Interviewees

Nicholas Molnar:  This begins an interview with Mr. Samuel Goldfarb on June 19, 2012, in Princeton, New Jersey, with Nicholas Molnar and Jon Lawler.  Thank you, Mr. Goldfarb, for having us here.

Samuel Goldfarb:  It's a pleasure.

NM:  Just for the record, can you tell us when and where you were born?

SG:  I was born on January 28, 1925, in 2 Jersey Avenue, Jersey City.  In those days, the doctor came to the house to deliver a child, didn't have a hospital for that purpose.  So, in order to start chronologically, I have to start before I was born.

NM:  Could you talk about your father and his past?

SG:  Well, my father came to this country as a teenager.  His brother had already been here, so, he lived with his brother and sister-in-law and he worked in a haberdashery.  One day, his employer said, "Max, there are no customers in the store, so, why don't you sweep out the store to keep it clean?"  My father said, "You hired me as a salesperson.  I'm not a janitor," and he quit.  He started his own store across the street and was self-employed for the rest of his life.  He had, eventually, a department store that employed about twenty women as salespeople and it was in business for over sixty-five years.  When my father retired, my older brother, who also went to Rutgers, and my brother-in-law and my aunt took over the store, but one of the women who worked for my father was my mother.  So, she married her boss and my father was fourteen years older than my mother.  Her parents said, "You're going to marry an older man?  He'll die and leave you with small children.  You'll be a widow and that's not going to be a good thing," but my mother was in love.  So, she married my father and, as it turned out--my mother told me this often--my father outlived all of the other suitors.  My mother was very pretty and some of my friends' fathers courted my mother, so, they used to tell me how pretty my mother was.  In any event, my father outlived all of the suitors that my mother had, so that the eventuality that her parents were afraid of never materialized.  Now, the reason I want to start before I was born is because I have to bring in a childhood friend.  My mother was pregnant with me at the same time as one of her friends was pregnant with what turned out to be my long-term friend, and they used to walk together.  So, you can say that Ray Frisch and I became friends before we were born.  Now, Ray was born six months before me, but he entered grade school, I guess, yes, six months before me, but he got out in February, so that when the time came to go to college, he had to wait until September.  So, I caught up with him and we went to Rutgers together, but, in the meanwhile, as children, we lived on the same block, so, we played together.  Our parents were friends, so, we saw them.  Each of the families got together frequently.  While he was a grade ahead of me, we walked to school and back every day.  We went to the same public school, #17 in Jersey City, we went to the same high school, Lincoln High School in Jersey City, and we both went to Rutgers in the mechanical engineering curriculum.  His older brother and my older brother also were engineers, so, that kind of gave us an incentive to go into engineering.  So, his name is Ray Frisch and he was my classmate in the Class of 1945 at Rutgers and we went into the Navy together, as I will explain.  We were in the same draft board, because we lived on the same block.  The president of the draft board lived right across the street from me, Reginald (Billington?).  We both came to Rutgers in September of 1941.  So, that's just before the war.  It was peacetime, but the clouds of war were gathering and it was just a question of time when we would get into the conflict.  He joined a different fraternity.  He joined the Sigma Alpha Mu and I joined Tau Delta Phi, but we still were very close.  We were classmates.  Every day, we were in school together and we dated the same girls.  He's six months older than me; he usually dated the girl before me.  After he dated her, I would date her.  So, along came Pearl Harbor--I remember the Sunday morning.  [Editor's Note: Japanese forces attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, thrusting the United States into the Second World War.]  I went to Sunday morning chapel.  In those days, you had to attend chapel fifty percent of the Sundays, unless you were excused by Dean Fraser Metzger, who was a Dutch Reformed clergyman, and he thought it was very important that we attend chapel.  That was the first time--when I went to that chapel at Rutgers--it was the first time I'd ever been into a Christian church.  I had always gone to synagogue and I felt very much at home, because a lot of the prayers are identical.  The Christian ritual took the prayers from the Jewish ritual, but Christology, of course, was different.  There was no Christology in Judaism.  So, Christology aside, I felt very much at home and Kirkpatrick Chapel is a beautiful little place.  So, I enjoyed those Sunday morning chapels.  I came home from chapel to the fraternity house--I was living there at the time--and everybody was very excited.  "What happened?"  "The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor."  I thought, "Boy, they're crazy.  We're going to mop them up in a couple of months."  So, I had no real concern, but, as the months went by, it became obvious that things were not going well and this was going to be a protracted conflict.  I came to Rutgers at the age of sixteen.  So, Pearl Harbor, in December of 1941, I was just under seventeen, so, I didn't have to register for the draft.  I had no worries about going into the service at that time.  I was studying and applying myself to my studies, but, at the age of eighteen, on January 28th, I guess it was '42, I registered for the draft.  Now, I had to think about what I was going to do in the service.  At that time, each of the services had representatives on campus.  They were out to recruit college men and each service would make promises.  "Join the Navy and we'll do this for you."  "Join the Army, we'll do that for you."  At that time, I don't think there was an Air Force, but it was an Army [branch].  It was called the Army Air Corps.  So, they didn't recruit separately, they recruited it as part of the Army, and you had the various programs.  You had ASTP, the Army Specialized Training Program, where they promised you they would induct you into the Army, you'll be issued a uniform, they'd go right back to the campus.  You'd march between classes as a drill, but you would continue with your studies.  So, that was very attractive--and the Army would pay for your tuition.  [Editor's Note: The Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), established in 1942, was an officer training program that serviced over two hundred thousand enlisted men in several specialties, including engineering, medicine and dentistry, psychology and foreign languages, at 227 colleges and universities.  The majority of ASTP cadets were reassigned in the Spring of 1944, before completing the program, to meet manpower needs in other units, particularly in infantry, airborne and armored divisions destined for frontline combat.]  So, that was very attractive, but there were a lot of other [programs], V-7, V-5--I've forgotten what the names of the programs were.  The Navy Officer Training Program made a lot of good promises, "You get a nice uniform, you dress in whites in the summertime and look at all that.  You're going to cruise on the ships and join the Navy."  [Editor's Note: The US Navy V Programs were condensed wartime training programs for college-level students in different specialties.]  Well, I didn't know what to do.  So, I went to Reginald (Billington?), my neighbor across the street, who was the president of our draft board, and I said, "Mr. (Billington?), I have all of these choices to make.  Which service should I go into?"  He said, "Samuel, I was drafted out of college in the First World War and I never went back and I always regretted that.  I'm going to keep every college man on the campus as long as I can and, when we need you, we'll call you."  I said, "Thank you, Mr. (Billington?)."  That was one piece of advice.  Then, the father of a girlfriend of mine was the only career Army person I knew, Colonel (Hornstein?).  He was in the Judge Advocate General's section of the Army.  So, I went to Colonel (Hornstein?) and I said, "What should I do?"  He said, "Don't volunteer.  Wait until you're called.  Then, you'll be put into the place where they need you the most."  Okay, two out of two--I stayed on campus and I didn't volunteer, but I did take every preliminary test that was offered to qualify you for one of these programs.  They all had qualifying tests that they administered and one of the tests I took was the Eddy test.  I have to tell you something about, at that time, Commander Eddy; he became Captain Eddy, eventually.  He was an Annapolis man and he was in the Navy in the First World War in the submarines and his submarine was depth charged and he lost his hearing.  So, after the First World War, he was mustered out and retired because of his hearing disability, but along comes Pearl Harbor and he wants back in.  So, he sees his friends, his old Annapolis buddies, and says, "I'm ready for assignment."  They said, "You're deaf.  You're not going to get in."  So, this guy is an extremely clever guy.  He makes a little hearing aid, which he puts into his pipe and, by clinching it in his teeth, he transmits through his skull to his auditory nerves.  When they strip him for a physical, he says, "May I keep my pipe?"  So, they said, "Yes."  So, all through the examination, he had his pipe, which was a hearing aid, and he passed.  So, they assigned him, because he had worked for--I think it was Balaban and Katz.  That name may not mean much to you, but Balaban and Katz were two partners in the movie exhibition business in Chicago and they saw television coming along and they wanted to get into it.  So, they set up a little experimental television studio and they needed somebody to head that program and they got Eddy, Bill Eddy.  So, he was in electronics.  Well, he built that little hearing aid, so, he was very good at it.  So, they said, "Okay, Bill, we need a program to train electronic technicians.  The ships are getting full of electronics and we've got nobody who knows, number one, how to operate them, much less how to fix them and maintain them.  So, we would like you to set up an electronic training program for the Navy," and that became the Eddy program and the test to qualify one for that was called the Eddy test.  So, I passed the Eddy test without any problem.  Now, I was in the mechanical engineering curriculum and it's wartime and they're not going to defer us to have a summer vacation.  So, we went on a trimester program, where we had two weeks off between semesters, but around the clock, around the calendar.  So, I graduated with the Class of 1945, with Ray Frisch, on July 4, 1944, because of that accelerated program, and our commencement was in Kirkpatrick Chapel.  All of us, with our families, fit in Kirkpatrick Chapel.  Today, you need a stadium to hold all the graduates and their families.  So, it was very nice and I knew I was going to be now drafted--Reginald (Billington?) knew I was graduating and he was going to call me into the service.  So, that summer, I had a great time.  This was my last time as a civilian.  I went down to the Shore and had a great time.  My girlfriends were down there with their families.  So, Ray and I had a good time, and some of my classmates went with me, Bob Goldberger, who was one of my classmates in the Class of '45, and a few others.  So, one day, when I went home to Jersey City, I found a letter, official looking letter, in the mail, "Greetings," telling me that I am being drafted and I have to report for induction to Newark.  There's an armory in Newark that was used as an induction station.  So, I quickly got on the pipe [telephone] to Ray.  I said, "Ray, did you get your 'Greetings?'"  He said, "Yep."  I said, "Okay, what date?" same dates, same time.  I said, "All right, we'll get together, we'll go to Newark together."  Oh, I guess the "Greetings" came maybe two or three weeks before the time we're supposed to go to Newark for induction.  I get a telephone call from a girlfriend of mine, a girl that I had taken to my senior prom in high school, Florence (Leaf?), and Florence says, "Stan," that's what my nickname was in those days, "Stan, I understand you're being inducted."  I said, "How'd you hear?"  She said, "Well, I heard that you're going to go in."  She said, "You're going to go in the Navy."  I said, "Wait a minute, at induction, they give you a physical and you go before a little board of representatives of each of the services and they look over your record and they decide in which service you're going to go."  "No, no, you're going into the Navy."  I said, "Well, how do you know that?"  "Well, you have Eddy test credentials."  I said, "That's right."  I don't know how she knew that.  She said, "Well, Eddy test people have the highest priority and the Navy has the highest priority on those people.  You and Ray Frisch are going to go into the Navy and you're going to go to Great Lakes [Naval Training Station]."  To this day, I don't know how she had all this.  She could have been a Mata Hari spy.  She knew everything and everything she told me came out just the same way, and this is what she told me, "You and Ray are going to go to Great Lakes for boot camp, and then, you're going to go into the electronics training program, which is in Chicago.  Now, I'm a student at Northwestern and you can have people visit you in boot camp every two weeks.  If you put my name down as your cousin and put my address down, that will entitle me to visit you every two weeks, and tell Ray Frisch to put my girlfriend's name down, because she'll come on the weekends that I don't come and each of us can bring a guest.  So, one weekend, I'll visit you, bringing my girlfriend as a guest.  The next weekend, she'll visit Ray, bringing me as a guest."  I said, "That sounds very nice."  She said, "Yes."  So, I took down the addresses and I gave the girlfriend's address to Ray.  Everything happened just the way Florence (Leaf?) told me.  We went to Newark and we went through a physical and we came up to the board and the board says, "Eddy test--Navy."  So, we're ready to go, but they said, "You have to go home overnight, because it's been ninety days since your last blood test." 

