Oral History Program Anna Chadwell Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 28 September 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Anna Chadwell Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 28 September 2016 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: Chadwell, Anna, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 28 September 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Anna Chadwell 28 September 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Anna Chadwell, conducted on September 28, 2016 in her home in North Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Anna discusses her life and her memories of World War II. Sydnie Shields, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is September 28, 2016. We are in the home of Anna Chadwell in North Ogden, and we are talking about her life during World War Two, and her experiences with that as part of the Northern Utah World War Two project. My name is Lorrie Rands, I’m conducting the interview, and Sydnie Shields is here with me as well. Anna, thank you so much for your time and your willingness. I am very grateful. So let’s start with when and where were you born? AC: October 23, 1920. I just put a quilt on the bed yesterday that my mother sewed at ninety. She died at ninety-two. LR: You’ll have to show us when we’re done. I would love to see it. I did that with my grandmother, and I miss those times. Okay, October 23, 1920 is the day you were born. Where were you born? AC: Habersham, Tennessee in Campbell County, forty-five minutes north east of Knoxville, Tennessee. LR: Alright, talk to us a little bit about what it was like growing up in Habersham. AC: Well, I rode a school bus from primer through twelfth grade. My surroundings were gentle mountains, a gentle stream rolling down below our house. I have seven siblings, and we were all born at home; all of one father and mother. My dad built our home with his own two hands, which we enjoyed because we had lived in an older home. I don’t know if he even had a level, because he set it on 2 rocks. Four rooms, a living room, a front porch, kitchen, and two bedrooms. My brothers always had a dog which was never seen in the house. We had trees all around us, beech, hickory, and a pine tree at our kitchen door, which was very pretty. We had a fruit cellar dug out in a little hill beside the house. We had a big vegetable garden, and we all worked in the garden. We did not have any fertilizers or sprays, so when the green beans, which is a staple in the South in the summer, would get bugs, we’d squish the bugs with two little rocks. From the garden we filled the cellar with mason jars. Peaches, Green Beans, Tomatoes, corn, all kinds of jellies and jams, pickles. Last things were potatoes, and sweet Irish pumpkins. We had a mulberry tree, which was tall, that’s a very common tree in Tennessee, with big mulberries on it, which are purple. Also beech trees, which had beechnuts. Chickens fed on them when they fell to the ground. Our grandpa and grandma always lived up the hill from us on their farm, which was just like this circle or a cup. Summer rains comes easy down there, and it’s hot in the summer. A big cloud or two comes up and you have rain, which is lovely, and it comes and goes, real quick. Thunder and lightning. We were never taught to be afraid of thunder and lightning. Honey bees were plentiful, my father would sit and watch honey bees. He’d see some stopping at a certain place and he would watch them at that tree all summer long. When fall came he would cut the nest out and we’d have our honey. Sugar cane was a crop we grew, and when it got ripe, they brought these things that would squeeze the juice out of the pulp to make molasses. My dad built a furnace of rock and mud and put a vent on it of tin 3 metal. You’d put the juice in there, and put fire underneath that, and you stood there and stirred it with paddles for hours till it turned into molasses. He made real good molasses, it was kinda like peanut butter, smooth and the same color. That was neat to be able to know how to do that. There’d be six or eight neighbors standing around looking at that juice turning color. They’d pile up all the stalks, like in the room we are in now, or bigger, and us kids would play in that, that was delightful. Especially if it happened on a moonlit night. That was some of our fun. Everyone knew everybody for miles around, and visited without invitation; stopped by, sat on the porch, every home had a porch, you'd sit there and talk with the neighbor. Traveling up or down, the road, you waved to them and say hello and wonder where they were going or who’s going to their house. When my brother got his bicycle I rode it also. I was an avid bicycle rider. I liked sports. The boys would pick me for their baseball team just like another boy. When I got in high school I wanted to play, but my folks didn’t have money for shoes and such, but I won a first prize at the county fair for broad and high jump. I was in the