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Let's talk about that just a minute because one of the things that I tell kids is this, what you're doing now is important. And if you have any notion of what your goals might be, even though they're pretty nebulous, you know, when you're 12 years old, what do you know about what you want to do with your life? Not much. But you think, okay, I'd like to work in the

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medical field or something. Whenever you have an option, you evaluate it for three ways. Is it going to help my goal? Do it. If it's going to be detrimental to my goal, don't do it. And if you don't know, don't do it. Good for you. That's great. Okay, I'm rolling. Okay, I'm Deanie Parish and we're in the home of Millicent Young in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She was a WASP class 44-10. Today is the 16th of September, 2000. Okay, Millie, if you will tell us your name. My name is Millicent, that's M-I-L-L-I-C-E-N-T, Amanda Peterson, B-E-T-E-R-S-O-N, Young. Y-O-U-N-G. I was born

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in Cheyenne County, Nebraska on December the 22nd of 1922. To George Hazlett, H-A-Z-E-L-E-T-T-E, and Mary Bell, B-E-L-L-E, Evison, E-V-I-S-O-N, Peterson. Great. Millie, did you have siblings? Tell us about them. I had six siblings. My sister Mary, who was 18 months older than I. I'm sorry. My sister Mary, who was 18 months younger than I, also born in Cheyenne County, Nebraska. My brother George Robert Peterson, born in Cheyenne County, died when he was six months old. My sister Isabel, who died when she was two and a half in Duell County, that's D-E-U-E-L, County, Nebraska. My brother Gail, G-A-I-L, Welty, W-E-L-T-Y, born in Duell County, Nebraska. And my brother Richard Dale, also born in Duell County, and my sister Madeline Kay, born in Duell County.

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Millie, what are your earliest recollections of growing up in Duell County, Nebraska? My earliest memories go back to Cheyenne County. One of my earliest memories has to do with my little brother. My father worked at the sugar beet factory, which was about twenty miles away at Ovid, Colorado, after the farm work was done. And my mother would milk the cows and do the family chores. And I was the eldest, and she would leave me in charge. My sister Mary was strapped in her high chair. My brother was in his buggy. And we had an old coal stove, you know, to cook on. And Mom had been sitting back on the back side of the stove, a pan full of sauerkraut with pork chops in it.

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And Bobby started to cry. Well, I was nobody's fool. I knew exactly what you do with this crying kid. You feed him. So I pushed him up to the stove, and I got my chair up to the stove. And I was reaching over to get a big forkful of the sauerkraut, and just pushing it in his face as my mother came through the door. And I probably wouldn't have remembered this except for the horrible expression on her face. So she saved his life for then. That's my earliest memory. Tell me about growing up on a farm. Did you have chores?

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Oh, yes. From the time you're born, you have chores, it seems to me. We had no electricity. We had no gas. We had no running water on the farm in Cheyenne County. So the water was carried, the fuel was carried, and you had kerosene lamps. One of the interesting things that I don't think many people think about is that when you have gas lights, as they did in the cities, or if you have kerosene lamps, the lights are soft. And so when people do have electricity, at the beginning they used to say, "We're going to turn on the light," because the light would be so bright.

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You may remember that those bulbs were not soft lights. They were all bright, you know, clear. We had chores. My earliest chores were picking up cobs to do the cooking with. And my, you know, whoever was big enough would pick up cobs to, usually out of the hog pen. Excuse me just a minute, can we stop just a second? I've got a little...

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Well, we can go on now. We're rolling. As you got older, your chores increased, of course. I learned to milk cows, to feed the hogs. I had to pump water for the livestock that were in the corrals.

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And since I was the eldest, I got to do most of these things. We... What was your dad mainly farming? We had thirteen different harvests. We had a bottom farm.

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The farm was on both sides of the Lodgepole River, which you could jump across at most places. It's now dry, I understand. But we had potatoes, we grew sugar beets. This is in Dool County, not in Cheyenne. Cheyenne, it was wheat. We grew wheat, we had livestock.

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My dad and I went into the livestock business when I was sixteen. Dad was in the livestock business, but I joined him. I bought cattle. What was your favorite chore? I didn't like any of them.

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One of the things that we had to do prior to the time that you... You know, to pick the corn, snap the corn. The difference between snapping and husking has to do with skill and the equipment you use. To husk a corn, you had a kind of a glove that fit over your palm with a hook on it.

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If you do it just right, you could grab that hook and grab the corn and pop it off and the husk would stay there. Then you'd throw the corn into the wagon, hit the bang board on the other side, and you'd throw it in. If you were snapping, which is what I did because I was not a good husker, you had the same equipment except no hook, and you'd just break them off and throw them in.

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We had to do that every morning before I went to school because we didn't have any feed for the livestock. We'd have to pick them for the day until we got the corn picked because we had thirteen crops. We had hay, three hay. We had alfalfa. We had natural hay. That was one of my first big farm jobs was running the piece of equipment called the bull rake or the sweep.

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When you're stacking hay, I don't know how much people know about stacking hay. The person who is skilled in the hay stacking business is a guy on the stack because he has to distribute the hay in such a fashion that the hay stack doesn't slide off. But first you cut the hay and then you leave it out there.

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In western Nebraska it's dry so you didn't usually have to turn it or ted it. Occasionally you did. Then you would rake it into windrows and then you'd come with the bull rake or the sweep, which is what I called it. It was a piece of equipment that was in front of the horses. You had wooden prongs go out and they had sides on it.

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You'd pick up a load of hay and then drive it over to the stacker, which had corresponding shapes with the forks on the bottoms and on the side. You'd drop the hay on them and then the stacker team— I guess that was my first job, was driving the stacker team.

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You'd talk to them and then they'd lift that stack, that piece of the stacker, and it would throw the hay up over and onto the ground. The guy that was building the stack would immediately start spreading it so that it would be a secure piece of equipment.

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Almost nobody does that now because they have those huge roller bundles. But in those days you had lots of stacks. Now there's about three or four different ways to do things. In western Nebraska we never had to put hay in the hay mound because it was dry out there.

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We did it sometimes just for convenience for feeding the livestock, but usually not. Did you help your mother cook for all these kids? Well, yeah, I learned to cook. So when I was in the seventh grade I made my first dress with nobody helping me.

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Let me ask you your earliest recollections of going to school. What kind of a school did you go to? I went to the city school, kindergarten. How did you get there?

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Mostly my father took me, but I sometimes walked, and I walked home. It was three and a quarter mile. What would you do in the wintertime? My father would take me or he'd take me to the nearest neighbor, and then they would take us.

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I walked home on good weather. One time my mother told me who I could ride with, and we had to cross a railroad track. There were lots of trains in those days, and I knew the engineers, you know, at Wavab. But one time my uncle, who lived in California or someplace, came to pick me up,

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and I wouldn't get in the car with him. I knew who he was, but my mother hadn't told me that I could ride with him, so I wouldn't get in the car with him. Do you remember any of your teachers and elementary school?

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I sure do. The kindergarten teacher was a terrible woman. She slapped your hands with rulers if you turned a head. Let me tell you, this business of reading seespot. So one of the kids learned to read a dong. We read exciting stuff like Chicken Little.

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The sky was falling, my gosh, and we weren't allowed to turn a head because it wasn't fair to the rest of them. Heck, we couldn't read. What was wrong with that woman? She'd whack your hand if you got a head.

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But we learned to read Chicken Little, not see spot, see spot run. She was mean, too. Let me see. Most of my teachers were pretty good. At the eighth grade, we had a principal who should never have been allowed to be near children. She'd been put away, actually.

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What was her problem? It was a man. Well, he was lazy, and he thought it was our job to amuse him. He conned the school board into buying movies and solar systems,

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and he would play the movies forwards and backwards, like old stereopican things. They were people diving into the water, and he was terrible. What do you remember about your grandparents? Tell me about those. My grandfather, Peterson, was born, I believe, in the United States, but I'm not sure.

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He may have come through the Port of New Orleans. He went to Rock Island, Illinois. His wife, Amanda Haack, H-A-A-C-K, was from Gothenburg, Sweden. She was twelve years old. She came to this country with a sign on her saying where to go.

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Her father had been relatively well off. He owned his own boat, and he had a small crew, and they would fish in the North Sea. He would take his fish then to the mothership. Somehow or other, they were separated from the mothership,

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and my great-grandfather's legs were frozen and therefore amputated. He had three daughters and no way to make a living. So he sent his eldest, my grandmother, to this country with that sign on her. She went to an uncle who was a professor at Augustana College in Rock Island.

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He was not a very nice man. She was taken away from him by the authorities. She helped some people take care of children, and she attended the Augustana University Elementary School and apparently progressed to the point where she actually went to the college for a while as a full-time student.

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Then she married Peter Robert Peterson and moved to Henry County, Illinois. They had ten children. My father was the third. And as you were growing up, what contact did you have with those grandparents? They lived a hundred miles from us.

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My dad had run away from home when he was about seventeen or eight. No, he was older than them. Anyway, we saw them with some frequency. My grandmother, they ran a farm. They had all those other kids.

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They would send the daughters out to help my mother whenever we had children, when she'd have a baby. Grandmothers, all the grandmothers came out to take care of me because I was the first grandchild on either side to survive infancy. There were two born before me, but died within a day or two in another family.

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And then they adopted a daughter who was older than I, but after I was born. My grandmother, Edison, whose name was Coffman, C-O-F-F-M-A-N, her father was a conductor on the Union Pacific. Grandmother was the eldest of three children, and her name was Millicent.

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And are you named after her? I'm named after both my grandmothers. The one from Sweden's name was Amanda Sofia, and Millicent Rhoda Coffman was my mother's mother.

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And she was born someplace in Illinois, but I don't know where. She rode across to Western Iowa in a Conestoga wagon. I was secured in a high chair on the back of the Conestoga wagon. This grandmother was kind of interesting. They both were.

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Because Grandma Peterson ran that place, let me tell you. Grandpa didn't stand a chance. She was a forceful woman. And Grandpa was not. And Grandmother Edison went when she—probably early in the 1890s—

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went to the Pine Ridge out in South Dakota to teach the Indians. One of her students' names was Theresa Walks Around, and Theresa was a graduate of Carleisle University. Grandmother got all kinds of gifts,

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and she was kind of taken under the wing of Dr. Charles Eastman, who wrote twelve books about being an Indian. He was an Indian with an Anglo name, and he graduated from the Dartmouth Medical School.

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And if you get a chance to read his books, they're reissued. But Grandma did not take care of the artifacts that were given to her. She had no more history sense than I. We had the war club.

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Then she married my grandfather, who had been a jockey. When he was sixteen, he weighed seventy-two pounds with his saddle. He was a small man. Grandma was five foot ten, and Grandpa was about five foot five, maybe, when he grew up.

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He was a commission man for—I don't remember what company in Chicago. A commission man in those days would go out and talk to the farmers and make a deal to buy the livestock that was there, you know, cattle. And then the company would have the obligation of shipping the cattle,

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and there was an advantage there, because if you shipped a lot of cattle, you got a deal from the railroad company. If you shipped a few, you didn't get a deal. So that was Grandpa's job.

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Then he was a farmer in Iowa until Mother got sick with tuberculosis, and they told him to go west, so they moved to Cedric, Colorado, and then back into DeWalt County, Nebraska. Mother was sixteen when they left Iowa.

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-During the summertime, would you get vacations? What would you do? -From what? -From school. -Yes. -Would you go someplace on vacation? -No.

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We farmed. We worked. I grew up during the Depression. It was a matter of getting food on the table. I did the truck farming.

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By fall time, I would take the melons and corn and anything else we had that had survived through the hails and that sort of thing that plagues western Nebraska and eastern Colorado and sell it in town.

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I started driving when I was ten years old. I drove everybody to school, and even one of the neighbors allowed me to take their kindergartner with them. They must have been mad.

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-And growing up, do you remember any tornadoes? -Oh, yeah, but they were at night. I saw the results, not the tornado. -Millie, tell me what a Christmas was like in your home as you were growing up.

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-Well, it depended on when we're talking about. My folks had--I got books and dolls, which I usually threw in the horse tank. I didn't much like dolls. They'd spend a lot of money to get a doll with real hair.

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I didn't like them much. -Would you have a Christmas tree, and where would you get it? -Well, the only time we had a Christmas tree is when the school gave it to us. The city kids got Christmas trees.

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It would never have occurred to my parents to spend money on a Christmas tree, nor me when it comes right down to it. I don't like the nuisance of a Christmas tree to this day. We always got gifts, usually stuff I didn't like.

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-Would you hang your stockings? -Yes, and we got oranges in them, and nuts and candy and stuff like that. -How long did you live out on the farm? -Till I left, till I was 19.

