Oral history interview with Billy May

Milligan: I'm going to give a quick introduction. My name is Sarah Milligan. I'm with the Oklahoma State University Library Oklahoma Oral History Research Program. I'm at the Chilocco reunion. Today's date is June 2, 2018, and I am here talking with Chilocco alumni Billy May. We're going to be talking about his time at Chilocco, as well as his military service. All right, that's as formal as it gets. I wanted to ask you first, can you just tell me a little bit about yourself? Where are you from, and maybe a little bit about your family?

May: I was born down in Stonewall. Lived around that area and around Ada until 1942. When the war started, we moved to Hobart, out in the western part of the state, and we lived there all during World War II. --

Milligan: Okay, so let's back up a little bit. I know you grew up in Oklahoma, but you were telling me that you went through school through your sophomore year 1:00and then you dropped out to work.

May: Then I dropped out, and I worked on harvest and--.

Milligan: Yeah, you went to California, it sounds like.

May: I went to California in '46.

Milligan: Okay.

May: I got this job in California working on what we'd call a combine back in this country. It was a machine that picked hops off of the vine. You make malt for liquor, beer out of the hops. That's the job I got, lucky. Fell into it because I needed a job. I got that job, and I went to work for a guy. They said, "We need a bunch of help. You, you, you, and you," like, ten people, "go over to that machine," and they had four of them. "You, you, you, and you." I'm way down 2:00to the end. I'm sure he pointed at me to go over there. I went and got me a job. (Laughs)

Milligan: You were waiting to make sure it was true or not?

May: Made sure, because if anybody got cut out, if there was more helpers there, they would trim it down, you know. I went to work and helped a guy. I was mechanically inclined enough that I knew what he was talking about to set this machine up. Never seen it before in my life, but it was like a combine. I worked with him, and he said, "Where are you from?" I said, "Oklahoma." He said, "Oh, me, too! I came out here before the war, and I worked for the Navy at an air station over by Santa Rosa, California. After the war was over they cut me loose, and I had to do things else." So I went to work for an Oklahoman--

Milligan: In California.

May: --in California, and then--.

Milligan: Were there still a lot of Oklahomans out in California at that point?

May: Yeah, that's California. They used to say that you could find your way from Arkansas to California by following bologna rinds and bread wrappers. That's how they got there. Cheapest way to get there. That's the only money they had. Anyhow, I worked for him for a week on this job. They said, "Okay we are going back to Santa Rosa," where they were from, "and anybody wants to work for us put your stuff on the truck. We're going tomorrow." I was the only guy out of fifty, sixty guys that worked there--they were all transits following the harvest in California. I told my uncle and aunt, (we were living with an aunt, a sister of 4:00his) I said, "I got me a job, and I'm going with them. I'll see you back in Oklahoma maybe be one of these days." I went with them. When we got there they had, like, forty acres of hops, and they had, like, another forty or sixty acres of plum trees that they raised.

That was the two items that they harvested year round, and these were brand new machines, the first time they had ever been put out commercially. I'm just helping the guy because he had little cookouts like this for people that worked for him. They could eat there for practically nothing every meal. They didn't have to go out looking for something to eat when they were working on his property. I worked around the cookhouse helping the guy. The second day, the 5:00father that owned the company, (was Fred [Semur]) he came in the cookhouse to have lunch. I'm sitting there talking to him and he said, "I hear you're going to go to work tomorrow night." I said, "I don't know." He said, "Oh, yeah, Fred's told me he's going to put you on tomorrow night." That meant running two shifts on eight machines around the clock.

Milligan: Oh, gosh.

May: He said, "We pay twenty dollars a shift, whether it's eight hours or whether it's twenty hours. You go out there. If your machine breaks down, you stay there and work on it. The other man comes to work, he helps. You help him get it going so that he can start his shift. Whatever happens, that's what you'll get paid. At the end of the week, I'm going to take your money, I'm going to put it in the bank for you, under your name and my name. When you decide to 6:00quit, (that's with all the people who work for me) if you decide to quit, we'll go to the bank and draw it out and get your money. This way nobody can steal your money because you're going to be working day shift or a night shift." Nothing you can do. You're working seven days a week and twenty-four hours a day sometimes, or eight hours or twelve hours or whatever. I worked there two months, basically a month and a half on that job. I went to the bank; I had a roll of bills like this (Gestures). I had like $450 saved. Most money I had ever seen, except in a bank. I caught a bus and came back to Oklahoma, and that's when I went to school in my sophomore year.

Milligan: Oh, I see, so that's when you decided--.

May: The next year, I called him, and he said, "Yeah, come back. You got your job." I go back in ʼ47, and I work for him all that summer. That fall I needed a job. I made enough money I could buy me a car. I could get around from where I lived. I got a job with Pacific Bell Telephone and the people that made the phone equipment. I helped install the first dial phones in Santa Rosa, California, in 1947.

Milligan: Wow! Did you have to know much about the technology?

