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She finished her master's degree in '82. Oh my land. The people are looking so young and perched lately. [laughter]

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You can go ahead. I'm Deanie Parrish and we're in the home of... Where are we? This is Nan. Is it Hazeltine or Hazeltine?

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Hazeltine. Like TN. We're in the home of Nanette Hazeltine. She was a WASP, Class 44W6. Today is April 10, 2000.

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We're in Ingram, Texas. You can tell us who you are. Oh, now it's my turn. It's your turn.

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Sorry about that. Balls in your court. Okay. My full name is Helen Nanette Hazeltine Fuller.

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Fuller is my married name. I'm now divorced. Although I think I'm widowed. It's a lot easier.

00:01:06.000 - 00:01:15.000

But I changed it to Hazeltine because when my mother started living with me, it was easier. It was so confusing.

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Harriet Hazeltine, Nan Fuller. What relationship? So I just started using Hazeltine again. Where were you born?

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Oh, yeah. Minor detail. I was born October 24, 1922 in Oakland, California. Lived there the first... Well, lived there forever.

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I swear to heavens. My brother was born three years later on September 4, 1925. Then one more kid came along. My sister Joan.

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She was born September 19, 1933. So it's like two separate families. My brother and I and then my sister. And of course it makes it kind of interesting

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because you hear of all of your friends and relations with kids close together. My own kids were close together. My oldest is five years and one month older than my youngest.

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And I have five, so you figure it out. It makes life very, very interesting. During my early years, I went to Glenview Elementary School.

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Thoroughly enjoyed it. I love school. Graduated from there. Went to junior high school, Westlake Junior High School. The principal of Westlake lived just a hop, skip and a jump from us

00:02:58.000 - 00:03:11.000

up on the next street. And it was quite an interesting thing. My brother took a couple of dimes that he had found and-- No, no, my mistake. He didn't find them.

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He took some beer that was in the basement and went out and sold one bottle to the policeman who lived across the street and to the principal of the school who lived down and up. Then when the folks got home, he showed them the two dimes that he had gotten

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and my poor folks hit the ceiling. It was home-brewed beer. It wasn't root beer at all. My dad goes charging over to the policemen and he gets it. Gets to them before they've opened it.

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But at the principal's office, they had opened it and there was beer all over the ceiling, all over the walls. Dad stayed to help and clean it up. What happened to your brother?

00:04:03.000 - 00:04:19.000

You know, I don't remember. I know they both landed on us for taking anything out of the basement. So I don't know whatever happened to him. What was your dad doing with that beer in the basement?

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Oh, they made it. Oh, okay. Yeah, home-brewed beer. This was during the Prohibition time.

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Personally, I thought it stunk to high heaven. Figuratively and literally. After--yeah, I was in junior high at that time, I think. I could have still been in grammar school.

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Junior high was a great time. We had a class that was half Caucasian, half a mixture of Oriental and blacks, and they were the nicest kids you'd ever want to see.

00:05:05.000 - 00:05:26.000

In fact, I had a funny one happen. Maisie Wong was a gal who was athletic, more or less, like myself. And so we'd always team up together, and if we were separated for teams, we made arrangements where we could be together.

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And she was going home one time, and Dad was picking me up, so I says, "Come on, Maisie, Dad will drop you off." So she came, and Dad told me years later that that was one of the hardest things he had ever done.

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He was born in Oakland and raised there around the turn of the century. Well, at that time, there was a big prejudice against Oriental people, and Dad had an extremely strong prejudice against them, and I didn't know it. And even with me asking him to take Maisie home, he never said a word.

00:06:10.000 - 00:06:30.000

He just did it, which I thought was score one for his side. And then after junior high, I went to university high, which was halfway between Oakland and Berkeley. And I'm not sure whether uni high was in the Berkeley side or in the Oakland side.

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All I know is I went there. What was your transportation? Oh, buses. Were they school buses?

00:06:42.000 - 00:07:04.000

Oh, no. No. We did get bus tickets. For those of us who lived beyond a certain distance, if we lived more than two miles from the school, we were issued a bus ticket. And that gave us rides to and from for a solid month.

00:07:04.000 - 00:07:25.000

And, of course, if you lost your ticket, you were just out in the cold, so you were very careful about that. But if I was going to be at my grandparents' for anything, I'd walk, because my grandparents lived closer to the school than we lived.

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And my grandparents were very interesting. I should not digress here to them, should I? That's fine. Go ahead. Okay. My grandfather used to be a jockey, a horse jockey, if you can imagine.

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And my grandmother had had polio when she was four years old, so she always walked swinging her legs from her hips. And she couldn't run, but she was bound to determine nobody was going to pity her or give her any sympathy, so she could ride anything with four legs on it.

00:08:09.000 - 00:08:30.000

And she did it side saddle, which is crazy as a hoot owl. I mean, if any of you have ever ridden side saddle, you know that it's not easy. But Grams did it, and it got to the point where all the cowboys from the surrounding ranches would get a hold of their horses,

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and they'd bring them in to Grams, and Grams would break them so that they could use them on the ranch. And she'd do it all with side saddle. Honest to Pete, I don't understand how she got on the horse.

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She couldn't bend her legs. It was very, very interesting. And, of course, when he first saw Grams, he said, "Well," he says, "there's the woman I'm going to marry."

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And he became a U.S. marshal up in the Dakota Territory. That's where they were living. And he went underground one time and joined the Jack McAllister gang. We still laugh about that one.

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And he was able to get the information to the sheriff in time for them to capture the Jack McAllister gang. And this Jack, when he found out who had put the key wash on the gang, swore up and down he was going to get Grams.

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And the minute he got out of prison-- Well, Grams kept his eyes on the Jack McAllister gang. He knew the guys were not up and up and that sort of stuff. So it was about 12, 15 years later that Jack McAllister and his gang

00:09:54.000 - 00:10:09.000

were released from prison. And by that time, Grams had retired from the marshal part of it, and he owned a hardware store. So he went down to the office this one day,

00:10:09.000 - 00:10:29.000

and he had a handlebar mustache and a long goatee. And that was the day Jack McAllister and the gang were released. And he came home for dinner, and he had shaved off his handlebar mustache and his goatee,

00:10:29.000 - 00:10:41.000

and he had four kids at that time. And the kids took one look at him walking into the house and started screaming "bloody murder." They didn't recognize him at all.

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And it was a good thing Grams did, because it was two days later, he looked up from his counter, and in the store walked Jack McAllister. And Grams thought, "Oh, brother, here it comes." Well, this character, this McAllister, walked up to the counter,

00:10:59.000 - 00:11:16.000

and he wanted to have guns and ammunition and this and that and the other thing. Grams didn't say a word. He just got them out, put them down. McAllister paid for them. And so after he left, Grams went to the sheriff's office

00:11:16.000 - 00:11:30.000

and told them what had happened, and he said, "That guy's getting ready to rob a bank in a close town." So they staked out the town's close by. "Sure enough, here comes Jack McAllister and his gang, and they are caught again."

00:11:30.000 - 00:11:45.000

After that, Grams could relax a little bit. In growing up, were you real close to your grandparents? I think so. We had some fun.

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Every Saturday night, my grandparents would come over to our place, and we'd go over to my grandparents' place. And on the Saturday nights that they came over to our place, I made a cake. I don't know why the--no, Bill was not into making cake, and Joan was too young.

00:12:06.000 - 00:12:24.000

So I'd make the cake, and I can remember one time we were sitting around eating the cake. Oh, we'd play penny ante poker first. After we had finished playing and we had settled up everything, we had our cake. All of a sudden, Grams picks up her fork, and she slams it down, and she says,

00:12:24.000 - 00:12:40.000

"Devitt, Nanette, you come over and make me a cake." She says, "Yours are so much better than mine." I says, "Okay." So it was the next week I went from school over to her place,

00:12:40.000 - 00:13:00.000

the distance of nine or ten blocks. And the first thing I noticed was that Grams was using all the early stuff, you know, lard and heavy flour. And so I went down to the store, and I bought some shortening and some cake flour

00:13:00.000 - 00:13:13.000

and that sort of stuff, and I got back, and I made her a cake. And it came out great. She was mad as a wet head all over again. I says, "Well, Grams, it's the ingredients.

00:13:13.000 - 00:13:29.000

Use the right stuff, and it'll turn out right." And she did, and it did. Let me ask you, you bought the ingredient. Were you on--did you have an allowance?

00:13:29.000 - 00:13:38.000

Oh, no, I didn't buy it myself. They gave me the money for it. Hell's bells. Didn't have enough money to sneeze at in those days.

00:13:38.000 - 00:13:50.000

Tell me what a Christmas was like at your house growing up. Well, it was sort of-- Did your grandparents spend Christmas with you? Oh, yes.

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Grandparents, my uncle and aunt, and sometimes the other side, aunt and uncle and my cousin. She was a stepdaughter. But they came over.

00:14:07.000 - 00:14:28.000

We'd usually have dinner. And I don't remember so much about the actual Christmases because I was busy doing all the stuff, you know, setting the table, taking care of the dinner, cleaning up afterwards, and that was my job.

00:14:28.000 - 00:14:45.000

And that's all there was to it. Easter was a time that was very interesting. I don't think anybody does it anymore, but we had spider webs. We'd take a ball of string, and after the kids were asleep,

00:14:45.000 - 00:14:58.000

the folks would take and tie the string to the foot of the bed, and then they'd run the string throughout the house. In fact, several times when we got a little bit older, up into our teens, they'd run the string outside.

00:14:58.000 - 00:15:24.000

And then along the string, they'd put candies of different kinds, you know, some nuts, things that were small and could be-- it would not get hurt by rain or get stepped on and squashed into the floor. And that was fun because, like with my kids, I had five kids.

00:15:24.000 - 00:15:37.000

So we had five different strings. And then, of course, getting to bed after you got them all put up was really a chore. You had to crawl over and under and step. You had to be very careful.

00:15:37.000 - 00:15:48.000

Otherwise, you'd break the string, and you didn't want to do that. And you had to be careful where you put them. Like if you put it around a particular lamp and somebody pulled on that, over would go the lamp.

00:15:48.000 - 00:16:07.000

Well, you didn't want to do that. So I don't know whether any of the kids do it nowadays or not. I know I've thought about that a lot. And if you have just one kid, you've got to have at least two or maybe three.

00:16:07.000 - 00:16:19.000

Did they race to see who could get the most? No. We set absolutely no speed on this. You take it slow and easy, and you don't take anybody else's.

00:16:19.000 - 00:16:35.000

You don't take anything unless it's on your string. Otherwise, they'd be reaching over and taking the candy Easter eggs from one part. And then at the end, we'd have some sort of a nice little gift. Sometimes I'd get socks.

00:16:35.000 - 00:16:49.000

They might need socks. Sometimes it'd be a game for each different ones. So there were five kids that mounted up to money, so you had to be careful. [Laughs]

00:16:49.000 - 00:17:08.000

Did you do this all the way through high school, and then you did it with your own children? Well, now, that's not quite right. See, I only went to uni high for the first year and a half. And then my aunt, my mother's sister, and her husband, my uncle, in Wisconsin,

00:17:08.000 - 00:17:23.000

wanted me to come back and live with them because their daughter, who was a year older than I was, had been put back one year in school. And she was almost on the same level as her younger brother. He was a year behind us.

00:17:23.000 - 00:17:40.000

So Marge was back--Margaret was back to my grade. There's a year difference between us. And so that's what happened. I went back there, and that was the end of the spider webs as far as I know.

00:17:40.000 - 00:17:55.000

It's something I enjoyed. And, of course, when my own kids came along, I inaugurated it again. My husband, he only did one string each time. I had to do four. [Laughs]

00:17:55.000 - 00:18:09.000

So you went and lived with your aunt to finish high school? Yeah, I lived back in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for my last year and a half of high school. It was great. I mean, I had never been exposed to the four seasons before.

00:18:09.000 - 00:18:22.000

And they says, "Oh, do you have a winter coat?" I said, "Sure, I've got a summer, spring, fall, and winter coat." And I pulled it out, you know, very lightweight. That's not going to do. [Laughs]

00:18:22.000 - 00:18:34.000

So for my birthday, they got me a winter coat. Jeepers creepers, that thing was heavy. And it was thick. But that's what they wore back there.

00:18:34.000 - 00:18:59.000

And it's a lot better now because the clothes are a lot lighter, but they're warmer. And to have snow, that was something else that tickled me pink. And, of course, what made it funny, we'd go to school, we'd have to have skirts or dresses on. We'd put snow pants underneath them.

00:18:59.000 - 00:19:20.000

And when we'd get to school, we'd zip off our ski pants and hang them in our lockers. We'd have long stockings and nice heavy shoes. So that wasn't too bad. It was completely different from anything I had been used to.

00:19:20.000 - 00:19:31.000

Well, let's see, what else was there about that? So when you finished high school, tell us about your girlfriend. Yeah, you left all your friends back home. How did that affect you?

00:19:31.000 - 00:19:43.000

Didn't really bother me in the least. I mean, there were so many kids. My aunt and uncle had six kids. One of them was already married, and two of them were in college.

00:19:43.000 - 00:19:58.000

So that left three of them there at the house. So there was three plus Margaret plus me. So there was five of us there. So, you know, it was perfectly natural, perfectly sensible.

00:19:58.000 - 00:20:25.000

That's how I really got into flying. My cousin Don, who was next older to Margaret, was taking flying from CPT at the college in town. And he'd ask different ones of us if we'd ask him questions, you know, check him out. Well, I was always gung ho for that.

00:20:25.000 - 00:20:42.000

So he got so that he'd say, "I've got some questions. You want to check me on it?" And I said, "Sure." So this one time, started reading the questions, and he was answering them. And then suddenly what I was reading triggered my memory.

00:20:42.000 - 00:20:57.000

He said, "Well, what if you did this or that? What would happen?" So he was telling me, and then I kept on going. It wasn't in the book. It was what I myself wanted to know. And he suddenly stopped. He says, "Is that in the book?"

00:20:57.000 - 00:21:13.000

I says, "No." And he says, "But I want to know." So I said, "Do you know it?" "Yeah." I said, "Well, tell me." After we talked a little bit on that, he said, "Why don't you learn to fly?"

00:21:13.000 - 00:21:30.000

I says, "Girls can't fly." I had been brainwashed by that time so that, you know, I expected girls couldn't do this, girls couldn't do that, girls couldn't do the other thing. He said, "Sure they can." I said, "You're kidding."

00:21:30.000 - 00:21:47.000

From then on until I graduated in six, seven months from then, my aunt and uncle had one hell of a time keeping me at home. I wanted to go out to the field and fly. They wouldn't allow it.

00:21:47.000 - 00:22:08.000

Well, I can't say I blame them. They were guardians of me. You know, they just didn't know how this was going to set with the folks. I didn't care. I was going to fly to hell with the folks. I graduated from high school on January 28, 1944.

00:22:08.000 - 00:22:23.000

No. When did I graduate from high school? Forty-five. Yeah, that was it. Then I came home. So maybe forty-one?

00:22:23.000 - 00:22:45.000

That's better. I was going to say, "No, I was in the service in '45." Yeah, I graduated in '41. In February, they took me to Chicago to catch the train to go out to the West Coast. Man, was that wind blowing.

00:22:45.000 - 00:23:03.000

Up in Wisconsin, it was dry and it was cold, but you didn't feel cold. You felt great. But in Chicago, without wind blowing, I felt as though they had put me in a cake of ice and left me there. I was glad to get out of Chicago.

00:23:03.000 - 00:23:31.000

So I got home, and I wasn't home more than ten days before my dad had found out from different people who were instructors on the field and where I should go and so forth and so on. So he took me out, I think. I can't remember whether he took me out or whether somebody else did. Anyway, the very first lesson I ever had was the very first time I was ever in the air.

00:23:31.000 - 00:23:43.000

And, oh, that was it. From then on, forget anything else, I wanted to fly. And that's what I did. Did you get a job?

00:23:43.000 - 00:24:05.000

Oh, yes. The first job I had was with my uncle and grandfather. They were manufacturers of signs, you know, like road signs, license plates. Now that sounds strange because usually they had the prisoners in the prisons make the license plates.

00:24:05.000 - 00:24:28.000

But my grandfather and my uncle made some, because I've seen them on cars to this day. They may have made the master, the stencil from which the plates are made. That might have been it. But anyway, what was I talking about?

00:24:28.000 - 00:24:46.000

You went to work for them? Oh, yeah. And I worked for my uncle for the next several months. What did you do? I was the chief office jack of all trades.

00:24:46.000 - 00:24:56.000

In fact, one time my uncle came out. He had his right hand in his pocket. Was it right or left? Left hand in his pocket. And he had a rag around it.

00:24:56.000 - 00:25:03.000

He said, "You've got to get me up to the hospital." I says, "Really?" He says, "Yeah." And he took the rag off.

00:25:03.000 - 00:25:20.000

He had punched off the end of his finger. So I jumped in the car and we traipsed up to the hospital. He was lying there while the doctor was trying to fix on him. He finally turned to me and he said, "Do you mind standing back so I can see what's going on?"

00:25:20.000 - 00:25:35.000

I had my nose right down the middle of it. I always did like medical stuff. So he got his finger fixed up, and I got to see the whole thing. I was thrilled to pieces.

00:25:35.000 - 00:26:03.000

So then after that, Pearl Harbor hit. And of course, the minute Pearl Harbor hit, the military closed down off-line on the West Coast. You either got in your plane immediately and took off and went inland, or you took the wings off your plane and you had to do it within the next half hour.

00:26:03.000 - 00:26:17.000

And I thought, "Oh, gee." Well, luckily, my uncle had a friend of his who was a pilot, so he got into the plane and flew it up to Reno. That left me not flying.

00:26:17.000 - 00:26:33.000

I was very unhappy, to say the least. So I was working for a dental lab at that time, making false teeth. [Laughs] We even made false teeth for an 8-year-old kid whose second set had not come in yet.

00:26:33.000 - 00:26:55.000

He was just far behind. I learned a lot about that. In fact, I was fussing away making molds so that they could take those and make false teeth that would fit onto, you know, partials.

00:26:55.000 - 00:27:05.000

And they'd have these bands that would go around other teeth. Well, I was doing that sort of stuff. And suddenly, one fellow says, "Hey, what are you doing?" I says, "Making this."

00:27:05.000 - 00:27:17.000

He says, "Yeah, but look at that bottle there." I says, "Oh, yeah, that's carbon tet. Gee, it smells so good." And I had it practically under my nose. He says, "For God's sakes, you'll ruin your brain."

00:27:17.000 - 00:27:28.000

I says, "I will?" He says, "Yeah." I says, "Oh, well, what do you do?" He says, "Well, you keep it closed, and you only dip your thing in once in a blue moon."

00:27:28.000 - 00:27:44.000

I says, "Okay." So I closed it up. But I was always unhappy about that because it smelled so very good. When I was in college, we had to tell what a particular chemical was.

00:27:44.000 - 00:27:55.000

The guy gave me carbon tetrachloride. And, of course, I didn't say anything about my experience with the lab. I took the top off, and I smelled it. I gave it back to him.

00:27:55.000 - 00:28:07.000

I says, "You want to give me another one? This is carbon tet." He says, "How do you know?" He says, "Prove it." So I had to go through the whole song and dance anyway.

00:28:07.000 - 00:28:21.000

But it proved out. It smelled so good. I can understand why these kids get hooked on chemicals. But they've got to understand that it's dangerous.

00:28:21.000 - 00:28:50.000

You can fry your brains, and who wants to do that? So after Pearl Harbor hit, and after I was in May of '42, then I decided I had to fly. So I trot on up to the mountains where the plane is. I find me a room at a farmer's place.

00:28:50.000 - 00:29:04.000

Here was the farmhouse. Here was town three miles away. And here was the farmer's farm strip. That's where we landed or took off with our plane.

00:29:04.000 - 00:29:24.000

And you could fly east, but you could not fly west without the military shooting you down. Well, we were very careful, believe me. What did you do, and how did you pay for your flight? Well, while I was there, I looked around, and I got a job with the Forest Service.

00:29:24.000 - 00:29:52.000

This is the National Forest Service, USES. So I had to walk into town every morning three miles, and then three miles back at night. They had all these fellows there. But with the war having started, these guys were being drafted one after another.

