Nelson Mitchell, Jr. Video Oral History Interview

              Nelson Mitchell, Jr.
April 22, 2010
Interviewer:  Katherine Gillen
Re:  World War II, Pearl Harbor Survivor, Luke AFB
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director:  Diane Nevill
Transcribed by:  Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona 


Gillen:  Today is April 22, 2010, and we’re here at the Visual Information Center at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, and I’m Katherine Gillen, the library director, and I’m with Mr. Nelson Mitchell, Jr., who is a survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
	Mr. Mitchell, can you tell me, where did you grow up?
Mitchell:  I grew up, born and raised in northeast Texas, a small town that was out in the country, named Bivens, B-I-V-E-N-S.  That’s where my grandparents came there after slavery, and they bought some land there.  I was telling that they bought land, and when he signed for his fifty acres, he put an “X.”  [unclear] pretty nice there, because they didn’t take the land away from them, because that’s all they knew, put his “X.”  And most of them that came there, put “X.”  I didn’t know my grandfather, but I knew my grandmother.  My grandmother used to go fishing with [me].  I was her guide when we went fishing.  On this land, there was a creek running through there, and I would always love to go with her, because we’d go down there.  And I had to hold the barb wire up so she could get through.  And usually, when we went fishin’, she always had a snuff box, and I used to have to chew that, [unclear] toothbrush.  And it was a black gum tree we kept in the field there.  We took twigs off there and I chewed 'em so that she could put it in her snuff box and [unclear].
Gillen:  Oh, my goodness!
Mitchell:  And she dipped snuff.  And she had a good time down there.  We had a good time down there, catchin’ fish and everything.  It was quite an interesting place.
	Now Bivens was a sawmill town.  When we went there, there were some sawmill, single mill, in this little area where we stayed.  After they bought the fifty acres, then they turned around and bought more.  We bought 320 acres, and we kept this land in the family.  It was passed on, in other words.  And after my grandparents [divided?], they had three boys.  There was Isam [phonetic], Walter, and Nelson.  And my father had a twin sister.  Her name was Carrie [phonetic].  But she went to school, she taught school and everything.  And there we hatched out in the country.  But they went to college, her and my mother.  My father married into a family, the Mosley family.
Gillen:  Was there a little African-American community there?
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  Okay, was Bivens mostly black then?
Mitchell:  No.
Gillen:  It was a mixture?
Mitchell:  Well actually, blacks stayed in different areas.  In there we had a church, St. Paul, and we had a Monzan [phonetic].  Monzan Church, there was a creek that run, separated part of the community.  And St. Paul was on the east side of the creek.  Monzan was on the west side.  And we stayed on the west side.  Also, the east side was the cemetery and the school.  We had a school down there, St. Helena School.  And that school went from first grade right on up to around about the tenth grade-well, it’s the ninth.  The tenth grade, I had to leave and go to Marshall, Texas, which was about forty miles from Bivens.  I went to school one year, and then I got sick, couldn’t go no more.
Gillen:  So what grade was that?
Mitchell:  I went through tenth grade.  I had the tenth grade there in Marshall, and we took up chemistry, geometry, [algebra], and history, and literature there.
Gillen:  Was your grandmother actually born a slave?
Mitchell:  Yeah, my grandmother was born a slave.
Gillen:  So there were other freed slaves that came to that community then?
Mitchell:  Yeah, because we had a cousin, lived with us.  Seemed like Cousin Gracie, her husband was born in slavery, and he’s buried at this graveyard there, St. Paul.  We have a graveyard and a church there, and the school was there.  They was all kind of together, and it was all out in the country.
Gillen:  Were the relationships between the black community and the white community-what were they like?
Mitchell:  Well, there wasn’t no whites there.  The whites there, I think we had a few whites was there, they had more or less, when the black come in, they kind of sold them the land and stuff, and then the whites, they were cuttin’ logs, cuttin’ timber, and makin’ shingles for the mill.  They run that.  We see them every once in a while, but more or less, it was just practically predominantly black.  And when they came in there, I don’t know.
Gillen:  Okay.  That’s interesting.  What was the nearest big city?
Mitchell:  The nearest big city was Atlanta, Texas.  We lived around about twelve or thirteen miles from Atlanta.  And Bivens was a sawmill, post office, and that was about it.  But all the whites lived up there in Bivens.  Also, Bivens extended out in the country too.  And we called that Bivens, Texas.  It was like a community out there.  And everybody got the mail carriers-they were white.  The postman, he would come by, first it used to be in his [unclear].
Gillen:  I’m sorry, in his what?
Mitchell:  Bergie [phonetic], where he’d have a little top over, like a little car.
Gillen:  A buggy then?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I reckon so.  And then after he got later on, he finally got him a car.  He didn’t have no car when he first started up.  And he brought the mail and put it in the boxes.  It was a route.  We lived on Route 1, Box 20.
Gillen:  So was that an area you would call farming, or was it like an area of ranching?
Mitchell:  It was more or less farming, and ranching too, because most people had cows and things in there.  But then in a certain area would be fenced off where you had your cows and things, besides somebody else had theirs in the next one.  And it was probably, may have been larger than Maricopa.  I think it was-I forget exactly how many acres or miles it was there.
Gillen:  Pretty good-sized, huh?
Mitchell:  It was a large area-still a large area there.
Gillen:  So you only got to the tenth grade because you got sick.  After you recovered, did you get a job, or at what point did you join the military?  What year were you born?
Mitchell:  I was born January 19, 1920.  And more or less I went to the St. Helena School until right on up until I graduated.  After I graduated from there, then I had to go to another school, because Marshall was the school we went to where they went through tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade.  But I got sick.  I had bloxina [phonetic].  In other words, I went blind and I couldn’t see, and I didn’t know nothin’ from one Sunday.  I didn’t know nothin’ 'til that Wednesday.  When I came to myself and woke up, I asked them what day it was, what time it was, and they told me it was, if I remember, Sunday.  And then after going through the coma, well, I asked them, when I woke up, I asked them what day it was, what time it was, and they told me.  My mother, we had one doctor, he wasn’t doin’ me much good.  That��s the reason my father went and got a doc by the name of Whitehead.  That’s the only reason I’m living, because he said, “Put a hot pack over his head, across, fifteen minutes, and then a cold pack.”  And we had to get ice from about twelve miles from where we lived at.  We had to dig our own well and everything.  And it was in the summertime.  And this was from our….  I got sick, and along about in, must have been about July….
Gillen:  Like 1936, or something like that?
Mitchell:  No, it was close to ’40.  Or no, it was ’38 and ’39, those late years in the thirties.  And after, Dr. Whitehead told me to put a cold pack over my head for fifteen minutes or a half hour, and then a hot pack.  And finally that got me….  My fever was so high, 'til I didn’t know anything.  And so after that, I come to myself, beside my neck there was where they had to go in and lance it, and there was corruption.  It come out of my head, down into….
Gillen:  You mean like pus?
Mitchell:  Yeah, pus.  He got about a half a cupful of that.  Then I had to wear glasses.
Gillen:  Of course back then they didn’t really have any antibiotics or anything.
Mitchell:  No, they just had to do anything.  I remember them takin’ a needle and puttin’ it in there, a-drainin’.  And then I couldn’t go back to school no more, because we didn’t have no money.  In 1940, January, I was able to join the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps.  I stayed there, and they sent me from Bivens to Mt. Pleasant.  Mt. Pleasant was a town.  I caught the train and everything.  I went to El Paso, and I stayed down there in El Paso for six months.  And then after six months I decided I didn’t want to be down there, and so I come home.  And then after comin’ home for about a month, I decided….  I had wanderlust, I wanted to go some other place.  And then I made some cross-ties to put on the railroad.  You work hard for them!  I only got 50¢ a tie, if it was a good tie.
Gillen:  Okay.  Were you kind of like contracted out from the railroad to make the ties?
Mitchell:  No, we cut the timber off our farm and made the ties.  We carried 'em up to Bivens, where they’d grade 'em, and if they was good pine ties, more or less they wanted wooden ties, something really strong.  And so they give you 50¢.  We’d never get over a dollar.
Gillen:  Good heavens.  How many could you do a day?
Mitchell:  Oh, you could do three or four, because you had to try to get 'em straight, saw 'em down, [unclear] and everything, and then hew 'em out with this broadax.  We had a broadax and if you’re doin’ a good job on 'em, you had to turn 'em over and make sure they were just about right.  And if we could do about three a day, we’d get about $1.50.  And then we put 'em in the wagon and carry 'em.  But we had to get about six or seven, five or six, and put 'em on the wagon and haul 'em up there.  That was about six miles to where they’d be buyin’ 'em.  So I did pretty good on that, and then after that I decided it was hard work, and I went and I asked my uncle, Uncle Walter … I wanted to join the Army.  There was no openin’ in the Army, and I asked him about the Navy.  He said he didn’t know, he was a [corpsman?] with my teacher.
Gillen:  So did you actually go to a recruiter for the Army and they said there were no openings?  Is that right?
Mitchell:  Yeah, we found out there wasn’t no openin’s.  He was goin’ to World War I.
Gillen:  Your uncle?
Mitchell:  My uncle, Uncle Walter was goin’.  And I had cousins that was in World War I.  There was quite a few of 'em I knew.
Gillen:  Did your uncle get shipped overseas?
Mitchell:  He went over to France, and there was some Gibsons, they went to France.  And there was some Rees [phonetic], they went to France.  And they went to France for a while, overseas there.  Most of 'em, I don’t remember of 'em gettin’ any killed or anything like that.  But they came back home after the war was over, and they stayed on the farm and stuff.
Gillen:  So he recommended maybe you try the Navy instead?
Mitchell:  Try the Navy.  And I went up there, and after my illness and everything, went to the CCC, then I was pretty healthy.  You had to be a certain weight, you couldn’t be overweight or you couldn’t be too much underweight.  You had to be just about right.  And so I [unclear].
Gillen:  Did you have to beef up a little bit?  Were you kind of underweight because of your illness?
Mitchell:  Illness.  When I was sick, I weighed 156 pounds.  And after I got sick and everything, my weight dropped to 138.  And so I lost all the weight, and I never have gained that-I never gained 156 back again.
Gillen:  Maybe that’s why you’ve made this good long life, because you stayed nice and slim!
Mitchell:  One thing about it is, I just was like that, I reckon, because most of our family, we [were] thin people.  My mother was about five foot, and she only weighed about 108-110 pounds.  There were eight of us in my family.  I had two sisters older than I:  Seria [phonetic] was the oldest, Marie, and Marie is practically a genius.  She went to school in Marshall and she come out, she was salutatorian.  She would have been the valedictorian because she only went two years, but she was nothing but “A’s.”  I don’t know how in the world she did it.  During the time after they came out of back home from Marshall, I was there, and they had TB, the ladies they lived with, and they didn’t know it.  And they came back, and my two sisters died of TB.  I had two brothers die of TB, and that left four of us.  And then I had one brother, the youngest brother, my mother had [R.A.L.?].  Well, he went and joined the service and he went to Fort Knox, Kentucky, accidentally got drowned there.
