Oral History Program Douglas Crookston Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 18 January and 8 February 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Douglas Crookston Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 18 January and 8 February 2019 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library 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: Crookston, Douglas, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 18 January and 8 February 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Douglas Crookston conducted over a two-day period between January 18 and February 8, 2019 in his home in Layton, Utah with Lorrie Rands. Douglas talks about his time during WWII serving in the European Theater. He also shares his experiences after the war, being a high school teacher in Davis County. Also present is his wife, Farris, daughter-in-law Lisa, and Alyssa Kammerman. On the Second day, Alyssa Dove is the video technichian. LR: Today is January 18, 2019 and we are in the home of Douglas Crookston in Layton, Utah talking with him about his life and his memories of World War II. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, and Alyssa Kammerman is with me as well. Also present are his wife Farris and his daughter-in-law Lisa. Douglas, I’m really grateful for your time and your willingness to sit and talk with us, so I’m going to start with when and where you were born? DC: Logan, Utah, 1924, October 30. LR: Did you grow up in Logan? DC: North Logan. LR: Okay, and what are some of your memories? DC: How far back do you want me to go? LR: All the way back… DC: Well, I remember when my appendix ruptured when I was five years old, and of course I didn’t know it ruptured but they took me to the hospital and when they got around to it they took the appendix out. I had a grand time on that bed 1 because the back of it would come up and my dad bought me a little tractor so as I could run it up and down there. They kept me 10 days in the hospital. LR: Wow. You were five years old? DC: Yep, the scar’s gone and so is the appendix. LR: What are some of your memories of just growing up? How many siblings did you have? DC: I had four sisters and one brother. LR: Where did you fall in that? DC: I was the fifth child. LR: Okay, so there were six of you altogether, and just for the record, would you tell us your parents’ names? DC: Newell James Crookston and Ethel Magdalene Smith were my parents. LR: Okay. Were they both from the Logan area? DC: My dad was from North Logan and my mother was from the 10th Ward in Logan. LR: Where did you go to school? DC: North Logan had an elementary school that had three rooms in it and my dad was the principal for 10 years. He hadn’t been to very much college for it at all, but he was a good teacher. LR: Let’s see, so you were about six when the Depression really hit. What are some of your memories of the Depression? DC: Well, I didn’t really know it was a Depression because I wasn’t old enough, but I do remember that they didn’t have very much money and they had problems from time to time. I could go to a little store in North Logan and buy a candy bar 2 for a nickel. My dad paid me 10 cents a day if I’d sit on the cultivator while he cultivated some of the property, but he never really talked much about it. He got a whopping $900 a year for being the principal and a teacher in the North Logan school, and then later in life, he ran for County Clerk and was County Clerk. To really bless me, what he did was when I was in the war, he hired Farris, my wife. I was discharged from World War II in Salt Lake about five o’clock in the afternoon of February 11, 1946 and then the next morning my dad said, “Would you just come down and say hello to some of the secretaries, you know ‘em all?” So I did, and after I shook hands with all of them, one of them turned her face towards another room and said, “Farris, your boss’s son is here. Did you want to meet him?” She come walking in the other room and I knew in less than a second that one way or another I was gonna marry her. She was born October 30th on my birthday, 1927, so we got married on her birthday in 1946. LR: That’s really cool, I like that. DC: That was 72 years ago. LR: So, you went to North Logan Elementary School? DC: I hated it, but I went. LR: Why did you hate it? DC: I didn’t like to have to write things down. I was five years old and all of the kids in my class were six and so I just assumed that if they were older than me that I was dumber than all of them and that stuck with me for years. I just thought that I was dumb and when I finally went to high school, I went to the first term and then 3 I dropped out. I didn’t like having to do book reports and little things like that; I didn’t dislike any of the teachers but I didn’t like to do those things. I repented after that and went back to school and graduated in June, well end of May 1943, and three days later I was in the military as a medic. LR: Okay, what high school did you go to? DC: South Cache High School. LR: Where’s that located? DC: Hyrum. LR: Okay… I have no idea what that is. DC: She went to North Cash. LR: I know you said that you repented and finally went back, what was it that really motivated you to go back to high school? DC: I don’t really know. My dad was pretty upset, but he never really pressured me. But my brother also did the same thing and since Dad was County Clerk and would have to drive to Logan every day, he finally talked him into going to Logan High; he could manage to do that even though the school district didn’t approve too much of it. His brother was a coach at Logan High and Dad was the County Clerk and he could get some things done that other people didn’t get done. LR: Alright. So, what are some of your favorite memories of growing up with your siblings? DC: Well, I used to ride on the cultivators and he was pulling it with one horse. He’d give me a dime a day and when I was really young, I told him I wanted more money than that. He said “How much do you want?” 4 I said “I want seven cents.” He said “Why?” I said “Well, a nickel is bigger than a dime and pennies are bigger than dimes so that must be more money than ten cents.” So that’ll give you an idea of how old I was, and of course I would just help on the farm as much as I could. Later in life, when I was about 12 or 13, I drove his tractor which he had bought ‘cause all of his horses had died. I drove it sometimes 12 hours a day, five days a week sometimes six. I guess that’s maybe why I was used in the Army because I could drive most anything they had. I enjoyed living there in North Logan. LR: Did your dad have a farm there? DC: Yeah, he had about 100 acres. He’s got it covered with houses now. LR: That’s a decent sized farm. DC: When I was really young, he used to take me fishing down in Benson Ward for carp and suckers, we didn’t care about the fish, we just liked to catch ‘em. Unknowingly, I passed her house in Benson Ward going both directions when I was just a kid. ‘Course I hadn’t met her. LR: You said that you joined the military three days after you graduated? DC: I did, I had a hard time getting in because my dad had a farm deferment for me. I kept wondering why they didn’t draft me; you couldn’t go enlist because they used those guys to do better things so they just drafted ya. I kept going in the draft board to see why I didn’t get drafted. The woman that was in charge of it 5 she said; “You can’t get drafted because your dad needs ya on the farm, and he just happens to be on the draft board.” I said “Well I still want to go, how can I do it?” She said, “You have to sign this piece of paper saying that you want to be drafted.” I can’t think of the word that she used, a voluntary inductee, that’s what they called it, and just a few days after that I was in Salt Lake at Fort Douglas in barracks trying to pass the inspections to be in the service. I remember some of those moments really well. But it was kind of interesting because I was raised on a farm where we had only one toilet in the bathroom and it was unheard of for me to go down and find five or six guys, and when they were doing our health examination, they had a long line of guys and a doctor on each side and we didn’t have any clothes on. I wasn’t used to being surrounded by naked people, and the rumor was that they had ear doctors on either side and they look in your ears and if they couldn’t see each other, you were qualified. Then they had a female doctor that checked us for hernia and that was embarrassing. Fortunately, she was about 60 years old and anything but pretty but that didn’t seem like Heaven to me. Then just a few days later I was at Camp Barkeley, Texas. I’d never been away from home so I was always surrounded by people I knew, and there I was in training with guys I had never seen or heard of. It was just uncomfortable for me. When we finally got to Barkeley, Texas I was there about five weeks is all. There were 250,000 soldiers at that Camp Barker, and I was in the medic and for some reason I never understood, they gave me a stripe 6 for PFC and sent me to dental school in San Francisco. I got out of the heat down in Texas where I couldn’t hardly stand it and we got in San Francisco in our summer clothes for the heat and nearly froze to death. I learned to make dental teeth, partials, crowns, and so forth. After I graduated from that then they sent me back to an area around Chicago, I can’t remember the name of the camp, and there we did nothing except be there. Then they transferred me to Tennessee to Camp Forrest near the town of Tullahoma and we didn’t do anything except fall out every morning over here to go be put in an outfit. They just would say, “Crookston go back to the Barracks,” for two to four weeks, and then one day they finally said, “Well we found an outfit, but they’re in Europe and we’d hate to send one or two guys to Europe so we’re gonna send ya to Fort Sill, Oklahoma ‘cause they need dental technicians there.” Well, I got there and of course Captain Echols interviewed me and since I was in the medic, he kind of assumed that maybe I was one that chose not to kill. He asked me if I objected to be in the artillery and I said, “No, I don’t have any objections at all.” He says “Okay, you’re in the field artillery.” That’s the story to there, and he was, I think, a wonderful officer. We went from there to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas and we drove all the way and we had to keep the vehicles so far apart because it was on the roads and and regular passengers you had to leave room for ‘em to get around between us. When we got to Camp Chaffee the temperature was 98 degrees and the humidity was 98 degrees and the water just poured off of ya but that’s what we did. I got to 7 be a driver for Captain Patrick and they had some kind of a new instrument that filled the back of the jeep that had compasses in it you wouldn’t believe. It was this big around and they were hooked to a table that would draw a map of everywhere you went to any scales you wanted. The land orograph is what they called it, and he and I were together while I was a PFC and he was a Captain. We got along pretty good. Then we were sent to New York and we were there for a couple of weeks. When we got through there taking shots and so forth, we got on the Queen Elizabeth, the largest boat in the world at the time. It was so crowded it was about 10,000 of us on there and there was nurses up in areas so there was men and women and so they divided the ship into three sections. They was called A, B, and C and if you were in section A you had to wear a badge that said A on it, if you got caught in the B they’d take you back. Sergeant Long I think was his name, after we’d been there just a couple of days, did the lifeboat drill at 10:00 every morning. You’d put on this big jacket and then you were just surprised you couldn’t walk around. The Sergeant, he says “I got a call today, we got to send one man down to the headquarters for duty and I don’t know what it is but you go and find out.” So, he sent me down there and that was the best thing that happened ‘cause it turned out that they wanted somebody to put their information on the bulletin boards for every area in the ship and there was 54 bulletin boards and I had an A, B, and C card so I was the only one in the outfit that could go anywhere I wanted and I thought it was wonderful. 