>> This is James Newberry,
and I'm here with Paula Fidler on Monday,
April 10th, 2017 at
the Sturgis Library at Kennesaw State University.
And Miss Fidler, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes.
>> Well, thank you so much. And thank
you for sitting down with me.
So we'll just start at the beginning.
Could you tell me your full name?
>> My full name is Paula Marcelle Tate Fidler.
>> And what's your birthday?
>> 07/11/1926.
>> And where were you born?
>> Pardon?
>> Where were you born?
>> I was born in Uhrichsville, Ohio.
>> But you didn't grow up there?
>> No. I grew up in a small town
called New Hagerstown, unincorporated.
There were maybe like 80 people in the town.
But it had been a larger town.
But when the railroad came through,
it bypassed us, and so we got cut out and lost
all our things that we
had, churches and academies and things like that.
But it's a small town.
Just our people mostly.
>> And we were talking about this earlier,
but what was the nearest big town?
>> The nearest big town,
I suppose you would say was Akron,
Ohio, because that for me
were the biggest as far as commercial.
>> Okay, and what were your parents' names?
>> My mother's name was Maudeline Price Tate
and my father's name was Claire Swineherd Tate.
>> And what did they do for a living?
>> My dad worked for
the WPA during the depression and then
he worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad
the rest of his life.
>> What sort of work did he do for the WPA?
>> Well, they were building dams.
That was one of the WPA projects in our area.
They built a couple of them.
And I'm not exactly sure what he did,
but I suppose they
were like construction workers in this day and age.
And my mother was a homemaker and then
she worked for the telephone company
and then she worked for the school system.
And she was the town nurse, so to speak.
Not that she was trained as a nurse.
My grandmother lived right across the street from me.
And she had the cows,
and the chickens, and pigs. And I learned to
milk a cow, and to feed the chickens,
and to feed the pigs, and slop the hogs,
and do all of that from her.
And then that's what we did.
I mean, that's how I grew up in the in the country.
And I I enjoyed it.
At our house, you never knew who was going
to be living at our house.
I like the town well,
I'm going to call him the town drunk.
He got hurt in
a tree accident when they were cutting down trees.
He ended up at our house.
My mother taking care of him because he didn't
have any other family. He was a bachelor.
And one of my cousins was born at our house.
And then we had a woman that lived there who had
no family and she
was old, and my mother was taking care of her.
So like I said, she never knew.
I had one sister and my sister
was 7.5 years older than I was.
So we grew up not really together because
my grandparents lived in another little town called
Leesville which had its own school.
And she went over and lived with them when she got into
the extracurricular activities at school.
So she was there,
but like I said,
she was 7.5 years older than so I grew up and
I was like, spoiled rotten.
>> So it was the two of you, your sister and you?
>> Yeah. That's all.
>> So how was your family impacted by the depression?
>> Well, like I said,
when my dad worked for the WPA and my
mother she went over in this little town of Leesville,
which had, like, maybe 300-400 people in it.
And when they were building the dam,
she went over there and opened a restaurant
to feed the people
the men that were coming to work on
the dam project because they
were all staying in local homes.
You know, the men where they were
renting rooms so they could
work because they came
from all around and she went over there and well,
in fact, we moved.
We never left the house that we were in,
but in New Hagerstown,
but we moved to Leesville and she opened a restaurant.
And so I got to work in the restaurant.
And I remember they had slot machines.
I used to like to play the slot machines I was like,
in third grade, I think.
So that's what she did.
We moved there, but we were only
there until the dam was finished,
and then we went back to New Hagerstown and I was there
the rest of the time until I graduated from high school.
Well, like I said, she
ran the restaurant and I helped in
the restaurant to feed the people.
>> Well, you said your house wasn't
electrified until you were eight or seven.
>> Yeah.
>> And do you remember how that changed the household?
>> Well, it did pretty good
because [LAUGHTER] when you don't have electricity,
we had an outhouse and we had kerosene lamps,
and when the electricity came through,
you had just to stoke your own furnace.
If you had stoves,
we had individual coal
stoves that because that's coal area.
And they burned wood also.