00:29:52.000 - 00:30:15.000

So I became the receptionist. I took the weather reports. I checked with all the lookout towers by radio to see what was going on and how things were going there. In fact, I was sort of a jack of all trades.

00:30:15.000 - 00:30:29.000

What were the lookout towers for? For fire control. We had, how many lookouts did we have on that forest? I was on the Plumas Forest out of Quincy.

00:30:29.000 - 00:30:55.000

The headquarters for the Quincy National Forest was in, the Plumas National Forest was in Quincy. And we were right outside of, four miles away from the railroad that went down, which went through the Oakland Recreation Camps. And we had one fire that was a lollapalooza.

00:30:55.000 - 00:31:16.000

A train had gone down, gone by the camp, gone by us, and all of a sudden they called in from the camp that there was a fire. And we were able to find out the train as it went by, it threw a shoe. And it was hot and it landed in the brush and started a fire.

00:31:16.000 - 00:31:33.000

And the fire crowned. That means that the fire was burning all the tops and it was racing. In fact, it was going faster than any speedster ever thought of going. And it went up the side of that mountain inside of 40 minutes.

00:31:33.000 - 00:31:51.000

Oh, it was horrendous. And we had a lookout up on top there. Luckily, he had a, you might say a protective den underground. And he just, all of a sudden he called in.

00:31:51.000 - 00:32:05.000

He says, "This fire is coming up here too fast. I'm signing out." He closed down everything and he went down underground along with, I think he had a couple of dogs with him. And they stayed there for the balance of the fire.

00:32:05.000 - 00:32:21.000

And that thing burned over that mountain. Oh, it was horrible. At 10 o'clock that night, I was still working because naturally we had to have somebody who could plug in the telephone lines to the different places.

00:32:21.000 - 00:32:35.000

And at 10 o'clock that night, I went outside. And by the light of that fire, four miles away, I was able to read the newspaper. It just doesn't seem possible. Okay.

00:32:35.000 - 00:32:54.000

Okay. We're just at the end of the first tape. Oh, that's a wonderful story. [video playing]

00:32:54.000 - 00:33:10.000

Oh, you're one of those. [video playing] It certainly is. [video playing]

00:33:10.000 - 00:33:21.000

Their own thing. [video playing] Tell me about the Forest Service. What was their job?

00:33:21.000 - 00:33:43.000

Well, their job was taking care of the lands of the United States. They have cut up the areas into different national forests. You get the Plumas National, the Siskiyou National, Yosemite National, Sequoia National.

00:33:43.000 - 00:33:54.000

Now, these are all national forests out in California. That's what I'm used to. And they govern it. They take care of it.

00:33:54.000 - 00:34:09.000

They manage it. You can only have so many people with so many heads of cattle grazing on a certain area of land. Or sheep or goats.

00:34:09.000 - 00:34:25.000

It's all taken care of. And you have lumber industries. You can only cut so many trees in such and such a place. For quite a while, up there in Washington and Oregon, they clear cut.

00:34:25.000 - 00:34:36.000

That means they took off everything and left the area absolutely clear. A lot of us couldn't stand that. We thought it was wrong. They're getting away from that now.

00:34:36.000 - 00:34:51.000

In fact, they got away from it quite a while ago. They go in now and they mark the trees that can be cut. In other words, it's management of our natural resources. And this, to me, is important.

00:34:51.000 - 00:35:10.000

They have fellows who do nothing but timber work. They have others who do nothing but agricultural farming. They have people who do nothing but fire control. That's another reason for the lookouts.

00:35:10.000 - 00:35:30.000

They scan the horizon all the time. And if they see any sort of a smoke, they mark it down, they plot it out, they take a reading on it, and then they call one of the other lookouts, and they take a reading, and wherever it crossfires, that's where the fire is.

00:35:30.000 - 00:35:59.000

And if it's a fire that is not governed, that's my clock. [laughter] The trouble is it's off two hours, and I don't know how to get it back on track. Anyway, if they find a fire and they can't tell exactly where it is--

00:35:59.000 - 00:36:09.000

Who is "they"? The tower, the lookouts. Lookouts that belong to what? The forest.

00:36:09.000 - 00:36:23.000

They're up on top of the mountains. They live up there for the season. If nobody has been to a lookout tower, for God's sakes, get there, because it's fascinating.

00:36:23.000 - 00:36:43.000

You get a bird's-eye view of everything. It was interesting when I was living there in Quincy, I would fly off the dirt runway, and I would have to take off one direction and land the opposite direction,

00:36:43.000 - 00:37:03.000

regardless of wind, so I'd take off and I'd have to scoot around an 800-foot hill and then go into my left-hand pattern. Well, Mount Huff was right at the end of our runway, and we could get up without running into Mount Huff if you were smart,

00:37:03.000 - 00:37:20.000

I mean, if you used your head. This fire that I was telling you about started at the base of Mount Huff, and it went right up the mountain. We had two lumber teams plus the lookout in there, and they were tracked.

00:37:20.000 - 00:37:35.000

They were able to get one team out. The other team got out as far as personnel was concerned, but they lost all their equipment. And, of course, the lookout, he dove down into his cave,

00:37:35.000 - 00:37:57.000

and he survived, but it was nip and tuck there for a bit. And it's taken--and that was 40-some-odd years ago. It's taken all that time for that growth to grow up again. There's no doubt about it, once you have a fire,

00:37:57.000 - 00:38:14.000

you have a whole change of vegetation, of trees, bushes. It's unbelievable. Did they have fire equipment? Oh, yeah.

00:38:14.000 - 00:38:39.000

In fact, I feel sort of proud of the fact that I was flying out of Quincy Airport, and they'd get a fire, and they couldn't tell where it was. Now, if it's on one side of a canyon or the other, it could mean sending out two teams, two fire control teams or firefighting teams,

00:38:39.000 - 00:38:56.000

because they couldn't tell which one they had to send out or where they had to go in order to get to the fire. So I came along, and all of a sudden, the fire control officer, Max, says, "Hey, Nan, I've got a fire. We can't spot it. Let's go take a look."

00:38:56.000 - 00:39:11.000

I says, "Great." So I hand over all the telephone and head gear to another person. Max and I hop out to the airport. We take off. We locate the fire.

00:39:11.000 - 00:39:35.000

We get down, and we see exactly where it is, on which side of the stream, on which side of the mountain, on which side of anything. And then the fire officer, Don was his name, he would go up to where the road forked, and he'd wait there until we came by, and we'd fly back,

00:39:35.000 - 00:39:52.000

and we'd open up the windows, and we'd point which road he should take. We didn't have any radio communication, but boy, we certainly communicated. And so then he would radio back to the thing, and he'd say, "Okay, we want one team to go so-and-so such-and-such a place."

00:39:52.000 - 00:40:15.000

It saved I don't know how many man-hours of traveling to get into that fire, and they'd gone it out fast and furiously, and everything was fine and dandy. And it was all that work that summer that they started in telling the RO in Frisco what they had done, and they said, "We need planes for flying, for firefighting."

00:40:15.000 - 00:40:33.000

And that's how planes came to be used in firefighting. I always felt rather proud of that. It was a connection that I had never dreamed possible. And then they went a step further and started using jumpers.

00:40:33.000 - 00:40:51.000

Well, I thought that was even better yet. But it was interesting. One thing about it, flying in the mountains, you learn your weather, and you learn how to fly in any kind of weather, any kind of situation,

00:40:51.000 - 00:41:15.000

and it's really fantastic. It's something I always look forward to and to be truthful about. I've been flying every single day since I was discharged mentally. I bet a nickel I could get into an AT-6 or a BT-13 or a Piper or anything else,

00:41:15.000 - 00:41:36.000

and I bet a nickel I could fly it very easily. In fact, I'm going to get a crack at it here if I ever get up to North Carolina. My son-in-law is learning to fly, and he went up in a Stearman here this last week. And you should hear him talk about it.

00:41:36.000 - 00:41:47.000

It was fantastic. And I thought, "Hot dogs." How long did you stay in that-- At Quincy?

00:41:47.000 - 00:42:07.000

--in the Forest Service? Until I got my orders to report to Texas. That was in--oh, heaven. '41, I was up there. '42, I was up there. '43, I was up there.

00:42:07.000 - 00:42:30.000

The end of '43, I went home for Christmas, and then I went to Texas. Let me ask you, how did you know about training for the WASP? How did you learn about that to even think about it? I don't really remember too much about that.

00:42:30.000 - 00:42:46.000

All I know is that there was this program, whether it was in the newspaper or some of the friends telling me that they had seen it or something. I cannot separate it out. But--

00:42:46.000 - 00:43:00.000

You learned about it, then what did you do? Of course, a lot of the girls with whom I had been in ground school with and flying up there at Quincy got into the WASPs ahead of me. They had their age. I didn't.

00:43:00.000 - 00:43:18.000

It made me furious. And I might have gotten it from them. I'm still in touch with, oh, three or four of those gals. How many people were flying out of that little grass strip that you flew?

00:43:18.000 - 00:43:38.000

Oh, let's see. We had 10 or 12 planes. So I would say we had a good--we had 20, 25 people. What were most of them flying for, just pleasure? Yes, I think.

00:43:38.000 - 00:43:56.000

Yeah, yeah, that was it. Or else they were trying to build up their time in order to get into the service. I know one fellow, they wouldn't let him in unless he had so many hours, and so he was putting in as many hours as he could.

00:43:56.000 - 00:44:12.000

I can't even remember. All I remember is that we had some marvelous sessions. What was your social life like? Did you date some of these people?

00:44:12.000 - 00:44:26.000

Oh, no. I'm not too up on socializing. I wanted to fly. So that a bunch of us would get together,

00:44:26.000 - 00:44:52.000

and we'd go up to Portola and have dinner and fly back. But that would be--it would be group stuff. And as far as dating, well, I did get to know the son of the Forest Service assistant supervisor, and we hit it off, and we became engaged.

00:44:52.000 - 00:45:10.000

And then I went down to Texas, and that was it. Do you remember--could you tell us about leaving Oakland? Did you go back to Oakland before you went to Texas to see your parents? And what did your parents think about what you were doing?

00:45:10.000 - 00:45:36.000

I never really found out except from my dad. He thought it was great, primarily because he had been in the Arrow squadrons as a sergeant pilot. He tells one story that I think is really funny. He was sent back--well, to begin with, he was inducted in Oakland back in 1917,

00:45:36.000 - 00:45:51.000

and he was sent to Texas. And because of his background or because of his height or because of something, he was made sergeant right off the bat. And he had all these fellows under him.

00:45:51.000 - 00:46:13.000

So they were in the train, and he says they went for four or five or six days on the train, and he says finally they stopped. And Dad looked out, and he couldn't see a darn thing. He says nothing but sand, more sand and more sand, and looked like scrub brush.

00:46:13.000 - 00:46:30.000

And so the lieutenant who was in charge of the bunch got out of the train and stood there. Dad, he was the sergeant, he got out and stood next to him. The lieutenant says, "Well, sergeant, there it is." Dad says, "There's what?"

00:46:30.000 - 00:46:52.000

And he looked all around, and he saw one little spigot sticking up out of the ground over a ways. Lieutenant says, "There's Kelly Field." And Dad and the group he was with were among the first ones to get out and start building the tent city that sprang up for Kelly Field.

00:46:52.000 - 00:47:14.000

They've got pictures of that early time, and I've often wondered if I should take a magnifying glass down, see if I can find Dad in the bunch. Because he had pictures taken, and those tents, they had floors, and they had sides up about so high, wood, and then it was just a tent.

00:47:14.000 - 00:47:33.000

And do you know how cold it gets here in the winter? Well, as Dad says, "That was one thing about Texas, it got hotter than hell." And he says, "In the fall, he was shipped up to New York." And he says, "He was there over the winter."

00:47:33.000 - 00:47:53.000

He says, "You know, that was the hottest summer Texas had had in 35 years." And he says, "Then I go to New York and they had the coldest winter they had had in 50 years." He says, "I can't stand either place." Poor Pop.

00:47:53.000 - 00:48:04.000

But, uh... Did he fly while he was... He was flying strictly as a student. But he didn't go into it because the war stopped.

00:48:04.000 - 00:48:18.000

Dad was shipped overseas to England, Scotland, Ireland. He was over... And he did a lot of entertaining. Dad could play the ukulele like nobody's business.

00:48:18.000 - 00:48:39.000

And they got together a string quartet, then they got a double string quartet. And one of Dad's cohorts in that group was my uncle, my mother's brother. And my uncle had a picture of my mother.

00:48:39.000 - 00:48:49.000

My dad saw it. And he wanted to know if he could write to her. My uncle said, "Yeah." So they started writing back and forth.

00:48:49.000 - 00:49:06.000

My mother suddenly told my mother, she says, "You know, this is the guy I'm going to marry." And Dad asked her to marry him when he came back. And she said, "Yes." So Dad came back, went on back to the West Coast.

00:49:06.000 - 00:49:25.000

And Mom followed. They were married out there in 1919. And they were together until Dad died in 1991? No, 1986.

00:49:25.000 - 00:49:44.000

Dad was just eight days short of his 91st birthday. Mom lived until she was 101 plus two months. And so she passed away just a little over a year ago. I come from a long-lived family.

00:49:44.000 - 00:49:54.000

Tell us about going from Oakland to Sweetwater. How did you get to Sweetwater? By train. Was that the time?

00:49:54.000 - 00:50:05.000

Now wait a minute. No, by gum. Yes, by gum. You know, I'm not sure.

00:50:05.000 - 00:50:15.000

On one of those trips, no, I went down by train. That's right. And got down there. We stayed at the Blue Bonnet Hotel. Who was "we"?

00:50:15.000 - 00:50:36.000

Any of the girls that were on the train who were going to that. I don't even know who they were. But they were girls from my area who we picked up on the way down. There were some girls there from, I think, Bakersfield, Fresno.

00:50:36.000 - 00:50:54.000

And then over into Arizona. We just pick up people all along. And we found out that, you know, there was a good half dozen of us who were headed for Sweetwater. Do you remember what that train ride was like?

00:50:54.000 - 00:51:05.000

Did you have a sleeper car? No, I don't remember. I don't remember being in a sleeper. I remember sleeping in my seat.

00:51:05.000 - 00:51:25.000

Which I thought was crazy. When you got to Sweetwater, do you recall, want to tell us about going out to the field, how you felt? I could hardly wait. I was ready to hike out there immediately, but they said no, we had to wait here.

00:51:25.000 - 00:51:43.000

And I was sick. No, it was something that I was so anxious to get to that I didn't see anything else. I didn't, we stayed at the Blue Bonnet Hotel, but, and we got food there. I remember that.

00:51:43.000 - 00:51:55.000

I don't remember what, if it was any good or not. I ate just because I had to. Do you remember that ride out to Avenger? How did you get out there?

00:51:55.000 - 00:52:11.000

I think it was by one of the cattle cars. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was. And that was fun because then here were all the other girls who were going the same place. And of course we got out there and of course there was the great big Fief and they're all right over the entrance way.

00:52:11.000 - 00:52:31.000

And it was nice. I felt as if it's finally at long last I had gotten there. Now it was just a matter of staying there. Because they told us right off the bat that 50% of us would evidently wash out.

00:52:31.000 - 00:52:55.000

And I thought, oh please dear God, don't let that happen to me. I think my guardian angels, I've got two of the best, one on each shoulder. And they've been taking care of me beautifully. I look back on it and a lot of things happen that I give credit to my guardian angels for.

00:52:55.000 - 00:53:11.000

Can you remember why you wanted to be a law? Can you tell us why? Well, primarily because of the nature of things in the world at that time. There was a war on.

00:53:11.000 - 00:53:29.000

My father was extremely patriotic. Heavenly days, he was in every single parade that ever was held in Oakland. In fact, he was in one parade twice. Which made it very interesting.

00:53:29.000 - 00:53:50.000

He was always gun-ho for patriotic ventures and patriotic movies, patriotic this. So we all became imbued that way. And my brother was too young. He couldn't go in no matter what.

00:53:50.000 - 00:54:03.000

And he looked young too. He didn't look as if he could. You know, some of these kids at 15 look as though they're 25. Bill at 15 looked as if he was 10.

00:54:03.000 - 00:54:21.000

So, you know, it was up to me. In fact, when Pearl Harbor hit, my dad flew out of that house so fast. He was the second man in line down at the recruiting station. And he was curious because he was two years too old.

00:54:21.000 - 00:54:31.000

And he says, "That doesn't make any difference. I can still do this and that and the other thing." But poor Sergeant there says, "Yes, it does make a difference. We cannot take you."

00:54:31.000 - 00:54:52.000

Dad says, "Well, change it." He was ready to go off even though he had a wife and three kids. And from that time on, Dad became a spotter, aircraft spotter. And, of course, being on the coast that way, that was important.

00:54:52.000 - 00:55:08.000

And he was down there two hours every single night. He was only supposed to have been working one day a week, but they were short of help. So Dad would fill in and he'd be down there at all times.

00:55:08.000 - 00:55:27.000

In fact, it was during that time, and that was in '42, that we discovered the jet stream. And Dad had called up Mom and he says, "Get the kids and get up in the hills. PDQ."

00:55:27.000 - 00:55:43.000

He says, "We've got an unidentified flying object coming in." And that's all he said. Mom gathered us kids together and got in the car and we headed up to the hills. We were pretty close to the hills anyway.

00:55:43.000 - 00:55:58.000

We got up there and got to our favorite spot to watch everything. And pretty soon all the lights started to go out. That's an eerie feeling to see all the lights in the city go out. And luckily there was no moon, so therefore it was dark.

00:55:58.000 - 00:56:17.000

In fact, it was black. And then all of a sudden, after we'd been waiting about half an hour, all these searchlights go on at once and they focus right on a big plane. And the poor plane wiggles and Dad says, "That poor guy, he was so scared."

00:56:17.000 - 00:56:34.000

And he comes on, he breaks radio silence. He says, "Don't shoot, don't shoot, it's only me." He was the commercial airline from Hawaii. Was it TWA? No, Pan American.

00:56:34.000 - 00:56:54.000

And he had planned on being-- I mean, his schedule was that he wasn't supposed to land for another two, two and a half hours. He had gone high on purpose because it was rough down below, so he went up higher. And he got into that jet stream and he went, "Zoop, zoop."

00:56:54.000 - 00:57:10.000

And that's the first they ever knew about the jet stream. And it was quite interesting. The--a little bit later on-- I don't know if you've seen any of the documentaries on World War II or not,

00:57:10.000 - 00:57:28.000

but they were planning a run on Alaska. And they were trying to figure out how long it would take them. And they figured a certain length of time. And they got up there and they hit that jet stream

00:57:28.000 - 00:57:46.000

and the jet stream practically stopped them in midair. And it aborted the whole thing and they couldn't figure out what was wrong. And then they realized that this jet stream that had already been discovered here a couple of months earlier was really what was causing the problem.

00:57:46.000 - 00:58:07.000

So it was very, very fascinating. And no matter where we go nowadays, we run into that jet stream, we are either held up or we are zipped along so fast. Nan, let me go back and ask you to make just a statement

00:58:07.000 - 00:58:26.000

about why it was important to you to do something for this country. And that's why you went into the WASP. I don't think it struck me as being important at that time. All I know is we were in a war.

00:58:26.000 - 00:58:41.000

I should be willing to pull my weight. I was out of school. I wasn't crippled. I wasn't dingbat.

00:58:41.000 - 00:58:55.000

I felt that I could do it. And I felt I should do it. And I was the only one in the family who could. It's a...

00:58:55.000 - 00:59:05.000

My dad couldn't. He was so furious. Oh, he was so mad. You should have seen him. He was marching up and down and yelling bloody murder.

00:59:05.000 - 00:59:19.000

It was comical. But I felt it was a necessity. And my mother didn't say anything about it. My dad was gung-ho for it.

00:59:19.000 - 00:59:30.000

Although he said afterwards that whenever anything happened and anybody called, he was afraid somebody was calling because I had cracked up. I didn't crack up.

00:59:30.000 - 00:59:43.000

Why on earth would you think that? And he said, "Yeah, but look at the planes in those days. Those planes were good. Good, solid, safe planes, if you treated them properly."

00:59:43.000 - 00:59:54.000

Now, if some of the people... Like, I feel so damn sorry for JFK Jr. He didn't have the education. He didn't have the knowledge.

