Oral History Program Harold Golde Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 24 August 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Harold Golde Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 24 August 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Golde, Harold, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 24 August 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Hal Golde 12 March 1943 Hal Golde immediately behind Douglas MacArther 1944 Hal Golde 24 August 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Harold Golde, conducted on August 24, 2017 in his home, by Lorrie Rands. Harold discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Sara Kamppi, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is August 24, 2017, we are in the home of Harold Golde, Hal, and we are talking with him about his life memories and World War II experiences for the World War II and Northern Utah project at Weber State University. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and Sara Kamppi is with me as well. Hal I want to thank you again for you time and willingness, and let's just start with when and where you were born? HG: I was born on February 11, 1923 in the Bronx in New York City. LR: I'm not very familiar with New York, so when you said the Bronx where exactly is that? HG: It's one of the boroughs of the five boroughs of New York City. Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and Staten Island are the burrows that comprise New York proper. LR: What are some of your memories growing up there in the Bronx? How long were you there? HG: Well, I have to go back to when I was born. In those days, a midwife delivered the children, and the doctor did visit but only to sign the birth certificate. I was 2 born with double pneumonia. The midwife said to my mother, "Do you have a name for this child? Because it looks to me like he's not going to be with us very long." I was kind of sickly. The doctor hadn't come yet, so my mother said, "Well, no, my husband works at night and we haven't decided on a name for the child." I have to digress here, because I'm old fashioned. I was the first born son, and I was one of those people who grew up with the idea I should have my father's name, and I don't. The midwife said, "Well, were going to have to have the papers ready for when the doctor gets here.” They wanted to have a name and the midwife said, "Well, my husband's name is Harold." So that's how come I got the name Harold. Then she said, "Well, what about a middle name?" My mother said, "Well, my husband is very close to his younger brother William." Bill. My uncle Billy. She said, "So we will give him the middle name of William." Then the family name was Golde. So that took care of that. So the doctor gets there and he sees that this child is very limp. In those days, we had sash windows that dropped down from the top and raised from the bottom. He said, “I want you to put this child in swaddling clothes,” does that sound familiar to you? LR: Ya, just a little. HG: “Put his crib over by that window. I want you to drop the top window down four inches, and I want you to raise the bottom ones four inches. Put his crib right there.” The midwife practically came unglued and whispered to my mother, "I'd get rid of this doctor if I were you. He's nuts." My mother said, "No, we have to 3 believe he's a good doctor and that he's here and he's going to sign the papers and all, and why he is doing this I have no idea." Well, this is the story that was told to me. Because I don't remember it. In those days, we lived in what they call railroad flats like a train. That starts in the back with the kitchen, and all the way through the front room. Each room was heated with a kerosene stove except for the kitchen. The kitchen always had a fire going in the coal or wood stove to cook with and whatever. I think that this doctor saved my life when my mother followed through and did what he asked her to do. The idea there was that the fumes from the kerosene stove would rise through the ceiling because heat rises, and we sucked out from the four inches away from anybody in the room. So I wouldn't be breathing bad air (Kerosene fumes). The cold air would naturally come in and drop, and so I was sucking in pure outside air. This was February, and in New York City it's cold in February. So that's my understanding of how he saved my life, and I wish I would have asked my mother when she told me this story. “Is he still alive? I'd like to meet this doctor who saved my life.” LR: That's a great story. HG: Yes, it is. LR: I'm glad that you shared it. You talk about these railroad flats that you lived in. It was one long row? HG: Yes, each room was like a car on the railroad. 