Gillen:  He drowned?!
Mitchell:  He got drownded in the swimming pool there at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  And that only left three.  I was the oldest, and then my other brother-I had another brother, Rizdon [phonetic]-and let me see, I was the oldest, and then Rizdon.
Gillen:  That’s terrible.  Those four, they all died of TB, was that like when they were children or teenagers or….
Mitchell:  They were teenagers.  They never got to be….  All of them died in their twenties:  twenty-one, twenty-three.  Marie died right around twenty-three.  Went to Rizdon, and Marie went to Curveo [i.e., Cuero?], Texas, to a sanitarium so they could try to help 'em.  But Marie didn’t get over it.  (Gillen:  How sad.)  Rizdon got over it, and he….  He couldn’t go to service because of his TB.
Gillen:  Where did you go to sign up for the Navy?
Mitchell:  I went to Mt. Pleasant.
Gillen:  How far from Bivens was that?
Mitchell:  That is about thirty-five miles.
Gillen:  Oh, not far.
Mitchell:  No.  And then they sent me to Texarkana.  From Texarkana right on to Little Rock, Arkansas.
Gillen:  I’m just kind of curious, because we’ve got to talk about the black-white thing, since things are so different from now.  Is that when you went in to the recruiter, was that a white recruiter?
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  And what did he tell you about blacks being in the military?  What was the kind of understanding?
Mitchell:  I don’t remember what they told me everything, but blacks could only go into the [mess ?] branch.  We could be servants for officers, take care of the officers in the Navy.  There was blacks, Filipinos, and Guamanians.
Gillen:  They told you that?
Mitchell:  That’s the only thing we could go.  We couldn’t be a gunner’s mate, couldn’t be a machinist’s mate, couldn’t be a boson’s mate.  We was restricted to one branch, and that was the officers.  We cooked for 'em, laid out their clothes, and shined their shoes, and give 'em their coffee and food and anything that they needed for their comfort.  That’s what we do.
Gillen:  When you signed up, for how many years was it you were signing up?
Mitchell:  Six years.  And after I did the six years, I did real good, and I was making $21 a month.
Gillen:  That’s not so bad, though.  After you signed up, you said you went to Texarkana.  Why did you go to Texarkana?
Mitchell:  Well, that’s where the train went.  From Texarkana, we went to Norfolk, Virginia.
Gillen:  Oh wow.  All on the train?
Mitchell:  On the train, nothing else but the train.  That’s the only way you could get there.  And went there, and [unclear] there two months.
Gillen:  Were there several of you together going to Norfolk together to join the Navy?
Mitchell:  I think some more went from Little Rock.  Yeah, a few more went, and we went on there, and they formed a class there.  And in that class there were about forty of us.
Gillen:  This is at Norfolk?
Mitchell:  Norfolk, yeah.  All of us was black.  I remember we were having a black man there.  He was a steward, and I reckon he must have been first class steward.  But he was one of the ones that was more or less over us there, and he trained us and told us about….  Well actually, we had to go to bed at a certain time, get up a certain time, eat at a certain time, and all that.
Gillen:  Did you have to do the usual military basic training at all, like you have to do?
Mitchell:  Yeah, we had to march and train with guns and things, didn’t have no bullets or nothin’ in 'em.  We had to do all the things.  And we did that for two months.  You have two months, and then one of the main things about that, you had to swim a hundred yards.  They had pools there, and we had to swim a hundred yards.  And fortunately, while I was at home, I learned how to swim, because we swam in creeks.  We had no swimming pool or nothin’.  Creeks had snakes and whatever.  That was what we did.
	So after doin’ all of that, and then I did go on leave.  More or less they give you, I think it was a ten-day leave.  I saved a little money, two months.  That means that I got around about $21 a month, and I saved that money and I sent it back home to my parents, to kind of help them out, because they didn’t have much money or nothin’.  They wasn’t gettin’ no money.  And so then I went and stayed there, and then they decided to ship me out to California.  I sent them the money and I went to California.  And then after I was in California a few weeks, my mother passed away.  And then I got a chance to come back to her funeral.  Mama was forty-eight when she passed away.  Then I went back.  That was in the forties.  Let’s see, ’41, ’42-about ’42.
Gillen:  Do you think it was after Pearl Harbor that your mom died?
Mitchell:  I had gone to Pearl Harbor and come back.
Gillen:  Okay, so we’re jumpin’ way ahead here.  We don’t want to jump that far ahead!  So your mother died after Pearl Harbor?
Mitchell:  Mama died in….
Gillen:  Because Pearl Harbor was December ’41.
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  Okay, and then you went to more training in California.
Mitchell:  Well, actually, [unclear] caught a ship.
Gillen:  Okay, let’s talk about that then, the first time you got on board ship.  What was that like?
Mitchell:  The first time I went from Norfolk, they sent me to California, and they had a ship there by the name of USS Regal.  It’s a receiving ship.  All the sailors would go there and they stayed until they were assigned to a ship.
Gillen:  Okay, so black and white, or just black?
Mitchell:  Black and white.
Gillen:  All on this receiving ship?
Mitchell:  Yeah, it was a receiving ship.  See, black would be in one part of it, white would be in another part.
Gillen:  Okay, so they’re all awaiting their assignments?
Mitchell:  Awaiting their assignment.  And the first ship I got on was, I stayed there, I got on the USS Selfridge, a 357th destroyer.  I got on that ship, and then after my mother passed away, they let me go to her funeral.  They said, “We’ll give you about seven days.”  I had to come over to California to Bivens, Texas.  By the time I got there, they had sent a telegram, told me it’s time, the ship’s about to leave.  It was moved to, I think, another different area.  But anyway, it didn’t need me until I got back.  The ship really didn’t go, they just told me by telegram, and so I come on back and got on that ship.
Gillen:  On the destroyer?
Mitchell:  On the destroyer, USS Selfridge, yeah.  And that time we went to Port Auburn.
Gillen:  Okay, so you got orders to go to Pearl Harbor?
Mitchell:  Well, the ship went to Pearl Harbor.  We stayed there a while, and then we came back, and then went back to Pearl Harbor.
Gillen:  So you were officially totally trained now in the Navy and everything.  Were you assigned to like a group of officers, or a couple of officers, or how did that work exactly?
Mitchell:  Well, actually, on there was about five of us steward mates.  We had about ten officers.  And so what they did, made up their bed and everything.  We were assigned to a certain room.  We took care of a certain officer.  But then still a lot of times we’d have to stand watch at night.
Gillen:  Kind of like guard duty?
Mitchell:  Right.  In other words, they need a cup of coffee or somethin’, we would carry 'em coffee or make coffee.
Gillen:  Okay, but the five of you shared one room?
Mitchell:  Yeah, we had bunks in the room.
Gillen:  Did you kind of have to do shifts?  Was that how it worked?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  At night, we would.  But the daytime, we would have to make up the beds and things, and we’d shine their shoes or whatever they needed.  And then we were to clean.  If they needed to go somewhere, we had to lay out their clothes and do all that.  And another thing we had to do, is before they got ready to go to bed, we had to go out, put their pajamas one way, and they’d tell us how to do things.  Shoes had to be a certain [unclear], certain way.
Gillen:  Were these some of the higher-ranking officers?  Were they like at least lieutenant commander or….
Mitchell:  Well, no, some of 'em was very low, they just come in, ensign.
Gillen:  Really?!
Mitchell:  Dan Steel [phonetic], I remember Dan Steel, one of the first ensigns to come in, yeah.  You had to do all this for them.  But Dan Steel, that was an ensign, lieutenant, lieutenant J.G., and then full commander.  Well, commander, he had three stripes.  The one, he [unclear] three stripes, is one [unclear].
Gillen:  A full commander, that’s like the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel, I think, for the Air Force.
Mitchell:  I think something like that, yeah.  But that was the way it was then.  So we just did whatever they told us to do.  But there were others, we had a cook and a steward.  The steward would make out the menus, tell you what to be fixin’, what [unclear] peel the potatoes or cut the celery.
Gillen:  So you had to do cooking duty too?
Mitchell:  We didn’t do cookin’.  We had some over us that did the cookin’.  We did the other duties, such as make up the beds and….
Gillen:  Servant stuff?
Mitchell:  Yeah, right.  And if they need coffee and stuff, they tell me “coffee.”  And we stand watch, too, a lot of times.  Because if you’re out at sea, that means that you have to go and make sure that everything’s okay, and if somethin’, a chair or somethin’ is about to move or somethin’, we had to tie them down or whatever.
Gillen:  What did you think of being at sea, after being in the middle of Texas which, at least where you were, wasn’t too close to the water.  What were your first impressions of going out at sea?  Did you ever get to go out and just take a look at the ocean?  Or were you always stuck down below?
Mitchell:  Yeah, we were right there in California where there’s nothin’ but water.  And when we went from California to Hawaii, I got seasick until finally I got my sea legs.  Couldn’t eat nothin’.  But once I got used to it, why then I got okay.  We did a lot of different things that we hadn’t been used to doin’ or nothin’.  But this was our duty.  We had people who had been in for a long time.  See, I was just a recruit, almost.  I had to learn all of this.  We had to shine their shoes and make sure that….  And then their clothes and things.  And they had some over us that’d been in a long time, and they’d tell us or show us, and they’d go up to the rooms.  Officers had bunk beds and things like this.  And if they’d need somethin’, they’d yell out.  But more or less it was things that we had to learn and accept whether we want to….  We had some people in there, they had called 'em back.  They were World War I, and they called some of the stewards.  [unclear] named Raney [phonetic].  Another man, his son was goin’ to school in Berkeley, California-UCLA?-one school or college there.  Their son is goin’ there.  They were the ones had been in there twenty-five or thirty years, and so they’d usually tell us what we were supposed to do, and make sure that we did it too.
	I sailed on the Selfridge there a good long time, the fact being, one thing about it, I was in San Pedro-we went to San Pedro-and then I accidentally got shot in my legs.  And my legs, I was sleeping in the bunk one Saturday, and this guy by the name of MacMurray [phonetic], he was foolin’ around on his own deck, standing watch with a gun pointing down toward the deck.  It went off, fragments come through and hit me in the leg.
Gillen:  They went through the deck?!
Mitchell:  Went through the deck, hit me in the leg.  I still have some fragments in my legs now.  And I stayed in the hospital for a good….  There were no bones broke, it was a flesh wound.  And I reckon some of the shrapnel was just fragments and things.
Gillen:  This is when you were docked in California or Hawaii?
Mitchell:  We were in California, San Pedro.  I went to the hospital there.  They had a big hospital there in San Pedro.
Gillen:  So you said you went to Hawaii, and then you came back to California, and then you went to Hawaii again?
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  What was your first impression of Hawaii?
Mitchell:  Hawaii was a very beautiful place, a lot of flowers and things, and I really enjoyed seein’ it.  And they had the hula dancers, and women dancing, and all the water and stuff.  So many different types of flowers I’d never seen before.  And then the little town there, we docked beside of it at the dock and we went there.
