Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with James Elwood Fisher was digitized.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.
Where and when were you born?
I was born on the twelfth day of April 1926. I was born in West Virginia. And I had two friends who at the same time that I was seventeen, they were seventeen, and one of them, Bill Dennison, was a real close friend. I went to high school with him, and the other was a fellow that was from Moundsville, West Virginia, he was also seventeen.
We all went for exams and everything at the same time, of course, we, at that time, we just did it because ofpatriotism and the fact that they were really taking young men and old men as well. They extended the age as well as dropped the age, because I remember that before I was eighteen years old, that Roosevelt commented that we would never, he would never send any boys to sea that were eighteen years old, and I had been in a major battle in the Philippine Liberation when I was eighteen years old!
And then a couple other battles, so he sort of missed that, but you know how politicians are. But anyway, after we were enlisted they sent us for five weeks of boot training, and that's just about the least amount oftime that they ever send you for boot training. And then we went in from there and we went to the embarkation barracks in San Francisco, CA and that's when I went aboard the USS Baltimore. And I don't know if you know the Baltimore is a heavy cruiser. You probably looked that up and know that about it.
In World War II they made two sizes of cruisers. Now they only make one. But the heavy cruisers had eight inch diameter pellets and nine mounted guns aboard the ship that had eight inch calibers. And there was a total of eighty-one mounted guns on the ship, counting all the small ones as well. But the eight inch ones were the largest ones. There was three of them on the fantail and two up on the bow of the ship with one sitting higher of the other. But in the light cruiser, it has six inch guns rather than eight inch guns, the same amount of turrets, just a smaller gun. I thought you might be interested to know that. And they named heavy cruisers after large cities and the light cruisers after smaller cities in the United States.
Now I'll give you this book to read. It talks about the different things in terms of the technical aspects, like displacement of water. One of the things I remember that it didn't say in here was the distance from the top of the ship to the floor down to the water line. That was forty-five feet. And I remember I never jumped over, but some of the boys would jump and it was a sting when you hit the water going down forty-five feet. But they had huge links in the anchor chains and if I held my hands together like that and you put your hands in there -that's about the size the links were. And you could walk down that ladder, you could use it as sort of a ladder.
So when we would come in to anchor, if it was in an area where there was no sharks or very few sharks, we could go swimming in the waters. But there would be a lot of times, especially when dumping the refuse from meals that they'd served in the water, then this material went out into the water and the sharks would just come, I mean there would be dozens of them flocking around especially from the exhaust from the chow halls.
So, we didn't go in the water at that time, at those times, remember many times it's climbing down the chain and looking at the sharks and watching them. They would go around and around that chain and I guess maybe they scented me, or you know scented that I was there. But, anyway, I was free to climb back up the chain.
Tell him about the ship that was hit with a typhoon.
I'll get to that in just a minute. One of the things, though, that, one of the reasons, though, that I went into the Navy, rather than the Marines or the Army, was because the dependability of the food, you knew that you could have, you expected that you could have good food all the time, but there was a lot, one of the things that struck me as sort of funny, or that never occurred to me that they would be doing that was that they served soup beans, or Navy beans they called them, of course, they're what we call Navy beans too, you may have heard it called that, but it's a soup bean, they served that for breakfast on Saturday. That was the menu every week for the time that I was in the Navy, I remember. They always had soup beans for breakfast, and when you think about, why would they do that, but the people that had been on watch, see, they had three watches, and they would get off at seven o'clock in the morning, from their morning watch. They were hungry, it was supper for them, or the last meal of their day. I guess that was the logic of it all.
But, another thing or two that I thought was rather interesting in the food, even though we had good food, and it was usually pretty good, but at times, the Japanese kept us at bay so much we couldn't get supply ships in. And one time in particular, I think that was in early '46 or late '45, that we were so guarded that they couldn't get supplies in for such a long time that the flour that they had on hand got those little beetles in them, called flour beetles or wheat beetles, and when they first started appearing in the bread that was baked, there was usually just one per slice.
