Oral History Program Jim Coyner Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 4 October 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jim Coyner Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 4 October 2016 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: Coyner, Jim, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 4 October 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. A newspaper article for Jim’s graduating high school class. Jim is seventh on the top row. 28 November 1943 Jim served on the USS Hancock in 1944 Certificate of Honorable Discharge from the Navy 12 March 1946 Jim Coyner 4 October 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jim Coyner, conducted on October 4, 2016 in his home in Bountiful, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Jim discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Sydnie Shields, the video technician, is also present during the interview. LR: It is October 4, 2016, we are in the home of Jim Coyner in Bountiful, Utah, and it is around eleven o’clock. We are doing an interview on his World War Two experiences. My name is Lorrie Rands, Sydnie Shields is here with me. I just want to thank you again for your willingness to sit down and talk with us. I appreciate it. I’m just going to start out at the beginning, and ask you when and where were you born? JC: Okay. I was born on a farm outside of Miamisburg, Ohio. LR: When was that? JC: January 8, 1925. LR: So you grew up on a farm in Ohio. Can you tell us a little bit about that? JC: Well, our money crop was tobacco, otherwise, it was just a general farm. LR: What were some of your memories growing up on the farm? JC: I wouldn’t have had it different. LR: Really, why is that? JC: Well, the freedom of being outdoors and, not confined to cubicles or working on a assembly line, where you stand there and screw in one bolt for eight hours and go home. You had to use your ingenuity in getting things done, especially in the days of the Depression. LR: What was that like? 2 JC: Well, we had no money, but we had plenty of food. We didn’t get a whole lot of toys or anything like that, but I think that my life was better than those that were living in the city, they couldn’t do things that we could do on the farm. LR: Like what, for example? JC: Self-sufficiency in food. If you have food you’re more acceptable with yourself, than you would with running on an empty stomach. LR: That’s true. Where would you get your seed for planting from? JC: The tobacco seed always came from the tobacco company. I believe that they controlled the plant breeding of the different types of tobacco, we were providing them a product that they wanted for their special interest in the tobacco industry. Our tobacco we raised was primarily cigar tobacco. We were growing a broad-leaf tobacco, as opposed to burly, which goes in the cigarettes. LR: I didn’t know there was a difference. JC: In those days a lot of people would smoke, and they’d smoke about anything. But ours were generally made into cigars, which many people smoked, and pipe tobacco, as opposed to burly which was definitely for cigarettes. LR: So were you able to go to school? JC: Yes. LR: Where did you go to school? JC: Miamisburg Ohio, the grade school system there. I graduated in May of 1943. At the time I had a deferment from the service, from being drafted to finish High School, because we could enlist up until we were eighteen years old at the time. But after you passed eighteen, you were subject to the draft, regardless of what 3 you wanted to do. I was offered a farm deferment from being called to active duty, but I just told my grandpa that I wanted to be with the rest of the guys. He said, “If I was you, I would do the same thing.” LR: So you enlisted? JC: No I couldn’t enlist because I had passed eighteen. I had a deferment until I finished High School, and I was drafted about a week after I graduated. I was loaded on a train and taken to Columbus, Ohio for an induction center. Different services had their quota for each day of different things, and me and a buddy of mine, wanted to be in the Marine Corps. Well, the Marine Corps, they had you in a line and they cut you off whenever they had the quota. They had filled the quota for the Marine Corps on that day, so then we came along and we had the Navy. Of course, there was no Air Force at that particular time, it was part of the Army, then they had the Army and there was also the Coast Guard. But, I ended up in the Navy. LR: So where did you go from Columbus? JC: The majority of them went back home for a week, and I decided no, I got this far along I’m going to go the whole way in. My buddy from a neighboring town did the same thing, so we went straight on, shipped up to Chicago and then to Great Lakes Naval Training Station. LR: How long where you there, at the naval training station? JC: Well, I went through boot camp, was about eight weeks where they gave you your shots and different things that they do. Early on you learn to march and to follow orders and don’t open your mouth unless you’re