Helen Holloway | Interview 1 | December 27, 2015

DUNHAM: So this is David Dunham with Helen Holloway in her lovely home in Centralia, Washington, on Sunday, December 27, 2015, for the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front Oral History Project. We usually start at the beginning, so could you tell me your full name and date of birth?

HOLLOWAY: My name is Helen Holloway and my date of birth is September 13, 1925. I was ninety in September.

DUNHAM: Congratulations!

HOLLOWAY: Thank you! [laughing]

DUNHAM: And where were you born?

HOLLOWAY: I was born in Chicago, Illinois.

DUNHAM: Can you tell me a little bit about your family history including--do you know when your family immigrated to the United States?

HOLLOWAY: My grandmother and grandfather--I'm Polish all the way around, and my maternal grandparents came to the United States, I think, in 1884. They came to Chicago. My grandfather worked in the stockyards in Chicago. He was a ham boner and he had huge machetes that he used to bone the hams. My mother--I was born just before the market crash, so in a few years the market crashed and we was po'. It was bad. My mother was working as a chambermaid in a great big hotel in Chicago. It was called the Lake Shore Athletic Club and they had a swimming pool inside, and the people that were in the Olympics used to come and train there and everything. But anyway, at that time my father was working and he was a punch press operator. But he lost his job and he didn't work from 1936 to '39, but he did odd jobs. My mother was making $30 a month and rent was $10, so we were very poor.

I can remember I used to run errands for the little old ladies in the neighborhood that couldn't make it to the store. They'd stick their head out the window and holler, "Helen, would you go to the store for me?" And they'd give me a penny. And I managed to get five or ten in a day, and then my mother could buy a quart of milk and a loaf of bread, because they were each $ 0.05. So that's where I got my work ethic! [laughing] But anyway--

DUNHAM: Did you know your grandparents on either side?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yes! We were--the first--well, I'm trying to remember. I was born behind the stockyards, so I knew my paternal grandmother, but my paternal grandfather had died in Europe, so Grandma came over by herself. And my mother's mother came over by way of steerage--do you know much about that?

DUNHAM: No, tell us about that.

HOLLOWAY: Well, it was in a ship down in the bottom, and there was animals and Polish ladies and--but anyway, it was horrible.

DUNHAM: Did she tell you about that experience?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: Did all the ladies down there survive?

HOLLOWAY: Well, she said there was a lot of them that were lost, because there was no sanitation--and I don't know how those people ate. It was quite a trip from wherever they came from.

DUNHAM: Yeah, because how many days would it have taken?

HOLLOWAY: I can't remember now, but--

DUNHAM: Yeah, lots of time.

HOLLOWAY: That grandma--I only lived in Chicago till I was nineteen, and then I went to California. But I was very close with my grandmother. When we lived behind the yards it was only a few years, and I can't remember how old--I guess--I've got pictures of my mother standing behind me, because I was just learning to walk. And they were taken at my maternal grandmother's house. So we lived there from the time I was about a year old until I was thirteen. And Grandma had this house, and then her back door--there was kind of a porch. And then she rented the back part of the house to us, and that's where we lived till I was thirteen. Then we moved away, just a few blocks away. But my grandma worked nights and my mother had six brothers. She was the oldest. My dad had three or four sisters and he was the baby of the family. Anyway, Grandma worked nights and during the day--

DUNHAM: What did she do?

HOLLOWAY: Pardon?

DUNHAM: What was Grandma doing?

HOLLOWAY: Grandma was a scrub lady. Have you ever seen--what is her name--well, anyway it doesn't matter. She was always a lady that was a scrub lady--Carol Burnett.

DUNHAM: Oh okay, in her routine.

HOLLOWAY: It showed her--it was a cartoon kind of a thing. But my grandmother scrubbed floors, terrazzo floors, on her hands and knees until she was seventy.

DUNHAM: My goodness.

HOLLOWAY: So anyway, you know the wages were abysmal in those days.

DUNHAM: Like eight hours a night, or more?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah. She worked at night. And Grandpa was home from his meat-cutting job at night so he looked after the boys. And then in the daytime I would go over there when Grandma came home from work and I'd have breakfast and stuff. I played around in the house, and if I wanted to I could come home just walking across that porch, and I'd have my toys and things. So that's the way I was raised.

DUNHAM: What was the ethnic makeup of your neighborhood?

HOLLOWAY: Oh! Well, mostly a melting-pot community. There was--well, we were mostly Polish and we had a Polish Catholic church and we had a Polish baker and a Polish meat market. They kind of stuck together. But when I went to school it was every nationality you could think of in high school and grade school.

DUNHAM: Did you learn Polish growing up?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, I--

DUNHAM: You'd learned it first?

HOLLOWAY: That was my first language, yeah. So when--and I was already learning to speak English because my mother's baby brother was six years older than I was, and so I learned to speak from the kids in the neighborhood and stuff.

DUNHAM: Did you have siblings yourself?

HOLLOWAY: No, I was an only child. They couldn't afford any more kids when I came along. [laughing]

DUNHAM: A lot of people seemingly couldn't, but sometimes they had a lot--

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, but anyway--my mother always used to say couldn't afford any more. But anyway, so I was an only child, and these six brothers--I always swore that when I grew up, if they ever came to visit me and I had children, and I ever saw them tease one of my kids I was going to do something drastic to them to pay them back. So anyway--

DUNHAM: They were hard on you?

HOLLOWAY: Well, they teased me a lot. I can remember--I've been a chocoholic all my life. And one Valentine's Day they--Hershey bars used to come--they were about that big and they weighed a pound. So anyway, this was a beautiful Hershey bar and they said, "Go on, you better start eating it, because when your mom sees how much chocolate you've got she's going to take it away. So start in." So I tore off the big Hershey label, and then it used to come with aluminum foil kind of--and I tore that off and it was a--somebody had made a piece of wood and cut out all the indentations and everything. So when I opened it up it wasn't chocolate. It was a piece of wood. I'll never forget that. I was so disappointed and I cried, because I think I was about five. [laughter]

DUNHAM: What are your earliest memories of school?

HOLLOWAY: I was always a good student, and I wore glasses, so I was four-eyes and a Polack, and stuff like that. But anyway, like I said, I was a good student always and I was kind of valedictorian of my eighth-grade class. Then when I went to high school it was just a two-year high school, and then you had to transfer to the main building which was a four-year high school, but we did our junior and senior year there. It was odd--and when I said melting-pot community; we had blacks in our school. In fact, the blacks that came to our school were in the sight-saving classes. They had green blackboards and they wrote on them with yellow chalk and things. And our valedictorian was Chinese. Our salutatorian was what we called DPs. He had come from Romania during the war--he was a displaced person. And so he was our salutatorian. He spoke broken English, but it was quite an adventure.

DUNHAM: You mentioned the sight-impaired blackboards for the black students--now why was that?

HOLLOWAY: You know, some of them were albinos. They had yellow--I don't know--

DUNHAM: So they had a percentage of vision?

HOLLOWAY: They had a vision problem, yeah.

DUNHAM: Were they segregated in the school?

HOLLOWAY: No.

DUNHAM: Okay, it was just a number.

HOLLOWAY: We weren't segregated anywhere. And not--

DUNHAM: In Chicago.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, because the neighborhood that I lived in, when I went back in--I went on a trip in 1968. I had made other trips to Chicago, but this particular one a friend that I had in high school--it was strange. My uncle had died and I came for his funeral in 1968. When he knocked on the door he was real shocked to see me there, and he said, "What are you doing here?" And I said, "Well, what are you doing here?" And this uncle that had passed away, his name was Felix. And he said, "I worked on a truck with Felix and I brought his stuff out of his locker."

So I was there for thirty days and while I was there he said--well, he came over one night and he said, "Helen, let me take you to see the old neighborhood." So he took me to see the old neighborhood. There's a program on television and I can't--it skips my mind too--but they had taken bulldozers and just took our neighborhood because they were slums, but that's not--it's a misnomer, because the ethnic people that lived there, they'd go out--the women would go out and sweep the street and the sidewalks. We were clean, paranoid clean type people. [laughter] We didn't have any money, but there wasn't the dirt and stuff that you would think about when you say slum.

But then if you went to the next block it was a black neighborhood and ne'er the twain ever met, except if--you know, like I was a kid and I had to go to a store five blocks away to save my mother a penny and I'd have to go through a black district. But we stayed away from each other then. But the people would have their windows open and the curtains would be floating outside and all shredded and everything. But you never saw that in our neighbor[hood]--just a street over.

Anyway, they had taken my whole neighborhood and bulldozed it and built these real high-rise apartments that eventually people were afraid to go to their home because they had to ride up in elevators and there was so much crime and stuff.

Fukumoto: What part of Chicago were you--

HOLLOWAY: On the southwest side. Are you familiar with Chicago?

Fukumoto: Oh, not really. It's just--I only hear through the news, Chicago has lots of interesting--

HOLLOWAY: It's--you'd have to have lived there to see what I was talking about. But I always thought that when they talk about slums and things--you know, I lived in a slum area, but that's a misnomer because it was so clean. We didn't have trees. There was a lot of asphalt and stuff, but it was well kept and people took care of their homes and stuff.

DUNHAM: You mentioned, when we talked on the phone, that you also had some, aside from helping out the neighborhood ladies, you also had a job pretty early on in the garment industry. Can you tell us how that came to be?

HOLLOWAY: Well, I was twelve years old--or thirteen when I graduated from grade school. I was thirteen, but you can't lay around the house when you're thirteen. You have to be doing something. So I went to the--they had--the board of education would give you a piece of paper if you were fourteen going on fifteen pretty quick--then you could go to work. So my mother couldn't give me my birth certificate to mess up, so I went to my church and I got my baptismal record and I--my mother had Purex, and so I took Purex and erased my birth date and made myself a year older. And of course it turned the paper yellow. And you know, I was smart but there was a lot of things I didn't know about. [laughing] So I went to the board of education with this piece of paper saying that I was fourteen, going to be fifteen in September. And so the lady at the desk looked at me and she said, "You really want to go to work, don't you?" And I said yes. So she said okay and she gave me the piece of paper that I took to my employer, who was the R.R. Donnelley Company, and I think they're still in existence. But anyway, they made the Chicago phone book, the Montgomery Ward catalog, the Sears catalog, the Spiegel catalog, and several--and Reader's Digest and several magazines like--I'm trying to remember. I think Look was one of them. But we put all these things together by hand and we stood on our feet for eight hours. And so I worked that whole summer.

Then when I went and started high school I got a job at Spiegel's at night. There was no computers or anything in those days, so you had thousands and thousands and thousands of cabinets. And everything was written out by hand or typed by somebody. They were in cards in these filing systems and it was a great big building, and we strapped on roller skates. And people--Spiegel's was a catalog place, and they were--I think they were wanting credit. But anyway, you'd take their letter--some of them wrote on a brown paper bag. It was really weird. And we'd start roller-skating to the cabinets, looking through the file system. And if they were in the file then you wrote okay on their card and they let them buy the stuff. And then they--that was out of our hands then. But I worked there all through the school year.

DUNHAM: So this is after school, evenings?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, after school I worked. And when I went to high school--

DUNHAM: I was just going to say--what kind of salary were you getting, do you recall, at the summer job and then this school-year job?

HOLLOWAY: Twenty-five cents an hour.

DUNHAM: Okay, okay.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, so anyway--and I made $ 0.25 an hour at R.R. Donnelley's too. And so anyway, then when school got out I worked full-time then. And I would work every night, and then on Saturdays and Sundays I worked at--I volunteered at hospitals. I would be a tray girl. I would patch rubber gloves, when they'd do surgery and stuff. It was like patching an inner tube. You'd probably understand that a little bit better. But anyway, we patched the rubber gloves and we--they'd have--they washed the sheets and everything and we would put--it was like masking tape on our hands. And they had big tables and you'd spread everything out and just do that with your hands so you'd get all the lint and hair, everything, on your hands so it wouldn't go into the patient's operation. And then we were tray girls. Then that next--

DUNHAM: What was--if I may ask--what was healthcare like at that time? How would you compare it with today, for yourself and/or working at the hospital, that perspective.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, well--I just did outside work. When I was in my third year in high school I worked in a minor surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago, and I cleaned the tonsils and the adenoids and fixed all the equipment to go in and be sanitized or disinfected.

