Oral History Program Calvin Watts Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis 12 December 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Calvin Watts Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis 12 December 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: Watts, Calvin, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis, 12 December 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Cal Watts circa 1940s Cal Watts circa 1940s Cal Watts circa 1940s Cal Watts circa 1940s Cal Watts Flight Crew circa 1940s Cal Watts circa 1950s Cal Watts 12 December 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Calvin Watts, conducted on December 12, 2016 in his home in Logan, Utah, by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis. Calvin discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Lisa Vascon, Calvin’s daughter, is also present during this interview. LR: It is December 12, 2016. We are in the home of Calvin Watts in Logan, Utah talking about his life and his World War Two experiences for the World War Two In Northern Utah Project. My name is Lorrie Rands, Melissa Francis is on the camera, and Lisa Vascon, his daughter, is here as well. So, do you prefer Cal or Clavin? CW: Cal. LR: Okay. Well, Cal, I want to thank you for your willingness to let us come into your home and interview you. So I’m just going to jump in and start with when and where were you born? CW: I was born in Rexburg Idaho, 1924. LR: Did you grow up in Rexburg? CW: Until the fourth grade. LR: Where did you move after Rexburg? CW: Moved to Logan. On the East Side, and went to the Whittier School. LR: Okay, do you remember anything growing up in Rexburg? CW: Well, I can remember that the wind blew all the time, and I didn’t realize that until I got out of Rexburg. LR: Why did your family move to Logan? CW: I’m one of the youngest in the family, so my older brothers and sisters went to 2 Utah State, or were coming from Rexburg to Utah State. My father was a traveling salesman for Lee Clothing Company, and that didn’t make much difference where he lived, as long as he could afford where we were going. So, the reason was because of the education. LR: Okay. What were your parents names? CW: My parents, John Austin Watts and Lucy Ellene Watts. LR: Eileen? LB: Ellene. LR: Okay, what was your mother’s maiden name? CW: My mother’s maiden name was Nichols. They were the Nichols from Brigham City, and her family was in charge of building the Tabernacle in Brigham City. LR: There’s a lot of history there. How many siblings did you have? CW: Had seven. LR: Seven, where were you? CW: I was next to the baby, I was the youngest male. My sister Lucy was the baby. LR: Alright. So you moved to Logan in the Fourth Grade, what do you remember about growing up during the Depression? CW: At that time I didn’t know it was a Depression, but as I look back on it, I can see that when we had bread and milk, I thought that was a treat, because my Dad made it look like it was the treat. Bread and milk was our meal most of the time, seems like. Of course, they knew how to take care of us. They weren’t going to let us starve to death. So we did okay, that way. MF: You said you went to the Whittier School for elementary school, where did you go 3 to high school? CW: Logan High. LR: So what year did you graduate from High School? CW: 1942. LR: That actually helps. That means you were in high school when Pearl Harbor happened. What do you remember about how you felt after Pearl Harbor, when you heard about it? CW: Well I told you what grade I was in. I remember that we listened to it on the radio, like everybody else. I remember telling myself well, it’ll be over by the time I get to be a senior. So I’ll just stay the way I’m planning things, go to school, and mature properly. So, we thought it was out of range. But pretty soon, they called everybody up to serve in the service, everybody but your old Dad here, cause I was the youngest, and I still had some time. I was surprised how mature I was at that time, but I had time to kind of look at something to do when it came my turn. So I decided I wanted to be in the air corps, if I could make it. So there was a big room full of applicants to get in the Air Force, and I’m one of them. We went out to the airport in Salt Lake, took physicals and so forth, and they said, “Well, you passed both, what would you like to do?” I told them, “I want to get in the Air Force.” At that time, we were able to go back to do some university for three months before serving in the service. So that gave me a little more time as the youngest. Anyway, there were seven or eight of us that had passed all of it, so now I’m sworn into the Air Force, and I want to fly. My due date to serve in the service 4 was like the fifteenth of the month, so that gave me another little window to kind of see what’s going on. My friends, they all joined what we called the enlisted reserve corps. That meant if they kept their grades up, they were going to be able to go to a university also. Well, come New Year’s Day, they were all called up immediately; their