Oral history interview with Grace Belknap Illman

WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION INTERVIEWEE:Grace Belknap Illman INTERVIEWER:Hermann J. Trojanowski DATE:January 17, 2006 [Begin Interview]

HT:Well, today is Tuesday, January 17, 2005, and it’s about 1:35 in the afternoon. My name is Hermann Trojanowski, and I’m at the home of Grace Illman in , , to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the of , .

Grace, thank you so much for talking with us this afternoon. It’s delightful to see you again. If you will give me your full name, we will use that as a test to see how your voice sounds on the machine.

GI:My name is Grace Belknap Illman, and it’s B-e-l-k-n-a-p, but the K is silent. [Tape turned off]

HT:So, if you could tell me a few biographical facts about your life, such as when you born and where you were born.

GI:I was born in Walla Walla, Washington, which everybody has heard about but nobody thinks anybody lives there; and it’s a beautiful Western town; and my great grandmother, whom I did not know, but I knew my grandfather, of course, was one of the immigrants and led a wagon train across the plains in 1843 and was one of the first settlers in what was known as the Oregon Country then. It was and , and I lived there until I finished college—not in , but in different places in central and central , and came East to Scott Field [now Scott Air Force Base, ] in 1942.

HT:And when were you born?

GI:Ooh, ha, ha, ha, ha. Well, I’m eighty-two years old. [Clock chiming in the background].

HT:Can you tell me something about your family life in ?

GI:Yes. I don’t remember much about it in . I remember much more about it in central . My father was a contractor. My mother had taught school for many, many years, and she was also a painter and artist; and I’m the oldest of four children; and I had a pretty good time through high school and no problems with grades or anything; and I went to a small-town school in Redmond, Oregon, which is a town I was just in this summer, and it’s a town of about 3,500-4,000, something like that, a small town.

HT:So, that’s where you went to high school?

GI:Yes, high school and to college from there.

HT:And where did you attend college?

GI:I went to Oregon State [University, Corvallis, Oregon] because I thought I wanted to be a home agent, which is kind of like a county agent, but it works more in the house with women more than in the crops in the fields, and then—but to graduate I had to go to the University of Oregon, [Eugene, Oregon] to get the science that I needed. So, I was just there very briefly, but most of the time at , which is in , which is a town where my great-grandmother had landed a hundred years before.

HT:And do you recall what your favorite subjects were in high school and in college?

GI:Science, absolutely, all the time. I liked it, all kinds.

HT:And when you graduated from college, what did you do next?

GI:Well, the first thing I did was take a very, very brief job to finish a year of teaching, and it was teaching general stuff upon the Columbia River in a little teeny-weeny town that overlooked the Columbia, and I finished out a school for someone who had had to—I can’t remember. I think her husband moved because we were at that point beginning to get into the scare of military and lots of the boys from that area were going up to Canada and joining the English or the Canadian army.

HT:Did you graduate from college before ?

GI:I graduated from college—no, right after Pearl Harbor, just a few months after .

HT:So, you were in college during Pearl Harbor, and how did you find out about , do you recall?

GI:We—I was home because it was a weekend, and we had gone out to get a Christmas tree into the mountains which was—we were in the mountains. It’s quite high elevation in central and found out about it when we came back into town, and people were all over the streets, and we had been attacked, and that’s the way it’s—

HT:Because it was a Sunday.

GI:Yes, it was a Sunday, and there weren’t radios and TVs in everybody’s cars like there are now. We didn’t know about it.

HT:When 00:05:00did you first decide to join a military branch?

GI:When?

HT:Yes.

GI:I went—I think I wanted to do something, and I had qualified to enter [, ,] in , and I thought I wanted to study science, maybe pre-med. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and anyway I couldn’t go to because they weren’t taking American citizens; and was— was already at war. So, I just—it was a question of there was a job at Scott Field to teach, but I had to go back to the University of St. Louis in St. Louis, [Missouri], which I did; and I went in the summer of 1942 there, graduated in a—it was called an army technical course; and went out to Scott Field to teach. Scott Field is just across the river from .

HT:What made you decide to do that exactly? Did you see recruiting posters or—

GI:Yes, I think so. There was recruiting posters, and we had a little pen downtown that everybody was putting their aluminum pots and pans in and all that kind of thing, you know, and it was—it was something to do to get away from home; and my mother thought it was pretty terrible because she had one of us in every time zone across the United States by that time; and with my brother in Denver, [Colorado], and my little sister at home, and my older—and my just younger than I am sister back in Delaware where her husband was; and, so, it was just part of the general push. You know, everybody was doing it.

HT:And were you civilian at that time still or had you joined a branch—

GI:No, I was a civilian. I was a civilian until I—almost till I got out [laughing].

HT:So, you were civil service?

GI:Yes, I was a civilian, but I think I told you this on before. They had to give us commissions, and they didn’t give us any basic training, or they didn’t give us any anything else. You just suddenly had different—you had to wear a uniform, and you had different clothes on, because when they began toward the end of the war— after I taught there for two years—they began toward the end of the war to bring the 9th Corps Army back from England, and those people wouldn’t take a word of instruction from somebody unless they were commissioned, and there was a lot of trouble. So, what they did was commission all the civilians that were working for the army. And there weren’t too many of us. I don’t know, probably 150-200 of us that were teaching there, and, so, we just all got a mass commissioning.

HT:And no formal training whatsoever like officers candidate school?

GI:I had no formal training whatsoever. I knew enough from just the general conversation that you heard the fact that we did work as civilians, we worked with officers over us. Our supervisors were all officers. We were around them all the time, all day long. We were working shifts. Sometimes you’re around them all night long, and it was just—you were supposed to absorb it by osmosis, I guess, and that’s what they did. At that time we were part of what was then being called the Army Air Corps. There was no air force.

