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NEW BRUNSWICK HISTORY DEPARTMENT: |
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An Interview with Charles Fletcher Bishop, Jr., for the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II. Interview conducted by Shaun Illingworth and Sandra Stewart Holyoak in Orlando, Florida, on September 10, 2001. Transcript by Domingo Duarte and David D'Onofrio and Charles Fletcher Bishop, Jr. and Sandra Stewart Holyoak. Permission to quote from this transcript must be obtained from the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II.
Shaun
Illingworth: This begins an interview
with Mr. Charles Fletcher Bishop, Jr. on September 10, 2001 in
Sandra
Stewart Holyoak: Sandra Stewart
Holyoak.
SI: Mr. Bishop, thank you for being with us this
morning and we'd like to begin by asking you a little bit about your family
history, and your parents. Your father
was born in
Charles
Fletcher Bishop: He was born in
SH: And your mother is from
CB: My mother was from
SH: Do you know how they met, your parents?
CB: No. Probably
in high school. They both went to
SH: We wanted to ask you then about your
family. You had a younger brother?
CB: Yes, I was born in 1926, my brother was born
in 1932 and then I have an adopted brother and he was born in 1937.
SH: What do you remember about growing up and
going to school in the area that you lived in?
CB: Well, I went to school.
SH: Where did you go to school?
CB: I first went to school in Berlin where my
mother taught and the reason I went there was there was no kindergarten in our
school system, which was Haddon Township, and she was didn't mind going to
kindergarten, plus this was the Depression and she was teaching at that time,
so we had two incomes in the family. So
I went down with her everyday to
SH: We love these stories. One question I had, though, is your memory of
the depression? What do you remember
about it ...
CB: I was very happy during the Depression
because we had two working members in the family. My father had a good job. The people who lived in our neighborhood were
not as lucky, as I said before, my father worked for the Philadelphia Electric
Company. The other people in the
neighborhood mostly worked for RCA or Campbell Soup in Camden and as the
Depression came along, many of them lost their jobs and I always felt, even
though we were in a very modest circumstances by today's standards, I always
felt we were sort of like the wealthiest people on the street and it was not a
lot of wealth, but we had no problem eating.
We had no problem really with anything.
When I wanted to do something in school, both of my parents were adamantly
interested in my getting everything I could get out of life, so I never had to,
I didn't get an allowance, but I never had to ask for something. I'd come home and say the school is going to
do this and the money came forth. So the
Depression itself did not touch me. We
had an automobile. We only had one
automobile and my mother used to have to drive my father down and put him on
the train to go to
SH: You brought up the political person that you
knew as a young man, what were the politics that were discussed in your home?
CB: My father was just a born Republican because
his parents were, I suppose, and my mother, she should have been a Republican
and she was until this WPA thing came along and then she switched and she was
adamantly against some of the Republican people who ran. She thought
SH: No, because you are the first person that we
have interviewed that actually attended a convention as a young person.
SI: Let's go back to the Great Depression, it
didn't impact your family but were there like people moving through Haddon ...
people knocking on the back door, or that sort of thing?
CB: No, not really. We knew when the people on our street were
out of a job and I really don't know how they survived. Most of them survived by having a
parent. I only had two young people on
my street who I palled around with.
There just weren't that many young people there. One of them, his
grandmother had money and she came to live with them. The other one, the grandfather had money and
he came to live with them and I figured that that was how they survived. Otherwise, to go back to your request, what
did you just ask me?
SI: Were there any other signs of the Depression
...
CB: I can remember there was a lady who lived way
down in the corner and she took care of an elderly man who was an artist. He layman died and left her his house, but
she had nothing but what he was paying her to take care of him. Her name was Mrs. Goodman and our community
had what you called welfare, and welfare was a little deal where you went
around on your street and you knock on doors and you carried this little cardboard
box with the slit on the top like a bank and you said, "I'm here for welfare,"
and they would drop a quarter and or a nickel and once in a while somebody
would put a dollar in and this really, I did this, I went around and did the
collecting. I can remember when somebody
put a dollar in there, I was really impressed and I began to think maybe there
were people, richer people, in the neighborhood than mine, because I think my
mother always put a quarter in, so people had to be taken cared of and that was
the way it was done then.
SH: Now do you know where the welfare little
cardboard box, where did that originate from?
CB: There was a committee in the town. I lived in a little section of five or six
streets called the Blue Birds and we had our own little community group. They put on Fourth of July parades and games
and things of that sort and this group, I would just turn the money over to
whoever was the president of this little community group and she had a
committee and they would go down to the grocery store and they would buy this
Mrs. Goodman things. She couldn't leave
her house, this little house that she live in, and they just took care of her
that way.
SH: Were you involved with the church at all as a
young man growing up?
CB: Not really.
I went to ... I was a Lutheran, because my father was a Lutheran and you
know ... I went to Sunday school and I had perfect attendance. Do you remember pins? You're much too young but you got your first
pin for your first perfect attendance and then you got a little guard or
something underneath that and then you got a series of things and I had them
all until I graduated from high school.
I went to Sunday school all the way through high school. I can remember we went on vacations and we
would have to stop in a town and I would have to go to Sunday school in Montour
Falls or something like that and I would go for the hour and they give me a
slip and that counted for my attendance, but that was my full church
going. I was not terribly interested in
it. In the summer I went to bible school
at another church, at a Presbyterian church, because you had ice cream cones on
Fridays and there were other little gifts and so forth and it, you know,
occupied the summertime, instead of just sitting around and building huts or
something else. That's my religious
experience.
SH: Can you talk about, we want to ask about Boy
Scouts and then we'll go back to the vacation story. Were you involved in Boy Scouts ....
CB: I was not in the Boy Scouts. My father was big Boy Scout but I was
not. It never really appealed to
me. There weren't too many young people
right back where I lived, and, of course, since I went off to Berlin to school
for my first two years of that particular age group, five and six, I didn't go
to school with the kids in the neighborhood and by the time I started in second
grade, which was probably not until mid-year or so, I was sort of an outsider
in my own school. So I didn't get into
the Scouts. I went to YMCA Boy camp
every summer for three or four summers.
My father wanted me to do everything and I did that and I enjoyed it but
it replaced the Boy Scouts for me.
SH: Where did you go to camp?
CB: It was called Ockanickon and it was in
Medford, New Jersey, Medford Lakes and there was a girls camp that came, we
went first and then in July and the girls came in August and I think that camp
is called Matollionequay, I used to love those names, it will roll across your
tongue.
SH: You will have to help us spell those.
CB: I don't know how to spell them.
SH: You talked about family vacations, can you
tell me what vacations you remember and how far you went up?
CB: Ok. We
used to go to the shore many times, this was down visiting people who had
places at the shore and they invited my mother and my brother and I down there,
by the shore, I'm talking about Beach Haven or Ocean City. We went down and visit them during the week
when the husband wasn't down there. Many
husbands commuted to the shore and we would go home by the weekend. My father took me camping several times. We would go up and visit his, one of his
sisters and the other sister would come down and the whole family would get
together on a river up near Carlisle, Pennsylvania and we'd all sort of bunk
out, there were houses out there and my father taught me to canoe. He always had a fit, though, about the third
day, which made the rest of the week very unpleasant because he couldn't stand
babies crying and there were always babies around and by the third day he
wasn't talking to his sisters and by the fourth day he wasn't talking to my
mother and by the fifth day he wasn't talking to either me or my brother, so
they were sort of traumatic vacations, although it was fun ... and then in 1937
we got a new Chevrolet and we decided, we didn't decide, my father decided we
would go to Canada, so we drove up to Montour Falls and Watkins Glen and then
on up to a Thousand Islands, oh, no, we went up to Skaneateles and ate at
Krebs, which was famous in that day and then on up to the Thousand Islands and
then to Montreal and then down along Lake Champlain to Saratoga and then on
home and that vacation went very well until the last day and then we had
another fight. We won't go into
that. Those were my major
vacations. We did, he took my brother
and I up camping to Eagles Mere, there was a camp up there. We would spend two weeks up there in camp and
then I went back ... I met a friend up there and the friend invited me to come
back for a weekend. I remember I went
back a week alone and that was the first time I had been alone except to be at
camps with the YMCA. Those are the major
vacations I can remember. Mostly I
wanted to go to the shore. I loved the
beach. I would go there every year if
somebody would just invite me. We did
rent a place down in Beach Haven a couple of times and that's about it.
SI: Did your family or maybe you when you were a
teenager often go to Camden or Philadelphia?
CB: Oh, I spent all my time going into
Philadelphia. I was very self sufficient
and I love to get on the bus and take the bus into, you can take the bus all
the way to Philadelphia, but I would take it to Camden and they put a rail line
on the bridge, and which was part of the subway, and I would take that. I just loved that. My father was good to me. He decided I had to see a show, so I had to
go to the Walnut Theater for an evening show one time and the Mummers parade
and I did a lot in Philadelphia. In
junior high, ninth grade ... I have a lazy eye and in ninth grade they decided I
would take some little exercises and it would improve this eye, so I went in
every week on Thursday or something and then after I finished with my eye
exercise, I'd meet my father and he would take me to dinner some place or
something. My brother and mother stayed
home, shifted for themselves. I used to
call Philadelphia "my city" and I still sort of think of it that way,
although I haven't been there in a long, long, long time. More?
SH: What were your interests as a young man, I
mean, you talked about camping and the beach being your great thing for the
summer, but what interested you in elementary school and going into high
school?
CB: I don't know.
All I can remember, I just palled around with this kid across the
street. There were a lot of vacant lots. This was a subdivision that had been started
in those days and they built a house here and a house here and one here and one
here and then I guess when the Depression came along, they went, 'pfft,' so
there were a lot of vacant lots around and we used to dig down in the lot and
make huts and put boards over the top.
We would make rooms and you would crawl in these things and you know and
we played 'kick the can' on the street.
The street was a place to play.
We had all sorts of little games that we played, and then when we grew
up a little bit, we got into, we put up poles and put nails in it and put a
bamboo thing across it and high jump and that sort of thing. I was reasonably good in school but I was not
standout at all and I went to junior high school over at Thomas Edison and we
shifted classes and I really liked that and I discovered I was very good in
English grammar and I have no idea why ... but I discovered I was good at it
because the teacher called on me all the time, and this is one of those things,
if you're good at something, and somebody tells you this, then you get even
better at it and we got into subjunctive mood and all of that, all of which I
have forgotten now, but I was a wizard then ... and I had a friend then and I had
a girlfriend and a boyfriend ... and I never made, it was very interesting, I
never made the honor roll and I was always a little disappointed in that. When it came to the end of my seventh grade,
they had a yearly honor roll and I had never made an honor roll but I made the
yearly honor roll, because they just averaged out. Well, this impressed me no end, so I made the
honor roll from then on. I think I was
just, I wanted to be good, and that was my sole aim all through grade school
and high school, well, junior high school and high school.
SH: You talked about having to choose between two
high schools, what made you choose the Collingswood?
CB: Well, it was much closer and also
Collingswood was a class four school and had a class four football team and
Haddonfield was a smaller school and I think it was class three or class two,
so if you had your choice you chose four and that's were I went. It was closer. It was a distance. I couldn't take a bus because the
Collingswood busses didn't come there so I walked to school all the time and I
thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a mile and
a half or something, but that's why I went there.
SH: Were there extracurricular activities that
interested you in high school?
CB: Yes, well, first of all I heard about the
National Honor Society so I decided that's what I wanted to do, so I didn't
quite know how to do that, but I knew I had to get involved in things so I got
involved in things and the one I did the most was the newspaper in high
school. I thought maybe I'd be a journalist
and I didn't turn out to be a journalist but I had fun then and that was my
chief aim. Then in my senior year, I
took solid geometry and trigonometry and, well, I didn't exactly take them, I
taught myself. About the third week in
the semester, this was, I think I had solid geometry first, about the third
week into the semester my geometry teacher, Ms. Latimore, fell down the stairs
and broke both of her legs. It was a
terrible story but she had this perception that she couldn't remember which foot
she put forward the last time so she would get down, she put this foot on the
step then you bring this one from the step above and down to the next one. Well, she forgot and she moved off with the
foot that she was down on this side which is still back here, so she fell. Well they had nobody, this was wartime, it
was 1943, '42 and '43 and there were no men around. We were in the height of the war then and
they couldn't find a solid geometry teacher and the plain geometry teacher had
a full set of courses and so they brought up the guidance counselor, who was an
algebra teacher from the junior high school, and first there were only two
sections, there was only one section of solid geometry, so I had, they looked
in the record book of Ms. Latimore and I had all these A's in these little
quizzes and so forth, so they asked me if I thought I could teach a little bit
of this. I said, "I don't know it myself
yet." But my father was very helpful, in
fact that was the time I was closest to my father, I mean how nice that I had
to teach this class and we did. We went
through the book and he was very good.
He was a very good teacher, very patient, and so forth, and he also let
me do my own thinking and he would only help me, he did this Socratic kind of
thing and eventually, you know, I learned and I went in and we did a whole
week's worth of lessons and we lined the problems and the homework they would
do and I taught all the rest of solid geometry and then trigonometry came along
and my father said, "Let's teach that, too."
So I taught trigonometry, which merely put me in bad straits when I got
to Rutgers University. But that's
another story.
SH: That's a wonderful story. I have never interviewed anyone who had to
teach in high school as a high school student.
