Oral History Program Steve Markos Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 27 January 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Steve Markos Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 27 January 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: Markos, Steve, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 27 January 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Chris Markos (Steve’s father) during WWII circa 1940s Chris Markos on Leyte during WWII circa 1940s Chris Markos and Miller in the Pacific during WWII circa 1940s Chris Markos circa 1940s Chris Markos (first row, far right) Flight Crew circa 1940s Steve Markos 27 January 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Steve Markos. The interview was conducted on January 27, 2017 in his home, by Lorrie Rands. In this interview, Markos discusses his parents’ experiences during World War II. Markos also discusses his memories and experiences from his life. Michael Ballif is also present during this interview. LR: It is January 27, 2017, we are in the home of Steve Markos, talking about his father and his World War Two experiences, and the Papageorge family, because there’s a connection there. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, Michael Ballif is here as well. It is about eleven o’clock and we’re in Layton. Steve, I just want to say thank you again for your willingness to visit with us. So let’s talk about your Dad. Can you give us his full name and when and where he was born? SM: His name is Chris H. Markos. He was born in Ogden. I don’t know if it was in the hospital or not, but it says Ogden on his birth certificate, and it was December 24, 1920. LR: Wow. Christmas baby. SM: My birthday’s December 25. LR: Oh geez, what are the odds? MB: What does the H stand for? SM: His Dad’s name was Harry, but it was always just an initial, I think they just give him an initial instead of a full name. LR: That makes sense. Now, who were his parents? 2 SM: Harry Markos and Frossini. Her maiden name was Houlis, and they were both born in Greece. LR: Okay, what was your grandparent’s connection to the Papageorge family? SM: Harry’s oldest child was Anastasia, who was my dad’s sister, and she married Alex Papageorge. I believe they got married in 1926. LR: Did your father ever talk about what it was like growing up in Ogden during the Depression? SM: Not a lot. He mentioned that they were pretty poor, they really didn’t have much money, and it was pretty tough to just scrounge up enough when he was on a date. The whole family would scrounge up their pocket change to see if they could come up with fifty cents or so to go to a movie and that. It was a farm that he grew up on, and he did talk a lot about how to grow a garden, and his older sister Anastasia, he was her helper when he was growing up. He’d stayed with them and helped her to raise a garden and do a lot of the household stuff, and he was a great cook too. He learned all that from her. LR: Okay. Is there a reason he spent all that time with his sister? SM: My dad was only eight years old when his mother died. Harry, Frossini, and all of the Markos boys had been living with Alex and Anastasia Papageorge, and she died in 1928, and they continued to live with the Papageorge’s until 1935, when Harry rented a farm down in Slaterville. At that point, my dad was about thirteen, fourteen years old, and the three oldest boys moved with Grandpa Markos to the farm in Slaterville. My dad had a heart murmur, and they opted to have him continue to stay with the Papageorge’s and help his aunt with raising her young 3 children, plus helping her with the garden work and stuff like that on the farm. That was a dairy farm at the time. LR: Okay. I almost want to laugh, because if he had a heart murmur, how did he ever get into the military? SM: I don’t know. It must not have been a real serious one. As part of his military story, little brief thing that he wrote just before he died, he talked about how he was going to try to become a pilot. He failed his flight check, what he called his flight check, and the only reason I can assume that maybe he failed that was because of this heart murmur. The heart murmur kept him from being a pilot, but it didn’t keep him from being a crew member on a bomber, apparently there’s a stricter qualifications to be a pilot. LR: Apparently. So going back, did your Dad ever talk about how difficult it was to be a part from his dad and siblings? SM: Not really. From the time I can remember, him and his brothers were always really close. He was even closer to his sister, because she’s the one who raised him. She was more like a mother to him than a sister, but he never did say anything about being—I think they were close enough together that even after they moved they still saw each other a lot. It wasn’t like he’d have withdrawal symptoms from having his family and stuff. LR: Okay. How many siblings did your father have? SM: There was Anastasia, who was the oldest sister, she was born in Greece. Then there were four sons. There was George, Herman, James, and my dad, Chris. All four of those were born right after Grandma Markos immigrated to the United 4 States. Grandpa Markos came in 1908 to the United States, but Grandma didn’t come until 1915, because they couldn’t afford to both come at the same time. As soon as they reunited in Utah, it was actually