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.
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Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
A Heartfelt Chronicle of Frederick Bloye's Remarkable Experiences
Frederick Bloye joins us for a captivating journey through a life filled with unexpected turns and heartwarming moments. Frederick's story begins in the quiet town of Grimsby, Ontario, where family bonds were shaped under the strong, watchful eye of his father, Big Jack. From the bustling streets of Detroit where the family flower business thrived, to joining the Air Force in a bold departure from floriculture, Frederick's early years are rich with anecdotes of sibling adventures, familial dynamics, and the path to independence.
Frederick's narrative transports us to the remote beauty of Alaska and the structured life on Oscoda's Wurtsmith Air Force Base. With vivid accounts of managing munitions and forming lifelong friendships amidst the backdrop of wilderness hunting trips, his military service is chronicled with honesty and humor. Listeners will be intrigued by tales of classic car escapades and the tension of military promotions that set the stage for his post-service life, painting a picture of a man determined to forge his path beyond the Air Force.
In the latter part of our conversation, Frederick shares the deeply personal story of his marriage to Dory, a partnership lasting 56 years and marked by love, laughter, and resilience. From humorous proposal stories to the challenges of raising a blended family, Fred's insights into life transitions, from automotive conversions to the stormy landscapes of Florida, offer both inspiration and practical wisdom. Throughout, themes of teamwork, legacy, and the belief in oneself resonate, leaving listeners with a sense of hope and the encouragement that their own journeys can be equally transformative.
All right, good morning. Today is Wednesday. It is November 27th 2024. We're talking with Frederick Bloy, who served in the United States Air Force. So, fred, we're going to start out real easy, I hope.
Speaker 2:When and where were you born? I was born in Grimsby, Ontario, Canada, June 28, 1940.
Speaker 1:Okay, and did you live in Canada most of your life?
Speaker 2:No, we left Canada, probably when I was eight, oh okay. And we came to Detroit as a family. And there was a reason for that. My father, who I'm going to refer to as Big Jack most of the time and there was a reason for that. My father, who I'm going to refer to as Big Jack most of the time because that's my association with him he had a greenhouse in Grimsby Towards the end of the war. He was running out of places to sell his roses. That was part of the reason we came to michigan. He got a job in a flower shop.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, so you, uh? Did you have brothers and sisters at that time? Yes, I had an older sister she's 18 months older than me and a brother who was older than me, and a brother who was four years, four years younger and a sister who was two years younger than that. So, okay, yeah, there were four of us, four of you and there. So there would be no middle child with four kids, right right, oh yeah I guess that works out yeah, what was?
Speaker 1:it like moving from canada to detroit. Do you remember that change, and was it a big change? Yeah, what was it like moving from Canada to Detroit? Do you remember that change, and was it a big change for you, or was it just not anything at all?
Speaker 2:It was nothing that stuck in my mind as being a big thing. We were in the middle part of Detroit and that was new Grimsby is on the edge of the Niagara escarpment, so it's got a mountain in the background and Lake Ontario in the front. Suddenly now we're in the city and our nearest neighbor is a milk truck place. That's where they parked their trucks.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you were right in the city at that point. Very much so. As a kid, what did you do for fun, if you had fun, steal milk out of the milk trucks Okay and fun.
Speaker 2:I don't recall that.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, why don't you tell us a little bit about your childhood then? What was that like growing up in Detroit? And maybe tell us a little bit about Big Jack too, because I'd like a little more information on that whole thing.
Speaker 2:Big Jack was the kind of a guy who was going to be in charge regardless. I'm the boss. I never called him Big Jack to his face because he'd beat the crap out of me. He was the boss. He was the boss of the house, he was the boss of the neighborhood. And where he worked in a flower shop for another guy, he was the boss there as well. Oh, so the only thing I can remember about our childhood I think that's for my sister and my brother had to do with Christmas. Sister and my brother had to do with Christmas, Flower shop Christmas. Those are two things that you say in the same sentence, Right? And if it was a good Christmas, we had a good Christmas at home.
Speaker 2:That's about the only thing I can remember. I might have got an electric train or a piece of one, but that was all it. We left there before I was a teenager and we went to northwestern Detroit.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right, and what was that? How was that different from where you were at?
Speaker 2:Huge difference. It was a full house rather than just a little thing with a milk truck in the back. It was a nice house and in a nice neighborhood. Obviously, big Jack was doing better than he would let anybody know About that time. It was time for him to start his own flower shop, which he did, and I guess it's hard to explain, hard to understand, but when he started the flower shop his wife was in charge of the books. My older sister was a designer. I took care of inventory. I took care of inventory.
Speaker 1:My younger brother and sister they tried to stay out of the way until they got old enough to do something important, so it was really a family business at that point, in every sense of the word. Exactly Okay Now, did you enjoy working at the flower shop, or was this something that you had to do? It was something I had to do. I mean, that was part of the family.
Speaker 2:You did that Right. You want to eat? No problem, dinner's on the table as long as you're working. Uh-huh, and that's pretty much what we felt.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what do you remember?
Speaker 1:about your mom.
Speaker 2:A very quiet sweetheart, uh-huh. She was raised by my grandmother, who did a good job of taking care of her family, and my mom was a very quiet person. She was able to keep everything under control, except Big Jack, right.
Speaker 1:and yeah, there was she was a sweetheart, took care of your kids and tried to kind of level things out for you.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what about your brothers and sisters? You have like some memories of them around this time.
Speaker 2:My older sister. My memories of her didn't start until later on, but I mean, it was a sister. She stayed on that side of the house. My brother and I got along really well. When we could we would take off together and maybe on our bikes or something like that. I can recall a few times going to a hockey game with him, taking a bus or a. It was a bus and going to a hockey game that was our thing Was that kind of exciting to just kind of get away and go do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very much so.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very much so. The younger one, linda. I don't think we were ever very close, but we didn't have to be. She was young, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I remember that with my own sister. Like we were very close in age, so her and I did a lot of things together. My brother was a lot younger, yeah, so he did whatever younger kids do. Was that kind of the way it was? Yeah, pretty much Okay. And then what about school? So you've moved a couple of times and you're working. Were you able to go to school?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we went to school. Well, elementary school we changed a couple of times and it was just you're just in another class class, that's all. It was no big deal. Yeah, uh, going to high school was a little bit different because we had to take a city bus. Uh, yeah, we had to take city bus to get to cooling high and it was a good long bus trip. There's an interesting story there. Okay, please share it. We'd love to hear it. Fred, I'm not sure. At age seven, I took violin lessons. I started taking violin lessons Now we're going into high school now and I'm about 14. And my older sister had taken viola lessons. My brother was taking a cello, so it was Big Jack's band. Okay, yeah, exactly that. I enjoyed playing the violin.