00:59:54.000 - 01:00:06.000

He didn't have the hours, and he got vertigo. I bet you dollars to donuts. And... But in making your decision to go into the WAC,

01:00:06.000 - 01:00:16.000

who was your biggest influence? Was it your dad? No. No. I don't think it was anybody.

01:00:16.000 - 01:00:28.000

It was just something that had to be done, and I'd better do it now. And... Besides, I'd get more education also.

01:00:28.000 - 01:00:38.000

And there's no doubt about it, we did. Hells bells. And how! Why don't you tell us when you got to a venture

01:00:38.000 - 01:00:48.000

in this cattle truck with all these other girls, what happened? Well, we were all... We were all milling around...

01:00:49.000 - 01:00:56.000

Mmm. It's all right. Darn throat gets so dry. It's okay.

01:00:56.000 - 01:01:05.000

It's... Well, we were herded first one place, and then another. We were separated out, flight one, flight two.

01:01:05.000 - 01:01:18.000

I was in flight one. Tail end Charlie, as they call him. I was in the last bay on that first bank. And there was five others with me.

01:01:18.000 - 01:01:31.000

All great gals. But as time went on, and people got washed out, it made the flights uneven. So then they'd even them up.

01:01:31.000 - 01:01:41.000

And I was the one they evened it up with. Well, our... My bay, my room. We girls were shifted over to flight two.

01:01:41.000 - 01:01:53.000

We weren't moved. We had to stay there, but we had to keep our eyes open. And when flight two fell out, we had to fall out with them. Then pretty soon, it got unbalanced again.

01:01:53.000 - 01:02:04.000

We were shifted back to flight one. So in a way, it was good. I got to know the girls in both flights, or most of them.

01:02:04.000 - 01:02:16.000

There's a lot of them in flight two that I never did get to know. Tell me about your bay mates. Oh, they were great gals. Hayden Head, she was a character.

01:02:16.000 - 01:02:29.000

She had been in Hawaii and joined up. And she was older than the rest of us. She was a good 10, 12 years older. Oh, I shouldn't say.

01:02:29.000 - 01:02:39.000

Edna Harrison was too. I'm still in touch with Edna. No, she's only about five years. Edna's only about five years older.

01:02:39.000 - 01:02:53.000

But Hayden was down there. And she'd go out on Saturdays, and she and Kay Allspock-- remember Kay? I don't know if you knew Kay or not.

01:02:53.000 - 01:03:09.000

She was in the first bay. She and Hayden got real close. And they'd go out, and they'd go to the bar, and they'd talk the hours away, drinking.

01:03:09.000 - 01:03:29.000

Then they'd come in, and it got to be funny, because they'd come in, and Hayden would walk in. Yippee! She'd kick out a foot and let loose a yelp,

01:03:29.000 - 01:03:42.000

and we'd start to laugh. And she'd fall into bed and be perfectly OK in the morning, so she wasn't over-intoxicated, just enough to make it interesting.

01:03:42.000 - 01:03:56.000

Can you tell me about the regulations that allowed that? Oh, gee. Verboten, strictly verboten. And of course, I'm a--what would you call me?--a naive prude.

01:03:56.000 - 01:04:05.000

So I never drank anyway at that time. I didn't drink anything. I'd get a plain orange juice. That was enough.

01:04:05.000 - 01:04:18.000

And-- Can you tell me how you felt, your first flight in a primary trainer? I just felt as if I was home again.

01:04:18.000 - 01:04:40.000

I felt as though this was where I belonged. And it felt good, it felt comfortable, and I wanted the instructor to hurry up and let me go by myself. Well, eventually he did.

01:04:40.000 - 01:04:54.000

Uh... It's, uh... Tell me about your solo. Oh, the solo was just normal, everyday thing.

01:04:54.000 - 01:05:05.000

That was just, you know, part of it. I knew I could have soloed after the first hour. Okay, good, she's got to change. Good.

01:05:05.000 - 01:05:12.000

Good. You probably need some more water anyway. Yep. I don't want.

01:05:12.000 - 01:05:27.000

Isn't it kind of fun-- [loud beeping] Uh-oh. No. I was, uh--

01:05:27.000 - 01:05:37.000

[loud beeping] All ready? Sure, why not? Okay, regarding solo,

01:05:37.000 - 01:05:53.000

at least the solo in the stearman. I couldn't wait to get that instructor out of the plane. Uh, I love to fly by myself. It's so refreshing, so exhilarating,

01:05:53.000 - 01:06:08.000

so--just so great. And, uh, the only thing that bothered me was one time we were landing at the auxiliary field and we had a crosswind.

01:06:08.000 - 01:06:19.000

Like a dingbat, I didn't bother to come in power on. I should have. And I landed and ground looped. And it ruined the one wing in the plane,

01:06:19.000 - 01:06:28.000

and I felt so miserable. I thought, "Oh, you dope, you should-- you know better than that, you know. You know how to handle that sort of stuff."

01:06:28.000 - 01:06:39.000

Well, that meant a trip over to the cotton-picking sick bay and then go back and get checked out again. Did you have to meet the board for that? No.

01:06:39.000 - 01:06:48.000

Uh-oh. No, that was--that was something I didn't have to do. I didn't even know they had one. [laughs]

01:06:48.000 - 01:06:59.000

Or that you had to meet them for any particular purpose. Tell me about ground school. Uh, ground school was great, but I can't remember too much about it.

01:06:59.000 - 01:07:09.000

Uh, I just studied. I got my stuff down. I know there was several of the girls who were having trouble with certain things,

01:07:09.000 - 01:07:20.000

like navigation. So I--they'd ask for help, and I'd say, "Okay, let's get together tonight." And so we'd have three or four of us all together.

01:07:20.000 - 01:07:34.000

And for some reason, I was able to give them the dope on navigation to whereby it stuck, whereas sometimes others, it wouldn't stick. But navigation to me was fantastic.

01:07:34.000 - 01:07:40.000

I loved it. I still do. And, uh-- Did any of the girls wash out?

01:07:40.000 - 01:07:53.000

Oh, yes. We lost, uh-- [sighs] Two or three from our particular bay.

01:07:53.000 - 01:08:02.000

Yeah. I hated to see them go 'cause they were nice gals. And I discovered something else, too. I don't know if it hit you the same way,

01:08:02.000 - 01:08:14.000

but the girls who washed out weren't necessarily bad pilots. They just could not fly the Army way. And there was the crux of the situation.

01:08:14.000 - 01:08:25.000

They could fly beautifully. In fact, I remember one gal-- it wasn't in our class, it was in another class-- who was an instructor,

01:08:25.000 - 01:08:36.000

and she washed out, primarily because she knew too much. Or she didn't-- she couldn't bend to the Army way.

01:08:36.000 - 01:08:45.000

Well, I was lucky in that respect. I hadn't been exposed to anything, and as a result, tell me to do something, I'd do it.

01:08:45.000 - 01:08:56.000

And, uh, it worked out fine. That ground looping, though, I never felt so disgusted at myself in all my born days.

01:08:56.000 - 01:09:12.000

And once you finished with the primary, how did you feel about going into the next one? Instruments? Oh, I was thrilled to pieces. Instruments, to me, are life insurance.

01:09:12.000 - 01:09:24.000

You learn instruments thoroughly. You do all sorts of things. In fact, uh, once I was stationed in Merced,

01:09:24.000 - 01:09:35.000

I was just praying that we'd get some instrument weather that I could fly in. So this one day, this major came out, he had to get some eye time.

01:09:35.000 - 01:09:46.000

I said, "Okay." So I went in to file a flight plan, and I found out that it was socked in down by Fresno. So I file an IFR flight plan.

01:09:46.000 - 01:09:56.000

Who am I to say nay? And the guy was good. We spent an hour and a half to two hours working the beam,

01:09:56.000 - 01:10:07.000

and, uh, ten minutes after we had left the field, I couldn't even see my wingtips. So I was on instruments very shortly.

01:10:07.000 - 01:10:18.000

So coming back, it was about ten minutes before we got to the field, we broke out into the clear. And I thought, "Well, thank God for that, because this poor guy would only have a conniption fit."

01:10:18.000 - 01:10:29.000

And so, we got up and landed. I was making out my log book. He suddenly looks over and picks it up. He says, "You can't do that."

01:10:29.000 - 01:10:38.000

I says, "I can't do what?" "You can't put that down as instrument time." I says, "Why not?" "Well," he says, "you weren't on instruments."

01:10:38.000 - 01:10:48.000

I says, "Major, I was on instruments from the time we left here until the time we got back. I couldn't even see the wingtips." "Oh, my God!"

01:10:48.000 - 01:10:58.000

And he storms off. I never did see him again. (Interviewer) Was he under the hood? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I wasn't going to bring him out. Not on your life.

01:10:58.000 - 01:11:09.000

So, instruments-- Once you learn instruments thoroughly, you're able to see when vertigo's going to hit, and you're able to cope with it.

01:11:09.000 - 01:11:22.000

There's no reason why not. That's the reason so many of them, I think, you know, they know so much more about it. They don't.

01:11:22.000 - 01:11:38.000

(Interviewer) Tell me about advanced flying. Oh, jeepers. That was great. I will admit that I no sooner got turned loose than whenever I get turned loose on a plane,

01:11:38.000 - 01:11:54.000

I go up as high as it's necessary, and I put it through everything I can think of-- all the acrobatics, all the different types of maneuvers. I want to see what the plane can do,

01:11:54.000 - 01:12:05.000

and I want to get the cobwebs out of my brains. At least that's what I called it. So on the very first time I soloed the AT-6, I took it up and I did everything.

01:12:05.000 - 01:12:17.000

And then I was going to do spins. I thought, "Oh, I haven't done spins yet. I've done everything else." So I got my speed up to 160,

01:12:17.000 - 01:12:27.000

pulled it up. I could not kick that thing in. I thought for crying out loud, "What's the matter with me?" So I tried it three times,

01:12:27.000 - 01:12:36.000

and three times I could not do it. It just didn't work, and I thought, "Something's wrong. I've got to find out what." So I went back down on the field,

01:12:36.000 - 01:12:46.000

and everything was okay at that time. The next morning, the instructor says, "Oh, by the way, girls, don't try to spin this over 120 miles per hour.

01:12:46.000 - 01:12:57.000

You'll go into a flat spin, and you won't come out." I said, "Oh, my God." And he looked at me and he said, "You didn't." I said, "Well, I tried."

01:12:57.000 - 01:13:11.000

I said, "I think my guardian angels were watching over me because three times I tried and I couldn't do it." He said, "Boy, you get those guys saying anything to you, you listen to them."

01:13:11.000 - 01:13:22.000

I said, "Okay." That was the biggest thing right then, was the fact that I did listen. I've listened ever since,

01:13:22.000 - 01:13:37.000

and it saved me an awful lot of grief. Did anything happen interesting on cross country? Nothing particular. Cross country was just--

01:13:37.000 - 01:13:53.000

Oh, I had done a lot of cross country in the mountains, between Oakland and Quincy, then after the war hit around there, around Quincy, and in fact around the valley.

01:13:53.000 - 01:14:11.000

When I was stationed at Merced, I wanted to go home and see the folks. Well, our house was within 5 miles, maybe 7 miles of the Naval Air Station.

01:14:11.000 - 01:14:28.000

So they'd come down, the folks would come down, they'd cross the estuary and stop at the main gate of the field. I'd come in and they'd take me to operations

01:14:28.000 - 01:14:40.000

and then I'd meet with the folks and we'd go home. I'd come back. It was great. One time I wanted to take off

01:14:40.000 - 01:14:51.000

and by golly, one of my mags was not working right. So they were waiting until I got off before they closed the field, and I finally said, "Sorry guys,

01:14:51.000 - 01:15:02.000

I've got a mag that's not working right." So they closed it immediately. I mean, the ceiling was so low that if they had held it open at all,

01:15:02.000 - 01:15:14.000

it would have been dangerous. So that's about the only thing in cross country. While you were in training, your cross country flights, where did you go?

01:15:14.000 - 01:15:29.000

You know, I'm not sure I remember. While in training. I'd have to look in my log book to find out. What was the most interesting thing

01:15:29.000 - 01:15:40.000

that happened to you while you were in training? In training? Oh, the most interesting thing was when we went down to San Antonio

01:15:40.000 - 01:15:51.000

for our high altitude test. Of course, going back to Kelly Field after Dad had been there. I took pictures.

01:15:51.000 - 01:16:01.000

He didn't recognize a thing. I guess he wouldn't, something like 25 years later, 24 years later. But coming back,

01:16:01.000 - 01:16:15.000

that was at the time when we lost one of our gals. Oh jeepers, that was a horrendous thing. Marge Edwards. She was such a pretty girl,

01:16:15.000 - 01:16:25.000

and so sweet. And by golly, she had been flying and something happened, and don't know what,

01:16:25.000 - 01:16:35.000

but the oil line broke and sprayed oil in her face. And she pulled up as high as she could and bailed out,

01:16:35.000 - 01:16:46.000

but she wasn't high enough. And she died on the fall. I mean, the chute didn't open soon enough and that sort of stuff.

01:16:46.000 - 01:16:55.000

She was too close to the ground. And so we were all told that some of these, they took the planes and checked them all.

01:16:55.000 - 01:17:06.000

And we were told that it was possible that the hydraulic system in these planes could go haywire and what we should do about it. Well, we had a group of the girls

01:17:06.000 - 01:17:20.000

fly the planes down to San Antone, and then those of us who were not flying, who were taken down in a larger plane, we got our high altitude test,

01:17:20.000 - 01:17:30.000

or whatever we took. Yeah, it was high altitude test, I guess. And then those who flew the planes down went back by the big plane

01:17:30.000 - 01:17:39.000

and those of us who had come down that way flew the planes back, so that we each got a crack at it. Well, I no sooner got into the air

01:17:39.000 - 01:17:50.000

and was coming home about 15, 20 minutes, and I noticed my hydraulic gauge was going crazy as a hoot owl. And it was going way high,

01:17:50.000 - 01:18:00.000

and I thought, "Uh-oh." So I started in doing what they told me to. Go into slow flight, down with the gear, up with the gear,

01:18:00.000 - 01:18:12.000

down with the flaps, up with the flaps. That was the most boring trip I'd ever made. And naturally, it took me twice as long. And I got up close and I finally called in,

01:18:12.000 - 01:18:21.000

and the tower said, "We've been waiting for you. What happened?" And I said, "Oh, I think it's that hydraulic business." And she says, "All right, you go to the end of the mat

01:18:21.000 - 01:18:30.000

and you stop right there. Turn the engine off and don't move. We'll pick you up." So I did, and they got me out,

01:18:30.000 - 01:18:42.000

and I found out later that's what had happened to that plane. That hydraulic system just got goofed up a bit, and I thought, "Well, at least they let us know how to handle it."

01:18:42.000 - 01:18:53.000

But that was the interesting thing, because as I was coming home to Sweetwater, you could see the country for a change. You know, you could really--

01:18:53.000 - 01:19:08.000

I was going slow, so, you know, comparably speaking, so that there was no problem there. And it was pretty, in a weird sort of a way. Dry, overgrown with high grass and that sort of stuff.

01:19:08.000 - 01:19:21.000

Now you should see the state. It's green all over the place and lots of irrigation, and I think, "Oh, boy, this is superb." So it was quite interesting.

01:19:21.000 - 01:19:31.000

The girl who was killed, do you know what happened to her body? No, I don't. No. We lost two girls,

01:19:31.000 - 01:19:46.000

and both of them were from the same bay, which made it even worse. Lib Erickson was on a practice flight. She was with a group.

01:19:46.000 - 01:20:04.000

In fact, it was when a girl in '44 lost her life. The two of them collided, and neither one could see the other. That was horrendous.

01:20:04.000 - 01:20:19.000

Let's go forward to graduation. Oh, yeah. My folks came down for it. They drove a little rumbled seat car down from Oakland

01:20:19.000 - 01:20:33.000

for one of the girls in W-9. I don't think you knew her, Phyllis Hintner. Well, anyway, Phyllis wanted her little car down there, so the folks drove it down.

01:20:33.000 - 01:20:46.000

They had a rough time because this was in August, and it was hot. So the folks got a chunk of ice, a big chunk, and they put it in the front seat.

01:20:46.000 - 01:21:01.000

Mom would put her feet on it. Then she'd chip off pieces, wrap it in a neckerchief, and tie it around Dad's neck. Then my sister was in the back in the rumbled seat,

01:21:01.000 - 01:21:17.000

and she had to have something over her because that sun was a killer. Then we all came home by train. Phyllis was glad to get her car.

01:21:17.000 - 01:21:37.000

Phyllis has since passed away from Alzheimer's. On graduation day, can you talk about getting your orders and getting your wings? Who gave you your wings?

01:21:37.000 - 01:21:51.000

It was Yont? Yont, is that who it was? It wasn't Arnold. I had hoped he would.

01:21:51.000 - 01:21:59.000

It wasn't Cochran. Yont, I think, was his name. I can look it up in the book. Or you can look it up in the book.

01:21:59.000 - 01:22:14.000

What am I doing? I'm just a little bit-- How'd you feel? Exhilarated, as though I had won 10 million jackpots all at once.

01:22:14.000 - 01:22:28.000

The only trouble is we had to wear our winter uniforms, and it was hotter than hell. Oh, hells, bells. That was a roughy in that respect.

01:22:28.000 - 01:22:42.000

Of course, I was used to very stable temperatures, you know, there in the Bay Area in California. The coldest it got in the wintertime was 50, and the hottest it got was about 80.

01:22:42.000 - 01:22:56.000

I get down here and, whoa! After graduation that day, what happened? After graduation that day, I don't even know. I don't even remember.

01:22:56.000 - 01:23:06.000

Did you go on the train with your folks? Yeah. I don't know whether we went that day or the day after. But we got back to Oakland,

01:23:06.000 - 01:23:23.000

and then I had orders to report to Merced, and that's the time when I was ready to pop someone on the nose. Our CO was--come to find out, he was a-- what do you call him?

01:23:23.000 - 01:23:44.000

He was a gambling manager for one of the gambling houses in Las Vegas. So when he--he was very pleasant at first. He says, "Well, glad to see you here.

01:23:44.000 - 01:23:55.000

Did you have a good trip? Did you enjoy your leave?" and so forth and so on. Yeah, there was--how many were there of us? Oh, I don't know, half a dozen,

01:23:55.000 - 01:24:10.000

and maybe only four or five. But he says, "Well," he says, "I may as well tell you. We didn't ask for you, we don't want you, and we're going to get rid of you as soon as possible.

01:24:10.000 - 01:24:22.000

Now," he says, "we've got an old club over here, and the fools get mighty lonesome, so why don't you make good use of that?" And I thought, "Why, you lousy stinker."

01:24:22.000 - 01:24:36.000

And I never went to the old club from that day on. I refused to, honest to Pete. And he was just--I asked some of the girls before and after. Yeah, that's his stock in trade.

01:24:36.000 - 01:24:50.000

He knows everything about everything, and he certainly makes you feel good. And I thought, "Jeepers." One of the gals who did a documentary for somebody

01:24:50.000 - 01:25:01.000

said the same thing, and I looked her up. Sure enough, she was stationed at my field, so she got the same thing. But how did the other officers treat you?

01:25:01.000 - 01:25:16.000

Great. The ones who knew their job and knew what they could do, they were tops. It's the ones who didn't know their job

01:25:16.000 - 01:25:32.000

or who were a little bit scared of the fact that we were in skirts, that it was kind of rough. I ran into just one. This guy, he was a lieutenant pilot,

01:25:32.000 - 01:25:42.000

and he needed to get his eye time. So I said, "Okay, I'll fly safety." On the way out to the plane, he says, "I'm going to fly front seat."

01:25:42.000 - 01:25:57.000

I said, "No, you're not. We have the hood in the back." And he says, "Well, I still want to fly front seat." I said, "Well, then I don't sign it off for instruments." So he finally got in the back under the hood,

01:25:57.000 - 01:26:07.000

and I got in the front. He did a good job on instruments. He did marvelous, and I told him so. I said, "You're doing fine."

01:26:07.000 - 01:26:24.000

He says, "Yeah, I want to go practice some touch-and-go's." So we went over to an auxiliary field, and I have never in my life been so scared. He did not line up with his landing pad.

