<Begin Segment 11>

JF: So after I got this apprenticeship, I got to thinking there were a lot of night schools in Baltimore. A lot of them would offer journalism courses. So I thought, I'm working on an afternoon paper, which means my evenings are free. I could teach at one of those journalism schools as well as being a working newspaperman during the day. So I signed up for the Johns Hopkins College for Teachers in order to get a teaching degree so -- oops sorry -- so I could reach this goal of being a teacher, and that's what I was doing when the draft came along. And I was in the -- the first draft in Baltimore was taken up with all volunteers. And so I called -- I had a ridiculously low number, something like three hundred and something. So I called and said, "I want to volunteer and get my years over with." And, and the fellow said, "Well, don't concern yourself about it because you're in the next draft anyway." So I was in that draft in Baltimore.

SF: Was the draft pretty unusual at that time? In other words, did you feel, "Man, I, out of nowhere I got picked here for the army," or was it pretty common that young men of your age were getting drafted at that time?

JF: No, it wasn't very common because the draft had just started, and they really, they really had a lot of problems with the draft as far as, as I recall, just who was going to be drafted and setting the parameters, and the, what they, physical abilities and so forth of all these people. And it was highly unlike -- unusual to be drafted, really. But, but anybody who was alive knew what was going to happen, and I, I just figured that if I get in and get my year over with, then I've got that much going for me if we did get into this thing. And I was just about ninety-nine and two-thirds percent positive that we were going to get into it. So I wasn't, I wasn't too surprised that, that happened. You know, they picked the thing out of a big fishbowl, and somebody had to have the low numbers, and I was one of those guys who got a low number. That's about the bulk of it.

JB: And a low number in the draft means that you will be drafted sooner?

JF: Soon.

JB: Soon. So, this was in 1940; is that right? This was the first...

JF: '40.

JB: ...peacetime selective service draft in the United States, I, I believe.

JF: I, I think so. I'm not sure whether they drafted in the Civil War or not because I, I know then that you could buy your way out of, out of conscription in the Civil War. But I'm not sure that this was exactly the first of the, of the kind of draft that they did have. But...

SF: So you actually had -- you were sure that we were going to get into it. What made you so certain that we were going to go to war?

JF: Well, it seemed pretty obvious to me that, that nobody had enough of an army or the willingness to stop Hitler. I mean, the, here's a guy who's been training these people for years and years. They've been, they've been highly successful everywhere they waged war, every, through surprise and through innovative military tactics. I mean, Hitler had one hell of a good army and air force and the whole thing. Beside that, he had it right there. It wasn't, it wasn't a potential thing like ours, our military was. I mean, I don't think anybody would have ever thought that the United States in such a short time could become a military power that we did with the amount of equipment that we were able to turn out. But Hitler already had it. Not only did he have it, but he was using it. And I don't, I don't think you had to be much of a, have much of an imagination to figure that somebody's going to have to stop this S.O.B., and there's nobody on the map who can do it, except us. And I really didn't talk with my friends very much about that, but I think everybody pretty much figured that, in about the same league of thinking, along that line because they had, they had everything going for 'em. They had, they had victory after victory. They had people who were very well-trained, and they had the stuka divebombers, which were unheard of. And it was, it was just amazing the amount of military that he had in a fairly short, fairly short time. Of course, he'd been planning it for years and years. But I mean, the British were, the British and the French were, they were still living in World War II -- in World War I.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.