Interview With
Michael J. Retz
Rutgers Oral History Archives
New Brunswick History Department
Jessica Thomson Illingworth: ... Jessica Thomson Illingworth ...
ML: ... This interview was made possible in part by a grant from the Rutgers Alumni Association. Mr. Retz, I want to thank you for being here and allowing us to interview you for this program.
Michael Retz: You're welcome.
ML: All right, let's start with the beginning. Where and when were you born?
MR: I was born in Passaic, New Jersey. My parents were living in Clifton, but there's no hospital in Clifton, so I was born in Passaic, on December 8, 1935.
JI: Now where did your parents meet, were they from the US or ...
MR: Yeah, they were both born in the United States. My, all my grandparents, you want a long story? My grandparents, all four of them, were from Hungary, although they consider themselves Germans, and if you go back in history, which I did, on the internet, and found out why my German grandparents were all from Hungary. It goes back a long way, and it has to do with the Holy Roman Empire and wanting to keep the Turks out of Hungary and all this stuff. So they allowed them, the Germans, poor Germans from the western part of Germany, to come down, settle in Hungary, which was undeveloped at the time, to keep the Turks out. And they gave them land, building materials, and livestock to settle there, and they were allowed to keep their German heritage, schools, churches, everything else. They never were required to learn Hungarian, but things got, I guess, a little dicey, and they came over here.
JI: Do you know what year they came over?
MR: You know, without looking in the Bible back at home, I couldn't tell you. It was in the late 1800s because my mother was born in 1902, she was born here, and my father was born in 1906 and he was also born in Newark.
JI: Where did they live when they were growing up, before they were married?
MR: My father grew up in Garfield, New Jersey and my mother grew up in Clifton and Passaic.
JI: Do you know how they met?
MR: They met at church, which, like a lot of people in those days, they were German families and our parish, Holy Trinity Parish in Passaic, was a German parish. In Passaic, I don't know if you've ever been in Passaic, there are churches on every other comer, but one's a Hungarian, one's an Irish, another one's a German, another one's a Polish, and, you know, they all went to their own nationality churches. That's how they met.
ML: What did your father do?
MR: My father, believe it or not, worked in the same paint and wallpaper store for his whole life, from the age of thirteen 'til he retired at sixty-two. It was called Stephan Gaal Paint and Wallpaper, Steven and Eleanor Gaal were the owners, and they hired my father at the age of thirteen to help paint houses, but then they also opened a store at the same time to sell paint to house painters. In those days, you didn't go to Home Depot; you went to a paint store that sold only paint. So, that's what my father did for his whole, entire working life.
JI: Did he go to school at all or ...
MR: He went to Holy Trinity grammar school, it was a Catholic school, and so did my mother, and my father actually went, I'm trying to remember, I think he went, like, nine years of school. My mother went to eight years of school. When she graduated, she could type, take shorthand, do all that stuff, and immediately got a job in New York City on Lower Broadway for the Marston, I think it was Marston Steamship Company and worked there. You know, she took the train over to New York everyday from Passaic. That was the way things were in those days. You came out of grammar school, ready to go to work.
ML: Did you work in the paint store as well growing up?
MR: No, no, no, no. I didn't like anything to do with being inside, never had a job, well, I shouldn't say that, I worked a few jobs inside, but, no, I didn't work there.
ML: So did you grow up in Clifton or Passaic?
MR: I grew up in Clifton on Russell Street in Clifton.
ML: Where did you go to grammar school?
MR: I also went to Holy Trinity School and had Dominican nuns, and then, from there, I went to Pope Pious High School, which also had Dominican nuns, because our parish paid for us to go there if we had a certain average, you know.
ML: Can you maybe describe your schooling growing up, were the nuns harsh?
MR: Well, you want to talk about the fear of God? Yeah, not like today's schools, I mean, today, the teachers fear the kids. In those days, boy, you just didn't step out of line.
ML: Did you ever get in trouble?
MR: You know, the only time I can remember getting in trouble was one time. We took turns cleaning erasers in those days, blackboards had chalk erasers, you know, and I was supposed to clean erasers. Well, the wheel that you had to do it with was over by the trash cans; it was quite a ways from our classroom and it was a lot easier to take them outside the door and go bang, bang, against the brick wall, so that's what I was doing when I got caught. That was the only time I really remember getting, not only a whack with a, they had yardsticks with a metal edge and you didn't want to get hit with those, even if it was on your rear end. That's the only time I really remember getting in trouble with the nuns.
ML: Did you have brothers and sisters growing up?
MR: I had two sisters, one older, one younger, and my older sister, Mary, became, she went to Paterson State, which is now, what, William Paterson College? And that was a teacher's college in those days, and then she got a job teaching. I want to say Number Thirteen School in Clifton on VanHouten Avenue, but then, when she was expecting her first of three children, she said, "That's the end of that," and raised the children until they got into school, and then she went into a parochial school right near her house in Clifton and taught there 'til she retired in her sixties. And then, my younger sister, Regina, which was also my mother's name, she went to Pope Pius High School also, all three of us did, and, let's see, she took a secretarial course and got a job with ITT in Nutley, and she got, one of her bennies [benefits] was, she got over to Japan for quite a while, and worked over there for ITT, and don't confuse that with AT&T, it was ITT. Don't ask me what it stands for, but she's always been a secretary and she still is, now she's kind of retired in Sarasota, Florida, but she and her husband want to move back to Toms River, New Jersey to retire, but so be it.
ML: Growing up, what did you do in your free time?
MR: Free time, we were lucky enough to live with a county park in my backyard, so, getting there was real easy. It was a six-foot cyclone fence, but the tops were bent down, like kids would do, and we had a doghouse, a garbage-can shed, and then the fence, so I went
boom, boom, boom, and I was into the park. There was a brook, Weasel Brook, that ran through the park that, of course, in the summer, my mother would say, "You got brand-new sneakers, stay out of the brook." Right. But we played in the brook, you know, all summer long, it was our way of staying cool, and then when we got a little older, we started playing softball every night, and there was a ritual there. We couldn't play baseball there, the field was too short. You would hit a baseball into somebody's window, so we had to play softball. But, in those days, there were no adult leaders, you know, the kids all got there, and you chose up sides. You had a leader for each team, and then he picked everybody and everybody knew who the best players were, so it pretty much evened out, and if there was a close play at first base, you argued about it for a while and then, obviously, the first side that got tired arguing was in the wrong, so you went back playing ball. Or everybody else said, "Aw, stop arguing, let's play ball," and, then you went back to playing. But we never had umpires, or adults, nothing. We just played ball.
ML: Did you play sports in high school?
MR: The only thing I did in high school was track. I was just a skinny, little kid; I couldn't play football, I wasn't tall enough for basketball or anything, so I just ran track.
ML: What did you run?
MR: Four-forty [yards], quarter mile.
JI: You mentioned earlier that you didn't work when you were younger, did you work when you were in high school?