4 LR: Okay, so were they one right next to another? HG: Yes, like you put rail cars together and hook them together. LR: Interesting. HG: But I didn't live there that long. We moved out of New York City to Long Island to the borough of Queens, and we lived in a town called Flushing. Flushing, Long Island. LR: When did you move there? HG: Let's see. I recall living in Longwood Avenue as a child. I had an older sister. I was the first born son. We had two more boys. LR: Alright, so you had four siblings. HG: The third boy was named after my dad, Frederick. He got my dad's name, but he was known as junior. I always hated that junior bit, or I disliked it, I should say. I think I was about five years old. LR: What are some of your memories growing up there in Queens? In Long Island? HG: Well, it's all kind of jumbled up because that's where I met my wife. LR: Really? HG: Who I knew only from my memory. It's clearer now, but at that time I only knew her as a great voice. She sang in the USO, The United Service Organization, and she also sang between school games when we took a time-out. She would sing and entertain both the teams and the spectators, and I knew of her as doing that. 5 We were both also in the school choir. This is the highlight of why she is my precious wife. We attended public schools in New York City and that was P.S. 107 where I went. We didn't have a middle school, so we had Kindergarten through eighth grade. Then we went to high school from there. So this is the school I'm talking about, Bayside High School in Queens. Our high school music teacher she said she would go to the principle and find out if we could have a special type of program. She had to get his permission. She came back with a report that she was very pleased with his reception of it. He said, "It's up to you, that's a good idea do what you think you should." Then she asked the students, “What should we call this?” Somebody in the student body said, "We ought to call it a night of music." She said, "That's a great name, and what we will do is we will have the choir sing and we will have quartets. We will have musical representations of soloists and what not. I have a very strong feeling about Harold Golde and Mary Zarth. Their voices seem to blend." Even though she was the instructor of the school and choir, she didn't always accompany us. She had one of the students who was studying piano as our accompanist. "I'm going to turn it over to you Dorothy to come up with something that you think would be applicable to Harold and Mary's voice." Dorothy said, "I got it right now, ‘The Indian Love Call.’" Even though my dad worked at nights, when he heard about the musical program he wanted to be there and he was there that night. We also had a newspaper that we recorded all of the activities in the school including extracurricular activities. So, that Monday morning, oh no, I've 6 got to digress. At that time, I don't know if you were aware of this but the movie, "In the Street" had a couple, Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, they were very famous singers. They made movies of hit shows. They were known as the singing sweethearts of the silver screen. On Monday morning, after Mary and I sang the Indian Love Call, our newspaper reported that the first night of music was a terrific success. There was a lot of participation, a lot of variety, but the highlight of the program was when Harold Golde and Mary Zarth sang “The Indian Love Call.” It was a smash hit. Monday morning our paper read, “We'd like to call them the singing sweethearts of Bayside High School.” HG: That's how we got our famous name. LR: That is awesome. So this night, you called it a “Night of Music,” do you remember what grade you were in? HG: Oh dear, well that came about as a result of something else in New York City. Mayor LaGuardia used to read the Sunday paper to the kids, and he said, "We should have an all-city chorus. It would be nice to have the kids in high school singing different programs." So he established the group called, "The All City Chorus." On Saturday mornings we went into the city. I forget what high school it was that we were at, but that's where we prepared all of our musical programs. That was before we had the Night of Music at Bayside High. Mayor LaGuardia introduced us on Sunday morning one time and said, "I'm proud to present a group of students from high school. This particular high school is Bayside High 7 School, out in Queens, and they are going to give us a musical program.” I enjoyed that so much and the man that was in charge was Peter Jay Wilhousky. That man could sing, and when he was trying to help the Sopranos phrases or something, he could actually sound like a woman. He had an amazing quality of his voice. He was a great big influence. Now, the thing there was that you had to be in High School to be a part of this group. I enjoyed it so much that when I graduated, I wrote him a letter and said, "Mr. Wilhouski, I enjoyed being a member of the ‘All City Chorus.’ Is it possible for me to come in on Saturdays and sit in with the group? Just because I like doing this." He wrote back that he was very surprised that a student would take time to write him a letter and express his desire, and he wrote, "Well, no you have to be in school. You have to be a sophomore, junior, or senior.” We were in that for that three years. He said, "You've graduated so you can't, but your timing is impeccable.” A young man came from Hollywood with Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians, and he is the vocal coach for Fred Waring’s Pennsylvania chorus, it was all men. He said when he got here, "Well we are in the Big Apple, I suppose they have a great choir in this city." Fred Waring said, "No, not to my knowledge." He said, "What? The Big Apple doesn't have a big choir? We got to do something about that." So he got in touch with Norman Vincent Peal, up at the Marble Collegiate Church on Riverside Drive and said, "I would like to organize a choir that will represent New York City from the five boroughs.” The day that he sent me his letter he said, "You go up there and have an audition with this 8 gentlemen known as Robert Shaw.” Mary was interested in that and so we went up and had our audition there. At the time, some of the people that worked with him, particularly one woman, who was a stand-in for the nun in The Sound of Music. When I went in to sing my selection she left the room for some reason or another and I sang my audition number which was “The Lord is My Light and My Salvation.” She came back in right after I finished singing and Robert Shaw said, "You missed it! We have a Heldentenor on our hands." I said, "Whoa, he's talking about me. I'm a Heldentenor?” That's a heroic tenor, it's not a lyric tenor it's heroic tenor that Wagner uses for his ring cycle. He's telling her that I'm a Heldentenor and I was flattered. We became members of the Collegiate Chorale. It was called that because we auditioned at the Marble Collegiate Church, and we had to re-audition every year to see we improved in our abilities to sight-read, to learn how to phrase. Robert Shaw was a great influence in my life. LR: That is awesome. Alright, so this Robert Shaw, he's the one who started the Collegiate Chorale? HG: Yes. Mayor LaGuardia organized the all city choruses, and the same people in the all city choruses became members of the Collegiate Chorale. Because we all wanted to continue this experience with great music and good instructors. LR: So would this have been about 1940, 1941? HG: Yes, prior to that, because my wife and I sang with the Collegiate Chorale for ten years. I had a hiatus while I was in the service. Because I went clear across the 9 South Pacific and I arrived in the Philippines when McArthur went back to reclaim it. He said he was going to go back, and I was with him. That's that picture up there. LR: Okay, that's really cool. HG: Mary, in the meantime, was singing in the choir while I was gone and then when I came back, we got married and had children. She worked for the Chemical Bank and Trust Company. She had the privilege of having maternity leave, and her boss said to her, "When are you coming back, Mary?" She said, "I'm not." He said, "If you need more time it’s okay, we can arrange that." She said, "No you don't understand, I have a new career, it's called being a mother." So she opted out of her job. She also left singing in the Collegiate Chorale to raise our children. I continued because she said, “There's no reason why you can't still sing.” Then who comes on the scene but Leonard Bernstein. I had some experiences with him in this group. LR: I'm kind of going back just a little bit, what are some of your memories of growing up during the war? HG: Oh, America was united. It was amazing to see children, myself being a child, going around and collecting things that could be recycled. No waste, nothing got thrown out. Women going to work in the factories. It was just unbelievable how united we were as a country. I saw what America is really all about in my youth. LR: Right, I can imagine. So, talking about how united the country was, what is your memory of Pearl Harbor Day? 10 HG: A very sad one for me. Since I was five years old I was building model airplanes. I had a love for airplanes. When Pearl Harbor happened, all of us decided we are going to get in on this. I went down because I love flying and I had an interview with somebody representing the Air Corps. My interview went very well until the physical aspect of it. They determined that I was colorblind and I could not fly. To this day I could kick myself for not saying, “So what? Can I still be in the Air Corps?” In some capacity I could have served, but I was so upset that I couldn't fly that I thought, “Well, then I'll wait until the President calls me.” I waited until I got drafted. I ended up going to Fort Riley, Kansas for my basic training, and there’s another picture up there when we finished our basic training. A group of us was selected to go to radio school there at Fort Riley. LR: So your basic training and radio school were at the same place? HG: Yes, and then we finished there and we boarded a train. What