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University of Illinois at Springfield Norris L Brookens Library Archives/Special Collections Carl H. Albright Memoir AL15. Albright, Carl H. b. 1921 Interview and memoir 5 tapes, 450 mins., 91 pp. Albright, retired Air Force Lt. Col., discusses his career in the Air Force, aviation cadet training, European assignments and missions during WWII; return to U.S., discharge, and return to college; reenlistment, and assignment as a nuclear chemist; and retirement. He also discusses growing up during the Depression in Springfield and attending Feitshans High School. Interview by Geraldine C. Albright, 1980 OPEN See collateral file Archives/Special Collections LIB 144 University of Illinois at Springfield One University Plaza, MS BRK 140 Springfield IL 62703-5407 © 1980, University of Illinois Board of Trustees Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright Memoir COPYRIGHT @ 1982 SANGAMON STATE UNIVERSITY, SPRINGFIELD, ILLlNOlS. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Illinois 62708. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield PREFACE This manuscript is the product of a tape-recorded interview conducted by Geraldine C. Albright for the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University. This interview was conducted in October and November of 1980, primarily in the home of the narrator, Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Carl H. Albright. Geraldine C. Albright transcribed the tapes and edited the transcript. Lieutenant Colonel Albright was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1921. Remembrances about his life begin in Spri.ngfield with the Depression and continue through his cadet training with the early Army Air Corps. After a brief separation from the Air Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Albright continued what became a twenty-seven year career with the United States Air Force as a bomber pilot and nuclear chemist. Upon his retirement from the Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Albright returned to his native Springfield and is presently employed by the Department of Public Health. The interviewer, Geraldine C. Albright, is Lieutenant Colonel Albright's daughter-in-law and a graduate student at Sangamon State University. Readers of this oral history memoir should bear in mind that it is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, narrator and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. Sangamon State University is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for views expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge. The manuscript may be read, quoted and cited freely. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the Oral History Office, Sanga:mon State University, Springfield, Illinois, 62708. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Background Childhood Memories Carrying Papers Papa and the Depression Table of Contents Grade School Memories (Iles Grade School) High School Memories (Feitshans High School) Post-High School and Miscellaneous Memories College Memories (Western Illinois University) Aviation Cadet Training Program Examination Pearl Harbor Cadet Training/Army Air Corps Training Experiences Student Officer B-24 Transition Schoo]; Westover Air Base; New Art: News European Assignments Return to America More Reflections on Missions Air Force Discharge and Return to College Reenlistment in the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Testing Idaho and the Harmons California and Alaska: Assignment as Nuclear Chemist Japan Project Cloud Gap Air Force Retirement, 1969 l 3 8 12 15 21 29 38 39 40 43 52 53 56 65 70 72 75 79 80 83 85 86 88 Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright, October 7, 1980, Springfield, Illinois. Geraldine C. Albright, Interviewer. A. My name is Carl Albright. Date of birth is the first of; March, 1921. Place of birth was 1526 Loveland Avenue, in Springfield, Illinois. To the best of my knowledge, I was born at home. My mother did not go to the hospital for either my birth or that of any of my brothers or sisters. I have an older brother, and an older sister, one younger brother, and two younger sisters. Early life was in Springfield. Before the birth of my younger brother, my family moved to Rantoul, Illinois, where my father worked on a farm. We stayed up there for probably two years, I'm not really sure. My life in that area is made up primarily of stories that have been told to me rather than things I personally remember. I can vaguely remember living in the house. I know my older brother had a very, very bad cut on his leg on the side. He fell off of a fence when he was climbing on the fence as he should not have been doing, but did. Right now, I have, since the day it happened, a very large scar on the left foot. It was acquired when I was walking around in a pig pen and got tangled up with a piece of broken bottle. It never caused a problem and I certainly don't remember it; but I do know the accident happened. Upon a return to Springfield, we moved back into the house at 1526 Loveland Avenue; and my two younger sisters, to the best of my remembrance, were born there. We lived at that house until such time as I was in high school. I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school when we moved into the house across the street and down the block where my grandmother lived, my father's mother. This was after the death of my grandfather. The house was much larger. My grandmother could not move into our house and live with us so we moved into her house and lived with her rather than staying in our own house. We lived there until after I graduated from high school. During the senior year in high school, my father and mother and the three younger children moved to Taylorville. My older brother, my sister, and her husband, and I, stayed in my grandmother's house and I finished high school living there. About that time, this was in 1939, in January, and things were pretty bleak as far as jobs were concerned, rather than not doing anything, I started back to high school again even after graduating, just to take some additional courses, got an opportunity to go up to Caterpillar Tractor Company. I eventually acquired a job at Caterpillar. So I moved then from Springfield to Peoria and was up there from probably March of 1939 Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 2 until approximately September, yes, September or October of 1939, at which time they did me a favor and fired me. That fall, and by that fall our father and mother had moved from Taylorville back to Springfie. ld again, and I was living with them, for lack of anything more to do, my father and I shucked some corn together, we worked part-time jobs on farms together until December. Right about Christmastime, in December, I got a job with Martin Oil Company and worked with Martin Oil until the following September when I moved to Western Illinois University for college. This really takes care of most of the time from that point up unti.l I actually left home and really didn't return again as a part of the family unit as such in that they were at least helping to control my activities. Q. Was it Grampa Albright that died? A. Yes. Q. When he d:i.ed, do you remember anything about the funeral or how the family reacted? A. We can go back and fill in quite a lot of these details but I thought that for the beginning why we could at least get a kind of an overview at which point we can then go back and start filling in some of the spots. (clears throat) My grandfather died, I guess it was in 1935, or maybe 1936, I'm not real sure of the year, but for this purpose it won't make too darn much difference, my brother, my older brother, Charlie, was in the CCC camp [Civilian Conservation Corps] because he had gone out to Oregon and he was out there at the time that my grandfather died and he came back right about the time of the funeral or shortly thereafter-- the sequences are somewhat fuzzy. But it seems like not too far off from that time. I guess the thing I remember most about the time of my grandfather's death was the fact that he was at home. He had had a stroke and he had become paralyzed on the right side of his body, or at least partially so; and they had moved a bed out of the bedroom into the living room. He was staying in that room and it seemed to me as a child a little strange that they would move him out to that pla~e; but perhaps it was so that he could be more available. He could be around the family more for whatever comfort that would give him. The place where he died was in that living room. People came that I had heard my family talk about--my grandfather's sisters, cousins, that sort of person came out. Down around St. Genevieve, Missouri, if I remember correctly, that's where some of his family came from; and they were still living in that area. He had some relatives that lived in Jacksonville, and were in business there for part of the time as bakers. This was one of the very, very few times that I remember seeing those members of our particular family. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 3 The family unit would be considered fairly close because my grandmother's two brothers--one to the best of my knowledge was a bachelor, and the other one was either a widower, or he was divorced, and I think he was a widower--both of whom had lived with him [grtlndfather] after my grandfather's death, when we chose to move into grandmother's house and live with her and help take care of her, we had the added problem of what did we do with the two uncles? (chuckles) This was an additional breakup of that family unit and I don't think it's any more typical of a German family unit than any other particular nationality that the.y were this close. I think it was a matter of time and convenience and probably economics that they did stay together and managed to keep the family that way rather than to be spread around quite so much. The next thing, they decided that when grandmother died, and then trying to put that in line with this, you know it had to be before I graduated from high school, and probably about the time I was a junior or thereabouts, my grandmother died, otherwise, I'm sure that my father and mother would not have moved to Taylorville 11nd there would not have been room for all of the family in it. That's what we're talking about here: my grandmother, my father and mother, my sister and her husband at that time, could not have all been living in that house at that time so I know that she hadn't died by that time and it had to be after I met Liz because I think she remembers meeting my grandmother, so that was when I was a junior in high school. Going back to some early childhood experiences, and interesting things that I can remember, probably one of the most vividly remembered is helping my brother carry papers. He got a paper route right around the Loveland Avenue area from south of South Grand to just north of Laurel Street, from east of Eleventh Street to west of Fourteenth Street, so not quite a four block square area in there that he carried papers. I was about six years old when he got this route; and I remember helping him carry, or at least walking with him. I thought I was helping him, maybe I was, I was six years old. Rain or shine you'd go pick up the papers and carry them. If my brother and sister were gone for whatever reason, why somehow I would manage on a rare occasion to get around and deliver the papers. I'm trying to remember if I, yes, later I carried that route by myself, if I remember correctly, because my brother got a larger route that had a guaranteed wage--$2.00 a week so he took the new route and I and my sister carried the one around home [Twelfth] for a little while. I can remember carrying papers when after a while, if it were raining quite hard, why you got so you didn't care if there was a water puddle there. You were already wet so you'd wade through it instead of walking around it, which is not unusual for kids either (chuckles). l remember wintertime coming when your feet were so cold they would hurt. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 4 The kitchen range was what we used to heat the back part of the house and it was always fired up. One of the good things about that was usually, if this were the case you'd come in and take your shoes off and put your feet almost in the oven--it'd warm them up--it hurt-( chuckles) at least it got them warm in a hurry. Dry off your feet and socks ... Q. Was it a wood stove? A. No, most of the time in the wintertime we would burn the coal. Lots of time in the summer, what we would burn in them would be corn cobs--you'd go out to one of the elevators and pick up baskets and gunnysacks of corn cobs. The reason for burning these is they gave you a real hot fire and burnt very quickly. You could get the stove hot enough to cook a meal on and then they would burn out very quickly, so that the stove then would at least start to cool down. During the afternoon or in between meals, before you needed it. In addition the hot water supply for our house was the reservoir on the side of the cook stove--that's on the side of the kitchen range. We had running water :Ln the house but it was cold. The toilet facilities were down in the basement which mean that you had to go out the back door, down to the cellar door (laughs) into the basement to go to the toilet. It was almost as bad as going outside to the back door john. Q. Was it a regular toilet with a stool and all that but it was down in the cellar? A. Oh yes, it was just down in the basement, in a little room, probably, oh five feet by six feet square, that my father had quite obviously just built with boards--nothing very secure. You had a door on the front that closed; you were in there by yourself. Of course for the kids it was kind of scary to go do~ in a dark basement. The hardest part of going to the toilet at that time, particularly at night, was to get somebody to take the time to go down in the basement with you so you wouldn't be scared. (laughs) Usually, what you try and do is to talk your brother, or a sister, or a brother and a sister, to go down in the basement and come up with some sort of game to play while you were going to the bathroom--or maybe they had to go~ too. You could make it a community affair. You stayed down there with them. so it was a rather icky type of arrangement maybe than you would have today. Q. You didn't have electricity or anything down in the cellar? A. There was a light down there. It was a dirt floor; and we had at some time or other built a bin along one side of the toilet wall because it was cool, dark, and the moisture level was fairly constant. If we had a good crop of potatoes, sweet potatoes or anything like that, which we often would go out to an uncle's house and plant Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 5 potatoes with him at his farm out at New Berlin, and plant sweet potatoes as well, and if we were lucky and had a good crop, why you could bring a lot of those materials in and the bin was a good place to store them. They would keep most of the winter without too many of them rotting. If there were extra squash or pumpkins, something of that nature that was available that you could get when they were plentiful, you could put them down in there and they would keep very well most of the winter--you'd have them at least until Christmas. The other room in the basement was probably even more dark. The floor was about six or eight inches higher than the floor in the main part of the basement and again it was dirt. Back in there my father had constructed two racks that were hanging from the ceiling and were a little taller than a half gallon fruit jar--perhaps they were hanging eighteen inches from the rafters, or the floor joist really, and in those, why any fruits, vegetables or anything like that that Mom would can, that's where we always put those. We would go dowu in there, and if you had anything left over from the previous year, why you'd have to get in behind them and move all that forward, then put in this year's canning in behind that; and it was not at all unusual to have these shelves filled, which were probably, oh four to five feet across and probably nine feet long, and there were two of them. A few other interesting things that took place in the back room was if we would make sauerkraut, we'd make it and put it in a large stone crockware pot that would probably hold twelve or thirteen gallons. That would be covered over with cheese cloth and then a plate turned upside down on the cheese cloth and then a large rock that had been pretty well scrubbed would be placed on that to hold the thing together and keep it pressed down. After that got to fermenting, why, it didn't smell too badly down there for a while, then after a while you'd smell the very pronounced odor of the sauerkraut working and you knew it was there. Dill pickles ... if we could find cucumbers at a reasonable price, or had any luck in growing a crop of cucumbers, why always selected as close to the same size as you could get, and we would make dill pickles. Again we would put them in a large c;rock or large crockery jug and then line the jug with grape leaves that had been taken off the grape arbor in the back and washed, put a layer of cucumbers and a layer of grape leaves, another layer of cucumbers and all of this on up to the top until the thing was full, and then again, put a cheese cloth cover over it and an upside down plate and a big rock to hold the whole thing together. These. were very good. I used to go down there and steal one once in a while (chuckles) Also, one of the things that happened in that back room is if there was enough fruit available and enough sugar available, occasionally Dad would make a job of rhubarb wine. And so he always put his wine in that back room, because again the temperat1,1re, humidity was at Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 6 least constant or fairly so, and it was a good place for it to work. When it was ready to use, we were probably, as kids, introduced to rhubarb wine at sometime around ten years old or a little less than that perhaps, even, because it was not unusual for a glass of wine or a jug of wine to be brought up for whatever the occasion might be and being kids we always wanted a taste of it too--I'm not so sure we liked it as well as we thought we did (chuckles) . , . It was kind of an interesting place down there--a good place to go and play on rainy days, a good place to get out of Mom's hair whenever she couldn't stand us in the house anymore. With six kids roaming around in a three-room house, it did get a little tight. So even in the winter, if it was Christmas vacation times, that sort of thing, whenever you tended to be home, or all the kids tended to be home and time would be hanging a little heavily on your hands, why you'd go down in the basement on a nice dirt floor again. Down there, why you'd shoot marbles and have a good time. You didn't have anyplace else to go, or much else to do, so you could at least go down in there and play. The basement had another important feature, I guess, for my mom, in that in the summertime, she always had a lot of potted flowers out in the back. Amaryllis, Wandering Jews various and sundry kinds of flowers that they would keep or try to keep in the house through the winter. We had a rack made like stair steps, and before the first frost in the winter, why we always had to get the rack down into the basement and all mom's flowers moved down there so they didn't freeze. They were always set then at the west end of the basement close to one of the west windows where they could get quite a little bit of sunshine to keep them at least reasonably alive; and then we had to keep them watered down in there, but again it was a fairly easy job. You didn't have to water them too often. They didn't really lose water as rapidly as they would in a present day basement that was heated and that sort of thing because there was no heat down there--we didn't have a furnace in there at that time. Our wintertime heating in the front part of the house was with a coal stove and I can remember having the more familiar kind of a round heater with the mica windows on the front and you could see the coals burning in there. Sometime, I don't remember the time frame, probably when I was seven years old, maybe eight, somewhere along in there, we got a very, very heavy heater and I guess the thing must have weighed close to two hundred pounds because it was just all you could do for a couple of people to move it in and out of the house. It had ribs on it like ventilating ribs and with that heavy mass of hangar once it got hot it stayed and kept the heat for quite a long while. To protect the people from that stove, just to keep the kids from banging up against it and touching and that sort of thing, it had a porcelainized frame that fit around it and the top of it was open and then the lower part of the sides had air vents in it so that the cool air could come in at the bottom and the hot air Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl -H. Albright 7 would move out at the top. This would circulate a little bit of the air round in the house and again it was nice when you were close to it. Some parts of the room were not always as warm as they might seem to be but we didn't suffer. Again [it was] a good place to come in and kick your shoes off and put your feet up against the side of that and warm them up when they were cold . . . Some of the things you remember as kids were sicknesses and that sort of thing that would happen. Much in contrast to today's method of taking care of people that have diseases such as smallpox or chicken pox, mumps, measles, scarlet fever or whooping cough, any of those [was] you always knew when someone had them because they put a red quarantine on the outside of your house. Those who were outside had to stay out, and those that were on the inside had to stay in. I can remember some one of the kids, and I'm not sure who it was, it may even have been me, that had one of the diseases, and Mom had to take care of us. So to put us where we'd be warm, and she could watch us, she would take. two kitchen chairs and put the front part of the chair up against the wall with the back away from the wall and put some blankets on it, and thCJ.t's where you'd lay dowu. The purpose of putting the chairs thCJ.t way [we1s] so if you were squirming around too much you wouldn't fall off of the thing and on to the floor and then you'd be in the kitchen where she was and she could keep an eye on you. Probe1bly one of the most memorable times was when my sister had scarlet fever and my father and my older brother had to stay out of the house. They had been in the house when whichever one of us, my sister, I'm sure it was, was sick, or first became ill, and before they put up the quarantine sign, why the doctor chased them out and said, ''Well if you're going to stay in here you're going to have to stay, and if you want to get out, get out now, and then we'll put up the quarantine sign and you can stay out." So they stayed outside. Actually they stayed across the street with my grandmother. While the rest of the fe1mily, probably at least four other children at that time and my mother, were quarantined in the house for two, three, four weeks, whatever it was, I don't remember, but what makes it rather vivid in the memory is the fact that my father's only living brother was electrocuted in an accident while he was working. This took place while we were under quarantine--the rest of the family were under quarantine. It was kind of a memorable occasion. The only thing I understood about electrocution at that time was the fact that a lot of criminals were electrocuted, so it must be bad. It took quite a long while for it at least to come to my mind that, okay, this electrocution, there wasn't anything wrong with it. It was an accident, and it was then, as soon as you said the word electrocution, you ah:rays thought of punishment of a criminal rather than an accident happening. I guess it's a matter of connotation and knowledge of what the root words really mean more than anything else. It seemed like our family, our immediate family anyway, was always Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 8 on the short side of money. From the time I can remember, of course this, probably my most vivid memory, would start about the time of the depression--! would be about six years old or thereabouts. And I know my father always tried hard to work, [he] seemed to be always looking for work. Very frequently, he would be out of work and many, many times the major income for our family would be whatever, at least during and up until the time I was somewhere in mid high school, or maybe even a little bit later than that, very frequently, our major family income would be what mom would make doing washing and ironing for those who could afford somebody else to do it and what we would bringhome from our paper routes. During this time, for several years, my older brother, my older sister and I all had paper routes. We were all three of us carrying papers, and as it ended up, all six kids in our family at one time or another, and some of us, as many as three, sometimes only one, would be carrying papers from the time I can remember at six years old until the time that my youngest sister was out of school. Q. High school? A. Bigh school, I think she was carrying while she was in high school. Yes, because I carried while I was in high school, Butch carried, Marg carried, and took over a route of mine when I left, no, Liz took over my route. Marg, I guess, Marg and Butch, were carrying one at the same time and then sometime later, after I'd gone to Peoria, and Mom and Dad had moved back from Taylorville, why, Dorothy carried papers--so we all carried them at one time or another. END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE A. We can try to pick it up at the time after we were carrying papers (clears throat). Interesting things that happen when you carry papers are, I guess, almost legends. People that have had that experience, I gue.ss it's like most anything else, if something can happen sometime or other, it probably will. I can remember, during the very depths of the Depression, in which, again, we were quite poor, I guess, and weren't really sure of it, but we did manage to have enough to eat--no one in our family so far as I know ever suffered severely from hunger. I suspect