Oral History Program Dorothy Benzel Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 28 August 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dorothy Benzel Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 28 August 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: Benzel, Dorothy, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 28 August 2017, 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 Dorothy Benzel, conducted on August 28, 2017, in her home in, by Alyssa Chaffee. Dorothy discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Sarah Kamppi, the audio technician, was also present. AC: Today is August 28, 2017. We are in the home of Dorothy Benzel, speaking with her about her experiences during World War II. My name is Alyssa Chaffee and I’m here with Sara Kamppi. Dorothy thanks for letting us come and visit with you today. I wanted to ask you, when and where were you born? DB: In Cozad, Nebraska. AC: What year? DB: 1924. AC: Is Cozad a small town? DB: Oh yes. It’s a farming community and I don’t know the population. When I lived there it probably wasn’t much more than 2,000, in the town itself. There are farmers all around. AC: Did you grow up on a farm then? DB: Yes, I did. AC: What kinds of things would you farm? DB: Well, my dad had some cattle and we raised corn and alfalfa. So many years ago. AC: How many siblings did you have? DB: I had six. Three brothers and three sisters. 2 AC: Did you help with the farming at all? DB: No, I didn’t. I helped mother in the house and I did some things. I would sometimes ride the horse out to bring the cattle in when it was time for milking. I would feed the chickens and things like that. Little things. My dad didn’t want his girls working in the fields. He had boys for that. AC: You were a child during the Depression. Is that correct? DB: Yes, that’s when I was born, in the twenties. AC: What do you remember of the Depression? DB: It didn’t matter to me. I mean, we had what we had and then we were happy. We didn’t know any different, you know, when you’re a little child. At Christmas, we would each get one gift and that would make us happy for the year. I never went hungry and I always had clothes and always had shelter. The Depression was okay with me. It was hard on the adults, but we children didn’t suffer. AC: Do you remember your mother doing anything special to make things stretch or make ends meet? DB: Oh yes. She had a garden, and we even canned meat. We canned vegetables and bought fruit to can. We had cherries growing on the farm, so we canned cherries. We had a cellar that had a lot of food in it for the winter. We ate a lot of fried chicken in the summer. We always had fresh milk and fresh eggs. Mother baked bread. That was good food. AC: What were your parent’s names? DB: Benjamin, the last name was Benjamin. Howard and Jenny Benjamin. I graduated from high school when I was fifteen and I got a job in town as a 3 secretary. As soon as I was seventeen, I went to Los Angeles to get a job where I could make some more money. That’s when the war began. AC: You said you graduated at fifteen. Were you part of an accelerated program? How did that happen? DB: No. We had a one room school, first to eighth grade. I had an older brother and sister in school. When school started, mother just let me go along and I wasn’t quite five. I started the first grade. There was only one other first grader, so the two of us finished all of first grade work at the end of the first semester, and the teacher put us in the second grade. I guess we went into the third grade when we were six. It just ended up that we both graduated when we were fifteen. AC: Your one room school, it had first grade through eighth. DB: Yes, and then we went to high school in town. AC: So did that elementary/junior high school have a name? DB: Well, I went to more than one elementary. I think one was named Bethel. They went more or less by districts. There’s a district thirteen and a district twenty-nine. I did go to about three different grade schools because we had moved from farm to farm. AC: What caused you to move? DB: Well, my dad didn’t own the farms. Some banker owned the farms and dad did the farm work. Then, of course, he got his share of the income. It was like having a job, you worked for somebody else. 4 AC: What was that like to go to a one room school where you had first through eighth grade? Was there a mass class that the teacher would give a lesson to everyone or did she come around to each individual student? DB: No, it was by classes, by grades. You had the teacher’s desk, which was in front and you had what was called a recitation bench. It was a long bench and when she would call up the first grade we would go up and sit on that bench and the rest of the school would just go on studying. We did our recitations and answered