A Force for Change: The Class of 1950

chapter 7

Into the Army, Navy, and Marines

Maurice Wann

He is the brother of Richard Wann. He is a retired educator but continues to tutor.

He works with several students—some in high school, some in college. More want his help. He does not have time. For twelve years, he was principal at Madison Heights High School in Anderson, retiring in 1985.

Born in 1924, Maurice Wann went to Purdue University at the same time as his older brother.

“I had an older sister too,” he says. “But my brother—I followed in his shadow. He always made excellent grades. He was a tough act to follow. My brother, my sister, and I had a pretty good relationship.

“For one year, I went to Elwood High School where my brother and sister went. Then, there was a change in the township trustee. The new trustee wouldn’t pay to bus kids into Elwood, so I went to Summitville High School. It was much smaller—only about a hundred fifty kids. But this was one place I wasn’t Dick Wann’s brother.

“On the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, we heard the announcement over the radio. I had uncles who were ready—right then and there—to put on a uniform, which most of them did. I did too when I was old enough.

“I graduated in 1942, when I was only seventeen years old. I wanted to enlist, but my dad had to sign the papers for me. He wouldn’t do it. I went into the Navy in April of 1943.

“I went to a service school to be a radioman. The Navy was recruiting people for the V-12 program, which was an officers’ candidate school, and I was selected. I studied two semesters at Purdue and two more semesters at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Next I went to a pre-midshipman school at Princeton University. I was two weeks from getting commissioned when they gave me a physical and said my eyesight didn’t qualify under new regulations. The war was winding down, and they didn’t need all these officers, so they changed the regulations to weed people out.

“I was sent to a Navy repair base in New Orleans and then to San Diego. I was assigned to a destroyer escort getting ready to head for Okinawa when, wing-bingo, they dropped the bomb and everything stopped. I spent the rest of my time in the military waiting to get out, which I did in 1946.

“It was rough when we got word my brother had been shot down. I had just received the information that I was getting wiped out of the officers’ training program. Then, this bad news came, and I had a feeling he was gone. I didn’t tell my feeling to anyone in the family, but I knew from being in the military that ‘missing in action’ is almost always a death. I had a good friend who had been missing in action. He did not survive.

“I prayed that my brother was all right. Finally, we heard from some of his crew that they had seen him jump from the plane and that his parachute had opened. So that gave us some hope.

“It was hard on our parents. You know how it is on parents with sons in the service. It’s always harder on the folks at home. When you’re the one involved, at least you know where you are and what you’re doing. They have no idea.

“When the Americans finally reached him, I got a call from my parents telling me the news. When he arrived in Indianapolis, I got a seven-day leave to go and see him.

“When I was discharged from the military, I went to work in a General Motors plant in Anderson making pretty good money. However, my brother pressed me to go back and finish school, so I entered Purdue at the same time he did in 1948. I had two years of college credits from the Navy V-12 program.

“I majored in science—chemistry, physics, and math. I wanted to teach, which is what I did.

“I lived with my brother and his wife in their trailer. It was kind of crowded.

“At Purdue I was so busy trying to make decent grades that I just kept my nose to the grindstone. It seemed to me that 99 percent of the people in the class knew what they wanted to do. Everyone hit the books. It was very challenging.

“I think those of us from that era owe a lot to our parents. And I think the one-room schools helped us. If you were fairly bright, you could learn a lot simply by listening to the teacher working with the older students.

“We talk about the depression years—but I think something was different in those days. There were some tough times, but we all pulled together. We had the feeling of being wanted and cared for, and there was a closeness we don’t often find nowadays.

“Nobody turned anyone away.”

William Hufferd

“It is possible that I graduated at an older age than anyone in the class of 1950,” he says.

William Hufferd was thirty-three years old and a veteran of World War II when he received his degree in agricultural engineering in March of 1950.

“My life has been a little messed up. A little different than most people’s life,” Hufferd says.

He was born in 1917, during World War I, the son of a rural mail carrier in Rush County, Indiana.

“I spent most of my young boyhood on my grandfather’s farm,” he says. “I don’t remember much about the 1920s. But the 1930s were rough. My grandfather and I farmed all through the thirties, and we never made any more than what we had to have to eat and pay the taxes. My father being a mail carrier actually had one of the best jobs in Rush County.

“In those days, school ended in April so the kids could farm, and I helped with the harvest in the fall after school and on weekends.

“I graduated high school in 1935. It was a small school with the elementary and high schools together. There were twenty kids in my graduating class—ten boys and ten girls.

“My father and I bought a farm in 1935. I guess I exaggerate when I say we bought it. We put a few hundred dollars down and took over the mortgage. What we bought was seventy-one acres. I farmed it and my grandfather’s 134 acres. We had tractors, but we used horses a lot. I planted corn with horses the first two or three years. At that time, I thought farming would be my life.

“Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. I was sitting in a restaurant that Sunday evening shooting the breeze with a bunch of guys. That was an unbelievable thing we were hearing. But I knew right then and there I was going to be drafted.

“So on December 9, I enlisted in the Army Air Corps to try and control my destiny a little bit. I can’t remember ifl was sworn in on the ninth or tenth, but I went right in. I was a month short of being twenty-five years old.

“I might have gotten a deferment for farming. But one of my close friends in high school stayed with farming and they drafted him. So you didn’t know.

“I wound up in Iceland for twenty-eight months. Going over there, we were hounded all the way by German subs, and I saw some freighters sunk. Our mission was to keep the Germans off of Iceland.

“When we left Iceland, they sent us to Scotland, and we returned to the United States on the Queen Mary. We carried a thousand ambulatory patients who had been cut up pretty badly in France. Those of us with no war experience were told to keep our mouths shut and not to complain about anything around those guys. And we didn’t. Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby were on that ship, too.

“We got back into New York on October 8, 1944, and the newsboys were hawking papers about Wendell Willkie’s death. He had run for president in 1940, and he owned farmland near ours in Rush County. His national campaign headquarters had been right there in Rushville.

“I spent the last year of service in Charleston, South Carolina, working on B-24s. I was discharged October 29, 1945, so I spent all but a day or two of the war in the service.

“I went back to the farm, and I became aware of this GI Bill. I had always had an ambition to go to college, but I never had the money. So we sold the farm, and I started off for Purdue at the age of twenty-eight. I wanted to be an engineer, and when I discovered ag engineering, I went for that.

“I started in March of 1946 and graduated in the winter of 1950. In four years, I spent a total of forty-five hundred dollars, including my own money and what the government gave me.

“I lived all four years in Cary Hall. In my first year, my roommate and I shared a room that had been for a single student. There were a lot of GIs, but most of them weren’t as old as I was. The GIs outnumbered the young fellows two to one, I expect, but we were all one big family. The only thing was, those young guys liked to do some things we had outgrown, like fraternity hazing.

“I’ll tell you, it had been eleven years since I got out of high school, and I had pretty much breezed through that. But when I got to Purdue, I found things weren’t going to be so easy. I found out you had to work at college. I was permitted to make up minor deficiencies in my high school education as part of the freshman curriculum.

“Rita Henley and I got married in August of 1950. I had known her before from back home. She was the cousin of a buddy of mine. I was thirty-three when we got married and thirty-seven when our oldest child was born. We have three sons and one daughter. Three of our children have college degrees.

“Jobs were scarce in 1950. After working a few months as a salesman for a farm co-op, I hired on with Public Service Indiana as an agricultural representative. I spent most of my thirty-one years with PSI as an adviser to farmers on the application of electrical energy to agriculture.