that probably the.re were times when my dad would leave the house after having eaten breakfast and go looking for work, and probably didn't have very much to take with him, if anything. Of course, X didn't know this at the time, but it probably wouldn't have made that big an impression. I can remember, on various and sundry occasions, sometime during the week, collecting, perhaps a quarter from the people on my paper route, and stopping by a grocery store and buying whatever amount of hamburger that would buy, which probably, at that time, was two pounds or so. This would be of an evening, probably going home around five thirty Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl 1-1. Albright 9 or that hour. When we got home, if I had, or if other member~ of the family came home with meat, why that's what you had as meat for supper that evening. Again, I don't think we would have gone hungry; but we might not have had hamburger--we probably would have had something else. I remember one occasion--I'm not sure whether it thrilled my mother as much as I thought it should have or not--but I, it was her birthday, and I'd collected some money and scrounged up a little bit someplace else--wherever I'd saved it--and as a real big gift to her I think I bought her two and a half yards of material to make herself a dress. I thought I was being real nice and I don't know if she really (laughs) appreciated the additional work at that time or not because she was quite busy with a large family. I don't know if she really had much time to sew for herself or not but she did eventually make a dress out of it b0fore it was over. I thought it was a pretty good deal and maybe it wasn't. The paper route that I remember most carrying was over on the, at that time, far east side of Springfield. It started on the east side of Eighteenth Street and went from there clear on out to the east side of town. It was a very poor neighborhood. People were really hard pressed to get the twenty cents a week to pay for the paper. A lot of polored people lived in the area. Some of them were very, very nice people--as good as you'd ever find any place. Some of them were not the nicest sort of people, but then, the same is true for whites. At that time there was a saw mill on, just east of Wheeler Avenue, at about Kansas Street. It was always an interesting place to watch them work, for someone who wasn't at all familiar with saw mill operation. There would be one or two people there and, they would work, oh, very regularly for a period of time, and then, all of a sudden, why there would be hardly anyone around--or there might not be anyone there for days on end simply because they either did not have any logs to cut, or they had no one to buy what they did have cut already. They had huge piles of sawdust around there which they must have hauled away because they never burned it, as was the case with a lot of other saw mills that I've seen in various parts of the country since then. sawdust was a waste product that burned instead of used for whatever useful purposes it could be converted. I don 1 t ever remember that saw mill burning any of the by-products other than the first slab that was cut off the side of a log which had a lot of bark and really unusable wood in it. Why they would then cut that up into short lengths and either use it in their own stoves at home or sell it to somebody for a few pennies, probably, a cart load or whatever size you could haul away. There was usually a fair stack of it around so that you could get it. It wasn't at all unusual at that time, particularly when you would carry papers on Sunday morning, before most people were up, you would Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 10 very frequently see some of the more industrious people out going along the railroad tracks in that particular area--at that time it was the Illinois Central tracks--and picking up the coal that had dropped off the trains. They were hauling a lot of coal cars through that area. There was a long curve and frequently why, when the cars would get rocking on the curve, why some pieces of coal would fall off. It wasn't unusual to see people out there picking these up in a bucket to take them home. That may have been the only coal that they had--the only fuel that they had, or at least it was augmenting that which they could buy. So the earliest ones are the ones that get up early and get out there first and got the best pickings, or probably got it all, because you didn't see very much coal laying along the railroad track, it would be picked up too quickly. I remember one discussion with a customer, a Black man, and this took place right about the time that Mussolini had taken his legions into Haile Selassie's kingdom. We were discussing whether or not the Italians would carry the day or whether or not the native in, I can 1 t think of Haile Selassie 1 s land, it was ..• Q. Greece? A. No--it was Ethiopia--or whether the Ethiopians would manage to carry the day. This particular individual seemed to me like he had at least some ideas about it anyway. He said, well, that he didn't see how the Italians could ever take all of Ethiopia and conquer the land because they would, when they got into some of the desert areas, they would run out of water, because the Ethiopians would probably poison all the water holes. There they'd be~ you know, out in the middle of the desert and no where to go and the Ethiopians then would know all of the secret watering places. They could get to those and manage to save the day, which they didn't do. But, again, kind of a little strange some of the things that you can remember that did happen. Everyone asks me where the tattoo onmy left forearm comes from. And, when this took place, when I acquired it, I was carrying this paper route. It was a man who was not really very talented as a tattoo artist, but he was a tattooe.ranyway; and I think he owed me thirtyfive cents for papers that I had delivered to him. He had no way to pay me so he one day offered to give me a tl'ittoo for the thirty-five cents so we struck that bargain and so I still carry my thirty-five cent tattoo(laughs). One particular house out there, the man had quite a collection of not very good used cars; and I'm sure he was not any sort of a licensed dealer. Maybe he didn't even have to be licensed--if he had two cars you could open your own used car lot--and he had, oh, quite a number of them around. So rather than wax them what he'd do is he'd get a very, very thin oil, almost like a kerosene, and he'd go out and wipe all the dust off with a rag that v.:ras soaked in Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 11 this sort of material. It did indeed make them shine for a little while--they collected a lot of dust (chuckles) by the next day, but then they shined for a while. He had somewhat of a turnover in his cars because they would be around there a while and then they, that group, would move and then a new group would come in, so he was managing to sell some. Q. When Grampa was, well, what kind of an occupation did he ... If people asked him what he did, did he ever really have just one thing that he aligned himself with? A. Probably a farmer more than anything. I think that he would have been most happy if he could have really made a good living on the farm. I'm not always sure that this was my mom's desire. Maybe that's why it was very difficult for him to do that, or it may have been simply a function of the times that he did not have a farm. Trying to work on the farm for somebody was not a very lucrative type of an occupation. He could do most any kind of work. A very powerful man--probably six feet, twQ inches tall, would weigh around two hundred fifteen, two hundred twenty pounds and he was not fat [a] very, very strong man. He could do the kind of electrical work that would work in most houses or around most jobs or places of business at that time. I know that he put in, for example, gasoline pumps at a station and [would] do work like that. He could do minor plumbing. He did plumbing in our own house. So most any job that needed to be done, he was capable of learning it if he had any sort of an opportunity to learn it; but as a trade he didn't have one until, oh, after, 1940. He went to Rock Island Arsenal after the economy started to recover. At the beginning of the war period, they sent him to a machinist's school. He became then, a machinist and worked there for a year and a half or so, maybe, maybe as long as two years. At that time, Mom did not go up there with him because he actually went in as an apprentice-- to learn the trade; because they did need machinists so badly all over the country. Then he later came back from Rock Island and got a job at Allis Chalmers which he kept all during the war. [He] worked at that job until such time as he became sick and could not go back to work; but, I can remember very vividly when he worked for a local rose garden. [It] was out on south Sixth Street, and this was probably two miles, two and a half miles from where we lived. My dad would fire the furnace, fire the stoker, and then run the temperatures through the green house to be sure that it was proper. I know that he would, on occasion, shovel as much as eight or ten tons of coal into a hopper in his one twelve hour shift on a cold winter night just to keep the particular green house warm, to keep the temperatures where they belonged. Then they would also, although it was a stoker, you'd have to fill the hopper. He still Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright had to shovel it from the storage bin into the hopper and then you had to haul and get the ashes moved out of the ash pit. That and then run the temperature through the house about once an hour, so he was a busy man. I think [he] probably made twelve or fourteen dollars a week for this. 12 I guess what made it most vivid in my memory is that I can remember on occasion having to carry his lunch out to him. He -would leave home and didn't take his lunch with him for whatever reason, and then we'd have to take it out to him on occasion. It -was such a long walk out there and you'd wait for him to eat lunch or eat his dinner and then bring the lunch bucket back or just sit around -with him while he was eating. Then it was kind of a treat though to walk around through the green house with him and see the flowers and how they were being cared for. You'd walk into the gardenia house and it was a most delightful place with the very heavy smell of gardenias in there. Q. I remember reading somewhere where the men during that time really were ashamed if they were out of work or felt less manly. Do you remember your father ever talking with you about those kinds of values or encouraging you to better yourself so that you -wouldn't end up the same way? A. Yes, he insisted very much that we go to school. Of course~ he didn't finish high school, or he didn't finish grade school. But he was very adamant that we were going to go through high school. You could [not] get a good job if you didn't have a high school education~ and I think there was a very distinct attitude on the part of people, particularly that we.re able to work, that there ought to be a job for them some place. It was not at all unusual to have them, the father of the family, leave early of a morning, and maybe be gone all day, either looking for a job, or just staying away from [home] so that the kids wouldn't know that he wasn't -working. Somewhere in that period of tin1e, I remember my dad talking about a guy who was very, very poor--had to be--that they hired where he was working. I think at that time he was working for Sinclair Oil Company, at their fuel storage area at Ninth and South Grand. They hired this I!k'ln for a day. He came along looking for just any sort of a job--anything that you could get--if it were an hour's work, you took it, if it were all day~ you were grateful. If you could get a job for a week, why you were really one of the fortunate few. This man had come to work carrying a lunch bucket. When the other people sat down to eat lunch, he walked away from the group and sat down, kind of with his back to them. The men invited him over to eat with them; and he said no, he had his lunch--he'd just sit over there and eat it. They got a little suspicious about it and walked over to him and looked in his lunch bucket. What he had in his lunch bucket was potato peelings. The other men that had been working there on a more or less steady basis had sandwiches--whatever they would have Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 13 been. So they asked him, and he said, well, we had some potatoes left in the house this morning. My wife peeled the potatoes to cook for the kids and I brought the peelings with me. And that's what he had for his lunch. So it hurt his pride very much, enough that he was not going to sit down with the other men and eat. But they did manage to make him share a part of their lunch with him. But I think this is kind of indicative of what the times were there; but it was very, very hard on many people [and] not at all unusual to see people walking around with Adlai Stevenson shoes--that's the ones with the hole in the bottom of them--that you'd walked, just completely worn the sole through, and cut a piece of cardboard or fold newspaper and put it in the bottom and go to school. By the time you got back at lunch, why you had to put a new piece of paper in the bottom of your shoe because you didn't have whatever, fifty cents or a dollar, whatever it was, to get them half soled--probably not even that much--I suspect maybe closer to fifty cents. One time we got a basket of food from one of the government programs. It may have been around either Thanksgiving or Christmas. It wasn't unusual for those sorts of baskets to be passed any more so than it is today. But probably, well, the Horner Baskets, that people remember, the Horner Christmas Baskets and Thanksgiving Baskets. I suspect that it was probably around that time, and I think it bothered my dad very, very much that we had to take this, or that by taking it, why, we were much better fed for that particular holiday than we had anticipated being. I do remember, very clearly, for a number of years, at Christmastime, they would frequently ask the route carriers for the newspaper to accompany the men that were taking these baskets from the central location out into those areas that the carriers would know best so that you would be sure and find the right family for that particular basket. They would have a list of all of the people that were to get the baskets, and you would say, yes I know these people and they live here, and, this is that address, and then they would deliver the basket. We used to go out to the Department of Transportation garage at Third and Ash and they would have the trucks out there and the whole building--it seemed to me at least--at the time, that it would be lined with all of these tremendous baskets of food. Then you would load them on the trucks--the men would do the loading--and young boys like myself would, thought we were helping--and perhaps, maybe we were. We'd pick up a basket and slide it over, or pick it up and carry it if we could, and help them load the truck. Then you'd leave and be gone, oh, half a day or better, at least on a Saturday, delivering the baskets. This would probably be the Saturday before Christmas. I know that there were a lot of people that got those baskets. If they hadn't gotten them they--I don't know what they would have had for Christmas--probably very little. Q. The year that your family got the basket, do you remember how Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 14 you felt, or were you too young then? A. I guess, the best that I can remember is that I was really surprised. You know they had that large amount of food that -was packed into one basket. TI1ere was a canned beef product that I thought was pretty good, most of us liked, most of us in the family liked it pretty well. Maybe it was because we were hungrier than we thought, I don't know; but .I know my dad was never very enthused about it. He just--it just really bothered him tremendously. Q. You don't remember your feelings or anything? A. No, no, it wasn't, it didn't seem like, that we were ashamed that we got it; and yet after a while, you didn't go out and tell anyone that you'd received it. It was something that, okay, if your neighbors knew it, they knew it because they saw someone deliver it; but you didn't go out and say anything about it. Q. That was just kind of an unspoken sort of thing [that] you just always understood. A. Yes, well you didn't, and you don't--you didn't go around and say, well we delivered baskets to so and so, and so and so, if you were on the delivery end of these things when I was helping with that. So far as I remember, the time that we got that basket, I guess I wasn't really old enough to be helping deliver them; but you still didn't go around saying anything about that well you knew that so and so got a basket of food or you know somebody else did, or these people didn't. Sometimes, within the confines of your own family, why you would say, well I know that so and so's over there got a basket and they didn't need it nearly as bad as some other family and I can't understand why the number two family dldn't get one too. They may have later gotten one through some other source or something like that, but there was a lot of publicity given to the fact that these baskets were made available to the poor people. But there was also not a lot of conversation among the people that received it. They were extremely happy to get it because most of them were, I'm sure, were hungry. Maybe they were not starving--very few of them were starving--but I'm sure that there were items in the baskets, such as fresh fruit, that they probably had not had in several weeks. Turkey--who could buy a turkey? It was something you didn't have, only on very rare occasions. I guess the first turkey that we ever had, that I can ever remember our family having, was, oh gee, I must have been maybe five or six years old. We went over to my grandmother's for either Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, and I think it was Thanksgiving dinner, and she had a turkey. It was the most tremendous thing you ever saw. You know to a five year old kid (chuckles), a turkey like that is something Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 15 almost beyond belief. I realized at that time, or at least I thought I did, that I didn't like turkey as well as I did chicken because it was too dry. That may have been in the cooking as well as some of the other things. But we, it was kind of a consensus of opinion of the kids, that chicken was better than turkey. Perhaps it was cheaper too, I imagine (chuckles). Well our whole family. I guess one of the things we haven't talked about's school. The--all the kids in our family--went to school at Iles Grade School for either all, or most of their life. They all graduated from lles Grade School. We all went to Feitshans High School and we all graduated from Feitshans High School. And I guess as you go down the line, it was a little trying on the younger ones because many of the teachers that taught my older brother and older sister taught me; and they taught my younger brother and sister. So I guess by time the last one came along, why they knew the whole family, and they already had their mind made up about this particular one before they ever got through. I'm not • . • I think that's probably not true because ..• But they did know us all. There was no question about them knowing who the Albright family happened to be because we were always, there was always one of us in their class someplace up and down the line. And the oh . . And an 1nteresting, episode at grade school I, took place, when I was probably 1n the fifth or sixth grade [or] thereabouts. I was fortunate to skip a half grade 1n grade school but, they . . . What was much more interesting for me 1n the grade school line is that Mr. J. C. Gannon, who was the pr1ncipal of Iles Grade School during this time, called me into his office one day. Of course that was one of the things you were never--you were never called to the principal's office for anything good. But anyway, I was called into his office, and he said I need someone to ring the bells for me and do some odd jobs around here in the office and you have been recommended. Do you want the job? Well, a job was something that you took if some.body offered you (laughs), so I was really a big shot around school. I was--worked for Mr. Gannon--[!] had to get there early enough every morning to ring the bell for class to start; and then had to stay around the principal's office long enough to ring the tardy bell, so you were always tardy for class but you were--it was all okay--because you were working for the principal. I usually would leave class a few minutes early to get from whatever the room happened to be, down to the principal's office to ring the bill for recess; and then you'd stay--got to ring it to bring all the other kids back in and then you went to class. You repeated this thing in the afternoon. I think I worked fox Mr. Gannon, I think it must have been two years that way and .•• Q. Did he pay you for that? A. I, yes, he paid me something--1 don't know--it may have been two Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 16 dollars a month or something like that but it wasn't very much; but, gee whiz, I was really important! Not only did I have a job, but I worked for the principal! I had an in at the head of the school there--you know I was really in. And one of the other fringe benefits of this job, this, at the end of the semester, after all of the lost and found items had been lost and found and refound and lost again--whatever was left over--and gee whiz, every once in a while, you could find a good knife in there. If you found something in that lost and found bo;x after it had been in there for at least a semester, why, if I wanted it, I could have it. I think I found a good pocket knife or two in there, a few things like that--you know, treasures. But you could find always one glove, or one shoe, or one boot, or what have you. Coats were always claimed pretty rapidly, or jackets or sweaters, or anything of that nature. The small pocket items that kids are always losing, why there were always a treasure of those in there; and they never think to go to the principal's office and look for them because you just didn't go to the principal's office for anything hardly--reluctantly even when you were called. One of the, had to be the, bane of all mothers at that time, was boys about fourth or fifth grade or so, had to be the hardest thing in the world on clothing because we were always wrestling. You'd get to school early so you could wrestle before you went in to class. You wrestled at lunch time, on your way home, on the way back to school, recess. And it had to ruin clothes--not only tear them, grind grass stains, (clears throat) into them, all the dirt and so forth that at least energetic boys of that age can get into clothing. I often wonder how mom kept them clean and patched together as much as she did because I was forever wrestling. It seemed like that was the only thing you knew to do in high school or in grade school at that time. Had some . . . They did play ball occasionally on the playground; but if you had a wrestling team set up, why you wrestled, whether 1lnything else was going on or not. And I know Mom used to raise all kind of hell whenever that would happen, you'd come home with [a] clean shirt that she'd put on you that morning and it was ruined by the time. you'd come home for lunch. Q. Was this just playful or . A. Yes, it was just play. It was a form of play. Girls would skip rope and play hopscotch; and in the, well, early in the Spring, you always played marbles. Then a little later on, as soon as it got where you could be out long enough and the ground wasn't completely sloppy and wet, why then you'd wrestle. The greatest thing in the world, probably, was to come out of the school building in the wintertime and there would be a slide. A kid, the first one at school of a morning, would start making a slide; and, by the time the school bell rang for you to go in, why Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 17 there would probably be a slide--maybe as long as twenty feet--and it might be a foot or foot and a half wide. It would be just a sheet of ice and it would be on the sidewalk and the kids would just take a turn. There'd be a long line. You'd get in it and you'd get back away from the slide and you'd take a run and see who could slide the length of it. If you could slide the length, why then that'd help lengthen it a little bit. More kids would fall. Soon as you--it didn't make any difference--you'd take your turn sliding and you'd get back in the line and off you'd go again. Very few people would bring sleds to school. You had no place to keep them. They didn't like to have them around because, well, there was just no place to keep them. They would either get broken or somebody would get too many kids on them or something like that and then they'd have an unhappy child because his sled was no longer usable--it had been broken with half a dozen kids piled on it. But the slides were always there, it seemed like, all winter. END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO A. We'll try to pick it up from the winter~ime and the sliding at grade school and see if we can remember some more of the things that occurred. It was always one of the things that you had to do--you bought your books in those days. You would always have to find some place that would sell you a used book. Very, very, few of us could afford to buy new ones, so you always bought a used one. And pencils-you had to furnish all your own equipment. We used to go to Ratz' s store. [It] was about a half a block from school, and you could buy brown wooden pencils for a penny a piece. They had a little conical-shaped eraser in the end of them and, as that eraser wore down, you could put that end of it in a pencil sharpener and erase, or trim off the end a little bit, so you could get some additional eraser. The pencils weren't very good but they only cost a penny so that's what most of us had to buy. The books, again, like I said, we always hoped--or I'm sure that Mom and Dad always hoped--that they didn't change books this year; because if they put a new book into the system, then there