[TAPE PAUSED]

SG:  Okay.  "So, you have to go home overnight and come back tomorrow and we'll go through the formal induction."  I said, "But, we just said good-bye to everybody.  I kissed my mother good-bye.  I said good-bye to my family.  When I come back, they're going to think I'm 4-F [classified as unfit for service]."  They said, "Well, you can stay here, but there's a canvas cot that you'll sleep on."  So, Ray and I looked at the canvas cot.  We said, "Okay, we'll go home."  So, Ray looks at his watch and he says, "It's two o'clock in the afternoon.  That's time for the matinee at the Empire Theatre," is a burlesque in Newark.  He said, "We can make the two o'clock matinee at the burlesque and we can go home after that."  I said, "That's fine with me."  Now, we each carried a little ditty bag, a little bag with toiletries, razor, shaving cream, things like that, and we walked off carrying our [bags].  Okay, so, we walked off and we went to the burlesque and burlesque was a great entertainment in those days.  I mean, it's gone now, but it was like vaudeville, risqué vaudeville.  They had girls, but it wasn't raunchy.  A lot of the famous entertainers came out of burlesque, and we sat there in the seats and we saw the show and Ray nudged me and said, [Mr. Goldfarb imitates sniffing], "Smell that nice smell?"  I said, "Yes, what is that?"  He says, "That is;" oh, there's a men's toiletry line.  I've forgotten the name of it now; it's a famous [toiletry line].  It's still in existence, but I can't remember the name.  He says, "That's the So-and-So, men's toiletries," and he said, "My brother gave me a whole kit with all aftershave lotion and shaving cream and everything else, and that's the smell."  So, I said, [Mr. Goldfarb imitates sniffing], "It's pretty strong."  Whoops--he looks down, he was sitting on his ditty bag and he burst the shaving cream and it went all over all his stuff inside the little bag.  [laughter] Okay, so, after the show, we went home and I come home and my brother's wearing my shoes, my older brother.  I said, "Fred, you're wearing my good shoes."  He said, "When you come back, you'll be two sizes larger."  He said, "These shoes will go to waste."  Well, I said, "Take them off and put them in the closet--they're my shoes."  Okay, the next morning, there's a hurricane.  September 13, 1944, there's a hurricane and Ray and I have to go to Newark for the induction.  So, my mother says, "Here's an umbrella."  I said, "Mom, in a hurricane, an umbrella's no good, and, besides that, you don't go into the Navy with an umbrella."  [laughter] So, she insisted I take the umbrella.  She said, "Leave it anywhere, but you've got to have an umbrella."  I couldn't put the umbrella up, because the wind was so high.  So, Ray and I took the 108 Bus on the Hudson County Boulevard, in those days--it's now Kennedy Boulevard--to Newark and we get to Newark.  They send us from the armory to the induction station that's right across a street from Penn Station in Newark.  I don't know if you know Penn Station.  Okay, it's up a flight of stairs, above some stores, and there are some Navy guys in uniform and they line us up.  I find I'm with Ray, I'm with another classmate from Rutgers, Spence Ross, I think it was, and one or two other guys, who all are Eddy test qualified.  We are sworn in and we're now officially sailors in the Navy and they issue us tickets on the Pennsylvania Railroad, leaving from across the street in Penn Station, to go to Chicago, to Great Lakes.  So, we walk down, I think it was four of us who are going to Great Lakes, go to Penn Station.  When we walk down the stairs from the second floor, the lower two or three steps are water.  The whole street is flooded.  What are we going to do?  We're in the Navy--we just can't make up our own mind and say, "Well, we're not going to go."  We have to go.  So, we take off our shoes and socks and roll up our pants and we walk calf deep across the street to Penn Station and go up somewhere in Penn Station, to where it was dry, and put back our socks and shoes.  We wait for the train and the train came.  I guess what it does [is], it goes down to Philly and, from Philly, it starts to cut across to Altoona, over the Appalachians, to Chicago, and our tickets are coach tickets.  We don't have a berth and it's overnight.  So, we sit there in these hard bench seats, trying to find something comfortable, and there's a broken window in the car and the wind is howling in, so, it's kind of cool.  Even though it's September, it's kind of cool, and we're tired.  It was a very uncomfortable trip to Chicago, but we got there safely and we ate on the train.  We had chits to give to the waiter that covered the cost of the food and, at Chicago, we changed trains to get on, I guess it was the North Western Line, that went from Chicago to Milwaukee and Great Lakes, going north.  There, at Great Lakes--now, it's daylight, the day later--and they're waiting to greet us and we fall in with a bunch of other Navy recruits and we go through the Navy procedures.  We go to our barracks.  We're mustered in the barracks and our names are checked off and they give us a lot of instructions about what to do and what not to do.  We finally go to a place where they issue uniforms to us and we wind up with arms full of clothes.  We gradually get ourselves used to the Navy.  The Eddy people are taken out of the group and we're sent to a special company, Company 1808, in the Navy training center in Great Lakes and, there, for ninety days or so, we go through the Navy boot program.  You learn all kinds of skills.  I think we were one of the last companies to learn rigging.  We had to learn to climb rope ladders and to tie knots and to mend sails.  I mean, I thought it was fascinating, [laughter] but kind of antiquated.  A short time after that, they stopped teaching the recruits those kinds of things, but I enjoyed boot camp.  It was rigorous, a lot of physical demands, and the food was okay.  So, I had no complaints and, at the end of that time, ninety days, we're given two weeks' leave to go home.  Now, we're in uniform, feeling very proud of ourselves.  Flo (Leaf?) says, "Okay, now, you're going to go to; [laughter] now, you're going to be in Chicago.  You're going to go to primary school and secondary school and here's my new address.  When you have leave, let me know."  Oh, by the way, in boot camp, the visits worked out terrific.  A boot doesn't have very many prerogatives.  You're at the low end of everything, and purposely, to teach you to be humble.  They give you, issue you, a big block of yellow soap.  When you want to wash your clothes, your underwear and socks and everything else, you've got this big block of yellow soap and you go to a trough with hot and cold water and you get your clothes and you rub the soap on it and you scrub them, so forth, and so on.  Flo and that other girl, whose name I don't remember, brought us Rinso [a brand of laundry soap].  Nobody else had Rinso but we, and we didn't have to use that yellow soap.  So, we were very well-off.  There were fellows that I knew in my boot camp who had parents who lived in Chicago and they didn't see their parents as often as we saw those girls.  [laughter] Okay, now, we went to primary school.  We went to Hugh Manley High School, which was taken over by the Navy as a Navy school.  It was a regular high school, had a gymnasium, classrooms, everything, library--everything you would think that a high school would have--and, again, it was great.  Now, we were in electronics training and I already had my mechanical engineering degree.  "Introduction to Electronics," Captain Eddy organized that course so well.  I remember going to the library where they had a piece of captured Japanese electronics equipment.  It was a radar and you looked in the back and all you saw are vacuum tubes.  You don't remember vacuum tubes, do you?  In the radios, we used to have vacuum tubes, instead of transistors, but there were maybe a hundred vacuum tubes on racks inside this Japanese radar.  I said, "Boy, if they teach me how a radar works, that will be fantastic, because I don't have the faintest idea what those vacuum tubes are doing there," and, indeed, they did.  In a year's time, they taught you sonar, radar.  It was just a great program [with] all kinds of electronics.  You had to start with basic electronics before you could learn how the sophisticated gear worked.  So, it was just wonderful and it was very rigorous intellectually.  They expected you to listen to the lectures and to be able to absorb it very quickly, and it was challenging, but we were all college people, so, the achievements were good.  Now, the time came to finish primary school and go on to secondary school and the first thing we had to do was take the final exam.  I was dating girls beside Flo (Leaf?) in Chicago, when I had leave or liberty, which was every weekend.  So, I didn't feel too well; I could feel I had a fever.  I really felt rotten, but I went to class and I did my work, but the final exam was coming up.  I really didn't know how I was going to do, but I took the final exam.  They divided us up into groups--what'd they call them? drafts--to go out to secondary school.  Some went to secondary school here, some went to secondary school there.  Oklahoma A&M was one secondary school.  There were different secondary schools.  Both Ray and I were assigned to Mississippi, to I think it was Biloxi, and, oh, I can tell you--no, I can't remember that.  Since I didn't go there, I didn't put it in my book.  They said, "Okay, go back to your billet [living quarters].  Dress in dress blues, pack your sea bag, seagoing fashion, and report to this particular place and the bus will take you to the train."  So, I had gone to sick bay and they said, "Yes, you have a 101 [fever], but that doesn't qualify you for sick bay.  You had to have a 102 and you don't seem to have any symptoms.  You feel bad and you [have] a sore throat and all these things.  Yes, you got something, but we don't know what it is.  So, you have to stay with the program and we'll see what happens."  So, I went back and I didn't have the strength to pack my sea bag, seagoing fashion.  You have to roll things very tight, tie knots and do things--I just couldn't do it.  So, my friends who were around me, they set up my gear for me and got my sea bag packed and, now, the time came to put on dress blues.  The blouse in the Navy has no buttons.  You go in through the bottom and it's got this kerchief in the back and it's tight and it's difficult to put on normally, but there I am, very weak and very sick.  I get my hands in the sleeves and my head is down inside the blouse and I can't move.  So, I turn to one of my friends and I said, "Would you please pull my blouse down?"  So, he pulls down the blouse and he looks at me.  He says, "Sam, your face is full of dots."  I said, "Maybe that's what they're waiting for."  "All I see is, you've got red blotches all over your face."  I said, "Okay, I'm going to sick bay."  I went to sick bay and the guy looked at me and said, "Ah, now, you've got something.  Let me take your temperature.  102, get into bed."  So, I get into bed and I have a money belt.  We were paid, I don't remember, twenty-one dollars a month, or something like that, but, in Chicago, in the war, you couldn't spend money, because they were so nice to servicemen.  Every time you went anywhere, somebody would pay your bill.  I remember taking a date to a nightclub and I had enough money, because I didn't spend much and I could afford it.  When the time came to get the bill, they said, "The man who was sitting at that table paid your bill."  He's gone already.  I couldn't even thank him.  So, that's what it was like.  So, I had maybe a couple of hundred dollars in my money belt and I'm laying there, absolutely out of it, because I am very, very sick.  The doctor comes walking down and he says, "You've got chickenpox."  I said, "That's not what they told me.  They told me I have cat fever."  Cat fever's short for catarrhal fever.  Anything that involved the pulmonary system, they called "cat fever."  He says, "You don't have cat fever.  You've got chickenpox and you can't stay here.  You've got to go to the hospital," because I was still at Hugh Manley, in the sick bay.  So, he says, "Get dressed and go down," to a certain place, "and they'll take you to the hospital."  I somehow got dressed--my sea bag is gone to Biloxi and I just have the clothes on my back--and I go down to this place and a truck pulls up.  It's a loading dock.  A truck pulls up.  It's got a canvas top and wooden benches and it's open and this is winter.  This is now probably December and I get, somehow, on to one of those benches and a bunch of other guys who are going to the hospital, coughing and wheezing and all kinds of sicknesses, they come in to the benches with me.  The truck starts off and the wind is howling through the bus, through the truck, because it's not enclosed.  It's got a canvas top and I'm just miserable and I'm there, huddled, trying to keep warm.  I realize my money belt is back in Hugh Manley.  When the doctor came by, one of the tests he performed was to push his thumb on my stomach and take it away.  That's a test for scarlet fever.  That was also going around.  So, if he sees this red blotch where his thumb was, that's an indication of scarlet fever.  So, he had me take my money belt open and, when I got dressed, I never bothered to buckle it back [up] again.  So, my money belt is back at Hugh Manley.  So, I'm feeling double miserable and I tumble out of the truck, when we're in the hospital.  This is the Navy hospital at Great Lakes and they line us up in front of a guy who's recording who we are and what we've got.  I come to this guy and he says, "Sam."  I look up, I don't remember his name anymore, but [he was] from Rutgers.  "Oh," I said, "oh, golly," I said, "I'm glad to see you."  So, he takes my name and, "Chickenpox," and he assigns me to a ward and I tell him about my money belt.  He said, "I'll get it for you.  I'll get in touch with Hugh Manley and we'll see to it that you get it."  I said, "Thank you very much," and I go to this ward and it is maybe thirty beds, fifteen and fifteen.  I'm lying in one of the beds and a doctor comes by, eventually, I don't know how long after I got in there, and he looks at it and he says, "Chickenpox?  You don't belong here.  This is a measles ward.  You've got to be over there, in isolation."  At the end of the ward, through a couple of double doors, there were two rooms opposite each other, across a corridor, and each room had four bunks, two double-deckers.  I find one other guy in the whole naval district in Chicago who has chickenpox and they put the two of us in there with two other guys who are so sick that they don't even talk.  I'm in an upper bunk and this other guy's in a lower bunk and a library cart comes by every once in a while and we're entitled to take books to read.  By this time, I'm feeling a little better, but still pretty bad, and then, a doctor comes by one day; oh, the nurse comes by and says, "Okay, your fever's only a 101.  You two guys go over here and sort linen."  So, we have to count sheets and pillowcases and sort them out.  A doctor comes by and says, "Aren't you two guys chickenpox?"  We said, "Yes."  He said, "You're sorting measles linen.  Get back in there."  He gets the nurse and he chews the hell out of her.  "Why are you putting chickenpox people to sort measles linen? and what's more, when you go into their room, you wash your hands before you go in and you wash your hands when you come out."  She never came in again.  [laughter] So, the doctor took good care of us and we recovered.  Meanwhile, one day, I look over and the two bunks are empty on the other side.  So, I called down to my other fellow there, I said, "What happened to our two roommates?"  [The other guy replied], "They died overnight.  They gave them sulfa drugs and they were allergic to sulfa and they died.  So, they took them out."  [Mr. Goldfarb whistles], "Boy."  [Editor's Note: Sulfonamides are a group of drugs used to kill bacteria.]  So, I'm feeling a little bit better and I get back to Hugh Manley and I'm in-between shipments of people.  So, I have to wait for the next shipment to go out.  So, they assign me to the Hugh Manley post office.  That was a lot of fun, sorting mail, so that I learned a lot about the mail, because we were under the supervision of a professional Post Office employee.  I learned a lot about that.  Now, I come up for reassignment to secondary school.  Instead of going to Biloxi, they assign me--oh, my sea bag showed up one day and my money belt showed up one day, so, I was very grateful--and, now, I'm assigned to Great Lakes again.  So, I'm going to still be in the Chicago area for secondary school and I went there and that was uneventful, except it was wintertime and the training schools were on what they called a grinder.  It was a big macadam field where we did drill and at the end of that field was a cliff and there's Lake Michigan.  So, the wind howls off Lake Michigan and blows across that grinder, fierce.  Every morning, we have to wake up, get dressed, go down, walk across the grinder to the chow hall.  [Mr. Goldfarb imitates the wind howling.]  That wind was fierce.  All you did was, you put your head [down] and you pulled your hat down, put your pea coat up and look at the guy in front of you, because the sun isn't up yet even.  It's just a little dusk, like a little light, and you look at him and you follow him to the chow hall.  By that time, there might be a foot or two of snow on either side, but you've got a path that's been trampled that you follow.  I learned to love beans.  Boy, on Saturday morning, all you had for breakfast was bread and baked beans and coffee and, when you're hungry, those beans really tasted good.  So, I learned to like beans and, to this day, I like beans.  I was now no longer with Ray, because Ray went on to Biloxi.  So, I was with a bunch of other guys and it was very collegial.  We had a good time, and then, at the end of secondary school, I had a delay en route to go home, but my brother was in Pittsburgh at the time, working for the Navy.  So, I arranged to visit my brother in Pittsburgh.  He was a civilian working for the Navy.  He was an engineer, working in Ambridge, just outside of Pittsburgh somewhere.  So, I corresponded with my brother and arranged to meet him and I spent two weeks with my brother in Pittsburgh, which was very nice, came back again to Great Lakes.  Now, I'm ready for the next tier of schools in electronics and I'm assigned to Navy Pier.  Navy Pier, do you know Chicago at all?  Do you know Navy Pier? 