May: No, all you had to do was do what they told you to do, and that's unroll thousands of feet of cable to be hooked up to the machinery-works that makes it go from a lady sitting up here saying, "Number please" to a dial phone. (Laughs) 8:00I worked there until, like, I don't know, maybe or June. I worked Santa Rosa, South San Francisco, Burlingame, San Mateo in those offices, running the cable for the guys that had the know-how to hook them up. It's a big olʽ job to hook them up, back in those days, to hook every wire up where it needed to be. The guy used to tell us, "Boys, one of these days all these landlines and hard lines are going to go away." We thought, "Man, you're crazy," because he was a little bit off anyhow. (Laughs) He'd tell us every once in a while. He'd say, "Yeah, one of these days. Right now it all goes line-line from place to place. One day 9:00they're going to have a tower up here that's going to be a radio, and it's going to go from radio tower to radio tower all over the country. Then it maybe get to be something else. I don't know what they've got planned."

I thought, "Jiminy, I'm eighteen years old now, and they're telling me this. I have no idea what he's thinking, what he knows." If I'd put a dollar away all the time back in the old time, I'd been a millionaire by the time I was fifteen because everything came true that he ever told us about. Then I came back to Oklahoma, and I did what I told you about the young lady that I met. She was in high school, her last year of high school. Then when she got out, she was going to go to college, and I had to do something. She convinced me I ought to go back 10:00to school, and that's the greatest thing that ever happened to me is having her convince me I needed to go back and finish my education. Didn't work out between her and I for about sixty days. She was there, and I was here.

Milligan: So tell me again how you decided to come to Chilocco.

May: I said, "The only way I can have anything is to go to Chilocco because it's free. I can't afford to go to public school and work and do that, so I--."

Milligan: So you would have had to support yourself for your living expenses and go to school?

May: I was supporting myself, and I was living with my older brother. We had an apartment out there. He and I both had been there in that area for basically ten years.

Milligan: In the Hobart area?

May: Yeah. I found out I could come here. I caught a bus, and I came. There was two young ladies on the bus when we got out here to get off at the end of the street.

Milligan: They let you out at the arch?

May: They let us out there. If you came on a train, you used to get off at the depot. The passenger train would stop at the depot and let you off. If you were on a bus, you got off at the end of the driveway out there. Sometimes there'd be somebody that would be there to check if you needed a ride. If there wasn't, you were on your own down the road to Chilocco. I came here, and I signed up. I started out being--I came here to be a baker. Right across the street over there 12:00on that side of he building was a little place about the size of this room, maybe be a little bigger, that was the bakery. I worked in the bakery until the horse barn burned down. I was helping move a hose off of the lake towards the horse barn, and there were four or five of us that had hold of this big hose. We were stretching it out and taking the curves out of it. They turned it loose, and I still had it. I jerked my back.

I had to quit over here because I couldn't lift anything on account of back sprain, so I went into shoe repair and leathercraft. Didn't know anything about either one of them, but they had a good instructor here by the name of [Boone] Meigs. He taught me all I knew about shoe repair and leathercraft. In two years 13:00I made two pair of boots, one for the superintendent and one for myself, plus belts and billfolds and all that stuff. You went to school half a day in the morning; you worked in the evening; you worked in the next morning half a day and went to school in the afternoon. You got a full day of school every other day. Same way with working. I was here until '51. I graduated in the spring of '51. That was my--well, in '50 when the war broke out in Korea, then I got my call. Being that I was in school, they gave me a deferment.

When I got out, I knew that was coming because when you get out and they turn 14:00you loose, they let them know, "He's out of school now," and all of that. I go back to Hobart, and I work the wheat harvest again in the summertime of '51. When I come back from wheat harvest, in a couple weeks my orders came through. I go to Oklahoma City. They check us all in. They said, "Out of the group here, there's a percentage of you that are going to go in the Marine Corps. The rest of you are going to go in the Army." I say to this boy, this full-blood Indian boy with me, I said, "Let's go join the Marine Corps." He said, "Oh, no, no, no, I'm going to wait and see if I pass this." I said, "Okay." The next day, he flunked the thing, and they sent him home. I'd already gone and signed up for 15:00Marine Corps. That day, they called us out. Sent this guy over to that side of the room. They called my name to go to that side of the room; called another guy's name to go over here and called another guy's name.

It was four out of, like, sixty guys, basically, that was in that group that went in the Marine Corps. The first guy was from Altus, Oklahoma, which is thirty miles from Hobart. He and I had both volunteered. He'd had his first year of college, and they called him, so he volunteered. I volunteered. The third guy said they brought him--he was at the fence plant up in Ohio, so he had to come back to Oklahoma. He said, "I got two years to do. If they tell me to stand in the corner on my head, I can do that for two years. That's no problem." That 16:00fourth guy hated the Marine Corps, hated it with a passion. I've never seen anybody hate anything so bad. We go through MCRD [Marine Corps Recruit Depot]. We get out and everything, and my friend, he goes to Santa Ana Marine Air Station. They sent me and these other two guys, and we went to training at Camp Pendleton, what they called boondocks training, and winter training and all that.

The guy that said, "I'll stand on my head," they sent him to Pensacola, Florida, to Marine barracks as a guard there at Pensacola. The fourth guy, he wound up on a ship going west. I don't know whatever happened to him, but he was the only 17:00one out of the four of us that hated it so bad. He hated it with a passion. I don't know whatever happened to him. I hope he made it, but with his attitude, it was unlikely. I waited. They shipped us all out to San Francisco for overseas, and I don't know where I'm going. I have no orders except to go with the group to San Francisco. Got there, and everybody shipped out. Two or three every day was going and going. One day about a week later, I'm the only one in my group was still in the barracks and just waiting.

