JWW:
Well, there may be something to be said for that.
CJW:
And someone else wrote an article about his hitting, and made a point
that he had extraordinary eyesight. When he was a player.
JWW:
There’s a story about the American fighter pilot, Chuck Yeager, who
may have had the same kind of eyesight. In his biography, I think
it’s his autobiography, he talks about being able to see enemy
aircraft at a distance of 50 miles. While he’s in the air, of
course, and it’s very clear up there, but 50 miles is still a long
way to see. Perhaps Williams had that kind of eyesight.
CJW:
He was in the Air Force too.
JWW:
Oh, that’s true. Yeah, he missed a number of years.
CJW:
Five!
JWW:
Five years.
CJW:
Think of what his records would be.
JWW:
Well, there’s at least a couple hundred home runs there.
CJW:
Oh yeah. One of the fine things about his character, and a lot of
people don’t like him. He never whined once about having to leave
the game to go to war. He said, “I came back. A lot of my buddies
didn’t.” Well, I admire Williams. I go along with those in …
he may have not been the greatest hitter. One of the things about
sports is its context. The 20s are not the 30s. Ty Cobb has been
thought as one of the greatest hitters. Another is Rogers Hornsby.
But one of the things about the time when Cobb and Hornsby were
playing, is that pitchers would go 9 innings. And they might win 10
to 7. So that the good hitters were hitting against a pitcher they
were facing 4 times in one game. And I think that made a difference.
JWW:
Late innings might have been garbage time for batting averages.
CJW:
Sure, yeah.
JWW:
It would be interesting to go back and look at where those hits
occurred.
CJW:
Yeah, where the things accumulated. But of course, they still mention
the curse of the Bosox, trading Babe Ruth. Not trading, selling Babe
Ruth for $100,000 to the Yankees, because the owner of the Sox, his
name was Frazee, needed $100,000 to promote some show he was putting
on, on Broadway.
JWW:
We don’t remember the show today, do we?
CJW:
[Laughing] I haven’t the foggiest notion!
JWW:
But we remember Babe Ruth!
CJW:
Oh sure! Then of course they built the stadium, Yankee Stadium. No,
Ruth was a fine fielder, great hitter, if you think about the
all-time greats, you’d have to wonder where you’d put him – how
high. Williams the same way. I think if Roberto Clemente had lived,
he might be in that class. [He] died on a goodwill mission. Whenever
I could, I loved Major League Baseball.
JWW: Well, maybe we could shift for a moment, and go to perhaps a related subject. You and I haven’t talked about this, so I’m trying to surprise you. I think most people who have seen you in a lot of situations where you may have gone to a movie, or you watched the Jackie Gleason show, or you saw some politician fall on his face … there aren’t many people who seem to enjoy watching the wind go out of the sails of some pompous person as much as you. We know you like slapstick, per se, but in a broader sense, I believe you have a real orientation to humor, especially when somebody who really deserves it, gets it. I wonder, what may have fed some of that … were there great comedians to see in the 20s or the 30s?
CJW:
Not that I saw. Obviously I couldn’t go to live shows very much. We
had radio, but really, radio comedians didn’t come in until about
the 30s. Radio in the 20s was a very haphazard thing. I think … I
don’t know why, but I have always detested sham, pomposity,
gasbags, and I’ve probably been unfair to some of them. That is I.
But you are right. One can get a secret delight in seeing some gasbag
fall on his face. I still do.
JWW:
TV evangelists and so forth.
CJW:
Oh yeah. That bugged me. Well, that reminds me. One of the early
impressions I had of that sort of thing was an evangelist named Billy
Sunday, who was a real … he was an ex-major league baseball player.
When he was illustrating his sermons, he would slide home on the
platform. That was a little much. I never saw it, but I was told
about it, or read about it. But I guess when I am considering a
person, I really want to know who you really are. I know there are
reasons why you may be this or that, or reasons why you may be
exaggerating, or reasons why you feel a big load of guilt, but who
are you really, and what sustains you? Those are the questions that
bug me.
