Betty Branan | Interview 1 | December 20, 2011

DUNHAM: It's Tuesday, December 20, 2011, and I'm here with Bettye Branan in her beautiful home in Pleasanton, California, and we're here as part of the Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project. We usually start at the beginning. Could you tell us your name and your date of birth?

BRANAN: Bettye Louise Branan and my date of birth is February 3, 1925.

DUNHAM: And where were you born?

BRANAN: Little Rock, Arkansas.

DUNHAM: Now, did you know your grandparents?

BRANAN: Yes.

DUNHAM: Can you tell me about your grandparents?

BRANAN: Oh, my grandfather on my mother's side died when I was in the first grade, and my grandmother on that side, she lived until oh, I think nineteen 00:01:00fifty something.

DUNHAM: How old was she? Do you know?

BRANAN: No, she was only about seventy-eight, and they were both from Tennessee and had moved to Oklahoma when it was still a lot of Indians there. It had just changed from Indian Territory to Oklahoma. They farmed in Oklahoma. They had been grocery store owners in Tennessee, but I guess they wanted to change.

DUNHAM: What was their ethnicity?

BRANAN: They were English or something like that, yes. They were blue-eyed and light haired. It's funny we never thought about ethnicity back then, yeah. My 00:02:00dad's side, now his father was one-fourth Cherokee Indian, and he was always in police business; he was a marshal. My grandmother on that side died when I was real small, so there wasn't much that I remember about her.

DUNHAM: So you knew more your grandmother on your mom's side and your grandfather on your dad's side, a little bit?

BRANAN: Yes.

DUNHAM: You grew up in Arkansas?

BRANAN: No, in Oklahoma, Poteau, P O T E A U.

DUNHAM: How old were you then when you moved there? Pretty young?

BRANAN: Oh, yes.

DUNHAM: And that was Poteau, you said.

BRANAN: Poteau.

DUNHAM: What was Poteau like?

BRANAN: It was the county seat, and just a small town. It was a lot like Pleasanton when we first moved to Pleasanton. About 5,000 people, and it was in a valley and surrounded by hills, sort of in the foothills of the Ozarks, and it was a nice place to grow up.

DUNHAM: Did you have siblings?

BRANAN: I had a sister. She was a little older. She was born in 1923 or 22; I don't know for sure. And my brother is younger than I am, about two years. My sister has passed away last year, this year actually, and my brother's still alive.

DUNHAM: What can you tell me about your parents?

BRANAN: Well, my dad was a policeman a lot of years. He was the police chief in Poteau, but in between times when he would change jobs he always went back to barbering. Strange, yeah.

DUNHAM: How did he learn to become a barber, do you know?

BRANAN: He went to barber college long before I was born, yeah. I think he was barbering when my mother married him. They did things pretty young back then.

DUNHAM: And what kind of home did you live in?

BRANAN: It was a rental, and at one time we lived in a two-story house. It was a 00:05:00real nice home, but most of the time we lived in a like a two-bedroom house.

DUNHAM: What was it like living through the Depression?

BRANAN: Well, there wasn't much money. We never went hungry, but you didn't always have what you'd really like to have. But you know, I don't remember. Everybody was poor at the time, so you didn't think that much about it.

DUNHAM: Were you near your grandparents that farmed? Were they nearby?

BRANAN: Well, by then my grandfather was dead, and so they didn't farm but still lived on the farm. But we didn't get groceries from out there. We bought the groceries. In fact, I know we had a charge account at the grocery store, and 00:06:00Daddy always went by there on Friday night or Saturday night and paid the grocery bill for the week.

DUNHAM: What was a typical day like for your mom while she was raising the three of you?

BRANAN: She was a housewife. She cleaned the house every day, every day. When she made up the bed, I just pulled mine up. She took everything off, shook it, put it back on and cooked. She cooked three meals a day because we even came home from school for lunch.

DUNHAM: What type of things would she cook?

BRANAN: Well, different things A lot of times we had sirloin steak that she would cook like chicken-fried steak because that was one of Daddy's favorites, 00:07:00and we had pinto beans. And we always had a garden in the summertime, with lots of tomatoes and cucumbers and things like that.

DUNHAM: Did you all tend the garden or --?

BRANAN: No, that was Daddy's. He did that. Mother took care of the flowers. And, yeah, they never changed that even after Daddy retired; she still kept the flower beds, and he just did the garden. And he loved it. But it seemed like every Sunday we had beef roast and gravy; Mother made good gravy, and things like that, mashed potatoes. We ate a lot of fried potatoes; we ate a lot of fried food, yeah. And for breakfast --we always had a hot breakfast. Mother 00:08:00would make pancakes, and if we got up a little later, we had to cook our own, which was all right, and bacon and eggs and cereal, whatever, yeah. But there wasn't much cash. But things didn't cost much, I remember hamburger --

DUNHAM: Sounds like you ate pretty well.

BRANAN: Yeah, hamburger was five cents a pound. Well, it's just amazing, but if you had a nickel to spend, that was a lot of money.

DUNHAM: So your father would make end meet. He didn't have a consistent job, did you say sheriff --

BRANAN: Yeah, he did have a consistent job. He was barbering.

DUNHAM: Oh, barbering was his primary job, and then he sometimes worked, as you said, a sheriff or marshal?

BRANAN: As a policeman. We in this, part of the Depression we lived in this 00:09:00mountain town. It was called Pine Valley, and it was owned by a lumber company. That was the entire industry was this lumber company. It was named Derrick's, and Daddy was the only policeman, and we lived pretty good up there.

DUNHAM: How old were you when you lived there then?

BRANAN: I was in the second grade, second and third, and I guess we moved back to Poteau when I was in the fourth.

DUNHAM: Did you know why you moved there and then back or --?

BRANAN: No, just did.

DUNHAM: What was it like changing schools --?

BRANAN: Well, when I came back to Poteau it was very hard because I made straight As in the Pine Valley School, but it was small. They had, I believe, 00:10:00three or four grades in a room, and the one teacher would teach one grade for a while and give them something to work on. Then she'd do the next two rows, and then on like that, so I guess we weren't getting that good of an education there.

DUNHAM: So Poteau was the big town compared to Pine Valley.

BRANAN: Yeah, it was.

DUNHAM: Did you have to switch grades or anything then?

BRANAN: No. I can just remember I was used to making straight As and then I got into that fourth grade and fractions, and oh, it was hard. But after that year I was fine.

DUNHAM: Okay, well after you got back to Poteau, what was an average day like for you as a young girl?

BRANAN: Well, of course, we went to school, and I always enjoyed school. Then 00:11:00when we'd come home, we changed clothes. You know you couldn't wear your school clothes to play in. Then we'd all go out in the back yard, and there was a lot of kids that lived around there for two or three blocks. They'd all wind up in our yard and the one next to it; we didn't have them fenced off. We'd play games, and a lot of times we could stay out until after dark playing games. We'd come in to eat dinner, go back out, all these kids. We'd sit around, tell ghost stories in the dark, try to scare each other, make them up, and that was about the way it was, yeah.

DUNHAM: Was religion a part of your upbringing?

BRANAN: Yes, we were Methodists. We went to Sunday school and church.

DUNHAM: The whole family?

BRANAN: Yes, the whole family.

DUNHAM: When you were a young girl did you have any particular dreams or ambitions or what you wanted to do with your life, do you remember?

BRANAN: Not really. I just figured I'd grow up and get married. I'd never thought about, because Mother didn't work. I just never thought about it.

DUNHAM: Okay, yeah, sure. Well, what about health care? Do you remember what health care was like when you were growing up?

BRANAN: Yes, we had good health care. When we lived in Pine Valley there was a company doctor. The company owned everything there, so you went to the doctor probably for free, I don't know, because they owned the house that we lived in and everything. In Poteau we just went to the doctor when we needed to and Daddy paid for it, yeah. He was a good friend of Daddy's.

DUNHAM: Well, do you remember where you were when you first heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor?

BRANAN: Yes. I was out in the country at some friends' house, and somebody came in and said, "They bombed Pearl Harbor." I must have been a junior or senior, junior I guess in high school.

DUNHAM: Because you graduated in '43 right?

BRANAN: I graduated in '43.

DUNHAM: We've already mentioned, yeah.

BRANAN: And nobody knew where Pearl Harbor was; you'd never heard of it. I think that was true of most people. Maybe not out here because of the closeness to the Navy things. Then, of course, everybody was worried because they knew that all 00:14:00the young fellows would be going to war. Almost every boy in my high school class as they turned eighteen, they were drafted and left. They couldn't even finish high school. So by the time I graduated there were hardly any boys left in my class to go through the graduation ceremonies. They were all gone.

DUNHAM: So what was that like? I mean, there were many changes of the war, but one is that fact that all the boys are going away.

BRANAN: Yeah, all the boys are gone.

DUNHAM: What was that like socially or --?

BRANAN: Well, you didn't do very much. My boyfriend was a year ahead of me in school, and so he went. He wasn't around for the senior year. But we did a few 00:15:00things, I don't know, just girls getting together, yeah.

DUNHAM: What else do you remember about those first years of the war, and did you have much awareness of --?

