Oral History Program JC Robinson Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 6 July 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah JC Robinson Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 6 July 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: Robinson, JC, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 6 July 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. JC Robinson 6 July 2017 1 Abstract: The Following is an oral history interview with JC Robinson, conducted on July 6, 2017 in his home, by Alyssa Chaffee. JC discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Sara Kamppi, the video technician, and JC’s wife Carrie were also present during this interview. AC: Today is July 6, 2017. About 10:10 a.m. We are in the home of Mr. JC Robinson speaking with him about his experiences during World War II and as well as his life experiences. My name is Alyssa Chaffey and I’ll be conducting the interview along with Sara Kamppi. So first, I would like to know where and when were you born? JR: I was born in Mountain Green, Utah. I was born in the hospital—Dee hospital on Harrison Boulevard and about 22nd or 23rd street. It’s a park now. AC: Oh interesting. JR: I was born on the 30th of March and they didn’t have any rooms for my mother— any labor rooms. So they put her on a stretcher and put her on the floor and that’s where I was born—on a stretcher on the floor. AC: Oh my goodness, I bet… does your mom tell that story to you a lot? JR: Ya, she told me. AC: Well you better be grateful. JR: Ya, I can’t remember too much about that. AC: Of course. What year were you born? JR: 1937. AC: So that hospital isn’t there anymore? JR: No. It’s a park. 2 AC: Interesting. That’s too bad it’s not there anymore. Tell me about your childhood. What it was like growing up in… you said it was green? JR: Well we moved out of Mountain Green six months after I was born. Because my dad couldn’t make a living up there. There was just not enough jobs. We came down and we lived at 32nd and Monroe is the address I know. Our neighbor, to the south, was Eli Rukavina he was an Italian fellow. There was a grain field to the south of us. I don’t know who owned that. My grandad owned the house that we lived in. He charged my dad $25 a month for rent. They don’t charge that anymore but my mom moved out she said she couldn’t stay up there. We were staying in a one room cabin at Robinson’s camp, up there in Mountain Green. She said, “This isn’t the kind of life we are going to live.” She moved out and Dad didn’t come with her for about a month. Then he decided he better get out because he couldn’t make any money up there either. She could make more money being a car hop—getting tips from being a car hop up there. Which she’d run out and they’d want a beer and they’d give her a nickel or a dime in tips. She was making more money that way than my dad was working twelve hours a day. But then my aunt wanted the job and she wanted to drive clear up from Clearfield and work the car hop job and go home. My mom said, “If she wants the job she takes it all or none.” So we moved to 32nd and Monroe… I don’t remember too much about 32nd and Monroe it was just bits and pieces. There was a little girl that lived on the next street up. I snuck through the trees and over the fences and went up to see her—just to play. Her dog bit me, so I decided I wouldn’t go up there anymore. I always used to go over—I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a 3 well. It was an open pitted hole in the ground. We called them a Pollywog—down in there. I was scared to death of him. I’d sneak over the edge and look over at him and I’d run like the dickens when I’d finally see him. But I was only about three years old then. Then the war broke out and I have a poem that I memorized—first time I’d ever heard it. I don’t know if you want that—hear any part of it. But it goes, “When I was a wee-wee tot my mother took me from my warm warm cot. And she placed me on this cold cold pot and me wee wee wither I wanted to to or not.” And that is actual of what happened to me. She pulled me out of bed and sit me on- In those days there was a pot under the chair and from that minute on, I was cold all day for some reason. We went, it was cold—Oh Lord it was cold. We went to a home and when I walked in, Mother left and this woman took me back to the washroom and she said, “Just stand there.” Then as soon as this man—he was drinking coffee and had his legs crossed. I was waiting for him to say hello. But he never spoke. Then when he left she would open this door and there were stairs going down to the basement. She took me down there and went over to a little room over in the corner. It had one-by-twelve boards across the door. So to get in there they had to lift me up over these one-by-twelves—which are three feet high. Then she shut the door and she done up the latch. I could hear her put the latch on and I looked through the crack in the wood and watched her go over to the stairs. She walked about three fourths of the way up, turned the light out, and shut the door, and that’s where I stayed all day. When that light went out and she shut that door, I put my hand in front of my face and I couldn’t 4 see it. And that bothered me. The other thing that bothered me was I wondered where my brother was. Why are they separating me from my brother and putting me in a coal bin. I didn’t even know where he was. Well, he was in school—I found out later—years later. He had gone to school and I was just extra baggage and they took me to a babysitter. She didn’t want nothing to do with me. But, I don’t’ know what time of the day it was but there was a certain time of the day a beam of light would come from the foundation. It would come over and it would hit this wall. It was about this long—about an inch long. And I could see specks of dust flying through that beam of light. It was the sun coming through the crack in the foundation up there. And I’d try and catch those specks of dust. That’s what I played with. The beam of light went down the wall and part way across the floor and then disappear. It was a terrible disappointment for that light to disappear, because then I had nothing. No light, nothing. I just stood there for—I don’t know how many hours. Until my mom was due to come and pick me up. She worked at the arsenal, loading—I think it was 0.37 mm ammunition. My dad worked at the arsenal, which is now the west area. He repaired jeeps, trucks, and rifles. He worked with a man by the name of P.O. Ackley. Probably one of the world’s greatest gun makers. He’d make a rifle and they’d take it down where Ogden Bay is and they’d shoot over towards Antelope Island, and if that gun didn’t shoot where Ackley aimed it, he’d take it back to the shop. They had what they called a press. And he’d stick that barrel in that press and it would turn that barrel right in a circle like that. His boss would get mad at him and he’d tell him he’s got a plus or a minus to work with. Ackley told him he says, “No, I do not have a plus or a 5 minus to work with.” He says, “I have a kid in the jungle that when he points this gun at somebody and it goes off. I want it to go right where he’s pointing it.” They fired him. Instead of letting him make sniper rifles, they fired him. And he became one of the world’s greatest gun makers. All of the kings in Saudi Arabia and that country down in there would order the rifles from him. He’s a story all by himself. But I don’t know how long I was in that coal bin. I had my gunnery sergeant. You want to get that little book? I don’t know if it was a week or a month or what. Time didn’t mean anything to me. I was just taken down there in that bin and the lights went out and that was the end of it. But this is my gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps. And he says, “You don’t know what hunger is.” Well I never had anything for breakfast except cereal and that don’t stay with you very long. And I didn’t eat until that night, however when my mom fixed the evening meal. I told him, “No, I don’t know what hunger is.” He was a Marine with the second raider battalion. When you study the Marine Corps you’ll find I’ll be there. Highly respected— Marines. They’re highly trained and I told him I said, “No, Gunner, I don’t know what hunger is. But I know what solitary confinement is.” I says, “You don’t.” I says, “You got something on me—you were 19 years old. I got something on you—I was 4.” So we got along pretty good. He was… It’s sad you haven’t interviewed him. But I didn’t know that you guys were doing this kind of work or I would have called you and told you. AC: Oh is he still around? JR: He’s dead now. But, there’s a picture in here of his trophies. That helmet there at the back of the file of material he’s got—I gave it to him. I told him I had a 6 Japanese helmet and he grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me up and he says, “I got to have that.” He says, “I’ll buy it, I’ll buy you drinks, I’ll buy you whatever you want.” I says, “Well, Gunner, I don’t drink and I don’t want your money.” And I says, “It’s not for sale.” So when Sargent Baxter brought me home, I just went in the shed out there and picked it up and I said, “Here give this to the Gunner, he earned it. I didn’t.” So, he took it out and gave it to him. It’s in his collection there, that’s the one thing he never got that he wanted. AC: Where did you get that Japanese helmet from? JR: Pardon? AC: Where did you get that Japanese helmet from? JR: I got it at an auction. AC: I see it has a bullet hole through it so I’m guess the Japanese gun JR: It does it has a bullet hole right over the left ear. He said, “No, fooling.” He said, “I shot a Jap, sitting right there. Right there.” He said, “On Iwo Jima.” He says he came over and he had his samurai sword up high and this guy that he was talking to. He came up from behind him and that guy looked up at him and then he ducked his head. He said that how the sword came down, put a crease in that Marine’s helmet. Darrell said he just raised up his rifle and that guy turned his head that way and he shot him. I said well there’s the helmet for you. AC: So you were four when World War II broke out? JR: I was four years old when I went into the coal bin. The way they found me was they were delivering coal. There was a fellow—I don’t know, he opened this door on the side of the basement and he was shoveling coal in on top of me. He finally 7 seen me standing there and he disappeared. He stopped shoveling coal and she come running down them steps and took me over in the other side of the basement and sat me on a stool until he off loaded his coal. Then she put me back in that coal bin. Locked me back in that. That was after—ya, that was after he had unloaded his load of coal. Shortly after that then I got out. When my mom took me out of there. I went out to the arsenal, they had taken one of the buildings and they hung up—they had made a frame. They hung up a big canvas to separate us kids from what they were doing on the other end of it. There was about thirty of us kids in there. They took me in the door and this woman come over. She said, “Take your hat and your coat and hang it on the hangers over there.” She said, “There’s a tool box or a toy box over there. Go pick you out a toy and play with it.” But there were three women in there. They didn’t bother us, they just let us kids play. I went over to that tool box—I’m going to go get the toy I picked out. This is the toy I found in there. Only it was a toy, it wasn’t the real thing like this. But as long as I had that in my hand, I was content to be out there at that nursery or whatever you want to call it. Of course they were just made out of plastic. After the third day this woman came over and she took it away from me. She said, “You cannot play with the same toy, day-after-day-after-day.” She took it over to this other kid and gave it to him. Took a fire engine away from him and gave me the fire engine and gave