To go back, I want you to talk about the war and what you knew as a
young man who would have been in junior high, I think, if my math is
right. Since you teach math, you have to
help me, talking about what was going on in Europe and in Japan and how aware
you as a family, were of what was going on and what you expected?
CB: Okay, my first recollection of being
associated or thinking about the war, oh, I remember when they bombed Pearl
Harbor. I was off ... my parents did not
take Sunday rides around, leisurely rides, you know the kind that when you
drive ahead, you think that these people would get off the road, they're just
Sunday drivers? Well, Charles Scooley
across the street, they had a big Buick that belonged to his grandmother, who
had come to live with them, and they liked to travel around, so I, Charles used
to come over and say, "We're going down to Salem today, or we're going here, or
we're going there, do you want to ride?"
and I went and I can remember we rode all day and had a wonderful
time. His father was a decorator of sweet
shop windows, with crepe paper, and you put it, fan shapes and all sorts of
things. He's very talented that way, but
he worked for Breyer's Ice Cream and they did this free, if you served Breyer's
Ice Cream in your restaurant or your store.
I can remember we went off all day and we stopped several places where
he worked and he would stream these streamers, and so forth, and then we always
had ice cream cones. It was just a
wonderful day and we got home, we pulled into the driveway and something in my
neighborhood didn't feel right and there were people all sort of standing on
the street and talking to each other and we got out of the car and they told us
that they had bombed Pearl Harbor and that was my first real association with
war. I didn't follow what was going on
in Europe with Hitler going into Poland.
I knew England was at war and they were our friends and, therefore,
Hitler was bad and Mussolini was bad and then we had a third one, Tito, no,
Tito was in Yugoslavia, I'm thinking of the Japanese, Tojo, right, he came in
and you know, there were billboards all over of these three ugly faces looking
at you and I knew we were at war and we didn't like all these people and we had
to go on rationing. Well, then, once we
were at war, everything changed.
Everybody was marching off to war and Rosie the Riveter was working and
it was a marvelous period because everybody just drew together. Everybody was your friend and you really
saved your money. I gave up ice cream
cones, so I could buy stamps to save and when you saved enough of them you got
a bond and people hung these little flags on the windows and if their sons went
off, then they were just sort of blue.
They had blue center or something and then if one was killed in the war,
it would be a gold star went on it and you sort of, when you walk to school, if
you saw one of these in the window, you got very silent and passed the house
sort of in bereavement, and there were bond rallies, it was a really neat
period. You all felt that you were part of
one big family instead of just your own little family. It was like that, it was great. High school was like that all through high
school because, you know, I was in there from '41 to '43 when I graduated and
that was it.
SH: What discussions went on in school about the
war?
CB: It didn't.
We didn't have to take too much history in high school. I did not like history. Later on I learned to love it but I did not
like it and I can remember ninth grade was medieval history, tenth grade, I
think I had such a full course that I didn't have to take history and if I
could avoid it, I didn't take it the rest of the time. So I was focused on myself. I hate to say this, but I didn't see it then,
but I was focused on what I was doing with my life and I wanted to do this
journalism bit and I wanted to get on the National Honor Society and wanted to
do a good job of teaching these subjects and it just didn't move me. I had been much more interested in the floods
in Johnstown and so forth, which were probably in '35 or '36 or '37 and I made
scrapbooks and so forth on that, than I ever was with the war. The war was far away from me. The only thing you saw about the war were
these people who were going off and they came home in uniform and everybody was
happy. It's a terrible thing to say, but
it was happy period for me and exciting, as opposed to something I was really
upset about. I had no concept of the
Jewish situation. I know that I had absolutely no concept of that at all. I don't know when "Anne Frank" came
out, but I don't remember thinking of her anytime during that period, nor
anybody like her. I just know that it
was awfully bad over there and the English were being bombed and the French
were having all kinds of trouble and some big long line, the Maginot Line, was
supposed to be something that stopped everybody and it broke down and I had ...
my mother's sister married a doctor, but this was her second marriage, she had
a boyfriend and she did not marry him, she married a ne'er do well, and then she
managed to divorce him and then she married a doctor but he was on a troop
ship. He was a lieutenant commander in
the Navy and he was on the troop ship that carried troops back and forth to
North Africa and I was interested in that and I can remember thinking about
Rommel down in North Africa and I had a concept that that's where we were gonna
start to win and then we went ahead and the next thing I can remember, all of a
sudden we were in Italy. Is Anzio in
Italy? Well, we did a landing there and
I was very pleased. This was like
hearing that your football team was winning and that was the last big thing I
can remember then, until I went off to war in '43, because ... When did we land
in France, that was '44 or '43, I don't know, but '44 probably but and then I
was no longer interested in what everybody else was doing in the war. I was interested in what I was doing and what
was going on out in the Pacific.
SH: One of the questions I'd like to ask was,
when did it dawn on you, I mean, I know you had to register for the draft at
eighteen, did you enlist or where you drafted?
CB: I don't know what I really did. I'm sure I was drafted. See, I started school early enough so that
when, I was seventeen when I graduated, and I didn't have to register then. I got a scholarship to Rutgers, which is why
I was in the Agricultural School. I had
decided on my own little fertile mind that if I was going for a state
scholarship, there were probably ... I didn't know how they divide them up, I was
really an innocent as far as things go, but I had in my mind that if you went
to the Ag School, you're much more likely to get a scholarship than if you went
to the regular school, so I decided I wanted the Ag School and that's what I
applied for and I got a state's scholarship and I graduated from high school
the second week of June and I was up at Rutgers the first day of July.
SH: As a high school student, did you think that
you would ever be in the war?
CB: No. The war was removed from me. This was something that happened to everybody
else and not to me, but I was all for it.
That was like you feel about a football team, your college football
team, you know. I'm not out there
playing on the field and I don't have to take any of those bruises or anything
but that is my team and we were at war and that was my war and it was exciting.
SH: Why did you go to Rutgers being so close to
Philly ...
CB: No state university. We were only state affiliated then. It wasn't a full state university, but I
thought I'd get in a better scholarship there.
I didn't have, I could have gone to any school I wanted to but I knew it
would be a strain on my, any school was a strain and if I could get a
scholarship, it would help and I just figured it was much easier to get a
scholarship at your own college, at your state.
They called them state's scholarships in those days and there seemed to
be more of those available than I thought there were others available and I did
not know. This was in my own mind. I think some guidance person, we didn't have
a guidance counselor per se. We had an
English teacher who did some guidance.
She was college prep adviser or something and she called us all in one
day and said, "You know, some of you should take the state exams for
scholarship." You took an exam just for
Rutgers, you did not take an exam like they do scholarships now, SAT or
whatever you call it, and they gave out a lot of scholarships. The other thing was there were a lot of
people going off to war, so they didn't have to give too many out. Anyway, I got one and I went to Rutgers and I
moved in to Winants Hall and had a little suite of rooms and there were four of
us altogether.
SH: You remember your roommates?
CB: Some of them.
I remember each of them, Don Braly was one of them. Another one was named Frank. Don Braly and I ... there were three rooms
there, a sleeping room, a sleeping room and a central study room in Winants
Hall and Don Braly and I shared this room.
It had bunk beds and Frank and this guy named Charles shared the other
room and this is the first time I had really been associated with four males
living together, other than camp which was just a two week thing and I thought
it was delightful. The cafeteria was
downstairs in Winants. We ate
there. The bookstore was down
there. The campus was loaded with army
people. They marched. They marched to class and all of us were
eighteen years old, seventeen year old except for the people who were 4F at the
time and but that was just a sprinkling and we came in strong and we had a
great time. I can remember that Charles,
about the third week there, he invited us to go home with him. His parents drove all the way down from
Washington, drove us all the way back to his house and I thought this is
college life. You go home and visit your
roommate and so forth and by the end of the first quarter, which ended in
September, he was eighteen and drafted and he went off to France and got
pneumonia and died. Meanwhile, I had
pledged to a fraternity [ Theta Chi] through Ralph Kleinschmidt, who was in the
engineering department, and my roommate, Don Braly was an engineering
student. The fraternity was in dire
straits on Union Street and they wanted to pledge people as fast as they could,
so this engineering man just invited everybody in his engineering classes over
and Don Braly said to me, "Come on along, they don't know you from an
engineering student." So I went over and
I pledged the fraternity eventually and by the time that second quarter
started, which was the September quarter, Don and I moved out of Winants Hall
and moved into the fraternity house which is what they wanted and I lost track
of Frank and the other one had died. I
don't know whatever happened to Frank.
But he was a nice enough guy. He
didn't get over there.
SH: Well, can you tell us about what your first
experiences were at Rutgers, as far as, you went there in July and this is in
July '42, '43? In '43 the ASTP program
is there.
CB: I forget the name of that, but that's right.
SH: Tell us a little bit about what it was like
to be integrated into these classes with these ... and you're taking ROTC ...
CB: No, well, yes, somewhere I took ROTC. I don't know that I took ROTC at Rutgers, now
that I think back at it. Some people
did. I had the problem because I had
courses over at the Ag school and I had to, between classes, get from the main
campus over to the Ag school and nobody had cars in those days. Rationing ... even if you had a car, you
couldn't get gas and you'd save it for the weekends, so I really didn't get
associated with the army except in one class and I told you a little while
back, that was my problem with teaching math.
When I got up there, they put me in, I went over to see the head of the
math department ...
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OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE--------------------------------------
CB: Whether I had algebra in eleventh grade. So he said, "Okay, I'll put you in analytical
geometry." So I went into
analytical geometry. Well, I discovered
in analytical geometry, I wasn't quite as good a math student as I thought I
was, and I didn't have my father to fall back on, but to get into that class,
none of the other college freshmen were in there, none of the civilian freshmen
were in there. All they had in there were
these army people, so here I am in this class with all these army people. Well, I muddled my way through that and I
think I probably got a C and the next thing they put me in was differential
calculus. That really blew my mind. So after about the third week ... that was a
terrible professor and there must have been sixty of us in the class and I was
the only one that was in civilian clothes and he would get up and he'd assign
these problems, the previous lesson, then he would get up and he'd say, "Anybody
had any trouble doing those problems?" and somebody would raise their hand and
he'd get up on the board, and write this problem all down on the board all the
way to the answer. I had no idea what he
was doing. I had no concept of it. He could have been talking gibberish. Well, after I had been there for two weeks,
six lessons, I decided I didn't like this course and I was paying for it, or my
scholarship was paying for it, so I just wouldn't go. I did not know you could drop courses and
that wasn't that, I didn't know that you had to go to a course you were paying
the money and then you went and if you finally pass the course, you pass the
course. If you didn't go it was just as
if you didn't go to the course, so I never went. At the end of the semester I had a big old F
on my record. I had a terrible time and
I never could talk to the Registrar out of that, Luther [Martin] somebody or
other. That was the name of the Registrar,
and anyway, I still had big old F on my record.
I did finally get through calculus, but it was after the war. So, I associated with the army only in that
respect and the fact that they marched around.
I think they lived in Ford Hall.
Is Ford Hall still there? Okay, I
think that's where the army was, and I was living over on Union Street, most of
the fraternities were closing down. In
fact, a couple of them where there were some stragglers, 4F or whatever they
were, they would come over and eat in our dining room, so somehow we put
together enough people to have a chef and cook there.
SI: Before you joined the service, did you feel
any hostility from the army men and that you were in civilian clothes?
CB: No, I just felt peculiar. I felt out of place and not badly out of
place. I wasn't thinking I should be
with them. I just felt that I looked
funny and I don't like to look funny and this was my whole concept and I didn't
get in with any other army classes because I went over to, one more I did get
in, meteorology with Professor Biel, and they gave that under the agricultural
department. I don't know why. But I really liked that class and that was
mostly army, but it was, he came over the campus and taught and then he flew to
Chicago and taught classes out in Chicago then flew back and this is the day
you didn't fly back and forth to do things, and that really impressed me. But I was gonna get back to your original
question. It slipped my mind, it will
come up again.
SH: How was the social life maintained at
Rutgers?
CB: Hold that.
I just thought of what you asked me before that I didn't, now I have
forgotten it again. All right I'll get
into the social life. Oh, you asked me
about being drafted and so forth. All
right, I should finish that off because it came into my mind. When I got back in September, some of my
fraternity brothers were gone. One of my
fraternity brothers who I liked very much was guy named Charles Heilman and he,
we palled around a lot together, I had a girlfriend over at NJC named Lavinia
Burns, we called her "Vinny" and you know I dated her regularly, once a week,
and you had to walk everywhere. We went
down to the movies on Livingston Avenue across from the Hotel Roger Smith now
and once in a while Chuck went along but he did not have a lot of
girlfriends. He wasn't that interested
in girls. Anyway at Christmas time, we
broke, it wasn't quite the end of the semester but we broke and when I came
back from Christmas, he was gone and there were about seven of us left and then
we had the break, then I came back and two more of those were gone, I think we
were only five of us left in the fraternity house and just as few on
campus. The numbers went way down and
then April came at the end of that quarter and when I got back, there were only
three of us. I had reached eighteen by
that time and my mother had gone down to the draft board. I had to register, I was eighteen in January
and I had started the third semester, third quarter, and she went down and told
them what I was doing and that's why she was bringing in my registration thing and
I would like to finish out the semester, the quarter. They said, "Fine." I didn't even make an appearance. Well, then I didn't hear from them, so when
the next quarter began, I just trundled my way back to New Brunswick and went
again, and then, there was nobody on campus, just army, absolutely nobody and
we had to close the dining room at the fraternity house and I made a new
friend, a guy named Charles Edward Lipartito.
