Oral History Program Lucille Cox Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 13 February 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Lucille Cox Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 13 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: Cox, Lucille, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 13 February 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Lucille Cox 13 February 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Lucille Cox, conducted on February 13, 2017 in her home in Layton, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Lucille discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Michael Ballif, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is February 13, 2017. We are in the home of Lucille Cox, in Layton, Utah, talking about World War Two and her experiences for the World War Two in Northern Utah project at the Steward Library. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and Michael Ballif is with me as well. Lucille, thank you very much for your time, I greatly appreciate it. LC: You’re welcome. LR: Well I appreciate it. I’m looking forward to this, and I hope that this is a good thing for you, too. Let’s start with when and where you were born. LC: I was born in West Layton, on Gentile Street, October 6, 1922. LR: Wow. Okay. So you’ve lived in Layton, then, your whole life? LC: All but a few. I followed Adrian for a couple of years but not much. MB: Just curious; how far away is where you were born from here? LC: Two miles it would be at the most. MB: Wow. LR: I know. It’s kind of cool. Okay, so were you born at home? LC: At home. LR: Okay, and how many siblings do you have? LC: I have seven, there were eight of us, six boys and two girls. LR: Where do you fall in that? 2 LC: I’m the fourth. LR: Okay. So kind of in the middle. Alright, I know you really don’t have a comparison to anywhere else, but what was it like growing up in Layton? LC: I loved everything about it. We knew everyone that lived in Layton. It was farming country, and houses weren’t too close, it was wonderful. LR: So it was really a hometown type of small environment. Who were your nearest neighbors? LC: Dibbles. First it was George and Helen Dibble, then it went down to Ralph and Carmen, and then Cleve and Barbara. Those three different ones lived in that home, that’s still there. LR: Was there anyone else living close to you? LC: Oh yes, up the street was my uncle and his family, which would be about two blocks. Below us it was about two blocks, and on the South Side of the Street it was two blocks probably. They were Greek, from Greece, and their names was Mannis. Two men lived there, and run the farm, owned the farm. Two. They went back to Greece and got their wives and brought them here. LR: That was very common. LC: They didn’t have a telephone, the Greeks. So they’d get messages from Salt Lake to our house, and I was the runner. I’d run down and tell them that they had a telephone call, and they’d always give me like a quarter. That was a lot of money then, and I had a baking can, an empty baking tin can, and I’d put the money in there. That was my bank. 3 LR: So was your family one of the only ones that had a telephone then? LC: No we all did, but the Greeks didn’t. LR: So you were the closest ones to them. LC: Yes. LR: Okay, that makes sense. Out of curiosity, where did you go to school? LC: Layton Elementary through the eighth grade. We did not have junior high school then, so we’d go to the eighth grade and then go to Davis High School as a freshman. LR: You went to Layton Elementary, is it in the same place the current one is now? LC: Yes. LR: So not far. Would you walk? LC: No, a bus. LR: You’d bus to Layton Elementary? LC: Oh yes, they bused everyone them. LR: Okay. What do you remember about the Depression? LC: I guess a lot, and yet it all was one word—poor. We did live on the farm, so we had all the food, vegetables and so forth, cows, so we had beef and pork and chicken, so it was always okay for eating. We didn’t have many clothes, anything. When I was sixteen, then I went to work at Smith’s Canning Company, different company, which was in Springfield. We worked on the peas and the apricots and the tomatoes, as the farmers would bring them in. What do I remember? 4 LR: How did you and your siblings help during that time? To make things easier? LC: Well, we worked on the farm that was one thing. When I was young, about twelve, we’d pick beans on the farmer’s place, we’d weed onions, and sometimes I even worked in the beets just thinning them. So, we always worked there, had to do quite a bit on the farm, but not too much. We never did anything in the barn, my sister and I, we never had to milk cows or anything like that, we were a little pampered, but we did work the farm. LR: When you said you were poor, you’re talking about just like your clothes and such. Was your dad able to get everything he needed to run the farm? LC: Yes, he had two teams of horses, and he loved horses. He trained some, so we had good riding horses all the time. Always had two cows, and I’ll tell you one of the stories about the cows. I wanted to learn to play a piano, but we didn’t have one. My aunt Maggie Flint didn’t have a cow, and they had a piano that they wasn’t using, her children had gone, so my Dad traded, gave her a milk cow and she gave us the piano. So, that’s how we got the piano. LR: Did someone teach you to play, or did you just teach yourself? LC: Across the street at Dibble’s, Jane Dibble was a very good pianist, and she taught me. That was