David Lloyd | Interview 1 | June 5, 2012

RIGELHAUPT: It is June 5, 2012. I am in Arlington, Virginia doing an oral history interview with David Lloyd. This is tape number one. And the way I like to start is if I could ask you to say your full name and where and when you were born.

LLOYD: All right. David Andrews Lloyd, L-L-O-Y-D, and I was born in Washington, DC.

RIGELHAUPT: And what year were you born?

LLOYD: Nineteen thirty.

RIGELHAUPT: How would you describe some of your earliest memories of your childhood in Washington?

LLOYD: I think I don't know of anything that was unpleasant. I enjoyed my 00:01:00birthday, and we lived on Irving Street in DC at that time. My father was an officer in the Washington, DC fire department, and we loved to go to the fire station with him. Sometimes he'd take us there when he was off, and we would slide down the pole, which was a big exciting thing for our childhood. I had a very great time then. Had no problems that I know of. Now, maybe I might change that but I had a very pleasant boyhood.

RIGELHAUPT: What neighborhood in DC? You said Irving Street. What neighborhood is that in?

LLOYD: That's in Northeast, I think. I don't even remember much about that place 00:02:00at all because I was so young.

RIGELHAUPT: Well, before we get to your move to Arlington, I'd like to ask a couple of questions about your parents. Where and when were they born?

LLOYD: Let's see. My dad was born in 1901. My mother was born in 1905, I think it was. And they were both born in Orange County, North Carolina, and that's where Chapel Hill was located. My mother did some courses at Chapel Hill there, at the University of North Carolina, and she taught school here in Fairfax 00:03:00County during the war. So we enjoyed having her working, teaching, but it was really tough during the war all around. It was like having two parents working. We lived in a modest house, a new house but it was modest, in Arlington on Fourteenth Street in South Arlington. And all my education up till college was here. I say I taught because I did go into education as a career later on. I went to school at Patrick Henry grade school in Arlington here, Thomas Jefferson 00:04:00Junior High School and Washington-Lee as my high school. Two Confederate soldiers--well, now, no; George Washington wasn't Confederate. [laughs] He was very much not a Confederate. But Robert E. Lee was, and I went to Washington-Lee High School here, which we considered the greatest high school in the world. It really was. Wonderful, wonderful place to go to high school.

RIGELHAUPT: Did your parents meet in North Carolina?

LLOYD: Oh, yes. Because my dad was in the navy at the time, and my mother was teaching. They both came from the same general area in North Carolina. So yes, 00:05:00they were both from the same area, so that was good.

RIGELHAUPT: Do you know how they met?

LLOYD: I think they probably met at church.

RIGELHAUPT: Were both of them active in church growing up?

LLOYD: Yes, yes. All their life they were.

RIGELHAUPT: What denomination? What--

LLOYD: We were Baptists.

RIGELHAUPT: Okay. Now, did that continue when they moved to DC?

LLOYD: Oh, yes. Yes. They continued to go to Baptist church in DC and then again when we came here we did the same thing.

RIGELHAUPT: So what brought them to Washington, DC?

LLOYD: Well, my dad first was in the Navy, and then he was stationed here in Washington at the Naval Hospital. He liked Washington, and he applied for the job and got a job with the fire department. He was an officer in the fire department.

RIGELHAUPT: Do you know what year they moved from North Carolina to Washington?

LLOYD: It must have been about 1926, I would think, something, yeah. Around 1926.

RIGELHAUPT: Okay. Did they ever talk about what neighborhood they chose in Washington and why they chose to live there?

LLOYD: Well, as I have indicated, they lived in northeast and northwest 00:07:00Washington. The last place we lived in Washington was in northwest, and I think we lived earlier in northeast. Washington was a completely different town in those days. It was not a rural town, of course. But it was so laidback, very comfortable. I remember Joyce, my wife, also was born in Washington. And Washington is noted, particularly in the summertime, as being very hot and 00:08:00uncomfortable. Joyce's mother and some of her friends used to take a blanket and go outside on the very, very hot days, hot nights, and they could sleep outside in the park on the blanket. It was a very peaceful town. Joyce, my wife, was born in Washington, I was born there, and we loved Washington. But Arlington was a better place to raise a family.

RIGELHAUPT: Did most of your extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, did 00:09:00they stay in North Carolina?

LLOYD: Most of them did. I had one uncle that came up here and two uncles killed in the war. But most of them stayed in North Carolina.

RIGELHAUPT: Did you get to go back as a child?

LLOYD: Oh, yes. All the time. Every summer we went. That was what vacation was in those days. You packed yourself in the car, your parents packed you, and you went, and that was it.

I have a comment to make on during the war. You got a gasoline allotment, and I 00:10:00remember one episode that we had. We had friends that were also from that area of the country down in southern Virginia. In the summer we always went to Carolina for a visit. These friends of ours had a place down there, too. And so one time during the war, when we were on the gasoline allotment and so forth and so on, we combined my father's license and got the gasoline, and this gentlemen who we went with and his family got the gas, and we had nine people in that car. We drove all the way down to southern Virginia with nine people in the car, and then we went further down to my people's place. Then on the way back we did the 00:11:00same thing. I remember it was so uncomfortable because there were four of them and five of us. We had four children and so forth. So it was a very hard visit. We enjoyed it. Laughed about it a lot because it was the way things went in that time. I mean we had to have gasoline. We had to make all kinds of conditions to get the gasoline. But that was one of the exciting things that I remember from my childhood. I remember the gasoline rationing. And, of course, they had paper drives, newspaper drives. They had aluminum and dishware, garden products, 00:12:00everything that they collected during the war.

And Eleanor Roosevelt came out for a visit to the theater here, Arlington Theater. There used to be an Arlington Theater in South Arlington. They built it after we came, but I remember it so well because one winter Eleanor Roosevelt came out, and we got free tickets to the movie. And we didn't know that it was a movie. I don't know how this will reflect on us or anything. I don't mean we were unhappy with this. But when we got up to the theater we were told that this 00:13:00was for poor children, and she had a Christmas party with toys for what they called poor children. And we didn't feel like we were poor children, so we turned around and came home. It was just one of those things. We said, "We're not poor children. We don't have that problem." So I remember that so well. But she was there, and we saw her, and they gave the toys out to all the kids who came. That is one thing I remember so vividly from the time during the war.