Speaker 2:I did not enjoy carrying it to school on a city bus and we had the class Bullying was with us on that bus. And every friggin' day, come on, Freddy, play the violin for us. Come on, Freddy, take it out and play the violin for us. We know you can play the violin, Freddy, Go ahead play it. And that was daily. Well, it was two days a week, because that's when I had lessons. So I had to take the violin with me After a while.
Speaker 2:I don't put up with crap like that very much, so after a while I recall and I've told this story so many times I might have even got it wrong, but it was. Come on, Freddie, play the violin. And I put the violin case down on the seat and opened it up and he was all excited he's going to play the violin for us. I took the violin out and just absolutely destroyed that kid's head with it. Oh my gosh, oh, yes, my gosh. I whipped him with it and the bow, I slapped him back and forth with that and put the remains back in the case and he was crying on the floor. And I mean, he was the bully, Right? He shouldn't have been crying, Right. So he lost his face right there. I went to school with pieces of violin in my case, and I was told I had to go see the.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure, if it was the Like the principal or the headmaster or whatever they.
Speaker 2:It would have been, we would have gone to Groups A through G were, oh, like the counseling center.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I had to go to see my counselor who said, frederick, you're in trouble. And he said you're going to go see the principal. Your dad is already in seeing the principal, so why don't you sit here for a few minutes until things cool down in the principal's office? Big Jack came out of the principal's office, nodded to me and left the school, didn't say a word, got home that night and things were calm in the house, no big deal. The principal, of course, told me I was in big trouble. You don't do that. You don't beat kids with a violin. The next day after school I got home and there was a piano in the living room. She's laughing. Big Jack says go ahead, beat somebody over the head with that, and from that point on I was taking piano lessons. Says go ahead, beat somebody over the head with that. And from that point on I was taking violin or piano lessons.
Speaker 1:Oh well, I guess that's one way to get out of playing the violin. Yeah, I gotta think, though, from what you're saying, though Big Jack sort of appreciated the fact you didn't take a bunch of crap from that kid.
Speaker 2:He never indicated that, but I think you're right. But I think you're right. I absolutely think you're right. Yeah, because he didn't force the issue at all on my end of it.
Speaker 1:Right, so you. So how did you like playing the piano?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, very much. Oh good, yeah, I played piano for a total of four years. Okay. And then I went into the military Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:So you made it through high school. I assume you didn't beat anyone over the head with your next instrument, so you were okay there.
Speaker 2:True enough, I had gained some stature.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I suppose People talked to me that didn't talk before, maybe because I had put scars on the bully's head, but whatever.
Speaker 1:Well, what's the old adage? If you get in a fight, you pick out the biggest guy possible and punch him right in the mouth and then hope for the best right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know if that was part of my thinking. I know that I had a good way to get rid of the violin.
Speaker 1:Right and take care of a bully and take care of a bully all at once Two birds with one stone. Yeah, so you make it through high school. Did you play any sports or anything in high school?
Speaker 2:No, you worked on cars, I'm not a sports kind of a guy at all. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid the first week or so in school. In high school. We changed clothes, we got on shorts and a T-shirt and we went out into the gym and the gym instructor said Okay, climb that rope. And I took a look at that rope and I said I don't know if I'm going to do that or not. He had a number of things. The rope sticks in my head. He had a number of things that we were supposed to do. One of them was run around the track in a group and try and be the leader of the group, and that didn't work real well either. And that didn't work real well either. So that week I transferred from gymnasium to ROTC. Okay, and for the four years of high school I was in ROTC successfully.
Speaker 1:Yes, no rope climbing there no rope, climbing no. And if anybody was going to say climb a rope, it was me telling the rest of the group to climb a rope, right, right, well, so did you have any other hobbies, like working on cars or things like that, when you were in high school?
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, we had one thing that Big Jack and I got along well with was his Model A Fords. He was restoring one and the only time we really got along was if he was on one side of the car and I was on the other. We might talk under the hood or something like that. But we worked on his car further on, maybe when I was a senior. Uh, he needed more pieces than he could buy, so he bought another model a and that was my car and he would take pieces off my car and put them on his car and that worked out really well For him yeah, well, actually, for both of us, because they didn't have to be on the other side of the car talking to him.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's true.
Speaker 2:My car had fender wells for the spare tire, uh-huh, and his didn't. Then it did than it did and my car had a trunk in the back. I'm thinking it did and it was gone Now. I had a spare tire in the back.
Speaker 1:Oh, so did you get your car running, though, even though the pieces were disappearing.
Speaker 2:Well, my car ran all the time, oh, okay. That was my daily driver. Uh huh and the people at school thought that was aces. That was really cool that I would have something other than a 57 Chevy.
Speaker 1:Right which everybody had.
Speaker 2:Which exactly everybody had that. It had a name. We all called it Granny.
Speaker 1:How did they get that name, fred? Because it was just an old car it was an old car.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh, and it ended up with that name, oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Alright, Now did a lot of. So I know you said a lot of the kids had 57 Chevys, but did a lot of kids at that time have a car in school?
Speaker 2:It seemed that everybody I knew had a car. Most of them started with, let's say, 49, 50 Fords, and then there were Chevys, probably all the way up to 57 Chevy's. Chrysler products weren't there, and neither were Model A Fords.
Speaker 1:Yeah, except yours, Except mine, yeah, yeah. Well, that's great. This really has something to do with it, but I just wondered. So Chrysler just wasn't making a lot of cars at that time they weren't making cars that encouraged high school kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, they made some terribly fast cars, because the Hemi came out about that time and in the Dodge and Chryslers the Hemi was put in the fast cars. Right the Hennie was put in the fast cars. Things like the Plymouth. That was a taxi cab and that's where it lived. It was for taxi cabs.
Speaker 1:It was a great taxi cab, but not something you want to drive.
Speaker 2:Yes, they had a station wagon so could be delivering flowers in that which. I did.
Speaker 1:Right Chevrolet kind of had the market cornered.
Speaker 2:It really did it was a question of Chevrolet or Ford, that was it.
Speaker 1:Right, which is still a big rivalry even today. Right, absolutely Can.
Speaker 2:I Excuse me. Oh, absolutely, that was it Right.
Speaker 1:Which is still a big rivalry even today. Right, Absolutely. Yeah, Can I Excuse me? Oh, absolutely Absolutely. So out of curiosity. So you get through high school and so you made it through ROTC very successfully. Yeah, so did you join the Air Force like right out of high school then? Not quite Okay.
Speaker 2:The jacket, decided that I was going to Michigan State to take floriculture, horticulture and modern greenhouse management.
Speaker 1:Oh, because you were going to take over the business at some point, then right, that's the thought. Oh, because you were going to take over the business at some point, then right, that's the thought. Yeah, and that was not my thought at all.
