Once Upon a Bubble
WW2 veterans could tell you a thing or two about the Depression
I listen to the radio a lot while doordashing — mostly National Public Radio — and I hear a lot lately about the possibility of an “AI bubble,” a bubble so big that the commentators have started using the “D” word, and there’s even a bestseller titled “1929.”
Well, 1929 and the Great Depression were very real events in the lives of the veterans I’ve interviewed, so I thought some perspective, compliments of the men and women of World War 2, might be in order.
John and Dede Knox
John and Dede were high school sweethearts in Columbus, Ohio. John went on to become a tail gunner on the B-24 King Kong, piloted by Jim Baynham. He and DeDe were already engaged when John was badly burned on the ill-fated Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944. When I interviewed them in February of 2010, they had been married 64 years.
“Dede,” I asked. “Is that for Denise?”
“Cecilia,” DeDe said.
“How did Cecilia become DeDe?”
“I had a brother and sister who were very young, and I was operated on. I had an ear operation, and the doctor said ‘I’m going to bring an anesthesiologist and a nurse and I’m going to do the operation right here at your home.’ And my brother and sister were downstairs at the gate, and I called down to them, and they called back up, ‘DeDe.’ And that stuck.
“I went through grade school, high school and college as DeDe. Now there are only two people who used to call me Cecilia, and they’re both dead. I’m known as DeDe.”
“And they call me Jack because we live in John Knox Village,” John said.
“Were your parents affected by the Depression?” I asked.
“Yes, slightly,” DeDe said.
“Yours,” John said. “Your dad had a job. My parents had nothing. We had nothing. We had to move in with my grandma and my two uncles. We lived with them about six years. My brother and I slept in an attic. We had nothing. As soon as I was old enough to get a paper route, I got a paper route. But we were really strapped. I remember we didn’t have meat on the table. And my grandma was awful good at putting things together with no meat.”
“Wat sort of things would she make?”
“German dishes. She did a lot of chicken. That must have been the cheapest thing. But she made a lot of mush, and noodles and things like that. When she made noodles she’d take the whites of the eggs and make angel food cake and the yolk and make noodles, and we had just basic meals. We always had something on the table. She didn’t have a refrigerator yet; they were just coming out. In the winter she had a box hanging out the window to keep everything cold. In the summer you had the ice man come and put the ice in the ice box.
“My mother did have a car. My dad wouldn’t drive. My grandfather was a tool and die maker, and he worked through the Depression. But we rented. We never bought a house until 1941, until I was out of high school, and that was because my grandfather died and left my mother and father enough money to buy a home. But your father had a house, way back,” he said to DeDe. “It was a modest house, with what, six people?”
“We lived close to school, walking distance to the Catholic school,” DeDe said.
“I remember the Depression,” John said. “Walking to school in the snow and ice. Nobody cared.”
“We met in French class in high school,” DeDe said.
“What did you do for fun during the Depression?” I asked.
“We didn’t do much,” John said. “We made our own kites out of newspaper and sticks. Somebody in the neighborhood had a Monopoly set, and we made a board out of cardboard and put in all the things, and made paper money, and made the cards out of cardboard, and copied this Monopoly set,” John said. “We couldn’t afford to buy one. That’s how poor we were. When I was about ten years old I wanted a bicycle for Christmas. I got a used bicycle my uncles paid about five dollars for, and painted it up, and fixed it up. I was disappointed. It wasn’t a very good bicycle. And then we got a paper route. My brother was a little older and we bought a couple of wood saws, a lathe, and a circular saw. We made all kinds of things out of wood, got to be real good at that. But we put a basket up on a telephone pole, shot baskets. A rim of a bushel basket, something like that. We improvised a lot of things. Oh, I remember once in a while saying ‘Mommy, I have nothing to do,’ but I had a brother and sister older than me, and DeDe, you tell him what you did, you tap danced and things like that.”
“I took tap dancing lessons and I took mandolin lessons, and my sister played the banjo,” DeDe said. “They had a fair in the summer and we’d play, and dance. I went to a shelter house in the South End and taught the kids there to tap dance after school”
“A shelter house?”