Do you want any more war stories?

RIGELHAUPT: Yes, sure.

LLOYD: Okay. As I told you before, we went to Patrick Henry Elementary School, 00:14:00and at that time they were having the air raids in England. So they sent two children--I didn't know the girl, but I knew the boy--into Patrick Henry. I remember he came to school, and he had on English knickers. You know those black knickers, those very heavy knickers that kids had in those days? And we went to school in dungarees, just regular cotton pants. And we had such a big laugh. We 00:15:00didn't laugh at this kid because we knew he was so embarrassed. I remember his name. Would you like to hear his name? His name was Edward Twentyman It was such an English name. And at that time we were--I suppose I was in the fifth or sixth at that time. And the boys lived on the fact that there was a war on. We weren't glad it was on, but it was so exciting to have it on. We spent so much time making toy balsa wood aircraft. I suppose you did that, too, at one time. But we knew all the planes on every side. And we admired the RAF. So Edward Twentyman, 00:16:00the boy I was telling you about earlier--. The interesting thing about that, and I hope people will believe this, but in the sixth grade--whether this was an effort to increase people's understanding what was going on during the war and so forth, and to get Americans involved in thinking about this--they had us in the sixth grade, the boys knitted these little patches-like--they were square patches-- and then they sewed them all together and made up a quilt for the English kids that were in the war bomb--I'm looking for a word.

RIGELHAUPT: Shelters?

LLOYD: Yeah, the shelters, the air shelters. That's the word I was looking for. I suppose they had those mostly in the underground railroads and stuff like that. But we knitted these little squares, and they sewed them all together and supposedly gave them to these British kids in the air shelters. And I honestly thought these kids would think the war was over and they lost or something, they getting [laughs] all these things were America; that this was something that was 00:18:00supposed to help them. But we did it nonetheless.

Also they sold war stamps at school; you brought your money to school, you bought a stamp, and they gave you a little book; you put in in there. And, of course, this was--you could turn it in later on and get money for it. Of course, we had an aunt that used to come out to our house every Christmas because she was a lady who had lost her husband, and we had her out because she was an aunt from Carolina. And she was a Redskin fan; everybody in Washington was a Redskin 00:19:00fan and still is. There were four children in our family. She would bring a war bond for each one of us; And we'd have Christmas Eve and have the war bond. And we thought we were the richest kids in the world. You got an $18.75 bond, and you got $25 for it later on. We enjoyed that so much, getting the bond and seeing my Aunt Mary who would come out.

And the Redskins were almost an institution; well they are an institution here, and everybody follows them. And we used to follow them with all the good players that they had. And that was a wonderful time.

What else might I contribute?

RIGELHAUPT: You sparked two questions. I'll do one at a time. You mentioned all the airplanes. How did you learn about them?

LLOYD: They were in all the magazines. They were in all the movies. We knew the Japanese Zero was such a great fighter plane. We knew the Germans had the Luftwaffe, had the Heinkel and the Messerschmitt and the Focke-Wulf. We all had BB rifles, the kids had BB rifles, and nobody thought anything of it. I remember when France fell, when the French surrendered to the Germans, and they had Vichy 00:21:00and all that they did, we organized a boys' squad. We thought the Germans would be soon over and all this kind of business. We all had BB rifles, and marched up and down. It was just kid stuff, but it was significant at the time because we really thought the Germans were going to win the war because it looked like they were for a while. At this time they were about to engage the Russians, and the French had fallen, and the Russians. So we were really into the war all the way. Actually, what else was I going to say about the war?

RIGELHAUPT: Do you remember what the magazines were that you were reading where you learned about all the airplanes?

LLOYD: Yeah. They had it in most of the magazines, Wings and things like that. And they had it in the movies, like Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. The British put on all kinds of--planes and the RAF and the war in Italy. Not Italy, excuse me. The war in Africa, I'm thinking about now. They had all kinds of pictures about the war in Africa and the British. The British were heroes of all of the kids, 00:23:00as were the Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek. Madame Chiang Kai-shek The fact that they were fighting the Japanese, though even at that time they had been so cruel. At least we heard that they had been so cruel. We heard of the Rape of Nanking. Remember that. You might have read it from somewhere. And Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang Kai-shek were heroes. So the war was just every part of our--we thought about it every day. I had a dictionary that had in the back--it had some 00:24:00drawn maps in the back of the dictionary. I had the maps where the Germans had taken over and all that stuff. We enjoyed that. Not all the killing; we didn't enjoy that. But we did enjoy keeping up with the war, as most of the kids in the country did.

RIGELHAUPT: You mentioned the Rape of Nanking. So how did you learn about that? Was it in newspapers, magazines, newsreels before films?

LLOYD: Yes, it was in the newspaper, in the paper. Magazines. And movies. All the movies had that. And the Japanese and how cruel they were to the Chinese. And how they were conquering the whole country and so forth and so on. The Chinese were the victims of the Japanese. So that was part of my boyhood.

RIGELHAUPT: It sounds like you read the newspaper from a young age?

LLOYD: Oh, yes. Well, yeah. Well, see, I enlisted in the Air Force right after I got out of high school. You had to be eighteen to get in the Air Force. Well, I joined the Air Force when I was eighteen, and we were still--there was no war on when I graduated in 1949, from high school. But they still had the draft, and I went down to Clarendon here and registered for the draft. And I walked down from Washington-Lee. A couple of others had to go, and so we all walked down from 00:26:00Washington-Lee and registered, got our stickers and all for the Air Force. And that's about it I guess for the war.

RIGELHAUPT: Now, you mentioned that you made a quilt for children in England most likely sheltering in the underground tubes. Was this before the bombing at Pearl Harbor and the US had actually entered World War II?