BRANAN: Oh, yeah, everybody did. There was very much awareness because everybody had somebody in the war, wasn't like now.

DUNHAM: How did you follow the war?

BRANAN: On the radio and in the papers. Of course, they didn't tell you nearly everything that was going on and then --

DUNHAM: Did you correspond with your boyfriend who went --?

BRANAN: Yes, he was in the Navy.

DUNHAM: What was that like, getting letters from him and vice versa?

BRANAN: Well, it was fun. Yeah, I liked it.

DUNHAM: Where was he serving?

BRANAN: He was in the Navy, and he was still in the states at that time. I 00:16:00didn't marry him. Then I did see him after he was in the Navy after I graduated, but then by the time he came back, I was married, yeah. So I met my husband out here. He also was in the Navy.

DUNHAM: We'll get to that, I guess, but you said you were recruited right kind of out of high school, so how did that happen?

BRANAN: You know, I can't really remember. It probably was always in the newspapers and on the radio. They needed everybody that could work to work, and like my mother had never worked. I have a picture here of her with her work clothes on.

DUNHAM: Oh, great, well, we'll definitely take a look at that.

BRANAN: Women, always in high school and everything, we always wore dresses. You didn't wear jeans or --well, you just didn't. We had dresses or sweaters and 00:17:00skirts, and that was a big change.

DUNHAM: You mentioned before changing from your school clothes to your play clothes, but those were still skirts and dresses, yeah.

BRANAN: Still dresses, except in the summer we'd wear shorts, yeah. But, of course, we didn't go to school in the summer.

DUNHAM: Right.

BRANAN: But, on the other hand, I can't --the recruitment, I'm trying to think. My sister had married a year or two before that, and she probably got married in 1941, and she lived here in California. So when they decided that they would work --he was a dry cleaner, and they were going to go to work in Richmond at the shipyards. That's when my dad came out. That was before I finished high 00:18:00school, senior. So he came out, and my brother-in-law and my dad went to work in the shipyards, and my sister worked at the Housing Authority, Richmond Housing Authority. Then when I finished high school my brother went to live with our grandmother because he still had another two years, I guess, of high school. And Mother and I came out here.

DUNHAM: Did you come out on the train?

BRANAN: No, we came on a bus, and it was --I'm trying to think what they called it. Whatever it was, it wasn't a good bus, and it was so full that people sat in the aisles on suitcases. I think --now, this doesn't sound reasonable, but I'm 00:19:00almost sure we paid $19 each for a ticket.

DUNHAM: That sounds like a lot, right?

BRANAN: Well, we thought it was pretty cheap, that was the cheapest one. That included your meals, but then when they would pull up to stop at a place to eat, you had to eat there. I guess they had arrangements with the restaurants, and you only were allowed just so much to eat on, and they only stopped for thirty, forty-five minutes, so you had to eat in a hurry and leave. Then I went to Long Beach, and lived there for a while with this friend of mine that she and I had graduated together. She went, too, with Mother and me, and we stayed there at 00:20:00her house for, oh, I guess I stayed there until September.

DUNHAM: Your mom went directly --?

BRANAN: Mother went on to Richmond, and then Mother went to work in the shipyards, and she was put in the plate shop, which is a really good place to work because everything was flat. My dad and brother-in-law were both working in Shipyard Number One, yeah.

DUNHAM: Now, did you mom know she was going to work when she came out --?

BRANAN: Yeah, she came out here to work, she wanted to. And she loved it. Just loved it. I think she liked the independence. But anyway, yeah, she went to work in the shipyards. Then I went to work at Douglas Aircraft.

DUNHAM: Over the summer?

BRANAN: Yeah, as soon as I got out there Doris and I got a job and lived with her aunt and uncle. We lived in Belmont Shore, which at that time was a beautiful area in Long Beach, and we were just not a block from the ocean, yeah. So we worked graveyard shift and then --

DUNHAM: What were you doing on the graveyard shift?

BRANAN: Oh, we were riveting. They teach you to. You know, I can't remember going to riveting school or anything like that.

DUNHAM: Don't remember getting any training for that?

BRANAN: I don't. But I'm sure they must have done something because it's not as easy as it looks, and the airplane skin's very thin. We were working on B-17s, the bombers. If that rivet gun wasn't held steady, it would cut a hole in the 00:22:00skin; then they'd have to put a bigger rivet in. But it would weaken the whole thing, so that was something you had to do. Mostly I bucked the rivets. One person has to be on one side and the other on the other side.

DUNHAM: So you were the bucker?

BRANAN: Well, I worked on the part where they were putting in the turret gun, and there was a small compartment that you had to stick your hand through. My hands were small, so I could do that. So I did that most of the time, and that was fun. We enjoyed doing that, but we worked from I think from midnight until 6:00. We had a shorter shift than the others.

DUNHAM: Do you remember your first night on the job?

BRANAN: No, I really don't. But I can remember we had to buy our own tools. We had to have --they sold them there. We had to have these big --I don't know, they looked like big scissors, but they weren't. But sometimes you'd use them to cut; they had these great big boards laid out there that they would have patterns around for people to cut around them, and you had to have those. I guess the rivet gun --I don't know if those were furnished or we had to buy them, but there were several things you had to buy.

DUNHAM: Your work clothes?

BRANAN: Well, your work clothes, it was clean work. You had to wear pants and shirts like that and wear your hair tied up because you didn't want to get it 00:24:00caught in anything. The thing of it was, it was so camouflaged that I never really could figure where we went in.

DUNHAM: Because at the whole camouflage over the whole thing --

BRANAN: No, you went through a tunnel. And there was camouflage above it, and they said there was this one group of pilots that flew in there one time and couldn't find it because they had houses and trees all up above.

DUNHAM: On top?

BRANAN: Yeah. But that's in there.

DUNHAM: How was the graveyard shift? Sometimes I've heard stories on graveyard in particular that it could be a little, I don't know, rough or loose?

BRANAN: Oh, no. We didn't have any time for anything like that where we were.

DUNHAM: How about working with men? Were you working with --?

BRANAN: Hardly any men. Most of them had gone to war. They were older if there 00:25:00were. There was one fellow that worked there I can't even remember what he did, I don't know. There weren't that many men. I worked mostly all with women. I do remember that we had to take our lunch, and we ate probably about four o'clock in the morning, and a whistle would blow and, of course, being young I could sleep anywhere. And there was all kinds of rigging where the airplane parts would be set up for you to work on. I can remember eating my lunch and then just kind of laying back in that rigging and going to sleep until --we only had thirty minutes, but that whistle would blow off, I'd wake up.[laughs] There was 00:26:00noise going on all that time but --

DUNHAM: But you responded to the whistle.

BRANAN: Yeah, and --

DUNHAM: Well, what was it like doing graveyard shift? When did you sleep?

BRANAN: Oh, we went to bed as soon as we got home, and then we woke up or got up, oh, it seems like around noon or 2:00 o'clock. A lot of days we would --her aunt always cooked, and then we'd take things and go walk down to the beach and write letters and stick our feet in the water. That's about as far as we went. The water was so much warmer there than it is here in the ocean. Yeah, or we could go shopping. We had the rest of the day until midnight.

DUNHAM: What about at night then? Did you go out?

BRANAN: No, I don't remember that.

DUNHAM: Out to movies or --?

BRANAN: Oh, once in a while we'd go out to a movie or to Playland. No, that's not what --was Playland here?

DUNHAM: Up in San Francisco they have Playland.

BRANAN: Okay, down there they called it --

DUNHAM: Other wharf boardwalks and things --

BRANAN: Yeah, that was here. Down there they called it --I can't remember what they called it.

DUNHAM: Yeah, I know they had more of those than they do now, like Santa Monica, and they had one right at Long Beach.

BRANAN: Yeah, they did.

DUNHAM: Well, what was the makeup of the workforce there? You were coming from Oklahoma, you and your friend were from Oklahoma, what about your coworkers?

BRANAN: Well, I know some of them were --the girl I worked with most of time, she was Mexican. First time I'd ever been around a Mexican because in Oklahoma you just didn't have that many immigrants. In fact, I remember seeing my first 00:28:00Chinese guy in Oklahoma at church just before we left. And I'd wondered a lot of time what he was doing there, because there was no families that lived there.

DUNHAM: Was it an adult or a young --?

BRANAN: Yes, it was a man. But I had a hard time understanding a lot of people because they had accents. Of course, I did, too, but I didn't know that.[laughs] But everybody was nice and friendly and helpful. But we worked the whole time. There wasn't any goofing off or anything. There was only one night I remember, and this wasn't that type of goofing off. We were supposed to come in at 10:00 o'clock instead of midnight, and we did, and we got there. They really didn't have any work for us to do. They for some reason put us in these, oh, some kind 00:29:00of smaller airplane. Mostly we just sat there for the two hours until time to go to our regular job.

DUNHAM: This is just one time or --?

BRANAN: Yeah, just once.

DUNHAM: I wonder why.

BRANAN: I don't know. Well, they called it overtime, and we went in and thought we were going to have a job to do, and I don't know to this day why they did that. Then I decided to come up here to work where Mother and Daddy and my sister lived.

DUNHAM: When was that?

BRANAN: I believe that was in probably September of '43.