You could hold it up to the light and sight it, because you know it caused a greasy halo around it, the bug, or what was left of it, and so we just pinched that out and throw it over our shoulder, so to speak, and eat the bread. Well then they got to the place where there was as many as four or five in the bread, and I mean you couldn't tear all those out, so they started using raisins. And they chopped up raisins and put them in the bread so we had raisin bread three times a day for as long as the raisin bread, I mean as long as the raisin supply lasted. And the next time then, everyone had gotten so used to the fact that they were going to be getting some protein along with their carbohydrates that they just started eating the bread, and I mean it was just oily all over, because there was so many beetle larva in there and bugs in there.
And then another time that we were all on call and had to man our stations for seventy-two hours, we were under attack for all of that period on alert, and I remember I was the rammerman, that was my job to pull a lever that pulled a two hundred and something pound bullet that was eight inches in diameter into the barrel. I was on the right hand turret in turret one and the right hand side, the starboard side. Anyway, when I pulled that lever the bullet would go in and I pulled it back again, and forward, and two thirty inch long, eight inch in diameter, bags of powder came in next. And then another fellow that was operating the radar, or watching it so if it had to be manually operated, it was automatic, but he then put the cap in and so on, and shot it. But we were just, that was the only time that we ever had food that wasn't decent. I mean it was just old dry stuff, it was horrible, and we couldn't leave our station at all. We weren't allowed to even, you know, unlock the hatch, so to speak, during that time.
So those were, in terms of food, which is pretty important to everyone, I guess, the only experiences I had that were not very favorable. Madge mentioned about the USS Pittsburgh and I think, I looked that up, it was on the eighteenth of December 1944. I had forgotten, I knew it was in December of '44, but I didn't know the exact date but, it tells you here in this book, is when they had a typhoon. And in that particular typhoon we were pretty frightened.
I was just about as scared as I think I ever was because the danger point of the ship pointing over was a forty two degrees and I mean at forty five, and we were at the forty two at one time, just three more degrees and we would have flipped over. And, of course, the water would have gone into all the air pipes and everything would have sunk, but the thing that did happen was that the USS Pittsburgh, which was also a heavy cruiser, lost its bow just behind the first turret and there was, I think it was seventy-nine, I didn't confirm that with the men when we were talking at the Memphis meeting, but I just remember that, it just never slipped my mind because seventy nine, but most of those were officers, by the way.
And when the bow broke, the water could get into the air channels, because all the hatches were always locked. We would pull the hatch closed and lock it. It had a sealer on there that made it airtight, so that ifthe ship did break in two, then you wouldn't get a rush of water through the doors. But, there was water going through the ventilation system and so it being in that storm, it couldn't get any towing or anything of that sort, so it actually sunk. And they put the ship in reverse and it went into repair that way, but they had an escort and a couple other ships from the crew that went back to the repair area.
But that portion of it went down.
Yes, it sunk because once the water got in, it didn't have the floatation because there was water in every chamber of it, every part of it from top to bottom. So that was a sad day. But that was the eighteenth of December 1944. Now let's see, that's the main things that I've made note on. There's several other interesting...
Tell him about Hiroshima.
That's what I'm gonna say. There's several other interesting things. After the war was over, we went into-By the way, I didn't tell you earlier, let me back up. We were in Fleet 3.5 under Halsey and you probably pulled that up on your internet and whatnot, and your information you got off the web. But, and of course, McCarthy and several very important people were associated with, you know, the overall picture. But that was the name of the fleet the USS Baltimore was assigned to. So I don't want to bring that in.
Oh, we were talking about earlier, one time we picked up the president Roosevelt and took him around, we were in the South Pacific then. We went on up to Alaska and came through all the islands, and I remember that pretty well. And I think a lot of this you can get out, but I was just going to mention after all these things that had happened to us during the war, we went into Japan when we were transferred from the 3.5 fleet to the 5th and 7th fleet.
We were no longer in 3.5 after the war was over. We went in as disarmament -we disarmed all the fishing vessels. And that's the only time that I really ever saw anyone that I had to shoot because we had, I was on duty, on one of the smaller guns on the bow of the ship. And we signaled this guy who was coming in a putt putt kind of boat, just a small boat, the length of that couch over there. And he was loaded with something, you know, something he was gonna ram the side of the ship. It probably wouldn't have done too much damage.