eighth grade then, and town was twenty miles away, La Follette. We got a new school on Stinking Creek, which runs from pioneer to Habersham or 25 highway, and that’s where I started in Primer school. My mother had to take her washing down to the creek, and there was an old man who was a missionary Baptist, and he was known all over the country. He’d ride his mule along by this place where my mother washed. So I was about eight years there, and my mother had these big black satin bloomers. So I got my 4 momma’s bloomers and put my feet in them and they come up around my neck. I was acting, I was an actor, having a good time, and I looked around and here come the Baptist missionary man on his mule. Well I ran and hid, where my mom’s brother lived nearby. My first cousin Delphie and I heard that if a hen was sitting on her nest and you didn’t want her to do that, you get her and you drag her through the creek. So we got the hen who had settled on the nest, and it was easy to get her because she’s sitting there with no eggs underneath her. We got her and we drug her down the creek back and forth, back and forth. We finally realized she wasn’t fighting anymore. This cousin and I decided we were going to live together. I was the oldest daughter, and she was the oldest daughter of these two families. We had a great big grocery box, and I was thinking not too long ago how they got a big box like that. Now they’re common, but back then it was probably about from there to over there in the room. Anyways, she and I, we says, “Well, here’s where we’re going to live.” We were real close cousins till she went away to town and got a job. But that was a good memory that we had, that was on our grandpa’s farm on Fork Ridge, which is the mountain behind where we lived. Grandpa and Grandma owned a farm there. LR: No, this is fun. What I would like to ask quick fast, could you tell us what your parent’s names were? AC: Marston Owens, and Minnie Johnson. My dad is Irish-Wales and my mom is Irish. LR: Johnston with a t, or just Johnson? 5 AC: J O H N S O N LR: Minnie Johnson, thank you. Okay, you were ten when the Depression hit. What do you remember about the Depression? What sticks in your memory? AC: Like I said, I grew up into the depression. Everyone worked hard and managed on what they wore and had to eat. My brother had one shirt at the age of fourteen. My mother sewed everything she could. My Dad worked in the forest, a lumber man. Mom, she was fifteen when they got married, and he was seven years older than her. Her first baby was born when the war came round, and my Dad went to the war. My brother was born in 1918, and my mother lived with his folks, and her brother, till he came home. Then times started getting worse, into the Depression. I was born in 1920, of course I can’t remember that, they were farmers and woodsmen and they raised all their food. They had their animals. We never had a loaf of white bread in our house till I was eighteen years old, when I left home. We lived on what we made. There was a truck came up through by our place on Stinking Creek that had kerosene for our lamp, we bought sugar, coffee and matches. Other than that, we went to the cellar. During the Depression we did not have food stamps. You did not depend on anybody to give to you, you were on your own. My dad and my oldest brother, they coal mined. They had a pick and a shovel, and they’d have a seam of coal that was wide enough. They laid on their side with picks and shovels digging and picking coal, crawling to get in. If they could get it, they’d dig, load it up, and put it in a wheelbarrow. That was work, they did that. I remember one or two men, the 6 ceiling fell down on them and crushed them right there. Little hole like this in the hills. Today Campbell County still sticks in my gut the same as then I learned to sew when I was ten years old. My mother had a little baby girl, and I cut out her first dress. It was just a plain, flat piece of cloth, and there was no sleeves or arms in it. I sewed around it with a heavy thread and gathered it up. That started my sewing. My mother could sew, she would lay down a pair of pants and make her a pattern. You didn’t go and get a pattern. My father put bottoms on our shoes with leather. There was a stand with the piece of iron cut out like the sole of your shoe, and he put the shoe on that and nail the leather on. That’s how my Dad kept our shoes together. We couldn’t preserve meat, except smoking it. We smoked hams, and we had this all winter long, along with everything in the garden. That is how I was raised. It was not a good place for apples and peaches. They’d get frosted and just rot. So we would wait for the peach man to come from Georgia, and my mother would can peaches in half-gallons. We didn’t have any luxury. Let’s see if I can tell ya any more before going into high school. My brothers fished, little bitty fish runs down through Stinking Creek. There were walnut trees, and we’d mash them up and have walnuts to eat. The chickens’ run