even before we got a piano, I’d go over to their house and practice. One day, no one was in the house, so I sat at that piano for a half hour doing my lessons, which was random, and I was playing the piano beautifully, having a good time. When I went to leave, in 5 from the kitchen, Mrs. Dibble was there, and she was hearing me do that. She looked at me and said, “You’re going to be a wonderful pianist.” That’s all she said. That was enough to squelch you and to know you wasn’t doing right. So I remember that incident. She taught me a lot that way. LR: Do you have any stories about going to elementary school that you’d like to share? LC: Well, we always would catch a bus at ten after eight and he would take us up to the grade school. We’d get out, and then we’d have to wait while he went all through East Layton and picked up the students there. School didn’t start till nine. LR: Wow. Were you able to wait inside? LC: Oh yes. It was very different then. Sometimes we’d even have time to run up town and buy some cookies or candy or something like that. LR: Yeah because main street isn’t far from the school. LC: Yep, and grade school was good. When I was eight years old in the third grade I got polio, and it just affected my left leg. One muscle died, and the others are weak and stuff, but it’s been okay until now. It’s not doing very good. LR: To be honest, you’re the first person I’ve ever met who had polio. How did they finally figure out that you had polio? LC: Well, my leg ached so bad, just terribly, and they took me to Doctor A.C. Tanner, he was the main doctor, and the only one around here. He 6 diagnosed it as polio or infantile paralysis. After that, my mother and I would catch the Bamberger and go to Ogden, over to the Eccles Building, and there was a man there that would work on my legs. He would put little electric pads on my legs, and turn up the electricity until it curled my toes. It was supposed to be stimulating the muscles, if it worked I don’t know. MB: So you’re going to school every day, you’re working the farm, that sort of stuff. You eventually get a job with Smith’s. So how much free time would you have? LR: Oh, a lot, really. MB: What would you do with that free time? LR: We had horses. In the winter time, we had skids, and the riding horse, we’d ride the horse and then put the skid on the big rope and whip us all through the fields and things like that. That was fun. My closest girlfriend was a mile away, but she came up all the time. Then I had three girl friends that was on twenty two hundred West, which was Call Street then. I was always with them, we played a lot. My closest friend was Ben Dibble, and he was just one month older than me. When we was just little we made mud pies all the time, and that was our main entertainment. A couple of times, we’d sneak out to the chicken coop and get us two or three eggs and put them with the dirt. But my mother knew every time we done it, because she knew how many eggs she’d get each day. LR: So would you actually crack the eggs open? 7 LC: We’d crack the eggs open and mix them with the dirt. That was our mud pies, and we made airport roadways, things like that. Did a lot of just playing outside. We’d play Run Sheepie Run, and kick the can, and tippy, all those kinds of games outside. We had this big red barn, and the boys would play out there a lot, and all their friends would gather there, and they’d play with rubber guns, what they called shooting the rubber. I didn’t like that much, because they’d always shoot us. LR: Of course. MB: You worked hard and you played hard, huh? So I know you shared with us some of your memories from elementary school; do you have any stories you’d like to share from your high school experiences? LC: Well, I met my husband there. He was from Bountiful, and he brought me home from school. They didn’t drive very often to school, but this day he and his friend did. He brought me home from school the last day of school my junior year. On August 18, we went on our first date, and we dated all through high school, and two years after that we were married. I was in the Zenith Club, which was just a social club, and three times out of the year we would have a dinner-dance and that was great. I remember when I was accepted into the Zenith Club. My girlfriend and I, and we went downstairs to the locker and cried, because we didn’t know how we was ever going to pay the fees, which was three dollars and thirty-five cents. We thought, “We’re in, but what are we going to do now? We won’t be 8 able to do that.” We had to buy the dresses too, but it worked out okay. We got enough money, and I was in it. So, it was a good club. LR: You were working when you were sixteen, so did that help pay for the club? LC: Oh, not then. I just didn’t have any left, I bought my school clothes. The dresses usually cost right around four dollars a dress, and we’d but them at J.C. Penny’s, and there was an Emporium and a Woolworth Store and a Dollar Store that sold clothes. LR: So would you go up into Ogden then, to get that? Cause I know the Emporium was in Ogden. LC: Yes. LR: So how would you get up there? Would you take the Bamberger most of the time? LC: No we had a car. So mother would drive, and we would go up in the car. LR: Okay. What year did you graduate from High School? LC: 1940. LR: You said you married your husband a couple of years after that? LC: April 11, 1942. LR: I’m curious what your memories are from Pearl Harbor Day. LC: I remember them. I had been to the Doctor because I had had a blood clot in my leg, so I had been up to