Oral history interview with Dora Anne DeHart Atha, 2010

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Dora Ann DeHart Atha
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: November 16, 2010
[Begin Interview]
TS: This is Therese Strohmer, and today is November 16th, 2010. I’m in Eden, North Carolina. This is an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dora Ann, I have—why don’t you go ahead and say your name the way you’d like it on your collection?
DA: Dora Ann DeHart Atha.
TS: Okay, sounds good. Well, thank you so much for offering to be part of our collection. I would love to hear—why don’t you start by telling us about when and where you grew up?
DA: I was born right here on this same land, Daddy bought it in 1928 and didn’t get married until the 1930s, and so we was [sic] all born in—across the line into Virginia, and I came back home, I was living on the same land.
TS: This—yes, we’re right close to Virginia here, right?
DA: Yes—
TS: You said the cows are—
DA: The cows are in Virginia.
TS: The cows are in Virginia.2
DA: You can almost spit across the line. [chuckling]
TS: So, you—so, this is kind of country out here, is that what it was—was it even more rural?
DA: Oh, we didn’t even have paved road until I was about twelve, thirteen.
TS: Yes.
DA: It was all dirt road, and we were the last of everything for many, many years, there wasn’t anything on below us. Now it’s trailer city.
TS: [laughs] Was it—was it like a farm that was—that you had, or what was—
DA: It was eighty acres back there, and we had raised tobacco, and we never raised cotton, we raised our own garden and had our cows and our pigs and the horses, and—we had horses after Daddy died. He loved his horses. He was born in eighteen and ninety four, he was six years old at the turn of the century, in World War I, so you know, we were raised the old timey way.
TS: [chuckles] Did you have any brothers or sisters?
DA: I had four brothers.
TS: What are their names?
DA: Joe was named after his granddaddy Joseph Burgart, and Bob was named after Daddy, Bobby Gates, Earl was named—I’m not sure, Earl Wayne, and then Frank is Franklin Edward after Uncle Davis.
TS: And do you have—so all brothers, no sisters?
DA: No sisters.
TS: And you’re the only girl.
DA: I’m the only girl.
TS: Where do you fall in that line?
DA: I’m the fourth.3
TS: You’re the fourth, okay. So, you’re not quite the youngest.
DA: No, no.
TS: No. To have been the baby girl, that would have been maybe something, huh?
DA: Mama said I was spoiled, I said I didn’t know when. [laughter]
TS: Now, what did you—now, did your dad just work on the farm, then?
DA: No, the mill, he worked for the Draper Sheeting mill, started out he worked for the woolen[?] mill, and I think World War I picked him up and took him off and he came back, and then worked mill and farm.
TS: You said Drapen—
DA: Draper-sheeting.
TS: Is that the name of the company?
DA: It was Fieldcrest.
TS: Oh, Fieldcrest, okay. But that was the type of work that they did, then?
DA: Well, we were three cities, we were Leaksville, Spray, and Draper. And so it combined all into Eden, so when you say Draper, you’re talking about ten miles down the road.
TS: What’s that middle one, Spray?
DA: Spray. S-P-R-A-Y. We had the Spray Cotton Mill—that’s a traffic circle. Yes.
TS: Now, did your mom work at all?
DA: No, she raised—
TS: Not outside the home.
DA: No. Five kids and cows and pigs and calves and gardens, she had her hands full.4
TS: She worked. [laughter]
DA: She worked.
TS: She just didn’t get wages.
DA: She made all of our clothes.
TS: Oh, did she?
DA: She made my coats and hats and pocketbooks when I was a little girl. I still have some of them.
TS: Oh. Well, so what was it like growing up here?
DA: Well, it was back in the late 40s and early 50s, and it was sort of just—there wasn’t hardly anything here. There was no 14 [highway], there was no fast food, just a whole different world from today. We didn’t even have running water except for two [legs?] and lights. Virginia wouldn’t run lights, because we were too far away from everybody else. North Carolina wouldn’t run lights because we was in Virginia. So we never had lights until I was about thirteen or fourteen and we built this house over here, my Mama did.
TS: Really?
DA: Yes. So, we grew up without a whole lot of things that people can’t imagine today. I still have a wringer wash machine. I don’t use an automatic.
TS: A wringer wash machine, is that like the—
DA: No, well, it’s electrical, but—
TS: But yes, it cranks it through or what does it—
DA: Yes.
TS: Yes, okay. What did you think, as a girl growing up out here? What kind of stuff did you do?5
DA: Well, you didn’t know what to think, because nobody else had anything either. I can remember the first time we had a—we had a battery radio when we lived out in Virginia, and Daddy would listen to Gabriel Heatter. And nobody touched that except Daddy, because it had battery, and it would go dead. And he listened to that Gabriel Heatter, and he listened to the Grand Old Opry. And that was a big thing in our life. And then there was a bus that used to come around every hour on the hour and it was ten cents to go to town, but we didn’t go to town very often. [chuckles]
TS: And where would a town—
DA: Well, we’d go all the way over into the town of Leaksville or on Boulevard.
TS: I see. Okay. Now, did you—we were talking a little bit earlier, before I started the tape, about where you went to school. You want to talk about that a little?
DA: Well, Virginia, we lived in Virginia, but Daddy wouldn’t drive us all the way to Axton, Virginia, which is about a twenty-mile round trip, and this—you’re talking about, well, Joe was born in 1936, so ‘42, and he wasn’t going to start driving him twenty miles in 1942. So he just sent us down the road and we caught the North Carolina school bus and we went to North Spray School, which went up to seventh grade, and it’s about three miles away, then we went to Leaksville-Spray Intermediate School, and then we went to Morehead High School, so those were our three schools, and so the people that we knew were—we all went to the same schools, we all knew the same people all the way through our whole life, really.
TS: Did you—and did you like school?
DA: Oh, yes.
TS: What’d you like about it?
DA: Well, I just enjoyed school. I was good with English and Earl was good with math, so I did his English and he did my math. [laughter] Not what they would approve of today.
TS: Well, I don’t know that that still doesn’t go on today.
DA: [laughs]
TS: But so, did you get to play any kind of intermural sports or anything like that?6
DA: We didn’t really have too much of that stuff that I know of, until you got up into high school, and then we didn’t have really—the older boys, Bob, Joe, and Earl, they were taken, as soon as school would allow them to be out, which was about eleven o’ clock in the morning, Daddy would pick them up at North Spray and take them to Draper, where he had another farm, and then he would tell them what he expected them to have done before dark. So, then they would do that, they walked ten miles. Well, I don’t remember, may not have been ten miles, they probably walked about five miles, and got in an old car and waited for Daddy to get off at eleven o’ clock and come home. They went to bed and went back to school the next morning, Daddy was waiting at eleven o’ clock to pick them up to take them back to Draper. And so during the fall, especially, you know, they were well occupied, and we just didn’t do things like that. We didn’t have ROTC when I was in school.
TS: No?
DA: No. So, my wanting to go in the army was just something that I had wanted all my life, and it really had no way of getting out ‘til I joined. [chuckles]
TS: Why did—[clears throat] why did you want to go in the army all your life?
DA: I really don’t know. Daddy was in World War I and we had his old helmet, I’ve still got it, out there in the building. And we had pictures of Daddy as, you know, as a soldier, and just—he didn’t really talk that much about it, but there was—I just always wanted to go.
TS: Because you would have been born during—when the war was on.
DA: Forty-two.
TS: Too young, really, to remember it, I would think.
DA: Yes. I don’t really remember anything about it. It was just—it was just something that I had always wanted to do, I just—it was a lifelong dream.
TS: Did you have any uncles or anything like that that had been in?