Gillen:  Didn’t you go to Pearl Harbor, or did you dock at some other base?
Mitchell:  Pearl Harbor was the base.  And then we had to catch the liberty ship and go to the beach, and got on it, and then we’d get on a bus and go to Hawaii [i.e., Honolulu].  And then we’d go to [unclear].  We had to be back by eight o’clock.  We’d probably leave at 9:30 or something like that, where we’d come back before, I reckon it must have been about ten o’clock, eight o’clock.
Gillen:  Was the segregation in Hawaii about the same as it was in Texas or California?
Mitchell:  No, they didn’t have too much segregation right there.  We could sit anywhere we wanted, eat anyplace, go anyplace we wanted to.  It wasn’t segregation like it was.
Gillen:  So it was different.
Mitchell:  It was different, and so we kind of enjoyed, I reckon, doin’ that.  Because a lot of times, I was a person [who] didn’t go too much.  All I would do is try to save a little money that we had.  I would take somebody else’s place, if they wanted to go over there and go to the dances or go to….  I don’t remember goin’ to the show or nothin’.  We had shows on the ship-movies and things on the ship sometimes.  And then I would just take their place, and let them go, and I would work for them.  I was so happy just to do that for them.
Gillen:  So did you like being in the Navy?
Mitchell:  I liked being in the Navy pretty good, because [of the net?].  But after I got shot and everything, I wanted to go back home!
Gillen:  Had second thoughts, huh?
Mitchell:  I said, “I need to go back home!  I don’t need to be out here.”  But nevertheless, since I was there, I had to stay on the ship.  But it seemed like my legs were hurtin’ me.  I was tryin’ to get out of the Navy.  I said, “If I can get out of the Navy, I could go back home, I won’t have to be fooled with.”  But then still, I wasn’t successful.  And after war broke out, there was a lot of guys whose time was up, they couldn’t even-whether their shift was over or not, they had to stay there.  And then they had called some of the ones from World War I, back.  They had to stay on ships and go ahead and serve, because they needed all these people.  And once that war broke out, there was no gettin’ out.
Gillen:  Was it the second time you went back to Hawaii, was that just before Pearl Harbor happened?
Mitchell:  Yes.
Gillen:  So you went back to Hawaii, I don’t know, October or November or something, of 1941?
Mitchell:  Yeah, we went back.  We got there to Hawaii around about in … must have been in November, and we stayed around there.  And a lot of times we’d go out to Johnson Island.  It was a couple hundred miles [unclear] out, and we’d go out there and practice.  And then we went out to then Hawaii.  They had an ammo dump, we had gone down there and got ammunition.  We went out to these different islands, a lot of times ships would practice shootin’ guns and things like this.  The ship I was on, it had five-inch guns.
Gillen:  That was the same destroyer?  Were you still on the same one?
Mitchell:  This was a little bit before the war really broke out, we did this.  But after then, I got a chance to go with Captain Wyatt Craig who was gonna be commander over a squadron of destroyers.  The squadron of destroyers, he’s in charge of eight destroyers.
Gillen:  So you became his personal aide?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I asked him if I could go with him.
Gillen:  Did you meet him on board the ship there?
Mitchell:  I met him on the ship.  And so he said he’d talk to the admiral, and whatever the admiral said [unclear], “But I want you to go with me, and you can be my cook.”  I’d cook for him, be his-I’d take care of him.
Gillen:  Personal assistant?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  I’d be just him only.
Gillen:  And what was the captain’s name again?  I’m sorry.
Mitchell:  Wyatt Craig.  W-Y-A-T-T, C-R-A-I-G, Wyatt Craig.  He was a commander, and I stayed with him all the time, because after war broke out and everything, well, what he did was, he had to go to-we went to Alaska, and we left Hawaii after war broke out, after we kind of got things settled, because once war broke out, I stayed on top deck day and night.  The only time I’d go down there [i.e., below decks] was to take a bath, take a shower, or use the bathroom.  And then after that, I stayed there, just kept my life jacket on, day and night, because we didn’t know whether we was gonna get hit.  And we went out and patrolled around the bay there.
Gillen:  Right.  Can we back up just a little second?  Were you sleeping on board ship on December 6?  It was a Saturday, right?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  Actually, I wasn’t asleep, I was awake.
Gillen:  Yeah, I just was thinking, because my mother was telling me that when she was young and she’s hearing about the Pearl Harbor attack on the radio, and it was a Sunday morning.  (Mitchell:  Right.)  But I’m just saying the Saturday before Pearl Harbor Day, you were on board ship?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I stayed on the ship.  As I say, I stayed on the ship most of the time.  I didn’t go over to the beach.  But after that, when I heard the [drum?] and thing, I didn’t have a special assigned ship.  I was off the Selfridge, and I went to the Jarvis.  Jarvis was a destroyer 393.  So I didn’t have special assigned quarters.  [unclear] on the Selfridge, my quarters was in the magazine, loadin’ up the powder and the shell.
Gillen:  That’s a dangerous place to be!
Mitchell:  Yeah.  And I got on the Jarvis, I didn’t have an assigned [quarters], but I did go up to the gallery.
Gillen:  Okay, so was the Jarvis where you were sleeping the night before?
Mitchell:  Yeah, the Jarvis.
Gillen:  Okay, so you got up and you were having breakfast?
Mitchell:  No, I wasn’t having breakfast.  I just had my shorts on.  So then I had run back down.  I couldn’t hardly get back down the stair to put my clothes on.
Gillen:  So what did you first see?
Mitchell:  I didn’t know what was happening.
Gillen:  So you were down below and you heard?
Mitchell:  No, it started, and then I went upstairs, I went up on the top deck.
Gillen:  In your shorts.
Mitchell:  And then I had to go back down, because we didn’t know what was happening.
Gillen:  But did you see Japanese planes?
Mitchell:  No, didn’t see the Japanese planes.  Jarvis was tied up between the bow….  A crane was over the bow-that’s the front.  There was a tree toward the fantail, which is the back.  And what it was, is, we were tied upside of a dock, and they couldn’t….  And there was a warehouse, big warehouse, and they couldn’t dive bomb on that, because they’d hit this warehouse and thing before.  And so I think it was only about three or four people got hurt, they got shrapnel in their legs and things.  But that ship laid there and it didn’t get hit, until after it was over, after all that bombin’ and stuff and shootin’ and stuff, and the bay was full of fire.  After that, we kind of, the ship, and got the officers.  A lot of them officers were over on the beach, because they had wives and things over there, at night.  And so they came on and got the ship underway.  And so we just stayed.  Once they came back and we got the ship underway, we went on out to sea to patrol and check and see if we could find any submarines or somethin’.  There was supposed to have been one right there, tryin’ to get in.  One was already in.
Gillen:  So the part of the bay where you were, or the harbor, you had a hard time seein’ what was goin’ on?
Mitchell:  You couldn’t see.  Fire and smoke was everywhere.
Gillen:  Could you see other ships that were on fire?
Mitchell:  I don’t remember seein’ any ship that was on fire.  I just saw the fire.
Gillen:  So you guys were kind of a little bit isolated off the way a little bit?
Mitchell:  Well, where we were, I wasn’t able to see exactly, but I knew there was more ships near us.  I think the Cashion, and the Downe [phonetic spellings] were pretty near us, because a lot of times destroyers….  Now, we was on the west side, was where the warehouse was.  And then the bay, we were kind of parked, tied up.  But then after the other ship was a different place.  So once we got that kind of over with and we got out, we had to go through-I remember what exactly-I think we was able to get around without goin’ into where the fire was [unclear].  And then we went on out to sea.
Gillen:  What did you see?  The officers came back aboard, and I imagine it was kind of like tension.  At that point, when the officers got back on board, you knew it was a Japanese attack, right?
Mitchell:  Yeah, they said it was a Japanese attack.
Gillen:  And then as you pulled away, what was it like to see the rest of the harbor on fire?
Mitchell:  Sometimes we couldn’t hardly see the harbor-there was too much smoke.  I don’t remember even seein’….  There was a few ships that we could get up close, and had to maneuver.  I reckon the officer, commander, navigator, he had to maneuver to get out of.
Gillen:  Did Captain Craig come back to this ship?
Mitchell:  I don’t remember whether he came back or not.  He hadn’t taken over that command at that particular time, but that was the ship he was gonna be on.
Gillen:  And so an incredible amount of smoke, and so did you know, were you guys just trying to get away from the harbor and patrol?
Mitchell:  Well, yeah, because a lot of 'em had their gun stations where they were goin’, and so they had to go and man their….  Some of 'em was to go to down in the magazine, get the guns and shells and things, and some of 'em were different.  Some was on the guns, and some was on the machine guns.  Had to get all them people back.
Gillen:  By the time you got underway, though, the Japanese had moved off?
Mitchell:  Well, yeah.
Gillen:  But you weren’t sure if maybe there was going to be a second attack?
Mitchell:  They didn’t know.  So what we did was, we went out in the bay, and we circled around.  And I suppose the number of ships that was there, make sure that one didn’t run into another or somethin’ like this, and hit the other.  We got out in a certain area we had to go, and we were taking orders from Admiral Chumwold [phonetic].  He was the commander of that whole area at that time.  And so there was battleships and things burnin’ and all this stuff.  Then there was some other ships that we was able to kind of get by and go on out, because we had to go through the gate.  See, there’s this gate, closed, see.  Had to open it up and get us out.  And when we got out there, we stayed out there for, seems like three or four days.  Then you come back in, get supplies and things.
Gillen:  What was it like when you first came back in, what did it look like?
Mitchell:  Oh, you see all these things tore up and things.  But then there was still a lot of oil on the water there, but they had got most of [this out?] at this time.  It wasn’t burnin’, nothin’ like it was before.
Gillen:  Just lots of destroyed and really wrecked ships.
Mitchell:  Yeah, wrecked ships and things like that.
Gillen:  Did you know what had happened to the Arizona?
Mitchell:  I didn’t know, no, because this battleship, we were away from that.  We didn’t notice it.  You could probably see some of 'em was tilted or somethin’, that’d been hit and like that.  But still, we didn’t know exactly.  We was outside, trying to protect them, trying to find out if we found any Japanese submarines out there, 'cause they had these little two-man submarines in there.  I think one had gotten into the bay.  But I think they did drop an ash can down and blow it up.
Gillen:  What was it like, what was the mood on board ship when you knew, “Hey, the world has changed today”?
Mitchell:  What did you say now?
Gillen:  What was it like when you knew, “Hey, this is the real deal, this is a Japanese attack, the world has changed”?  I think the closest thing I could probably think of in my time is seeing what happened on 9/11 and you knew the world had changed.  What was your feeling, being on board ship, seeing the aftermath of what happened at Pearl Harbor?  Can you tell me kind of what it was like, what your feeling was?