Speaker 2:Not at all, I didn't mind delivering Didn't mind talking to taking flowers into the funeral home. That was part of my job. My job had nothing to do with modern greenhouse management, right. So the next conversation I had with Big Jack was from San Antonio, texas.
Speaker 1:Michigan State University is not in San Antonio, Texas. Oh, so what happened?
Speaker 2:I made arrangements to join the Air.
Speaker 2:Force, Uh-huh, and raised my hand actually in Lansing and they bussed me down to San Antonio for basic training, Okay, bused me down to San Antonio for basic training, Okay. And there I managed to call Big Jack and what I told him was that if he was real quick he might get up to Lansing and get a lot of his money back from tuitions. I can't say what he said. I can't Now that I'm listening to it. What the F have you done Right? And I said well, I have joined the military. It has always been my choice to join the Air Force. I did that. Well, I got to go. Now they're loading me on another bus and I don't think we talked for a good number of years after that.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh, I feel like Big Jack wasn't used to people saying no or doing their own thing, not even in a little bit. How'd that feel to be able to do that?
Speaker 2:Powerful. Yeah, yeah, well, and I felt like I was trained to do that. Rotc did a lot for me. It taught me who's going to be in charge, and it wasn't going to be Big Jack.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can go on through my entire life that way, but that was where we were, and the Air Force did a couple of wonderful things for me right then we had our choice. We took tests and, depending on what you did on the test, you were able to choose your workforce or your school, what you wanted to do, right, and you had the opportunity to write down your choice. And I wanted to be in demolition seemed reasonable to me. Yeah, why not? That's what I wanted to be, and I got to go to simulation school.
Speaker 1:I want to back up just a little bit. What was it like those first few days at boot camp or basic training? What was that like for you? I mean, you're kind of on this high from making your own decisions and now you're at basic training. What was that like? How was that like? How was that different from your, your life before?
Speaker 2:it. Actually I didn't have a problem with it at all. For one thing, my ROTC got me a stripe on my sleeve that that nobody else in my squadron got, so it gave me a bunk at the front of the front of the barracks and I could talk with surgeon Anderson if he was there.
Speaker 1:So it was a different dynamic for you than it was for other people. It was yeah.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh yeah, and it was decided that I wouldn't put that stripe on my sleeve until after I graduated, because it just wouldn't look good to the rest of the guys Right.
Speaker 1:So, you have a stripe on your sleeve and a target on your back right Pretty much, yeah. So you have a strap on your sleeve and a target on your back right Pretty much yeah. No one wants that, no, all right. So you wanted to go into demolition yeah, and you put that as like your preference and you ended up going to demolition school. Now I will tell you a lot of veterans that I talked to, including myself. We put our top three things on the list and we got number four. So you were very fortunate to get what you wanted.
Speaker 2:Not an awful lot of people wanted that Uh-huh. And when I was all through with basic training and, in two sections, off to demolition school. It was in Indian Head, Maryland.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:And it was a good school. So what was that school like for you?
Speaker 2:It was interesting because there were the demolition school taught everybody around the world. There were people from England, there were people from France, there were people from Italy. They all speak English, but they were all taking the same courses. I was for the same reason. I was and at the end, see you later. I'm going back to the Air Force and you're going to go wherever the hell. You are Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and so how long was? How long were you? Do you remember how long you were there for that school? It?
Speaker 2:was about seven months.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, and you. So, if I'm doing my math right, you came into the Air Force right between Korea and Vietnam, or am I? Yeah, so you were kind of in that in between and I was disappointed when Korea quit yeah. I hate to say that, but I was well, no, I mean a lot of people join the military because they want to serve in that capacity. I get it, completely get it. So you finish up with demolition school. Where do you go from there?
Speaker 2:to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, the SAC case, and SAC was my main charge from then on. Strategic Air Command Okay, cheesy Air Command. They had B-52s just coming in to get rid of the last airplanes which were B-36s and they a compact next to that thing. Right, and this will be difficult, but I didn't have an awful lot of responsibility because at the time of the mission we didn't blow anything up.
Speaker 1:Didn't we get to practice or anything?
Speaker 2:No, oh Well, I did one time at Helsingborg. We got rid of JEDO bottles or jet assist takeoff bottles that would go on the back of B-47s or the B-36 and help them take off. B-52 surely didn't need that. So we got rid of all these Jato bottles. Since I was the only demolition expert there, we put them all in a row One of it, that one and that one. It was just a lot of fun to watch.
Speaker 1:So you daisy-chained them right? Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 2:How exciting was that it was thrilling. Guess what I was in charge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you made that happen, you bet. I must have felt great it was all good then.
Speaker 2:From from them we're into the Air Force now.
Speaker 1:Absolutely From that on, not an awful lot happened at Couchworth with the B-52s.
Speaker 2:They were well taken care of and whenever they were putting weapons on them, I had to go out and watch and that was it. That was my whole outfit.
Speaker 1:What was it like seeing that so this is a brand new bomber coming in. What was that like to kind of see that shiny new object get brought in when we saw that first one land?
Speaker 2:it was unbelievable to see that thing coming in from miles and miles away and hitting it the wrong way and doing it right, and it was just an incredible. Like you said, it's a brand new nice, shiny object.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a privilege to be able to see something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it was the squadron that I was assigned to were in charge of the bombs that went in it, and they had no idea how to do that. So it was a question of training them to put bombs in it and then the crews to fly with these things in it. Now did they do a lot of training-52s, and other air bases around SAC bases that had either B-47s or B-36s were being informed of what the B-52s were going to be like, and our guys not the ammo guys, but the flight crews would take these things into various Air Force bases, show them off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, why not?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So how long were you in the Air Force in total? How many years did you serve? Nine years, nine years, okay.
Speaker 2:So this is really your first assignment.
Speaker 1:It was Okay, and then where?
Speaker 2:did you go from there To Texas? I can't think of the name of the base.
Speaker 1:Oh, we'll get there, but you went to Texas. I went to Texas, yeah.
Speaker 2:And what we did in Texas was we took a number of B-52s and made that an active B-52 base. Okay, it had been only a training base before that and now it was becoming an active SAC base.
Speaker 1:Uh-huh, so you got to take a little bit from here and bring it over to Texas and…. Yeah, okay, and do you know how long you were in Texas for?
Speaker 2:Maybe not quite a year.
Speaker 1:Okay, just long enough to get everything set up. Yeah, and then where were you off to after that?
Speaker 2:Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska.
Speaker 1:Oh, texas to Alaska, that's got to be a big change. Yeah, it was a great change.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:It was to get to see Alaska, yeah. And get to see Eielson Air Force Base, and it was an interesting, interesting move.
Speaker 1:Well, tell me a little bit about that, because it sounds like it was probably beautiful there?
Speaker 2:Oh it was. It was incredible. This was before Alaska was a state and it was. It was. In some places it was wild country. I even got an apartment in Santa Claus's home, oh really.
