Oral History Program Don Emerson Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Tanner Flinders 27 July 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Don Emerson Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Tanner Flinders 27 July 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: Emerson, Don, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Tanner Flinders, 27 July 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Don Emerson circa 1940 Don Emerson in Uniform circa 1940s Don Emerson in Africa circa 1940s Don Emerson in Africa circa 1940s Don Emerson 27 July 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Don Emerson, conducted on July 27, 2016 in his home in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands and Tanner Flinders. Don discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. LR: It’s July 27, 2016. We are in the home of Don Emerson in Ogden, Utah talking about his World War II experiences. I am Lorrie Rands, and Tanner Flinders is on the camera. Thank you Don for letting us do this and your willingness to talk to us. Let’s start with when and where you were born. DE: When and where I was born? Well I was born in 1920 on February 4 in a little town called Lenox, L-E-N-O-X, and we lived on a farm. My dad had just got out of the service in 1918 from World War I and he went to farming and we lived on a little farm until I was about ten, twelve years old and dad had several different kinds of jobs on farms. We moved to town and he got a job with the county engineer and he was building roads and all kinds of things. I guess from there on you want to know what happened huh? LR: No, no, keep going. DE: Well anyway, when we moved to town I was probably seven or eight… I was in the third grade, I know that. I was half way through the third and I went to country school for the first two-and-a-half years before we moved to town and then I was going to city school. We had a great three-story school building. High School and all the grade schools were all in one big building. So I went through all the grades, through seventh and eighth grade. Graduated in 1939 from High School after four years of that. Then I went to work for a friend of ours who was a 2 plumber. I was going with his wife’s daughter, I was pretty well involved with that girl for three years in high school. After I got out of high school and went to work for this plumber for about a year then I went to work for the county engineer, surveying roads and drainage deals and such as that until 1941 when the war broke out over in Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill got together and started drafting all the young guys. They sent me to Des Moines, Iowa to Fort Dodge, which is a big army camp. My problem was, when I went up there, I had chronic conjunctivitis, hay fever and I didn’t pass. My eyes were all swelled shut and everything else, so they sent me home and I stayed home for another year, but in May of 1942 they sent me back again. That time he checked me out and I still had hay fever and I asked him, “Well what about my eyes?” He said, “Oh you’ll get over that in a couple of weeks or so. You’re in.” “Ahh,” I’m starting to cry I think. They sent me to Fort Sill, Oklahoma in the month of May. I spent eleven weeks in Fort Sill, it’s an artillery school. They had horse-drawn artillery, old World War I deals. We dressed up like we was old World War I in boots and breeches and a fat stiff brimmed hat and all that stuff. The United States wasn’t ready for a war whatsoever. We didn’t even know what we was doing. After eleven weeks down there they sent me to a fort in New Jersey. There was hundreds and hundreds of troops at that camp and they took us down to the beach and loaded us on the Queen Mary, England’s biggest ship in the world. 22,000 of us on that one boat. Took us five days to cross the Atlantic. 3 Submarines, German submarines chased us one night like the devil. We went clear up around Greenland and all this and that and finally ended up in Ireland after five days. Americans had established a big camp in the northern part of Ireland and we stayed in Ireland until almost Christmas. It was in late December. They shipped us all across the channel over to Norway and we were there for a couple of weeks or so. After that, one night in December they says, “Everybody pack up, we’re moving out.” So on Christmas Eve we were loading on the big ships. “What’s going on?” We didn’t know where we was going or what was happening. Anyway, they loaded us all, whole big division which was the 34th Infantry Division. They were all mid-western kids from Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and all that part. We’re out to sea on Christmas Eve and we’re headed south, we knew we was going south. We could still see the shoreline lights over in France and all but we didn’t know for sure where it was. So in daylight after about two or three days of shipping there we come into the Mediterranean, through the Port of Gibraltar and on the 2 of January we were in the Mediterranean at a place called Oran, it was a big seaport just inside of the Mediterranean and the Germans had bombed that place, it was a disaster. Well, on shore was the French Foreign Legion. They sent a lot of people down to North Africa, it was like a prison more or less, but they called it the French Foreign Legion. When we were to come on shore, we were in landing crafts off of the big ship, and those French started to shoot at us from the shore. Those guys that was running the boats, they got scared and they 4 wouldn’t come in to shore. If we was going to get in we had to jump overboard and swim. I don’t know how many people we lost, drowned before they ever got to shore and the French Foreign Legion was shooting at us and we’re shooting back of course. Well we finally overdone them and got on shore and captured them finally, cause they weren’t very big. But from there on we spent months in North Africa. The British, who were already fighting the Germans in Tripoli and over in that part of North Africa, we’re supposed to go to the front lines, help the British. Well we spent all spring and all summer fighting the Germans more or less and our first big encounter was on a hill called 609. The Germans had it pretty well under their control and I’ll never forget, I went up there after they had a big battle but I don’t know what reason now. Some of our trucks, big six by trucks were up there and there was a crew up there, picking up the dead. They were throwing them into a truck like cordwood, piling them in there. We lost all kinds of people. In fact, a little later on, we lost 1800 people. They captured our troops and they spent the war in prison camps. We fought them on that hill up there. You’ve heard of Patton and his big tank outfit. Eisenhower was in command then, so Patton was going to take that mountain. It was the Italians and the Germans. The Italians were with the Germans at that time. But we fought them a lot and when the tanks came in the Italians wanted to run. They wanted to quit, but the Germans, I never did see it, but it was rumored that they chained the Italians to their artillery pieces so they wouldn’t run. But anyway, later on we 5 captured all the Italians. They quit as far as that goes. But those tanks that I was talking about was going to take this mountain deal. Unbeknown to them and it didn’t show on the maps evidently, there was a swamp land at the bottom of that mountain and all them tanks, there must have been thirty or forty of them, went in to that marsh and got bogged down. They could not move even. The Germans used them for target practice. Patton took an awful beating with these tanks at that time. But they finally got them out of their and late in the summer the Germans were having an awful time with our air force. They were bombing the heck out of them on that mountain and back in Tripoli and other places. So they decided that they would surrender or get the heck out of Africa. So there’s a little town on the seaboard in between where we’re fighting called Bizerte, and it was a race for the Allies and the Germans, to see who was