grades didn’t matter. So out of all that group, there were seven or eight of us that were able to be called to fly. LR: You volunteered for the Air Force, where did you do your basic training for the Air Force? CW: I went to Kearns, Salt Lake. LR: There’s that airfield there. CW: It’s still there. They made a town out of it. LR: So you spent some time in Kearns. And where did you go after that? CW: After Kearns, then I happened to be with a group that was the very top group at Kearns, and so we were able to select for where we’d like to go for what we called “Primary”. So we selected Tucson, Arizona. That’s where I went to do my first flying. LR: What were you learning to fly? CW: I was learning to fly a single-engine, with the idea of it as a P-51, or a fighter plane. As I look back on that, being the dumb kid I was, they were kind of protecting me, because I was in the right spots at the right time, nothing to do with me, but someone was helping me find those positions. So we were flying around Tucson, and pretty soon my instructor climbed out, “You’re soloing.” We had four or five hours. I says, “Oh?” He says, “Yep, you’re soloing. I’ll get out.” 5 We were flying in this auxiliary field, kind of a gravel field, or a pasture. So now I’m up alone, and coming into touch-and-go landings. They thought they’d wave me on; my instructor was out waving his hand, if I remember. So I had to go around again and again in the pattern. That went on for a little while, and then somebody ahead of me landed, so I thought it was my turn. No, my instructor was still out there, but I landed anyway and it was safe. But I remember he came out to the plane and he says, “You SOB, did you know you landed while I was out there telling you not to land? Well, I lost my dollar, hope you know that.” He bet a dollar with the other instructors that were there that I wouldn’t do. Ryan Field at Tucson Arizona was where we first started to fly, and I really found out that I was a damned good flyer. The way I can judge that now is that I became a flight instructor at a young age, so now I had something to measure by, and I was a junior flyer, but I was the best they had. From there on I went to flight instructor school, at Randolph Field, Texas. Randolph Field was the West Point of the Air at that time, and I got to fly there, so… MF: I did have one question for you. How long were you in Tucson? CW: At Tucson, I was there about three months. MF: Three months. So it seems like your training moved really quickly. CW: It did, about three months in positions. They sent us back to school, and I happened to draw Utah State University, so, I went from home into the service and then back home again. LB: Where did you stay at Utah State. You didn’t stay at home? CW: No, I stayed at the bottom of Old Main. It’s still there, the round windows face the 6 west I think and that’s the room that I was in. So the Air Force had the bottom of Old Main, and from the center all the way north, that’s what we called our barracks. Every once in awhile somebody would screw up, stay with a girlfriend or something, and by the way, I think I knew more about the girls in Logan than I ought to. LR: What were you learning at Utah State? What were they teaching you? CW: They were teaching us navigation and discipline. They made sure they did that. LR: How long were you at Utah State? CW: I was there for three months; it was quite a nice assignment. LR: Were you able to sneak home or anything? CW: On weekends we could be out until twelve o’clock. All the other times we had to be in our bed at ten o’clock, for bed check. LR: Do you remember about what year this was, that you were at Utah State? CW: We graduated in the fall of 1943. LR: Once you’re done at Utah State, where did they move you? CW: I went from Utah State to Ontario, California. LR: Okay. Do you remember what you were learning there? CW: We were learning to fly, I think we would go to school in the morning and fly in the afternoon, and the next time we’d fly in the morning, school in the afternoon, so it all rotated, different times. LR: What were you flying? Were you flying P-51s? CW: Not yet. It was a Ryan plane of some kind, single engine. LR: How long were you at Ontario? Three months again? 7 CW: Ontario was, I think about three months. LR: Do you remember where you went after that? CW: Yeah, to Luke Field for advanced flying. LR: Where is Luke Field? CW: Luke Field at Phoenix, and we were learning to fly, and it wasn’t just a joy ride. Every time we would go up with our instructor, it was an emergency. They’d turn the gas off. They knew how to do certain things. The plane would quit running, and we’d have to figure out how to get it going again. So we got good at emergencies. I remember we would be flying around and we had to pick out a place to land, emergency landing. So I picked out this field which I noticed before, so I fly a regular pattern that I was used to, my instructors behind. So now I’m coming in on I think they were Mexicans, thinning beets or doing something with the beets. So I thought, “Well I’ll scare them a little