Veteran Interview with Carl L. Pool (B)
(40:21) Mr. Carl Pool describes his military career and his career with NASAFlorence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive Interview with Carl L. Pool January 17, 2013 Florence, Alabama Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood Clip 2 of 2 Carl Pool: But once we broke the Japanese’s back...
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library
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War Years at Home and Abroad Collection |
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Florence-Lauderdale County Public Library |
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Military life |
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Military life Veteran Interview with Carl L. Pool (B) Florence-Lauderdale Public Library |
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Military life World War 1939-1945; Ships |
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(40:21) Mr. Carl Pool describes his military career and his career with NASAFlorence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Carl L. Pool
January 17, 2013
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 2 of 2
Carl Pool: But once we broke the Japanese’s back, they like to broke ours before we did it, that was a bloody, bloody outfit for that, that period. So anyway, we operated there. Our planes flew, I don’t know the exact mileage that they’d fly. They had to calculate fuel. You got no fuel stations up there. I imagine that pilot, he might not have went that last mile, he might have made that 180 and headed home again. But you know, that Guadalcanal, them planes the Curtiss had photographed that whole durn island area because there was no, there was no charts. The Japanese had their charts they made, but we had no charts. And we had a, we had a photographic outfit, being a flagship. Wasn’t that many, there’s about ten men with a chief in charge of it. They come back with that durn film, they would develop that film, then, then make it into black and white pictures. And they had to have an identification and they’d get the crew’s mess hall, they’d have it for at least twelve hours, twelve hours it couldn’t be used and they’d lay this stuff out on the, on the deck and they had, ah, rolls of types of paper you could cement that on, paste it on and made that up in maps to where the, then they went out to where they could be, could be utilized or used. But that was just one of the chores. But anyway, the planes, they operated continuously. There was some in the air and gone at all times. I think we had twenty-four planes and they had their own, their own missions. Mission after mission. And of course, we housed and fed the crew and did the mechanical work on the planes and everything. Now then, this same night, that brings me back to my ol’ Quincy. The Quincy come in the night, the night that we got in, they come into Espiritu Santo for about six hours and some work that we could do they did on the ship and one of my shipmates, Donald Russo, my running mate when I was on the Quincy, he come over to the ship and just for a little bit said, “Well, we’re leaving in a few minutes, go back to the ship.” Anyway, that night the Quincy, the Vincennes, Astoria, and Australian cruiser Canberra was operating as one unit and they’re up there in the landing. They’ve been, been all over now and now it is the 9th, the night of the 9th of No—, ah, of August. The Japs come down, they, ah, our patrol planes had spotted them out of New Guinea, coming down, but they’d been playing around and changing the course and doing different things so nobody thought there was any danger. And then all at once they apparently went full speed ahead and they come down, and then they named it the [Swat], through these islands and there’s troop ships offloading right on his, right on his port hand side as he come down. But his intelligence had already got word to him that these cruisers and everything is, is just, is just laying, almost laying to at that Savo Island, off of Savo. And we never did it, but the Japs did. He launched, he launched a couple of their little ol’ sea planes and he went right up and he dropped, he dropped the flares and he illuminated all them ships. And they’re lined up over there, four, bing, bing, bing, bing. Sank all four of them within two hours and blowed the b-, bow, I don’t know how they got him, but the Chicago, another heavy cruiser, was up and away, not, not in the line with them at all. So that’s where I give, give you all that list of names there, the Quincy, now and I had in some of the mess, the man that found the Titanic. What’s his name?
Clint Alley: Ah, was it, ah, Ballard?
CP: Ballard. Ballard.
CA: Ballard.
