>> So this is James Newberry,
and I'm here with James Russell on Wednesday,
May 25, 2016, at
the Sturgis Library at Kennesaw State University.
And Mr. Russell, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes, I do.
>> Thank you so much. Well, we'll start at the beginning.
If you could please state your full name for me.
>> James Paul Russell.
>> And when and where were you born?
>> I was born in Thadelphi,
West Virginia, August 12, 1925.
I'm 90 years old and approaching 91.
And I'm amazed at my mind is still with me.
So many of my friends have dementia and
other mental ailments and of course,
I've outlived most of my friends.
I made a trip back to West Virginia
one time to visit with some of
the friends that I played baseball
with and football and so forth.
I found one still living.
Some had moved away and they didn't know where they were,
but many of them had passed on.
So my trip was uneventful.
>> Well, Mr. Russell, could you
tell me a little bit about your family?
>> My father and mother were of course,
married, mother worked in the post office,
and my father was a World War 1 veteran
and served in the army for over nine years and he was in
France in the trenches in
World War I and Germans gas
to all the troops with mustard gas,
and he was sent home and
discharged from the army and given a pension.
And nose day didn't have Milan so he went to
the post office and met
my mother who was working at the post office.
And they saw that
they had a joint interest and they got married.
>> What were their names?
>> My father was James McPherson Russell,
and my mother was Winona Long Russell.
>> Okay. And did you have siblings?
>> I had two sisters.
My sister Mary, who is deceased,
my sister, Sarah, who is deceased.
She graduated from West Virginia West Liberty University
and education and she taught for
30 years at a rural school in West Virginia.
She finally gave it up because when she started out,
it was farm children and mostly white.
Then it became black and Spanish and of course,
the Spanish didn't speak English and
she was having to teach him to write
and speak English and
just wore out and she decided that she retired.
But my brother-in-law,
my youngest sister Sarah's husband,
is still living and he's in an assisted living place.
And I hear from my niece,
Carol, who by the way,
is an FBI agent.
She tells me about her dad.
Now, my sister and her husband
raised four of the smartest kids
you ever saw in the world.
Besides the FBI agent,
one of the boys worked
for insurance companies in Columbus, Ohio,
and wrote all their programs way back in the days when
computers was just starting and he
was he was probably the smartest of the three.
John who has a PhD
in electrical engineering works
for the electric company in West Virginia.
George the youngest son,
nephew has a doctorate
and teaches computers at Marshall University.
So you name it. I've got it.
Now, my oldest daughter,
she married and divorced and married again and she was
always tough for my mother to control and deal with.
And so she didn't like
West Virginia so she left and moved to Washington,
DC, and worked for for the government.
>> Okay. Well, tell me about the home you grew up in.
>> I grew up in a very, very poor family.
And the first house that we lived in was
a four-room house with
no running water and no indoor plumbing.
And we had a cistern
and a pump in the kitchen where we'd pump water into
the kitchen for our normal washing
and mother would use the water from
the cistern for washing
and boiling clothes and all that sort of thing.
So I had to carry
water from the next to a house next door to us,
had a coal mine and they closed it up,
but they had they found
that they had a problem with water in the mine,
so that's the reason they closed,
but they put a steel pipe
underground from the mine out to the street.
They put what they called a watering trough there,
and it was a place for people to water their horses in
those days and the water ran continuous 24 hours a day.
When we needed drinking water,
and we got it there, had to carry it,
of course in buckets and what have you.
So after that,
my dad's family had some property
on what is known as the National Road,
which is Route 40 that goes from
the East Coast West Coast,
and it was the main highway
to the West in its early days.
So they bought the property from his brothers
and sisters and ended
up starting a service station and grocery store.
And Dad ran the service station
and grocery store and mother kept books.
And in those days,
you didn't get an accounting degree or anything else.
She had to learn the hard way,
keep the taxes paid,
and determine whether we were making
any money or not and what have you.
But my mother was a very,
very frugal person and she ruled
everybody in the household and she had rules like,
whatever you put on your plate,
you better eat it because I'm not throwing anything away.
So you took servings and
suits what your appetite
was because she didn't dare leave anything.
She'd get on you like I don't know what.
But as I say,
she ruled a Rose and the smartest woman you ever saw.
I'll give you an example of how smart she was.
When I came home from the Navy,
I bought a car and they had to station.
Dad didn't drive, mother didn't drive.
So every place a car went,
why they went with it.
And of course, I was playing baseball and
so they'd go to the baseball games
with me and so when I got married and took the car away,
mother decided she needed a car.
So what she do? She goes and buys one and
drives at home without
a learner's permit or a driver's license.
It's amazing what she did do.
She went and took her driver's test
passed they traveled all over the United States.
She had a couple of cousins in Iowa,
Ames, Iowa, and she would go visit them,
driving, Dad would be the co-pilot and go to Washington,
DC to see my sister there.
He didn't bother her.
She was a piece of work.
>> Well, tell me where you attended high school.
>> A little place Trodophi was the name of the town,
but they had Troy Delphi High School,
and I started there
after I completed grade school in junior high,
I went there and it got along fine,
my freshman year, my sophomore more year.
I lost a little interest in
school and I flout sophomore in English.
So my junior year, I was taking sophomore in English.
You didn't get a GED in those days.
You had to go to school and earn it.
So I was studying sophomore in English and
junior English and I just got fed up with it and I quit.
My brother said, well, you're
not going to lay around here,
you're going to go to work and
you're going to bring home the pay,
and I'm going to charge you Room and Board.
And that's what I did.
I got a job. Fortunately, the man paid in cash.
I was a landscaper working for a landscaping company,
and so I brought my money home.
She took out room and board,
and I got what was left.
And then I became eligible for the draft growing up.
>> Well, tell me what are your memories of
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?
>> Well, it's vague.
I wasn't there, of course,
and it upset the whole United States.
We declared war on Japan and Germany both,
fighting two wars at the same time.
>> So you were living at home for a period of
time until you became eligible.
And in that time that you were living at home,
how did you keep up with news of the war?
>> Radio or newspaper. That's it.
>> Do you remember President Roosevelt
giving any speeches at that time that stuck out to you?
>> I heard him on the radio, yes.
>> Did your family get a ration book?
>> We had a ration book.
And of course, dad had the service station.
So he had to accept
the ration coupons and exchange for groceries for people.
There was a little bit of under the table,
shall we say type deal.
People would need some cash and they bring
your ration coupons in and sell them to him.
And he'd sell them back to somebody.
And of course, there was
a little trade situation going on there,
not legal, but they made it work.
>> How much would they pay for a ration book?
>> I wouldn't have an idea now.
It's too long.
Memory bank is blank.