“I guess with the experiences I’ve been through, I’m a little more conservative than a lot of young people today. I’m not too much for government handouts. But I was delighted to go to college on the GI Bill.

“If there ever was a government program that worked, that was one.”

Harold Michael

When Gordon Kingma was with the Indiana Chamber of Commerce on a visit to Washington, D.C., he asked federal officials for the top man in urban traffic.

“I’d like to see the best man you’ve got here for some fresh advice about urban transportation,” he said.

No problem, he was told. In fact, one of the top people in the country happened to be in Washington that very day and a meeting would be set up.

Not long after that, Kingma was presented to the expert. It was Harold Michael, head of the Purdue University School of Civil Engineering and a fellow member of the Class of 1950. They knew each other quite well.

Kingma still laughs when he tells the story.

Michael has been closely involved with Indiana State Highway projects, including the interstate system, throughout his career and consults internationally. He retired as head of civil engineering in 1991.

He still spends weeks at a time in Washington, D.C., with various traffic committees.

In 1992, Purdue presented Michael with an honorary doctorate—his first Ph.D. In a circumstance that no doubt will never happen again, Michael served as head of a department at a major university without a Ph.D. He did not get it done early in his career. And in his later years, there seemed to be no need for it.

“They told me in the early 1950s if I didn’t get my Ph.D. I wouldn’t advance,” Michael says. He smiles because they were wrong.

Michael—people call him “Mike”—was born on a small farm outside Columbus, Indiana, in 1920. His father died when he was five years old, and his mother took Michael and his younger brother to the farm of her bachelor brother.

The warming aroma of soup simmering in the Michaels’ kitchen fills the house while he talks.

“My uncle had 250 acres, which is all you can handle with teams of horses,” Michael says. “He was happy to get two boys. We were young, but we soon started doing things.

“We picked the corn by hand. It was a hard job. You had to shuck the corn. You had a hook in your hand and you pulled. You could do about an acre a day. It was slow going. I turned out to be a pretty good shucker, as far as that goes. I even entered some corn-shucking contests that were held all over the state.

“Everything we ate we grew on the farm, but some things on the farm my uncle wouldn’t let us eat because they were too valuable. We used them to get money, which we used to buy sugar and flour. We never ate beef. We sold the cattle and sent them to people who had more money. We ate a lot of pork and chicken.

“I liked farming, and I probably would have been a farmer if the war hadn’t come along. I wanted to go to college, but my mother didn’t have much money. Everybody wanted me to go to college because I had good capabilities. I was toward the top of my class. I took a lot of math. The best teacher I ever had was my high school math teacher. She’s still living. She thinks I’m the greatest thing that ever came along.

“When I was a freshman in high school my uncle had a serious accident and was put in the hospital. Who came to see him every day but an old girlfriend he hadn’t visited since his high school days.

“When he got better, he married that woman. Under those circumstances, we had to find a new place to live. My mother bought a fifty-eight-acre farm. About six acres of it was woodland, and some of it was too wet to farm. But we farmed what we could and raised cows, pigs, and chickens. We always had something to eat, but we didn’t have much else.

“I graduated from high school in 1938 and went back to farming. Then I got a job at Westermeier Hardware Company in Columbus and soon became the person in charge of repairing all small appliances. In 1942, I was drafted.

“When I joined the military, I went to officers’ candidate school and did well. They sent me to officers’ survey school. That was when I got my first taste of civil engineering.

“I ended up a second lieutenant, a forward observer with an artillery unit. It wasn’t long before the commander of the unit, a lieutenant colonel, found out I could read maps better than anyone else in the battalion. He decided he wanted me beside him so that he would know where he was. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the Germans, and he kept me with him at all times.

“I landed in Normandy a few days after D-Day. There was a storm. We were supposed to land on Omaha Beach, but part of our group landed on Utah and the other part on Omaha.

“We finally got things settled, but we had to pass through French towns that the Germans controlled. However, the Germans had pulled back from them when we went through. Our superior officers told us to keep on moving. The Germans later came back to those areas. A week after we landed, we had to turn around and fight for those towns we’d passed through.

“The maps we had from aerial photos were so good all you had to do to fire the guns on target was measure distance and angles from a visible point in the photos to each of our howitzers.

“We were the first unit over the Elbe River, and we captured a bridge over the Rhine. We wanted to be the first to capture Berlin, but they decided to let the Russians have it. They told us to go back, but we refused. It had been too much trouble to get where we were. We had done a lot of hard fighting. We had lost a lot of men. I wouldn’t want to go through it again.

“In October of 1945, I got sick. At one point I had a 107-degree temperature. I was sent home in December of 1945.

“Before going overseas, in December of 1943, I had married my high school sweetheart. By the time I got home, we had been apart for two years. I wrote her a letter every day, and she wrote to me.

“When I got home, I was sent to a hospital in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It was a rehabilitation center, but I didn’t need rehabilitation by that time. They kept me there for six months and told me I had to be in bed in the morning when the doctor came by.

“My wife came to White Sulphur Springs, and we rented an apartment in town. I spent the night in the apartment, and every morning I’d go in to the hospital to be there when the doctor arrived. When he left, I left and went back to the apartment I had with my wife.

“I got out of the military in July of 1946, and we returned to Columbus. I went back to Westermeier Hardware, and in the fall, I started at Purdue in an extension center in Columbus. I took freshman engineering there.

“I came to the West Lafayette campus in 1947. The GI Bill paid tuition and books. My wife, Elsie, got a job at Lafayette National Bank as secretary to an officer. She developed kidney problems and died in 1950.

“I was twenty-six years old when I started college on the GI Bill. I was thirty when I graduated.

“The students at that time were the best Purdue ever had. They knew what they wanted, they were willing to work, and they did work. They had experienced much in life and were mature. There weren’t very many who took longer than four years to get through. I made it in three and a half years majoring in civil engineering.

“That was an exciting time. Highways really started developing after the war. There was no money to spend on them during the war, and they were in such bad shape they had to be rebuilt. Highway construction was going on everywhere. And we knew a lot more about building highways by that time. Everybody got a job who wanted a job.

“The first year of the interstate system was 1956. They were looking for engineers to do this. There was no problem finding engineering jobs—good jobs, high-paying jobs.

“I’ve traveled all over the world advising people. Most of my time, however, has been spent here in the United States.

“I remarried in the 1950s. She was a widow with four children when we married, and then we had one more. She died in 1989.

“The legacy of the Class of 1950 is this: we were a group of people, many of whom had been in World War II, who came to college generally knowing what we wanted to do. And then we started working on the redevelopment of this country.

“And we still are.”

Bob Mitchell

Bob Mitchell’s voice is weak. His days are hard now. Just six months before the February afternoon he told this story, he had been diagnosed with cancer.

“It’s the worst one,” he says. “I have it in the stomach. I’ve had chemotherapy. I’m off it right at the moment. I have good days and bad days. It’s not a fun trip.”

Mitchell, who got his degree from Purdue University in forestry, lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon. He worked for Weyerhaeuser and then went to the Federal Bureau of Land Management where he stayed until he retired.

Born March 28, 1924, he grew up on a little farm in Scottsburg, Indiana, about thirty miles north of Louisville.

He graduated from Little York High School in the spring of 1941—six months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. A good student, he entered Indiana Central College in Indianapolis and studied one semester, working his way through.

“In fact,” he says, “When I left, the college owed me thirty-eight dollars. I hauled coal, and I was fireman for the heating plant. We made good money. They furnished us with little short-bed, half-ton Dodge trucks, and we loaded the coal by hand off a gondola car, hauled it, and dumped it in a pile.