him the pistol. So I watched him real close and the minute he laid that pistol down he had the fire engine and I had my pistol back. I don’t know why a contentment came over me to have that in my hand. So long as I had that in my hand I was content to be there. At the end of the day 8 they put our coats on and they’d send us out to a bus. They’d bus us kids down to the Roy gate—which is nothing now like it was then. It was run by the army not by the air force, it was run by the army. This guard there, he had this pistol on his hip and I always wanted to go over and touch that but I was scared of him. I didn’t want to get too close to him. I just would stand a little ways from him and watch him. After a while my mom would come and take us out of that guard house and we’d go home. AC: Did both of you parents work at the arsenal? JR: Yes. AC: And you said they were both making…. JR: Well, she made—you seen on board a ship—you seen those guns that shoot like this. They are 0.37 millimeters. She made those bullets that shot out of them. They came in a packet of five. Those guys would load it by setting a pack of five in there. He’d reach down and get another packet of five and set in there. She made them. But I don’t know if she made them for the navy or if she made them for the army. That part I never did ask. AC: And what did your father do? JR: Well, he repaired trucks, jeeps—he worked with P.O. Ackley with rifles and machine guns etc. Small arms ordinance is what they call it. After that dad transferred up to the east area? Ya, east area. He got into the machine shop up there. But, my mom retired—she quit and stayed home with us kids. Now, as kids the war wasn’t over yet. We’d get cardboard boxes and we’d write Hitler’s name on it and then we’d burn it. That was our attack on the German nation or 9 whatever—our enemy the German’s. Or we’d take a cardboard box and write TOJO on there and that was his house and we’d burn that down. That was our little contribution to the war effort. AC: That’s great. So before the war, what did your dad do? Was he still a mechanic? JR: Well, he was a bus driver for the Morgan school District. If you go through Weber Canyon there’s an iron bridge over on the right hand side. Our store—we had a little store—it was right across the road from that bridge. My grandmother and my grandad was there. My grandad, he had a broken back—a sleigh got loose from a guy and the tongue came down a hill and the tongue hit the bottom of the hill and swung around and it hit my grandad in the back and broke his back. He was a cripple from then on. He just could never work—do any man’s work. He’d try and get my dad and his two brother to do the work outside but he couldn’t go out in the winter because the cold would get into this back. My dad stayed with him, Uncle Bob went to Las Vegas building Hoover Dam and my Uncle Cliff went to California—I don’t know what he did down there. But he went to California. They both wrote letters to my dad and told him to come down and get a job down there. But, Dad couldn’t figure out what to do with his dad. He was just a cripple. He was laying in bed and I know my dad hated it. Of course this was before the war. But, he told my dad, he said, “Come and take this rock out from under my back.” And he says, “I’ll roll over and you can take whatever is under there.” Well, it wasn’t a rock, it wasn’t anything, it was his back had a boil on it. And it stuck out about that far. It was—what’s that infection? Staph infection. Well my grandad told him to take a knife and heat it and lance it. They’d drain it and then 10 wrap it up. That’s the worst possible thing you can do to a Staph infection. Within about seven days my grandad was dead. So dad always figured he kind of killed him. After that, he couldn’t make enough money to survive on. Because he had to give what he made at the store to grandma so she could survive. Then he’d work for the farmers and they wouldn’t pay very much. Then his brother-in-law, Uncle Fred needed a job so he said, “Come up to the store, stay in one of the cabins and you can drive the school bus.” As these things chipped away at his income, he was getting less money and less, so he had to come to Ogden to get better employment. And he started driving a dump truck. I used to know that guy’s name but I don’t know it anymore. He drove for him for a while, and that’s when the war broke out. Dad got a job at Hillfield—the arsenal. He was making awful good money then. That’s when I went into solitary confinement in the coal bin. I call it solitary because when that woman put me in there she didn’t come down to give me a drink of water or a sandwich or nothing. It was just—I was there by myself for 8-10 hours a day. AC: Did your mother know that you were going through that? JR: No, she didn’t. Not for a while. But when she found out she was pretty upset. But you can’t do that to a small child. It affects you up here. You never ever forget being abused. It doesn’t matter if you are a male or female. Once you’re abused you’ll never—you ask a question about anything at the time that I was in that coal bin, and I can answer you almost to the second of what I did in there. Which was nothing. I stood in one place, because I couldn’t see to move. If I moved I’d stumble on some coal and fall down. So I just stood in one place. You’ll have to 11 try that sometime for 8 or 10 hours a day. I’ll brag a little bit, I never wet my pants, or nor mess my pants. I got them two things to brag about. I didn’t do either one of them. I don’t know why. I have no idea why the body function just left me I guess. But I never soiled my pants at all. But I guess that’s one reason Mom didn’t know what was going on. It would have been a sign for her to ask that woman, “How come he’s messed his pants?” But, I never did, so there was nothing for her to question that woman about. AC: I’m curious, what do you remember of the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked? Do you have any memory of that? JR: I only remember that my mother was very—I’ll say upset. Because Dad was—I think the minimum age for drafting men into the service was thirty-three. I’m not sure. Thirty-three or thirty-four. My dad was thirty-two. And she was afraid that my dad would be called into the service. Which something she didn’t want. I guess no woman wants to see her husband leave. But, instead, he fixed trucks for them guys and fixed jeeps—repaired them. What he did with rifles I don’t know—and machine guns I don’t know. He never did say very much about them. Other than him and P.O. Ackley would go out to shoot at Antelope Island. When that rifle wouldn’t hit that target right where P.O. Ackley wanted it to, he’d write down the serial number and how many inches to the right, to the left, up or down, it was. When he got back to the shop, he’d just take that rifle and he’d put it back in the press—it’s just rollers. They are off-set rollers. So when it’d bent that barrel it would just bend it until it when in a circle. Boy, his foreman would get mad at him. He’d just really get mad. He told him, he said, “No.” he says, “I know I have 12 a plus or minus.” But he says there’s a kid out in that jungle someplace and when he raises that rifle up to shoot, I want that bullet to go exactly where that kid shoots. Where he aims. He says, “If he misses three inches to the left, then that’s my fault. If he misses three inches to the right, then that’s my fault. And then it’s your fault too.” So he said, “I won’t make bad material and send it out. Not on plus or minuses. It’s got to be on the button, or it won’t make it.” And that was his philosophy, he didn’t make many rifles. But, what he did make were deadly on. There was no up or down, left and right. Once he sighted it in, it had better shoot in that same place every time. AC: Did you ever meet him? JR: I didn’t meet him. I wanted to. But he retired about the time I got enough money for him to have a rifle built. I wanted a 6 millimeter built—which is a twenty-four caliber. But he retired, just got too old and said he couldn’t see good enough to get the dimensions just right. But I can show you one of the rifles that he may have built, if you want to see it? AC: Ya, definitely. JR: Do you want to get it? The one in there. It’s—I don’t know if I should speculate on the value of it. I’ve heard that it’s about fifteen to two thousand dollars for the gun. And I paid seventy five dollars for it. AC: That’s fantastic. JR: If you ever heard of the proverbial dumb Mexican. I ran into him. Don’t let that go… I don’t mean that to be derogatory. But this Mexican did not know what he had. It’s right below the safe. Oh, there it is. This is the type of a rifle my dad was 13 working on. Fact, at the beginning of the war, this was the type of rifle that was issued. But then they went to the M1 Garand, which was a semi-automatic. But this is called an 03-A3. And if you look right there it will tell you that it’s an 03-A3. When they first came out this site was right up here. But the Marine Corps didn’t like it. Because it was an open site. This is a peep site. It’s a little itty-bitty hole you have to look through right there. The Marine Corps says this wasn’t as accurate as this one was. They wanted to move from there back to here. When they did that it made it from an 03 to an 03-A3. I don’t know what the purpose of that was. But this is almost a new rifle. There’s no jungle marks—dings, dents, or scratches. It has a RIA stamp on it, right there. It’s hard to see. But RIA stands for Rock Island Arsenal. The one with an “O” on it is Ogden. It will have an “O” and then it will have an initial below it for the guy who overhauled it and made it—it was like brand new. So this has been worked on once and I can’t tell you when or who did it. His initials aren’t on there. It’s just RIA on there. But this little switch right here—that there will let you take the bolt out if you put it right there. I think your grandad will know that. If you push that all the way down it will let it go back all the way back and then close. If you put all the way up there it’ll come down but you won’t be able to close it. Now that tells you you’re out of ammunition—so long as that there is a bullet to push forward. That’ll go forward like that but once it comes down and that snaps then you’re out of ammunition. So it’s just a matter of whether you want the gun to tell you it’s out of ammunition or whether you are smart enough to figure that’s five bullets gone and shoot it yourself. If you ever see that movie “Sargent York”? If you have enough time we 14 will show it to you. He shot one of these and it was very deadly with it. But he didn’t like this peep site. He wanted the site up front because he said if he held it up he could see what was on either side of his rifle. And this one here when you look through here you can only see what’s through there. But this is what my dad worked on. AC: So it only held five bullets at a time? JR Five bullets. Yep. AC: That’s a lot of loading. JR: Well, the one that replaced that held eight. It held a clip of eight. It was an M1- durant. I’ve got one but it’s a son of a gun to get to—I’ve got it hid. AC: That’s really interesting. JR: Well, I asked each one of my boys and my daughter—I had four of these. I bought one or two from the Civilian Marksmanship Program. That’s where the government sells it to these people in Ohio. Then they’ll sell it to you. It’s called the CMP. About two—they weren’t the 03-A3’s they were just the 03’s. The 03 is the year it was patented in 1903. But it wasn’t registered until 1917. I don’t know why they put an 03 on there, and not ’17 but they didn’t. AC: Interesting, those are really cool. JR: It was just their way of doing things I guess. AC: You mentioned earlier in the interview that you and your friends—to help contribute to the war, you would write Hitler’s name on a box and burn it and such. Did you have a pretty big awareness of the war and what was going on? 15 JR: Yep, you bet. I had an uncle, Buck Durfey, he was Anzio. When they landed in Anzio. The rest of my uncles seemed to be of an age that they weren’t at the age where they could be drafted. I have a cousin, he’s related to Howard Hughes, he volunteered to go in the Navy. That airplane that lands on the ocean. It’s got the two motors up here and then it’s got two pontoons. He was in one of those. He was a radio operator in one of those. His sister, Norma Hughes, was going to be my sister. That is to say my dad and mom was going to adopt her. Because her mother abandoned her and Bob, down there in Los Angeles. When they found out that they’d been put in a—I guess it was a Catholic school for children. They all wore a certain dress, a certain skirt, a certain shirt with a black tie. The boys had a certain uniform to wear. When my grandad found out about that, he sent my uncle Kenneth down to get them and bring them back up here. But Grandpa asked Mother if she could take care of Norma, he would take care of Bob. We hated to split them up, but there was no other way we could do it. Financially, everybody wasn’t stable enough. You haven’t asked me a question. SK: I do have a couple. JR: You have a couple? SK: Let’s go back to your parents. What was your mother and father’s name? JR: Her name was Alice Marvel Olsen Robinson, or AMOR as I called her. She didn’t like that though. I didn’t call her very often. SK: And what about your father? 