were no used books available. You had to go out and buy a new one; and a new book might cost all of two dollars or something like that; whereas, you could buy a used one for, I would suppose, anywhere from twenty-five to seventy-five cents--! don't really remember how much the prices were. One book that you usually got that was a real~ real good one--and parents didn't mind paying too much for a real good book--was your Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 18 speller. Because you could use your spelling book for several years, up through, most of it all the way through grade school-~from the time you started having spelling until you got out of grade school-so you always got a good speller. It didn't help you learn any better; but you had a good speller, so it'd last you the whole way through. Most of the tablets that we used in those days were like the yellow steno pads that we use in offices nowadays. You could get a white, vcry,very, poor grade paper tablet that was somewhat cheaper. The teachers didn't like you to use that because they liked for you to use the yellow--it was easier on your eyes when you were in school~for whatever, if it were so or not, I don't know, but then that was at least the excuse that you should use the yellow tablet; and we all had those. You could get a spelling tablet. It was a special little tablet with, I think, twenty or twenty-five lines on it. You always had either ten or twenty spelling words as your lesson and then that lesson might be for a week. When it came to the end of the week and you had your spelling test, why, you always had to write it in the spelling tablet. This was about the same length as a regular tablet, but probably four inches wide--just long enough to write a word in most of the words weren't terribly long, it didn't seem like. I'm trying to remember our, always remember the English books that we used in grade school. They were Our English. Very few of them after more than two weeks in school read Our English--they mostly read Sour English (chuckles), which may be a reflection on the teachers, I'm not sure. But there were always, someone had always penciled in the S in front of the our for a sour. I can't think right now of any more interesting things, or any really very important things, that might have happened in grade school with possibly one exception. When I first started in grade school, I met a boy there whose name was Harry Patia. Harry and I went all through grade school together, all through high school together. We started college together; and it wasn't until I went into the Air Force, and Harry went into the Navy, that we were separated in school. Today~ I still bowl with Harry; and it's been a friendship that has carried on since. we were both about six years old, which is kind of neat, really, in many ways. Interesting things that, when talking about Harry, that would come up, is that close to his house was--and I can 1 t remember the people's name now--and I intended to ask Harry about it today, were, was a family that had an ice house. They sold blocks of ice. Very, very few people at that time had refrigerators. It was very frequently the job of a couple of the younger children in the family to take a wagon and walk the half a dozen blocks or more from our house over to the ice house and pick up a twenty-five pound chunk of ice, cover it with paper, or a gunnysack, or something like that, and haul it back home so that you could put it in the refrigerator--or into the Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 19 ice box really--so that you would keep the butter cool, and the milk cool. Any of the other foods that were left over why, you tried to keep them in there. It was always nice to be able to go to the ice box and chip off a chunk of ice and make a lemonade or ice water or something of that nature. If you were going to have company in for Sunday, you always managed to get an extra block of ice and tuck it into the ice box someplace so you could use it to make ice tea or lemonade. Probably the unhappy time of the day for Mom was when the ice, the drip pan under the ice box, would run over. Somebody was supposed to have emptied it and didn't, and it would very promptly be forgotten until you were wading through the water on the floor. That wasn't where most of the water came from--by the time you try to slide the brimming pan full of water out from under the ice box why, then, more of it would slop out and you 1 d e.nd, usually end up mopping about half of the kitchen floor--probably not very well, but at least it had water on it (chuckles). Going along with the seasons, and summer into winter, why your biggest job then, and it was always one that most generally the boys in the family had to take care of, was being sure that there was kindling split and in the house in the evening; that the coal buckets were filled so that you'd have enough coal to bank the fires for the night; and usually, you didn't haul the ashes out. Once in a while~ if it was extremely cold and you had a lot of ashes, why you might haul them out of an evening; but usually, you would haul those out of a morning. Again~ by the time you'd bank the fires for the night in the heating stove and in the kitchen stove-~the range--you'd used up most of the coal that you'd carried in--a couple of buckets--and so then in the morning, when Dad would get up and get the fires going again, he'd take the ashes out of the stoves and put them in the coal buckets. Then we'd haul the coal buckets down to the alley and dump the ashes and fill them with coal and bring them back to the house so Mom would have coal for the day. If you were lucky, you got kind of chunk-sized coal so that it was easy to handle. Well, 1t wasn't really easy to handle because sometimes it would come i_n big chunks. But i_t was a lot better fuel because you w-ould break i_t up then into smaller pieces so that you could get it into the coal buckets and haul lt to the house. Then you'd always bring a couple of big chunks into bank the fire with, if you had it. If the economy was really low, and you d1dn't have any money at all 1 and you were really trying to skimp down to the last penny, why you would probably buy, I think they called it "mine run coal" at that time. This had a lot of real trash in it--a lot of dirt or coal dust. It wasn't hard to shovel into the buckets, but it didn't burn very long-it didn't last very long. It was really, probably in the long run, a more expensive type of fuel to use than the lump coal. So if your dad was working, and we had a few extra bucks, why, that's where we would probably spend some of it would be to buy a bett~r grade of Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 20 coal, because I'm sure he was well aware of the fact that he wasn't getting very much for the money that they were spending for that low grade coal. Well, we'll go on to ..• Q. Grade school went through what, eighth grade? A. Eighth grade at that time, yes. I didn 1 t start to kindergar~~n and a lot of kids did not start kindergarten at that time. A few years later when, probably my youngest sister was going through grade school, why, they had changed the rules and you had to start in kindergarten. But we went from eighth grade, I mean from first grade through eighth grade in grade school. Usually, at that time, until you were about the fourth grade, you didn't change rooms. Most generally you had one teacher for most of the subjects. After you got around the fourth grade, maybe into the fifth grade, if you changed or had different teachers, the students would stay in the rooms and the teachers would change rooms. Then I guess in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, maybe in the fifth, I don't remember, but at least in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, why you were in upper grade school, and you got to change rooms, which meant that when the end of class came, you got up and you marched out of the room in a line in a file. All of th~m that were going in one direction would be on one side of the hall and all of them going in another direction would be on the other side of the hall. The teachers would usually be in the center to see that there was no fighting or any of that sort of thing and you moved as a class. You would just walk down the hall to the whatever the next room was and then go into that particular class and the teacher would be there waiting for you. One of our, I'm trying to think what to call her, she wasn't a bad teacher, she was a very good teacher as a matter of fact, but I guess one of her jobs was to monitor the kids coming into the school up the stairs and heading into their homerooms. And it wasn't at all unusual to see her standing at the end of the hall over the stairwell where she could see from essentially the time you walked in from the outside. In that same stairwell, you could go down into the basement where the lavatories were and there was a big playroom down there and that's where you went to eat lunch. When it came time for school to begin, why you'd look up there and she would be standing at the head of that watching the stairwell with a long paddle in her hand. One of the things she was not averse to using was the paddle. I think she probably had a whole lot worse reputation among the kids than she really was because the paddle was not spared but it was not used to near the extent, I think, that most students would have thought that it was. But you could see her standing up there every day with her paddle in her hand. But the very difference in teachers . • • The one that was monitoring a same stairwell at the other end of the, or a similar stairwell at Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 21 the other end of the building, would be standing down there without the paddle and no problem at all--no more fussing or fighting with kids coming in her door than there was with the ones coming in the door where the teacher with the paddle would stand. The girls had a playground on one side of the school and the boys had a playground on the other. When the bell rang, particularly in the morning, and after the lunch break, for classes to start, if the girls were not close to their room, to their end of the building, to come in through the door that they were to come in, then they had really to hurry and run and get around there and get into that door because they were not supposed to come in the door where the boys did. If the boys were, it was the same thing for them. They'd had to hurry around and come in their door. I guess the lady with the paddle was always standing at the boys' end rather than at the girls' end (chuckles). The playrooms down in the basement of the school were separated. The boys played in one end and the girls played in another. You could, they had around the playroom, there were benches up against the wall, and if you carried a lunch to school, why then that's-particularly in the wintertime where you would have to go and eat lunch. Of course it was used much more so in the wintertim~. _ it would be in the summer. I don't remember [being] restricted to the use of the playroom in the summer or in the warm, nice weather; but it may well have been, because no one really went down there during the nice weather during recess or the lunch period. Our family only lived three blocks from school, so it was cheaper and more convenient really, for us to come home for lunch. We would leave school, hurry home, and Mom would have whatever lunch w-as available. You'd eat lunch and then get back. Seems like vte had about an hour to do this, which, apparently was ample time. With there always being at least two of us in grade school, why--and sometimes three--in the same grade school, why vte would come home because Mom could feed all of us probably for the price of the lunch--fixing or packing a lunch for one. In high school, when [I] first started over to Feitshans High School, part of the building that currently exists was there as the whole building. There were a lot of portable buildings. These were just wooden school rooms--reasonably weather tight--I don't remember them being unnecessarily cold or anything of that nature--that were moved in and set on make-shift foundations around the school to accommodate the growing classes. Then, as they increased the size of the school, why they gradually moved all the portable buildings away. I'm sure that they're still using similar buildings at schools, even today, in which they set up the temporary classroom to meet class requirements and [accommodate] the student population. Your high school experiences were really new from when you first Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 22 started there as freshman. You had to make up your own mind or with the advice of, a counselor, or homeroom teacher, probably a--mare a homeroom teacher than anything else at that time--and with a little bit of help from your parents, and probably, a good bit of encouragement from one of your grade school teachers or some of your grade school teachers, at least, as to what type of a course should you really pursue. You didn't really have to take algebra. It was one of the courses that you were interested in, dreaming about a college education or going to any school after high school, you needed to have the mathematics. So they did encourage a lot of students to take the algebra courses and to pursue a college preparatory type of a curriculum. Other students that were not really prepared for college--or maybe their grade school teachers didn't think they were capable of handling college work--would be directed into, perhaps easier, courses, and even more into the manual arts. We had oh, a general, manual arts class in which you were introduced to tin smithing. .. One of the things you'd build would be a little, maybe a-funnel, out of light-gauge metal, a flour scoop or a sugar scoop, and these sorts of things. It would teach you the basic principles of tracing the pattern, cutting the metal, folding the edges so that they would interlock, and then use a locking tool and seal that seam down and then solder it with a soldering iron, a gun. You would have a large, heavy iron that you'd heat it a gas, [a] little gas furnace, and then you would use that to finish off the .. Actually, more like kitchen gadgets and usable items. Then there was another portion of the time that you would use heavier gauge metals and make things like a garden trowel. You'd take a piece flat iron and cut it, shape it down to a point, sharpen it, then actually bend it so that it would have a, kind of a scoop, or a semicircular shape to it, take a piece of round iron rod, cut it to length, and bend it in a shape so that whenever you had the handle in your hand,your hand would clear the ground if the, if the scoop part of the trowel was on the ground. It also introduced you to simple DC electricity--you'd wire a doorbell or learn how a flashlight would operate and, (I'm] trying to remember one other area that we . . . seemed like there were three sections of that. The mechanics end of it would, would logically be the other thing that you would learn. I guess maybe that was it--you ~ould learn to use pulleys, and why you got more mechanical advantage if you put three loops of rope around a set of pulleys and tried to lift a heavy weight as compared to one or why you would, if you wanted to move a heavy object, you would move the fulcrum of a pry bar much closer to the weight and then your weight and then your weight would give you a much greater mechanical advantage. You 1d learn to turn mechanical advantage and I doubt if very many of us remember it as such, but you did really start to pick up many things that were quite useful to, in a, vocational type of a way. I think that probably the program basically was for that purpose--to introduce--a lot of the students to those types of endeavors so that they would know Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 23 whether they might like to go into electricity more than into soldering or into mechanics or something of that nature. I know that this took place in our freshman class. We ... I don't remember when it was [that] probably Mom threw away the last one of the sugar scoops or flour scoops that she had around the house that Charles or Butch or I had made while we were in high school. There was a requirement for English. Everybody had to take English whether you liked it or not. You had to take a certain amount of physical training and physical education. One of the things that it wasn't too terribly unusual to see was some of the kids there out on the gym floor playing around in either their sock feet or barefooted because they didn't have tennis shoes, You were all supposed to have tennis shoes but some of them couldn't afford it, so what were you going to tell the kids? Now if they said, well, I got one pair of shoes and that's it--they may have been able to talk--some of them may have been able to talk their parents into buying one pair of tennis shoes and they wore them outside and then into the gym as well. So they were, they had tennis shoes. But a lot of people wouldn't go this route, so they were out there playing in their sock feet. We had, in the manual arts department of the high school, a printing class in which you went in to learn how to set type. God, remember, [I] can't remember what they called the type holder now, but you had, the type would be in small individual characters in a case, and you would have to pick them out of the case and set up your work projects. Also had mechanical drawing, and wqqdwo_1;~.. To me, wQodwoTkine; _ class was always a much more. interesting one and I enjoyed it a whole lot more. Your first introduction to ¥~odworking. in high school, what you got to do in the introductory cl~ss depended upon some of your work in grade school. Because in the seventh and eighth grade in grade school, one year we would have to, one afternoon a week, we. would have to go to a different school. I think in the seventh grade we. took a mechanical drawing type of a course; and in the eighth grad~, we actually got to go into a woodworking class. There you learned what a plane was, and a sander, and how to use a square to make a board square, a level, and so forth. So if you had this bit of background in woodworking, why then when you were, went into high school, you could actually start making something. What you had to do was to get a rough piece of lumber, smooth down the sides, the flat plane, the broad side of the thing, and get [it] nice and level so your teacher, who was a real craftsman, was satisfied. If you didn't satisfy him, you might start with a three-quarter inch piece of board and it might be planed down to (chuckles) less than a halfinch by the time you got both sides of it so that they were nice and true and flat with a plane so that he would accept them as, the fact that, okay, now you knew how to use a plane and use it properly. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 24 Then your next task would be to square the edges of those boards-again using a plane--so that they could be glued together. The glue pot was always a very fishy smelling thing because it, the glue, would come in a kind of a translucent, amber-colored sheet of dry glue really, and this would then be broken up, placed in the glue pot and heated. The glue pot was kept hot all the time, with a little bit of water to keep it fluid. When you were ready to glue your boards, why you got the boards all lined up, had your clamps together, had your blocks on the end of the boards so that you didn't mess up the good edges that you had just fixed, and then you would take it up to the, where the glue pot was, and glue the edges and slap it together and put the clamp on it. You couldn't use that board for at least twenty-four hours until the glue had a chance to set. A lot of those pieces that were glued together are still holding now. There's that one octagonal shaped table at our house, is one that I glue.d together. Charlie made a cedar chest that was, so far as I know, he still has it in his house today. A real craftsmanlike job had to be done on these things. Mr. Krebbs, the woodworking teacher, was, a tyrant in many ways (laughs)-[ he would] scream and yell like mad because things weren't done the way they should be; but when you finished the project, it was some-thing that you would really, [be] glad, and proud to take home--you could say, by gosh, I did it--it's mine. It was a very, to us, at that time, an extremely well-equipped woodworking shop--there were three lathes, I think, and a wood turning lathe, a band saw, a planer, an edging planer, and a table saw. You had to be . . . No freshman ever got to touch any of the mechanical equipment--this was all for sophomores, or juniors. Freshman--you couldn't touch it--you just stood there and watched. You did all of your planing and so forth with a hand plane but there are, no telling how many pieces of furniture still around in the city of Springfield that were made in those woodworking shops that are really still very, very fine pieces of furniture. You used the best walnut in the world that you could find. Probably the highlight of the woodworking career was whenever you had your project all together and you were ready then to finish it. You could go--there was one, area--a different room, a separate room-that was set aside. You would take your materials in there after you had sanded them and run the steel wool over them to get the wood itself just as smooth as it could be. You'd wipe all the dust off of it, then you'd take it into the finishing room. That's where you would fill it, stain it if it needed a little bit of staining, and then varnish it. Mr. Krebbs was extremely particular about how you went into the finishing room because he didn't want any dust in there. When you finished and had that final varnish coat on your piece of furniture, it ought to shine like glass because that was the Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 25 only way it was right. (chuckles) I would say that, at least on some of the items that I made in the shop, I know that they had at least four coats of varnish that were on them. You'd put a coat of varnish on it, let it set, and get nice and dry and then you would take a piece of fine steel wool and go over it and smooth out that varnish coat. You might even take a pumice stone and oil and rub it down so that it was nice and smooth. Then you•d put another coat on it and you'd repeat thi.s process until Mr. Krebbs was satisfied that that coat was just exactly what it ought to be. Then you would work it down with a little bit of linseed oil and a very fine--just a little bit of pumice in there--to take any shine off of it, or glitter off of it. Then, when you were through, it would have a nice, soft, satiny shine to it. It was a real project--it was a real good piece of work when you came out. I don't talk very much about my period in print shop because the printing instructor and I didn't get along very well. I didn't really enjoy mecha.nical drawing. So, I took what I thought I had to in those areas, to get into the woodworking shop and to be able to continue what I wanted to. What I thought I liked to do in woodworking, which was really much more interesting to me. In the area of classroom studies, it's kind of interesting to look back at some of the people that we met, and some of the people that we knew at the time. One of the good teachers that we had, one of the enjoyable teachers that we had at school, was Carl Wilson, who later was in the State Department of Education's office, Clyde McQueen~ who was one of our teachers there and was later the County Superintendent of Schools~ [a] very nice man. As a matter of fact, when we came back to Springfield after I'd retired from the Air Force, Clyde McQueen was one of the people that I went to looking for a job. He almost had me a job down here but some guy wouldn't take his word for my capabilities and he couldn't get in touch with me so he wouldn't hire me without seeing me and talking with me. So, I gu~?.ss that ended my career teaching in Springfield. Charlie Kenney, who's a lawyer, in Springfield today, was one of our teachers in US Government and History. When I was in high school, Charlie Kenney was still going to Lincoln Law College in Springfield. He hadn't quite finished his law degree yet. He's a very good friend, even today. I know him and he's in our Optimist's Club. Those are kind of unique friendships-at least it seems so to me--that were formed at that time, and are still viable today, when I can see any of those people and still -- talk with them on a very, very friendly basis. END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE Q. Carl, we were talking some about some of the people you'd met in high school that you are still friends with today and some about your woodworking classes on the last tape and I'm wondering if maybe you Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 26 have some other things to add about your high school years? A. Continuing to, in the vein of talking about some of the instructors that I knew in high school, and Charlie Kenney, of course, with his background in law, was an extremely effective teacher in American government, in American ldstory. It was always his unique way of teaching that if you asked a question, he would most generally tell you where you could find an answer and tell you to go look that question up--or the answers to it--and then bring it back to class and they would discuss it. If you got any misinformation any place down the line in your research work, he would very quickly get it straightened up for you, so there was never any problem in your mind about whether or not he knew the answer. He was trying to, at that time, create within the students, I'm sure, the desire to go look, to use the library, to do your own research, rather than to have a teacher stand up front and parrot out the information that is already in their brain. It's so easily forgotten that way. If you go to the library and look it up for a little while, or spend a few minutes with a topic, then at least you get a lot more out of it and probably find out a ~1ole lot more and remember much more in the long run, than you would if he just told you the answer. The other unique mark of Charlie Kenney is you never had a question about what was wrong or what corrections were made on your paper. He always used green ink. Everything that he marked on your paper, any note that you would get from him, was always written in green