NM:  Yes.

SG:  It comes right out.  You're one or two blocks from the Loop, the Loop being the center of town, and this goes out about half a mile into Lake Michigan.  The Navy took it over and it's all electronics training.  You're divided into companies and you go to class and you live on Navy Pier, except on weekends, when you have liberty.  You go into Chicago and you just walk two blocks, you're right in the middle of Chicago.  It's like being on the 42nd Street Pier in New York, where you walk a few blocks, you're in Times Square.  So, it's very nice and I met some people there with whom I'm still friendly, my Navy buddies from Navy Pier, and we had a lot of good times together in Chicago.  Navy Pier had its own peculiarities.  It's like a warehouse shed.  Up three or four stories are windows, which are somehow manipulated to open and close way up there for ventilation.  It's not made for comfort.  Nobody's supposed to live there; supposed to be a place for passengers to board or to disembark.  So, the bunks are five high and I was on top again.  So, you climb up four bunks, and then, you get to your bunk and, because the windows are open for ventilation, birds fly in and birds have droppings and they drop onto the beds.  So, it was the custom for us to put our hammocks--in those days, every sailor was issued a hammock--to put your hammocks over your mattress and sheet, so that the dropping didn't fall on your bedding, it fell on the canvas hammock.  You could wash the hammock with a scrub brush to get it clean.  You didn't have to worry about your bedding exactly.  Well, that was the season when the birds were in there and nesting.  The reason the birds were there was because there were lots of spiders.  So, there was the spider season, followed by the bird season, but the reason that the spiders were there was because of the flies.  That was the season before the spiders.  So, the flies are first all over everything.  You walk on them, you bat them on your [face].  Then, along come the spiders.  When you get back to your bunk after class, the spider webs are all over.  Every time you knock them down, they put them back up again.  Then, come the birds that eat the spiders.  So, that's good.  That got rid of that, but, then, you got the droppings.  Okay, so, Chicago was a lovely town to be in the service during the war.  Now, they had promised us that if we did well academically, the top of the class would have their choice of where to go for duty.  So, I was fourth in a class of 150 and, by the way, we had people in that curriculum from every engineering school in the country, MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], Illinois Institute of Technology, every one you can think of, and I felt that my education at Rutgers was as good as any of them.  So, I graduated fourth in a class of 150.  So, I thought I'd have my choice of where to go and this program had one of the schools in the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.  I figured, if I could get a job as an instructor in the Naval Research Lab, A., my credentials being in the Naval Research Lab would be very good, because it's a very respected institution, still is today; not only that, but, being in Washington, I could go home to Jersey City on weekends.  So, I put down that my first choice was Washington, DC, Naval Research Lab.  So, the time came to be assigned and I look at my assignment and, yes, I got Washington, DC, but I got the Potomac River Naval Barracks.  I don't know what that is, but it's Washington, so, they did something for me.  I have two weeks off and I come back to Jersey City, and I think it was New Year's Eve I headed home.  Shortly after New Year's, I was supposed to report by midnight on such-and-such a date to the Potomac River Naval Barracks.  So, I get on the train from Penn Station in Newark, again, down to Washington.  I get into Union Station in Washington and, now, I want to get to the Potomac River Naval Barracks.  This is wartime, so, I go out to the street and there are taxis, but the way the taxis worked in wartime, they would accumulate a group of people who were going to the same place and we would share the taxis.  That way, they would save gasoline; you also saved money.  So, I tell some dispatcher that I'm going to the Potomac River Naval Barracks and I get into a taxi and the taxi drops off all these other people, maybe three other people, I don't remember how many.  Now, I'm alone with the taxi driver and he says, "Potomac River Naval Barracks?"  He says, "That's a mistake."  So, I take out my orders.  I said, "It says Potomac River Naval Barracks."  He said, "That's a WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service] barracks.  They're not going to let you in."  I said, "But, my orders read Potomac River Naval Barracks."  He said, "I'll take you there, but I can tell you, I bring WAVES there all the time.  They're not going to let you in."  Well, I get to Potomac River Naval Barracks and it's a little before midnight, when everybody's coming back from liberty.  I'm in there with a whole flock of WAVES, of Navy women.  I get to the gate and the guard, who's also a woman, stops me and says, "Where you going, sailor?"  I said, "I have orders to report to the Potomac River Naval Barracks."  She says, "Let me see them."  She says, "Okay, you're all right.  Go in to the officer of the deck."  So, I find my way to a little shack and I said, "Electronic Technician Samuel Goldfarb reporting.  Here's my orders.  What am I doing here?"  So, the WAVE says to me, "Electronic technician?  Oh, wonderful."  She said, "My radio doesn't work.  [laughter] Can you repair my radio?"  I said, "Well, I don't have any instruments, but," I said, "I'll take a look at it."  Well, it was an AC/DC set.  I look in there and the filaments didn't light.  So, I knew it was [that] one of the tubes were bad.  I said, "You got a bad tube here, but I can't tell you which tube.  Let me see if I can find out."  So, I took--I said, "You have a hairpin?"  They gave me a hairpin and a piece of paper.  Pins two and seven on the bottom of the tube are usually the filament.  So, if you go across a filament of a tube, all the filaments are in a series--well, I don't know, are you engineers at all?  Okay, anyway, there's a way of [telling], look for a spark and that'll tell you which of the tubes is bad.  So, I got a spark.  I pulled the tube out.  I said, "Here's a bad tube.  Tomorrow, go to a radio store and get a new tube."  "Oh," she said, "thank you very much.  Just for that, here's a hamburger with onions and we're going to put you up in the Mayflower Hotel."  The Mayflower Hotel, I mean, that's posh.  "And, tomorrow morning, you report here again and we'll give you your assignment."  I said, "Terrific."  I go to this lovely room in the Mayflower Hotel.  I have a good night's sleep.  Next morning, I go back again to these women in the Potomac River Naval Barracks and they said, "Your orders are to report to the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue, to room so-and-so."  I have them.  I could probably find the room number, but it's a room there, anyway.  Well, I don't know if you know the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue.  This is the heart of the US Navy.  This is where all the admirals have their offices.  This is where the Secretary of the Navy has his office.  It is the top of the top.  So, I go in there and I find my way to room so-and-so and I knock on the door and no answer.  I hear voices on the other side of the door.  So, I try the door and the door lock opens and I push the door and it yields.  It opens a crack, but there's resistance.  I can't open it all the way and, when I get it open a crack, smoke pours out of that crack.  I eventually get it open, and the reason I have trouble is because it's packed with sailors and they're pressed against the door.  They all seemed to be smoking and the cigarette smoke is dense in there.  So, I get in there and I said, "What's going on?"  They said, "We're waiting to hear what our assignments are."  So, in a little while, somebody stands up on a desk and calls for silence and I find out that I'm assigned to radiophoto facsimile.  This is, in those days, a fairly new technology for transmitting pictures and images via radio.  I never learned anything about that in my Navy training, because it's very specialized.  "So that we're going to train you," he said, "to operate and to maintain radiophoto facsimile gear and you will be assigned to a radio facsimile station somewhere in the world, because we're going to set up stations all over.  You will transmit pictures through the network as the Navy requires.  In the meanwhile, we have so many people that we can't fit them into our facilities.  So, we're going to divide up into three shifts, and it'll be arbitrary.  We'll tell you, right away, which shift you're on.  Those of you who haven't already been living here in Washington, you have to find yourself quarters to live and you'll be on quarters and rations.  What that means, you get a per diem and it's up to you to find a place to sleep and up to you to pay for your meals," which is considerably upgraded from the usual Navy stuff, where you go into a Navy base and you're given a cot and you eat in the chow hall.  If you have the money, you can eat in any restaurant in Washington, DC, but you don't have all that money.  So, I find a buddy and the two of us go looking for rooms and we find a rooming house out--oh, we get a list of rooming houses from the Navy.  "These are places where there's a room available.  Go and, if you like it, make arrangements with the landlady or landlord to have a room."  So, the two of us take a room out in the "second alphabet" in Washington, which is pretty far out from the center of town, but we're nearby one of the main streets with a streetcar.  So, we can take the streetcar and get down to Constitution Avenue and get to work every morning, or every night, depending upon the shift.  So, I find a suitable room and I find I'm on--I guess it was the day shift to begin with--and I got into a routine.  We're learning from an instructor on how the gear works, all the theory and practice of operating and maintaining the radiophoto facsimile gear, and I become aware of the fact that the Navy is way behind the Army.  The Army's got the latest gear and we've got New York Times facsimile gear that the New York Times used for their radiophotos--a lot to be desired in the New York Times gear, because it's so old.  The Army is much better equipped than we are, but I'm in the Navy and I make do with what I've got.  We had an office or two or three--I don't remember exactly--with hardware that we're working with, and then, we have a darkroom.  I don't remember if it was on the same floor or one floor down, but it was in a distance away from our offices.  To get into the darkroom, you have to walk through a PBX room--PBX or TBX, I forgot.  [Editor's Note: PBX rooms were switchboard rooms where operators could connect calls.]  It's a Teletype and there, in that room, are hundreds of Teletypes arranged in rows and every Teletype has a Navy WAVE working with a Teletype.  So, you have to walk through all these WAVES to get to our darkroom and these WAVES--servicewomen are usually pretty aggressive--they see a sailor that they think is good-looking, they'd try to grab him.  So, there, WAVES are wondering, "What's going on in that room?  All the sailors are going in, coming out," and so forth.  So, they become interested in our activities in our darkroom.  What we're doing, they tell us--our instructors tell us--is that [we] not only have to be familiar with the gear that transmits and receives the images, but we have to be able to process the film on which the images fall, we have to be able to make prints from the negatives and we have to be able to go through all the darkroom procedures--mix the chemicals, do the developing, do the finishing of the pictures, and so on.  We're told, we have cameras here, "Take the camera, take some film, go out and take pictures.  Come back and develop the pictures and make prints.  Get used to everything," and we got flashbulbs to take pictures with flashbulbs.  So, okay, my buddy and I, one day, we grab a Speed Graphic, which is a very big [camera].  It's a press camera.  I don't know if you remember seeing the guys with their brims up in their fedora and a press pass in the front and they have this big camera that they're using--that's a Speed Graphic.  We'd go around Washington, DC, taking pictures, like tourists.  We'd go to the Washington Monument, we'd go up to the top, we'd take pictures out the top.  We'd go to the Lincoln Memorial and take pictures with the Lincoln Statue and we'd come back to the Navy Building.  There were some things in the Navy Building that were interesting.  In the lobby of the Navy Building are these big, beautiful models of battleships and the USS Constitution, very elaborate models.  If you stand right so [that] you don't get a reflection off the glass, because they're under glass, you could take a nice picture of the model and we'd take pictures of the model and, not only that, but we're walking around the Navy Building, we see Admiral King's office, four stars.  [Editor's Note:  Admiral Ernest Joseph King was the Chief of Naval Operations during World War II.]  [We say], "Oh, that's a good one."  So, we stand in front of Admiral King's door, with the four stars over our shoulder, and we take pictures of each other and we go down [to the darkroom] and we develop them, and so on.  One day, our commanding officer, who's Lieutenant (Langdon?), who they called "Lucky" (Langdon?)--I don't know why, because he started the war as a lieutenant and he ended the war as a lieutenant.  He never got a promotion for the whole war, [laughter] but he was a very nice guy.  One day, Lieutenant (Langdon?) says to us, "Let me see some of your work.  Let me see some of your dark work, let me see your prints," and he had a Loupe magnifier.  He would look and, if you didn't do everything just right, he could tell from the print, said, "You didn't focus your enlarger right.  You didn't do this right, you didn't do that right.  Go back and do it right."  So, we show him our pictures and he says, "These look like they're taken in the Navy Building."  We said, "Yes."  "Oh," he says, "you can't take pictures in the Navy Building.  It's against the law.  You could've been shot by a Marine guard."  We said, "Nobody stopped us."  [laughter] That's what it was like in the Navy Building, which was the heart of the Navy.  If you went to any other Navy base, your cuffs had to be down and buttoned, your hat had to be squared above your eyebrow, your neckerchief had to be tied just the right way.  In the Navy Building, you could walk around without a hat, without a neckerchief, with your sleeves rolled up--nobody cared--and here are all these admirals.  When the time came to eat, you went to the cafeteria and you stood on line with all officers and men, no discrimination between flag officers and other officers and enlisted men.  It was very nice working there.  So, we snapped into line and we stopped taking pictures inside the Navy Building.  Now, we finish.  Oh, yes, one day, I come in--I must have been on the day shift at that time--and there's a big commotion in the office.  Everybody's running around all excited.  I said, "What's up?"  They said, "There was a problem last night and there's going to be disciplinary action."  I said, "What?  How?  Who?"  Lucky (Langdon?) gets up and says, "Okay, we're being disciplined.  Seems that the night before, someone flicked;" first of all, there was no air conditioning in those days.  The Navy Building, it still is the same way.  If you go down to Constitution Avenue, it's a whitewash building, three stories or four stories high and about a city block square and it's got blue awnings on all the windows, beautiful, blue awnings.  I mean, you can picture it, white background with blue awnings on every window.  It's a very nice looking building but square.  Somebody flipped a cigarette butt out our window and it fell on the awning in the window below and started a fire and the fire engines come, they said--during the night, this is--and they do the investigation and they find out the window above where the fire is is our office.  So, somebody says, "Who the hell are they?  What's radio photo?" and they find out and Lucky (Langdon?) is called in on the carpet [to be reprimanded] and said, "You've got so many men assigned to you--fifty percent reduction," because of that occurrence.  So, what they're going to do is, they're going to give a test and the lower fifty percent of the class is going to get washed out and go out to the fleet, and, when you go out to the fleet, you're going as a replacement.  