NEW BRUNSWICK HISTORY DEPARTMENT: ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES OF WW-II INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT I. OWEN

An Interview with Robert I. Owen, for the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II. Interview conducted by G. Kurt Piehler and Melanie Cooper and Sandra Stewart Holyoak and Linda Lasko, in West Long Branch, New Jersey, on July 24, 1997. Transcript by Joe Varga and Sean Harvey and Eve Snyder and Scott Ceresnak and G. Kurt Piehler and Sandra Stewart Holyoak. Permission to quote from this transcript must be obtained from the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II.

The Rutgers Alumni Association has bestowed upon this Rutgers College Alumnus the title of Loyal Son of Rutgers for his years of dedication to improving the quality of the University.

Kurt Piehler: This begins the interview with Robert I. Owen on July 24, 1997 in West Long Branch, New Jersey with Kurt Piehler and ...

Melanie Cooper: Melanie Cooper and ...

Linda Lasko: Linda Lasko and ...

Sandra Stewart Holyoak: Sandra Stewart Holyoak.

KP: Now I guess I would like to begin by starting out with your father who was Rutgers class of ...

Robert Owen: '08.

KP: Class of 1908. Do you know why your father chose to come to Rutgers?

RO: Not really. [But I think it may have been related.] He was living in upper New York State, and upper New York State had, and still does have these, Regents exams, I think, and ... one of his older brothers came to Rutgers, ... Earl Owen. He was Class of ... '04, I guess, and only one son could be away from the farm at a time. He [Earl] was at Rutgers and my father was helping at home on the farm. And so, I think it was the New York State Regents exams plus the connection with his older brother. As soon as the older brother graduated, my father came that fall. He worked his way through Rutgers. He couldn't be very active in sports and things of that sort. I think there were only maybe 80 in his class. Since he had waited for the other brother to graduate, he was the oldest person in his class, and, apparently, also one of the strongest. Because [it] always was important to him that when they took their strength tests, or something or other, he was doing chin-ups until they told him, "for heaven's sake, stop." ... He had been harvesting on the farm that fall and he was hardened. But, anyway, he lived in Winants Hall some of the time. He also lived where that parking lot is now, beyond the Chapel. ... There had been a building there, which also was a dorm. He lived there for a while. He worked for the big book store, on George Street? And he was in charge of a number of newsboys, so he'd get up real early ... and take care of all that. He put himself through and was Phi Beta Kappa, which he was always very proud of. He was disappointed that I didn't make it, … I almost did. Anyway, his experiences at Rutgers were rewarding. ... There was no NJC in those days and the boys met local girls. I think he met my mother in church. They were Baptists, at that time. ... She was one of five sisters, and three of them married Rutgers men.

... But he was a poultry specialist and he wasn't making enough money from Rutgers to satisfy my mother, I don't think. I think he would have liked to stay in teaching or county agent work, for one thing. So ... having been a poultry specialist, why, he went and bought this poultry farm, in New Jersey, Marlboro, New Jersey, right at the wrong time, not long before the Depression, when the bottom fell out of the egg market and everything. ... I was an only child. He didn't have me until he was over 40, I think, and my mother was getting close, although she never admitted it. In fact, she falsified her driver's license age for years, until Social Security came along and then she had to fess up in order to get the benefits. [laughter] Anyway, Rutgers was the only college I ever heard about. I heard my father's stories and he had taken me up to New Brunswick, occasionally, to football games in the old field, across from the old gym up in there. And he took me to his fraternity house. His fraternity no longer is at Rutgers, but he was one of the founders of it, Pi Kappa Alpha. So it just never occurred to me, really, to think in terms of any other college. Rutgers was the only college that I applied to.

KP: So your father had very fond memories, though he had it very hard?

RO: ... Oh yeah, he had very fond memories. He had a lot of good friends. I don't know how many were in his graduating class, but I think, 80, maybe, when he entered. ... It's a little bit different than today.

KP: Your father got a job at Rutgers very quickly, relatively quickly?

RO: Yeah, [I guess], immediately.

MC: Did he ever return back to New York State, to the farm?

RO: Only on visits. I was taken up once as a baby. Of course, I have no memory of that. In recent years, we did make one trip on the way back from Grand Rapids, where I have a daughter living, to swing up there and visit the old town and look around a little bit.

SH: It says in your survey that you also lived in California, in San Pedro?

RO: Well, that was during the war, when I was going out in order to get ready, [to] get a little more training before going to the South Pacific and it wasn't San Pedro, ... it was San Francisco.

KP: In your father's alumnus file at Rutgers there were some clippings and there was one mention of you, at age six, riding a pony. I guess, in Marlboro.

RO: Oh, yeah. We were not well off, but [my family], I was never aware of any shortages or anything, but, at one period, my father wanted to let me have things, and we had a pony, ... I guess, for one whole winter and spring, until summertime. ... At that time, people had these ponies giving little ... children [rides] in the summertime, going around in circles, at the shore and so on. ... They didn't move the ... ponies down South or anything. They farmed them out, to let people have them, to look after them during the winter and then they would pick them up again in the summer when they were ready to start. I had Daisy, she was a ... Shetland. It took a long while to get her to keep from going around in a circle, I tell you. And when she learned that, then she learned how to go under a low pear tree and knock me off. I even tried to make her jump once, but she didn't think much of that [laughter] so she stopped and I went into the barberry bush. But, anyway, it was nice of him to do that, it was nice of him. Later on, he was still trying to be nice to me and help me out when we couldn't afford much, he bought a horse, thinking, well, we could plow a little bit with it. But unfortunately, this was an ex-polo pony, not likely to do much plowing and he ran away with the plow a couple of times and things like that. ... I had him for a couple of years, which was nice, in rural New Jersey, to have.

KP: It sounds like you very much enjoyed the farm, despite the hard times.

RO: ... Well, it was a poultry farm and it wasn't too many years before the poultry farm wasn't paying. Everything was bad. So he went into sales work with a West Coast company. This maybe was San Pedro, somewhere down that way. A company called Phillipar Park that had kelp products, ... from the Pacific, additives to animal and poultry feeds. So he became, you might say, the East Coast representative and did a lot of traveling and was not home very much. But that was a ... difficult period.

KP: Did your parents sell the poultry farm?

RO: No, they kept it. Right until, I remember now, it was in the '50s, ... when my parents just couldn't stay there anymore. ... I helped them move out, into Freehold, New Jersey. I spent a good deal of my childhood working with my father maintaining those big poultry buildings, even when he no longer had any chickens. We did have the responsibility, because of the mortgage and so forth, to keep ... them up. So, we worked on, every summer I worked on the roofs with him, putting hot tar and paper on the roofs, or working on the foundations. Dad figured if you did those two things, the roofs and the foundation, the rest in between … forget about it. [laughter] ... I had happy experiences working with my father. I learned a lot.

KP: It sounds like his career as a salesman really subsidized the poultry farm.

RO: Oh, yeah. ... But, by the time he became a salesman we no longer ... had any chickens. But we did have interesting times. Because he had fond memories of sheep, as a boy on his farm, and so we had sheep. Not exactly approved of by my mother, but we had sheep. We had them on chains eating the lawn, mowing the lawn, instead of my having to mow it by hand mower, so I approved. They all had names. The big ram was, I'm going on and rambling too much, I'm going to beat your ... old record at this rate, anyway, Julius Caesar was the ram. Cleopatra, naturally, had to be one of the ewes, also Helen of Troy and so on. Eventually, Helen of Troy got loose and ran out and was hit by a car. And so, rather than waste the meat, we ate her, you know. At Sunday dinner it was, "Pass some more Helen, please." [laughter]

SH: Did you have any kind of help on the farm?

RO: Well, there was a period there when my father employed a very nice Irishman, named Henry Hardy, who later on became the sexton of the church. He would baby-sit me a little bit, help father on the farm, but when things got bad, ... my father couldn't afford him anymore. ... But I used to go over and have great fun with Henry. You know, the Old Brick Church, in Bradevelt ... near where the institution is, a beautiful old cemetery, an old Dutch Reformed Church. We were the closest house and ... my parents went there in the summertime. It was closed in the wintertime, you went to Marlboro to the chapel then. I used to go over, not having any nearby playmates, I used to go over and pester Henry and follow him around the cemetery when he was sexton. He paid me ten cents to help fill up graves, ... after there had been a funeral. I roller-skated on the church sidewalk once and in a while over there, not a very good surface, but better than what we had.

KP: So you were sort of isolated growing up on the farm?

RO: Well, ... you might have thought of it as isolated. But ... we did shopping in Marlboro Village and in Freehold. … I had relatives in Freehold. ... One of my mother's sisters lived in Freehold. And I went to grade school in Marlboro. A school bus picked me up and I went to school in Marlboro. Well, but, first, I went to school right next door. There ... were six grades, I think, ... in one room. ... It's a house now. ... So, I started out there at four and a half. My mother wanted me to get started on my way to Rutgers as soon as possible. [laughter] Only for a few months. They canceled that school and then the bus would come and take me into Marlboro Elementary.

KP: But your first experience was in a one room ...

RO: Yeah, a one room schoolhouse. That was a rough experience, in a way. Because I was too young, of course, and there were a lot of tough kids in there and the language and everything else. [laughter] A lot of these things you probably wouldn't want to use, but one of my first memories of that school was ... of one boy who was particularly proud of breaking wind and lighting a match so you would see a blue flame. ... There were things rougher things than that going on, so I was quite impressed. ... I could walk there, it was so close to our farm. A rough bunch, the same rough bunch, went also up to Marlboro. But then there was a larger group.

MC: Did they all come from farms, these children?

RO: ... No, I mean, they weren't bad kids. But they were, I guess, Estonian or Lithuanian families. Some of them ... had kind of gotten together up on that next hill, (called "Big Woods"), to the east. It was just beyond the State Hospital. … Where there used to be St. Gabriel's Church, which has since been moved by name, but the building is still there, the original St. Gabriel's Catholic Church. There was a little community from the Baltic States up there.

KP: Did they farm?

RO: I don't think they did. I don't think they were farming people, mostly.

KP: Do you know where they worked?

RO: Not really. I had a feeling they were manual laborers. Maybe some of them worked on farms, but I'm not aware of any of them having owned farms, you know, on their own. But there had been a lot of farms around over at the State Hospital, I guess. There was a family, before they started building the State Hospital, that was in easy walking distance. I knew the girl in the Hayes family. And then there were other people, including another Hayes family, possibly related, that was about a mile away. Marlboro Village was just a mile from us and, as soon as I got a bike, why it was nothing, or to go over there or with my horse. ... We had a post office box in Marlboro, a general store we went to, and a fire company. We went to their firemens' fairs and suppers. This is enough ... probably, of this sort of background.

KP: You mentioned you wanted to go to Rutgers very early, but did you know you wanted to go into Ceramics?

RO: No, I had no idea. I didn't even know there was such a thing as Ceramics. But in high school I had been a good student, one of maybe the top half dozen students. I had done well in math and in science. Professor George Brown was the head of the School of Ceramics and a friend of my father. He and my father, the families knew one another. ... Ceramics was a fairly new field and apparently included a fair amount of, I was told, you know, science and math and things that I'd done well in. I went to ... college when I was sixteen. I didn't know anything of what I really wanted to do in life. ... I was sort of persuaded, "Well, why don't you ... try Ceramics?" I did. So there ... is nothing really more sensible than that. In fact, I never did decide what I really wanted to be. I came into the Foreign Service many years later and thought I'd sort of, "Well, we'll try it out, see how we like it." And I retired, ... 31 years later. [laughter] ... I still haven't decided what I'll be when I grow up.

SH: What was your mother's background that she was not happy with the farm?

RO: ... She was a city girl. The family had moved around a lot. And my grandfather apparently, I didn't know him too well until he was very old, ... he was only quite old, I'd say he was about as old as I am, he came from a good family, from way back in Monmouth County and elsewhere. But he was the younger son, so he didn't get their farm, which is an historic farm, ... still operating. So he was the one who went around and got odd jobs here and there and eventually ended up in real estate in New Brunswick. ... He was very good at producing children. I think, actually, there were twelve pregnancies. No wonder my poor grandmother was in ill health much of her life. My mother was the sister who looked after her and looked after the family. ... She was the organizer and the planner and the saver. No thought of her ever going to college. She did finish high school. But anyway, she was active in church. ... What did I miss? What was that last question?

SH: I just wondered what her background was and how she felt about moving to a farm?

