Densho Digital Archive - Joseph Frisino Interview

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JB: Today is June 20, the year 2000. And this is an interview with Joe Frisino for Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project. Our narrator is Joe Frisino. And Steve Fugita and Jenna Brostrom will be the interviewers, and Dana Hoshide is our videographer.

And Joe, I'd like to begin this interview and just ask you to talk a little bit about your early childhood. And if you could tell us when and where you were born and what was your full name at birth.

JF: Well, I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 2nd of January, 1919. My folks named me Joseph Francis Frisino, and I didn't like the Francis, so when I was confirmed, why, I took as confirmation name Charles, which was my -- I had an Uncle Charles, my Irish Uncle Charles was my favorite uncle, favorite person. And so I took his name, so then I gradually switched around to Joseph C. So, I consider my name now as Joseph Charles Frisino.

JB: Okay.

JF: That's kind of a long way around the horn, but that's exactly what happened.

JB: Good. I'd like to ask you also about your grandparents. And start, if we could talk about your grandparents, and where they came from and how they came to America.

JF: My mother's, my mother's parent, parents both came from Ireland. My grandfather was, was Robert Drane, and he had died before I came on the scene. My grandmother was Catherine Barry Drane, and since my, since her husband had died, she came at sometime, apparently right after he died, to live with my mother and father. And she lived with us just about up to the time my mother died in 1940. She was with us all the time, although she had two sons and an, another daughter still living.

It must have been, must have been tough, but I, to have -- on my father's part -- to have his mother-in-law living with him all the time, but I think that was just a, I mean, looking back, you would think it would be difficult. But I think that was just such an accepted mode that it never, never became a problem. I mean, that was, if your father-in-law died, you took your mother-in-law in. That's all, all there was to it. Whether or not my father got any financial support from any of her, of any of my grandmother's other children, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think any of the others were -- probably my father, who was a finish engraver, probably made as much money as anybody, maybe more. I never, I've often thought of that, and they seemed to get a, get along in kind of a neutral way that, well my Irish grandmother, she was a, not a particularly gabby old lady, but she was, she was capable of holding her own in a conversation.

But she was not an interfering type of person, except with us kids she would, she would have her way. And I can still hear her saying, "Oh, what a nice ball. Bubby, put it away. Put it" -- Bubby was my nickname -- "Put it away and save it. Save it." She wanted me to save everything. She never had anything when she was growing up, and so material things were rather, I guess, became important to her. And she was trying to convey that fact to me that if, if you don't take care of things, they're going to disappear. So I think from her I got some of my habits of preserving, keeping things. Like my baseball glove, for instance, when I finally did get one, my father got one with cigar coupons, and I've still got it. And when I was a kid, at the end of the season I had a little wooden box that cheese came in. It was about three and a half inches square, about yea-long, and -- you've seen those loaves of cheese. They came in neat little wooden boxes. And I had that lined with some cloth from my mother, and I'd oil my glove and put a ball in there and then form the glove around the ball and put it in the box and nail the box closed for the next season. So I always knew where my glove was, and I knew it was being taken care of.

Well, I did that for years and years. I've still got a train, electric train that my father bought me when I was six years old. And I've got some of those boxes as well because I always put the -- I wrote on the box which car came out of it, and I've always put the cars back in the box, put the, put the smaller boxes into the main, main boxes and, until the next time we would play with them. I got that, and some of that is flipping through to my kids as well. They, they preserve certain things fairly well.

JB: And that was from your Irish grandmother, you think?

JF: Yeah.

SF: Did your Irish grandmother pass on any kind of Irish cultural things, you think?

JF: It's hard to say because if, if she did I wasn't, I wasn't aware that this, that this, was a way things were done somewhere else. My Irish grandmother made bread all the time. She was the bread, she was a good cook. My mother was an excellent cook, and, but my grandmother would make the bread. And that was -- I don't know if you've ever experienced that when you were -- but having a loaf of bread just right out of the oven and slather it with butter, there's not much better than that, or not much that smells better when it's cooking. But we had hot-water heat in there, in our house in the outskirts of Baltimore, those long, low radiators. And there would be a couple pans of bread raising on the, in the wintertime, on the, on the radiators.

But, as far as any -- she was with us all the time. So it wasn't a matter of going to Grandma's house and she did things this way or that. She was there all the time. So it's like she was just, just one, one of the family. And there was, no particular things stands out, except of course her, she was a devoted Catholic. So she, my father never went to church, but my mother was a devout Catholic and so... but the things that, her children all, all my grandmother's children really liked her, loved her. And there was a, quite a few times in the months of, they, my Uncle John or my Uncle Joe, or my... well, we used to go to my Aunt Mary's quite a bit, she didn't come out. But they would come out on the bus, on the trolleys, to see my grandmother, spend a Sunday afternoon and so forth.

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JB: Now, how about your father's side of the family, your Italian grandparents? Could you tell us a little about them and where they came from?

JF: Yeah. Unfortunately, I don't know where they came from. I did a lot of genealogy, a lot of research. I became very good friends with a lady who was a publicity person from the Mormon Church, and I helped them quite a bit, and so she helped me with my genealogy by taking me to the Mormon library in Bellevue. And we found nothi-, no record of any Frisino there. She, through the aid of some friends, in fact, I think she went back to Utah at one time, and she looked up herself in the main files and found nothing. And I always told her, I said, I'm Irish and Italian Catholic, and there's no way you're going to find any Mormons. And she said, "That doesn't make any difference. We have everybody here because everybody," as I understand the Mormon Church, if you're on the list, why, you're on the list to be saved for salvation by the Mormons. So that's why they have this huge list. But I, I can't find all the records -- I've got where they were married.

JB: Was that in Italy, or in America?

JF: No. That was here in the United States. My grandfather could speak and write English before he came over here. He was a barber. My grandmother spoke rather halting English. And my grandfather, my father and his older brother were both born in Duluth, Minnesota. How they ever got there or why, I haven't the slightest idea. That's one of the puzzles of my life, is trying to figure out why they apparently landed on the East Coast and went in that direction. I thought it was because my father, my grandfather was following the railroad, but it wasn't. It wasn't at all. So I don't know why they went through there, but at any rate...

And then the next question is, why did they leave Duluth and go to Baltimore? I got sailing records from about twenty years or so, what time and which -- maybe it's not, it was only ten years -- passenger list of ships coming into Baltimore. Pardon my pronunciation, it's really "Ballimer." But Baltimore, so people know what I'm talking about. I got these passenger lists from the, from the federal, federal government. They, they put out the -- out at Sand Point Way there's a huge series of buildings, and they're all federal records. And through them you, as a researcher you can get these ship, ship manifests. And I looked and looked and looked, and I found no, very few Italian people coming into, into Baltimore. So I don't know. That ended in a zero. So I don't know.

My young son's -- youngest son spent nine months in Italy. And he was down on the, near the heel of the Italian boot, and then one of my cousins who's done some research but who lives back in Baltimore, told me the name of the city she thought the family came from. And Tim looked it up, and it was just a small little place, and unfortunately, they had burned the records. And rather than move 'em years and years and years ago, they just simply burned the damn thing, which is kind of a shame. But, so I don't know where they came from. They had, as I said, they had my father and my Uncle Tom, two oldest, when they lived in Duluth. Then they went to Baltimore, and moved into a neighborhood on Madison Street, where I was born. And that's near Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And that's where they had the rest of their family. Their family -- my, as it wound up, my Italian family and my mother's brother and sister lived within about a block of one another in eastern Baltimore.

JB: So when you were visiting your Italian grandparents, do you remember any lessons learned from, from that side of the family or any, maybe Italian culture they passed on to you?

JF: Just the, the fact that they, a love of eating and wi-, drinking wine. [Laughs] That's about it. I was a wine drinker when I was just a very small kid. I was the oldest grandson, oldest grandchild. But wine and, and good, but very simple Italian food -- my grandmother didn't go in for anything fancy. She, when we had a gathering, say at Thanksgiving, we would, we would simply have spaghetti and, spaghetti and chicken or turkey and beef and meatballs. And, I mean there was no real fancy, fancy food. Every once in a while she'd, she'd make something a little more fancy, but she went in for quantity rather than for -- well, she went in for quality, but she also went in for quantity. She had a bowl about this big and about this deep which she filled with spaghetti when the whole family was there. And my, my Uncle Tom, who was my dad's older brother, had to be one of the, one of the great eaters of all time. He would eat out of what would normally be a family serving dish. He just, I don't know where -- he was not, wasn't a huge man, but he was about 5'10", and broad and straight down.

JB: Wow.

JF: Very -- he worked on the railroads, doing repair work after accidents and so forth. So he worked very hard and he lived pretty hard and he'd eat pretty hard. I mean, I was always amazed. He would, we would be at my grandmother's, and he'd be off to work and he'd have a pie, six sandwiches and a pie. And that was his, I mean, not, not little, skimpy sandwiches, but... sandwiches.

JB: Now, Joe, you told us that you were born in 1919, and I believe you have one sibling. When was she born?

JF: My sister was born about a year and a half after I came along.

JB: Okay.

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JB: And could you tell us a little bit about the neighborhood that you grew up in? I know you mentioned that you moved.

JF: Well, it's kind of embarrassing, but we'd -- I can remember when we lived in rows, row streets in Balt-, row houses in Baltimore. And we had -- when you lived in a row house in, in Baltimore, you had a spec-, very specific amount of space. And we had a fence, fenced-in backyard with a gate out into an alley. And there was, it was something like chicken wire between. It wasn't a wooden fence. The rest of the, the rest of the houses that I've been associated with in the row houses all had wooden fences, vertical slats of wood about five inches. And one day -- there was a family lived next to us that had an older boy. He was probably ten. And one day I was out in the yard, doing I don't know what, but I remember this. I was about three and he urinated on me. And my father was very upset to say the least. And not soon after, not long after that, why, we moved out into what city folks called the country. But I remember several things about living there in that row house.

JB: Did you move because of that incident?

JF: I don't think so.

JB: Oh.

JF: But I mean, it was, just happened to be coincidence, and very happy one, because my father would have nothing to do with the next-door neighbors after that, and they'd been pretty good friends before. But, at any rate, I remember that we had a -- all the houses were exactly the same formation inside, and we had this, our living room was very, always kept closed. They had sliding doors, but it was always kept closed unless we had company, and they would sit in there. But it was very dark. My father had, at that time was painting oils and sort of following the old Dutch painters where he used a lot of dark colors. And so here's this dark room and all these dark paintings. I remember that. And I also remember that when we moved my father rolled all those paintings up, took them out of the frames and rolled them all up, and later he just threw them away. He just cut them all up, which is kind of a sad thing because I would like to have seen some of his earlier work. But I remember that. And I remember that apparently that they were changing the outhouses to -- in that part of Baltimore -- to sewer lines because I remember walking through these huge pipes with my grandmother. She was always, seemed to be always with me -- my Irish grandmother. And then, but I -- apparently that's what they were doing. It was about 1920 because we moved when I was three. We moved out into the outskirts of Baltimore.

JB: And what was that neighborhood like?

JF: Oh, it was beautiful. We, we lived on top of a hill, and we had a 50 x 150 lot, and lots of grass and trees. And, and there was woods in back of, across the street from us, and a big old abandoned -- well, it wasn't abandoned at that time -- but it was a big farm, and lots of trees and woods. And there were several empty lots which we could go through to get to the wooded area, and had a, just a trail for it called the Sandy Road. And it was a great place to grow up. I had some friends, established friends, friendships there with a, particularly one fellow who lived up the street about five houses or so. His name was Hughes, and he and I are still close friends. We still, we've known one another since I was six and he was five, so seventy, seventy-one years. His family was, his family was English, and they'd been in Maryland for a long time, on the eastern shore of Maryland. Hughes family. And then next to him was another English family named Mills. And then there were three, three German families, then our house, and three more German families, a German family across the street. And so there were a lot of German people in there. But no, no small, no small boys to play with except, well the one, Freddie (Balk). He was older than I was.

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JF: But I, all the schools, of course, were segregated. I was, I went to school with, white as your, your sweater. It was just, there was no -- the only time we saw black people was when we went into town, and, but usually on Halloween the black people would come up from wherever they lived up into where my, my Aunt Mary and my Uncle Joe lived, and so we would see all these black people in costume. But that was about the only contact I ever had with them. In the row houses, my mother's sister and brother lived side by side. My Uncle Joe, who was, no, my Uncle John was the oldest. But my Uncle Joe bought that house in, I think 1913, something like that. He lived there just about all of his life.

SF: Did your parents ever comment on black folks or make some sort of remark, I don't know, offhand or casual that you recall?

JF: No, not really. I mean, there was no -- it was out of sight, out of mind, actually, is what it really was. On the newspaper which I worked, no stories about black people unless a horrendous crime of some kind. I think Joe Lewis, I think the fighter, was the first black man whose picture was ever in the News Post, so I mean, there was, I can remember I'd be in the city room, and somebody would say, well, such-and-such has happened, and the immediate question was, "Where?" "Oh, that's in, that's in a part of town we don't cover." That's all there was to it. It's kind of a strange, strange way to operate. I mean, the line, we felt the line was just there. I don't know who had drawn it or why, but it was just there. And breaking that down was no easy, no easy task. I remember, oh, we had this, when we wrote a, if there was an occasion, I think we, I think we referred to black people as "Negroes" with a capital N, "Negro man," but that was few and far between. But there was no particular reason for my folks to mention any black people at all because we never, we never saw them.