bit,” even with the instructor along. I just kept going down, he says, “Pull up, pull up,” and I acted like I couldn’t hear him. So I went right down close to them, and some of them got down flat on the ground, that’s how close I was. Didn’t bother me, but sure as hell bothered them, and they’d get up and they give me the finger. But I was having fun with it. That was the way I learned how to fly, and I got very good at flying. I became an instructor myself. LR: From the time you did your training, did you immediately go right into being an instructor? CW: Straight from graduating. My instructor that was teaching me, he says “What do you want to do?” I says, “Well, I want to go into fighter planes, P-51.” He says, 8 “Well I’m going to tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to instructor school.” So, as I look back on it, that was one of those saving times, where I was just a kid, and they were helping me stay safe, which was fortunate for me, because I didn’t know what that was all about. So I was there for three months as an instructor. LR: Okay. What was that like being a teacher, teaching how to fly? CW: It was good. I remember we used to blackout. We could pull out with enough G-force that we couldn’t see. You’d see the lights kind of go out, but you could hear. It was fun to black them out, especially my students. I had this student up, and I went into a loop and took him out, and he flopped over like this in the cockpit. I tried to wake him up. “What are you doing, what are you doing?” I could take my stick flying and it would move his also. So I could bang him on the knees. Finally got him awake. So he went through the black out completely, kind of passed out. LR: What type of planes were you flying when you were instructing? CW: They were single engine, and I was heading for the P-51. But they switched me back to the bomber class, so then I’m in the B-29, you know which one that was? That’s the one that dropped the Atomic Bomb. LR: So that’s the Super Fortress with the big long wingspan. So that’s what you were teaching to fly at instructor school? CW: Yeah. Can you imagine at a dumb age that I am, now I’m an instructor? But I was good enough, so I felt good about that. Then I remember we’d get up, we could be flying and turn upside down, and then you could do rollovers, and come to stop and stop, stop, stop. Go all the way around, stop eight times, somewhere in 9 the process. LR: So like in point turns? CW: Yeah. LB: You were teaching people to fly, but what were you flying, once you finished with instructing? CW: Had a lot of different planes I could fly. Being as young, as I look back on it, I should have been flying every damned thing, because no one was paying attention to me, to keep me from flying, so I could have got a hold of any airplane that was sitting out there, even at that age. Yeah, they wouldn’t have known any different. MF: So you were an instructor for six months, then what did you do after you finished as an instructor? CW: I went from single engine into the B-29 bomber. We used to practice twelve hour missions with the B-29, so we’d fly from Tucson to New Orleans, and cross country up to Seattle, Washington, and back to base, and that would be about a twelve-hour flight, because we were training to go from our base to the enemy and return. We did some flying like that, where I learned what real flying was, and how tired you could get. That was so tiring, and I don’t know why, but I almost had to be poured out of the airplane. LR: I could imagine that. So after all of your training and all of your teaching, what did they have you doing? Did they send you overseas or did you stay in the states? CW: No, I stayed in the states, in the training command for three years. LR: So for the whole time, you were training. 10 CW: I was in the training command, I was training someone else. LR: You weren’t kidding, you were being protected. Wow, that’s amazing. CW: As I look back, I’m sure that’s what they were doing. My seniors probably thought, “Keep this dumb kid around for a while longer.” LR: Of all your time training and flying here in the states, and teaching, what is one of your favorite memories? CW: One of my favorite memories, well while I was still in training, in the single engine, we were flying out and there were five of us I think, formations. Then we’d split up, and we’d all go on certain directions, and meet you wherever the light is, at a particular time. So it had to be time and distance in order to beat all the rest of your people. I’m down low, flying in and I looked ahead, and there was people working on a haystack. As I come ahead of them I can see them watching me a little bit, and I thought, “They can’t take my number on the plane, because I’ll be past them before they think to do anything.” So I decided I was going to get them off the haystack. I go down at three feet, or whatever it takes. Sure enough, by the time I got to those haystacks, where they’re stacking hay, grain and so forth, they’ve all split off the top, and they were down, where I’d have to run into the haystack to get