Oral History Program Elden Jackman Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 13 September 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Elden Jackman Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 13 September 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: Jackman, Elden, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 13 September 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Elden Jackman 1927 Elden Jackman circa 1940s Elden on ship during WWII circa 1940s Elden Jackman circa 2000s Elden Jackman 13 September 2017 Elden Jackman 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Elden Jackman, conducted on September 13, 2017 in his home, by Alyssa Chaffee. Elden discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Elden’s wife LaDawn, and Sarah Kamppi, the video technician, are also present during this interview. AC: Today is September 13, 2017. We are in the home of Elden Jackman, speaking with him about his life and his experiences during World War II, for our World War II in Northern Utah project. My name is Alyssa Chaffee and I am here with Sara Kamppi. My first question is, where and when were you born? EJ: Nineteenth of November, 1927. AC: And where were you born at? EJ: In Magna, Utah. AC: What do you remember about being a kid out in Magna? EJ: My father was a school teacher. He graduated from BYU, and we moved from Magna to his teaching assignments in southern Utah. Widtsoe, Cannonville, and Hatch. Little towns. He would organize a school there, and then they’d have five classes in one room. They’d have first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, and then each class would have an assignment, and he would be teaching one of the classes, so that each one was on a different row. AC: How often did you move? EJ: We went from Pinebridge to Hatch Town, to Woodrow. We’d move about six times while I was young, and we ended up in Mapleton, Utah. He was a school teacher in Mapleton, and we settled there. 2 AC: About how old were you when you settled in Mapleton? EJ: Seventh grade. I ended up going by bus to Springville High school. The junior high school and high school were in the same area so I was in junior high school at Springville. Then we moved to Provo, and I attended Farrer Junior High School until I graduated to the ninth grade and then went to Provo High School. AC: So was your father your elementary school teacher? EJ: No, he taught a different class than what I was in. AC: What grades did he teach exactly? EJ: He taught the fifth grade, and I was in another class for fifth and sixth grade. We were in the same building, just different classes. AC: So you’d have first through fifth in one room, and then sixth on in another room. Is that how it worked? EJ: Yes it was. AC: Interesting. How was, what do you remember about that? Was it confusing to have so many grades in one room? EJ: Well, it didn’t happen in Mapleton. We did in Pinebridge and Hatch and Widtsoe. Widtsoe was closed up by the government, they turned it back into a forest, so we were the last people in Widtsoe. In fact, I’ve been back to see it. Most all the buildings are just broken down. We were interested in going to the cemetery and be able to see our old friends that we had that were buried there. It’s quite a place. AC: That’s really interesting. So they tore down that old school house and just planted a bunch more trees? 3 EJ: They didn’t even tear it down, just everybody moved out of town, just deserted the whole town. Town probably had a hundred people in it. AC: What did your mother do during that time? EJ: My mother lived in Provo with my father. She was a retired housewife. Their name is Hanks. You’ve probably heard of the Hanks, Ephraim Hanks who found the hand cart company when they were stranded in Wyoming, that’s her people. AC: That’s her maiden name? EJ: Yes. AC: What are your parent’s first names? EJ: My father’s name is Golden Leon Jackman. I have his second name as my middle name. My mother’s name is Teton Hanks Jackman. AC: What are your memories being a child during the depression? EJ: It’s when we were in southern Utah, my father made $90 a month as a school teacher, and so things were really poor. I remember at Christmas time making popcorn and then stringing it on a string and putting it around our tree for our decorations. We had chickens and I would collect the eggs from the chickens and take them to the store and buy groceries with them. It was that bad. SK: Do you have any brothers or sisters? EJ: I’m the first of six. My next oldest brother is dead, he died of diabetes, and then my baby brother just died two weeks ago. He had a heart attack, it was really sad. He was out mowing the lawn and he just crashed over on the lawn mower, just really sad. All of my brothers and sisters are basically in Provo area. None of the family moved anywhere but me. 4 AC: Did you go to BYU for college? EJ: I went to BYU for two years and got married. I wanted to get an advertising major and BYU did not have advertising at that time. So I investigated colleges who would teach advertising and Northwestern in Chicago and Woodbury University in Los Angeles were the two places that were available. I chose Los Angeles, so that’s where we went on our honeymoon. That was a delightful experience! We made a connection in Hollywood, and they would send us tickets every week for different programs that they wanted us to pass out the tickets and give them to other people, so we went to activities every week from big name people like Art Linkletter and Red Buttons. AC: Wow! So when World War II started, you would have been about fourteen? EJ: In the eighth grade! I was in Junior High School. I just remember when they attacked Pearl Harbor. It’s interesting and we’ll come back to that, but Pearl Harbor is where they were attacked, and I end up there in the service. I was on a submarine in Pearl Harbor. AC: Okay, what are your memories of Pearl Harbor Day? EJ: I didn’t know much about it. I was young and, and it didn’t make a lot of difference to me. I’m sure if I were older, it would have made a lot of difference because I would then have been drafted and had to be in the service. When Germany was fighting England, I learned how to spell some of their foreign towns like Czechoslovakia, and so we practiced dictating all the names of these foreign countries that were being captured by Germany. But I had nothing to do with the German war. I was strictly with Pearl Harbor or with the Japanese program. 