Doctor Tanner, and he had lanced it, and that was right around ten o’clock in the morning. When I got home, we heard the news of Pearl Harbor. That was frightening, but we didn’t know 9 it was going to be as bad as it was, and I was going with Adrian then. He didn’t come up for a date that night because he wanted to be home and listen to the radio with his folks about it. I guess it didn’t affect us too bad at first, it was going on and on, but then Adrian went into the service in February of 1943. LR: So he joined after you were married, and he was drafted? LC: Yes. LR: So February of 1943, he was drafted. LC: Yep. LR: When did it become real, what was happening? LC: Oh, each month got worse and worse, and we realized it. LR: When you say each month got worse and worse, what do you mean by that? LC: Well, we just knew that all of our young men were going to go to war, and all our brothers. We were scared, not for our safety, but for theirs. We never had anything bad here. They build a naval base, which would be about four miles from our home, and also Hill Field had opened. It opened, I’d say, about 1941. My husband was one of the first that worked there. He went to a schooling, to be an airplane mechanic, and he would travel to Salt Lake Air Base. After he got that, he was one of the first employees at Hill Field, in the mechanical airplane care. I know everything was scarce. We couldn’t get sugar, we had to get stamps to buy certain things that we ate, so we had to be very skimpy with that. We had gas stamps, and so 10 we could only have so many gas stamps a month. You had to be very careful on where you went and how many you used. My brothers, I had some little ruffian brothers. We had Japanese working there on some of the farms around us, and so these boys would go out in the field and steal the gas out of the tractors so they could have another gallon or two to run on. But the one thing that we was the shortest on was sugar and gas. LR: Well you talked about your brothers, you started realizing they were going to go. Were your brothers drafted, or did they enlist? LC: Yeah, I guess I’d say they was. My oldest brother, he was exempt until almost the end of the war, because he was older, out of the draft age. My brother Glen, he went in the service, in the Army Air Corps. He never saw action. He served time at the Arsenal in Layton, and Clearfield. Alan, my brother five years younger than me, when he became of age, he went into the navy. So, so all of those served during the war. We didn’t lose anyone, but there was a lot of different people around in Layton that did. LR: Do you remember those times that you would hear of someone not coming home? LC: Oh yes. LR: How would that affect the community? LC: Bad. We all felt for them. When you have anyone in the service in your family, they would give us a card with a heart or a star on it, or something like that to hang, they knew that people would see that and know that you had someone in the service. We had one main guy, Howard Day, 11 everyone liked him so much, and he was killed. Mother’s and that, they’d hang a, I can’t remember what it was, they’d hang it in the window, and that meant they had lost someone. LR: A gold star. I think it was a gold star. A blue star meant someone was serving, and a gold star was someone who died. So you remember those little things. LC: Oh yes. My best friend that made the mud pies with me all the time, when he graduated from High School he was accepted at Annapolis. He went four years at Annapolis, and the war was really going then, so he went on a ship, but he was okay, he came back. LR: Well that’s good. You got married in April 1942. When you got married, was there, in the back of your head that he’s going to go soon? LC: Oh yes. We knew the day was coming that he would have to go. LR: Did that speed up your marriage at all? LC: No, it didn’t. LR: So you were going to get married anyway. Because it was in the middle of the war and there was rationing happening, did that affect the type of wedding you had? LC: Oh, we didn’t have a wedding. His folks did not want him to get married, they wanted him to stay at home. My Dad was drinking so bad right then that we couldn’t have it at my house. So, we went to Preston, Idaho, and got married up there in the court house of all things. Adrian was happy, 12 but I was very unhappy, because we dreamed about having a nice reception and things. LR: Did you ever have a reception at all? LC: No. It was okay. I wanted to get married in the temple, but Adrian did not hold the priesthood then. His folks were converts to the church and came over from England, and Adrian was the youngest in the family. By the time he got there, his mother had got really bitter towards the Church, so she never ever had him go, but all the rest of the family was active when they was growing up. His one brother was a Bishop for thirteen years. But Adrian was a good guy; I knew that I wasn’t taking too big a chance marrying someone that didn’t hold the priesthood. Tina was a baby when the Bishopric got him active in the church, and so from then on, he worked in the Senior Aaronics, they don’t have that anymore - It went to the 70s. So he was good from then on, very good. He worked as a Stake Clerk for President Barlow, for eleven years. LR: That’s a long time. MB: Something I’m curious about, you said his family didn’t want you to marry him. LC: Yeah, the reason was his father was out of work. They never got their American citizenship. He wasn’t working then, and Adrian had to pay board, twenty dollars a month. In their family, once you reached out of High School then you paid them board. They didn’t want him to get married because of twenty dollars. 