8 Four and a half days later I was in the Firth of Clyde in Scotland not very far from where my great-grandfather was born and raised. From there we went by train to Southern England and I don’t remember the little town we were in but it was total dark out. When the sun went down you saw nothing and we lived in tents and it was so dark you couldn’t move around at night and tell one tent from another. So, we took white ribbons that they gave us, miles of it, and put them on down the pathways ‘cause you could still see a little bit of white in the middle of night. Then I saw my first rock houses with grass for lids, I thought I’d gone back a thousand years in time. I did get to go to London for a couple of days while we were waiting to do something else. I couldn’t count the money ‘cause I had never heard of farthings and hay-pennies and of course the Brits don’t pronounce the ‘h’ so that made it even more complicated. I went somewhere on a subway and a girl says, “Give me,” whatever it was and I didn’t know what they were. Finally, I just reached into my pocket and handed her a handful of coins and she flipped ‘em back the ones she didn’t want and said, “Now get along, you Yank.” That was basically my experience there in England. Then we got on a smaller boat than what we’d come on and crossed the Channel and I landed on Omaha Beach but it was four months after D-day by the time I got there. I was the jeep driver, and we had the land orograph but we couldn’t find a use for it. It would do wonderful things but we still couldn’t think of anything it’d do that we needed to do so they just took that away from us and put it somewhere else and that was that. I just remember the long ride and you saw 9 the picture of three guys in France that was myself, and one we called Eager Beaver ‘cause he was eager, and one was Ed Gigiure, and that was Léon, France. We thought it was wonderful there until we found out where you go to the toilet. They say, “Well there’s that post over in the corner of that shed you just go pee against that,” and it was right on the corner with women walking by and that was so embarrassing I had to hold it. When I finally found an actual one, they charged us 25 cents to use the toilet and when we’d come out of that, I was with Ed Gigiure, and he starts to laugh and I was “What are ya laughing at?” He said “Look at that sign over the door when we leave.” It was in French, but he spoke French, he had learned French before he was learned English. He says, “Well what it says is ‘Don’t forget to zip your pants’.” To us that was funny. Then we went to Belgium, and to Holland and at night when we were in Belgium we could see the flashes from the big guns going into Germany. Ya see Holland and Belgium surrendered along with France early so they were pretty much intact. When we went into combat, I was driving Captain Mosby and we were in the town of Auckland and that was about nine days after Auckland was taken. Auckland, the city, just surrendered, they didn’t get beat to pieces and so they were a little bit more friendly. I remember driving down some of the streets when we left Belgium and I thought we were in a newsreel that I saw as kids. People just crowded around us; we’d have to stop the chain of ‘em because the people just wanted to be there thanking us. We couldn’t understand what they were saying but it was hard to get through the streets; all I could think of was 10 when I was younger Dad would take us to a movie once in a while, you’d see a newsreel with the troops in that situation. That was my first day in combat with I think it was Captain Mosby. I just couldn’t believe we were on the Siegfried Line; I don’t know if ya know what that is. But there were German tanks shot up, there was American tanks shot up, there was dead soldiers laying everywhere some of ‘em American. The Americans that haunted me was the ones that were swollen up like dead cattle because the medics hadn’t had time to get ‘em out before they’d died. Not one but two or three and that’s when I thought I was actually in Hell. I couldn’t believe what I saw and I don’t remember ever getting out of there but I did. I mentioned I was strafed on New Year’s Day of 1944; a bunch of German fighter planes come over our village, I didn’t learn ‘till later in life that there was 2,000 of ‘em scattered around, and they were gonna give us a “Happy New Year” by seeing how many people they could kill. I was excited to see those planes fighting each other and I stupidly got on top of one of the houses they lived in over there. They make tile roofs everywhere and all of a sudden, I hear bullets hitting these tiles right around me and it scared the daylights out of me. I wasn’t so much scared as I felt stupid to think that I was even up there, but it didn’t take me long to get off of there and get out of sight. I did get to see P-51s flying. I didn’t know at the time that that’s what they were but I learned later they were the P-51s and they shot down all five planes. I can still see those planes exploding— not being knocked down or shot down but exploding. Of course, I don’t suppose those guys wanted to die any more than I did, but they died that’s for sure. 11 In January, they didn’t have us start crossing the Garonne River for about three months later and I was on outpost duty because I was a driver and a radio operator. Captain Patrick, I was his driver, and we went to the town Linnich, what was left of it, and there were no German people they just moved out. We got up into the attic of the building and we took some tile out so we could put our BC scope out of it. The BC scope is like binoculars except you look in here and it goes up and comes out so that you could stick them through a hole and look outside without showing yourself. They had things that you could turn it so you could know about where you were. Pretty soon some machine gun bullets come through that hole and passed our heads. The next thing we know a mortar hit the roof of the house and we were out of there like gangbusters. That’s when I was introduced to mortar fire ‘cause we were only two or three hundred yards from the Rhone river it’s a little smaller than the Rhine. I stuck the gun out that hole when the machine gun started and that’s when I looked for somebody to kill. It was daylight and I would’ve killed them if I could hit ‘em; but there were no men, there was just this barrage of machine gun fire and mortars and that was my baptism of fire. You know they can shoot 12 at a time and they had 50 or 60 vehicles shooting 12 rockets. They had no accuracy but they could just scare the daylights out of ya ‘cause you didn’t know where they were going to land. I remember we were near a big ammunition dump and you don’t know what an ammunition dump is until you see one. Truck loads, and truck loads, and truck loads of artillery things. But going back, I went to Bostwick one day on a 12 mail run just ‘cause I could go and it was 30 miles from where we were in Holland to Bostwick to pick up the mail. On both sides of the road for 30 miles there were ammunition dump, ammunition dump, ammunition dumps not on one side of the road but on both sides. Sometimes there’d be a farm road that went out in a field a half a mile and there’d be ammunition dumps on both sides of that—billions of ammunition, not hundreds but billions of rounds of artillery, and it was just unbelievable to see that. Later in life, I went to Korea and some of the kids saw a shot-up jeep and says “Oh Crookston you ever see anything this bad?” I says “Where I don’t see anything?” “Well look at that jeep,” and I just busted out laughing ‘cause that was nothing compared to what I had seen. Anyway, Captain Patrick would have to go back for water every day and I’d spend 12 hours on a roof with him and six hours to go back to the outfit to get water. We had big places where they bring in water that they’d discontaminated and so forth. We didn’t use local water and you had to have it every day. We only had a five gallon can to carry the water in and there was four. You couldn’t shave or wash your hands, you didn’t have enough water to go around ‘till we go back the next day and get another five gallons, so that’s what we did. When we were in France, I shouldn’t maybe bring this up ‘cause it’s going back, but when on duty you had to go to Cherbourg to get some supplies and I was stopped somewhere and the driver stopped and there was a jeep and I come up there and I said, “You don’t happen to know a Earl Nielsen do ya?” 13 He says, “Yeah he’s right here in Cherbourg.” Well, he was my uncle and so I talked my way to going the next time we went to Cherbourg to see if I could maybe find him. So, I went down and I walked right in and it was the commanding room and here’s me, a private, and he’s playing cards with some other officers. I walked up to him and I says “Gosh Colonel is that all you do is play cards?” They turned around and looked at me like—a PFC talking to a Lieutenant Colonel like that. He got up and just hugged me. We spent an hour together and when the Lieutenant come back to pick me up my uncle said, “Do you need any things that we can help you with?” He was in a supply thing and we’d had trucks with sticks to stick up so you could put a canvas top on them but we had no canvas. I took him out there and he says, “What do you need Lieutenant?” He was, “Well we don’t have any of this and that.” My uncle just tells them, “Fill ‘em up, fill ‘em up.” I had things for the outfit that they couldn’t get anywhere else just because I knew him. Then, I can’t remember just where we were, but I’d driven Captain Mosby somewhere and I was half sick and didn’t really want to go. I had a cold and I had a little bit of diarrhea and we were going to division headquarters. They went in the building and I could only stay for a minute ‘cause I had to go find a latrine if you know what that is. It’s not an outhouse it’s just a trench and I went out an found one and there was another guy there and turned to me and he said, “What are you doing soldier?” 14 I said, “Well I’m doing the same thing you’re doing, what does it look like?” That kinda upset him a little bit but we had to shout at each other because they had a six-by-six truck with a huge generator in it supplying lights for the for the division headquarters. He turned to me and he’s, “What’s your name soldier?” I said, “Doug Crookston, what’s yours?” He shouted back, “Gerald Busby” and I didn’t think anything about that. Then he walked away and I could tell he was upset and that I was in trouble but I didn’t know what I’d done. Pretty soon Captain Mosby comes out and he says, “What happened Crookston?” I told him and he said “Well that wasn’t Gerald Busby that was General Busby.” I said, “Oh I guess I’m in trouble,” and I started visualizing being put in prison. ‘Course I didn’t know where they’d put me—they could put me in combat but I was already there. The captain said, “I want to talk to some of the other Officers and you just wait here.” In a few minutes he come back and he said “The other Officer says he does that to somebody everyday maybe two or three times a day.” We had phones from place to place ‘cause you could have a phone with a magnet needle on it and you could crank it and it’d go through the wires and you could talk through ‘em after you got somebody to answer. He’s all “I’ll call Captain Echols and see what we can do to help ya, but Colonel Bush, I don’t know what he’ll do 15 to you because he’s General Army and he might do something that you won’t like. But I think you’ll get along okay with Captain Echols.” So I drove back and found the outfit and of course we’re in beat up buildings and you just had to find enough of one that you could use it. I went directly to Captain Echols and I was almost in tears. He walked up to me and he said, “Crookston there are a lot of really bad people in the army and some of them are Generals. Just forget about the whole thing.” He put his arm around