CP: Yeah, I went to San, to San Antonio, Texas before this happened and he, he was there. We had, ah, met at the oaks outside, the great big ol’, I guess they can handle a couple of thousand people, but we went there for our reunion. And they had all these heavy cruisers and people from Australia, from the Australian cruiser for our get-together. And he was there and that’s when he said, “We’re gonna go, we’re going to, we’re going to the Guadalcanal and we’re going to Savo Island.” Went down, went down in a little sub he’s got and found them ships sitting on, almost sitting on even keel, sunk. Usually think of one turning over, but they didn’t. And they put a, they put a bouquet of permanent made flowers on the deck and some kind of a little plaque on the deck from them little ol’ submarines he was down there in, did all that. So that, it’s al-, it always stuck to me, you know, my old ship, all the things that it did, ah, the many places I went, just starting from nothing and don’t know nothing and, and finally make all the rounds and survive it, well you, you wonder. I bet we had one of the most colorful ceremonies on the, on the equator, that’s on the Quincy, yeah on the Quincy when we’re making the Roosevelt’s goodwill tour because we had all these dignitaries on the ship. So they’re pollywogs, too. So everybody gets initiated. Course, it’s some of it they didn’t put them through that they did. We had a lot of officers that escaped it, but us little ol’ peons you’ve got all of it. When you got through, you knew you was initiated. There’s one I’ll never get over. We had a sail maker on the ship. He made a canvas chute about this big around and almost the size of this room, I guess. So they, they got that on the deck and they got water in it. But they put rotten eggs, let you have a couple of cases of rotten eggs they put in there and they got, they got the whips up here, “Get in there! Go!” You know. Course, once you get in there, there’s only way when you go is go out the other end. That was the stinkingest mess that I ever got in my life. That’s like the, you go to court, they have court, we had the regular ceremony, we had all the equipment, the ship bought that out of Philadelphia. I went across the equator about four or five times and we’d have initiation, but never had all that equipment we had on there. Fox Movietone had, they had, had movies of it and I bet they’s on the Quincy when she went down. Used to show them so, ever so often I guess when you got new, new men aboard, show them what we did in the past or if we do it again here’s what, what you’re in for.
Rhonda Haygood: So, how long were you in the service all together?
CP: Twenty-six years. Twenty-two years and ten months on, on ships. Two years, a tugboat captain in a shipyard. Oh yeah, went, went to, I went to Korea. We went to Korea and this is our, this is our goodies for going. We went around the world. We left Newport, Rhode Island through the Panama Canal, Pearl Harbor, and finally Japan and up to Korea and when we finished our tours at Korea we left there and we went down to Singapore, Hong Kong and what’s that durn island off the tip of, of India? Giant island. Been fighting wars over, between, between them, all of them is, all of them is Indians. Hot dang. Anyway, the city there, we went in this city and—jewelry makers, jewelry factories—I’m gonna get my wife some, some fine jewels for just a few dollars. And I got them, man they just looked fine and I got to Newport, Rhode Island and that’s returning now, finally I’m coming home with all the goodies. Two or three of them had bought some, says, “You know what?”—we found out, yeah, one of the banks had a person that could evaluate, evaluate, you know, precious stones. And he says, “You really want me to tell you what you got, huh?” I said, “Yeah, that’s what I want to know.” He says, “Coming out of that part of India,” he says, “that’s, that’s a, just a little better glass than what they put in a beer bottle.”
RH: Oh, no.
CP: I think I’ve still got that somewhere stashed at home. My wife, she never wore it.
RH: Did she get to go with you very much? You said you brought her to Hawaii, right?
CP: Yeah, yeah, she got to do quite a bit of going. But it was sad. We delayed marriage a long time. That’s the reason I got ma—, I knew her before I ever went in the Navy, you know.
RH: Oh.