5 AC: Okay. Did you get drafted or did you volunteer? EJ: Both. I got draft to the Army and joined the Navy. I did not want to eat K-rations and live in trenches, I was afraid that’s the kind of war that I’d be in. So when I did get the physical for the draft, I just wrote on the envelope, joined the Navy and sent it back. They didn’t give me any problems at all. I reported to San Diego boot camp for my twelve weeks of training. AC: What year was that? Do you remember? EJ: I graduated from high school in 1945 and I immediately went in the service. AC: So you went in at the tail end of the war then? EJ: Yes. AC: Okay. Did you go to Camp Pendleton? For your boot camp? EJ: No, it was just San Diego Navy Training Center, and from there I wanted to travel, so I put into submarine school, which is in New London, Connecticut. They sent me to New London school for a twelve week school. We learned a lot of basic communications, we worked a lot to help us keep in good health, and we practiced going out in the Atlantic Ocean on a submarine to learn how to run it. When we graduated, they assigned us to different ships and my assignment was to the submarine called the Sea Dog. They’re all named after things in the ocean, and 401 was our number. So I was sent to San Francisco and from there went over to Pearl Harbor on a captured German luxury liner. So we landed in Honolulu, and then they picked us up and took us out to our submarine. AC: Wow. 6 EJ: If I hadn’t of moved to here, I’d have pictures to show you, but we moved from a five bedroom home to a two bedroom home, and most everything was put in storage. AC: What was it like, being stationed at Pearl Harbor after it had been attacked four years earlier? Was that intimidating to be over there? EJ: Nope, didn’t pay much attention to it. They had rebuilt the city. The ship called the Nevada was bombed really bad, and they took it out and dropped an atomic bomb on it, just to blow it up because it had been destroyed. Big ships were sunk or were towed to other places. Pearl Harbor is actually a harbor, and it is where all the ships were parked. AC: Interesting. I don’t know a whole lot about submarines, to be honest. Tell me about what you did exactly in the submarine. EJ: I was the only one that knew how to type, and so they put me in the office, it was called a yeoman, and I would have to send a report every time that we’d go to sea. I’d have to send a list of all of the people that were on the ship, so that if we were sunk, they would know who was in the ship. I had several duties. I was on lookout, we climbed up on the top the tower with binoculars and would look for the enemy or anybody that was coming. One time we were in war maneuvers, and we were the blue team, and there was a grey team. One of the grey team’s planes came over us, and he kept flying and wiggling his wings back and forth and then he’d come back and go over us, and then he dropped a message to us, but it dropped into the ocean. The message was saying that they could not find their aircraft carrier, and that they were gonna land in the water. I ran down and 7 got my camera, and came up and took pictures of this plane actually landing on the water. The pilot and co-pilot got off on the wing, and got into a rubber boat that they had in the plane, and then we rescued them. They said, “Here we were ten thousand feet up in the air, and now we’re 500 feet below the island on a submarine!” We had a lot of pictures that were of rescuing these people. That was quite an adventure. AC: That’s really interesting. So were submarines more for recon, or did you also fight with submarines? EJ: Fight! They were the major shift to blow up the enemy freighters, air craft carriers and all. We would spot them when we were submerged. We had a periscope that would go up just barely above the water and we could see where the ships were. Then we would calculate how far away they were, and we would program our torpedoes to go that distance and would go about ten feet depth in the water so that we couldn’t be seen so much. I have a book, and I’ve got a copy so I can show ya. Just a moment...The rising sun. Rising Sun was Japan, and their signal was just a regular picture of the sun. But this tells about all the submarines that were in the ocean, and I have lots of good pictures. It tells how many ships they sunk. The main battle in the ocean was submarines against the regular ships. If the enemy had an aircraft carrier, they would surround it with destroyers, so that if submarines would approach the aircraft carrier, the destroyers would be able to drop depth charges, and try and blow us up. This is what a submarine looks like. They’re very narrow, and when they submerge, they blow the tanks that have the air to keep us on top. They blow 8 that out, and it sucks in water, and it helps the submarine to dive. So there’s a lot of fun shows, I collect submarine shows. This ship right here looks just like the submarine that I had. Here’s how big the ship is. AC: Oh, wow. Okay. EJ: It’s quite small. AC: It’s extremely narrow. It’s really surprising. Did you ever encounter enemy submarines? EJ: No. We patrolled Russia more than Japan. We did not trust Russia, so we would watch when Russia would have war maneuvers. We would go up and watch them through our periscopes. On the front of the submarine, we had two tubes for torpedoes. The torpedoes were stacked on the inside of the submarine, around our bunks; we were sleeping around them. We had two tubes that we could shoot out from the front, and two tubes we could shoot in the back. So if we shot our torpedoes, we could turn our ship around and aim our torpedoes against the ships. But most all the ships that were sunk in the pacific or in the Atlantic Ocean were done by submarines. SK: How many men would be on one submarine at a time? EJ: Seventy-nine people. We were very tight. When I’d sleep, I had three other beds above me all stacked together. SK: What was that like? Were tensions pretty high between people? EJ: I was dumb. I wanted adventure, and I got it. I was very excited about being on a submarine. It was different, it was something to talk about, and I just enjoyed it all. I laid a lot on the top of the submarine getting sun burned. I’d take a blanket 9 and just go out and lay on the top of the submarine. I was as brown as the Natives. We would go by taxi into Honolulu from Pearl Harbor, and there’s a clothing store there that had lockers for service people. We’d go in and change our clothes and then just put on regular swimming clothes and they wouldn’t have known who we were after that. SK: How often were you able to go up on top of the submarine? EJ: Daily. There’s a tower when you get up on the top that we climb up to get to our lookout station. We’d have binoculars and, our job was to make sure that nobody was going to attack us. AC: This was while you were stationed in Pearl Harbor? EJ: Yes. AC: How often did you go