RO: Well, I mean, women went where their husbands went. And since she was the one that thought he should make more money and so on, why, she was stuck with it once he got the farm. She worked her head off. She was a very remarkable woman, a very strong character. You behaved when you were around her, but she was a good woman. She could do everything, from gardening, we had tremendous gardens. ... When my father was sick, at one period he had ... something of a nervous breakdown and stayed in bed for a while, she went out and kept working, ... collecting eggs and so forth. One memory is when she was collecting eggs at one of these buildings that had high steps. ... I suppose about six or seven feet to get up to that part of the building. And she came out with this whole pail of eggs, maybe two, and stepped down on the steps that had fallen away from the building, (since she went in). So down she went with her eggs, on top of these fallen steps. She got pretty well bruised but nothing broken. She would do upholstering. She would re-do the house, walls, once every couple of years, depending on what the current style was. She made a beaded dress, little tiny, tiny beads, the whole dress from beads, down to below the knee. She was a remarkably hard working woman and a wonderful cook.

KP: It sounds like times were tough during the Depression, but you were able to grow a lot of what you needed?

RO: Well, we always had a good-sized garden. My father was very good at that. And then when we had chickens, why of course, when a chicken got old we ate it. [laughter] ... It was a difficult period because I remember we had dogs come and kill some chickens. We had some chickens, range chickens, and a pack of dogs came and killed a bunch. Another time, we had a small farm building that had brooding chicks in it, you know, little baby chicks, a lot of baby chicks, and a fire killed most of those. It was one series of problems after another. It was not an easy period. ... My mother did canning during the Depression. ... And she did again, later on, during World War II. She made a lot of her own soap, laundry type soap, you know, using fats and lye and wood ashes. We had cherry trees, for cherry pie, and pear trees and strawberries. There were periods in the Depression, I'd have a chair, or a little stand, if you will, out front, just a table, and sell strawberries for 25 cents a quart, and cherries and some of her gladiol blooms. She had beautiful gladiol. I mean, for a long time there, 25 cents a week was my allowance and I had to work for it. But later on, in high school, I would get up to a dollar. And I insisted on that I kept getting a dollar all through Rutgers. [laughter] But then [I] had to work for that, too. I had a lot of jobs at Rutgers, too. ... I went to Rutgers on a scholarship but it wasn't a full scholarship, it was just hundred dollars. Then I did well enough the first year so that I went on a full tuition scholarship ... and I was commuting, I couldn't afford to live there at first. But later on I went and lived in a boarding house on Livingston Avenue with a couple of other fellows and then, I think, it was only the last year I stayed at the fraternity house (Phi Gamma Delta). I earned my ... room and board by washing dishes and pots and pans.

KP: It says on the survey that during the Depression your father was a Republican. How did he feel about Roosevelt and the New Deal?

RO: Well, he wasn't too strong about it, but my mother referred to Franklin, FDR, as "that man" and was very reluctant later on, in a way, to accept ... his social security, but then she didn't ever rip up the check. ... Of course, my wife and I are both card-carrying liberals and proud of it, which causes me certain problems now and then. Being both brought up in the Depression, we appreciated, we understood what was going on or felt that we did, at least I did. I read a lot of (liberal) things ... like Upton Sinclair. So that's part of my background and I became very aware of the injustices that so many people suffer. It seemed to me then, and still does, that the Democratic Party has done more to alleviate the problems of a majority of people, ... even though financially I am now up in the top ten or fifteen percent. [laughter]

KP: When you grew up on Upton Sinclair ...

RO: Well, you mentioned that I, you know, that I was sort of isolated. Well, I ... early developed a great love of books and read everything that was in our small library. Then we had neighbors, the Barkers, up on the hill, ... where the YMCA (Camp Arrowhead) is now, the ski lift and the pool and so forth ... that had a turkey farm up there. They were lovely people and they had a lot of books and I read all their books. ... The man, ... Sam, never grew up. He used, you know, to wear a big cowboy hat, when people didn't do that, and play a six-gun, and so on. His wife was the practical one, but he was a lot of fun, too. They had a walk-in closet that was almost as big as this room, at least two-thirds as big, just full of pulp magazines from World War I, Argossy, Aces, one thing and another. So I did an awful lot of reading there. [laughter] ... As I mentioned to someone I think, already that I read, (I guess at the library today when I got another Michener book), in that in high school I read all of Dickens' works because you got more points for reading a volume of Dickens. You didn't have to read as many books. I read all of Dickens. So, just reading Dickens, you get an idea of people being mistreated and poor, and so on, I think. I read Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, I read everything I could get my hands on.

KP: What about movies, did you ever go to movies in the 1930s?

RO: Yeah, well, in those days when you went to movies ... in the '20s, too, you would get, during the Depression, too, they would give you a free cup or a plate or something every time you went, so you could build up your own set. And they had vaudeville, too, which was nice. We went to Freehold, some of the time. There were two movie theaters in Freehold, the Strand and the Liberty. The Liberty was not considered to be so high class, so my mother insisted we went to the Strand. She was a socially conscious lady. But in that period, the Carlton Theater, what is now the Count Basie Theater, opened up in Red Bank and that was not so far from where we lived, across from the Marlboro State Hospital. So, we mostly went there, maybe, once every couple of weeks. That was nice.

KP: Did you ever travel on vacations while growing up?

RO: Not very much. My family (had) retained quite a number of friendships from New Brunswick and, particularly, Highland Park, where we had had our house. And we would sometimes travel to New Brunswick to see them. Or, occasionally, people would come out, maybe once a year, and play "Michigan," at our place. And then I would find money on the floor afterwards, or under cushions, or whatever, but any way some of it I think [was] salted so that I would find it, but I didn't complain. But we didn't do much of any traveling. One period, as a child, well, let's see, it was my father's connections. I hope I am speaking clearly enough. One of his good friends, from the time he had worked at Rutgers, was Harry Lewis, who became a big poultry farmer in Rhode Island and, for one period, even was Secretary of Agriculture in Rhode Island. He had this big, beautiful poultry farm. So once in a while we would go up there around, maybe even have, Thanksgiving dinner with them. That was always a great treat. They didn't have any children my age, their one son was somewhat older, but that was nice up there. ... I'm going into too much detail here. Among other things, I still have some swords from the Russo-Japanese war, some old rusty swords that he had a bunch of and I found them in the barn or something. And he said, "Take any that you want." So I took a few. But as far as traveling, one of my mother's sisters had married a person of German or Pennsylvania Dutch background named Succop, and they lived with their two children, my cousins, in Pittsburgh. Uncle Dave was a paint salesman or something of that sort. And there was one time, after they visited family in the East that ... I went with them when they drove back, there were no big highways then over the mountains to Pittsburgh where they lived on Squirrel Hill. ... After my holiday in Pittsburgh, they put me on a Pullman car, told the black gentleman to look after me, and I came home in style.

KP: Which must have been very exciting for you.

RO: Yeah. Another family, named Musgrave had been very good friends in New Brunswick, and I kept up with the boy, George Musgrave, who in later life put a shotgun to his head and killed himself. But he had a marvelous collection of toy soldiers. Anyway, they moved. ... The father, who may have been George also, I'm not sure, was working at the Department of Agriculture or some other department in Washington. They lived over in Falls Church, Virginia. I remember one time my mother and I drove down to Washington for a visit with them. I played with George. That was about the furthest we ever got from home. Once in a great while I would get up to New York, or Newark with Mother, to buy something at Bambergers. We went to Trenton fairly often because my mother liked a store there (and Aunt Emma lived there near a little park and zoo). Our dentist was in New Brunswick. You know, my mother didn't want me to become a country boy. ... It was not always easy, because she made me wear shorts long after the other boys my age were wearing knickers, not shorts ... and I was a little plump, too. So I had a few problems adjusting to my mother's ambitions and wanting to be like everybody else.

KP: You must have gone to the beach a lot, I would imagine.

RO: We did. Somehow or other, we got where we liked Manasquan best and we went ... quite a lot to Manasquan. That was nice. I would suppose my mother, my father couldn't go very often, but my mother and I would go to Manasquan a lot. Thank heavens for my mother's insistence, she took me to have swimming lessons in Asbury where there was a ... natatorium, or whatever it was called. There, so I learned the Australian crawl. There had been a lot of relationships with the beach. Because earlier, even before we came to Bradevelt, my parents went several summers down to Sea Girt where they rented a cottage. They would also go down in that area and have bonfire picnics on the beach with friends from New Brunswick. One of the earliest problems I heard about, with me, was that I wandered off into the Sea Girt inlet one time and was already up to my neck, going further out, before they realized where I was and came and got me. I was never afraid of water but I still hadn't learned the crawl or anything by then. I was only about three.

KP: You went to Marlboro Elementary and then Freehold High School. I imagine there must have been something of a, particularly in Freehold High School, a split between the townies and the kids from farms.

RO: Oh, I suppose so. I don't know, I wasn't too much aware of it except indirectly. As I recall now, thinking back, I sort of got in with the Freehold kids, who had been in school together, somehow or other. Maybe, my mother having family there, and so on, and she was always pushing me, "You are not just there just to study, you're to go out for this or that or to do this and that," giving me encouragement (to be active). And I had an older cousin, Carol, who, I think, was a senior when I went there as a freshman. This was the Pittsburgh cousin. ... Her mother, she, and her little sister moved to Freehold after the father, my Uncle Dave, died, ... so I had that connection. I mean, Carol taught me how to dance and even took me on a double date when I was ... in eighth grade.

KP: You were very young.

RO: I was precocious. [laughter] I mean, ... it was just to help me grow up. It wasn't a real date. ... It was ... with her and her boyfriend and one of her girlfriends who pretended to be my date. You know, it was with real "adult" people, sixteen, seventeen years old. ... I was only twelve, when I went to high school. Anyway, I got into things. I was very active in high school. Like Mary, a fellow student, I got a "Gold F" pin (for Freehold) for being in so many activities.

KP: What activities were you involved in, in high school?

RO: Well, I did a lot of writing then, still do. ... So I was one of the editors of the school paper and the coeditor of the yearbook, and things like that. I was lousy at baseball, but it was the only sport I had ever been in at all, so I started out with baseball, then shifted over. Since I was light, I didn't go in for sports so as to build up my muscles to show bravery or to prove something, I did go out for football. I never got beyond, really, the second or scrub teams. I got beat up on all the time playing against bigger, older kids. I only weighed about 140-45 pounds then and was too slow to be a good end. But anyway, I did get into track, and found that I had more stamina than most anybody else in the school. So I could run miles when they couldn't. [laughter] There were no cross-country teams then, but I ran. I was, relatively, the best school miler, anyway, and ran in a lot of meets. Got my school letter. I built up a lot of credits, one way or another. I had a lot of fun. I dated almost every good-looking girl in my class and in a few other classes, too. I got to be vice-president in my senior year, strictly on the womens' vote. [laughter] We had wonderful dances at school. And in that period, say by senior year in high school then certainly on into Rutgers, all the big bands were coming down to the shore. It was wonderful.

KP: You mentioned that in high school and in college, and it is one of the things my students always bring up, they almost are envious of how active the social life was at Rutgers, particularly the dances.

RO: Of course. At Rutgers and with Mary at NJC, (Douglass), there were dances almost every weekend certain times in the year. We'd go over to NJC, I think it cost a dollar a couple, and they had a paid orchestra. They would give you a piece of cake, or cookies, and punch. I didn't do too well in my cross-country towards the end because I was spending too much time with Mary. ... Douglass (NJC) is a pretty long way from Rutgers campus, Old Queens, so whatever training I did, I did running over to Douglass, [laughter] ... if there wasn't a dance or something. Mary usually treated me to the dance when it was there, only a dollar. We would stop at a little place that's ... still there on George Street. We would stop there, ... go in and each get a cup of tea for a nickel. You could sit there and have a tea together for two nickels. Then she would walk back to NJC and I would trot back to Rutgers. ... This was when I was living in New Brunswick. I commuted for my first two years in a car with three other people.

KP: From Freehold?

RO: From my Marlboro home, yeah, they would pick me up going to New Brunswick by way of Matawan and Old Bridge.

KP: Who were your commuters, do you remember them?

RO: Not too easily. ... Milton Horowitz was one. He was the driver, I guess, usually. Then there was a Sylvia Lazansky. She later changed it to Lazan. She was, I think in the NJC Class of '39 or '40. And another man, a classmate, whose name slips me at the moment, (Sam Siegel). I haven't seen any of those nice people in a very long time.

SH: How many years had you been at Rutgers when you met Mary?