JWW:
A couple of your grandchildren, and one of your children, have sent
some questions, and they wanted to try to have you think about [them]
while we are filming. Maybe we’ll just start out with Marj’s
questions, and see where it leads us. Marj says that your grandson
Mark Flower wanted to know what your parents told you about Sweden,
if anything. What kind of … perhaps, comparisons or contrasts, they
may have made, between the life you were living and what they had
left in Sweden. I guess this is really, your father left Sweden, your
grandparents left Sweden, but your mother was born here.
CJW:
One of the great gaps is that my father never talked that much about
Sweden. I don’t really know why. I don’t even know for sure why
he left. But some of the few things I heard, that in addition to
having a farm, his father, my grandfather Westman, was also the
postman or letter carrier, probably similar to our RFD. I remember
him saying that his father, when he would deliver mail, would drink
50 cups of coffee a day, because every place where he delivered a
letter, he drank a cup of coffee. True? I don’t know. I did know
that my father said one time that he had a couple of brothers who
died by accident. One of them, I remember him saying, stepped on
scythe when he was mowing alone, and bled to death before people
found him. I don’t know how the other one died. He did have a
sister that came to this country of course, Christina, who married
Carl Nelson, in New York. Carl Nelson was a captain on a rich man’s
private yacht. The rich man was named Gould.
JWW:
Hmm. Interesting, huh?
CJW:
Yeah. One time when Nelson was in the Boston area, he took my father
and me to Quincy where the yacht was in dry dock. And I remember he
gave us a brass spindle bowl from the yacht. It was around the family
for many years.
JWW:
I remember that being in the family. I don’t know where it would
be.
CJW:
I don’t know who has it now. But somebody does.
JWW:
I remember that, yeah.
CJW:
And Aunt Christina died, before my father did, and she had had
several children. And for some time we were in touch with those
children – Christmas cards, mainly. But I remember at the time my
aunt Christina died, and of course neither of my parents went to the
funeral in New York, they sent an 8”x10” picture of Aunt
Christina in her casket, surrounded by her husband and the children,
and I remember thinking to myself, what a sort of macabre picture
that was. I think there was a time, I believe, it may be true, that
Billy Nelson, who was about my age, maybe a little younger, became a
Lutheran minister. And another of the cousins – I don’t know her
last name, but it’s on that sheet that I distributed years ago,
which I could still find if I had to, lived in Danbury, Connecticut.
The older daughter, I forgot her name, she married a carpenter.
Anyway, go ahead.
The
only thing else, he didn’t say that much about Sweden. For years,
we would get Christmas cards from cousins of his – I remember one
that came for years and years, from someone named Esther Naslund.
He
wouldn’t even speak Swedish in the home. I remember asking him,
because I wanted to learn, and I remember he told me, “If I speak
Swedish here, I’ll never learn English.”
JWW:
How much Swedish was spoken in your home?
CJW:
None. Occasional words, if they wanted to hide something from the
kids.
JWW:
The children, huh? Mark also asks about your childhood relationship
with your sister Elsie.
CJW:
That – that’s … there’s only one word for it that I can think
of, and that is “remote.” She was 3 years younger than I, and
after my father died, let’s see, I would have been almost 13,
before I was 14, and she [was] 3 years younger, I was practically
never home, because of being in school and having to work after
school. The only thing I can tell you, is that it was remote … we
never were close. After she was married, and I married your mother,
we occasionally saw them in southeast Massachusetts, Fall River or
some city like that, but not often. I had a big problem, that I
didn’t know how to handle, frankly. Still don’t. Whenever I would
see my mother alone, she would talk about the terrible treatment that
Harry (Elsie’s husband) was giving the rest of the family. And then
she would pledge me, “Don’t ever say anything about it to him or
anybody else.” Which is a real frustrating experience, because, I’m
sure you might feel like I do, you want to confront and say “What’s
going on?” But I couldn’t do that. And that was a real problem
for me.
JWW:
You were talking a minute ago about working after school and so
forth, and Marj writes that she’s interested in hearing you talk a
little bit about some of the jobs you had, the ones you liked, which
ones were the most lucrative … perhaps there’s a logical trail of
that discussion into ending up in Canton, NY.
