Oral History Program Duane Rands Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 December 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Duane Rands Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 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: Rands, Duane, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 2 December 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Duane Rands 2 December 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Duane Rands. The interview was conducted on December 2, 2016 and December 16, 2016 in his home in North Salt Lake, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Duane discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. Michael Ballif, the video technician, and Craig Rands were present during the interview. LR: It is Friday, December 2, 2016. We are in the home of Duane Rands in North Salt Lake, and we are talking about his life and what he remembers of World War Two for the World War Two in Northern Utah Project. My name is Lorrie Rands, I am conducting the interview, and let’s just start with when and where you were born. DR: I was born in the Thomas Dee Hospital in Ogden on February the 21, 1934, approximately seven in the morning. LR: Was that the hospital that was on Harrison? DR: Yes, that’s it. It was on the East Side of Harrison, about Twenty Third or something in the middle of the city. LR: Did your parents live in Ogden? DR: Well originally, when they were married, they lived in Roy. But Dad lost a farm or whatever it was he was living on in the Depression, and they jacked up the chicken coop and moved it over on a sand hill behind the railroad, and we lived there until about 1937. LR: Do you, do you know quite where that was? DR: I think it was on C Street off of 24th. It was right at the end of C Street. LR: Okay, what were your parent’s names? 2 DR: My father was Duane Rands, no middle name, no middle initial. My mother was Thelma Elizabeth Wiggill. LR: Was her family from Layton? DR: Yes, her family was from Layton. LR: So when your parents got married, they just lived in Roy? DR: The old homestead is in Layton, roughly in the vicinity of Fairfield Road and about… LR: Is that about Gentile Street? DR: No, South of Gentile Street. The house was in Layton, and the property was in Kaysville. LR: That makes sense. After your father lost his farm, what did he start doing? DR: He went to work for the terminal railroad there in Ogden as a fireman. I forget what they called it, Ogden Transfer or something like that. Ogden Terminal, proper is what it was. 1937, he got a job in Milford on the Union Pacific, and he was the oldest fireman in 1937 on the UP. His seniority date was 1-7-37. LR: Why is that important? DR: Seniority is always important on a railroad, because it depends when you go to work. If you’re older than somebody else, you get the job. LR: So it’s not about how old you are, it’s about how much time you’ve had on the job? DR: That’s right, it’s when you hired on. The terminal on the railroad is cause he stayed on the farm too long. 3 LR: Did you guys move to Milford with him? DR: We moved to Milford. Fay was born in 1935, before we moved to Milford, and we lived on Utah Street. I don’t know the address, and it was the last house in town. I wandered away a couple of times and got back in the sagebrush, and mother was afraid to walk in the sagebrush because of the snakes. So, she got in the car, and drove out and picked me up and put me in the car and brought me back. She’d watch me a little closer after that. I remember the neighbor killing an eight-foot rattlesnake. It was hanging on the clothesline, and both ends of the snake were touching the ground. It was a big snake. I was just a little boy, and it made a pretty good impression on me. LR: I’m sure! Did you go wandering off again? DR: There was kind of a ruin back behind the house, and you could look up there and see this old house that’s fallen down. I kept wanting to go up there, and she kept telling me no. I think I only wandered off the one time. LR: So, how long did you stay in Milford? DR: Until 1939. LR: Okay, and where did you go from there? DR: We moved into a duplex at 673 West, 4th North in Salt Lake. LR: Okay, did your Dad get transferred then? DR: Yeah, he got seniority. He’d been up here, the oldest one who did, and he got the job. LR: So he was wanting to come back to civilization? 4 DR: We were all wanting to come back to civilization. Mother wanted to come back especially. I can remember sometime in 1938 or 1939, he went to a used car lot and bought a Chevrolet car and brought it home. It had two problems. It was a Chevrolet, and it was green. Mother wouldn’t even get in it. So he switched it for a blue Ford, and we had that blue Ford through the war. LR: Do you, do you have any memories of the Depression, of what it was like? DR: Well you know, I don’t remember too much about it, but when they moved over onto the sand hill, they took one cow with them. When I was six months old, they ate the cow, and bought a case of Seagull milk. So I was raised on seagull milk, and they also bought a sack of kidney beans. So we had ham hock and beans or boiled ham bone and beans for quite a while. To this day, I really don’t like ham and beans, or seagull milk. I can’t stand canned milk. I know a lot of people like to put canned milk in the gravy, but if they put it in the gravy I can’t eat it. LR: That’s funny, but that actually makes sense. Alright, so you’re living in Salt Lake, and your about five years old? DR: Well, I was six. I started school in Milford. But when I got to Salt Lake I was too old for Kindergarten, so they put me in the first grade. At the end of the first year, the teacher didn’t think I was learning anything, and so when it come time to go to the second grade, they sent me back to the first grade. The teacher asked me to read out of the reader, and I just 5 picked it up and started reading it. When I finished the book, they put me back in the second grade. LR: So, were you quiet in school? DR: Oh, I’ve always been a quiet person. I never got in trouble in school, not for anything. LR: Are you just being modest? DR: I’m not just being modest, I never got in trouble for anything. I was just quiet, and never did anything that could be construed as, oh, what would you call it, exotic? LR: How long did you live in Salt Lake? DR: Until I went in the Air Force in 1953. Dad built a house on 8th West. The house is still there, it's 609 North, 9th West now. When we moved there it was 609 North 8th West, and we were the only people on the block that had hot water in the wintertime all the time, because we had a water jacket in the furnace. We were the first house on the block to have central heat, which was coal, and we had a stoker and a furnace down there, and I hated the stoker thing. Go down and fill it up every