>> This is James Newberry,
and I'm here with Roger Amidon on Tuesday,
March 21st, 2017 at
the Surgis Library at Kennesaw State University.
And Mr. Amidon, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes.
>> Well, thank you so
much for agreeing to sit down with me.
>> After persuasion.
>> Mr. Amidon, what is your full name?
>> Roger Holman Amidon.
>> And what's your birthday?
>> 1, 29, '28.
>> So where were you born?
>> Elyria, Ohio.
>> And what sort of place was Elyria?
>> What sort of place?
Used to be a relatively small town,
it was when I lived there about 21, 22,000.
And it's pretty good size now.
It's probably 50,000 now.
But that was 89 years ago.
>> What were your parents' names?
>> My dad was named Hugh,
H-U-G-H Hugh and my mother
was Sigrid good Scandinavian name.
She was the youngest of five girls,
the only one born in this country.
Her four sisters were all born in Sweden.
They were all older than she was.
>> So they immigrated here?
>> Her parents did, yes.
And she was born here.
>> Do you know why they immigrated?
>> My grandfather got a job in one of the steel mills,
which was a promise for him.
They immigrated to Pennsylvania and
then eventually found their way to
Elyria to a different steel mill.
And about two months before he was scheduled to retire,
he got fired, which
was standard practice back in those days.
They didn't have to pay in retirement.
>> And how did your parents meet?
>> I'm not sure. It was when my dad was in the Navy in
World War I and
I don't know how they bumped into each other.
Tell you the truth, probably never asked.
>> So tell me what did your parents do for a living?
>> My dad worked as a self taught
mechanical engineer for the steel mills
as long as I can remember,
and eventually he is
a proud owner of two or three patents.
And he capitalized on those by being an entrepreneur of
his own primarily in the construction business.
>> And what sort of inventions?
>> One was a three way fitting about so big.
The one used with standard pipe
could go three different directions at the same time.
This way, this way, and this way.
It was unique for its time,
but it outlived its usefulness
and it became a dead horse like everything else.
And he had a patent
on what he called the skull separator.
The skull is the slag at the bottom of
a ladle when they're making steel out of iron.
And it's an iron based and then they add all the goodies,
the charcoal, and the lime
and all the other stuff that goes with
it and blow the impurities
out through the open hearth in the [inaudible] system.
And when they tap it,
it's liquid iron or
liquid steel into a pretty good sized ladle.
And in the bottom, there's what's
called a skull separator.
The bottom of that thing is
a relatively small maybe about that big,
build filled with the concrete
because of the limestone and
the other ingredients that were used in the making of
the steel because the steal goes at
the top and all the junk goes to the bottom.
And it becomes a real problem to bust
those things up because
they're pretty good size hunks of concrete.
So his skull separator was nothing more
than a fence like
that that was set in the bottom of the thing.
And that was used by every steel mill in the country.
>> Now, did your mother work outside the home?
>> When the depression hit,
my dad lost his job and my mother went to school.
She went to the Cleveland College of Massage.
And that was before the term masseuse became verified.
She was an expert at
Swedish massage and physical therapy.
And she had a good business
for quite a while after she got going.
>> Can you describe your childhood home?
>> It was easy. I was the only one there.
My dad worked for the steel mill,
and my mother had her massage practice school
and so I had the house pretty much to myself.
We moved a bunch of times.
I went to five elementary schools and two high schools.
Finally, I graduated from the last one.
>> And which one was that that you graduated from?
>> I graduated from North Ridgeville High School.
>> So you said that
the mill was closed during the depression?
>> They cut the engineering staff from 15 down to one.
And the only survivor of
the engineering department was the chief engineer.
And my dad was Number 2,
and so he got cut too.
I know what that feels like,
because same thing happened to me some many years later.
>> So was your family relying on your mother's income?
>> Hundred percent. It started
in the late '20s and went all the way through
the '30s and into the early part of the '40s.
When we moved out of there,
her practice gradually diminished.
Well, she was getting a little older.
And we moved out to the farm in 1943.
And that put an end to
the massage business and of course,
thes working for a steel mill had long gone by that time,
and we had 50 acres of farm.
And I was the only worker until we hired a guy.
He had to be about 70 when we hired him.