MR: Oh, yeah. Well, actually, I started before I was in high school. I had an uncle who taught, I got to tell you about my uncle because he really had more influence on my life than my father did. My father had tuberculosis before I was born, actually a couple years before I was born, and I think he spent a couple of years in a sanitarium overlooking Paterson, Valley View Sanitarium, I think it was called, and he had one lung removed. Let me follow onto that. When I got to Rutgers, I was an Aggie and one of the things we were required, as freshmen, to take was a one credit course, and I'm trying to think of what it was called. I think General Agriculture but it was a one credit course, and we would have speakers on Monday afternoon on agricultural topics. There wasn't any testing or anything, but you had to be there. So one of the afternoons, we had this little, tiny guy, Dr. Waksman, who developed streptomycin at Rutgers, and I was thinking when I was sitting there, I had known about my father with tuberculosis and I had an aunt who had tuberculosis, and I was thinking, "God, it must be so great to know you personally have saved tens of millions of lives," and that's really what streptomycin did. So I was kind of awed by this guy and he was just a little, little guy, yeah. Anyway, my father was very quiet, if you asked him a question, he'd give you a yes or no answer and that was about it. My uncle, my mother's brother, was just the opposite; he was very outspoken. He and his wife, my aunt, never had any children, so I was kind of an adopted child. My uncle Joe was a lawyer. He went to Seton Hall, then got his law degree at Rutgers. I think he eventually became the lawyer for the city of Clifton, for the fire and police departments, for the parish, Holy Trinity Parish, and he had a good law practice. But, one of his good friends in Seton Hall became the head of Seton Hall University and called him up one day and said, "Joe, got a deal for you." He said, "I want you to come here and teach," and my uncle said, "What?" And his friend said, "Ah, think about it, then give me a call." He hung up the phone, and talked to my aunt and he said, "You know, I never thought of that." He said what he didn't like about the practice of law was sometimes you couldn't tell the truth, and, so, he immediately called his friend back and said, "I'll do it." So he became a philosophy professor down there at Seton Hall until the day he died. In fact, the day he died, in 1963 I think, he came home with some blue books. Remember the old blue books? Do you still use them? Oh, yeah? Blue books, he had a whole stack of them, came in, he was putting them on the dining room table, and in the middle of a sentence, my aunt said he stopped talking and she heard a clunk. He had a stroke and died. But he was a big influence in my life.
JI: What was his name?
MR: Joseph Prefladisch and I can spell that, not too many people can.
JI: What year did he graduate from Seton Hall?
MR: You know he was born in 1899, you could probably figure it out.
JI: Maybe in the '20s?
MR: Yeah, I guess.
JI: Did he go to Rutgers Law right after that?
MR: Yeah, he went to Rutgers in Newark, I guess it was.
ML: So he lived nearby when you were growing up?
MR: Yes, they also lived in Clifton, on Grove Street. We had to take a bus to get to his house, but it was no problem. But one of the things he did for me is, I used to go up, when I was in grammar school, and on Saturdays, I would earn a few dollars. They had Irish setter, who lived in the cellar. Their house was on a hill, so the back of the cellar was actually the first floor in the back. But I used to sweep that cellar, comb the dog, and do all those things and then wash the floors and wax the floors upstairs and take the dog for a walk and then in the summer I cut the lawns. I used to do all these little things and they gave me a few dollars. That was a lot of money in those days and with a couple of dollars I could go to the hobby shop and buy a HO gauge railroad car kit. I don't know if you know anything about HO gage railroad, but in those days, they came in kits and you basically had to assemble them. Now, it's all plastic, you know, but I would be able to get one railroad car with each Saturday's wages, and then, to get an engine with an electric motor and stuff, that would take me maybe three or four Saturdays, but that's how I started working. Then, of course, when I turned sixteen, I immediately got a job in the movie theater as an usher where you meet a lot of girls. That was kind of like a nighttime thing. In the summer I worked at A&P stocking shelves. Then, my father got me a job with the department of Parks and Recreation for Clifton between my first two years at college doing playgrounds, putting in playgrounds and then you have to kind of drag the infields everyday during the summer when they play ball and put down the lines and all that. . It was a good job, it paid well. But my Uncle Joe also was a big influence on me. There was a TV station, it was Channel 13 in Newark back in those days, WAAT, I believe it was, but I'm not sure about that. But Channel 13 was the only New Jersey TV station and they had a program called "Junior Town Meeting", I think it was called. But every week for an hour they had three schools and that debated. Well, the night I was on the subject was taxes. On the first part of the debate you presented your side of a particular issue. Then the other two would give their side, and then it was opened up to the students in the audience who were from the three schools. This was live television. It was not taped, or anything, this was live. I can remember the girl next to me, I forget what high school she was from, and she says, "I'm going to die, I'm going to faint, I'm going to throw up," you know. She was so nervous that it kept me from being nervous, because I was trying to calm her, so it worked out pretty good. But before this whole thing started, we had a deal in Pope Pius that this one nun used to pick a student to represent the school. Well, this one guy, who was by far the sharpest, smartest kid in school, said, "Ain't no way you're going to get me up on that thing," so he actually refused, and then it came to another guy and he said, "No," and then she came to me and she said, "How about you do it, Michael?" And I said, "Let me think about it." So I went home and I went to my Uncle Joe because he was really my mentor in those days, and I said, "What do you think?'" He says, "Of course, you're going to do it." I said, "What do you mean, of course?" I said, "I know nothing about taxes." We already knew the subject was going to be about should we reduce taxes. This was 1952 or 53 and he said, "You come up here every night after school, and we will educate you on taxes." He was a strict Republican, you know. He was one of a few people I ever knew in my life that didn't like Roosevelt, FDR. But I did that, and I survived the hour on TV, and that really was something that I was able to take through life, you know, don't be afraid to jump into things like that. Anyway, that was my Uncle Joe.
ML: Now, you were fairly young when the Depression and World War II happened.
MR: I don't remember anything of the Depression, I know we moved around. In fact, we lived with my uncle and aunt, the one I just talked about, because he had a good job all through the Depression. But my father's, the store my father worked in, the paint and wallpaper store, you can imagine, people weren't painting their houses during the Depression, so there was no income there. But the Gaals told him, "If you'll keep the store open and continue working there, when things turn around, we'll pay you," and so I guess that's what they did.
JI: So he worked for nothing?
MR: I guess he worked, basically, for nothing, but we had to move in with my aunt and uncle because we couldn't afford renting a house.
JI: So before the Depression, your parents rented their house?
MR: Yes, they were married in 1929, I don't know if you know anything about the Depression, the crash was October 1929, I forget what date you can actually pin it down to, but, anyway, they got married on October 12, 1929, and went to Boston on their honeymoon, and so they were renting, initially, and then my sister was born in '32 and then I was born in '35 and we lived with my aunt and uncle until about '39. My father borrowed money from one of his brothers who had a good job with the Mountain Ice Company. He managed the Mountain Ice Company in Paterson, and he gave him cash, forty-five hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. My father bought a two-family, Archie Bunker-style house, where every house looks the same on the street, and we bought the house and moved in and then he got twenty-five dollars a month from the other people downstairs. That was a pretty good place to grow up. So, we, my sisters and I, used to lie in bed at night and count the kids; we had about a hundred kids on our street, just one block. Every house had kids in the '40s, this was in the '40s.