DUNHAM: So basically you worked the summer at Douglas.

BRANAN: I did, and when I got ready to come up here, they wouldn't give me a clearance to go to work. See, when you were working in some of the defense work, 00:30:00they didn't want you to leave. So the way they could keep you from leaving was not give you a clearance to get another job, and you had to have that. So I said, "Well, okay, I'll just go to school."[laughs] So they gave me the clearance, and I came up here and then --

DUNHAM: Did you know that would work, or did you --?

BRANAN: No, I didn't. In fact, I didn't realize I had to have a clearance until I was going to quit. Then I was told right away that I didn't have a clearance.

DUNHAM: Do you remember what that conversation was like on that --?

BRANAN: Well, I was pretty upset, but anyway, when I said, "Well, I just won't work; I'll just go to college." That's what my dad wanted. Anyway, I rode up 00:31:00here and got the clearance and came up here and went to work at the shipyards right away.

DUNHAM: Was that same day that they after they said no initially you got the clearance or --?

BRANAN: Yes, I got it the same time, yeah. So then I rode a bus up here --

DUNHAM: A little less crowded than the journey out from Oklahoma?

BRANAN: Well, not really. You had a real hard time during the war as civilians to get on a bus. All the servicemen got on first. Then if there was room, you could get on, but otherwise you didn't; you just had to keep waiting. I came out here the year between my junior and senior year to visit my brother-in-law and sister. They lived in Paso Robles, and he was working as a dry cleaner. So I had 00:32:00ridden out in a car with some friends, but from Los Angeles I had to take a bus up to Paso Robles. They left me in the bus station, and then I was supposed to get a bus out right away, and I had to sit there for hours because every bus would load up with soldiers. I had to wait to get a bus that would take me.

DUNHAM: How did you feel about that?

BRANAN: Oh, I was worried to death because --and it seemed like everybody I spoke to in that bus station had some kind of a foreign accent I couldn't understand.

DUNHAM: This is in Paso Robles?

BRANAN: No, that was in Los Angeles. That bus station was a big bus station, and now when I got to Paso Robles --I should have got there in the daytime, but I 00:33:00got there at night. The bus station was small, and it was closed. Fortunately there was a cab there so I could get a cab out. My sister and brother-in-law had been there when I should have got there, but I couldn't get on that bus, so I got a cab and went out to their house. But no, all during the war transportation was a real problem.

DUNHAM: So how long were you out for? Was that for the summer that you came out --?

BRANAN: Yes, I was out here probably for a month or two.

DUNHAM: So you had had a taste of Southern California --

BRANAN: Yes.

DUNHAM: And what did you do that summer?

BRANAN: Nothing.

DUNHAM: Yeah, did you make friends, or I mean there just --?

BRANAN: Well, mostly I was with my sister and brother-in-law. They were young, and we had a good time together.

DUNHAM: Did you guys go out to clubs --?

BRANAN: We went to dances, yeah. And I would get to dance with somebody.

DUNHAM: Is that in LA, or --?

BRANAN: No, that was in Paso Robles. Paso Robles is about halfway to LA. But I didn't make any friends.

DUNHAM: I know we talked a little bit about the end of the journey. What about the first bus ride out from Oklahoma, then? You came by yourself?

BRANAN: No, Mother and my girlfriend, yeah.

DUNHAM: So you came out that first summer, too, together, okay.

BRANAN: But that was quite an experience.

DUNHAM: Yeah, how so?

BRANAN: Well, the bus was full.

DUNHAM: Oh, so both times you came out it was pretty much the same, just jam-packed.

BRANAN: Jam-packed, yeah, that's just the way it was during the war.

DUNHAM: How about the bus ride home going back for your senior year, was it 00:35:00crowded, or no?

BRANAN: I don't remember that it was.

DUNHAM: Maybe because everybody's coming out this way, maybe not so much.

BRANAN: That must have been what it was, yeah. No, I don't think that was crowded.

DUNHAM: So you're heading back to, you're coming up to Richmond.

BRANAN: So I'm coming up here, yes.

DUNHAM: And what happened then?

BRANAN: Well, I got a job at the shipyards right away.

DUNHAM: Yeah, how'd you do that?

BRANAN: Just went down and applied. I guess I had to go to the union first and apply there, and then applied for the shipyards to be a welder, and they hired me.

DUNHAM: Did you know you wanted to be a welder, or how did --?

BRANAN: Well, that's what Mother was doing. I didn't know anything at all about the shipyards. So then I went to welding school out there at the shipyards. I can't remember how many weeks, but it was just a matter of weeks.

DUNHAM: I think on the phone you said about six weeks, but --

BRANAN: That's what comes to my mind, about six weeks.

DUNHAM: Was it hard?

BRANAN: Not particularly.

DUNHAM: No? Came easily.

BRANAN: We had to go buy those leathers to wear, and I guess we had to buy all of the stuff we'd wear. I remember we had to get maybe steel-toed shoes. They were work shoes like men wore, and the big old gloves and all. But yeah, I don't remember welding school being that hard. I worked the same shift they did, I went to that school, and they were working swing shift. So then Mother asked her 00:37:00foreman at the plate shop if he would ask for me when I graduated to come work over there, and he did. So I got to go work in the plate shop, too.

DUNHAM: Do you remember your first day at the plate shop?

BRANAN: No.

DUNHAM: Tell me about the plate shop anyway. An average day, what was it like?

BRANAN: Well, we really worked hard, nobody ever goofed off. But it was fun, too. So they had shipwrights. Now, the shipwrights were men, yeah. They were probably most of them like thirty-five, forty, forty-five, which I thought was old men [laughs] at the time. They would bring these huge plates in with those 00:38:00things would carry them; I can't think what you call them.

DUNHAM: The cranes or the --?

BRANAN: The cranes, yeah, I mean huge. The whistle would blow when they was going to bring a plate by and everybody had to stop and get out of the way in case it fell off, but none ever did when I was there.

DUNHAM: Did you ever hear of one --?

BRANAN: Never did hear of it, no. But the shipwrights would draw those two plates together --they'd be laying flat --and put beams; they'd even put them --they must not have just been at the seams. And those beams, the best I can remember looked kind of like railroad ties, I mean railroad rails.

DUNHAM: Tracks, yeah.

BRANAN: Anyway, they would get them fastened down, and I know they'd pull and get all the stuff like that, and then they'd have the tacker. I worked as a 00:39:00--most of the younger women worked as tackers because we had to stand up all the time, and you tacked it in places about so far apart, and that would hold it in place. Then the welders would come along, and they could sit down. They sat on one plate and worked on it right there, and then they'd come back up the other side. So the faster the shipwrights that you worked with, the faster you worked, yeah. Then they had women there that were; there was just one or --there was quite a few welders and tackers, but I just remember one on our side. The plate shop was divided into two sides and right down the middle where all the things 00:40:00that the machines that you were hooked up to. And there'd be a woman that was a burner, and when they made a plate cut, they'd call for her, and she'd come over and burn out whatever it was. When she didn't do that, she'd have to wait for somebody to call her. But we worked pretty steadily.

And then there was one old fellow; he was a retired lawyer, and he was eighty years old. His name was Mr. Butterway. He was a nice old fellow, and about all he did was help some of us. The lines were very heavy that we used for the welding, and you had to pull them sometimes for fifty, seventy-five feet. He 00:41:00would help us pull those lines if we needed help. Then we always bought our lunch at a little lunch stand that was right out in front there.

DUNHAM: Oh, yeah? What kind of food was that?

BRANAN: Sandwiches. We had twenty-five-cent lunch and a fifty-cent lunch and a --no, twenty-five, thirty-five, and fifty cents. The twenty-five cent lunch was always the bologna sandwich. I can't remember a whole lot more. The thirty-five-cent lunch, I never knew what it was, but I liked the sandwich, and it was something all ground together. Then there was a little different thing in there with that. Then the fifty-cent lunch was just a really good lunch and 00:42:00always had a piece of fruit or something, had more things in it. But anyway, they were good.

DUNHAM: Did it vary which one you got? Or did you --?

BRANAN: I'd buy whichever one I wanted, spend the money for, though we had lots of money because at that time we made good money at the shipyards and very few expenses because we lived in the public housing.

DUNHAM: So what was that like? How did you come to live in the public housing?

BRANAN: Well, because there wasn't any place else to live.

DUNHAM: Was that with your mom and dad?

BRANAN: My mom and dad, and my sister and her husband had an apartment in the public housing.

DUNHAM: In the same complex, okay.

BRANAN: Mother and Daddy and I had a two-bedroom apartment.

DUNHAM: So they were already set up when you got there.

BRANAN: They were already set up when I got there, and the only way they would have gotten the two bedrooms was also because I was going to be there. So they 00:43:00signed me in, and my brother, because they had thought when he finished school he would be out.

DUNHAM: Now is your sister working in the Housing Authority at this time and if so, where? Is that what you --?

BRANAN: I'm just trying; I can't remember whether she was working at that time or not. I don't think she was.

DUNHAM: Did she have children?

BRANAN: No, but she was pregnant. Yeah, no, she wasn't working. But we wouldn't have had a two-bedroom apartment if there had been just my mother and my dad and myself. I would have had to sleep on the couch. That's the way they did it.