You've got no credentials.  You don't know [if] you'll wind up swabbing decks.  So, we don't want to get assigned to that.  So, they give us an exam and I passed the exam and, now, we've got fifty percent fewer people.  It becomes much more manageable for us.  Then, it so happened that, on the night shift, some of the guys who were working in the darkroom would invite some of the girls who were working on the Teletypes into the darkroom and said, "I'll take your picture, a nice portrait.  You could send it home to your parents," and they start having the girls come in one at a time and pose for pictures, and then, the girls start to pose semi-nude.  At this time, we're sending pictures from Washington, DC, to San Francisco.  There were two stations already in the network and somebody has a collection of pornography.  So, they start to transmit pornography on the network and, now, they've got these pictures of the WAVES, these semi-nude pictures, and they start to send those back and forth.  Somebody walks--maybe Lucky (Langdon?)--walks into the darkroom when one of the girls is posing and all hell breaks loose and, again, when I come in, disciplinary action, another fifty percent reduction.  So, I take another exam and I pass and [another] fifty percent is gone.  Now, we have a workable group of people.  So, it became manageable after that.  When we finished the course, I get assigned to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which is pretty good, as duty goes.  I could have been assigned to a ship, where you're prone to seasickness, where you've got a bunk, which is less than luxurious.  I'll be on land.  So, that sounds pretty good and Lucky (Langdon?) is really a very nice guy.  He transmits TWX-es, telegrams, to the Fourteenth Naval District in Pearl Harbor and says, "We have to set up a radio photo facsimile station at your base.  We needed the following requirements--so many square feet, has to have refrigeration, because we have photographic equipment that we have to keep in a refrigerator, because it's tropical.  Otherwise, the film and paper and all that, chemicals, will degrade.  We have to have eating facilities in the office, because we're going to be working all kinds of schedules.  We're an international operation and we have to operate our equipment on a New York schedule or maybe on some other capital's schedule.  So, we can't eat at prescribed times, so, we have to be able to cook our own food in our facilities," and he gets this posh place for us in Pearl Harbor.  Finally, he says, the last telegram, which we got a copy of, which I looked for, I couldn't find, "Four highly trained electronic technicians en route to your facility.  Greet them cordially."  So, four of us are assigned to Pearl Harbor.  We leave Washington, we have tickets on transcontinental rail and we head for San Francisco.  On the way, we said, "If we're going to Pearl Harbor, why are we going to go on a ship?  Why don't we go by plane?"  The Navy's got transports, NATS, it's called, Naval Air Transport Service.  "We'll go to NATS in San Francisco and we'll get on the list and, when they work their way down the list, we'll get on a plane.  We'll be able to fly to Pearl Harbor, instead of having to go by boat, which is three or four days," whatever it was.  So, we all agreed, four of us unanimous.  So, we go, when we get to San Francisco, and we get a room at the St. Francis Hotel, which is very, very nice.  We go to NATS and we get on their list of people wanting to fly toward the west.  We are waiting now to hear our call.  We're supposed to stand by our telephone in our hotel room.  At ten o'clock in the morning, they'll tell us whether we're on the manifest for that day and, if we are, we have to quick check out of the hotel, go down to Ford Island [Treasure Island?] and get on and meet the plane, but, if we don't get the call, we have to listen at ten o'clock the next morning.  So, we reported to NATS, we're on the list and what are we going to do?  So, we go to a very nice restaurant.  We have a good meal--after all, this is our last night on the mainland--and we go to see Harvey, which is a play that's being performed in San Francisco, with Joe E. Brown.  I don't know if he makes any [impression].  He was a famous comedian and he's in the play and the four of us have a good meal and we see this lovely play.  It cost us considerable, because we have to buy tickets, but we all have money belts and it's our last night on the mainland.  We go back and we sleep and the next morning, at ten o'clock, we listen, no call.  So, the next night's going to be our last night--we go to a good restaurant, we do something else.  I don't remember what, but whatever it was, we spend some money.  After three, four days of not being called, our money belts are not so fat anymore.  So, we call NATS and said, "Look, these are our names and we're on your list.  We have to get to Pearl Harbor and, if we don't get there, if we don't leave in the next day or two, we're not going to have any money and we're going to have to get some emergency pay."  So, the person says, "Look, we're full of people going for the atom bomb tests, out to Bikini [Island], and the planes are full.  So, your chances of your getting [on a plane] in the next couple of days are not good and I don't know how you arrange for emergency pay, but I would advise you to get on the manifest for a ship, because, that way, you'll be sure you'll get meals and you'll be on your way."  So, we reluctantly agree and we find our way to some Navy office where we get on the list for a boat.  We find ourselves on an attack transport heading out of the Golden Gate on our way to Hawaii.  We left in the late afternoon and it was really very thrilling.  Don't forget, I have never been on a liner, on a big ocean, and going under the Golden Gate Bridge and going out, the air is bracing and we're passengers.  We get no duties on the ship and I walk around and it's, like, not quite as luscious, plush, as being on a cruise liner, but it's pretty nice.  Time comes for dinner and I go down and, after walking around the deck with the fresh air, I'm really hungry.  They're serving pork chops and I have a good dinner.  Now, I go and find my way to my bunk.  We're up forward and the bunks are maybe five, six high, I don't remember, but I'm somewhere in the middle and I find myself in the bunk.  My three buddies suggested that we all put five dollars each into a pool and the first guy to get seasick will collect the money.  So, it was all right with me and I felt great.  I went to sleep in the bunk.  In the middle of the night, I wake up and I hear retching.  The boat is rocking and I hear guys vomiting all around me and the smell in that compartment is bad.  I climb out of my bunk and the best thing I can do is get up on deck.  As I walk across the deck and the bunk and the compartment, this stuff is sloshing around.  So, my shoes get full and I walk up a ladder and I get out on the deck, "Phew," fresh air.  I spent the rest of the trip out on the deck.  I sleep on the deck and I sit on the deck and read when I could.  It wasn't a good crossing and it wasn't me alone.  The crew, who'd been on that ship for several years, said that was one of the worst crossings that they had had--and they'd been out all over the Pacific.  Well, we get to Pearl Harbor--maybe it was Honolulu--we docked.  I don't remember if it was Pearl Harbor or Honolulu, but, when we looked out off the deck, there's a crowd of people, civvies, civilians, out there.  So, are they greeting us?  Well, what are all these people doing here?  This is an attack transport with a bunch of servicemen.  What are they doing?  When we got off the ship, we found out what it was and here's the story--there was a certain sailor, not one of us, stationed somewhere around San Francisco, who was the son of a very influential oil family, very wealthy family.  He had become involved with a girl in San Francisco and his mother did not want that girl involved with her son.  So, she got in touch with somebody way up in the Navy and said, "Get my son out of San Francisco."  So, they assign him to Hawaii and the mother believes that this is going to get the son away from the girl, but that girl, evidently, was a professional.  She got that boy, that sailor, to smuggle her onboard the ship and they set her up in a stateroom and she was doing business on the ship.  We're passengers--we don't know anything about this.  Crew is the one who's involved with this.  Well, they were found out and the way I heard it was this--the girls kept a record of the guys who were on credit.  Those who paid cash, there was no record.  If one of their visitors was on credit, they took down the guy's name.  So, when they caught the girls, they knew the names of the guys who were on credit and they were court-martialed.  The girls were put in the brig [military holding cell], he was put in the brig and the word got to Hawaii, to Honolulu, that there were two stowaways, two girls, the girl involved with this fellow and her girlfriend, that there were two stowaways on this ship.  Everybody came down to see these two girls come off the ship and that's the reason the crowd was there.  We got off there.  Commander (Piety?) was waiting for us.  Commander (Piety?) was our commanding officer when we were on detached duty in Pearl Harbor.  Our commanding officer really was Lieutenant (Langdon?) in Washington, but we're on the detached duty, so, we report to Lieutenant (Piety?) in the communications office in Pearl Harbor Navy Yard.  Commander (Piety?) is an awfully nice guy and he's going to take us around.  They've got four places that they think will fit our requirements.  We have our choice of which of the four places that we want to have for our activity.  He takes us from place to place in the jeep and we find what had been the Navy harbor communications office.  It was a bombproof building, air conditioned, really very nice, isolated, by itself, and there is where radios were, originally, that would communicate with the ships who were anchored in the harbor.  That's where the communication went back and forth.  So, we said, "Yes, this is a nice place and, now, we have to have darkrooms and laboratories and offices and bunks and a kitchen, a mess, and so forth."  So, they assign us a Navy architect, who has the prints of the building itself, and he's going to petition to suit our requirements.  So, what we did was, every morning, we would come in and we would see the architect, who would show us the work he did the previous day.  We would say, "That's fine, but this has to be larger," or this was this or that was that.  Then, we would leave for the day, because we had nothing more to do, and the architect would continue with his work.  We would go to Waikiki and we'd spend the day on Waikiki, come back and sleep in the Navy building.  We'd have our meal out in a restaurant in Waikiki or we'd go to downtown Honolulu.  It was idyllic and, for about three weeks or four weeks, while the architect is working--oh, it was more than that.  First, it was the architect.  Then, when we approved the drawings, then came the workmen who came in there to install all the facilities.  So, maybe it was a month that we had nothing to do, that we would just go to the beach, with lots of fun.  One day, we didn't know any girls and servicemen on Hawaii, on Oahu, in those days, it was thick with servicemen.  You didn't see many civilians.  So, girls were very difficult to date, because they had their choice of scads of servicemen and lots of officers.  So, one day, we're on the beach on Waikiki and there were two girls on a blanket not far from us.  We had our towels or something that we were sitting on and we came over and said, "Hello."  I guess there were only two of us, myself and another fellow, and our conversation went along nicely.  We found out there were two girls from the mainland who were in Hawaii visiting their parents, who lived in Hawaii, in Honolulu.  They were teachers on the mainland and they were on vacation.  So, we made a date for that night.  We're going to take them to the movies and to dinner.  Meanwhile, I'm an old beach boy, because from Belmar, here in New Jersey, I'm a good swimmer, and so forth.  So, I'm going to show off.  I had a snorkeling mask with a big glass lens and I asked the girls if they wanted to go swimming and I would let them borrow my mask.  So, we went down to the water and Waikiki, when you see the surf, pictures of the guys surfboarding, that's quite a distance offshore.  That's where the reef is and the big waves coming across the Pacific break on the reef, but, then, by the time they get over the reef and they come in to the shore, they're a little ripple, a little wave, not much at all, but they don't break even.  So, I'm going to show off.  One of these little ripples comes in--I run down there and jump into the wave.  I hear, "Pop," because I was wearing my mask up here, and I reach up and I feel sharp--the glass is broken.  Then, all of a sudden, I can't see out of my right eye.  So, I turn around to walk back to shore and my buddy yells, "Sam, you're hurt.  You're all blood."  What happened was, it cut my forehead and the blood went down over my eye, so [that] I couldn't see through my eye, but this other eye was good.  So, the girls are all very concerned.  They grab their towel and they blot the blood and we go over to a first aid station.  The Navy had first aid stations every once in a while, because a lot of servicemen are out there on the beach.  They put a tape across my forehead and everything is fine.  We went out to dinner, and then, we went to the movies.  Oh, before we went to dinner, the girls insisted that they take us back to meet one of their parents, who was living there, with whom they were staying.  They wanted their parents to pass judgment on us before they went out with us.  So, we walked with them, not far from the beach, to where one of their parents lived.  We met their father and mother and they gave us a quiz, "Where are you from?" and, "What do you do back home?" and so forth.  Then, we got their okay and we took the two girls to dinner and we took them to the movies and we brought them back and deposited them back in the house.  That was the only dates that we had in the time we stayed there in Hawaii.  So, Hawaii, in those days, was a foreign country.  First of all, it was the Territory of Hawaii.  You talked about "the mainland;" you didn't say, "The United States," because they took umbrage to that, because we were in the United States, but it was a territory.  So, you didn't say, "Back in the United States this; back in the United States that."  You said, "Back on the mainland, this or that."  People wore different garb.  Women all wore muumuus, these long dresses, Hawaiian dresses, with prints, floral prints, and the men all wore white pants and floral shirts.  In order to speak with people there, you had to know a little Hawaiian.  They spoke English and most of the conversation was in English, but, when the time came to give directions, it was Hawaiian.  Certain other things were Hawaiian words and you had to use those Hawaiian words in order to be understood.  So, it was a beautiful, beautiful island and we did a lot of traveling around the island, because Lieutenant (Piety?) would give us his jeep.  So, we could travel wherever we wanted.  One day, Lieutenant (Piety?) said to us, "We're going to get a crate that we have to set up in our office and we have to get a truck to bring the crate in.  So, why don't you come with me?  I'll drive the jeep and we'll go up to pick up the truck.  Then, we'll pick up the crate and we'll come back here."  So, we get in the jeep and we pick up the truck and one of us could drive--I didn't have a driver's license at that time, but one of us did.  He got the truck and we piled into the back of the truck and we drove the truck, under Lieutenant (Piety's) guidance, to a depot.  There's this big crate marked for us and we get a forklift and we somehow manage to operate the forklift, under Lieutenant (Piety?) instructions, and lift up the crate and put it on the truck.  Now, we're on our way back to Pearl Harbor.  We get back to Pearl Harbor, to our building, and we unload the crate.  We get into the office and we take a wrecking bar and we pull apart the crate.  There is a radio transmitter, six feet high, racks of equipment with all kinds of dials, which we recognize, because we knew how to handle transmitters.  Lieutenant (Piety?) explains to us, "This transmitter covers the ham band."  You know what a ham is?  Do you know what a ham is? 