He had a girlfriend in South River and we used to go out there once in a
while and eat and then I got to thinking, "You know, everybody else has gone
off and here I am still struggling around here, I am able-bodied," and all of
this and then I can remember one night I went down to a movie on, I remember
this as clear as can be, a movie, Johnson and Johnson was on the river and
then, what was that street that ran off from there?
SH: George?
CB: Right, and there was a theater before you
ever met the cross street which went out to Highland Park, there was a theater
in there and I went to the movie. I went
to the movies and I enjoyed the movies, and I think we even had newsreels then,
Pathe News or something, I'm sure we did, and I came out, it was about the war
and I came out and I got back to Queens Campus and I walked past the chapel,
what's the name of that chapel, Kirkpatrick, Voorhees was over at the girl's
school, Kirkpatrick Chapel and I got to thinking, "Fletcher Bishop, you are a
very lucky person. You've gotten
everything you want out of life. You got
on the National Honors Society," I don't why I had this thing for the National
Honors Society, but I did, "you got on the National Honor Society and they put
you in a book and you came out here and you got a marvelous education. Your parents were never out of work, you ate
well, you went vacations and all of this, it's, you know, you've had a good
life. It doesn't matter if it's all
over" ... and this is right on campus. It
wasn't snowing but it was raining and ... I love that chapel. I hated going there because I didn't like whatever
they talked about. It was Dutch Reform
or some kind of, but I loved all those pictures on the wall, of those people
looking down at me and the stained glass windows. I sort of felt very religious there and then
you walked past, the next building was the long Old Queens and I just decided,
"I want to call my draft board and find out why they have not drafted me," and
so I got home and I called my mother and she said, "Are you sure you want to do
this?" and I said, "Yes." So pretty soon
I got a notice that said, "report," and this is the end of June. There was one other reason then, I've wanted
to go in the navy and somehow, I got the assurance that my draft board was
sending people to the Navy then. I don't
know how I got this assurance but I got this assurance in my mind. I often assumed things. I may have just assumed that, but I got in
the navy. So that was the end of that. Now you want to know about dating and girls.
SH: On campus, before you go off to war ...
CB: Well, I had this one girl, Lavinia Burns, and
I wasn't terribly interested in girls but you had to have a date and she was my
date. I had gotten her from the president of the fraternity. He had a bad leg, his name was, Bob Smith,
Robert Graham Smith, and he had a very bad leg from infantile paralysis, or
something. So, he had this girlfriend
named Lavinia Burns and she got too serious for him. She just got very serious. Well, I was going with a little girl named
(Sweetsie/Switzy?) then and I thought Lavinia was the prettiest girl I had ever
seen, so when Bob Smith said she got too serious, this didn't register with me
that she might get serious with me. I
thought this was just, you know, so I got rid of (Sweetsie/Switzy?) and I got
Vinny. Well, I went with Vinny till I
went in the Navy and then I went back and went to dances at NJC with her and
then I went off to war and she wrote me everyday, everyday, some of them are
little short ones, but she wrote me everyday and then I hate to say it, I
dumped her after the war, and I don't know a way to explain it but I did.
SH: One of the questions that we ask is what kind
of activities were there, the military balls or things for you to attend? Did your fraternity host any social ...
CB: The fraternity had fraternity parties, but
they weren't as wild as the parties were after the war, and they were more
limited in scope, plus people kept disappearing. It was mostly going over to NJC and they had
to be back at something like eleven o'clock and that was only on the
weekend. It was seven o'clock during the
week and it was eleven o'clock on the weekend and you could go down to the
movies and you could get an ice cream or something. I didn't do a lot of drinking then, and you
walked all the way back and by the time I got involved in this dating, it was
fall and then winter came along and New Brunswick is terrible in the
winter. I think it was one of the worst
places in the world in the Winter. It's
damp and dreary and oh, ... anyhow, it was a chore walking all the way over to
NJC to pick up these girls and then walking all the way downtown and blowing on
our hands, because you didn't want to wear gloves, you look like a freak if you
wore gloves, and then you went to the movies and you held hands, you got nice
and warm and then you came out and you made the terrible, cold walk back and
you kissed her goodnight and you had to walk all the way back to New Brunswick
and that was it and going on a date was a chore.
SH: Were there activities on campus such as
concerts and ...
CB: I don't remember any during that period. I don't remember, I really don't. The thing we had, I really don't even
remember much about football. I don't
think we had a football team in 1943, fall.
I just don't remember it and I should because after the war, when I came
back for the next three years, I went to every football game we ever had, away
and home, and the last football game I went to ... I only went to one football
game in my life after I left Rutgers and that was at the University of Florida
when Rutgers came down to play them and I went to that because somebody invited
me and that's it. I'm not a football freak.
SH: Did you find, you talked a little bit about
mandatory chapel, there was mandatory chapel when you went in '43, did they
continue that when you came back?
CB: I think they did continue that. I don't remember it up through my last,
senior, year, but I think maybe in sophomore year, we had to. I call sophomore year when I went back, '46,
'47. I think maybe we did, but don't
quote me on that. I mean, you can listen
to me but I don't know for sure.
SH: Do you remember some of the speakers that
came to your chapel?
CB: No, I don't.
I think Clothier was president at that time and I think he talked to us
once. I think the minister, there was a
Dutch Reformed Church right on College Avenue and I think he came over and
talked to us, and I'm sure, Metzger, was he a dean? I think Dean Metzger talked to us. They weren't dignitaries, or at least if they
were dignitaries I didn't know they were dignitaries, plus I thought they were
boring. So I wouldn't have known anyway.
SH: Were there any musical programs that you
remember?
CB: No. I
really don't remember a thing during that early period.
SI: Do you remember if Camp Kilmer was right there? Did that have any impact on life in New
Brunswick, on the campus?
CB: No. I
knew it was there and you would, but see we had all these army people that were
on campus and I really didn't differentiate Camp Kilmer with these people. If I saw them in town, I just saw them. There were soldiers everywhere and there were
sailors, you know, they were home on leave or something. All I knew with that was in my mind, that was
a disembarkation camp and it had no influence on me at Rutgers at all. I didn't know it was really close at hand.
SH: Did you keep a job at all while you were on
campus the first year, or first ...
CB: I think I did. I think I worked at the YMCA and I don't know
how I fell into the job. I think it was
through a fraternity brother, but this may not have been before the war, or
before I went to war. This may have been
my first year back. I didn't work there
terribly long but I worked just sort of like a little desk clerk at the YMCA
and it was an evening thing. I would eat
and go down there at six and the desk stayed open till nine, maybe ten. This was right near the theater on Livingston
Avenue, the YMCA was there. I don't know
whether they're still there, but they had like a little hotel there and if I
had a job, that was the only one I had.
SI: You mentioned that you had in your head
already, you wanted to go to the navy, was there a particular reason why?
CB: No.
Yes, I just figured being out on the sea, you know I loved the shore and
the beach, and so forth, and I thought of the army as people who were running
around with guns and dropping in foxholes.
You know the story in the Pacific was terrible at this time, we were
doing better in Europe. I didn't think
of foxholes in Europe. I thought of the
foxholes in the Pacific, don't ask me why, but this is just my concept at that
time. I think I was still thinking of
landing in Anzio and I was thinking of this Maginot Line that didn't hold. I just had these little tunnel visions of
episodes that were happening, but the Navy just appealed to me as a nice clean
way to fight a war and the Army was like a dirty way to fight a war. I don't mean it that way, but ...
SH: The Targum,
was it still being published while you were on campus that first time?
CB: I think the Targum may have published but if it did, it was not a regular. I
think if they probably came out, it probably came out the beginning of each
semester and then even when I went back, it wasn't a daily. Is it a daily now? It wasn't a daily. It was a, I think it was a weekly when I went
back. If you ask me to state what I
think, I don't think it ever was a daily while I was there. I think it was a weekly.
SH: Because you worked in the newspaper in
school, in high school, I wondered if you thought of working in the Targum?
CB: I did.
Well, but not until I came back from the war. There were no activities in campus when we
went up that, in July. You just went to
school and you got involved with getting into the fraternity if that's what you
were going to do and I don't remember any activities, I really don't. I don't remember any dances. There were just guys coming and going and
that was it. But after the war, yes.
SH: And you've mentioned the newsreel and the war
movie that you'd seen and how that influenced you to change your draft
status. What do you remember of the
newsreel and how they reported what was going and were there further
discussions on campus?
CB: I don't remember discussing the war. I don't remember discussing the war with my
folks. I don't remember discussing the
war with the kids at school in that period or even the ones in high
school. We knew it was going on and we
knew, we had the rationing and we were helping everybody and but the war itself
... I was kind of a loner, too, so I didn't get into discussions with, you know,
people would say, "Oh, I really don't want to go, and I'll probably be drafted
and I probably be killed." This to me
was just depressing thought, I turned it off.
It didn't mean a thing to me. The
newsreels, I was very distressed that we were losing and I hated these three
men who were up on the billboards.
Somehow Stalin got in there somewhere and I don't know how he got in
there. He may have been later, but he's
mixed up in my mind with these three and Tojo and Mussolini and Hitler, but I
did not discuss the war. It was just
something that, it was there in the background and we were all living by it and
you know, that was it, and we were conserving.
SH: Go ahead and explain about how you changed
your draft status and the process that it took you to get to the military.
CB: Well, I went in for my physical and I passed
the physical.
SH: Did you go to Camden?
CB: I went to Camden. I lived in Collingswood, went home, they told
me what day I had to report and I went in and reported and then I went home
again and then somehow I got some orders, or something, and believe it or not,
I got on the train in Camden and I had no idea.
I should have been put on the Philadelphia and gone right down to
Bainbridge but I got on in Camden and that train went all over everywhere, we
had to get off, take the ferry boat to over from New Castle and get on the
train again down in Wilmington and then go on down to Bainbridge, and down I
went. Is that where you want me to go
next? You want to know all that happened
down there? Well, I got down there and
they marched us in and they cut our hair and sheared it all off and then they
put us in this big old long barracks and they put some guy in charge of
us. I think his name was Patera and he
was very Italian and very big and very gruff and they gave us this rolled up
sack and then we got clothes and other, but the worst looking thing is the
underwear. The jeans were too big. They weren't like jeans today. They didn't have the thing, they were just
blue jeans and with blue chambray shirt and this hat, which they pulled down
over your head because you were shaved up there, and you didn't want your head
to show and I got in there. Well, then,
he got us all out and ran us around something called the grinder and I thought,
"This is terrible," and we'd ran and we did this and we did exercises and oh,
on and on, then we started to march.
Well, I was up at the head of the line and I didn't know. I didn't know my left foot from my right but
I had one hell of my time, pardon the expression. Well, this annoyed me because I always wanted
to be good and I decided I have got to get this, so whenever I had any time
off, I did this, I'm talking to myself, did my own marching. Well, pretty soon ... I had led this
squad. I think every line was a squad
and then this was the platoon when the squads got together and you had two
platoons. Anyway, but pretty soon, I was
up in the corner here and I really got kind of good at this, because I practiced
a lot, and so pretty soon I got to be platoon leader and then I got to be, I
guess, captain, which was in charge of both platoons but under whoever this
leader was we had. Anyhow, I had a
wonderful time, because at Rutgers, I did have to take gym at Rutgers and we
had, you know, stockade, you had to climb up the ropes and over this thing and
fall down the far side and then wander through these ugly looking mazes and
what have you and I had done that fairly well at Rutgers and I was pretty good
at it there and I got better and better and finally it was all over and I don't
know whether we were there eight weeks or nine weeks and oh, I had grown my
hair back. I was a 140 pounds skinny
stick when I went in and when I came out I weighed 153 pounds and I had some
muscle and I really felt, for my first time in my life I felt attractive. I used to think I was ugly as a kid. My father used Vaseline Hair Tonic on my
hair, it wasn't tonic, it was grease. It
was like Vaseline and I was always plastered down like this. It was terrible and I wore glasses because of
my eye and I always thought I was just an ugly little kid. I thought I was like, there was a guy in the
"Our Gang" camp comedies, Alfalfa. Do
you know Alfalfa? I felt I looked like
Alfalfa, but a little worse and I never did feel attractive until I got out of
the navy and when I got out of the navy, I thought I was gorgeous and that's
the truth. Oh, it was wonderful and then
I forgot about having to look attractive and thought about other things in
life. You go home and you got, I don't
know whether we got thirty days leave or fifteen days and then you came back to
Bainbridge and you went in the front gate and they said, "Go to OGU," which
meant Outgoing Unit. So you went in
there and they assign you to a barracks and gave you some bedding again and so
forth and then they interviewed you.