I had a cousin that lived in Oakland, so I went and visited them one weekend. I came back; the next day or so I got my orders to leave. I asked the sergeant 18:00where I was going, and he said, "I don't know. The paperwork says to put you on the ship." I said, "Okay. You don't know any more than I know." When I got on the ship, I found out I was going to Pearl Harbor, Fleet Marine Force Pacific, Pearl Harbor. It was a small headquarters and service company for everything. Paperwork that came out of the Far East came through Pearl before it came to the United States. I worked in a warehouse there, whatever that company needed. It was a small company. We only had maybe a hundred guys total, so I was there for the remainder of my time.

Milligan: So you were there until '53?

May: Got out in '53. Got married in '53, in July of '53. Married a girl from Hawaii.

Milligan: Oh, yeah?

May: These girls that's doing the Bingo out here, that's my daughters. My wife is out there, too. That's another story. We won't talk about that one. Anyhow, I worked with a guy at a service station down in Waikiki. He was still in the Navy, and I was a civilian. He said, "I was trying to get into mechanic school. I'm going to go to the school in Kansas City." He was from Missouri to start with. He was married, and his wife and baby was with him out there. He said, "You should come over to our house and have the Navy pick your stuff up and mine, too. We're both Navy and Marine Corps." So they just went by and picked 20:00his stuff, stopped at my house and picked all the stuff up that I needed shipped, shipped it to Missouri. We came back here; we went to Kansas City. We went to school together. We lived together for a while. I lived with him and his family until my family came. My wife and little boy, they didn't come for about a month after I did. I had to come here to get into school by the first of September, so I brought my oldest daughter. Was ten months old, and I brought her from Hawaii.

Milligan: You came with her without Mom and Brother?

May: Without my wife and my oldest son. My wife fixed everything up I needed. 21:00Flew out from there to LA, caught the train in LA. Rode the train to Newton, changed trains in Newton. Rode that one south, got off at Oklahoma City. We were, like, at Edmond; I put her last clean dress and her last clean diaper on her. We were on the train and flying from--we left Hawaii Wednesday night, I believe. Thursday we caught the train in LA, and we were on that all the way until the train broke up in Roswell. Part of it come north; the rest of it went south to the Houston area. We came that way, and I took everything and did everything that needed to be done in the trip, from when we got to LA. My wife 22:00said, "When you get there, stop and get a couple cans of milk. You can make the formula because they have hot water on the train, or the cooks can make it for you."

She knew nothing about the train, but--that's the story we worked up with. The first day, she ran out of formula. I went and got the cook to open the cans, and the milk was no good. Went back and got the other can of milk. They opened it, and it was no good. Here we're out this side of LA with a baby that needs formula, that was on milk formula. I got off at every stop from there to 23:00Roswell, New Mexico. Every time we'd pull in someplace to stop, I would get off at the first of the train, run through the station to see if they had anything out, and catch the last car as they were pulling out. Had this black lady on there that had a couple of youngsters, and she was bringing her husband's body home from California to Arkansas. I got to talking to her after we got to change trains at Newton. She said, "I was hoping you always made that train," (Laughs) because they were sitting in the same car that I was in.

There was a young lady sitting in front of me, so I'd say, "You watch my daughter. I'm going to go up to the front and get off and go through the station and catch a car before the train pulls out." I did that until we got to Roswell. 24:00We had to get off at Roswell because the air conditioning went out and they had to fix it, so they let everybody get off the train and go wander for a couple of hours. I went to the grocery store and got new milk, went back. The cooks made it all up so she had formula the rest of our way home. The one day that I had the cooks put regular milk in and add water to it, it was fine, and it didn't bother her at all. My family met me in Oklahoma City, picked me up in Oklahoma City, and went to Ada where my folks lived.

Milligan: Your uncle?

May: My mother and father and my sister came to pick us up there, and she was, 25:00like I say, ten months old.

Milligan: How stressful.

May: No problem. Got on the plane at night, and back in those days they flew the old Pan American flights out of the Pacific. On the bulkheads they had a place there, and they had what they called the sky cradle. They put it up there; they thumb-screwed it up. You put your baby in there. You had the first seat, so you were right there with the baby. Slept all night long. Got on the plane about nine o'clock Hawaii time; got into LA around seven o'clock the next morning. Slept right through no problem. She didn't give me any problem on the train. --

Milligan: That's amazing.

May: Yeah. Then my wife and my son, they came a month later. They did basically the same thing, but we picked them up at Pauls Valley rather than Oklahoma City. I didn't know Oklahoma City was the only place I could go on the train, but Pauls Valley was only thirty miles from Ada then. When they came in, my nephew and his friend took me, and we went over and picked them up at the train station. They stayed with my parents for six weeks or something after I had come up here to Kansas City and started school. Then I went back and got them, got a place to live and all that. Then they came to Kansas City. She loved the Kansas City area; always has loved Kansas City.

We stayed in Kansas City, and people would say, "Your folks all live in Oklahoma. How come you stay in Kansas City?" I said, "If I live in Kansas City and something happens to my parents, I can get home." Back in those days, it was a ten-hour drive. I can drive to Oklahoma in ten hours. I'm far enough away that nobody knows what my business is, yet I keep in touch with everybody. What we do is we stay in Kansas City; what they do they stay in Oklahoma. We don't worry about it. We do the best we can. That's basically what we did there. I went 28:00through the automotive and partially through diesel school.

