Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
In a world where storytelling has been our link to the past since the days of cave drawings, there exists a timeless tradition. It's the art of passing down knowledge, and for Military Veterans, it's a crucial piece of their legacy. Join us on the Veterans Archives Podcast, where we dive deep into the heartwarming and awe-inspiring stories of those who served, no matter when or where.
Here, Veterans get the chance to be the authors of their own narratives. Through guided interviews in a relaxed and safe environment, they paint their experiences with their own words and unique voices. The result? A memory card in a presentation box, a precious gift they can share however they please.
But that's not all. These stories find a secure home in our archive, a treasure chest of experiences for future generations to explore. The best part? It's all a gift to the Veteran – our way of saying thank you for their service.
Tune in to the Veterans Archives Podcast, where history, heroism, and heartwarming tales come to life.
Veterans Archives is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Please visit our website for more information. www.veteransarchives.org
Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
Marvin Morehouse: A Life of Valor and Verse
Imagine growing up in Verdonville, West Virginia, during the Great Depression, facing personal adversities like losing a mother at a tender age and being raised by an unkind sister. That’s exactly the childhood story of Marvin Morehouse, our guest for this episode. As a United States Navy veteran and a nonagenarian poet, Marvin takes us on an unforgettable journey through his life, sharing heartwarming anecdotes of adventure and survival with his nephew amidst economic turmoil. Discover the resilience and grit that defined Marvin’s early years and laid the foundation for his remarkable life journey.
Marvin’s narrative doesn’t end with his childhood. He brings us aboard a World War II submarine, sharing a firsthand account of the challenges and experiences faced by naval personnel during wartime. From life underwater, maintaining submarine pressure, to the urgency of wartime missions, Marvin’s stories are filled with unique insights into the naval operations of the time. We also explore his extraordinary career journey post-war, navigating industries as diverse as beauty, automotive, and industrial coatings. His ability to adapt and innovate paints a vivid picture of the determination and resourcefulness that defined his professional life.
But Marvin’s story is not just about challenges and career achievements. He’s a poet who shares his works during an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C., delighting fellow travelers with his yodeling talents. Supported by his friend Bruce, Marvin’s adventures are a joyful testament to camaraderie and personal growth. From real estate ventures and romantic endeavors to reflections on life’s lessons, Marvin’s narrative blends humor, wisdom, and history, offering an episode rich in storytelling and inspiration. Join us as we celebrate Marvin’s life and legacy, filled with heart, humor, and resilience.
Morning. Today is Monday, october 14th 2024. We're talking with Marvin Morehouse, who served in the United States Navy. So welcome, marvin, good to see you this morning, glad to be here, absolutely. So we're going to start out really simple today. I just want to ask when and where were you born?
Speaker 2:Verdonville, west Virginia, that's in Logan County. That's about it.
Speaker 1:Okay, and when were you born?
Speaker 2:1928.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:March 31st 1928,.
Speaker 1:yes, Okay, and is that referred to as West by God Virginia?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know how that came about. How Tell me about that? Well, when politics was heating up for the Civil War, virginia and West Virginia were two different. It was all one country, all one state, and the settlers in the western counties had been political prisoners and had been sold themselves into slavery for passage to the United States. So when the politics got hot, the Civil War, virginia called up the militia mm-hmm, guess who the militia was? Western counties of Virginia haven't been slaves themselves. West Virginia knew what slavery was and they told Virginia up your ass. And they seceded from Virginia and became West Virginia. And so that you will never mistake a West Virginian for a Virginian, you ask him where he's from and he'll.
Speaker 1:Well thank you for that history, Weston.
Speaker 2:Might be miles from history, who knows?
Speaker 1:Makes for a great story, though. So talk to us a little bit about what it was like growing up. Did you have siblings? Just talk about your childhood a little bit. What do you remember?
Speaker 2:My childhood probably started at six years old when my mother died and I had three siblings and life was a living hell. Yeah. I found out that black people are just like white people in West Virginia. I didn't know why at the time, but I can elaborate later and so my mother went to church with the black ladies, and so when she died, the black ladies took me under their wing and fed me many times, because this is the heart of the Great Depression, you remember. Right.
Speaker 2:Nobody could work, nobody worked, nobody worked, and the area close to the so-called camps was peopled by the long-timers, and so it was a get by by the skin of your teeth. I don't know how I would have managed it If my mother had lived. It would have been a pretty good existence, because she was very intelligent and very ambitious, and so she knew how to make a nickel stretch, but unfortunately she died, so we were on our own, and I never really had a childhood, because I was sort of, in my opinion, kidnapped from my father by a sister. She's evil, she's an evil sister. In fact, I suspect she might be the first cook in hell.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, all right, so she was quite a bit older than you then oh yes, she had a children my age, uh-huh, and she took me to be companion to her own son, who she had kidnapped from her husband who had custody and a divorce trial, and so we were fugitives all of my younger life what with that family so did you move around a lot. Oh yeah, okay, Within the confines of West Virginia and Kentucky.
Speaker 1:Right, okay.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of stories connected with this.
Speaker 1:So do you have a? I don't know if this is the right question or not. So, with all of that going on, though, do you have a favorite memory of that time? I mean, that was a hard time. Your mom had passed away, your sister had taken you, and you're kind of on the run, but is there any time during that period where you think back and go well, that made it okay, or that made it a little bit better, or just not at all?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 2:I had good times with my nephew as a child, and there was well I can recall, one particular memory we, the poor people which we included, everybody I guess scavenged coal from coal banks.
Speaker 2:When coal is mined, it's grated and anything that has what they call gob, which is sulfur and other minerals, onto it, they throw that aside and that ends up on what was known as a slate dump. And so we always got those slate dumps and scavenged the good stuff from the bad, and that's how we heated our runner stoves and heated our fires, both runner stoves and heated our fires. Now my nephew and I were probably nine years old and we discovered we had moved on a property that had once been the headquarters of a mining corporation that had went kaput, bankrupt probably, and we imagined ourselves to be miners and we started mining this place and we found out a number one coal. So apparently when they closed the mine down they dumped the cars. It happened to be mined full of coal and we were the benefactors of it. So we mined up up as far as well, probably 10, 15 feet under the mountain, under this mountain of coal garbage. Right.
Speaker 2:And we bragged about it and our not our parents, his parents and my sister wanted to see this fabulous coal mine that we'd discovered. And that's when we paid the price of our adventure, because at any time we were looking for timbers. Back up we were looking for timbers, we up, we were looking for timbers. We had to do it the way miners do it, you see, right, because we, in our imagination, were miners. And that's when all hell broke loose, because they found out that we were in danger in our very lives, because at any time that mountain could have kicked in on us and we'd be gone forever. So we took a good tanning and closed the mines down.
Speaker 1:So that mine got closed down twice then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and another time. Now, my sister was a a what do you call them call a bagger, and she moved. She had to keep away from this husband, ex-husband of hers, because he was known to be a very violent man. You know, moonshiner, and had been in mine fights, you know, you never know who got killed or who killed who, but that was quite common.
Speaker 1:West.
Speaker 2:Virginia is probably the most violent state in the Union. Anyway, I was always running from him and so the brother-in-law had made his own home brew and kept it a little too early and it was in the closet. You know, aging Right and sister was doing the laundry and we had a house, probably five or ten acres around the house, that the cow grazed into and she had the .38 pistol in on the end of the ironing board because she wanted the light of the windows and bang, because she wanted the light of the windows and bang.
Speaker 2:So she took the pistol and went through the window and damn near killed her cow, grazed her and so she. She was determined that that was her ex-husband getting gone after his son. What it was was one of the bottles with green beer Bottle too early, exploded and the soup of the beer would come under the closet door, and that was the explanation. So when the husband came home at about oh 8 o'clock in the morning, he was on what they call a graveyard shift and he said who has been messing with my gun?
Speaker 2:And he said who has been messing with my gun? And she told him that she thought her ex-husband, oscar Dingus, who was his name, maybe I shouldn't mention, oh that's okay, was after his son and of course he seen the beer and he said well, you almost killed a cow and she's bleeding like hell. So he raised a little hell and it finally settled down. But that was a memory from those years.
Speaker 1:So that beer almost cost that cow its life. Yeah, it did. Did the rest of that batch come out? Do you know?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, now see, we always put it in a well. A well's about 60 foot deep and they dug that thing wide enough until a man could dig his way down and buckets pulled up with the dirt. So we put our beer in a bucket and this was a dry state. By the way, was it during Prohibition, right?
Speaker 1:Prohibition was in force in a bucket, and this was a dry state, by the way. What is? Was it during Prohibition right?
Speaker 2:Prohibition was in force at the time. So we'd put our beer down homemade homebrew, we call it in the well. And so one day the county sheriff came by to do some trading with the head of the household, his brother-in-law, and he wanted to have a beer. So he went to the well and just pulled himself up a drink, he thought, and he pulled up the beer. Oh no. Well, I guess everything turned out all right, but we scared hell out of everybody because we knew we didn't break into law.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so that is a memory. And of course there's lots of memories of picking coal, where you could find it, and nothing real exciting, as I can recall.