ML: What about your remembrances of World War II? You mentioned that your uncle...
MR: World War II. I had another uncle, my father's youngest brother, Henry, who was in the Army. He was in artillery, he landed at Casablanca. I don't know if you're up on World War II history, landed in Casablanca, went up to Tunis, across to Sicily, went ashore at Anzio, and then went up through Italy, to Germany, so he saw a lot of World War II. The funny thing is when he came back, I was ten years old. I was like a sponge. I'd say, "tell me about it." Never would he say a word, never. He would not say a word about the war.
JI: Did your father hear from him while he was away?
MR: Yeah, and, in fact, I still have a letter I kept. It was called V -mail, I think it was where they actually photographed the letters and then somebody censored them. My uncle lived on a farm in Sussex and I wanted to get into one of the sheds, there was something in one of the sheds and he had put a combination lock on it and I asked him for the combination and he wrote out the combination. Of course, it was censored. I don't know why, but they had people censoring those things. I don't know who the guys were who used to spend all their time reading all the stuff. Can you imagine all the letters going back, to wives and stuff? Oh, my goodness. But, yeah, he was my youngest uncle and the only part of the war I could remember, basically, was sitting at the radio with my father, and a certain battle was taking place in Europe and my father would be listening very intently at the radio because he knew his brother was there. My father having one lung and three children and he was a little bit older, you know, he was born in 1906 so by 1946, already he was forty, so by the early '40s, he was, you know, probably past the draft age already, so he didn't have to go in.
ML: Do you remember things being rationed or anything like that?
MR: Oh, yeah, I can. It was a funny thing, you used to have these A stickers and B stickers on your window and that tells you how much gas you could get, and, of course, rubber tires were impossible to get and stuff like that. And then, I remember, this was in the days before supermarkets, before the Grand Union opened up by us, we used to have a butcher shop down the street from us and Rudy's Bakery, and then we had a guy who used to come around on our street and sell fruits and vegetables and he lived two doors down from us, and I can still remember his horse. He had a horse and wagon and every day, long before I got up, he would take that horse and wagon from Clifton and go to Crooks Avenue, which was like the border between Clifton and Paterson, and he would get his fruits and vegetables for the day on that wagon. He'd come back to our neighborhood and he would go up and down the streets and he'd call out. If it was August and the watermelons were ripe, he'd come down the street yelling out "Watermelons," and all the women would come out of the houses. Of course, most of the women were home raising kids. They, women, weren't working, so that's how the women got their fruits and vegetables every day, and I also remember his horse had a tendency to kinda walk away if he didn't pay attention. So he would put this big iron, round iron thing, down and hook the horse to this thing, so the horse couldn't walk away when he was trying to sell vegetables off the wagon in the back. But that's how we got our stuff. Every day, we would go down the street and get a loaf of bread from Rudy's Bakery. We would go late in the afternoon because, when the bread came out of the oven, they couldn't put it through the slicer; it was too hot. It had to cool for an hour or so, so we'd go back about five o'clock and, by then, they could slice it. I would eat the two heels on my way home. I always liked the two heels. The butcher shop, O'Lear's Butcher Shop, I remember going into it with my mother and counting out the little stamps. You had little, tiny stamps. You had to rip off a certain number to get a pound of beef, or whatever she was getting, and then Mr. O'Leary would go in this big locker, or whatever that was, whether it was a refrigerator or freezer, I don't know what, and he had these big carcasses hanging up, and he'd take this thing, take a sharp knife and cut off what my mother wanted. You don't see that anymore. Everything is wrapped in plastic.
ML: So growing up in your neighborhood, was it mostly kids of German descent? Did they separate by where the church was or...
MR: No, no, no, our neighborhood was probably lower middle class, all mixes, you know, every kid on the street. If you remember, after World War I, we didn't have any immigration to speak of, so all of the kids were basically born in America. You didn't have any kids that were born anywhere else, but a lot of the parents and grandparents were born in Europe, so, you know, we had a lot of them. They were Russians, they were Polish, I can just go up and down the street, Hungarians, we were Germans, there were all kinds of mixes. There were very few cars on our street. We always played in the street because there were few cars. My father never owned a car in his life.
JI: Really?
MR: Nope. Neither my father nor my mother drove, and they lived to, my father died at ninety-two, my mother died at near ninety. She thought it was great when I got a car. That day I turned seventeen, man, I was ...
JI: You got a car when you were seventeen?
MR: Oh, yeah.
JI: Wow.
MR: Actually, I got it before I was seventeen but I couldn't drive it.
JI: Was that money that you'd earned?
MR: Yeah.
JI: Must have been good with the ladies.
MR: Two hundred and ninety-five dollars, I paid for it, '41 Chevy.
JI: So it was a newish car?
MR: Well, that was in '50, let's see, about '52,
JI: About ten or eleven years old then. Better than my first car.
MR: Well, cars last a lot longer now. You know, if you got a hundred thousand on a car in those days, that was fantastic. Today, I've got an old Tercel out here; I've got two hundred thousand on it and nothing's ever broken on it. They last so much longer.
JI: Are we ready for Rutgers now or is there anything else?
ML: Yes. The obvious question, how did you pick Rutgers?
MR: Well, of course, my uncle wanted me to go to a Catholic university. I said, "But, Uncle Joe." Well, let me tell you why I wanted to be an Aggie. Because I spent my summers on my grandparents' farm in Sussex. Do you know where the town of Sussex is? Okay, going towards Unionville, which is north, about three, four miles north, on that road to Unionville, off to the right hand side, was their chicken farm. They had an eleven acre poultry farm, chicken farm. They sold eggs, and I didn't like chickens too much, but across the street was a dairy farm and I just loved those cows, and I thought, "Man, this is it," and, in World War II, dairy farmers got rich, a lot of farmers got rich,. They put up this beautiful barn with all the modem stuff and everything, and I just thought cows were so much smarter than chickens. [laughter] So, anyway, I wanted to be a dairy farmer and my uncle thought he wanted me to be an engineer, and he said, "Well, if you want to be." I also wanted to just, after high school, go up there and live on the farm with my grandparents, my uncle and aunt, and he said, "No, no, no, no, no. If you want to be a farmer, that's fine, but you're going to go to college for four years first." I said, "Do I really have to?" And he says, "Yes, you have to." So, I said, "Okay." So, I found out that Rutgers was the only place, and it wasn't a State University yet then, but it was a lot cheaper because it was a land grant college and you could get tuition much cheaper, I think it was seven dollars a unit then, and I didn't pay for any of that because I got a scholarship. I forget what scholarship I got, but I applied for a scholarship and they wrote to my high school, and they sent my marks and stuff, so that I would get a scholarship. I never paid tuition.
JI: So was it a full scholarship?