her questions and turned in our papers, whatever work we had done. She’d call one grade at a time. I don’t know if they still have those schools like that anymore. We learned our ABC’s and our math. We had to learn a lot of things. I don’t know if they still teach the capital of every state. We knew the capital of every country in Europe and we knew Geography pretty well. I thought it was a good school. Then, in high school, I took more of a course for being a secretary. That’s what I had in mind anyway. It was typing, bookkeeping, shorthand, plus our other subjects of course. AC: What high school did you go to? DB: Cozad High School. At that time there was only one. There are more now, but the town has grown a lot in the last seventy to eighty years. AC: Where were you when you heard that Pearl Harbor had first been attacked? DB: Well, I was right in Los Angeles. It was Hollywood, but to me that’s the same as Los Angeles. I had a sister there when I went out; I didn’t go out at seventeen with nobody to take care of me. She was living in Hollywood, so I moved in with 5 my sister and that’s where I was when we heard about Pearl Harbor. That was a bad thing, a day that will live in infamy. AC: Do you remember what some of your feelings were when you heard about Pearl Harbor being attacked? DB: No. One of the first things I did was buy life insurance and sent the policy on to my parents. So, if I didn’t make it through the war they could ship me home. I don’t know what I was thinking, but that was what I did. As soon as I was eighteen I went to Lockheed Vega and got my job. I started out as more of a clerk typist, but I wanted to work in the IBM department. They sent me to IBM school, and then I got in the payroll department. We ran all the payroll for Lockheed Vega, those aircraft plants. We paid every Friday. That was an exciting thing to get the payroll out to everybody. We never missed. Those IBM machines were the forerunners to what computers are now. It was all automatic, although not as fast as we have it now. I loved that job. While I was working there, my boyfriend decided to enlist in the Air Force. He was sent back to the Las Vegas Army Airfield so he was still close to where I lived. I worked at the aircraft plant for one year and then we got married in Las Vegas. Then I worked at the airfield there, for the Air Force, doing office work. AC: You said you worked for Las Vegas Army Airfield? DB: Yes, while working there I got pregnant. When I was about eight months along my husband was shipped overseas. So I went back to Los Angeles – Hollywood - to where my sister was so she could help take care of me. I had no place else to go. My son was born just after the war ended. I know I sat up at night listening to 6 the radio. It was almost V-J day and when it finally came, my husband was still in the Mariana’s, in Guam. He got home when my son was about four months old. AC: How often were you able to hear from your husband while he was gone? DB: Well, I wrote to him every day, and he wrote frequently. I sent care packages to him, whatever I could send. When he first went I had no way of contacting him. I don’t remember how I finally got an address, but it was through some outfit that finally gave me an address where I could write, to even let him know when the baby was born. I had no way of letting him know, but I sent a telegram. Do they still have telegrams? I don’t think so. I sent a telegram, and I think my son still has a copy of the telegram because his dad brought it back. I had kept it all these years and gave it to my son. He has a dollar bill that says “Hawaii” on the back in big letters. That’s the way it was printed. I don’t know why, but some of the money was made that way. My husband bet a friend of his a dollar that his child would be a boy. So when he was a boy, he paid him the dollar. My son still has that dollar also. That dollar bill had great big letters “Hawaii” across it. It covered the whole bill. It was done by the federal government. I don’t know if that was special money in that part of the country or what. AC: Was your husband stationed in Hawaii? DB: No, he ended up in Guam, the Marianas. Guam is a United States Island It’s a part of our country. AC: So, he was gone about thirteen months then? DB: Yes, because I was about eight months, and actually the baby was late coming. Then he was four months old. It was probably almost thirteen months. He didn’t 7 really see much combat because the Japanese had pretty well been taken care of. There was still a lot of hideouts on the islands in caves. They had to be very careful because the Japanese were still there. Even when the war ended, the Japanese that were left there refused to believe that it was over. They thought we were still fighting. The men finally captured all that were left and took them as prisoners. AC: Did you continue to work after you got married? DB: I didn’t want to work when my child was little. I didn’t want someone else to raise him. After he got in school, I would take part time jobs if I could work during school hours. I didn’t go to work full time until he was twelve. Of course, I worked all the way through his college and then I kept right on working. His father died when he was only fifty-three so my son was probably only twenty. Then I married again and I lost this husband a year ago. I’ve lost two of them. Things that were rationed during the war: we had these coupons, I guess that’s what they called them, and we could use them to buy meat or to buy sugar or to buy various things. It would take so many coupons. We could get coupons for one pair of shoes per year. We couldn’t buy any nylons. Ladies, we started painting our legs with tan stuff, like we were wearing hose. There were a lot of things we couldn’t get. You couldn’t buy any appliances like a refrigerator or a toaster or any of those things until the war was over. Then, when my husband came home, we bought an ice box. Do you know what an ice box is? That’s where you had ice delivered, a big box of ice to put in it. Boy, did they raise the prices on those old, used ice boxes. They were almost as expensive as a refrigerator, until they 8 started making them again; then, we could get one. You couldn’t buy tires. You couldn’t buy gas without coupons. Because of that, my mother and dad didn’t even get to come to my wedding because they were in Nebraska and I got married in Las Vegas. You couldn’t fly or use public transportation unless you were in a uniform. There was just no way that the civilians could travel if you couldn’t buy gas or tires. They didn’t get to be there for the birth of my son. They missed things like that. I guess we just did what we did. We knew it couldn’t change. We couldn’t do anything different about it. AC: What was it like having a wedding during war time? DB: I was just married in the chapel next to the church. The priest married us and there were three people attended my wedding - my sister, one of the G.I.’s, the best man, and the G.I’s wife was sitting there too. Big wedding, but I did have flowers. Of course, I didn’t wear a bridal gown and that. I don’t think there were many who did have those big weddings then. I didn’t know of any who did. I know my younger sister got married. It was just at that time. I stood up with her. It was just a minister there. It was legal and it lasted. AC: How many children did you have? DB: Just the one. AC: What branch of the military did your husband go into? DB: He was in the Air Force. SC: Do you know what type of work your husband did for the Air Force? DB: He was an instrument flying instructor. He taught the pilots to fly by instruments. My second husband was in the army and he was in Italy. He walked from the tip 9 of the boot to the North of Italy. He was decorated as a hero. He saved a lot of men’s lives. He got the bronze star. Of course, I wasn’t married to him until 40 years ago, so the war was over. He led men through a mine field and he went into where the men were shooting at him. He went in to save one of his buddies that was down and carried him out while they were still shooting at him all the way. They missed him, so that was lucky; he wasn’t wounded. He had surgery; have you ever seen the M.A.S.H. TV show? It was kind of like that, where he had his surgery. It was for his hemorrhoids, and they laid him over a barrel. He didn’t have it on a hospital bed. They stretched him over a barrel and removed his hemorrhoids. He was very ill for a long time. While he was in the bed sick, one of the nurses looked at him and whispered to the other nurse, “He’s not going to make it.” He heard them say it, and he thought, “By darn, I’ll show you.” He made it. AC: Did any of your brothers serve? DB: Oh yes. I only had the two living brothers when the war came on. One was a Marine and one was in the Navy. My brothers-in-law also served, one was in the Marines and one was a musician. He was in the Army or the Air Force, but it was a musical thing. He was in uniform and he had a rank. These men played for the Air Force band. He was in Los Angeles, stationed there. AC: What were your first and then your second husband’s names? DB: The first one, we called him Gene Poncelet, and then Dick Benzel. It was Eugene and it was Richard. AC: Okay, so originally it was Eugene Poncelet and Richard Benzel. 