ink. Charlie Kenney still used green ink today in writing notes or making comments and so forth on any sort of written matter-~particularly in his law practice. He used green ink so you knew Charlie had been around if he's written on your paper. One man that I owe a great deal to was my chemistry teacher in high school, John Hillemeier. I enjoyed the sciences very much, and took biology under Mr. Rugg. He and I were very good friends as well as [having a] teacher/student relationship. When I got into chemistry Mr. Hillemeier was a very young, and what I thought, at least was a very handsome young man at the time, and an interesting teacher to me. He made chemistry a real challenge and a real part of what was to be my future. He opened a whole new area of knowledge, or lack of knowledge, that I had. So I took chemistry under him and then worked for him, I guess, the following year, as a laboratory assistant or [I] would come in and help him in his lab work with the new classes as my time would permit. He was a very good friend of mine at the time; and, if l'd been a little more courageous or maybe not so naive, he would probably have gotten me into Wast Point Military Academy. At that time, Mr. Rillemeier was a major in the Army Reserve. This, of course, was about 1937-1938, perhaps. Some rumblings of the future were beginning to make themselves heard. He talked with me at quite some length about going into West Point. He got a bunch of books from West Point showing what the entrance exams were, and went over those with me to Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 27 some extent, and tried to convince me in many, many ways that this was something that I should do--something that he felt I had the capability of doing. He, at least on two or three occasions said, if you want to go to West Point, don't worry, I can help you get an appointment. Well, at that point in my life~ to go to West Point was beyond the wildest dream that a poor kid would ever have--who could go to West Point? Someplace along there I read in the book that you had to have, I don't know, maybe, five hundred dollars to start because it took you that amount of money to get to school and to have some initial outlay for uniforms. This would all come back to you, but who in the world had five hundred dollars? Where could you get that amount of money? It was just unbelievable. And, I just-I was scared. l wouldn't do it (chuckles) because, part of it, I was afraid. I just knew that this would never be something that I could accomplish. The unfortunate thing that happened there is that shortly after Pearl Harbor, or right about that time, anyway, Mr. Hillemeier was called on, back to active duty with the Army. He was sent to the Phillipincs and became a prisoner of war of the Japanese and later died while he was a prisoner of war of the Japanese. And, so, to the best of any information that we were able to find out, why, he did die on the Bataan Death March, or at least that's where I think he died. But, anyway, he was the man that got me interested in two things-chemistry and the military. So, he was, and still does, hold kind of a special place in my memory as someone that I would like to have known a whole lot longer than I did. Oh, interesting incidents that happened in high school or things that kids would do is we--Harry Patia and Freddie Pritchett and myself were good friends; and [we] probably had a certain reputation around school of being the ones that were always doing something-maybe not bad--but at least we were always bugging people. We have, on occasion, gone down to the, in the wintertime gone down to the dean's office and, eventually talk the dean into excusing us for an afternoon so we could go out and shovel snow and make a quarter or a half a dollar or something like that. Then, before we'd leave the school the first person we'd ask if we could go out and shovel the walk would be the dean and we'd only charge him fifty cents or something like that to get his walk shoveled. Once in a while he would let us and sometimes he wouldn't; but we were not above doing something like that. The high school choir under Miss Curry, Catherine Curry, was kind of an interesting group of people. Again, Harry and Freddie and I were in it. Fred Fromm is another fellow that was in the choir with us. Herb Havenar, Dorothy Sullivan is one of the girls, Pope, yl?.s, Jane Pope was the other one and the girl that Fred Fromm married was, yes, Florence Biederman. I guess I don't know whether any of those people are still around Springfield, with a few exceptions. Dorothy Sullivan is still in town. Harry and I, of course, are here. Fred Fromm was, may be dead for all I know. I'm not sure; but anyway, we had a good Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright time in high school. It was very enjoyable. A nice group of kids that really didn't get into too much trouble, but then they had a lot of fun, too. 28 Academic-wise, probably one of the smartest young [men] in our class was a young man by the name of Leo Povse. He was a neighbor of ours, as well as a classmate. If you had to compete with somebody from a scholastic standpoint why, usually Leo Povse was the one that you had to come out ahead of if you were going to be number one. He was, and to my knowledge still is, an extremely intelligent person. Someplace along in high school, the American Legion gave an award for scholastic ability and I was the person--one of the people--that was nominated for that. Someplace around in our collection of junk I still have a large bronze medallion that was given that night. [It] was a very shiny night for me, it seemed, because, [it was] one of the earliest times that I can remember really going out to someplace. and having a dinner--a banquet type of a dinner--and it was sponsored by the American Legion. Q. What kinds of feelings do you remember having? Was Leo involved in this kind of thing, or .. A. No, I don't remember Leo being involved in that particular one. I was, I know, very surprised that I was the one selected for that particular award. I guess, scared like most children or young people would be about something of that nature; and yet, excited about it, that, okay, you know, well really, what does this all mean to me? Some of the young people that I have contact with today would have been about that age or, the same age that I was at that time, [and] how much, much more mature [they are] than I was and [how] much more at ease in a public situation, [they are] particularly when you compare the way they handle themselves in such things as the oratorical contest and that sort of presentation. They were very mature and that would have scared me completely to death at that time. I don't know whether I would have been able to handle it or not. One of the things that didn't come up [was] that I did [not] have to make a speech or anything like that. Probably all I had to do, if I remember, was to get up and say, you know, thanks, I'm glad to get it and sit down and wonder if I'd said something wrong. I guess during high school I had quite good grades; [I] didn't have any problem with most of my studies. I ended up, I think, fourth or fifty scholastic-wise in my high school class and would have been eligible, I'm sure, for some sort of scholarship assistance had I known such things were available. My graduation from high school took place at mid-term--mid year--(clears throat) and so after graduation, why we--that's where we had no jobs--we had nothing specifically in mind to do so we . . . quite a lot of us would always come back and take a post-graduate course. That's really what I Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 29 started right itnmediately after high school graduation. One of the other people that I met in high school when I was a junior, was a girl that transferred from Springfield High School, and recently moved into the neighborhood. I guess I thought she was pretty cute because I started chasing around after her and eventually started going with her and finally married her and 11m still ma.rried to her. That was Mary Elizabeth Howard. Since those days, why we've had a lot of fun, a lot of traveling, and done many things that we--probably neither one of us I know that I never thought we would do. [We have] seen many places that we never would have expected to see together, or alone--at the time when we first met. Liz's relationship with Harry Patia has always been kind of an interesting one to me. Quite a lot of competition between the two of them, really. Good friends, I think with a very competitive spirit of both of them. They get along, at least--at least, tenuously (chuckles). Q. They're competing for you, then? A. I don't know whether they're competing for me or just competing against each other--I think that's it more than anything else. They have been friends even as, ever since, really, the group of us have been together. Now the relationship between Liz and the other one of the three--Harry, Freddie and I--her relationship with Freddie was, considerably different. They were very good friends, not the competitive feeling between the two of them as there was between Liz and Harry. So today we still keep in touch with Freddie on occasion, although he's in Florida now. Oh, following high school, as I said, it was not unusual for the students to take a post-graduate course which meant that all you were doing was coming back to, or going back to high school and picking up some class that you think you would enjoy taking and just taking it for fun, which is really, I think, a very nice way to do something. You're not really competing for anything, you're just doing it because you want to. [I] don't even remember what courses I started to take at that time; but then, somehwere along in there, probably February or so, of 1939, I took a trip to Peoria, to Caterpillar Tractor Company. At that time they were interviewing high school graduates for their tool and die making apprenticeship course. I went up to Peoria and took the test for this particular apprenticeship endeavor and passed the acceptance test for it. They later hired me. I forget, this must have taken place probably in March or thereabouts. So that meant that I had to leave Springfield and go to Peoria to work. My first few weeks up there--probably the first eight weeks or more-was not an apprentice program. It was working in their chemistry laboratory. So maybe some of Mr. Hillemeier's background was already Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 30 beginning to rub off on me there. But I did work in the oil laboratory at Caterpillar and one of the things that we learned to do was to check the viscosity of oils, lubricating oils, used in tractor engines and [to] do some work on the friction releasing capabilities of some various greases. I did this for quite some time in the lab, whatever it was--six weeks, eight weeks--before I actually started into the apprentice course. The introduction to the apprentice course was really moving out of the lab into the factory. I worked under a man in the tool crib. Part of my job was to take care of the large punch press dies and forming equipment that were used there. If some machinist would come up and want a particular die, why, I had to locate it in the storage area, get it out to where he could move it up to his machine and then certain hours of the day, why we would go to a class and do the studying that was required for the apprenticeship. This went on up until, around September, of 1939, and then at that time, I thought it was disaster struck--and they fired me. The man who was in charge of the apprentice program there decided I wasn't smart enough to become a tool and die maker and wasn't making progress to suit him so he decided that I ought to look somepJ.?ce . else for work because he didn't want me there any more. So I came back to Springfield after that. Q. Were you really down about that,being that jobs were so short in the first place--worried? A. I don't think I was worried--I think I was very, vary, very disappointed. It was quite a shock to someone who had really thought, okay, now, you know, this was going to be something real great because tool and die makers were quite an elite group in the factory. They made some of the better salaries that were being made there and I had no idea that I would ever be anything other than, or would go in to something like [the] management area in a factory of this sort and so becoming a tool and die maker would have been really something quite great, for me, at that time. Yes, I was pretty downhearted about the whole thing, for quite a while. I guess it seemed like a pretty bad day anyway. That fall, or the rest of that fall anyway, after coming back from Peoria, why, the jobs were still pretty tight around Springfield and I helped my father shuck corn and do whatever odd jobs we could find until about oh, it was just a few days or a couple of weeks perhaps, before Christmas, and, I got a job with Martin Oil Company. They still have stations in Springfield. The station that I worked at at that time was at Ninth and South Grand. I guess, there, when I went to work there, I was probably making either fifteen or eighteen dollars a week. I would work from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. I forget whether it was five or six days a week--I gue.ss Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 31 it was just five days a week. Going back just a little bit, when I was in the apprenticeship program at Caterpillar, I started out when I first ~ent up there in the oil laboratory at twelve dollars a week, which was [a] pretty good salary for a young kid just out of school. When I went over and actually started into the apprenticeship program, they raised my pay to fourteen dollars a week. So, when I--that Christmas area time--when I went to work for Martin Oil Company, why I was making more than I would have been making in the apprenticeship program. I guess some place along in there, why some of the memories of the apprenticeship program got pretty well erased. At the time I didn't think so, but they--I've later observed several times--that probably Caterpillar did me the biggest favor in the world by firing me. I've later used that story to [show] to a lot of young people that were worried about failing in something that sometimes it's not the worst thing in the world to fail: ---The worst thing is not to do. And if you fail at something, and maybe, maybe it's a good thing--you triad it and so you get canned--it's not the end of the world--it may seem like it for a while, but it really isn't. There was quite a group of characters at Martin Oil Company when I worked there. One of the very nicest people that I've had the privilege of knowing is Tommy Courtney. Tom worked at Martin Oil Company with me and we became friends. He liked Liz and of course that was a, all right with me, because if he liked Liz, why then he and I would get along quite well. Torn had a girlfriend that lived over in Quincy, Illinois, and her name--Janice Horning. And whenever he had time off from work, why he'd always run over to Quincy to see Janice. He later married her and brought her back to Springfield. One of the first people that Tom and Janice met when they carne back was Liz and Carl. Today Torn and Jan are living in Phoenix, Arizona. They're still good friends of Liz and Carl. We don't write ... -maybe once a year--at Christmas--maybe a little more often--sometimes not even that often. But Torn and Jan are our very, very good friends--we could walk in their home tomorrow and be as welcome as if we'd been there forever. We have really enjoyed knowing those two people tremendously. One of the things that I found while working at the Martin Oil Company is that there is probably not a much colde-r job in the world than working on the ramp of a filling station, or at least it seemed so at that time. It was not at all unusual to get a gasoline spill on you; and, in the wintertime, why that can be very cold. Around 1939, early 1940, you didn't use the ethyleJ~e glycol _o:f:_pre~-:- .. tone type of anti-freezes unless you were rather wealthy. -The-~~freeze that most people used in their automobile was an alcohol; and I would imagine that it was probably methanol or wood alcohol rather than the grain alcohol type; but I do remember that we would Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 32 sell it for about ten cents a quart. One of the favorite things for the customers to do would be to come in sometime in the evening on a winter night and say, well how cold is it going to be? Well, the only thing you knew was what you heard on the radio if you were listening--you didn't know any more about the weather than they did. So then the next request would be, well, how about checking the radiator? So you'd check it. Well, do you think that's enough to keep it from freezing tonight? Well, you didn't know, so the next thing you had to do was to, well, drain out a quart and add a quart of alcohol. This meant that you got down on the ground, and reached up under the radiator to a pet cock there, and you'd drain out what you thought was a quart of fluid that was in the radiator. Then you'd add another quart to the top. You had to be very careful not to drain out too much, because, if you did, why, then his radiator would be low and he didn't like that. So, you wanted to drain out enough so that you could add the quart without having to get under there and get another armful of water down your sleeve because that's usually where it would run--you'd open the pet cock and it would be right down your sleeve, and if it wasn't when you opened it, then it would be when you reached back up under there to turn it off. So you'd usually end up with a wet sleeve and the alcohol and water mixture would evaporate and make it even colder. Gasoline--would sell for somewhere around 12.9 to, I guess, 14.9 cents a gallon. You always gave stamps with the purchase and people would save them and trade them in like, much like Martin's used to do in town. I don't know if they are still doing it--they're not giving stamps now, I guess, at the Martin filling stations but, you can trade them in for pots and pans, or toasters, all sorts of kitchen gadgets mainly. Q. Gasoline wasn't rationed at that time at all? A. No. Not yet, and, the truck drivers, if you'd come in (clears throat), with a big tractor trailer truck, I forget what the limit was, perhaps twenty-five gallons, but if you bought more than twentyfive gallons of gas at one time, why you'd get a discount. And I think for truckers, the discount was two or three cents a gallon; but they still got their stamps. It was not at all unusual for some of the truckers to come in and put a hundred and fifty gallons of gasoline into their rigs and collect up all their stamps. Also at that station, we had a large enough parking ramp that they could pull a tractor and trailer rig around behind the driveway off the portion that was always being used for customers. We had a bunk room in the back where they could take a nap if they had been driving a long while. There was also a shower room back there where they could take a shower. These facilities were all free. You could come in and use them if they bought gasoline there so even at ten or eleven cents a gallon--or nine cents a gallon--they were given prizes and all the facilities that would save, actually would save them, a Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 33 motel room or a place that they would have to buy or rent--a room for the night. So that way they could come and use, sleep there, and save them that amount of money. Oil--lubricating oil--motor oil, I think, was, about, fifteen cents a quart. If I remember correctly, you could get a, if you bought enough oil and had your oil changed, you could get five quarts for the price of four and they [would] pull the car in over the grease rack and we'd change the oil for you for free. So probably, either sixty or seventy-five cents is what an oil change would cost you; and that included that oil and having the work done, too. We always liked to get oil changes because we got a commission on oil--we got no commission on the amount of gasoline that we sold but for every quart of oil that you sold, why, we, you would get a commission, so we very carefully marked down the oil that we were selling. If you thought somebody was coming in, or you knew that there was a regular customer coming in on a particular night, and they always would get an oil change when they would come in, why everybody would be looking for that person to pull in the driveway and try and get out and to service their car and try to talk them into the oil c;:hange. The old timers at the station, of course, had their regular customers and you didn't dare touch one of their customers--they'd come in and ask for a particular, either Bill Shaw or Bill O'Bierne or Casey, and that's who they wanted to service them. Particularly, if they were corning in for a grease job and an oil change, why they would ask for those people, and if they weren't there, why they'd drive away and come back when they would be there. It was a very carefully guarded source of extra money. One of the things that you always had to do, and there was a big sign up there, that if we failed to clean your windshield, why then you could get your purchase free. So, usually, you would go out, if you weren't really busy there would be two people go out to service every car. One person would go to the driver's side and find out how much gas they wanted and what kind and would start putting the gas in the car, and the other person would usually go to the radiator or to the hood of the car and open it up and check the oil--even without the people asking. The reason for doing this is that you hoped that maybe you could sell them a quart of oil. And if you did, why, okay, that was your sale--even though the other guy was putting the gasoline in the car, you got the oil sale. So usually you'd work in pairs. One time why one guy would start the gas and the other one would check the oil and then you'd switch on the next customer that would come in. Then one or the other of you would start cleaning the windshields as soon as you got that done. So, it was a nice working relationship with most of them, with competition for the oil sales, of course, because the commission was there. But then in general you worked in pairs and didn't have to worry about somebody slacking off very much. Tommy Courtney always went on the run. As soon as a car would turn in the driveway, why he would be out there almost before the car would get stopped because that was just the Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 34 way he worked all the time. A very good salesman. END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO Q. Carl, at the end of the last tape we were talking about some of your experiences between high school and college and in particular, about the Martin Oil Station that you used to work at at Ninth and South Grand so we'll pick up wherever you'd like. A. One of the most common forms of entertainment during the period of time that we've been going over--high school and so forth-~was, at least for the kids in our family, would be to go to a movie. And I guess that was probably the major form of entertainment for most children at that time. You, we've all heard of, people talking about the old-time serials and the Saturday afternoon movies. This was almost as much a part of our life as the present-day t.v. with the cartoons and this sort of thing because you did get to see the cartoons. There was ... the Empress Theatre was the closest one to our home. It was down at South Grand Avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth Street, and on a Saturday afternoon, you could go to the movie. It would cost four cents. You always got to see, oh, a movie, maybe it was a Tom Mix western or Hoot Gibson, or one of those type of a westerns which were some of the favorite fare. Then there was always the weekly serial. This would be Rin Tin Tin or Flash Gordon or, gosh--I can't think of some of the others right now--Tarzan of the Apes was one that was always a favorite. The place would just be full of kids because that's all that would go. You'd get to see the serial and probably maybe, fifteen minutes long at the most, and if you missed this week, why, if you remembered what was on last week and went next week, why you got to see enough overlap of each one of them so that you really didn't miss anything. So it had to be a fairly short skip--probably no more than fifteen minutes. Then the regular feature would be, probably, forty-five minutes to an hour. So you could go at one. o'clock or one-thirty, something like that and be out by three. And if we went, usually we didn't go on a Saturday afternoon because, so often, we were carrying papers, and, frequently wouldn't get home from collecting your paper route on Saturday morning unti.l about noon. Then by the time you had lunch and did whatever chores you had to do, you didn't have time to go to the movie because you had to go about three-thirty in the afternoon again, then pick up papers and deliver them that evening and finish up collecting on your route. One of the fringe benefits of being a paper carrier at that time, particularly if you paid your bill in full on Saturday night, was you would get a free pass to the movie--one of the downtown movies-and this pass was usually good at any of the theatres in the downtown area. There were quite a number of them. Once in a while if the very plush Orpheum Theatre was having something like a stage show,
Object Description
Title | Albright, Carl H. - Interview and Memoir |
Subject |
Aviation Depression, 1929 High Schools United States. Army Air Forces (WWII) World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--Europe |
Description | Albright, retired Air Force Lt. Col., discusses his career in the Air Force, aviation cadet training, European assignments and missions during WWII; return to U.S., discharge, and return to college; reenlistment, and assignment as a nuclear chemist; and retirement. He also discusses growing up during the Depression in Springfield and attending Feitshans High School. |
Creator | Albright, Carl H. b. 1921 |
Contributing Institution | Oral History Collection, Archives/Special Collections, University of Illinois at Springfield |
Contributors | Albright, Geraldine C. [interviewer] |
Date | 1980 |
Type | text; sound |
Digital Format | PDF; MP3 |
Identifier | AL15 |
Language | en |