HT:Well, can you tell me a little bit about what you taught and that sort of thing?

GI:Yes, I can. I taught ground school, which was all the things that they—GI, the non-commissioned or they—probably just a PFC [Private First Class]—and they were coming in to Scott Field from universities, colleges. Some of them were forty and fifty years old, and some of them were eighteen and nineteen years old.

Everything that they needed to do to service an airplane on the ground, and I was not teaching anything with gasoline and fueling and that kind of thing, but I was teaching communications. And when I see some of the movies that have been made, the Memphis Belle, it makes me very nostalgic, because there was that little carbon mike right in front that used to hit you in the teeth if you weren’t careful and didn’t watch. And I taught antennas, antenna ties, some code—not much but a little bit, enough to get your brain in and out—and, then, other forms, and the ANRT-13 [Army/Navy Radio Transmitter] was a very, very good piece of communications equipment, and we took it apart and put it back together and taught it. It was an army/navy radio transmitter, and it was something that just about every 00:10:00plane had, and it was something that—there were two or three other communications schools. There was one up in , , and there was one, let’s see, I think it was in Texas—no, , and they all used the same, basically the same equipment, and that’s what I taught.

HT:Now what kind of training did you have to have in order to teach this?

GI:They gave me training in . I had—it’s funny, but the first thing they give you that they were giving you then was the first twenty-five pages of the RCA2 manual, because at that time communications equipment had electronic tubes. It wasn’t chips and things like it is now. It was all electronic. It was vacuum tubes, if you want to call them that, and they’d give you that, and that was just nothing but basic electricity. It wasn’t elect—It was electronics. It was, what’s a resistor? What’s a capacitor? How to code them, how to understand them, how to check them, how to—and the basic rules, I guess you could call it, for electricity and how it worked.

HT:I guess your science background really helped or your love of science?

GI:[No audible response].

HT:Your love of science that you in high school and college really helped.

GI:It was—

HT:It helped you.

GI:It helped there. It really did.

HT:Did you have to take some sort of civil service test in order to—

GI:I had to pass the exam, the final exam, in order to be hired by—I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t. I imagine they would have given us a little more training and taken us anyway [laughing], because they were desperate for instructors. They had to be to hire people like I was and who didn’t have any more background; because I’m sure they could have gotten service people to work who had had their own electronic shops, because heavens there was radio, things like that, and there was, and every house was wired for electricity; but they had—they were using, I’d say half of us were women.

HT:And my next question was, how many women were involved?

GI:About half of us were, and about half of them were men, and most of the men were older or retired; and that was a help when you were a young person starting out, too, to have—and I was not very old—to have people who had been in the business for twenty-five years, primitive as it was at that time, and it was looking back.

HT:And what kind of hours did you keep?

GI:I taught three different shifts. We were divided twenty-four hours. It was divided into three eight-hour shifts; and they all started with a one-hour instruction period at the beginning of every shift, a break for a meal at the beginning of every shift, no matter when it was, and, then, six hours of class which was spread over seven more hours so that we had an eight-hour day; and about every six weeks it changed from I think the—it’s pretty standard. I think the shift—one of the shifts ended at ten o’clock or something like that or eleven and so on like that; and they were varied into eight-hour shifts, but it was—the town was moving with people all hours of the day and night because people were on shifts; and I was living in Belleville, Illinois which is a very nice little town. I was there this summer. It’s a suburb. It’s a pretty town, suburb of St. Louis, and about half of us worked at the field or lived there, and they were either GIs who were working at the field or there were those of us who instructors.

HT:Interesting.

GI:It was a town that didn’t even have any public schools when I first went there. All Catholic schools and a very, very nice town.

HT:Well, what did your family think about you moving away from home? You sort of alluded to that a little bit earlier.

GI:Well, my mother had us—we were all scattered. So, there was no objection to that. I had no battle to fight about that because my father had been in World War I long enough to get to Europe almost get turned around when peace was declared, and the first buildings that he saw that he thought was the European shoreline was New York, and he was in that famous division that got sent over there, turned around in the ocean didn’t know they weren’t turned around. So, he had had no military experience as such except a little basic training, and that’s all. It wasn’t quite the same, and he had no objection. Nobody had any objection.

HT:And what about your friends, what did they think about you—

GI:Well—

HT:—doing this? 00:15:00GI:I went back for a high school reunion quite a few years ago, and I’m glad I did it when I saw the people who were still in this little town. I’m very glad I did it. Some of them went into the service. Some of them didn’t. There was a difference. I think some of us who got out—it was different.

HT:It makes you different. It really does.

GI:It makes you think that maybe you knew a little more than you thought you did at that point [laughing].

HT:Do you recall what people thought about—of course you were not in the military as such even though you taught military—but what—did you ever teach women?

GI:No, I taught no women.

HT:Taught no women.

GI:We didn’t have any women. I had a sergeant who was an assistant for me who helped prepare lesson plans and did some typing and things like that. She happened to be from also. She was from—

HT:She was a WAC [Women’s Army Corps], then, I guess?

GI:She was a WAC, and she was from , and the day of the—VJ Day [Victory in ] —VE Day [Victory in Europe] she jumped in the pool in the middle of , a big fountain, and broke her leg and got sent home. That was it [laughing].

HT:Well, do you recall what people in general thought about women who did join military: the WAVES [Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service] and the WACs and women who—

GI:I was in such an isolated kind of structured environment living in and back and forth commuting by bus to St. Louis that the ones that I saw the brief time, the year and a half or so that I was in uniform, just thought it was all right. It was that part of the was pretty much into it; and there was no—I never had anybody say, “Oh, I wouldn’t want my daughter to do that.” I never heard anybody say that. It was just taken for granted that this is the thing that you did, and I know you had a question one time about did you—letting a man go to fight if you took a job like that. Well, they didn’t tell us that because I was taking the same job I had had except it is in a different situation, but there were a bunch of people like that in this United States who were scooped up in situations just like mine, because they did it in other bases, too.

