Oral History Program Dick Winegar Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 28 February 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dick Winegar Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 28 February 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: Winegar, Dick, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 28 February 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Karl Winegar during WWII circa 1940s Grant Winegar circa 1940s Karl and Grant Winegar circa 1940s Dick Winegar 28 February 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dick Winegar, conducted on February 28, 2017 in his home, by Lorrie Rands. Dick discusses his life and his memories involving Wolrd War II. Michael Ballif, the video technician, is also present. LR: Alright. So it is February 28th, 2017. We are in the home of Richard Winegar, talking about his time in World War Two for the World War Two in Northern Utah project, and also his life story which he had in Davis County, and Weber County, if I am not mistaken. DW: Nope, it was all in Davis County. Well, we had one in Rose Park for a short period of time. LR: So I’m just going to start with my normal question- when and where were you born? DW: I was born in Bountiful, Utah. LR: When was that? DR: It was December 11, 1924. LR: Okay. What was it like growing up in Bountiful for you? DR: Well, my mother had me with a midwife type, that’s the way we were born in those days. Really I was raised in West Bountiful and there were a lot of us boys the same age within a year or so, so it was normal growing up years. Lot of farm area, lot of onions. We thought Woods Cross and West Bountiful grew all the onions for the world in those days. I mean it was pretty close to the school and close to church, and that’s the way we lived in those days. 2 LR: So you would just walk to school? DW: Yes. LR: Where was that, where did you go to school? DW: Well, up until the sixth grade, we went there on 4th North, just above 8th West, on the north side of the street. My junior high was in Bountiful on 4th North and is pretty near Main Street on the north side of the road, and that’s where I went through the seventh and ninth grade. Then Davis High School for the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade. Occasionally we rode the bus up there, it picked us up in Bountiful. LR: That’s a long bus ride. DW: Yep, about twelve miles each direction. But that was the only high school we had in the whole of Davis County. LR: That is true, it’s kind of hard to fathom now. DW: Yes it is, it really is. LR: What are some of the things you would do for fun when you were younger? DW: Play kick the can and squirt water on the girls, whatever boys that were growing up would do. You want to talk about Halloween, we were tough on Halloween. LR: For instance? DW: Well, in those days, that’s eighty years ago, everybody went outside to go to the bathroom. You wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about. LR: No, you’re right. 3 DW: But some of us would be kind of rambunctious, and tip over the outhouses and make everybody mad. Of course I didn’t do that when I was eight or nine, I did it when I was twelve or thirteen. We had farms close to us, and we’d do some weeding in the early times of the summer when the crops were up and the weeds were growing healthy. David Holbrook had a farm right next door to our home, so I would go weed onions for him in the summertime. Typical type things for boys to do. LR: How many siblings were in your family? DW: There were five of us. When I was seven my sister Jean was born, so she was the last. LR: Curious as to what it was like for you, realizing that you did grow up on a farm, what it was like for you during the depression. DW: Well my Dad was in the grocery business, had a little store there in South Bountiful, right on the railroad tracks between the two cities, West Bountiful and South Bountiful. I didn’t know much about hard times, really. I always had something I could do. When I got a little older I was working in my dad’s store, along with my brothers, and my oldest sister. All I remember is when Christmas time came along things were tough. If we got a bag of oranges, a little coal in our stocking, and a pair of Levis, overalls in those days, that was our Christmas. But we didn’t know that we were going through tough times; that was normal for us. If you don’t have a lot you don’t expect a lot. If you don’t know you don’t have a lot, you 4 don’t know that you don’t have everything that everybody else has got, it’s just normal. MB: Something that I’m just curious about- what was it like working in your Dad’s store? DW: My Dad had a credit account for practically everybody that traded with him. The store wasn’t any bigger than this room here, and we sold everything from bolts and nuts, galoshes, coal, hay, and Christmas trees in the Christmas season. It was a tough business in those days, really tough, because people didn’t have very much money, so my Dad was one that would give everything and anything to anybody that needed help. That’s how I grew up, helping other people. It was a learning experience for all of us kids. Luckily, we had a job, luckily we