Oral history interview with Carol Alban Johnson

WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT

ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEWEE:Carol Johnson

INTERVIEWER:Therese Strohmer

DATE:May 1, 2008 [Begin Interview]

TS: This is Therese Strohmer and I’m here with Carol Johnson on May first of 2008. We’re at the Jackson Library. This is an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. So Carol, go ahead and state your name the way you’d like it to be on your collection.

CJ: Carol A. Johnson

TS:Okay, thank you. [recording paused] Carol, how about if we go ahead and start about where and when you were born?

CJ:Okay, originally I’m from Ohio. [I] was born in Columbus, November 15, 1944. And actually that was how I got my name, because they were beginning to have Christmas carols and such being played, and so that was how my mother ended up calling me Carol because she really wasn’t sure about—they weren’t really sure what to do about names and said, “Oh, Christmas carols, okay.” [laughter] I don’t know. I’m glad I wasn’t born at Easter time. I might have ended up being Bunny.

TS:There you go.

CJ:I don’t think I look like a Bunny.

TS:[chuckles] Well, you’re a holiday baby then.

CJ:Yes.

TS:Well what about in Columbus, Ohio, in 1944? What kind of town was that?

CJ:Just a very basic, middle-size town. We had a couple military installations close, and of course it’s not far from Dayton, which is Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And a lot of—let’s see, General Electric was one of the big employers there, so that was machinery, this kind of thing.

TS:What did your folks do when you were growing up?

CJ:My mother was a stay at home mom, my dad worked heating and air conditioning construction.

TS:Did you have any brothers or sisters?

CJ:I had one brother. He’s fourteen years older than I am, so Larry jokes that we are the only brother and sister who are only children.

TS:I bet that’s not true. There’s probably a few that are spread out like that.

CJ:Yeah, we’re really very spread out. Oh, my goodness gracious. I cannot say the name of the installation. It’s on the south side of town, and it was army. And a tremendous amount of the beef going overseas in the Second World War came out of Chicago and St. Louis, the meat packing plants there, and Columbus was kind of where they came together and then were shipped again to the east coast to go overseas. And of course the refrigeration units there where they brought the frozen beef in, [it] was very important to keep those functioning, and as I said my father did air conditioning. So that’s—he did not serve actively in the Second World War because he was in what they considered a necessary duty there, because keeping the air conditioning going, refrigeration and air conditioning as such there at that installation where the meat was was deemed critical, and that was where he stayed.

TS:So it was like a war time industry job.

CJ:Yeah. And he would get calls that—if the temperature dropped below a certain point, he would get calls and have to go and see what it was. And I remember him telling this story that he could tell by what time of day they called what was wrong. Because he would get out there and go over to the, of course, this food area and so on, the kitchen wasn’t that far away for preparing meals for the men that were stationed there, and he would just kind of yell in at the cook on his way by, “All right, Cookie. Are you cooling those D potatoes again in my freezer?” They boiled the potatoes before they could peel them, they cool them down, they run them in the freezer and they’d drop the temperature. That just had always stayed with me as one of the stories that Dad told.

TS:Yeah, I’m sure that that’s what they did, too. Well what about growing up? What was it like growing up as a young girl?

CJ:I can’t really think of anything, you know, way out of the ordinary. It was, you know, I lived in the city. I know where I am living now in Reidsville [North Carolina], most of the people talk about things that they did growing up. There was farming in that area, and so they did 00:05:00things to entertain themselves and so on, outside like that. And for me it was taking popsicle sticks, we’d put them in the gutter and race them after a rain when the water was going down the gutters really fast. We’d put our popsicle sticks out there and race them.

In the winter time back then it got cold enough and we had enough snow and ice and so on. It would be maybe two inches thick on the side streets. That’s where we went ice skating. Of course, the sledding any place there was any kind of a hill and we had enough snow and so on. They don’t get that much up there now either, as we don’t here.

So it was really you know well rounded, I guess. The summers were hot, the winters were cold. We had four seasons. Not that many kids in my neighborhood, but enough. We, you know, played back and forth between the houses.

TS:Did you have a favorite game that you liked to play?

CJ:No, not particularly. I enjoyed the roller skating until, of course, they would always come loose. These were the skates that you turned with the skate key. It clamped to your shoe. If it worked loose it would flip up behind you and the part that was at the heel of your shoe would slip up and cut into the back of your ankle. So usually after about two of those, that was it for the day. [laughter]

TS:That doesn’t sound like too much fun.

CJ:No.

TS:Did you play any sports at all?

CJ:No. It was—I wouldn’t consider it a sport. You had to be able to move quick, needed good reflexes. But the high school that I went to was West High. There was just North, South, East, West, and Central, five high schools in the city at the time. West High was surprisingly the Cowboys. And one of the things that they had—like now with the football teams and so on, they have the band, they have the cheerleaders, and they’ll have the flags, a lot of times the guys and gals that will do all the routines with the flags. Ours was with lassos, and that was interesting. I managed to learn how to do it.

TS:So you were a part of that?

CJ:Yes, I did. I learned how to do that, and I even—I think the toughest one, or the scariest one is the one where they do the big circle vertical and you jump through it standing up. You pull it across you really, and then you jump and it goes left to right. Because where the rope goes through—see, one end of the rope goes around in a circle and the other end of the rope goes through it to make the lasso, to twirl. Well, on the one where you do the big vertical circle is a large—and it is heavy. It is weighted, because it has to hold that whole rope. It has to get enough centrifugal force going. And if that thing bonks you in the head, you are on your knees. And I remember that was like, “Okay, are we going to make it?” And we made it. [laughs] Oh, me.

TS:So what other kind of things did you—did you like high school?

CJ:Not particularly. It was—there wasn’t as much variety, and I can see why kids used to get pretty bored, because the—we had to have gym. We did this every day and it went with the seasons. Volleyball, basketball, think we did some softball, and track, and it was the same four every year. You knew exactly what was going to happen. And I’m not that tall, so the basketball was totally not interesting to me. I was kind of just running and was half-court. So I’m like running that far and don’t go over the line, and there were all these other very tall people that were playing above my head. And of course they dragged you outside for the track and the volleyball when it was very very, very, very hot. And I’m like, “I’m still not the biggest person here. Everybody’s got longer legs than me. I’m eating their dust. I’m tired of this.” [chuckles] No, I don’t really—no, that wasn’t terribly 00:10:00 exciting.

TS:How about for classes? Anything pique your interest?

CJ:History.

TS:History?

CJ:History was the big one for me. We had some very good history teachers. I had one in particular that I remember. I was always terribly impressed because she would come in and sit down and open the roster, her class roll book, and she would take attendance. And then she would close it, and then she would set it to the side of her desk, and then she folded her hands on top of her desk. There was never a paper, a book, a note of any kind. She simply sat there and spoke with us. She didn’t stand up and speak down to us. She didn’t write things on the board and say, “Copy this. It’s going to be on the test.” She sat there and spoke with us. She told us stories, and she had a tendency to make things connect, one to the other, in historical events. It made history come alive. It really did. And that’s something that I probably—you know, we say, “If I could go back and do it over again—” which is only if I could know then what I know now—in that case, I probably would have paid a lot more attention to the history. I would’ve majored in it. I think that would’ve been a really good thing.

But that was not my biggest deal for high school. It was kind of like something that—I did go to college for a little while. I did about a semester, a semester and a half. And I was not impressed because I simply was—I wasn’t settled down enough to know what direction I wanted to go. And we didn’t have the tools back then. I think if I had—if a counselor of some kind had gotten a hold of me and given me an aptitude test or something along that order, that might have unlocked something in my mind, but we didn’t have that sort of thing.

So I said, “Okay, this is it.” And by then we were getting pretty into the Bay of Pigs [Invasion] and the whole deal up there, and that was the first time that I remember, I guess, the big—the big deal with playing on the emotions of the American people, with how big a threat this was and all these sort of things. They had many people very, very, very upset. And we didn’t really know for sure exactly what was going on, what was happening, and it just—I guess the military was more visible at the time. And I said, “Well, I’m not too thrilled with what I’m doing here. What the heck,” you know? And it really basically was a “what the heck.” And so that was how I ended up joining the army.

And again, that would’ve been another decision that I would’ve made had I known then what I know now: I would not have gotten out. I would’ve stayed. Because the way—the assignments that I had had, where I was at that time, I could’ve chosen where my next assignment was. I was like, “Okay, you chose to get out? This really was not bright, Carol.” [laughter] Because I could’ve done embassy in Europe. I could’ve done anything I wanted. And it’s not often that you’re in a position like that.

TS:Well when you—when you’re—which college was that you went to for a little bit?

CJ:Ohio State [University].

TS:Ohio State? And did you have a major at that time that you were thinking about?

CJ:No.

TS:Just taking some classes?

CJ:Yeah. Which was the basic thing was, “Just take general classes and don’t worry about it. Something will make sense.” They forgot to take into consideration there’s a lot of people that are like going through these basic classes going, “Why am I taking this? If I had any idea why I was taking this—.” Kids still do it today. Because I—for about a year and a half I was a duty-free aide at Wentworth School. And that’s where I would come over for just two hours in the afternoon, and I would go around to the different classes for about fifteen, twenty minutes a piece after lunch so the teachers could get in a quick break if they needed to check something or just get off their feet for a second and meditate for a little while so they don’t come in and hurt one of the kids, they can get—oh, well. But I remember 00:15:00so much that when they were doing percentages in one of the classes, and one gal in the back of the room, she was just not getting it at all, and it was frustrating her and she said, “Why do I need to know this junk anyway? I’m never going to use it.” And just the happenstance that my head and my mouth were in sync for a change, and I turned around and said, “Honey, when you go in to Kmart or any place and they have a dress that is really, really pretty and you really would like to have that dress, and it is on sale for 35% off, how are you going to know if you have enough money for it?” And she looked at me and it was, “Oh.” It was an “ah-ha” moment for her, because I remember that so clearly. “Why am I studying this?” As long as you can make it relevant to a child—really to anybody for any subject—“Why am I learning this?” Make it relevant and you’ve got them.

