Carter, Arthur, Sr. oral history

              Interview with Mr. Arthur (Art) Carter Sr.

Recorded on 12-4-04

[Interview starts at 006 on counter]

Hank Powell: Today is December 4, 2004 and I am Hank Powell and I am interviewing Mr. Arthur Carter.  We are in Marrott Apartments in Indianapolis, Indiana and it is 12:12 pm. [My father, Robert Powell jumps in and out of the Interview]

Hank Powell:  Mr. Carter were you drafted or did you enlist?

Arthur Carter:  I enlisted.  We were referred to as a volunteer.  You determined that by the way you read my Army serial number.  Do you know what an army serial number is? Well, every man is given a number when you enter the service whether it’s by draft or by volunteer.  If you volunteer, your number will have a one in front of it and then the second number lets them know what district or area that you came from and if you were drafted it’s a three in front of your number.  So my serial number is 15333944 and when they would call roll and ask you for your name, rank and serial number and when I recited my serial number the draftees, “Aww sucker, gee why would you do that? They’d have to come and get me.” 

HP:  Where were you living at the time you enlisted in the army?

AC:  918 E. 16th Street.

HP:  Was that here in Indianapolis?

AC:  Here in Indianapolis, Indiana.  I was nineteen years old.

[038]

HP:  Why did you decide to enlist?

AC:  Because my draft number came up.  Everybody registers.  You haven’t registered.  But everybody registers and then you get assigned a number, a rank and this is a remember this is wartime.  Pearl Harbor occurred on my birthday December the 7th in 1941.  I turned nineteen that day. And so I had had already registered because everybody eighteen to thirty-five had to register. And then my number had come up. And so I decided I did not want to be a foot soldier because foot soldiers have to sleep on the ground, dig trenches, foxholes and live out of their helmet.  Cause when you’re in a fox hole and you got to urinate you don’t jump up and jump out the foxhole ‘cause there’s no corner, no bushes for no place, so you use your helmet cause they’re not gunna allow you to urinate in the trench when you got men all along the trench, so you have to use your helmet and then you throw it out __ throw your urine out with the helmet up over the __ over the foxhole out. 

HP:  Why did you pick the service branch you joined?

AC:  As I look back now I was gung-ho use the term.  In other words I wanted to fight for my country and I wanted to be a pilot because I had made aircraft out of balsa wood when I was a kid.  And we used to __ you buy a kit then you make the plane and then you throw it to see, if it would fly and we were fascinated with flying. We would lie on the ground and look up and watch the airplanes flyin over.  As a kid now.  I’m a talking about as a child before the war, and we always said “Ohh man one of these days I’m a learn how to fly one of these days I’m gonna own an airplane.” So that was in the back of my mind that I wanted to fight for my country and I wanted to learn how to fly cause it was a glamorous thing.

HP:  Do you recall your first days in service?

AC:  Ohh yes, my first days in service the first ten days was out here at Fort Benjamin Harrison on K.P.

HP:  K.P., what’s K.P.?

AC:  K.P., kitchen police.  Serving the dishes, serving food and washing the dishes and emptying the garbage and whatever because I was what we referred to as a recruit.  And recruits do all the grunt work and one of the things that stands out in my mind is that when you sit down to eat out here you sit down in what we call family style and the food is in dishes on the table in front of you and course you pass it around everybody gets a portion on the plate.  The last, the man who takes the last portion out of the serving bowl has to get up and go refill, get a refill.  And of course if its this much [gesture of a small portion of food] I would only take somebody would only take half of it instead of___ so they wouldn’t have to get up and go get it filled and so uhh someone asked me asked me to pass the salt and so when I picked up the salt shaker I salted my food.  And the sergeant in charge saw me do that and when he came and told me to get up, which I did, and he said when someone asks to pass something to them you don’t short stop it.  You don’t stop and use it.  Suppose that was the last bit in there but he asked for it and instead of passing it down you take it and put it in your plate, but see I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to get up and go get some more so anyway I got put on, watcha call it, washing the trays for a couple of days.

[122]

HP:  What did your first days feel like?

AC:  What did they feel like; it felt like I didn’t want to be there because I wasn’t used to the regimentation and to doing things when somebody else wanted me to when they wanted me to do it.  At nineteen you know that’s tant amount to slavery.

HP:  Can you tell me about your first days in boot camp or training experience?

