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[Bleep] - It's gonna be difficult because they just say yes, no. - Johnny Carson, I'm gonna start rolling here and mom will talk and, ready?

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Okay. - Let's roll. - Let's roll. - Okay, I'm Deanie Parrish with Wings Across America. Today we're interviewing Betty Blake

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in her friend's home in Cave Creek, Arizona. Betty was a wasp in the first class, 43.1. Today is the 11th of November, 2001. Okay, Betty, if you will start off by telling us your full name and when and where you were

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born. My full name is Betty. My maiden name was Gild, and my married name was Tackerberry. And then I married again, so it is Blake.

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I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. And I was—what the date, I imagine? October 29, 1920. Tell me about your mom and dad.

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My mother was Canadian. She was born in Winnipeg. My father was born in Edinburgh. He was a Scot.

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And they're such travelers, the British, that he ended up in Hawaii when he was about fourteen or fifteen years old. He followed his oldest brother over there and stayed. What did your dad do?

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My father was a CPA. He was with Castle and Cook for years. Tell me about your siblings. I have two younger brothers.

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One is five years younger than I am, and they were both in the service. The other one is nine years younger. And then tell me about your grandparents. My grandparents, I didn't know my British grandparents because they died when I was

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just a baby. I did know my grandparents, Canadian ones, who had moved. My mother grew up in Portland, Oregon. They moved to Portland.

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And their house now is a historic landmark. My grandfather built a great big Swiss chalet, three-story Swiss chalet on the side of a hill in Portland. And my mother grew up there, went to school there, got her teacher's certificate there

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and taught for a while. She was engaged to be married. My father was in Honolulu. My grandfather gave she and her sister, when they graduated from college, a trip to Hawaii

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in 1915, which is kind of hard to believe in those days. She met my father in Honolulu. There weren't too many white people in Honolulu then. I think there were like 200, or not very many.

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Anyway, royalty was still reigning then. She met my father and my father talked her into cancelling her engagement and coming back to marry him. They were married in Portland and came down to Lulu.

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Kelly: So he knew your grandparents, your mother's grandparents? Lowry: He knew my mother's grandparents, yes. Kelly: As you were growing up, were you able to visit your grandparents? Lowry: Yes, almost every summer.

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The nice thing was my father was with Castle & Cook, so we rode on the ships free. So every summer we took a ship up to Portland, spent the summer with the grandparents, and then went home. A couple of years, though, when I was in high school, I stayed over the winter there and

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went to school in Portland. Kelly: As a young child, when you would go there, what would you do? How would you spend the time at your grandparents'? I took riding lessons.

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I was always interested in horses. I had a horse of my own in Honolulu, and I took English riding classes there and used to ride quite a bit in my spare time there when I wasn't in school. In the summers, when I was younger, my grandparents would rent a house down on the beach at Seaside,

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and we'd all go down there and spend the summer on the beach there, which was fun. And they took the horses down there, so we rode horses on the beach. As you were growing up, Betty, what was a Christmas like in your home? It was fun, but different.

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My father was addicted to taking pictures. So every Christmas when we were little, we did not get a chance to open a present until maybe eleven in the morning because he was so busy setting up his lights and cameras and everything.

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And we had to open them very slowly so he could take pictures of us while we were opening them. Mother, after a couple of years, felt sorry for us and let us pick one present to take to bed with us the night before so we would not have to wait so long.

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And then my mother was a wonderful cook. So she—there were quite a few relatives then in the islands that had come from Scotland and England, and she always had Christmas dinner at noon on Christmas Day or at two two in the afternoon, and there would be twenty-two people.

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Kelly: And what would that dinner be like? Martin: It would be regular Christmas dinner, turkey and all of the trimmings. But I did not enjoy it as much as the grown-ups did because there was so much preparation and helping mother set the tables and do all of this.

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And then after everybody left and none of them ever offered to wash a dish, why then Then we spent the evening cleaning up. So that kind of took half of the Christmas day, every Christmas. Do you remember any of the ornaments on your Christmas tree?

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What kind of ornaments you had? I do not remember. I am sorry, I do not. Recall for me your first day of school.

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I went to a little private school just a few blocks away, Hana'oli, still there. I could walk to school. My mother took me that first day, but I already knew the school because I had been there and older boys in the neighborhood had been there.

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It was a little tiny school. It had about a hundred people, a hundred students. Then it eventually went through the seventh grade, but at that time I think it went through the fifth or sixth grade.

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Kelly: In those early years, do you remember any teacher that made an impression on you? Lowry: Yes, I remember a teacher, Miss Curtis. She finally wrote a book. She was the greatest storyteller, and we had her.

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She wasn't in kindergarten when I started, but she was in the older classes. I know I had her in fifth and sixth grade. She was the greatest storyteller. We would have our classes out, beautiful monkey pod trees all over the grounds and lots of

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small buildings, one-story buildings kind of sprawled out on beautiful grounds. We had a lot of our classes. There were only seven in my seventh grade, just one boy and six girls. But we'd sit out under the trees and do our work and everything.

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It was a delightful way to go to school. And we had shop and all those extra things. We did batik work and we did clay work and big, small school like that. We had lots of advantages.

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Kelly: And where would you eat lunch? Klemski: There was a great big open—like a lanai, had no walls at all, just a roof. And they had plays, put on plays there and everything. And they had a kitchen in the back, and they had a lot of tables and chairs, and we all

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ate under the roof. Kelly: Were you ever involved in the theater, in the plays? Klemski: Yes, I was, and it used to scare me to death. I loved doing it once it started, but I would almost be sick at my stomach getting ready

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to do these things. So I finally decided in high school that I was not going to do that anymore, because it was torturous beforehand. Kelly: In those first seven years, what were your dreams as a young child?

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Lowry: I forgot how old I was in seventh grade. How old would you be? Kelly: Probably thirteen. Lowry: Well, and I was thinking of flying.

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None of my family had ever flown, been in a plane. I read, I got books from the library and I would read all the books by the Lindbergh's Travels in their small plane, Island Hopping, and Louise Thaden, and Blanche Noyes, and lots of these women pilots.

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And then when I was fourteen years old, Amelia Earhart came to the islands, brought her plane over on a ship to make her flight, to be the first woman to fly solo from the islands to Coast to Oakland, and she gave a lecture the night before at the university. I couldn't drive, so my father drove me up there.

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I sat in the front row and I was the only young person there. She was delightful. She was tall and willowy and ethereal and soft-voiced. And she, there was a shyness about her almost, but she's much more attractive, I thought,

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in person than pictures I had seen of her. And after the lecture, she singled me out because I was the only kid there, and came up and talked to me, and there was a whole line of people that wanted to talk to her, and they weren't too happy with me, and she just kept talking to me.

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And she was leaving the next day to fly to the West Coast, and she was leaving, flying from Wheeler Field, so she invited me out there to watch her take off. So I went out the next day and it was kind of a cloudy, rainy day. And I think maybe, did I tell you about this, Nancy?

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Can you cut it out if it's something I shouldn't say? Anyway, we went out to watch her take off. As I say, she finally got in the plane and taxied down the runway and started to take off and she boarded the takeoff about halfway down the runway and taxied back.

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And she came back to the hangar and there was a number of people standing around, including all the mechanics and everything, and she taxied right up to the front of the hangar and she got out. And she started talking to the mechanics and she used four-letter words that I have never

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heard of in my life. She was a totally different person that morning. I guess she thought they had done something to the plane or hadn't done something properly or something.

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And my father, who had never said a swear word in his life, or wouldn't even take medicine that had alcohol in it, just took me and guided me out. So I never saw her take off. Where do you think you got that love of flying, or interest in flying?

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I don't know. I never went to the airport or anything. I really don't know where it came from. What was going on around Hawaii as far as airplanes?

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They had a private—they had one school out there at the Honolulu Airport, which is now international, but it was just a little gravel runway then. We had inter-island—we had Hawaiian Airlines that flew between the islands in flying boats, small ones, Sikorskis.

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Kelly: And then the military, what did they have there? Klemski: The military had—well, the little fighters were the P-26s. They were cute. Do you remember those?

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Blue and yellow. I loved those. And I used to go out to the airport. When I started to learn to fly, a lot of my instructors were military pilots that were

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moonlighting and they would instruct in their spare time. So I got into some of the planes and everything. But they had P-36s. In fact, General Roger Raimey was a captain then, and I knew him, and he was flying P-36s

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at Hickam. And he later became a general and was in Texas. I never saw him again, but I kept reading his name and places, and he was a character. Kelly: When you finished seventh grade, then did you change schools?

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Yes, went to Punahou, which was the big private school there. In fact, Punahou is the oldest private school west of the Rockies. In high school, what was the most interesting subject that you took? What did you like?

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I did not really like any of it. All the boys went to Punahou with me and all we thought about was how can we cut school school tomorrow to go spearfishing or canoeing or something at the beach. And we did that a lot.

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Kelly: In high school, did you have organized sports? Were you into sports at all? Martinez: Yes, I swam. I was not on the team or anything, but we had a swimming pool on the grounds and a swimming

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team. And I liked—I was on the—I cannot even think of the name of it—gunnery team. We used to shoot.30-30s prone because they were too heavy for us to hold up, so we would lie on the ground and shoot them.

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I liked guns, but I never really had any guns until Pearl Harbor happened. Kelly: Were there any teachers in high school that influenced you? Klemski: Yes, my English teacher was a man, and I was doing a lot of writing then. I was writing a lot of stories.

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In fact, I sold one to a British magazine when I was like twelve or thirteen years old. I couldn't believe it. But he kept urging me on to write, so he was really the one that pushed the writing. And I've been too disorganized all my life to really do a lot with that, though I did

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write a newspaper column here in Scottsdale for five years. Kelly: What kind of student were you? B student, B's and C's. I was not really interested in school at all.

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Kelly: What were your social activities like besides spearfishing? Klemski: Well, I grew up, as I say, with nine boys in the neighborhood. I was the catcher on their baseball team. So I had to learn to do all the things because I did not want to get thrown out of the group.

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I did not have a lot of close girlfriends because they played with dolls and everything, and I wanted to be outside. I had some beautiful dolls. I like them now.

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I have a collection of dolls now. But at that time I was outdoors and swimming, and I was not really athletic. I played volleyball out at the Outrigger Club at the beach and everything, but I never was into sports seriously.

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Kelly: Do you recall your high school prom? Klemski: Sort of. I cannot remember who my date was, though. I was madly in love with a football player that was a University of Hawaii player at

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that time, so I do not remember who I went to the prom with. I know he did not go with me. Describe your high school graduation. Did you have caps and gowns?

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No, I do not remember what we wore. I am sure dresses. It was outdoors, I think. I do remember one thing about it, and that was when they called me to pick up my diploma.

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I could hardly wait to get back, and on the way back I am looking at it to see if it is blank, because I had changed schools in the middle of the year. And I had not done very well the last half of the year when I was a senior, and so I was not a bit sure that it was not a blank diploma.

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So I was very happy to see writing in there. I was kind of a maverick kid. Kelly: In high school, now you have started taking flying lessons? And my first flight was a boy that I liked very much, a doctor's son who was a couple

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of years ahead of me in school. And I knew him, I had grown up with him, Brewster Morgan. And he got his private pilot's license and he was also the pitcher on our team. So he had asked me to be his first passenger.

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Well, I didn't tell my family or anything because they would have said flatly no. And he took me out to the airport. He had a driver's license. He picked me up and we drove out there.

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And I had second thoughts as we walked toward the airplane because it was a J-3. I really had not been close to small planes and that looked so small. It looked like it was held together with bailing wire. And I was not even sure it was going to fly.

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I would like to have said, "I changed my mind." But being the catcher on the baseball team, I could not lose face by doing that. And I prayed the whole time I was in the air. It was very rough.

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In fact, we hardly ever flew J-3s in the afternoon because the winds pick up in the islands. They were almost like flying a helicopter. You would come in on your final approach to land and you would just hover there. You could not get to the field.

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It took forever to get there because they were only sixty-five horsepower. Flew about sixty-five miles an hour, as I remember. But anyway, that first flight, I had an Opel ring that was my good luck ring. I said prayers and rubbed that ring the whole time I was in the air and said, "Dear God,

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I'll never do this again if you just get me back on the ground safely." The minute my feet were on the ground, I was all ready to go again. I didn't go that day. The next day Brewster was flying the plane and he ran out of gas on the way to the poly

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and had to set it down in the trees. Tore the plane up badly, walked away from it. But I thought my guardian angel was with me because if I had been with him that second day.

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I probably never got in a plane again. It might have cured me completely. Kelly: And as it was, when did you get in a plane again? Klemski: Well, this little flying school was owned by a very nice older man, who was like

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sort of a father image to me. His name was Ole Andrews. And Ole sort of took me under his wing and had a lot of instructors there who were PBY pilots and Air Force pilots, Air Corps pilots. And when they didn't have anything to do,

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he'd tell them to take me up for a ride. So for a couple of years I did that, and they taught me a lot and they let me shoot landings and everything. But I didn't dare—and I was ready to solo many times, but I couldn't do it because I was underage without my father's permission, and I didn't dare ask him because they thought I was going to the beach every

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afternoon. I would hitch rides out to the airport and everything with friends of mine. And I always had a tan, so they never questioned it. I felt very badly about that later, but I knew that my father was very strict.

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I knew that if I told him what I was doing, that would have been the end of it right then. Kelly: Then when did you start logging your time, for example? They brought a CPT program to the islands, to the university, and it was the first one there.

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They went by tens at that time. They had to have ten students or twenty students or thirty students. Well, they had thirty students, all men. They had no women in there now.

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I tried to get in, but they said no women. One of them, in fact, was Barton K. Yount, Jr. His father was general head of the training command later, but he was a colonel then, the father was. And he was transferred back to the States.

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So Bart had to go too. In this program, I had been taking the ground school. Oles said, "Why don't you go up and take the ground school at the university anyway? Even if you can't get into the flying, you can take the ground school and it will help

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you." Bart and Kay Out left the islands, took his son with him. That left twenty-nine. That meant they were going to have to drop nine or pick up one, so they picked me up.

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Kelly: And how old were you then? Were you still in high school? Martinez: I was, yes. Or just, I'm not sure whether I just graduated or not.

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Kelly: And in the CPT program, you had ground school and you began flying. Martinez: Yes. When did your mom and dad find out about your flying? Well actually, they had to sign the thing.

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I was still underage. So my father, surprisingly, was talked into signing. My instructor and everybody who was a Navy pilot talked to him and everything. Finally talked him into it.

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He was not happy with the idea, but he did agree. So then I was able to go on. Otherwise I could not have even gotten into the CPT program. When you graduated from high school, what was your goal?

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I do not know whether I had any, except flying. I just wanted to fly. Did you want to go on to college? Yes, all my friends were going to college.

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They were going to colleges on the East Coast. My father did not want me to go back there because the weather was bad, he said. I could not fly if I went back there, absolutely no flying. Well flying was more important to me than anything.

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So I went to the University of Hawaii so I could continue to fly. Kelly: And when you went in the University, where did you live? Did you live at home? Klemski: Yeah, I lived at home.

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Kelly: Okay. And then you began taking flying lessons under the CPT program? Klemski: Yes, yes. And I was the first to solo and everything in the CPT because I had all this background

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that the other boys did not have. Do you recall your first solo? Yes, I do. I was in a Luscombe and I had no idea it was coming up.

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But I was not fearful of it because I really had a lot of time in the Luscombe and lots of other small planes. So the day the pilot, my Navy instructor said he was getting out, I was comfortable with that and I shot a couple of landings and that was it.

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Kelly: When you were flying, taking this program, would you fly out over the water or would you be confined to the land? Martinez: Yes. No, we flew over the water. And after I got my—I later on got a limited commercial. I do not think they have them anymore, but you had to have fifty hours to

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have a limited commercial, and then you could fly passengers. And I flew passengers between the islands. When I think of it now, it scares the heck out of me, because we had so few instruments and no life jackets, no nothing.

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Little putt-putt cubs and luscombs and tailor crafts and aroncas and things like that. And a lot of biplanes, too. I flew a lot of open cockpit biplanes. Kelly: In college, what did you decide to major in?

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Or did you just— I just went as an unclassified student. I took art and home ec and writing classes, literature. Kelly: Were there any outside activities at school that you participated in, in college?

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Drama or speech, music, anything like that you were interested in? Lowry: I was taking music, piano lessons, but it had nothing to do with school. I took them for six and a half years. I wish I had kept on.

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I can't even read music anymore. I wanted to go to the beach and play with the boys and go surfing and everything. I didn't want to do all those things. I was not a good daughter for my mother.

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I was the only girl, and my mother was a girl's girl. She had four or five sisters, and she did girl things. She liked to cook and do all the things that women did in those days, and girls. I didn't want to do any of that.

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So did you get into a sorority? No, I did not. Is there anything you would like to tell us about any of the flights that you had? Were you ever afraid?

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Oh yes, I have been afraid because so many—the islands, rain comes and goes so quickly and cumulus clouds develop very quickly and sometimes I would be coming home from one of the other of the passenger, and there would be little clumps of clouds and then suddenly it was solid under me.

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And that was scary, going down through the clouds. We had two or three instruments in those planes, you know, and just— Kelly: I thought it was going to ashore. Klemski: One day I had to land on the beach at Mullakai because the weather got so bad

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we could not go and it was pouring rain. Kelly: Was that a smooth landing? Klemski: Yeah, it was a pretty smooth landing. And it was—I think it was an interstate cadet, which was like a cub.

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And why don't you turn that off for a second? All right. I had to go to the bathroom so badly, and here we were standing in the rain and very gusty winds, and we were both holding onto the struts to hold the plane down on the beach.

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And we were soaking wet. So I thought, "What difference does it make?" So I just did go to the bathroom. And then when it cleared up, why, we all got to get back into the plane and take off on

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the beach for the island. And I wrote about that in a story. I took a writing class and we each had to write short stories. It was memory thing, you know, autobiography type of class.

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And we each read our stories each time and there were a lot of men engineers and things. I was amazed how many men were in this class. And we each read our stories. And after, one who had a wonderful sense of humor, and I had read several of the stories.

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One of them I had written about my youngest brother when he saw snow for the first time and my grandfather told him to write his name in the snow. And after I had read several of these stories like that, afterwards this engineer said, "Do you have a problem with bodily fluids?"

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Because I was writing about a lot of children things. Kelly: As you were growing up, who were your role models? Klemski: You should have prepared me for this. Pilots, as far as I know.

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I was kind of a maverick. I just kind of bucked the strict supervision and I guess it was contrary. I had a good disposition, I think. I was happy all the time, but I just did not want to conform.

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Kelly: Were you ever able to take your mom and dad in an airplane? Lowry: They were my first passengers. Kelly: Tell me about that. I took them up in a—I can't believe it to this day that they would both—I wouldn't

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have done this with my sons when they got their license if I hadn't known how to fly. But they agreed to be my first passengers, and it was in a Fairchild 24 cabin plane. And my mother sat next to me, and her knuckles were white. She held on to everything.

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I'm sure my father was in the backseat too, but I thought, "What guts." But to people who don't fly, when you have a license, you know everything. It's like people getting a driver's license doesn't mean they are good drivers, but somehow the people that aren't familiar with the thing don't realize that.

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If you have a license, you can do anything. But they were very brave. I don't think they ever went up with me again, but eventually they let me take my younger brothers up in open cockpit planes.

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One of them got a license, the other one didn't care about flying. At that time in your life, what were your ambitions as far as flying airplanes? Did you want to go with the airlines? I never thought I had a chance to go with the airlines.

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I was working toward being an instructor. In fact, I got my instructor's rating and my commercial license on December 6, 1941, Saturday afternoon. I finished all the tests.

00:30:16.060 - 00:30:29.320

Never activated it, because there was no more civilian flying in the islands. It just was finished for a while. Kelly: Tell me about the next day. Klemski: The next day, well, on Saturday afternoon—I used to fly passengers, tourists, around the

00:30:29.380 - 00:30:40.760

islands in the mornings. It was a great thing for tourists to do. It took about an hour and a half in an open cockpit biplane. We would fly around the island.

00:30:40.900 - 00:30:54.920

We would usually go early in the morning, and it was beautiful then. Just everything was dewy in the sun and sparkling in the sunshine. We would buzz a hotel on the other side of the island, a very interesting hotel, Haleiwa Hotel.

00:30:55.900 - 00:31:11.580

We would land in a grass strip over there. Several pilots did this. There were usually three or four of us with passengers, especially on Sundays. We would land in the grass strip after buzzing the hotel, and they would send a little Filipino

00:31:12.340 - 00:31:21.740

houseboy or something out with a station wagon. We called them banana wagons then. He would pick us all up at the field and take us in, and we would all have breakfast at the hotel.

00:31:21.840 - 00:31:35.400

Then they would drive us back to the field and we would all take off. And the way back would be past Wheeler Field and Schofield Barracks and Pearl Harbor, and then we would be back at our field and land. It took about an hour and a half actual flying time.

00:31:36.220 - 00:31:50.240

And on Saturday afternoon, December 6, my father's—one of his good friends was head of the Rangoon Railroad, and he was on his way back to Rangoon. And he was there in the islands for a few days, and he had dinner with us on Friday night.

00:31:50.880 - 00:32:17.060

And so Saturday we decided that I would fly him around the island Sunday morning. I was going to a party at the Officer's Club at Pearl Harbor that night with my date, my ensign, who I later married after Pearl Harbor. But we were going to the Officer's Club that night and I really did not want to get

00:32:16.880 - 00:32:31.100

up in the morning, but I wanted to take my father's friend on this trip. Well he called me Saturday night and said, "Could we possibly postpone the trip until Monday morning because I am going to a big party at the Royal Hawaiian tonight," where he was staying.

00:32:31.620 - 00:32:45.040

And I said, "Oh, goody, because I am going to the officers club and I don't want to get up early either," because we usually took off around 6.30 in the morning, which meant getting out there quite a bit earlier. So I was most relieved that I didn't have to fly that morning.

00:32:45.160 - 00:33:03.160

Again, my guardian angel was taking care of me, I think, because Monday morning we did not fly. Kelly: Describe that Sunday morning. Klemski: Well, I woke up Sunday morning around—we were very used to war games.

00:33:03.210 - 00:33:22.000

We had been having war games in the islands for a year. The island was full of military, Navy and Navy ships, and they had been having war games and lots of flying and lots of practice anti-aircraft puffs in the air. You'd hear it going off all the time, "Poom, poom, poom, poom," and you'd hear these

00:33:22.100 - 00:33:36.740

big gray puffs. And we got so very callous and casual about it and never paid any attention. We had had practice blackouts. Suddenly everything would go off, you know, all the lights would go out and they'd announce

00:33:36.780 - 00:33:54.460

on the radio that it was just a practice blackout. Sometimes they lasted twenty minutes or so. We were used to all these war games. The Navy ships were going out to sea during the week and they would come in on weekends. All the ships came in on weekends, but they would

00:33:54.460 - 00:34:13.240

take carriers and everything out to sea during the week and they would fly off of them and everything and then they would come back on weekends. That Saturday night I was just twenty-one, or I'd just become twenty-one. And it was at the Officer's Club and everybody thought that I should have a drink.

00:34:13.440 - 00:34:27.980

I'd never had a drink in my life. And so they thought, well, they'd break me in on Southern Comfort. And so I had about five Southern Comforts, I think. They were so good and they just were so sweet and they slipped down your throat so easily.

00:34:29.340 - 00:34:58.460

So on 730 on Sunday morning, I was sound asleep and we heard these pops of the anti-aircraft. And my younger brothers, who were very young but very interested in airplanes and everything goes on, went out on the balcony and they came rushing in. The night before at Pearl Harbor, the Officers Club, my father had invited my fiancé to

00:34:58.460 - 00:35:14.540

at our house, because he didn't have a car and I had a car, and I would have had to come home from Pearl Harbor by myself. And my husband-to-be had the night off, so my father invited him to spend the night with us, which is the only reason he was alive, because his junior officer was killed the

00:35:14.580 - 00:35:28.300

next morning. But my brothers woke him up, and he ran out on the balcony with them, and he rushed back in and he said, "That is real ammunition." They were big black puffs.

00:35:28.920 - 00:35:45.540

He rushed back in and turned the radio on and they were screaming on the radio for all military personnel to return to their bases immediately. They were just shouting. The announcers were—you could hear their voices were really strained with excitement.

00:35:46.540 - 00:36:00.980

My father said he would drive TAC—what was his nickname? He would drive TAC back to Pearl Harbor. And I said, "I want to go too." So I ran upstairs like a stupid girl to get my purse.

00:36:01.080 - 00:36:12.820

I don't know what I thought I was going to need a purse for. And of course that was their opportunity to take off without me. And as they were going out the road to Pearl Harbor, they were strafing along the road. They hit two or three cars.