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-Let me ask you about junior high school, for example. -We didn't have a junior high. The division was 8-4. -Okay. Well, then we'll talk about high school. Do you remember any special teachers in high school that influenced you?

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-All of them influenced me, some of them adversely, some of them positively. -Let's talk about the positive ones. -That's an interesting thing, because I thought the worst teacher in school, my brother-in-law thought was the best teacher in school, so there you are.

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Mrs. Smith, I can't remember what her name was, when she was single, seemed to know everything, and she could do almost anything. I don't know that there was any obvious encouragement. I just kind of admired her, that's all.

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-Could you tell me about the discipline with children then as compared to now in school? -Well, I am told that the principal at the elementary level, especially from the fifth grade through the eighth grade, that the principal used to take them in and spank them with paddles.

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I don't know if that's true. He threatened to do that to me, but he knew better. My mother would have ruined him and my father would have been right behind her to clean up. But I was not a nice kid. I was sassy to them. I had no respect. That's a principal I thought was such an awful man, had no respect.

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-How did they discipline you when you would fast back out of school? -They threatened me. They didn't do anything. -Did you have detention after school? -Good heavens, no.

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I was driving all those kids to school. I had band before school, orchestra after school, play practice after school. -Where did you get your love of music? -Well, before radios and things, people used to sing a lot.

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The kids learned the nursery rhymes when they were very young. They didn't know the ads, they knew nursery rhymes. -Did you have any kind of musical instruments at home? -I played the saxophone. Mother played the piano, sort of, but we didn't have a piano.

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But Mother knew how to play. I played the saxophone, my sister played the viola. I also played the bassoon and the bass vio. I couldn't read the music, but I memorized it and played it in the orchestra.

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I sang alto in trios and quartets and in the choir. I played saxophone solos and entered into competition and got excellent ratings and so-so ratings. -When you would have competitions, would you go out of town? -Oh, yes.

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-And how would you get to those competitions? -People drove us. Parents drove us. -When you were in high school, did you also have other interests? Drama, for example. -I was in drama.

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-Tell us about that. -I played in all the plays that I was eligible to enter. From the time I was in the third grade, I was in every play I was eligible. In the third grade, they had people try out to be posed pansies and butterflies and things,

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and they never let me be one. But I got to be the emcee. I was Mother Goose. Before that, I danced in the Maypole Dance, but I was particularly awkward. There was a boy that, he and I were both awkward and scared of the stage.

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I thought I'd fall off, and he pissed me, and I hit him with my lunch bucket. -Did he ever try that again? -No. His parents tried to get my parents to pay for his doctor's visit, but they wouldn't do it.

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They said he should have known better. But Mother made me carry that same dented lunch bucket the whole time. Part of the time, Mary and I rode to school on a horse. The horse's name was Dunn, and she was.

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She'd had 19 colts, and she was the hardest riding horse I ever saw. We'd get off and walk until we got close to home. Then we'd both get on the horse and ride into the yard. [laughter]

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-When you were in high school, what were your social activities outside of school? Did you have dances? -Well, yeah, they were outside of school and not school-connected. I went to Russian wedding dances over at Ovid, Colorado.

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That was fun. My parents were opposed to dancing and card-pulling, but they let us do it. -What was your favorite subject in high school? -Probably English. I don't know. Probably.

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-What were your goals? -To get a degree in college. In my family, we never discussed if you went to college. They always said, "Well, when you go to school or to college, this and this and this."

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-What were your goals for college? What were you going to be? -Well, I went there. First, I think I should mention the fact that--

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And these were kind of social activities. I was a school reporter to the county paper, which came out weekly, the chapel register. I was on the junior member of the fair board, and the 4-H. I was involved with the 4-H.

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But I had a scholarship to attend the Ag College, so that kind of set things. The Union Pacific Railroad had the Carl Raymond Gray Scholarships. For any county that the railroad went through, they offered four scholarships a year, I guess. There was one from the high school for boys and one for girls,

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and then there was one through the 4-H for each of them. And I earned mine--the first student ever to earn one as a junior. But we had to do that because we had too many kids to crowd in that needed the scholarships, so I decided to get mine early.

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So I went on a Carl Raymond Gray Scholarship and had to attend the Ag College, and that was all right. I thought maybe I'd like to represent General Mills or something in South America, and so I took some Spanish courses in college and decided that I did not go to South America. I have no talent with languages at all.

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I was going to ask you, in high school when you were in the band, did you have uniforms? Oh, yes. And did you enter competition with other schools? Yes. We always did well.

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Out in western Nebraska, everything was competition. You'd go to Scotts Bluff and to Grant and to Ogallala and all over. Sometimes there were just joint band concerts. People would come from miles around, but there was also the competitions.

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Do you remember a favorite play that you were in in high school? I remember the favorite play. I don't remember the name of it or anything, and it was about--except that I was a perfectly horrible woman. And the person that followed along behind me, my husband, I would make a statement,

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and I'd turn to him and say, "What do you think?" And he'd say, "Perhaps you are right, my dear." I've used that in social work a lot. You don't confess to anything. It's wide open.

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When you were working on the news of your class book or whatever you were doing there-- We didn't have class books. All we had was pictures. No, I was the school reporter. Did you take journalism courses also?

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At the university I did. I had a couple of articles actually published. When you were in college? Yeah.

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When you were a senior in high school, tell me about your high school prom. I think we had the Hawaiian--well, we had two. You had the junior and senior. They were two. You had one junior and then the senior.

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I made my own dress, and the home ec teacher said it was awful, and it may have been. I made a bright red heavy satin slip with big ruffles on the bottom, and I covered it with white organdy. I thought it was gorgeous, but it probably didn't.

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Did you have a date for the prom? Yes. Tell me about that. Somewhere along in my senior year I decided I needed a date, because I had the car.

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See, I'd been driving since I was ten, so everybody rode with me. I decided I needed a date, so I punched this guy, stuck him with sharp pointed needles, and dropped books on his head. I got his attention.

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Then for my birthday I invited him to my birthday party, and we were an item thereafter until I went to Oshkosh to a roller skating rink. There was a woman there in a purple taffeta dress. Her brothers were going to throw me down the steps.

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I never heard of a roller rink on the second floor, but these did. But he ended up being my boyfriend. He didn't bother to ask me to the dance. It upset me, but he showed up.

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He knew I had this gorgeous dress with the purple red slip and the white taffeta, or the white gorgandy. What kind of a student were you in high school? I was in the upper fourth of my class, which meant that I was number four in the class,

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because there were 45 students in my class. I was not a real good student. What was your graduation like from high school? Well, I was a speaker.

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How did you get to be a speaker? Well, I just did. I don't remember that I volunteered or that he asked me or what. Do you remember your speech or something?

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I remember the subject. There's nothing the matter with youth but youth, and time will remedy that. I went on and on about it. You know, the Depression was a horrible time.

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Part of the time I only had one dress. We always had plenty to eat, but clothes were a real problem. When I had medical problems, my feet needed expensive shoes, for instance. I suppose I should go back and answer your question.

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I'd been making presentations to public from the time I was nine at church and at school. I would make speeches at school and in church. So I suppose that's how I got to be a speaker. It wasn't because of my academia.

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I was going to ask you, out on the farm, did your dad have some hired hands or did just you children help him? When I was young, we had a hired hand. Then when I was 14, my father and I had a conference.

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Dad said, "Here's the deal. I've got to have help on this place. Now if you help me, I will help you when you go to college. If you cannot, then I'll have to hire somebody to do that.

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If I don't have to hire anybody, we'll put the money aside and buy cattle, and then we'll have that income for you for school." I got to thinking about that. You know, that's pretty heavy duty.

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When I was 14, my dad's asking me to enter into what I thought was a serious agreement, and it was. My father didn't do things that weren't serious in situations like that. So I agreed, and at that time I decided that I better have some goals.

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So that's when I made the goals. I had on my list I was going to graduate from the university. I decided that I needed to get married and have some kids. I decided that I would learn to do things that were fun, like play cards and dance.

00:35:00.600 - 00:35:34.600

And I decided that I would learn to operate every kind of a piston-driven engine. I had no goal to drive a train engineer, to be a train engineer, for instance. So I did learn to operate small boats, airplanes, tractors, trucks, combines, everything. I did my father's wheat farming from the time I was 14 until I went to the university.

00:35:34.600 - 00:35:51.600

That's kind of how I got in to get the money to fly, if you're at all. Should we talk about that now or later? Let me ask you, when is the first time that you remember seeing an airplane? I was seven.

00:35:51.600 - 00:36:15.600

I was seven. The family known as Gladys and Allen, one word, lived about a third of a mile from us up a hill. There was a little road in front of their house, a narrow lane, and they had hilly land. In front of the road on our side, we had a relatively flat area.

00:36:15.600 - 00:36:39.600

It was sloped a bit, but it was flat. Gladys had a brother who lived in California who was a pilot. He also had a wife and a daughter. Somewhere along the time, I believe I was seven, they called and asked to say they were coming out to visit Gladys and Allen.

00:36:39.600 - 00:36:57.600

So they made arrangements for them to land on our land, which was where the cattle were, the milk cows and things. I knew about this. The day they nailed the sheet to the roof of the house, I watched and watched. I watched for what seemed like months.

00:36:57.600 - 00:37:17.600

It probably was two or three days. I finally saw the airplane circling. I may have seen planes high in the air before that, because there were planes flew by, I think, before that. But anyway, I saw that guy circling, so I ran as hard as I could go up that third of a mile.

00:37:17.600 - 00:37:35.600

By the time I got there, they had landed and they were emptying the vehicle. The first thing the pilot said was, "Little girl, don't touch the airplane." Of course, he had some justification, because it was a cloth and dope skin. But I thought that was pretty dumb.

00:37:35.600 - 00:37:57.600

Mother had to get the kids in the car, and she had to go through gates and all kinds of things. So it was a long time before she showed up, so I snuck around and touched that airplane. When you said, "Put the sheets on the house," what did you do? On the roof. They were nailed to identify the house from the air, so the guy would know where to land.

00:37:57.600 - 00:38:15.600

He didn't know where they lived. And then after that, did that give you your first love of flying? I don't know. The first interest. Then Lemberg flew, that whole fiasco.

00:38:15.600 - 00:38:38.600

Mother and Dad talked about that a lot. That kind of impressed me. The next thing that happened was that I had a ride in a tri-motor Ford. After the harvest, we're in the middle of the Depression, this was 1933 or '34.

00:38:38.600 - 00:39:02.600

The barnstormers would come by to try to make a living. It was $5 a person to fly, and it was just a short flight. Anyway, we heard that they were going to leave, so my dad came in and handed my mother $25. My sister Mary, my brother Gail, my brother Richard, who was three, and I.

00:39:02.600 - 00:39:19.600

He says, "Take the kids and go flying." We all got in the car, and the plane took off. We were driving down the road, down a road that was seldom traveled. It was after the grain trucks had driven by them, and it was real bumpy and stuff.

00:39:19.600 - 00:39:33.600

The plane took off, and my little brother screamed and said, "They're leaving! They're leaving!" My brother hit a big bump, and he bit right through his tongue. There was blood. He started to cry. Mom says, "Anybody cries, and nobody flies."

00:39:33.600 - 00:39:50.600

So there wasn't a sound. We got there, and Mother wouldn't get in the airplane. She said, "If they crash, who's going to take care of Dad?" I thought that was pretty wild, all of her treasures being on the plane and all.

00:39:50.600 - 00:40:15.600

But I was disappointed in the flight, because they just flew around and then landed. Then the next thing that happened was Evelyn Sharp was in the Omaha World Herald as the youngest licensed pilot in the United States that day. It was her sixteenth birthday, and she had her license on her sixteenth birthday.

00:40:15.600 - 00:40:32.600

I thought, "Shoot, if that girl can do that, so can I." Then I started reading books about it, so I knew that flight in the tri-motor Ford was not the way it was. That was pretty dull. So that's why I decided to fly.

00:40:32.600 - 00:40:38.600

Okay. That changed everything. Good, good, good. Excuse me.

00:40:38.600 - 00:40:51.600

Okay. I'm developing interest in A.V. aviation. Okay. When you graduated from high school, then what did you do that summer, for example?

00:40:51.600 - 00:41:14.600

Well, I cooperated with the farm practices. The thing is that people had different harvests, and people would go from one farm to another to help operate things. I worked in people's houses fixing dinner for the threshing crews and stuff like that. But mostly I farmed.

00:41:14.600 - 00:41:42.600

I was doing what they called summer till. In western Nebraska, it takes two years to grow a crop of wheat, winter wheat they call it, and you plant it in the fall. First you keep the weeds down and you conserve as much moisture as possible. Then you plant it in the fall, and then you harvest it the following July or August.

00:41:42.600 - 00:42:13.600

I was doing all my father's wheat farming. That was my job, my main job. Then when I was seventeen, it seems to me, I got his wheat farming done. We had a neighbor that had a relative that had some land over in Biovid, Colorado.