RO: Well, I met Mary ... Mary was in high school with me at Freehold and she was in my French and English classes and she was one of the fifteen or twenty pretty girls I dated. [laughter] And she was very nice, right, as a lot of them were. Anyway, as I say, we knew each other and we were in a number of classes together. ... I saw quite a lot of her for a couple months at one time, before I got a real serious crush on somebody else. And then, later on, ... after my freshman year at Rutgers, I was home. I thought I'd like a date for July Fourth, and I kinda went through what little books I had and I wasn't doing very well getting anybody to date me. And ... my mother said, "What about that nice Mary Hance you used to see?" More maternal influence. ... And I said, "Hey, that's a great idea." So I called her, and it was a July Fourth date. On July Fourth we went out to the fireworks at Matawan, right, and we got along well together. So when ... I went back to Rutgers and she went back to NJC, we got together again. First thing you know we were going steady. ... We were, more or less, engaged for about, you might say, ... four years before we got married. It was not a relationship that Mary's mother particularly approved of because she had Mary all set to be a journalist or a writer or so on. I don't think Mary's mother's marital experience had been very happy, and she didn't think too much of men, generally, but she put up with me because she didn't have too much choice.

KP: So her mother had sent her to college to have a career?

RO: Yeah, ... Mary's mother was her father's third wife and he had been a farmer. But he died ... when Mary was only about fifteen. And the mother, ... who was not left much of any living, went into ... [the] antique business and things of that sort. So it was really marvelous that Mary was able to get married at NJC. Where are we now? ... I didn't quite answer that question as I recall. Oh, I see, about Mary, yeah.

KP: Were you disappointed that you could not live at Rutgers and that you had to be a commuter? Or did you just accept the fact that this is the way it was and you were just glad to be going to college?

RO: I don't recall any great disappointment. I recall wishing I were living at college and as soon as I could manage it, why, I did. I mean I got jobs. I was one of those people that was always checking coats at dances or doing one thing or another, ... even later on, when I was in the fraternity. And I worked whenever I could get a job, all four years. I worked in the summers at farms. One whole summer I worked at the Marlboro State Hospital in the ... stores department, assistant to the storekeeper. I was making money every summer, picking potatoes, or working one way or another.

KP: Since we are on the subject of summer jobs, one summer, you worked at the World's Fair, in 1940.

RO: Yeah, ... I was ... at Rutgers. Maybe this is one major benefit of having been in the School of Ceramics. When it (the World's Fair) opened up, I didn't go work there the first year, but then two Ceramics students in the Class of 1940 went up to work with Dupont at the World's Fair, giving little demonstrations of the ceramic colors and one thing or another as part of their show at the Dupont exhibit. And then it sort of got started, through the influence, I guess, of George Brown, Dean, and the School of Ceramics. ... When they (1940 students) graduated, why, then the fair was continued and they needed replacements for those two. And so two members of the class of, the Ceramics Class if you will, of 1941 were asked if they would go and I agreed. And the other one was a very nice man who was killed in flight training before he got overseas in World War II.

KP: Do you remember his name?

RO: Williams, no, not Williams, Harold (Harold Johnson)? At the moment it escapes me, but anyway ... that's how I got to work at the World's Fair. And I got training. They took us to the Dupont factory, and we ... had a big, long speech to memorize. That we would do some of the time ... theoretically when we could get the whole spiel for the whole show, not just our little Ceramics (Engineering) part. But mainly we were there, ... with little electric ovens, decorating china and glasses, firing them in the ovens and passing them out to people. But that's essentially ... why I didn't get to be Phi Beta Kappa. Later on, my father was asking about it, because he had wanted me to make it, and George Brown told him how it was, that I was considered for Phi Beta Kappa, but had missed too many labs due to working at the World's Fair, ... during part of the school year, I mean, I would go up and I would be at school all morning, then I would get on the train in New Brunswick and get out to Long Island to work the rest of the day at the World's Fair. So he said I had just missed too many labs ... to give full credit, that otherwise, I might have made Phi Beta Kappa, (like my dad). It didn't make any difference to me at the time, it is only in later years that I sort of wished I had it, I wish I had a grandchild I could pass that [on to], made Phi Beta Kappa and then have yet to pass his key on, too. Dad always wore his key whenever he was dressed up. He always had both his father's watch and his Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from a chain.

KP: My stepfather talks about this a lot. He says it was a very exciting World's Fair.

RO: It was, it was a very exciting fair. It was exciting in more ways than one. On one occasion, it must have been the first year before I was working there I took Mary to the World's Fair. We went up to the Fair and we had a marvelous time. But then I forgot, we didn't keep track of the time, and we missed the last train back to New Jersey and had to spend the night in Pennsylvania Station. We didn't have enough money for a hotel or anything and Mary's mother was rather upset. [laughter] You would have thought, you know, Mary's reputation was ruined forever. It was almost like having a baby out of wedlock, for heaven's sake, and I ... wasn't guilty of anything at all. I wouldn't want to spend the night in Penn Station anymore, but it wasn't altogether a cozy spot back then, either. But that (working at the Fair) was a good experience and I got paid some marvelous amount, something like $138.00 a month.

KP: Which was still a lot of money?

RO: It was not a vast amount, even then, but it might have been the equivalent of four or five hundred now.

KP: You mentioned that you got into Ceramics sort of by accident that you had come to the idea sort of by ...

RO: Yeah, I just sort of drifted in. It appealed to me in a way that the classes were smaller. I only had eight or ten people in my class in Ceramics. And it had a certain prestige on campus as being one of the toughest curricula on campus. You had your own special Ceramics courses, which were not very difficult, really, but then you were also taking engineering courses, you were taking chemistry courses, and it had a certain, I don't know if it does now or not, but in those days that was considered you ... weren't taking snap stuff. ... I worked, also, at the Ceramics lab. I made ... 40, I figure it was 40 cents an hour or 60 cents an hour mopping up the floors in the Ceramics building.

----------------------END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE-------------------------------

KP: Did you think you would have a career in Ceramics?

RO: I wasn't drifting, I was working hard and doing well, but by the time I graduated, or I guess a little bit before I graduated, I didn't know what I was going to do. World War II had not come along yet, although the rumblings were there. ... At one point even thought I might like to go into geology. I was very attracted by one geology course I had, enough to go and be interviewed, or go talk to the head of the Geology Department up at Columbia. He was more interested in paleontology. ... Anyway, ... I wasn't all that excited, and I didn't get any offer from Columbia. ... I guess Professor Brown always thought I should go on and do graduate work, if I could get a scholarship. And I was offered a fellowship and a scholarship at MIT, in the Department of Metallurgy. MIT had ... a very famous [professor], at that time, I can't think of his name at the moment, who headed ... the Department of Metallurgy, a very famous name in Ceramics (Norton). ... So I got a full fellowship and a scholarship, too, which I supplemented later by working in the graduate school cafeteria up at MIT. That was just because I couldn't really make up my mind and here was something to do, right? And then, of course, when World War II came along and I suddenly, to my great surprise, found myself with a commission as a (Navy) Ensign. Why, that took care of the next four years very nicely. [laughter] And I never did go back into Ceramics, although I had passed my written exam for the Doctor of Science before I went in the Navy. But I would have had at least one year more in research, and thesis, and oral exams, so I never went back. They had kept the space open for me, if I had wanted to go back. By that time I matured enough to know I didn't want to be stuck in some lab for the rest of my life, when I really liked being with people, working with people. I had broader interests. In the meanwhile, I had read, ... this is my earlier reading habit, on the Pacific Islands, I read countless other books that my wife sent me, or I ordered ... by mail. Every subject I had missed at Rutgers, botany, biology, history, you name it. And on the basis of all that reading, I decided when the chance came along after the war to, or [during the war] toward the end, to take a Foreign Service exam. Well, I was able to pass the exam. (As I learned later on), they at first weren't even [sure] whether they were going to accept me even to take the Foreign Service exam, because my background had been in engineering and so limited, and, in lieu of academic credits, I submitted a list of everything I had read in the South Pacific. And they said, "My word." ... I talked later to someone who was in the office that reviewed my application, and [they] said, "Let's ... see what he can do. See if he can take, how he can make out, on the exam." Well, I skimmed through the exam, barely did the (foreign language-)French part based on high school French and a little scientific French (at MIT). The rest of my life was changed, if I hadn't done all that reading in the South Pacific and a certain amount of cramming in the few weeks I had ... before the exam, reading cram books on American history, and things of that sort. So I passed the written and later was invited (to take the orals), … twenty-five thousand or more World War II vets took that written exam and something like one thousand passed, most of them were offered the oral and by the time the orals came, probably not more than half of those were still interested. So I got in through the orals. Maybe, maybe a hundred were accepted. I've been lucky, it's a great life. But it's all chance. [laughter] So I'm drifting around, at least we can get a little about World War II in here. [laughter]

SH: If we could go back to "the rumblings" that you heard. Can you describe the rumblings of the war in Europe? Where you were and how they progressed?

RO: Well, in high school Hitler was already moving. ... Of course, ... earlier you had the war in Spain, you had Mussolini going into Ethiopia, and so it was clear things were getting pretty bad. But, you know, at our age, young kids in high school, it was interesting, but you were more interested in the next dance or something else, what you were going to do. And then it got, of course, in '38, '39, and '40, ... the Germans really started moving, going into Czechoslovakia.

KP: A number of people I have interviewed knew people who often were German-Americans and knew some people in their community or high school who were involved in the Bunde. Did you know anyone?

RO: No, there wasn't any activity of that sort that I am aware of, or was aware of.

KP: You read a lot. How closely did you follow foreign affairs at the time?

RO: Very little I would imagine, other than what I needed for courses in high school.

SH: Were you aware of any discussions in your home of war?

RO: Not that I really remember. Of course, obviously, ... we had radios, you know, we would hear things on the radio. ... We would worry as things happened. ... We were aware that there was a lot of extra training going on. I think it's obvious, for example, that while I was at Rutgers they started encouraging kids to take a sort of aviation training, subsidized. And a number of my friends did go into that. I wanted to, but I was too young and my parents wouldn't give consent, so that's one reason I am alive today, probably. They didn't agree.

KP: So you wanted to take the Civilian Air Training Program?

RO: Oh, sure. I was always interested in new things. Of course, then I was marching around for two years in the ROTC. I didn't care too much for that.

KP: You decided not to apply for advanced ROTC?

RO: I don't recall now my thinking on the subject, but I wasn't particularly attracted to it. It didn't have ... anything to do with assessment of the possibility of service, or anything. When the opportunity came along for the Navy, why, I kind of grabbed it because to me the Navy had more class, or it was more romantic. I had read all those Hornblower stories in the Saturday Evening Post when I was a boy and my Uncle Ed had been in the Navy (in World War I), although I don't think he had any kind of career. But he ... still had his sword in the attic when it was time for me to be married. So we borrowed his sword as one of the swords to be held in the arch coming out of the chapel.

SH: As a commuter you were exempt from chapel, so by your senior year did you have to attend chapel at Rutgers?

RO: Yeah. I don't think it bothered me, I mean we were church-goers. I was in the choir, children's choir, until I started having voice problems. [laughter] Of course, we had the church across the street. I never was able to get the little star or bars or anything for perfect attendance, but I came close one year. [laughter]

KP: What did you think of Dean Metzger and did you have any dealings with him?

RO: I think he is the one that married us, I will have to check back on that. [He was.] Mary doesn't remember, she thought it was ... Demarest, the former president, whom we used to see once in a while and who my father knew just as a student, he didn't have any special relationship. Poor Demee, he had trouble with his teeth, with speaking, in later years. ... He was a fond character. Dean Metzger, the Dean of Men, ... he was tough. He was a disciplinarian. I don't think I was ever called up on the carpet. I made sure, I was sort of a "Rover Boy," anyway. I was not the sort to get in trouble, except once in a while. [laughter] The same in high school, one big incident in high school, ... here I had been ... one of the really good boys, didn't drink, ... didn't have a bad reputation with the girls, even though I went out with them a lot. ... Senior year, I guess, we were going on a trip to New York, a class trip to New York to go to Radio City Music Hall and whatever. I had two or three particular buddies in high school, two of them from Farmingdale, one from Freehold, son of a rug mill person, very good friends. On the senior trip we got together and we said, "Radio City Music Hall?" Anyway, ... we skipped that part, we went to the burlesque, Old Minsky's Burlesque. [laughter] This was quite an experience for us, and on some other street, we bought those horrible fluorescent type ties you can get real cheap, for obvious reasons. They were cheap ties. And then, not content with all that, why, then we wanted to go on a big, long subway ride. So we went on this big, long subway ride and got way up in the Bronx, or heaven knows what, and they had to hold the bus for us, because we were so late getting back. Which was the worst sin of all. Of course, then it came out what we'd been doing instead of going to Radio City. So I was suspended, the only time I was ever suspended from school, or on probation or something, for a few days. And my reputation at the high school went zooming out the door. [laughter] They thought I was just too good to be true before that.