night before you go to bed. LR: I know you weren’t very old when Pearl Harbor happened. Do you remember hearing about that? DR: I do. I was playing in the front yard, it was a nice sunshiny day, a pretty day, and one of the neighbors come out and says, “The Japs just attacked Pearl Harbor, we’re at war.” Well we weren’t technically at war till the next 6 day, but I remember that. 1941, I was eight. He was about ten or eleven, the kid next door, one of the Fleecy boys, I think. LR: You remember how your parents reacted? DR: Dad was out, and I don’t really remember mother saying much about it. I think she heard we’re at war, and she turned on the radio and listened to the radio for a little while, but I don’t remember much detail of what happened. LR: Did your dad mention anything when he got home? DR: I don’t remember. Dad had flat feet, and so he was 4-F. He worked for the railroad for the whole war, and I can remember going to school, and he’d be coming up the front steps, and when I come home from school, he’d been gone earlier that day. LR: Geez, that’s not a lot of downtime. DR: No, that’s not a lot of downtime, and it was that way for the whole war, just long enough to get some sleep and then back to work. LR: Was that, was that common for anyone that worked on the railroad? DR: Yes it was. They deferred the ones they could, to keep some people on the road, but people that were 4-F, they could work all they wanted. The railroad would take them. LR: What are some of your memories of that time during the war? Do you remember rationing? DR: Oh yes. Mother was a price checker for the OPA. She would go around and check the prices in stores, because prices were all frozen. You had to 7 have a ration stamps, or those little plastic coins, I’ve got some in my collection. You had to have the coin or ration stamp to buy anything. There was red for meat and blue for other things, and another color for the gas. You could only buy so much gas, and the speed limit was dropped down to thirty-five miles per hour. If you went to the store, and bought say a piece of meat, or a bunch of hamburger, you had to have a ration stamp and the money to buy it. If the meat wasn’t enough to cover the ration stamp, they would give you these little coins back in change. So that’s how you got the coins. If it took, say, a stamp to buy a pound of meat and you only bought a half a pound, then they would give you a five coin, little red five coin back, so you could buy five units of meat somewhere, or some other time later. LR: So they didn’t give you actual money back? DR: Well they gave you money back for your money, but they give you these little coins as change for the stamps, so that if you had a stamp that was bigger than what you were buying, you didn’t have to forfeit the whole stamp, you could get change back for the stamp. LR: Kind of ingenious. DR: I don’t know if it was ingenious, it was a big pain in the butt. But it worked. LR: I’ve heard that some of those plastic coins were also used as a form of tax. DR: Well that was a different system. I guess I should get them out and show them to you, but it’s too buried right now to dig out. Most of them were 8 gray, and green and blue and stuff like that, and what they were was money. They were fractions of a penny. So I think ten tokens was a penny, if I remember right, and at first they were little aluminum coins. One was about the size of a dime, with a hole in it, and the other was about the size of a nickel with a star in it. I think the one with a hole in the middle was one penny, or one tenth of a penny, and the one with the star in the middle of it was half a penny. The tax then was, I think, two percent or something like that. So you had to have a, a nickel and a token to buy a candy bar. This was not a war thing, this was all the time, this was how you paid your sales tax. They would take off your two pennies, your one penny or something on the purchase, but if you were buying something like, say, a candy bar, or a loaf of bread that didn’t use a whole penny in the tax, they had these little tax tokens you could pay taxes with. After the war they went to whole number taxing, so they just used the pennies and, right after the war they quit doing that thing. Tax tokens went away, like the ration stamps did. LR: You mentioned that the prices of goods was frozen. Did it ever change during the war, or was that for the duration of the war? DR: That was for the duration of the war, the prices were frozen. LR: Okay, so nothing ever went up? DR: Well there was always someone trying to make an extra dollar. That’s why mother went out checking prices. They found somebody that had raised the price, and she turned them in. That’s what she was doing. She would 9 go out and check the prices, make sure they were what they were supposed to be. Oh there was a big drive on black market. They wanted to kill the black markets. LR: So is this something she just decided to do on her own? DR: She didn’t get paid for it, she volunteered. LR: So they actually had people volunteering to go out and check prices. I didn’t know that. DR: Tires were impossible to get. They would put patches on tires. They called them boots, and you put it on there, heated it up and it would stick to the outside of the tire. Some people would put bolts in. Course, there is no such thing as tubeless tire. They were all tube, and you’d get in there and the bolts would eventually work a hole in the tube and you would have to get another tube and you couldn’t do that. There was patches on everything. LR: I’ve discovered that there were even shoe rations. DR: Yeah, new shoes, clothes, everything. That’s why I say you had the red one for meat, and you had the grey one, and I forgot, blue for regular food. Everything had its own color. You had to have the ration stamp and the money to buy everything. Clothing, shoes, socks, everything got darned. LR: Did you ever have to make your shoes last? DR: Always. LR: How would you keep them together when they would fall apart? 10 DR: Well, they put cardboard in them. I’ve walked on much cardboard. Cut the little end soles like you used to and put them inside your shoe, and they’d keep sand and the dirt from coming into your socks, but they didn’t keep them from coming into the shoes. LR: What else do you remember during that time? DR: I can remember laying in the backyard, and watching B-17s fly over continuously for two hours. You couldn’t hear anything except airplanes. LR: Did that happen often? DR: It happened at least three times that I know of. I think they used Salt Lake for bombing practice, because they come over flying from West to East. LR: That’s a lot of planes. DR: That’s a lot of airplanes, that’s a lot of noise. You’d go out there time to time and you’d hear some airplanes way up high, flying the same direction. But it was only twice that I remember the long string of them and that was about in 1943. LR: Do you think they came from Hill? DR: No. Hill was North of where we lived. They were probably from Nevada or California. LR: Okay. So really practicing a bomb run. DR: Well I don’t know if they were practicing or transferring airplanes, but probably a chance to do both. You put that many airplanes in the air, you don’t want to do it for fun. It’s got to be serious business. LR: Anything else you remember? Any of your family end up being drafted? 