Eric Walz History 300 Collection Kent J. Marlor Life during WWII By Kent J. Marlor October 6, 2003 Box 3 Folder 10 Oral Interview conducted by Robyn Christenson Transcript copied by Carol May September 2005 Brigham Young University Idaho 1
RC: Where were you born? KM: Murray, Utah. RC: In our previous discussion you mentioned that you were growing up during the time that World War II broke out. KM: Well I wasn t even growing up. I was little. RC: Do you remember pretty much your parents reaction to what was going on? KM: Yeah. They were really upset. They were upset at Pearl Harbor. Particularly they were upset at Pearl Harbor. I was really young then. I was only five years old then. RC: What was their impression of it? KM: Well, for one thing they said it was kind of a sneak attack by the dirty Japanese. RC: Did they blame the Japanese of the community or KM: No, well, no we had quite a few people in the community who were Japanese farmers and Japanese American farmers. They were US citizens. But my folks didn t blame them at all. They didn t have a problem with that. Some others did and some Japanese felt pretty bad. In fact, they all at once became Chinese. At least they allowed people to believe they were Chinese because there was a lot of pressure in a lot of different areas. RC: Do you think people looked at them differently or acted towards them differently after that? KM: Uh, well, I think some segments of the public. Some people who were really quite ignorant didn t understand anything. If a person was oriental in the first place they figured automatically that they were Japanese Americans or Japanese they didn t even distinguish between Japanese and Japanese Americans. 2
RC: So were they pretty much all discriminated against or grouped together? KM: Ah, they tended to lump everybody together I think that way with Japanese Americans. Unfortunately. But they didn t have a lot of experience dealing with them. Especially in Utah and Idaho and that. Other than just the farmers who were there. RC: Do you remember hearing anything about the concentration camps? KM: Well, I know they talked about the internment camps down there because they existed not to far away. But I don t think people basically understood what they were all about. I mean they didn t understand that this was really kind of a slap in the face to the constitution and everything. And they only saw it from the perspective that there could be some kind of an espionage or spying by these groups that had come from the coast, been sent from the coast to internment camp. RC: So they thought they were it was just a pre[caution]. KM: Yeah. RC: Nice. Do you remember the effect it had on the community, the war? KM: The war, you know, it had a great effect on the community and the first place everyone tended to be ultra patriotic and conserved everything and consumed just what you had to consume to get by and everything was rationed and we had lots of problems with people violating the rationed and that. And everything was rationed, sugar was rationed and I still remember my mother mixing the little colored nagles of dense of the imitation butter margarine kind of stuff that existed because that s all we could use. We never got any butter. The only people that got any butter were typically on the farms and the rest went to the war effort to the troops and everybody. So, but everything was. Gasoline was rationed, you had to have stamps for them. Even clothing and that you had to have stamps for clothing. You had to have stamps for everything, rationing stamps. For sugar, RC: Uh-huh. 3
KM: you had to have stamps for them so that was just a fact of life that we all, you know, growing up with, and it existed after the war was over for some time, it didn t just end automatically with the secession of the hostilities. RC: Did your dad get drafted or anybody in your family? KM: No, my father worked for Hercules Powder Company making dynamite and explosives so he had a deferment but must, uh, all his brothers went but he didn t because he was working in this exempt position and he would work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, six days even seven days a week sometimes producing explosives then for the war effort. RC: Did your mom help with the war effort too or [ ] KM: My mom was a stay at home mom. She kept the whole family on track doing things. My grandfather had a farm and the idea here was to try and produce everything you could produce for the war effort and still maintain equilibrium as much as you could. RC: Did you get to talk to your brothers at all through letters when they were in the war? KM: Yeah, I talked to my uncles but a lot of the time they didn t talk a lot, they were affected. I had a good friend I used to go fishing with us, my dad s friend, after the war that used to have bad dreams, from his involvement in combat in the war. It was not pleasant. I mean, he would wake up just screaming cause you would have flashbacks of these battles and that in his sleep. And he ended up going back into the Korean conflict which was you know only five years after the war was over. RC: Geeze. Was that pretty common for people to be drafted again? KM: The ones that had leadership position and a lot of experience, he was a sergeant, a masters sergeant, and he ended up right back over there, survived that Korean thing too. But, uh, pretty rough. RC: I d imagine. Was that pretty common for flashbacks to happen for return soldiers? 4