01:26:24.000 - 01:26:36.000

He had it at 45 degrees angle because the wind was coming 45 degrees. He was facing into the wind and going over the ground sideways.

01:26:36.000 - 01:26:45.000

He'd land that plane, and it would shudder, and it would shake, and I thought, "Sure, he's going to turn us turtle." And after about--

01:26:45.000 - 01:26:54.000

Well, he did two power-offs and two power-ons, and it was the same every time. And finally, after the fourth one, I got mad. I got so mad I couldn't see straight.

01:26:54.000 - 01:27:03.000

This jerk! I took that stick, and I slammed it back and forth on both sides. I said, "I don't know where you learned to fly, but I think you better wake up and learn all over again."

01:27:03.000 - 01:27:14.000

And I really sounded off. Gosh, I was furious. And I did two landings-- one power-on, one power-off--

01:27:14.000 - 01:27:21.000

and I greased those things in so you couldn't even feel them touch. I have never done it so good. [laughs]

01:27:21.000 - 01:27:32.000

I was so tickled. We got back to the field. I wrote down exactly what he had done for instrument time and then practiced touch-and-goes for the rest of the time.

01:27:32.000 - 01:27:46.000

And he picked up the paper, and he marched off the field. He was mad, and I can't help it. I thought--I told him, I said, "My God, it's your life. Wake up and learn how to do this right."

01:27:46.000 - 01:27:54.000

[laughs] Did you ever have him again? Nope, never did. And I was--oh, when he left, I thought, "Uh-oh, here I go.

01:27:54.000 - 01:28:06.000

I'm going to be bounced. Sure as God made little green apples." And the next morning, sure enough, here came his captain. Well, when the captain got close enough, I said,

01:28:06.000 - 01:28:15.000

"Captain, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done it." He says, "Honey, don't you worry. You keep on doing things like that."

01:28:15.000 - 01:28:23.000

And I said, "What?" He says, "Yes, we've had trouble with that character ever since he got here. He's a 90-day wonder, and he thinks he knows the whole thing."

01:28:23.000 - 01:28:34.000

And we've been trying to show him and tell him. He says, "I think he got through to him." [laughs] He says, "Keep up the good work."

01:28:34.000 - 01:28:50.000

And, oh, you don't know what a relief that was. I thought, "Sure, I was on my way out." Tell us about some of the other things that you did at Merced. At Merced, we flew--

01:28:50.000 - 01:29:07.000

we transported all-- I remember one thing that I really enjoyed. This one fellow, he was a big, beefy fellow, a doctor. And he needed to get back to Hammer Field,

01:29:07.000 - 01:29:18.000

which was down at Fresno. So I wasn't doing anything. I said, "Okay, I'll take you. No problem." We got in the plane, and whenever I get somebody like that,

01:29:18.000 - 01:29:30.000

I ask them, I say, "Would you like to see Yosemite?" "No, he didn't want to see Yosemite." I said, "Okay." Well, I did not bother talking about his job

01:29:30.000 - 01:29:46.000

or where he was from or anything like that. We talked about mundane things that didn't have any bearing on flying or the service or anything like that. And he was pleasant, very pleasant.

01:29:46.000 - 01:30:02.000

And I said goodbye when we got there. And about four or five days later, I was told to go back and pick him up. I thought, "For heaven's sakes, you know, this is strange."

01:30:02.000 - 01:30:16.000

And I went down, picked him up. It was the same sort of a thing. And a little later on, one of our girls cracked up. Mary Jean's servant.

01:30:16.000 - 01:30:31.000

Eunice Spadonovich was flying. Mary Jean was second seat. And they cracked up on takeoff. And so they were down there at Hammerfield in the hospital,

01:30:31.000 - 01:30:48.000

and this doctor was taking care of them. So I went down to see Mary Jean one time, and down the hall came this doctor. His chest was plastered with metals, with ribbons,

01:30:48.000 - 01:30:57.000

with all sorts of things. And I looked at him. I says, "Doc," I says, "Excuse me, but," I says, "I've never asked you what you did or anything.

01:30:57.000 - 01:31:05.000

I've never talked about it." He says, "That's right. That's the reason I keep asking for you to fly me." I says, "Oh, for heaven's sakes."

01:31:05.000 - 01:31:15.000

I says, "Oh, I appreciate that." I says, "But what's all this about?" And he says, "Well, this is this, this is that." I says, "Yeah, but this one looks like--looks Oriental."

01:31:15.000 - 01:31:25.000

He says, "Yes, that is. That's the one the Chinese gave me." Come to find out, he was Major White, who had flown with Jimmy Doolittle and had walked out.

01:31:25.000 - 01:31:35.000

He was the one who had amputated Ted--somebody or other's leg while over there. I says, "Oh, my God." [laughs]

01:31:35.000 - 01:31:47.000

I says, "Okay, enough said. See you later." He kept calling me. We kept talking about nothing except mundane stuff. It was very interesting.

01:31:47.000 - 01:32:09.000

He had had Ted transferred to his hospital down there in Fresno so he could keep an eye on him because of the amputation. But it was amazing. We never talked about that flight over China either, over Japan.

01:32:09.000 - 01:32:21.000

I'd like to have been able to question him about it. Was he also a pilot? No, he wasn't. He was the doctor who was with Jimmy Doolittle.

01:32:21.000 - 01:32:35.000

I think he was the only doctor, but I'm not sure. But it seems to me he was. I mean, they didn't have room enough. They had to be careful of weight,

01:32:35.000 - 01:32:58.000

especially after having to take off from the deck of the Hornet and then be that much closer to Japan before they could do it. They were spotted before they got to their taking-off place, you should say. So it was interesting.

01:32:58.000 - 01:33:07.000

There's no doubt about it. They were a lot of interesting people. Where did you live at Merced? Live in the what?

01:33:07.000 - 01:33:18.000

When you were stationed at Merced, where did you live? On the base. Actually, off the base at an auxiliary thing. Single rooms.

01:33:18.000 - 01:33:28.000

But, you know. Were they nurses' quarters? I wonder, were they? We had nurses with us.

01:33:28.000 - 01:33:47.000

I wouldn't be a bit surprised. I liked it because we were right next to the field. And the field was grapes. And the grapes got ripe, and we'd crawl through the fence and go get some grapes.

01:33:47.000 - 01:34:04.000

And then we'd put them in the dish pan and leave them out and let them get sun-dried. Then we'd have raisins. And that went over beautifully. Is Merced right on the coast?

01:34:04.000 - 01:34:16.000

No. Merced's in the center. It's in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. So you didn't have any restrictions when you were flying? No, not from there.

01:34:16.000 - 01:34:34.000

Oh, no. We're military. We could go anyplace. I mean, as far as the Japanese or... No, we had one interesting incident that tickled me. I decided to go up to see the folks.

01:34:34.000 - 01:34:54.000

So I filed my flight plan, took off, got up there. The folks were going to meet me. And I got up pretty close, and I called the tower and said, "This is Air Force so-and-so and such and such," whatever the number was,

01:34:54.000 - 01:35:05.000

"wish to have instructions for landing." Dead silence. Finally, a voice comes up, "Will the female who's clogging up the airwaves please get off?

01:35:05.000 - 01:35:18.000

We're trying to land a military airplane." [laughs] I howled. I thought, "Oh, dear." So I went back on the mic, and I said,

01:35:18.000 - 01:35:33.000

"So-and-so and so-and-so, this is military so-and-so and such and such. I am female. This is a military plane. Give me landing instructions for a straight-in approach." Dead silence. [laughs]

01:35:33.000 - 01:35:42.000

Finally, I went back on, and I said, "Fine, I'll come ahead and land regardless of instructions." [laughs] And that got their attention.

01:35:42.000 - 01:35:53.000

And I got on the ground, and it was hot. This was end of August, first part of September. It was hot. So I zipped off my headset.

01:35:53.000 - 01:36:06.000

No, I didn't either. I took off my cap, put my headset back on, and was rolling down the-- I had landed and was rolling down the runway,

01:36:06.000 - 01:36:20.000

and I zipped back the canopy. Oh, jeepers, it was so hot. And all of a sudden, "Jesus Christ, it is a dame!" [laughs]

01:36:20.000 - 01:36:33.000

I thought, "Good Lord." So then the instructor says, "Follow the jeep that has 'follow me' in the back, and he'll take you to the place."

01:36:33.000 - 01:36:42.000

I looked up, and I kept going, and I turned off where they had told me to turn off. It was five jeeps, "Follow me, follow me." [laughs]

01:36:42.000 - 01:36:55.000

They had never seen a woman pilot before. You know, this was Navy. You'd think that they would be up on it, but no way. And so I got over there to where I--

01:36:55.000 - 01:37:10.000

and it was red carpet treatment from then on. They cooled it off a little bit. It was a little much. -Do you remember when you first heard about deactivation,

01:37:10.000 - 01:37:19.000

and what were your feelings? -Oh, complete devastation. Complete devastation. I thought, "Oh, my God, how are we going to survive this?

01:37:19.000 - 01:37:32.000

The war's not over. You need us." So many of the girls had done so many great things, more than I had ever thought about.

01:37:32.000 - 01:37:40.000

"Oh, you're blinking again." [laughter] "Yes, I am." [laughter]

01:37:40.000 - 01:37:52.000

-Okay, we're into deactivation. -Deactivation. Deactivation was gruesome. Oh.

01:37:52.000 - 01:38:03.000

We all swore to heavens we were going to keep in touch with each other. My folks came down to pick me up, and all my junk that I had accumulated

01:38:03.000 - 01:38:12.000

was gone. -Did the base give you any kind of send-off, any kind of parade? -No.

01:38:12.000 - 01:38:26.000

I will admit the girls got together and had a party, but inasmuch as I didn't drink, I didn't see any sense in going. I always felt like a fifth wheel.

01:38:26.000 - 01:38:35.000

I felt one of these days I'm going to have to learn how to drink. A little bit. A lot. So it was...

01:38:35.000 - 01:38:48.000

It was a case of turning all my stuff, get my gear together, wait for the folks, pack up, and head back to Oakland.

01:38:48.000 - 01:38:59.000

-Okay, when you got back to Oakland, then what did you do? -What am I going to do? Oh, I had to go to work again.

01:39:00.000 - 01:39:14.000

I investigated work, and I investigated college. I wanted to get college done. I was very surprised.

01:39:14.000 - 01:39:26.000

I got into... Of course, I was working part-time. I was working for the... California Forest and Range Experiment Station

01:39:26.000 - 01:39:34.000

out at Berkeley. Part-time. And going to school part-time. Which was fine.

01:39:34.000 - 01:39:47.000

The only trouble is, I was able to get in two years of college, and my second year, I wanted to get in

01:39:47.000 - 01:40:08.000

as much chemistry as possible, because I wanted to go into agronomy. And so I signed up for all those kind of courses. And I go down to college about 6 o'clock in the morning,

01:40:08.000 - 01:40:23.000

and they had the labs open, thank heaven. So I do all my lab work in the early morning. Then we have our class lecture at 10 o'clock. And then they split and go to their section meetings.

01:40:23.000 - 01:40:34.000

Well, I skipped that. I went to work. And they told me I'd never be able to do it. That it would be too much. Where were you working?

01:40:34.000 - 01:40:42.000

CF and RES. The California Forest and Range Experiment Station. Which was just off campus. Why would you do that?

01:40:42.000 - 01:40:57.000

Sort of an assistant... Secretary, assistant, whatever you call it. Did whatever they needed. I wanted to learn to draft.

01:40:57.000 - 01:41:11.000

And they tried me, but I didn't have enough education for that. So... It was interesting because of the fact that it opened up some fields for me.

01:41:11.000 - 01:41:26.000

And I decided I'd go into agronomy and get as much background as I could in the growing of things. Like wheat, barley, rye, anything like that.

01:41:26.000 - 01:41:42.000

But I'd have to transfer up to... Oh, heck, the Agricultural College up there. Can't even think of the name of it. I've been losing my memory, I swear to God.

01:41:42.000 - 01:41:54.000

Anyway, it got close to time to go up there. My mother kept making remarks, "Well, you're going to have to get a job where you can take care of all the things you're used to."

01:41:54.000 - 01:42:05.000

And what about us? Because half my pay was going into... I'd get all the dog food and all the horse food and all that sort of food to bring home.

01:42:05.000 - 01:42:18.000

And I'd get most of the groceries and bring them home. I never got recompensed for it. Mom said, "You can just stay right here." So I did.

01:42:18.000 - 01:42:30.000

My brother was living there. He was going to school. He was a professional student. He got so many degrees it was ridiculous.

01:42:30.000 - 01:42:46.000

Me? I went to work. And my sister, both did not have priority in college. It's too bad.

01:42:46.000 - 01:43:03.000

But the folks grew up at a time when there was no help from your parents. You either made it on your own or forget the whole thing. So I gave up the idea of finishing up college.

01:43:03.000 - 01:43:14.000

But then I keep thinking, "She may be some day I will." And I tell my grandkids, "You be careful. I might just finish up school with you." Then what did you decide to do?

01:43:14.000 - 01:43:30.000

Well, we had our own business. I wanted to go into business. I felt it was better than trying to work for somebody else. Because you never were sure.

01:43:30.000 - 01:43:41.000

That's not a secure thing. So, uh... Hang on one second. After you finished the WASP...

01:43:41.000 - 01:43:53.000

Yeah, after I finished the WASP, I was home the latter part of January. I joined the WAVES either the first part of February or the middle of February.

01:43:53.000 - 01:44:06.000

I'm pretty sure it was in February. What made you decide the WAVES rather than the... Well, that's an interesting thing in the sense that I was deaf on the wax.

01:44:06.000 - 01:44:19.000

I didn't like that branch at all. My father was in the Army, so he was gung-ho for that. But I didn't like it. My brother was gung-ho for the Navy

01:44:19.000 - 01:44:31.000

because he liked the ocean. And he liked sailing. And he liked that. So I thought, "Well, I may as well join the WAVES." And I looked at it. I was thinking of the Coast Guard.

01:44:31.000 - 01:44:42.000

I should have joined the Coast Guard. But I didn't join the WAVES. And I don't know what pushed me in that direction. It was not assistive.

01:44:42.000 - 01:44:50.000

It was handy. Where was that? Where was what? Where did you join?

01:44:50.000 - 01:45:01.000

Oh, in San Francisco. And then I was shipped by train back to Hunter College. Hunter is a girls' college.

01:45:01.000 - 01:45:13.000

And the service had taken it over. The Navy had taken it over as a boot training camp for girls. And it was good.

01:45:13.000 - 01:45:23.000

It was nice. It was boring. I mean, I already had boot training. You know, that sort of stuff.

01:45:23.000 - 01:45:36.000

So there was no problem there. And I had wanted to stay there in New Jersey and go into the weather. Become a meteorologist, which was open.

01:45:36.000 - 01:45:47.000

But come to find out, there was another girl who was from that area, who had never been away from home, who was homesick,

01:45:47.000 - 01:46:01.000

and would I please trade with her? And I said, "Oh, and yeah." Like a jackass, I did. So that meant I went to Pensacola

01:46:01.000 - 01:46:15.000

and became CTO instead of going to... where is it? Some place in New Jersey that has the... the views of an L.

01:46:15.000 - 01:46:25.000

And I've got some cousins living there, and I can't remember their address. Got to look it up. How did the waves compare with the ones...

01:46:25.000 - 01:46:38.000

Oh, no comparison. The wasps were so much more advanced, so much more... They had a lot more on the ball.

01:46:38.000 - 01:46:54.000

The girls were a lot more educated. They were sensible. I never ran into so many idiots in my born days like in the waves.

01:46:54.000 - 01:47:04.000

And yet some of them were real swell. Some of the girls were real good, but there's no doubt about it, so many of them were...

01:47:04.000 - 01:47:18.000

So lackadaisical. To get them to do anything right took an act of Congress. But how long did you stay in the waves?

01:47:18.000 - 01:47:32.000

Oh, until I was discharged, June 9, 1946. I had my points in, and they were to get out. And I must admit that

01:47:32.000 - 01:47:41.000

on the day I was to leave, I made sure I had everything packed up. They handed me my discharge with one hand, I picked up my suitcase with the other hand,

01:47:41.000 - 01:47:53.000

and I left. And then I went up to South Carolina, a very close friend of mine, her husband had been transferred there,

01:47:53.000 - 01:48:08.000

so I stayed with them for about a week. And I had gotten very underweight. The food was no good. I'd eat ice cream once a day,

01:48:08.000 - 01:48:23.000

and that would be about it. I tried to eat, and I couldn't do it. I lost, and I had weighed down to 130 pounds. I fell about 150 now.

01:48:23.000 - 01:48:36.000

So it was a case of... When I got up there to Barbie's place, my friend, she took one look at me, and she said, "My God, we're going to have to feed you."

01:48:36.000 - 01:48:48.000

And so she started in, but I couldn't eat. My stomach had gotten so small that it was impossible. I then went on up to New Jersey and stayed with my relatives,

01:48:48.000 - 01:49:05.000

with whom I had wanted to stay when I was in the service. And Mom and my sister, Joan, came back by train to meet me there. Now Joan was only...

01:49:05.000 - 01:49:26.000

Heck, how old was I, 21, 22? Joan was only 11 or 12. So we stayed there with my aunt and uncle and cousins. And then Mom and I went on to Lockheed in Pennsylvania

01:49:26.000 - 01:49:43.000

to pick up an airplane that my other uncle had bought. And we flew back to the West Coast. It took us just about a month to do it because we stopped at every place along the way

01:49:43.000 - 01:49:57.000

where we had friends and relatives, and we stayed with them two, three, four days. And it was just fantastic, you know, just terrific. And we couldn't get out of Lockheed right away

01:49:57.000 - 01:50:12.000

because it was sucked in, and the hotel was so porous that you could hear people in the second room down. God, it was a riot.

01:50:12.000 - 01:50:27.000

And, yeah, one night there was a big fight between a man and a woman two doors away, and we could hear it so plain. [laughs] Okay, you and your mom then flew back to the West Coast,

01:50:27.000 - 01:50:40.000

and then you stayed with your mother and dad? Let me see. No one in the room. I want to know when you met this man

01:50:40.000 - 01:50:49.000

because I know you have five little ones. Yeah. Let me see. Cheaper time.

01:50:49.000 - 01:50:55.000

I've got to get that square away in my thick skull. Can you take time out for me? Oh, sure. Absolutely. Okay.

01:50:55.000 - 01:51:12.000

Well, we came across country, and we only had one bad experience-- well, two bad experiences. I took off from someplace in Michigan,

01:51:12.000 - 01:51:23.000

and we flew for two hours, and I was still over the same place we had taken off. We laughed. We didn't go very far that time.

01:51:23.000 - 01:51:36.000

We just landed and stayed over there. Then we kept-- I called the people after we got on the ground. There's no sense in saying we'll be at such and such a place

01:51:36.000 - 01:51:51.000

at such and such a time. It never worked out that way. We got down there to Albuquerque, and what we would do, we would get up early,

01:51:51.000 - 01:52:05.000

and we'd fly from about 6 until about 10 or 11. Then we'd stop, get the plane fueled up, find out where we could stay the night, you know, that sort of stuff,

01:52:05.000 - 01:52:14.000

and then we'd look around. We'd go see whatever there was to see. Well, in Albuquerque, we did that, and it was wonderful.

01:52:14.000 - 01:52:27.000

We went to one of the Mexican restaurants, and it was pretty. I don't remember about the food, except that it was good. Then the next morning, I filed a flight plan,

01:52:27.000 - 01:52:43.000

and as per usual, we were going to go on over to-- Oh, heck, where was it? I'd have to look at my logbook. But it was not quite to California.

01:52:43.000 - 01:52:57.000

It was at the western side of Arizona. And we got along, and all of a sudden, I thought, "Gee, this doesn't sound right." You know, I was watching my head,

01:52:57.000 - 01:53:11.000

so vividly, avidly, and looking at everything and checking everything, and all of a sudden, I realized I was lost. Nothing looked right, nothing looked the same,

01:53:11.000 - 01:53:23.000

and I was running out of fuel. So I looked around. Yeah, there was a nice farmyard down there. It was wet, but okay, that'll help to break me.

01:53:23.000 - 01:53:38.000

So we go down, we land on this farmer's yard, and the ground was muddy. We had mud all over the plane, all over us, all over everything.