10 DB: Yes. AC: Would you tell me that story about that plane incident where they were shooting at that plane that they thought was a bomber? Would you retell that story so that we have it? DB: It was at night. We were having the black outs so there were no lights whatsoever when we started seeing these searchlights on the coast going up to the sky. Then, a lot of shooting aimed at the sky. We heard later that there was a plane up there, an enemy plane that they were shooting. Whether there was or not, I’m not positive because nothing was ever shot down. Of course, you couldn’t see because it was dark. They were shooting at something. They had those barrage balloons tied all along the coast so enemy planes couldn’t fly in low. It kept them at a good elevation. When they flew in, they had to come in high. I can’t remember much else about the coast. I know they had the Coast Guard. They actually patrolled the coast on horseback. I had one friend that was in the service and he patrolled on horseback on the coast. I don’t know how many they had doing that. All my friends were in the service, either the Marines or the Air Force or something. One thing about that war, because the United States was attacked and it was a World War, none of the men were draft dodgers. Every young man, as soon as he got out of high school, enlisted because he wanted to serve his country. They were very patriotic. My second husband graduated, but he didn’t wait for his diploma. As soon as he graduated, he enlisted. That’s how fast they got entered. My first husband was actually deferred because he worked as a machinist and he was doing work they could 11 use. He left Los Angeles and flew up to Montana, his home, and enlisted up there because they wouldn’t let him go if he enlisted in Los Angeles. So, he quit his job and enlisted anyway because he wanted to serve his country. AC: Why do you feel that they were so patriotic? DB: Because our United States was endangered. Because we were attacked and they had killed so many at Pearl Harbor. They just wouldn’t accept that, killing our men. I think they would be again, if the United States was attacked. We have so many men in the service now, but they’re in those foreign countries that don’t seem to apply so much to the United States because they’re not hurting us. If somebody attacked the United States, I think you’d pretty well see the same loyalty. I think the men would be just as patriotic now as they were then. AC: Did your father serve in World War I? DB: No. He had ancestors that served in the Civil War. One of them was on General Sherman’s march to the sea. I remember that. AC: Did you keep up on the war a lot? Was that something that you thought about every day? How much did it impact your life at the time? DB: I followed the news very carefully. We didn’t have television then, but the radio. We tried to read the newspapers to keep up with what was happening, all the time wishing it’d end. We had V-E day first, when Germany surrendered. Then we had V-J day, when Japan surrendered. When they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima that ended it. That was a horrible thing. I don’t say it was wrong to do. It ended the war. I just hope now that the North Koreans don’t drop one on us. AC: Did your husband come back after V-J day? 12 DB: Yes. In fact, I drove from Hollywood down to wherever the ship was coming in to meet him. I didn’t meet him. They had taken all the men off of the ship and put them on a train, and took them someplace to give them a nice meal and keep them overnight, really a treat in their eyes. So, I drove all the way back. He called that night and we were on the phone for a very long time. Then, I got a friend to drive me down and pick him up when they brought him back to that area again. In fact, that friend’s wife was expecting a baby any day. So, I left our car with her and her husband took me. When we got back, she didn’t have the baby yet. It seemed to me that it was about a month before she finally had her baby. AC: I want to know what your memories are of the day that you heard that the war had ended. DB: Oh boy, I sat that night, practically all night, leaning like this in front of the radio listening and hoping and hoping and hoping. That’s when I finally heard that yes, it was over. What a relief. When I was listening, I know I didn’t have the baby yet. He was born in October of 1945, so it was another month. I know that when my husband left, I was glad I was pregnant because I thought, “If he doesn’t come back, you know I’d have his son.” My son lives here in North Ogden and that’s why I’m here. When I last lost my husband in Alaska, he came up and brought me down here. AC: After the war ended what did you and your husband do? Did you stay out in Las Vegas? DB: We stayed in Los Angeles until our son was three. Los Angeles schools were having just half day schools, they were getting so crowded in their schools. Plus, 13 they no longer would teach phonics. They wanted to teach sight reading, and we did not agree with that kind of school for our son, so we left. We moved up to Montana, which was his home state. I lived there until he died. Those are real good schools in Great