spoken to. I finished that, 4 and then of all things they decided I was going to go to carpenter school, for a carpenter’s mate in the Navy. It’s probably a non-functional rank in the United States Navy today, because they’re all steel. I thought it was kind of odd, but I went through that and I finished that in about three or four months, I forget exactly how long, but then I was sent to fire school in Newport, Rhode Island. LR: What is fire school? JC: Where they taught you how to fight fires, and we had some pretty intense fires that we had to go into and put out. After that I was transferred to the Boston holding pen it was a center where they put you till you receive an assignment. I was sent to the Four Rivers Shipyard in Braintree, Massachusetts. They had two barracks there, and we put everything in our barracks, we went over to the shipyard, we got our paycheck plus we had per diem. They didn’t have any facilities there for eating, so we had to eat out at the corner bar, and then we went to the shipyard. I was assigned to Hull-1611, which was supposed to be the USS Ticonderoga, it was an aircraft carrier. But, because the Hancock Life Insurance Company sold enough bonds to pay for one aircraft carrier, they transferred the name of the Hull we were on to the USS Hancock. We had the blueprints of the ship as they were putting it together. I was destined to be into the ship’s company, working primarily on fire control and maintenance. Anyway, the big switcheroo happened and we ended up being called the USS Hancock, although all our blueprints said Ticonderoga, and so we got a different number, from fourteen to nineteen. 5 The ship was launched on the third week of January of 1944, and I was assigned the week after it was launched. I looked at that 900 foot long bathtub, I thought the war will be long over before this ship is operational. Well, surprise, April the fifteenth, we commissioned it into the United States Navy, and I am a plank owner on the USS Hancock. For definition of a plank owner, there’s one time, and one time only that an individual can be a plank owner, that is when the ship is accepted by the United States as a ship in the United State Navy. If you’re on the crew at that time you’re a plank owner, and that’s the only time you can be a plank owner. LR: You talked about a different number, fourteen to nineteen. What does that mean? JC: Well, the class of carrier carried the letter CV. A CV was a big aircraft carrier, but I can’t say the class now, but it designates the class of the carrier. The numbers signify the names of the ships. LR: So fourteen would’ve been Ticonderoga, and Hancock was nineteen? JC: It was nineteen. LR: Okay, that makes sense. JC: Aircraft carriers of the Essex class, that’s what I was trying to get, it was an Essex Class carrier, the CVs. They were named for famous battles and for famous people. Of course, John Hancock was the signer of the Declaration of Independence. Ticonderoga was the name of a big battle during the war of 1812. The later ones, like the Coral Sea, that was because of the Battle of the Coral Sea, which we were in. LR: Okay. So, you said it was commissioned April 15. Was that 1944? 6 JC: 1944 LR: After it was commissioned, where did you guys go? JC: After it was commissioned, we went from Boston down to Norfolk, Virginia. They did some tune up work there, and then we did our inaugural trip. We went to Trinidad, and back. The shakedown cruise is what they call it. LR: What’s the purpose of that? JC: To make sure everything is running right. We put it through high speed test runs, and we dived a couple of German submarines, and the planes flew off and dropped depth charges on some, I don’t know whether we got any or not, but they were sure dumping a lot of explosives on them. LR: So after your shakedown cruise… JC: We went back to Norfolk, and then we left and went through the Panama Canal. After we got through the canal we went to San Diego, where we took on some more crew members. Then we departed for Hawaii, to Pearl Harbor, and after that we were on our own. Depending on the admiral that was in charge, it was either the Third Fleet or the Seventh Fleet. It was all the same ships, but when Halsey was the commander of it, he was commander of the Third Fleet, and I forget the guy that was head of the Seventh Fleet, it’s just not coming to me. LR: Was it McCain? JC: No. McCain’s grandfather was an admiral, but he was only a two-star. He was on the Hancock, he was the branch commander at one time. The Third and the Seventh Fleets were divided into four sections, four divisions, and he was a divisional admiral when he was on the Hancock. 