AC:  Well, you call it boot camp.  We call that basic training.  In the Air Force or in the Army and usually what they did when you __ when you hit your first your second station this is called the recruit station here but when I got to Tuskegee then I was assigned to what they call a basic training detachment.  And that’s where they send you out on the field and you do calisthenics and they give you a rifle and you do basic training, which was supposed to be six weeks of basic training so that gets you in good physical condition; teaching you how to use a rifle, how to bivouac which means to go out and camp in the woods and the like.

HP:  How did you get through it? Was it tough was it easy?

AC:  What the basic training ohh yea, I never finished it.  I never finished basic training because I think about the second week because someone came some sergeant came out and asked if there’s anyone that could type.  I graduated from Attucs High School typing ninety-five words a minute, so I held up my hand and he said come with him he says come with me. So they took me up to headquarters and they sat me down to the typewriter and asked me to demonstrate my ability to type and course I burned up the typewriter and I never went back to basic training. I never finished basic training.

HP: Which war did you serve in?

AC: World War Two

HP: Where exactly did you go?

AC: The different places, you mean how many different places did I get assigned to?

Hp: Yes.

AC: Ok. My first place was Fort Benjamin Harrison.  Then to Tuskegee Army Air field then from Tuskegee Army Air field I went to MacDill, MacDill Field __ m-a-c-d-i-double l Field in Tampa, Florida.  That where I stayed thirty days while they taught me what they call administrative work how to be a administrative clerk working in the head quarters.  That���s where you have the records the men transferred in men transferring out and all kinds of the files, army regulations that they taught us that in Macdill field, I stayed there thirty days.

HP: Did you see any combat?

AC: No.  Now after I left MacDill Field I came back to Tuskegee and then I stayed at Tuskegee until I went out was assigned to go out on the campus of a college it was called Tuskegee Institute which is in Tuskegee Institute, Alabama which is the campus where Dr. George Washington Carver had his laboratories and his museum and did all of his scientific experiments and the like and so I was station on that campus with an outfit called 320th College Training Detachment. And our purpose there was to train men who had not completed their college education. And that’s a long story maybe I will get into that after you go through your list.

HP: Where you training them for the army or where you training them for college?

AC: No we were training them to become cadets to enter into the cadet program to learn how to fly.  And they had to take a certain number of hours of college training because they were high school graduates.  I might interject at this particular time that when I enlisted in the Air Force they had lowered the requirements to two years of college.  Before then the only way you could become a cadet to learn how to fly you had to have a college degree. The first thirteen black men who were recruited to learn to fly at Tuskegee were all college graduates and one officer ___ Davis who had graduated from West Point. I don’t know if you have heard of him or not.  Either way he died a couple of years ago. But he was the first black officer and the other twelve were civilians. 

[199]

HP: Were there any casualties in the Tuskegee airfield?

AC: Yes, there were casualties but they were not war casualties.  The war was not in Alabama.  The casualties that I witnessed or was apart of, was where the cadet student- that is the cadet who was is learning how to fly.  Some of them got killed in the process of training.  Some of them were killed for foolishness and some of them died because the equipment failed, the airplane engine quit or whatever and they tried to bring it down but they didn’t make it.  When I say foolishness I can remember one incident where there’s a bridge over a river and the cadets would fly under the bridge and come out and do a chandelle which is a maneuver in which you try to hide the letters and numbers on your plane and if you’ve seen an airplane its going to have numbers on what you call the fuselage that’s along the side and there’s going to be numbers up underneath the wing and so you can actually come out and do a maneuver that will tend to shield the sight of those numbers because if you ever somebody gets your number and reports you, you’re going to get disciplined for doing that. Well anyway it so happened that it rained one night and the river rose.  Back in the forties we did not have retractable landing gear.  You didn’t take off and the wheels we didn’t have that.  In training the wheels were always down.  So the young man the cadet with intent to fly under the bridge with the river having risen his wheels touched he got caught in the water.  Well, he died. He crashed in the water he couldn’t come out.

[248]

HP: Could you tell me a couple of your most memorable experiences?