Speaker 1:So were you able to go to school then at all during all of this time?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, we went to school, but I've been to so many schools I couldn't remember them all, but I've been to so many schools couldn't remember them all. You know. Yeah, moved around because she was always running from this well, running from her reputation, I guess. Yeah, she stole her child and she had to stay out of reaching. And the coal mining community, everybody knows everybody, like Bruce knows everybody in the Tri-County area, right you know he'd be right at home.
Speaker 2:Everybody knows everybody, like Bruce knows everybody in the Tri-County area. Right, he'd be right at home. I remember the tales of the Matewan Massacre. I could recite that for you. Well, in fact they made a movie of it.
Speaker 2:It's called the Matewan Massacre. You might want to get it and see it sometimes. Said Hatfield was the sheriff of Mingo County and he was pro-union, of course, and the Union were being organized in a taking over greater areas as they could get membership, and they were on a strike and the company owned all the housing, all the utilities, such as the light and the gas and so forth and so on, and you were slaves of a system. So when they went on strike, the miners I mean the hired thugs of the mining company that they mining company per se hired these guys to deputize them to empty out the people's furniture on the street. Now, sid Hatfield was a direct descendant of Devlin Anshap, the Hatfield-McCoy people, and they came to town and Sid Hatfield met them in a town called Matewan in Mingo County, probably 300 or 400 population at the time, I don't know. Anyway, they had an argument and when the dust settled there was 12 people dead in the middle of the street and Sid Hatfield's two guns were empty.
Speaker 2:Oh, so they tried to try him in a Mingo County court. Of course they couldn't get a jury Right, so they tried him in another county. I don't remember the county in which it was, but when he appeared for trial or arraignment he walked up the courthouse steps and they assassinated him. The coal interests assassinated him. Nobody was ever tried, nobody was ever convicted of his assassination. And so ended the story of the Mingo, of the Matewan Massacre. Wow, that was pretty interesting to kids at that time. We reenacted it with our wooden pistols. We didn't have cat busters, that took money.
Speaker 1:Right, well, so it's true. Then, though, like in these coal mining towns, the coal mines, the companies, had their own currency, oh yeah, and you basically worked to pay them to live there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you basically worked to pay them to live there. Yeah Well, they had such a wide area, say 50 square miles, and in that they hired people, destitute people, really people from the South, much like Michigan hired people from the South after World War II got the industry here and so they hired whoever one applied for a job, if you could speak the language and understand enough language to follow orders. So black people, a congerians, bull, hun, whatever. They all ended up in the coal mines. Now, getting back to how the blacks lived in harmony with the whites.
Speaker 2:You see, in the mines in those days you always had a partner. You never went singly on the job, and your partner might be a black man, he might be a Hungarian, he might be a German, whatever, and all day long you worked with that guy. You had his life in your hands. He had your life in your hands. He had your life in his hands. You couldn't work with a man under those circumstances all day long and the mind and the danger that they lived in, and then snub him on the street Right. So you were friends 24 hours a day. And the children? They liked to have fights, because you know my group, the Hoopier group.
Speaker 1:Kids will be kids right.
Speaker 2:And so I never knew. There never was a color line in my raising as long as I was there. Of course, I left that country, probably when I was 10, 12 years old and ended up in Ohio.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about that. How did you end up in Ohio?
Speaker 2:Well it started out with I lived with a maiden sister who got married. A maiden sister who got married and he was a religious fella and a farmer ex-farmer and he was coming toward the end of his life and he wanted to move to Pike County, ohio, where he had a brother to be a farmer. And so we moved and of course he didn't last long because he had a black lung and he was mowing weeds one day and trying to get the area that we owned so he could farm it and he passed out and died from asphyxiation, I guess. And so that's how I ended up in Pike County and, being a noble kid as I was, I figured if I couldn't do something to keep the family, help the family, I would go where I could, and that so happened that my brother-in-law, the sisters that had From the sisters that had kidnapped you.
Speaker 1:Okay, they.
Speaker 2:Well, it wasn with five mile of us and of course that was a magnet and I ended up there, as you might say, a prisoner, a slave. They'd hire me out to the farmers in the area and collect my wages. I never saw any of them, I never seen the benefit of any of them. And my older brother in the Army at the time older brother and he sent me an allotment and I never seen any of that. In fact, when I graduated from the eighth grade, I graduated with clothing that my brother-in-law had and they pinned them up on me and they took my allotment and bought my nephew a new suit. Now, that was the circumstances. So I had a brother that was an older brother that was going to free me from all this. So we made an arrangement that I would meet him at one of my dad's old cronies in West Virginia, and so I left home and ended up in West Virginia.
Speaker 1:So how old were you when you took off? You must have been, what? 13, 14?.
Speaker 2:About 12, 13 years old? Yeah okay. And I ended up as a character taker for a whorehouse, if you please.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this was when we met this past winter. That story came up and I thought, well, that's interesting. So how did this happen?
Speaker 2:Well, my brother was a womanizer of the best. He was also a politician. He earned enough money from the Kennedy campaign to buy a gin mill in Phoenix Arizona because he knew everybody in the county, like Bruce does, and he was very active in the elections, especially the black elections. And ostensibly what they would do, they would have meetings of the Democratic Party, meetings of the Democratic Party, and they would have a big tub of beer and another smaller tub full of potted meat minced ham they call it. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:They'd open it up and they'd have the whiskey chilled, because black people like to drink their whiskey chilled chilled, because black people like to drink their whiskey chilled. And my brother, he coordinated all this. He knew everybody in the county and was friendly with everybody in the county and screwed over half of the wives in the county Cuckold them, they call it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You know what that?
Speaker 1:means yes, I do. I'm familiar with that term, Marvin.
Speaker 2:So he was quite a guy. Well, anyway, he was going to free me from my enslavement. So he coaxed me to come back to West Virginia. Now, my nephew and I he was a co-collaborator in this we gathered up all my clothes that I could put on and all the money that we both had managed to scavenge, and so I took off on my thumb to West Virginia and so I was there to meet him and he was going to take me back to Baltimore to work in the shipyards where he was a welder at the time, and of course the war was in full bloom. And so he said where did it couldn't come. And I was marooned because he had been up for a paternity trial and they had a warrant for him. The people that the gal that he was supposed to have inseminated, I guess, had enough money to hire an attorney. So if he come to West Virginia, they got him. It had been penitentiary for him.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So I was stuck and I earned my keep by taking care of three what they call weed monkeys in West Virginia. That's young women that sell themselves into prostitution to get enough money to escape the damn system, and that's how they escaped that 50-mile prison that they were in. Right, they'd go to a town like Columbus, ohio, dayton or Indianapolis, wherever there was industry, and start a new life and forget the old life, anyway. So there I was hungry. I couldn't make a living taking care of these girls.
Speaker 2:What I would do Saturday night miners this is kind of getting disjointed gamble and they look forward to weekends and they gambled all the weekends and sometimes they'd get in their bank clothes, their dirty clothes that they wore in the mine. They'd go back into the mines on Monday and well, they'd never benefit asleep or whatever in a poker game. Now, when they would lose in a poker game, they would use their credit to sleep with one of the girls, and they had three of them there. When I decided to stay with this old gentleman, he admonished me that I don't touch the whiskey or the women, otherwise I'm out Because that's a business. Yeah, so I didn't the whiskey or the women, and otherwise out Right, because that's a business yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I didn't. I believed him, and so that's the way we lived. Well, as times were changing, the soldiers had begun to come home from the invasion and he advised me that I would have to find a new place to live, and, of course, I was 14 years old.
Speaker 2:I remember distinctly yeah and I couldn't get a job other than cleaning hog pens and chicken coops, and that wouldn't pay my board. You could board for $5 a week, room and board meals and so forth, and so I decided to go register for the Army at the draft board. So I went in At the ripe old age of 14. Oh yeah, I went in at 14 and my life was so good that they couldn't break it down and I came out at 18. Wow, that's quite a transformation, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And then it was well. That's how I ended up in the Navy. That's an interesting story in and of itself. So, anyway, I found all kinds of jobs, and the first one was digging footers for electric power lines in West Virginia.
Speaker 1:I want to back up a second because I'm missing something here. So you went to join the Army, but you didn't. But you came out 18. Yeah, Okay, okay.
Speaker 2:And then you were able to use that information. I had that magic card that said I'm 18 years old.
Speaker 1:Okay, and for that you were able to use that information. I had that magic card that said I'm 18 years old, Okay, and for that you were able to get jobs.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, okay, I'm with you now. Anyway, the folks wrote me and said they were going to lose the farm because they had taken on extra farm duty for the war effort and so forth and so on, and their farm was pledged. If they couldn't keep the crops going they'd be sued and lose the farm. So I went back to Pike County, ohio I was living in Columbus, ohio at the time and helped with the farming. I was supposed to be able to be free and have my cigarettes, and all cigarettes was just an act of not rebellion, but freedom, right, yeah. So anyway, that went about three weeks or a month and I was back into slavery again.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh, I left again.