CJW:
There is an obscure trail. I’ve tried to follow it through. Of
course, after school and Saturdays, I worked at the John T. Connor
grocery store, delivering groceries in a cart that I wheeled down the
street here and there, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was doing
odd jobs around the store, like bagging potatoes, which came in big
burlap bags, and you put them in peck and half peck paper bags. And
that paid me $4 a week. Afternoons from roughly 2:30 to 5:30 or 6;
Saturday from 9 in the morning til 11 at night. But $4 could buy an
awful lot of groceries. And I liked that job. I didn’t mind the
walking, I met a lot of different people, and I was always interested
in the differences in people, so I didn’t mind that job at all.
Then
when I was in high school, the last 6 months of my senior year, I was
excused from any classes, so that I could put in January through June
working for an accountant in Boston, which was part of a study-work
program that the school had. I had been in what had been called The
Commercial Course, because all the relatives said, “you can’t go
to college, so you’ve got to take something to get yourself a job.”
So I was a fairly competent stenographer – typist, bookkeeper. And
so I went to work for 6 months with Percy Gleason. Sounds like a name
from a sitcom, doesn’t it?
JWW:
[laughing] Well, it does sound like maybe Reginald Van Gleason the
Third’s cousin or something like that.
CJW:
Anyway, Percy Gleason was a CPA, with an office on Milk Street in
Boston, and he had one young woman working for him. So I did odd job
things, anything from typing, and of course, we didn’t have the
kind of equipment you have today, so you had a very simple adding
machine to add columns and verify them, and sometimes talking back
and forth to check numbers. And I liked that; it paid $14 a week, and
even though I had to subtract the car fare, but that wasn’t much.
JWW:
This is on the … did you call it the El in those days?
CJW:
We called it the El. I know in later years it was called the Metro,
but that was long after I left Boston.
JWW:
The MTA.
CJW:
The MTA, yeah. So I enjoyed that job. I learned a lot. Other kids
might have felt deprived of the last 6 months of high school, with
all the festivities, but I did not, because I had never been able to
participate in them anyway. So that was no loss for me.
In
terms of the most lucrative job I ever had, I guess it had to be at
Quonset Point, the naval air station during the war, when I ran a …
I was sort of a foreman, or honcho of a warehouse. I think I was
getting about $60 a week. I might have gotten a little more in a
shipyard, but it was such a miserable working situation, working
inside these ships, cleaning welds, and there was no … the air
situation was terrible. The blowers just didn’t blow away the smoke
and the grime and the …
JWW:
You were grinding weldmans?
CJW:
Yeah, I was a chipper. You know what a chipping gun is?
JWW:
Hydraulic?
CJW:
Yeah. And so you had to clean the welds, because they’d be spread
all over the place, and so you had to shave them off.
JWW:
What were you … were you looking for something as you cleaned these
welds, or simply cleaning them?
CJW:
I just cleaned them. [If you were asking if] I inspected them, no.
They had other people … inspectors.
JWW:
Looking for continuities.
CJW:
So that was good pay. I think I got about the same. The problem with
both of those jobs was that contracts ran out as the war was petering
out. So then I got the job in the iron foundry in East Bridgewater,
commuting from Whitman, and that was hard work. But then I was made
foreman of the night shift, and so then I still got about $50 or $60
a week, which was pretty good pay. So in terms of most lucrative,
before ministry, yes.
[Break]
JWW:
Well back to the business of working prior to going to St. Lawrence.
There are a couple stories stuck in the back of my mind that interest
me now that we’re talking about it, and I don’t know that I can
recall much about them, and I don’t know if they’d be more
interesting. There’s a story that you dug graves [CJW nods], and
there’s also a story that maybe your most lucrative job, on a
per-hour basis, was driving a truck for a bootlegger. So I don’t
know if any of that is true, but I wanted to hear you talk a little
about that.
CJW:
Well, the story about the bootlegger is very brief, because it wasn’t
an ongoing thing. I drove two loads of vegetables from Fitchburg to
Boston.
JWW:
Vegetables.
CJW:
Yeah. Behind the the crates of lettuce and stuff were grain alcohol.
JWW:
This was maybe in the late 20s or early 30s?
CJW:
Early 30s. Early 30s. I’d say … hardly a year or so before the
repeal.