LLOYD: It was early in the war. It was early in the war. But I remember when we 00:27:00entered the war with the Japanese because--this was on Sunday, as you all know. We were playing football in the street in Arlington, on Pollard Street in Arlington. Because we always played down there. And my dad came home from work and came down and told us what had happened. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. And we didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was. I don't think many Americans did at that time because it was not significant at all. The Hawaiian Islands were not as prominent and understanding--Americans didn't really understand much about Pearl Harbor until that time. But yeah. What was the rest 00:28:00of the question? Did you have another?

RIGELHAUPT: I was asking about if you knew the quilts that you made, if that was taking place before Pearl Harbor and the US involvement. Not that--

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: Not that my question was aimed at you knowing exactly but part of it was trying to get at what was--did you have a sense before the war that the US was likely to become involved?

LLOYD: Oh, yes.

RIGELHAUPT: Did you know that this was something that--?

LLOYD: Absolutely. We couldn't see any way in the world that the United States was not going to be involved in this because the Germans were so ruthless in the way they handled everything and the way they invaded Poland. With Mussolini they 00:29:00invaded parts of Africa and all of Italy and all of these things. Yeah. Every day there was something in the newspapers about what was going on in Europe. Of course, by this time I was in sixth or seventh grade. I could read, and I could understand pretty well what was going on. Yes. We knew all of that. I think most kids did because it was in the papers. Every day we saw that. And it was never any question about who was right and who was wrong, who was invading someone that had done nothing to them. Germans got a very bad name and so did the 00:30:00Japanese. And you wonder sometimes if some of it might have been overdrawn but, after all, people were getting killed. Efforts were being made to--whether we were going to win this thing. Because people don't realize how strong the Germans were and the Japanese. I read some stories about how the Japanese and the Germans both had been prepared for the war and we had not been preparing for the war. So that was my childhood, as all the people in this area.

I remember the first year I got to the Virginia school--this was Patrick Henry, 00:31:00as I indicated. They grouped everybody together, and then they put--if you were going into the fourth grade or the fifth grade they put you in that room, and you would get to know some of the kids and so forth. And I remember they put me in whatever grade I was at the time, and we had a lot of paperwork to do and so forth and so on. And then they asked for volunteers to sing. I remember the two girls; I later knew these two girls. One of them was going to sing something from The Wizard of Oz and the other one was going to sing The White Cliffs of Dover. And, of course, the Wizard of Oz was not a war song at all but The White 00:32:00Cliffs of Dover, there was no question about that being a war song. "The blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover. Tomorrow when the world is free. There'll be love and laughter and peace ever after tomorrow when the world is free." Here I was in fourth grade. I was in the fourth grade. I was in sixth or seventh grade; I don't know, but yeah, the war was a huge part of our lives at that time.

And then I remember two very bad personal experiences that I had. My mother had 00:33:00two brothers that were killed in the war. One was killed in a training accident they had. He was in the port--at the Army base in Indiana, I think it was. Indiana. I came home from school, and my mother was lying on the bed and crying. And I said, "What in the world? What is this?" I went in. I found out that she had got a call from Carolina that he had been killed in war. That was a real experience for me. And later on at Saint-Lô in France, at the time of the invasion, her other brother, the other brother, was a chaplain's assistant in 00:34:00the American Army, and they were at Saint-Lô, and the German artillery blew--the truck that he was using; they killed him. And she was in the bed again. It was a terrible time. There was nothing amusing about it at all or anything. It was terrible. And, of course, at the invasion--well, we all know what happened when they invaded--well, not invaded but sent troops into France to stop, to halt the war if they could, which they did.

But I don't know what else to say about it. It was just a sad but memorable experience in my life, and I still remember. I was in public education for my career, and when I retired one of the things they gave me was my World War II book because we had talked about it in class. Are there some other questions I could--

RIGELHAUPT: I was asking, obviously it had to have been incredibly hard to lose family members. And you obviously weren't alone in the sense of hundreds of 00:36:00thousands, if not millions of American families, lost--

LLOYD: Oh, yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: And I say that to ask did you talk about that with your friends? Did friends have similar experiences?

LLOYD: Yes. We had a whole neighborhood group there that--we were all about the same income. There was no competition or anything like that in that. There was one lady that lived in our neighborhood that was of German extraction. In fact, she had come over before the war, and her background was in Germany. We didn't like her too much, and I think it was because of that fact. And we had some of 00:37:00the older guys that took us under their wing when we were playing ball and stuff like that because--see, one other thing about where I lived in South Arlington, there was a meadow at the end of the Pollard Street in my neighborhood, sort of in the heights of Arlington, which was subject to invasion by the--I guess you'd have to call it the Yankees when Arlington was a young and very southern city. We played baseball there, and these guys would--these older guys would come by 00:38:00and give us tips and stuff like that.

So we all had great admiration for the troops out there, and we had several that were killed in the war that were neighbors that I knew very well. There was a whole neighborhood there. A lady and husband up there from Greece and they'd come to the United States. And the Greeks had been invaded by the Germans. And this lady that was a German--there was nothing in there like, for example, they had out in California, I understand, during the first World War where the Germans were sometimes persecuted. That wasn't the case; we didn't do that to this lady because she was a nice lady, and she didn't try to claim the Germans 00:39:00were correct and all this. But that kind of things we thought about all the time.

There was one incident that I remember so well. Up on Columbia Pike--you know where Columbia Pike is? Well, you may not know that. But anyway, right after the invasion of France and then Germany with Normandy and all of that, there was this guy that I didn't know well. He wasn't one of the guys I knew very well. I did recognize him, that he'd been in the service. He had a fender-bender with an 00:40:00older man, and they had almost gotten in a fight. They were yelling things at one another, and I saw that he had been wounded, had a scar up in his eye, above his eye. A scar that went there, and he's telling this guy, "Come on, I can take anything. I can take anything," he said. "I can take anything. You want to fight, we'll fight." And, of course, the other guy didn't want to fight. So that never developed into anything, which I was glad of because there's no need having an unnecessary thing like that. Most people that lived through the war understand that. I don't know what else to tell you.

RIGELHAUPT: I'm intrigued by what you said earlier, in the years leading up to the war. You were probably around ten. That you knew Germany and Japan were strong militarily.