7 LR: Okay, so you’re in Hawaii, where does your ship go from there? JC: We were at Pearl Harbor just briefly, took on more supplies, and then we headed down to Indochina. In fact, they hadn’t done anything around the Philippines, so they turned us around the day before we were to cross the equator and says, “Gotta go back and join the Third Fleet.” The first night that we were with the Third Fleet we were attacked and Japanese planes dropped a bomb that went through our catwalk. A ship is measured in frames, and a frame is four feet. The bomb went through the catwalk at frame one, so it was four feet back from the bow of the ship. When the bomb went through the catwalk it just put a hole like that and then it exploded in the water. It was just like we hit a rock, the ship just stopped and you could feel it raise up and settle down from the explosion. It didn’t do anything, but we were welcomed into the Pacific War. LR: That’s just crazy. What were your duties on the Hancock? JC: Generally speaking, I was a carpenter’s mate. About the only wood we had was the deck, we had to keep it operational. When we had plane crashes we’d have to take out the chewed up wood and replace it. We were in damage control. If we got hit, we had stored lumber that we could put coppered down in the ship to keep the water out as best you can. We were in charge of keeping the ship afloat and firefighting. That was our duties. LR: After your initial welcome to the Pacific where did the ship go? JC: We were in the battle of the Philippine Sea. It was the largest naval battle ever fought in the history of the world. We got the Japanese Navy in a pincer, because somebody cracked the code of the Japanese Navy, and this is a historical fact, 8 that we knew where they were and what they were doing, I didn’t, but the, the commanders knew where everything was. So, we knew which way they were moving, and we hit em from all sides, and boy we sunk the ships. I got a rundown on how many ships we sunk and all that is just a matter of numbers, but that was the battle of the Philippine Sea. That was about a three-day job, but it lasted what seemed like forever. LR: I can imagine. Besides the bomb that dropped on the catwalk, was that your first real taste of being in a battle? JC: Yes. LR: Can you talk a little bit about what you were experiencing? JC: Well, I don’t know. After our first bomb that came down, the very first battle and it went through our catwalk. That really brought us to reality, that boy this is for real. LR: So, what you’re saying is that the battle of the Philippine Sea, it was almost like another day’s work? JC: It was just another day, and then from then on it was just another day. LR: So, you became accustomed to that life? JC: Yes. We spent a lot of time at General Quarters. When the ship goes into General Quarters, they shut all the doors, and all the hatches, and they’re locked. Not with a key, but with dog wrenches, and if anybody would open one of those doors after it had been locked for security, they’d be court martialed. It was a serious offense, and of course it turned off all the air conditioning or the air circulation. It got kind of stuffy at times, but that was for our own protection, like 9 when we had a plane crash on the deck and it was loaded with gasoline, and the gasoline would run all over everything. You gotta confine it, and that was our job, and we learned that pretty early on. LR: So, during these battles, where would you be on the ship? JC: Well, I was down in damage control central. I didn’t particularly like it down there but that’s where I was stationed. I was in contact with all the firefighters through our communications. The damage control officer was there, he was a Lieutenant Commander, and then there was several First Lieutenants, and Lieutenant JGs down there also, all in the same place. We were directing everything that was going on top of the ship, from the standpoint of security, to protect it from fires or explosions or anything like that. LR: After the battle of the Philippine Sea, where did you guys go? JC: Well we just went on up along the Philippines. First, we got through Leyte, and it was Leyte Gulf was where the big battle was. LR: Is Leyte Gulf part of the Battle of the Philippine Sea? JC: Leyte Gulf, yes, that’s the official name of the Battle. LR: Okay, I didn’t know that, I thought they were two separate battles. JC: No, that was it. Then we just kept working right on up the island till we finally liberated Luzon, the island of Luzon. Just one step at a time. Of course, then came Iwo Jima, we were in the middle of that, and then South China Sea. We went into the first South China Sea that just had a whole sequence of events just gradually going up. Everybody went past Wake Island and dropped bombs on it, for practice if nothing more. Some of those islands they bypassed, like Midway, 10 and there was Japanese soldiers on there that was clear into the 1980s when they finally decided the war was over. They were still hiding in the jungles. LR: That’s crazy. Were you ever allowed to go off the ship and go to the islands at the end of a battle? JC: No we didn’t. We just went from one battle to another. I mean every day was completely the same, except General Quarters could happen any time. We had a General Quarters every morning, an hour before sunrise, because that’s the time of day that, if they were going to attack you, they would come in. That was an everyday routine. Then in the case of the battles, you were at