CP: So about knew, about knew one another all of our lives, I guess. And I give her my little talk. I says, “You never been nowhere. You start, you starting where I started; you don’t know nothing.” And I says, “I will do all that’s in me to take care of you.” But I says, “Now, my intent, I don’t know, I might change my mind somewhere, but,” I says, “I figure on doing a career.” Well, at that time the depression is still in effect. I mean, it looks dismal. I know that you can make a living. But I says, “To just make that living and can’t get one inch above that.” But anyway, that Quincy, just put the final stamp, I was exposed to so much I just couldn’t, I was just overwhelmed, overwhelmed. And I guess I make myself get that way. I appreciate many things, to look at mountains, but to look at any, any kind of scenery or anything and stuff just, just gets my mind. But to get in total darkness and you can’t find a place today, total darkness and just, if you could, just lay down and look into the sky. It just, it’ll almost blow your mind. I believe there’s people today that, that has never been able to just gaze over a long period of time and take in the heavens and what have you. Course I, I, I get in, I get in orbit without bl-, without lifting off of the earth. I got, I got a man I bet, I bet y’all know him, too, retired from the Air Force, took the last flight of the Blackbird from San Diego to Washington. He’s been in the news; he’s been interviewed. Watch my little mind just go haywire. I know the man’s name. I talk to him over and over again. I talked to him and he said, “Now you,” he says, “you’ve been, you’ve been in this, you’ve had to be secret a little bit,” but he says, “mine’s still in effect. I can’t—.” [unintelligible] when the Blackbird takes off you got a fuel plane a way up there and you fuel and then he goes on to eighty thousand feet and he can just ‘putt-putt’ from then on. You can go around this earth; you can do all kinds of things. But you up there by yourself. He said, “Oh, you can get lonely; you can get lonely. Talk to the Lord.” Yeah, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re equipped you can do that, too. But, but he loves to talk and I do, too and I says, “I, I wasn’t there, but I can kind of soar with you. I just, just imagine what it is, you know.” Course you’re, ah, you’re doomed if something another happens. But he made it through and they retired that plane and it’s at the Smithsonian in Washington. They’ve got it up there, the Blackbird.
CA: Ah, going back to Pearl Harbor, when you heard that we were being attacked were you shocked about it or, or had y’all been expecting that or—?
CP: God no! No! No, the furthest thing from it. There’s too much ramification here. Long before now, now I’m backing down. 1937, the Japanese invaded China. I bet, I bet you got it in school, the book, The Rape of Nanking. Well that’s these Chinese, they went into China and we’ve always had a—not always—we’ve had an Asiatic fleet since in the 1800s in China. Or in the Chinese area. And in Shanghai, Shanghai used to be one of the world’s leading cities, one of the biggest cities in the world. And China, as you know, until communism never had a central government that had any power. Big cities governed themselves, even made their own money. So there was no, there was no real functional system, but the Chinese invaded China, as to why is anybody’s guess. And they was brutal. The Chin-, the Ja-, the Japs was brutal. But they’re in Shanghai and the western world’s Navies was in, was in, up there as well as the Americans. Stayed, stayed up at Shanghai, in the Shanghai area. That border front in Shanghai is thirty-four miles long. Just the durn waterfronts. And that water runs swift through there, but they, you’re anchored, anchored out, anchored, anchored down I reckon. Yeah. But anyway, the, the flagship in ’37 was named Augusta was a heavy cruiser and the Japs fired two rounds of artillery right across the bow of that and course the word went to, went to Washington just like that. And again the Quincy, I got the, got the names of them here somewhere with all this mess. If I was organized I could show you where in, in Long Beach, California them three heavy cruisers loaded, loaded, loaded and had the landing force, each one had Marines and sailors and the place in San Pedro called Reeves Field, Admiral Reeves, and it’s for drills and all marches and what have you. So, we’d take boats and make our landing over there and the Marines was training us, I was the landing force and we’re going to China. We’re all ready to go. And on the ship I can, I can remember they had the, you had these news, news reels and we’re down in the magazine in the lower part of the ship, you’re coming up, you got your helmet on and a jacket and they say, “Keep your head down. Keep your head down.” And he’s photographing you as you come up. Don’t want nobody to look up so you can identify the face. And they passed that off as though they’re in China, we’re there. But anyway, I’ve got that thing and then the word they cancelled out. Another one in Seattle in ’37, too, a highlight. Ah, Amelia Earhart went down in that Pacific and the Quincy, we got ready again to go to look for Amelia and they cancelled all of them out and sent the aircraft carrier Lexington. She steamed out and went to the South Pacific looking for Amelia Earhart. And then I got a so called doctor friend, he