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: And taking over territory around the world and invading other countries. And that they might win.

LLOYD: Yeah, we knew that.

RIGELHAUPT: Did you talk about with your friends--again, you were ten years old. It may not have been conversations you had of what would the world be like.

LLOYD: No, we didn't have any. I don't remember any really mature declarations 00:42:00for anything that would happen. But, yeah, we did. Kids, eleven, twelve years old, always going on, always hearing this stuff, they get to the point where they think it's very interesting. But we were always hoping that the war would be over and we would win it. That was what we were hoping. I remember particularly when the movies, like Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and we read about that and saw that in the movies. And what was happening in North Africa with Rommel and his soldiers, and the British soldiers and so forth. So yes, we were 00:43:00very well informed. Whether it was completely accurate or not--but there was never any sympathy for the Germans and what they were doing.

RIGELHAUPT: You just mentioned that you and your friends wanted to see the US get into the war.

LLOYD: Well, it wasn't that we really wanted to see them get into the war. What we wanted to see is that the Allies were going to win the war. That was the thing that we wanted to see. And we had a great admiration for the British. Now, I don't think we knew the Communists in Russia. I was in the glee club in high 00:44:00school, and we used to sing Russian songs. The teacher never mentioned a war or anything, but they had Russian combat songs and Russian "tovarisch." I remember the Russian word for--I think it was "tovarisch." It was a Russian word for comradeship and so forth. It was a good song; it sounded good. I remember that. But it didn't take long before we decided the Russians weren't as admirable as 00:45:00we thought they were.

RIGELHAUPT: And so before the US enters the war there's an uncertainty?

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: Right. It was very interesting to hear you articulate that. That you and your friends could sense that the future was uncertain.

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: Trying to think back when your father first told you about Pearl Harbor, did that seem to signal--what did that signal to you in terms of that uncertain moment?

LLOYD: Well, I guess the thing that we realized at that time was, this was a group that hated us because we saw they had--they didn't have any TV at that 00:46:00time, but they had casters, broadcasters that would tell you about what happened to the American Navy there, what happened to all the men that were killed and all that. We just couldn't tolerate that. It was just such a cowardly blow. You don't know what causes nations to do these kinds of things. You know world history, you know that this has been going on in one area after another all through man's history together. But it was such a cowardly act that Americans--we were very naïve about that. Americans didn't do those kind of things. We felt like Americans didn't do them. And, of course, we haven't done 00:47:00like so many countries have done, but we've had our day in court. So I hope I haven't given you a too drastic picture there.

RIGELHAUPT: Part of what I've read about and heard about after Pearl Harbor is that people immediately, Monday morning, lined up at army recruiting stations.

LLOYD: They did.

RIGELHAUPT: Do you remember seeing anything like that? Obviously, you were too young to go do that, but was there an immediate sense among you and your friends and your family of "we are going to contribute somehow, we are going to do something"?

LLOYD: Yeah. There certainly was. And whether it was either out of British 00:48:00propaganda or whether it was because of what officials in our country knew, that we were going to have to fight these people, they let everything revolve around that because the papers were always talking about what had happened at Pearl Harbor. And the Jewish people being treated so badly and what the Germans were doing and why they weren't cooperating, and things like that, without any kind of gesture made to keep it peaceful. Remember Chamberlain and what he did? I was always interested in this stuff. I just liked it. Might not like the outcome 00:49:00sometimes, but it was interesting. I got to say it was interesting what was going on.

And as I told you before, I had an old dictionary that had a map in it, and I had where the Germans had advanced and what country they were going to now and so forth and so on. And now Britain and France made that agreement that they would fight if Germans invaded Poland. And they did. They just came right out and invaded them. The Germans knew the war was going on. And it was just the way it was in those days.

I hope we don't have to go through that again with anybody. Today, though, we 00:50:00have serious ethnic and religious problems but not someone as ruthless and powerful as Hitler was.]

And American music. I remember American music. You remember Hitler's song? That they used to sing that? They would sing that in movies sometimes to get people laughing. They'd say--well, let me remember. Hitler says, "We is the master race," and they would accent it like that. "Ve ist the master race." "Ve ist." We say "Heil, heil, heil," and then they'd make an obscene gesture, like [spitting sound] right into the Fuhrer's face, and that's what they did. That was a song that was very popular in those days. And then they had the movie about Hitler and all. And then obviously you know it must have impressed me 00:52:00because I remember so much of it. I'm not glad it happened, but I'm glad I do remember it.

RIGELHAUPT: It sounds as though popular culture, movies in particular, were one of the ways you learned a lot about what was going on. Do you remember other forms of popular culture? Comic books, for example, or other things that informed you about the war?

LLOYD: I read in Reader's Digest how this Japanese guy had picked an American to 00:54:0000:53:00box him, or to fight him. He was going to use his jujutsu, as he called it. He said, "He won't remember that." But it was a Japanese way of fighting someone. And he was to box. And the Japanese guy beat him up one time, and then the next time the American used his glove and beat him up, beat the Japanese guy up.

And what I was going to suggest, or talk to you about, was that fact that now they have so many activities like karate and all the engagements for kids. Soccer, all the soccer, all the different things they have. When I was growing 00:55:00up the kids did more or less what they wanted to on their own. They didn't have any organizations working with them. They didn't have any soccer practices, anything like that. What we used to do in the summer was throw out the softball and go play softball or baseball and then--summertime it was baseball. When fall came it was football and basketball if you could get to a gym. But none of the elementary schools had gyms so you didn't do that. And the sport that we used to do that was so popular was marbles. I don't know whether you ever played marbles or not. But we used to play marbles every--it would come in the springtime. When it first got warm all the kids come to school with marbles, and we used to play 00:56:00keepsies or comesies--or longsies. What was it? If you kept them you called them keepsies. If you lost them, if the other kid's marble knocked yours out, you lost your marble. I guess that's why "you're losing your marbles." But we used to do all of that kind of stuff. I remember in elementary school--and I was in education, as I told you before--the teachers over at Patrick Henry would give us what we'd call recess, and then everybody would go outside and play ball of some kind. The girls played hopscotch or something like that. The boys played 00:57:00either football or basketball. Not basketball, but football or baseball or marbles or something like that. And they didn't have any real extracurricular sports activities, except just for recess, as we used to call it.