MR: The tuition was, yes. The only thing I had to pay was room and board and I didn't want to live in a dorm, I don't know why I didn't want to live in a dorm, maybe it was the cost, but I went down there looking for a place to get a room. They had, I found some bulletin boards, you know, or I went to the admissions office, or something and they gave me a list of places. We ended up at this one house, it was Mrs. Phyllis Day on 91 Easton Avenue, and I liked it right off the bat, maybe because she had a nice blonde daughter, I don't know, but Mrs. Day was nice, she was really nice, and I stayed there four years, believe it or not. It was six dollars a week for the room and my mother used to give me twenty dollars for the week. So I'd pay the six dollars and then I had fourteen left to eat and so we had a lot of ketchup sandwiches, stuff like that, but every once in a while we'd go and have a good meal. I was an Aggie, so I used to bum rides over to the Ag campus. Most of our classes as freshmen were on the main campus, but I think Tuesday and Thursday we had to go over to the Ag campus. There was a place that specialized in lunch, right, I'm trying to think of that street that came up, name some streets.
JI: George Street?
MR: No, George was the main one in town. This is right on the Ag campus where the girl's dorm used to be.
JI: Nichols?
ML: Neilson?
MR: Yeah, might have been, you know, I really can't remember. Anyway, this little place specialized in lunches for truckers, and stuff, and man, we would just pig out for a dollar. I mean we would get, you'd go, "[Wow.] How are you going to stay awake in class after this meal?" But that was one of the bargains in town. So, anyway, that's how I went through four years living at, we used to call it "Ma Day's." "Ma Day's Flop House," we used to call it. We had about, let's see, one, two, I had a roommate, Louie Weidemann and then Jim Bums was another student and then, in the room adjacent to ours, was a little old lady who never came out and Mrs. Day used to bring her meals up to her, and then upstairs was a bus driver and a guy who, I guess he was a post graduate student, a chemist, who actually worked down in Bound Brook, but he used to come up and take classes and he lived upstairs. So there was like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, roomers there, in the house.
JI: You just had one roommate?
MR: Actually, I had two over the four years. My first two years, I had a guy I went to high school with, but he dropped out after two years and then later came back and finished up at Rutgers and then got a job as a county agent in Pennsylvania. His name was Jim Cain. My roommate the second two years is a guy I worked with as an usher in the Clifton Theater. He went to Clifton High School and his name was Louie Weidemann, and Louie and I still email almost every night to this day. In fact, he just wrote me last night, he says, "Guess who I just got an email from?" I said, "Okay, who?" "Kathy Palma." She was a little candy girl that I had a crush on and I said, "Holy mackerel. Where'd you?" He said, "Well, I didn't know where she was, but her husband was a classmate of mine." Kathy was a year behind us. Small world.
ML: So ...
MR: So we're at Rutgers.
ML: We are at Rutgers.
MR: I was a dairy husbandry major.
JI: What years did you go?
MR: Well, I started in '53 and then graduated in '57.
JI: Did they have chapel in '53?
MR: Yes.
JI: All four years?
MR: You know, I don't remember whether they had the last couple of years, but we did, it was Monday, right around one o'clock or so.
JI: Do you remember anything about chapel?
MR: Yes, I remember some of the choirs and stuff were just incredible. I thought, "Wow, these guys can really sing." We never had any religious stuff like that, but I enjoyed chapel, some of the entertainers, they don't call it that. They don't do that anymore, I take it?
ML: No. Were you involved in sports? Did you go to the games?
MR: I wasn't and, even if I was, there was no time for it. I was in class half a day on Saturday. I mean, we had labs almost every afternoon. There was no way. I had a couple of friends who were business majors, or something like that, they were playing tennis every afternoon. I thought, "Holy mackerel," you know, "it isn't fair." We used to have labs that would last till four, sometimes five o'clock. If it wasn't chemistry or organic chemistry, it was geology, or it was something that, one of the Ag ones, took a long time, too. No, I never did sports at Rutgers.
II: Now, were you at Rutgers College or were you at Cook?
MR: Well, it's Cook, but it wasn't Cook in those days. They were beginning to call it Cook campus but it was, you know, Rutgers.
ML: Did you get to socialize at all?
MR: Well, most of my social life was back in Clifton and Passaic. My girlfriends were back there. When I first got there it was New Jersey College for Women, and, you know, you could go over there and the rules were so strict that ... We had a couple of girls in our class on the Ag campus, but none on the main campus. There were no women on the main campus. They were strictly Douglass and they did all their courses there, but in the Ag part, there were a few women who were taking courses with us. That's the only place we had women in classes. But my social life was North. [laughter]
JI: Do you go home every weekend?
MR: About every other weekend.
II: How did you get home, by bus or train?
MR: My roommate had a car. Well, I shouldn't say this, but my roommate was kind of a spoiled guy. [laughter] He was an only child, his father was a labor negotiator, arbitrator. In those days, that was a rare breed. I mean, there weren't too many around. I'm sure he made very good money and he gave my roommate things that I wouldn't even dream of getting, like brand new tape-recorders. In those days, I mean, a tape recorder was big, and he gave him a brand new '55 Chevy hardtop, powder blue and cream. Today, that's a classic car. I can remember him getting it. Then we also had, we had a group of us back in Clifton there, we were called Relic, Incorporated. We actually incorporated in the State of New Jersey because, as a non-profit, it didn't cost you anything first of all, and secondly, by us not individually owning the cars, the liability wasn't there, and if we sold it to each other, these old junky cars, we didn't have to get it inspected for six months. None of these would have passed inspection. We had a '30 Pontiac that you could just put into third gear, take your foot off the clutch, and, when you wanted to go, you had a throttle and choke on the dash, because the floor throttle, the accelerator, didn't work. We would pull out the gas on it. [laughter] And then, as you got a little higher speed, you had to pull the choke out, too, or it'd die. The only brakes, well, it had brakes, but mechanical brakes, but the real brake was the hand brake in the middle, so you pull this hand brake, you know. If my parents ever knew we were driving around, oh my God, but we had a lot of fun with it. And we had the regular "ugga ugga" horn, we had a "bap bap" horn, we had "ding-dong" bell on the floor, and a wolf whistle on the carburetor, and so, you can get a lot of attention on these cars. You don't want to hear all these times we had in that great car. It was a fantastic car; we had a lot of fun in it. But, anyway, that's where my social life was, back up there in North Jersey.
JI: Did you date at all while you were at school?
MR: Did I date? Of course.
JI: But you dated girls from home.
MR: Yeah, mainly from home, Clifton, Passaic. I married a girl from Passaic, who knew my sister, but I never knew her, and she never knew that my younger sister had a brother, until we met each other in the front of my house one evening. They were walking home and I said, "Who's that?" And my best friend had dated her and so he told me who she was. But most of the girls I dated were from Clifton, Passaic, one from Garfield, one from Belleville. Actually, my roommate Louie's wife, that I dated, was from Belleville. They're still married.
JI: Do you remember any of your classes at Rutgers, or professors?