“It was for poor people, like a settlement,” DeDe said. “They asked me to go down and do that, and it was kind of fun. In high school my sister played bass fiddle and after she was ready to graduate, I was going to come in the very next year, so the orchestra leader came to our home and asked my parents, would they send me to take bass viol lessons at the university during the summer so I could play in the orchestra when I started the ninth grade. They said sure, so I learned to play the bass fiddle and I played in a concert orchestra, and the jazz band. It was kind of fun. I played for four years then.”
“Were you in the same class, or how did you meet in school?”
“In French class,” John said. “I was a year older than her, so I learned English and math and all those subjects, but French was an elective. I think I finished two years of Latin, then I switched to French, and somehow that put me in her French class. That was my junior year. At that time I was setting pins in a bowling alley, and that’s how I made my money to take her out on a date. That was hard work. A lot of nights I’d set two hours together, and boy, as little as I was, I was real good at it. The boss liked me. I think I got three cents a line. At the end of the night I’d make a dollar, a dollar ten or something like that. But that would go a long way. A downtown movie, a brand new movie like ‘Gone With the Wind’ was a quarter I think. We had a good time. I’d even put a quarter’s worth of gas in the car.”
“What kind of car did your mother have?”
“When I first met DeDe she had a ‘35 Ford, and then about a year later, that would have been 1940, she got a brand new ‘41 Ford. And boy, I’d take her out in that black Ford with the whitewall tires. We’d just come out of the Depression, and I was starting to live after being so damn poor. Boy, I loved that.”
John and DeDe Knox:
The Hotel Plaza Fire
“We were staying in a hayloft in Berle, Luxembourg, and it was January 10, 1945,” Bob Rossi, a loader in Company C of the 712th Tank Battalion, said. “I was standing in the turret waiting to move out. Our tanks were idling, and I saw one of the guys from my neighborhood [in Jersey City, New Jersey] walking by, Johnny Burghardt. He was a captain in the 26th Infantry Division. And as I’m calling him, ‘Johnny! Johnny!’ he didn’t hear me with all the noise around us. He walked to the command post. With that, we moved out.
“I met Johnny after the war, and I told him how I saw him, and he remembered the town after I described it to him. He recalled Berle was a jumping off spot for the 26th, 35th and 90th Infantry divisions. That was [during the Battle of the] Bulge.
“Johnny’s youngest brother, Phillip, we used to call him Philly, and I were best friends. Philly and most of his family burned to death in a fire, I think it was Holy Thursday, March 1937. The night before the fire I was in their house. Everybody was poor, but these people were super poor; they had kerosene lamps, and Philly had to go get the wood every day. There was a yard full of wood because his uncle was a junk dealer. And they had the outhouse, and they had bedpans. And we were sitting around the stove, and Mrs. Burghardt was telling us about death and Irish superstitions, and the next day Mrs. Burghardt and her brother John Gorman, Charlie, Philly, Florence, Theresa and Veronica, who we called Varney, they all burned to death. They were up on the third floor. Johnny was not home at the time. And one daughter, Rose Burghardt, she was on the second floor, and there was an Italian-American club down the street. Danny DeBrita was standing in the club and saw the fire, and he ran up the street and ran through the alley, climbed up the fire escape and he kicked in the window. He grabbed her, took her downstairs and brought her across the street. He tried to get back in but the fire was too great.
“Ironically, this came to my mind. Now, this was 1937. Maybe it was either the year before, 1935 or 1936, there was a big fire at the Hotel Plaza in Jersey City [actually it was 1937]. It was Christmastime. And we were playing two-hand touch in the street. Kids at that time, we used to roll up the news and wrap cord around it, that was our football. We played two-hand touch with some of the kids, and someone yelled out the window, “Hey, the Hotel Plaza’s on fire! I just heard it on the 770 Club.” That was a radio show. So we ran up to the Hotel Plaza, and I can remember a woman’s foot hanging out the window. They said she was gonna jump and she got a heart attack and fell back in. Her shoe was dangling off her foot.
“And then there were some other people with West Point jackets on, there must have been some cadets that were staying there, and they were giving their jackets to the old people. What had happened, they had a Christmas tree in the lobby with a train around it, and the sparks from the train ignited some cotton. And the switchboard operator, her name was Sullivan, she stayed at her post and she burned to death, warning all the guests.