DUNHAM: Well, how did you get a two-bedroom apartment?

BRANAN: Well, Mother and Daddy put my brother down thinking he was going to come out later. See, so they have to have a --then it had twin beds in that room.

DUNHAM: But he didn't end up coming out?

BRANAN: No, he didn't.

DUNHAM: What did he do? He was --

BRANAN: Well, he finished school and then he went in the Air Force. Yeah, and so, everybody now in the plate shop --my best friend was a native of Richmond, yeah. Her name was May Wakefield. She was married, but her husband was in Saudi Arabia working in oil there. Then mostly --

DUNHAM: How did you guys become friends?

BRANAN: She was friends with my mother. My mother made friends easily. Then there was another girl there that was my age, and she was from --she was also a 00:45:00friend of my mother's. She didn't like me at all when we first got there, when I first went to work there.

DUNHAM: How so?

BRANAN: Well, she told me this later after we had become friends. She said, "I wondered how Sada --that was my mother --could have a daughter as spoiled as you were."[laughs] I thought, "Well I didn't know that." But I didn't think I was, but anyway --

DUNHAM: Was she also from Richmond?

BRANAN: No, she was from Arkansas, not too far from where we lived. She and her sister both worked in the plate shop, and they were single. We became really good friends and were friends until she passed away about three or four years ago. Yeah, and our husbands were friends. Yeah, and it was a wonderful friendship.

DUNHAM: So as young single women in Richmond what did you do for fun?

BRANAN: Well, we went to show, and we dated a lot, yeah.

DUNHAM: How did you meet the guys to date?

BRANAN: Well, it was mostly people that I knew that came from Oklahoma. One guy, I had dated his brother in Oklahoma, and I dated him out here for a while. Then I met this guy that I had gone to high school with; he was a couple of years older than I was, and he was in the Merchant Marines. But he lived in El Cerrito, and he was between ships a lot. He would always come in there.

DUNHAM: So what would you do on a good date? What would be fun?

BRANAN: We went dancing and out to dinner, went to dinner a lot. I never liked to cook. [laughs]

DUNHAM: Do you remember some of the restaurants or some of the clubs you went to?

BRANAN: Yeah, Betsy's Kitchen in what used to be on San Pablo, not too far from Cutting Boulevard. We lived on Cutting and San Pablo, and we were just about a block off of San Pablo. It was close by. They had great food, and we ate there a lot, yeah.

DUNHAM: And what about for dancing? Where did you go dancing?

BRANAN: We'd gone over to Sweet's Ball Room and also some bar. I wasn't old enough to drink, but I did.

DUNHAM: It wasn't something that was asked at the time? It was pretty loose in that regard?

BRANAN: I never drank in high school.

DUNHAM: Okay, but I mean once you got here --?

BRANAN: But once I got here, it wasn't too long.

DUNHAM: Live and let live --?

BRANAN: Yeah, and we'd go dancing and go out to the bars, and you could dance there. A lot of times it was always --well, it seemed like every place we went you could dance.

DUNHAM: You were working swing shift; did you go out after your shift?

BRANAN: Well, I worked swing shift until almost, I worked there until my mother went back to Oklahoma, and then she didn't want me in the shipyards. She wanted me to get a job somewhere else first. So I got a job at the Housing Authority.

DUNHAM: Was that because she couldn't kind of have her eye on you? What was she worried about?

BRANAN: I guess. Well, I don't know. My sister never did work in the shipyards. My sister was working at the Housing Authority at the time. Well, the war was winding down.

DUNHAM: When did your mom go back to Oklahoma?

BRANAN: I'm trying to think. Well --

DUNHAM: She and your dad?

BRANAN: My dad was gone already. He had tuberculosis and had to go back to Oklahoma. I guess she went back because he was back there, but I can't --well anyway, she wanted me to get out of the shipyards.

DUNHAM: Did you mind at all or --?

BRANAN: No, no.

DUNHAM: Even though it was good money and --?

BRANAN: Yeah, and I made about half as much as the Housing Authority.

DUNHAM: But you didn't mind.

BRANAN: No. Well, my sister --by then her husband was gone into the Marines. And we were living together, and then we stayed there in the apartment. I still worked in the Housing Authority, the two of us. Then we got a chance to rent a house, and so the three of --one of the girls that worked in the bookkeeping 00:50:00departments where I went to work, and I went to work as a typist. I was always a terrible typist, my worst subject in school. But they needed somebody, and all I typed was like headings and things for the bookkeepers. So this girl that worked there in the bookkeeping department --there must have been eight or ten bookkeepers, and it was all machine bookkeeping --so she said, "When you're not busy typing if you want to come over here, I'll show you how to do the bookkeeping," because they got paid more. So that's what I did, so the next opening I got a bookkeeper's job.

So then later we moved into a house together. We found a --well; I got that 00:51:00through the Housing Authority. One of the women there her nephew and his wife got a divorce. They lived at 415 Barrett Avenue, and it was a really a nice little house. It was a craftsman style, if you know what that is, yeah. So the three of us, Inez and Joyce and I, rented that house, and it was $45 a month, two bedrooms, a huge living room, dining room, kitchen, washroom and breakfast nook.

DUNHAM: Do you know how much you were making at the time?

BRANAN: No, but we were just splitting the rent, so it was $15 a month, and we split all the groceries. It seems to me like I was only making about $35 a week. 00:52:00But things didn't cost much, and then that was my part.

DUNHAM: So do you know about when you left the shipyards and went to the Housing Authority?

BRANAN: It's probably here because I have the withdrawal slip somewhere, and yeah, let's see, September 8, 1944.

DUNHAM: So you worked in the shipyards about a year. You want to hold that up for a second, I'll take a picture.

BRANAN: It's also got my union thing. Well, no, one's one way and one's the other; maybe we should take it out of here.

DUNHAM: Oh, well, you can leave it in. I'll take a shot of it later, too. I'll just go ahead now for --hold it up a little bit higher? Great. So September 1944. Did you have an exit interview, do you recall, or do you remember anything 00:53:00like that? No?

BRANAN: No.

DUNHAM: Did you give notice?

BRANAN: Probably. I don't remember, but they wouldn't probably have replaced me. Well I don't know.

DUNHAM: September of '44, well --

BRANAN: Yeah, that's right, because the war wasn't over until '45.

DUNHAM: Yeah, still a ways, but did you miss the shipyards at all after your --?

BRANAN: No, because I had a lot of fun.

DUNHAM: Yeah, so did you have more fun after you left the shipyards; that meant because you weren't working swing shift, you had more time?

BRANAN: I went out more, yes, though it was easy to date when I worked at the shipyards because I got off at midnight and everything went all night long during the war. Richmond had four or five movie houses, and they all stayed open all the time. If you had a date, you still went to the movies, and then also the 00:54:00dances would go all hours.

DUNHAM: Yeah, at Sweets and are there other dance places --?

BRANAN: Oh, I remember going to --there was a country-western band that played there and their name was Dude something.

DUNHAM: Dude Martin?

BRANAN: Dude Martin, yeah.

DUNHAM: We have a friend, a colleague, who did some interviews and did a documentary film on Dude Martin.

BRANAN: Really?

DUNHAM: Yeah, back in --I can send you some information about that. But he did a short documentary film on --

BRANAN: This time we went out to the dance that --it's really funny, because we were young and thought we was pretty nice, and my girlfriend and my sister and I all went out to the dance and we said, "Now the first three guys that ask us to dance, we'll say no." Just being silly. Nobody asked us.[laughs] None of us. 00:55:00Yeah, it was really funny because there was so many guys and not that many girls.

DUNHAM: Oh, really?

BRANAN: No, because all the sailors are around, yeah. So it was funny. But yeah, we went out. Of course, my sister didn't date because she was married, but she would go to the dance. She did that time, I know. But then Joyce and I --that was the other girl that was from Oklahoma that worked in the bookkeeping. I introduced her to the guy, I was dating a guy from Poteau that I had known in school, and when his brother came back from the war, she dated him and married him.

DUNHAM: Oh, really?

BRANAN: Yeah, well, that's what we did for fun. You couldn't go anywhere much because nobody had a car, and if you did you couldn't get --

DUNHAM: Yeah, did you get to San Francisco at all or --?

BRANAN: Oh, yeah, we rode the bus. But that was always just the girls. We never went over there on dates.

DUNHAM: Why was that?

BRANAN: I don't know.

DUNHAM: It was just girls' night out in the --

BRANAN: Well, for one thing, the guy I dated had a car. When he came in, his gas went farther because he was a Merchant Marine and he wasn't back and forth a lot, I guess. I don't know. But he seemed to have gas money.

DUNHAM: Where would you guys go in the car?

BRANAN: Well, that's when we would go dancing and to dinner and things, yeah.

DUNHAM: Locally, or did you ever go farther?

BRANAN: We went to Oakland, and that was about as far as we went, yeah.

DUNHAM: So when the girls took the bus to San Francisco what would you do in San Francisco?