TS:Well, so you talked—you were talking a little bit about the environment of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis and all that was going on then, what did you think of President [John F.] Kennedy at that time?

CJ:Was not sure about him at all. Nobody, at least where I was living—He was the first president that was Catholic by religion. He had been educated in England, very—then that country was socialist in their medicine and a lot of other things. People were afraid of him, really very afraid of him. Because I remember when he was elected, people were saying, “God only knows what’s going to happen now.” There was a strain and a tension before he ever even got to the missile crisis and Bay of Pigs and all this sort of thing. And then, of course, it ramped up. So it was just going from bad to worse. And people were really, really, really, “He’s Catholic. He was educated with that socialism. He’s from Boston, up there in the Back Bay area type thing of Boston, and they’re all very—it’s all very closed, and it’s a lot of money, and who knows what they can do.” And that was pretty much the sentiment that was going on and on and on. People were really getting themselves into an Excedrin headache. It was bad. So, yeah, that might have been part of the reason that I wanted to get out of there. I was tired of hearing it.

TS:So you were conscious of what was going on in the military. Did you know anybody in the military at that time that helped influence your decision to join?

CJ:No. My brother had served in Korea. And that, of course, had not been easy at all. He was in the Signal Corps.

TS:Was he in the army?

CJ:Yes. And he did the—of course, Signal Corps is all the communications, and he—the radios that they used to call back to headquarters. This was the kind where they—

TS:Carol is rolling her arm around.

CJ:—wound the handle. Yeah.

TS:—the crank.

CJ:—cranking that little thing on the side there. And Larry did a lot of repair, where he would have to go to the front lines and fix when things would get broken, dropped, stepped on, shot, whatever. And so he was back and forth. And he never really said, and we have no idea, except that putting two and two together from different comments at different times over the years, he apparently was pretty close up towards the bay, Chosin Bay [sic—Reservoir], when they would not allow—because he made the comment—I don’t know if he heard it or if he was there when the young man did it—that they were on the phones begging 00:20:00headquarters to put an air strike on the [Yalu] River.

Because it came back and they said, “We can’t be firing at Chinese in their own country.”

And they said, “No, no, no, listen to me.” He said, “The river. Don’t touch anybody, just blow up the river. They are pulling the people and the equipment out, crossing the river as it freezes. Every day or every couple of days they can move closer to us. They don’t have a bridge. The only way they can get here is to come across the frozen river. The river is freezing from each side. They’re coming across. They’re getting to solid ground to walk across on. Blow the river. If you will blow up the ice, they can’t come across and get to us.”

Headquarters never understood or would not take the chance of dropping a bomb in the middle of the river, which is, you know, it’s idiotic. It’s idiotic. Of course, now, I think that there probably would be somebody who would have the nerve and have the ingenuity and to have better explosives. They have plastic and so on now. They might just roll a log out there and let the little sucker do its job and just tell headquarters later. But during that time, it wasn’t the way they did things. And so they—Larry was in touch with someone who was watching them come towards him, which really—that makes your blood run cold.

And I don’t know. I guess all of that—for background, I guess—was something that—my cousin served in the navy. Had another cousin who, actually, he flew a couple of missions right at the very tail end of World War II. When the war was over, he came out, went to Ohio State on the GI bill, and then went back in. And he flew missions. He was in the air force. He flew missions [in] Korea and Vietnam before he retired. And [I had] an uncle that was in the navy. So yeah, there’s a fair amount of military.

TS:Was that anything that you were thinking of in high school at all?

CJ:No, not particularly. Because it was just—everybody, you know, was pretty much had such in their families. With Korea, the young lady that was in my Girl Scout troop, Brownies at the time, Karen, lived a couple streets over from us, and her older brother had gone to school with my brother. They were about the same age. His name was Lorenzo. And they’d gone in the service about the same time. Larry would not go to Officers Training School [OTS]. He said, “I’m doing my two and I’m going home, folks.” But Whitey, Whitey Lorenzo, Whitey went to Officers Training School, and he was a lieutenant and had one of the first platoons that went up Pork Chop Hill. And I remember Mom saying that Karen wouldn’t be at the Brownie meeting, that from what they’d heard, they’re pretty sure that Whitey had been killed in one of the battles. And then came time for the meeting that week, and Karen and her mom came because Karen wanted to invite everybody in the troop to come to the memorial ceremony for her brother. That—and I remember her saying that it was going to be a memorial service, not a funeral, because we don’t have his body. I remember that stuck out to me really, really big. And we were in Brownies, so we were not that old.

But yeah, this was just life. This is the way it was at that time. Pretty much everybody had folks that had been in the service or whatever. So it didn’t seem to me then, and it really doesn’t now, seem like an unusual decision that I said, “Okay, you know, I’ll just go in the army.” [chuckles]

TS:So 00:25:00how did you go about doing that?

CJ:Best I remember, I just kind of sort of toodled downtown and walked in said, “Hello. What do you have going on? What have you got going?” and—

TS:Talking to a recruiter?

CJ:Recruiter, yeah. [I] just wanted to know what they had going on. Of course, about the time that I just simply walked in and said, “Hi, hello. I’d like to know what you’ve got going on,” they were of course falling all over themselves. [chuckles] Like, “Oh my god, this person just came and wants to sign up.” That’s number one, and number two, it’s a girl. Because then—

TS:And this was 1964?

CJ:Yes. They didn’t have so many of us from any one particular place. Yeah.

TS:Why’d you pick the army?

CJ:I think that was probably because my brother was in the army.

TS:So did they tell you what you were going to do? Did you get to pick a job or anything?

CJ:They did some testing. Finally somebody did some aptitude testing. Basically administration, the paperwork, but one of the tests that they had given me was—involved like tools and motors and this kind of thing. Because I remember when they got done with that part of it, the sergeant kind of went down through it and he was grading it or whatever they called it. He said, “Well, I can tell you one thing, you are not going to be in the motor pool.” [laughs] “No, this is not where you’re going to end up.”

I said, “Okay.”

So that was how, really I guess, that I ended up with administration, because I started out in personnel, and through basic—that was in Alabama—and then I went back to Fort Dix [New Jersey] for the personnel.

And we did not have electric typewriters. This was your old fashioned, manual typewriter. And you had to get up to X amount of words per minute to graduate, and I realize now that I probably had some really pretty strong fingers, because I was up to eighty words a minute.

TS:You really had to punch those keys hard, too.

CJ:You sure did. You had to be very definite about it. Because then later, they brought in the electric. And you just, you know, all you had to do with those was touch them, and I was used to go going [taps the table loudly]. Yeah, they had a little trouble with that. Everybody in the room was like, “No, please don’t beat on them.”

TS:Well now, what did your brother think about you going into the army?

CJ:He always was kind of quiet. He didn’t have a lot to say about anything. And his basic was just, “Watch your back.”

I said, “Okay.”

TS:What about your parents?

CJ:My dad was pretty much okay with it. My mother was not. She was just completely tore up about the whole thing. She couldn’t figure out why I would want to do that or anything else. And so that just kind of ended up with, “Okay. We won’t talk about it.”

TS:How about your friends?

CJ:Nobody seemed to be terribly, you know, emotional about it one way or another.

TS:Okay. Do you remember what it was like, how you felt when you first put your uniform on? Did you have any particular feelings?

CJ:I think the first real realization probably was after taking the oath, because that was like, “Okay. You really did do this, didn’t you, kiddo?” Hello. No, after that it was just a matter of things were happening pretty fast, because then it was travelling to Alabama and then things were just going [snaps] one, two, three four. You didn’t have time to stop and think about anything. You were moving.

You had all the different bits and pieces of basic, which most of it, of course, is the physical. I remember I think the biggest deal was the second time through the gas house that—because we had to—we did it two ways. We went in and put the gas mask on, and then they turned the gas on. Then we had to go in—yeah, because we would walk over to the door, take the mask off, and walk out. And then the other 00:30:00one was coming in with the gas already filling the room, put the mask on, clear it, and walk out. [I] did those just fine until I got to the last run, which was taking the mask off as you’re going out, and for some reason that one hit me really, really bad, and I was like out of there. And somebody said something to me about doing something again.

I said, “I do not think so.”

And they said, “Well, we’ll probably—”

And I said, “No, we won’t. Not this kid.”

And ever how I said or the expression on my face, we didn’t talk about it anymore. I don’t know what I did, but I know I didn’t go back in.

TS:Well, how were your other experiences in basic training?

CJ:It was fine. There wasn’t anything—you basically come out of it much more balanced than you went in. My weight was better, because we’re eating three square meals a day, no snacking, because you didn’t have time, and had the full exercise all day. So my weight was where it should have been. And the routine—I had the routine of the day, [and] had a great deal more energy, because everything was lined up like it was supposed to be. Which I suppose I’d be better off right now if they had some kind of a little farm that I could go to that they would dictate to me for about eight weeks there, get everything back to where it’s supposed to be.