RIGELHAUPT: I'm going to pause right there. I need to change tapes.

RIGELHAUPT: I am on tape number two with David Lloyd. Still June 5, 2012. And as I was changing tapes we talked briefly about the Depression and that it preceded World War II, and you were talking about what you remembered about people 00:58:00visiting your house and your mother.

LLOYD: Yeah. Well, before I go into that I want to say that my father had a steady job. All through the war he had the same job. My mother taught school on an irregular basis because she had taught in North Carolina, and they needed teachers all over the place. But I didn't say, I haven't talk about this, that my mother and my father both had large rural families. My parents were both country girls and boys. We had visitors from our family that came up and would stay with us until they got a job somewhere in DC because the jobs were in DC. If there was any way to have them, they were in DC because they could just get 00:59:00more jobs there than they could down in Carolina or even in Richmond here or Arlington. We used to have an uncle. He'd come in most every summer and stay with us until he got a job. They would get jobs either driving cabs or other--working for funeral homes. Doing all kinds of stuff. They would stay and work at our house. So we had a lot of that. Let's see, what else was I going to say?

Oh, I was going to tell about--lots of women did this. That they would give 01:00:00sandwiches to hoboes and people that didn't have jobs that would come around to the house. And I'm just wondering now. I heard later on that the the people without money, without a job or anything, had a way that they could leave a note or some kind of something to make another one know that there was a lady there, a kindly lady that would leave him with a sandwich or something. Because they used to come by all the time, and my mother would usually give them a sandwich. Wasn't anything fancy; it was just a sandwich. But we didn't think anything of 01:01:00it. We thought the guy's just hungry, so we give that. We lived in Washington at that time, and the jobs were up here. If they were any place, they were up here. That's what I remember about that.

RIGELHAUPT: So you had family come up from North Carolina?

LLOYD: Family would come up and stay with us and work--get a job or something like that.

RIGELHAUPT: Did you have a sense that the Depression hit your family in North Carolina harder than your immediate family in--?

LLOYD: Well, no. The only thing we could realize from this thing is that my background was always--on both sides they were rural people. And they always had 01:02:00food. There was food to grow. You could grow food, and there weren't too many jobs around down there, but there was food to be had. And a lot of boys from the country, and the city, too, went out and went into this hoboing or what they call--. And, of course, President Roosevelt--I can't remember the name of that group now. Country boys and city boys that went out--and it was a very famous program that skips my mind now, that these boys were able to get jobs working in 01:03:00the woods or building roads or in the cities. CCC, the CCC boys. Because that was very popular. But I don't know any of my relatives that were CCC boys. I do know some CCC boys that--I used to have a friend that, when he was younger, went out, was with the CCCs. And it was very popular.

RIGELHAUPT: Well, the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, was a New Deal program.

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: What did your parents, or did they--actually, why don't I back up and ask--did you, your family, your parents, your friends, did you talk about the New Deal and what these programs meant for the country and the changes they implemented?

LLOYD: Well, I just remember that there was nothing--that my parents never 01:04:00talked about these guys being people that were trying to get something for nothing, like so many people did. And that they were thieves and all. They could do this and that. And I wouldn't to have this or that to do with any of them. My parents were always very understanding about these guys. They admired them in many ways. I never had any relatives with them but I do know--I could say--I never met a person who was a CCC guy that had anything to say about the group except that it was the best around. They would really have a tough time if it hadn't been for them. I think it was a very important, very good program.

And in Johnson's Administration, in the Job Corps that they used to have--as I 01:05:00told you, I was a teacher, and then I was in administration. And we had many boys, particularly boys, that were not anxious for school and had no interest in school. And we dismissed them if they get in the Job Corps. And they would come in--I used to come in and kids would come in my office and tell me how they'd gotten in the Job Corps and they were leaving school and so forth because so many of the states had realistic--irrealistic, I should say--. Some people just 01:06:00are not--they don't like algebra. They don't like physics or anything like that, and they really like the Job Corps. They used to feel like it was a real triumph to come in and get in the Job Corps. And I thought it was too, because they wanted something useful to do, and this was it. Because Virginia, see, had the--you have to. You can't just drop out of school. You can't say when you're sixteen years old, say, "I don't want school anymore," because we got a compulsory attendance law. You've got to stay in school. If you're not interested in school, had nothing to do with school, you were just foreign to everybody. So the Job Corps or something like that would put these kids to work, 01:07:00and they loved it. They loved it. So I wish they still had it for kids that can't--that don't like school and do something--I mean, they weren't dumb kids, all of them; they just didn't like school. So I'm letting out a lot of steam here. I hope I didn't--

RIGELHAUPT: But going back to the New Deal and some of the government programs that you're talking about, certainly reading about Roosevelt and the New Deal retrospectively is--well, he's certainly held in high regard as a President. I'm curious if you had a sense--and, again, you were young but it sounds like very 01:08:00aware of world events if you're mapping things in the back of the dictionary. Did you have a sense that FDR was doing new and important things as they were happening?

LLOYD: We were--when I say we, I mean--I think that I was always a Democrat. I mean, when I started voting--they didn't let kids vote, of course. But I thought these programs were good. I thought when I was working in school administration I thought the programs were good. When I used to have to teach--I taught history and government a couple times--that these were great programs. There's no 01:09:00question in my mind about it. I thought the Job Corps was good although you had to be careful with that. You had some people that didn't do the best they can in this, but that's always the case. There's always somebody that's not going to appreciate, that's not going to work with you. But most of the guys were really, that we talked to, wanted to work, and they wanted to do the right thing. That's why I liked it.

RIGELHAUPT: So this moment of transition out of the Depression into World War II. Arlington boomed. I'm wondering if you could talk about what comes to mind 01:10:00as you start thinking about the expansion of Arlington early in World War II.