“Kate Smith was very big at the time. She had her own radio program. She honored this Sullivan girl, she was like the heroine of the week or something like that.
“So ironically I’m running up to a fire with Philly, and the next year he and his family burned to death.
“One of the kids from the neighborhood came up after the fire was all over. We lived a few blocks away, and I heard my mother crying. We jumped up out of bed. ‘Ma, what’s the matter?’ And this fellow Pete, he was my brother Charlie’s friend, he said, ‘The Burghardts all burned to death in a fire.’
“And we ran around there, and sure enough, as we got there, this was in the early hours of the morning it happened, the firemen were just carrying John Gorman’s dog Zoop, it was a big German shepherd, the dog’s name was Flora but they called her Zoop because she made that noise when she was drinking.
“A couple of days later, one of the guys, Johnny Zaro, was up there scrounging around, and he found Philly’s medal from a track meet, and he gave it to me because he knew I was his best friend, and I held it for all those years. It was a bronze medal in the relay. And many years later, Marie was working at the Jersey City Medical Center with Mary Burghardt, who was married all this while. Mary was another of Philly’s sisters who was living elsewhere and wasn’t in the fire. Marie found out who she was. Then I gave her the medal so Mary could have it.
“Oh, when I saw Johnny Burghardt, when I’m waiting to move out, just at that time several German prisoners were brought in. They were standing on a little mound of dirt and snow to the right of our tank, and a GI spotted this one Kraut with American combat boots on. He was screaming, ‘Take ’em off! Take ’em off!’ He made him take the boots off, and the Kraut’s standing there in his stocking feet in the snow.
“And then we moved out, and I don’t know what happened to the Kraut prisoners after that.”
Cornbread and molasses
“I was born and raised in Ohio County, Kentucky, on a farm, just about 30 miles from here,” Arnold Brown said when I interviewed him at his home in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1997. “Of course I was a teenager back during the Depression years. I got tired of eating cornbread and molasses three times a day so I decided to go into the Army. I left home with 50 cents in my pocket and an eighth-grade education. I went out in the bushes and waited till the first freight train came through, and when it slowed down I jumped inside one of these boxcars. It was dark inside, and there was a professional hobo in there. He said, ‘Where you goin’, sonny?’ Like to scared me to death. But he turned out to be a very nice hobo, because he told me when and where to get off the train when I arrived in Louisville so that the security forces wouldn’t pick me up; otherwise I probably would never have made it into the Army. So this is my beginning of my military career.
“In those days, we were an all-volunteer force, and of course they got a lot of their men, individuals like me, and other young men who would get into some type of minor trouble with the authorities. A judge would call them before him and would give them a choice of paying his fine and spending 15 to 30 days in jail or going into the military. So a lot of them would take the military. And in those days, the basic training in the military was to weed ’em, in other words either make a man and a soldier out of them or out they would go. Later on, I ended up being a recruiting instructor in the same outfit. And this was quite a problem, because as a corporal in those days I had more authority than the majors had later on as far as disciplinary actions were concerned. If we had a problem recruit, we could take him down and put him in the guardhouse and leave him there overnight, no charge or no nothing. He didn’t know how long he was going to be there and this would scare the heck out of him. When he came back, why, he’d turn out to be a good soldier. Can you imagine trying to do that today in this type of Army?
Arnold Brown:
“I enlisted on March 18, 1936. And it took me a year and 11 months to make Pfc. But it wasn’t too long after that until I made corporal. But the only reason I got promoted to corporal, a World War I sergeant committed suicide, and this left a vacancy for sergeant, so when they promoted one of the senior corporals to sergeant, it left a vacancy for a corporal, and they got all the senior Pfcs and they chose me then for the corporal’s rating.
“So, I proceeded then and basically got I think to buck sergeant, served as platoon sergeant, and I was getting ready to leave the service after my first career. I’d already met my future wife. I was stationed at Rockford, Illinois, and I was going to be separated in March of the following year, and I already had my job lined up where I could, as soon I got out of the service, step right into this occupation as a machinist. In the military at that time a sergeant made $72 a month, and on that pay I certainly couldn’t afford a wife, so I was planning on getting out. I was in a position where I could take a trade school. I even had a job with a company lined up, so we decided to get married, and got married on Thanksgiving Day. It was November the 20th, 1941. Well, you know what happened December the 7th, so I couldn’t get out. Well, now I’m stuck. So I applied for OCS.”