they did in those days they had converted all of the Pullman cars to accommodate the troops. They took out the nice comfortable seats and put in park benches, and we had to sit on those things with our full backpack on and a duffle bag. We got on the train at Fort Riley and as we pulled out our guardian took out the paperwork and said, "We're headed for Pittsburgh." We all cheered and said, "Oh wow! We finished our basic training we are on our way to Pittsburgh so maybe we can get a weekend pass and go home and see our families.” He said, "No, that's not possible. We are going to Pittsburgh, California." They had never heard of such a place, and that's when I first became familiar with Ogden, because as we sat on these park benches all the way from Fort Riley, the route took us to Ogden. 11 We have to get off at Ogden for twelve hours so that the next train coming could go back East, and we were sent to the Ben Lomond Hotel. We got a good night’s sleep, I think we were on the twelfth floor, and I got up early because I was so used to reveille, and I went to the window and looked out and saw a street car going up the hill towards the mountain covered with snow. It was Ben Lomond. That stuck in my mind, so that when I came here years later with my wife, because my son Rick, had convinced us that we should come and live within proximity of somebody in the family, mainly him. He went over to Harrison Regent and introduced himself and said, “I have to ask you to do me favor. Can I take my camera and have someone escort me around to the different facilities here so I can send it to my parents to give them an idea? I've already talked to them about coming here to Ogden and they don't want to, and I thought maybe if I have some way of showing them what it's going to be like they'd change their mind.” Because when he first said that to us, I said to my wife, "Do you want to move?" She said, "No, I love it here in California." We had built our retirement home and we were retired, and became members of the guild at Auburn Faith Hospital, and we worked as volunteers there. We were quite happy, but he seemed to think I had too much on my plate because my wife came down with diabetes, type II, and she needed somebody to take care of her. He sent us this film and we watched it and she said, "It looks nice but do you want to move?" I said, "Not really," but a couple of days later my wife said, “Let’s look at that thing again.” We did and she said, “Maybe we should go out and live in Ogden.” I said, “You sure? Because if we decide to go, we can’t come 12 back.” She said, “No, I’m sure.” I said, “Well, if you want to do it, then I want to do it.” So we came out here and Rick had already established with Harrison Regent what room we were going to be in. We were on the third floor, in 326. It had a balcony, and when we got there, “Come on Dad, I want to take you out on the balcony.” He pointed and he said, “What’s that over there?” I said, “Ben Lomond.” He said, “That’s your mountain.” LR: That’s cool. HG: Yes, he took me to my mountain, because I had told him about this mountain with the street car. LR: That’s really a full circle story. HG: Ya. Isn’t it? LR: That’s great. So, let’s go back. You were in Ogden for twelve hours, did you notice in the train station, did you notice the canteen that was in the train station? HG: I don’t believe I did. LR: Okay, it was right there in the back on the pavilion, right as you walked up the subway stairs. HG: Oh, I don’t recall it, but I probably did. LR: Because there was free coffee and doughnuts and sandwiches and such for soldiers. HG: I know I was very impressed with the station facility itself. It reminded me of Penn Station in New York. 13 LR: When you got back on the train, you go to Pittsburg, California. What were some of the things you did there? HG: That was a replacement training center, and this is a good story to tell you. Like I said, a replacement training center waiting to be assigned to a unit. It came up that we were going to be sent overseas to Hawaii for jungle training, because of this radio school. They needed people that were trained in signaling and message stuff. Flags and what not. Now we have to go back to when I was a little boy. My dad, it seemed like all he did was work, but he did have one love. He loved to go deep sea fishing, and he took this five year old boy out on a fishing cruise. He didn’t get much of a chance to go fishing because he had a sea-sick little boy on his hands. That ruined it for him. I always remembered that. Sure enough we were assigned to the S.S. Matsonia, which was the flagship of the Matson Lines, which had been converted to a ship for troops. So we are going out under the Golden Gate Bridge and I am sitting on the deck there and I see this terrible tribulation in the water. I said, “Oh, here we go again. I’m going to get sea sick.” Well, there was a sailor on board who heard me say that. He said, “No, you’re not.” I said, “Oh, yes I am.” He said, “No, you’re not. I want you to go down to the galley and tell the cook to give you a handful of saltines. I want you to come up and I want you to stand at the bow of the ship with me when we go through this turbulent water. It’s going to go up and down. It’s going to rock this way and rock that way. You keep eating those crackers and keep your eye on the horizon and you won’t even know that the boat is moving that way,” and it worked. I never got sea sick again. 