SF: At that time were there other groups that were perhaps not as isolated as blacks from being covered and so forth, but were further down on the pecking order, maybe I don't know, Poles, Russian immigrants, Italians, I don't know. Was there kind of a pecking order of like the European immigrants, and how did people sort of see that?

JF: If there were, or if there was I was pretty much oblivious to it. [Pauses] I think there was a certain -- I mean, everybody took their lumps at one time or another, the Irish and the Italians, and in some places, just prior to my coming into this world, in Boston, for instance, which became a very Irish city, why, there were signs all over the place, "No Irish Need Apply," no matter what you were looking for. And I think the, my father would take exceptional, would get exceptionally angry if somebody used the word "wop," W-O-P, which apparently means "without papers." And I don't know just how it came to stigmatize Italians, but like, "Kraut" for Germans and so forth. But those things for me, as a, growing up, teenager, they were so far out of my realm that I never paid very much attention to them.

SF: Were there any notions about going into a particular neighborhood or that you shouldn't go into this neighborhood because it was mostly X or Y, something like that?

JF: Well, see, I really, really don't know because we moved out, we moved out of, out of that intensely populated area, those areas in the deep city when I was, just as I say, about three years old. So we were out there in the open spaces, and the neighborhoods were few, we figured that, we lived in a place which was called Raspeburg, named after a Raspe family, R-A-S-P-E, and that's where I lived, on Raspe Avenue. But the next community was Overlea, which, but there was no, things were so spread out, it seems to me that there wasn't no real tight-knit sense of, "this is my territory." But whether or not my cousins felt that or not, living in town, I, I don't know, but I don't think so. I think that they would certainly stay away from the areas in Baltimore where, which were mostly, mostly black neighborhoods.

But then again, I'm, that's just something I'm, seems to me would've been a good idea. But I don't know whether people living at that time actually thought, "We'd better not go down Jackson Street," or, "We'd better not go down so-and-so," because I mean, you have the same thing here in Seattle. I mean, we don't just go down through what they used to call "The Hollow," and it just made some common sense, it seemed to me. Although our kids never seemed to be bothered.

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JF: But it, considering that World War I was just over by a few years, it's, since I've been thinking about this, it seems to me that we did a hell of a good job of getting together with the German people who were our neighbors. My first boss at the newspaper was a lady named Deutsch, and she was saying that her family had been subjected to some FBI questioning during World War I. Now whether or not, I don't, I don't know about any of my neighbors.

The only one who would come to mind would be a man who lived right next door to us. And actually he had a lot-and-a-half, so he didn't, his house was 25 feet away from ours easily, 30 feet. He was a locksmith, and apparently a very good craftsman. And I remember the feather in his cap. He got to redo all the locks in the, I guess it was the Baltimore City Jail or some such, but anyway, it was a pretty big institution. So in view of his lineage, I mean, he was, he was a German. There was no doubt about that. I think he was born in Germany, but I'm not sure. But I mean, he spoke very, very little English. But he was a very intelligent man. Always a nice guy. Seemed to be a good neighbor. It seemed to me if there had been any of that feeling that was very hard, then he never would have gotten a city contract or county contract, whichever it -- well, it had to be city because Baltimore's a city. So that's the only thing that -- one thing that I've always been sorry for, his name was Hobbicht, and I'm not sure how to spell it anymore. H-O-B-B-I-C-H-T or something like that. But one time when I was about six years old he gave me a, cutout puzzles were -- well, they're still popular today -- but they were pretty popular then. And he gave me a cutout puzzle. And the subjects were all German battleships of World War I. I mean, you can imagine how valuable that thing would be if my Irish grandmother had said, "Put this away somewhere." [Laughs] I might still have that today. But unfortunately, it got lost. And I've always regretted it because they were really authentic pictures of the battleships, in color, that had been made into puzzles. But, strange.

JB: Now, Joe, in a previous conversation you had shared with us a story about the first time you heard of German soldiers' actions during World War I. I think you had mentioned you were in the sixth grade at that time.

JF: Yeah. That was our, that was our famous Alsace-Lorraine, janitor. We would periodically, I guess, sixth grade would, each class studied World War I, which was just been over not very long. And the teacher would call on him to speak, and he told of seeing these atrocities wherein the Germans would cut off the right arm of all the Alsace-Lorraine kids or anybody else, any other young boys that they captured, to prevent any further war. I, I don't know whether that's ever been documented or not, but, and I always thought that it probably hadn't been. This was just some propaganda that he, I think, that he had swallowed, and he was passing it on to us as remembrances. And we were certainly swallowing it hook, line, and sinker because it really is something that you'd want to, would remember as a twelve-year-old kid. It'd make a hell of an impression on you. You can just picture these guys whacking off the arms of these kids. And I just, I've always wondered about the wisdom of a teacher who presented this man as being someone who was there and who had actually seen this firsthand.

JB: Did you consider asking your German neighbors if those stories might be true or...

JF: That never occurred to me. No.

SF: You think that that might reflect kind of the, kind of the hyper sort of Americanism that might have taken place after World War I when the, victorious over the Germans, and were sort of, sort of take great pride in that?

JF: Well, I think that probably, I mean, there are several ways to look at it. One would be that, that you would be happy to hear that the people that you defeated at such cost were truly as bad as that. It makes you feel pretty good that you have -- in World War II, there was no question, but World War I, I'm not sure where the propaganda ended and the, and the truth began and vice versa. I, I would think that certainly that we were over there and all the songs were pretty euphoric about the fact that we had pretty much had a large hand in winning that, that war, although you, pretty hard to tell the French that. But I would think that would have been a part of it. But anything, anything bad that you could nail at the Germans' feet was kind of, made us look a little bit better.

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SF: Maybe we can go back one step to your, your family. When your family had these gatherings, like for the holidays and stuff, you had your Irish side from your mom and then the Italian side from your dad, how, how did your family negotiate that? Go to separate things? Did everybody come together on the holidays and stuff like...

JF: This was, most of the time it was just the Italians. I mean, my grandmother's house was just so big, and we, she, we pretty well filled it up, just the Italians. But we did have, we had either one or two parties at our house where we had a little bit more room, where both sides got together, and we had a ball, yeah. No, they all knew one another growing up. Apparently, my Irish grandmother had a store, little candy store, and that's where our people hung around. And I don't know whether there is such a thing as doing that today. Maybe, maybe you guys hang around a certain area, the U. District or maybe people still do. I'm not quite sure. But in those days there were stores all over the place, and each one had its little clientele and clique and I guess my grandmother had her share of people that she knew. And she must have known a lot of people because my dad sure knew, knew everybody.

I was thinking of that the other day, and my -- as a for instance, my, my mother's older sister, my Aunt Mary, had been married to a man named Talbert, and they had two sons. Well, one of those sons, I guess it would've, he would have been my cousin, my Cousin Leo, and my father's, one of my father's younger brothers were friends, and they joined the Maryland National Guard together. So I mean, they had, they knew one another pretty well. And it never ceases to amaze me how, how thoroughly my father knew so many of the people that he -- that later became shirttail relatives of his. Like my, when my, my Irish grandfather was a, a custodian in the school, I guess the school janitor, and my father used to, and my father and mother went to the same school together, my father, I think he went three or eight or something like that. My mother had more education. I think she went through sixth grade. But at any rate, he'd always say, "If I'd known that old man was going to be my father-in-law, I'd have been much easier on him than I was as a kid." [Laughs] They all grew up together, and they all had stories of when they were kids together. Just, just amazing to listen to them. And the funny thing was that some of the worst of them, when I'd say, I'd say to my dad, "Well, whatever happened to that guy you were telling about, that guy who did this and did that?" "Oh, he became a cop." So many of them became policemen. But they sure, they sure knew one another when they were growing up.

JB: Since both sides of your family were Catholic, did they also gather at the Catholic church together?

JF: Well, my, my Aunt Mary and my Uncle Joe and my grandmother, my Italian grandmother, used to go to church together, yeah. But my Italian grandmother was, I mean, she wasn't about to wait around on church, doors opened. She was there a half hour before the doors ever opened. She wanted to be sure that she got there. So she'd leave real early, and she'd be waiting on the steps for the priest to open up the church. I mean, that's the kind of, if I look back on it, I would say it's anxiety. And I think I have some of that from, from the Italian side of, being anxious about time because I don't like to be late. But my grandmother carried it to extreme.

JB: Joe, could you tell us a little about your experiences with going to church as a child or what lessons you learned from your times at the Catholic Church?

JF: Well, one thing I learned was never to cross that big nun who used to teach us Catechism on Saturday mornings. [Laughs] She appeared to be about six foot tall. And not going to Catholic school, I therefore was subjected to Catechism lessons on Saturday mornings. So I would go to the church hall, and the nun would teach us the Baltimore Catechism. And that, I learned very fast. I didn't want anything to do with that nun. She always carried a ruler, and she would swing it around. But, I don't know, I got to be a fairly religious person. I never, I never missed a mass. And that carried all the way through my army career and so forth. I've attended a lot of meetings, a lot of masses where the, the jeep was, the jeep hood was an altar in the jungle and so forth. I kind of slid away from it in the last fifteen or twenty years. But all of our kids went to Catholic school.

SF: When you were really small and you had to go to the Catechism classes, did you see that as sort of a big pain in the south side, and you'd rather be out playing baseball?

JF: Oh, definitely, yeah. It was just one more thing to study for. And I don't know. It was just another, another thing that I could probably have lived without, but my mother was rather influential, so I went there. But I never, all my friends were altar boys. All of our kids were altar boys. I never was. I couldn't, I didn't want to mess up in front of everybody, so I never, I never tried the altar boy route.

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JB: Well, I understand that earlier in the 20th century there were some anti-Catholic sentiments, which followed some of the anti-immigration sentiments especially on the East Coast, and were you ever aware of any of those feelings, or did your family ever talk about that?

JF: The only, the only thing that I recall along that line is that, I don't know what sense it was used and I don't know whether it was ever used, but there was, there was the word "Cat Licker" for Catholic. I don't know whether you've ever heard that phrase or not, but that, that was a, excuse me. That was a phrase that I heard somewhere along, and I don't know. I kind of shrugged it off. It didn't make too much sense to me, and it didn't make much, much difference to me. But that, that was a derogatory term that someone along the line had used. But I don't recall any -- we said prayers in school, and the Catholics end The Lord's Prayer one way and they end it before the Protestants do, and now they're, now it's pretty much all the same, but I never got in any problem, but not saying "for thy kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever," which is the way the Protestants end the prayer. So I never had any problem with that.

I don't -- oh, we used to get kidded about eating fish on Friday. That was, I mean, that was the single, the big single thing. But it didn't amount to anything that I can remember, except my mother would send me to the store to get a pound of filet, and I thought filet was a kind of a fish. And I didn't realize it was filet of haddock. And I can't find it anywhere. It's kind of like cod. It would come in slices about like so and break off in big, white, almost like topaz, different colors. But I really enjoyed it. I liked it. But I'd have to go down to Mr. Hoffman's store and get a pound of filet all the time, whereas the people all around us were eating meatballs and all these other, sour beef or sour rabbit or whatever the hell they ate, and we had to eat fish.

SF: Was that fish-eating kind of, sort of a negative thing, or did you look forward to eating fish on Friday?

JF: Well, as I said, I liked the fish. I liked that haddock. I liked the stuff. So it was all right with me. But lots of times my mother would make other dishes that were not, not necessarily fish dishes, but not, didn't have meat in them. But I, it's always been my personal opinion that the Catholic Church made a mistake in, in doing away with that day of fasting because that, eating fish on Friday and the nuns' habits and not eating after midnight when you were going to communion the next day, those three things to me were being Catholic. And, now all of a sudden you can't tell a Catholic nun from a, from a schoolteacher. I mean, there's no, I mean, when I was a kid and you saw that nun come walkin' down the hall with those big pointed white things, [Gestures to head] there was an authority figure. And there's no two ways about it. You knew exactly what that nun would do to you if you screwed up. And she was a real authority figure. Now all of a sudden you walk down the school, and you can't, here's somebody in a skirt and blouse, and maybe she's got a little cross around the neck, but what the hell is that? Doesn't make anything -- any difference at all. I mean, that was, to me, it was a tremendous mistake. They lost the Catholicism, they lost that strength right there. But in order to get people into the church, they made it, being in the church easier, from my view, which eroded the church. So that's one of the reasons I don't go to the services anymore. One of them. I've got a whole series of them. But I, I think that that was one of the big mistakes that they made. A good many of my friends went to Catholic school, and invariably, Sister Margaret or Sister Mary, she was the topic of conversation. Even I got to know some of these nuns by what they would, would or wouldn't do to the guys that I played ball with. And it was just a pure matter of authority, and they lost all that.