Well, at this particular time, everybody was going in, they were
shifting everybody to what they called the CBs and landing crafts for the
Pacific. I mean, they were shifting
everybody to San Diego, that was the disembarkation point. I guess we had landed at Normandy and the
European war looked good and the navy was thinking about shifting people to the
Pacific and this did not appeal to me. I
always wanted a nice clean ship and I was not gonna be on one of these little
landing crafts and I didn't want CBs. I
think ... I was still kind of innocent, but it sort of, I had in my mind that
they went on shore and they built little huts and you sat there and the Japs shot
down at you and this was not what I was going to do, and you just stayed on the
shore and then the army came along and you kept ferrying the army people in
there and meanwhile you stayed on shore and built these little huts. Anyway, it was not appealing so, while they
were interviewing me, I told them all about my teaching experience in solid
geometry and trigonometry. I couldn't
get over that, so the next thing I know, they came down and got me out of my
bunk and said you had to go up and see this chief somebody or other, and I
thought Chief, it was Chief Petty Officer.
Well, I went up and I saw this man.
Well this was a salt from way back, I mean, this was the epitome of the
Navy. He was all dressed in khakis, not
whites, and a hat with something on it and it was just like an admiral to
me. Anyway, he says, "I understand you
taught." I said, "Oh, yes, solid
geometry and trigonometry." He said,
"Well," he said, "I'm giving a course down here in navigation for
quartermasters, plus we have all these people in OGU and we have to teach them
something because they are here for three days or so. We have to interview them and then after we
interview them, we have to make up rosters and tell them where they go and
everything," and he said, "We've got these people hanging around here for three
days, so were gonna give them indoctrination classes." I said, "Oh," and he said, "I would like you
to teach survival at sea." Now that's
what he said to me. So he said, "Do you
think you can teach that?" I said,
"Well, I don't know. I did, I didn't
know solid geometry or trigonometry." He
said, "Oh, we have a book here." He
said, "You take this home, back to the barracks, and I'll enroll you in this
class with the quartermasters and you can teach these people survival at
sea." So I read the book and the next
day I had sixty people in front of me and I had four of them, I had four
classes. I taught the same thing each
class but I told them just what I had read.
I sounded like an old salt. I
told them exactly what to do and it was fascinating. Anyway, I stayed there and I learned how to
navigate and then finally, I got bored with that. I went home every weekend. I had every weekend off, I went home and had
a marvelous time, up to Philadelphia, Camden it was close. Then a friend of mine in OGU, he was doing
something there. He said, "Listen,
they've got at lot of neat little billets coming down at wherever the offices
that you go from," and he said, "Come on down with me, I want to pick someplace
to go, because this is gonna be the end of my deal here and you're close." I said, "I'm close?" He said, "They're gonna ship you out pretty
soon." So I went down and all these
little billets were up on the bulletin board and I looked up and down the
bulletin board and there was one with YMS 400 out of New York and I said, "What
is a YMS?" Well, I found out it was a
minesweeper and then I drew back and then I thought, "Well, out of New York,
this couldn't be too bad because I'm sure that harbor is protected and we
probably just ran up and down the harbor of New York sweeping for mines and
this would be delightful." So I signed
up for it, and they shipped me out. The
thing I didn't know was "out of New York" didn't mean right in New York, it
meant "way out of New York." I told you
I was innocent. So they shipped me out
to New York and I went to Pier 92. Do
you want to hear all of this junk? I
went to Pier 92. Do you know of it? Anyway this is a pier at the end of 42nd
Street out into the Hudson. Cruise ships
used to leave from it, but now it was a navy bunkhouse, and I went in there and
they assigned me a bunk and this is the first time ... not a bunk, it was not
exactly a hammock, it had springs but you rolled your thing out on it, but
there were five or six on top of each other.
I mean that place was loaded.
That was another place they didn't know what to do with you. You got there and you had these orders to go
to YMS 400 and other people were going other places so they put me in there and
then they said, "Well, you have to do something," so they put me ... when I got
out of Bainbridge I got this little wheel to put on my jumper, which was a
quartermaster striker thing out of seaman second class, so there's a little
quarter inch striker thing here so they looked at that and I guess they figured
I was important and if they didn't I must have told them, but anyway, they put
me in charge of a scullery crew. I had
no idea what this was. Down I went and
it's really nice. I had to wear my
whites and then I had five or six other people underneath of me and they ran
this machine, this dishwashing machine, and it came up and this one would
scrape the stuff off and he'd put the dishes here and the tray over here and
then this guy would stack the dishes and ran it through this little machine and
all these came down and then the guy over here would pick them up, put them
back in the racks again, like milk bottle racks and this was delightful. So I ran this, and you only had to run for
one meal, so I ran it and that was sort of like for lunch and then when you're
finished you went back and then you went down to the liberty quarters and you
asked for a chit and out you went, and then you always had a twenty-four hour
chit so the next day you did not have to be back until after lunch. So that night you would look up on the board
and you would maybe have the dinner scullery duty. Well, anyway, I did that and I kept waiting
for my orders. Now this is in early
November. So I took the train down to
New Brunswick and I also got forty-eight hour passes. I took the train down to New Brunswick, went
over, had a date with Vinny. If I didn't
have to be back at night I would stay over at the fraternity house and then I
go back to New York and then if I didn't really want to go to New Brunswick, I
did all the shows in New York. I had a
wonderful time and in those days, if you're in the navy uniform, you got into
places free. Not just USO, I never had
to go to the USO because the shows you could get in if you went there late and
there were seats, which there always were, because people were coming and
going, and you got into the shows free.
I went to the movies at the Roxie, Radio City Music Hall, I just had a
wonderful time and time went on. When I
got the weekend pass, I went down to Collingswood, which was my home, and
visited with my folks and my father would take me to the Engineer's Club and
Walt Whitman Hotel in Camden and we just had a marvelous time and he kept
telling everybody in the office I was going off on this minesweeper. Well, two weeks later, I'd appear again and I
could see my father was a little annoyed.
My mother was happy and I wasn't sure he really wanted me to go, but he
also had told everybody I was going.
Well, Christmas came and I went home again for Christmas and New Year's
came and I went home for New Year's and then one day I got back and I went down
to sign up for scullery duty and they said, "No, no, no, there will be a
taxicab here for you." So I thought, "Finally
I'll get in," and I still in my mind, I was gonna sweep New York Harbor. So I got in this taxicab with two other
people, I didn't know who they were, two other sailors and off we went. We went over the [George Washington] bridge
and got into Jersey City and then we went to Bayonne and I was thinking, "Where
are we going?" So, finally they pulled
up, and we had what we called Liberty ships in those days. The merchant marines built them and they did. They were wonderful. They were the backbone. But here were these Liberty ships, and they
did all kinds of cargo, and so forth, plus I learned, they also ferried people
to where they were supposed to go. So I
got on this Liberty ship, oh, it was cold and rainy in Bayonne. New York was terrible and I got on this ship
and they gave me my own cabin. I ate
with the officers and the two other people who were with me and finally we set
sail and I'm wondering, "What am I doing on this big tub?" Well, a couple of days later, they wouldn't
tell you. Nobody would tell you
anything. Everything was secret then,
and it got warmer and warmer and warmer and the next thing I know, we pulled
into this harbor and I'm in Trinidad.
That started my ... and then, well, they got me off the ship and I saw all
of these people in these Caribbean kind of homes, which were open with just
wooden doors that you could close and they're painted gorgeous colors. Oh, this was fascinating and they dragged me
onto the base and they put me in this big barracks and I was the only one there. I don't know what happened to the other two
people but I was the only one there and they ...
So I unpacked my things and rolled out the mattress that they gave me
and I thought, "Well, I'm here for a while, when am I gonna get on the ship?" Well, all of a sudden, somebody came up,
called my name, and here's this guy with a little braid on, and was the
captain, "Bishop," he yells. So I said,
"Yes," and he says, "I'm Captain McLaren, you're my quartermaster," and I said,
"Oh." So he dragged me off there onto
this little ship and checked me all in and then he said, "Now I want you to go
up and meet Basset, he's been waiting for you for two months, his eighteen
months" ... you had eighteen months duty and then you could get a thirty day
leave if you were out of the states and Basset had been waiting two months for
me to come as his replacement. So I went
up and he showed me the chartroom and so forth then he started talking about
the flag bin, and I said, "What is this?"
Well, they have all these little flags there with squares and stripes, and
what have you, and you're supposed to run these up when you're doing something
special in formation and you don't want to break radio silence and you don't
want your light flashing where somebody else could read it. Well, I had never been really a quartermate
striker. All I had learned to do was
navigate. So I said, "Oh, I can't do
that." So Basset said, "Well, how fast
are you on the light?" and I said, "On what light?" This is the truth. It was terrible. So then Basset disappeared and pretty soon
comes back with the captain and the captain says, "You can't signal?" I said, "No," he said "Can you do semaphore?"
and I said, "No, I can't do semaphore.
Is that this thing?" he said, "Yes." I said, "No." He said "Well, what
can you do? Why are you a
quartermaster?" I said, "Because I can
navigate." He says, "Nobody can
navigate. A quartermaster doesn't learn
to navigate." I said, "That's what I
learned to do," so he started asking me questions about navigation and I could
answer them all and dead reckoning, and so forth, so he liked this [guy] Basset
and he really wanted Basset to get his time off and you never get reassigned to
your same ship again, you went somewhere else and he knew he wasn't gonna get
him back and he certainly didn't want him to leave with me there but there was
nothing else he could do. So Basset left
and I was the quartermaster striker and he insisted that l learned, first of
all, how to do the light, the Morse Code.
So he took the signal man, he said, "You teach him this." The signalman was due to get off, too. He told the signalman he could not leave
until I could read Morse Code on the light and so the signal man taught me. This was a crash course and it's one of those
things like typing or something. It goes
so slow and so slow and you think," I am never gonna do this," and then all of
sudden it comes and the biggest problem is because you don't think ... I was a
great reader but you think and seeing the whole word and with the signal you're
saying to yourself, "RAS ,"and then you mix the next letter and then T and you
think, "What does that spell?" and it's terrible and then all of a sudden, one
day it comes to you and you put them together, so I learned how to signal. I never did learn how to run those flags but
I did learn how to look at the book and put them all, line them all up in the
flag bin and so that they'd be ready and I never learned semaphore, but I used
my navigation and the captain was very pleased with that because he didn't have
anybody else on board. We had three more
officers and none of them could navigate, but I could. So we had a great time. Anyway, that's how I got on board the ship.
SH: Did you ever consider OCS?
CB: No. I
was really, well, I considered this when I went to school, in fact when I went
to Rutgers I thought, "You know, I'm seventeen and I'll get this college under
my belt, I have at least a year up there," in fact I was counting on two
years. I thought I would get a
deferment. I would start my second year
and get a deferment and finish my second year and then the navy would be
clamoring for me. Well, it didn't quite
work out that way and I never considered it again. After my little episode by Kirkpatrick
Chapel, I just got in the navy, and then I got through boot camp and thought I
was so gorgeous and why bother with anything else? Enjoy the world, and I really liked
traveling. It was wonderful. I was not seasick and I loved the duty I had
and if you're quartermaster, you're up on the bridge and the captain really
depends on you. I always felt I sort of
owned that ship, you know, the rest of the people were just there to work for
me. None of them were in my crew except
who was up on the deck, I mean up on the bridge but they were sort of down
below and out of the way and they were the things that made it possible for me
and the captain to run the ship.
SH: How many were on board?
CB: Thirty-five, forty, it was a small. It was only a 138 feet long, wooden bottom
and people down below and they were seamen, gunnery men, and so forth, and I
was up on the bridge and my crew is the yeoman, the radio man, the sound man,
the sonar man and myself.
SH: Were they all from the Northeast like
yourself?
CB: The soundman was from Boston, that was that
Harry Marshall Nolan. We had had one
before and he was replaced. The
signalman was from Pennsylvania. The
yeoman was from Wilmington, Delaware. I
can't remember where the radioman was from and, of course, I was from New
Jersey. That was about it. But the people down below, the motormacs and
the people that were in that crew, they were Pennsylvanians, so forth, but the
seamen were mostly Virginia and Georgia and that area.
SH: Where was the captain from?
CB: He was from Connecticut.
SH: Was he a career man or Coast Guard ...
CB: I don't think he was a career man, but he was
very good. He's a wonderful captain
really. A lot of people didn't like him,
I liked him, but, of course, we associated a lot up above. He appreciated me and you know when you're
appreciated you like anybody.
SH: When you went down to Trinidad, not knowing
where you were going at that point, was there any concern on the Liberty ship,
did you travel in convoy, or were you alone?
What about submarines?
CB: I think we traveled on that Liberty ship all
by ourselves. I do not remember being in
any kind of a convoy. I don't know
whether it was because of the period, you see, this is January 1944 and for
some reason I do not remember that and yet I knew when we got to Trinidad why I
was down there and that was particularly for convoys and that sort of
thing. But I don't remember myself being
convoyed.
SH: Can you talk a little bit then of what your
duties were and where you sailed ...
CB: Oh, yes, we'll never finish. Trinidad is a peculiar ... Venezuela is down
here and Trinidad is shaped like that, right off the coast of Venezuela, and
then there are three big rock formations here and that, the United States mined
it themselves. They mined this end with
moored mines so that it was completely closed.
Up at this end they mined between all of these rocks and Venezuela,
except for one entrance, and that was a deep channel and the gulf in there is
called the Gulf of Paria and the concept was, and this happened although I got
down there late, the concept was in the previous eighteen months before I got
there, that cruisers and battleships and aircraft ...
