Interview with Paul Schiltz [July 7, 2003]

Janet Hammond:

During World War II Paul served with U.S. Army Air Forces in the Air Transport Command including both the Central and the North African Wing. He attained the rank of Sergeant. Some of the locations associated with his stateside service are Jefferson Barracks, Missouri; Lincoln, Nebraska; Burbank, California; Bismark, North Dakota and Great Falls, Montana. Locations in Africa include Accra in what is now in the Gold Coast.

Paul Schiltz:

Accra.

Janet Hammond:

Accra, which is now in the Gold Coast. Wadi Siedna.

Paul Schiltz:

Wadi Siedna.

Janet Hammond:

Near Khartoum. Payne Field near Cairo and El Aouina Air Base near Tunis, Tunesia. Also present at the interview is Lillian Danielson Schiltz, Paul's wife of 57 years. Paul, tell me something about your childhood and the family in which you grew up.

Paul Schiltz:

Well, I was born out on the farm. And my mother I think had a midwife there at the time. But my dad come from Minnesota, Caledonia, Minnesota, that's where my mother comes from too, and he homesteaded there on 160 acres. He built a little shack, put sod around it to keep from freezing to death in the wintertime. We lived twenty miles from the closest town. After he got that built he went back and got married to my mother, I think in 1910, brought her out there. And they come out in an immigrant car with a few horses and a walking plow and maybe a disc or something to farm with. And then there was four of us children. The oldest boy was Lowell, six years older than me. The next one in line was Vincent, and he was three years younger. And then it was me. And then finally my sister Felicitus. That was the four of us.

Janet Hammond:

What were some of your interests as a child?

Paul Schiltz:

When I was a young boy or when?

Janet Hammond:

Yeah, when you were a kid.

Paul Schiltz:

Well, we had a lot of fun. It was make-believe fun. We never went to movies. I never went to a movie until I was in the second year of high school. And we used to go down to the pond and the creek and catch frogs. And we would get a straw and blow them up and see which one could stay up the longest without diving down, and that was the winner, the one that stayed up the longest. Then we used to take grasshoppers. We had a hell of a bunch of grasshoppers there. And one year they ate all our crop up. And we would take a long thin strong straw and stick it in their hinders and let them go, and the one that flew the highest was the winner. So we had lots of fun that way. We didn't have to spend any money. We didn't have any money to spend anyhow. We milked about ten cows. And dad would give us a penny apiece for each dollar he got in cream, take it up to the creamery. We would get about ten cents a week, which was enough to buy two good sized candy bars twice as big as they are now, probably three ounces apiece. We could buy a big box of Cracker Jacks for five cents. So -- well, I don't know what else to go on with. We had --

Janet Hammond:

Where did you go to school?

Paul Schiltz:

We went to a school out in the country a mile and a half from our place. In the wintertime my dad used to drive us over there with a sled. He had a couple buffalo robes he would throw over us to keep us from freezing to death. And it was all eight grades in one school. We had a big furnace down in the basement to furnish the heat. Some years the teacher would boarder at the school so it was nice and warm when we got there in the morning. Otherwise, if a teacher didn't board there, why, it was cold when we got to school. At school played the usual games kids play. In the summer when it was nice we had softball and baseball and used to catch pocket gophers -- not pocket gophers, flicker-tailed gophers. If we would see one go in a hole, we would take some store string and make a noose around it and put it around the hole and lay back about six feet. When the gopher would stick his head out, we would yank him. We heard the county was paying one cent for each tail, so we cut off their tails and let them go so they'd propagate and we'd get more tails. But it turned out that we got fooled. The county didn't pay us anything. That was just a rumor going around. They also used to pay fifteen cents for a pair of magpie wings because magpies were destructive. And they did pay that. And you would get two and a half for the ears of a young coyote and five dollars for an old coyote's wings because they were bad on sheep and livestock and stuff like that, chickens. They would come and kill the chickens and everything else.

Janet Hammond:

You mentioned going to high school. Where did you go to high school?

Paul Schiltz:

Well, when I got -- I graduated out of the -- MRS. SCHILTZ: Assumption Abbey.

Paul Schiltz:

No. I mean, to start with in the gradeschool I skipped from the fourth to the sixth grade. And then in the eighth grade we had a teacher that didn't teach us much of anything, let us horse around all day and sit together in the seats and talk and fool around. So hardly any of us passed. I missed two subjects and I had to go a whole extra year. Then I went through Assumption Abbey at Richfield, North Dakota. It was run by about thirty-five Catholic priests. They had a big farm there. They furnished all the grub we had to eat. We ate down in what was called the refractory. And it costs a thousand dollars a year, which was a heck of a lot of money during the Depression in 1932 when I started out. My dad said, "If they'll let you take enough subjects", which was 16 credits at the time, he says, "I'll give you a thousand dollars because that's what I have to pay each year for your tuition and room and board." So I started taking six -- enough subjects a year, and I graduated in three years as valedictorian. So I did pretty good there, and I got my thousand dollars. And in 1942 I spent that $1,000 on buying 160 acres of land adjoining my dad's. I didn't sell it. I rented it out to my dad and then to my brother-in-law until 19 -- 2001, and I sold it to my brother-in-law for 36,500. So I had quite a gain there besides getting all the rent flow through the years too. So you can see what inflation does.

Janet Hammond:

What kind of jobs did you have before you went in the military? Were you always on the farm?

Paul Schiltz:

No. I worked at the triple A office. It was called Agriculture Adjustment Act at that time. It was in Killdeer, North Dakota. And I went up there. And I had to find some room and board. The lady wanted $20 a month for room and board. My dad didn't have $20 to spare and I surely didn't have it. So she says, "Well, I'll let it go until you get your first paycheck." I got $60 a month, which was real good at that time. My dad was on the commission on the A.A. at that time. He worked, would come up about three times a week. He got $0.07 a mile for driving 27 miles plus $5 a day for his work. So I got to see him about three times a week. If I wanted to go home weekends, why, he'd pick me up. I didn't have any wheels of my own at all. No kid my age had wheels in those days.

Janet Hammond:

Where were you --

Paul Schiltz:

I think I worked there probably a year.

Janet Hammond:

Where were you when you heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked?

Paul Schiltz:

I was getting a hair cut in Dickinson, North Dakota. And I got kind of excited and I thought, well, maybe I'll get drafted. So the day came when I was called to get an examination. And they found out I had an umbilical hernia, a little air bubble in my belly button. When I was a kid, I remember my folks had put a silver dollar on and taped it on for about a half a year, and the damn thing never went away. It never bothered me though. So after I found out I wouldn't be inducted, why, I thought, well, I might as well go to airplane school instructors and stuff and go out to the West Coast and make some big money because a lot of women were even go out there and getting jobs at that time. So two neighbor kids and I went down there and started school. And I got about halfway through, I got called back to have another reexamination. This time they wasn't so fussy. I passed with flying colors. So that kind of aggravated me. The darn school wouldn't give me my money back anymore even for what I hadn't gone through there and finished.

Janet Hammond:

How old were you at that time?

Paul Schiltz:

Well, I think when I went to the service I was about, well, let's see, I can't just remember how old I was at that time. Anyway, I --

Janet Hammond:

Could do you remember when you were -- the day you were inducted when you actually got into the military?

Paul Schiltz:

No.

Janet Hammond:

Where were you at that time? Where were you when you were inducted?