“There was a lot of talk about what was going on in the world. Like now, you couldn’t tell what was going to happen by listening to the politicians. Roosevelt said, ‘I’ll never send your boys to Europe to die.’ That wasn’t exactly true, was it? Pearl Harbor was bad news. It looked as if there was going to be a war. I didn’t enlist for awhile. I went into the Marines in June of 1942.

“In August or September, they sent us to the Central Pacific. We never even had a liberty. I was in amphibious reconnaissance. We checked out places to make sure it was safe for the Marines to land. There were many, many islands in those Pacific chains, and our officers relied on intelligence about whether or not the islands were occupied. But intelligence was frequently wrong. Usually when they told us an island was occupied, no one was there, and when they said it wasn’t occupied, it was.

“The work wasn’t too safe. We had two guys on lwo Jima thirteen days before that invasion. I don’t think the information they got was worth the risk they took. We already knew the information they got, and their presence alerted the Japanese. They knew we’d been there. All those guys took with them was swimming fins, a knife, and a capsule—cyanide.

“We also did a lot of patrols behind our lines. They used us for security at night. Here’s how the Marines operated. When they went through an area, they didn’t bother to clean everything out. They bypassed a lot, so the enemy was out roaming around at night. We went looking for them. It wasn’t easy, but we had it better than a lot of people.

“At the end, we were getting ready to go into Japan for the invasion. They were going to land six Marine divisions with no support other than what they had. It would have been pretty bad.

“I went to Japan with the occupation. The Japanese didn’t have much stuff left. A lot of their guns were just terrible. But they were intending to fight for it. They wouldn’t have given up. They didn’t know those words.

“I was sent home in January of 1946. I decided I wanted to study forestry. I don’t know why. I guess since I’d grown up around trees in southern Indiana I just decided I’d like to study forestry.

“I worked part of that summer in construction and went to Purdue in the fall on the GI Bill.

“Purdue was just full of veterans—and it was crowded! I was assigned to Cary Hall, but I didn’t get a room the first year. I ended up in the attic. There was sort of a dormitory up there. It was all right, but you didn’t have any place to study—just a bunk. You could sit on your bed and study, but there was a problem with light.

“I wore my Marine Corps dungarees a lot—khakis. You heard war stories all the time from all those guys. People going to school then were of many different ages. One guy in our class was retired from the Navy. He’d had at least twenty years in the Navy before going to college. Most of us just wanted to get done and get out.

“After I graduated, I got a job with a classmate, Jim Rardon. I had stayed in the Marine Reserves and was called back for the Korean deal. I went back for another year.

“The Marine Corps had used the reserves for the Inchon landing. Some of those guys had just been in the service for a couple months and, bang, they were dead. So Congress passed a rule saying no one could be taken overseas without a year of training. I was signed up for only a year, so that was the end of it for me. I was with a recon battalion at Camp Lejeune. All we did was train. It was kind of strange. It didn’t make much sense, but we did it. You know, it could have been tougher.

“We could have been sent to Korea.”

On March 15, 1994, thirty days after this interview, Bob Mitchell died.

Erwin Michalk

They used to call him “Red” because of the color of his hair. Some still do, but the red is long gone from Erwin Michalk’s hair.

A retired electrical engineer, Michalk is now an adjunct professor at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, where he lives. The son of a Lutheran minister, he has a son who is a Lutheran minister.

Born in 1924 in Texas, Michalk grew up during the depression.

“We were able to exist because we lived out in a farming community and we could raise our own food,” he says. “But it was very tough. The house along with a small plot of land was paid for by the congregation, and we raised cattle and cows for milk.

“We didn’t have electricity. We couldn’t keep food fresh, so every day we had to get what we were going to eat. We collected water from the rain that ran off the roof of the hog house.

“My father was paid the princely sum of one thousand dollars a year. There were seven of us children and Mom and Dad and a grandparent all living together, so ten people had to live off that thousand dollars a year.

“I remember it was always my job to clean the henhouse, and one day something in the manure pile caught my eye. I thought it might be something interesting, so I dug it out, got some water, and cleaned it off. It turned out to be a gold dollar. I have no idea how it got there. I saved it. Then, of course, not long after that, the government called in all the gold.

“I was the son of a minister. I had to do what was right and turn it in, but I sure didn’t want to. When I took the gold coin to the banker, he took one look at me and my long face and said, ‘Let me see what the law says about this.’ He did a few ‘harumphs’ and said, ‘Well, you do have a coin collection, don’t you, son?’ I looked at him and didn’t know what to say. He nodded his head for me to say yes, so I said, ‘Yes.’ Then he said, ‘The law allows you to keep this coin if it’s part of a collection.’ I still have that coin.

“In June of 1941, I graduated from Concordia Lutheran College in Austin—it’s what today we would call an academy. We lived on the campus. That was another thing that made everything very tight for the family. My brothers and I chose to go to Concordia, and that meant six hundred dollars a year out of the one thousand dollars the family had to live on went for our education. One brother did it because he wanted to be in the ministry. Two of us just wanted to have an academy education.

“By the time I graduated, war clouds were looming, and I couldn’t find work no matter how hard I tried. Employers didn’t want to hire a seventeen-year-old because they figured he’d get called into the service.

“So I decided I was going to try one of the courses called ESMWT, Engineering Science Management War Training, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The program prepared people who had been farmers to go onto the production line. The idea was to try to improve our nation’s industrial production capability for the coming war. It was obvious the United States was going to be in that war sooner or later.

“Then, I became aware of another school. Not much was said about it but that we’d be paid for going to school. I thought, Great, I’ll give it a try. They needed people in training so badly the school was being run twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. I went from eleven at night to seven in the morning.

“Next, I went to another level of training—back at SMU—and again I was placed on eleven at night to seven in the morning, six days a week.

“What was being taught was very secret. One night they showed us a movie about radio direction and ranging. That was the first I ever heard of radar. They told us we could not divulge what we had seen. It was quite new. But that’s what we were training for.

“Eventually, they said I had to put on a uniform. Since we already had all this training, I went in as a tech fifth grade, T5.

“I happened to be at home one weekend, and I was milking the cows when my dad walked down from the house. He said he’d just heard over the radio that the Japanese had attacked us that morning. I said, ‘Well, I guess we’re at war.’ He said, ‘Yes, I think so.’

“We prayed. By that time, a lot of my friends from the neighborhood had been taken in the one-year conscription in 1940 and 1941. As they left, those guys said they would be back in a year. All those guys I knew were sent to the Philippines and were killed. I lost an older brother in the war, too.

“When I was ready to be assigned, the need for radar men had decreased a bit. Quite a few had gone through radar training. We were given an opportunity to take a test to see if we could qualify for a college training program, ASTP, Army Specialized Training Program. I took the test, and they said, ‘Why don’t you go to the Citadel in Charlotte, South Carolina, and join ASTP.’

“So I went to the Citadel and was there for three weeks, and they moved me to Clemson. I was there a total of nine months and the program ended. We didn’t find out for six months why. It was because they needed warm bodies for the invasion of Europe. I was one of twelve men from the two-thousand-plus group at Clemson who went to the signal corps. All the rest were assigned to infantry and artillery and sent for the invasion.

“In the signal corps, they put me in training, but they didn’t say much about what I’d be doing. It wasn’t until I found myself on the way to India of all places that I found out we were to test a new type of communication, what we called ‘Stinky Link.’

“This communication link was being used to support the OSS operation in the China-Burma-India, or CBI, theater. OSS was Office of Strategic Service. Now it’s call the CIA. It was an outstanding success. One of the rather obscure stories of World War II was how effective the OSS was in preventing any shipping from reaching the home islands of Japan.