Speaker 2:Ended up in Columbus, Ohio. And where the hell was I in this story? Anyway, I had.
Speaker 1:Oh, so you were hanging high line yeah yeah, I had this 18-year-old.
Speaker 2:My 18-year-old didn't drive anywhere. I wanted to and I was staying in a boarding house and this lady's son came back from the invasion. He was a paratrooper and he was all screwed up in the head and he made me his bodyguard. I'm 14 years old, if you can imagine. You've got to. I can't even imagine it myself.
Speaker 2:He dressed me up in a Gestapo outfit and we'd go into South Columbus and I finally figured out why he wanted to make me his bodyguard. That was just diversion, and he would steal topcoats. We'd go into a nightclub and he'd find this topcoat that was in. Everybody had that topcoat, or you wasn't in.
Speaker 2:Right. So he'd find the best topcoat and put his over it and when we'd leave he'd leave with two topcoats and he'd take one to the hawk shop and that would finance next evening's parade. Well, I didn't go for that because I'd been taught not thief or steal. I was raised in church, right. So anyway, I got rid of that. Couldn't find a job in town that was suitable, so I ended up on the farm, on a dairy farm, and the circumstances were so bad that it was intolerable to live. It was colder than hell and I had a place in the attic and that was supposed to keep me warm and one of the side effects of that I had.
Speaker 2:On a dairy farm with 30 cows you've got to get rid of the manure and they put that on the farming ground as fertilizer. And at that time they were still training people for the war effort. The war was still going strong. The invasion had happened, but there was a war in the Pacific and a war in Europe that hadn't been won yet, and these there was an airport about five miles from where we lived and they'd come over and strafe me when I was spreading manure. And when you get a manure spreader going so fast. It throws it back on you. I'd get off of a manure spreader going so fast, it'll you? It throws it back on you. I'd get off of that manure spreader. And we have more manure on me than the fields has on oh no these guys were.
Speaker 2:They probably had a hell of a laugh about it.
Speaker 2:And if the farmer told me you don't do, you don't put the bridle in a horse's mouth before you get it off the rack or you'll take the hide off their mouth, just like sticking your tongue to a doorknob, I got the idea it didn't have to be and so I held with that and I socked them right into the horse's mouth and I took the hide off of them and when they come over to strafe me back and the hand, they stand on their hind legs and got rid of that noise. But anyway, having having lived at with this guy as his bodyguard and living on the farm, I had to see, yeah, I couldn't tolerate this cold in the attic. I'm still intolerant of cold. I can take heat up. I could roofed in Arizona when there's 120 degrees as an adult.
Speaker 2:But I was very sensitive to cold then and sensitive to it now. And so one payday I went to Columbus and I saw this thing for the Navy and so I enlisted and I got away from that and I took my training in the CB camp in Camp Perry, virginia, and that's up on the James River.
Speaker 1:Anyway.
Speaker 2:I ended up in Pearl Harbor. I ended up in a working party at the sub base and the tile fish was in dry dock there and the old chief, he says where are you from, kid? And I said Columbus, ohio, because that's where I'd enlisted. And he said, hmm, so am I. And he wanted to talk about all the gin mills. Hell, I'd been in them. I was 18 years old.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:With the mentality of a 14-year-old. And so he said how would you like to be on the boats? I thought he was talking about a damn rowboat.
Speaker 1:And Pike County.
Speaker 2:Ohio doesn't have a good-sized pond. So he said no, that's a boat that you've been scraping on. It's the only ship in the Navy that can be legally called a boat.
Speaker 1:That's right, so a lot of people don't know this, yeah, a lot of people don't know that A ship is a ship and that's something that sails on the surface. The only thing that's a boat is what A submarine.
Speaker 2:There you go. So anyway, he says, I can fix it up. Now it's a known fact that no sailor ever goes to be a crew of a submarine that hasn't gone to subschool. Right, and I didn't go to sub school. They were so anxious to get the submarine in the water that I finished out the crew, because they don't have no supernumeraries on the submarine. It's crew and that's it. Yeah. So I ended up on the boat, the submarine, because I guess, because I'd been in the gen mill and knew this guy, he fixed it.
Speaker 1:He vouched for you. Basically, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, he knew his way around. He was well. Necessity is a mother of invention. Yes, so I ended up on the boat and the first time out I had a bow plane. Now a sailor that's been through sub-school knows all about this thing and knows all the hydraulics and all the pumps and so forth and so on. I didn't know a damn thing about it. I was on this bow plane goofing off late, early and a damn near erectus. Because you get a submarine that's fully trimmed Okay, okay, we were in full trim. That means all your tanks are full and everything. And so if you get in a dive too great which I think is around six degrees, memory serves me and you can't trim out of it because you hit the bottom and you're dead, you can't pump anything anywhere, right, and the Germans, interesting, had a way of getting out of that. They run the crew forward and left. If you watched the movies, they used the crew as ballast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we didn't do that. So anyway, the diving officer whipped me away from it and chewed me out real good, and so I learned that lesson that way. But I never was in sub school, and that's a rarity. Never was in sub school and that was that. That, that that's a rarity. And so I submarine, we. The scuttlebutt was that our whole squadron was after the Japanese submarines that had refused to give up at Pearl Harbor after the Japanese surrendered in World War II, and so that was why I was on the submarine in the first place, and I guess that's about the end of it.
Speaker 2:I don't remember anything interesting about submarine, except you have to go through an act of Congress to use a head. You know. You've got to blow out, blow in, blow out, you know, because you have a pressure hull and then you have the inner hull. That's your living quarters and it's separate from the outer hull. Now, I used to think after 80 years that we had lived in the pressure hull. But we don't live in the pressure hull because memory I was trying to get a compensation for my dizziness I have what they call it oh, vertigo, vertigo, yes, and I've been running that through my brain and in fact I tried to get a hearing to that effect brain, and in fact I tried to get a hearing to that effect, and it couldn't work because the inner space was where the crew lived, they had.
Speaker 2:You can't make atmosphere, so the atmosphere that we had they recirculated and had bled oxygen in it. Now, only the people that built those damn things know that. I didn't know anything about it, but that's obviously how it worked. And so that when we dived or surfaced they always went back to where we were accustomed to breathing and living. Yeah, it equalized the pressure in the inner cabin. Yeah, because if you take a 100-foot pipe, put a gauge at the bottom of it and it'll give you 47.9-tenths pounds of pressure and you multiply that, say 300, where there's of good cruising depth for submarine, and you've got a hundred and twenty pounds or thereabouts pressure on your and that that would give you the bins. Yeah, because you come up in a hurry and you go down in a hurry and and you, the body couldn't acclimate, so they held it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they just equalize the pressure. So it was always a constant pressure for the people inside.
Speaker 2:Yeah, constant pressure on ourselves and they can reafter you come to the surface, that atmosphere is disposed of and you're breathing atmosphericthe atmosphere, and so they just go down and as the temperature rises, they pressurize the hull, but not you, right, right, because it would hurt you if you were. Yeah, it would hurt us. There was nothing, as I told you earlier, nothing very interesting happened to me on the submarine, except what I related to you just now, except you almost wrecked it, yeah so and then got out of the Navy.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh I. I had a wandering eye called strabismus and I insisted it was straight when I went on the submarine. You've got to be a perfect example of health to be on a submarine, because you don't have any means of being. You know, it's not like a ship, a floating ship. Anyway, I went to the doctor and insisted that they straighten my eye again because I had this watch about six hours of watch on a bow plane.
Speaker 2:It's like taking a level out on Lake Michigan or one of the lakes and keeping the bubble on zero. It's hairy. That's what you're doing when you're on a bow plane. You have a bubble that the diving officer gives you, and I had a—well, it was a battle of the Coral Sea or some damn thing or an enactment of it and I had about a six-hour watch, an emergency watch, and my eye just couldn't handle it. Because here we go, you've got your eye on that bubble and you could dance and take it off. I learned that early on, and so I insisted that I get the eye straightened and they sent me to California at Balboa Hospital to get it operated on that ended my submarine career.
Speaker 2:You've got to be a perfect specimen to be on the submarine. I ended up on the submarine tender about the Bushnell AS-15. Whatever Third loader too, huh, third loader. Oh, no, no, on the submarine. Yeah, it was on third loader. On the cannon Okay, five-inch cannon. Thank you, bruce, and that's how my hearing got positive. I guess the beam of a submarine is probably 25 feet at best Right, and probably a cannon takes up 10 feet of that. And from the ready locker to where the cannon is you keep your weight as much as dead center as you can of the boat. It's easier to trim. The cannon was probably 10 feet from the ready locker and I was third loader.
Speaker 2:So when you come up, you come up in a hurry because you are a On the surface, you're a target Right, and down below and below surface when you're underwater you're looking for a target Right. So, anyway, you didn't have air plugs. If you had them, you didn't know where the hell they were and you never knew when you were going to dive or when that klaxon was going to go off, what the hell you were going to do. So that quickly you react, so you don't take pads for your ear. Yeah, then that caused me a deafness that I get a benefit from now. So, anyway, then, third loader on it, you maybe go through 10 rounds. So anyway, being third loader on it, you maybe go through 10 rounds, and boy, that can give you a lot of shock. What is it? What's the expression for it?