16 JR: James Earl. I don’t know the age—my mother’s age when I was born. We were kind of spread out. My brothers was five years older than I am. My sister was seven years younger than I was. So my mom spread us out for quite a ways. SK: And you mentioned that you when you were younger you had an Italian neighbor? What do you remember about him? JR: Who? SK: Your neighbor that was Italian. JR: Oh, Eli Rukavina. I was scared to death of him. Because he spoke broken English with that Italian accent to it. He was the nicest guy in the world actually. But for a little kid and somebody who would speak Italian, it scared you to death. I just didn’t want to be anywhere near him. Whenever my dad would talk to him, I’d hide behind my dad—I’d hold on to either side of his pants like that. But he had a daughter named Rose, a beautiful woman. My word that girl was beautiful. He knew it and he kept her in the house a lot. She couldn’t date too much. I never knew what happened to Rose. All I know is that when I seen her, what a pretty woman. Even as a young kid. I went home one day—and with us kids Roy Rodgers’ wife was the most beautiful woman in the world. He was king of the cowboys and she was queen of the cowgirls I guess. Anyway, I went home one day, there was the most beautiful woman talk to my mother. First hand, like they were mother and daughter. It was—Norma Hughes and my mother. My mother raised her until she was sixteen. Then she married some guy that had a dairy up along the Utah/Idaho border. But, he thought maybe he could chase all of the women up there so she divorced him. Married another guy—didn’t last very long. 17 Then she married Kenneth Baird. Ya, Kenneth Baird. He died and she married his brother, Var. Then they moved to Richmond—Richland Washington. Norma started a business up there—a café. She was a very industrious woman. She was very industrious. She’d start a business of some sort and it would be a success no matter what. She’d stay with it until it was successful. I sure miss her. I know I teased her a lot. Anyway. Back to the coal bin again. What did you need to know there? SK: Do you remember the woman’s name that… JR: No, I don’t. No, I don’t. I don’t even remember what she looked like. I don’t even want to remember what she looked like. SK: It’s probably a good thing. JR: She wasn’t a beautiful woman I can tell you that. She just grabbed a hold of the back of my coat and down the stairs I went. She locked me in the coal bin and then she was up them stairs and gone. And that was about the extent of her association with me. SK: So when did you start school? JR: When did I start what? SK: When did you start elementary school? JR: I failed the first year because I had start a fever. I started school, and I went through the first grade twice. Most of the first grade. And I got Scarlett Fever and I was out for so long they decided I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the kids. So, they held me back and I started the first grade again. I went to Washington Terrace Elementary. And if I could find that principal of that school—to this day— 18 I don’t care how old he is. I’d kick him so hard in the pants it just turn collar down on his shirt to take crap. I shouldn’t say that but. Me and him did not get along. He was going to have me thrown in jail and I would stay there for years. You don’t say that to a kid in the first grade. There was another kid in there—what it was I was late for school. My mom didn’t get me on my way soon enough. But I had—that has nothing to do with the war. I fell off a what they call the ice truck. It was doing—I would guess between 30-35 miles an hour when I fell out of the back of it. Did you ever go to Washington Terrace? You wouldn’t know where Navy was? They still call it that to do this day. We lived in A-court of Navy Way. I think I started bouncing on that road at B-court and I didn’t stop until I got to C-court. Anyway, these two women were standing on the corner waiting for the bus. Their hand went up to their face like that. Kind of going “Oh.” I looked at them— as I looked at them everything went yellow. Then it went a little deeper yellow and then it went orange. Then I couldn’t see those women anymore because everything was red. Because the blood was running down in my eyes. I knew I didn’t want them women to get a hold of me. I don’t know why, but I just did not women to get a hold of me. So I went over to the edge of the road which didn’t have a gutter, it was just pavement and then sand. I knew that if I kept my left food on the pavement and my right foot on the sand, I could go down the road and find A-court. Or I could turn in to go to A-court. Ours was the center house of the horseshoes—Houses were like this and they would—ours was the center one. I can remember turning into A-court—I remember running into a dump truck. It was parked alongside the road. It was about as high as the top of my head and 19 I bumped into it. Then I knew where I was so I felt my way along because I couldn’t see. Then I went up and I knew this one house had a fence it was difficult to cross and I went up and crossed over until I found that fence. Then I somehow managed to crawl over it twice. Then I think the boiler was still on—the later part of the war. Mom would always have the newspaper and it would always have the battles we were fighting over in the islands. A picture of it. Where our lines were and the Japanese lines were. Anyway, I felt my way over to the house and our house had two steps to get in. I can remember going up the two steps and I don’t remember anything until I was walking to school when that principal came over and got after me. That’s when I woke up. That sounds goofy, that you’re asleep—so to speak. You just don’t know where you are. You don’t recognize anything. I looked at the mountain up there—there’s a place where the rocks just go into the hill. Right behind Weber State. I looked up there to that and now I know where I am at. Then I started walking straight toward that school and here come that knot headed principle out of there. I don’t care if he’s 150 years old today, I’d still kick him in the pants. AC: What were you doing in the back of an ice truck by the way? JR: Oh, they used to deliver ice to you in an ice bucket. We didn’t have refrigerators. We had ice boxes. If you wanted ice, you put a sign in your window that said ice. He’d drive along until he’d seen that ice. Then he’d stop and deliver the ice to you. Well us kids would jump on the back and hold onto the back. We’d ride— soon as it would stop we’d jump off and run on the side of the roads, you know? Innocent little lambs then he’d get in his truck and we’d hear him put it into gear 20 and then we’d run back over. There was one kid, Clyde, he said, “Let’s see who is the bravest of all of us. See who hangs on to truck the longest.” I was the bravest. The jumped off—he didn’t last a second. I was on there for ten seconds down the road almost to Stimpson’s store. Just before the roads divided, there was Stimpson’s store right there. I think—I almost made it to where that divided before I let go. AC: And when you let go, that’s when you were bouncing down the road? JR: Ya, that’s when I paved that road with my face. There wasn’t a piece on me that didn’t have a scab. Nowhere. My back, my rear-end, my knees, my toes, my hands—everything had a scab on it. And I don’t remember being taken to a doctor. Mom said she laid me on the couch and she had tweezers, and she picked the sand out of my skin with these tweezers. I don’t remember a thing about that. Even the ice truck driver stopped and came in and said how sorry he was. He didn’t realize we were back there. Of course it wasn’t his fault. It was us kids’ fault. But I don’t even remember talking to him. And that woman that held me in coal bin I don’t even want to talk to her. She’s got her own things to answer to. That’s why I say if you’re going to be abusive to a little kid, he’ll never forget. He’ll never forget the abuse. It’s hard to think, “Well I’ve got to be a nice person all of the time.” Because my little great grandson I lost my temper with him and the minute that I lost my temper I knew I’d done something wrong. I just—I knew it was wrong, I knew it was wrong. Did I run you out? AC: So, we kind of left off on a pause. What I was asking is—did the other children that you played with know about the war and talk about it? 21 JR: Ya, they knew about the war. But Clyde’s brother was a sailor in the war. But I don’t remember any of the other—I’m trying to think some of the other kids’ whose brother’s or dads were stuff in the war but I don’t remember any of them. AC: Did you ever talk about the war with your friends? JR: Oh ya, We always had to go and bomb Hitler. That was a great sport to get that burn that cardboard box burning and have his name written on it. And have that thing burning up. Once his name was burnt we didn’t care no more. It was destroyed. AC: Did you….Oh, go ahead. JR: Goofy, just think what goofy kids do. AC: Did you have them with them some scrap metal drives or anything else during the war. JR: You know, we didn’t. We participated in—I’m going to say it was an Italian fellow. Would come around pushing a—I’m going to say handcart. But it wasn’t what the Mormon’s had. His was a longer one. I think it was taller—the sides were taller. Anyway, he would go and push that cart around and gather up aluminum, steel, and rubber. That was the hardest things to acquire was aluminum, steel, and rubber. If you had inner tubes back then—we had inner tubes instead of tubeless tires. They had an inner tube in there that was always made out of rubber. Us kids would take and make a flipper. We’d find a piece of willow that forked and we’d cut that out and we’d notch the very ends of it and put this rubber on there and tie it on us a special way. We’d make ourselves a flipper—a homemade flipper. You didn’t just go to the sporting goods stores like we do today and, “I 22 want a flipper.” You made your own. You found your own inner tube, you cut it up, and then that guy told us not to cut anymore inner tubes. He wanted that rubber to put towards the war effort. We also had what’s called bonds. Even twenty-five cent bonds for kids. There was twenty-five dollar, fifty dollar, and one hundred dollar bonds. I think most of the employees from the bases out there were required to take a twenty-five dollar bond from their paycheck. Which you could cash it within the next six weeks. It was just a matter of being out of that much money for six weeks and then you had