your battle station, and you would be there as long as you were under attack. LR: During a battle, did you ever get relieved so you could go rest? JC: No, you don’t go to rest. You stay right there. LR: So for three days, you were at your battle stations. JC: We never was there that long of a time. We would be in and out, but in the Battle of the South China Sea, we were pretty much in battle stations about all the time then. That was, kind of a long, drawn out affair. LR: Did it ever get to the point where you were just done, wanting a break from the monotony? JC: Well, but you didn’t’ get it. LR: So, it didn’t matter? JC: It didn’t matter. You didn’t even know what day it was, really. It didn’t matter. Every day was the same. We got off the ship one time at Christmas. We went to 11 Ulithi Atoll, and we went ashore for a couple of hours. But other than that, we weren’t ashore at all. In fact, didn’t even see land. LR: So the carrier was your land? JC: Yes, but I sure’d like to get my feet on land. Fifteen miles down there is land, you can go to it if you want to. LR: That’s funny. JC: We had a plane explode on deck once. The plane was to drop two 500-pound bombs, but one didn’t release. It released off the front hitch but not the back, and they finished the run and closed the bomb doors with the bomb still in there. As they were returning to the carrier it dropped off the back hitch, pulling the arming wires for both the front propeller and the back propeller on the bomb. When they came back to land they didn’t realize it was armed. When they landed the plane, the TBMS, the last thing they did with the fluid in the plane that operate the flaps and stuff like that is they open the bomb bay doors to release the fluid. Here there was this 500-pound bomb. We weren’t at general quarters, and it dropped right onto the deck and exploded because it made so many revolutions when it was released and armed. The pilot didn’t make that mistake again. LR: I’m sure. What are TBMS? JC: A type of dive bomber. LR: Okay, so it’s the plane. That makes sense. What is probably your most memorable moment on the Hancock? JC: You don’t sort them out like that. LR: No? 12 JC: No. I guess the most memorial one was when they dropped the atomic bomb. We knew that the war was over. We knew that it was supposed to be top secret, no one was supposed to know it anywhere. Rumors on a ship was referred to as scuttlebutt. The scuttlebutt was that the United States had a new bomb that was an atomic bomb. This was before anything was going on with. Anyway, they told the whole fleet to go out fifty miles from all the land and just go around in circles. They were waiting for an operation to happen, and nothing happened. Then we thought, “Aha, they’re going to dump the bomb on Japan,” and there was some hitch in the procedure, it didn’t work, it didn’t come out. So, we went back and we sailed around and was doing our regular duties, bombing them every chance that we got, and they told us to do it again about a day, two days later, to go out and circle around. That time they did it, they dropped the first one. We knew, boy, it was over, we knew it was over. I suspect that had we been up on the super structure of the ship we probably could have seen the explosion, I don’t know, nobody ever said they did, but it was in the middle of the night and it would have sure lighted up the sky. The next time they told us what they had done, and scuttlebutt proved it was right. We knew what was going on, and then they dumped the second one and the Japanese, they quit right then and there. LR: You said something that interested me just a few minutes ago, I asked you about your most memorable moment and you said it doesn’t go that way, that’s not the way you remember it. Can you explain that to me a little bit? JC: Well, every day was just pretty much the same. LR: So even during the battles, it was pretty much the same. 13 JC: Well, you know, when you knew a guy was diving on your ship, you was hoping the gunners was doing their job and get him before he got us. LR: So, was it more kind of tense and heightened during a battle? JC: Yes, you get a little uptight, but we got pretty seasoned to it. When the guy dropped the bomb through the catwalk, we actually had some people that they had to take off. They lost it. In fact, one of them was a captain that was saying he was going to give a description of what was going on over the loudspeaker. When the plane started coming down they see it was aiming right for us and when he turned the bomb loose, even though it hit us, but it actually missed, that’s the last we heard him. They had to get him off there. I would imagine half of the crew was greenhearts that had never been in battle before. We had some of the ships company that had been on other aircraft carriers earlier, and actually were on ships that were sunk, but they survived, and they put them back with us. They told us what was going on, if the ship goes down, you got to get on the boat or something, or get your lifejacket on. Some people had real difficulties with that reality. We