outside, and we had our eggs, a pig pen, and a cow. LR: Self-sustaining. AC: We just lived. LR: It sounds like it. That’s just great. So when you graduated from high school… 7 AC: Well, we had moved away from this place for a little while. My dad moved to Fentress County, to deer lodge for the summer. I was through grade school and had my first year in high school there, at Walburg. We then moved back to our house on Stinking Creek, and I started school at Catoosa. I just got started at Catoosa when they built a high school in Habersham, Wynn High School. So moved into there, but we had no books, nothing was furnished. The parents had to buy the books, everything that you used in school was bought. One of the boys that I had gone to grade school with walked at least two miles every morning in the dead of winter time to get down there to school to start the furnaces for the day. It gets cold in Tennessee, it would freeze over Stinking Creek, which we would skate on. Anyway, I started into school then at Wynn High School, and here’s a picture of, oh let’s see, where’d I put it? All the girls there in the junior and senior high school. I just found that a few days ago, and this is me. LR: Right here? AC: Yes. LR: Okay. AC: Now these girls were just round in the community. All of them came on buses. No high school kids had a car. We all went on the bus. When I was in high school my dad, drew a pension, a small pension from the 1st War, and that helped us buy our shoes. I don’t remember just how much he got a month, but we had more, sometimes, than others, with that small pension. He even came home one time with a Victrola on the mule’s back. Anyway, when we started high school, I 8 had clothes just as good as the rest, except the coal miner girls, they had better clothes than stinking creek girls did. I sewed my clothes, I took home-ec for two years, and I sewed a wool suit, when I was a junior. The girls learned to cook and sew, and that was not by choice, that was our grade. The first Valentine I got, I was probably ten years old, it said “What every girl should know, is how to cook and sew. If you love me enough to learn, I’m sure my true love you would earn.” Now that was a little Valentine card I got that big, from a little boy who was my age, and he turned out years later to be kind of a boyfriend. High school, had a kitchen and it was ten cents for a bowl of soup. I didn’t have ten cents, so we’d come home from school hungry, and we’d run to go see what we could find to eat, and what we could find would be cornbread or a biscuit and jelly. I know one girl, she always brought a biscuit with some meat in it to school. My two cousins, left home and quit school in the eighth grade so they could get a job out in La Follette, at the shirt factory. I wanted to go to school, so I went to school through high school. I didn’t have pretty clothes like they did, but I had a yearning in me, deep inside me, and I got that from not having anything. So I graduated from high school. LR: Well, obviously, finishing high school meant a lot to you. So when you graduated, the first thing you do is you go find a job. AC: Well yes, that was my aim. I wanted money, that’s all there was to it. I remember searching through my father’s house when my husband to be was in the Panama, for a penny loose card postcard. There was just no money, so as soon 9 as I got through high school there were a couple of girls at the high school that knew me, and they said they’re going to Cincinnati. My brother had gone to Cincinnati, so they said, “Well, come up here”. So I got on the Greyhound bus, and went to Cincinnati. I lived with my brother and his wife and baby, and a sister-in-law in one room. They had a hot plate for what little they could cook, but my brother was working, he had a job. So I lived there with them in one room till I got my first paycheck, and with that check I went and found a room with a bed in it, and shared the bathroom at the end of the hall with two or three other people. I had enough money for that. I lived there, maybe a month, and then had enough to go get me an apartment. I had a good job, it was an ice cream store. They made their ice cream, this was a Jewish store, and they’d also serve tuna sandwich or egg salad sandwich. I dipped ice cream, three dips for a dime. I lucked out in a good apartment, I shared it with a woman who worked; she was a housekeeper. When she’d get a weekend off, she was there with me. We both stayed in the same bed. Three story place, the owners were in the first floor, boys on the second floor, and the girls on the third floor. One water line, if I wanted to take a hot shower, the boys didn’t have hot water. I walked home from my work in the afternoon, and I would pass a beer garden. They had lights outside, and in the summer time they had chairs and benches outside. These people, old and young, sitting out there drinking beer, having a good time, it didn’t enter my mind, I was nineteen years old then, and I passed right by and went on home. I lived there when war was declared in 1941. 