But then when electricity came through,
we could have furnaces and bathrooms and I
can remember that made a difference,
we just added on to the fan because before that,
when we had water, in the house,
we had a pump that went from the well that we
had and it wasn't bad.
Hey, I survived.
>> Okay. So where did you attend school?
>> I attended school in Bowerston, Ohio
and in Leesville for one year,
just for one year in Leesville.
Maybe two years, I guess I was in Leesville,
when my mother ran the restaurant.
Yeah. But Bowerston Ohio,
and that's where I graduated from.
>> What kind of student were you?
>> Average. I wasn't any genius or anything like that.
Of course, I rode a school bus,
but now a lot of kids rode school buses.
The thing that I guess I remember about
school was that we had
one building and it had 12 grades in it.
That's not a very big school.
And my graduating class had,
I think I counted 13 kids in it.
That was all.
Yeah. And we didn't have a very big athletic program.
I mean, I did everything.
I played basketball and I did
the high jump for the outside places,
and I did everything that they had go in.
We tried to have a school orchestra and a school band,
and in the orchestra,
I played the violin,
and in the band,
I played the drums.
You do whatever needs done.
That's the way I looked at it.
>> Well, so when you were in high school,
there was a war going on?
>> Yes.
>> Okay. So I want to jump
to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
>> I remember exactly where I was.
My cousin and her parents,
Glory Jane and her parents, and myself.
And they came and got me and
took Glory Jane and me to
the movie down in New Philadelphia.
And when we came out of the movie was when we
heard in all the streets and what have you,
that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.
And that's from there.
That was in '41.
Yeah. I graduated in '44.
Well, we did things.
They cut us down to we can only
buy so much sugar and so much flour,.
What did they call that? I forget.
>> Rationing.
>> Rationing. Yeah. Well, we went through that.
I remember that.
Well, I remember we did whatever had to be done.
>> So your mother was running that restaurant?
>> Well, that was before the war,
because that was when I was like, eight years old.
And at the time that I was in high school,
I must have been freshman in high school,
and our sophomore,
my mother was then working for
the telephone company as
a telephone operator because that
was different thing than the kind you have now.
You people wouldn't know what I was talking
about. So we did.
And my dad, we had ration cards and he had to drive.
He was working for the railroad by then
and he had gas rationing.
And we only had one car.
And so we did a lot of walking.
And I sometimes had to walk from my house to
to Bowerston for athletic events that we had,
unless you could get a ride with somebody else.
But we did.
The one thing that I remember was down in Dennison,
which is right next to Uhrichs
with big train station.
And this is when I was almost out of school.
The troop trains used to come through
and we would go down and give
the troops coffee and doughnuts and what have you.
It was like the USO today.
I guess maybe it was part of the USO.
My childhood was good.
I'm sure I complain,
but like I said,
I had a chance to have both the rural and the town.
>> Well, I want to ask about the way
your high school changed during the war.
Did many of the older boys get drafted?
>> Yes. Well, my grandmother,
like I said, lived across the street from me,
and she used to take boys from
the orphans' home and raised them because my grandfather,
that grandfather was dead before I was
born because he was 20 years older than my grandmother.
So she didn't have anybody but herself, live with her.
And so she used to take boys from
the orphans' home and keep them from
the time that they were in the eighth grade
until they graduated from high school.
And I can remember seven of them.
And I remember the last one that she had was George,
was two years older than I was.
And he got drafted.
And he got drafted in the Navy,
he joined the Navy.
And he was home
between the time that he was drafted there,
first met with them until he was due
to go to Lake Eerie for his duty station.
He was home and he
and another friend of ours, a school friend,
lived in that town too,
and we were out in my dad's fishing boat on
a trip in the lake
or in the dam that my dad had helped build.
And he had a fishing boat.
And the three of us,
George, Jim and myself,
where we were out in that.
And another boat came up and
swamped us and George drowned.
And that was in '43, I guess, maybe.
He knew how to swim,
but he had been working in
the fields and had a terrific sunburn.
And they said that that's what caused him to.
Well, it was in May and the water in Ohio in May is cold.
And like I said, he'd been working
in the fields and he had blisters.
All over his back was blisters.
Anyway, I had a hold of him.
He knew how to swim, but it was too much and
he didn't really drown,
caused him to have a heart attack.