01:53:38.000 - 01:53:50.000

And the poor farmer and his sister were poking their heads out of the door of the house. They couldn't believe it. It scared them half to death.

01:53:50.000 - 01:53:59.000

So we got up to the house, and I explained to the fellow what had happened, and could I--did he have gas that I could buy? And yes, he had some gas.

01:53:59.000 - 01:54:10.000

He could let me have five gallons. I said, "Great!" And so I called in for my flight back. Come to find out, there was a magnetic storm

01:54:10.000 - 01:54:22.000

that had pulled my mag compass 190 degrees off the way I was supposed to go until I was way south. I was absolutely flabbergasted.

01:54:22.000 - 01:54:32.000

So anyway, they helped us-- Yeah, the lady helped us too, but she was scared green. She was afraid to even step.

01:54:32.000 - 01:54:43.000

Luckily, it wasn't so muddy that we couldn't walk. But we swung the plane around and got it so it would be running downhill. Now, the only way to get out of there

01:54:43.000 - 01:54:51.000

was to come down the hill. There was a hill here, and then another hill with trees all over here. There was a fence here and a fence here,

01:54:51.000 - 01:55:02.000

and back here, it was high ground. And I thought, "Oh, gee, this is gonna be interesting. It's the devil." So I told them, I said, "Now, look,

01:55:02.000 - 01:55:12.000

hang on for all your work until I yell. When I yell, you let go quick." So I revved that thing up to the highest point. [laughs]

01:55:12.000 - 01:55:21.000

So I yelled at them to let go. Boom, diddly-boom, diddly-boom. But I thought, "My God, will we get enough flying speed to get up?"

01:55:21.000 - 01:55:31.000

It got going down the hill, and just at the bottom, it got a little bit of flying speed, and it went right across the little gully there, and it hit the other hill.

01:55:31.000 - 01:55:44.000

And the hill bounced us into the air. At the same time, one wing slapped a cow in the back. [laughs] Bob was talking to Lachi, said,

01:55:44.000 - 01:55:54.000

"That cow's gonna give Colonel Milk for the next month." [laughs] So we got out of there, and we skimmed through some trees,

01:55:54.000 - 01:56:03.000

and we got around, and gradually I got up, and finally wiggled my wings, and they waved, and away I went. I got up to where I was supposed to land,

01:56:03.000 - 01:56:10.000

and I landed. The landing gear had tree limbs in it. [laughs] I told them, "Gee."

01:56:10.000 - 01:56:21.000

But it was a good experience. It showed me that regardless of my instruments, you've got to double-check everything else. And...

01:56:21.000 - 01:56:31.000

- Okay, you're back at Oakland now? - Yeah, we got back to Oakland all in one piece. [laughs] - And then did you live with your mom and dad for a while?

01:56:31.000 - 01:56:42.000

- Yeah, for the time being, I was back there. And I... opened my own business. I became...

01:56:42.000 - 01:56:56.000

typesetter, a freelance typesetter. And I got ahold of the salesman for the Veritype Company, donated his commission, if I would get a Veritype, and do this.

01:56:56.000 - 01:57:08.000

So I did, and I got space at this fellow's print shop in exchange for answering his phone. He didn't have anybody to answer the phone, and that would be a big help to him.

01:57:08.000 - 01:57:21.000

And also taking care of customers as they came in. So I went on that way for... oh, the next few months. And one of the fellows...

01:57:21.000 - 01:57:37.000

that Jack--Jack was the guy who owned this print shop-- had hired was this fellow who was a-- his name was Neil, was Neil. And he was spelled K-N-double-E-L.

01:57:37.000 - 01:57:46.000

It's short for Neil. And so he liked to fly, too. He was a fair-weather pilot. He would only fly in fair weather.

01:57:46.000 - 01:57:56.000

He didn't have any instrument rating or anything like that. But he did have these private laces. So he wanted me to take him flying. I wouldn't do it.

01:57:56.000 - 01:58:10.000

He was a fastie, as far as I was concerned. So we worked alongside of each other for upwards of six months. And then he asked me again.

01:58:10.000 - 01:58:22.000

He asked me every once in a while to take him flying. And then he'd take me over to see a play. I finally said okay. And that was the start of it.

01:58:22.000 - 01:58:37.000

And Neil and I married in... January of '50. And now it so happened that for two years-- two and a half to three years--

01:58:37.000 - 01:58:47.000

I was under doctor's care because everything inside me was going crazy. I didn't know why or how. He finally told me, the doctor finally told me.

01:58:47.000 - 01:58:55.000

He said, "You're going to get married?" I said, "Yeah, in May." He said, "In May? That's too far.

01:58:55.000 - 01:59:04.000

I don't care when you get married. Just get pregnant in the next month or two." And he said, "That should fix it up." And I said, "Okay, God."

01:59:04.000 - 01:59:11.000

I was just not that kind. I just didn't believe in it. I didn't want to. Well, I wanted kids.

01:59:11.000 - 01:59:20.000

And he said, "If I didn't get pregnant within the next two months, I'd have to go in for a hysterectomy." And so that tilted the scale.

01:59:20.000 - 01:59:35.000

But I went ahead. Neil and I had relations before we were married. And I was pregnant when we were married. And it was interesting in the sense that

01:59:35.000 - 01:59:52.000

there was this naive prude who couldn't stand anything like that. But she was born in the end of July. We were married in January,

01:59:52.000 - 01:59:59.000

so there was only seven months there. But I was pregnant a month before that. She came early. She was due in September.

01:59:59.000 - 02:00:15.000

And she was the funniest looking little thing. From her neck up, she was perfect. From her neck down, her skin hung in folds. I thought she was going to roll right out of her skin.

02:00:15.000 - 02:00:29.000

It was so loose and so wishy-washy. It took four months for her to get enough weight on her to fill up that skin. And we were feeding.

02:00:29.000 - 02:00:41.000

Did you fly during this time? Was that your own airplane that you and Neil were flying? No, didn't fly at all. No, I was pregnant.

02:00:41.000 - 02:00:54.000

And then from there on, I was pregnant for five years. And it got to the point where I didn't fly because I couldn't get into the plane. It was huge.

02:00:54.000 - 02:01:06.000

And it was nutty. And you stayed. You were living in Oakland. We were living in Castro Valley. We had gotten a small house out in Castro Valley.

02:01:06.000 - 02:01:22.000

And going back and forth to the doctor's office was a long haul. And since I was already in business, Neil was still working for Jack,

02:01:22.000 - 02:01:38.000

we finally decided to combine and make our business together. So we started up Koltype. We spelled it with a K. K-O-L-T-Y-P-E. Because Neil was spelled with a K.

02:01:38.000 - 02:01:55.000

And we could work for any of the printers. And Neil was a good salesman. He could sell anything. So our work was pretty steady.

02:01:55.000 - 02:02:13.000

And I had to really hop to it to keep up. I did the composition and paste up. Neil did the camera work and the stripping. Sometimes I'd double on stripping.

02:02:13.000 - 02:02:27.000

But I could never double on the camera work. I just didn't have the knowledge. And Neil could never teach a person how to do anything. He'd say, "Well, you put this here, and it comes out over here."

02:02:27.000 - 02:02:42.000

He couldn't tell you anything in between. And so as a result, I finally gave up. I said, "No, don't teach me. I can't understand it." And, "Oh," he says, "you're just stupid."

02:02:42.000 - 02:02:57.000

And after my mother saying that for years, I just believed it. It was a stupid thing to do right there. -So you stayed in California, and you had five children.

02:02:57.000 - 02:03:11.000

And how many years? -Five years and one month. The first two are 14 months apart. Number two and three are 17 months apart.

02:03:11.000 - 02:03:30.000

Number three and four are 14 months apart. Number five and six, the next two, are 16 months apart. And as the doctor says, you can have a kid for the next 10 years each year, and it wouldn't hurt you physically.

02:03:30.000 - 02:03:56.000

But financially and mentally, forget it. -How long then did you stay in California? -Until 1988. Yeah, my father died in '86.

02:03:56.000 - 02:04:23.000

And my brother was living in--he was living on a boat. And Neil and I, we had moved to Oakland. In fact, if you ever see that documentary on the big fire of Oakland, it burned over 3,000 homes.

02:04:23.000 - 02:04:37.000

It was a horrifying fire. 25 people were killed. And where we were, we were right on the edge of the part that was killed. In fact, the house next to us was okay,

02:04:37.000 - 02:04:48.000

but the house beyond that burned down. That's how close our house was to that. -Where were you when that was going on? -Had you gone?

02:04:48.000 - 02:05:09.000

-Yeah, we were out of--see, that was in '86, '87. Huh. For heaven's sakes, I can't remember exactly what happened there. I know I called--oh, we were on the road.

02:05:09.000 - 02:05:23.000

It must have been '88 or '89 that that fire took place, '89, because it was an odd year. And my brother had died in '88. Very suddenly he had pancreatic cancer.

02:05:23.000 - 02:05:40.000

And I found out afterwards that the smoking that he did when he was young was detrimental. And he had stopped smoking, but he lived on a boat. He did nothing but wear a pair of shorts,

02:05:40.000 - 02:05:54.000

and he had that sun beating on him all the time. And he didn't wear any sunblock. This was back in the days before we realized what sunblock was. And so he got the full brunt of the sun rays,

02:05:54.000 - 02:06:16.000

and that gave him pancreatic cancer. So he found out in April of '88 that he had the cancer, and he went into the hospital for something or other. They opened him up, closed him up, and said that he had five months to live.

02:06:16.000 - 02:06:40.000

He lived five weeks. That thing was so fast. And so after he died, he had been taking care of Mom. Mom was living down there in the Bay Area right off the Bay.

02:06:40.000 - 02:06:55.000

And she turned to me and she says, "Well, you're going to have to retire." She says, "I've got to have somebody to stay with." Well, I was thinking, "Well, why can't you stay?" But no, she won't consider a rest home.

02:06:55.000 - 02:07:17.000

I had to retire, and I could take care of things. And I thought, "Well, I guess I can." I had always realized that I'd evidently be tagged for that. So from that moment on, from September of '88,

02:07:17.000 - 02:07:42.000

excuse me, from September of '88 on, we traveled. I got a hold of a fifth-wheel trailer, and we had a pickup, and we traveled all over. We'd stay at campgrounds. In fact, I keep track of where we were going, and it was funny.

02:07:42.000 - 02:08:06.000

We started out one time. This was up here in--was it Colorado or the Dakotas? Well, someplace up in there. We started out, and we went east, and suddenly we saw something we wanted to see. So we turned off the road, and we went there, and then we saw something else,

02:08:06.000 - 02:08:19.000

and, you know, we could do that. We ended up that night 25 miles behind where we had started that morning. [Laughs] And we just howled. It was so funny.

02:08:19.000 - 02:08:37.000

But we saw a lot of the country, and it was interesting, and it was nice. It was fun. We saw all our relatives, that sort of stuff. In the meantime, all your children had married and left home. Yeah. Well, no, they hadn't all married.

02:08:37.000 - 02:09:03.000

I've only got--one was married and lived up there in Twain Heart. The folks had decided to move up to Twain Heart where I was. I had wished they would stay down where they--where Dad was happier. Dad did not like this traipsing around the way Mom did.

02:09:03.000 - 02:09:20.000

As Bill said, my brother, he said, "After seven years, your mother is going to want to move." Sure enough, every seven years she wanted to go someplace else. Six or seven years it was. And Dad would follow right along.

02:09:20.000 - 02:09:33.000

But he had a lot of friends. He had lived up at the--the last two years of his life, he lived up at the veterans' home in Yonkville. And we'd go over there about every other weekend.

02:09:33.000 - 02:09:47.000

And it was a nice drive, but it took four hours. Isn't that where he was when he died? Yeah. He was up there. Okay.

02:09:47.000 - 02:09:54.000

And then-- Oh, she's got his change tape. Oh, the one with blanks. Oh, there it goes.

02:09:54.000 - 02:10:09.000

I said, "The one with blanks," but it's blank. Okay. We're into deactivation. Deactivation. Deactivation was gruesome.

02:10:09.000 - 02:10:28.000

Oh. We all swore to heavens we were going to keep in touch with each other. My folks came down to pick me up and all my junk that I had accumulated. Did the base give you any kind of send-off, any kind of parade?

02:10:28.000 - 02:10:43.000

No. Uh-uh. I will admit the girls got together and had a party. But inasmuch as I didn't drink, I didn't see any sense in going. I always felt like a fifth wheel.

02:10:43.000 - 02:11:07.000

It's--I thought, "One of these days I'm going to have to learn how to drink a little bit. I don't have to drink a lot." So it was--it was a case of turn in all my stuff, get my gear together, wait for the folks, pack up, and head back to Oakland.

02:11:07.000 - 02:11:24.000

Okay. When you got back to Oakland, then what did you do? What did I do? Well, I had to go to work again. I investigated work and I investigated college.

02:11:24.000 - 02:11:45.000

I wanted to get college time. And I was very surprised. I got in two years--of course I was working part-time. I was working for the California Forest and Range Experiment Station

02:11:45.000 - 02:12:15.000

out at Berkeley part-time and going to school part-time, which was fine. The only trouble is I was able to get in two years of college. And my second year I wanted to get in as much chemistry as possible because I wanted to go into agronomy.

02:12:15.000 - 02:12:34.000

And so I signed up for all those kind of courses. And I'd go down to college about 6 o'clock in the morning and they had the labs open, thank heaven. So I'd do all my lab work in the early morning.

02:12:34.000 - 02:12:50.000

Then we'd have our class lecture at 10 o'clock. And then they'd split and go to their section meetings. Well, I skipped that. I went to work. And they told me I'd never be able to do it, that it would be too much.

02:12:50.000 - 02:13:00.000

Where were you working? CF and RES, the California Forest and Range Experiment Station, which was just off campus. What did you do there?

02:13:02.000 - 02:13:16.000

I was sort of an assistant. Secretary, assistant, whatever you call it. Did whatever they needed. I wanted to learn to draft.

02:13:16.000 - 02:13:40.000

And they tried me, but I didn't have enough education for that. It was interesting because of the fact that it opened up some fields for me. And I decided I'd go into agronomy and get as much background as I could in the growing of things.

02:13:40.000 - 02:13:58.000

Like, you know, wheat, barley, rye, anything like that. But I'd have to transfer up to... Oh, heck, the Agricultural College up there. Can't even think of the name of it.

02:13:58.000 - 02:14:10.000

I've been losing my memory, I swear to God. Anyway, it got close to time to go up there. My mother kept making remarks, "Well, you're going to have to get a job where you can

02:14:10.000 - 02:14:23.000

take care of all the things you're used to." And what about us? Because, see, half my pay was going into... I'd get all the dog food and all the horse food and all that sort of food

02:14:23.000 - 02:14:38.000

and bring it home, and I'd get most of the groceries and bring them home. I never got recompense for it. Mom says, "You better just stay right here." So I did.

02:14:38.000 - 02:14:50.000

And my brother was living there. He was going to school. He was a professional student. He got so many degrees, it was ridiculous.

02:14:50.000 - 02:15:12.000

Me, I went to work. And my sister, folks would not help her out either on college. And it's too bad. But the folks grew up at a time when there was no help from your parents.

02:15:12.000 - 02:15:27.000

You either made it on your own or forget the whole thing. So I gave up the idea of finishing up college, but then I keep thinking, "Gee, maybe someday I will." And I tell my grandkids, "You be careful.

02:15:27.000 - 02:15:44.000

I might just finish up school with you." Then what did you decide to do? Well, we had our own business. I mean, I wanted to go into business.

02:15:44.000 - 02:15:55.000

I felt it was better than trying to work for somebody else because you never were sure. That was never a secure thing. So--

02:15:55.000 - 02:16:12.000

Hang on one second. After you finished the WASP-- Yeah, after I finished the WASP, I was home the latter part of January, and I joined the WAVES either first part of February or the middle of February.

02:16:12.000 - 02:16:30.000

I'm pretty sure it was in February. What made you decide the WAVES rather than the WASP? Well, that's an interesting thing in the sense that I was deaf on the WAX. I didn't like that branch at all.

02:16:30.000 - 02:16:48.000

My father was in the Army, so he was gung-ho for that, but I didn't like it. My brother was gung-ho for the Navy because he liked the ocean, and he liked sailing, and he liked that. So I thought, "Well, I may as well join the WAVES."

02:16:48.000 - 02:16:57.000

And I looked at it. I was thinking of the Coast Guard. I should have joined the Coast Guard, but I didn't. I joined the WAVES.

02:16:57.000 - 02:17:06.000

And I don't know what pushed me that direction or not. It's just that it was handy. Where was that? Where was what?

02:17:06.000 - 02:17:24.000

Where did you join? Oh, in San Francisco. And then I was shipped by train back to Hunter College. Hunter is a girls' college, and the service had taken it over.

02:17:24.000 - 02:17:38.000

The Navy had taken it over as a boot training camp for the girls. And it was good. It was nice. It was boring.

02:17:38.000 - 02:17:55.000

I already had boot training, you know, that sort of stuff, so there was no problem there. And I had wanted to stay there in New Jersey and go into the weather, become a meteorologist, which was open.

02:17:55.000 - 02:18:12.000

But come to find out there was another girl who was from that area, who had never been away from home, who was homesick, and would I please trade with her. And I says, "Oh?"

02:18:12.000 - 02:18:32.000

And, yeah, like a jackass I did. So that meant I went to Pensacola and became CTO instead of going to-- where is it? Someplace in New Jersey that has--

02:18:32.000 - 02:18:44.000

it begins with an L. And I've got some cousins living there, and I can't remember their address. Got to look it up. How did the waves compare with the wasps?

02:18:44.000 - 02:19:03.000

Oh, heaven, no comparison. The wasps were so much more advanced, so much more-- they had a lot more on the ball. The girls were a lot more educated.

02:19:03.000 - 02:19:16.000

They were sensible. I never ran into so many idiots in my born days as I did in the waves. [laughs] And yet some of them were real swell, you know.

02:19:16.000 - 02:19:36.000

Some of the girls were real good, but there's no doubt about it, so many of them were so lackadaisical. To get them to do anything right took an act of Congress. So how long did you stay in the waves?

02:19:36.000 - 02:19:56.000

Oh, until I was discharged, which was June 9, 1946. I had my points then and was able to get out. And I must admit that on the day I was to leave, I made sure I had everything packed up.

02:19:56.000 - 02:20:09.000

They handed me my discharge with one hand, I picked up my suitcase with the other hand, and I left. [laughs] And then I went up to South Carolina, a very close friend of mine.

02:20:09.000 - 02:20:29.000

Her husband had been transferred there, so I stayed with them for about a week. And I had gotten very underweight. The food was no good. I'd eat ice cream once a day and that would be about it.

02:20:29.000 - 02:20:50.000

I'd try to eat, and oh, I couldn't do it. So I lost, and I was weighed down to 130 pounds. Hell, I'm 150 now. So it was a case of--when I got up there to Barbie's place, my friend,

02:20:50.000 - 02:21:07.000

she took one look at me and she says, "My God, we're going to have to feed you." And so she started in, but I couldn't eat. My stomach had gotten so small that it was impossible. I then went on up to New Jersey and stayed with my relatives,

02:21:07.000 - 02:21:33.000

with whom I had wanted to stay when I was in the service. And Mom and my sister Joan came back by train to meet me there. Now Joan was only--heck, how old was I, 21, 22? Joan was only 11 or 12.

02:21:33.000 - 02:21:57.000

So we stayed there with my aunt and uncle and cousins. And then Mom and I went on to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, to pick up an airplane that my other uncle had bought. And we flew back to the West Coast.

02:21:57.000 - 02:22:12.000

It took us just about a month to do it because we stopped at every place along the way where we had friends and relatives, and we stayed with them two, three, four days. And it was just fantastic, you know, just terrific.

02:22:12.000 - 02:22:38.000

And we couldn't get out of Lock Haven right away because it was socked in, and the hotel was so porous that you could hear people in the second room down. It was a riot. And, yeah, one night there was a big fat fight between a man and a woman,

02:22:38.000 - 02:22:54.000

two doors away, and we could hear it so plain. [laughs] Okay, you and your mom then flew back to the West Coast, and then you stayed with your mother and dad? Let me see.