on those missions to places like Russia to go do some recon? EJ: It varied. It depended on when we’d have an assignment. We may stay in Pearl Harbor for two or three weeks, and we may be out two or three weeks. Our submarine could not stay under water more than about two days. The new nuclear submarines now can stay under water for months. We have nuclear submarines around North Korea now. North Korea is giving us a real bad time, and we have submarines around there and we have a fleet of our ships around North Korea just in case they give us a bad time, we’d be able to attack them immediately. They keep shooting rockets, and we’re threatening that if they shoot anymore we’ll come after them, but they just keep shooting them. We have cut off all the supplies to North Korea, and we’ve ordered all the countries that buy or 10 sale from North Korea to not ship to them anymore, so hopefully we’ll be able to cut em out so that they’ll quit shooting! They’re shooting missiles at Guam, and it’s about two thousand miles away. They are shooting a missile that can reach Guam, and that’s major! We have our air force there, our submarines are there, our big ships are there, and if they hit Guam with an atomic bomb they would blow up everybody in Guam, so we’re doing everything in our power to protect our country. I’m sure that a lot of submarines are round there now in North Korea in case that something happens so they can go in and blow up their ships because that’s the main thing that a submarine is built for is to blow up the enemy. Anyway, we would go into Honolulu when we were off on weekends, and I organized a, a group of uh servicemen. We had fifty service men and would meet every weekend, and we would go out on the beach and play. A lot of the young ladies would come out from Honolulu and we had a good time. We played volleyball in the sand and swam out in the beach too. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel is the hotel that submariners would go to when they come in from a long trip to unwind. We would go swimming out in the ocean just beyond the royal Hawaiian Hotel, and they had colored lights flying on the ocean, and we’d go out and swim in their colored lights. It’s really, it was an adventure. AC: You mentioned that part of the reason why you didn’t want to be part of the Army is you didn’t really want to eat their k-rations. Did they have rations for submariners as well? 11 EJ: No, we had steak and lobster. They spoiled us with food, but we had to be in excellent condition with the kind of food they gave us, just to make sure that we were able to handle our responsibilities. We didn’t have k-rations, we had baked meals every day. I gained a lot of weight. *laughter* AC: Did they have pretty consistent training to keep you guys in shape? EJ: No, not after we were on the ship. There was no training for keeping in shape at all, we were supposed to have landed there in top condition. The submarine was our home! We had no pace to go but the submarine. AC: So you’d sleep there every night? EJ: Oh yes, every night. I didn’t stay any time in Honolulu. AC: So you never stayed in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel? EJ: No. I only saw it and we just appreciated it. The submariners that were out a lot longer than I was would come into the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and just recuperate from the pressure. The nuclear submarines, they have a lot more pressure because they’re under the water for a month at a time. All I did is have fun, I really enjoyed it. Eighteen years old, I just really enjoyed myself. I did everything I could to keep healthy. They fed us well, and they made sure that we were always in good condition, but there was no place to go for activities. We were home away from home. AC: I wanted to go back a little bit to your training. What were some of the things that they would do to train you to prepare you to get on those submarines? EJ: Okay, we learned Morse code, we learned survival, and we had a tower that was full of water. It was a hundred feet long, a hundred feet deep and we could have 12 a choice because we were being taught how to escape from a submarine if we would have been blown up. I only went to the fifty foot tower, but you could go down and enter into the hundred foot tower. We had people who were swimming in that tower all the time and they would have places they would go and get air and then they would swim around and tap us on the bottom if we were not straight. We would go into the tower to learn how to escape, and every ten feet there was a notch on the rope, and we would stop and acclimatize our body to get use to the depth in the water. One guy that was below me panicked, and he let loose of the rope and popped to the top and he got bends. We don’t know what happened to him, but I’m sure that bends would kill you, because that gets air on your blood vessels. I was not a very good swimmer, but I made certain that I was gonna stay on that rope until I got to the top. I could have gone down to a hundred feet, but it was not required and I didn’t want to do it. Fifty feet was a long way to learn how to escape from. AC: I bet. After you would go on a mission in the submarines, was it hard for you to reacclimatize to normal climates or? EJ: I was young and dumb, I didn’t have any problems at all. When I was in the Navy base in San Diego, they checked me to see if I could take the pressure of living in a confined place. They checked my finger nails to see if I was biting my fingernails; they had a lot of questions about whether I can take pressure. They gave me a lot of tests that showed that I could handle pressure without panicking. AC: Interesting, how would they test you? 13 EJ: Pressure in tanks. I didn’t think it was very much, I thought it was all fun. They had to make sure, because with seventy-nine people living in a submarine, if someone panics and goes berserk, we’d be in real trouble. So the interviews that they did, and the test that they gave me uh, they made sure that I was gonna be okay confined in a tiny space. AC: I can’t even imagine. EJ: Well, a lot of people are amazed that we are even there, that we were in a submarine because they know how confined you are. But I was young and dumb and liked adventure. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I joined the submarine, I knew it was a trip across the United States to go to submarine school, and then it was to be an assignment to be on a submarine. So I loved it! It was great. SK: My brother-in-law is in the Navy, and he works at the bottom of the ships, and he says there’s a specific type of shoes that they have to wear so they won’t make too much noise so they won’t be tracked. Did you all have to do anything like that on the submarine? EJ: We did. The enemy could hear us because we would make vibrations while walking, so if we were in the war place, we had to wear these special shoes that did not clunk, clunk, clunk, when we were walking. SK: That’s really interesting. EJ: I still brag about it. I get pretty excited about my experience and, and it’s not a normal life. But now it’s all over with, and I got a lot of benefits. I get my prescriptions for nine dollars apiece, and some of em are like two hundred dollars. I could get money borrowed from the government for low interest rate on 14 the G.I. Bill. Talking about the G.I. Bill, when I went to college, a hundred percent of my tuition was paid for. They gave me thirty-five dollars a month an apartment, and that’s all it costs. We were in G.I. Housing in Los Angeles and um, that’s all we paid is thirty five dollars. While we were there we had abed that pulled out from the wall. We only had a two room apartment, so the bed would pull out and I’d put a stick under the wheel. One evening, the front door started rattling, so I reached under and got my stick from the wheel to go after somebody and pretty soon, the back door started rattling. We realized that we were in an earthquake. Our son was in a bassinet in the kitchen, and dishes were falling out of the cupboard, so we grabbed him and brought him in the bed with us. My wife was all worried, and I says, “Nothing ever happens in an earthquake.” The next day we looked at the news, and a downtown company had all the mannequins fallen over and out onto the sidewalk from the earthquake. When we saw pictures of the earthquake on the sidewalks would just roll. Nothing happened to us and we were just excited to have our first earthquake. AC: So the submarine you were on was the USS Seadog 401. EJ: Yes, the war was shortened because of submarines because the ships that were coming to Japan to give em supplies, we were sinking. AC: Interesting. I wanted to ask you about the fellow who rushed up the tube too fast during training and got the bends. Do you know how they treated that during the war? 15 EJ: I lost track of him when he went to the hospital. But he may have died. I felt that if the person gets bends that they would probably die. He went from fifty feet to zero feet in about ten seconds. AC: So with those tubes were they like long glass tubes that they stuck in the ocean or were you in a tank? EJ: No, it’s a diving tube. It’s a large thing about, ten feet across and its a hundred feet tall. You’d go into a decompression system and get acclimatized to how deep you are. If you’re a hundred feet deep, there’d be a lot of pressure on your body. They had men that were swimming around, I couldn’t figure out how they can get down to a hundred feet and still get air. There’s little holes that they can put their head in and get oxygen, and then they’d go again, but they were just swimming all over that place. AC: That’s interesting. You mentioned also with the training, that they would do interviews to make sure you can handle being in that crowded space for so long. EJ: Yes. AC: Were there techniques that you learned to help yourself if you did start feeling claustrophobic? EJ: I don’t know. The doctor that interviewed me had a lot of questions and he didn’t give me any tests or anything, he just asked me questions. He looked at my fingernails and said, ‘Your fingernails are short. Do you bite them?” I says, “No, I just pick them off.” So he reached in his drawer and gave me a finger nail file and said take care of this and do it this way. I was very fortunate that I passed the interviews, cause he wanted to know how I would react. If you’re two hundred 16 feet deep in the ocean, and had an emergency physically, it would be pretty tough for everybody to know what to do. So they knew that anyone that accepted the submarine service would be qualified to handle the claustrophobic responsibility. AC: Did you learn some first aide just in case there was some kind of a crisis while you were down there? EJ: No, they had medics on the sub. That’s what they were prepared for, they could take care of anything. AC: So you had to be pretty tough to begin with? EJ: I realize that more now than I did then. I went to a twelve week school in New London, Connecticut for submarines. I’m sure that they watched us very closely to know how we were reacting. We learned Morse code, we learned working with a radio, and we learned sign language because if we were ever in a place where we had to communicate with another ship next to us we could do it with the flags or the sign language. So we learned all those things in the school. AC: Okay. You mentioned that you went out to the Russian coast a couple of times. EJ: We operated out of Vancouver, British Columbia and apparently it’s just across from Russia, and our submarine had special equipment on it that we would be able to pick up their communications and just watch them. We’d be submerged and our periscopes would go up just above the top of the ocean, and be able to watch them and photograph what they were doing. Sort of scary, or it could have been, there still not our best friends. 17 AC: That’s really fascinating. So while you were out there, how would you get supplies? EJ: Every time that we would leave Pearl Harbor, Guam, or wherever, there were different places that we would stop. There were navy bases and they would supply us. They’d have a list of all the food that they need and they’d bring it in by cases. They spoiled us with the food. AC: Even when you were out on a mission? EJ: Oh, yes! We had shrimp often, and lobster. They did everything in their power to keep us in good physical condition. AC: That’s great. What were some of the bases that you would pick up food from? EJ: Guam, the Cook Islands I think. I know that Guam was the main one that we would go to, other than Pearl Harbor. AC: You mentioned that while you were spying on the Russian’s, it got a little scary sometimes. Were there any times that you ever got close to getting caught? EJ: No! Never! We were very careful, and our submarine was especially fit for observations like that. Most of it was done through periscopes. AC: How long would you usually be off the coast of Canada spying like that? EJ: Probably a week. It’s just during the time that they had their actual war maneuvers. How they let us know, or how we found out that they had war maneuvers, I don’t know. That was top brass. AC: So you guys were just kind of hanging out in the submarine for a week at a time? EJ: Yes, we lived on the submarine. The only time that we got on base was at Pearl Harbor, and then we were off for weekends. We had duties on the ship all