Despite having only an eighth-grade education, Arnold became a rifle company commander in the 90th Infantry Division, stayed in the Army and retired as a colonel. I don’t know about molasses, but cornbread survived the Depression and went on to become a delicacy at my local supermarket.
Cornbread three times a day
“I was living on a farm, and we had a big family, and I was in the third grade at school when the Depression started in 1929,” Paul Swofford, who was a B-24 pilot on the Kassel Mission, said during a 2009 interview, “but I didn’t know anything about what was going on. Here I am about eight years old. But we noticed it in what we were able to go to the store and buy. I was aware that my folks didn’t have any money coming in and we didn’t have biscuits for breakfast anymore. We didn’t have any biscuits to take to lunch to school. Since we lived on a farm we raised corn, so we had cornbread three times a day. That was one of the things that we noticed, but being a young person like that, I wasn’t aware of what all my folks went through.
“I knew they didn’t have any money, but I wasn’t big enough to, that wasn’t my interest at the time. My mother and father had 16 children. One of them was born in 1914, and it was a boy and he died after three weeks. But there were 15 that lived, so one of 15 is the way I grew up.”
“Where was the farm?” I asked.
“It was in western North Carolina, in McDowell County. That’s where I was born, and we later moved near Mitchell County. That’s where Spruce Pine was the largest town, so we children went to school at Spruce Pine and that’s where I got my high school diploma in 1937. And when we changed school, I conveniently skipped a grade. So all through high school I was the youngest one in school. And when I started college I was the youngest one in my freshman class at college.
Aaron Elson: And how did you go to college?
Paul Swofford: Apalachin State Teachers College was close to us at Boone, about 50 miles away, and I had two brothers that were also going to school there, and incidentally, in spite of the Depression and the fact that we didn’t have any money at home and so many children, before me there were three of them that got bachelor’s degrees and a college education. And so it was just natural when I finished high school that I would also go to college, and that’s where I met my wife, Sybil. Of course, it was, well, Sybil says it’s the greatest thing ever happened to me was that when I came up to my senior year, I dropped out. Well, the reason I dropped out is, I didn’t have any dollars to go to school, and I realized that my senior year I would have to do practice teaching. That means a couple of suits of clothes. I didn’t have a suit of clothes, and I didn’t even have enough money to register. So I dropped out for a year, went out West at 19, 20 years old and worked for a year and came back in ‘41 before Pearl Harbor and started back in and about the first day of school Sybil and I met each other. First day of school. I was a senior and she was a freshman just coming in, and Sybil says the greatest thing ever happened to me was that I didn’t have any money, I had to drop out of school, because I’d never have met her. And that made a lot of sense.
Aaron Elson: When you went out West, what kind of work did you do?
Paul Swofford: I ended up working down in California on a ranch that raised sugar beets and aspara ... well, they had asparagus but mostly it was sugar beets raising, and my job was to work on a rain machine. Now, rain machines, they didn’t have much, any rains in the summertime out in central California around Sacramento, so we had to lay these water lines, get water out of the canals and pump them with a tractor to put some pressure and they called them rain machines, the whirling two streams of water. And so we let that soak for an hour or so, and then shut her down, and move it over about fifty feet and set up shop again. That’s what I did for, oh, I guess about six months out there in the summertime.
Aaron Elson: And you were able to save up enough money to ...
Paul Swofford: Yep. I held onto everything and came back, and even lived, that’s the first time I’d ever lived in a dormitory. In my previous years I had to work for my room and board and scratch around. It only cost me $25 to register at school. Twenty-five dollars. I never did have any textbooks, couldn’t afford ‘em. I’d go to the library and read their copies, but I’d have to turn ‘em back in at the end of the hour when I’d go there. But I didn’t have any problem remembering in those days, like you do when you get a few years on you, you know, sometimes you don’t remember what you went to the bathroom for!”
Paul was one of only four pilots out of 35 who managed to bring his B-24 back to its home base after the ill-fated Kassel Mission air battle of Sept. 27, 1944. He would complete his missions, remain in the military and retire as a colonel.