---------------------------------------END
OF SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE------------------------------------
CB: The concept was that battleships and
cruisers, and so forth, could be convoyed down there. They would find little snags in engines, or
what have you, on the way down. They
could go into this harbor which was now completely protected by mines except
for sonar and radar and I don't know what kind of electronic surveillance
between this one entrance to the harbor and the Gulf of Paria was the biggest
secure harbor in the world and a battleship could go in there and another
battleship and three cruisers and they could do maneuvers in the harbor. They couldn't do everything they could do at
sea but at least they could turn around and not bump into each other and they
could get their new crews used to running the ship and turning it, and what
have you, and that's what they used it for, for eighteen months. By the time I got down there, as I said, the
war in Europe was closing down. We had
landed at Normandy, see, I'm '45 now, I mean this is the year 1945, we've
landed there, we're winning. So our
problem, and our duty was, our duty as a minesweeper was to go out from section
base daily or every other day and sweep around the harbor in areas where mines
might have drifted a little bit. See,
these were moored mines and they're on rocks and so forth and then they have a
cable and the mine is on the end of the cable and if you cut the cable, by
Geneva Convention the mine is no longer supposed to be active. I don't know how it works, but all those
little points that stick out on them, they're no longer active so there was no
fear of the mines that might have come loose.
There was a fear that some of these could drift when the rocks down at
the bottom drifted and so we had to sweep around the entrance there and outside
the entrance and then around the harbor in the more shallow areas to see if
there were any mines, and we never found one then. So that was our duty, plus, we also, whenever
there was a mine report down in Curacao and Aruba, they were big refinery
centers, the oil came up from Venezuela, in Maracaibo and that area. They had little lake tankers which had a very
shallow draft like four or five feet and these lake tankers would carry the oil
out of Lake Maracaibo or Gulf of Maracaibo, or whatever it was called, Gulf of
Venezuela, right over to Curacao and Aruba and they would refine it there
before it was shipped to wherever we needed oil and gas, and every once in a
while, there would be a report that maybe there was a German submarine in the
area and then, or that the submarine was still there, then we had to pretend we
were a sub chaser. We also had to sweep
mines and we would go to Aruba and sweep in the harbor of Aruba and we'd sweep
in the harbor of Curacao and we never found anything there either. We chased subs, we never found a sub, but we
did a lot of chasing and it was great fun.... and that was one of the, the big
problem with our ship was, we had this gigantic gun on the front of the ship, a
three inch gun, and you should never have a three inch gun on a 138 foot
ship. So we were top heavy and we had a
wooden bottom and we were shallow draft, again, so that we wouldn't encounter
mines and when we went out to sea, it was terrible. I mean, we would turn actually sidewise,
you'd look out here and the water is practically halfway up the deck at you, I
mean, all the water, not just splashing up, and we had a lot of seasick sailors
at the time but it was really fun and exciting.
I enjoyed it. I went into the
inside bridge instead of the outside bridge and that was mainly our duty. Then all of a sudden, two months after I got
on the ship or three months, VE Day and
all of that was done. We didn't have to
worry about that, but then we got orders to sweep our own mines up, the ones
that we had laid, and I don't know, I think there were supposed to be 490 mines
down at the one end and I can't remember how many at the other end and we had
maps. They sent us all these maps from
Washington, showed us where each of these mines was so we went down to the low
end, down by Port of Spain in the San Bernardino, or whatever it was called,
and we swept and we swept and we swept.
We never did find a mine.
Never. So then we came up to the
other entrance and we started sweeping there and the concept of a minesweeper,
you have this gear that runs out the back, it's just on a big, long cable and
there are knives or teeth in them and the concept is that you cut the mine,
that means that it's no longer can be activated and then you sink it with
gunfire. Well, first of all you always
wonder if when it cut loose, whether it did, and then you travel. The first ship went in close to shore where
nobody could lay a mine, this is on a moored mine, then his tail came out here
into the area outside of that and the next ship followed at a distance behind
that so that if you cut a mine, he was far enough behind to veer in and then
shoot this mine and detonate it. Well,
we finally cut four mines and I'll never forget when we shot the first
one. Everybody is sitting there
wondering, "Is this thing gonna blow?"
It just sank and that would happen to all four of them, that was the
end, and we found out later, well, they told us later, they already knew that
many of these mines had drifted loose.
They had found them over in Spain, in North Africa, and apparently they
never did blow up, they're not like land mines.
Whatever the Geneva Convention said they should do, that was the way
they were made, and then for magnetic mines, which is what submarines lay in
the harbors if they get in, you had this big long tail that went out, oh it
went out for miles and it pulsed and it was supposed to ... you didn't follow
each other then. You went by yourself
and the other ship stayed far enough away and this was supposed to, you were
supposed to be able to travel over it because, again, by Geneva Convention,
these were supposed to be weighted somehow so that they were at a certain
depth, because they really wanted to blow up a big battleship or something and
this had to be down far enough where it was gonna do damage, so that with our
shallow draft, we were supposed to be able to pass over the top of it. And then
this tail that pulses increased as it went and it was supposed to blow it up
far behind it. We never did find one of
those. We went down to Maracaibo and swept
through there for a while and never did find a magnetic mine, which is a good
thing because later on when we got to Hawaii, they told us that the thing was
all set wrong and we'd probably blow ourselves up.
SH: Tell us about that beach, we have pictures
that you shared with us about VE Day, when you were in Trinidad. Now can you then tell us how this progresses
for you?
CB: Well, that was just a big celebration and we
sort of knew it was coming and you know it was a big party and we partied and
the next day we went about our duty. You
got over things in the navy fast. You
did what you were supposed to do and this was, and they were all responsible
for it. They fed you, they clothed you,
they cut your hair, they pulled your teeth and you had no worries except
drinking beer or writing a letter home or drinking coffee or what have
you. It was a very quiet life and VE Day
was over and that was over and of course, Roosevelt died right after that, I
think, I think, yes, because I think, was he alive on VE Day? I think so, no, about a month before. Well, we had been through that, that was
traumatic for us. I do remember
everybody was very upset at that. You
know, what are we going to do now? This
man is, well, part of us were, he had been carrying us through the war, winning
in Europe and then all of a sudden we're left and this little man from Kansas
is gonna be in there and he was not impressive as a vice president, just not
impressive. That was a worry. I think we were more concerned about that
than we were jubilant over VE Day, and then of course, as I said, we went in
and swept then. Do you want funny
stories? Well, after VE Day when they
decided they're gonna send us to sweep two more little bays, or whatever you
call them, in Venezuela where some oil was exported. They told us we had to get out there. Well, my captain was the prime captain for
about five minesweepers, so we got underway and we were what you called SOPAs,
Senior Officer Present. So off we went
and we're cruising off Venezuela when all of a sudden we got a radio message
that we could not go in there until we got rid of our, all of our, whatever
explosives we had on board. So the
captain had to stop the whole convoy, we had to point in different directions
and move apart from each other and then we had to shoot all the shells for the
three inch gun which was up in front of the bridge and doing the three inch
gun, we had never done this before and these shells are long like this and this
big a round, well they're three inches in diameter, but they're big looking and
you have a man who's called "hot shell man" and he gets dressed up like a
baseball umpire. He's got big gloves up
here and big gloves up here and mask and everything. We had a seaman who was the hot shell man. He was not too bright. I used to have to write his letters home
because he couldn't write but he was a nice guy. Well, anyway, we get up there and they get
these things and the gunnery officer is up there and the captain is up there
and every time we were in, this is called "general quarters," everybody had to
put on their life jackets and my job then was to be on the wheel, because I
knew more about running the wheel than anybody else, and I got on the wheel and
the glass is in front and so then I heard the gunner go, "Fire." Well, they had put the shell in then closed
the thing and I heard him yell "Fire."
Well, they did something rather here and all of a sudden this huge
explosion goes on. The shell goes out
the front of the gun, the back opens up, and the hot casing comes out and the
hot shell man steps aside, it rolls over the deck, hits the captain on the leg,
burns it. Oh, it was terrible, not only
that, it broke the glass in the chart house.
I was standing there wondering why I'm still alive. It was awful, you could feel the whole ship
shudder. You were sure that we were
breaking apart, into pieces. Because we
were wooden bottomed, they called YMS's "the splinter fleet" and we really felt
we were going into splinters. Well, we
got over that. I don't remember what we
did with the rest of the hot shells, I
mean with the rest of the shells but we were supposed to get rid of them. Then we had to get rid of the depth charges
we had for chasing submarines. We had K
guns and Y guns and the gunnery guy had gotten hurt and he was back in the base
in the hospital. So we had a gunner's
mate striker and we also had a gunnery officer who didn't know very much anyway
and he decided ... I don't know what we were supposed to do with these things but
there are two settings on them and one of them is how far out you throw it from
the ship and the second one is the depth that which it is supposed to go
off. Well, you would think these would
have been set to throw them way far and way deep. But they weren't set that way. They were set however they came on board and
they had never been off their little racks, so they put these on these guns and
I heard the, the captain was down there nursing his leg, I heard somebody yell,
"Fire one," and this thing went off, blew up over there and then next one went
off. Well, it didn't go very far. It fell on the deck. It fell on the deck and it rolled off the
back of the ship. Well, on a minesweeper
you don't have gunnels on the back because this is where your gear goes out
streaming so it just rolled off and then it exploded, and the whole back of the
ship shattered. The captain came running
out on his sore leg and we were in terrible straits by this time. They called down, from down below and said
some water was coming in. What we did
was we blew one of the ... we had twin screws, this was for maneuverability, and
a ship that small didn't usually have twin screws, but we did. Well, we wrecked one completely and bent the
other one so we had to signal back to base on the radio, back to base, that we
were disabled and we were turning SOPAs over to the 312 and we had to limp back
to the harbor on this bent screw. Well,
that ended up our sweeping duty and everything else and we had to go and dry
dock, and we went in dry dock for repairs.
We were in dry dock for a long time and we just spent time in the
barracks, in the section base, while the ship was, plus we had to go down
everyday ... One of those pictures is people chipping. You get barnacles on a wooden ship just like
you do on a metal ship and I remember one day I had to chip and I sat there with
this ugly looking little tool chipping away at this thing and I got myself out
of that in a hurry. I knew we were going
someplace so I told them the charts were in a terrible mess and I had to go
down and redo all the charts. I worked
like a dog. I did charts for places I
never dreamed of going, but it got me out of chipping, and then we took
off. We had no idea where we were going
but we knew we would go through the Panama Canal and up to California and then
someplace in the Pacific, and that's what we did. That was a delightful trip through the Panama
Canal and up. We were a small enough
ship, we should have been a coastal minesweeper, we should not have been called
a YMS, we should have been called an AMc, and we were always kept in sight of
shore even though we were sailing in the Pacific ocean. We went into Nicaragua and we went into
Manzanillo, Mexico, Corinto, Nicaragua and we finally ended up in Newport
Beach, California, Balboa and we went into a private shipyard because we had a
wooden bottom and the navy didn't really know how to take care of wooden
bottomed ships and we went in there to a private shipyard. Everybody who had a year's duty but had not
been transferred, they all got thirty days off.
I had not had quite a year on the ship and so this sonar man and I just
enjoyed, we stayed on the ship, we didn't have to do anything. The people took care of the private
shipyard. A navy ship has to have some
navy personnel on it, just has to be, you can never leave it alone, so, we
split duties and took liberties and had a wonderful time. I described some of that in there so I won't
go through it all again. But we went to
a dude ranch. We went to San Juan,
Capistrano and down to Laguna Beach, which is where they were shooting lots of
movies at that time. It was one of the
locales they used and I just had a marvelous time in California and then we
took off and this time we went on a convoy, because we were going to Hawaii.
SH: What year, do you remember ...
CB: Now I'm, November 1945 ... the first of
December of 1945. We spent almost two
months in California. We left Trinidad
probably in August and it took us till late September to get up to Newport and
then October and November we spent in Newport, California and then we took off
for Hawaii, and that was exciting. Being
a small ship, you know, we can't carry much fuel, so we had to be in a convoy
with the tanker and we had to have a ship that had medical officers on. We had just a corpsman on ours and there were
several little ships going, but we had to have this supporting group going
along ... and you know the Pacific was supposed to be so tranquil, well, we
happened to hit when it wasn't tranquil and I spent just hours on the
wheel. This big tanker had to come up
alongside to put fuel on you and you had these lines going across, plus the sea
was stormy and as I said we were a top heavy ship. We still had our three inch gun, no shells,
and we were back and forth and you were always afraid of breaking the line, and
you know, I would spent five or six hours on the wheel, keeping us so that we
would not run into the ship next-door, or break the line and the wheel had an
electric thing so that you could run the rudders by just pushing the wheel like
that, like power steering, but it also ran by ropes and I could feel it better
by rope, especially when we're tossing out of the water, you no longer have a
feel and if you're on electric, you know the wheel, it either gonna spin like
crazy or you're gonna hold on to it, but you had no idea for a couple of
minutes, but if you had it on cables, you can feel everything that it does, so
I would put it off electricity and put it on cables, and then I could tell I
was holding it where it was supposed to be in position and it was deadly, and
you were tired. We stood two eight hour
watches each and then we had eight hours off and you never saw the same
people. They slept at different times
and they did, you had to wear your life jacket the whole time. We landed in Hawaii, I was really glad that
trip was over and I was glad to be in Hawaii.