KM: Well, I don t know how many that was my only experience with it but I can remember sleeping in the same tent as him and wake up, and I was just a little guy you know, but I just remember him screaming because he relived those things and I suspect that they, these people never did get over that kind of things completely. RC: During the time of the war, do you, the, ah, the whole community was it pretty patriotic? KM: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, nobody, in fact there was practically no tolerance for people who wouldn t subscribe to all the rationing system, the scrap metal drive, the newspaper drive, but I mean they had drives for everything and the idea here was of course to do your part with the war effort. RC: Do you think that growing up then had an impact on your interpretation of patriotism towards the country? KM: Oh, I think so. I think that people were left with a very positive attitude in terms of their country and what is expected, what could be expected in order to preserve your system because that kind of conflict, and this is different than it has been recently because in that situation it felt like, you thought nine eleven was serious, and it was. Here the whole, the whole future of the state was up for grabs after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with what went on in Europe. Even though we didn t get invaded we felt challenged to continue to exist because there the perception was that Hitler particularly Hitler in that case was bent on world domination. RC: Do you think that that scared a lot of the adults thinking of being taken over by Germany or Japan? KM: Yeah, they thought that. They were worried about that. The idea was, well, we could fight them, take our choice, we could fight them in Europe, fight them in the islands, or fight them here at home. And nobody wanted to have that brought to American shores. So whatever it took, that was the idea. Production wise without any doubt to move from a peace time economy to a war time economy and just produce beyond belief with the Metropolitan areas where you were shipbuilding and had all the women working like crazy and all the defense industries this was accepted as necessary for survival. 5
RC: How was the, how do you think the mind frame switched from lets say World War II to the Korean War and Vietnam [War]? KM: Well, I think that one thing that was hard during the Korean conflict was for people to accept the notion that all at once we were being threatened again when there was no direct threat to US territory. And I think they had a harder time with that. And it was a UN type of war a lot of people perceive, so other people had to help with responsibilities, but we seemed still end up being the major combatant force over there and so and Vietnam was still farther in the same direction. People could figure a threat to our territory and our way of life as much and that why so many people avoided the draft and went to Canada, and evaded the draft and everything. You couldn t identify, people couldn t identify the same way so. RC: So you feel in situations such as Pearl Harbor or September eleventh, whenever we feel attacked that public is generally KM: Yes. RC: acceptant towards the aggressive? KM: They understand direct threat, they really do. But when the threat is somewhat removed or it s not as specific, they don t move forward with the same kind of support. In Vietnam the whole country ended up being divided. And we re seeing right now with Iraq more and more people who have problems with the situation and I think that it isn t too difficult to understand. In Vietnam the body bags how many people came who came home dead, you got fifty four thousand, uh, that got to the point where you could tell people [we] were winning the war, it didn t add up. And today already we don t have that many people that have died over there. This has been a war that has taken very few lives as far as the initial combat was concerned and now we have over a hundred that have died and continue to die each day over that and, uh, yeah, through Gorilla types of operations, terrorist types of operations, and thought they might not be many this does not go over well with the American Public because they are loosing their own. RC: How old were you when Korean War broke out? 6
KM: Fourteen. RC: Did you see a lot of people, some of your older friends being drafted or [ ] KM: No, uh, they were all older than I was, uh, I didn t have friends that old, that I really[ ]Yeah, I didn t graduate from high school until fifty four and the war was already over so. RC: How did it affect your schooling, if your teachers were did they talk about it a lot or [ ] KM: Not really, not nearly as, not like today at all. I don t recall at least that we did, but then we didn t have instantaneous news. We didn t have TV. I mean you saw the Russles on TV, hello, that s about all they ever programmed the news wasn t like it is today. And it was nothing. Communications didn t exist like we have it. Radio and TV were, you know, or computer; there was nothing like that. Everything moved so much slower, so it took far longer to sink in what was going on all the time. And today I can use video clips in my classes at the bat of an eye. If I hear, I get notices every day of front-line series programs that are on PBS and things on Discovery and with one telephone call I can have them tape that I don t even have to do it myself, and with no problem of violating property rights or anything. I can use them in class the next day so that my students can be up to date on everything that is going on as it relates to international politics or conflicts in the world Not at any problem there at all. This was not the way it was back then, it was, and it seems like, you know, if your talking to a real old guy if you re ever talking to my father about communication and transportation in the 1920 s, I remember him telling me the exact same thing. Things just move too slow. And he only died a couple years ago, he was nine, over ninety years old but you know model A-4s and model T-4 s top speed at thirty-five miles an hour down the highways and that, but when it comes to conflict and that today. This weekend for example the president of Bolivia resigned amidst all kinds of social and economical problems down there, we knew it within a matter of minutes, see, and it used to be it would take all kinds of time to find out what was going on down there. RC: Do you think sometimes that hurts the war effort when people are able to see kind of the destruction that s going on? 7