02:22:54.000 - 02:23:07.000

No, now wait a minute. I want to know when you met this man because I know you have five little ones. Yeah. Let me see.

02:23:07.000 - 02:23:14.000

Jeepers, I've got to get that square away in my thick skull. Can you take time out for a minute? Oh, sure. Absolutely. Okay.

02:23:14.000 - 02:23:38.000

Yeah, well, we came across country, and we only had one bad experience--well, two bad experiences. I took off from someplace in Michigan, and we flew for two hours, and I was still over the same place we had taken off.

02:23:38.000 - 02:23:57.000

We left, so we didn't go very far that time. We just landed and stayed over there. Then we kept--I'd call the people after we got on the ground. There's no sense in saying we'll be at such and such a place at such and such a time.

02:23:57.000 - 02:24:16.000

It never worked out that way. We got down there to Albuquerque, and what we would do, we would get up early, and we would fly from about 6 until about 10 or 11.

02:24:16.000 - 02:24:30.000

Then we'd stop, get the plane fueled up, find out where we could stay the night, you know, that sort of stuff, and then we'd look around. We'd go see whatever there was to see.

02:24:30.000 - 02:24:46.000

Well, in Albuquerque, we did that, and it was wonderful. We went to one of the Mexican restaurants, and it was pretty. I don't remember about the food except that it was good. Then the next morning, I filed a flight plan.

02:24:46.000 - 02:25:13.000

As per usual, we were going to go on over to--oh, heck, where was it? I'd have to look at my logbook, but it was not quite to California. It was at the western side of Arizona. We got along, and all of a sudden, I thought, "Gee, this doesn't sound right."

02:25:13.000 - 02:25:31.000

I was watching my heading so vividly, avidly, and looking at everything and checking everything, and all of a sudden, I realized I was lost. Nothing looked right. Nothing looked the same.

02:25:31.000 - 02:25:50.000

I was running out of fuel, so I looked around. Yeah, there was a nice farmyard down there. It was wet, but okay, that'll help to break me. We'd go down, and we'd land on this farmer's yard.

02:25:50.000 - 02:26:07.000

The ground was muddy. We had mud all over the plane, all over us, all over everything. The poor farmer and his sister were poking their heads out of the door of the house. They couldn't believe it.

02:26:07.000 - 02:26:18.000

It scared them half to death. We got up to the house, and I explained to the fellow what had happened. Did he have gas that I could buy? Yes, he had some gas.

02:26:18.000 - 02:26:29.000

He could let me have five gallons. I said, "Great." I called in for my flight back. "Come to find out, there was a magnetic storm

02:26:29.000 - 02:26:45.000

that had pulled my mag compass 190 degrees off the way I was supposed to go, and so I was way south. I was absolutely flabbergasted." Anyway, they helped us.

02:26:45.000 - 02:27:00.000

Yeah, the lady helped us, too, but she was scared green. She was afraid to even step. Luckily, it wasn't so muddy that we couldn't walk. We swung the plane around and got it so it would be running downhill.

02:27:00.000 - 02:27:18.000

Now, the only way to get out of there was to come down the hill. There was a hill here, and then another hill with trees on it over here. There was a fence here and a fence here, and back here it was high ground. I thought, "Oh, gee, this is going to be interesting as the devil."

02:27:18.000 - 02:27:33.000

I told them, I said, "Now, look, hang on for all you're worth until I yell. When I yell, you let go quick." So I revved that thing up to the highest point, and I yelled at them to let go.

02:27:33.000 - 02:27:50.000

Boom, diddly-boom, diddly-boom. I thought, "My God, will we get enough flying speed to get up?" It got going down the hill, and just at the bottom it got a little bit of flying speed, and it went right across the little gully there, and it hit the other hill.

02:27:50.000 - 02:28:02.000

The hill bounced us into the air. At the same time, one wing slapped a cow on the back. [Laughs] Bob started to laugh.

02:28:02.000 - 02:28:19.000

He said, "That cow is going to give Colonel milk for the next month." [Laughs] So we got out of there, and we skimmed through some trees, and we got around. Gradually, I got up, and I finally wiggled my wings, and they waved, and away I went.

02:28:19.000 - 02:28:40.000

I got up to where I was supposed to land, and I landed. The landing gear had tree limbs in it, and I thought, "Oh, gee." But it was a good experience. It showed me that regardless of my instruments, you've got to double-check everything else.

02:28:40.000 - 02:28:50.000

Okay, you're back at Oakland now. Yeah, we got back to Oakland all in one piece. [Laughs] Then did you live with your mom and dad for a while?

02:28:50.000 - 02:29:10.000

Yeah, for the time being. I was back there, and I opened my own business. I became a freelance typesetter. I got a hold of the salesman for the Veritype Company,

02:29:10.000 - 02:29:30.000

and I donated his commission if I would get a Veritype and do this. So I did, and I got space at this fellow's print shop in exchange for answering his phone. He didn't have anybody to answer the phone, and that would be a big help to him, and also taking care of customers as they came in.

02:29:30.000 - 02:30:00.000

So it went on that way for, oh, the next few months. One of the fellows that Jack--Jack was the guy who owned this print shop--had hired was this fellow who was a--his name was Neil, was Neil, and you spelled it K-N-double-E-L. It's short for Neeland.

02:30:00.000 - 02:30:11.000

So he liked to fly, too. He was a fair-weather pilot. He would only fly in fair weather, and he didn't have any instrument rating or anything like that, but he did have his private license.

02:30:11.000 - 02:30:28.000

So he wanted me to take him flying. I wouldn't do it. He was a fastie as far as I was concerned. So we worked alongside of each other for upwards of six months,

02:30:28.000 - 02:30:41.000

and then he'd ask me again. He'd ask me every once in a while to take him flying, and that he'd take me over to see a play. I finally said okay, and that was the start of it.

02:30:41.000 - 02:31:03.000

And Neil and I married in January of '50. And now it so happened that for two years, two and a half to three years, I was under doctor's care because everything inside me was going crazy. I didn't know why or how or anything.

02:31:03.000 - 02:31:12.000

He finally told me, the doctor finally told me, he says, "You going to get married?" I said, "Yeah, in May." He says, "In May?"

02:31:12.000 - 02:31:21.000

He said, "That's too far. I don't care when you get married. Just get pregnant in the next month or two." And he says, "That should fix it up."

02:31:21.000 - 02:31:30.000

And I thought, oh, dear God. I was just not that kind. I just didn't believe in it, didn't want to. Well, I wanted kids.

02:31:30.000 - 02:31:44.000

And as he said, if I didn't get pregnant within the next two months, I'd have to go in for a hysterectomy. And so that tilted the scales, and I went ahead. Neil and I had relations before we were married,

02:31:44.000 - 02:32:09.000

and I was pregnant when we were married. And it was interesting in the sense that here was this naive prude who couldn't stand anything like that. But she was born in the end of July.

02:32:09.000 - 02:32:19.000

We were married in the end of January, so there's only seven months there. But I was pregnant a month before that. So it was early. She was due in September.

02:32:19.000 - 02:32:35.000

And she was the funniest-looking little thing. From her neck up, she was perfect. From her neck down, her skin hung in folds. I thought she was going to roll right out of her skin.

02:32:35.000 - 02:32:51.000

It was so loose and so wishy-washy. It took four months for her to get enough weight on her to fill up that skin. And we were feeding her. Did you fly during this time?

02:32:51.000 - 02:33:04.000

Was that your own airplane that you and Neil were flying? No, didn't fly at all. No, I was pregnant. And then from there on, I was pregnant for five years.

02:33:04.000 - 02:33:18.000

And it got to the point where I didn't fly because I couldn't get into the plane. It was huge. It was nutty. And you stayed.

02:33:18.000 - 02:33:35.000

You were living in Oakland. We were living in Castro Valley. We had gotten a small house out in Castro Valley. Going back and forth to the doctor's office was a long haul.

02:33:35.000 - 02:33:55.000

And since I was already in business, Neil was still working for Jack. We finally decided to combine and make our business together. So we started up Koltype. You spell it with a K, K-O-L-T-Y-P-E,

02:33:55.000 - 02:34:09.000

which Neil would spell with a K. And we did work for any of the printers. And Neil was a good salesman. He could sell anything.

02:34:09.000 - 02:34:36.000

So our work was pretty steady, and it was--I had to really hop to it to keep up. I did the composition and paste up. I did the camera work and the stripping. Sometimes I'd double on stripping, but I could never double on the camera work.

02:34:36.000 - 02:34:51.000

I just didn't have the knowledge, and I couldn't--Neil could never teach a person how to do anything. He'd say, "Well, you put this here, and it comes out over here." He couldn't tell you anything in between. And so as a result, I finally gave up.

02:34:51.000 - 02:35:06.000

I says, "No, don't teach me." I said, "I can't understand it." And, "Oh," he says, "you're just stupid." And after my mother saying that for years, I just believed it.

02:35:06.000 - 02:35:26.000

It was a stupid thing to do right there. So you stayed in California, and you had five children in how many years? Five years and one month. The first two are 14 months apart.

02:35:26.000 - 02:35:49.000

Number two and three are 17 months apart. Number three and four are 14 months apart. Number five and six are--the next two are 16 months apart. And as the doctor says, you could have a kid for the next 10 years each year, and it wouldn't hurt you physically.

02:35:49.000 - 02:36:15.000

But financially and mentally, forget it. How long then did you stay in California? Until 1988. Yeah, my father died in '86.

02:36:15.000 - 02:36:45.000

And my brother was living in--he was living on a boat. And Neil and I were--we had moved to Oakland. In fact, if you ever see that documentary on the big fire of Oakland, it burned over 3,000 homes. It was a horrifying fire.

02:36:45.000 - 02:37:02.000

25 people were killed. And where we were, we were right on the edge of the part that was killed. In fact, the house next to us was okay, but the house beyond that burned down. That's how close our house was to that.

02:37:02.000 - 02:37:16.000

Where were you when that was going on? Had you gone? We were out of--see, that was in '86, '87. Oh.

02:37:16.000 - 02:37:28.000

Huh. For heaven's sakes. I can't remember exactly what happened there. I know I called--oh, we were on the road.

02:37:28.000 - 02:37:41.000

It must have been '88 or '89 that that fire took place. '89, because it was an odd year. And my brother had died in '88. Very suddenly, he had pancreatic cancer.

02:37:41.000 - 02:38:02.000

And I found out afterwards that the smoking that he did when he was young was detrimental. And he had stopped smoking, but he lived on a boat. He did nothing but wear a pair of shorts. And he had that sun beating on him all the time.

02:38:02.000 - 02:38:23.000

And he didn't wear any sunblock. This was back in the days before we realized what sunblock was. And so he got the full brunt of the sun rays, and that gave him pancreatic cancer. So he found out in April of '88 that he had the cancer.

02:38:23.000 - 02:38:42.000

And he went into the hospital for something or other. They opened him up, closed him up, and said that he had five months to live. He lived five weeks. That thing was so fast.

02:38:42.000 - 02:39:08.000

And so when--after he died, he had been taking care of Mom. Mom was living down there in the Bay Area right off the Bay. And she turned to me and she says, "Well, you're going to have to retire." She says, "I've got to have somebody to stay with."

02:39:08.000 - 02:39:23.000

Well, I was thinking, "Well, why can't you stay?" But no, she wouldn't consider a rest home. I had to retire, and I couldn't take care of things. And I thought, "Well, I guess I can."

02:39:23.000 - 02:39:52.000

I had always realized that I'd evidently be tagged for that. So from that moment on, from September of '88, we--excuse me. From September of '88 on, we traveled. I got a hold of a fifth-wheel trailer, and we had a pickup, and we traveled all over.

02:39:52.000 - 02:40:14.000

We'd stay at campgrounds. In fact, I keep track of where we were going, and it was funny. We started out one time. We were up here in--was it Colorado or the Dakotas?

02:40:14.000 - 02:40:34.000

Well, someplace up in there. We started out, and we went east, and suddenly we saw something we wanted to see. So we turned off the road, and we went there, and then we saw something else, and, you know, we could do that. We ended up that night 25 miles behind where we had started that morning.

02:40:34.000 - 02:40:45.000

[Laughs] And we just howled. It was so funny. But we saw a lot of the country, and it was interesting, and it was nice. It was fun.

02:40:45.000 - 02:40:57.000

We saw all our relatives, that sort of stuff. In the meantime, all your children had married and left home. Yeah. Well, no, they hadn't all married.

02:40:57.000 - 02:41:22.000

One was married and lived up there in Twain Heart. The folks had decided to move up to Twain Heart where I was. I had wished they would stay down where Dad was happier. Dad did not like this traipsing around the way Mom did.

02:41:22.000 - 02:41:39.000

As Bill said, my brother, he said, "After seven years, your mother is going to want to move." Sure enough, every seven years she wanted to go someplace else. Six or seven years it was. And Dad would follow right along.

02:41:39.000 - 02:42:00.000

But he had a lot of friends. He had lived up at the—the last two years of his life, he lived up at the veterans' home in Yonkville. We'd go over there about every other weekend. It was a nice drive, but it took four hours.

02:42:00.000 - 02:42:06.000

Isn't that where he was when he died? Yeah. He was up there. Okay.

02:42:06.000 - 02:42:13.000

And then— Oh, she's got his change tape. Oh, the one with blanks. Oh, there it goes.

02:42:13.000 - 02:42:23.000

It said, "The one with blanks," but it's blank. Okay, I'm going. I won't watch it, but I'll go. [Laughter]

02:42:23.000 - 02:42:38.000

Making up your mind ahead of time, huh? So we went on that trip, and I said to her, "Mommy, I'm just going to go because you didn't want to do it." But once I made up my mind, I'm just going to pretend that I enjoyed it. And I'm just going to go and do whatever you want me to do.

02:42:38.000 - 02:42:47.000

It was the most wonderful trip. We were gone almost the whole time. Good. [Beep]

02:42:47.000 - 02:42:54.000

Okay, tell—yeah. We need to know about her dad. Yeah, we'll start with dad. Right.

02:42:54.000 - 02:43:16.000

Dad, after—well, during the Depression, he took a—he joined the National Guard. He got extra money that way. And he belonged to the American Legion, American Legion Post Number 5 from Oakland. And he became the drum major of their band.

02:43:16.000 - 02:43:30.000

They got a darn good band. It won first prize in so many of the regional and state things. That's Ginger. She's three.

02:43:30.000 - 02:43:41.000

Okay. And where was I? Oh, yeah. He belonged to both of those.

02:43:41.000 - 02:44:00.000

He was the drum major for Oakland Post Number 5. Then he joined the National Guard and he became the drum major for the National Guard band. Well, they always had both bands in all the patriotic parades. You know, the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day, whatever.

02:44:00.000 - 02:44:19.000

So here's dad on the Fourth of July this one year. And it went hot that day. And he's the drum major and they're going to have both bands in the parade. So they make arrangements to put the National Guard band up to the front of the parade

02:44:19.000 - 02:44:41.000

and the American Legion band at the back or vice versa. I don't know which. Anyway, I was always on pins and needles because dad always used to put it on me. He would throw his shoulders back and stick out his chest and raise his knees real high and point his toes.

02:44:41.000 - 02:45:02.000

And he'd have his tall shako on. And he'd go marching down that street and people would just fall all over themselves to see him. He'd really make a show of it. And so they had a friend of dad's, Jack Hasler, was the manager of the city.

02:45:02.000 - 02:45:23.000

He was in the reviewing stand and he was announcing to all the people. And mom and Bill and Joan and myself were in the -- we weren't in the reviewing stand, but we were right next to it. And all of a sudden Jack says, "Oh, boy, here comes Irv Hazleton. You've got to see this guy.

02:45:23.000 - 02:45:36.000

He is tops." He went on raving and raving and raving. And then Jack called, "Hi, Irv. Keep up the good work." And he waved at him.

02:45:36.000 - 02:45:55.000

And dad threw him a salute, you know. Went on. Well, they had it so fixed up that just beyond the reviewing stand about a block, another one of the fellows from the post had dad's other uniform in the car.

02:45:55.000 - 02:46:36.000

And dad would fall out of line and get into the car and change his clothes in the car while the guy there was driving back to the front part of the parade. So the parade keeps on going and pretty soon along comes the tail end and here is the Oakland Post number five, dad with his big shako on. Good thing he was second because on the earlier one he had just the steel helmet on or whatever you want to call it. And so he starts out again and he gets up to the reviewing stand and Jack Hassler says,

02:46:36.000 - 02:46:54.000

"Here comes Oakland Post number five with, oh this is impossible. It says here Irv Hastleton. Irv Hastleton's already gone through. Oh my God, it is true. It is him. You've got to see it to believe it, but that's him."

02:46:54.000 - 02:47:11.000

He goes on ranting and raving. We just never forgot that. That was the piece de resistance. And dad was very gung ho about organizational stuff.

02:47:11.000 - 02:47:26.000

He was in the Masonic Lodge. He went through the line. He wanted to join the shrine, but he refused to because it cost so much money. And you know this was still in the Depression era.

02:47:26.000 - 02:47:49.000

So now I think we'll talk about your kid. Well, one other little thing. During dad's last couple of years of life, he moved up to the veterans home in Yonkville. It was great.

02:47:49.000 - 02:47:57.000

He was in charge of this. He was in charge of that. He was in his forte. He was just having a ball.

02:47:57.000 - 02:48:20.000

So when he all of a sudden passed away, it was a very surprise. But he had congestive heart failure because when they had been living up in Twain Heart, dad insisted on shoveling wet snow on a steep. So it overtaxed his heart and that's all there was to it.

02:48:20.000 - 02:48:44.000

Now the kids, Del was born in 1950. She'll be 50 years old at the end of July. She was married and lived for 20 some odd years in Twain Heart. I had built a geodesic dome in Twain Heart for the folks and myself.

02:48:44.000 - 02:48:56.000

She and her husband bought that. They lived there for quite a number of years. Then they separated. They have two kids.

02:48:56.000 - 02:49:12.000

Oh, there's the morning dove. That's the clock. Yeah, see? It's only 5 o'clock.

02:49:12.000 - 02:49:22.000

It's supposed to strike at 7. I've been ripped asleep on this bed. But, yeah. Your next child.

02:49:22.000 - 02:49:36.000

Yeah. Mike was born in '51. Odell is more the literary person. She's a marvelous writer.

02:49:36.000 - 02:49:52.000

She's already had some stuff published. I'd like to get a hold of some of it. It's primarily religious. She was a born-again Christian.

02:49:52.000 - 02:50:23.000

She was over in Europe in the late -- I don't know when. She was about 18, 20 years old. She went over there with Dr. Francis Schaefer. I don't know if any of you have heard of him or not, but he was very well known on the radio for Europe.

02:50:23.000 - 02:50:47.000

She's a darn good writer. She's getting her master's in counseling. No, not child -- just adult psychology, you might say. And she lives in Tlain Heart yet with the two boys.

02:50:47.000 - 02:51:16.000

I'd like to see them sometime, but we'll have to wait and see. Number two was Mike. I thought, sure, he was going to end up in Colorado Springs at the academy. But he got up -- he was very good on his math and all that sort of stuff.

02:51:16.000 - 02:51:27.000

And he got up there and he finally came over and he says, "I know what I'm going to do." I says, "Great. What are you going to do?" He says, "I want to go to art school."

02:51:27.000 - 02:52:00.000

So he went to art school. And the teacher in the art school liked him so much that he wanted Mike to go down to the sister campus in Mexico, Mihuacan. And Mike did, but he went down a year sooner than they really wanted him to. I mean, they had other people going down there when they were in their senior year, but Mike went down when he was in his junior year.

02:52:00.000 - 02:52:23.000

And the instructor evidently thought he was pretty sharp. So he is a fine carpenter. I don't know if you ever heard of Chez Panisse, a restaurant out in Berkeley that's well known for everything. Anyway, Mike did all the fine artwork in there.

02:52:23.000 - 02:52:40.000

And I've read about it in several magazines. I've been very tickled, very proud of him, very surprised. And then the number three is Diane. Diane's a crazy goof.

02:52:40.000 - 02:52:52.000

But she's got her masters in literature. She's the one I'm in touch with most of the time. Every week we are talking to each other. Don't do that.

02:52:52.000 - 02:53:14.000

And she has two kids that are adopted. She was a foster home and had these two kids and they persuaded she and her husband to adopt them. So they did. And Diane never had any kids of her own and she was built to have kids.