I'd heard about it all my life, and we went into the navy yard there,
again for practically thirty days, and that was to fix secret equipment that
they couldn't do at the private shipyard back in Balboa, because it was secret
navy equipment. That's where they told
us that all of these electronic things that we had to run that magnetic tail
were all set wrong. So then they set
them right, but we were not so sure that they were any better than the other
people.
SH: What about Hawaii, because that's where Pearl
Harbor, now you're in there, what three years later? What was still there or not there or what do
you remember seeing ?
CB: The navy base was just a navy base. I didn't have any desire to go see ... I guess
I was a terrible serviceman, I was a terrible navy man, I guess, I had no, I
did not want to go see the wreckage, and so forth. It had all been rebuilt. We were doing everything out of Hawaii for
the Pacific, or at least it had been done.
We were out in the Philippines then, pretty well secured because
remember VE Day had happened. I mean, VJ
Day, yes, that war was over. It was just
another navy base and we had no duty then except that some sailors had to be on
at all times because it was our ship. It
was a commissioned ship. I just
thoroughly enjoyed myself. We went
everywhere. I ate at ... I spent all my
pay there I had saved up, eating at classy restaurants. There were only two hotels downtown, the
Royal Hawaiian, this is on Oahu, and the Moana and they were both ritzy hotels
and they had this beach in front and there were all sorts of people on this
beach, nice looking people, and you walked out in the water and then you walked
further and you walked further and you walked further. You could walk a mile out into the water and
you're still, weren't up to your waist.
I had never seen water like this before and I just had a marvelous
time. We went out to Diamond Head, which
was the ritzy living area at that time, and the University of Hawaii was there and
I decided then and there and this Harry that was with me, we decided we were
gonna go back and I wasn't gonna go back to Rutgers, I was gonna go to the
University of Hawaii and the people were so pretty. Everybody was pretty out there. It's just amazing. I just had a marvelous time. In fact, Mac, who started me on this, Harry
Nolan thing again, when he sent me his message, he said, "Do you still collect
menus?" That is from the Royal Hawaiian
and I'm thinking, "Who is this, what is he talking about?" Well, it seems one time, I guess, when Harry
couldn't go or something, I took Mac to the Royal Hawaiian. I mean to go eat with me for dinner and he
was nervous through the whole thing because it was mostly commissioned officers
in there. I think I was probably second
class quartermaster by this time, but I never felt inferior and you know, it
was my money and I was in the Royal Hawaiian and I was pretty well up in the
ranks, I was still just a lowly petty officer, but I was proud of myself and
the rest. Upper class just didn't exist
and I just had a wonderful time and I must have, at the end of it, asked for
the menu. I remember now, because I had
a menu from Liao Chai's and several others.
I must have asked for the menu and this guy never ate his meal. He was nervous through the whole thing, but
that's what he remembers for fifty-five years, and I had to have him explain it
the second message I left that there.
Anyway, we left Hawaii, we better leave Hawaii or I'll never get
done. Then we sailed. The Pacific was pretty. We went to a little island called Eniwetok,
it was an atoll and that was fascinating.
But the 312 had gotten there ahead of us and they had broken out a
picnic. We hadn't had a picnic the whole
time I was on the ship and they had taken their supplies that they got in
Hawaii and they had broken out a picnic on the beach. It's just delightful. I can remember this and that was bluest water
I ever saw and the whitest sand and at that point we finally learned where we
were going. The 312 went up to Saipan
and Tinian and we went to Guam and then off into the Philippines, and we got to
the Philippines, we were down at Samar Island or Leyte, or right in between,
Tacloban was the name of the area down there, and we went into a small bay in
there and stayed, stayed and stayed.
There was nothing to do. There
was no city. We had movies come to the
ship, we had books come to the ship and we just went to the movies, on the base
sometimes, sometimes on the ship and drank beer and I went to Easter service, I
remember, and fainted. I only fainted
twice in my life and that was one time I fainted and they had drag me back to
the ship and I don't know to this day why I fainted. We finally go orders to do some sweeping and
went up to Luzon and we swept in the place called Ragay Gulf, where they had
reported possible laying of mines, and it was nice, and we didn't do anything
but swim off the ship and sweep around the whole thing. Then we went back and about a month later we
got orders to sweep in Mindanao and they put a Japanese man on our ship and he
had seen them lay mines somewhere and he was gonna lead us to it. Well, I think he lied. I think he just decided that he was going to,
he's gonna get a ride of his life out of this, so we went over in Mindanao and
I remember we had a big thing with the natives there. We landed and I wrote it all out in that
thing when I was writing to these people.
It was just delightful. They gave
us a picnic and then they took us inland and the thing I remember the most
about it was they lived in little grass huts but beyond this, in the jungle,
was this gorgeous Catholic church and you'd wonder how did this get out
there? There's not another wooden
structure or anything there and here is this stone church with the windows and,
I'm not Catholic so I didn't, but you go in and they got all the idols in those
little niches and this just blew my mind.
It was fun. Then I got my orders
and I came back on a big, old, troop ship.
I wrote several hundred letters trying to get off the ship, because my
eighteen months was up and I wanted to go home, and I finally got off the ship
and came back.
SH: What did you come back on? Do you remember the name of it?
CB: I don't.
I didn't want to remember. I
never saw so many people in one place.
It was worst than Pier 92. At
least in Pier 92, you can walk out the front door and here you were just on the
ship. I remember they took pictures and
I bought a picture and here are 8000 people on the gunnel of the ship and I thought,
"How could I possibly find myself if I wanted to?" and I didn't have another
friend on the ship, just a casual acquaintance I had been talking with and then
I came back on a troop train. We landed
in San Francisco and they put me on this train and the train, it had wooden
seats, it did have bunks, but it had wooden seats and we traveled on this
train. We get into bunks at night then
we get back on the wooden seats and we went down through Santa Fe and Texas. I could remember traveling across Texas and
the one thing that impressed me was we passed this, you know Texas is flat or
where we were is flat. I was gonna say
hillside, but it's not, it was just acreage and there must have been 10,000
P38s there, just all parked and I guess they eventually rusted. I don't know what they were ever gonna do
with all those P38s, but there they were, field and field and field. I mean, you just travel past these and you
thought, "God, did they ever use all of these?" and I remember that. Then I got to Lido Beach, Long Island and
they discharged me and I got on the train, came home, and started my new life.
SH: Now when did you get back to New Jersey?
CB: I went in on June 24, 1944 and I got back to
New Jersey on June 26, 1946. So I was in
two years and two days.
SH: What did you do when you first got back and
then, what happened to the University of Hawaii is the next question?
CB: I never got there. That's what happened to it. Well, no, what happened was, I had started a
correspondence relationship with a girl and so I hadn't really told "Vinny"
off. I didn't want to tell her off. I had just stopped writing to her. This is dreadful. So I got home and my father met me in Camden,
or wherever, or maybe Philadelphia, at home and I asked where my mother and
brother were. He said, "They're down at
the shore, the beach." So I said, "Oh,
what are they doing down there?" He
said, "Well, we're spending the next two weeks there." So, I said "Fine." So he picked up some things at the house and
we went down to Beach Haven and I got down there and there's my mother and
brother and we had all these greetings, and so forth and then they said, "We
have to go down to the train." So I was
thinking, "Who else is coming? It must
be my aunt. It must be somebody." It was "Vinny." They had invited "Vinny" down. Well, I didn't know what to do then, so I had
to entertain her for ... I guess she was working that summer. I had to entertain her for the weekend, or
what have you, and I did, but this was very testy. Anyway, we put her back on the train and I
spent the rest of the time on the beach and then I went and played golf with my
mother a lot and I played on the weekends with my father. They were both good golfers and I just had a
nice little summer and I could hardly wait to get back to Rutgers. Hawaii disappeared into the netherland and I
went back to Rutgers.
SH: Now this correspondence, was the young woman
from Rutgers or NJC? Was she someone
that you had met prior to leaving?
CB: Oh, you mean the second girl? No, this girl went to the University of
Pennsylvania and I don't know ... When I was in boot camp, I had this friend who
had gone to the University of Pennsylvania and this girl was a neighbor of his,
or something, and her father was president of Inland Steel, or something like
that. Her name was Marjorie
"Something." Well, when you're in boot
camp you had plenty of time to write, and I had finished writing to "Vinny" and
so he says, "Write to Marjorie," so I wrote to Marjorie. Well, this is one of those ... you did this
during the war, and you got very friendly with these people and the next time
you were with somebody, in the Navy and you ... so, oh, yeah, "I got a girlfriend
that goes to Penn State, her name is Marjorie."
I have never seen what she looks like except for a little snapshot he
had in his wallet. This is the way it
worked. Well, we wrote off and on and
when I got to Trinidad, all our mail was censored by the captain of the
ship. He was only supposed to look for
you revealing where we were and I know he read more than that because he said
something to me. He said, "You are
giving up this Vinny for this Margie?"
And he did, that's absolutely true.
Well, I didn't even know her, but I was trying to tell her I was in
Trinidad and there was a song "Rum and Coca-Cola" and there's a line in that,
"go down Trinidad," something manana, [spanish for tomorrow] or what have
you. Anyway, so, I wrote this big long
letter to her one day and I said, "I remember the time we had gotten so drunk
at this party, and so forth," which was all a lie and this was a real blatant
lie, and I said, "I just never could drink rum and Coca-Cola," and I said this
about seven times in the letter and I thought this girl ought to get this,
because the song was very popular then.
She didn't get it and she knew I had never been out with her, what did
she think all these malarkey was? In
fact, I think she wrote back to me and said, "What is this?" We didn't correspond much after that. Then one day, I got a letter from her and she
said, "Viola, I know you're in Trinidad."
She said, "You mentioned in one of your letters of going to Scotland
Bay." Scotland Bay was a little swimming
area that the navy went to down in Trinidad.
Why it was called Scotland Bay, I don't know. But she had gone to a party that her father
had given at their home, or what have you, and somebody, there were Navy and
Army personnel there, and somebody mentioned Scotland Bay and she went over and
said, "Scotland Bay, I have a friend who swims in Scotland Bay," and he said
"Oh, that's in Trinidad." So then she
wrote to me and said she knew I was in Trinidad and what all that other BS was
that I had done before. But I never did
meet her. She remains, I can't remember
her last name, and then I got back at Rutgers and by the time I got back there,
I think "Vinny" had gotten the idea that this is not to be and I dated somebody
else, Jane Smith or somebody. I think
her name was Jane Smith, she was down from near New Castle.
SH: Tell us about the comparison, now you're
coming back to Rutgers as a seasoned veteran.
Are you on the GI Bill?
CB: Yes.
SH: Did you go back to the fraternity? Just reintroduce Rutgers to us from an old
man's eyes of twenty-two ...
CB: It was terrible, just terrible. I mean before, you know, I thought I was
something important on campus when I got back there. You would not believe the mess that we
had. All the freshmen were living out in
Raritan Arsenal. The fraternity, I had
gone up once ... I'd gone up to visit "Vinny" in Jersey City, trying to cool
things down and I had stopped and there were people at the fraternity, the
fraternity house was new. We were now on
Bartlett Street, from Union Street, and this house of Kleinschmidt's, there
were some fraternity brothers in there, half of whom I did not know and they
were trying to get upperclassmen to stay in dorms or get dorm rooms so that
they could pledge. Going back to the
pledging business, they could pledge people and one of the things was, they
could get the kids, the freshmen who were out at Raritan Arsenal, and they
could come and live in town this way and this is the first time I got to
thinking about how commercial this dumb fraternity was, but I signed up for a
dorm room and I was put in Pell Hall in the quadrangle, which I liked because
you just walked past Bishop House and right across the street was Bartlett
Street and the fraternity was three houses down Bartlett Street. It was a delightful experience and I got in
with the fraternity brother, mine, the one that I had enjoyed, Charles Heilman
back in my freshman year. We were
together, we had a third roommate, we were in one room now, not a suite, but it
was a good sized room. There were three
desks and three beds. The other guy was
Ray Kingsley and he was a nice guy and we just roomed together and it was great
and I didn't care that much for the fraternity.
You know, there were all these strange people and they were
upperclassmen and then I sort of had in my mind, how did they get to be
upperclassman? How did they get back any
quicker than I did? And you know, they
started before, they may have been a year or two older but how did all these
happen? But they were already entrenched
and back. Then there were all these
other people who had only had one year or a half-year, or something, and they
were all kinds of people, I mean, tall and short, skinny and fat. I didn't know them. The group that I knew and I don't know ... The cafeteria, we didn't start the dining
room until we got the freshmen to move from the Raritan Arsenal over to the
fraternity house and the cafeteria then was a, it was right there alongside of
Pell Hall across from the gym and it was a huge Quonset hut, huge, and the
front of it, they had bricked up the front.
It was like Disney. It was just
like Disney. You had this front wall, of
these bricks and old whatever they were, colonial style, whatever that Rutgers
style is and here these colonial bricks and you walked around the side there
was this black Quonset hut that stretched for miles. Oh, it was terrible. Well, we ate there until we opened the dining
room and then I ate over in the fraternity, and there was a guy in the
fraternity ... you got so that, now you had to make friends with all these
fraternity brothers who were supposed to be really close to you and I had
discovered by then, "this is all a ruse."