00:36:12.940 - 00:36:25.480

I don't think anybody was hurt, but there were several cars along the side of the road. And they made it to the guardhouse at the entrance to Pearl Harbor, and they ducked into the guardhouse until the second wave was over. This was about 9.30 in the morning.

00:36:26.620 - 00:36:40.200

And then they would not let my father in, so Tack had to get transportation back to his ship. And it was sunk. And the strange thing was, and I have never heard one word about this, but I know this

00:36:40.880 - 00:37:00.160

to be true because he told me, that morning of Pearl Harbor they had an admirals inspection, Which meant all the ships had all their voids that are airtight voids that hold air so that the ships do not sink. They were all open for inspection, so there were no airtight voids.

00:37:01.720 - 00:37:22.520

For admiral's inspection, they stow all ammunition below decks. So as my husband's junior officer went down to get ammunition, he was asphyxiated down in the hold of the California. But I have never read a word about this admiral's inspection, but I thought, "How foolish

00:37:22.530 - 00:37:39.480

to have an admiral's inspection," when there was so much unrest. My cousin was the youngest admiral in the Navy, and he was on his flagship, I think it was the Coronado, came through on his way to the Philippines a couple of weeks before Pearl Harbor.

00:37:40.460 - 00:37:59.280

And he had dinner with us, and I can remember his sitting across the table from me, and my father asked him, "What do you think about this? Do you think the Japanese are going to give us any trouble or start anything?" And Norman looked at me as he said this, and he said, "They wouldn't dare."

00:37:59.280 - 00:38:10.640

He was later killed down in the South Pacific. His ship was sunk. But nobody believed it. It was like us here in the United States on September 11th.

00:38:10.800 - 00:38:27.060

We would not have believed anything could happen to us here. Kelly: Then how did that Sunday change the islands, the people on the islands, and change you, your routine? Klemski: Well, it changed us a lot.

00:38:27.360 - 00:38:45.180

That Sunday was a hectic day because the islands do not have much twilight. It goes from sundown to dark. We lived casually and our house was up on a hill and it was all glass, no drapes or anything.

00:38:45.230 - 00:38:54.280

It was all glass all the way around looking out toward the ocean. We did not even think about it. We were just glued to the radio all day. Radio was off except for special announcements.

00:38:54.520 - 00:39:11.320

they were announcing that—they had just gotten a report that parachutists had landed on one of the hills right near us. They had another announcement said that 10,000 troops were landing in barges on the other side of the island, 10,000 Japanese.

00:39:12.500 - 00:39:27.880

We were just paralyzed with fear. We thought they were taking over the islands that day. It turned out these were all hoaxes, every one of them, not a truth. We sat glued to the radio that day, and suddenly it was dark.

00:39:28.720 - 00:39:39.700

We hadn't thought anything about food, dinner, anything. And here we are wandering around, "Where do you put your toothbrush?" or "Where do you put your clothes?" You know, because we were kind of relaxed and sloppy.

00:39:40.580 - 00:39:58.080

We really shaped up. By the next day we knew where everything was in the dark, you know, because they told us we couldn't even turn on flashlights because it might be seen from the air and give somebody—in In fact, they immediately had civil defense workers walking on all the streets in the

00:39:58.080 - 00:40:11.900

residential areas and everything. And one night I had learned to smoke, and I was lying on the floor listening to Tokyo Rose and one night there was a knock on our Arcadia doors. And I went to the door and he said, "Put out your cigarette."

00:40:11.900 - 00:40:34.240

They could see it from the air. That is how strict they were about those things. And we had lived up on the hill, we were so used to looking at the whole city below us. This whole city just was lighted up, just beautiful sparkly lights.

00:40:34.420 - 00:40:48.380

And Waikiki, and we could see that there were only two hotels out there, then the Royal Hawaiian and the Moana, and you could see all the ocean in between. My brothers used to look out there and say, "Oh, the waves look good," and then they load their surfboards on the top of their old Model T and take off for the beach, you

00:40:48.380 - 00:40:55.700

know. Now you can't even see the ocean from the house, it's all high rises. But— Kelly: Let's stop, Betty.

00:40:55.730 - 00:40:59.540

We need to change tape. Klemski-Hill: Oh, all right. Kelly: Okay. You're doing great.

00:40:59.690 - 00:41:25.120

Klemski-Hill: Oh, I'm going too many sidelines. But you can cut out what you don't want. It was one of those things, any of the girls I knew ever stayed home a night all year. There were so many young military personnel in the islands and not enough local girls.

00:41:25.880 - 00:41:41.220

It was nothing to have seven people call you in a night in one. Sometimes you had two dates, one early one and one late one, you know. And then suddenly Pearl Harbor happens and that's it. Pitch black at night, you can't read, you know, you can't do anything.

00:41:41.400 - 00:42:03.720

just sit at home. So everybody got married. You mentioned Tokyo Rose. Who was Tokyo Rose? Tokyo Rose was an announcer for the Japanese radio. I went to work at Pearl Harbor four days after Pearl Harbor, and I worked in the Captain of the Yard's office, which reminds

00:42:03.720 - 00:42:21.080

me in the movie Pearl Harbor, it shows a gray building at Pearl Harbor, a gray concrete building. That is the Captain Yard's office where I worked. But I had an interesting job because they got all the reports, Captain Yard's office

00:42:21.160 - 00:42:41.200

got all the reports of where the ships were, the positions of the ships and everything. And I got a clearance so that I could type up the positions of the ships, which they distribute to the different offices in the building. And then they would take the carbons, I would make two or three copies, and they would take

00:42:41.260 - 00:42:53.620

the carbons away from me. I would give them the papers, they would pull the carbons out and they would burn them in a wastebasket right there at my desk. And then they would distribute them for security, because it had all the positions of where

00:42:53.720 - 00:43:11.260

the ships were in the South Pacific and everything. I had a security clearance first before I could do this, but they did check me out. I felt very important. At night, we had nothing to do at home, so we would all sit around in the living room

00:43:11.800 - 00:43:30.060

and listen to Tokyo Rose, shortwave, because there was nothing else to do. Tokyo Rose would always be announcing that such and such a battleship or carrier had just been sunk at the Coral Sea. My father would sort of look at me this way and I would just say, because I knew—I just

00:43:30.120 - 00:43:40.060

typed up the report that day. I knew that this battleship and carrier were in another part of the ocean. It was kind of fun. But I had to be careful not to say anything.

00:43:40.240 - 00:43:56.160

But my father was just—he had the tightest lips of all, so I could nod my head to him. Kelly: By this time, were you out of college? Yes, I just didn't really pay too much attention to that. And that was all over.

00:43:56.860 - 00:44:17.180

They took over the grounds and everything. They had military things going on at Punahou and everything. Well before Pearl Harbor, I also taught junior kindergarten at this little private school where I had been on the assistant in the junior kindergarten.

00:44:17.460 - 00:44:28.580

And in the middle of the year, the gal who was from New England decided to go back to New England, the teacher. And they had nobody else to fill in, and in a private school you do not have to have a degree, at that time anyway.

00:44:29.280 - 00:44:51.740

So I finished the year as a schoolteacher there. Kelly: And what prompted you to get a job with the military? Was it a sense of patriotism? Well, when my husband was transferred, we stayed in the islands after Pearl Harbor until

00:44:51.860 - 00:45:15.160

June or until May, I guess it was, and they raised the California, the channel there where the ships went down is only like 40 feet deep, so the top deck was always out of water. And he stood his watches, his anti-aircraft watches and everything, on the ship until Until they decided to raise it, then they took the guns and everything over and put

00:45:15.200 - 00:45:31.480

them on the side of Pearl Harbor and taught the Army how to use them and gave them to the Army. But when they raised the ship, why then it was decommissioned. So he was sent back to a cruiser in Philadelphia, and that is how I happened to get back there.

00:45:32.100 - 00:45:49.640

Well I had an instructor's rating and a commercial license. Others were very hard to find, so I do not remember now how it happened, but I was offered a job teaching Navy cadets down in Nashville, I think it was. Kelly: Let me back up a bit and ask you, when you got married?

00:45:50.520 - 00:46:06.940

How long after Pearl Harbor? Klemski: I got married February—I do not remember, fourth or fifth or sixth. I cannot really tell you now. But we were married in the chapel of the Congregational Church, because my mother went to the Congregational

00:46:06.940 - 00:46:23.720

Church. And it was not fashionable to have a big wedding or anything with a war going on. As a matter of fact, I got very few wedding presents because by February all the stores that carried dishes and silver and things were already out and nobody was shipping any

00:46:23.740 - 00:46:35.700

more in. So there was not anything for presents. So we got a lot of promissory notes, but most of them did not ever come through. But that did not matter.

00:46:35.700 - 00:46:47.800

Kelly: In the meantime, you were working for the military? Typing up those ships? Klemski: Yes, yes, yes. Which was a civil service job.

00:46:48.360 - 00:47:01.040

But they were desperate for people there. My cousin was a captain on a destroyer that was based there, and he is the one who talked me into going to work. Because a lot of the secretaries and everything at Pearl Harbor were officers or enlisted

00:47:01.140 - 00:47:16.600

men's wives, and they were pulled off the day of Pearl Harbor. They were out of there, so they needed a lot of secretarialist, stenographic help. So my cousin said, "Why don't you go to work for them, because they desperately need you."

00:47:16.600 - 00:47:28.780

So that's how it happened. Kelly: So then after you married, did you continue to work? Klemski: Yes, I did, because I didn't see my husband a lot, because he was on the ship a lot.

00:47:29.340 - 00:47:47.240

Because he didn't live on the ship, but then when they transferred the guns over to the military, he lived in tents over there and everything, so I very seldom saw him. And we were both very young, and we were about the same age, and much too young to get married. I didn't really want to marry him.

00:47:48.160 - 00:48:05.900

I'd been dating him for quite a while before Pearl Harbor, and he kept giving me a miniature Annapolis ring, and I kept giving it back to him. And he was a fun guy and I liked him—I really loved him, I think, but I was not in love with him.

00:48:07.100 - 00:48:21.800

But I kept giving him his ring back and he would do crazy things. He would give me a purse on my birthday and in one of the pockets the ring would be there again and I'd give it back to him again. And then at Christmas time—or no, before Christmas—no, at Christmas time I guess

00:48:21.820 - 00:48:38.380

it was. I don't know how he happened to do it, but he gave me a box of chocolate-coated cherries. In the cherry, I almost broke my tooth, is the ring again. And I finally just gave, I wanted, I was interested in being a Navy wife because I had so much

00:48:38.440 - 00:49:03.980

family in the Navy and I kind of liked that life. But everybody just, we were so used to having fun and dating and everything and suddenly, And now the hotels blacked out all their rooms in the hotels at the beach, and they blacked out their dining rooms and they had orchestras still there that played dance music and everything,

00:49:04.020 - 00:49:22.580

but you had to go and check in before the blackout sirens went off at six at night, and then you had to stay until the sirens went off again, the all clear, at six the next morning. And with my strict parents, a lot of the kids were doubling up and the girls supposedly

00:49:22.700 - 00:49:35.400

were staying in rooms and the boys had rooms. My family said, "No, no, we're not taking chances on that." So I didn't have any of that. So we were very lonesome, sitting at home in the dark listening to Tokyo Rose every

00:49:35.640 - 00:49:49.580

night. And this way, if you got married, then you could have an apartment or whatever and have a little life. So I guess I just—I think we all thought we were on Mars or something.

00:49:49.920 - 00:50:06.700

It was such a different world. At night we would—at home I would look out at the city and there were lots of trees and everything but you would always see all the sparkly lights before the war. After the war, the only people that drove had to have passes, and I had a pass because

00:50:06.760 - 00:50:23.260

sometimes I had to work late at Pearl Harbor and come home after dark, so I had a pass to drive at night. But they took blue cellophane, and if you drove at night they taped up your headlights so there was just a little light showing through and the rest was blue.

00:50:23.680 - 00:50:38.760

So from our house you would look at night and you would see through the trees and everything and you would see these little flecks of blue going along the streets. And at every stop, every corner, Civil Defense would stop you. And you couldn't drive fast because you couldn't see.

00:50:40.940 - 00:50:55.500

And they would stop you and you would check your ID. And if you didn't have it, you parked your car and you went right to jail and you were there overnight. And it happened to a lot of people who thought they could get away with it and couldn't.

00:50:56.880 - 00:51:07.580

But anyway, it was such a different world. It was just like the whole—the first few days there was no traffic on the roads or anything. We could look down at the streets and the only thing you'd hear was a rumble and you'd

00:51:07.520 - 00:51:24.540

look and you would see these military trucks with the great big canvas over the back and they would be full of soldiers that they were taking to the other side of the island or something, where they heard people were landing or something like that. And that was about the only—the grocery stores did not open, I do not think, for a

00:51:24.540 - 00:51:38.040

day or so. They immediately rationed gasoline. I had a good friend, a little gal from Brazil, who was one of my best friends, and she lived in an apartment out at Waikiki and she also worked at Pearl Harbor with me.

00:51:39.440 - 00:51:53.740

And that Saturday we had decided that when I got back from flying this man around the island that we would go to the beach for the afternoon. And so she was going to—I was going to pick her up. She lived out at Waikiki in this apartment.

00:51:54.440 - 00:52:16.040

Well on Sunday morning about noon I guess was when she was going to come up to the house. We got this frantic call and this girl was just hysterical on the phone. She had gone to the gas station to get gas and the man at the gas station said, "Lady, don't you know there's a war going on?

00:52:16.340 - 00:52:25.180

I can't sell you any gas." And she said, "War going on?" She slept through the whole thing. And she went back to her apartment and called me, and she was hysterical.

00:52:25.340 - 00:52:34.180

So I got in my car and I went out and picked her up, brought her back to the house. She stayed with us for two weeks. She wouldn't leave. Poor thing, her family were all in Brazil.

00:52:35.960 - 00:52:50.520

But it was a crazy world. I mean, nobody was thinking straight, because it was just like being out in space somewhere. Your lives were just so totally turned around. How long after you got married before he was—

00:52:50.580 - 00:53:06.980

Steele: We got married in February and he was sent to a new cruiser in June. We went up on a convoy and the convoy ships were little United Fruit boats that had been commandeered. There were banana boats and things from the Caribbean and they were brought over.

00:53:07.960 - 00:53:32.180

They were not all that, but I happened to be on one that was a banana boat. There were fifteen ships, I think, quite a few ships in the convoy, all kinds of ships, I mean big cruise ships and everything. We were supposed to have a military escort, and the ships were full of wives, military

00:53:32.320 - 00:53:48.720

wives and children being shipped back to the States. Usually the trip took five days. It took us ten days across the Pacific because we zigged and zagged. All those convoy ships did this.

00:53:49.240 - 00:54:03.200

All the lights are out at night on the ships. We were supposed to have two cruisers and three or four destroyers to escort this group of ships. We had one cruiser and two destroyers, I think, showed up.

00:54:07.440 - 00:54:23.120

Kelly: Then where did you land? And we landed in Oakland. But before, just to tell you the rest of the thing, we had a very funny thing happen. One of the ships, there was a battleship a day ahead of us going to the west coast, and

00:54:23.120 - 00:54:37.380

they spotted submarines. My husband's and my room cabin were below waterline in this ship. It was a small ship. And we woke up to the sound of machine guns.

00:54:38.240 - 00:54:50.640

The whole ship was vibrating because they had.50 caliber machine guns mounted all over the ship. Apparently they spotted a periscope and they were shooting at it. I do not know whether anything ever happened or whether they ever got it.

00:54:50.720 - 00:55:05.240

The funny thing was that the vibration on the ship, which was not meant for this, knocked in the doorman's dining room. So we had moonlight dinners for the rest of the trip. No seat, no roof in the dining room.

00:55:06.140 - 00:55:23.740

just vibrated it down so a big chunk of it fell out. But it was a long trip, and when we arrived in Oakland it was late in the afternoon and very cold, and the wind was blowing like crazy. And we pulled up to the dock and there were all these women standing around.

00:55:26.480 - 00:55:44.280

And as we came down the gangway, they gave us wool scarves, they were all the gray ladies, Like we were refugees and they gave us wool scarves, wool socks, all kinds of things. We all had our own clothes, you know, and everything. And they had hot coffee and hot cocoa for us down there and everything.

00:55:44.880 - 00:56:06.540

They really treated us like nothing I had ever seen before. And we all kind of chuckled about it because I guess they just did not have enough information to know that we were not starving to death for refugees. And that night we stayed overnight in San Francisco.

00:56:06.840 - 00:56:20.480

My husband was on his way to Philadelphia to the cruiser and we stayed overnight in San Francisco. And my aunt, one of my aunts lived there and we saw her and they took us out to dinner and it was just like being free.

00:56:22.860 - 00:56:37.440

After Pearl Harbor you felt like you were on an island this big in the middle of nowhere. You felt so totally unprotected by the United States or anything because you were so far away. And it felt so safe to put your feet on the mainland.

00:56:38.620 - 00:56:53.560

And it was so nice to see—they were having brownouts, but it looked so brilliant to me that I just spent the whole evening practically when I got home from dinner standing in the hotel window just looking at the lights. I used to have dreams about what it would look like to see lights at night.

00:56:53.700 - 00:57:04.540

You know, for six months is a long time to not see any lights on at night. And it was quite an experience. Everybody laughed at me because they thought it was so dark. It looked so bright to me.

00:57:04.710 - 00:57:23.260

Kelly: Then how did you get from Oakland to Philadelphia? Lowry: Well, for one thing, when we came from Honolulu, you could not buy luggage or anything, or winter clothes or anything unless you already owned them, because everybody was out of those things by June when we left.

00:57:23.820 - 00:57:38.500

And there was no luggage and my family did not have a lot of luggage. So my husband commandeered. We had five coffin boxes, big pine coffin boxes that he got, Navy ones. And we packed everything in the coffin boxes.

00:57:38.900 - 00:57:58.000

And I never forgave him because my aunt had given me monogrammed linens and things like this long before the wedding, and those were my prized possessions. And I put all of those and my little suitcase full of all the stories I'd ever written and everything in this one of the five.

00:57:58.700 - 00:58:06.220

And we stood there and watched them unload four, and my husband said, "We only had four." I said, "No, there's one more." "No, we only had four."

00:58:07.140 - 00:58:16.960

And you know men. So I knew we had five, but he said, "Don't worry about it. Our names and dresses are on it, and Philadelphia are on it, so we would go to the Navy Yard in Philadelphia.

00:58:17.370 - 00:58:28.660

It never came. The one of all of them that meant something to me, because it had all my stories that I had written on, because I had been writing all my life, that was the one, of course, that was lost.

00:58:28.730 - 00:58:41.940

Kelly: When you got to Philadelphia, where did you live? Lowry: We rented a house. It was like a brownstone. We had the third floor, and it was on this little cobblestone street that was just a

00:58:41.780 - 00:58:58.300

block long called Smedley Street. And there was a little Italian restaurant on one side of the street and they were all just like, almost like miniature brownstones. And we had the top floor and with it came a maid, a Negro maid, Lee.

00:59:00.420 - 00:59:15.040

And we had it and it was a cute little apartment and it had a deck out in back that was out in the trees and you had to climb out the living room window to get to it. It was about five feet square and I used to sit out there in the afternoons and it was fun.

00:59:15.180 - 00:59:32.060

But it was a walk-up. I came home one day. These are sidelines I shouldn't even be saying, but I came home one day, one afternoon, and Marian Anderson was sitting in my living room upstairs.

00:59:32.280 - 00:59:40.140

You know who she is? Kelly: The singer? Klemski: Yes, the singer. It turned out that Lee, the maid, and Marian Anderson had grown up together.

00:59:40.660 - 00:59:52.580

And Marian Anderson was giving a concert there that night, and she invited me to it. But it was in the park. But she said, "You know, Lee and I grew up together, and she had a better voice than I did."

00:59:52.580 - 01:00:08.140

But she never believed it, and her family would not let her take lessons and things. But he said, "She had a better voice than I did." But that was startling. How did you occupy your time when your husband would be gone all day?

01:00:08.280 - 01:00:23.140

Would he also take trips? His ship was cruising the East Coast on trial voyages and everything before they headed over to the Pacific. So we only saw them about once a month.

01:00:23.500 - 01:00:40.660

And there were several other young wives, and we all knew each other and lived in the same vicinity more or less. And so we would have lunches and dinners together and talk about our husbands. And then we would get a call and they would be in Boston, or going to be in Boston for

01:00:40.720 - 01:00:52.680

the weekend or something. So then we would all jump in the car or train or something and buzz up to Boston. And then maybe a few weeks later they were down in Norfolk. In fact, they were in Norfolk for a month and we all went down there and we stayed in

01:00:52.720 - 01:01:04.580

the Chamberlain Hotel in Newport News. And then they would shuttle them across in a boat to their ships every morning. How did you get gasoline to do that? Because it was rationed, right?

01:01:04.850 - 01:01:12.580

I do not know. I do not remember the rationing back there. Maybe because we were military or something, I do not know. I do not remember rationing then.

01:01:12.580 - 01:01:28.920

I certainly remember when we got to Houston, but we had no trouble with the rationing then because in Houston they gave us whatever the number was that gave you the most gas. I do not remember if it was A, B, or C. And they said in Texas, "Hey, we pump the gas. We can give it to anybody we want to.

01:01:29.960 - 01:01:38.580

And that is just Texas, you know. Anyway, they did everything their own way anyway. So we had no gas trouble at all. Kelly: How long did you stay in Philadelphia?

01:01:40.210 - 01:01:58.680

Lowry: He was shipped out. After he was shipped out, I stayed on there, because I really had no place else to go. He wanted me to go back to Chicago to be with his family, but they did not care much for for me, because I had taken their only son away from them, and they never really forgave

01:01:58.760 - 01:02:07.760

me for it. So I was not about to go back and live with them. We stopped on our way to Philadelphia and spent the night with them. And that was enough.

01:02:08.020 - 01:02:21.860

Yes. But they tracked me for a long time while I was overseas. So I will tell you, they would show up in Long Beach and things like that. I would suddenly look out and here is a black limousine sitting in front of my little house

01:02:21.960 - 01:02:34.660

in Long Beach after I got out of the service. They had driven out to see what I was doing, just watching me. Kelly: When was the next time that you flew? Lowry: I flew—you mean after the war?

01:02:34.800 - 01:02:50.380

Kelly: No, before you went into Wasp Training. Lowry: Oh, well, I went down to—my very best friend in Honolulu was Cornelia Ford, who joined the WAFs. But Cornelia was an instructor at the school where I was flying.

01:02:51.200 - 01:03:04.220

She was just there the last year before Pearl Harbor. In fact, she was flying that morning with a student, and they portrayed her in "Toratoratora," the movie. And they called her "Carnita" in the movie, but unfortunately she had been killed in a

01:03:04.320 - 01:03:16.620

flying formation in an accident. A pilot crossed over and his wheel hit her in a BT-13, hit her canopy, and she went straight in. Four days before I got to Long Beach.

01:03:16.680 - 01:03:33.260

And the reason I wanted to go to Long Beach was because she was already there, and she was killed about four days before I arrived. Kelly: Let me back up and ask you, when you first heard about a WASP training program, how did you hear about that?

01:03:33.380 - 01:03:48.900

Klemski: Cornelia called me when she got into the WAFs. She called me from Wilmington and said, "Get down here as fast as you can get here and join the WAFs." So I got on the train the next day and I was down there and I spent the night with her.

01:03:49.640 - 01:04:05.300

Nancy would not accept me because I did not have multi-engine time. And so I went back to Philadelphia very disappointed. And then I got a letter from Jackie Cochran asking me to be in the first class. So maybe she got the rejects from the WAFs.

01:04:05.800 - 01:04:18.200

But actually when we went in, we were WAFs still. It was before we became WASPs. I had a WAF uniform and everything when I first went to Long Beach, which was much nicer than the WASP one.

01:04:18.680 - 01:04:27.660

Kelly: In the meantime, your husband is overseas. Martinez-Montoya, Jr. Yes, he is in the South Pacific. Kelly: Did he know what you were joining?

01:04:27.900 - 01:04:39.360

Martinez-Montoya, Jr. Yes, and he resented it. He was jealous, actually. He had learned to fly in Honolulu just before the war, had his private license, and tried

01:04:39.420 - 01:04:58.000

to get into Pensacola, but he had a stigmatism or something, and they would not accept him. He had already graduated from Minneapolis then, so he could not do that. He resented my flying. When he came back, unexpectedly, unbeknownst to me, his ship arrived.

01:04:58.500 - 01:05:11.240

He was then skipper of two destroyer escorts, and they came into Long Beach. I had no notice they were coming. He came in and he called the CO at Long Beach and said, "I want my wife to have two weeks off.