Milligan: What made you decide to do that?

May: I was mechanicking basically when I was young. My brother and I took the family car that they didn't want, and then they got something else. This was back in the middle ʼ40s. We used to keep it up and go all the time. It always ran like a clock all the time because he and I were both, essentially, mechanics that could make everything work. We lived there, and then they moved back to Oklahoma, back to the Ada area, and we stayed out there because he was working. 29:00Then I got a job working there.

Milligan: Down at Hobart?

May: Yeah, Hobart, so we just stayed in that area until we made the circle around, came back, and got to Kansas City.

Milligan: I think it's interesting that you had this affinity for mechanics, but that's not what you chose to do in Chilocco? And it's maybe not what you did in the military.

May: I left the shoe repair and leathercraft company completely except for a little bit of hobby work on leathercraft.

Milligan: Was there an option for you to do auto mechanics or anything like that at Chilocco at that time?

May: There was an automotive place, but I wasn't interested in going over there.

Milligan: How come?

May: I don't know. There was probably somebody I knew that was in shoe repair 30:00and leathercraft. I had met the instructor, so that's just where I went.

Milligan: I see. What about baking? You said you went there thinking you were going to do baking.

May: Yeah, I've never missed a meal for myself. (Laughter)

Milligan: Is that just something you thought you wanted to learn, or did you think, "maybe I want to be a baker"?

May: A friend of mine that I was in high school with at Hobart, he had graduated, and then he got a job delivering bread. When I wasn't doing anything I'd hop on the truck with him and make his route during the day. I decided that's probably something I wanted to do because I wasn't afraid of it. I wasn't afraid that I couldn't do it. I felt like I could do that kind of work, so 31:00that's what I wound up thinking I was going to do when I came here. Then when I got hurt and I couldn't pick up anything, I couldn't lean over that much, and it was kind of the second shot of getting my back hurt. I passed the Marine Corps with no problem. They had to help me a lot of times out on marches and everything. Two or three times I'd have never made it if it hadn't been for a couple of good buddies.

Milligan: They helped you get to the end?

May: That helped me make the rest of the trip. Come back, met a guy--. He had decided, I guess somewhere along the line, he was not going to stay in the Marine Corps. I didn't know him that well. He was a person that had a mental 32:00condition at that point. He was second from the back when we were marching. He'd step out and call his dog. There was no dog out there. They'd go about four, five, six steps, and he'd get back in line again. The guys would talk to him and tell him, "You got to stay in there, buddy," and all of this, and it was the same thing over and over and over and over. One day they told him to pack his stuff, and they sent him to the hospital--.

Milligan: That was during boot camp?

May: I guess they sent him to the psychiatric ward to find out what his problem 33:00was. I never did see or hear anything from him. It takes a lot of guts if you're good up here (Gestures to head) to do something like that.

Milligan: Do you think it was genuine? Do you think he genuinely had something wrong?

May: Yeah. I think everybody thought that he definitely had a mental problem. How he ever passed--. Well, when they're picking you up to draft you, as long as you could walk and talk and you didn't have anything really bad, they'd pass you on down the line. Some of it, they passed you down the line, and wherever you went would take care of it.

Milligan: I see.

May: It's easier sometimes when you got thousands of guys coming through all the time to read whatever's down and send them some other place to let somebody else--.

Milligan: You went to Camp Pendleton for boot camp?

May: Yeah, that was what they called tent camp. That was to get you acclimated to working in the outside.

Milligan: How'd you acclimate?

May: They marched you. They give you a rifle. They--.

Milligan: No, I mean how did you do? Was it hard for you, or was it--.

May: It was hard for me, but I made it. The only thing I couldn't really handle was the long marches. That was the worst thing.

Milligan: And that was from your back?

May: Yeah. We went to winter training up by Reno, Nevada, up in the mountains in February, the last of January or February, and the snow was about this deep (Gestures). We got out there, and it was snowing when we got there. We had a 35:00week's snow training, and you would march all day through the snow. You had to make your own trip, and stay in somebody else's trail, and go wherever the officer wanted you to go to, and then set up camp. About the time you got warm, here would come a whole group of guys that worked at the camp all the time. They were the enemy. They would come down over the hills on skis and ride through your camp and shoot blank cartridges, throwing firecrackers, and all that stuff to get you up, to get you acclimated. You might have to go through this if you 36:00were going to Korea. It was there already. They tried to get you all situated so that you would know what you were expected to do. You'd grab your clothes as best you could and get them on, grab your rifle, and get outside to see what was going on. They had what they called a warm tent. If you just couldn't stay in your own--you had a buddy. You had two shelter halves. You put those together, and you made a tent out of it. You had two sleeping bags that went in there.

If you ever go out overnight anywhere, you get something to go between your sleeping bag and Mother Earth. The sergeant said, "I don't care how much you 37:00love her. You'll never warm her up. You'll never warm her up." (Laughs) Anything. When they would deliver supplies out in the field, we'd grab any piece of a cardboard box we could get. If it's only this big, it goes under--your sleeping bag. Then your heat don't go to the ground. It reflects back into your bag or onto your bag, and you don't freeze to death. If you was on the ground, you'd freeze to death. You never get warm. You could put anything under it. Put a shelter half under it; put anything between you and the ground. It's the same thing like going out--people go hiking and everything nowadays. They never think 38:00about what they need to take, a rolled up piece of plastic. A black plastic bag is better than anything else you can get. It doesn't take up any room; it spreads out; it keeps the cold in Mother Earth when you're laying down.

