<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So, Ron, we're going to get started again. And we're just sort of finishing up your high school, and with a sense that you weren't really planning to, to go on to college. Why don't we retell that story? You mentioned it a little bit about, about your, what you were going to do and your mother's intervention, but why don't we talk about that again in terms of...

RM: Okay. It was a critical moment.

TI: Yeah. So you graduated from high school. What, what were you doing?

RM: When I graduated from high school, I was still working in a machine shop. It was June -- May, actually, of '45. The war in Europe had ended, but the war in Japan was still going, and I was working probably four to midnight at the machine shop, putting threads on nuts and bolts. And I remember our high school graduation, we went out and partied all night, and I went back to work the next day. As I said, a machine shop you could work whenever you wanted putting the threads on. And so I would do that, and the, at this time, my, I can remember coming home, probably, maybe a week or two after, and asking, not asking my mother with the stuff on my desk. And I would be... I was of age, I was eighteen, I think, at the time, so I thought that I could just go ahead and fill out the forms and send them in.

TI: This was forms for the merchant marines?

RM: This is forms for the merchant marine.

TI: Now, why the merchant marines? Why didn't you think about --

RM: Well, because I loved to travel, and that goes back to another incident. In my junior and senior years, I worked for the forest service, pulling weeds that kill trees. And one, the summer of my, of '44, I worked on the -- I was up in the Blisterust, up out of Pierce, Idaho. And some sheep got in the water and a lot of people came down with boils and wound up in the hospital. And they closed the camp, not completely, but mostly. And so I took off, I hitchhiked and spent five weeks on the road to Cleveland, Ohio, and back. And I learned that I loved to travel. So enjoyed meeting the people, was really an experience.

TI: Do you recall anything in particular on this trip that really...

RM: Yeah, well, in Big Timber, Montana, I got aboard a car and the guy was drunk, and we drove on the wrong side of the road. I kept telling him to stop, I needed to get out and go to the bathroom -- and I really did. [Laughs] He finally stopped and I got out and ran the opposite direction, and he, he went off on the wrong side of the street, and I slept in a haystack in Greybull, Wyoming, and walked all night in North Dakota looking for a town, or South Dakota. And wound up having trouble hitchhiking through Chicago, so I took the train from one side of Chicago to the other. And wound up in Cleveland -- I had fifteen bucks, and turned around, because I figured I'd better go back home while I had some money, and I wound up back home. I never told my mother, and one of the people who gave me a ride sent photos of, from Chicago that I caught the ride from Chicago to Yellowstone Park with this couple and their baby. So he sent pictures and she, I told her, finally, where I'd been. But she thought I'd been up on the forest service all this time. So I knew I loved to travel, and...

TI: What was it about the travel that you loved the most?

RM: The people, the different people, the farmers, the carpenters, the different people of all walks of life. Probably, I don't know how many different people I met on that trip.

TI: How would people react to, you're like seventeen years old, a person hitchhiking, what was the reaction?

RM: I was dressed in khaki. I had an army uniform on with, without any insignias or anything, and they thought I was probably in the service or something. And they would pick me up and give me a ride. A lot of lonely people. I remember a priest giving me a ride from Chicago to Detroit, and I thought, and he, he asked me to go in and buy some chewing tobacco. So I went in the store and bought the chewing tobacco, and the guy looked at me and he says, "Gosh, you're young to be chewing." [Laughs] I didn't say anything. I took it out and gave it to the priest. But a lot of different people in a wonderful aspect of, cross-section of America. Didn't discuss, surprisingly, didn't discuss the war, this was 1944, didn't, none of that. One guy who gave me a ride had been working on Hanford, and he says, "They got their building, this huge plant. We don't know what for, and it doesn't look like it's for anything. They're just keeping us busy." That, that kind of thing. In the main, they were very nice people.

I remember one night, it was on the way back, and I'd gotten a ride, it was turning dark, and this fellow came out of a house and -- quite a ways away, and he said, "You know, it gets awfully cold here at night." I had lost my clothes in Detroit, all I had was the coat -- I mean, I'd lost my coat and other things in Detroit, and so I just had the khaki uniform on. He said, "You better come on in." So I went in, and they fed me dinner, wonderful farm couple, then, and their boys had joined up in the service. And I slept in one of the bed, and I remember I had a silver dollar, and I left that on the chiffonier, and went out. And they, she fed me breakfast, and I walked over to the road. Here he came running with the dollar, and said, "Oh, you can't, we can't take that." He said, "You were delightful company, my wife really appreciated having somebody." So I said, "Oh..." "No, you take the dollar," so I did. And, but people like that were awfully good. Hitchhiking in 1944, there were dozens of people doing it. It was a most common form of travel. And every once in a while I'd get stuck and I'd take a bus to the next town or something. Not much, though.

TI: But that gave you a sense that you liked to travel.

RM: Yeah.

TI: And that led you to want to be a merchant marine? 'Cause you thought you would travel the world?

RM: Yes. Yes. I, and it fit with my love of history.

TI: How so? How would the merchant marines...

RM: I knew there were places in the world I really wanted see, that I had an itch to see. That it was much bigger that living in Boise, that there was another world that I wanted to go and see, be a part of. And I could hardly wait to travel. And so, and that always was in the back of my mind, and I had responsibilities later as a husband and father, take care of my mother, that kind of thing, I knew those responsibilities. But I could work travel in every once in a while, and did. And, and I was fairly good at foreign languages, I didn't have to work at it to learn languages.

TI: So what foreign languages did you know going through high school?

RM: Well, French and German, and Spanish. Those, those in particular.

TI: So how, did you learn in school, or was it self-taught?

RM: Mostly self-taught. I found I could learn languages easier by myself. And I did the flash card routine, and I did that for my doctorate. The flash cards, the five thousand essential words in each language, I would memorize about a dozen of those a day, and I would carry them in my pocket and, and gradually build up. And so I had a lot of trouble with the verbs for irregular and that kind of thing. That, that was the part that I had to really work at when, later on.

TI: That's amazing.

RM: But I, I was, I think it was the fact that we went to this Finnish farm, and we had to speak Finnish, that I was five or six years old, and it was duck soup. Didn't have any problem because of that. And so I've always been an advocate of people learning foreign languages when they're young. And, and it carried over, I can feel that. And I think 1974 I learned Serbo-Croatian, so, so I could go to Yugoslavia. And I didn't have as much trouble with that as I thought.

TI: How, how about Japanese?

RM: I, you know, I have the flash cards on Japanese, and I've given it my best, and maybe I have a speaking vocabulary of five hundred words. And I've discovered that, the law of diminishing returns as you get older. And I've always rued the fact that I did French and German, because I never used it after -- oh, yes, I did, in graduate school. But after graduate school I never used it. I have been to France and Germany, and I can get along there, but in the main, I found that they weren't useful for me in the history that I've done.

TI: That's interesting. So let's go --

RM: Japanese would have been tremendous.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.