Mitchell:  We were just hoping that the Japanese didn’t bomb the ship, or take over the island.  That was the most things.  [unclear] if they got in here and bombed [unclear], we may be going to be captured.  And still it was quite … just hard for you to think, get your memories together.  And then you think all these sometimes crazy ideas and things, what if they come in and take over this base?  Or what if….  And then one of the main things I thought about, what if they bomb the ammunition dump?  It’ll blow that….  Because they had ammunition there [unclear].  But after we kind of had got ourselves together, we still-it takes a long time to kind of get the right composure.  In fact, we didn’t get the right composure, because the ship would go out, and sometimes be sailin’ along pretty good, and all of a sudden somebody else says there’s planes comin’ in, or somebody shootin’ or somethin’ like this.  And it was hard to kind of….
Gillen:  Didn’t know if it was us or theirs?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  Well, we did know, because a lot of times by these ships, usually, if it was a torpedo, and we had to try to guard certain ships….  Destroyer was a ship, they had to take the blame or torpedo, rather than to take it [unclear] the cruiser or something like that.  And so what they did was, they would be less-it’d be better for them to hit that small one, than go out there and torpedo that big one.
Gillen:  Okay, we’re talking about patrolling and everything, right?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  When we went out to patrol, and we patrolled that harbor day and night.  And usually, a lot of times, as long as the ship was goin’ along, and there were ships, or we were on the perimeter of the ship, because we wanted to protect the ship goin’ through, right in the center, was like your heavy cruisers and things, valuable ships, but we would go certain areas that we went around and patrolled.  And then every time we’d see the ship was speedin’ up, we figured there must be somethin’ happenin’, or going to happen, and sometimes it didn’t.  But a lot of times we’d go out and drop the ash can-that’s not the right word for it-but those tin cans.
Gillen:  You mean the bombs that go underwater to attack the submarines?
Mitchell:  Yeah, blow up the submarines.  We would drop them.  We called them ash cans [i.e., depth charges].  We’d go out and drop one of them, and we’d speed up.  And sometimes they said they suspect something on the starboard side-that’d be the right side-or the port side of the ship or something like this.  In certain areas, then they would have to get, said this was in a certain range.  They had all this down, that they would tell to check and see if you can pick up anything, because we had to stay ready.  We didn’t know exactly what was gonna happen.
Gillen:  Were you manned with less than before?  Had there been some casualties, and was there a cutdown in the crew size at all?
Mitchell:  No.  The ship I was on, the only thing about it is I’d say there were about three or four guys that got shrapnel.  And so I didn’t know very many people….
Gillen:  I thought maybe if there’d been somebody that was off the ship when the attack occurred, and maybe they’d been killed or injured and couldn’t make it back to the ship.
Mitchell:  I wouldn’t have know them, because I just had got on that ship.
Gillen:  Your duties didn’t change any at all, did they?
Mitchell:  No, didn’t change any.  And I didn’t have a permanent battle station, because usually if I’d been on there permanent….  Then when I finally got permanent, then my battle station was down below decks.  And the only people with a battle station was the people that was up in the tower.  And the ones who were gunners, they had to man these guns day and night, just in case somethin’-or they spot a plane or somethin’ and they are comin’ over to drop a bomb or somethin’.  And so that’s ways that they wanted things to go.  And I reckon they did a good job on this ship, because this ship finally, after a certain length of time, after [unclear], I got off of that ship, and I got on another ship.  And this was the one that was gonna sail to Alaska.  And we went up there….
Gillen:  Do you remember the name of the ship?
Mitchell:  USS Case.
Gillen:  Was that also a destroyer?
Mitchell:  Destroyer, yeah.  And the Case went to Alaska.  That was in May.
Gillen:  Of ’43?
Mitchell:  ’42.  Case sent there.  We got up there, and then we stayed up there all that summer, because they needed destroyers up there, because they thought the Japanese was gonna invade.
Gillen:  The Aleutians, yeah, there was a real concern.  And actually, the Japanese did come on some of those islands.
Mitchell:  Well, the Aleutian Islands.  So we went from-in May, because I remember writing it down, I kept a diary and all that stuff-and what they did was, we went on up there, and finally we got to Alaska.  We went and hid behind some island, in case they come, then we’d be able to intercept 'em.  They wouldn’t even know that we were there at the Aleutian Islands.  And there was a harbor there, Derch [phonetic] Harbor, they went there and picked up a few little stuff.  But we went back to everything.
Gillen:  Did you intercept anybody or attack any more submarines or anything like that?
Mitchell:  We didn’t even attack anything.  There may have been some, but we were always prepared, and we would patrol, come out of Derch Harbor, and certain areas you go in Alaska.  And our ship was only then-Captain Craig was on.  And then we picked up three high-ranking officers:  Happy Chandler [phonetic] and the guy, he was the commander of Alcatraz.
Gillen:  Oh, the whole area.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  He came up there, and then Happy Chandler, who was the first baseball commissioner, we picked him up, because he was in Washington, D.C., because he was a senator or something before.  But he had some high-falutin’ job.  He was on up there.
Gillen:  That’s while you were still patrolling Alaska?
Mitchell:  They were up there to look around and give President Roosevelt information about how things was goin’ in Alaska.  And they stayed up there, and so that was the time we stayed up there, and what we had to do it, when they got ready, I reckon we carried them back to, we went to Juneau, and we carried them back to Juneau, so they could catch a plane and go back to Washington, D.C.  And so that was about seventy-five miles down that straight, a beautiful area, right on both sides.
Gillen:  Yeah, I’ve been there.  Have you been back to that place since?
Mitchell:  Haven’t been back yet.
Gillen:  There’s a lot of cruise ships that go up there now.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  But I haven’t been back there.  We stayed up there from May right on up until I think around about close to October before we came out of there, and then went back to Hawaii, and then back to the States.  And then after that, then I went to the South Pacific.
Gillen:  Was it the same ship, or did you get new orders?
Mitchell:  Different ship.
Gillen:  How about the captain, Captain Craig?
Mitchell:  Captain Craig, he was still commander.  We went on back to the South Pacific.  And what we did was, we went back out there to Maynus [phonetic] Island.  A lot of islands in the South Pacific.  Went to Okinawa.  Well, we didn’t get there, we didn’t go to Okinawa until later, because Japanese occupied that island.  But we patrolled and on our way there, we went to Sydney, Australia.  We went to Brisbane, McKay, and all those islands we patrolled.
Gillen:  Did you get any shore leave when you went to Australia or New Zealand?
Mitchell:  No.
Gillen:  No shore leave, huh?
Mitchell:  No.  So what we did, they let us go over to shore probably one day, if you wanted to go.  But we were there to pick up food and rations, and a lot of times we stayed at sea.  The ship stayed at sea for a long time, quite a few days, and then you’d go to a supply ship and get supplies from that ship if we needed anything.
Gillen:  When you were patrolling on the destroyer, were you with any other ships, or just by yourself?
Mitchell:  Yeah, it was a whole squadron out there patrolling.  Not only that, then the aircraft carrier, battleships, and cruisers-light cruisers, heavy cruisers.
Gillen:  Do you remember any of the aircraft carriers that you were part of the group with?
Mitchell:  I don’t remember what carrier we were with, but I think it was one or two.  They wouldn’t let 'em all be near each other.
Gillen:  I was just wondering if it was one of the ones like the Enterprise or….
Mitchell:  May have been one of them.  I’ve forgotten now exactly whether it was the Enterprise or not, but I know we went there.  And then we went down into New Guinea.  We were there because the Japanese dropped a bomb on one of the ships out there, and we picked up some of the people who were on that ship.  And then we had some of the officers come in the ward room, and we had one person on the ship, he said, “Well, Nelson, I can’t stand watch because that man, he died.”  I said, “Well, he’s dead.”  And so what I’d do, I’d take his place and told him, “Well, you go ahead on and go to bed.  I’ll stand watch for you.”  Not at night, he didn’t want to be there at night.
Gillen:  He was afraid of getting killed?
Mitchell:  Afraid of ghosts.
Gillen:  Because somebody had died there?
Mitchell:  Yeah, somebody’d died there [unclear].
Gillen:  Oh, he thought the deck was haunted?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  He figured that.  I know, because his name was Cotton.
Gillen:  Oh dear.
Mitchell:  So I told him, “You afraid of that?  I’ll go ahead and do that for you.”
Gillen:  How often did that happen?
Mitchell:  Oh, well somebody else would come on after four hours.
Gillen:  Right, but I mean did he ask you to take his duties several times?
Mitchell:  Well, I know I took it one or two times.  Yeah, he was quite a character.  And still, a lot of times, people really, I don’t know whether they were seeing ghosts or not, but I’ve had people tell me they seen 'em.  I looked for 'em, but I never did see any.  So in the Pacific there, we patrolled there, almost to an island, every little place there in New Guinea, because we [unclear] out there in New Guinea.  And these people, we see 'em, a lot of different places, little different places, and we’d go around and patrol them, make sure Japanese wasn’t there.  And at night, everything was dark, we couldn’t see nothin’.  And so we just kept the lights off, because if the Japanese spot a ship, they’d drop a bomb or something at night.  We could hear the plane and everything, but we never could see it.
Gillen:  So at that point, did anybody engage the enemy?  Was there any….
Mitchell:  Yeah, we got in some battles there.  We bombarded the shores.
Gillen:  So did you have Marines on board?
Mitchell:  No.  It was a little bit too small to have Marines on a smaller ship like that.  The larger ships, now they had Marines, and I reckon they … like the cruisers, battleships always had Marines on it, because they’re huge ships.  But the destroyer, we had about 250 people on that, so too small to have Marines on there.  And I think they had everything pretty well under control as far as-we did never have no problem that we know of.
	After the war was over, we were near Japan, and we were happy it was over.  What we did, the ship I was on came back into Japan.  We went to Yukusko [phonetic], which is an island there where the Navy more or less had a harbor there and a base they could go into, and a dock there they could go into and kind of rest and relax a little bit.  And all these Japanese was there.  We didn’t know much about Japanese people, and still some of them, after the war was over, they wouldn’t let them eat.  They would give them something-if anybody wanted anything, they’d give 'em something from the garbage cans or something like that.
Gillen:  The Japanese?
Mitchell:  Yeah, they’d give 'em some food-like they’re gonna throw it away anyway.
Gillen:  Oh, I see, okay.  You just mentioned in passing that yeah, there were battles and everything.  Tell me more about what a battle was like.
Mitchell:  When you went to battle, a lot of times everybody’d be on their battle station, and they’d bombard or just ’til the battle was over, sometimes maybe two or three hours.  If they figured they sank the ship or whatever they did, bombard, they ceased the guns, whatever’s on the beach, because a lot of times they had these guns mounted on the beach and they could sink ships and things.
Gillen:  What was the noise of the guns like?
Mitchell:  Oh, it was horrible.  But a lot of times, you bein’ down under the decks, you couldn’t hear too much until after it was all over.  And they would call general quarters.  That means you get to your battle station, and you stayed there until after everything was over.  And more or less some of our battle stations was below decks, and below decks down there, why, you didn’t hear too much.  You’d feel the ship-when they shoot the guns and things, you feel that, because it would be shootin’.