Speaker 1:Well, don't have don't don't Lots of decibels of noise really, yeah, yeah. So the sub would pop up, they would fire the gun and then it would go back down.
Speaker 2:They'd plot their target, yeah, by the scope. And when we, uh, uh, submarine, we was that ready locker, boom, boom, boom, boom, quick, quick, quick. And to get our firing done and then go down below again. Now they, they've done that seasonously. We were operated out to a thousand feet, feet, 1,000 miles out of Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2:Looking for this again is scuttlebutt. You know the word? Oh, I do, I do. And so that's a logical explanation for it, because after the war, I enlisted, two months after the war was over, by the way. Well, I have to back up on that, and the reason that I have a World War II service is that we were in a war zone the entire time that I was in the Navy on that submarine, under the submarine tender, and so, by an all-in-all I don't remember it says so on my discharge somewhere, all the people that were involved in the Pacific submarine thing out of Pearl Harbor, particularly Pearl Harbor, was paranoid as hell about submarines sneaking in and with 12 torpedoes ours, I think, we carried 10 torpedoes, I think the Japanese maybe carried 12 or more and you could imagine what damage they could do underwater. We would have lost the war. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So that's why it was so urgent and when I was discharged, I was discharged with full benefits of World War II. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I don't want to interrupt you, but I want people to understand where scuttlebutt comes from, because you and I know this. Yeah, but scuttlebutt is basically the drinking fountain on the ship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's where all the information gets disseminated.
Speaker 2:That's right Is at ship and that's where all the information gets disseminated.
Speaker 1:That's right the gossip.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so if you work for a company, it's water cooler talk, but in the Navy it was called scuttlebutt and that's where it came from. I just thought people should know that. I'm glad you brought that up. That's true, yeah.
Speaker 1:So you were discharged as a World War II veteran then, oh, yeah, yeah and we got.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll let you know what happens to a World War II veteran at the time. You've got $300 mustering out pay. Uh-huh, all the well an. Army, navy and Marine.
Speaker 1:And all the different branches.
Speaker 2:And so they give you $100 at the time, plus your pay that you had coming, and they set you free and a month from that time you'll get another $100, and then another $100 for a total of $300. And they gave you 52 weeks of $20 a week that way. Somebody called it rockin' chair money. Hank Williams wrote a song about it. I got rockin' chair money. You want me to sing it? Absolutely. I got rockin' chair money and I got it the hard, hard way. I fought in every battle from BJ to the BJ day, and now I'm rockin', rockin' all the way. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1:That was 52 weeks of $20 a week.
Speaker 2:At that time, the minimum wage was $0.25 an hour, so you can imagine what you could do.
Speaker 1:This was money. This was rocking chair money, rocking chair money.
Speaker 2:You could pay $5 for your board for a week and have $15 to get out and whore around with and whatever else, and given your past, you know what that was all about. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:I learned early.
Speaker 2:So that was great and of course, that lasted you a year, yeah, and so all the veterans at the time. I knew, young men, particularly because they could get in at 17 if somebody signed your papers your birth certificate and I was an orphan when I enlisted your birth certificate, and I was an orphan when I enlisted, so I had somebody to sign off on me as my parent. Right.
Speaker 2:And so I got in at 16, because they was taking you at 17. And so I have a different age in the Navy than I do then.
Speaker 1:Right, you've had a couple different ages in your lifetime, haven't you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, anyway, from that I gravitated to my first job I had, was somebody suggested that since I was a sailor, I ought to know the knots and such. Well, I knew them when I was in boot camp, but I forgot them. And we were putting in a honeysuckle thing on where the highway was slipping down into the river Howell River, by the way, that's where Daniel Boone the Indians was trying to fricassee him. Oh, okay, anyway, way, that's where Daniel Boone, with the Indians, was trying to fricassee him. Oh, okay, anyway, that, that, that, and so I didn't remember my knots. So I borrowed a scout handbook to get this tree climber's knot so that I was letting I was a supervisory sort of, and I was letting 20 or 30 men down that cliff putting in honeysuckle plants, and that was to stop the erosion.
Speaker 1:So you best know the knot, because these guys are dependent on this right. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:But I'd forgotten that knot. I'd given my interest in hell to know it now.
Speaker 1:But it was a great knot.
Speaker 2:You could let yourself down as you went and you'd stop and you'd pull it and you'd get to the bottom. I don't remember how they got back up again, but I was only concerned with up and down, and then you fiddled around and I have probably worked at a half a dozen different specialties in my life.
Speaker 1:So where did you—so you ended up back in Ohio. Then, after you got out of the service, uh-huh, okay, I was just trying to figure that out. So you ended up back in Ohio. So let me interrupt you. I'm just trying to get the timeline.
Speaker 2:So then you did that and then you did some other. Well, when we got out of the Navy, they took all these displaced people out of Europe. You know there were millions of them and we were responsible for a lot of them. We took the responsibility for some of them, like for instance Poland, and put them to work. And this guy was passing out a driver's license because everybody lost their license, you know, for three or four years in the service. Oh yeah. So he says I'm in the line and he says you drive. I said yeah, I drive. What do you drive? I said John Deere tractor. He says, oh, you give you a license and he wrote me out a driver's license. I've never taken a test since I was telling Bruce about that. So, anyway, oh, what the hell? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was dating this gal that was a beautician and I'm just actually subsisting on my $20 a week and of course, the way you stretch that out, and of course the way you stretch that out, you find these young ladies that were enamored of the servicemen, and they're gainfully employed.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, and they'd feed you your breakfast and nuts and hide if the boss is gone.
Speaker 2:And if he was, we had another one. Yeah, I always had alternatives. So, anyway, I met this beautician and I was sleeping with her, of course. And she says Marv, you've got the GI Bill of Rights and you can borrow up to $100,000, I think at the time, and they'll pay your tuition. Why don't you become a hairdresser, a beautician, and we can pool our resources and our knowledge and we'll open up a chain of pots. So that sounded like a good idea. So I enrolled in this beauty thing and about halfway through the school she went elsewhere. She disappeared. On you, she disappeared.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what the hell do I do with a half of an education? So I finished the education, yeah, and I never worked professionally at it. So I came to Michigan to enhance my education. There's a fellow I called Anthony that would let you sit in his class for $100 a week. Sit in his class for $100 a week. Now, that's when the minimum wage was probably 30 cents an hour. That's a lot of money, and the automobile industry was paying 60 cents an hour. Yeah. I went to work for Hudson Motor Car Company and one day I was sitting eating my lunch and I was thinking about car company. And one day I was sitting eating my lunch and I was thinking about not. Here I am working for 60 cents an hour to give this guy my payday and go back to a portion of how maybe make $50 a week.
Speaker 2:That don't ever the math doesn't pan out right, so I talked it and ended up hanging aluminum siding for making a good money at that, yeah, and there's probably a lot of people out there don't even know aluminum siding existed, right, because it's all vinyl siding.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all vinyl.
Speaker 2:She was hanging aluminum siding started out being aluminum siding. Yeah, the industry cap plastic hadn't got a hold yet, and so somewhere along the way I became professional. I became a professional industrial coatings troubleshooter. I knew all about the equipment needed to coat anything. The equipment needed to coat anything, everything from electrophoresis to hydraulic painting, silk screening If it had anything to do with paint. I was a, so I worked for Sherwin-Williams and every company I worked for wanted to give me further education and of course, I softed up like a sponge. Yeah, why not? I had myself a refrigeration business. I had myself a refrigeration business and I worked for Chrysler Airtemp at the time, and I had the business on the side and I made more money on the weekend than I had made all week at Chrysler Airtemp. And while I wanted to know about refrigeration, they'd give me a book. I knew the people that knew the things and education's as close as your nearest library. I'm a self-educated man or boy or wherever the hell I am. I feel like a young man, but I'm not.
Speaker 1:Well, according to the rest of your life, you can eat whatever you age, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and anyway, I'm kind of hard to keep a trend of thought here I ditched that Anyway, having well, I guess I got married somewhere along the way, yeah. When did you get married? Oh hell, I don't remember.
Speaker 2:But I got a son 73 years old, I was probably in my 20s, okay, and I needed more income. So I had myself a do-it-yourself business refrigeration problem. Do anything in your kitchen that you could do in the shop? Yeah, and did, and so I bought a refrigerator at an auction. The damn thing wouldn't work and so it was a sulfur dioxide system and I figured out how to make it work and therein started the business and I called it Blizzard Refrigeration. I'd buy your, I'd buy. The refrigeration was coming on big. Yeah, because everybody had done without during the war and in those days the refrigerant, the common refrigerant, was sulfur dioxide and it works under a vacuum as opposed to Freon and the other refrigerants. And anyway, that's how I got into the refrigeration business. Now I used to paint those refrigerators and I bought myself a paint gun and it cost me about $100. That's a hell of. And I bought myself a paint gun. It cost me about $100. That's a hell of a lot of money for a paint gun.