And that's what killed him. Was that.
And that's the last one that she had.
All the rest of them, well,
one of them was a cousin,
I guess it was.
But anyway, my growing up,
I had it better than a lot
of the people because I got to travel,
because my dad worked for the railroad and we
got passes and my grandparents.
One set of grandparents had moved to California and so we
used to get on the train and go to California.
And it'd take us like five days to get there.
But most of the other people around there,
kids my age didn't get to go.
So I was Fortunate.
>> So the passes work?
>> The passes worked. We didn't cost us anything.
All we had was coaches.
And we had to sit up.
And I remember one time during the war,
we went one year.
I don't remember what year it was.
It must have been '42 or '43.
We rode and the train, of course,
it was full of troops. And I sat in the aisle.
Most of the way we would go different routes,
but we would go like to
Chicago and then you would change trains and
then you get a train in Chicago and then
you would go to maybe Kansas City,
and then you would change trains and then
you would go I don't remember.
But my grandparents lived in Stockton, California.
So we would go to there.
>> Why did they move to Stockton?
>> I had an uncle that went out
there and homesteaded a whole lot of years before that.
And then he went back and they went out to be with him.
Well, his wife was my one grandfather's sister.
One of my great grandfathers was one of
the founders of the State of Ohio Thomas Price.
That was my grandfather DeForest Price.
>> So these trips you were making to California,
was that during the war?
>> Oh, yeah. That was during the war.
We went almost every year.
>> So the war didn't necessarily stop your mobility?
You were still able to. [OVERLAPPING]
>> No. We were fortunate, as I said,
we had gas rationing because my dad was working,
well, he never went with them.
It's just my mother and
my sister and myself are the ones that went.
But it had to be a traveler.
And most of the people in that area,
didn't travel very far.
That's why I said, I was fortunate that I got to
go because, again,
the people that lived around there most of
them were farmers because there was no business there.
They were just farmers and they didn't travel very far.
But as far as they traveled was to the county fair.
>> So I want to talk about your graduation.
What did you expect to do after you finished high school?
>> Well, one of my classmates and myself had put
into a school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for nursing.
And that's what I had thought about doing.
But they came and recruited
people for government jobs,
secretarial and filing, which I guess they needed
because they opened up
all these would be like contract people.
They came and recruited from the schools for us,
they would pay us to go to a business university,
that's the bunch that I relate to.
And that ended up what I did was I joined up with one
of those and they gave us a,
well, I think it was maybe like three months
and they went off to a business university.
They call them business university in Finley, Ohio,
and we did typing and
shorthand and that kind of stuff for
eight hours a day and we lived with families,
they rented this room.
And after we finished that,
this was after I had graduated from high school.
And after you graduated from the business university,
some of them went to Washington, DC.
And I chose to go to Dayton, Ohio,
where the Air Materiel Command
and the Wright-Patterson field was.
Because I could still get passed on the railroad.
That was my means of transportation.
I went to Dayton and I went
to Air Materiel Command and had a job as a secretary.
>> What is Air Materiel Command?
>> Well, it was the,
let me see, what do you call it?
They did all the contracts
for buying all the stuff for the airplanes,
well, air material,
that's what we did.
We did all business contracts for the government.
It was run by the government.
And we were affiliated with Wright-Patterson Airfield.
For the things that they needed for their airplanes,
we were contracting for and buying,
that's the type of thing that. [OVERLAPPING]
>> Was it only Wright-Patterson
Airfield or was it other airfield?
>> I don't know because I was so far down on the command.
All I was doing was shorthand and
typing, it was paperwork.
That's what it was.
Paperwork. And there was from my school, I don't know.
And as I'm saying,
I can only speak for my bunch,
but they recruited from thousands of kids.
And the ones that I knew were from Michigan.
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.
It was one of the places
that a whole bunch of the girls that I knew.
We went and we lived.
They put us up in dormitories there right across
the railroad from railroad tracks
from Air Materiel Command there and well,
I think it was called it wasn't the city of Dayton.
It was I think it was Fairburn, Ohio.
Does that sound right?
I think Fairburn, Ohio I
think was the name of the place,
but it was just a bunch of well, they built houses.