But I--it was really strange. When I was seventeen I got chicken pox and so I stayed home. And oh, you couldn't put your little finger between the pock marks. So anyway--and my mother, you know, would be after me, "Don't scratch, don't scratch." But I still had scabs all over, so I went to school. When I went to school the home-room teacher said, "You've got to go to the office and get permission to come back to school." So I went there, and the principal or whoever was in the office said, "Where is the letter from your doctor saying you can go back to school?" I said I didn't have a doctor. I didn't know what a doctor was, because we couldn't afford a doctor. So my mother talked to my aunt and said, "Do you have a doctor?" And she said yeah, send her down here. So I went there and the doctor charged $5 for me to get that thing. My mother--I think she's still turning in her grave over that--

DUNHAM: Five dollars for what?

HOLLOWAY: Well, for a note, to say that it was okay.

DUNHAM: Oh, just for the note, okay.

HOLLOWAY: And I never had a doctor at all. I had a terrible gall bladder when I was eighteen. I had my first gall bla[dder]--on my eighteenth birthday. We never went to a doctor. I just laid in my bed and prayed to die because I was so sick. But we just--never had a doctor, didn't know--"You'll get better. We all, all the rest of us did."

DUNHAM: When you started earning money as a teenager then, did you just have to contribute it all to the family?

HOLLOWAY: Yes, yes.

DUNHAM: Or did you get to spend any?

HOLLOWAY: Yes, yes. When I was working I can remember we got a pay envelope that had money in it, and I ran to my mother and gave that to her and it was a blessing, because my dad didn't go back to work until 1939. And by that time I'd graduated from grade school. Already there's rumblings in Europe. Hitler was overrunning Europe and they knew we were going to have a war.

DUNHAM: Where did you get your news of the war and other things? Did you have radio or newspaper or a neighborhood--

HOLLOWAY: Well, I was in church when they bombed Pearl Harbor.

DUNHAM: On that Sunday.

HOLLOWAY: The priest announced it from the pulpit. So we went home and turned on our radios and listened to what was going on. But as the war progressed we used to go to the movies, because movies were a nickel and a dime. They had--Pathé News would tell you--they had the pictures of the planes bombing and doing everything, but the news would always say Somewhere in Europe, Somewhere in India, Somewhere in Africa, or wherever they happened to be fighting, but you never knew where. And we never knew where our troops were, that was all--if your loved one was overseas for the army you wrote to an APO, Army Post Office. And then they have naval post offices too, I guess. But anyway, if we really wanted to know what was going on we went to the movies a little more regularly.

DUNHAM: But you did have a radio in the home growing up?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: Did you listen to other programs? I know you were busy in school and working a lot, but did you--

HOLLOWAY: Oh, there was Fibber McGee and Molly and a few of those other kinds of things.

DUNHAM: Did you ever listen to the FDR fireside chats?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yes! Every week he had it.

DUNHAM: What do you remember about those?

HOLLOWAY: We were drawn to it. We thought he was a saint. You know he was the president four times.

But anyway, it was terrible because you had loved ones. My mother's two brothers were in the service and other family members on my dad's side too. You just always--you were worried about them all the time because you didn't know what was going to happen. And it took so long for communication to do anything.

DUNHAM: When you--so what year in school were you at the time of Pearl Harbor?

HOLLOWAY: I was--let's see, '41 I was sixteen.

DUNHAM: And so you were a sophomore or a junior?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, a sophomore.

DUNHAM: And so how did things change in your neighborhood and your area right then?

HOLLOWAY: Well, everybody that had a son, the sons all tried to enlist, because that was a job. And so you saw all these blue and gold flags. And then if they were killed they put a gold flag in their window, and that's how you knew that somebody in that family was killed. But when I was going to school you could quit school legally at sixteen. And a lot of the boys, that's what they did. They quit school because there were so many widows. Their mothers were the only ones, and they were trying to take care of the kids and work, and so in bigger families the kids went to work because they couldn't go to school any longer.

But when I went to high school then they started putting the flags up in our big auditorium, and we had blue flags and we had a lot of gold ones too. You know, there's so much problem now about prayer in school and celebrating Christmas and all--when I was in high school, every--after Pearl Harbor--every day we started, no matter what, if you were in your homeroom or in a classroom or wherever you were--you prayed for the soldiers and the sailors and all the fellows that were in the service. We started every day with prayer for the people that were in the service. And there was--we went to school with Chinese and Japanese and people of all races and religions, but everybody--it didn't matter who you were. You prayed.

DUNHAM: Well, speaking of that, I know Japanese Americans weren't incarcerated who were that far east. But did you know any there--or Italian or German Americans and any prejudice towards them because of the war?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, and there was some--the most prejudiced was because of the Japanese. And you know they were sent to internment camps, and I learned more about that when I went to California. But we--we had every nationality and creed and color that you want to--and we didn't, well--I guess the Germans too, after Hitler started decimating all those foreign countries and--

DUNHAM: And Italians too because--so but did you know Italians and Germans in your area?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, there was Polish and I think the Italians were the next group that were almost as--

DUNHAM: Next biggest group, okay.

HOLLOWAY: --large as the Polish.

DUNHAM: Do you remember if there were any incidents relating to them then?

HOLLOWAY: No. You know, I think everybody was so busy working and minding their own business you didn't have time for that kind of garbage. I can remember--and you and I talked on the phone about this--when I finally went to work at the Dodge Chicago plant, making the B-29 engines [sounds of paper rustling]--that's the picture of a B-29 and that's a story that--just recently I got that, about a woman that was working there. And I never thought to write to them and tell them about it.

DUNHAM: I'll take a photo of this later.

HOLLOWAY: But anyway, this was the biggest plant under one roof, they said, in the world. And we had--let me have that.

DUNHAM: Yeah, okay. I want to take a photo of it later, but yeah.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, okay. Well, anyway, the plant was a big plant like this, and all the upstairs was working area. But we went in--when we came we went downstairs and there was--it was like a big H. Those were tunnels and you could get out--as you walked down the tunnel you could go upstairs close to where your department was, because the people that were delivering the stuff in the plant--we either wore roller skates or they had little, like a golf cart that they went, or they rode a bicycle because there was so much area to cover.

DUNHAM: I didn't know there were so many jobs you had to be able to ride roller skates for! [laughing]

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, no--there was so much--see, it made you move faster.

DUNHAM: Yeah, no I understand, I understand that. I just--

HOLLOWAY: So anyway, there was--you know, if two white people get into an argument and one pokes the other one in the jaw, they can settle it that way. But during the war--and this is just all I've ever known about it--in those tunnels sometimes somebody would get aggravated, because sometimes you'd get really mad at some of the colored people that came. You've got to understand that they were coming from the South. Some of them were illiterate. They couldn't read and write, so they got pretty menial jobs.

In our department we had a fellow named Dave, and he was a great big guy and he was our degreaser. And the job that I had was a Magnaflux operator and inspector. And when I got the parts I magnetized them, and then I put them in the jaws of a machine and sprinkled kerosene over them with iron filings in it, and because it was magnetized and there was any defects in the metal, the iron filings would arrange themselves around the defect and that's how you knew that that was no good. Dave was our degreaser and he was lazy, lazy--you wanted to just shake him. So anyway, here we'd have all this stuff and it had to be degreased and it had to go on its way to the next operation everything, and so I was always--I was working with older married women and stuff. So they'd always say, "Helen, go find Dave." So I'd start walking. And when I'd see a great big box I'd give it a good kick, and if Dave was sleeping there for the night he'd jump out of the box and I'd give him a few choice words and stuff. And he'd say, "Listen you, when this war is over and you've got to go back on welfare I'm still going to be working on the railroad." He was working on the railroad in the daytime, because we all worked nightshift. So he was going to keep his job, so he'd try to sleep as much as he could on our job.

But like I started to say, if two white people punched each other out in the--somewhere, that was just a fight, you know, okay. But let a black guy and a white guy do any kind of fisticuffs or scream or yell at each other we've got a race riot on our hand. But that was quickly quelled. But it seems like--and maybe I'm not nice, but white people didn't walk around with knives that I knew of. Maybe the Italians did, because that was another group. But it seems like the black people always had some kind of a--

DUNHAM: Well, did the--you mentioned, of course, that you had southern blacks who were coming who were less schooled. Weren't there also an influx of southern whites who were similarly less educated?

HOLLOWAY: You know, yeah--because I worked with some.

DUNHAM: Yeah, who also maybe brought that greater conflict?

HOLLOWAY: No, I didn't notice. I didn't notice that they were uneducated. But the blacks that were illiterate stood out like a sore thumb, or maybe they just gave them a lousy job. I don't know. I should have prefaced my remarks.

DUNHAM: No, I'm just curious about that part.

HOLLOWAY: But the blacks that came--every government contract said in it, 10 percent of your workforce had to be black before you could get the--if you were the lowest bidder and got the contract you had to have 10 percent of the people working for you had to be black. But like I say, somebody would holler, "There's a race riot down in the tunnel." I never heard of anybody getting killed. But if a black and a white fought, that was a problem. Two white guys could go at it and people would just walk right by them, I think.

DUNHAM: Yeah, well I understand. Well, and part of what I meant is also coming from the South was maybe a greater hostility between whites and blacks because of the--not that everything was so rosy in the North either.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah. Well, we were too busy. You didn't have too much time to dwell on it. Maybe you'd call them a--whatever nationality you were they had a nickname for you. So if they got made at me they'd say you lousy Polack one and blah, blah. But we didn't have time for that because--

DUNHAM: Well, I was just--when you said a race riot or fight was quickly quelled, how did you mean? How was it--

HOLLOWAY: There was always guards.

DUNHAM: There was security. Okay.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, security guards working in the plant. You couldn't get your foot into a plant--

DUNHAM: Would people be fired over fights and those kind of things?

HOLLOWAY: I don't remember.

DUNHAM: Okay.

HOLLOWAY: Because there were so few men that were able to work. That's why all the women were working.

DUNHAM: Yeah, well you mentioned, of course, your one guy who slept a lot during the job, and I imagine there were a lot of people working multiple jobs like that, which could be dangerous for certain types of positions if you--

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, but right there we had Dave and we had John. And it was really funny. There were some, as I was growing up I remember--there was blacks that had reddish hair and a yellow skin and they used to call them High Yellers. So John was a High Yeller. And I can remember fellows that drove a jitney were--they had beautiful curly hair. And they would--I was a single girl, seventeen years old and eighteen years old, and a lot of the women were married and they had gray hair and stuff like that. Well, some of these jitney--we called them jitney drivers but they were forklift trucks. The jitney drivers, there was one especially--I can't remember what his name was, but he was kind of overly friendly. But I bought my cigarettes--he had black-market cigarettes, so I would buy my black-market cigarettes from this kid. And so the women were saying, "Helen, he looks like he likes you." You never went out with anybody who was black. If you did it was highly--your own business and you'd do it on the sly somewhere. But anyway, John was our High Yeller degreaser, and when we couldn't find Dave, John was working his tail off. So whenever they'd--they kept hollering at me about this guy that was on the forklift. So anyway, I said to John, "Come here." I said, "John, they're trying to get me fixed up with the jitney driver. Would you tell them that he's black?" And so he said, "Sure." So he walked over to the table. He said, "Helen don't like you talking about getting too friendly with the jitney driver. He's just as black as I am." And here is [John], High Yeller, you know. The other fellow was--his skin was as white as yours almost. He had beautiful curly hair and stuff, but you could--they had an accent and stuff like that.

There was a lot of black and white stuff going on. But mostly, like in our department, it was--he was such a good guy, John was such a good guy and he helped us. He'd see a woman kind of, an older lady struggling with something. He'd run over and help her. So when I'd--I used to take the money and the orders, then we had a truck that came in that sold sandwiches. And so as I was going around I'd say, "John, what do you want for lunch?" And he'd say, "Why?" And I'd say, "Because I'm going to the truck." And he'd say, "No, you're white and you're a lady. You can't do that." Anyway, I'd say, "Okay, I'm going to buy you something and bring it back and you're going to eat it and you're not going to pay for it." So he started letting me bring his lunch, but he was loathe to do that, because he felt lower on the human ladder and I was a white person. He didn't want to do that. But I don't know, when you're working with people you judge them by how they treat you. It doesn't matter what color they are or what nationality or anything. I found that all my life that's the way I have reacted to people that weren't white.