01:05:11.300 - 01:05:24.720

I am going to be in Florida for three months, and I want her to go with me." Or he said, "I want her to go have three months off." And Andy Cannon, who was the CO at Long Beach, he said, "Don't you know, the Navy and Army don't like each other too much anyway."

01:05:24.720 - 01:05:39.540

He said, "Don't you know we've got a war going on?" And he said, "But she's my wife." So anyway, Andy—and we weren't getting along at all then, by letter or anything else. He had told me about a romance he had in the South Pacific and stuff.

01:05:41.760 - 01:05:54.460

We shouldn't have been married anyway. We were only together for four or five months, and the whole four years of marriage. But anyway, he had asked Andy Cannon for it. So Andy agreed to give me two weeks off.

01:05:54.540 - 01:06:04.260

This was without asking me or anything. So suddenly he is at my doorstep, my husband, and he says, "We are driving to Florida in your car." I said, "Oh, we are?"

01:06:04.360 - 01:06:20.500

I had a big Buick that I had bought from another pilot, a big four-door Buick. It looked like a mafia car with the chrome wheels on the side and everything. I paid $1,000 for it and it had 10,000 miles on it. Anyway, my husband's executive officer was with him.

01:06:21.440 - 01:06:40.500

And so I agreed, I mean I had two weeks off, so I agreed to drive him to Florida because he was going to be stationed there for three months teaching something down there at the Navy. And so we got to Florida and he did everything he could do to keep me from going back.

01:06:41.740 - 01:07:00.880

I do not know why, just he told everybody that I was a terrible flyer, his friends. He did everything that he could to just queer the whole thing for me. And then he announced that he was keeping the car. He needed a car while he was there and I did not need it in Long Beach.

01:07:00.940 - 01:07:10.660

He gave it back to me when he went back overseas again. And when he went back overseas, he left it in Texas and called me and said, "It is in storage in Texas. You can go get it whenever you want to."

01:07:11.820 - 01:07:26.240

By the way, he did not like my flying. Kelly: Let me back up, Betty, and ask you, did you get a telegram from Jacqueline Cochran telling you about this program? Klemski: No, I think I got a letter from her.

01:07:27.250 - 01:07:40.020

I do not remember telegram. Kelly: Then what happened? Where did you go? She asked me to go to Houston, and I cannot remember whether it was October or November,

01:07:40.140 - 01:07:51.000

I think it was the sixth of one of those months, and I have forgotten which month it was. I do not really know. We would meet at the Rice Hotel in Houston. Did you go by yourself?

01:07:51.360 - 01:08:00.660

Yes, I did. Did you know any other girls who had gone into training? We all met in this great big room, and Jackie introduced herself and got up and did her speech and the whole thing.

01:08:00.780 - 01:08:23.540

She was good at that and told us about the whole program. Then she told us the types of living arrangements she had arranged and told us to just pick what we wanted and pick the girls we wanted a room with and everything. So that is how Ruth and Sydney and I got together.

01:08:23.540 - 01:08:32.500

Kelly: Tell me about them again because you were off camera before. Klemski: Oh, all right. Ruth Hellman was from San Francisco. Her husband was a colonel.

01:08:33.050 - 01:08:56.700

He was stationed in Fairfield. His family owned the Wells Fargo Bank, were the biggest owners. Her family, her grandfather was Levi Strauss, so she was an heiress to the Levi Strauss. I did not know that for a long time afterwards, but she was from Boston originally, but lived

01:08:56.700 - 01:09:11.900

in San Francisco. She came from San Francisco, Sidney came from Mineral Wells, where her father was mayor, I think, for twenty-two years. She had one sister who came down to visit a couple of times, and I loved the sister's

01:09:11.960 - 01:09:22.700

name. She was Luscious Lucia. Everybody called her Luscious Lucia. Kelly: Then describe some of the other girls who met.

01:09:23.040 - 01:09:46.420

There was one who was a cab driver in New Jersey. There was one girl, tall girl, who was an interior decorator. And I cannot think right now, but there was Marjorie Kumler. She had worked, she had been a photographer for Life magazine and been all over the world.

01:09:50.640 - 01:10:09.760

And there was a girl from Portland. No, she was not in my class. She was at Long Beach, but she was from another class. I wish I had thought of these things ahead of time and looked down the list of my class

01:10:09.880 - 01:10:27.740

because I could tell you by looking at the names, but I just cannot think. Kelly: Tell me again how some of them were dressed. Lowry: Some of them had sweats on, some had slacks, some had Levi's. I guess Ruth and Sidney and I were dressed.

01:10:27.860 - 01:10:40.640

I had come from Philadelphia on the plane. Ruth had come from San Francisco, which was still very dressy in those days. She had heels and a suit on, I had heels and a suit on. Sidney was very well dressed, too.

01:10:42.180 - 01:10:59.520

Some of the others, most of the others had slacks or sweatshirts and things like that on and somehow when they said, "Everybody pick somebody to room with," we just kind of—the three of us kind of gravitated together, though we were an oddball threesome. Kelly: And then where did you find to live?

01:10:59.520 - 01:11:22.340

Lowry: We stayed in the—I think it was the—you told me the name and I forgot. Garden Villa. They were two-story apartments built around a court. And Dee Dee lived in one of them and she was our housemother, but this was her first stint

01:11:22.400 - 01:11:32.880

as housemother and she didn't really know how to be a housemother so she didn't really pay any. I think we were kind of—she was in awe of us so she never checked on us and we did as we wanted.

01:11:34.460 - 01:11:47.740

Bill Holden, the movies, was a lieutenant. He was stationed at Ellington Field. We met him and he used to come over and play gin rummy on the floor with us in our apartment at night.

01:11:47.860 - 01:12:00.660

He was just a fun guy. I just really loved Bill Holden. I did a radio show with him in the hangar out there at Long Beach. They used to send radio programs to the boys overseas.

01:12:02.800 - 01:12:21.040

We did it and it was cold and we had our leather fleece-lined suits on and everything. We are standing in the hangar, it is open at both ends, and the wind is just whipping through there and we are just like this with our teeth chattering trying to talk into this microphone, engines roaring in the background and everything.

01:12:21.240 - 01:12:38.460

Kelly: At Houston, describe what your training was like. Where did you train? We flew from the commercial airport there. Kelly: Did they have special facilities for you?

01:12:40.180 - 01:12:57.300

Klemski: They must have. I can remember the barracks and the places where we took our ground training and everything, which was a military contract school. And at the beginning, we did not even have military planes, because we were the guinea

01:12:57.430 - 01:13:14.660

pig group and they did not think—even though we had to have two hundred hours to get in at that time—they did not think girls would be able to fly military planes. So the military, the Air Corps, commandeered a lot of civilian planes. And every day we flew a different plane.

01:13:14.780 - 01:13:29.300

They painted them all olive drab and put the stars on the side and everything. And one day we were flying a gull-winged Stinson, the next day it might be a Cub, the next day They was a Fairchild 24, a stagger-winged beach. So for the first three or four weeks, that is all we had to fly.

01:13:30.300 - 01:13:44.320

And the instructors were not happy to be our instructors. They were all lieutenants in the Air Corps, and they were not thrilled with the idea of teaching us. So they gave us kind of a bad time, a hard time at the beginning.

01:13:44.500 - 01:14:02.120

They turned out to be buddies later. What did Ms. Cochran tell you would be the final product from your training? What did she think you were going to do after you finished training? Just be in different parts of the aircraft, wherever we were needed.

01:14:02.920 - 01:14:19.020

Ferrying and the training command and test piloting and towing targets, I guess, and things like that. And fortunately, being in the first class, we were allowed to pick. And I picked the Ferry Command and Long Beach, because I wanted to be where Cornelia was,

01:14:19.180 - 01:14:27.840

because we would have a lot of fun there. Kelly: How long was your training? Lowry: It was six months, I believe. We graduated, I think, April 24th of '43.

01:14:28.130 - 01:14:36.340

Kelly: And did some of that class wash out? Lowry: Yes. We—I thought—the records say thirty. I thought originally there were thirty-two of us.

01:14:37.220 - 01:14:53.580

Twenty-three graduated. Kelly: And do you know why they washed out? Various reasons, some of them because they could not fly well, I guess. Some were health reasons, some were family reasons.

01:14:55.960 - 01:15:04.060

I think mainly those points. Kelly: And what did the flying training consist of? Did you get aerobatics and instruments and cross-country or what did you do? Klemski: Yes, we did.

01:15:04.530 - 01:15:20.640

We did not get as much of the aerobatics as the military cadets did because we were not going to fly in combat. And we did not have gunnery, but those are the only two things I think that were different. Kelly: And did you have uniforms?

01:15:21.480 - 01:15:34.000

Klemski: No, we did not at that time. We all wore khaki pants and white shirts and jumpsuits. We had jumpsuits for flying. Kelly: Tell me about your graduation.

01:15:34.520 - 01:15:57.300

Klemski: We wore the khaki pants and white shirts. And I think we had overseas caps, as I recall, khaki caps. And we marched over at Ellington Field. And it was funny because the general and colonels and everything had never pinned wings on women

01:15:57.520 - 01:16:08.200

before. And when we went up on the stand to have the wind, this general just did not really know how to grab my shirt and pin the wings on. I think he was afraid he was going to puncture me or something.

01:16:09.280 - 01:16:22.820

And so finally he was really having a lot of trouble, so he handed the wings to Jackie Cochran and she pinned them on me. But I think in later classes, didn't they hand you the wings? I think that was because of that.

01:16:24.740 - 01:16:39.360

A little difficult for a man to pin wings on a woman in a shirt. Kelly: So before you graduated, though, you had selected to go to Long Beach. Klemski: Yes, about the time—I don't know when they let us choose, but I definitely wanted to go to Long Beach.

01:16:39.500 - 01:16:52.120

Kelly: Did some of your classmates also go with you to Long Beach? Klemski: Ruth Hellman did. Sydney went to the Ferry Command, but she went to Dallas because she wanted to be near home.

01:16:52.260 - 01:16:58.920

Kelly: Did you get some time off between the time you graduated until you had to report? Klemski: I do not think so. I do not think so. Kelly: How did you get out?

01:16:58.920 - 01:17:15.260

Klemski: Did you get time off? Kelly: How did you get out to Long Beach? I do not know. When you got to Long Beach, to whom did you report?

01:17:15.680 - 01:17:31.760

Lowry: To the base, to Andy Cannon, who was the CO. His assistant had been a Flying Tiger, too. He was a great guy, Colonel. Kelly: What did he tell you your assignment would be?

01:17:33.060 - 01:17:39.880

Lowry: Flying trainers. Kelly: And flying them for what? To ferry them? Klemski: To ferry them.

01:17:39.920 - 01:18:02.120

And most of them—Downey, where the Vultee vibrators were built, was between Long Beach and L.A. And they of course had a runway and everything there, so they used to shuttle us over there. And we would pick up thirteens and fifteens and fly them to places like Enid, Oklahoma,

01:18:02.440 - 01:18:13.040

to basic schools. There are some in California. I cannot remember now all the places we flew them, but usually to schools. Kelly: Were there some WAFs stationed at Long Beach?

01:18:13.040 - 01:18:23.880

Lowry: Yes, yes. There were four. Kelly: How did they treat the new girls coming in? Lowry: They were fine, but they were definitely the bosses.

01:18:24.380 - 01:18:44.480

Kelly: Okay. Did they have anything to do with your schedule? Yes, B.J. Erickson, Barbara Erickson, was the gal who was in charge. And she kind of—well, she did not decide who flew what or anything like that, but she

01:18:44.640 - 01:18:57.960

kind of over—she was a housemother, shall we say. She did a lot of flying. I do not know how she got a Distinguished Service Medal for flying across the country and back.

01:18:58.500 - 01:19:09.100

doing it like three times a week. But she was a good gal. Kelly: Where did you live? Lowry: We lived in a—first, when we first got there, they didn't know what to do with

01:19:09.180 - 01:19:20.420

us. So they put us in—well, the first week we were there, Nancy Love was with us, and there were five of us, I think. And we all stayed in the Villa Riviera Hotel.

01:19:22.140 - 01:19:32.900

I think we had the penthouse or something. This was a live-in hotel. All the generals and admirals' wives and everything lived there during the war. It was a beautiful hotel right on the beach.

01:19:34.020 - 01:19:48.980

We stayed there while they were fixing quarters for us. Then they put us in this little building that was off by itself. We found out after they put us in there was the psycho ward. I don't know where they put the psychos, but anyway, we had the psycho ward.

01:19:50.280 - 01:20:05.680

I didn't remember the bed arrangement. Jerry was talking to me last night and she said we all slept in one room or something. I don't remember that at all. But I remember the bathroom because all the toilets were around in a circle like this.

01:20:07.040 - 01:20:24.000

And so everybody would go to the mess hall for breakfast and then everybody would come back and sit around and talk. And Ruth Hellman and I just couldn't quite handle that. So we would stand around with our legs crossed until the officers' club, which was not

01:20:24.080 - 01:20:37.700

far away, opened up at nine in the morning. And then we would just make a beeline over there, because they had booths over there. Kelly: I meant to ask you back when you went into training, what the biggest adjustment you had to make?

01:20:44.060 - 01:20:54.180

It has probably been places on time. I had a very relaxed life. Rules, rules, yes. I was not used to rules.

01:20:55.000 - 01:21:10.540

But we did not have nearly the rules that you had later. We were not regimented at all because Dede did not really know how to do the job then. I think we buffaloed her. I think she was a little in awe of us and did not know how to tell us to do things.

01:21:11.820 - 01:21:22.460

Ruth and Sidney and I, these apartments were unfurnished. We rented furniture. I think we paid sixty dollars a month for the furniture to furnish this two-bedroom apartment.

01:21:23.120 - 01:21:37.120

And then we rented a car for about fifty—an old jalopy for about fifty or sixty dollars a month, and we drove ourselves to the airport every day and back home. And that's how relaxed we were, very different than you. (laughs)

01:21:37.120 - 01:21:41.360

- Right. - Okay. - Do you still have a minute? - I think go ahead and start.

01:21:41.400 - 01:21:45.860

- Oh, okay. - Okay, good. - When I do this, it's usually right at a minute, so you've got a whole minute to--

01:21:45.980 - 01:21:48.180

- Okay. - You're doing great. - Oh, yeah. - I'm what?

01:21:48.260 - 01:21:53.720

- You're doing great. You remember-- - Oh, I think that a lot of stuff, though, is probably stuff you don't want, you know,

01:21:53.840 - 01:21:58.940

that I'm wandering. - Well, this is your story. It really is. - But really, it was interesting.

01:21:59.720 - 01:22:13.320

(audio cuts out) - On the morning of Pearl Harbor from the balcony of the my house and it was so stiff and I had a heck of a time trying to stumble through that script. We laughed about it later.

01:22:13.840 - 01:22:26.740

Sidney had such a crush on Bill Holden. His wife was, he was still married, but his wife was over in Europe making a movie and they were kind of not really together I don't think anymore, but Sidney had such a crush on him.

01:22:27.460 - 01:22:40.340

And we kept saying, "Sidney," she was a cute little tiny blonde, we kept saying, "Sydney, he is married. Don't get all hooked on him." "Oh no, I am sure he likes me."

01:22:41.080 - 01:23:00.580

He was fun for all of us, but I don't think he liked any of us more than the other. But we had lots of fun with him because he was bored over there at Ellington Field and he was kind of fascinated with the girl pilots. But he would come over and we would go out to dinner.

01:23:01.300 - 01:23:16.480

Sydney was funny. was a little tiny gal, but she was used to having her own way. And she tried to make a lot of rules, and Ruth and I, Ruth was very easygoing and everything, and we didn't make fuss about it, we just kind of, but we'd go, several of us would

01:23:16.480 - 01:23:26.500

want to go out to dinner and they'd say, "Well," everybody'd say, "Let's have Italian food tonight." And Sidney said, "No, I want Chinese food." So we'd all go and have Chinese food.

01:23:26.640 - 01:23:45.300

I mean, when Sidney said it, then we all just seemed to have to do what Sidney said. Kelly: Since Long Beach was on the coast, were there any special rules as far as blackouts or flying on the coast? Steele: No, we had a few earthquakes, though.

01:23:45.480 - 01:23:57.800

But I was used to those in Honolulu, so that did not bother me, but it scared a lot of people. Tell me, describe a typical ferrying mission that you would go on. What would you take with you?

01:23:59.360 - 01:24:18.320

Well, often the missions were because of the planes after we got out of the—the first planes I flew were BT-13s. And they—why they picked me, I do not know, was to check out the new girls. As a new group came in, I had to check them out on their cross-countries.

01:24:18.820 - 01:24:35.740

And some of them kind of shocked me because they made pretty bad landings and got lost. And I did not really like that job, so as soon as I could talk B.J. into it, I got her to give somebody else that job. I just wanted to ferry my own planes, and I forgot what you asked me.

01:24:36.560 - 01:24:51.360

Kelly: What a typical ferry trip. Lowry: Oh, typical ferry trip. Well, most of them were supposed to be overnight trips. We often didn't get off the ground in Long Beach or the factories where we were picking

01:24:51.440 - 01:25:07.320

them up, like the P-51s, until about noon because a lot of the planes couldn't fly instruments in. We all had instrument ratings. In those days, fighter pilots didn't fly instruments in planes, in fighter planes.

01:25:07.860 - 01:25:19.820

Pursuits, they were called then. We all had instrument ratings, but they just didn't require you to fly instruments on air. So often we were sitting on the ground until noon, until the fog cleared up so we could

01:25:19.880 - 01:25:34.300

get out of there. And often I'd take off with a 51 at Mines Field, LA International, and go right up through the clouds, no contact with the ground, hoping there were no other planes in the same cloud I was in.

01:25:34.360 - 01:25:45.400

That's what everybody did. And then get on top of them and go head east. But that was kind of scary sometimes. Kelly: Certainly a P-51 is different from a Piper Cup.

01:25:46.240 - 01:26:01.580

Did you have to take extra training? Klemski: Yes, we went to—and I will get back to the daily ferry trip in a minute. We went to pursuit school in Brownsville. All pilots did to get checked out in pursuits.

01:26:01.840 - 01:26:12.680

It was thirty days long. And when I was there in Brownsville, Texas, there were about ninety pilots going through training. They came from all the bases.

01:26:13.620 - 01:26:26.960

And there were probably five or six of us were girls. And they put you in the back seat of an AT-6 for ten hours. And lots of people ground-looped them. I was one of the lucky ones that didn't, but I almost did a couple of times.

01:26:27.760 - 01:26:41.520

And then you would be taking the ground school. And then they just—the first plane I was checked on, it was a P-47, with a great big radial engine there in front of me. And they just said, "Go out and sit in it, and when you feel comfortable, fire it up

01:26:41.560 - 01:26:49.740

and take off." And that is kind of scary when you have always been checked out by an instructor or something, you know. I sat there for about a half an hour.

01:26:50.540 - 01:27:12.540

Then I got it up in the air and I—we had a very small area, a twenty-five mile area, and there are ninety pilots up there, or most of ninety at a time. And then this one time they told me to go up and do spins and stalls and everything. I was not about to do that the first time in a great big, this huge, huge airplane.

01:27:13.940 - 01:27:27.660

And by the time I got through just the cockpit procedure after takeoff, I was out over the Gulf, you know, because there were so many more things to do than I had ever had to do in a plane. But I get out and I flew around for a while.

01:27:27.720 - 01:27:40.020

I was not going to do any stalls or anything that first time. I figured I would try that maybe after a couple of more trips. About that time we get a call from the ground from the tower saying everybody called in. Fog is coming in from the Gulf.

01:27:41.400 - 01:27:58.880

So everybody rushes to get on the ground. There were ninety airplanes in the air, they said that afternoon. I made nine passes at the runway, and every time I am on final approach, which was scary because you could not see the runway in front of you because of the wings and the big radial

01:27:58.920 - 01:28:06.540

engine. The only way you could tell you were lined up right is when it starts going by underneath your wing. So that was a little scary.

01:28:07.320 - 01:28:15.080

And every time I was on final approach with my flaps down and everything, they told me to go around. There was a plane too close on my tail. They did that to me nine times.

01:28:15.300 - 01:28:33.940

Everybody was scared and wanted to get on the ground. And when I got on the ground and stepped out of that plane, I almost collapsed on the ground. My knees were so weak, I bet I lost ten pounds sweating that thing, milking the flaps up and sweating it around the field that many times on my very first landing in a great

01:28:34.020 - 01:28:43.820

big plane like that. So it was scary. Kelly: Let me ask you about the planes that you flew when they brought in military planes in training.

01:28:45.120 - 01:29:05.680

What did you fly, military aircraft? I cannot remember whether they were the low wing—I do not know whether they were 22s, 17s, or—I think they were 19s and 22s, but I am not sure. And then we went to BTs, and then we went to AT-6s, and then we went to the twin-engine

01:29:05.820 - 01:29:10.420

Cessna. Kelly: So you had twin-engine time before you graduated? Steele: Yes. Kelly: Okay.

01:29:11.000 - 01:29:20.680

And now let us go back to a typical mission. Steele: All right. Typical mission. it to be overnight, so we took very little and there wasn't much room in the plane.

01:29:20.840 - 01:29:40.460

So I usually carried a little duffel bag thing, a sports bag with a zip up, and I would put a toothbrush and a clean shirt in there and a brush and comb and maybe some clean underwear and roll it up and I would put it—well, in the 51s anyway, the only place to put it was right under my elbow where I had my arm to hold onto the throttle.

01:29:42.840 - 01:30:03.740

So we did get more creative after a while because the 51s had ammunition cans and we did not have any ammunition in our planes, so the cans were empty. And with a quarter you could open the thing on the top and so we would store high-heeled shoes in there and extra things sometimes.

01:30:04.260 - 01:30:19.520

And if we went to Juarez, which was usually our first overnight stop was El Paso, and We all went over to Juarez and everybody would always say, "Bring us a bottle of Bacardi rum." So we would get several bottles of Bacardi rum and we would stow them in the ammunition

01:30:19.620 - 01:30:35.820

cans in the wings. The trouble was we hardly ever got home with any of them, especially sometimes we had to go to Tulsa and that was dry. The ground crew would look and see we had been to El Paso overnight the night before,

01:30:35.960 - 01:30:51.380

So then they would check all the ammunition cans and you would get out and look the next morning, no liquor. They got pretty smart about doing that. Kelly: Then when you would leave the airplane at a base, how would you get back to Long

01:30:51.460 - 01:31:02.180

Beach? Klemski: We had little books of chits. I think they were, that the military gave us, and all we had to do was tear off one and give it to the airline.

01:31:03.580 - 01:31:19.100

And we had two priority. I think the only people that had higher priority than we were were generals on official business or members of the cabinet. Of course, now they all have their own jets and everything.

01:31:19.320 - 01:31:27.620

But, oh, she told me to turn that off. Oh, I didn't have the water. Is it turned on yet? Well, yes, I guess.

01:31:27.620 - 01:31:43.200

We were putting the rum in the ammo holders and then we did the next morning. Kelly: Did you want more about the typical trip? Martinez-Royce: Right, and then I wanted to know—and you said that you could bump anybody, but was there ever a time when you could not get an airline?

01:31:43.440 - 01:31:59.740

And what did you do? Kelly: No, I had an aunt and uncle who lived in New Jersey, in Upper Montclair, and I usually, if I stayed overnight for any reason at all, I stayed with them, because we landed in Newark. they would just come down the hill and pick me up.

01:32:00.440 - 01:32:21.120

And some day, usually we did not go back—usually I stayed overnight with them, then I would go into New York, do some shopping, like I could wear civilian clothes and things, and poke around with my aunt during the day, and then usually get an airline out of New York at early evening.

01:32:21.940 - 01:32:38.080

And those days they were all DC-3s, and it was an overnight milk run. I took TWA or American. I liked TWA better because they did not make so many landings at night. But we had to take whichever one we could get.

01:32:38.380 - 01:32:58.380

And one night, two other men pilots and I were on American sitting in the plane. The doors were closed. They were firing up and suddenly the stewardess—they were stewardesses then—came and tapped us and said that we were being moved onto another flight.

01:32:59.940 - 01:33:15.840

That our luggage would stay on this plane, but it would be in Long Beach by the time we got there. So we got moved to another flight and when we got to Long Beach the next morning, we usually – they landed at our base because it was usually all ferry pilots on the plane,

01:33:15.980 - 01:33:33.740

so they made special landings at the base in Long Beach. And when we got to Long Beach the next morning, we found out the plane we had been on had gone down in the river by Memphis. So our luggage did not get to Long Beach, and neither did the people.