Speaker 1:I have to hear about this.
Speaker 2:It was a mistake. I needed to get a house. It was a mistake, I needed to get a house. It was someplace between Hiles and Fairbanks and that's where North Pole was, north Pole's, a little town in between those two, and I got to stay in North Pole for a while. Wow, I've never met anybody that lived at North Pole. Now you do.
Speaker 1:I have to get your North Pole for a while. Wow, I've never met anybody that lived in the North Pole. Now you do I have to get your autograph when we're done. Oh yeah, no problem.
Speaker 2:And another interesting thing I did two things that I thought were interesting. I worked in a flower shop there. Oh, Because I had some experience. They needed somebody. They really needed somebody, Somebody that knew how to take care of the flowers that were coming in from Seattle on an airplane how do I get them out of the box and get them in the water and trim the edges and all that sort of thing and that's what I did. I wasn't a designer or anything. I took care of inventory of real flowers.
Speaker 1:Right, and that was an interesting job. How was it different? I mean, you worked for Big Jack doing kind of the same thing. How did it feel to work doing that for somebody else?
Speaker 2:Somebody appreciated it and said hey, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how'd that feel.
Speaker 2:It made me feel very important. Very good, yeah, and I could do that. No-transcript. He would do it one reflex, I would do it the next one, so I could spend my time at the flower shop.
Speaker 1:So you had some free time when you were there.
Speaker 2:A lot of free time.
Speaker 3:It was good.
Speaker 1:And how long were you in Alaska for?
Speaker 2:18 months.
Speaker 1:That's the tour so it sounds like your time in the Air Force. It was a lot of turnover. Then you went from place to place. So, other than working in the flower shop, what's one of your favorite memories of Alaska? Because people watch it. So people will hear this and people will watch it, people watching it. When you said you went to Alaska, your face kind of lit up. That was really kind of a great place for you.
Speaker 2:It was. It was very good I managed to buy a car.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:A little dash, it's a great car.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it's a great car. Oh yeah, it's a great car. So me and the guys that were associated with me, we'd load in the car and go for trips around. They'd want to go hunting and I wasn't interested in hunting too much, but I'd go with them because there were places in the car to put their rifles and stuff.
Speaker 1:Right, there's something interesting about because I've done this before when you go with people who are hunting and you see it from a different point of view than a hunter sees it. Yeah, and it's a really great experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wasn't interested in shooting anything.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Especially caribou, which is what we and occasionally a moose. They would shoot caribou because they're easy to carry back to the base and that. Nothing bigger, nothing smaller, and they got a major kick out of it. I got a caribou, take it to the dining hall and they would take care of it there and feed the troops with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they must have appreciated that I would think yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so what a great deal. You drive them out there, you get to see the wilderness and you get a great meal afterwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So where did you go from Alaska? What was your next duty station?
Speaker 2:All the way to Michigan, okay. To Oscoda, yeah, we're there for space in Moscow, okay I actually have been there.
Speaker 1:When I was in the Navy, I was a recruiter and we would go to Oscoda to use the medical facilities. Yes, before they closed everything down. Yeah, but we're Smith. Yeah, I remember that place. How did you like being there?
Speaker 2:That was pretty good. That was a good experience. By then I had more than just the oneron in some respects in my respect and the things that were done at Wurtswins were very good for me. I knew where the ammunition dump was and I knew where everything like that was the bombs that we put on the airplanes. They were stored in the same place.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so were you kind of doing the same thing there, just overseeing the loading and fueling and that kind of thing. Yeah Well not the fueling, oh, just the loading. All weapons Okay, and bullets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, b-52's got bullets.
Speaker 3:I did not know that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's got four 50-calorie machine guns in the back.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of firepower.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is, and anybody chasing it down is liable to get shot. But as the B-52 grew bigger or older, the weapons stayed there, but the gunner was back up front with the rest of the staff. He didn't like being in the back, really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not a good place to be.
Speaker 2:No, well, he had to lay down. There was no place, no chair for him to sit on and he was laying on his stomach and if anybody wanted to chase him down, he had the ability to put a lot more bullets back in that back area and he would see through a screen what he might be shooting at.
Speaker 1:Oh, so he no longer had to manually move that gun around. He could do it from up front, right, yeah, yep, everything changes, doesn't it? Oh, it all grows up. It does, yeah, it does. So how long were you at Wordsmith? Another 18 months, then there.
Speaker 2:No, the rest of my tour, actually, with an exception.
Speaker 1:Okay, did you do anything outside of the military while you were at Wordsmith? I know in Alaska you were working in a flower shop, but did you have anything else you did there, or you just sort of did your job?
Speaker 2:but did you have anything else you did there? Or you just sort of did your job. I painted signs and drew pictures and that was about it. Okay, and just for me only I might put signs in the window of a restaurant saying copying down their menu and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Okay, Just for fun. So you had some artistic talent. Then it sounds like it was developing.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh, it was developing there.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then you said you were there for the rest of your tour, with like one exception. What was that?
Speaker 2:I got an invitation to go to Southeast Asia, oh, and what did you do there? We developed a bomb dump. We were invited to go into what really was a mess of jungle. Oh, we'll take care of the trees, don't worry about that. And they did. They defoliated the whole thing. Guess what?
Speaker 1:I'm guessing they used Agent Orange to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it wasn't Orange, it was something else, but 12 of my guys are dead.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:And it was pretty nasty. But we didn't know it was nasty. All we knew was that the trees are gone and all the weeds in the jungle is gone. Now we can see our fence.
Speaker 1:So did they pass away fairly soon after that, or years later. Right away after that, so you kept in touch with people once you got out.
Speaker 2:Only accidentally. There were a couple of them that I met on motorcycle runs that my son and I were doing through the woods in Michigan and they would tell me oh, did you hear about. And again, one by one, they were all gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were losing a lot of our veterans due to the chemical, including the base commander, who was a good friend of mine. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, so I don't want, I don't mean to jump around, but I just kind of wanted to ask that question. So how long did they have you in Southeast Asia putting this together?
Speaker 2:Um probably 18. Months.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right, and then what's so? What's a bomb dump? What is that? What is that? What's the purpose of that? It's a place to store. Oh, so it's like an ammo. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I understand, um, it's, it's revetments. Well, what dirt did you do with?
Speaker 3:it.
Speaker 2:With it. You know the thing with the blade in front of it. Oh yeah, and we had a row of 500 pound, 750 pounds, whatever, in there. The other ammo would be in a revetment with a roof over it and steel doors in the front. That's where the bullets would be for the weapons that people on base would need.
Speaker 1:So things were starting to happen in Vietnam at this time in Southeast Asia.
Speaker 2:Beginning to happen. Yeah, we had a total of five aircraft and they flew daily with weapons on them. Sometimes and then that becomes where my job came from sometimes they'd come back with a bomb hanging like this on the bottom of the wing Right.