14 LR: That is really cool. HG: But there’s a sad part to that. Because I had that in my mind. I don’t get sea sick, and first thing I’m going to do when I get home is say, “Dad, it’s on me this time. Let’s go deep sea fishing, you won’t have a sick boy on your hands.” But that didn’t happen because God took my dad away from me. He died while I was overseas. So, when anybody mentions, “Do you like to go fishing?” I say, “No.” I couldn’t go fishing unless I had that opportunity to go fishing with my dad. It’s okay, but it’s not a big deal with me. Because I missed out on what I wanted the most. LR: That makes sense. So, you make it to Hawaii, and what happens there? HG: We were sent out into the fields to learn how to jungle fight. I came down with chronic bronchitis, which didn’t mean something terrible to me at the time. They took me to the hospital and I remember that this one nurse showed me how to cough up the stuff that my lungs were trying to get rid of. She had me hang over the edge of the bed and tap my head to the floor. “Wait there for two or three minutes and then come back up.” I would cough up all of this stuff. I said, “How long am I going to have to do this?” She said, “Well, I want you to know what to do because tomorrow your outfit is moving out. You’re going to the South Pacific.” I said, “There won’t be any hospitals.” She said, “No, that’s why I want you to know how to do this so you can yourself.” I said, “I’m going to have to go?” She said, “Yes, they’re leaving tomorrow.” That also tore me apart because while I was in the hospital in the Schofield Barrack, P-51’s were flying over my head every day. My heart was up 15 there and not in the hospital. I wanted to be flying so in my mind I was flying with those guys. I could not get airplanes out of my system. To this day, I can’t. I’ll run out and see a passenger plane and look up at it and they’ll say, “Hal, haven’t you ever seen an airplane before?” I say, “Not that one.” That’s how much I love airplanes. Anyway, I ended up in the 40th Infantry Division, Special troops. We were a combat unit but we were not going to be in active combat. We were going to be a liberation army. We kept going from island to island in the South Pacific. I was in the Solomon Islands and on an island called New Britain. We were trained to use one of our vehicles, which was not going to be in combat, it was just going to be used to help liberate the people in the Philippines. It was like a tank, but instead of having treads it had wheels, and it was a four-man vehicle. Each man had to know how to do all the jobs that were required, so we would shift. If you were the driver you also had a guy next to you who was the assistant driver. Then you had two men standing in the turret. One of them was a spotter with binoculars looking at the terrain to see if he could see anything. That’s where our colorblindness came in, we could detect people that were camouflaged and see them, when nobody else could. So that was a blessing being colorblind. We each had to be able to do one of the four jobs. One day, they read your mail to make sure you’re not giving any, what do you call that? LR: They censor the mail. HG: Censorship. I wrote that I hate war, and I’m sick and tired of kill or be killed, because I could not kill another human being even if he is my enemy, and live a happy life. I’m sick and tired of this. So they took me out of that situation and 16 made me a Chaplain’s assistant. That’s why I ended up being a Chaplain’s assistant, who went ashore with MacArthur. I didn’t ask for a transfer they said, “This man is so gung-ho for his country but he just doesn’t want to kill anyone. We need that kind of a person to further moral.” That’s what I ended up doing. I loved it. LR: It’s the series of events that happened that put you with MacArthur. It’s just crazy if you think about it. Are you in this photograph? HG: Yes, yes I am. LR: How did you come about being with him on that landing? HG: Well, the flotilla of ships that were in the Pacific is unbelievable. I’ve got tapes of it showing all of these ships of every kind, we were on Liberty ships. They were thrown together, it’s a wonder if they even floated. That’s why they were called liberty ships, therefore, the liberation army. Wherever we went we were relieving the active marines or airman or whoever to go home or go to a rehab center. That was the idea. Then we landed in Leyte in Manilla. We went all the way down to Manilla relieving the people that were prisoners. But