<Begin Segment 8>

JB: So Joe, I'd like to pick up, in 1929 you were just ten years old, and this is of course when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. I was wondering how the Depression affected your family or if it did at all or if it affected your schooling or your plans for the future?

JF: Yeah. My father was, as I said, was a finish photographer -- or, finish photo engraver, and his business relied on advertising, of course. And apparently that's one of the first things that companies cut back on when the, things were, the economy's slowing, as they say these days. But he was, I don't think he was ever out of work more than a week. They were such a good, they did such good work, and then so they got a hefty chunk of what, what little bit there was left in Baltimore. But of course we didn't have, I'm sure that my father had to take several pay cuts because there were some, one Christmas that I remember, the only gift I got was a, was a red wagon, a wagon I could ride in, that, my, my uncle, who was an artist for the Hearst newspaper in Baltimore, the paper was giving a wagon away for prescription -- for subscriptions, and somehow my uncle got my father one of these wagons, and he gave it to me for, for Christmas. I remember that was one of the tough Christmases we had.

But my mother, my mother was, with the mother she had, was very frugal, and she could make a dollar go an awfully long way. And she never wasted any money, and we never wasted any food. It's funny. I was talking to my daughter's fiance's father, and he said, the other night we were, had a Father's Day party at my daughter's house. And he said to me, he said, "When you were growing up, did you always have to clean your plate because there were starving" -- I can't remember the nationality he used, but I said, "No, we didn't have starving Norwegians. We had starving" -- what the heck was it, that we had. Not Albanians, but any rate -- so he said, "Well, we had these starving Norwegians out here on the West Coast." And that was always the same around our house, too: "Think of all the people who are starving around the world, and you're leaving all of this food on your plate." So we pretty much belonged to the clean-your-plate club. It didn't affect my schooling at all. I was in public school, so there was, there was no extra cost there.

But we knew it was all around us, and we could -- the man across the street had a, the one Italian who lived near us for a while, he was a shoemaker and a shoe repairman, and his business virtually went to hell, and he had a lot of, lot of problems feeding his family. And there were other people around the neighborhood who had some problems. Because it was pretty, it was very severe. But even as young as I was, I, and it went on until -- when I finally found a job, why I, in 1937, it was still so strong in my mind that I did everything I could to hold on to that job. And I wasn't about to have left for any, any reason at all because once you had a job, you kept it. You held on to it. But I used to cut, cut grass for money and things like that. Twenty-five cents for cutting a lawn. I cut the same lawn for three years running at 25 cents a shot, which shows I'm not much of a businessman. But for 25 cents it's amazing what you could do in those days.

But my Uncle John, who was a, had a lathing, lathing crew for house building, that went to pot, and he was, he was having lots of, lots of bad times. So we were helping him. My, my father's, a good many of my father's brothers were out of work, so we were helping my grandmother. And it was, it was not a, easy times.

SF: How did, how did people explain this awful economic time? Was it the government, other countries, or just bad politicians or just something that the economic system has to occasionally endure? How did people see that?

JF: I'm, I'm not aware of who, who was taking the blame for that. I really, I think, I think the folks in my family were happy to see Roosevelt elected president because he was, he did, he took action right away on the banks and so forth. But I'm, I'm not really positive as I could say what the ordinary, the ordinary man felt was behind all of it. It was just the Depression was on us, and whether people looked for a reason for the Depression, why I don't, I'm not sure. I mean, I had, I had a lot of other things on my mind like baseball and football and so forth, and trying to get through school.

<Begin Segment 9>

JB: Joe, could you tell us a little bit about your high school years? I mean, what, what were you thinking about for your future? And you had told us you attended a mechanical school?

JF: Mechanical drawing school, yeah.

JB: How did you get interested in that?

JF: I, I had very little idea of what I was, what I wanted to be, as they say, when I grew up. I had pretty good grades, and my teacher convinced me that I should try for the, what they called the A course at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, which is a, a technical high school in Baltimore. And they had very high standards and very -- you had to maintain a 70 grade point average and so forth. And if you graduated from the A course, you had three, four years of high school and one year of college, in effect, in four years. So you went there for four years. So with about three or four other fellows from my class, in junior high I went to this high school, and I, I liked it. And then graduated from there. We did a lot of -- [Coughs] pardon me -- we did a lot of mechanical drawing. And one of my teachers, a woman teacher, which is unusual at Poly, also taught at Maryland, Maryland Institute, and the principal of Poly, a fellow named DeHuff, William DeHuff, an outstanding educator, was the principal at, there. So somehow we decided to, my friend and I, this fellow that I told you about, Josh, he was still going, I still correspond with him and call him, he and I decided to go to Maryland Institute on Saturday mornings and learn even more about mechanical drawing. And we did that for four years. I've never used it, but it's something I enjoyed doing. I was pretty good at it.

So I managed to scrape through school. It was pretty tough. We had a, A, B, and C classes. A, A people were very smart, the B people were about average, and the C people were just not quite as smart as the B people, and I was in the B classes all the time. And I graduated, and I decided to take a year off before I was, was going, trying to, I didn't think we had enough money to go to college, I wasn't sure. So I thought I'd look around for a job after a year, so I took, I graduated in 1936, and I didn't start looking for a job until 19, early 1937. And I, I went to, I put an application in a lot of different places. And one day I got a notice to come to a department store in Baltimore. It was, it was probably the second, second-best department store in Baltimore, named Hutzler's. And I went there, and I was a stock boy for one day, and that night my uncle who worked on the newspaper called and told me that there was an opening in the library at the newspaper. Did I want to have that for a summer job? He could probably arrange it because he was a good friend of the librarian, this Ms. Deutsch that I mentioned earlier. So I went down there and I really liked her immensely, and I liked my Uncle Tony, who was the artist. So between the two of them, why, I got this job. And I never did go back to my career in retailing. So I don't know what would have happened there. But at any rate, that was Hearst Newspaper, and I was with Hearst for the next fifty-four years. It's as simple as that.

<Begin Segment 10>

SF: If your family had enough money, you probably would have gone on to college, right?

JF: I probably would have, yeah. Lord knows what I would have turned out to be. I don't think I would have made very much of an engineer. I'm not sure. Although I'm pretty good at theorizing things. But I could see in the newspaper business there were a lot of options there, all of which I liked. I liked to read, and I was a fast reader and I was fair at spelling and I could look up things in the dictionary fairly fast. So I found that that was, my first job was filing photographs. Every photograph that was used, I would clip that out of the paper and paste the caption on the back of the picture that had been used. And maybe the picture was worth saving. If it was, it was filed. If it weren't, it was thrown away after sixty days or something like that. And then I would, plus the hundreds and hundreds of pictures that we got in from the different wire services, and my, the librarian, Ms. Deutsch would select the pictures that she wanted to keep, and I, I would file those in different alphabetical orders. We, we became very good friends, Ms. Deutsch and I. And in fact, I became friends with everybody who was in that library, and I liked them all. But I mean, in a male-dominated business world, and in the particularly male-dominated business such as newspapers, why, she was the head of the library, which speaks pretty highly of her.

And we had a business editor named Pinkney McLean, Britisher. Big, tall, fastidious man. And he was a good friend of Ms. Deutsch. And she knew I was interested in writing heads. So she talked to Mr. McLean. He had been a fighter pilot in World War I, by the way. He was a fascinating man. But she talked to him, and he would let me come in on my half-hour lunch breaks and write heads on business stories. So he had time to critique and so forth. So I learned quite a bit about that from him, and helped him out some. Then I started doing that on the regular copy desk, and a copy desk in the newspaper is the, the copy reader is the last person who handles the copy before it's set in type. When it leaves his hands it's supposed to be, have a headline written on it, and then everything is supposed to be there. If it's not, why, you make, or try to make sure that it gets in the story or fill up any holes that the reporter might have left in the story. You don't do it, but you ask the city editor, and it goes down, back down to the reporter who wrote the story.

So I started volunteering -- I would work, we worked six days a week in those days, and I would work days on the, on Saturday mornings for the Sunday paper, and then I would work the rest of the shift until the paper closed down at night, for free on the copy desk. So I learned a lot that way. And we finally got a company union in about 1939. I think it was '39 or '40, I'm not sure which. And they set up a, apprentice copy desk man, reporter and photographer. And there were two other guys, a guy who wanted to be a photographer. He was doing the same thing I was doing in the photographic field. He was out chasing ambulances and taking pictures, and this other guy was writing news stories as often as he can as a copy boy. And we were very interested in making those our careers. So we got those apprenticeships. And all three of us were pretty successful. I was getting paid $20 a week, but the apprenticeships only paid $19.50, so I took a fifty cent pay raise -- pay cut. But at the end of a year's apprenticeship, the salary jumped up to $36 a week, which was pretty good money in those days.

SF: Do you think it'd be a fair summary to say that you saw the potential in the newspaper business and you sort of went that way because of the kind of, intellectual challenge or, that the field might have offered you?

JF: Well, I guess you would call it an intellectual challenge. I'm not quite sure I would ever think of it that way when I was eighteen years old. But what I could see was I could get on the rim of the copy desk, and I could then become the copy desk boss, and who knows where that would lead, see. So I could, I could see a definite series of steps that I could take. And that, that intrigued me. I mean, it was very possible. I had a lot of, I guess enthusiasm, and I was a hard worker, and all that went with my Irish grandmother's teaching. And I was never late, thanks to my Italian grandmother. And so I had all these things going for me, and I did, I think I did pretty well for a guy who never finished high school -- I mean, never finished college.

<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.

<Begin Segment 12>

JB: So, thinking back to your high school days, I know you graduated from high school in 1936, but Hitler's aggression throughout Europe started in the early '30s, so did you hear about some of those aggressive moves even when you were in high school, or did most of your knowledge about Hitler begin when you were working at the newspaper after high school?

JF: No. I think, I think most, most people were aware of this, this guy and what he was trying to do.

JB: Throughout the '30s or at a certain time?

JF: Well, yeah, in the late, in the late '30s...

JB: The late '30s?

JF: ...when he started. Certainly, when he and Mussolini, when they got together, why, they had made a, on paper pretty formidable foe, except the Italians didn't have their heart in it.

SF: How did, how did Japan figure in the equation for folks who were living on the East Coast, and were they sort of part of the thing, or people didn't think about...

JF: I never even gave them a thought as far as I knew. I knew that they were -- this business of the "Rape of Nanking" and all of those battles with China, but that seemed to be so far away. And actually it was a hell of a long way away. But it came close, though in, in a big hurry. But I don't think a lot of people had the concern that they did about Hitler. I mean, after all, he was a mere ocean away from...

JB: What kind of concern did Americans have at that time about what Hitler was doing in Europe? Was that, was there a fear in America at that time, that Hitler --

JF: Gosh, I'm not sure there was fear. I think it was one of those, one of those things where people say, "Why doesn't somebody do something about this?" And the obvious thing to do was to stop him, but the British weren't about to try it, and they had such weak leadership that they were willing to, you know, turn their backs on just about anything Hitler did. And Chamberlain and his, "Oh, we're going to have peace from now on. Hitler's -- this is the last land that Hitler's going to grab and everything's going to be fine. He's perfectly content." And the next day the guy grabs off another nation. I think, I think most, most people I think had the idea that somebody has to do something about this, but nobody seemed to -- it's like one of these things that will go on today you say, "Well, we can't have that," but yet it's happening right there under our noses, and it's gonna happen, and yet there's no solidification or unification and a concerted effort to, to stop the guy.

JB: Do you think that was a desire for, on Americans' part, to protect democracy, or was that, many people were concerned about the countries they had come from being attacked by, by Hitler?

JF: The countries they came --

JB: For example, if they were French Americans, maybe they were concerned about their parents' homelands or something.

JF: Oh, I'm not, I'm not sure of that.

JB: I guess I was wondering if it was a, a pro-, protection of democracy that people were concerned about or democratic ideals.

JF: I guess it would filter down to that, but kind of a long way around the barn because I think mostly it was a matter of almost like fair play, you know? What right does, did they have to do these things and to kill these people who never did anything to him, except Hitler said they were going to do something to him. So rather than just stop the war, he killed them first. I mean, that's, that was his, that was always, "They were going to attack us, so we attacked them to save ourselves," idea. But I always thought it was a matter of, it was just, how much are they going to let this guy get away with, before somebody did something?

JB: So at that time, when Americans were pretty aware of, of what Hitler was doing, do you think there was any repercussions for German Americans? Was there, were there any negative feelings towards German Americans during that time?

JF: Well, we've talked about that somewhat. I'm, I really, I really don't know. Nothing, nothing that comes across my mind as I, as I think about that. I think maybe later -- as I mentioned, later on, the FBI would question people of known German descent and so forth, but earlier, I'm not quite, quite sure.

JB: Well, during the late '30s you were working at the Baltimore, Baltimore News Post. So were you covering these events in the newspaper?

JF: Oh, yeah. We were, the newspaper was covering them, yeah, but I was just handling pictures in the library. So I saw a lot more through the pictures that I was filing than I, that you would read in the newspaper, you see all of these pictures of Hitler triumphant, and this, all of his troops. And the enormity of his program was, was -- you'd just see these huge areas of barracks, just thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers. And they'd been training for years, and they, they knew exactly what they were doing and what they could do and what they wanted to do.