But yeah, that was—it was all, you know, really pretty routine all the way through. They laughed at us about us learning how to—because we learned how to fire the rifles. And there was the one company of women and about four or five companies of men, and going out to the range or coming back, you would normally pass another company or platoon or something. And the guys always were making these comments, “Please, point that at the ground, not at me. Let’s get the heck out of here.” [laughs] They just kind of made fun of us a lot. But other than that, [I] don’t remember a great deal more about it.

TS:What about—your first assignment was at Fort Dix?

CJ:Fort Dix. Yeah, that was—

TS:How was that?

CJ:Okay. That was where I went for training as personnel specialist—the typing school and all of that sort of thing. And they kept us going pretty fast then, also. But by then things were loose. They were—our schedule was a little bit more loose. We had a little bit of social time, not a tremendous amount, but a little bit. And this was when we could go off base on the weekends. This was—of course, Fort Dix is in New Jersey, and I just discover hoagies.

TS:Hokies?

CJ:Hoagies, the sandwiches.

TS:Oh, hoagies!

CJ:And the hoagies were awesomely good up there. They’re not like the hoagies here in North Carolina. They’re different. They are really, really good, really, really greasy, really, really bad for you, but boy, were they good! And after eating in the mess hall, boy, were they good.

We still didn’t—there wasn’t a lot else going on except the getting to school, keeping everything clean, because there were the inspections once a week or more. We could go to the NCO [Non-Commissioned Officers] Club. That would be another thing on the weekends.

TS:What would you do at the club?

CJ:Dancing was the big thing. I remember there was one gentleman [who] was getting ready to retire, but he really liked his dancing. And he was a drill instructor, okay, so he had these guys out there running them up and down the roadways and such, and so he was in really very, very good condition there. And I think that he was getting—they were going to force 00:35:00him to retire because he was hitting seventy. At which I was you know like, “Okay. He’s seventy years old, and he’s been out here running up and down the roads all day with—.” Number one, I can’t believe he did that, and number two, all the gals looking at each other, “How long is he going to dance?” Right? Wrong, he was still dancing as we were huffing and puffing out the door. This guy was really—he was funny. That was one of the unique things about the NCO Club there was that he would dance with anybody that would dance for a while, because he kept wearing everybody out.

My first assignment I stayed there, went into the personnel, in fact, for headquarters company.

TS:What kind of people were you meeting?

CJ:All over the world—all over, rather, the States. The one young lady whose name I cannot remember, but she sticks in my mind because she was from Alaska, and that was when they had the big earthquake in Alaska. She went several days, couldn’t get a telephone call through or get any kind of information to find out about her family.

And we had a really, really big snow. We kind of walked out the next morning and some of us are just kind of looking, and some of the other ladies that were there from the more northern states even, Michigan, Minnesota, places like this, where they said, “Yeah, this is a blizzard. This qualifies as a blizzard,” because the snow was drifting. It was all the way to the top of the windows of the first floor, working its way to the second floor. We said, “Okay!” And things were—the whole base was on delayed time that day, and nothing really got cranking until between ten and eleven o’clock that morning, and that’s saying something for an army base in an area where they expect snow and have it overrun them.

TS:Now about how long had you been in before you got your first assignment, which was at Fort Dix?

CJ:Okay, that was—let’s see, four months, five months? And then after I finished the personnel school there at Fort Dix, I just stayed there and moved over to headquarters company. And I had Company C, and what I did was I just took care of all the paperwork for the personal records of each of the guys assigned to Company C. And that was when we were at a point of—okay, the—their full file would be in the file cabinet, but a condensed form of that would be on this manila—it started out a green form and then we—I was there when we transferred to the manila, because that was a lot of typing. And these were kept in just a box on the corner of the desk in alphabetical order so that we could look through them. And that was one of the things that I hadn’t been there very long at C Company when we started doing this sorting. The front of it would have their name, their rank, then their MOS [Military Occupational Specialty]. And it would be primary MOS, PMOS, and secondary MOS, they might have a third. And this was the letter and number combination that indicated what their job was, what they were specifically trained for. And I remember that we had to sort three different times because they were so desperate for stevedores.

TS:What’s a stevedore?

CJ:Stevedore works on the docks, and they were—they had the engineers. That was not a problem because they had entire engineering companies. But they were getting ready to build, and the name leaves me. I want to say Tonkin, the bay. They were just getting all of the—everything organized, the materiel, to go over, and the people to build.

TS:Where were they going to build this at? What country?

CJ:Vietnam.

TS:Vietnam. That’s 00:40:00what I thought you meant. I just wasn’t sure.

CJ:And Tonkin keeps coming to my mind. I think that’s right. But anyway, so stevedores was what they really, really needed. And we went through about three or four different times. And they’re still going, “Are you sure there are no more stevedores?” Because we went through for primary—that their primary training was for this job—went through secondary, went through third. And they were still—and I guess by then they were—they had to bring some from Hawaii, because they—a lot, of course, places there, the ships are in and out on the west coast and Hawaii, and that was where they went to get the rest of the stevedores for the bay in Vietnam. And they were upset with having to do that, because it was making them shorthanded in the other places. Oh, geez, big mess.

But we would go through and they would send down what MOS they wanted, what jobs they needed primarily. And that—We would go through and pull the names, turn the jackets in, and they would look through. The sergeant and the lieutenant would go through them and see which ones met enough of the rest of the requirements. And that was how it was decided, you know, who would be shipping out next. And they—for up and down the east coast, they had a lot that they congregated there at Fort Dix until they made up a number of whatever it was, the job that they were filling, that they would ship then to Vietnam from there. And so we also did—guys would be sent back there, and they would process out of the service from there.

TS:From Fort Dix?

CJ:Yes. They were literally coming and going. It was a very busy place.

TS:Were you aware then of what was happening in Vietnam and the buildup then?

CJ:Yeah.

TS:What did you think about it at the time?

CJ:At the time, we would, you know, basically hear what jobs were needed and from what was said from people coming back. There was always scuttlebutt. You could pretty much figure out what area and what was going to be happening, and what was the basic of what was going on. Plus, of course, a lot of that happened on the TV. You got a lot on the evening news. So yeah, that—I guess all of us, the whole country, everybody had a pretty civilized idea of what was going on.

TS:What was your—you had talked a little about Kennedy and where you were growing up. Now, he’d already been assassinated when you went in. Do you remember where you were when—?

CJ:Oh, yeah, when that happened? I had just come home. I was working part time at a department store in Columbus, Lazarus Department Store. And I had come in and I fixed a sandwich, poured some tea or something to drink, and I sat down at the kitchen table to eat this and had turned on the television set. And it was one of the soap operas that was on. Of course, they interrupted. And the first time that they interrupted, the screen went blank. They simply cut the picture, and it was Walter Cronkite’s voice that there has been a shooting in Dallas, that they have a reporter on the scene.

He said, “We’re going to switch now and see if he can tell us anything more.” And it was Dan Rather. And he said, “What has happened that you can see or that you have heard? What do you know to be the status of what’s going on there?”

And he just very simply said, “Bullets—shots have been fired, and President Kennedy has been assassinated.” [bangs on table] Thud, just like that, and it immediately went off. Sound went immediately away. They shut him down because it was too much, too quick. It was going to scare people 00:45:00really, really more than what it ended up. Then within one minute or less they brought up the picture and everything with Walter Cronkite, and he went ahead and, of course, then they started taking it more gently, one step at a time, that shots had been fired at the motorcade, and that the secret servicemen had jumped on the back, and the motorcade, of course, immediately sped up and was escorted quickly to Parkland [Memorial] Hospital, whatever it was. And it was probably—was it a little after one o’clock that they announced that he was dead? But I remember very clearly sitting there a lot closer to 00:50:00hearing Dan Rather say, “The president has been shot, and he has been killed.” Bang. Just that flat out. Just that quick, “He was killed.”

TS:Was there any picture of him, or was it just a voice?

CJ:Just the voice.

TS:Neither. Just a blank screen?

CJ:Blank screen and just his voice. It was most dramatic. I remember I called my mom. She was at work at that time. She was working at the library.

I called her and I said, “Now,” I said, “you—do you have a radio close to you?”

She said, “Yeah.”

And I said, “You’re going to need to turn this on. They have just announced that President Kennedy has been shot.”

She said, “Don’t say that like that out loud. You’re going to scare somebody to death.”

I said, “Mom, turn on the radio so you can hear it for yourself.” And I just hung up.

I called my Aunt Helen and I said, “They’ve—I was watching the TV, and they just said that President Kennedy has been shot.”

She never said a word. She just hung up and went and turned on her TV. Those were the only two calls that I made. I just sat there then, of course, and then like everybody else, watched that afternoon.

But, yeah, I remember seeing Cronkite, the first time he did that, that he took his glasses off and looked up at the clock and made the announcement. Yeah. [pause] That was another one that had people really shaken. They didn’t see how things could go peaceably from that to the next administration, because nobody was alive that had ever seen that happen before. And then it—I think that was another reason that they, as quickly as they did, they had the pictures of [Lyndon] Johnson taking the oath on the airplane. And I think everybody markedly settled down. Of course, then they cranked right back up about whether or not he’d be a good president. [laughs] We just don’t give them much time at all.

TS:No. So what did you think about Johnson, then, President Johnson? Because he would’ve been the president while you were in the military.