Rights | © Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. For permission to reproduce, distribute, or otherwise use this material, please contact: Archives/Special Collections, University of Illinois at Springfield, One University Plaza, MS BRK 140, Springfield IL 62703-5407. Phone: (217) 206-6520. http://library.uis.edu/archives/index.html |
Collection Name | Oral History Collection of the University of Illinois at Springfield |
Description
Title | Carl H. Albright Memoir - Part 1 |
Rights | © Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. For permission to reproduce, distribute, or otherwise use this material, please contact: Archives/Special Collections, University of Illinois at Springfield, One University Plaza, MS BRK 140, Springfield IL 62703-5407. Phone: (217) 206-6520. http://library.uis.edu/archives/index.html |
Transcript | University of Illinois at Springfield Norris L Brookens Library Archives/Special Collections Carl H. Albright Memoir AL15. Albright, Carl H. b. 1921 Interview and memoir 5 tapes, 450 mins., 91 pp. Albright, retired Air Force Lt. Col., discusses his career in the Air Force, aviation cadet training, European assignments and missions during WWII; return to U.S., discharge, and return to college; reenlistment, and assignment as a nuclear chemist; and retirement. He also discusses growing up during the Depression in Springfield and attending Feitshans High School. Interview by Geraldine C. Albright, 1980 OPEN See collateral file Archives/Special Collections LIB 144 University of Illinois at Springfield One University Plaza, MS BRK 140 Springfield IL 62703-5407 © 1980, University of Illinois Board of Trustees Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright Memoir COPYRIGHT @ 1982 SANGAMON STATE UNIVERSITY, SPRINGFIELD, ILLlNOlS. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University, Springfield, Illinois 62708. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield PREFACE This manuscript is the product of a tape-recorded interview conducted by Geraldine C. Albright for the Oral History Office, Sangamon State University. This interview was conducted in October and November of 1980, primarily in the home of the narrator, Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Carl H. Albright. Geraldine C. Albright transcribed the tapes and edited the transcript. Lieutenant Colonel Albright was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1921. Remembrances about his life begin in Spri.ngfield with the Depression and continue through his cadet training with the early Army Air Corps. After a brief separation from the Air Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Albright continued what became a twenty-seven year career with the United States Air Force as a bomber pilot and nuclear chemist. Upon his retirement from the Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Albright returned to his native Springfield and is presently employed by the Department of Public Health. The interviewer, Geraldine C. Albright, is Lieutenant Colonel Albright's daughter-in-law and a graduate student at Sangamon State University. Readers of this oral history memoir should bear in mind that it is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, narrator and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. Sangamon State University is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for views expressed therein; these are for the reader to judge. The manuscript may be read, quoted and cited freely. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the Oral History Office, Sanga:mon State University, Springfield, Illinois, 62708. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Background Childhood Memories Carrying Papers Papa and the Depression Table of Contents Grade School Memories (Iles Grade School) High School Memories (Feitshans High School) Post-High School and Miscellaneous Memories College Memories (Western Illinois University) Aviation Cadet Training Program Examination Pearl Harbor Cadet Training/Army Air Corps Training Experiences Student Officer B-24 Transition Schoo]; Westover Air Base; New Art: News European Assignments Return to America More Reflections on Missions Air Force Discharge and Return to College Reenlistment in the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Testing Idaho and the Harmons California and Alaska: Assignment as Nuclear Chemist Japan Project Cloud Gap Air Force Retirement, 1969 l 3 8 12 15 21 29 38 39 40 43 52 53 56 65 70 72 75 79 80 83 85 86 88 Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright, October 7, 1980, Springfield, Illinois. Geraldine C. Albright, Interviewer. A. My name is Carl Albright. Date of birth is the first of; March, 1921. Place of birth was 1526 Loveland Avenue, in Springfield, Illinois. To the best of my knowledge, I was born at home. My mother did not go to the hospital for either my birth or that of any of my brothers or sisters. I have an older brother, and an older sister, one younger brother, and two younger sisters. Early life was in Springfield. Before the birth of my younger brother, my family moved to Rantoul, Illinois, where my father worked on a farm. We stayed up there for probably two years, I'm not really sure. My life in that area is made up primarily of stories that have been told to me rather than things I personally remember. I can vaguely remember living in the house. I know my older brother had a very, very bad cut on his leg on the side. He fell off of a fence when he was climbing on the fence as he should not have been doing, but did. Right now, I have, since the day it happened, a very large scar on the left foot. It was acquired when I was walking around in a pig pen and got tangled up with a piece of broken bottle. It never caused a problem and I certainly don't remember it; but I do know the accident happened. Upon a return to Springfield, we moved back into the house at 1526 Loveland Avenue; and my two younger sisters, to the best of my remembrance, were born there. We lived at that house until such time as I was in high school. I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school when we moved into the house across the street and down the block where my grandmother lived, my father's mother. This was after the death of my grandfather. The house was much larger. My grandmother could not move into our house and live with us so we moved into her house and lived with her rather than staying in our own house. We lived there until after I graduated from high school. During the senior year in high school, my father and mother and the three younger children moved to Taylorville. My older brother, my sister, and her husband, and I, stayed in my grandmother's house and I finished high school living there. About that time, this was in 1939, in January, and things were pretty bleak as far as jobs were concerned, rather than not doing anything, I started back to high school again even after graduating, just to take some additional courses, got an opportunity to go up to Caterpillar Tractor Company. I eventually acquired a job at Caterpillar. So I moved then from Springfield to Peoria and was up there from probably March of 1939 Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 2 until approximately September, yes, September or October of 1939, at which time they did me a favor and fired me. That fall, and by that fall our father and mother had moved from Taylorville back to Springfie. ld again, and I was living with them, for lack of anything more to do, my father and I shucked some corn together, we worked part-time jobs on farms together until December. Right about Christmastime, in December, I got a job with Martin Oil Company and worked with Martin Oil until the following September when I moved to Western Illinois University for college. This really takes care of most of the time from that point up unti.l I actually left home and really didn't return again as a part of the family unit as such in that they were at least helping to control my activities. Q. Was it Grampa Albright that died? A. Yes. Q. When he d:i.ed, do you remember anything about the funeral or how the family reacted? A. We can go back and fill in quite a lot of these details but I thought that for the beginning why we could at least get a kind of an overview at which point we can then go back and start filling in some of the spots. (clears throat) My grandfather died, I guess it was in 1935, or maybe 1936, I'm not real sure of the year, but for this purpose it won't make too darn much difference, my brother, my older brother, Charlie, was in the CCC camp [Civilian Conservation Corps] because he had gone out to Oregon and he was out there at the time that my grandfather died and he came back right about the time of the funeral or shortly thereafter-- the sequences are somewhat fuzzy. But it seems like not too far off from that time. I guess the thing I remember most about the time of my grandfather's death was the fact that he was at home. He had had a stroke and he had become paralyzed on the right side of his body, or at least partially so; and they had moved a bed out of the bedroom into the living room. He was staying in that room and it seemed to me as a child a little strange that they would move him out to that pla~e; but perhaps it was so that he could be more available. He could be around the family more for whatever comfort that would give him. The place where he died was in that living room. People came that I had heard my family talk about--my grandfather's sisters, cousins, that sort of person came out. Down around St. Genevieve, Missouri, if I remember correctly, that's where some of his family came from; and they were still living in that area. He had some relatives that lived in Jacksonville, and were in business there for part of the time as bakers. This was one of the very, very few times that I remember seeing those members of our particular family. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 3 The family unit would be considered fairly close because my grandmother's two brothers--one to the best of my knowledge was a bachelor, and the other one was either a widower, or he was divorced, and I think he was a widower--both of whom had lived with him [grtlndfather] after my grandfather's death, when we chose to move into grandmother's house and live with her and help take care of her, we had the added problem of what did we do with the two uncles? (chuckles) This was an additional breakup of that family unit and I don't think it's any more typical of a German family unit than any other particular nationality that the.y were this close. I think it was a matter of time and convenience and probably economics that they did stay together and managed to keep the family that way rather than to be spread around quite so much. The next thing, they decided that when grandmother died, and then trying to put that in line with this, you know it had to be before I graduated from high school, and probably about the time I was a junior or thereabouts, my grandmother died, otherwise, I'm sure that my father and mother would not have moved to Taylorville 11nd there would not have been room for all of the family in it. That's what we're talking about here: my grandmother, my father and mother, my sister and her husband at that time, could not have all been living in that house at that time so I know that she hadn't died by that time and it had to be after I met Liz because I think she remembers meeting my grandmother, so that was when I was a junior in high school. Going back to some early childhood experiences, and interesting things that I can remember, probably one of the most vividly remembered is helping my brother carry papers. He got a paper route right around the Loveland Avenue area from south of South Grand to just north of Laurel Street, from east of Eleventh Street to west of Fourteenth Street, so not quite a four block square area in there that he carried papers. I was about six years old when he got this route; and I remember helping him carry, or at least walking with him. I thought I was helping him, maybe I was, I was six years old. Rain or shine you'd go pick up the papers and carry them. If my brother and sister were gone for whatever reason, why somehow I would manage on a rare occasion to get around and deliver the papers. I'm trying to remember if I, yes, later I carried that route by myself, if I remember correctly, because my brother got a larger route that had a guaranteed wage--$2.00 a week so he took the new route and I and my sister carried the one around home [Twelfth] for a little while. I can remember carrying papers when after a while, if it were raining quite hard, why you got so you didn't care if there was a water puddle there. You were already wet so you'd wade through it instead of walking around it, which is not unusual for kids either (chuckles). l remember wintertime coming when your feet were so cold they would hurt. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 4 The kitchen range was what we used to heat the back part of the house and it was always fired up. One of the good things about that was usually, if this were the case you'd come in and take your shoes off and put your feet almost in the oven--it'd warm them up--it hurt-( chuckles) at least it got them warm in a hurry. Dry off your feet and socks ... Q. Was it a wood stove? A. No, most of the time in the wintertime we would burn the coal. Lots of time in the summer, what we would burn in them would be corn cobs--you'd go out to one of the elevators and pick up baskets and gunnysacks of corn cobs. The reason for burning these is they gave you a real hot fire and burnt very quickly. You could get the stove hot enough to cook a meal on and then they would burn out very quickly, so that the stove then would at least start to cool down. During the afternoon or in between meals, before you needed it. In addition the hot water supply for our house was the reservoir on the side of the cook stove--that's on the side of the kitchen range. We had running water :Ln the house but it was cold. The toilet facilities were down in the basement which mean that you had to go out the back door, down to the cellar door (laughs) into the basement to go to the toilet. It was almost as bad as going outside to the back door john. Q. Was it a regular toilet with a stool and all that but it was down in the cellar? A. Oh yes, it was just down in the basement, in a little room, probably, oh five feet by six feet square, that my father had quite obviously just built with boards--nothing very secure. You had a door on the front that closed; you were in there by yourself. Of course for the kids it was kind of scary to go do~ in a dark basement. The hardest part of going to the toilet at that time, particularly at night, was to get somebody to take the time to go down in the basement with you so you wouldn't be scared. (laughs) Usually, what you try and do is to talk your brother, or a sister, or a brother and a sister, to go down in the basement and come up with some sort of game to play while you were going to the bathroom--or maybe they had to go~ too. You could make it a community affair. You stayed down there with them. so it was a rather icky type of arrangement maybe than you would have today. Q. You didn't have electricity or anything down in the cellar? A. There was a light down there. It was a dirt floor; and we had at some time or other built a bin along one side of the toilet wall because it was cool, dark, and the moisture level was fairly constant. If we had a good crop of potatoes, sweet potatoes or anything like that, which we often would go out to an uncle's house and plant Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 5 potatoes with him at his farm out at New Berlin, and plant sweet potatoes as well, and if we were lucky and had a good crop, why you could bring a lot of those materials in and the bin was a good place to store them. They would keep most of the winter without too many of them rotting. If there were extra squash or pumpkins, something of that nature that was available that you could get when they were plentiful, you could put them down in there and they would keep very well most of the winter--you'd have them at least until Christmas. The other room in the basement was probably even more dark. The floor was about six or eight inches higher than the floor in the main part of the basement and again it was dirt. Back in there my father had constructed two racks that were hanging from the ceiling and were a little taller than a half gallon fruit jar--perhaps they were hanging eighteen inches from the rafters, or the floor joist really, and in those, why any fruits, vegetables or anything like that that Mom would can, that's where we always put those. We would go dowu in there, and if you had anything left over from the previous year, why you'd have to get in behind them and move all that forward, then put in this year's canning in behind that; and it was not at all unusual to have these shelves filled, which were probably, oh four to five feet across and probably nine feet long, and there were two of them. A few other interesting things that took place in the back room was if we would make sauerkraut, we'd make it and put it in a large stone crockware pot that would probably hold twelve or thirteen gallons. That would be covered over with cheese cloth and then a plate turned upside down on the cheese cloth and then a large rock that had been pretty well scrubbed would be placed on that to hold the thing together and keep it pressed down. After that got to fermenting, why, it didn't smell too badly down there for a while, then after a while you'd smell the very pronounced odor of the sauerkraut working and you knew it was there. Dill pickles ... if we could find cucumbers at a reasonable price, or had any luck in growing a crop of cucumbers, why always selected as close to the same size as you could get, and we would make dill pickles. Again we would put them in a large c;rock or large crockery jug and then line the jug with grape leaves that had been taken off the grape arbor in the back and washed, put a layer of cucumbers and a layer of grape leaves, another layer of cucumbers and all of this on up to the top until the thing was full, and then again, put a cheese cloth cover over it and an upside down plate and a big rock to hold the whole thing together. These. were very good. I used to go down there and steal one once in a while (chuckles) Also, one of the things that happened in that back room is if there was enough fruit available and enough sugar available, occasionally Dad would make a job of rhubarb wine. And so he always put his wine in that back room, because again the temperat1,1re, humidity was at Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 6 least constant or fairly so, and it was a good place for it to work. When it was ready to use, we were probably, as kids, introduced to rhubarb wine at sometime around ten years old or a little less than that perhaps, even, because it was not unusual for a glass of wine or a jug of wine to be brought up for whatever the occasion might be and being kids we always wanted a taste of it too--I'm not so sure we liked it as well as we thought we did (chuckles) . , . It was kind of an interesting place down there--a good place to go and play on rainy days, a good place to get out of Mom's hair whenever she couldn't stand us in the house anymore. With six kids roaming around in a three-room house, it did get a little tight. So even in the winter, if it was Christmas vacation times, that sort of thing, whenever you tended to be home, or all the kids tended to be home and time would be hanging a little heavily on your hands, why you'd go down in the basement on a nice dirt floor again. Down there, why you'd shoot marbles and have a good time. You didn't have anyplace else to go, or much else to do, so you could at least go down in there and play. The basement had another important feature, I guess, for my mom, in that in the summertime, she always had a lot of potted flowers out in the back. Amaryllis, Wandering Jews various and sundry kinds of flowers that they would keep or try to keep in the house through the winter. We had a rack made like stair steps, and before the first frost in the winter, why we always had to get the rack down into the basement and all mom's flowers moved down there so they didn't freeze. They were always set then at the west end of the basement close to one of the west windows where they could get quite a little bit of sunshine to keep them at least reasonably alive; and then we had to keep them watered down in there, but again it was a fairly easy job. You didn't have to water them too often. They didn't really lose water as rapidly as they would in a present day basement that was heated and that sort of thing because there was no heat down there--we didn't have a furnace in there at that time. Our wintertime heating in the front part of the house was with a coal stove and I can remember having the more familiar kind of a round heater with the mica windows on the front and you could see the coals burning in there. Sometime, I don't remember the time frame, probably when I was seven years old, maybe eight, somewhere along in there, we got a very, very heavy heater and I guess the thing must have weighed close to two hundred pounds because it was just all you could do for a couple of people to move it in and out of the house. It had ribs on it like ventilating ribs and with that heavy mass of hangar once it got hot it stayed and kept the heat for quite a long while. To protect the people from that stove, just to keep the kids from banging up against it and touching and that sort of thing, it had a porcelainized frame that fit around it and the top of it was open and then the lower part of the sides had air vents in it so that the cool air could come in at the bottom and the hot air Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl -H. Albright 7 would move out at the top. This would circulate a little bit of the air round in the house and again it was nice when you were close to it. Some parts of the room were not always as warm as they might seem to be but we didn't suffer. Again [it was] a good place to come in and kick your shoes off and put your feet up against the side of that and warm them up when they were cold . . . Some of the things you remember as kids were sicknesses and that sort of thing that would happen. Much in contrast to today's method of taking care of people that have diseases such as smallpox or chicken pox, mumps, measles, scarlet fever or whooping cough, any of those [was] you always knew when someone had them because they put a red quarantine on the outside of your house. Those who were outside had to stay out, and those that were on the inside had to stay in. I can remember some one of the kids, and I'm not sure who it was, it may even have been me, that had one of the diseases, and Mom had to take care of us. So to put us where we'd be warm, and she could watch us, she would take. two kitchen chairs and put the front part of the chair up against the wall with the back away from the wall and put some blankets on it, and thCJ.t's where you'd lay dowu. The purpose of putting the chairs thCJ.t way [we1s] so if you were squirming around too much you wouldn't fall off of the thing and on to the floor and then you'd be in the kitchen where she was and she could keep an eye on you. Probe1bly one of the most memorable times was when my sister had scarlet fever and my father and my older brother had to stay out of the house. They had been in the house when whichever one of us, my sister, I'm sure it was, was sick, or first became ill, and before they put up the quarantine sign, why the doctor chased them out and said, ''Well if you're going to stay in here you're going to have to stay, and if you want to get out, get out now, and then we'll put up the quarantine sign and you can stay out." So they stayed outside. Actually they stayed across the street with my grandmother. While the rest of the fe1mily, probably at least four other children at that time and my mother, were quarantined in the house for two, three, four weeks, whatever it was, I don't remember, but what makes it rather vivid in the memory is the fact that my father's only living brother was electrocuted in an accident while he was working. This took place while we were under quarantine--the rest of the family were under quarantine. It was kind of a memorable occasion. The only thing I understood about electrocution at that time was the fact that a lot of criminals were electrocuted, so it must be bad. It took quite a long while for it at least to come to my mind that, okay, this electrocution, there wasn't anything wrong with it. It was an accident, and it was then, as soon as you said the word electrocution, you ah:rays thought of punishment of a criminal rather than an accident happening. I guess it's a matter of connotation and knowledge of what the root words really mean more than anything else. It seemed like our family, our immediate family anyway, was always Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 8 on the short side of money. From the time I can remember, of course this, probably my most vivid memory, would start about the time of the depression--! would be about six years old or thereabouts. And I know my father always tried hard to work, [he] seemed to be always looking for work. Very frequently, he would be out of work and many, many times the major income for our family would be whatever, at least during and up until the time I was somewhere in mid high school, or maybe even a little bit later than that, very frequently, our major family income would be what mom would make doing washing and ironing for those who could afford somebody else to do it and what we would bringhome from our paper routes. During this time, for several years, my older brother, my older sister and I all had paper routes. We were all three of us carrying papers, and as it ended up, all six kids in our family at one time or another, and some of us, as many as three, sometimes only one, would be carrying papers from the time I can remember at six years old until the time that my youngest sister was out of school. Q. High school? A. Bigh school, I think she was carrying while she was in high school. Yes, because I carried while I was in high school, Butch carried, Marg carried, and took over a route of mine when I left, no, Liz took over my route. Marg, I guess, Marg and Butch, were carrying one at