Speaker 1:It was a nice paint gun and paint always didn't turn out right.
Speaker 2:So I went to Moran Paint Company and asked them why don't we teach them that book, particularly in nitrocellulose? And they'd give me a book. I read the damn book and the Lyle brothers, a division of Sherwin-Williams, had an ad for a sales correspondent. So I answered the ad and knew more about the damn business and the guy that was interviewing me. So I got the job thumbs down and they decided to make me a paint salesman. And that didn't work out because on the way to my territory a lot of times it elapsed On the way to the territory I was driving one of those biggest Chevy that was made and the sales manager was with me and we was down somewhere in Indiana and I couldn't keep the damn thing on the road and the sales manager was giving me a bad time over it.
Speaker 2:Well, I had a short fuse. I said if you can drive this thing any better than I can, you're welcome to it. That ended my sales career. So I became a troubleshooter, oh yeah. So they put me through lots of schools, sent me to the Velva School, and so you know, I'd already been in the industry and I knew the chemistry of it because I read the damn book that they give me at Moran Paint to get me out of their hair, you know. And so I'm passed and I became expert and so I was a consultant on the pipeline in Alaska for urethane foam and so forth and people that bid it in Columbus, where the hell was I? Oh, it was in Arizona by this time.
Speaker 1:I've lived in 13 states by this time I was going to say so. California, back to Ohio, michigan, alaska.
Speaker 2:Now you're in Arizona. See, I was in. I ran off a branch of an office. I had a branch accompanied out of Utah and couldn't make it pay. So I went to Utah and became troubleshooter for the organization. We had about 11 outfits on the road, and what kind of work was this Urine foam, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:We made sprayed potato cellars and apple cellars and so forth and so on for insulation, and urethane foam is a trade of all of its own. It's a whole science that you know. We've done everything from roofs to fruit sellers and so forth. And then I say I was a consultant on a Bailey Bridge project for the Vietnam War. We was doing them in Marion Ohio and I became the company that I had consulted with proselytized me from the company I was working for. My salary made me the head honcho for about 120 people in an Army depot at Marin Ohio. So I had a stint at that and whatever I wanted to do, the world was my oyster, because I had a vocabulary that was comparable to a PhD. I don't have it now because my memory's gone to hell in a handbasket.
Speaker 1:Well, you're doing pretty good yeah.
Speaker 2:But I had it in those days because I made it a point when I was 10 years old to read a page of the dictionary every night. I got that book, and where the hell I got it from? But I never let it go. In my house you'll find all kinds of dictionaries, and the thesaurus and the Bible, of course, right and but because that that was my education mm-hmm and I was college educated.
Speaker 2:of course, and all all respects of course, if you can speak the language of a science, you in effect know the science. So when I applied for a job, I never was at a loss for words. I manipulated the conversation most of the time because I knew how. I'd been doing it since I was 14 years old. Yeah, so you know, I told you there's nothing particularly interesting about my life.
Speaker 1:Well, so did you remain a consultant then, throughout your career.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when necessary yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, and so you have a son who's 73, so he would have been born in what are we 20?
Speaker 2:So he would have been born in the 50 he'd have been born in the 50s, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been married four times okay, all right, and so the third time's not the charm, mmm second one was okay.
Speaker 2:I got a woman made a, made a man out of me, really seven children. All of them are college educated and professionals. Yeah, so it worked out well. I said through the divorce under I supported them all. I think a deadbeat son of a bitch is gonna split hell wide open. Yeah, and I never would be one.
Speaker 1:So anyway. So you had a nice long career. You had four wives. When did you finally retire from that kind of work? Anyway, I could ask you a couple of questions, if that's all right. So while we're thinking about that, I know that you've stayed active with veterans. Anyone can see you're wearing your VFW 6132 hat yeah. When did you start getting involved with the VFW and all those organizations?
Speaker 2:Oh, when I got out of the Navy, the VFW used to have dances every Friday night, that's in Portsmouth, ohio, while I was on the 5220. And I'd go to those dances. And VFW was that I first became a Freemason, and that was in, I guess. I was living in Indiana and I was a troubleshooter for an Egyptian lacquer manufacturing company out of New Jersey. I worked in New Jersey for them and they transferred me to Lafayette, indiana, and that's where I entered Freemasons and I became. I never, given my thought, much thought, I never, for instance, wore a World War II cap or so forth, until I met Bruce and he got me into the VFW and because you know, I have all the necessary papers for it, and that's when I got when I went to all the things that he papers for it.
Speaker 2:That's when I got, when I went to all the things that he and I attend. You know, bruce is, bruce is Gepetto to my and I'm Pinocchio. Okay, I got you. He runs interference for me and manipulates me what he wants me to do. He thinks I'm not on to him, keeps you on the straight and narrow a little bit there too. Yeah, we have a— Honor flight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk a little bit about that. You went on the honor flight to DC.
Speaker 2:Yeah, bruce says we need to get involved in that. Bruce says we need to get involved in that. And so he got in touch with Slotkin how we go about doing it. And so we went through the detail of it, and so we was accepted. And they took us from here to what the hell was the name of that place, traverse City, traverse City and put us up in a hotel. And so we took a plane out of Traverse City. Now it's interesting. We got on the plane and Bruce says I'll get you a. I'll talk to these stewardess and see if we can get you an open mic. I had a briefcase full of poetry you know, Right right.
Speaker 1:So something we hadn't talked about is, Marvin, you write poetry. Oh yeah, you write a lot of poetry.
Speaker 2:Oh, a lot of it, yeah, anyway.
Speaker 1:So you get on the plane and they're looking for an open mic for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I got an open mic and these two sewer stewardesses I'm trying to make out with them, of course, of course you never leave a good-looking woman unapproached, and that's a science in itself.
Speaker 2:But and that's a science in itself. But anyway, he got me an open mic and so I read a poetry. I had a lot of it in memory at the time. I had a lot better shape then. How long has it been? It's only been a year and a half ago. Boy, when you're in your 90s, it goes fast the deterioration. Anyway, he got an open mic and I recited, oh hell, half a dozen different verses that I'd written. I'll give you an example.
Speaker 2:I don't believe that God will disfavor us because we were warriors. I don't believe God will disfavor us because in the Bible he favored warriors everywhere. I rather think we'll gain his favor because great warriors we really were. So rest in God's peace. Rest in peace. You sleep in God's favor. You sleep in God's favor. He showed us many times the righteous shall not fall. Yeah, oh yeah, you sleep in God's favor. He's the greatest warrior of us all. He showed us many times the righteous shall not fall. Now, that's a great piece of poetry. It is. I'll get it damned if I have to say it myself. It's amazing. Yeah, it is. And I wrote the one about warriors. One and all you yodeled for the plane. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So you yodeled for us when we were at the museum and I would be remiss if I didn't let the audience hear you yodel for us. So, marvin, you need to yodel for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got on that plane and I run out of verse. So I says I'll do some music for you guys and I yodeled for them. I love sick blues. Yodel-ay, yodel-ay, yodel-ay, yodel-ay. I got a feeling called the blues, oh Lord, since my baby said goodbye and I don't know what I'll do.
Speaker 2:All I'll do is sit and cry. Oh Lord, that last long day she said goodbye, oh Lord, I thought I would cry. She do me, she'll do you. She's got that kind of lovin' Hell after her when she calls me sugar daddy. Such a beautiful dream. I got to thinkin' it over. I lost my heart. It seems I lost my heart. It seems I'm grown so used to you somehow I'm nobody's sugar daddy. Now, when I'm lonesome, I got the lovesick blues. He-o-da-lay, he-o-da-lay, he-o-da-lay.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's amazing.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that At 95 years old, I think I tend to agree with you.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's my kind of music actually. Really it is, it is.
Speaker 2:So I sing a couple of others. So you were the flight entertainment, basically yeah, yeah and everybody knew me, but I didn't know everybody, and so when I got off the plane, everybody wanted their picture made with me and Bruce he introduced me to everybody and he helped my career. All you have to do is have Bruce run an interference for you. Right, have to do it. Have bruce uh run an interference for you, and right you get. You get he, uh, he just takes my personality and magnifies it now.
Speaker 1:Well, and so, marvin, we've we've heard, we've talked about bruce. Bruce is actually sitting at the table with us right now oh yeah he's been helping us along. Um, you'll hear bruce's story too. Uh, as well, because we're gonna we're gonna get bruce behind the mic at some point here, but I just wanted to point out that we're not talking about Bruce and he's not here. Bruce is here and he's been very helpful in getting Marvin to this session. So, bruce, thank you for that. We appreciate it.
Speaker 2:You know what a swamp cooler is? I do Okay.
Speaker 1:I do know what a swamp cooler is In Arizona.
Speaker 2:the swamp coolers can drop a house, any house, if it's sufficiently sized. 20 degrees in temperature. Now that works fine until the house becomes saturated and you can't evaporate any more water into the air. It's a refrigeration principle very simply.