11 DR: Darrin was drafted, and Curt and Max were both drafted. LR: Who are they? DR: Darrin was my mother’s brother. Max and Curt were my cousins. They were Francis’s children. They were the only ones that were old enough to be drafted. LR: Who was Francis? DR: He was my mother’s older brother. LR: So all of these were from your mother’s side of the family. DR: Yeah. I don’t’ recall anyone from the Rands side getting drafted, but there must have been somebody. We weren’t close to the Rands’ like we were with the Wiggles. LR: Is there a reason for that? DR: Well Dad was always working. We’d go to his family only when he was in. I don’t think he took a vacation during the war, I don’t think they allowed it. LR: A story that you told me a while ago about, I think it was about Darrin, going to his house, when he was gone, playing with his car… DR: Well he had I think it was a 1926 Chevy Touring car. I remember it was a six cylinder engine. That was my first introduction to six cylinder engines. When he went into the army he locked it in the garage. Well, you know how little boys are. We found a way into the garage, me and Vern Wiggle. He was my cousin, he was about eighteen months younger than me. We got in there, and I started playing around with that car, found some tools, and we started taking the car apart. About the end of the war, we had it 12 just about apart. I mean, not one bolt and one nut together. I knew where everything was, and I had it all laid out systematically so when I went to put it back together I could find all the parts. He come home and one night the phone rang. Mother talked to him for a little while, finally she turned to me and she says, “Do you know what happened to Darrin’s car?” I said, “Yeah, I took it apart.” She told him on the phone that I had took it apart. I says, “Does he want me to put it back together?” She talked to him again on the phone. She says, “No, he’ll take care of it,” and that was the last I heard of it. I know if somebody took my car apart I’d be mad, so I assume he was mad. But he went and bought himself a new car and he was happy. LR: So you have no idea if he tried to put it back together? DR: No he didn’t put it back together. LR: But you could have? DR: Yeah I could have put it back together. He traded it in. That was easier than putting it back together. LR: So was that something you would do during the war to pass the time, then? DR: Well, we only did that when we were out at Grandmas. They let us go to Grandmas for two weeks each year when we were out of school. So I took it apart in two weeks in two years. LR: So that’s why it took you so long to take it apart. 13 DR: Well, it wasn’t as bad as what I did to my Dad. I had one of those little wind up trains, clockwork train. I used to have them, I saw one here about twenty years ago in an old shop in some way out city. They were kind of copper colored engine, with three or four cars, and a little bit of track, and it had a bell with a ringer that hung down between the rails. When it hit the ties it would ring the bell. Well, it quit working. It must have been around 1936, 1937, somewhere around there. I was pretty young. Maybe as much as four or five. Dad was always going to help me fix it. I got tired of pushing it around the track, and I picked it up and I was looking at it one day and I figured out how to get it apart. I looked in there, and I could see where the mainspring had come off of the lock, so I put it back together, and wound it up. It promptly come off again, so I took it out and put it back in there. Put it on something and I hit it with a hammer, put it back together and it worked. I’m sitting there playing with it as it’s going around the track dinging, and Dad comes in and sees its working. He asks Mother who fixed it, and she says, “He did.” Well, he opened his watch and look in there and stuck his finger in and played with it, closed it up and put it on the table and went in and took a shower. You know how railroaders are, come in dirty, so first thing you do is come in and shower. Well I’d seen him do that, so I went over and I opened the back and I look in there. Hey, this is just like my train, so I took it apart. Well, when he come out of the shower, he hit the ceiling. If you know what I mean. He wouldn’t let me put it back together. He gathered 14 up all the parts and took it to the jeweler and had the jeweler put it back together. So when Christmas came, it was probably about 1938, so I had been about four. I was taking stuff out of my sock, and here’s this Ingersoll watch. I was told definitely, “You can take that one apart. Leave mine alone.” LR: Watches are pretty important to a railroad man. DR: Well, yes. You don’t work without a watch, you gotta have a watch that works to work. He never left it on the table again. You know, looking back at it now it’s funny, but I didn’t know what was going on. It was just something to play with. LR: Did you have a lot of toys growing up to play with? DR: Oh, I had erector sets and tinker toys. Everything you could imagine. I built my first model airplane when I was eight. LR: You’ve never stopped. DR: I’ve never stopped. I got a quarter allowance every time dad got a payday. Briggs Drug Store was on the corner of North Temple and Sixth West. Now that was a mile. I could walk over there and I could get a model airplane for, I think it was ten cents, a tube of glue for ten cents, and I had a nickel left to buy a coke. Every payday I’d go over there, buy me a model airplane and a tube of glue and a coke, and then I’d walk back home, put the airplane together. We had a water jacket in the furnace for hot water, and in the summer time, we didn’t use the furnace. We didn’t have hot water. Dad bought this little, they called it a monkey stove. It was 15 just a little water jacket with a stove built inside of it. So every Monday, mother would take the week’s garbage and put it in the monkey stove and build a fire to heat the water for the washing. Well, my workbench was there behind the furnace, cause it was the only place in the house that didn’t have something in it. Just enough space for me. Well, she had Stan putting the garbage into the stove, keeping the water hot. He was putting the garbage in the stove, and a piece of Kleenex or something caught fire in his fingers. Instead of letting go of it he threw it, and