HT:I have never heard of that before. That’s really a novelty because I’ve not heard that before. Quite interesting. Well, can you just—you sort of alluded to this a little bit earlier, but can you describe a typical day in your teaching?

GI:A typical day would be—let’s say I got there at eleven. Had one hour of class, went to lunch at twelve, and if it was after I got this funny little so-called commission, I might march a school squad to the mess hall to the tune of “Pistol Packing Mama,” and, because we always had a band—and if the weather was decent—and then you came back, and at 1:10—I remember, we had ten minutes to get them organized—we went into a classroom which was stand up. The teacher had the only chair in the classroom. The men stood at workbenches, and they were trained with a set up of resistors and computers—not computers, I’m sorry—resistors and capacitors and power supply, two kinds of power supplies, meters and all that sort of thing, at each position at a workbench. You presented the lesson for the day. We went through everything from, “You can’t write on the blackboard” orders to “You can’t have any paper in the class” orders, because they were messing up the grounds to, “You have to use paper to—well, one of my last lesson plans was done on a roller shade in colored ink that I could pull down and show what I wanted and make it disappear, because they didn’t want anything left in the classrooms from one shift to the other, and I might be teaching antenna ties that day, and there’s about three or four ways to tie an antenna, and antennas used to be tied on the outside of the airplane, and it was a little round one, a loop antenna, and then there was a thing called a buggy-whip antenna, and maybe you wind the buggy-whip antenna up with a loop antenna gave a solid note, and that was what you honed in to the airbase on, and I would teach the fundamentals of that process.

HT:So, the people that you had in your class were there all day?

GI:They were there all day. 00:20:00HT:They didn’t rotate in and out like they do in normal classrooms?

GI:In this class I would have them for—let’s see, we were—I had two classes. One class was there for two hours and forty minutes or something like that, and we had a break about every hour, a 15-minute break outside, and this sounds terrible these days, but the men were expected to go outside and smoke a cigarette. And that was just the way you did it. I didn’t smoke, but then you watched to be sure that the GI’d the cigarette butts and that they put them in the waste can or that they stamped them out and all that sort of thing and took the class back in. At the end of three hour total over time or over the whole time. A new class came in, and we did the same thing with the same each—it would be two classes paralleling each other, A section and B section. They had funny numbers like 207A was in somebody’s class and maybe his friend was in 207B.

HT:Now were these guys enlisted or—

GI:Most of them were enlisted. We had had classes now and then were not enlisted. They were second lieutenants, and later toward the end of the time I was in, there were more of them than they were at first, and I had a Chinese class. I learned to say [Chinese for “Good morning and how are you?”] with an interpreter. I taught —it was very disconcerting to make a paragraph and you told them about three sentences long and have the interpreter say, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” That was it. You don’t know whether he said what you said or not. I had people from who spoke Portuguese or Brazilian. I forgot which they were now. Anyway, they spoke Portuguese. I didn’t speak Portuguese, and I certainly didn’t speak Chinese, but we had people who came in from other countries, too, and you would get a section of them going through school.

HT:And how long was this particular class? It was like six weeks?

GI:Yes, I think it was six weeks. I believe that’s what it was. It had six weeks in DC, direct current, six weeks in alternating current, six weeks in the theory of vacuum tubes, then we would have—Then they would have six weeks in building—they built a little kit, a receiver, and they built a little transmitter. Those were some of the things that they did.

HT:Now was this a pass/fail type situation, or was there such a thing as—

GI:I think it was a pass/fail because we did give them a grade. They got a grade on the last part of it, and it was a set exam that was, came down from the office, and there was a bit of scandal a time or two when supposedly the exam copies got out, you know, that kind of thing. So, I remember there was some sort of grading, but I don’t remember how it was done. It wouldn’t be that way now.

HT:I’m sure not. Well, can you tell me a little bit about the time when you switched over from being a civilian to the time you became military?

GI:An order came—

HT:Orders came.

GI:Read to all of us at our eleven o’clock meeting before there or whatever time. I don’t remember which shift I was on now. It was that time, and they read the orders saying that we would all be commissioned and we would be in the day room of the—some building that was in the third area of Scott Field—and that was the area farthest from the hangar, and the commissioning would be done by Captain Bass, and that was it. There had been rumors of all kinds that this had happened up in , and it had happened in , [], though they had because the same classes were taught those places, too, and, so, we were sort of halfway expecting it.

HT:And when did that switch take place, do you recall?

GI:What?

HT:When?

GI:Forty—let’s see. Forty-five, forty-four, forty-three—1943, in the fall. Yes, in the fall or in the summer, summer of ’43.

HT:So, you became a first lieutenant?

GI:Second lieutenant.

HT:Second lieutenant.

GI:Oh, no, no. They may have been liberal, but they weren’t that that liberal [laughing].

HT:And how soon after that did you have to start wearing a uniform?

GI:About two weeks.

HT:Oh, two weeks, okay.

GI:Yes.

HT:And did they furnish that for you or—

GI:Oh, no way. No way. I should say not; and it was quite a shock to some people because there were no such things as nylon stockings and that sort of thing, and now we had 00:25:00to wear heels no more than two inches high and stockings and skirts and blouses and jackets.

HT:Whereas before you just wore regular civilian outfits.

GI:And a funny, funny hat. It looked like a stew pot, almost like a present-day—

HT:That must be the Hobby hat, I think.

GI:It was the Hobby hat we had right at first. Those hats didn’t last very long.

HT:What was the color of the uniform at that time?

GI:Khaki or dark olive drab.

