was born in Ogden, Utah. Lived here all my life. LR: And when was that? MM: May 14, 1922. LR: Were you born at the Dee hospital, or were you born at home? MM: I was born at home with a doctor and a midwife. Doctor Edward Rich. The midwife was Kathleen Moore. LR: Where at in Ogden did you grow up? MM: Down here on Twelfth Street. 890 Twelfth Street. The house has been destroyed now, when they had to widen the road. LR: What are some of the things you would do for fun as you grew up? MM: I liked to do all sorts of things like running and athletics and cartwheels and somersaults and games with my friends. We would gather under the streetlight and play hide and go seek, run sheepie run and kick the can. We had a wonderful time. The boys would later raid their father’s watermelon patch. LR: How many siblings did you have? MM: I had four brothers and one sister. I was the youngest in the family. LR: Where did you go to elementary school? MM: Mound Fort which was down on the corner of Washington and Twelfth Street. Elementary school was one to six. High school was only two years, junior high school was seven to ten, so I went to Mound Fort for ten years. We went in a different part of the building for junior high. LR: You went to Mound Fort School on Twelfth Street. Would you walk to school? MM: Yes five and a half blocks, but you would have an hour for lunch, so I’d walk home and five blocks back. LR: Was it worth it? MM: Sure, but I didn’t know anything better. LR: What are some of your memories of growing up during the depression? MM: Well, I know I didn’t have a lot of new clothes. My mother would make my clothes. We’d go to JC Penney's and buy some fabric and it cost about twelve and a half cents a yard. I remember I had two dresses, one to wash and one to wear. One pair of shoes. If the soles wore out, my dad would bring home a package with rubber soles. You’d have to rub the bottom, apply glue and apply the rubber sole to it. Sometimes it didn’t take and you’d get a flipper flopper. Original flip flops. LR: When you were growing up on Twelfth Street, did you live on a farm or was it just a house? MM: The houses were fairly separated so everybody had at least an acre of ground. We had fruit trees and we had berries and a garden and chickens. Some of the neighbors would come and buy eggs for twelve cents a dozen. We had cherry trees, peach, pear, apple and apricot. Sometimes there’d be a surplus and we would sell it. LR: So during the depression, you always had food, it sounds like. MM: That’s right. We didn’t have to buy very much. Sometimes my mother would get hungry for some sardines in an oval can with a key. There was not much trash. We always burned any papers that we had. The only trash we had was clinkers from the stoves, and ashes. Do you know what clinkers are? When you burn coal, sometimes it will just adhere to itself. It’s a clinker. So we’d put that in the trash bin and sometimes those clinkers would still be hot. The truck would be going down the street with those clinkers still hot. We called him the ash man. LR: Who were your parents? MM: My father was Charles Yorgason. It’s Swedish. It originally being Jorgensen, but nobody could spell it or say it, so it was changed. Then they couldn’t say that either. LR: And your mother? MM: Esther. LR: Did they meet here in Ogden? MM: No. They met in Sandy. My father lived in Sandy. My mother was living in Farr West and her aunt had a new baby in Sandy. She was about 18 and she went down to help her and she met my father. He owned a bicycle shop. He repaired and sold bicycles. He would ride his bicycle from Sandy to Farr West to come and see her and he’d come and spend the weekend with her family. They were engaged for two years because she said she wouldn’t marry him until she was twenty-one. SK: What type of work did your parents do during the depression? MM: My father was an auto mechanic. He had his own shop. LR: Was there a lot of work for that during the depression? MM: Well yes, nobody had new cars. He’d repair them. My mother didn’t work out of the home. LR: What do you remember about Pearl Harbor Day? MM: Oh, I remember that very well. We had just come home from church. My dad turned on the radio to get the news. It was just full of Pearl Harbor information. We just couldn’t believe our ears. I had two brothers who were eligible to be drafted. That was really hard. We just couldn’t believe it because I’d known Japanese people all my life. I couldn’t believe that they would do this horrible thing to our country. That was so far away, just a little island. Why did they bother? LR: You said you’d