>> This is James Newberry,
and I'm here with Bill Campbell on Tuesday,
April 11, 2017 at
the Sturgis Library at Kennesaw State University.
And Mr. Campbell, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes, very much so.
>> Thank you very much.
And thanks for sitting down with me.
So let's start at the beginning.
What is your full name?
>> William Doyle Campbell.
>> And what's your birthday?
>> January 3, 1937.
>> So Mr. Campbell, where were you born?
>> I was born in my grandfather's house in Mad,
Oklahoma, a small little town
about 40 miles southeast of Oklahoma City.
>> And what were your parents' names?
>> Gerald E. and Edith L. Campbell.
>> What did they do for a living?
>> My dad was a druggist.
My mother worked in
a wholesale drug place just filling orders
for the drug stores around
Oklahoma City that needed
prescriptions filled and so forth.
>> So you said your father was a druggist,
tell me about your lifestyle with him as a drugist.
Did you stay in one place,
did you move around?
>> We moved around frequently
because he did not have a license.
He learned to be a druggist.
His father was a doctor,
an MD and his father was always writing prescriptions and
my dad got well acquainted with the druggist in
town and that man taught him how to make pills.
Then you didn't count pills,
you made pills and capsules
by putting the right medicine in the capsule.
And dad learned that but he didn't have very good
eyesight and he just
couldn't go to college to get a degree.
And so he worked for the druggist that had
a license all his all his life
except right at the very end.
So we moved a lot.
>> And you said you were born in
Mad in your grandfather's house.
Was this your father's father?
>> My father's father, the MD.
He he went about two weeks before
what he perceived to be the delivery date.
He went over to mom and dad's house and
got and took my mother and she
lived with them and he delivered
about two weeks later on January 3.
>> So what were some of the places you moved around,
while your father was still there before before the war?
>> Well, we lived on the outskirts of Oklahoma City for
a little while and he worked at a drug store nearby.
And mother wasn't working at that time.
But then his brother lived
about 40 miles south of Oklahoma City in a little town
and his brother was
in the public school system as administrative jobs.
And dad decided to move down
there and his brother owned
a little grocery store right
across the street from the school.
And we moved into
that grocery store and lived in the back of it.
And I went to the first grade there and
my first grade teacher was my dad's brother's wife,
my aunt in the first grade.
And shortly thereafter, dad was called to the service.
So then we moved back to Oklahoma City.
>> So you were living in the back of a grocery store?
>> Yes.
>> So can you tell me about
your family's financial situation?
>> We were poor as church mice.
My dad's brother was pretty well off.
He was the superintendent of
that county in public school system.
And they lived down the road
in a really lovely home and had a few horses.
He was in a roping business
and all kinds of different activities,
roping calves at various get togethers.
Anyway, dad was dependent on his brother
to help us find a place to live that we could afford.
>> So do you have memories of that grocery store?
Is that what you've been told?
>> No, no, I have very distinct memories of that.
His brother gave dad a horse among the other horses.
He he raised quarter horses,
but he gave this big old horse.
He was so tall.
And I used to have to take a pillow,
the back of that horse was so sharp
that it hurt to sit on him so I had to take
a pillow and sit on a pillow and
ride a mile up the road to
the post office to get the mail
for mom who run the grocery store.
And dad was about 10 miles
away working at the drug store in another town.
>> So you were living there
at the start of the war or when
the United States entered the war?
>> Uh huh.
>> So do you have any memories of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?
>> Just hearsay. We didn't have TV at the time,
and in fact, I don't think there was at the time.
But we radio and talk at school,
people would talk about different things,
some of the teachers would relate to it.
>> So when was your father drafted?
>> Well, he was drafted I think it was 1942.
And he shouldn't have been drafted he was 38 years old.
He wouldn't have passed the physical exam,
but he knew drugs.
And at that time, the activities
where the fighting was going on,
he was in Germany.
And they had earmarked
him for being in the back hospitals,
working with medicine for the doctors that were patching
up soldiers at the at the various army camps.
And they didn't really mind that
he was flat footed and couldn't
pass a physical and was old.
He was the oldest guy in the division.
And they got his orders mixed up somehow.
And he wasn't at the hospitals in the back lines,
he was up in the foxholes,
patching boys that shrapnel had hit him pretty bad.
>> Is that something y'all knew about at the time,
or did you only know after?
>> Dad, he was in the battle of the bulge.
And after the war was over,
he came home and I
would sit at his feet when he would sit in
his easy chair and
ask him questions and he wouldn't answer them.
He didn't want to talk about it.
It was five years of me asking before he ever opened
up because the memories
that it would bring forth when he was to be talking,
you could see tears going down his eyes
and he just it was something
that he just didn't want to relate to anymore.
>> And when he eventually did tell
you can you share some of that?
>> A couple of things
that I just couldn't believe it happened, but it did.
He was in a foxhole,
a pretty good size one with another troop.
The other troop was on
the opposite side of the foxhole from
my dad and they were looking at each other, staying down.
It was a fairly deep foxhole
and they heard this German buzz bomb.
They had a big rocket that the Germans
were firing and when that thing went off,
anything around 100-150 yards,
it just blew to sky high.
And this buzz bomb went right over
him and landed about 100 yards beyond him,
and it was a dud,
it did not explode.
And shortly thereafter, the Germans were
lobbing some little small rockets,
that they have where
they load and drop it and away it goes.
And a piece of shrapnel off of one of those rockets hit
that soldier across from dad right in
the mid section and just blew him open.
And dad says, well, he said,
I looked at him and he said,
I knew he wouldn't live long.
But he said the only thing I could think to
do was to take some sand in the foxhole and
put it in there to stop the bleeding so
rapidly and maybe I'd have
a little bit of time to talk with him.
And he said he said,
I've had sleepless nights thinking about that event,
and that was the worst one he ever told me about.
There was another one where they
were down in a German town.
They had taken it, but the Germans had
built some underground structures where
the stairways would go down one way and in turn and
turn so that if
a bomb went off at the top of the stairway,
it would never get down to the bottom because of
all the changes in direction.
