Oral History Program Donald Kingsly Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 11 July 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Donald Kingsly Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 11 July 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Kingsly,Donald, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 11 July 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Donald Kingsly 11 July 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Donald Kingsly, conducted on July 11, 2017 in his home in Layton, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Donald discusses his life and memories of World War II. Michael Baliff, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is July 11, 2017. We are in the home of Donald Kingsly in Layton, Utah, talking about his life and remembrances of World War II for the World War II and Northern Utah project. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview and Michael Baliff is on the camera. Donald, thank you again. I know I’ve said that three times probably or four, but I’m so grateful that you’re taking the time to do this. So, let’s just start with when and where you were born. DK: I was born in Johnson City, New York and it was May of 1934, sixteen May, thirty-four. LR: Where exactly is Johnson City? DK: Johnson City is a little over a hundred miles west of New York City and fifteen miles above the Pennsylvania border right, in the southern part of the state there. LR: Did you grow up in Johnson City? DK: Yes. I was born there and I grew up there. I enlisted in the service and that’s when I left that area and never went back there permanently except for visits with family and so forth. LR: What are some of your memories of growing up in Johnson City? DK: I had two younger sisters. One sister was only eighteen months younger than me, but I always let her know I was the boss. I was the older kid there. I was lazy in school. I didn’t do well and she did. She’d do homework for me. My mother 2 finally found out what was going on and she put a screeching halt to that. They put me in another room. She still lives there in Johnson City. LR: Do you remember the name of the elementary school you went to? DK: It was Harry L. Johnson. That was named after a shoe mill company, Johnson’s Shoe Mills. This was one of the owners of the shoe mills, who it was named after. That was the industry there. People - that’s where they worked. That was where we earned our living. People had other jobs, but that was the major thing. LR: Did that shoe mill survive the depression? DK: Yes. The interesting part about it is, during the depression, Mr. Johnson managed to keep everybody working, if not full time, enough so they had some money coming in. He provided medical care for us, so he was a very generous man. But that’s all gone now. Those factories are all empty. They’re shells. We get our shoes overseas now and so forth. I was back there about a year ago and the buildings are still sitting there, but I guess they are like a ghost town now. It was a great place to grow up as a kid. LR: What would you do for fun as a kid? DK: Get in trouble. No, there was some of that, but nothing serious. We played baseball. We didn’t have little-league then. They had a couple of ball parks there that we could play on during the week. We’d get our team set up and we’d go over and play baseball. We didn’t have little-leagues and stuff like that, either. We put our teams together by our neighborhoods. We’d say, “Well yeah. We can play ball better than you.” Then we’d go down into the ball field park and play ball. We did a lot of camping. We’d get our little sacks full of something and we’d 3 go up in the hills that are right alongside where we lived there. We’d go up there and stay up there over night or a couple of nights until we got into our early teens. We had dances at the YWCA that they had a little later. LR: I know you weren’t very old, but what are some of your memories of Pearl Harbor Day? DK: Oh, I’ve got a precise memory on that. We were living with my aunt. My father deserted us, but we were living with my aunt. It was a Sunday night and my mother had gone on a walk up to the little town there for something. She had to run an errand. She came home and she come in the door and she says to my aunt, “Turn on the radio, Pearl Harbor has just been bombed by the Japanese.” My aunt said to her, “Where’s Pearl Harbor?” I remember that precisely. I don’t know why it sticks with me, but it did. LR: So you didn’t hear about it until later that day. DK: Probably almost a day after with the time difference and everything. LR: You said your mother was taking care of you. Was she working? DK: She was working then as a clerk in a store. This wasn’t a super market. We didn’t have super markets. This was a local man who had a grocery store, and he hired her to work in his store there. I don’t know what she made. It wasn’t much, I know that. A few years later, I delivered groceries for them for a while. They’d call in on the phone wanting something from the store. They placed their order and Mr. Wilson, his name was Wilson, he put the order together and put it on the bike and give me an address. Most