me and gave me a little hug. Now if that don’t say something something about your officers there’s something wrong with ya. That’s the kind of Officers I had, except one. The first Captain I had on OP duty; I had a happy thing happen once in a little town I don’t remember where it was ‘cause you never knew where you were except by name. Sometimes he'd go back with another driver to get water and supplies and even though I was the lower ranking one he’d leave me in charge of the BC scope ‘cause I’d had more experience than any of the others. Sometimes other officers would come up and they’d come because they wanted to see from the BC scope. They’d say, “What’s that town over there?” I’d tell ‘em. “What’s that town over there?” and I’d tell ‘em the name. But apparently, they mentioned it to the Captain and he’d come and told me later, “You know some of these officers really think that you’re doing a good job up there.” That made me feel wonderful to think that I was nothing but a Private and other officers were complimenting me to him. 16 Then when we got with Captain Nolan, he took the other one’s place and I was his driver. We had two other guys with us who outranked me but I was the driver and the radio operator both. He didn’t seem to make smart decisions in my book, and one day he said, “We gotta get closer to the frontlines,” and officers, they just go this way or that way and they don’t sometimes even talk to ya. We pulled onto a street and he says, “Take a left.” ‘Course I stopped and he says, “What are ya stopping for?” I said, “Well I just don’t think this is the right thing to do,” and of course I’m a private he’s a captain. He’s, “What do ya mean? We gotta get going to the frontlines I need to be closer to ‘em for observation.” I said, “Well I just don’t think it’s a smart thing to do.” He’s, “What are you, a chicken?” I said, “No, I’m not chicken.” “What are ya, scared? You act like it.” I said, “No, I’m not scared. I just don’t think it’s a smart thing to do.” The other two guys, one was a Sergeant and the other was a corporal, he turned to look at me and he says, “I’m not going with you either captain.” He says, “What’s the matter with you guys?” The corporal says, “Well look around captain, why are we the only ones on this street?” He said, “I don’t know but get going.” 17 We called the big guy Punjab because he was tall and he said, “Well why is there nobody on the street captain? Look at that infantry man hiding in a building across the road. I don’t know why he’s there; we’ll call him over and ask him.” The captain reluctantly motioned for him to come over and of course in combat you don’t salute officers because that identifies them as an officer. “What’s going on here soldier?” He said, “Well there’s a war going on.” “Well, why are you just standing here?” “Well, I’m hiding, and I don’t think you ought to go up that road captain.” He said, “Well I gotta get to the frontlines they’re four miles away.” This private said to the captain, “Captain our men are getting killed 50 yards from here but you go if you want to.” He changed his mind and I went through that with him so many times—not that thing but he would do stupid things. We went into a farm village one night and ‘course the people vanish but we went into the houses and the tea kettle was still boiling on the stove so they weren’t far away. There was ducks and geese all over and he shoots a big goose and I said, “Well what’d ya do that for?” He says, “Well I thought maybe we could have roast goose.” I said, “Captain what are we gonna cook it in? And where are we gonna do it?” 18 He said, “Well I hadn’t thought of that,” and it was just little things like that all the time. We went into a house once and there was an old woman and an old man that hadn’t left, and over in Germany they didn’t have much heat like we had furnaces in our place. They would fasten the barn to the house because it was full of cattle and the heat from the cattle will help heat the house, not some but it does help. This old man and old woman, I didn’t understand German but I figured out they were concerned about their cattle. I told the captain, “Look maybe they could go upstairs.” He says, “Yeah they could go upstairs.” I says, “We’ll be gone by morning.” He says “Yeah, if we’re not dead. They’d come down in the night and shoot us.” I said, “Well then I’ll sit here on the stairs on guard all night to see that they don’t.” The next morning they’d never come down and we were gone. We went into a little town, and a town over there is all made of brick, that’s the way it’s been since ancient times. You have a way in and a way out. We drove in and there was just a big archway and you drove into it down the street to another archway and it was almost on the banks of the Rhine River that they hadn’t yet crossed. We got down to the end of the street near the other entrance and there was a corporal standing there and he walked over to the jeep. I’d stopped the jeep ‘cause there was nowhere to go, and he said, “Congratulations captain.” 19 He says, “What for? We haven’t done anything.” The corporal says, “Oh yes you have. The Germans have an 88 gun across the Rhine River and its sight is right down this road. You’re the first ones to make it.” Then we turned down the road and went past these German tanks, about half a dozen maybe or more shot to pieces heads laying on the ground. We just wanted to get out of there. We were in Hell. Anyway, I don’t know if it was right after that we were driving down a road, and this wasn’t like freeways or autobahns, most of their roads were the width of a car. We got down the road a ways and then the Airforce had dropped some fire bombs and it looked like they’d hit a taxi or car whatever it was and it was still smoking when we got there. Apparently, a girl was riding in it and tried to get out of the vehicle ‘cause it was on fire and she was laying crossways into the road. I guess it was a girl you couldn’t tell much. I was just with him alone in that particular time and I looked at the girl and stopped. He said, “What are ya stopping for?” I said, “Well I can’t get around her handily.” He said, “Well drive over her.” I says, “Well she’s dead.” He said, “I know she’s dead, don’t make a difference just drive over her.” I wouldn’t do it and I put the jeep into low gear and I said, “I’ll just go around through the curb.” He says, “No you don’t, there might be bombs in there.” So, I disobeyed him put it in lower range, four-wheel drive and drove through the curb and got around her. 20 Shortly after that it was the four of us again in a four-by-four truck and he says, “We gotta get back to the outfit,” so we start driving and he was lost, again. We went on and on and it finally got dark and he’s out with a flashlight trying to read road signs. We didn’t think that was a smart thing to do in the middle of the night when you’re in combat. This big Punjab he says, “What are ya doing that for captain?” He’s all, “I want to read the road signs.” He says, “Well you ought to know the Germans switch them around so that they won’t tell ya where you’re at.” He finally gave up the flashlight and got back in the jeep or the vehicle with us and we drove and drove and drove. Finally, he stopped and he says, “I’ll look around here,” and it’s so dark you could hardly see. He says, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” While he was gone the 6-10 radio that we had with us was about this shape and about this deep and weighed 60 or 70 pounds. I took the antennae off of it because as a radio operator I knew that if they were close by, they would have to be really close to get the signal with no antennae. So, I took it off and pretty soon he comes stumbling back and he says, “Oh they aren’t here.” I said, “Captain we’re close to ‘em.” “What do ya mean we’re close?” I said, “I took the antennae off the radio and I got answered by our outfit. We’re within a hundred yards of ‘em.” “No we’re not.” I said, “I think you’d better look again.” 21 Pretty soon he comes back and he says, “You’re right Crookston, they’re here.” I’d been with him for so long and of course we had to carry all of our gear and our sleeping bags and everything went along with us all the time. So, I started unloading them and he looked at me and said, “What are ya doing, taking all your stuff?” I said, “Captain, I’m finished with you,” and I just told him I wanted to go back and that’s a PFC to a captain again. He says, “Well how long ya been on OP duty?” I told him and he looked at me and he says, “Well I think you’ve had your turn, so go ahead,” and then I never had any more to do with him until after the war. Just before then we were up near Wismar, Germany which is not very far from the Baltic Sea and from Denmark and it was daylight like in Alaska. We were so far North it didn’t get dark at night and you’d see a few Germans once in a while but not very many. But this had a big mansion and it had a washer and a dryer in it and I would wash my clothes in it. They put only one guy on guard duty because it was still daylight all night long and one guy from our outfit was on guard duty and ‘course it was big enough he had to walk around the area. About two o’clock in the morning we heard a gunshot and it scared the daylights out of us. We’d figured somebody had shot our guard, but we went out to see what happened and there was a Colonel from Germany in the garden and he had taken a pistol and put it to his head and pulled the trigger and then of course the gun dropped. Essentially that’s kinda the way the war ended for us. 22 Oh, I didn’t mention one thing when Captain Eckles told me all about the bad people in the Army I turned around and walked away from him and Colonel Bush I just happened to be going this way with him and I thought “Oh man, what’s going to happen now?” Colonel Bush come up to me and he busted out laughing and gave me the highest salute you’ve ever seen so I guessed that he knew General Busby. LR: Sounds like it. You said that you were a radio operator and a driver, when did you learn? DC: Well, we had three different kinds of radios but I carried a 6-10 with me. I didn’t tell ya the whole story about that; we never saw a German railroad gun but I knew what kind of hole the mortar makes and what kind of a hole a German 88 makes and so forth. Me and another radio operator—well he wasn’t an operator so much he was just there with me, and the captain had gone somewhere with another driver. I could see stuff going on that I thought they ought to know about and I could see it through my BC scope. Then mortar shells started coming around, but I couldn’t reach ‘em with the radio at ground level because of that 610 thing. I said, “We’re gonna have to get it in the attic.” We crawled up in the attic someway and he was laying on his belly and I’m standing on a chair that I’d taken out of the house with this 60- or 70-pound radio in my hand trying to hand it to him so that we could maybe call the outfit. When we got it about half way up, he had a halfway hold of it and I had about a halfway hold of it and that shell boomed behind us not 60 feet or 70 away. It was just an explosion you can’t even imagine and it knocked me off the 23 chair and I landed on the ground on my back and that 60-pound radio landed on top of me. We walked over to it and that hole was bigger than this room and it was eight or 10 feet deep. Now that’s not a mortar that’s a 12-inch German railroad gun. They can send ‘em so they explode there above the ground and send shrapnel everywhere but they can take out an entire intersection. Well, we crawled around in there and we picked up shreds of the bullets that were this long and with sharp edges you couldn’t even pick ‘em up hardly without gloves. Some weighed 25 or 30 pounds and they were all around us and that’s when I said the big gun knocked me over, and it did more than that. I don’t know really a whole lot more I could say on that, but up by Weinsberg being a farm boy I found some horses in a barn at this big place. I just got one and put a bridle on it and there was another one so I got that and I got my buddy, we called him Miserable Patterson because he said every morning, “Another miserable