DA: Oh, we had a lot of cousins and then, too, by the time I got up to join, a lot of people around here, Gene Hutson and you know, different—and they had the draft, so people, by the time you got ninth, tenth grade, all these boys were being drafted in. As a matter of fact, when I was wanting to get into service, I kept going to the post office, and they had the [United States] Air Force and the Marines and the Army, but no WAC.7
And I kept saying—they kept saying “Oh, you come on with us, you know, your friends are in the navy, your friends is [sic] in the air force, your friends is [sic] in the Marines.”
I said “No, I only want the army.”
Didn’t even know what they were called, but I wanted it, so finally they gave it up and said “We’ll get you a recruiter here.” My own recruiter.
TS: Oh, is that right?
DA: Yes.
TS: So, they got [laughing]—you solicited for a recruiter.
DA: Well, that was the only thing I wanted. When I was in eleventh grade, we had to make a career booklet. And I made a career booklet—that’s how I got those pamphlets I was telling you about. I got all those pamphlets and made a career booklet. Well, Mama had heard the army so much that she refused to allow it to be mentioned anymore. It was not allowed in the house anymore. Don’t even talk about it.
TS: How long had you been talking about it?
DA: Probably all my life, I can’t remember—I can remember as a little girl, my Aunt Rosie, Daddy’s sister, lived across the street, and that was where we’d go get water a lot of times, because it was—down under the hill was a spring, but I guess eventually Mama then just sent us—thought to send us out to Aunt Rosie’s.
TS: Well, it’s too bad we’re not doing a video interview, because everybody’d see that you’re sitting here in your uniform. [laughs] That you still fit into!
DA: [laughs] I love my uniform, it makes you feel patriotic.
TS: Well, it looks good, it looks good.
DA: Thank you.
TS: Well, let me go back just a little bit, before we get into the army. Did you—so you were good in English, is that what you liked, English? And did you have a favorite teacher or anything like that?8
DA: I don’t know that I had a favorite teacher, but I’ll tell you one thing, there was a lady called Miss Ivy, and she was eleventh grade English teacher, and she’d make you get up in front of the class and tell what—give us books to read, then we’d have to get up and give a book report on it. And I never was one that—I like to talk, but I don’t like to get in front of people. And so we had to do that. She also taught us that rats gnaw and humans say no. You don’t say “cheer”, but “chair”. You don’t say “chimeley”, but “chimeley”. Actually, I probably still didn’t say it right, but anyway.
TS: Which one is that?
DA: [laughs]
TS: Chimney?
DA: Those—those were the things. And she talked about—there was a hotel over in town, but I mean, who ever went to a hotel? I had never even been in a restaurant until I went in to apply for a job after I graduated from high school. Had no idea what they did.
TS: In a restaurant?
DA: Yes. Didn’t know how to behave in one, either. But she did a lot about trying to tell us, you know, what was on the outside world.
TS: Right.
DA: She talked about tips, she talked about hotels, and bellhops, and how to act, and how to sit, and she did a lot of things that—a lot of people didn’t like her, but she really was a teacher that tried to bring us out of the country and get us prepared for the city life. [chuckles]
TS: That’s interesting, that’s interesting. Did you—so, what kind of things did you do—so your brothers are all working pretty hard, though maybe your younger one, he’s not.
DA: No, he didn’t do—
TS: He got away with it a little bit.
DA: Because he was five years younger than I was, and Daddy was—Daddy was 65 when I retired [graduated] from high school. So, they were older parents to start with, so.9
TS: Right. So, what kind of things did you do around the house and things?
DA: Well, Mama could keep you busy; that was for sure.
TS: What’s your mama’s name?
DA: Clara Fay. And so, she—she believed in work, and there was plenty of work to do, because she tended mostly to the garden, she did all the milking, and she used to get me up out of the bed sometimes at twelve o’ clock at night because she’d be so tired that she didn’t milk, maybe that afternoon—at six o’ clock, or whatever.
She just milked in the mornings, and she did all the milking until she got about sixty, and she said “You know, I’ve had it, I’m through, I’m not milking anymore.” She’d milked her whole life, and she was raised up in Patrick Springs, and so she was the second of about ten boys. So, she felt like she had already raised one family before she started us, she said one time. She said “I’ve been raising kids my whole life.” But she would get me up and we would go out in the pasture and go run the cows up and milk them. Well, she let me go back to bed, but she’d make me go with her.
TS: [chuckles] At midnight.
DA: Yes.
TS: Oh, goodness—because she had to get them milked.
DA: Yes, they had to be milked, and the next morning, she had to get us off, and Daddy never got up, because he worked second shift, so we never saw him, but—I never saw much of Daddy, because we were in bed by the time he got here from work, and then we went to school before he got up. He said one time he wasn’t crazy enough to get out there in the middle of that mix. [laughs] Five of us trying to go to school.
TS: That’s right, that’s right. Now, do you remember anything, because—so, your school years would have been kind of during the Cold War, like the height—the tension with the Soviets that we were having. Do you remember—did you have any of that duck-and-cover, any of that kind of stuff?
DA: I don’t remember any of it.
TS: No?10
DA: No. As a matter of fact, we did, as we got on up older, I think we had some hurricane—you know, told you what to do, but that’s been so long ago, that may have been my children had it [laughing], I’m not—
TS: Oh, instead of you, huh? Do you remember anything about that, politically? Did you have any political discussions at home?
DA: Well, we didn’t have television, we only had a radio we wasn’t[sic] allowed to listen to. We never knew anything about what was going on in the outside world.
TS: No?
DA: No.
TS: Just like the local community and things like that?
DA: That’s about all—and I was raised in the era where children shut their mouths. They didn’t get in there and mess in between the parents talking. My mama and daddy said that little girls belong outdoors and you went outdoors. You didn’t—you didn’t sit around and listen to what adults had to say. But honestly, I think all they talked about anyway was cows and pigs and horses. [laughs]
TS: What was going on with the farm.
DA: Tobacco and the prices and I mean, you know, we was pretty well self-contained, I think.
TS: Did you have to help a lot with that, with the tobacco?
DA: Oh, tobacco, yes. I never did string a lot, I was doing—I was mostly handing, I did a lot of the handing. My brother—
TS: What is that, what do you do with handing?
DA: You picked up three leaves, and you handed them to the stringer. And I never really did want to be the stringer, because that string ran through your finger—
TS: Oh.
DA: And you had to loop one and wrap the other, and loop one and wrap the other one. And it would just cut your fingers all to pieces, even with Band-Aids and all. So usually, a lot of 11
the times, the older girls would do—most of the girls did the stringing and the handing; little girls did the handing. And Daddy didn’t care how much you talked as long as sister you keep those hands going as fast as your mouth.
TS: [laughs]
DA: So, I know how to work and talk.
TS: That’s a good line. So, all right, let’s go back to—you’re in high school and you’ve been thinking about going in—
DA: I made my career booklet.
TS: You made your career booklet, and you wanted to go in the army. Did you ever have any thought of any other possible thing that you could do with your life? What’d you think of—when you’re sitting there as a little girl thinking about the army, what kind of expectations did you have?
DA: Who knew? I was—Daddy was in the Calvary and we had horses, I might have been in the Calvary, I don’t know!
TS: That’s all you—
DA: But Miss Ivy, when we did our career booklet, and I had the military on it, and I had all these pictures of these girls in these uniforms and they looked so nice, you know, and all of this. As a matter of fact, I still have my career book.
TS: Do you really?
DA: Yes. And she said “You’ll never go to the—” Oh, and the other thing was, I was going to join the army and go to Germany, because my Granddaddy Burgart was a German.
TS: I see.
DA: He wasn’t born there, but his parents were. And so, I had always wanted to go to Germany.
And she says “You’ll never do it.”