KM: I think they re, I think with an administration like the present one the Bush administration has to be far more careful with everything that goes on. When you combine the international happenings with domestic happenings its termed intermestic if used any more and you can t sort anything out again, you can t cover things up as much, you can t keep things as well, either. RC: Mm-hm. KM: As you used to be able to. I mean the president instantaneously is in the news all the time everybody in government who is anybody, what they say is going to be right there. Not only that what they said five years ago and ten years ago and twenty years ago because of, you know, the recording ability is going to be right there. Rush Limbaugh found that out this, just in one local call here in the post register quoting what Rush said you know quite awhile ago on different things but it s instantaneously accessible. So that we have politically we have a far different ball game today than we did in World War II where everything was pretty well covered up, you know until it was over. They didn t they had some problems with intelligence leaks at that time. But kind of pale in terms of what goes on anymore. RC: Do you remember pretty much the day that Vietnam broke out that that was announced? KM: No, you know, there was no one date that figured because we had an escalation, piece meal escalation with Vietnam through three different presidencies. And it just kept getting worse and worse and worse Linden Johnson, I remember the day that Linsen, Linden Johnson, I have this taped, Linden Johnson announced that he would not seek office again. Not seek reelection. And it was Vietnam that beat him. No doubt about that. But again we had three presidents and it just was a matter of escalating from taking over after the French defeated the Indians who, until got finally got humiliated and got out because we couldn t win it. RC: How old were you when that all broke out, pretty much? KM: Oh, I was teaching here. I ve been here 41 years. I came here in 1963 and I taught at Penn for two years on leave, University of Pennsylvania. But that was before Vietnam. And I had a lot of students that fought in the conflict. And you know, their, they d come back and some of them had 8
mixed feelings. Some of them just couldn t understand it, some of them couldn t understand why we couldn t prosecute the war more vigorously. Others couldn t figure out why we didn t get out a lot earlier. But the country really ended up getting divided and did not have a good understanding of what really was going on over there. RC: What were some of your experiences with the students as they came back? KM: I used to go hunting with a good friend of mine. Good friend, still lives in Ririe. And he just couldn t figure it out. He couldn t understand how we could just keep going and going with no plan that was designed really to win the thing. He had a rough time. He had a rough time in terms of emotions after being over there and he had some emotional problems from that conflict that I don t think he ll ever get rid of. And he was a coreman over there, which is, you know, quite rough, as you, because you constantly see a lot of good people die and a lot of them wounded horrible. So but he still is good friend. But we do still talk occasionally, he still comes over and sees me, but he had a rough time with his marriage because of what happened, and remember during this era, everybody was drafted. It wasn t a matter of, you know. RC: Of choice. KM: Yeah. Choice, so. RC: What are your feelings towards the draft, seeing so many of your students drafted, and how do you feel about the draft? KM: Oh, I think we ve gone the correct way. I think we put a strain on things somewhat when we use reserve and guard units, but I think that s the only, I think that s probably still the better choice than a professional military. I think that s a far better choice, far better, than to just draft. Drafting people you get some real quality people but as Hugh Nibley said this is the crazy thing about our military, they had people with P.H. D s scrubbing toilets. You didn t use them really to, great as And he was one of them. World War II intelligence officer that ended up in France after D- Day but he thought this whole thing was ridiculous because you didn t make the best use of the resources you had available to you at the time. 9