went to General Quarters every single day period. Whenever you heard that gong go off on the ship, you dropped everything you was doing and you went to your battle station, then you find out what’s going on. LR: So, you were at sea when the atomic bomb was dropped. How soon after that was the ship turned home? JC: Well, we had gone through Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and both Philippine islands, the north and south islands of the Philippines, and the battle against Japan. I went 14 through five major battles, their all in the book here. There is a list, see those, that’s all of the battles that we were in. LR: Okay. So, South China Sea. JC: Yes. LR: Kind of hard to read. JC: I know, it’s kind of difficult. Print isn’t very heavy. But that was all of our places that we’d been in the time. LR: You guys were kind of all over the place, literally. JC: When the ship left any port or anchorage, as soon as we cleared the outer limits we could go no less than twenty knots. That was our minimum speed. LR: Why is that? JC: Well, because we could outmaneuver submarines. That was our absolute minimum speed that we could go, and the slowest we would go for months would be twenty knots. LR: That’s not really slow, though. KC: Well, it was about twenty-three miles per hour. A mile and an eighth is a nautical mile. A knot is a nautical mile in distance or speed, whichever you want to call it. LR: Alright, that makes more sense now. As you’ve looked back on your experiences in the Pacific, which battle do you think made the biggest difference in the war? JC: Oh, I think the battle of the Philippine Sea, or the South China Sea, that was the biggest thing, although that was our first actual battle. We got a lot of experience there. But, that’s when the United States really took over control of the seas around in the Pacific. 15 LR: I know in January of 1945 the Japanese started doing more of the kamikaze… JC: They started that in 1944 yes. They tried to hit you with the planes, but you didn’t know. Some of those planes were pretty well shot up before they ever got to the ship. You don’t know whether they were actually flying it or if they were dead and the plane was just going that way. I don’t know how you could ever separate that out. When we were hit on April 7, 1945, we knew the guy was intending to plow the plane into it as well as drop the bomb. LR: Did the ship sustain a lot of damage from that? JC: Yes, we had some severe damage, enough that we went back to Pearl Harbor. We went into dry-dock and they scraped the barnacles off of the bottom of the ship while we were there, and they gave us a new paint job. It was doing the physical damage repairs as much as just doing the routine ship cleanup. SS: I don’t know if I caught it, but after the Atomic bombs were dropped, how much longer was it until you were able to get back home? JC: Well, I got home in about late September. LR: So, you weren’t at sea when the official surrender happened? JC: Yes, I was in Tokyo Bay Harbor. We were anchored a half mile behind the Missouri on the day that they signed the peace treaty. They signed it at two o’clock, and we hoisted anchor at ten o’clock that morning and we sailed down to Vietnam, or what’s Vietnam now, and we picked up 7,000 Prisoners of War. From the time we left Tokyo Bay Harbor, we built bunks on the hanger deck and we got rid of a lot of the planes. We sailed back to the US with 7,000 Prisoners of War. Some of them were real basket cases, all of them were pretty well 16 emaciated, and, they were happy to be on board. The bunks were five tiers high, and 7,000 people; that was more than we had on the ship. LR: That’s a lot of people. JC: It is, and it was a happy day when we pulled into the harbor at Long Beach. LR: What happened to those prisoners of war? JC: Well, some of them were shipped to military hospitals and taken into other hospitals if they needed, they were American Prisoners of War. We fed them well when we were bringing them back, the galley was open twenty-four hours a day. You could go down there and eat anything that you wanted that they had cooked for you, because those guys needed some nourishment. I was happy to be part of getting them home. The ship was divided into sections, and I got the first leave, so I left in September and I got a thirty-day leave, and then they sent me a telegram that they extended it for fifteen days, because our ship had gone down to Australia and back while I was gone. Then when I was back on, I got back on in early November, and then it went to the Philippines and back, and then I got off for discharge. LR: Okay. So when you were discharged, where did you go? JC: I went to Chicago, to the Great Lakes, where they discharged me. LR: Did you go home from there, go back to Ohio? JC: Yes, that was a fun trip. LR: Why? JC: Because everyone on the train was going to get discharged. I met a WAV, a woman in the Navy, and she was from Ohio too. We had a good time boy, I 17 mean, it was a party. On those old trains, they’d pull us in and let freight trains go by us, but we