“I got out of the service in 1946, and I decided to enroll at Valparaiso University in the fall because some friends had spoken very highly of it. I thought I’d check it out. It was also a Lutheran university. I went on the GI Bill, which was marvelous—probably one of the best things the government ever did.

“After two years, I made the move to Purdue. We didn’t have time for much nonsense at school. We all felt four years had been taken away from us—four to six—and we had to do something about it. So, much of this Joe College business was absent from our lives.

“One thing, though, the GIs did get involved with was a bicycle race. It was held just before the Indianapolis 500. The married male students would have a race. They would start with a tricycle and go around the course twice before making a pit stop.

“At that point, they could do mechanically whatever they wanted to the tricycle, so long as for the last two laps they returned it to its original condition. They were all inventive. They would bring in bigger wheels and have the big wheel driving the small wheel. It was very interesting.

“That was the kind of stuff we engaged in—rather than the Joe College stuff.”

Charlie Sanchelli

Charlie Sanchelli, the grandson of Italian immigrants, owns a Lafayette real estate company specializing in restaurants and businesses.

Born in 1924 in Newark, New Jersey, he was the oldest of four children. The family moved to Irvington, New Jersey, in 1928.

“We lived in a two-family house,” he says. “Our family had the first floor, and my mother’s brother and his family had the second. It was like one big family. We only locked the doors at night.

“I entered high school in 1938. During my senior year in 1941, my father was fixing up a nice room in the attic for my cousin and me to live in. On Sunday of Pearl Harbor Day, he put down his tools and never picked them up again to fix that room. He knew what was going to happen to us. We wouldn’t be using that room.

“I graduated from high school in the spring of 1942. I thought I was going to be mapmaker. I tried to get in the Navy Air Force as a pilot, but they turned me down because of a heart murmur. I went home to my doctor, and he told me not to worry about it. He said, ‘If they don’t want to take you, fine.’

“I ended up getting drafted into the Army Air Corps, flying on B-17s. During my whole military career when they checked me, they always stopped and listened a little longer to my heart. But no one ever said anything. When I finally got back home from Europe after flying fifty missions, the doctor said, ‘Do you know you have a heart a murmur?’ I replied, ‘Yes, I do.’

“I was an engineer gunner on a B-17 and was sent to Italy. Our crew flew practically every day. We were there less than six months before we got our fifty missions in. The Air Corps wanted to send us someplace to rest after those fifty missions and then bring us back for another fifty. But the flight surgeon said they weren’t going to do that. He said, ‘I’m not going to let them keep sending you back until they finally kill you.’

“We went on bombing missions, a lot of them over the Ploestia oil fields. We also bombed targets in France and Germany. One time we flew to Russia, and on the way, we bombed in Hungary.

“We stayed in Russia for ten days and bombed a couple targets from there. The people in Russia were very nice. Everyone went to the park at night and walked around. They kept the streets free of rubble, even though they were being bombed. When we came back from a mission, young Russian kids, fourteen and fifteen years old, would jump on our planes to wipe off oil. If they did that satisfactorily, they didn’t have to go to the front, so they were very eager. When we went to town at night, we saw elderly men with machine guns walking along with their wives. They were on their way to the front. It was very sad.

“The bombing missions in Italy didn’t bother me. One time I wrote back to my father, ‘Dad, don’t tell Grandma, but we just bombed her town today.’ She got a little upset that we did that. But I was born in the United States. I was an American.

“I went overseas in 1944 and I came home in 1944. I can’t remember the dates, but I was there less than six months.

“When I got back to the States, I joined the cadets to learn to fly, or to navigate, or to be a bombardier. I was heading for pilot training when I found out if you had eighty-five points you could get out. I had that many points. I figured, The heck with being a pilot. I went to the colonel and told him I wanted to get out. He said, ‘You can’t get out. You’re a cadet.’ I told him I had eighty-five points. I said, ‘I quit the cadets.’ I got out on September 25, 1945.

“I went back home to Irvington and checked with the VA about going to college on the GI Bill. I wanted to be an engineer, and I tested well for engineering. I was accepted at Georgia Tech and four other schools, including Purdue. I decided to go to Purdue.

“I got to campus in the fall of 1946. We lived in the gym for about four weeks—in bunk beds lined up just like in the Army.

“The university finally put up some housing. I moved into a building called Seneca. Three other buildings like it were constructed. Each one had seventy-two or seventy-six single rooms. I spent my whole four years living in Seneca. We had a very good softball team. We were champs every year. There were a lot of former GIs in those four buildings. We formed an organization called ‘Dunroaming,’ which kind of described us all.

“In my senior year, I was invited to join a fraternity, but I decided not to. Having gone through the war, I didn’t feel like going through the hazing and so forth.

“The GIs were at Purdue for a purpose, to get an education, so we didn’t do much fooling around. We were glad to have the opportunity to go to college and we took advantage of it.

“We didn’t go on vacations to Florida during spring break in those days. During the summers, I went home and worked. One summer I worked two jobs. Starting in the morning, I delivered Coca Cola, and at night, I’d get two or three hours of sleep and then work at a bakery.

“However, we did have fun while we were at Purdue. We used to go to town and raise heck, but we never got into any trouble.

“I remember eating places, such as the Blue Blazer, the Gun Club, the Circle Drive-In, the Park-and-Eat, and the Wagon Wheel. We’d go to the Knickerbocker once a week for dinner for a dollar and a quarter. There were so many restaurants in town—so many more than there are now.

“I remember on weekends we walked downtown, and there were a lot of people walking around. The drugstores with their soda fountains were busy. It was real nice.

“I graduated in February of 1950, and I went to work in Decatur, Illinois, for Wagner Malleable Iron. I was paid a dollar and a quarter an hour and was very glad to get it. Jobs weren’t too plentiful in 1950.

“I got married in June of that year to a girl from Lafayette. Every weekend we went back to Lafayette to see her folks. Her father liked a drive-in restaurant along the way between Decatur and Lafayette called Dog ‘N’ Suds, and he told us to stop there. Coming home one weekend, we did stop. I didn’t know a thing about the restaurant business, but when we left that restaurant, we had a franchise for a Dog ‘N’ Suds in Lafayette.

“We opened in 1953—the Patio Drive-In. It was located on U.S. 52 South, on the bypass where Wendy’s is now. We sold pizza, too. Actually, we gave it away. We were the first Lafayette restaurant to offer pizzas, and we used to give out a slice with every order we sold. People didn’t know what it was. The only ones who knew were the students from bigger towns.

“Bruno’s Swiss Inn and Pizza King came to town and they sold pizzas, so I decided to get out of that business. A young fellow named Eddie Pearlman—fourteen years old—worked for me. He said it would be a mistake to get out of pizzas. I told him, no, I had a good drive-in business.

“It turns out he knew what he was talking about.”

Bogdon Mareachen

The son of immigrants, “Bogie” Mareachen is a born storyteller. In the nineteenth-century house in Lafayette that he bought while going to Purdue, and where he still lives, Mareachen’s eyes sparkle as he remembers and tells stories. He pauses for effect and enjoys the response of an audience.

He’s a small man with a big heart. He would find it hard to tell you no if you asked a favor.

Born in Hammond, Indiana, in 1923, he never expected to go to college. In fact, after his service in World War II, when he was in his twenties, he had to return to high school to pick up some credits before he could get into Purdue on the GI Bill.

“I originally went to Hammond Technical Vocational High School,” Mareachen says. “My dad was a blacksmith. He worked in the New York Central Railroad yards. He kept his job through the depression, thank God. I was lucky, very lucky.