>> So when people came along to fuel their cars,
how many fuel ration cards
did they hand in? How did that work?
>> Well, it was based on
the number of gallons you were going to get and
you got a coupon for every gallon.
So if you want to five gallons,
well, you had to give up five coupons.
And we had gravity flow pumps,
meaning you had a globe on top that
showed the gasoline and a measuring device that was
implanted inside the globe
and would indicate the number of gallons
you were dispensing and
you could get five gallon for a dollar.
And then you had to hand pump that thing back full again.
You hoped the guy didn't get
10 gallon because you're going to be there a while.
>> Did you help out around the service station?
>> When I was eight years old,
my dad used to get the flu because he'd been in gas in
the war and his lungs
were susceptible to that sort of thing.
So he'd be sick maybe two weeks for the flu.
So at eight years old,
I was running the store and in the service station,
checking people's oil and cleaning their windshields
and put air in them tires and whatever they requested.
That's what we did. Now we didn't change oil.
We didn't have a lift or a pit,
but we'd sell you the oil.
And our question was,
what do you normally pay for a quarter of oil?
And if they said a dollar a quarter,
that's what we sold it to him for.
The next person said $0.75,
that's what we sold them to him for.
We were agreeable at any price.
We could have sold it for $0.50,
but we had it in cans,
we had it in quart jars with
a nozzle on the top of it that you can pour in the car.
And so we had what we called bulk oil,
which we filled the jugs up with.
So we'd sell you oil for any price you want.
We even had people bring in
their oil when they changed oil and we had
a filter system that we put in through the filter and it
would filter out most of the residue.
And then we'd sell you used oil if you wanted.
Maybe $0.05 a quarter.
>> So how did your family fare in the Depression then?
>> Bad. Because I was born in 1925,
depression was '29,
and one period of time,
mother said she didn't
know what she was going to feed us for the week.
But she had a lady friend
who was married to a florist and they had
no children and the lady brought
groceries enough for us to exist for a week.
Now, I don't know how mother communicated with this lady.
It was before telephones and all that.
Maybe the lady came to visit and saw what was going on
and she brought groceries
back and we lived on those groceries.
But we got commodities and it consisted of
a government dole out of cheese, lard, and buttermilk.
I grew up on buttermilk.
And my dessert at night would be
old stale bread crumbled up in a bowl
and a dash of buttermilk was put on top of it.
No ice cream, no cake, no pies.
That was your dessert for the night.
>> Well, tell me about reaching
eligibility age and enlisting in military.
>> Well, it was the time when they were drafting people
and I was going to turn 18 in August the 12th.
And dad who had been in
the army for over nine years said,
I don't want you going into the army.
I don't want you going to the marines.
I don't know much about the air force.
But if you want to go, I'll sign you up for the navy.
I said, fine.
So I went and signed up for the navy
and left on my 18th birthday.
>> Where did you go to sign up?
>> In Wheeling in West Virginia to
a recruiting depot or recruiting place.
And signed up, left on my 18th birthday
and went to Hunkry in West Virginia for a physical,
passed the physical and went to
Great Lakes Naval Training station for
eight weeks to find out how dumb I was.
Because every day it was march to breakfast,
march to class, march to movies,
march to health,
back march to lunch,
and it went on day after day after day.
You did very little navy type work.
They were interested in your health and they showed you
some raunchy movies about
ailments that sailors had gotten.
I mean they were down right bare naked showing you
every ugly thing that they could think of
because they didn't want you get that sort of problem.
[NOISE] Excuse me.
But I think I need a sip of water to cure that dry.
But at the beginning,
I was learning how dumb I was.
I thought I was smart and knew everything,
but I didn't know crap.
I didn't have any knowledge of the world really,
but I soon learned from the Navy.
>> What do you remember some of
the names of those films they showed?
>> I don't remember the names of them,
but I would rather not describe
them because they're not vulgar,
but they border on something near that.
>> So I'm assuming they were
introducing venereal disease and these sorts of things.
>> Absolutely, they were.
>> Get when you went into the service
and overseas, things like that.
>> Absolutely were, and
they laid it on you just as nasty as they
could lay it on you because they wanted to make
an impression on us young green guys about
they didn't want that happening and we took notice of it.
>> So tell me about some of
your physical training at Boot Camp.
>> Well, it was mainly marching and swimming.
In those days, Navy
was looking for underwater demolition teams.
These were personnel that would go out in rubber boats,
bail out of the rubber boats,
and plant explosives on anything
the Japanese would have to guard
the beach to keep landing boats from getting to it.
And these UDT guys
would plant all their explosives
and there would be several of them.
And then they'd bail back on the boats
and I tail out of there and we were
[inaudible] and we were
up close to the beach and we were
laying down fire to protect these people.
And when they blew up,
they blew up on the string
and threw up fountains of water.
>> But how would you be assigned to
these underwater demolition teams?
>> You had to pass a physical test
in Boot Camp, and I tried.
First thing you had to jump off of
a 30 foot tower into the water and be able to swim.
Well, in those days,
I swam the sides stroke.
I didn't swim or crawl or anything like that.
So I didn't make it
because I didn't swim and I
had no experience swimming in the ocean.
So they were looking for people
who had been to the beach,
swam in the waves and that sort of thing.
And so I didn't pass.
But guess what?
The Navy SEALs swim the side stroke.
And I was gung ho in those days and I
would have probably tried for the Navy SEALs.
And I've seen their training films and all that.
Boy, it's gruesome.
>> So what do you mean you were gung ho in those days?
>> Anything that they put up in front of
me I was going to volunteer for.
I was going to have some of it.
But it wasn't in the cards.
>> So you didn't make it onto
this underwater demolition team?
>> Oh, no.
>> What did you do instead?
>> After I finished Boot Camp,
I didn't realize that they had tested your hearing,
eyesight, and all that stuff.
I didn't realize how good a test I had made on hearing,
but they did and they sent me from
Great Lakes to Key West Florida to Sonar High School.
Now that's a practice of sending
out sound signals into the water
and detecting a submarine,
which you were looking for,
and echo back and it would have
a tone differential that you had to recognize.
So I went through five weeks
of nothing but hearing tones,
and they graded you seriously
on whether it was a higher pitch, lower pitch,
low level, high level,
and all the varieties,
is something that is amazing
how many varieties sound that you would hear under water.
There's one where you have a thermal barrier
where there's a water temperature
difference in the water.
You send out the sound,
it hits the thermal and bounces back,
it makes a particular sound.
If you hit a whale,
it sounds out of a different sound.
If you hit something metal,
then that's the one you want.
>> So how did you go about testing to hear these sounds?
And what room were you working
in or were you working outside mostly? How did that work?