going to get to Bizerte first. Well the Germans won and they got all their troops out of Africa and they went across the Mediterranean to Sardinia. Sardinia was the name of the island, just off the Italian isthmus. So they took up forts there and we tried to chase them off of their. We finally chased them off the island over into Italy and it was late in the summertime. We weren’t the first ones to go to Italy but we finally went to Italy and we come in at Naples, and that was the beginning of two years of chasing the Germans up Italy, pushing them all the way up to France. That’s when a lot of the little experiences I’ve had come along. Besides those that was in Africa. I had some funny deals in Africa that really didn’t pertain to the war. For 6 instance, one of the funniest deals I think, we was going down the road and we come up on a farmer. They had a lot of farmers in North Africa, Frenchman, British, they raised a lot of grain and vegetables, but anyway this truck was right ahead of us and it was loaded with watermelons. We pulled up right behind that truck and we had three or four guys, one of them gets out on the hood of the Jeep we’re driving, climbs in the back of that truck and we were robbing that guy of watermelons. After we got enough we just blowed away, I don’t think the farmer ever knew we was in his truck, as far as that goes. One of the other little funny deals, those farmers and those people down there raised a lot of grapes and they made a big tank like on the ground and had an arm on it that went around with a kind of a drag deal on it and the French girls and Italian girls got in that tank barefooted and tramped the grapes and all the juice would run out of the spout into containers. That’s the way they made their wine. It was quite a deal. Those farmers’, they had natives around down there, Arabs and all, working in their fields. They raised a lot of grain and those farmers would ride around on a horse with a sun helmet and the boots in battle and a little swagger stick and go around keeping them Arabs at work. It was quite interesting. They had a lot of horses in those parts down there and we used to ride on the horses all the time. They had trails that they took them on. That was just some of the stuff outside of doing battle. It was kind of a peacetime really at that time and we used to swim out in the Mediterranean up there. I and other guys saved a Lieutenant one time up there. He was out swimming and had an 7 undertow in the water and it was pulling him out to sea. We finally grabbed him and saved his hide. He liked that pretty good. That’s just some of the little things that happened over there. LR: Last time you mentioned you were almost captured in North Africa, by the Germans. DE: Those that were captured by the Germans? LR: No you were almost captured as you were escaping. DE: I was in an artillery outfit and we’re four or five miles behind where all the fighting’s going on and one time in Africa I almost got captured. They sent us, my outfit that had four artillery pieces, down in the Sahara and the cactus down there, there was big cactus groves. Cactus grew eight, ten, twelve feet high and we went down there and we was just trying to circle around behind the Germans is what we were trying to do. But we hid in those cactus patches and then another big outfit with what they called a Long Tom artillery, it was shot a big old shell called a .240 and it weighed about 1800 pounds. They was off to our side and they was raising heck with the Germans. Well the Germans didn’t like that so they sent aircraft. Every morning at seven o’clock would come these light bombers over and they had sirens on them and we could see them coming and they would dive and they were trying to get this big gun. They would dive on it and open up them sirens. Well we had all dug big holes around there like a bunch of gophers trying to hide, and those aircraft was bombing us and them. So then they was knocking 8 the heck out of us so we decided we better get out of there, but the Germans also decided that we were going to get out of there so they sent tanks after us on both sides of us; they was going to encircle us and they came in the night, we could hear them rumbling. We decided to bag up everything there was and I and a Lieutenant was in a command car leading this whole convoy and we’re traveling on top of sand dunes trying to stay out of the sand and all. It was black as heck at night. I was driving part of the time and he was driving the other part. When he was out he would walk in front of me with a lit cigarette in his hand and I followed that lit cigarette wherever he went. Now that whole convoy, I don’t know how many vehicles we had, there was quite a number of them with their guns and all that and we can hear them tanks a rumbling on each side of us. We lost one vehicle. One of them drove off the top of one of them sand dunes, but we escaped all those tanks finally. That was what was real crazy, boy, trying to follow that guy with that little cigarette light through there and here’s them rumbling tanks, we didn’t know if we was going to get captured or what. We did get away as far as that goes. That was one of my narrowest escapes in Africa. We lost a lot of people in Africa because we did not know anything about fighting a war whatsoever. Before they ever left the United States, they gathered up all them troops out of the Midwest and sent them to Louisiana, down there in the swamp lands and we had no guns, no nothing. We used trucks to simulate tanks. Troops carried wooden guns. We had no rifles. We weren’t prepared for nothing before 9 they sent us to Ireland, and we were the first American outfit to go to Europe. There was another outfit, the 45th Division that went two or three months ahead of us, but they went to Africa, off the west coast of Africa and was fighting the French down there. We went in to North Africa, like I was saying on January 2, we hit North Africa, but from there on we’re in Italy, more or less, for two years. LR: Can you talk about your time in Italy? DE: Well, we went in to Naples. We weren’t the first ones to go into Naples, but when we did the ships couldn’t get into port, we had to wade into port. They sent thousands of troops in there. There was some other outfits that came in, and I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of Mt. Vesuvius, it’s a big volcano which goes way back in history. It erupted and wiped out Italian villages, just burned them out. But anyway, that’s where we came in. We camped just below that volcano and we started chasing the Germans up and down there. In Italy we saw Mussolini hung, strung up to a big cross with his girlfriend and another Italian poor guy hanging upside down in Milan, Italy. That was quite an experience to see. I could tell you a little story about that I guess. Anyway, on that deal, as we went up through Italy, I’ll tell you a little bit about Mussolini. I was sent out with a driver and a radio man and a jeep. The Germans were retreating real fast and they were getting around us so my Colonel got us together and he sent me out to see if I could find some Germans, see where they was at. Well I found out where they’d been. They’d been camping but they got away, but they were really in bad shape. They were pulling horse drawn artillery, they had no 10 gasoline for their vehicles, and they were really in bad shape. Anyway, I’m wandering around all over trying to find Germans and I wandered into Milan, Italy. It’s up in the northern part more or less. Anyway, there was three of us, we were driving and it was in the evening of course. Three girls come along and we got to talking to them and we had some food with us; the little bit that we had got from a little party the night before with some people. We stayed in a hotel in Milan that night and the next morning when we got up this whole big crowd was out there. “What’s going on?” So we went over there and that’s when we found out that it was Mussolini. Their own people took him and hung him up. The people was down there with cane poles hitting him and punching him and they were really treating him bad and they more or less killed him on the crosses. I remember later in the day they cut him down finally and took him and buried him in a cave out their down in Milan. Well just as we were leaving and we’re going to get the heck out of there, here come another jeep toward us and it was a captain and his driver come up there and he says to pull up to the side and he says, “What are you guys doing in Milan here? We haven’t even taken this place yet.” “Sorry captain, we took it last night.” He looked at us like ‘What in the heck is going on here?’ Well we just drove off finally. A little later down the road, here comes a convoy towards us, “Who in the heck is this?” They get closer and closer and he said, “Hey, that’s a bunch of Germans.” Well it was, it was the German headquarters for Italy, for all their troops. They had a lot of women working for them in their offices, and they 11 must have been fifteen or twenty vehicles and they were practically all women with this big old Colonel and a few soldiers. We pulled up along the side of them and the Colonel stood up in the vehicle and saluted me, he wanted to surrender to me. “Whoa, what am I gonna do with these people?” Well, previously we had passed some MP’s up the road a ways and we weren’t too brave about all of this deal so we told this big old Colonel, “Just keeping going on down the road there and them MP’s will take care of you.” So, we took off which was a mistake, I should have taken them myself, I’ve often thought, “You dummy, why didn’t you lead them on down there?” We got the heck out of there and the amazing part was, I was with the 34th American Division and this was the 34th German Division. Now in that frame deal that I’ve got and I gave you, if you notice, that one German medal in there, that was that outfit, that 34th Division. But anyway, I finally got back to my outfit and it was a lot of experience doing it as far as that goes. That was just one of the little highlight instances in my life. LR: When we left off last time you were just getting into Italy, let’s pick up right there. DE: Ok. Well, I don’t know what I told you about. TF: I think we were in Milan. DE: I can tell you about landing in Naples. LR: Let’s just start with that. DE: Well anyway, after we left Africa we had forces already in Italy but we went in a little later on and we went in at Naples there, Mt. Vesuvius. From there on we 12 went up the road there to a little place called Salerno where we camped out for a while and a few things happened I guess on the way. We come to a stalemate more or less. We and the British had a river, I don’t remember the name of the river, but anyway it was short of Rome a ways. We was there for about three months. We had time to let some of us go on a vacation you might say, time off. Well I went in to Rome later on and I went in to Florence, Italy also. Before we went in there, we was stalemated at this river deal where there was an abbey across the river up on top of a mountain and we thought the Germans were using that for an observation point. Well I was assigned to go up there and find out for sure. We’re on one mountain side of the river and that abbey’s on the other, so there was a little town down in the river valley that the air force bombed and just destroyed. Well I went down through that area all by myself and climbed that mountain up there to get up towards this abbey. No Germans contested me or anything and I went up to this abbey and there was nothing, they weren’t using it, it was empty. Well that was quite an excursion. Took me a little while to get up there and back. After that the Allied forces decided to bypass that area and go around and take Rome. Well we went out to sea and boarded a bunch of ships and landing craft and all, and came in at a place called Anzio. It’s near the Leaning Tower of Pisa, just south of Florence. We landed on that shore and it was an English general in charge of the whole operation. When we landed on there, we could have walked right in to Rome but he wouldn’t go, he got scared. He didn’t want to do it and we 13 sat on that beachhead at Anzio for three months and while we’re sitting there we get bombarded with a great big gun somewhere near Florence. It shot a projectile about eighteen miles and it weighed 1800 pounds. They fired one of them one time at us on the beach and it went into the sand and didn’t explode and we dug it up and that’s when we found out that it weighed 1800 pounds. A little later on, after three months we decided to go and we went towards Rome and the Germans weren’t even in Rome they were outside of Rome and they retreated, going north. We had a big general there, he wanted to make a show so we formed a big convoy and we drove into Rome. It was like a celebration deal, all the people they gathered around us and gave us flowers and hugs and kisses and all that stuff and we sat around Rome for quite a long time after that. I went through seeing the Pope one time in the big courtyard and the Pope come out on his little pedestal deal up there, give a big speech to his people and all and I stood around there and listened to that. We vacationed more or less in Rome for quite a little while. Going back to Anzio, on the beachhead while we’re there, I and a couple of guys discovered a wine cellar where there was dozens and dozens of thousand gallon vat barrels of wine buried down in this cave. Some of the infantry had already found it and they just shoot holes in the barrels and would lay under there. In fact it was one or two GI’s floating, laying on their backs floating around in a wine about a foot deep. Just floating around down there. Well anyway we 14 gathered up a little, we drank a little of it and we went back to camp. The captain come out and he seen us all drinking a little wine and he says, “Where’d you guys get that?” Well then we told him about this cave deal where all the wine was. He says, “Emerson, go find all the water cans you can in camp, take a truck, go down there, fill them up.” So we must have had twenty-five cans. We had a whole truck load. We went down there and we filled every one of those cans up with wine and brought it back to camp and we always said this was the reason we finally got off the beach of Anzio, we were all so drunk we didn’t know what we was doing. We had two guys that got drunker than skunks and the Germans had a machine gun nest that was harassing us a lot. Well those two guys charged that machine gun nest, bare handed, they were just going to whip the heck out of them and they jumped on those Germans and everything else. Well they all run finally and about two days later those guys never come back. So we were moving out towards Rome and we find those two guys laying in a ditch dead. The Germans didn’t put up with them anymore but they killed those two guys and that was the end of that. That’s when we finally gathered together and marched into Rome and took over there. That was quite a place. We went on north of Rome for quite a little while and I took leave, I guess it was, and went into Rome. I took a vacation you might say and I went into Rome. No I didn’t either. I went into Florence. Florence, Italy and that’s where I met one of those little gals in those pictures you got. The little one. I met her and 15 she was quite an educated little girl. She’d been to seven different colleges in Europe. She took me to operas and I lived for five days with her and her mother in an apartment. I had quite a time, it was just like I was home more or less. But anyway, after five days I had to go back to camp but while I’m in Florence I almost got killed. She and I was going to go out to her grandmother's place so I rented a couple bicycles and we’re riding down the street and a big old six-by-six American truck came up behind me and tried to knock me off of my bicycle. He hit me in the shoulder with that truck and he wasn’t quite lucky enough to get me, but anyway it almost killed me right there. If I could have got my hands on him I’d have probably done something to him. After five days I had to go back. I went out to the airport there, we had a bunch of American airplanes, transports, and