Milligan: So that was something that they taught you when you first got there?

May: They taught you all you could do, something to take the cold off of you. When you get out in the cold weather, it's cold, cold, cold. That's why I love hot weather. I've always been able to take enough clothes off to be decent and still be cool. (Laughs) Wintertime, you can't put on enough clothes to stay warm all the time. You're just cold and cold. That's what killed most of the guys in Korea was they froze to death.

Milligan: Did you have expectations you would be sent to Korea at that time?

May: When you're in the Marine Corps, you have a number they give you. It's 0300; that means you're a rifleman. You're in ordnance somewhere or other. If you're working in the warehouse, they give you a number, 0311 or -110 or -112, depending on your rank, depending on what kind of job you're going to do. Everything is 0300. That means if an order comes out 0300, I don't care how good a baker you are or what you're doing. You drop that and get your rifle and go. You go to the front line. When it gets down to the real nitty-gritty, the only people that stay back is the people that are support, back behind the front line 40:00people. That's the way they were. Half of them drop out; they bring some more of these people up to take over. No matter what you are, no matter how high you go, you're a rifleman. You're supposed to know how to use that, get out there, do the best you know how to do. I had some friends that was in the Army, and--well, the Marines got the same thing. They fought their way all the way up to the Chosin Reservoir, and then they turned around and fought their way back.

It was so cold, a guy told me that was in the Army that I worked with years later, he said, "We never turned a vehicle off. It ran day and night. To keep 41:00warm, we cut the top out of barrel, put some holes in it, and pour oil in it. Keep that oil going, and that's how you got heat at night. That was the only heat you had." He said a lot of guys would be fighting--they'd be fighting the weather during the days. They would lay down at night or get in the truck at night. Couldn't get warm enough, and they froze to death. A lot of them died. Never got hit; they died from exposure. The Marines turned around, and they were fighting back down this other way. Some reporter said, "General, how come you 42:00reversed your--you were going north. How come you reversed and started backing up?" He said, "We're not backing up. We're fighting our way out." Nobody will admit to it, but 90 percent--I won't say 90 percent. Fifty percent of the enemy was Chinese. They weren't all Korean. China, we did in a lot of Chinese people. They won't admit that they were there, but the Chinese were there.

Milligan: Was that commonly something that was known?

May: Yeah, it's just common knowledge. About the time you'd get someplace, bivouac for the night, then here would come a group of them. There might not 43:00even be a rifle in their group, but they had pots and pans and everything they could make noise with. All at once, noise would break out, and you guys would get out of bed and see what's going on and all of that. Then you were fine. They found a lot of enemy that they killed that there wasn't a rifle in the bunch. They were psychologically trying to beat the Americans because instead of fighting all day, they were resting all day somewhere, and just a few people fighting. At night, they would come out where there was a lot of them, and they would make noise. They'd make music sometimes, bull horns, anything to keep you awake.

Milligan: Were you ever over in Korea?

May: No, but I had some friends that went. I had a lot of friends that was 44:00there. Mostly it was Army friends that I met when I came back to the States. It was guys that had been there and had come home, got discharged, or whatever. They'd say, "This happened, that happened." Most of them had PTSD. They didn't know what it was back then, but now I know what it is basically. I have two grandsons in my family didn't have anybody. Had an uncle that was in World War I that I know of. I don't know of any of the May family that was in World War II. There must have been some of them somewhere in the May and the [Gibson] family, 45:00but I don't know of any close friends that was there. I was in the Marine Corps. My brother that graduated from here, the three years he was here he was in National Guard.

Milligan: In Chilocco?

May: Yeah. Then when he got out of here, he went to Bartlesville, and he was working there in shoe repair and leathercraft, that line of work. He couldn't get to a place where a meeting was at because he didn't have a car at that point and he was straight out of school. Finally he signed out of the National Guard, and my mother said to the draft board, "My son just got out of the National Guard. Do you think there's ever a chance of him being called up?" The guy said, 46:00"I don't know." Sixty days later, he had his draft notice. He'd been three years out, a couple of years, more or less, gotten married, had a job, and he got his call, so he went in.

Milligan: What did he go into?

May: He went in the Army. He was in the National Guard here, so he went in the Army. He'd always been good with a rifle or a pistol, so when he got in the Army and went through all the training and they were looking for people that was marksmen to go around and teach people, give demonstrations, they sent him and his wife to Germany. It was their headquarters. He traveled all over Europe 47:00doing demonstrations. He--was like the Cold War type. He was in that area there where there wasn't any fighting going on, basically, so he did his time and got out. He was in. I had a nephew that was in the National Guard at Ada, and he went to Louisiana. He was there. My daughter that I brought from Hawaii, when she grew up, in 1970, along about the middle of the 1970s, she joined the Air Force. There was an Air Force base right outside of Kansas City, so she went into the nursing side of the Air Force. She went out there for meetings and 48:00meetings. Then they sent her down here to Wichita Falls, and she took all of her training at Wichita Falls.