known Japanese people all your life. Did that change the way you saw them? MM: No, because they were still friends. I remember two girls in my classes. They’re very bright girls, studious. They would go to school during the day and then on Saturdays they would go to their Japanese school to learn language. They were anxious to learn. They were just delightful people. LR: Were any of them taken and put into internment camps that you remember? MM: I don’t have any idea. They could have been. LR: You graduated from high school in 1940. What are some of your memories of high school? MM: Well, I know I had to walk those five blocks to catch a bus to Washington Blvd and Twelfth Street. The bus was always crowded. I don’t know how they got away with it, standing room mostly. The driver would open the door and the students would just about fall out. I never had a seat. I lived over two and half miles from school, you would receive free bus tickets. So, that was nice. LR: So you caught the bus on Washington and Twelfth and it would take you up to Harrison? MM: They’d go up Canyon Road and up the divide up to Twentieth Street. It struggled to get going. It was interesting. Sometimes you’d just about go backwards. LR: What else do you remember? MM: Well let’s see. I usually enjoyed my classes. I liked my English classes. I wanted to be a home economics teacher. They said I would have to have all the math classes so I had Algebra and Geometry at Mound Fort. I took Chemistry when I was in high school. There weren’t too many working openings for women in those days. You could either be a nurse, a school teacher or a clerk in a store. That was it. I didn’t want to be a clerk in a store and I didn’t want to be a nurse. But my dad said, “You can’t go away to school.” So, I changed my plant to be a secretary. I had taken typing in high school and decided to do Business College, learned shorthand and all the typing skills and office proceedings. I took classes in spelling and rapid calculation and, bookkeeping. I enjoyed my classes. LR: Where did you got to Business College? MM: It was called Henagers, in Ogden. Interestingly, if I’d gone to Weber for this, it would have taken me two years but I completed two years of shorthand in six months taking several classes during the day. I could type on a manual typewriter fifteen minutes perfect for seventy-five words a minute. I took a typing test when I went to work at Ben Lomond High School on an IBM Select and my speed was ninety-five words per minute. I could do shorthand about two or three hundred words a minute. It was great. LR: Shorthand is not something you see today really. So, how does that differ from typing word for word? MM: It’s using symbols, but they’re logical symbols. It’s very logical. Otherwise, I would have never learned it. When I was learning shorthand, I thought I’d like to be a court reporter or an archeologist one day. LR: Did you do either one? MM: No. I became a secretary. LR: So, you said that you had two brothers eligible for the draft. Were both of them drafted? MM: Yes. LR: Do you know where they served? MM: Yes. My brother Rulon was in the Signal Corps and he was in the Philippines and Japan after a while. My brother Elden had language skills. He’d been on a mission to Norway, so they decided he was adept at language. They sent him to language school to learn French, and he went to England. He was in the after wave of the invasion of Europe. Something interesting that happened. He had graduated from Ogden High, Weber College and Utah State. When he went to church, he met a young lady from Hooper, and they discovered that she had gone to Weber College and Utah State at the same time. But they didn’t meet until they went to church in Paris. They got married later. LR: Were Rulan and Elden your only two brothers who joined the military? MM: Yes. My other brother, Milton, was working in Texas. He was older and had a family. The oldest brother died at age seven. My sister was older than I. She’s nine years older than I, so didn’t really get know her very well. She moved to California. LR: You ended up working as a secretary at Weber College during the war years. MM: Do you want to find out how that happened? LR: Please. MM: I was working for a company and I was not using my shorthand or typing. So I thought, I’m not using my skills. I’ll go up to Weber College and signed up for shorthand and typing and office proceedings. The teacher had been a school teacher and he was now treasurer for the college, Mr. Harold Handley. After a few nights, he told me about an opening at the college and would I be interested