there’s all my model airplanes made out of balsa wood and paper. Excellent tinder. I lost ninety model airplanes. LR: Oh my gosh. DR: This is 1944. I was ten. I had been building airplanes for two years. LR: In two years you had built ninety model airplanes? DR: Ninety model airplanes, and I had just finished a B-25. It was laying across a cardboard box, drying. You know how glue is, needs to sit still. It was across that box drying. Mother went in and picked that up and carried that out, and that’s the only airplane that survived. She had the hose right there and she was washing. If she hadn’t have been washing, we’d have lost the house. She grabbed the hose and turned on the water, went over there and put the fire out. LR: Geeze. I’m still boggled by the ninety model airplanes in two years. DR: Well it was a great place, we lived just east of the airport, and these airplanes that they talk about now, they were flying over all the time. Every 16 time I hear an airplane I’d run outside to see what it was. I got pretty much where I could tell which one it was just by listening to it. LR: So all the planes they used during the war would fly over here? DR: They would fly around all the time. LR: So would the mustangs fly over? DR: Yeah, mustangs. P-38s. P-40s. 47s. B-25s. B-26s. B-17s. Long toward the end of the war, they had a bond drive, and they brought a B-29 into town, that’s the only one I ever saw before I went in the air force. LR: So that was part of their bond drive? DR: They brought it out and let everybody look at it. LR: So kind of like the airshows they do today? DR: Oh no, these are airplanes just flying around. They’d come in, land in Salt Lake, refuel, and go somewhere else. I built an airplane model based on a P-38. I got to thinking, “Well, if one cockpit is good, two is better.” So I put another cockpit on it. I got to thinking, “Well this thing needs a turret on top of it.” So I put a turret on top of it. I got it all sanded and put together, and it was a nice looking airplane. I went down to Chris’s and I bought a can of paint for a dime, I painted it, and it really looked good. Well, I went looking for it one day and it’s gone. No airplane. I asked my dad, “Do you know what happened to my airplane?” He said, “Yeah, I took it down to show one of those air force officers, and they confiscated it. It’s supposed to be top secret.” 17 LR: Without knowing it, you created a plane that they were trying to keep secret. DR: No, I didn’t, looked just like a P-61. I was just playing, but they confiscated my airplane. I wish I had it. LR: Yeah I bet. That would have been something to have. So do you still have that B-29 that your mom saved from the fire? DR: The B-25? No, I don’t have that. LR: To me, B-25, B-29 is all the same. DR: Doesn’t make sense to you, but I was a little boy. If it had one tail it was good, if it had two tails it was better. The B-25 had two. Without going into why it had two tails instead of one, I thought that was better. LR: Makes sense. DR: But, you just saw the logic. If one cockpit is good, two is better. LR: A turret on top. Why not. What do you remember of the war coming to an end? DR: I had been expecting it, and regardless of what these news broadcasts, or storytellers think, we did know about the atom bomb. When they set it off in New Mexico, we knew what it was. LR: Okay. Could you see it? DR: No, we couldn’t see it. We knew about it. We knew what it was. So I expected all that months before Hiroshima. So it wasn’t a surprise that they used it. LR: How did you know about it? 18 DR: It was in the newspaper. LR: Did they specifically talk about it being an atom bomb, or a new weapon? DR: Just a new weapon. LR: So you didn’t know it was an atom bomb, but you knew they had a new weapon. DR: Well, when it was dropped on Hiroshima we knew it was an atom bomb. LR: Okay, and you figured that was the weapon they were working on? DR: That was the weapon they were working on. You know, you don’t’ set something like that off in the desert in the middle of the night without drawing attention to it. I think it was seen as far away as St. George. Light up the sky. It’s not something you can hide under a bushel basket. LR: Well that’s true. That would kind of be hard to do. So you were expecting the war to come to an end, and at that time you were ten or eleven? DR: I was ten or eleven. LR: How did that affect your life, the war coming to an end? DR: Well I always thought that the bombs they dropped in Japan saved my life. Because I was within five or six years of being draftable, enough that if the year hadn’t ended, I would probably have got drafted. I nearly got drafted anyway. LR: For Korea? DR: For Korea. I would have got drafted if I hadn’t have gone ahead and volunteered. 19 LR: Okay. Didn’t think about that. Your love of airplanes, is that one of the things that made you decide to join the Air Force? DR: Yeah. I’ve been aviation oriented. I probably should tell you how I got to be an electrician. When I joined the air force they made me an airplane mechanic, and I was assigned to the 45th Air Transport Squadron in Dover, Delaware after I finished the AD School. After a few months, they assigned me as a crew chief on a C-124. Now, a C-124 is a four engine airplane, whose nickname, well it had several, but its nickname was Old Shaky, because they shook a lot. It was called an Aluminum Overcast. That’s an aluminum fog, so to speak. Or it was an uncreative B-29. Anyway, I went over, and my buddy had a little problem. I was crew chief, and I went over there and looked at it, because when I was at Hill Field I had some electrical experience. I messed around a little bit, and I thought I had cured his problem. It was something like the take-off warning would blow when number four engine was running at 1800 RPM, just stupid. I changed the relay, and that seemed to go away. This was in about April or May of 1955. Well in the middle of June, to the middle of July, I went on leave. I came home on leave for thirty days. When I went back, the 45th was gone to war, and I had been assigned to the 20th. That airplane got assigned to the 20th, and some of the maintenance was being done by the squadron and some was being done by the base shops. Well, the problem changed, it didn’t go away, it changed to when this airplane hits V1 Speed, the take-off warning horn blows, for just a minute. Most of the experienced 20 electricians got discharged, so all they had was guys right out of the school. At Hill Field I’d been used to troubleshooting, and I stopped to think about it. I got this thing, that if I got a problem, I go to bed, and think about it, and go to sleep. When I wake up in the morning I got the answer to the problem; this was just a gift. Your husband probably has it to. Am I mistaken? LR: No. It’s one of those frustrating things. Well, not for him. DR: Well, I started thinking about it, and figuring out what was wrong with the airplane, and long about, I guess September, I told Sergeant Birch, who was my supervisor, that I knew what was wrong with that airplane. He says, “Well they got guys to fix that, don’t worry about it.” So I went back doing my job. A little while later, they sent me out to tune up an engine, to change a sparkplug, it had a fouled spark plug, the C-124 had an engine analyzer, like an episcope. You look at all the engines ignitions, and you can tell which spark plug is bad. So you just go out there and change that sparkplug and its fine. So I go out there and I change my spark plug, these electricians are up there working on the flaps, and the maintenance officer’s out there, and he’s getting concerned. This problem started in May of 1954 and we’re back in September of 1955. That’s a year for a problem, that’s a long problem. I’m standing there talking to the maintenance officer and he says, “Well, do you think they’ve got it fixed now?” I says, “No they ain’t got it fixed.” He says, “Why not.” I says, “Well in the first place their in the wrong 21 place.” He says, “Where’s the right place.” I says, “Back in the tail.” We were sitting there by the terminal, and I said, “Do you mind if I hop the fence and go to lunch?” He said, “No, go ahead.” There’s this brand new C-130, first one I’ve ever seen, sitting there on the ramp right next to it. I said, “Do you mind if I walk around that thing for a little bit?” He said, “No go ahead,” so I walked around that thing for a little bit, looked it over, then I hopped the fence and went to lunch, because if I go back to the squadron I got to walk half a mile to get to the mess hall. Well that gave me a nice long lunch, and I’m walking back to the maintenance office, you know how military is. They got a whole row of doors there, but you can’t go in one of those, you have to go in the other side, go in a special door. I walked past the maintenance officer’s office, and the door come open and he come out and says, “Your tools are out there on the airplane, and when the rest of the people get back from lunch we’ll be out there.” So I went out there, and poked around a little bit. I knew what was wrong with the airplane. So I’m sitting there in the pilot’s seat, and the other guys start trickling in one at a time. A Douglass service rep come up there and he wanted to sit in the pilot’s seat, so I let him sit in the pilot’s seat, and very soon I’m crowded out of the cockpit. A C-124 has a cockpit the size of this room. It’s a big cockpit, plenty of room. All these electricians are up there, and all these other guys are up there, and the service rep, and here comes the maintenance officer. They start talking in the front of the cabin and he says, “Well, Corporal Rands 22 has got some ideas we’re going to try.” So I stood up there, and I outlined what I knew about the problem. I said, “105 knots, that’s a number that rings a bell.” Nobody else said anything, but the Douglass Service Rep says, “V-1 speed?” I said, “Yep, that’s V-1 speed, anybody give any thought to what’s going on here at V-1 Speed.” He says, “What do you mean?” I leaned around one of the guys and I pointed at the stick and I said, “Somebody’s pulling back on that thing.” So he went and got a hold of it and that horn started to blow. I had the problem fixed in five minutes. The next day, I come in to work, and my sergeant says, “They want to see you in the office.” I says, “What did I do this time?” I go in the office, he says, “You’re in charge of the electric shop today.” That was that. I was an electrician after that. About three months later, I got a letter that said you gotta take the test for electricians. My Sergeant was worried I couldn’t pass that test. He wanted to know if I wanted to cram, and I says, “No, I don’t want to cram.” Well, I went and took the test, and I got what was at that time the second highest score in the air force. It was 173, it was, very few people got over 160, and it was very rare to go over 170. But after that I was an electrician, and just shortly thereafter, early in 1956, they consolidated the maintenance on the electricians, and I was made to NCO, I ran the base electric shop. LR: That’s one way to get promoted. DR: The next promotion list that come out, I was right on top of it. LR: So you made… 23 DR: Buck Sergeant, three stripes. LR: Three stripes is Senior Airman now. Wow, that’s pretty impressive. DR: Well that’s not as impressive as what happened the next year. I get a letter in the mail. It says come to the interview to be a Staff Sergeant. Course, I’m in charge of the electric shop, I got work to do, I aint got time to play games. I threw the damn thing in the wastebasket. So, about two weeks later, I get a phone call, a guy identifies himself, he was a Major or something, he says, “Did you get a letter telling you to come before the promotion board?” I says, “Yeah I got it.” “What did you do with it?” “I threw it away.” He says, “Well, I’ll send you another one.” I says, “It won’t do you any good, I’ll throw it away too. I already made up my mind, I’m not going to reenlist.” He says to me, “I can have you court martialed.” I said, “Go ahead, it’ll give me more incentive to get out. February 2nd, the promotion list come out, first name on top of the list. LR: They made you Staff Sergeant DR: They made me a Staff Sergeant. LR: Did that upset you? DR: No, but I enjoyed that stripe. I really did. LR: So you didn’t reenlist after your initial enlistment. DR: I did not reenlist. LR: Is there are reason for that? DR: There are a couple of reasons. I had a near death experience, and whoever I met over there said that they were unhappy with what I was 24 doing for a career, I.E., a soldier. I had a heart attack and I had a heart murmur that a doctor had already told me I couldn’t reenlist. That’s about it. I wish I had reenlisted. I had it made there. My, my opinion meant something. When I said that’s bad, there were people that listened. I had a couple of problems that I solved for them. It was just a knack. Part Two LR: It’s December 16, and we’re back with Duane Rands. Michael Ballif is with me, and also present is Craig Rands. So Duane, we stopped last time talking a little bit about your time in the air force, but I’d like to go back to when the war ended. You were eleven years old? Can you, can you talk a little bit about what it was like having all the soldiers come back home and the influx of people returning? DR: Well I didn’t have too much to do with anybody coming home. Because the ones that were coming home from the family all came back to Layton or Ogden. I remember my cousin was pretty well shell shocked. Just after he got home in August, we had a big thunderstorm, and he was hiding under the bed, he couldn’t take it. LR: That’s crazy. Was it strange in school, going