Speaker 1:That's not good?
Speaker 2:Not good at all. They had to salvo that bomb and the rack and it all went in wherever they could drop it and they tried to drop it away from the base, away from the city, and we had to get there before the Thai guys did Right, they wanted that bomb so they could go fishing Bomb fishing.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it was like dynamite fishing right Pretty much, yeah, exactly. Oh goodness, yeah, and they figured out. I don't know how they figured out, but they could take the fuse off the front and the tail fins off the back and then they could get in to where the explosives were. They had to get that fuse off first.
Speaker 1:That whole thing sounds dangerous.
Speaker 2:It is. It was terribly dangerous and we had to get there first. We'd pick it up with with a helicopter and fly it back to the base as quickly as we possibly could, so we could fix it Right.
Speaker 1:Now so did they repair those, or did they just detonate them somewhere?
Speaker 2:No, we would only get a bomb before the locals got it. Okay, if the Thais or the Leos got ahead of them, we didn't have any way of getting back to them, yeah, and we might get to rack.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they didn't really care about that, they just wanted the bomb. Right, they just wanted the bomb. Okay Now, did you get to see much of Southeast Asia while you were there, or was it mostly just work? I didn't get to see much of the area.
Speaker 2:Just number one, I didn't have the time. Number two I managed to buy a motorcycle and I could ride that around, but I couldn't go very far.
Speaker 1:Right. So did you buy? Was that like a little small motorcycle or was it something? Oh yeah, 125. Yeah oh, you can get in a lot of places with that, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well that must have been kind of nice. You never knew when you were in Laos or in Cambodia. Don't go any further. We belong in Thailand. Don't get in those other countries here.
Speaker 1:Right, right, because no one's going to admit you were there anyway, right? Uh-uh, yeah, so you did your time there and then you came back to Wordsmith Wordsmith, yeah. And then did that pretty much finish out your time. Then, when you got back to Wordsmith, pretty close, yeah, okay. And so when you got out after nine years, what rank would you have been then?
Speaker 2:Was that a? I was Airman First or Buck Sergeant?
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. After nine years, why'd you get out of the?
Speaker 2:military Because they didn't give me that other strength. Oh, air Force had a way of promoting by percentages, mm-hmm. By percentages you were able to promote a certain percentage of available airmen to the next strike.
Speaker 1:And if you were in an ammunition squadron, we don't have like 50 people in the whole time. Somebody had to retire or die or get out right much yeah yeah. It sounds like people enjoyed the job. So where are they going to go Now? They're going to stay there, and I was going to say that that was it was my life.
Speaker 2:I was going to be there Didn't work out Because while I was in Ubon a guy was transferred into another base and he had the same stripes I did and they promoted him with my stripe.
Speaker 1:Oh, I can understand why you might be upset about that upset was easy, yeah, lots of other words we could use. I guess Right, yep, yeah. So you decided I'm done, I'm going away. So what did you do? You got out, what was your plan?
Speaker 2:I didn't really have a plan. Uh-huh, I have a plan, uh-huh. There's pieces of my history in there, in that part, that I just don't want to talk about right now. Okay, won't do it. Okay, I went to work for big jack. He had a flower shop with an apartment above it. Now I got the apartment can't go wrong with that it had a garage and that's where the model a was. Bad news there. His was in there, mine was gone.
Speaker 1:Oh, he donated mine while I was away was gone. Oh, he donated mine.
Speaker 2:Well, that was a way wow. Well, I guess he was still probably pretty mad that he left. Well, pretty much, yeah, yeah, yeah, and he probably got, probably got a good amount of cash plan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how long did you work for him?
Speaker 2:Not very long, because I got an opportunity to go to work for General Motors at the Tech Center.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Now was that, as a result of your training in the military, somewhat?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and would you believe my job was to write letters.
Speaker 2:We had engineers sitting at drawing boards and they would make changes to the fender, the hood, whatever make changes to the vehicle that they were working on and explain that in their words to me. I would write a letter that the people that are going to get a copy of those blueprints could understand.
Speaker 1:So you translated their engineer talk into something regular. Guys could understand Very much.
Speaker 2:That was my job. There were three of us. There was the really old grump who was in charge of it and there was myself and another guy that wrote letters and I think we had 18 girls that worked in the reproduction group and I would take my letter, along with the work order and the old drawing in there, and give it to one of the girls and they would make copies and ship them out.
Speaker 1:Sounds like you got pretty busy then. Is it at some point here where you met your wife? Exactly Okay, Was she one of those gals? That was Alright?
Speaker 2:well, I have to hear this story, yeah well, I would take the drawings in and my letter and the paperwork, do it right, put it on the counter and she would snub me, her. She would snub me Right and give it to somebody else to do. She wouldn't recognize me or anything. We worked from 6 o'clock till 2 o'clock in the morning. That was our shift. Someplace in the middle of that was a lunch hour. The lunch hour was upstairs on the third floor and of course the elevators were all shut down.
Speaker 3:Down the stairs.
Speaker 2:The girls would go up first in sections, and then my buddy and I would go up at once, and this herd of girls rounded the chair, a stairway coming down in front of us, and I said, oh my God, that's the one, that's it, that's the girl I'm going to spend my life with.
Speaker 1:So you pretty much knew right away I did.
Speaker 3:I don't think she did though.
Speaker 2:He said you mean short skirts, Yep.
Speaker 1:That was her nickname. Yeah, short skirts. Short skirts Because she wore short skirts.
Speaker 2:I was right about that time in history right?
Speaker 1:Yes, you got it Absolutely. It was a beautiful time in our history, Perfect for me. Yes, I can only imagine. So you knew right away.
Speaker 2:I did.
Speaker 1:She wanted nothing to do with you.
Speaker 2:No, it was probably two months before she would even acknowledge me, and that was that come time to. It was coming on Christmas time then, and General Motors then and still lays everybody off at Christmas time, just the way it is. And our group got laid off and instead of going three stories up to the lunchroom, we went to a little local bar and got a sandwich and a beer there at lunchtime. To a little local bar and got a sandwich and a beer there at lunchtime. And the whole crew decided, hey, we're laid off, what do we care, let's have a party. And yeah, okay, we're going to have a party. Well, okay, let's have it at Dory's house because she's close. And Well, okay, let's have it at Dory's house because she's close.
Speaker 2:And I wasn't working there anymore. I was working for another engineering firm. I was the guy on the drawing board making the pictures rather than the guy writing the letter, right, and I worked during the day. So at lunchtimetime I meet these people there and it was decided that I would take Dory and we would get all the stuff for the party the beer and then potato chips and pop, whatever and the party would be at her house after. Well, yeah, but I got to get back to work. No, you don't have to get back to work, you're not going to go back to work anyways, they all did.