And he could work twice as much as long as I could.
He was something else. Oh, Gus.
If you're familiar with farm,
you know what hay looks like when it's growing.
It gets about so high.
It's got to be cut, gathered,
put into piles and transported.
And you do this all with one person, me.
We had a miscellaneous dog eared
collection of implements that were all horse drawn,
and we converted into tractor drawn.
So when I wanted to change
something on the whatever I was using at the time,
the mower or the rake or whatever,
I'd have to stop, get off,
go change the implement,
get back on the tractor, and move on.
It was a lot of fun.
>> So how did your family get the news at this time?
>> How did they get what?
>> The news of the world.
>> I haven't the slightest idea.
>> Now, did you know of war in Europe?
>> The war in Europe started
and we weren't really concerned with it.
That belonged to the British and the French
and the Dutch and the Belgians,
as far as we were concerned.
And because we were still living in pretty much of
an isolationist atmosphere in the country back then
in the late '30s.
That would be when Hitler took on Poland,
it was 1939 and went forward from there.
And when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor,
my dad was guilty of making a statement.
He says, "I'm glad it happened right now because,
I'm too old, and you're too young."
Both answers are wrong.
He was an auxiliary to the Coast Guard.
And what it did, it took a bunch of guys who
volunteered and having had some water experience.
And just as I said, we lived close to Lake Erie.
And they took over all the patrol duties for
the able-bodied coastguard men,
who were then transferred to ocean going trips.
And he was to be on duty for,
I think a whole Friday,
all day Saturday, all day Sunday.
The next week it would be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
>> How did he feel about that?
>> He loved it. They never shout at anybody either.
They didn't have any spies crawl
on the beaches of Lake Erie.
But they patrolled the beach,
and they used to go on rescue quite often.
Some idiot out there with
his sailboat or runabout or whatever,
would either run out of gas
or run out of knowledge one or the other.
They wouldn't have to be rescued.
>> So with him, doing this patrol,
what happened on the farm?
Did you keep up the farm?
>> Yeah. I was still on the farm when I graduated.
I was glad to get out.
[NOISE] Excuse me.
>> So how would you say the war
affected the small community that you were in?
>> Well, shortages, primarily.
We didn't suffer because my dad had
a critical job and got a C stamp for gasoline.
Everybody got an A stamp,
which I can't remember the exact details,
but it was something like maybe
four or five gallons a week,
or something like that.
And we had an A stamp for both cars.
We had one was a 1931 Austin.
And the Austin was the predecessor to
the Bandon and the Bandon was the predecessor to
the Jeep, going by generations.
And that little bugger engine was
about that long, all four cylinders.
And pretty neat little car.
A model A4 is what it looked like.
I don't have any pictures of that thing. I wish I did.
I may have somewhere stuck in something,
but I don't have and
we had a R for rural because of the farm.
So we didn't suffer from a gasoline problem,
which was the primary motivator anyway.
And my dad had a C stamp because of her critical job.
He's working in steel mill,
in the engineering department.
And the only problem we had was occasionally with food.
We raised chickens,
and we found a grocer in town in Ridgeville.
He would be happy to trade beef for chickens.
So we traded him chickens and we got beef.
That was pretty good wartime.
And then that listed until
I was drafted, and I was gone.
Actually, I was happy to leave the farm,
if you want to know the truth.
That was honest day's work. Yes, sir.
>> Well, how did you get news that you were drafted?
>> How did I get the news?
Well, I had we all had to sign up.
We he to register,
and my registration came out 1A.
And I think I probably got a postcard saying,
"Show up at the town hall."
That's it. No other explanation.
And I went from there to
the induction center. Didn't even go home.
>> So what was this 1A classification?
>> Go.
>> And you said that you went
straight from Town Hall to the Induction Center.
Where was the Induction Center?
>> Cleveland.
>> Now, were you still in school at this time?
>> I was out of school.
I had already graduated.
In my second high school,
it was rather interesting.
I went from a potential graduating class
with the first high school of close to 300,
to a graduating class of 26.
That was a culture shock.
Four boys and 22 girls.
Yes.
[NOISE] Nothing ever transpired with any of us four or,
any of the 22, believe it or not.
It didn't just never happened.
>> And this was in Ridgeville?