the same time and then sometime later, after I'd gone to Peoria, and Mom and Dad had moved back from Taylorville, why, Dorothy carried papers--so we all carried them at one time or another. END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE A. We can try to pick it up at the time after we were carrying papers (clears throat). Interesting things that happen when you carry papers are, I guess, almost legends. People that have had that experience, I gue.ss it's like most anything else, if something can happen sometime or other, it probably will. I can remember, during the very depths of the Depression, in which, again, we were quite poor, I guess, and weren't really sure of it, but we did manage to have enough to eat--no one in our family so far as I know ever suffered severely from hunger. I suspect that probably the.re were times when my dad would leave the house after having eaten breakfast and go looking for work, and probably didn't have very much to take with him, if anything. Of course, X didn't know this at the time, but it probably wouldn't have made that big an impression. I can remember, on various and sundry occasions, sometime during the week, collecting, perhaps a quarter from the people on my paper route, and stopping by a grocery store and buying whatever amount of hamburger that would buy, which probably, at that time, was two pounds or so. This would be of an evening, probably going home around five thirty Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl 1-1. Albright 9 or that hour. When we got home, if I had, or if other member~ of the family came home with meat, why that's what you had as meat for supper that evening. Again, I don't think we would have gone hungry; but we might not have had hamburger--we probably would have had something else. I remember one occasion--I'm not sure whether it thrilled my mother as much as I thought it should have or not--but I, it was her birthday, and I'd collected some money and scrounged up a little bit someplace else--wherever I'd saved it--and as a real big gift to her I think I bought her two and a half yards of material to make herself a dress. I thought I was being real nice and I don't know if she really (laughs) appreciated the additional work at that time or not because she was quite busy with a large family. I don't know if she really had much time to sew for herself or not but she did eventually make a dress out of it b0fore it was over. I thought it was a pretty good deal and maybe it wasn't. The paper route that I remember most carrying was over on the, at that time, far east side of Springfield. It started on the east side of Eighteenth Street and went from there clear on out to the east side of town. It was a very poor neighborhood. People were really hard pressed to get the twenty cents a week to pay for the paper. A lot of polored people lived in the area. Some of them were very, very nice people--as good as you'd ever find any place. Some of them were not the nicest sort of people, but then, the same is true for whites. At that time there was a saw mill on, just east of Wheeler Avenue, at about Kansas Street. It was always an interesting place to watch them work, for someone who wasn't at all familiar with saw mill operation. There would be one or two people there and, they would work, oh, very regularly for a period of time, and then, all of a sudden, why there would be hardly anyone around--or there might not be anyone there for days on end simply because they either did not have any logs to cut, or they had no one to buy what they did have cut already. They had huge piles of sawdust around there which they must have hauled away because they never burned it, as was the case with a lot of other saw mills that I've seen in various parts of the country since then. sawdust was a waste product that burned instead of used for whatever useful purposes it could be converted. I don 1 t ever remember that saw mill burning any of the by-products other than the first slab that was cut off the side of a log which had a lot of bark and really unusable wood in it. Why they would then cut that up into short lengths and either use it in their own stoves at home or sell it to somebody for a few pennies, probably, a cart load or whatever size you could haul away. There was usually a fair stack of it around so that you could get it. It wasn't at all unusual at that time, particularly when you would carry papers on Sunday morning, before most people were up, you would Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 10 very frequently see some of the more industrious people out going along the railroad tracks in that particular area--at that time it was the Illinois Central tracks--and picking up the coal that had dropped off the trains. They were hauling a lot of coal cars through that area. There was a long curve and frequently why, when the cars would get rocking on the curve, why some pieces of coal would fall off. It wasn't unusual to see people out there picking these up in a bucket to take them home. That may have been the only coal that they had--the only fuel that they had, or at least it was augmenting that which they could buy. So the earliest ones are the ones that get up early and get out there first and got the best pickings, or probably got it all, because you didn't see very much coal laying along the railroad track, it would be picked up too quickly. I remember one discussion with a customer, a Black man, and this took place right about the time that Mussolini had taken his legions into Haile Selassie's kingdom. We were discussing whether or not the Italians would carry the day or whether or not the native in, I can 1 t think of Haile Selassie 1 s land, it was ..• Q. Greece? A. No--it was Ethiopia--or whether the Ethiopians would manage to carry the day. This particular individual seemed to me like he had at least some ideas about it anyway. He said, well, that he didn't see how the Italians could ever take all of Ethiopia and conquer the land because they would, when they got into some of the desert areas, they would run out of water, because the Ethiopians would probably poison all the water holes. There they'd be~ you know, out in the middle of the desert and no where to go and the Ethiopians then would know all of the secret watering places. They could get to those and manage to save the day, which they didn't do. But, again, kind of a little strange some of the things that you can remember that did happen. Everyone asks me where the tattoo onmy left forearm comes from. And, when this took place, when I acquired it, I was carrying this paper route. It was a man who was not really very talented as a tattoo artist, but he was a tattooe.ranyway; and I think he owed me thirtyfive cents for papers that I had delivered to him. He had no way to pay me so he one day offered to give me a tl'ittoo for the thirty-five cents so we struck that bargain and so I still carry my thirty-five cent tattoo(laughs). One particular house out there, the man had quite a collection of not very good used cars; and I'm sure he was not any sort of a licensed dealer. Maybe he didn't even have to be licensed--if he had two cars you could open your own used car lot--and he had, oh, quite a number of them around. So rather than wax them what he'd do is he'd get a very, very thin oil, almost like a kerosene, and he'd go out and wipe all the dust off with a rag that v.:ras soaked in Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 11 this sort of material. It did indeed make them shine for a little while--they collected a lot of dust (chuckles) by the next day, but then they shined for a while. He had somewhat of a turnover in his cars because they would be around there a while and then they, that group, would move and then a new group would come in, so he was managing to sell some. Q. When Grampa was, well, what kind of an occupation did he ... If people asked him what he did, did he ever really have just one thing that he aligned himself with? A. Probably a farmer more than anything. I think that he would have been most happy if he could have really made a good living on the farm. I'm not always sure that this was my mom's desire. Maybe that's why it was very difficult for him to do that, or it may have been simply a function of the times that he did not have a farm. Trying to work on the farm for somebody was not a very lucrative type of an occupation. He could do most any kind of work. A very powerful man--probably six feet, twQ inches tall, would weigh around two hundred fifteen, two hundred twenty pounds and he was not fat [a] very, very strong man. He could do the kind of electrical work that would work in most houses or around most jobs or places of business at that time. I know that he put in, for example, gasoline pumps at a station and [would] do work like that. He could do minor plumbing. He did plumbing in our own house. So most any job that needed to be done, he was capable of learning it if he had any sort of an opportunity to learn it; but as a trade he didn't have one until, oh, after, 1940. He went to Rock Island Arsenal after the economy started to recover. At the beginning of the war period, they sent him to a machinist's school. He became then, a machinist and worked there for a year and a half or so, maybe, maybe as long as two years. At that time, Mom did not go up there with him because he actually went in as an apprentice-- to learn the trade; because they did need machinists so badly all over the country. Then he later came back from Rock Island and got a job at Allis Chalmers which he kept all during the war. [He] worked at that job until such time as he became sick and could not go back to work; but, I can remember very vividly when he worked for a local rose garden. [It] was out on south Sixth Street, and this was probably two miles, two and a half miles from where we lived. My dad would fire the furnace, fire the stoker, and then run the temperatures through the green house to be sure that it was proper. I know that he would, on occasion, shovel as much as eight or ten tons of coal into a hopper in his one twelve hour shift on a cold winter night just to keep the particular green house warm, to keep the temperatures where they belonged. Then they would also, although it was a stoker, you'd have to fill the hopper. He still Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright had to shovel it from the storage bin into the hopper and then you had to haul and get the ashes moved out of the ash pit. That and then run the temperature through the house about once an hour, so he was a busy man. I think [he] probably made twelve or fourteen dollars a week for this. 12 I guess what made it most vivid in my memory is that I can remember on occasion having to carry his lunch out to him. He -would leave home and didn't take his lunch with him for whatever reason, and then we'd have to take it out to him on occasion. It -was such a long walk out there and you'd wait for him to eat lunch or eat his dinner and then bring the lunch bucket back or just sit around -with him while he was eating. Then it was kind of a treat though to walk around through the green house with him and see the flowers and how they were being cared for. You'd walk into the gardenia house and it was a most delightful place with the very heavy smell of gardenias in there. Q. I remember reading somewhere where the men during that time really were ashamed if they were out of work or felt less manly. Do you remember your father ever talking with you about those kinds of values or encouraging you to better yourself so that you -wouldn't end up the same way? A. Yes, he insisted very much that we go to school. Of course~ he didn't finish high school, or he didn't finish grade school. But he was very adamant that we were going to go through high school. You could [not] get a good job if you didn't have a high school education~ and I think there was a very distinct attitude on the part of people, particularly that we.re able to work, that there ought to be a job for them some place. It was not at all unusual to have them, the father of the family, leave early of a morning, and maybe be gone all day, either looking for a job, or just staying away from [home] so that the kids wouldn't know that he wasn't -working. Somewhere in that period of tin1e, I remember my dad talking about a guy who was very, very poor--had to be--that they hired where he was working. I think at that time he was working for Sinclair Oil Company, at their fuel storage area at Ninth and South Grand. They hired this I!k'ln for a day. He came along looking for just any sort of a job--anything that you could get--if it were an hour's work, you took it, if it were all day~ you were grateful. If you could get a job for a week, why you were really one of the fortunate few. This man had come to work carrying a lunch bucket. When the other people sat down to eat lunch, he walked away from the group and sat down, kind of with his back to them. The men invited him over to eat with them; and he said no, he had his lunch--he'd just sit over there and eat it. They got a little suspicious about it and walked over to him and looked in his lunch bucket. What he had in his lunch bucket was potato peelings. The other men that had been working there on a more or less steady basis had sandwiches--whatever they would have Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 13 been. So they asked him, and he said, well, we had some potatoes left in the house this morning. My wife peeled the potatoes to cook for the kids and I brought the peelings with me. And that's what he had for his lunch. So it hurt his pride very much, enough that he was not going to sit down with the other men and eat. But they did manage to make him share a part of their lunch with him. But I think this is kind of indicative of what the times were there; but it was very, very hard on many people [and] not at all unusual to see people walking around with Adlai Stevenson shoes--that's the ones with the hole in the bottom of them--that you'd walked, just completely worn the sole through, and cut a piece of cardboard or fold newspaper and put it in the bottom and go to school. By the time you got back at lunch, why you had to put a new piece of paper in the bottom of your shoe because you didn't have whatever, fifty cents or a dollar, whatever it was, to get them half soled--probably not even that much--I suspect maybe closer to fifty cents. One time we got a basket of food from one of the government programs. It may have been around either Thanksgiving or Christmas. It wasn't unusual for those sorts of baskets to be passed any more so than it is today. But probably, well, the Horner Baskets, that people remember, the Horner Christmas Baskets and Thanksgiving Baskets. I suspect that it was probably around that time, and I think it bothered my dad very, very much that we had to take this, or that by taking it, why, we were much better fed for that particular holiday than we had anticipated being. I do remember, very clearly, for a number of years, at Christmastime, they would frequently ask the route carriers for the newspaper to accompany the men that were taking these baskets from the central location out into those areas that the carriers would know best so that you would be sure and find the right family for that particular basket. They would have a list of all of the people that were to get the baskets, and you would say, yes I know these people and they live here, and, this is that address, and then they would deliver the basket. We used to go out to the Department of Transportation garage at Third and Ash and they would have the trucks out there and the whole building--it seemed to me at least--at the time, that it would be lined with all of these tremendous baskets of food. Then you would load them on the trucks--the men would do the loading--and young boys like myself would, thought we were helping--and perhaps, maybe we were. We'd pick up a basket and slide it over, or pick it up and carry it if we could, and help them load the truck. Then you'd leave and be gone, oh, half a day or better, at least on a Saturday, delivering the baskets. This would probably be the Saturday before Christmas. I know that there were a lot of people that got those baskets. If they hadn't gotten them they--I don't know what they would have had for Christmas--probably very little. Q. The year that your family got the basket, do you remember how Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 14 you felt, or were you too young then? A. I guess, the best that I can remember is that I was really surprised. You know they had that large amount of food that -was packed into one basket. TI1ere was a canned beef product that I thought was pretty good, most of us liked, most of us in the family liked it pretty well. Maybe it was because we were hungrier than we thought, I don't know; but .I know my dad was never very enthused about it. He just--it just really bothered him tremendously. Q. You don't remember your feelings or anything? A. No, no, it wasn't, it didn't seem like, that we were ashamed that we got it; and yet after a while, you didn't go out and tell anyone that you'd received it. It was something that, okay, if your neighbors knew it, they knew it because they saw someone deliver it; but you didn't go out and say anything about it. Q. That was just kind of an unspoken sort of thing [that] you just always understood. A. Yes, well you didn't, and you don't--you didn't go around and say, well we delivered baskets to so and so, and so and so, if you were on the delivery end of these things when I was helping with that. So far as I remember, the time that we got that basket, I guess I wasn't really old enough to be helping deliver them; but you still didn't go around saying anything about that well you knew that so and so got a basket of food or you know somebody else did, or these people didn't. Sometimes, within the confines of your own family, why you would say, well I know that so and so's over there got a basket and they didn't need it nearly as bad as some other family and I can't understand why the number two family dldn't get one too. They may have later gotten one through some other source or something like that, but there was a lot of publicity given to the fact that these baskets were made available to the poor people. But there was also not a lot of conversation among the people that received it. They were extremely happy to get it because most of them were, I'm sure, were hungry. Maybe they were not starving--very few of them were starving--but I'm sure that there were items in the baskets, such as fresh fruit, that they probably had not had in several weeks. Turkey--who could buy a turkey? It was something you didn't have, only on very rare occasions. I guess the first turkey that we ever had, that I can ever remember our family having, was, oh gee, I must have been maybe five or six years old. We went over to my grandmother's for either Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, and I think it was Thanksgiving dinner, and she had a turkey. It was the most tremendous thing you ever saw. You know to a five year old kid (chuckles), a turkey like that is something Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 15 almost beyond belief. I realized at that time, or at least I thought I did, that I didn't like turkey as well as I did chicken because it was too dry. That may have been in the cooking as well as some of the other things. But we, it was kind of a consensus of opinion of the kids, that chicken was better than turkey. Perhaps it was cheaper too, I imagine (chuckles). Well our whole family. I guess one of the things we haven't talked about's school. The--all the kids in our family--went to school at Iles Grade School for either all, or most of their life. They all graduated from lles Grade School. We all went to Feitshans High School and we all graduated from Feitshans High School. And I guess as you go down the line, it was a little trying on the younger ones because many of the teachers that taught my older brother and older sister taught me; and they taught my younger brother and sister. So I guess by time the last one came along, why they knew the whole family, and they already had their mind made up about this particular one before they ever got through. I'm not • . • I think that's probably not true because ..• But they did know us all. There was no question about them knowing who the Albright family happened to be because we were always, there was always one of us in their class someplace up and down the line. And the oh . . And an 1nteresting, episode at grade school I, took place, when I was probably 1n the fifth or sixth grade [or] thereabouts. I was fortunate to skip a half grade 1n grade school but, they . . . What was much more interesting for me 1n the grade school line is that Mr. J. C. Gannon, who was the pr1ncipal of Iles Grade School during this time, called me into his office one day. Of course that was one of the things you were never--you were never called to the principal's office for anything good. But anyway, I was called into his office, and he said I need someone to ring the bells for me and do some odd jobs around here in the office and you have been recommended. Do you want the job? Well, a job was something that you took if some.body offered you (laughs), so I was really a big shot around school. I was--worked for Mr. Gannon--[!] had to get there early enough every morning to ring the bell for class to start; and then had to stay around the principal's office long enough to ring the tardy bell, so you were always tardy for class but you were--it was all okay--because you were working for the principal. I usually would leave class a few minutes early to get from whatever the room happened to be, down to the principal's office to ring the bill for recess; and then you'd stay--got to ring it to bring all the other kids back in and then you went to class. You repeated this thing in the afternoon. I think I worked fox Mr. Gannon, I think it must have been two years that way and .•• Q. Did he pay you for that? A. I, yes, he paid me something--1 don't know--it may have been two Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 16 dollars a month or something like that but it wasn't very much; but, gee whiz, I was really important! Not only did I have a job, but I worked for the principal! I had an in at the head of the school there--you know I was really in. And one of the other fringe benefits of this job, this, at the end of the semester, after all of the lost and found items had been lost and found and refound and lost again--whatever was left over--and gee whiz, every once in a while, you could find a good knife in there. If you found something in that lost and found bo;x after it had been in there for at least a semester, why, if I wanted it, I could have it. I think I found a good pocket knife or two in there, a few things like that--you know, treasures. But you could find always one glove, or one shoe, or one boot, or what have you. Coats were always claimed pretty rapidly, or jackets or sweaters, or anything of that nature. The small pocket items that kids are always losing, why there were always a treasure of those in there; and they never think to go to the principal's office and look for them because you just didn't go to the principal's office for anything hardly--reluctantly even when you were called. One of the, had to be the, bane of all mothers at that time, was boys about fourth or fifth grade or so, had to be the hardest thing in the world on clothing because we were always wrestling. You'd get to school early so you could wrestle before you went in to class. You wrestled at lunch time, on your way home, on the way back to school, recess. And it had to ruin clothes--not only tear them, grind grass stains, (clears throat) into them, all the dirt and so forth that at least energetic boys of that age can get into clothing. I often wonder how mom kept them clean and patched together as much as she did because I was forever wrestling. It seemed like that was the only thing you knew to do in high school or in grade school at that time. Had some . . . They did play ball occasionally on the playground; but if you had a wrestling team set up, why you wrestled, whether 1lnything else was going on or not. And I know Mom used to raise all kind of hell whenever that would happen, you'd come home with [a] clean shirt that she'd put on you that morning and it was ruined by the time. you'd come home for lunch. Q. Was this just playful or . A. Yes, it was just play. It was a form of play. Girls would skip rope and play hopscotch; and in the, well, early in the Spring, you always played marbles. Then a little later on, as soon as it got where you could be out long enough and the ground wasn't completely sloppy and wet, why then you'd wrestle. The greatest thing in the world, probably, was to come out of the school building in the wintertime and there would be a slide. A kid, the first one at school of a morning, would start making a slide; and, by the time the school bell rang for you to go in, why Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 17 there would probably be a slide--maybe as long as twenty feet--and it might be a foot or foot and a half wide. It would be just a sheet of ice and it would be on the sidewalk and the kids would just take a turn. There'd be a long line. You'd get in it and you'd get back away from the slide and you'd take a run and see who could slide the length of it. If you could slide the length, why then that'd help lengthen it a little bit. More kids would fall. Soon as you--it didn't make any difference--you'd take your turn sliding and you'd get back in the line and off you'd go again. Very few people would bring sleds to school. You had no place to keep them. They didn't like to have them around because, well, there was just no place to keep them. They would either get broken or somebody would get too many kids on them or something like that and then they'd have an unhappy child because his sled was no longer usable--it had been broken with half a dozen kids piled on it. But the slides were always there, it seemed like, all winter. END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO A. We'll try to pick it up from the winter~ime and the sliding at grade school and see if we can remember some more of the things that occurred. It was always one of the things that you had to do--you bought your books in those days. You would always have to find some place that