in it. I said, oh yes. I was making $100 a month and this job was $140. Wow, talk about a raise. I said I definitely would be interested. He said, “Ok, I’ll make an appointment for you to talk to Dr. Robert Clarke.” He did and I went for an interview. He wanted me to work for him but I’d have to go and talk to the President because he always wanted to meet the people who joined the faculty. I was interviewed by Dr. Henry Dixon and the rest of the people who were in the offices and went to work. The young lady in the same class with me at night school was a sister to my boss so she called her brother and told him, “Myrtle’s going to leave you.” So I gave him two weeks’ notice so he could get a replacement. LR: You were doing vocational training for war production workers? MM: Yes. LR: I know I’ve interviewed a lot of soldiers who said that they would go to colleges to learn. Is that what that was? MM: That’s right. Dr. Clark recruited civilian people to take classes that were being requested. These people came by the dozens to Utah. There were just thousands of people pouring in with little or no training to do the work here. They didn’t know what to apply for so Dr. Clarke we went to the department heroes and asked, “What do you need to help people receive instruction to be able to work for you?” He recruited instructors from the private sector, every place he could find someone who knew something; for instance, welding. He would go to someone who was doing welding for people. “Would you like to come and help instruct people? May they come to your shop and you can instruct them there.” So, a lot of it was on-the-job training. A lady told me she had been a welder. I thought, you’re going to be a welder? Then she was asked if she’d like to learn soldering. That’s quite a bit different. She said she had to wear special magnifying glasses, and then to do the soldering under a microscope. That’s very minute because the wires were so tiny she couldn’t see them. I'm sure she was very good at it. LR: It looks like you guys did on-the-job training and offered classes for all the military installations in and around Ogden, Hill Field, Defense Depot Ogden and Clearfield Naval Supply Depot and Ogden Arsenal. What kind of classes would you offer for them. MM: The Defense Depot Ogden was storing incoming supplies and shipping out for use. Supplies would come in and the personnel would have to organize it and know how and where to ship it out as needed. That was a big organizational enterprise. LR: What about the Clearfield Naval Supply Depot, was it the same type of thing? MM: I’m sure it was. LR: I really don’t know the difference between the Ogden Arsenal and the Defense Depot. MM: The Arsenal was making bullets and other explosives. LR: Would you guys offer classes in machinery for that? MM: Yes. How to handle bullets with the gunpowder. Whatever they had to do. LR: I’ve heard about Naval Air Cadets coming into Weber College. MM: They would take the theory classes at the college. Then they would go out to the Ogden airport and learn how to fly small planes. This was a first step in their flying career, so they had to learn on the little ones first. LR: So, the motor pool classes that you guys taught, was that for the Red Cross Motor Corps? MM: I don’t think so. It was for the military people because they would have cars and they sometimes had to be transported to another department. This was a big spread out place and you just can’t take off walking. So, they’d have cars and jeeps for the military. It’s funny, I’d never seen a jeep, and the teacher came to the college this one day driving a jeep. I said, “I’ve never seen one.” He said, “Come on out and look at it. Would you like to go for a ride?” Sure. My gosh, it was hair-raising. No seat belts, I was hanging on for dear life. I think he went over every bump he could find. He had a steering wheel to hang onto. I didn’t have a thing. LR: So your responsibilities were keeping track of the students and the hours that they trained and then all the different names for all the different classes? MM: Yes. LR: That’s a lot of work. MM: It was. It was interesting. A lot of different names for people too. LR: To your best recollection, how many students do you think came through? MM: They claimed that there were over ten thousand. LR: During these three years? MM: That’s right. Like I say, they came from all over the country without much training. Doctor Clark was a great organizer. He was a mathematician and so that’s what it takes to be able to do that. He had the kind of a mind that can organize. LR: Did he teach math at