01:33:35.020 - 01:33:46.020

So you always wonder how that happened. She did not know why we were being transferred, the stewardess. We said, "Why are you taking the three of us?" "I do not know," she said.

01:33:48.740 - 01:34:06.640

We were lucky ones. Yes, yes. I wrote a story about that because I was—but we would get to Long Beach and you were sitting up all night. I always tried to get the single seat on this side and take the pillow and kind of snuggle in and try to sleep, and often kick my shoes off because

01:34:06.680 - 01:34:25.980

I am a Hawaiian and I do not like shoes. And sometimes I could not get them on in the morning. My feet would be swollen and I would have to get off the plane with my bare feet carrying my shoes. But usually, as I say, they'd taxi you right up to the buildings there in Long Beach. And as you'd be stepping off the plane, you would hear the loudspeaker

01:34:26.100 - 01:34:47.340

calling orders. And you'd hear your name called to go pick up your orders. And so you'd rush up to the—you'd pick up your orders, rush up to the barracks and get a clean shirt or something, and take off in a car and they'd take you over to one of the factories to pick plane and head east again.

01:34:47.840 - 01:35:02.900

This was with fifty-ones mostly, but sometimes three a week. Kelly: When you went to Long Beach, you chose that for one reason, because Cornelia was there. Did you get to fly on ferrying trips with her?

01:35:03.240 - 01:35:15.360

Klemski: No, because she was killed just before I got there. She was killed a few days before. We were not supposed to fly formation, but we all did all the time. there was just one girl and half a dozen guys, you know.

01:35:17.420 - 01:35:37.880

So we did a lot of that across the country. But that particular day, she was flying a BT-13 and somebody was on her left wing, I believe, and decided to cross over or something or got too close anyway and hit her wing. I thought they hit her cockpit, but we have had several stories since then, so I do not

01:35:37.900 - 01:35:48.680

know really which one is right. But she went right into the ground. Kelly: What was your favorite airplane to fly? McMillan: P-51, I guess.

01:35:49.620 - 01:36:03.620

And next to that, maybe the B-17. I really liked the B-17. Kelly: In the B-17, was that also ferrying trips? McMillan: Yes, most of them were.

01:36:07.120 - 01:36:23.080

We used to fly navigators from Long Beach to El Paso, and they would shoot the stars. It was all night flights. We would stop in El Paso. I usually went in and bought a big apple or something to eat on the way home.

01:36:23.500 - 01:36:40.340

And then we would fly them home and they would shoot the stars on the way home and pass little notes up to us all the time. They had just graduated from navigator school. Sometimes we ended up north of Santa Barbara, and I was glad that they were not going to

01:36:40.500 - 01:36:53.820

navigate me across the Pacific, at least until they got a little more experience. But those were fun trips, those were all-night trips. We did a lot of night flying. I went to sleep a couple of times flying at night, but I was co-pilot at that time.

01:36:54.680 - 01:37:14.200

But the pilot went to sleep too, but we both woke up about the same time. A lot of times we took—planes would be brought to the base to be ferried, so we did not always go to factories to get them. And when they would come to the base, sometimes the Ferry Command kept them for two or three

01:37:14.280 - 01:37:28.700

days to use them to go pick up pilots at little fields where they did not have airlines close by or something. So we often went to Salt Lake City. Lockheed Lodestar, one time we went up there one night and I had been flying day after

01:37:28.700 - 01:37:58.680

day. I was so tired. I was copilot on this flight and we had to go up and pick a group of pilots up in Salt Lake City. We got up there in the middle of the night and headed home. I was so sleepy all the way up there. I remember the position of the moon as we headed home. When I woke up, the moon was in a different position. I looked over. I

01:37:58.680 - 01:38:22.120

the window this way. I had just gone to sleep without realizing I looked over the pilots asleep too. And we were in a gradual turn, and we have got a bunch of pilots in the back. They are probably all asleep too. So we quickly shaped up. But that was kind of scary. I went to sleep another time in a 51 and ended up in a spiral. I lost about 1,500 feet between

01:38:23.180 - 01:38:33.700

Phoenix and Tucson. Phoenix and Tucson. Kelly: While you were at Long Beach, were any of them killed? Martinez: Yes.

01:38:37.780 - 01:38:58.980

Two or three were killed there, two that I can think of. Evelyn Sharp in a P-38 and some other gal in a BT-13. Oh, there were more than that. one killed in Bismarck in a P-39.

01:38:59.870 - 01:39:14.960

Kelly: How did that make you feel? Martin: A little more careful, probably. I think, though, most pilots—and you know this—are fatalists anyway. You figure if it's your number, it's your number.

01:39:18.760 - 01:39:34.720

I enjoy flying more than I do riding on airlines, because I like to be up there where the action is. Kelly: While you were at Long Beach, did Ms. Conklin come out and make inspection trips or anything to that base?

01:39:37.920 - 01:39:51.620

Lowry: I do not remember her coming out. She may have. I may not have been there when she came, because we hardly ever saw them. We were all so busy ferrying that Ruth Hellman brought her children down and her governess,

01:39:52.000 - 01:40:09.300

and they took an apartment at the Villa Riviera. Whenever we were in town and didn't want to stay at the barracks, we or both of us stayed at the apartment. But I hardly ever saw her, because when she was on a trip, I was home.

01:40:10.080 - 01:40:24.080

When I was on a trip, she would come home. We just passed in the night, most of us, and we hardly ever saw any of the other gals for any length of time. Because often, as I say, I would get off the plane, the airline, in the morning and we

01:40:24.080 - 01:40:37.580

would have orders. And that afternoon I was on my way again. Kelly: Aside from the time that you went down to Florida with your husband, for that two weeks, did you have any other time off?

01:40:37.740 - 01:40:53.640

Did you ever get to go to Hawaii to see your parents? No, no. As a matter of fact, when we were disbanded, well first I did go to Florida to AFSAT school, Officers Training School down there. Tell me about that school.

01:40:54.360 - 01:41:13.660

That was an interesting school. It was in Orlando. It was in the summer. It was miserably humid during the day, but the nights always cooled off because they had a thunderstorm at about five every afternoon. But they were an interesting group of people. They were officers from all over the world. There were French military officers, there were a lot

01:41:13.700 - 01:41:38.580

of British officers there, and they all came and went through this training. We had radar training, we had jungle survival training, and there was no way we were ever going to use any of that. But the military orders said, "This is what you go through," so we all went through it. We had lots of classes on military law and airplane recognition, you

01:41:38.580 - 01:41:51.360

They flashed them up and you had five seconds to see what kind of a plane it was, things like that. And then we had jungle survival. One day we had to eat rattlesnake meat.

01:41:53.060 - 01:42:04.320

I did not eat that day. I was told it tasted like chicken, but I did not want to find out. I like rattlesnakes when they are moving around. Kelly: Do you know what the purpose of that school was?

01:42:05.240 - 01:42:20.980

Partly, to train us, they thought we were going to be militarized. And I probably should not say this, but I think we would have been, except for Jackie Cochran. She just would not take orders from the WACs, the General.

01:42:22.120 - 01:42:36.240

And they wanted us to be a branch of the Air Branch of the WACs. But I did not mind not being militarized. I figured that we had less red tape. But Ruth Hellman was court-martialed, and we were not militarized.

01:42:36.310 - 01:42:45.720

Because we— Kelly: Did you fly there? Martinez: Yes, I was with her when it happened. We were flying two BT-13s to Enid, Oklahoma.

01:42:48.340 - 01:43:01.440

So Ruth never got—she was not there very long before she was court-martialed. She had not graduated into any of the bigger planes. But we were flying and we had never been to Sweetwater. We had heard about Sweetwater.

01:43:02.880 - 01:43:11.700

And we were going to land in—oh, what is the town just east of Sweetwater? Kelly: Big Spring? Abilene? Klemski: No, Abilene.

01:43:12.810 - 01:43:29.280

We were going to land in Abilene that night. And we thought—it was a Sunday and it was the middle of the day, and so we were going to buzz—we thought we would buzz the lake at Sweetwater. And we saw girls down there lying on the beach or something, you know, and so we thought

01:43:29.360 - 01:43:42.140

we'd buzz them, and we did. Unfortunately she hit a power line that went across the lake that knocked out all the lights in Sweetwater, I guess. And she knew she'd hit something.

01:43:43.180 - 01:43:50.360

And she looked out at her wing. She was not sure whether the wing was going to fall off. It was her left wing. Fortunately I was above her so I didn't hit it.

01:43:51.580 - 01:44:06.660

So she went up to 3,500 feet and I stayed with her and went up 3,500 feet too. She flew around for a few minutes to see if she thought the wing was going to stay on or whether she was going to have to get out. She decided she was going to take a shot at Abilene, so she went and landed.

01:44:07.920 - 01:44:24.480

Of course the ground crew came out and wondered what happened. She told them. The word gets around the base when a girl does something very, very fast. The major, who was the operations officer, came out and we were standing out there.

01:44:25.600 - 01:44:44.620

He looked at the wing and it looked like somebody had taken a knife and just sliced through the leading edge of the wing, fairly close to the fuselage. So he said, "Well, we're going to say that you hit a bird. I'll send in a report that you hit a bird."

01:44:44.620 - 01:44:54.280

Ruth was the most honest person that I think I've ever known, and she said, "No, I'm going to tell them what happened." And he says, "No, no, you can't do that. They'll court-martial you."

01:44:54.280 - 01:45:11.140

And she said, "I'm not even in the military. They can't hurt me, and I'm going to tell the truth." Well he finally—we stood there for half an hour, 45 minutes, and he finally convinced her to go back and say that she'd hit a bird, and he would send in the report saying

01:45:11.400 - 01:45:20.180

such a thing. And she was not happy with that at all. So Ruth went back. She left her plane there and she went back to Long Beach.

01:45:20.280 - 01:45:39.400

I went on to Enid and delivered my plane. I got back to Long Beach and there was a real buzz. The operations officer from Long Beach, who was a good friend of ours and a really great young guy, had unfortunately landed in Abilene about an hour after we left.

01:45:40.020 - 01:45:53.240

And of course the ground crew immediately told him about the plane, and he went over and looked at it. Well, there was no way that any bird hit that plane. And so, but Ruth, the Major had made Ruth's promise that she would never change her story,

01:45:53.320 - 01:46:02.820

because he said, "I'll be court-martialed if you change the story, and I have a wife and two children." I remember him saying that to her. She stewed about that, but she left anyway.

01:46:03.110 - 01:46:19.720

Got back to Long Beach, they court-martialed her. I cannot think of his name now, but he called her into the office and he tried and tried. I talked to him later, he said, "I tried and tried to get her to tell the truth." And she would not budge off the story because she was protecting the major then.

01:46:20.860 - 01:46:29.200

So she went home. Kelly: And you know what happened to the major? Klemski: No, nothing probably. Kelly: Wow.

01:46:30.800 - 01:46:57.240

Was there ever a time after you started flying fighters and so forth that you were afraid? Martinez: Yes. One day I had a P-51, I was going into Atlanta or Birmingham, I think it was Atlanta, and It was late afternoon and it was almost dusk, and there was no wind.

01:46:58.700 - 01:47:11.560

I think the sun actually had set or was about to set. I put my gear down and it did not show it was locked down. So I flew by the tower and asked them to look at it, and they said I only had one wheel down.

01:47:12.820 - 01:47:28.940

So they suggested I go down south of town and do a couple of snap rolls and see if I I could get the wheel down. So I did. And the light still—I can't remember now whether it went off or on when they were locked

01:47:29.020 - 01:47:41.500

down, but anyway, it didn't do what it was supposed to do. Boy, it's terrible to have a memory that goes. But I went back and I flew by the tower again and they said the wheel was down, but it still wasn't showing locked down.

01:47:41.640 - 01:47:57.580

And they suggested that I go south of town again and bail out. I think I was more afraid of bailing out than rolling up in a ball of fire somehow. So I decided I was going to try and land it and pray that it was locked down. So I landed.

01:47:57.600 - 01:48:10.240

Boy, they had all the fire trucks and everything out there. The thing that worried me was there was no wind, so I knew I was going to land really fast because we landed about a hundred-something anyway. I knew that I was going to really roll.

01:48:11.080 - 01:48:21.680

I never made a straighter landing in my life. I mean, I did. I was just like this. And the fire trucks were right there beside me, and as soon as I slowed down enough, everybody

01:48:21.780 - 01:48:33.160

jumped out and grabbed the wings and stopped me. And they put a bar between the wheels. And I got on an airline and went home, and I don't know whether the wheels were locked down or not, and they didn't either.

01:48:35.960 - 01:48:51.160

But that was scary. I had another time when a P-39, when I had left Niagara Falls with it and was taking it to Great Falls, Montana. It was early morning and they had the—did you fly any of those?—they had the engine

01:48:51.240 - 01:49:03.400

behind. And they had Allison engines and they sounded like sewing machines. And they changed tone all the time. I always listened to them because after flying the 51s with a beautiful Rolls-Royce Merlin

01:49:03.480 - 01:49:22.060

engine in them that just purred, I did not trust the bell. And I listened to every sound, every time it changed sound or anything. And I thought, "What's happening now?" But anyway, this morning I took off and I was on my way west, and about fifteen minutes

01:49:22.140 - 01:49:45.020

before I was to land in Rochester, which was one of our refuel stops, I happened to look out—I guess it was—I don't know how I looked out anyway. I saw black smoke, the shadow of black smoke across one wing, the shadow of it. Then I look back and here is this black smoke pouring out.

01:49:45.020 - 01:50:02.100

I am at 15,000 feet and black smoke is pouring out of the cowling on the side. And I thought, "I have got to get out of this airplane." So I am checking my belts and switches and going through the procedure of jettisoning the door, because you had to jettison the door to get out.

01:50:03.740 - 01:50:15.660

And I went through it about three or four times. I look back, "Maybe there is not as much smoke as there was." I'm thinking, "But I've got an auxiliary tank back here behind me," you know, and everything.

01:50:16.740 - 01:50:25.200

And I should have gotten out. But I looked down at the ground and, boy, there was a lot of air between there and the green pastures down there. And I just waited another second.

01:50:25.320 - 01:50:42.980

I kept thinking, "A hundred octane gas, you better get out of here." And then I looked back and I thought, "There isn't nearly as much smoke as there was." So I went on, but I was shaking. By then I had the stick in my hand and my knees are pressing against it because I am

01:50:43.020 - 01:50:52.120

like this. And I land. It was a long fifteen minutes into Rochester and I landed. And when I got out I really went down on my knees.

01:50:53.740 - 01:51:06.080

My knees collapsed on me. I was so grateful to be on the ground and the whole side of the plane was black. And they pulled the cowling off while I was there. They said I had a very bad oil leak.

01:51:06.540 - 01:51:16.600

He said, "But it could have gone, caught fire just any second." He said, "You were silly not to get out." But those were the—I had three scares. That was one of them.

01:51:16.660 - 01:51:30.500

The other was the landing gear and then one other time when the first time they put us in a P-63 and just said, "Sit in it. When you feel comfortable, fire up and take off." And they gave me the wrong map at Niagara Falls.

01:51:30.840 - 01:51:46.860

And I had a sectional when I should have had a regional or I had a regional when I had a sectional. And I was looking for Cleveland, and I had never flown down the east side of Lake Erie before, so I did not—this was my first trip that direction, because I was taking that

01:51:46.920 - 01:51:59.620

plane to Long Beach. And so we got to this, and Mary Lou was—have you interviewed her over on the coast? Are you doing that one at all? Kelly: In the future.

01:51:59.750 - 01:52:10.420

Klemski: Oh, all right. Well, she was with me. She will remember this trip because she was also in a '63 and it was again a rainy, rainy day.

01:52:10.820 - 01:52:26.880

So we were down about a thousand feet so that we could stay and see the ground. And we came to this town and we are talking back and forth and I thought it had to be Cleveland because I have the wrong map. I think we are at Cleveland and I am looking for the airport and it is not in the right

01:52:26.980 - 01:52:33.940

place. I do not see an airport. It is pouring rain. And I see this gray thing down there, I do not know whether it is a river or what it

01:52:33.960 - 01:52:51.760

is. And then my—what am I trying to say? The coolant gauge goes up against the red peg. And I said to Mary Lou, "I have got to land."

01:52:51.760 - 01:53:05.480

I do not know whether that is a runway down there or not, but I am going down because this engine may freeze on me any second. So I turn and I go and I land on this gray strip, and it turns out to be a runway at Erie, Pennsylvania.

01:53:06.600 - 01:53:23.100

And it was not built for military planes. Thank goodness the runway was covered with water, and that slowed us down. So Mary Lou came in behind me. And so we were there for a couple of days while they had to fly down from Niagara Falls

01:53:23.200 - 01:53:33.700

to check the plane out. It turned out it was just the gauge, it was not the coolant. It was just the gauge that was bad, but it was pretty scary. But they treated us like kings there.

01:53:33.780 - 01:53:47.820

They never had any military pilots in there before. Two girls stayed at the hotel. And when we took off, it was a Sunday. And I remember—I'm sure you remember, too—that at the airports on Sundays, it

01:53:47.900 - 01:53:57.840

was like somebody was having an air show. People would come out and they'd stand along the chain link fences like they were watching an air show and you would come in and land and then they would see a girl get out of a 51 or something.

01:53:59.060 - 01:54:15.420

You would taxi up and park there and they were just in awe. But this particular Sunday everything was fixed and we were set to take off. And the place—they did not come out to see us, but the place was—there were lots of people out there to watch the planes that day.

01:54:16.300 - 01:54:38.520

And I had never taken off but once before at the factory in a '63. And I thought that I should maybe buzz the field once after I took off, just to give them a thrill. So I did, and I stuck the nose down and I buzzed the field, and then I pulled up and

01:54:39.240 - 01:54:55.600

I whited out. I just couldn't see anything. Boy, I could have killed myself right then doing a dumb, dumb, dumb thing. But anyway, I put the nose down and I quickly recovered, but boy, that scared me.

01:54:55.900 - 01:55:21.140

That really scared me. Kelly: Is there anything else about the training or the time you were a WASP that you would like to tell us about? We had a lot of fun in the training because we had so much more relaxed atmosphere than

01:55:21.260 - 01:55:47.020

the gals who came later to Sweetwater, which was much more regimented. But this is an aside thing. We were such oddities in Houston that everybody was paying attention to us. And the fare department store, which was right across the street from Sackowitz, was a great

01:55:47.160 - 01:56:03.520

big multi-story department store, decided they should give a party for us. It was in the papers and everything, they were going to give a party in honor of the WASPs. We flew in military pilots from Lubbock, places to be our escorts, and they took over the

01:56:03.680 - 01:56:21.240

shoe department floor in this big department store and had liquor and everything. I mean, it was a regular party there and all these escorts for us. And then they took us all down to the gambling—to J.K. Friedman's gambling casino down in Galveston.

01:56:21.740 - 01:56:36.080

First time I'd ever been in one in my life. And my name was Tackerberry and I was introduced to him when he greeted us all at the door when we came in. And he said, "Come into my"—he was a funny little wiry man—he said, "I want

01:56:36.100 - 01:56:43.980

to show you something in my office." And I thought, "You do?" But I did go into his office. He never forgot my name.

01:56:44.120 - 01:57:00.420

Later he became an owner of one of the—part owner of one of the casinos up in Las Vegas. And I went up to see him one time. But he never forgot my name because he took me into his office and this wall was covered with—he had racehorses—it was covered with all these racehorses.

01:57:00.540 - 01:57:12.820

And believe it or not, he had a racehorse named Tackaberry that had won a race that afternoon. So he never—can you imagine a Tackaberry in the name of a horse? Anyway, he never forgot my name.

01:57:12.920 - 01:57:29.500

So when I was in Las Vegas one time, I was the—I've forgotten what it was now. It's all ashes anyway. It was one of them that they knocked down. But I went in and I had somebody tell him that Tackerberry was in the lounge.

01:57:29.790 - 01:57:34.340

I did not think he would remember me at all. He came shooting out of there. "Tackerberry!" He hugged me.

01:57:35.400 - 01:57:49.760

The only time I ever saw him was three or four times down there in Galveston. But those were the fun sidelines. When you were in Long Beach, how did you spend your spare time? What role did you have?

01:57:51.040 - 01:58:10.360

Well we stayed, when we had spare time, and sometimes Ruth was there with me, we would stay at the Villa Riviera and they had dancing down there at night. And we, a lot of the Hollywood people, well we had Hollywood people, we had a number of Hollywood characters that were based at Long Beach.

01:58:10.540 - 01:58:27.960

They were told if they joined the Ferry Command there, they could go home at night to Hollywood. They would not be sent overseas and everything. So we had some interesting ones. But this particular one night, Ruth and I were there, and Laurel and Hardy used to come

01:58:28.020 - 01:58:34.560

down there. Laurel, which was the big one? Hardy. He used to come down there with his wife, and he was big.

01:58:35.120 - 01:58:43.680

And he would get out on that dance floor, and he would just almost bump you off the floor. And we met him and he was very nice. I've just met him a couple of times.

01:58:43.690 - 01:59:02.480

He used to come down there quite often with his wife and dance. And another person who used to come down, but not with his wife, was Bing Crosby. And we got to know Bing, and he was very, very nice to us. In fact, he gave a dinner party for Ruth and me in Hollywood one time.

01:59:03.400 - 01:59:27.340

And we went up—we stayed in one hotel and the dinner party was in the Ambassador Hotel. And we—Bing came down to our hotel, I don't remember the name of it now, and he came down and we had driven my Buick, my fancy Buick with the silver chrome tires on the side, up there with the top down, leather upholstery and all.

01:59:27.580 - 01:59:37.140

And so Bing came down and he drove my car up to the ambassador. He was the chauffeur. We all went in my car. And he had a beautiful blonde girl with him.

01:59:37.460 - 01:59:52.380

His wife was an alcoholic so she never was around. She was up in Reno or something on the ranch. But this was a very pretty, long, blonde-haired girl. And so we all went up there to the ambassador and we went into the bar first and he bought

01:59:52.460 - 02:00:02.580

drinks for everybody. There were about twenty. invited other military pilots and their girlfriends and stuff. There were about twenty of us in the party, but he said it was for Ruth and I because

02:00:02.840 - 02:00:20.880

we knew him down there in Long Beach. And so Freddie Martin was playing, his band was there that night. And do you know the Ambassador at all? You go down this fabulous stairway, you feel like you are in the Queen's Palace or something,

02:00:21.120 - 02:00:31.180

huge stairway that goes down and the dance floor and the dining room and everything are on the lower level. And we went down there. I had a table on the floor, of course.

02:00:33.460 - 02:00:45.120

But first we were in the bar and I remember his song "Sunday, Monday, and Always" had just come out. So somebody in the bar asked him if he'd sing it. Well, it hadn't come out.

02:00:45.720 - 02:00:57.480

It had been out a little while because we all knew the words to it already, so it had to have been out for a while. I was standing next to him. He was about my height.

02:00:58.000 - 02:01:11.520

I don't think he was any taller. I felt like he was shorter than I was. We were all standing shoulder to shoulder, all of us, clear across the room, singing Sunday, Monday, and always, which was sort of fun.

02:01:12.320 - 02:01:25.860

And then afterwards we went into the dining room and he sat with his back to the dance floor. He got up and danced with this gal and he danced with each of us. And we sat there and we were having dinner and this little waiter came up to bring us

02:01:25.900 - 02:01:40.440

our second course or something. And he saw Bing sitting there. I was on one side of him, his blonde girl was on the other. And we saw Bing, he saw Bing sitting there and he was a little guy from Brooklyn and

02:01:40.500 - 02:01:53.100

he just lost his mind when he recognized Bing. And he said, "Oh, if Mamie were only here, if Mamie were only here, she'd just die to know I was standing here looking at you." "Bing Crosby!"

02:01:53.100 - 02:02:07.900

You know, and he's just shouting, everybody's stopping on the floor to see what this is all about. Bing was by then drunk, but nice drunk. And he said to this little fellow, he said, "Well, let's write Mamie a note."

02:02:07.900 - 02:02:23.060

He said, "You go on up the stairs and ask the maitre d' to give you a piece of paper a pen and we'll write a note to Mamie." So this little kid is just beside himself. He runs up the stairs and he comes back down, and I move over a little bit so Bing has room

02:02:23.140 - 02:02:37.680

to write, and he writes this note to Mamie. And this kid is just absolutely out of his mind. He can't believe this is happening. And to think Bing would write a note to his wife, you know.

02:02:39.020 - 02:02:51.900

And so he opened his wallet, and I could see it, he was right here beside me, he opened his wallet, and he's going to buy a round of drinks, this little kid is, for everybody at the table. And he's got a hundred dollar bill in his wallet.