NM:  A radio?

SG:  A ham, a radio ham.  It's an amateur radio organization and how it became ham, the name ham, I don't know, but it's the Amateur [American] Radio Relay League, ARRL.  That's the name of the organization.  They had the government permit to license amateurs to use radio for communication.  They had a band they called the ham band and you had to stay in those frequency ranges, so that you didn't interfere with other people who were using other parts of the spectrum.  Lieutenant (Piety?) was a ham and he wanted a transmitter.  So, he finagled a way of getting a transmitter into our office.  Now, this was still wartime, I believe, and it was against the law to make unauthorized transmissions from a Navy base.  You had to have an authorized frequency, authorized equipment, everything authorized, authorized call signal and everything else.  Otherwise, you're liable to all kinds of problems.  Lieutenant (Piety?), I don't think he was regular Navy, but he had guts and he would come in, in the evening, after dinner, and put his feet up on the desk, set up his transmitter on the ham band and [broadcast], "CQ, CQ, calling anybody on this frequency."  CQ means "all calls;" anybody who hears him can respond on the same frequency and listen.  He would call the mainland and he would transmit messages to his family.  He would do all kinds of personal stuff there, illegally, but, in gratitude to us, for letting us use the office and put the transmitter in there, he would bring us food from the officers' mess.  As a result, we had shrimp and steak and ice cream all the time.  So, we ate very, very well.  Lieutenant (Piety?) was an awfully nice guy to work with, and then, came Able and Baker Day.  [Editor's Note: The atomic tests conducted at the Bikini Atoll were codenamed Operation: CROSSROADS.  On July 1, 1946, atomic bomb test ABLE was detonated at an altitude of 528 feet.  On July 25, 1946, atomic bomb test BAKER was detonated ninety feet underwater.  Both tests were conducted to observe the capabilities of nuclear weapons against naval ships and materiel.]  We set up our equipment, we got everything working.  We got into the network with San Francisco and Washington and Saipan.  There were two ships out there at Bikini, one called the Appalachian [(AGC-1)] and one called the Spindle Eye.  They had the same gear we had and some of our friends that we trained with were onboard that ship.  They would transmit the pictures from Bikini to us and we would retransmit it to San Francisco.  So, we set up and we were running regular pictures back and forth for training, because there were no pictures yet from the Bikini [tests]. 

[TAPE PAUSED]

SG:  Okay, so, we had these routines and we had everything working out pretty well, and then, came preparations for Able Day.  All the press people, out there on the Spindle Eye and the Appalachian, are sending pictures back to their newspapers and we have to transmit them back.  These are all preparatory, so that pictures showing ships getting moored, because they had ships out there--I don't know if you remember, when they exploded the atomic bomb, they had ships moored all the way around Bikini Atoll, because they wanted to see the effect of the blast on the ships.  So, they had some ships close, some ships far away, some big ships, some small ships--they could get all the data they wanted.  Onboard these ships were animals, goats, so [that] they could see the effect on life onboard the ships.  So, we started schedules, sending back these pictures from Bikini to San Francisco, where they were distributed to the newspapers and to Washington, DC, where, on the East Coast, they distributed also.  We were pretty busy.  We didn't have much time for fun at that time.  Now, then came Baker Day; after Able Day came Baker Day.  It was another blast and another very intense time.  Oh, wait a minute--no, it was after Able Day, between Able and Baker [Days].  Now, the war was over by this time--Japan had surrendered--and the Navy was looking to release people, but they had an organized fashion for doing this.  You got points.  For every month in the service, you got a certain number of points.  If you're in a battle, you got points.  If you were overseas, you got points, and Hawaii, by the way, was considered overseas.  So, there were points that were fairly distributed, and then, they would announce that anybody with more than so many points could be discharged.  So, everybody with that number of points or more would go to their commands and say, "Okay, I have the right number of points and here's my accounting for my points," and they'd say, "Yes, okay, you're released.  Go to [the following] outgoing unit."  They'd be shipped off to wherever they're going to be discharged.  One day, I look at the bulletin board--oh, and, periodically, the points are lowered, because they want to keep reducing the force--and I see that I have enough points to qualify for discharge.  So, I go to Lieutenant (Piety?), I say, "Lieutenant (Piety?), looks like next week will be an even month for me and I'll have the right number of points and I'll be eligible for discharge.  So, I'd like to get assigned to a transport going back to the mainland."  "Oh," he says, "we can't do that."  Oh, by the way, this was very strict, because the commanding officers are being robbed of all their trained people.  They're responsible for running an organization and their organization is dissolving in front of them.  So, unless there's really some very severe penalties, the commanding officer is going to say, "I can't spare you.  You've got to stay."  So, there were severe penalties--when you had your points, you had to go and the commanding officer couldn't stop you.  He said, "Sam, you can't go.  Baker Day is coming up and you're trained for this and we need you here to perform."  I said, "Well, you know the regulations as well as I do."  He explained to me, he said, "Look, if I put you on the outgoing list now, you're going to go down to Ford Island and wait for a transport and it's going to be a week before they're going to find a ship with room for you.  Now, you're going to go not through the Panama Canal, you're going to go down through South America because--no, you're not going to go to the West Coast--because there's a train strike and there's nobody going across the country by train.  So, they're going to take you through the Canal and up the East Coast to New York and, by the time you get there, it's going to be a month-and-a-half."  He said, "But, if you stay, the Captain," that's Lieutenant (Piety's) commanding officer, "the Captain will get you air transport back to Lido Beach on Long Island.  That's where your discharge center is.  He'll get you back to an airfield nearby and you'll be discharged before if you left now."  I said, "Gee, that sounds like a good deal.  Okay, can I have that in writing?"  He said, "The Captain is an Annapolis man.  His word is his bond."  I said, "Lieutenant (Piety?), I need something in writing to go by.  I just can't say that Captain So-and-So told me that I can do this.  I had to have something."  "Well," he says, "let me see what I can do."  He gets back and he says, "You've got the Captain's word and the Captain is not going to give you a letter."  I said, "Well, do you mind if I type a letter to the Captain saying this is my understanding?"  He said, "Okay, you can do that."  So, I hunted and pecked it on our office typewriter and I sent the letter off to the Captain, kept a copy for myself.  So, Baker Day comes and goes and we transmit the last pictures back from Bikini and I'm ready to go.  So, I pack my sea bags, seagoing fashion, put it over my shoulder and go up to see the Captain in the Fourteenth Naval District Communications Office.  The WAVE secretary stops me and says, "Who are you?"  I said, "I'm here to see Captain So-and-So.  I'm Sam Goldfarb and the Captain promised that he would send me back on a flight to the mainland."  She says, "Just a minute."  She goes into the office and comes back and says, "The Captain says that the planes going back to the mainland are full of people coming back from Bikini and he can't possibly get you on a plane, but he will get you on the USS Shangri-La, which is an aircraft carrier, and they're making a speed run to San Diego.  You should be there in two or three days."  I said, "Okay."  What am I going to do? but I learned a lesson from that.  [laughter] So, I reported down to wherever I was supposed to and I got onboard the USS Shangri-La.  The Shangri-La at the time was an Essex-class carrier, the largest ship class in the Navy, big, and I was a passenger.  I got assigned a nice bunk and I'm free to do anything I want.  The war is over and they're not on any battle stations or anything like that.  So, it was a very relaxed speed run back to San Diego.  Every night, we had a different movie.  The geedunk stand was opened all day.  The geedunk stand is ice cream.  Anytime you're off duty, you go to the geedunk stand and you can order up a sundae or a cone or whatever.  It was a good trip.  I felt a little queasy at one point, but the biggest ship in the Navy is not going to roll much.  So, it was a pretty safe, pretty nice trip back.  We docked in San Diego and I got off the ship and got onto a troop transport train.  By that time, the train strike had ended.  We went on a southern route, from San Diego through El Paso, St. Louis and back up to New York, then to Lido Beach, where I was discharged on August 17, 1946.  As soon as I was discharged, I called Flo (Leaf?), [to] say hello.  That was my career and I think I covered all the stations I was stationed at.  You can see that my Navy career was very funny.  I had a lot of funny things happen to me.  When I was on the Shangri-La, I thought about the "dog faces," the soldiers fighting in the jungles, and here I had a geedunk stand that was at my disposal.  The Navy was a good service to be assigned to and I was very fortunate, very fortunate.  I lost friends in the Battle of the Bulge.  [Editor's Note: The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Von Rundstedt Offensive or Ardennes Offensive, was the failed German attempt to break through the Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Luxembourg and Belgium launched on December 16, 1944, and which lasted into late January 1945.  The Allied forces came out victorious, but the Americans alone lost 19,000 casualties.]  Two of my Jersey City friends were in ASTP.  They believed what the Army told them.  They enlisted in the ASTP.  They were issued uniforms and sent back to their schools.  I don't remember what schools they were, what colleges they were going to, but, in my age group, we were just old enough to get into the service toward the end of the war.  By that time, the war was already going around in our favor.  They could see that the huge mass of men that they needed--that they thought they needed--they were not going to need.  So, they started discharging people.  As far as the ASTP was concerned, they're not going to send these guys to college and pay tuition if they're not going to use them in the Army.  So, the whole ASTP program is dissolved.  All the guys in the ASTP are put into the regular Army.  They don't have an opportunity to go to officer's training, they don't have an opportunity to go to any of these schools.  They're given a rifle and they're sent to basic training, and then, they go overseas, but they're not trained well, because all they had was the equivalent of boot camp.  So, they assigned them to a sector which was safe, well behind the front lines, so that there was no fighting going on.  They were there to do support work for the guys out there in the front who are doing the actual fighting.  The Germans, in one last, convulsive try, have an offensive there where there was a bulge in the line at the Ardennes Forest.  They drive through the front lines and get into the back where all these poor guys are, who don't know how--hardly how--to shoot a gun and they just mowed them down.  The reserves came up, eventually, and pushed them back, but that didn't save those poor guys who didn't have the training or the discipline or anything else to protect themselves.  So, two of my buddies were killed there.  My cousin who went into the Air Force, he was on a bombing mission over Romania, over the Ploesti oil fields.  I heard two different stories.  One was that he's flying in formation, coming back from the raid, and his wingman says, one minute, he looked over and saw the plane.  The next minute, he looked over, he saw a big, black explosion.  An antiaircraft shell hit them and blew the plane up.  So, his mother, who was my mother's cousin, used to say that my mother was so lucky, because my sister, who we lost, not in the war, had a grave that my mother could visit, but she had no grave.  So, I was very lucky.  The training I got was great.  Rutgers gave me two years' credit toward an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering.  So, I came back to the campus, took two more years and got a bachelor's in electrical engineering.  My first bachelor's was in mechanical [engineering].  Then, I stayed, because I got appointed as a research associate in the Engineering Experiment Station and I took graduate work for two years at Rutgers.  [Editor's Note: The Engineering Experiment Station was founded in 1926 and is commonly referred to today as the Bureau of Engineering Research.  The Bureau of Engineering Research provides the engineering faculty with appropriate management of grants and contracts.]  So, I was just very, very lucky.  If I had been born any earlier, I think I would have been in the thick of the fighting.  If I was born any later, I would have been in Korea or Vietnam.  So, I was really grateful.  As far as Rutgers was concerned, I felt that my education at Rutgers--and I felt that way for the rest of my career--that my education at Rutgers was very good and I worked on some very interesting projects.  You interested in that?