Speaker 2:And so some guy got the sweet idea of piggyback air conditioning with it. So when your air becomes saturated, you have an instrument that tells you and turns on your air conditioner takes the water out of the air. And then you have an instrument that tells you and turns on your air conditioner, takes the water out of the air, and then you repeat the cycle all over again. Yeah, so I had an ad in the paper that I was a contractor because I'd worked at all the skills, everything from drywalling to timber cutting. Oh yeah, I cut timber when I was 12 years old. I was a slave. I'm changing the thing here.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I showed up at this lady's house and I spent probably an hour trying to figure out how I could put a swamp cooler into her refrigeration system, and it didn't work. I later found out while I was sleeping with her on the opposite wall. I could have took a side out of the wall and put a swamper in there, and still it would work the same way. But that's hindsight. Always thinking, always thinking, always thinking.
Speaker 2:Anyway, when I told the lady, there's no way I can do for it, nothing I can do for you, and she felt bad about it and she says can I take you to dinner, at least as a compromise? Yeah, that's the way you say thank you, a way of saying thank you, yeah, and I said we're fine. And I went to dinner, she, we went to dinner and she said, and I says, may I call on you? And she says, please do so. I called on her with a bouquet of roses and we talked and blah, blah, blah, and after a couple of three dates I was sleeping with her and she must have liked what she found, because she proposed to me oh, okay. Not at that time.
Speaker 2:I was telling her about beautiful West Virginia in the spring. And, by the way, you have the same features I have. I was telling her about beautiful West Virginia in the spring. By the way, you have the same features I have. Are you aware of that? No, you have, doesn't he? Yeah, you could be my brother, my father, anyway. That's an aside.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we dated back and forth and we used to go a lot to Vegas, so we'd stay at my sister's and we'd try to buy groceries or try to buy this and that, and she would have no part of it. So I was telling my lady that I was dating. I would call her Krista, that's her name. I said we ought to buy something for my sister as a gift. Sure, we appreciate her hospitality. She says great idea, do it and I'll put you in half. So I did it and her half never showed up and I said piss on you, lady, I don't need. So I did it and her half never showed up. Huh, and I said piss on you, lady, I don't need this. And I went on to my house. I had a couple properties in Superior Arizona because I had a real estate license, and so I invested, and I was invested several ways and so she kept calling me, kept calling me, kept calling me. I just cut her off the way to get a woman. If she's interested in you, really interested, just cut her off, yeah.
Speaker 1:We call that playing hard to get.
Speaker 2:They can't handle that. So anyway she finally, by accident or somehow or other, I answered the damn phone and she says you rotten son of a bitch that's what she said you promised to take me to West Virginia to see the flowers and the mountains. German people are flower crazy. If you've ever been to Germany, you notice that Every household has a rose garden. Uh-huh. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I lived there four years. Anyway, I said, okay, but you buy the car, you pay the expenses and I will take you by God, and so forth. Well, it lasted one day and day and of course I'm back in the sack with her, yeah, on the way to West Virginia. And so we get to West Virginia, she bought a new car and she paid all the expenses and I've just went along and I was a stud right now, so you were a couple. So we get to West Virginia and I have a brother that lived in Wayne County.
Speaker 1:West.
Speaker 2:Virginia and so she liked to look at real estate. I had a license and so I could tell her this and that and the other about it. And we went to look at this property. It had 17 acres, 12 acres of timber, 5 acres of lawn and so forth and about three bedroom house, and it had a price on it. And she says let's buy this, let's get married. No, she says, let's buy this house and get married. And I said what the hell do I want to buy another house, for I've got two in Phoenix and I did have, because the house that I'd lived in in Phoenix I leased and I had to buy another one to have a place to live after I quit shacking up with her Right, so I always had money. And so she said, well, if you don't want to buy the damn house, I'll buy it, let's get married. And I said, well, I was between marriages at the time. Why?
Speaker 2:the hell not, you know but, I said now you have your estate and I have my estate and you buy this damn house. I'll do what you need to do to make it to your liking, and but you buy, I'll do what you need to do to make it to your liking, but you pay all the materials, all the expenses, and I'll do the labor. Now the labor is worth more than the materials, because an old rule in takeoff and carpentry is three times the raw material is the labor. Yeah, no. So if you're going to if you're going to anyway, that worked out pretty well.
Speaker 2:I told her you have your and I have mine. And we worked it that way and I flipped six houses for her, in fact, and I flipped one in Colorado that made $80,000. I bought it at $140,000, sold it at $220,000, and I had two representatives of real estate companies bidding at it. That's a dream. That's a salesman's dream. Oh yeah, just let them fight it out. Yeah, yeah, that's a salesman's dream. Oh yeah, just let them fight it out. Yeah, in fact, I told the people there's two people there. The one says well, I would like to make a counteroffer. I says I do not like playing one human against another, but if it's in the best interest of my family, I'll make an exception. So what is your offer? She went $10,000. And I closed the deal and she gave me a couple thousand dollars as a gift for making the deal. But hell, I took walls out of the house, not load-bearing walls. I knew better than that.
Speaker 2:Right and the one place I put in a bidet and I had 17 joints out on the floor. With the floor removed that I had to solder and I made 17 joints and no ought to have a leak. My God, that's hallelujah.
Speaker 1:Someone was smiling on you that day. That's got to be a record.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the West Virginia house. Of course, we lived together a long time, 20-some odd years. She wanted to move to Germany and we was living on North Willow, two doors from the St Gerard's Church. Yeah, yeah, the second house on the left, cape Cod House.
Speaker 1:You've seen it. My dad actually lives over that way, so I'm driven by that house. It has a whiteod house. You've seen it. My dad actually lives over that way, so I'm driven by that house.
Speaker 2:It has a white roof on it. Anyway, she wanted to go back to Germany. She went at least 30 days a year and she convinced me to go to Germany. I said, well, I don't really have any interest in Germany. I've been all over the damn country. I'm tired of traveling. Any interest in Germany. I've been all over the damn country. I'm tired of traveling. Well, I was.
Speaker 2:I've been all over the United States troubleshooting, you know. And so the Germans like to celebrate round birthdays, that's 60, 70, 80, 90, you know. So I went to one and you invite all the guests and pay for their bills. I could run $1,000, and it did. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I went there a couple of times and I got to know the family. They were a household that had servants. She was a millionaire, I discovered after I got into her and anyway, when we moved there, her son was a doctor.
Speaker 2:We bought an apartment across the hall from him, which was a bad mistake, and he was a pusher, a controller. I don't control easy, I was making takeoff of the apartments that we'd bought and he says, well, you left off the ceiling. I said the ceiling don't need paint and I'm not going to paint it. And he says, well, I want off the ceiling. I said the ceiling don't need paint and I'm not going to paint it. And he says, well, I want it painted. And I said you don't have the right to tell me what to do with my apartment. The deal was I paid the down payment on this thing $72,000.
Speaker 2:I was in the stock market at the time, making the bucks, making out with it too, and so he was to carry the mortgage it was his name and we lived there five years and then we could start paying rent, anyway. Then we had a hell of an argument about it. Now we're living all of our furniture's in Munich we're living all of our furniture's in Munich. We're living in his office and put a bed in it, moved his things up and all we had was our. We had our suitcases. So we had this hell of an. I had this hell of an argument with him. And he's a big. He's bigger than you are. I wouldn't take him on Right because he'd kick my ass for sure. So, anyway, words, and he's uh, gets high on.
Speaker 2:He drank a fifth a day and anyway he was playing heavy metal. Now you know what my taste is in music, yeah, and I'm listening to this. My wife's got her damned ears plugged. She didn't hear a damn thing. And at 2 o'clock in the morning I got up and went in and sarcastically said can't you play the damn thing any louder? And he did. And at 10 o'clock I was out of the damned house, and 12 o'clock I was in the United States. And so there was my wife left behind. I didn't have anything against her, Loved the woman.
Speaker 2:My daughter says who's a CPA? Said Dad, you've got a problem. And I said what's that? And he says well, you invested all these years with Krista, and she particularly, in utilities. And so if she liquidates those because she'll roll them over for 20 years, Right, and if she liquidates them, you're going to have a hell of a bill. Guess where they'll come for the money. They'll come to you, Otherwise they'll have to go through legal procedures. You'll get into Germany and all they've got to do is just nail you down.
Speaker 2:And so I went downtown and got me a divorce, Done it myself. I'd done her divorce, by the way, from her husband in Germany at the time. So anyway, time goes on and I was reconciled to leave her in Germany and she took sick and she died, kept calling me, and calling me, and calling me and she says, if you'll come and help me out, I will pay the way here and there'll be a ticket standing by any time that you want to leave and come back home. Well, I loved the woman, yeah, and I'd lived with her for 20-some years, and so I went back. And I took care of her.
Speaker 2:I got her back on her feet and I was about four years. We went to Hungary, we went twice to Spain, we went to the Canary Islands and all over Europe, because when they planned their vacation the doctor always paid the bill, you know, for the thing. And then we became friends again you know, Can't hold a grudge.