<Begin Segment 13>

SF: So when you got drafted, did, did you feel that you were really going to make a contribution by potentially being able to help stop Hitler? How did you see that, your role when got drafted into the, into the army?

JF: I don't really know, (Steve). I think that I... my first inclination would be to say that I thought well, now maybe something was going to happen. But I'm not sure that I felt that way. Certainly it made, it made me aware of how, what a long way we had to go to get prepared. I mean, I was drafted, we had absolutely nothing to train with. Not only did we have nothing to train with, but nobody had any training plan. We, a lot of us from Baltimore/Pennsylvania area went to Fort Knox and trained with the 1st Armored Division. We were there for housing and, quartering is what I think they -- food and quartering or something like that. I'm not quite sure what the phrase was.

But there were no weapons, and there was, there was no -- the army was put in a position of having to take in thousands and thousands of men and literally not knowing what the hell to do with them. I mean, what we did was walk. I mean, we walked for miles and miles and miles over, over the Kentucky countryside. And that was the only, that was the only thing that we did as a group because there was, there was nothing to do and there was nothing to do it with. We finally got on the rifle range, and we had World War I British Enfield rifles on the firing range. And we had no, there were no tanks. We had no tanks. We had no anti-tank weapons. So we learned in a tremendous hurry how far behind we were as far as, you've got twenty thousand people here, which is virtually division size, but fire power, training, and so forth, you've got zero. You couldn't stand up against a good German platoon, for God's sake, with twenty thousand men there's just nobody who's, to speak of, has fired a weapon.

SF: How did they, how did that happen where you've got the masses of the American public knowing that you've got this horrendous force that they're probably going to have to contend with, and yet the military and the politicians are kind of standing on their hands or sitting on their hands, and you've got nothing happening here, and people are anticipating this great problem that they're going to have to deal with?

JF: I don't know. I, I, they say that one of the reasons for the famous "death march" on Bataan was because all of a sudden the Japanese captured, I don't know how many thousands and thousands of American prisoners, and they didn't know what to do with them. They had no food, they had no, not enough guards, they had no water, they had no sanitation, they had no place to put these people. All of a sudden they've got 'em. And chaos is what resulted. And I think that the military was in the same boat. They knew they were, they knew that all these people were going to descend upon them, but knowing and being, having the time and the ability and the money to do something with them was an entirely different thing. If you, there just wasn't, just wasn't the time from, from the first volunteer group joining the army, until the first draft, drafted people joined the army. There simply wasn't time to do, to get this set up.

<Begin Segment 14>

JF: I mean, I was in command status in training for a long time, and it takes a long time and a lot of training to know what the hell to, how to set up a training schedule and what to train for and how to do it and how to get the equipment to do it and getting the leadership to do it. And there just wasn't time for this. All of a sudden they had all of these people. Not only that, but the regular army, the regular army people could see the handwriting on the wall. I mean, you've been in uniform for thirteen years and you're a corporal. This guy's been in uniform for fifteen years and he's still a PFC. And all of a sudden you're surrounded by fifteen thousand people who are all going to be vying for your rank. Not only are they vying for it, but they're better educated, probably in just as good a physical condition as you are, they've got a lot of ambition, they're used to working with people, they've got a whole lot of pluses which you don't have. You can't even, you can't even read more than a fifth grade text. So what are you going to do? You're going to feel awfully, awfully alone and very, very worried about those two stripes you've got.

And that was another problem of getting the, the regular army people to train, to train these guys. We weren't draftees. We were f-u-c-k-i-n-g-d-r-a-f-t-e-e-s. One word. One word. Until one day down at Fort Knox -- Fort Knox was armored cavalry from the old cavalry -- and here this full colonel comes riding by, and he heard this sergeant saying, "Okay, you f -- draftees." And he called the sergeant over, he called all the other regulars over, and he said, "That is the last time I ever want to hear that phrase. Next time, nobody gets any, has any stripes in this whole outfit." And they stopped using it.

But that was it. They were not very happy with us guys because we were a direct threat to them. And you can put yourself in their shoes. I had a, I had a corporal in my tent. He had been in the army twelve years. He'd been a sergeant. He was busted down to private. He had been a corporal. He was busted up and down. And he still couldn't read the manuals. Now, he's got no chance in God's green acre against a guy like myself, even who's got a high school education, and most of the other people who were at least high school educated. And a lot of them, a lot of them were college people who were drafted. He hasn't got a prayer. He's going to be a private for the rest of his born days. So he's not very happy. And he took it out on us. We'd have an inspection, he'd sit on his bed and make us carry his bed outside and platoon, and polish up his area. And it was just, just amazing those little things that went on.

SF: So how did that affect you? Here you have this guy who's giving you a hard time and --

JF: It didn't. One thing for me, I wasn't in the army more than three or four days when I decided I'm going to get rank in this man's army as fast as I can get it. I'm not going to have to take orders from some guy like that. Maybe, maybe in combat he's a hell of a lot better soldier than I am. I don't know. But when it comes to coming in out of the rain at the right time, I got him beat, and I'm not going to have to take, don't want to take orders from him. So I think a lot of people felt as soon as possible they were going to get rank in this man's army.

And that's what had started to happen. We formed, we formed the 5th Armored Division. And we went, this was at Fort Knox, and we went to Camp Cook outside of Lompoc, California. It's Vandenberg Air Force Base now. Okay, we got probably five thousand people right out of basic training. Some of them hadn't even had basic training. And we had to name, pick out sergeants, three-stripers, right out of those raw guys because we didn't have enough guys to, enough people. I'll never forget, I had, there was a guy there who had some leadership. His name was McGarrow. And I picked him for one of my sergeants. I mean, that's it. This guy hasn't -- as we said in the army, "You haven't got your first cleaning back yet." And he hadn't. He had not been in the army that long, but he's a sergeant. And sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn't. But the whole, the whole thing was that this ball was rolling so fast that the military didn't have time to catch up with it. And if they got, if weapons were manufactured, and they were at an amazing rate, they went to the people who were firing the damn weapons, not to the guys who were training with them. I mean, it makes sense. So we always got what was left over, if, if that. But it was something that we learned the hard way, that you don't, you don't train somebody overnight because the training, the training of the trainers takes so much time and is such a, such a tough task.

SF: So in your personal case you, you went to Fort Meade, is that right? Is that where the induction center was or the...

JF: I went to -- [coughs] -- excuse me. I went to Fort Meade for a couple of days. That was, that was the -- the Baltimore Armory was where we took our final basic, final physicals.

SF: Then, then you went to Fort Knox as the, for, for basic training.

JF: Basic training, yeah.

SF: And that was, was that kind of like everybody takes the same basic, or was it specific to the armored people?

JF: It was specifically armored force, such as it was. As I said, it didn't amount to anything but walking. It was the only thing we could do. Armored force is not, not a walking outfit, it's a vehicle outfit, vehicle-oriented, and, but we didn't have the vehicles.

SF: So when did the, Knox get tanks and armored personnel carriers and all of that stuff?

JF: Well, that came in later. They had, they had some, but we certainly didn't have any, any, as trainees we didn't have anything like that. I mean, we were, after a year in we were in the midst of war with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Things got even scarcer. I thought, I thought, well, we, we'll never get home before Christmas of 1941 because the attack was on December 7th. Well, to our great surprise we got home, got home Christmas Eve. And I thought, well, when we go back, certainly things are going to be different. So we went back to Fort Knox. And what we were doing was sweeping the streets because some big British general was coming over to inspect the troops at Fort Knox. But not, no training.

<Begin Segment 15>

JB: Joe, you were just two months away from completing your one year of military service at the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. So, where were you on that day, and can you tell us about your reactions to that, the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

JF: Well, yeah. One of the, one of my friends, Floyd Couch, had made arrangements with the Post photographer to come down and have his portrait taken so he could send it back to his wife. And we were both buck sergeants. And we were walking down the street at Fort Knox, and we went by the, it was a huge old PX called the Pool Hall PX, and we said, "Well, what do you say we go in and get a beer? Fortify yourself for the photographer?" He says, "Okay." So we were hardly in the door when we saw this, well, it must have been twenty-five, thirty GIs all standing around this radio. And we said, "What's going on on a Sunday morning? Why are you guys here?" And they said, "The Japanese just attacked Pearl Harbor, and a whole bunch of guys have been killed already." Says, "I guess we're at war." And man, that didn't sound right. He says, "Listen." So we, they kept saying on the radio, "This is not a, this is a real thing," in other words, they were saying, "This actually happened. This is live news. Japanese Air Force just attacked Pearl Harbor." Well, where the hell is Pearl Harbor? Nobody knew of it, never heard of it. Well, we found out that it was around Honolulu, and most of us knew where the Hawaiian Islands were.

And then we knew that we were at war, whether we wanted to be or not. And then it was just incredible, the feeling that that gave us, of hatred for anybody who would backstab us like this, because we were hoping that the Japanese, who were in Washington talking peace at the time, would work at this whole thing out and... so the, you could cut the amount of hate that was in that room, you could cut it with a dull knife. I have never had any such feeling as that since, before or since. It was just unbelievable how high off the floor I felt. And Couch was the same way, all of us. So we, we never did have a beer. We just walked outside in kind of a trance and went down and had a photograph taken. And the cameram-, photographer says, "Why are you guys so damn glum?" Said, "You haven't heard the news?" And we told him, and he was worse off than we were. That was something I'll never forget. And then, the next morning we all met in the mess hall. The company met in the mess hall, and President Roosevelt gave his speech. And afterwards they played the national anthem. And I'll never forget that. We, we were all standing like iron statues. I've never heard it with such emotion before or since. And then we knew, we were at war, officially. But we, everything was, was thrown aside, and time, time was nothing anymore.

<Begin Segment 16>

SF: Joe, last time we were talking about your experiences with Pearl Harbor and first of all, the action and some of the folks around you, how they reacted to the news of Pearl Harbor. Maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about how you think people on the West Coast were reacting to Pearl Harbor and perhaps the Japanese.

JF: Well, this is just, would just be hearsay, really, but when my wife tells me stories, my mother-in-law told me stories, and I didn't get here until spring of '43, so a couple years after Pearl Harbor. So I really, I had no firsthand knowledge of what the civilian people were doing at all. I just know what we did in the military. But I guess, I guess the main, the main fear was from, for sabotage and, there were always these stories about the very curious milkman who disappeared after December the 7th or the, the grocery store owner, Japanese grocery store owner who was no longer there. And you wondered, people wondered, did he somehow get back to Japan with a lot of information, and fear of being so close to Boeing, of air strikes. We mentioned, I don't know whether we were on camera when we mentioned the submarine alert that we were on, but that was always, that was always a possibility in the civilians' mind, apparently, that something like that was going to happen.

My mother-in-law was a kind of, kind of lady who tried to help people. And for instance, she helped a lot of Chinese with their immigration to the United States. She, my wife knew a lot of Japanese Americans, youngsters, because they were in her class at Garfield. Garfield at the time had a lot of -- Garfield High School -- had a lot of Japanese Americans. And my wife knew 'em, and she knew some of the sad stories that these families told later of their encampment and so forth. But my mother-in-law tried at first when these Japanese people had to suddenly leave and sell everything, that she was trying to put stuff in storage for them and things like this, which she simply became overwhelmed. There was no possible way that any one person can do this. But she, she had some pretty good friends who were Japanese. But I don't, I don't know very much more about that subject.

SF: When did you first learn about the Japanese American friends that your wife had? Was that in '43, or was that quite a, quite a bit later?

JF: That was later, later when I came home from overseas. But we, well, before, before I went overseas we were too busy courting to be talking about anybody else. And once we got married we only had ten nights together before I went overseas for two years. And so our conversation didn't head in that direction.

<Begin Segment 17>

SF: Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you did meet your wife and under what circumstances.

JF: Yeah. I graduated from Officer Candidate School early in February. I think it was February 13th. I think that was the date. We graduated and became officers. And there were sixteen new second lieutenants all on orders to come to Sea-, to train to Seattle, Washington. None of us knew where Seattle was. We hadn't heard of it. This is early in 1943, before the, before the Boeing B-17 became so famous, and of course before our sports teams put Seattle on the map. So we, we really didn't know where it was.

So we were assigned to the Alaska Communication System, ACS, which was a civilian-owned organization providing communications between Alaska and the mainland, Seattle, based in Seattle. And they were at that time in the Federal Building. I don't know whether they always had been or not. But any rate, the army just took them over lock, stock, and barrel. So we had people who at one day were a civil servant then the next day was a captain in the Signal Corps. And they didn't have uniforms. They provided their own housing just like they had always lived in the civilian population. There were no barracks with ACS on them or anything like that. So when we came here, well, we didn't know that, of course, but we got here. And they said, "Well, you have to find your own living quarters." Well, we had, seven of us had kind of cliqued together. And we got off the train, and there was a couple, couple ladies representing hous-, military housing, and we asked them, "Where do we stay?" They said, "You have to find your own place." We said, "Do you have anything?" And she said, "No, not really." So we figured well, we, going to put up in a hotel or something. Then this other lady said, "You know that Mrs. Knox? Well, she's just, she had three or four soldiers in her house, and I think they moved out, either yesterday or the day before or something." And she said, "If you fellows wouldn't mind being a little bit crowded, I'll call her." So she called.