So, after I joined the army, a couple of times when I was home, I thought “I ought to go in there with my uniform and tell her, “Here I am, I did it!” And I even got to go to Germany.12
TS: Did you tell them—did you come—
DA: No, I never did.
TS: Didn’t want to, like, put it in their faces?
DA: Well, you know, it’s—
TS: Too, you were being polite. [laughter] Well, let’s talk about, so you get through high school, you graduate from high school, and then what; what happened then?
DA: Well, I needed a job, and so I went into the Boulevard Restaurant to see, there between Leaksville and Spray, there’s a little town called Boulevard. And I went in and applied for a job. Didn’t have any idea what there was doing or how to do, I certainly didn’t know anything about setting tables, because we didn’t set tables, we just—we drank out of paint jars, we never drank out of glasses.
TS: Out of what jars?
DA: Paint. P-A-I-N-T. Paint, yes.
TS: What kind of—oh, really? Paint jars?
DA: Paint jars. You know, like quart jars, paint jars.
TS: Were they—what were they made out of?
DA: Just glass, Mason jars.
TS: Mason jars, okay.
DA: And we had plenty of cows, so we used to drink—it was nothing for us to drink a quart of milk each, because you drank two paints, it was a quart. So—but anyway, I went in and I applied for the job, and they sort of looked at me. I was seventeen; I graduated from high school at seventeen. And we were picking blackberries the next day, and my little brother Frankie come running down because somebody, out here I guess, had a telephone. I don’t really remember how, somebody, anyway, got hold of us and said they wanted me to come to work the next day. So, I went in, and I had no idea how to serve anybody, how to do anything. And I worked a big party—I didn’t work but that summer, because they started beer in September, and I wasn’t but seventeen. I had to move on, so I moved on to 13
the dime store. But right before I had to quit, they had a party, you know, with these men and it was steak[?], and I had a handful of silverware, and I had to go behind them and put the silverware in the proper place, and this silverware fell out of my hand and right down the back of the guy’s jacket. [chuckles] When that happens, you don’t expect much of a tip. Not that many people tipped you anyway, back then.
TS: No, they didn’t.
DA: But whenever they started the beer, then I went to Leaksville and applied for a dime store job. And I loved candy, and I was put on the candy aisle.
TS: Oh, goodness.
DA: But I didn’t stay there long, I don’t know why, they sent me on to the material, I couldn’t eat the material. [laughter] There was sort of like a—not a full upstairs, that the bossman, the owner, set up there, and that was where his office was. And so he was like at the end of the store here, and the candy counter was right here as you came in the door. So, he had perfect watch of me.
TS: Were you sneaking some of that candy?
DA: Oh, I probably snuck quite a bit of it. I mean, you know, you had to fill it up, and so—
TS: How often did you get a chance to have some candy?
DA: Well, let’s not even think about that one. Like I said, he moved me to the material.
TS: The material.
DA: I didn’t work there long.
TS: You kept your job, though.
DA: Oh, yes. Well, this was in—I must have started to work there in about October of ’60, I graduated in June of ’60 and I worked in a restaurant until it was probably—I wasn’t, I hadn’t turned eighteen, so I had to quit in September, because I turned eighteen in September, the last of September. And so this, maybe, was about October when I started at the dime store, so worked through the Christmas. Well, in that following April, April of ’61, was when I joined service. When I had started in December going to the post 14
office to talk to the recruiters, you know, and so I quit my job and I had my ticket to go to Charlotte, North Carolina. And I had never been out of town.
TS: This was when you were—
DA: I just had turned eighteen.
TS: And so were you waiting to turn eighteen to join, or?
DA: No, I just hadn’t turned eighteen, and I really never thought about it in that respect. I just got a job and that job ran out, I got a second job, and I was right close to the post office, it was right around the corner, and I saw all these recruiters, and it just got me going again, wanting to join. And so I didn’t tell Mama, because she already said, after I made my career booklet “I don’t want to hear it anymore, don’t want to even hear the word.” So she didn’t.
TS: What was the reason that she didn’t want to hear it anymore?
DA: She was tired of it; she didn’t want me to go.
TS: That’s what I was going to say, now, how did she feel about you when you actually—
DA: Oh, well, we’ll get into that one later.
TS: Okay.
DA: I told the boss lady that I was going to Charlotte, I was joining the army. I talked about it all the time, except at home. It was never mentioned at home. And I had a car, I had a ’50 Ford. And Mama had come, the last day that I was going to work—I don’t know when I thought I was going to tell Mama that I was going to Charlotte.
TS: Maybe you weren’t going to. [laughter]
DA: I probably hadn’t got that far.
TS: [unclear]
DA: But Mama came, and she was going to ride home with me. And as we was going out the door, because then, everybody closed at six o’ clock. And as I was going out the door, 15
Mrs. DeHart—it was really DeHart Dime, he was a cousin, but—an older cousin that I didn’t know he was a cousin until I worked there, and one day he told me.
But I was going out the door and Mrs. DeHart said “Now, Dora Ann, if that doesn’t work out going to the army, you always have a job here.”
And Mama says “What? What are you talking about? What is she talking about?”
I said “[clears throat] Let’s just go home, Mama.” [laughs]
TS: You ignored it?
DA: Well, no, with Mama, you didn’t ignore things too much. She was not very happy.
TS: Was she giving an earful on that ride home?
DA: Whoof! She was upset with me. But I left, I went on Monday; I took off. I had my ticket and I went to Charlotte.
TS: What was her objection?
DA: Well, she really didn’t say, she just didn’t want me to go. I mean, I was her daughter, I was her only daughter and [chuckles]—you know, too, the men came back and they talked a lot about what went on. And to be honest with you, I was saved as a young girl. I was saved when I was about twelve or thirteen, I went out to the gospel tabernacle right down the road. And Mama sent me to church my whole life. Now, the boys didn’t go, but I used to drag my baby brother. And a lot of people, when they found out I wanted to go, they started talking about what all goes in, and how you screamed and how you cussed and this and that and the other. And to be honest with you, that was the only thing I dreaded. I dreaded going in and being cussed at, because we just wasn’t accustomed—we didn’t grow up cussing.
TS: Right.
DA: People didn’t cuss when I was young, except men. And women just didn’t do it. But I dreaded it for that, but I wanted to go so badly that I just figured I could handle that.
TS: Now, how did your dad feel about it?
DA: Well, he never had anything to say about it. I don’t think they thought it would really happen, because I went on down to Charlotte, and I was met by a Sergeant Faircloth. And she had a brown coat on, and it was tied in the middle, and it was sort of loose at both ends, and a silly little hat on top of her hair. She was brown-headed. And she poked her 16
head on the bus, and I’d never been out of town, and she said “We’re looking for a DeHart.” Well, I’m the DeHart, and I had a little AWOL bag, a little bag, that—we didn’t even own suitcases. I had borrowed it from a neighbor out here, who had joined the army before I did.
TS: What’s an AWOL bag?
DA: It was just a small plastic little round bag, and it had two handles on it, and you put your overnight—and I had gone out there to Gerald McGuire’s and borrowed it. And so I got off the bus with that and she said who she was and that she was a recruiter and so she would take care of things for that day. And I was told that I would probably have to spend the night, so I had, you know—I had my flannel pajamas in there.
TS: [chuckles] Okay.
DA: But I don’t remember too much about what happened in between when she got me, which had had to have been after lunch, and then I was given a lot of tests and stuff, because I had written in my papers that I was hungry and tired. And they took me to a hotel, they took me to the Mecklenburg—she took me to the Mecklenburg Hotel. And they were doing remodeling.
And she said “Now, I can’t go around where—the front’s closed off, so I’m going to have to let you off here. You’ve got to walk around to the side.”