had something that we could do, and so it kept us out of mischief most of the time. LR: What was the name of your father’s store? DW: Well, first it was Wood’s Cross Mercantile, and then it ended up T.E. Winegar and Sons. The building isn’t even there anymore, it’s been torn down, about ten years or so ago. We had grain in one section of it; wheat and oats, and that’s where we’d put our Christmas trees during that season. We had another building, east, on the left side of the building, and was up on little bricks, where the mice couldn’t get into it. I mean in those days we didn’t have the opportunity to have things as good as we have them now. That building was up, and that’s where we kept the flour and things that mice would get into. It was elevated where you had to step up 5 onto a floor that was maybe two and half feet off the ground to get the flour out and get the stuff that you had stored in that particular building, so it was quite an experience. Glad the kids don’t have to go through that. LR: How long did you work there? DW: Well, got out of high school at eighteen, graduated, and went into the service from there. LR: So you worked all through high school? DW: Oh yeah, and then my brother-in-law had a farm over on Page’s Lane, and I worked there probably more than I did in my Dad’s store. I was the head water master. Took a watering turn at 2:30 in the morning, and had six wells on the farm. I said to Clarence, “Well Clarence, why don’t you have somebody else do this?” He said, “I can’t trust anybody else to get the water to the bottom of the rows. I know you will.” When you got rows of onions and stuff, and you gotta have the bottom watered as good as the top. I worked there most of the time after I was—in fact I stayed there with them after I was about ten years old in the summertime to work on that farm, so I really worked there more than I did at my Dad’s store. My brother’s worked in the store more than I did. So I really turned out to be a farm boy. LR: Yes you did. I’m going to jump ahead a little bit, and ask you what you remember about Pearl Harbor Day? DW: We were just come from Church, sitting around the table, and they had the radio on, didn’t have any TV in those days, turned the radio on and they 6 announced that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. This was in 1941, so I would have been sixteen years old. We couldn’t believe it, but it happened, so we just prayed for everybody and hoped everybody was going to be okay, and of course, it went on from there for quite a few years. LR: Did you expect to be drafted? Was that in the back of your head? DW: Oh yeah, everybody was drafted in those days. LR: So it wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when? DW: Yeah. There were a lot of young people, especially the boys, they didn’t want to get drafted, they wanted to get in the marines or the navy or a deal where they could maybe pick and choose where they were going to serve. I didn’t care where I went, really. Soon as school was over we knew we were going to be drafted. LR: So how long did you have to wait after you graduated for your draft papers? DW: Well, we got our diploma in our left hand and our welcome to Fort Douglas in our right hand. Here’s where you go for your internment. LR: Interesting term. DW: One thing I’m happy about is that during my senior year, the government had a program at the college in Logan, they called it mechanic learner program. It had radio and navigation and Allison Engines, and I thought the Allison engines sounded pretty fancy to me, so that’s what I took for three months. I just stayed right up in Logan, right out of High School. 7 When that was over we went back to school, graduated high school, got our diploma, and it was in May, and in July I was at Fort Douglas. So it was three months. LR: So when you were at Fort Douglas, did they decide then where you were going? DW: Well, number one we were going to go to basic training first, East of Denver Colorado, about eighteen miles, close to where the airport is now. Snake country in those days. Took our tent, our rifles and our outfits they gave us, and off we went for an eighteen mile hike. We stayed overnight, it was about a week up and back. From Denver, we got our assignment, and at that time my assignment was to go to Grand Forks North Dakota for school, to the college there. I don’t know what for, but we had to get up at five o’clock in the morning, and North Dakota’s pretty cold in the wintertime. Anyway, that was an experience, and I was there about six months. LR: What were you learning there? DW: Just normal school subjects. Nothing in particular. Just general, someplace for us dummy’s to go. LR: Then from North Dakota? DW: Went to Santa Ana California. That’s where we really got our assignments, at Santa Anna, and I was to go to the air force. Most of all of us that went to Logan for that program for the government all went in the air force, that’s where we were automatically put. Didn’t ask for it or anything but 8 that’s where we went. Some of us went to radio, some to navigation, some to pilot training, some went to bombardier training, and that was me. They sent me for bombardier training, with navigation on