| Summary: | (6:53) Mr. Miller talks about coming home after serving as a Marine during World War II.
Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Paul Miller
July 12, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 4
Clint Alley: We were talking earlier about the letters. How frequent was communication during the war?
Paul Miller: Strictly letters of course. I got letters from home from my mother and my sister. I was, I didn't have a girlfriend when I left. I was, had just turned eighteen. But I got letters from my mother and my sister and other relatives almost—a few friends— almost every day. And I, I did not write every day. I wrote maybe two or three times a week.
CA: Um-hm. About how long do you think it took a letter to get from home to like for instance, where you were in Guam or China?
PM: Gosh I don't remember. I don't have any idea.
CA: Um. Well some of the other guys we've talked to said it would be weeks before they would hear from home sometimes.
PM: Well the only time I had to wait weeks for mail was the time when I was on Guam and, and one other, well there were two times. On Guam in the transient battalion, I guess nobody knew where we were so we got mail about, no more than once a week. And then another time the unit I was in was called, it was the first unit of its type to be formed and it was known as 4th JASCO, J-A-S-C-O, which meant Joint Assault Signal Company. Well, we were attached to the 1st division. Near the end of the war somebody got the brilliant idea that all the other units that had been formed, the JASCO units, had the same number as the division they were attached to except us and the JASCO that was later attached to the 1st division. So they changed our numbers and changed the name from JASCO to ASCO. We had been 4th JASCO and they changed the name to first- no we were 1st JASCO, they changed the name to 4th ASCO. And our mail, it took a long time for our mail to catch up with us then. And I'm sure it drove the folks in the fleet post office in San Francisco crazy.
CA: Well, so you, you spent about six months in China and then you were discharged to go home after that?
PM: Well, I came to the states to be discharged.
CA: Okay.
PM: And we, we came directly from Tsingtao, China to San Diego, no stops anywhere. We were on an Army transport that carried like eight thousand troops, almost continuous chow lines aboard ship. And then we docked in San Diego and were there a few days and I guess debriefing interviews and stuff. And then they sent me to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina to be discharged.
CA: Okay.
PM: And that was in like June of '46.
CA: Okay. And did you go back home to Scottsboro after that?
PM: I did.
CA: Okay. And what did you do after? Did, did you go to school or get a job or –?
PM: Before I went in service I had been running a portable movie circuit for a friend of mine. We took 16mm projectors and drove all over Sand Mountain and rented an auditorium for a night at the schools and we would show movies and charge admission. I did that for about six months while I was waiting to be drafted before I went in service. After I got home, he offered me the job again. I took it for about six months and then he sold it to a man who was gonna operate it himself. And I went to Birmingham to work for Western Electric very briefly. I don't know, three, four, six months maybe. And I trained in Birmingham, went to Anniston and stayed three or four weeks, went to Cullman and stayed another few weeks. And then they decided they needed a bunch of us in New Orleans. I didn't want to go to New Orleans and I felt like I'd done enough traveling in my time, so I quit and started school at the University of Alabama. And I graduated from the school in, from Alabama in summer of '50. And came down here and went to work for the Florence Times as an ad salesman in October of that year.
CA: Okay, okay. Did you use any G.I. Bill money to go to Alabama?
PM: I did.
CA: Okay.
PM: Also, I took a G.E.D. test for extra credits. But I had enough; I had some time left over as a matter of fact. I don't remember how they allocated the time. I think it was one month for each month of service or something like that. But anyway I had enough G.I. Bill to get my degree.
CA: Okay. Well that's great. I've always heard that a lot of people thought that was one of the best programs they could come up with.
PM: Oh, it was, yes. But it was tough. You didn't get a lot of money.
CA: Yeah.
PM: In fact I lived at Northington Campus which had been an Army hospital during the war and they had converted it into dormitories to handle all the service men who were beginning to go to school. I lived in one of the bays and had some friends who were married. And I guess it was the truth, it might have been a joke, that everybody was broke all the time and one day ah, this boy's wife asked him for some money. And he said, "Honey, you know I don't have any money." She said, "I don't know why, you had a quarter yesterday." So money was tight especially if you were married.
CA: Um-hm.
PM: And there were a lot of married students too.
CA: Yeah, yeah. Did you ever marry?
PM: I did. I married a local girl.
CA: Oh, okay.
PM: A Florence girl.
CA: Was that after college that you married?
PM: It was. I, after I came down here and went to work I met her and we got married and had three beautiful kids. I always said that she was the only woman I ever saw that I thought I could spend the rest of my life with. Unfortunately it was the rest of her life, not mine. She died in 1994. And at that time I had retired. I went from here to Booneville, Mississippi as publisher of the weekly paper, then to Dyersburg, Tennessee as publisher of that little daily. I retired up there, moved back to Booneville because we had left a daughter there. And, ah, she died in '94 and I moved back up here to be closer to better medical facilities in my old age. And also, I had a sister here. And my son who is an RN at the hospital is here. And I thought, you know, be nice to closer medical facilities and have an RN in the family nearby. So I moved back here and I've been living here—
CA: Okay.
PM: ―since, well I moved in '95. She died in '94 and I came back in '95.
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