02:53:14.000 - 02:53:30.000

Oh, gee, makes you sick. Number four was Kim. Kim is the financial wizard of the family. He swore up and down he was going to have a million bucks by the time he was 35.

02:53:30.000 - 02:53:48.000

He did it and then some. He owns a -- what do you call it? A racket and tennis and swim club down in Livermore. He won't travel.

02:53:48.000 - 02:54:09.000

If you want to see him, you go where he is. And he never married, but he is living with a gal, and I'm not sure whether they're married or not, who had a couple of kids. So there's one or two kids in the household. I don't know anything about it, though.

02:54:09.000 - 02:54:34.000

And then Brad was number five. He was born in '55. He's a film editor, goes all over the world, is thoroughly enthralled with the people from Nepal. He's also had his license, his flying license, but he says it costs too much money.

02:54:34.000 - 02:54:47.000

He says it's not worth it for what little you get. And that's true. He does a lot of rock climbing. Oh, did you see the picture of that kid in here?

02:54:47.000 - 02:54:58.000

No, I haven't seen it yet. We'll look at it when we get done, though. Right. And it scared me half to death until I took the picture down to somebody and I said, "What can you tell me about this?"

02:54:58.000 - 02:55:15.000

"Oh, this guy's okay. He's number -- he's got this and this and this and this, and he's a number five grade." I said, "What does that mean?" "Well, it means he's -- number five is the highest you can get."

02:55:15.000 - 02:55:27.000

And he says if he couldn't do anything, he'd be down there in number one. This is in rock? Rock climbing. So I thought, "Well."

02:55:27.000 - 02:55:42.000

Who does he work for in the film business? He's freelancing. He's worked for -- oh, excuse me. He's worked on movies with -- what's his name?

02:55:42.000 - 02:55:55.000

Williams, Robin Williams. And he's worked on lots of other ones. Some of them he says, "You stay away from, Mom. They're not worth looking at."

02:55:55.000 - 02:56:09.000

As I told the kids, I'm a Walt Disney character. I like those guys. So they still steer me in the right direction. But I've gotten so that I don't particularly like movies at all.

02:56:09.000 - 02:56:33.000

I've been doing a lot of reading. So -- and Brad lives in New Jersey, I think. He spends his time between New Jersey and London, England, and France. He goes to all the film festivals.

02:56:33.000 - 02:56:56.000

In fact, one of his films was up for a big prize in the International Film Festival at Cannes. And they didn't get it, but he was one of the ten that were selected. And I thought, "Well, good for him." How did you end up here in Texas?

02:56:56.000 - 02:57:12.000

Well, that is a crazy situation. Mom and I were traveling around all over the place. And I was keeping in touch with different friends and families and that sort of stuff. And I suddenly realized Mom was getting old.

02:57:12.000 - 02:57:30.000

She was up in her 90s. And it was getting more difficult for her to walk around and that sort of stuff. And I thought, "Gee-bers, she needs a base to work from." So I started looking around and I told my cousin -- no, my niece and her husband,

02:57:30.000 - 02:57:45.000

who were living here in San Angelo, about my problem as to where I should light, where I should take Mom. And Glenn says, "Go down to the hill country." I says, "What hill country?" He says, "The hill country of Texas."

02:57:45.000 - 02:57:55.000

I says, "Don't be ridiculous. Texas is flat as a pancake." I says, "They don't have any hills." He says, "Oh, you'd be surprised. They've got lots of hills and they're good." I says, "How high?"

02:57:55.000 - 02:58:15.000

"Oh," he says, "I don't know, 2,500 feet, maybe 3,000." I says, "Well, for heaven's sakes." So I took time out, left my mother there, my nieces, and I trotted down here and looked around and saw this one real estate lady.

02:58:15.000 - 02:58:29.000

She took me one place. This was the second place she brought me, and we couldn't even come in. She didn't have a key. And I says, "You know, this looks like what I'm looking for."

02:58:29.000 - 02:58:44.000

"Oh," she says, "no, you don't know what's going on." She says, "Let's go see some of the others." So I did. I says, "No, that second place, come to find out the FDIC had this and had it for about four years.

02:58:44.000 - 02:59:01.000

We're living here. The FDIC had rented it out for a couple of years, but it was overgrown with grass that you couldn't see the forest or the trees." And I took a look at it, and I thought, "Well, I don't care about the grass. That could be mowed."

02:59:01.000 - 02:59:16.000

And so we got a couple of people to mow it, got ahold of a fellow who could come in and check the house. We needed a new roof, and we needed something else, and needed this, that, and the other thing.

02:59:16.000 - 02:59:29.000

And so I said, "This is it." And I says, "How much?" Well, she says, "Could you make an offer?" It's been on the market for so long, so I made an offer of $30,500.

02:59:29.000 - 02:59:36.000

They took it. How many acres do you have? Three and a half. Great. So you and your mom moved in.

02:59:36.000 - 02:59:55.000

Yeah. In fact, we moved in before we had furniture. Yeah. I got back down here on the 30th of December of '92. And, oh, my husband had passed away in '92. The jackass insisted on smoking up a storm all his life.

02:59:55.000 - 03:00:07.000

And it was funny. At the dinner table, all the kids would be there, and we got in the habit of talking about whatever we wanted to talk about. We'd all chive in.

03:00:07.000 - 03:00:22.000

And so the kids would pipe up and every once in a while say, "Hey, Dad, you know what a lung looks like after it's been smoking for 20 years?" [laughs] It finally got to him because he stopped smoking in the '70s.

03:00:22.000 - 03:00:39.000

And it wasn't soon enough. He came down with emphysema and cancer of every goddamn thing and part of him. So he passed away in '92. Nan, in looking back over your life,

03:00:39.000 - 03:00:54.000

give me some specific things, instances, where you feel like someone else was helping you. And you call it your guardian angel. Can you tell me about some of those times?

03:00:54.000 - 03:01:11.000

Well, I could tell you about four or five of those times. All right. But it's not somebody helping me. It's sort of a psycho experience.

03:01:11.000 - 03:01:29.000

For instance, when I was younger, Joan was only, say, one or two years old, so that would make me 12 or 13. And my dad would go down to a lodge meeting every Thursday night.

03:01:29.000 - 03:01:42.000

We'd all travel along with him. We'd all get in the car and we'd all go down. Then on the way home, Mom would stop at Edie's Grand Ice Cream and we'd get a cone. Oh, this was the highlight of the week.

03:01:42.000 - 03:01:53.000

And then we'd come on home. Well, this one time, we'd gotten in the car. I was in the back seat with the two kids. And Mom started to get in the car and she stopped.

03:01:53.000 - 03:02:03.000

She looked at us. She says, "You kids get out and stay here." Well, this was an unheard of thing. And I took a look at her face and I said, "Oh, God, something's going to happen."

03:02:03.000 - 03:02:14.000

So I said, "Come on, kids, let's go get some popcorn." I don't think I'll ever forget that. And so we got out and we got in. Dad would say, "Hey, they don't have to get out."

03:02:14.000 - 03:02:27.000

"Yes, they do. Yes, they do." Well, Mom took Dad on down. And on the way home, she felt something was going to happen. So she stayed on the right-hand lane of the street

03:02:27.000 - 03:02:40.000

so that she wouldn't get hit by oncoming cars. That's what she was afraid of. And by golly, as she was going along, a car suddenly just pulled out of the curb without looking and smashed in the whole right side of the car.

03:02:40.000 - 03:02:52.000

If we kids had been with them, I'd have been in the passenger seat and they'd have been killed immediately. I would have been killed immediately. So I didn't say anything.

03:02:52.000 - 03:03:13.000

I just--Mom said, "Oh, thank God you kids stayed home," you know. And then when I was back in Wisconsin, I woke up one day and I was beside myself. I couldn't think. I couldn't--it was terrible. I felt so miserable.

03:03:13.000 - 03:03:27.000

I asked everybody, "Is everybody all right with you? Is everything okay with you?" "Yeah." And so I went to school, but I couldn't concentrate on schoolwork. And after three days, that feeling left me.

03:03:27.000 - 03:03:47.000

And I couldn't figure it out. And about four days later, I get a notice with a newspaper article in it. "Mrs. Harriet Hazleton narrowly escaped death today when her car rolled down the embankment because of the rains," and so forth.

03:03:47.000 - 03:03:59.000

And I just went, "Oh!" and I set out. That's what had been bothering me. I knew it was happening. And my aunt said, "My God," she says, "this is crazy."

03:03:59.000 - 03:04:30.000

And so we all just sort of, you know, just sloughed it off. And then when I was in the service, that time when I flew the 6th and almost dug myself six feet under, and then I was in the Navy, and this is the one that sort of--well, there was two things in there.

03:04:30.000 - 03:04:48.000

That and--what was the second thing? In the WASPs, something--oh, coming home. That time, I knew it was haywire. The minute I saw that stupid thing, I started to goof up.

03:04:48.000 - 03:05:04.000

Then in the Navy, I was in the tower. I woke up one morning, and I was supposed to go on duty, and I thought, "Uh-oh, we're going to have a crackup today." I thought, "No, you're crazy. You can't have a crackup today."

03:05:04.000 - 03:05:13.000

So anyway, I went up there, up to the tower, and I told the girls, I said, "I think we'd better be on our toes. We're going to have a crackup today." "How do you know?" I said, "I don't know.

03:05:13.000 - 03:05:29.000

I just know we're going to have a crackup." So everybody was watching carefully, and we were keeping on our toes, and the tower officer, the gal in charge of the tower called the tower officer, and he came up, and he was sitting there, and I thought, "What's he doing here?"

03:05:29.000 - 03:05:46.000

We were on three different stations. Finally, on the third hour, I went on to the microphone, and I thought, "Uh-oh, it's going to happen during this next half hour or so." I told the girls, I said, "Well, be aware.

03:05:46.000 - 03:05:59.000

It's going to happen during this next half hour or so." We were very careful and watching, and I was watching, and all of a sudden, the planes were going out to take off. I said, "Oh, my God."

03:05:59.000 - 03:06:10.000

They said, "What is it?" I said, "There it is, right there." It was one of the planes going out. They said, "What about it?" I said, "That's going to crack up." They got out. They took off.

03:06:10.000 - 03:06:25.000

That plane got 200 feet in the air and spun in. It scared me. When I saw it go start down, I hit the crash buttons. Well, you hit them with two fingers, and I froze on them.

03:06:25.000 - 03:06:45.000

The tower officer came over finally, and he picked up my hand and took it off. He says, "We got it. We got the message." He says, "If you have any more feelings like that, you let me know. PDQ." I said, "I don't think I will. That one scared me too much."

03:06:45.000 - 03:06:58.000

I've had them a couple of times when unusual things were going to happen, and I've paid attention. Sometimes I've won. Sometimes I haven't. What do you think that is?

03:06:58.000 - 03:07:12.000

Mental dyslopathy? It can't be. It hasn't happened yet. I don't know. It's some phenomenon that we don't have too much knowledge of yet,

03:07:12.000 - 03:07:29.000

of which we do not have too much knowledge. That's better. There are so many people who have this psychic ability. You hear about them, and you read about their results.

03:07:29.000 - 03:07:43.000

Lost things, lost articles, lost people, people who have gotten into a tight spot, who have been murdered, and they couldn't find the body. Some psychic comes along and says, "Well, look here."

03:07:43.000 - 03:08:00.000

There they are. It's fascinating. I wish I had not been so scared about it, and I wish I had gone on and studied it. Who knows? Maybe I could have awakened some of the crazy brain cells

03:08:00.000 - 03:08:13.000

that are lying dormant in our brains. Do you give any credit to a higher being? Oh, yeah. But that's the point. That's exactly the point.

03:08:13.000 - 03:08:27.000

How? Why? If that is taking place, why me? That doesn't make sense. Yeah, it doesn't make sense at all.

03:08:27.000 - 03:08:41.000

Not to me. It's interesting. Have you read a lot of these stories on these kind of things that happen? They've got studies at Stanford.

03:08:41.000 - 03:08:55.000

I'd love to get exposed to something like that. Dale graduated from Stanford. Mike graduated from Hell's Bells. The boys didn't graduate.

03:08:55.000 - 03:09:09.000

All the boys just took courses that they wanted. Brad was going to three different colleges all at the same time. Honest to Pete. You know, you wonder.

03:09:09.000 - 03:09:28.000

Brad is the smart one in the family. In looking back or in looking ahead, what do you feel is the legacy or will be the legacy of the Wasp? That's an interesting question.

03:09:28.000 - 03:09:52.000

But I'll be darned if I could answer it simply. I don't know. The girls all came from different walks of life. So, therefore, it's not especially a particular type of girl from a particular walk of life. It's something innate.

03:09:52.000 - 03:10:09.000

I think it's something within the person. And they've got to discover that for themselves. Whether they do or whether they don't, a lot of it has to do with environment.

03:10:09.000 - 03:10:23.000

I wanted to finish college. I didn't have the guts to go ahead and do it and say, "I'm sorry, guys. I'm going to finish." You know, I was told for so many years that I was there to help the rest of the family.

03:10:23.000 - 03:10:47.000

That I was to be ready for this, that, or the other thing. And as a result, it's a hard thing to get away from. And Mom was a very strong character and very long-lived. She only passed away a little over a year ago.

03:10:47.000 - 03:11:05.000

And I will admit this last year has been an eye-opener. I'm free! Of all the things that you have done in your life, what are you most proud of? Oh, the wasps. Definitely. Indubitably.

03:11:05.000 - 03:11:30.000

You'll say that in a whole sentence for me. Yeah, and it was, what makes it interesting, it was the happiest year of my life. I was doing something that I felt I could do with a group of people who were terrific. And it was just great.

03:11:30.000 - 03:11:55.000

Whether it's any legacy we leave or not, that's a horse of a different color. We all leave a legacy, I guess. My grandmother's, I still take my hat off to that woman. Here she is, crippled, has to swing her legs from side to side, and yet she was breaking a horse's.

03:11:55.000 - 03:12:17.000

You know, it doesn't make sense. So there was something there that was pushing her on. When your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, see this video in some classroom, it's going to be a shocker-oo.

03:12:17.000 - 03:12:38.000

I bet you dollars to donuts. What do you want them to learn from your life? Well, I don't think that's going to be a sensible thought. Because it's just like your great-great-grandmother.

03:12:38.000 - 03:12:56.000

You didn't learn so much from her life. Those genes are carrying a certain amount of power in them, and I think that's the big thing, to a certain degree. Is there anything you want to say to them?

03:12:56.000 - 03:13:18.000

No. No. Just go do what you want to do, when you want to do it, and how you want to do it. I know Mom was always after me because I was spoiling my kids. I wanted to give them love and kisses and things like that.

03:13:18.000 - 03:13:33.000

"Mom, you're spoiling them. You're spoiling them rotten." You know, so I stopped. No, I shouldn't have. It's crazy.

03:13:33.000 - 03:14:03.000

I know after Neil and I were married and we lived, we had our own business, which we ran, oh, for, what was it, until, oh, it was in the '70s. '70? Oh, '77, '78. Yeah.

03:14:03.000 - 03:14:15.000

And then Neil told me that he would rather have me out of there. "What do you mean, out of there?" "Well, I don't want you in the office anymore." I says, "Well, do you want me at home?" "No, I don't want you at home."

03:14:15.000 - 03:14:27.000

I says, "You want to be divorced?" "Not necessarily, but I don't want you around." So I left. Well, that gave him the right to tell people that I had left him high and dry.

03:14:27.000 - 03:14:35.000

[Laughs] I laughed. I thought, "Well, that's Neil." He was a--whoops, it's blinking. That's all right.

03:14:35.000 - 03:14:55.000

He's a manipulator of the first water. It's too bad. I might get one more take. And you did it the way she said, or you'd get yourself knocked for a loop.

03:14:55.000 - 03:15:10.000

And I know one time my grandfather--I was so surprised. I wanted to use my grandfather's bed. My grandfather was living in a rest home at that time. So I asked Mom.

03:15:10.000 - 03:15:18.000

Mom says, "You're going to have to ask your grandfather." I says, "Okay." So I went in and I asked my grandfather, "Could I use it?" "Oh, are you planning on moving?"

03:15:18.000 - 03:15:38.000

I says, "Oh, no, not yet." I said, "We'll have to be there until the year one." Because I was living with the folks at that time, with all the kids, you can imagine. And so Mom and Dad went in to see him, and she comes back, and she is living.

03:15:38.000 - 03:15:50.000

And she bawls holy heck out of me. She says, "If I'm planning on moving, she ought to be the first one to know." I says, "I'm not planning on moving." "Grandpa says you're getting ready to move this week."

03:15:50.000 - 03:16:03.000

I says, "No, I didn't say anything like that." "Don't lie to me. Your grandfather's not a liar. If he said you said it, you said it." And I just about, I thought, "Oh, this is ridiculous."

03:16:03.000 - 03:16:25.000

I mean, she would not discuss anything. When I was going to college, there was a word, "ration." It consisted on pronouncing it "ration" because it's a derivative of "rate." Well, it's logical, so I always pronounced it "ration."

03:16:25.000 - 03:16:41.000

Everybody else pronounces it "rashin." And I didn't know why until I got to college, and then I found out it was a derivative of "raheel," which is Latin for "rate." And so I went to tell her, I said, "You know, I had the funniest experience today

03:16:41.000 - 03:16:52.000

in regards to ration or rashin." She hit the ceiling. "I don't care what you--I never mentioned it again." Poor mom.

03:16:52.000 - 03:17:05.000

She was locked in, and I think she missed a lot of things. There was no discussions. Mom made a statement. That was the way it was. Even with Dad.

03:17:05.000 - 03:17:28.000

We couldn't figure out why Dad put up with it, but he did. -As we finish this interview, Nan, is there anything that you want to say that we've overlooked? -Well, let me see. Well, let me think. Mom and I traveled the country.

03:17:28.000 - 03:17:50.000

We settled here because of--oh, we settled here because of finances. I couldn't live in California. The expenses were so high, it was ridiculous. And you know, I always thought Texas was dry, barren, hot. I've certainly learned differently.

03:17:50.000 - 03:18:11.000

And having the irrigation and having the grass grow, it's really great. In fact, in January and February and March, I was running around in shorts. If we had had sun out today, I would have been in shorts again. So I've been very, very surprised.

03:18:11.000 - 03:18:27.000

I get a laugh out of it. Dad always kept looking at me, "Well, how is it down there in the hellhole of Texas?" [laughs] I'd laugh.

03:18:27.000 - 03:18:45.000

That's when I was at Sweetwater. But, you know, it's very neat. I should get up and get going. I don't have any energy, and I'm not too happy about food.

03:18:45.000 - 03:18:57.000

I don't like to eat. It's ridiculous. I should eat, but I don't want to be bothered fixing it. I don't want to be bothered eating it.

03:18:57.000 - 03:19:13.000

I don't want to be bothered cleaning up afterwards. [laughs] You know, it's just really, really stupid. What would you say about your life? I think it's been very good.

03:19:13.000 - 03:19:33.000

It could have been better along certain lines. It could have been worse along most of the lines. So, I hope it hasn't been a case of getting a swelled head. That was one thing. Mom couldn't stand, she says.

03:19:33.000 - 03:19:52.000

You know, any time we got a compliment, we'd go to tell Mom, "Don't tell me!" She says, "It'll just make your head swelled up." In fact, it reminds me of one time when I thought, "Well, this is ridiculous." We were traveling, and heck, it was someplace in Texas, northern Texas.

03:19:52.000 - 03:20:13.000

We stopped at this campground, and it was a great big, huge circle with roadways going off back to camping places. Which is great, you know, you're separated a bit. So, I pulled up, and I backed my trailer down this one road. I got halfway down, and I straightened it out, and went down the rest of the way.

03:20:13.000 - 03:20:32.000

And parked it. And I was very proud of myself. I thought, "Huh, that wasn't so bad." Well, heck, I'd been driving the trailer for, what was it, a year, two years? I should be able to back it up now, even with the fifth-wheel trailer on.

03:20:32.000 - 03:20:50.000

And the gal in the campground next door says, when she was laughing, she came over, "I gotta tell you this," she says. She said, "You know, when you first started down there," I thought, "Oh, dear." She turned to her husband, and she says, "Joe, you better go help that lady. She might need some help."