JWW:
I see. So you were already out of high school.
CJW:
Oh yeah. And of course … but I only did it twice. Caution took
over. But I got $30 a trip.
JWW: Well that sounds like a pretty good hourly rate, doesn’t it?
CJW:
Of course in those days you couldn’t go from Fitchburg to Boston in
an hour, it took a couple hours. What was the other one?
JWW:
Oh, talking about digging graves.
CJW:
Oh, see after awhile in the foundry, I began to cough and cough and
spit black, because the ….
[Break]
JWW:
OK, we’re talking about working in the foundry and having to make a
job change.
CJW:
And so, unusual for me, I went to a doctor about it. And he told me
to quit that job and get a job in the open air. And so, in Whitman,
there weren’t that many jobs in the open air. And so I happened to
come across the manager of the cemetery, and his assistant had just
quit, so he hired me. And for not too long a period I was working for
him. Of course, it wasn’t just digging graves, it was mowing grass,
cutting weeds, …. I remember one trip we took the truck to go to
Hanover, because someone wanted the remains brought to the Whitman
cemetery.
JWW:
Hanover, New Hampshire?
CJW:
Hanover, Massachusetts. Which is not too far. So we took some burlap
bags, because when we got down there, the wooden casket [had]
entirely rotted away, and of course all we had were bones. Those were
put in burlap bags, and transported back to the cemetery, and put in
another coffin, and with some ceremony, then the family interred it
with the rest of their relatives.
JWW:
I going to assume this was another one of these closed-coffin
affairs.
CJW:
[laughing] Oh yes. Oh yes. I forget how long I stayed in that job,
whether I stayed in that job til I went to St. Lawrence or not? I
can’t remember. It was all mixed in that time … the foundry, the
graveyard ….
JWW:
Maybe we can back up a moment to before the bootlegging, and talk a
little bit about when and how you came to drive an automobile, and
what were some of your favorite cars, and Marj was wondering whether
you remembered trying to teacher her how to drive, and then having
both agreed that maybe the family harmony would be best served by her
going to driving school.
CJW:
I remember that well. I went to driving school too. There was really
no one I could call on to teach me. So I went to driving school, and
I remember it well, because the driving instructor had a brake on his
side, as well as the brake on my side. So I took several lessons from
him. And then I had my first car, which was an Essex Torpedo
Roadster. Two-seater. The back was shaped like this [makes tapering
motion with hands]. And I got my license OK, and I went to a great
many places with my Essex Torpedo Roadster.
[Editor’s
note: A number of luxury car companies – such as Bugatti,
Mercedes-Benz, and Delahaye – produced roadsters with tapered back
ends and named “Torpedo”, although Essex does not appear to be
one of them. Consequently, he may be simply be referring to an Essex
model that has that shape. One with that shape was called the Essex
Speedabout Boattail Roadster.]
JWW: Was that your favorite car?
CJW:
Yeah. All in all, certainly my favorite car, at least until I was
driving Volkswagens, which really are my favorite.
JWW:
Marj would like to know if you remember who your first love was.
CJW:
Yes, I do....
JWW:
She didn’t ask if you wanted to talk about it, but I will! You may
not want to talk about it.
CJW: I don’t mind talking about it. This ties in with the Essex Torpedo Roadster. For awhile, in the summertime, some friends and I, they took a car - ‘cause my car only held two, you see – we would go to Old Orchard Beach, in Maine, on what was then called the Newburyport Turnpike. And Old Orchard Beach, Maine, had a wonderful pier, there were all kinds of shops along, and then you got to the big pier where there was dancing, with big bands on Saturday nights. And I got acquainted with a young lady who was dishing out ice cream at one of those stands on the pier. Her name was Yvonne Bouthott. And we got friendly, and I used to go up when I could on weekends. And I think our last date was Thanksgiving, when she invited me up for Thanksgiving with her family, all French Canadians, who didn’t like it that I wasn’t French Canadian and 2) that I wasn’t a Catholic. And that Thanksgiving was my only experience with rhubarb wine. I don’t particularly recommend it.
JWW:
Maybe it did the job, though.