Gillen:  The whole ship would kind of shake?
Mitchell:  Yup.  Because a lot of guns, see, they shoot from one side.  They shoot from this starboard side, the right side, I mean the port side.  But they’d get in position.  They’d know how far these shells would have to go before they explode, and how far they have to go, or how far the other ship, the enemy, was at the particular time.  They made sure that they were right in that line of….  Well, they would be on the target.
Gillen:  You jumped ahead to the end of the war, but we have like about two or three years there.  Did you spend that many years at sea with all the battles?
Mitchell:  Well, a lot of times that we were at sea, we went to the Philippines.  We had battles out there too, and we stayed out there and fought.  But on the Philippines, a lot of times the ships there, I think we was there for-one time, I know I stayed on the ship for six months.  I never even got off.  Another time, I stayed for five months and never even got off.
Gillen:  Did you get stir crazy?
Mitchell:  No.
Gillen:  Six months on board ship and all that time down below?
Mitchell:  Still, you just endure it.
Gillen:  Was everybody real busy all the time?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  You were on your duties.  Whatever you had to do, you went and done it.  And the guns and things [unclear].  But a lot of times when the battle come up and all that, you would be at your battle station until they said all clear.  When they mentioned all clear, then that was kind of a good feeling, because if it wasn’t all clear, you always figured maybe a submarine was gonna sink the ship or torpedo the ship with a torpedo [unclear].  And still, so far, the ships I was on….  Some I got off of, the Selfridge, it got the bow, blew off it.  It was a big ship, and they blew the bow off it.
Gillen:  That wasn’t when you were on it?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  I had gotten off.  The person that took my place on that, he got killed.  I know another guy, he was from Arkansas, LeRue Watkin [phonetic].  He got killed.
Gillen:  How about on your ship?  Did you sustain damage, or anybody killed or injured?
Mitchell:  No, not on the ship that I was on.  We were just fortunate.  When the ship I was on [unclear], the ship that the commander, he tried to protect it, give it all the protection he could, because he is a very valuable person.  Captain Craig, he had all the ships around him, and they were supposed to protect that ship.
Gillen:  So was your ship kind of surrounded by a lot of other ships most of the time, it was kind of like in the middle?
Mitchell:  Yeah, we were on the inside, yeah.  You had this other convoy, the outer perimeter, they’d take care of [unclear].  Just like your aircraft carriers and things, they would always take care of them before these other smaller ships.  The other smaller ships would be like out scoutin’.  We’d be out scoutin’ and see if we found anything.  If we found anything, then we were supposed to engage.  Destroyers, they were the main ones, because they were faster and they had more maneuverability than the others.  And so that’s the way they did.  And so they would be always….  And then there would be others [unclear] planes and things, be sending information about what to do, if a plane’s comin’, or if they suspect that something was happenin’, yeah.
Gillen:  When you went to the Philippines, was that part of the whole move to take the Philippines back-MacArthur and everybody-was that part of supporting that?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I think it was more or less, because some of the guys told me that a lot of times that was a dangerous place in the Philippines.  Sometimes you land on a dock or something, and then them people, if you go there, you may be walkin’ along, and they come along with a machete, cut your neck off.  They did all kinds of stuff.
Gillen:  Do you mean the Japanese?
Mitchell:  Filipinos too.  You know, you got all kinds.  The Japanese, we never did go to their island until after the war was over.  That’s the only time we went to their island, because they didn’t know much about the Japanese.  And after they dropped the atomic bomb, in that area, I don’t think we would ever go near there.  I never went to Japan until after the war was over.
Gillen:  When you weren’t engaged in a battle, what was a daily work day like?  Was it really long?  Was it like a twelve-hour work day?  Did you go back to kind of a routine, like you were, being the personal assistant to the officer?  Did it get kind of routine, or what was it like?
Mitchell:  Yeah, it would be pretty calm, they’d try to keep everybody kind of calm, tell them when we were out and everything and they hadn’t found anything during the time of battle or something, and they say everything is pretty quiet and everything.  But that was after I reckon certain days in certain areas.  They knew there wasn’t any ship there, there wasn’t any submarine, because we had like submarine things.  The ship wasn’t in danger of being shot at, because there wasn’t anything near there.  And they had a certain [island?] that they had to go through.  Or else they had planes.  We had planes always up, trying to take care of them.
Gillen:  Again, when you weren’t in a battle situation-I mean, you had a whole bunch of men all stuck together there for days, weeks, whatever, on end.  Did anybody ever just kind of get in each other’s business?  I mean, were there ever fights?  What was it like?
Mitchell:  No, not on the ship.  I don’t remember anybody ever being hostile between.  They seem to have been pretty calm, the ship I was on.  Never heard about anybody, like having any riots or things like that.
Gillen:  Was there any fitness?  Did people try to stay in shape, anything like that?
Mitchell:  During the time of war, but after the war was over, then after that was over, then what they’d do is go up and scrape the deck or the ship, paint the ship, do all the normal duties, and whatever that’s there to be done about the ship.  And even while the ship was at sea, if it’s calm enough a lot of times they paint different things over the side.  But sometimes if the water is too rough, you just didn’t.  Like up in Alaska, that water really got rough.  And in Alaska also, them days was about….  Let’s see, we had about four hours of daylight.
Gillen:  Alaska fall or winter, yeah.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  When we were there.  And we’d have to stand watch.  You’d go out and stand watch from before sunrise.  An hour before sunrise until an hour after sunset, we used to stand watch like that, and be on your battle station.  And after that, then they could kind of relax a little bit.  But so far, I never heard about anybody, like on ship there, having problems.  They may have had problems, but you know, one ship may have problems just like one house.  A ship would be [well well?] and they didn’t bother interfering once, because there was just one particular area, or one particular ship.
Gillen:  When you were on board ship all those many months, did you ever get to hear from home, did you ever get letters from home or anything like that?
Mitchell:  Yeah, if we’d go to shore.  I got letters if we was in a port.  Because I know my aunt, she sent me a pound cake, but it was about six months later, and the cake had already….
Gillen:  Gone bad?
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  Well, the thought counted.
Mitchell:  That was in Alaska.  It didn’t make it up there.
Gillen:  But you did get cards and letters and things like that?
Mitchell:  Oh yeah, we got cards, we got mail and stuff from home-mail call.  When we went in port, sometimes you didn’t get it until you was in port.  If you were someplace where you were gonna be at sea for a week, well then you get the mail after you got in.  Everybody was glad to do that.  I know in Alaska, that was about the longest time I remember not gettin’ anything.  I remember the cake, that was a package.  They didn’t send very many packages, but we did get mail.
Gillen:  I would have thought back when you were out near the Philippines or New Guinea or someplace like that, that would have been the time when you didn’t get much mail.
Gillen:  Yeah.  Well, let’s see, I think every once a while when we’d go into port, they’d make sure that the people got mail, kind of keep the morale up.  And we’d always be glad to get mail.  But all the mail was censored.  Like in Australia.  We went to Australia, they censored.  It had to go to….  And only certain things you could write on the letter.  You couldn’t write where you were or nothin’, or anything about the war.
Gillen:  Kind of hard.
Mitchell:  That you was doin’ all right, everything was goin’ okay.
Gillen:  Was your incoming mail censored too, or they didn’t open that?  Letters from home.
Mitchell:  I don’t think the incoming mail was, but the outgoing was, because it’d have to go through there.  I’ve still got some cards with the “censored” on it.
Gillen:  Yeah.  So what happened after the Philippines, where did you go from there?  Because that would have been towards the end of the war.  That would have been ’44.
Mitchell:  After we got to the Philippines, we went on back towards Japan, went back in that area for a while.  But I know the last ship….  After I re-enlisted for the second term, I was on an oil tanker for the last two years.
Gillen:  That would have been after the war?
Mitchell:  Yeah, after the war.
Gillen:  Two things:  Where were you-I’m assuming you were probably on board ship when you heard about VE-Day, victory in Europe?  Do you remember that at all, or do you have any memories associated?
Mitchell:  I don’t.  I think [unclear].  I’m not for certain.
Gillen:  That would have been April 1945.  Were you still out in the Pacific somewhere on board ship when there was VE-Day?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I was in the Pacific, yeah.  I stayed out there practically all….
Gillen:  I’m just wondering if everybody was like, ���Wow, at least part of this war is over!”  Wasn’t there a good feeling about it?
Mitchell:  Yeah, but I remember at times when [unclear].  My memory….
Gillen:  Probably remember VJ-Day better.  Did you hear about the bomb when you were on board ship?
Mitchell:  Oh yeah.  Yeah, we were aboard ship, yeah.
Gillen:  And do you remember where you were in the Pacific when you heard about it?
Mitchell:  Seems like we were….  Seems like to me-I’m not for certain, on account I need to jar my memory.  Seems like we were between Hawaii and Okinawa someplace, out in that area someplace.
Gillen:  I thought maybe you might even be close to Japan, in case there was some kind of support thing or something.
Mitchell:  No, I don’t think we were near.
Gillen:  Okay.  So when you heard about the bomb, then you heard that it was VJ-Day.  Were you on board ship then, at the end of the war?
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  Was there a big party?
Mitchell:  No.  A lot of times they didn’t have too many parties.
Gillen:  Not even for VJ-Day, the end of the war?
Mitchell:  I don’t remember.  I sure don’t remember havin’ no party.  But everybody was happy, so that was one thing about it.  They were happy the war was over.  And of course you know a lot of times  people would have a little party, it’d get back, and they’d be singin’.  They didn’t have guitars or nothin’ like that to play, but they’d be out singing these songs and different things.  Some of the things, I don’t remember 'em havin’ too much of a … really.  But a lot of 'em was sayin’ how happy they were that the war was over.  Now they can go home.  But some of them, bein’ out in the Pacific, they had to get back to the States before they could go home.
Gillen:  How long was it after VJ-Day you still had to stay out in the Pacific for quite a while?  Or did you guys get to come back to California?
Mitchell:  Let me see….  Seems like we stayed there for a while.
Gillen:  A few more months maybe?
Mitchell:  Yeah, a month or so.  I don’t remember exactly.
Gillen:  Do you remember coming back to California?  Was that like later in 1945 probably?
Mitchell:  When I come back to California, let’s see….  Back in ’45, I think I was then on a different ship.  We were in Okinawa.  We [unclear] in Okinawa someplace.  I can remember now, because what I did was, they told me I could go home.  I got off the ship and I caught a plane and flew back to Hawaii.  And from Hawaii, I could come on back to ‘Frisco by ship or somethin’-a transport ship, I think-got on, I come back there.  I think, if I make no mistake.
Gillen:  After the war was over, and you finally did get stateside, were you given some leave?
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  How much leave were you given?
Mitchell:  Thirty days.
Gillen:  So did you get to go home to Texas?
Mitchell:  After the war was over, yeah, I got a thirty-day leave.
Gillen:  So you went back to Bivens?