But, anyway, he kept coming and we kept signaling to him and he just kept on coming and we had to shoot him and that was the only time that I ever had to really shoot anyone. Of course, we were in the bombardment of the Philippines in 1944. I think that was November, I believe it was, of '44.
Was that called the Philippine Liberation?
That was the Philippine Liberation, that's what they call the Philippine Liberation. And we were in on that. But what was I going to tell him, oh,
About the...
About Hiroshima. Some say "Hee-ro-shee-ma", but I think the correct pronunciation is Hiroshima. That's what they called it there anyway. And when we went into anchor there, we had some different Japanese people that did demonstrations. One of them I found very fascinating was that they took bales of rye or grain of some type, it could have been wheat or whatever, they had it in sheaths ofabout, oh I guess the diameter of eight to ten inches, and they were about two feet in height. And they were sitting at least twenty to twenty-five feet away from this fellow that had a sickle, with a handle on it. And he took a hold of the tip of the sickle and swung it around and just sliced that bale of straw and I mean it spun around and just cut it in two and just things ofthat type. They had different demonstrations and then we had people to come aboard ship and talk about different things that had happened in Hiroshima. We could see the results of all the burning...
Tell him about the priest, honey.
I'm getting to that story. And we could see buildings that had been destroyed by the heat of it and they were just like, well ribbons of candy of something. They would just twist, I mean they were just still in the air just twisted on each other and melted into each other. So that was one of the speakers that we had of the demonstrations we had.
There was this Catholic priest that spoke about his experiences and he showed, and we were anchored just below where his house had been, up on the hill. And he said the thing was, when the planes first started coming over, at eight o'clock, right on the nose, he said that you could set your time to it, it was just so close, right on eight o'clock -that's when they would fly over. And at first he said they were quite alarmed by that. But it had just gone on for such a long time that, he just wasn't of any concern.
He used to see when they would go over, he would go out and look down on his congregation, or the cathedral where he had services, and he said he would, you know, just check to make sure that everything was going to be all right down there. But he said that the last thing he had remembered of the last trip they had made through, or went over in the sky, that he was shaving and he had a little hut. We actually got a chance to go look at it. The whole thing wasn't much larger than this family room of ours, which is twenty-two feet wide, or something like that, by twelve feet long, or maybe twenty-two feet long.
But anyway, it was something on the order of not much larger than that. And he showed us where he was standing shaving on the door, and he said a lot of times the door would, you know, when the thing would go, or when the door was opening, it would swing on hinges. But anyway, he said that this particular time he was shaving, it was the last thing he remembered and when he came to, the door had swung off the hinges. The air that had come through had torn it off its hinges. In other words, from the...
This is when they dropped the atomic bomb.
Yeah, when the bomb dropped, it made such a, well what would you say, a massive air movement that it just tore the hinge off the door and he said he was over against what was left of the wall and that's when he came to and he said the first thing of course that he looked for was his church and it was gone. And he said he could look down on the city and see that the rest of it was so nearly gone. And we could see people, if they even had just any part of their skin, their face, their hands, things ofthat sort, that wasn't covered by a garment, was just charred. It was just black. I mean, black with char. And they were in so much pain that it was just.. it was probably just twenty years before I could relate this story about how they looked and how much pain they were suffering. Because, their bodies just had to be terribly painful because they were taking things like radishes and turnips and just slicing them or grating them and putting a poultice on their bodies to draw that heat out, because it was burning so. And it was just so pathetic, it was just so touching to me that I just couldn't relate the scene for many, many years. Now it's been so long ago that I can relate.
He still doesn't like to watch war movies.
No. I can't watch war movies. They just bring back too many, it just tears me apart. And I said from that day on, that Truman should have had to go see some ofthat and I know that they claim that it ended the war sooner. But Russia had declared war against them and they just had little boats and their navy was weak and their airships, many of them had been lost too, so it wouldn't have been very long until they would have surrendered without that. But-
Actually they say too that some of the Japanese didn't, that were in caves and things, didn't know the war was over. What was it, forty years?