day.” His name was William C. Patterson, and we started riding the horses. Pretty soon somebody tells Captain Echols, or else he saw us I don’t know which, and he come over and say, “What are you guys doing?” I say, “We’re riding horses.” He says, “Well you know we’re still in combat, where’s your rifle?” I said, “Well I guess we didn’t take ‘em ‘cause we’re on horseback.” But that was all he said, never another word. We had genuine gentlemen for Officers and we had some knuckleheads. LR: Do you remember what unit you were in? 24 DC: 472nd Field Artillery Group, now that’s different than a Battery or a Battalion. The group has maybe a half a dozen battalions under her—I never saw her guns, except once. Oh, I still don’t miss this, we had to sleep in bombed out buildings. We’d go down in the basement and it was the middle of the Winter and you had to sleep on the basement floor, ice cold and just miserable as you can imagine. We had to take all our gear with us and in that same building we got up one morning and some Officer comes over and he says, “You’ve got to evacuate the house.” I said, “Why, what’s going on?” He’s all, “We’ve got this 240-millimeter American gun that’s right here by ya and we’re gonna shoot it for a test, and just the blast of the gun will probably knock the house down.” That’s the first time I’d ever seen one of our artillery pieces. That was a big one, and they just fired it to see what it would do, but it didn’t knock the house down. The pictures that you saw of the dead Polacks, it was run by the Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth were 14 or 15 and they only used ‘em because they didn’t have enough soldiers and they had ‘em running this little camp and in essence they had made slaves out of the Polish people. Half of ‘em would be working and the other half would be sleeping, then they’d do it again, 12-hour shifts. In this building they slept on straw because that’s all they had and the group that wasn’t working was in the building. In fact, the kids drove ‘em in the building that weren’t working and on the straw that was in there they poured gasoline and set it on fire and then closed the door so that they couldn’t get out. Some of ‘em tried to dig 25 under and got out and got the door open so they started crawling out and soon as they come out the kids shot ‘em. Now the happy part is the Polacks that were working were close by and when they saw what happened, and it was only about four days before the war ended, and they went nearly nuts. They’d pick up a wine bottle and hold it by the neck, hit it on a rock so that the bottom gets knocked off and jab the faces of those German boys and made ‘em dig a grave for every Polack because by then the Polacks were in charge. When we finally left Germany after the war I didn’t get to choose when I could go home because they had this point system and I was only 18 when I went in so all the old boys went home first. When we left, let’s see where were we? We were in Langenselbold and we lived in little communities that weren’t shot up and when it comes time to leave there, I was the driver because I could drive trucks. I had a whole load of guys in the back and we left there and went to Marseilles, France. It was in the Winter and I nearly froze to death. When we got to Marseilles, we had big tents to live in on a plain that didn’t have a single tree in it and the wind blew like crazy and we nearly froze to death in there. I didn’t get to pick my seat or my bed in that big tent but I got pushed to the corner one and the corners didn’t come together and the wind would blow in there and the rain would come in. I finally took my rain coat and put it over the tent to keep it out and we couldn’t keep warm because we couldn’t find wood and coal didn’t exist. We had two of those stoves in that tent trying to warm it up and since I was a truck driver we’d go out and look for stuff. Well, the plain it was on there was no 26 trees but we found a camp where the Germans had been once and it was full of dead people. We drove down into Marseilles, France and got to a shipyard and they were unloading stuff there and we got all the boxes and brought ‘em back, a whole truckload of ‘em and took ‘em back to our tent. We got there after dark and one of the guys said, “Let’s pull up the planks around the stove and hide the wood, because they’ll make us give it to every tent and there isn’t that much wood.” So, we buried it under the floor and then put the boards back in. Guys from another tent would come over and say “You got any spare wood?” “Oh no look at our pile only got two or three pieces,” but we had a ton of it under the tent. We finally left Marseilles, France and went down through the Mediterranean Sea. Six days on the Mediterranean, calm water, and we went out through the straits of Gibraltar in the middle of the night. I wanted to see the straits of Gibraltar, but it was midnight and all it was a few lights on one side and a few lights on the other. We got into the North Pacific and it was in February and it was just like this and I was seasick all the time, for 19 days and the captain said, “Well the last boat we brought back had wounded people in it so we went South where the water’s calmer but we can get ya quicker if we go up in the North Sea past Finland.” I can remember waves that were 30 feet high and you could look down at a valley, the waves were that high. We finally got to Camp Shanks and I got on the train and went back to Salt Lake and got discharged ‘bout five o’clock that night on February 11th. I went 27 home and the next morning my dad said, “Well you know all the secretaries you ought to come and say hello,” so I went down to his office. He was County Clerk then, and I walked in the office and shook hands with all the people and then one of ‘em turned to another room and said, “Farris, Mr. Crookston’s son is here, did you want to meet him?” When she stepped through the door of that room I had almost a heart attack. I can still feel my heart was going like barumm, barumm, barumm—that was 72 years and three months ago. So that’s essentially my story. LR: Well, that’s your story up until you were 20? DC: Well, you want the rest of our life? I can do it brief. I went to the Korean War and was offered combat commissions three different times and I said “No, I don’t want one,” because I’d have to stay in the Army and I wanted out. I only went to Korea because we didn’t have any money, so I joined the National Guard and they sent us there and I had some special training. I took lots of pictures and sold over 10,000 of ‘em for just a few cents so that then we’d have a little money. Then I come back and I finally went back to college. I got a teaching certificate in Salt Lake and I had to have four jobs plus the teaching to stay alive financially. I got offered a job in California with some big company that made stuff for the Army and so I worked for them until they laid a thousand of us off, so I taught school there for the balance of a year. Then I’d come back to Utah ‘cause I just wanted to be home. When I was in California, I met a guy that I had gone through college with and one day we’d go fishing in California and he said, “I got two cousins that go 28 to Alaska and fish for salmon every summer and I hear they do pretty good,” and that thought never left my head. It took us eight years to put that together and then from that day on we spent every summer in Alaska for about 50 years. Went over the Alaska highway 93 times. I taught school in the winter then we went there in the summer to fish and it was hard work, and we had this foolish idea that if you work hard, you ought to play hard. The kids went hiking and row boating and all that kind of thing and Alaska completely turned our life around financially and mentally, there is just no place like Alaska. We were in places in Alaska in the summer when it was 98 degrees and in winter some places it drops to 81 below, but the summers are marvelous the sun don’t go down in the summer. I was a schoolteacher for 23 years and I’m gonna to tell it as short as I can. I learned through teaching that the teacher in the room is not the most important thing, it’s the students. I learned to love my students; I mean literally love ‘em. You know there’s lots of way to love and 40 years later I had students come to me that I didn’t recognize ‘cause they were all grown up and thank me for being—I sound like I’m bragging but I’m not, these were their words. One of ‘em said, “You were the eminent teacher of my life.” And one, some girl called me over in the Tanner Clinic—Farris was in taking a test and I couldn’t be with her and she said, “Didn’t you teach at Kaysville Junior High?” I said “Yeah I did.” She said “You are Mr. Crookston, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes.” 29 She come running over to me and put her arms around me and said, “You’re the best teacher of my life.” But and I had kids come to me in classroom when we’re there and say, “Mr. Crookston I love coming to your class because we can relax and we know we’re not going to be gotten after us all the time and we just enjoying being in your class.” I shouldn’t say this but I was nominated as the most delight—well I don’t know exactly the words it’s in the other room—and it was published in a local paper that I was the most popular teacher in the high school in Davis County for the month of December whatever year it was. But you know when I first started teaching they said, “You ought to have a take a little thing with ya to spank them on the butt once in a while.” But I finally learned that if the kids will like where they’re being then you know, I just plain out told ‘em when I’d changed my ways I said, “I think you should know that you’re the most important thing in the room, if I died tonight, you’d have another teacher tomorrow.” So why am I important? I’m not that important. I said, “I want ya to know that I love you all, I care for ya, and I think we ought to learn to get along with each other.” That’s just the way I taught them probably the last 10, or 12, or 15 years, I taught 23 years. When I think back to memories of my past I think of two things: mostly the military when I was in Germany I don’t even think about Korea that amounted to nothing, and my students—well and of course family members and you can see there’s a few books ‘round here. LR: So, I’m gonna go ahead and wrap up but I’d like to ask you one final question, if that’s okay. How do you think your experiences during World War II shaped and influenced the rest of your life? 30 DC: I don’t know. I still had some problems after I’d come back, but I could tell ya this much about it, there’s some things you do in your life that you don’t get over and that’s one of ‘em. I remember those boys like they were standing beside me right now. With Miserable Patterson, we called him that. When we were in New York we had a few days off and he wanted to take me home to his place in Wayne, Pennsylvania so I could meet his parents and that surprised me a little bit. When I got made corporal, I felt guilty because I thought he should’ve had it. I don’t know why I got it, but I was made corporal and he was not. I made a whopping 50 bucks a month when I first went into the military and then I jumped clear to $54 dollars a month, and then as a tech corporal I made a whopping $74 dollars a month or 76 I think it was, and I sent most all of it home to my dad. That was enough to buy her a ring and a few little things. AK: You mentioned that when you were in school you didn’t like it, but then you ended up becoming a schoolteacher later on. Was that something that you had thought about doing always? DC: It was something I didn’t think I would ever do, ‘cause I didn’t like it but see when I come home from the War I went to college up at Utah State because that’s where we lived, in North Logan. I didn’t finish, I finally decided I didn’t want to finish, so I moved out to the farm at Dad’s place and tried to take it over but all we did was go broke. That made me volunteer to the National Guard ‘cause I could make a little bit of money which I couldn’t do on the farm. I got called to go to Korea so I went there, and