It really is a ruse, and they have all this stuff they preached to you,
but now you got all these people here and you got friendly with some and not so
friendly with others and classes were hard to get into, you were busy all the
time, and I remember this guy, Walt Yonkers, and he was a senior that year and
he was on the yearbook and he said ... I don't know, one evening we were there
and he got up and he said he had to go down to do something with the
seniors. I think he was in charge of the
seniors and so he said, "Come along." So
I went along and I helped him out, doing whatever it was that night and there
were still a lot more work to do, so I went down ... and the Scarlet Letter. So I went down again to help him and toward
the end of the year, he said, "How would you like to be senior editor?" I said, "I don't have enough experience," and
he says, "Well, I'm leaving and they don't have a senior editor and it would be
good for you." So I became senior editor
of the yearbook and meanwhile ... I was a joiner ... meanwhile I had gotten onto
Scarlet Key and I liked that, and I enjoyed the people I was with and I enjoyed
the staff of the yearbook and I got less interested in my fraternity because we
were having a big battle then about color, and about expansion, and I was very
liberal minded but I didn't like them expanding because we had this clause in
our fraternity that it was only for Caucasians, period, and back in freshman
year when I first visited Rutgers in '43 there was a Japanese boy or Chinese
boy on campus whose name was Tee Hashizume, I love the name, and he ate in our
fraternity and as a pledge class we asked why ... we called everybody else
brother but this was not brother Tee Hashizume and we asked, "Why?" and they
said, "Because we had just Caucasians."
That kind of annoyed some of us, I don't know if it annoyed all of us
but it annoyed some of us, and then when we got back, I had gotten, the
fraternity had decided to expand, but this wasn't my concept of a
fraternity. I thought the fraternity was
exclusive and they were going to place us in like "Lower Podunk Teachers'
College" and they had a colony started there and they had one started at East
Texas Agricultural Seminary and these little colleges, I figured, "Why are we
expanding there?" We had one at Cornell,
we had one at Yale, wherever we had one, we had one, and I thought, "Why aren't
they picking other ivy-league schools or state universities, why are we doing
all these?" Well, one reason, they
wanted these colonies but two they had, there was some agitation to get rid of
this clause and when you have a colony, they have to buy the old, whatever you
had that existed in the past, and they thought they had now put on a string of
people ... Theta Chi's headquarters was in Trenton. They had put on a string of people who were
traveling men. These were guys who
couldn't get a job and you went to work for your fraternity after you graduate
and they put them on and they carried them.
They made them go out to these little places and start these things, and
the big thing they did was to talk up about our exclusiveness in "all
Caucasians," and this got to annoy me.
Why these little podunks were running around doing this and I didn't
like this idea and I was vice president of the fraternity and I got into a
violent argument. I alienated a lot of
my fraternity brothers and I just decided, you know, I had this friend on the
yearbook from Chi Psi and I would love to be a Chi Psi and I had this other
friend, George Persley and he is in a Jewish Fraternity. He was football manager and I liked him a
lot. I met him through Scarlet Key and I
thought, "I would just as soon be in that fraternity, whatever it was and or a
Chi Phi or an Alpha Chi Rho and here I am a Theta Chi and I don't like half the
people at Theta Chi and I really don't like what they're doing and I'm not
really prejudiced, that I know of," so this just annoyed me and I just decided
to heck with it. I got other things to
do and that's when I really got to spinning and you know, I was on the dance
committee for the junior prom and I went to Inter-Fraternity Council. I got in everything I could get in and I
remember my roommate wrote a song, a poem, it went something like, "spin a
while" ... they called me Spinner ... "spin a while, you go to see the Dean,
Fletcher. You're the biggest wheel I've
ever seen. Scarlet Letter, Scarlet Key,
you have no time for me. Once was when
we spent together many hours," or something like that, "now the only time I see
you is when we're in the showers." This
went on and on and I just had this reputation for spinning and even when I
wasn't spinning, I had to pretend I was.
So I would disappear and spin and by that time, somebody on the yearbook
staff was put in Crown and Scroll Junior Honorary Society and I did not know
why this guy was put in there and I did not know why I wasn't. So I just bided my time and there was a
senior society called Cap and Skull and two of the guys on the yearbook, the
next year when I became business manager of the yearbook ...
------------------------------------END
OF SIDE ONE, TAPE TWO---------------------------------------
CB: I mentioned something about how did Doug
Campbell get on the Crown and Scroll and they said, "We don't know." They said,
"But he's not gonna get on to Cap and Skull, we know who is." So, you know, this is a big hint. Well, I kept my fingers crossed and I caught
on to them, and I know it was because both of them were on Cap and Skull and
Cap and Skull votes for it's own members the next year, but you had to have a
certain number of activities and I activitied all over the place to make
sure. It was like the National Honor
Society, it was the same thing. Really
hardly worthwhile and that was the end of my ...
SH: Now Scarlet Key, can you describe for the
tape what their activities are?
CB: Scarlet Key met any of the sports teams that
came to town. You went down to the train
station, there was a lot of train travel then, there was still not a lot of car
travel and you met them and you had gotten the word on where they were gonna be
housed, Sometimes it was in Ford Hall,
sometimes it was someplace else, then if it was just a small crew, you walked
them up there. If not, you got a taxi. If it was a bigger crew you had a bus that
you took down and met them at the station.
You got them and you settled them and you settled them in their dorm and
told them where they could go to eat and then you took them out. If this was a football team, you took them
out to the stadium area and if it was a basketball team, you took them up to
the gym, showed them around the gym and the locker rooms. You were a hospitality thing, that's mainly
what it was.
SH: And the Cap and Skull was, did that lead to
Phi Beta Kappa or ...
CB: No.
Cap and Skull, you don't have Cap and Skull up there anymore? Cap and Skull was just, this was supposed to
be the highest honor in Rutgers and it had nothing to do with academic
work. This had to do with having done the
most for Rutgers and been an outstanding person at Rutgers. Normally, Frank Long, I think he edited the Targum then, he was there. Ed Lonsky was in Scarlet Barbs. Scarlet Barbs was an association of people
who did not want to be in fraternities.
They were adamant against being in fraternities and he was the president
of that, or something, plus he did a lot of other things and he was elected
same time. John Yewell was in NSA. NSA was running strong then. I always shied away from that because it sort
of had connotations of communism and this McCarthy was coming in, and I don't
think NSA was, but they were little groups and you sort of shied away from
it. But John was active in a lot of
other things and he got in. Nobody else
on the Scarlet Letter got in that year.
I did and I guess because Conway liked me, but you were chosen because
you were liked and also because you had an activity record.
SH: What did you become on the Scarlet Letter
then?
CB: I don't know what I was sophomore year, when
I went down with Yonkers. Yonkers
graduated. Junior year I was senior
editor, that meant editor of the senior section. I had to set up the section in the book, what
it was gonna look like, and then I had to schedule all of the pictures for all
of the students who were graduating in '48 and then in '49, which is my senior
year, I was business manager. The three
of us, we had a managing editor, editor-in-chief and a business manager. We were just a team of three who supervised
all of these other people and their sections of the yearbook. Somebody did fraternities. I remember the guy that ... it doesn't
matter. I remember who I turned the senior
area over to, and I went down to see ... I worked with a man named Brill with a
red face and you know, we saw that the money was coming in and I paid the
bills, and they would come to Brill, and then I would go check and see that
this had been accomplished and we had finished this and then we could pay the
bills. That's what I did.
SH: What were you studying then? Did you change your major from when you went
in as a freshman?
CB: No. I
didn't really have a major. I had
started out in the Ag school and then I liked biology better, so most of the
courses I took were biology oriented and then I decided I wanted to be an
agricultural chemist so I took chemistry courses until they did me in, like
calculus. I did well in organic
chemistry and well in qualitative and quantitative analysis, but then the next
chemistry was physical chemistry and that blew my mind, so I decided I was no
longer going to be a chemist. I took all
the biology courses I could. Out in the
Ag school, I could take plant pathology and plant physiology, these were all
technical courses and then I finally gathered up 165 credits and they told me
it was time to graduate. So I graduated
and by then I was totally disenchanted with the fraternity. Have you ever heard of a man called Howard
Crosby? Well, Howard Crosby befriended
me somehow and I used to invite him to dinner in the fraternity house and this
is a terrible thing to tell, but he always had indigestion and he was nervous
and high strung. Toward the end of my
senior year, he called me in and asked me if I wanted to become an assistant to
the Dean, and I think he was gonna be moved up into a dean position then and
then he was gonna have instead of just ... he was a single person working under
the Dean. He was gonna have five or six
people working underneath him and there's gonna be little assistant Deans. Well, I got in my mind then that I did not
want to stay ... That was a closed environment, school, and I saw what he was
like and he was just like a big over grown old college boy and there's nothing
worse than an over grown old college boy trying to pretend that he's still a
young college boy. I really observed
this, and I was not a great observer of humanity, but I was an observer of him
and I just thought, "I do not want to do this," plus I don't like this
fraternity and I have nothing against them, but I just, I want to do something
new. So I graduated and I left and I've
only been back twice. When I moved back
to New Jersey, I went to Florida from college and got a good job down there and
then another good job and I stayed down and then I went to Europe and then I
came back and then I went to the University of Washington and I started
teaching school and then I ended up in North Jersey again, in the Watchung
Mountains. In fact in Watchung Regional
High School and I had turned to teaching, and one day, I was close to New
Brunswick so I drove down to New Brunswick and they had rebuilt the gym or they
had expanded, or something and I drove down Bartlett Street and I saw this
fraternity house and so I got out and I walked up the front steps and then to
the front door, and it looked like the same old fraternity house, but here were
all these young little babies running around and I was now, probably about
thirty-two, maybe thirty-one I don't know, but there were all these little kids
running around. The campus didn't look
like I remembered it and so I went and had lunch somewhere and went back again
and then I got a message about Cap and Skull was gonna have its fiftieth
reunion, I think it was. Well, I had
worked so long to go to Cap and Skull and I was living in the area ... One of the
reasons I hadn't gone back before was I was lived in Florida, it's a long trip
from Florida, so I want back to the Cap and Skull reunion and I met Ed Lonsky
again, and Frank Long, and people I knew and I had been teaching at Watchung
Regional High School and that's another story.
That was the weirdest school I've ever been in. The guy had a marvelous idea but he couldn't
put it all together and the staff was too bright for him and I decided I wanted
to leave. I had five preparations plus
the yearbook to do there. I taught five different subjects and I was
complaining to Ed Lonsky and I said, "I've already turned in my
resignation." He said, "Well, I'm
chairman of the science department in Plainfield High School, that's the best
high school in the state, would you like to come down and teach honors
biology?" So I went down there and
taught honors biology, but I never went back to Rutgers after that. The next thing that happened during all that
uproar of Vietnam, Rutgers turned, blew apart somehow, and they banished all
these societies. There was a movement
then. Everybody was banishing everything
and they just banished it and I thought, "Golly, you can't just banish
societies," but they did and I got very angry at them. I got as angry at them as I did at Rutgers,
well, the people as I did with, I think Mason Gross was president. He had a terrible time trying to handle all
of these people. The drugs were in, I
don't know what was going on in campus but I didn't want to get anywhere near
it because they had all these weird people there and I really didn't get in
tune with the Vietnam War either. I
think that's the most interesting thing that I haven't even talked about. If you went through World War II and I had a
good time. I not only don't regret it, I
really enjoyed World War II as far as my own life was concerned, and then I was
teaching in Plainfield High School during most of this Vietnam War. We had mother teachers there whose children
were now going out to the Vietnam War.
Woodstock was going on. Everybody
was on drugs. The high school was full
of drugs and this was just out of my realm and this was a war. I never did consider that we were fighting
somebody else's war. We declared war and
therefore we were fighting the war and I figured everybody in Vietnam just sort
of sat around and smoked and we dropped all that stuff and defoliated the thing
and it was again not something I identified with and I feel very badly about
that. Later on, I got terribly involved
in my mind, particularly after all the revelations that came out after it, but
I was thinking how I went through my whole life and I didn't focus on the war
as a war. I didn't focus on what was
going on in Rutgers after it. I didn't
focus on the black problem because of my own interest in it. These were things that happened to me and I
lived them and I threw my interest in it as far as it interested me and then I
went on to other things. I can remember
after I got out and when I got to Florida, I graduated in '49, and we got into
the McCarthy thing. Now, I should have
listened to all of that, and I did. I
listened but when I listened to it on the radio, we had radio, television
wasn't in Florida then, and I listened to the radio and I was much more
interested in Cohn, Roy Cohn, and he had a friend who was in army and he called
David Shine and Roy Cohn kept protecting this David Shine and I got more
involved in thinking about that than I was thinking about McCarthy beating
apart these people from Hollywood and they were having to testify. I was more interested in the logistics of
what was going on than I was in the text of what was going on, and I think
that's why I never liked history as a student of it, because I focused then on
trying to recall the logistics of it rather than the things that were behind it
all. Now when I look at history, when I
get into genealogy and I go back, and I have this relative in Alsace-Loraine
and has escaped from Wurttemburg during the Forty Years War, I'm much more interested
now in why they went here, and why they went there than I am in the person,
it's a complete shift. Enough of
that. What else do you want me to
say? You have another appointment at
one.
SH: Shaun, do you have any follow up questions?
SI: No.
SH: You talked in such brief terms about after
the war ... could you maybe flesh that out a little?