For forty years, there were still some of them coming out and with their ammunition, they didn't know the war was over. That had occurred, some of it in the Philippines. Dr. Zapanta, when I had an ear infection here a couple of years ago, I went to him and he was just so grateful to me for being there. Anyway, he said that his father was a friend to some of them, in other words, he was sort of an undercover person for the US government, and giving information from the Japanese because he was working both sides of it. But, anyway, he said there was times that they would find somebody, and we read in the papers about it too that they would find these Japanese coming from caves in the mountains in the Philippines.
Dr. Zapanta was two years old.
His father was a physician. He's an interesting person.
One of the things you should tell is how during the typhoons...
Oh, yeah, let me tell you about the typhoons. There was many times, I remember one time, when there came a typhoon, typhoon came. It would get to the danger point that you had to lock all the hatches and stay in one room. And I was caught in the room where the post office was. I had gone to check my mail or something like that. It locked the hatches and I was in there. But that wasn't bad, because I just got on a bag of mail which they'd put in just outside the door of the post office. But I can remember bedding, walling myself down in and I didn't slide back and forth, because that thing was kind of locked in place. But when we would get into the typhoon, they would tie a rope that was almost half as big as your wrist and from one bulkhead to the other, the walls were called bulkheads, and at a level about where you could reach.
And they also had access to coffeepots where hot coffee was made and they had those hanging so that you could pull that coffee down and get a drink. And it took two men to pour the coffee because one would have had to hold on and the other held his cup. And the one that was pouring then would tilt the pot that was on this rope, or line, to fill it. So we worked together to get a cup ofcoffee. But many times your grip would, your hands would just get so tired of holding and you would take turns without, and they'd finally just kind of paralyze.
We had more casualties following those typhoons than anything else because people were actually knocked against the bulkhead with such force that it would break their bones. And so we often had that sort of thing. And one of the guys down at Memphis at our last meeting that they had for the Baltimore, here after they're going to meet as a group with other ships, but this was the last one. And he was telling, I remember they had forgot they sold the cigarettes to us, he was telling about getting and making some booze one time. He took coconuts and opened them up and put some sugar in there and then corked them off. It fermented into a wine and he said he got, you know, called down for that in no uncertain terms. But I remember one time, and this is now getting toward the end of the experience, when the USS Franklin, you should pull that up, USS Franklin was the carrier, you can pull that up, and you can get the date when this occurred. But we were back in the Philippines and they had declared it safe, in other words you could smoke on the deck, you could, they were showing a movie on the fantail, and we thought we were safe.
By this time, the kamika... what they call the ones that committed the...kamikazes, they were, this was towards the end of the period, in other words, they had already given up hopes essentially, and that's why I said the war is basically over with because they would volunteer their life just to run an airship into one of the US ships. So there was, we were in this safety zone, anchored about I would say three to four hundred feet from the USS Franklin and it was off of our fantail. And I was among those who were watching a movie on the fantail of the ship. And it was really getting to an interesting part where the man was walking down a staircase and there was a sort of a table, you know for a lady, seated at it, just about the time he was getting in position to make some comments to her.
That's when the Franklin went up in fire, the kamikaze had hit it, the plane. And it being as full offuel as it was, being a carrier, it just, I mean it just, the whole thing just blew up. You could parts of the steel, sections of steel and bodies. You could actually see the people's bodies flying into the air in the blaze. It created enough light. And then they, of course, sounded the battle station that you were to get to and that was on the fantail. I had all the length of the full ship to go and I was on the starboard side going down. And I don't know how many, probably half a dozen at least, people that were just frozen in their tracks because they were just so frightened they couldn't move. And if you'd just push them, and knock them off their feet or against the wall, they came to and got to their battle station. But that was just a real common thing. And that particular one, you see they came in under the radar, and I think our radar was eight feet, so they had, I believe that's right, so they had to get between that radar detection and the water, and there was a little, not a real strong wave, but some waves might be in a port. And one of them hit the Franklin. One of them got caught in a wave and a third one missed our bow by twelve and a half feet.
That's all it would have affected it to hit the bow of the ship. And that was what it was targeted for -he was thinking he was going to hit the bow of the ship. It may have floated around a little bit, you know how they anchored it, it wouldn't have floated much. But he just miscalculated that much, or whatever, but they said twelve and a half feet and we would have had a little blaze going out in our area. Now, what else. Do you have any questions or things you would like to ask about?