>> That was fun. [LAUGHTER] I
thoroughly enjoyed high school.
I hated high school when I was at [inaudible],
but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I played football for one thing.
As I said, my son was a lot better than I am.
I was. But I played anyway.
>> And what were your plans after graduation?
>> Well, Go to school if I can get it in.
So I did for about three months,
then I was drafted.
>> Where did you go to school for three months?
>> Baldwin Wallace. I really wasn't a write type student.
I got there through politics,
because my grades did not support college education.
>> What do you mean politics?
>> A friend of my mother's knew somebody on
the register staff at Baldwin Wallace.
And that helped immensely.
[LAUGHTER]
That's how I got into
the school but it only lasted till I was called up.
>> So the induction Center was in
Cleveland and what happened there?
>> Not much. You obviously
are alive and you get measured
for height and weight and so forth.
And then you go from there to Camp Atterbury, Indiana.
That's where I went next.
And that was all the same day.
>> So we were talking about the induction center
in Cleveland and you said you went from there.
>> To Atterbury, Indiana, it was nonstop.
We just went from there to the Train Depot.
Atterbury, Indiana, was probably
five or six hours by train.
I guess maybe more.
I don't know. I can't remember.
And that was a full blown army installation.
I was inducted into the army at that point.
Got shots the first day and uniform the second day.
In the third day, I was on KP.
>> Which is kitchen patrol.
>> Yeah, kitchen patrol. That's right.
Because my name was early in the alphabet.
In every succeeding team that I ever served on
KP always was I got to fly the clipper.
And the clipper is the dishwasher.
It's a monster. It's not like
that cute little thing that slides under
the counter that we have today but this is monstrous.
Of course, the dishes were plates or trays, not dishes.
The third day I came home back to
my "home" in the barracks.
And like I say, I had been in the army for three days.
And we all gathered outside
the orderly room for mail call.
You have three days not going to expect
any mail and shipping orders would come out.
Well, I didn't get any mail,
but I was on a shipping order.
I'm in the Army three day,
didn't even know what it was?
So you got to answer with your serial number.
So I fumbled around and got my dog
tag out and read off my serial number.
I hadn't the slightest idea what it was.
And I was say going to go to Biloxi, Mississippi.
Where the heck is that?
I don't have the slightest idea.
I don't even know where Mississippi is, for sure.
And we went from Atterbury and over to Louisville.
And after a slight delay,
we got the L&N special from Louisville to Mobile.
And would you believe there were four of us.
And four of us had hung together
for quite a while, as a matter of fact.
Us four, we were
all scheduled for this Project Mike deal.
And we each had a lower berth on
that train going from from Louisville.
That was first class.
We did understand that.
That was a culture shock if there ever was one.
And there was a vehicle
that met the train and took us from Mobile to
Biloxi and put us into
this beautiful pre war barracks
and there were four people there,
us four, nobody else.
>> Who are these three other guys?
>> It was Joe Brady,
lived in Canton,
Bill Wilber lived in Cleveland and,
Howard Hochek lived in Chicago.
Those three guys. I have those three guys.
Wilber, I have no knowledge of,
but I kept in touch with Joe Brady
and Howard Hochek for years and years and years.
And unfortunately, they're both deceased now.
>> So what's going on in
the war at this point that you're traveling to Biloxi?
>> It was winding down. The shooting had stopped.
This is why this Project Mike I was talking
about earlier on that never
happened which was supposed to be a traveling show.
We had dancers, we had singers,
we had a military style band and two dance bands.
I was in one of the dance bands playing my trumpet.
And the whole thing fell apart
but I presume budget, I don't know.
>> Was that in the States that you were doing this?
>> Yeah. We were going to go tour the States first
and then go everywhere.
Germany and England.
Wherever there were troops,
that's we were supposed to go. We never did.
>> Why?
>> All we got was after we'd accumulated
about another 20 guys in the barracks,
the captain called us together
and got some bad news for you guys.
I got some good news and bad news.
The bad news is that Project Mike was canceled.
Politics, I'm sure, budgetary restrictions.
Actually, it was a duplication of
what special services was already doing.
So I strongly suspect it was politics
but anyway, who knows?
And the good news
is that you get to start basic training.