CJ:Yeah. Nobody was terribly impressed with the entire—the establishment. You know, if you’re going to do it, do it. If you’re not, then don’t. Let’s all go home and go back to tending our gardens or whatever. I just couldn’t get past the politics of it, and you can only push so far, and then this country gets upset or that country gets upset. Nobody’s—because you cannot expect as many different countries as are in the world, then and today, that everybody’s going to be on the same page at the same time.

TS:So you’re in Fort Dix. You’re about twenty years old, I think?

CJ:Twenty-two? Twenty-one, twenty-two.

TS:So was that your feelings at that time about the politics, or is this something that came—?

CJ:I think I was more, at that time, concerned with the mechanics of learning my job in the military, doing my job in the military, and I was not questioning so much at that point in time. And then, let’s see, I moved from Fort Dix to the information team.

TS:What was that about?

CJ:And so 00:55:00that was definitely fast. That was the one that—at the time it was Colonel Bailey was in charge.

TS:Colonel Mildred Bailey?

CJ:Yes. And we went around to different cities in support of the recruiting and also basic public relations, because we would be at—we did like Rotary Clubs, this kind of thing, any group that would have us to come in and do this. And we had costumes for different periods of time. “Women in the Military” was the basic theme of it. The long program went back and started with Cleopatra because she was a strategist and so on with the military, and then all the different women up through history, the different wars, battles, whatever. And we would wear clothes that were appropriate to that time frame, and we would show those and model those while a script was being read.

TS:So you had like—it was like a stage event sort of?

CJ:Yes.

TS:And then women would come out in the clothes and someone was reading like the history of—

CJ:Yeah, telling the story of how—What did the women do during the War of 1812? And somebody dressed in 1812 [costume]. And we had music that went. The recruiters usually were the contact person in each city with this, and they would get the music for us, rather than—which now I wonder why we didn’t have our own set music. But at any rate, we didn’t. And we had this one—I can’t remember where it was—but he had gotten appropriate music for every other date on the list except 1812. He couldn’t find anything that matched 1812. And it hadn’t been that long before there was a popular song—gosh, I just don’t know who sang it—it was about the War of 1812, about going down to New Orleans, Andrew Jackson. I can’t say the song now. You’d recognize it if I could say it. Oh dear. But anyway, this song popped up, and it was a contemporary popular song about the War of 1812. And everybody kind of did a stutter step and went, “Whoa, really? Okay.” And we just picked up and went on.

TS:Did you—were you one of the women that dressed in a costume?

CJ:Yes.

TS:Did you have a particular one that you wore all the time, or was it changed?

CJ:No, we changed. Although some costumes, especially the ones that were authentic, it was like, “That’s the size. It doesn’t change.” So there was just always at least one gal on the team that was that size. And that’s what I have some pictures of—

TS:Oh, good.

CJ:—is that. And we had a good time with it. We went down the east coast and all the way to Florida, came back up and we—the furthest west we went on that trip was Texas, El Paso. Yeah, El Paso was the one stop there. That drive across Texas was most amazing. We were in a—we had a van that we travelled in, and all of the costumes and the luggage and the everything was in an eighteen-wheeler, and we travelled together. But boy that drive across Texas, whew. Wow. It makes a believer out of you. That is a big state, big state. And it is really, really flat in some places, and not a lot out there.

I think one of the really, really fun stops was Beaumont, Texas, which is in the southeastern corner, and it’s right on the gulf. And they were—it was the state fair, or the fair for the southeastern part. And we had a really good time there, and they—we had a break in between. We did two shows. We had a break in between there, and they brought 01:00:00this big tub, galvanized tub of shrimp. And we’re like, “Oh, okay!” And they just had bunches and bunches of shrimp there at Beaumont, I guess. I had no idea, but I, you know, was more than willing to help eat them. Gosh, they were good. [chuckles] But they had a couple of big stands there at the fair that, of course, were selling the shrimp. So they just went around and collected some shrimp from each stand and brought us this big bucket to eat.

TS:That’s nice.

CJ:Boy, we—yeah, we sure did. We got around that thing and went to.

TS:Well now, what—when—what was the purpose of this tour that you were doing?

CJ:In support of the recruiting, just to get information out there that women have been involved in military things. This is not a new concept. And that there are many different things that women can do in the service. Of course, at that time, we were not on the front lines. And so it was a matter of freeing up the men to fight on the front lines, that the women could do the support. And that was the basic idea, to try to get that across to people: that if somebody joined the military, they were not going to be firing machine guns or driving tanks. They didn’t let ladies do that just yet. Of course now, yeah.

But I guess that was a lot of it was that they were trying to reassure people that if their daughters wanted to join, that this was not going to be as dangerous as what it would’ve been for their sons—although it was not without danger, because we had medics in particular in Vietnam. One of my friends from Fort Dix, when she—she reenlisted and went to Vietnam as a medic. I’m trying to think of—there were a couple of other gals I know of that went over, but her in particular. I was closer to her. And then that was, I guess, the biggest part of it for the women over there that I remember being around at all, was hearing them talk about being a medic over there, which of course that kept them very busy.

TS:Did you—with this touring, how many people were in this tour that you were doing with Col. Bailey?

CJ:We had two gentlemen that took turns driving the eighteen-wheeler. About six of us. Five of us with Col. Bailey.

TS:Now did she travel with you?

CJ:Yes.

TS:How was she to work with?

CJ:Very good, very organized, knew exactly what she needed from the recruiters or whoever was setting things up, and you didn’t have to wonder what was going on next. She was organized. She knew what was to happen next, and she could communicate that. So that, you know, had a tendency to keep things running a great deal more smoothly.

Oh, gosh knows—I don’t know where we were. It had to be to [Washington] D.C.—Walter Winchell, okay. We were at this some kind of a dinner thing. It wasn’t full formal, but we wore—we had on dress uniforms, and [gossip columnist] Walter Winchell was in the restaurant with a group of some kind. And she [Col. Bailey] was not bashful. She decided this was good publicity, okay. So she—I don’t know how she got word to him or how she did this exactly, but as we were leaving, we stopped by his table to be introduced and to say hello. She wouldn’t miss an opportunity. Nope, not—never missed an opportunity to get the information out. She would pick up on it.

We did shopping malls, schools, Rotary Club, state fairs, any place, any place. And heaven knows we did our costume changes about any place, too. [laughs] Those were wild. Oh my goodness gracious. We had one where the only place to—that had enough room, the only place to change was like on one hallway, and we had to go down and over and back up to get to the auditorium. It was far enough that it really put a hurting on us because some of them, the changes we had three minutes. And we were running up and down this hallway for at least one of the three minutes. Whew. That was rough.

TS:That’s a quick change.

CJ:That was a very quick change. A couple of tricks that we used were, depending upon which costumes—of course, we knew ahead of time what our layout was, because you laid out the costumes. Everything that goes with the first is here. Everything that goes with the second is here. You could put on, if you were wearing black stockings with the first one, and you had a very short change, or really just because it was more convenient, if you had black stockings here and brown stockings here, you put the brown stockings on first, the black stockings on over, so all you had to do was take one pair off. Yeah.

TS:That’s a good trick.

CJ:Oh my, yes. And anything, anything that you could layer like that. And a lot of times blouses—you would think—one of the dresses was the old southern belle, the hoop skirt and the big—and you would think that you could layer really easy with that. You could put on whatever underneath this great big hoop skirt. But you see, the silly thing would swing, so you couldn’t do that. You’d go up a step, or if you take too large a step, this thing is swinging, and that was why they wore the great big fluffy pantaloons that you wore under that. But ironing that was fun. That was a two person job.

TS:Well now, did you enjoy this, what you were doing?

CJ:Yeah, I really did. It—nobody did it for all that long because it was tiring, very tiring. Because we would pull into a town, get checked in, go and find out where we—what the site looked like, what we were going to be doing, whichever presentation—because we had like a half hour, an hour, and an hour and a half presentation, depending on how much time they wanted us, and we had that many costumes; we could break it down. So we would see, and this decision would be made then as to which length, because if we were going to have to have a lot of time in between just because of the physical, it might take us the better part of an hour to do a half an hour show. So Col. Bailey would put this together and get squared away on the logistics. And then we had to unload and get everything set up, take care of ourselves with the makeup and so on and getting ready, and then we did the show. And usually we would stay in that town that night, and then load up the next morning and move on.

Sometimes we would get in; there would not be a long distance, and we would get into the next town before lunch time, and we would have that afternoon and do one in the evening. Which, of course, everybody went, “Yee haw,” and started running for the nearest laundromat, because that was another fun thing that we had to squeeze in, the laundromat. Oh my, yeah. And every once in a while, eating in between. Oh, gracious. And we had to be cautious not to live on doughnuts and so on, or the weight would change, and that changed how we fit in which costume. So yeah, this was not something that you did for years on end. Nobody could handle that.

Although Col. Bailey did it for several years, and I really—I’m not sure how she did that. That was—her husband passed away during, I think, the last part of the tour that I was with her. 01:10:00And that was a super duper shock to her, because when she got home, got back to their apartment in Washington [D.C.], the hardest part of it was that his cup and spoon were on the table. He had his tendency to leave and go to work and leave the cup and saucer with the the spoon in the saucer at his place on the table. And she had to pick that up and put it in the sink to be washed. That was probably the hardest thing going. I don’t know. Did she tell you in her section that he was a Marine?

TS:Right. Yeah, in her interview. She did that with someone else, but I read the transcript.