the Japanese lost contact, they didn’t know that the Atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, they didn’t know that a surrender had taken place. They thought they were still fighting a war, so they were taking shots at us. The man that replaced me—I’ll never forget this. They were going down a road in this vehicle that I explained to you. The guy that replaced me, as they went under a tree there was a sniper up above who dropped a hand grenade into the turret. This guy knew that he didn’t have a chance to get it and throw it out, so he laid himself on top of it and it took his life. 17 But he saved three others even though we weren’t at war anymore. It was sad that these Philippine and Japanese soldiers didn’t know that the war was over. When I saw the Fox Movietone News pictures of the Atom bomb. I said, “Oh my God, what have we done?” Then I realized, God was on our side because he took all of those German scientists and made them want to go to America and forget Hitler. They left and that’s how come we had the atomic bomb before they had it. Because that’s all that Hitler would have needed, and he was really strutting his stuff. LR: What was it like walking with MacArthur on to Leyte? What was the feeling? HG: Well, that was another thing, my dad was a great admirer of MacArthur, because he participated to a certain degree. At home he was an air raid warden and he was a commander of the local American legion post. They knew all about what MacArthur wanted to do. I still say to this day we would have never had the Korean War and we certainly would not have had the Vietnam War if Harry Truman would have listened to MacArthur, but he thought MacArthur was grandstanding. When we landed there in the Philippines I saw those people. They wanted MacArthur to be their president, that’s how much they admired him. My feeling was, “This guy is okay.” I think he got a dirty deal. LR: So were you with him as he continued his progress? HG: Well I wasn’t with him. He went on ahead, but he was in command. He was our top dog—top general. LR: After you landed with him on Leyte, How long were you on Leyte? 18 HG: Well, I don’t really know how long it was. All I know is that I ended up in South Korea, awaiting to go home. That was another good thing that happened to me. I’m thinking when my number came up to go I was going to go back to the West Coast, because I fell in love with California, we built our retirement home there and everything. They took us down through the Panama Canal to go home. Which I probably would never had seen the Panama Canal if they hadn’t. So that was a plus watching us go through those locks. It was in September, we came out on the other side and headed up towards the east coast. I think we were going to Maryland or one of the east coast states to be discharged. That proved I wasn’t sea sick because that ship was doing all kinds of dances. I kept saying I lost my dad and look at this I don’t get seasick. When we got to the east coast, they were still trying to have us re-up. My status at the point when I left Korea I could have become a sergeant, and they said, “Well, you’re going home so we don’t need to.” I said, “Ya, but if you have a colonel and he gets to a point of having a promotion, he gets his promotion which means more mustering out pay and a higher rank. I’m just a T-5, I could become a T-4.” They said, “Well, it doesn’t work that way.” When we got there, the next morning the guy said, “I have to do this, I have to ask you if would be interested in reassigning yourself?” I put my face right in front of his and I said, “NO.” All because of that again, why didn’t I get my promotion? So I said, “No.” That was the end of my military career. LR: Do you remember about what year you were discharged? Because if you came home in September of 1945, were you discharged soon thereafter? 19 HG: Well, maybe it was later than that because I was discharged on New Year’s Day, so 1946. LR: When you came home, when did you find out that your father had died? HG: I was overseas. LR: Did they get a letter to you? HG: Ya, they got a notification from the American Red Cross I think. They told me that my father had passed away and I said, “Would you double check that?” Because my mother had a tendency to be high strung. I said, “Check and find out if it was my mother.” They checked and came back to me and said, “No, it was your father.” I said, “What did he die of?” They said, “A heart attack, but we are arranging a way for you to go home.” I said, “Oh really? If I go home, do I have to come back?” He said, “Well ya, because we need to rehabilitate these people in the Philippines. So you are still in the Army.” I said, “Well, I go back I’m not coming back here.” He said, “Well you can’t run and hide because we will come and get you and then you may be brought up on desertion charges. You could be facing a firing squad.” I said, “Oh boy, my dad would not like that, it would be a disgrace. Okay, then I will