Well, he and this captain were told to go down
to the bottom of that to make sure there were
no Germans in the areas in any of the rooms down there.
And he was scared to death because he didn't have a gun.
All he had was a flashlight.
And I remember the World War II flashlights,
they were green and they
went up and then the light poked this way,
not straight on and they would put
the light around the corner and if nobody shot at them,
they figured, okay, it's clear that way.
Anyway, they went through
all the rooms and they found this one guy, sleeping, German,
the captain got the drop on him and took his gun,
gave it to dad and said, now,
you stand here and you
hold that gun on him, if he move shoot him.
And dad says, I couldn't even make my hand still.
He says he was just shaking all the time.
I was just so nervous and I didn't want him to move,
but boy, I was going to shoot him.
And he said the captain went off and looked
at some of the other rooms that they hadn't been to yet,
and that was the only guy they found and
so then they finally took him out.
But dad said that that was
a fearful event because I
just didn't know what was going to happen.
I didn't know if this guy was one of
the kind that thinks he's martial,
and he can overcome me or
whether I just didn't know, but I was nervous.
And so a couple of times that he related to me.
>> So did he regret or
have irritation or stress
that his orders had been mixed up,
and, he was serving or served on the front line?
>> He never really talked about that much.
Yeah, he was disappointed but he said that well,
he put it this way, he said that's where God wanted to
be so he lived it that way.
>> And you said most of his duties had to do with
him being knowledgeable about drugs?
>> Medicine.
>> So he was gone for a time there?
>> He was gone for 28 months.
>> And can you talk about your life in that period,
you and your mother and your sister?
>> Okay. That was another interesting I have a lot
of memories about that time because,
well, like I said,
we were very poor.
We had to move to Oklahoma City once he was
drafted and we moved into downtown part of
Oklahoma City across the street were
my mother's mother and stepfather and a duplex.
We found a place to live right
across the street in downtown Oklahoma City.
And it was an abandoned barbershop.
And this barber shop
it had a big picture window out on the sidewalk.
And you go back
into the room and there was a toilet and a wash basin.
And that was it. That's where we lived.
Grandma was a seamstress.
And so she helped mom build
a couple of big drapes that we
could put up close to the front to
keep people from looking at us
when they're walking down the sidewalk,
little privacy and then another drape to
demark the bedroom in the back.
But all we had was just a toilet and a basin,
so all of our showers,
all of our meals were at grandma's across the street.
And my sister was three years younger than I am,
and I was starting in the second grade at that point.
School was right up the street one block away,
so I could easily walk to school.
And ma'am then went to work
farther downtown in wholesale drug company
just filling prescriptions for
the drug stores as they would call in
the orders and then the drug company
would deliver the stuff to the drug stores.
And she had very much
like a shopping basket at the grocery store today.
She had one of those she'd go down the aisle and pick
things and fill the orders,
and that's what she did all the time, dad was gone.
And dad and ma'am wrote to each other almost daily.
We'd get a little special.
It wasn't a very about side of a postcard that
the military provided for
the troops and dad would fill that out,
and then ma'am would respond back and forth.
And they kept in really as close touch
that I was impressed
that ma'am would take
the time to just to answer
his questions, he would answer ma'am.
They kept in contact
like that and ma'am was worried about me.
She enroll me in the YMCA.
It was about four blocks down the street.
And so I was in the second and the third grade,
so while dad was over there,
and I learned how
to swim at the Y. I learned how to shoot pool.
And my aunt worked in the plumbing department
and on Saturdays,
I would go down and go to
the Western movies at
the YMCA and then go over to my aunt's place.
She got off at noon and we go see
a Roy Rogers movie or a Gene Autry movie.
They were my favorites.
Of course, Gene had a ranch in
Southern Oklahoma and they
had a big parade in Oklahoma City one time.
And I went out.
I had my little beanie with
the stuff hanging on it and so forth.
And I was down there to see Gene Autry.
The police didn't bother us too much.
I ran out on the street and I was pulling
on his pant leg, said, hi Gene,
and that picture came out in
the Oklahoma Times Newspaper,
and I've got that where I was standing there
and Gene sitting on his horse going down the parade.
And as soon as I did that,
he said, "Better move over."
And so I got off the side.
But that was a highlight for me.
My grandmother favored my sister,
who was three years younger.
And my grandpa, he was a leasing agent for oil companies,
and he would go out looking for
oil leases and to lease land
where they could pump oil put a pump on and that,
and so she wasn't in school.
And so they would take her with him on all the trips.
Grandma would go with him on these trips all around
Oklahoma and they became really close.
Well, my aunt felt like I was being cheated.
So she's the one that took
me to all the movies on Saturday.
So they looked out after
us kids because we didn't have a dad there to do that.
And that was really swelling.
And to go to church, ma'am went there.
Sunday was the only day,
she worked six days a week.
Sunday was the only day that she had
off and she just rested.
She got us up, dressed us in time to go to church.
We'd go on a city bus that went
about a mile up the road and my aunt went to
the church and she would meet us at the bus stop at
the church and we'd go to church that
way during World War II.
That's another memory I had.
I remember we wanted to take some pictures
and grandma and grandpa didn't have a camera.
We didn't have a camera,
so I went to all the businesses up and
down the streets, saying,
"I'm saving newspapers,
can you save your newspapers for me
and I'll pick them up weekly?"
And about two blocks up the street from
the school was a place that
bought newspapers, penny a pound.
And I had a little red wagon
and I loaded that wagon every week,
went up there, and I would tell everybody,
"I'm saving these newspapers to buy
a camera to take a picture of
our family to send a dad over in Germany."
And it was a little pony camera cost $7.
And I saved enough money picking
papers to buy a camera
and we took pictures and sent those pictures to dad.
I missed my dad,
I nearly failed the second grade.
I just wanted him home so bad.
I was just sure some German was going to
shoot him, but he made it back.