CJ:I always got tickled at that, because he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps and he—or she was, at the time that they met, I guess, a lieutenant in the army. And that was just not going to work at all. Both services were going to have nervous breakdowns. So he came out because she wanted to continue. But his joke was always that one Marine sergeant equaled an [U.S.] Army lieutenant. That always tickled her to death. It was one of the stories that she told. But yes, she did. She stayed with that for a couple of years. I’m not really sure exactly how long, but—

TS:Well, how did you get selected to go on the program?

CJ:If I’m not mistaken, it was our lieutenant at our company that—apparently Col. Bailey had been in touch and said—because they were in that area to do a show, and she knew she was going to need some replacements, and so she had called and asked if the base—if they knew some people that they thought they would recommend to be interviewed. And there were about four or five of us that interviewed with her. And I basically had forgotten about it because she finished that tour and everything, but then got—just got the word that I had been selected if I wanted to go and do that. And I said, “Okay.” At this whole point in my life apparently I was, “Okay,” seemed to be my thing, “Why not?”

TS:Do you remember any of the shows that were most memorable for either things that went right or things that went wrong?

CJ:We were lucky. We didn’t have any really, really, really big boo-boos. We were very lucky on that. At this point, I really can’t.

TS:Any memorable places that you went to? Besides the shrimp place, which, of course, that was a good one.

CJ:Yeah, I’ll always remember Beaumont. It was a school that we had to run halfway around the place. The shopping center, that was interesting. I don’t know if you’ve ever—in shopping centers you have the store that faces the main aisle, and then there’s kind of this back hallway behind the buildings, each of the stores where they—

TS:So the inside shopping center?

CJ:Yes.

TS:Okay.

CJ:And they have these hallways where they move merchandise in and out, where they load and unload the trucks. They might just have one big door. The truck comes there, and then they have this hallway that goes up and down the back, and there’s bits and pieces of hallways and they’re stacked with all different stuff and whatnot. That was where we changed.

TS:[chuckles] Now who was watching at the shopping mall?

CJ:This—gosh, who put—I can’t remember who put it on, if it was the recruiter that sponsored that one, or it might have been a radio station that sponsored that one. And they would just have an emcee that would, you know, speak to the people and kind of get them gathered up. And one of the gentlemen that did the eighteen-wheeler also—I think both of them could emcee the program and would read down through it. And we did do, I think it was just like one or two costumes a piece. One costume and then our uniform 01:15:00for like a local morning show on TV.

And I remember because I had come back from doing my part out there, and I came back not really realizing that I was the last person, because I was not scheduled to be the last person. But something had gone wrong with the time, either we ran over—who knows what happened—but at that point I was supposed to very quickly get out of the costume, get into my uniform, and then we were supposed to come in uniform and come back out for the wrap-up thing there. Only I didn’t know any of this because I had been out there doing my little thingy. And I came back, and all of a sudden I’ve got different people pulling off my hat, pulling off my jacket, “Lift your foot,” taking off my shoes.

And, “What’s going on?”

“Put her on!”

And I’m just kind of like this and they’re—and I’m standing there with my arms out and whatnot. They’re dressing me. Because I remember I was still putting on my gloves and trying to do it down here so nobody could see me because I was still standing there going, “What’s going on?” I had no idea [laughs] through that entire closing.

And it was just, “Stand there,” I’m standing.

“Smile,” I’ll smile.

“Okay, what did I do?”

“You made the closing by the skin of your teeth”

I said, “Oh, okay.” [chuckles]

TS:So they were helping you get dressed for that.

CJ:Yeah, absolutely. They had to, because they didn’t have time to explain to me and me get dressed. So it was, “Hush.” [laughter] And whizzing things. I don’t even remember exactly where we were in the studio, because, at that point everything was irrelevant except get everything pulled together and get out there.

TS:Yeah. [End CD 1—Begin CD 2]

TS:Well, now you’re—how—what—when did that end then? Is this into ’65, or—

CJ:Okay, I came out in—

TS:[Nineteen] sixty-eight.

CJ:[Nineteen] sixty-eight, and the last about eight months is when I was in D.C. So I would’ve finished with that in, probably, I guess, in ’67, something like that.

TS:[Nineteen] sixty-seven was when you were doing that?

CJ:Yes, I was doing the information thing.

TS:So what did you do after that exhausting experience was over?

CJ:Yes, after that I did stay in one spot for a while. That was when I was receptionist for [United States] Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor.

TS:And how was that?

CJ:Oh, that was amazing because it was up and down. It could be long, long, long stretches of very quiet, library quiet. And then it could start with snap, crackle, pop. Whew. That was amazing. They have a thing called backchannels for messages. And this could be a lieutenant or captain, and he would have a briefcase that was handcuffed to his wrist, he wore his .45 caliber sidearm, and he would walk around the Pentagon with the backchannel messages. These messages came in through a specific place, and they were organized about which ring and which hallway and so on, and different ones went in different directions and—

TS:You’re talking about in the Pentagon?

CJ:In the Pentagon, I’m sorry. And they would come in and go—because the—when you came in the front door, our desk, as the receptionist, was right here, and then you’d go to the right, and that was two secretaries in there, and then secretary’s office was—Resor’s office was beyond that. Behind—there was a wall right behind our desk, and then behind that was a large room with two secretaries and three colonels that were secretary’s staff, and public relations staff was across the hall. So we had quite a little—and their own switchboard, their own switchboard in there. So we had quite a little group there.

But he would come in and immediately go through to Virginia, who was the secretary’s private secretary, and she would—they would take all of his paperwork, so on. He would leave, okay. And sometimes it was like 01:20:00two, three minutes and she would step to the door and hand it to me and say, “I want five copies and no more.” And this is when I’d go down the hall, across a couple of connectors, and there was a specific place that I went to make copies, and bring the copies back. And I’m like, you know, I know basically—we all had clearances that were above top secret—and I know basically I had the clearance for this, but, boy, I wish I didn’t. [chuckles] And as far as looking at any of it, I do not think so. No.

TS:You just made your copies and—

CJ:Made the copies and got my little self right back there. We weren’t—

TS:You weren’t curious to look at any of it?

CJ:Usually did have curiosity, until I reminded myself, “And if you walk outside the door and somebody puts a gun up to your head and asks you what was on that paper, how honestly do you want to be able to tell them ‘I have no idea.’” So yeah, that kind of took the edge right off [chuckles]. But—

TS:Was that stressful, do you think?

CJ:There were a couple of times, yeah, because I knew that something was going on. Because when it’s like the third backchannel of the day and everybody’s frowning, yeah, you just kind of do what has to be done, and let’s get this taken care of and off the board in a hurry. We worked twenty-four hour shifts. It was twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, because you didn’t know when you went in what all might be happening. I never had to work all the way through. I did ever work about, I guess, seventeen out of twenty-four hours. Marcia ever worked a straight twenty-four. I forget exactly what was going on. She was the other receptionist. I forget what was—there was a something that was a big deal that they were there for straight twenty-four.

TS:So you’re here from like ’67 to ’68? Is that the time frame?

CJ:Yes.

TS:So the Vietnam War is really kicking up in this period.

CJ:Yeah. I was there and it was my twenty-four. I don’t know exactly which section of it. I don’t know if it was at the beginning or if it was towards the end of it. There was the Tet Offensive. And that moved. I want to think that it was towards the end of it because it was moving with a great deal of efficiency and there was a lot of information going back and forth. But if you didn’t know—of course, I could look back on it, and it was—I thought it was extremely calm in that office for that much to be going on.

TS:In retrospect?

CJ:In retrospect, yeah. Because see, at the time, I didn’t. Like I said, I’m not sure. I think maybe it was towards the end of it that I went on duty.

TS:Because you’re just a little cog in the wheel and you don’t know the whole big picture at the time, right?

CJ:You don’t get the whole thing at the time. You can look back, but your first instinct is that, “Okay. I think [President Lyndon] Baines [Johnson?] would have been really hysterical at that kind of a time period.” But of course, at that level, they don’t get hysterical. No.

I think the funniest thing that happened—gosh, this was—now this was later. It couldn’t have been that long before I left, really. But in the evening we would put the secretary’s desk away.

TS:The Secretary of the Army’s desk?

CJ:Yes, Secretary Resor’s. So like he would have papers on his desk that he was working on, and whatever was scheduled for that evening, he would—it was common that he would work right up until his driver was saying, “It is now or never.” See, he would simply stand up and walk out. Well, everything on this desk is something way over top secret. It was laid out in a specific manner, and we knew how to take it off the desk and stack it so that the next day we could put it back in its same place. And we would come in then and put the desk away, 01:25:00empty the ashtrays, do the basic pick up and put away.

So one evening, somehow Marcia and I were both there. I don’t know. He might have had a big meeting or something that day. And the side door just opened, and this—

TS:Oh, no.

CJ:—gentleman stepped in and said, “Oh, has he gone home yet?”

And we’re like, “Uh, yes, sir. I’m afraid he has left.”

“Okay!” He says, “Not a problem. I’ll catch him tomorrow.”

Well, this gentleman was working late, because it was definitely late by then. And he had his blouse off, he was just in his shirt and uniform pants, and it was General [William] Westmoreland. [laughs] Hello, okay! It was so funny because he was so casual about it, and you tend to forget that they have—because at that time then he was back from Vietnam and he was [U.S. Army] Chief of Staff. They have a bunch of paperwork to do, too. He was just doing his everyday thing when he’d taken his jacket, which we called a blouse, off and was doing his thing, and just thought of something and said, “Oh, I’ll just run over here.”