Well, that was no big thing. And so I take my little AWOL bag and I’m walking around the sidewalk to the side of the thing, and this big colored man, he had shoulders—honestly, he must have been that broad. He had hands like beefsteaks, and had pearly white teeth. This black man, we called them colored then, he came up to me and just sort of grabbed my suitcase and took off with it. And I thought the joker was stealing it, and I thought to myself, that’s not even my bag, and you’re not going anywhere with my bag. And so I took off behind him [makes clicking noise], I had on high heels and a spring suit, a little green—little suit. And he—I thought, when he turns this corner, I’m going to jump straddle his back and I’m going to beat the stew out of him and I’m going to get my bag back. And I’m going to run. But as we turned the corner, I saw that he was headed for a desk, and Miss Ivy had tried to teach us about the outside world, and I decided, okay, this guy’s got to be a bellhop. He’s not stealing my bag, he’s helping me with my bag to the desk. But I remember she told us about tips, but I didn’t remember what she told us. I mean, this was two years ago, when I was in the eleventh grade, and I didn’t remember what she told me about tips, because after I got signed in with all my papers from the army—
TS: Right.17
DA: He put me on an elevator, and I’d only been on an elevator when I was a little girl. And here I am on this little tiny room with the door shut, and this room starts moving up. But I did have enough sense to shut my mouth and stand there, and so we get to the—I don’t know what hall we went to, and he takes me to a room and sets my bag down and stands there and waits. Well, I knew what he was waiting for, but I wasn’t prepared to pay any tips, I didn’t have [chuckling] any idea what to do. But I’m not sure quite exactly what I did do about that, I’m sure I gave him something, but I don’t know what. And he came back several different times. They were really very helpful, because other military people—personnel were put there. I didn’t meet another WAC, but I did meet a WAF.
TS: A WAF.
DA: Women’s Army—Air Force.
TS: Now, you had—this was just where you were enlisting, right?
DA: Yes, I was just taking the test and—
TS: Okay. So what happened there?
DA: Well, they sent a girl up that they thought I’d be interested in. But the next day, we had more tests, and then I was sent home. I was told, and I knew from my brother Earl that had joined a couple of months before I did—and that was another thing Mama wasn’t happy with. She’d already lost a son to the army, and it wasn’t but about two months later, and I’m trying to go in. So, that does not make for a happy mama.
TS: Right.
DA: I knew that I would have to come home and stay a few more days, and Mama had to sign papers. Even though I was eighteen, Mama had to sign papers.
TS: Because you had to be twenty-one as a girl.
DA: Twenty-one, then, yes. And so, we got my stuff all done, and I caught a bus and came back home. Mama had the silent treatment. [laughs]
TS: Oh, did she?18
DA: But I had my papers, and she had to sign them, and I was hoping she’d have them signed by the twenty-fifth, because that was when I was supposed to do it. And finally she told me that she didn’t want to hear any more about it, and she wasn’t going to sign them. Daddy had to sign them too.
And so I called Sergeant Faircloth and I said “Well, Mama’s done made up her mind, she’s not going to sign for me.”
So, that Monday, I took off and went to town with a boy that was in the air force that was home, and come home several hours later and found out that Sergeant Faircloth had come up anyway. And she was enough country, and had had enough sense—well, I mean, let’s face it, how many people had she already enlisted? She knew how to handle these little old ladies. [chuckling]
TS: Okay.
DA: And so when I came in, I was shocked that there she sit.
TS: There she was.
DA: And she had been there for several hours, she must have come shortly after I left. And we didn’t have cell phones, so there was no way for anybody to call anybody, you just showed up.
TS: Right.
DA: And she’d talk army, and Mama’d get hot. And she’d talk farming, and cows, and pigs, and horses, and tobacco, and Mama’d cool off. Then she’d talk army, Mama’d get hot again. [chuckles] So, after I came in, I was a little uppity, I’m sure, because I didn’t hardly know how to go around Eden, much less anywhere else.
I told Mama, I said “Well, if you don’t sign, I’ll just pack my things and I’m going to Greensboro.” Now, Greensboro was fifty, sixty miles away, I’d never even been there. I said “I’ll just get me a job in Greensboro.” That’s sort of a dumb thing. But we finally sort of coerced her into signing. She finally did sign.
TS: Coerced her. [chuckles]
DA: But my daddy—
TS: She wasn’t still happy about it.19
DA: Oh, no. But Daddy, we said—I sort of suspect that this came sort of from the recruiting sergeant. She said that we didn’t exactly know where Daddy was. Well, that wasn’t exactly the truth, but it wasn’t exactly a lie. Daddy was down at Draper, but we didn’t exactly know where he was in Draper.
TS: Oh, you need him to sign the papers.
DA: To sign the papers. So, the boy that had—Bobby Gilley, that was in the air force, that I had gone to town with, he had to sign and I don’t really know why he had to sign, but I read that in my paper, that he signed for me.
TS: For you?
DA: Yes.
TS: On behalf of your dad, basically?
DA: I really don’t really know.
TS: Huh.
DA: So, Sergeant Faircloth helped me get my little pack together and we took off to—back down to Charlotte, and I still had a couple of days that I had to—
TS: Was your mom still hot, as you say?
DA: Do what?
TS: Was your mom still hot?
DA: Well, I think she just cried.
TS: Yes. Now, what’d your brothers think?
DA: Well, they weren’t around.
TS: But they knew that you were going to do this, right?
DA: No, well—20
TS: They didn’t?
DA: They knew that I—they knew that I had applied, of course they knew that I had been to Charlotte, and my older brother had already passed away, he got killed in Florida when he was twenty-one. I was still in school when he passed away. So, Bob was the oldest, and Bob worked in a mill, and Earl was already in service, and Frank, he wasn’t but fourteen.
TS: Younger?
DA: So, he didn’t—he didn’t care. [laughs]
TS: Let’s talk about, then, so you go down to Charlotte, and you’re going to go in the army, now, right?
DA: Yes.
TS: Tell me about that experience.
DA: The closest I came to walking out—I don’t know if you want this on the tape or not.
TS: Yes, we want it all on tape.
DA: [laughs] I had to have a physical.
TS: Okay.
DA: And I’d never been to a doctor.
TS: Oh, goodness.
DA: And I refused to take off my clothes.
TS: [chuckles] So how did that go?
DA: [laughs] It didn’t! They told me I could either do it or leave.
TS: Right.
DA: So, I had to do a lot of contemplating on that thing, whether I was going to leave or not.21
TS: Was it a male doctor that you had?
DA: I—probably, yes, I’m sure it was.
TS: Might have made it more difficult.
DA: Well, and I didn’t know that, then, I just—I was just sent into the doctor’s office and told, you know, take off my clothes and put this little gown on. Well, I took off my outside clothes, I didn’t take off my inside clothes. [chuckling] But anyway, we got through that, and then I went back to the Mecklenburg Hotel. That was where the campus—and a girl, Marylou Coddle, was sent up to my room. Like I said, they were really nice about [tending?] other personnel. And we—I had already had supper, but she went out to eat and I went with her, and we compared the list that Sergeant Faircloth had given me of what I could have at the army and what she could have, you know, in the air force.
TS: Right. Were they about the same?
DA: Basically, they was [sic] about the same thing.
TS: Yes.
DA: And so the next morning, we met for breakfast, and I never did see her, I don’t really know what happened to her after that, but I was sworn in that day.
TS: But you remember her name!
DA: I also have her picture.
TS: Oh my goodness. [laughter]
DA: I have her picture.
TS: Did you know her before this, or just—
DA: No, no.
TS: Okay.22
DA: When I was there the first time, there was a little short girl who was being sworn in, she actually was two weeks ahead of me. She was from Gastonia, and all I knew about her was her name was Farrar, and she was a whole lot shorter than I was. Well, I had on heels, and she was short to start with, so I was tall and slender and over her, and she went on into basic before I did, and believe it or not, I met her in Fort Sam Houston. We was at the laundry sink washing clothes, and I was talking about this little bitty short girl that I had met in Charlotte, North Carolina that had joined the army before me.