I just wanted him to see my sister and I and ma'am that
we were okay and send him some pictures.
>> When you're thinking about your dad
and your fear for him and your concern,
were you following what was happening in the war?
Were you reading his letters?
How did you keep up in that?
>> I read his letters.
We didn't have a newspaper.
I would every once in a while
looking the newspaper over grandma's house and
just read articles and grandpa sometimes would talk about
what the news had said on the radio and so forth,
but I didn't know anything about Germany.
I didn't know the various towns
that their medical squad had to be at,
I just knew that he was up there where
the fighting was and it wasn't in the hospitals,
and that's what really worried me.
>> When his letters came,
did they have any censoring on them?
>> No. I was like a postcard.
It wasn't in an envelope.
>> And so I want to go
back to the barbershop that you were living in.
You said it was abandoned.
Do you have any sense of how
your mother got it or was
it because your grandparents had said,
hey, there's an abandoned barbershop get address?
>> Well, the barber had passed
away and nobody wanted to take over his business.
And so it was it was open.
I mean, it was available.
And so my grandfather went over and talked to
the people and told my mom,
he says, hey, we can get this for a reasonable price.
And if you don't have
enough money to pay the rent, he says, I helped you.
And I don't know whether they did or not.
I wasn't into that side of the business.
But we did move in and we lived there for a while.
And there was shops on each side of us.
It was just a little,
I don't know what kind of shops, I don't even remember.
But on down was
an alleyway between the major streets about halfway.
And in that alleyway,
there was a house there that had been
abandoned or was available for sale
or for rent and somehow we wound up moving
into that house and it was a little
two bedroom home and had a bathroom.
And a tub and we lived there
for probably the last six months of when dad was gone.
>> I see. So living in the barber shop,
you said you ate your meals at your grandparents?
>> Yes.
>> So would you go over there at
regular meal times or just anytime you have a snack?
>> Well, now, somehow we came up with an ice box.
And back then, the ice man would deliver
ice and there was a cardboard thing it had 25,
50, 15, whatever pounds and whatever you put at the top,
that's how many pounds of ice you
wanted on the delivery date.
And so he would bring that ice
in and put it in the ice box.
I think we had a milk jug,
maybe a water jug.
I don't know what all ma'am kept in there,
but sometimes we would just have cereal for breakfast
over before going to school and for her going to work.
But the major meals in the evening,
especially she may have
kept sandwich meat in there, I don't know,
but she wasn't home during the day and I was at school,
my sister was in grandma,
so the evening meal
was the main one and that's where we ate with them.
>> Can you tell me about a typical weekday from getting
up to going to school
and how you when your mother left and that sort of thing?
>> Well, we were back in
the back behind one of those big drapes.
And we slept on army cots.
That's all we had. And they were okay.
To me, there was a nice bed.
Ma'am would wake us up and she'd
get ready and then sometimes she'd just
take my sister over to grandma's and then come back
and maybe we'd have a bowl of
cereal or she may have bought something at a store,
we could have a glass of
milk and a little something to eat.
I'd go off to school. And then she would get off work.
And so her work
was either 5:00 or 5:30 in
the evening and school was out at 3:00.
Sometimes I would come home and get
my tolley and my dakers
and you probably you may not know what that is,
but the tolley is a marble that you can
shoot and the dakers are what
you put into the ring to shoot at.
And on the school grounds,
there was a couple of guys up there
that we would all play
marbles and we weren't supposed to play keeps.
We were supposed to just come and leave with what we had,
but I always came home with a full pocket of marvels.
And I spent a lot of my time on the school grounds,
just killing time, but
then I'd come back to grandma's house.
>> What disciplinarian was your mother and grandmother?
>> Well, my mother was a loving person.
She always wanted what was best for us and she was
always willing to give so that we might have.
My grandmother was very partial to my sister.
In fact, the only time I
did something and she didn't think it was
the right thing for me to do against my sister.
And she locked me in the closet.
And when my ma'am found out about it,
she talked to her mother and said, don't do that again.
She said, well, you make him behave.
And my aunt heard about it and boy,
that really troubled her that you got
cast in a closet and
she didn't like my grandmother ever since.
>> This is her mother?
>> No.
>> This is her mother in law?
>> No. My aunt was my dad's sister.
>> That's right. So she's the other side of the family?
>> Yeah.
>> I see.
>> And she's the one that she was partial to helping
me with understanding dad
and church and things like that.
She was a lovely Christian.
And she wanted us to grow up as Christians.
>> So can you tell me about
your memories of Oklahoma City,
you said you were living downtown.
How big was it in those days [inaudible]?
>> We lived at 6:16 North Hudson.
That's six blocks from main street downtown.
And Oklahoma City was a pretty good sized building.
A lot of building down there,
a lot of hotels downtown.
I just remember it as a big place.
The Y was about three blocks down toward town.
Hudson was a main street.
The streets were one way.
Hudson was going into
town and the streets on
both sides of Hudson were going away from town,
so I could walk on and just stay on the sidewalk,
get downtown with no problem.
It's a big city, though. To me,
as a kid, is a big city.
>> Do you remember noticing if there were people
better off or less well off than your family?
>> In my family?
>> No. Just in the city.
>> In the city. Oh, well.
>> Than your family.
>> I guess today people would call us poor trash.
But we just didn't have anything.
I mean, Ma'am would buy me a pair
of jeans or two and
a couple of shirts and that's what
I wore all school year.
I didn't have any fancy clothes
like a lot of the other kids at church.
But that's okay. That didn't bother me. I was just me.
I was just us. My ma'am had,
before she got married,
she was singing on the radio.
And she works sing for a men's clothing store,
just like two or three songs,
just as they did
their announcements about suits and ties and all that.
Well, she was a singer and
when I was in the third grade at
the school of the block from
us she found out that they had
a music program in
the third grade and she enrolled me in the music program.
Well, she wanted me to be a singer.
And so she worked me harder than the teacher did.
And in the fourth grade,
we had moved then dad came home from
the service and we moved out into a little town
just outside of Oklahoma City
on a three room house on 160 acre farm.