Paul Schiltz:

When I was inducted, I went to Minneapolis or St. Paul. Now my memory fails me. Anyway --

Janet Hammond:

How did you get there?

Paul Schiltz:

By train, I got there by train. And while I was taking -- they give me, they give us all a aptitude test I guess they called it at that time. And mine was mostly as far as mechanics go because I was pretty well mechanically inclined, and I passed with flying colors. That's why they sent me to Lincoln Air Force Base in Lincoln, Nebraska, to further my education in airplane mechanics. And while there, I met Teddy (Levings) who was an old Indian friend of mine that used to sleep next to me at Assumption Abbey up in the dormitory. I hadn't seen him since 1934. And here it was years later. He -- we always exchanged a candy bar each day. One day I'd give him a candy bar and the next day he'd give me one. One day we got to wrestling and I got the best of him. I got a scissor-hold on him and he had to give up. And that day he didn't give me a candy bar. He was mad at me. When I got in bed, I felt something funny in bed. And I reached down and here was my candy bar. He wouldn't talk to me and give it to me, but he was good enough to give it to me in my bed. So I had my evening snack before I went to bed.

Janet Hammond:

When you were in training at Lincoln, what were you actually being trained to do?

Paul Schiltz:

We had ten different courses, I think they were ten days a course or something like that. They were -- well, like structures and hydraulics, electricity and all the different things. And when we got overseas, even taking that much training and studying that much, when you actually get to working on the line, the planes come in, it's altogether different from what you learned in books. You got to make due is what you got to do. We learned how to change engines. When we got over there, there wasn't any engines to change if one went bad in the airplane. We had to go out to a junk pile that was about seven acres of shot-down planes and get parts out of it and try and fix up the best we could.

Janet Hammond:

During your training period there at Lincoln, what was an average day like, were you in class all day or did you have any free time?

Paul Schiltz:

We weren't in class -- we were in class five days a week as far as I know. Every morning we had to march. We had to march across a new bridge they had built. And you had to get out of step when you marched across that bridge. And one day we all made it out that we're going to stay in step and not do as our leader said. And we got there and that bridge must have went up and down about six inches because all the pounding just like these people that do these -- what do you call them -- things do, cloggers. Well, we had to study pretty good. I might tell the joke. I don't know if it's too good to tell or not. But we always told the joke, the instructor one day was telling about this monkey in the cage down in a beer joint downtown. He says, "You want to go and visit there?" He says, "Well, it's a pool hall." He says, "Rack up the balls and whichever ball you get, you pay you a dollar and whichever ball you get in, you get a dollar for it. If it's number five, you get five dollars." Well, I was dumb enough to ask him, "Well, what if you don't get any ball in?" Well, then he says, "Well, you got to go over and kiss the monkey in the cage there in the corner." So the next day I thought I'd get back at him. I thought up kind of a joke. I thought it up myself. I says before class I told the instructor, I says, "Did you hear about the G.I. out at the MP gates last night? They found a dead G.I., didn't have a single clothes on, didn't have tags on or anything. He says, "Well, how did they know he is a G.I. if he didn't have any dog tags on and he was naked?" Oh, I said, "he had his ass chewed out." That was a saying we used to say when you got hell, you know.

Janet Hammond:

What did you do during your free time while you were training there?

Paul Schiltz:

Well, sometimes we went downtown. And you couldn't get any liquor there in Nebraska at the time. And of course young guys like to drink once in awhile. But we had a phone number of a taxi cab. And all we'd do is go downtown, we'd phone him up and tell him what we wanted. And so while he was on duty downtown, he would say what street to pick us up. He'd have our fifth of whiskey or whatever we wanted. And the next block he'd leave us off. He wouldn't even charge us any cab fare. But he got paid for his whiskey. Then we'd go out to a little place in the country and get some, a little something to mix with it. And we'd do it under the table so the waitress wouldn't know what the heck we were drinking. We would order some lemonade or something like that and make believe we were drinking that or did drink it too with our liquor. Otherwise, we had movies at the base and stuff. So we didn't really have to go to movies there if we didn't want to, downtown, unless it got too hot. I remember in Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, we just went to the movies so we could lay down and sleep because it was so hot there and they had air conditioning there. It cost a whole ten cents, the movie. So that was cheap air conditioning.

Janet Hammond:

When you finished your training at Lincoln, did you go somewhere else then for further training in aircraft mechanics?

Paul Schiltz:

Well, first I got sent to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, for a little training in -- oh, I don't know what you call it -- basic training they called it. Basic training should last six weeks or more. But they were in a hurry to get me through because they needed mechanics overseas, so I was just there two weeks. And then I got sent to Gore field --

Janet Hammond:

Lincoln?

Paul Schiltz:

No. From there I got sent over to California.

Janet Hammond:

Lockheed?

Paul Schiltz:

Lockheed-Vega. That was a training school there for the A-20 Attack Bomber. It was right north of Hollywood. And there was a highway going through called Hollywood Way. And every time you wanted to go down into Hollywood, why, you would just stand out there about a block from our school. And somebody would stop, usually the first car that went by. And there was dozens going by, and they would stop and pick you up. One day there was two negro soldiers standing out there and I was standing out there. And the first guy that come along picked us up. And he asked where the boys wanted to go, and they says "Hollywood." Well, he drove probably a mile and got into downtown Hollywood and stopped. And he says, "Well, that's it boys." And the negro boy says, "We want to go to Hollywood." He says, "This is Hollywood." "What do you mean this is Hollywood? I thought Hollywood was thousands and thousands of people. This is just a little city." Well, he says, "You got it right there." I guess that day I went to the Hollywood Canteen and danced with about half a dozen of the movie stars. I tried to find a postcard the other day, and I can't find it, with their signatures on it. I thought it would be nice to know who all I danced with. You started dancing. You got about twenty steps and some other G.I. patted you on the back, you had to let go and let them dance. So you didn't get to go very far. About all I could do was say hello and goodbye. And then afterwards they all would sign, give you their autograph. So that was kind of nice. And they give you some free goodies there everyday, just a really nice place to go and something to do. One time I went to a big show. I can't remember. It used to be a big fat guy. He was on -- he wasn't on television because television wasn't out yet then. But he was all over the radio at the time. Oh, Gleason was his name. Yeah, I just thought of it. And he had a big fat belly and was always cracking jokes. And I got a ticket, a free ticket to go to his show. I got there, and there must have been a few thousand people. I couldn't find my seat number. I didn't know where to go. So I wandered around. And Jackie Gleason was up on the telephone shooting the bull before he went on the air. And he says, "Hey soldier, can't you find your seat?" And I says "No". "Right over there by that real pretty girl." And everybody just roared. And I felt like hell. I guess I blushed quite a bit. Anyhow, I found her. She was a pretty girl. But I never did date her after that. She probably married anyway. After I got through there at their school, I think it was probably only a month or two on the A-20 Attack Bomber. I never did see one overseas. They were all sent over to England. So that didn't help me too much. Anyhow, they put some of us on a plane -- a train, a big long train. And it was all G.I.'s going to Florida. I don't know where they were all going, if some of them got off before then or not. At that time the negroes and the whites were segregated. They had their own car and we had ours. If we when got bored, I would go back with the negroes. They were shooting craps and hollerin' and having a hell of a time. And the white guys just sitting there like duds and didn't have any fun at all. Anyhow, we got down to West Palm Beach, Florida. And that was about in, that was in January I think. And the sun come out every day and it would rain, and then the fog would come and you would just sweat. And I didn't enjoy it there at all. I think I was there about two weeks before I got shipped out. That was just a place to wait until I got shipped out, I guess. And I didn't do much there except horse around, look at things. And I got -- flew to Belem, Brazil, I believe, and then some other place, (Aiden?) No. Anyway, the last place I stopped in Brazil we got on a great big sea plane. There was several generals on there and about four or five of us privates. So it was quite a combination, generals and privates. Anyhow, it was really big plush rooms. On the sidewalls there was nice velvet. And we were really in seventh heaven. And we stopped at a little island, Ascension Island it was called. It wasn't inhabited at all. There was probably a dozen G.I.'s there. And they had kind of a barracks there. The first thing when they landed there, they says, "You got any whiskey?" And we said, "No, we ain't allowed to carry whiskey." "Well, we haven't had any for a long time. We don't get anything, whiskey or candy or anything here." So us privates we slept there that night in the barracks with them. And they were about going nuts, they didn't have anything to do. They played cards. One guy, he had a knife. He would stick it in the floor and pick it up and stick it in the floor again just for something to do. And there was no natives even on that island. The British tried to make an airfield, landing field there, but they didn't succeed. But the Americans made a kind of a curved air landing strip there for landing planes. And then they had the sea right next to it where amphibious planes could land and come up to the shore there if they needed anything. And we landed, I think, off the coast of Liberia. And we couldn't get too close to shore because all kinds of things would get our sea plane, weeds and all that trash and stuff. So I think it was about ten big negroes come out in a long canoe, it must have been about 40 feet long, and picked us up. And we could hear bong bongs from drums and we got an eerie feeling. In one direction you would hear one bunch of drum beats and in another direction you hear another. That's the way how they communicated, by the number of thumps and this and that between the different tribes. That night we got put in tents that had all mosquito netting on. It was just full of mosquitoes before we got there, we got in the tents. And when we got in the tents to sleep, we got half the mosquitoes in there to bite us all night. Anyhow, they had a PX there. And there were all negro girls taking care of the PX there, which we didn't mind, we hadn't seen any of them in PXs before. But we had quite a bitey night. The next morning they took us through jungles. I don't know where all we went. We went through villages, round mud huts about like 2,000 round grain bins are nowadays, about that height. They had grass roofs on them. And it was just one layer on top of the other, about twelve inches apart like shingles would be laid. And the kids were tending their goats out in the field. There wasn't much there to see. Women were running around. They didn't have any clothes on, which was quite a sight for G.I.'s Anyhow. It was interesting. Something to look at anyhow. They did have something around their privates. They had a string of beads going around their belly and then a string going around each side of the thigh connected to the string going around the belly. And the men wore little loin cloth, about eight by ten or something, and they had this string going around their belly to hold that in place. And we wondered if that was to protect his privates from the sun so he wouldn't get sunburned or if it was for modesty. We didn't know. I never did find out. I wasn't that interested. I never saw them that bad before even in the Gold Coast where we were. That's where we end up -- ended up, on the Gold Coast. And I did airplane mechanics there. It was a dirty city. It's now called -- it's not called the Gold Coast. It's called Guinea. And it was a big city, a dirty city. All the while I was there, I only saw one toilet like we have in the United States here. If you went into some establishment and you had to go to the can, there was a cement floor with a big round ring in it. It started from half inch, about six inches wide, a groove in the cement and went in a horseshoe shape through a hole in the center and then a groove in the other side again. You urinated in there. You could go anyplace in the groove or anyplace else and it would run down the hole. And if you defecated, why, you just went old farmstyle fashion and sat over the hole. You didn't have anything to wipe yourself or anything, but you got used to that. Of course, I think, no, we didn't have any running water or anything at the barracks either I think. We had outhouses, about twenty of them in a row, as far as I remember. But it got so bad there that I got fungus all over. And, boy, that itched terrible. And I went to see the doctor. And he says, well, "I'll see if I can't get you transferred someplace else." He says, "I can't do nothing." He put something on there. It burned like hell. It pretty near knocked me out it hurt so bad. He says, "Oh, I'm sorry, I should have diluted it down." I said, "Yeah, now that you think about it after you put it on." Anyway I got my orders to go to Khartoum in Egyptian Sudan. I wasn't there but about two, three weeks when all my fungus went away. It was so dry and hot, 110, 120 every day. But then I got heat rash, which was just as bad as the fungus itch. But I had to live with it. I finally got on the night shift. I was assistant crew chief there. There was five of us to a crew was the usual. And we didn't have very good food there. I think everything we got come down the Nile River, which took forever. They got flour, I know that, baked their own bread. One of my coworkers, we'd eat breakfast together in the morning after he got off of work. We would have toast. We would try to see who could get the biggest pile of weevils out of our toast. It tasted pretty good after you got the weevils out and you couldn't see anymore. You would pretty much it apart so you would get all the weevils. Anyhow, they were toasted so they weren't too bad to eat. They had meat once in awhile. That was these wild water buffalo that they worked to death on the plows and everything else that they had to use them for, including pulling conveyances, two-wheeled carts and everything else. And they were so tough, you couldn't swallow. You'd chew and chew and chew and you bite off a little chunk, you might be able to get it down. But if it had a good flavor, you would chew all the flavor out and you put it beside your plate, throw it in your mess kit and throw it out in the barrel when you're done. Never had any food for breakfast or anything. It was always Spam or something like that. Sometimes you would go to breakfast and there would be a big line-up. And you ask them, "What's coming out, what they got for breakfast?" "Spam." And you turn around and go back, sick and tired of it, no appetite for it. Then they started putting little tomatoes with Spam, so it made it a little tastier. I ate it once in awhile. One time I got some chicken, actual chicken, and I got a wing. It was black up against the body, and it was rancid even after it was cooked. I didn't eat that thing either. I couldn't say we had anything good to eat there at all. I don't know why they couldn't have flown in fresh food in there. I think if they did get any, the cooks probably took it down into Accra and put it on the black, sold it on the black market for a good price. Because you could get a lot of money for a pack of cigarettes or anything like that if you wanted to spare them. Some kids that smoked cigarettes would just buy them if they didn't even smoke, take them downtown and probably get $5 worth of merchandise or that much in cash and their money for the cigarettes.

Janet Hammond:

What was your day of work like? What planes were you working on?

Paul Schiltz:

We was with the Air Transport Command, the ferrying group. I was in different ferrying groups wherever I went. It wasn't always the same one. I can't remember the number of ferrying group anymore. But it was mostly C-47's, C-51's and C-46. C-46 was the biggest transport, carried the most passengers, mostly material. At that time we weren't sending any troops up to North Africa like we did in Khartoum and Egyptian Sudan. And, well, let's see. Now I'm talking about -- I don't know where I'm -- oh, I'm still down in the Gold Coast. No, I'm up in --

Janet Hammond:

Like when you were at Khartoum?

Paul Schiltz:

Karthoum, I'm at Karthoum now.

Janet Hammond:

Where would those planes be headed?