I was sent to survey school back at Fort Silicone, Oklahoma and I turned out to be a surveyor and I got so I could do logarithms in 31 my head I did so much of it. I had some really nice officers over there and a knucklehead or two also. But the colonel he kept offering me these combat things and I say, “Does that include staying in?” “Yeah, you gotta stay in another two and a half years or so.” “So, I don’t want to.” But then I accepted a commission after I got home; I joined the National Guard again and I got a commission there. Anyway, I had come to learn that I could do things that I didn’t think I could at that time and the reason I chose teaching is because I had about half enough for a degree in college when I first come back from the war. When I come back from Korea I thought, “Maybe I’m not as dumb as I think I am.” I went back to the college and they got all my classes that I had taken and to put it all together the shortest route for a degree was teaching school. I reluctantly did it but that changed my life when I learned to love my students. LR: That’s awesome, thank you so much. Part Two, 8 February 2019 LR: It’s February 8, 2019 and we are in the home of Douglas Crookston, and this is part two. I am Lorrie Rands and Alyssa Dove is with me, as well as Douglas and Ferris Crookston. Alright, so you’re in the middle of talking about how you ended up in Korea. DC: Well we went there broke, but before we were married I happened to have sent all my money home from Germany to my dad and he just kept track of it, so I had a whopping thousand dollars after three years in combat in the Army. That was quite a lot of money then, and I bought the most expensive Kodak camera you 32 could buy—foolishly. I loved photography ‘cause I had started on it when I was 16, and when I went to Korea I just took that camera with me. When they called us up, I was just called to survey sergeant—I didn’t have a clue what they did except that was what I was called to be, so I went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma to survey school. It was three months long and just a few days before it was completely over Colonel Whitesides called me from Washington D.C. It was strange to me that the Colonel would call me but it was him on the phone and he says, “Crookston we’ve been called to Korea I think you’d better come home.” I say, “Well school’s not over.” He said “Well talk to them and see if they’ll let you do it.” There was only a few days left, and it was a three month school and ya taught them six or seven hours a day on the one subject. So I asked the guy as I was leaving where I stood with the rest of the students in the school ‘cause we had tests often. In high school, I told ya I was a dumb kid, least I thought I was. Anyway, he went through the records and he says, “You’re in the top four percent.” That kind of threw me. I thought, “Well maybe I’m a better student than I thought I was.” So I went back to the outfit and I told Farris I didn’t think they’d take an old World War II vet into combat again, but I couldn’t find a job so I just went to South Korea, and that’s where I took the camera. I was in debt to a close friend who loaned me some money to get cows and so forth. I was going to make a fortune on the farm and we just couldn’t do it. The farm had shrunk to almost nothing and so we went to Korea, and since I was trained to be a survey expert I was usually out where none of the other guys 33 were. They were in the gun batteries and I was in the headquarters but we didn’t have any guns but our other units did. I would see things that they would never see, they weren’t particularly beautiful pictures but it was Korea, and one day I got to thinking I’d send them home to Carton Jewelry in Logan ‘cause I was a friend of the store owner and they had done photographic stuff years back. He arranged to get them printed and sent ‘em back to me. One day I took about a dozen of them and put them on one of the guys’ bed and I says “Maybe you want to see these.” He looked through them and says “Can I buy ‘em?” I hadn’t even given that a thought, and I said, “Well I guess you could.” “Well how much do ya want?” “Well, give me a dollar.” There was probably a dozen pictures, and then I just kept on going. I carried the camera everywhere I went along with transits and circles and other weapons for surveying. My crew would be out there with me and I’d be snapping pictures when I had time and saw something that I thought I’d take. To make a long story short I sent ‘em back to Carton’s and decided maybe if I got a hundred sets I might could sale a hundred sets of about ten or twelve pictures. I didn’t want to take advantage of ‘em so the only profit I made was three cents per picture. They had to pay for the processing and the mail to get it there and back. They were thrilled to get ‘em but I didn’t want to take advantage of ‘em. Then after a hundred went, I thought, “Well maybe if I order another hundred,” so I did and they went so fast that I decided to ask Carton Jewelry to make a hundred 34 copies and they mailed ‘em back to me and they went right out. Then I thought, “Well maybe I ought to take a chance.” See it costs quite a bit of money to get a hundred prints of each one, and I asked him to get a thousand and they went in days. I was making three cents on each picture, and so then I really took a chance and I ordered 3,000 of ‘em. In the meantime, back in Logan, he was picking pictures that he liked and having 8x10 photographs made and put ‘em in the front of his store facing the street. Even Farris was there to go look at these. It was a local Logan outfit and people would line up to get there, and I suppose they’d go into the store and buy something so he’d always put them up. He started sending me the 8x10s that people seemed to like the best and I sold them for ten dollars each. Did I say three thousand? Yeah well, I did that three different times, and they were gone in no time. I got to go on roads in Okayama I believe it was in Japan and instead of being dead broke I had $ 3,000 in my pocket. LR: Wow. DC: I couldn’t believe that that’d ever happen. Then later in life I thought “You know I should have charged ‘em a nickel, would’ve had five thousand dollars.” I went in as a Staff Sergeant and then I promoted up to Master Sergeant and I spent a lot of time with Colonel Bush ‘cause he was the one that was going hitherto and saying “I want this surveyed” or “I want that surveyed.” Even though I was a Sergeant and he was a Colonel he just depended on me to do things and I sort of became a friend of his. Three different occasions he said, “I want to give you a combat commission.” 35 I thought about it and I said, “Well I don’t know if I’d fit in with the officers, I’ve always been an enlisted man.” “Well, you can adjust to it.” I said, “Do I have to stay in the Army later?” He says, “Two and a half years.” I said, “I don’t want two and a half more years of being in the Army.” Three times I turned it down. Speaking of photography, the Colonel come to me one day and he said, “I found a place I like that had been carved out maybe centuries ago but it’s inside of a building. I guess they built the building over it to preserve it from time. There’s a little light in there but not enough to take the photograph, and frankly, I don’t know what to do.” This is a Colonel talking to a Sergeant, and some of the other Officers had cameras and they wanted it, so he put me in a vehicle with five officers and the enlisted man is trying to teach them how to take a picture where there isn’t enough light. One officer had a number five flash bulb that went on his camera and he was the only one that had a flash bulb of all of us. So we go in and I studied it for a while and I said, “Well Captain So-and-so has the flash gun and he has to stand a specific distance from that bulb to get enough light for his camera.” In those days you could hold a shutter open on a camera if you wanted to ‘cause that was just the way cameras were then. I said, “The rest of you can stand anywhere you want and I’m going to count to five but when I say ‘three’ I want the captain to take his picture and at the same instant you hold the shutter open until I get to five and then you let it shut off and we’ll 36 see what we get.” I don’t know what they got but I know what I got and that’s a gorgeous picture taken under those circumstances. So that’s in Korea, and I went back home with a Master Sergeant and so I kind of changed my life as a Master Sergeant. I got a job in Logan from Peterson Tractor, he was a Caterpillar dealer in Logan and he had a store in Preston and he had one in Tremonton. I was interviewed for what I could do and I says, “Well I don’t know anything about tractors except I’ve driven ‘em a whole bunch.” They say, “Well we need someone in the parts department.” I said, “Well I don’t know how to do that.” He says, “Well then maybe you can learn.” So, they hired me as a parts man and after a year they decided I could be a Caterpillar salesman. The opening that they had was up in Preston, Idaho so I went up there with Farris and we had two little kids at the time and I worked out at that store and I sold two or three Caterpillars. Then the nation got to where it was hard to sell an expensive tractor, and they had to lay somebody off so he said, “I’ll lay off the parts man and you can take over his job ‘cause you already know parts.” He kept saying, “You know if I lay that guy off he’ll starve to death he doesn’t know what to do except this.” So I said, “Well if you’re that worried about him, lay off me.” He goes, “Well that wouldn’t be fair,” and then I went in the next Monday morning to the parts room and the same kid was there and he’d come over and 37 apologized. He said, “I got to thinking over the weekend what you said and you can make it better in life than he can by doing whatever you can think to do.” I moved back to Logan, but Farris and I, and the two boys we didn’t have any place to live. Her Dad happened to have a couple houses that he had bought up in Logan for rental even though he was a dairy farmer in Benson Ward. He didn’t know anything about stuff like that but he had ‘em, and one of ‘em was just a tiny building that only had three rooms and a little kitchen; so little you could hardly walk through it. They were on vacation back East and the house was empty so we just went in, cleaned up the house, and moved in. They didn’t even know about it ‘cause they were back in New York somewhere. I didn’t have much of my G.I. bill left because I had squandered it on the farm trying to make a living, so I went up to the college, and went to down where they keep all their records to see what I could put together ‘cause I had spent some time in the college before the Korean War. They put all my credits together and I chose to take the major that I could get in the shortest length of time and it turned out to be an industrial arts teacher. We still didn’t have enough money from Farris, she got a whopping $75 a month and that’s not a lot of money for sewing or for anything. I thought even though I was laid-off at Peterson’s, “I still know how to do parts,” and I did what most people wouldn’t do. I walked down to Peterson Tractor and went in and picked up a time card and punched in and got behind the counter selling parts. They never once said, “What are ya doing?” They just accepted it, and so I worked for them 28 hours a week. That’s all the spare time I could have, and 38 then they wanted to promote me back to sale once I got my teaching degree. I said, “I don’t want to be a salesman. I’m just going to take a chance on teaching,” and so that’s what we did. He offered me more money and I said, “I can’t really depend on what you’re doing all the time,” and I made the correct decision because six months later Caterpillar took the major part of their Caterpillar Tractors away from Peterson’s and there was nothing I could have done. I was teaching at a brand-new junior high that was just being built in Salt Lake, but I can’t remember the name of it. I taught industrial arts there for the winter but we had bought our first house that we had ever owned and we made a whopping $3,900 a