>> In Boot Camp, they tested
your hearing extensively for sound differential,
tone difference, volume difference,
and so forth, and you were graded on that.
Well, I didn't realize it,
but when I went to
Sonar High School and retested down there,
I ended up third highest score
of all the people they tested.
Number 1, was a band director.
And you would expect a human be
able to hear sound differential.
And so I ended up Number 3,
which I was proud of at the time.
>> What was the name of the base
or the school in Key West?
>> In the United
States Naval Training Center, Key West Florida.
>> What did it look like? How large was the base?
>> It had a couple of barracks and some classrooms.
>> And how long were you there?
>> Five weeks.
>> Did you learn anything in addition to sonar?
>> No. That was a concentration.
One of the tasks was,
they have sonar and submarines and sonar on destroyers.
And so they had a submarine there,
an old time and diesel submarine.
And so they took us guys out on the submarine
and played war games with a surface vehicle and so forth.
And they were pigging back and forth.
But the smell of the diesel just affected me.
I didn't actually get
sick and throw up or anything like that,
but I made a decision,
I wasn't going to go on a submarine.
When they came back up,
they said, well, you want submarine duty?
I said, no way.
So they said, okay,
you'll be assigned to a destroyer duty.
So after graduating from Sonar High school,
I was shipped to Norfolk to the Navy base there
where a crew was assembling for duty on a destroyer.
And from there, they sent us to Mobile Bay, Alabama.
Now, that was a real experience for a Navy guy.
You're in a navy base that has no fences.
And it has two barracks and
chow hall and officers quarters.
We all ate the same meals,
but our ship wasn't ready.
So every morning, we had what we call muster,
and you had to show up and
they called your name and they didn't trust you.
If somebody yelled, yes,
they said, step forward to be recognized.
So you had to step forward to
one step and be recognized as a person,
and they went on
and took stock of
the whole crew at eight o'clock in the morning.
And they said, you're dismissed for the rest of the day.
Those of you have duty in the barracks to clean up,
go get your duty,
clean sweep down before and after,
and cleans cohorts and all that stuff.
Here I am rated man.
I don't get any of that jazz.
But boy, we were in Chickasaw,
Alabama, which is North of Mobile Bay.
I used to go into Mobile Bay and Mobile was just
like my hometown Wheeling, West Virginia.
It had little parks and
same movie theaters and about the same size.
Boy, did I get home sick?
And I was calling my mother on the phone collect.
She must have had
a tremendous telephone bill
because I was calling her every day.
>> What did you tell her on the phone?
>> No. I just tell her what we're doing and
what we're not doing about
the town and I miss them more and I miss
the hometown and whatever would come to mind.
>> Do you remember some of the guys that has
assembled for your crew on the destroyer?
>> Oh, shoot, yes.
We had nine sonar men on
there and such names as Cistero,
Shear Schwartz, O'Connor, I don't remember all of them,
but they were all rated.
And some of the older fellows,
if you've got a sound contact,
they would come and take over.
They were more boture.
We were younger and more energetic and so forth.
So they'd relieve us and check out
the sound and do whatever is necessary
and you would go
to general quarters and I had
other duties at general quarters.
But one of the jobs while you were on
just normal duty was you
operated for 30 minutes on the sonar equipment,
then you operated the helm
and steered the ship for 30 minutes.
Then you had 30 minutes of no activity, [inaudible].
That was clean the coffee pot and make coffee,
make sure the cups are clean.
So the off duty in person didn't get
all the niceties not having anything to do,
but that's quite of experience.
>> And you went up the Mississippi River?
>> Yeah. After we left Chickasaw, Alabama,
we didn't have any ammunition,
so we went up to Mississippi to [inaudible], Alabama.
No, that's wrong.
We went to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
And I knew I would make a mistake in that,
but we went up to
Baton Rouge and we took on torpedoes and
all the artillery shells or all our big gun shells and
40 millimeter and
20 millimeter and depth charges and all that stuff.
We come out of there we were ready.
So after that,
we had orders to go up to Norfolk for training.
Of course, we were all
gaining knowledge of the ship at that time.
It was all new to us and
so we had some people on
there that had been on other ships,
but the majority of us this was were
first timers on a ship and proceeded to get
seasick and all the accompanying side things
went up to Norfolk and
there we got to fire guns
and drop depth charges
and do everything that you could do.
They had towed aerial targets and towed sea targets.
>> What are towed aerial targets and towed sea targets?
Well, the aerial target is towed behind
a large plane with 1,000 foot tow line,
and it's like a huge sleeve.
Air goes in it and it inflates
and then you try to shoot it and hit it.
The towed target is like a sled that floats on the water,
and again, it's towed by a ship and you try to shoot it.
We were the world's worst navy firing ship,
we couldn't hit nothing.
And so from that reading,
we got assigned to
escorting fleet tankers in the Pacific.
Now, I understand what they do
is they carried the oil and groceries for
serving carriers and battleships and destroyers and all
that fuel the fleet with everything.
So we escorted them and we
had the flag officer on our ship.
I was a captain and he was in charge of all the oilers
and he told us what to do.
So we did that for a long time.
We run into a group of
ships and the oils to go about their business.
They come out and they would offload into one or
two of the tankers and
all the other tankers would go
back to Pearl Harbor to get filled up.
So we were at Guam and we had just finished
fueling the fleet and
the Japanese aerial aircraft found
us and they started throwing bombs at us.
They hit one of the tankers
and two bombs straddled our ship,
went on each side, didn't hit us.
And so the captain
in charge of the oilers told
the captain of the tanker that was hit,
put it on the beach.
And what he had knowledge of was
the next day is when they're going to invade Guam.
And so for overnight,
they would be sitting ducks,
but they beached it and the invasion was
the next day and everything turned out all right.
>> Well, we got to back up. Because we got
to go back to when you left,
you shipped out of Norfolk,
and then you headed to Pearl Harbor.
>> We shipped out of there, went through
the Panama and went to Pearl Harbor.
>> Well, what was life like aboard ship when you're
just moving towards a destination?
Are you still doing this routine
of 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there?
>> Still operating sonar equipment,
still looking for submarines.
We still had lookouts and radar,
we had a surface search radar and
aerial search radar and gun control radar.
And the gun control radar wouldn't
come into play until we engaged something,
but surface search and aerial search were going all the
time because we had to know what was out around us.
So we'd have the four hours on, four hours off.
>> What did you do for your free time?
>> Slept mostly.
>> And what bunk were you in?
>> I was in the bottom bulk of
a three tier bunk arrangement.
Underneath the bottom bunk was foot lockers where you
keep your shoes and some of your stuff.
Then you had a vertical locker where you could hang up
your pants and shirts and so forth.