Did you form any friendships or form camaraderie?
Oh yes, and being really young and impressionable and that sort of thing, you know you, well, some of the things I probably shouldn't tell because there was one Indian guy that I was really fond of and his name was Blake. I can't remember his first name. And he was from North Dakota. And he and I would go on liberty a lot together and I remember one occasion when we were close to some British soldiers and we called them "limies" and they got mad and there were three of them. And I battled with one of them until I knocked him over but Blake would, I was six feet tall and weighed about 175 or about 180 at that time, but Blake was about a foot taller than I am and a big, I mean he was really muscular, he just picked two of them up and knocked their heads together and pushed them into the stream. It was a pool by us. Oh, we just had, you know, experiences like that.
You were also in with two good friends, in fact.
Yeah.
And in 1987 we went by to see Charlie Hall.
Oh yes, and that's another thing I can tell you about. Charlie Hall was the one from Moundsville and we enlisted at the same time and we went through the lines and all, along with Bill Dennison. Bill Dennison had died, oh, I don't know how long ago, probably, how long? 25 years? Honey, it was years ago. I regretted so many times not going by and seeing Bill because he had cancer and he died and we've been retired 17 years this summer. It was before we retired, I'm almost positive it was. But anyway, he died earlier and this Charlie Hall married a woman from Moundsville area, but he liked California, so he went to California shortly after he was discharged and started working in construction work. He was sort of a foreman. So we've kept in touch. What year was that? '87 we drove, yeah, '97 , that's when it was. We drove across the country and stopped by and visited with him a day or two. And he being in the Bay area, had repeated these stories in the Navy and his experiences with other Navy people so many times that all that stuff was fresh in his mind. And I wished we would have had a tape recorder because he told a lot of things that I'd forgotten and I can't remember now for this occasion. But anyway, he was one of the last of the ones before our meeting this time.
You didn't get in touch with him for a while, and then you couldn't.
Yeah, when we tried...
He was almost self-destructive. He had no hobbies and he had nothing that he was real interested in. He smoke and drank coffee all the time.
Yeah, smoking and drinking coffee, his only pastime.
He was on a self-destructive path. Now his wife wasn't all like that, but we don't remember any of the children's names, we didn't write them down, that we could get in touch with what might have happened, or maybe, you know, they moved from there.
Well, it's possible. He could have even been in an old folk's home or something of that sort. We just, when we tried calling him, calling on telephone, it was no longer in servIce. But, we had one guy aboard ship. Oh let me tell him one other story. We had one fellow aboard ship that was the vice-president for the American Association for the Advancement ofAtheism and he used to hold powwows. See you're going to meet all kind ofpeople and when you're young and impressionable, when going in the Navy at 17, you are more impressionable I think. But one of my friends in Company 1 was a very strong Christian and he never went out with us for drinking or anything of that sort.
He was the only one that didn't get a tattoo.
Yeah, he was one that didn't get a tattoo. And I remember he was from Michigan, that's all I can remember about him. And I'm not sure of his name. I think I know it, but anyway, I used to buddy around with him some. But we had a lot of interesting experiences. And one time, we were in San Diego, we were anchored there, and I was one that was chosen to march in a band for the Navy. You know, during the event. What else do you have?
Where were you when the war ended?
We came in, after the war was over, you mean? Yeah, I was out in the middle of things, so to speak, when the war ended. And then when we realized that it was all over, that's when we went into Japan. We were transferred then to the 5th and 7th Fleet and we went in to disarm the fishing vessels and things like that, and go from port to port and that type of thing. We met a lot of interesting people. By the way, we had to learn twenty some Japanese words, I've forgotten the exact number, like twenty-six or something thereabouts. And I can't remember one of them now, but sometimes I can, but my memory is getting a little bad too.
How did you return home?