I got on a transporter airplane. So I got in and they had no seats or anything, had benches along the side and there was a guy or two sitting in there and I went over to sit down on the bench and the guys revved up the motor and took off. Well they tumbled me, I fell over and I rolled clear into the tail end of that airplane. I finally got up on my own, get back and get on the bench finally and then hitchhiked on an airplane back up to the front lines again. That was quite an airline experience you might say. LR: After you left Florence you said you got back to the front lines, where was that? DE: Well I can’t tell you the name of that front lines deals, I know we was at this river deal where I was telling you this abbey was. Anyway, after we took Rome and up in Florence, in that area, the Germans were retreating quite a bit and that was a 16 little while after the colonel called me in to his office. He got out of his pocket a knife, I was a sergeant at the time, and he started cutting my stripes off. I said, “What are you doing?” He says, “We’re going to make a lieutenant out of you.” So I got a field commission as a second lieutenant. Then he says, “I got a job for you. The Germans are retreating pretty heavy and we don’t know where they’re at. I want you to take a jeep, get a driver, and a radio guy so you can communicate with us and go find them Germans.” “OK.” We took off and I’m roaming all over northern Italy looking for Germans, never did find them, but I found there camps lot of times. About this time is when I run into some Italian deals and they was going to throw a big party for us so I told the radio guy, “Find out where the camp is, we gotta get back to camp.” He come back in a little while and he says, “I can’t find them. They’re gone.” “Alright, we’ll try to find them” That’s when I went towards Milan up to the northern part of Italy up there. We moved into where Mussolini was… that’s when we seen Mussolini. Well after we left we was going down the road and here’s a bunch of troops, cars, and there’s a civilian car parked along the road there. So we stopped to investigate it and, boy it was a nice car. I was going to take it and drive it back to camp, but at that time a jeep come down the road with a big old colonel in it and he seen what I had and he took the car away from me, he was going to take it and have it. So, well, goodbye. So we went on down the road and that’s when I ran into this convoy that I told you about. From there on all we had done was chase Germans out of Italy more or less. 17 LR: So you’re chasing Germans, you never got into Germany right? DE: No, I never did get to Germany. Only place I got out of Italy was over into France. On the Riviera of France. There’s a place over there I was going to tell you about. Move that thing around. Monte Carlo. LR: Monte Carlo, ok, let’s talk about Monte Carlo. DE: Monte Carlo, that was controlled by, well I don’t know what you call her, a queen maybe, but that was one little tiny kind of place. Just one mountain, and they had a big castle up there and she controlled Monte Carlo and the beach head. I had been promoted to Second Lieutenant and I took about twenty, twenty-five guys over to the beach head just below Monte Carlo in France. The war was over with by that time and we went over there and we were camped for about three months after the war was finally over. I and a few guys wanted to see what Monte Carlo looked like, so we went up to see and went through the Monte Carlo castle. That was something else. We was just having a vacation deal more or less, and some of the things you seen on that beach was something else. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but we walked by a little walk in bridge and there is a couple laying down there, making love. Right out in the open. Didn’t make a difference to them people. The women walking around the beach there either didn’t have any hair or it was dyed different colors. The Germans would get those women because they would fraternize with the enemy and the Germans would cut their hair off or dye it to mark them. Everywhere we went you seen blue hair, red hair, yellow hair, 18 green hair, or they were bald headed, and it was funny as heck. We run onto two guys with a woman out there on the beach, and we got to talking with them, and this lady was a prostitute, which is what she was really. She had on a black lace dress and there was pretty big holes in it and that’s all she wore, that lace dress. They was talking to them and they was trying to make a little deal with us and we wouldn’t do it and they took off. They went back over the border to Italy. As a lieutenant I was in control of the motor pool and I ran on to a French gal that owned a restaurant there on the beach head. I remember one time she wanted to go down and see it so I put her in a vehicle, and officers weren’t supposed to be driving cars, but I had the jeep and I put her in, and we went down to check out her restaurant. She had it all boarded up and a colonel seen me go by later on and he called me in and says, “Emerson, you know you’re not supposed to be driving the vehicles.” I says, “Hey, Pop,” I called him Pop, he thought I was his son I guess, he treated me like that. I says, “Not hurting anything, just took her down there and looked around.” So that was one of the little experiences. Then I met another woman, she had a little ten-year old daughter and her husband was in the Italian army. He was a war prisoner at that time and I got pretty well acquainted with her. I was staying in a kind of a hotel like, I had a nice basement apartment, and one night I’m sitting and I hear a rap on the window. I thought, “What in the world is that?” I looked and there was this woman on her 19 hands and knees crawling around trying to find me. She finally found me by looking through those windows, and she rapped on the window and made me come out. It was in the middle of the night and I thought, “What’s going on here?” I got pretty well acquainted with her for… while we was living there on that beachhead. She was like my girlfriend or something of that nature. It was quite an experience with her and her little girl. I don’t know what ever happened to them. But anyway, when it came about August they told us to pack up and we was going home. So we boarded a bunch of big ships and headed out to the Mediterranean and crossed the Atlantic back to America. We came into Virginia in a big port there, I don’t remember the name of it now. LR: Norfolk. LR: I’m going to take us back a little bit. You mentioned you have a bad knee. DE: Oh. That was one of the things I was going to tell you about. Well, I was in an artillery outfit where we had four different groups of four guns a piece and I was in the headquarters as a sergeant at that time. We had to survey for altitude for the guns and all that and we was always out ahead of them, behind the infantry chasing guys. In fact our little group had credit for twenty-eight captured Germans at different times. One of the funniest ones, we was out surveying one time and here come this guy walking across the field toward us and he got there and it was a German soldier, hands up in the air and he was wanting to surrender. Well ok, so I put him on the hood of the jeep and drove him down to headquarters, which was back quite a little ways. Drove him right through the 20 gate and right in front of the general’s office, and the general come out and he said, “What in the world is going on here.” I said, “I got a guest here for you,” and the German, he was just as happy as everything. He was waving at all the guys and everything, boy he was really happy he got out of the war. Whatever happened to him, I don’t know, they sent him probably off to some prison. We had one other prisoner which we was trying to capture one time, and he didn’t want to be captured and he come up to a big two story house and he ran in this house and we wondered, “Well how are we going to get him out of there?” So we finally surrounded the place and went in the house and we couldn’t find him. Well the sucker had crawled clear up in the attic of that house and there