Paul Schiltz:

Karthoum would go all over. They had bases into India and Pakistan and Bazar, Iraq, and all over, a big line-up. I got them all in my scrapbook, the different bases that we had. And I was at most of them. I didn't get to visit much at any place. Most of them an overnight stop and preflight the plane and leave the next morning. I wasn't an aerial engineer at the time when I was at Karthoum. I didn't get that until I got up to Tunis, Tunesia, because they didn't usually send an engineer along at that time, just the co-pilot and co-pilot. Later on they thought it was a good idea to have an engineer along. And I could see good reason for it, which I'll tell you about a little bit later when I get up to Tunis. Karthoum, we had only -- well, there was nothing much to do there. We had a place where you could go in town and drink whiskey, and that was about it. You couldn't even bring anything back to base. One time we each brought a fifth of whiskey back. And the MPs at the gate took it away from us and they wouldn't give it back to us, and we put up quite a howl. So about a month later they had on the bulletin board, will the G.I.'s that had their whiskey taken away from them stop by on their way into Karthoum and pick it up, and you can drink it there, and don't bring it back, not even the empty bottle. So we got our liquor back. You had to watch out what you bought there too. Some of the liquor, people went blind for it. Must have had a lot of lie or something in it. I don't know. But there were a few cases of people went blind when they drank it. I don't know about G.I., but some of the civilians did, even had Canadian Country Club whiskey, and that wasn't too good. Everything was made in a hurry and it wasn't set long enough to do its, get its full benefits. But in Karthoum you would find a man with a donkey, give him a half pack of the cigarettes or a package of gum, and he let you have his donkey all day. You could ride along, go down through the Nile River which is about a mile away and see the hippopotamus and rhinoceros and ostriches and alligators, or, you could get a camel. I liked to ride a camel. I felt more safe because if you went along the Nile River and a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros was out about half a mile and their young one was in closer to the river, why, they would charge you. And the donkey would knock you right over. So I felt a little safer on the camel. And they always looked where a hippopotamus or rhinoceros was. Alligators, they didn't get out very far. They just went out in the sand a little bit. There you would see the people. They had goat skin bags. They made a little satchel out of them, put two of them together, hung them over the donkey, went down the Nile River. Horses and camels and everything else were pooping in the water, and they get their drinking water and wash their clothes down there. There was a few rocks down there. They'd pound their clothes on there and stick them in the water again and shake them out and pound our clothes. And they didn't have any soap. You could get about anything if you give them a bar of soap. Well, I don't know anything else there's much excitement. We had a little monkey there. Well, we had a couple monkeys. They were our friends. You would take them in your hand and take a piece of candy out of your shirt pocket and give it to them. And they would have it done and they knew where the next piece was coming from. They'd reach in and get another one. They didn't have to be told. I guess they wouldn't understand if you told them anyway. They were kind of fun. We used to ride the dogs just to get a ride. We had a few dogs around. But the weather was terrible there. Everybody lost a lot of hair. In the morning my pillow would just be full of hair. And some nights I would get in, go in the shower and lay down in the shower and lay down in the shower trickling on me try to sleep. We didn't even have regular G.I. beds. They were what they call log beds. They were pieces of trees about two inches in diameter and wound together with cowhide at each end. Then they had sticks in the end to hold them up. And they didn't have any mattress on them. It was, I guess, cowhide. At least it stunk like one. And it didn't have a decent pillow. And some -- and we had tin roofs to sleep under. In the daytime that wasn't much fun at all. It got hotter than hell in there. When we first got there, these were all Pan American bases that we had in different cities and different countries and the United States took them over. They were given the right to use their air fields. When we got there, we lived with the Pan American help, mechanics and stuff like that, and it was real nice. The Arab waiters in the morning, they would ask us how we wanted our eggs. You'd would say makloubeh. That meant upside down. You would turn them over and you'd get the yoke a little covered up. And we had pretty fair eats until we got to eat under G.I.'s and got our own mess hall. And we lived in some mud kind of buildings which were fairly cool. There was about four of us to a room. Every morning you woke up, you had to empty out your shoes, knock them on the floor upside down, get any tarantulas out of there because if you get bit by one of them it would really swell up and it was really painful. You could even die from it if you was kind of frail. And one day, well, the bus would pick us up, take us out to the airport early in the morning. One day, I just got paid that day. And the day before, three, four of us were laying out on the concrete waiting for the bus to come by, half asleep. And when I got out to the airport I couldn't find my billfold. One of the damn Arabs must have stolen it out of my rear pocket. Every night we had to put them in our pillow case because if you didn't, they would sneak in during the night and go through your trousers and steal your billfold. And if you went downtown, you better watch your wrist watch. If you had a leather band on it, they had some kind of a gizmo with a razor blade in that just cut about as thick as your leather band, wouldn't even cut your skin. They would cut your band off and they'd have your watch. Or if you would have your billfold in your back pocket, they had some cohort come along the opposite way and bump into you and want to be following you, and they wanted to apologize for bumping into you and slapping you on the shoulder and the other thing while his companion would be taking your billfold out of your rear pocket. You would leave and you wouldn't know your billfold was missing until it was too late. So I always really wanted to button that or hold it. The safest place was up in the front on your jacket in the front buttoned up. Well, that's about all the miseries I can think of when I was in Khartoum, Sudan. The natives there, the little girls, they used to have -- put ivory rings around their ankles when they were tiny girls. And I've got some pictures of them when they were about 12, 15 years old, still have them ivory rings on. They'd leave them on for life unless they'd get too bad and they'd get too fat and the rings started grooving in their skin too badly. Most of them keep them on all their lives. One time this kid wanted to -- he was a helper, Arab kid helper. He was hired by the government. We had quite a few Arab workers. They filled gas in the planes and stuff. They would crawl up on those wings to fill the gas tanks in their bare feet. And, here, we couldn't even hardly touch the wings and stuff by our hands, it was so hot. One day we took an egg out and it pretty near fried it. It got all white. It didn't quite get done though. It needed a little more heat. Let's see. There was a couple more incidents I was going to talk about. I guess that's all I can remember about that. Then I got, from there I got my orders, shipped to an air base in Cairo, Egypt. I don't know the name of it right now. Anyhow, I wasn't there too long. While I was there, it was kind of fun. It wasn't quite as hot as in Karthoum. I did the same kind of work. I got made a crew chief, I think, while I was in Cairo or assistant crew chief, and had five men to our crew, the same as we had the other places.

Janet Hammond:

Now, did the five men include the crew chief?

Paul Schiltz:

It included the crew chief and the assistant crew chief. There was three other ones. So if the crew chief wasn't there to give orders or if you had to work on several planes, the assistant crew chief would take a man or two and go to the other planes. Sometimes, like in Karthoum where they had sagebrush. It was a desert country but they had sagebrush probably fifteen, twenty feet high, a bunch of planes would come in at night and they would get in the sagebrush to hide from the enemy in case they'd get bombed, they couldn't see them. We'd have to get their tail numbers and go and preflight them. And that wasn't much fun hunting them up. And they always had Arab guards there. You had a nameplate on you in Arabic. You had your name in Arabic. You had to wear that all the time. Every morning when you left the engineering office to go to work in your fourwheel, whatever you call it, well, you come to an airplane, there would be an Arab guarding it. He had a rifle in hand, he'd ask you for the password. You give it to him. He would let you in work on the planes, preflight them, get them ready to take off. And if you didn't know the password, forgot it, he would put the old rifle bullet in the chamber and, boy, you better either scoot or go back and find out what the number was for the day. It happened a few times. (Laughter). We forgot to get the number before we went out. Anyhow, these radial engines, most of them had radial engines. You would go around like the basketball players do in a circle and shoot baskets. We had to go around and grab hold of a propeller blade and turn it, and the next guy would grab it and turn it over and you go around in the circle until you turn it over about ten times. The reason for that, when a plane sets at night they have these open cylinders where the oil goes to the bottom cylinder. You start your engines in the morning. They haven't got a starter. It's an energizer. It takes about two minutes. As it energizes, it has a great big iron wheel. Then you press a button and that wheel goes around and it starts your motor. And if you wouldn't have that oil out of your bottom cylinder, it would split it wide open. It happened several times. The different pilots themselves didn't wait until the crew got around, so you had to go to the junk pile and get another cylinder on and hope that it would work. (End of Audio File 001.) (Begin Audio File 002.)