And then Mrs. Knox, who was always a, looked at both sides of a dollar, said, "Sure, I'll take them all. I'll take seven of them." So we got in cabs and went up to her house. And she lived in a big house on 30th Avenue South, just off Jackson Street, its just up the street here a ways. And I first met my wife, I was, it was, it's an old house, built in 1893, I think it is. And it has a spiral staircase going up. And I was about four steps up the spiral staircase, wondering, going up to look at some rooms, and this young woman came out in the front room, carrying a vacuum cleaner, with a pretty angry look on her face. And I introduced myself, and that was Harriette. She was, I thought she was an impressive-looking woman, and decided it'd be a good idea to get her, get to know her better, which I did. So at any rate, that's the way I remember, that's the way we met. She was angry because she was, she had just gotten rid of all these, three or four soldiers, and she was going to get her own room back. She was sleeping in the same room with her mother. She was going to get her own room back. And she was going to start traveling to Chicago, I think it was, to visit some relatives. And all of a sudden, why, her mother turns her life upside-down again. So she was pretty angry with her, with her mother, and it kind of reflected on us for awhile. But that's how we met.

Then, the seven of us, Harriette and her mother, after about a week or so of us living there, one of Harriette's girlfriends decided to have a party. And she, Harriette and her mother picked out gals for the -- one fellow was married. And four of us married the Seattle gals that we met through this, through Harriette and her mother. I married Harriette. We were the last ones to get married. I was the best man for two of the weddings. One, one couple eloped. They got married in a little church about, actually about two blocks from her parents' house. We walked in her parents' house, and said that we just got married, and shocked her parents no end. And the other couple got married up in Anchorage, where I was stationed with one of the fellows.

SF: Wasn't that kind of scary for everybody, to know that you guys were going to ship out and go to a war, then get married?

JF: We were taking a chance, yeah.

SF: Yeah. What was working there, I mean...

JF: I don't know. It seemed to me it was a pretty unusual story. I've told it about a thousand times. But it all worked out. I mean, we, we got there sometime late March, I would think. I mean, we knew what we were, all of us knew what we were facing, and we decided anyway, I was not going to leave Harriette pregnant. That was for sure. And I didn't, but, and neither did any of the other fellows. But we were all, we were all married until death took two of the fellows away. One of them died in '81, and the other fellow -- I was the best man at his wedding, he was the one who eloped -- he died in '81. And the other friend who lived back in Alexandria, Virginia, lived, died in '98. But this other couple that lived in Visalia, California, and they were just up here, we saw them a couple of times, and then, we travel together and things. We go back fifty-seven years. So other than for the incident of death, we'd all, we'd still all be married, which is kind of unusual, considering the fact that we had such very little time to get to know the gals that we married because all of us, all of us were, went overseas. In fact, my friend from California who left Tuesday morning, yesterday morning, he was in France and Germany with an infantry signal outfit, and after all that he came back and his youngest son was not even walking yet, and he was reassigned by the army to Korea. And he spent a year in Korea after all the time he had spent in France. It was a, it was very hectic time for us. His wife lived in -- he found her an apartment on the big complex on Mercer Island. Freeway goes right by, I can't remember the name of it. Not sure. Some apartments over there. So I looked out for her and took pictures of the kids and things like that until Don finally came back home. But she was a, she was a nurse in the Air Force during World War II.

<Begin Segment 18>

SF: I think in those days, '42, '43, '44, that the American public sort of reoriented its sort of concern with Hitler and Germany to Japan. How do you think that sort of played a role -- were you more worried about Japan or angry about the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor, even though before the war the Germans were the major threat, I guess.

JF: Yeah. That was, that was my hate focus all the time. Yeah.

SF: So you, I mean, your anger was almost totally directed toward the Japanese because of, basically because of Pearl Harbor.

JF: Yeah.

SF: How did, that might have influenced how you might have thought about Japanese Americans, or did you think about the Japanese over here?

JF: I really didn't. I really didn't because I had no, I had no frame of reference for the Japanese people living here whatsoever. As I mentioned, I lived in a white-as-a-sheet neighborhood, and all my life I dealt with white people up to that time. And maybe, maybe some black people, interfaced with some black people, but not on, not on any of the, any remarkable occasions, and certainly never with Oriental, Oriental people or Asian people. So this was an unknown to me, just an object of desperation, I suppose.

JB: When did you first make that distinction between Japanese and Japanese Americans? When did you first realize there was a distinction?

JF: I don't know. It was, it had to be after -- I'm not quite sure really. I don't, I don't know whether during the war I ever knew anything about them, the fact that there were so many Japanese in this area or not. But I mean, the 442nd, the word of that outfit really woke me up to the fact that not all these, not all these people can be as bad as their images in my mind.

<Begin Segment 19>

SF: I think you, you told a story earlier about one of your soldier friends who had guarded or overseen the, some of the Japanese Americans being interned. Could you tell us that, about that?

JF: Well, we were at Camp Cook, and we, it seemed to me that we were deployed along the, along the coast from Santa Barbara north when the submarine business, when a part of our battalion, in fact, part of our company, including my friend Sergeant Couch, who was with me on Pearl Harbor Day going to have his picture taken, he was by this time a platoon sergeant, staff sergeant, and he was one of those who was -- I don't know how they selected them -- but called out from this 85th Armored Reconnaissance Battalion to usher these, the Japanese Americans to a camp somewhere. I'm not quite sure just where, but somewhere in California. And they were gone, I guess four or five days. I'm not quite sure.

But everybody envied him because here was a chance to maybe get into some action against some of these rotten people who have done this. But nothing really untoward happened. It was simply a matter of escorting these people in, but this one, one fellow was saying that he was, he was manning a machine gun on the, on the armored scout car, and was he saying, "I was just watching these people like a hawk, just hoping somebody would do something 'cause I could fire." And I mean, he was really gung-ho to fire into these people. And, when he said this, I had no feeling whatsoever of, "Why would you want to do that," or anything. It just seemed, "Okay, that's a, that's a natural way to go, that, you want to hate somebody, if you want to have some revenge, why, this is the way to do it." But it never, fortunately never happened.

But I never, I never realized then that, the background of these, of these people who were in these trucks. I mean, the Japanese Americans who were in the trucks. So that was, that was my only encounter with, with that transportation situation. I'm, I'm certain that there wasn't a man in the outfit who didn't feel exactly like that fellow who was manning the machine gun, that given a chance, they're gonna fire.

<Begin Segment 20>

SF: Okay. I'd sort of like to, kind of go over your military career kind of systemically. So, you started out at Fort Meade. You were inducted, right? You took your initial physical and filled out some papers probably. And then you went to Fort Knox, I guess, to take your basic, right? And that was kind of like a standard, basic training. And then what did you do after Knox?

JF: After we took our basic training, we had a series of tests to determine maybe what army career we would have, what kind of slots we could fill. And I along with a whole group of other people was sent to signal school to learn to be a radio operator, and that was, I think, a three-month course at Fort Knox. And we did, we did move out of tents in the barracks for that. And that was pretty intense training, and very successful. It was surprising to, to both the general soldier population as well as to the cadre of the school that, how well some people did and how poorly some other people did. I mean, education seemed to have nothing much to do with the ability to hear a sound and write it down. And I had a, I had a good friend from school, his name was Fidorowitz, Frank Fidorowitz, and he was, I don't think he had graduated from high school. He was kind of a sharpie from Philadelphia, but he had a knack for this. And he was one of the, in fact, he was the first one in the class to ever reach, receiving 25 words a minute, which is pretty fast. They teach you by sound, but you don't say "dot-dash," you say "dit-dah," "dit-dah," "dit-dah," "dit-dah" because that's the way it sounds on your headset. And Frank, Frank was just superb at that. But where some of the other fellows seemed to have much more going for them intellectually, had trouble passing twenty, twenty words. I mean, twenty -- they're not words, they're code groups of five. But you gradually, you gradually pick up speed in receiving, and you gradually pick up speed in sending, over, over a period of time.

So after that, when I graduated from, as radio operator, I was sent to Pine Camp, New York, which was a brand-new camp. We were talking about training and things the other day. Everything was new. They didn't have the, they didn't have the housing facilities. That's why the tents. All of this had to be built, and somebody had to plan it all, and somebody had to select the sites. So I mean, for a nation to get ready for war, there's a million little details to take care of. So we went, at two different times we went into brand-new, just-built barracks. That was Pine Camp in New York, and then I went there and I was a radio operator, oh, for just a couple months. And then into the winter, into the fall, went back to Fort Knox, and we formed another armored division, and that was the 5th Armored Division.

And after that winter at Fort Knox of training and getting in more people, not too many more, but more of a cadre, then we went to another brand-new camp at Camp Cook, California. And then we just were inundated with people who've been called into the service. By this time I was a platoon sergeant, and then I was, I was a staff sergeant, and then I was -- our operations sergeant went to, applied for and was accepted to go to OCS, Officer Candidate School. Unfortunately, he didn't, he didn't complete the course. He was washed out. But any rate, I took his job as an operations sergeant for the 85th Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. And that was mostly training, mostly, setting up convoys of, and camps where we could go and do overnight bivouacs and just to get an idea of a whole company being able to roll out at the same time. In our battalion we had four, four armored car companies and one tank company, one light tank company. So the idea was primarily to get all these people on the road and get to the same destination roughly at the same, same time, and to find a place that would take us in.

And I remember one time this lieutenant, who was, first lieutenant was in charge of this training branch. He was my immediate boss. And his name was Severe Roang. I'll never forget that name. He was from the Midwest, of course, and a very, very nice fellow, really a hard-working guy. And he was, he was under a lot of pressure because of the four companies that we had in our battalion, three of them were, were commanded by West Point graduates and one by a Virginia Military Institute graduate. So the officer caliber was pretty high. The colonel was a West Point man, the battalion commander was a West Point man. The assistant, his assistant was a Major, Wayne J. Dunn was a West Point graduate. So we had, we had a pretty high level of officer leadership there. And I think it was a pretty damned good outfit. But any rate, we, soon after I became operations sergeant, why, we went out on the Mojave Desert for desert maneuvers, the desert training center that General Patton set up. And that, that, was tough.

<Begin Segment 21>

SF: You were the operations sergeant. Isn't that a really kind of responsible job? I mean, you have to sort of make things happen. You've got a lot of details and so forth, so it's a, it's, you must have been doing really well in the military for, to be --

JF: I was goin', I was doing pretty well. Yeah. I, well, there was, that was it. I mean, you either slouched by the wayside or you gave it all, and most people pretty much gave it their all because they, they, I think most of them had enough common sense to know that sooner or later, if we're unlucky enough, we're going to be in combat, and we'd better damned sight learn how to fire this weapon and how to do this and how to do that and take commands and so forth. So it was, it was an interesting, interesting job. But when we were on maneuvers we were pretty much, for those three months we were pretty much under -- for me, we didn't have very much control over what we were doing. It was all assigned, all assigned by corps and general officers where we were going to go and what we were going to do.

SF: So after the Mojave Desert experience and before you were the operations sergeant, then, then where did you go?

JF: Well, I applied again for OCS, and --

SF: What made you apply for OCS? Because you knew that your tour of duty was probably going to be longer, right? I mean, you had a commitment after you took OCS.

JF: I still had the idea that I was going to get as high as I could in this man's army. But then I gather then I've, well, yeah, so I figured, what the hell. So I applied for OCS and got the signal OCS. So, that was when the maneuvers were over, and actually what we were doing at this particular time was policing a desert. We were, we were just hundreds and hundreds of miles of terrain that we just swept and walked over and picked up debris that was, been left. So the jungle -- the desert was as clean as it was when we got there.

But that was a, that was quite a turning point in my life when I, we were at Needles, California. You must know where that is on the border, and we were living in tents. They weren't tents, exactly, they were, each man has a shelter half, and two men attach the shelter half together and has a small tent that will sleep two people. Strictly for sleeping 'cause you can't, there's no room for anything else. So four of us would get together and button the tents, button all the tents together, and then put a stake at each corner and pull the thing taut so that you had a shelter about this high, as high as the tent pole, to sleep under and get in, get in out of the sun. And, but I was, most of the time I didn't want to sleep on the ground, so I, I slept under, on the hood of a, one of the scout cars. It was just, I was short enough I could just fit on there comfortably. So I would just lay on this steel on deck and sleep there.

But I went from that on to the Santa Fe Chief. The Super Chief was the better grade of train, but the Chief was pretty damned nice, too. And I went from eating out of a mess kit with a spoon and sleeping on this thing to the lap of luxury in this modern train vehicle, which was just a fantastic change and a virtual cultural shock after three months. [Laughs] 'Cause the food was good, and my own, my own little bunk at night in the Pullman, and it was fabulous.