00:42:13.600 - 00:42:30.600

He had rented it to farm it, and it became very, very sick, and nobody wanted to farm it. I called him up and I said, "I'd farm it." I said, "I'll take it over, I'll sublet it for me." He said, "Well, I've got to have $40 for the plowing."

00:42:30.600 - 00:42:40.600

I said, "Dad, I've rented this land." He said, "Well, be healthy." I said, "I need $40 for the plowing." He said, "I don't have $40."

00:42:40.600 - 00:42:57.600

He said, "If it's a good deal, the banker will loan you the money." We went to the bank. I'm seventeen. I told them I wanted to borrow $40, and they said they would loan me $40. That they would loan me $40 plus enough money to buy some crop insurance,

00:42:57.600 - 00:43:20.600

which was primarily hail insurance, so that they wouldn't be out there forty bucks. I owed them about $100, including interest and things. I farmed the land, and we had a good crop. The way things work in western Nebraska, they don't talk about sharecropping,

00:43:20.600 - 00:43:45.600

though that I suppose is what it is. The farmer plants, furnishes the seed, the labor, the gas, and the equipment, and the landowner offers the land itself, and for that they get a third of the crop. You take the crop in to the grain elevator,

00:43:45.600 - 00:44:01.600

and you sign the load slips after they test it for protein and moisture and all the things that they check for. You put the landowner's name on it too, with their address, so that everybody knows who gets what.

00:44:01.600 - 00:44:23.600

I signed all my load slips in Peterson. I had a good crop at $800, but I could have bought the land for that. It was the first time in something like seven years these people had gotten enough income from that land to pay the taxes.

00:44:23.600 - 00:44:44.600

By this time I'm eighteen, so I'm off to college. They came out, they were so excited, but they didn't know who I was. They went to the grain elevator, and they said they wanted to talk to M. Peterson. They wanted to know what he was doing with his life, because they wanted me,

00:44:44.600 - 00:44:58.600

M. Peterson, to rent that land. The grain elevator man looked at them for a while, and he said, "Well, I think she's gone to college." He said, "She? We don't approve of women in the fields."

00:44:58.600 - 00:45:14.600

So he went out and tried to get my dad to rent the land. My father said, "My daughter's one of the best wheat farmers in this community, and if she didn't please you, I wouldn't. And besides, she does all my wheat farming, every bit of it."

00:45:14.600 - 00:45:31.600

So they gave it to somebody else and didn't get the taxes back again. By this time, of course, the war's on, or it's 1942 or something. So then they came out and tried to rent it to me. That was gutsy, don't you think?

00:45:31.600 - 00:45:47.600

My father said, "Well, she's off flying airplanes for the Army Air Corps." That was the last I heard of those folks. But I took the money, and I conned my mother into taking me to town to take the bus. I was going to go see some friends.

00:45:47.600 - 00:46:01.600

As I got out of the car, I told her, "Mom, I'm going to go fly." So she got in the car and drove home, and Dad came in later that morning. It was real early when I left. I said, "Well, I got a little chore for a million."

00:46:01.600 - 00:46:09.600

Mom said, "Well, she's gone to learn to fly." And my dad said, "What the hell are you saying?" And that's all they ever said. And I wasn't 21.

00:46:09.600 - 00:46:21.600

They didn't tell me not to fly. So I didn't. What do you think it was that gave you that desire? Well, it was on my list.

00:46:21.600 - 00:46:31.600

It was an engine that I couldn't operate. I don't know. I'd read the romantic stories about flying. I'd read those.

00:46:31.600 - 00:46:41.600

Was this airport in your little hometown? No, it was in Ogallala. Ogallala is 40 miles away. Ogallala, Nebraska.

00:46:41.600 - 00:46:58.600

And you did that you would go over and learn to fly? Yeah, and I did. And I worked in town taking utility money for the guy that was collecting. He was an insurance agent.

00:46:58.600 - 00:47:11.600

He had a son that was a little creep. He asked me if I wanted to go canoeing on Lake McConaughey, and I said, "Well, yes." Well, he didn't want to go canoeing. I had to swim home.

00:47:11.600 - 00:47:20.600

Anyway-- What did he want to go for? I don't know. I wasn't going to find out either.

00:47:20.600 - 00:47:35.600

But I was smearing, doping. You know how bad that smells on the skin, you know, the cloth skin. I worked a little of it off that way. And Al didn't approve of women in the air either.

00:47:35.600 - 00:47:52.600

He had a piece of flexible exhaust pipe, and he'd whack his leg with it whenever it came in for landing. I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Well, if you freeze on the control, I can hitch over the head and take over." And he never would solo me, so I soloed illegally.

00:47:52.600 - 00:48:07.600

The guy that owned the airport was a used car salesman. All car salesmen in those days were used car salesmen. He was a serial in Oglala. He said, "What have you and Al been doing up here?"

00:48:07.600 - 00:48:19.600

And I said, "I don't know." So he did the usual thing, you know, flew around a couple of times and got out to talk to some guy. First thing you know, you're up there by yourself. Isn't that the way it was with you?

00:48:19.600 - 00:48:40.600

You think, "How the heck did I get up here?" Millie, do you remember where you were and how you felt when you heard about Pearl Harbor? I was walking down the street in Lincoln. I think I was coming home from another overindulgence in donuts.

00:48:40.600 - 00:49:02.600

And I couldn't believe it. It was a warm day, and the biology teacher was out doing something in his yard with his radio turned up very high. And I thought, "I can't be hearing this." So I rushed back to the place where I was staying at Bloom Square, and we turned on the radio, and it was true.

00:49:02.600 - 00:49:20.600

And I was sick. My stomach felt weird. Let me go back and take you from the time you graduated from high school. Then you worked that summer, and then where did you go to school?

00:49:20.600 - 00:49:45.600

At the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. How did you get down there? Did you have your own car? Oh, no. Part of the deal with the UP was that I got to ride the UP to a one-round trip ticket within the state. They couldn't go in or--and of course, from Chapel, you go to Julesburg, Colorado, and then you go back into Nebraska.

00:49:45.600 - 00:50:04.600

So we always had to pay from Chapel to Big Springs, Nebraska, and then the rest of it was a free ride. If I went into other times, I rode with neighbors who did have a car. No, I didn't have a car. We only had one car. And the UP being the Union Pacific Railroad.

00:50:04.600 - 00:50:25.600

Pacific Railroad, yeah. When you got to the university, where did you live? In a private home. They had nine or ten girls living there. And what were your intentions? What were you going to study at the university?

00:50:25.600 - 00:50:40.600

I had no choice. Home economics. Because of my scholarship. Okay. And was it while you were at the university that Pearl Harbor happened? Yes. Okay. What year were you?

00:50:40.600 - 00:50:59.600

I was a freshman. Tell me about going to school. What did you enjoy most while you were at the university? I don't know. What were your other activities? Did you continue in music?

00:50:59.600 - 00:51:03.600

No. Or in drama? No. Or in journalism?

00:51:03.600 - 00:51:23.600

No. Well, I wasn't doing much in journalism except for the reporting job. I had a hard time. I came from a little bitty old town. And all of a sudden there's these hordes of people and all these lines to stand in and forms to fill out. And I had a tough time with that.

00:51:23.600 - 00:51:38.600

I was going to ask you, what was the biggest adjustment you had to make? I just was accustomed to being in charge of my own life. And there were rules and stuff, all kinds of things that I didn't know what to do with. And all those people. The people bothered me.

00:51:38.600 - 00:51:51.600

And of course, about a third the size now, I guess, than it is now at the university. Maybe not even that. Maybe a little bit. What were your social activities like when you were in school? At the university?

00:51:51.600 - 00:52:12.600

Uh-huh. Well, there were school-sponsored dances. I went to them at the student union. And of course, in no time at all, they had the-- Was it STP? Student Training Project? Is that what that was?

00:52:12.600 - 00:52:34.600

Where they brought the people in and they taught them crash courses on whatever it was they needed to know. For instance, engineers learned how to do engineering, math, period. Nothing else. STP, I think. At what level was it then that you decided you were going to learn to fly? Where were you in school?

00:52:34.600 - 00:52:55.600

I learned to fly as soon as I got that money from the farm. Was that before you entered the university? No, it was--I was trying to remember. '43, it was the second year when I decided, yeah.

00:52:55.600 - 00:53:12.600

Maybe it was the beginning of the third year. It's hard for me to remember. When you were taking flying lessons, was it during the summertime? Yeah, I did it in a relatively short time, after the wheat harvest and before college. So I had about six weeks.

00:53:12.600 - 00:53:25.600

Did you know any other girls that were flying? No. And what made you-- I knew of Evelyn Sharp and of Ev Amelie Erhard.

00:53:25.600 - 00:53:37.600

And I'd heard of the 99s. But for miles around, I was the only woman that would even consider such activities. I was considered weird. All the old Swedish ladies tried to marry me off to their sons.

00:53:37.600 - 00:54:03.600

Their sons weren't too interested in me and I wasn't too interested in their sons, but they considered me a catch. And when you went home that first summer from school, then did you work on the farm during that summer? I think that's the--yes. And I think that's the summer I learned to fly. And do you recall--

00:54:03.600 - 00:54:16.600

Oh, it was the next year. Go ahead. Do you recall when you heard about a flying program for women? No. How did the war affect your family?

00:54:16.600 - 00:54:29.600

Pretty badly. The whole war--my dad--we grew sugar beet. Sugar was a big priority. I've never figured out why, but I think they used it somehow in munitions or something.

00:54:29.600 - 00:54:39.600

And so we grew sugar beets. We had all the sugar we wanted. We had all the flour we wanted. We had all the meat we wanted because we grew them ourselves.

00:54:39.600 - 00:55:05.600

But clothes were hard to come by, you know. Shoes, you got shoe coupons and that sort of thing. But the biggest effect that it had on my family was that it was getting very, very difficult to get help. And I don't know what year it was, but we had German prisoners of war doing the sugar beet farming on our property.

00:55:05.600 - 00:55:33.600

And one of the rules was that the owner or his representative had to be present at all times on the property. And then there were guards along with the German prisoners of war. And many of the Germans were well-educated and they spoke English. My father couldn't stay there all the time, so he had my 16-year-old brother, Gail, would be his representative.

00:55:33.600 - 00:55:57.600

And the minute Dad left the property, why, these people would start taunting my brother, saying, "Well, when this war is over, you know, I'm going to ask the Fuhrer for this farm. It's a pretty good farm." And one of them, my brother didn't have enough sense to keep his mouth shut, he had the mouth off. And one of them lifted the thinning hoe.

00:55:57.600 - 00:56:21.600

I don't know if you know much about that equipment, but it's a little short-handled thing, but it's very sharp. And it came from my brother and the guards shot him. And my father refused to grow any more sugar. He said people, he didn't want blood-stained land. And we were the second owners of that, you know, deeded owners to that land.

00:56:21.600 - 00:56:46.600

But that was pretty dramatic. The other thing that happened, and this I think is pretty interesting, after about a month or so after I went to the WASP, a B-29 exploded over our property in the middle of the night. And my parents heard the explosion and they heard the men crying as they fell through the air,

00:56:46.600 - 00:57:11.600

one of which ended up impaled on a post in our pasture. My brother ran out to see what was going on. Of course, it was in the middle of a big thunderstorm. My parents never said come home. I think that was pretty brave. It turned out that I knew one of the fellows who had died that day.

00:57:11.600 - 00:57:30.600

I had known him at the University of Nebraska. He was stationed at Lincoln and they were transporting the aircraft to Long Beach for overseas. At that time you were already in the WASP. Yes, I was. And I think that took guts. Never did they say come home.

00:57:30.600 - 00:57:50.600

I was going to ask you how they felt about your flying when you first learned to fly. Well, as I said, Dad's response was, "Well, I'll be damned." But he didn't, he wouldn't fly with me. He knew none of them would fly with me. And I'd bring the airplanes over and they wouldn't get in. Oh well.

00:57:50.600 - 00:58:06.600

Millie, where were these German prisoners imprisoned? I don't know. I just know they worked on our farm. I don't know where the camps were. I have no idea. Tell me something about rhubarb.

00:58:06.600 - 00:58:33.600

Rhubarb, you know, for the pioneers, before they were all this fancy transporting oranges. And my goodness, you can get just about anything now in the grocery store any time of the year. But in those days, rhubarb was the first vitamin C, fresh, fruity tasting thing that you could get every spring. So it was an important thing.

00:58:33.600 - 00:58:52.600

And I never knew anybody that didn't have a rhubarb pie plant, they called them, because they made pies out of them. But they stewed a lot of rhubarb too. Rhubarb I don't think is particularly tasty, but a lot of people. Well I understand though, because it is tasty if you haven't had any oranges or anything all winter.