got there. LR: After you were discharged and your back home, what did you do? Did you go to school, just get a job? JC: The first thing I did, when I got discharged in March, I went home, and the second day that I was at home, I took my grandma with me and I went down to Miami University and enrolled for the summer session. The second semester was already started when I went down there in March, and the first that they had would be the starting of summer school. So, in the meantime I worked for a national cash register in a Woodworking shop. Then I went straight through, well I did my bachelor’s degree in two years and eleven months. I took one summer off. LR: What did you major in? JC: I majored in zoology, with a minor in chemistry and botany. LR: Wow. What did you do with your degree? JC: Well, then I went to graduate school, at University of Wyoming, and got a master’s degree in wildlife management. LR: Did you work for the forest service? JC: No, I worked for the Wyoming Fish and Game Department, then the US Fish and Wildlife Service. LR: What, what did you do for them? 18 JC: Oh, I was an ecologist. I was a game warden in Wyoming, just game management, and Fish and Wildlife Service. Yes, I got my master’s degree in wildlife ecology. LR: What brought you to Utah, then? JC: I was transferred here from Fish and Wildlife Service from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I worked twenty years with Wyoming Game Department. LR: Wow, so you came to Utah and you never left? JC: Well, no. I got here and my first wife died. She had breast cancer, and it was very aggressive. From the time she discovered it till the time she died was sixteen months. She was a registered nurse, and she worked surgery, and she did her monthly exam, and she said, “I’m not sure but I think I feel something in my breast. I’m going to be working with a surgeon today, if there’s anything I’ll have him do it.” While their doing surgery, she told him she would like to make an appointment to come into him. She said, “I think I feel something in my breast that feels different.” He says, “Florence, you don’t have to come into my office. Soon as we get cleaned up, I’ll find a place and examine ya.” He said, “Yes, there’s something there, I feel like we should look at it.” They did the surgery, and it had already gone through, I forget how many nodes. It was very aggressive. LR: You met your second wife here then? JC: Yes. LR: Do you have any other questions? SS: When you moved to Utah, because you were transferred, how long was it until you had retired? 19 JC: I moved here in 1972, and I retired when I was 65, I guess that would have been 1989. LR: What made you want to stay in Utah? JC: Well I owned a house, and I didn’t have any reason to move, and I didn’t have any reason to stay except that I owned a house. My daughter already had her bachelor’s degree and she was teaching up in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and my son was a junior in high school. I stayed here till he graduated, and he went to graduate school up at Northwestern. LR: Oh wow. Good for him. JC: He’s now a manager of the skype office in London for Microsoft. LR: That’s awesome. Do you think your experiences in World War Two shaped the rest of your life? JC: Probably not. No. LR: What makes you say that? JC: Well, because I think I was destined to be a farmer. I liked it. Wildlife manager is just a farmer on a bigger scale. I like the outdoors, I like working outdoors. LR: Well, let me just ask you this final question, then we’ll be done. Is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t talked about? JC: Well, I don’t know, but you know that map I showed ya? LR: Yes. JC: That was where I was by date, and each one had its own peculiarities. I found a family here in Utah that was on the Philippines. They were the founders of the Dole Pineapple Company, and they were in the Philippines when the World War 20 started. They’re about fifteen years younger than me, they were kids. They were telling about when the war started, they were wondering what was going to be happening. The Japanese would come sneaking through there and the kids would take off and hide. Both the Japanese used the Dole Company’s building for their meetings, and then some Americans came in, MacArthur and his crew. That’s when they invaded, the predecessor to invading and running the Japanese up out of the Leyte and Luzon, and up into the Northern Part. When they were telling me about their stories about how they were moved around and moved up into the number of Japanese ships that they were put in the hull, and they were running just at night, and I was thinking about how many of those ships that we sunk, just like them. They were telling me about their days in the Philippines, and it was just like putting a puzzle together. I was getting what was going on in the Philippines when they were wondering what was going on outside of the Philippines. It was kind of interesting how the whole thing just kind of fit. Their life and my life kind of just ran parallel, ended up at the same place.