DUNHAM: Well, you mentioned--did you know of any whites and blacks who did date on the sly, or however you want to put it?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. No, that was a well-kept secret, because that was terrible to everybody else. You would have been ostracized beyond redemption.

DUNHAM: Well, what about--what was the dating life like at that time and with also a lot of men and soldiers away at war, so for married women or whomever--

HOLLOWAY: Oh man! [laughing] Yeah, married women had a lot of extracurricular affairs. But I had this boyfriend, him, in the South Pacific. I didn't mess with any other men or anything. And I have never been a drinker, all my life. And the only place to go at midnight or the middle of the night was--the bars were open. Chicago was wide open. We used to go swimming in hotels that had swimming pools and we bowled and things like that. But drinking and dancing was about the only thing we could do. And so they always--we'd always go in groups. There was more women than not.

DUNHAM: Right.

HOLLOWAY: So anyway, when we'd go anywhere whatever soldiers and sailors--you could have your pick! Because they were lonely too, and they'd want to come over and dance with you and buy you a drink and stuff. But they always used to call me the baby. And whenever the waitress came to the table and wanted to know what drinks to prepare, they'd say, "Give the baby a Coke," because I didn't have any need. But I smoked, and that was a right of passage in those days for girls.

DUNHAM: Almost everybody was smoking.

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: Well, I'm curious just about--I don't want to prolong it too much, but in terms of married women having affairs--because we talked about whites and blacks and how looked down upon that would be. Was it known of married women having affairs and was that similarly looked down upon?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: Or is that a different level of--

HOLLOWAY: Well, no. If you went out with a white guy and you were white, they just thought you were lonesome.

DUNHAM: Okay. So having an affair while your husband was overseas, that's not nearly as big a deal.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

DUNHAM: Yeah, okay.

HOLLOWAY: We weren't that worried about it because we had too many other things in our head, you know. Because we had to buy war bonds and stuff. When I was working I signed up for war bonds and pretty soon I found that I couldn't buy my lunch. I had to pay for my streetcar ride, so I got a job. In the morning, when I got off work, I went to a restaurant and I worked for four hours.

DUNHAM: Because your war-bond commitment took up most of your salary?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, most of--yeah. Yeah, if you're making $ 0.50 an hour and you signed up for a war bond, the war bonds, the cheapest ones, were $18.95 or $18.75. So like I say, I didn't have enough money for spending money, so I kept my waitress wages, which were $ 0.50 an hour for four hours--that's two bucks a day. One time in this restaurant the guys were all--they were hitting on everybody, you know. So I'm a young waitress, and there was another lady--she was twenty-nine, that was waiting on stuff, and she had a job. She was working at R.R. Donnelley's at night. So anyway, and I--finally, my last year in high school I babysat her kids so I could keep up with my schoolwork. So anyway, like I say, and she had a boyfriend and nobody--everybody would ask me to go out. Well, I didn't have time to go out and I didn't want to go out.

DUNHAM: So how did you handle that? Because like you said, the guys kind of could harass you.

HOLLOWAY: I'd just say hit the road. No.

DUNHAM: Were they ever a little stubborn and you had to say a little more?

HOLLOWAY: No, no, no. It seemed to me like men were a little nicer to women and they had a little more respect for them than they do nowadays. When I see how women and girls are treated nowadays I just want to [making a blubbering noise]. I'm glad I'm ninety and I'm on my way out. It's a different world.

DUNHAM: That's interesting. I could see that in ways, but in some ways, and particularly when we think about the Rosie the Riveter and we hear about women entering the traditional male roles, if you will, in some of these work places, sometimes I've heard about men being really--even though so many were away at war--the ones who were there still being really resistant to women getting those jobs.

HOLLOWAY: You know, I know Doris Bier talked about that, and she was sixteen and stuff like that. I never, never, never heard tell of any of that, and I worked in a lot of different plants.

DUNHAM: Yeah, yeah, I know you did. Well, can we back up a little bit, because we kind of jumped in? We were talking about Bendix Aviation, right? Was that your first job during the war years?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. The--

DUNHAM: So what was your first job after the US entered the war and how did you get it?

HOLLOWAY: Okay. I graduated from high school June 23, 1943. And there was a young--there was two of us in our neighborhood, and when I say neighborhood, there's a lot of people in a block, a square block in Chicago. And so this kid and I--he was an only child. His mother had TB so they put her in a sanitarium and he was born there, and the father went bye-bye. So she had to work all the time and when she finally made it--I think he was seven when she got out of the TB san--and so we were friends, but we'd walk back and forth to the streetcar, you know, the places where we had transportation. So anyway, I'm saying to Bobby, my last year in high school--he was home on furlough. He was in the navy by that time. And so anyway, he came over and told me he was back and all, on a furlough. So anyway, we were talking and I said, "I'm going to graduate pretty quick and I'm going to have to have a job." He said, "They're hiring where my mother works. When you graduate why don't you go to work with her some morning, and they'll hire you--because they'd take them off the street."

So the morning after I--I had talked to his mother. Her name was Margaret. And I said, "Margaret, Bobby told me that I could go to work with you and get a job." She said, "Sure." But I never asked her what she did or anything. [laughter] So we get to work and it's the gun factory. And you couldn't tell what they were doing. So she said, "I work on the second floor, but there's a big long tunnel I have to go through. You come with me." So when we got to the guards at the door she told them that, "She's looking for a job." And so he said, "Yeah, the foreman will take care of that." So we're walking down this deep tunnel, because see, all these rifles were going off and you had to have somewhere to catch the bullets when they shot them. So anyway, I walk in this door and here's a conveyer belt with rifles on it. And I'm wondering--and they're all whole. It never dawned on me that you have to test them or do anything. They're ready to ship when they come down off the conveyer. And there was a man there and he was putting the guns in a rack. So they--I went to the foreman's office and so anyway, his name was Sam {Padulo?}, and he said, "How old are you?" and all that kind of stuff, and I told him. He said, "I've got just the job for you." So he took me into the functioning room and showed me what to do. And my job was to take a rifle off the rack, put it into another rack that had springs on it so that took care of the recall of the rifle. There was some window screens and stuff like that with holes and you had to put the magazine in the gun and then pull the trigger. And if it didn't fire, you had to find out what made it not fire. So I diagnosed the problems with the gun. That was my job. And you learn pretty quick you know.

DUNHAM: Did you get training? Or you just, how did--

HOLLOWAY: Well, when he stood there and watched me for a while.

DUNHAM: Did he show you different reasons why they wouldn't work?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: Okay.

HOLLOWAY: And so well, what you did, you dismembered all the bullets and stuff, and then you looked, because you could see what was happening. There was a little window, and I've got some things left yet from where I got burnt with shells, but when you were pulling the trigger if the--they call it a six-o'-clock ejection. And you've got to understand that the soldier is going to be holding a gun like this, and if the shell was thrown out in that six-o'-clock ejection, he'd get it in the face. So then you had to see why it was doing it.

DUNHAM: Did you wear any special equipment or clothing for this?

HOLLOWAY: No, no--you didn't even have to have your hair covered. But you had to wear their uniform and you'll see it in one of the pictures, because we had a different uniform and always with the steel-toed shoes. And we couldn't get shoes those days, but boy, you could get steel-toed ones.

DUNHAM: But did your face or arms have any protection from the potential burning or shells?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. After a while--when I would do a six-thousand rounder, which took all day--I learned so fast and they trusted me because when I told the gunsmith what was wrong with that gun, he did what you do to cure that and then they could sell the gun. So they--

DUNHAM: What does a six-thousand rounder mean?

HOLLOWAY: Well, when you had a shipment of x number of guns, you did five-hundred rounders, ten of them, and they were called interchangeables. And you'd do them and you had to cool them and you had to clean them, and when you got five hundred rounds in those ten guns, you took them all apart, every piece you took apart. And you put them on the table and then you went like that and then you put them all back together and then you fired them.

DUNHAM: This is if they all worked you had to that?

HOLLOWAY: Well, they were all done and ready to be shipped, so they'd better work and they did. So anyway, then when they got this massive shipment you did six thousand rounds, because you had already been doing ten five-hundred round guns as you were building up your shipment, so they always had me do the six-thousand rounder, because they always said she'll baby it and take care of it and it'll work. And the soldiers liked the .30 caliber carbines because they were light. I think they only weighed eight pounds. And then they had an M1 that was heavier than that, but they said that you could just shoot it like a revolver.

DUNHAM: Had you ever shot or handled a gun before this job?

HOLLOWAY: No.

DUNHAM: Were you at all intimidated or concerned about it?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. Everything was an adventure, just like this is! [laughter]

DUNHAM: And what was your salary at this job? You just sound like you just kind of got there and were thrown into it.

HOLLOWAY: Fifty cents an hour. So then I found out that if I worked on the night shift--and I may sound pecuniary, but $ 0.05 an hour was a lot of money!

DUNHAM: Of course, of course.

HOLLOWAY: So I heard that if you'd go on a swing shift you get $ 0.05 more, so I went to Sam {Padulo?} and I said, "Hey Sam, can I get on the swing shift?" And he said, "Sure, come on." He went in the office and he said, "You're only seventeen. I can't let you work on the swing shift." And you know, it was like--that $ 0.05 was going to pay my car fare, because I'm already slinging hash in the daytime. So anyway, he said, "Bring me a note from your mother that says she doesn't care if you work nights." So I brought a note from my mother and I got on the swing shift, and then I turned eighteen in September, so that--it was just a short time that--like I say, this was a lot of fun. And I've told people, if they came to me right now and said would you test fire--I'd get a walker and go there and do it! [laughter]

DUNHAM: So you miss it.

HOLLOWAY: Because it was fascinating.

DUNHAM: So aside from the increase in pay, was there any significant difference being on the swing shift rather than the day shift?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. Just different hours. And all the--there was no women that were gunsmiths and there was no women that were targeters.

DUNHAM: Is your--okay, what was your job called?

HOLLOWAY: I was a functioner. I tested the functions.

DUNHAM: Oh okay, so go ahead, you were saying about--

HOLLOWAY: The first thing you did with that rifle, you took the rack and you went over to a metal kind of a casket, and it was as long as the gun was and you opened it and you put the gun in there and then you put a bullet in that was one and a half times the gunpowder as the .30 caliber bullet was. And if there was anything--sometimes when we'd open up the little casket the gun was broken. There had been a defect in the barrel or something and the barrel would be split. So then you threw it away. But you did that, and if the fun passed that test then it was functioned. Then--and these, that's another thing. That everybody's worried about everybody's--with fumes and this and that and the other thing. We never got anything to put in our ears! And there's just wooden slabs that--there was this much daylight between our six women that were functioning. And then you could hear the targeters. They sat on a stool and they put their arms on the table and they had big pads in there. They used hunting jackets and stuff, because they had gun club signs on them. Most of the targeters were fellows that had been in a branch of the service and already been discharged, because we're talking 1943 and the war had been going for two years.

DUNHAM: Well, you mentioned no women were targeters or gunsmiths.

HOLLOWAY: There was no women--

DUNHAM: Did you have any interest in being one of those?

HOLLOWAY: Well, the guys used to say, "Helen, you're doing such a good job functioning, come on, let's see how you can shoot." You know, when there'd be downtime or something. I was real good at fast firing, just to ease in on the target. I can still do good, but they always used to say, "When I have my gun factory you can work for me as a targeter."

DUNHAM: Oh yeah, well how--were you working alongside other people so you could ask questions? Because it's--

HOLLOWAY: No, no. They came to me and I asked them--

DUNHAM: Well, how did you figure it all out? Were there any manuals or anything? Or you just--

HOLLOWAY: No.

DUNHAM: Because it seems like a lot of different things to learn.

HOLLOWAY: Well, yeah, but see, when your bread and butter--and you're only seventeen and you've got a work ethic from running to the store when you're five for a penny, you're a quick learner. And it was such fun and I had never been around this and I just--every factory I worked in it was just like I was a sponge.

DUNHAM: You've mentioned not wearing ear protection.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, nobody did.

DUNHAM: Did you or anyone get any hearing deficits that you know of?

HOLLOWAY: Well, maybe I'd hear a lot better today.