was a little window in the corner of the eave. We finally went outside and we heard a noise and that sucker climbed out that little window, fell down on the ground and he was getting ready to go run away when we grabbed him. He was ornery boy, he didn’t want to be captured at all. He was ornery as the dickens. We had to fight with him, but we finally controlled him and took him back to camp and turned him over to the MP’s. That was a couple of the prisoners. One other time we had about eight or ten prisoners of war, just wanting to surrender and we ended up with twenty-eight of them while we were out surveying. We had quite a few little experiences with that, that’s some of the things I was going to tell you about. One other time we was out surveying and I and a lieutenant was in a jeep and we’re out there and we drove up to this village and they had a street that went up one side and went up around, it was on kind 21 of a hill, went up one and then went around and come back down. Just two streets, the town was built around them. We drove in and we drove right up this street, went up around there and we’re just starting to come down and the place just exploded with people coming out with wine and watermelon and all kinds of stuff. We was like, “Viva la Americanos!” We had quite a celebration with all of that. But we had to get out of there, so finally we’re just leaving town and here come a guy walking up out of a little ditch like mountain, and it was a an infantry major and he had a whole bunch of infantry guys behind him. He said, “What are you guys doing in this town? We ain’t even taken this place yet.” “Sorry, Major. We just took it a while ago.” “What!?” “Yeah. We’ve been here for a while. We just took this place. You can have it if you want it,” and we drove off. I don’t know what ever happened to that, but after we drove off we run into a German camp where there had been some troops and the fire was still burning, it was still smoking. There was nobody there and there was a barn over there a little ways and I don’t know why we went and checked out this barn, I guess to see if there were Germans in there, but we didn’t find any Germans but we did find about an eighteen year old girl laying in the straw dead. Now why they killed her I never did know. She didn’t look hurt, she wasn’t shot or a darned thing. How they killed her, I don’t know, but those three Germans had headed her in the barn. I think what they done was had their way with her and just asphyxiated her or something and then they took and run off. We never did capture them guys. Anyways, that was one of the little crazy deals. 22 One other time we was out surveying and there was three or four of us in the jeep and we’re going across the little meadow and we crossed a little irrigation ditch, it couldn’t have been more than eight or ten inches wide. As we went across that thing all four tires on that jeep went down. I don’t know whether they had spiked it or what the dickens but every tire on that jeep went down. So we had a radio of course and we radioed back to camp to the maintenance guys to bring out some tires, “We need four new tires,” and of course back in camp they laughed. The maintenance truck come out with four new tires, no Germans around or nothing, fixed up our tires and away we went again. To this day I never know why our tires went down. It was crazy. I got hurt one time when we were out surveying. There’s a tank sitting right between two little hills and I’m about, oh, twenty, twenty-five yards away, and this tank, “Woom,” incoming shell. Germans were trying to shell that tank. I was just finding a place to hide, and I got on the side of the hill in this little ditch like and I’m laying on my back. Evidently while I’m laying there my knees must have been sticking up cause one of them shells hit that tank and the shrapnel all ricocheted around it. “Ouch. What the… a bee must have stung me.” So I pulled up my pant leg and there was little piece of shrapnel about quarter of an inch square sticking out of my knee. It was a heck of a bee. Boy it was enough to really put me down as far as that goes. I finally crawled out of there and Germans kept shooting at the tank, but I finally got out of there and got back to camp. I was laid up for about three days. I never did go to the hospital or anything but I was through the 23 medics. Ever since then that knee’s been a something I didn’t need. It never bothered me for a long time, but the last ten years or a little more than that probably, it got to bother me and I had it operated on. The doctor said I had bone to bone and it was grinding up little pieces in there. So they cut her open and cleaned it out, course by that time I lost my lubrication in that knee and ever since then it’s bothered me more or less. I got a purple heart for that anyway. LR: That’s where the Purple Heart came from. DE: I think I gave you the Purple Heart. LR: Yes you did. DE: Did I give you the whole thing. The heart and the ribbon? LR: Yes. DE: I thought I did. TF: Where did you find that German Iron Cross? DE: That was the time that I was telling you about after they made me a lieutenant to go out and find the Germans. I was out rambling around and I told you I found a bunch of their camps without the Germans. Well this one camp we found, they had left a whole lot of stuff. Books and papers and all kinds of junk that they’d had in the camp. I’m going through all that junk and that’s where I found that cross. I don’t know why he lost it or what, but I think that’s about the second or third highest medal that they can get. It’s not the Iron Cross but it’s similar, and I thought, “That’s quite a prize,” when I found that deal. There was several other 24 deals that I don’t suppose you want to hear about the war. LR: Go ahead and talk. Tell us about them. DE: Well, they’re kind of nasty, some of them. LR: That’s ok. DE: One of them was in Africa, while we was down on the Sahara desert. There was a little Arabic town down in the desert and we was outside of town about two or three miles. A couple of guys decided that they was going to go into this little town. Well they did but they never come back. A little later on we found them hanging over a wall, upside down, and this is the part you probably won’t like, with their privates cut off and stuffed in their mouth. Them Arabs didn’t put up with them at all. They were down there after their women and the Arabs wasn’t going to put up with that stuff, killed both of those guys and more or less cut them up. Them Arabs, they were vicious people boy, you had to be pretty careful of them. One other time down there in Africa, I think I told you about the caves that I went into exploring around. I got into a cave with something like a cockroach, or they was some kind of a beetle. Just millions of them and they’d get on you and they wouldn’t leave you, they’d just get all over you. I got in this cave and boy they all just landed on me and I wanted to get out of that cave but I didn’t know how I was going to get back to camp with all those bugs on me. Outside of camp, I and another guy that was with me, we hollered at somebody in the camp, “Bring us a five gallon can of gasoline out here.” “What for?” “Just bring it out.” So what 25 we done was we took our helmets off and took our clothes off and dumped our clothes in that helmet with gasoline to get rid of them bugs, and actually took a bath in gasoline to get rid of those cotton-picking bugs. Any Arabic hut that you ever got into or anything, they were lousy with them crazy bugs. The Arabs lived with them. That was something else. I also had a little experience on the boat going over to that England to start with. We had clothes on at that time that had a chemical in them and it was about the same way, it was terrible. That was kind of like the bug story. One other time we had a little encounter with Arabs, we’re out there and this Arab’s sitting up on the hill with a herd of goats and he, “Ararara,” just chanting like mad. “What the heck is that?” We found out what he was doing, he was telling the Germans where we were at. Well we found that out and he didn’t