BRANAN: Oh, we got paid at the Housing Authority every two weeks, and almost always on payday my sister and Joyce and I would catch the bus. We could catch it there at the Housing Authority and ride it to San Francisco, get off there on Mission and First, and then walk down to Market. There was lots of stores on Market at that time, and we'd shop, spend money, buy clothes. Then we used to go to the --

DUNHAM: What kind of clothes would you buy?

BRANAN: Dresses.

DUNHAM: Did you notice fashion changing at all during the war years. I mean obviously there were the work clothes at the shipyards and --

BRANAN: Yeah, that was different.

DUNHAM: But did people --?

BRANAN: But you didn't wear them out if you went anywhere.

DUNHAM: Did you see women dressing in pants at all, or was it --?

BRANAN: Well, I just remember them at work or going back and forth to work I guess, but yeah, because if you went somewhere you'd still wear a dress.

DUNHAM: What were some of the stores you would shop for dresses?

BRANAN: Well, I can't think of the names of those stores. There was nice stores. I remember I just went shoe crazy. Of course, you could only get one pair of leather shoes maybe once a year or every six months, and you had to use them for your work shoes because they had to be leather. But they had all kinds of other shoes that were made that looked nice, high heels. That's when I was starting out wearing high heels. I know I had green ones and red ones and black ones, everything because I --

DUNHAM: And you could dance and do everything in your high heels --.

BRANAN: In those high heels

DUNHAM: And it didn't bother you?

BRANAN: Well, it hurt my back. I remembered that I was always so short that I 00:59:00saw this one pair, they looked like patent leather, but they weren't. They had three-inch heels, and I bought them. I thought, "I am going to look tall." I bought those shoes, and I can remember wearing them to San Francisco to shop in and then we'd spend --we always went to the Golden Gate Theater after we got through shopping. And we went over to that Oxford Hotel that was right near that at that time, and ate, and then went to the Golden Gate.

DUNHAM: Was the Golden Gate a live theater or --?

BRANAN: They had a live show, and I remember seeing Artie Shaw there. And there was a live show and then a movie, so you saw both. Then we'd catch the bus home, and I had to walk about a block and a half probably from the bus stop, and my 01:00:00back would just kill me and my feet, too, with those three-inch heels.

DUNHAM: So you were okay all night until the end of the night --

BRANAN: Oh, then hurt.

DUNHAM: You felt it all then. Well, we're just at the end of the tape, so let's pause there for a moment.

Audio file 2

DUNHAM: This is Tape 2, December 20, 2011 with Bettye Branan. You were just mentioning about the apartments not being bad as the government housing that you first lived in in Richmond. Can you describe them to us a little bit?

BRANAN: Oh, yes. Yes, the one that we were in was on a very short block on Cutting Boulevard. So there was just the one apartment house on that block, but they were all up and down the street. It was new when we moved in, and we were 01:01:00upstairs and had a living room and a little tiny kitchen. The eating table was in the living room, and the bathroom was right off the kitchen, and then two bedrooms in the back, but you had to walk through one bedroom to get to the other one. They had a wash house built down below where you could go and do your laundry. Nobody had telephones, and there was a family that lived right below us that had a daughter my sisters and my age. We were friends, so when we wanted to talk to them, to her, we'd beat on the floor with a broom and she had their air 01:02:00vent for the heat was up high, and ours was down on the floor, so we would open the air vents and talk back and forth through the air vents. But nobody could get telephones, nothing during the war.

DUNHAM: Yeah, had you had telephones back in Oklahoma?

BRANAN: No, yeah, but we did later, of course.

DUNHAM: Sure.

BRANAN: But not then. Well, there was telephones in Oklahoma, but we just didn't have one, yeah.

DUNHAM: Well, what other things were different during the war years, or do we take for granted now that --?

BRANAN: Well, for one thing, I just jotted down a few little things here so I wouldn't forget them; I think they're in the kitchen. Is that okay if I go in there?

DUNHAM: Oh, yeah, just unhook, I'll just unhook your microphone. [tape break] Okay, go ahead; we're on.

BRANAN: One thing I remember, all the cars had what they called brownouts. They 01:03:00drove with their lights on dim or else with fog lights. You didn't use bright lights. Nobody --I read that book that that woman had written about Rosie the Riveter or something during the war. I got it the day that I saw you over at Richmond. When I read that I thought it talked about a guy meeting a woman and they drove to the beach and this and that. They couldn't have done this. It says they went at night and they had a strong light. You wouldn't have been allowed to have a light on the beach at night. It was patrolled.

DUNHAM: Yeah. Is this a novel that you read, or a non-fiction book?

BRANAN: Well, it's written on there, they were selling them at the thing --

DUNHAM: I'm not sure --

BRANAN: And it was a novel, but it was written where it said she had studied it and everything.

DUNHAM: Was it a brand new book? I think I might have corresponded with the woman.

BRANAN: I don't have it anymore, or I'd show it to you.

DUNHAM: Was there a romance in it?

BRANAN: Yes.

DUNHAM: Was it a female-female, a lesbian --?

BRANAN: No, it was a guy and a --but the woman was married.

DUNHAM: So it was an affair?

BRANAN: Yeah, and her husband was gone.

DUNHAM: Did you, not the headlight at the sea, but did you see any of that, that surely must have been some, I guess, with so many men away?

BRANAN: Yeah, but not a whole lot.

DUNHAM: Yeah.

BRANAN: Well, for one thing, well, of course, there was guys here. I met guys, but yeah, actually, when I think about it, this woman that I said was married that worked in the plate shop that I was friends with, yeah, she dated, yeah.

DUNHAM: Did you have any feelings about that, or just think having a good time --?

BRANAN: Well, I didn't know her husband, and I thought it wasn't the thing to do, but I --

DUNHAM: I mentioned that one book that I read about recently that had a female-female, like lesbian, relationship. Did you ever know of any here lesbians?

BRANAN: No, I didn't. And it's funny, I never heard of such a thing until I came out here. It was strange and --

DUNHAM: Did you hear about it during the war years? Did you hear of it anyway or --? When you said when you came out here, so was it when you first came to California you heard of some --?

BRANAN: I don't remember it. I don't know when I first heard of it. I remember there was one fellow in Poteau that they called him morphodite, and that's the 01:06:00only person that I ever heard of as being referred to as something different. They said he had --both his genitals were male and female. Now, I don't know --

DUNHAM: Hermaphrodite, I think that's the initial word.

BRANAN: Is that what it was? They called it morphodite, so I didn't know what it was.

DUNHAM: Was this a man, a grown man, or a child?

BRANAN: It was a man; I guess it was a man. He dressed like a man.

DUNHAM: Was this person kind of outcast then?

BRANAN: Yes, very much. When I look back it's kind of pitiful. I don't know where he came from. He was a grown man when he first showed up there.

DUNHAM: Did he have a job in the town?

BRANAN: I don't have any idea. I just used to see him, and somebody'd say, "There's that old," they'd say, "morphodite." So I never saw him with anybody. That must have been terrible, yeah.

DUNHAM: Were there any other people in Poteau that were kind of outcasts or 01:07:00unique --?

BRANAN: I don't think so. I don't know.

DUNHAM: That's a pretty homogeneous town.

BRANAN: I remember there was one guy in my class that everybody called a big sissy, and he'd play with dolls and everything. But when I'd gone back for --I'd thought about a lot of times thinking maybe he was homosexual --but when I went back for reunions he was married and had a family.

DUNHAM: You said you hadn't met any Mexican Americans before you came out here. Were there any other races of --?

BRANAN: Indians.

DUNHAM: And were they --?

BRANAN: Indians were well respected.

DUNHAM: And you're what, you're one-sixteenth Cherokee yourself?

BRANAN: Yes.

DUNHAM: But it wasn't a big part of your identification.

BRANAN: No.

DUNHAM: Did you know you were part Cherokee growing up? Yeah.

BRANAN: In fact, my grandfather, I'll show you a picture of him, and my dad --

DUNHAM: Oh, we got the microphone on; toward the end maybe we'll show some of that, yeah.

BRANAN: I can show you later. He looks like a full-blood Indian.

DUNHAM: Oh, yeah? Your father or your grandfather?

BRANAN: My grandfather. But anyway, nobody --well, see, Indians were well off because they owned land, and a lot of it was oil land. Oklahoma was full of oil, yeah.

DUNHAM: And were they going to school with you, Indian children?

BRANAN: Some did. Some of them went to Indian schools. I know there was a family lived out behind us for a while, and the kids all went away to school, all of to Indian school, but they didn't like it, but they went. They had to board there and stay there during the whole term and then come home during the summers.

DUNHAM: Yeah, when you mentioned the kids playing in your backyard, would that 01:09:00have included Indian kids and --?

BRANAN: If they, well, there wasn't any Indian kids around there except those, and they --

DUNHAM: Not in your neighborhood?

BRANAN: And they, like I said, were gone during the whole school year. But there were Indian kids in my class, at least one or two. I never just saw them as Indian kids, so I can't --nobody did. Yeah.

Anyway, I was just mentioning that about the brownouts and the beaches being patrolled like that, and then when they'd have blackouts, and there were some blackouts, and everything had to be turned off, all your lights, they told us that if you struck a match, you could be seen from three miles up. It was scary. 01:10:00They had wardens go around --they called them block wardens --to just check to be sure nobody was showing any light.