10 LR: When in this time did you meet your husband? AC: He joined the Army when he was seventeen. He hitchhiked miles to get to Knoxville, and he was too thin, so an officer told him to go out and buy five pounds of bananas. He went out, ate, came back, passed, and he was sent to Panama. LR: So you knew him in Tennessee. AC: Yep, he was across the hill on Hickory Creek. LR: For some reason I thought you met him for the first time in Cincinnati. AC: No, he came down from Fort Knox AWOL one time, and all through his years, that’s the only thing that is on his discharge. LR: Was his AWOL? AC: Yes, that he was absent one day. So, I was living in Cincinnati and had my apartment, and he called me. It kind of upset me, because he was already at Fort Knox. So I said “Well I’m quitting my job, I’m going to go to Fort Knox, Kentucky.” So I went, but I had nowhere to stay, but they did have places for visitors on post. So I got a visitor’s place, and we went to Louisville to the theater. It was just chaos, crying women losing husbands, and sweethearts. War, all out, just like that. So when we got married, he had some soldiers cursing the japs from his company stand for us, I never saw them again. We saw a courthouse, and we just walked up the steps and got married. We caught the bus back to camp and he went back on base, and I went back to the visitor place to stay, because I couldn’t go to the barracks with him. LR: So, I’m trying to understand this, it’s almost like it was a whim, getting married. 11 AC: Well I had no intention getting married when I quit my job and went to Fort Knox to see him. It’s just like I said, everybody was upset, and the world had come to an end. LR: So it was this thought of, “We need to seize the moment, now’s the time, if we’re going to let’s it do it now.” Was that kind of the mentality? AC: Yes, we didn’t think nothing no more about it, let’s just get married. LR: So you go back to Fort Knox, and how long were you able spend with him before he was shipped out? AC: A week. He got his leave and we went to Tennessee on the Greyhound bus overnight. We walked up Stinking Creek for two and a half miles to my folk’s house. There wasn’t room for us because there was little ones in my family then. So we went to his Dad’s, who was on the farm, a widower. We spent a couple nights there, walked back down Hickory Creek where two creeks met on a big bridge. I lived on stinking creek, he lived on hickory creek. I said goodbye to him standing on that bridge. He was on his way to walk two and a half miles to catch the Greyhound bus. I stood there and cried washing away my tears. His youngest sister was getting out of high school in just a couple of months, so I waited for her to get out of school, and we went to Baltimore, where defense work was. LR: Going back just a little bit, you watched your husband leave; when was the next time you heard from him? AC: Two and one half years. He landed in North Africa and went through that whole campaign. He was just outside of Rome when he was sent home with the 12 medical. I never knew where he was. I showed you the little victory letters, but I never heard his voice till he walked into my door in Baltimore. He came back and they sent the guys to Miami for R and R. The most gorgeous hotels they had in Miami, and he got out of there and went home to Tennessee. Well, I’m working and I had to get discharged, you didn’t walk off a job during the war. In fact, I got home sick and wanted to go home between these two and a half years. I said to my boss, “Paul, I want to go home.” He didn’t want me to take time out of my job. Everybody could get a job and needed a job, and once you got a job they wanted you to stay. So I said “Paul, have you ever been homesick,” he was born and raised in Baltimore. He said, “No.” I said, “I’m homesick. I want to go home and see my little brothers and sisters and my Dad and Mom.” He says, “Well, I can’t give you leave.” So I said, “Well I’m going.” So I did, and I stayed three or four days, went right back, walked in, said, “Here I am.” He said, “Okay, there’s your job.” LR: So you go to Baltimore with your sister-in-law, what was your reasoning for going to Baltimore? AC: Oh, everybody went, because the depression was over. That was the place to go. They manufactured airplanes, and that was where I went, to Glen L. Martin, in Middle River, Maryland. She and I both wanted to work in the shipyard, but her brother-in-law said, “Girls don’t go there, it’s the shipyards, go to a little more elite place.” We would have made more money at the shipyard, but anyway. LR: So you work at Glenn L Martin, and what did you do there? 