them, and sure enough, they got the number. Then we were flying around there, and now we’re going to regroup again at this particular time, so it’s going to be on the railroad. When it was time for me to get on the railroad, sure enough, there were a couple of the planes ahead of me, and they kept getting a little bit lower on the railroad tracks, and so when it did come to my turn, they were off of the railroad track, and down in the barrow 11 pit. I figured I could come crash on top of them. Anyway, that was a fun time, it was a training time, and expecting to go overseas and, now the war’s kind of winding down a little bit, and I’m in the B-29, still in the training command. LB: How did you get Mom to marry you on the airfield? CW: Well, I remember in junior high, she says she loved me. Hell, I didn’t realize what love was. That scared me to death. So, I didn’t see her for a while. But I knew her and kind of had an eye on her. She was a beautiful woman with brunette long hair. So now we’re married, and there was a motel named Sage and Sand in Tucson, and it was on the highway to Benson. That’s Benson, Arizona. That’s where we started our married life, and then they moved us as soon as a certain motel room came available. Their name was Crabtree, and they said, “We want to take some pictures of you.” “Okay.” So somebody came and took our pictures. Well, we found out that it was for their advertising, so now I could see myself and Ann on advertising for quite a few years. LR: So when did you get married? CW: We got married July 22, 1945. LB: At Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. They were married by a chaplain on the base, in the chapel. How did Mom get from Logan to Tucson to marry you? CW: She got on the plane, in Salt Lake, and she got shipped to Los Angeles and then back to Tucson. But I never had her up in my plane. That was kind of against the rules, and I didn’t want to wash out because of some dumb thing, so I played it just the way I’m supposed to, and got through three years in the training command. So I’m waiting for her plane to come in, and the military base runways 12 were right side-by-side for commercial airlines. So, I waited there and thought, “Well, boy, I’m going to miss getting our license.” Finally, here comes the plane, and there happened to be Ann on it. As soon as she came out of the plane, walked down the stairway, she saw me, so now we’re doing okay. We hurried in and got a license to get married, and we got married on Sunday. LR: So how long did you stay in the service after the war ended? CW: I stayed in a total of three years. I had to be in that position for three years to be promoted into a First Lieutenant, and it all ended after thirty-three months or something. So I didn’t get my three years completely in the service as an officer. LR: Where did you and your wife go after the war? CW: Well, we went back to Logan. My brother was there, Conley is his name, and we decided we would start a lumberyard. We called ourselves Cache Valley Builders Supply. LB: What was it like starting a business right after the war? CW: Well, we were the Greatest Generation, they tell us, and we were that because everybody wanted to help. So we started a lumberyard. We had a wheelbarrow, a bag of cement, and a shovel. That was our inventory to start our yard. We rented a place which was a narrow piece of property. It was on Main Street, and we called ourselves Cache Valley Builders Supply. We rented a garage about as big as this room right here, and the garage door would go out, the aluminum doors would flip up. So every time that somebody wanted to help us by being a customer, they had to be careful not to be killed by the door. It mostly almost hit them on the shins. 13 We did that for quite a while, and how we ever got past that first bit is a miracle. No inventory, no money, but we didn’t know it couldn’t be done. We were in that together for a little while, and then Con, my older brother by thirteen years, he had a heart attack and died. So now, I’m Cache Valley Builders Supply and I felt kind of like I was super-blessed, because I was smart enough to handle that and make the lumberyard succeed. We became the lumber business in Logan during that time. LB: How many years were you in business? CW: In business fifty-five years. LR: Wow, so you didn’t’ do too shabby then. You did pretty good. CW: We did good, because we didn’t know how to fail. It was interesting, because like I said after the war, everybody wanted to help everyone else. We had people who wanted to help us. We could get lumber with the Latham Trucking Company in Wellsville, because they would go to Montana with salt, and haul back lumber for me. That helped me get started. MF: Going back just a little bit, how much did you communicate with your family back home, while you were in the service? CW: I’m sure I wrote every week. MF: How were they doing back home, during all this? LB: How many, how many kids did Pop have in the service? He had you, and Loy was flying for the Navy. Was Con in the war? CW: No. LB: LeMoyne? 