Weber College? MM: Yes. And calculus and trigonometry. LR: You mentioned Doctor Clark and Lorenzo Peterson. Who was he? MM: He was his assistant. MM: They would go everyday to these different installations to see that classes were being taught. They were just making sure everything was going the way it should. LR: Was it hard keeping instructors at this time? MM: No. He was able to get people to do the task at hand and they were willing and ready to do it. No, I’ve never heard of one being fired or quitting. LR: So this is what you did through all the war years, work at Weber College. MM: Yes. I was there actually for two years because the program had started before I came. There was another girl before I was there. I don’t know who she was or why she left. LR: So you were there in 1943 to 1945. MM: Yes. LR: Do you remember any stories of that time period that are right there in your memory? MM: Not particularly. Everybody was busy for the war effort. That was all in my mind to just get it over with, do what you have to do. LR: How did rationing affect you? MM: Shoes. I dearly loved shoes. I couldn’t get shoes, only so often. There was a nice lady shoe store, L. R. Samuels, and I picked out the shoes that I wanted so badly but I knew I couldn’t get them until my shoe stamp came up. So I tried them on and priced them. That’s what I wanted a B-17 shoe stamp to come due. About that time a B-17 bomber came out, so I named those my B-17 shoes. They did make some artificial manufactured shoes, fabric tops with a flimsy sole. You didn’t dare walk on the snow because you’d just slide right down. I had a pair of those and they were terrible. LR: You could not just go out and buy a pair of shoes, you had to wait for the shoe stamp due date and then you only had to pay the price for the shoes. LR: I’ve seen some photographs of women working with heavy machinery and airplanes, and they’re not really wearing work shoes. They’re just wearing whatever they had available. Could they go out and get a good pair of work shoes? MM: I think maybe they might have been furnished for them, with hard toes. LR: The photograph I’ve seen, she’s wearing a pair of loafers. It makes me smile because I think, I don’t know if I’d want to work in a shop like that with just a pair of loafers on. MM: I think that was a posed picture. I’m sure they had them because they had to wear coveralls and that sort of thing. LR: I didn’t think about it being a posed picture. MM: Might have been. LR: Where did you meet your husband? MM: The USO came to Ogden and they asked young ladies be hostesses for the Saturday night dances. The musicians had gotten together and formed a dance band with a young lady singer, but they needed hostesses. So they went to the LDS wards, the other churches and clubs and so on and asked for young ladies to come and be hostesses. So my girlfriends and I, since there was nobody to date, we decided to go to the USO. It was fun. LR: About what time period is this? MM: 1943. LR: That’s where you met your husband, was through the USO? MM: Yes, we were going to the dances, and they told us, “General Hospital in Brigham City needs some ladies to go to the rodeo because they’re bringing patients down from the Bushnell.” So we decided to go. I was driving my brother’s car at this time. When he went in the military, he gave me lessons on how to drive. I think the lesson lasted about fifteen minutes, push in the clutch, shift gears, push in the clutch. He said, “OK, now you can drive.” Sure I could drive. I’d come home drenched. I could really kill the engine. LR: Well, that’s all they really had back then were clutches. MM: That’s right. One of the teachers at school purchased a new car, automatic shift, and we’d never seen one before. He came and said, “Would you like to go for a ride?” Sure. So, we went. I couldn’t believe you didn’t have to push in the clutch and shift the gears. It was like floating on clouds. LR: Going back to the USO and meeting your husband. Was he one of the patients from Bushnell? MM: Yes he was. I sat down and I was talking to him, and he asked me if I’d lived in Ogden all my life and I said yes. He said, “Are you a Mormon?” Eventually, I said, “Yes, but I don’t have horns.” That’s most of what we were confronted with, these fellas from the east coast and other places. He says, “I’m a Mormon too.” He was from Arizona. LR: What was his name? MM: Gilbert. LR: Where at in Arizona was he from? MM: He was from a town called Woodruff, a little town on the Little Colorado River. LR: How long had he been in the service before he was at Bushnell? MM: Well, he’d been in