Falls. He graduated and then he went to college in Bozeman, Montana. Montana was beautiful. AC: What did your husband do for work in Montana? DB: He was a pilot. After the men are discharged, they usually got some free schooling of some kind, so he chose flying. He had been with the Air Force and was flying with the Air Force pilots all those years, but he didn’t have his own license. He couldn’t pilot in the Air Force because he wore glasses, which broke his heart. He became a pilot and he was a flying instructor. He flew trips where you take a patient and fly them someplace else, or go pick up somebody and bring them back. He did an awful lot of commercial flying. Then, when he had a heart attack he could no longer fly, that was an awful blow, but they wouldn’t renew his license, even though he was healthy again afterwards. My second husband was in construction, and that’s why I ended up in Alaska - from Montana to Alaska. He went up to build a hospital. He was a superintendent. We fished the Kenai, it is the greatest salmon stream in the United States. He was a fisherman. AC: How did you meet your second husband? DB: Through friends. He had a man friend who is also a friend of mine. My close girlfriend was in love with my husband’s friend. So anyway, the four of us 14 happened to get together and it was a couple of years before I married him. He was a great husband. AC: What year did you two get married? DB: The end of 1975. AC: What did you do for work after your son was in college? DB: I worked in a hospital. I went in as a secretary and then I later became an office manager in admitting, dismissal, and switchboard; I was over that area. I worked there for about fifteen years. When I married again, my husband didn’t want me to work outside the home, so I didn’t. DB: I forgot to tell you, in that one room school house, a lot of times I rode a horse to school. We had a little three-sided barn. It had a manger. You tie your horse up during the day and he just stood there and waited. When you got out, you got on your horse and rode him home. In the cold weather, I didn’t. Sometimes we rode three to a horse, one behind the other because we only had one riding horse. It was always bareback, of course. We had a little two-wheeled cart that we sometimes drove to school. That was fun. AC: What was your horse’s name? DB: Buster. AC: What would you do during the winter time? DB: We walked. It was about a mile and a half. Every country school I went to was a mile and a half, and we mostly walked it. I think that was good exercise. There was no such thing as a school bus. I remember walking home when it was 15 snowing awful hard and you had to keep your head down-facing. Thought nothing of it, I mean you just do that. AC: Why didn’t you ride your horse in the winter time? DB: The poor thing, he liked to be in the barn and be warm. We didn’t want him tied up when it was that cold. AC: Did the other children ride their horses to school as well? DB: A few; not very many. They didn’t all have a riding horse either, so we were lucky. I did a lot of riding in the summertime just for fun. Always bareback, I never had a saddle AC: How far apart in age were you and your siblings? DB: About two years. Just about two years between all of us. There were just two younger than I. I am the only one left. I lost my last sister a little over a year ago. She was 102. She was still doing good, but age got her. I’ll be ninety-three next month. AC: You said that you used to ride your horse bareback. Would you also have reins? DB: Yes, and a bridle. He was funny; when I was little, I had tried to put the reins on him and he’d jerk his head. So, I’d have to get my dad to go walk down with him and he’d hold still for my dad. Then one time when I was riding him and I got on, I was trying to make him really run, so I took a bridle and reached back and gave him a whack and he dropped his head and I slid right off of his head. I landed on my feet. I didn’t know what to do. He just braced himself and dropped his head. He showed me who was boss. Yes, living on a farm was fun, I think. That was one reason I went to California to look for a job. There were so few jobs in that 16 small town. I couldn’t stay home and work because it was almost eight miles out of town and I had no car. I had to rent a room in town and then I worked for a lawyer as a secretary in the beginning. The pay was $60 a month or something like that. It wasn’t really much. Of course, everything else was real cheap. I think my room was two dollars a week. Things are so different. AC: Did you board with anyone? DB: Later, after I had lived there for a while. She asked me if I minded if another girl shared the room. That meant that I had to share the bed, but I didn’t care. I knew the girl. We had gone to school together. I said, “Sure.” We played tricks on