NM:  I want to ask a few follow-up questions.  What programs, after graduation, did your classmates in the Class of 1945 join?

SG:  Okay, now, we were all in the same boat, we engineering students.  We all took all these exams and we all went through the trimester accelerated program.  We all graduated July 4, 1944, and we went into the service from there.  Al Walker, who was a close classmate of mine and who I still see frequently, he went into the Navy, again, because of [the] Eddy program, but we did have a choice of going into aviation or into shipboard.  I went into shipboard.  I don't think I had a choice--maybe they just sent me there, maybe they just sent him into airborne--but he went to Corpus Christi [Naval Air Station in Texas] and became an aviation electronic technician's mate, which is the longest title of any enlisted man in the Navy.  Al was ahead of me going into the Navy and he went, as all electronics/Eddy program people did, to Great Lakes for boot camp.  He was already in boot camp when Ray and I, and Spence Ross, got to Great Lakes.  So, there, we had a reunion with Al.  Then, Al eventually went ahead of us, through the program, and worked and went into Corpus Christi, where he became an electronic technician's mate, aviation.  Flying in the Navy, he had an opportunity to handle the airplane, because the pilots--it was very informal.  You're on some flight, going somewhere or other, not in battle.  So, the pilot would say, "You want to handle the stick?  Take over."  He would give him instruction on flying.  So, Al, when he came out of the service, got his pilot's license.  Now, after the war, he's living in New Brunswick, I'm back in New Brunswick, again, as an undergraduate.  He takes me flying from North Brunswick Airfield.  That used to be along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks there in New Brunswick.  It's now an industrial park.  I always was an aviation buff.  I used to make model airplanes, and so on, gas-powered models, but, now, I have an opportunity to fly.  So, I'm working as a research associate in the Engineering Experiment Station at Rutgers.  That pays for my tuition.  So, I don't have to use the GI Bill.  [Editor's Note: The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the GI Bill of Rights, offered funding for college or vocational education, as well as one year of unemployment and loans to buy homes, to returning World War II veterans.]  I've got GI Bill credits--what am I going to do with them?  So, when I went down to the airport to see about taking flying lessons, they said, "If you have GI Bill credits, you can get the GI Bill to pay for your flying," which is what I did.  So, I took my instruction at North Brunswick Airport and got my pilot's license.  So, I could fly with Al Walker.  Now, going back further, we're back in boot camp and we're not the only Rutgers guys.  I mean, we had close to a dozen Rutgers guys there at the same time, all in the electronics training program, but in various seniorities, so that we weren't all in one company.  Ray Frisch and I, and Spence Ross, who I--well, Ray is gone, Ray passed away a year-and-a-half ago--but Spence and I were together at the reunion just in May.  We were together in boot camp and Spence--is it all right if I digress like this?

NM:  Yes.

SG:  Okay.  Spence was in the Glee Club, starting in high school, in Highland Park High School.  He and Al Walker and a couple of other guys were in the Glee Club.  When they came to Rutgers, they were in the Glee Club at Rutgers, and Al's got a good voice, but Spence has an excellent voice.  When we're in boot camp together, we would, on occasion, be washing our laundry at the same time and we'd be opposite each other, at this water trough, where we're washing.  Spence would be singing Rutgers songs.  So, I would sing with him.  He says, "Sam, why don't I teach you the second part and we can sing in harmony?"  So, he taught me the second parts to a lot of Rutgers songs and we used to have a great time singing, and other Rutgers guys would hear and chime in.  So, let's see who else there was--there was a fellow I can picture, but I can't remember his name--Spence, Al Walker, Ray Frisch and me, oh, yes, Morty Burke.  Morty, also, I see often.  Morty lives in Neptune and he was at reunion and Morty was also in the Eddy program. 

NM:  Was ROTC mandatory?

SG:  ROTC was mandatory because we were a land-grant college, but the mandatory part was freshman and sophomore year.  The two upper years were voluntary and, if you did take the two upper years, you got a commission when you graduated.  I took the two basic years that were required and I didn't volunteer for the two upper years, but we had interesting times in ASTP [ROTC].  Somehow, because, I guess, we were mechanical engineers, we got Signal Corps training.  So, the freshman year was standard--everybody got the same thing--but the sophomore years, you started to specialize, infantry, Signal Corps, whatever else, artillery, I suppose.  I don't remember what other divisions there were, but we had maneuvers.  Do you know the sandpits out on Route 18?  It's probably housing developments now, but that part of Route 18, when you went out of New Brunswick toward the shore, was potato fields, soy beans and a quarry for clay.  They dug pits where they'd excavated the clay and rain water came in there and filled to a certain depth with water, which was beautiful blue, because there were minerals, I guess, in it.  It was a beautiful looking thing and it was a good place to bring dates.  You'd go there in the evening and make a little fire on the shore and it was nice.  Because it was so rough and rural, we would have maneuvers there.  So, we learned Morse code, with a key, and we had a radio.  There was a hand-cranked generator and one guy would sit there, cranking the generator, and then, the radioman would tap the key and they'd set up networks as if you were an army.  There was a division headquarters, I suppose company headquarters, and so on, because that's where the communication gear was.  The officers had certain programs, that we would retreat or advance, and so forth.  They'd lay wire, for wire communications, and that's the training that we got, but I was a very inept radioman.  First of all, I didn't have good rhythm.  So, it was difficult for me to learn the Morse Code.  I was very slow and I was assigned to division headquarters.  I get my gear set up and my friend is cranking the generator and I report onboard the net [network] and I am now in the net.  I get messages back that everybody receives me and I'm in the net.  Somebody comes running over with a sheaf of messages.  I'm to send these messages out.  So, I put them down on my lap, or wherever, and the top one, I start to send.  I'm very slow and I'm sending and I'm sending and I'm sending.  Somebody comes running back and says, "Did you get an answer to that urgent message?"  I forgot to look to see which message is urgent and which message is routine.  The one I'm sending is asking--it's all in code, so, you can't tell--but the one I'm sending is a message to ask somebody where this guy's lunch is, but the urgent message, which had to do with our maneuvers, is down two or three messages.  I haven't even started it yet--oh, God, terrible.

NM:  You were at Rutgers from 1941 to ...

SG:  '44, and then, '46 to '50.

NM:  Can you describe the atmosphere of the campus during the war? 

SG:  Well, during the war, it was very restrained.  There weren't many guys there and those that were there were in uniform.  The girls at NJC [New Jersey College for Women] didn't have many dates, because there weren't many men to date.  Before the war broke out, in other words, before December '41, it was a real college the way you read about, dances and house parties and lots of fun.  It was great.  It became much more somber as everybody realized the cost of the war, in lives and materiel, but, up until December '41, [college was] lots and lots of fun--football games with house parties and displays and floats and a lot of fun--and classroom work was interesting.  I was always interested in engineering, so, I enjoyed the classroom work very much.  It was a small school.  You weren't on campus more than a month before you recognized everybody.  Even if you didn't know their name, you recognized their face and the tradition was, you say hello.  It was called a "hello tradition."  So, as you walk across the campus, "Hello.  Hi.  Hello."  Everybody said hello and it was very friendly and very nice, and I enjoyed it very much.

NM:  You mentioned that there was football and other activities.  Did some of those cease during the war?

SG:  Yes, yes.  I can't remember in particular, but I think intercollegiate sports, while they still may have been going on, were much fewer, much less, and, certainly, the talent that was available in the various sports was missing.

NM:  Was the war talked about among your classmates on campus?

SG:  Oh, yes, yes, because we all knew that, one day, we were going to be in the service.  So, when there'd be something bad happened, like the Hood got sunk or another British battleship or something--there were a lot of reverses early in the war and it looked very dismal--we would talk about the fall of Singapore, or something like that, or what was going on in Europe, how the Nazis were preparing for the invasion and how it looked like a very tough fight was going to be in store.  [Editor's Note: The HMS Hood was a British battlecrusier sunk in the Battle of the Denmark Straight by the German battleship Bismarck on May 24, 1941.  The British surrendered Singapore on February 15, 1942, after about a week of fighting.]  There was nothing we could do about it, so, being seventeen, eighteen-year-olds, nineteen-year-olds, we did our best to have a good time.

NM:  Now, you mentioned ...

SG:  Oh, let me say this--go down the [Jersey] Shore, after graduation, in the Summer of 1944, there were blotches of oil on the sand.  The submarines, the German submarines, were sinking tankers just offshore and the wave action would bring the oil onto shore.  You were not supposed to show a light on the shore, on the boardwalk, for example, because the submarines would silhouette the ships going along the coast against the lights of the mainland.  They were using [the lights] to aim their torpedoes that way.  So, we had to keep a blackout.  We were supposed to keep a blackout.

NM:  These are follow-up questions.

SG:  Sure.

NM:  From other people we have interviewed, especially the guys who were in-between, not being drafted, in that time ...

SG:  Being deferred, you mean? yes.

NM:  Yes.  They mentioned that they felt pressure on them to join.  People would ask them about why they were not in the service.

SG:  Absolutely, absolutely.  First of all, you didn't want to be 4-F.  4-F was a designation for those who were infirmed, had handicaps and couldn't go into the service.  Their eyesight was bad, their hearing was bad, they were disabled in some other fashion.  So, you wanted to appear to be normal and physically fit.  So, you didn't want to be 4-F.  "So, why aren't you in the service?  At your age, you should be in the service."  So, you frequently had to explain to people why.  Women whose sons were in the service [said], "Why aren't you in?  My son is in the service.  Why aren't you in the service?"  I remember, one time--I was only seventeen, so, I hadn't even registered for the draft yet--I took my bicycle, I went up to what is now University Heights [the Busch Campus of Rutgers in New Brunswick/Piscataway].  You know Stelton?  There was an Army camp up there [Camp Kilmer] and that was where they shipped overseas.  Guys who'd been trained and hardened as much as they could, they went up there and their unit went from there by train to a port, onboard a ship and over to France, or wherever, or England.  So, I ride my bicycle up to University Heights, beautiful day, spring or summer, and I park my bike and I'm standing looking at the greenery, and so on.  I hear [Mr. Goldfarb imitates the sound of men marching] and over the hill come these guys.  Every one of them looks like he's six-foot-three and husky and they're carrying battle packs.  I'm telling you, it's a scary sight to see these guys.  As they come by me, they said, "Why aren't you in the service?"  I said, "I haven't registered for the draft yet," [laughter] but, boy, that was impressive.

NM:  What led you to study the field of engineering at Rutgers?

SG:  Okay, my brother was an engineer.  First of all, my mother was an aviation buff.  It's hard to believe, but, in those days, when you were sitting in your house and you heard the drone of an airplane, everybody ran out to look at it.  It was so unusual, even though we were pretty close to Newark Airport, [living] in Jersey City, and Newark Airport was the busiest airport in the world in those days.  So, I became interested in aviation and, by the way, I was an eyewitness to the disaster in Lakehurst, when the Hindenburg blew up.  [Editor's Note: On May 6, 1937, the German airship Hindenburg caught fire while attempting to dock at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey.]  So, I always tinkered.  I built model airplanes, I took clocks and watches apart, I became an amateur watch repairman and all these mechanical things fascinated me.  My brother built a buckboard with a motorcycle engine and four wheels on an old door and he and his buddies, who were all engineers, in high school, they built that.  So, that interest continued, and then, my brother went to Rutgers.  First, he went to Newark College of Engineering [now New Jersey Institute of Technology], and then, he transferred to Rutgers.  So, I was also inclined to do that.  Rutgers was the only college I applied to.  So, I guess that's the reason why I went into engineering, but it was a good field, too, in those days.

NM:  Okay, I want to get back to your growing up in Jersey City.  You mentioned that your father owned his own store. 

SG:  Yes.

NM:  Growing up, did you work there?

SG:  Yes, on vacations from college, and those usually coincided with the busy season in the store, because it was Christmas, Easter, and so forth.  I would go down--the store was Downtown.  We lived uptown on Jersey City, where--they didn't call it "Jersey City Heights," but it's the higher part--and then, Downtown, along the waterfront, was a lower area of Jersey City.  It's called Downtown and my father's store was down there and, at first, I would do stock work.  I would make boxes from flat punchings, to put the sides up and the covers down, and so forth, and I would open up shipments from the wholesalers and put them into shelves, stocks, and so on.  I would do all kinds of things like that, but, then, I got older and I started to do sales work and I enjoyed that very much.  I enjoyed working with people.  My father taught me that, "If someone comes in for a pair of socks and you sell them a pair of socks, you're a clerk, but, if someone comes in for a pair of socks and you sell them the socks and a shirt and a tie, you're a salesperson.  So, always try to interest the customer in something more than what they came in for."  My father was a very ethical person.  He ran a very legitimate store.  Everything had a mark with a price on it.  There was no haggling and his sales were all legitimate sales.  One day, I was working there and a woman came in with a white boy's shirt.  We sold children's wear, largely.  She came in with a white shirt for a child and she said, "I want my money back."  I look at the shirt and the cuffs and the neck are all black, so, you know the shirt's been worn a long time.  She says, "I don't like the shirt.  I want my money back."  I said, "Just a minute, please."  I went to my father, I said, "Dad, look at this shirt.  The woman wants her money back.  It's obviously been worn.  Do you want to talk to her?"  He said, "No, give her her money back."  I said, "But, look at this [shirt]."  He said, "Goodwill is more important."  So, that's the way he worked, and my father taught me ethics.