the side, so you had to take both, bombardier training and navigation training. Next question? LR: Where was that bombardier training at? DW: Bombardier training was in Carlsbad, New Mexico. LR: Were you actually learning in the airplane? DW: Well that’s where you do your training, in the airplane. Well, you have ten hours of pilot training. Those little Piper Cubs, and then you go out in the twin engines with your bomb sights and do your practice bombing. I was there at Carlsbad New Mexico about six or seven weeks, so it was a quick program. From there I was sent to Kingman, Arizona for gunnery school, figure out how to shoot guns. Us Westerners, we knew how to do that, but that was part of the program. You want the next place I went? LR: Yes. DW: Just gonna keep after me, aren’t ya? LR: Yes I am. DW: I am surprised I can remember all these things, how long ago that’s been, don’t you? LR: Yeah, it’s been a long time. DW: Okay, from there I was assigned to go to Lincoln, Nebraska. At Lincoln, Nebraska, we did more studying and thinking and working and I was only there maybe three or four weeks. A pilot on the B-25 has to have 9 somebody to have the navigation skills to go out with him. They wouldn’t let them go alone, so they’d call and I’d go with them because they had to do so many hours a month to get their flight training in. I had that experience with different pilots, where you’d go out for their benefit, not for mine. From there I was assigned to go to Savannah, Georgia, and that’s where we were assigned for B-29’s, preparing to go to Japan. We were there close to six months, and in that time we were not doing very much; some reading and keeping up on what you learned prior to going to Savannah Georgia. We got assigned to a certain crew, which was the crew you would go up on your training missions. We were there when they dropped the big bomb in Japan in August of 1945. Then a deal came out where they knew they had too many air force guys, and at one time they had, “If you want to go to a different organization than you are now, apply here.” Well a lot of them applied from the Army, to go into the Air Force, naturally. So those that had gone into the air force from other outfits in the service they were sent back to the organization they came from. All the guys that were going kept asking, “Dick, why aren’t you going?” I said, “I don’t know, I guess it’s because I went to Logan for a course on Allison Engines!” That’s how I got in the Air Force. I stayed until about September, a month after they dropped the bomb on Japan. Then they sent out a directive, “You want to sign up for full time service or you want to sign up to get out?” Well I was ready to get out, I didn’t want to stay in, I was not a service person, and I didn’t want to 10 stay in the service. So I signed up to leave the service. By November, a Jewish fellow from California who was in the same group that I was at, he bought a car, and we were both out of the service. Mo, Mo said, that was his name. “Dick, I bought this Plymouth,” I think it was a 1943 or 1940, they quit making them because of the war effort. He says, “Will you drive me, I can’t drive.” I says, “Why did you buy the car for?” “Well, I thought I needed one when I got home in California.” I says, “Well, how are you going to drive to California if you don’t know how to drive?” “Well I know how to drive, I don’t want to.” So I drove him from Savannah, Georgia, to Bountiful, Utah. We stopped a couple of times, and he says, “I need some money, can you figure out how I can get some money here before you head me out to California?” I says, “Yes, we’ll go through the Farmer’s State Bank.” I knew the people in there, and this young girl, Colleen Argyll, waited on us. She was a year behind me in High School, but I knew her. As boys, we knew most all the girls in those days. I got him a couple of hundred dollars there, I knew the bank manager and I talked to him for a minute or two, told him what I needed. He said, “That’s fine,” so I got Mo 200 dollars, and he walked out of the bank, got into his car, and said, “How do I get to California?” I said, “Go out on this highway, go south, and follow the signs. Let me know how you did, if you got there.” I never heard another word from him. LR: So you have no idea if he made it home? 11 DW: No idea. I know he did. I would have heard something I think. Anyway, that was that, and then I was home, I was through with the military and I was so happy to be out, I can’t tell you how happy I was. LR: Something you talked about when we were here the first time, you talked about the troop trains, and that you always seemed to be on one. DW: Well, when we left to go to Denver, we picked up a troop train in Salt Lake City. We went through the Moffat tunnel while we’re eating. We had vanilla ice cream as our desert. They treated us pretty good. When we got out of the Moffat tunnel on that troop train, the vanilla ice cream looked chocolate. You couldn’t hardly breathe, because those troop train cars were loose as loose. Anyway, we got there alright. We got to Denver. So anyway, that was my train ride. MB: How many years were you in the service? DW: Two and a half years. LR: That means you were drafted