<Begin Segment 31>

SS: What messages or lessons would you like to pass on to your grandchildren, or your great-grandchildren?

HW: Well, very simple thing. That people are people. They differ according to the economic situation they're in, but they're still people. I think that we are probably suffering from too much good economy, which is on the verge of coming to an end one of these days if we don't watch it.

SS: Do you think your experience, both in your childhood growing up, working very hard and working very hard during the war -- do you think that experience has made you a stronger person or a better person?

HW: Well, probably. I don't think a person innately becomes better. Probably becomes better by paying more attention to different, to more different things. But I think striving helps. But I think it's hard on the health, too. The human body can, the human mind can only take so much stress. Starts affecting the body. I know because I left Boeing when I was, walked out when I was fifty-two years old, too young to retire, so they wrote a letter and told me to report back when I was fifty-five and they would give me a small pension. Which I did. Got a real tiny pension from Boeing. But I had been away from Boeing since, pension-wise, since (age) 55 (...) and physically I've been away since '70, '71.

SS: Do you have any regrets about your, about the path that your life took? You did fulfill that dream of working with airplanes.

HW: Yes, and I see the airplane of, my last one that I worked on, the (747). I had a lot of things that I liked, that I asked for and got in that airplane.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 1996 Densho. All Rights Reserved.