Mitchell:  I went back to….  Let’s see, my father and them had moved to Arizona.
Gillen:  Oh! your father had moved to Arizona?!
Mitchell:  Yeah, uh-huh.
Gillen:  Oh! I didn’t know that.  Okay.  Because I know we’re gonna get to our Arizona talk in a little bit.  But that’s your Arizona connection.  Where did he move to, here in Arizona?
Mitchell:  They came to Phoenix.  Well, the town was Okima [phonetic].  You know Okima is an area where I had an uncle out there.  That’s on 40th Street and University, not too far from Tempe.
Gillen:  Oh, Tempe, yeah.
Mitchell:  Well, actually, our mail route was Tempe.
Gillen:  Did your dad sell his land in Texas?
Mitchell:  No.
Gillen:  So other family was taking care of it?
Mitchell:  Well, when he came to Arizona, he just kept the land in Texas, and he sold the house and everything:  the horses, mules, and plows and all of that stuff.  And then he finally, since there was  three of us, he divided the land up.  He gave all of us a certain amount of land.  And I had sent money to him, and he gave me about nineteen, twenty acres more than the rest of them, because I’d sent them money.  My other two brothers, they got a hundred acres apiece.
Gillen:  So you didn’t go back to Texas, and you came to Arizona to visit your dad, is that right?
Mitchell:  I went back to Texas, because I got married in 1946.
Gillen:  Okay, so you went back to Texas.  You were still in the Navy though?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I still was in the Navy.
Gillen:  So you had a girlfriend that was kind of stayin’ true to you for a while, and you came back to marry her?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I married her.
Gillen:  But your dad was in Arizona in 1945?
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  The first time you came to Arizona, what did you think of it?
Mitchell:  Well, I didn’t think much of Arizona.
Gillen:  (laughs)  Did you think it was hot and dry?
Mitchell:  It was hot!  It was hot and dry when we came through here.  And still, it wasn’t nothin’-when I was goin’ to California.
Gillen:  Now, why did your dad select Arizona?
Mitchell:  We had an uncle.
Gillen:  Was this the uncle that was in the Army?
Mitchell:  No.  Uncle Perry [phonetic].  Uncle Perry, one time they were in Georgia.  He came to Arizona and he settled out here.  And so my grandmother on my mother’s side, he knew them pretty good from my grandmother, from the Rocamo [phonetic] side.  So they knew exactly kind of where they were and everything.  And they’d come out here, because they figured farming or whatever.
Gillen:  So your dad wanted to farm in the Tempe area?
Mitchell:  No, they didn’t farm, they just come out here for his health.  He had asthma.
Gillen:  Okay.  I was going to ask that, because a lot of people in those days did come to Arizona for their health.  Did he get better out here?
Mitchell:  Oh yeah, Papa looked better when he died in ’81 than he did….
Gillen:  Your father died in 1981, or he was eighty-one [years old]?
Mitchell:  He was eighty-one when he died in 1980.
Gillen:  Okay.  That’s interesting.  You had your first visit then when you were still in the Navy, visiting your dad in Arizona.  (recording paused?)  We talked a little bit about Arizona on leave, and Texas on leave.  Did you get back on board a destroyer at that point after your leave?
Mitchell:  No.  After, I stayed on the list two years, and my tour was on an oil tanker.  And that oil tanker [unclear], that’s the one that runs….
Gillen:  So ’46 to ’48, you were on the oil tanker.
Mitchell:  Right.  They wouldn’t let me go on shore duty.
Gillen:  Oh?  Why not?
Mitchell:  They said, “You don’t need to go to shore duty.  You could teach these people somethin’.”
Gillen:  So you were at the point where you had to teach other people?
Mitchell:  They wanted me, but I told them, “No, I want to go on shore duty,” because I was gonna go, but they wouldn’t give me no shore duty.
Gillen:  You’d been on a ship for a long time.
Mitchell:  Yeah, five or six years.  And then on my shore duty, that would have been a good chance two years in the States.  But then after that, they sent me back on this oil tanker, and this thing went right on back out to the Pacific, and we went down to pick up the oil down there in Arabia.  We stayed down there and hauled oil to China, Japan, and [unclear] Islands, different places like that.
Gillen:  So you actually went from California all the way over to somewhere in the Middle East and picked up oil and then had to bring it back to China?
Mitchell:  Yeah, went down there with King Saud.  We were down there.
Gillen:  That’s a long trip.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  But then it takes a long time to get down there.  Went through Singapore and then [unclear], and then Ceylon, India.
Gillen:  And you weren’t going to different Navy bases and leaving the oil off?
Mitchell:  No, no, no.  We had to go that way and pick it up, and then come and bring it back, and then to Japan and to Guam.
Gillen:  Who were you taking the oil to?  Other ships?  Or the bases?
Mitchell:  To the bases, because this was an oil tanker.  And that was when King Saud was down there, and he had sometimes fifteen ships in there, waitin’ to get oil.
Gillen:  They weren’t all Navy ships, though, were they?
Mitchell:  They were tankers.  All of 'em were oil tankers.
Gillen:  Right, but they were all tankers that were part of our Navy?
Mitchell:  Right.  A lot of it was haulin’ for the Navy, bring it back there, fill up 'em [unclear].  So that was the last tour of duty.
Gillen:  But were you doin’ the same kinds of duties as before pretty much?  Or your changed your duties at all on board?
Mitchell:  I was steward.  I cooked and baked on the ship.  Of course it was no big deal for me.  We didn’t have to fight, didn’t shoot no guns or nothin’, because we had more or less … well, cargo for oil.
Gillen:  How many men were on board ship?
Mitchell:  I don’t exactly remember.
Gillen:  [unclear]
Mitchell:  We had maybe, I don’t know exactly, but maybe a hundred some-maybe more than that.
Gillen:  Okay.  So you were working more in the mess at this point, as opposed to working for an officer or two?
Mitchell:  No, we were with the officers.
Gillen:  Oh, you were still with the officers.
Mitchell:  Yeah, with the officers.
Gillen:  Because I thought you said you were cooking.
Mitchell:  Well, they got to eat too!
Gillen:  So you would cook just for them?
Mitchell:  Just for them.
Gillen:  Oh my goodness.
Mitchell:  Yeah, we didn’t cook for the crew.  Crew had different cooks.  And we’d bake bread and pies and all kinds of different things.  Once we made up the menu, we’d know exactly what they’re gonna have from one week to another, or one day to another.
Gillen:  Some men like to cook, did you like to cook?
Mitchell:  You know I didn’t cook until I got in the service, because my brother next to me, he did the cookin’.  I always did the field work, helped to do the field work.  I was up with Papa and I liked plowin’ and doin’ whatever, takin’ care of the horses, the hogs, the chickens, and all of that.  But he did that, and my mother-and then I had two sisters-they did [unclear].  And when I got in there, and now I do a lot of cookin’ now.
Gillen:  Did they send you back for any more training at all for that, or you just kind of learned on the job as you moved up in rank?
Mitchell:  No, they told me, “Anybody who can cook as good as you can, you don’t need no trainin’.”  And when I come to Arizona, I couldn’t even get a job cookin’!
Gillen:  This was after the war?
Mitchell:  Yeah, because they said, “What certificate you got?”  “I don’t have no certificate.  They didn’t send me to school.”  And so that was one of the things [unclear].
Gillen:  So you spent two years on the oil tanker, and this was a lot of traveling around the Pacific and the Middle East, a lot of time on board ship.
Mitchell:  Yeah, the ship, yeah, the oil tanker.  That’s all they did, haul oil on the thing.
Gillen:  But you got married in 1946 somehow.  You had some leave time and you got married?
Mitchell:  Well they give you, let’s see, leave, just the time that….  No! I stayed overseas practically the last couple of years.
Gillen:  I know!  Your poor wife!
Mitchell:  Yeah.  And then after I come back and I got discharged in California….
Gillen:  Did you want to get out?
Mitchell:  Oh yeah, that’s the reason I got out.
Gillen:  Yeah, you’d had enough?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  I said, “I ain’t stayin’ in here,” 'cause if I stayed another four years-see, I just signed up for four years then-then I’d have probably stayed overseas.  Well, they put you on a ship, and wherever they say that ship needs to go, well, you go.  We didn’t have the type of duty like they have now.  In fact, they didn’t want you to even-if you had an emergency, you couldn’t even go hardly.
Gillen:  Wow.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  But now it’s very nice for them to-if a person has family or some [reason] they need to go….
Gillen:  It’s better, yeah.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  And then it’s so much more time leisure, all over.  Like people with jobs and different things years ago, you had to stay at that job from the time you get on it, 'til the time you retire.
Gillen:  After you guys got married, did your wife stay in Texas, or did she go to Arizona, or did she go to California?
Mitchell:  She stayed in Texas until after I got out, and then we moved to Arizona.
Gillen:  Okay, so right in 1948 you decided to move to Arizona.
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  Did you move in, at least for a while, with your dad in Tempe?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I’d bought land there.
Gillen:  You owned land?
Mitchell:  I bought land in Arizona.  My father had my power of attorney, and I bought land in Phoenix in about 1945.
Gillen:  Oh!  Even before you got out you bought some land here.
Mitchell:  Oh yeah.
Gillen:  You’re a smart man.  That’s a good move to do.
Mitchell:  I saved my money.
Gillen:  You bet!
Mitchell:  That’s one thing, I wasn’t gonna spend no money.  My bank account, I paid off all that land in 1946, because I had my bank account in Marshall, Texas, and I drawed the money out and then I got the shippin’ overseas and re-enlistment pay, I paid that land off.
Gillen:  How much land did you buy?
Mitchell:  Three and a half acres.
Gillen:  And was that also near 40th Street?
Mitchell:  It was all on 40th Street.  I bought half of 40th Street, 3620 South 40th Street.  I had to buy half of the street because that’s where the markers were, was right in the middle of the street.
Gillen:  Was the street paved then?
Mitchell:  No.  It was partly paved.
Gillen:  What was around there?  Were there a few houses?
Mitchell:  No, a farm.  A big farm on the east side.  Then on the west side that was behind me, they had partial acreage, three and a half acres of canal that run right around, and it was practically independent.  But then on the south side there was some houses.  There was some land there, and the land that I bought, three and a half acres, the man that owned that, he put these Quonset huts and things, the ones that soldiers and things stayed in.  He sold that to them, about a half-acre of land for a house.
Gillen:  Fortieth Street and what would be a major cross street now for where you were?
Mitchell:  It run out to 40th Street and quit.
Gillen:  Okay, the land that you bought, what’s a street that’s near?
Mitchell:  Oh!  Broadway and University, north of.
Gillen:  Oh my goodness, right in the middle of downtown now.
Mitchell:  That’s where the Coca-cola plant is and everything.  The man that I bought the land from, he owned a lot of that land out there.  I could have bought five acres, same thing.  I bought three and a half.  But then he [unclear] five acres.  You couldn’t get out.  When you got a chance to go to town, you had to have two pair of shoes-one pair of shoes to walk in the mud if it rained, 'til you got to the street.  Then you put them out, save them 'til you come back home, 'cause you’ve got to go back there.  And if you’ve got a car back there-they didn’t drive cars back there on those streets because you couldn’t go out.