Speaker 2:And at 2 o'clock in the morning they all showed up at her house and we had a great party and the thing that she likes to say. I don't necessarily enjoy this part of it, but the party was getting and they stayed with us for the party and I heard and everybody else heard, Dory say Don't you leave me alone with him, Don't you do that. And they bye and they left me alone with her and from that point on on I think we were connected. Uh huh, there was. We went out virtually every night until finally she said look, you can't take me to the bank, I've got laundry to do, great all that stuff she's been putting off going out with you Exactly.
Speaker 1:So how long did you date?
Speaker 2:Oh, a year.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, and we made the rounds of the places that played guitar and sang folk songs. Oh, so you watched it or you participated? No, no, I watched it. Okay, all right, I was thinking you were a folk singer.
Speaker 2:That came later, oh, okay.
Speaker 3:All right, all right, I figured you were a folk singer. That came later.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, all right. Yeah, we went to the Poison Apple, which was downtown Detroit, off of Jefferson, and it was in the basement of an old brick building. Wow, must have been a great time it was.
Speaker 1:It was awesome. So at some point after that year long dating, you decided to get married.
Speaker 2:I think I decided and then I had to decide, get her to decide as well sounds like there's a lot of convincing going on in this relationship.
Speaker 1:It's kind of my life, yeah, so you asked her to marry you. Sounds like there's a lot of convincing going on in this relationship. Yeah, yeah, so you asked her to marry you.
Speaker 3:I did.
Speaker 1:And at some point she finally said yes.
Speaker 2:Actually she didn't argue very much. Oh, all right, we went to a the jeweler and bought a ring together.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's nice, and did you get married fairly soon after that?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it was very soon after that. Okay, tell them how you proposed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's hear about this proposal For the people watching and listening. Dory's just off to the left here with me, so she's kind of helping fill in some of the story and maybe keeping Fred honest here. But yeah, so how did you?
Speaker 2:propose I had intended to propose when we were out to dinner and I had ordered my dinner the way I like it. She had ordered her dinner and I said you know, you've got to try these. These are really good. No, I don't eat toast. Oh, come on. And she, it was. She was going to go in the bathroom and throw up after she had a snack of a piece of my meal.
Speaker 1:So the proposal went to another time okay and do you remember when that was no, I don't when we did taxes oh so, so the romantic doing the taxes, you decided to propose them. Yeah, I saw how much money she had come in Right, and it was about time then, right.
Speaker 2:Our friends were coming over. You had already told them that you were going to propose. I had spent the day in a junkyard, which I enjoyed doing Pieces for the cars and stuff like that, and my friend was there and they were. Him and his then wife were going to come over afterwards and I said, well, I'm going to propose to her so you can help us celebrate. It was the day that we were working on our. I was helping you with your yeah, she is the tax person in the house.
Speaker 2:So we were doing taxes. Yeah, so I was in February, so we were doing taxes. So I was in February and our friends walked in the front door and, instead of keeping it quiet, what did she say?
Speaker 1:Oh no, oh no. Cat's out of the bag now.
Speaker 2:Yes, there it is. And they looked at me and says well, it was not a very romantic situation, makes for a great story though, doesn't it? Oh, yeah, until then he had been quite the person to give me flowers and to be sweet.
Speaker 3:But he asked me that day, not when we were doing taxes, but he asked me that day.
Speaker 1:I don't know when we were doing taxes.
Speaker 2:So finally you asked her to marry you, and then you got married a while later, not a long while later. I got married in August.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay. So you proposed in February, got married in August. So how long have you been married now? 56 years or 57 56, 57 years, and how many children do you have?
Speaker 2:we have two daughters and a son, and that's one of the reasons we're here, because the two girls one is 12 miles that way and they're 12 minutes that way and the other is 9 minutes that way.
Speaker 1:So it's nice close to family. So tell me when your first child was born. Was that your daughter or your son? Our first child was our daughter. Okay, all right, and what's her name?
Speaker 2:Marnie Marnie.
Speaker 1:Moose, so she married someone named.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Oh, you call her Moose, I called her. Moose. Oh okay, I thought you were telling me your name was Marnie Moose. So what's the story behind calling her Moose?
Speaker 2:In the hospital. I spent all day in the hospital waiting for Dory to provide a baby, Okay, and the doctor had already broken his elbow trying to get things done right. It was not a good day for anyone in that hospital and I sat in. Those days you sat in a waiting room.
Speaker 1:Right, the guys didn't go back. Right, you waited.
Speaker 2:And people would come in and the nurse would come in and announce a name and oh yeah, it's me Out, they go and here I'm sitting waiting for a girl and other guys are coming and going right, oh yeah, and here I'm sitting waiting for Dory to produce his girl and other guys are coming and going right. Oh yeah, yeah, and you're just sitting there.
Speaker 2:So back at the viewing room where you could stand and look through the glass windows and you see all these babies in there. And all the babies that were in there were little tiny things, except for one, and one was a good-sized baby. And this guy asked me well, which one is yours? And I said mine is the moose that's over there.
Speaker 1:It's still there all that, that name stuck. Huh, Just kidding. He's the only one who gets it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I get away with it. Nobody else does. Uh-huh, Our oldest daughter he married me with my daughter.
Speaker 2:You were a teen. Yeah, she had a daughter.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, okay, so she she was so how old was she when you got married? Four five five, okay, yeah, all right, and so what's her name? Donna, donna. So you have Donna and Marnie and then Alexander. So how long after was Alexander born? 7 years after so there was quite a distance between so so 5 years between the girls and then 7 years between your son. And then where were you working as you were raising your family?
Speaker 2:Oh, my Too many places, okay, so you moved around a little bit yeah. I worked as a designer on a drawing board and doing things called job shopping, and a job shopper will take contract to design, detail check, roll it up and give it to the person that pays the bill. I job shopped a number of different places and it was that's what I was doing. Somehow I managed to get connected to drawings that I was doing for the guys that make the bowling alleys and things over in the far side of the state.
Speaker 1:Over like a Grand Rapids area.
Speaker 2:Let's go a little further than that, oh like. Muskegon yeah, probably Okay so but the west side of the state then.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, far over the west side, oh, like Muskegon, yeah, probably okay, so, but the west side of the state?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, far over the west side. Yeah, okay, and it all started. We need a machine uh-huh.
Speaker 2:Frederick, I know you can do this. We need a machine that that can take a bowling pin off a rack, put it into a machine that puts plastic all over it and then take it out and stack it in another rack. And I said, well, that's a big place. I was really familiar with that at the time, with other jobs that I had done. And, okay, well, build me one, and we know what it's worth. Do I just go ahead and build it? Well, I did.