But they weren’t terribly, terribly stiff. There’s a formality. The formality is definitely adhered to, but—okay, like once a year at the Army-Navy [football] game. And the secretary of the navy—I think it’s the chief of staff of the navy, navy’s office that is above the secretary of the army’s office. So there’s these great big windows. And he was in his office. I’m not sure if they called down to see if there was anybody in there or if they just didn’t care and dropped it down anyway, but there was this sign that came dropping down that said “GO NAVY” right outside the window by his desk. [laughter] Oh me, that was funny.

And then—okay, that was the same weekend of what he referred to as “the big game,” because we were in there working on Saturday. Because I remember him saying, “What’s the score of the game?”

And somebody said, “Army this, Navy that.”

And he said, “No, no, no, no, no. The real big game.”

And they said, “What game is that, sir?”

“Harvard-Yale, of course,” because that was being played that weekend also. He was from Yale.

TS:Which one are you talking about? The secretary of the army, Reser?

CJ:The secretary of the army.

TS:He was from Yale.

CJ:Yeah.

TS:Oh, okay.

CJ:And he wanted to know what the score was of the real big game.

TS:Oh, I got you.

CJ:The real McCoy there was the Harvard-Yale game.

TS:The Army-Navy game still—

CJ:It was still—yeah. But it just happened that the real game was being played on the same day. That was too funny. We got a kick out of that.

TS:So what was it like to work in this environment with classified material and generals popping in? You were working for a general?

CJ:I was working for Secretary Resor.

TS:Oh, secretary, right.

CJ:General Westmoreland was right down the hall. Yeah. Okay. It was very interesting and very delicate at times, although protocol was known, thank goodness, by everybody. For a general to come in the office and to walk straight through into Virginia’s office: minimum of three stars. And I’m not positive if even three stars did that or if it took four. I want to think really honestly it took four stars to walk straight into Virginia’s office without me announcing them. One star, two star general did not go through the door until I announced it to Virginia, and Virginia spoke to Secretary Resor and told me what to do. Yeah, it could get—

TS:Did some of them try to intimidate you to just let them through?

CJ:No, they didn’t do that. They really didn’t.

TS:They’re pretty good at following rules?

CJ:Yeah, 01:30:00and too busy doing their own thing. They—of course, this was during the war. What they had on their plates was pretty heavy duty. They didn’t have time for games. Not at all.

TS:So you’re a—are you a specialist 5 at this time?

CJ:Yes.

TS:So how did you feel you were treated then by—I mean you’re in a pretty high profile job?

CJ:Yeah. Very respectful was all the way around, all the way around there. As I said, it could be very fast paced, and then at other times we would have sections of time where it was very, very quiet, very, very quiet because everybody had their little heads down working. We would spell the lady that did the switchboard while she went to lunch.

TS:Spell?

CJ:Okay—

TS:Relieve her?

CJ:We would relieve her, yeah. It was a PBX [private branch exchange], a big PBX, and I took one look at that and thought, “Okay, this is going to wash me out.” Whew, because—

TS:What’s a PBX stand for?

CJ:It’s a—I’m not even sure. It’s a type of—

TS:Like a console of—

CJ:Console, yeah.

TS:Communication console?

CJ:Console, right.

TS:Okay.

CJ:Because it had levers on it that were—completely down it was off. You pushed it all the way up to answer and say hello. That was like picking up the phone. And then if you put them on hold, you brought it back to the middle. Okay. And then you went over to whomever this person was calling, and theirs is all the way down, so you push it all the way up so it rings and they answer, and you get the instructions of what, you know, whether we take a message, whether we put them through, leave them on hold for just a second, and then you’re doing these levers again. Okay. Let’s see. My one—I think my biggest boo-boo on that was when I cut a senator off. Got him. Secretary Resor’s staff in the back was two lieutenant colonels and a full colonel, and I cut the senator off from the full colonel. Yeah, that wasn’t fun. That was not fun, nope, nope, nope.

TS:Do you remember what senator it was?

CJ:No, I think I distinctly remember forgetting quickly. [laughter] Did not want to know. Oh, my gosh. Wow. That was interesting because it wasn’t the senator’s secretary, it was him. Oh! I think which probably helped blow my mind.

And that was another thing about who comes on the phone first. And a telephone call coming into Secretary Resor, doesn’t make any difference who it is, the only call that he picks up first and the other—and waits for the other person to answer would be the president. Everybody else is on the line and waits for Secretary Resor to pick up. Oh, yeah. There were a lot of little things like that to get down pat at the beginning. That was—that was wild.

TS:So for a young girl in Ohio not knowing what she was going to do, you had quite a lot of responsibility in your twenties.

CJ:Yes, I was—I’d forgotten about it—When we’d pick up his desk—of course, as I said, these are all top secret and above—and we had them stacked in certain order, and we took them to a specific safe in the back and we locked them. The next morning we would be at work before the secretary because we would unlock that safe and lay out his desk before he came in. Other than the morning that I walked in at like, I don’t know 6:15 [a.m.], should’ve been early enough. He never came to work until 7:30, eight o’clock. Not that morning. He was back there trying to remember the combination to the safe, which, of course, at that split instant I completely forgot. [I] could not have told you, not even one number. Yeah, that was another awkward little stretch there.

And he—as I said, he always tended to work right up until—they had a very big formal affair at the White House that they were attending, and so the driver went by his house and picked up Mrs. Resor and then they came back by the Pentagon to pick him up. And this was white tie and tails. And so he—in fact, he knew that he had a late meeting. He had brought—the clothes had been brought to his office. And off from his office there was a small restroom, shower, and everything if he needed it. And so he had changed. Well, when he came back out, his secretary, Virginia—she’d been with him for years and years and years, his job before he accepted this—and then her backup secretary Hilda, and they—when he came out they couldn’t help it, but by then enough of the day was over, everybody could play a little bit, and so they kind of very lowly whistled, and he was laughing with his head down. He walks in [and they say] “Wow! Boy, your wife is waiting for you!”

And he had seven sons. And I think it was the youngest boy that—as I remember, Mrs. Resor was a little concerned about how they were going to handle this, because his son, one of the sons—I want to think it was the youngest—had borrowed his father’s—for the tuxedo shirt, the studs instead of buttons. And he had a set of diamond studs, and the son borrowed them and lost them. [laughs] Okay, you know, wow. Mrs. Resor was very laid back about—because I remember the driver talking. [He] said, “You know, most people, if they were going to the White House to dinner, would be all fussy about everything. They’d go to the—most ladies would go to the beauty parlor and all this sort of thing.” [He] said “She was playing tennis, and when I got there to pick her up, she was just disappearing into the house. And so about twenty minutes later, she comes out and she’s got on her evening gown and everything. But she was carrying her heels, because she had just slipped her feet in sandals or something and her hair was still in curlers, so she took the curlers out of her hair on the way.” Like, okay, I don’t think I could’ve done that. That’s a little more laid back than I could handle. But gosh, I cannot imagine how fast their household had to have run, I mean, with seven boys and Mr. Resor having a high-powered job like that. Whew, yeah. Yeah, that was—I guess dinner at the White House was no big deal.

TS:[chuckles] Well did you get any perks from this, the job, or for working with Col. Bailey?

CJ:Not particularly, I don’t think.

TS:Did you get to go into the White House or anything like that?

CJ:No.

TS:No? No special tours?

CJ:No, no special tours.

TS:Just slaving away?

CJ:Yeah. It was rather fast-paced. Everything was just keeping up with what was going on.

TS:Well, now how did you get this job, the job for the where you worked for the secretary?

CJ:Coming off the information team.

TS:Recommendation from Col. Bailey?

CJ:Yeah. And I think there were two or three different jobs that I could’ve picked between, and this one stayed in D.C. Which another thing, I was there when we were told not to go downtown. They—was when they had set the city on fire, a part of the city, the riots—

TS:Is this after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot?

CJ:Yeah. Okay, we stayed at Fort Myer, and there was a tunnel that went under the highway. You could walk through the tunnel to go and would bring you out right at the back of one of the parking lots to the Pentagon. You could walk up the steps and to go in. And I remember we went through 01:40:00to the other side of the tunnel to look because you could see the whole sky was different colors of orange. Yeah.

But most of the time in the morning going to work we were picked up by a car, because we had to be there at kind of an early hour, and no transportation was running yet, no official type transportation. So a car would pick us up and take us over, so I guess that would be a bit of a perk there because we didn’t have to worry about how I was going to get to work. We were on the—our names on the early shift getting food at the mess hall because that was—that didn’t open until close to an hour after we would’ve been through there, so we were kind of eating at the same time as the cooks, which was pretty good. We got what we wanted for breakfast most of the time.

TS:What time did you have to be to work? You said six—

CJ:6:15, 6:30, something like that, yeah. So it was early.

TS:So what kind of housing did you live in?

CJ:Lived in the dorm—

TS:Where?

CJ:—dormitory type atmosphere.

TS:Where was that at?

CJ:At Fort Myer.

TS:How did you like that? Did you have—was it like, did you have a roommate or was it a suite?

CJ:There were—let’s see. One time there were four of us in a room, and I think at another time there were two of us in a room. Kind of did a little bit of rotating there.

TS:How was that for having growing up as an only child with your brother sort of fourteen years apart.

CJ:Having my own little thing there. It was, you know, pretty much okay, because again everybody worked different schedules. Very seldom was everybody there at the same time. The room was very much sectioned off. You just kept your little area clean. We didn’t—thank goodness we didn’t have to do the inspections like we did while we were in basic or AIT, advanced individual training. That’s AIT that I did at Fort Dix.