AC: My most memorable experience would’ve been the first time I soloed after having gone so many hours and then the instructor tells you to land and he gets out and waves you on.  Your heart’s in your mouth and you’re scared to death, but you do it and course I did it and on my landing I ground looped.  Ground loop means that when you come in and you’re coming in and here’s your wing [he is demonstrating with a pencil the ground loop] you let one wing (you’re not supposed to) but a wing touches the ground either, whichever and when this wing touches the ground it loops you around and I did that on my first solo and so I tore up that plane!  It was number three. And so then I got some did some more training and all and did it a second time and then they washed me out.  To washout means that they eliminate you.  And incidentally I __ this is my diary that I kept while I was in service.  It’s 60 years old but in here its pictures, narrations about my time spent at Tuskegee.  And in here find the page where I ground looped, my wife sent me this book the first month or so while I was at Tuskegee and, oh boy I should have marked it.  1944, 1945. Forty-five I down in Amarillo Texas. ___ army airfield. Here we go.  So at, way over here, getting old can’t read mine own writing from sixty years ago. So I reported to __ this was on the nineteenth of March __ I was reported Tuskegee Army Airfield.  I was assigned to the Cadet Corps and I entered pre-flight training and was assigned to class 45I and we can skip on down here to were I went in the hospital and then entered primary training and orientation flight went back to the hospital again and I ground looped on the 9th of July took off on my first supervised solo flight I ground looped upon landing.  My duration time was eighteen minutes.  I got recommended for elimination from flying training.  And went before the board but they didn’t eliminate me.  They gave me a new instructor.  And then I went up for a second supervised solo 30 minutes on and then I had a third for fifty minutes a fourth one, one hour and I failed the progress check and I was recommended for elimination from flying training. And I was eliminated with twenty-three hours of flying time and thirty-five minutes of which I had a ground score average of 80.6 but all this information is in that diary there.

HP: Were you ever a prisoner of war?

AC: No. Didn’t get overseas.

HP: Were you awarded any metals or citations?

AC: No more than a good conduct medal.

HP: How did you stay in touch with your family?

AC: By letters and in that diary there by coming home on three day passes. I should tell you that in the diary you will find where my wife arrived at Tuskegee Alabama in 1943. We had one child.  We had a boy; but she arrived at Tuskegee and she was with me there at Tuskegee just about the whole time when I was there and we rented a four-room house a lot of land.  She planted corn and vegetables.  We raised chickens.  Just lived like civilians.

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HP: What was the food like in the Tuskegee Army Air ___?

AC: The food was all right the few times I got to eat it because I lived off the base and lived at home and while I was out on the campus I was eating on the campus.  The food that was prepared in the dining hall there at the Tuskegee institute.  When I say Tuskegee Institute, that’s the college.

HP: So you made most of your own food?

AC: No, no, no I never did any cooking.

HP: Did you have plenty of supplies?

AC: The only supplies that I was concerned about was paper supplies pen and pencil, using the typewriter, carbon paper.  I didn’t have to worry about other supplies.

HP: Did you ever feel pressure from any of the jobs you might have had during the war?

AC: No, no, no.  Yes I should take that back for this reason. After I washed out, no that was before, before I got to cadet training I was sent to Amarillo Army Airfield which is where they train mechanics __ men to become mechanics and I was stationed there almost six moths learning how to repair and service aircraft bombers in Amarillo, Texas. That’s in the diary there. And it’s also in here I was taught or learned how to repair B-17 B-25 B-24 and the B-29 and the B-29 was the largest aircraft in the world at that particular time. That’s the one that they used to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

HP:  Was there something special you used for good luck?

AC: No.  No I don’t believe in good luck.  My definition for good luck is where preparation and the opportunity meet.  You prepare yourself when the opportunity presents itself.  You’re there.  That’s good luck if you want to call it that, cause it’s bad luck if the opportunity presents itself and you’re not prepared to take advantage of it.

HP: How did people entertain themselves?

AC: Drinking, Gambling, Women.

HP: Were there any entertainers?

AC: Many, many times that’s in the diary. I have pictures of the black entertainers came to entertain us.  Lena Horn, she was there February the 4th, 1944.  That’s me, here [pointing at a picture].  And this is my ___ party. I was away some place probably goofin off so I didn’t get in that picture. Rochester, Eddie Rochester came to visit us and the band ___ band, Duke Ellington. They always had entertainment for all soldiers’ black and white but at Tuskegee only the black entertainers came.

HP: What did you do when on leave?

AC: Went to visit my family here and Indianapolis or would stay there in Tuskegee with my wife and my son.  My second son was born in Tuskegee.  But my grandmother who raised me lived here in Indianapolis.

HP: Did you travel many places while in the service?

AC: NO, no more than the different stations where I was stationed.  I went to visit my wife’s family.  They lived in Shreveport Louisiana, Birmingham Alabama, Forest City Arkansas.

HP: Do you recall any particularly humorous or unusual events?