each other - tie each other’s shoe laces - silly stuff. We got along fine. I can’t remember now how many upstairs bedrooms she had, but I know that each one was rented. AC: This was when you were about sixteen? DB: Yes. AC: After you graduated high school, you stayed at your home with your parents for about a year and then you moved out? DB: No, I wanted to go back to school for a few months and you could go free, what they call post grad. So I went in town and talked to this one lady and asked her could I possibly live with her and work and go to school half days. She had a baby. I’d babysit, clean her house and help her with the washing. She said, “Sure.” So I was free, I could live with her. Then I’d go home on weekends. My mother would do my laundry and that sort of thing and I’d get everything done up. I was going to go all year, but the end of the first semester I decided I’d had 17 enough and I wanted to go to work. I didn’t have a dime to my name, you know? I wasn’t making any money with my job I had, babysitting and housekeeping. So I quit, and went to work. That’s when I got that job. It was quite a bit of bookkeeping in that job, and I was glad I had studied bookkeeping for a year and a half in school. I had taken more advanced courses in the post grad. That was the only shorthand I took because I didn’t take shorthand before I graduated. I only had the one semester of shorthand, but I had learned enough that, as a secretary, I could take it and read my own scribbles. AC: Did you go to a college? DB: No, just that post grad. Then I had that IBM school that they sent me to. I didn’t have any college. Very few of us did in those days. I think nobody could afford college, even though it was a heck of a lot less than it is now. Even when my son went to college, we were able to pay cash all the way through, so when he graduated he had no student loan. He’s 70 years old, so that was quite a while ago. If I had gone, I think I would have studied nursing. I kind of thought I would like to be a nurse. I still think of it sometimes. AC: What kind of a nurse? DB: Oh, I think in pediatrics is where I’d like to be. AC: Are there any other memories that you’d like to share before I ask you one last question? DB: I can’t think of anything exciting. You sure helped with your questions because if you just sat there and wanted me to talk I would’ve shut up long ago. You had to get me started. I couldn’t ever in my life stand up in front of a crowd and talk like 18 some people can. Sitting with the two of you in my own home is easy visiting. Here we have our resident meetings and all of us meet together and if we have any complaints or suggestions. I have a lot. No way am I going to get up and talk in front of everybody. I just let it go. I hope that somebody else mentions it and if not I’ll just live with it the way it is. AC: For my final question, I wanted to ask - How do you feel that your experiences during World War II affected your life as a whole? DB: It seemed like we all thought the same way and we all came together and we were all trying to do the same thing for our country. It was just that closeness I felt. I don’t feel that anymore, that we all have something to work for together. It was just the closeness and if you weren’t in the war or in the service or working for it, it seemed like you were the outsider. There weren’t very many like that. Even now, this group here, because we are all elderly, most all of us have either been wives, widows, of servicemen. We have one woman actually, who was a Marine, living here. Most all of the men, I think, are veterans. I’m kind of back with the same group that I had in World War II. I mean we have a lot of the same things we visit about, and a lot of the young people just don’t understand what’s so important about it. Maybe you do, or you wouldn’t be doing this. AC: Definitely. We love hearing these stories. They are so amazing. Definitely worth preserving. DB: I’ve bet you’ve heard a lot of good ones. AC: Yes. DB: Have you talked to very many men who were on active duty? 19 AC: Yes. DB: Those must be the good stories. AC: Yes, but I really enjoy the women’s stories. I think it’s fascinating to hear what life was like on the home front, honestly. The men’s stories are fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but I love knowing what it was like for women, to have to support their husbands from home and make ends meet and just keep up the war effort. I think it’s great. DB: The girlfriend I went to California with ended up being a riveter in Douglas Aircraft. She was a year older than I, so she was able to start her work right away. She was making good money and I was still working for peanuts. I was working for a real estate outfit, in office work again, and they don’t pay anything. So, you girls get your college and study hard.