a repetition. You’re paycheck plus a bond. And we would buy twenty-five cent—they were a stamp and you had a book. You’d lick that stamp and once you filled it up you could go cash it in. I remember getting mine a third full and then I never seen it again. It disappeared. I don’t know where but it just disappeared. AC: That’s too bad. JR: I think my brother made off with it but I won’t say that. AC: How many siblings did you have? JR: How many what? AC: Siblings. JR: I had one brother—older brother, and a younger sister. And they are both deceased. AC: How much older was your brother was your brother? JR: He was five years older than I was. My sister was seven years younger than I was. AC: Oh, that’s quite the gap. 23 JR: Ya. AC: Did you guys play together? You and your siblings? JR: Nope. No. He didn’t like me. He didn’t like me at all. And truth be known, I didn’t like him very much. We weren’t pals. Until, we were twenty-five maybe thirty years old. He married a woman who was—I don’t know if I should go into that or not. She was very stingy, he couldn’t have any money at all. The car was in her name, the property was in her name—and eventually his paycheck went to her. They had a checking account, then it was a dual checking account. So after she got that going and the paycheck went to that dual-account she went up to the bank and had his name take off. So that made it his paycheck went to that account but she was the only one on that account. She was that stingy. If he had a drink of liquor boy, it was hell to pay. So I bought him a bottle every week. Just to make sure she was good and mad. I didn’t like her. But we went over fishing over at Flaming Gorge and we got into some fish pretty good. On the way back we stopped at a convenience store and I didn’t pay any attention to him. He went to the back of the store and I was paying for some soda pop up front. He came out he had a pint of pretty good liquor in his pocket. He was hiding it from me, and I told him, “You know bud, I don’t give hoots or jiffy pop whether you drink or not.” I said, “If you want, uncork that thing and take a pull on it. Help yourself. Ain’t nobody going to say a word to ya” Boy he didn’t. Between Fireman’s memorial campground over there—I don’t know if you know where that’s at or not. That’s where you go across the dam—it’s just a little ways further than that. And from there, to Horseshoe Bend is where I threw that empty bottle out the 24 window and on the rocks. He wanted to throw it out. He was too drunk, I was afraid he’d hit a car or something. So I threw out for him. It was Horseshoe Bend where I threw that out. He drank it between there and Horseshoe Bend. When he got home, boy, she was mad. She was hopping mad. She run across the street and said, “The only reason why I let him go with you was I thought you could control him.” I said, “Well, I’m his brother I’m not his mother.” I said, “If you keep up with this tantrum you’re having I’ll go buy him a fifth. I won’t buy him a pint, I’ll buy him a fifth.” And she screamed, “I’ll divorce him!” And I said, “Go right ahead, it wouldn’t bother me any.” That was the end of our friendly association. He was driving down the road and his car started to veer off it wasn’t a curb and gutter it was kind of a sway-o type of a gutter. And he went across that and he almost went into a guys pine tree on his front yard. And she either grabbed the wheel and turned it or turned the key off, I just forget. The next time that he got that frozen look—I guess that’s what you would call it. He smashed into a tree and destroyed their car. She didn’t say anything to anybody. She went and bought a new car and it was in her name. He couldn’t drive it no more. So I’d take that bottle I’d buy him and put it under the passenger seat. I know I’m a bad person but then I got to have my thrill in life. AC: Definitely. I’m curious, when the war ended do you remember anything about when the war was over? JR: Oh boy. There’s a couple of things I remember about the war. There’s a movie that’s out now called Midway. If you see when they’re taking out those planes off from—I forget what aircraft carrier to launch them. This one fellow that was in 25 them planes, had a camera and he filmed all of that as they were flying towards Japan. They were thirty feet off the water going towards Japan so that their radar couldn’t pick em’ up. The little fishing ships that were out on the ocean would radio in, “Hey, there’s a flight of bombers coming in.” But they wouldn’t believe them. They thought they were playing jokes on them. They didn’t believe them until them bombs starting falling on Tokyo, which Tokyo had been told that it was impossible for anyone to bomb them. But soon as they went in—well, they had those actual film that aircraft going in and going across Tokyo bay and into that railroad freight cars. That is actual footage of that plane going in. Then they—you have to watch close on that film, when they’re flying along and then that plane stops, and then you can bombs drop. That’s not—you can’t stop a plane in the air like that. The plane has to keep flying or it will fall out of the air. You have to watch and you’ll see actual footage of them dropping those bombs on Tokyo. In fact, that guy that wrote the book thirty seconds over Tokyo, the name of his aircraft was The Ruptured Duck. When that movie—President Roosevelt ordered it released to the public. Because we had our butts kicked at Honolulu, Hawaii. We lost another battle not too far. We needed something to boost our morale—is what he said. So he said, “Turn it loose.” That was the bombing of Tokyo. There was a theatre in Ogden—I hope I can remember the name of it here—the Emporium, I believe was the name of it. People were lined up out on the streets, down to Twenty-Fifth Street, then down Twenty-Fifth Street. Almost half a block, just to get in to see that. They weren’t even charging an admission for it. If you could put a quarter in the till, you did. Us, young kids we’d sneak in between pant 26 legs, you know, and get into where we could see. We were watching—that was big time stuff. AC: Was that after the war had ended? Or towards the end of it? JR: Nope, that was during the war. AC: Okay. JR: That was during the war. That was their first actual attack on Tokyo, since Pearl Harbor. We needed that morale boost and that was what boosted our morale was that particular film. AC: Do you feel like it worked? JR: Yep. He told them not to charge us. If we could pay to get in fine, if we couldn’t pay to get in—that’s fine too. That’s where a lot of people don’t realize, he also told the railroads, “Don’t be kicking people off your train. If they want to travel on their box cars, you let them relocate so they can find employment.” Carl Horton, a fellow that...our neighbor out there, he came in from Arkansas. In an empty oar car—where they haul coal. I keep track of who’s walking down the street. Somebody’s walking down the street there. Well, I wondered who it was their strung out for a half a mile. But, that was our one big morale builder during the war. Was that we could get in—I thought it was neat that we could go in for free and see that movie. That’s when Howard Hughes was making that movie “The Outlaw.” You had to be—I think a woman had to be eighteen or nineteen. A man had to be twenty-one to get in to see the movie. What they didn’t realize was that I had a friend that was an usher. He said, “Wait until this movie is over with and this crowd is coming out and this crowd is coming in. Just mix in with them.” He 27 says, “Hand me a piece of paper.” So I gave him a piece of paper. He pretended to rip up a ticket. We got in to see that X-rated movie at the time—not X-rated anymore but it was Jane Russell. He wanted a lot of boob exposure on her. In fact, he has to pay her $800 a month for the rest of her life. Now, if you go back in those days that was a grumble of money. My dad was only making probably $120 a month. There she was making $800 a month for nothing. Just exposing her boobs a little bit. Then from then on—nothing. She didn’t have to work, she just had $800 a month coming in—Howard Hughes had to pay her for the rest of her life. It’s just one of the oddity’s that went on. AC: That is super crazy. So what was Ogden like on V-day—on the day that they announced they ended the war? JR: You mean when the war was over? Victory day? V-day? Horns honking, people yelling, and there’s was a little bit of paper work being thrown out of windows from the taller buildings down there. Not too much of that. But there was a lot of horn honking and people were most generally very happy about it. Especially, when the Japanese surrendered. Well, it was the same with Germany. But mostly when the Japanese surrendered. There was a lot of horn honking, screaming, yelling, probably a lot of drinking. Although, I didn’t get involved in that part. I was too young. I don’t know I think I was about seven. AC: Were you pretty excited? Or did it not mean too much to you? JR: Well, it really didn’t make much sense to me. Just, “Yahoo, we’re having fun.” We went to were my dad worked—the arsenal. They had kind of a picnic thing. They 28 just had—what do they call those things? Those tables underneath them? Then there’s a roof over them? AC: A bowery? JR: A bowery, ya. But they had containers that were, I don’t know they were about this long and about this wide. They were full of ice and soda pop. You didn’t have to buy any of it. You just drink all you want. I was wooping down on that Root Beer. They had Seven-up, Root Beer, and Orange. I really wanted Pepsi, they didn’t have any Pepsi. But if you wanted one, you just grabbed it and helped yourself. AC: That’s great. JR: A lot of people were in groups talking and yelling—carrying on. The war effort, it cut into ya. You didn’t have extra things like that. Or you made furniture. You made a chair to sit on. A table—you might be able to find a table. It’d be wooden, wouldn’t be any metal to it. You could… knew somebody who was a Carpenter, you might find enough scrap wood to make you a table. My grandad, he died, but my dad was a pretty good carpenter and he made us a table. I don’t’ know where he found some chairs. It was over in Uintah somewhere. We got… My dad never would buy a truck. He liked Plymouth automobiles and that’s all we had was Plymouth automobiles. We got into the Plymouth and he took the back seats out and we went over into Uintah and got these chairs from one of our family members over there. My dad’s uncle said he had these four chairs if we wanted them we could use them. Dad was right out there. Then we took the back seat out and we put in the old wash tub. The wash tub in the back and then we went 29 up into Cottonwood. My dad was raised with those people so he knew where the—I don’t know what they call it—Sheering corrals were. There’s a lot of sheep down up there. And he’d gather all that up for fertilizer in the back of the car and bring it home. In the trunk, in the back where there wasn’t any seat and cans and boxes as he could put in there. He put in there. He was worst than a coyote. They pushed a heard of sheep down through Weber Canyon. They didn’t truck ‘em back in those days. They’d just get cowboys or sheep herders, whatever you want to call them. They push them through there. Dad—he just happened to see four sheep that wandered up this little canyon. The rest of the heard went on by. Dad watched them for a day or two. I just forget. I was four years old. Four years old, ya. He told mother, he said, “Come on we’re going.” My brother got in the car and my mom and dad and myself got in the car and we went up. If you know where Horseshoe Bend is. It is the first little canyon this side of Horseshoe Bend. There’s a small railroad bridge—not very long. There’s one that goes over Horseshoe Bend and then there’s a little one just this side. It was right on the other side of that bridge. My dad he said, “Come here.” He took that 22 up and “pow!” This sheep dropped and he went over and cut its throat. He said, “Now, sit on this thing. Hold his head back like this.” I did what I was told. I was sitting there, holding that sheep’s head back like that. Every time his heart would beat, there would be a spurt of blood would go way up in the air. I was watching that and “bang!” Down went another one. My brother was sitting on that one and “bang!” Down went another one. My mother was sitting on that one. Then the track walker came by. During the war they had a man who would walk the tracks. 