DUNHAM: Do you remember the Port Chicago explosion?

BRANAN: Yes, I was working.

DUNHAM: Where were you working?

BRANAN: In Richmond, at the shipyards, and we didn't know what it was. We heard it and felt it. It was a huge explosion, and that's quite a few miles away.

DUNHAM: Absolutely. So what happened? Did you stop working or --?

BRANAN: No, we didn't. I don't know if we even found out while we were at work what it was.

DUNHAM: Do you remember finding out?

BRANAN: I can't remember just when I found it out. But we did. Of course, we always had a newspaper.

DUNHAM: What was your newspaper?

BRANAN: It was the Richmond paper I guess, I don't know.

DUNHAM: The Richmond Independent? Did you read the Kaiser Fore and Aft, those 01:11:00newsletters and all, too? Do you remember that?

BRANAN: No, I didn't, yeah. Oh, I remember; this was one thing I was going to mention. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, it was on a Sunday, so when we went to school Monday morning, all the high school was called down to the assembly room in the auditorium, and the Superintendent was there, and he had a radio that he put up on the stage, and we listened to President Roosevelt declare war. That was a very moving experience.

DUNHAM: Yeah, do you remember what that felt like?

BRANAN: Well, it would give you goose bumps. He was quite a speaker. And I remember being at work when President Roosevelt died, and we were --everybody cried. That was when I was in the Housing Authority, yeah.

Another thing that happened there, one of the bookkeepers was a German lady, and she had lived in --it seems like it was Frankfurt, Germany, I'm not sure. She was a nice lady, and her husband was a merchant seaman, and I'm sure German, too. When the United States Air Force bombed her city that she had grown up in 01:13:00she cried because she knew a lot of people still there, and they fired her. That was her last day at work.

DUNHAM: Oh, my. This was at the Housing Authority?

BRANAN: Yeah. They fired her right there, and everybody thought it was fine, that she shouldn't have felt that way, because everybody felt so different during the war --

DUNHAM: Did you know her well?

BRANAN: Well, I had worked with her for quite a long while, and being our desks were all in this one room.

DUNHAM: Were you surprised she was fired?

BRANAN: I guess I was surprised she was fired, but I didn't think she should have been crying that --we were all happy that they'd bombed the town.

DUNHAM: Was she like hysterical or --?

BRANAN: No, she was just quietly crying. And then she mentioned that was her 01:14:00hometown, and they fired her. Yeah, things like that you just didn't do during the war.

DUNHAM: Had you known many other German Americans, Italian Americans or Japanese Americans?

BRANAN: No.

DUNHAM: Did you know that she was German American prior to --

BRANAN: I did. She worried about her husband going out on those merchant vessels just like everybody else did. But, yeah, no, I didn't know anybody.

Now, when we were there in Richmond right nearby where we lived there was all of those beautiful Japanese nurseries. They just were standing there. They had 01:15:00taken all the Japanese people to internment camps and those --what do they call --hot houses, they just sat there all during the war, and some of them had windows broken out of them. But I don't remember an awful lot of vandalism being done to that, but I used to think when they come back are they going to have anything. Though at the time it's just fine that they take them all away because we were taught that the Japanese were like animals.

DUNHAM: In what ways were you taught that or --?

BRANAN: Well, all the billboards and everything about Japanese showed them with big teeth and just --

DUNHAM: Cartoons being for the movies --

BRANAN: Yeah, cartoon characters, yeah. And all the movies would show them like this, everything did.

DUNHAM: Were there billboards around town then?

BRANAN: Oh, yeah. And a lot of signs of Uncle Sam saying, "I want you," because they wanted you to work and go in the service.

DUNHAM: Do you remember much of the kind of the Rosie the Riveter iconography recruiting women?

BRANAN: Yeah, that was there, those like they have here. I've got one of them.

DUNHAM: How did you feel about that at the time?

BRANAN: Oh, I didn't think much of it, just part of life at that time.

DUNHAM: Well, we talked a little about race, and I know growing up in Oklahoma you didn't really see it, but you notice in either Long Beach or then in Richmond, like in Long Beach you said they had that one Mexican-American woman who you worked with and made friends with. What about in Richmond in the shipyards?

BRANAN: Almost everybody was from the South, Oklahoma; there were no colored 01:17:00people in there, not in the plate shop. Now, there was in the shipyards. I don't know why there wasn't any in the plate shop, and I never did think about it at the time because I was used to segregation. So I just never thought of it because Oklahoma was segregated at that time.

DUNHAM: So what about around town? Did you see African Americans or other races then and --?

BRANAN: Yeah, there was.

DUNHAM: Was it mostly segregated, or did they eat and dance in the same places?

BRANAN: I don't know, I just don't know. It didn't bother me to be around them, but I just don't, I can't remember. I can remember seeing them in grocery 01:18:00stores. Now it wasn't segregated in the movie houses, I remember. Yeah. Of course, nothing was segregated out here. It never had been I guess.

DUNHAM: Not formally, but I think to a certain extent. And then there was segregation and sometimes it was enforced I think by white businesses or groups.

BRANAN: Yeah. Oh, well, it could have been. But I can remember in the movie houses and also in the grocery stores, but I can't really remember otherwise.

DUNHAM: In your role in the Housing Authority did you deal with that at all? I guess you were in bookkeeping, or did you hear about kind of issue around housing and --?

BRANAN: You know, I wasn't working where people applied for housing, but my sister did, and when I think about it, they were all put down there in what now 01:19:00is that Iron Triangle or something like that housing thing. They were not as good. They were older or something. I believe they were all down there. I'm not sure. And that Acheson Village was a very nice area if you could get into it.

DUNHAM: Right, and that was all white at first.

BRANAN: That was all white, I'm pretty sure.

DUNHAM: It was Parchester Village which was --

BRANAN: Now Parchester was built later, yeah. And it was mostly colored women.

DUNHAM: Do you remember your sister at all talking about that? Was she dealing with people applying?

BRANAN: She dealt with the public, yeah. But she never said anything that they put them in a certain place or anything. I never heard her say anything about it. Mostly she'd just remarked about some of the silly things that some of the 01:20:00people would put on their applications.

DUNHAM: People that maybe didn't know how to --

BRANAN: They didn't know what they meant, like she said this one guy when she came to sex, he said, "About once a week."[laughs] Instead of that he was a male. That's what she was laughing about.

DUNHAM: That's funny.

BRANAN: Yeah, she did run across some funny things.

DUNHAM: Any others that you remember from that?

BRANAN: That's the only thing I can remember. We laughed about it and --

DUNHAM: What was, we talked a lot about dating and all, what was sort of around 01:21:00sex at the time, do you know?

BRANAN: Well, I don't think it was loose; I don't really think so, yeah. And I met my husband, though, the first night, the only time I ever played hooky from work. I went to work, and then this woman from Richmond that was married, there was a carnival in Richmond; it was out there by that park, Nichols Park I think. She said, "Let's don't work tonight; let's go to the carnival." So I said, "Okay." We had already gone to work, and we left and got a bus back downtown, went to the carnival. We had on our work clothes, and so we was just walking around through the carnival, and these two sailors came up and said, "You want 01:22:00to go for this ride?" whatever it was, and so of course we was looking for fun, and we said yes.

So then we did; then we went for I guess a sandwich or something to that café down around --it was around it seemed like Tenth Street and MacDonald. I had my badge in a little coin purse --that's what I carried to work --and so I was in that restaurant. I stuck it; I laid it on the table. Well, the waitress had come by and filled up the napkin holder and pushed it in front of my little coin purse, and so the two guys took us home. When we got there --we was in a cab 01:23:00--we started to get out of the cab, I realized I'd left my coin purse, so they said well, they'd go back and get it, but for us to meet them the next day in San Francisco. That's where I'd get my coin purse back. So I had to have it to go to work, couldn't get in without my badge. So I told Mother the next day what we was going to do. So we got the bus, May and I did, and went over there and met those guys.

Then I started dating him, and we got married about a year later. He was gone, though, for about nine months of that time. He was out to sea. He had been on 01:24:00one ship that was sunk in North Africa, and then when he came back he was stationed in San Francisco and they would take ferry boats; they'd take ships from here to New York, and then they would outfit them over there with something. Then they would take the train back out here, and this was guys that had been on that ship that sunk. Then they would catch another ship that was partially finished and take it around to New York like that and then come back out here. So he was here for a while, and then he went to sea again on an ammunition ship. That was horrible. That's what he was on for about nine months. 01:25:00He got hurt. A lifeboat fell on him so he had to come back to the states.

We got married two or three months after that. Part of that time he was stationed after he came back out here at Camp Parks in the Navy. Then later here we wind up in Pleasanton, yeah, though when I was dating him he was riding the bus from Camp Parks all the way to Richmond.

DUNHAM: Now where was he from, because most of your dating circle and kind of group had been from --?

BRANAN: He was from Georgia.

DUNHAM: So was that close enough for you to have been --?

BRANAN: Oh, I always like the South, and so he was such a nice fellow. We was married for sixty-four years, yeah.

DUNHAM: Wow, congratulations.

BRANAN: Yeah, he died a year ago last March.