NM:  As a businessman, did the Great Depression affect his work?

SG:  Oh, yes, yes.  First of all, in 1941, it didn't look like I was going to be able to go to college, but I pleaded with my father, because I didn't have a scholarship.  I didn't apply for a scholarship.  I should have, but I didn't, and I pleaded with my father and my mother and they eventually agreed that they would send me to school, but I knew things were difficult.  I was very young.  [In] 1929, I was four years old, so, I wasn't too conscious of what went on there, but, in the early '30s, all around me, I saw these very depressing sights.  There was Hooverville.  Hoover was blamed for the Depression--I don't know if justly or unjustly, but he was blamed--but Hooverville was located in the Meadowlands between Jersey City and Newark.  There, men who had no jobs, couldn't support their families, had to live someplace, couldn't afford rent or anything, they would take cardboard or sheet metal, or whatever they could find, pieces of scraps of wood, and they would put up a little hovel.  They would live in there, protected, maybe, from the rain or a little bit from the wind.  They would put these up next to one another, because, by having adjoining [huts], they would protect one another, and it was very depressing.  These guys had no hope and no future.  They would come around to the homes--we had a private home, we were well-off, relatively speaking--they would come around and beg, "I'll do anything, any work at all, for food.  I'm hungry."  We had people who came around with pushcarts to sell bananas for a penny a banana.  We had people who came with grinding wheels on their back and they would call out, "Knives sharpened, scissors sharpened."  The housewives would come down and they would pay them a few pennies and they would grind their stuff.  There were little bands, three, four people who played instruments, who would go to the apartment houses, in the courtyards, and they'd play and people would throw them pennies.  Penny was a valuable thing in those days.  So, I knew that.  Not only that, but the things I wanted and I would ask my father for, for toys or things like that, can't afford it.  When my holes came in my shoes, my mother--I wasn't conscious that there was a hole in the sole in my shoe--but my mother would dress me and look to see this hole in the sole of the shoe.  She would put cardboard on the inside and there was a material called "Save a Sole," came in a can, and she would take a knife and she would butter the bottom of the sole with this material.  It would dry and it would give you some more life to the shoe.  So, all these things, and I was very saddened to see these men on the street corners selling apples.  They didn't have a job.  They somehow wholesaled apples, and then, sold them for a little profit.  I used to get a dollar at Hanukkah time in pennies as a gift from my father, my parents.  I would count the pennies every day when I came home from work.  I learned to count to a hundred.  So, occasionally, I'd count ninety-nine and I'd accuse my brother of taking a penny, and he said, "Count them again," and I'd count them again--there'd be a hundred.  [laughter] Anyway, this man would come down with a pushcart with bananas, yelling, "Bananas, bananas, a penny each."  I took a penny every day and I would buy a banana, because I felt so sorry for him.  He didn't have a house.  He didn't have parents like mine.  So, things were pretty tough.  Now, that was one aspect, that was the Depression, but this was not long after the war.  The First World War ended in 1918 and this is only, like, ten years later or so.  You had veterans who dressed in uniforms and were on little carts with four wheels, with no feet, no legs.  They had two blocks of wood and they would push themselves along.  That was very sobering.  So, when the time came for us to go into the service, you had these visions of these guys, fellows with an empty sleeve.  [Editor's Note: World War I ended on November 11, 1918, while the Great Depression began on October 29, 1929, a span totaling around eleven years.]

NM:  This was in Jersey City.

SG:  Jersey City.

NM:  Was religion an important part of your life growing up?

SG:  Yes, yes.  Religion was an important part of my life for two reasons.  Number one, my peers did not let me forget I was Jewish.  Jersey City was a Catholic city.  I knew immediately--I don't know, from a very early age--which diocese I was in.  I had a lot of friends who were Catholic.  I had a lot of Jewish friends, too, but the Catholic friends, in those days, in Catechism, learned that the Jews killed Jesus.  A young kid said, "The Jews killed Jesus?  Sam is a Jew.  Why did he kill Jesus?  Why did he kill our Lord?"  So, they'd come after me, "Why did you kill our Lord?"  First time I heard that, I couldn't [understand], "I didn't kill anybody."  So, I couldn't forget I was Jewish because of the environment.  They did rudimentary torture.  It was--you know, I can look back on it now as a joke--but they'd take me down into somebody's basement and they'd tie me up and they'd do some things to me.  They didn't really want to hurt me, but they did it as, I don't know, some kind of a compulsion or other.  My parents, while they were not very observant, we belonged to a synagogue.  I did have a godmother who was quite observant and she insisted that I have a Jewish education, a religious education.  So, I went to Hebrew school after regular school and Sunday school, and my Jewish friends did the same--most of them, I wouldn't say all, but most of them.  So, three o'clock comes, the school bell rings, you're free, "Wow."  You run out of school, you run home, you drop your books, you run out into the street again.  There are all your other friends.  Someone's got a football or a softball, or whatever it was, whatever the season was for the [game], and you played in the street.  Comes a quarter to five, the Jewish kids dropped the ball and we all go to Hebrew school.  The Greek kids went to Greek school and some of the Catholic kids went to Catechism.  So, it was that kind of an environment and we got along except for these [issues].  It was never really egregious.  It was something that it seemed my friends were doing out of force of habit, or maybe their peer pressure, but I never felt in danger.  There was one bully, but I don't think that was a religious [issue]--he was just a bully.  So, I was bar mitzvah and we were married in a synagogue and I belonged, for forty-nine years, to the Princeton Jewish Center.  I was chair of the religious affairs committee for a number of years.  I've done volunteer work at the synagogue, and so on.  So, religion is one of the important factors in my life.  I think that religion, in anybody's life, is an important aspect, no matter which faith it is, like you should--everybody should--be trained a little bit in music and learn to appreciate music, everybody should learn to appreciate art or appreciate nature, because it makes for a fuller life, everybody should have some faith, because that's another dimension of life. 

NM:  Did your father ever talk about why he emigrated from Austria-Hungary?

SG:  I don't remember exactly, but the common thing was that, one, a relative was in America and said, "This is the land of opportunity.  Why are you staying back there in that backward country?  Come here.  You'll stay with me and you'll get on your feet and I'll help you."  That was one thing.  My father came here at a very, relatively, early age, teenager.  For other boys, other men, when they reached eighteen, if they were in Russia, they were subject to draft in the Tsar's Army and, when you went into the Tsar's Army, you didn't come out.  They kept you in as long as they could and the life in the Army, in the Tsar's Army, was not good, especially for a Jew.  So, as they approached that age, they wanted to get away from the Tsar, but that was Russia.  Austria-Hungary, I don't remember if they had a conscription there or not, but my father was too young to be [drafted].  He left before he could be conscripted, but those are the motivations, I think, usually, for immigration. 

NM:  Did you have a lot of contact with your aunts and uncles in the United States?

SG:  Oh, yes, there was another aspect.  When an immigrant came, usually they came to family and the families supported each other.  So, they usually were in the same area.  Now, there were exceptions.  There were pioneers, who would go out West somewhere, where they had no relatives at all, and seek their fortune, but, in our family, I had cousins, aunts, uncles, all in the same area of Jersey City.  We had one outlying family in Brooklyn--that was my Aunt (Ana?) and her family--and another group down in Philadelphia, but most of the family were right around us in Jersey City.  So, I would walk a block, for example, when I came home from school, if my mother wasn't going to be home, she'd say, "Instead of coming home, stop at Aunt Jen's house and have your milk and sandwich there."  So, I would go in to Aunt Jen and, like, I had my cousins there, and so on.  So, growing up in that environment, it was like a village.  I had to be careful to behave myself, because there were all my relatives around.  [laughter] If they got wind, my parents would get wind, so, I was always careful to behave.  When I took out girls, I had to watch out, because their parents knew my parents.  If I didn't behave, their parents would complain to my parents.  So, it was something that kept you on the straight and narrow and kids who don't grow up in a village or that kind of a village environment, I think they lose out somewhat.

NM:  You mentioned your father's background.  Your mother was born in ...

SG:  New York.

NM:  New York.  Could you talk about her background?

SG:  My mother was the oldest of five children who survived infancy.  She had two siblings who died before she was born.  My grandfather came to this country, again, to relatives, and many, many Jewish, and other [groups], Italians, and so forth, and so on, became tailors.  Why did they become tailors? because you could have your own business with very little investment.  To have a store, you had to rent or buy a store.  You had to have capital to stock the store, but, if you were a tailor, for very little money, you could buy a sewing machine and you put the sewing machine in your house.  You didn't need a store.  You put a sign out in front that said, "Tailor."  Someone would come in with a torn something or other or something to be mended.  You use your sewing machine to do that.  You either were taught by a relative or you learned it the hard way, how to do this.  So, for very little capital, you could go into the tailoring business.  Some became skilled tailors and some of them never did, [laughter] but they had, maybe, made enough to make a living.  So, my grandfather became a tailor and he was very observant and they lived downtown in Jersey City and my mother went to work for my father as a teenager.  My mother was in the first graduating class from her high school from Jersey City.  In those days, girls were not educated and high school graduation was unusual--and college education for a woman, for a girl, was virtually unknown.  So, my mother married her boss.

NM:  Where did your grandfather come from?

SG:  He came from Poland.  Irene's parents also came from Poland.  My grandfather came from--Irene? I can't remember the name of the town--but not far from Warsaw, not far from Warsaw.  As a matter-of-fact, when we did a genealogy and I found out my father's, my grandfather's, village and Irene found out her father's village, they were only nine kilometers apart.  They could have known each other.

NM:  It sounds like you went to the Shore often as a child.

SG:  My father was very prosperous before the Depression.  In the 1920s, my father's business was very prosperous.  My father employed a lot of people.  He had a manager to run the business for him.  My mother and father traveled to Europe.  When my mother was pregnant with me, my mother and father went to Europe.  My parents told a story that my mother urged my father that the two of them should go to travel to Europe, and my father said, "No, no, I'm too busy and we'll do it later."  My mother said, "There may not be a later.  Let's go now."  My father said how grateful he was, because [it] wasn't many years than that when he lost all his money.  So, not only did they travel in Europe, but they employed help at home.  We had a nanny who took care of me and who cleaned house and cooked.  So, my father was very well-off, and then, came the Depression.  Everybody was investing in stock in those days.  If you had a little money, you bought stock, because, every day, when you looked in the newspaper, the stock value was higher and higher.  Then, came the Crash and these people lost most of their money.  That's when my father had to retrench and he worked himself--didn't have a manager--and my mother could no longer afford to have help in the house.  My mother did all the work herself.  She patched my shoes and she sewed my clothes and my mother sewed my sister's clothes, made them from scratch--all this to save money.  So, things changed, but those of us who are old know that things go in cycles.  So, when the bubble was in there, we knew that, someday, that bubble's going to burst.  Now, we know that, someday, things are going to recover and the whole cycle will repeat again.  That's the way it goes. 

NM:  Your brother had finished his education as an engineer at Rutgers in 1937.

SG:  Correct.

NM:  Was employment hard to find for him?