And that was a neat place.
My cousin had given me
a collie dog while we were out there,
and we spent a lot of time out in the woods.
My dad gave me a BB gun when he got home.
And he was still working at a drug store in
Oklahoma City and he drove into Oklahoma City.
But when we were out there in the fourth grade,
Mom had worked with my voice so much
and taught me a lot about music and singing
that that little country school decided we're going to
have a play and I became
Uncle Remus and saying Old Man River.
They blackened my face and everything.
And I sang Old Man River and then in the fifth grade,
we moved again and 100 miles from Oklahoma City,
farthest would've ever been.
Dad bought a drug store down
there and a guy he had worked for before he
went into the service floated alone to Dad to help
him as how people
feel about trying to help
the military guys that went over to serve.
Well, that was the situation between
this druggist that owned the drug store down
there where we when I was born
and he helped Dad get into that drug store.
And funny thing about it,
that the town was 2000 people,
just a small little town.
The townspeople decided that we
needed a high school band.
So they hired an instructor and said [inaudible].
He went around to the high school kids and
there wasn't enough kids interested in a band.
So they dropped it down to junior high.
Still not enough kids.
They finally got down to the fifth grade,
which is where I was,
and there were 15 of us in
the fifth grade that wanted to
be in the high school band.
Now, that would never happen in a city,
but it happened in that little town and
so most of the kids didn't know much about music,
but I had had the voice training and so forth.
And we took little tonets and
learn how to read scales and all this stuff.
And they started a band.
And I chose the trombone.
Once we get off the tornet,
I chose a trombone,
I couldn't even reach the sixth position on the trombone.
I was small fifth grade.
And we did okay as a marching band. We really did.
But as a concert band,
we couldn't read new music well enough to score high.
And we could learn the marches and march in the band.
And here were the trombones at that time,
they all sit on the front row of the band, you know,
and then the majors out in front and the leader.
Well, here we are a senior,
a couple of juniors and a fifth grader,
the height on the first row and so forth.
But I learned how to play that trombone.
And I later learned that my uncle Benny Harris.
He used to play for Jack T Garden
and he was a first trombonist for Jack T Garden,
and he was in a car accident.
I never got to meet him. But I chose that instrument.
So my aunt sent me a bunch of of her husband's stuff.
They were out in California at the time.
>> Well, I want to return to the war years.
When you said you would find out news
about the war in different places
from teachers and things like that.
Can you talk to me a little bit about how
the war affected you on the home front?
Did you get involved?
How did your family contribute?
>> Well, I seem to
remember that the war was three parts.
Italian, German and Japanese.
And I remembered about Pearl Harbor,
all the news and everything,
and I wondered why would they want to do that?
Why would they want to come in and blow
up an island like that and attack America?
And that bothered me and
my uncle in that little town that had the horses,
his son was called to the military and he was
over in Hokan when
some of those places where the Japanese were fighting.
And I was hearing some things about
that going on for the Japanese once in a while.
And also the Germans situation and then all of a sudden,
the Italians gave up.
And so now it was the Germans and the Japanese.
And I couldn't understand why people
want to fight each other and not just live in harmony.
And that really bothered me
because we were a peaceful family.
We were just trying to make ends meet.
I mean, money was never anything that we had much of.
And we got by week to week pretty much.
But I didn't get into a lot of
details about the fighting going on.
All I knew is that they would
take a city and we would do in runs around,
some of the stuff that the paper would talk about how
the Americans overcame a town in Germany stuff like that.
>> Did you have to ration?
>> Oh, yeah.
We had a little meals,
we call them a half a cent and
a tenth of a cent mills to pay the taxes.
And we also had food stamps
basically and mom had signed up for all of
that and I can
never conceive a penny seemed to be a lot of money to me.
But then there was a half a penny and a tenth of a penny
that you could also
pay taxes when you buy something at the store.
I just wasn't in the money
except for the time I was collecting papers so I
could buy a camera.
>> Did you see like a ration book?
>> Mom had a ration book and it
was pages and pages and pages and stuff.
And she could get those because of our situation.
And then I remember there's no butter.
But from the grocery store,
they sold a little thing that was yellow and you could
mix this in with
the margarine and they would color it like butter.
It was almost like a little plastic pill.
You broke it and mix it up
with the margarine to try to make butter.
Or if The farmers, I remember them,
they would milk their cows and save the butter and out of
the milk and the heavy milk and sell
the regular milk to the stores that
would bottle it and sell it to families.
I remember I used to mix the butter stuff for mom.
>> Did you contribute to
any metal drives or
old tires or something to contribute to the?
>> No.
>> There was nothing like that in the in the city?
>> Well, not for me.
I mean, none of that was available.
>> So your mom didn't have a car?
>> Oh, no. We didn't have a car.
>> Did your grandparents have a car?
>> Oh, yeah. He was traveled all over
the state making oil leases.
>> And did he have
to figure out how much gas he could use?
>> Yeah.
The oil company had some a deal to
where the public had ration gas,
but grandfather because that was
the business in the oil companies, I guess is political.
I didn't think of it at the time,
but probably political that he could get more gas
because that was his business to get him to the job.
>> I see. Were there
any military bases near Oklahoma City?
>> Well, there was one that not near Oklahoma City.
About 100 miles away was a base down
south of Oklahoma City and that's
where they had a lot of bootcamp for
the first entry and
that's where dad went for his bootcamp.
>> Did you see any troops on leave in Oklahoma City?
>> Yeah. You could see and my mother and my grandmother,
grandmother was she loved to dance and mom went with her.
They would go to the USO dances
and they would be a lot of boys home on
leave and they would be
there to be partners and dance with the troops.
>> Where was the USO?
>> In Oklahoma City there.
>> It was in a building.
>> Yeah. I never did go,
so I don't know really where but I think it was
a big hotel downtown that had a big ballroom area.
>> Your mom and your grandmother would go down there?
>> Yeah.
>> She dance with the servicemen?