Couldn't make soldiers out of you.
Well, there's a big difference between Air Force
basic back then and Army basic.
When you're tolling on your stomach underneath
the barbed wire and there's
a machine gun shooting over your head.
The machine gun for the infantry is 50 caliber,
the machine gun for the Air Force is
30 caliber. That's the only difference.
We had the whole cadre for
theoretically teaching us guys was all infantry.
So we got an infantry basic training,
which included very much familiarization
with the M1 carbine,
which was with the standard side arm for air Corp.
>> Was that in Biloxi?
>> Yeah. Then they decided to close Biloxi
down as a basic base.
We'd been there about six weeks already.
And they moved us to,
I got to stop and think.
It was part of Texas near St. Antonio.
>> Amarillo.
>> And start all over again.
And we re heated the first six weeks
and then went on and finally got out of there.
Then I went to communication school.
Why? I don't have the slightest idea.
I got myself a nice cushy job through more politics.
Joe Brady got me a job in
the office while I was waiting for shipping orders.
And I was taking
pay envelopes and putting them
with shipping orders off a list
so that their personnel package
would stay with the money package
on the correct shipping list.
I worked there for two days.
The middle of the second day,
I found my name on a shipping order.
So I lost my cushy job.
I went to school in Belleville,
Illinois, which is a suburb of St. Louis,
really, but it's across the river in Illinois.
And that lasted,
I don't know how many weeks. I can't remember.
>> What type of school was it?
>> Communications repair.
>> What were you learning there?
>> My specialty was teletypes.
I didn't even know what a teletype was.
We had the state of the art teletypes and
especially very new to the program
back in at this stage of the game.
What was referred to as an RTT,
a radio teletype, no wires which was pretty fantastic.
And we learned those two.
Essentially, the radio portion would be all right.
And I thought nice
that I've been to school, I'll never use it.
And the only job I ever had overseas was that job,
maintenance and repair of teletypes.
>> So when you were in that school,
I'm assuming you had no idea
what you would be doing with it?
>> I have no idea.
>> How did you feel going through all of this training?
>> Bewildered mostly.
I enjoyed it because
the first three months of school before I got drafted,
I ballooned up to about 230 pounds.
And by the time that I finished my days in
St. Antonio, I weighed 160.
I dropped about four or five pant sizes.
>> So you're feeling good about your physique?
>> Yeah. And when I finished school in there,
I was wandering around and I
came across one of our swimming pools,
and there was a lieutenant there,
they were getting ready to open the school.
I said, "You got guards."
He said, "I need guards."
I said, "I have a junior life saving,
senior life saving,
and water safety instructure, all Red Cross."
He said, "Show me the paper."
Well, phone call home,
package up the paper, ship it down, here it is.
I got a job. For a week.
And I came out on orders, [NOISE] overseas.
>> So how did you feel when you got that order
that you were going to be going overseas?
>> There is a feeling that you get,
you're not in control of your own life.
This is one of the things is somebody else is controlling
your life and you just walk
around in a bewildered state and go where they say.
That's all. And the less
you know about what's going to happen,
the better off you are.
You learned that pretty quick.
Keep your mouth shut and your ears open.
That will get you most everywhere.
>> Do you remember where you shipped out from?
>> Yeah, San Francisco.
They were still using convoys back then.
I came across when I looked at the pictures. Let's see.
We were on the Admiral Hughes transport.
It was pretty good size built
to carry 1,500 and we had 3,000 on there.
It was a little crowded and we
hit what the remainder of a typhoon and we got sick.
Everybody got sick.
It was pitiful. Even the old hands from
the sailors themselves that
ran the ship, they got sick too.
I don't know who was running the boat,
but as I remember,
there was no news article,
but it was a commentary and somebody made
the commentary that we lost a destroyer in the storm.
I can't either approve it or
disprove it. It just happened.
>> So what did the end of this typhoon
look like on water?
>> Just big waves.
We didn't go up on deck. No way.
You stayed in the compartment,
you put your life belts on and we were told to
get in our bunks and put our belt across.
Like the seat belts today.
Belt yourself on into your bunk.
And I says, if this ship goes down, we go with it.
There was no expectation of going off.
Probably lifeboats for maybe 100 people
and we've got 3,000.
