They didn’t have that pounded on the carburetor. I liked it. Randolph was a wonderful place.
Beautiful barracks we stayed in, steam heated, but no air conditioning. Had linoleum floors, and I mean we had buffers every morning before you went to work. That floor was shining, and your bed was made where you better not have a wrinkle in it.
Every day, not Sundays. We could have it messed up on Sundays. Oh, that’s nice.
But anyway, we had a first sergeant, a man of our story, great big guy. We slept about 100 or so in a bay. At first, it was just single-stack, then they double-stacked beds.
You had foot lockers at the end of the beds, and you had inspection about once a month. They opened that foot locker, and your shorts had to be lined up over here, and the next thing over here, everything was right in. They checked your foot locker, and everything was in order.
You had a war locker, your uniforms, your overcoat and raincoat, and everything had to be right in line all the way through there. If you didn’t, you got demerits. You paid the price for it.
Benz, it was the Air Force, well, it was the Army Air Force, a show place. It was a new field just completed, known as West Point of the Air. You see, their officers were, they not just made pilots, they were somewhat like at West Point in officer training, and they had discipline.
Those cadets were really on a string, I’ll tell you. They didn’t mess around. But it ran over the enlisted men that worked there.
We weren’t like any other base. When we went to the PX, we couldn’t go there in overalls. We had to put on Class A uniforms to go walk down the streets, and you didn’t go with a sloppy.
When we went to work in the morning in our coveralls, we formed a formation and we marched to the hangars. But we had other things that we benefited too. We had beautiful mess halls, and they served good food, and we didn’t have to do no KP, which was really strange.
The first KP I did was I wanted to be a flight pilot. I went to Santa Ana, California. I’d been in the service three years by then.
Finally, when I got to be a sergeant, I got to move. They had a few rooms there where two or three people would have a room, a private room to stay in. I got to live in that later on.
We had a German. He was a mess sergeant. That guy could make the best apple pie I’d ever eaten in the rest of my life.
He made about 100. We didn’t have to do KP. We hired Mexicans from down in San Antonio.
They waited on the table. They served it in bold family style. We passed it around and ate on a bowl.
I mean, serving. It wasn’t like the rest of the Army. But it was nice.
In the base squadron, all the rest of them were school squadron men. The enlisted men there, their main jobs were mechanics on those training planes. I was in the base squadron.
We had just these old age planes, but they were different. All of them were different. They had a variety of things.
I had a crew chief on the experimental observation plane. He was a booger for a while. We also had a transom airplane that came in.
Sometimes they had transom duties. We stayed up all night waiting for the plane to come in and service them when they came in. But it was interesting.
You saw all kinds of stuff, new stuff that was being built. It wasn’t as routinely as some of the other jobs. And being with the base, I had to take care of all the other duties too, like guard duties.
So if I got to be a guard at the main gate at Granville, you didn’t rotate. I was a guard there for a month. Saluting all the guys coming in at the main gate at Granville.
You do that a month and then you go back to your old job. It kind of changed the routine. How long were you there? About a year? Right after the year.
Three years? Oh, three years. Yeah, that’s where I went. And the war wasn’t going on yet? After about the first year that I was there.
See, I’m 39 is when I joined. And it was about, what, 41? 42 is when I thought the Pearl Harbor happened. Oh, I may have been 42.
I think. I don’t know. Anyway, it was that couple of years before the war started.
But you see, up to then, we had civilian clothes too. Soon after the war started, you shipped all your civilian clothes home. You only had uniforms, and you only wore uniforms to the shower, practically.
Which was a good thing, because it stopped the battle anyway. You didn’t have to move as much crap. You moved the uniforms.
You’d have to have them anyway. So you had that to reduce the problems and move. I enjoyed myself in San Antonio.
I’d come home, hitchhike. It was easy to hitchhike. People would pick you up on the road and so forth.
My parents bought me a car, and I went to— Well, I went to my church. Before I had the car, I’d ride the bus in. I didn’t have no damn money.
Save a bus fare, I walked about— I don’t know how many blocks down the southwest of the church. Come back, and I knew I wouldn’t make it back for dinner. So I ate a little snack there and then rode my bus back to Randolph.
And then when I had the car, I think I could go to people there at the church where we were. They were real nice. I had the car and made it.
I was having fun with it. The young people, not many of them had a car. Most of the boys were in the service.
There was a higher girl-to-boy ratio, which wasn’t bad for me. I had some friends over there. I wonder what happened to all of them people.
When I got to be a staff sergeant, I was a sergeant. I got noncommissioned officers. The club, I joined them, and we did have big blowouts.
We’d have dances and dinners over at the roof of the Gunter Hotel and stuff like that. It was fun.
And they were interesting. I mean, they had lots of gadgets on it. Of course, we didn’t mess with the radios or the instruments.
We had specialists for all of that.
But I got a pilot who requested that the crew chief go with him on this trip. And we went from there to March Field, spent the night over there. And then we went up to San Francisco, and the World’s Fair was going on over there.
Oh, yeah. And I got to go to the World’s Fair a couple of days. It was real interesting.
And from there I went up to Seattle and back down through Idaho and back home. Took about a week or so to go on that trip. I was over there in San Diego.
I stayed at Moffitt, which was—I guess Moffitt’s still there. Moffitt is still there. The blip hangars are even still there.
Is that big dirigible hangar? Yeah, the big dirigible hangar is still there. I was in that thing. Yeah, you could go walk in it today.