LLOYD: The thing I remember most was the fact--now, we lived in the District. We didn't live in the slums or something like that. But we lived in the District, and it was crowded. Before the war started, people began to know that there was going to be one, and there were going to be jobs somewhere, and the District was the first place they came to. So the District was very crowded, and real estate was expensive and so forth and so on. And the first time my dad drove us over to see where we were going to live in Arlington, I was just fascinated with it. 01:11:00Now, they didn't have what they have now, super highways coming in and out. They had a second class airport on the Potomac here. It was really second class. No Dulles or Reagan National or anything like that. Just a sort of second class airport there. And the Pentagon wasn't there. When we moved to Arlington the Pentagon wasn't there. And when I got out there I saw that it was--I don't know whether this makes any difference or not, but I think--and I wouldn't want to say whether I was positive of this or not--but I believe one of the first things 01:12:00that I learned in school was the fact that Arlington had 20,000 people in it. Now, I think now that Arlington has about 500,000. I think it says that. I wouldn't want to be--the thing I'm saying, it was enormous as far as the population compared to what it is in those days. And the thing I liked best about it is we came out, and they were building modest homes all over the place and cutting down the trees. Now, I didn't like that because I loved the woods. We used to spend all our time, most of our time, in the woods. We'd build huts down there. We had Four Mile Run, Four Mile Run down part of--it's part of 01:13:00Arlington, between Arlington and Alexandria.

RIGELHAUPT: Well, could you describe what that was like when you were first going there?

LLOYD: We never even thought about whether it could be contaminated or not. It was a fresh water stream. If you were six feet tall you didn't--you thought it was a little stream, no good to anybody. But when you're four feet tall or five feet tall, it was a swimming hole. We swam in the Four Mile Run. And all the time I swam in the Four Mile Run. We had the Four Mile Run. We had the lake at Barcroft.

RIGELHAUPT: One thing I was going to tell you about. If there's specific names 01:14:00like this that just don't come to mind right now, you'll have a chance to look at the transcript before it's finalized and fill in specific names like this.

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: So, it's no problem. If you can't remember now, you'll have a chance to get it straight.

LLOYD: Fort Myer that's here, the Army base, Fort Myer. It was there, I think, 01:15:00because it was over the height of what would be Arlington. But through the Civil War they had had forts around Washington, some of them not full forts. And one 01:16:00of these was at the end of Pollard Street in Arlington here. It was elevated. It wasn't a fort but it was a high ground that they could--look down over the valley that the Confederates would probably come up from the south. Obviously. And that you would spot them coming up from the south on this sort of a plateau. Fort Myer was operating then. And when I was a boy we used to have cavalrymen 01:17:00ride their horses out to this height over Arlington and look down on Four Mile Run and the creek and all of that, and that was very fascinating for a young kid. We used to go out there, and we'd find bullets that we used to think were Civil War bullets. We never could figure out which ones were Civil War bullets and which ones weren't. But we could find these bullets down there; we used to look for them around on the height there. But the height looked down on Four Mile Run Drive, and Four Mile Run was a creek; we used to call it a creek. And, 01:18:00as I said, most of us I'm talking about, were not--about four and a half, five feet tall, and we could swim in there. We didn't have any problem about whether it was clean or not because it was an outdoor stream, and we loved it up there. We used Four Mile Run, and then there was Lubber's Run that's closer here, and the Potomac River. I remember when we, in the springtime, we used to ride our bicycles from Arlington here to Chain Bridge and go fishing in the river there and all that. It was just wonderful for a kid because that's what boys like to 01:19:00do. And we loved it. We loved the way Arlington was.

RIGELHAUPT: Did you ever go watch the Pentagon being built?

LLOYD: We saw it. We drove past. We could see the Pentagon being built, yeah. And I worked down at the Pentagon. I don't mean I worked for the government or anything, but during high school they needed a boy to work in the District Newsstand, they called it, and that's where the Pentagon people could pick up their newspapers, obviously, magazines and all. And they didn't choose me, but they chose my brother to go down there and do this, to work for them. And, see, we had a school bus. The school bus went right past my home, and I could get on 01:20:00that school bus and go down to Columbia Pike and take the Pentagon down there for a dime and work in the Pentagon. And I worked down there all through high school. My brother and I and some of the other kids worked there. And it was a wonderful kids job of some kind. It was so good. They gave me ten dollars a week, and it cost a dime to ride down there on the bus. And you got down there, and there's no security to my knowledge. I used to walk right on up there, go to the newsstand and sell newspapers. I sold newspapers up at the shop up there, 01:21:00and then they would take a group. They would take papers down to the south parking. There was a south parking lot and so forth. I sold newspapers down there. That was the greatest job I had in high school.

RIGELHAUPT: Did you have a sense at that point that the Pentagon wasn't--well, that it had some symbolic meaning?

LLOYD: Yeah. We knew all along that it was a government building, that they were--we didn't know exactly what they did, but we knew that it was a government building. Because a good many of the people that came by and bought newspapers--we sold newspapers and magazines, and we'd didn't hawk them, or go ,"Yeah, here's a newspaper." They came by, and they were mostly of the uniform; 01:22:00there were a lot of uniformed guys that came by. They would come by and buy their newspaper at this place. It was really a great job considering you're looking for a job. I'd ride the bus that came by my house that went right to the Pentagon. I rode the bus from my house, and then when I came home I would ride 01:23:00the bus out to Columbia Pike and catch the school bus. It was perfect. I couldn't believe when he got that job.

RIGELHAUPT: Do you remember any other major expansions in terms of housing? I think when we spoke briefly on the phone you mentioned that--was the airport being built?

LLOYD: Yeah, the airport was being built all down there by the Potomac. But there was an airport here before then. They had another airport that wasn't as--I don't want to say grandiose, but it wasn't as, you know, up to date as the one they have down there now. But there was one there, yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: Did you or your friends talk about the changes you were seeing in Arlington? That it was becoming less rural, more urban, more built up during the war? What did you guys think about it?