13 LR: They didn’t want him to get married due to twenty dollars? LC: It’s fascinating. His mother was a very strict English lady. Very strict. LR: So you had been married for not quite a year when he was drafted. LC: I lived at home all while he was gone in the service. LR: That’s nice. You didn’t have to be alone. LC: Yeah. Dennis was born in November of 1943, and that was when we was still living at home. He was way down in Arlington, Texas, still training. LR: I’m curious about how you corresponded with each other while he was gone. LC: We wrote letters constantly. It would take about ten days for a letter to come while he was overseas. But otherwise, we always wrote wherever he was. Never used the telephone, you just did not make a long distance call. LR: So, even when he was overseas, it only took about ten days? LC: Yeah, it was just about ten days there. LR: So what did he do in the service? LC: He was the engineer on the planes, and defense, he was the tail gunner, which was a very serious spot to be in. You know, they flew fifty missions. LR: Do you know where he was… LC: He left here in May, and they went directly to Italy, and that’s where he was based. The biggest things that he had to fly over was the Ploesti Oil Fields, and try to get rid of the big tanks of oil. The other very important missions he’d run would be over Stuttgart and around that area, for the 14 railroad yards. They were the main ones, but he never got injured in any way. When he came home, his nerves were terrible, so he went to Spokane, Washington, to Fort George Wright, from January until May when he was released, just for nerves. LR: Do you think that helped him? LC: Yes, it did. It wasn’t concerned military duties or anything like that, they were totally free from that. He worked in the wood ship a lot and he liked that, it was relaxing to him. LR: So he found a way to cope with his nerves so he could come back and be productive, if you will? LC: Right. He couldn’t handle loud noises. On 4th of July, we went up to the park for the fireworks and stuff. That’s how I learned how bad it was, because the big booms reminded him of the flak that he flew through. So that was hard. We never did that anymore. MB: Something I’m curious about. Going back a little ways, you said that when your husband went into the service he was in Arlington with Dennis? When your husband was in training, did you have your first child? LC: Yes. MB: What I’m curious about is what it was like taking care of a baby during World War Two with the rationing and all that. LC: Oh, we was young and we didn’t care. We just wanted to follow him. First place we went was Biloxi, Mississippi, and I roomed with two other girls whose husbands were with Adrian. They would come in at five o’clock at 15 night until ten if their grades were good. So of course, their grades were good. That’s how we lived in Mississippi. Then Dennis went to Peterson Air Force Base at Colorado Springs. That’s when he did the actual flying and working on the air planes. We lived with Mrs. Poole, she had one girl that was eight and her son was in the Navy. They actually took their dining room, emptied it out, put a bed in there, and would take couples in to live. Colorado Springs was completely full of people and all. So we lived there in her house, and I can’t believe how anyone would do that. They took their dining room set out, and it was all laying in one of their bedrooms stacked up. LR: So did she make money that way? LC: Yes, she charged my fifty dollars a month. That pretty much took my money, because they only got sixty. LR: Where else did you go? LC: He was moved to Topeka, Kansas, for just about five or six days while they picked up their airplane. So he calls me, please come. He’d be there for five days or something. So I got on the train and went there for about four days. He got his plane and was going out that fourth night, and I wasn’t going to go home until the next morning. But I could hear those airplanes taking off, and you’d hear them go over, and it was awful, so I made arrangements to get a train ticket at eleven o’clock at night, got a taxi, and went to the train station to come home. 16 LR: Yeah those airplanes get pretty loud. I can remember how loud they get when I was in Biloxi. So, I understand. LC: He said one of his worst feelings was when they left Florida, and they were going out over the ocean, and he could see the lights of Florida all along the mainland get dimmer and dimmer. He said it was awful when that light went. LR: Yeah, actually makes sense. So you followed him to Biloxi, Colorado Springs, and Topeka Kansas. Was there anywhere else you went with him? LC: Topeka was just those five days. Well, when he got home the Government had taken over a lot of the big hotels in California, so we went to Santa Anna, and just stayed at the hotel Miramar for the better part of a month, they were all returned servicemen there. They had a lot of stuff for them to do there, like all the coffee tables had jigsaw puzzles on it, and they had different important movies and stars and that come in for a meeting. They had Lou Costello come in one time, and I saw him. Can’t remember if there’s more. So it was very nice staying there. LR: Yeah, I’ll bet, and you had your son by then. LC: Yes, but my folks took care of him while I was gone there. At Washington, up in Spokane, just Dennis and I and his Dad. LR: You were able to go with him… LC: I