02:02:52.380 - 02:03:10.100

And Bing fortunately saw it and he says, "No, no, no, no, we've got all we need." And he just made the kid fold up his wallet, and he didn't want to, he really wanted to buy a round of drinks, he was so excited about this. And then afterwards we all drove back to our hotel and we all went swimming.

02:03:12.940 - 02:03:23.900

Did you have your suits? Yes. We'd been there before. Oh, I'm going to wear you out.

02:03:23.980 - 02:03:33.680

No, you're not. But you've got stories I had no idea. Swimming to cool off because we were just dying, skinny dipping. Probably.

02:03:34.080 - 02:03:43.660

I don't know. No, I don't think so on the base. We must have gone in underwear or something. But one day, I mean you couldn't see into the water.

02:03:43.740 - 02:03:54.880

I know one day you could feel the plants and everything around your legs when you're kicking, but you couldn't see into the water. It was so dark. And one day this huge turtle surfaced beside me.

02:03:54.960 - 02:04:04.000

That was really startling. Then another day I look across and on the other side of the bank is a crocodile or alligator or whatever they have in Florida. I never remember which is which.

02:04:04.860 - 02:04:14.060

But it is lying over there. I never went swimming again. All the girls got fungus in their ears from swimming in the lake. We all got bitten.

02:04:14.380 - 02:04:27.900

We all had chiggers, chigger bites all over our legs, because in the afternoons when it cooled off, they would put the tables outside and we would sit out there and have drinks before dinner or something. We would sit in this long grass.

02:04:29.180 - 02:04:44.040

All night we would sit there. The hospital there gave us—I want to say collidin' or something like that. It was a clear liquid, looked like fingernail polish, and we would spend our evenings covering our bites with that.

02:04:44.180 - 02:04:57.980

And it sealed them off so that the chiggers died, so he said. But we all had these red bites all over us. But we were nice. They had some black officers there.

02:04:57.980 - 02:05:10.660

There was still a lot of feeling, you know. And the black officers, some of them were captains, majors, there were three of them actually. And we had these long tables in the mess hall and everybody would get their trays, you know,

02:05:10.760 - 02:05:23.060

and go and sit down at tables. Those three guys were always by themselves. None of the men officers, anything, talked to them or did anything. And so one night we thought, "That's a dirty trick."

02:05:23.060 - 02:05:35.140

So the next night we all took our trays and went over and sat down and from then on we We sat and ate with them every night. And they were fun, they were interesting, but nobody paid any attention to them. Kelly: Were they Tuskegee Airmen, do you know?

02:05:35.440 - 02:05:47.480

Klemski: I do not know. I do not remember, unfortunately. They were big, tall fellows, I remember. Kelly: Do you recall when you first heard about the WASP being disbanded and how they

02:05:47.580 - 02:06:02.620

were— Klemski: Yes, I certainly do. I had a P-51. There were five fellows from Long Beach that I had made four or five trips with, five young

02:06:02.640 - 02:06:17.000

guys, and we had flown formation back and forth and we always got the same flights. So we had been together for four or five trips. We were all weathered in Belleville, east of St. Louis. We were there for ten days.

02:06:17.200 - 02:06:31.000

It was ten degrees above zero. The weather was so bad that nobody got off the ground. And there was so much snow that every day the snow plows were clearing the runway and piling it on the sides.

02:06:31.500 - 02:06:44.800

After ten days it was six or eight feet high on the sides. It was just like going down a tunnel to take off. We went out every day and I had just summer clothes on because I expected it to be an overnight thing.

02:06:44.840 - 02:07:01.020

And I had my trench coat, but that is the only thing I had with me. And I was freezing to death. I never knew that you could hurt so much when you get that cold. But every day we had to go out and de-ice our wings and thin the oil in our planes,

02:07:01.460 - 02:07:18.380

in our engines. And then we would come back in and stand by the fire in this little pot-bellied stove in the operations office and just stand there and freeze, you know. And then we would go back home or the bar or the restaurant or something to kill time.

02:07:19.380 - 02:07:44.180

And finally, one day—I guess we had been there about nine days—I got a call from—it was the 15th of December—I got a call from Andy Cannon, personally, the CEO at Long Beach, saying, "You are being disbanded in five days. You can either leave your plane there and get on an airline and fly back to Long Beach,

02:07:44.360 - 02:07:55.080

or you can go ahead and deliver it and then come back on the airline." So I was in a state of shock. Well, the next day the weather cleared. So I thought, "I am going to fly it.

02:07:55.200 - 02:08:08.920

This will be the last time I ever fly a 51. I am going to fly to deliver it to Newark." And so the next stop was to be Dayton. And they told us ICE was on the runway in Dayton.

02:08:09.100 - 02:08:27.680

That did not thrill me, but I did not think a lot about it. But I was forced to take off when we got the engines fired up and warmed up. I taxied out, sitting in line to take off. And the first plane got off and his oil line broke.

02:08:29.440 - 02:08:38.080

And he barely got around the field. And when he came back, the whole plane was black. And so was he. He had to open the canopy to see, and he was covered with oil and everything.

02:08:39.660 - 02:08:48.940

That was a little unnerving. Then the next plane took off. He got off all right, so I thought, "Well, it's okay." He took off into the wild blue.

02:08:49.780 - 02:09:05.580

Then the third plane, the one right ahead of me, started to take off. His wingtip clipped a snowbank on the side and he plowed right into the snowbank before he got off the ground. I thought, "I think there is a message in this."

02:09:05.580 - 02:09:22.840

So I called the tower and I said, "I am aborting." So I taxied back, and I was heartbroken. While I was sitting there, after the oil line broke, I was thinking, "You know, last trips. Meteor Heart's last trip turned out to be her last trip.

02:09:23.020 - 02:09:35.820

Charles Kingsford Smith, who my father knew, was on his last trip, and it turned out to be his last trip. And last trips are kind of scary." And so I had that in the back of my mind, "When this kid in front of me went into the

02:09:35.940 - 02:09:45.280

snowbank, I saw it. This is a message." So I taxied back and when I got out of the plane, the ground crew had already gotten all the word.

02:09:45.880 - 02:09:58.340

And they all came out, because I had been in there so many times to Belleville. And they came out and they hugged me and we all shed a few tears and I patted the plane and I knew I would never get in one again. I was heartbroken.

02:09:59.520 - 02:10:16.520

But before this happened, I have to tell you, one thing that happened during the nine days, I was freezing to death. So it was getting close to Christmas, so we all stayed in the same hotel in Belleville. One morning the guys knocked on my door and said, "We brought you an early Christmas

02:10:16.700 - 02:10:27.920

present, but you've got to promise that you'll let us see it after you open your present." So I said, "Okay." So I opened the door and here's this big box like this, Christmas-wrapped.

02:10:28.240 - 02:10:42.640

Oh, it's a huge box, and it's got ribbons all around it and everything. I said, "My God, what is this?" I open it up. "It's long, Johns." I could have hugged them all. I did hug them all. I said, "Boy,

02:10:42.740 - 02:11:04.460

you couldn't have bought me anything. I want more." They said, "You promised you'd let us see you in it." I said, "I changed my mind." But boy, were those good. Did those feel good. I put them on under my uniform and I was warm for the first time in ten days. But you know, I could not go into the—they would not let us in the hotel.

02:11:04.780 - 02:11:17.540

I could not have dinner in the hotel. All the guys, we all had to eat in little podunk places because they would not go in without me, and because I had slacks on. They would not allow me in the hotel dining room, even though I was in uniform.

02:11:19.500 - 02:11:38.600

At some point during the time you were at Long Beach, did you get different uniforms? Yes, we got the regular blue ones. we had the nice silky gabardine Army khaki. Oh, I love—yeah, pinks and greens.

02:11:40.180 - 02:11:48.520

I am talking about summer uniform now, though. It was not the winter uniform. We did not have those. But this was a beautiful silky gabardine.

02:11:48.600 - 02:12:02.540

And there is a picture of me marching in it. You may have seen that picture. It has been in all the magazines, BJ and I in front of the flags marching on the field. I had the WAF uniform then.

02:12:03.440 - 02:12:18.100

Kelly: And then you got the Santiago Blue. Klemski: Yeah. I hated to change because those other uniforms were much better fitting and better material. And then from then on, when I got the blue uniform, I would go into these little towns

02:12:18.220 - 02:12:31.940

down south and they always thought I was a Navy nurse, a flight nurse or something. You mentioned taking a P-51 to Newark. Do you know where those P-51s were bound for? Steele: Yes, I do know.

02:12:33.720 - 02:12:47.820

They pickled them in Newark. They took the wings off. They sprayed the planes with plastic and put them on carrier decks and took them to England. I have to say, the girls—at that time, we were breaking in brand-new engines.

02:12:48.140 - 02:13:03.680

When we picked up our 51s at the factory, we knew the test pilots there. There were two of them. They showed twenty minutes of airtime on the logs. They had never been in the air.

02:13:04.280 - 02:13:10.880

The test pilots said, "We cannot fly all of them. We do not have the time." There were forty-four a day that came off the assembly line. They just rode up.

02:13:10.940 - 02:13:20.580

They ran them up on the ground and rode it up as the twenty minutes. When we took off, the plane had never been in the air. That was a little scary. I used to say a prayer every time I took off, because we were heading right for the oil

02:13:20.780 - 02:13:38.360

wells, usually northwest. I would just say the prayer, "Dear God, please keep this engine running until I get a thousand feet so I can get out of here." You always wondered if maybe they had forgotten a rivet or a bolt was loose, or they left

02:13:38.440 - 02:13:55.360

a rag in the fuel line or something, or maybe sabotage, but I never, ever knew of any. When you left that final P-51 and got back to Long Beach, did the officers at Long Beach do anything special? Lowry: No, they didn't.

02:13:56.010 - 02:14:09.720

They probably wore off on trips. No, nothing special. But we were all good friends there. When I did this program for CBS, the Night Watch program in Washington, D.C., the first

02:14:09.660 - 02:14:22.860

First thing, Chris Matthews was the moderator, and the first thing he asked me before we went on the air is, "What about harassment? Tell me about harassment," because it was right after the Anita Hill thing was over. And I said, "I did not even know what the word meant.

02:14:23.180 - 02:14:40.040

That had no harassment." The only time the guys checked on us were the new pilots that came in from Randolph Field and were put on BT-13s, and we were flying P-51s and C-47s and everything. And if we did anything wrong, it was back at the base before we got back.

02:14:40.840 - 02:14:54.980

But the minute they got checked out in '51 and things, then they were our buddies, and then we were good friends. But before that, they kind of kept an eye on us. Kelly: When you were disbanded, where did you go?

02:14:56.500 - 02:15:05.580

Lowry: You really want to know? Everybody else went home. I could not go home, because I could not go to Honolulu in those days. My mother was in Portland.

02:15:07.440 - 02:15:18.480

Yes, she was, but I did not think of going there. I do not know why. But the first five days, everybody else was gone from the base, and I got a motel room. I bought myself a book.

02:15:19.120 - 02:15:37.680

I loved to sew, so I decided I was going to make myself a dress or a blouse or something by hand. So I got some materials for that, took them back to the motel, bought a pint of bourbon, And had a few drinks every night for about five nights, all by myself, feeling very sorry

02:15:37.760 - 02:15:51.200

for myself. Everybody else had been flown home and given all kinds of to-do. Margaret said that they gave her a choice of planes to be flown home and everything. Nobody did that or even mentioned it.

02:15:51.960 - 02:16:06.980

But I was so alone. Everybody else had gone home for the holidays, you know, and it was such a sudden thing. And I felt very sorry for myself. And I went to sleep with a cigarette and an ashtray on the bed.

02:16:07.820 - 02:16:16.900

I woke up the next morning, there was a hole in the mattress like this, and I had to buy the Motel mattress. That was a good lesson. I never put a cigarette on a bed again.

02:16:17.100 - 02:16:29.840

Kelly: So you did not have a Christmas tree? Lowry: No. No, I probably had several drinks all by myself on Christmas, because there was not any place to go.

02:16:30.420 - 02:17:01.700

And then how did you get out of that depressed mood? I stayed on—I went back to work as a link instructor at Long Beach, and I stayed on there as a link instructor for quite a while. And then someplace, I was at some hotel for dinner one night and met a man who had a manufacturing

02:17:01.800 - 02:17:25.440

business, toy manufacturing business, and had gotten a government contract and made a fortune in Kansas City with this government contract in his little factory. And he had a ninety-eight foot sloop that he had bought with a crew of ten on it. And it had—oh, it was a beautiful boat.

02:17:25.520 - 02:17:39.800

It slept twenty people. And he bought that and he decided he was going to—he lived in Kansas City still, but he was going to—he had a captain and everything and they were going to send—take tourists to Catalina.

02:17:41.140 - 02:17:57.360

And so he asked if I would like to handle that. So I did that for a while. never got a ride on the boat, never had time, but I did arrange some of those trips. And he also had a plane.

02:18:00.920 - 02:18:22.260

He bought two planes—or he had two planes, two twin-engine Cessnas, like we had flown in school. And he wanted to fly shrimp from New Orleans to California. So I took that job.

02:18:23.780 - 02:18:35.800

I left the link trainer instructor job and I took the job flying for him. Kelly: When you were instructing in link, who were you instructing? Were they private? Klemski: The pilots.

02:18:36.020 - 02:18:45.300

No, the pilots who had to put in their four hours a month to get their flight pay. They were all pilots from Long Beach. What? Kelly: Army, Air Force pilots?

02:18:45.300 - 02:19:05.040

Klemski: Yeah, from our base. But the instructor in the next table was an interesting guy. He was an enlisted man and he was from Arabia and he spoke Arabic. So he taught me some Arabic and he would give me books and I would go home and study because

02:19:05.120 - 02:19:22.220

we had one of our—we had split shifts. I went in the morning until noon, then I had the whole afternoon off and I'd go to the beach and everything, then I had to go back to work from six to twelve at night. And he had the same shifts, so we would talk back and forth while our guys are in there

02:19:22.800 - 02:19:35.080

flying around in their trainers. I can't remember a lot of the Arabic that I knew then, but he gave me some books and I was studying them. I was fascinated by the language because they don't have tenses.

02:19:36.020 - 02:19:50.260

You say, "I go yesterday, I go tomorrow, I go today." And go is the same for all of them, you know. So some of it was quite simple. But I do not remember many of the terms now except "masalema," which meant "walk

02:19:50.300 - 02:20:01.980

with God," and "bokr fil mishmish," which is like "manana," I will do it "manana" some other day. "Bokr fil mishmish." Those are the only two things I remember now.

02:20:02.780 - 02:20:22.680

Kelly: And then what did you do next after you— Klemski: Then I had been divorced for a while then. Kelly: Did you do that before you got out of the WASP or after? Klemski: After, but while I was a link trainer instructor I think.

02:20:24.540 - 02:20:45.840

And then I—oh, that's funny because my husband got the divorce. He could get one in Chicago in twenty-four hours, in Honolulu, or in California rather. It took six months or something, or a year, I can't remember. And so I let him get it and he charged me with desertion.

02:20:48.840 - 02:21:02.720

It didn't make any difference. But yes, he had written me a letter from—you can cut this out, this stuff, afterwards, can't you? He wrote me a letter when he was in Florida.

02:21:04.590 - 02:21:20.020

He wrote me a letter while he still had my car in Florida for those three months to tell me that he was dating a nurse down there and that she wanted to marry him and he did not know what to tell her. So I just tore the bottom off the letter like this, the white space, and I wrote, "Marry

02:21:20.520 - 02:21:30.260

her!" Exclamation point and mailed it back to him. That is why he did not bring my car back to me, he just left it in Texas. And did you eventually get that car back?

02:21:30.970 - 02:21:47.540

Yeah, I had to go to Texas to get it though. But then, oh no, but I had to give it back to him in the divorce. He wanted that car. And so I had bought a house by then in Long Beach at Lakewood Village.

02:21:48.420 - 02:22:01.140

When I was a link trainer instructor, I had no place to live. So I bought this little subdivision house on a cul-de-sac, and two of the ex-WASPs who who were still in Long Beach, moved in with me. As a matter of fact, one of them and I bought a P-38 together.

02:22:03.160 - 02:22:20.740

And so they roomed with me and helped pay the payment and everything. And so he wanted half of the house. And I said, "No, I bought this with my money." He had given me an allotment, a very small allotment, all the time he was overseas.

02:22:21.340 - 02:22:32.320

It was in a bank in Philadelphia. I never touched a penny of it. I bought the car out of my things. I had even taken my—I got war bonds every month out of my pay.

02:22:32.980 - 02:22:46.640

And I had them made out in my name and his, so if I were killed in an accident, they would automatically go to him. He came into town—this was just before the final divorce. I mean, we hadn't discussed divorce, but he came in unexpectedly to town.

02:22:46.720 - 02:23:02.880

I was back in Chicago with my mother at the time. And he came to my house and he told the two gals that he was my husband and that he was going to stay there for a few days. Well, they kind of knew the situation, but how could they kick him out?

02:23:03.060 - 02:23:18.500

He is my husband. So he stayed there and I had a strong box up on a shelf in my closet with all the bonds in there. And he took all the wands out.

02:23:19.160 - 02:23:31.760

He did not tell them or anything, he just went through the closet and he took them all out and there were only two there when I came home. They were ones they had made a mistake on and just put my name on instead of both names. That is all I had left out of a couple thousand dollars worth of bonds.

02:23:32.340 - 02:23:45.800

I had not touched the money he left me or anything. Then he wanted half my house, I did not want to give him half the house. So he was going to fight me on that. He said, "Okay, I will take the car instead."

02:23:45.800 - 02:24:00.300

So I gave him the car. And he turned around and sold it for $1,500, which was more than I had paid for it. About the next day, I saw a big black woman driving it around Long Beach after that, and it made me mad because I loved that car.

02:24:02.560 - 02:24:23.840

But anyway, I am telling you lots of crazy things. Kelly: So then what did you go on and do? Then I had flown—some of the flying I did at Long Beach was for what they called "SNAFU Airlines," where they would commandeer these airplanes and keep them for three or four

02:24:23.980 - 02:24:39.080

days and use them to go pick up pilots around the country, and then they would bring them back and then they would be delivered. And there was this very attractive guy who was a captain who was head of SNAFU Airlines, and he assigned the crews.

02:24:39.700 - 02:24:53.760

Well, they were using a lot of gals on these planes to free men to fly across the Pacific, because they would not let us go. And so they started out as co-pilots. They needed co-pilots on these crews, so they grabbed the gals.

02:24:53.900 - 02:25:12.300

And we would be on ten days at a time and got a lot of experience. Most of the pilots that were flying those, a lot of them that I flew with, were ex-Northwestern Airline pilots or TWA pilots or United or something. And they were very nice to me and very fatherly and taught me lots of things about the big

02:25:12.340 - 02:25:33.320

airplanes because we were flying all kinds of B-24s, C-47s, B-17s, whatever was available on the field. And they had a lot of twin-engine C-47s because the factory was right on the other side of the runway at our base, the McDonnell Douglas.

02:25:34.420 - 02:25:50.980

And so they had a lot of those, and he assigned the crews. And I wanted four-engine time, because I was already checked out in a C-47 and everything, so I wanted four-engine time so I would get checked out in a B-17. So I was very nice to him.

02:25:52.160 - 02:26:07.740

And we made a bet, and I do not remember what the bet was, but if I lost, I would go out on a date with him. I lost, maybe intentionally, I do not know now. I finally married him.

02:26:10.480 - 02:26:26.340

That is how I ended up in Arizona. He had been a Pan Am pilot out of Florida before he got into the service. He went in as a civilian, whatever they called him, and then became a captain eventually. Kelly: Then when you married, did you quit?

02:26:26.620 - 02:26:41.140

Yes, because he had flown the hump. He would have made a marvelous airline pilot, because he was one who just—everything was just exactly right. I mean, if you flew at 50,000 feet, you were at 50,000 feet, not 51.

02:26:43.160 - 02:26:54.020

I was not that careful. I knew all the headings across the country to Newark and everything. I knew what every town looked like, what every airport looked like, and where every lake was and everything.

02:26:54.200 - 02:27:02.540

I knew general headings. And I did not worry if I was five hundred feet above or below or something, you know. I mean, I just relaxed. But he was not that way.

02:27:02.980 - 02:27:26.240

But he had so many bad experiences flying the Hump that he did not care if he ever saw another airplane. What were the qualities that you saw in him that made you fall in love with him? Very decisive, fun to be with, fun at parties and things like that, but with a direction

02:27:26.240 - 02:27:37.080

and just very stable and strong. And I had a very strong father. And my first husband was weak. I didn't know that at the time,

02:27:37.140 - 02:27:47.640

but he was a kid that hadn't grown up. And he left everything to me to make all the decisions. You pay the bills, you do this, whatever you want, dear. You know, I didn't like that attitude.

02:27:48.820 - 02:28:00.580

I like somebody that I can argue with, but somebody who knows where they're going, A good, strong man, and he was one. Kelly: Then how long did you stay there in Long Beach?

02:28:02.820 - 02:28:17.140

Klemski: When we were pretty serious, he was flying the hump. We wrote back and forth about every day or so. He had to fly six hundred hours, and he did it night and day to get back as soon as he could.

02:28:17.820 - 02:28:32.540

He made it in about six months, I think. Most of them it took closer to a year, but he was flying two trips a day and everything just to get it out of the way fast. Kelly: And as a pilot on the Hup, was he in a branch of the service?

02:28:33.220 - 02:28:48.300

Klemski: He was in the Air Transport Command. He wrote an article for a Saturday Evening Post or something afterwards, which they would not print. They said they could not, because he was risking his neck every day.

02:28:48.400 - 02:29:02.860

They had no radios, they were flying at 20,000 feet. Their electric suits did not work most of the time and shorted out, so they were freezing to death. They had no ammunition or guns or anything with them.

02:29:03.420 - 02:29:19.560

They often had Japanese planes flying around them and they were trying to stay below them so they would not see the exhaust. He was flying C-87s, which as you know is the B-24 with all the gas tanks down the middle. He was flying bamboo tent poles to China.

02:29:19.560 - 02:29:32.620

He was going into Kunming usually. Bamboo tent poles were going to China. Vitamins were going to China. Cases of strawberry jam were going to China.

02:29:33.490 - 02:29:46.460

What was the other thing? And Kotex. And he wrote this article about it afterwards. He said, "I spent six months risking my neck under these horrible conditions.

02:29:46.880 - 02:30:05.100

No radio contract, most of the flights at night, but he was flying days too. And we're taking bamboo tent poles and Kotex and strawberry jam to China, and they wouldn't print it. They said, "No, no, too touchy, can't do that."

02:30:05.100 - 02:30:20.340

But— Kelly: And then when he came back to the States— He did not know what he was going to do. His family, he was from Worcester, Ohio, and during the time we were flying we had one

02:30:20.380 - 02:30:44.860

trip where he had a B-25 and I had a—it was funny, we were going overseas to fly the hump and I had a P-51 and we stayed together all the way across the country. He had to stop and pull a radio wire or something someplace so I could—no, I had to stop and do that so he could catch up with me. I have got it backwards. But anyway, my co-pilot—no,

02:30:44.980 - 02:31:02.180

I was not in a 51. What is the matter with me? I was in a C-47 going to Fort Wayne, where they converted them into hospital ships. Then they would give us one that was already converted with all the stretchers and everything. We would take that back to the West Coast. I made a number of trips doing that. That trip I had a little co-pilot who was about—she

02:31:02.260 - 02:31:14.900

should not have been co-pilot in the 47. She had pillows behind her and pillows under her. She could hardly reach the rudder pedals. If I had needed her, she would have had to pump the landing gear down, which I had to do once when I was co-pilot.

02:31:14.980 - 02:31:31.220

It takes 175 pumps like this to get it down, and if I had been left-handed, I could not have done it. I would not have had the strength. But anyway, her husband, unbeknownst to the base, was flying a P-51.

02:31:31.360 - 02:31:57.580

I mean, they did not know they were married or that one of them would have been transferred. But he was flying a 51 to Newark. We were going to Fort Wayne and my guy was taking a B-25 somewhere on the East Coast. Oh, and yeah, I don't know, probably to Newark, because he took some of them in there.

02:31:58.220 - 02:32:10.200

Anyway, we had all kinds of unscheduled stops so that we could all stay together across the country. We did not know, but they were putting little pins in on the maps every night to see where we were staying.

02:32:10.990 - 02:32:23.620

When we got back, B.J. was furious at me. "Don't you know there is a war going on? What are you doing just playing around there, staying overnight here and overnight there?" But I do not know why I told you that story.

02:32:24.240 - 02:32:37.200

Too many details. Kelly: When your husband got back, did he stay in the service or did he get out? He got out. Kelly: And then did you live then in Long Beach?