AC: Yea, you call them humorous.  I guess I laugh about them now but at the time they weren’t vary humorous.  When you get stopped by the police for speeding in Alabama in the middle of the night and they ask you to get out of your car and walk down the middle of the highway.  One foot in front of the other on the line that separated on the road and when you get out so far he say OK now come back to me toward me and I turned around to walk back toward him and he says no, no, no, no, no, backwards.  Well you know that meant that I got to put one foot behind the other and go backwards. When you’re drunk you can’t do that very well, but I wasn’t drunk and I did walk backwards but the fellas teaseed me about that.  They say well he could have shot you in the back and you by yourself and they said the term we used that will be all she wrote. We laugh about it now. They laughed about it then; they thought it was kind of humorous how could you walk backwards.  If the stripe is there the trick is this foot is on it so you gauge putting this foot behind that foot.

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HP: Did you or your friends pull any pranks on any officers or fellow cadets?

AC: I never pulled any pranks on any officers. No, that would get you court martial and kicked out the service. But on your fellow cadets, you're using the word prank.  Actually the term to use is hazing.  Hazing is a form of a prank.  Now there’s hazing in every academy.  Hazing is at every academy: West Point academy, the Naval Academy, the Marine Academy, the Air Force academy and the Coast Guard academy.  There is hazing in all of the branches of service.  Remember so long as you are on this earth there will always be someone who outranks you.  I’ll ask you now who is the commander in chief of all the armed forces; who is the commander in chief, your President George Bush is the commander in chief.  When he landed on the aircraft carrier, the President of the United States is the commander in chief.  Our country is run by civilians, in the foreign countries the military tend to take over.  But here in the United States, the civilians __ we vote, we run things and our commanding officer for us is the President of the United States.  Therefore the buck stops with him, you got the private at the bottom in the military and then he’s got private first class, sergeant, sergeant majors, first lieutenant, second lieutenant, majors, colonel, generals.   In the cadet corps two classes of individuals, what we call the lower class and the upper class and as long as you are here there’s always an upper class who can give you orders.  And if you don’t carry the orders out in the cadet corps you get demerits. And the certain number of demerits will eliminate you.  Now the hazing that they did in the military in the Air Force is something that was done to condition you for war.  And in particular if you got captured by the enemy.  Then you could sustain the abuse and torture that would be put upon you because you are always taught only give your name your rank and your serial number.  That’s all the Geneva Convention requires a soldier to do, even if you lose your life in the process. Cause they want information from you but if you give up the information and you get back alive and your commanding officer whoever finds out that the information you gave was detrimental because some of your buddies got killed or injured because of the information, you get court martialed. Now, so far as the hazing part in the cadet corps they would have you do certain pranks or tricks or whatever you want to call it just to see how much you could endure.  I endured certain things that injured me in my groin.  And that’s in here you see where I went to the hospital two times for that because I was doing a so called prank its called the chair infinity c h a i r.  And that’s where they put two chairs together like this here’s the back of the chairs and then you lay down and they begin to pull the chairs apart slowly until your heels are resting on the edge of this chair and your head about here is resting on the edge of this chair.  And you’ve got your arms beside you and you’re holding your body rigid.  That’s called chair infinity there’s nothing under you and as long as you can hold that you’re fine, but it’s a hell of a strain on the abdomen.  And then when they walk away from you, they’re not going to put the chairs back together.  You just fall on your ass __ on the floor and I went through that.  The government is now paying me a disability because of the injury that I suffered sixty years ago.  Because of the chair infinity because after I got out of the service I had two hernia operations one on my either side.  And its taken me up until two years ago I’d been fighting it and finally at the end of about two years ago they decided that because the hernia on this side has opened up again.  They want to operate on me, but I refused.  I said no, I’ve been cut on five times.  The next time I get cut on the undertaker will be cutting on me.

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HP: I saw you had pictures in your diary who were the people in the pictures and what were the pictures of?