MC: Did many people from your high school attend college?

RO: ... Yes, quite a few did. In those days, you could take two tracks, so to speak. They didn't even have that term then. ... There was a special set of courses required for people who expected to go on to higher education, others got more shop, or sewing, or whatever. They still had other good courses, but they were not pointed toward higher education. I don't know what the percentage was, I would say about half maybe went on to something, went into special schools, normal school, or CPA school, or college. Maybe not quite that many. ... Sort of the ones mostly that I [was] associating with [went to college]. When you asked earlier about cliques, possibly, between the country kids and stuff, I wasn't aware of it too much, except there were definitely some. People tended to stay with their friends, the ones they had gone to grade school with. I broke into the other groups. In fact, I was in several different groups, depending on who I was dating at the time. But I didn't see that much of my old classmates from Marlboro. We just sort of, … weren't in the same sports or weren't in the same social circle. It wasn't that easy for me because Freehold was a long way, and I would have to hitch-hike home from Freehold a great deal. I couldn't drive obviously, I wasn't seventeen yet. I did not drive until I was a sophomore in college, oh no, ... I guess, ... I got a license the day I was seventeen in February 1938.

LL: You mentioned that you enjoyed writing. Did you write for the Targum when you were at Rutgers?

RO: Yes, I wrote for the Targum, I wrote for the Scarlet Letter. I was one of the activities editors, my last year, of the Scarlet Letter. I was editor of the fraternity newspaper that came out once a month or so. I always enjoyed writing. ... Mary was a journalist, though. She was at the School of Journalism. But at that time the girls could come over to Rutgers for journalism classes, in ... maybe junior and senior [years], at least senior year. I used to meet her at the journalism, its where the Geology Museum is now, right next to Winants Hall. I would be there and meet her and she would be given some assignment to go. So I would take a pad along, and I would go along with her to whatever assignment that she was supposed to report on. [laughter]

KP: You joined a fraternity. How did you come about joining the fraternity you joined?

RO: Well, obviously, you got rushed. They looked around to see who they wanted as members. Well, I got a bid from my father's fraternity. ... I took a girl up there once for a date from New Brunswick, I mean from high school, I think it was the year before, a few months before I went in and it didn't impress me too much, that particular group of fellows. That whole experience was one of, you know, people huddled together in dark corners. And then Chi Phi gave me a bid and Phi Gamma Delta, Fiji's, gave me a bid, ... I was at both houses and I opted to become a pledge, and did as a freshman for Phi Gam, even if I didn't live on campus. So ... that was my fraternity, and I had a good time there. They were a pretty well behaved bunch, in those years anyway. We always had ... a man, living in the house, who did the cleaning and so, and his wife was the cook, a nice black couple. People generally behaved. Once in a while, there would be a binge, a little drinking, some did visit the wrong parts of town occasionally. But, it was not too bad.

KP: What was the wrong part of town?

RO: I did not visit there, let's ... [make] that clear. [laughter] But I knew where it was and heard some of the experiences. It was a house of prostitution, down somewhere (near) where that theater is now.

KP: The George Street Theater?

RO: Yes, I guess that is the George Street Theater. Yeah.

KP: Livingston Avenue, by the Y?

RO: No, it was down closer to the campus. ... Maybe the theater is not there anymore. It was not the one up on Livingston Avenue, this was the one --

KP: On Albany Street?

RO: On Albany Street. I don't know whether it was even a house of prostitution, I know it was a place where people could get a drink and find girls that were willing.

MC: Where was your fraternity house? Was it on frat row?

RO: No, no. There's a big dorm where it used to be. You know where the Chi Phi house is? Well, if you go north toward the river ... it was at the corner of Bishop Place and that next street.

MC: George Street.

RO: George Street. It was a beautiful old building, up ... on a hill, looking out over the river. Seems to me one of the George Street fraternities now is down below, on the right to where that used to be. But that was a nice, we had a fire later on and they had to move and they moved twice. I guess now they have moved a third time, fourth time, maybe.

SS: Do you remember your initiation?

RO: Yes, well, not so much the initiation, I remember "hell week." In our particular fraternity, the tradition then was that you each got a big bunch of onions hung around your neck. ... Whenever an upper class-man saw you, he would ask some question and then you would have to take a bite of onion. And you couldn't take them off, day or night, right. ... Plenty of people [gave you] room in class, people moved away. And there was still, still there was still paddles then. I don't recall it ever being abused. I always had mixed feelings. I think it was sort of a rite of passage, and it wasn't all that harmful. There weren't any pranks so serious that anybody, at least in our fraternity, ever got seriously hurt. They might scare you to death a little bit. I remember Vince Kramer particularly. I remember he and I were not the best of friends, it wasn't bad, but we just sort of had different personalities. Well, he was the football hero and I was the runner. He was contact sports and I was not contact sports. ... Oh where was I, wandering too much again.

SS: About the initiation.

RO: ... I remember particularly being so impressed that upper classmen would challenge freshmen, you know, for exchanging swats. You would have to swat them first, the upper classmen, you know, he'd bend over assume the position and you would give him a swat, and then it was his turn. [laughter] ... I remember Vince particularly was very stalwart in this regard, and I think one of the seniors and he must have exchanged about ten swats. ... I don't think either one of them sat down for a while. It was a very good period at Phi Gamma Delta. ... We had, I think, an exceptionally compatible group of people in all the different classes. I think, at one time I did check out on ... the contributions to Rutgers from different classes and there were an awful lot of active people in the class of '41. And '38, '39, '40, '41, '42, '43, I mean somewhere in that group, ... people had such a good, active time that they continued their fondness by supporting Rutgers more than some others might.

Hey, we're not even anywhere near World War II hardly yet, let's hurry it up, if we go a little while longer and then stop for lunch or something. ...

KP: Okay. Whenever you are ready to stop.

RO: I can talk all day, you know. ... Will I get a copy of what I said that you don't use because that can be ... an oral history that will useful to us.

KP: You will get the whole transcript to edit. You will have to do the editing.

RO: Because you will have to cut this down. ...

KP: Oh no. We put the whole transcript on the Internet.

RO: Well, this means it will never get read because people will get so tired of it. ...

KP: Oh, no!

RO: Okay, well go ahead. ...

KP: On campus, did you see a split between those who commuted and those who lived on campus?

RO: I don't know how serious it was, I mean, I was young and pretty naïve, right, still am, not young, but naive. There was more of a split you might say between fraternity and non-fraternity, but this wasn't evident, as far as I can recall, in class relationships, or club relationships or working for the Targum, I suppose. There was a very active non-fraternity group, I forget what its called now, I think it's probably still has the same name.

SH: Scarlet Barbs.

RO: ... The Scarlet Barbs, or whatever, right. And there were separate dorm groups. But ... I don't feel that it, I mean you might say having ... been in what at the time may have been considered the more elite group in the fraternities but I was much less aware of any distinction then if I had been in, say, been in the ... commuter club or group, that wasn't as active, and might have felt some people were looking down on them, which maybe they did, but I wasn't aware of it, really.

KP: So by being part of the fraternity, but still being a commuter, you felt like you had a place.

RO: I had so many. The fraternity was important to me, but it didn't mean I had fewer friends among my Ceramics classmates, or that I didn't have a lot good friendships in the cross country track group, or Scarlet Letter group. I mean, I just sort of kept doing what I had done in high school and throughout my life in a sense. I avoided being too closely identified, in the narrow sense, with any group. I like people, whatever, I mean, I'm not bragging, its just been my approach.

SH: Did you notice any split between those who favored isolation towards the war when you were there? Vince Kramer mentioned in his interview that he thought there was a division between those who ...

RO: Between which?

KP: Between the isolationists and the interventionists.

RO: I don't know. I think he picks up a lot from times later on rather than from school years because he has very strong views about people who were draft dodgers or one thing or another. I was not aware of this. ... Certainly there was really no feeling about it, as far as I can tell, in say '37, '38, '39. Maybe starting in '40 people were beginning to think, well, sooner or later, they might go in and a few people left college to go fight ... with the British before we went in. People were a little concerned about the future. But, I don't think there was too much of this until, say, the draft started. Let's say in that period and people had to make up their minds whether they were going to go, or what did they feel about it, or whether they would be volunteers, or wait to be drafted. Maybe if you had been an advanced ROTC person, you would have had much more feeling for this than the bulk of the student body.

KP: So you did not view the debate over America going to war as a big issue dividing the students?

RO: Not for me. Maybe in the Department of History, not in the Department of Ceramics. [laughter] I didn't hear too much about it at the fraternity, either, which included people from all different faculties. If anything, it made us a little envious toward the end, in our naive approach to war, a little envious of those who had been parading around in uniforms.

KP: Several fraternity people have said that part of the reason they joined advanced ROTC was because of the military ball and their uniforms.

RO: Yeah, they also got a certain amount of pay, which was very handy and tempting for people. I guess I, it just was not a very challenging subject in terms of the scholastic side of it. And there were other courses I had to take, I had a pretty full schedule in Ceramics, and with working at the World's Fair, and all my dating activities, I just didn't have time for it. [laughter]

KP: Before we move on to the war, could you maybe reflect on who your favorite professors were and maybe some you were less fond of?

RO: I don't think I had ... any favorites at Rutgers. I barely remember, I mean at MIT.

KP: What about at Rutgers?

RO: At Rutgers, well, I'd have to do some more thinking about that. I liked most of them, I didn't have any particular gripes. ... Looking back over the years, there were some subjects that I found that are more helpful to me later in life. In the Foreign Service, for example, where I also had to do quite a lot of writing, reporting, it was helpful to have had engineering writing as a skill, how to organize an engineering report for example and this I found good. Later on, I forget the name of the nice young professor, maybe he was even an assistant or instructor who had public speaking. In later years, I wished I had really worked much harder on that, because I was not really a very good public speaker, except in informal circumstances. ... I could have benefited later in life if I had more training that way. We had almost no, in Ceramic Engineering, general courses, except for freshmen English, and American Civilization, which I enjoyed. It was all those engineering courses, you were too busy working and learning what you could. Freshmen chemistry, I should remember, Professor Van Mater, he was another family friend. This was nice, you didn't have instructors come and teach, you had the professors come and teach. Which I think is a great shame, later on, that hasn't had that contact, close contact. His was the biggest class I had, and there must have been 60 I guess, maybe 70. ... But they were nice people in the Ceramics Department, ... I really can't pin down particular professors as being great favorites or that this or that person influenced my whole life. They probably did, but.

KP: You did go to MIT for metallurgy.

RO: Well, it was in the Ceramics (Engineering) aspect within the Department of Metallurgy.

KP: How did you like MIT and Cambridge and Boston?

RO: I liked Cambridge and Boston. [laughter] I liked MIT, but it was very, very arduous. I did not have calculus in college ... and it was considered a deficiency, but I was still given my scholarship and fellowship on the understanding that I would take a crash course in Differential Equations when I went up there. And boy, if you have had no background in high school or college in differential equations and then have to take the equivalent of a whole year's course in five or six weeks, five hours a day or something. … I flunked every test in that except the final, and just somehow, things sort of started coming together at the very end. [laughter] ... That was not a very auspicious start, because this was in the summer, June or July, early August, until regular courses started. And I was very busy there, of course, and I had to do a lot of studying at night. I had my work to do as well as my studies. I had some very good friends, the young men in the Ceramics (Engineering) Department. I particularly treasured relationships with three or four. But at ... MIT I was pretty poor, and I was engaged, of course, to Mary, but I didn't have an engagement ring yet. ... So I was saving money, I was only getting fifty dollars a month from the University. And I'm supposed to eat on that as well as pay my rent. ... It was a little tough. So, for quite a while there I was eating Spanish peanuts, which were the cheapest thing you could get that were nourishing. Mary's engagement ring was bought, you might say, with Spanish peanuts, at so much a month at this second hand jewelers in Boston. But I got awfully tired of Spanish peanuts. ... So I started, I got a little ... hot plate and one of these little gas ovens, for gas, but we didn't have gas, ... and I would put that over the hot plate and cook it in my room. ... This was very difficult on my roommate, who was [from] a well-to-do family, he didn't have to, but to have the room all smelled up from my cooking. So finally, one day I guess, whether he was there or I was there, people coming into the MIT Graduate House where we lived would say, "Oh, we're having pot roast for lunch." And they would go downstairs, and no pot roast, just the smell coming down from my room. So I gave up, under considerable pressure, I gave up cooking in my room. ... I got a job as a busboy in the Graduate House cafeteria, which provided my food. It was an interesting period.