And so you stored your stuff according to your desires.
But one of things we had to do with stencil
all our clothes because when it went to the laundry,
they came back and it would be in one big lump pile,
and you had to sort through it to find your stuff and you
better have your name on
it or somebody else would take it.
And so that's what we did.
No, you showered and shaved every day.
>> Was there a store or a commissary board?
>> And we had what we called a pogybit store.
Pogybit another word for
candy and chewing gum and stuff like that.
And we had a first class petty officer
ran the Pogy store and it was his job whenever he
got a chance to buy stock for that and
put it in the Pogybit store and you had to pay for that.
You didn't get it give to you.
You had to pay for it.
So if you wanted a candy bar,
that's the place to go.
>> How much were you making?
>> See, I don't recall that number.
It wasn't much.
I know that I when I was on the ship,
I didn't have any place to spend it other than
cream or shaving equipment
or occasional candy bar or something like that.
So I sent money home to
my mother and I was sending her $100 a month.
So I had a little bit over $100 a month.
>> Did you write letters to her?
>> Oh, yeah.
>> And what did you report to her in those letters?
>> Very little because you
couldn't divulge your location.
Every piece of mail was audited for content.
And if I didn't agree with what you were saying,
you got it back and you couldn't send it.
So you had very little,
it's sunshine I think it's going to rain,
and I got to get my laundry
together and just happening so and I
couldn't say I'm operating
the sonar equipment looking for
submarines and you can't say that.
You couldn't get into actual onboard activities
or engagements or anything else.
>> Do you remember the approximate date
when you landed at Pearl Harbor?
>> No, I don't.
>> What did you find there?
>> Well, we went to Dark
there and we got
to see some of the sunken ships that were still there.
And we got pass duty to go into
Honolulu and one of the things that
Navy Marines Army and people used to
do is the ship would go into say Pearl Harbor
and guys on the ship would find a bar
saloon where everybody would
meet and they would pass the word
among shipmates that so and so
bar is where we're going to meet and have a drink.
So we'd all meet there.
If we desired.
We can go to movie or go sightseeing,
whatever moved you for the moment.
No, I never went to Diamond Head because
Diamond Head was a secret base at those times.
So I think you see diamond head.
But Navy had taken over
a hotel called the Royal Hawaiian.
It was a pink hotel,
it was on the beach.
So you would get a weekend leave
to go there and stay and they didn't charge you anything.
Just go sign in and they just sign you to a room and you
could go to Wakaki Beach and swim and get sunburn,
and I did all of that.
And I ate outside at the hotel
and back of the hotel
where you could see the ocean and all that.
Later in life, my wife and I went to Hawaii,
we stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
We sat outside in the back where I had
sat and we had dinner there.
So there was a lot of memories about my time in Honolulu.
>> So you stayed in Hawaii then a fair length of time.
>> It might have been a week or two weeks,
and we did some more training there,
towed targets and all that kind of stuff.
And they had an island where we can
instead of a towed surface target,
we practiced shore bombardment on this island.
We must have had enough artillery shells on it
or shells on it to sink to
the island because everybody was shooting at it.
But we did that training.
>> During a short bombardment training,
what's your role on board ship?
>> Well, in all special CD tails or during,
I have a name for it and I can't
recall the name at the moment,
but we would all have duty stations.
And my duty station during
those times was a telephone talker on the bridge.
Now, my duties were,
if a captain said something,
I repeated it to all the stations that I had
on my tie in.
He would say, "Tell
the gunnery officer to commence firing."
So that's what I'd tell the gunnery officer up and
the radar controlled gun control.
And [NOISE] one particular
time that I had really some very important duties.
When we invaded Iwo Jima,
we were heavily involved in Iwo Jima.
That was our biggest operation of
the whole Pacific fleet.
And when the underwater demolition teams went in,
we were 1,500 yards from the beach
laying down fire to keep
the Japanese from bothering these people.
When evasion took place the next day,
we went up and they had some smaller what we call
LSTs and that size vessel along the beach and line,
and we were behind them farther out.
And of course, it was
designed to provide the Marines with
artillery and fire to keep the Japanese occupied.
Well, the ship right in front of us got hit,
and it affected their ability to maneuver the ship,
and they came directly at us and we had to move and
barely got out of the road to
that ship to keep from the collision occurring.
But our captain said, "Well,
we got a hole in that line," so we
went up there and filled it.
Now, we're in machine gun range of the beach.
You could see the Japanese running around.
You could see them on
Mount Sarah Bach going up and down and what have you.
And I had a pair
of binoculars and now I'm tuck around on the bridge.
I had access to a pair of binoculars and I was looking at
Mount Sarah Bach which is the volcano there.
And down on the side of it,
the Japanese had a gun track mounted that
would run out and shoot point blank our ships,
and they were getting hit.
And I saw this with
the binoculars and I told the captain and of course,
"Being a young man,
I'm really excited," and he said, "Calm down."
I said, "Well, they're shooting
and they're hitting our ships."
Well, he took the binoculars and he
looked and I've come to the gun
and shot and hit a cruiser.
He was supposed to be radio silence.
He broke radio silence
and called him and told him about that gun.
And the battleships obliterated
the bottom of that mountain.
No more gun.
I learned a little bit about myself.
I can get very excited and want to make
my point [LAUGHTER] and
the captain had to tell me to calm down.
>> Tell me, you said that you've got
a new captain at one point.
[OVERLAPPING] Tell me how that came about.
>> Well, normally, when you have a captain and he
gets line experience running a ship,
he gets promoted to take on a larger ship.
I don't know what happened to him,
but he had gone to
the Naval Academy and was
a graduate of the Naval Academy.
So we got a replacement for him.
This fellow was a graduate of MIT,
and he came on board,
and he was an electronic genius.
But the thing that impressed everybody was,
he didn't trust our repair technicians or
operators to be completely familiar with their equipment.
What he did is he climbed the mast of the ship,
and looked at the intent of the way it was pointing,
communicated with our combat information center
where they had the controls for that,
and received the signals from that radar antenna,
and they compared bearing and so forth,
so that it was what the guy was reading down
below was the same as what
the antenna was pointing above.
And he went over personally,
every bit of electronic gear on that ship,
radios, and all personally.
And we were so impressed with him.
Boy, I'm telling you.
After that, he asked for a re-fire.
So sure bombardment, towed targets.
Well, after we finished that,
we never got to shoot first or second or third.
We had to wait till everybody else had shot at
the aerial targets or the towed targets or whatever.
And then they would tow
it and give us permission to fire.
And a lot of times we shoot down the aerial target.
Or we'd hit the towed target and tear it all pieces.
So he had a big effect on the ship.