AC:  Well let’s start here.  My wife sent me this book. At one time I had her picture right there.  I don’t know what happened to it.  This is the card that came with the book.  While I was in service I got names and addresses of some of my buddies and I think twice I’ve gone from here to the east coast to visit these guys if I could find them and where I got a red X means that they have died.  And ___ tried to keep in touch with them buddies of mine.  This is my grandmother, that raised me she lived to be a hundred and two and she kept me and raised me from the time I was a year and a half old, when my parents died in Houston, Texas from tuberculosis.  And my mother, on her death bed asker her mother that’s my mother’s, mother to take me out of the South because they lived in Texas in Houston in a swampy area where it was damp and which was conducive to tuberculosis, and my mother and my father died from Tuberculosis.  And there was no cure in 1920 in the twenties here in Indianapolis there was a place called Sunnyside out off of State Road 67.  And if you contracted tuberculosis, that’s where they sent you and you slept in a screened in area night and day, rain or shine, sleet or snow.  The theory then was that fresh air would cure you of tuberculosis.  And that was Sunnyside out here.  So anyway at fifty-seven years of age she took me and brought me to Indianapolis.  This is me in 1946 and that’s my oldest boy when he was that’s July 44’ and he was born 1942.  So he would be almost two years old then.  That’s my wife’s first cousin and she’s dead.  She was a schoolteacher.  This is my first-born son like I said he was born August of 42’ and this is December of 42’ because I was at Tuskegee then.  This is my commanding officer at Tuskegee his name is Theodore Randall.  He was, but he’s dead now and he lived here in Indianapolis.  His son Theodore Randall Jr. is a lawyer here and I had his son under me in scouting.  I was a scoutmaster for twenty years and so his son was under me and his son’s a lawyer.  And Lieutenant English and Eugene White and Eric ___, all those are dead.  Davenport was a close friend of mine he was at Tuskegee he was from Kokomo and Eugene Kittrell.  I named my youngest son after him.  His middle name is John Dale Eugene Carter.  And this is the permanent party that I was working with we call it the __ and we were out on the campus holding down the fort in the 320th College Training Detachment.  And this is when Lena Horn came to visit us at Tuskegee.  That’s Sergeant Medley, Captain Randall, Theodore and me and what is his name and Arch.  Can’t remember the last name now.  And this is a picture of cadets marching on the campus at Tuskegee.  And this lady here, her name is White and we rented __ my wife and I rented one of her houses, a four-room house about a half a block down from hers.  This is Mrs. White standing here with her grandchildren, her children, this is her daughter and that’s her daughter’s.  So she let us rent her house and it set on about a half an acre of land and the first year that we were there that first summer, I am not a farmer I didn’t do anything with the land and Mrs. White came and says we don’t let land just lay you use it.  So she brought some seeds, seedlings and a piglet and had her husband to build a pig sty and everything and then she says and you send a ___ to Tennessee to buy some baby chicks and so I bought 500 baby chicks and they were shipped and her husband also built a chicken coup where we kept the chickens and so we raised chickens, we raised peanuts and she says the pig piglet that your garbage bucket and everything you don’t eat the garbage and everything you throw it over in the pig pen for the pig.  And when the pig got fat enough her husband came down took the pig and in the winter time when its cool slaughtered the pig and brought, I don’t know ___ I got everything I was supposed to get or not but I know there was some ham and some bacon and some Kentucky oyster, chitlins and pig feet, pig tails and pig ears the whole pig and her husband taught me that the only thing that’s wasted on a hog that’s what it is after it gets big on a hog is the squeal everything else is used.  They make blood pies they make hog brains with eggs and on New Years Day people have black eyed peas and hog head or some kind of pork or something, I know you heard that but nothings is wasted on a hog but the squeal and if the man could do something with that he would.  These are guys I worked with at the telephone company right before I took off to service.  ____[003] Kelly Kerr is the only one that still, no Luther Hall is living.  Luther Hall lives at 38th and Rookwood and Kelly Kerr jus married his wife Emily Townsend and then the rest of it is songs that were popular back then that’s what you’ll find here, Air Corps march.  These are the odds on craps.  In other words if you going to learn how to shoot dice then if you get points you should know, I ain’t going to try to teach you about to shooting craps but, you know what a dice looks like?

HP: Yes

AC: Do you play monopoly?

HP: Yes

AC: Okay. So a dice got six sides one through six, right.  Ok. How many ways can you make a four, only two, three and one, two and two.  How many ways can you make a ten six and four or two fives that’s it.  If you shooting dice and you get four ___ point the odds of you making a four is two to one.  Which means if I’m going to bet that I’m going to make the four and if I make it you have to pay me twice the amount of my bet.  That’s in professional gambling in Las Vegas I ain’t talking about street craps.  Street craps will get you killed cause that almost happened to me shooting craps in the latrine.  The latrine is the toilet and you put a blanket down on the floor and you go out there and you shoot craps until ___, which is time to wake up and I had made a bet and I turned my head and somebody picked up my money and I knew I had one cause the dice had passed but anyway I jumped on the boy and I was working in the office so one of us was going to get killed so they transferred me out.

HP: Was there any kind of army slang?

AC: Yea, the book here its right here for you if you want.  Army slang, yea Okay This is army slang in 1943.  Can you read it?