year. That’s a little over a hundred bucks a month, and with the house payment and the driving to the school and back every day wasn’t enough. So, I called the old Salt Lake Tribune, and they wanted a mail carrier. The mail had to be taken up at five o’clock in the morning and put in people’s mailboxes. So, every morning at four o’clock Farris and I’d get up and get in the car and go from mailbox to mailbox to mailbox and we’d get a tad of money from the Salt Lake Tribune. That wasn’t quite enough, so I went down to a big grocery store, which was big in its day ‘cause it had a shoe shop in it and other things you know, like they have now, and I got a job there. I’d get up in the morning at four with Farris, she always came with me ‘cause our two little kids would still be asleep. I’d go to the grocery store right after school and work ‘till 10:00 every night and six hours on Saturdays. I rejoined the National Guard because I’d get a little money from there and I accepted a commission. Put ‘em all together it still wasn’t quite enough, so with the teaching 39 and the paper carrying and I bought a little business we thought that maybe we could make work, which of course didn’t work, all it did was cost money, not make money. Finally, I read the wanted ads in the paper every day and one day there was some guy at the Hotel Utah, which is now the Joseph Smith building, and they were hiring for test equipment engineers at Northrop Aircraft in California. I asked him what the pay would be and it was only a little more than double what I was getting and I thought, “Well that’d be nice we won’t have to have four jobs, we could just do it with one.” Farris was pregnant with our third son, and when he was 10 days old we put him in the car and headed for California. I found a place called Lawndale that was close to where Northrop Aircraft was, and I worked for them and we had sufficient money because it was more than we’d ever had. They’d give us 10 hours overtime per week and that was another hundred and some odd dollars, so we were being paid way more than we’d had. Farris didn’t have to work, she just had the three kids. That went on for two years, and my job was to detect, if I could, errors that engineers had had when they drew up some of the plans for things. For instance, sometimes they would make the drawing for a switch that was this big and then they’d put the wrong number on it and you’d get one that was this big and you couldn’t get it in the hole, so I had to redraw their stuff and I was authorized to do that. Then I think it was December of that year, 1957, they laid-off a thousand people and I was one. I learned, and I shouldn’t say anything against Northrop Aircraft, but the original contract they had with the Air Force was, “We will pay 40 you your costs plus 10% for your product,” and that sounded okay but when you think about it the more expensive they could make that part the bigger their 10% would be and that’s why they hired a thousand guys they didn’t need. Then the Air Force changed the contract, “We will pay the less money for the part as you can make it the bigger the percentage will be,” so that became their goal to make the most money and that’s why we were laid-off. For a month we had to live off of the Bishop’s Storehouse for food, and I tried everywhere to find another job. I went to the local elementary school, they didn’t happen to have any junior highs down there, just elementary schools, and went in and asked the superintendent if I could get a job teaching, and there I met an ignoramus. He said, “Do you have a Master’s degree?” I said, “No.” He says, “Well go get one then we’ll hire ya.” I said, “Why does it have to be a Master’s degree?” “We want intelligent people, not just anybody.” To me that’s a mark of stupidity, because you can have a doctor’s degree and that has no relationship to whether you gained more intelligence. He says, “Well Hillside Elementary was just built,” and this was in February and that’s a hard time to find a teaching job. “They’re building a new room to the school down there at Hillside Elementary and they would have to have another teacher for when that room is done. I’ll call ‘em.” He called ‘em and hung up the phone, he says, “They want to interview you I don’t know why’d they’d hire someone stupid to do that.” 41 I went and interviewed with them, we chatted back forth for a while and I’d given them the name of my principal back in Salt Lake and I guess they called him. I went back later and the short version is they said “Well we’ve got to have a teacher and you’re available so you’re hired.” So we go to Hillside Elementary and I had never taught elementary school and I had no education in elementary school, my specialty was industrial arts in a junior high so I just had to put up with what I could to make that work. Here I am surrounded mostly by girls, but there was some boys and I felt totally ignorant to be with these kids for six hours, but I finally caught on to it a little bit and started doing different things. I remember my first discipline thing. It was one of the lads who was on the front row and the aisle to the door was right beside him, and I walked over to him and said, “I think you better stop that.” He said, “Mr. Crookston you’re in California now, if you even touch me my parents will have you fired by tomorrow.” I said, “I know that, I have no intention of touching you,” so I took his desk which he was in, drug it down the aisle and threw it out the door and that was the end of my discipline problems. I just have really good memories from a few of the kids. One day, this kind of a tall girl came up to me, I think her name was Suzie but I’m not sure, and said, “Mr. Crookston, I’ve lost my contact lenses,” and her’s were about as big as a thumb nail maybe a little smaller. She says, “It must be somewhere in your room, I’ve got to find it ‘cause my parents will kill me if I don’t.” So I had all the 42 students on their hands and knees crawling all over the room trying to find her contact lens. But they couldn’t find it. Finally, I got to thinking, and I didn’t know anything about ‘em really, but I said, “Suzie maybe I can find it for ya.” She says, “Well we looked everywhere.” I says, “Just come up to my desk.” She stood in front of me and I finally pulled up her eyelid and there it was up under her eyelid, so she pulled it back down. Not every day, but real often she’d come, “Mr. Crookston can you find my contact lens?” That went on for about the whole time I was there. Then they had that thing called drop-drills, I don’t know if you know what they are, but if things got out of hand I’d say, “Let’s drop-drill!” They’d all get on their hands and knees under their desk and that was a drop-drill. Since I was an industrial arts instructor, I tried to do things that would be educational to ‘em. Kodak at that time had made a paper that was so slow that it could be developed in a lighted room, normally you have to have a darkroom, then you have to have a really bright light to expose it because it was such a slow thing. So I built a little box and put the machine in. I had a thing you could put a negative next to a photograph and I’d press the button and I would develop the film for them. I just brought pie trays or something whatever it was and they were absolutely thrilled so I said, “Well do you have negatives in your home? Bring your own negative, we’ll do this once in a while if you’ve got a negative.” 43 So, they developed pictures in there and when they had Parents’ Night they’d come to school, “Mom I want to show you how to develop a picture,” and they were thrilled. When I was a kid, I made what they called crystal radios. You could roll up stuff on a cardboard like the toilet paper roll when all the paper’s gone and put some kind of a crystal and a little needle that could move around on it, hook a battery to it and you could hear a radio in earphones. I thought, “Well I’ll have one of the kids do a radio.” So in their spare time they made a radio, and it was a little more sophisticated because by then the transistor had been invented and so he did that. His mother was disappointed she says, “That don’t look like no radio to me,” I guess she wanted a Philco or something. Anyway, the weeks come and went and then the kids got to thinking and so did the principal, I guess. Forgot if I heard it from the kids or him, “The kids want a yearbook of some kind and we’ve never had a yearbook, but I guess we’ll have to do without.” I got to thinking back to some of the classes I had and I got to thinking we can make a little Mickey Mouse one if we use silk screen printing, which is a long-gone thing. I went to a shop and bought some silk screen, made little frames to put it in and I said to the kids in class, “Draw a picture of what you want on your cover.” One kid had come up with something that the rest of the class liked and so I said, “Well, we’ll use that.” We made a three-color run of silk screen and they were absolutely thrilled to get that. Then Farris and I decided we wanted to come back to Utah. We didn’t really dislike California but when you get stopped on a freeway driving hung up 44 for 35 or 45 minutes without a car moving, we thought we’d get back. I either called my dad on the phone or sent him a letter, and I said, “See if you can find me a teaching job in Utah, we want to come home,” and just after school let out, I got a letter from Davis County School District and they had hired me to teach at Central Davis Junior High. I never really applied for it but they sent me one, I guess they trusted my dad or whoever it was. I’d figured he’d find something in Logan but he couldn’t find anything. When I checked it out, they were paying 2,000 a year more down in California than up in Utah and I had teachers tell me, “Crookston in six months you’ll be back to California or you’ll be weeping that you hadn’t come ‘cause you’ll make more money. You’ll be back in six months.” I says, “No I won’t ever be back, and in spite of the 2,000.” When I went to the superintendent to check out everything he said and these are his words not mine “Crookston,” he said, “I know you’re going back to Utah. Here’s what I want ya to do. I want you to go back to Utah and find all the LDS teachers you can find and bring ‘em back to the school district and I will hire all of them and you again.” That’s one of my memories that I liked. While we were in California, we met a friend that had taught a class to me in college when he was a senior. They made some of ‘em teach a class now and again, and we’d become good friends. We’d fish down on the wharf in California for whatever kind of fish they had and one day he and I’d come back with some fish and he says, “You know Doug I got a couple of cousins up in Richmond and they go to Alaska every year and do some commercial salmon fishing. I hear 45 they do pretty good.” That became a thought, I had never given a thought to Alaska in my entire life but I couldn’t get that thought out of my mind. When we’d come back to Utah, we’d go to school and all that stuff I kept thinking about it so I wrote letters to the fishing game and the school district in Anchorage I thought we’d move to Anchorage and fish and to teach school. They said, “Well does your wife have a degree?” I said, “No.” “Well then she couldn’t teach here.” I says, “Does that matter?” He says, “You can’t possibly live off of one income in Anchorage, Alaska.” So that was out. I still kept thinking, “I want to see what this is up in Alaska.” Eight years went by and I don’t know how short I can make it but our last child was about to be born, that was Nick—the one you were hoping would be here. Farris’ sister’s son turned 18 and he’s the only son they had ‘cause his dad was killed in Okinawa and she never remarried and never wanted to. She says, “Sam wants to go to Alaska for his 18th birthday.” I said, “Well, let him go.” She says, “He can’t go alone. He’s picked two friends and I don’t like who he wants to go with. You’ve always wanted to go to Alaska, why don’t you just take him and go?” I said, “Mavis, I don’t have that kind of money, and besides that Farris is having a baby in June.” 46 She says, “Well I don’t know