Apartments for the workers at Air Materiel Command and at
right Patterson with government housing
and they put us up in dormitories.
And that's where we where we worked.
>> Did you share with multiple women a dormitory?
>> You could either get a room,
you could have a partner
in your room or you could get one for yourself.
>> Did you have to pay anything for it?
>> Yes, we paid,
but it was subsidized in a way.
I don't remember now.
That's been a long time ago.
Well, now I think that maybe we didn't pay.
I think the government we had, like,
housemothers in the dormitories
and they had it set up and it was in an area
where all the government housing that they had to
put up real quick to get the people there to work.
And the people that worked in
this housing development that we lived
in worked for Patterson and Air Materiel Command.
And there were like I said, I don't know.
There were like 300 of us in a dormitory.
>> So what was the etiquette in terms of dating?
>> That the
man that I married,
he had been in World War 2.
He came home and I had live I
moved out of the dormitories
after I'd been there for a while.
And I moved in with a lady and she
lived right next with an older lady and she
lived right next door to
my husband's parents who were living
there and working for Patterson.
And when he came home from the war,
I was in the process of moving
from that apartment to another apartment
with another lady because that one I was living with was
leaving and his mother told him to help me.
And that's how I met him.
And I met him in February and we got married in April.
>> Were you allowed to date when you were in the dorm?
>> Yeah. We had housemothers.
>> Sounds pretty strict.
>> It was up to a point.
And we abided by the,
we went by the rules and we were allowed to go home for
the weekend and we were allowed to go out.
They didn't. We went into date.
It was like, maybe
10 miles or 15 miles into date outside of date.
And we spent a lot of time in date on the weekends.
That's where we went.
That was the only place close enough
to have anything to really do.
They had in that community,
the housing development that they built for the families,
and we were right on the outside of it.
They had theater there for them and they
had a recreation building.
And then you met the people that you worked with,
they came from every place and there were a lot of
military people of course that were working.
In fact, the bosses were most of them were
military men that we worked for.
>> So when you came there,
were you ready to go to work or
did you have a training period?
>> No. The training period was
when we went to the business school.
That was it and we went from there.
I don't remember exactly.
I think I don't remember whether they
asked if you wanted to go to Washington, DC.
Now, afterwards, I have met some of
the same women that were girls,
the same age as I were that were went to Washington to
work in the Pentagon
and all those places that they have up there.
But the ones that I met,
there's not any that I know that are still living.
>> Tell me about this facility,
the Air Materiel Command. How big was it?
>> It's huge. I have no idea how it was. I have no idea,
but it was a huge big place.
>> And how did you get to work every day?
>> I walked. Because they
built the housing development right close.
Like I said, all we had to do
was walk over the railroad tracks.
Well they built the housing development
on this side of the railroad tracks,
and Air Materiel Command was on
the other side of the railroad tracks.
Well, it was two stores,
but acres, it was a big factory.
>> And what did you wear?
>> Well, whatever we had, we wore.
There was no dress code.
We were not Rosie the Riveters,
but we were the paper side of Rosie the Riveter.
We were doing the paperwork
for the things that Rosie was working on.
>> Did you typically wear a dress, skirt or pants?
>> Well, I'm thinking back
then we wore skirts and blouses and things.
I don't think they were
into jeans and things like the pants, back in that area.
I remember back in that little town that I grew up
in I was the first one to wear
overalls and they were big overalls.
The kind that the fellows wore.
They weren't making them for girls yet.
I had a horse and I rode a horseback
and I was into a lot of things
that girly girls didn't do.
I was raised as a tomboy.
Let's put it that way.
And in the town that I was raised in,
my age, there was only four girls.
All the rest of them were boys.
I went out and worked in the cornfield
and I did all kinds of things like that.
Well, I had one girlfriend that did that.
And I'm talking about families,
one family that lived in
that little town had 12 children in it.
And during the war,
we had to share a lot of things.
And like I said,
I was raised as the tomboy because I
went with my dad every place that he went.
And I had a nickname.
One family called me Tom and my other nickname was Skip.
And that's what I went through
because all through growing up,
I went by my middle name,
which was Marcio,
which was a strange name,
still is a strange name.
And I have no idea where it came from.