camps in the United States then he went to Panama for a year. Then he went to New Guinea for two and a half years in the jungles. Then the island they were on, after the Japanese had been cleared out, he picked up a shiny object on a table and it blew up. It was a booby trap. He lost an eye and several fingers, shrapnel. He was sent to Bushnell. He was recovering. Then when he got well enough, they put him to work in a psych ward. They were doing electric shock treatments. LR: Did he ever talk about his time working at Bushnell? MM: He was very busy. One time, someone died, so he was chosen to take the body to Minnesota and meet the family. Anything to do with the military is rough. When Gilbert was in New Guinea, he said that they would deal with the natives. They’d bring big stalks of bananas, and he says you’ve never tasted a banana until you’ve taken it right off the tree. So, they’d give them some corn beef and they thought that was wonderful. Great trade. Then he got malaria when he was in Panama. When he got home, we’d been married about five months, he had an attack. It was awful. He was out of the military now. I didn’t know what to do, I called my doctor and he didn’t know what to do either because they’d never had an occasion to deal with it. He needed some Atabrine. That’s what they gave him when he was in the military to prevent it. He just had to weather it. It was awful. He was so sick. High fever, sweating. The sheets were just wet. It was awful. I was scared to death. LR: When did you guys get married? MM: December 20, 1944. A long time ago. LR: How long did you guys date? The whole time he was at Bushnell? MM: Just for five months. I met him in July and we got married in December. LR: Was he still at Bushnell when you guys got married? MM: Yes. The war came to an end. We were down in Phoenix when the war came to an end. We was there for a while. We had driven my brother’s old car. We didn’t have enough gas stamps. So friends gave us stamps, relatives gave us stamps. We had a tank in the back of the car, in the trunk, with gasoline, so we could get back home. We were in Phoenix, when the Japanese declared the war over and gas rationing was over. Cars were going just as fast as they could go down the street heading for gas stations to fill their tanks up. LR: Was there a lot of celebration going on down in Phoenix? MM: Oh yes. They were just hollering and honking their horns and making all kinds of noise. That was a great time. LR: I’ll bet. How long did you guys stay in Phoenix? MM: Not very long. I had to get back for my job. LR: Were you still working at Weber College at that time? MM: Yes. Then that program I had been working on was no longer needed so I was out of a job. But, it was OK with me because I was pregnant with my first child. LR: What did your husband do when he was discharged? MM: They had given him some aptitude tests and said with his history of malaria he needed to do something outside. Two things - forestry or mail service. He didn’t want to go to college, so he opted for the mail. I had a friend whose father was a mailman, and we talked to her father. He applied and was hired. He needed to be outside. They had lots of physical exercise, which was just right for him. LR: Was that here in Ogden that he worked for the mail service? MM: Yes. LR: How long did he do that for? MM: Oh, about fifteen years. Then he slipped and fell on some steps and wounded his knee. He had to retire. LR: Did he do something else after that? MM: No. He had a friend who had a gas station, and he would go over and help him. LR: Did you ever work again after your time at Weber College? MM: Yes. I had four children and I decided I needed to do something. My husband and I had divorced by now and I was by myself. I saw in the paper a secretary part time. I thought, that’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to be home with my children. So I applied for the job and was hired. LR: So you were looking for a secretary job after you were divorced, did you ever find one then? MM: Yes I did and I worked there for two years. It was interesting because I decided to come have my picture taken and the photographer offered me a job. I still had this job and I had a new one at the high school. LR: Who was the photographer? MM: His name was Brandt. I thought this is really interesting, three jobs. LR: Were you trying to raise your kids on your own? Were you a single mom? MM: Yes, it was hard. My youngest was in first grade half day. It was a full time job for me. When I went to work, I told my child they were to call me the minute they got home from