what to tell you but I wish you could take Sam up there.” Farris went to her doctor who was delivering the baby, he was a friend from Kaysville, and she told him you know about wanting to go to Alaska but couldn’t go for the baby. He said, “Farris when that baby’s five weeks old, he couldn’t care less who tends him. You got a mother and a sister who both want to tend him for the summer, and he’ll be just fine. He won’t even remember that that happened.” I was teaching shop again at Clearfield High School, so after work me and my two boys would go over there and we’d build a little homemade trailer that we thought we could live in. When Nick was five weeks old, we delivered him to Farris’ mother and we headed for Anchorage, Alaska and got there two or three weeks later. That was the year of the Alaska earthquake—houses upside down, streets this way when they used to be this way, they’d be this way. It was the biggest mess you ever saw. I said to Farris, “Well we’re only 200 miles from Kenai we just might as well go see what that was all about.” So, we went down to Kenai and got almost there in a little town called Soldotna. There was one grocery store and we stopped to get some groceries and I said to the woman that was the clerk in the aisle, “You don’t happen to know Doyle Carlson do ya?” He was one of the cousins and she says, “Yeah, he’s over in Kenai fishing.” I says, “How do we get to Kenai?” She gave us directions and so we drove down and parked our little trailer out on a side road. We looked down over there and there was fishnets and stuff but they weren’t really in the water. I climbed 47 down a bank about this steep and introduced myself and we chatted for a minute and he says, “You know, I got three nets that could go in the water. It looks like there’s some fish out there but my kids are all little and I can’t get out by myself.” I said, “Well I’ve got two boys and a nephew, if you’d show us what to do I guess we could do it.” So we went down and helped him do that. I brought Farris down to meet him, and he took one look at Farris and he said, “Oh Farris Roundy, I went to high school with you. I can see I was dating the wrong girls.” We became [friends] with him and then we found out some dude along the beach, they call it Salamandoff Beach, wanted to sell his site. Of course, I didn’t have any money to buy it, and Doyle says, “I’ll take ya into the cannery where you can talk to Dobby.” His name was Harold Dobbinspect but everybody called him Dobby. I says, “Oh he won’t want nothing to do with me.” “Well, you’ll meet him anyway,” so we go in and meet this Harold Dobbinspect and Doyle said to him, “Dobby, Doug wants to buy Mel Sanders’ site. He has a few bucks,” which was not quite the truth, “would you finance him?” He looked at me, a total stranger for about 10 seconds, “Yeah I’ll do that. The site’s worth $8,000, I’ll take care of it for ya.” So I go to this Mel Sanders guy and he just says, “Oh I got to have $13,000.” I said, “Well I can’t pay that much.” 48 He said, “Well that’s what it is. If you don’t want to give me $13,000, you can’t buy the site.” We had to go home to teach school, and I went in to Mr. Dobbinspect and I said, “I don’t know what to do, Mel wants $13,000 for that fishing site, and you offered him eight.” He says, “That’s because that’s all it’s worth is eight. He’ll come down.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “I’ll tell you what Crookston, you and your family go home and for every week that you’re home, he’ll come down a thousand dollars.” We come home disappointed ‘cause we really wanted to do it, and one week from today the phone rings from this guy that wanted to sell his site and he lived in San Jose, California. He says, “Thirteen thousand dollars or nothing,” and we dickered over the phone for a while and he says, “okay, $8,000.” He’d come down $1,000 a week for every week that Dobbinspect said he would do. Then I got to thinking, “You know he’s kind of a crook, if I send him a check for $8,000, he’ll cash it and run and I still won’t have the site.” So, I made up a contract for him to sign but I had to see him to get it to happen. I went to our Stake President, Brother Blood down in Burbank, and I told him I says “You’re a Stake President, do you have a book that has names of anybody down in San Jose?” He looked through a book, “Yeah I’ve got names of Bishops and Stake Presidents all over the West.” He’s sitting there going through ‘em, he says, “I can’t find one.” About that time the secretary tapped him on the shoulder and 49 said, “Mr. Blood you’ve got a telephone call you’d better answer it.” He got up and left but he left the book on the table so I start thumbing through it and found San Jose, California, Bishop Denzel Wiser. I just happened to spend a year in Korea with him, and he put it all together and in a couple of weeks we had our fishing site and that changed our lives forever. It’s just like living in Paradise. What people don’t seem to know about Alaska is most everything. I’ve got letters from my aunt “Dear ones in the frozen North,” and it was 70 degrees. It was sweaty and hot because there’s more humidity there and we were in places in Alaska where it was 98 degrees, and up in Denali Park it was so hot you couldn’t hardly stand it. It’s just a huge, delightful place. Not everywhere is huge and delightful, but it’s huge always. The first year we made no money at all, but this Mr. Dobbinspect brought up shiploads of food and fuel for all the guys that sold him fish. He was running a cannery and of course by then we had got all that food for nothing. We’d pay for it out of our catch, but there was no catch and I thought, “Boy this is it, we’ll never be able to handle this.” Well, I went and told him I says, “I don’t know what to do, Dob”—we’d called him Dobby by then. I thought he’d probably take the site away from me. He thought for a second and he says, “Well Crookston nobody made any money this summer. I’m going to worry about it next year.” He turned to his secretary and says, “Fred, give Doug a check for $1,000 so he can get home and back.” Now what kind of a guy is that? 50 The next year we caught some fish and I never worked so hard in my life. Twenty-hour days, day after day and night after night. I told Farris, “We’re going to have to sell this place, I just can’t do this anymore.” Typical Farris she said, “Well Doug, if you want to sell the site go ahead and sell it, but I go with the site.” So, we stayed. We stayed for 50 years, summer after summer after summer, and it just got better and better and better through the years. I guess I’m kind of a gadget maker ‘cause I got my brother and I to put together an old diesel tractor. When I got it up to Alaska they says, “I heard through the grapevine Crookston, you don’t know what’s going on. You can’t start a diesel in this weather in this country.” It was the only diesel tractor there and it was the only one you could always start. Then later on I found a Big John Deere tractor up in Boise somewhere and I bought that and took it to Alaska and I heard through the grapevine, “Crookston’s crazy he doesn’t know that four-wheel vehicles are no good on the beach ‘cause there’s so much mud here and there.” Before long it was six John Deere tractors on the beach. I mentioned it to the dealer and I said, “You know I brought the first John Deere up here, and now there’s six of them.” He says, “Crookston, you don’t know the beginning of the whole story. There’s not six on these beaches in Alaska there’s 65 of them. You really started something.” Alaska just changed our lives financially. Romantic’s not the best [word] but it just is paradise. Our kids had fun. When the fishing was over, they’d go 51 boat rowing at Stormy Lake or other places. The kids now tell me—four days they spent in canoes on Princewood and years later Ted’s oldest boy said, “That’s the best vacation I’ve ever had in my entire life was those four days there.” The kids worked hard then they played hard, and it just changed our lives completely. Anyway, so I come back to Utah to teach and I told ya today how much I learned to care for the kids. When I started teaching math I thought—but in particular this one was on a number called pi, and instead of just telling about it and what it was, I cut out a circle of wood about this big, and a little one and brought ‘em to class. I said, “Now what’s common about these two things?” “Well, nothing except they’re made out of wood.” I’d say, “No there’s more to it than that,” so I’d have the letter pi in it we can figure that out. I said, “I’m not going to tell ya what pi is, I want you to find it. Spread the desks apart and we’ll measure the circle and see how far around it is. Measure it as close as you can and then we’ll take the little one and do the same thing with the little one.” I’d put a little mark on the on the circle and when they were done I’d say, “What’s the difference?” “There ain’t no difference because they’re both just circles.” I said, “Well they have something in common. Let’s take the two measurements and do a little bit of arithmetic on it and you will find that the radius has something in common with the other one.” “But we can’t, they’re different sizes.” 52 I says, “Well let’s see what we get.” So, they worked the math and lo and behold they come up with pi. I wrote that funny little symbol and they said, “But isn’t that a number?” I said, “It’s the only number that you can’t write down.” “What do ya mean you can’t write it down?” I says, “It can’t be written so you have to use this symbol.” “Oh why can’t they just write the number?” I said, “Well have you ever done a division problem where nothing ever ended? There’s always another number but a number is never repeated over and over, and they call that number pi.” So they got to discover it, and I tried to do little things like that when I could. Then, sometimes a student gets done with their work, and I had one come up and say, “Mr. Crookston, I’m all done. I’ve still got two minutes, what can I do for two minutes?” I said, “Well, it just happens that there’s a jump-the-rope in the back of the room, go jump-the-rope for two minutes. Health is good for ya,” and so they would. Sometimes they’d say, “I got my work done, what am I going to do?” I didn’t give huge homework assignments, because in my book if you give a huge work assignment, so does the English teacher, so does the History teacher, so does the Health teacher, when are ya going to do that? So I said, “Well, you need to learn to think. Now all you’ve got to do is take this thing and take this heart that’s hanging down there”—and I made this by the way—"and take it off.” 53 They would work and work and work and never get it, and then I would put it behind my back and take it off and hand them the heart. I says “There’s a way to solve this problem, but you got to think.” I can’t seem to do it anymore or I’d take it off for ya. I showed it to my brother who is mechanically inclined, “Bet ya can’t take ‘em off.” He picks it up and just does this and says, “Is this what you wanted?” So it works. Then I made this little gadget right here. “I got two minutes of class, what can I do?” I says, “Go use this and see if there is something special happening.” She says, “What is it?” I said, “It’s called the do-nothing machine, you might notice some difference in it.” I wanted the kids to think for themselves. LR: This is just cool that you made these little gadgets yourself to teach your kids, I think that’s just ingenious. DC: Well, I didn’t invent it. LR: I realize that, but it’s just the fact that you took the time to make it so that your kids would have something to do. DC: I shouldn’t tell ya this one but I’m going to anyway. LR: Okay, tell me. DC: I had a student come to me towards the end of the class, maybe 10 minutes left, and she said, “Mr. Crookston, I’m in trouble.” 