Gillen:  So you came there not only to be with your dad, and make a new start with your wife and everything, what did you want to do for a living?  Were you going to farm?  You said you couldn’t get a job as a cook.  What did you do?
Mitchell:  What I did was, when I got out, I drawed 52-20.  In other words, we could draw twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks.  But then I washed cars, started washin’ cars about a dollar.
Gillen:  Just on your own?  You didn’t go work for some car wash place?
Mitchell:  Yeah, it was a car wash place, automatic.  They didn’t have but two automatic car washes in Phoenix at that time.
Gillen:  Okay.  And you worked at one of those?
Mitchell:  I worked at one of those for a while, and then worked there, and then I went to California.  And that’s where I kind of got a job there.
Gillen:  For a while.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  And then finally this base opened up, and I come back, and I got a job here at the base.
Gillen:  Okay, here at Luke?
Mitchell:  Uh-huh.
Gillen:  Do you remember what year that was you started here at Luke?  In 1950, or 1952?
Mitchell:  I retired from Luke in….
Gillen:  But when did you start here?
Mitchell:  About ’52, ’51.
Gillen:  So you had about three or four years there where you were workin’ the car wash or workin’ for the place in California.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  Right.
Gillen:  And then you came back.  Well, tell me about the first time you came to Luke.  We’re here now, and of course it’s way different, but tell me what it was like.
Mitchell:  Well, actually, when we first came to Luke, I worked up there at Roads and Grounds.  That was where you did all the like repairin’ roads and grounds.  When it just opened up, me and another guy by the name of Turner, we used to haul-I used to drive truck and different things, and patch roads, little streets and things, and the grounds.  And then what I did was….
(recording paused)
Gillen:  You worked with the roads and stuff like that?
Mitchell:  Yeah, and we also had an incinerator up there at the north gate.  And what they do is, all the paper and stuff, then we’d burn it up in that incinerator there.
Gillen:  How did you hear about working out here at Luke, do you remember?
Mitchell:  I don’t remember.  Probably I heard through the newspaper, or maybe on the radio.  And then I come out here and I [asked] to see if I could get a job.  The only job was labor.  And I said, “Well, I’ll take the labor job.”
Gillen:  So when you decided to start working out here, did you change your house then?  Did you move from Tempe to more like the west side?
Mitchell:  No, I always stayed at Tempe.
Gillen:  You drove all that way?
Mitchell:  Yup, all that way.
Gillen:  What kind of car did you have?
Mitchell:  A 1946 Plymouth.
Gillen:  That must have been a good car!
Mitchell:  When I started working out here, I’m the only one that had a car.
Gillen:  You saved your money!
Mitchell:  The other guys was with me, who wanted a ride, I picked them up.  I come through town.
Gillen:  Did you charge 'em?
Mitchell:  Yeah!  Yeah I charged 'em.  There was six of us in the car.  I’m the only one that had a car.  [unclear] paid a dollar a day, and so we worked and I paid the car off anyway, because we bought the car.
Gillen:  How long did it take you to get from home to out here?
Mitchell:  About an hour.
Gillen:  Just about all dirt road?
Mitchell:  No, it had pavement.  I would come from 40th Street, and I would come around by-go from 40th Street to Washington.  And then I had some guy I picked up over town on Washington.  One was out there where I lived at, [Challis?].  And I’d get him, and then go to Washington, two more guys.  And then there was [unclear] more.  No, some Tempe used to ride with me too.  They’d drive to the house and leave the car at the house, and then I picked them up.
Gillen:  Just kind of headed west on Washington for as long as you could?
Mitchell:  Washington up to 7th Avenue.  And then Grand Avenue, just keep right on comin’.
Gillen:  Pretty close.  Grand is kind of a little east of here.
Mitchell:  Yeah, they kind of [unclear] around, and a lot of times if it rained or somethin’ like this, you couldn’t go certain streets.  And sometimes I would come through about Buckeye Road, and is that Indian School, or what?  Well anyway, they had some little Quonset huts right there on Gossett [phonetic] and….  I don’t remember what….  [unclear] runs into the street that runs….  What street is this out here that runs east?
Gillen:  There’s Northern and there’s other ones.
Mitchell:  No.  It’s the one that comes out of….  It used to run all the way right straight up, right parallel to the base.
Gillen:  Northern runs just north of the base, and it runs….
Mitchell:  Yeah, but we didn’t have a Northern.
Gillen:  There’s Olive and Glendale.
Mitchell:  But anyway, Glendale runs right into, come from [unclear], but Glendale runs east and west.  This one runs north and south.
Gillen:  Litchfield Road?
Mitchell:  Litchfield Road!  Thank you.  Yeah, pick up Litchfield Road up there in Avondale.
Gillen:  [unclear]
Mitchell:  Yeah.
Gillen:  How many of the roads were paved?
Mitchell:  They were paved, but they were just two-way.
Gillen:  Okay.  I was wondering.  So Litchfield was even paved, and Grand was paved all the way?
Mitchell:  Yeah, we could get here, it was paved all the way.  Used to haul all the trash there to the river.  We used to bury it right there.
Gillen:  So Luke was a lot different back then.
Mitchell:  Oh yeah.  We had a few houses, not very many.
Gillen:  Right.
Mitchell:  And we used to work on the other side of the base.  Sometimes we’d go on the west side, and we used to do different things out there that needed to be done.  And then I think the last time before I retired, I worked for-we was Roads and Grounds.  That was the first one there, Roads and Grounds.  We’d take care of the grounds and things.  And then I worked for the hospital for a while.  And then from there I went down to the engine build-up.
Gillen:  Were you working on airplane engines (Mitchell:  No.) or truck engines?
Mitchell:  No, if they needed parts, I would get the parts.  And I’d get 'em different washers and different parts for the airplane. Then from there, [unclear] salvage yard, Redistribution and Market.  Also I worked there, and they sent me to school, to Denver, Colorado, a month.
Gillen:  Training?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  Right.
Gillen:  On what?
Mitchell:  Well, redistribution and marketing.  I went up there in … hm, must have been about February or March.  Must have been about March, and it was cold.
Gillen:  What year was that?
Mitchell:  That was my last year.
Gillen:  Oh, not until like 1970 or something?
Mitchell:  In 1970.  I had a first cousin up there, he was a doctor.  We went to school together.
Gillen:  All this time, were you traveling from Tempe out here to Luke?  The whole time?
Mitchell:  Yup.  Well, that was the only way to get out here.
Gillen:  I just thought maybe you’d give in and buy a house out here.
Mitchell:  No, because I had a house and land down there.  [unclear]  I didn’t buy a house out here.
Gillen:  Were you still being real thrifty and saving as much money as you could?
Mitchell:  Yeah.  Yeah, we saved a bunch of money, but we had to survive-and had the children too.
Gillen:  How many children did you have?
Mitchell:  Three.  My daughter, Cynthia, she doesn’t have no children.  But the other son, Nelson, he has two daughters.  And Lynwood, he has two boys.  And that’s it.
Gillen:  Did any of your children join the military?
Mitchell:  Lynwood did.  Lynwood put thirty years in the military, E-9.
Gillen:  In what service?
Mitchell:  He was a Marine.  He is smart!  He retired in 2001, and they wanted him to work at Novara [phonetic], and somebody else wanted him to work.  He said, “No, I ain’t gonna work.”  But then he found a job [unclear].  He works for a company now, and he’s doing really good.  His wife is a beautician.  They went to school together, and they got married when the were only eighteen.
Gillen:  Oh, you’re like me, I have a whole stack of cards in my purse.
Mitchell:  Let me get my glasses and I’ll read it.  Yeah, I’m very proud of him.  And he didn’t go to college.  But Cynthia, my daughter, she went to college.  Lockheed!  He’s [i.e., Lynwood] a supervisor.  He makes his own…. He tells 'em how much he wants for a job.  How much pay.  And besides that, when we was over there, and he was gonna retire (laughs) he said, “Now I’m gettin’ out.  I’m gonna get me a real job!”  (laughter)
Gillen:  One thing that’s not changed at all, really, I would think, is all the flying here at Luke.  I mean, Luke is always about flying, so you saw a lot of different aircraft over the years, a lot of people come and go.  Do you have any kind of memories of anybody or anything that happened while you were working here at Luke?
Mitchell:  Just used to be the south gate down there over on Litchfield, we used to go down the side of that to go [change in build-up?].  Sometimes there’d be wind and stuff, and those great big tumbleweeds, they were taller than a car.  You couldn’t [unclear].  You had to, [unclear] come across the road.  You had to stop and let them go on across.
Gillen:  Did you work a lot with other military? like with the airmen or sergeants?
Mitchell:  Just with the airmen on their … laundry, taking care of the hospital.  Okay, I worked there, and so the clothes and things.  And I never will forget, they had some, and we had to give out the laundry soap and stuff:  White King box powder.  Years ago, they used to have a coupon on there, and I’d tell the guys, “Give me that coupon off there,” and I got roses.  And I sent that to California and for 25¢ I got a rose bush.
Gillen:  So that’s how you got into roses?
Mitchell:  That’s how I got into [roses].  And one of the main things, right across the front of my house I had roses all the way across.  But I didn’t even know the name of any of 'em.
Gillen:  What attracted you?  Did you just think they were beautiful?
Mitchell:  My mother, used to be in Texas, she used to grow roses.  They had a rose bush, and in that rose bush-it wasn’t a hybrid tea, it was just one that come out and bloomed once a year.  What she’d do, people from the church and things, she’d come by and she’d give 'em a cutting, or dig up one of those little sprouts, and they’d get a rose bush too.
Gillen:  So it reminded you of your mother.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  Mama loved roses.
Gillen:  So you got a whole bunch of roses for your house in Tempe?
Mitchell:  In Tempe I used to have 248.
Gillen:  Oh my goodness!
Mitchell:  Then I joined the Rose Society and I began to learn about roses, and then I got to be a judge, I’ve been a consultum rosier [phonetic].  Then I got into the business of roses.
Gillen:  Oh really?!  When did that start?
Mitchell:  Oh, I started about….
Gillen:  When you were still working here at Luke?
Mitchell:  No.  Oh no, I’d retired.  And then that was in about���.
Gillen:  ’70-something?
Mitchell:  Yeah, after my wife passed away.
Gillen:  Oh, I’m sorry.
Mitchell:  So I had to take care of her.  She had valley fever, then she had a stroke.  I carried her to California, over there, because it took-I had to hire an ambulance from here to over the other side of Bakersfield.  Carried her there, because didn’t have no doctors or nothin’ could treat 'em here, because the doctors they had, doing treatment for valley fever, most of the patients died.  They just didn’t [unclear].  A lot of people here at Luke, used to be that a lot of them had valley fever, and airmen.  And most of the people that come to Arizona, they’ve been around a touch of valley fever, but they don’t catch it.