went up there, yes. LR: I didn’t realize that. 17 LC: Yes, I did. We just lived in a little small motel strip, one room and a bathroom and kitchen over to the side. I spent all day every day with Dennis and Adrian up at Fort George Wright. Dennis became very smart, because I had all day long to play with him and teach him. LR: So when you were traveling with your husband before he was deployed overseas, would you work while you were with him, or just spend the time with the other wives? LC: Yes, that’s all. We didn’t work, in none of those places. MB: When you left Topeka Kansas, you came back to Layton, and then you stayed at home until your husband came back? LC: He was very lucky. He was gone, he lacked three days from being gone six months. That was short, but they put all their flights in just that short time. LR: So he flew fifty missions in six months? LC: Under six. He was only gone six. But it was hard on them. LR: Well yeah, six months, that’s a quick. LC: Its way to quick, which they realized afterwards, and they cut it back down to thirty-nine missions was all they could make. LR: When your husband came home, you said you didn’t quite realize how bad it was for him. But when did it start to occur to you that he was having issues just with everyday life? LC: Not very often, but if anything crossed him or anything, he would get the shakes really bad. 18 LR: Okay. So, today we would obviously refer to it as PTSD. They didn’t really have a name for it then. LC: No, shell shock maybe, but it wasn’t that. LR: When the war finally ended, because your husband came home before the war was over, how… LC: What did we do when it ended? LR: Yeah, was there a big celebration? LC: Oh yeah, everyone headed for Salt Lake. Adrian and I did. Main Street Salt Lake was completely packed. Everyone was there, just completely happy. That was a big day. LR: So that would be August of 1945. I’m curious why not Ogden. Why Salt Lake. LC: Oh, it wasn’t nearly as big or exciting or anything. LR: Okay. So more was happening in Salt Lake. That makes more sense. When things calmed down what did Adrian do, what was his career? LC: Well, he went on with the air planes, and was a technician on the instrument panels and that at Hill Field for twenty some-odd years. He became the manager of a hundred and forty men and then he had a nervous breakdown. After that he went to work at First National Bank. LR: Okay. The one here in Layton? LC: He worked there for twenty-four years. LR: Wow, so he had two careers? 19 LC: Yes, thank goodness. He got Social Security by working, and then the government. It was good. LR: What did you do? LC: Different things. When I was down in Mississippi, I did work in a grocery store for maybe three months, something like that. After I got out of high school, I worked at Sweet’s Candy Company in Salt Lake. I was working there when we got married. But in that day and age, the men didn’t believe women should work. So, I quit working and was just home. LR: So, after the war, you stayed home and raised your family? LC: Yes. LR: How many children did you guys have? LC: I have four, three boys and a girl. MB: I know that your husband’s family didn’t want you to get married. Did you ever reconcile with them? LC: Oh yes, we wasn’t mad at them. We just had to do everything on our own, and not with them. He was very close with his folks. LR: You mentioned your Aunt Flint. Is that where Flint Street… LC: I was a Flint! LR: Oh, is that where the Flint Street comes from, named after your family? LC: Yes, my Grandpa Flint grew up in West Kaysville, right on that street, but they didn’t come across the plains. When they came they came by train, and he was a very good businessman. He was considered rich in that day and age, and he gave each of his children, which he had thirteen, one had 20 passed away, so there was twelve of them. He gave each one of them twenty-five acres of ground, a new horse, and new buggy and a horse, so that was like getting a brand new car. They were set up good. MB: So, this may be jumping ahead a little bit but you’ve lived in Layton for most of your life, aside from when you followed your husband around. What changes have you seen? LC: Oh my goodness. Well the main one is we knew everyone in Layton. Lots of changes with the times, things move on. LR: Layton’s gotten very big. You mentioned the Naval Base coming to Clearfield, before it was there, you could just drive straight… LC: Through to Clearfield LR: But once it was built, it blocked all of the roads. How much time did that take off your travel time? Was it inconvenient? LC: We just had to go through what we called them the Cuts, which was just a half mile away from us. We called them the Cuts because the railroad had a little incline, which they made because the tracks were that low. We all didn’t like it, none of us farmers or that did. Took away part of their freedom I guess, really. LR: Do you have any other questions? MB: Not at this moment. LR: Okay, so I’m just going to ask one final question if that’s okay, and it kind of encompasses everything. How do you think World War Two and living through that shaped and influenced your life? 21 LC: Made us much stronger. LR: How so? LC: Well, we just accepted everything, became tougher, and fought for what we wanted. We grew up a lot, it was good. LR: Alright. Well, I don’t have any other questions. I appreciate your time, Lucille, and your willingness. It means a lot and I’m very grateful. LC: Oh I hope there’s something there that will be of use to you. LR: There’s plenty here that will be of use.