DUNHAM: I'm sorry. You had sixty-four great years.

BRANAN: Yeah, we did.

DUNHAM: I was thinking back about kind of Southerners kind of staying together and, as you said, dating. Did you ever have much --sometimes people made fun of people particular Oklahoma and Arkansas and had some names --?

BRANAN: A lot of people made fun of Okies. I never had heard that expression until I come out here, and what was funny, we used to make fun of Arkansayers in Oklahoma. I think everybody picks on somebody, but the thing of it was they wanted Okies was everybody that came out here, not just people from Oklahoma.

DUNHAM: You happened to actually be from Oklahoma.

BRANAN: But I actually --actually, yeah it was.

DUNHAM: So did you take more offense at it?

BRANAN: Yeah, I did. Yes, I didn't like it.

DUNHAM: Did you ever get in any arguments over it?

BRANAN: No, I don't remember doing that. I was always pretty quiet. But I did resent it because it was somebody that was ignorant.

DUNHAM: Did you ever see any arguments or fights over it or other things during those years?

BRANAN: Not during those years, but my dad was very sensitive about it. After we had been married, oh, probably two or three years, my mother and dad had come out to visit. We had a little fence about two or three feet high around the front yard, and a salesman came by taking magazine orders. He came in and he irritated my dad as soon as he came in because he was remarking about something in the house, and then I said that I didn't want to take any magazines. My dad 01:28:00was sitting there and listening but not saying anything, and so then he turned to my mother and he said, "Well, how about you? Would you like to buy some magazines?" Mother said, "No, we're out here from Oklahoma. We're just visiting." And said the guy says, "Now let's see, do they have magazines in Oklahoma?" And Mother said, "Of course, they have magazines in Oklahoma." And he said, "Well, don't they go barefooted?" And my dad jumped up and said, "You SOB. I'll show you what they've got in Oklahoma."

That guy hit the door running, and my dad always wore these pointy-toe shoes. He chased that guy out there kicking his hind end until he literally jumped over 01:29:00the gate to get away. I was upset because I said, "He'll go get somebody else and come back." And Daddy said, "No, he's not going to tell anybody he got his behind kicked."[laughs]

DUNHAM: Yeah, but it must have been some of that that happened during the war years with all the people coming together, but --

BRANAN: Oh, I'm sure there was, yeah, because people didn't appreciate it.

DUNHAM: But you never saw anything like that.

BRANAN: No.

DUNHAM: How would you compare kind of your experience at Douglas and at Kaiser at the shipyards?

BRANAN: Well, it was completely different at Douglas. It was very clean, and we were inside. Here the plate shop was open at both ends, and the wind just blew through there. During the afternoon sometimes it would get hot. Not too many 01:30:00days, but some. They had us take --they had salt pills right by the water fountain, and they encouraged you to take a salt pill when it was hot. And, of course, the shipyards were dirty. You had to take your leathers and things; you left them at work; you had lockers. And they really got filthy.

DUNHAM: You mentioned how fastidious your mom was about cleaning. Did that bother her or --?

BRANAN: Well, she never said anything about it, but she took a shower as soon as she got home every night.

DUNHAM: What was kind of the work culture? Was there any real differences in kind of the feeling there? Was there a strong sense of sort of patriotism that 01:31:00one more than the other? Or was it more about making the good money, people were coming for the jobs, and --?

BRANAN: Well, no, we all were patriotic, and that's really a lot of the reason --and the jobs, too, of course. The good jobs would come out here to work. But then they also wanted to help with the war effort. No, you just didn't hear people criticizing the government and things.

DUNHAM: I don't think I asked before, but what were your impressions of California before you came out? Had you thought much about --?

BRANAN: I'd always thought about orange trees and orchards and things like that. I never really thought that much about it. And, of course, Hollywood; it was in all the movie magazines and stuff.

DUNHAM: So how did reality compare with your vision?

BRANAN: Well, Long Beach was just a beautiful place, and, of course, right there 01:32:00at the ocean. But I don't remember being disappointed. I remember down around Los Angeles as we came in it was just acres and acres of orange trees and lemon trees. Of course, I'm sure they're all gone now.

DUNHAM: Did you think you would go back to Oklahoma?

BRANAN: Yes, I did. But then after I was out here for a while, I just really liked it, and I liked people's attitudes, people --

DUNHAM: How so?

BRANAN: Well, people didn't criticize other people as much. In Oklahoma you always knew that somebody's watching whatever you're doing. Well, of course, it was a small town.

DUNHAM: Part of that small town --

BRANAN: Same way when our children grew up out here in Pleasanton, and so if you did something on a Saturday night, your folks knew about it Sunday morning, yeah. But, yeah, I just enjoyed it here and always did And I remembered that my husband when we first become engaged he was talking about moving to Georgia, and I said, "Oh, I don't want to leave here. I'm going to stay in California." And so we did.

DUNHAM: It took a little persuading, but --

BRANAN: Not a whole lot, but we always went back and visited with his family every year for years and years.

DUNHAM: And did your family stay back in Oklahoma?

BRANAN: They did, and they went back there and built a new house and --

DUNHAM: With the money they made during the war?

BRANAN: Uh huh, yeah.

DUNHAM: Did your husband utilize the GI Bill?

BRANAN: No, he didn't. We used it to buy a house. That was using it, yeah. In fact, we bought our house in Hayward, and then he got the job with Mosquito Abatement as soon as he got out of the Navy, and he was an operator. Then when he became a supervisor Pleasanton had just been annexed to the Mosquito Abatement, and we had to live out here, so we moved out here. Best move we ever made, yeah. It was such a good place to raise kids, yeah.

DUNHAM: How long did you work at the Housing Authority? Did you work there past the end of the war?

BRANAN: No, because they started --I don't know why.

DUNHAM: Do you remember your last day there?

BRANAN: Yes, I do.

DUNHAM: Was it before V-E Day and V-J Day?

BRANAN: No, I think it was before that, but not much. They must have started --maybe they were laying people off by then, I don't know, because I remember that I went to work for an accountant downtown. He was right there on MacDonald upstairs, and he was in the same office building upstairs that --I don't know if you ever heard of that attorney, Mr. Carlson?

DUNHAM: I'm not sure.

BRANAN: And I remember his name because I can't really remember him, but he was one of the attorneys that went over after the war for the trials.

DUNHAM: The Nuremberg trials?

BRANAN: Them, yeah, Mr. Carlson did. I worked there, and I was still working there when I got married. The war was over then because Tom was out of the service I know.

DUNHAM: Do you remember V-E and V-J Day?

BRANAN: I remember V-E Day, and I didn't go out because I was sick. I had a cold or sore throat, but V-J Day my sister's mother-in-law was up here, and she 01:37:00wanted to go see her brother that lived in Oakland somewhere. We went to San Francisco on the bus, and we went back to Oakland on the bus. The streets were packed. Everybody was just having a ball. It was such a happy time because it had been so awful.

DUNHAM: Yeah. Was it before your husband-to-be had come home? Did he not come home until later?

BRANAN: Oh, he came home later, yeah. So I was trying to think if there was something else.

DUNHAM: Well, I was wondering, we didn't ask; I'm not sure when your sister had a child, but did you know of shipyard workers or others who had children during the war and how they took care of the children?

BRANAN: I didn't. Well, May had a daughter, this girl from Richmond, and her father-in-law kept her little girl when she worked. He lived with her.

DUNHAM: Oh, okay. There were child care --

BRANAN: Well, my sister had a miscarriage. She didn't have her baby.

DUNHAM: I'm sorry.

BRANAN: Yeah, after her husband went into the service. He was in the Marines, yeah. Then when he came, he didn't get to come home when the war was over. Everybody didn't get to come home right after the war. He was sent to Shanghai, and they were there for quite a while after that. I had this scarf that he had sent me while he was in Shanghai, yeah. I don't know, see what it says, "Shanghai."

DUNHAM: Yeah, Shanghai. Go ahead and hold it up, a little bit higher. Okay great, thank you.

BRANAN: I've had that all these years. Then while this one fellow that was on the Lexington that grew up across the street from us, he sent me this from an island; it was Tongatabu. I don't know where it was, and this girl there had made it. See, it's got my name up here.

DUNHAM: Yeah, "Bettey Louise Cupp."

BRANAN: Yeah, spelled my name wrong, but other than that --

DUNHAM: Just the Bettye? Is everything else --?

BRANAN: Bettye, I've got the e after the y, and she's got it before.

DUNHAM: What does it say there in the middle, Mary --?

BRANAN: Louise, oh, that was her name, Mary Rose.

DUNHAM: Oh, okay, that's nice.

BRANAN: Do you notice it says "victory" and something else.

DUNHAM: Yeah, "victory and peace," and there's palm trees and, so where was she? She was in Tonga --?

BRANAN: Tongatabu, wherever that was.

DUNHAM: With her husband --?

BRANAN: No, it was a native girl.

DUNHAM: How did you know her again?

BRANAN: I didn't know her; he did. This fellow that grew up across the street from me. He was on the Lexington.

DUNHAM: I know we talked on the phone before, too, about kind of just the crowded nature of it and the theaters. I think you mentioned on the phone at multiple times you saw fleas in the theaters. What was that like?