KP: You had just been at graduate school a few months when the news of Pearl Harbor came. Do you remember where you were?

RO: That day, I have no idea where I was. I don't remember exactly any important place, where I was on a given day, even the Kennedy assassination, I can't pinpoint it. But anyway, ... shortly after Pearl Harbor, ... a Navy recruiter came around to MIT, ... offering engineering, I suppose engineering graduates and I was a graduate of Rutgers and doing graduate work at MIT, commissions in the Naval Reserve as Ensigns, maybe some higher depending on age, background. ... So he offered me a commission in the Navy and by now I was aware of what was going on, and sooner or later one way or another, I am going to be in this, and wanted to be. There was a lot of patriotic fervor around, more than enough. Anyway, but he ... assured me, "Oh, we wouldn't want to take you right away, you would be so much more valuable to us, you know, when you've got your Doctor of Science degree." So I said, Okay." My commission came in, and not too long after my first orders came to report for active duty, in June, at Fort Schuyler's Officer's Training School in ... New York City, upper New York City. ... So that's when I passed my written exam, and MIT said they would hold a slot for me, if I wanted to come back after the war and finish up. This sort of made me think, too, that maybe I ought to get married before too long, if possible, if I was going overseas. So Mary was amenable to that, her mother was not. [laughter] I was only 21 and Mary was 22, (that June 8, 1942).

KP: So, you actually needed her mother's consent.

RO: No, well, I was already 21, Mary was over 21. She didn't need consent, but, her mother was a widow and she (Mary) didn't want to go too much against her mother. But for the first time Mary actually said, "I'm going to marry him, whether you come to the wedding or not." And at some point, Mary's mother was advised by her brother, who used to live in this house, a dentist, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em, so she did come to the wedding. Anyway I was at Fort Schuyler, New York, Officer's Training, kind of a basic course, where you paraded around, and you took courses on naval history. ... I can't recall anything too much that was useful, it was terminology and you salute the quarter-deck when you come on board ship, and be nice to your captain, and all that stuff. [laughter] And remember Admiral Farragut, and so on and so forth. But they did a certain amount of training, and a lot of physical exercise to build us up. So those were some interesting, quick weeks, and Mary and I scheduled our wedding for August 8th, 1942, just the weekend before the school was going to close. So we got married at Rutgers and came out safely under the crossed swords. [laughter] And a reception at Woodlawn, where Mary had been living [working as ... alumnae clerk], and also she was occasionally also a hostess (at Woodlawn) there to help with things. But anyway, that was the reception and big fancy wedding, big reception. I don't remember too much about it, I was in a big daze.

KP: Most people are at their receptions. I remember my own.

RO: But right after the reception we went down to the station got on the train to go to New York. We went to Hotel Pennsylvania for our day-and-a-half honeymoon, and then Sunday morning, real early, I got up in order to be back up at Fort Schuyler by seven a.m. Then I think at nine a.m. we had our strength test to see how much we had progressed physically in the course. [laughter] And so I graduated, and that was it. I was a cheapskate even then. I was thinking back to the wedding because my best man, who had been one of my best friends from high school, he came but he left his shoes, his white shoes at home or something. ... So I sent him downtown, New Brunswick, to buy a pair of white shoes. He was a big fellow, by standards then. He was well over six feet, and had big feet. But I made him get the shoes in my size. [laughter] Or at least he did, as I recall, and so I used those shoes later on. If anybody saw him he didn't look too comfortable in those around the reception. [laughter] Everyone has a practical side.

KP: MIT, in World War II, would play a major role in the war effort. Did professors approach you, or did you think you might be staying as part of the war effort at MIT?

RO: I wasn't even aware of it, as far as I know now, I wasn't even aware of anything like that going on.

KP: No professors said, "We've got this great project"?

RO: No, no. Actually, of course later on, much later on, Ceramics became very important. You wouldn't have anybody up there in space if we had not developed ceramic materials for insulating the tiles. Anyway, maybe I just didn't know what was going on around me, MIT students didn't discuss anything. They were really a dull bunch, generally. Not so much in the graduate school itself, but you go some place else and you would think kids like at Rutgers would be having a nice time talking, no, these MIT students would be there sitting around hunched over playing with their slide rules. At least that was the impression some of us more freewheeling graduate students had. [laughter] But it was nice to be up there, Mary came up and visited. And a very important development in my life occurred at MIT, because there was a boat club by MIT that had these little sailing dingies in the Charles River Basin and they wouldn't let you use these boats unless you took their course, so I took the course and that's when I started to sail and I've been sailing all my life since. It was really a wonderful start on a lot of things. And I taught all my children to sail, too. So you never know what's going to lead to what. And also, my wife and I are now, and have been a long time, very fond of classical music, we go to many concerts. I had no concept of classical music or the beauty of music at Rutgers to speak of. Glee Club, or something, but at MIT my roommate, who was a more cultured gentleman than I, introduced me to classical music by taking me over to Boston Commons to listen to the Pops orchestra. So I think that was another wonderful deviation in my life.

SH: After Camp Schuyler, where did you go?

RO: Well, we got orders to report to Mare Island Navy Yard, in San Francisco for additional degaussing duty. I'm sorry, I got ahead of myself, we first got orders to go up to Boston Navy Yard, Charlestown Navy Yard, in Boston, for Degaussing training, which we did. And we went almost at once up there, got a little place, little apartment to live, a little cellar type apartment, a basement apartment I guess is a better word, on Beacon Hill, but not on the fashionable side.

KP: But you ended up going to a place you were very familiar with, Cambridge and Boston.

RO: Yeah, to a degree. That was pleasant, but I worked on, I forget some of these names now there's so many places, Castle Island, it was a little island in Boston Harbor, where they had a degaussing station, and sent people for training, and I was there for awhile. And that was interesting it wasn't a deperming station, where you wrapped temporary coils around a ship, but it was one where you ran tests on ships across ranges that were on the bottom of the channel. ... You listened and you learned and learned a little bit particularly about instruments, you know, so that you could adjust them and read them properly and read the tapes, and work out charts to give ships and so on. I don't say I was terribly proficient, but I did that. I remember more one experience when, on a slow spell, I was standing out on this little dock, or pier, coming out from the station and I wanted to fish, here I was in my Navy uniform, you know, untarnished braid and everything, the young Ensign. And they had a kind of like a little fishnet you'd throw out right to try to catch some little minnows or whatever to fish with later. ... But, I stood outside the railing, and I threw too hard, and I pulled myself off this pier down into the water, (which was) only about four or five feet deep, no, maybe only two or three feet deep, and hit my arm. Pushed my whole left arm out, hit a rock, dislocated my shoulder, got a little scratch on my head, maybe, lucky. That was very memorable because it was very embarrassing. Somebody else had to go in and fish my hat out, with the braid, of course, after that it looked a little more senior. [laughter] But they took me to the nearest naval facility with medical possibilities. It was like a boot station place. They just about killed me trying to push this arm back into position, because they were pushing in the wrong direction. Finally, someone, "Ohh, that's the wrong way." And they pushed it the other way and snapped it right in. I haven't had a great deal of confidence in certain types of medical people since. Anyway, I decided to go back to our little apartment and sleep in a chair for the next week or ten days or two weeks. … Not the best way to spend a second honeymoon.

KP: What was your wife doing while you were training in Boston, was she working at all?

RO: I wasn't there all that long. ... I think she just kept the home-fires burning, so to speak. In fact, one time we had to evacuate the apartment because I had gotten some free wood from the Navy that happened to be creosoted, and the smoke fumes from our fireplace drove us out into the street. It was not very pleasant.

KP: Did you have a hard time getting an apartment in Boston?

RO: I don't recall. I think that wherever you went, there was always somebody in a Navy office that had a list of places and would offer help. ... So I suppose that's how we found this spot.

KP: Could you tell us about the problem with mines and merchant shipping in World War II?

RO: Well, of course, it wasn't just the merchant marine, but in the early stages of the war, the Germans mounted a massive effort, using magnetic mines, which means mines that would be triggered, would be primed and triggered, by the magnetic waves of ships going over (or nearby). It's like in the olden days where there would have to contact, but this is, they'd blow up with a certain magnetism. And ships, all metal ships, have you might say, magnetic signatures depending where they are, what direction they're heading. ... One way was discovered, I think probably the British pioneered it, but we, anyway, we followed up and did more, in ways to counteract these magnetic signatures or reduce the size so it would be less likely for our ships to set off these magnetic mines. We lost a lot, we probably lost a lot more ships or as many ships from magnetic mines as we did from submarine torpedoes.

KP: Because you always hear about submarines.

RO: Right. ...

---------------------------END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO --------------------------------------

RO: It is not real clear now in my memory, whether, as far as amounts go of course, submarines did an awful lot of damage. But off England, in areas where we wanted to send supply ships and other ships, areas that could be mined, were mined, and these magnetic mines presented a very serious problem that was vastly reduced once they developed the techniques for this degaussing. Degaussing meaning de-magnetization. Which was done either by wrapping coils around an entire ship and putting direct current through it which is just sort of a one time thing, it reduces a certain amount, but not too much. Or installing coils inside the hulls of ships, from simple ones on a ship like Liberty ship, all the way around, and occasionally a vertical one, or to much more complicated coils of various types, aboard say a destroyer or a battleship or so on, where you'd have some fore and aft and vertical and whatever. And then, ... these were run also on direct current, and you could measure the effect of the ship in various headings and times by instruments on a channel underneath a ship. ... From this you could draw up charts to be given to the captain and the navigator, so that as the ship was going along, depending where, and what heading, what part of the world, they could adjust the currents on these various cables to minimize the magnetic signature. This later on became important also for when the Germans started using magnetic torpedoes. It really affected us if a torpedo didn't hit the ship, it didn't hit the ship, but it could go under the ship, or even come near the ship, and be blown up by the magnetism of the ship which could increase their deadliness, so to speak. But anyway, there were a lot of people in this activity, both officers and enlisted men, and degaussing stations set up all around the world, in all harbors, to take care of this, because every so often these signatures, magnetic signatures would change, and the ship would have to be re-calibrated, so to speak, given new instructions. So everything I did in the Navy pretty much was related to this activity, assisting in ... one of these degaussing stations.

KP: So what skills were involved in your training to do this?

RO: In degaussing training?

KP: Yes, in just your training in general.

RO: Well, in all honesty, like in many things including modern days, being able to use a computer. ... It's one thing to, you can learn how to do a great deal without knowing all the theory or how to write your own programs on a computer right. Well, you could learn how to use these instruments by watching other people and by hands-on experience and work up your charts, it was just step one, two, three, four, without knowing all the magnetic theory, which of course, you also got a smattering of, but ... it is a practical talent that you develop by doing. And that was pretty much true. ... I suppose I drank more coffee than I did anything else in those training periods, while watching other people, more skilled people do things and then, now and then, in effect, taking the helm and working some of the stuff out, taking sort of a practical hands-on type test to see if I was ready to go on to the next step. You got to be very familiar with the anatomy of ships because many of these cables really were in odd spots of the ship, and you had to inspect it. Every kind of ship, aircraft carriers down to little, small ships if they were metal. PT boats, no, because they didn't have enough metal to have any real magnetic signature, and they usually weren't around in a given spot long enough to set something up anyway. But we did, also, as a secondary help, we would occasionally even go aboard a PT boat in order to help them adjust their compasses, which, of course, ... were magnetic compasses, since we had a little bit of experience with that. But that was sort of an extra duty that we would do on occasion to be obliging, or do the same thing, favor for liberty ships, adjust their magnetic compasses. At the same time we were also giving them instructions on how to reduce their magnetism. It wasn't really very exciting. I had much more fun with Mary, learning the towns that we were stationed in, and making friends with other trainees.

KP: Did you make any lasting friends that you've kept in touch with?

RO: Well, I guess, pretty much as long as they lasted, you know, we kept correspondence up for years, but don't ask me at this moment to recall their names, Mary would be much better she's always been my name resource person.

KP: Were you disappointed that you got this assignment?

RO: I never gave much thought to it. It was much later on in the South Pacific that I tried to get transferred out to most anything else.

KP: It sounds like you were looking for something more exciting, that your mission proved to be very mundane even in the South Pacific?