>> Yeah. Also my grandmother she had two friends.
Four of them would go together and
they would go to these USO dances and they did that.
They enjoyed dancing, but they felt like they were
contributing to the troops that
are not necessarily from Oklahoma from all
around when they were back on leave. I don't know.
>> Now, is it correct that you were a boy scout?
>> Yes. Later, I joined the scouts.
>> That was after the war.
>> Yeah.
>> We'll talk about that.
>> Well, I was in Cub Scouts first,
but this is up in my junior high years.
>> I do want to ask you quickly
about President Roosevelt.
Do you have any memories of hearing him on
the video or thinking
about him seeing him in the newspaper?
>> The only memory I have is my grandmother loved him.
She would preach Roosevelt.
I wasn't into political stuff.
I just heard her say what a great guy he was and
so I believed it and and that was it.
>> Do you remember his death?
>> No.
>> What are your memories of the end of the war?
Do you have any memory of the war coming
to an end and celebrations, things like that.
>> Well, they had some celebration in Oklahoma City for
the troops gathering and they had speakers.
I think I don't even
remember who the governor of the state was,
but they were a bunch of
high officials and all the troops that were
available came down there and we went down to
an outing and heard the wars over.
Now we've got to get back to be in America and
just peace guys coming home looking for jobs.
>> When did your father come home.
Can you tell me about his return?
>> Well, it was a surprise because he didn't let on
that he was coming at that time that he started home.
I don't know why, but it was more of a surprise and we
learned that he went over and came back on a ship,
so it took several days of
transport time to get him back.
I just remember mom was real
excited about him finally coming home,
and we were living in
that house on the alley at that time
and it was a time
of jubilance and I was going to see my dad finally,
and I was really happy.
>> In those post war years,
how soon did you move away from Oklahoma City?
>> Well, that's when dad was looking for
a job and he got a job out at
Southwest 29th Street out west of
Oklahoma City at a drug store and we didn't
want to stay downtown
and grandmother and grandfather were going to
stay right where they were
and dad was taking the family over now,
and so we moved out to
that little three room house on that big 160 acre farm.
I went to fourth grade out there and part of the
fifth and dad drove into town. We got a car.
He drove into town and
this old 38 Chevrolet and it was a clunker.
Meanwhile, we didn't farm the farm.
There was two cows there that we milked and no other
animals except the dog that
my cousin had given me, little Cole.
We just all grew up together
again and enjoyed the country life.
I don't know how many people know,
but on the western part of Oklahoma City,
say 20 miles out,
there is a corridor that runs
southwest to northeast and tornadoes
love that area and when I was in
the latter part of the fourth grade,
mom and I were at home on a Saturday.
My sister daddy went to work,
my sister was at grandmother's and mom looked out
the window down the southwest part of
the pasture and she saw this funnel.
That little house sat here.
The barn was about 75 yards out behind the big fence.
We had a pig pen, two hole outhouse.
We didn't have an indoor toilet and a chicken pen in
between and the cellar was
behind the house and so mother went to
the kitchen door and tried to turn
the knob so that
we could go out and around to the cellar,
and the wind was blowing so hard on the door that
the friction of that little slide
when you turn the knob, she couldn't do it.
She couldn't get the door open.
We went around to another door,
went around the house the other way.
Standing there, we're looking at this tunnel coming.
She's doing this. She was 100 pound soaking wet.
She was a tiny little woman.
She's doing this with this thing like this
and I'm holding onto my colleague and supporting her.
All of a sudden, you
ever see something out of the corner of your eye,
that you don't know what it is, but you
react. Well, I did.
I reacted and I flew my arm up like
this and a piece come
off of the barn door, the big tube of fore,
and it was whirling anything and I put my arm
up and it took a punch of meat out of my arm right here,
just just indented my that blood just went everywhere.
Mom saw it knocked me down
and she saw me and she saw
the blood and she went to that door,
she opened that door and down my dog went.
And then she got me down there and then
we closed that door and closed
the door inside there were two doors in the cellar.
She lit a lantern and started working on me.
Well, she had been around drugs.
My dad was a druggist,
grandpa was a doctor.
She knew how to patch things up
and they had at first aid kit in
the cellar and she lit lantern and here we are.
And then we heard that train go over.
I mean, it was a terrible sound.
I heard that train for years when I was sleeping.
And it went right
over right between the house and the barn.
It took the barn door
off and pieces of it were flying around.
But the pig pin, the pigs
were walling in the mud, they were okay.
Our outhouse, we never found it.
It just disintegrated.
And the chicken pin,
the feathers were all in the trees back in there
for yards and yards.
And then we were down there and so after a while,
mom said, well, let's go out and see
what all has been damaged.
The house wasn't touched.
And they passed me up and I got over that.
>> So that was common Tornados.
>> That was Tornado Alley.
And you don't know
how much Oklahoma history that you know.
But just below Oklahoma on the way to Norman,
where the University is where I went to school.
More Oklahoma.
It's been in two or three Tornadoes and it's in
that Northwest Southeast Alley.
>> Now, you had rheumatic fever at 13.
Yeah. Can you tell me about that?
>> Well, at 13,
we had moved from this 2000 town
up to my seventh grade year.
And then in the eighth grade,
I was back then,
we had the eighth and ninth were junior high,
and I had just made
first string catcher on the baseball field.
And I really worked hard and I love baseball.
And one day the coach says, Bill,
are you okay I hit the ball and I was running to
first base and and it seemed to
him like it took me forever to get to first base,
and I should have made it easy, but they threw me out.
And he says, are you okay?
I said, Well, yes.
And my right knee started swelling. Got big.
And he called his dad who was in
a little town below and said, here's his symptoms.
Grandpa said, I'm coming up there.
I'm going to examine him. By that time.
My right ankle had swollen and my whole leg was big.
Then it went over to my left knee and my left leg.
My heart started and finally it doubled
its size with rheumatic fever.
And Grandpa, when he examined me, he said,
I think he's in the beginning stages of rheumatic fever.