“During the depression, most of the parents in our neighborhood were unemployed and had a lot of time to devote to kids. It was one of the blessings of being born at that time. We’d make sandwiches and go on field trips or fishing along the rivers—no organized events. The movies were five cents. I didn’t go very often because it was so expensive.

“My parents were immigrants. My father was born in Austria and my mother was born in Russia. My name, Bogdon, is Russian. My parents spoke with accents. We were a close family. We enjoyed being together.

“At the age of fourteen, my dad was told he had to leave Austria or my grandfather would lose his job overseeing the farm. You see, my dad had killed the landlord’s dog because the dog had attacked and bitten him.

“My dad went to Czechoslovakia, then spent time in the Balkan countries, the Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and, finally, Germany. He could see that the kaiser was getting ready for war. He went to a seaport and asked a German captain in a tavern where was the best place in the world to live. The captain went over to a map and pointed to Argentina, and then he pointed to the Great Lakes. My father came to Hammond.

“When I was in high school, in about 1938, because my first name was Russian, I was offered membership in the Communist party in Hammond. Since my last name was Austrian, I was offered membership in the Nazi party. I went home and told my dad I’d been offered membership in the Communist and Nazi parties. He looked at me and said, ‘Do you know why I left Europe?’ I didn’t join either.

“In my neighborhood, I had to learn to speak German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Yugoslavian. My mother spoke very little English. Usually she spoke Polish or Russian. It’s very simple to learn all those languages. The real challenge comes in your dreams. If you dream in a particular language, then you really know that language. I always dreamed in English.

“My high school, Hammond Technical, was not accredited as a high school for entering college. When I graduated in 1941, I was able to get a job for two years at the Pullman Standard Ordnance plant. We built tooling for the tanks, the howitzer 105- and 155-millimeter shells, 81-millimeter mortars.

“The Army conscripted me in the spring of 1943. I was about twenty years old when I was drafted. Because of my background in machine shops and welding, I was put into an aviation engineering battalion. We were sent to the Pacific. Our battalion would go in by ship with the invasion force. Our job was exclusively to go in and rebuild.

“We were hit by suicide aircraft. I lost 117 buddies with one bomb. I was always on the deck of the ship during an attack. Nine planes would come at us—eight suicide planes and one that would return. Two would come at the ship from each side. The two coming in from behind would try to hit the screw—they’d try to knock off the propeller. Another would go for the bridge and another for the engine room. I’ve seen that tactic repeated and repeated and repeated.

“We had fifty-caliber machine guns strapped onto the deck, and we’d go after the planes. I could see those eighteen- or nineteen-year-old pilots in those planes. They were so close I could take off my sunglasses, throw them up, and hit those guys in the head as they flew by. As a plane went by, our guys would let him have a burst of fire. It would hit his canopy, and he’d go down in the water without doing any damage to us.

“When those planes came in, they winked at you. They had guns in the wings. As they came in, they fired one after another, and it looked like they were winking at you. Three minutes after those attacks started, it was all over.

“I got back home in early January of 1946. I had been in active combat areas for two years. Our battalion was on the ground, so we saw what the bombers did. We encountered children who were orphaned, and we would take them in. I didn’t see that this was a clean victory because of what we had caused not only to ourselves but also to others. I thought, My gosh, it’s horrible. It’s no lasting solution. I think war is the last thing we want.

“I had worked with a great many engineers in the service, and they knew so much more than I did that I wanted to be like them. I wanted to go to Purdue but I lacked high school credits. I was admitted to Purdue with the stipulation that I get those credits.

“I was twenty-three years old when I went to high school classes to catch up on my deficiencies. The principal approached me and said, ‘You are a veteran and a male, and the girls will take to you. I only ask one thing: you do nothing with the high school kids, especially the girls.’

“In September of 1946, I started Purdue at the branch in Hammond. In 1947, I came down to the campus in West Lafayette. I was on the GI Bill, and I majored in mechanical engineering.

“When I came to West Lafayette, I lived as a tenant in a little apartment in the same house that I’m living in now. The owner of the house was interested in selling it, so I talked to my brother. My brother had half the money and I had half the money, so while I went to school, I bought this house for eighteen thousand dollars. That was a lot of money back then.

“I rented out ten sleeping rooms. This is what I did while I was going to school—I was very mobile. I had a bed, a desk, and a light. I would move into one apartment and work on it. When I finished that apartment, I rented it. Then, I moved into another one and worked on it. I made money while I was going to school.

“I would go down to the Wabash Tavern with a bunch of guys, and they would start talking about the war. You could tell when somebody was lying, saying more than he’d done. I kept quiet until one of them said, ‘Bogie, what did you do during the war?’ So I outdid them.

“I said, ‘It was very simple. Have you read about Mac?’ I was talking about MacArthur. I had seen him many times. So I said, ‘Before every invasion, he would have the entire beach lined up with people ready to embark. He would drive up in a Cadillac driven by a sergeant. The sergeant would open the door, and Mac would step out with his corncob pipe. He would look at the men in readiness. Then, he’d sort of put his hand over his mouth while he lit his pipe and say, ‘Is Private Mareachen here?’ I pretended I didn’t hear him. Finally he’d remove his pipe, cup his hand around his mouth, and say, ‘Is Private Mareachen here?’ I always answered in the same way. I said, ‘Yoo hoo, Mac.’ Then he would give the order—and let the battle begin.

“After I told that, I didn’t have to listen to another war story from someone else for years. Many of the guys started calling me ‘Private Mareachen.’

“While I was at Purdue, I got to know Dean Potter. I would take the Monon Railroad to Hammond. He had a daughter in Chicago, and we would be on the same train. Sometimes we would sit together. We would talk, and I would complain about school. One time, he said, ‘Bogie, don’t waste your time griping. You’ve got a full schedule. You haven’t got the time to gripe about Purdue. The colleges in this country are young and we’re still learning.’ Here he was the dean of engineering, and he said he was still learning.

“I wanted to get out of school as soon as I could. In 1948, I met my wife on a blind date. We were supposed to play tennis but it rained, so we went to a movie. I fell in love with her. We got married in 1950. She had started at Purdue in 1944, but she quit.

“While I was at Purdue, there was this dog, Boozer, that was enrolled and attended classes. He was a huge dog. Boozer would come in a building, pick a class, and sit down in front. When this dog did that at the beginning of the year, it meant he would be in that class every session. If you tried to remove him, he growled.

“Boozer was admitted to Purdue under a fictitious name. The fraternity that had him did all this. Boozer took tests, had a grade-point index, and had an ID number. Guys in the fraternity would take the tests for him. It came time to graduate, and through some little technical glitch, the dog forgot to pay a fee. The university asked for the person to come forth—and the whole thing exploded.

“Years later, I asked, ‘What happened to Boozer?’ The fraternity guys said, ‘Well, we transferred him to Indiana University.’

“I enjoyed college. I found out I knew nothing about anything. What I thought I knew I didn’t understand. A lot of people when they get out of Purdue think how great they are. When I started to design machines, I asked the question, Have you considered what new problems your solutions will create?

“I met two Purdue students once and talked to them for about an hour. When they left, I said they would never finish Purdue. And they didn’t. People asked me how I knew. I knew because out of the whole time they talked to me they spent 95 percent griping, griping, griping. If they did that 95 percent of their time, that only left 5 percent for studying.

“As Dean Potter told me years ago, don’t waste your time. You don’t have that much time in this world to waste it by complaining.”