>> Did you have one?
What? Lifeboat? I don't remember if I did.
>> Did you get sick?
>> Yeah.
>> And what did that mean? What happened?
>> It's like the worst case of flu you ever heard of.
You work on both ends.
That's self-explanatory.
[LAUGHTER] I won't illuminate that.
>> If you're in your bunk,
can you get up and go to the latrine?
How are you doing that?
>> You just lay there. By that time,
you'd stop throwing up because you haven't eaten.
You just couldn't get up.
I was one, two,
I think I was third from the bottom and that made me one,
two, third from the top also.
There were five bunks in a row.
>> So you're smack in the middle.
>> Yeah.
>> Were they on chains?
>> Yeah. Chain to the wall.
They had been refitted.
They normally would carry two.
This [inaudible] put in five.
They would normally be two bunks,
fold on the wall come down like this.
And then they had five.
But didn't make any difference.
We didn't clean the compartment anyway.
We just shoveled it out.
>> How long was this journey?
>> Let's see. We made a stop in the Philippines,
and then the next stop was Yokohama.
And I think it was 12 or 13 days.
Pretty good time going over the Pacific.
There's an interesting,
I think it's interesting,
comment about when I was little,
I always wanted to grow up and go to sea.
Me and one of my cousins were always
going to be in the sea.
Kept reading books about sea stories.
We thought that was pretty neat.
So it turned out
that my dad was
in the Navy but never got off out of
Charleston in the World War I.
And he only went to see Lake Erie in the World War II.
My uncle was in the Army in World War I.
All my cousins save one were in the Navy.
All my buddies were in the Navy,
and all my relatives were in the Navy. Not me.
I'm in the Army Air Corps. Big deal.
I got more sea miles than all of them put
together because they never left the land,
I was the only one that crossed the ocean.
And boy, that Pacific is an awful big place.
I found that out really quick like.
>> Well, tell me about post
war Japan. What did you find there?
>> Well, I got put
into Fifth Air Force headquarters in Nagoya, Japan.
Nagoya was then initially,
prior to the war was probably
maybe the third or fourth largest city in Japan.
[NOISE]
It was picked by the Air Force
because they had a super airport.
They could land anything,
including B29s, if they wanted to bring them in there.
And that was why they picked Nagoya.
And our working arrangement was up
in the second or third floor of the Nagoya,
what used to be a bank building.
I can't remember the name of it,
but it was a good building
and one of the few in the whole city.
The majority of the city of Nagoya were
small businesses with the exception of
one area that was operated by Mitsubishi.
That was one of the many locations where they
built the zero fighter,
which was a super airplane.
And my cousin tangled with some of
the zeros because he used to escort
B29s going over to boom Japan.
Anyway, Nagoya itself, there weren't that many buildings.
I got some very poor pictures
taken from the top of our building.
And you see what it looks like out there,
there's a building here and the building
there and one down
there and one over there
and one over there, and that's it.
Everything else was gone.
All the small businesses and
residences were all paper and wood.
And Nagoya was bombed
by 500 pound bombs and incendiaries,
which were very effective.
They weren't the thousand pound blockbusters
or obviously not the nuclear
because it hadn't quite happened yet.
Well, it had happened and it was still off limits.
>> When you say you were seeing a building
here or a building there,
was there destruction or had been cleaned up?
>> Both. A lot of the destruction was
still there and the cleanup was in process.
Well, the smaller places were easy because
they burned down totally.
And when I first got there,
we were building in the hospital.
And it turned out to be only a week
because we were waiting to get Quonset huts built.
And they were under construction when we got there.
And I have a picture of the hospital and
the only damage it took was one bomb
had come through and messed up one wing.
We were living in the other wing of the hospital.
And it was right across the street,
a very narrow street,
from the Mitsubishi assembly plant where the zeros
were and they obliterated the zero plant.
And the only mark on the hospital was a bunch of
busted windows and that one crater.
That's it. Those guys that flew over in the 29s,
really knew what they were doing.
There was pinpoint bombing.
>> So this is where you worked on
the radio teletype in this large business building.
>> Yeah, it was a honest to goodness,
steel and concrete building with
two subterranean floors. We found out.
We never used them, but that's what they had.