in Price, Utah, they had those four sons, one a year, until they was done having babies. LR: Right. I don’t know her last name, but Mary… SM: Kogianes. LR: Thank you, she talked a little bit about the three brothers that enlisted, or were drafted. SM: Right. LR: She talked about where they all went. The three brothers that were in the military were George, Chris, and was it Herman? SM: Herman, Chris, and James. George was already married and was a farmer when the war broke out and that gave him a deferment from getting drafted. LR: Okay. I knew one of them had a deferment. Was Chris the only one that went into the Pacific? SM: Yes. LR: The other two went into the European theater, okay. So, you mentioned this before, but your father had this love affair with airplanes from when he was a little boy. Can you talk about that a little bit? SM: I talked to Mary Kogianes, and I believe it was in 2008, about my Dad when he was a little kid. She told me that there wasn’t many planes around Northern Utah, but he had an interest in them, and I got a picture of him when he was probably twelve or thirteen years old wearing a leather flight helmet, with goggles and all 5 that on it. She said he just wore them until they wore out, but he just always loved airplanes, so when he decided to join the military, he didn’t want to be an infantryman, so he opted to join the Army Air Corps, which he hoped would give him a chance at being on an airplane. LR: When did he join the military? SM: He joined on June 2, 1941. He left for basic training on June 10, 1941. LR: Do you know where he did his basic training? SM: He did his basic training at Moffett Air Force Base, or Moffett Field, it was called, and that’s south of San Francisco. Nearest town to it is Mountain View. LR: Was that just the basic Army training? SM: Yeah, it was strictly Army, cause there was no air force at the time, and it was the home of the military version of the blimps, the dirigibles. He’s got a lot of pictures that shows the big hangers that they were based in and stuff. He just took pictures of airplanes like crazy, that was when he first got up close and personal with airplanes. LR: So how did he get into the Army Air Corps? SM: I really don’t know; I think they had a choice, if they enlisted, of what they wanted to do. LR: I heard that. So, from Moffett Field, where did he go, what was his next training station? SM: Kay, he had finished basic training, and December 7th, 1941, the day that we all remember, and him and a few of his buddies were in San Jose, California at a movie theater. All of a sudden the movie stopped and some MPs came in and 6 asked for all military personnel to come back out and report back to their duty stations, which he did. They went back to Moffett Field, and about two or three weeks later, he got sent to Lemoore Naval Air Station, and that’s in central California, and become a flight scheduler for the training flights that were being done there. That was in December of 1941 when he went there. LR: Did he ever talk about his feelings about Pearl Harbor? SM: Not really. You know, we did actually talk about that quite a bit, how he was able to reconcile his feelings about Japanese people and all that, and he didn’t hold any grudge against any of the Japanese at all. Some of his best friends were Japanese people here in Utah, after he got out. I don’t know how he was able to put that away, but he did. He never did exhibit to me anyway, any hard feelings or anything about it. That was probably one of the things the Greatest Generation did, they put that all away, back then there wasn’t anything such as PTSD, so they just had to deal with it, and somehow he was able to. LR: Wow. I just find that fascinating. So after his training in California, where was he sent? SM: He went to the Lemoore Naval Air Station and worked for about six months, and then he says, “I didn’t want to be a secretary any longer,” so he put in for flight training. Pilot training, basically, and in June 1942, they sent him to King City, California, for what he called flight training. That was to become a pilot, and he failed his flight check on the pilot portion of it, and the only reason I can imagine that he failed was cause of that previous condition with his heart murmur. With failing that, the heart condition didn’t keep him from being a gunner, so the next 7 thing that he did was in September of 1942, he was sent to Las Vegas, at what is now Nellis Air Force Base. At that time, it was some sort of an Army field for gunnery school. LR: Was he, at that point, told the type of plane he would be on? SM: No, he knew he was going to be on a bomber, and whether it was going to be a light bomber, heavy bomber, medium, no idea. This was just to teach him how to shoot a .50 caliber machine gun. LR: I can’t imagine what that was like. SM: I’ve shot one, and it’s a hoot. But, I shot at one of those stationary targets on the ground. He shooting them at moving planes, so that probably wasn’t a hoot anymore. LR: No, I know he didn’t talk a lot about how he felt, but from what my husband has told me, and all he did was fix refueling planes. But he said knowing that he was refueling aircraft that were going to be bombing, it affected him. How do you think that affected your dad, this being behind that gun, knowing he was shooting at a moving target? SM: I never saw any emotion one way or another. I