Janet Hammond:

This is Side B, a continuation of the interview of Paul Michael Schiltz by Janet B. Hammond, on July 7, 2003, in Powell, Wyoming. Paul, tell us about any furloughs you might have had while you were overseas.

Paul Schiltz:

Well, from the time I left home I never got a furlough all the while I was in the United States. My folks never had a telephone out in the country. My brother never had a telephone. They never did get telephones in there until after, about 1949 when the REA came in. The only way I had to communicate with my parents was through letters. And when I got overseas, it took about ten days to get there and about that many days if they wrote to me. Well, the news got kind of old. And I didn't even get any furlough before I left for overseas. And when I got -- well, I did get one after I got home. But this time I think I was in Karthoum at the time, and I had heat rash real bad from the heat, and I got a seven-day furlough to Palestine, or, maybe it was ten days. Anyhow, it was the most enjoyable days I had in the service. It cost me $17, which was well worth it. We got into Tel Aviv, which was a new city at that time, only about twenty-five years old. You got a nice room, two of us to a room. We could look down. There was a balcony sticking out. You looked down on the street. It was really a modern city. And there was bus tours everyday. And there was also English soldiers. And there was WACs and WAAFs and whatever English women are in the service. And we went together in two buses, I think, probably forty of us. I got pictures of us. And we went to Jerusalem, which was an old city, mostly made out of mud. And all had cisterns the way it was for drinking water. I don't know if they had any city water or not. Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, we seen where Christ was buried. We went up, walked up Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, where Christ was crucified. And coming down the steps there was dead people laying there or people that had some newspaper over them. Somebody felt sorry for them because of the hot sun and put a newspaper over them. Somebody would look under there and give them a kick to see if they were still alive. Maybe they were there the day before and wanted to know if they was dead or not. Nobody paid much attention. They died most of veneral diseases over there at that time. We saw Joseph's well where they used to get their water. It had the old rope on it yet where you pull the pail up. I doubt if it was the same one; but it was a good replica of it anyhow. We went under the basement of this church. It was St. Joseph's Carpenter Shop at the time. A lot of these churches were built over certain things. It was really interesting. We got to go -- I went and put my feet in and waded in, let's see, where Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River or where he baptized people. And I thought it would be a great big river, but it was only about twenty foot wide and running about a foot deep at the place we were. It might have got bigger someplace else. And then we got swimming in the Dead Sea. That is way below sea level. It's all salt water. Being as I had the heat rash, it really did me good going into that nice salt water. I didn't stay in more than ten minutes. I beat the hell out of there because I just couldn't stand it. I walked in up to my belly button and my feet left the floor of the sea, they were so buoyant with salt. And if you walked a little farther, well, you tipped, whichever way you were leaning, you tipped backward or forward, you couldn't control yourself at all. It was easy swimming if you wanted to stay in and swim, not much paddling at all. You wouldn't want to beat that. It took me about two weeks to get the salt out of my hair. It was so stiff I couldn't even run a comb through it. I washed it with soap and shampoo it and everything else. Well, when we was there we would go swimming in the sea next to there. I don't know what it was called anymore. And there was a lot of girls swimming there too. And they had pretty fair food there at the time. But they were still shooting at each other, the Jews and the Israelis. You could hear gun shots. And they'll never have peace, I don't think, no matter who tries to broker peace. You might have peace for a few months; but it ain't going to last very long. These countries never were peaceful to each other. And I don't think they ever will be. But the trip was really worth it. One day we went into a kind of a casino or I wouldn't know what you call it, had a few beers. There we met a bunch of Montgomery's VIII Army Soldiers. They give us their toupees or whatever they called them black things they slammed over their head like these, oh, Saddam Hussein hat, they look about like it. So about seven of us G.I.'s, we got caps and put them on and had our picture taken. There was always somebody around wanting to take your picture and selling it to you. I don't know how they developed them that fast. But it was kind of nice having your picture taken and getting it right away. I even got one taken of -- I put it on a postcard. And it said "Important visitor to the Middle East". And it had my picture and my name underneath it. So I sent that. I had quite a few copies of it made and sent it to my folks, my friends and stuff. And that's, yeah, that's when I was still in, in -- well, anyway, that ended. That's the only vacation I had until I got back to Bismark, North Dakota, after I pretty near got out of service. Anyhow --

Janet Hammond:

You mentioned becoming a flight engineer. When did this happen and how did your job change?

Paul Schiltz:

From Cairo, Egypt, I got sent to Tunis, Tunesia. When we got there, they were just mopping up the Germans and the Italians. The Italians were really easy. They raised their hands and they were prisoners of war right now. But the Germans were ornery cusses like me; I'm a German. Anyway, when they would get a German it took about two Americans to take him into prison because, boy, he'd take a chance on his life. He'd turn around and try and knock his guys taking him into prison out. So they finally got them all corralled up a couple weeks after we got there. But Tunis and the Air Force Base, El Aouina Air Force Base where I was stationed at, they were completely destroyed. Very few buildings in Tunis were standing yet and the air base was all shot, the hangers and the living quarters and everything. The French trained their aircraft, their aviators there I guess. And that's one of the places, why they wanted to hit that, El Aouina Air Base. But the Americans came in and fixed it all up. We had to sleep in a bombed out building at a opening about 20-by-20. And it got pretty damn cold at night, probably down to 60 in the winter and it was kind of cool. So we being mechanics, we had to drain the water out of the airplane wings for preflight. Then there was always gas come out after that. So we waited until the gas come out and we'd take some and we all took some oil back to our hole in the wall where we slept, and we made a little outfit to burn that oil at night to try and keep warm. We had a kind of wick-to and we stuck that in there. That would last about two, three days until one of the inspectors came by and threw everything out. So we slept in the cold after that until they finally got some new buildings put up. We had outdoor toilets. I think there was two seats opposing each. I mean there was a row of two seats about twenty in a row, toilets, outdoor toilets, one facing one way and one the other so you wouldn't have to look at each other I guess. That was a lot of people using those toilets. Anyhow, when we left there it was really nice. They built it up. It was called French re -- no, reverse lend lease. That means I think that they were supposed to pay us back sometime. But that never happened. They spent millions of dollars rebuilding all those buildings. Every morning there would be at least a hundred Arabs come in there who would bring half a loaf of brown bread and some vino, wine, and that would be it for lunch. They were carpenters and bricklayers and concrete pourers and everything else. They did a real good job, and we had a beautiful building there. We finally got coke machines in there just before I left. And it was an operations building with all kinds of seating and everything. I had to take three pictures and stick them together in order to make -- get ahold of that building or I'd have got too far away, I never would have seen it even. It was so monstrous. Anyway, while I was there I finally got on flight as a flight engineer. I got time and a half for each month on my sergeant pay. I would fly mostly into Sisley and Italy and we would fly soldiers up there. Naples was the frontline. We flew quite a few to Naples, G.I.'s. One day we was flying over the Mediterranean from Tunesia to Naples. One airplane engine started clonking out. I got up there and got on the wobble pump and tried to get it started and it wouldn't start. I told the pilot to windmill it. That's where you put -- it's electric. You put your propeller wings in different directions so the air will make it go around. And that way you don't have to energize and start it. That wouldn't start it either. So I couldn't figure out what was happening. Pretty soon the other one started skipping and missing. And we only had two engines, one on each side of the cockpit. And I finally thought, "My God, it sounds like that thing's getting air." So I remembered when they shipped these planes over from the United States they had these big gas tanks back in the compartment where we hauled people and everything else, supplies and all that. And I remember they had shutoff valves back there. When they took those cabins out when they got overseas so they could haul more stuff, and they didn't need them. And I thought somebody must have hit that with their foot and broke the wire that holds that to the right so it wouldn't open up. And sure enough I went back there and, here, one of the guys must have hit it with his foot and broke it. And that valve was about halfway open. I closed that. And the motor that was spitting, that started going right full force again. And I had the pilot windmill the other one and it started right away. So off we were. And the G.I.'s, they were all infantrymen, they was bragging how nice they had it in the air and everything. They didn't have to sit in the foxhole and have somebody shoot at them. And after that incident they says, "Let me down to the ground anytime, I'll take it down there. I don't want to die in the Mediterranean." Another time we was flying over the Mediterranean and we hit a downdraft. According to the altimeter, the pilots always watch that. It shows the height you're flying. The pilot said we dropped 1,000 feet, it's a vacuum. And the wings or nothing holds you up. Some of the fellows that weren't buckled in their seats hit the ribs on top and made gashes in their heads. But anyhow we bent one wing up. We did get to Italy and landed safely. The G.I.s that time, we were going up to the frontlines, they says let me on the ground anytime too. They got scared as hell. I don't know if they ever got in any worse situations after that or not. But it was nice. Didn't get bombed too many times. The first or -- second time I got bombed, well, first time I want up there in Naples, they told us where the bomb shelter was. It was about a block from where our plane was for the night. They had big metal mats laying down because it was so muddy and stuff. And the planes would rest on the mats. Anyway, they told us where these dugouts were. And I went out to look at them before I went to sleep. I went to sleep in the plane. The pilots, they got someplace to sleep that was halfway decent, I suppose. I don't know where they slept. Anyway, that night I heard the sirens coming along. And it got closer and closer. And pretty soon I heard some bombs started dropping. And I had my shoes off. I didn't even -- I don't remember if I buckled my shoes or not. Anyhow, I opened the door of the plane, I had my clothes on yet. And I jumped out. The wind hit. It was pretty stiff. And the wind caught my foot. And I dropped down on the steel mat on my knee. And, boy, I had to crawl up on one knee all the way. I couldn't even walk to the dugout. And our plane didn't get hit that night but some of them get squished about a block from there. After that whenever the air raid siren went off when I was up in some of those cities, I just laid in the airplane. I thought, the hell with it, I ain't going to try and run over there. If I get bombed, I get bombed. I never did get hit. So I lucked out there. But it was really nice up there in Tunis. I really loved the weather. It was beautiful everyday. I'd get a nice breeze off the Mediterranean. This is right off the Mediterranean. It never got hotter than 85 in the summer. I was there sixteen months. And the coldest was about 55, 60, a couple days in the winter. One day they had a light snowfall. It barely, barely covered the ground. Kids were running around like nuts. They had never seen snow. Old people said there they never saw snow for 30 years. So it was quite a thing. It wasn't enough to make snowballs though. The kids would have had more fun. We had a lot of entertainment there. We had a nice U.S.O. club. It was a great big round building and they furnished meals in there. You could take your girlfriend there if you had one. There was always girlfriends were trucked -- bussed there. Every night they had a nice meal. You could dance to music. Another fellow and I had two girlfriends we usually took there. Once in awhile we took them downtown in Tunis. They had real good restaurants down there. The girls would bring their brown bread because the restaurant couldn't furnish any bread. But if the girls forgot their bread and the restaurant waiter would see that you don't have any bread, they would bring you a quarter loaf hidden under a big platter they had brought to your table so nobody would see them furnishing your bread because they weren't supposed to, it was rationed. One day we ordered fish. A buddy and I had two girls we took out to lunch. Here they brought the fish with the heads and everything in, all the insides in. They had to clean the insides out. The girls, they cleaned the insides out but they ate everything on the head of the fish, even the eyes. They picked the eyes out with their forks and the skin off of the sides of the fish. Oh, God, I couldn't hardly believe it. About as bad as, it reminded me of the time when I was going to Assumption Abbey there and that Indian kid from the reservation. He was telling me how his parents butchered beef cattle or buffalo or something, and they would take the intestines, they wouldn't even clean them out like we used to do. We used to clean them out good to use for sausage and wash them good. But he says they just left everything in the intestines and they put corn meal all the way through them in big strips about thirty inches long, then tied the ends and baked them that way. He said they were really delicious. So that kind of reminded me of my Indian buddy friend. To this day I haven't seen that kid. I don't know whatever happened to him. I would like to know but probably never will. Anyway, there was some, there was a lot of things along the shores of the Mediterranean. There was a big dance hall called the jetty there. We would get trucked out there on Saturday nights, and they would truck a bunch of girls out there and we'd have a hell of a time. Once in awhile we would get some sailors that would stop there even. And one night the sailors got drunk and the Air Force guys, a lot of them were drunk too. And before we knew it, there was a bunch of stabbing going on. And here the MPs were carrying out guys with stab wounds to their chest, blood all over the floor. And that was the end of the dance that night. We were told to get in the busses and they took us back to our barracks. That was quite an incident too. Then there was an old city called Carthage along the Mediterranean. That used to be a hangout for the old Roman pirates. They would steal gold and stuff from other ships and they would hide it around Carthage there. I don't know if they ever found any or not. Then, I don't know, there was a place called, well, it was a grotto. It was called the tomb of St. Felicitus and Perpetua. They were buried there and they were declared saints. Why, I don't know. Anyhow, we visited that. And then they had an old Roman colosseum there. It had blocked seats all around at the time that was built yet. You had to sit on them blocks, a big semi circle. And down below there was big places and it had openings where they let the lions out. And the lions took after the Christians and chewed them up and killed them. They did let a lion or two out of the hole; but it was guarded, there was no Christians down there to eat. So we didn't see that. But we were told the whole story anyhow. It was really interesting. So there were a lot of interesting things over in Africa.

Janet Hammond:

Were you located stateside before the end of the war, Paul?