in 1943? DW: Yes. LR: You literally stayed stateside the whole time. DW: Yes. LR: This is probably not a fair question, but do you feel that you missed something by not being… DW: Going over the pond? LR: Yes. 12 DW: I would have liked to have gone, but a bombardier sits up in the front of that airplane with a big gun right in front of him along with the bomb sight that you’re looking through to put it on whatever target you’re after. I don’t know, as I was growing up we never went anyplace. I mean, home was where we spent all of our time, home and work and school. I remember going with my Dad and my next older brother to California to a grocer’s convention. My Dad was a red and white, you wouldn’t know this, but there was a group of grocers that belonged to a group of stores called the red and white stores, so they had this convention in California. I was just twelve years old at the time, my next oldest brother was fifteen or sixteen because he could drive. My dad passed away when he was sixty-one years old, pretty young. I would have liked to have gone over, but I don’t care that I didn’t. Everybody couldn’t have gone over, with all the millions in the service. I read this book, I just finished it, that Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard wrote called, “Killing the Rising Sun.” I related so much to the bombing and how many B-29’s were parked on some of these islands. Several hundred of them were over there. I mean, our war effort cost billions, and trillions of dollars, and there was a lot of waste. Of course, nobody knew how long that was going to last, and if Truman didn’t make the decision to drop that bomb, those Emperor’s, they were not going to give up. They were going to formulate and rule the world, and if it hadn’t have been for the bomb, we might have been ruled by the Japanese. The 13 war ended, and I have never looked back. I was happy to get home and get married, have kids. The other woman that was in the bank, this Coleen Argyll, was the one I married! LR: Ah-ha! One more quick question about the war and then we’ll move on. How many of your siblings served? DW: Just my older brother, Stuart. He was also in the air force, but he had a daughter, Sally, when he went in, and he went in before they drafted him. He stayed right in there until the war ended. He was eight years older than I. LR: Okay. That’s a big difference. So when did you get married? DW: June 19, 1956. LR: Okay. So quite a few years after… DW: Wait a minute, wait a minute. That’s not right. How about 1946, because my oldest daughter was born eleven months later in 1947. LR: I know you said in 1947 you started the Winegar store with your brother. Do you think working with your father in his store, did that kind of lead you down that path of having your own store? DW: Yes, you see my Dad had this little store, and Stuart and I, we were able to get Mister Hatch that had some ground on 5th South and 5th West in Bountiful to lease us an acre of ground to build a grocery store on in 1947. We wanted to stay in the grocery business but we couldn’t make a living in the small store, so we wanted to build this. To us, in those days, a 6,000 square foot store was a big store. We had 600 lockers in the basement, 14 people could come and rent a locker to put their meat and fish and chickens in. I processed a couple of hundred deer every fall in October when deer hunt was on. That was in 1947, and my dad lived another four years, he died in 1951. When we were contemplating making the move, the President of Farmers State Bank said, “You’re making a big mistake.” I said, “Why Glen?” Glen Hatch was his name. “We can’t make a living down here and we want to stay in the grocery business so that’s where we want to go.” He said, “Well I don’t think the people down here will cross that busy road to go shopping with you.” I said, “I guess we’re going to pull the people out of Bountiful to shop with us.” Coy Hayward had probably the best volume store in Davis County at the time, up on Main Street in Bountiful. It’s now a furniture store, used to be a Hayward’s Grocery Store. While we were building, Coy and Alan were brothers, and Coy drove a big old Cadillac, and every couple of weeks you would see him drive by when he was building. He had a notice in the Clipper that it was really sad that we were seeing these veterans coming home, and they couldn’t find enough material to build homes, but here’s somebody building this grocery store. He didn’t say all this would be a competitor of his, and we just laughed as he drove by. Anyway, we started that store and moved in in 1947, just a couple of years after we was out of the service. LR: How were those first couple of years with the store? 