Speaker 2:It's not wise to do so. You let your ass ring. You'll eat your appetite when you do to do so. You let your ass ring, you'll eat your appetite when you do Right. And so, anyway, I made coffee. Germans like to coffee in the afternoon, it's a thing you know. And so I'd made coffee and I'd pergoed the whole damn apartment or patched what somebody had, pergoed it and beat it up, and I'd made coffee and she hadn't drank it. I was working on the floor, maybe doing dishes or some damn thing or other, because I took over the housekeeping and everything, not a fee, just lived there and she paid the grocery bill. Of course I cook, she buy and I fry, uh-huh. So, anyway.
Speaker 2:I said, hey, you haven't drank your coffee, something wrong with it? She says I'm kind of dizzy and I said, well, let's find out what's wrong. And I took her over to the couch and put this that's, I mean, the blood pressure, the blood blood pressure in later, yeah, and everything is was kosher 120, over 80 or some damn thing around?
Speaker 2:and so she said no. And then I come back after I took her blood pressure. I took her she was sitting from the table to the couch, which was a mistake and I came back and I spoke to her. She didn't answer me and I came back and I just glazed. Look on her face, just like she'd frozen in time.
Speaker 2:I remembered that from my mother died of a stroke, and I remember that look on my mother's face. I don't know why the hell I did. I'd never seen anybody else. That's going back 85, 90 years, 80, whatever. A long time, a hell of a long time. And so she didn't respond and I went across the hall and got her. Her son was at home at the time. It must have been the weekend and so he came over and he got her off the couch on the floor and started doing CPR, and she never spoke a word. That's the way she always said. She wanted to go Right and which makes me think maybe when I was threatening to come back home to the United States because I couldn't master the language it was too late in my life and I never had to. She spoke impeccable English and I'm all the European die next to, you know, and there was no incentive to do so.
Speaker 2:But anyway I couldn't master the language. I tried and I reckoned that one day I'll, at my, I'll end up in a nursing home and guess who my compatriots would be? They would all be German and they would all have memories of when we were at war and the Americans were murdering their children. And what the hell would I be? I'd have it on both sides and I couldn't defend myself. So I'll go back home. I told her that Right, and I've just always wondered if maybe she didn't have it, since her doctor was, her son was a doctor. She didn't find out what she could use to exit real quick and I've often wondered if she maybe committed suicide Because her diet was such Germans when they they live on pork Because their country's so small it doesn't allow for grazing.
Speaker 2:If you've got it, if it's arable, they plant it and so, anyway, I always thought that maybe she had done a suicide thing because I was threatening to leave If I come back. She was well again and I was coming back to the United States because I was threatening to leave, come back. She was well again, you know, and I was coming back to the United States because I didn't want to be end up in a damn nursing home. You know how long? How long can you help last when you're 90 or 85 or whatever the hell I was. Yeah, it's been five miles, five years now, so it's probably I was around 90. But you look at, when you're 90, you don't. You know, 72 is an average age that you expire. What happened to her dad? What happened to her dad? That's how they ended with all the money.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah. So we couldn't. So she died and was cremated, of course. And you can't scatter ashes in Germany, it's against the law. So her son contacted a person in Switzerland, which is five or six mile away, and so her ashes were sent to Switzerland and Switzerland gave them back to my stepson, the doctor. And you can't scatter them on the lake either. But we rented a boat and went out and scattered them on the lake, and all these children, the grandchildren and all I know the danger of a frickin' boat, right, and they didn't, and they were whipping this damn thing all over the hell and I thought, well, one time I'll just jump out and swim out of the frickin' lake and get destroyed.
Speaker 2:It was the danger of my life. And, of course, lake Constance in Germany is 85 miles long. The Rhine River comes in this end and exits the other end, and it's a big lake. It's 10 miles between Switzerland and Germany. It's 10-mile-wide places and that's why it's a garden place in Germany, 10-mile away. You've got the Alps Right and all that cold comes down and precipitates all the warmth of Germany, because the Rhine River is just like a new country. You've got this and this and boy, the garden stuff that you eat out of the garden spot of Germany is like nothing you ever eat in your life. Pretty amazing, oh fantastic. The strawberries are so sweet that you don't even have to put sugar on them. Yeah, and yeah, the sugar's great. But I've got to tell you about one of my experiences on the Bushnell.
Speaker 1:Yes, so we're going to go all the way back to the Navy times and you were on the Bushnell, which was a subtender, Subtender.
Speaker 2:About second in size to an aircraft carrier, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:They're big ships, big ships, and we had lost our skipper by transfer or whatever means, we didn't know, we didn't care and he was replaced by a skipper from the battleship new york. The battleship, and prior to that time the black people were could only be stewards mates, right, but the equality movement had manifested itself to where they could be crew now. And so this fellow Knight had been steward's mate to this skipper at Battle of New York for 10 years, and when he came aboard he seen Knight, just like father and son, yeah. And so he took Knight to the wardroom and they rehashed old times and they got Knight drunker than a skunk, uh-huh and they got.
Speaker 2:Knight drunker than a skunk and it just so happened that Knight had. He was a sailor, he was not a steward's mate anymore and he had the watch in the crow's nest. We didn't have anything to look out for. We were port, yeah, but it was still a watch that had to be made. It still had to be made. That's tradition. Yeah, there's a lot of tradition in the Navy. And so how the hell he ever got up into the crow's nest is anybody's guess. A little bit drunk as he was, yeah. So, admiral, I mean First Lieutenant, we'll call him Joe Clark. First Lieutenant Clark, he was officer of the deck, yeah, officer of the day, and he's sitting in his office and he's calling all the stations on the sound phone, and a sound phone doesn't require electric, it's sound transfer. I guess We'll know more about that tonight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sound-powered phone. I know exactly what you're talking about. We still use them.
Speaker 2:Anyway, he ahoy in the crow's, ahoy here and ahoy there and so forth and so on and all the stations reported in. Came to the crow's nest, ah, came to the crow's nest a horn the crow's nest no answer. A ho and the crow's nest no answer. A hoi and the crow's nest no answer. So he got off his ass and went around to see why he didn't get any an answer from a crow's nest. So he looks up in the crow's nest. Now nights up there, yeah, he says aoy in the crow's nest no answer. Ahoy in the crow's nest no answer. Ahoy in the GD crow's nest.
Speaker 3:Knight hangs his head over the side and says Ha, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha Ha, and it drove that superintendent nuts.
Speaker 1:Ha Ha.
Speaker 2:Ha. So anyway, the legal aspects of law on the ship. It starts with the skipper, the captain, and the captain was ill-equipped to take any action against Knight because he got him in the condition he was.
Speaker 1:Right, right, that was kind of his fault.
Speaker 2:So I don't know how they handled it, but the skippers got a lot of pull because he's the big man on the ship and so every time we'd see this lieutenant and he didn't see us. If somebody say ha, ha, ha and they drove the poor guy nuts, literally nuts he got a transfer out of the ship. But I remember that because Bruce remembers it. That's a great story.
Speaker 1:That's a great story. Yeah, yeah, that was good. So you have lived a lot of years and a really long and interesting life. I mean, there's some great stories here. Oh yeah, as we get close to kind of wrapping up our interview, is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you want to talk about?
Speaker 2:I've got three stories for publication at uh reader's digest. Of course they take those and put those in the file, yeah away. And when they pull one out and and publish it they send you your new right five hundred. So I wrote this one about uh fishing and I'll try to remember Me and a Mexican friend of mine. That used to be when I was working at the mine. I had retired from the road and became a craft painter. I knew all about paint. I knew all the chemistry and I knew how, all the equipment to use it. They had an airless that they'd bought, paid about $3,000 for it, and nobody knew how to use it. So I had applied for a job at an atomic plant. They was building an atomic electric plant.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, the nuclear plant Nuclear plant and they wanted to put me on hold for three months and I had to hell, I needed a job Right. So they had this ad in the copper mine so I answered the ad for a craft painter. I was a master painter, I had license to prove it.
Speaker 2:So I went to work for the mine and I got to know the guy that passed out the tools and all, he's a good fellow to know Right, and he was a Mexican and we hit it off and I took him fishing with me to Utah one time, and that's the time we forgot to bring any cornmeal or anything to fry fish with. Now, how the hell do you fry fish in a skillet? You can't do it because it sticks and you've got a hell of a mess. So necessity is a mother of invention. We had paper towels. So you wrap a paper towel around a fish. After you've eviscerated him, fry him, take the towel off and all the scales and everything fins comes off on the towel and you've got the best fillet you've ever eaten in your life. That's a great idea. Yeah, it worked.
Speaker 2:And so, anyway, mike and I went up this high lake it was about 11,000, 12,000 feet and it had been an old volcano and nobody knew the depth of the place and we set our poles at about 30 degrees with heavy rocks and proceeded to shoot. The shit, maybe Right. Anyway, I said, mike, let's make a kachina.