TS:Did you get to do much social[izing] when you were in the D.C. area?

CJ:Yeah, yeah. In D.C. we—there was usually time to date, go out to dinner, go to the different clubs around the area. Nothing really in particular. [I] tended to stay reasonably close to base. I’m trying to remember if there was anything that—I don’t really remember anything in particular that I went to or—

TS:Did you have a special place that you’d like to eat at?

CJ:Nope, didn’t even—oh, gracious. I was really pretty bland. [laughter] We didn’t—

TS:Did you—Go ahead.

CJ:We didn’t have Starbucks then, or I certainly would’ve had a couple of those pegged.

TS:Well, with—you had some very unique jobs in your time in the Women’s Army Corps because not a lot of people got to have those positions that you filled. You talked a little bit about the physical thing in the basic training that was hard for you and a little bit of the emotional of working in that high octane environment. But is there anything just about the military in general with your job that—I mean how did you take to it, I guess is what I’m saying? How—when you went into the military, did you have certain expectations, and was it what you expected?

CJ:I think fairly close to what I expected. There were probably some pieces of reality that, of course, I had no idea. I remember one day when I was working at Fort Dix, when I was in personnel there, 01:45:00I was at one end. It was a long, narrow, one-room area with desks lined up for each of the different companies down through there, and there were doors at each end. A gentleman had come in the other end, and he was processing out. And—okay, where I was handling C Company, I was fairly close, the second desk down from the sergeant’s desk, because the sergeant was on one side, the lieutenant on the other. And so I was kind of at the one end of the building, and I would see people coming in there, and they were anything but happy because they were picking up orders for where they were going, or they were coming to speak with somebody to try to get something changed.

Most of the guys that came in from the other end of the building were processing out. And I remember that this gentleman coming in had a really big smile on his face, and just immediately knew he was processing out. And I did whatever I was doing, I looked up again, and he was much closer then, and I could see that the right side of his neck and partway up his right cheek was scarred. And I remember that it took me about two seconds, and that was all, to realize that that was napalm. And in spite of the fact that he was going to be going home with this napalm scar, he had his uniform exactly as would be and had a huge smile on his face. I thought, “Wow.” Because I always remembered him, and I’ve always wondered what happened to him. He certainly took a tremendous amount of courage and self-presence to have done his time over there, to come back with that, and, obviously, with ever how much of a positive attitude that could get a smile on his face like that. I thought, “Wow.” I’ve always thought, “I hope the rest of life treated him very well.” He’d paid his dues already. The little pieces of reality that’s just part of growing up and part of life. It’s not a—nothing really special.

TS:Well, you talked about the riots in D.C. when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. And they had the whole counterculture movement going on. Were you aware of what was going on at the time that you were in the service?

CJ:A little bit, but not so much. I guess for as much as the counterculture and the flower kids had their little insulation of their commune or whatever where they were, or being on a different planet from whatever they were smoking, we were in a like culture that we were a cocoon over here on the other side. There wasn’t—and I guess if I had been stationed someplace maybe on the west coast, I might have run into more of it. Of course, Washington, being a very a large town, obviously a lightening rod, but still Fort Myer was just right there literally across the river, just right on top of the Pentagon. And everything was very, very close, and, of course, there was a very strong perimeter to all that. So yeah, we had our own little world in there, and other than what you maybe watched on television or somebody might make a comment here or there, and there wasn’t that much. I can well imagine that on the west coast, where there were so many guys coming back in or going out, see, they would’ve been—because they were coming in and going out of public places, so they were, you know, more apt to run smack 01:50:00dab into—

TS:More exposed.

CJ:A lot more exposed.

TS:Well, it sounds like you have—you had—the people that you worked with in the military and at the secretary of the army’s office that you had high regard for.

CJ:Oh, yeah. They were all very professional, very knowledgeable, and had everything under control. Which was, as I look back on now, even, too, it’s amazing, considering how much was going on and the amount of paperwork that was coming and going, and not uncommon for a senator to call and ask about a this or a that, and you didn’t just flip out any little old answer. Not speaking from that office. You had to be very accurate with what you were saying, very careful with what you were saying. And they just seemed to handle the whole thing like we’d go make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Most amazing were—

TS:Well, you’re part of this too you know, Carol. You’re in this, the wheel that’s turning. [chuckles]

CJ:We’re very, very lucky that there’s people that talented that will use that talent in the government, and I just hope that there’s still a lot of them up there. I know the one other person that I ran into there, [U.S. Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger, was in amongst all the people in the town at that time. There’s no way that he could read every newspaper in the whole world every day, but he had readers, literally readers. These are people who sat there and read every newspaper. And they would be, of course, broken up by what their specialty was. And there was one gentleman who would once in a while take a break, and he—his office for reading was in the Pentagon, which I thought, “Okay, maybe they just don’t have any more rooms at the state department. I don’t know.” But anyway, then I also thought to myself later, “Hmm. Maybe he was reading for more than one person,” [chuckles] and I don’t know.

But he would come down and speak to Virginia and Hilda. He would chat with them for a little while if everything was loose enough that he could. And I got to kind of hang around the conversation a little bit there a couple of times. But that was his whole job was that he read, and I believe his area was the Balkans. And so he would read the newspapers from these other large cities and countries and so on, and if he ran into—there would be keywords, if he ran into anything that pertained to any of these keywords, he would write a synopsis and send it to Kissinger. So that’s one way that they—was kind of interesting. I felt like it was kind of a peak behind the curtain. How do they get this information? How do they keep up? And it’s not just by a machine. It was by this gentleman who had very, very, very thick glasses. Bless his heart. He was putting his eyes in this whole thing here. But he was interesting. He was very interesting, and also spoke with a very heavy accent. But yeah, the different jobs that are available out there in the world is most amazing, most amazing what you can do.

TS:Very true, very true. You don’t sound like you had any—did you have any negative experiences, or anything that, you know, irritated you? Not necessarily where you ended up, but anywhere along the line while you were in the military?

CJ:I guess everybody that’s ever been in the military laughs about it because it’s just part of the thing. You’re moving and you’re dealing with a tremendous number of people, so there’s your basic “hurry up and wait.” It’s that being really, really hungry, and “What do you mean they get to go? That entire platoon gets to go to breakfast 01:55:00before we do? Excuse me, we are here. We are in line.” But no, it’s—I can’t think of anything that was a really, really, really big turn off. There were things that I was probably irritated with at the time, [but now I’m] older, realizing that there’s a little more room for patience. And maybe I learned what little patience I had because I did a lot of the hurry up and wait. [chuckles]

And it’s like any other job. You can hear people talking, and they think that this, that, or the other thing with the military or government work or whatever is not that big a deal. And you really probably think that, you know, the milkman doesn’t have that big of a job either, but you go do it for a few days and let me see if your attitude doesn’t change, you know. So yeah, it’s just because we haven’t done that person’s job, which is your basic “walk a mile in their shoes before you say anything.” Which I guess my biggest lesson on that one was working as a duty-free aide at the school. When you closed that door and you are the only big person in the room, I tell you life changes. It changes your whole perspective on the whole thing.

TS:Was that the high school?

CJ:This was middle school.

TS:Middle school, okay.

CJ:Middle school, yeah, sixth graders. They will definitely change your mind about a lot of things. [laughter] But yeah, it’s all just life. Everybody gets a lot of the same experiences in different ways.

TS:Did you feel like you had any mentors that helped you along the way?

CJ:I guess most of the people that were my immediate superiors with the personnel—I can’t remember his last name, Sergeant J.D. He went by his initials for his first name, which he found out later in life actually did stand for John David, and he didn’t know that until he was definitely much older in life. He was, again, very, very good at what he did. Calm, cool, collected. Got things where they were supposed to be. And that was, at that time, with the assignments that were being made out of that office, I remember the lieutenant took over with one young man who was trying desperately. He needed one week, just one week.

He said, “I have no intentions of not going. I will go. I’m not giving you any problem about that. I’m asking for my deployment date to be extended by one week. My wife’s due date is one week later.” And he’d stand there and tell him no. I remember sarge talked to him for a little bit, and he was getting really, the young man was getting wound up. That’s when the lieutenant walked over and said, “Take a walk with me son.” He took him outside and they walked up and down in the grass for a while talking. I remember looking out one time and saw the lieutenant just shaking his head no. And I thought, “No, that’s the bottom line. This is not going to happen.”

Yeah, it got down to some very thin lines. Somebody had to say the yes and the no. That was pretty much the level of when things got—you get higher up and they make the broad decisions, and as it comes down, you get down to the individual standing there face to face, it gets hard. That gets hard. I got to see a little bit of both sides of it.

TS:Now how about with you—I’m sorry, were you going to say something, Carol?

CJ:No, go ahead.

TS:Being a woman in the military and you’re in a—although in some of your offices you had more women—how did you feel that you were accepted as a military person in the Women’s Army Corps?

CJ:I don’t remember having any problems about it at all. Just everybody was more interested 02:00:00in you holding up your end of the stick, getting done what needs to be done, and, yeah, because everybody was really busy paddling their own little canoe. But—

TS:Did you ever hear of any, like, sexual harassment, or was that anything—I know that wasn’t probably even a term at that time, but incidents like that that might have happened?