They had one drawback.
They all our lighting in there.
We were in a closed classified area along with
cryptography and a few other people
and no outside windows.
And we had fluorescent lights,
us US fluorescent lights,
which are designed to operate on 60 cycle current.
Japan is 50 cycle.
And it makes a constant flicker like this.
And it's hard to work,
messages up your eyes.
If I'd been smart,
the government would be paying for
my glasses all these years,
if I'd have been real smart
because they screwed up my eyes.
>> Well what were your working hours?
>> I got lucky. I was from
midnight to 8:00 in the morning,
which was good because a couple of good reasons.
One, we'd come off shift at 8:00 in the morning,
we wouldn't have to go and stare
at powdered eggs in the mess hall.
We'd go back to the kitchen and have the cooks make
us eggs and bacon and toast and whatever.
And we'd eat in the kitchen.
We got good foo. There was about 10 of us together.
I got good buddies with a guy.
He was the sole person on that shift
for what was the known as carrier.
And carrier is the all of
the so called electronics
that powered all of
the teletypes and the radios and everything else.
They were monstrous things.
And he looked after those,
but he had both by himself on third shift.
So he and I got to be buddies.
>> What repairs did you have to do?
>> They were usually caused by the 50 cycle current.
We'd always have spare units to go in.
So we'd go in and get a bad one
back and we'd run a test on it and find
out if it was a mechanical or was it electric, really.
There was no electronics involved.
There wasn't such a thing back then.
>> So you said you did a lot of traveling around Japan?
>> Yeah. I went to Korea once, Hapkido once.
I went to,
I can't remember the name of the city,
but it's the one with the Big Buddha.
I didn't take my camera.
I can't remember that Osaka. It could be Osaka.
And most of the cities were smaller than Nagoya,
but they were in the same shape as Nagoya was.
There was a building here and the building
there and the building somewhere else.
That's it. It's no wonder that they surrendered.
It wasn't entirely the nuclear bomb that did it.
They were pretty devastated to start with.
There were people living everywhere in boxes.
If they had no boxes,
if they didn't have any.
There was one about a quarter of a mile or half a mile
from Quonset hut, was a ravine.
And it was full of people.
They were all refugees from some place.
Some part of Nagoya they were refugees from.
There were refugees everywhere.
You'd hear the interesting trucks that
they used were wood burning trucks.
They burn wood. It's a low grade steam operation really,
but there was no gasoline,
no butane, no nothing.
It just was gone.
>> What about your interactions with the Japanese?
>> The interaction.
Obviously,
militarily we didn't do anything.
We had no contact whatsoever. But by the same token,
it was safe to walk down the street.
There were no gangs running around
ill bent on revenge, so to speak.
It was orderly.
There were MPs everywhere.
So you didn't have to look very far to find a cop.
You didn't find any Japanese cops.
There was such a thing,
but we didn't see them.
>> Did you have any communication with
family and friends back in the States?
>> Yeah, I got letters back and forth from a girlfriend.
>> Who was that?
>> My first one. I had
the first one before I shipped overseas.
She graduated a year behind me in another high school.
And I figured that was a sure thing.
We were going to be us rather than friends,
and it didn't happen that way.
I came back from overseas
and one of my buddies picked me up at the train station.
He got out of the army
about three weeks before I got out.
And he asked me about my girlfriend and I said,
there's nothing to know.
He said, yeah, she has a friend.
That was the end of that.
So on to number 2 [LAUGHTER] That was in college.
>> Well, can you tell me about getting word
that you would be going home and how you felt about that?
>> [LAUGHTER] It was real strange. As I said,
I worked from midnight to 8:00,
so I had the [inaudible] all day,
if I wanted to use it.
Sleep, who needs sleep?
There was too much to see.
We did a lot of that.
And about going home,
I was out in the yard and I was playing
basketball with a bunch of guys.
And a kid from the orderly room came out and he said,
the first sergeant wants to see you.
Well, I knew that I couldn't go over
there bare-chested in shorts and sneakers.
I couldn't do that.
You got to walk in the room,
you got to be class A.
Shortly after the cessation of hostilities,
all of the chicken stuff came back.
She had to do this, she had to do that,
you had to do something else.
So there was no loose operation like it was before.