We're putting him in a hospital and they did immediately.
And I was in the hospital for two weeks.
Laying on that hospital bed,
I could not get up period.
I had to lay there bedpans, became my friend.
It was awful. And I had a cutest little blonde nurse, so.
She was I just love her to death.
Anyway, she would she would rub put this ointment on
my legs and give me rub down and talk to me about,
you're going to get over this,
give me all good spirit and everything.
And then they sent me home.
And at that time,
the doctors were transitioning
on how to handle the rheumatic fever.
I didn't know anything about it,
but but said, well,
your heart will start going back to its size.
But a lot of times you have stretch marks and
they will cause problems with
your heart later on in life.
Like a woman's stomach when she has a baby,
you know, stretch marks you see there.
That's the way the heart he said the way he talked about.
And I was in that happened before Easter.
And right at the beginning of baseball season.
And so I was in bed I don't know,
sometime up into the summer at home after I got out of
the hospital and I could get up the first week or two,
seemed like I could get up one time to go to
the bathroom and back to bed all the time.
They rented a hospital bed
that would raise up and down and all these things you do.
And they put me in
the front bedroom by
the windows and I could see the kids walking to school.
I just wanted to be one of them so bad.
And I missed about the second half of that semester.
I got to go to promotion,
but they roll me in on a wheelchair and so forth.
And the excuse, I did
homework from my bed
and I went ahead and graduated from the eighth grade.
And so during the summer,
as things eased on,
I got to get up a couple of times a day and then finally,
I could long as I didn't walk too much,
I could so and I enrolled in the ninth grade that fall.
And about a year later,
the doctor says, your heart got back.
It's not quite where it was.
It's bigger now and your blood pressure has gone
down because it had been about 72 beats a minute.
Now it's about 53 or 54 beats a minute.
And he said, you're going to have a stronger heart.
There are no negatives
with the way the heart has been treated.
And they went from starving
me to feeding me everything I would eat.
And that was the transition the doctors were making
on handling rheumatic fever at that time.
And I gained 30 pounds and I grew 3 " during that year.
And came out of it.
The doctor says in a year's time,
do whatever you're big enough to do.
>> So you had some extracurricular interest here.
You were building model airplane?
And how did you get interested in?
>> Well, my cousin was older than I.
And when I was in junior high,
he was about 10 years older and and he had
just gotten a job as a pilot for Delta.
And I remember going over to his house and
I I could see these big planes hanging in
the hallways and out on the back porch and he
had built a big six foot wingspan.
And boy, I was really impressed with that.
And so I talked mom and dad into
buying me a kit and I built
a six foot Cleveland condoor Glider.
And when we moved from the seventh grade to
the eighth grade and had our first home ever.
Dad got the GI bill and he was paying
$48 a month rent to pay the think,
$5,000 house back in 1950 whatever.
I think they put built this when we
was before we moved into that home.
And in the transition of moving dad was at work,
mom was loading stuff and hauling it over in the car.
She put my airplane in the back windows,
and the span was wider than the car.
The tip went outside,
so she rolled the windows down.
And when she took off, they lifted my model went.
And so that was the end of my glider.
But I had loved airplanes
all that time and and I just thought.
Might be kind of nice to be
an aeronautical engineer some day.
>> That's what got you into it.
So where did you attend high school?
>> In Putnam City, High School,
it was a Northwest part of Oklahoma City.
>> And what did you expect to do after high school?
>> Go to college. I was hard over, mom, dad.
They tried to help me, but
mom would package up some groceries.
My first semester, I stayed at home.
Dad turned the garage into
a little bedroom and I stayed there,
but that didn't work.
I had to drive to school every day,
and it was about 20 miles to college.
And then I moved
up there and got a bedroom in the back of
an old lady's house
and paid her rent across the street from the college.
And stayed there for two years in
a little college called Central
State North of Oklahoma City.
And then to get in and I did all my undergrad stuff,
English and History and all these courses.
And then I got into my majors.
I transferred to the University of Oklahoma
and got married my junior year.
And so we moved into parental housing.
It was old Navy barracks at the university there.
And I worked all the time.
When I was in the first two years,
I worked with a trucker
they would go down to Oklahoma City and pick
up goods for the little town offices around,
whatever and they deliver the goods and I would run
the Dolly and deliver the goods into
the store while he
went in and took care of the paperwork.
I did that for two years
and just made enough money to keep going.
My girlfriend at the time later reviewed my wife,
her father was working for
a dresser graph Multigraph company and they were in
a transition where when
people going to the filling station and
they'd give them a card and they would compress,
sic card in here, compress thing.
I used to work off of
purple ink and it was really, really messy.
They wanted to convert this to where the paperwork
they would put in and write how much
the transaction was for gasoline.
They wanted to put what is it?
You call it two pages within between the pages
a piece of stuff that makes
the writing come through on the second page.
I can't think of the name of that.
>> I'm blanking too.
>> Anyway, they were transitioning from
this ink to this two page thing,
so they put the credit card in there and do that.
He had 10,000 of those.
They had to transfer
from ink to this new way of doing it.
And he would bring them up in boxes
20 at a time to the college.
And this lady that I was living at in her place,
she had a garage and there's nothing in
the garage except a bunch of tables.
And so that was my place to put all 20 of these.
I'd take them all out of the boxes
and do one thing at a time on each of
them go around and call
them and he'd come and get them, bring me 20 more.
And so I did 10,000 of those,
and he paid me $1 apiece for them.
So I made a lot of college money there.
>> So you paid your way through college?
>> Oh, I did.
>> With these series of jobs?
>> Well, I got a couple of
support type things that
the school would offer if you needed money.
You could apply and if they'd give you
some help with the school expenses.
>> Before I go into your education,
can you tell me about meeting
your wife and then getting married?
>> Well, I met her.
I was a senior at
Putnam City High School. She was a sophomore.
And so when I was doing my first two years,
she was going up junior and senior and she
was valedictorian at her senior year.