02:32:37.820 - 02:32:56.880

Klemski: No, he asked me to marry him and he wanted to live in Arizona because his roommate when he was with Pan Am was a boy from a native of Arizona, who was going to come back here and set up business. His whole family were here and everything.

02:32:57.480 - 02:33:12.160

So he wanted George to come back and go into business. They were going to go into business together and they had been great buddies in Florida. They had a sailboat together and everything and had a good time. So George wanted to come to Arizona.

02:33:13.860 - 02:33:27.940

The trouble was that Jerry Quayle never came back to Arizona. He ended up, he retired as a general on Coronado Island. He stayed in the service. But then we were here waiting for him to come and I came over here and George and I were

02:33:28.040 - 02:33:45.500

married here. I came over to marry him. On the train coming over, there was a woman who was the wife of a bank president. We sat up in the club car all night, and she drank a lot.

02:33:46.520 - 02:34:03.420

She told me that—and then I found out she had been over there to Palm Springs to be dried out, so she was just refueling herself on the way home. But I remember her telling me, she said, "I want you to remember, don't drink anything but vodka in Arizona because of the heat."

02:34:03.420 - 02:34:18.100

And she said, "You know, women don't die in Arizona, they just dry up and blow away." And I remember her sitting there with her drink telling me this on the train that night. I've never forgotten it, because I'm beginning to think she's right. You do just dry up and blow away.

02:34:19.560 - 02:34:36.720

Kelly: So when you came to Arizona, did you come to Phoenix? When Jerry did not arrive, my husband's family—I started to tell you, he was from Worcester, Ohio. His father and grandfather had started a company that made aluminum pots and pans.

02:34:36.840 - 02:34:46.440

Buckeye Aluminum was the name of it. It was second only to wherever. It was a great big company. When the war came along, his father had died and so had his grandfather.

02:34:47.340 - 02:35:06.200

His mother was running the company, and he was expected to go back and take over the company. He had worked in the summers and everything while he was growing up and in college, and he was expected to take it over when he got out of the service.

02:35:07.300 - 02:35:20.720

But then they could not get aluminum during the war, so the factory closed down. He did not want to go there anyway, so he was delighted. His mother sold it or whatever. So he had no direction then.

02:35:20.800 - 02:35:36.500

He thought that that is what he had to do, so now he did not know what to do. I had some friends who had a pottery in Honolulu, and I always loved working with clay and stuff. We found a little pottery. He wanted to work for himself.

02:35:36.560 - 02:35:52.280

He did not want to—I talked him into—we bought this little pottery down on Van Buren, and it was just going great guns. The guy had so many back orders, he could not fill them all. He had two kills going, and he had so many back orders.

02:35:53.100 - 02:36:05.760

He had eight gals working for him, and they could not keep up. They were just swamped with orders. We had no idea why at the time. We certainly found out after we bought the factory.

02:36:06.520 - 02:36:21.920

People were buying pottery because they could not buy metal things, or plastic was not around or anything. The minute the war was over, everybody said, "Hell with pottery. Now we can buy enameled metals and plastics and all kinds of things."

02:36:22.000 - 02:36:35.040

The pottery business just went like this. We just practically gave it away. Then he decided he liked politics, so he got into politics with Barry Goldwater, who had become a good friend of ours.

02:36:36.160 - 02:36:48.240

I met Barry during the war while we were— Kelly: While you were ferrying? Yes, he was stationed in Wilmington and he was ferrying P-47s to the West Coast. I was flying P-51s to the East Coast.

02:36:48.600 - 02:37:04.300

One day we were in Dallas and a Blue Northern came through and we were there all day waiting for the weather to clear so we could go our opposite directions. I sat down on the Red Cross and was drinking coffee. Barry came in and sat down next to me and we started talking.

02:37:05.140 - 02:37:18.780

I had never heard of him, of course, or anything. He told me he was from Arizona, and we talked. Of course, I had no idea I would ever be here. It was just sort of passing in the night, and he was an interesting guy to talk to.

02:37:19.680 - 02:37:35.300

Then we moved here, and I ran into him again. He remembered me, and we became friends. Peggy, I like Peggy, his wife, very much. We used to party together and everything all the time.

02:37:35.540 - 02:37:53.360

He and George became very close friends. Barry had a Navy on, and George was running for the legislature. And Barry—we hadn't had a Republican governor for a long time. This was kind of a Democratic state.

02:37:54.060 - 02:38:09.920

And Howard Pyle, who was a radio announcer with a beautiful voice, as Time magazine said, the honey-dipped voice when they wrote him up, he was running for governor. And so Barry and George really got him elected. We had our cars painted up.

02:38:10.200 - 02:38:26.440

Pyle driver, his name was Howard Pyle. And "I'm a Pyle driver," it said, and I had this little Ford convertible, and they'd put flags on it and they'd drive it in the parades with the top down and everything. And they flew Howard all over the state to make speeches.

02:38:27.020 - 02:38:46.900

Barry had the Navy on and George and Barry would fly him all over for a year. And then he was elected. And so during that time they would be close friends. And Howard, because of that, he offered Barry and George any jobs that he could hand them.

02:38:46.940 - 02:38:59.820

And he asked George what he would like to do. Well, George always had a little showing in him, so he said he would like to be head of the state fair. So he was head of the state fair.

02:39:00.660 - 02:39:13.420

And it was very small then because of the war. It had like 50,000 attendants in ten days or something. George got it up the first year to 200,000. Now they do about 200,000 in a day here.

02:39:14.720 - 02:39:29.120

But anyway, he kind of put it on the map. And so they were good friends until Barry ran for president. And then it just—I mean, we were not in the same league anymore. He did not cut us out, but we just did not travel in the same circles or party with the

02:39:28.940 - 02:39:44.840

same people or anything. But I saw Barry not long before he died. He married a nurse that was taking care of him. He was crippled then, he was in a wheelchair, and he had two hip replacements.

02:39:46.060 - 02:39:57.360

I ran into him in a store one day, or I left him a message. He built model airplanes all the time. I was in a model airplane store. I wanted to give Margaret an AT-6 because she loved them.

02:39:57.420 - 02:40:07.960

I was trying to find an AT-6 model to give her for her birthday and could not find it. Everything was jets and everything. They had to order it for me. So I went in to pick it up when they told me the order was in.

02:40:08.020 - 02:40:23.900

I looked up and here is a great big jet kit up on the wall right behind the cashier. It says, "Call Barry," with a little post-it on it. I said to the guy, "That could not be Barry Goldwater by any chance." He said, "Yes, that is for Barry."

02:40:23.900 - 02:40:35.600

I said, "Would you put a note up there for me?" Because I hadn't seen Barry for quite a while. So I put a note up there and I said, "Call Betty Blake." And so I got home that afternoon and Barry called me.

02:40:36.120 - 02:40:47.220

And he had married the nurse. His wife had died and he married this nurse who was taking care of him. And she doesn't like me a bit. She's just not interested in the flying or that part of it at all.

02:40:47.840 - 02:40:58.980

So every time I'd run into him anyplace, he'd say, "We're going to have you for dinner. I haven't talked to you for a long time, I want you to come out to the house for dinner." I'd say, "All right, you got my number, call me."

02:40:58.980 - 02:41:13.800

Never called, because she was doing all the calling. If I'd see him in a store in his wheelchair, she'd just turn around and wheel him away. He'd say, "Hi, Betty," and he was gone. But a lot of people are that way about women who fly.

02:41:13.830 - 02:41:26.180

You probably run into it too. Some of the wives who are not into that, and I can understand it, they kind of feel left out. Kelly: And then did your family start increasing?

02:41:26.620 - 02:41:38.260

Lowry: Yes, yes. Kelly: Tell me about your children. Lowry: It took a while. Well I had a little girl first, and I lost her in labor, unfortunately.

02:41:39.080 - 02:41:49.360

And I tried for seven years. In fact, I had been trying to talk my husband into adopting, and men are not always too crazy about that. So I had not really talked him into that, and then I became pregnant.

02:41:49.540 - 02:42:03.660

A little girl lost her, decided I had to try again. So I had three boys. Always wanted to have four boys, because I grew up with boys. I think maybe the good Lord knew what he was doing, because I am not sure I could have

02:42:03.720 - 02:42:13.080

handled all the hair ribbons. Friends of mine who had little girls who had to have their dresses pressed and this and that and all that. I do not think I would have been a good mother for that.

02:42:14.800 - 02:42:28.740

Kelly: What kind of mother were you to those little boys? I think I was kind of a friend. Were you involved in their school activities? Not as much as I would be today if I were doing it.

02:42:29.320 - 02:42:45.780

I really did not realize how important that was. Tell me why you think it is important. Well because I think children do much better when the family is behind them. How did you spend your time then when those boys were growing up?

02:42:47.380 - 02:43:02.820

I did lots of things. I had a beanbag business. Just for fun, for friends of mine who were having children, I made these little felt animals and filled them full of stuffing and things.

02:43:04.100 - 02:43:22.600

I finally discovered that I could put—first I started putting wild bird seed in them, because then they could sit and flop, and I did frogs and all kinds of things. 17 animals finally. I gave them to a friend of mine who had children, and they opened a shop.

02:43:22.820 - 02:43:37.200

They said, "Can we have your beanbag animals for our shop?" Because it was kind of a gift shop and it had all kinds of things. I did mice and they could sort of hang over the edge of things. So they went well, and they kept calling me up.

02:43:37.780 - 02:43:51.360

They bought a dozen to begin with. I figured that is the last I would hear, and then they called me and wanted more. to four days later, we sold them all, you got to make some more. Then I had a friend who took them to the gift show in California. He was a manufacturer. And in one day over

02:43:51.460 - 02:44:11.480

there, or no, in three-day show or whatever it was, he came back with $5,000 worth of orders for me. And I was doing this all by myself. I almost had cardiac arrest. I didn't know what I was going to do. So I hired some girls quickly and tried to set up sort of We had a four-car garage.

02:44:11.480 - 02:44:28.540

We made it into a big workshop out in Paradise Valley, and the gals would drive clear out to Paradise Valley to work for me. So we really got into business. I had reps in California, and I had a rep in Dallas, I had one in Chicago, and I was

02:44:28.540 - 02:44:48.660

shipping them all over the country. There was a shop in California on Sunset Strip, a cute shop that a couple of guys had, and saw my things at the gift show, so they ordered them from me and they kept reordering and reordering. Well, I was over there one day and I saw the cute shop. It looked like a

02:44:48.660 - 02:45:05.460

Cape Cod cottage, a two-story one, with the small paned windows. Inside they had a stairway that went up to nowhere in the back. It was green carpeted with this railing along. They had all my animals sitting everywhere, on the rails and on the steps and everything, and they were all over the shop.

02:45:07.820 - 02:45:15.000

I'm going to roll out here, so I'm going to have to change tape real quick. Do you mind? No. God, I—

02:45:16.160 - 02:45:26.780

[Audio break] —use those black and white ball fringe. I would buy it at the wholesale places by the umpteen yards, and I would cut them off and I would glue them.

02:45:27.000 - 02:45:36.980

I went to make a little felt thing around it, and then I'd glue the eyes and I'd have them looking this way or that way or that way. And this manufacturer took them to California and said, "Call them people watchers." I did not know what to name them.

02:45:37.610 - 02:45:58.460

I still think that was kind of a funny name, but anyway, that is what we called them. One day I had just shipped these two guys a big order of animals, and they called me up about three or four days later and said, "Could you ship us another order?" I said, "I just shipped you one.

02:45:58.510 - 02:46:05.960

Did you not get it?" "Yes, they are all gone." I said, "What do you mean they're all gone?" I couldn't believe them because it was several dozen.

02:46:08.480 - 02:46:20.100

And they said, "Well, Jack Lemmon came in with his assistant and he saw them and he went crazy over them. He bought all of them in the store." And I said, "He did?"

02:46:20.100 - 02:46:35.960

He said, "Yes, he wants to use them in a movie." So I said, "Believe this." I thought it was—first when he called me, oh, then a couple days later I get a call and it says, "This is so-and-so Gould with Jollim Studios."

02:46:36.220 - 02:46:55.660

And I had a friend who was the heir to Morton Salt, and he was a producer in a radio station here and he used to call me all the time and play jokes on me. So I figure he's just giving me the business. So I gave him a very sassy answer and hung up on him.

02:46:55.780 - 02:47:09.140

I was sure it was Morton. So about two minutes later the phone rings again and says, "This is serious. I am so-and-so. I'm a director, whatever it is, for Jallam Studios.

02:47:09.480 - 02:47:21.980

Have you ever heard of Jallam Studios?" And I said, "No." He said, "Jallam Studios is Jack Lemmon Studios." And then I think, "Ah, the guy just told me that he bought all the animals."

02:47:21.980 - 02:47:32.680

So I listened. And he said, "We want to use your frog in a movie that Jack is making, and we will fly you over to California." And they changed their minds about that.

02:47:32.760 - 02:47:45.600

I think somebody said, "Hey, she is just producing the thing. What are you going to fly her to California for?" So they cancelled out on that finally. But for five months or six months I worked with them, because they decided the legs needed

02:47:45.680 - 02:48:01.260

to be two inches longer. Then they wanted the eyes two inches farther apart. And then they wanted the material changed, and then they decided—because I was doing them in calicos and everything, and some were felt and some were in fabrics—and they decided

02:48:01.320 - 02:48:14.380

they wanted green and white polka dot for the frog. Well, they could not get any green and white polka dot material in Arizona. It was a much smaller town then. So I had to fly to California to the whole side houses over there to buy bolts of this

02:48:15.040 - 02:48:28.240

green and white polka dot. So I made—and they said they need five identical frogs. The spots have to be in exactly the same places and the eyes exactly the same because they have to be interchangeable if they get soiled and things.

02:48:28.360 - 02:48:38.920

So I made five. Then they would call me up and they'd say, "We're having a meeting. You have to have him here by tomorrow morning." This would be like five in the afternoon.

02:48:39.760 - 02:48:58.560

So I'd stay up half the night. I'd call the airport and find out when the last flight to California went. And so then I would stay up all night making these things and making the changes in them, rushing them out to the airport to go to California for their ten o'clock meeting in the morning.

02:48:59.400 - 02:49:19.300

Then they'd call me up and say something else needs to be changed, they have to have feet on them because I just had them coming to points. And by then I'm using, or long before this, I'm using the refuse from foam cups. There was a big Thompson Industries here that made all the foam cups and things.

02:49:20.120 - 02:49:31.900

And all the little beads, very small beads, not the kind they put in beanbag chairs, but much smaller. And they would have these gaylords of them that they would scrape off the machines and everything.

02:49:31.980 - 02:49:48.960

And sometimes they had a few lumps in them. But I just got a piece of hardware cloth with quarter-inch meshes and I just poured the stuff through there and it would get rid of the lumps. So we used that to fill the animals and then I would buy silica sand, which is kind of

02:49:48.960 - 02:50:00.560

a dustless white sand that you could buy at the lumber yards and everything. And I would put so much sand in each one so that they would have enough weight to sit and flop around. So that is how it started.

02:50:01.180 - 02:50:20.380

So they used it. But I held up the production of the movie for five days while they were in New York sitting in the Hotel Pierre waiting for the last thing, change in the frog to be done. And they're all sitting there calling me every day, drunk as billy goats, not Jack,

02:50:20.480 - 02:50:34.080

but all the crews and everything, waiting for the frogs to come. I said, "Give me time!" Because the first scene was shot in New York or something. That was the first scene they were going to shoot that had the frog in it.

02:50:34.520 - 02:50:47.180

But anyway, April Fool's was the name of the movie. Catherine Deneuve was in it. The story was he worked for Peter Lofford, Jack Lemmon did, and he was his usual fussy little salesman self.

02:50:47.920 - 02:51:11.900

And Peter Lofford was very cool and he was married to Catherine Deneuve and they had this very elegant New York apartment. He was invited to this party and Peter met Jack's wife and she did not like parties and he did not either, so they escaped from the party together.

02:51:13.320 - 02:51:31.600

They went and did all kinds of things and somehow ended up in a greenhouse. She kissed him in the greenhouse and said, "I am going to turn you from a frog into a prince." went right out the next day and he bought my frog, supposedly, and gave it to her. And

02:51:31.600 - 02:51:53.720

it would show these scenes in the movie as he'd go up to pick her up. He didn't know she was the wife of his boss at the time. She was just somebody at the party. But he went up to pick her up later and here was the frog sitting on this big black marble pedestal right in the entrance.

02:51:54.120 - 02:52:10.800

Oh, they had great shots of my frog in that movie. And it was in twenty-three scenes in the movie. And at the very end, he and Catherine Deneuve, he divorced his wife and Catherine divorced her husband and they were going to run to France together because she was French.

02:52:11.600 - 02:52:22.620

And they were to meet at the airport and he got to the airport late and she was already on the plane and she's sitting there with the frog and she didn't like the frog, you could tell. to carry it and all these scenes and everything.

02:52:22.650 - 02:52:34.480

You could tell she was just bored to death carrying this lumpy thing. But she sat the frog down on the seat, the empty seat that was supposed to be his, beside her. And she's sitting there, tears rolling down her cheeks,

02:52:34.580 - 02:52:40.740

looking out the window and looking back. And there's no jack. And she's alone. And she's going to France all by herself.

02:52:40.940 - 02:52:54.280

And he's running, you know, the way he does, rushing, rushing down the ramps in the terminal, knocking people over and everything, trying to get to the plane. And the very last scene, he walks down the aisle and he sees her and he picks up the

02:52:54.420 - 02:53:04.940

frog and he slides in under the frog and puts it in his lap. And that was the fade-out scene. But it played here all summer. It's a horrible movie, but it played here all summer.

02:53:05.620 - 02:53:23.120

And the theater was in, they knew it was my frog. They let me set up my frogs because I did three-foot ones and everything. So my husband made me a bunch of white pedestals, white wood pedestals, and we sat them all over in the lobby, big frogs, little frogs, and everything, and they let me put my sign

02:53:23.240 - 02:53:44.920

because I had a shop in Scottsdale then. I did a land office business, and they gave me passes. I took my friends. I saw the show seventeen times because I had to go with my friends to get them in. It was a crazy summer. Then after that, I went to work as a continuity director at a radio station here at Channel 5.

02:53:45.840 - 02:54:03.820

What did that entail? Steele: Writing all the commercials and a five-minute air program, or whenever any of the others—it was a twenty-four-hour-a-day station, and we played music at that time, and good swing music.

02:54:05.740 - 02:54:21.200

So if any of the others were sick, then I took the night shift. Kelly: During that time that your boys are growing up also, did you do any other kind of volunteer work? You were so busy with your frogs.

02:54:30.600 - 02:54:46.660

I didn't do very much, really, I'm sorry to say. You were pretty busy, though. Well, I had my gals, I worked all night on the beanbags, getting things set up for my gals who would arrive in the morning and then they'd work all day and I would go into

02:54:46.860 - 02:55:03.360

town to the wholesale houses and buy thread and do all those kind of things. My kids still say, "Oh, Mom, all we can remember of our childhood is riding along with you and walking into these wholesale and fabric places and everything to get all the stuff.

02:55:03.980 - 02:55:08.460

That's what we remember." They had a good life. We lived out in the desert. They all had bikes.

02:55:08.880 - 02:55:17.620

They rode around the desert. They went quail hunting. We had twenty acres. We were one of the only three houses in Paradise Valley then.

02:55:17.680 - 02:55:25.940

It was this whole big valley and a big cattle ranch on one end of it, and that was it. So it was country living. We had a pool. We built our own swimming pool.

02:55:25.990 - 02:55:36.140

Kelly: What did you finally do with that business? Klemski: I finally closed it. My husband had several heart attacks. In fact, he had five altogether, and he could not work.

02:55:37.160 - 02:55:53.420

I was supporting the family, but I did not have enough of a good assembly line. I was selling to small shops, and they are very slow pay. I mean ninety days was nothing to get paid for an order. I just got to the point where I had to get another kind of a job.

02:55:54.400 - 02:56:03.020

Kelly: So then you went with the radio station? Klemski: Yes. Kelly: Then what did you do after that? Did you do something after that or did you retire?

02:56:06.140 - 02:56:19.740

Klemski: When the kids were growing up, for five years I had forgotten the sequence of some of these things, but I wrote a newspaper column for the weekly—it was a weekly paper then in Scottsdale for five years. Kelly: What kind of column was it?

02:56:19.740 - 02:56:38.380

Klemski: It was anything I wanted. I had total control. I got invited to a lot of parties because people like to see their names in there, and I tried to write the funny things. Long before Elvis Presley came out with the song "Blue

02:56:38.440 - 02:57:05.280

Suede Shoes," I wrote a column about blue suede shoes. The town of Carefree was started by two men that were good friends of ours. One of them was kind of a big, freckle-faced, heard Santa Claus kind of guy, a bachelor, very popular in town because there were a lot of divorced women in Scottsdale in those days. But Tom Darlington always wore blue

02:57:05.320 - 02:57:20.840

suede shoes. So when I did not have anything to write about, I would pick—one day I wrote about—I picked a word out of the dictionary and just wrote a whole story, a whole column about that. But a lot of times I made one very bad mistake once.

02:57:20.940 - 02:57:34.620

I mentioned that one couple who were fairly close neighbors of ours were going to Europe for a couple of months. When they came home, their house had been robbed. And they always blamed me because I had it in the paper that they were going away.

02:57:34.740 - 02:57:42.880

So I was very careful. Then I did not mention anything like that about anybody. I got a very nasty letter from them about that. They were no longer friends.

02:57:43.120 - 02:57:52.060

That was the end of the friendship. So I was careful. I could write about anything I wanted to. And that is when I stopped.

02:57:52.600 - 02:58:09.020

I had just stopped smoking. And that was very hard, because I found I was used to writing. I would put the typewriter on the dining room table, and I would put an ashtray here and put the paper in the typewriter, and then I would light a cigarette so I could start

02:58:09.120 - 02:58:22.020

thinking. And when I stopped smoking, I would sit down at the typewriter and no words came out. I just couldn't write. So finally I found out the answer.

02:58:22.160 - 02:58:36.460

I got a little stubby pencil about the length of a cigarette and I would just lay that in the ashtray and I'd pick it up and hold it in between my teeth and lips and they just worked fine. I don't have too good a head here, see?

02:58:36.480 - 02:58:52.840

I mean, I can convince it of lots of silly things. Kelly: Anything else in your working life that you want to tell us about? Klemski: No, I thought of something a little while ago and I have forgotten it. I have that kind of a mind at this point.

02:58:55.110 - 02:59:14.360

Kelly: Okay, well, tell us about your sons today. Klemski: My sons today, two of them are contractors. One of them—my youngest son flies for a commuter airline. And the amazing thing to me is that he was my youngest, he always wanted to be a pilot.

02:59:15.080 - 02:59:27.220

And we never pushed it because when he was two years old, one of the little neighbor kids that was over gave him a shove and he had a little liquorice glass in his hand that he loved to—he climbed up on the stool to get it. His father used to give him milk in it.

02:59:28.120 - 02:59:46.640

It was a little Stanley Kerr glass and she shook the stool he was standing on and he fell and went through his eye and blinded him in the eye. So his eyeball—he was only two years old, so his eyeball did not grow. He went around like this as a kid because it was very small.

02:59:46.740 - 03:00:03.240

It did not mature like the other one did. We used to let him wear his hair over here because kids can be brutal with other kids. They called it "Little One-Eye" and everything on the bus and just bothered him. But it made a very strong, good person out of him.

03:00:03.860 - 03:00:26.720

Because of that, I do not know. But anyway, he never really remembered having two eyes, so he adjusted very well. And he is the commuter airline pilot. And he now has a cap that he can take in and put in and take out that's like a—it covers

03:00:26.760 - 03:00:41.520

the whole front of his eyeball. And the doctor, even when they did it, drew the veins in to match his other eye and everything. And it's his left eye, and you know that I used to always—it was like a stab in the heart every time I looked at him because I would see that eye.

03:00:42.380 - 03:00:55.320

And it fortunately still tracked with the other eye, but he could not see anything, totally blind. He lost the lens, and that is the one thing they have not learned how to replace. But he has—

03:00:55.320 - 03:01:02.320

Kelly: He learned to fly. Reifeldt: He learned to fly. He wanted to all the time, and we never pushed it at all because we did not think he could get a license.

03:01:02.540 - 03:01:17.940

And here he has the top licenses. He has—what is the two initial ones? The something pilot? it. It is the top whatever you can get. It is not a license I guess, but it is a course

03:01:18.020 - 03:01:38.260

you take. I want to say AP, but that is not it. I cannot think of the letters. But he has the whole thing. But I suppose losing his eye at such an early age, he learned—because he has never had any trouble with depth perception or anything. And you would think, I mean when When I cover one eye, I think, "Wow."