She says “Well, I’m the girl!” [laughter]
TS: She looked a little taller then?
DA: Well, no, she was still a little bitty short thing. We’re friends to this day.
TS: Is that right? Where does she live now?
DA: She still lives in Gastonia. She called me the other night, and I told her that you were coming, and she just—
TS: Oh, we’ll have to get her name and—
DA: Well, try. But she—bound and declared, she didn’t remember anything about it. I—because I was asking her if she remembered the cadence.
And she says “No.”
I said “Don’t you remember? [in cadence, singing] Here comes Grandpa, across the field, one-two, driving his Ford [unclear] automobile, three-four, bring it on up, one up two up three up four—”
She said “Nope, don’t remember any of it.” [laughter]
TS: Not even after you gave her a little song for it, huh? Well, I’ll have to write that down.
DA: Oh, I love cadence. They used to—
TS: Well, tell me though, okay, so you get—you’re—you join the army, you put your hand up and—
DA: I was sworn in and I was sent off.
TS: And you’re sent off and where’d you head off to for your basic training?
DA: Well, they put me on a plane, and I’d never been on a plane before.23
TS: Oh! Tell me about that experience.
DA: Oh, that was scary. I didn’t know what to do with all this. People were going everywhere, but you know, you had to pretend like you knew. I mean, after all, I’m old enough to join the army now—
TS: That’s right.
DA: —I got to pretend like I know what I’m doing. It was like getting on a bus, and I found my seat, and got on it and sat down, and a little guy, a little short heavyset guy with a bald head sat down beside me. And I guess he decided that he had to take care of this nervous little kid, because the plane cranked up, and it was—I guess we rolled back just a little bit. But the buildings around me wasn’t going anywhere, but we were shaking just a little bit, not really much, but I mean, you know, you could feel it.
TS: Right.
DA: And I’m thinking “Wow, what’s happening here? How can we be flying, we haven’t—the buildings are still standing?”
He said “We’re warming up.” [laughs]
TS: The propellers were just kind of going around?
DA: Shaking us, I guess. And so—and then when they brought us, they brought us shrimp. And I’d never eaten shrimp, didn’t know what it was except it—just little squiggly things. And he, I guess, decided that all people need to—
TS: Try?
DA: Try it, so he had me to eat it, and I ate it. But I think my nerves—because I got so sick.
TS: Oh.
DA: But I didn’t throw up on the plane, I did afterwards. But I think it was my nerves. For a long time, I couldn’t eat on a plane.
TS: Yes.24
DA: But we had a layover in Alabama—I mean, not in Alabama, in Atlanta, Georgia. And then I got on a little ol’ bitty plane, and it only held nine.
TS: How big was the one that you were on before?
DA: Well, I don’t know, but it had more than nine seats! [laughs]
TS: Okay.
DA: And so this one only had nine seats on it, that’s what I—
TS: See the pilot up there, right?
DA: Well, you know, I don’t know. I took a picture of the plane—of a plane, I don’t know if it was the plane, but it probably was.
TS: We’ll have to look through and see that.
DA: And see that. And there was a girl named Bender on that plane, I met up with her, and she was going to Fort McClellan, Alabama, also, this was sort of, I guess, a hop from Atlanta to Fort McClellan. And we—when we landed, we had a number to call. When we went in—what is really an airport, it’s probably like Shiloh over here, it’s just a little drop-off place. And the man said “We’re closed, and you have to sit outside on the baggage carts.” Well, we didn’t have anything but our little layover bags—
TS: Until when? How long were you—
DA: But we had a number to call for somebody to come pick us up. So finally, this Jeep comes, and a boy is driving it. And he’s just tickled to death, I mean, you know, here are these two raw recruits and I’m sure we looked—I probably looked green around the gills. And so, it seemed like it was a long ways, I really would love to go back to Fort McClellan and just see, you know, how it could have been. But we get there to the WAC detachment and he’s just full of joy. He’s laughing and teasing and oh, y’all are really in for it, because he probably was a greenhorn just out of basic. And we were just going into it. And he said “Lots of luck!” Yes. So, we go in, and there was this tall lady with a black shirt and a black pair of pants, and she had very short hair, they all looked like everybody had short hair, sort of. And there was these girls running around, black ones and white ones and Mexicans, and they had their hair all tied up in kerchiefs and rollers and they had on shorts and a shirt.25
They were scrubbing and mopping and it was like monkeys, they were cleaning the walls and I thought “I’m in a woman’s prison.” [laughs] I had decided maybe this wasn’t—this didn’t look [like] those photographs I had seen. And this lady, this tall lady, she kept saying something about a number. I don’t remember what she said, but she kept saying we had a number, we had a number, and all we had that I thought about was a telephone number, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted our serial number.
TS: I see.
DA: Which was [serial number redacted]. Believe me, when I learned it, I never forgot it. But that was what she kept wanting. And we didn’t—
TS: But you didn’t know at that time.
DA: No, we didn’t know what—we had them, because she knew we had them, but we didn’t know what they were.
TS: Right.
DA: So, she goes up three flights of stairs, and we’re trying to follow her up, and I’m thinking, “Boy, she really thinks she’s something, don’t [sic] she? She don’t [sic] even bother to help us.” Little I knew about the army, didn’t I? But we get up there in this big hall, and she goes into this big room and there’s just bunk beds, iron bunk beds. There’s two rows here, there’s an empty aisle, and two rows over here.
And she says “You go to the next bed and that’s your bed.” And she said “Is there anybody in here that wants to show these ladies around?” And she said “Don’t everybody offer at one time,” because nobody offered. And finally one girl said she would. But all we actually saw was a big bathroom, it just had, you know, stalls and then sinks on the wall, and then she took us to a room that had washing machines and ironing boards. It was about twenty-four ironing boards in there. And then we go back and lights was [sic] out at ten o’ clock, and she said we could take a bath, but lights was going to be out at ten. So, the lights was cut out while we was trying to get a shower, and then we had to find our way back down the hall into the bed and find the bed, and when I hopped in my bed, I looked over and there was a colored girl and she had gold teeth. And there was enough light in the windows or something that her gold teeth kept shining at me.
TS: [chuckles]
DA: And then somebody—they—somebody said they were hungry, and that was about all I really remember about it.26
TS: From that first night?
DA: Yes, and I put on—oh, Mama had made me a pair, that winter, probably was my Christmas present, of [unclear] lime green pajamas. Homemade, in Anniston, Alabama, in April—the first of May. I had them on, and I crawled in my bed. [chuckling] I got a lot of teasing about that. When the girls got to where, you know, we got more familiar with each other, they’d tell about the first night they saw you and what—Culp was the girl that was beside me, and she said, “Oh.”
TS: What’d they think of you? Did they tell you?
DA: Oh, they thought I was country.
TS: Were you?
DA: Well, what do you think? [laughs] And talk about Southern accents. There was a lot of them from the north, and my Southern accent, I got teased about that the whole—all the way through the army, all the way.
TS: Did you?
DA: Yes. Now, people tease me about how I don’t talk so Southern. I don’t know.
TS: What—so that was your first night, and then—what other kind of memorable things do you have?
DA: Oh, I remember the next morning!
TS: Well, let’s hear it.
DA: They called us out and told us we was going to go to breakfast, but we were going to first make a formation. And they had you to line up, and we were in our, of course, our civilian clothes, and then we was to line up behind the person—three rows—well, it was only about two rows then, but we were to line up, you just put your hand out, and you was to stay that distance, and you were supposed to be in line with this fella here. So, you—that’s how you kept your lines straight, and you kept it at a certain thing. It had rained that night, and so there was mud puddles, or rain puddles, and we were going to go to the mess hall, and I still wasn’t feeling good from the night before. I just did not feel good at all.27
TS: Well, you thought you were in prison.