DUNHAM: You seem to be doing pretty good. I don't know if I'm yelling, but--[laughter]

HOLLOWAY: You know, I've got to tell you this as an aside. My son was drafted. He is a Vietnam vet. And I was working like for $1.25 or something around here in the sixties. And so when he gets drafted he said, "Mother, why don't you go to Boeing and get a job? They'll hire you tomorrow because you used to work around airplane factories. So I went to Boeing and I got a job. And my first job I got at Boeing I went to--I worked in interior trim. And an airplane is just all panels of aluminum and then there's a lot of stuff on the inside of it. But anyway, I'd go to work in the morning on Monday and I'd get a gallon can of airplane glue--you know, what the kids were sniffing, and a three inch--I had a three-inch brush. And I would paint all this insulation with this glue. By Friday I was about that far off the floor! And man, you know--

DUNHAM: Because you didn't have a mask or anything?

HOLLOWAY: No, no any kind of fans or anything.

DUNHAM: And this is in the late sixties or early seventies?

HOLLOWAY: Sixty-six I went to work there. And as I'm speaking to you every once in a while I grope for a word, but I think that glue did its job on my brain, really and truly.

DUNHAM: How long did you do that for?

HOLLOWAY: Well, it's--I always thank God that this airplane almost was ditched into the Atlantic. It was a 707 cargo plane. It went to Africa to get rhesus monkeys to bring them back for cosmetic companies and people like that, to use them for trying their--

DUNHAM: Research.

HOLLOWAY: --makeup on them. If the monkey lived, why I bet they made the cosmetics. But anyway, the stench going over the Atlantic from those monkeys was so horrendous that they thought they were going to have to jump out of the plane. They couldn't stand it any more, but they finally made it to land somewhere--and so somebody decided to do a fume-tight curtain. Now, the fume-tight curtain was circular and it was half of the plane. And so that thing was about as big as half of this living room.

When I started working on it there was a man who was higher on the pay scale. In 1966 we were still having trouble getting part of what the men got. So he was my lead man, and he was a three and I was a seven. And boy, when they said you can have this job because we're going to let Carl do something else, I really jumped at it because I thought I was going to get his upgrade. And I never did and that was--I worked for three more years, they sold the trailer court, and so I said I'm quitting here.

DUNHAM: You stayed at the same exact level, or did they give you partway?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah--no, I stayed at the same level I started. Four years I was a seven.

DUNHAM: Did you--I wouldn't think you wouldn't ask. [laughing]

HOLLOWAY: I went to the union--I went to the union and I finally went to my superintendent and he almost threw me out of the plant. He said, "We have--there are steps to this. You don't walk into my office. You start out with your foreman." And I said, "Nobody'll listen to me." The union didn't even pay any attention and that made me really angry. But anyway, so I worked on the fume-tight curtain, so I wasn't smelling the glue. But it was a--I had to crawl on my hands and knees and work on top of the table and crawl on the floor and drill holes underneath and everything.

DUNHAM: Well, let's go back to the war years, speaking of pay and equity. So were there other men doing the functioner position?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. Only women.

DUNHAM: It was all women, okay.

HOLLOWAY: No women gunsmiths, no women targeters.

DUNHAM: For women that were doing the same positions do you know if they were getting the same pay?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. I don't think so. But see, the factory built the gun and then it was sent from the factory down on a conveyor belt to us. So we got the finished product. And then we tested them and they--the targeters targeted them, because you had to move the sights and everything.

DUNHAM: Do you know what the targeters and gunsmiths made?

HOLLOWAY: No, I never--never asked.

DUNHAM: Just curious. And did you have to be in a union for the functioner job?

HOLLOWAY: No, not there. But then when I started working in the aircraft plants I was AFL-CIO and that was--

DUNHAM: Okay, so how long did you work as a functioner?

HOLLOWAY: Almost a year, and they said one day, "You come in at eight o'clock on Monday morning." I said, "I work night shift." "Come in at eight o'clock," and they paid me off. [speaking to Candice] Would you like to go to sleep in my bed?

Fukumoto: No, no, you know what--I'm just trying to--we've been traveling all day.

HOLLOWAY: Well, sleep. We don't care.

Fukumoto: I'm totally relaxed.

DUNHAM: But maybe we'll take a quick break, just in case--yeah, so hang on just a sec.

HOLLOWAY: Would you like a cup of coffee or something? [interruption in recording]

DUNHAM: And I think we're about to talk about your second job. So we're back on and you did about a year as a functioner, right?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: And so you were talking about when you got--

HOLLOWAY: So Monday morning they paid me and I'm wondering what am I going to do? But you know, I had my lunch and it was eight o'clock in the morning when we got there, and two minutes later they threw us out the door.

So I started down the street, and I walked a half a block and there was a big sandwich board sitting on the sidewalk and it said, Help Wanted, and the arrow went upstairs. So I went upstairs and they hired me. I sat at a table with a soldering iron and they were making headphones to wear in a tank, because everybody had to have earphones and--that's the only way you could communicate is by this radio in the tank, because it made so much racket when it went. So anyway, I was there long enough--the first thing I did was lean on a red hot soldering iron about that long. And so by the time I went and got some cold water on it and all that good stuff, I came and sat down and a whistle blew and it was lunch time. And the guy said, "Everybody out and down on the street. We're going to go on strike." [laughter] And I'm thinking--my burn isn't even healed yet!

So I took my lunch and my purse, and when I got down the steps I just kept walking. I walked another half a block and here's another sign that said Help Wanted. And it was Bendix, that used to make the washers, washing machines, but now it was Bendix Aviation. So I went in and now--I never saw these earphones and stuff before, so now I'm going to be an inspector. And my wages went up to a dollar! So anyway, they sent me to school. The gunsmith place, the guy told you what to do. But now I'm going to school for two weeks or three weeks or something. I learned to--

DUNHAM: Can I ask too, Helen, sorry--I missed--at the gunsmith job, the functioner job you were--was it severance that Monday morning, or what was it?

HOLLOWAY: No, they filled out their contract.

DUNHAM: Oh, okay, so it was the end of their--they were just done.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, it was the end of the--yeah.

DUNHAM: Okay, okay, sorry. Thank you for reminding me. So go ahead. You were starting the training at Bendix?

HOLLOWAY: So I start the training at Bendix. They taught me how to run all these machines, drill presses and all. Then I had to have my hair covered, because while I was working on that job there was a lady--and I noticed, in that article in the book I showed you, the lady said that the hair, after you'd work a while the hair would start coming out. Well, this lady was running a drill press, you know, and some of her hair got around that and it scalped her and she died in nothing flat. And when we came in she's screaming! Oh! But anyway, so then all the hair went back in the net and we wore a cap and they called them snoods. They had a big--because we had--everybody wore long hair in those days. So anyway, that snood went down and carried all that hair that was down below your shoulders.

So anyway, my job was to go to the tool crib in the morning, and I got the blueprints and whatever drill bits or whatever I needed to put in that machine to make it do its thing. I had ten or twenty--sometimes as high as twenty women. I'd go to them and I'd set up their machine and I'd tell them what they had to do, and then I'd stand there while they got a little accustomed to it. I had all kinds of measuring equipment; micrometers and feeler gauges and all kinds of stuff like that. I would check what they were doing because I was responsible for the waste. And metal was--you didn't want to waste it. So when I saw that she was okay I'd go to the next one till I got all these ladies working. And all day long, ten hours a day, I would keep going and checking them to be sure that everything was going right, because sometimes if they didn't put something in the jig right, it was crooked or something--so I had to watch them like a hawk.

DUNHAM: Were you their manager?

HOLLOWAY: No, I was an inspector.

DUNHAM: Oh, the inspector. Okay. And so--I know you're a quick study, but how long was your training to master all of this?

HOLLOWAY: I think two or three weeks.

DUNHAM: And then was there on-the-job training too? Or you just already knew how to do it and that was it?

HOLLOWAY: No, it was on the job, but you had to learn to read all these instruments and then you had to know where to put these drill things and drill bits and that kind of stuff. You had to learn to read blueprints and stuff that I never knew. But anyway, so that was okay.

DUNHAM: And what were they making?

HOLLOWAY: They were making parts for B-17 engines, B-25s, and B-24s. So I came to work one morning, because I didn't work nights there. I worked days. And they said, "You have to go that way." "Oh, okay." "Here's a paycheck." So I had to go find another job. And the last job that I had in Chicago was at the Dodge Chicago plant, and I had to ride the streetcar for an hour and a half. And I got on a--it was a kind of swing shift, but you went to work at seven and came home at five, six, seven in the morning. So anyway, that job I went to school for months, and I became a Magnaflux operator and never--operator/inspector. So anyway, what you did was you had this big machine with a big tank on it. They brought your stuff to you in trays and you put it there. And with one hand and with one foot you opened the jaws to the thing that--it was jaws. So you'd put the part in there and then release that. And then you'd bump it with your hip. It was--people used to stand there and watch me, because when I got going it was a--it looked like I was a performer in a circus. [laughter]

DUNHAM: And what were you making there?

HOLLOWAY: Well, components for B-29 engines.

DUNHAM: Oh, this was--okay, okay.

HOLLOWAY: Strictly B-29 stuff.

DUNHAM: Okay, B-29.

HOLLOWAY: And if I ever, ever was proud of a job, it was the B-29, because I felt like I won the war for everybody, because it was a B-29 that dropped the bombs. So anyhow, you'd put that part in there and then you'd take your foot off the clamp and it would shut. And then with the other hand you're doing this and bumping to magnetize it, and then putting the solution on, the kerosene on with the iron filings. And then when you fill your tray then you go sit down and you check everything out. And then you do paper work and blah, blah.

So anyway, I had some pretty funny experiences. You can only magnetize certain metals, and aluminum is not one. [laughing] And I had a boss who--I've had bosses that I don't know how they got to be a boss, but they were men, and they didn't know their armpit from their elbow. [laughter] So this boss--

DUNHAM: [laughing] Is that all men or just your bosses?

HOLLOWAY: Well, a lot of bosses, because when I was doing the fume-tight curtain, just the inspector and I knew about the specs and all that stuff, and my boss didn't know what I was doing. So anyway, I couldn't go and ask him any questions because he didn't know. And that was a lot of my jobs. My supervisors couldn't answer my questions, so you had to learn by yourself half the time. So anyway, I'm doing my shtick there at the machine, and this guy was my foreman and he came over and he said--and I had a little container that had a piece of porous rock or something that was in there that they put acid in it. And then I had a stick with a rubber thing on the--it had my number on it, that I was responsible. It showed I did it.

DUNHAM: Okay, marked it, yeah.

HOLLOWAY: So when I finished my inspections I stamped all these parts, so that if anything went wrong they could either shoot me or whatever they did to people who didn't do their jobs. But no foremen ever died. But anyway, so this foreman of mine had--there was this big container that the forklift would put its tynes underneath it, and he said, "Helen, go get the specs for this and inspect these parts." And they were aluminum. And I said, "Mike, I can't inspect them." And I had a uniform on. You always wore the uniform that they assigned you because sometimes you bought it in their stores. And so I had my little ink, acid pad in my pocket and that little stick was sticking in there. And I said, "It can't be magnetized." "Well, put your stamp on it anyway." And I said, "And then I'll get fired because they'll say you put acid on aluminum and wrecked the part." And he said--then he got really wrathy and he said he was going to fire me. And I said go ahead. So then he started using some fancy words and he started to reach for my stick with my number on it, and I put my hand up there and he started to pull away. And I said, "Do you want me to holler rape?" And so he got his hands away from me, because right now I had him intimidated. And he said, "I'm going to go see the superintendent and you're going to get fired." But I never got fired. But that was fun. I gave him one.

DUNHAM: Did they follow up on that? Did you talk to the superintendent? And your boss never came, the foreman?

HOLLOWAY: No. Evidently he never went, because somebody must have said, "You jackass. If that lady said you can't magnetize aluminum she must know what she's talking about."

DUNHAM: But he didn't get fired or anything.

HOLLOWAY: No, no, no.

DUNHAM: He continued to be your boss.

HOLLOWAY: No, because see, nothing happened. If I would have--not known my job good enough or something there could have been problems. But anyway--

DUNHAM: Wow, so what was the name of this company again, where you were working on the B-29s?

HOLLOWAY: The Dodge Chicago plant.

DUNHAM: Okay, thank you.

HOLLOWAY: They used to make cars.

DUNHAM: Yeah, sure. And the previous company, Bendix, they also had the contract end? It that what happened?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah. And eventually this outfit, Dodge Chicago plant, ran out of--no, I don't think they ever did. Because like Boeing here, they were making engine parts for the people that made the engines for the B-29s, and that was solely what this whole plant turned out.