00:58:52.600 - 00:59:08.600

So it's an important thing. Just toss that in. I know in high school you were in the glee club. No, they called it the choir, it wasn't the glee club. When you went on to college, did you continue to sing?

00:59:08.600 - 00:59:30.600

No. I was in the church choir too. While you were in high school or college? No, not, I sang some at church I guess for maybe a year after I got to college, I don't know. I dropped all that. I didn't have time, I was having a tough time just being a student.

00:59:30.600 - 00:59:52.600

When you learned about the WASP training and... And see I don't remember that at all. But eventually you must have applied. Do you remember a physical or anything like that? I remember the physical. I was horrified. I figured my God, they're going to look at me and say, "What the heck is this?"

00:59:52.600 - 01:00:05.600

But they didn't. Where did you take that physical? At the Lincoln Air Base. Were there other girls also taking the physical?

01:00:05.600 - 01:00:17.600

No. How did you get from home out to Sweetwater? On a bus, at my expense. When you were on the bus, did you meet other girls going?

01:00:17.600 - 01:00:37.600

No. Once you got to Sweetwater, tell me your first impressions of Avenger Field. It was scary, but not nearly as scary as that first day at the university. The Blue Bonnet Hotel was kind of a deal. I wasn't much for hotels.

01:00:37.600 - 01:01:04.600

My dad used to take us to Denver to check into hotels so we'd know how to do it. But I think I only stayed in a hotel once and that was with my family until I got to the Blue Bonnet. But I don't have no vivid memory about Avenger. I just was glad to be there. I remember that. I knew that everybody knew a lot more about flying and were a lot prettier and a lot smarter than I was.

01:01:04.600 - 01:01:22.600

I was sure of that right off. Let me ask you about your clothing since you said you made your high school prom dress. We made most of our clothes, some of them out of feed sets. How about your underwear? Did you make your underwear?

01:01:22.600 - 01:01:38.600

No. That's a surprise. When you arrived at the Blue Bonnet, do you remember how you got out to Avenger Field? On one of those dang cattle trucks.

01:01:38.600 - 01:02:00.600

I don't remember that. That's a mild assumption and it's reasonable, so I'm sure that's how it happened. Do you know how your family felt about you leaving home and going so far away? No, I don't. Were your other siblings still at home?

01:02:00.600 - 01:02:24.600

Oh yeah. Mary had been to college one year I guess. By this time maybe she was even married. I can't remember. At the time you left to go to Sweetwater, were you still living out on the farm without electricity or had you gotten it? We had no telephone, no electricity, no gas. We might have gotten that summer.

01:02:24.600 - 01:02:58.600

I have no memory of living at that house with those kind of amenities. When you left to go to flying training, were your grandparents still living, the ones that were nearby? My father's father and my mother's mother were alive. My mother's mother was living at Hot Springs, New Mexico they called it in those days.

01:02:58.600 - 01:03:20.600

I stopped to see her on the way. I remember that the bus broke down, my feet swelled up, it was hotter than anything. I took my shoes off, I had to be carried across the street to get shoes to wear. I got cardboard and cloth shoes they made. I couldn't get my shoes back on at all.

01:03:20.600 - 01:03:48.600

I got to El Paso and they bonused me even though I had military orders I finally did get on. The bus was terribly crowded. From Chapel that was the easiest way to get to Sweetwater on the bus. I'm going to back up for a minute Millie and ask you about your mom and dad taking care of some other children beside you kids.

01:03:48.600 - 01:04:04.600

Tell me about that. It seems to me that we have a tradition in our family. My great-grandparents took care of other people's kids. My grandparents took care of other people's kids. My mother's older sister died and my grandparents raised her sons.

01:04:04.600 - 01:04:34.600

My father and mother raised one of mother's cousins, her youngest uncle's son. His sister had lived at our house for one year before she went to California. They were not there together but Jess Evison who lives at Brady, Nebraska says that my father was the closest to a father he had. He's about nine years older than I.

01:04:34.600 - 01:04:54.600

My youngest son and I had 50 foster children come through this house before I went blind. So we have a tradition. Families taking care of families. Well not necessarily families just taking care of people.

01:04:54.600 - 01:05:10.600

The people that we had had not been relatives and the ones that my great-grandfather had were not relatives. They were just some kids that were wandering around on the streets. He had 11 kids. He didn't figure any two more would make much difference. That's great.

01:05:10.600 - 01:05:41.600

I'm going to go back to Sweetwater. When you arrived and you went out to Avenger Field with other classmates, what were your expectations with that program? I figured that I would learn to fly and that I would be providing useful skills to the war effort. By that time my boyfriend, the one that didn't invite me to the prom but showed up, was in the Army.

01:05:41.600 - 01:05:58.600

He had come to Lincoln to get married but I wasn't in for that. I didn't even want to be engaged. But anyway, I thought I would be doing something useful. Why was that important to you?

01:05:58.600 - 01:06:21.600

It's always been important to me to develop and improve my own skills at whatever. Not just for the hell of it, but so there's a contribution made. I don't know why that is. It's just the way it is. Tell me about your bay mates when you got to Avenger.

01:06:21.600 - 01:06:38.600

They were all smarter and prettier and better pilots than I. Every one of them. I knew it. We were P's. There was one R in my class. I can't remember what her name was either.

01:06:38.600 - 01:06:50.600

In my bay, I mean. Have you remained friends with some of those bay mates? Oh, yes. Did you find out that you could fly as well as they could?

01:06:50.600 - 01:07:13.600

Well, I never found it out but I finished and some of them didn't so I must have been better than they. I don't know. It's so weird when you're a young person. You always compare yourself to other people and in my family we always compare ourselves adversely.

01:07:13.600 - 01:07:40.600

My kids tend to tell you how great they are but we always said, "Well, yeah, but you know." Describe the training program. From a flying standpoint, I thought it was excellent and I was really excited to get into that AT-6. I had Doris Fincher as my AT-6 instructor and Doris bothered me a lot.

01:07:40.600 - 01:08:04.600

I think he'd have washed me out except I was his last student. Maybe he had one other. But the person who taught me instruments said, "I think I know you." And I said, "I doubt it."

01:08:04.600 - 01:08:24.600

And then I looked at him again and I said, "Maybe he does." So finally after about four days, he said, "Where are you from?" And I told him, "My God, you're the girl with the bloody brother." So anyway, that was Ray Suter. I loved that man.

01:08:24.600 - 01:08:43.600

He told me all about the Iron Compass, flying the roads and the railroads. Because he didn't know how to navigate when he was a barnstormer. Loved that man. What was his name?

01:08:43.600 - 01:08:54.600

Ray Suter. What does the Iron Compass mean? She just told you. The Iron Compass was the railroads and the roads.

01:08:54.600 - 01:09:08.600

Yeah. He didn't have any navigational skills. My primary instructor was a guy named Roberts, who was a seven-day Adventist. And he'd go down to pray for us on Saturday.

01:09:08.600 - 01:09:34.600

And that's the only time I got in trouble. I was out shooting stages, if you remember stages. I'm sure you do. And I came in-- Well, anyway, somehow or other I stalled out above the ground too high,

01:09:34.600 - 01:09:49.600

and the aircraft turned. You know, remember that big wooden wheel, a T out in the middle of the field, and the instructors would all sit out there and grade the stages? Well, there were about five guys out there, and I stalled out, and the plane turned like that,

01:09:49.600 - 01:10:02.600

and bounced and went right over them. And they were scrambling to get out of the way. And I bounced off across the field the wrong way. Crossways of the traffic.

01:10:02.600 - 01:10:22.600

And got the aircraft airborne again. And then I came in and started to taxi up to get a different airplane. And one of those instructors who was still shaking got on the plane, and then he looked at the number on the plane, and he said, "Well, I'm--"

01:10:22.600 - 01:10:38.600

He said, "What are you going to do? Where's your instructor?" And I said, "He's in town." And he said, "Well, I'm canceling my students. They don't need to fly with you in the air." So he rode the airplane on the wing up there and got up and canceled all of his students' flights,

01:10:38.600 - 01:10:53.600

and I went on then to shoot the stages. I was practicing on the other one. And the very first one, by that time I was calm, as you can imagine, I blew a little dust up with the right wing,

01:10:53.600 - 01:11:10.600

and that meant that I didn't fly anymore that day. And some--Mr. Kradok, who owned part of the Blue Bonnet, was an instructor out there. He took the airplane back for me. But that was my worst day.

01:11:10.600 - 01:11:22.600

And, of course, I handled things so well. That was on a Saturday, so the next day we're down at Sweetwater Lake, and people are teasing me about it, and I'm laughing hilariously. "What are you going to do, cry?"

01:11:22.600 - 01:11:39.600

So I laughed. Well, nobody liked my attitude. They thought I should have had a different one. So Mr. Roberts, I made it through the check flights. Do you remember your first solo in a PT?

01:11:39.600 - 01:11:56.600

No. Isn't that strange? Tell me about ground school. Ground school, I had a terrible time with code. I told you I don't have much to do with languages. I'm not good.

01:11:56.600 - 01:12:13.600

I think that people who understand the rhythms of language and stuff and can absorb it can probably do quite well with code. I could send like crazy, but receiving was another thing, so I had trouble passing that. The other part, since I'd been raised on a farm,

01:12:13.600 - 01:12:28.600

and I'd driven a Model A, I could change a tire, put a patch on it, pump it up on a Model A, I knew where to lift the floorboard to push the starter through when it caught, I could make a tractor go.

01:12:28.600 - 01:12:51.600

I drove a Model A tractor. You learn how to cope. I could fix anything. So the rest of the—except for code, I did pretty well with it. I knew the engine parts, you know, and they weren't foreign to me.

01:12:51.600 - 01:13:12.600

And I had had a crisis when I was flying over Lake McConaughey. In the porter field, there was a big explosion. Whammed up on the cowling, and then the windscreen was covered with oil,

01:13:12.600 - 01:13:24.600

and of course I suddenly had out one of my smarter moves, so my face was covered with oil also. And I throttled back, and I got the thing back to the land because the wind eventually blew some of that oil off.

01:13:24.600 - 01:13:40.600

Somebody had not secured one of the spark plugs, so one of my field checks before pre-flight checks would include checking all those spark plugs, because I didn't trust anybody after that.

01:13:40.600 - 01:14:06.600

What was the food like when you were in training? Bad. We were winding down, and they were serving us mush. Stew, greasy stew. I'd never heard of pork stew, but they had a lot of that. Was there ever a time when you were in training when you were really afraid?

01:14:06.600 - 01:14:30.600

Well, I don't know. I was kind of afraid, but really, really, really afraid. I'll tell you what happened. I was under the hood, and Frankie Meisner was my lookout, and somehow or other, we were up and the clouds moved in under us,

01:14:30.600 - 01:14:48.600

and we couldn't find a hole to go down to land. Frankie knew what she was doing, though. She had been a link instructor, and she was a lot better about that. She was smarter and prettier, a better pilot than I.

01:14:48.600 - 01:15:03.600

Don't tell her I said so. They were sending up instructors to go look for us and lead us down and all kinds of stuff, but we landed. During that time, I was concerned, but I figured we could fly in the other direction

01:15:03.600 - 01:15:22.600

and beat that cloud cover, but that was the only time I was really afraid. I thought I was going to wash out when I did that trick with going over and jumping the T. Were you called before the board or anything for that? No.

01:15:22.600 - 01:15:46.600

Describe one of your cross-countries. What would a cross-country consist of? The one I remember most had to do with somebody had taken a plane to Blythe, California, and had some kind of a medical problem and had been brought back to Sweetwater,

01:15:46.600 - 01:16:15.600

and the plane remained in Blythe. On the cross-country, we went to Bixfield at El Paso, and then we went to Davis-Monthan at Tucson. At that point, I can't remember how this did.

01:16:15.600 - 01:16:33.600

Somehow or other, two people went. They got the airplane that was in Blythe and brought it back, but I'm stuck somehow or other flying an airplane back by myself, which is not too alarming, except that everybody had already gone,

01:16:33.600 - 01:16:52.600

and I'm taken off late. By the time I get back to Bixfield, I can't tell whether I'm landing on an airport in downtown El Paso. I'd had no night landings at all. I finally found the field.

01:16:52.600 - 01:17:12.600

I would tell them that I was coming in for a landing, and they'd say, "Where are you? Wave your wings." And I'd wave my wings, and you'd say, "You're not in the right place." So I landed without any difficulty, but I was a little afraid then, too, because I don't think I'd look good in downtown El Paso.

01:17:12.600 - 01:17:33.600

It wasn't totally, totally dark either by the time I landed, but the lights were on, so it was pretty dark. But I wasn't terribly just concerned. I don't remember being terribly concerned. I remember the feeling of power and the feeling of jubilation you have sometimes in the air.