school. They always knew they should not invite any other children in the house when I was not home. Those kids, you know, I was always so proud of them. I never had to tell one of them, “Do your homework. Did you get your homework done?” They just did it. It was a miracle. I had nothing to do with it. I just couldn’t believe that they’d sit out on the living room floor and just do it. LR: Did you ever remarry? MM: Yes I did. His name was John McPhie. LR: So what was your first husband’s name? MM: Gilbert Turley. LR: How long were you married to him? MM: Well, I guess a total of twenty years. It was an off and on thing. Mostly off. I didn’t have enough courage to move out on my own because I needed insurance, he was making house payments, I had to have a car and for security reasons. I just I couldn’t make enough money on my own. LR: When did you marry John McPhie? MM: In July 1967. LR: Did you stay in Ogden then? MM: No. I sold my home and we bought another home. I didn’t want to be in my old home so we went to North Ogden. I just loved North Ogden. It was so neat and a really nice home. I had to leave it to come here. You work all your life to get things just the way you want them. Children all married. I was alone. Couldn't take care of myself, home, or yard. I was 85 years old so I moved to the gardens assisted living, a good move. LR: Are there any other stories that you’d like to share about your time here in Ogden? MM: That’s about it. I’m very dull. LR: Hardly. Let me then ask you my final question. How do you think your experiences and your time during World War II shaped and affected the rest of your life? MM: I think they made me more tolerant of people in different parts of the country. It’s interesting because you’d kind of judge people from where they come. Upper East certainly had a different accent from the Deep South, definitely interesting. The rest of us all talked Western English. LR: So you learned to be more tolerant. What else? MM: That there’s another world out there besides Ogden. My husband and I travelled in several states. It is a beautiful country, so much to see, but I still didn’t ever see Niagara Falls. Then I went to Sweden. I did see the Statue of Liberty. When I was married to my husband the second time, I was doing sweepstakes. I’d do five every day. I had a little pamphlet from a company that published all the contests sweepstakes. Postage was five cents. I figured I didn’t smoke or drink so time and postage was my vice. I was winning: dishes, pots and pans and this one time, I won a wonderful cookbook. There was nothing that I could do because it actually belonged to somebody who is in charge of big dances and banquets. I was not involved in a country club so I called them and asked them if they’d like to see it. They said, “Yes we’d like to.” It would tell them how to order nice big parties and balls and that sort of thing. So they said, “How much do you want for it?” I said, “I want a roll of stamps; twenty dollars’ worth of stamps.” So that’s what they gave me. I thought it was a fair trade. Then, I won a really nice one, second prize in a contest from a wine company. We won a trip to the Caribbean plus two thousand dollars to spend. LR: Did you enjoy that trip? MM: Yes. It was funny because I was actually scared to death of flying and petrified of water. There I was in the middle of the ocean on an island. I called my brother and said, “Do you think I ought to take this?” He said, “If you don’t, I will.” It was December when we went with coats and warm clothes. Stepped off in Puerto Rico in December, it was hot. Got on this big bus and somebody on the bus said, “Can you turn on the air conditioning?” Driver said, “You’ve got it. Right through the windows.” That was a fun trip. We went to Caracas, Venezuela. I bought myself an emerald. My birthday is May and the birthstone is an emerald. I was collecting earrings so I bought earrings and something from each island. I bought ivory and a tortoise shell jewelry watch. Tortoise shell is now illegal. LR: Are there any other stories you’d like to share? MM: One last thing. I am doing quite well. I have four children all doing fine. One is a teacher of the year in Reno, Nevada. She has BS and MA degrees. My other two daughters are expert hairdressers who graduated from MSU and own their own businesses. My son is ex-military - paratrooper also 750 jumps also licensed packer for military and civilian repairs and responsible for chutes to stop planets and for pilots to be ejected from planes. I have 9 grandchildren and 17 great grandchildren. I am now 95 years old. LR: Thank you.