30 He’d turn and then he’d go back. So that if there were any landslides—any rocks that came down on the tracks—he could stop the train. Until the crew came out and cleared the tracks. He stopped when Dad shot the last one. He was standing there watching us. Dad went over to mother and he said, “Here, hold this gun.” He went up and talked to that guy and he said, “I’ll give you half of them if you just keep quiet about it.” That guy said, “I got to walk down to that place down there and then I’ll be back.” He says, “Ya, half of them sounds good.” We had to give half of one of them to that track walker. We had a lot of meat to eat for quite a while. Especially, if was lamb because my dad would say… Boy he loved sheep. Well, it sounds a little cruel at the time. If you’re into that all your life, it doesn’t bother you. I guess from then on, it never bothered me to kill an animal. I did my brother. He wouldn’t—if he had a dog that had to be put down, he’d take it to the vet. Nowadays it’s about seventy-five dollars I think for a shot. It’s a hundred and something for a horse. I just took my horse up there in lost creek she didn’t come out. But a lot of people, my daughter had hers cremated. It’s in a little bottles in the house over the fireplace. But she’s in love with horses. I’m not. I just take em out and put them down. Well it was a learning process. Back in those days if you had a chance to get free meat—you went for it. That’s what dad did. Now you couldn’t go after deer or pheasants or grouse or elk or moose. I didn’t ever see a moose around. Any of the game animals but farms animals you could go out and get them. AC: The sheep were kind of free pickings then for anybody? Extra meat? 31 JR: Well, they had a turn out. What he was doing was taking them to market. He just didn’t watch his sheep and he didn’t pick up—he lost four of them. There was some fern, some weeds that grow up and they’ve got a fern leaf and a sheep get up on there to get cool. These four had wandered up in there to get cool. The sheep herders went on by and didn’t see them. It was the only four in the canyon that they missed. Believe me, we checked that canyon. But, they kept them on the road and see that’s why if you’ll notice there’s a family in Morgan now that they drive cattle on the interstate. Up past Taggert’s to Lost creek and then they get off the interstate. Because the state didn’t provide a road off the side of the interstate. All of the rest of the way around there’s a road off to the side. Now they stopped them from going through Weber Canyon. But once you don’t do that, you lose that right. So that’s why those guys pushed those livestock up there every year. My son, he takes part in that. They call it a drive. Just to ride his horse, more than anything. She wants to. But you know she’s seventy-nine years old. I don’t want her to. But she wants to. AC: So we’ve been going for about an hour and a half. How are you doing? Do you want us to stop? JR: Oh I’m holding good. Oh I’m holding good. Do you have a drink of water, momma? AC: If you need a break we can always come back to whatever is best for you. JR: Nope, I’m good. I’m enjoying myself. AC: Oh good, well we are enjoying it too. JR: Okay, good. But I’m wandering off the war years there. 32 AC: Oh it’s okay. JR: That was during the war years—getting those sheep. Because I was only about four years old. Do you guys need a soda pop? AC: I’m okay I have some water here. JR: I’ve got a diet coke out there. SK: Oh, I’m okay. Thank you. JR: You want it? SK: I’m alright, I don’t need it. JR: Oh, you’re alright. AC: I do want to know what life was like for you after the war. Were you still at elementary school? JR: Yes, after the war, my dad quit the arsenal out there. We moved Trenton. That’s west of Logan. It’s east of Tremonton and west of Logan. Just a little farming community. He thought he could sell those farmers—I don’t know—Watkins products. Somebody talked him into taking that route up there. He had the whole northern part of the state and he thought he could make some good money out of it. It wasn’t very long that we were right back to Hillfield out to the arsenal. Because he found out that he couldn’t make any money up there. Those farmers didn’t want to buy any products that they didn’t need. It was right after the war and they just didn’t have the money that they probably should have had. They had plenty to eat but they didn’t have enough to splurge with. But he turned right around and came back to—I don’t know if he went to the arsenal or Hillfield. But he probably went to Hillfield to the east area. I know we moved into 33 grandma/grandpa’s duplex. My aunt and uncle lived on one side and we lived on this side. My aunt and uncle had to pay $25 a month and we had to pay $50. My grandad didn’t like my dad. I didn’t like my grandpa. We lived there in Ogden for some time then we moved to South Ogden. I graduated from Weber High school. AC: Weber High school—is that the same as Ogden High school? JR: Nope, that was on 1100 Washington Boulevard. Ya, where stop and shop is. AC: So they don’t have Weber High school over there anymore? JR: No, they don’t. Well, they’ve got it but it’s over in North Ogden. Ya, Pleasant View. AC: Okay. JR: They tore this one down and built one out there. I think this one, we just out grew it. Because that one out there is supposed to take care of quite a few school districts. After they got that built they decided we had to have a second one. And this one over here. They built it. CR: Fremont, Bonneville Sailors. JR: One out in the Terrace. R: That’s Bonneville. JR: What’s the one up on Harrison? That Mark went to? R: He went to Ben Lomond. That’s an Ogden school. JR: That’s a city school. AC: So do you feel that times were just as hard during World War II as they were during the depression? 34 JR: Very hard. You had what’s called ration cards. You could buy so many gallons of gasoline and then the guy you bought it from would tear out a stamp for every gallon you bought. If you used up your quota of stamps for that month you just walked after that. That’s where a lot of—they called it midnight something— they’d go syphon gasoline out of these farmers tractors to get gasoline. The farmer couldn’t get any more gas, so they had to get the German and Italian prisoners of war that were up here. They’d come out and do the farm work. You do know where that prisoner of war camp was? Okay. The Japanese they were too radical. They had to have them out on the desert. They didn’t bring them in. The Italians—when Italy surrendered they gave the Italians 3 silver dollars and they said, “Ogden’s right over there. You be back here Monday for roll call.” That’s where Beth Giordano met Joe. She had to go to Italy to get him to bring him back after the war. He had to repatriate back to Italy. Because he met an American woman here and fell in love with her. That didn’t mean nothing to the government. He still had to go back to Italy. Now, if she wanted him bad enough, she could go over to Italy and find him and get him.—Get the paperwork and bring him back and that’s what she did. Joe is a hard man to understand. I never could understand Joe. His mastery of the English language—it was lacking. But the Giordanos, they all just live right over here—most of them. Well, Dick lives right over here. CR: Dick and Randy. JR: Randy, ya. CR: One of them—one boy, I think lives in West Weber. 35 JR: Well, Joe Jr. got killed out there at Locomotive Springs. They were hunting rabbits. Joe was getting out of the Jeep and the guy in the back had a 22 and he pulled the 22 this way to get out and shot Joe in the back of the head. That was the end of Joe. But he was the oldest of the Giordanos. AC: Do you have any memories of seeing the POW’s working in the fields? JR: I didn’t, no. I never had any occasion to have any contact with them at all. Beth did. Most of Slaterville—the older people up there did. I don’t know you’d have to see Slater up there. The older… Let’s see the sheriff—I don’t know if the Sheriff—he’d be my age. What was his first name? CR: Brad? Is that who you’re thinking of? JR: Brad Slater? Ya, he was the Sheriff. He probably would remember some of the prisoners. They’d bring the Germans out. But mostly the Italians and worked the fields. There were three German prisoners that escaped and they caught them down in Arizona I think. They thought they could make it across that big desert down there—down to Mexico and then back to Germany. They got out into that desert and kind of figured maybe they ought to not go any further. AC: That’s a long ways. JR: Ya, it’s awful hot down there. They’d never experienced anything like that. Germany is a country full of pine trees—farm land and pine trees. I worked with a German prisoner of war—in fact, three of them. Rudolph Dorman—I can’t think of Paul’s last name–and I can’t think of the other guy’s name now. It’s been too many years. Rudy—a fun guy to be around. I asked him, “Why’d you join the German army?” He says, “I didn’t. I was working in my dad’s field. Three big 36 black automobiles drove up. These men got out that had big shiny boots on up to their knee.” His dad motioned for him to come in. He told him, he says, “I don’t want to go to war. I don’t hate anybody.” He said that German officer said, “You have three choices. You can go with me, you can go to a German youth work camp, or you can stand against that wall over there.” To me, he said, “Given those choices, what would you do?” I said, “I’d be singing a song, ‘I’m in the army now’.” That’s what he did, he joined the army. AC: He was forced into it? JR: Ya, they didn’t have a choice. Not under Hitler. AC: Where did you work with him at? JR: At Hillfield. You, he and his wife were from Germany. But they repatriated back to this area. Paul he came over as a youngster. He was a very young man when he came over. The other fellow, I can’t think of his name. I’m sorry. He said he was a half mile from the Russian front and twenty miles from the American front. I says, “Why didn’t you surrender to the Russians?” He says, “The little short buggers can’t run very fast.” So he made it over to the American front and surrendered to the United States. I said, “Well, I can’t say I blame you.” He was a very level headed fellow. He would give the officers masseuse—he was a masseuse. He’d give them massages. He was… boy. The strength in his hands was just awesome. If he got a hold of you started pinching, there was just no stopping him. He could really hurt you just by pinching ya. I only let him get a hold of me once. After that, I didn’t let him get a hold of me after that. Fritz Blitchow was his name. 37 AC: So did you go to college after high school? JR: Nope, I met her instead. AC: Oh, how did you guys meet? JR: Blind date. She kept chasing me after that. CR: You’re the one that had a car, not me. AC: So did you friends set you up? JR: Kind of, sort of. The one fellow that I knew, he joined the army and then he stole some stuff from the army and took it off base and was selling it to get extra money—in England. They caught him. He got a dishonorable discharge. He got court martialed. Boy, I didn’t realize that a dishonorable discharge—as wicked as it could be—you don’t get any recommendations you don’t get any. He was just, more or less was a bum for the rest of his life. When I found out what had happened with him, I just said, “Clyde you know better than that.” But evidently he didn’t. There’s one born