01:17:33.600 - 01:17:51.600

You feel next to God, I think. I think you have special powers. At least I did. Kelly: Were there any outstanding incidents that happened while you were at Sweetwater that you want to tell us about?

01:17:51.600 - 01:18:19.600

Reid: I already told you about them. Kelly: Okay. Do you recall the first time that you heard that the WASPs were going to be deactivated, and how did you feel? Reid: I didn't believe it. Of course, I just ignore that kind of stuff. I continued to do what I had to do, and I thought I'll deal with it when it comes by, and that's what I did.

01:18:19.600 - 01:18:39.600

I do that with everything, though. Kelly: When you were in training, what were your uniforms like? Reid: They were delightful. We had, of our own supply for walking around and stuff, we had those tan slacks, black shoes, white short-sleeved shirts.

01:18:39.600 - 01:19:03.600

Then to get in to actually fly, we had those mechanic uniforms, and the littlest girls got the littlest ones. No matter what size you were, you didn't have anything that fit. You looked absolutely horrible. Somebody, I can't remember who it was, claimed that we had uniforms that were costing the taxpayers $50 apiece or something.

01:19:03.600 - 01:19:30.600

Kelly: When you were in training, did you ever have some time off, and what did you do with that time? Reid: I was sick a couple of times. The time off we usually had, we went to the Avengerette Club. The natives would throw parties for us once in a while, I think one or two.

01:19:30.600 - 01:19:47.600

I can remember one barbecue, but I can't remember two, but I think there were. We hung out at the beach. I would swim across the lake back and forth. I wasn't a great swimmer, but I had great stamina.

01:19:47.600 - 01:20:09.600

I could go on and on. Kelly: When did you get some brand-new uniform that was a WASP uniform? Reid: Just before our actual graduation. Kelly: When you were in training, what were the auxiliary fields all about?

01:20:09.600 - 01:20:32.600

Reid: They were to practice landings, and they were dirt. They were a step up from the one in Ogallala, though, because we didn't have to chase the livestock off. The runways were set for the prevailing wind. They taught me how to handle crosswinds, which was a good thing.

01:20:32.600 - 01:20:50.600

One time I was in Lincoln after that flying. While I was up, I had this boyfriend I was impressing. The wind did a complete shift, and so it came in. There was no runway that was even close to the wind.

01:20:50.600 - 01:21:12.600

I landed that sucker, and it was a strong crosswind. I got it down with no difficulty. That was a good train. Kelly: The orders coming out that the WASPs were going to be disbanded, what effect did that have on the training program at Avenger?

01:21:12.600 - 01:21:31.600

Reid: I don't think it had any. They completed it just as they had scheduled it. They even washed one girl out late in the training, which I thought was unconscionable, because her legs actually were too short to reach.

01:21:31.600 - 01:21:47.600

Kelly: What did you most enjoy about training? Reid: I enjoyed the humor of the people. That was fun. I enjoyed the flying.

01:21:47.600 - 01:22:11.600

Do you remember Lieutenant LaRue? Lieutenant LaRue decided to learn to fly. He would fly in that corner of Avenger that was reserved for general aviation. One day, that poor man went up, and he flew the pattern exactly right.

01:22:11.600 - 01:22:33.600

He chopped his throttle, and his airplane just backed right up. He did that five times before he figured out that he had to have the motor on to go in the wind, because the wind was so strong. We were all sitting down there rooting him on. But the fact that he elected to learn to fly at that time, I thought was interesting.

01:22:33.600 - 01:22:49.600

But as far as our training, I don't think there was any change. I don't know that, because I wasn't there. Kelly: Since you were there in the hottest part of summer, how did you cope with that? Reid: I came from western Nebraska.

01:22:49.600 - 01:23:05.600

It's hot there, too. During the Depression, it used to get so hot and no water. That coincided with the great drought and the dust storms and that sort of thing. Those are some of my big memories from youth.

01:23:05.600 - 01:23:21.600

Go ahead. Kelly: We'll come back to those. In preparation for your graduation, what happened? Reid: I don't remember.

01:23:21.600 - 01:23:41.600

Kelly: At that point, were you the only class there, or what were they using the field for? Reid: Just us. General Arnold came, Jacqueline Conklin came. General Arnold gave me my wings.

01:23:41.600 - 01:23:53.600

Kelly: Did you have any relatives that came? Reid: No. Kelly: Tell me about getting orders. Did you request a specific base, or how did that work?

01:23:53.600 - 01:24:09.600

Reid: I doubt it. I don't recall. Kelly: Tell me what your graduation day was like. Was there a band? Reid: There must have been. I don't remember.

01:24:09.600 - 01:24:28.600

Kelly: Did you realize that that was a really special graduation with all those big weeks there? Reid: Sort of. Yeah, I did. I knew it was the last one, and I knew that was of more importance than some others. At the same time, once again, no feeling of history at all to speak of.

01:24:28.600 - 01:24:50.600

Kelly: Do you remember General Arnold's speech to the graduating trainees? Reid: Vaguely. Kelly: After you graduated that day, what did your orders tell you to do? Reid: Well, then we went the next day, I think, to Ilo.

01:24:50.600 - 01:25:05.600

Stayed there that night, I think. I don't remember. But they sent me to Ilo Field. Oh, I know. Every time you left a base, you had to have a physical. Every time you came to a base, you had to have a physical.

01:25:05.600 - 01:25:18.600

Let me tell you, I was physical. We were all physical. We had one when we left Sweetwater. We had one when we got to our new base. And then ten days later, we had another one because we were leaving the service. There you are.

01:25:18.600 - 01:25:28.600

Kelly: How did you get from Avenger to Ilo? Reid: I have no idea. Kelly: When you arrived at Ilo, did you have any time off? Reid: No.

01:25:28.600 - 01:25:40.600

Kelly: When you arrived at Ilo, to whom did you report? Reid: I have no idea. Oh, the CO. But I don't know his name. Kelly: Were there other WASPs already stationed there? Reid: Yes. And there were two of us that went.

01:25:40.600 - 01:25:59.600

I can only remember one, Barbara Searles came with me. Kelly: Tell me about your assignment at Ilo. First, where did you live? Reid: We lived in the barracks with nurses and a couple of other WASPs and the three of us. Kelly: Tell me about your assignment.

01:25:59.600 - 01:26:25.600

Reid: We were assigned to this target-towing place. I mean, to tow targets for air-to-air gunnery. Kelly: Describe for me what a mission would be like from the time you got your parachute and went out to the airplanes. Reid: I only had two, and I'm not sure that I can describe it very well.

01:26:25.600 - 01:26:40.600

Well, wait a minute, that may not be true either. Anyway, I don't remember. Kelly: What kind of airplane were you flying? Reid: An AT-6.

01:26:40.600 - 01:26:53.600

Kelly: And you would have another crew member with you? Reid: No. Kelly: To let out the target? Reid: I had a lever, didn't I? It was a long time ago.

01:26:53.600 - 01:27:04.600

Kelly: I don't know. You did two missions? Reid: Well, maybe three, I can't remember. Kelly: Okay. And then— Reid: Maybe more. We were there for ten days.

01:27:04.600 - 01:27:27.600

No, we were there longer than that. We were there for two weeks. Kelly: How were you treated? Reid: They weren't doing anything special for us. We had to push to get anything. Kelly: When you were disbanded on the 20th of December, what did you do?

01:27:27.600 - 01:27:50.600

Reid: I had arranged military transport as far as Amarillo. And then there was a guy that was being transferred to Buckley, who was driving to Denver. He left ahead of me. That was kind of an interesting thing. I flew into Amarillo and there he was, and the wind was blowing something off.

01:27:50.600 - 01:28:10.600

I couldn't get transport beyond that, and he had his car, so he said, "Okay, I'll drive you up to Denver." I said, "That's great." We kind of arranged that before, unless I could get transport. We went back to Amarillo and I said, "I hope you arrange for me a place to stay." He said, "Oh, yeah."

01:28:10.600 - 01:28:34.600

We went into the hotel and the guy said, "At the clerk, you know, it turned out we had one room." I said, "Well, not me." I went stomping out of there. I had a dress on. Why? I don't know, but I had a dress on. I went stomping out the front door. The wind hit me, blew me down, blew my dress up over my butt. There I was, but I did get a different room.

01:28:34.600 - 01:28:49.600

We drove on to Denver. I ended up at the Brown Palace. Then I stayed overnight there and then took the bus to Chapel. When you got home, were you wearing your uniform? Yes.

01:28:49.600 - 01:29:13.600

How did your folks react? Oh, they were proud and glad to have me home, but they were confused because it was at that time that we learned that that boyfriend was dead. Such tense times, such tense times. When you came back home, did your family want you then to stay home?

01:29:13.600 - 01:29:26.600

They always wanted me to stay home, but I didn't. I couldn't have stayed there. What did you want to do once you were— I had no idea. What did you do?

01:29:26.600 - 01:29:52.600

I got on the bus and I went traveling to see people that were in my class and visited with them. I ended up staying at several places. I got to someplace in Texas, that great big Army base. Oh, my mind's gone again. My God, I've got to find it.

01:29:52.600 - 01:30:03.600

Fort Hood? My brother-in-law was stationed there. Is that near Waco or what? Yes.

01:30:03.600 - 01:30:24.600

It's probably what it was. Anyway, I was in uniform and they wouldn't let me into the USO because they claimed they'd never seen that uniform before. How did that make you feel? It made me mad.

01:30:24.600 - 01:30:46.600

I didn't know what to do about it. I wanted to contact my brother-in-law because I had arranged for a place for my sister to come and stay in town at the Tweedell places. Nancy Tweedell had been in our class and I needed to get in touch with him. They wouldn't let me in, so I sat out on the porch.

01:30:46.600 - 01:31:14.600

It was at Little Rock. That's where I was, Little Rock. Because on every one of the light posts, it had great huge signs that said, "Beware VD." I was sitting out there and then every once in a while I'd stand up and look around. Finally, the light posts were on stands that were maybe three feet high and I could clamber up on them and see further than I could on the steps.

01:31:14.600 - 01:31:44.600

I did, failing to notice that the sign was up there that said, "Beware VD." My brother-in-law came along, well first another guy from my class in high school. His sister and her husband came along and every time he tells this story, I'm climbing in this post with the "Beware VD" sign on it. But my brother-in-law started talking to me and his buddy says, "Don't talk to her. Don't you see the sign? Don't talk to her."

01:31:44.600 - 01:32:10.600

Anyway, I finally got off the post so that my reputation was good. But yeah, I thought it was too bad. People didn't recognize, wouldn't acknowledge a uniform that I thought was pretty important. And then where did you end up getting a job?

01:32:10.600 - 01:32:37.600

At Tyndall. How did you select Tyndall? Betty Sloan was there and they had big sisters and Betty Sloan was my big sister so she said there was a job there so I went there. And I knew I couldn't stay in school, I knew I couldn't stay at Chapel, I just knew I couldn't stand anything so I had to get away.

01:32:37.600 - 01:32:58.600

And you worked at Tyndall? Yeah, in operations. Yeah, I would... Not on the radio, the radio, we'd give instructions to the tower, that's what we did, didn't we?

01:32:58.600 - 01:33:15.600

It's hard to remember the sequence of events in any of those things. But eventually you left Tyndall and... I went to the university again to finish my education. And what were your plans to do with that education once you finished?

01:33:15.600 - 01:33:39.600

I didn't know. I was going to go to grad school, in fact I even enrolled in grad school. And the project that I had outlined, which had been pertinent when we first thought about it, back when I was a junior or something, was to figure out how far the water was from the house on farms.

01:33:39.600 - 01:34:07.600

And some people were carrying water as much as 10, 15 miles. But by the time I got into the grad school, while the REA was coming through, and we even had electricity at Chapel on our farm, and most people had electricity and therefore had water running in the house. So I had to revamp my whole project anyway.

01:34:07.600 - 01:34:33.600

So at that point you had radios at home. Before, when you were growing up and didn't have a radio, how would you find out the news? Well, we had a radio when I was little, but it was a battery operated. And I don't know if you—we had a fireplace with a firebox like that, that was absolutely loaded with batteries,

01:34:33.600 - 01:35:05.600

including a car battery and some big square batteries that were like 18-inch cubes. And it would be attached to a little radio. And I listened to my favorite program, which was Amos & Nandi, and I was allowed to stay up late for that. The news came because we—well, we talked to people and then there were people that took the newspaper.

01:35:05.600 - 01:35:43.600

We always got the Sunday paper, the World Herald, so that was—we knew about that. Dad would drive to town and get that. We were three miles from the town. Okay, when you came back to the university, at what point did you meet someone really special? I graduated in June of 1946 and I met Bill Young in either late April or early May.