13 AC: My sister in law was a typist, and I worked in service engineering, and artists. I kept an account, a chart, of their progress and when it was supposed to be out and that, proofreading, and filing. LR: So did you ever get to see the day-to-day operations of the factory, or were you in an office? AC: I was in an office. LR: Did you want to be out there working on the factory floor, or did you care? AC: Well, I didn’t care I just wanted a job. I had high school education, and the people that were going to the shipyard could be people of any sort. LR: Okay, making sense. Did you enjoy working in the office? AC: I did, because we were drawing nuts and bolts and on drawing boards. We were working. The war is out there, this is needed. It’s got to be done. LR: So you feel like you were contributing, doing your part for the war? AC: Yes, everybody wanted to do their part. LR: Did having that job make the separation, not knowing where your husband was easier? AC: Well I didn’t know him as a husband, I knew him as a boyfriend who had been gone. I wasn’t used to going out and seeing him. LR: This was your way of just doing your part for the war? AC: Yes, and in the meantime, I told you that before his sister left home, with me, their brother was killed in the Death March in the Philippines. Their Dad had received his flag. LR: Yes, I know what you’re talking about. 14 AC: So, then when he came home, we both went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where their making the bombs, because the war is not over. LR: What did you do there? AC: I was a timekeeper. LR: What did your husband do while he was there? AC: I don’t know. You didn’t ask anybody what they did. When you went in the gate you were signed in by somebody that knew you, and you didn’t go around asking anybody what they were doing. I don’t know what he did. He come home one day, and he said, “Well, there’s gonna be a new guy next to me, he won’t be there tomorrow.” I says, “Well how come?” He says, “He opened his mouth, and it was heard, and he was out the door.” They had very tight security. While we’re there, we get a little trailer, it’s winter time, and it got cold. I went down to the office and I said, “There’s no heat in my trailer.” Bomb planners went up in that valley, in Tennessee, in the backwoods of Tennessee, and chose that place to build the bomb, where there’s just old mountain people. They chose that part of the country, comparable to West Virginia, to build that part, which is still there. If there was a war, Oak Ridge would be right there. LR: So when, when did you guys quit working at Oak Ridge? AC: In 1943 I think. My mother had a sister who got married, slipped away from the mountains and went to Washington State. My mom had always talked about her, and my cousins there and stuff. We just decided we didn’t want to work at Oak Ridge, that was open enough that we could just leave Oak Ridge, and we went down to my folks, and it was Sunday morning. At the breakfast table I said, 15 “We’re going to Aunt Eda’s in Washington State, you want to go with us?” My mom said, “Yes”, and my dad said, “No.” Mom didn’t get to leave our neighborhood during the war, because of four little ones, but my Dad came to Baltimore and lived with me awhile. He wanted to be back home, and he got a job back at home. So we were at Oak Ridge for three or four months I guess, and we went to Washington State. So, my Mom said yes, and my Dad finally decided to go because my Mom wasn’t gonna live in Tennessee any longer, so she boxed up her sewing machine, her bed clothing, her dishes, and personal effects, got on the train, and we all went to Washington. We stopped off in Cincinnati, and picked up my grandmother, cause she wouldn’t leave her, and took her to her sisters. Her mother had never seen her sister since she was a young girl and snuck away at night and got married. She had never seen her since she left my grandma was old. Anyway, we went there, and my Dad had fifty dollars of their life’s living, when he got his first job in the forestry. They loved it there. Eventually they went to the coast when we went to Seattle, and they bought a home in Leavenworth cause they were gonna live there forever. This is about the time my Dad got killed on the highway, the coast highway five. It had been open maybe two or three months, and my Dad was working in the afternoons. He got out for his walk home, and walked straight in front of a truck, and a car came and just took him like that. After my Dad got killed, my mom went back to Tennessee, took the kids back home. My husband and I lived on the coast, our kids were born in 16 Longview, Washington, and that’s where my heart always will be, cause that’s the important time in your life, our two little girls. LR: So, what brought you to Ogden? AC: Well, my husband’s health, actually when all is said and done. We lived in Colorado Springs and he couldn’t get the job he wanted cause he didn’t have a trade when he got out of the Army. He went to Jackson, Michigan on the railroad and shoveled coal to make steam, and there he learned how steam works, and then he got a job in Connecticut as a steam operator in a hospital. He had a panic attack which took us all over, time and again. He couldn’t get a job at the Academy in solo, and he was coming home to get a shot for his nerves, anxiety, and his brother said “Come here. I retired at Hill and maybe I can help you get a job at Hill.” We came and he got there and retired there. LR: Do you think that his anxiety was because of the war? AC: Absolutely, he come home with what these boys have. I could’ve told them when they started wondering what’s happening with these boys, they’re having to be sent back and forth and it's tearing them apart. They’re worn out. My husband, after two and a half years, he was worn completely out. At one time, before one of our babies was born, he was working graveyard, and he didn’t feel good. Well, he went to the doctor, and this doctor kind of told him, “Well, you’ve run down your heart.” Well it took years to get that out of his mind, and that’s what he died with, but he didn’t have a heart attack then. LR: So, I’m going back a ways, but I’m curious about, you said your husband was medically discharged from the Army. Can you talk about that a little bit? 17 AC: Well, when he came home, he was fifty percent disabled, and that’s what his discharge said. He drew a pension, fifty percent, and that’s what carried us over all these moves we made, and we did a lot of them. He’d say, “I can’t.” He went to the mental hospital, let me tell you about that. We were in Oregon, and the girls were little, and he was going to the doctor because he hurt his shoulder. His job was putting a little patch in plywood. He’s cut out where there was damage and then cut out a piece to fit that and patched it on. So his back is hurting, his shoulders hurting, so the doctor told him “Duff, I can’t do much more for you. But I can send you where you can get some help I think.” “Well send me.” So he sent him to the Roseburg Hospital in Oregon, to the VA. So we loaded up our two little girls and headed out for Roseburg. We didn’t know what Roseburg was. It was a VA mental hospital. So, we headed out and we stopped at our minister who lived kind of close to Roseburg. He knew what Roseburg was, and he said, “My child, why don’t you just take the girls and go back home and let me run him down there. It would make it easier for you.” “Well fine.” So I took the girls and went home, and our minister took him to the hospital. He walked in, and they said, “Well, who is admitting you?” He says, “I’m admitting myself”. He had his fifty percent discharge in his hand and they had to take him. Service connected, they cannot refuse him. I went home and went up to my sisters, who lived a few miles away, and spent the night. My sister’s sister-in-law said, “Does Anne know what that hospital is?” My sister says, “Yes, it’s a VA hospital,” and she says, “No, it’s a 18 mental hospital.” So, my sister said, “Anne, you know what kind of hospital Roseburg is?” I says, “Yeah, it’s a veterans,” and she says, “Anne, it’s mental.” Well next morning me and the girls were on our way to Roseburg, and by that time they knew that he was not crazy. But he had to stay six weeks, in order to stay good-will with the military, with the Army. Anyway, I left him standing there, put my two little girls in the car, the blackest day I’ve ever had. Your husband, in the mental hospital, with two little girls. So he stayed six weeks, which did him good, because he saw what mental is, and he come home and we just started our life all over again. We lived for years in many states, and if I had known. One of our moves was from Oregon to Memphis, Tennessee. He was sick after he had come back from the mental hospital, and they found a spot on his lung, we thought cancer. He wanted me to go home, where my folks were, and they operated in Memphis, Tennessee, it was fungus. But anyway, we drove all the way back to Tennessee, unloaded at his father’s house, and he went to the hospital and he had surgery down there. If I had just faced the music, when it started, right there when he was diagnosed with the lung thing, but I didn’t know. The doctor had told me, he thought our little girl had rheumatic fever, and she laid for six weeks on the couch. Rheumatic fever was really bad. But if I had just known, and I was not a kid, I didn’t have the first baby till I was twenty-six. I would have said, “No, we’re not leaving, you’re going to have to work it out.” If I had gone to the VA and said, “Take him, take care of him, I can’t, we’ve got little children. Take care of him,” but I didn’t. 19 I’m a strong person, I went through it, our kids never went hungry; they never went naked. We didn’t rent very many times, because he could always buy in to VA homes. When he went to get a job, he had a ten-point preference, like when he went out to Hill, and there was somebody applying for the job besides him, he had a ten-point preference. So he got jobs like that. He was a hard worker, he was an honest man, and he was a good father. He was good to me. LR: You talked a little bit on Friday about working here in Ogden, going back to school, becoming a nurse. AC: Yes. LR: Where did you go to school? AC: Weber. Well, I worked at many, many things, and I’d always wanted to go and be a nurse, but when I graduated from high school, unless your folks had money you did not go to school, unless you went to the city and worked. So, I went through all these years, I went to Comptometer school in Connecticut, the beginning of computers. I got a job right off in the state building. I’ve never been a waitress. I don’t know how I missed being a waitress. I was a car hop though! I had a job in Oregon where they grow mushrooms, and I was a carhop there, too. When the war was over and we were in Michigan, I got a job at, do you know about the man, his name is Hughes, and there was a big thing about him here in Utah. LR: Howard Hughes. AC: I got a job in his airplane factory in Detroit, and I went to school and learned how to be a riveter. 