CJ:Right, yeah, it sure wasn’t. I was trying to remember if anything in particular and no, I think the most that I can think of was that it was consensual. It was just two folks that had gotten together and everybody else was basically like, “No, you can’t do this!” for whatever reason, rank or whatever. “No, no, no, no, no.” So that was not where one person was being harassed or put upon or anything.

TS:Well, do you have any particular one experience that was particularly memorable for you?

CJ:Gosh, not that I can think of right now.

TS:We’ve talked, actually, about a couple of them.

CJ:Yeah, really we have. I guess if I think back about service in general, the gentleman that came back having been victim of the napalm is pretty much a thought picture for me.

TS:Well, do you think there’s anything in particular that you would want a person who’s a civilian and who’s not experienced anything in the military to understand what it’s like to serve that they may not appreciate?

CJ:I don’t know if there’s any one or two things that I would. They—I think people today do fail to realize, I guess, the meaning of being in the service, that people have—that are in the service have a mindset that they have to have to be able to do that job. I noticed so much on the television that where we have the guys now and gals in Iraq and Afghanistan and they’ll talk to their families here and their families are saying, “I just don’t want him to have to go,” and this kind of thing. And I’m like, “Ma’am, did you not know that when you married this man?” You know, really. I don’t know if the newscasters or somebody is trying to make John Q. Average Public feel guilty about these folks being there, being separated from their families. And I’m sitting there going, “Excuse me, but no. That’s what they signed up for. They knew about that when they signed up for it.” Now some find out that it’s not what they thought it was, so they do one tour and they come out.

But I don’t know. I think today that’s where so much people want—was it the basic ‘‘want something for nothing”? And they fail to give consideration to the cost of what they’re getting and the cost that the people are paying that are in the service, and their families. But also then, some of the families don’t quite understand who they married. And that has its tendency to kind of bother me. I keep wanting to say, “Wow, what’s going on here?” Because when they’re standing there crying, “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go,” it’s making it harder for the person to be where they’re going to be assigned. And they’ve got to pay attention to what they’re doing. They can’t worry about somebody sitting on the curb boo-hooing. They know that they would rather be at home, and the person at home knows that they want their soldier at home, but this isn’t something that we get all emotional 02:05:00and throw around all over the place without it causing difficulty for the person that’s trying to watch where they put their foot.

That’s kind of a concern for me right now. I wonder how are some of these folks handling it that are over there where they, as I said, they have to watch where they put their foot or where they drive the humvee or whatever, because they’ve got to pay attention.

TS:What do you think about the way that women’s roles have changed in the military since the time that you served?

CJ:I think it’s very reflective of the way society in general has changed. Because when I was growing up and making these little decisions or not about what to do with my life, gosh, what? A nurse, a secretary, maybe if you really, really, really pushed it, a doctor. But there weren’t even that many women doctors. Women were just really beginning to get a college degree and do something with it. I remember the line used to be, “She’s taking elementary education for her M.R.S. degree [implying that a woman is in college primarily to look for marriage prospects] until she finds a husband.” That was it. That was the way they looked at it, the way they perceived these young women that were going to college. And there were those that were taking elementary education and they were very serious that they wanted to bump up the level of education for second, third, and fourth graders, but they weren’t given that kind of credit.

So now it’s—we have women that not only helicopters, they fly fighters and they do night landings on aircraft carriers. Okay. And I will come stand on the dock and wave to them, because oh, boy. Whew, that would scare me to death. But they have ladies that can do that. They can go for that. They can reach for it. They don’t have to just dream about it anymore. And this is good. This is good because we need everybody pitching in. Got a whole lot more going on these days than we did forty years ago, a whole lot more.

TS:Well, it would’ve been forty years ago that you got out. So why did you decide to leave the army?

CJ:It was really, basically, I think, another one of my silly decisions. I met my husband. We both came—he was coming out, period, point blank, that’s all. He did his two years and was out. And he was in communications for the chief of staff’s office, and so he would deliver some of the messages. But we both have to think that if we, again, could go back and know then what we know now, we would’ve both stayed in to retire.

A friend of his retired from the navy, and he was—his training in the navy was a medic. So he came out and they moved back to Reidsville [North Carolina]. And he got everything settled and whatnot and kind of took his time getting a job, and he got a job at LabCorp. And because he just translated his medic [training] right on into doing the tests that LabCorp do on blood and whatever else. And so as is hard for—Glen and I both are going, “Oh, my goodness.” Yeah, he’s been at LabCorp now for twenty years. He’s just turning sixty-five. He’s getting lined up to retire. He has his military retirement, he’s going to have his retirement from LabCorp, and he’s got social security going on. We said “Darn. Sharesies[?].” 02:10:00[laughter] And I don’t think at the time that he went in the navy that he probably really honestly thought about it, thought that far ahead. But you talk about some financial planning, good gravy, Agnes, that’s it! That is tremendous security there, as opposed to—

Because where we came—both of us came out, and I’ve always just worked part time and different things like this with—being with our children. But my husband is in that—we’re in that generation that got—what is it they’re calling us, the “squeeze generation”? We’re the ones that hit all of the layoffs, the downsizing. They’re outsourcing your job. All of these new cute little phrases. Yeah, we went through all of that out here. So yeah, if we could’ve known then what we know now, we would’ve stayed in the military. But yeah, we both came out, and he got out about a month ahead of me, and I went ahead and came out and came down here, and we got married. I had two terrific kids. And—

TS:Would you recommend the military to either one of them?

CJ:I did not. Jimmy was the—my son, was the only one that gave consideration to it. And I said “Okay. I don’t care if you do the military, but I care about how you do it. Get your college degree. Go in as an officer, and I don’t have a problem.” Because they—when he came out of high school, they were already [in Operation] Desert Storm, I think, Iraq one [First Gulf War]. And having been through Vietnam, knowing people that were over there, being able to look back and know how decisions were made and what influenced decisions, that’s why I told him it was a matter of how you do it. If you’ll go in as an officer, fine. If you want to just enlist—

I wish that he could have. I think it would have done him a lot of good. But I didn’t trust it. I really did not trust. [I] didn’t have a really good, clear idea that anybody was serious about what they were doing in Iraq. It seemed like it was too much like ‘Nam, and, yeah, I couldn’t hack that. So he did not. He went to Appalachian [State University]. And, of course, by the time he got out, they had finished up over there, and he had pretty much—was aging out, kind of. He could have, actually, still gone in, but in his mid- to late- twenties he would’ve been up against eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. I think he decided he really didn’t want to try to run three miles with them. Let’s be logical, not doing that.

But we worked—He was in scouting, and I worked with scouting, boy scouting, for twenty years, close to it. And of the guys that went through the troop, I have one young man that—I don’t know how old he was when he made up his mind. It just seems like forever Brian wanted to be a [U.S.] Navy SEAL, and that’s exactly what he did. He just he set his mind. He went straight for it. He was a star athlete, lettered in three different sports, and there was no doubt in anybody’s mind he was going to be a Navy SEAL. And he’s, without doubt, I am sure one of their better ones.

Have another young man from the troop that served in Afghanistan, and he was navy also. And then he came out of the navy when he got married. He’d done a couple tours, I think. And decided he didn’t like it out here, decided he wanted to go back. He went back. He was, I think—no, he had just gone over being out the ninety days.

They went to the recruiter and he said, “Okay, I’ve had it. I’m ready to get back in the game.”

And they said, well, the navy was basically going to start him over square one.

He said, “Let me think about this.”

So he went down the street 02:15:00and walked into the army recruiter and he said, “Okay, now, I’m just not real sure I like the deal the navy’s got.”

And he said they said, “Hey, we’re going to do better than that by a whole lot.” And they gave him a sweet deal and he went back in.

Another young man is a graduate of the [U. S.] Air Force Academy. So we’ve—guys that are still looking at it long term, which is really good because we need it. We have to have it.

TS:Now did you ever use any of your GI benefits?

CJ:I went to, in fact, GTCC [Guilford Technical Community College] for a while. We were living in Trinity [North Carolina] at the time, just outside of High Point. And I was doing computer programming, and I literally got all the way to last semester. And that was the first time that, yeah, they closed the company completely because the textile was beginning to go down. And so we moved back to Reidsville, and enough things did not change back to RCC [Randolph Community College]. Jimmy was not that old that I wanted to be driving back and forth to GTCC, and it just—everything just kind of fell through the cracks, which is really, really, really, really bad, because as I said, I was doing computer programming, and this was back when we had the cards, and you keyed everything into the card, and then the card, put it in the card reader. And if I had stayed with it then and made all of the changes to today—but it just was not so that we could get my time free enough to write that, do that last semester. Last semester was a killer in that program. It was huge. And I would’ve had to have had time to go and do the keying. And usually with that last big project, I think it was about five programs that you had to write, key, debug, and have run correctly. That’s a lot. It was a lot. And Glen was with his job, travelling at different times that we couldn’t control. And you get everything all set up there, and you’ve got one program about three-fourths of the way done, and everything just—you don’t do that too many times before you say, “Okay, that’s it.” So that was—but I did get a fair amount under my belt before time and GI Bill ran out.

TS:Well, do you feel [pause] feel like there’s anything that we haven’t covered today that you’d like to talk about?

CJ:No, I think we’ve—we really have covered a bunch. A lot of it is, as you said, as I was talking things came back to me. I was like, “Oh, wow.”

TS:Well, Carol, I really appreciate you coming to talk to us today.

CJ:You’re more than welcome.

TS:I look forward to looking through your scrapbooks. We’ll do that off tape though.

CJ:Yes, okay. [End of Interview]