from always being prepared for something bad to everything’s going to be fine now? DR: I don’t think there was any time when we thought something bad was going to happen to us. We were comfortable in school, I don’t know anyone who was afraid of being bombed. Of course, when Pearl Harbor 25 was bombed, nobody knew what was going to happen, and everybody was kind of apprehensive about what was going to happen. But after the war got started, I don’t recall anyone being afraid we were going to be bombed. We’re really too far inland for navy fighters. LR: So, what high school did you end up going to? DR: I went to West High School, Salt Lake City. LR: Now, did you meet your wife there, or was that years later? DR: No, my wife lived about two blocks down the street from where I lived. I went to school with one of her sisters. When I was home on escort duty in 1956, girl I had wanted to marry, she was out on her front lawn with a friend of mine, and I found out they were married. So I took her off my list, and Mister Olsen was a big man. I wanted some big boys, so I decided that if I could get one I was going to marry one of his daughters. The only one left was Geneel. The other girl was way too young, so I married Geneel, and you saw what happened. But I assume you’re happy with your husband. LR: I have no complaints. DR: He’s a good sized man. I just got that picture in the mail back there. LR: That’s his grandson, and there’s his great-grandchildren. Ian is the tallest of all the grandkids. MB: How tall is he? LR: 6’4”. That’s a good picture. DR: Hand it to me for a minute. (holds up picture for camera) 26 LR: So, what, when you finished high school, you went immediately down to try to find a job at the railroad, and you didn’t want to be a brakeman? DR: Fireman. LR: So you didn’t want to be a fireman. Was that when you went to Hill Field? DR: When I got home my call to Hill Field was in the mail. So I went to Hill Field Monday morning and went to work. LR: So where did you work at Hill? DR: I worked on the B-26 line. LR: What did you do? DR: I was an electrical accessories installer. LR: Will you explain what that is? DR: Well, aviation is divided into two groups. There are things that apply just to the airframe, or the airplane period. They’re called airframe. Everything else that goes on the airplane is an accessory. So I was installing electrical accessories. I think the first job I had was cleaning switches up, the airplanes had been in storage, cleaning up switches and cleaning the wires and putting them all back together, making sure they were all correct. Fix the wires. I changed a lot of cannon plugs on rudder servo on a B-26. On the B-26 the nose comes off, and most of the equipment was right there where you could work on it. So I stand on the nose wheel, and re-shutter the cannon plug for the rudder servo for the autopilot. Was a 27- pin cannon plug. I did that for perhaps three months. Then I graduated 27 putting something else in, and then I worked on the instruments for about another six months, installing all the instruments and checking all the lines, leak testing everything. Marking the range marking, did a lot of range marking. Then I started doing operations, tests. Things like that. LR: This was all on the B-26’s? DR: All on B-26’s. LR: You said the planes were in storage. Why were they in storage? DR: Because they were surplus from the end of the war. LR: Oh, were they preparing for the Korean War, or the Korean Conflict? DR: Well I graduated school on June 6, 1952.The Korean War was two years in. They had flown the airplanes from the production line, and they’d been sitting on the sand hill behind Hill Field. Later, when I come back out of the Air Force, and went back to the B-26 line, I was working on a B-26 one day, and the airplanes were coming from Tucson, Arizona. I grabbed the edge of the door, and lifted myself up, and a great big scorpion ran out and dropped down in front of me. I climb up in there, and I give it a good looking over the second time, making sure there were no more scorpions in there, because they had been sitting in the desert down in Tucson. LR: So, you said when you graduated the Korean War was two years in. Were you worried you were going to be drafted? DR: A little. LR: Was that why you enlisted? 28 DR: It was one of the reasons. The story that goes with that is that I was very skinny. I weighed about 108 pounds. Our Bishop wanted to know if I could flunk the physical. I said, “I don’t know.” So I went down and tried, and look what happened. LR: You didn’t flunk the physical then? DR: No. They sent me down there, the doctor down at the physical they give you down at Parks Air Force Base. I took my basic at Parks, that’s in California. Doctor says, “You don’t weigh enough.” I says, “Give me a discharge and I’ll go back home.” He says, “Well we can’t do that.” LR: You did your basic training at Parks Air Force Base in California? DR: California, that’s just outside of Pleasanton just outside of Vallejo. LR: Where did you go from there? DR: Went to Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas. LR: What were you specifically going to be doing? DR: An A and P mechanic. LR: Can you tell me what that means? DR: A is Airframe and P is power plant. I was trained specifically on large airplanes. LR: Like the cargo planes? DR: Yeah. Large airplanes. LR: What unit were you in after you graduated from basic? DR: Well, I was assigned to the 45th Air Transport Squadron, out of Dover, Delaware. That was late winter of 1954. About February or March. 29 LR: Were you at Dover for the remainder of your time in the Air Force? DR: Yeah, but I was in the 45th Squadron for two years, and I went on leave in June of 1955, and when I came back the 45th had been deactivated. We were an eight airplane squadron. They changed that to a twelve airplane squadron, and they eliminated I think, three squadrons, and made I think six or seven, twelve airplane squadrons. LR: So what squadron were you in? DR: I come back in the 20th. LR: So the same type airplanes? DR: Same airplanes. C-124s. LR: Isn’t that the one with the big funny nose on the end? DR: Yep. Looks like a pregnant pelican. LR: Yeah, I don’t know what they called it. DR: Globemaster. Well, actually Globemaster 2. LR: So your job was specifically to maintain the airplanes, the electronic components of the airplanes? DR: No, the mechanical part. The electrical part is a whole different story. I would go into the airplane, and anything broken, you would get parts or order parts and fix it. If they didn’t have parts you’d go steal it off another airplane or something. Actually, I spent most of the time changing spark plugs. LR: Did you enjoy your time in the air force? 