Robert Sparks

In February of 1946, an old factory on the outskirts of Lafayette became the new home for Robert Sparks, a young man from the Pittsburgh area fresh out of the Navy. Other than the fact that no one was shooting at him, living conditions were not that much better than what he had experienced the previous years aboard ship in the Pacific.

Born in 1924, he was an only child. His father worked in middle management at Alcoa.

On the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was driving with some friends to a drugstore where kids hung out. They heard the news on the radio.

“We knew we were all going to war,” he says. “We said, ‘This is it—we’re all going into the military.’

“I graduated from high school in 1942 and went to work in a local defense plant for a year before I enlisted. Everybody was going. That was what you were expected to do. We had been attacked, and we wanted to get into it and beat the enemy.

“I was always interested in the Navy. Even before the war, I thought I might go in the Navy. So that’s what I did. I was on fire control—gunfire control. That means we aimed and directed the guns and solved the problem of hitting the target. The ships were rolling and pitching while the target was speeding away. To aim the guns and put them on target was very complex.

“We did have computers on those ships, but they were mechanical, not electronic. They had gears and that kind of thing. We provided the input as far as a ship’s speed and such, and the computer calculated where we should fire the guns.

“I was on a destroyer, the USS Hale, in the Pacific. We were in seven major engagements—the Marshalls, the Gilberts, the Marianas, the Philippines, Tarawa, Leyte, Okinawa, and we bombarded Japan. We were the first destroyer to shell the mainland of Japan. I was at sea for three years. I went home one time in that entire three-year period.

“The quarters were very close. We had bunks stacked three high. There were about three hundred guys on the ship.

“It was especially difficult when the kamikazes came. One of the ships in our squadron took a hit. Thirty-eight guys died. Our ship was very close to that. We never got hit—just one near miss. The kamikaze crashed into the sea not far from us.

“We went into Japan at the end of the war. The place was completely devastated. Everything was bombed out. We were amazed. The people didn’t resent us. They just accepted the fact. They didn’t give us any problems.

“We arrived home in December of 1945, just after Christmas. We always had a turkey dinner on the ship on Christmas, regardless of what we were served the rest of the year.

“I was interested in metallurgical engineering. Purdue was one of the best three schools in the country as far as I was concerned. I had been discharged from the Navy for only two weeks when I had a wire from Purdue notifying me of my acceptance for the February 1946 term ifl would accept emergency housing.

“Having just been released from three years on a destroyer, I didn’t think there was any kind of housing that could phase me. When I arrived on campus, I was told that about a hundred of us veterans were assigned to the Duncan housing facility. This building turned out to be a windowless factory made of cement located on the outskirts of Lafayette. The building had been constructed to manufacture some sort of military product by the Duncan Meter Company and was now war surplus. Transportation to the campus was by bus early in the morning and late in the afternoon.

“Sleeping facilities were double-deck bunks in one large space. Lavatories were those left over from when the factory was in use. One locker was provided for all your possessions. You had no real study facilities. Studying was done in the library. As far as living conditions, this wasn’t much better than the military. I escaped after a couple months to Cary Hall.

“When I got the opening in Cary Hall, everything there was doubled up. One-person rooms became two-person rooms, and two-person rooms became four-person rooms.

“But we were so glad to be out of the service and back in school that we didn’t complain much. We just wanted to get into school, get a degree, and get to work.

“Everybody had just gotten out and had war stories to tell until the wee hours of the morning. Guys were saying, ‘There I was at twenty thousand feet and had to bail out.’ When the lights were out in the dormitory, they were still talking about it.

“I married my wife, Nancy, in 1948. She was from Boston. I met her in the Navy. While I was in school, she worked in Lafayette, and we lived in an apartment at 424 North Grant Street in West Lafayette. It’s a parking lot now.

“I’m semi-retired now. I was manager of research and development for Wyman Gordon in Worcester, Massachusetts. I worked for many other companies before that—Pratt-Whitney on airplane engines and rocket engines. My first job was in a tractor plant in Iowa.

“While I was working for the tractor company in 1950, I was called back into the Navy during the Korean War. I spent a year and a half on active sea duty. We didn’t go to Korea. The ship was in and out of Boston, so I got to be home with my wife fairly often. My initial thought when I had to go back in was, Oh, no! But then I thought, If they really need me, if the country is in trouble, I’m willing to go. It just bothered me that I had to delay a little longer working in my field.

“What with the depression, World War II, the GI Bill, Korea, and everything that’s happened since, I think ours was a unique generation. I don’t think any generation will have to go through something like this again.

“I hope not.”

John F. W. Koch

John F. W. Koch was born in Evansville, in southern Indiana, nine days before Christmas in 1925. There were four children in the family, two boys and two girls. It was a perfect storybook tale to their parents.

Koch’s father had a good job. He was an office manager for a metal bed company. Life was good. But life takes unexpected turns.

By 1940, the company Koch’s father worked for folded, and his father spent several months out of work before getting a job at the shipyards. In the 1930s, the family experienced some hard times, but so did many others.

“When we children went to school, we wore clothes made by our mom,” Koch recalls. “We wore socks that were darned in the heels. The darns were a quarter of an inch thick. We didn’t throw socks away just because they had holes in them.

“I remember Pearl Harbor Day. We had just returned home from church, and we heard on the radio about the attack. I was sixteen years old.

“As young men, we pretty well knew right then that this was going to be a big war, and we all wanted to do our part. Dad had served in World War I. He said, ‘You don’t go in until you are eighteen years old and get drafted.’ And that is what I did. Several classmates volunteered at seventeen to go into the Marines.

“I graduated from high school in June of 1943, but I started at Purdue in May of 1943. The university was running twelve full months, three sixteen-week sessions. One session started in May. Even if you had not finished high school, if your grades were satisfactory, you were allowed to start college. I was able to get requirements such as English and speech out of the way.

“My dad didn’t have to pay my expenses. I had a job at International Steel Company during my junior and senior years in high school and was able to pay my first-year expenses at Purdue.

“I was drafted on June 6, 1944. I was eighteen years old. I remember the day I left. My mom was standing at the front door of our home. I can still see her there. She said, ‘Now that the invasion is on, you’ll never have to go overseas.’ She was at least relieved about that. Four and a half months later, I was on my way to Europe.

“I was in the infantry, the Sixty-sixth Infantry Division. We were on the high seas on Thanksgiving Day of 1944. First, we went to England. Then, on Christmas Eve, we shipped out to France. At that time, things were confused and moving fast because of the Bulge. We boarded the wrong troop ship at Southhampton. The one we were supposed to be on got torpedoed. We were right next to that ship within sight of the harbor lights of Cherbourg. We lost about a thousand men that night.

“From France, we were sent to Germany, and after the war, we ended up in the occupation forces in Austria. I returned home July 1946.

“I returned to Purdue in September 1946 on the GI Bill. I majored in civil engineering—structures.

“It was an interesting time. Most of us at Purdue were veterans, and we had just one goal: get that degree and get out. I was twenty years old, and I thought I was in school with a lot of young kids. Of course, we didn’t realize how young we were ourselves.

“I joined Kappa Sigma fraternity. Most of us in the fraternity were older veterans. There was some hazing in the fraternity, but it was tempered by our past experiences. Drinking was not a major problem, and drugs were unheard of.

“The ratio of men to women on campus at the time was about five or six to one. There was one girl in our civil engineering class. It was very unusual then for girls to be in engineering.

“I graduated in the first week of February 1950. I was married on February 18. We left Evansville on the day of our wedding in a car I had borrowed, and we drove to Chicago. In Chicago, I went to work for Swift and Company, a meat-packing firm, in their engineering department.