15 DW: Tough. We learned how to work in my Dad’s little store, and you just used that, all your experience, but it worked out, it finally worked out wonderful. LR: When did it occur to you that, yes, we’re going to make it? After how many years? DW: Oh I think after two years. We were content that things were coming along okay. We cut meat most of the time when we got started, that’s why I was the one who had to do all those deer. I was back in the meat department when my Mom called me and told me, “Dick, your dad just passed away.” He passed away in December, just after Christmas. I think we had a good following, we had all the people from down in West Bountiful and South Bountiful that shopped with us. We pulled a lot of people out of Bountiful, we just did a better job than our competitors. That’s what you had to do to be successful, just do the best job you could, and be better than your competitor. MB: So, I’m just curious, whatever happened to that guy’s store that wrote that letter about your store? DW: Well, Coy, the guy that was the money guy, he didn’t trust anyone, he didn’t even trust his partner’s wife. She was a checker. I had people tell me, “You go in his store and he’s all, ‘It’s good to see you,’ and you could be in the restaurant or the drug store across the street, and he’d come in and he wouldn’t even pay attention to you.” I said, “Well that’s the way some people are.” But anyway, they were in business for probably ten or fifteen years after we opened up. 16 LR: When did you open your second store? DW: Second store, number two. My second store was over on Page’s Lane. I bought that eight acres over there in about 1956. LR: So almost ten years after you opened your first one. Not quite, but close. How many stores did you have at the pinnacle? DW: At the end, we had five. LR: Okay. They were all in Davis County, besides from the one you had for a minute in Salt Lake? DW: Down in Rose Park. Then there was one on the highway there in Sunset, and that wouldn’t be Davis County up there. LR: Depends where in Sunset. DW: Well the freeway took it out. LR: Well… I know Sunset is still considered Davis County. DW: Okay, that’s where it was. LR: Okay. From Rose Park to Sunset you had stores. Is there just the one store left? DW: 2200 South. That’s Dick’s Market. See, 1959 I went to work for Mayfair Markets when they came into this area. We had the Green Stamp, you don’t know anything about the Stamps, probably, you’re too young for that, but we had the Green Stamp franchise. A competing outfit in the wholesalers came out with a Gold Stripe Stamp to compete with the Green Stamp. J. Erroll Garrett, who was the President of Mayfair Markets in Los Angeles, they pushed him to come in to Utah and start buying 17 stores. They bought the American food stores in Ogden, and they bought the Grand Central Stores in Salt Lake. They contacted us because they wanted the Green Stamp franchise. We had it tied up for Davis County, and so we met with them. The number two store we built on Page’s Lane was 14,000 square feet, and that was a pretty good sized store for us, a little over twice as big as the one we first built, and so they contacted us about buying our store. Hayward’s was still in business as I recall at the time in 1957. We finally made a deal with Mayfair to take over our store, lease the building, we sold them the equipment, the inventory, and leased the property to them. In the meantime, they wanted me to go to work for them, which meant move to California. So we did. In July of 1959, I gathered up Colleen and our four kids and we moved to California. They moved me to Oakland, which was the head office in the north. We bought a home in Northern California. Then they contacted me and wanted me to come to LA and I did and they wanted us to go to San Diego. They had some problems in San Diego, so that’s where we went. We moved from the home we bought just about a year earlier. Had twenty-seven stores in San Diego. So I was to go down there and straighten it up and be the Division manager of those stores in San Diego. After about a year, I got things straightened out, and then they had some problems in Sacramento. So we moved to Grand Oaks Boulevard in Sacramento, and then they called me back to Los Angeles after we got that straightened out and said we want 18 you to go to Utah. That was in about 1962 or 1963. They said, “You tell us what you want to do.” Well, you go to work for somebody, you do what they want you to do or you quit or retire, period. So I said, “Colleen, you want to go back to Utah?” She said, “Well not very bad but if that’s what you want to do.” So we moved back to Utah. We rented a home for a while, and built another home on 11th East. I said to Lloyd Pettingill, who was my immediate boss from Los Angeles, “Lloyd, this isn’t working.” He says, “What do you mean?” I said, “A Division in Ogden, and a Division in Salt Lake. I want to put them together as one.” He says, “You think it will work?” I says, “Of course it will work, it will have to.” They had Tom Pannis, who was Morris Worshaw’s son-in-law running the Salt Lake Stores, and Purse Ballanger who was the old manager of the American Food Stores in Ogden as the manager up there. Well, when you got two different companies with supervision and mid-managers, meat supervision, produce supervision, grocer supervision, fires in both divisions, it took a lot of work, let me tell you. It took a bunch of work to get those two together, and we finally ended up okay. Then, we went back to California, where Lloyd Pettingil, my boss, they put him over the real estate. He said, “Dick, how about leaving this retail deal and joining real estate, finding locations and that.” I said, “If