the 18 time, and we were always readied to be launched and go back out to sea within thirty minutes. If we were on the beach in Honolulu they’d somehow have to notify us to get back in a hurry, and I don’t know how they did it. AC: Did you have a specific job on the submarine? EJ: Yes! I was just a Seaman First Class rating and part of the job was being on the top of the deck with binoculars to watch for anything. There were always two of us up on the ladder with binoculars just watching, and the officers were down below us directing the ship. We had to always be observing to make sure there was nothing coming at us. I learned to steer the ship, I learned to run the bow planes, which would make us dive or raise up, and then the stern planes. We had a big wheel that we turned to make these planes work. One man panicked one time when he was running the bow planes, and he turned it for us to dive down deep. I could see that he panicked, so I just pushed him out of the way and took over. I learned a lesson about myself, I learned how I would react in an emergency, that I don’t think I knew, really, what I would do. I corrected the bow planes and got us back to level. We were still underwater, but we stayed level instead of diving more. AC: When you traveled to different places, like to Canada for instance, would you travel submerged? EJ: On top, we were on top. We would do about twenty-seven miles per hour on top and about fifteen miles per hour underneath. It didn’t give us much desire to go underneath and travel. The only time we would travel underneath is when we’re trying to not be detected. So we went to Canada on top of the water, and we 19 went from Pearl Harbor to San Francisco, and we went to Mirror Island. Mirror Island is by Vallejo, California, and that’s a submarine base town. So we went there and they scraped off the barnacles on the ship. A lot of things would attach to the ship, and they would go in there and totally clean that off. AC: Did you ever have to help with that? EJ: Some, yes I did. They would lower a rack above the water, and I would scrape off the boat that was above water, and then they did it underneath. We went into a shipyard in Vallejo, California, and I don’t know how they did it, I didn’t see, but I just know that the submarine was up out of the water, and on to a rack. I took pictures of that boat. It was sort of eerie, to know what was underneath us. AC: I bet. EJ: It was fun. I was nineteen years old, I couldn’t care. I just wanted to have fun, and I did a lot. AC: Did you correspond with family or friends? EJ: Oh, weekly. I’d write letters and put them in our mailbox, wherever we were, and they could send that mail from Guam or Pearl Harbor. I’d get mail back from my folks, delivered to us also. One time my father told me when I was just getting in, he says, “If you can write me a letter when you’re nineteen telling me you’ve never smoked a cigarette and you’ve never had a drop of liquor in your life, I’m going to send you a five dollar bill. On the five dollar bill, I’m going to write on it the congratulations for making it,” which I did. So he sent me that, and I have that collected now. I never spent it, but he wrote on it, “Congratulations for making your goal.” 20 AC: That’s cool that you still have it too. EJ: I do. I don’t know where it is. When we moved here, we moved from a five bedroom home to a two bedroom home, and a lot of things were in boxes someplace, with family probably. AC: How would you get mail when you were out on those missions? EJ: We got no mail out at sea, only at port. Interesting thing about mail, we never had to pay for a postage stamp. When we would write a letter, we just wrote free across the part where the stamp is, and the government would mail it for free. AC: Would citizens ever try doing that as well? EJ: No, that was strictly military. AC: I’m just wondering if citizens got caught trying to get free postage some time. EJ: It depended where it came from, they would be able to check that out pretty fast, because anything that was free mail came from the service. I don’t think there would be any chance for civilians to use it at all, and stamps were like six cents apiece. AC: Do you have any other stories from the war that you’d like to tell before I move on with the rest of your life? EJ: The main stories are in the book that I loaned you. Each of these submarines, they had thousands and thousands of tons of ships that they had sunk. I picked up our submarine after it came back from China, so I was never actually in the war. We were still on alert, and if there had been any problems with some foreign countries we’d have been ready to go. AC: So how long did you serve? 21 EJ: Two years. AC: You entered in 1944? EJ: I graduated in 1945 from Provo High School. The war was over in September of 1945 and that’s when I went into the service. AC: So you were in until 1947 then? EJ: Yes, good math. AC: Thank you. Tell me about what that was like trying to relieve the people who had fought in the wars. Was there a lot of clean up to be done, or how did they wrap it up? EJ: At Pearl Harbor into Honolulu, they had the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. It was strictly for military, so when they created problems with themselves, they would stay in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and acclimatize. AC: That’s really cool. So were you out there the day that the war ended? EJ: Yes, we knew when it was over. When I went into the service, the war had just finished, so I knew before I got there. We didn’t know whether we would be facing other enemies, like Russia. We were still suspicious of them, and I think we still are. AC: Yeah. So where were you on the day that you heard that the war had ended? EJ: I was in Provo, Utah. I owned a Model A Ford car, and I learned how to make it backfire. So I would push on the gas and turn off the key and it would go boom. So I went up and down the center street of Provo making that backfire, my celebration. By that time I had been drafted, so it was just a matter of going into the service. 