MR: Professors, boy, you know, I don't really remember too many. This one, I remember this one guy we had, great big guy at the Ag campus, (Boden?), or (Boyden?), or something like that, his name was, and I had him for several subjects. They used to teach several subjects, but none of them really stood out to me. The subject I liked the most was geology. I loved it, you know, you drive around New Jersey and you don't realize what you're looking at until you take geology, and then you go to someplace like the Delaware Water Gap, or, just north of Rutgers, is the terminal moraine of the Wisconsin Glacier. That's as far as the glacier came, and then it started going back, so you've got this ridge, that runs across the whole state, of all these gobbled up rocks and stuff that it had picked up coming down, and then you go south, like you get to New Brunswick, you can't find a rock. But you go north of that, like at my grandparents' farm, they used to make their walls out of rocks because all their neighbors got together on Sunday, and they'd have these rock wall parties, or whatever you want to call it. They'd get these wagons and the horses together and they would pick up all the rocks and every time they plowed the fields, more rocks would come up, and, so to get rid of them, they'd build rock walls, and I bet you could still find them out there.
ML: You were in Catholic school all the way through high school, was it a difference for you at Rutgers?
MR: I don't know whether I ever thought of it as different. I mean, you had professors that you're looking at your watch, "Hey," if the guy didn't show up for another two minutes, "we're out of here," and you walked from one to the other, you know, whereas in high school, you walked from class to class, but you didn't walk from building to building or drive to class.
JI: Did you find it academically more challenging?
MR: Rutgers? No, not when you have Dominican nuns. Hey, look, in grammar school, fifth grade, this is fifth grade, I used to write, this nun required us to write a five hundred word composition every single night including Friday night, every night, and she read them all, and then she would pick, everyday, she'd pick somebody to read theirs in front of the class. I mean, when I got to Rutgers as a freshman and there was a requirement for, twice a week you had to write a five-hundred word theme, everybody went, "Ah!" I said, "Piece of cake," it was easy, I mean, the English language to those nuns was important, I could remember catechism, we would take these sentences that were about ten lines, you know, and we'd diagram it. We'd have the whole blackboard to be diagramming one sentence -- gerunds, infinitives, and independent clauses, and dependent clauses, and everything. I learned English and, to this day, my grandkids, "Him and I are going," "Him and me are going," or "Me and him are going." I thought, "Oh," you know, I think how they're murdering the English language today. I heard somebody from Rutgers the other day on the radio, PBS, doing the same thing. I was driving down the road and I said, "This guy is from Rutgers?" and he said, "Him and me." How did he say it? It was something like that, "him and me did this," and I'm thinking, "Oh, my God. This guy is a college graduate." Anyway, I learned a lot from the nuns and it was, college was, to me pretty easy.
JI: Did you even think about leaving?
MR: College?
JI: Did you enjoy your four years at Rutgers?
MR: Oh, yeah.
ML: Do you remember Ag Field Day? Did you participate?
MR: Yes, cooking, cooking hamburgers, I remember, boy, it was hotter than hell cooking hamburgers. But I remember the log rolling contest and then the canoes with the things, with the boxing glove on the end of the pole, and stuff like that, and the cow milking contest, where they get people who never milked a cow before to try to milk a cow and it was fun. Then, we had a dance at night and so it was fun, the Ag Field Days were a lot of fun. They still have them?
JI: Yes, they're one of the most looked forward to days of the year.
MR: They had a parade. I have eight-millimeter home movies of the parades taken from the admin building there. I was able to get to a second-story window, and took movies of the parade, like the queen, the bands, the ROTC drill teams and then the floats, different floats.
ML: You also served in the ROTC.
MR: I was in the Air Force ROTC for two years, but military didn't appeal to me, I don't know why. But I did get to fly in an airplane for the first time in Air Force ROTC. But then, you know, after two years, you had to make a decision whether to continue on and then get a commission, or not, and I said, "I don't want to."
JI: You did it your first two years.
MR: First two years, we were required. You had Army, excuse me, Army or Air Force, you had a choice.
ML: You picked Air Force because?
MR: I don't know. Maybe I like blue better than brown or something. [laughter] I have no idea why I picked Air Force. Maybe, I don't know, I think back, the Air Force was relatively new then, you know, it was '47, or so, that the Air Force became an independent branch. It just appealed to me more than the Army. I never thought I'd much want to dig foxholes.
ML: You said it was your first time you flew a plane.
MR: Yeah, we got to fly a twin-engine Beechcraft one time, and we took turns. I think there were about five of us students in the plane and we would take turns, you know, getting up in the front with the pilot and actually turning, and stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool.
ML: Where did you fly out of?
MR: Oh, boy, you know, I really couldn't tell you. It was a small field, wasn't too far from New Brunswick, but where the name didn't make any impression on me [Hadley Field?]. I was sitting in the back of a station wagon, or something, talking on the way, to wherever it was. I don't know where it was.
ML: Were there a lot of GIs coming back from ...
MR: In fact, one of my good friends, who was an Aggie, Bob Nunamacher, was in the Korean War and he carne back. He was already married and living at home and he was going on the GI Bill, and there were a lot of guys still going on the GI Bill. I don't know how many of them were still from World War II. A lot of these guys, I think, were Korea by then, '53 to '57.
JI: Do you remember the Korean War, well, obviously, you remember it, but do you remember its impact on campus at all?
MR: You know what had a bigger impact on me? I could remember during World War II, the big shortages were coffee and sugar and various things like that, that we've talked about before. But I was on my grandparents' farm when the Korean War started in June of '51, I think it was, and I used to go to the farm in the summer when school was out, and I was up there when the whole thing started, and my grandmother, as soon as that war started, she says, "We're going to town. We're getting coffee and sugar," and we went down, I can remember, we drove up to Middletown, New York. She figured there would be more coffee and sugar up there. I remember going into stores with her and she had all this sugar and coffee, [laughter] because she thought it was going to be rationed again. So, that's the big impression the Korean War made on me, but I didn't know anybody personally who was in it.
ML: Was there any kind of political activism on campus. Did you ever see speakers come?
MR: If they came, I didn't attend; I was somewhere else. No, not 'til Vietnam did I experience that, and, of course, I wasn't there. Was there activism on campus during the Korean War?
ML: I'm not sure.
JI: I know there was more during World War II and I think some of it did spill over into the Korean War, but it was, obviously, like you said, more World War II and Vietnam.
MR: I don't remember.
ML: Then you graduated in May of '57?