stay.” LR: Then you head home. When you did get home, who was there to meet you? Your mother? Was your wife there? She wasn’t your wife at the time. HG: No, she was my intended. She wrote beautiful poetry and she sent these things to me in parchment paper. I wrote back and said, “Boy, that person that you’re mentioning, who is the lucky stiff? Because it sounds to me like you’re praising a man that you have a great admiration for.” She wrote back and said, “I hate to 20 say this, but it’s you, stupid,” and then I knew. My dad had said when he first met Mary—while he was still alive and I wasn’t overseas yet or anything, when we were in the Collegiate Corral and what not. He said as we left, because I wanted him to meet Mary, I heard him say to my mother, “That’s the girl he’s going to marry.” I said, “Did you hear what my dad said?” She said, “No.” I said, “He said, you’re the girl I’m going to marry.” She said, “What does he know that we don’t?” I said, “I have no idea.” But it was true. LR: So when did you get married? HG: June 22, 1947. LR: You waited a little bit. HG: Ya, well my mother-in-law didn’t believe in long engagements. We wanted to get married right away and she said, “No, you need to get adjusted.” I got out in January, and we got married the following June. Six months, something like that. LR: I’m sitting here thinking, that was a year and a half? So you got home on New Year’s Day of 1946, and then you married in 1947? Or did you come home in 1947? HG: No, I think I came home in 1946. LR: Getting adjusted, a year and a half isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things. HG: See some of that stuff is not concrete in my mind. It’s all befuddled. LR: I can appreciate that. After you were married, how long before you and your wife moved out to California? HG: This picture was our 50th wedding anniversary. Wow, I can’t recall. 21 LR: It’s all good. But you were in California for quite some time, because you retired there? HG: We retired there, and in fact we built our home and had to commute from it because my wife worked for the city of Roseville. She processed all the building permits. They knew that we were going to build a house and one of the guys came into to get his building permit for a project he was doing. He said, “Mary, if you guys are going to build your home. You better do it now, because there is going to be a building crunch. We aren’t going to be able to get building materials. You need special kind of stuff for that house that you are putting up.” So we did. We built our house and hadn’t retired, so we commuted for five years from Alta to Roseville. She worked for the city and I worked for the school district. LR: Okay, and what did you do with the school district? HG: Well, I had three hats. We had seven schools and one central kitchen, which was the main place where they cooked the food. So, I delivered the lunches to each of the seven schools. I delivered the payroll when payday came. I delivered all of the school supplies. I was in charge of the warehouse where all of the stuff was taken care of. I had a run in with Frank Cursey is his name. He was the head honcho for the supplies. He was in charge of the building. He said to me, “When you get done, when you’ve finished your last run, I need to have you stop here and wash the trucks or something.” I said, “Frank, I can’t. I just can’t do that.” I went to the headquarters and I said to the business manager, his name was Barry Callister, “I got to get something straightened out, Frank wants me to do this and that and the other thing and I haven’t got time to do it and still take care 22 of my job. So I want to know who my boss is?” He said, “We will have you come in, and our cook, Mrs. Kirby, Frank, and I will be there.” He asked Frank what was the problem he was having with me. Frank told him that he’s not cooperating. He asked Mrs. Kirby, “Do you have any problems with Harold?” she said, “Not a one. That guy is so dependable he seems to know what the next move is supposed to be. He has no hang-ups with me.” I said, “How about you Barry?” he said, “Well, I know you are always on time. I know you know your job. You just keep doing what you think you should do, and Frank leave him alone.” LR: Simple. I wanted to ask a final question before we close this and that is: How do you think your experiences and your time during World War II shaped and affected the rest of your life? HG: How do I think it shaped? Well, I grew up. I take life seriously because I think I did pretty good for a kid that was born in the Bronx. Who incidentally saw Babe Ruth smack one out. LR: Nice. That’s a good memory. HG: Well, to sum it up, what happened to me was that I served God and then my country, because he gave us the country. That’s about it, to summarize. LR: That’s great. I appreciate that. Alright, well thank you, Hal for your time. HG: Hey, my pleasure. LR: It has been fantastic. I hope this all turns out good. HG: Well this is a new experience.