Well, let's see. By train. Because, we left the ship in Seattle. It was decommissioned then. After that, and during the Korean War it was recommissioned, but we left it there. They said "putting it in mothballs" is what they call it when they take a ship like that. And I came back east on the train. I remember stopping in Glacier National Park for a day and I had a 51 Japanese rifle, we all got one of those, if you wanted one. I remember selling it there. I wish I would have kept it, because they are really worth a lot of money now. But, that's one of the, I guess.....
Almost all the soldiers, I was just eleven years old, when the war was declared, but I do remember almost all the soldiers were taken by train.
Yes, the train was so common in those days. And we just...
When they would go through the towns, they would wave to everybody and everybody was out watching because it was a time where all the people were together. I don't believe they've ever been together like that.
That's right.
People were patriotic and that was when so many women started working in men's jobs. In fact, there is a picture of Rosie the riveter, and I mean she was really doing a man's job and so that's what they did. And women, they had victory gardens that came about at that time. And women were knitting socks and gloves and scarves and they were just doing ...
Well, we were rationed too on gasoline rationing, food rationing, and everything.
That's when canvas shoes came into existence because you only got one leather pair of shoes a year and so they started making out of them the first pair of canvas shoes. But they started making canvas shoes, you see, because they didn't have the leather.
The military came first in terms of leather shoes...
Sugar was rationed, tires were rationed, gasoline was rationed, leather was rationed. No one seemed to mind because they thought-
It was for a cause. Everyone was united then.
And we haven't seen that kind of thing since.
Well, we got into a series of wars after that. I think that it's just gotten until noone...
Well at that time, the United States was attacked.
Yeah.
And, you know, Pearl Harbor. But since that time the United States has not been attacked.
Part of that was brought on by our own actions because you can't expect a country in the war, you see we were carrying ammunition to the enemy, so to speak. And the enemy at that time being Germany. And Germany was an ally with Japan and had dreamed the Japanese, in fact, we were led to believe that we had superior, our lenses, everything was superior to the Japanese. That was a big awakening. Because it was not superior. The Germans had taught the Japanese all about optics and everything else in terms of productivity and we were really, like I say, we were indoctrinated, but we were really surprised that they had such good equipment.
Mark, you might like to know that after the war, we went in and built the Japanese airport.
Yeah. We did that.
After all that fighting with the Japanese. But I guess one of the sad parts was all the people ofJapanese descent were put in a prison.
Prison, yeah. They weren't trusted.
In California, wasn't it?
Yeah. And that wasn't fair. You probably read some ofthat, haven't you? Honey, he's read about things. He's probably done a lot of research on this. Well, what else, anything else?
How were you received by your family and community when you returned?
Well, I think very favorably. You know we just... I being seventeen, I hadn't finished my lih grade. I got credit for military training and you know, history and geography and stuff like that, I got credit for that. And the physical education, of course, I had done enough to meet that and so I didn't have too much more until I could get my graduation degree. And, of course, I had the GI bill and I had being in parts of four years, I got credit for four years of the bill. So, I first went to work for Monaghe Heiley Power Company as a lineman. And I had an uncle that was a foreman for that and he wanted me to go on and be an engineer and he would help pay for it.
But I wasn't interested in that so I worked for a welder for a while. I was the helper. And this welder was welding across the top and he'd say, "Okay, buster, chip it off' and you'd get chips of slag on there so I'd chip it off. He was making $12.50 an hour, this was back in the early '40s, I mean mid to late'40s. About'46, maybe'48 I guess. I thought this has to be the best job in the world because that was big money then. And I went to school then in Nashville, TN and took arc and acetylene welding and I became a welder and I just lasted about 3 months because it wasn't as good as it looked when you were working from the top. I went on what they called a big engine, a 20 inch line, and I was welding across the bottom and the sparks from the welder was falling on me and everytime I would raise my helmet to put in, you know, oh, what are those sticks called...
Somebody would start an arc down at the next joint and I knew I was going to have my eyes burned out in no time so I didn't last very long on that. So I had enough GI bill left -I went to that training on the GI bill. So I just decided that I was going to college and I went to Freed Hardiman, which is in Nashville, TN which was very close to where I had gone for welding, and that's the reason I went there. And I was going to be an art major with a history minor. And I took Bible too, because it was a religious school.