14 CW: No, so just the two of us. LB: Okay, but Lucy’s husband, Stan, and Marjorie’s husband, Clark, were in the war. CW: In the Navy LB: Was Ace in the war? Arvilla’s husband? CW: No. LB: Okay. So he had four, two in-laws and two sons in the war at the same time. MF: What was your wife’s name? CW: Anna-Mae Adams Watts. MF: You said you knew her in grade school, but did you date in high school at all? CW: Yeah! MF: So were you writing home to her as well while you were in the service? CW: Yeah. MF: Was she working during the war? CW: She was working at the telephone office. She was the one who said, “Number please.” MF: When she joined you in Tucson, did she continue to work down there while you were in the service? CW: No, I don’t think so. We were married then, needed to keep track of each other. LR: Then I’m gonna ask my final. So, looking back, how do you think your experiences in World War Two influenced your life? LB: Dad, what did you learn from training? What did you learn from being in the military? CW: I learned mostly that what was good for me was discipline. I didn’t want to make 15 any waves. I remember, I went up for a flight with my instructor and now we’re flying instruments, which means there’s a canvas thing that comes over our head, and the only thing we can see are the instruments. No outside contact whatsoever. I’m flying the instruments for an hour, or I get our little map out like this, and follow the map. When I got down my instructor says, “Is that an ordinary flight for you?” I says, “Yeah, it was a little rough today, but.” He says, “Mister, that’s the best instrument ride I’ve had on this base.” I remember it was wonderful. I hit all points, and it gave me a lot of confidence, and I was young enough to accept it, and bright enough to continue. MF: Well it must have given you a lot of confidence, like when you started this lumberyard, you said you didn’t know it couldn’t be done! CW: That was amazing. The lumber would come in from Montana, like I said, they’d haul salt up, and on the return haul lumber back. The lumberyard was about as wide as this room, and a little deeper, but I would get the lumber off of the truck, and I would stack it one on the other, and I’d put one just a little bit ahead of the other so it wouldn’t get wet, so, now I’m the best at that. One piece of lumber at a time. MF: I like it. LR: Just seeing you can see how much you loved it, by seeing the way you light up when you talk about it, so thank you so much for sharing- I appreciate it. CW: So now my class, this was Ontario California. My class that graduated, they were having some time off, so they went to Los Angeles, and I was still just a little behind, because of diphtheria or something. I had to put in an hour and fifteen 16 minutes in order to have enough flying time to graduate with the rest of them. My friends had gone into Los Angeles, so now, I’m flying by myself, in Ontario, California, and I didn’t want to get myself in trouble, but I saw some plane over there, and I’m watching him. I keep thinking, “That kid has got to be good to be doing what we’re doing as well as he is. I guess, there’s flyers better than I.” So then he started moving over towards me a little bit. I had to be 500 feet away from him, so I move away, and he keeps coming, so I turned it over into a split-s, like this. We’re right down low as I could be to the ground, and I looked over and Good Hell, that plane was flying right next to me in flying formation. Well, it happened to be one of the instructors of another class, and I tried to get away and thought, “I should be okay.” As soon as I landed, an enlisted man came out with the block, and says, “The Major wants to see you.” I knew it was this instructor, because he pulled his canopy back to make sure I saw that he was important. I’m in trouble now, and I didn’t like that too much. But, I did go see the Major, and he says, “Hit a Brace, mister.” That meant come to attention. Clicked your heels and you’re in the Army now, that kind of thing. He told me, “Well, you’re restricted to base, so don’t leave the base.” I thought, “Can’t anyway, so that’s fine. I’m already at the base.” I’m on base, and one of my instructor says this is the best ride I’ve had on this base, so I thought I was pretty damn good. But now, I’m under control of this other person, he knows I’m pretty damn good too, but he says, “You’re restricted to base. You let me get too close to you.” LB: Dad, how about one more thing. The story about how you could have washed 17 someone out flying, and what you did instead. I’d like you to tell them that. CW: Well, the luck of the draw, and as I was an instructor now, we had to pick up another class that got behind on their flying time. So when they came over, they assigned me five of them, and one of them was Alan White, who I went to school with. “Good heavens, how are you doing? You’ll fly number three, number two, number four,” and so forth. So I started to take them for an hour each in training. Now this Alan White that I went to school with, he was flying, and it had taken all day, I didn’t spend any time teaching him, I