So anyway, then my girlfriend got married and I think I told you about how she was going to go to California and I--

DUNHAM: Well, let's talk about that in more detail. But first I want to--can you compare and contrast a little bit, since you had so many--I know one you only had for a couple hours, but so many of these different jobs in Chicago--in terms of the different nature of these jobs? Were they more similar? Or were there any key difference in how they were run, or the safety or anything like that?

HOLLOWAY: Well, the one--the Bendix job you could get your hair pulled out and you could put the drill in your hand instead of in the part, and stuff like--

DUNHAM: So that happened to some folks?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, you know--because you moved the jig that had the part in it under the--it wasn't stationary. It moved. Because sometimes you did little parts, sometimes you did bigger ones. So it was--it was on a table and you moved it. Women get tired--you can tell them. You can write a book about that. [Candice laughing in the background]

DUNHAM: [laughter] Oh, geez. Well, I'm also curious because you've talked about this competence issue with your bosses and the foremen, doing this physical work that's dangerous too--

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

DUNHAM: --and also important for the war effort. Were some people let go or left of their own accord because they couldn't quite hack it, men or women?

HOLLOWAY: No, no, no. You, when you went through your training, if you didn't look like you were going to make it, they must have had ways of getting rid of you. But if you quit your job you couldn't find another one for sixty days. They wouldn't let you go to work anywhere. That was your penance that you paid for doing that.

And my dad--oh, my poor father. He was--we lived in Chicago and he rode a streetcar for like two and a half hours each way, to go to Gary, Indiana. Because--it's right on the lakefront. You know, where Lake Michigan ends here. He was a--he worked on the big smokestacks and he was some kind of a maintenance man. And two or three times he got overcome by carbon monoxide when he was looking over the smokestacks and they had to bring him home and stuff. We--my dad died when he was fifty-one of leukemia.

DUNHAM: I'm sorry.

HOLLOWAY: And so we thought maybe smelling that carbon monoxide--you know, three times. That was bad, because it's--it just builds up in your blood stream.

DUNHAM: Was that an especially good-paying job? Or what made him go--

HOLLOWAY: No, that's what I started to tell you. Dad made $ 0.88 an hour. He was frozen in his job. We always used to kid my dad. Everybody had to go to the draft board and register, and they all got different numbers and things. And my dad's classification was 1-H and so we always used to say that my dad would go first, after women and children. [laughing] That's funny!

DUNHAM: It's a little mean though.

HOLLOWAY: That was war humor! [laughter]

DUNHAM: Yeah, but he--so he couldn't get a job closer or better paying during the war years?

HOLLOWAY: He couldn't leave that job, no.

DUNHAM: He couldn't leave that job. Same issue.

HOLLOWAY: And when he found out, when I went to the Dodge Chicago plant I got $1.20 an hour--that was the most I've ever made. And my father used to give me these litanies about saving my money--well, I was buying all the war bonds that I could. That and serving coffee to a bunch of lousy truck drivers.

DUNHAM: Were you--you were doing the waitressing job all through these other jobs?

HOLLOWAY: Mostly.

DUNHAM: Or when you worked the swing or graveyard shift at least.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: Wow. And what about your mom? Did she--during the war years did she find other work?

HOLLOWAY: My mother, my mother worked at Western Electric all through the war, and I don't know how much she was making, because we didn't--I never was home with them long enough to visit, because in the summertime, as soon as I came home from work and doing the coffee stint I would go to the beach and swim. I was in Lake Michigan--I think I tried to take it to California with me. But anyway, my mother was working at Western Electric and she was an elevator operator and she had a special kind of clearance. So she always used to say, "I got the money elevator." They used to pay a lot in cash during the war and you didn't have to cash a check or anything. You just came home with a pay envelope full. So anyway, my mother, when the Brink's Express came in with the payroll they went right to my mother's elevator and she took them to where they had to go. And like I say, she had special clearance because she was doing this. But she also had--I don't know if they came in a Brink's truck or how they came, but they had diamond drill bits, platinum--there was a lot of gold, silver, and platinum in the job--and diamonds. Because the diamonds are real hard and they lasted longer in a drill bit. But anyway, so Mom had that job. That was hers all through the war and she came home at six in the morning.

DUNHAM: Oh, so it was graveyard shift for her.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: So did you--so through high school you were still contributing to the family, but once you graduated high school then you were on your own saving for yourself, buying war bonds? Or--no?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. I gave my mother my last paycheck when I was still nineteen.

DUNHAM: So right, for the first year or two out of high school.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

DUNHAM: Is that up until you moved?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, well see when I was working, babysitting for $30 a month, working at a hospital for thirty bucks a month, working at Spiegel's, I turned in my paycheck--that was just--that's what you did.

DUNHAM: Right, everything went to--right, but--okay.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, because you helped with the bills and stuff. By that time my dad was making about $35 a week. He was working at Miehle and they were building printing presses, and he walked to work. It was real close. Mom and I had the trip--

DUNHAM: Oh, this was after the Indiana--

HOLLOWAY: Yeah. No--this was before he went to work, before he got his 1-H classification. Because see, when he was working at Miehle, he was working and the printing presses he was building were going to Germany. Well, when the war started--after '39 I think he only worked there two years. And he had to go get into an industry that was--well, in those days nobody was making anything for consumers. So everybody was doing war work. We didn't get any consumer things until after the war. They weren't building cars, they weren't doing anything like that.

DUNHAM: Well, speaking of that, how did rationing affect you or your family, if at all?

HOLLOWAY: Well, my mother was the ration person. We gave--she had the books and she shopped. She did a pretty good job, because see, here's three people eating lunches that you had to pack. So anyway, I never had to wear--I never had good shoes, you know, dressy shoes, because where was there to go? You work and you wanted to drop or go swimming on the weekend if you had any time off. So anyway, I never had to use shoe stamps because I had steel-toed shoes on all the time.

DUNHAM: You just wore those everywhere?

HOLLOWAY: Well yeah, but when you're working so long and riding the streetcar, yeah, it's a--

DUNHAM: Did fashion change, especially for women, during the war?

HOLLOWAY: Don't ask me about fashion. Because I wore--sometimes I had a khaki uniform, sometimes I had a blue one. But that's--I lived in that kind of stuff. My fashion tooth got cured, or got pulled, when I graduated from high school, because up till then I was worried about clothing and stuff. But then after you started working, you know.

DUNHAM: Well, how did you--since times were so tough, back into high school, how did you make do?

HOLLOWAY: My mother bought me skirts and blouses, because that was--and what did they used to call--saddle shoes. Because that was--you had to dress up like the rest of the kids did. Yeah.

DUNHAM: So Dodge--at Dodge--

HOLLOWAY: Chicago plant.

DUNHAM: And what leads to your coming to California? Is that the next step from Dodge?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah, because Merle was in the service, and--

DUNHAM: And did you tell us how you met?

HOLLOWAY: Well, that's a kind of convoluted story. His mother--I went to school with his baby brother. Merle was ten years older than me and his brother was two years older than I was. He was a weird kid. All he wanted to do was ride his bike. His mother and he hitchhiked from Pierre, South Dakota. She worked as a school librarian. They hitchhiked from there to Chicago. And her relatives lived cattywampus--I lived in the middle of the block and they lived over here, and it was her brother and his wife. And so she stayed with them.

Then she got a rental across the street, and Hank was out on his bicycle, you know. I don't know what he was doing. He never delivered papers or anything like that. But she'd stick her head out the window--and his name was John Henry. He was Hank to this day if he's still alive. But anyway, she'd holler, she'd put her head out the window and holler, "John Henry?" And she could have yelled till the cows come home and John Henry never heard her. So I come out and I say, "Mrs. Foote, did you need something?" And she'd say--we got acquainted and she knew my name and everything. And she'd say, "Helen, would you go to the store for me?" So here's a penny. She died in 1939, by the way.

I met Merle because my best girlfriend was--they were related to the woman that was a brother to Mrs. Foote. And so anyway, she was my best girlfriend. So I'm babysitting for her. She was related to the lady that was twenty-nine years old, that I took care of her two kids my last year in high school. So anyway--and when I'd come home from school I got off the elevated, walked across the street, and just opened her door and went in. And if she hadn't gone to work yet I would just take my coat off and start babysitting. But sometimes I'd go there and there was a note on the table, because she worked--when I got there she went to work, and she was working at R.R. Donnelley's. So anyway, sometimes I'd come there and there'd be a note--"I'm at Mom's." So Mom was a sister-in-law to Merle's mother.

So anyway, when Merle went into the service he was hauling--he was living here in Washington and he was hauling piling to the Bremerton shipyards, and so he had a deferment. Well, the war came along December 7, 1941. He went into the army May 6, 1942. And he just quit his job so he could go--he wanted to go to war. And that was--all the men were doing that. A lot of them didn't want to go, but he was single and so he went.

But anyway, the last time I'd seen him I was thirteen years old and I went to his mother's funeral. And that's where I met him--I mean, I knew who he was. So anyway, when the kids in the family--we would go and we'd play cards. We used to play war, and so he'd sit and watch us and then he'd be hollering at us to shut up and go to my house or something, because he was driving a wrecker and he couldn't stand that. He left Chicago. He said he had to go to wrecks and he said, "I dream about it." So anyway, he wasn't there very long but I got to know him.

So then I get to Alma's, to go to work, and there's a note on the table, "I'm over--the kids are at Mom's." You know, just in case I was there a little bit longer and I'd just pick the kids up. So I went and knocked on the door and the door opens up and here's this tall, dark, handsome soldier! And I recognized him and I said, "Hi Merle!" And he looked at me so strangely, and I was embarrassed. I said, "Oh, I'm sorry. You probably didn't even recognize me." He said, "I recognize you, but my God you grew!" [laughter] Because now I'm seventeen. So anyway, he was there a whole month and he came to Alma's every day. When I got there I started cooking dinner, and her husband would come home from work when I had dinner cooked. Because in the old days we didn't have any quick cooking. You had to buy meat and cook it and it would take you a couple hours to get dinner on the table. So then her husband would eat real quick and he'd go to work for another three hours. So then I would clean up after dinner and wash the dishes and put the kids to bed, and do my schoolwork, because I'm in my last year in high school. So anyway, Merle would be there and we'd be listening to the--he'd have the radio on and stuff.

So the last night before--and he'd carry my books home, because it was just across the street, cattywampus, from my house to where he was staying with his aunt and uncle. So this particular night he said, "I'm going to have to leave early because I'm going back." And so anyway, I walked him to the door and he put his arms around me and held me and kissed me and said, "Will you come with me tonight?" And I'm thinking--I never went back to your aunt's house with you, and I looked kind of puzzled. And he said, "I want you to run away with me." [laughing] And I thought, "Holy Christopher! I'm not running away with anybody." I told him, I said, "My parents will kill me if I don't finish high school."

So anyway, we started--he went and I told him I'd wait for him. So in the letters--he's going to send me money, because I'm going to graduate in four months, and you come--first he was in Florida and then he went across the country to Ford Ord. And it was a year--or not quite a year, from the time that he left me that night--it was in December of '43. Then in November of '44--he was in Fort Ord all that time, and he left from Fort Ord, California--he went overseas and I never knew where he was. I just knew he was in the South Pacific. But anyway, now we go to me getting done at Dodge Chicago, and he was writing letters--he could never tell you anything because the censors wouldn't let you say anything. But he acted like maybe he was going to come home, and the reason he did was because he got jungle pneumonia and he thought he was going to be sent home, get discharged. But that never happened.

So anyway, all the time he was in California, then he really wanted me to come there. But by that time I'm working in a war plant, seeing the havoc that's being caused by women cheating on their husbands, and you know, when you'd talk to them they'd cry and say, "I'm so lonely." And I always used to wonder how could being in another man's arms take the place of your husband? I had never had any kind of a relationship to that extent, so I didn't understand that kind of stuff. So anyway, I didn't want--I waited for him and I told him I'll wait for you. But he was going to send me money and I'm supposed to go here and I'm supposed to go there. I told him, "Merle, I'll wait for you to come back, but I will not marry you while you're still in the service." Sometimes he couldn't understand what was wrong with me. "You say you love me and you want to be married to me but--." Well, anyway, so then--

DUNHAM: Was that because you wanted to spend more time with him to make sure?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, yeah, and I waited for him. I didn't ever go out with anybody or anything, but I went to California. And so while I'm in California--

DUNHAM: Did you go on your own to California?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, yeah.