30 DR: Some of it I did. I didn’t enjoy the mechanical work. We got our first airplane in June of 1954, while I was in the 45th. We got eight brand new airplanes. When I got transferred to the 20th they transferred half of the 45th airplanes to the 20th, and the 20th had old airplanes. They were from the year before, and mostly they were identical. They change airplanes all the time. They had, I think about, our airplanes in the 45th had turbine APUs, and about half of the airplanes that the 20th had had Briggs and Stratton APUs. You know, the little lawnmower engine, driving the generator, and they were a little older, and a little more prone to problems. The little turbine worked so well, that I think they eventually changed all the airplanes to the turbines. About June, July, or August of 1954, they made me a crew chief of an airplane. Now, crew chief on a four engine airplane is a big job. You got four engines to take care of, a whole airplane, it’s more of a coordinating peoples, to fix them. If it’s a mechanical job, you just go out there and make sure somebody's doing this and make sure you got parts and make sure you got equipment. LR: So, when did you get out of the air force? DR: Well on April 28, 1957. That was also the day I was sworn in, four years earlier. LR: Wow, that doesn’t happen often DR: They discharged me at exactly the same time. Exactly four years. 31 LR: So you, you went back home after that. Okay. That’s also the year you got married, 1957. DR: Yeah. LR: So you went back home and, is that when you started dating? DR: Well we dated a couple of times when I was home in 1955. Just once or twice. She’d written to me for a little while, then she had quit writing to me, then suddenly she started writing to me again, right before I got out. So we started dating regularly, and ended up getting married. I should have reenlisted. LR: Why didn’t you? DR: There was a couple of reasons. One was that I couldn’t pass the physical anymore. LR: Okay. Why was that? DR: Well I had a heart attack on January 6, 1955. LR: So you decided, because of that, not to reenlist? DR: Well, I knew if I went on sick call they’d kick me out. So I didn’t go on sick call, I just started taking it easy. I made it through. LR: Where did you start working once you came back home? DR: Well I was working at Hill Field when I first enlisted. LR: So you went back to Hill Field? DR: Yeah, I went back to Hill Field. They had to give me a job. LR: Why did they have to give you a job? 32 DR: Because I was working there when I enlisted. When you go in the air force they guarantee you a job when you get out. LR: I didn’t know that. Were you working on B-26s again? DR: I worked on B-26s again. They started up another B-26 line about a year later, went down to Tucson and got some B-26s and refurbished them for some foreign country. I think at that time I was working on F-89s. Then that changed to F-102s, and then F-101s. I did some work on RF-101s. The RFs were reconnaissance airplanes. When I first started I was working on RB-26s. A reconnaissance airplane gets a lot of updating, because they use them all the time. They’re painted black so you can’t see them at night. LR: How long did you work at Hill Field, after you got out of the air force? DR: Worked there until 1962. I wanted to go to college, so I quit to go to college. When I needed a job I hired on at Channel 2 as a studio supervisor. Well, I hired on as a projectionist. They switched me to a supervisor in 1963. I didn’t’ work in projection very long, about six months. LR: Is there a reason why you didn’t go back to Hill Field? DR: It was a better job. I’ve always had good jobs. LR: How long were you at Channel 2? DR: Six years. Then Faye started working Air West, and she heard that they needed an electrician, so I went down and hired on down at Air West as an electrician. 33 LR: I just learned something. I didn’t know you worked at an airline. How long were you there? DR: About six months, three months, something like that. I started working in Salt Lake, and Salt Lake is a prime position. Air West had company wide seniority, so I was looking at spending my summers in Matsetland, and my winters in Calgary. So I quit and started with the railroad. LR: So you started working for the railroad in 1964? DR: 1968. LR: 1968, and that’s where you retired? DR: Yeah, I retired from the railroad. My original date was 8 April 1969, that was in round house as an electrician. My road date was December 1981. They’d hired me to work from Salt Lake to Green River, but after I got out of school, they put me on Salt Lake to Milford. I worked there until I retired. Now Salt Lake to Milford, that includes main line trains, trains from Provo to Milford, and trains from Salt Lake to Provo. I think it was 1983 they merged with the WP and the Rio Grande and the SP. Worked out on the causeway. You remember the cold winter we had in 1983? Well, WP tracks along the side of the lake got covered up in water. So, we went out there and I think they raised it ten feet or something like that. They not only raised the track, they built a beach on the lake side, so that the waves couldn’t pound on the tracks. That’s how the UP come into take over the WP railroad. WP couldn’t afford to do it. So we ran two trains a day. I think we made three trips a day. We had two trains; there would be a train out 34 on the causeway dumping, and a train up at Erda loading. Then we passed down at Garfield, and the empty train would go up and load again. We made three trips a day, I’m sure. LR: What’s one of your favorite memories of working on the railroad? DR: Favorite memories… I think the time I went underground at 4th South. The tracks going to Provo used to go down Fourth South, they’d come out of the depot and go down Fourth West, and there’s a freeway bridge at, well I don’t remember exactly where it was, but there’s a bridge over at fourth south and a bridge over at fifth south and a bridge over at sixth south. We had been going down the east track, because it didn’t have as many spurs in it. The west track had a spur just about every hundred feet, there were a lot of switches in it. I sat at fifth west, waiting to go out for about two hours, because we’re waiting for a train to come down. This is Provo, it is one track. So he come in, and I started out there, and looking down Fourth South, the track splits, and there’s two or three switches on that side, and just one or two on the other side, there are about two blocks worth of switches. I’m looking down that track, and I said, “I wonder what I’d do if this train started into one of those switches,” and just then, the engine started to rock, and it started into one of those tracks, and I reached over and pulled the emergency. I don’t know how those guys in that mill do it, there’s cars of wheat that are getting emptied, but before I stopped, the guys that were working on those cars were out there looking. And the lead truck of my engine went into the spur, and the