would sell you a used book. Very, very, few of us could afford to buy new ones, so you always bought a used one. And pencils-you had to furnish all your own equipment. We used to go to Ratz' s store. [It] was about a half a block from school, and you could buy brown wooden pencils for a penny a piece. They had a little conical-shaped eraser in the end of them and, as that eraser wore down, you could put that end of it in a pencil sharpener and erase, or trim off the end a little bit, so you could get some additional eraser. The pencils weren't very good but they only cost a penny so that's what most of us had to buy. The books, again, like I said, we always hoped--or I'm sure that Mom and Dad always hoped--that they didn't change books this year; because if they put a new book into the system, then there were no used books available. You had to go out and buy a new one; and a new book might cost all of two dollars or something like that; whereas, you could buy a used one for, I would suppose, anywhere from twenty-five to seventy-five cents--! don't really remember how much the prices were. One book that you usually got that was a real~ real good one--and parents didn't mind paying too much for a real good book--was your Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 18 speller. Because you could use your spelling book for several years, up through, most of it all the way through grade school-~from the time you started having spelling until you got out of grade school-so you always got a good speller. It didn't help you learn any better; but you had a good speller, so it'd last you the whole way through. Most of the tablets that we used in those days were like the yellow steno pads that we use in offices nowadays. You could get a white, vcry,very, poor grade paper tablet that was somewhat cheaper. The teachers didn't like you to use that because they liked for you to use the yellow--it was easier on your eyes when you were in school~for whatever, if it were so or not, I don't know, but then that was at least the excuse that you should use the yellow tablet; and we all had those. You could get a spelling tablet. It was a special little tablet with, I think, twenty or twenty-five lines on it. You always had either ten or twenty spelling words as your lesson and then that lesson might be for a week. When it came to the end of the week and you had your spelling test, why, you always had to write it in the spelling tablet. This was about the same length as a regular tablet, but probably four inches wide--just long enough to write a word in most of the words weren't terribly long, it didn't seem like. I'm trying to remember our, always remember the English books that we used in grade school. They were Our English. Very few of them after more than two weeks in school read Our English--they mostly read Sour English (chuckles), which may be a reflection on the teachers, I'm not sure. But there were always, someone had always penciled in the S in front of the our for a sour. I can't think right now of any more interesting things, or any really very important things, that might have happened in grade school with possibly one exception. When I first started in grade school, I met a boy there whose name was Harry Patia. Harry and I went all through grade school together, all through high school together. We started college together; and it wasn't until I went into the Air Force, and Harry went into the Navy, that we were separated in school. Today~ I still bowl with Harry; and it's been a friendship that has carried on since. we were both about six years old, which is kind of neat, really, in many ways. Interesting things that, when talking about Harry, that would come up, is that close to his house was--and I can 1 t remember the people's name now--and I intended to ask Harry about it today, were, was a family that had an ice house. They sold blocks of ice. Very, very few people at that time had refrigerators. It was very frequently the job of a couple of the younger children in the family to take a wagon and walk the half a dozen blocks or more from our house over to the ice house and pick up a twenty-five pound chunk of ice, cover it with paper, or a gunnysack, or something like that, and haul it back home so that you could put it in the refrigerator--or into the Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 19 ice box really--so that you would keep the butter cool, and the milk cool. Any of the other foods that were left over why, you tried to keep them in there. It was always nice to be able to go to the ice box and chip off a chunk of ice and make a lemonade or ice water or something of that nature. If you were going to have company in for Sunday, you always managed to get an extra block of ice and tuck it into the ice box someplace so you could use it to make ice tea or lemonade. Probably the unhappy time of the day for Mom was when the ice, the drip pan under the ice box, would run over. Somebody was supposed to have emptied it and didn't, and it would very promptly be forgotten until you were wading through the water on the floor. That wasn't where most of the water came from--by the time you try to slide the brimming pan full of water out from under the ice box why, then, more of it would slop out and you 1 d e.nd, usually end up mopping about half of the kitchen floor--probably not very well, but at least it had water on it (chuckles). Going along with the seasons, and summer into winter, why your biggest job then, and it was always one that most generally the boys in the family had to take care of, was being sure that there was kindling split and in the house in the evening; that the coal buckets were filled so that you'd have enough coal to bank the fires for the night; and usually, you didn't haul the ashes out. Once in a while~ if it was extremely cold and you had a lot of ashes, why you might haul them out of an evening; but usually, you would haul those out of a morning. Again~ by the time you'd bank the fires for the night in the heating stove and in the kitchen stove-~the range--you'd used up most of the coal that you'd carried in--a couple of buckets--and so then in the morning, when Dad would get up and get the fires going again, he'd take the ashes out of the stoves and put them in the coal buckets. Then we'd haul the coal buckets down to the alley and dump the ashes and fill them with coal and bring them back to the house so Mom would have coal for the day. If you were lucky, you got kind of chunk-sized coal so that it was easy to handle. Well, 1t wasn't really easy to handle because sometimes it would come i_n big chunks. But i_t was a lot better fuel because you w-ould break i_t up then into smaller pieces so that you could get it into the coal buckets and haul lt to the house. Then you'd always bring a couple of big chunks into bank the fire with, if you had it. If the economy was really low, and you d1dn't have any money at all 1 and you were really trying to skimp down to the last penny, why you would probably buy, I think they called it "mine run coal" at that time. This had a lot of real trash in it--a lot of dirt or coal dust. It wasn't hard to shovel into the buckets, but it didn't burn very long-it didn't last very long. It was really, probably in the long run, a more expensive type of fuel to use than the lump coal. So if your dad was working, and we had a few extra bucks, why, that's where we would probably spend some of it would be to buy a bett~r grade of Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 20 coal, because I'm sure he was well aware of the fact that he wasn't getting very much for the money that they were spending for that low grade coal. Well, we'll go on to ..• Q. Grade school went through what, eighth grade? A. Eighth grade at that time, yes. I didn 1 t start to kindergar~~n and a lot of kids did not start kindergarten at that time. A few years later when, probably my youngest sister was going through grade school, why, they had changed the rules and you had to start in kindergarten. But we went from eighth grade, I mean from first grade through eighth grade in grade school. Usually, at that time, until you were about the fourth grade, you didn't change rooms. Most generally you had one teacher for most of the subjects. After you got around the fourth grade, maybe into the fifth grade, if you changed or had different teachers, the students would stay in the rooms and the teachers would change rooms. Then I guess in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, maybe in the fifth, I don't remember, but at least in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, why you were in upper grade school, and you got to change rooms, which meant that when the end of class came, you got up and you marched out of the room in a line in a file. All of th~m that were going in one direction would be on one side of the hall and all of them going in another direction would be on the other side of the hall. The teachers would usually be in the center to see that there was no fighting or any of that sort of thing and you moved as a class. You would just walk down the hall to the whatever the next room was and then go into that particular class and the teacher would be there waiting for you. One of our, I'm trying to think what to call her, she wasn't a bad teacher, she was a very good teacher as a matter of fact, but I guess one of her jobs was to monitor the kids coming into the school up the stairs and heading into their homerooms. And it wasn't at all unusual to see her standing at the end of the hall over the stairwell where she could see from essentially the time you walked in from the outside. In that same stairwell, you could go down into the basement where the lavatories were and there was a big playroom down there and that's where you went to eat lunch. When it came time for school to begin, why you'd look up there and she would be standing at the head of that watching the stairwell with a long paddle in her hand. One of the things she was not averse to using was the paddle. I think she probably had a whole lot worse reputation among the kids than she really was because the paddle was not spared but it was not used to near the extent, I think, that most students would have thought that it was. But you could see her standing up there every day with her paddle in her hand. But the very difference in teachers . • • The one that was monitoring a same stairwell at the other end of the, or a similar stairwell at Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 21 the other end of the building, would be standing down there without the paddle and no problem at all--no more fussing or fighting with kids coming in her door than there was with the ones coming in the door where the teacher with the paddle would stand. The girls had a playground on one side of the school and the boys had a playground on the other. When the bell rang, particularly in the morning, and after the lunch break, for classes to start, if the girls were not close to their room, to their end of the building, to come in through the door that they were to come in, then they had really to hurry and run and get around there and get into that door because they were not supposed to come in the door where the boys did. If the boys were, it was the same thing for them. They'd had to hurry around and come in their door. I guess the lady with the paddle was always standing at the boys' end rather than at the girls' end (chuckles). The playrooms down in the basement of the school were separated. The boys played in one end and the girls played in another. You could, they had around the playroom, there were benches up against the wall, and if you carried a lunch to school, why then that's-particularly in the wintertime where you would have to go and eat lunch. Of course it was used much more so in the wintertim~. _ it would be in the summer. I don't remember [being] restricted to the use of the playroom in the summer or in the warm, nice weather; but it may well have been, because no one really went down there during the nice weather during recess or the lunch period. Our family only lived three blocks from school, so it was cheaper and more convenient really, for us to come home for lunch. We would leave school, hurry home, and Mom would have whatever lunch w-as available. You'd eat lunch and then get back. Seems like vte had about an hour to do this, which, apparently was ample time. With there always being at least two of us in grade school, why--and sometimes three--in the same grade school, why vte would come home because Mom could feed all of us probably for the price of the lunch--fixing or packing a lunch for one. In high school, when [I] first started over to Feitshans High School, part of the building that currently exists was there as the whole building. There were a lot of portable buildings. These were just wooden school rooms--reasonably weather tight--I don't remember them being unnecessarily cold or anything of that nature--that were moved in and set on make-shift foundations around the school to accommodate the growing classes. Then, as they increased the size of the school, why they gradually moved all the portable buildings away. I'm sure that they're still using similar buildings at schools, even today, in which they set up the temporary classroom to meet class requirements and [accommodate] the student population. Your high school experiences were really new from when you first Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 22 started there as freshman. You had to make up your own mind or with the advice of, a counselor, or homeroom teacher, probably a--mare a homeroom teacher than anything else at that time--and with a little bit of help from your parents, and probably, a good bit of encouragement from one of your grade school teachers or some of your grade school teachers, at least, as to what type of a course should you really pursue. You didn't really have to take algebra. It was one of the courses that you were interested in, dreaming about a college education or going to any school after high school, you needed to have the mathematics. So they did encourage a lot of students to take the algebra courses and to pursue a college preparatory type of a curriculum. Other students that were not really prepared for college--or maybe their grade school teachers didn't think they were capable of handling college work--would be directed into, perhaps easier, courses, and even more into the manual arts. We had oh, a general, manual arts class in which you were introduced to tin smithing. .. One of the things you'd build would be a little, maybe a-funnel, out of light-gauge metal, a flour scoop or a sugar scoop, and these sorts of things. It would teach you the basic principles of tracing the pattern, cutting the metal, folding the edges so that they would interlock, and then use a locking tool and seal that seam down and then solder it with a soldering iron, a gun. You would have a large, heavy iron that you'd heat it a gas, [a] little gas furnace, and then you would use that to finish off the .. Actually, more like kitchen gadgets and usable items. Then there was another portion of the time that you would use heavier gauge metals and make things like a garden trowel. You'd take a piece flat iron and cut it, shape it down to a point, sharpen it, then actually bend it so that it would have a, kind of a scoop, or a semicircular shape to it, take a piece of round iron rod, cut it to length, and bend it in a shape so that whenever you had the handle in your hand,your hand would clear the ground if the, if the scoop part of the trowel was on the ground. It also introduced you to simple DC electricity--you'd wire a doorbell or learn how a flashlight would operate and, (I'm] trying to remember one other area that we . . . seemed like there were three sections of that. The mechanics end of it would, would logically be the other thing that you would learn. I guess maybe that was it--you ~ould learn to use pulleys, and why you got more mechanical advantage if you put three loops of rope around a set of pulleys and tried to lift a heavy weight as compared to one or why you would, if you wanted to move a heavy object, you would move the fulcrum of a pry bar much closer to the weight and then your weight and then your weight would give you a much greater mechanical advantage. You 1d learn to turn mechanical advantage and I doubt if very many of us remember it as such, but you did really start to pick up many things that were quite useful to, in a, vocational type of a way. I think that probably the program basically was for that purpose--to introduce--a lot of the students to those types of endeavors so that they would know Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 23 whether they might like to go into electricity more than into soldering or into mechanics or something of that nature. I know that this took place in our freshman class. We ... I don't remember when it was [that] probably Mom threw away the last one of the sugar scoops or flour scoops that she had around the house that Charles or Butch or I had made while we were in high school. There was a requirement for English. Everybody had to take English whether you liked it or not. You had to take a certain amount of physical training and physical education. One of the things that it wasn't too terribly unusual to see was some of the kids there out on the gym floor playing around in either their sock feet or barefooted because they didn't have tennis shoes, You were all supposed to have tennis shoes but some of them couldn't afford it, so what were you going to tell the kids? Now if they said, well, I got one pair of shoes and that's it--they may have been able to talk--some of them may have been able to talk their parents into buying one pair of tennis shoes and they wore them outside and then into the gym as well. So they were, they had tennis shoes. But a lot of people wouldn't go this route, so they were out there playing in their sock feet. We had, in the manual arts department of the high school, a printing class in which you went in to learn how to set type. God, remember, [I] can't remember what they called the type holder now, but you had, the type would be in small individual characters in a case, and you would have to pick them out of the case and set up your work projects. Also had mechanical drawing, and wqqdwo_1;~.. To me, wQodwoTkine; _ class was always a much more. interesting one and I enjoyed it a whole lot more. Your first introduction to ¥~odworking. in high school, what you got to do in the introductory cl~ss depended upon some of your work in grade school. Because in the seventh and eighth grade in grade school, one year we would have to, one afternoon a week, we. would have to go to a different school. I think in the seventh grade we. took a mechanical drawing type of a course; and in the eighth grad~, we actually got to go into a woodworking class. There you learned what a plane was, and a sander, and how to use a square to make a board square, a level, and so forth. So if you had this bit of background in woodworking, why then when you were, went into high school, you could actually start making something. What you had to do was to get a rough piece of lumber, smooth down the sides, the flat plane, the broad side of the thing, and get [it] nice and level so your teacher, who was a real craftsman, was satisfied. If you didn't satisfy him, you might start with a three-quarter inch piece of board and it might be planed down to (chuckles) less than a halfinch by the time you got both sides of it so that they were nice and true and flat with a plane so that he would accept them as, the fact that, okay, now you knew how to use a plane and use it properly. Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 24 Then your next task would be to square the edges of those boards-again using a plane--so that they could be glued together. The glue pot was always a very fishy smelling thing because it, the glue, would come in a kind of a translucent, amber-colored sheet of dry glue really, and this would then be broken up, placed in the glue pot and heated. The glue pot was kept hot all the time, with a little bit of water to keep it fluid. When you were ready to glue your boards, why you got the boards all lined up, had your clamps together, had your blocks on the end of the boards so that you didn't mess up the good edges that you had just fixed, and then you would take it up to the, where the glue pot was, and glue the edges and slap it together and put the clamp on it. You couldn't use that board for at least twenty-four hours until the glue had a chance to set. A lot of those pieces that were glued together are still holding now. There's that one octagonal shaped table at our house, is one that I glue.d together. Charlie made a cedar chest that was, so far as I know, he still has it in his house today. A real craftsmanlike job had to be done on these things. Mr. Krebbs, the woodworking teacher, was, a tyrant in many ways (laughs)-[ he would] scream and yell like mad because things weren't done the way they should be; but when you finished the project, it was some-thing that you would really, [be] glad, and proud to take home--you could say, by gosh, I did it--it's mine. It was a very, to us, at that time, an extremely well-equipped woodworking shop--there were three lathes, I think, and a wood turning lathe, a band saw, a planer, an edging planer, and a table saw. You had to be . . . No freshman ever got to touch any of the mechanical equipment--this was all for sophomores, or juniors. Freshman--you couldn't touch it--you just stood there and watched. You did all of your planing and so forth with a hand plane but there are, no telling how many pieces of furniture still around in the city of Springfield that were made in those woodworking shops that are really still very, very fine pieces of furniture. You used the best walnut in the world that you could find. Probably the highlight of the woodworking career was whenever you had your project all together and you were ready then to finish it. You could go--there was one, area--a different room, a separate room-that was set aside. You would take your materials in there after you had sanded them and run the steel wool over them to get the wood itself just as smooth as it could be. You'd wipe all the dust off of it, then you'd take it into the finishing room. That's where you would fill it, stain it if it needed a little bit of staining, and then varnish it. Mr. Krebbs was extremely particular about how you went into the finishing room because he didn't want any dust in there. When you finished and had that final varnish coat on your piece of furniture, it ought to shine like glass because that was the Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 25 only way it was right. (chuckles) I would say that, at least on some of the items that I made in the shop, I know that they had at least four coats of varnish that were on them. You'd put a coat of varnish on it, let it set, and get nice and dry and then you would take a piece of fine steel wool and go over it and smooth out that varnish coat. You might even take a pumice stone and oil and rub it down so that it was nice and smooth. Then you•d put another coat on it and you'd repeat thi.s process until Mr. Krebbs was satisfied that that coat was just exactly what it ought to be. Then you would work it down with a little bit of linseed oil and a very fine--just a little bit of pumice in there--to take any shine off of it, or glitter off of it. Then, when you were through, it would have a nice, soft, satiny shine to it. It was a real project--it was a real good piece of work when you came out. I don't talk very much about my period in print shop because the printing instructor and I didn't get along very well. I didn't really enjoy mecha.nical drawing. So, I took what I thought I had to in those areas, to get into the woodworking shop and to be able to continue what I wanted to. What I thought I liked to do in woodworking, which was really much more interesting to me. In the area of classroom studies, it's kind of interesting to look back at some of the people that we met, and some of the people that we knew at the time. One of the good teachers that we had, one of the enjoyable teachers that we had at school, was Carl Wilson, who later was in the State Department of Education's office, Clyde McQueen~ who was one of our teachers there and was later the County Superintendent of Schools~ [a] very nice man. As a matter of fact, when we came back to Springfield after I'd retired from the Air Force, Clyde McQueen was one of the people that I went to looking for a job. He almost had me a job down here but some guy wouldn't take his word for my capabilities and he couldn't get in touch with me so he wouldn't hire me without seeing me and talking with me. So, I gu~?.ss that ended my career teaching in Springfield. Charlie Kenney, who's a lawyer, in Springfield today, was one of our teachers in US Government and History. When I was in high school, Charlie Kenney was still going to Lincoln Law College in Springfield. He hadn't quite finished his law degree yet. He's a very good friend, even today. I know him and he's in our Optimist's Club. Those are kind of unique friendships-at least it seems so to me--that were formed at that time, and are still viable today, when I can see any of those people and still -- talk with them on a very, very friendly basis. END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE Q. Carl, we were talking some about some of the people you'd met in high school that you are still friends with today and some about your woodworking classes on the last tape and I'm wondering if maybe you Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 26 have some other things to add about your high school years? A. Continuing to, in the vein of talking about some of the instructors that I knew in high school, and Charlie Kenney, of course, with his background in law, was an extremely effective teacher in American government, in American ldstory. It was always his unique way of teaching that if you asked a question, he would most generally tell you where you could find an answer and tell you to go look that question up--or the answers to it--and then bring it back to class and they would discuss it. If you got any misinformation any place down the line in your research work, he would very quickly get it straightened up for you, so there was never any problem in your mind about whether or not he knew the answer. He