“I don’t know why I wasn’t called for Korea. I was called for a physical examination by the Army in June 1950. The only reason I can determine I wasn’t called is that my MOS—Military Occupation Standard—was that for a machine gunner. The Army must not have needed machine gunners.

“We have two adopted children, John II and Amy Jo. John II missed serving in the Vietnam War by one day. He had a low draft number, but they just quit calling. If they had called one more number, he would have been drafted.

“I felt sorry for the troops in Vietnam. I couldn’t comprehend the combat conditions in the Pacific in World War II, and I felt the combat conditions in Vietnam must have been much the same or worse. I had never experienced that type of combat.

“I felt that it was right for us to be in Vietnam. I couldn’t understand or condone the violent antiwar demonstrations by so many people who had never experienced war to defend the freedoms we take for granted.

“I have my own engineering practice in Evansville now. If I were to say anything about the Class of 1950, the primary observation would be that everyone in the class seemed very close. We all had experienced the depression and wars. I never felt we had been deprived of life’s amenities. It has been a good life. We have seen so much that we have been able to accomplish.

“It was true then and has proven to be true over the years: we are a class that has been challenged.

“And we have met that challenge.”

Jim McCarty

When you look at a guy like Jim McCarty, it is easy to see he is successful. Sitting in a chair at the Purdue University Memorial Union on a Saturday afternoon, he is relaxed and dignified and talks with self-assurance. There is an aura about him that tells you he is satisfied with life and what he has done.

He has returned to campus for a reunion of Acacia fraternity brothers. The rainy May day has not spoiled their excitement.

McCarty is retired founder of Colonial Garden Centers in Evansville. There were three stores with 150 employees when he retired and turned the business over to his son. It is among the top one hundred garden centers in the United States.

“We’ve enjoyed great success,” McCarty says.

Success has not come easily. He started in the popcorn business with his father, who had become one of the biggest popcorn producers in the world. But his father got leukemia, the business was liquidated, and McCarty went off on his own.

“The best years to be alive have been during our lifetime,” he says. “It’s been a period of remarkable changes. With our generation’s background from Purdue and the other experiences we have had, it’s been a wonderful time to be alive. We’ve seen the development of computers, television, and transportation, including jet aircraft—it’s been a great time for growth and discovery of all types.

“I was born in 1925 in Evansville, Indiana. We did well during the depression. We all had to work very hard, but we had a strong work ethic that carried us through the tough times.

“I graduated from high school in 1943. I served on an amphibious ship in the Pacific for a year and a half. I saw little action. Most of the action was over in that area by the time I got there.

“I came to Purdue in the fall of 1946 on the GI Bill to study agriculture, business, and horticulture. Purdue was a big place—crowded. A lot of people were coming back from the service. I was married between my freshman and sophomore years to Bonnie, a girl from home.

“I lived in the Acacia house the first year, and then we got a place in the tar-paper buildings out by the dairy farm. They were pretty breezy places, but we made them work. We had little money, but we had a lot of enthusiasm and desire to get an education.

“The apartment had a living room-dining room combination and a little kitchen. We cooked on a gas stove, and in the middle of the floor was a furnace that heated the place. We had one bathroom and one bedroom, both small. There was not much to the apartment.

“To save money, we played cards, ate peanuts, and drank beer with friends on Saturday nights.

“I worked part-time for a professor. I always took a full load of courses and went to school in the summer. I finished in three and a half years. I was in a hurry! When you’re broke and going to school, you need to get to work.

“Between my sophomore and junior years, our first daughter was born. Eventually, we had another daughter and a son—and now six grandchildren.

“I didn’t think my studies at Purdue were very difficult. I’m convinced almost anyone can make it through a university if he has any desire at all. But I had an advantage. I was married. I’d go home at night and study—that was the program. We didn’t have a lot of extracurricular activities.

“After graduation, I worked for my father for seven or eight years, then started my own business from scratch in 1958. I hocked my life insurance for five thousand dollars, and I borrowed twenty thousand dollars from the bank. That was a huge amount of money back then.

“I had experience working with my father, a background in horticulture, a little knowledge of numbers, and huge desire. It’s the American dream to own your own business. But I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. A lot of guys I’ve talked to this weekend have worked for large corporations and done quite well. Having your own business is more personal, but there’s a lot of sacrifice.

“I retired in 1990. I stay away and let my son run things. But on special projects if he says he needs me, I’m happy for activity.

“I would say my generation is pretty work oriented. In our business, we worked hard to get going. We had the first television program on gardening in our area. It was thirty minutes long and all ad-libbed. I wrote a garden column for the local paper and also wrote for Flower Grower magazine.

“You don’t have to have a lot of money to enjoy yourself. I sometimes think I had a better time when I had less money than I do now.

“I’ve enjoyed life. It’s been great. And there’s going to be a lot more to come.”

Bill Popplewell

Retired, Bill Popplewell and his wife live eight months of the year in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The rest of the time they are in the mountains of western Maryland.

“I feel a little spoiled,” he says. “We hate to leave both places.”

It is a far cry from his youth. Popplewell was born in Anderson, Indiana, in 1925. His father was an itinerant builder through the depression years. Popplewell went to eight elementary schools and five high schools.

He says over and over how lucky he was.

“Actually, it wasn’t as hard as they make it sound today,” he says. “Authorities talk about the psychological problems that moving causes a teenager. But we did all right. I realize now it was probably tougher than I thought at the time. However, in those days, we seemed to appreciate life and what we had more than people do today.

“The depression wasn’t tough on everyone. My wife’s father was salaried, and she doesn’t remember its being so difficult. But it was difficult for our family.

“My dad had some time on the WPA. When he was on the WPA, he supervised the building of a gym at the high school that I was attending in Alexandria, Indiana. I was proud of my dad, and I was proud that he was the supervisor of that project.

“A lot of people thought the WPA was a handout, a make-work program. And some of it might have been, but not this gym. I was proud of Dad, and I didn’t realize the negative aspects of working on the WPA until he told me he didn’t want me to tell my friends that he was supervisor of this project. He was ashamed to be on WPA.

“Those were pretty poor days. Many people weren’t doing well financially. But we made it through somehow.

“In 1943, I graduated from Franklin High School in Franklin, Indiana. I was first in my class and won a scholarship to Purdue. I can’t remember if the scholarship came from Purdue, the state, the county, or where. Because I was draft bait, the scholarship went to an alternate.

“I went from high school into the Navy. In those days, you could sign up before you were eighteen for the branch of service you preferred, and they took you when you came of age. I went in the summer of 1943.

“I spent a lot of time at some very good electronic schools, and then I went overseas on an aircraft carrier to the Pacific. I didn’t ship out until the; tail end of 1944 and early 1945. We were involved in the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions. Iwo Jima was the worse.

“Later at Iwo Jima, I was in a heavy-bomber squadron. Previously, I had been in carrier-based torpedo bombers as a ballturret gunner. It was a little scary.

“In that Iwo Jima invasion, I was glad to be up there flying, instead of on the ground with those poor Marines. It was horrible. We left a lot of Marines buried there. Some of those islands were made of volcanic ash, and all the landing equipment was designed for sandy beaches. The equipment bogged down, and for those guys, it was like being a target in a shooting gallery.

“Our ship got ‘kamikazed’ badly. We had three twin-engine bombers come at us all at once, and we got hit hard. It was at night, and they came in over our fantail. Two missed, but one actually hit. It went right through our aft bulkhead and exploded on the hangar deck. It was the loudest noise I’ll ever hear in my life—I hope!