When they got all through with that, nothing was going on, so they took her out, let her go. So she was in. Then nobody else was in out of my family until my two grandsons grew up, and they were from my youngest's brother. The youngest one, he's got the smarts up there. (Taps head) When he was in high school, he joined the National Guard. Summertime, he'd go to camp; winter, he'd go to school. He did that about three years. His brother was going, and he graduated. Then he didn't have a job, so he was just doing one thing and another. My family was 49:00working doing landscape work and all of that kind of thing around new buildings and all of that, so he took a job following a lawnmower for one of the companies, cutting grass that had to be cut wherever they had buildings and everything. Said one day, "I can't handle this," so he went and joined the Army, (Laughs) joined the regular Army. His brother was younger than him and gone in the Army for three years, and he's already got rank on him.

They both wound up going through camp over in Missouri. The oldest one got 50:00married, had one little child. This was, like, his second year in service, I guess. The Haiti deal came off, so he was in the group that went to Haiti and spent nearly a year. Then he comes back home, and he goes back to camp again. One day they call that bunch up and gave them the final whatever they needed to do because they were going to go to Afghanistan. He shipped out the first of December; the youngest one shipped out the first of January. They both went to Afghanistan, same time, same basic time. The youngest one went down south of 51:00Afghanistan; the oldest one went to [Camp] Leatherneck up in the north. His second child is coming along, and the sergeant said, "maybe I can't send you home to be with your wife, but I'm going to send you down south to be with your brother." So he transferred him for a weekend.

Milligan: For one weekend?

May: For one weekend. They were there nine months; they saw each other three times.

Milligan: Oh, gosh.

May: The youngest one came home first. He was the last to go over, and he come home first. The older one came home the next time. The oldest one is at Fort Riley now, and the youngest one works for a gas service company in Kansas City. They've both been to Afghanistan, and he had PTSD when he came home. He knew he 52:00did; he felt it. They brought him into Fort Riley, and then they shipped him all the way down here to Texas and gave him his discharge down there. He was forty miles from home up there, and they couldn't get them to sign the papers. He had to go down here. They brought them all down to Texas, cut them loose, then sent them home. He went to the hospital down there when he was there for a week or two or whatever, and he kept telling them, "I need some help. I need some help." They said, "When you get home, go see somebody up there that can help you at the base," or whatever. Like I told you before, they push stuff off sometimes, don't handle it. The same way with the VA, the whole deal with the VA. I've never 53:00spent one day or night or hour in the VA Hospital. Everything that I have medical done I have paid for; I've had insurance that I paid for. I never went--I had friends that went and got good service in some of them, but this was back in the ʼ60s.

Milligan: Was this a choice of yours not to go to the VA then?

May: Yeah. I don't think I would go to the VA. Somebody might take me there, but I don't think I'd go there on my own.

Milligan: Why is that?

May: I just don't trust them. With all of the things that's gone on with the VA which was supposed to be a great thing, and it was to start with, but it's got 54:00so big. People don't understand that every year everything gets bigger and bigger. This back here doesn't get smaller and smaller all the time until it gets way down the line, twenty or thirty years down the line, before these people get to the point they can't do anything, and yet they got people coming out all the time that needs help.

Milligan: Right. Well, it's obvious that you have a long history of military service in your family.

May: Yeah, I had the service, and I know what goes on with some of them. My youngest grandson, when they were in Afghanistan, they lived in a place, camp. They'd go out on patrol during the day, and they'd come back to camp at night 55:00because they had these freight crates that they shipped stuff in. That's what they made their barracks out of, pretty well protected. They would go out, and they would go out, and he was kind of, I don't know what his rank was. He was second or third charge of a group that was going out. He said to the guy one day, "Why do we go out the same gate every day? There's four gates on this base. Why do we go out the same gate? Those people are watching us. They know exactly how many people that go out that gate every day. Somebody is sitting up in the mountains or hills out there somewhere counting us. From now on, I suggest that we go out of a different gate every day, no matter where we're going or if we 56:00have to go all the way around the camp and come back and do the same." They were out walking on the road looking for IEDs.

He stepped, and the ground under his foot was soft. He didn't move. He called the sergeant, and he said, "What's wrong?" He said, "I don't know, but underneath my foot it's soft." That's what these people would do. They'd go along the side of the road, dig out a spot to put a charge there, and cover it all up. He said, "Well, let's stop and figure this out, what we're going to do, how we're going to get you off of that thing." They go get a rope, about thirty, 57:00forty foot of rope, tie it around him, tie it to the jeep which is back on good ground. He told the sergeant, he said, "Tell my folks I love them." -- They jerked him off of that. That's how they saved the guys if they thought they were on something that was going to blow up. They could tie something to them and jerk them off and not blow up right on them. Come to find out, somebody had dug a hole. They couldn't get it deep enough, and they covered it back up. That's the one he stepped on. But he said, "I figured my days were--." Just listening 58:00to those guys talk over the years--.

Milligan: Yeah. Also when you were stationed at Pearl Harbor, that's a big thoroughfare. It seems like even with that, you probably--.

May: Everything that came in and out of Pearl--. We'd go up every day and check the roster of casualties to see if we knew anybody that was on the casualty list that had been--because when I went into that barracks there was eighty guys in it. I come in from Catlin one evening, and there was a deal on the board. Next morning, there was twenty of us left. Sixty of them left that morning.

Milligan: So how did you feel? You knew your job was to stay there every day. Did you not?