Speaker 2:And he said what the hell is a kachina? And I said that's something the Hopi Indians, or whoever the hell it is. They make one for corn, they make one for birth and they make one. So we might as well make one for fish. Yeah, you find something that looks like a fish and whittle it out and throw it in the lake and we'll catch fish. Theoretically Makes sense. And so he's whittling away on it.
Speaker 2:Come, these two guys, and a Mormon missionary has a look that's distinctive from anything else you'll see in your life and people. So I recognized these guys coming. We had our fishes, our lines propped up on. So I said we'll have some fun out of these guys, mike. And he says how you going to do that? I just follow my lead. And he says okay. So they come up and he says who are you guys? Where are you guys from? You haven't any luck. I says no. They said what are your friends doing there? I says he's making a kachina.
Speaker 2:Now, when you get this kachina, he's a tribal medicine man Boy. He's got some powerful medicine. So you wouldn't be around when this guy does his thing because it gets dangerous. When he's on peyote in the medicine tent he'll be captured, all kinds of miracles and bullshit. And they said, well, what is he doing right now? And I said, well, he's working on a kachina and when he decides to do his medicine you'll see him. So I was talking to him and he's doing some of his guttural Spanish. He's supposed to be an ancient medicine man. So when he gets the kachina fixed he says, well, since you're the representative of the tribe, uh, you want to throw in the thing? I said no. I said you, you know the ceremonies of the, the ancient ceremonies, and he had some ancient guttural ceremonial talk and he's throwed that damn thing in the in the lake. That quick, my line practically took my line away, away the fish, yeah. And I pulled it in and here's this fish, perfectly bound up and twined, and the hook never got in into his hide anywhere. Uh-huh, he's wound up in this thing.
Speaker 2:And I told these mormons. I said you see this, if you guys hadn't have been here, we would have had our right up on the van. You should see him in the medicine tent. Boy, this guy has got powerful medicine. You talk about your miracles in the Mormon language. This guy's got them. So they walked away and the young'un sends to the elder. You don't suppose they had a trained fish, do you? And the elder guy says, charlie, if you're going to sell the miracle of the Mormon language, the Mormon religion, to the world, you've got to believe in miracles. You just saw one.
Speaker 1:Let's go home. Was that a trained fish?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, charlie wanted to know if that was a train fish and the older guy told him that that's the way I wrote the story. When I sent it to Reader's Digest they accepted it. Yeah, yeah. And Superior, arizona, there's what they called the Amethyst. Oh, apache Tears. It's the only place in the world they exist.
Speaker 2:You ever hear of them? No, they're about the size of marbles,000 feet, two or three thousand feet place, and in the canyon, and they Indians knew how to get up and down and they'd come down and rob the ranchers and murder beef and cut him up and take him back and live it high on the hog. And and somebody gave the white soldiers the know-how to get up there and it so happened that they're feasting on that Apache. What's the thing they make the tequila out of? Oh, agave, agave, plant sugar. And they're all drunken and having a hell of good time.
Speaker 2:And then the soldiers come in and literally massacred these people, these Indians, and a lot of them committed suicide over the patchy leap and it's still there today. You know a couple of thoughts. A thousand foot high and it used to be a rock and escarpment and the highway runs under it and there's skilletons still on there. They stayed there for a long, a lot of years, because nobody wanted to go down on a climbing thing and resurrect them. So, anyway, the fable is that these Apache tears were the tears of the maidens that their lovers committed suicide rather than be captured. And that's their tears, and they dig them up out of the sand.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, that's the fable, the legend of the Apache tears, the tears of the women that grieved for the lovers that had committed suicide over the thing and they sell Apache tears there and they're obsidian, they're beautiful. If you're a rock hound, you've got to have them in your outfit. They're beautiful, obsidian. You've seen obsidian? Yes.
Speaker 1:Yep, I have.
Speaker 2:And they put it on a wheel and do all kinds of things with it, cut it up and so forth. It's a nice story with it. You know the history of Tecumseh, no, well, he was the Indian that was educated by in the white. He knew the language and he was a personal friend of Tyler Tippecanoe and Tyler too in history. Anyway, he had organized all the Indians and the lake tribes to the extent that the United States government would have had to have done business with him. His brother was a so-called prophet, he was blind in one eye and so forth.
Speaker 2:Now they came to a fight at about 10 mile up the river, on the on Wabash River. 10 miles from what the hell is it a university, lafayette, indiana, at the Wabash River, and it's still there. The prophet had convinced the Indians that the bullets from the American soldiers couldn't hit them. Of course he was wrong as hell and when they come to battle they just mowed them down. But that was a tragic thing for the Indians because Tecumseh had all these people organized and the only time that the Indians were ever as a group and he had them all over the lake tribes. Now they do that and in Chillicothe they have a reenactment of that. It's out in the woods and they have the river the lake and everything.
Speaker 2:They've gone a hell of a lot of trouble to put it down. If you ever get to Chillicothe and you want to see that it's the reenactment of the Battle of Tippecanoe In Indiana, it's called Battleground and it's still there and all the monuments and everything, the who died where and so forth. And Prophet Shrock, where the prophet gave his talks to the Indians, where the battle all happened Right, and it's an area I experienced to go through that battleground and read all those things.
Speaker 1:Well, that'd be really interesting to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you can see it in action Now. My wife and I she was, you know we owned about four motorhomes and she wanted to see the United States, so I took her everywhere she wanted to go the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We'd drive all over New York Not New York, new Mexico and all the 50-mile, the most remote highway in the United States, 50-mile of it to the Las Vegas desert. Yeah. And you don't see nobody, nobody, no, that's a long drive yeah, I have not yeah, nothing but desert all the way, 50 mile of it.
Speaker 2:Now her father was garnered. He had been a CEO of who said electric people, siemens and Berlin War come along, and he put his resignation in and he was a member of the party. Nobody that had any job of any significance belonged to the party, the Nazi party, they said. So he and the work came along. Their house was within a block and a half of the airport. They were coming along. Their house was within a block and a half of the airport and the first bomb fall. He decided to move his family south to the Schwarzwald or Black Forest.
Speaker 2:Schwarz being black and Wald meaning forest Schwarzwald. And so they did. And he took his savings and bought a department store. They were a practical giveaway at the time because nobody could get merchandise to put in them, right. But he was a go-getter, he was a mover and shaker. He got somebody he had.
Speaker 2:He got his store whiz-banging, you know, and somebody blew the whistle on him or said that he was a black marketeer, right. And of course the Gestapo come and picked him up, picked him up in his pajamas, and he never got to say goodbye to his family. Nobody ever seen or heard from him, and four years later he got out of there. In the meantime, though, before he let his brother manage the store, he let his brother manage the store and he came out of the. He went in at the concentration camp weighing probably close to 200 pounds, and came back at less than 150. Yeah, 125 or something walking skeleton. Yeah, 125 or something walking scalp. And in 10 years he parlayed the one department store into five. And my wife, he sent her to college in Munich to be a lawyer. So she went to it and passed her exams and all and had a degree in law and never took to— oh, the boards.
Speaker 1:The board. Yeah, yeah, a bar, yeah, the bar exam, that's right.
Speaker 2:Anyway, he done so because he wanted her to take over his things when he expired. Yeah Well, she didn't. She had her own idea of what she wanted to do with her life. So she married an Episcopal priest and they went to college together in Munich, and that's how. But anyway, when he died, he left five daughters, no sons. Five daughters millionaires. My wife was one of them, the one that I told you about the Marian and we had a hell of a good life.
Speaker 1:Oh, I can imagine.
Speaker 2:Yeah but since I had divorced her when she died, I forgot to tell you the kicker. I didn't even get as much as a handkerchief for all my effort, Right, because I had divorced her and she changed her will in the four years that I had divorced from her. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I didn't expect anything anyway, didn't want anything. And I didn't expect anything anyway, didn't want anything. So I had 120 people under my command at Marion Depot to rebuild Bailey Bridges. We took all those Bailey Bridges that was used in World War I and World War II and refurbished them so that they could go to the Vietnam War. And that's because I was a consultant on the $7 million bid to do that.
Speaker 1:Went on to the next thing and ended up in Arizona. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And a new career.
Speaker 1:Well, with all of that right, we are coming kind of close to the end of our conversation, but I do want to ask you one question. You've lived a long life, you've done a lot of stuff and you've had good times and you've had bad times. If someone's listening to this a hundred years from now, now when neither of us are around, what do you want people to take away from your life?
Speaker 2:What message would you have for people? It gives it back what you put into it. I never got an education because somebody snapped the fingers and gave it to me. I studied it and I studied hard. So, anyway, I think life gives you back the dividend that you put into it, just like an investment in money, I mean in a market. Yeah, which brings me to a verse that I wrote about it.
Speaker 1:Well, let's end this on your verse, okay.
Speaker 2:Let's do that. If you want to make money, you buy the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, invest in God, read your Bible and you'll have life eternal. After all, a fool and his money is soon parted. God's love is not a gamble. God's love is manifest. So you better now get started.