RO: Yeah, you might say. Well, of course, when I was in charge of my own unit, why then I was sort of the CO, and responsible for all aspects of the enlisted men. When you're out a place like that you didn't, they weren't all degaussing specialists, you had to have signalmen, you had to have cooks, you had to have coxswains, you had to have divers. You had quite a miscellany of people that you were responsible for. And that included responsibility for everything you could think of, including helping them with their advancement through monitoring and teaching, giving them tests to see if they were qualified for going up another grade. I've always loved a wide variety of responsibilities and experiences. I sought that and achieved that in the Foreign Service and the Navy its always been very interesting. I don't think I ever really questioned the right of the Navy to send me anywhere they wanted or tell me what they wanted me to do. It was always fascinating to go to a new place, San Francisco, New Caledonia. You got to interesting places, in New Caledonia I wasn't at the main naval base, I was on a small island out in the harbor. We always were somewhere off on the edge of things, where there'd be a suitable channel in depth for you to have these instruments on the bottom. On the island of Ile Nu, in the harbor of Noumea, which had been a very infamous prison island, but the prisoners had long since departed, although some of the ancient ones were still hanging around Noumea itself, because they never could get anywhere else. But we were on that island, that was maybe what five, six miles out in the harbor. Once in a while we would get into the main base, not too often.

I guess I did mention that I bumped into Admiral "Bull" Halsey there on the main base, I went in one time and they had a beach somewhere out near Noumea, and a lot of people in the water as I recall, mostly about chest high. ... And I was ... always a great one for swimming under water and I would dive, and I was swimming under water and I came up, "BANG", against somebody's big tummy. I came up and looked and there was Admiral "Bull" Halsey standing there in front of me, I had just banged into him. Needless to say, I was down under the water and off somewhere pretty quickly. [laughter] He had a reputation for being, as well as, he was he was the top naval officer in the South Pacific, I didn't hang around, I was cautious after that. I remember that particular island, one on Ile Nu they were growing wild not pepper plants, there were little pepper plants, very, very excruciatingly hot peppers, about that long, in rocky soil. And one way, when you were a new person, somebody was always telling you "try one of these peppers." So I remember a number of times doing the same thing to other poor kids that came on. You would sort of pretend to eat one, and say, "these are good, really have one," and you would see them get redder and redder.

KP: After Boston, you were assigned to San Francisco?

RO: Yes, I was assigned to, ... I think it was Pier 33. Here again, it was not close to the Navy Yard.

KP: And you mentioned that the Navy had said you had to be in San Francisco at such and such a time.

RO: Yeah, they ... made it possible, in those days, to take a roundabout way. They were only really interested in ... the date you were supposed to report. And they, of course, would pay your travel. ... I think they also paid for my wife's travel, since I still wasn't going overseas, you know, and we were married. So we took this opportunity to, with naval assistance or maybe there's some other word, ... to get to San Francisco ... from Boston by way of Niagara Falls, where we stayed overnight I guess, a day or two maybe. And then stopped over briefly in Chicago where I guess we changed trains and got, I think it was called the "Chief" or something, an old train, quite famous, but a slow one. You could get another one that was much faster, but we got a slow one so we could stop at different places. We stopped at Carlsbad Caverns, and saw Carlsbad Caverns and had wonderful seafood at a little hotel near there. Then we went up to the Grand Canyon. I showed you some pictures of Mary and I ... coming up out of the Grand Canyon by mule-back ... in the snow, the ... last day it was open that year. And then ... got to San Francisco, and the Navy helped us find this little converted store with the big show windows boarded up, except for little holes in it, where we lived for several months before my going [back] overseas. That was the period that ... I had mostly night shifts at Pier 33, which was both a deperming station and a degaussing station. Here again mostly filling in time, while other people did the work. Sometimes there would be nothing ... to do, but you still had to be there. I learned that the Navy ... has endless cups of coffee going, usually in the same pot that hadn't been washed for years. But it kept you awake. Then I would come home and Mary would be doing her housework in the middle of the night, and putting out laundry, ... then be available with me the next day, say until maybe three or four in the afternoon to go enjoy Golden Gate Park or go around town. We were only a block or two from Golden Gate Park actually. It was in town, right on a noisy place too during the day because of the trolley going by, just up the corner next to the liquor store. This meant that people ... at night, when I was working down at Pier 33, people would come up from the liquor store, having bought something, and stand in the little store doorway to at least have a few, and sometimes, Mary said, there were as many as two or three bottles out by our doorstep in the morning, empty ones, when she came out.

KP: It sounds like you and Mary enjoyed San Francisco a great deal.

RO: Yeah, ... it was delightful weather. It very often rained in the early morning before we got up, and then it would clear off, and then rain, and then be delightful. This was, of course, at Christmas-time. It still was pleasant and warm by midday. We had our own little Christmas tree there in the store window.

SH: What was the relationship between the Navy personnel that you worked with and the merchant marine?

RO: Mutual respect I would say, I can't think of a better way to express it. If you're looking for news of conflict, I know of no good conflict going. You hear about it, you read about it, but I didn't have any. The merchant marine weren't much people for spit and polish, on the other hand, neither were a lot of us reserve Ensigns. [laughter] We were there to help them, I guess about all the disagreement we may have had is that a lot of the merchant skippers didn't know too much about, or weren't too keen about, degaussing. It meant a little bit more of a nuisance for them, except for those maybe that had had some experience or learned about how much it maybe saving them in terms of danger. I suppose it was understandable if they had not heard of any recent ships going up from magnetic mines in the area they were traveling, they were less inclined to want to take the time away from their other duties to cooperate by going back and forth across instruments in different directions. But they were always nice, they would invite you in to sit and have a cup of coffee with them.

KP: How long would it take for a ship to go through the process?

RO: It would depend again on how complex the equipment aboard a given ship, ... and, of course, how fast a ship could go and maneuver and come back and so forth, and whether you got good readings where it was quite clear what the results would be and how you'd make out the chart. Or in some reason or other it didn't come out clear you'd have to do it again. ... Oh, it could be anything from fifteen minutes to several hours. On some of the more simple ships you, in some cases, could take a signature of that ship on their way into the harbor and then ... not do it again until they were on their way out. And then from those two, ... the two tapes make your comparison and send a boat out or they'd send a boat in to pick up the results. Usually somebody went aboard, but not always. You could handle this by signal light, which is what we mostly used. We would just send out a good signal to tell the ship which heading to take next and so forth.

SH: Was there any difference in security between the East Coast and the West Coast?

RO: Security? What do you mean?

SH: How monitored were your activities?

RO: I don't think I was ever aware of any monitoring other than the guidance we got at training school. Or there would be a big sign, of course, when you go into an installation, there would be a big sign on the wall, be careful, "don't talk, the enemy may be listening." But I was never particularly impressed, I don't recall now that our degaussing activity was supposed to be classified information. There wasn't anybody to tell it to anyway. I don't think that the enemy could have benefited very much from, I suppose there were ... some aspects ... they might have benefited, in order to get information about our degaussing techniques and so forth to enable them to make a more sophisticated mine. I don't think any of us were particularly anxious to talk to anybody about it. We didn't, I rarely had any chance to associate with anyone that wasn't already in the Navy. [laughter] I don't recall any approaches, or hearing of any approaches by mysterious civilians or ... seductive blondes to pry out secrets from me. ...

[laughter] ...

KP: You mention that the Navy reserves did not take to the discipline, the spit and polish. From the interviews I have done, I have gathered that the Navy was a very hierarchical and tradition bound service as compared with the other services.

RO: Well, I don't know. ... I was never too much aware of it, because they couldn't be too hide-bound during World War II because suddenly a very small organization, relatively speaking, was expanded many times by the bringing in of people like myself, and enlisted men from all walks of life. I suppose if there were problems, they'd be problems aboard a particular ship, depending on the personality of the officers and the Captain, of those who had been through Annapolis and had professional experience during peacetime, trying to cope with all these eager, sometimes inept, but maybe mostly willing, new people. ... I didn't have a ship-board experience, as such, I spent a lot of time on ships helping them and working with them. And I encountered a lot of regular Navy at some of these bases. I can't really be helpful on that. I could speculate, but why speculate.

KP: When you got your orders for overseas duty, did your wife stay in San Francisco or did she come back East?

RO: Of course, going to San Francisco, we knew this was just the beginning of the end, and that we were going to have to leave. In fact, we knew that when we got married. We were just happy that we had as much time together that we did. But there would have been no reason at all for her to stay in San Francisco. Go back home where the family is, so she did, went back and stayed with her mother, in Freehold, New Jersey. And very soon applied for, and got a job working for the army down here at Fort Monmouth, at various camps, including Camp Wood. ... I'll let her tell you about her experiences, but she worked, until she got word, ... I guess the day she got word that I was coming back from overseas, well, that's the day she handed in her resignation. [laughter]

SH: Can you tell us about how you shipped out of San Francisco, and what you did from that point?

RO: Not too well. ... You said San Pedro earlier, ... it wasn't San Pedro was it? I left San Francisco ...

KP: You actually left from San Diego.

RO: Oh, that's right. Well, we left from San Francisco and then the ship that we got on went down to pick up some additional people at San Diego. And we were just there a day or two, ... I think I had time to go see the races or something. And ... then it was a solid month before we saw land, or pretty much a solid month. Because ... there was still a lot of presumed danger from submarines, right, and there had been a lot of submarines suspected earlier, and then suspected of being in the vicinity of Hawaii and other places. ... Unfortunately, it would have been nice to seen Hawaii that way, but ... we bypassed and zig-zagged, in long zig-zags, all the way across that tremendously long ocean. Even though our ship was, I suppose, relatively fast, having been a former ... French passenger ship, why, it took a long time. ... We had a lot of time doing mostly nothing. Some watches, to assist with the other enlisted personnel onboard this transport. Admiral Rochambeau is the name of the ship, it had been, I guess Vichy France had it, but then we got it away from them somehow in North Africa and ... gave it a Navy number, and then ... fixed it up so that you could five people in rooms that one person used to be in. [laughter] Not to mention the poor enlisted men stacked up like sardines in the hold one on top of the other. So [we were] really just enjoying the ocean, as far as you could enjoy it, on good days, and not enjoying it so much on bad days. And learning to play bridge and cribbage, and more coffee, and salt water showers.

LL: Did you ever encounter any bad weather?

RO: I don't recall any. ... No real storms. It was a pacific Pacific, in that period, mostly, as I recall. I don't recall too much about that trip you got to know your roommates rather ... well.

KP: Did you go over with a unit, or where you going over as an individual?

RO: I was going in as an individual, although, as I seem to recall, at least one, maybe more of the people that were in the cabin with me were going to go into degaussing. ... One particular older man, at the grand old age of something like 28, 27 or 28, from Boston, who was an actuarian, I think he was a slightly higher rank, I think they gave him an extra half bar, lieutenant j.g. when he came in. And, he's the one that persisted to try to teach me bridge, never achieving the quality that lived up to his standards. We also ... all tried chess, and started carving our own chess sets. I never got very far in chess, either. Cribbage, I did.

KP: It sounds like after this voyage was over, you had an idea of what war would be like for you, that there would be a lot of time to fill?

RO: I don't quite understand your question. ... You weren't participants in war, you had various drills and stuff.

KP: But you really had a lot of time on your hands aboard ship.

RO: Yes.

KP: That you managed to fill in a lot of ways.

RO: Well, here again, good old reading. I was able to read a lot.

KP: You landed in?

RO: Noumea. ... That had been a French colony. ... I forget now the history of it, but there had been some kind of, I guess Vichy France had wanted to hold on to it, but couldn't. So then we had a Navy base there, a rather large Navy base. A very interesting country in fact, I wondered around some, some areas there, there were very few roads, but the natives were Melanesians, many of them bright red hair because they used some kind of bleach or ... lime, I guess, quick lime to try to kill the bugs, and things and it gave them red hair as a result. Not a very attractive lot, generally. [laughter] ... The town was like a frontier town, like you might imagine ... hundred years ago. Here it was supposed to be the biggest city, the capital, but still ... pretty scanty by the time we got there. I mean they, most of the goods, they were very poor, the shops were very poorly supplied. It was really frontier-type conditions, except for the Navy part.

KP: And the Free French were running the island, as the civil authority?

RO: Yeah, I don't know if we would call them Free French then, but they certainly weren't imprisoned French.

[laughter]

KP: It wasn't Vichy?