MR: Well, May or June, I don't remember when. It must have been June because I got engaged on the fifteenth and the next day, I had to be in Pensacola, and I remember, I think, we got out of school on the ninth of June, it was after graduation, or something like that. It could have been early, but I think it was very close, that I graduated, got engaged, and, then, I had to leave the engagement party to get a flight out of La Guardia to get to Pensacola the next day. Then I thought my world had ended. "What am I doing?" The world had changed when you get in the boot camp atmosphere-type thing. But Rutgers, I enjoyed my four years at Rutgers. I got to tell you about one incident that happened. I'm trying to think who the dean of men was at the time. Who was dean of men back in '56-'57? I could call my roommate and find out, but it doesn't matter. But Louie had the '30 Pontiac down there. I don't know how the dormitories are set up now, but we used to go to what they called the Quad, and we drove the car in the middle of the Quad, and, of course, he, Louie is a nut, anyway, but he drove it in there, "ding dong, wolf whistle, bap bap, ugga ugga," you know, and who happened to be walking across the Quad, but the dean. Dean, geez, his name is on the tip of my tongue, but it doesn't matter. [Cornelius Boocock] So he walked over to the car, and Louie and I said, "Oh, shoot," you know. He said, "I want to see you two boys in my office at one o'clock." I'm thinking, "God, we're going to get kicked out of school." Here we are, seniors, and we're going to get kicked out of school. So we went to his office and he kind of greeted us with a smile. He says, "You know what?" He said, "I couldn't, with all those guys in the yard," he says, "I couldn't crack a smile and laugh at this, but," he says, "I thought that was the most hilarious thing I ever saw." [laughter] He says, "But I have to put on this show of, you know, being a disciplinarian," so he says, "But please don't do that again." [laughter] He says, "But you got a great car there," he says. So we went, "Oh, thank God, we didn't get kicked out of school."
JI: So you met your wife while you were at Rutgers or did you know her growing up?
MR: No, I met her in Clifton of 1955. We used to do things as a group in those days, we went to a skating rink and she was a roller skater. She liked roller skating, and I had taken this other girl, Lois, to the skating rink, but then Lois wasn't too good a skater and Rachael was. I was kind of new at roller skating. I had ice skated all my life, so roller skating is a piece of cake after you've been ice skating, and I started double skating with Rachael and, you know, we just kind of blended together and I thought, "Hey, this is pretty good," so, before the evening was out, I asked her to go on the Rutgers boat ride up the Hudson. Do they still do that? We used to, first week of school, we always had a boat ride up the Hudson River and I asked her if she wanted to go on it. She said, "Yes." So that was our first official date; the Rutgers boat ride up to Bear Mountain, and then, we just kind of hit it off.
JI: Was she living at home? Was she in high school or ...
MR: She was out of high school, working. She worked in a place called Tung-Sol, in Bloomfield. They made radio tubes, a thing from the past, actual vacuum tubes, you know, for television sets and stuff and she was on the assembly line of that, and her father was a cook at Clifton's Howard Johnson, and what else do you need to know about her? [laughter] So, yeah, we started dating between my, I guess that was the summer between sophomore and junior, or somewhere around there.
JI: You got engaged two years later?
MR: Well, yeah, we got engaged just before I went in the Navy, June '57, and then we got married when I went home on Christmas leave from the Navy in '57.
JI: When did you decide to go into the Navy?
MR: Well, here's how I decided. I was at the Commons for lunch one day and they had a table, about this size, set in the comer, and it had a banner hanging up, "Fly Navy." So I'm eating my lunch and I'm thinking, you know, here it's 1957, I'm going to graduate in a couple of months, this is April. "I'm going to graduate in a couple of months, what in the world am I going to do?" There's no farms left in New Jersey to speak of. Do I really want to sell pharmaceuticals, which was the big thing? And, so I was thinking, "Well, I'm going to get drafted." Everybody was getting drafted if you didn't join some other program in the military in those days. So I walked over there and I said, "What are you selling?" He says, "Well, we want to get you to fly airplanes in the Navy." From that conversation, the thing that stuck in my mind was, he said, "We'll pay you seven hundred dollars a month to fly airplanes." I went, "Cha Ching. Seven hundred dollars a month; I can afford to get married at seven hundred dollars a month." That was a lot of money in those days, it really was, and I was thinking, "Hmm, eighty-nine dollars a month in the Army for digging foxholes or try this?" I said, "What have I got to lose?" So I signed the thing and, before you know it, I was over to Floyd Bennett Field getting a physical. No, first I went to Lower Broadway; the Navy had a thing there, and there were about thirty-five of us who took the eight hour written exam. Yeah, eight hour exam, and they test you on not only what you learn in school, but your dexterity and all these other things. So, anyway, finished that thing and a couple of us passed it and we ended up going to Floyd Bennett and then I took a physical. I got to tell you about the physical. In those days, I weighed a hundred thirty-five pounds and I was five foot ten. You had to weigh a hundred thirty-seven pounds to get into this flight program at 5' 10". So my roommate Louie was going to drive me over to take this physical, so we leave Rutgers and we drive over to Floyd Bennett Field. On the way, we go down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and he says, "We're going to stop and get a bunch of bananas," and he says, "You gotta make sure you eat these bananas before you get on the scale. Don't go to the bathroom, you know, or anything else until you're off that scale." So we got a bunch and he ended up eating more of those bananas than I did. So, anyway, I passed it and I got accepted into the flight program in the Navy.
JI: What did your parents think of you enlisting?
MR: Well, they really didn't ...
ML: Did your uncle have an opinion?
MR: My uncle approved it, too. They all liked the Navy, for some reason, I don't know why. People seem to like the Navy more than the Army, I don't know why.
JI: It sounds more glamorous, I think.
MR: Yeah, maybe so. Nobody had any objections to my joining; the only thing I can remember was leaving. The night I left, my mother and sister got kinda teary-eyed. "Oh, we'll never see you again," Gimme a break. But I went down to pre-flight and managed to get through pre-flight and got a commission in October, October 4th, and my then fiancée, Rachael, took a train down from New Jersey to Pensacola. She says the highlight of that trip was when they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. She didn't know anything about segregation and she said, "We crossed the Mason Dixon Line, all of a sudden, there were some black servicemen and everything, and they chased them out of the car, and, 'Get in your own car,' and all. Everything became colored and white and the rest rooms and the drinking fountains ..."
JI: Like they just flipped a sign?
MR: Yes. She says it was kind of a shock to her, you know. She didn't see that in New Jersey. But she came down for the commissioning and, then, she flew home. She didn't take the train. In December I went home and we got married. What's the nice thing about that is, I got home and, two days later, we had our wedding, but I didn't have to do anything. I just [showed up], she said, "You don't realize how much work it is to get ready for a wedding when your fiancée isn't here."
JI: Did you have a big wedding?
MR: Not really. It was at a little Italian church; she's Italian and, like I said, every nationality had their church. St. Anthony's was the Italian church and I can still remember it was very cold, December 28th, and this little Franciscan priest had things on like this, [points to sandals] but no socks, barefoot, and it's cold. I can remember him coming outside the church and everything, and I thought, the one thing I remember about that, "He must have cold feet." Anyway, we got married and then went on our honeymoon up in the Poconos, Pocomont Lodge. My Uncle Joe and Aunt Nettie gave us the honeymoon, and then we came back, and flew down to Pensacola. I had rented a house down there. Actually, one of the chaplains, when I got down to pre-flight in June, you had to go to one of the three services: Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. So I went to the Catholic service there, and they said, "Anybody want to be an altar boy?" So I said, "I was an altar boy all through school; I'll volunteer." So I got to know this chaplain and he had just come back from Deep Freeze One, the first Antarctic expedition that the Navy had down there, and he was really a fantastic speaker. So we got to be his altar boys, this other guy, Emmett Ward and I, and so that was kind of our introduction. This chaplain had a boat, so we used to go out on weekends, when we weren't doing anything else, we were out on that boat water skiing and stuff like that and it was great.