SG:  Tough, tough.  First of all, he was Jewish and, in those days, everybody asked, on your employment form, [for] religion.  You had to put down what your religion was.  Today, it's against the law.  So, my brother could not find a job in 1937 and he did his best to help out in the house, help out with my father in the store, but he didn't have a job.  My father was very dismal about it, "How are we going to get [you a job]?  How are you going to get a job?  What are you going to do?"  My brother finally got a job with the Interstate Sanitation Commission.  [Editor's Note: The Interstate Sanitation Commission was established in the 1930s by the federal government to help combat the growing pollution problems plaguing New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.]  Here he was, with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, and he would take his car--and he had an expense account for the car--and he would go to certain locations and take a sample jar and scoop up river water, or sewer water or whatever, and record and cap it and bring it back to the laboratory, where they would analyze it for contaminants, for toxic things.  Who did the work in the laboratory? a Ph.D.  Ph.Ds. couldn't get jobs, so, they'd work in the laboratory for a very small wage, analyzing these sewer and river effluence.  As time went by, things improved a little bit.  My brother was able to get a decent job as an engineer, but I didn't feel a lot of anti-Semitism.  I knew it existed and, amongst my friends, there were certain people who I couldn't get along with, and so on, and I would just steer clear of them.  In my freshman year from college--that was a full summer, they hadn't yet instituted the trimester--I looked for a job and I wanted to get a job as an engineer.  After all, I had taken metallurgy and engineering problems, [laughter] so, I felt I was an engineer.  So, I went from place to place and in Jersey City was a lot of industry.  So, I didn't have to go far from my house to an industrial section, where there were rolling mills who rolled iron, where there were jobbers who sold steel and aviation companies that overhauled aviation engines, a lot of different things going on.  Any one of them, I would have loved to work for.  So, I went around from place to place and I fill out the employment form and I went, one day, to J. T. Ryerson and Son--I think they're still in existence.  They were, and maybe still are, steel jobbers.  Now, if you're a construction company and you want steel beams for a job that you've got, you can't go to Pittsburgh and order the steel beams.  American Iron and Steel and Carnegie Steel, they don't want to hear from you.  They want to ship trainloads full of steel.  That's where Ryerson comes in.  They would order the trainload full of steel.  They would stock it in their yard and, when you called up for a beam twenty feet long, of this kind of a cross-section, they would go to their stock and they would cut it to your length and they would put it on their truck and deliver it to your construction site.  "So, J. T. Ryerson Steel?  Sounds good--maybe I can use my metallurgy."  So, I go in there and I fill out the form and it asks religion and I put down Jewish.  I get an interview with Mr. (Trivellain?), who was the manager of this big plant, with a big yard full of steel, and I was impressed, but I wasn't frightened.  Mr. (Trivellain?) was a very nice guy.  He says, "What do you want to do when you become mature?" and I said, "I'd like to design airplanes."  He said, "Well, we're a steel firm.  How do you expect us to train you to design airplanes?"  I said, "Well, the high stress part of the airplane is made out of steel and I'd like to learn about all the alloys, different alloys of steel and what their properties are."  He said, "That sounds good."  He said, "Thank you very much.  We'll let you know."  My friend, Ray Frisch, was with me.  He filled out a form, too, and he had the same interview.  After we went to some other places that day, I don't remember, we went home.  The next day, I got a telephone call from J. T. Ryerson to come into the plant.  So, I came into the plant and they said, "Okay, we're going to give you a job.  You have to fill out these forms and we're going to do this and we're going to do that.  You'll work here and this is what you're going to do.  This is what your wage is going to be," seventeen dollars a week, and you worked half a day on Saturday.  So, you worked, like, forty-eight hours a week and you had seventeen dollars, which was great for me, because I lived at home and my parents supported me.  Seventeen dollars, boy, I could buy an awful lot of model airplanes for seventeen dollars.  So, that was great and I worked there and it was interesting.  I had an initiation from these tough guys, men, who were working there.  I was a kid, so, they would play jokes on me, which was fine with me, but they treated me nicely.  One day, a girl comes by--there were lots of women working in secretarial positions, and so forth--and this girl comes back around and says, "Sam, are you Jewish?"  I said, "Yes."  She said, "So, am I, but they don't know it.  You are the only Jew that works here."  I have no problem, but, in those days, certain occupations, you just couldn't get a job as a Jew, or as a black. 

NM:  What was the ethnic makeup of Jersey City in those days?

SG:  Largely Catholic, Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic, those were the two--Polish Catholic, there were three.  There were a lot of Baptist whites, some Baptist blacks; Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Protestants like that, not so many, Dutch Reformed, not many, although they started Jersey City, when New Amsterdam was Dutch.  There was still a couple of Dutch Reformed churches in Jersey City, and a good percentage of immigrants of various kinds--not of my generation, but my parents' generation.

NM:  Did all of these groups intermingle in grade school and high school?

SG:  In school and high school, all intermingled.  While there'd occasionally be a fight based on some religion, it was not organized and there were no pogroms that I ever saw and I never saw any really malicious or criminal activity.  [Editor's Note: A pogrom is a Russian term for anti-Semitic rioting against Jewish populations.]

NM:  Is it okay if I jump ahead a little?

SG:  Sure.

NM:  Did you have any plans for after your discharge from the Navy?

SG:  Go back to school and get a graduate degree.

NM:  Okay.

SG:  Matter-of-fact, that might be a good segue.  I have here a letter to Rutgers, which I wrote from Pearl Harbor, saying, "Will you please let me know how I can apply for undergraduate or graduate school in September?" 

NM:  For the record, Mr. Goldfarb gave us that letter.  We will make a copy of it.

SG:  You want to make a copy?  I can make a copy downstairs.

NM:  Yes, after the interview.

SG:  That's it.

NM:  Before you were discharged, you were planning on going back to Rutgers.

SG:  When I was in Pearl Harbor, during that month or so when we had nothing to do but go to the beach, sometimes, it was inclement--rarely, it was--when the weather was not good.  It was beautiful weather there, usually, but there are occasionally, like, monsoons, where the rain would come for a solid day or two.  We're not going to go to the beach--what am I going to do?  So, there was an institution called USAFI, United States Armed Forces Institute.  That's it, USAFI, where you could enroll by mail and take [courses].  They had a list of courses and, by correspondence school, they would send you textbooks and material and you would do homework, which you would send back to them.  They would grade it and come back to you with suggestions for how you can get [better], do remedial work if you weren't catching on or what you should do to progress further.  So, I had nothing to do.  So, I took advanced calculus and I took some other courses and that got me back into the academic [mindset] and I thought, "Gee, when I go back, I have a choice.  Should I go to work?  Better yet, if I go to graduate school and get a master's degree, I'll be that much more employable.  If I can get into Rutgers, I'll be back right where I'm familiar.  I'll get my old room back in the fraternity house and my old girlfriends are all around [laughter] and I'll resume my civilian life again."  Actually, what happened was, one veteran, who I will not mention by name, was in really rough fighting in Europe.  I mean, he saw a lot of action.  It's a miracle that he survived without being injured.  He got back, because of his points, very early.  He had a lot of battle points.  So, he goes back to Rutgers and he goes to Tau Delta Phi and becomes a brother.  Here, he's got all these kids.  He's a mature ex-serviceman with a lot of battle experience and these are a bunch of high school kids, freshmen and maybe even upper graduates.  He says, "Look, you guys, in a little while, there are going to be a whole bunch of your fraternity brothers coming back from service who are going to want to get back into the fraternity house.  You're all going to lose your rooms because these guys have seniority.  So, you'd better change the bylaws and make it so that returning veterans no longer have seniority."  That's what they did.  So, I came back to try to get my room and they said, "The bylaws have changed.  You don't have any seniority.  These rooms are ours, we undergraduates."  So, right next door was a rooming house.  I went next door to the rooming house and I got a room there and all I had to do was walk next door to eat my meals in the fraternity house.  In that rooming house were two daughters.  One of those daughters married a Princeton guy and lives here in Princeton.  Forty-nine years ago, when we moved to Princeton, we renewed our acquaintance. 

NM:  How had the campus changed when you returned?

SG:  A lot of veterans, a lot of guys, all over the place.  School was big, because the classes were packed.  They didn't have the facilities to cover all of these graduates and undergraduates.  So, that changed and I felt a little bit like an outsider, because of all these kids--and I was older, as a graduate student.  I didn't live in the fraternity house.  So, I tried to enjoy college life as much as I could and I think, before I moved into the rooming house next to the fraternity house, that first year I returned, I lived on Livingston Avenue.  You know where that is, in New Brunswick?  There was a fraternity brother, a younger undergraduate, whose grandfather lived on Livingston Avenue in a lovely home.  The grandfather was a widower.  His wife had just died and my fraternity brother's parents said, "Your grandfather is old and has difficulty.  You should live in his house with him and help him to cope.  His wife just died and you can be a companion to him."  Well, there was room for another person, so, he said, "Well, if you want a room, you can come to my grandfather's house with me."  We did and, every day, we took the bus from Livingston Avenue to the campus, but that was kind of awkward.  You had to wait for the bus and had to take the bus back again, and so on, and we said, "Why don't we buy a car?"  So, we looked for a used car and, for a hundred dollars, we bought an old LaSalle, 1929 LaSalle limousine.  It had jump seats, three rows of seats.  I guess it's like a van is today, except the seats folded up into the back of the front seats.  So, if you didn't have three rows, the back seat, you had a lot of distance between the back seat and the back of the front seat.  I was an engineer, he was a liberal arts guy--so, I maintained the car.  I did all the engine work and maintenance, and so forth, and we would go together.  We would look at our schedule and the guy with the earliest class would determine when we went to campus and the guy with the latest class would determine when we came back and it worked out quite nicely.  Then, when it came to the weekends, one weekend, I'd have the car and I would be able to date with my car and, the next weekend, he would have the car and he would go out on his date.  Then, one day, he said to me, "It's my turn for the date for the car, but you can have it, because I'm going to drive in my father's new Buick."  Now, this is just after the war and cars are very hard to get.  They're rationed, and so forth.  You've got to be on a list to get your car and his father has a brand-new Buick, "Wow."  My roommate took his girl in the new Buick and he was somewhere on the road when one of those thick New Brunswick fogs came in.  He didn't see where he was going and he ran up the car on an island, one of those dividers between the traffic lanes.  He backed off the island--didn't realize it, but, going up on the island, he had ripped open the oil pan at the bottom of the engine and he lost all his oil.  Liberal arts guy, he doesn't know engines.  He drives on the engine with no oil and, pretty soon, red lights glow on his panel and the car comes to a screeching halt.  When they tow the car, they tell him, his engine, every bearing is burned out.  He needs a new engine.  So, he goes with his hat in his hand to his father and he says, [laughter] "You know that new Buick?  It needs a new engine."  His father says, "Okay, you'll pay for the new engine."  So, he says to me, "Can you buy my share of the LaSalle?"  I said, "Okay."  So, I guess I paid him fifty dollars and I owned the LaSalle after that, but, not long after that, the LaSalle had a fire.  I was driving along one day--oh, I was coming home from New Brunswick to Jersey City for a weekend--and I go by the Meadows near Elizabeth.  You know North Avenue?  There used to be dumps there and they would burn the dumps every once in a while, to reduce the mass, and that smoke, with toxins--we didn't know in those days--would come over Jersey City, into Brooklyn.  Everybody didn't know any better.  So, I'm driving past North Avenue and I smell smoke and, boy, this smoke is thick.  I figure it's the garbage being burned, but, then, I realized the smoke is between me and the windshield and it's not outside.  I look back and there's smoke coming out of the upholstery.  So, I pull over to the side and I flag down a car and he takes me to one of those pay stations or a tollbooth, or something like that, and I call emergency [responders], "My car is burning."  "Well, where are you?"  I said, "I'm on Route 1, near the dumps."  "Well, are you in Jersey City or are you in Elizabeth?"  I said, "I don't know where the dividing line is."  He says, "Well, you have to know, because one of us is going to respond."  I said, "I can't tell you."  He said, "Okay, we'll go there."  So, by the time I got back, the fire engines are there and I see a guy inside with an axe and he's cutting into the upholstery and there are hoses coming in and the water's pouring out.  Well, that wasn't quite the end of the LaSalle, because the engine still ran, but I really couldn't use it on a date anymore.  So, I bought a Rolls Royce. 

NM:  You mentioned how lively University life was in 1941 and how it ceased during the war.  Had it returned when you got back to campus?

SG:  Yes, yes.  Sure, all the proms and the dances were going full blast and the returning veterans were carrying on.  The undergraduates, I think, had a tough time, because all the girls were taken by the veterans.  They much preferred this, to date a mature serviceman than one of these high school kids, and the high school girls who were their age were flattered to be dated by a grown-up.  That's how I got my wife.  She was dating her contemporaries and, when I came along, she said, "This guy's a man.  These other kids are boys."  [laughter]

NM:  Did you have any concern, when the Korean War broke out, that you might be recalled into the service?

SG:  Yes.  I got a questionnaire from "Lucky" (Langdon?) and he said, "Sam, would you like to come back?" [laughter] and I had to check off some different things.  So, I checked off, "I would like to come back involuntarily," [laughter] but I wasn't going to volunteer.  By that time, I was married.

NM:  Okay. 

[TAPE PAUSED]

SG:  The Pacific Theater and another one.  I don't know if it's called Good Conduct or what it's called, but there's another thing.  I'll go into it later. 

[TAPE PAUSED]

SG:  Here's one of the explosions.

NM:  For the record, we are looking at some of the images that had some radio static from Mr. Goldfarb's job in the Navy.

SG:  Some of them don't have too much static, but here are the captions that the press people were putting on the pictures.  So, yes, they had to match up.  The people who were going to use the picture in the newspaper would match up the caption with the picture when they published it. 

NM:  This caption would be sent across as well.

SG:  Oh, yes.

NM:  Okay.

SG:  Yes.  Now, the Army, with their equipment, they would send the picture on, it was single sideband.  They would send the picture on one sideband and they would dictate the caption on the other sideband, real neat, but we [the Navy] didn't have that.  Here's a ship that was sunk by the [bomb]; here's an aircraft carrier that was sunk by the bomb.  Now, there are some interesting pictures, but there are a lot of them.  I can't go through them all.

NM:  Yes.  This concludes the interview for today.  Thank you for having us, Mr. Goldfarb.

--------------------------------------------END OF INTERVIEW--------------------------------------------

Reviewed by Thomas Acs 11/13/12

Reviewed by Stephanie Bongiovanni 11/13/12

Reviewed by Elan Sherman 11/13/12

Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 10/13/14

Reviewed by Prof. Sally Goldfarb 2/22/24