01:35:43.600 - 01:36:07.600

I saw him before that. Do you—well, I was in a speech class. John Carson was in it, too. Johnny Carson? Yeah. I had a problem with an infected tooth, which had affected my voice and still does,

01:36:07.600 - 01:36:35.600

because one end of my vocal cords were paralyzed. And therefore, my speech was unreliable as to volume and tone. And so I was taking freshman speech, or whatever speech it was, in order to see if I could modulate that and correct it. And one of the chores we had, we had a lab.

01:36:35.600 - 01:37:03.600

And in those days, you had like a three-minute wire tape, and you could talk into that, and it would record what you said. And then you would listen to it and evaluate it. But nobody else—that was it. You recorded, you listened. Then you could record again. And we, each of us, had to do that, and the use of the lab was posted on a bulletin board.

01:37:03.600 - 01:37:30.600

So I got there early, and there was a guy that I had known for many years from Sydney, Nebraska, who was sitting there. And he was going to—as soon as the labs were open, he and I would be the first two in. And Bill Young walked through there to check to see when he was going to talk. And after he left, I said to the cat's kid, I said, "No, that's for me."

01:37:30.600 - 01:37:51.600

So I spent the next two weeks trying to find out who he was. Now, after we'd been married about three years and had two kids, my husband said, "Now just exactly who was that curly-headed son of a bitch you were sitting with in the speech lab?" I didn't think he'd even noticed me.

01:37:51.600 - 01:38:13.600

What were the qualities about him that made you fall in love with him? I have no idea. If I was good at qualities, I probably would have fallen in love with somebody else. He was smart, he was witty, he was good-looking, he was sexy, he was charismatic.

01:38:13.600 - 01:38:29.600

When he introduced me to his ex-dates, he'd say, "This is my wife," and they said, "I don't believe it." Even his family said, "I don't believe it." What was Bill studying to be? He was taking pre-law, but he didn't like studying.

01:38:29.600 - 01:38:45.600

He didn't like being inside. He should have been a crock, a Davy Crockett. The whole family should have. None of them were good scholars. They were smart, they just didn't like being indoors.

01:38:45.600 - 01:39:04.600

And this has nothing to do with you, but was there anything special about Johnny Carson that you remember that would have made him a celebrity eventually? No, he wasn't in my section, but I saw him a couple of, three or four times. No, I don't remember anything that would have set him apart.

01:39:04.600 - 01:39:20.600

He's a lot like Bill Young, though. I used to know his jokes when he'd be on the TV. I'd say, "Now this is what he does, the Kingfish impersonation." All the guys that age did Amos and Andy impersonations, didn't they?

01:39:20.600 - 01:39:44.600

They grew up with him since they were babies, just as I did. What did you and Bill do for recreation or social or whatever on dates? We went to sporting events. We went to movies. We didn't go to many dates. We just got married.

01:39:44.600 - 01:40:07.600

We went boozing, some drinking. Tell me about your wedding. Well, we went to Kansas. Nobody was there. We didn't tell anybody. The witness was a cigar-chewing, I don't know, a tobacco-chewing cab driver.

01:40:07.600 - 01:40:26.600

And a Reverend Mothnagle at a Lutheran church performed the ceremonies. We went to Kansas City because it took three days to get married in Nebraska. I knew that if I had three days to think about it, I wasn't marrying anybody. So we went down there.

01:40:26.600 - 01:40:43.600

We went back and forth across the bridge about three times. Maybe we got married in Kansas City, Kansas. I'm trying to remember. I guess we did. I'll have to look at that sometime. I'd cry them both ways, crying because I was going to get married and crying because I wasn't.

01:40:43.600 - 01:40:55.600

And finally Bill Young goes, he saw some good-looking blonde and he said, "Well, I came down here to get married." So he went chasing that girl down there while we were at the bus station. I said, "All right!"

01:40:55.600 - 01:41:11.600

So we got back in the cab and went back across the bridge and got married. I was sobbing the whole time. My preacher's wife thought I was having trouble getting him to the altar. She was trying to adjust my hair and make me look resentful.

01:41:11.600 - 01:41:22.600

The cab driver says, "Well, I know where there's going to be a big wedding this afternoon. You might as well take advantage of it." So we did. But that was a weird wedding, let me tell you.

01:41:22.600 - 01:41:29.600

Had you met his family? When we got married? Uh-huh. Two brothers.

01:41:29.600 - 01:41:36.600

Had he met your family? No. Okay. Then where did you-- Well, I say he had. Yes, he had.

01:41:36.600 - 01:41:51.600

I'm sorry. My folks came to my college graduation and, of course, he stayed over for it. My sister, who was 17 years younger than I, was little, and we took her around to the restaurants and he told his ex-girlfriends that this was our child.

01:41:51.600 - 01:42:03.600

And that upset him a little bit. And she played along. She was five. She'd say, "Daddy, can I have this?" Anyway, he was a terrible person.

01:42:03.600 - 01:42:16.600

Yes, so he has a sense of humor. Oh, yeah. You know, things were weird. When I came back to school, number one, I was the only woman there that could fly with the boys.

01:42:16.600 - 01:42:35.600

So I'm out there and we're doing this hangar flying bit, you know, all over the place, and having one fine time. And then people that I had known before came home, and one of them says to me on the student union steps, he says, "Millie, why don't we get married?"

01:42:35.600 - 01:42:51.600

And I said, "Gosh, Bob, this is kind of sudden." And so that was the end of that. And that afternoon, I was standing on the steps again, and he introduced me to his fiancée. And I said, "What are you talking about?"

01:42:51.600 - 01:43:01.600

And he said, "Well, don't pout. You had first chance." And he married that girl. Wow. That was pretty bizarre.

01:43:01.600 - 01:43:23.600

Once you came back from Tyndall, even before you married, did you fly some? Oh, yeah. I flew right up until we started investing in kids. Okay. What did your flying consist of? Oh, just amazing, you know, taking boyfriends up and trying to impress people.

01:43:23.600 - 01:43:46.600

Well, I needed to keep flying, too. I didn't know what I was going to do. And Bill wasn't flying either by that time. It cost a lot to fly. I mean, it wasn't much money compared to now. My first instruction cost $10 for the airplane and $2 an hour for the instructor.

01:43:46.600 - 01:44:00.600

So that was a lot of money. And had Bill been a pilot also? Yeah, he was a B-29 pilot. After you got married, did either of you fly?

01:44:00.600 - 01:44:26.600

No. Well, each of us flew maybe three or four times each. And then I got pregnant, and finances were a problem. After you had your first child, what activities-- well, all of your children, what activities did you participate in when your kids were growing up

01:44:26.600 - 01:44:50.600

as far as their activities, like PTA or 4-H? I didn't do any of those things. I used to--I'd go to school meetings, but I wasn't much for PTA. We had Boy Scouts with one of them. We were leaders for the Cub Scouts.

01:44:50.600 - 01:45:09.600

Millie, I know you've done a lot of interesting things from the time you got married. Why don't you just take us through some of those and explain a little bit about each one? Like--what do you mean? Employment? Employment.

01:45:09.600 - 01:45:23.600

Well-- What was your first paying job? Well, you mean after I graduated? Right.

01:45:23.600 - 01:45:46.600

We were in business for ourselves for so long. My first paying job was probably the World Book Encyclopedia, and that was strictly commission. That was--oh, no. My first paying job was working in--was being a substitute teacher. And that was--you got paid by the day.

01:45:46.600 - 01:46:17.600

And then I worked in that--I worked in the factory first, and making the carburetors for the single-cycle engines. That was kind of fun and different, and they were made of cast aluminum, which had holes in it. And one of my jobs for a while was to attach a hose to the carburetor, put it on a seal,

01:46:17.600 - 01:46:32.600

and then pump air into it under gasoline, and the gasoline would fly all over. Most of them were rejected and had to be sent back. But I did other chores with that, too. Then I was a substitute teacher.

01:46:32.600 - 01:46:50.600

Then I got the--when Bill was one year old--when young Bill was one year old, I got the contract to sell World Book. And I did that. I'd go out and sell up a storm, and then I wouldn't do anything. Mostly I raised kids, and I'd take them out in the middle of the winter, you know,

01:46:50.600 - 01:47:13.600

and turn over rocks and evaluate the living things that were animals that were out there, because it looked like there were none, except for big things like dogs and cats and people. And I did everything I could to avoid housekeeping. I absolutely detested. And--

01:47:13.600 - 01:47:36.600

And at the time you and Bill had a business together, what were you doing? Well, to begin with, he had milk routes and I did the bookkeeping. And we had dairy, so we ran the whole operation, and I did the bookkeeping and he ran things. That was kind of--I was occasionally the boss, but not very often.

01:47:36.600 - 01:47:47.600

Did you live out at the dairy? Yes. So you're back on a farm. Well, sort of. It was in the middle of Fontana, California.

01:47:47.600 - 01:48:12.600

The--yeah, it was a patch of land out there. You had the cattle, you know, and the milking barns, and the--we had another fellow that took care of them, but they were our operation. Then we processed the milk and bottled it and delivered it and ran a milk store, the whole bit.

01:48:12.600 - 01:48:44.600

And then we ran a guest ranch up in the high Sierras up near--on Peckinpah Mountain near North Fork, California. What was the guest ranch mainly? Was it horseback riding or-- No, it was a--it was a rustic place. We had central toilets and a place to shower, but the cabins themselves had no running water and no electric lights.

01:48:44.600 - 01:49:05.600

And people seemed to like that. It was primarily hiking. There was some horseback riding, but primarily hiking. And we took people on--we had trailhounds, you know, the ones that bark. And we'd take them and tree bear and big mountain lions and stuff like that.

01:49:05.600 - 01:49:25.600

They liked that. Huge crowds would come along, and we'd have to control them to keep them-- when I say huge crowds, if you're on a hunt like that, 20 people would be a lot. And we'd have to restrain them to keep them out of the way so that the animals wouldn't hurt them, the wild animals. We never killed the animals.

01:49:25.600 - 01:49:44.600

At this point, were your children young? I had two children. See, I had two children, two boys. Then six years later, I had two girls. And then I had one son, an only child.

01:49:44.600 - 01:50:08.600

Then once you got rid of the ranch, the dude ranch-- We were washed out. It was the year of the big flood up there in the icy area. And the cabins were washed off their foundations and sand washed in things. We lived down Whiskey Creek.

01:50:08.600 - 01:50:31.600

We were cut off. The water came down off the mountain. It was about 14 inches deep, just level, coming off Beckenbaum Mountain. There'd been a lot of tindering up there, but there wasn't much mud even then. There was huge granite walls.

01:50:31.600 - 01:50:54.600

The place was called Cascadel. It's a kind of a little-- People still live at Cascadel now. They have homes. They built the place up. It used to be a stop on the over-the-mountain mail route.

01:50:54.600 - 01:51:20.600

There was a trading post that went way back to early California. It was an interesting place to live, and I loved it. It's really hard when nothing is solid. Everything's moving. I know during the time your children were growing up, then you went back to school again.

01:51:20.600 - 01:51:41.600

When my oldest children got into high school-- By that time, everybody was born, I guess. No, Bill wasn't born. When my oldest son went to high school, the teacher said, "Now, in the history class," she said, "Most of your parents or your dads were in the war.

01:51:41.600 - 01:51:59.600

We'll go around the class, and we'll say, 'Was your dad in the war? If so, what branch and what did he do?'" They came to my kid, and he said, "Well, my dad was a pilot in World War II, and so was my mother." The teacher says, "Oh, no, there were no women pilots in World War II."

01:51:59.600 - 01:52:20.600

It just happened that Thelma Miller's twins were in the class, and Penny Garrett's daughter, I think, was in the class. They all three stood up and said, "Well, our moms were too." But they were real belligerent about it. They thought those kids were lying. Can you imagine?

01:52:20.600 - 01:52:41.600

I forgot the question. I was asking you about going back to school again. I went back to school between the birth of the older boys and the oldest of the girls. I got Colorado College so I could get a teacher's certificate, which I did.

01:52:41.600 - 01:52:58.600

It was good for ten years, and I decided that I wasn't going to teach school. Somebody was going to get killed, and I decided probably I should get out of this business. I was sick of kids. I'm a good teacher, but those kids were awful, I thought. I didn't like them.

01:52:58.600 - 01:53:21.600

Junior high kids, the only thing I could get them to do was to recite the Cremation of Sam McGee, and all the boys did that so they could shock the girls. Then you had some other jobs also. Tell us about some of those. We talked about making the carburetors.

01:53:21.600 - 01:53:48.600

Then after Bill was born, I was a substitute teacher. Then after Bill was born, and he was a year old, I got the contract to sell the World Book Encyclopedia and child craft, a job that I loved. Then I left out being the door girl. Did we talk about that earlier?