just says, “I’ll fly, and you can relax.” So, I took over, and did the things that I liked to do, maneuvers and acrobatics. He didn’t get sick, but almost. When we landed and I filled out the grade report sheet, everything he did was okay. I wrote at the bottom, “Doing a good job,” because I didn’t know, I didn’t let him fly. Later on I ran into him in the travels, and he says, “You know when you went flying with me, I had already had my two pink slips, and was being washed out. You gave me a passing grade, so that caused a commotion over in our flight, maybe they weren’t making a mistake on me.” MF: So it caused a bit of a commotion at their flight class? CW: Yeah, so they had to have this big meeting at their end of the field. When I saw him later he says, “You know you gave me a passing grade?” “Yeah I did. Nice marks.” He says, “Well I’ve already had the slips. The whites and the yellows. I was being washed out. You gave me a passing grade, and good remarks. So they assigned me another different instructor, and I was able to stay in, so.” I says, “I saved you by mistake. I don’t know whether you were safe or not 18 because I did all the flying.” Flying then just wasn’t up and down, it was all kind of combat flying, dog fighting, airplane to airplane, and flying formation. No restrictions evidently, because I was gonna fly formation with this other plane, so I’d come down right to the side of him, and moved in. I could see it was another instructor with a student, so I motioned to him that I’m going to move up on him, because we’re close anyway. So here he is, and I’m here flying formation. It was close, and so I moved up right to here, put my wing down on his, and I knew how, and I made sure that I didn’t put my wing that his ailerons wouldn’t move. They bent out a little bit, but I put my wing on his wing. MF: That’s impressive. CW: I know, and I haven’t told anybody, because they’d think I’m just off of it a little bit. LR: Well somehow I think you have to be able to fly an airplane, but that’s just me. LB: Lorrie one other thing is that in Logan, they have this beautiful bridge. It’s a veteran’s bridge over by Logan High School. On that bridge they have the names of all of his comrades who didn’t come home, and it had fallen into disrepair for about twenty years. So Dad had somebody come to him and say, “We gotta do something,” so he put all the money forward to repair the bridge, gussy the thing up and make it look right. So he made the memorial in Logan. CW: So I knew all of them on that. Everyone that was on that I knew that had been killed in the war. One of them that was killed that I mentioned, was a good friend of mine. And, his last name was Boyle. B-O-Y-L-E. And, so, it was like I knew all of them that didn’t return to that wall for their names. 19 LR: Just gonna sit with that for a minute. Kind of hard to comprehend. If you don’t mind I want to ask you a quick question. How, how do you think, as you’ve listened to your Dad’s stories over the years, how have they influenced you? His stories? LB: Good question. I guess the first thing was to hear my father, all during his life, say that he didn’t want to get washed out in the Air Force. He wanted to be able to succeed, he wanted to be able to fly, so he’s always on his toes, always doing the very best that he could. Then he’d surprise himself that he would do as well as he did. So he was both humble and capable at the same time, and that influenced me, as I was growing up, to see that. A way a person can be. Humble, but capable. When he married my mother on the base, that wasn’t very traditional, because they came from a little Mormon town, and were married on the base. I just remember thinking my Mom looked like a movie star, my Dad looked like a movie star in this picture; so young and vibrant and shaking the world and all that. It. And it always made me proud that my Dad served in the war, and it made me patriotic, made me love my country. When he came back, he gave back to the community. He helped people build homes, and all these homes throughout Logan have Dad’s lumber in them. So I learned a lot from what that service did for Dad. My Dad’s mother died when he was fifteen, so he didn’t have a mother from then on. His sister, Lucy, was twelve, so at fifteen he and Lucy were somewhat fending for themselves while Pop was out as a salesman. Dad just happened to get lucky enough, blessed enough, to get instructor training, to 20 get an education in such a way that it changed his life. It gave him the direction and trajectory for his life. That always gave me discipline. I always then had direction in my life. LR: Thank you. Do you have any other questions? MF: No, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed hearing about your hot shot pilot days. Thank you so much for meeting with us today. Like we said, we really enjoyed listening to your stories today, we really appreciate it. LR: We do. CW: Well, hate to see you go. LB: Thank you so much. Thanks for coming. I think it was just in the nick of time. LR: Well I’m glad that we were able to come up and visit with ya.