rear truck went down the 35 main line, and the lead truck of the next engine went down the next spur. Rails are popping and banging, breaking. I stopped about ten foot from hitting those cars. I hit a bunch of cows, and that was kind of a mess. The track comes along Chicken Creek, and then it crosses a bridge, and there’s about eight cows up on this track, and then the bridge is right there, and I come around the corner, and there’s just nothing you can do. The trains gonna cross that bridge, even if you put it in emergency, it’s going to go. We had a hold of about ten thousand tons, and you can’t honk at them, cause they run away from you. So I tried to jiggle the horn a little bit to get them off the track, and they run away from me, and they run onto that bridge, and there were pieces of cow hanging over everything. It was a pretty big mess. I got down to Milford and I got off the train, told the relieving engineer, knuckles were all tested. Everything’s been tested. Might want to go back and kick some cows off of the cow catchers. LR: Geeze. Do you have any questions? MB: Yeah, so going back earlier, I know you said you were in high school when the Korean War began. What was your feeling toward the war, or just the public feeling here about that conflict? DR: Well a bunch of guys were going to go down and enlist in the National Guard. I don’t remember the reason. I couldn’t go. So I didn’t get signed up in the National Guard. But I come into school the next day, and this 36 desk is empty and this desk is empty and this desk is empty. Lot of guys went down and enlisted. LR: Was it the same type of feeling as there was when World War Two was happening, this need to go out and fight? DR: Well some of the guys that were militarily inclined were, yeah. But I didn’t have any big urge to join. I told you why I joined. Bishop wanted to send me on a mission, and I couldn’t flunk the test. MB: So, how old were these guys that volunteered? Were they eighteen? DR: About seventeen, eighteen, probably all seniors. MB: Okay. So the war began in 1950? Is that right? DR: 1950, yeah, but this incident occurred later. There were a few students that disappeared quickly. First girl I remember getting married was in the ninth grade. MB: Whoa. DR: She quit school and got married. First girl I knew that got married. I don’t know if you know Jerry… what’s his name. The trumpet player, that was with Floyd. CR: Newman? DR: Jerry Newman. They got married in 1950, out of the tenth grade. Sherry Newman and Pat McMillan. Then years later, Rob come to the house and says, “They’re looking for you.” I says, “Who’s looking for me?” He says, “The High School, your graduating class.” They had got a list before I ever heard, or I knew they were going to have a reunion. They come and told 37 me that they were looking for me so that I could go to the reunion. They both quit in 1950. I don’t know if they finished high school or not. He went to work for the gas company, he worked for the gas company for years and years and years. This guy that lives across the street is his grandson. LR: Okay, that’s interesting. MB: Nice connection there. DR: We’re all West Highers. MB: So, for your entire air force career, you were just in Dover, Delaware? DR: Well I went to Parks for basic, and Shepard for training, and then I went to Dover. Spent the whole time there. MB: That is unusual. You said you went on leave in 1955? How long were you on leave for? DR: Thirty days. Think I started on the 15 of June, and went to the 15 of July. MB: What did you do during your leave? DR: Just messed around. Went to a couple of dances, couple of dates. That was my first date with Geneel, about the end of June that year. MB: What did you do for that date? DR: Well, the guy I come home with on leave lived in the Price area. He come down one night and asked me if I could find a date, and so I called her up and asked her if she’d go out with me and she did. The rest is history. LR: Literally. So talking about West Highers, your wife never finished high school. 38 DR: No, they wouldn’t let her finish when she married me. That was SOP at that time. LR: Was she a sophomore or a junior when you married her? DR: She was just starting her junior year. LR: Couldn’t wait till she graduated? DR: Well, I guess we couldn’t. LR: I’m not complaining. You talk about the time when you had your heart attack, you talk about that. What was it about that experience that changed your course? DR: Well, one of the things is, the people over there said that they didn’t like what I had chosen for a career, which was a soldier. But that it was an old and honorable profession, those were the exact words they used, an old and honorable profession. I couldn’t pass the physical anymore. When I went for my discharge physical, they told me I had a heart murmur, couldn’t reenlist. So, I went back to Hill Field. Worked there for another six years. They tried to fire me, they had a reduction in the force, about a month after I got back on Hill Field, and they tried to fire me, and I went over to the personnel office, and was going to start to clear the base, and the lady sitting there, she looked at my records, and said, “They can’t fire you, you’re a permanent employee.” So they put me back where I was. LR: You said you decided to go to college. Where did you go to college? DR: I started at the University of Utah, and, the second year I went to Weber College. Wasn’t Weber State, it was actually quite a small school. Four 39 buildings up on the hill, and they had just built a student union, a couple of other buildings. I don’t know- they had a stadium, but it was pretty bare knuckles. LR: What did you get your degree in? DR: I didn’t get a degree. I probably got enough credits for an Associates, but I never took one out. Family demands took over. LR: Oh, yeah. You start having kids. Last question, and this is something I have been asking everyone who we’ve been interviewing for this project; how do you think World War Two affected you? DR: It was a great time to grow up. Especially for a guy that liked airplanes. They were all over, any airplane you wanted to see would eventually be over there up in the sky somewhere and you could see it. I didn’t like the kits; balsa got scarce because they were putting it on airplanes. Balsa was a war time material, and it come from South America. You couldn’t buy balsa kits, you couldn’t buy balsa to make trivial stuff out of. They substituted it with cardboard and thin strips of pine. They actually made better airplanes, but they made them heavier and they didn’t fly quite as good. That’s the only way the war really affected me, is that you couldn’t get balsa, and I loved to get airplanes. I was thrilled when the war was over and you could get balsa. LR: Okay. Thank you Duane, for your time, and letting us come and interview you. I appreciate it.