So I got a two year degree there, transferred to Fairmont State, and when I went to Fairmont State, I still was continuing with thoughts of being an artist and getting a degree also in history. I was between my sophomore and junior year when I took my first biology class. It was in the summertime and this professor of biology was a botanist too and he was so impressed by my knowledge of plants, because my grandmother was a folk medicine doctor and I had learned about 400 plants before I was in high school and how to, you know their common names, and how you could use them economically for food, medicine or whatever, and salves and whatnot. I just knew every plant we came upon and he was so impressed with my knowledge of them, he talked me into being a botany major with a minor in art and a minor in history. So that's what I got my first degree in and I graduated in 1953 when DNA was just discovered, that same summer that I graduated, DNA was discovered.
So then I had a teacher's certificate as well with those majors and had then a degree in teaching high school. I went to Ohio to teach in a town called Busarus. I taught World History, Art, and in introductory course in general science, Biology and I had one other class other than that that I taught in high school. I taught from '53 to, when did we go down to Lebanon? '58, so I taught from '53 to '57 and I was asked then to go down to Miami University, which is near Lebanon but the year before that I had gone down there, I had been hired to put in a lab class in biological sciences, so that's why. And then the next year I started going to Miami University, that time to major in zoology, the degree I got in zoology. And then I came to Madison in 1960 when there was 1200 girls and 48 boys. The boys were commuters and they had to be offcampus with a 10 0'clock curfew and they were really strict in those days with the students.
The girls who took Phys Ed could not go across the campus in their shorts. They had to wear a raincoat.
Or a robe, or something.
What life lessons did you learn from military service?
Well, survival I guess. Though I got a good background. I still use many of the things, you know, in terms of everyday life. Especially, tying knots and things ofthat sort in everyday life. By the way, the thing that I did on the ship, was that I was in charge of a boatswain locker, where you had to issue line or tackle and all kinds ofthings. And I had learned, I think 156, it was over 150, knots and bends, foxcombing and I could do all kinds of fancy stuff and macrame and so that was what my job was. And of course, they always wanted some people to do painting. If you didn't have something to do you would have to do the painting and then you would scrape it off, and next week you would paint it off again.
He grew up mighty fast.
Oh yes. Well I was more mature, I think I was more mature at seventeen than most seventeen year olders are right now because I grew up on a farm and we had responsibilities. My grandfather Fisher had a country store where he sold all kinds of commodities like ice and everything you could think of, hardware, and so on, so I was very close to my grandparents in my years of growing up. I've always been interested in history and I had my grandfather to tell, especially when I could corner him, when he wasn't busy with the grocery store, I would ask him all kinds of questions about when he was young and what he did and so on. I grew up learning things like how to graft trees and just how to do everything because we were pretty much, even though he had a store, we still raised a lot of our food, pretty independent. I think the Navy helped me, but it certainly helped me financially because I wouldn't have been able to ....
There were an awful lot who got their degrees because of the GI bill. And now they're trying to revive that and get a new GI bill for those who are coming back from Iraq. But my brother-in-law finished his degree because he had the GI bill.
Oh, so many people took advantage ofthat.
There were an awful lot who at that time got their degrees. That certainly was a benefit.
Yeah, that alone would be worth a lot. It got me started in the field of education.
In fact, Elwood was the only one in his entire family that got a degree. I have three brothers and all of them went into some phase of Navy because one of them was in the Coast Guard. None of them had any experiences of military.
What else have you got?
Have you had contact with fellow veterans or had membership in veteran's organizations?
No, not really. Other than what I just mentioned to you last fall. Well, I actually learned about this about three years ago. The first meeting of the Baltimore was in Boston and then they had one out in San Diego and then the one that was in Memphis we went to this past year. But I didn't learn about that organization until that time or I would have...
Actually, his brother, who is very good with a computer, pulled it all up and let him know about it. What they would do is they would alternate years where they would have it on the west coast and then the next year they would have it on the east coast.
And this last one being in Memphis, they said they wanted to get a central location in the United States as they could and that's why they chose Memphis.
So that's they only veteran's group we've been in.
But this was one of the books that they sold, the only book that they sold there.
Do you have any more questions, Mark?
I think that will do it.