DA: Yes, but I think I was just sick from my nerves and everything and having eaten that shrimp that I didn’t know what it was, and anyway, so we—she told us that we was to put our head up, look straight ahead, not at the ground, and we were not to walk around or step over mud puddles, we were to go over.
And I thought “Not on my dollar shoes, you’re not!” So, I held my head up, put my eyes down, and I just took giant steps over any mud puddle that was over there. And we got in the mess hall, and you had to pick up your tray and you went through the line. And I had never seen sausage links. Well, don’t ask me what I thought they looked like.
TS: Okay.
DA: They were burned.
TS: Okay.
DA: I didn’t eat them. But anyway, we had to—they’d fill up the tables. And after that, we went to the quartermaster’s to get our uniforms, to get uniforms, and nothing was civilian size. I wrote in my paper, and that’s how I found out what the different sizes was. I wore—some things were sixteens, and some things was [sic] twelves, and my hat was an eight, and it was large, my gloves was large, [unclear].
TS: They didn’t give you what they had?
DA: No, that was the only way it’d fit you.
TS: Yes.
DA: And it was just—[unclear] with those papers. It just—everything was different. You’d fit what fit you, and the jackets were one size, the skirts was another size.
TS: Well, how’d you feel about putting that uniform on?
DA: Oh, I loved it. But oh, they were way down long because they hadn’t been hemmed, you know. We was all having a lot of fun out of it and giggling and so that was—that was a thrill to go get it.
TS: Well, is there anything in basic training that you did that was physically difficult for you?28
DA: No, I was from the farm. [laughter] We had formation and a lot of parades and practice and stuff, and one day, they finally put me in the lead. The girl on the right was always the lead, and I was ahead, they were supposed to be following with me. And they said “Left flank”. I took a right flank. When I looked around to dress, there was nobody there, they was all headed down the other old field. So, I took off and run and caught up. Well, they just had a ball out of me then. By the time I got ready to get in step, you had to skip to get in step, they just flipped the whole platoon around on top of me. And so they just—and then by the time you got over that and tried to get back in step, they’d just flip it another way.
TS: They were messing with you.
DA: Yes, they messed with you. They had a lot of fun out of the recruits. And then another time they let me be the lead, and we was doing cadence. And I was heading out down that field, boy, little Sergeant Allen—we had a Sergeant Allen and Sergeant [unclear]. And Sergeant Allen come running up, she was just a [unclear] and she used to tell us about how she almost couldn’t get in because she wasn’t quite five feet. And what they did to make her five feet.
She comes running up, and she says “Dehart, Dehart!” she said “You’ve lost the whole platoon!” [laughter]
TS: Again?
DA: Again! Needless to say, they didn’t put me back on lead anymore.
TS: No? Well, you had a shot at it.
DA: I did, but I was taking too long of steps and I was moving too fast, I was singing and a-marching.
TS: I see.
DA: I left the whole platoon behind.
TS: Oh, so there, you were just moving too fast.
DA: Oh yes, I was moving on, so.
TS: Now, how about mentally? Was it mentally challenging for you?29
DA: We learned a lot in—we had classrooms where we learned about army history, how they wanted—they only wanted two creases in your skirt. You pulled that skirt tight and sat down and you’d better not have but just one crease on each side. And you crossed your legs, and all of this stuff. But they also—we did some combat type things, not like the army—like the boys did, but one day we was called, it was probably close to the end, we was called out and we was on the outdoor bleachers, and the stage down there, and it was a warm day, and I was so sleepy. And they was [sic] telling us all this stuff, and I didn’t know what they were saying, and all of a sudden the lieutenant or captain or something come running up on the stage and says “Cuba has invaded the United States!” See, this is when Cuba was—this was in ’61—so when Cuba was an active force down there. “They’re already into Florida!” Well, hey, I don’t know where Florida is from Alabama, but it must be awful close the way they’re carrying on. [laughs] And so, she said they were going to call up recruits, and you come up front, and so we went running up front and we’d been training about gas—
TS: Gas masks?
DA: Yes, the gas mask, and poison gas, and all of this stuff. So they gave us a poncho and told us that we were to run across this field to the buildings out there, but if a plane came over and dumped any kind of chemicals on us, we were to fall on the ground and cover our heads and our feet and be all covered up. Well, we’d been practicing that and all. So, they sent a bunch of us, and I was one of them, out down through the field. Well, sure enough, here came this plane over top of us, and it’s blue and pink and I don’t know what all colors the dust was, it come [sic] falling—you know, you looked up and it came falling down. You talk about falling on the ground, I made a tiny ball on top of that ground and then they come along and they tapped you and told you it was all right to keep running. But when we got up to run, we was [sic] running past people who had blown off legs, who—it was fake. But you was too scared to know whether it was fake or not, we just saw—
TS: At the time, you didn’t know, right?
DA: Yes. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and then they tell you—I mean, here this plane has come over here and you’ve ducked down, and then they tell you to keep running. Well, you better believe you kept running. But these people were laying out there on the ground moaning and groaning and had big holes in their legs and big holes in their chest, and oh, it was something else. Of course, when I got to the building we found out the whole thing was fake, about the people and them—30
TS: Was an exercise, right?
DA: That it was an exercise, yes. But let me tell you what, it was a scary exercise, you didn’t forget that one. And then we had a night march, and we had had day marches and we had—the backpacks had to weigh forty pounds. Now that cut into your shoulders, that was not comfortable, and you had on your canteen and all of this kind of stuff. And the straps—the women, the next time we had one, we put pads under the thing.
TS: Under the straps?
DA: Yes, trying to help it. Come to find out, the sergeants didn’t have anything in their packs. I heard it was newspapers folded up, because their pack looked like ours, but it didn’t weigh like ours. And so we—but we had this one night march, and you were supposed to stay one hand length in front—arm length in front of the person—behind the person in front of you and one on the side of you. And they took us out down through the woods.
Well, all of a sudden, this woman, this girl right in front of me, she falls down on the ground and starts screaming “Snake bit me, a snake bit me!” Hey, I don’t know whether a snake bit her or not, but I wasn’t standing around. And they kept telling us, you know, one of the things we were trained, you don’t stop, you keep going.
TS: Right.
DA: You know, you just step over them and keep going. And then—different things, the people were screaming and hollering, all through that night march, and this one girl, she just took off down through the woods.
TS: Just started running or something?
DA: Just started running and started screaming. Well, when we got back, we found out all that was fake, too. Except the sergeant made the remark that she didn’t know who had been contacted to do this acting.
TS: I see.
DA: And so when that girl went running down through the woods, she actually thought the girl may have lost it. [laughs]
TS: Oh, so she went after her?
DA: Yes, they all went after her. And of course it was just playacting, but.31
TS: This was just to make sure that you all kept following—
DA: Knew what to do, and—
TS: Following what the orders were telling you to do, and—I see.
DA: What to do if we were ever in these situations.
TS: And so, did you just do what you were supposed to, then?
DA: Well, I guess we did, we all got through it, one way or the other. But it was—you know, that was toward the end, and so we found out that it was all just playacting, but it didn’t feel like playacting at the time, I can tell you.
TS: Right, because you didn’t know what to expect at all.
DA: No, you didn’t. We just was [sic] going out on night march, and all these people start screaming. Whoo!
TS: What’d you think about the army so far, while you’re in basic training?