54 I said, “What’s the problem?” I don’t know who the girl was I just remember that’s what she said. “Ms. Johnson the gym teacher told us to write a poem, and it’s due today and if I don’t get it done, she’ll kill me!” If you knew Ms. Johnson, you’d know what she meant. “I don’t know what to do.” I said “Well what’s the problem? What’s it about?” She says, “Well it’s about gymnastics or something, and I just forgot all about it.” I says, “Well I’ll make a deal with you.” She says, “What are you going to do?” I said, “You go finish your math, I’ll write the poem for ya,” so I took about ten minutes and zipped out two or four verses of limericks. Know what a limerick is? They’re easy to write sometimes, if you can remember, for instance: “I once met a man from Morrim, we bought him new pants and wore ‘em. He sat down and laughed, but he soon felt a draft. He found out just then he’d torn ‘em.” She’d come back three or four days later to class she says, “Oh Mr. Crookston, I got an ‘A’ on my poem.” Sometimes teachers hurt kids without thinking, and I did that once to a girl—I think it was Suzie. I walked over to her desk when she was supposed to be doing homework, and she was writing a note down in long hand not math. I lost my temper, which you ought not to do, and I tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket. She got so mad she jumped out of her seat and went through the door and slammed it back, and I went out to get her and the principal happened 55 to be right there and he says, “I’ll take care of her Mr. Crookston.” I got to thinking about that, “Is everything that I think the most important thing in their life?” All I really did was I embarrassed her in front of all of her friends and now she has another problem with another teacher because I embarrassed her, and I don’t think that I should’ve done that ‘cause sometimes teachers make mistakes. So, after the kids got doing their work, I walked over to the office and she’s sitting in the principal’s office and I said, “I want you to come back to my room.” She says, “I can’t, the principal told me to stay here he was going to talk to me.” I said, “Well I’ll take care of that, come on back to the room with me.” I got the garbage can and I found all the pieces, we taped ‘em back together, and I said, “Go in and write your whatever it was.” She was my best friend after that, and you know I wasn’t trying to make a friend. But you know I don’t think a teacher is perfect, you’re sitting with a bunch of kids but some of them, mentally, are more intelligent than the teacher. Everybody has an IQ they may not know as many things, but their ability to think is important. I embarrassed two girls once—I don’t remember who they were—I just thought that what they were doing they shouldn’t be and so I told ‘em both, “Sit down and shut up.” The next class I got to thinking about what I had done and I couldn’t teach because that was on my mind. So I went over to the office, I knew the girls’ names by then, and asked them to call the rooms they were in and send them over to me. They’d come walking in after a while, and I took them into that little side room and I said, “I think I did something that I shouldn’t have done, and 56 I’m not sure what it was you did, and I know that I embarrassed you in front of all your friends and I just want ya to forgive me for that.” They both cried on my shoulder and it’s just the way I taught. You know I had this happen once. LR: The Davis Teacher of the Month. DC: I had four kids in photography class and I taught ‘em. I had an enlarger and developing processes in the darkroom and they’d learn how to do it. I had ‘em take pictures and this is the camera I taught ‘em how to use. It’s a little different than cameras now. LR: Wow, yeah just look at it. DC: I told the kids, “Now you know how to make enlargements and print pictures and so forth, carry the camera with you once in a while.” For four years me and the kids took all the pictures in the yearbooks. The kids did it, not me. I did the back one ‘cause I had to go down in the shop and I wanted something in the shop. On my period off I spent taking photographs after photograph with that camera you just held, and I photographed all these pictures and the student council put them together. When they got towards the end they’d decided this is the kids’ book not just mine. I did the things they couldn’t do and they did what they could do. I went down to Carr Printing in Bountiful and sit down with them in the room while they were putting the book together. Then, I can’t remember which one, but one of the students in the art class made the cover. LR: That’s really cool. DC: Usually get a professional to do this “Oh we have a good cover for ya,” but this is a kids’ book not mine and not Carr Printings they just made that. 57 LR: So, how long did you teach at Kaysville Junior High? DC: I think it was 17 years in that school. LR: Okay, so you taught at Central Davis Junior High? DC: I did. LR: You taught at Clearfield High School? DC: Yes. LR: And then at Kaysville Junior High? DC: Yes. That’s my teaching career. LR: So how many years did you teach all told? DC: Twenty-three, I think. One year I got so frustrated at teaching them juniors ‘cause I needed more money and I took a job out at Hercules on the west side of the valley. They were making a third stage of the Minuteman missile. I worked for them for one year and what I did was teach engineers several things about the third stage of the unit. This is a high school teacher teaching engineers. I could go without stop for four hours on some of the subjects; ‘course we’d have to take a 10-minute break every hour. The thrust termination system was just a two- or three-hour thing, and those are things you wouldn’t know what thrust termination is and nozzle alignment and so forth. I don’t want to say this to brag but they asked me and another guy to go out to a place in Ogden, somewhere where they were winding engines out of fiberglass, and talk to them. He and I went out and he gives his lecture and I did mine, and then on the way back he says, “Crookston I hate you.” I said, “Why?” 58 He said, “I gave my talk and you gave yours, and it was so superior to mine that I hate ya.” We went back out to Hercules, and we didn’t have rooms, we had these pillars that were about over your head and they could just swing around—I walked into mine and he went into the supervisor next door, and you could hear every word they said ‘cause there’s no wall between them. He went into the supervisor and I can’t remember the names of either one, and said, “You oughta heard Crookston’s talk. He gave a lecture that was so defined that you never heard one that good before.” I was listening next door, and the supervisor said, “Well what about me? I can do better than that.” He says, “You don’t even come close to Crookston’s.” Then I got bored ‘cause I didn’t get to do it enough. I was used to working all my life and I ended up teaching 12 and a half hours a week, and it was a three hour drive to and forth from Hercules because there was no freeways. I just got bored and I come home one day and there’s a thick envelope on the mail from the school board and I said to Farris, “Well I guess they’ve fired me. I’m not teaching.” I opened it up, and there was a contract to teach at Clearfield High, and I nearly fainted, for $1,000 a year or less. I just said “Hoop, hoop horray,” and I signed it and mailed it back to the district because I was simply bored. I was trained to work. I just couldn’t sit there hour after hour after hour with nothing to do. Essentially, that’s that story. Then there’s this one other important part of our life that you would be interested in I think. Our youngest daughter married a guy up in the Boise Valley 59 years ago and their first years of course they had no children. One day we went up and he took us out to a little town called Silver City, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, it was about 70 or 100 miles from Boise, and it’s an old ghost town where they mined for silver years ago. They just took us out to go through it. The buildings were still intact, and there was one building they had a guy in trying to sell ya something because people did come there once in a while. So, I took my camera one time and I took about 200 slides of Silver City. I got to thinking about a thing called slide shows, and it’s not just a projector showing a slide and then another slide and another slide. I got all the gear downstairs and I put ‘em all together, and it takes two projectors. I had a special recorder about this big with the little thin tape on it but the tape was designed so that you could tell the projectors what to do on half of it, and the other half would play the music or whatever ya put in it. Well Connie and John were taking a summer class from Boise State College in history and their professor wanted the kids to write a paper on something about history of Idaho, and I got to thinking about this other thing and I bought all the equipment and I spent three months working on that film. I said, “Why don’t you talk him out of it, and tell him that your dad will show him some slides?” They called me back and said, “No, he says slides are no good.” So I kept after her, and finally they told the professor so many times he finally gave in. We drove back to Boise, it’s only 300 miles, and I set everything up two projectors and a box this big and this high. 60 The professor says, “Well do what you’re going to do.” He nearly fainted when I pushed a button and went down and sat down in the audience with him, and not one kid left the room. Farris and I went back to their house, and they come home from the class about two hours later and I said, “What’d the professor have to say about it?” She said, “The professor told me in class last night that you have people all over Boise wanting to know where they can see the movie on,” they called it a movie, “On Silver City.” He says, “I get calls every day ‘Where can we see that?’” So, then I got the bad habit of making more of ‘em. I’ll just mention two or three of ‘em. Have you ever heard of Sill’s Café downtown? LR: Yeah. DC: Well, Golden Sill was in World War II. LR: Right, he was. DC: He was at a different place than I was, but then when he left the military he taught school up at Hill Field’s school house, and Farris just happened to be his librarian. So anyway, he was going to retire because the district wanted to tear the building down and oh he’d been there for about 30 years. Farris came home one day and she said, “Doug, Golden Sill is going to retire and the faculty come to me and said ‘We want to have a surprise party for Golden Sill and we’re going to do it on this Friday night in your house.’” I said, “Five days?!” She said, “Yes, five days.” 61 I said, “What am I going to do?” She says, “You’re going to put together a slideshow.” I says, “What with? I don’t have any pictures.” “Well find some.” So we went down and visited with his wife and asked her for every picture that she could find about them and Golden Sill. I sometimes worked ‘til 2:30 in the morning, and Friday night they got Golden Sill to sit down in the basement with me, and I had an eight-foot screen, and I started to show the pictures of him his wife had taken of him when they were kids and then when they were married. Then you won’t quite believe this part, his war story. Twenty or 30 days before the war ended, he was a lieutenant in a tank battalion or something and the general that was over the Air Force for Hitler? LR: Gӧring. DC: Yeah, Hermann Gӧring that was it. He said, “The General told me that Gӧring wanted to surrender, and we’re to meet him.” He drove 80 kilometers with six tanks to go back behind the front lines to get there. He said, “Nobody fired a shot at us,” and one or two of his guys happened to have cameras and they got pictures of Hermann Gӧring surrendering, and luckily his wife had the two pictures. I turned ‘em into slides ‘cause I know how to do that. Anyway, he sat here for 30 minutes and cried every second, that’s our pay for that. He had me show it to his high priest group, and then he had me show it to his family. He told me he said, “Doug in my life I have never had anybody do something like that for me in my entire life.” That’s the Golden Sill story. 62 LR: That’s amazing. You’ve got some great stories. Thank you so much for sharing them. I’m going to go ahead and turn off this camera, but before I do I just wanted to say thank you again for talking to us. 63