HP: Yea.  Armored cow, canned milk

AC: canned milk yea.

HP: was there any reasoning behind that?

AC: Yea, canned milk we didn’t have fresh milk so we had Wilson’s canned milk what do they call that small can Wilson’s evaporated milk.   And then there was Carnation they still sell Carnation.  That’s canned milk.

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HP: And an army banjo

AC: What does it say it is?

HP: Shovel

AC: It’s a shovel

HP: That’s funny.  Did you have any best friends or really close officers when you were stationed?

AC: No, because we are not supposed to fraternize with officers.  That’s taboo; enlisted people and officers don’t run together.  An enlisted man cannot go in a officers club and the officers don’t come in to the enlisted men’s club.

HP: Do you recall the day your service ended?

AC: Yes, November the 21st, 1945

HP: Where were you?

AC: I left Tuskegee and came up to Baer field, Indiana.  Which is in Fort Wayne that’s the last page in my diary, inside the diary there.

HP: What did you in the days and the weeks after?

AC: Well from November the 21st when I got home I did not go back to work at the telephone company until after new years about January 1946’.  Cause you had ninety days to go back to your old job. And when I left going to service I was ___ Indiana Bell Telephone Company and I returned and decided I didn’t want to go back to work but your job was held for you for ninety days after you got back.  Lets see what was I going to show you in here.  These were the songs that were popular back there then and you could write them.  Go ahead son.

HP:  Did you join any veteran organizations?

AC: Yes.  When I got out of the service I joined the American Veterans Committee, AVC.  Which was about ninety-five percent Jewish and the Jews were reaching out to us.  That organization was active for I don’t know a long time but it finally died out because number one there were those in Washington who felt like because it was Jewish and they were reaching out to Negroes.  _____[003] I don’t know if you know about the McCarthy era the movies stars and all got tainted because they were supporting the other side of our politics and if somebody said well he’s a communist, well then your name went on a list that the FBI was putting together.  I also joined the American Legion Organization but I joined the American Legion Organization because I wanted them to represent my claim for disability for my disability in the groin and so they were me representative but they tried all those years, now I did get what they call a __ I got recognized for this, but no money.  It was called it was less than ten percent disabled and so I got no money for that until ____.  The reason __ one of the reasons I got money was because as a mechanic they didn’t issue earplugs to put in your ears.  Now remember, these were propeller aircraft.  There were no jets.  Everybody had propellers and you had four-engine job they had four propellers.  On the B-17 it was four engines, B-25 so when you stand in front of those it was deafening and all you could do would be to cover your ears up or stick your fingers in your ears but it took me fifty almost sixty years to convince them that I am now hard of hearing and it started back in Tuskegee and in Amarillo, Texas on the line when I was around airplanes and I understand now that those of use who are veterans, that have lived all of us they’ve given them ten percent.  Ten percent is one hundred and six dollars a month.  Yea, so you take that on top of my groin disability down here so it brings it up to about two hundred and some odd dollars a month. In fact I keep ___ checks by the I think I got a years checks here and I was going to go to the bank and cash them in.  It’s about 3400 dollars here they date back to 12-04-03.  So you got a year it says on here void after one year.  I’m going to the bank today

HP: Did your military experience influence your thinking about war or military in general?

AC: Did it what now

HP: Did you military experience influence your thinking about war?

AC: About war, yes definitely so. I volunteered, as we know now I volunteered.  I raised my wife and I raised four children two boys and two girls.  I taught my sons you keep your __ but in college you will not volunteer unless it’s a hot war.  World War two was a hot war; World War one was a hot war.  The Japanese attacked us.  I don’t approve the war we’re in.  I didn’t approve the Vietnam War.  I didn’t approve the Korean War.  I didn’t approve all the other little war and ___ that we had, the Bay of Pigs and all of that.  I didn’t approve of any of that. So I taught my boys you keep your behind in college, get your self your degree so in the event that you have to go to service you don’t have to be a foot soldier.  You will be an officer.  They live like kings.  They give orders except for the ___ somebody over them so, my attitude about it now I would have told my kids to go to Canada.  Can’t do that now because Canada and the United States has an agreement. They will not shelter and hide the Americans in Canada.  They will help the United States to bring them back, but we don’t have a draft yet but I state here now I predict we will have a draft.  You will be drafted because I don’t believe this war will last, will be over in my lifetime.  And I expect to live another eighteen years I’d like to see one hundred but I don’t believe this war will end in my lifetime.  We may end it like Lyndon Johnson did by pulling out, but we’re not going to win.