RO: ... Well, ... we were in control. ... I suppose there were people there who might have preferred the Vichy, but they didn't have any choice particularly. But I learned a fair amount about the island. I think it helped me later on in my Foreign Service oral exams when I was questioned about the country and what they did there, and what the natives are like and one thing or another and I had answers because I was interested enough to read the little guide books and wander around a certain amount. So it didn't hurt me.

KP: In some ways, although there is a war going on, you are almost a tourist, not in a bad sense.

RO: Not a first class tourist. [laughter] I mean, I was following orders I was doing the job that I was supposed to be doing.

KP: Well, one captain had said to his crew as they were passing through the Caribbean and the Panama Canal that "People in civilian life pay a lot of money to do this." And since you were going to exotic islands ...

RO: Well, exotic yes, but not ... like the Heddy Lamar-Bob Hope movies, really. [laughter] ... There was a certain amount of disease, you know, and you saw people with elephantitis, and you saw, on that island of Ile Nu, there had been a leper colony there. ... No longer, but you can see that and you had the impression of how many thousands of people might have suffered as prisoners in this cruel place.

KP: And the prison was gone when you were there?

RO: There were walls and deserted buildings. It had been as bad as any of them in its day.

KP: How long did you stay at this naval base?

RO: I was there about eight months. I would not say I was in training, I was there actually doing work, but I was one of a number of officers on this island doing their work. And, I guess, they decided I had progressed enough to take over some more responsibility, and they gave me orders, put me in charge of a unit, of a small unit up in the New Hebrides. Again, out on a little island, an even smaller island. No other residents there of any kind, except wild boars and bugs and so forth. I guess there were a few lady pigs, too. ... I shot one once with a .45 caliber automatic because ... we were getting awful tired of spam and other things. ... She was a very obliging, fat pig. ... Well, not that fat. They were pretty fast, these wild ones. But anyway, she let me get close enough to actually hit it with a .45, which takes pretty close. ... But unfortunately to my dismay, the only person, the only other officer or two, and the cook, were the only people that would eat this pork. All the other men had such prejudices against wild pork that they wouldn't eat it, so most of it was wasted, unfortunately. They would rather eat spam then risk whatever diseases they might have picked up from this beautiful pork. I didn't get any disease from it. Here again, I ... remember all these sort of interesting things that talk about what I did in my spare time, and I did work once in a while. [laughter]

KP: At the first base overseas, Noumea, what was a typical day like, in terms of your work duties, how often were you on?

RO: I can't really ... think of a typical day. I suppose you could say that you got up, you had breakfast, ... you went to ... you might say the office, which ... in this case probably a Quonset hut, overlooking the harbor, with a lot of people in with machines going [makes machine noises] around. ... And you would be hailed by a ship by signal light that was coming in to the harbor. ... You would direct it how to, what to do, ... maybe what to leave their coils off, and then maybe to put current on certain of their coils, to go across this range and then come back at another heading. Meanwhile, these machines would be spitting out pieces of paper with ink on them, ... up and down and around. And you could ... put these together and see where the magnetism needed to be corrected most. ... Then you'd try to correct one place and maybe that'd give you a new bump somewhere else, and you'd have to correct that. ... You'd all be very busy for, as I said, up to maybe a couple of hours, I'd say on the average, maybe not more than half an hour, 45 minutes. And then there wouldn't be anything. Maybe there'd be a ship following right along, waiting out there to come in follow the next. So you could be ... constantly busy for a day, and then maybe the next day you'd only get one or two, and the next day you'd be off somewhere, assisting a ship adjusting magnetic compasses, inspecting cables, if something wasn't working you'd send technicians, or something would go wrong with your instruments and you'd have to send a diver down to try to correct them, or repair other instruments. ... You were pretty busy much of the time, but when you weren't busy, why, you were certainly not busy. ... Then it was boring, and you missed your family, you missed good food, it was too hot, the bugs were killing you, who knows. Of course, actually, around New Caledonia, the period I was there, the weather was much more, it wasn't really bad because it has a climate something like Hawaii, maybe not quite, but still, unless you got up into a jungle somewhere, why the weather was moderate. Once you got up into the New Hebrides group, well, you were in another situation where there was dengue fever and there was malaria, and no town, that could be called a town. Some enterprising Frenchman on the main island had put a restaurant somewhere. They would just take you into their house, it wasn't a restaurant you could go in. I guess there was one little restaurant, it was a shack about not much bigger than this room, where you could get some bad wine and bad meat. But we didn't get in to the main island, so we were mostly out on this little Ile Nu place eating rations. ...

KP: You mentioned Noumea was a larger base, but still you ate a lot of spam. What was your diet like, what was the ratio of spam to other foods?

RO: I don't really remember. I remember we got a fair amount of New Zealand mutton. We had a lot of canned foods, I mean the army does pretty well with the supplies and the Navy is usually is a little better. In fact, this was one of the benefits of being in degaussing, because you went on so many different ships. And you would hope that the captain or somebody would invite you to have lunch with them. [laughter] Where the food was, generally speaking, aboard ship was, depending on the kind of ship, and how recently they'd been provisioned, could be ... quite good.

KP: Yes, because some Navy ships had very good food.

RO: Right.

KP: I remember one Navy member telling of how the men complained when the ice-cream maker broke.

RO: Well, we didn't have an ice-cream maker. We did get a ration I guess where you could get a beer a day, if they had it, and when they ran out then, ... then we had to get ... our own supplies to come into these little islands, you know, we'd send in, if we had a boat of our own, and we did, why we'd send that into the main base and send the cook and a couple of his helpers along to see what they could find, and beg, borrow, steal, and bring back. But the choices weren't too great. We ate a lot of canned food. As the illustration of the pig shows, the men were pretty hide-bound, they weren't, they hadn't been brought up to be very imaginative in their eating ... habits. So they'd rather have a can of beans, or something, rather than even sometimes using the fruit you might find somewhere on the island. I was very fond of papaya, which grew on that second island.

KP: You had grown up with fresh eggs. You must have grown tired of powdered eggs?

RO: Powdered eggs were pretty poor. Powdered potatoes were pretty poor. Powdered coffee was pretty poor. They ... improved in their methods of making these things over the years. But I can think of very few things less pleasant than scrambled, powdered eggs, or canned bacon had much to be improved on too.

KP: At Noumea, how often did you get mail?

RO: I don't remember. I suppose some mail would probably come almost every day or every other day, ... but not everybody got mail. ... Mary was very good sending letters, but sometimes it took quite a long while.

KP: You mentioned a lot of the recreation you created, like the cribbage games, but did you ever get any movies on Noumea?

RO: Oh, yeah. ... I'm not saying quality of movies, I didn't get any movies on, we were very rarely on Noumea itself, we were usually down on that prison island, Ile Nu. Both there, and later, on Bogacio up in New Hebrides, we had our own projector. And when it was running, why you could see a movie, right. You've been to many places where projectors have broken down, well, they used to break down very regularly. So ... maybe once or twice a week, once every week let's say, maybe you'd get a movie in. Some old movie, maybe you'd seen it two or three times before, but at least it was something. You've seen of course, M.A.S.H., well, a lot of our activity, without all the casualties and the operating room, was sort of like a M.A.S.H.-type atmosphere. Not quite so much kidding. [laughter]

KP: How formal were you in terms of military discipline and uniforms?

RO: Well, when you are out on your own island we were, we had certain limits, but we wore uniforms, but we didn't always wear complete uniforms and we didn't wear ties when it wasn't necessary. You didn't go around looking like the young people do today, going up and down the street with pants over your shoes. ... So if you were at the main base and you were going to report in for some reason at the headquarters, ... you put your tie on. ...

KP: And you looked more spiffy.

RO: Looked more spiffy than you might otherwise. They were pretty tolerant of these reserve officers. ...

[laughter]

KP: Did you encounter many regular Navy officers?

RO: Well, nobody went around necessarily with a big sign saying, "I'm Regular" or "I'm Irregular," right. [laughter]

KP: A lot of people have told us particularly about the brass ringers, the Annapolis people.

RO: Well, I didn't bother looking at fingers. I mean, you'd go ... on board some ships, ... and you could tell, you know, that it was a very tightly run ship, and everybody was, I wouldn't say running scared, but they were well disciplined, the uniforms were right and the salutes were straight. And you sort of thought, "Well, probably the captain certainly's a regular." If it was a big ship like an aircraft carrier, you didn't find reserve officers being captains of aircraft carriers or sometimes destroyers, more often you would find reserve officers on the smaller vessels as captains, DE's, and so on. But I got very tired of all this recreation I was having as a tourist. ... I was trying to get active duty aboard some ship. I took navigation courses and got credits for them and I kept applying. When I was up on Bogacio every so often I would apply for something new possibility I had heard of, to be on a ... landing ship or ... a landing tank ship was even smaller. [laughter]

KP: Which were all dangerous assignments.

RO: Yeah, it was all dangerous, ... it was dangerous going crazy on a little jungle island, too. You know, you're young and ambitious, I won't say so much ambitious, but you like variety. And some of this great touristing got pretty boring after now and then. And you wanted to be active where you knew other people were being active, maybe taking a few risks and feeling you were really a part of a war effort instead of sitting out your time on some horrible, but pretty little island. So I kept applying and I kept getting turned down, how essential I was. I guess they couldn't find anybody who wanted my job. I almost applied, at one stage, I was about to apply to what ... would now be called Navy seal duty, ... because I was a good swimmer, and if they weren't going to give me a ship, maybe they would let me go in and remove mines in a harbor somewhere. ... It's a good thing I didn't get it, I'm here. Finally, I was getting closer in time, ... I wanted to get down to New Zealand for a holiday with some people down there. The reports that came back were pretty glowing of ... liberty in New Zealand, but they wouldn't give me, finally, they said, "All right, we'll let you go to New Zealand, but then you have to sign up for another year overseas." No choice, so I didn't sign up, and I came back on such an uneventful voyage, I don't remember anything about it. I don't remember cribbage, I don't remember anything about it, except that it was much shorter, a much more direct route. We still didn't stop anywhere that I can recall. But I had a lot of duty down in the hold, every watch they had a couple of officers down there to make sure nobody killed each other or did something or other wrong. It was rather unpleasant for everybody, but especially for enlisted men packed in too close onto some of these ships without enough adequate ventilation. And who knows what kind of experiences they'd had during the war or what they were anticipating when they came home. Some of them were sick physically, some were sick mentally, and a lot were just okay, just waiting patiently. You had to maintain a certain discipline aboard ship in case it was needed suddenly, because of an attack or something.

KP: Before talking about your experiences coming I want to ask about your experiences as CO on Espiritu Santo.

RO: Well on this Ile Nu, ... of this ... little degaussing unit.

KP: How many people were in your unit?

RO: I've had trouble remembering, there were three officers, some of the time, and then in a period there was only myself and one other officer, I'm not quite sure how long the second two overlapped. ... They were good people, they were both married, one missing his wife more than the other, because it hadn't been a very satisfactory marriage, but, you know, both missing home and family. ... It was ... a lonesome duty, ... you weren't really supposed to, and didn't have pals among the enlisted men, for example. There was very little social life, so you were right up against the fact that, you know, two of us in the same half tent. It was not a full tent, ... they had a floor and a frame and screens around the outside and then canvass above. And this was ... your life, and you were together to enjoy one another or not.

------------------END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE--------------------------------------

RO: Or you could go once in a while, maybe every month or so, you could get into the main base and go to the Officer's Club.

KP: So going to the Officer's Club was one of the social highlights?

RO: I don't really remember particularly so, in fact, I don't really remember the club very much there, Noumea except maybe the last month or so that we were there. The unit was being disbanded and the other officer and I and the enlisted men were taken into the main base, and given various, assorted duties. I can't remember doing very much except waiting around for the orders to go home. And then you would go to the Officer's Club, to talk to people. ... You did sort of learn to drink occasionally, which hadn't been a pre-war experience. I smoked cigarettes, ... I'm not a smoker. At one period it was very hard to get my favorite cigarettes, Pall Malls, ... the only way I could get Pall Malls was through the Seabee's, who were very enterprising. I could buy a case of fifty cartons, I bought a case of fifty cartons and long before I was through that, I was hooked.

KP: How long did you smoke?

RO: I kept smoking much too long in my life, I finally gave up after the Surgeon General's report came out. I gave up cigarettes and kept the pipe, and then gave up the pipe later, about 25 years ago up here, when I found I didn't have enough wind to be a proper member of the choir. It also worries the family, the kids and everybody had been pressuring me to cut back or down or both or entirely, for years. I eventually did, I'm glad I did.

SH: Was it at Noumea where you bumped into Admiral Halsey?