JB: And that took you from California to the East Coast; is that right?

JF: I went right to, I got leave, en route to New Jersey, I got leave to go home to Baltimore. So I, I went home for probably a week or so, then reported to OCS, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

<Begin Segment 22>

SF: Did you do that partly because of patriotism or wanted to make a contribution to the war effort? I mean --

JF: What was that?

SF: To go through the rigorous training of OCS is probably the hardest way to earn a pair of --

JF: That was just part of, part of the way of getting to be an officer, yeah. A lot of people didn't make it, but then a lot of people did. But that was, that was as strict a control as I've ever been under, I think, other than being in jail. I've never been in jail, but that, I mean, they regulated every bit of time we had until about eight o'clock at night. And about from eight to ten, you were pretty much free to do what you wanted to do, but you were so dammed tired you couldn't do anything. Your level of energy was way down. I mean, I think one, one sign of it was kind of, something that I'll never forget is seeing people, fellow officer candidates, eating these huge chocolate bars, those big size Hershey bars, just eat one of those like you would an ordinary candy bar. Eat the whole damn thing. I mean, that on top of a fair, fairly substantial dinner. [Coughs] Excuse me -- but that, that was common because you were so tired all the time. You needed the energy.

But they, we had, we had two, two what we call tac officers, tactical officers, who were there all the time to make sure we didn't goof up. I mean, inspection after inspection of different kinds, different, different... one of the, one of the craziest things I -- in our senior month I was a platoon lieutenant, and I was in charge of the barracks. And this officer came around to -- this was a captain, he was a big wheel then -- came around to inspect our barracks and everything else, particularly us. And I'll never forget, we, I called barracks to order and got to attention. And he went through, we were going up the stairs to the second floor, and he said, "Mr. Frisino, are all your men wearing garters?" I said, "I think so, Sir. Yes." He said, "Well, let's see." I got upstairs, called everybody to attention. He said, "Let's inspect for garters." So I called everybody to attention. I says, "Left leg, raise." Everybody raises their leg. "Pull up slacks, pull." Everybody pulls up their slacks. "Legs down, let go slacks, feet down." And everybody had garters on. He just kind of looked at me because he thought sure he was going to catch me. That was the craziest thing I think I've done as an officer. But any rate, we proved our point.

But you only needed ten demerits to be flunked out of school, and they were fairly easy to come by. I think I had a total of four, something like that. But if they wanted to, they wanted to get rid of somebody, they could do it in very much of a hurry.

SF: So going through that kind of rigorous training, did you become more patriotic, or well, how did it affect you?

JF: I don't know whether I ever thought of patriotic or not. I don't think so. It's just something else to put up with. I mean, you've been in the army long enough to know -- I was in the army two and a half years at this time -- so I was in there long enough to know that you had to put up with a certain amount of BS in order to get anywhere. And that's, that's the way it was. But you had to be very careful at OCS in everything you said and did. We had this one fellow, first of all, he told you, "We never want to hear the words 'in our old outfit. In our old outfit, we didn't do it this way. We did it this way.' We never want to hear that. We never want to hear any complaints about the officers." "We never..." a whole list of things.

So this guy, who was kind of a talkative character, he was kind of a pain in the butt at times. But any rate, the officer made a statement about, officer teaching us about the M-1 or something, I think it was the M-1 rifle, made a statement about what happens to the M-1 in certain conditions. And this guy raises his hand, and he says, "Wrong, sir." Boy, if you don't think that brought everybody to attention. He says, "In our outfit, we never had a rifle break down because of that reason." And the officer just looked at him and said, "Mr. Benchley" -- whatever the hell his name was -- he says, "First of all, you never tell an officer he's wrong. Second of all, you never refer to what happened in your old outfit. And thirdly, I've got statistics here that show this." And he was gone the next day. It's just that fast. They, they didn't put up with anybody who was screwing around with the system. It was his own, his own ignorance. You never, everybody's head just popped when he said, "You're wrong, sir." I'll never forget that. I mean, it was just so, so stupid on his part to start up something like that.

JB: Almost a conscious decision on his part.

JF: Yeah, yeah. And then we had this cooking, these teachers teaching us about cooking. And all of these fellows, it was, it was kind of a game. They, they were very, very strict at first, 'til they got your attention, and then maybe after three or four days they would ease up a little bit. And this one fellow, this one teacher was particularly strict. And one day he said, "Well," he said, "the best way to cook kidneys is to boil the piss out of them." And everybody, we didn't know whether to laugh or not. And he says, "You can laugh." [Laughs] But I mean, all these, all of these crazy things that, that, made you so absolutely aware of what you were doing. I mean, how quickly you could get into trouble. Because no matter what your rank was -- I was a tech sergeant -- if I'd have failed out, I would have gone back as a private to some outfit. I would've, I'd, you'd lose your rank and the whole schmear, which is something to consider.

<Begin Segment 23>

SF: So after you got your lieutenant's bars and were out of OCS, where did you go next?

JF: To Seattle.

SF: Then you went to the --

JF: Well, first of all, we took a course in, at Fort Monmouth in radio, radio communications. This, this was a time when we were just breaking away from using codes and using, and breaking into voice radio. I mean, it made a heck of a lot of difference because in the armored force, they figured a radio net that operated at ten words per minute was pretty good. Now, ten words a minutes is not very rapid communication. So we were, we were learning about voice radios and setting them up, and so forth. Mostly, they were line-of-sight radios. You had to be able to see the person you were, at least the general area where, where the person was that you were trying to communicate.

When I first went into the armored force, this tent mate of mine was just recovering from a motorcycle accident. He had slid along the road, and he'd just torn up all the skin on one side. He was a mess. His name was Johnson. He was a staff sergeant. What he was was a motorcycle messenger. And he had a stick about four feet long that he carried in the boot of his, he had a Tommy gun. He carried a stick in there with a clothespin on the end. And the officer would write a message and call him up, just wave him up, and he would stick his stick up like this while he's going along parallel with the, with the vehicle, and the officer would attach that message on his stick. He'd pull it in, see who it was going to. Well, maybe it was a commanding officer, and he was three-quarters of a mile up the road. So he'd just gun his motorcycle and pass it away.

Now, that was probably just as fast as the radio, although radio seemed to be faster, but actually it wasn't. So that's the kind of communication they had, which is pretty, pretty primitive really. But these guys were remarkable on their motorcycles, Johnson especially. He was one tough guy.

SF: So you got up to speed on voice communications, and then you went to Seattle. And that's when --

JF: Then we came to Seattle and joined the Alaska Communication System.

SF: And then after Alaska, then where did you go?

JF: I came back down from Alaska, mostly I was a message center officer up there. Came back down from Alaska, got married the same day, and in ten days I was to, my wife and I had ten nights together, not consecutive. And, but I had to report right away to Oakland, Oakland facility. I can't remember the name of it offhand. My wife went down to California with me and stayed. In those times, you could only stay in a hotel about two days in a row. And we shared a two-room hotel with a fellow who had been our best man in our wedding and another friend of mine who would come out to Seattle with me, signal officer. And then we moved to another hotel. And I think we moved three times in the short time I was there. And I, I had to get on a train and leave for Hampton Roads, where I got on the ship and went to Casablanca. So it was pretty sad, pretty sad time.

<Begin Segment 24>

JB: So, what thoughts were going through your, through your head when you were leaving the Continental U.S. and heading overseas to enter World War II?

JF: Well, of course, mostly hoping we'd get back, and second, hoping that no submarine commander would torpedo the damn ship we were on. And that was, that was a fear that everybody had that you -- you know, it wasn't so much as you were going to be sunk as the fact that all of that training you had was just not going to ever going to be brought to fruition. Boy, I didn't go through desert maneuvers to die here in this goddamned ship sinking, that kind of thought. Most people, a lot of them didn't have the time that I did, but still, that was pretty much a thought that was on everybody's mind.

But we went overseas on a huge ship called the Andes, which was going into the Pacific and Orient, steamship line, as a passenger ship, when it was caught, caught in the waves by the war. And they never really finished it. But it was just a huge ship that held, I don't know how many thousands of people were on that thing. Then we went into Casablanca, then separated there.

But when we were going overseas, we were formed into a company, a battalion of casual officers and men, which means they weren't assigned anyplace. So we were going into a casual pool in North Africa. And from the casual pool, there's other organizations, other military organizations would draw six radio operators or four infantrymen or whatever, so it was just... and I was, I was one of the company commanders. Imagine, we had a battalion of men, and all the officers were second lieutenants. Battalion commander was named Page, he was a second lieutenant. I was company commander as a second lieutenant. All this, all my platoon lieutenants were second lieutenants. So we got to North Africa, and we tried to give the fellows some kind of training, although again, we had nothing to train with. It was just a matter of walking every day. So we'd walk out to the ocean on, on the outskirts of Casablanca, and stop at a wine shop and get a couple of glasses of wine. They had a lot of wine, but they didn't have very many glasses. So we had to very careful not to break the glasses. But at any rate, we had a couple glasses of wine, and we'd walk all the way back again, maybe four or five miles one way. And that was, that was the extent of our so-called training.

SF: Where did you go after Casablanca?

JF: Well, I got separated from my company. I still swear to this day that somebody was poisoning our water, but I had no proof other than the fact that a lot of the, lot of the fellows including me got this intense diarrhea. And I got really sick this one night, and this friend of mine said, "I'm going to call, tell them you're having an appendicitis attack or something. See if we can get you in the hospital. So sure enough, he did and the, they came out, put me in the ambulance and took me to the hospital, Casablanca. I was there celebrating my 25th birthday, by the way. And after three or four days of just not eating anything and drinking milk, why they managed to cure this, well, by that time, my outfit had moved over to north, to, they had started on their way to India. And I caught up with them again in India.

But we went from -- now, here I am, I'm already a casual officer without an outfit, and now I'm a casual officer all by myself without even a company to command. [Laughs] So, so we went around North Africa by train, which was a fascinating trip, to Oran. And we were in Oran for probably two, three weeks while they were forming a convoy. And then we went through the Mediterranean to Calcutta -- not Calcutta, but Bombay, through the Mediterranean, through the Suez. We sat for three days off of (Aden), A-(d)-e-n, at the tip of, I can't remember which peninsula it is. But three days, and it was just boiling hot, waiting for the convoy to be able to move again across the ocean, Indian Ocean, I suppose and get us into Bombay, which we finally did. And then I caught up with the outfit. They were in, I think I caught up with them outside of Calcutta. We flew across to Calcutta. And that's where I caught up with the outfit again.

<Begin Segment 25>

SF: So after you got to India, where did you report to?

JF: Well, I joined a, I'd been assigned to a, a big, actually it was a battalion, but it was called the signal company, and gradually they did refer to it as a, as a battalion. But it was providing communications up and down the Ledo Road, and Ledo is in Assam, India. And the road goes down and turns, it goes way down into central Burma, then turns back and goes back up into China.

They were building this road in order to not to have to fly over the hump, which is a... isn't it amazing, I can't remember the name of the mountains. It's Himalayas. Because they were losing so many people. I mean, they were flying these C-47s or C-46s, and flying gasoline over to support the Americans and the Chinese troops in China, and it was very, very costly in manpower. And so they were trying to build this road. And, and we were supplying communications for the, for combat and for the engineers who were building the roads and for anybody else who needed it along this strip. And I was assigned to a place called Tingkawk Sakan, and the only reason that place was there, carved out of jungle was because at that time our main communication was a cable about, about a half inch through, maybe 5/8 of an inch. And it was just like putting down a phone line, except it was a heavy cable, and every once in a while at a given distance this, the messages on this cable had to be, not re-emphasized, but made louder. I can't...

SF: Amplified.

JF: Amplified, exactly. And this equipment was call repeater equipment. And we, they had to be at a certain distance apart. And we set up this repeater station for the cable and also cable repair and things like that, plus the fact that we had radio communication and some, well at that time we didn't have teletype, but we had radio communication. So there was just a small group of us there representing our, our company, in the, in the jungle. We ate with the -- we had our own tents, but we were rationed by our engineer outfit for a while. The food was mostly air-dropped. There was a field along the combat trail, the clear area, and they would drop, drop canned food into there, canned food and bags of rice and so forth. And details of cooking people would go out there and bring that in and fix meals. So the food was not cuisine by very, very much of a jump. But any rate, it was livable, and gradually more and more people came in including supply people because they got enough down that far where they could set up a supply depot. And so we had these big, what we called bashas, big structures made out of bamboo to store this food for the administration of the storage and putting it out to the Chinese troops who were doing the fighting, and anybody else who needed the food. So we had supplies, we had engineers, we had our little signal outfit. And that was about it for quite some time. Then as the Japanese were pushed down the road, more headquarter type people came in including the Red Cross had built a big, big basha there, but not in, just about everybody was gone by the time they were finished -- excuse me -- finished this big -- pardon me -- big building. But, at any rate, why, civilization kind of took over, and we even had the Red Cross girls giving out doughnuts and things like that.

SF: Did you see much action against the Japanese in...