Robert Powell: How do you know?

AC: Because they are fighting a religious war, because anytime a man believes that if he straps a bomb around his waist and ___ in to a crowd of people and blows himself and everybody else up because if he dies they’re seven virgins waiting on him.  No, I am not an atheist.  I am agnostic. I believe I don’t know what I believe in at this junction of my life and I was raised in a Baptist church from by my grandmother until I left to go to service at age nineteen.  But I believe I don’t know I believe in a Supreme and I don’t know what makes me be able to breath.  But I got turned off with my ministers and with the churches just like I’m turned off about this war because this war is our side __ is over the oil there.  Argument is that we are trying to control them and we want to spread our democracy all over the world. But who suffers the grunt of that? __ the poor among us.  Those without influence who don’t have anybody that they can appeal to.  Have you seen how many blacks, __ I’ve got it on my computer __ a list of all the blacks that have died in that?  Thirteen hundred or so that have died because our blacks decided that they will go to the service, put in some time and then I can come out and get an education.  It don’t work that way because somebody is going to lose their life so it’s a gamble. Yea it influenced me.

HP: What kinds of activities does your veteran’s organization have?

AC: I belong to the American Legion Post which is Post 249 which is up there on 2500 block on Northwestern on Martin Luther King and has all the fifty some flags out in the yard and I belong to that post and it’s open seven days a week you can go there and drink and play games and they got a TV screen bigger than that window over there over in the corner.  You can watch the games and they have tip boards which you pull things off to see if you win fifty dollars, twenty-five dollars, one hundred dollars.  They have fish fry on Wednesday at night all the catfish and coleslaw you can eat for eight dollars.  I belong to the Tuskegee Airman’s unit here and we meet there.  That’s where we have our meetings.  So there is an association that’s call the Tuskegee Airman and which is a national organization and it’s headquartered in Arlington, Virginia and we have chapters all over the world.

HP: Do you attend Reunions?

AC: Our chapter here meets twice a month.  I am the treasurer of our chapter.  We’ve got about $30,000 in the bank.  We don’t know what to do with it.  I go to the meetings.  The National Tuskegee Airman they have a convention every year.  This year the convention was in Omaha, Nebraska.  Next year it will be in Orlando, Florida.  It was here in 1997 here in Indianapolis.  They come from all over and if you want to call it a reunion, which it probably is because I get to see some of my Tuskegee Airman from one year to the other but there we fifteen over 15000 of us black Tuskegee, white Tuskegee, female Tuskegee, black and white at Tuskegee everybody at Tuskegee was not black couldn’t be for one reason, when the first thirteen black cadets reported to Tuskegee to learn to fly who would be eligible to teach them.  There were no Negroes that could teach.  They didn’t want us to learn to fly period.  So all of the instructors were white.  The base was segregated. They had the area in fact the whites never lived on the base they lived in town.  They didn’t want them on the base at night.  There was a theatre on the base for everybody to go to.  The whites went to the theatre at six o’clock in the afternoon and at 7:30, we blacks would be lining up outside the theatre waiting for them to come out so we could go in.  We couldn’t mix and mingle. They lived off the base and were paid rations and everything so they wouldn’t have to be bothered with us.  Go ahead.

HP: How did your service and experience affect your life?

AC: That’s a good question. Number one, the training in the Cadet Corps provided me with the fortitude to put up with just about anything and condition my mind that I could succeed.  The fact that I washed out doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that the hazing that I endured toughened me to where as you are asking me to do almost the impossible and I knew that if I didn’t do it I’d be washed out or eliminated or whatever and I came out of this thing saying that I can do whatever anybody puts on me.  All of us strengthen but because most of us who left Tuskegee even though we washed out went on to become doctors, lawyers, dentists all of the different professions. Why? We had the G.I. Bill.  The G.I. Bill was that which you got time to go to college at government expense. I had four years given to me because I served in the military three years and they add one more year for the time you put in.  So I had four years of entitlement to college training and I used every bit of it.

HP: So your education was supported by the G.I. Bill?

AC: Yea to finish, I already had the two years when I went in so I used that to finish those two and then I also went to the Indianapolis school of electronics which was down on Washington street and I studied to become an electronics technician.  So I learned how to build television sets, radio, install we call it HiFi in peoples home where you have the speakers in the wall and all that kind of stuff and I did that for about almost twenty years, too.

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HP: Is there anything you would like to add that we have not covered in this interview?