And we had met I was in
the Boys Glee Club and the overall course,
boys and girls, and we were away at a musical festival
up in Enid Oklahoma way north of Oklahoma City.
And we were there with
a lot of other choristers from other schools around,
and it was a big musical get together.
And we were learning
some new music and we're going to sing for
the people that would come to listen to
us as a giant chorus.
And we had broken from the morning session.
They said, go get some lunch and
so I was driving at the time.
And my buddy and I we had ridden up
together and he didn't have a license.
So we rode together. And we're just driving
down and there's this girl sitting on the corner there.
And I noticed she was from our school, I didn't know her.
She was in the choir,
but she was a sophomore and I was a senior,
I didn't really know her that well.
Just knew of her and she was standing there.
I stopped and said,
Are you waiting for somebody?
She said, Well, I
thought somebody was going to
come by here and pick me up,
but I've been here for about 15 minutes.
And I don't know why I remember this is the details,
[LAUGHTER] but there she was.
Well, I said,
we're getting ready to go to
lunch. Why don't you go with us.
So we did. We went to lunch,
and that's where I met her really to learn her name.
And we dated from then on.
And so, she graduated from high school,
and we were going together to
a church there across
the street from the little township we were in.
And it was the headquarters of
the Nazarene College and the Nazarene Church there.
And so we started going together there.
I was in the Church of Christ at
the time and she wasn't,
she was in a Methodist Church something we agreed to,
why don't we just go to the Nazarene Church here.
It's local. And so I did.
And we just decided let's get married.
And so just before I started my junior year,
we got married and moved into housing that
was the old Barracks type housing
down at the University of Oklahoma.
>> And what was her name?
>> Kate.
>> And are you still married to her?
>> No, that lasted 23 years.
And I'm married to Miriam now.
We departed.
>> Well, tell me at school you
were studying aeronautical engineering?
>> Well, when I went to the university, yeah.
>> And you finished college.
And then where did you apply to work?
>> Well, let me back up one step.
>> Sure.
>> While I was in college at
the University of Oklahoma, two summers there.
I worked in the oil field as a roustabouts,
and we helped the guys that worked on
the pump the actual oil pumps
when they put them all together, pumping oil.
We did all the groundswork around kept the lawns mowed
and we would hook up the pumps to
the big oil tanks and
we were working with four inch pipe,
threading it and so forth
and doing all the piping and stuff, like that.
But that's a roustabouts.
We weren't a roughnecks.
The roughnecks work on the pumps themselves.
I worked one summer there to
make enough money to go to college.
Another summer at the university.
I worked in a ladies dress shop
in a men's clothing store next door to each other,
and I was the janitor.
And I worked while I was to school that summer.
And then now to get back to your question.
>> And so when you finished your schooling,
you started applying for job.
>> Applying for jobs. Well, at that time,
there were 13 aerospace companies in existence.
And I think I sent out 10 resumes to all of those.
Lockheed gave me the best offer of all,
Boeing was second in Wichita Kansas,
but that was too close to Oklahoma.
I wanted to go west because most of our family moved
to the West Coast and we were so
poor that's the last we saw.
We couldn't go on vacation out there.
We didn't have the money. And so I said,
this give me an opportunity to go to work,
best paying job, see relatives,
and take it from there, see what happens.
And so I picked Lockheed in Burbank, California.
And that's when I was telling these guys
about two years and that was in 1959 and I went to work.
In 1962, NASA had been talking to
our upper management corporate people and said,
you hired a bunch of guys in '59 and '60 in engineering,
and they're all bachelor's degrees.
You need to up their levels.
We like to deal with higher level people
in the technology business.
And so Lockheed Management picked 30 of us and sent us to
Southern Cal University for
10 courses and they picked the courses Lockheed did,
that we took and we got a master's degree.
Out of Burbank, they gave us
time off on Friday afternoon to go to
the campus and take a course for
four semesters and a summer semester.
And then they would send
a professor for the other another course
out to the Lockheed Training Center
at Tuesday nights and we would take a course that way.
So for 2.5 years,
we got a master's degree.
>> And how long were you in California?
>> Well, I moved out there in '59 in August
and we moved to Georgia.
Well, I worked on a program out there
that was a NASA program.
They wanted to see
if that we could come up with a Mach 3,
three times the speed of sound
commercial airplane that could carry
300 people from New York to
Los Angeles in a couple of hours, Mach 3.
And so I got to working
on that program and I was in charge of the wing design.
And little did I know at that time,
but there was a place across the runway from
regular engineering called Skunk Works.
Skunk Works was a highly technical group
of guys, very brilliant.
They built things under high classifications,
top secret, all that thing.
We had secret clearances,
but we couldn't go over there to do the top secret stuff.
But we didn't know it on my side.
Management knew it, but none of us down
in the working levels knew it.
And they had already had a prototype flying at
Mach 3 at 100,000 feet called the SR 71,
spy in the sky airplane.
They sent that airplane all over the world,
took pictures of Russia,
China, Korea, this place, that place.
A lot of times they were shot at
by missiles, never got touched.
Pilots would just fire wallet,
climb on out, and the missile
would come up and go back down.
[LAUGHTER] And so those people
were trying to help us with our NASA design.
And since I was in charge of the wing,
it was right up front and they were saying,
no, you don't have all you can get out of that wing.
There's still more to come.
If you'll just listen to us.
And so they finally sent
me to NASA in Virginia, Langley, Virginia.
I took three of their big high speed models
and tested them in the wind tunnels
at NASA for six weeks.
I was cornered there,
sending the data back to
California for our engineers to look at and massage.
And finally, we had a big meeting.
First time I met some of the guys over there.
And we started talking about details of the design.
Well, come to find out that they designed the SR-71
for Mach 3 at 100,000 feet cruise.
Commercial airplanes can't go
higher than 60,000 feet and they didn't know that.
So they were designing our airplane at 100,000 feet.
And when you bring that airplane down to 60,000 feet,
the leading edge curvature and the leading edge between
the engine and the fuselage was drag at 60,000 feet.