JF: No. Knock on wood, I didn't see any. We, we had some cables cut. The only military action, and it wasn't that, really. But we had some cables cut, and we found that, we got a whole bunch of the guys together and armed everybody as well as we could. And we went, following the cable along, we found a pile of cable that somebody had cut apart and dumped here. And we figured it was the Japanese. So we, we kind of scoured the jungle for a good bit of the day, and I saw something up a tree which I thought was maybe a man, and I fired once. That was my only fire -- only shot. But it wasn't. And we never did find out who was doing that.

And the cable was kind of a standby at that time anyway. We mostly had, were using typewriters, teletypewriters. So it didn't amount to very much. But that was, that was the only time. We could hear, we were close enough that we could hear the sounds of battle, but we had no part in it, which was fine with me. That's not a place, not a place to live, much less to fight. Often we would see the bodies of Chinese and bodies of Japanese, 30, 40 feet apart. It was just bloody fighting.

<Begin Segment 26>

SF: Do you think living in the jungle and seeing the bodies and so forth affected your attitude toward the Japanese or the war?

JF: Oh, I think my level of disgust for the enemy was at probably about as high as it was going to go, so it didn't make a lot of difference anyway, kind of expected it. But we did play host to, one day a bunch of Merrill's Marauders, I don't know if you've ever heard of that outfit. They came through. We had a, just had received a whole bunch of orange juice. I don't know where we got it, but we gave it all to those guys. And then another time, some of the British Chindits came through. They were Ja-, they were combat fighters to the nth degree. Both them and Merrill's Marauders were. So we really went all out to try to help those guys. But they, they were just moving through. They were skin and bones and looked like hell. They'd been through a lot.

JB: So Joe, you went through, it sounds like, pretty intensive training in the United States for a couple years, and you mentioned how you were on the ship, you know, going overseas and you wanted to make use of the training that you had spent a couple years going through. What was your, what was your sense of purpose, or what did you feel like you were really fighting for or, what... I guess, what was your sense of purpose when you were serving in the military at that time?

JF: I think it was, I don't know as I ever sat down and thought about it. I mean, it was just something that had to be done, and we were the ones who were going to do it. And it was a very, there was no decision to be made about it. It was already made. You were, you were in the army, and that's all there was to it. There's no, no specific goal or idea or anything as far as, you were just going to do the very best you could. But I, you never sat down and thought, "Well, I'm really going to do the best I can if I ever get a chance." You didn't think about that. It was, all of that was just taken for granted by just about everybody. Yeah.

I recently, oh, about a year ago I sent away for a book on the 5th Armored Division, and one of the first things I found that was that, that two of my, two of my favorite officers had died, had been killed in action, in late 1944. Without, to me, the sad part of it is that they never lived to see the fact that we were on our way to victory. At that time it was kind of six of one and half-dozen of the other. But a fellow I'd known from the time he was a second lieutenant until he was a major, Major Gerald, he was commander of the 85th Armored Reconnaissance, and he was killed. And the captain who was a lieutenant colonel, he died. Had been my, had been my company commander before we both went to headquarters of the 85th Armored, he was also killed in the line of, in action.

But, this captain and I were sitting there one day, and we were going to Camp Cook on the train, and he had just gotten a beautiful pearl-handled revolver. I don't know if his wife sent it to him or what, but we were pretty good friends. And he said, "Frisino, if anything happens to me, I want you to have this gun." I said, "Thanks, Captain. Hope it doesn't." And that, because if I had stayed with that outfit, I would've, I would have been with, with those guys. And I kept looking for people I knew but I didn't find... there was a lot of names in the, in the book, but I didn't find anybody that I -- I thought my friend Lloyd Couch might have been there. I never heard from him again. I don't know whatever happened to him.

<Begin Segment 27>

SF: So you finished up your army tour in '46; is that right? In Burma. Is that right?

JF: '45.

SF: '45. Okay.

JF: I came home in 1945.

SF: And then maybe you could tell us how you readjusted to life, civilian life, and how you got your life started again.

JF: Well, it was pretty fast. But I had, I had some mental problems, I guess you'd call them. The strangest things. I'd been literally surrounded by armed people for all these years, and all of a sudden I'm in this little house that my wife bought when I was overseas. And there's just the two of us. I haven't got a weapon. And I had one hell of a time ever getting to sleep. I mean, I was just on guard all the time. For some reason I couldn't, I couldn't shake it. And this little house was on a hill, and the side of the house was kind of built into the hill. So all you had to do was walk up the hill and step over on the roof, and we had a big skylight over our head. And I could just think of somebody just coming through that skylight. And I'm, and I'm totally unarmed. And it, it just, I heard every sound for, this went on for probably a year. That was one.

Another was that I got this job at the newspaper, and when I came home -- I went to work by bus -- when I came home, I transferred at Third and, I can't remember the corner, but that's where the old post office used to be. And the new post office was there now. But the old post office had this very heavy and ornate decoration above the top, kind of hanging over, and I for some reason got the strange idea that I shouldn't stand under that thing. So I was always standing out by the curb. And I, I mean, there was always something over your head in the jungle, and every once in a while these things would fall, vines or something would fall down. And I never got hit by one, but sometimes they'd take out part of your, part of a tent or something. But for some reason that stayed with me, and I, those two things I had really a tough time acclimating to civilian life.

And then an army buddy of mine, a fellow that I had met in (Baltimore), when we were taking our pre-induction physical in 1940, December, it was December 23rd. We were taking our induction physical together, and we were sworn in together, and we became, he went to radio school with me, Fort Knox, and we corresponded ever, all our military career. And finally when I got out of the army he was already out, and he came, we had a two-story level house with this huge room in the basement. And he said, "I'm going to go to pharmacy school at the University of Washington." I said, "Where are you going to live?" And he says, "I don't know." I said, "How about our lower room?" So he said, "Well, yeah. I'll fix it up, and I'll live there." It was already fixed up. It was plastered and the whole schmear. So he was in school about four days, then he brought home two other guys. And he says, "Is it okay if these guys live with me?" And I said, "Sure." So all of a sudden I had some support in my own house, and these, these feelings of being alone left. It was a really strange thing to go through. To this day I don't know what the heck caused it other than the fact that you've been cramped for so long with, surrounded by people and all of a sudden you're all by yourself. So they, they stayed with us for quite some time. In fact, all through the school. And we had a ball. It was great.

<Begin Segment 28>

JF: But I, in January, January the 3rd, which was the day after my birthday, of 1946, the University of Washington started a catch-up course for returning veterans. A lot of people had returned before I did. And I signed up for that course. And one of the things I did, I took a news writing course. And it just so happened that the teacher was the news editor at the Seattle P-I, a fellow named Bruce Helberg. And one day he asked us to write a little autobiography. So I did, and told, wrote about my newspaper career in Baltimore. So he called me in his office a couple days later, and he said, "I understand you were, had some news, newspaper experience. And I said, "Yeah. I was an apprentice on the copy desk." And he had brought some stories, newspaper clippings with him with the heads torn off. And he said -- there were three of them, I think. And he says, "Here, write me some heads on these stories." Well, I hadn't done this for five years, but it came back. And pretty soon I dashed these heads off. He says, "Come on down to the P-I. I'll give you a job." And just like that. I don't think I was in school a month, and I had a job. So I went down to the P-I, and that was it.

In the meantime, a friend of my wife's was the advertising manager for a big store that used to be here that is no longer in existence. And she was trying to get me a job, because of her friendship with my wife, she was trying to get me a job on the P-I. Well, I already had the job before she got into action. But that's the way it worked. The funny thing that, we were in, when we came into New York Harbor, there were some newspaper people came aboard because we hadn't -- I didn't know it -- but we had some Indians aboard who were fairly famous for something or other. And these fellows were going to interview them. And I asked the two reporters, I said, "Any of you fellows have any contacts at all in Seattle?" And the guy said, "Yeah. I've got a friend works there on the Times." He said, "I'll give you his phone number. When you get home, give him a call. Maybe he'll find a job for you." Well, I never had to follow up on that because Bruce Helberg got this immediate job at the P-I. And I've been there virtually ever since.

SF: What were the different jobs that you had at the P-I?

JF: Well, I started on the copy desk, and I did pretty well then. We moved in the winter of 1948-49, we moved to the building where the globe was on Sixth and... well, any rate, we moved in there. And soon after we moved into the new building, why, they started a paper called The Red Line, which was an afternoon paper that was supposed to be in direct competition with the Times. And the fellow who was the telegraph editor was, preferred sports, so he would send in the sports. And the news editor at that time gave me the job as telegraph editor. So I started, that was my first editorship, and it was about 19 -- late part of 1949. Sixth, Sixth and Wall (St.) was where we moved to before the P-I moved down to the waterfront, where it is now. And, and from there I went to different editorships. I was picture editor for something like fifteen years, and makeup editor and news, news editor and so forth and so on. So I had a pretty good, lot of experience in those different jobs over the years.

<Begin Segment 29>

SF: Over that long time period, did you ever bump into Japanese Americans, cover a Japanese American story or something about the Japanese American community, anything of that sort?

JF: No, I don't recall. I don't recall what I did. No. A fellow who lived across the street from us, a fellow by the name of Bob Dietch, was a, I don't know how he ever got the job, but he was the secretary of, of a Japanese American veterans organization. And I was writing a column at the time, and this was fairly recent, last twenty-five years or so. And he said, "Why don't you come to one of the meetings with me and meet some of these people?" So I went down, somewhere down in this area here, and I met a lot of these people. A lot of them were 442nd veterans. And I was pretty impressed. And I wrote, I wrote about them. And then I don't how many, I don't know whether I ever went back to another meeting or not because Bob got pretty sick at that time and eventually died of cancer. But that was one of my first contacts.

JB: Joe, when did you first learn about the 442nd?

JF: I don't really remember. I think, I think when I was at, in the, in Fort Dix, I think it was Fort Dix, where they left, they, where we landed when we came home from overseas, they said, "All you people who live west of the Mississippi are lucky. You're all going to be flown home." Turns out we weren't lucky at all because the weather was so inclement that they, day after day flights were scrapped, just cancelled. And in fact, I tried like heck to be discharged right there in Baltimore just so I could go home, and then get out to Seattle on my own hook. Because it just took forever. And one, one of the reasons that they cancelled people flying from New York to Seattle was that a planeload of Nisei, 442nd people, had crashed in the mountains somewhere. I'm not quite sure where. So they cancelled all of those flights. So when we did get on a flight, we went down through Texas, and I was finally discharged in California, then had to come up here by train and by bus. I was a basket case by the time I got home. But that's, I think that's probably one of the first times I really heard about the 442nd was when that, when that plane went down.

SF: How did finding out about the 442 affect your attitudes about Japanese or Japanese Americans?

JF: Well, my attitude had softened quite a bit before then in talking to my wife about the, the friends that she had who were Japanese, and I got a little background about what these people did here and what kind of people they were, and actually not different than anybody else, and not at all the absolutely horrible people I thought they were. So that was a process of time and getting to know more about what I was talking about.

And I mentioned that we were in Hawaii, and this cab driver turned out to be a veteran of the 442nd, and he mentioned the numbers, and I, it didn't click with me at all. And he said -- he wasn't very kind, in fact, he was pretty, pretty beat out of shape about the fact that I didn't know what the 442 numbers meant. He says, "What the hell's wrong with you? Don't you know anything about history?" And I said, "Well, probably not enough." And he says, "Well, the 442nd was the most decorated outfit in the army," and so forth. And he gave me a thumbnail lecture. But I mean, he was so, so adamant and so worked up about the thing, that this must have been some outfit. But I'll never forget that. He was, he didn't know who I was or my background at all, but he was sure as hell telling me about his background. So I kind of appreciated that.

SF: What did your wife say about her Japanese American friends, and did you make friends with them because she knew them or anything like that?

JF: Well, they were, they were classmates of hers. She had, she had been, she went to Leschi School for a while. She went, she had a rather mobile life as a young, as a younger child. And her mother got divorced, and so forth, and so she was, had moved around quite a bit. But she, she got to be pretty friendly with some of the, some of the people. Actually, tomorrow the Golden, Garfield Golden Grads are having a lunch, and she and I are going to go to that, and I'll meet again some of the many Japanese Americans who were in the class and who still, still come back to the meetings, which is kind of interesting. But she, she just knew them as fellow students at Garfield, and what they did and what they didn't do, and they, the background didn't, didn't seem to play any, any part. It was just, I mean, any more than someone, they, she was, if they were Irish or whether they were Jewish or Greeks or whatever the heck, it didn't make any difference. They were just classmates and friends.

SF: In the old days, when you just got back, and she mentioned that these folks were her friends because she had gone to school with them and so forth, did you ever get into a little discussion about, about the Japanese or anything like that, because your attitudes were different at that time?

JF: I don't think so, (Steve). I don't, I don't recall anything like that, although given the situation, you'd think that that would have happened, but I'm, I'm not, I think in all probability my stand had softened considerably by that time, so I'm sure I was ready to hear more about these people that I didn't know anything at all about.

<Begin Segment 30>

SF: What do you think caused you to soften your attitude about the Japanese over the years?