DUNHAM: Okay, so what was that like?

HOLLOWAY: It was horrible. The train ran out of food and everything, about midway between--I went to California on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. [laughing] There's a song written about it.

DUNHAM: Did you know anyone in California?

HOLLOWAY: Well, see this girlfriend went and she said I've got an extra bed. So I went there. And I could tolerate--we were together two days a week and then her stinking husband came home. I don't know what she saw in that guy and I was so glad I was single! Because I used to have to--I'd go to the skating rink. That's the only thing I really knew how to do was swim and skate--because I didn't want to be in the house. He was oh, he was such a vulgar thing and he cussed at her and got mad at her. He didn't like walking the dog for two days and two nights.

DUNHAM: So you took the train out to--with this girlfriend in California?

HOLLOWAY: No, no. I went by myself.

DUNHAM: Oh, she was there already.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

DUNHAM: Okay. So she--a friend from Chicago who had moved out there.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah. She was my best girlfriend.

DUNHAM: Oh okay. He was in the military too?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, he was--I told you he had a killer dog and he walked the beach to kill Japanese that landed out of their submarine. But I don't think he ever had to kill one.

DUNHAM: I don't think so, okay.

HOLLOWAY: But anyway--because they didn't bomb the coast anymore. I guess they knew Helen was in town. [laughter]

DUNHAM: Exactly, exactly. So where are you exactly?

HOLLOWAY: I'm in Santa Barbara.

DUNHAM: Okay, Santa Barbara.

HOLLOWAY: And the first thing we do--we find out Olga never had a job. But when I came I said, well, you know, you've got an allotment and your husband's working. He wasn't an officer, but he--in those days a buck went a long way. Anyway, I said, "I've got to find a job." And she said, "You know, I'd like to get out of here," because she didn't like being home those two days with Russ. So anyway, we went to Hoff Hospital because we heard they were hiring. That was, again--either be in a restaurant or something like that, and I didn't want to serve coffee to any more truckers.

So we went there and we said--when we went to the office they took us to the colonel who was the big shot of everything. We said, "We saw a sign they're hiring for the laundry." And he said, "The only people we let work in the laundry," because Southern California was--[gasp]--nothing but wetbacks. Pardon the bad talk. But anyway, they were all--they were still drying their backs off. They were all Hispanic. And he wouldn't let us go down there. He said, "We need office workers." And I said, "I do not do office work. I have worked in factories, and I think I could fold a sheet and throw it through the mangle faster than you can figure it out." So he said, "No, we will not let you go there."

It was a civil service job. He said, "Do you know how to type?" I took one quarter in high school of typing so I could have neater papers for my assignments. So anyway, he gives me this horrendous civil service application and sits me down at a typewriter. And I could type with two hands and everything, but nothing like what you need when you're working in an office. So anyway, he said, "See, you know how to type. You're going to work in the office." [laughter] So he sent me to the office. And I don't know where Olga went. She was in the office, but she was in a different office. But they put me in the office where--were you ever in the service?

DUNHAM: No.

HOLLOWAY: Okay. When you're in the service they do a morning report, and they do it every morning. That's why it's called the morning report. And they count everybody by their rank and serial number and blah, blah. So anyway, I'm counting what they call permanent party. That means people that belong there and rule the roost. And then there was a morning report for the patients, according to rank and serial number, blah, blah. So anyway, I had two morning reports to do. So that took me till noon. So I'm counting all these soldiers, and in between times they're coming to the window and they want shoe stamps, because they had to--they were in the army, but they still had to go to town with a shoe stamp to buy shoes. And a lot of them were brought in on a gurney, or a stretcher, so they just had their pajamas, and so they had to have shoes and stuff. So I gave them shoes stamps. They, some of them, wanted their medals. So I knew how to get their medals, and I did the two morning reports. Because I was single and I didn't have anything else to do--I was away from Olga and we never met, because we never saw each other at work. She was in another office.

So and then Olga went home because her husband was transferred someplace. So anyway, I was living in a rooming house and the woman had four children, and they were--when I knocked on the door, because it said Room For Rent on the door, this older man--he was white-headed and everything, came to the door with this tiny little three-month-old baby. And he asked me, through the screen door, what I wanted. And I said, "Do you have a room for rent? Could I see it and find out how much it costs, if I can afford it?" And he said sure. So he had this little boy and it was a baby, and he looked at me and he said, "Helen, this is Jerry. Jerry, this is Helen." And I said, "Oh, I bet you're so proud of your little grandson." [laughter] Don't never say that! That was their baby! And so anyway--

DUNHAM: But you got the room? It was affordable?

HOLLOWAY: I got the room.

DUNHAM: Now, can I ask how much you were making at the hospital? And this is a military hospital.

HOLLOWAY: Ninety-six dollars a month.

DUNHAM: Okay, what did that come out to an hour?

HOLLOWAY: Forty-five dollars or $47.50 every two weeks. Six of it went for a cup of coffee and a piece of toast in the morning.

DUNHAM: At your new place that you got.

HOLLOWAY: Meal for supper. No, she was a good cook, but I couldn't stand the diet. I never ate that kind of stuff.

DUNHAM: Well, can you talk a little bit about your adjustment to California? How long have you been out in California now, and was there some culture shock? There's the food.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, I cannot stand a palm tree, the sight of a palm tree. [laughter] Oh my God!

DUNHAM: On--instant? Or was it a little while after being in California that you--

HOLLOWAY: Well, I'm used to blizzards and stuff like this, and here the sun is shining every--

DUNHAM: But you could swim all the time!

HOLLOWAY: No, you can't! The first time Olga and I, when I got there, we put our bathing suits on and went into the pure Pacific Ocean. And we're walking along--first it's up to here, then pretty soon it's up to here, and here's a dead shark came swimming. We never had that in Chicago, believe me, in Lake Michigan. So that was the end of that. But then we went to--there was East Beach and West Beach. And West Beach was the one where the big waves came in and it was fun to jump through them, and West Beach had a swimming pool on the sand.

So anyway, I'd work, and when I'd go on Saturday and Sunday to do the morning report--I was a very devout Roman Catholic, so on Sunday I'd go to their church, on the post. But then when I was done with that sometimes the guys would holler--come on! They let me join--and that was how I made my movie money. I played poker. They taught me to play poker and we got ten matches for a dime, yeah. So if I won the game I was losing a penny. So anyway, that's what I'd do. And sometimes the guys were too sick or they'd just had surgery and stuff, so the group was broken up for a couple weeks.

So anyhow, then I'd go home. Molly taught me to make bread, the lady of the house. And we got to be fast friends. We were friends for years after I got married and came up here. Because Merle stayed there for months before he got out of the service. He had a furlough, but you know--and he had to have a place to stay. So she had an extra bed, the two older boys' bedroom. So he stayed there. And there was two marines who got married on the base.

See, Santa Barbara was a jumping-off place to bring back sick people--the soldiers and stuff--there was every branch of the service was--had one of these fabulous hotels. They commandeered everything that was civilian and used it for the military. So one place would be a marine base, a coast guard base, air force base, and the place was crawling with servicemen.

So anyhow, these two marines wanted to be off the base so they could have a room together. So they rented one room. There was a would-be starlet that never made--she got the let but not the star, so she was always drinking and drunk--she had one room and I had another. Yeah, there was four of us and Molly and her husband at the table every night. So anyway, when I'd come back on the weekends I'd wash clothes for Molly, and I baked bread and I did lots of stuff. I was just--and she was like a sister.

DUNHAM: Did you help take care of the kids too?

HOLLOWAY: Huh? Yeah. And I babysat the kids, like on nights--

DUNHAM: Did you get a reduction in rent or anything for your--

HOLLOWAY: What?

DUNHAM: Did you get a rent reduction or were you just helping?

HOLLOWAY: Oh no, no, no. I was a volunteer from back yonder. And so anyway--and she was so nice to me and everything. When I was home on the weekend maybe I got a little sandwich on Saturday. You had to pay for everything.

DUNHAM: When you say home for the weekend, you lived there through the week, but you're just saying you were there the whole weekend kind of thing.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah. But I wouldn't, if the guys weren't playing poker I'd do my morning report. On Sunday I'd do the morning report, but I'd go early. And I'd go to church. It was a Mass. So anyway--

DUNHAM: Was the church, was that a seamless transition? Was it very similar to what you'd experienced in Chicago?

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah, a Roman Catholic church is the same way in Timbuktu or anywhere.

DUNHAM: How long before Merle rejoined you in California?

HOLLOWAY: Well, I got there in about May and he came the twenty-third of December. So anyhow--

DUNHAM: So what happens when he--well, first of all, so before he comes the end of the war comes. Can you tell me about what you remember of V-E Day, V-J Day.

HOLLOWAY: Oh, the end of the war! When I worked at the Hoff General Hospital it was in Goleta, eight miles or something. No public transportation. So you stepped off the curb and you did this, [sticking thumb out] and they'd stop. It didn't matter what color you were, what sex you were--you got a ride. Nobody bugged you. They'd say, "Where do you want off?" So they'd let me off right at the gate of Hoff Hospital. When I got off work I came outside and stuck the thumb out. That's the way you got around everywhere.

So this day we're coming home. And see, the war ended in August, and so they kept us on. The hospital closed, they took the patients and sent them wherever. And so we stayed because we had to pull all their documents and everything in writing went to Fort Douglas, to a big hole in the ground where they kept all the annals and everything. So anyway, the hospital closed and I lost my job in October. But anyway, we're coming home this day and like I say, the patients are gone and we're pulling files and everything. And this nice man--I got a ride in a pickup. And pretty soon we're getting closer--because see, we're eight miles out of Santa Barbara and it's kind of like country, farmers and stuff.

So we started noticing that traffic was building up and stuff and people were in the streets and stuff. So I had my window down and I'm hollering at these people, because the pickup was pretty high. I said, "What's the matter?" And they said, "We're celebrating! Get out of that truck!" Because then we couldn't go anywhere in the truck. I usually cry when I'm telling this, but I'll be okay. And so they said--[voice breaking] No, I'm not going to be okay. And they said, "The war is over." [crying] Oh God! You had to be there to know what was going on! Everybody was hugging everybody. We were crying and kissing each other, strangers that we never saw before in our lives. And we kept saying, "Is it true?" Because we didn't believe it, you know--all this length of time they're fighting and people are dying. And so they said yeah. There was a Catholic church close by, and I left that--because I had to walk from there home. So I went to the church and was in there alone and got down on my knees and prayed and thanked God that the war was over. But anyway--you had to be there. You had to be there. Because that was a long war and so many people that we knew in our lives had died.

There were stories like the lady that lived next--we lived in an apartment building in Chicago. And before--my mother told me about this. This lady--her boy and his wife moved in with her. She was a little old lady and she didn't work or anything. And so the daughter had a baby. And her husband was getting ready to come home, because he hadn't--there was a point system. But if you were in certain places you never got to come home. If you had so many points--like the flyers would have points for their missions that they flew. And they had their choice to come home or stay. So this young man that was my mother's neighbor, he had points and he was married and he had a child, so he had enough points to come home. And he was doing some kind of a clean-up job somewhere, and there was a landmine buried and he stepped on it and died, the night before he came home. There were stories like that all over. And so now you knew that that's not going to happen anymore, you thought.

DUNHAM: So in one part you knew Merle was probably that much closer, or did you already know he was on his way home?

HOLLOWAY: No, I didn't know anything. But anyway, and this is in August. So there'd be times that I wouldn't hear from him maybe a month, because he was going somewhere. So anyway, he finally wrote to me and he said, "All I do is sit on the beach with all my stuff around me and wait for an empty ship." So anyway, Bill--Grandpa who had the baby [laughing]--he used to get the Santa Barbara Gazette every night when he came home from work. And that was inviolate. Nobody touched Bill's paper. So Bill's sitting at the table, and every night there was little pieces of stuff in the front page of that paper that said, Tri-County Arrivals. And because I had moved to California Merle had changed the address he was going to be coming home to and the place where he was going to be discharged. So there was three tri-county arrivals. And I had to look over Bill's shoulder, and the printing looked like it was that big and it just jumped out--Foote, Merle FT-4. And he had just arrived in San Francisco.