LLOYD: Well, actually, we didn't enjoy them cutting down all the woods. We didn't enjoy that. And we didn't enjoy--on the other side of Four Mile Run, there was a big mountain-like hill, and there was a farmer up there that was a full-scale farmer. He still worked the land, and that was his main job. And he used to invite everybody that wanted to, to come up and pick blackberries at his 01:25:00place. It was such a nice thing to do. Go pick up blackberries and all. And his name was the same as mine. He was no kin to us at all, but his name was Lloyd. And the thing about it was, I told you that Four Mile Run is down at the run below a mountainside on each side. There was a big hill on the other side. There's a big hill still there now. If you look at Sixteenth Street, South Arlington, and George Mason Drive, you'll see that they go down, way down. And one of the things you felt like you'd really accomplished was when you were able to pump a bicycle up Lloyd's Hill. We used to call that Lloyd's Hill. And that 01:26:00was no kin to me at all, but we used to enjoy going down Lloyd's Hill. Now, I've talked a lot. I hope I haven't bored you with some of this.

RIGELHAUPT: No, this is great. Part of the expansion in Arlington and other parts of the country during World War II was new people moving in, right? People may have come for jobs. Many different reasons, perhaps .Did you have a sense that there were lots of new people moving in and perhaps attending school with you?

LLOYD: Yeah. Yeah, we did know that. But the only thing that bothered us, and it would bother anyone, and it bothers anyone from any situation, was the fact that 01:27:00a person would come in and be critical of Arlington County. And, of course, like kids everywhere, you go up in the middle of New York, for example, and start lambasting the schools up there, you would not like that. And I remember--this is a funny thing. We had a guy that was an air raid warden. He works for the government somewhere, but he was an air raid warden during the war. And he used to be very critical of Arlington because he was from--I won't mention the town he was from in Pennsylvania. But he thought he was--he liked to lambast everything in Arlington. We used to think, and we never told him that, but he ought to go to back to that town. If he didn't like Arlington, he could go back. 01:28:00We didn't care. And there were lots of people. And I don't mean this to be critical to people from Massachusetts, but I remember we lived a long time in Fairfax, too, after I grew up and all. And we had a lady there that lived next door to us, and she used to criticize everything that was in Fairfax. She didn't like Fairfax. She wanted to go back to New England. She said we didn't know how to drive during the snowstorms and things like that. It got irritating to hear that.

RIGELHAUPT: Now, you said your mom taught in school during World War II, and she 01:29:00had been a teacher previously?

LLOYD: Yeah. She taught in North Carolina for a while, and then when she got married she came back to--she came up here. And during the war there were a whole lot of people had left their ranks and education, going in the army or to come and work or something. So they were looking for teachers, and my mother taught out at Bailey's Crossroads and taught out there during the war.

RIGELHAUPT: That's part of what I was going to ask, is that my understanding from reading is that there was a time when a woman got married she could no longer teach. And your mother was married during the war. Was that because, as 01:30:00you said, there were shortages? They had to bend some of those rules to--

LLOYD: Well, I don't remember whether they had that rule. They might have somewhere. But they were looking for teachers during the wartime, and she had taught in North Carolina and had her certificate and so forth in North Carolina. So they let her teach in the war. She didn't teach all through the war, but she taught for a couple years there, and they always need teachers.

RIGELHAUPT: One other change nationally--and it may not have been as immediate right in this area, but I'm curious if you heard about it or have any memories--was that Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which banned 01:31:00discrimination in terms of race in hiring in defense industries in 1941. And part of what, right, that changed was that there were more African Americans working in defense industries during World War II. Do you remember any sort of similar changes occurring around Arlington? Of people who were in new places, working in different jobs, different points of contact?

LLOYD: Well, I do in one respect. Of course--and everybody knows this, so I'm not telling you anything new--but Arlington was behind as far as African 01:32:00Americans were concerned. I never went to school with an Afro-American until I was in the service and I served in the service. I worked with these--but we didn't persecute people like this or anything like that. But our school systems were completely segregated. Elementary school to senior high school. We never went to school with the colored guys. We wondered about it, but it was there. I was talking a moment ago about the plateaus above the creek there, Four Mile 01:33:00Run. Down at the bottom of Glebe Road, what is now Glebe Road, there was a large Afro-American group of people living there. And we never had any trouble with them at all. We never had any fights with anybody. We did occasionally run into a group of black guys on the meadow up there. We would be up there playing ball, and they would come by. We'd look at them, talk to them. Sometimes we would talk. We talked mostly about the base--not baseball but boxing because this was Joe Louis time. Joe Louis. Max Schmeling was a German, and little did I know at the time that Louis and Schmeling were great friends. There was no problem; they 01:34:00knew each other. They weren't bosom buddies, but they knew each other and respected each other. But we never had any difficulty with the black population here. At least I don't remember any. We had no fighting with the black kids.

RIGELHAUPT: Were there kids of different ethnicities at your--either through elementary or high school? Anywhere in your schooling? That ethnicity mattered more? If you were Italian or Irish or Jewish or Greek, as you mentioned.

LLOYD: There was one problem that I know of, and it's not a problem to me, but 01:35:00it was a problem with some of the kids that had to do this. Some of the Catholic kids, apparently their parents didn't, or they didn't, I don't know who, but there were times in school when the minister came in. Generally a Protestant minister would come in, would come and talk to some of the classes. And the kids that were not Protestants, they had a special place that they could go because they didn't want to--and so as far as I know it was just the fact that they didn't want to make kids that were not Protestant stay in there. So they just 01:36:00went somewhere else, and they had a teacher in with them or someone that--no, I don't remember any problems that we had at W and L [Washington-Lee], with the religion of anybody that went to W and L, because when I was at W and L there were like 2,600 kids. Twenty-five, twenty-four, something like that. It was a large school, and we didn't pay attention to any of that. No one ever went there that was black. But we had Italian kids, Greek kids, English kids, Irish kids. Because there was no problem there.

RIGELHAUPT: How do you remember hearing about V-E Day?

LLOYD: V-E Day?

RIGELHAUPT: Yeah. Victory in Europe.