The Boom
“My father was a graduate of Cornell with a degree in engineering, and then, after a few years, he went back to school at Columbia and became a highway engineer,” Kay Brainard Hutchins said when I interviewed her in 1999. “This was in – well, he married my mother in 1915; he was 33 years old by this time, mother was 28, and the First World War started and he worked in Washington, D.C. My sister and I were both born during the First World War. And I’m really not sure; I know from my mother talking about it that he was very involved in the camps that they were building overnight to train soldiers.
“But by the time they’d been married seven years, Mother had four children and my father had an illness that nobody could determine what it was. He was working by this time with Standard Oil of New Jersey, and it turned out, we learned a few years later, he had multiple sclerosis. So he never worked again. My mother had a sister who was 12 years younger, and she and her husband were down here in Palm Beach and making money hand over fist in what was called the Boom in South Florida. Of course they were in the real estate business. They had two small children, and they said it’s so wonderful, the weather’s so good — at this time we didn’t know it was multiple sclerosis — why don’t you come down here? This is probably a good place for Albert to get well. So we sold our house in New Jersey. We had moved to East Orange when he was with Standard Oil, and both my brothers, Newell and Bill, were born in Orange.
“We moved the whole family down here, and brought all our furniture. I think we had a 13-room house, and we moved into a two-bedroom, one-bath house down here. And my mother went into the real estate business too.
“Those were the years of the flappers; of course Mother wasn’t a flapper because she was older than Ruth, who was a typical flapper, and my sister and I were both envious of her and remember her so well. But when the Boom collapsed, they along with a lot of their friends took off immediately for Havana. I think they’d been selling lots that were out in the swamps. And we were left high and dry, Mother with an invalid husband and four kids and no money.
The banks — it was sooner than when Wall Street crashed in 1929; we had it in ’26. It was late in 1926. One Monday morning none of the banks opened. Period. The Boom didn’t last too long — it was in the early part of the 1920s, but we came down here in 1925 and everything was in full bloom at the time, but it didn’t take long for everything to fall apart. I wasn’t aware of anything except how cute all those flappers were that would come by our house, smoking their cigarettes and drinking martinis. It was a wonderful time, but unfortunately my uncle, who married my mother’s sister, became an alcoholic, and Aunt Ruth died of pneumonia when she was only 32 years old. It was before penicillin. So Mother is left with four kids and an invalid husband.
“I had an uncle in Connecticut. Mother and Father were both from Hartford, and my father’s youngest brother — there was something like 17 years difference between their ages; my father was embarrassed when he was in college and came home and found his mother was pregnant — this younger uncle was a doctor, and he said to Mother, ‘Send Albert up here. You can’t handle four kids and Albert, too, as an invalid.’ They didn’t have the medications then that they have now that keep them living for 30 years or more. So my father went back to live with my uncle and his wife, and my grandmother was still alive. And Mother went into a business — she actually had a degree in nursing from Hartford Hospital, she was an RN, but she couldn’t leave four young children, which today nobody would think twice about doing, but she thought it was important that she stayed with her kids. So she went into a business that she could do out of our home.
“Since we had no money, our church, Holy Trinity Church, opened up a small store. I forget what they called it, The Women’s Exchange or something like that. If you could knit a sweater or bake a pie or paint a picture, whatever you did you could sell it there and make a little money, hopefully. Somebody who did volunteer work at this little shop told Mother that they had a lot of people bringing in pies but nobody brought in any cakes, and suggested that she try her hand. And Mother said, “I never considered myself a baker, but I guess I could bake a cake.” So she started baking cakes. But of course, a regular cake, a person couldn’t afford the whole cake. So Mother came up with the idea, “Why don’t I make cupcakes? Then they could just buy one, two, a half-dozen or a dozen.” So she switched to making cupcakes. And they were very popular. At that time all the drugstores had soda fountains and office buildings had luncheonettes, so one or two of them said, “Mrs. Brainard, how about bringing us some of those cakes? We could use them for our lunch group.” And she supported us for years doing that. We all chipped in — not my two brothers; Mother at that time was like people are today. She didn’t think it was boys’ work. But my older sister Betty and I, we learned how to ice the cakes and help get them ready, and we’d do this before we went to school.