You know, I don't know--well, I was associated with a lot of soldier stuff and nomenclature and processes and all that kind of junk because I was in the office. And something told me to call the harbormaster in San Francisco. And to this day I think--what kind of a thing told me to do that? So I called the harbormaster in San Francisco, and I knew Merle was on the USS Grant. So I said to him--and you've got to understand, there's fifty thousand soldiers, sailors, and vice versa in ships in San Francisco Bay, that they can't get anywhere near a dock; eighty thousand servicemen around where they've been let off the ships. But they can't go anywhere because there's no trans--they can't get on--there was no planes then. You can't get on a bus, you can't get on a train. Everybody's sitting there trying to get home. So anyway, when I called the harbormaster he said, "What ship are you inquiring about?" And I said, "The USS Grant." "Oh!" And I'm thinking oh God, Merle won't get off his ship for a month and then it'll be another three months before he ever gets anywhere out of that San Francisco area. So he said, "Oh, the men have all disembarked and that ship went back to the Orient." And I'm thinking how could that be? Well, Merle hitchhiked home to Santa Barbara, and that was on the nineteenth or twentieth, or twenty-first of December. I can remember the day he came home--that he walked in the door. But anyway, he was--when they told me that the ship had gone back to the Orient I couldn't figure that out. That seemed ludicrous.

So anyway, Molly had four boys and Jerry was the baby. And by that time he's already a year old. And then there was Billy. And Billy was my shadow. Billy called me mommy and everything. He was always in my room. And I had two dressers. He's always in the dresser drawers, and the windows are that far from the floor, you know, where they close. And so I didn't want to be ornery or mean, and I'd say, "Billy, go see--" because I had a picture of Merle. "Who's that?" Or I'd say, "Who is that?" And he'd say, "Uncle Merle." And so I'd say, "Billy, go see if Uncle Merle came home yet." And so he'd go to the window and he'd look around. "No." And back into the drawers and we'd go through this, "Go see if Uncle Merle came home." So the twenty-third was on a Sunday--Saturday, well, I was home because I didn't have a job, and I went and got a job at the telephone company. I was a long-distance telephone operator as soon as they canned me--well, they didn't can me, but they shut the hospital down.

DUNHAM: Yeah, yeah, sure.

HOLLOWAY: And I worked nights. So anyway, Billy's in my dresser drawers, and I said, "Billy, go look out the window and see if Uncle Merle came home." So he goes and looks out the window and came back. And I said, "You didn't tell me whether he came home." He said, "He came home." And I ran to the window and there he is paying the cab driver off. Boy, I'm telling you, I was down those stairs and out the door real quick. But anyway, so he came home and he had to go to some town that was somewhere that they discharged the soldiers, to be discharged.

But I said, "How did you get off your ship?" He said, "You know, it's December. We came around the Aleutians and there was a horrendous storm," and the ship started cracking in half because it was from World War I. And so they had to take all their clothes and stuff in the--and he said, "We thought we were going to die before we got home." So he said, "They let us get off right now when we pulled in the harbor. We all got off." You should have seen his clothes. All he had on his back was whatever they could find. He was over six feet tall. The jacket they gave him--he was married in it. The sleeves were that short on his arms. [laughing] But anyway, he said they took it away.

And in the meantime, in the years that have gone by, I had a friend who was a computer nut. She came and visited me here a couple of years ago and brought her computer. And so I didn't even know he had any medals or anything. And so anyhow, I didn't know anything about where he was, and she's digging on the computer and she--I could remember parts of his address, because all his letters that I saved I lost in the flood in '96. So anyway, I'd tell her numbers. And so she'd punch him up and she said the found the USS Grant. Within five days they had it in the boneyard and it was all--they had it scrapped. So anyway, that was interesting to read about.

DUNHAM: So were you--how soon after did you marry?

HOLLOWAY: [laughing] Well, I had a thing about needles.

DUNHAM: Needles.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, and you had to have all kinds of tests and blood tests and everything.

DUNHAM: Oh, because you hadn't gone to the doctor as a kid?

HOLLOWAY: No.

DUNHAM: Maybe that was part of it.

HOLLOWAY: No, I never, never--just to get my ticket with the--[technical interruption to adjust microphones] Well, anyhow, so--Merle got to thinking that maybe I didn't want to get married, because he's there for Christmas and he said, "What do we have to do?" So we finally--we went to the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church is an organization that you wouldn't believe. So we went in there--now, I am buddy-buddy with the chaplain at the army hospital because I'm going to Mass, and I'm the only civilian going to Mass. So I told him, I said, "Father, when my husband-to-be comes back, would you marry us?" And he said, "I'd be honored." Well, I said, "I've got a problem. I'm living in a household with Mormons." And you could not have--and they made up their mind the minute they laid eyes on me, we're going to stand up to your wedding. So I told him, "What am I going to do? They're going to stand up to the wedding." He said, "I won't ask." So I had my wedding all taken care of and everything.

Well, so then we go to the priest. When they were passing out brains he must have asked for an invisible one or something. But anyway, we go in there. He said, "What did you want?" And I said, "Father, I'd like to make arrangements to marry this man." Now, Merle was a non-Catholic, but he had been working with a Catholic priest in the Philippines, because the place he was in the Philippines they were going to be invaded. So everybody that had a typewriter or any kind of a thing like that, they had it in a cave in the side of a mountain. Merle comes and the priest is trying to type something and Merle fixes his typewriter. So he had a permanent job all the time he was in the Philippines waiting to come home. So anyway, he knew, the priest told him, what all he was going to have to do to marry a Catholic. So he was well versed in what had to be done.

So we went, both of us went to the priest. And the priest said, "What did you want?" And I said, "I'd like to make arrangements to marry him." He said, "I've never seen you before. You don't belong to my church." I said, "I'm from Chicago." And he said, "Where have you been going to Mass?" And I explained to him that I worked at Hoff Army Hospital. I had to be there on Sunday, so I went to the Catholic church on the post. And he said, "Well, I don't know you." He was asking about Merle, what church did he belong to? And I had to say he's a non-Catholic. Oh, oh. [laughter] He said, "Why do you want to marry him?" And I was kind of flabbergasted and I said, "Because I love him." And he said, "That's no reason." Well, I had another reason I was going to give him which wouldn't be true, but I just wanted to see what his reaction would be, but I didn't.

So anyway, Merle is sitting there twisting his hat on his fingers and he told the priest, unbeknownst to me that he was going to say it. He said, "Father, I'll turn Catholic for her." When he said that I came out of there like a shot out of a cannon! I said, "It's hard to be a Catholic if you were born a Catholic! How can you even think of something like that. It's too hard." And I got up and walked out. And I stop at the door and I look around and I said, "Are you coming with me?" So he doesn't know why I'm leaving, and there was a park across the street from that door that we walked into and I ran across the street, sat down on the bench and I started crying. And he said, "Honey, I'll do anything so it'll be easier." I said, "Nobody's turning Catholic because of an idiot like that!" So there went my marriage plans. And I told him, I said, "I'm never going to go to a Catholic Church again. I'm all done."

So anyway, we went to the--we found out where you had to go to get your tests and everything. I finally went and got the needle, because he said, "Have you decided you don't want to get married?" And I said, "No, I don't like needles." So anyway, we went and got our tests and then--so then we went to the courthouse to get the license and we're asking the person who's giving us the license where we can find a justice of the peace. And somebody said, "What do you need a justice of the peace for?" And we said we want to be married. He said, "I'll do it." And it was a superior court judge. So anyway, he came over to where we were and he said--and dumb me, I should have been married on the thirtieth of December so I got my income tax back, but I said, Let's get married on New Year's Day to start the year off. So we lost all my tax money. But I didn't find that out until about a year later. But anyway, he came down on New Year's Day. He wouldn't take any money for marrying us. He opened up the courthouse and he married us! He came and opened the courthouse up for us! And Merle starts to pull his wallet out, you know, and he said, "No. You're not even discharged yet. Keep your money." So that's how we got married. Then--

DUNHAM: So it didn't take you too long. He came home on the twenty-third--

HOLLOWAY: And we were married New Year's--

DUNHAM: Married by the first--

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, but for him it was a long time! And I was trying to keep from getting married. [laughing] But--I wanted to marry him but I was such a chicken. So anyway, when--

DUNHAM: Was that the real reason you didn't marry while he was still in the service? Or was it that you weren't sure?

HOLLOWAY: No, no, no. I didn't want to be a army wife. Never. I'd never been away from home, and then I go all the way to California by myself. But anyway, when we got married then he went to Los Angeles a while--because see, he didn't get out of the army till the nineteenth of January. And we had to go to another town and everything, to where he was getting discharged.

So anyway, he wanted--Merle's whole life was driving trucks. And so he went to Greyhound. And somewhere in the go-around when he was a young man he had broken an arm. And the first thing they did--he was good fodder to drive the truck, because he had lots of experience and everything. They took X-rays of his arms. They said you can't ever work for us. So anyway, he came home and he said, "Honey, let's go to Washington. I know I'll get a job there." And so we came to Washington. That was why we left California. And he didn't like big cities anyway, and if he got a job at Greyhound we would have had to move to Los Angeles.

DUNHAM: Yeah, wow. Well, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I know either you or Cindy mentioned that some years later you had an experience with an atomic bomb survivor, a Japanese person.

HOLLOWAY: Oh yeah!

DUNHAM: I was curious about that story.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, you know, and it's really funny how these things happen. I went on a trip, and I used to go when--Ernie and I used to travel a lot after we got married. He had five bouts of cancer while I was married to him, but between his bouts of cancer, when he was well--because he'd always say if you've got to have it anywhere, have it there and we can cure it. So they did.

So anyway, we used to go with this company. So Ernie's in the home and they were going to Lake Crescent, and so I went. And when we got to Tacoma the bus became full and the lady was Japanese. And she was a little sweetheart. And I wanted--and she sat with me because I was in a seat by myself. She was with a man, but he said go ahead and sit with her. I said, "I'll go sit in the seat he was going to sit in, then the two of you can be together." He said no, just go ahead. So we're on the bus together for over eight hours, and oh, I wanted so bad--because she had an accent and everything. And I wanted so bad to say, "Where were you?" Because we're matching stories and we're both about the same age. So she's got to be in Japan when the war was still on. So I said, "Where were you when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima?" She said, "In Hiroshima." And man, I hit the mother lode. So I started talking to her, and man, she just--I cried and apologized for us dropping the bomb on her. And she was a real religious person and she said, "No, no. If you hadn't done that we'd still--lots of people would have died. We were so grateful that he dropped the bomb."

So anyway, she said she met this army-of-occupation GI, they got married, and she said, "God was with me! He brought me to the United States. I became a Christian. My whole family is here now!" And so she told me all about where she was working. She said they were in a--they had tunnels or stuff when the bombers came over. She said her--and there were seven kids and the mother is saying, because she's looking out the window. She said every other day--one day she went to work at seven, the next day at nine. And this was her day to go at nine. And so she would go to the restroom and put towels and toilet paper out and everything. That's why she went early, but that day she didn't go. So she said when she finally saw the building--it was a big building and she didn't go into any detail about where she worked in it, but there was only one wall here and one wall here. And everything else was gone. She said--she just, through her conversation, was telling me about God. And she said, "Not one of us got hurt or killed or anything."

But she said, "My mother's asking me, 'Are there planes?'" She said, "Yes, there's planes." But she said, "I think today must be the day they're going to drop leaflets." Because they wanted the Japanese people to go and kill the emperor--do nuts stuff like that, and they would drop propaganda. And so she said, "They're not dropping anything." And she said, "They must not be going to drop bombs today." So everybody was happy. And then they dropped it. It was horrible. But they never got any radiation burns--nothing happened to them. Their family was intact. So anyway, she just was bragging about how glad she was.

So then Ernie's in the home and there's an Italian man who has a power of attorney who comes and talks to him. And I'm telling them about meeting--I wrote to her for a couple years. Her name was--oh, I don't know but I've got it in my address book. Anyway, I'm telling him about meeting her. And he said, "I was in the tower, the flight tower," what do they--you know, where they send the ships out.

DUNHAM: Air traffic control? No?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, air control. And so anyway, he said, "That was my job."

And we, when we were working at the Dodge Chicago plant, the one girl that I got acquainted with, she was a mother with a little boy, and her husband was--we used to do everything to try to find out where they were. So anyway, when she got her job with the B-29 she wrote to him. And so this one day he wrote and told her--and they said Saipan was a B-29 base. So he writes her a letter and he says, "Honey, I know you're working real hard, because I see the evidence around me every day." So she knew he was on Saipan, because that was the only B-29 base there was.