>> So the record of the ship improved?
>> We got every nasty duty from then on.
We went 100 days.
Go here, go there, not stopping.
We got down to, it was meal for breakfast, lunch,
and dinner, rice, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
And we were running out of rice.
A hundred days we hadn't been resupplied.
We've been refueled, but every nasty job that came along.
>> What was that captain's name?
>> I don't recall at the present time.
I wish I had brought
my reference material with me. I could have told you.
>> So you said you got every dirty job-
>> For example, we were at Guam,
and somebody reported that there was a submarine
supplying an island in the Mariana's chain called Rhode.
And so we got work, go investigate.
So we went up, circled Rhode which was
a volcanic rock island,
no beach, nothing like that.
And we couldn't find a submarine.
Well, we came around to the one side of
the island and the Japanese
let us up with a search light.
And the captain said, "Put it out."
Boom. One shot and it was gone. No more light.
So I relayed that
to the gunnery officer and he put it out.
And so I was an intermediary. [LAUGHTER].
>> Was that search light coming from a ship or?
>> No. It was on the road on the island.
They had us lit up, boy,
we were right in the beam.
>> So tell me more about Iwo Jima.
You said there was some nighttime fighting there?
>> We became the artillery for the Marines.
After they landed, they couldn't get
their stuff up the volcanic ash,
their artillery pieces and
their tanks and all that stuff.
So they put two radios on the ship,
and they gave us a call sign.
Our call sign was thoroughbred.
And it was my job to monitor those two radios,
and if they said something, I repeated it.
In fact, they would call for firing a certain coordinate.
And we had maps of Iwo Jima that were broken down
into coordinates by number and so forth.
They call a number,
and I get the number,
and I repeat it.
Well, the gunnery officer had the same information,
and he would direct the fire to that area.
And the Japanese were bad about attacking at
night or had kamikaze raids at night, which is,
you're going to get killed,
and you don't have any say about it,
you go out and try to kill Americans.
Well, the Marines would hauler
the number of the place where they
wanted our guns to shoot and we would shoot them there.
And then at night,
we provide a star shell coverage,
which is a shell that bursts in the air,
and with lights up,
it's on a parachute,
sinks slowly [NOISE] and down.
So the Marines could see what's going on around them.
And one of the Marines called and said,
"Don't let the light go out."
I remember that distinctly.
I relayed that to the gunnery officer,
"Don't let the light go out."
He kept a star show up there.
>> Why did they need the light to stay out?
>> Well, the Japanese were
attacking and they needed to see where they were.
They come out, the Japanese had
tunnels and places in this whole island.
They had kitchen.
They had mess halls,
they had living areas,
and it was all heated from the heat of the volcano,
so they had perfect living conditions,
and as far as that was concerned,
and they all lived underground.
There wasn't a building above ground.
>> How far offshore was your ship?
>> Probably 2,000 yards.
>> So did you ever sustain any attacks from kamikazes?
>> No.
Never had one.
We lucked out at Okinawa,
and we were in the harbor of Okinawa,
and most of the shores were going out on what they called
radar picket duty around
the island and up towards Japan,
and they would pick up these planes coming in,
and they would tell
everybody to duck and cover because here they come.
Well, for some strange reason,
and I say it's strange,
very strange, our radar went
out and our repairman couldn't get it fixed.
So we didn't get radar picket duty.
We were in the harbor and we're awful glad,
and it's suspicious to me,
I had no evidence,
but I think our techs may
have found a bad tube in one of the units,
[LAUGHTER] so we say,
and it wouldn't work.
It worked perfectly up until then.
>> What do you think they were trying to do?
>> They didn't want to go out there on
radar picketing duty and have
those planes smash into our ship.
One of our sister ships in
the shore was level to the water line,
boy, it's still floating,
but they lost about everybody on that ship.
>> And that was off of Okinawa?
>> Yeah.
>> So did your ship play a part in other major battles,
did you go to other islands?
>> We were in Guam, Tinian,
Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa,
the Philippines, we had six major battles and we got
battle stars on our ribbons for six major battles.
>> And in each of these battles,
your ship was playing a similar role?
>> Exactly.
>> And which one sticks out,
you've talked about Iwo Jima,
are there other moments from
other battles that stick out to you?
>> Not particularly.
It's overwhelming that the part
that we played in Iwo Jima,
each one had its moments,
but Iwo Jima was our big operation of all the Pacific.
Yeah. We provided shore bombardment for the Marines and
Army in Okinawa and the Philippines and so forth,
but not to the extent
that we were involved with Iwo Jima.
>> So you said there was a period where you were
going hard for 100 straight days.
When you finally did get a break,
where would you go to re-fuel or re-supply?
>> We went to atoll called
Ulithi which had a large basin.
It was surrounded by little islands all around,
and you could go in there and anchor,
and they had supply ships there
and we resupply ammunition,
and groceries, and fuel,
and maybe we can get liberty on the beach,
they'd send you over with some beer,
warm beer, no refrigeration.
Yuck. [LAUGHTER] Believe me.
In the Philippines, we were over to
this island and had a big fence up between
the area where we were going to be and the Filipinos,
and Filipinos would come
up to the fence and they like to bargain.
They had Japanese money,
it was worthless,
and they'd give you some of that for a pack of
cigarettes or maybe a warm beer,
[LAUGHTER] whatever you could bargain with them on.
I still got some Japanese money at home.
>> Did you get any entertainment?
>> Never saw the USO,
never in all my Navy career were we
involved in any of
those so called shows that went around,
they entertained the Army, the Air Force,
and the Marines, but of course,
we were on a ship when we were of sea,
we didn't have access to all that stuff.
>> Well, how was your mood throughout this time,
you're going through these constant attacks,
preparing for them,
how are you holding up?
>> Well, I surprised myself
in the fact that I didn't worry about it.
Our ship was called the Lucky John.
D. and everybody believed in it because,
we were in areas where there were floating mines.
We could have hit one of them and blown us up,
so close that they were shooting them,
blowing them up with rifles,
and our people would get
a rifle hit the thing and blow it up,
and one of them was close to the ship and
the shrapnel bounced off the side of the ship.
And captain jumped on a loud speaker system and said,
"Don't touch that piece of metal,
it'll be red hot."
>> What type of ship was it?
>> I was on a destroyer 2110 Fletcher-class destroyer.
It had five five inch guns,
and five 40 millimeters,
and must have had eight or 10,
20 millimeter guns, plus our
torpedoes and depth charges.
>> How many men?
>> Three hundred, give or take a half a dozen or so.
>> And when you're on the way to
another island or another mission,
what preparation did you have to do?
You mentioned the maps,
but would they always give you a map for each new place?