of the people I knew in that town anyway, where they lived. I’d take the groceries to them. 4 LR: About how old were you? DK: Probably twelve, eleven or twelve. LR: I know you weren’t that old during the war. DK: I was about ten years old during the war. LR: What are some of your memories of the rationing or any of the bomb drops? Do you have any memory of those? DK: Not so much. It didn’t touch us, the rationing and so forth. It didn’t seem to touch us. My mother was pretty plain with cooking and so forth, so we were just a meat and potato family. I remember the stamps and so forth, but it really didn’t affect us and my sister very much. We didn’t have an automobile, but everybody was scratching for gasoline. Nobody would drive any place. They were saving their gas and so forth. We could walk to most places in the town. The biggest thing that happened is they opened the Remington Rand plant where they made propellers for aircraft during World War II. My mother got work there. The men were gone. That’s why she probably got the work there. She was paid low. Things changed for the better for us when the war came along. I know that sounds weird, but for us it just turned out that way. There was work for her then. She wasn’t just working in a household, cleaning houses. She was in a plant that made propellers for airplanes. LR: Do you know what she did in the plant? DK: Not exactly. I know they had it lined up - somebody put the bolts on it and somebody else screwed them down. She worked on an assembly line. That’s the first time she began to make a nice amount of money, so it worked out. 5 LR: The Remington plant - did they use the shoe factory as a base? DK: No. They had another plant that they had built. They put it up almost overnight. I don’t know exactly what they were making but I think it was propellers or parts for propellers. All the planes were propeller driven then. LR: Do you remember any of the older boys being drafted in your town? DK: My father had eight brothers and they were all of age. The youngest one was the only one that didn’t go in the service. The others were all drafted. LR: Did they all live in Johnson City? DK: Yes, pretty much. In or right around the area. It was a simpler time. LR: Maybe the questions aren’t exactly fair, but as you’re watching a lot of these older boys being drafted, was that in the back of your mind? Were you ever worried that if the war keeps going, you’re going to be drafted? DK: No, that wasn’t in my mind. I wanted to be a soldier. I was wishing I was older. I would have been one of the first to go down and join. I thought these guys were all heroes. They all wore their uniforms. When I went into the service and came home, I didn’t stay in a uniform when I could get into civilian clothes, but they wore their uniforms when they got home for the most part. We were fortunate none of my uncles were lost in the war. Three of them, I know for a fact, were in some combat time. The others, I’m not sure about. Several of them saw some pretty tough times. LR: What year did you graduate from high school? DK: 1951. LR: When the war ended in 1945, was there excitement in Johnson City? 6 DK: Yeah. I was twelve years old at that time. The other boys my age that I played with, we got some things to bang pots and walked around this little town. We were saying, “Hooray, the war is over. We beat them Germans.” Sort of our children’s celebration at the time, but you could do that in a small village in those days where I lived. We were old enough to know that wars were bad. LR: Did they keep building in that plant your mother was working at? Did they keep it open or did it close down? DK: It stayed open through the Korean War. She eventually got a retirement from there. They still made parts for planes, especially the electronics. That was what Remington Rand was doing for the aircraft, I think. MB: What year did you join the service? DK: 1951. MB: The same year you graduated high school? DK: I didn’t graduate there. I graduated after I went in the service. I got a diploma. MB: Had you always wanted to go into the service? DK: Yeah. I had the uncles that all were in the Army except one and he was the one that was in the Navy. He was my favorite. LR: Is that why you went in the Navy? DK: More or less, yeah. I never did any long range planning as a kid. LR: Where did they send you for basic training? DK: Bainbridge, Maryland. It’s not there anymore. They had decommissioned that area when World War II was over with. I spent a good part of my recruit training in the Navy there. The fields that we marched on when they had you drilling and 7 so forth, the weeds were chest high. We mowed it and everything, but by the time I left recruit training, there wasn’t a blade of grass on it. It was all dirt by then. This was the beginning of the Korean War. LR: When you enlisted, did you realize the Korean War was beginning? DK: Yes. LR: Once you finished your basic training, where did you go? DK: I was sent to a radioman school. The primary method of communications on ships, in between ships and ship to shore was Morse code. I was a radioman and Morse code operator. LR: Where did you do that training at? DK: Norfolk, Virginia. LR: How long was that training? DK: That was about three months. From there, I went to the USS Saipan, which was a carrier. That was a ship that was laid out to be a cruiser before the war started. When the war started, we didn’t have any aircraft carriers, and they knew they needed them. The cruisers were big enough that they could put a full flat deck on it, so instead of being cruisers, they were carriers. LR: So you served on the USS Saipan? DK: Yeah. The first voyage I went on, we went on a cruise with the mid-shipman for their summer training cruise out of Annapolis. I was shocked. The first port we hit was Dublin, Ireland. I thought everybody loved us because the United States had just saved the world. We pulled in alongside a pier there in Dublin, Ireland and there was these people standing out there with big signs saying, “Go home 8 Yankees.” So that was the beginning of me growing up, when I realized the whole world didn’t love us and so forth. It stuck with me for years because it was the first real jolt I had out there. From there, we went to Torquay, England. Torquay is a little town on the very southernmost part of England. There was just a little strip of beach there and cliffs that went up. They had little landings where they had chairs or benches where they could sit down and so forth. This was a love place for the English kids. They were using the place as their place to meet. It was a beautiful port. From there, we came back to the states. So that was my first cruise. LR: Did you find time to meet anyone, to get married? DK: I had a girlfriend back home that I was going to marry. I grew up with her. I knew Beverly as a toddler and all through school. There were times when we didn’t get along, but when I joined the Navy, she come over to my house crying, “What have you done? Where are you going?” I thought oh my gosh she likes me and she’s pretty too. So, I got through with recruit training, I got through the radioman school I was in and then I got leave. I came home and I married her. We had two children. LR: Where did you get married? DK: In Johnson City, New York where I was born. LR: When was that? DK: 1952. LR: You decided to make the Navy your career. DK: I stayed in for almost thirty years, twenty-nine years. 9 LR: What were some of your more memorable tours? DK: We did a tour duty in Bermuda. This was a plush tour duty, but by the time I was there, I was what they call a Master Chief. That’s like a Sergeant Major in the Army, that’s the highest rank an enlisted man can get and so forth. I didn’t realize what the job was all about until I got there. I found out we had a Canadian force there, we had a British base and a US base. This is an island that’s only about thirty miles long at the widest point and a mile and a half wide; so, three big bases on this little rock out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Because I was a senior enlisted man for US forces, I had to attend all these dignitary parties with my wife. We wore our full dress uniforms, but my wife got a new dress out of it every time. I thought she’d love it. She hated going to those. Otherwise, it was a good tour of duty. LR: Did you see any combat on the Navy ship? DK: No. At the Korean War time, that’s when I was on the Saipan carrier. We were deployed over there, but it wasn’t like World War II with submarines and things like that. We were pretty free to launch aircraft as we please, when we please; so, never in any harm’s way. I got a ribbon saying I was there, you know. When you see us guys wearing these ribbons and so forth, don’t put too much stock in it. LR: Were you in for the Vietnam War? DK: Yes. LR: Were you deployed in that region during that time? DK: No, I wasn’t. I was never in harm’s way. 10 LR: Besides the Bermuda tour, was there another tour during that time that stands out? DK: Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. While we were there, Castro took over from the dictator, Batista. Up until that time, we were able to go into town, but they closed us down once Castro took over down there. We could sit out along the banks on the bay, and on the other side of the bay was a little town called Camron Iron. We could watch and see them fighting over there - the Castro group against the dictator’s forces and so forth. We used to go out there and sit down. We could hear the gun fire and so forth over there and watch some of the things going on. LR: As you look back does it occur to you that at that moment in history you were there? DK: No. The only time that I really significantly felt that way, because it was obvious we were going to get some kind of credit for it, is when a plane went up in the first outer space trip. They had ships strung almost all the way across, about a hundred miles apart, across the Atlantic because they weren’t sure where he was going to come down. So anyway, he comes down and we’re the closest ship, but we didn’t pick him up. We were going to be there, we were just steaming away to get to him. The Destroyer behind us was named the Joseph Kennedy and, for press purposes apparently, they told us to back off and let the Kennedy go. The President’s brother that had been killed in World War