LLOYD: I was riding home from a track meet when I heard that. One of the kids got on the bus and said, "V-E Day. The war is over. V-E Day." Well, I told you this before, I think. Didn't I tell you that we were playing football when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I remember that clearly. I remember victory in 01:38:00Europe and all the fun that went on there. Washington was like a--like it was a fraternity house. Guys were kissing all the girls and making all the noise. It was a great time. I didn't get downtown for that. But they had it on the movies and all of that, and the fact of V-E Day and so forth. And it was a great, great day. I'll never forget that because we saw that in the movies, and we heard it on the television. There was no--I said we saw it on television. We didn't see 01:39:00it on television. We saw it at the movies.

RIGELHAUPT: And how did you hear about the use of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

LLOYD: Well, I was in school then. We didn't understand it. We didn't know about the implications of it. I think everybody knew the Japanese were not going to surrender easily. I think most people didn't like the fact that it took an exercise of that sense in bringing the war to a close, but I think most people 01:40:00thought that the war was--the Japanese were not going to surrender and that it had to be done if the Japanese wouldn't surrender. Now, that's what I'm saying. A lot of people felt like that. I don't know. I don't know. It scares me because I--when we're talking about a bomb that powerful. It really scared me, as it scared most Americans. Most Americans were scared that we had a weapon of that power. But at the same time they thought, well--that people were talking about--I knew that people thought up to a hundred thousand men would be killed if they had to invade Japan because the Japanese were not surrendering. They 01:41:00were not surrendering anywhere. That wasn't a part of their culture, for people to surrender. And they treated some Americans, particularly in the Philippines, areas where a lot of American soldiers were, just treated so badly because a soldier wasn't supposed to surrender and under their culture they didn't surrender. To think about a hundred thousand men being killed because of a bomb. Terrible. And they wanted the war to be over, I guess is what I'm saying. What can you say?

RIGELHAUPT: It sounds as though part of your initial reaction, and it sounds 01:42:00like even perhaps you talked about it with other people, the part of the initial reaction to the atomic bomb was fear, that this was something new and powerful and unknown.

LLOYD: Yeah. That's true. That was it. We didn't understand it. Nobody knew exactly what an atomic bomb was. They knew it was just terribly--as far as human life, that it was--people were killed there in the hundreds of thousands. I don't think anybody in the United States--even today, I don't think--nobody wants to have to use that again. My God, they make all kinds of efforts not to use it and to make sure no other country is going to use it. Right now, it 01:43:00appears they have that same fear today.

RIGELHAUPT: Do you remember how you learned about the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do you remember if you by chance saw a picture of a mushroom cloud on a newspaper or a news--?

LLOYD: We did see what the thing involved, and we did have a lot of concern about that. But we, I guess, figured that they'd have to figure out a way to live with it, or maybe we were going to die for it, you know. You think about 01:44:00another war coming, all that. Something like that really shatters you, to think that that could happen, to us. Could happen to anybody.

RIGELHAUPT: This may be an unanswerable question and in some ways not necessarily a great comparison. But thinking about the atomic bomb as one symbol of World War II that has had a lasting impact, that it changed the world--

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: What was it like learning about that and thinking about that without television in the sense of--or even the Internet now. How do you think it would be different if something like that had been--the way we have television news, and they play it over and over and over again. Or--

LLOYD: I don't know. It would have just been such a--if it fell on an American city it would have been such a terrible thing, such a tragedy to have it so--like out here. An atomic bomb or something that hit Buckingham or something. Just unbelievable. I can't even imagine what it would have been like. It was such an awesome thing. Speaking of Buckingham, you know where Buckingham is? 01:46:00That's down Glebe Road, to Buckingham. One of the movies we used to see in Arlington was at Buckingham because we could get--we could ride up there on the bus for a nickel. We used to do it, too. I'd ride up there for a nickel. A nickel back home. Ten cents you'd ride the bus. It was about three miles from Buckingham to where I lived, maybe less than that. Maybe two miles. But we used to ride up that for a nickel. I can't imagine what it would be like to see this area hit by an atomic bomb. Just beyond comprehension. I hope it never happens. Hope it never happens anywhere. I think that's the only advantage of the fact 01:47:00that it's such a tragic thing to happen to anybody. That people will go to great lengths not to let it happen. I hope that's what we're doing now, going to great lengths to not let it happen.

RIGELHAUPT: As I look at this I have pretty much asked about all the questions--we have touched on most of the things I wanted to ask about. And I tend to like to end with two questions. First, is there anything I should have asked and I didn't? And, two, is there anything you'd like to add?

LLOYD: Well, I'd like to know, what is the purpose of all this?

RIGELHAUPT: The project?

LLOYD: Yeah.

RIGELHAUPT: The oral histories are going to be part of, and help to inform, the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond, California. And so I'm working for UC Berkeley, who's working with the National Park Service to record and document what Americans remember about the home front during World War II.

LLOYD: Well, I think everybody in a position like I'm in, and talking about this and thinking about it and working with someone with it, you don't want people to 01:49:00think you're all wrong on all these things. And my name will be on it, this conversation. Well, is it what you wanted? Is it something you think will be interesting to people?

RIGELHAUPT: Yes. Hands down.

LLOYD: We're all vain enough to think if I'm going to do it I want it to be on a positive note and people will understand why I am seeing these things. Because there'll be obviously hundreds of people that--maybe not the same mind, but I mean, you see something like this, and there's always somebody that says, "Oh, that guy's all crazy." So you have enough concern to want to do well on the thing. I could tell you something else but that wouldn't be too--you want to do 01:50:00well in a situation like this. You want to think it means something to people that--because I can't think of anything that made more of an impression on me than World War II. I was at the right age, and I was at the right spot, and I had tragedy in my life from the war. Right now I think of there's people that are getting their kids killed in the war now, and I think if we can do something better than what we're doing; I don't know how we're going to do it, but 01:51:00something's got to be done. I'm not un-American. I know we have to do some of these things. But I think of those kids that are getting killed now--I mean, they killed 40,000 people. That's unbelievable that it ever happened. I don't know of anything else that I--anything this'll do to help it I'd like to do.

RIGELHAUPT: All right. That's a nice note to end on. Thank you.

LLOYD: Well, I hope it helps.

RIGELHAUPT: It does. Thank you.

[End of Interview]

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