My mother, I don't know where she found it someplace.
But when I went to business school after high school,
and when you went to go to work for the government,
you had to go by your first name,
which was Paula and middle initial and last name.
And so that's how I came with the name that I have now.
>> So when you were working at
Air Materiel Command with
these other young women, you were Paula?
>> I was Paula.
>> So in this facility where you went,
were you in a big office with a lot of desks?
>> Well, that depended on who you were working for.
And they had steno pools someplace.
Let's see. That was it.
If they had needed you someplace else,
sometimes you would be sent
there to work for somebody else.
Let me see. They had a secret project going in St. Louis.
This was after the atomic bomb became known.
And they were making a documentary of
the atomic bomb of where
it was delineated first and how that came about.
And they sent me down to St. Louis to work.
It was a secret project because I had a secret clearance.
They sent me down there.
And I lived in a hotel.
They paid me per diem.
And I worked in a true vault.
It was a huge big vault
and we worked in there and I took shorthand by
flashlight because they had recruited people from
Hollywood from the filmmaking industry
to make this documentary.
And like I said,
at that point, it was secret.
And of course, I didn't understand most of it,
but then that didn't make any difference.
And they had MPs at the door of the vault.
And when you wanted to go to the bathroom,
the MP escorted you to the rest room
and waited outside and then
escorted you back to the vault.
And we were in that vault eight hours a day,
except when you went to the bathroom.
Well, they did let us out for lunch.
And they followed us.
They knew where we were, I think,
every minute of the day.
In fact, before I
went down to St. Louis for the secret project.
I had put in for it and they
were following me at Air Materiel Command.
There was one captain that was everywhere.
Every time I turned around,
he was saying hi to me and he had no business there.
I didn't realize it at that time,
but I finally figured that out.
>> Why was he doing that?
>> He was studying me.
This is when I had put in to go.
I guess he was making sure that I wasn't taking
my secret clearance because it was top secret.
>> So he was making sure you were serious?
>> Yeah, that I was serious about that.
>> So when you were in that vault taking shorthand,
who were you doing that for? Who was there with you?
>> The military people.
In fact, I can remember
the name of the captain that I worked for.
His name was Roney Dusac.
And we sat there. I sat there.
He sat there and I sat here and he talked.
Well, as long as they were making the film, like I said,
we were in there for most of the time eight hours a day.
>> How long did you do this?
>> Now, that drawing a blank as to time wise.
It was maybe six weeks
or something like that.
>> What else was in the vault?
>> Well, I don't know, they had papers,
but it was filming.
I don't know what else was in the vault.
They didn't let me look around and
they escorted me in there and put me in a chair,
and that's where I sat.
>> Could you talk to anybody about it on the outside?
>> Well, I suppose maybe
that's what they were checking that I didn't do that.
[LAUGHTER] Like I said,
I wouldn't understand and
you probably wouldn't understand what they were a lot of.
I do remember seeing pictures
of the bikini where they detonated it,
and some of that kind of things,
but I didn't understand most of the rest of it.
>> Did you have any sense of
how the information you were gathering,
how was it going to be used?
>> Well, I think this was
after they had used it.
After they had done the Hiroshima,
I think this was after that.
>> So did you ever see a documentary.
Did they ever produce one?
>> Oh, I'm sure they produced it,
but I didn't see it.
I must have seen part of it while I was in parking.
[LAUGHTER] But we were there for six weeks,
I think, is what it was.
And they finished the documentary,
and then we went back to Air Materiel Command.
>> I want to ask you a few more questions
about air material.
What hours did you work in a day?
>> The regular hours,
8:00-5:00 or whatever they had going then.
It was like a regular job.
>> Did they have a night shift for other workers?
>> Well, I'm sure that they had a night shift,
but they were 24/7,
it was going all the time.
But they didn't have a night shift
for the clericle people.
But they had other people,
and there were lots of military there.
I'm sure each section was headed by
a military man of some kind,
or some rank or something.
There were a lot of that.
But
we
did work overtime sometimes,
but that was rarely.
And I remember that I was working on a teletype machine,
and I was filling in for somebody
that had taken the day off or wanted
to take the day off and asked me to do it for him
when it came across that the war was over.