last long. They used him for target practice. Done him away. We didn’t have no more trouble after that with the Arabs. One other time the Arabs, they had these big herds of goats and this Arab with and his son, I guess it was, his wife and two little kids, put his wife and his kids out in front of them and drove the herds of goats ahead of them. The Germans put mines out all over and the goats would set them mines off, blow them up, and then the Arabs send his wife and kids out ahead of him. He wasn’t going out there, but they never did get blowed up that I know, but we often wondered whatever happened to them. Arabs used to come around with a little burro with a bag on each side 26 loaded with cantaloupes or peaches or other fruit. We’d barter with them on one side of the bag and the other guy would go around the other side and help himself. We never did buy anything, we’d tell them, “Nah, we don’t need anymore.” We already stole enough out of his bags. That was quite a deal. That was after we chased the Germans out of Africa. Them Arabs were pretty slick though, one time we was getting ready to move out in our vehicles, and a couple of Arabs come along and kept standing around our trucks, and them guys could steal stuff while you were looking at them. They’d steal stuff off the trucks and we didn’t even know they took it most of the time. Well while were sitting there there’s a couple of Englishmen come along, they say, “You seem any Arabs around here.” “Yay, there’s two or three of them just went by here.” They were swearing at them and said, “Last night we had to sleep out in the open and we had a couple of blankets with us and when we woke up in the morning we had no blankets. Those suckers took them blankets off us and never woke us up.” So these English were hunting them, they were going to skin them alive! I don’t know whether they ever found them or not, that’s just a little Arab story down there. We always traded with Arabs a lot, they always had some kind of fruit or some kind of vegetable or something. During the winter time once down in Italy, we was in the southern part of Italy, it snowed like the devil. Snow must have been three four feet deep. So to do our survey deal and we couldn’t get out to it. They ordered in a bunch of skis and snowshoes and we walked around with snowshoes to do our survey on the 27 snow. Spring time came and we was camped down by a river down in a valley like and all that snow that was on the mountains up there started a melting and the river came up. We had a truck, a big old 6X truck with a guy driving. He could drive across that river, the water wasn’t very deep, but he got about half way across and that snow was melting so fast that the water was just coming down in gushes, just in waves. It stopped that truck right in the middle of the river. He couldn’t get out of their and it was clear up on the truck, he had to crawl out of there and get on top of the cab of that truck to get out of the water. We finally throwed him a line, we shot it with a little gun we had to pull him in to shore, and the truck got washed down the river. Some of the craziest things that happened while I was in camps. One time while we was up there by this abbey deal we couldn’t cross the river. The 36th division, which was a Texas outfit, came in to help us or relieve us more or less, to get across that river. Well we had engineers that had cleared the path across the river and taped it off so our infantry could go across, cause the Germans had mined the whole river. Well after our engineers left and the Germans, they’d watched them do that, and they go down and they moved the tapes over into the mine field and the 36th division they went across the river and they got into the mines. They lost a lot of guys who got blown up going across the river. They claimed they lost 1800 guys, but I don’t know how many they did actually lose. It was a disaster anyway. Another time, we supplied our infantry a lot after we did get across that 28 river. We was just south of Rome and we had a bunch of burros and mules for pack deals. They carry ammunition and stuff up for the infantry. Well they’re stalemated up there in the hills, I went with them one time leading the mule with cases of ammunition on them for the infantry up there. There was a buddy of mine right with me one time and he got hit twice while he was up there. Now I never did get hit but he got hit twice up there while he was delivering the ammunition. Lot of those mules, they’d kill the mules sending mortar deals in. Talking about mortars, one time I had to go up to the front with a lieutenant, I was to be the radio operator while he called in for artillery on targets. Up with the infantry we had two foxholes, more or less side by side. I was in one of them with the radio and the lieutenant was in the other one and we had a telephone line also. We had strung wire out for a telephone back to the deal. Well the Germans would shoot mortars across the little valley at our infantry and they broke the telephone lines. So I’m out checking on the line, trying to find out where the break is. I finally found the brake several hundred yards back and while I’m back there, the Germans turned on a barrage of mortars, blowing the heck out of the infantry up there on the hill. I fixed the line after they quit shooting, and went back up and the hole where I was to be in with the radio, one of their mortar shells hit that hole and blowed my radio all to heck. Now I was up there for about a week with that deal. You couldn’t do nothing. When I came back there was a picture taken of me that shows me standing there with a gun, a rifle across the front of me. I had whiskers, hadn’t 29 shaved for two weeks I don’t think and I’m standing there with that gun like, “Whoa, I’m really something.” We finally chased those Germans out of them holes on the other side of that little marsh but they had caves, they had trenches dug in and little huts back in the dirt, and they was living in them places. You couldn’t blow them out of there for nothing. They really had it fixed up good, but we overpowered them finally and we run them out of there. Now one other time we come upon a river and the Germans were over on one side of it and we’re on the other. All we could do was shoot artillery back and forth at each other, we finally decided we was going to cross the river and get them out of there. We waded across this river, surprised them pretty well. We finally chased them out of the woods but we had several guys get drowned going across the river. There was a big bridge just up the river a ways that she was intact. We finally got our tanks and all to cross that bridge and chase them guys out of the hills out of there. One other time we’re up on the front lines, we were about in the middle of Italy up there in the north part and an outfit called the 90th infantry division was a colored infantry unit. They were over on our left next to the ocean and the Germans was giving them a bad time, they wanted to run and get the heck out of there. They didn’t want to fight them. So they called our outfit to go over and back them up, keep them from running. So we traveled all night across northern Italy on the road over there to back up our own troops, keep them blacks up on the line. They didn’t like that at all but we had to do it, that’s all there was to it. We 30 were fighting our own people frankly. Then we had a Japanese outfit, they came in along beside of us about that time. A lot of them were out of the Ogden area even. It’s called the 442nd, Japanese infantry unit. They were fighting fools, I’ll tell you. They used to find a little rise in the ground somewhere and they’d dig a trench along it or just below it. The 442nd would get in these trenches and as the German tanks would come up over the bank, they’d expose their underside, and those Japanese would attach bombs to the bottom of them so when they got down off that rise it’d blow a hole in the bottom of the tanks. They were pretty clever with that shit. One time the Germans bombed them with a bomb that had a chemical in it, when it exploded it would get all over you