RC: Yeah. That s kind of hard. I know you said earlier that you had been drafted into the Navy? KM: Yeah, I was drafted, I didn t think they did that. But they drafted me into the Navy and in the end I went into intelligence, communication intelligence, and worked with op. 20G, I spent two years in the Philippines with my family. Over there my one son was born there in the Philippines, and then two years at the National Security Agency just outside of Washington, DC. RC: What year were you drafted into the Navy? KM: 1956. RC: What were your experiences with the Navy? KM: Well, I was fortunate the area I was in, in fact I only went aboard ship once. I didn t want to go aboard ship. I didn t lose anything, and I didn t want any water above six feet and nothing larger than a row-boat. But I had only been married a month when I got drafted and my wife and I, we liked the Navy in a lot of ways because promotion was based exclusively on examination, competitive exams after completion of courses in a lot of different areas. Mine were all in intelligence in the end and that was good, that was good for me. It was an opportunity, we lived right outside of Washington, DC, my wife was a secretary to a congressman, and I wanted to come back and finish my degree, and it ended up the congressman s assistant because the guy that talked me into finishing political science, he became a faculty member at BYU and we all ended up, both ended up there at the same time, so I, it was a great experience and I learned a really lot about national security issues and everything and got really a good perspective of everything that goes on. RC: Was that pretty much the overall feelings of the people that were being drafted into the Navy that they were still patriotic towards the country and they weren t angry about the draft? KM: Oh, a lot of people were angry about the draft but what were you going to do about it? You know, unless you took off, and you know, and fled. But most weren t going to do that. They were patriotic enough that they were going to serve, a lot of people didn t like where they served but you didn t 10
have a lot of options. I was fortunate the options I had in the end, but in the end a lot of people didn t have any. They might end up as mess cook, or you know, or, clerks, typists, I know guys with college degrees that were clerk typists, supplies people in supply cars, and you know they didn t really their back ground training didn t help them one bit there. They wasted their time as far as their future was concerned for the most part. But it was service to the country, so. RC: Was there any way to change the occupation that you were being drafted to or? KM: Once you got in you could list choices, but you know, that didn t mean anything at all. You went were they put you. Where you were needed. RC: How did that all work? Did they just send you a letter letting you know you were going to be shipped out or? KM: Oh, you got a letter that said greetings from the President of the United States. You have been selected by a group of your draft board, that s what it amounted to, a group of your friends and neighbors to serve, you know, and then it told you to report. And that s what you did. RC: How were the feelings during Vietnam? I know you were teaching so you got to see a lot of students. KM: Oh, people really hard time, hard time struggling with that because there were so many people dying, and it was fine, it didn t hit home until some of your own ended up over there and not come back, then it was a different situation, then it really hit home. But, again, the propaganda and the publicity for what was going on to justify it was pretty good except for a lot of people didn t buy it when it was their own that they were losing, and you didn t lose the conflict. It kept, you would stay there for year after year after year and with more and more people involved. We ended up with [some] 100,000 people over there, and we still didn t win. The ratio when sergeant, or your own conventional forces doing sergeant forces in order to break even was about 18 to 20 to one so, for every guy they had fighting in covert actions over there, we had to have 18 to 20 and it just did not, not only was this their home. And we were the foreigners. And the country was fractured. It was a civil war comp situation so. 11
RC: Were a lot of your students at the beginning a lot more acceptant towards it than those being drafted towards the middle of it? KM: I think the longer it went on the support level went down further. But that s the problem. Americans generally feel very patriotic when it doesn t take a long time to resolve it, the situation. The longer it goes the more problems they had. RC: How did the people that were left behind react to the war, to the Vietnam War when the numbers started coming back? KM: They didn t, they had a hard time. RC: Did some of the faculty, did that affect their teaching at all or the students? KM: Oh, I didn t, I remember some of my students saying Brother Marlor, you are really hard on them. You are really hard on them. The country, you know, we re trying to do the right thing. And I remember telling them it isn t what you re trying to do, it s what happens. What results here. And it, the difficulty is how you re going to win. How you re going to come out on this. And, you know we d take an area during the day and by night we d lose the whole thing. Because, Vietcong, North Vietnamese would come out of the word work out of the jungles and you would just have a mess. So... And you know they didn t have the best weaponry in the world either to fight us. We had all the technology. They had all the motors, they had some hard artillery pieces, but they use primitive stuff you know. Sharp sticks stuck down under the brush so you d run the bamboo stuff right through your feet and, it was not a fun kind of deal. RC: Did you know about the situations down there pretty much as the war was dragging on being in intelligence? Did you get any of that information? KM: Well, I didn t, by the time, I was out of intelligence by the time this thing was going on, but there was enough that was getting in to the news magazines and that but you couldn t escape clearly that we were in trouble. Well, it just got worse as it went along. RC: What was it like seeing some of your students leave knowing the conditions that were down there? 12