Speaker 2:I didn't build anything. I had a team of people. I had welders actually former Vietnam guys that did the welding, and I had other people that did the buying and other people that did, and all I did was go in my drawing board and make pictures for the next machine, right, and that happened. Then I made the smartest decision of my life right about then, because people would come in and say, what about my blue cross? What about my vacation time? What about this, what about that? And I said you know time, what about this, what about that? And I said you know what, I don't have anything to do with that and I don't care. You want to know how to find that kind of information. You talk to the president, and about that time I had made her the president, oh so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she didn't know that she got a promotion and all the fun stuff that comes along with it. Yeah, you bet, so you had quite a business going then.
Speaker 2:We ended up with. We had about 50 people and it was just about like an Air Force base. These people did this, these people did that, those people did the other thing, and all the way down the line.
Speaker 1:Now do you feel like your military experience then really helped you with that?
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And were you still in the Detroit area when all that was going on?
Speaker 2:It was here in Howell.
Speaker 1:Oh, in Howell. Okay, so you had moved to Howell with your family.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then. So how long did you do that?
Speaker 2:I built machines and that was five, six years, Okay, something like that Until Mitsubishi bought my biggest customer. They had their own automation person. They didn't need me at all. So when I'm finished with that machine, I'm finished with that customer. And it was not a good time, right then.
Speaker 1:Would this have been like the mid-70s then, or early 80s?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that was a—.
Speaker 1:Middle to late 70s. Yeah, that was a tough time to not have work yeah, it was.
Speaker 2:So I got a job at General Motors at in Flint and turns out the guy I was reporting to was a friend of mine from high school and of course he sat in an office and we waved at one another. It was our job to export Gemini Motors products. Mm-hmm, I was in charge of Buick and Cadillac and exporting cars that big it was a little difficult.
Speaker 1:I can only imagine, yeah.
Speaker 2:But they all wanted them right. Most of them were taking a Cadillac four-door and making a limousine out of it or using it as a limousine to pick people up at a hotel. Driving to the airport, driving to the airport, and they were driving, in a lot of cases, on the wrong side of the road. So okay, fred, what does it take to make a right-hand drive Cadillac? My proposal was it will take two cars, one technician and three months, and at that time I'll have a right-hand drive Cadillac. At the end of three months I actually had a right-hand drive Cadillac. At the end of three months I actually had a right-hand drive Cadillac.
Speaker 2:And when you finish a project, you write a report, put it in a folder with the cover on the top and you give it to Mr Rogersgers and I'll never forget his name.
Speaker 2:Mr rogers was the general manager of the general motors engineering office and I had my documents all prepared and the car was sitting outside shiny cleaned, and I went around and put a document at each of the places that were his engineers were going to sit.
Speaker 2:He came in and he had sat at the very head of the table and looked at that and he said I am not going to sit here and listen to another report of a right hand drive, any effing thing slammed it down, and the guy that I had been working with on this Slammed it down.
Speaker 2:And the guy that I had been working with on this said you better get your books read. So I did, picked up all the books, went out of the room, met him in the hallway and I said well, I'm done here, what do we do now? And he said well, what do you want to do? I said, well, I'm going to go home and talk to Dory about it, for one thing, because I'm out of work and we had been between us. We had been talking to people overseas in Malaysia, thailand not so much Vietnam at that time, but the islands in the South Pacific, england, ireland, scotland they're all right-hand drive countries and two of the northern countries right-hand drive and we've been talking to those people about the fact that we're building a right-hand drive Cadillac and someday you can have one.
Speaker 1:Well, now they wanted one and so we were in the right-hand drive business. So did you convert left to right? Yep, wow, that's no small undertaking, is it no?
Speaker 2:it's not it's very worthwhile. My personal car was the Cadillac that I had done.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask what happened to that one-off Cadillac.
Speaker 2:I kept that oh you still have that car? No, I don't. Oh no, they came and got it and burned it. That's too bad.
Speaker 2:I was upset about that too. Oh, I'll bet. Yeah, we had a 2,000 square foot building that was sectioned off where that's the area they make fiberglass stuff. This is the one that takes the hoods off and on, and this does the wiring on and so forth. It was all sectioned off and done well and done cheaply, because I had my son and his buddies come in and they were taking the hoods off.
Speaker 2:You know, after school and it was a good social thing to do and we did make a complete conversion out of it and we had interesting comments of people overseas who had seen other conversions until they saw ours. We had one of our. Our first Corvette actually was in the London Motor Show.
Speaker 1:And boy did it raise hell. Yeah, that was so good, so you would convert whatever car it was they wanted. Then it wasn't just Cadillacs.
Speaker 2:We did Cadillacs, lincolns, mm-hmm Cordats, one Viper. Pretty much, that was it Okay.
Speaker 1:And how long would it take? Like if someone over there ordered a Cadillac, for instance. How long would it take for that conversion to happen? I would want about 12 weeks. Okay, Not really a long time then, not a long time at all and a lot of money.
Speaker 2:It will cost you just what you think it would be worth to have a right-hand drive car in your country.
Speaker 1:So similar to what Carroll Shelby does, where you buy the Mustang and then you ship it to Las Vegas and they do all the work to it, they do all that custom work, and then you ship it to Las Vegas and they do all the work to it, they do all that custom work and then you get it back. So you're really almost buying two cars when it's all said and done.
Speaker 2:We were a little different than that. We had the customer buy the car and had it shipped to us.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:In their name, because it's their car, us in their name.
Speaker 1:Because it's their car.
Speaker 2:It's their car Right. And they got it back when they opened a shipping container at their country, because after we were through with it, we would put it in a container and put it on the boat all the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, any idea how many of those cars you converted over time?
Speaker 2:We probably did. That company's name was Panther. At Panther we probably did 40 or 50 cars in the first year, and one Viper, and that was for Chrysler Corporation. They never burned theirs. An interesting thing happened about then. We got in contact with a company in California who built limousines long ones, the formal limousines and they were going to all these same countries too and they were having difficulty getting their cars registered because they didn't have the steering wheel on the right side.
Speaker 2:So we want you to make our cars right-hand drive. We want you to make our cars right hand drive". So they paid to have us move me and my dog to Arkansas where their manufacturing plant was, and we set up a right hand drive operation there and I stayed there for a while.
Speaker 1:It was good we lived there for a while. So was that the last—did you retire from that work or did you go on to do something?
Speaker 2:else once you were yeah, no, that was about it for manufacturing things, making things and even designing things. Then I managed to come back to Hull and I was working for my son-in-law as a car salesman and I thought that was magnificent, because all I'd have to do is show them the car. If they liked it, sell it to me.
Speaker 1:Right, you'd talk to people and if they buy'd buy a car. They'd buy a car, yeah.
Speaker 2:How long did you do that? Seven or eight years, something like that. Okay.
Speaker 1:So you were successful at that. Clearly Quite, yeah, yeah, yeah, quite no-transcript. And then so what part of Florida did you move to? Palmetto, palmetto.