01:53:48.600 - 01:54:07.600

No, go ahead. When we first came to town, I decided I'd better find out what's going on in this town. They were hiring people to greet the people at the Emerson Hotel and park their cars. I took the job in the evening, which was a bad time because you didn't get the tips.

01:54:07.600 - 01:54:29.600

Tip checking out, not checking in. I enjoyed that, and then I convinced the Gazette that they needed my talents, and they agreed. They hired me to write a food column, and I did some national advertising, which mainly meant looking up signatures and ads and that sort of thing,

01:54:29.600 - 01:54:55.600

and arranging them to send them down to lay out people. I did that a couple of years. I kind of liked that. Then I worked at the factory making the carburetors. One of mine was a teacher and then the world's best salesperson.

01:54:55.600 - 01:55:16.600

Then after young Bill got into first grade, I took a job at the Department of Social Services and worked there for 21 years. Tell me what you did there. I was a social caseworker.

01:55:16.600 - 01:55:32.600

When I first went there, if you received a check from the state while you had a caseworker, and the caseworker did everything, they computed the amount of check you got and what you had to pay for food stamps and everything. But shortly thereafter, they changed that and separated the two.

01:55:32.600 - 01:55:55.600

So I just provided social services, which meant that I would provide or schedule someplace else the therapy that people might need. I would help them to find a place to live or make referrals. So you were in a people-to-people contact.

01:55:55.600 - 01:56:06.600

Yes. Is that what you enjoyed most? That's what I did most, I suppose. I like influencing people.

01:56:06.600 - 01:56:23.600

You learn a lot about yourself when you're doing stuff like that, too. I noticed there was one really interesting school you went to. There was something about China. Would you tell us about that?

01:56:23.600 - 01:56:49.600

Well, I went there for one of those block things. Actually, after I retired, I went out there to a satire workshop, which was put on by the University of Hong Kong at the Kodori Center, which was really the agricultural center, I think, in New Territories, outside of Hong Kong.

01:56:49.600 - 01:57:25.600

The other students included a wife of an oil magnate, a woman from Singapore, a Catholic priest. But most of the people were children of people who had escaped China, escaped the Communists. And some of them's fathers had not thought that the Communists would kill them, and they'd gone back to Canton or someplace and they had been killed.

01:57:25.600 - 01:57:44.600

It was most interesting. All of the little Chinese kids wanted a grandmother just like me, because they'd never seen an old lady act like I did. But I was having fun. I was teaching them, one little, two little, three little Indians in Spanish,

01:57:44.600 - 01:57:59.600

and they were teaching me the same song in Chinese. Millie, what did you expect to do with that piece of education? Did you have something in mind that you— I thought I'd have fun with that.

01:57:59.600 - 01:58:25.600

Besides, my son was a presenter, so there—well, not exactly. The presenters were three other people, but he was a significant addition to them. Satir—I wanted to see how it worked in a foreign country. That was part of it. And tell me, or tell the camera, what's Satir? What is that program?

01:58:25.600 - 01:58:45.600

Virginia Satir had studied with some of the other social workers and psychologists that were prominent in the United States, and each of them focused in their treatment on the presenter problem, or the presenting person who was the problem.

01:58:45.600 - 01:59:05.600

And Virginia was just a jump or two ahead of the rest of these people in saying, "Look, if there's somebody that has a problem in the family, the whole family has a problem. If Dad's a drunk, then they're all living in the alcoholic haze. If there's a child that's acting out, you need to know why.

01:59:05.600 - 01:59:22.600

You need to know what kinds of things to look for." And so she insisted that we have family therapy, not individual alone. You can have individual, too, but— And so, as I said, she's called the mother of family therapy.

01:59:22.600 - 01:59:50.600

And my eldest son had studied with her for ten years and is now carrying on her work, yes? And when you came back after studying, did you use that information? Well, yes. It's hard not to. I go to the Web of Wisdom, some Satir kinds of workshops here occasionally.

01:59:50.600 - 02:00:25.600

And you just use it in your daily life. You learn things. And I've not studied with—I studied with Virginia for like maybe a total of six weeks in little pieces here and there. And, you know, it's really interesting to watch how people fall into the— Everybody goes through what she calls a stance, as everybody does, but when they're used to, you know,

02:00:25.600 - 02:00:45.600

as a way of dealing with a problem consistently, then we need to find out what's going on. And it's one way of doing it. Are there other jobs that you had that you would like to tell us about? I can't remember.

02:00:45.600 - 02:01:18.600

Or any other schools that you attended? Well, the University of Northern Colorado and the— had to do with—most of them had to do with addiction, because that was my area of expertise at the department. I worked with people who were suffering alcoholics and that kind of thing.

02:01:18.600 - 02:01:35.600

I forgot what I was going to say. That's okay. I can stop. I'm going to ask you about your husband, if you would not mind telling us about a tragic thing that happened to him.

02:01:35.600 - 02:02:13.600

Well, as I told you—or maybe I didn't—he was considered an expert on the Front Range here in a fairly limited area for geology. So there were some people who had a mine up on Jones Mountain up near Buena Vista in Chafee County, and they were consulting with him, and he was to get a portion of the payoff, if there was anything to pay off. And so the man that owned the mine came down here one night, I don't remember,

02:02:13.600 - 02:02:31.600

and asked Bill if he'd come up and give him some direction on how to follow the stope or the vein or something. Because they knew they had to stope it out, they just didn't know which way. Anyway, so he agreed to do that. What kind of mine was it?

02:02:31.600 - 02:02:57.600

It was a silver mine. And so he got in his Bronco and drove up there with a buddy, and there was a pristine little lake up there, and he thought maybe they could stay overnight and maybe do some fishing, too. So the other guy had gone back up, and Bill drove up there, and when he got there,

02:02:57.600 - 02:03:20.600

one of the employees was on a track, a Caterpillar tractor, rubbing back and forth, you know, "vroom, vroom," because there was a big rock stuck in the track. And the thing they didn't tell Bill was that they had blasted the night before, because when they came down, they still hadn't done it.

02:03:20.600 - 02:03:49.600

And so he didn't know about the blasting, so he rushed down to help them. And as they're going "vroom, vroom," why, the portal came down, came crashing down and smashed him, tore his arm off, injured his buddy who was with him and injured his leg, but not terribly bad, and minor injury to the man who owned the mine.

02:03:49.600 - 02:04:17.600

And, of course, by the time they got Bill Young off the hill, I went down to the hospital, he was dead. So I had gone to work that morning, and I knew that something happened, but I didn't know what. I've always known I've never known what. I know you have some wonderful children. Would you like to tell us about your children?

02:04:17.600 - 02:04:49.600

My son Stephen, who is the eldest, had his leg smashed in 1972 in Scotland. He is the one who studied there for ten years with Virginia Satir and does training all over the world, from Guatemala to the Czech Republic, maybe in Slovakia. He is talented with languages. He can pick up in two weeks enough so he can carry on a decent conversation with people.

02:04:49.600 - 02:05:25.600

Can you imagine? In Slovakia! Anyway, he travels a great deal and he puts on workshops having to do with the Satir methods of social work. My son Kent, the next son, is a lawyer in general practice and part-time prosecutor for Carbon County, Montana. He has three children, all of whom are exceedingly bright. Of course, all of my kids are bright.

02:05:25.600 - 02:06:04.600

My second, my eldest daughter, has finally decided after getting her teenager so that she can own enough to stay a while, she finally decided to continue with her education and is getting a teacher certificate from Mesa State College. She was on the Dean's list half of the time. The other half she always manages to get at least one B to take her off. My second daughter, Martha, I didn't tell anybody their names.

02:06:04.600 - 02:06:38.600

The oldest is Stephen, the second is Kent, Millicent the second is the student. Martha has a degree in sociology and she cooks for large groups of people and enjoys it very much. For one thing, you can work like that for just a few days a year and make enough to live on. Bill is the executive director of this child placement agency called Young's.

02:06:38.600 - 02:07:04.600

He and I were, for a while, foster parents and we had fifty kids go through this house. The most interesting group of that is we had six people from Tonga who ran away from Hawaii to get here. They stayed in this house for a while and only one of them spoke English with any facility at all. That was kind of funny.

02:07:04.600 - 02:07:33.600

Why would you take children as foster children? What is it about you that makes you want to take care of children? I don't know. I don't even like kids. Everybody knows that. I tell them. I advertise it. The oldest of seven, the mother of five. What do I want to take care of anybody else's kids? I know you told us off camera why you had so many kids. Would you want to tell us on camera?

02:07:33.600 - 02:07:54.600

My friends used to say, "Millie, we only have two kids. We knew what caused it." I said, "I've always known what caused it. I liked it." Of all those foster children that have come through this house, have you kept up with some of them? Some of them, yes.

02:07:54.600 - 02:08:06.600

How were they selected to live with you? I don't know. Just different means? The Department of Social Services would say, "You've got room for one."

02:08:06.600 - 02:08:46.600

I'd say, "Oh, yeah." They've robbed me. They've tried to steal my car. They've stolen my keys. I had to change all the locks. They've been interesting kids. One of them turned out to be a murderer much later. I felt so sorry for that boy. He's in prison now as an adult. About ten years ago, his brother died. His mother said, "I wish it were you," and destroyed that kid with those words. Just destroyed him.

02:08:46.600 - 02:09:25.600

You think about that. I kind of liked him. He was a nice kid. Millie, of all the things you've done, and there have been a carload, what is the one thing that you are most proud of? I suppose just being a military aviator, a pilot for the Army Air Force. It was the most unusual. However, it's hard to pin it. Yeah, that's it.

02:09:25.600 - 02:09:56.600

I want to know what made you think that you could do something that other women had never done? What are the qualities that made you accomplish that when so many of your classmates washed out? I don't know. I have no idea. It never occurred to me that I did things because other women hadn't done it. I just did it because I wanted to or because I thought it was important or something.

02:09:56.600 - 02:10:18.600

It never had anything to do with other people's accomplishments, except that in the case of Evelyn Sharp. I said, "If she can do it, I can too." I never met Evelyn. I never exchanged any words with her, either verbally or on paper, but she had to do with me flying. In other words, she was a role model for you.

02:10:18.600 - 02:10:51.600

Yes, she was. Yes, she was. I didn't even know her. I had a good, strong family value. My folks were married until they were death to them apart. It wasn't always an amicable marriage. Most marriages have some pretty rough spots, and theirs did too. There was a real cultural difference. My mother's father was an Englishman.

02:10:51.600 - 02:11:18.600

The English, they land on the Brits, are the worst people in the world for prejudice. They looked down on everybody else. It's interesting to me that my mother married a Swede. The only Swedes that my grandfather ever knew, they made fun of because they spoke differently. His eldest daughter married a Greek who didn't speak English real well either.

02:11:18.600 - 02:11:36.600

I always thought that was pretty tricky. I need to tell you a little bit about Grandpa. I told you about him being a jockey and all. He and his brothers used to come to our house or to their house, and I'd be lurking in the corners. They'd all turn their chairs around so the backs were facing the table.

02:11:36.600 - 02:12:13.600

Then they'd straddle the seats, and they'd put their hands up on top of the backs of the chairs and start yelling at each other. My grand—they would discuss politics and science and everything. The thing I remember most that was the oddest and caught my attention the most was that during the Great Depression, they were talking always about shipping purebred cattle from Europe or England or some of those islands out there to the United States.

02:12:13.600 - 02:12:46.600

It was a cumbersome and dangerous operation. My grandfather decided that the best way to do that would be to impregnate a bunch of purebred cattle. Then when they were impregnated, to operate on them and take all the little baby calves out and stick about 40 of them in one cow and then send her across the ocean.

02:12:46.600 - 02:12:58.600

Then when she got there, they would take them out and stick them in another cow. It didn't have to be the same breed or anything. There they'd have these purebred cattle. I thought it was fabulous.

02:12:58.600 - 02:13:19.600

Now they do stuff like that. They send the semen now, though. This was in the early '30s because I was little enough to sit in the corners and not be noticed. Was there something interesting that you wanted to tell us about your grandmother with the Indians?

02:13:19.600 - 02:13:32.600

Didn't I? She was a teacher at the Pine Ridge. She was all-- Did we talk about Dr. Eastman?

02:13:32.600 - 02:13:50.600

No. Eastman was the physician at the Pine Ridge when Grandmother was there and when new young people particularly would come to the Pine Ridge in any capacity, he and his family would take them under their wing and look out for them a little bit.

02:13:50.600 - 02:14:05.600

Grandmother was one of those people. What was the Pine Ridge? The Pine Ridge Reservation for the Sioux up in South Dakota. It's right outside of Rapid City.