BRANAN: Oh, yes, they get in your clothes.

DUNHAM: Can you tell us about that? Was that at various theaters or were there some in particular that were worse than others?

BRANAN: Well, there were some that was worse at the movies that were --it seemed like it --was there a State Theater?

DUNHAM: Yeah.

BRANAN: That was the worst one because I can remember setting there trying to 01:41:00watch a movie and suddenly realize there's a flea hopping around. And if I had a date I didn't want to let on I had a flea hopping, [laughs] It was just terrible. But that was the worst theater.

DUNHAM: I haven't been, but I've heard Oklahoma has a lot of critters compared to California.

BRANAN: Oh, Oklahoma has got lots of critters.

DUNHAM: Does that make it a little less difficult for you, but --?

BRANAN: A lot of bugs. Well, no they weren't crawling around on me.

DUNHAM: Not in the movie theaters? No?

BRANAN: They weren't in the house.

DUNHAM: Were there people sleeping in the theaters? Did you notice and that kind of thing? What about bowling alleys?

BRANAN: There could have been. I never went to a bowling alley. But I don't remember people sleeping like that, but I have heard that people slept in their cars because there just was no place to live.

DUNHAM: Did you see people just kind of camping out ever, sleeping out, whatever?

BRANAN: No, I don't remember that. The only time I would go to town would be to buy something, shop, and I didn't really pay attention to anybody. I don't think people were sleeping around that much on the streets, it's not like now. Everybody worked, and I don't remember being afraid when we went anywhere after dark. It was very dark because they had the street lights most of them turned off. I can remember going to Chinatown and being down there after dark, and never thinking a thing about it.

DUNHAM: In San Francisco?

BRANAN: Yeah.

DUNHAM: What was Chinatown like then?

BRANAN: Oh, it was a lot of fun, and also there was --what did they call it, it was that real awful part of San Francisco --

DUNHAM: The Tenderloin?

BRANAN: That's not what they called it. It was all nightclubs and things like that, and it seemed like it wasn't far from Chinatown. I remember us going down there and not feeling the least bit worried about it, just girls. Of course, there was usually at least three of us. But even so, now I wouldn't want to do it.

DUNHAM: When you were young and --?

BRANAN: Yeah, and like I said, you just didn't hear about a lot of crime because I think everybody worked. And another thing --my son and I were talking about it this morning --I said, "You know, when you think about it, the boys went in the 01:44:00service as soon as they was eighteen, so there wasn't that many young people, young guys around. And that's really who commit most of the crimes right now. Because they don't have jobs and things, and maybe that's why you didn't hear about a lot of stuff. But and if they were in the service they had to be in at a certain time and stuff.

DUNHAM: What did you do after the war, then? You got married soon after and --

BRANAN: Yeah, I worked as a bookkeeper.

DUNHAM: In Richmond, or --?

BRANAN: In Richmond at that place upstairs there on MacDonald. It must have been about Tenth or Twelfth and MacDonald because I walked back and forth from Fourth and Barrett, so it wasn't that far.

DUNHAM: Were you still living in the same place?

BRANAN: In that house that I said that we all did. No, Joyce had left and gotten married, and my sister's husband came home. He and I --there was a garage apartment in the back, and the people were moving out of that about the time we were going to get married, and so we rented that. But it was still the same area, see, yeah. It was just a living room and a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen, and that's what we were in. So, and glad to get it, it was $30 a month and that included our water.

DUNHAM: Yeah, well you had transitioned to a lot of different jobs during the 01:46:00war and kind of made your choices on your own choices it sounded like, so the end of the war wasn't necessarily a big shift for you job-wise per se?

BRANAN: No.

DUNHAM: But were there other women who had maybe had grown dependent upon those jobs, who maybe lost their jobs. Did you see kind of that issue?

BRANAN: I didn't. Because I just wasn't around them anymore the ones that I had worked with. I think a lot of them really never intended to work after the war. They hadn't worked before, and they expected when their husbands come home, that they'd quit working. I think that what most women thought at the time.

Now you was asking me if I did know of anybody that their marriage broke up. There was one girl that worked there at the plate shop, and she and her sister-in-law both worked there. I think she and her husband divorced because I 01:47:00think she was chasing around. Yeah, and she had children.

DUNHAM: So like in her circumstance depending upon she might have had --

BRANAN: Her husband was there.

DUNHAM: Oh, yeah? He was right down there.

BRANAN: Oh, yeah. He worked in a different shipyard.

DUNHAM: So he wasn't even away in the service.

BRANAN: No, but you know women hadn't been working with men. That was the difference I think. They hadn't been together.

DUNHAM: Sometimes we've heard stories more on the swing or on the graveyard shift of even hanky panky on the job. I noticed you were all focused and working hard in the plate shop, but did you ever hear of any stories along those lines?

BRANAN: I did, yes, and I'm trying to think, but I don' remember it being somebody in the plate shop. It'd be --no, where it was it was down at the airplane factory.

DUNHAM: Oh, in Douglas?

BRANAN: Yeah, yeah. And it was that one guy that I told you that I could remember was there, and a woman that was working as an expediter or something, yeah.

DUNHAM: Was she older, too, or was she --?

BRANAN: No, she, I don't know how old she would have been. I never --she would just come through checking what we were doing I guess. So I didn't know her very well. But yeah, apparently it really happened, yeah. And apparently they didn't care if people knew.

DUNHAM: Didn't get in trouble or anything.

BRANAN: No. Well, I don't know if they were married to other people or if they were married or single, or what they were, but yeah, that did happen.

DUNHAM: Well, you were, I think you were honored as a Rosie the Riveter here in 01:49:00the Pleasanton Parade a few years back?

BRANAN: Oh, yeah, I forgot that.

DUNHAM: What was that?

BRANAN: It was a lot of fun.

DUNHAM: How did that come about?

BRANAN: Well, they put an ad in the paper that said they were looking for any Rosies. I knew this woman, so I called her up, because my husband was in VFW and she was in the Auxiliary, and said, "You're looking for Rosies?" and she said yes, so I said, "Well, I'm one." So she just was so excited, and then later they decided that since I was from Pleasanton and the parade was here in Pleasanton, 01:50:00I was the only one at that time at least that they knew of from Pleasanton. So they asked me to be the Grand Marshal, and I said, "I didn't know, would I have to say anything?" And they said, "No." Then I said, "Yeah, I'd like to do it." And it was fun. Then there was a woman from Livermore, and I think another woman from up at Castlewood here, but she hadn't welded or anything, she'd worked in the office, yeah. Then there was quite a few people that came from --women, that came from other places around several miles that were there for the parade, and it was really fun.

DUNHAM: Oh, what a nice tribute. Oh, I'll take a shot of that thing in just a minute, but before that maybe let's wrap up the interview portion. Is there 01:51:00anything else you'd like to add today? I guess in reflecting back on the war time and how it fits into the story of your life, or anything like that?

BRANAN: Well, it changed my life completely, of course. But I guess everything just turned out fine. There was a lot of the fellows in my class, high school class, that were killed during the war, and that was sad. But I think I've told you about everything that I can think of.

DUNHAM: Great, well thank you so much for sharing everything today, and --

BRANAN: There was one thing --

DUNHAM: Yeah, please.

BRANAN: I can remember that if you bought hamburger meat, you wouldn't know until you started to cook it that it was full of mutton, not lamb, but mutton. 01:52:00And mutton stinks when it cooks. I know that we had bought that so many times and just hardly could eat it, but you did.

DUNHAM: It sometimes was, or it always was, during the --?

BRANAN: Most always. It was pretty bad. I think they was bringing it from Australia; I don't know. You couldn't get bananas during the war at all, or even right after.

DUNHAM: What other things would rationing or just were hard to come by or what other difficulties were there?

BRANAN: Well, of course nylon stockings. Anytime you saw a line said nylons, boy everybody lined up. Actually what we would do is anytime we saw a line we'd get in it.

DUNHAM: What were some other lines you just happened upon?

BRANAN: Cigarettes. I didn't smoke at the time, but I'd always hop in the line and get cigarettes. I know we had a drawer full of cigarettes, and, of course, 01:53:00we gave them away. But then later I did start to smoke, and I smoked for four or five years.

DUNHAM: Before the war ended or --?

BRANAN: Before the fellow that I married came back from overseas. He kept wanting me to smoke, and I wouldn't smoke before he left, and then while he was gone I started smoking. I don't think he was as happy as he thought he would be. [laughs]

DUNHAM: Yeah, I didn't realize --

BRANAN: But then everybody smoked. It was amazing. Well, my mother didn't. But then in 1950 he said he was quitting, so he came in, he quit. I had a terrible time, but I did quit, and I've been so glad. Everybody smoked, and I mean there was no such thing as some places smoking section and non-smoking.

DUNHAM: Right, so in the movie theaters and everything --

BRANAN: Everywhere people smoked, yeah. So you thought that was really cool. And the food, yeah, you couldn't buy a lot of things.

DUNHAM: Did you have a Victory Garden, or know folks that had Victory Gardens?

BRANAN: We didn't have a Victory Garden because we lived in the apartment, and there wasn't any place for it. We wouldn't have had any tools either.

[End of Interview]