Speaker 2:Which is between Tampa Bay and Sarasota. Well, Bradenton is there.
Speaker 1:It's a suburb of.
Speaker 2:Bradenton Okay.
Speaker 1:I know what you're talking about. So you, when we talked before we started recording, you had been traveling to Florida off and on right and you were finally like we need to move down here, so you moved to Florida, yeah and we did. And it didn't make your kids happy, right they?
Speaker 2:Well, we sold it to them, okay, well, you know, I have you know, but I was big enough to keep them down. You can have that house and you do your vacation here. What's?
Speaker 1:like selling a car right selling the idea of yeah moving to. Florida. Okay, and so you. You lived in Florida until recently, then.
Speaker 2:Very recently.
Speaker 1:Yes, you were affected by the hurricanes right.
Speaker 2:Three of them, okay, debbie and the other two yeah, they came in rapid succession, didn't they?
Speaker 1:Yes, they did. Yep, so before, all that happened, though I mean you were. I'm assuming you liked being in Florida, was it?
Speaker 2:We did. It was very good for us. It was good enough that it had two master suites.
Speaker 3:Oh, there's at one end ours at the other. Watch what you say next About.
Speaker 2:Eric, no, yeah, no.
Speaker 1:We don't need to share anything. We don't need to share. No, absolutely not. So you moved in with them.
Speaker 2:Not really Okay. We would go there on our vacations, oh that's perfect.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's perfect. So you sounds like Florida was good to you up until recently, when Well, we did go through a number of storms.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we all just said you know what, as long as we keep the windows down, everything's going to be fine. Mm-hmm, until everything wasn't Right, until everything wasn't and when Debbie came along, it was high wind and rain and a lot of rain. And that one bothered us. I had pictures of our house with water line at about four feet.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And everything we had was soaked or blown away. And what? Or blown away or blown away. Right it. Or blown away or blown away.
Speaker 1:Right, it's amazing how a storm can come through and just take everything, and it did yeah.
Speaker 2:We had every car on the street. Everybody lived on the street that had a car in the driveway. The cars were scrapped. Yeah, the cars were scrapped. Fortunately ours was not. I don't know why, but somebody was caring for us at that time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:We had what was the first one's name, the first storm? Well, it was Debbie. But what was the next one that gave us four feet of water in the house?
Speaker 1:If it makes you feel better. I don't remember naming any of these storms either, because it feels like they just came pretty quick and….
Speaker 2:What we did was we had every relative that was available and every friend of ours and we went to the house with four feet of water in them and we opened the door and our treasures out. The important papers, the things that we cared about. They said well, this caravan just got here because it's loaded with stuff, and they didn't take our caravan away, they took the neighbors cars. Oh, every car in the block went to the junkyard.
Speaker 1:Well, because they were across the street on the water, yeah, and so while the storm surge just came in and wrecked everything. So you packed up what you had left and you came back to home. It happened.
Speaker 2:We came to my oldest daughter. She picked us up at the Flint Airport and we flew home. The car was in the driveway and we had a very good plan all set. Marnie was going to go down and check through the house and make sure we got all the treasures and she would put them in crates and boxes and barrels and in the house and then secure gonna haul the caravan and everything he'd get in that big truck All of our treasures, all of our lives.
Speaker 1:Right Stuff you've collected for years.
Speaker 2:And everybody did that. Donna picked us up, took care of us for two weeks, maybe three. We lived in her house while she was arranging this. We saw this. She had a nice couch here, everything was here, and she did that while we were sleeping in her guest room.
Speaker 1:Well, family takes care of family right.
Speaker 2:And don't they.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So now you're back here and you're able to I'm assuming relax a little bit.
Speaker 2:Relax more than we're used to.
Speaker 1:Do you find it hard to relax? Sometimes we do Like you feel like there should be something going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I should be building something or designing something or drawing something.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, you've led a very interesting life and you've done a lot of things. I'm always amazed when I sit down and talk with people, when I hear the things that they've done, but this has been really truly interesting and amazing and something I'm not going to forget.
Speaker 2:Well, see, I built all that for you. Yes, you did. That's true, interesting and amazing and something I'm not going to forget. Well, see, I built all that for you?
Speaker 1:Yes, you did. That's true. That's true. I know where to come if I ever need a right-hand drive Corvette.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but yeah, so… we had people in Thailand and Malaysia specifically those two countries telling us that we can get right hand driving belt right here, and I said how were they doing that? And they explained to me that they would take the steering wheel over there and build something to put it on, sticking out of the floor and have a bicycle chain from here to here and as they turned, the front wheels would turn and if they ever hit a bump they'd crash the car. They had a terrible, terrible history of cars busting up after they hit a bump. Oh yeah, well, you have to do it the right way. Yeah, mine were the right way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a legacy. I mean, some of those cars are probably still out there on the road I'm sure they are, yeah, and then people still talk about it. Yeah, not. Not a lot of people get to have a legacy like that.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:You know, when we talk about bowling, I mean the work you did there, I mean that's still there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that'll be there for hundreds of years probably.
Speaker 2:We built a number of machines for them. For Rumswerk, who's the company, we built a number of them over there that were now rather than what they had before. They now had some nice machines that did the job.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. Yeah, so you know, as we kind of wind down our conversation today, I want to make sure we covered everything that you wanted to cover, but also I want to ask one final question. So before I do that, is there anything we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about today, actually?
Speaker 2:we've probably talked about things that I haven't even thought about for years then I've done my job.
Speaker 1:I've done my job, so I've got one last question for you, and I ask everyone the same question. We talk about your legacy and how people are going to know your work for years to come, but when someone's listening to this or watching this video long after you and I are both gone, what do you want them to take away from our conversation? But, more specifically, what do you want people to take away from your life and the way you've lived it?
Speaker 2:Like anybody that's paying attention to what we're doing today, to get a smile out of it. Maybe they'll figure yeah, you know, if Frederick did it, I can do it. It doesn't take much more than Frederick to do what he did, and I could never have done what I did without a team. Never did anything alone. I had to have a team. Even selling cars I had to have the cash would make a dead copy of the dashboard. Picture that. How do you make a copy of a dashboard when you've never done one before? And the same with the guy doing the wiring. We had. Wiring in a car is a bugger. Now I had a guy that was putting all that wiring over on the right hand side and he felt like he knew what he was doing and I never asked him differently. It worked Right it worked.
Speaker 1:It's part of building that team. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's always been a team, and the 12 guys that I was with in Thailand it was a team. We did what we had to do and we did it well, and what we did is still there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, alright. Well, thank you for sharing all that with us and thank you for taking time out to do this with me today.
Speaker 2:I hope you understood it or were entertained by what I said.
Speaker 1:I learned. Some of it was entertaining and some of it was just plain learning, and I appreciate it, thank you.