every minute, you know? He went to prison for a year for writing bad checks. He didn’t care whether he paid you back or not. You meant nothing to him. He’d borrow from ya. He borrowed from me $7. He said, “I’ll get a paycheck next Friday or Saturday or something like that. I’ll pay you back then.” That Friday never come yet and he’s dead, so. Not much chance of my getting my money back from him. After I loaned him that money he came back and wanted to borrow more and I said, “No, Clyde, you haven’t paid back the last one you borrowed. When you pay that one back then we will be on even ground. I’ll consider loaning you some then.” This man here, I asked him how many imperial Japanese marines that he killed, that he knows. He says he’s 38 thought of it a lot. He said the closest he could come—he shot 3,000. He said they would come out, they’d only have—I don’t know what that thing was they tied around their crotch. But they’d come out on this ridge and they’d shake a stick at him like that and scream at him. Then they’d holler that they’d want to die for their emperor. He told me, he said, “I just helped them with what they wanted.” And he shot them down. There’d be five or six of them walk up on top of that ridge and throw rocks at him. He’d just take that machine gun and mow them down. AC: So you were in the Marines with him you said? JR: Yep, this is my Gunner Sargent. AC: How old were you when you joined the marines? JR: Eighteen. AC: Were you married at eighteen as well? JR: No. AC: How old were you when you met your wife? JR: Nineteen. Maybe Twenty. AC: What did you guys do on your blind date? JR: Oh, we just drove around Ogden and I never was much of a drinker so I didn’t get her liquored up or anything. We just went for a ride. AC: How long was your courtship before you got married? JR: I’ll have to ask her. It wasn’t too long. I kind of figured I knew what I wanted. I presumed…she was engaged to some guy. Ya. So I guess you could call me a thief. 39 AC: She was engaged when you met her? JR: Ya, but he was ugly. They have a question for ya. AC: How long was your courtship? CR: Four months. I don’t remember the date when I first met him but it was close to four months. AC: When did you guys get married? CR: January 17, 1958. AC: Interesting, and you said you were engaged when you went on your first date? R: Ya. AC: That sounds like a good story. CR: Then I went and told him I done it. Well, I remember receiving a letter from him saying he had done it. Saying that he’d gone out with someone. AC: Was he in the war? Or where was he? CR: He was in Germany at the time. JR: Ya, he was just stationed in Germany. CR: I think he was in the Army. AC: Okay, stationed over in Germany. How funny. So when you two married, then you were a marine. Is that correct? JR: Ya. AC: Tell me about what made you decide to join the marines? JR: huh? AC: What made you decide to join the marines? 40 JR: I liked their uniform. I think nothing uglier than an army uniform. And if you been to an Army—I went to the National Guard thing, up there—and the army reserve. Their area—we’ll call it an area—stinks. It smells a lot like moth balls and stuff like that. In the Marine Corps you don’t smell moth balls very much—very seldom. They make Marines take things out, and clean them, oil them, and put them back. You don’t moth ball them. You take them out and you clean them and oil them and put them back. It’s a different smell. That’s one big thing I didn’t like about the Army. I had a friend that was in the Army National… Utah National Guard. He wanted me—he kept hounding me to go with him and join that up. I went up and talked to him once for a while, but I went up to talk to Wilbur Bowman—a guy name Bowman. A guy named Bowman and Sergeant Shaw. They were about as honest of men I could find. Then their outfit didn’t smell bad. I just liked the way they did things. AC: Did you always want to join the military? JR: I always figured I’d go into the military. One phase of it or another. AC: How long were you in the marines for? JR: I was in this reserve outfit for 8-10 years. CR: Probably. JR: About ten years. This guy here, was in forty—oh hell, I’d have to read this again. About forty years. Because he went in 1942 and he got out in 1999 or 2000. I just don’t remember. He was in there a long time. But he went through—he was a hundred feet away from that picture, right there. That guy there—trying to think of his name. Harlon Block, is that guy’s name. When his mother seen that picture, 41 she says, “There’s my Harlon.” You look at it and tell me features you can see that would be—the only thing you can see is the back of his head and his butt. They ask her, “How did you know that was Harlon?” She said, “If you’d put as many diapers on that butt as I have, you’d know.” In two months, she went from jet black hair to solid white hair. After she found out he had been killed. He was killed an hour after that picture was taken. They sent her a letter, telling her that Harlon had been shot. He was standing up and he was on a field phone and they told him to get down. He wouldn’t do it. Then a bullet went right straight in his mouth and out the back of his head. He went in a hurry. AC: I want to know more about your military career. Where were you stationed and everything? JR: Well, I was stationed right up here. At 20th and Jackson. I was a reserved marine. I‘ve been to Wesley Harris. I’ve been to Pendleton. I’ve been to—we call it MCRD. CR: The one up in Washington. JR: That’s the one that’s—Wesley Harris. I’m trying to think of that island that’s out there. I’ve been aboard the USS Missouri, where they signed the peace treaty. That plaque is about that big around and I’ve stood right on top of it where they signed the paper work. AC: Which war was that from? JR: That was the Japanese surrendering. AC: Oh, okay. 42 JR: I missed the one down at 29 Palms. I would have liked to have gone there. But they told me I was fortunate I didn’t. I had two at Wesley Harris and Elliot. Elliot was a monstrous base. It would be as big as northern Utah almost. It’s just huge. CR: Where’s it located? JR: Hmmm? CR: Where was it located? JR: Just east of San Diego. The Marine Corps gave it up and moved over to— Arizona—oh what’s that town in Arizona? CR: Phoenix? Tucson? I don’t know any others. JR: Anyway, they moved over to Arizona and the government gave them a big reservation over there—for their training. It suited their desert training more over there than it did down there in San Diego—over at Elliot. There was more of a desert without any water and too many hills. It’s where—what’s his name goes every winter? Well, anyway… Yuma. That Marine Corps went down to Yuma. When you join the Marine Corps, you go to San Diego, which is M.C.R.D. Then they’ll transfer you just further north to—hell, why does my mind go blank? CR: Maybe because you’ve been talking for so long. JR: I guess. But anyways, then you’ll probably go over to Arizona, for different training. How old are you? AC: I’m 24. JR: And you’re just graduating? AC: I still have about a year and a half left. JR: Why don’t you join the Marine Corps? 43 AC: Because I want to do this for a living. Asking people questions. JR: They’ve got those kind of jobs. AC: Ya? SK: I almost joined. JR: If you ever…. What? SK: I almost joined because my brother is a gunnery and he tried to recruit me to be in the band. Because I wanted to play music for the Marines. But it did not work out. JR: He wouldn’t let you go in? Oh, that boob. SK: He’s been in little over twenty years now and he’s a gunnery. I think he did his training in San Diego and Arizona. JR: Was he in San Diego? SK: He started off there. I was three when he went. My mom signed him away at seventeen so he could go. He’s been in ever since then. JR: Well ask him if he doesn’t want you to go in, why is he staying in? You go in, go down there and talk to those recruiters. SK: If I join it would probably be the air force because… JR: Oh, now don’t say that. That’s the ugliest uniform on the face of the earth. Absolutely the ugliest uniform. And if you got a degree behind you, the Marine Corps is like being a queen in a palace. Men will actually jump when you beller. They won’t do that in the air force, I guarantee ya. SK: He probably wouldn’t like for me to join the Marines, but he’s looking for me to be an officer. 44 JR: Ya, you’d be about an officer in the corps. SK: I know… I know they work the hardest. JR: What? SK: The marines work the hardest. JR: They also survive the most. AC: Do they? JR: Yep. Ya, when we took Okinawa, we had a marine division over here, and we had a marine division over here, and we had an army division in the middle. And they army division couldn’t keep up with the marines. So the…he wouldn’t come down to the Marine Corps—but he was the general in charge of that battle. Fired the army general and took those army guys and started kicking their butts. He told them, “You’re in a fit, now get out there and start fighting.” You don’t want to go in the air force. AC: We can go ahead and pause the interview if you would like. It’s been two hours, I don’t know how you’re feeling. JR: Oh, I’m feeling good. AC: You’re feeling good? Okay, good. I just keep seeing you stretch so I want to make sure… JR: No, no it’s just downtown. CR: Don’t worry, if you have to go just tell him. AC: I don’t think we have any time restraints honestly. JR: You’re looking for lunch. You’re on a schedule. AC: No, we’re actually not. Totally good. 45 JR: Air Force. I got a brother that’s in the Air Force. CR: Was in the Air Force. JR: Was. Yeah. AC: So you were in the Marines for ten years? JR: He became a drunk. In fact, when he’d get drunk the guys he was drunk with wouldn’t take him within closer than a city block from where he lived. They’d say, “Get out. We aint’ putting up with your woman screaming at us.” So if you go into the Air Force you’re going to be a drunk. You know. AC: Automatically. SK: I don’t let him drink that much. I’m also not a screamer. JR: You don’t drink at all? SK: I don’t like for him to either, so he’s mindful of that. JR: Well, it’s okay to get tanked up once in a great while. But you got to learn to control it and it can’t let it control you. That’s what the gunny told us. I thought, “Well, that’s a good philosophy.” I’ll listen to what he has to say and I thought it was pretty good. She won’t drink. So there ain’t no sense in me getting drunk. Because all I do is fight with her. CR: For a short while, when we first got here, the first three years. We had a park, I did drink that night. But then I suffered for about a month. JR: What? CR: Hush, I suffered for about a whole month with cankers in my mouth. I thought, “Okay, that’s it.” AC: Ya, no thank you. 46 CR: I can’t handle caffeine. The acid is… one day, you know I had been with—I hadn’t drinken any colas for a long time. This one day, I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll have caffeine free. I’ll try one.” I got about half of that and I started getting sores in my mouth. I think there’s a lot of acid in there caffeine. AC: I think you’re right. I don’t handle caffeine very well. It makes me all shaky so, ya. So, it sounded like you and—I can’t remember what the gunny’s name is. JR: Darrell. AC: Darrell. You two were pretty good friends. JR: Oh ya. He was a good man. You could march forever with him calling cadence. I’ve tried to find a lot of guys that would disagree with me. But none of them would disagree with me. Hey, get down. Get down. AC: He’s so cute. JR: Well, the damn thing licks you. Get down. Get down. Slap her. SK: You can’t slap her. JR: I’ll put her out if she keeps pestering. Come her dog. AC: No, she’s okay. JR: Turn that off for a second. AC: Okay, will do. [Video stops] JR: When I got through using a horse. I don’t want to keep him around just to ride him. This that my wife and my daughter—it’s all what I call “Show and tell.” They go down to the colosseum—if you want to see some riders go to the colosseum