RO: Yeah, that was on the beach at Noumea.

LL: How often were officers of that rank at Noumea?

RO: Beats me, I suppose whenever their particular ships were in port. I wasn't in the circle that knew these things.

KP: How big was the force at Noumea?

RO: I don't know that either, I suppose the permanent contingent at the base may have only been several thousand. When a big ship was in ... you'd suddenly ... or a big fleet was nearby you might be up two or three times that amount. On that island that I served I doubt if there was ever more than a hundred people on that island at any one time.

KP: Where there any civilian inhabitants of these islands?

RO: No, not on there. ... Not on either island, neither Ile Nu or Bogacio. No, either units on the little island, Bogacio Island. They had a pretty beach.

LL: Had the civilians been evacuated?

RO: No, there'd never been anybody on that island. And I didn't see any relics of any huts or anything. I think it was just uninhabited, tropical island. There may have been natives there at one time, the pigs must have come from somewhere, been leftover from some time and multiplied, they were not in danger of anything except me and my .45. ... The real danger was boredom and people sort of going off their rockers in places like this, for one reason or another. Everybody has reasons, right? Things weren't working out in their lives or they hear their wife is off running around. Or they get a "dear John" letter, or a family illness, and they couldn't go back, or whatever. Some cases of homosexual relationships, I'm sure, ... because of the absence of women, in most cases. ... It could be a disappointed male lover, and shoot yourself.

KP: Did you know of any homosexual affairs going on?

RO: ... I had to keep a pretty close look on my group out there on the island, because there were some suspicions of temptation there. I had no proof, but ... one sailor ... got where he couldn't stand being out there everyday, I got him transferred into the main island. ... I forget now the arrangement, but he hung himself, I think, while he was at the main island. This may have been unrequited love for some person of the same sex. You would hear a certain amount of joshing, the enlisted men don't really confide in officers too much about things that could lead to court martial, right? [laughter] You wouldn't expect them to. But you do keep an eye, and you usually have at least one, and we had several, reliable non-coms, so to speak, and related people, that you could rely on to try to keep things within bounds. And we had sort of a special relationship, not one to tell on one another, but a special relationship of confidence with the officers. Anyway, ... I wasn't too strict but we had a good ...previous CO who had set up the unit and worked out all the various bills of performance and activities and work descriptions or job descriptions or whatever the Navy term was, and procedures for what to do at certain times of day, and to set up the watches. It all gets pretty complicated, not too complicated once you learn it and abide by it. He had done a good job, so that I inherited a unit that already was well organized and had everything pretty well set out so that it wasn't too hard.

KP: Where was that?

RO: I'm speaking now of Bogacio.

KP: Well you also were really isolated, you mentioned, and not very well defended.

RO: No. Well, we didn't have any weapons at all, except I guess the officers each had a pistol. Originally, I had a really good Smith and Wesson, ... a revolver that I could shoot decently with, but it wasn't macho enough, you know, ... you had to have a .45 automatic, even though you couldn't hit anything with it, but you should have that because it was macho, though that term wasn't used then. So I turned it in at some point for a .45, and I guess the other officer had either a pistol or a .45 and then we had a Thompson's submachine gun, that you had a pistol, I had a .45 also, for the seaman on watch, on duty, at any given time. He was the duty man and he had his .45 in his belt and all. The Thompson sub-machine gun was restricted of course to the officers, but I remember one time, the crew was particularly antsy about a lot of things, and there had been, of course, Japanese there earlier, and there used to be once in a while, ... not while I was there, a plane would come over and drop one bomb and then go off somewhere. ... But presumably, some of these Japs were still around up in the hills somewhere, living off the natives in the jungle, and maybe sneaking in to steal something once in a while. At least, that's what our ... crew thought. And there were certain noises in the jungle, ... including noises of wild pigs moving around, and sometimes making more noise than they should. This one period, everybody was so upset that I went out and I took the Thompson, and I let a few rounds go into the jungle, knowing there weren't any people there. At most, it might kill a pig. And then people could settle down, figured well, if there were any Japs, I scared 'em off.

KP: You never had any contact?

RO: Well no, ... not with the enemy. Of course, when you're isolated like that, right, as we were, it was all too easy for somebody in a little canoe or a raft or whatever, who was maybe starving somewhere up in the hills, to ... avoid detection, and come out to a place like that, and make off with stuff that they needed, maybe hoping to get some weapons. Of course, they would present a danger to the people. I never put much credence in that, but I guess there was a potential. And we did have native visitors, at least once. Some storm was coming up, and a couple of canoes, dugouts or whatever, came up and the chief or whoever was in charge asked to see me, since I was, theoretically, the chief, and get permission to stay overnight until the weather was better before moving on. So, they did stay, I forget how long they stayed, it wasn't very long. As luck would have it, they loved of course, to get gifts, and they loved spam. [laughter] ... The gift of spam that we were happy to get rid of put them in extreme joy, and so they gave some gifts to us. They gave me one of those sleeping mats that they wove. I still have it somewhere around, in bad shape. But it was a little bit difficult because apparently somewhere in their canoes they had stashed away some alcoholic stuff they had cooked up, some kind of jungle juice, and some of our men got a hold of it. It wasn't any real disaster, but I was happy when they were away. You see ... that ceremonial paddle there? That ... came up on the beach one night there-it's studded with inlay of mother-of-pearl. It just blew up on the beach, once in a while you would get something like a Japanese gas mask, or something like that would come up. Bits and pieces of things. ... In Bogacio, the war was a lot closer to us than at Noumea. Noumea had never really had a war down there it was just a base from which to move up north. After Guadalcanal, for example, some of our units got very badly chewed up. And instead of sending the poor guys to Noumea, or New Zealand they sent them down to New Hebrides [Espiritu Santos Island], which was not exactly a holiday spot, and put them in camp until they sort of licked there wounds and reestablished discipline which might have become pretty bad. Check out the mental cases. And then, send them back up to some other island to be chewed up again. So there were periods when we'd have a whole division there on Espiritu Santos or what was left of a disorganized division that needed reorganizing. So those are periods too that you know, if you didn't see them out at Bogacio, ... you'd encounter some of them when you were in-- and up on the north, there was an airport up on the northern part of Espiritu Santos, we never got up there, but there was an airport ... up there where the bombers would go out. Since I've been here I've met a person who was an officer who was serving with that unit who had some of the same experiences in terms of exploring little streams around Noumea. Of course, I don't approve of his experiences, he used sort of catch fish by ... throwing dynamite or hand grenades in the water which is not very environmentally suitable.

KP: You have an interest in the environment, and these were very interesting islands from an ecological point of view, or did you have other things on your mind?

RO: I wasn't ecologically developed, as you might say, in that period, although I'd been brought up in the country and I liked nature, and so forth. ... Of course, I told you, I did a lot of reading and I was an observing type, so somehow or other, I had gotten into a correspondence with a man at the Smithsonian Institution who was head of their, maybe it was their zoology, it could have been Zoology Department, well anyway, he and I got to writing and he wanted me to see what I could do to collect crustaceans. Well, I never was able to satisfy him in that regard, but I tried for awhile even to collect spiders, I would catch spiders by hand and hope nothing bit me and they didn't, and put them in some alcohol or whatever, but they didn't keep, you couldn't really do that. But I was much better with lizards and geckos. I got quite a collection of lizards and geckos that I caught and put in alcohol and I sent them back, I didn't send them back to him, at one stage, I wrapped them in a cloth with alcohol in it, and put them in a sealed can and mailed it back to Mary. [laughter] I told her what was coming, so it wasn't any big shock, but she kept them, I don't know how long, under the cellar stairs or something, and finally got them down to the Smithsonian and the man was very appreciative and invited me down to visit him, which I did later on, at the Smithsonian. He gave me a crustacean paperweight. They were just learning then to embed things to preserve them in plastic, that was a new technique. He was Otto, I almost remember his name, but anyway, he was a very nice person, [Schmit].

KP: And how often would you write to each other?

RO: Oh, I don't really recall, probably not more than two or three times altogether. But he was nice enough to invite me to come see him in Washington later on, and I did.

KP: Did you ever get to a Bob Hope show or another USO show?

RO: I don't recall any at all. I remember the movies, but I don't, possibly there was one in Espiritu Santos while I was still out on Bogacio, that I heard about, but ... they didn't come around and dance for me. [laughter]

KP: You mention that the World War II experience was very decisive because if you had not have gone into the military, you probably would have finished at MIT.

RO: Right.

KP: And if you did not have all this time on your hands you might not ...

RO: I might not have done all that reading. It also gave me an awful lot of time to think of what I wanted to do in the future. Before I came back, I had already pretty well decided that I did not want to go back to MIT. Also, a factor I think in my future was that I enjoyed being part of my government, even if it was in the military part of my government. ... Whether I liked the prestige, or what I liked about it, I don't know, but I liked serving my country, let's put it that way. And so it wasn't too big of a step from serving your country in one ... capacity to serving it in another capacity once you got the opportunity, at least to look into it. And coming back on the ship, unfortunately, aside from everything else, I don't have any memory of it, really of that voyage back except getting to San Francisco and, after a period, coming and meeting Mary in New York. ... Where was I? I'm losing myself again. How did I start off that last part do you remember?

KP: I had asked about reading and how you had time to reflect.

RO: Oh, yeah, and then I got into the Foreign Service. Well, you see, on the ship coming back, I came down ... or at least got the bug for infectious hepatitis, as a lot of people were getting in those days. And they didn't know anything about it, really, except that people were sick. And that sometimes they, once in a great while they'd die from it, or they'd have serious liver complications. And when I got back and went to work after a little holiday with Mary up in the Poconos, I went to, I was still in degaussing, I went to work on a little island in the harbor of New York, but attached to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And we got a little apartment in New York, temporarily. And I started feeling sick. One particular evening I know, Mary and I went out to a restaurant where there was a gypsy violinist going around, had some of that rich food, and I got very sick. And it turned out it wasn't just what I ate it was because I was coming down, finally, with this infectious hepatitis. I went to Brooklyn Navy Hospital, and ... to add to my respect for the Navy medicos, they diagnosed it obstructive jaundice, now there's some kind of tumor, which scared the life out of me. ... But they were feeding me all kinds of stuff, that if you have jaundice you should not have, pork chops and everything else. [laughter] And then they inspected and sort of probed around and said, "Well, now, I guess you don't, you probably have infectious hepatitis," for which you're supposed to have a complete, hundred percent fat-free diet, at least. ... So then they put me in a hospital up in New York not too far from Columbia, I forget, anyway Rockefeller Research Institute, which had been taken over by the Navy for hepatitis patients, because there were many of them. ... So I was there a month or two on strictly a fat-free diet, and almost developed a life-long aversion to raspberry jello, which was permitted, excessively. But anyway, during this complete bed rest, ... if you call complete bed rest being in a place where anybody that comes by your door says "Oh, maybe I'd better check him," comes in and takes some of your blood. I mean, it went on and on and on. It got where all I had to do was look at a needle and my arm would jump. And I'm not sensitive, normally, to that kind of thing. But anyway, I finally improved, but there was no treatment for it then it was just really bed rest and special diet. We were sort of out of the line of things in terms of getting news or information from the Navy and reports and ... circular letters and things. So I was in the hospital there when I got such a circular notice to all naval personnel, that there was the possibility of taking a Foreign Service examination. I didn't even know what the Foreign Service was, but it did explain a little bit about it. But ... I got this so late that the deadline for applying was something like a week later, ... or maybe a little more, I don't remember exactly, but very soon. And Mary and I sat there in my hospital room, and "well, should we try it? It sounds interesting, we don't want to go back to MIT. Who knows, take a stab at it." And I applied, and I told you before, they accepted my application based primarily on all the reading I did overseas. Even though I was a dubious case, they weren't really looking for chemistry or engineering majors, let alone a Ceramics major, I don't think any of them knew what it was. So ... I did apply, didn't hear of course right away, but ... I got well enough to go back and work on this, so-called work, on the degaussing. If ever there was very little to do at times at other places, there was less at this particular spot. We were just waiting for the war to end. At that time, I guess, part of the war had ended. Because I was fully anticipating maybe getting orders to be sent over to the European Theater, when that canceled, why we were all just sort of hanging on. ... I forget the name of that island?

KP: Swinbourne Island.

RO: Swinbourne Island, it's still there in the harbor. It's not too far from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and its sort of close to ... Staten Island. So I put in time there, I don't remember much about that except that I was shocked by another officer ... who had liquor and brandy in his coffee for breakfast. But there was a lot of traveling b