“Mother did that I think for 12 years; got us all out of school anyway. Then she rented a house — a big, lovely old place — and put up a sign and made it what they call a guest house. We didn’t have any motels then.
“By this time Betty and I were both out of school, and the two boys were finishing up high school, and Mother was able to support the family. We didn’t live very high on the hog, but nobody else did either. It was the Great Depression, and nobody had any money, but we had a hell of a good time around here. We had the beaches, and we’d meet there on the weekends. I think we all had a wonderful childhood in spite of the fact that we had no money, no TVs, and we didn’t miss it at all. I loved to read; all of us in our family loved to read, so there was plenty to do without; in our high school we had many dances.”
Kay’s brother Newell was a co-pilot of a B-24 on the Kassel Mission. He bailed out of his burning plane and reached the ground successfully, but was murdered by angry civilians. Her brother Bill was a prisoner of war. While Bill was a POW and Newell was listed as missing in action, Kay enlisted in the Red Cross and went to England so she would be closer if and when her brothers were liberated. As it turned out, Bill got home before she did. My interview with Kay is in my book “Nine Lives: An Oral History.”
Buttered Lard Bread
“Before the war, I was a roustabout. I went out at night, didn’t work, spent all my money, just hustled a dollar,” Lester Suter said when I interviewed him at a tank battalion reunion around 1990. “My father died when I was 7 years old, and my mother, she worked at a jacket factory, she made 14 bucks a week, 12 bucks to start with, and Jesus, we were hungry. In fact, going to school, I even took buttered lard bread with salt and pepper on it for lunch.
“The nun there — I went to Catholic school — she wanted me to take a luncheon program that they had that was free. I said no, I don’t want free stuff. So I sat at the other end of the eating hall and I ate my bread. That was my lunch.
“Then one day, I became hungry when I got off of school, and I went home and ate my mother’s sandwich for that night, and oh, was I depressed, because I figured I ate her dinner, and that depressed the shit out of me. I was poor, poor, poor, as poor as you could get. I went to school with tennis shoes on that had holes in the sides and all in the snow, in the cold, and I ran, when I’d get to school, I’d run so I’d get there faster, and I wound up, man, my feet were freezing, but they asked me to take their free shoes, no way for me, because I didn’t accept charity. Never have I accepted charity.
“I was 23 when I went to California. I went to California because I’d messed up in St. Louis, and I figured the quicker I get out of town the better off I am. So we got a job driving cars — when you haul a car to California you got paid 25 bucks. But then, because it was a four-passenger, or a six-passenger car, you’d take passengers that you’d charge 15 to 25, so you could get a hundred and a half for driving a car. I didn’t know this until I met these guys in St. Louis, but anyway, I paid them 15 bucks to drive me to California. But when we got to Tulsa, Oklahoma, this one fellow says you can drive. We had two cars; we had a 1939 Packard and a 1940, I don’t remember the model. We drove them to California in September of 1939. I wound up in Pasadena with $13.50.
“How did I mess up? I messed up by quitting a job. I got married to a gal in St. Louis. I was living with her. I didn’t worry about working, anything like that, so to me it was a free ride. What do you want to work for? Have fun all day and sleep with a gal at night.
“In California, the first thing I did was go out looking for a job because I only had six or seven bucks after we paid our rent. I got a job shingling roofs. The guy said ‘I’ll give you two bits a bundle for every bundle of shingles you put on.’ And these goddamn shingles weighed 90 pounds, but they came by boat and they were water-soaked, which brought ‘em up to about 125. So on this house, I had to carry those shingles up a rickety ladder, and then shingle.
“Well, I did eight bundles but I put ‘em on crooked, so at the end of the day he says, ‘I can’t pay you, you did the job wrong.’ So I had a sunburned back because I wanted to get a nice suntan, and so I says, ‘Shit, I worked all day, got my back all sunburned, hurt it with those goddamned wooden shingles,’ so I was really irritated. But next day I didn’t show up, ball game was over on this shingle business, so I had to go out and look for something else.
