Oral History Program Lorraine Kimber Interviewed by Stephen Perry 9 December 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Lorraine Kimber Interviewed by Stephen Perry 9 December 2016 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Kimber, Lorraine, an oral history by Stephen Perry, 9 December 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Lorraine Kimber, conducted on December 9, 2016 by NUAMES student Stephen Perry. Lorraine discusses her life, her father’s service in United States Navy during World War II, and other memories and experiences regarding World War II. SP: Where were you born? LK: Oakley, Idaho. That’s in the south-central part of the state. If you know where Twin Falls and Burley are, Oakley is the apex making a triangle. SP: Do you know what hospital? LK: My own home. SP: Oh, you were born in your own home? LK: I was born in my folks’ home. SP: When were you born? LK: November 22, 1936 SP: Do you know any lasting effects of World War II? LK: I remember my father was taken into the Navy. He had been in the Navy at the end of the First World War, and they drafted him. He was gone for eleven months, and then they sent him back to us because they found out he was married with four kids and he should have been home in the first place. SP: Do you know anything about what he did while he was out in that eleven months? LK: No, I don’t, except he was a Boatswain’s Mate. SP: Do you know what your father’s opinion of the war was? 2 LK: He was all for it. He thought we’d made the right choices. SP: Did he ever express why we made the choice? LK: No. SP: How about your mother? LK: Mother was sad that he was gone. We sold our car because mother didn’t drive, and so we walked everywhere we went for eleven months. But we didn’t seem to notice any difference. SP: Do you know your mother’s opinion about the war? Did she have the same outlook as your father about World War II? LK: Yes. SP: What was yours? LK: At the age of five, I didn’t think about it very much. I just noticed that sugar was rationed. We could only get sugar once or twice a year, and it was expensive. Ladies wore nylons all the time back then, and they were rationed too. We had to be very careful when we wore stockings. SP: Do you know how much it was? LK: No. SP: Knowing what you know now, do you think the war was a good idea for us to join it? LK: Yes I do. We had to. The Japanese had overstepped their bounds. In order to keep our country free, we had to defend it. SP: Given the option, if you were just a bit older, would you have supported the military by becoming a nurse or something? 3 LK: Whatever I could have done, I’d have done it. SP: You had siblings? LK: I had three siblings at that time. A brother younger than myself, and an older sister. SP: What do you think caused the Japanese to do what they did? LK: I have no idea. It’s hard to understand why anyone would have the thinking that they could go and bomb other people and kill them and take over their lands. I don’t know what their thinking was. SP: The U.S. was part of the Allies and worked with the United Kingdom and several other countries. Do you think it would have been more in our favor if we’d had the help of some of the smaller neutral countries? Do you think we could have helped push back some of the people who were trying to hurt others faster and sooner? LK: We may have done. I don’t know how the government worked. I know that we had to go to war because we had to defend our rights. That’s all I know. SP: You mentioned things were rationed. LK: Yes SP: Was there anything else that you can remember? LK: Not in particular. Flour was rationed a bit, rubber was rationed. That’s another reason why my father sold our car. He couldn’t afford to buy the tires to keep it running. SP: Later after the war, when you were older, say fifteen, were they still putting you through drills? 4 LK: When I was in elementary school, they had air raids, and we would go down in the basement of the school. By the time I got into high school, they weren’t doing that anymore. It was far enough away from the war that we didn’t. SP: Growing up, did you see any lasting effects of the war? LK: No, we lived in an area where there wasn’t that much. We had air raids and had to put blankets over our windows at night so the light wouldn’t shine out. The Oakley Dam was at that time the third-largest man-made dirt filled dam in the world. They were afraid they would come and bomb the dam and destroy all the valley. It would have taken out Burley and parts of Twin Falls. It would have been devastating for southern Idaho if they had bombed that dam. SP: If it had been bombed, it would have covered your town and a lot of area. LK: Yes, it would have flooded an area of the Snake River. SP: Did your parents ever express discomfort toward this? LK: No they kept very quiet. SP: While you were growing up, after rations were lifted, did life go back to normal? LK: As far as I knew, it did. We never had any problems. I don’t remember just when our dad bought our first car after the war, but we just kept working on out little farm we had. We lived just across the street from the high school. We had a cow, and chickens, and pigs, and it was our responsibility to help take care of them. SP: What were some of your jobs on the farm? LK: Doing dishes, helping mom cook, picking raspberries, taking care of the vegetables in the yard. The normal things that kids do when they’re on a farm. SP: When you weren’t at school or helping on the farm, what did you do? 5 LK: We played outdoor games: hide and seek, kick the can, run sheepie run. We had all kinds of games we used to play. SP: Did you enjoy hanging out with other kids when you had time? LK: Yes I did. I was active in the marching band. From the time I was in the fourth grade, I marched in the high school band. That’s how small the community was. As soon as anybody could learn to play an instrument and keep a rhythm, they marched. SP: Did you play an instrument? LK: I played a B-flat clarinet. SP: What were some of the other instruments in your marching band? LK: Clarinets, saxophones, trombones, trumpets, drums. Just about anything they had in the bigger ones, one or two of us could play something. SP: How often did your marching band do things? LK: We marched at the football games, and we had state tournaments. We went as far away from home as Moscow, Idaho to participate in state tournaments. We had a pretty good showing for our little marching group. When I graduated from high school, I went to BYU and played with the BYU marching band. That was great too. SP: When you went to BYU, what career were you pursuing? LK: I was going into physical education. Then I had problems with my back and the doctor said, “You can’t take any physical education classes at all.” So that cut my career short. About that time, my husband came home from his mission and we decided to get married, so I didn’t finish my degree. 6 SP: Did you stay home and help your kids? LK: I did for the first fifteen years. When my kids got to be teenagers and needed a little extra, I started working. I worked at Smith’s Food and Drug, in their café. Then I worked for an insurance company, and then I worked for the university. I worked at the Utah water research lab for fifteen years and then six and a half years at audio-visual services. SP: What did you do there? LK: I was the secretary. I was the receptionist at the water lab. When they asked Lucinda where I worked, she said I worked at the “Water re-church lab.” So we got a kick out of that. When I worked at audio-visual, I helped teach the kids how to use the equipment there. I also worked as secretary and bookkeeper at the Logan airport for a couple of years. SP: Thank you for your time.