some nights. I think it’s Monday nights, you can see some fantastic women riders. My granddaughter is the western United States barrel racing champion— 47 for 2008, I believe it was she won the championship. You ought to see that— she’s got a display. It folds in and then it folds out and she’s got these belt buckles that she’s won. She’s got two saddles sitting over on the side of the display. She’s got her championship belt buckle up at the top and she’s got a lot of pictures. When she goes out on a horse it’s just—when they run through that timer she just melts right into that horse. It’s just very comedy—not comedy. It’s phenomenal for me to watch her because that fierce competitor. My word, she went up to Idaho and shot clay pigeons with over a hundred men and she beat them all. Not a one of them—plug your ears. Turds would go over and shake her hand. You know, “Hey, you beat me and I want to shake your hand.” But, we were out here in the field hauling hay and she was six, I think. I told the wife, “Let me move the truck up.” And that little girl was already behind the wheel of that truck. All she had to do was pull it down one notch and it was in a gear and just touch the pedal and it would pull forward. I seen a competition right there. She wouldn’t about to let me jump in that truck and drive that forward. She was going to do it and there wasn’t none of that grandpa stuff getting in there. I outshot her on this—let me get this picture for ya. This day here, I outshot her. It’s the only time she had been outshot. I have to tease her about that. AC: How many kids did you have? JR: Huh? AC: How many kids did you have? JR: Two boys and a girl. Three accidents. Well, she tricked me on the last one. CR: I tricked you with the girl. 48 JR: Ya, I knew it. CR: He made a statement but I didn’t correct him. JR: I knew it. I never lied to her though. CR: I didn’t lie to ya, I just didn’t… JR: It’s kind of like, sort of the same thing. AC: He thought it was a boy but. JR: No, it was just a, “I’m pregnant.” One of those things. It’s bound to happen in a union of a male and a female. It’s just bound to happen, if it happens a little more than you want it, then that’s the way it goes. But she went a little past that, I think. AC: So when did you guys move into this house? CR: ’67. AC: Okay. JR: We lived in South Ogden and the neighbor behind me—I really was only going to put a big box on the back of my… We had a back room. I couldn’t get all of my lawn equipment there. I wanted to put the lawn mower and some tools in it and that would be the size of it—wouldn’t be much bigger than that small couch area. The neighbor behind me says, “What are you doing?” I says, “Just building something to put these tools in so I can get them out of the weather.” Next thing I knew there was a big red piece of paper on the side of it that said, “Stop work. You’re in violation of building code such and such.” Well that guy turned me in. Then the neighbor on the west of us—I went home, I had busted my buttons. I was thoroughly give out. He was over on my side of the fence pulling weeds. He said, “Alright, come on, get over here and get your hind end to work.” I said, “You 49 go to hell.” I says, “I just put in a day, I’ll put you down.” I just walked in the house and flopped on the bed I think. I just got—the guy on the other side of us, CR: Had a lot of cars. JR: He had automobiles and he’d put them out on the street. And he’d take one wheel off and jack the front up or the back end, and then he’d leave it like that. It would stay that way. One day, I heard a tire screeching and an ambulance showed up and this little boy of theirs—a grandson—had ran out into the street and this man stopped. The policeman came to the door and he said, “Did you see that accident out there?” I said, “No, I didn’t, I was in the house. I heard of it. But, I didn’t see it.” But I said, “If you give him a ticket I want his name and address, I want to testify for him because he stopped in that much of an area. Officer, I challenge you to stop in that same area from hitting a kid that ran out in the street.” This neighbor was screaming, “Oh, I’m going to sue that guy.” I told that police officer, I said, “You ought to go out there and put your arm around that guy and say, ‘I need more drivers like you.’” If you can stop in that much area—I think it was 22 feet or something like that. He came to a complete stop. What he did was he bumped the boy and knocked him down. Because when they loaded him in that ambulance he was screaming at the top of his lungs. You want that chair back? CR: No, I’ll get it if I want it back. JR That’s when that guy came and he was screaming how he was going to sue him. I told that policeman, I said, “You pat him on the back and tell him you need more policeman… 50 CR: More drivers. JR: “Drivers like that to stop in there.” And I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll get a mannequin of some kind and you come up the street and wherever them skid marks stop, I’ll throw this thing out and you stop before you hit it.” He never gave that guy a ticket. CR: Well you told him if he did, you were going to testify for him. JR: I did. I told him I’d testify for that guy in court. Because I said, “That man has down a hell of a job of getting that machine stopped for that kid running.” I said, “Look at all them cars parked out there on the street.” He went over and chewed that guys butt out—having all of them cars on the street. CR: He started working over… so way a few months he made a comment, “We need to move. We got to get out of the city.” I said, “Okay, great. I was looking for a real estate right now.” JR: She wasn’t giving me no problem. Of course, when we got this place, there was no water. CR: Ya, the culinary water—the well had dried up. JR: The well went dry a week after we had moved in. There was no water and what else that we paid for? CR: I don’t know. Well, years later they brought the culinary water in JR: Ya. CR: And the gas. JR: And the gas. R: and we got the gas. 51 JR: We had propane. Boy that is expensive, I’ll tell ya. CR: Now it is too. JR: Ya, but they brought the natural gas down the road. So, we pretty much got everything you got in town. I don’t want somebody standing twenty feet over there looking in my front window at what I’m doing. What me and her does ain’t nobody’s business. Pull them curtains or even no curtains it’s just we’re out here kind of by ourselves… I told her, “We’re not buying any place but what—I ain’t got a hundred feet that side, a hundred feet that side, that side, that side, and that side of us.” Nobody living there. CR: We got it. JR: I got it. AC: So what did you do when the well went dry? How did you get water? JR: I went over to this guy over here and I asked him if I could have it just for washing the dishes and he had a running well—laundry and stuff like that. Then we’d go into town and get our drinking water with milk cans. That guy over there told me no. Al Pally—I’m not supposed to say names. Al was his name, He said, “No, you can’t have any water.” CR: We had an outhouse though too. So you know, we could use it. AC: Do you guys still use the well out here too? Well no, we got culinary water. JR: No, we got culinary water. AC: That’s right, you had said that. CR: What we did, was we put out what’s called a sandpoint—he put it out, I should say. With the help of some neighbors and that got our water. At the time, we 52 didn’t even have it inspected to see if it was good water. We just drank it and never got sick. JR: Thank goodness. CR: But we had that for what? Ten, twelve years before we… JR: It was just a couple of years. CR: No, it was more than that. JR: Because Randy Marriot was going down the road—down that way. They were bringing the culinary water on that side of the road and the natural gas on this side. I asked Randy, I said, “When you coming down this road here, Randy?” He says, “Just don’t worry, I’ll get to ya, I’ll get to ya.” I said, “Oh, okay.” I says, “They’re bringing the natural gas on this north side, so you take your time.” Thirty minutes there was a tractor on this side of the road, coming down this way. And he was putting water down this way. CR: I had actually—it was the best thing because with the gas they come down on the other side of the road but then they were able to put it under the road without digging the road up. JR: Yep. SK: Oh, that’s cool. CR: Ya, it was real cool. AC: And you guys have horses out here. Did you always have horses you’re whole life? JR: Pretty well. That’s all we raised was kids and horses. I’ll be right back. AC: No, you’re just fine. 53 CR: Ya, I’ve rode horses all my life. There were years that I didn’t. But that’s because my mom and dad moved into town. AC: Where are you from? CR: Malad. AC: That’s really cool. So did he do anything else after he finished his career as a… CR: Reserve? AC: Marine. CR: He just worked at Hill. AC: Oh that’s right. [To J.C.] And what did you do at Hill? JR: Who? AC: You. What did you do at Hill Air force Base? JR: I repaired airplanes. AC: Oh, okay. JR: Blast. CR: He was an aircraft sheet metal mechanic. AC: Okay. CR: And our two boys were out there for some years with him. AC: Is he still doing that? CR: Oh no, we retired back in ’94. JR: They had what they called T.O’s that’s when you changed the formation of an airplane. When we got into it in Korea. Would you like a diet coke? SK: I’m okay, thank you. JR: you sure? 54 SK: I’m fine. JR: It wouldn’t cost you nothing. We got into it with that big airplane up there. They could out-maneuver us. They could out shoot us. They could—Their plane was just far superior to ours. Almost better pilots. That’s the only thing that we had that was better than they had—was pilots. So they came out with what they called The Wild Weasel. That we had to take the wing—the front of the wing off and that’s no easy task, I’ll tell ya. Then we had to re-drill it and put on a new front wing and the front wing would actually come down and fall down like this. Then it would come back by hydraulics. That would give our plane maneuverability—he could turn on a dime. Which is what the Maiden 21 was doing. It was spinning on a dime and we couldn’t. We had missiles where they had machine guns. They found out that we needed machine guns on our airplanes as well as letting the communists have machine guns on theirs. So we put a pod—what they call a pod—they put a pod on there and he had machine guns over here and machine guns over here. Then he could shoot at the communist aircraft as well as they could shoot at ours. So we were getting back to even Steven. Then they come out with that F-16. That kicked butt on that missile they made. It was just such a superior airplane. It just...so they slowly petered out the F-4’s and sold them to second rate nations—let me put it that way. Which would be Argentina, Columbia—those countries in the south down there. Let them fight with those worn out airplanes. Then we sold some over to Egypt and a few other places I don’t know just where over there. But we wouldn’t have the F-16 for a long time. Then when we did let them have the F-16 we took 55 out a lot of the technical equipment which was in there. We took it out. We’d have to build a blank where that plane had a gauge or a… AC: Radar. JR: Ya, that thing with needles on it that tells him: how, when, where, if, all that. In the F-16 we’d put just blank holes. There wouldn’t be any, so we’d have to get in there and working with a woman out there on that F-4 was what was hard. Because rumors they fly just… CR: One night I got a phone call and he was telling me, “Somebody may call and tell you this.” JR: They brought a woman in. Her name was Kathy Merryfield, she was a nice girl as far as I’m concerned. Other people didn’t like the looks of her. Or her reputation or whatever but I never had any problems with her. So I had to tell her that we worked together and I mean that means she’d be right here and I’d be right here. We were both