JI: Now is it called basic training?
MR: It's called pre-flight and then you get commissioned. You're a cadet, an AOC, Aviation Officer Candidate, AOC Cadet, and you get paid a whole thirty-nine dollars every two weeks until you get commissioned and then, boy... [whistles]
JI: What do you remember about pre-flight, was it tough?
MR: Pre-flight was kind a tough. Of course, growing up in New Jersey, you know how to swim, because I could remember this one guy in our class grew up on the North Platte River in Nebraska, and we got down to the pool and, of course, they ask you, "Can you swim?" and a couple of these guys said, "No, I can't swim," and I asked, "How come you can't swim? You grew up, you said, you grew up on a river." He said, "Where I lived, the river was a mile wide and six inches deep." He says, "You don't swim in that." So, he had to learn to swim and by the time the sixteen weeks is over, you have to swim two miles with your clothes on, flight suit on. Then the Dilbert Dunker, have you ever seen or heard of the Dilbert Dunker? It's an airplane cockpit on rails that goes down at about a forty-five degree angle, hits the water, flips upside down, and sinks, and you have to un-strap, and pull yourself down and out, because you're upside down, and then get out of it. It's very, I mean, it sounds easy, but it's very disorienting. They give guys a certain amount of time to get out and then, you know, scuba divers would pull them out. Some of those guys took it ten times before they could get out of that, and I would think, "Oh, my God."
JI: Do you remember what the time was?
MR: Before they pulled them out? I don't remember, probably a minute or so, but not long. Luckily, I was able to get out the first time, so I didn't have to do it again. But that was one of the tougher things and, of course, the step test, somebody told me about the step test. It's like a bench about that high...
JI: About the height of a chair.
MR: Yeah, and you stand there and they put on this record, tape, or whatever it was, anyway, "toot, toot, toot," and what you have to do is step up with the left foot, then the right foot, step down with the left foot, then down with the right foot, then repeat it for five minutes. These guys who we talked to, who had gone through it the previous weeks said, "You know, by the first minute, your body is going to tell you there ain't no way that you're going to do this for five minutes," and he says, "Don't believe your body, you can do it." So I remembered that and I started doing it and he was right. Boy, by the time the first minute was up, my legs were aching so bad, you know, and all that, but I stuck with it and most of the guys did. But there were a lot of requirements, you know. You had to do like thirty-seven sit-ups and ten chin-ups, and everything, which is not a lot. Today, it's probably a big deal because kids are in terrible shape. I have grandkids that couldn't do two chin-ups. You know, we were doing chin-ups, hanging in trees, and stuff while we were kids. Kids don't have that chance nowadays. But pre-flight, academics were easy. I took meteorology at Rutgers for six months and 4.0-ed the meteorology course, you know, in pre-flight. There was another guy from the University of Miami, played football down there, took a whole year of meteorology, flunked meteorology in pre-flight. I'm not going to speak for some of the universities today, but back in those days, some of these guys who were football players and stuff, I mean, they tried, but they, academically, could not hack it. They just didn't make it and they would, we would coach them and they would be taking No-Doz to stay awake and study all night, still didn't make it. One guy, Johnny Campbell was his name, had a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Mississippi and that poor guy just couldn't catch on to anything. He finally washed out, but I felt sorry for him because he tried so hard, but I was thinking, "What are these guys learning down there, you know?"
JI: But was there a lot of camaraderie between you? There was no competition?
MR: Oh, no ... We were Class 24-57, the twenty-fourth class in 1957. So, you would hear this thing and we were in this barrack-type thing and you'd hear this thing over the loud speaker, "Class 24-57 muster on the quarter deck immediately," and everybody just races out of the room, you know, down to the quarter deck and then the guy would say, "With toothbrushes," and then, everybody would run back, get their toothbrushes, and come back, and then, of course, the last guy down there would get chewed out. You know how the military is, but it was all a big game. But the game was to make sure you could go along with the program and that's all boot camp really is, you know, even today. You've seen these movies, I'm sure, where these drill sergeants are in these guys' faces and stuff. It's that way to see if you're going to crack and it's never going to change, I guess.
ML: Where did you live in pre-flight? Were you in barracks?
MR: Yeah, big barracks, and then, when we got commissioned, of course, we could get married. I lived in the BOQ, Bachelor Officer's Quarters 'til December 1957. Then, I rented that house I was telling you about, the chaplain actually found the house for us on the bayou, so he could tie his boat up in our backyard and we had a nice little house that we rented. We rented it from an old retired couple that lived close by. The old man flew the first night hop in a Navy aircraft in the Pensacola area back in 1917, tells you how old he was.
ML: Once you got into the military did you like it? You said when you took ROTC you didn't really like it, but once you got into the Naval air corps ...
MR: Did I like the military? Your grade and class standing and everything in pre-flight was based on military, academic, and physical, three things. The physical, to me, was, you know, a piece of cake. I was running track in high school and stuff like that. I never had any problem with that and the obstacle courses and stuff like that, climbing over these walls. I always 4.0-ed that and then the academic to me was easy. The military I thought was kinda, "Do we have to do this?" So I wasn't a fan of the military part. I wasn't all spit and polish, like some of the guys would really get into it, but I managed, as long as you can make a right turn and left turn when they tell you to do it.
ML: How long were you in pre-flight?
MR: Sixteen weeks.
JI: You got your commission.
MR: Got commissioned and then we start flying, and that's when we went to a place called Saufley Field, one of many outlying fields that the Navy had in Pensacola, and we flew the T -34, which is a basic trainer. It was made by Beechcraft, and you get assigned an instructor, and you have to learn the aircraft, and you learn all the steps and procedures and stuff for it. The first thing they teach you on all these things, and this is true with all flight training, is emergency procedures. If that engine quits, what are you going to do? And you have to learn stuff, you open the canopy, put the wheels down, do this, do that, all this other stuff, so, you know, you go through that and then you get about fourteen flights. Then your instructor takes you out to an outlying air field somewhere, and these were all grass fields that we used, and he says, "Okay, I'm going to get out. I want you to take off, fly around and make two touch-and-go landings and then land again and pick me up" and that's your first solo, and that's a big deal. Nobody in the back there that's going to save this thing for you if you screw up, and then, after that, if he says, "Okay," then you go on to doing a lot of solo stuff, and then you go into acrobatic stuff, and you go into instrument phases, all the different phases, and formation flying, and gunnery and Carquals (carrier qualification), and all bits like that. Then when you get through with basic, basic training, then you have to decide. In those days, it was, do you go with jets, do you go to helicopters, or do you go to multi-engine? Those were the three choices, and I always was fascinated by helicopters. Helicopters were relatively new back then, and I was always fascinated, so I was high enough in the class standing that I was able to get what I wanted. So I went into helicopter training and that was fun. We used to have these old Bells they called them, Bell 47s. Going back to the tail was all a bunch of just open tubing, aluminum tubes and stuff, and the funny thing is, in a hot summer day down there, you had to have a light instructor with a heavy student, or vice versa, or the plane wouldn't get off the ground, that's how underpowered they were. Then they had these things called fire ants. We had these great big fields and, you know, you just fly out there and the instructor would tell you to do a turn, or do this, or do that, and then they would have whitewashed squares and you'd have to put the nose on the line and go like this, and then turn ninety degrees and go like that, you know, turn again, and stuff like that, and then do circles, all basic stuff that you do to learn in helicopters. Well, they had these fire ants down there in Pensacola and they would build mounds about that high ...