03:01:38.280 - 03:01:48.120

But he never remembers anything else. So I think it is a blessing he lost it at that age rather than when he was a teenager or something. Kelly: And your other son?

03:01:48.120 - 03:02:01.120

Klemski: My middle son is a contractor. He builds houses and all kinds of things like that. He is doing very well right now, as you can imagine, because Arizona and especially Scottsdale area is just booming.

03:02:02.480 - 03:02:12.960

My youngest son, besides being the airline pilot, also has a stucco company, so he is busy doing that. He is on leave from the airline right now because he is remodeling his house, but when he is finished he will go back.

03:02:13.560 - 03:02:21.760

One of the reasons he is on leave, too, they wanted to move him to Chicago, to O'Hare Field, and have him fly out of there. He did not want to move. He has got a beautiful house here.

03:02:21.820 - 03:02:33.720

He had a son in high school who is now in college, but he did not want to leave until something else or they changed their minds. That is why he is on leave. My oldest son is music.

03:02:34.040 - 03:02:44.380

I have to say that my husband called them the three Ms when they were little kids. Music, muscle, and money. And he was exactly right. He did this when they were little.

03:02:44.940 - 03:02:55.080

My oldest son used to have his own band, but he decided unless you get big, you're not going to make any money at it. So he decided he'd go do the behind-the-scenes thing. So he started a company.

03:02:55.160 - 03:03:14.360

It's called On Cue, and he's a partner in it. And they do all the lighting and the mixing and stages and things like that for the rock bands that come in town. But now he is still a partner there, but he is on the road.

03:03:14.370 - 03:03:25.000

He is the road manager for a rock band I had never heard of. He could not believe I had never heard of it, but it is Cheap Trick. And they sell out everywhere. The guys are all like in their fifties.

03:03:25.050 - 03:03:38.400

I mean, he was one of the early, early ones. But he has been to Europe. Right now he is in Hong Kong, I think. Then he goes to Spain and then he goes to Italy and then Sweden and then Belgium.

03:03:39.360 - 03:03:56.360

He has already been over there last year. Last year he was over in Japan as the road manager for this group. He has been to Greenland and everywhere. So he is the music one.

03:03:56.360 - 03:04:11.680

He is the oldest. And my middle and the contractor who is building houses and things is the muscle man. He could not even—I love him dearly, but he is the oddball in the family. Very, very creative, very artistic, loves to draw and paint and do things like that

03:04:11.740 - 03:04:28.400

when he has time. He has had two magazine covers with his photographs. But he—on my birthday, the gang were bringing me ice cream and cake and we were going to to have a celebration, but he had to go to the gym.

03:04:28.520 - 03:04:44.280

I mean, he could come back afterwards, but he could not miss the gym. You cannot miss a night of the gym, you know. And he has got the body to prove it. And then my youngest, who is the pilot, is the conservative one, the one with one eye,

03:04:44.420 - 03:04:53.560

and he is the money one. He plans ahead, he has got everything planned ahead. He is not spontaneous like Bruce and I are spontaneous. Do it now.

03:04:53.700 - 03:05:04.540

Yeah, do it right now. But my son plans everything. So they are all different. Kelly: I know that you lost your husband not too many years ago.

03:05:04.640 - 03:05:13.620

Klemski: '86. Kelly: Right. How did you get through that sad time? Klemski: Well, I guess I better tell you the whole story.

03:05:15.100 - 03:05:33.480

We had been divorced since 1971. We were still friends. It took a little while to be friends, but I think it all happened because our places in the family changed.

03:05:33.760 - 03:05:43.680

I became the breadwinner. He loved to do sculpture. He had sculpture in different shows in California and here, he had collectors buying his things here.

03:05:44.560 - 03:06:07.820

started too late doing that to make a name, and he was not that well. He started doing that when he was recovering from one of his heart attacks, and the heart condition ran in his family. He was very happy doing sculpture at home, and it did not pay.

03:06:08.220 - 03:06:26.540

Sculpture does not sell a lot, so it did not pay bills and everything, so I was the working one. And somehow that changed our relationship because he was well again for a long time, but he didn't—it's very hard for men to know how to go out and ask for jobs.

03:06:26.700 - 03:06:44.080

He'd have been head of the state fair and things like that. I guess it's very hard on men's ego to walk in and say, "I need a job." My father had trouble with that too after the Depression. And my father had just retired just before the Depression, and he would not ask anybody

03:06:44.240 - 03:07:01.120

for a job and struggle for a long time. But I think it is very tough on men too. They lose face or something when they have to ask, and so he never did. And he just stayed home and did sculpture, and it just changed our relationship.

03:07:05.700 - 03:07:17.000

I had a shop in Scottsdale. We took turns in the shop. I am a night person, so I would take the four to ten shift, and we were right next to the entrance to a theater.

03:07:17.880 - 03:07:31.900

In fact, our windows on one side of the shop opened right up to the ticket booth, and people walked in past the windows to go to the movies. And they had a lot of college kids. They were showing a lot of foreign movies, and then the college kids who took those kinds

03:07:31.900 - 03:07:44.220

of courses came over from the university to go to the shows, the movies. So I stayed open until ten at night because a lot of these guys bought these stuffed animals for their girlfriends and everything. I had a lot of fun.

03:07:44.300 - 03:08:07.520

The kids used to come in and visit with me. George took the—I do not remember when we opened—ten to four shift, I guess. And one day when I went to take over at four o'clock in the afternoon, a gal was, a very tall, willowy, good-looking blonde gal was just leaving the shop and he introduced me

03:08:07.620 - 03:08:21.400

to her. And the way she looked at him and the way—I knew something was going on. I just knew. She just said, "Oh, she was a guest and she was visiting in Arizona and she just happened

03:08:21.400 - 03:08:33.360

to walk into the shop." But there was something—I instantly knew something more was going on. And then I came home one day, and—well, then two or three times when I'd go to take my shift, I'd see her going down the street.

03:08:33.620 - 03:08:56.040

They had a time so that she'd get out of there before I got there. And then one day I came home and I guess nothing else went on for a while. We had to close the shop because our lease ran out and new owners bought the building and did not want to have the shop there anymore.

03:08:57.700 - 03:09:05.880

It was just before Christmas, we could not move to a new location. We could not find a location in Scottsdale that would be good because we had a lot of foot traffic. It was on the main street.

03:09:06.380 - 03:09:25.360

So we closed it. I got a job at the radio station then, went to work at the radio station. I would come home from the radio station because I had crazy hours sometimes. I would come home and my gang would be having dinner and she would be there.

03:09:26.440 - 03:09:45.300

They would say, "Pull up a chair and join us." So I knew things were going on a lot and then the children started telling me things. She had a little boy and she would leave the little boy with my kids to babysit while she She and George went off on a picnic or something.

03:09:47.380 - 03:10:11.520

At that point, I just decided not to do anything further about it. I would not do the same thing today, because my kids were getting early teenagers. They have scars because of it. My kids begged me to leave the house because they just could not stand what was going on.

03:10:13.500 - 03:10:28.060

So I left and I did not want to take them into Phoenix with me because I knew I had to work. I had a real estate license then too, I was a broker. I knew that they would just be running loose on the streets of Phoenix while I was working

03:10:28.140 - 03:10:37.160

and everything. They were much better out there in the house they were born in, with all the desert around them and schools that they were used to and their friends. So I had to leave him there.

03:10:40.960 - 03:10:58.600

So that was how it happened, and I realized that there were scars from that. Nobody knew the word "counselor" then. If I had known the word "counselor" then, today if I were doing it again, I would have insisted that we both go to counseling and try to work the thing out for the kids'

03:10:58.880 - 03:11:12.280

sake. But just did not realize at the time, and unfortunately you cannot go back and do it over. They were good boys, never had any trouble, no drug problems, no smoking, no—an occasional

03:11:12.400 - 03:11:20.660

beer or something like that. They are happy kids and they live good lives. Kelly: That is great. And how do you spend your time now, Betty?

03:11:21.790 - 03:11:40.240

Klemski: Trying to get rid of all the papers in my house. I love to write and I am not writing right now because I still have a lot of my son's stuff there that he hasn't moved out, and my carport is full of lumber that he hasn't moved to the new location, to his new house and things, and it's a mess.

03:11:40.640 - 03:11:55.020

But inside, I'm a pack rat is what I am, and I will read an article in a magazine or want to read it and don't have time now so I save the magazine to read it later, and they just pile up that way. And then new ones come.

03:11:55.100 - 03:12:17.220

I don't get magazines anymore because they just pile up too fast, so I don't subscribe to any. But I will read the newspaper in the morning and I will sit there and have my coffee and read the newspaper and I will read something in there and it will have a word like "funnyhead."

03:12:17.220 - 03:12:33.380

And so I have to cut that out and put it in a box or write it on a pad, you know, to remind me. And I do that all the time and I clip things like that and lay them aside. I get boxes full of these things that I could never remember were there.

03:12:33.880 - 03:12:46.360

Then I spend half a day going through them and trying to organize them and throw the ones away that I don't want. And I'm doing all this stupid stuff instead of writing, which is what I want to do. And then somebody will say they're coming.

03:12:46.540 - 03:12:59.540

My brother, I have two younger brothers. One is very much a controller. He's my youngest brother, but he has to run all the shows and everything. He is the one who gave me the truck, because I was having a lot of trouble with my old

03:12:59.600 - 03:13:17.380

one. But he likes to run everything. And so he arrived—the truck was an absolute surprise. I had a little Ranger pickup before and it was totaled out in front of—on Scottsdale

03:13:17.580 - 03:13:29.400

Road by an eighteen-wheeler. I was in it. Fortunately, I was black and blue all over, but I did not break anything, but it totaled the truck. I stopped to make a left-hand turn and he did not see me stopped. I was waiting

03:13:29.480 - 03:13:50.180

for the fast traffic to go by here so I could turn into my road. I heard his air brakes go and I looked up in my rear-vision mirror and his radiator was bigger than my truck. I heard the squeaking brakes, or the air brakes, just before he hit me. He folded the whole back end of my pickup right under the back wheels. I hit my head. I knocked the windows

03:13:50.180 - 03:14:01.540

out of the back of the thing with my head. It was a mess, but I was black and blue. I had black and blue eyes. I could not breathe because of the shoulder strap thing just bruised my ribs and everything.

03:14:01.660 - 03:14:12.860

It was a mess. How did you get through that? How did I get through that? Well, the police came by to see me the next day.

03:14:12.960 - 03:14:21.100

I was in the hospital that night. They took me to the hospital and everything. I came home the next day. the police came by to see how I was doing and he said, one of them said to me, "Now

03:14:21.180 - 03:14:42.760

just remember," they had been there at the scene, they said, "Just remember, you've used up one of your lives, you only have eight left, so be careful." I just got over being black and blue and I still have some things, I have a need that bothers me, I don't know what I hit, maybe the side of the door, it spun me around.

03:14:43.460 - 03:14:53.240

I went clear around. How I missed the oncoming traffic that was doing fifty or sixty miles an hour, I do not know. I have no idea how I missed them or whether they were able to shoot around the car or

03:14:53.240 - 03:15:03.560

what. Because it spun me around so that I was suddenly facing the wrong way and I started to tip over. I hit a telephone pole instead and it kept me from tipping over.

03:15:03.820 - 03:15:13.420

Right at my entrance there, the pole is still there and it has a big chunk out of it. I told somebody one day, "I am going to go out and autograph that. That is mine." Do you think maybe you had a guardian angel?

03:15:13.580 - 03:15:31.520

Oh yes, I have had a guardian angel all my life. Just amazing, amazing guardian angel. I think he or she put me in the right places at the right time. I have had such an interesting—I mean growing up in Hawaii, living in the ocean, having

03:15:31.580 - 03:15:42.300

a wonderful life as a child. You have been blessed. I have been blessed. But I got into some bad times with those boys I grew up with, because they were older.

03:15:42.560 - 03:15:55.660

Most of them were two years older than I was. I remember one night, a Halloween night, we had a streetcar that went through a—this was streetcar age—went through the neighborhood, not our neighborhood, but it was about a couple of miles away, up in the hills of Manoa.

03:15:56.520 - 03:16:15.620

And it went up a hill this way, and it went straight for about two or three blocks. Then it made a very steep turn this way and went down to another section. Well, the boys thought it would be nice on Halloween to grease the tracks. Right at the turn, there was an alley that went like this, a gravel alley with bushes

03:16:15.720 - 03:16:27.480

all along the sides. I was with them. I did not grease the tracks, but they greased the tracks. And then we—this is like eleven o'clock at night—we waited, and the streetcar came

03:16:27.580 - 03:16:38.100

along. Fortunately, nobody in it but the conductor. And it jumps the track and it goes right down the alley this way. It does not tip over or anything, it just stops in the bottom of the alley.

03:16:39.340 - 03:16:57.020

And we ran. And I ran to a house nearby, because I had walked from home, which was probably fifteen blocks away, and I ducked under a tree, or under a bush outside this window at somebody's house.

03:16:57.460 - 03:17:06.460

And I stayed there. It was a great big leaf bush, and I stayed there for hours. And the cops were there and they were hunting everywhere. I could not go home.

03:17:06.580 - 03:17:16.520

I had to stay under the bush. They were knocking on people's doors to see what people—I have never been so scared in my life. And I really had nothing to do with it except being with the group, you know.

03:17:17.700 - 03:17:26.980

But they did things like that. I could have gotten into lots of trouble. One day at Waikiki they thought it would be nice. There was a truck pulled up, a van, and they opened the doors.

03:17:27.100 - 03:17:53.260

It was a dry-cleaning truck full of clothes in there, no plastic bags in those days. And the kids got a hose and they just sprayed the whole truck full of clothes. And then they ran and I ran, but I got caught because I could not run as fast as they could. Nothing happened, but I got into some situations with that gang.

03:17:55.100 - 03:18:08.060

Tell me Betty, what makes you happy now? What makes me happy? The blue sky, the trees, I love animals. I am addicted to animals.

03:18:08.620 - 03:18:22.580

The wild rabbits, I love snakes. My kids had pet snakes when we were growing up. I had a pet king snake that used to follow me out to the barn to feed the horses. My little kid is with me and he would follow me out and we would go back and he would follow

03:18:22.500 - 03:18:38.320

me back and we put a dish of sauce or milk out for him. One day I was on the phone and I looked up and I saw the neighbor's Dalmatian going by the window with my king snake in his mouth, so that was the end of the king snake. But I love animals and I love nature.

03:18:38.840 - 03:19:02.060

I think if I were going to—I don't know whether I'm religious or not. I think I'm probably an agnostic, but I feel like I'm spiritual. But I could almost be a Taoist because they're so involved with nature and I feel spiritual when I'm outside with the blue sky and the trees and the animals and the green grass

03:19:02.100 - 03:19:19.380

and everything. And I don't feel, and I'm probably completely wrong, I don't know, I'll find out someday, I don't feel that I have to sit in a pew in church on Sunday to be a good person. I feel like God is inside of me, he's the energy in me.

03:19:20.130 - 03:19:44.600

And I think, I talk to him all the time and I feel that he directs me and keeps me going and probably is really what I call a guardian angel, you know. But that's my idea and I just, my computer man is a devout Catholic and we have to stay off religion because he says I'm going to hell and everything and I said I don't believe

03:19:44.600 - 03:19:54.580

in hell. I think it is here on earth, I make my own, you know. So we go round and round about those things. And I am using up your tape talking about sillies.

03:19:55.060 - 03:20:15.700

Kelly: What is your personal opinion of Jacqueline Cochran and the WASP program that she put together? Klemski: I have a great deal of admiration for Jackie. She was a very, I think more than assertive, really an aggressive person, and I think that

03:20:15.700 - 03:20:34.540

is why she got where she did. I personally was not really fond of her because I just don't like women that are that aggressive, but I admired them. And she certainly came a long way by herself, also with the help of her very wealthy husband

03:20:34.540 - 03:20:56.660

who was able to finance a lot of things for her, but she had the drive. When we had our physicals at Bowling Field in Washington, D.C., there were about ten of us there, I guess, eight or ten of the gals for the first class, and we were told to fly down there to have our physicals.

03:20:57.680 - 03:21:11.820

That was a funny day, because they had never done women before. was at the base and Jackie was with us. And they had to do chest x-rays and all that kind of stuff, and we had to undress. And we were all in one big room.

03:21:12.360 - 03:21:27.260

And I was not very modest because I grew up in Honolulu. We went skinny dipping, we changed the same bathhouses. The kids in my day growing up in Honolulu, the bodies were natural things and everybody was not so sex-oriented or something.

03:21:27.380 - 03:21:39.840

I do not know. I was teenagers, we didn't think a lot about it. I didn't think anybody was thinking about it. Anyway, we got into this dressing room to undress, and Jackie said in a very formal

03:21:39.980 - 03:21:49.760

way, "Girls, please turn your backs. I'm undressing." That was my first meeting with Jackie. And I thought, "Who are you?"

03:21:49.760 - 03:22:00.920

That irritated the heck out of me. It probably influenced the way I felt about her all the rest of the—I flew with her one day. We went out and flew in into Twin Beach into Birmingham, I think it was.

03:22:02.540 - 03:22:17.180

It was a small airport, maybe it wasn't Birmingham, I don't remember. It was someplace in the south. And it was a small airport and when we got out she told me to tell the ground crew—I mean this is below her, you know, to tell the ground crew what to do when she has a

03:22:17.180 - 03:22:24.980

co-pilot to tell. So I got out to tell the ground crew what to do and they're saying, "Ha, ha, ha, you're flying with Tony Cochran." And I said, "Yeah?

03:22:26.720 - 03:22:36.940

Do you know what? She didn't nick the props this landing." And they said she used to come in there often and he said she always bounced the thing and nicked the props in the gravel, you know?

03:22:41.100 - 03:23:02.080

But she did funny things. I was—God, I don't know where this is going. I shouldn't cut it out if you don't want to, but maybe I told you this, Nancy. We were in—several of us taking planes to the west coast were weathered in in Memphis.

03:23:04.360 - 03:23:20.980

We had been staying at the WAC quarters, where we were supposed to—they would not give us per diem. If we were landing on a base where they had quarters we could stay in. So we were staying in the WAC quarters, and they were supposed to be in the WAC officers'

03:23:21.060 - 03:23:35.540

quarters, but the officers did not like us because I think they were all jealous of us. So they never had any room for us. So they always put us in the enlisted quarters. And there would be lights down the middle of the room, the beds were all like this with

03:23:35.560 - 03:23:45.760

walks in between them. And the night I stayed there—we were weathered in there. We were going west and we could not get west of Memphis, and there were three or four of us there.

03:23:49.120 - 03:23:59.380

And they did not have any sheets or pillows or anything for us. We lay on the mattresses. They just were out of these things. But I think they were all jealous because we had the fun job, you know, and they were

03:24:00.660 - 03:24:17.660

typing letters or something. So we—Jackie—we were sitting there in the operations office every day waiting for the weather to clear so we could get out of there. Jackie breezed in one day, "What are my girls doing here?"

03:24:17.740 - 03:24:24.260

We were always her girls, you know. "What are my girls doing here?" We said, "We are weathered in." "What do you mean, weathered in?"

03:24:24.260 - 03:24:35.140

She goes up and talks to the weather officer. She pounds on the counter and she says, "My girls are good pilots. They can fly in that kind of weather." Really?

03:24:35.340 - 03:24:55.980

I mean, she always was doing something like this that just really turns me off. He said, "Nobody is flying west right now except on instruments." He said, "There is a hurricane, a typhoon or something between here and—in the area between here and Dallas," which was our next stop.

03:24:56.820 - 03:25:06.800

"And nobody is flying unless they are on instruments." And she was furious about that. She said, "Where are you staying?" We said, "We are staying at the WAC quarters."

03:25:06.800 - 03:25:16.540

"Well, I have a suite. You are going to come into the hotel with me tonight." So we went in there, and she went up to the counter. She had just landed when we saw her.

03:25:17.020 - 03:25:35.220

She went up to the counter, and it was full of—as the hotels always were during the war—all the officers and everything standing there waiting to sign in. There was a general there in the bunch of them, and she elbowed her way through the man to get up to the counter.

03:25:36.080 - 03:25:54.500

And they all kind of looked at her like this, and there's three or four of us behind her. maybe five, I don't remember, anyway, several of us. And she pounds on the counter again and she says, "I want my suite." And this little guy behind the counter said, "I'm working with these gentlemen."

03:25:54.500 - 03:26:03.780

And she said, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Jacqueline Cochran and I want my suite right now. And these are my girls." All the guys turned around and looked at us.

03:26:03.940 - 03:26:14.760

I wanted to get down on my hands and knees and just crawl out of there. I felt like she was a madam and we were her girls. That's the way she always made us feel. So I wasn't too...

03:26:14.800 - 03:26:28.920

And Nancy was... Nancy would never have gotten us where Jackie got us, but Nancy was a perfect lady. She was a finishing school girl and very polite and soft-voiced and everything. Absolute opposite.

03:26:29.760 - 03:26:50.280

And they hated each other. And partly because Jackie moved in and took Nancy's whole thing away from her, you know. Nancy stayed on, but Jackie knew Hap Arnold and said, "You promised me that if there were going to be any girls flying, you'd tell me about it."

03:26:50.320 - 03:27:19.940

Jackie was in England at the time, and boy, she rode right back over here and just took over the thing. The other great hotel was the one in Nashville, Hermitage Hotel in Nashville. That and the Brown Palace in Salt Lake City were the only hotels during the war where

03:27:20.000 - 03:27:32.140

they would give us room service during the war. All the others had cut it out. And we would be so dirty and tired sometimes when we would get in at the end of the day. We did not want to get dressed or go out to a restaurant or something for dinner.

03:27:32.380 - 03:27:46.240

And those hotels you could call up and they would just bring it right up to the room and it was just lovely. And then you could just take a nice hot bath and go to bed. Now there was one too on Peach Street in Atlanta that did that too, but I do not remember what

03:27:46.300 - 03:28:00.800

the name of that hotel was. But it was so hot down there. I would go take a shower or a bath in that hotel in the summer, and I would come in and there was a fan right over the bed and I would just lie down naked wet and let the fan cool

03:28:00.880 - 03:28:22.100

me off. Boy, it was so humid down there sometimes. Kelly: Betty, what do you feel the legacy of the WASP will be? I think that we were the gals that got the ball rolling and got women into—showed that

03:28:22.240 - 03:28:32.420

women could fly military planes. And I do think today that they're a lot better than we were, because I think women today have a different mindset. They're more career-oriented than we were.

03:28:34.480 - 03:28:52.440

And I think they're just more businesslike and more—because of the world we live in, I think they are better adapted to the flying that they probably will do than we would have been at that time. But the girls were very conscientious.

03:28:54.620 - 03:29:03.620

When we would take a 51 up, they would tell us to fly it at so many RPMs and everything to break in the engine. Now I hear you do not have to break in any engines, but at that time they would tell you what to do.

03:29:03.680 - 03:29:19.360

And we were very careful. Now some of the boys that made the trips with us were not that careful. They were doing aerobatics and they were doing whatever they pleased. One day, years later, I met a man who had been a mechanic in England that serviced the

03:29:19.420 - 03:29:34.020

51s. He said to me, "You would have been surprised at how many engine changes we had to make in England before they could fly them in combat." I thought, "I don't think that was any of the planes that the girls flew," because

03:29:34.080 - 03:29:47.980

I think all of the gals that I knew were very conscientious. We also knew they were watching us like hawks, you know. But I think the women really wanted to do it right. Kelly: And why do you think they were watching us?

03:29:49.100 - 03:30:00.820

Klemski: Because we were in a man's world. It definitely was a man's world. I can understand. I was very nice to the ground crews that serviced my planes.

03:30:01.960 - 03:30:12.560

I can remember the crew that took care of my 51 many times in El Paso. I was always very polite to them. I figured, "They are putting the gas in my plane. They are checking this and that.

03:30:12.560 - 03:30:25.140

I want everything to be right." I probably was nice to them partly for that reason. Besides, I like guys, and they were fun. I am used to talking to men, so I did not have any trouble making conversation, as you

03:30:25.160 - 03:30:39.140

can tell. But I found out that some of those guys that were pumping gas, were mechanics, were washouts from Randolph Field and things like that. And I thought, "Gosh, this has got to be tough."

03:30:39.140 - 03:30:56.440

For them to be putting gas in a—a 51 comes in there and a girl pilot steps out, and they are pumping gas on the ground, and they feel they should have been flying that too. I hurt for them. We were in their world, really, and we were so new in their world.