“In those days, you couldn’t even put the word kamikaze in a letter. The censors would cut it out. The kamikaze almost turned the tide of the war. Our defenses weren’t designed to handle that kind of thing. They still aren’t.

“My torpedo bomber also did some sorties over the Japanese empire. I never got hurt. I was lucky, very lucky.

“I enjoyed the action of being on an aircraft carrier. We lost almost as many planes to normal takeoffs and landings as we did to enemy action. We used to call landing on a carrier a ‘controlled crash’—this wasn’t funny because that’s what it amounted to.

“Toward the end of the war, I was on a plane that was designed to seek out and obtain intelligence on enemy radar. This was in the early days of electronic counter measures.

“You know, at our age at that time, I guess we were too naïve to be really scared. Most of the guys had a fatalistic attitude. You were either going to get through it or you weren’t. The problem during the war wasn’t wondering if you were going to get hurt or killed. The problem was wondering when you’d be able to get back home. My biggest problem was being homesick.

“I returned home in the spring of 1946. I elected to study electrical engineering at Purdue, one of the top engineering schools in the country. I was lucky to be a Hoosier student and fortunate to have the GI Bill.

“One of the criteria for going to Purdue in 1946 was that you needed a local address that could be verified. It was almost impossible to find housing. As a last resort, I went to a church rectory and found a note on the bulletin board from someone in Lafayette looking for a student boarder. So I got a room there. I was lucky. I lived there until I married my bride.

“My wife, Xena, and I met at a Lafayette short-order grill where I worked. We met when she came into the restaurant for supper one evening. She was a long-distance telephone operator. In those days, you didn’t have to push all those numbers to make long-distance calls. You just called the operator and gave her the number.

“We were married in July of 1948 and got an apartment for sixty bucks a month. I think every apartment in town was sixty bucks a month. We both kept working.

“I had gotten that job in the short-order place when I was in there with a bunch of other ex-GIs. The new owner, George Davis, leaned over the counter and said, ‘How would you like a job?’ We asked which one ofus he was talking to. He said, ‘All five of you,’ and he hired us all on the spot. He needed waiters and cooks and dishwashers. That was the kind of confidence people had in ex-GIs. George and his wife were like Mom and Pop away from home to us. They even asked us out to their farm on weekends.

“We took school seriously, especially those of us who had been in the service, and probably some of the guys right out of high school, too. I think we were driven by the tough times of the depression. In general, depressions build national character and individual character, and the good times have the reverse effect.

“I looked at school much the same as going to work. I turned down a chance to be in a fraternity. I was in school just to get an education. I wanted to get out as fast as I could and get work.

“I graduated in February of 1950. Engineers that year were a dime a dozen. There were 440 electrical engineers in the February class of 1950, and as I recall, RCA tendered only one offer—to the top guy in the class. Lord knows how many engineers graduated in the spring that year. There must have been a carload of them.

“Being married when I graduated, I had to find work quickly, so I took my first job as a mechanical engineer in Ohio with an outfit that employed my dad.

“By the end of 1950, I had gone to work for IBM. I started as a customer engineer, which is what they called the field technicians who installed and maintained the old punch-card equipment.

“This era was the beginning of the electronic revolution. I was fortunate to be in on the ground floor of a lot of developments. I was in on the early engineering and programming of computers, and IBM was a great company to work with. I retired in 1983 as a senior systems engineering manager. Throughout my career, industry’s favorable reaction to the Purdue sheepskin made me proud to be a Boilermaker!

“In the early days, IBM, MIT, and the Air Force designed the Sage Computer System for the air defense system. That computer was the size of a basketball court and had fifty-five thousand vacuum tubes. It cost millions of dollars. Our home computers today are more powerful, smaller, and faster at a fraction of the cost.

“I look at these comparisons, and I think, My gosh, it’s almost impossible to even imagine the advances!

“We had three children, sons born in 1951 and 1953 and a daughter in 1954. My sons were of draft age in the Vietnam era, but the older had a school deferment and the younger, unfortunately, had a medical deferment. And I considered that a big break. Do you want to know why?

“Most of us who were involved in the World War II era—and not just those of us who were in the service but the whole country—were pretty patriotic. That was a well-defined war. We knew who the enemy was and that they were bad guys who were at our throats. It wasn’t too hard to understand why we had to be at war.

“But Vietnam, that was just the opposite. It was very difficult to understand why we were involved and why we did the things we did. From my vantage point, being from the patriotic World War II generation and a veteran, it was very difficult because I wondered about and even doubted why we were in Vietnam.

“Someone once asked me what the difference was between World War II and Vietnam. I said, ‘In World War II, teenagers were afraid they’d be 4-F. In Vietnam, teenagers were afraid they wouldn’t be 4-F.’ That sounds corny. But it’s true.

“In the Vietnam era, my boys were subject to being called. I often look back at those days and wonder how I would have responded if one of my boys had come to me and said, ‘Dad, I want to go to Canada.’ I’m glad I didn’t have to answer that.

“Because I don’t know what I would have said.”

Jim French

Jim French always thought he would be a good teacher. He was right. After nine years in the classroom, he became a principal at Murdock Elementary School in Lafayette and stayed there for twenty-nine years until he retired.

He lives in Delphi, Indiana, the town where he grew up. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1925.

He is a happy man with a ready smile and a ready hand if you need help. He knows what hard times and needing help are like.

“I grew up on a farm, and it was a tough life during the depression,” he says. “I remember when corn sold for ten cents a bushel and a lot of people were burning it, using it for fuel. It was cheaper than buying coal.

“I graduated high school in 1945, and I really wanted to go to college. But that wasn’t the way it worked. I graduated on a Wednesday, and on Friday, I was in Camp Atterbury in Indianapolis going into the Army.

“The war in Germany was already over by then. They trained us for jungle warfare, and they were going to ship us to Japan for the invasion. But they dropped the bomb. I have to be thankful. I was probably one of those saved by that. We were all headed to be replacement cannon fodder in the invasion of Japan.

“Instead, I was sent to Germany for occupation duty for thirteen months. The people were friendly, but the place was totally devastated. You had a feeling of, Why? It made me think there must be an easier way to resolve problems. This was total destruction.

“When I returned home, I started right in at Purdue on the GI Bill in January of 1947. In order to finish by 1950, I took classes every summer.

“You couldn’t find a place to stay on campus. I lived with a relative in Lafayette until I finished Purdue.

“Girls were very scarce. I had to go back to Delphi to date Francie. We got married in 1951 after she finished at Indiana University. Her father had a small newspaper, and I worked for him to make some money.

“Back then was a friendly time—a time when people would help one another. I remember I had trouble with physics. I went to a couple of guys, and they said, sure, they’d love to help me. I guess after the war, we were striving to make the world a better place and to take care of each other. The feeling was that we needed to do well in school and become better doctors or teachers or whatever.

“There was a feeling of euphoria after we won the war. The United States was the big power. Our country had great strength and strong people, brave people, people who were willing to try and make the United States a great nation. It was a hustling time. It wasn’t a time of apathy. After we won the war, we felt, Hey, what else can we conquer? Conquer our own lives. Make the country better. Build highways. Make things go. It was a big growth period.

“There wasn’t this feeling now prevalent that the government had to take care of everyone. You took care of yourself. If you weren’t making enough money, you got two jobs, you worked longer shifts.

“With the feeling we had after World War II, I just never could imagine, during the Vietnam War, how people could ever question serving their country when they were asked. I guess I’m more capable of imagining that now. Maybe we were hoodwinked when we were young. You read some troubling things now, such as how everyone collected lard during the war, and maybe it wasn’t even needed. However, it did make us all feel that we were involved.”