20 LR: You’ve literally done almost everything. AC: I have. My children have suffered for being taken from one place to another, but they never went hungry, they had good clothes, and they never had to live in dumps. Their dad was a good worker, he could get a job, and you didn’t have to have so many degrees, seventy-years ago. LR: When you were working here in Ogden as a nurse, where did you work? AC: I started at St. Bens, and went from there to the VA. I was scared to death at St. Bens, I have to tell you, I’m not Catholic, and I always in my life heard about a Catholic hospital, and the nurses was nuns. Are you Catholic? LR: No, I’m not. AC: So here I am at St. Bens, and anyway, it was a good job and I worked the second floor, and the sister was lovely. I heard about the VA, so I went to the sister on the second floor, and she said, “Now, if you don’t like it, you will come back, won’t you?” They were just good. So I went from there to the VA. My husband said, “Now let’s move down to bountiful that way, Anne, and it won’t be so long for you.” I stood up in our living room and I said, “I am NEVER moving out of this house.” Now, it took me all that time to say I will never move again. LR: That’s why you stayed. AC: It was hard for me to leave the beautiful home in Colorado, and it was hard on my kids when we moved here, it was very hard. They were in high school, and it was very hard on them. They had been all over, and been to many, many schools in many towns and states. My kids were exposed, if that’s the way you’ll put it, to all kinds of living with all kinds of people. 21 LR: Do you have any questions? SS: I did have one. Did you meet your husband in high school? Going back a lot further. AC: No, my husband did not go to high school. SS: Okay, so did you know him when you were young? AC: Oh yes, we lived like, three miles apart. SS: Okay. When did you decide that you wanted to date him, even though you were in Cincinnati and he was in FT Knox Kentucky? AC: You mean, how come we kept in touch? Well, when he come home from Panama, I didn’t know that he was coming, but we kind of kept in touch. My Dad and Mom had gone to church, and it’s the nighttime, and there was a knock at the door. There stood a handsome man, dressed out beautifully. “Well hello there.” He did a whole term in Panama, he’d been gone four years, and he just grew up, and I grew up a little. “Oh, neat, come on in.” My brother and sister pushed the furniture around, and we played music and dancing while our folks were at church! LR: That’s great. I love that. AC: That’s the way I grew up. We played the guitar, we always had a guitar, and my mother played the organ, well, she played the organ in church. We just grew up with a guitar, and I had played till my fingers don’t play anymore, and one of my brothers could have been uptown in it, but he had to be about three sheets in the air before he could play, so he didn’t want to turn out to be a regular alcoholic. There’s been music in my family, and we all played but one of my brothers. My 22 eighty-seven year old sister got married again three years ago, I have one sister that has lost her husband a year ago, and this sister had never stayed alone one night, when her husband died, she had never been alone one night. LR: That’s hard. Let me ask you one final question. AC: What am I gonna do now? LR: No, but that’s a good question. AC: Well I go to Arizona every winter, and I have for fifteen or fourteen years. I go down there and play cards, dance, and socialize for five months. I come here just when I have to. LR: So what is the one thing that you hope you have given to your children, almost like a legacy? AC: That they have learned how to work. My one girl, here, could put a meal on the table when she was fourteen years old, when her Daddy would come home from. She’s a gifted artist, she has a house art in Arizona, where we go. She’s going into knitting and quilting, she learned soap making, and she’s successful at everything she does. My other girl is a graphic artist, and she lives in Australia. She and I went on a cruise and she met a guy from Australia and went there, and married, she’ll be a citizen this year in Australia. She makes good money, she just does her stuff. LR: Thank you Anna, so much for your time.