HT:So, it was like the army uniform?

GI:Yes.

HT:The WAC uniform, I guess.

GI:Yes, it was just—that was all it was.

HT:And, so, do you recall any other changes that happened when the switchover took place? Did you have to march or go parade or salute?

GI:We had to appear once in awhile as a squadron, as a school squadron it was called, and there were times when we had to appear. And as I remember—I can’t remember for sure when [President Franklin D.] died.

HT:I think it was April of 1945.

GI:That was about—must have been about two months, then, before I got out. Yes, something like that, because I know we had to appear because his body was moved up through the Middle West and on up into Washington that way, and we had to appear—I can remember that appearance, and there were other times, oh, that was about it. It was very loose shall we say.

HT:Well, did you have to move on base after you—

GI:No, I did not. None of us had to move because was consisted of about half GIs who had enough money or enough rank and enough money to live off the base anyway, and an awful lot of them did.

HT:Can you describe your living quarters?

GI:Yes, I had a nice house that I have seen several times since then. I had a nice house, and I shared it with another girl, Betty Allen [phonetic], who married the head of the Civil Service up here in at one of the bases up there later, and the two of us had a house together.

HT:All by yourself?

GI:All by—

HT:A whole house?

GI:Yes.

HT:That was very unusual for those days because I’ve always heard that housing was a premium, a shortage of housing.

GI:Housing wasn’t that short in . It had been—it’s a town that had—it’s surrounded by farms, beautiful farms, and it’s still that way. [Interstate] 64 goes through it; and it’s—the farmers lived on the farms in the summertime and moved into town in the winter, and they’re still doing it, even probably in the last two or three years now. I know it was much more crowded because I ate there in July when we were going through that part of the country, and the restaurants—there were more restaurants, but the same ones that were there when I was there fifty and sixty years before were there, the same road, the same streets went down to St. Louis and across the bridge, across the bridge, and it hadn’t changed that much. It’s beautiful farming country, really beautiful.

HT:So that’s the only place that you served was—

GI:I was sent at one time to Massachusetts, to Boston, and then I was sent to Enid, Oklahoma one time to—just for a week at a time to get training on a new piece of equipment.

HT:And during that time did you have the opportunity to go home on furlough or anything like that?

GI:I had several times, and one of the funniest things happened to me. We used to get our tickets. We went by train. We got our tickets at the base, and if you—if it simply said second lieutenant so-and-so, I was supposed to share a lower bunk in the train bed with someone else because they were putting two people in those seats, and one person up above. And you never knew what you were going to get for a bunkmate, and you usually had to—the conductor would have to rescue you. It happened to me twice. I had some GI that I had never heard of before [laughing]. But if it had been—if I had been a GI, even a second lieutenant man, that was what they would have done. They were doing that then. The trains were so crowded.

HT:I guess you were lucky to even have a—what do they call those, berths?

GI:Berths, yes. We were lucky to get a berth, but we did get a berth if you were going over so many, I think over three hundred to four hundred miles, and, of course, I was going almost two thousand miles across to , [].

HT:And how long did that take you on a train?

GI:It took about four to five days then. It doesn’t take much less now.

HT:That’s a lot of sitting and a lot 00:30:00of looking out the window.

GI:And a lot of reading, and a lot of crossword puzzling, and a lot of card playing, and a lot of running up and down the isles.

HT:But I imagine—of course, from our vantage of point of view from seeing the movies, the troop trains, the guys always had a lot of fun.

GI:Yes. It wasn’t bad. I had a friend who worked in the—he was from Belleville, and he worked in the railroad station in St. Louis, and if you’ve never seen the station, the railroad station in St. Louis, it is one of the wonders of the Midwest. It’s a meeting of the waters of Missouri of Mississippi and the big fountain across the street; and it is now a center. It was a gateway to the West at that time. It was a very gorgeous piece of architecture, and it was a place everybody took their visiting family to see. Train travel wasn’t so bad, and we could get the , city of— [Tape paused here for phone ringing]

HT:It sounded like you really enjoyed your work. It sounds like it was very fun and very important.

GI:I always have enjoyed my work, Hermann, you know?

HT:Yes.

GI:You know.

HT:Well, do you think you were treated equally?

GI:Yes.

HT:It was no problem, discrimination because you were a woman or anything like that?

GI:No. We would—the last few minutes before—many times we had a few minutes at the end of the day. We would meet in the snack bar or someplace like that. There was one in every building. I can still remember how in passing some of those army men who were, who came back from , when one day a—I think that Zimmerman was a second lieutenant, too. Anyway, he wasn’t a teacher. He was in the office, and he asked Willie Farmer if he didn’t want a Coke, and Willie said—Willie was a technical sergeant—and he said, “No, I don’t want one.” He said, “Oh, sure, here you do,” because he had gotten one for him out of the machine, glass bottles, small Cokes like we had then. So, he tossed it to him. Willie stood there with his arms folded, let the Coke hit the concrete floor. Never moved a muscle, and I thought, boy, what those people have been through to be that solid. And the Coke, of course, hit the concrete floor with the expected result. So, call somebody in to clean the place up, but there was—it was great. It was a very good experience. I wished that Cathy [Illman Sykes] could have had that kind of an experience, but she didn’t, of course, she had her own experiences, plenty of them. Seven times as many as I did.

HT:Well, do you recall—what was the hardest thing you ever had to do physically while you were—

GI:Oh, the hardest thing was one of the—they changed me to another sort of classes, and I was teaching a thing called a Dynamotor, which is a thing that changes electrical energy from one form to another, audio—I mean the direct current to alternating current, and it’s done mechanically, pretty much as it is done in a car, was done in a car then—and I had to carry that heavy motor which weighed pounds and pounds and pounds, a big, heavy one to my class every day and take it back and check it back. And I thought I was being very much put upon because I had stomp in my two-inch heels down the hall and carry that thing back. And why they didn’t have rolling carts for those things, I’ll never know, but it hadn’t occurred to somebody to make them. We carried these—they were about the size of a small—an engine in a small car.