and just eat the flesh right off of you. They killed quite a number of them Japanese with that stuff. But, I don’t know, one of those guys that was in that outfit I got acquainted with, he ran a restaurant here in Ogden later on. Another little American story I could tell you about, and most all this is not on the front lines fighting. We were up swimming in the Mediterranean, on the beach, they got a beach up there. We’re up there and we hear a guy out there hollering to beat the devil. Well there was an undertow, if you know what an undertow is, and it caught this guy and it was pulling him out in the sea. Well I and another guy swim out to him and get a hold of him and between the three of us we got him back to shore. On shore would be little pool of water with a little ink, I don’t know, animal. Oh what the heck do they call them? Anyway, when 31 you touch them they shoot out a lot of black fluid to hide in, we called them an ink fish. LR: Their called squids. DE: Then you’d find them on the shore line, the water pools, their just something to play with, and we used to throw hand grenades at them and blow them up. LR: Oh jeese. DE: Another story down in Africa I guess, they always had them little towns that would have a bunch of girls for sex or something else, during the war down there. This was an off limits deal, and I and another guy walked down in there and there were several other soldiers down in there too, talking about these gals. The MP’s come along, and they were going to throw all us in jail, they were off limits, and while they were loading up fifteen or so of those guys, I and this guy I was with, we walked by like we were spectators. We walked right out of there and ended up and watching them load up down there, we got out of there and didn’t have to go to jail. Another time, talking about the jail, they had a depo for clothes and food and all that kind of stuff, there was about five or six of us gone down there. There was a Lieutenant that was supposed to be in charge, and some of the guys got to telling him some of the stories about what we been doing up in front. They says to the rest of us, “We went out to the supply dealer to help ourselves to tankers clothing.” Tankers had a different uniform then the rest of the soldiers did, they had a nice jacket and wool pants. Anyways good deal and all, so we helps 32 ourselves and our whole survey group of about five or six guys we were always just helping ourselves on something, we had all these clothes and they let us keep them. We wore them out in pictures, you’ll probably see me a couple of them, one of them is standing down by the river and I’m wearing them out, cause I wore them out most the time I was over there. The rest of them had to wear army clothes. We was always perforating something, it was something else. We was always out in the sewer, souvenir hunting or just checking up on things all the time. We had free reign and we would go into some of these villages looking over things and places nobody else was supposed to be going. We have a lot of fun doing a lot of that stuff. Don’t suppose I told you about the lion seller and all that? Did I tell you about the time I went up to the Abbey? Have I told you about another trip where I was out as the Liaison in a village that was ahead of us to see if there was any Germans up there or anything? We drove into this town, there was just one main drive and there were buildings on both sides, and there was nobody around, we couldn’t find anybody at all. On the way out we got shot at and it was some German hiding somewhere and they shot at us and I had to drive off into the ditch and hid under the jeep to keep from getting shot. So then we left the jeep and crawled out of the ditch and ran back to camp and told them in headquarters, that there was some Germans there in that little town. They say “Well we got a report here that says there is nobody there whatsoever.” There was a Colonel there that had an outfit called the rangers and there was a lot of hunters out and they was going to take that 33 town the next day. I says, “Well you better be careful cause it’s full of Germans.” “Ahh nahh there’s nobody there!” So they went out the next day and they marched into that town and as they got down that main street, Germans all bombed those building down the sides of them. They mowed down that entire ranger outfit, except the Colonel and his driver, which was supposed to lead them, but he was driving behind them. He and his driver was the only ones that escaped outside of about 100 rangers, the Germans killed them all. He got back out of there, and he says he was told there was no Germans there, but there is. Sometimes the information don’t get around very good, but those Germans were pretty clever at hiding in some places like that. That’s just some of the little action you might say. TF: So what happened after you came home from the war? DE: Well, to start with we loaded out of Italy about three months after the war was over on an American cruise ship. It was really fancy, like you was going on a voyage or something. We rode that back to Virginia, and we got off in Virginia and checked out all of our stuff, and there was a train waiting for us to go to Chicago, Camp Sheridan. We loaded up in that train, and they got these old cars but there was windows in them but no glass, just these old cars they must have drug out of the junk pile somewhere. We road that thing and all the smoke from the engine and all the cinders were floating back and coming into the windows, we looked like a whole bunch of blacks by the time we got to Chicago, and freezing to death. This was later in the fall and they give us a blanket but that 34 didn’t help much. We got to Camp Sheridan and we was gonna be there about thirty days before they could send us home. So there was about three or four of us and we says, “Let’s get down to Chicago, see what’s downtown, we’re out of the war, and were gonna do the town.” So we’re heading to downtown Chicago and it’s the middle of the night, and we get acquainted with some guy that lives in Chicago. He says,” Well come with me, I got to go out home, then we will come back and do the town.” So we hailed a taxi cab, which there was very few running in at that time, and the guy driving the taxi said, “Well I can’t take you, I already got a passenger!” We says, “That’s too bad we gonna get in anyway,” so we crawled in the back and here a drunk was laying on the floor in the back. So the taxi drives us out to Cicero, this guy lived out there, so we went to his house and we made a big mistake, we let this cab get away. So we wanted to go back down town, so we had to wait quite a while for another cab to come and picks us up. So we spend all night monkeying around downtown, getting half-drunk, and we’re out and we’re really celebrating. Then we had to go back out to the camp and they gave us a pass to go back for thirty days, to where ever you came from. I come out of a little town in south west Iowa, and that’s a two or three hour drive on the train from Chicago. On the train, and this happened all over I understand, there was three girls and that’s all they done was ride the trains. They were making money with sex deals, was all they were. They’d get all these soldiers, and it made no difference to them, openly in the seats and everywhere 35 else around there, it was something new to us. I finally got home and my folks had been in California during the war then come back to Iowa, so I stayed with my parents then for about thirty days. I was at my folk’s house with my old girlfriend that I had going with before the war and she had come out west here to Ogden, because her father was up at Kemmerer, Wyoming, and her mother had died, so she come out to Ogden with her father. Now she was a school teacher, she taught school out in Roy, and he worked at the arsenal out in Ogden. Anyways, when my folks decided after the war to go back to Iowa, the story was that everything go to pot after the war and went just the other way. They loaded up and was going back to Iowa and on their way through Ogden they picked up my old girlfriend, my