And I just happened to be on this particular teletype,
which we had learned before.
And most of the time,
it was nothing important on it,
it's just that you had to receive whatever came
across and then you had to
get it to whoever it was meant for,
make sure that they got the thing.
But I do remember that.
Everybody jumped up and it wasn't only
my machine that I was working on because there
was a whole bunch of machines,
and I'm sure it came across all of them at the same time.
>> The message was coming through the teletype machine?
>> Through the teletype machine.
We worked. We had badges that we
wore in order to put
a little light in the atmosphere.
We used to paste pictures.
We had to go through a gate to get in,
and the man at the gate was a military,
and he was supposed to check
everybody's badge to think that you were around there.
We used to paste pictures of monkeys and
dogs on our badges to tease the people.
Of course, I was a girl and most of them were fellows,
to see if they were going to
check to make sure that you were who you were.
>> Well, how did the men working there treat you?
>> Very good.
We were treated very good,
didn't have any problems.
I didn't have any problems with any of them
except that one that was, I don't know,
if I left my desk and went downstairs and several times,
he would be either coming or going up the steps.
And I finally got recognized.
You know a whole lot of them because there were so many.
We're talking about thousands of people in there,
and you knew the ones
that were in the vicinity where you worked.
>> So were there
African Americans working there at this place?
>> I don't know about that.
I didn't know any.
Well, I don't know how to put that because I don't
remember any women or girls.
We were girls,
and I don't remember
any African American girls in the dormitories.
Now, there wasn't just one dormitory,
there were five dormitories.
And like I said, then I knew
one bunch that came from Sault Ste.
Marie, Michigan.
And the only reason I knew about her well,
she happened to live not in my dorm,
but in the next dorm.
And we had a shortcut that we used to catch,
of course, nobody had cars or anything like that,
and we used to catch the bus to go into Dayton, Ohio.
And we had a shortcut that went across
the railroad tracks and it was beside
one of the dorms and she lived
in the dorm next to me and she was
taking the shortcut to go to
get the bus and she got hit by a train, killed her.
And she was from Sault Ste.
Marie. And I don't
remember any African Americans.
>> So you said you, at one point,
were operating a teletype machine.
Were there other machines that you operated?
What were your daily duties?
>> Well, my daily duties were typing,
shorthand, filing, making coffee.
That's strictly what we did.
It was strictly secretarial
and you just did the day's work,
whatever came in, and whatever they wanted you to do,
that's what we did, whatever was going.
>> How much money did you make?
>> I have no idea.
I should've kept that.
I saw one of my pay slips the other day,
some place. I don't know.
>> Did it seem like a lot to you at the time?
>> Well, yeah.
Sure. It seemed like a lot because,
well, like I said,
I didn't live in a big city
and my dad worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
He was a machinist.
That was a good paying job because there were
a lot of people in that area that didn't.
Well, it was during the depression,
and they didn't have much to do and we shared a lot.
We grew our own.
We had vegetable gardens.
Well, that was normal, anyway.
And we did canning and we shared what we had.
I can remember when I was growing up,
I went over and they had some people,
I guess it must have been like 8 miles from us,
and I walked over there and picked strawberries.
And I think I made something like maybe $0.02 a pint.
But that was when I was growing up. Well I did.
I went to work for a department store that was over in
Bowerston where I went to school when I
was 14, I expect, yeah.
And I worked there.
I worked in the shoe department,
and I worked in the grocery department.
That was big. I have no idea.
I probably made $0.50 an hour or something.
>> So you consistently were working?
>> Well, I tried.
You don't have much else to do.
Like I said, I was raised in a town,
it was all boys.
So I learned to play marbles and I learned
to do all the things that fellas did.
I had a horse.
I did horseback riding,
not in any capacity other than to entertain myself.
And I worked in the cornfields,
and hoed, and did all of that stuff.
>> Well, when you were working at Air Material,
did you have much communication with your family?
Did you correspond with them?
>> Well, yeah, because it wasn't very far away.
And like I said, I still had passes.
So I could jump in the train.
I could get on the train and I could go
home for the weekend.
But back then,
and at that age,
unless it was a holiday,
you didn't want to go home because
there was nothing there
to do when you could go to Dayton, Ohio.