CB: Okay, I left Rutgers, my mother and my father
were having difficulties. My brother was
also a difficulty, the second one. He
was bright, extremely bright, and he would not finish his papers in chemistry
and he had to go back to summer school strictly for writing his chemistry
reports and he wouldn't write them. He
said, "I know the chemistry, why do I have to write this stupid report," So he never graduated from high school, and
he was a problem at home. My mother and
father they had a strange relationship all their life and they stayed together
sixty some years, so I guess it survived, but they had a strange relationship
and my mother had just graduated from college.
She had her degree, Bachelor's degree now in Special Education and she
had decided that she got colds up there and had severe sinus and she got her
brother-in-law to say she had to go to Florida.
So she got a job down in Florida.
I had been working for the Turnpike Authority, they were just doing
surveys of where they were going to put overpasses, underpasses or combine
roads and I had a crew that went out and counted cars going up and down these
little country roads. So I told her I
would drive her down to Florida, I'd give up that job and drive her to
Florida. I wanted to go to the
Caribbean. I wanted to go to Nicaragua
and work for United Fruit, don't ask me why, and raise bananas, and I thought
Florida was closer. I am an
innocent. You know I figured if you got
down closer it would be easier. Actually
if you wanted to get hired for Nicaragua, it's in New York that you get hired,
but this didn't cross my mind, so I came to Florida. I got her enrolled in school and Minute Maid
was just starting up and I answered an ad in the paper and I went over and got
the job at Minute Maid, executive training job.
But I had also applied for another job over in a little place called
Howey-in-the-Hills as assistant to the vice president and I had gone over there
and been interviewed by a treasurer. The
vice president was in the Mayo Clinic having fluids taken off his heart. He was only thirty-eight or thirty-nine years
old. So, this guy told me he'd call me,
but he never called me and I went to work for Minute Maid and on Saturday ... We
were living in a little cottage then with no mail delivery. On Saturday I went down to General Delivery
to get our mail and there was a letter that said, "Report on Tuesday at three
o'clock, Mr. Taylor would like to interview you." It's already Saturday, so I called up and he
said, "Oh, we filled that job, but I really wanted Mr. Taylor to meet
you." He said, "I checked all your
references and they were glorious references, so you come over." Well, I went over and I met Mr. Taylor and
Mr. Taylor said, "Fire the other man," and hire me. Mr. Taylor, he was a marvelous man. He was bright, he was a Dartmouth graduate
and he thought everybody south of the Mason Dixon line was an imbecile, an
absolute imbecile, and I came from Rutgers and this was ideal. Plus I am present, so he hired me on the spot
and I went to work for him and to make a long story short, I went to work for
him the first of November and on May 1st he had a heart attack and
died and I had learned his job, which was a public relations job, and fruit
sales, and so forth, for a company that managed groves for northern grove
owners. I knew all the grove owners
because we had a hotel there and I had had to go up to the hotel and meet these
people because he was sick and carry them out and show them their grove and if
they wanted to pick some fruit and ship it north, help them do that and see
that the hotel shipped it and it was a delightful job. He had two young daughters who I liked very
much and he was high society in town and I just drifted in. It was a marvelous job, and I stayed there
for seven years, and then I was thirty and Orlando only had 50,000 people at
that time. To go to the movies I had to
go to Orlando and there were only two movies in Orlando and I was bored. Both of his daughters had gotten married and
gone. The Korean War was over. My brother had come home. My mother had gone back to New Jersey after
one year down here and so I left and went to Europe and I traveled in Europe
for a year. Then I came back and I was
gonna go to work for J. Walter Thompson who I knew from my work down here. I'd worked with them through the Florida
Citrus Commission and I decided I really don't want to get in that rat race, so
I went to the University of Washington.
I had a friend out there and I just went out and I had to do something,
so I went to the University. I started,
I really want to be a teacher, so I took education courses and did practice
teaching and this was all graduate work, but it was not graduate work on a
graduate level. It was just extra work,
and my practice teaching was superb. I
had had all this experience, so it wasn't like a kid, why this was thirty-one
years old, and so they wanted to hire me in Seattle. Well, I had the wanderlust or something. Why do I want to be out here for? I really don't know a lot of people. My family is back in New Jersey. Everybody I really know is back in Florida,
so I didn't. I took a job in Atlantic
City, Atlantic City High School, and I was a floater. I didn't have my own room ... had to have this
little cart that I carried all my books around and my biology experiments and
it was terrible ... I had been making when I left Florida ... I was making a good
salary ... I was making about $15000 a year, which was high then, and I took a
job in Atlantic City for $4000 a year, and I didn't mind. It was enough to get along and then I lived
down there during the winter, which meant that I had a motel room, sort of a
glorified motel room with a bedroom and a front room, which was a summer rental
and I could have it from Labor Day to Memorial Day at a reasonable rate and I
liked it and I invited my folks down and I liked Atlantic City because it was
temperate. The reason I went there was
in Seattle I was growing roses in the yard and I knew that the Japanese current
warmed it there and I figured Atlantic City, with the Atlantic ocean it never
gets to freezing so it's got to be more temperate than New Brunswick. So I taught, and I would have stayed there
another year because they had a good staff.
There were some nice people on the staff. This was the old school of teachers. Long story, I'm almost over. I picked up the paper one day and it said ...
you know, I was rehired for the next year and here were all the salaries of all
of the teachers, and it told that I was making $4000 and one of the kids in my
class, her father was a doctor and she came in to class the next day, she said,
"Mr. Bishop, you're my favorite teacher.
I read in the paper where you make $4000, is that true?" Well, I turned red and said, "Yes." She says, "We pay our maid more than
that." She absolutely did. I left school that afternoon, went down to
the main office and said, "I'm not coming back next year." I quit and that's when I went to Watchung
Regional. Enough. You got to have lunch and meet other people.
SH: Well, we thank you very much.
CB: You're quite welcome.
SH: Tell me about your family now, how you came
back to Florida very quickly and I know you have been involved in the politics
of Howey-in-the-Hills ...
CB: Oh, yes.
Oh, I have a lot of stories I haven't told you. Well, I was living in New Jersey. I was teaching at Plainfield High
School. I went through the big riot in
Plainfield where they stomped a police's head into smithereens and the school
was closed down and we had police for the rest of the term. That was in the old high school. We built a new high school and they trashed
that in a year and a half, and I was teaching honors classes and it was just
unbelievable. You would be teaching, I
have twenty-four students in there, and the door would open and somebody would
scream all kinds of epithets at you and ran up and down the hall. The administration couldn't do anything. You couldn't send anybody out of your class
for discipline. You sent them to the
library and the librarian just said, "Cope, cope." This is it and it was so discouraging and I'd
had some wonderful teaching experiences and I just decided I'm don't want to
teach anymore, and one of my best friends in Howey-in-the-Hills, when I had
lived there before, my folks had gone down to visit her on a trip and she was
selling her house. She was eighty and I
loved her house and it was cold up there and I was trying to get my parents out
of the snow all at the same time. So I
talked to my brother, who was living with me then, my adopted brother, and he
had moved up in several jobs and he was getting kind of discouraged at his job,
and I said, "Why don't we just buy this house down in Florida?" I had a little antique shop I was running
then in addition to teaching, "We'll move the antique shop down there," and
that's how I got back to Florida.
SH: And then you ran for office in
Howey-in-the-Hills?
CB: Yeah, well, I was a joiner. That is the best story of all. But you don't have time for that.
SH: We do.
CB: All right, very quickly. I went to Howey-in-the-Hills. I opened my little antique shop down
there. My brother went to work up at the
Mission Inn and I went down to the town office after we had been there about a
year. We had a woman mayor then, Flonnie
Cope and I went to the office and I sent her a letter, I said, "Dear Mrs. Cope,
I had done things all my life and here I am in a community and I think you
should help the community out, so if you have any committees, or anything of
that sort you think I could serve on, I'd be delighted to do it." She never answered the letter. Never.
So I really got angry at this. So
the next town council election came up, which was in '74, I got a petition, I
ran around town and got twenty-five signatures on it, and I ran for
council. Several people told me, "You
can't make it," but I still had Dodge Taylor's widow who he had told I was the
brightest person he ever met in his entire life. Well, she told everybody in town this was true
and so there were three people running and I ran. Flonnie Cope was one of them, the old mayor,
and she was bound to get some votes.
Carrol Chalk who was a lover boy in town, he's about eighty-five years
old, but he fixed everybody's plumbing and did all sorts of things. No matter what was wrong, you called Carrol
Chalk and it was taken cared of. You
knew he was gonna win hands down and then there was this Chester Burdick so and
then two other people ran. Well, we all
ran and I came in third. So I was one of
the three out of five or six who ran.
Well, C.V. Griffin, who was my president of the company before, Dodge
Taylor was Vice president, he was president, he called me and he said, "Now,
the council elects the mayor, and we can't have Chalk for a mayor." Chalk came out with the highest number of
votes. He's hard of hearing, plus Chalk
and C.V. had an argument and C.V. ran the town, so he said, "I want you to vote
for Flonnie Cope. Flonnie Cope we know
what she's like and we know how good she is and what she's doing and so I would
like you to vote for me." He said, "Now,
I have to tell you, I didn't vote for you."
He said, "I wanted Chester Burdick in there because he was in before and
I know what he's like. But I do want
your vote for Flonnie Cope" Well, I got
upset at this. First of all, I had now
experienced Flonnie Cope and she was a nice enough person, but she could not
speak the King's English and the minutes was "thems wases" and "this done
happened," and I thought, for a town this is terrible. So I could not vote for her. So I didn't know what to do. So we had two women, the two women were gonna
nominate Flonnie Cope and vote for her.
We had two men, a carry-over and Carrol Chalk and Carrol Chalk wanted to
be mayor and he had the other man who was on the council was gonna vote for him
and I was the oddball and I was supposed to make the choice, because we're just
five votes. So I didn't know what to
do. I went over to see my lawyer. I said, "What do I do in this case?" he says, "Don't you read Robert's Rules [of
Order]?" I said, "I've been through
it." He says, "A nomination," he says,
"I don't know why they second nominations, but a nomination does not take a
second." So he says, "Why don't you
nominate yourself?" This is my old
friend lawyer. So we go to the first
meeting. This was funny. We go to the meeting and they swear in the
new members and Flonnie Cope is the old retiring mayor, and of course, she's
gonna run, so she said, "Now we have to elect the mayor, we'll have the
vote." So she said, "Are there any
nominations?" Well, Helen Hisey
nominated Flonnie. "Are there anymore
nominations?" Well, Bob Edwards
nominated Carrol Chalk. So then she
said, "Are there nominations going to close," and I said, "No, I nominate
myself." She says, "You can't do that."
I had my Robert's Rules with me.
So this fractured the audience.
Well, she didn't know what to do, so she said, "I guess we'll have a
vote." The vote came out exactly as the
nominations and my own came out, so nobody was elected. Well Flonnie went on with the meeting. She says, "We'll vote again at the end of the
meeting." So we went up to all the
nominations again and there were a lot of people who did not like C.V. Griffin
and thought Flonnie was his flunky on there, so by this time, people had called
other people and they came down to the meeting.
So the end of the meeting, we came and we came into the nominations and
I nominated myself. Well, ... they all wanted me to vote for Carrol Chalk
... the dissidents. The others wanted me
to vote for Flonnie and I wasn't gonna do that.
I got up and I said, "You know, I'm brand new. I don't even know how the council runs, I
haven't been to a full meeting ever," and I said, "but you're making me, the
new person, make the choice of whose
gonna be mayor and I shouldn't be doing that.
If you four people, you can elect the mayor, three of you anytime and if
you can't decide on who you want, you are not gonna make me decide," so I went
that way again. Well, Flonnie said,
"Well, we'll meet again a week." So a
week came on a Monday, we had another meeting.
This was not the regular monthly meeting, this was another one. We went the same way again and this man in
the back, I'll never forget as long as I live, he all of a sudden, it's quiet
as a mouse and I nominated myself and we voted and it came out, two-two and me
and this man yells, "Get her out of here!
Get her out of here!" and the whole audience broke up. Then there was chants, "Get her out of
there." I don't know where her
supporters were. Well, this was most
embarrassing. We had to adjourn the
meeting and we met the following, two weeks later we met at the regular
meeting. But meanwhile, I was running my
antique shop and lampshade shop down there and I was getting the cold shoulder
from a lot of people and they want to get her out of there. I was getting, particularly, the people who
want to get her out of there and the only way they saw was to get Chalk in. They gave me, they came into my store and it
was terrible. But I held out and
finally, the day before the meeting Carrol Chalk came in and he said, "All my
friends have been in to see you," and he said, "It sounds like you're not going
to give in." I said, "No, I'm not going
to give in." I said, "If either one of
the ladies want to vote for you, you should be mayor." And he said, "Well
they're not going to, I know that." So
he said, "I told Bob Edwards to nominate you."
So I made mayor the next meeting and I didn't know my ass from a hole in
the wall. It was terrible, and Flonnie
Cope took off on a vacation to the Caribbean that next day. She didn't even come down to give me the
keys. She gave the keys to the town
clerk and I had to collect it from her and that was my first experience as
mayor.
SH: Well, we thank you, Mr. Charles Fletcher,
Jr. This concludes the interview.
----------------------------------------------END
OF INTERVIEW------------------------------------------
Reviewed
by David D'Onofrio 7/17/02
Reviewed
by Sandra Stewart Holyoak 11/4/02
Edited
by Charles Fletcher Bishop 2/14/03