May: No. I knew my job was there. Every day when I got up, that's where they 59:00told me to go. It could have evaporated during the day. They could call me--when all these people left, I could have been one of them that left rather than one that stayed there. It's just who they need somewhere else, and you're holding down something back here that is minimum number of people that can handle this back here. The housing had a master sergeant, a staff sergeant, a corporal, (I think we had two corporals) and one PFC that worked five warehouses. We went in 60:00and out of Pearl every day. We'd get up in the morning, take a truck, go out to Catlin, which is between Pearl and Honolulu about five miles. That was where our duty station was all during the day unless we were called in to do something else. December 1952, there was a sign on the bulletin board that says, "Everybody will not do your jobs today." They all fall out over by the warehouse, so we went over there. They said, "Okay, go back to your barracks, put on your Class A uniform, and you're going to go over to Kaneohe," which is 61:00the Marine air base.

They're going to take how many men. I don't know how many there was in that unit at that time. We go over there, and we have a staff sergeant that was in charge, I think. We get there, and he meets somebody from Kaneohe. They said, "Oh, yeah, we got these full bungalows over here. We had to put guards around them. The president elect, Eisenhower, will be in by four o'clock in the afternoon. He's won the election. He's gone to Japan to converse with the people in the field. He's coming back here. He's going to spend four days here before he goes back to 62:00the States. He'll be back there for Christmastime, and then he will be inaugurated in January." I stood front-door guard on Eisenhower before he took office. It was like this. (Gestures) The front door; the walkway; the door was here. This was the back of a wall going to the bedroom. I stood in that corner from noon to four o'clock. They came about three or three thirty. They got in. They came to the bungalow. I opened the door. I saluted him, and he went in.

That's the first and last time I ever saw him except when he came out to go home 63:00on Sunday morning. We had guys that walked along the beach. There wasn't anything between the Kaneohe beach and Alaska or Washington or Oregon or somewhere. There was nothing out there, but you had to have somebody out there walking. These guys would walk down here. They walked to center and back and forth like this all day and all night. My first day was in the afternoon, four hours in the afternoon. When I got off of there, I didn't have a dry thread on me. The polish on my shoes had melted off. It was only about eighty degrees, but that sun was just burning down. You had to be there; you didn't have any place 64:00to go. The next time I came on, the Secret Service man that was with him--they worked twelve hours and twelve hours. The next time I came on, this guy was on there, and on each corner of the bungalow was a great big flood light shining out.

You couldn't see the bungalows when you were out there looking this way.

He said, "Go get you a chair, come around here, sit with me right at this corner." We were just around the corner of the main street, but we see everything that's on the street. We see everything down there. He was from Oklahoma, too. (Laughs) We talked, and he said, "Yeah, I got a job, Secret Service. Some days it's hard work because twelve hours and twelve hours. That 65:00really gets monotonous and sometimes it gets awful hard, but, you know, it's a job. I like it because I travel a whole lot, too." We sat back there on the days that I came at night and he was on. We sat in the shadows, and he said, "My buddies are all out here walking the beats back there." (Laughs) My highlight, I guess, was opening and closing the door. I heard some bad language that they did during the night.

Milligan: Oh, from inside where Eisenhower was?

May: Yeah, from inside--. It was same thing then as it is now. The reporters would not leave the president alone. They asked the stupidest questions that 66:00anybody can think of. He walks five steps over here, and somebody asked him the same question. He blew up in there that night with whoever his guy that was--. It wasn't vice president. It was somebody else, you know, in his cabinet that was with him. They were talking, and the windows were open. They had fans going, but the windows were open. It was nice and cool. I was standing outside here, and I could hear them talking. He was so mad. He was so, oh--. This guy was saying, "Mr. President, they're all this way. You didn't know that. You've never been in the position in your adult life of being in the military. You have never 67:00been in a position like this where you can't say anything back to them. In the military, you can work it around and tell that man over there to go somewhere else, but you can't tell that civilian out here that's asking all these stupid questions." He said, "Yeah, but I answered it once." They said, "Yeah, and you'll answer it again and again unless you just--. When you finally turn them off, then they'll write something else about you. They'll have another question to ask you next week or tomorrow when they see you. They're that way. They just get worse sometimes."

Milligan: So you could hear that through the open window?

May: Yeah. I'm from here to the wall from where they were at in the living room, and I'm standing outside of the door. It was just a screen door. I've never been 68:00to the museum, and it's not that far from where I live. I just never get there.

Milligan: The Korean War? Which museum?

May: The Eisenhower.

Milligan: Oh, the Eisenhower Museum, sorry.

May: Yeah. They're about 150 miles or less from where I live, but I've never been able to afford to travel like I would have liked to have traveled. I never did go down to Lake of the Ozarks until a couple of years ago, and it's hundreds of thousands of acres of lakes down in there. It just never was a point that--if I had time off, I usually came to Oklahoma to see my family, stuff like that that I felt was more important than going out. I know people that can't live 69:00from Monday until Friday to go to the lake, you know. You probably see them going over to Grand Lake the same way or some of the other places. (Laughs)

Milligan: We got some lakes for that. We've been talking for an hour now, so I'm not going to keep you too much longer because I know lunch is happening. I can hear it, and I know it's been a long day. I'm just curious at this point--it really has actually been interesting. I know when you started you said there's nothing really to tell, but it's been interesting to hear who you met and how you negotiated being in Pearl Harbor. Is there anything I missed about that part of your service era that you want to talk about before we wrap up?