CJW:
[laughing]
JWW:
There was a … this is a digression, I’m sure … I remember even
in the 70s, early 70s, when I moved back to Massachusetts, there was
still, I think, a French school in Lynn, and I’m wondering if …
or Boston, I’m not sure where it was now, but there was Boston
Latin School, there was a Boston English School, and these were all
really public schools, weren’t they?
CJW:
I certainly remember Boston Latin and Boston English, which are
public schools. But you had to be good to get in, for either one of
them. Boston Latin still exists, I understand. I don’t know about
Lynn. We have a fellow member of the church who worked for GE for
years in Lynn … Buzz [inaudible], aeronautical engineer.
JWW:
Maybe we can talk a little bit about reading and books. You seem to
have been a voracious reader, and not just in terms of how fast the
pages might turn, but also, you seem to have very good comprehension
and retention, I would say exceptional. When did you first become
aware of this passion?
CJW:
About seven years old. Certainly by the time I was nine I was reading
hours every night.
JWW:
Not because you had to.
CJW:
No, no, because I enjoyed it. You see, in Everett, there was the
Parlin Library, named after the benefactor who gave the funds for it.
And I would get books … some of them were the usual nonsense, like
Zane Grey, and the Tarzan series, Frank Merriwell, Dick Merriwell,
but also I read Dickens and liked it, there were some histories I
read and liked it. I always liked biography from the time I was able
to comprehend it, because I found, and still believe, that if you
want to know a historical period, read the biographies of the
principal characters who seem to be in that historical period.
Because that way you get a balance. Historians have a bias, too, you
see. So yes, I remember cold nights sitting by the stove with my feet
in the oven, reading books.
JWW:
Was this a wood stove, or gas oven?
CJW:
Wood and coal. And so that meant ashes every day.
JWW:
When during this sort of literary growing up did you run into
Shakespeare?
CJW:
I had read as a child, Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, if you have
ever heard of that, which was really a prose simplification for young
people of Shakespeare’s plots. I really ran into him as a sophomore
in high school through the English teacher, I’ll never forget her,
Matilda Clement. And she took us, in the course of the time she spent
on Shakespeare, to see a play at Boston University put on by the
players of that college: The Merchant of Venice, I’ll never forget
it. And together with that, and being assigned Julius Caesar to
report on, which to my mind is one of the most quotable, well, it
started there. It started there. And it wasn’t until I retired that
I was able to devote the kind of time that I wanted to. Since I’ve
been ill, I’ve not read everything of Shakespeare every year, but
for the couple years before that, I would read everything Shakespeare
wrote, once a year.
JWW:
Marj asked if you could re-read only one Shakespearean play, which
one would it be, and why?
CJW:
Too tough a question. Depending on my mood, it might be Hamlet or it
might be Julius Caesar. On the other hand, if I wanted a delightful
romance, well done, it would be As You Like It. That’s the only way
I can answer that question.
JWW:
Why might you have chosen Hamlet or Julius Caesar?
CJW:
Because Julius Caesar illustrates so well the ultimate failure of the
power-seeker. Julius Caesar failed, Brutus and Cassius failed, and in
other plays, like Antony and Cleopatra, Antony failed. That would be
my attraction to Julius Caesar. Plus the wonderful quotes. “Cowards
die many times before their death, the valiant never taste of death
but once.” And “The fault, dear one, is not in our stars, but
ourselves.” [sighing, yeah]. I still …. And when I saw the Marlon
Brando play, when he played Antony in Julius Caesar. That’s a great
movie, I’d love to have that tape. Probably doesn’t exist.
JWW:
There’s something in the news today about the top 100 films of all
time.
CJW: I saw that.
JWW:
And it turns out that Marlon Brando is in two of the top ten, I
think.
CJW:
Citizen Kane was [number] one.
JWW:
That was, I think that was Orson Welles.
CJW:
Orson Welles.
JWW:
And then …
CJW:
Casablanca.
JWW:
That was …
CJW:
[Number] two, I think.
JWW:
Humphrey Bogart. But you had On The Waterfront and The Godfather,
were two of his films.
CJW:
Judy Garland is in there, for The Wiz[ard of Oz].