in the aft cockpit, and if we were both in the aft cockpit doing a job, rumors would fly. Boy, they there in the back cockpit, you know. So they come around and said, “Can’t you work in the forward cockpit and let her work in the back?” I said, “You bet.” But if she calls me more than twice to come and show her how to do this—this, that, or the other—to hell with your rumor starters and all this other stuff. I said, “You want to agree to that terms?” And they said, “Yep. That would be good.” He wasn’t down there for about an hour and he was down telling me, “Hey, go ahead and work in that aft cockpit whether she does… doesn’t bother me. Don’t listen to them.” I said, “Okay.” The aft cockpit when the canopy goes up, you cannot have anything laying on the canopy seal. If you do, 56 you’ll bust that canopy all to pieces. She—I was working down on the floor and she kept calling me, “Get up here and show me how this works.” I said, “Okay, just give me a minute.” So I’d be working away and she’d holler again. I said, “Kathy, just a minute.” I’d be working away and finally she came down and had her hands on her hips like that, “I said, you come up there and show me how to do that.” I said, “Okay, Kathy, let’s go.” So I went up there and I showed her on the seal—you can’t have anything laying on this surface right here. I showed her all the surfaces. I said, “Now, what you wanted to do was there was a jury strap. It holds the canopy up and you put it on and put a pin in it. Do not take that out if the pressure is on the down side. You have to take the pressure and push it on the up side. So that when you take and pull that out it doesn’t explode and come and hit you in the face.” So, I told her, I said, “You see this says up and this says down? Alright, you always push this button here that says ‘up’. Now, there’s two buttons inside here and there’s two buttons outside.” So I said, “They both got to be in the ‘up’ position. I says, “Or that thing will tear your head off.” And she was intelligent, she picked up on it right away. I told her, I said, “Well that’s just the way it’s got to be and same thing with that forward cockpit.” And this so-called foreman we had wanted her to—we had a canopy boom that was a piece of metal going this way and this canopy boom was touching it. You can’t have two pieces of metal touching each other. So what they did, was he told her to get a piece of emery cloth—you had to lay on your back and go over your head—it’s harder than hell to do like this. I said, “Well, that’s one way you can do it, Kathy.” I said, “Kathy, go up there in that forward cockpit and lower the canopy down— 57 let’s see what happens.” Well, when she lowered that down, the boom that was chaffing on there moved back. I said, “Well, now you’ve got a lot of room—you can take drill motor and just trim it back.” She looked at me and she says, “And that other asshole is a ‘foreman’.” I never thought she’d say that. But she did. I says, “Well, ya. That’s the way it works out here. You don’t have to know everything. You just have to be a good boss.” And she was mad at that guy for a long, long time. A long time. Well, there was a lot—I had another little girl— Cindy. She was so skinny. She said when she had her babies she could lay them on her hand and they’d be this long. I said, “Cindy, that’s because you’ve got a bad case of worms. So that’s why you’re so skinny.” She went into orbit on arguing with me. She didn’t like me worth a hoot. About a week later she came over—I was at what they call a smoke area. I smoked at the time. I was sitting in there and I was having a smoke and she come over and she said, “I will have you know that I do not have worms.” I said, “Who told you?” she said, “My doctor.” I said, “You didn’t go to the vet, Shoomfield, because he’s the worm specialist.” And she says, “No, I ain’t going to no vet either.” She said that was the day that she enjoyed teasing with me after that. AC: That’s great. JR: Well. There’s no sense in getting too wound up with your job. You got to have a little fun. AC: That sounds like a really job too. JR: It was for a while but they put some guys in charge of the crews that—they actually destroyed a wing. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. They—the 58 foreman went on vacation for two weeks and they put me down in his area to run the crew. They asked us to help them with this problem on this wing. The problem was they had a mechanic that drilled a hole through the fastener and then out into the wing. You can’t do that. Not even with a number 40 drill bit and he did it with a number ten. Which is a big one instead of a little one. Then he went on top of the wing and drilled down through the top of the fastener and then out into the wing and then he rotary filed the wing and it just destroyed that wing. They come over the next day and said, “Hey, help us out on this wing.” And for a time or two I said, “I’ll see what I can do.” But I told this one—the best mechanic on our crew—I said, “No, you stay away from that. Don’t you go near it.” I said, “If you go near that I’ll put an entry in your 9071.” Which is a bad thing. Once that gets in there they can’t get it out—hardly, you got to have a good reason. And he said, “Well, I ain’t going near it even if you tell me to.” I said, “Okay.” So, the next night he asked again, and I told him, “That wing is destroyed.” He says, “Well help us get this done, that done. Get it passed.” I said, “No, no, you messed it up, you fix it.” So the next night—the second level, the boss that we had and then our boss upstairs—he came down and he said, “Put somebody on that wing tonight.” I said, “Okay Ed, you bet.” So I told this guy, “Sit on that wing right up there and don’t you touch a tool—don’t you take a tool up there. You just sit on that wing.” He said, “Put somebody on that wing and that’s what we’re going to do.” So we put him on that wing. He came down the next day, “Why didn’t you do something with that wing?” I said, “Ed, I’ll tell you what—we’ll do that, we’ll go up there and we’ll help those guys fix it if you sign it off. You’ve got to sign that work off that it 59 was done and done properly. Because I guarantee I won’t and neither will that mechanic. You can threaten all you want.” He said, “What’s wrong with it?” I said, “I ain’t going to tell you a thing. If you want to see what’s wrong with that, you go up there and you take a look for yourself. But don’t ask me because I’m not going to turn anybody in.” So he went up in there and he looked at it and he come down. He said, “Don’t go near that airplane.” I said, “That’s what I’ve been telling ya. I don’t’ want to go near that.” But I said, “You’ve only seen half of it. Go up on the top of the wing and look.” So he went up on the top of the wing. He said, “Oh my god, that’s a scraper.” And that’s about—oh, I’d say $300,000 in damage. He said, “Nope, I’ve got most of your whole crew off that airplane and let it sit.” I said, “We’ll help them out with this other work and they can concentrate on their screw up. Or I can get a engineer down here.” He said, “No, let me talk to them first and then we will see.” Never heard no more from him. Well, some country down there is flying an airplane that’s in real bad shape. AC: Did anybody get fired over that? JR: No, the guy that done that work—done that mess up. I said, “You get a broom and a dust pan and you start sweeping over there by that door. When you get through down there at that other door, you turn around and you start sweeping back this way.” I said, “That’s all you do when you’re on this ship. Don’t you pick up a tool or nothing.” I said, “Give me your keys to your toolbox.” I said, “I’m going to take them and confiscate them. I says, “Don’t you go borrowing any tools.” That was all I could do. Unless, I turned him to an engineer. I could do that, but then I’d be that thing in a ringer. But I—I don’t know. He didn’t back the 60 code man. He kept wandering off. That’s a hard thing—that’s a hard thing to live with. Because it messes your mind up. I’d just assume you’d take a good whip and then have him mess with my mind because that’ll come off me and boy I’d just have to pull off the side of the road until it goes away. In fact, I was in the hospital a couple of years ago and broke down up there. They sent me home, they weren’t going to go home. I said, “Ya, you’re going to let me go home because I can’t handle this place no more.” So they did, they bundled me up and sent me out the door. Well, I mean there’s a lot of people, you know, that have had an experience of one sort or another, that it has messed their mind up. They’re having a hard time dealing with it. I can understand what their problem is. If their having a hard time dealing with it—I’ll be glad to help them if I can, but I don’t want to stick my nose in their business. Because they can come right unglued. That woman just didn’t know what she was doing. So I haven’t really hated her, per say, for what she did, because I just don’t think she knew the damage that she was doing. AC: Do you feel that experience made you more of a passionate person? JR: I hope it has. Like I said, that little grandson of mine, if I told him, “Don’t put that little door up. He’ll bust his ass to go over and put that door up. And it’s with everything like that. If I tell him, “Don’t move that pillow, he’ll bust his butt to move that pillow.” But it’s other things—he’ll go to the fridge—we got all those little sticker things on there, you know? He’s there just throwing his hands on them knocking them all over the floor. I told him, “Don’t do that.” He went on the other side of the fridge and does it some more. I swatted his little butt—it didn’t’ hurt 61 him—but I swatted his butt. He runs to her and she’s softer than an egg. But, we were going in there–I was telling him he couldn’t hit grandpa or something like that, and he had plastic toy—one of the super hero thing. He swung at it and he hit my elbow right there—hard as he could. My god, I just lost my temper. I turned him over my knee and his mother was sitting right here. I came in and I told her what I did, I was embarrassed and I want her to take care of that boy. I can’t do it. I just lose my temper. But he goes, “I don’t….” [video clip ends] [next video clip begins] his way to do things when I tell him not to. I got an electric plug in that there. I told him, I don’t know how many times, “Don’t go back there and pull that plug out.” And he’ll crawl right back there and pull that plug out. AC: Oh, no problem at all. JR: Pardon me. AC: Before we wrap up, is there any last things you wanted to say about the war or just about your life in general you want to say as we wrap up? JR: No, I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you about wars. There will be started that we were going to fight wars and fight them, I think. We get through with one—we kick their butt. We get through with them and we kick their butt. We went into it with another bunch of people. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t have any answer. AC: That’s totally fine. Anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up? JR: You both have been a pleasure to have out here. AC: Thank you, we really appreciate being able to come and interview and your wonderful wife here. It’s been great being able to meet you. 62 JR: Well she won’t help me out any though. CR: Why would I speak up? This is your idea. JR: Well it wasn’t my idea. They were the ones that put the ad in the paper. CR: You’re the one who answered it. JR: I did? I said, “They wanted to talk to all of these guys that were actually in the battles, but what about those that were locked up in coal bins? I just didn’t know. AC: We wanted to hear home front stories as well. So yours was perfect. We got so many great quotes. Thank you so much. JR: There’s a lot of them that didn’t—from that era. AC: Well it’s good though. We like to hear the whole life story because that’s valuable as well. JR: Well you got a life story there.