May: You know, the guy that I volunteered with--I come in from my work station 70:00one day about a month after I got there, and I had a phone call in the office. The guy said, "Somebody called for you." I said, "I don't know anybody out here." He said, "Somebody called, and they left this number for you to call." I called, and it was the guy that I had volunteered with. They had sent him over from Santa Anna. They sent him to the Marine air station at Kaneohe, so he called me. Then we were friends there all the time we were there. He was one of the ushers at my wedding and all that. Had a military style of wedding with all the guys in Marine dress uniform. All the guys came, and they hunted up their 71:00uniforms and wore them. We used to say the uniform of the day in Hawaii is dress blues: tennis shoes and Aloha shirts. (Laughter) Nobody ever dressed that way, but that's what they all wanted to do. I guess Maybe when I came here, they had probably instilled something in me that I was already doing for the people that I met here to encourage me to say whatever I felt like I wanted to do.

I've had a good life really. I've had a lot of sickness in the last ten years. I had hay fever for twenty-five or thirty years, bad. I worked almost every day. I 72:00worked for--I wound up working for the City of Kansas City, Missouri Parks and Recreation Department in small engine type of work, lawnmowers and stuff like that. Then I graduated to the trucks and what have you, and then I wound up doing welding work because I had done welding work before I even went to school. I did welding work--I helped build the stadium at Hobart, the concrete stadium the year before I went to Chilocco. I knew something about welding, but I didn't 73:00take it up there. I just lingered along over the years, and then finally when I worked for the parks department, it was a job that I went to--. I had a pretty good job, but they decided they were going to cut my wages.

I said, "I can't handle that. I've got a family to feed. I've got to find something that I can still make a living at. It's not that I don't think I can." I was off for a while, and then I found the job with the city. It didn't pay a lot of money to start with, but it paid a lot more money than what I was making at the last job I had. Then I got insurance. Then I got sick leave. Then I got vacation time, and I saved as much as I could. When I was sick, that was covered along the way, and I worked for the parks department for twenty-four and a half 74:00years. When I got to be sixty, the time and job that I had with them and my age--. You had to be eighty before you could retire with full pension from the city, so I had, like, eighty-four years at that point. I said, "You know, maybe I could just retire and do what I want to do and what have you." I was renting a little farm out in south Kansas City. I raised horses. I had twenty-five horses at one time. (Laughs)

Milligan: That's a lot.

May: I had six or eight horses that boarded with me. I got up and fed them, and I went to work. I did all of that stuff for seven or eight years before I 75:00retired, and then when I retired, I took care of them and that kind of thing. I've been retired since '89. (Laughs)

Milligan: Oh, gosh, that is a long time.

May: It's longer than I worked for them.

Milligan: That is a long time.

May: Like I say, the pay wasn't that good to start with. It got a little better along the line, and other things got better. It was enough to live on if you live right, and you could get by along the way. When I retired, then you can work so much when you retire, if you want to retire, and you can work a 76:00full-time job by working with your retirement funds and all of that stuff. I just piddled here a little while and did one thing and another and kind of did what I wanted to. In '93--I'd get up every morning, go feed the horses and everything, and go to work, and I get this hurting right up here in my shoulder. It would last for maybe ten minutes or so. After a while I went to see my doctor. She checked me all over, and she said, "I want you to go to the hospital and get checked."

I went down to the hospital, and they checked me. They put the catheter and the dye and whatever, and right here (Gestures) I had a collapsed--on the coronary artery right here. They said, "We don't know how long it's been that way. It 77:00could have been there all your life. Could be in the last years. We can do two things. We can go in there, and we can take that out, or we can go in there, and we open it up. It might stay open, and maybe collapse again. I said, "Doctor, why don't you go fix it then?" Said, "Okay, I'll do that." They took the vein out of my leg and put a shuttle around the spot there. They didn't take that spot out. They just went around it so I get more flow through there than I've ever had through there.

Milligan: And here you are, and that was twenty-five years ago!

May: Yeah. I asked him, "How long is these good for?" He said, "Nowadays we're talking about fifteen years with no trouble. That's how long we've been doing 78:00it, and we know that it works at that point." I'd been in the hospital umpteen times, and they always said to go back every year or every two years and get a full check on it. Said, "Your heart beats better than it ever has." A couple of guys a few years ago said, "Your heart's stronger now than most twenty-five- or thirty-year-olds are nowadays." I've never had any--.

Milligan: All that right living you did up until that point, right?

May: I don't know what it was (Laughter) along the way. I had a horse fall on me when I was twelve or thirteen.

Milligan: Oh, that was your first back injury then?

May: Yeah. The horse fell, and I fell in a rut on the hillside going through the pasture. I fell on my back, and the horse fell and rolled over me. I didn't have 79:00anything broken. Got up, staggered around a little bit, and went to the house and told Mom my horse fell on me. "Well, you wasn't supposed to be riding the horse, anyhow." I said, "I know but--."

Milligan: I can hear them closing down, down there.

May: I don't care if they close out. (Laughs)

Milligan: This was interesting! Thanks for taking time out of your afternoon.

May: This is more important to me than that because I see that every year, and I've been with that ever since I've been coming to the things. A year after the bombing in Oklahoma City, I started coming to the Alumni Association. Lived in Kansas City and never sent a child of mine here. I had four girls and two boys, 80:00and I never sent one down here. I'll tell you something, I didn't know I was doing, or I didn't remember.

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