It wasn't lift as it was at 100,000 feet.
When they found that out, they backed off.
[LAUGHTER] We had the best design.
And that airplane just about covered the field.
That was a little comment that we had made.
Imagine a circular body for
supersonic flight to carry
300 people, had to be pretty long,
and it was almost
football goal lines in
length and the wingspans were almost at the side lines.
That's how big an airplane it would be.
And what we did is when we tested models that were
three or four feet long in a supersonic tunnel,
there was an awful lot of stuff that goes
on to take that data and expand it to full scale.
And I learned a lot of bit about that aerodynamic detail.
And so when they started the C-5 here in Georgia,
they transferred me here,
because that again, was another big airplane;
small models, big airplane.
And I knew the aerodynamic pathway.
So in 1967, they transferred me here.
>> And what did you know about the history of
the Lockheed Plant in Marietta?
>> In Marietta? Well, when they moved the C-130 here,
it wasn't the Lockheed Plant,
it was a Bell Bomber Plant.
And later, they started building C-130s,
and the first two C-130s were built in
Skunk Works at California.
They transferred that down to a group that was
known as the Bell Bomber people, but Lockheed people.
And finally, Lockheed just bought them
out and then they built the C-141,
which was longer than the C-130,
and it was a jet engine, not a propeller.
Then they built, starting the C-5,
and that's when they transferred
me down here to help with the C-5 design.
>> I see. So how long did you work there at Lockheed?
>> Forty-one years.
>> And where do you live today?
>> I've lived in three different homes from
the time I moved here in '67 to now.
>> And you want to tell me about your family today?
>> Well, in California,
those seven years we were out there,
we had a son, David,
and a daughter Denise in '61 and '63.
And they today are beautiful people.
My daughter has been in a Ladies' Trio.
They finally disband after almost 10 years,
but they were professional singers.
And they sing pretty much pop music
and some church music and they're all Christian ladies,
and they they've sang all over the Southeast.
Her husband, Brian,
went to the same Sprayberry High school,
just over the road here.
And he was one
of the three guys on
the wrestling team that were state champions.
And those guys were amazing.
[LAUGHTER] They never once worried
about getting beat in a meet.
What they would bet each other on
is who's going to pin their guy the quickest?
And she married that guy.
He was a couple of years older than her.
And he is in a business
now that they live up on Lake Lanier.
They have a big fancy home.
He's done very well.
He's computer science major from Georgia.
My son is a computer science major.
And he worked for 30 years for a drug company,
McKesson, and he just got retired.
So he's going to start his own business now.
He's not old enough to retire yet.
[LAUGHTER] So my daughter,
she's married to the guy
that's living up on Lake Lanier,
and they're doing very well.
My son is an elder
at the first Baptist Church in the valley out here.
We're a close Christian family.
We've got grandchildren and great grandchildren.
>> Well, Mr. Campbell, before we
finish up, I just want to ask you,
you shared your life story,
but you spoke about your experiences during the war.
So what does it mean
to you to share your World War II story?
Does that have special meaning to you?
>> Well, it makes me go back and think about,
see how much I can remember of the things
when you came out and talked to us at the Kiwanis Club.
That started me thinking about all that.
And then you said, well,
would you come and share those, and here we are today.
I have a real place in my heart for veterans.
While I was in high school,
I joined the Oklahoma National Guard.
And I had a eight-year obligation.
And you were only signing up for three-year at a time,
but you had to stay in eight years somehow.
So you had three year rehabs and one year rehab.
So three and three and one didn't make eight.
It was much beyond eight.
And three and one,
so what I did is I had to do
threes rehabs and I
had to join the California National Guard.
And then in my music career,
when we were out in California,
I became not a minister of music,
but I felt a calling from God.
And I didn't want to be a preacher.
And I was praying, don't call me to that preacher.
He said, no, I'm not calling you to that.
I'm calling you to lead music in the church.
He said, you've got a fantastic music background.
You played the trombone. You've sung
all this time your mother came up.
All the times I was out in California,
two or three different churches,
I led the music, led the choir, sang solos.
I guess I had more music background than
anybody at the church at that time.
So when we moved here down below
Roswell Street Baptist Church
is little Nazarene Churches,
we were Nazarenes at the time.
Well, they had me leading the music
there for several years.
And there came a time
that we were going to the Nazarene Church,
but living out near Chastain all the way down to town.
And our kids weren't going to school,
and to church with the same group.
And we thought, it's not fair to
our children not to be
able to be with their friends like that,
because to go to
church those guys in Marietta down there,
they really weren't friends
where you do things with them.
And so we moved out and we visited
the little church over.
She's about 200 strong.
And the pastor found out that I had a music background,
and he said, well, we really need some music help.
He says, let me talk to you about it.
And then if you're in agreement,
I'd like for you to consider maybe
taking over the leading of the church music.
Then Piedmont Baptist Church on Piedmont Road.
And then the next Sunday,
he had me leading the choir,
singing a solo, leading the congregation.
He met with the deacons that afternoon,
came over to the house, said you're hired.
I said, no, I have a job.
I'm working at Lockheed.
[LAUGHTER] He said, no,
but you're going to be on the staff,
and we're going to pay you.
And so I thought, well,
I've never been paid to do this before.
Anyway, that lasted for five years and I said, look,
to take the youth choir on a tour
around the state of Georgia for a week,
that takes one of my weeks of family
away from my family for vacation time.
Lockheed, I had two weeks at the time.
And I said, look, you've got to replace me.
I can't teach voice.
I can't teach other instruments.
And the church needs, we're growing.
So finally, he got somebody
else and the church was growing.
It went from 200 to 750 in that five years plus time.
And they built a new church,
everything, and I finally got out.
[LAUGHTER] And so now I'm in the choir and I'm happy,
not having to lead anything anymore.
I'm 80 years old and enjoying life.
[LAUGHTER].
>> Well, Mr. Campbell, I want to thank you for sharing
your story with me today and we'll conclude there.
>> Okay.