HT:Oh, my gosh.

GI:And then some officer came along and decided that was too hard on the instructors, and so that order was changed, and I don’t remember what we did then. Maybe we took our students to where the motor was, something like that [laughing].

HT:Oh, gosh. What about emotionally, did you have—recall what the hardest thing that ever happened to you emotionally while you were in service?

GI:Well, we did have one kid that was killed, and that was sad. One of our instructors was killed in an accident, and that was very sad, and to see his parents and to have them come through the classes where he had been teaching and all that, but, no, nothing else. I didn’t have anybody in my family. I didn’t lose anybody in my family. I didn’t really know anybody who—at this point the war was beginning to wind down, and most of it was in the Pacific, and the communications had been pretty much taught. We were getting them back to keep in—some of them were coming back to become 00:35:00permanent party, and some were coming back to just wait out their time before their so many days and so many points would get them out. It was a very sanitized, very pleasant—if that kind of thing can be considered pleasant—existence.

HT:Do you recall any embarrassing or humorous moments?

GI:Well, I think the humorous one was when the Coca-Cola hit the floor, but, no, I don’t. I don’t. There were other times I had my car there, and also I had a carpool of other instructors who I picked up in Belleville on whatever shift it was on, and I used to—I would sometimes have to race around and gather them to get them out there to the base on time, but that hour before class started gave us—gives you a little leeway. If you were ten minutes late for that class nothing much was said about it, whereas, it would have been bad if you had—we had twenty students in each class; and if you’d had twenty rambunctious GIs in the room taking the place apart, you couldn’t afford to be ten minutes late there, but it worked that way. It was in some ways it was good management, in other ways it was pretty bad.

HT:You said earlier that you had to do shift work. So, sometimes you had to teach all night long?

GI:Yes, I did, about every six weeks we changed shift.

HT:Wow. That had to have been difficult for everybody.

GI:Two and three o’clock in the morning it got pretty sleepy.

HT:How did the students react to this?

GI:They were sleepy as the instructors were, absolutely.

HT:Do you know why it was done this way? Was the sheer amount of—

GI:It was the sheer amount, I think, that was going through there, because every class was full, absolutely, the class was full.

HT:So, every building, every classroom was full basically twenty-four hours a day?

GI:That’s what they were doing, twenty-four hours a day. The cafeteria—of course the mess hall was across the street from where I happened to be, and I was in basics, which was the first six to eight weeks of training because these people had more training, of course, than they got there. They got flight training some place else, but that was going twenty-four hours a day. One of my neighbors in worked in that, and he had been a butcher and had retired, and he came back, and he was in charge of meat cooking or something, whatever, that sort of, that part of the mess hall was. They had civilians. The food was excellent. Some of the best ice cream I have ever had in my life, and I learned to eat many things that I had never had, rich German food, because it was a German community, and it was very—a good place to—living was good.

HT:Well, how did you spend your spare time, because I’m assuming you worked what, eight hours a day, was it seven days?

GI:No, six days a week.

HT:Six days a week.

GI:Yes, six days a week and your day off wasn’t always Sunday either. It shifted. Seems like, as I remember, we had two days off between shift changes, something like that so that you changed.

HT:Get acclimated to the new time.

GI:Yes.

HT:Can you describe what you did during your spare time?

GI:What I did besides teach?

HT:Yes.

GI:I went to , and I shopped, and I toured . I learned it pretty well, and I still loved it, and I would have retired there, I think, if we hadn’t—if I hadn’t met my husband who lived down here, and he wasn’t my husband then—and I, I had a car, so I could go some places. I went to . I saw—I was at the opening of Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s in . That’s the only movie opening in the big town I have ever attended, and it was pretty interesting. I saw Bing Crosby’s back from about a block away [laughing], but it was—my mother came to visit me. My sister came. My brother came, and I had a house, and I had a car. So I was lucky, much more so than somebody who was, some girl or man who was there rooming with somebody and didn’t have a car.

HT:Do you recall what your favorite songs were from that period of time?

GI:Well, I—yes, a couple of dumb ones. We—it was when “America the Beautiful” was becoming, was taking the place of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was one thing that I was conscious of because I didn’t know 00:40:00“America the Beautiful” the way they do it in the Middle West; and then “Pistol Packing Mama,” of course the band played all the time because of the—they thought it was funny that the women instructors would have to march a school squadron to the mess hall—and “Beyond the Hills of Idaho” was a very poignant minor sort of thing that—well beyond the hills of Idaho was Oregon, and that was my home, where snow-capped mountains meet the sky and that kind of thing. Those were the songs we danced to, and another thing I loved to do was a trip on the boat in—

HT: [River].

GI:. We had many, many. We would have—a group of instructors would get together, and we would reserve a little section or something like that, and we did a lot of that.

HT:What about going to dances, did you—

GI:Oh, yes, yes, they were everywhere, that country dances, and they still do.

HT:It sounds like it was a wonderful place to be.

GI:That part of the Middle West across from and in that area is still a nice—and I noticed it when I went through it twice this summer. It is still a nice place. The fields are beautiful. The houses look prosperous, and it is just a good place to be. It’s a pleasant place. It lead the in savings bond drives in both world wars, and it was just a lot of farmers with their European background realized how good a life they had.

HT:I’ve only been to that area one time, but I remember the soil was so super black.

GI:Black.

HT:Rich.

GI:Very HT:It was almost like compost.

GI:Yes, it was.

HT:It’s wonderful. And deep, very deep.