22 AC: What were the celebrations like in Provo on that day? EJ: Firecrackers, a lot of people just yelling and screaming and making lots of noise. Everybody was excited that it was over because a lot of those people had sons that had been in the war, they were grateful because they were not going to be killed. AC: Do you feel the excitement was dampened for you a little because you still had to go in? EJ: They were still drafting. A lot of people that were actually in the war were being released and the new recruits were taking their place, wherever they were. I did not want to go into the Army, I knew the Army was living on K Rations. AC: How long did they draft people after the war ended? EJ: I don’t know. I know that a lot of people that were in the actual battle were being released, so they had to draft more people in to take their place. AC: That makes sense. So after you served, where did you go from there? EJ: I went to college. The nice thing about being in the service was that you got the GI Bill. LJ: He went on a mission. EJ: I did, before I left for college, I went on a mission for the LDS Church. I went to what was called the Central Atlantic States mission, and I thought that was some foreign country, Central Atlantic. Turned out it was North Carolina and Virginia. So I was there for two years. AC: So you covered two states in your mission? 23 EJ: North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. I lived in each one of those. About every six months we’d be transferred and I would go to another place. West Virginia was a coal mining town, and there was a major strike in West Virginia, and anybody that would go and mine coal, something would happen to them. They’d rub big rocks down on their truck or something, they would even kill them. The union was really anti anybody harvesting coal when the strike was on. AC: What was that like, serving in a coal mining town? Was that pretty depressing? EJ: I had a lot of friends there. It was a wonderful place. There were two of us, I had a companion with me all the time, and we would organize fun things for the young people. We had a loud stocking party, we had everybody came and just dancing in their stockings, and we had prizes for those who had the loudest stockings. We tried to have a lot of activities to keep the young people busy and it was a delight. I was in Roanoke, Virginia, which was our headquarters. I was in Grundy, Virginia, and I can’t remember much about it. I just know that I’d been there, it’s been sixty years ago. But it was a great assignment, it taught me how to learn to get along with somebody else. The companion that I had, we worked together, but it helped prepare me for marriage. I learned to get along, not just for me, but for the other person that was with me. AC: How long was your mission? EJ: Two years. AC: Just curious, because you said you transferred every six months. EJ: Yes, and after my time was over, I went back to Roanoke Virginia and I interviewed with our President. The next day, one of the fellows had a car, so I 24 made arrangements to go back with him. We went to the Hill Cumorah on the way back, which is where the story of the Book of Mormon is. We saw the great image of the people that were there, statues and so on, it was an outstanding experience. Then from Hill Cumorah we went to Nauvoo, Illinois, and just worked our way for all LDS activities that happened. It was fun. One of the fellows that drove the car, he lived in a town called Birds Eye, Utah. It’s up further North, and he invited me to stay with him one weekend. We went deer hunting in Birds Eye, and I was able to shoot a large trophy deer in his backyard. AC: Did your parents not come out and pick you up? EJ: No, they could have done, but they didn’t. Part of my arrangement in going out was that the Church would pay my trip back home, and so all of our gas and everything was paid for by their tithing that they collected. AC: Was that pretty typical for that time period? EJ: Yes. I think some people went by train. I would probably have gone by train if we had not had a car. AC: Not air plane? EJ: I went out there by train, and they met me in Roanoke and gave me my assignment. My assignment was to Roxboro, North Carolina, just a small town out of Durham. Durham is where Duke University is. For a small tobacco land, they raised lots and lots of tobacco. Lots of conflict between the white and the black people at that time, and we learned to really love the black people, but some of them were prejudiced against the whites, and the whites were against the blacks. We just wanted to make friends with all the people, and some of our 25 really good friends were black people. We just loved to be with them, they were just fun people. AC: Did you know your wife before you left on your mission? EJ: No, I met her at Brigham Young University after I came back. After my mission I went back to BYU and I met her. We started dating, and finally fell in love and got married. I had applied for other colleges, to go to school, because my background was advertising, and BYU did not have advertising. They do now, but then they didn’t, and there were only two schools that did. One was Woodbury University in Los Angeles and the other was Northwestern in Chicago. I did not want to come home for Christmas clear form Chicago, so we chose Woodbury. Woodbury was a very interesting school. Their professors all owned businesses, so they taught us the reality. They didn’t just teach us out of the books, they taught us reality, this is what you do. The highest grade that I received at Woodbury was an A plus. I’ve never heard of anybody getting an A plus, but I was given honors form that school, and it made a difference when I was married and settled down, because then I could study and do my work. In fact my wife worked at Woodbury in the office. We could have lunch together and go back and forth from school, and it was really special. AC: Was your wife going to school during this time as well? EJ: No, she was going to school while we were at BYU, but when we married, she did not go to school anymore. She worked to keep us alive. I had the GI Bill, and that helped a lot. It paid my rent which was thirty-five dollars a month. AC: Can’t even imagine. 26 EJ: Well, that was the GI housing, so we were just on subsidy from the government. AC: What all did the GI bill cover? EJ: Covered all of my college. They paid me so much money a month to live on; the rent, the food, the transportation, all paid by the GI Bill. I do not remember how much money we got, but it was enough. AC: What did, advertising look like when you first entered into it, because obviously there weren’t computers. EJ: No, we learned to do newspaper advertising. In fact, I went to the Glendale News Press, which is a newspaper, and got a part time job while I was in school. I designed advertising. They had a lot of advertising books that we could go through and pick out the different kinds of ads, then I would go to the people in town and show them a sketch that I had made and said, “Put your ad in this.” I made a circle with a lady with the telephone on it, and the ad says, “Call these people for their business.” So I designed an advertisement that was introducing the little stores that I went to. We did no radio, it was all newspaper. AC: When you designed these advertisements, would