>> Oh yeah. Captain would go to a meeting and
learn what our job would be
and he'd come back aboard with maps and so forth,
pass them around, it's necessary.
>> So did you have an expectation
that you might face really grave danger?
You said you felt lucky,
but when you're going to anticipate? [OVERLAPPING]
>> When you have two bombers
planted on either side of you and
they blow up and you're not hit,
then you got those floating mines
and you're blowing them up,
we could have hit one of them,
and shoot, we
didn't get this six battle stars for nothing.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So how long of a period were you in service at then?
>> Well, let's see, eight,
13 weeks and probably
around 20 months before we went to the Pacific,
and then we stayed in the Pacific until
the peace was signed with the Japanese,
and when that was signed,
we got orders because we wore out
that ship and we got
orders to come back to the United States.
The captain said, "Secure the sonar equipment.
We're going to go as fast as this ship will go."
and we were up next to Japan,
and we tailed it down to Guam,
stopped, and refueled,
and took on some food,
and hightailed it for Pearl Harbor,
and stopped there,
and went all the way to San Francisco,
and went under the Golden Gate,
and went to a place called Hunters Point,
and half the ship went home on
leave for two weeks and half stayed,
and then when we came back,
the ship was in drydock,
and so we were in barracks and the other half went home.
I had a friend who was
from West Virginia and
he lived about 12 miles from where I
lived and his parents and my parents were talking a
lot whenever they got a letter and
they call the other and read it and so forth.
Well, he didn't go in the first group.
He stayed back in San Francisco.
Well, he spent all his money.
He found him a lady friend and they set up an apartment,
and they were not married,
but he ran out of money.
When I came back, he borrowed
$400 from me to go back home.
So I had a dickens
of a time trying to get that $400 back out of him.
Taught me a lesson, friendship
goes so far except when it involves money.
[LAUGHTER] It is not too friendly then.
>> Can you tell me about your reunion with your family?
>> When I came home on my two week leave
my mom and dad were not
in the greatest of health
and they weren't financially that well off.
They still lived in the old house,
but in the meantime,
mother had put in a shower
and had piped in running water,
the city built a water line up through
there and she put in a septic tank and had
a flushing commode in this old house with
a stack stone foundation. It was old.
>> I want to go back for just a second and ask you,
did you have any memory of President Roosevelt's death?
>> Very little.
>> What about the dropping of the atomic bomb?
>> I knew about it and saw pictures of it,
but I just thought it was
a good choice for us to get the Japanese attention.
>> And then you were posted in Japan after the war?
>> No. We went up,
did radar picket duty off the islands.
And what was going on is our bigger planes were flying in
there and they were bombing for a period of time.
So we gave them directions going and coming
and point where they could touch base washes.
One plane came back out of Japan that would've been
hit and they said they were going to have to ditch.
So the captain and
a pilot agreed on a baring and he said,
you guys bare out
and we'll come down the line and pick you up.
So they bared out
and we went down the line and picked them all up.
>> What do you mean down the line?
>> If you take a baring and you're on the same barring,
you're proceeding down the line,
and they jump out and we go boom.
That's just a term.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So you talked about returning home and seeing
the improvements your mother had made
to the family house.
Tell me what was your plan at that point for the future?
>> That point in time I
wanted to relax and
forget about the war and forget about the navy,
but one thing that occurred that I had made up
my mind that I was going back to
high school and get my high school diploma.
So when I came back,
I went to summer school and I had frunk two subjects.
I took two, they only allowed you to take one,
but because I was
a service man and the circumstances little different,
I took two summer school classes
and I had to pass them of course.
And then I entered my senior year.
Now my sister was a senior and
she was Number 2 or 3 in the class,
and she cried when she heard
that I was going back to high school
because I had performed so lousy in the past.
Fortunately, we didn't have a class together
[LAUGHTER] so that caused no conflict.
But I took an extra subject for
my senior year and
I've still got the report card to prove it.
[LAUGHTER] Is a valued position because I would
not have been able to get a job like I
got without a high school diploma.
>> And where did you go to work at that point?
>> I went back to high school and I wasn't working,
other than helping dad at the station
or mother around the house, and mowing the yard,
and picking the grapes,
and picking the strawberries,
and gathering vegetables out
of the garden and that thing.
But summer school occupied my time,
my senior year occupied my time and I had
bought a couple of used cars for
that time and I had an order in for a new car,
but there was a big waiting list
and believe or not when the dealer called you with a car,
you got what he had or you
pass and go to the end of the line.
I bought a 39 old small Fielder Sedan
that we had to push to get started.
When I bought it and the day I sold it,
we had to push it to get it started.
It was a bare,
it would not start and run,
and once you got it going, it was fine.
But then a teacher had a Chevrolet club coupe with
a rumble seat and two passengers and all that.
I bought that and that was a pretty dam nice car.
But then the dealer called and said he had a car for me,
and I got rid of
the Chevrolet club coupe and bought the car and
I had that when I was dating my wife
and I decided I would teach her how to drive.
Mistake Number 1,
I had too much confidence in
her ability to drive and we were in her hometown
and we come up a street and had to make a right hand
turn into a side street and
she was driving and she turned the corner and there was
a car parked at the curb and
she hit it head on carboard,
my new car.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Tell me when you went to work in the coal mine.
>> [LAUGHTER] That was in my baseball playing days and
the Mine said we're playing on mine property.
They had fixed up the baseball field force,
and if you played baseball,
you had a job at the mine,
so I went to work in the mine.
Lasted six months.
I was hurt twice and almost hurt a third time
and I decided that
my mining career was going to be
cut short and of course I was going with my future wife,
and she said, I'm not going to marry a coal miner.
I quit the next day.
[LAUGHTER] Didn't take me long to get the message.
>> What was your wife's name?
>> My wife's name was Sarah Jane Ruth Harbison Russell.
She got all the leftovers. She was the youngest.
She had a brother and a sister.
They were older than her.
I used to tell her, you got
all the names leftover, didn't you?
She said I guess so.
Sarah Jane Ruth Harbison Russell.
>> And where did she work?
>> She was a long-distance telephone operator.
Strange beginning.
We got married, and she was working and I was.
But I had been told
that I was going to be hired by the telephone company,
so I had to quit the coal mine and
her dad had a project for me I didn't love.
He wanted to put cement in his basement.
It had a dirt floor.
And he had already poured a pad and had
a gas furnace put in.
So he wanted to dig out the floor so that he could put in
a four inch slab of concrete and match it up with
the concrete that the furnace was sitting on.
I got a lovely job of digging that out.
Hard hard, Clay.
You couldn't swing full.
You had to take little chopping motions,
and then I shoveled it into a wheel bar and he fixed
a ramp for me to wheel it out and dump it over the bank.