dad liked her better than I did I think. Anyway, and they took her home with them, and when I got home after the war, there she was, living with my folks. Hell then we kind of got together back there pretty good, and my mother said to me one day, “You two better get married.” So I said that’s what I better do then, so then I did, I married the girl. My uncle had what they called a tin shop, done gutter work and metal work and all that stuff. So I went to work for him for about a year or so. There was a little town that my folk’s retired to which was about twenty miles from the original town where they lived. A little town by the name of Creston, about 8000 people, so I worked there for a couple of years. Down in that little town where I came from down the road twenty miles, I had an old school friend that was 36 starting a plumbing and heating business all that kind of stuff, and he wanted me to come work for him, so I did. I drove the twenty miles for about a year, back and forth working for him, then we decided to move down to that little town again. There was a lady down there, an old maid that my wife at that time knew very well, and we made an agreement with her to move in with her, and we did, we moved in and lived with this gal for about two years. Well she was getting quite elderly and she retired. She worked downtown in a department store and I was working for this friend, and Doris, my wife, she got a job as a school teacher, a rural school teacher, that’s her right over there. She got a job at the county school system, teaching school and those days they had country schools. She went out to country school, teaching kids that were maybe, one to six or eight to ten grade wise in this school, different grades. Some things were getting rough over there, my friend they finally went bankrupt in this business, so I and another guy took it over. We worked that for about a year, we had little competition, small town wasn’t that big, wasn’t doing that great, so we decided we gotta go someplace, where we can make a living. I wanted to go to Denver, try that down there, and the wife says, “Let’s go to Ogden, Utah, I know a lot of people out there,” so we go. By that time we had a three year old girl, and a five month old son. So we sold out all of our furniture, whatever we had, had an old 1941 ford and I build a box that could go on top of the car for the stuff we was gonna take with us, which wasn’t very much, and we headed out for Ogden. All about the last of June, and we got into Ogden about 37 the 2nd of July. So my wife knew some people out in Roy here, and we come into town about five o’clock. We stayed in Rocks Springs the first night, then came on into Ogden the next day. TF: What year did you move to Ogden? DE: 1951, it was the first of July when we headed into Ogden, and as I come down Washington boulevard, It was about six o’clock or so and all the lights along were on and oh what a beautiful sight. Ogden City, man it was a pretty city at that time. Anyways we went out to Roy and met these people out there, and they have a basement apartment and we took over. We had to furnish it just a little bit, we had to buy a bed, and a few things. We lived with them for two or three months, then finally we moved to Ogden up on 7th street. There was government housing way up there. They had built a bunch of cinder block buildings and above it was a bunch of wooden building, one was up for two units, one in the front and one in the back. We moved in to one of those up there, and that was about 1952 when we moved into that buildings. I was going to go to work at Hill Field, but I didn’t like it. I worked out there for about a week and I left that job, didn’t like it at all. Come back to town and I got a job with another outfit putting in furnaces and stuff, it was just kind of a fly by it wasn’t very big. Then a guy from Young Electric Sign Company come in one day when we was on a job and was talking to this guy about how he was looking for somebody that could solder. I overheard the conversation, and lord and behold, back when I worked for my uncle, he taught me how, and I told this guy, 38 “I know how to do that!” What do you need?” He said, “Well I’m from Young Electric Sign Company, and we got a contract with the government to make two gallon gas can tanks, we have about 200 of them but we need someone to solder them. I said, “I can do that,” so the guy I was working for, I told him, “I’m gonna take and do that job for these guys.” He said, “Might as well, things aren’t very good here with me.” So I went to Young’s in the fall of 1951 and I stayed there for 32 years. Anyway after we did the gas tanks, me and this other kid they hired, they let us both go. Then they needed somebody for a serviceman to help repair our neon signs and all. I said, “How about that job, I’d like to have that job.” So I talked to the foreman, and they mad a service man and they talked to the owner and he said, “Okay, well take you on. He’ll take you and show you what to do.” So the fall of 1951 I started to work for the Young Signs company, and I was with this guy for about two weeks and he was teaching me some of the things I would do. So after two weeks he told me, “You’re on your own Emerson.” They gave me a pickup truck with a twenty eight foot ladder on it, a fourteen foot step ladder, an eight foot step ladder, and a half ton truck. After about a year they decided they needed somebody in Pocatello, Idaho, and southern Idaho and I was to take the job in Pocatello. So I moved to Pocatello, Idaho in 1953 and I stayed up there for three years. I went clear to West Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, Rock Springs, Wyoming, I had all that territory to take care of besides around Ogden. I was the only service man they had at that time. 39 For the next thirty two years, that’s what I done. I had territory in Ogden, south her almost to Salt Lake, southern Idaho, clear to Yellowstone to Jackson Wyoming and Rocks Spring Wyoming. I covered that whole territory all the time, serving signs, every week I’m on the road somewhere. Finally I retired in 1983 I guess it was. I traveled the whole country all the time, I was my own boss you might say. The boss called me in one day says, “Don, you got your own truck out there and you got your own area. It’s all yours. You take care of it all by yourself.” So I would come and go as I wanted. When it come vacation time I could take off whenever I wanted to. I really had the run of the place up there, and even the big bosses out of Salt Lake, their headquarters was in Salt Lake at the time, even the big boss used to come up and talk to me about it and how I was doing and all. I was pretty well noted with Young Electric Sign Company. I turned sixty three years and I retired from the Young sign company in 1983. Across the street over here was a guy by the name Jones. He had twenty four apartments and he needed somebody to do little jobs for him. So I went to work for him fixing up his apartments and people would call and I was busy all the time, plugged up drains or whatever would happen. Then I run across another guy from Weber College, he was the athletic director out there and I can’t remember the little guy’s name. He and his wife had another twenty four apartments scattered out from here to Hill Field, all over. So all together I had forty eight apartments to take care of. For the next eighteen years I worked on the apartment deals. Finally, after eighteen years, I had to quit doing things for 40 somebody else, and start doing things for myself. In 2001 my wife passed away and I’ve been living here by myself ever since. I have a daughter in Omaha, she worked the Railroad, from the West Coast to Omaha, Nebraska, that’s where she lives now. I have a son that also worked on the railroad, he’s up in Washington now. I’m here by myself all the time, so that’s the story of the last bit of my life. TF: I think we’re good, unless you have any more stories you want to tell, I think we’re okay with leaving it here. DE: Well I don’t know if there are any more wild stories I could tell you. LR: You shared a lot of good stories Don.