GI:Deep, anything grew. It had been an inland sea around the . Anything grew.

HT:When did you get out of the military?

GI:Forty-five, I think it was. Let’s see. Forty-five. I think it was forty-five.

HT:So, it was after VE [Victory in Europe] Day which was in May of 1945, and VJ [Victory in ] Day was—

GI:In June of ’45—

HT:It was August.

GI:August, I mean, yes.

HT:So, you were still in the military during both of those days.

GI:Both of those days, yes, because that’s when the girl got, broke her leg on VE Day; and—but I got down here in time, just barely in time, by that time I was coming out of the service to start school teaching here in Greensboro.

HT:Oh, okay. So, it was in fall of 1945. Now were you married by that time?

GI:No. I was not married for three more years. Better than three more years.

HT:Well, do you recall what the mood of the country was during that time, the early to mid-1940s?

GI:We must save everything, and we must—we saved aluminum, and we used leg makeup instead of nylons, or there was no nylon then, instead of silk for stockings, and we, clothes got shorter and shorter. And I’d say not being attached by a family or anything to the area I was living in, so I was a bit detached from it, but I would say it was a very upbeat mood. We had [Franklin D.] for a president, and it was pretty upbeat. He had pulled people out of the Great Depression, although the West Coast didn’t have the Depression like they had it back here I’m told.

HT:That’s because it was perhaps more rural, less industrialized?

GI:Less industrialized and less people, much more sparse. When you think of the state at that time that had something like five people per square mile: . . .

HT:Well, I mentioned both VE Day and VJ Day. Do you recall anything particular about those days?

GI:No.

HT:VE Day was May 8, 1945.

GI:I remember—I think we had to go stand some place in a formation, but not anything special. Shift went right on, and they went on for quite some time after 00:45:00that; and, then, when I was there for Christmas a few years—not too many years ago, about 1990, maybe—shifts were still going on just the same. Scott Field was good, old Scott Field. The only thing is they closed down one—third of the area. I lived—I worked in the third area, and they closed that down, and it was no longer school, but it still is a big school base, and they’re still teaching communications and computers and things like that, because both Bill [Illman] and Cathy were there. And I had a chance to go back and bowl the same bowling alley that I had bowled in when I was there. Hadn’t changed.

HT:So, you were discharged in 1945. What was your rank when you were discharged?

GI:Same as it was [laughing].

HT:No promotion.

GI:No promotions, no. No promotions. I think they would have demoted us if they could have.

HT:Back to civilian?

GI:Yes, back to civilians.

HT:So, you were eligible for the GI benefits after—

GI:I was but I didn’t take advantage of them. I was coming down here. I was also eligible for teacher’s pension eventually, and I came to to teach vocational education till I got married.

HT:Now, you had alluded to the fact that you had met your husband, Walt [Illman]—

GI:Yes.

HT:—there?

GI:He was another instructor. He was a civilian, and he left to go to the service, and he managed to stick it out for a year and something like eleven months before he was discharged. The military— [End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, Side B]

HT:Before we changed the tape we were talking about Walt and how you met and that sort of thing. Can you tell me a bit more how you met and that sort of thing?

GI:Yes. He was living, boarding. He was one of those people up there who had come from a very responsible job with Burlington Industries here in , [], to do his thing, but he didn’t want to go into the military, so he was teaching. And he was boarding with a lady down the block. And after I rented this house which we rented from the—Betty and I—from the Metropolitan Insurance Company, we met a couple of the fellows who were standing and waiting for the bus every morning, and we formed a car pool. And he was in my carpool. And he never did really care about driving anyway from then on for the next sixty years.

HT:So, did Walt continue teaching there, or was he sent overseas or anything like that?

GI:No—yes, he went to B-29 school, and he was in an accident. They—something blew up, and, anyway, he was sent to , , to , I think it was. Yes, is in Deshon [ , ], and eventually got out on a medical discharge because he—that’s when he lost his hearing. And he came right back to and went right back with them. And finally talked me into coming down here.

HT:Now, after you left the service in 1945, did you come down here or did you go back to ?

GI:No, I came here. I left because I could leave early because I was coming here to teach, and Ben Smith had come to—the person who had the job before I did, husband—and Walt were in, were fraternity brothers in college, and he knew what she was doing, and he knew she wanted to get out. And he told her about me. And Mr. Smith interviewed me in , and I was hired up there. And, so, because of the stipulation if you were going to a public school teaching job or there were two or three other types of jobs you could get out early. And you didn’t have to wait for the three years to be up, and it wasn’t quite. And, so, that’s why I came down here. I came straight down here from—put my stuff in a big truck and shipped it down here, and moved into a house over by the college.

HT:And you’ve been here ever since?

GI:[No response]

HT:And you’ve been here ever since?

GI:And I have been here ever since, and I moved from that house to the college into 00:50:00this house, and I’ve lived in this house for fifty-seven years.

HT:Oh, my gosh.

GI:And if that isn’t squatting on the nest, I don’t know what is.

HT:[Laughing]. Well, can you describe your adjustment back to civilian life after—

GI:There wasn’t any [laughing] frankly. I was so near a civilian all the time that it wasn’t like these people who have flashbacks and traumatic experiences and things. I had a house. I had groceries to buy. I had a yard to mow, things like that. And it was just changing from when I had left civilian experience after I moved here because I was living in the upstairs of a house and somebody else was taking care of all the rest of it, and it was really no difference. As far as I’m concerned the military is a wonderful career.

HT:[Laughing]

GI:Career? Brief.

HT:Well, who did you admire and respect from that period of time? Who are you heroes and heroines from that period?

GI:Not any special.

HT:Nobody special. Well, what did you think of President Franklin Roosevelt?

GI:Very much admired him.

HT:Did you ever have a chance to meet him?