know it had to have affected him, but that was another thing he was able to put away and get on with life. He was an avid, avid hunter, and when I was a little kid, and even into my teenage years, I’d go with him duck hunting. We’d set in the duck blind, and he’d start talking about the ducks are incoming at twelve o’clock high and stuff like that. Some things I guess, you apparently don’t forget. He’d talk about the ducks being at three o’clock low or twelve o’clock high or four o’clock, and that’s the way they 8 used to talk. I thought that was neat. I still couldn’t hit the ducks, but boy, he could. He was a great shot, no matter what he was shooting, and that had to be from, all that he did there for four years or however many years it was. LR: So, when did he get assigned to a bomber? SM: Kay, the next thing he did after the gunnery school, he graduated way high in that class, which qualified him to go to bombardier school, and navigator school. So in October of 1942, he went to Carlsbad, New Mexico for those two trainings. Then after he’d completed them in November of 1942, he went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for training on the maintenance of a B-25, so I’m assuming at that point, he had already been assigned that he was going to be working on a B-25. Fort Campbell, Kentucky at that time, I’m not sure if it was called Fort Campbell, but that’s where I had basic training when I was in the Army. When Dad found out that that’s where I was going, he was telling me all about Kentucky and I’m sure the barracks that I stayed in were the World War Two barracks, so chances are I was in the same building as him. MB: So I’m not sure if I caught it, but how long was he in gunnery school for? SM: The gunnery school lasted from September to October, so just a month. MB: Okay, and then how long was the bombardier and navigational training SM: One more month. LR: He didn’t just work on B-25’s, though, did he? SM: Not by the end he didn’t. He was on B-25’s between November of 1942 and July of 1943, then he moved to B-24s. LR: Do you know the difference between those two planes? 9 SM: B-25 is considered a medium bomber, it’s a two engine. A B-24 is a heavy bomber, four engines. It carries a much bigger payload and it has a higher top speed too, and a longer flying range. It’s just a bigger airplane. They both got the rear double aileron, or vertical stabilizers on the tail, that’s the only two in the United States military that had that. That’s the way I immediately can tell them two from a B-29 or a B-17 or any of the other bombers. LR: Now I’m going to look when I go to the Hill Air Force Base museum. SM: I can go get a model that I built for him and show you when we get done. LR: That would be awesome. So, once he had finished all of his training, and it looks like his training lasted a good year, what was his first duty station? SM: First duty station was in December of 1942, at Augusta, Georgia. While he was there, they were on submarine patrol missions over the Atlantic Ocean. He was only there a couple of weeks, and then they moved him to Reading, Pennsylvania, for the same type of duty. That was only another couple of weeks, and then they went, and I don’t know why, but they ended up going to Godman Army Air Field in Kentucky, doing the same thing. That’s farther inland, and maybe it was just because they wanted to move the flyers, the planes a little farther from being right on the coast in case there was an attack from Germany. LR: He spent some time in the states? SM: Yeah, once he finally started flying which was December of 1942, he was in the states all of 1943 doing these missions. He flew patrol missions from December of 1942 to July of 1943, on B-25s. Okay, July of 1943, his squadron got reassigned to B-24s. So in July of 1943, he went to Clovis, New Mexico, to learn 10 how to maintain B-24s. After they done that training, which lasted a month, in August of 1943, they went to Briggs Field, Texas, which is near El Paso. They were doing the submarine patrol missions into the Gulf of Mexico, and doing them on a B-24 instead of a B-25. When they were doing these submarine missions, they were fully armed. They were carrying bombs, and the machine guns were loaded, but they never did have to fire anything. There were a few close calls and suspicious things, but they never did have to drop bombs on anything, but they learned a lot about how to run things on the plane doing that. LR: I’m sure. So, after his time at Briggs, did he then go overseas? SM: Getting close. He was in Briggs from August to December of 1943, and then in December of 1943, him and his crew went to Topeka, Kansas, and I don’t know the name or what kind of a field it was, and they picked up a brand new B-24. They had a set of orders, when they left Topeka, that were sealed and they weren’t supposed to open the orders until they were airborne. The pilot opened the orders, and they thought that they were going to Europe, I mean that’s where everybody was going at the time, and they’d already been ordered wool clothes and all of the cold weather gear that you would get in Europe. When he opened them, they were to go to, actually his next spot they were supposed to land was Hill Field, Utah, because they were headed overseas to the South Pacific. They came to Hill Field and they were there about three days to get an extra fuel tank installed