II, the Destroyer was named after him. LR: That had to have been interesting to be on the ocean during that time. 11 DK: You don’t think so at that time. I just wanted to get the job done and get back home, you know? LR: OK. That’s fair enough. Do you have any questions? MB: Were you on the Saipan for your entire Navy career? DK: Oh no. I was on Saipan, that’s the first one. I was on the Wagner - that was a destroyer. I was on the Hummingbird - that was a mine sweeper. I was on the John R. Pierce, another destroyer. The Wright - that was a communications command ship that was converted from an old carrier. That was there when the days that Linden Johnson was President and we were thinking that the Russians were going to come over with a bomb anytime. We had to stay close in shore so they could put him on a helicopter, get him up on the Wright and then we’d steam the sea where they couldn’t find us. That was one of the theories of it anyway. I look back at all this stuff and at the time, I hated it. I’m going to sea because some dope over here needs to get away. I have to leave my family at home, but was a lot of interesting things. I was on the commodore staff on destroyer squadron twenty-seven, and I was on commodore staff and the tour squadron twenty-two and was stationed in Cuba. MB: So, you were in the Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you have any memories of that? DK: Oh yeah. Well, the President just said, “No. That is not going to happen. You’re not bringing the missiles here.” We were put down on station to intercept the ships if they came here and they turned around. They Russians turned them around, took the missiles back. 12 MB: So, you were part of the naval cordon to block that? DK: Yeah. LR: It’s interesting as a historian to look at what you lived through and what you saw in your naval career. For me, it’s amazing. DK: Why? That’s what sailors do. We go to sea. It’s just what I did. I did the same thing. I was a radioman and that’s what I did when I went to sea. I didn’t pick our missions. I was there to just communicate. LR: When you finally decided to retire, did they tell you to retire or was it a choice? DK: It was a choice. My first wife died and I got heavy into drinking. I was on an admiral staff and my boss then said, “Master Chief, you need to think of probably retiring now. You’ve got enough time in. You can get your retirement or else you’ll likely end up losing it if you don’t straighten out.” It helped get me back on track. I grew up with my first wife. It was a tough one to get by. LR: When you finally retired, where did you decide to go and settle down? DK: I retired on the west coast in San Diego. I forget what I was doing. I was doing something stupid, apparently. This strange woman come up to me - she’s a little bitty gal too, about five foot two – and she told me stop being a horse’s ass. So, I married her. We got to know each other. She’s been gone almost two years now. LR: What brought you to Utah? DK: She did. She was from Utah and she had a son. He was about eleven or twelve when we got married. We come up to visit her folks, and I looked around and I said, “How would you like to go back to Utah?” She said, “Would you do that?” I says, “Yeah, I don’t have any love for California. It’s not my home either.” So, we 13 came up here. In a California they have what they call a psychiatric technician. About nine weeks of training and you were a psychiatric technician. You worked with the mentally ill. No such animal when I got out here, so I went back to Weber and got a nurse’s degree – RN. I still worked with the mentally ill here while I was practicing as a nurse. LR: Where did you work at? DK: I worked at the old McKay-Dee Hospital. I had the retirement pay, but you weren’t going to live too well on just that. LR: Let me ask you a final question. You grew up during World War II. You’re beginning your teenage years, so it might not be a fair question or an easy one to answer, but I’m going to ask it anyway. How do you think your experiences and the just the overall feel of World War II affected and perhaps influenced the rest of your life? DK: Well, it affected my life in the sense that I knew I was going to be in the military. I had all those uncles I told you about, so naturally I was going to be in the military. I always been the one that wants to be the odd ball, though, so I wasn’t going to go in the Army like them guys. My favorite uncle went in the Navy, so I went in the Navy. You can tell I have a lot of brains, you know? A couple of screws loose, here I guess. But that’s about what it was. He was the youngest, and he’s the one that put up with me as a kid. He was a favorite uncle and I was going to follow his footsteps, only he didn’t make a career out of it, I did. LR: It’s not a bad career. DK: No. Hard on the family though. I have some regrets on that. 14 LR: Thank you, Donald, for sitting and talking with us. This has been great. From a history point of view, you have some great stories, and I appreciate your willingness. DK: I think back about it, and it hasn’t been too bad a life for a kid who grew up in a small town in New York. LR: I’ll agree with you. This was great. Thank you.