And so this man, who was the power of attorney for this fellow, he said, "I was air control. The Enola Gay," and that was the one that dropped the first on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki three days later and then the war was over, when they dropped the second bomb. So anyway, he said, "We kept watching, because the Enola Gay," well, when they'd load the bombs they'd pull over this--they'd open up their bomb bays and there'd be a pit and they'd load all the bombs that they were going to drop. So they had--oh, there was a lot of work done to outfit that plane to drop the atom bomb. So he said there--and nobody knew. This was so hush-hush-hush it was terrible. He said they didn't even know that she had dropped the bombs until three days after Nagasaki. So that was six days that they didn't know what happened. But anyhow, he said they kept watching and watching and he's wondering what they're putting in there, what they're fiddling with. And so anyway, then the plane took off and bombed, but nothing was said about it or anything. And you know they never got the news.

But anyway, here now I meet a man who had the Enola Gay sitting next to him. Then I go to the museum and I meet an astronaut, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar. So that's three things in my life that--I never thought I'd live to be ninety, but I'm glad I did. [laughing]

DUNHAM: Well, well said--and I'd like to wrap up, but I just want to go back to your wartime work in the Rosie the Riveter vein, if you will, and just--I wonder if those opportunities to do so-called men's work at times, how they may have influenced your life?

HOLLOWAY: Well, I was an only child and my dad wanted a son. And so he, in 1929 when things were still good, he bought a Ford Crown Victoria. And Daddy would be changing the oil and he'd ask me for wrenches and I'd hand him wrenches. I was always out there. When I was in high school I had aptitude tests and I always had mechanical--was high in mechanical ability. And the war work or the machines and stuff came pretty--you know. I was built for it. Let's put it--

DUNHAM: And I know you've kept busy all your life. Did you have opportunity to do that type of work, inside or outside of work or volunteering later in your life? Or did you want to?

HOLLOWAY: Well, I worked in hospitals. I wanted--in fact, when I graduated from high school I was--they had some kind of uniform that they used to call these girls that helped out in the hospital.

Fukumoto: Candy stripers.

HOLLOWAY: And they named them after the uniform. I can't remember what it was.

DUNHAM: Candy stripers?

HOLLOWAY: Candy stripers, but I never had a uniform when I did it. I told you about patching the gloves and rolling bandages and stuff. I worked in Mount Sinai Hospital for one of my night jobs after--in my third year in high school. So anyway, I liked--I worked around so many hospitals that I kind of liked it and I thought I wanted to be a nurse. So I had, when I graduated from high school, I had all the qualifications to go to the Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago and become a nurse. But we had no money, and so you had to pay to go to school. So anyway, I didn't get to be a nurse.

And my second thing, when I was in high school I always wrote--I was sports editor for our school newspaper and stuff like that. And I had a penchant for writing. So anyway, I thought--I had a chance to go to the University of Illinois on a trip and was sent--they paid my expenses. I was there for a weekend to look around and see--it was all people who worked on their high school newspapers. And then I thought about that, but here now--this is going to be more expensive because I'm going to be in southern Illinois going to school and everything. So that was out the window.

When I got old enough I didn't ever want to join the WACs or any of those women's army corps things, but I thought this is my chance to become a nurse. I'm going to join the Army Nurse Corps. And I've always been the kind of a person that doesn't jump into something until I've exhausted--they've answered every question. I want to know all about it. So I went and found out what it was like to be a nurse. Well, when you got done with their little school, the Army Nurse Corps, you got to be a second lieutenant. But when the war is over you're not a nurse. You're nothing. You're a civilian. So if you want to be a nurse, then you've got to go to nursing school. Well, that wasn't going to work. So that's why I went and worked in war plants.

DUNHAM: Well, I'm curious too, I guess, what you would most like future generations to know about your World War II Home Front experiences and what you think they can most learn from it.

HOLLOWAY: You know, I've got two friends--and this is an aside. I've got two friends whose husbands--now, during my war years you couldn't--if you didn't mind their rules they'd--I guess they'd shoot you or something. You never went and disobeyed a rule. Now my generation, the call us the Greatest Generation because we did everything we were told. But anyway, I've got these two friends, and their husbands were in the service like for thirty or forty days. They didn't like the rules and they didn't like it--and they left. So they never got discharged or anything--and they were drafted. I don't know why they didn't send them to Leavenworth or something. I can't understand it.

DUNHAM: They went AWOL?

HOLLOWAY: No, they threw them out of the service because they weren't--they were unmanageable I'd say.

DUNHAM: They were dishonorably discharged?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah. And that didn't bother them.

My son--and you know that's a sore subject with me because he heard, when he was drafted, and he was one of the first ones that when they reinstated the draft he went to Fort Lewis to get his basic. And when I went to see him the first time I said, "What's it like Mike?" He said, "Like any other jail." Because I had to be taken to where he was. They'd bring him there and--take your hat off and do this. He was just like a robot. But anyway, they told him when he was drafted, if you sign up for an extra year, which is enlist, we'll send you anywhere in the world you want to go. And he got it in his head he wanted to go to Germany.

So when he finished his basic training Mom and I went to his graduation, and it was a seven thirty in the morning. At eight o'clock--at McChord Field--at eight o'clock he was on a plane headed for Germany. So he got to be a sergeant. My son is taller than his father--tall, dark, and handsome. Within nothing he was a sergeant. He got into the honor guard. He was a chauffeur for a colonel. His job was working computers and filling--the place he was in in Germany was the jumping-off place for Vietnam. So he knew how many pounds of luggage they took, how much everything was, and so he filled every plane. That was his job, and with a computer. When he got out of the service he would have went to work for any airline anywhere. He told me, "I'm never going to wear a suit. I'm never going to do this--nobody is ever going to give me orders." Blah, blah, blah. And he came back a buck private.

I went around looking into his things, because I figured he might have been dishonorably discharged. But he volunteered to go to Vietnam so he could get thirty days out quicker. And he was broken down to just a buck private. We've never delved into it, but my son went AWOL on his R&R from Vietnam. He went to Honolulu. And unbeknownst to me--his dad died and I had, when his father died, I didn't want to do this or that so I just had a sum of money set aside, and it drew interest and everything--and in those days it was 6 percent. So he happened to get his inheritance just before he got his R&R. And what he did was he bought civilian clothes. He paid for a phony--you could only leave Honolulu with a visa or orders from the army. So he just bought all this fake i.d. and everything, came home, and for five days he cried and he walked the floor and told me what a horrible place that was and how bad it was.

So--that was when all the boys were going to Canada, or if they were really deserters they went to Sweden. So he went away. He was only allowed seven days from the time he got to Honolulu till he had to be back on the plane. And we didn't discuss where he was going. And from how he was acting, I just--I was so tortured and I don't think I would have cared if he deserted, because of the way he was suffering and the stories he was telling me. So anyway, I got a letter from him in about five or six days.

When his father was in the service he put his name and rank and blah, blah, all that stuff, and his APO number. But nothing else, so you never knew where that letter came from. But Mike, when he wrote to me, and he wrote almost every day, he had a map of Vietnam and there was a little star that told where he was located, and then he put his return address on it. So when I got that letter, that's the first thing I did was examine that corner. Because I figured it had to be either a Swedish postmark or a Canadian. And it was from Vietnam. So I tore the letter open and the first sentence in his--he said, "Well, now that you've examined the return address and know I came back here--I came back." And of course he was AWOL, but when--he told me when he was going to get his R&R that he was either going to go to Sydney or Tokyo for the R&R, and what did I know? I believed everything he told me.

So on January 26 of 1969 I got a phone call from the operator and she said, "I have a collect call from David Foote," and I'm thinking--I'm making a buck an hour. What's that phone call going to cost me? And without even thinking I said, "Where in the hell is he calling from?" And the operator started hysterically laughing. And she said, "From Sea-Tac Airport." [laughter] So I told her I'd do it. And I'm thinking--I was nuts about that time, because my son used to make such terrible choices and he always told me about them and I didn't want to know. So anyway, he said, "I'm at Sea-Tac. Come and get me."

Well, at that time they were redoing the administration tower. And when I went to get him my car was moving like this, but just before he went to the service I bought a car. It was white. I bought my first brand-new car. The car was white and he was delivering newspapers, so it cost $17 to put the vinyl red top on it and it was a '64 Plymouth Belvedere, Plymouth. So anyway, I'm moving, wondering--I'm looking up at the hill and I wondered how I'm going to find that kid. Pretty soon the back door opens up and something gets hurled in there. The front door opens up and he slams the back door and he jumps into the car and he looks at me and he said, "Mom, if you ever drove careful, you'd better drive careful today. I'm government property and I'm AWOL." Oh my God! If I'd have had a gun I'd have killed both of us, because I know this kid is--I can see him standing before a firing squad. So he spends those days with me, and after what he told me and how he got there and all, I never expected him to go back. And when he went back to Vietnam I couldn't believe it.

DUNHAM: So he finished out his tour?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

DUNHAM: How much longer was that about?

HOLLOWAY: Six months.

DUNHAM: Wow, and then he--then he was done?

HOLLOWAY: And then he was done, but see, I thought--and he was telling me about being in Vietnam.

DUNHAM: He was in active duty in Vietnam?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

DUNHAM: That must have been really hard.

HOLLOWAY: And so anyway, he's telling me about one time the four guys went to the store, and the kids, when you'd come out of a store in town--because you couldn't do it at the PX on the base--the kids would grab your packages and start to run. And he said when we were in Vietnam we didn't know who the enemy was. We didn't know who the Vietcong were until they started shooting up the people, and then he said you'd hit the ground and thank God you didn't get killed. So when the kids pulled the packages and started running, the Vietcong opened fire on him and his buddies. And two of them were killed, and one was like Robert Kennedy, he said--we watched it on TV when he was assassinated, but he said his brains were coming out his neck. And then he comes back, and so anyway--I just, I couldn't believe it. And like I say, he made such terrible choices all the time, just like going AWOL. How did he know he wasn't going to get picked up?

DUNHAM: Well, he was--well, it was the--

HOLLOWAY: Well, he knew the role--they must have talked about it a lot, the boys did.

DUNHAM: Yeah, but if you're also facing that potential reality or death too, I don't know how--that must be very, very hard. Wow. Well, we should wrap up. Is there anything else you would like to add before we close today?

HOLLOWAY: You were asking me something about working with men or working like men or something?

DUNHAM: Well, I just wanted to know, since this will be your voice speaking for all time to different generations, if there's anything else you'd like to share about your experience, especially going back to the World War II Home Front years.

HOLLOWAY: Yeah, the thing that I worry about--I know we have some wonderful soldiers. We have people who follow rules. We have people who do the right thing. They have their heart in the right place. When I look and--I kind of feel bad about saying this--but when I look at a lot of what this generation is--and that's one of the reasons I have my shades drawn. People come by here and they look like they're casing the joint. I would never have my shades up and sit at the table by myself, because then they'd know I'm alone here. I've got a security system and cameras, but anyway, I just wish that there wasn't so many people who didn't pay attention to laws, who broke the rules--because some day we may need these people to defend us, and it bothers me that maybe some of those kind of people--that you know, just leave the service if they don't like what's--because they don't have the kind of rules they did during the Second World War. And I worry about that. I don't want everybody to be waving the flag, but this is a wonderful country. There's a lot of things that the government doesn't do right, but I wouldn't want to live anywhere else and I love this country. You know, I just--I worry about the future.

DUNHAM: Well, on the more positive side, what does it mean for you, to you, to have your wartime home front contribution recognized?

HOLLOWAY: Well, I'm kind of surprised, because I never--when I was working I didn't think I was doing anything, because I needed to work to eat. And 2005 they started making a fuss over us. And I thought yeah, that's pretty good, and I started thinking about the things I did. It was such a change from what other people had done. You know, like my Grandma scrubbed floors. I didn't have to do that. I test-fired rifles! [laughter]

DUNHAM: Well, I just want to thank you, Helen, for sharing many of your experiences. We didn't quite make five hours. I think I owe you a couple. But I think we'll--

HOLLOWAY: No, I'm just pulling your leg.

DUNHAM: We'll leave it there today, okay?

HOLLOWAY: Yeah.

DUNHAM: But thank you very much.

HOLLOWAY: Well, you're welcome--and thank you for--how did you find out about me?

DUNHAM: Our pleasure. Through--