into the bomb bay, because the leg of the flight that went from California to Hawaii was so long a B-24 couldn’t make it without this auxiliary fuel tank. As luck would have it, he got to land at Hill Field and got to spend three days, got to 11 visit his Dad, and the one brother that was still here. The other two brothers were already gone. LR: Did he ever talk about being home and seeing his family for that period of time? SM: Nope, he never did, not specifically. He talked a little bit about a couple of times while he was on leave he got to see his Dad and that, but he never did specifically name that one. He had a couple of girlfriends back here that he kind of liked to see… LR: That’s reason enough to stop! SM: He did take time out to see his Dad too. LR: Eventually, from what you said, he gets to Australia. SM: Yeah, after they were done at Hill Field, they went to Camp Suisan, or something, I can’t remember how to pronounce it in, California, and then they flew from California to Hawaii to Fiji to Christmas Island, and it took about four days to get clear to Townsend, Australia. That’s where they got their final combat duty training, and stuff. They spent about a month there, in the town of Townsend, and it was an Australian Air Field called Gorbutt Field. LR: So, after their training there, was there a place they went to do their bombing missions from? SM: Yeah. On February 28, 1944, they went to Nadzab, New Guinea, and that’s where he started flying his combat missions out of. At that point, most of the island of New Guinea was still occupied by the Japanese. The Nadzab is right on the very east end of New Guinea and they started from the East end and doing their bombing missions farther west and farther west and farther west, until they 12 disabled all the Japanese fighting capabilities, their airplanes and whatever. The Japanese, they never did actually kill them. There was never a ground invasion. But what they did was embargoed any ships or any planes, anything from being able to fly in, and most of the Japanese troops just starved to death. LR: Well that’s at least a bloodless battle. SM: Yea, yeah. LR: For the Americans, anyway. SM: They flew missions out of Nadzab until July of 1944. By then the missions were so far to the west that they had to move again, because the round trip was pushing the limits of what a B-24 could do. LR: So where did he go after New Guinea. SM: Okay, the next place, and he was only there for two weeks, was Wakde Island. It was a real small island, just off the North coast of New Guinea, probably fifteen hundred miles west of where he’d been. They were there for two weeks, and then they went to a place called Owi Island, and flew missions out of there. When they got to Owi Island, the ground troops that normally went to these different places prior to where the aircrews would get there, and they’d get the camp set up and all that, but that wasn’t done. When they got to Owi Island, the air crews had to do their own set up of their camp and everything, and there was some sort of a bug there that was carrying malaria or something, I can’t remember exactly what it was now, but they had to cover themselves with oil to keep this bug from getting them while they were trying to get everything set up camp wise. It was 13 like the middle of the summer, couple of hundred miles away from the equator, and they are covered in oil. I can’t even imagine what that was like. LR: No, that sounds miserable. SM: But, it was, according to the book I got about it. Owi Island was like a paradise island in the South Pacific, if you wasn’t there to be in a war. They described it as just extremely beautiful, and it hadn’t been bombed out by either Japanese or United States. It was still pristine. All they did was just cut in an air field big enough for B-24s to operate from. LR: I know you mentioned last time that their bombing missions really didn’t correspond to battles, in the sense that we think of battles. SM: Yeah. They were supporting, especially in the Philippines, they were supporting the liberation of the Philippine islands, and they were on various islands in the Philippines bombing other islands, getting ready for the eventual defeat of the Japanese on the Philippines. I guess you could say he was involved in the Philippine liberation. One other place that they bombed that was to liberate an island was the Palau islands. As a matter of fact, after they bombed it, he flew missions out of there for a while. LR: Geeze. I just love that you know exactly where he went, station by station, I love it. SM: Yeah, the last place we got him is Owi Island, and he got there in August of 1944. He was there until November, and when I talked to you before, I told you that he was on the island of Leyte in the Philippines when MacArthur came, I was wrong. He wasn’t there. MacArthur did that in October and my Dad didn’t get 14 there until November. But what they did from Owi Island, they didn’t fly to Leyte Island, they took a naval convoy. It took them like two weeks to get from Owi Island to Leyte Island, but by the time they got there, it was like three days before they could even get off of the Navy ships because there was still such heavy bombardment going on by both the Japanese and the Americans that they just couldn’t even get off the ships. They finally got off the ships, and the B-24s they were supposed to fly