So anyway, back to the barracks, jump in the shower,
put on my class A uniform,
walk to the orderly room
when the first sergent ain't there.
And the kid said, well, I know where to get him.
He's with his hooch.
What the heck is that? Well, I learned.
But anyway, we got him on the phone,
and I told him my name and he said, oh, yeah.
He said, you're going home. I said, when?
He said, you got to be in Yokohama by about 10 o'clock.
You got to catch a ship?
So I bummed a ride to
the railway station and through the use of the MPs,
I got on the right train, got to Yokohama,
got off the train at Yokohama,
found my way to to the shore and found my boat.
The Admiral or the General Pope was the name of the ship.
And it was a twin sister to the one that he came over on.
But no storm. And 37 days at sea,
we stopped every island in the whole Pacific Ocean.
We stopped at Wake
and we stopped at Guam and we stopped at
Hawaii and we stopped all over
the place to pick up bodies,
is what we were doing primarily.
And a lot of bodies came home
for burial rather than
stay where they were and get buried.
The ones in Hawaii all stayed there.
So I convinced the compartment commander that I
had some people I know in Honolulu.
They said well, so does everybody.
Everybody has a friend in Honolulu.
I said, no, this is for real.
And I convinced him.
I spent three days in
Honolulu before the ship pulled out again.
And we went from Honolulu
right straight back to the States
in warm summer uniforms and it was cold in San Francisco.
>> So how long were you in
the Pacific altogether? Do you remember?
>> You mean the overseas?
>> Yes.
>> About 10 months.
>> So how do you feel about your service there
in the occupational force?
>> We did a job. With our help,
they got their own lines of communication back.
Our linemen and our guys that would go out
and install telephone poles
because there weren't any telephone poles left.
They didn't bury underground like they do now.
They were all strung out
like all above ground telephone and power and everything.
And we were instrumental.
I personally wasn't involved with it,
but our group was first communication squadron.
I think there were 30 of us altogether.
>> So you were classified 4E when you came back?
>> Yeah, 4E.
>> What does that mean?
>> Prior military service.
>> And what did it mean for you in subsequent years?
>> I wouldn't get drafted for Korea.
I was able to avoid that.
I didn't want that. I did
not join the the reserves or anything either.
>> And you went back to school?
>> Yeah.
>> And what was the school, again?
>> Baldwin Wallace.
>> And so were you on the GI Bill at this point?
>> Yeah. That worked great.
>> How did you get the money? How did that work?
>> They'd mail. They'd sent the money right to
the school. I'd never see it.
Matter of fact, I came across a receipt for
a quarter tuition and lodging, it was $126.
That's almost unheard of.
That was for a quarter,
which is 12 weeks.
>> Did it cover anything else?
>> Books. Yeah
>> Did it cover everyday spending money?
>> No.
>> Okay.
>> You had to work for that. I did that. I worked for it.
>> When you came out of college,
what work did you do initially?
>> Through a friend of a friend of a friend,
I got a job with a real small company.
I was the office staff, the whole thing.
I did correspondence, I did accounting, I did shipping.
I did a little bit of
everything that's involved in the ongoing.
The company did about,
I'm trying to remember now. But their gross
was probably around $5,000 or $6,000 a month,
was pretty big for back then.
And I was there.
I had to drive 30 miles
one way to get to
work but I was glad to do it because I found a job.
Every job that was around had
at least one half a dozen applicants,
doesn't make any difference because I
went that route also.
And then they decided
to move out of the building they were in,
which was an old building.
This was an investment casting company.
I don't know whether you know what that infers,
but it came from the field of dentistry.
That's how they make false teeth or
false or implants or whatever you need in your mouth.
False teeth on a bridge or what have you.
The teeth are cast.
An impression is taken
and the industrial side is exactly the same.
The impression is taken,
a pattern is developed out of wax.
And the pattern or the wax pattern is put into,
in the case of the dentist and also the small industrial.
These are relatively small.
I forget the name term of but it's a small,
almost looks like a can and it's
full of stuff that looks like plaster of Paris.
What's done is this thing is put in there,
this pattern is put in there.
The can is filled with this investment.
They fire it and the wax burns off and leaves a cavity.