DA: I liked it. After I found out I really wasn’t in prison, but we might as well have been for how we was allowed to—you know, the men had a chemical MOS [Military Occupational Specialty], and that’s where they took their training. I mean, it wasn’t just WAC training there, there was [sic] others. So, we’d be marching home from school or whatever, and there’d be—men would be on a truck; they got to ride, we had to march. And they’d be marching by us. Well, of course, they were coming on our left. They’d holler “Eyes right”, so we had to look this way and the men would go that way, and we’d try to see them, if we could see them. [laughs]
TS: They’d turn your heads away from them.
DA: Oh yes, so we couldn’t watch them. And so it was just things that they did to, more or less, mess with you a little bit. But you remember the Pinky Dinky?
TS: Go ahead.
DA: The Pinky Dinky ice cream machine? Do you remember? Well, there used to be a little truck, and it was pink, and it sold ice cream, and it had a little bell on the back of it; it was called Pinky Dinky. It was allowed to come on the base, and I would assume it went 32
around to the men’s places and all that, but it also stopped at the WAC detachment. And I guess that would be for the sergeants or the lieutenants or whoever wasn’t in actual training, basic training. Because it would stop down there and ring its bell. Well, it got—this also was sort of toward the end when we got sort of a little crazy. And some of the girls would go to the window and holler, “Just a moment, I’m coming!” like it was their date waiting for them; as if we got to go to a date. And you know, Mother’s Day came in May.
TS: Yes.
DA: And I asked permission to call home. And when I went to work in a dime store, I bought a telephone, and I told Mama I’d always pay for it. Well, that lasted until I went in service. [laughs]
TS: [unclear]
DA: We still have the telephone number and still have the same telephone?
TS: Is that right?
DA: But anyway—
TS: In this house over here?
DA: Over—yes, the house, because we moved there in the ‘50s. So, Mama—so I called. I got permission to—because we couldn’t leave the base and the telephones was in another place. So, I got permission to call. Well, I’ve always woke up early, so I wanted to give Mama a call early.
So, I go in and I call and I said “Hey Mama, you know who this is?”
She said “How many daughters you think I got?” [chuckles]
So, we talked, and I said “Mama, the sun comes up on the wrong side of the earth down here!” I was just in Alabama! But it always came up in through the windows.
TS: Right.
DA: And it didn’t come up through our windows on the base. But anyway—so we fell out for formation that morning, and the sergeant said “Recruit DeHart, did you call home this morning?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Did you use a telephone?”33
“Yes ma’am.”
She said “Why didn’t you stick your head out the window? As loud as you was hollering, you didn’t need a telephone.” [laughter] So I probably busted Mama—I guess I busted Mama’s eardrums.
TS: That’s cute.
DA: So, they liked to pick at you. The sergeants really weren’t mean, and they did not cuss you, they said “You are ladies, you will be treated as ladies, you are expected to act as ladies,” and we were.
TS: What’d you think about the women that you were training with?
DA: The sergeants or the people—oh. I’ve got pictures of every one of them, I guess, or maybe not everyone except out of the group, but I’ve got pictures of them, and we only knew each other by last names.
TS: Right.
DA: Bender and Culp and Eckerson and—Eggerstons and all of this.
TS: Well, what was that like, having been raised up in this area where you say you didn’t even really go to Greensboro or anything?
DA: Well, we didn’t really—we were very restricted to our A3, we were A3, Company A3. We had to learn how to answer the squawk box, they called it up there, and we—just—you stayed together so tight, and you didn’t have time to dislike anybody, because you had so much to do.
TS: And it was an integrated unit, right?
DA: Yes, that was—
TS: Was that different for you at all?
DA: Well, we had not gone to school with the blacks, but there was a family that lived right out here, just the next road over, and my brothers used to swim with them, and then raising tobacco, Daddy used to have different colored people that worked for him. So we—I was accustomed to them.34
As a matter of fact, that was one of the things that they really talked about when I was joining, was, you know “What do you think about the blacks,” well, we called them colored, and “How do you get along with them?”
And I said “Well, I actually was basically raised with them.” And Daddy had a—when Mama got married back in the early ‘30s, Daddy had a black boy named Snowball. He was as black as the ace of spades, but he was called Snowball, that worked for Daddy for many, many years when he bought this place out here in Virginia, and lived out there as a bachelor. And so Snowball lived in the next road and he kept—and actually—
TS: Oh, before he was even married. I see.
DA: Yes. And actually, while I was in service and Mama was at the woodshed, because she had a wood cookstove and all, and she was at the woodshed and this car came up and this big black man got out of the car.
And Mama said “Oh my,” you know, “Who in the world is this?” And he kept coming, just coming right to her. It was Snowball.
He said “Well, Mrs. DeHart, don’t you know who I am? I’m Snowball!”
And she said she grabbed him and hugged him, and she wanted to go to town. And he put her in the backseat of the car after she got dressed and took her—drove her to town. Yes, and Snowball had retired from the military.
TS: I see.
DA: But he had come to see if Mama—if the DeHarts still lived here, I guess, and maybe if his old homeplace too.
TS: Right.
DA: And so he came up on Mama, and so it was—that was fun.
TS: Oh, nice. Did your dad get to see him too?
DA: I think Daddy probably must have been in Draper. Daddy died in the ‘70s, so he stayed down at the Draper farm. He always called this farm Mama’s and he always—he called that one his. He retired when I graduated from high school in 1960; he retired at 65 from Fieldcrest. And so he would go down in the mornings and come back. As a matter of fact, when I joined, I left before Daddy was home. Well, my car was sitting in the driveway, of course, so about dark, Daddy asked Mama where I was, you know, where’s Dora Ann. And she said something, I’m not sure. And then when it got—we always went to bed nine thirty, ten o’ clock, I mean, everybody did. And so it got bedtime and I still hadn’t come 35
back, he demanded to know where I was. And Mama told him I had joined the army, had left that day. She wrote me in a letter, she said the rooftop is still floating weeks later. [laughs] And she always said, I guess to the day she died, she never believed I liked the army. I did, I loved it.
But when people would ask me, you know, what do you think about the army, I’d say “Oh, I loved it.”
My mama’d say “She always says that, but she really didn’t.” But she always said basic training and Fort Sam Houston and Fort Bragg, she’d write me every once in a while “Now, if you really don’t like it, I’ll get you out, your daddy didn’t sign.” But—no.
TS: She thought that was her way to—
DA: Get me out. I think it would’ve been a little harder. We had a girl in basic training, really nobody thought anything different about her. She was a little earlier than I was. She fixed some of the girls earbobs, pierced them, put a potato behind it and stuck it with a needle.
I said “Ugh, I believe I don’t want to go that route.”
And she, you know, didn’t talk any different from the rest of us, but toward the end of basic, she decided she wanted out. So she went to the commanding officer and told them that she was only sixteen years old. That she had used her sister’s birth certificate. And she thought they would just say “Well, excuse us, we are so sorry, we’ll send you home.” They put her on full-time KP [“kitchen patrol”]. She went to the bathroom, to the latrine, and cut her wrist. They took her to the hospital and clamped it. I still remember how it looked. They just clamped it.
TS: You went to see her?
DA: No, they sent her back home. They clamped her up and sent her back home. Cut her wrist.
TS: Back home—
DA: Back to the base. Back to the base. She went to the hospital and they just sent her back to the unit, back to us. And I still remember her skin being pinched up and just metal clamps in it. The next morning, they got her up, sent her back to KP. Taught you a lesson. You want to know what KP was like?
TS: Sure.
DA: They—four o’ clock in the morning, they come get you. You put a towel on your foot locker so they knew who to come and wake up, because the whole bay didn’t have to get 36
up. And they would come and shake you, and you got up and you put on your PT uniform, that’s the brown uniform, and then you went to the mess hall. You were shown around the first time, more or less this and this, big kitchen, and you was allowed to eat before the others come, then you were put on the serving line or different things. We never did do the cooking, we just mostly did the serving. The fun came after we served. Three times a day—this was just harassment. We tore down that dish machine, and thankfully, you didn’t have to pull a KP a whole lot. And they had lemon with salt, and you took that lemon and salt and scrubbed all the different parts of those machines, three times a day, you did that. And it just ate your hands up.