while they were there had already been destroyed by Japanese bombs, so they set there for about three weeks, just hiding in foxholes and whatever, trying to avoid getting bombed while MacArthur, or whoever it was, was deciding what he was going to do with them. I told you there was a story about him, and this is one thing that he did talk about more than one time. They were being bombed and I think it’s while they were at Leyte, when the air raid alerts would come on, day or night, whatever it was, whatever they were doing they would jump into a fox hole and take cover and cross their fingers. Well, it was at nighttime on one of these raids, and the air siren went off and he told me that he jumped out, put his helmet on, and ran out to his foxhole. The bombs were going off, and he felt something on his bare leg. It was light enough that he could see, so he looked down, there was a boa constrictor, or anaconda, one of the two, the big snakes. He said it was about twelve inches in diameter, and he just took off running. He said, “I felt safer ducking the bombs than I did being in that hole with that snake.” But for the rest of his life, he was absolutely terrified of snakes. When he’d come up here to my 15 house in the summer, he never go past this first little level of my back lawn, because there are snakes back there. LR: I can understand that. You mentioned last time that he had mentioned he had to bail out of an airplane once. SM: He did. He told me and my brother and sister that. Probably more than once, and he told us that it was over Borneo. According to the book I got, and the flight records I got, he had several missions to Borneo. It’s probably true, but I can’t document it, I can’t prove it in the book or anything. He wouldn’t have told us that if it hadn’t have been true. He told us that the plane got hit and they was able to bail out and nobody got killed or anything, but it took them like ten days before Army troops or Marines or somebody, was able to find them and rescue them. LR: Last time you mentioned that there were a couple of things he brought home with him. He did get malaria while he was over there, and that would flare up throughout his life. Was that the only outward sign of his time in the Pacific? SM: He had on his feet something he called jungle rot. His feet were yellow, and his toenails were like a block of wood on the end of his feet. He said that wasn’t that way before he was in the service. So he picked that up somewhere over there. They were wet and miserable for months at a time. Interesting thing, when they finally did leave Leyte Island, MacArthur had decided that it was no sense of them setting there and having a chance of getting shot, so there was two squadrons there, which is about a hundred and fifty guys. He was in the 33rd Squadron, and the other one was I believe the 494th. They decided they were going to evacuate them out of Leyte and move them to Angaur, which is on the 16 Palau Islands. So these two C-47s left the Philippines, and half the guys got on one of the C-47s and the other half got on the other one. About a hundred miles out of Leyte, the one that my Dad didn’t get on was shot down by Japanese Zeros and everybody died. There was about sixty guys on the plane when it went down, and everybody perished. He wrote a little thing about his time, about a month before he died. He says he just didn’t like to go to any details about any of the things that happened, because of how dangerous it was and how close the near fatality was on a lot of the missions he was on. I’m sure that’s one of them he’s talking about. LR: Probably. So, I forgot to ask this, but, you said he was in the 33rd Squadron. What bomb… SM: 22nd Bombardment Group. LR: Thank you, and which air force? SM: 5th Air Force. LR: Thank you. When he was finally able to go home, because he enlisted, and it was a three year enlistment? So, obviously, he was in longer than three years. SM: Yeah, he was coming up on four years. LR: When they said, “You have enough points,” or “Your enlistments over?” SM: Kay, in about April of 1945, they had told him and the other nine guys in his crew that they all qualified to go for a thirty-day leave to home. They were all on their way back home when they had come up with this point system. If you had so many combat missions and, I don’t know, there was a bunch of different things it added up to, you could either choose your next duty station or choose to get out. 17 The points that you needed was eighty-five points, and he had 147. So he was in-route somewhere, and I’m not sure if he was on the ship coming back or where exactly they were at, but it was in-route when that came out and he told them at that point that he’d had enough and he wanted to get out. So when he got back the ship landed in California, they told him at that point, “You’re done, you can get out, but you gotta go to Fort Douglas, Salt Lake to process out.” So he did, and he went there on June 10, 1945, and he got released. That was exactly four years from the day he left Fort Douglas in 1941, June 10th to June 10th. LR: That’s crazy. That’s a long time. SM: All told, he did fifty-two combat missions, and that’s just the combat missions in the South Pacific. He had many other that were stateside missions, probably another fifty or seventy-five, I didn’t ever count them, when they were doing submarine duty. MB: So while he