“Then I got a job setting pins in a bowling alley, 15 cents a line, and you’d set a line here, and then you’d jump over and set the other line, and you’d jump back and forth and you’d make about $2.75 a night, and my shins would get all hit with those things because the pins would fly everywhere and they’d hit me in the shins. But I had to take it because I needed the two bucks or $2.75 I’d make each night.
“I was working there, and all of a sudden I saw that shoe factory that was working nights there in Pasadena, that was the Joyce Shoe Company, and so I said ‘Man, I’m going down there and tell these guys I’m a shoe worker and try to get a job.’ So I went down there and I got ahold of this one guy and I told him I was a shipping clerk back in St. Louis for Brown’s Shoe Company, and he asked me a few questions, and, because one of my friends worked at Brown’s I’d learned a little from him about it, and so I told him what I knew, and he said, ‘Well, that proves you worked there,’ so I got my break right there. I went to work, 14 bucks a week, and I worked night and day, Saturdays and Sundays; I saved up enough money in about a year and a quarter to buy myself a new Oldsmobile. The Oldsmobile torpedo body, first hydromatic shift. It was a fantastic looking car, absolutely great. I pulled up at the factory that the Joyce Shoe Company was building in Ohio, because the guy that was running the factory was a clerk out in Pasadena before. As I pulled up, Mr. Joyce was there, and he says, ‘Who’s that guy pulling up?’ And the guy looked, and he says, ‘That’s the guy that runs the shipping department for you in Pasadena.’
“He says, ‘What? He drives a car like that and he’s only a shipping clerk?’ He called me over, and he says, ‘I want you to get in touch with me when we get back to California, because I want to know how you got that car working for me.’ When I went back, Joyce and I got together. He was the president of the company. I told him what I knew, and before I knew it, I had a pretty good job with him.
“Then I went and got married. I started driving to St. Louis because I left a girlfriend back in St. Louis that I said I was gonna come back and marry someday, so I’d drive to St. Louis about once every three or four weeks and I’d see her for the weekend and drive back. And driving back on a Sunday night or Monday morning, you might say, man, I was falling asleep, four hundred miles from Columbus, Ohio, to St. Louis. I’d slap my face, roll down the window so it would be cold in the car, anything to stay awake, and I’d get up there back in Columbus about 7 in the morning and go to work. I courted her long-distance and I finally married her. I married her in September of 1941.
“After that, we rented an apartment in Columbus, $40 a month. Joyce had appointed me purchasing agent for Columbus. I told him some good ideas, saved him half a million bucks. I was a rough-talking young kid, but still I was recognized as having the brains.
“A year later, in September of ‘42, we had a baby. Her name is Sharon. She’s living yet today. ‘42 we had the baby, and November 18 or 20 I went in the service the same year. They drafted me right after she had the kid.
“I had tried to join the Air Corps two times. My depth perception was bad and they wouldn’t accept me in the Navy or the Army Air Corps. I went to Fort Benning, Georgia, and in Fort Benning, they told me when I left someplace in Indiana, Jefferson, they took 400 of us at 5 o’clock in the morning and we got out and stood in the snow and cold and got on a train, and I asked the guy am I gonna get in the Air Force? He said, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re going in the Air Force.’ I thought I was going to Florida. Well, we wound up in Fort Benning. I became a tanker instead of an Air Corps man.
“They put me in charge of administering the Army General Classification Test, and I learned to be a classification sergeant. I kine of liked the work, so I thought, ‘This is an easy job.’ I wish I had it all during the war.
“I didn’t like the outfit because I was in the tanks. Fort Benning had a parachute school there, and I said, ‘I’m going over and join the paratroopers.’ I didn’t tell them that. I just liked the way they wore their hat, and the clothes they wore, they wore better boots than we did. They had a rugged attitude, too, like a commando attitude. Anyway, I wanted to be a tough guy, so I was going to go over there and join the paratroopers. And when I got over there, they said, okay, so they took me up this big goddamn tower, 750 feet. I looked down at the ground, and they said, ‘Now you put on this parachute and you jump.’ I said, ‘Bull shit for me, I’m not jumping off this son of a bitch, take me down!’ So they took me down and let me out. I went back to the tank battalion and was happy.”
Lester Suter went through the war as a sergeant in the 712th Tank Battalion.