GI:No, never did. Never did. Saw the funeral train when it came through, and that’s the only thing.

HT:What about Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, did you—

GI:Never saw her. My mother did in , but I didn’t. She didn’t introduce herself at Scott Field, but she was out in , of course, lumber mills and things like that.

HT:We talked about famous people a bit earlier, about Bing Crosby. Did you ever meet anyone who was real famous, like Bob Hope perhaps, or any famous movie stars who would come around and do USO shows [United Service Organizations] and that sort of thing?

GI:I didn’t have much to do with the USO. There was one in town. In fact it was only about two blocks from us. It was in—it had been a high school. This is silly. The only person that had any fame at that time you wouldn’t even know now, and his name was [Robert G.] LeTourneau, and he was the man who owned the great big Massey Road Equipment Company, LeTourneau, that is still being made, and he—his son was killed in, I don’t know whether he was in the Pacific or whether he was in Europe—but he built a church across the street from where I lived in Scott Field, at Scott Field in Belleville; beautiful little church with bells that we would hear in the mornings, and I did because we were all in the neighborhood. We met him. Now, he was well-known at that time; but he probably had grandchildren in the company now, but he is not a figure except that his name is on half of the heavy-duty road equipment that you see.

HT:And how to you spell his last name?

GI:L-a-t-o-u-r-n-e-a-u, I think, LeTourneau. I think that’s right.

HT:Because I’ve never heard of him.

GI:Yellow equipment, of course, isn’t it all yellow? Yellow equipment with LeTourneau on it, and it’s a heavy, heavy equipment. Saw some this summer in on [Interstate] 90.

HT:Well, do you consider yourself to be an independent person?

GI:Very.

HT:Always been that way?

GI:Always [laughing].

HT:Were you born that way?

GI:Yes, I think I was. I think I was.

HT:So, the military didn’t make you that way?

GI:No. No. No. I’ve always been independent. I have always probably been a little too—what did they used to call the sub-citizens of this country? Uppity, maybe, cocky, maybe, I don’t know; but I’ve always independent. No, it didn’t make me that way.

HT:So, you just—

GI:My great-grandmother was. She had led a wagon train across the country and wrote a book about it.

HT:That is amazing. Do you still have that book by any chance?

GI:I have it. Jenny Hester has it in right now. She’s using it for a report. It was the last two, and then the other thing I do have a lot of stuff from her diary. But she had—she ate on a tablecloth every night, and they pulled a round circular piece of timber out of the wagon and set up a table. She took chickens along so she had fresh eggs. She baked bread. She did things like that that other people didn’t do. They just ate bacon and coffee and maybe some sort of biscuits, and here she was having complete meals because that’s the kind of person she was. Her father 00:55:00was later, after she left and became a bishop in the , and she was—she could read and write and play the piano which was in 1843. She was born in 1820. She was—that was—not all girls could do that, and they said she led the wagon train. She may have been small, somebody says in one of the books that I had, but she was definitely the leader. And I didn’t know her. She died at ninety-nine, which was very old in 1919. I did not know her, but I knew she had one son who lived. That was my grandfather, and they had one son who was—this is going on the tape I guess. There was an RH negative strain. There is through the whole family. I had one son who died, and I have one daughter who is living, but that’s something that we—my sisters and my brother and I—have all had to contend with, and it makes us a very, very small family.

HT:Do you consider yourself to be a pioneer or trailblazer or trendsetter because you did join the military? Of course you joined in a round about way. It wasn’t like many of the women who did.

GI:Yes, I didn’t come from a small town and was the first girl to join like Jessica Lynch up here or somebody like that. No, nothing like that, and Earl and Pearl Arnesmeier [phonetic] who were the boys that sat—my name was Belknap, and there’s was A, began with an A, and they were next to me all the way through high school—joined, went to Canada and joined long before, and there were quite a few people. Bill Brewster went to , and there were quite a few people that I was in school with who did long before I did. I just kind of fell into it.

HT:And the next question was, of course I know the answer to this one is, have either of your children been in the military? Of course, Cathy was in the military for—

GI:And I encouraged it.

HT:—for twenty years?

GI:Yes.

HT:So, did your experiences with the military sort of encourage—

GI:Yes.

HT:—encourage her?

GI:It made me think that it’s pretty good. I mean she had graduated from college when she went in. So, she went in as a lieutenant, and it didn’t take her long to become a first lieutenant. I feel like there’s something about it that doesn’t hurt anybody and helps a lot of people, especially those who are from a one- or two- child family, you kind of get a family of your own. And, of course, the air force is closer to me. My husband was in it. I was in it. Her husband was in it. His father. We just feel like they take care of their own. They maybe known as a—what’s the big luggage company?

HT:Samsonite?

GI:What?

HT:Samsonite?

GI:Yes, they’re the Samsonite service because they travel, and they travel with suitcases, but it’s still—they take care of their own better than any of the other branches of the service I feel.

HT:Well, you know, I was in the air force as well.

GI:Yes, well you know they do.

HT:Oh, yes.

GI:They do. They don’t make you move except in the summertime if you have children, things like that.

HT:A little more civilized.

GI:Yes, very definitely more civilized.

HT:Oh, gosh. Well, just thinking in general terms, what impact do you think having been in the air force had on your life in the immediate term and long-term?

GI:Long-term it taught me that there is a lot of people in this whole country that may be different from me, but they’re just as good and just as interesting. And they all have something to offer wherever you are. It took me out of a little town in or in —I could have been in either one of them—to something that was bigger and where they’re people from different backgrounds, European backgrounds. We didn’t have any out there. People who I had never worked with, minorities like we have in the South, and it made a big difference, and it has made a difference—I can see it—it did in my son and in my daughter. You become more tolerant maybe, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t miss that for anybody for anything.