JF: I think it was just a matter of time, and I keep, when you ask me if a thought came to my mind that I was appreciative of, of the way that the Japanese fought, they were no slouches, that's for damned sure. And just, I think that probably would play, play some kind of a role in this, figuring out appreciation of another soldier who was very well, very well-trained, and just being ever-so-thankful that we didn't go from Burma over into, invading force in Japan.

SF: Do you recall what your feeling was when you first heard about the atomic bomb?

JF: I think mostly I didn't believe it at first. I don't know how we heard about it. I think it must, must have been on the news radio somehow. But then when it actually did happen, why, there was, I mean, when we actually knew it, then the war was over, why, we celebrated it as well as we could, but we didn't, really didn't have any, any way to celebrate, other than having a drink, which we did anyway. So, but I mean, I was at the town of Myitkyina by then, and we were on the outskirts of the town, and apparently they were -- at the hospitals where there were nurses and things, why, there was a lot of partying going on and things like that. But I really don't remember what my, my first, my first reaction was to the, to the bombs. I think, as I said, I think it was just total disbelief that they could do anything like that.

<Begin Segment 31>

SF: With -- over the many years that you were in the newspaper business that things like the Civil Rights movement and the kind of changing American attitudes toward racial groups, how did that impact you?

JF: Well, that's pretty hard to answer because I, once again, I had to... of course, by that time I was in Seattle. And I had no, I had no particular feel for the, for the, the total picture that older cities represented or presented. I mean, the area containing black families at that time in Seattle was very, very small. You take a place like New York or Chicago or Philadelphia or even Baltimore where there were tremendous areas of black population, and I had no firsthand information, really. I'd never, well I'd barely seen the, seen the scratch on the surface of the black neighborhoods. And I had no idea how those people were living, so it was a, I guess I was about as naive to it as most, most people were, except that I saw it from the newspaper's standpoint all the time and saw it coming and the problems. By this time, our kids were in schools along with black kids, and we had black friends. It was very difficult to be able to see the anger that some people were coming from, and the hopelessness of some of the, some of the black people, trying to get justice. So it was, it was kind of a learning process for me.

I had had some very close contact with black people coming home. When we were still, when we were still in the jungle, we, those of us who were coming home were assigned to a black signal company that was coming home. I knew something about this outfit, but not very much. And all of a sudden, I'm assigned to this and we were surrounded entirely by black people. And that was kind of an eye-opener. The company commander was a southerner named Captain Miller, and he was, he was really a leader in more ways than one of this, of this black group of soldiers. I mean, it was, it was a real eye-opener to me the way, the way he handled these, these black fellows. I mean, they would come to him with, with their problems, and he would listen to 'em, and he would talk to 'em, just almost like a priest would to a, to a parishioner.

I remember one day this day huge black guy was being harassed by another pretty good-sized black fellow, and he got the captain aside, and I happened to be within earshot. And he said, "Captain," and he started to cry, this big, husky guy. And he said, "Captain," he said, "I've already killed one man," he said, "as a civilian." And he said, "I'm going to kill that guy if he doesn't get off my back." And, and I, but I couldn't hear what the captain was saying, but the captain had his arm around him, and they were walking up and down, and he was just consoling this guy about the kind of actions he could take and should take, but most of all not anything as violent as he was contemplating.

But I've never forgotten that that this fellow, he, Captain Miller was a tall, skinny guy, typical farm boy, but he was sharp. Mostly he, he had the greatest empathy for the fellows in his command. He had been with 'em for quite some time in the jungle, and there were stories were told about how they were afraid to go into the jungle and so forth and so on, but I don't know if that would be true or not. But he was, he was just fantastic with these guys, and I kind of learned, learned something from being associated with these fellows all the time. But they were pretty much like everybody else. So I had, I had that as kind of a criteria. Unfortunately, the only time I ever had anything stolen from me was when I was with this outfit. Somebody stole my watch. But I didn't know whether, who had done it or why, but it was a real eye-opener. But it was interesting in the fact that in their every day, the differences in their everyday life. I mean, I'm talking these fellows are all twenty, nineteen, twenty years old, and this is 1945, and the, we had to have, make sure everybody had full clothes before they were discharged. I don't think there was a pair of socks to be found in the whole damn company, or handkerchiefs. To me, that spoke quite a bit about the kind of people we were dealing with, their personal, personal habits. They did not wear, want to wear socks, and they did not have any training in the use of a common handkerchief, which is kind of a small thing, but still it was very striking, that we'd go through an inventory of these things, and everybody needed, needed a pair of socks or a handkerchief. That's kind of getting off the point, but it was just fascinating.

And again, there was, there were some of those, some of those fellows, just -- in almost every case where you get a group of men together, whether they're black or white, there's always a comedian, someone who can make you laugh no matter where you are. And it was exactly the same thing. There were one or two of these black kids who were just so naturally, just natural comics. And they were just funnier -- they could get anybody laughing. I mean, it was just amazing, the closeness of, of the association of humor to their fellow man. It didn't make any difference what color they were or what their station in life was. They just had that innate knack of coming up with the craziest situations and the right words at the right time. It was an eye-opener.

<Begin Segment 32>

SF: Well, maybe I can ask you one more question about Japanese Americans, and maybe Jenna can finish up. I think it was 19-, 1988, President Reagan signed a redress bill that gave everybody who was in, every Japanese American who was interned $20,000 and a formal apology. It was kind of pro forma, just a sheet of paper. But everybody got a redress check for $20,000. What are your thoughts about that?

JF: Well, at the time, I was, I was heavily into reading about the American West and how we thoroughly screwed over the American Indians. And my thought at the time was, this was kind of a one-time thing for the Japanese people, but why the hell don't we do something about the American Indians that we've done this to time after time after time over hundreds of years? And also I figured that it certainly wasn't enough money for what, from what I had heard and how some of these people were, some of the Japanese Americans were pretty damned well off, and all of a sudden, why, they didn't have anything, that it was not nearly enough compensation. If they're going to do it, they ought to do it with a little more generosity. So I was kind of ambivalent there. But, and I still, right now sitting here, feel exactly the same way. I mean, we, we violated the Japanese rights. There's no doubt about that. But still we, we did much worse to the Indians, as even wiping out, definite attempt to wipe out their cultures, which to me is a terrible crime.

But those two thoughts are still with me, that if they're going to help the Japanese, $20,000 is a drop in the bucket from what, what's going to actually do, what good is it going to do. And what good is it going to do the people who have passed away? Because a lot of 'em, a lot of the Japanese were long gone.

<Begin Segment 33>

JB: Well, Joe, to finish up the interview, I'd like to ask you one last question: You shared with us stories from your early childhood up 'til the time you were back in Seattle and working at the P-I, and I was wondering if you could recap some major lessons you've learned over your life or some of the key, key ideas you've learned in the past eighty or eighty-one years, and hopefully some students will be viewing this interview, and maybe you could think of something you'd like to, to leave with either your grandchildren or students who might be watching this interview.

JF: Well, I, I feel awfully lucky that I had what I had. As it appeared to me while it was happening, it was a pretty, a pretty damned good life. If I dig into it, why, there were a lot of questions that I could ask myself, something that you sometimes don't think about it, why, when I was in the service for five years, did I never receive a letter from some of my relatives, particularly my Italian relatives. And then it dawned on me that probably none of my father's brothers or sisters had ever written a letter in their life. And so I could kind of mark that off. But I grew up maybe naive but still loving all these people and getting a great, great joy out of them. And despite some of these things that you think about them, why, it would kind of irritate you.

I think between my wife and I and all of us who were married at that time, we had a sense of commitment which was very, very strong, but we also had a sense of humor which, if you can just say something that, say the right thing at the right time, you can ease off on your anger no matter what you're angry about. It took me a long time to figure that out. For a while I followed in my father's footsteps. He and my mother very rarely fought, but my father would have these silent periods where he wouldn't say anything. And I tried that, too, but it didn't work for a damn with my wife, so we'll just flare, and then she'll say something or I'll say something, and just, it pretty much vanishes. And I think that the other guys who married Seattle girls were just, just about the same way I am, find something to, or between the two of them find some way of, of diffusing the feelings.

Harriette and I have been particularly lucky with our children, knock on wood. They, none of 'em had any serious problems. Although it is kind of a thrill to wake up and have your son come walking up the steps with two big cops following him, and that's what happened to son John. He was scouring around in somebody's car that wasn't his, and police caught him and brought him home. Or going to a jail and get somebody out of jail for speeding or something like that, drinking. But no, no serious problems. We've got families that we love. And that I have, Harriette and I have a whole large group of girls that my daughter went through high school with at Forest Ridge who have adopted us for years and years, and actually two of them, when they lost their fathers, they adopted me as their father. And so we've got the love of all those girls and their families, and we feel pretty good about that.

They had their 25th (graduation) anniversary, and Harriette and I were the only parents invited, and we were invited to be bartenders. And when they graduated in 1970 from Forest Ridge, I wrote a poem about their graduation, and they had me read the poem as part of the 25th anniversary. And now, this year, they're celebrating their, their 30th, and once again the poem is going to be included in the, in the affair. And we're, Harriette and I are invited. So we feel real good about those people. And we've got in-laws that we like.

<Begin Segment 34>

JF: I think if, you always, always hear when you're, your age of you folks, that health is so important, and I sure have noticed that in the last, about the last three or four months. I've had some pretty serious things wrong with me, and I've been very, fairly weak, and mostly there's a certain anger and frustration that comes with that, that you can't, you can't do what you really think you ought to be able to do. And it's, there's this, of course you've heard the story about the man who says, "If I'd known that I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself." Well, I always tried to take good care of myself, and I stopped smoking years and years ago. I got my wife to stop smoking. And I've been trying to get all my kids -- well, none of our kids smoke right now.

My son John was heavily into marijuana at the time when it was fashionable, and he tried to get me to try it. And I said, "I don't, I just don't need, it, John." He said, "It makes food taste better. It makes music sound better. It makes life just so much better." And I said, "I don't need it. I'm fine. My food tastes good to me. I can listen to all the music I want to hear. And I just feel fine. I don't need anything to give me an, an uplift." And I still feel that way. Fortunately, they've all, eased off of that.

But John was living in California, and he had a woman who was, he was doing repair work with -- she lived out in the valley somewhere outside of Hollywood. And he had all of this marijuana growing there. And John, I told John, he had three expensive marijuana plants from Mexico. And I said, "John, I want you to get rid of these things right now." "But Dad, they cost me so much, and this is such excellent marijuana." I said, "I want it out of the house." So we had this big three-story house, and every once in a while, I'd get up on the very roof, climb up the roof. And there was a flat place there, just, it was wonderful. You'd just look out over the, out over all of Lake Washington and the mountains and everything. So I go up there one day, and lo and behold, here's these three marijuana plants. So I picked each one of 'em up, and I threw it as hard as I could out the front yard, and of course, they smashed into a million pieces. And I left them there. Well, John came home. I don't know where he'd been, but he came home, and he found these. And he said, "I'm leaving. I'm running away from home." I said, "Where will you go?" He says, "I don't care." He said, "Somebody'll take me in." He says, "You've ruined so many hundreds of dollars worth of my marijuana." So I says, "Well, okay." And Harriette, Harriette was trying not to stop him, but her heart wasn't in it particularly. So he's gone for about five minutes, and pretty soon there's a knock on the back door, and it's John. He says, "Can I borrow $10 for gas?" [Laughs] That, that kind of changed the whole thing around. So he, after a couple of days, well, he was staying with a friend and he came back.

JB: So, some of your lessons of fatherhood, might have been some of the most significant...

JF: But it was, having all these, these kids we had, all of our kids were four or five years apart. We had this big house, and we had eight bedrooms, so we had enough room that each child had his own area. And they all, always had friends in and so forth. So we pretty much had a lot of people with us all the time, which is, when I think about it, apparently went back to my army days when I was happy surrounded by other people. Because I like nothing better than having a lot of people around. I don't know.

I guess we'll just, I don't know anybody who wants to live forever, but I don't know anybody who wants to die, either. And it's kind of, it's really pretty profound, you know? I mean, you figure, I'm eighty-one years old. I'll be eighty-two in January. How much longer do I want to go? I've got a friend who's eighty-four who can't walk because he's lost his knee, and his knees are virtually given up on him. I've got another friend who's younger than I am who has diabetes who's lost one part of, part of his right leg and a good part of his left foot. And the thought of death is there, but you certainly don't want to do it yourself. You don't want to take your own life, and yet you don't want to get beyond a certain point where you're virtually a walking invalid. Which is what my friend George is. And he was one of the most active guys I've ever met in my life, and here he can't do a damn thing except hobble around his room. He can't play golf. He and I were commercial fishermen together. He couldn't even begin to climb aboard a boat. So all he has to do is just look out the window and watch people do what he used to do. And at some point that's not compensation enough. Yet there's that question of how long you want to go.

JB: Well, Joe, we all wish you good wealth -- or good health, sorry.

JF: Thank you. I wish you health.

JB: Yeah. Thanks so much for coming to do the interview.

JF: That's an important thing.

JB: Because I think we'll finish with that. And thanks again, Joe.

JF: Okay.