was overseas, I know he was able to see his father a couple of times, and when he came and landed at Hill Field he was able to see his family. How much communication did he have, did he send any letter s back home? SM: When I talked to Mary Kogianes about it, she said that when he first went in they were getting a letter at least every couple of weeks. But as time went on, especially once he got overseas, there would be months and months at a time they would never hear from him. Mary said Aunt Anastasia would just sit and fret thinking that the worst had happened. Then, when he did get home, the one comment that Mary made was, “When he left he was a happy go lucky little guy, 18 and when he got back, he was quiet, and his personality had completely changed.” As time went on, she told me that he did get back to his normal self. But, she said he was a completely changed individual. LR: Thank you for sharing that. So, he gets back home, and when does he meet your Mom? SM: The first thing he did when he got back home was, him and I think it was with two or three other guys that he went to school with, they took a trip to Yellowstone. He bought a car, very first thing he did was buy a 1941 Chevrolet De Lux, and they drove that to Yellowstone, and had a wind down party. Then in July of 1945, he went to work at the Ogden Arsenal. I guess he decided that he might as well stay with the government service. When he went to work there, his boss was a lady named Larene Summers. About six months later, they got married, and she was my mother. LR: I just like that he married his boss. SM: He told me, about six months later, he became her boss, and then, because he told me that, “No wife of mine will ever have to work.” MB: So he laid her off. SM: That didn’t break her heart any, because she never did work outside the house. She was a stay at home Mom. LR: Did your Mom ever talk about her time at the Ogden Arsenal? SM: Little tiny bit. She could take a .30 caliber rifle apart, bolt and all, without even looking at it, and put it back together. She never did really say how it was working there or anything, and I’m not sure exactly how long she worked there, either. 19 LR: Do you know what, beside .30 caliber, what her duties were, what she did there? SM: I don’t know if they were rebuilding, or what they were doing, but it involved having to disassemble and reassemble .30 caliber Brownings. LR: Did she ever talk about, I know sometimes the guns would be shipped and covered in Cosmoline. SM: Yeah, and that’s probably what they were doing. LR: Just cleaning the Cosmoline off? SM: Yeah. LR: I was just curious about that. So when, when did your parents get married? SM: January the 8, 1946. LR: Okay, and then they ended up having three kids? SM: Yeah. They had four, but my oldest sister was stillborn. LR: Okay. SM: So there was four, but three survived. LR: Where do you fall in those? SM: I’m the oldest of the survivors. I was born in 1947, and then I got a sister that was born 1950, and a brother was born in 1958. LR: Oh, that’s a big gap. SM: Yeah. I think he was surprise, surprise! LR: Maybe this isn’t a fair question, but from your experience, what was it like growing up with a World War Two veteran? SM: My Dad was really strict. I don’t know if that came from four years of military or not, but he was tough. Boy, you did what he said. If you didn’t, which I was 20 always good at pushing, see how far I could make it, so I didn’t get beat up or nothing like that, but I got disciplined. Plenty. I wish I could have got him to talk more about what it was like and everything, but I never could. I didn’t really start getting an interest in it until he was almost on his death bed, and then I got him talking a couple of times, just really briefly, and every time something would come up and he would just clam up. So, he was strict, but he was fair, and extremely honest. He was probably the most honest human being I’ve ever seen in my life. LR: Do you think those qualities were something he learned from his time in the service, or do you think that’s just the man he was? SM: Combination of the service, plus his upbringing. LR: Alright. Did his time in the service prompt you to join? SM: No, I joined because at the time it was in 1967, and I wasn’t all that hot about going and beating the jungles in Vietnam, so I joined the Army Reserves. LR: Kind of like your Dad, just decided I don’t want to be drafted, so I’m just gonna. SM: Yeah, don’t wait. If you got any control over it, do what you can do to control your own destiny. LR: That makes sense. LR: Is there any other story you would like to share about your Dad, or about your own experiences with your Dad? SM: Nothing really comes to mind right now, other than, I talked about hunting with him and he was an outdoorsman all the way; I’m sure he learned a lot of that and survival and whatever from being in the military, even though he didn’t talk about 21 it, he just lived it. His career, he started off as a little kid loving airplanes, and he worked on airplanes until he retired. LR: So he worked at the Ogden Arsenal, and then he went to Hill? SM: Yeah, he transferred to Hill Field in 1948. LR: Okay, and then he worked there the rest of his career? SM: Yeah. I think he retired in 1973. So he was pretty young when he retired. He was fifty-four I think. LR: Thank you again, I’m extremely happy with what we have.