that’s what you want me to do. So we moved back to California. We rented a home in Lafayette California, beautiful place, we just loved it 19 there. Church was great, every place we went, we were so thankful for the church, because it made all of our moves very easy to do. Wherever you go, you go to Church, you got friends, you got people that love you, and you got all this association that you need when you move. We were there doing okay, going around finding locations for the company. Mayfair had 255 stores, from Oregon down to Arizona. Well they gave me a call one day, and they said, “Dick, we’d like you to go to Arizona and run those twenty-seven stores in Arizona.” I said, “Can I give you an answer tomorrow?” They said that would be fine. I says, “Colleen, you want to go to Arizona?” She said not very bad. So I just wrote a letter and resigned. We came back to Utah, let Mayfair off of my lease, and took my store back. That was in 1966, I’ve been in it ever since. We changed the name over there to Dick Wingear’s, because my brother Stuart and I, when I went to California, divided our interests. He kept the Winegar’s name, and I had the Dick Winegar’s name, had to have something on it. Gradually I changed it to Dick’s Market, when people knew what it was, knew I was back in business, that sort of stuff. When my family was old enough to start coming into the business, and after a couple three years, we built that east building where Ace Hardware is now, and we put Colleens Gifts in there. She did very well in the gift business, but she always wanted more room and more room for all her stuff. I said, “Why don’t I buy you this piece of property next door and I’ll build you a building and you can hire your own people and pay your 20 own bills and you can do all of this stuff yourself.” “I don’t want to do that. I want you to do all the hard stuff, and I’ll just do the fun stuff.” I said, “Well, okay.” So anyway, things went along quite well after we changed the name to Dick’s. About fifteen years ago, my youngest son, Kent, I think he’s kind of a clone. He says, “Dad, I think I can get this Calder property over here, it isn’t zoned commercial but I think we can work around. I know a lot of ones in the city offices, and I think we can get it zoned commercial if we can get the property.” I said, “Go ahead.” He worked on that for two years. Had people there that didn’t want a grocery store, but finally he bought the property, got it zoned, and built that building. Then Associated came along, they bought the Macy's stores, they bought our two stores, they bought Dan’s stores in Salt Lake and Layton, and Lynn Stores in St. George. Anyway, they came to us and they made us a deal that we couldn’t turn down. So we leased those two stores to them on a ten-year basis. Then Associated bought twenty-seven of the Albertson’s stores, and one of them was on Parish Lane a mile away from our store that they were in. When our lease was up with them on that store, they had decided they were going to go over to Parish Lane. So that’s what they did. Left us high and dry with that store, but they still have the lease on the store here on 2200 South. It’s still named Dicks Market. In fact the one on Parish Lane is Dick’s Market. That’s the name they bought, when they bought us out they bought everything. So anyway, I’ve probably told you more maybe then you wanted. 21 LR: No, you’ll be surprised how much we leave, because this is fun history that I didn’t know. So it’s fun, but we’ve been going for about an hour, so I’m going to wrap this up. As a final question, I’m curious as how you think that your experiences during World War Two influenced or shaped what you did for the rest of your life? DW: Military life, when you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old you learn to follow directions, you learn to follow commands, and you learn to follow your leaders. I really believe that it gives you a firm understanding of responsibility, do what your told, act like you're capable of being a person that can be respected. I think just generalities more than anything. I say a lot of young kids that were there, they had no background, they had no understanding of family life, they had nothing. If I hadn’t had the kind of a family life I did, I would have felt a lot more responsive to what they were telling us, but I had gone through most of the stuff that a lot of these young kids coming in, especially from the east, they had no training family wise or anything. So it was something they had to learn from the ground up, really, and I’d had family life, I had brothers and sisters, I had a different life. I guess that’s why I really didn’t want to stay in the service. It wasn’t my life, it wasn’t the kind of life I wanted to live, yet those that stayed in, they were happy. That’s where they wanted to be. They didn’t want to be out there on their own, they wanted somebody to tell them what to do and how to do it. That wasn’t me. 22 LR: That makes sense. Well, thank you for your time. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we turn off the camera? DW: No, I’m just so happy that I could spend this time with you and getting acquainted with you. I meant every word of it.