And he had a stopper
down at the bottom so the dirt
wouldn't roll out in the street.
Remember, this is West Virginia, nothing flat there.
Everything is either down or up.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah.
It's a wonderful place for some people to visit,
but I don't want to go back.
[LAUGHTER] I had enough of it.
>> So what did you do when you
started working at the telephone company?
>> I was what is known as a cable splicers helper.
I had a splicer.
He was my boss,
and he was a little fella.
And he'd been with the telephone company for years.
He really knew his business.
He was given all the tough splicing jobs
that the company had,
and he taught me all the ins and outs of the job.
And he was,
well, I'd say he was a weekend alcoholic.
And when he came into work on Monday,
we'd get in the truck and I'd do all the driving and we'd
leave the garage and he might say, turn right.
That's the extent of the conversation now.
I didn't know where we're going. I'd drive.
At the next light, make a left hand turn.
That's all I'd hear until we got to the job site.
Then we park,
and he said, well,
we're going to put up a platform,
which is a place for him to set up on
the cable and he was going to cut in maybe a terminal.
And he'd go into the cable,
pick up the wires that were going to be appearing in
the terminal where they would connect
the telephone service from
the house or business or what have you.
So it was my job to hang the platform by myself now,
put up the ladder.
If there's no steps on the pole,
put the ladder up,
put the platform up.
Of course, I had a pulley
and I could attach the platform to the pulley,
and then I get up there and then I have to hoist it up,
grab it and hang it
and then come back down because I had tied down ropes,
so I'd have to level the platform and
tie it down so it wouldn't move.
And when I'd get that all arranged,
I said, well, I got the platform home.
Okay. That's all we're going to do today.
We're on the job site,
and I thought he would start to work.
He said, well, we'll start on tomorrow.
And then we would leave and we would go to
a local saloon and they
had small glasses of beer for $0.10.
And being the next day guy,
he and I would drink the rest of the day.
Needless to say,
some days I wasn't fit to drive the truck,
but I was still the driver.
And one day we went into
the garage and they had a railing up on
the left hand side and they had a walkway
that was above the level of a grade that you drove in on.
So I drove in and I cut her a little short on
the left hand side and I hit
the rear fender on the guard rail.
He said, well, I guess I know
what you're going to be doing tomorrow.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah, I straightened fender,
sand it down, and get
the telephone company paint and paint it.
Yeah. That was me.
>> Well, tell me how you ended up in Georgia.
>> Well, I had worked for the telephone company
in West Virginia for
CNP and we used to call them cheap in particular.
I'll tell you a little story
about them and why we call them cheap.
When I come out of the service,
I was given $100 a month because
the new government knew I was going to
have to go through some training.
So $100 never got to me.
Oh, I got it but CNP, cheap in particular,
subtracted $100 from my pay
equal the amount of money that
I was getting from the government.
True story.
So we put up with that because I needed a job,
and so I became a cable splasher shopper.
Then after two years of working as a helper,
they decided they needed
a telephone installer and
they promoted me to telephone installer.
And that's when my training really began.
I went to school,
learned how to climb poles and
attach wires and run
them to the house and wire the house,
test the phone,
and all that kind of stuff.
[NOISE] Even to doing the wiring in the office where
the line was going to
end up being exposed to the inside office,
either an operator position
or when you picked up a phone and they'd say,
number please because the light
would light in front of them
and they'd put a chord in and say, number please,
and you give them a number and it might say long distance
and they'd switch it to a long distance operator
and so forth.
So from the installers job,
I became an installer repairman.
Now, each step along
the way was a little bit of a promotion,
a little bit more money
and a whole lot more responsibility.
Well, I really had a knack for being able to repair
phones and detect what the trouble was and cure it.
And so they had a school,
and we had a entirely new switching system
coming out on the market,
and they needed to train
people to maintain that equipment.
[NOISE] Yeah it it was
automated and it came
out of the Bell Telephone laboratories.
And I went to school eight hours a day
for a full year to learn that switching system.
And we made field trips to
other areas where the companies
already had the equipment,
and sometimes we went
there before it was cut in the service and
we work on it and troubleshoot it and so forth.
So we learned by various methods what needed to be done.
After the school was finished,
I got promoted to be a supervisor.
And that's not the most healthy situation
because I was given an office,
a brand new office,
and I had some of my classmates to supervise.
And they knew when I took a nap.
And when I dogged the lesson,
they knew all about me.
[NOISE] Here I am their boss.
Uncomfortable situation.
Cheap in particular, tell you how particular they were.
When you become a boss,
you had to wear a hat.
I never wore a hat.
And I didn't wear just a cap or something,
I had to go out and buy
a regular brimmed hat of a particular color.
I had to wear a suit and tie and a top coat,
none of which I had.
And they gave me a briefcase.
Whoopee. It was a leather briefcase
and it had two leather handles
and it had a zipper compartment to
carry your so called papers in or your lunch or whatever.
But I was the boss.
And it was a life up game.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So did you come to Georgia in
that position as a supervisor?
>> Well, I was still with Saint P,
and one day I was home in Charleston,
West Virginia, and my boss called me up.
My boss was Saint P. Said,
"Hey, ConTel, Continental Telephone is in town,
and they would like to interview you,
with the possibility of joining them in a position."
And he said, so and so was going to be interviewing and
I knew who he was because he'd been
with CMP and he had joined ConTel.
[NOISE] So I went to the motel and was interviewed.
And they said, "Well, we're going to buy you a house,
and pay your moving expenses,
and we're going to give you an 18% increase,
and we'll take care of your medical and your retirement."
And they had more benefit programs
that I could afford to pay for.
Some of them I had to contribute.
Like I had matching funds,
you could save up to 12% of your salary,
and they'd actually match 50% of it.
So 6% we'll pay.
[NOISE] This company was far ahead
of anybody else that I ever heard
of in employee benefits.
I had all kinds of benefits you wouldn't believe.
My wife couldn't believe it.
She said let's take it and let's move.
So they moved me to Lynchburg, Virginia,
and our division office was in Amherst, Virginia.
And so we of course,
we're selling our house and we had to move.
And so we found this new subdivision
and a house that we liked,
but I didn't have enough money for the down payment.
So I went into the office,
told my boss that I was a little short.
He said, "Well, go see the division manager."
[NOISE] I go and see the division manager.
I had never met him before,
but he was from West Virginia and he had
owned a telephone company in West Virginia.
What I didn't know was he
also owned a bank in West Virginia.
So I told him what my problem was,
and he said, "Well, you need $5,000?"
I said, yeah. He said,
"Well, you got it."