you draw them yourself? EJ: Yes, I would draw them, or I would go through books of different ads and find ideas. Then I would prepare a sketch and go to the businesses and show them what I wanted them to buy an ad in this paper. AC: So you had to be a pretty decent artist, obviously? EJ: Well, in imagination, yeah. When I went back to Glendale, California, on a vacation, we got a copy of the Glendale News Press, and they still had the ads that I had done. They were doing it with other businesses then. They had two full 27 pages of newspaper ads that they had done, which made me very happy. In fact, I made a book of ads that I did, just to remember what I had done. When I graduated from Woodbury, I got a job in Ontario, Oregon, I was their advertising manager. I had a little office, and I had all kinds of ideas that I had presented to a furniture and appliance store. I did all the window displays, did all the articles for the banners that we did for the windows, and we did a lot of the contests. I helped sell their pianos, which is interesting, because I don’t play piano. We loaded a piano truck, and would go into Bend, Oregon and Burns, Oregon, and try and sell pianos to people. What we would do is run an advertising that we would give a piano free for the oldest piano that we could find. People would send their letters to us, and we would go out and see their pianos, and get the serial number, and we had a book that would tell how old they were. One time, we were in looking at a lady’s piano, and a policeman came and arrested us, and said that we were soliciting without a city license. He took us into the police office, and we sat there for two hours and nobody would say anything to us. All at once, a policeman comes out and says, “You guys are free to go.” I says, “I want to know what made the decision.” He says, “You had a lapel pin on your shirt that has LDS,” Latter Day Saints! “The chief of police is a latter day saint, and he saw that pin, and he was not going to arrest any of his people.” It made me really appreciate the value of religion. AC: Your wife didn’t finish college, is that correct? EJ: No, she went to Weber State and got a two year degree. AC: What was it in? 28 EJ: Education I think, isn’t that right LaDawn? LJ: Yes. EJ: I get verification. She loved Weber State and I loved to see her in the march for the graduates that was exciting. So we have a great loyalty to Weber State. AC: It’s a good place. So how exactly were you introduced to each other? EJ: We went to the same church in Provo when we were at BYU. She lived in a home. We were in a stage play, and needed a chair, so she and I went up to her apartment to get it. I started getting acquainted with her. I was dating another girl, and finally got her as a blind date for my friends. We went three or four dates as double dates together. Then I decided that she was the one that I wanted, and not somebody else. We started dating, and we were on campus for probably one quarter, and then we got married. We were married the first of February, and we were in Los Angeles in school probably in March. Interesting story, we were married in the Idaho Falls LDS Temple, and her folks lived in Twin Falls, Idaho. We went back to Twin Falls and had our wedding reception in their home. They owned a motel so our first wedding night was in their motel. I had to go back to Los Angeles for school, and she had to have minor surgery, so she stayed there. I got a bus ticket from Twin Falls to Burley, Idaho, which is about thirty-five miles away, and then I got out on the street and hitchhiked all the way to Los Angeles. I put on a straw hat and wore a suit and on my suitcase I got a white tape and I put LA, for Los Angeles. I’d go out on the street and hold my suitcase up like that and I got rides all the way to Los Angeles. It was really special. You wouldn’t do it now, it would be very scary. 29 AC: So you went out first and then your wife followed you? EJ: Yes. Her folks brought her and all our wedding presents. I had a friend who was in the mission field with me and lived in Los Angeles. He knew of a family that were on an LDS Mission as a couple, and they had a vacant apartment, so he made arrangements for us to rent their apartment. It was right on Wilshire Boulevard, downtown Los Angeles. She came out less than a week after I got there. AC: What year were you married? EJ: February 1, 1951. It’s been sixty-six years ago. AC: Congratulations. What is your wife’s name? EJ: La Dawn. Its two words. AC: Did you guys have a honeymoon at all? EJ: Two years! Los Angeles was our honeymoon. We had a connection with the Hollywood movie places, and they would have stage shows and so on, with Red Skeleton and Red Buttons and all of the fun people. They would send us tickets every week that we could pass out so that people would be able to go to these shows. We saw a lot of shows for free. AC: How many kids did you guys end up having? EJ: Seven children. We have four daughters and three sons. Our oldest daughter died five years ago. She had melanoma cancer, and it traveled in her body and got into her lymph nodes on her arm and she died. WE took her to Huntsman cancer clinic a lot, but that didn’t stop. AC: I’m sorry. 30 EJ: That’s her picture right there. AC: She’s beautiful. EJ: She’s a redhead. La Dawns a redhead, you wouldn’t know it now. Three of our seven children are redheads, and then interestingly, down the line, we have grandchildren and great grandchildren that are redheads. The red hair is very prominent. I used to pull red hair out of my sideburns. I had little pieces of red hair, so that came out also. AC: That’s actually pretty uncommon. EJ: Very much, but I must have had a little bit of red blood in me, and with her red hair, it became quite prominent. It’s really interesting to see our grandchildren and great grandchildren as redheads. We like that. AC: What brought you back to Utah after you graduated and everything? EJ: Well I was raised in Provo, so Provo’s home. We took a long time to get to Utah. My first job was Ontario, Oregon, in the advertising I told you about. Then we moved to Twin Falls, Idaho, and started working for Sears in the appliance department. I became the manager of the Sears Department, so we did a lot of fun things with the appliances. We would carry all these out in the parking lot where people came in, had appliances lined up, and people could look at them as they came into the store. It was a really fun assignment. I learned to love the Sears appliances, they were high quality, mostly built by Whirlpool. AC: From Twin Falls, where do you go from there? EJ: That’s where Mutual of New York found me. I loved tennis, and I created tennis tournaments