KM: It was rough, it was really rough. You never knew if you were really going to see them again. This affected the Church Missionary program, of course, it affected everybody. They at that time, as I recall, they stopped holding missionary farewells, and, because you know it was the situation where some had to go into the military and others went on missions, so it was, it was a rough situation for everyone. RC: How did they handle that between the missions and the draft? KM: Well, it all depended on when you, if you got a call you know, I don t think there were as many problems there as there might have been. Typically if you got a call to go on a mission they had a military, or a milisitory deferment. But you could expect to go the minute you got home. And I know many people that did. They got drafted. And that was the case even before I was in the Philippines, that was the case. RC: Alright. So the school, do you think the school opinion here was a lot different than lets say some of the bigger schools in California or? KM: Oh, yeah, I think that this, it was far more measured here and we were far more supportive of the conflict the whole way through here. It just became more and more difficult as time went on. This place has never been Berkley, that s for sure. And the element of trust in leaders and that, far more trust, but again the longer it went on the more difficult it was to support so. RC: When the kids came back for the war did they come in and counsel with you or ask the teachers for counseling? KM: Well, they, not a lot of them. There were a few that did. Once they, once their service was over, they tended to throw themselves right into schoolwork or whatever. And tried to get rid of it. They d had enough, really enough. RC: How do you think the students reacted to the returned soldiers? Do you think it was different than, let s say, when we were victorious in World War II? 13
KM: You know the students here they didn t know how to react but they would listen to as much of talking as was done. They would listen to the ones that had been over there. And those that had been over there when they had heard students that hadn t been over there give their opinion sometimes they would get really irritated because they perceived that they didn t have a clue at what was really going on. So yeah, tended at times to have some fairly critical comments made and you had to be a little careful because once in awhile you had to referee because the guys that had been over there were not about to hear stuff that didn t agree with what their experience was, they just couldn t take it. RC: I bet that was pretty hard for them to readjust. KM: Oh, it was, it was pretty hard for them. RC: Did the school? KM: Some of these guys, you know, they would hear loud noises and it just, I remember one guy in class one day jumped right up and out of his seat and I don t remember if it was a tire blowing out or what it was outside but he came right up out of his seat the minute that noise took place. So you know, they didn t, people don t get over these things too easily. RC: Did that happen a lot for the students to have outbreaks like that or? KM: No, no, not a lot, but once and awhile there would be something, and RC: Did the school provide counseling at all or? KM: I have no idea what they did then, I just remember talking with a few here, there, you know. I suspect they did. But I wasn t privy. RC: Was the general consensus of the returned soldier was just to keep it quiet about it? Not talk about it? KM: A lot of them didn t but some of them were pretty vocal on that. I think this was a little different than World War II was, yeah, tended to basically revolve around what their experiences were, what their perspective was, after the war. 14
RC: Do you [think] that when people came home during World War II they were treated a little differently, a little more victorious? KM: Oh, by far. I think that, you know, they were treated as heroes. Vietnam, how do you treat someone as a hero in your own estimation if you re losing the conflict or if you haven t resolved it? This was hard for everybody that way, you know, I think that the people, you know, showed appreciation for what these young men had done but in other ways it wasn t the same. Never has been the same. For Vietnam. You know, it kind of, Korea is talked about it as the forgotten conflict. Vietnam, nobody forgot it but no one wanted to talk about it. Not a lot. RC: Do you think it was the goals that were switched kind of during the war that? KM: Well, nobody had the goals just ended up being having the same democracy for and use the domino theory for the foreign policy here and to prevent communism from spreading but it just didn t, in the end it didn t work. The domino theory was not sound, even though it had been sold like crazy it just didn t seem to pick up under scrutiny. RC: Do you think that it was different than World War II? KM: Well, it was different in that you could see your enemies, you could in fact develop a theory of Tojo or garble or whatever you wanted and that stuck but when it got to Vietnam, you did not, the never, you couldn t muster propaganda to the point where people could identify who the enemy really was. See, you know you just didn t RC: A lot less personal. KM: Yeah, yeah. RC: So, after growing up during World War II, a couple other wars and intelligence, what are your personal feelings about the Vietnam War, and after seeing your students come back? KM: Well, I don t think we, I don t think we were real at all in the way we developed our foreign policy objectives as they related to the conflict and I 15