>> It was more fun.
>> We didn't have theaters in the town that I lived in.
You still had to go like 18 miles to go to
the movie because there was nothing. I had been.
My grandfather had owned a little store
there way back,
but the things I don't remember.
I remember some of the stuff
that I remember where it was,
but it was not in action at
that time that I was not working at the time,
that was when I was little.
I can remember things that I
did when I was like, three years old.
I have a pretty good memory.
>> Well, let's transition to the time when
you finished working in St. Louis.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. So this is after the war.
And you returned to Air Material.
You told me about meeting your future husband.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. And y'all married fairly quickly after you met?
>> Yeah. And he was on his way back.
He had just returned from World War II.
>> Where did he serve?
>> He was in 101st Airborne.
And he had jumped in D-Day and all of those other places.
I mean, he went from jumping
in D-Day and he ended up in Austria.
So he went through France and that's where he ended up.
It was in Austria.
And then he came home.
He had already signed up to go back to Europe.
And I met him and, like I said,
we met in February and we got married in New Jersey.
And he was on his way back to Europe when we got married.
We got married and I
left and came back to Air Materiel Command,
and he went back to Austria.
>> Tell me about the wedding.
>> There was no wedding.
We got married by Justice [inaudible]. I take that back.
He was a preacher, but it was
that Justice of the peace type thing.
We had one of his buddies and the buddy's wife,
and that's all was there.
We eloped. That's what I did. Yeah.
>> Why did you elope?
>> Well, because he was on his way back to Austria.
He was on his way back to Europe.
>> Why did you feel it was necessary to
get married before he went back to Europe?
>> We just decided that's what we wanted to do.
>> And then you returned to Ohio?
I went back to Air Materiel Command.
>> Okay. And continued working there?
>> And he put in.
He went back to Austria,
he put in for me to meet up with him over there.
Anyway, he put in for me
to come to Austria to be with him.
And the army sent
me over there in August of '46.
We got married in April and in August,
I went to Austria to join him.
And like I said,
the army was really not prepared for
dependence but I wasn't the only one.
We lived in a small air base because my husband,
like I said by that time he was a sergeant,
I guess, either corporal or sergeant,
I forget which it was.
But anyway, it was
a small airbase in Austria at Herrsching.
And we lived in houses that
apartments
that had coal
or cats they use over there to heat the water.
We had no furnaces and we did have electricity,
but they turned it off every night at
10 o'clock and regrouped it.
And I don't remember when it came back on
early in the morning but we didn't.
Wasn't the best living,
but like I said,
I survived and it was good enough.
>> So how long did you live there?
>> We were there for a little more than a year.
We came home.
We came home in September of '47.
And Pam was born in November of '47.
And then we
went back to Germany.
Let's see. We were
at Fort Bragg.
And he went to OCS.
And I went back to Ohio from Fort Bragg.
And then he graduated from
MCS in November of '48.
And my son was born in November of '48.
Your dad didn't graduate until
December because we were back in Ohio.
Anyway, they put in to go
to Germany and we went
back to Germany and I took the two kids.
>> How did you feel about going to Germany with
your young children and [inaudible]?
>> I guess I was born traveler,
but, like I said, now
I had been to the West Coast two or three times
by train and other people were not traveling like that.
So it was kind of didn't mean all that.
I guess I'm a bit of adventure or something like that.
Anyway, I went.
>> And where did you live in Germany?
>> Well, we were in Austria for a year and we came
home and we were home for a year, I think.
And we went back to Germany.
We started out in Hanau,
which was an engineer depo because that when
my husband graduated from OCS.
He was an engineer, Corps of Engineers.
And we were in Germany at Hanau.
And that's where I went back to work for the government.
And there again, because I had a secret clearance.
I got passed around a little bit because whenever they
needed but they were going to do something secret.
I would work for the commanding officer or whoever
was doing the secret business that they were.
And especially they were transferring
the whole military business
across the Rhine down
to what they called K-town, which was Kaiserslautern.
And I worked on that because it was supposed to be
a big secret that they were going to
move because the Hanau was up close to not Heidelberg.
>> Berlin?
>> No.
It'll come to me.