03:30:56.700 - 03:31:12.860

And I think, amazingly, they were wonderful to us. Now a couple of the girls that were back in the Wilmington area, or I think Jane Strawn, who was in my class, did not feel that way. She said they felt like they were picked on, but we never felt it at Long Beach.

03:31:12.940 - 03:31:28.940

I never talked to any of the girls that felt—I never even thought of the word "harassment." It was terribly disappointing to Chris Matthews. He was going to build on that. Let me ask you, of all the things you have done, and you have certainly done a lot of

03:31:28.940 - 03:31:46.980

things, what is the one thing that you are most proud of? Steele: Having three good sons I think probably is number one. But I am also very proud of having flown and felt that I did a good job. I played along the way.

03:31:46.980 - 03:32:05.880

I buzzed a few people in rowboats in the Gulf and things like that, made them jump out. Buzzed down in New Orleans, used to go along in 51s, because we took the southern route in the winter because the weather was better. We would go down over the trees and there were a lot of little farms in there and all

03:32:06.060 - 03:32:15.860

the woods and everything. We would just, you know, doing about three hundred miles an hour. They do not hear you very far ahead. I would go over and I could see chicken coops and chicken wire and everything.

03:32:15.900 - 03:32:36.320

I just knew that I was plastering the chickens up against the fence. One time I had a C-47, I was going into Nashville, and I was going east, and there was a little knoll there, and there was a little house right on top of this knoll. I was very low because it was a very rainy day, and I was just getting lower to start

03:32:36.380 - 03:32:49.600

getting close to Nashville. As I went over this house, I swear—the copilot didn't say, too, because it was my little co-pilot that day. Men came out of all sides of the house.

03:32:49.680 - 03:33:00.000

They came out of windows and everything, because we were very low over the roof. I guess it made quite a noise. They all had black hats on. They were a whole bunch of hillbillies, I guess.

03:33:00.240 - 03:33:09.680

Everybody had a black hat on. We both talked about it later. Everybody had a black hat on, but they just came out of the woodwork everywhere. I'm sure we startled them.

03:33:13.420 - 03:33:35.780

But we had so many funny experiences, too. I told you some of them already. If you could say something to children in future generations, give them some advice to encourage them to do things that they have dreamed of, what would you say to those children?

03:33:37.140 - 03:34:03.460

I would probably say just believe in yourself, study and work hard, and you can get to your goal no matter what it is if you just believe in yourself and try. Is there anything that I have left out or anything that you would like to talk about that I have forgotten to ask you?

03:34:04.780 - 03:34:20.400

No, I really feel very fortunate to have been a WASP. I would like to have gotten into the WAFs, but today I am very glad I did not because we had such good training, which the WAFs did not have. They may have had a couple more hundred hours.

03:34:20.580 - 03:34:42.340

Several WAFs only had five or six hundred hours or something when they got in. I had three hundred and fifty, but I got some very good training. One of the things that still amazes me is some of the planes that you were not checked out and they just tell you to go and read a tech order and sit in it until you were

03:34:42.380 - 03:34:52.240

comfortable and fire it up and take off. And even when I tell some of the men pilots that, they just cannot believe it, but it did happen. I am sure you know that.

03:34:53.700 - 03:35:09.340

And I do not remember the question you asked me. Kelly: Well, I asked about talking to children in the future that might watch this, or anything that I have left out. Martin: I think you have done a beautiful, beautiful job.

03:35:10.320 - 03:35:21.240

You brought up things I would not have thought of. I am sure the minute we leave that I will think of a lot more things. Kelly: Well, you have been a beautiful, beautiful person to talk to. Martin: And I have run you out of money and tapes, I am sure.

03:35:22.840 - 03:35:39.780

I have had a marvelous life. If I dropped dead tomorrow, I could not have a single regret except that I would like to be around for my kids, because I love them dearly. One lives on the west side of town, the other two live within two miles of me.

03:35:42.380 - 03:35:56.900

My grandson just went down to the university in Tucson this year, and he is very much into computers and everything. He is dying to learn to fly too. His father has a nice little Cessna 170, but he never has time to fly it anymore.

03:35:57.550 - 03:36:15.180

Maybe his grandmother can teach him. Is just the one son the pilot, or do the other two sons? My middle son, the muscle man, is a hand glider pilot, if you call him a pilot. He has flown gliders too, a glider and hand glider pilot.

03:36:15.470 - 03:36:28.360

He used to test hand gliders. He still has hurt feelings because I would not go out and watch him. I did not want to. He ran into a—it was on one of the mountains here one day.

03:36:28.460 - 03:36:39.860

They were testing him. A gust of wind picked him up and threw him right into a water tower and knocked him out. His two brothers were there that day. They rushed down.

03:36:39.920 - 03:37:01.320

They thought he was dead because he was out cold. I said, "Bruce, that is why I am not going to watch you." Also I remember showing off for my family and buzzing my grandmother's house in Oregon and buzzing my family's house in Honolulu when I really should not have, did not know

03:37:01.440 - 03:37:19.220

enough to be safe. And I do not want to have you show off for me, you know, and hit another water tower. But he still hurt because I would not go out. And my youngest, my oldest son is not as much of a pilot, but he has an ultralight, a two-place

03:37:19.660 - 03:37:35.480

ultralight, but he is never in town to fly it. But he wants me to fly in it with him, and I said, "No, I don't want to. I don't want to fly in a bicycle with a piece of cloth over it." And I said, "I have," which is true, "I have height phobia," whatever you call

03:37:35.560 - 03:37:48.440

that. "I don't ever feel that in an airplane, but I went up in the Eiffel Tower and I swear I could feel it swaying. Whenever I stayed in a hotel at night, when we would go into the hotel, sign up for a

03:37:48.440 - 03:38:01.260

room, I would say, "Do you have anything on the second floor?" Because I do not like being in Chicago on the 18th floor and looking out. I feel like I am going to step out the window and jump or something. But I never have that feeling in a plane.

03:38:01.730 - 03:38:16.180

Kelly: Can I ask you what you think the WASP taught you? What did you learn from being a WASP? It probably made me a lot more independent. It probably gave me more confidence in myself.

03:38:19.640 - 03:38:41.320

I think I still do have a self-esteem problem to some extent. You cover it with a lot of noise and talk and everything, but I think down inside I think of all the opportunities I've missed that I didn't do anything about, or the The things that I tried and did not work hard enough at and really become a major success

03:38:41.400 - 03:39:02.880

at, I just dabbled in this and dabbled in that and had a lot of interesting times. But I do not think I worked hard enough at any of the things I did, except maybe flying. Kelly: Well, you made it on the important thing. Klemski: Well, I was lucky there too sometimes.

03:39:03.020 - 03:39:22.440

I thought I would get washed out in line school because we were not supposed to, and I am sure you were not either, to have anything to do with the instructors. I had one instructor, I have forgotten his name again, that is good, Tall Sinfellow, who took a liking to me.

03:39:24.380 - 03:39:40.580

He kept asking me to go out with him. Some of the girls were going out with the instructors on the side. I think we were all lonesome. We were holed up in these places every night and everything, and it was a totally different

03:39:40.660 - 03:39:58.840

life and it wasn't very exciting nights and everything. So finally one day, he finally talked me into going down to Galveston, which was a couple hours away or something down on the water and spend the night. Separate rooms, he said.

03:39:59.900 - 03:40:12.800

Well, I do not know, but I decided I would go with him. We got down there. He picked me up and we drove down and we got there and he had a couple of drinks and he turned into an animal.

03:40:13.530 - 03:40:30.620

I mean, he made noises like an animal. I went up to my room—it was not two rooms, it was one room—went up to the room and he started—this was before dinner—started chasing me around the bed. And I thought, "Well, I guess I asked for this."

03:40:30.620 - 03:40:42.840

But I was so naive then. Even though I was married and everything, I was still naive about men and life. I just left and I went down. I said, "I want to go home."

03:40:42.840 - 03:40:52.680

Well he would not take me home. So here I am with no transportation in the evening. And so he finally did buy me dinner. We had dinner.

03:40:53.540 - 03:41:03.100

Then he thought maybe I would have a change of heart, but I did not. So he kept me waiting downstairs. I sat down in the lobby and he said he would be down. And he did not come down and did not come down.

03:41:03.180 - 03:41:19.580

And I am thinking, "How am I going to hire a cab or something to get back to Houston?" He finally came down at about 1130 at night to see if I had changed my mind, and I had not. And so we got in the car.

03:41:19.950 - 03:41:40.760

I put my little overnight bag in the car, and he never said a word to me the entire time back to Houston. And when we got back, he did not drive me to my apartment. He stopped about six or eight blocks away, and it is now like about two in the morning.

03:41:42.540 - 03:41:54.620

And he says, "Goodbye, have fun." And I got out of the car and walked home. Boy, that was a lesson. But it was my stupidity to say yes.

03:41:55.480 - 03:42:04.260

I believed him when he said two rooms, you know. And I thought, "Well, that would be kind of fun." They had a casino down there, it was gambling and everything. That is where we had been to gamble before, you know.

03:42:07.300 - 03:42:19.660

And guess what? The reason I say I thought I would be washed out, he never acknowledged that I was anything but thin air from then on. I mean every time he walked by me or anything, guess who I drew for my check flight at the

03:42:19.660 - 03:42:26.420

end? Him. So I thought, "That is it. He is going to wash me out right then."

03:42:26.420 - 03:42:37.140

He had never spoken to me. He did not speak to me when we got on the plane. I was scared to death. When we got out of the plane, he walked by me and did not even look, and he said, "Good

03:42:40.900 - 03:42:50.460

flight." And I was so relieved. I knew he was going to say, "You are out of here, baby." Kelly: Did you ever get a pink slip when you were flying?

03:42:50.470 - 03:42:55.340

Klemski: No. I got a broken tooth. Kelly: How did you get that? Klemski: These are not my teeth.

03:42:59.720 - 03:43:15.380

I guess it was a BT-13. I had been taught in Honolulu to do—I had a Japanese instructor. One of my instructors in Honolulu was the smoothest pilot. He ended up—he was the chief pilot for Hawaiian Airlines, Roy Imaki.

03:43:15.560 - 03:43:25.160

I just loved him dearly. He was a great guy. But he taught me—he kept saying, "Be smooth, be smooth, be smooth," you know. And he was the smoothest pilot I ever flew with.

03:43:25.520 - 03:43:38.520

I had another pilot who was a cowboy and he went jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, but Roy was just smooth. When I got back to Houston, I thought that is the way you flew. That is not the way the military wanted us to fly.

03:43:39.200 - 03:43:53.940

And I did not—we were doing spins one day, and you remember there was a metal mic hanging on a hook on the instrument panel? Well, I did not come out of a spin fast enough to suit the instructor, so we went up to do and he was going to show me how to do it.

03:43:53.980 - 03:44:08.900

So we did another spin and then he kicked it out. And he kicked it out so hard that the metal mic came up and hit me right in the mouth. I had a lip this big and I chipped one of my front teeth. I never forgave him for that.

03:44:09.860 - 03:44:25.160

But he said, "You cannot fly military planes. You have to kick them around." Do you have any funny stories about the relief tube? Klemski: Yes.

03:44:27.420 - 03:44:48.200

You knew I would. I was taking a plane—I think it was a BT as a matter of fact—to Chico, California, from Long Beach. We had to call in over each radio tower to say where we were, so if we went down they

03:44:48.280 - 03:45:11.480

would know we were within fifty miles or something. Wasn't there one every fifty miles along the airways, I think? So we called in and I had to go to the bathroom, but I was not too far away from Chico. I called the tower, or called the radio thing to report in, and they were talking to half

03:45:11.480 - 03:45:27.340

and other people. And they did not call back and they did not call back. And I had to go to the bathroom so badly I knew that I had to do it right then. So the BT-13 had the runners for your feet and then underneath was the big canvas sling

03:45:27.600 - 03:45:43.640

that covered all the radio equipment and everything. Well I got undressed and thought to heck with the thing. I will just keep flying and go on. I got undressed, I finally get the tube out and I have it cupped in the right place, hopefully,

03:45:44.960 - 03:46:00.080

and use it. And then the tower starts calling me back, calling me back. And I cannot answer because—and then that time the engine quits and I have to switch tanks and I have the cup in my hand and it will not go back under the seat.

03:46:01.940 - 03:46:17.620

And so I'm flying and talking and doing everything and I got the engine switched before it would kaput. And I got this thing and it's full of liquid. And I don't know, I'm jerking and jerking and then I think, "Well, I slide the canopy

03:46:17.780 - 03:46:27.340

back and pour it out." Oh no, no, I won't do that, I'll be right back in my face. So I'm sitting there and I'm getting closer to Chico and I said, "What am I going to do with this?"

03:46:27.340 - 03:46:43.300

And it is really jammed so that the tube will not go back in. And it is sitting there full and I thought, "Well, I cannot land this way. So I am just going to have to pour it into the canvas down there and hope it does not get on the radio equipment."

03:46:43.300 - 03:46:58.740

So I did that. And then the tube goes back in, gets out of the way. And so I am flying and I am looking down there and I keep seeing this liquid going like this. I think, "I have got to get rid of it.

03:46:58.840 - 03:47:14.140

They can replace the radio equipment." I start doing slips and skids, and I get the liquid right up to the side, but there was just enough of a curve I could never get it over. Then I do it the other way, and finally I realize I am going to have to land with it

03:47:14.160 - 03:47:25.020

in there, that is all. I am not going to write it up in the Form 1. They will see it. I just finally land in Chico, and I never got out of an airplane and got my headset

03:47:25.020 - 03:47:44.480

and everything so fast in my life, and just took off out of that airplane before the ground crew got to it and got in and checked everything in and got out of there. But I guess it did not ruin the radio equipment, but I am sure they were really shocked when they got to the plane.

03:47:44.580 - 03:47:55.900

But there was nothing else I could do. I have used them before and everything went fine. I never liked to do it because you have to get undressed to do it in a single airplane. And a single seater.

03:47:57.480 - 03:48:15.520

And I used to have—and the trouble is you often sat on the ground in these places waiting for weather to clear and you would drink coffee and drink coffee and drink coffee and then get it. Nancy wants to know if you ever had to fill out the Form 1 and talk about the relief tube

03:48:16.180 - 03:48:26.620

that had been used. Yes, I did once. I really used them. I guess I did eat all the other times, because it went back and went where it was supposed

03:48:26.720 - 03:48:36.620

to go. And I did not dare not do it, because if somebody took the plane up next and did a slow roll or something with it, they would be drenched. So I had to do it.

03:48:36.780 - 03:48:51.960

But I always got away from the plane fast before the ground crew could read what I had put in the form on. But it was something we did not want to do. I just did everything to keep—and the trouble was, when we would leave Long Beach, we would

03:48:51.960 - 03:49:16.120

The first stop was—wait a minute now, where am I? The first stop was usually Phoenix, but I hated to land in Phoenix because all the little cubs and everything had come in from the coast and were all here. We had one runway in Phoenix that was long enough for the 51s to land on.

03:49:16.320 - 03:49:36.340

There are terminals all there now, but it was the only one that was long enough for military planes. And it went south, east, northwest, and we were usually landing northwest. And all the little cubs and everything would be coming over and landing across us often.

03:49:36.840 - 03:49:48.420

We would be going down this direction and they are coming over us. And they had no radios and they were landing on green lights or red lights or something, you know. And they would just be hovering over us and right over top of us and we are rolling along

03:49:48.460 - 03:50:02.020

at a hundred miles an hour or something, you know. It was scary. So I did not like to come in there, because it was just swarming with planes. So I would have them fill the auxiliary tank, which was right behind the pilot seat, and

03:50:02.360 - 03:50:20.540

I would have them fill that. I think that held 175 gallons or something like that. We were not supposed to do it, but the ground crew would do it for me over at the factory. Then I could just take off in L.A. and fly direct route, not the airways or anything,

03:50:20.780 - 03:50:43.200

fly direct to El Paso and have about fifteen minutes' gas left. The other stop that you could make here in Phoenix, instead of Phoenix, was Coolidge, but it was just a little runway and a tiny little hangar, an auxiliary field, and it was right in the middle of all these farms with all the different colored lots and everything.

03:50:43.200 - 03:50:55.660

I could never find the thing. I just talked to another pilot, a commercial pilot, he said the same thing. He said, "You can never find it." It was just this little runway and there were all these patchy farms and everything around

03:50:55.700 - 03:51:10.140

it, so I had to go in there. And besides, it was very hot and there was nothing there but a little hangar. So that was easier to just fill the extra tank and fly direct to El Paso. And I had to go through a lot of mountains north of Tucson that way, and I used to say

03:51:10.180 - 03:51:27.260

a prayer because if I had to go down in any of those mountains, they would never have found me. I mean, that would have been it. And we carried.45s when we were flying 5170, because they had secret gun sights.

03:51:27.500 - 03:51:38.760

Kelly: Did you know how to fire them? Klemski: I had never fired a.45, no. They did not make us fire them. I carried mine in a shoulder holster, because if you had to make a forced landing in one,

03:51:38.840 - 03:51:54.620

you had to stand with it and guard the plane until they came and got it. And I was afraid if I had to bail out, I might need the gun to shoot a wolf or something that was trying to kill me. So I wanted the gun to go with me if I had to bail out.

03:51:55.560 - 03:52:08.720

So I carried a shoulder holster so that I could take it with me if I had to go. I never had any desire to bail out. Never, never. Kelly: I want to ask you one more question.

03:52:08.820 - 03:52:26.900

Did anybody ever stop you and wonder what in the heck you were? All the time, all the time. I may have told you this, I do not know, about being in Redding, California. Three of us were there and we were flying little L-5s, little Stinson observation planes,

03:52:27.160 - 03:52:40.280

about the size of Cubs, and we were flying to Tacoma, Washington, and it was just before Christmas. The weather was not very good and we could not get over the Siskiyous. So we were in Reading and we were there for ten days.

03:52:41.120 - 03:52:54.000

And we were there over Christmas and everything. And we were all in the hotels and we got bored to death. This little town, there was one theater in town, there was a bowling alley, and we did all of that.

03:52:54.580 - 03:53:04.420

But the theater, the movie didn't change in ten days, so we didn't want to see that again. It was a cowboy movie or something. And we bowled a couple of times and we got bored with that.

03:53:04.520 - 03:53:19.840

So we just—oh, some of the gals, we did not know from day to day whether we would be off the next day. We were in our pinks then, and I swear after ten days I could stand mine up in the corner and they would just stand there.

03:53:21.460 - 03:53:35.140

But anyway, we were window shopping on this Sunday. The three of us were bored to death. And so we were out just—some of the girls had had their hair done during the afternoons and things just to have something to do.

03:53:36.340 - 03:53:47.280

And so we were just looking in the windows on Sunday, everything was closed, and we got back to the hotel, there were three of us in the same room, and here was the sheriff sitting on one of our beds in our room. We unlocked the door and walked in there.

03:53:48.440 - 03:53:55.760

And with his badge on and everything, and he says, "Hi girls, how are you?" We said, "We're fine." "What are you doing here?" "Well, need to talk to you.

03:53:57.560 - 03:54:10.740

You'll have to come down to the station with us." We said, "What do we do? We're just walking around town looking at windows. Well he said, "You'll have to come down, we'll explain it."

03:54:10.740 - 03:54:26.280

We showed him our IDs, it doesn't mean a thing to him. He was a very nice man, very polite, so we got in his car, we went down to the station, it was Sunday afternoon, and we told him to call Long Beach to verify that we were who our IDs said we were.

03:54:27.020 - 03:54:43.920

And he called Long Beach and got some kid, I guess, on the other end of the line, and he asked about this kid, said he had never heard of him. I do not know whether he was being funny or whether he was just dumb. Anyway, then the guy turned back to us and said, "Now what, girls?

03:54:46.100 - 03:54:54.860

Explain yourselves." And we said, "Try the number again and ask for an officer or the CO or something. We are legitimate. We are based in Long Beach."

03:54:54.700 - 03:55:06.560

So he called back and he got a major on the phone and he says, "Yes, they are WASPs, they are based here. Yes, they are supposed to be flying with planes. Yes, it is legal for them to wear officers' uniforms."

03:55:06.560 - 03:55:25.520

And it turned out there was an operational training base for fighter planes just east of town, and the wife of one of the pilots over there had been driving through town and saw three of us walking around in our uniforms and reported us to the sheriff. There are three girls walking around town impersonating officers.

03:55:28.680 - 03:55:40.420

But I had been taken in a small town one night. I was by myself. I had a split prop on a little L-5 or something. I was taking to Reading, Pennsylvania, and I had to wait while I flew in another prop.

03:55:41.640 - 03:55:56.280

I was in this little town. I do not know whether it was Vicksburg or someplace like that down there. I went out for dinner. left the hotel and went down the street for dinner. And this woman, little old woman with

03:55:56.320 - 03:56:15.560

a cane, came across the street and called to me, "Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! I want to talk to you!" So she came over, it was not a very wide street, and she came over and she said, "I have to know what you are. Does your husband work in an aircraft factory? Is that why you have wings on?"

03:56:15.560 - 03:56:32.740

And I said, "No, I'm a ferry pilot." "Oh," she said, "now I understand we don't have any ferry boats in our town." But we had funny things like that happen. You've led a wonderful life.

03:56:32.980 - 03:57:01.820

Well, I think we had more fun being in the Ferry Command, had a lot more things happen. But you, my goodness, I want to hear about you too, because you flew—I flew a B-52 B-26, it had number 13 on the tail. First one I'd ever been in. And I had to fly it from Grand Isle, where it was modified, to Cheyenne at night or late afternoon. And when

03:57:01.880 - 03:57:23.420

I saw that number 13, later it turned out to be my lucky number, not on the plane, but since then 13 is my lucky number. But that day I sweat a little. And then they made me take my parachute off. I was co-pilot on that trip. They made me take my parachute off and leave it in the back of the plane. The pilot too. I did not like that because I had heard

03:57:23.420 - 03:57:35.320

a lot about B-26s and I wanted my parachute to be close by just in case. And then with the 13. Kelly: Yeah, Wannabe and Tampa Bay. That's what they—

03:57:36.020 - 03:57:46.220

Klemski: I'm happy. This is extraordinary. It's absolutely extraordinary. Klemski: And I'll think of all the best things that I didn't tell you when I got

03:57:46.310 - 03:57:50.640

home. [Laughter.] Klemski: All the best things that were coming back. This is—

03:57:50.640 - 03:57:57.720

Kelly: They couldn't get any better. Klemski: No, it— Klemski: Oh, we've had a—well, you're very sweet to say that. I'm sure you have had better ones than that.

03:57:58.120 - 03:58:07.380

who told about the real things that happened, not just funny things. Well, they are, but there are real things that happen. They are real. Everything you've talked about is real.

03:58:09.280 - 03:58:24.780

We had so many funny things. One day I took off in El Paso with 51 going east, and I had my radio on, of course, and I heard these guys talking. Maybe I told you this already, did I, Nancy?

03:58:26.920 - 03:58:45.080

They were telling jokes, I mean really dirty jokes, on the air and I just, I sat there and chuckled at them and then finally I thought, after they told three or four and they were laughing and talking back and forth, talking about girlfriends and everything, I punched the mic button and made a comment.

03:58:46.620 - 03:59:00.540

And there was dead silence for what seemed like a minute, nobody said a word. And finally one guy said, "Jo, that sounded like a girl." Joe says, "Nah, there aren't any girls on this frequency. There are no girls on this frequency."

03:59:00.540 - 03:59:08.380

They went back and forth. There were three or four of them. They were flying formation. This was an operational training base at Roswell, New Mexico, which is, what, 100, 200 miles

03:59:08.420 - 03:59:18.580

away from me. They went on talking, and I didn't say any more. Then finally I came in, and I said, "Yes, there are girls on this frequency." They were shocked.

03:59:18.700 - 03:59:39.640

Then we had quite a conversation, and I went my way, and they went on with their—but But it was fun talking to people that you never see. In this C-47, this one trip where the husband of my co-pilot was flying a 51 and my boyfriend was flying a B-25, when they all left us, mine had to go to Wichita and he had to head

03:59:39.720 - 03:59:57.860

for Newark, and we had just passed Kansas City. And when they said goodbye and left instantly almost, these men's voices came in and said, "Hey, gals, where are you?" And we said, "We just passed Kansas City."

03:59:57.860 - 04:00:13.860

And he says, "We're in a B-17 and we're just approaching Kansas City. If you gals will turn your plane around, we'll buy you dinner." But it was fun passing people in the night, sort of, you know, never meeting them. Just strange, fun experiences.

04:00:14.520 - 04:00:27.240

Kelly: I hope you write down so much of what you talked about. I've got about 20,000 words written, but God, everybody in the world has written a book. If I write one, it's going to be about the funny stuff, not the "we won the war"

04:00:27.520 - 04:00:28.040

kind of thing.