HT:You talk a little less provincial.

GI:Oh, yes, much less provincial [laughing].

HT:Well, how do you feel about women in combat positions?

GI:I have some feelings, but 01:00:00I’m not opposed to it. If the Jewish people can do it, and they do, we can do it, and I think there are many times—I don’t see why it should be any different for them than it is for their husbands or their sons, because many times some women are a little bit more resilient and a little bit more resourceful, and we need that resiliency and we need that resourcefulness, and we would be losing 50 percent of it if we said you can’t do your thing.

HT:Of course that’s really changed, I guess, in the last fifteen years. Since the first Gulf War.

GI:Now, Cathy was in Desert Storm, and I knew she was not in any great danger. She was in , and she was calling home oftener than she called me when she was living in . We had been in four different times while they were there, and when she was sent down to Saudi, she could call me just almost any time she wanted to because Western Electric here was making it possible. But I didn’t worry about her a bit. I know one officer—she was in—Cathy was in the flying unit, and I know this one woman who got—I didn’t know her, I knew of her—who got her both arms broken and was a doctor. But Cathy was in a nursing squadron, and she was living in a house that had been built by Germans by the Sheiks, and she had a cook and seven or eight girls living in the same house, and the air force took care of her very well.

HT:Sounds great. Well, Grace, I don’t have any other formal questions to ask you. Do you have anything you would like to add from that period of time? I’m not sure that I’ve covered everything. What about interesting stories and that sort of thing, do you recall anything?

GI:No, not special, not anything great. Can I recommend anyone else to be interviewed? Of course, I recommended one. Did you ever know Pat Chamings?

HT:I did not. I talked to Betty Carter— [Tape turned off]

HT:We covered a great deal of your military experience, but tell me about what you did after you left the military in 1945—

GI:I came to —

HT:—and came to ?

GI:—to teach vocational education. There had been a vocational education in the schools for many years, but it had been taught by retirees from tire and battery organizations and lumbering companies and stoneworkers and things like that. There had been no women teaching, and Virginia Hester and I were the first two women hired in North Carolina, and we were—she was from Sanford where E.P. Pierce was the superintendent and decided he needed to break the barrier sort to speak—and I was in Greensboro where Ben Smith was a superintendent. And, so, we neither one of us had the education required for teaching vocational education, so we both went back to school to [North Carolina] State College, and it was an eye-opener when you are the only girls in a state program every summer. The conferences were these—it went on for three years that way before they hired any more women, and then they hired someone in Kernersville was the next person who was hired. But I had twenty to twenty-five students each semester who were learning the background of the particular industry or job that they were in. I had everything from book binders, service station employees, stonecutters, carpenters, aviation. Bill Martin and his friend were at the airport, and I’d had to find the technical literature material to teach them a one-hour class in school before they left school at noon and went to work. Also, deal with a—their employers and then run a sort of job search every summer so I had enough jobs for the people who were coming into my program.

HT:And where did you do this teaching?

GI:Grimsley [High School, ].

HT:Grimsley.

GI:Yes. A.P. Routh was the principal, and he was absolutely wonderful. He was understanding.

HT:He was my principal in high school.

GI:Best person I have ever worked with. He 01:05:00backed his teachers.

HT:How long did you do this?

GI:Five years.

HT:Five years. And then what was next on your agenda?

GI:I quit. We built a house. I—

HT:I guess you got married in between?

GI:I got married in the meantime. We had built a house in the meantime, and I’m still living in the same house, and I’ve done a lot of volunteer work in Greensboro, and I seldom go anyplace that I don’t see someone I either taught in high school or someone whose parents I taught someplace.

HT:Of course, I first knew you when you were teaching out at GTCC [], the landscaping class.

GI:I left public school teaching when integration came in, and there wasn’t a place for the job I was doing, although it’s continuing—it’s coming back now—but I went with the community college, and enjoyed almost twenty years of working out there.

HT:How did you become interested in teaching landscaping and later cooking?

GI:Well, it was just one of those jobs when they gave it to you and said, “You teach it,” you know, and then I went to cooking because I had had some experience in that. I told you, I wanted to be a farm agent and home agent when I was in college, and I had had foods and things like that there, but I hadn’t had microwave cooking because there was no such thing as a microwave. It’s one of those courses where you sink or swim, or you teach yourself or something. The landscaping came from my mother. She was very good. I had grown up with that [pause], but moving clear across the country, it’s a little different. The plants are different.

HT:Quite different.

GI:The trees are different [laughing].

HT:So, have you officially retired now or are you still active?

GI:Yes, I have retired. I am doing a lot of volunteer work. I just finished—this doesn’t need to go in your report. [Tape stopped].

HT:This was a little bit earlier, but what are your thoughts about Cathy joining the military and tell me your feelings about that, please?

GI:I was all in favor of it, very much in favor of it because she had a good training—had good training as a nurse. I didn’t know what she would be doing. I didn’t realize she would not be actively nursing, although she did for a short time. She would become an instructor in many other allied fields as she did, but I should have known it [laughing]. She’s about as independent as anybody I know of, but I think it was great. And she was marrying somebody who came from a family of military people, air force people, and it worked just fine.

HT:Well, Grace, I don’t have any more questions. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you would like to add to your interview at all?

GI:I think this has been great.

HT:Okay, well, good. It’s been wonderful seeing you again. I really appreciate it, and I think it will make a great addition to our collection.

GI:Well, as I said mine is such a feeble service, and I know you have people who have been in twenty years and twenty-five years and things like that. There were some older women who had been in a long time. That one was Pat several years ago. I am not even sure she is living now is probably in the earlier part of the collection that they have over there, but I think it’s a good deal what they’re doing.

HT:It is. We’re real pleased. Well, again, thank you so much. [End of Interview]