was trying to, at that time, create within the students, I'm sure, the desire to go look, to use the library, to do your own research, rather than to have a teacher stand up front and parrot out the information that is already in their brain. It's so easily forgotten that way. If you go to the library and look it up for a little while, or spend a few minutes with a topic, then at least you get a lot more out of it and probably find out a ~1ole lot more and remember much more in the long run, than you would if he just told you the answer. The other unique mark of Charlie Kenney is you never had a question about what was wrong or what corrections were made on your paper. He always used green ink. Everything that he marked on your paper, any note that you would get from him, was always written in green ink. Charlie Kenney still used green ink today in writing notes or making comments and so forth on any sort of written matter-~particularly in his law practice. He used green ink so you knew Charlie had been around if he's written on your paper. One man that I owe a great deal to was my chemistry teacher in high school, John Hillemeier. I enjoyed the sciences very much, and took biology under Mr. Rugg. He and I were very good friends as well as [having a] teacher/student relationship. When I got into chemistry Mr. Hillemeier was a very young, and what I thought, at least was a very handsome young man at the time, and an interesting teacher to me. He made chemistry a real challenge and a real part of what was to be my future. He opened a whole new area of knowledge, or lack of knowledge, that I had. So I took chemistry under him and then worked for him, I guess, the following year, as a laboratory assistant or [I] would come in and help him in his lab work with the new classes as my time would permit. He was a very good friend of mine at the time; and, if l'd been a little more courageous or maybe not so naive, he would probably have gotten me into Wast Point Military Academy. At that time, Mr. Rillemeier was a major in the Army Reserve. This, of course, was about 1937-1938, perhaps. Some rumblings of the future were beginning to make themselves heard. He talked with me at quite some length about going into West Point. He got a bunch of books from West Point showing what the entrance exams were, and went over those with me to Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 27 some extent, and tried to convince me in many, many ways that this was something that I should do--something that he felt I had the capability of doing. He, at least on two or three occasions said, if you want to go to West Point, don't worry, I can help you get an appointment. Well, at that point in my life~ to go to West Point was beyond the wildest dream that a poor kid would ever have--who could go to West Point? Someplace along there I read in the book that you had to have, I don't know, maybe, five hundred dollars to start because it took you that amount of money to get to school and to have some initial outlay for uniforms. This would all come back to you, but who in the world had five hundred dollars? Where could you get that amount of money? It was just unbelievable. And, I just-I was scared. l wouldn't do it (chuckles) because, part of it, I was afraid. I just knew that this would never be something that I could accomplish. The unfortunate thing that happened there is that shortly after Pearl Harbor, or right about that time, anyway, Mr. Hillemeier was called on, back to active duty with the Army. He was sent to the Phillipincs and became a prisoner of war of the Japanese and later died while he was a prisoner of war of the Japanese. And, so, to the best of any information that we were able to find out, why, he did die on the Bataan Death March, or at least that's where I think he died. But, anyway, he was the man that got me interested in two things-chemistry and the military. So, he was, and still does, hold kind of a special place in my memory as someone that I would like to have known a whole lot longer than I did. Oh, interesting incidents that happened in high school or things that kids would do is we--Harry Patia and Freddie Pritchett and myself were good friends; and [we] probably had a certain reputation around school of being the ones that were always doing something-maybe not bad--but at least we were always bugging people. We have, on occasion, gone down to the, in the wintertime gone down to the dean's office and, eventually talk the dean into excusing us for an afternoon so we could go out and shovel snow and make a quarter or a half a dollar or something like that. Then, before we'd leave the school the first person we'd ask if we could go out and shovel the walk would be the dean and we'd only charge him fifty cents or something like that to get his walk shoveled. Once in a while he would let us and sometimes he wouldn't; but we were not above doing something like that. The high school choir under Miss Curry, Catherine Curry, was kind of an interesting group of people. Again, Harry and Freddie and I were in it. Fred Fromm is another fellow that was in the choir with us. Herb Havenar, Dorothy Sullivan is one of the girls, Pope, yl?.s, Jane Pope was the other one and the girl that Fred Fromm married was, yes, Florence Biederman. I guess I don't know whether any of those people are still around Springfield, with a few exceptions. Dorothy Sullivan is still in town. Harry and I, of course, are here. Fred Fromm was, may be dead for all I know. I'm not sure; but anyway, we had a good Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright time in high school. It was very enjoyable. A nice group of kids that really didn't get into too much trouble, but then they had a lot of fun, too. 28 Academic-wise, probably one of the smartest young [men] in our class was a young man by the name of Leo Povse. He was a neighbor of ours, as well as a classmate. If you had to compete with somebody from a scholastic standpoint why, usually Leo Povse was the one that you had to come out ahead of if you were going to be number one. He was, and to my knowledge still is, an extremely intelligent person. Someplace along in high school, the American Legion gave an award for scholastic ability and I was the person--one of the people--that was nominated for that. Someplace around in our collection of junk I still have a large bronze medallion that was given that night. [It] was a very shiny night for me, it seemed, because, [it was] one of the earliest times that I can remember really going out to someplace. and having a dinner--a banquet type of a dinner--and it was sponsored by the American Legion. Q. What kinds of feelings do you remember having? Was Leo involved in this kind of thing, or .. A. No, I don't remember Leo being involved in that particular one. I was, I know, very surprised that I was the one selected for that particular award. I guess, scared like most children or young people would be about something of that nature; and yet, excited about it, that, okay, you know, well really, what does this all mean to me? Some of the young people that I have contact with today would have been about that age or, the same age that I was at that time, [and] how much, much more mature [they are] than I was and [how] much more at ease in a public situation, [they are] particularly when you compare the way they handle themselves in such things as the oratorical contest and that sort of presentation. They were very mature and that would have scared me completely to death at that time. I don't know whether I would have been able to handle it or not. One of the things that didn't come up [was] that I did [not] have to make a speech or anything like that. Probably all I had to do, if I remember, was to get up and say, you know, thanks, I'm glad to get it and sit down and wonder if I'd said something wrong. I guess during high school I had quite good grades; [I] didn't have any problem with most of my studies. I ended up, I think, fourth or fifty scholastic-wise in my high school class and would have been eligible, I'm sure, for some sort of scholarship assistance had I known such things were available. My graduation from high school took place at mid-term--mid year--(clears throat) and so after graduation, why we--that's where we had no jobs--we had nothing specifically in mind to do so we . . . quite a lot of us would always come back and take a post-graduate course. That's really what I Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 29 started right itnmediately after high school graduation. One of the other people that I met in high school when I was a junior, was a girl that transferred from Springfield High School, and recently moved into the neighborhood. I guess I thought she was pretty cute because I started chasing around after her and eventually started going with her and finally married her and 11m still ma.rried to her. That was Mary Elizabeth Howard. Since those days, why we've had a lot of fun, a lot of traveling, and done many things that we--probably neither one of us I know that I never thought we would do. [We have] seen many places that we never would have expected to see together, or alone--at the time when we first met. Liz's relationship with Harry Patia has always been kind of an interesting one to me. Quite a lot of competition between the two of them, really. Good friends, I think with a very competitive spirit of both of them. They get along, at least--at least, tenuously (chuckles). Q. They're competing for you, then? A. I don't know whether they're competing for me or just competing against each other--I think that's it more than anything else. They have been friends even as, ever since, really, the group of us have been together. Now the relationship between Liz and the other one of the three--Harry, Freddie and I--her relationship with Freddie was, considerably different. They were very good friends, not the competitive feeling between the two of them as there was between Liz and Harry. So today we still keep in touch with Freddie on occasion, although he's in Florida now. Oh, following high school, as I said, it was not unusual for the students to take a post-graduate course which meant that all you were doing was coming back to, or going back to high school and picking up some class that you think you would enjoy taking and just taking it for fun, which is really, I think, a very nice way to do something. You're not really competing for anything, you're just doing it because you want to. [I] don't even remember what courses I started to take at that time; but then, somehwere along in there, probably February or so, of 1939, I took a trip to Peoria, to Caterpillar Tractor Company. At that time they were interviewing high school graduates for their tool and die making apprenticeship course. I went up to Peoria and took the test for this particular apprenticeship endeavor and passed the acceptance test for it. They later hired me. I forget, this must have taken place probably in March or thereabouts. So that meant that I had to leave Springfield and go to Peoria to work. My first few weeks up there--probably the first eight weeks or more-was not an apprentice program. It was working in their chemistry laboratory. So maybe some of Mr. Hillemeier's background was already Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 30 beginning to rub off on me there. But I did work in the oil laboratory at Caterpillar and one of the things that we learned to do was to check the viscosity of oils, lubricating oils, used in tractor engines and [to] do some work on the friction releasing capabilities of some various greases. I did this for quite some time in the lab, whatever it was--six weeks, eight weeks--before I actually started into the apprentice course. The introduction to the apprentice course was really moving out of the lab into the factory. I worked under a man in the tool crib. Part of my job was to take care of the large punch press dies and forming equipment that were used there. If some machinist would come up and want a particular die, why, I had to locate it in the storage area, get it out to where he could move it up to his machine and then certain hours of the day, why we would go to a class and do the studying that was required for the apprenticeship. This went on up until, around September, of 1939, and then at that time, I thought it was disaster struck--and they fired me. The man who was in charge of the apprentice program there decided I wasn't smart enough to become a tool and die maker and wasn't making progress to suit him so he decided that I ought to look somepJ.?ce . else for work because he didn't want me there any more. So I came back to Springfield after that. Q. Were you really down about that,being that jobs were so short in the first place--worried? A. I don't think I was worried--I think I was very, vary, very disappointed. It was quite a shock to someone who had really thought, okay, now, you know, this was going to be something real great because tool and die makers were quite an elite group in the factory. They made some of the better salaries that were being made there and I had no idea that I would ever be anything other than, or would go in to something like [the] management area in a factory of this sort and so becoming a tool and die maker would have been really something quite great, for me, at that time. Yes, I was pretty downhearted about the whole thing, for quite a while. I guess it seemed like a pretty bad day anyway. That fall, or the rest of that fall anyway, after coming back from Peoria, why, the jobs were still pretty tight around Springfield and I helped my father shuck corn and do whatever odd jobs we could find until about oh, it was just a few days or a couple of weeks perhaps, before Christmas, and, I got a job with Martin Oil Company. They still have stations in Springfield. The station that I worked at at that time was at Ninth and South Grand. I guess, there, when I went to work there, I was probably making either fifteen or eighteen dollars a week. I would work from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. I forget whether it was five or six days a week--I gue.ss Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 31 it was just five days a week. Going back just a little bit, when I was in the apprenticeship program at Caterpillar, I started out when I first ~ent up there in the oil laboratory at twelve dollars a week, which was [a] pretty good salary for a young kid just out of school. When I went over and actually started into the apprenticeship program, they raised my pay to fourteen dollars a week. So, when I--that Christmas area time--when I went to work for Martin Oil Company, why I was making more than I would have been making in the apprenticeship program. I guess some place along in there, why some of the memories of the apprenticeship program got pretty well erased. At the time I didn't think so, but they--I've later observed several times--that probably Caterpillar did me the biggest favor in the world by firing me. I've later used that story to [show] to a lot of young people that were worried about failing in something that sometimes it's not the worst thing in the world to fail: ---The worst thing is not to do. And if you fail at something, and maybe, maybe it's a good thing--you triad it and so you get canned--it's not the end of the world--it may seem like it for a while, but it really isn't. There was quite a group of characters at Martin Oil Company when I worked there. One of the very nicest people that I've had the privilege of knowing is Tommy Courtney. Tom worked at Martin Oil Company with me and we became friends. He liked Liz and of course that was a, all right with me, because if he liked Liz, why then he and I would get along quite well. Torn had a girlfriend that lived over in Quincy, Illinois, and her name--Janice Horning. And whenever he had time off from work, why he'd always run over to Quincy to see Janice. He later married her and brought her back to Springfield. One of the first people that Tom and Janice met when they carne back was Liz and Carl. Today Torn and Jan are living in Phoenix, Arizona. They're still good friends of Liz and Carl. We don't write ... -maybe once a year--at Christmas--maybe a little more often--sometimes not even that often. But Torn and Jan are our very, very good friends--we could walk in their home tomorrow and be as welcome as if we'd been there forever. We have really enjoyed knowing those two people tremendously. One of the things that I found while working at the Martin Oil Company is that there is probably not a much colde-r job in the world than working on the ramp of a filling station, or at least it seemed so at that time. It was not at all unusual to get a gasoline spill on you; and, in the wintertime, why that can be very cold. Around 1939, early 1940, you didn't use the ethyleJ~e glycol _o:f:_pre~-:- .. tone type of anti-freezes unless you were rather wealthy. -The-~~freeze that most people used in their automobile was an alcohol; and I would imagine that it was probably methanol or wood alcohol rather than the grain alcohol type; but I do remember that we would Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 32 sell it for about ten cents a quart. One of the favorite things for the customers to do would be to come in sometime in the evening on a winter night and say, well how cold is it going to be? Well, the only thing you knew was what you heard on the radio if you were listening--you didn't know any more about the weather than they did. So then the next request would be, well, how about checking the radiator? So you'd check it. Well, do you think that's enough to keep it from freezing tonight? Well, you didn't know, so the next thing you had to do was to, well, drain out a quart and add a quart of alcohol. This meant that you got down on the ground, and reached up under the radiator to a pet cock there, and you'd drain out what you thought was a quart of fluid that was in the radiator. Then you'd add another quart to the top. You had to be very careful not to drain out too much, because, if you did, why, then his radiator would be low and he didn't like that. So, you wanted to drain out enough so that you could add the quart without having to get under there and get another armful of water down your sleeve because that's usually where it would run--you'd open the pet cock and it would be right down your sleeve, and if it wasn't when you opened it, then it would be when you reached back up under there to turn it off. So you'd usually end up with a wet sleeve and the alcohol and water mixture would evaporate and make it even colder. Gasoline--would sell for somewhere around 12.9 to, I guess, 14.9 cents a gallon. You always gave stamps with the purchase and people would save them and trade them in like, much like Martin's used to do in town. I don't know if they are still doing it--they're not giving stamps now, I guess, at the Martin filling stations but, you can trade them in for pots and pans, or toasters, all sorts of kitchen gadgets mainly. Q. Gasoline wasn't rationed at that time at all? A. No. Not yet, and, the truck drivers, if you'd come in (clears throat), with a big tractor trailer truck, I forget what the limit was, perhaps twenty-five gallons, but if you bought more than twentyfive gallons of gas at one time, why you'd get a discount. And I think for truckers, the discount was two or three cents a gallon; but they still got their stamps. It was not at all unusual for some of the truckers to come in and put a hundred and fifty gallons of gasoline into their rigs and collect up all their stamps. Also at that station, we had a large enough parking ramp that they could pull a tractor and trailer rig around behind the driveway off the portion that was always being used for customers. We had a bunk room in the back where they could take a nap if they had been driving a long while. There was also a shower room back there where they could take a shower. These facilities were all free. You could come in and use them if they bought gasoline there so even at ten or eleven cents a gallon--or nine cents a gallon--they were given prizes and all the facilities that would save, actually would save them, a Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 33 motel room or a place that they would have to buy or rent--a room for the night. So that way they could come and use, sleep there, and save them that amount of money. Oil--lubricating oil--motor oil, I think, was, about, fifteen cents a quart. If I remember correctly, you could get a, if you bought enough oil and had your oil changed, you could get five quarts for the price of four and they [would] pull the car in over the grease rack and we'd change the oil for you for free. So probably, either sixty or seventy-five cents is what an oil change would cost you; and that included that oil and having the work done, too. We always liked to get oil changes because we got a commission on oil--we got no commission on the amount of gasoline that we sold but for every quart of oil that you sold, why, we, you would get a commission, so we very carefully marked down the oil that we were selling. If you thought somebody was coming in, or you knew that there was a regular customer coming in on a particular night, and they always would get an oil change when they would come in, why everybody would be looking for that person to pull in the driveway and try and get out and to service their car and try to talk them into the oil c;:hange. The old timers at the station, of course, had their regular customers and you didn't dare touch one of their customers--they'd come in and ask for a particular, either Bill Shaw or Bill O'Bierne or Casey, and that's who they wanted to service them. Particularly, if they were corning in for a grease job and an oil change, why they would ask for those people, and if they weren't there, why they'd drive away and come back when they would be there. It was a very carefully guarded source of extra money. One of the things that you always had to do, and there was a big sign up there, that if we failed to clean your windshield, why then you could get your purchase free. So, usually, you would go out, if you weren't really busy there would be two people go out to service every car. One person would go to the driver's side and find out how much gas they wanted and what kind and would start putting the gas in the car, and the other person would usually go to the radiator or to the hood of the car and open it up and check the oil--even without the people asking. The reason for doing this is that you hoped that maybe you could sell them a quart of oil. And if you did, why, okay, that was your sale--even though the other guy was putting the gasoline in the car, you got the oil sale. So usually you'd work in pairs. One time why one guy would start the gas and the other one would check the oil and then you'd switch on the next customer that would come in. Then one or the other of you would start cleaning the windshields as soon as you got that done. So, it was a nice working relationship with most of them, with competition for the oil sales, of course, because the commission was there. But then in general you worked in pairs and didn't have to worry about somebody slacking off very much. Tommy Courtney always went on the run. As soon as a car would turn in the driveway, why he would be out there almost before the car would get stopped because that was just the Carl H. Albright Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield Carl H. Albright 34 way he worked all the time. A very good salesman. END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO Q. Carl, at the end of the last tape we were talking about some of your experiences between high school and college and in particular, about the Martin Oil Station that you used to work at at Ninth and South Grand so we'll pick up wherever you'd like. A. One of the most common forms of entertainment during the period of time that we've been going over--high school and so forth-~was, at least for the kids in our family, would be to go to a movie. And I guess that was probably the major form of entertainment for most children at that time. You, we've all heard of, people talking about the old-time serials and the Saturday afternoon movies. This was almost as much a part of our life as the present-day t.v. with the cartoons and this sort of thing because you did get to see the cartoons. There was ... the Empress Theatre was the closest one to our home. It was down at South Grand Avenue between Eleventh and Twelfth Street, and on a Saturday afternoon, you could go to the movie. It would cost four cents. You always got to see, oh, a movie, maybe it was a Tom Mix western or Hoot Gibson, or one of those type of a westerns which were some of the favorite fare. Then there was always the weekly serial. This would be Rin Tin Tin or Flash Gordon or, gosh--I can't think of some of the others right now--Tarzan of the Apes was one that was always a favorite. The place would just be full of kids because that's all that would go. You'd get to see the serial and probably maybe, fifteen minutes long at the most, and if you missed this week, why, if you remembered what was on last week and went next week, why you got to see enough overlap of each one of them so that you really didn't miss anything. So it had to be a fairly short skip--probably no more than fifteen minutes. Then the regular feature would be, probably, forty-five minutes to an hour. So you could go at one. o'clock or one-thirty, something like that and be out by three. And if we went, usually we didn't go on a Saturday afternoon because, so often, we were carrying papers, and, frequently wouldn't get home from collecting your paper route on Saturday morning unti.l about noon. Then by the time you had lunch and did whatever chores you had to do, you didn't have time to go to the movie because you had to go about three-thirty in the afternoon again, then pick up papers and deliver them that evening and finish up collecting on your route. One of the fringe benefits of being a paper carrier at that time, particularly if you paid your bill in full on Saturday night, was you would get a free pass to the movie--one of the downtown movies-and this pass was usually good at any of the theatres in the downtown area. There were quite a number of them. Once in a while if the very plush Orpheum Theatre was having something like a stage show, |
Collection Name | Oral History Collection of the University of Illinois at Springfield |