TS: They didn’t have gloves for you or anything?
DA: I don’t remember us wearing gloves. I just remember how that burned your hands so badly, that lemon and that salt. Then, you thought that was bad, but if they sent you outside to do the trashcans, that was bad. You about had to crawl in it. You had to take just a small scrub brush, with no handle, you didn’t have something like a toilet brush with a handle on it, it was something you had to hold in your hand. And you had to crawl into that thing and scrub the bottom and scrub all the way up, three times a day. Now, I don’t remember that you had the dish machine and the trash cans at the same time. I just remember how the dish machine was and how the trash can was. And I know that one time I had to serve, it was supper time. And I had to serve potatoes. And I stunk so bad. I stood way away from the table and I picked up that spoonful and I put it on their plates. I was ashamed to get up next to anybody, anywhere around anybody. That was the day I had cleaned the trash cans twice. You got back to the bay about eight o’ clock.
TS: That’s interesting.
DA: That was—that was not a good job.
TS: That part of the army you weren’t so crazy about.
DA: Thankfully, after you got out of basic, it wasn’t that bad.
TS: Now, did you know what kind of job you were going to have?
DA: I told Mama that if she would let me join the army, I would be—I would take office work and I would work in the office. I really thought that. When we graduated, and we were standing out waiting to get our orders, this was at the time of graduation, I’m not sure how it fell in there. We were standing in line, and they would call you out and they’d say, 37
these people were to be MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] was medic, or clerical, or scientist—or different MOSs that you had.
And so when they got to my name, they said “DeHart,” said “You’re going to Fort Sam Houston under medical.”
Well, I didn’t even think about where I was or what I was doing and I said “No, I told my mama I was going to be a secretary, I can’t go to medical!” [laughs]
TS: What kind of reaction did you get to that?
DA: Well, thankfully, they weren’t cruel to us. How would you think that.
But she said “Well, do you have—did your recruiting sergeant give you a certificate stating that you were to go to clerical?”
“Well, not that I know of, unless it’s in my papers.”
“Well, then if you don’t have the promise that the army has given you that you’re going to clerical,” Which would have stayed at Fort McClellan, Alabama, “Then you will be going to medical.”
Oh, my mama’s not going to be happy about this one, I know. But I had also, along with joining the army, my three things was to join the army, be a nurse, and go to Germany.
TS: Okay.
DA: So, going to Fort Sam Houston, the Lord just took care of the nursing part of it, and I was shipped to Fort Sam Houston. Mama never said anything about me, whether—that I had said I was going to be a secretary.
TS: It doesn’t sound like she would have been happy no matter what job you had.
DA: [laughs] Well, as far as—as long as she thought that I was all right, I think she was all right—
TS: Safe.
DA: Yes, safe, too.
TS: You think she had—there was any, in her mind, anything about like the stigma of women in the military?
DA: Well, I’m sure it was, I’m sure—because like I said, when I was talking about it and the preachers, the different preachers, and they say “You don’t really want to go in. You 38
know, you’re not—you’re a Christian, you don’t need to go in.” But I found it entirely different, I really did. We were treated nicely. Now, they harassed us, with the little things.
TS: Right.
DA: But we were never screamed at.
TS: Right.
DA: I mean, about the worst I ever got screamed at was “Recruit DeHart! You lost your whole platoon!” [laughter]
TS: And that was that one. Well, how was Fort Sam Houston, then? And where was that at, Texas?
DA: Texas. Sam Houston, it’s in—
TS: Is that why your—you have that Texas cover on there?
DA: Yes.
TS: I was wondering about that, okay. That’s a scrapbook that she’s got, a Texas—
DA: And it started out with Alabama.
TS: Okay.
DA: See, this is all the girls in the uniforms, and then it goes into Fort Sam Houston. And I got ten day leave between Fort Sam Houston and Fort McClellan, Alabama. Well, they may have flown me to Alabama, but they put me on a bus and sent me back home.
TS: Oh. You mean after basic training?
DA: A train; on a train after basic training.
TS: Okay.
DA: They sent me back home on a train along with other military personnel who were headed up the east coast, and I had to get off in Greensboro.39
TS: Okay. So, before you went to Sam Houston?
DA: Yes, before I went to Fort Sam Houston. And they had bus tickets for me, and I went down with an AWOL bag, I come back with a duffel bag which weighed sixty-some pounds, I want to say it was sixty-two pounds. That was all my uniforms and everything. And it weighted sixty-two pounds. So, they put me on a bus, but I could only go to Leaksville, over there on Bridge Street to the bus station. And then I could either catch a city bus or whatever, but I decided, it wasn’t but five miles, I’d walk. So, I left my duffel bag at the bus station.
TS: Oh, okay.
DA: And I took off walking. And I went down Boone Road, around to Spray Traffic Center, and passed through the Spray cotton mill and the Spray bank.
And all of a sudden, I hear some woman hollering at me “Get on, get on, I’ll pay your fare!” And the bus, the city bus, had stopped, and there stood my mama on the steps of the bus. She must have run off that bus, hollering “Stop, stop!” I’m sure she had seen me coming up the sidewalk.
TS: Oh! Did she know you were coming?
DA: I don’t really know whether she did or not. She may have.
TS: She was just headed somewhere and she saw you.
DA: She was headed to town and saw me. And so she was on the bus, bottom steps, and she was hollering “Get on, get on, I’ll pay your fare!”
TS: Oh, wanting you to get on.
DA: Yes. And so she put a dime in that thing and everybody was just a-laughing and carrying on. And talking and everything, and I don’t remember, I’m sure my brother had to go pick up—Bob had to go back and pick it up.
TS: Duffel bag.
DA: So, I stayed my ten days here, which basically wasn’t ten days, and she had to take me back to Greensboro to the train station. And my brother Bob, who worked in a mill on 40
first shift, was the one that took us. And as happy as she was when she saw me, down in Spray, she was that sad when I had to leave. I think she was on the verge of crying.
TS: Yes.
DA: But we got there, it was late when we got to the train station, and it was empty. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t too happy either. I just—it was scary, because I mean, it was like a big space and Mama was really sad and you looked around, there was very few people there. It was sort of scary for that, but then I went to Fort Sam Houston.
TS: And how was that?
DA: It was a whole different world from basic, because we were allowed freedom. We no longer had to stay just—we had a place assigned and we had school, but we could go to the PX when we wanted to. In basic, we could only go twice. And one time, we were allowed in basic to go, and we hadn’t had candy in weeks. And they told us not to bring any candy home, so we get smart. We put it on top of our head and put our hats over top of it. You know, you’re dumb. Eighteen years old, we thought we knew something. These sergeants had been in there for years, and they’d been dealing with these eighteen year olds. When we got back to—got off—came back from the PX and walked back to the dorm, well, lo and behold, she asked us to pull our hats off. That was—I mean, we lined up.
And she said “Take your hat off.” Well, she had a good snack, lots of good snacks that night. And so that was—so we were free to go and come at the PXs, you know, within limits. It was sort of like a job. And we trained medical.
TS: And what were your—you were in the barracks?
DA: We were sent to barracks, yes.
TS: Was it the same as basic training with the big open bay, do you remember?
DA: I don’t remember that, but would suspect it probably was.
TS: Pretty similar.
DA: And we had—I have a pass where I went to—meal pass that I went to—you had to present to go to the mess halls and things.
TS: I see.End of Part One.
Interview continues in Part Two.