JWW:
I have a question for you, since we’ve been going to Ashland [for
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival], where Shakespeare himself might
have acquired his insights into human nature, because he doesn’t
reveal an insight, that I’m aware of, that’s really off the mark.
CJW: That is true. I once bet my friend Al Escanazi in Lakeland …
JWW:
I remember Al.
CJW:
… that – he was a psychologist – I tell you any psychological
condition, and I’ll find you somewhere in Shakespeare that
describes it. I lost the bet, because he finally came up with, a week
later, multiple personalities.
JWW:
There is a question – Al’s passed away, hasn’t he?
CJW:
Oh no, no. No.
JWW:
He’s alive?
CJW:
His wife did. He’s remarried.
JWW:
Oh, OK. Well, when you talk to Al, you might say that there’s been
some literature lately about multiple personality disorder not being
a real thing.
CJW:
I was going to … I saw that …
JWW:
So you might still be able to win the bet.
CJW:
[laughing] I know! Too late.
JWW:
What do you think might account for a person who is basically an
entertainer, a playwright,
CJW:
… entrepreneur
JWW:
He was commercially successful, I think, in what he did, so for him
to end up being such an observer and a psychologist seems amazing to
me.
CJW:
That is the great mystery and debate. Did Shakespeare write
Shakespeare? Was it Francis Bacon, was it … or something or other.
The weight of the evidence of most scholars is that he did. His plots
were mostly old stories. He didn’t create plots particularly well.
But the insights into human nature – that is the great mystery. How
could he do it? It is true that schoolboys in those days, and he went
to school, did study the classics. So he probably knew some Latin –
maybe much Latin – and some Greek. Maybe. But other than that, it’s
the big old question: how do you explain genius? Explain Beethoven to
me! Or Mozart, or Picasso.
JWW:
And if we aren’t ourselves geniuses, it may be impossible to do
that.
CJW:
It may be impossible.
JWW:
Anything more you’d like to reflect on about Shakespeare, before we
might move to another subject?
CJW:
No, except that I’ll be looking at Richard III again, before too
long.
[Break]
JWW:
We’re recording now. OK, Marj was interested about the Second World
War, and was interested in what the atmosphere was at home, the
propaganda, what did we know about the Holocaust, how did we learn
about things in the war, what was our source of information, what
about the patriotism and so forth.
CJW:
Of course, there was strong isolationism before Pearl Harbor in the
United States. There were also strong bodies of support for Hitler,
particularly [among] semi-Fascist organizations, like the
Brownshirts, the Silvershirts, the German-American Bund. Where I
first learned about Hitler’s treatment of the Jews was in the
church. It was around 1938, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the
minister of our Unitarian Universalist Church there was Owen Whitman
Ames, who came from the same city I did, and the same church,
Everett, the Universalist church there, and Whit – that was his
name – Whit Ames – I was there one Sunday when he preached an
entire sermon on the anti-Semitism and the cruelty of Hitler and his
gang, and the threat it represented to what we believed about people.
That was my most complete introduction to the kind of things going on
in Germany, and they weren’t particularly printed in the usual
press. Whit Ames really introduced me to that.
Up
to Pearl Harbor, I would say there was strong isolationism. Franklin
Roosevelt ran on the platform “He Kept Us Out of War” - and there
gradually began to build up some fears. Of course, I think there was
considerable influence from England, and France, people sympathetic
with what was happening to them. Particularly the low countries –
Belgium, Holland, Denmark. There began to be many defense contracts
let. People began to worry about the Japanese, because for years we
had been shipping scrap iron to Japan, which of course they used for
their war machine. At the time, nobody criticized it – it was a
place to make money. But with Pearl Harbor, there was a complete
switch. The feeling was – I won’t say unanimous – but it was
almost total. The isolationist organizations had just faded out of
the picture.
Of
course we had the draft, we had the bond drives, we had all the
propaganda machines of war hitched up to go. And so some of us who
could not get into the armed services – I tried, it was a silly
thing when you think of it, with a family – so I went to work for
Quonset Naval Station first, and when the contracts expired there, at
Hingham Shipyard, I went to the foundry. We had problems, of course,
there was gasoline rationing, and people who drove people to work
could get extra coupons, like the fellow from Whitman that drove four
others beside himself, I don’t know how many coupons he got, but he
got some, driving us Whitman to Hingham every day, for the job. There
were other coupons for meat and sugar, I think. I don’t really
recall much privation as far as food was concerned. Some of the
things were things we wouldn’t have bought that much anyway.