Into the cavity, they
pour whatever metal they're going to use,
whether it's going to be tin or whether it's going
to be something sophisticated
like beryllium nickel or beryllium copper
or any of the stainless steel
is going to be cast in that hole.
And they cast it and then its removed,
the powder is removed and
the part comes out and requires nothing.
No machining, no drilling,
no sanding, no filing, no nothing.
We made parts like rotors for aircraft fuel pumps.
You cut your fingers on the blades.
They were that sharp. Just as
sharp as the sharpest knife you ever had.
Whatever the pattern was for this little company,
that's what you got,
whatever the pattern was.
>> So I know that you worked at
several different places,
I want to jump to your move to Georgia.
Can you tell me why you moved to Georgia?
>> That's pretty easy. Like I say,
I worked for this one company after three other ones.
And it was pretty relatively happy.
Well, the politics were changing.
So I got an offer to join
a representative company industrial agency.
They had our line among others, and I knew all of them.
So there was no problem. They hired me.
Obviously, I quit first, then they hired me.
And also I formed a division of fabrication.
And I got a couple of welders in there,
and we did fabrication plus representation. I did both.
And I thought, man,
I'm really going along.
End of the second year,
I had a little conference with the,
Bookie, the CPA that we used.
And I got a chance to look at our books,
which I wasn't allowed to do before,
but I got a chance to look at it.
Man, we turned a profit.
Isn't that neat? We turned about a $10,000 profit.
So knowing that, I could
have a big smile on my face
when I went to the Christmas party.
Everybody's getting bonuses.
I opened my envelope,
Unfortunately, your division suffered a $12,000 loss.
They put a management fee on of $10,000,
the owners of the company.
That's politics at the top.
So in other words, they wiped out our profit margin.
There was no such thing as a management fee before.
I was the manager.
I would charge. All I got was my salary.
I was the only manager we ever had.
Well, three months after I got fired,
they went out of business completely.
By that time, somebody tells me,
when you lose your job or
you get fired or whatever happens,
don't keep it a secret.
Tell everybody you know,
him, him, her, her.
Tell everybody. Contact everybody you know.
Tell everybody in the world that you need a job.
And contact your ex employer.
So I did. The company
I worked for before I went with the agent.
That involved to move to Pittsburgh.
Anyway, I was happy to leave
Pittsburgh and come down here.
The the boss man at the at
the same company had a big thing against rehires.
He didn't like rehires at all.
Well, one way or another,
I got hired back and not in Cleveland anymore, Atlanta.
And eight states that go with it.
I used to think the 26 mile drive to work was long.
Now when I got a 300 mile to
South Florida because I had all of the Southeast.
>> Can you tell me about your family?
>> I got two boys and a girl.
As a matter of fact, you came across something yesterday.
My oldest son graduated from Juniata.
He went there to play and played football.
I think I remember telling you that.
And he also graduated from Juniata College.
And he thrived on the small college aspect of it,
but it wasn't a stepping stone anywhere,
unfortunately, but he eventually wound up working.
So my second son went
to Georgia Southern and graduated cum laude.
And my daughter went
two years to Georgia Southern and two years to,
I can't remember the name of the place.
It's an arts institute,
Commercial Art Institute in downtown Atlanta.
Can't remember the name of it
but that's where she graduated
from and has a degree in fine arts.
And she wanted to did
cartography or she does watercolors.
She does oil, and she also does acrylics.
Her personal preference is acrylics.
She's a pretty good artist,
but she's driving a school bus now.
My oldest son has great granddaughter.
My granddaughter is now 37 years old.
I came across that yesterday
because her birthday is May 1st.
And that happens to be May day.
It was also my dad's birthday and
so I have an appointment on May 1st.
And that's how the whole thing came about.
The fact that she is 37 years old.
That's shakes you a little bit.
>> Well, let me ask you, Mr.
Amidon you had some hesitancy to come today.
So I just want to ask you know,
do you think it's important to
share your World War II experience?
>> Oh, yeah, I still think I contributed,
I suppose to an effort that was due at the time.
I profited by it by being able to go to school,
which is very fortunate because I was able
to finish school with the marriage that I had.
And put that all together.
It was a good experience, I think.
>> Well, thank you very much. We'll end there.
>> That's a good spot to end.