think some times foreign policy, those that get involved in foreign policy they look short term with respect to goals and I think that s what happened there. So, there were no element or long term goals developed that you could really move towards. And so basically everything was based on what are we doing today, what are we doing tomorrow, not where are we going to be two years, five years, ten years. American foreign policy has that weakness. Typically, we don t look long term. The British tend to be very consistent in foreign policy. They always have been, based on the realities of the empire and what the goals, what the long term goals were. We just haven t, we haven t been able to do that. We re like the guy that was told to drain the swamp but the problem is it s full of alligators and so he s preoccupied with getting the alligators out and never gets the swamp drained. RC: How do you think the media was different from Vietnam and World War II? KM: Well, Vietnam was the first time that we actually saw footage that was relatively up to date to what was going on over there, and some of it wasn t what we wanted to see. That one famous shot of that woman packing her child with clothes, pretty well blown off of them down the street or burned off, I should say with napalm, that didn t agree with our bias of what was happening. We didn t see the innocent. There s a report this week that I just read on how many innocent people ended up getting waked to pieces, just hacked up by US military in one situation over there. And we had the Mi Lia problems, the massacre and, you know, in the end we were torn apart because we couldn t see us as the good guys all the way through in accomplishing everything. The government in South Vietnam was corrupt, the country was fractured and in some ways the same kind of fracturing we see in Iraq today. And it s difficult for public support given what the media has given you when you get a very unclear and troublesome picture. RC: How is the mind frame different from kind of the older people that were growing up in World War II and fought in World War II to some of the teenagers in Vietnam? KM: Well, I could, older people couldn t understand what was going on with these people because they perceived that you ve got to be totally loyal and all these people weren t. And they didn t understand why. They didn t understand. To them, a threat was a threat was a threat was a threat. And if the government said it was a threat then it was a threat. 16
RC: They were still willing to fight the war. KM: Mm-hm. RC: Do you think propaganda during World War II, kind of everything supporting the war and then in Vietnam how a lot of it was negative, do you think that had a lot of an effect? KM: That had an effect, there s no doubt about it. I mean it, I mean again it s different with respect to Iraq, this week I see some changes that are hard for us to handle like we aren t losing a thousand people a week. But one report, and they come right from Iraq from the reporters that are running all over the place, which we ve never had before in these situations, quite anyway. In the report this week it indicated that there were about twenty plus attacks on US military everyday. And you know a lot of times you only get the umber of futilities and people injured, but the press today is so much closer to what s going on and with, you know, video phones and everything they can, you can shoot stuff so fast it s not funny. They aren t hampered by only being able to use short wave broadcast when the atmosphere is decent and everything else. This was a far different that s the way it was in Vietnam. Not anymore. You got satellites up there and you get very clear pictures and you get them right away. RC: Yeah, alright, last question. This is going to back track a little bit but in your previous discussion you were talking about World War II and the rationing and how your dad and your grandpa saved up gas. KM: Yeah. RC: And I want to ask you about that story again. KM: Well, that was a situation where I was just a little guy but we wanted to go fishing in the Anima mountains, and it was over, it was about 150 miles away as I recall to go, and my father basically begged, borrowed and nearly stole the rationing stamps so we could get enough money to go because you just couldn t travel. And he car pooled to work with people making his dynamite and that so that we could, till he could get by but then he got a few surplus stamps from that so that, you know again he could, you know, and this rationing went on a long time after the war was over, and so 17
that it was still going on when I was eleven years old so, I think that was forty, oh wait, let s see, yeah probably forty-eight. No, forty-seven. Fortysix, and forty-seven after the war was over and we would go fishing but we could only go if we saved up enough stamps so that we could buy gas because you couldn t buy gas unless you had the rationing stamps. So, again the food rationing, it went on for a while after. I remember my dad didn t have cash when we would go on these little forays, 150 miles, he d take a savings bond with him and use that if he had to in order to have enough money so that if there was a problem he figured he could get back and cash one. That was another thing, I never matched that, but everybody, every penny that they had, you, that was extra, you were expected to buy war bonds with it to help with the war effort, you didn t put it in the bank, you bought war bonds with it. RC: How did that (the war bonds) work out for everybody? Were they pretty receptive towards that? KM: Oh, yeah, they really were. I remember my dad even as young as I was, he bought war bonds and kept them for me until I was in my forties before, no I wasn t I was in my fifties. RC: Oh, wow. KM: But these had matured and you know the interest just kept going and everything but he socked them away, and, you know, they were worth money. But the idea here was you help. You do everything you can for the war effort. So... RC: Alright. Thank you very much. KM: Okay? Alright, hun. 18