Of
course the employment of the war industries really stopped the
Depression. I’m not sure when the Depression would have ended if
had it not been for the war. And of course there was money being
accumulated, because you couldn’t buy new automobiles, automobile
industry was making airplanes and tanks. Some people … thousands
and thousands of women had been working who had never worked before,
and after the war was over, still wanted to work, creating problems
here and there which still persist in terms of equality and all the
things that you know about.
One
of the worst things that happened – I was on a bus, I think I was
was going from Whitman to Brockton, and D-Day, not D-Day, but the …
[Germany] had just surrendered …
JWW:
V-E Day
CJW:
V-E Day. Some conversation was going on not far from us, and a woman
said loudly, “I am so sorry the war is over, I never had such a
good job.” And another woman jumped up and she just about slapped
her, and she said, “My son died in France.” I remember that very
vividly.
JWW:
Both women really having honestly expressed their feelings about it.
CJW:
Honestly expressed their feelings. So that woman that said she was
sorry the war was over, I think a great many shared secretly that
feeling. Not something you’d want to announce publicly.
JWW:
Maybe back to the propaganda thing a little bit – in the early 60s
when I went in the Army, Army recruits were taught to hate
communists. And in the musical adaptation of Michener’s South
Pacific by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Hammerstein writes that you have
to be taught to hate others. What kind of teaching about hating
Germans and Japanese was going on in mass media in those days?
CJW:
Very little. You could hate.
JWW:
So the Frank Capra stuff was not ubiquitous?
CJW:
No, there were all kids of caricatures, particularly of the Japanese.
JWW:
More subliminal than direct, maybe.
CJW:
And they were the slant-eyes; they had other opprobrious names. And
the Germans, of course, some had revived the World War I epithet, the
Boche. Others revived alleged stories of mass killings, executions –
some of which were true. But I have come to the conclusion that no
nation has clean hands in war. We did a great many things that we
didn’t advertise.
JWW:
Sure. But you weren’t being taught to go to work every day with a
special fervor about hating the enemy.
CJW:
No, no, you went to work with the [mindset] of getting your job done
for the day. And sometimes worrying what the hell was going on. For
example, near Quonset, a nearby community called Davisville, became
the headquarters for building Quonset Huts. That’s where they got
their name, from Quonset Naval Air Station. And one time – I
happened to know it because I was in the warehouse – they had a
thousand station wagons parked over in Davisville. And people were
crying for automobiles, and they couldn’t understand why they
couldn’t buy a station wagon when there were a thousand of them
parked for months in Davisville. Eventually, of course, they went to
war too. I don’t know where, but ….
And
the worst mistake that happened in my warehouse, there was a Persian
rug that was to be shipped to an admiral, in Argentia Newfoundland,
which was a naval base then, and by mistake, somebody in the
warehouse made a mistake, and it went to Iceland. You’d think we
had lost the goddamn war! That admiral was so P.O.-ed. I got my
disillusionment with brass from that moment on.
And
of course there was a lot of thievery going on. ‘Course, you
couldn’t get supplies for your private business, like Romex cable,
which was used then for electrical … so there were many instances
where electricians on the base would take their shirts and pants off,
and wind their bodies with Romex, and go out the gate. Or put some
very nice tools in the lunchbox. They made random checks, but nothing
great or efficient. So there were a great many people who took
advantage of the war. Not only the so-called profiteers in the
defense industry, but the average Joe Sixpack was doing things too,
within those limitations.
JWW:
Maybe we could spend the last segment this morning talking a little
about becoming a minister. I know that you have said in the past that
some of the classes you took at St. Lawrence were pretty easy for you
because you’d done a lot of reading over the 15 years since high
school, along with bringing a certain life experience and maturity to
the job of being a student. What kind of things did you … well,
maybe you could explain how you chose St. Lawrence in the first
place, but then, what kind of things did you get from St. Lawrence
that really took you to another level of understanding and knowledge
that perhaps you weren’t aware of from your general reading. Did
you continue to read while you were digging graves and all these
things?