AC: No, I think we don’t have the time for me to, I brought my bag of goodies down here but we don’t have time to go through those.  Briefly what it amounts to is that there are over a hundred and fifty books that have been written about Tuskegee Airman and I don’t have, this is what I carry with me when I go to speak. Well let’s go back here.  Arthur Carter page 218, fifteen, sixteen it should be right here if I can get this apart.  Well if you read that paragraph there you’ll find my name and Lena Horn.

RP: Is this a local author that wrote this book?

AC: Oh no, no, no, no the local author that wrote a book that lives here that’s his book. Pompey Hawkins he just wrote that one.  My book is in the process.  I’ll probably die before I write it before I get it written up.

HP: Did you want to be put in these book?

AC: They came they interviewed yea sure they interviewed me.

HP: You didn’t mind?

AC: No. There’s no way they’d make any money.

HP: Do you think these books portray a good image about the Tuskegee Airman?

AC: Oh this is factual that book that’s the facts.  This book is factual too.  These are books written by who wrote that one, oh I know who wrote that one but she and those folks came in and interviewed us.  We had mutiny in Freeman Field out in Freeman, Indiana and 103 Tuskegee Airman mutinied because they didn’t want us to go into the white officer’s club, so they mutinied and up until 1997 everybody was pardoned so to speak except for one man and he was the only one court martialed but they cleared him and he got all the back pay and got his rank restored, but the pathetic thing about it is that he went on to school and became a lawyer but because he had the court martial hanging over him, he never could make a lot of money. Because when you get court martialed, there’s a cloud over you for life, but he got cleared.  These all kinds of book _oh here’s the program from when we were here when the convention was here in 1997.  That’s ___ Hill.  He taught over at Attucs High School.  This guy, he flew in all three, the World War Two, Vietnam War and Korean War, McGee, Mr. McGee

HP: Were you involved in the process of writing or getting interviews for all these books?

AC: No not for all of them.  This one and that one I just showed you with my name in it.  They came here and interviewed me. I think I’ve got something here I can show you. Now in this book here right here this is a __ now what this is this is just a copy right here of my diary.  That’s what this is and then starting here is a roster of all of the graduates all of the blacks who graduated and got their wings. That’s what this is this section right here and there was 960 some pilots that graduated and of the 966, 400 and some of them went overseas to fly the single engine.  That’s the fighter squadron and the rest of them were twin-engine pilots.  The bombers (see I was a mechanic for the bomber group) now the bomber group didn’t get over because Truman pushed the button and we dropped the atomic bomb. But I was in the group, the 477th bomber group, that was getting we were ready to go heading towards the Pacific, but in August when we bombed Hiroshima then I got discharged that November 21st so I never got overseas, but we were all trained and ready to go. And ___ Hill was a bomber pilot. ____ Anderson was a bomber pilot.  Walter Palmer who lives here and he’s a single engine pilot and he shot down a ___  ___ when he was in Europe and he’s lost an eye.  He’s only got one eye and Pompey Hawkins who wrote (where’s Pompeys’ book?) that book there.  Pompey was a ground crewman.  He was a photographer.  I mentioned a while ago about the fact that none of this come to light nationally ten years ago.  One of the reasons is that everything is about the pilot, the flyer they are dying out.  There was only 960 some of them and they are dying out.  I doubt if we have a fourth of them still living all of them are eighty years or older every last one of them so within the last ten year they who are still living became aware of the fact that they we forgot somebody, we forgot the ground crew, the ground crew for every pilot up there it takes at least ten people on the ground to keep him up there the mechanic, the parachute rigger the guy that rigs his parachute, you’ve got to have the hydraulics man you got to have a doctor on the ground, you got to have a dentist, you got to have a nurse you got to have it takes ten men to keep that one man up there.  As a mechanic when we would get this plane already to go and the pilot come to get in it we tell him, “hey, that’s our plane.” That plane belongs to us you just make sure you get it back, because it don’t take but one screw to be either not tight to cause a crash because every not and bolt on a plane has to be torqued.  Torque, t-o-r-q-u-e and you have to tighten it and there’s a torques wrench and you measure the torque and then you stick a wire through so that that nut wont back off and mistakes kill people kill pilots, parachute fail even though if you pack it you put your number in and they used to say what the hell is the use for putting the number in well at least we will know who packed it you wont know but cause you’ll be dead.

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HP: That was my last question for you and thank you for doing this interview.

AC: No problem.  Sorry I couldn’t get into everything with you cause now lets see what else you don’t have here.  Those are my speeches. 

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