Gillen:  Well, you catch it, but you don’t know you have it.  You think maybe you have a cold or something.  Some people, like 1% or something, get it really bad.  So that’s what happened to your wife, she got it really bad?
Mitchell:  Oh, she was bad, yeah.  The idea of her shots, and then they put her in the hospital over there, and she stayed over there for almost three years, because I carried her there in ’66, ’67, ’68, ’69.  Then I brought her home, but they had found Dr. Gershner [phonetic]-both of 'em were doctors.  He was a doctor, and she was a doctor-his wife was a doctor.  And they could train under Dr. Crane [phonetic], and they could do the treatment for her and come back in here.  I retired in May of ’80, and she died in November.  She died about ten days before her birthday, her forty-fourth birthday.
Gillen:  That’s sad, very sad.  I’m sorry.
Mitchell:  [unclear]
Gillen:  On a happier topic, with the roses again, there’s all the rose fields still behind the base here.  Were there rose fields behind Luke when you were working here?
Mitchell:  I reckon so.  No, they were out here on the other side of….
Gillen:  There’s a whole bunch of 'em just here at Northern.  I think there’s still the ones that are just west of the base, too-real big fields of 'em.
Mitchell:  Oh yeah, I know some of those guys.  We went out there and met them.
Gillen:  I was wondering if that kind of inspired you too.  I didn’t know when those rose things went in.
Mitchell:  No, we didn’t care too much about roses.  They had roses out here.  They were on 60th, on the other side of….  Let’s see, they was out there on the other side-had to be way on the other side of Bill.
Gillen:  So you don’t remember when they put the rose fields in here?
Mitchell:  No.
Gillen:  I was kind of curious about that.
Mitchell:  I think maybe Jackson Perkins was one that paid 'em out there.  And Jackson Perkins found what the deal was, they went back to California.  And then these people over here, see, now they got about three-fourths of the roses in the United States grown in Arizona.  [unclear] so I got into that business.  Then I made pretty good money, because I take care of roses for people, and they see all them roses I had, and they wanted me to plant 'em roses.  I worked for a lot of people out here.
Gillen:  So you were kind of raisin’ roses yourself and selling them?
Mitchell:  No, these are patented roses, and so what I did was, if they wanted some roses, then I’d show 'em the catalog and see which ones they want.  And then if they wanted certain ones, I’d get 'em for 'em, and I’d plant 'em.  And so then I moved from Phoenix to Peoria, and now I only have about 150 [rose bushes].
Gillen:  So when did you finally move over to Peoria?
Mitchell:  About 1992.
Gillen:  Did you sell your land then?
Mitchell:  Yeah, I sold that, because taxes were goin’ up about $5,000.
Gillen:  Well, I hope you got a good price on it.
Mitchell:  Yeah, I got a good price.
Gillen:  You probably should have gotten a pretty good price.
Mitchell:  Oh yeah, it was a good price.  I can’t complain about the money.  Not only got a [good] price on it, but then they wanted me to work.  I said, “Well, when I left, I carried a few rose bushes with me.”  And then they said, ���Well, we want you back because these guys don’t know nothin’ about no roses.  Come back.”  And so I worked for them until last year, until last August.  And then I got sick because they think I had cancer.  [unclear] cancer [unclear].  Anyway….  And so what I did was, I told 'em I can’t work no more, I don’t want to work no more, I don’t need no more money.  He said, “C’mon back, you don’t have to do much.”  I said, “Yeah, but them roses need attention every week.”  And so I work for 'em.  They’re nice people here.
Gillen:  When did you decide to get involved with the Pearl Harbor Survivors Society?
Mitchell:  Oh, shoot, that’s been a long time ago.  When I learned that they….  Somebody told me about the Pearl Harbor [Survivors Society] in I’ll say about 1987 or ’86.
Gillen:  So after you retired.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  Yeah, I was retired.  And then I started to call 'em up and then I’d write, and then I’d get a magazine from the Pearl Harbor Survivors.  And I go to meetings there, and I’m a lifetime member of that.  But now we don’t have a lot of people because they’re dyin’ every day.  I just got my book a couple of days ago.  We have a lot of 'em in there.
Gillen:  Do you still have an occasional small meeting here in the Phoenix area?
Mitchell:  Well, they disbanded.  We had a chapter here, and they still have one in Tucson.  But we didn’t have enough people to carry on, and so they decided we might as well disband.
Gillen:  Have you gone back for any of the anniversaries back in Pearl Harbor?
Mitchell:  No.
Gillen:  Didn’t go back for any of those, huh?
Mitchell:  I haven’t been back to Pearl Harbor since.  My foster mother, baby Riley [phonetic], I was gonna go back with her.  All of a sudden she got sick in ’78 or ’79 and she passed on.  I never had no [unclear].  I could go back, but I said I didn’t want to go back.  My son and his wife, they go over there, I think Nelson and them.
Gillen:  You should go back sometime.  Maybe you’ll go back this year.  Maybe you’ll go back this December.
Mitchell:  I know they’re having the Pearl Harbor Survivors meeting this [unclear].
Gillen:  You should go!  Have your son go along with you.  That’d be good.  I think you should go, that would be great.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  [unclear] and so I used to go to-well, I do go to meetings.  And then we had years ago, up to California, different places where they have the meetin’s at.
Gillen:  Was there kind of a special bond-especially maybe ten or twenty years ago when there were more of you-was there kind of a special bond when you all got together?
Mitchell:  I knew some of 'em, but they say I’m the last black one that belonged to that association, all of 'em’s gone.
Gillen:  Really?!
Mitchell:  Yeah, all of 'em’s gone, according to them.  That’s what they said, I’m the last [black] survivor.
Gillen:  I definitely think you should go back and everything.  I wanted to ask you, when you came back from the war, was there kind of an adjustment period?  Did you kind of have to shift gears?  You know, you were no longer on [board] ship all the time, you were no longer being in battle situations, or hearing the guns go off, and being at sea for months.  Was there a feeling when you finally got home and you knew the war was over?  Was there any kind of adjustment?
Mitchell:  I don’t think there was.  Wasn’t too much.  I may have [unclear] when I first got out and come back home.  Well it was….  [unclear] that involved in different things.  It may have been a little bit [unclear], but then I was glad I got out, because see they didn’t let me come home.  When I was in the service, heck, they wouldn’t let you stay with your-like if your wife was someplace, they didn’t let them come on.  Nowadays, your wife can move different places and things, but not then.  And the fact is, you could only have leave at certain times.  They didn’t let you have….  Because I remember times that the man that was the executive officer, his name was Smith.  He was the executive officer, and he didn’t even want me to go home to my mother’s funeral.  He said, “Well, she’s dead now.”  I said, “Well, I can go ahead and see her for the last time.”  But that’s a lot of money!  (laughs)  Everybody called him Snuffy Bill [phonetic].  But nevertheless I said, “Well, all people have certain ideas of things.”  But he didn’t know, and still….  But when they got in the service, I reckon you’re really indoctrinated.  And so he was one that really….
Gillen:  Went by the book, huh?
Mitchell:  Yeah, he went by the book.  One of the men that I started cookin’ for, the first time I started cookin’, when I went to the service, he said, “Nelson, can you make a cake?”  I’d never made no cake.  (laughs)  I said, “I don’t know, maybe I can make one.  I’ve seen my mother and them make 'em.”  He said, “Well, these guys can’t do nothin’.”  I said, “Well, would you tell him to make me a cake?”  I made him a chocolate layer cake with chocolate icing.  Ohhh!  And every time….  And I’d just been in the Navy for a short time, when they called me, “Nelson can do anything.”  That’s the reason they wouldn’t send me to school.  They said, “You don’t need to go to school!”
Gillen:  Oh dear.  Did you have a cookbook at least, I hope?  You must have had a cookbook.
Mitchell:  Well, I had a cookbook, and then pretty soon I get to know all the different recipes.
Gillen:  Change things up.
Mitchell:  Yeah.  And I had to make light bread and rolls and donuts.  And another thing we do, officers at that time, they had to have a snack about right after lunch, and that’s about two o’clock.  And they called me to make the donuts.  And so I did all that cookin’ and things, bakin’ and things, but I didn’t know that until I….  But now I said I’ve been cookin’ and bakin’.  I do a lot of cookin’ and bakin’ and I give a lot of stuff away, ever since I was about twenty-two, and now I’m ninety, just about.
Gillen:  And hard workin’ all the time!
Mitchell:  Long time cookin’.
Gillen:  Yeah.  When did you finally retire from everything, all your different jobs and everything?
Mitchell:  I reckon I won’t ever retire.
Gillen:  Yeah.  I know you’re still involved with the Rose Society and everything like that.
Mitchell:  Yeah, because that’s [unclear].
Gillen:  But you’re still not doin’ anything with the roses like plantin’ or sellin’ to people or anything are you?  Or are you?
Mitchell:  No, I told 'em I was quittin’.  “I’m tired.”  He said, “Well, you can just tell them guys what to do.”  I said “I don’t even want to come down there!”  I have a friend of mine, I had to help her-well, at least I didn’t have to help her.  All she had to do, I planted her the….  She couldn’t get nothin’ to grow.  She’s over on South Mountain, up there, and I finally planted her some petunias.  And these are the old type.  Once you get them growin’, they’ll grow!  So now she’s happy, she’s got petunias in her yard.
Gillen:  You’ve seen a lot of changes here in Arizona, and I’m sure you’re kind of aware of changes in the military.  You had the real deal segregation and no opportunities and stuff.  As we kind of wrap things up here, do you have any final thoughts on changes and anything along those lines that you’d like to say?
Mitchell:  One thing about it, the military years ago, the people complained about the planes and things.  I know they complained by saying [unclear] too much noise.  Well the planes was here before they came!  If they don’t like the planes, move!  [unclear] still I reckon we’re going to always have people of that caliber.  And still the base has been good for Glendale.  [unclear] all over, if you didn’t have the different bases and things.  And you never can tell what [unclear].  Them people from over there, they’re just as crazy as they can be, some of 'em.
Gillen:  I know what you’re talkin’ about.
Mitchell:  They’d just as soon [die than live?].  But anyway, I’m glad to see it goin’ on.  I’m glad to see the ones here.  And I encourage the ones that want to be a part of it, or to [deuce?] anything, or join it, do it to the best of your ability, because you just can’t, you never know.  [unclear] used to be when World War I come, World War II, you know who you fight.  Now, you don’t know who you fight.  [unclear]
Gillen:  Well, I want to say thank you for your service and for being such a wonderful American and hangin’ in there through tough times, and being one of the most hard-workin’ people I think I’ve been around.  You always went with the best you could, so I admire you very much for that.
Mitchell:  Thank you.
Gillen:  I thank you for your time, and I think we’ve covered quite a bit of ground, unless there’s any last little words you wanted to say.
Mitchell:  Well, I’ll tell you, I’m gonna live as long as I can and die when I can’t help myself.
Gillen:  There you go!
[END OF INTERVIEW]