CJW:
Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, St. Lawrence happened for two … there were two
theological schools that trained Universalist ministers in this day
(that was prior to consolidation with the Unitarians). Tufts, and St.
Lawrence. Now, we had students at Tufts, and in Whitman, the student
minister of our Unitarian church in Whitman was David Hayman, whom
I’m sure you’ve heard the name, you may even remember him.
JWW:
I remember David.
CJW:
He was kind of a wild sort of guy. And it turned out that your mother
and I, seemed most Saturday nights were the ones who put him up, fed
him a Saturday night meal and put him up for the night – he and his
girlfriend Frances. He never stopped kidding that he always got
spaghetti on Saturday nights. I don’t think I often told him he was
lucky to get that. So we became good friends. He was a good
person at deflating windbags, too, which I liked. I think the first
sermon I heard him preach in Whitman, he said, “Some people want to
know the difference between a real Christian and a fan in the
bleachers at Fenway Park. A real Christian sings, ‘Stand Up, Stand
Up for Jesus’, and a fan in Fenway Park says ‘For Christ’s
sake, sit down!’”
So
we became friends, and when he got kicked out of Tufts, expelled …
[Interruption]
…
even though I had to leave it because of the black stuff in my lungs.
I had been the spokesman for the union, the labor union, the
laborers, When they made me foreman, the boss told me, “You can’t
speak for the union anymore. That’s over. You just keep your mouth
shut and do what I tell ya.” I said to myself, “There must be
something better than this.”
JWW:
What kind of classroom or academic experiences stand out from your
years at St. Lawrence?
CJW: It is more than the character of some of the the faculty that stands out, more than particular classroom experiences. I did well in all my classes, frankly, the record is there, I was elected to Phi Beta [Kappa], but the character, particularly of the Dean, John Murray Atwood, and Angus MacLean, particularly, but also, to a lesser degree, Vincent Miles, the homiletics professor, and Max Kapp, who taught church history, the sense that they created that we were a real family, the whole bunch of us at theological school. I was not the only married student at that time, although there weren’t many. And there were older students. None as old as I, but some who had done service in the war, coming back after the war. So between the Dean particularly, but also Angus and Max, there was a real sense of family. A real sense of family. And those that could would gather almost every afternoon downstairs in the theological school and play ping-pong, or swap stories, or tell [them]. So it was the character of the faculty, I think, more than any particular course or instance that made it so good for us.
JWW:
How large was this group of students, becoming UU ministers?
CJW:
At that time, we probably had 15-18.
JWW:
In the total undergraduate school?
CJW:
No, well, some were in graduate school, some were in undergraduate
school and theological, you could do both in those days.
JWW:
So it was a small group.
CJW:
Yeah, and not all went into the ministry. Some didn’t last. I
remember one fellow, why he ever entered the school, I don’t know,
well, I do know, but he had been a bullfighter in Spain, as a kid –
[so] he said. I believe he had been in Spain. [laughs] I think he had
to leave because he had an affair with a young English instructor, in
the college.
A
couple others left because they found it just wasn’t for them. You
see, it was a great place to get an education, because the semester
fee was $150, and most of us got scholarships for that.
JWW:
So you had to support …
CJW:
You had to support yourself. So that’s when I went to work for the
bank. I became a bank janitor.
JWW:
And that’s when you found out about what Willie Sutton said when he
was asked why he robbed banks?
CJW:
That’s where the money is! No, they treated me wonderfully. Ralph
Michaels was the president of the bank, and his wife was Helen Sykes,
and she was the daughter of a one-time president of …
[Break]
JWW:
OK, we are rolling. I think when we broke for lunch, when we started
this tape, I think we were talking about St. Lawrence, and I’m not
sure we got the last couple minutes of what you were saying, because
I think I ran out of tape. But you were talking about the fact that sense of community, the specific professors, more so than the
school, and perhaps you would have some more comments on that, or
perhaps you’d comment on the – aside from the financial impact,...
[End
of Part 2]