Paul Schiltz:

Before the end, yes. I was up in Great Falls. Then I got shipped back to Bismark, I think. Well, when I left Tunis, Tunesia, I went to, let's see, Marrakech. Where was it? Right on the coast anyway. There was a bunch of us waiting to be transported back by plane to the United States. We had to wait out our turn. You took whatever come along. If it was a B-54 or a C-cargo plane or whatever. If you could catch a ride, hook a ride, you got a ride. So I think I was out there about seven days. We had to use mess kits there. We had a kind of a camp there. And we had a kind of open mess hall. And one day I was coming back from mess hall to my tent. It was just this temporary place. And I met this guy and I says, "Hello, Joe." And he says "Hello, Paul." And I says, "Where in the hell did I ever see you before?" "Oh, my God, he says, don't you know? We used to go to dances in Plattsville, North Dakota, all the time. You know me." "Oh, God, yes. I says, "I remember you." I says, "The last time I saw you was in Lincoln, Nebraska." I felt kind of dumb about that anyway. But I did get, I think it was a C-54 or it was a bombing plane anyhow. We landed in the Azores. I knew we was having trouble when we landed there. We was going around in circles for a long time. Most of the guys weren't flight engineers so they didn't know what was going on. But I could tell we was gradually going lower and lower and going around in a circle. The only thing I could figure was fog. And finally after about twenty minutes we started really dropping down. And when we got about five feet from the ground, I could see the runway lights. It was that dense of fog. So they come in on instruments, which we had to do sometimes too. It was scary. If I'd have told them guys what was going on, they would have had a fit. We only stayed there overnight I think. And then we went over the Azores or went through -- now I can't think of the place again -- Newfoundland, yeah. Stayed there overnight. And then we got, landed back in LaGuardia field in New York. And we had to wait a day or two from where we were before we got shipped to where we were going. And at Laguardia field I noticed a little television. It had about a six or eight-inch screen on. And I see two guys boxing. It was Joe Lewis and somebody else. But all you could see was their boxing gloves. They were so small. Their boxing gloves and their arms were so big. Once in awhile it said underneath Joe Lewis and whoever he was fighting at the time. That's the first time I ever saw a television. That must have been in '45, '44. Anyway that was quite an experience too. We had so damn much luggage going back. And we were told what train we had to catch to get back to Bismark, North Dakota. We had to go through Chicago, and this was New York. And we must have had to walk over a mile. And we didn't know we had to go through a bunch of different train lines to try and find our car number and the train number. It was about five, six of us in the bunch. We finally found it about ten minutes before it was ready to take off. Got to Chicago. That wasn't much fun either. We had to transfer over to a different train. And it was a lot of fun trying to find the next train to take too. I think I got shipped back to Lincoln Air Force Base in Bismark, North Dakota. There I got a few days there to wait for my shipping orders to Great Falls, Montana. While I was there I was downtown one night by myself horsing around and I see this bunch of girls who was horsing around too having a good time, and they asked me if I didn't want to join them on a picnic. They was having a graduation party, I guess. They were going to have a picnic by the Missouri River. And I said "Sure." One boy and seven girls ain't too bad. Couldn't find another boy. Anyhow, this red freckled girl, she kind of caught my eye. And I asked her for a date. And I had a few dates before I got shipped up to Great Falls. And I kept writing her after I got up there. And when I finally got out, we finally got married, on July 9th, 1946. Still happily married. Anyhow, there wasn't too much to do in Bismark. Oh, I did, after I got out of the service I did work for Ward-Johnson in Dickinson there for a garage as a car mechanic. And once in awhile I'd go down to Bismark and spend a weekend down there and visit her. Otherwise we didn't get to see each other. She'd come up once to visit me as far as I know. I didn't have any wheels at the time either, broke pretty near.

Janet Hammond:

Where were you when the victory in Europe happened, VE day in Europe?

Paul Schiltz:

I was home in North Dakota on VE Day. And I didn't even get up to Dickinson, North Dakota, to celebrate with the rest of the people.

Janet Hammond:

Were you still in the military?

Paul Schiltz:

Yes, I was still in the military then. And VJ Day I was home on vacation too by accident. I don't know why. I just -- they let me have two vacations, and that was both VJ day and VD Day. Great Falls wasn't too bad. It was winter up there at the time. They had about a foot of snow that winter or more. In the summer I was up there part of the time when they didn't have any snow. I had two -- I don't know if they call them WACs I guess, women airplane mechanics on my crew. I was a crew chief, and I had an assistant crew chief and another guy and two women WACs in my team, not much to do. They'd all come back from overseas and they overloaded with workers and nothing to work on. So I worked in overhauling engines in that shop.

Janet Hammond:

Was that pretty unusual to have the two women on a crew?

Paul Schiltz:

Yeah, it was. I never had them overseas. I don't know. I never see any women overseas in airplane mechanics or aerial engineers at all. But they were. They knew what to do because my co-worker and I, we went fishing a few times and left the other three there to work on airplane engines and stuff. And they did a good job. We just checked over what they were doing the next morning, and they did real good, as far as rebuilding them. And we wouldn't catch any much fish except some old carp. But we would throw them back on the beach where everybody else was throwing them. So it really smelled fishy around there. Once in a while we'd catch some good edible fish. We would give it to somebody else there that was civilian there that wanted some more fish and didn't have their quota yet. Wasn't much else to do there in the winter time or in the summer except fishing once in awhile. I wasn't there really too long.

Janet Hammond:

What did you do for a career after your military service?

Paul Schiltz:

Well, after I got through with Great Falls, I think I got shipped to Lincoln, Nebraska, to get demilitarized or whatever you want to call it when you get out of service. And when I got out of service, I didn't know what to do. Well, we got married in 1946. I got out in November of '45, got married in '46. I got under the G.I. bill of rights and I got to go work for Ward-Johnson in Dickinson, North Dakota, as an airplane mechanic. I got paid, let's see, $70 a month and the government paid 130 for three months, and then every three months I'd get $30 more from my garage and the government paid $30 less, so anyhow, $200 a month. And I actually did work like the other mechanics did. I learned real fast because I was an airplane mechanic anyhow and understood a lot of things. And after I was there about two months I went up to the clerk there that took care of the pay wages and that, and I asked her to figure up my time once and see how I compare if I was working at what the regular mechanics were getting that weren't on training there. And here I was earning about half time more than they were. So I slowed down a little. I thought what the hell was I working my butt off for? I only had a few accidents there. It was so -- we were married and we got this apartment in the basement, $20 a month so $200 a month didn't take too much off of that. And my wife worked at a clothing store, so we did all right. One Sunday she was -- we had a three-burner stove down in the basement apartment. There was only one bedroom and a kitchen was all it amounted to. And I told her, "I'm sleepy I think I'll take a nap." She says, "Well, dinner is going to be ready in about fifteen minutes." So I laid down and I felt real sleepy. And pretty soon the landlady come down and she says, "I smell gas." And she looked at the burners and here they was all out. And that's where they don't reignite themselves, them old burners. So here the gas was coming out from the burners she was cooking chicken on. Another twenty minutes we would have both been dead if she wouldn't have smelled that. And they had a gas line coming along the ceiling in the corridor going to our room. And her damn nephew -- grandson turned that damn gas off and then he went and turned it on again. Boy, did she ever given him hell. And I did too. I could have kicked his butt, but I didn't. But I enjoyed working there. While I was working there I could buy a new car. You couldn't buy a you in car you had to wait for a year or two years, according to the manufactures were making war stuff during the war. I put my name in anyhow. My mother died in -- let's see. Anyway I went out to the farm, we went out into farming with my dad because I had a quarter land out there too. We farmed there a year, had a pretty good crop. In 1949 I had a real good crop. I had put in for a homestead in Caldwell, Idaho. My name was drawn. I went out there, but it was way down on the list. Most of them were rejected because they were so rough and hilly and would have taken a lot of work. But I put my name in anyhow and a number. And I was given a homestead if I wanted it. And I was just wondering if I should or not. And dad and I were standing out on the steps one night, a big old black cloud come up from the north. I told my dad, "Boy, we could use that rain. The crop was just about -- need a little rain to get them kernels really fully up without getting a little shrunk up." "Yeah", I says, "it could be hail too." I says, "I hope not." About fifteen minutes later it come down. It was all hail. We didn't harvest a kernel of wheat. I stood on the steps and tears come out of my eyes. All my investment was in the farm. I says, "The Lord taketh, the Lord giveth, the hell with it." I says, "We're going to Idaho." And that's where we went. We loaded up our Fortune tractor and old two-bottom plow, which I didn't know we couldn't use out there because it wouldn't turn over and go the opposite way. You'd leave a dead furrow. But we put it in the big truck, put a cattle rack on and a big canvass on top of that, and put that in and, oh, what little furniture we did have and all our clothes. And we had one baby, Paula. We had her while we were out to the farm. And we got the new car. It costs us $800. It was a Ford Coach. It had a short seat in the back you could get there, kind of like these pick-ups now where you got to kind of jam your feet in back. Anyway, my wife and little daughter drove out there. It was in -- No, that ain't the way it happened at all. I went out there first, took the car out there. I took all the stuff out there and then I took a bus back to Dickinson. Then we left, my wife and I and Paula, we left and we went and we got a place near Caldwell because our homestead didn't have any house or anything on it. We got a place about three miles west of our homestead. And they had some apartments there and stuff, beyond Caldwell there. But anyhow, when I took the truck up at first went west Yellowstone through Idaho. And going through Yellowstone Park before I got into Yellowstone Park, we had a hell of a blizzard, and I was just barely making it. There was no cars or anything coming. And there's no gas stations opened. They all closed for the winter. Here the old gas meter went down, down, down. Pretty soon it showed zero. Pretty soon the engine stopped. What am I going to do now? It's blizzarding, nobody coming by. I tried to get the tarp off of the back end of the truck and get some gas out of the tractor. It was frozen solid. I had it nailed down at (______). I didn't know what I could do. I thought maybe I could let some gas out of the little glass that collects the water and dirt and make a little fire. I had some matches. I didn't have any candles or anything. I thought I'd freeze to death. Pretty soon a car come along, a little old car without any top on. It had chains on like log chains. He got through. He took me in West Yellowstone. I got five gallons of gas there and no way to get back. I tried to get a ride back that way. Nobody was going back that way. Finally I had to hire a taxi to take me there, about five miles. I got the gas in and got to going and I finally got back up to Caldwell. Let's see. I think I probably missed something somewhere along the line - --

Janet Hammond:

You then were a farmer then the rest of your working career, Paul?

Paul Schiltz:

-- we farmed in Idaho for -- we stayed at, what is it called (San Pooley?) No, it was something else. No, it wasn't that. Anyway, we stayed there for about three months. We built a, had a basement dug and built. And we put a subfloor on and tar paper on top of that. We moved into that. We had the basement finished just like the upstairs with rooms and everything. And it took us a year before we finally got an FHA loan to build the upper part. And we did most of the building ourselves. It costs us $6,000 for the house and probably 2,000 square feet, a real nice home. And then we built a great big milking barn on there. We couldn't get on the Grade A, but we built it to Grade A specifications just in case we could get Grade A allotment. We sold milk to (silt) lots. They dried it and sold powdered milk, which I'm sure they got overseas. I couldn't drink the stuff. It tasted horrible at that time. We sold it in barrels. We still got out in the garage in those barrels that they used to ship that dried powdered milk in. We'd get stuff we don't need in there. Anyway, we started milking about probably fifteen, twenty cows probably up to thirty, had to get up at 5:00 every morning in order to have the milk out on the stand at 7:00. And then you had to go in and irrigate. And that ground was volcanic ash, just like ashes. We had 125 checkdrops on that 65 acres, all downhill land. You couldn't take siphon tubes out of it. So we had -- I built a bunch of little boxes with tin slides you put in before the checkdrops. I opened the checkdrop from inside and let so much water out through a little corrugate, and I'd put ten, twelve corrugates under that ditch and I'd have to put sand around each one so they wouldn't wash away. You check it three, four times a day and put more sand on it as washing. In the morning you would get out there, your checkdrop would be washed out or your ditch would be washed out, you would have a foot deep hole three feet wide going down your field to the bottom. Lots of fun. Well, we finally built a big granary and a nice garage. We had a nice set of buildings. You could really raise a good garden there, watermelon, cantaloupe and everything else. You get seven ton of heathy acres, three cuttings. We really only raised, oh, probably twenty acres of mixed grain, wheat, barley and oats for ground feed for our milk cows. And the rest is all alfalfa for our cattle. We didn't have any way -- we had a flatbed, we had to lift all those bails up by hand and stack them. That was really fun until I got smart and finally found a Moorman (darrick) with a long pull on. And I got a Jackson fork, what they call it, with a bunch of tines. And I cut half of them off so we could stick down in three bails. And Lillian, my wife, she was on the Ford tractor. She would pull the tractor back and pull the bails over the stack and I'd pull the trip, and then she'd come ahead again. And we did that until it was empty. That was ten times easier than stacking them by hand. That stack in the field got to be too much of a problem, so I got smart and built a short ton wagon, and I had the guy that bails for me put it right back of the bailer. And I stood back there as the bails come out and I'd stack them on the wagon and took them off with a Jackson fork. So it wasn't all that much bother like it was to start with in the old pioneering days. Finally we got tired of that business. We wasn't making a fortune there. You had to report to the government. And even you put a nickel in the cockeyed car meter, I mean, the meter downtown, you have to put it down, they wanted every penny you spent there. And every penny we had coming in too. We got tired of that. We had a neighbor that was Mormon. And we was in there one time when he was in there. And he said he gives so much to the Mormon church. And that guy blew his head. He said, "The government comes before the church. I don't want to see you giving them anymore." So I don't know if he give him anymore after that or not. Anyhow, I didn't give too much to my church so he didn't grumble too much about that. He probably didn't give anything to his church at all. I don't know where he went. We were there. In 1950, Cecil, our son, was born. It was a rainy old night. We had a muddy road with the cover washed out. We had to go in beside that. And I made it. I took her up to the hospital which was, I think, thirteen miles at the time and probably eight at night. It was dark anyhow, wind blowing beat hell, drizzling. And I guess she didn't have Cecil until about two, three in the morning. Anyhow, I stayed awake all the way. I think I read a truth story all the way through during that time. I didn't even fall asleep. I must have been nervous or something. Anyhow, we finally got tired of farming so I asked (Pratt & Barner?) Agency if they wouldn't try and sell my farm. I wanted 32,000 for it. I probably had 8,000 in buildings in it, a lot of work, not much leveling because it was all downhill. I didn't have to level. Anyway, finally he found a buyer for our place. And I says, "Now what the heck am I going to do?" I says, "I don't know. I haven't got a job. What am I going to do?" Oh, he says, "One of my partners quit." He says, "Do you want to buy into the agency and sell real estate?" I says, "I don't know anything about selling real estate." He says, "Well, you got to take a course and learn." He says, "There's books about it." I says, "Yeah, I'll try that." So in the meantime we rented a house out in the country with a garden and nice berries and everything there and a yard. (End of Audio File 002.) - - -