for young people and sponsored by the junior chamber of 31 commerce. We did a lot of fun things like that for young people. One time we had a banquet for the JCs, it’s called, and they were picking the outstanding young man for the city for that year. I got my camera up ready to take a picture, and they announced that it was me. So I put my camera down, went up and received my award. I received a pin that I still wear. It’s a beautiful pin that was for the outstanding young business man of the year. That was a fun, fun time. AC: You were mentioning off camera of how you went to several different states for training, did you move there or was it just like a training seminar? EJ: No, one month at a time. So the training, Mutual of New York I started in Twin Falls, Idaho, moved to Pocatello, Idaho, and there I was made a manager of that area. Then I would hire and train salespeople. From there, the regional vice-president chose me to go to New York for management school for a year. I was home sometimes once a month, and when I was flying home, La Dawn would be out with the children at the airport to see me. The kids would see that airplane and say, “There’s daddy.” That was funny that our children would say, “Daddy’s in that airplane.” New York was very interesting, and I was quite frightened of the big city, because I had been raised in such small areas. I was very cautious in not getting myself involved in any places. I lived in a motel, and then would walk to the headquarters on 45th and Broadway in New York City, and go to school every day. I’d go early in the morning and type up all my notes from the day before. I had a booklet of the things they trained me, and when I came back to my office, I would teach the things that they taught me, so I’d have the very latest training. 32 Then we went to Fargo, North Dakota. While we were in the school, somebody says, “If you mess up they’ll send you to Fargo.” When they told me I was going to Fargo I said, “What have I done wrong?” They said, “We have a manager that’s retiring, and you’re going to take his place.” I said, “Okay.” We were in Fargo for eight years, and we loved Fargo. There’s a lot of neat situations in Fargo that we learned. We hired a lot of people, I had three secretaries, and my first assignment as a manager all alone was there in Fargo. When they told me that I was going to Fargo I said, “I was raised in the West. I need to get back to my country.” He says, “You stay in Fargo for three years, we’ll send you back West.” Eight years later I was still saying, “What happened to my three year situation?” I met with the Salt Lake manager of Mutual of New York, and he made arrangements for me to come and work with him. Same company, but I was able to come back West. AC: That’s how you got back to Utah then? Okay. EJ: Well, Utah’s offices were in Idaho and Utah. When we came back, I came back alone just to search for a place, because I knew we were being transferred. I picked Twin Falls, Idaho, and I called my wife and children and says, “How would you like to live in Twin Falls Idaho?” They didn’t know anything about it at all, but they says, “Wherever you pick is where we’ll go,” so that’s where we went. We traveled a lot with Mutual of New York. Like; Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco, and it was interesting because they would set me up in a motel, and I would be training underneath the managers there in those towns. I had a great education for how to run a management position. 33 AC: What would you do as a manager over advertising firms and such? EJ: I would run ads in the paper for people to work for us. Anybody that we would hire I’d say, “We’re looking for other people,” and many times they would bring us some of their friends. I became a part time adult sitter because when we hired people who were couples, the husband didn’t have to work because his wife would make enough money he’d become lazy. That was one of the problems of management. AC: When you came back to Utah, do you remember what year that was? EJ: It was a lot of years ago. We landed in Brigham City in 1975, and then we moved down to Ogden Utah in 1985. We’ve been here ever since. AC: What company did you work without here? EJ: With Mutual of New York. When I retired from Mutual of New York, I had a friend that was selling alarm systems for homes. He took me to Salt Lake to interview with his manager and they hired me, so I sold burglar alarm systems in homes. AC: That’s really cool. One final question and then we can turn off the camera, so just to wrap up the interview, how do you feel that your experiences during World War Two affected you for the rest of your life? EJ: I was very devoted to the service. I loved the Navy, I loved the adventure more than anything else. I felt that I had a devotion to be in the service, especially when they were drafting us. When I was seventeen, I lived in Provo, and I would go to Salt Lake with my friends and we’d interview different services. The Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, the Navy, the Army, and I was convinced then that I did not want to be in the Army. The Navy guy says, “Okay, take your draft.” I came to 34 Hill Field for the physical examination, and when I got my draft notice, I just wrote on the big envelope, because I knew what it’d look like, I just wrote join the Navy. I put it back in the mail, and I never did have any problems. I was very fortunate, because once I got out of the Navy, they could draft me anytime they needed me, because I was in the reserves. When I got married, and we went away to school, and I never did get any contact with the military. We were in Los Angeles, but we never heard from them. They had the Korean War during that time, and they didn’t need any submarines, so they didn’t bother me at all. I think you asked me about the benefits, they put me all the way through school, and I get all of my prescriptions through the government. I pay nine dollars a prescription, even if its 200 dollars. They’ve taken care of all that for me. I don’t know how much money I received when I got out, but it was enough to pay the rent and the food and so on. You ever heard of Lady Ellen Clippies? AC: No. EJ: Lady Ellen Clippies are clippies for the hair, to fix your hair. When I was in Los Angeles, I got a part time job, and I worked for a company called Lady Ellen Clippies. They had deodorant spray, and all of those perfume. When I would come back home from my part time job, my wife could tell where I’d been because I smelled of all the perfume. It was not good for her because she was pregnant, and there are still certain smells that reminds her of all the times that I was there. AC: That’s so funny. Thank you so much.