It'll be on a 90 day renewable note,
and you can renew it as many times as you want,
and there'll be no interest charge.
You talk about a gift in the boy I fell in.
I'm telling you.
I never had such a nice deal.
Second day on the job, he said,
"Hey, we're going to fly down to Mobile, Alabama.
You want to go along with us on the plane?"
Here's a company plane with a company pilot,
and associated bosses and all that,
and I'm flying down to Mobile,
Alabama to go to buy you at Battery, Alabama.
And I go there and there's guys in t-shirts
coming out of Virginia at the time in the winter.
Here these guys are in t-shirts building shrimp boats.
So I go visit the telephone company.
Boy, I got a shock there,
and I found out really why they got me,
because they had bought
all these mom and pat telephone companies,
put them together, and they
didn't have a common way of keeping records.
When you called the report of trouble,
they didn't have a standard way of recording.
They didn't have a standard way of laying
out the facilities,
so that you assigned a facility to a customer,
and you made a record of it.
One thing was called a line card.
You had the people's name and
address and their telephone number,
and where they were served from.
And they had no poll numbers.
So man, they didn't have
a record keeping system to go with anything.
So I got back to Amherst,
my boss said, "Well,
you know what your job is?"
I said, "I think I have an idea."
He said, "I want you to set up training for
the division and keeping records."
Well, I had done that in CMP,
so I was familiar with it.
And he said, "Hire a couple of people,
set up a training area,
and train these people how to keep records."
And he said, we'll tell the engineering department and
the construction department to start numbering polls
and so forth and keeping a record of that system.
So I hired a couple of people.
One of them I hired was
a cable splicer from
West Virginia who had been an alcoholic.
And I knew that he had stopped drinking,
and I called him and I said,
"You want a job?" He said, "Sure."
So come on aboard.
I told him what he was going to do.
And so the personnel department
had a woman who wanted a job,
and she had experience in keeping these records too.
So I married the two of them together,
and they became my trainers.
And we set classrooms
and brought people in and trained them.
Only trouble was the girl wanted to be the spokesman,
the detailer, and she tried to dominate
the situation and I had a personnel problem
on my hand right from the very beginning.
Here's an alcoholic on one side
and a dominating woman on the other side.
Whoopee. Now, needs say I cured that problem,
and we went on and we were very
successful in what we were doing.
>> So can you tell me a little bit about your family.
You have four daughters, is that right?
>> I have Jane, she's the oldest.
She has a master's degree in education.
She taught for 30 years and she's now retired.
Janet has a degree in physical education.
>> She taught in Dallas and Donaldsonville, Georgia,
but she met her husband
in Donaldsonville and they
got married and moved to Virginia.
He heads up a brokerage firm and
she works for two vice presidents,
two, not one, two,
vice presidents at Roanoke Gas.
And anything that they have that they want done,
they gave it to Janet.
She's the type of person.
She don't need a lot of instruction.
She knows pretty much what to do.
For example, they were
changing out their telephone system.
Then Janet, you're in charge.
Well, she knew from having been around
me that you need to do extensive testing.
She told me what she was going to do,
and I said, well, don't forget one thing.
You go to every station,
and you test it for all features: incoming,
outgoing calls, transferring calls, and so forth.
So she had a helper,
a guy, and that's what they did.
And they found one problem with
one telephone and she
went to where it was
connected and it was connected improperly.
And I don't know whether you're familiar
with a wire punch down system,
but the wires are plastic coated and they put them
in between metal notches and they punch them down,
which cuts the insulation and makes the contact.
One of those was wrong.
So she took it,
punched it down properly,
cured the problem herself,
not with my instruction or anything else.
She just knew the job and watched
and learned and had no problem.
Tested every station and worked perfectly,
and she got every cut and pick and
dirty job that those guys had.
[LAUGHTER]
>> And what are your youngest two daughters names?
>> Well, Judy.
Now, she's the one that I
didn't think she ever going to finish college.
She got a degree in education
from the University of Georgia.
Didn't like student teaching,
decided that she would go to
Georgia State University and get a nursing degree,
another four year degree.
She is a nurse now.
She worked 13 years for
a church school while
her daughter and son were going there to school,
of course, they got privileges and after 13 years,
they built a new house and moved away.
And just yesterday, she told me that she now has
an interview for another private school
as a school nurse.
And I've already told her,
you're the first person that we've ever interviewed who
comes with experience and
the actual thing that we're needing.
So she feels very sure she's going to get that job.
>> And what's your last daughter's name?
>> Jamie. That's a piece of work, that girl.
She has a master's degree in psychology.
And she works for Wellstar.
As I tell her, she takes care of
all Wellstar's fruits and nuts.
Fruity people and nutty people,
and fruits and nuts is a term that we use in the Navy,
especially around San Francisco.
We call that the land of the fruits and nuts.
Not only for California's crops,
but also San Francisco.
You wouldn't believe back in even wartime,
man, those people were nuts.
Absolutely.
First time I have ever been approached by
a male who wanted to take me to his hotel room.
>> Is this after you got back into San Francisco?
>> After, yeah.
I'm still in the Navy.
I'd been home, I go back and I'm on
shore patrol duty and all that kind of stuff.
But I run up against
this guy and he wanted me to go to his room.
>> Did it surprise you?
>> Oh, man. Yeah. But I knew the answer.
No, not interested.
He wanted to take me up there and give me a drink.
I said, no, not interested.
I've had enough for the day.
>> So you've lived in Kennesaw since 1985. Is that right?
>> Yeah.
>> And tell me, Mr. Russell,
why do you think it's important to
share your story of World War II?
>> Well, I'm a unique individual I think.
I didn't have a high school education,
went to the Navy and found out how dumb I
was and couldn't wait to come back
home and go back and get my high school diploma
which knitted out benefits to
me that I can't
assemble all of the benefits that I've had.
I've had some dangerous jobs
besides being in the navy and being shot
at and bombed and all that stuff.
To working in a coal mine,
and being hurt in a coal mine.
To working in a steel factory,
tending a sheet metal galvanizing tub.
Huge sheets of metal are in the steel stage,
and they run them through this liquid
that galvanizes a sheet and it comes out the other end.
Now, I say, what's dangerous about that job?
Well, you have to put
a so called ingots of metal in that pot.
And if you put one in there
that has a drop of water on it,
it's going to go, kaboom.
And you were subject to being burnt
severely by the splashing hot metal.
So I learned very quickly
that any ingots that I was going to put in that pot.
I put them up on the side and
let them sit there and heat and dry.
>> And when did you work at the steel mill?
>> This was after I came from the service.
>> Well, Mr. Russell, we're going to have to stop there.
I appreciate you agreeing to do
the interview and we'll conclude there.