Anyway,
they were moving the engineer depot
from Hanau down to Kaiserslautern.
And then we moved down to Kaiserslautern
and I worked down there for a while.
And then we came home.
And we were home for two years.
We came home from there.
We were in San Francisco
stationed at Fort Mason in San Francisco.
And we were home for two years at San Francisco and
we left there and went to Japan. And we left Japan.
We were there in Japan for two years,
and we came home.
And we were in Oklahoma at Fort Sale.
And my husband was working at Fort Sale.
And we were there for two years.
And while he was working there,
he would go off for a month down to Mexico.
He was working on the Redstone.
He was making liquid oxygen for the Redstone Missile.
That was when they were
first doing it, the missile business.
We were there Fort Sale for two years,
and we left there and went to Taiwan.
>> The whole family.
>> Whole family. I dragged them along every place I went.
>> So were your children starting school overseas?
>> Yeah. Let's see.
Pam was the oldest.
So she was in school in Germany,
I guess, is where you started.
I think. Germany, she started.
Because they always had
dependent schools wherever we went,
so I didn't worry about that.
And we went from Taiwan.
We were in Taiwan for two years.
Well, the first time we were in Germany,
we were there for three years.
And then the other ones were all two-year tours.
And we went from Taiwan, we came home.
Where did I say we went to? Where?
>> Norman.
>> Went to Fort Sale.
>> Norman Oklahoma.
>> Oh, we went to Norman Oklahoma.
That's it. That's where the university was.
And from there, we went to Korea.
My husband went on a short tour by himself for
a year and then came home and then we went to Korea,
and we were in Korea for two years.
And my son graduated from high school in Korea.
Pam didn't get to graduate from high school.
>> I did.
>> She did graduate,
but they let her do her end
of the senior semester and gave her
early because we left and went
to Korea in February,
and they let her do her work
ahead so that she could graduate.
>> I see.
>> Well, she stayed. You stayed.
No, you didn't stay behind.
No. They let her graduate and we all went to Korea,
and we were in Korea for two years.
And then we came home and we decided
that that was enough.
>> Well, Ms. Fidler, tell me how
you ended up in Georgia.
>> Well, we came back.
My husband retired and we went back to Norman,
Oklahoma, where the university is.
Both of the children graduated,
the kids graduated from OU,
went to school there and graduated from there.
And we went back there.
Well, we liked Oklahoma.
We had bought a house
there before when we'd been there before,
but we still didn't have it,
but we went back to Norman.
Well, he had been with the district
when we were in Norman.
And then we went to Fort Leonard Wood.
And then he retired from Fort Leonard Wood and
went back to Norman.
And his commanding officer that he
had had retired and came to Georgia to work for Rich's.
And when my husband retired,
Marshal Saws was his name.
And Marshal got in contact with my husband and asked
him to come to Georgia to work for Rich's in there.
They were expanding.
They were building stores and other parts.
They built one in South Carolina and another in Georgia.
They had a several of them anyway,
and that's how we got to Georgia.
>> What did you think about the south?
>> My theory when we were moving to
all these places was that
if those people could live there,
I could live there because
I'm not any better than anybody else.
So that's the same,
and I thought I I had not been in the South,
but I figured get along with,
I got along with most everybody.
If I could get along with all those foreign people,
I guess I could get along with the southerners.
I didn't really agree with a lot of them.
I could get along with them.
One of my great grandparents had
been in Florida way back from way over on the coast,
well, I knew him vaguely,
but not very much.
It was something new and I could do that.
I survived.
I'm still here.
>> Well, I wanted to ask you one more
question to finish up.
Your wartime service in your work,
what does that mean to you now?
Why are you wanting to share it?
>> Well, I think that, like I said,
I can normally speak for my group,
but there was thousands.
And I met some from different areas.
I knew some from the south,
women, I'm talking about girls.
Then they went to work
up at the Pentagon or up in Washington, DC.
And I met some from Wisconsin.
And I thought,
we were working,
maybe not as hard as Rosie the Riveter,
and they were all taken away from
their families and left home,
so to speak, to work.
And I think that it was equally as
important as Rosie the Riveter.
>> Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Ms. Fidler.
>> Okay.