02:14:05.600 - 02:14:31.600

There's a rosebud and the Pine Ridge are the two main reservations for the Sioux in South Dakota. Dr. Eastman was a Sioux Indian who had graduated from Dartmouth and was the physician at the-- and he wrote books that are not great Shakespeare literature,

02:14:31.600 - 02:14:53.600

but they sure tell you a lot about the Indian culture and what things were like growing up Indian, which he did in Minnesota and in South Dakota and northern Nebraska on the Niagara. Did your grandmother grow up on the reservation? No, no, no.

02:14:53.600 - 02:15:19.600

She grew up in Woodbine, Iowa where her dad was a conductor on the Union Pacific. And also she was the very first woman bookkeeper in Omaha, Nebraska. She quit because there was a store and the owner's son used to come in and take a handful of cash out, and she objected, and he said, "Well, it's his store,"

02:15:19.600 - 02:15:33.600

so my grandmother said, "Well, I'm not keeping books on something like this," and quit. And then she met my grandpa and married him. Those people were in their 60s and couldn't keep their hands off each other. I never saw people like that.

02:15:33.600 - 02:15:49.600

[Laughter] Let me ask you, what is your opinion of Jacqueline Cochran and the WASP program? Well, I can find a lot of fault with the WASP program and Jacqueline Cochran. Anybody can.

02:15:49.600 - 02:16:04.600

But I wasn't--you know, the times were different. Things were different. I think she did the best she could for us. I think the only thing that she was an inner--I think she gave up too early on us to get our militarization.

02:16:04.600 - 02:16:16.600

And I don't know that she had that kind of power anyway. I don't know. I think that she was a remarkable woman, and if she'd been a man, everybody would say what a great man she was. They found fault with her.

02:16:16.600 - 02:16:43.600

Some people found fault with her because she was a woman, but I'm accustomed to that, and most of us are. And people find fault with us because we're women and choose not to stay in the groove. Look what they're doing to Hillary, poor dear. What are your thoughts about the fact that the WASP history was left out of the history books?

02:16:43.600 - 02:17:07.600

And what are your feelings about the Wings Across America project that is trying to get that history into the educational system? I think that this is a worthy endeavor, and I sure hope it works. It sounds to me as if you're doing a good job. So many of the books that we read or the articles we read, they say that the WASP were women of privilege.

02:17:07.600 - 02:17:26.600

Some people were working and saving for two weeks to get enough money to buy a half an hour's time. I was able to buy mine all at once, but I earned every penny myself. It would never have occurred to me to ask my father for the money for that. It didn't occur to me to ask permission either, though.

02:17:26.600 - 02:17:58.600

So I think that given the time, I think Jacqueline did really well. I think that the WASP program was--and people recognize it now as a real good stepping stone. The fact that it was omitted from the history books tells you just exactly how important they thought it was at the time. But once again, I mean, they're spending a lot of time on the Battle of Leyte Gulf and stuff.

02:17:58.600 - 02:18:22.600

Things that had to do with immediate lives, the loss of lives, I suppose, seemed to them to be more important than what a bunch of privileged chicks did. And then when you find out we weren't all privileged, that was a big surprise too. What do you feel will be the legacy of the WASP? I think women will be doing everything that men are doing in the air.

02:18:22.600 - 02:18:47.600

I think that eventually--well, I think even now they're already considered a significant part of our defense strategy. What do you think your legacy will be? Well, right now we're sure leaving a legacy, aren't we? My kids can look it up.

02:18:47.600 - 02:19:05.600

My grandchildren's other grandmother, the one in Montana--the kids in Montana's grandmother--was in the SPARS, and she doesn't want to be even listed at the Women's Memorial. Somebody put her in. But I think that's a terrible mistake.

02:19:05.600 - 02:19:27.600

I think that we need that in there because no place else is it going to be. You pointed out it's not in the encyclopedias. It wasn't for 15 years that you found even the WASP mentioned in any encyclopedia that I consulted. Aviation encyclopedias may be different, but not general encyclopedias.

02:19:27.600 - 02:19:39.600

Millie, I know in life there are ups and downs. There are good times and there are bad times. Everyone has them. What gets you through the bad times?

02:19:39.600 - 02:19:50.600

Well, I have no alternative, really. I don't know. I ignore it. I have the ability to compartmentalize my life.

02:19:50.600 - 02:20:02.600

After Bill was killed, three days after the funeral, I was back at work. I could do a good--at least I thought it was good. Maybe it wasn't. I noticed that my supervisor was walking back and forth in the hall to see what I was up to.

02:20:02.600 - 02:20:25.600

But I could do the social work, and I was only six weeks into it without any problem. It was when I didn't have a chore to do that I felt part. I had a bad time then. Now, with my current medical condition, which I think is pretty bad because of the loss--

02:20:25.600 - 02:20:40.600

it isn't the loss of my sight; it's the loss of my ability to drive, to hold a book and read it. I can still play cards. I don't know for how long. And now I have cancer, the big C.

02:20:40.600 - 02:20:53.600

I don't know. I'll ignore it. That's all I can do--accommodate my blindness, accommodate it as much as I can, and follow the instructions of the doctor.

02:20:53.600 - 02:21:19.600

I'm better at the compartmentalization than most people. -Millie, what advice could you give to children or grandchildren? -My big message is that what you do when the time that you are first able to make decisions does count. Probably the Jewish people have it right.

02:21:19.600 - 02:21:36.600

It's somewhere around 14, 12 to 14, where you start making decisions that will affect your life. It will establish patterns. It will establish your reputation. And you need to have some kinds of goals.

02:21:36.600 - 02:21:49.600

They can be pretty vague. One of my goals that I omitted in that other list and that was important too was three ways to make a living. I had been--grew up during the Depression. I knew people who had advanced degrees.

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For instance, I knew a guy that had an advanced degree in geology, and he couldn't support his family. He had to send his wife and kids to his--to her brother to feed them while he tried to keep the home fires going. So you need to have some flexibility.

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And so you need to plan things like that. You need three ways to make a living. You need to get as much education or training as is practicable. You need to make a decision when you have a choice.

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Will this advance my goal? If it is, do it. If you don't know, don't do it. And if you know it's going to be bad, do not do it.

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Evaluate things. Don't just--don't react, respond. It's really important. Was there something else I said on there that was important I don't remember?

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Is there anything that I have left out that you would like to say or any event that you would like to talk about, anything at all that you would like to say to your children, to your grandchildren, or just in general? I think that's what I had to say there.

02:23:08.600 - 02:23:29.600

I love a whole bunch of them. In this--see, I can't remember after we talked, did we have my awards and that sort of thing or are those attached in a different way? Yes, but I would like you to tell us the awards that you have received, which are most important.

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See, and I've forgotten the years already. Besides the degrees, which we have recorded, I have Colorado Working Woman of the Year in '85. Is that right? I think so, yeah.

02:23:41.600 - 02:24:08.600

And then I have a whole slew that were given by the National Council on Alcoholism when it was a viable operation from El Paso County Branch for my work with the people who suffer from alcoholism. I quit work as a caseworker for--which when I got the four, I was the highest-paid caseworker there,

02:24:08.600 - 02:24:23.600

at the department. Then other people earned that four rating also. The supervisors had a different rating schedule. But I think that's all.

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Anything else? Let's pause for a moment. Okay. Because I'd hate for you to have to go through the whole thing twice.

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Okay. So let's go ahead and do it, and then I can always skip over it. Start when you're in second. Well, in the first place, I want to impress on everybody that it's important what you say to your kids

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and how you say it. When I was in the second grade, my mother was pregnant with my brother who was born-- this is like August, and he was born in October. My little sister had started her second year.

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And my father would grow lots of watermelon. That was his contribution to the community. And people could come out and they could get a watermelon, and Dad wouldn't charge one. Or they could get two, depending on the size of your family and stuff.

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So Dad went to town to get the newspaper. At that time we had a hired hand. And while he was gone, somebody drove up in a nice big car, and my mom said, "Well, there's somebody here for some watermelon.

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Now don't take any money." This is right after we'd done our shopping for school. We had pencils and new paper and stuff like that, getting ready to go to school. Anyway, so I ran out there.

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She wouldn't go because she was so big pregnant. And I ran out there, and the guy wanted two watermelons, so I gave them to him. And he said, "Here," and he started to hand me two fifty-cents. And I said, "No, that's all right. You can have them."

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And so he backed up, and as he backed up, he flipped the two fifty-cents out. Well, I'm in a spot. Mom said, "Don't take money. I can't leave two fifty-cents laying on the ground. No seven-year-old's going to let that happen."

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So I went and picked them up, and I didn't know what to do. And I felt real bad about the whole thing, because I had the biggest notion of what I was going to do. I'd violated my mother's orders, at least in my eyes I had. So we had a garage that had sliding doors, and there was space between them.

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So I got in there, and I thought, "Well, I'll just sit in here and think it over." Well, the next thing I know, I hadn't come to any conclusions as to what to do with the two fifty-cents. And my father is out on the front porch yelling at me, wanting me to come to eat. And I didn't respond. I still didn't know what to do.

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Well, the whole upchuck of this thing was that they sent the hired man out on a horse to look for me. And my father went to town and reported me missing. And they rang the fire alarm, and the sheriff stopped the trains between North Platte and Denver, searched them to see if I was on it.

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And there were thousands of people swarming all over the place looking for me. And on one side of the garage, there was a bin full of wheat. And my grandmother decided that I had slipped under the wheat, and they expected to find me suffocated down there.

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Well, I was behind the doors, and things were getting worse. I couldn't possibly come out to this mess. About that time, the sheriff fell in the creek, and he decided that that's where I was, and they were going to seine the creek.

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And I finally had to get out of there, so I went walking. And there was a gal that had kind of a blue dress on, and she says, "Little girl, have you seen that Peterson girl?" And I said, "Well, no."

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So after she left, I went back between the doors, and I sat there, and it was getting pretty tiresome, all these people. And so I knocked on the--and there were a whole bunch of people leaning on the doors then, a bunch of men carrying on solemn conversations about what had happened to that little Peterson girl, me.

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So I'm knocking on the door, and somebody takes a flashlight and goes like that, and they missed me. So I waited a long time later. It was 10 o'clock at night. I knocked some more, and finally they dragged me out and said,

02:28:47.600 - 02:29:05.600

"Does anybody know about that little Peterson girl?" Somebody had decided that I had gone to sleep in the cornfield because they found a nest out in there with a bunch of magazines. My sister Mary had gotten all the red pencils, so I had stolen them and put them at my bloomer leg.

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They made up a whole story about this, none of which was true, and I tried for years to straighten out the story, and finally gave up. I had been between the doors the whole time for 12 hours at least. But, you know, what could my mother have said?

02:29:22.600 - 02:29:35.600

Why did I take this so seriously? How do you know? That's the end of the story. What did you do with the two 50-cent pieces? I don't know. I gave them to Mom, I guess. I don't know what I did.

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My grandmother was all over me. I had weed seeds on me, but I had been in the cornfield, you know. But I don't know. She didn't ever get spanked?

02:29:46.600 - 02:29:59.600

No. They said, "She'll put my poor mother through hell." I mean my poor father. But everybody was so concerned, and the more concerned they got, and I could see them.

02:29:59.600 - 02:30:15.600

I was getting more and more agitated and upset, and I didn't know what to do. I certainly was not equipped mentally or emotionally to deal with this problem. And I keep thinking about that when I hear people telling their kids what to do. I think about that.

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Pretty interesting, huh? It is. That's it. You've been a great, great interviewee.

02:30:26.600 - 02:30:42.600

I want to thank you very much. I hope children and generations to come will appreciate what you have done. I want to know one thing, Millie. When the teacher said there was no such thing as a WASP and those kids stood up, did you go talk to the teacher?

02:30:42.600 - 02:30:52.600

No. I got so mad at the teachers at the local high school. I had them hauled up on the carpet, they said, "Oh, that's Mrs. Young, she calls all the time." Which was true.

02:30:52.600 - 02:31:07.600

They never answered the phone. I had the police there when I was going to go visit with the teachers at Boston High School. We had totally incompetent teachers in some cases. Totally.

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Yet your kids have gotten a great education, evidently all of them. Yeah, well, you know, it comes from my mom. I was always late to school. I delivered milk and stuff before I got to school. So my mother, at the beginning of the year, wrote a whole tablet full of excuses.

02:31:25.600 - 02:31:37.600

Every morning she'd rip one off and hand it to them. The old cow had a calf. What would happen if you were late for school? I had to have an excuse.

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And if you didn't? Well, I don't know what they were going to do. I always had one, my mother knew. And I had to have one, so she wrote a whole packet full of excuses.

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Well, I hope we haven't completely tired you out. You haven't. See, I can sit. Good.

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It's that twisting that I do when I'm doing something with the dishwasher. That kind of movement, I decided, is something I'm not going to do any more of. Listen, for your eyes, what are they doing?