JI: Very high mounds.
MR: Yeah, and so every once in a while, some wise guy would, just before he flew the plane back to the Ellison Field, which is where he started from, he'd go sideways with the skids, you know these things have skids on them, and level off one of these ant things. Well, by the time he got the plane back there, it's crawling all over with these fire ants, and so the next guy on that plane had some problems. [laughter] Anyway, from there you go through advanced helicopter training, which was what they call a HUP, H-U-P, which was a tandem rotor helicopter, didn't have a tail rotor, and I got through that thing. I can remember one of my last flights in the training command. We're in a cross country phase, where we're actually going to go navigate around, and we started out and, this is a check pilot, and he says, "Oh, hell you know what this is all about. I want to show you some places where all these stills are," and he took me around. This is in southern Alabama, and he says, "Do you see all that smoke coming out of there?" He says, "Let's check it out." Sure enough, there was a guy, there was a still, and some guy's running away from it, and stuff. It still goes on, I guess, down there, cheap whiskey.
JI: Let's take a quick break.
[Tape Paused]
JI: This continues the interview with Mr. Retz.
ML: So you're just about to the end of your training.
MR: Well, I got my wings in October, no, November, early November of ' 58. In fact, our daughter was born October 21st and then I got my wings, I think, November 11. My first assignment was in a helicopter squadron out of Norfolk, anti-submarine squadron, HS-3. We rented a house there and I immediately went to sea, left my wife and brand-new baby there, and that's how it is in the Navy, you know. So, she became very independent, very quickly, and she remains that way to this day. But I spent four years in that squadron, out to sea, back and forth, back and forth and some people might have said, "Well, wasn't flying in Vietnam kinda scary?" I think some of the scariest flying I ever did was the North Atlantic in the wintertime. There the weather is horrible and we were flying at night, lots of times, especially after we got the H-3 helicopter. Every Commanding Officer wanted to fly it at night because it was an all-weather, instrument-capable helicopter and, "Oh, boy, new toy." So, we would fly at night and sometimes you'd be fifty miles from the carrier and you only had from a hundred-fifty feet to the surface assigned to you, because above a hundred-fifty feet were the fixed-wing aircraft that we worked with. Well, you know, a hundred-fifty feet, and you can't see anything, I mean, it's pitch-black, cloud cover, and no moon, no nothing. It's pitch black and you've got to trust your instruments and you doing that for four and a half hours is just really draining, and, you know, the planes were brand new and these automatic systems they had didn't always work.. In fact, we used to show each other our thumb because the release button was your thumb on your collective. You have a collective, which is the up and down control, and you have a cyclic, which is forward, left, right, back, and all that stuff here. Well, you'd push the button to go into automatic mode from a hundred-fifty feet and the plane would slowly go down to forty feet and, into a hover, automatically. Well, sometimes you'd push that automatic-to-transition button and the bottom would drop out. It would go into auto rotation, you know, it'd just cut the engines down to idle and the thing would just fall out of the sky. So you would hit that release button with your thumb, and you'd hit it so hard, you come back from the flight, you'd have the impression of that button in your thumb. So that was our trademark, you know, for a while. It was scary. In fact, I thought it was probably scarier than flying in Vietnam.
JI: Were these helicopters flown by just one person?
MR: No, you had two pilots and two sonar operators in the back, and, basically, what you did is, you went into hover, lowered this sonar dome down a couple hundred feet into the water, and then listened for submarines and that was your job.
JI: That's what you did for four years?
MR: Yeah.
ML: Did you ever encounter anything when you were out there listening? Did you ever hear submarines?
MR: Oh, yeah, you know, in those days, the Soviet Union and the United States were always playing games. I mean, you'd have these Russian trawlers that were around with you and, sometimes we thought we had our own submarines playing with us, and sometimes they weren't our own, and stuff like that. But, to be honest with you, I don't think our antisubmarine warfare ever caught up with our submarines, or the Russian submarines, because submarine technology advanced with the [advent of] nuclear submarines at an incredible rate. I'll tell you, not these newer helicopters but the older ones, the newer ones, H-3s, were jet, two jet engines, but the older ones were the big reciprocating engines, you know, and they only had one of them. We used to go out from the carrier, you know, maybe fifty miles and practice with a sub, one of our own nuclear subs. When they were brand new, we didn't know whether we could actually track them and everything, they were so fast and so quiet. So this one day we were playing with them and then it was time to go back to the carrier. There was a certain time you got to be back for your recovery. We got back and the submarine was surfaced alongside the carrier, and I thought, "My God," you know, "and they expect us to play war games with these guys, it isn't fair." Of course, we were going into a headwind and he wasn't. But they're fast, they were really fast.
ML: What was life like out at sea on the carrier, day-to-day wise?
JI: I can leave for this if you need me to.
MR: No, well, there's no women. There was a lot of practical jokes, I mean, you're there with guys. My first cruises, we had a room with twelve pilots and, you know, there's always some comedians in it and we called our room "The Funny Farm." We would do stupid things and I won't tell you all the stupid things.
ML: Can you give us a couple of examples?
MR: Well, like we went into liberty in New York one time and we had two light bulbs in the overhead. We don't call them ceilings in the Navy, they are overheads, bulkheads, and decks, and so forth. But, anyway, so one of the guys who got back early decided, "Well, let's play a practical joke," so what he does is, when you flip the light on over here, nothing happens because they've unscrewed the light bulbs a little bit. So, then they decide, "Well, we'll put a couple of chairs in front of the door and maybe a couple of waste baskets beyond that," so when a guy comes in, flips the light on, and says, "Oh ..." you know, a few obscenities, and then trips over a chair, or two, and falls into a waste basket, and all this other stuff and, oh, geez. Then we had this one guy who always brought his poopy suit [to hang on his bunk]. We called the survival suits poopy suits. This was to keep you alive for a little bit longer in the cold water, and because the water in the North Atlantic is, you know, so cold that without a poopy suit, you might live ten minutes, but with a poopy suit you might live forty minutes, or something like that. So he always brought his poopy suit down from the ready room and hung it alongside his bunk, which were like double bunks, and we were saying, "Mac," his name was Harrison McDonald, "Mac, why are you dragging that thing down here?" "Well, if the ship sinks, I want to have a chance to survive."