03:20:50.000 - 03:21:11.000

And he says, "Oh, I don't need to give her any help. She can do it better than I can." And I was so tickled that somebody had said that. And I started to tell Mom, and she says, "Don't tell me. You'll just get a swell head." I thought, "Oh, for Pete's sakes."

03:21:11.000 - 03:21:34.000

What is your favorite word? Favorite word? The one that I use the most is "stupid." They're trying to get me to quit using it. Outside of that, "Hell's bells."

03:21:34.000 - 03:21:48.000

My grandfather taught me that one. My grandfather taught me how to play poker, and he taught me how to play cribbage. And I've enjoyed both games ever since. And who taught you how to play piano?

03:21:48.000 - 03:22:00.000

Mrs. Martin, Ethel Long Martin. She was a crackerjack. But it didn't go far enough. I'm only classical.

03:22:00.000 - 03:22:21.000

And there's so many other ways of music. I never really got a broad spectrum of music. I love to listen to it. I put them on and listen from now until Doomsday. But I haven't touched the piano in four years.

03:22:21.000 - 03:22:37.000

And that's not good. At first, I was practicing pretty good. I thought I was. And then it got to the point every time I sat down to practice, Mom would say, "What's on the TV?" Let's go back and talk about the organ.

03:22:37.000 - 03:22:53.000

Oh, the organ was a church organ. And it was only a single manual. I think it was single. Was it two? No, it was single. But it was a little country church.

03:22:53.000 - 03:23:08.000

And there was nobody around to play it. So I tried. And it was so neat. It was so fun. And it was so crazy. I'd pull different stops and I'd get different tones. So I just started playing for church.

03:23:08.000 - 03:23:20.000

They said, "Gee, that sounds good." And, okay. Now, there's one thing I learned early. You have three different types of pianists.

03:23:20.000 - 03:23:35.000

And I'm saying "piano" because I'm not playing a piano. Jeepers! The way some of these people call a pianist. Ugh! Drives me straight up a wall. Just like flute. It's not a flautist. It's a flutist.

03:23:35.000 - 03:23:45.000

You're playing a flute. Well, I get my dander up. And that's one of the things I get my dander up on. You're playing a piano. So you're a pianist.

03:23:45.000 - 03:23:59.000

Period. And, uh, the organ was there. And I saw no reason we shouldn't use it. And after fussing with it for a little while, they thought maybe I could do it for church.

03:23:59.000 - 03:24:12.000

So I did it for church. And, uh, no doubt about it, I was limited. And then when I went back to Wisconsin, that took the organist away from there.

03:24:12.000 - 03:24:28.000

So, uh, they got something else. Someone else. I don't know who. But, uh, when I came back, they had done a lot of growing. And they had an organist there who was a crackerjack.

03:24:28.000 - 03:24:43.000

And they got a new organ. It was a three manual, I think. And the gal who played it was superb. I'd go over to church just to listen to her play. And, uh, otherwise I didn't like church.

03:24:43.000 - 03:24:59.000

I think my last question to you is, what do you feel, how do you feel about Jacqueline Cochran? And give it to me in a complete statement. I felt Jacqueline Cochran had a lot on the ball.

03:24:59.000 - 03:25:15.000

But I was also thinking she was one-sided. The only thing that mattered was what Jackie wanted, when Jackie wanted it, and how she wanted it. Which is fine. It's got her where she is, or where she was.

03:25:15.000 - 03:25:38.000

But I felt that she was missing the boat by not expanding her, her thoughts on other people. Uh, for instance, she would make statements, and if you contradicted her, she was, "Ref!"

03:25:38.000 - 03:25:59.000

It's, it's, uh, and she had some statements that were very erroneous. I take my hat off to her for the stick-to-itiveness, for the ability to go, but I do not take my hat off to her for the way she treated other people.

03:25:59.000 - 03:26:14.000

Uh, she trot on them, easily, completely, and I just don't think that was right. I know there's a lot of people who do that, and you've got to have them in the world,

03:26:14.000 - 03:26:40.000

but you don't have to kowtow to them. What do you think about the WASP program itself, and what it achieved? I think it achieved a great deal, and I think it was a good program. I do think it could have been expanded a little bit more,

03:26:40.000 - 03:26:57.000

to take in those gals who were good pilots, but who could not fly the Army way. They could have been used in so many different ways, that I think we missed a bet there, missed a big bet.

03:26:57.000 - 03:27:23.000

The, the, the way people are, they've got a lot, like for instance, oh, poor Jackie had to do it just exactly her way, or she was out in left field, she just wasn't with it. But there's so many people who feel that way, and yet they give.

03:27:23.000 - 03:27:44.000

They're a little bit more flexible, maybe that's what I'm thinking. And, uh, just like that character that I ran into at Merced, I hope he was flexible. Discrimination, treatment, anything like that, anything else?

03:27:44.000 - 03:27:59.000

With Jack Bloom? No. Oh, Nancy wants to know about any other discrimination that, did you ever feel any other discrimination other than what you had prescribed to us,

03:27:59.000 - 03:28:16.000

from either Air Force officers, from nurses, or from COPRAN? Or from men. Or from men in general? Well, men, I'm anti-men, because most of the men that I've run into in the last 20 years have been ridiculous.

03:28:16.000 - 03:28:30.000

And of course, there's something else. I'm not a sexy person. So, as my husband would say, "You're supposed to be ready, willing, and able to have sex wherever, whenever I want."

03:28:30.000 - 03:28:48.000

Well, of course, that didn't sound well with me. And, uh, it got to the point where I was drinking like a fish. Oh, I drank like, like tin fishes. So that I could knock myself out, so that Neil could have his sex, so that I wouldn't be bothered.

03:28:48.000 - 03:29:00.000

And, uh, he had to have sex every single night. Sometimes it was two times a night. Sometimes it was three. Oh, it was such a blessed relief.

03:29:00.000 - 03:29:19.000

I had wanted to get divorced within a year or two after the last kid was born. Absolutely not. He would not tolerate that. And I realize now that I was being used to take care of everything that he didn't want to be bothered with.

03:29:19.000 - 03:29:33.000

Like all the book work and that sort of stuff at the office. All the book work and that sort of stuff at home. All the fussing with the kids. He didn't want to be bothered with any of that.

03:29:33.000 - 03:29:56.000

He just wanted to come and go as he damn pleased when he damn pleased to do it. And, uh, I remember one time I was very surprised at him when I take my hat off to him for it. We had gotten into an argument. He was telling the kids that when they start driving, to be aware that any situation you get into, you can get out of.

03:29:56.000 - 03:30:09.000

I says, "I wonder if it's an accident." "Well, they can see it coming and they can eliminate it." I says, "No, Neil, that's not right. There's going to be situations where you have no control over it.

03:30:09.000 - 03:30:20.000

And you've just got to be ready for it and do the best you can." Oh, my, you should have heard him rant and rave. And it was two or three years later. He walked into the office.

03:30:20.000 - 03:30:28.000

"Well, you're right." I says, "What do you mean I'm right?" "I just had an accident." "Oh, my God." I says, "Are you okay?"

03:30:28.000 - 03:30:42.000

"Yeah, I'm okay." Come to find out he'd been going down a street and the side street was a stop street. The signals there. And this guy plowed right through and hit him broadside on the driver's side.

03:30:42.000 - 03:30:54.000

It totaled the car, but he wasn't hurt. His guardian angel was watching over him. And how. But he had the decency to come in and say, "Well, you were right."

03:30:54.000 - 03:31:03.000

[Laughs] You had the last word. Yeah. Oh, I didn't say a word. I knew what was going to happen if I did.

03:31:03.000 - 03:31:21.000

But he was a very intelligent person along certain lines. But he felt that everybody that had skirts on was food for him. What do you think your best attribute is? Your best thing? My best thing?

03:31:21.000 - 03:31:30.000

Yeah. Oh, gee. Being able to follow the orders? No.

03:31:30.000 - 03:31:56.000

I don't think I have any best thing. That's like--that's like--oh, heck. I was asked one time what my goal in life was. I don't have any.

03:31:56.000 - 03:32:19.000

Do you have a passion? Something that makes you happy to get up in the morning? Oh, everything did that up until just here six or seven years ago, five or six years ago. Now I'm enjoying stretching out in bed, staying in bed until eight or nine o'clock,

03:32:19.000 - 03:32:33.000

getting up, getting the dogs fed. Not fed, getting them their pills. Oh, I do have to feed Ginger. You know, things like that.

03:32:33.000 - 03:32:44.000

I'm kicked back. I'm looking at the flowers. We've got some beautiful flowers out here. Little tiny ones, violet in color.

03:32:44.000 - 03:32:59.000

I don't know what they are. The rain lilies. And people say I ought to get up and get to talking with other people. I have no desire to go into town.

03:32:59.000 - 03:33:20.000

I have no desire to go into Ingram. I go in when I have to, like when the dogs--that is a must. And I get them in there and I'll pick them up in the morning. And I'd rather spend my money on them and on the kids.

03:33:20.000 - 03:33:35.000

And me, I don't buy clothes. I don't particularly like clothes. I put on clothes in order to be decent. I think God has given you your own little universe here.

03:33:35.000 - 03:33:51.000

That might be true because I've said for years, one of these days I'm going to say, "Stop, world. Let me get off." And when we got this place here and I finally stopped working-- Was I working when we got here?

03:33:51.000 - 03:34:04.000

No, I wasn't. It all of a sudden hit me that I have. I have--the world has stopped and I've gotten off. But I've got to get back on at least and see what's going on.

03:34:04.000 - 03:34:21.000

I don't have a newspaper. I turn on to the news on the TV. But half the time it's all about one thing, either about, oh, that poor kid down in Florida.

03:34:21.000 - 03:34:36.000

It's either about that or about somebody who's-- was accused of something or other. If I told you that if you came to Waco, we'd get you a ride in an A26, what would you say?

03:34:36.000 - 03:34:50.000

Oh, I'd say, "Great. I'll put the dogs in the kennels and I'll be right there." I'd be right there at the Johnny at the Rat Hole. I had an instructor.

03:34:50.000 - 03:34:59.000

I've never forgotten him. And yet everybody thought, you know, this was back in the days of discrimination. And of course I couldn't stand that.

03:34:59.000 - 03:35:20.000

Archie Williams, I don't know if you've ever heard of Archie Williams or not. In 1936, he was a Negro Olympic track star over in Berlin along with Jesse Owens. He won the 400-yard dash, the fastest he had ever gone,

03:35:20.000 - 03:35:29.000

and he doesn't know how he did it to this day. But I had him for an instructor. I was having troubles with spins. [laughs]

03:35:29.000 - 03:35:42.000

So he went up with me. We did 23 two-turn spins, and the last two or three were right on the button. And I sat back and I relaxed.

03:35:42.000 - 03:35:50.000

I said, "Archie," he says, "I think I've got it." He says, "I think so, too." I says, "I think I'd better go home." He says, "I think you'd better, too."

03:35:50.000 - 03:36:04.000

We got out of that plane and we were like a couple of drunken people. It was a darned thing, but it was nice. I mean, Archie was such a good sport. And then I found out how he'd been treated afterwards,

03:36:04.000 - 03:36:12.000

and it made me very unhappy. Is he still alive? I don't know. This wasn't at Sweetwater, was it?

03:36:12.000 - 03:36:20.000

Oh, no. This was back in Oakland. Yeah, heck, that was back in the-- Is this before you went to Sweetwater? Yeah.

03:36:20.000 - 03:36:30.000

I wonder if he became a Tuskegee Airman. Yes, he did. So that's another thing that I wanted to check up on. I found out about him on the Internet.

03:36:30.000 - 03:36:39.000

I'm going to turn this off. Okay. I put their name on it, and she said no, that she only had permission to come to wake up.

03:36:39.000 - 03:36:48.000

She could not go to a picture. That's the thing I don't like about some of these things. Right. But anyway, this was done. We taped her on Friday.

03:36:48.000 - 03:36:56.000

Let's do it again. So I had called the newspaper, and I said, "Could you send a photographer?" And she stayed with us.

03:36:56.000 - 03:37:05.000

She stayed for six days with us. I had never seen her before. She was wonderful. Could we go over out in front of Pat Naff Hall,

03:37:05.000 - 03:37:14.000

which is so pretty. It's a beautiful building. Yeah. And so we went, and she said, "Okay." So we went, and I just cringed,

03:37:14.000 - 03:37:22.000

because I just knew I was getting her in trouble. Anyway, so we did the picture, and we finished the interview. Isn't it great?

03:37:22.000 - 03:37:29.000

I knew it would come out on Sunday. But I thought it would be over in the second or third section. You know. Yeah.

03:37:29.000 - 03:37:36.000

Anyway, so at 5, I get up, and go out and get the newspaper off the grass, and I came in and opened that up. I know it was.

03:37:36.000 - 03:37:41.000

Oh my. I just cried. I took it up. I woke up Nancy, and I said,

03:37:41.000 - 03:37:49.000

"You're not going to believe the front page." [Laughter] So by the time Teresa came down for breakfast, I had looked up a scripture,

03:37:49.000 - 03:37:57.000

and I don't know what it was, but anyway, it was something about half faith, or something like that. So I read that tour,

03:37:57.000 - 03:38:04.000

and then I said, "Here's the newspaper." Maybe somebody will. Not her.

03:38:04.000 - 03:38:08.000

We're not surprised. Is that? That's me. Is that you in the bay?

03:38:08.000 - 03:38:13.000

Yeah. With your little... Yeah, with the, um, with our thing...

03:38:15.000 - 03:38:19.000

Skinny locker. Yeah. What about on the right? Is that you in your uniform?

03:38:19.000 - 03:38:25.000

Yeah. Yeah, that is. Okay, and then the one in the middle is you and your brother?

03:38:25.000 - 03:38:30.000

Right. I'm really good at this. Well, you certainly are. There's my brother again.

03:38:30.000 - 03:38:36.000

Oh, there's my husband. So that, and that's the wedding picture down there. Yeah, that's the wedding picture. Okay.

03:38:36.000 - 03:38:41.000

That's my brother. Okay, let me, let me get this. I'm taking pictures. Leave it to me.

03:38:41.000 - 03:38:49.000

[Laughter] Let me take some. I put it on here, and hopefully we'll be able to

03:38:49.000 - 03:38:55.000

make it a still picture. Oh, look at that! Mm-hmm. And if we can make it a still picture,

03:38:55.000 - 03:39:01.000

then we can... Is that you? Or is that your brother? That's my brother.

03:39:01.000 - 03:39:06.000

With the hat? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. And then... No, that's my cousins.

03:39:06.000 - 03:39:11.000

Oh, those are your cousins. Your sister here, because that really is a cute picture. That is.

03:39:11.000 - 03:39:19.000

It's adorable. It looks like a picture of my sister. Good. Okay, that's your brother and sister.

03:39:19.000 - 03:39:24.000

Okay, and... Halloween. What are you... Oh, Halloween? Uh-huh.

03:39:24.000 - 03:39:35.000

Are you going as a pair of pants? No, okay, uh... Clown costume. ...his uniform all the way up until he died.

03:39:35.000 - 03:39:42.000

Wow. Okay. And good-looking. I didn't realize how good-looking

03:39:42.000 - 03:39:52.000

until I saw that picture. Uh-huh. And she had a lot of art. Oh, yeah, those are my sister's kids.

03:39:52.000 - 03:39:59.000

This one is mine. The one at the top with the striped shirt? Yeah, that's my brother. [laughter]

03:39:59.000 - 03:40:06.000

Is that the youngest? Uh-huh. He's a lot of climbers? Yeah.

03:40:06.000 - 03:40:11.000

He's a good-looking kid. Yeah, they all are. Yeah. If I do say so.

03:40:11.000 - 03:40:17.000

They take after their dad. This is the second one. Uh-huh. This is the third one.

03:40:17.000 - 03:40:22.000

This is the fourth one, and this is the fifth one. [laughter] When you were in the waves,

03:40:22.000 - 03:40:27.000

did you have to wear your uniform off-post? Yes. All the time? Yeah.

03:40:27.000 - 03:40:32.000

Right. Well, we didn't have to. You had to wear a different uniform for years, it seemed like,

03:40:32.000 - 03:40:41.000

before you got into civilian clothes. Yeah. Who are the two people in the picture? That's her mother and her grand...

03:40:41.000 - 03:40:54.000

Oh, my mother and my aunt. The one on the right is my mother. I've got to check and find out. I always thought my grandmother was born in 1866.

03:40:54.000 - 03:41:02.000

According to that picture, 1876. Uh-huh. There's a... I think you said something.

03:41:02.000 - 03:41:13.000

American religion. Oh. Oh, yeah, religious. Yes, because they had a lot of religion in Masonic order.

03:41:13.000 - 03:41:21.000

That's true. And his political identity. Republican. If you don't want to answer,

03:41:21.000 - 03:41:28.000

I'll leave it at this time. He was a Republican all the way through. Really? My folks were Democrat.

03:41:28.000 - 03:41:35.000

They just... They didn't know anything but go in and just pull the lever. Yeah. But I've been a Republican.

03:41:35.000 - 03:41:48.000

Well, I consider myself independent. Yeah, that's the way I consider me. Okay, your mother is a biological mother and her first name. Harriet H-A-M-M-R-I-E-T

03:41:48.000 - 03:42:01.000

Gertrude McKean. M-C-K-E-E-N. I see somebody I recognize here. Yeah.

03:42:01.000 - 03:42:10.000

Okay. And her place of birth. Water, good Lord. Bridgewater.

03:42:10.000 - 03:42:21.000

Well, we're both getting you from both angles here. Who's in this picture with you, Nan? All right, my father is the first one on the right. The man next to him is my uncle, my mother's brother.

03:42:21.000 - 03:42:33.000

That's Joseph Leveville McKee. Then there's me and then there's my mother. So, did you put your mother up? Well, Mom and I flew in that little plane all the way from Lockheed, Pennsylvania.

03:42:33.000 - 03:42:44.000

Okay, this is the little plane. The one that was taken when we landed at Concord. And made a birth. November 26, 1897.

03:42:44.000 - 03:42:52.000

He prayed they could teach school. Yeah. Just like him. He was teaching college and he had never gotten a college.

03:42:52.000 - 03:43:08.000

She took a job as bookkeeper to a jewelry store. Both. All during the early parts of the war and that's what it was. She was bookkeeper to Deb's.

03:43:08.000 - 03:43:20.000

Okay. Did she belong to, was she Eastern Star? Yes. Eastern Star was her big thing.

03:43:20.000 - 03:43:37.000

But she belonged to, oh, they all both belonged to PTA. Okay. And they had their own small clubs. They used to play cards all the time.

03:43:37.000 - 03:43:44.000

Okay. Good. She was not a power baller. No. She let you do it.

03:43:44.000 - 03:44:03.000

She was a good player. He wasn't a captain. So I'd say he was a lieutenant. Okay.

03:44:03.000 - 03:44:09.000

But he wasn't a pilot. No, he wasn't a pilot. Okay. And what did he do?

03:44:09.000 - 03:44:18.000

He was with the Army Tellers and Frisco newspapers. I'm seeing myself in there. That's not good. What's John's married name?

03:44:18.000 - 03:44:22.000

You know when I got my degree? What? 1979. Good.

03:44:22.000 - 03:44:30.000

Okay. Now this one is your mother's mother. Which one is that? Or your mother's grandmother, your mother's mother.

03:44:30.000 - 03:44:43.000

No, it would be her mother's grandmother. Because it's her grandmother. Okay, let's see. How many more? Oh, do what?

03:44:43.000 - 03:44:49.000

Ride in an A-26. Oh, I'd say I'd love that. I know you would. Okay.

03:44:49.000 - 03:44:57.000

Thank you. I don't see anything that you left. Since I'm the one that chooses to be the dummy, thank you very much. Sounds like me.

03:44:57.000 - 03:45:08.000

A lot of times it's me. Come on, you little pigeon. Oh, you got to go, huh? No, no, no.

03:45:08.000 - 03:45:19.000

I'm just getting a picture of you saying bye. Oh. Take it easy. Yeah, that's what I got to do.

03:45:19.000 - 03:45:24.000

I got to eat. Yes, you got to eat. Get up and go again. Oh, I know.

03:45:24.000 - 03:45:28.000

I think it's about the way I used to run around when I was a little chirp.