was in the Navy, was a, was a pilot. Dr. Mims from Tuscumbia; he’s retired now. Dr. Mims went, he went—what island did he go to? He studied where Amelia might have went down. And he went down and he rented a plane somewhere in them little ol’ islands down there and flew around there and I don’t know what all he did. But they have looked, the Japanese had all those islands when she went down. They’ve had all kinds of things, but what would they do to a woman if she did crash or they found her or something or another? Still a mystery. They have a theory, they got a theory of the little ol’ island and they think they found a part of the plane that might have floated up or something or another. But anyway, Amelia was, took the show for a while. Then the round the world cruise, back, yeah then, then was NASA. I’ll, I’ll wind up for you. I retired the 30th day, the 30th day of December, 1961, after spending three months in the hospital with suspected ulcer, ah, ca-, cancer of the stomach. But I survived all of that. And I come home with a wife and three children and retired on depression type pay. And you’ve never experienced it and it’ll be hard for you to come by what one dollar was really worth. What just a penny, a penny had buying power. All children knew what a penny was. If you had a penny you could go to the store and get a piece of candy. The storekeeper was glad to, glad to do it because they needed the business. But anyway, ah, we had a downturn, ah, I had me a job—oh yeah, I had another experience before I retired out of the Navy on the destroyer, Gearing. We was attached to the submarine, George Washington. The George Washington was the first built atomic submarine. With atomic submarine with the capability, the missile at that time was named Polaris, the Polaris missile. And she was equipped with a, a row of eight, eight like this, then a little passageway and eight over here like this and with a way of launching those, submerged, while you’re under the water. I still can’t come to terms with myself, but I’ve been aboard that submarine because we was attached to it, all the secrecy. And she come into Cape Canaveral and your navigation, ah, we didn’t have the satellite exactly like you have now and I can’t, I’m at a little bit of a loss. I know Westinghouse Electric had the, had the contract, but they set up and that submarine would come in, everything was guarded, nothing come around them. And they went through some, some thing of, and the electronic field at that time for the communication, what it was communication while they was submerged. So the, anyway to shorten that, at the Cape after she’s all set we go to sea with her, four destroyers, and we know that the, the Germans has got submarines all over the place. But we got four destroyers, two out in front of her and two back here and course our ships know where they’re gonna submerge and what course they’re gonna run. And then we went southeast of the Cape, I forget how many miles, then they fired, fired all them missiles. Not all of them fired, four of them. Fired four Polaris missiles proving that they could be fired from submerged. And today, that’s where all of them is planned to be launched, but the ones they got today we hope don’t never happen. Another long tale of submarines, I’d like to have a written story of how, ah, in the north of Russia somewhere, I always think of Murmansk, it’s a way up, and now this is the Cold War, Cold War is going on. But we find out, some Captain in the Navy says, “Well, you know, the whole world, you put, if you’ve got a cable that’s gonna run under the water, you’ll have something another warning, ‘Do Not Anchor, Cable Crossing.’” With the little thing they started and they found and we had a submarine, one specially equipped with a small sub, sub on that sub that could be launched and they found that cable, identified it, they had, they had stuff they could clamp on to that and, and find out what they got. But that was the first, the first step. They did that and they did that two or three times until they devised a way that we could, we could, we could just get, we could get, get it off of it automatic like. And we wait-, we waited till the Cold War was over before we told them about that. I don’t know why they told them then. Then we found the second one the same way on the Pacific side. Did the same thing. So we knew all the operating plans they was doing. At the tail end of World War II, my wife’s first cousin was a lieutenant in the Navy, in the Navy Reserve, got his education over here at UN-, UNA. Times were so hard the ol’ boy just said that he owned tennis shoes and washed dishes over there to help, to help pay being in college. Anyway, he’s on a jeep aircraft carrier and they’re on submarine patrol from, I always think of it, Argentina somewhere off of Buenos Aires or off one of them islands down there across to Africa and they’d find out that subs have got way down in there and they’d been trying to run merchant ships around different places to keep them out because the North Atlantic they just picking them off like flies up there, picking our ships off. Well anyway, they got on the tail end of this, of this sub and them subs has got, you’re running on battery power, you got, you got to surface to where you can run your engines and charge your batteries. So he tried to come up a couple of times and they dropped depth charges on him and they damaged him. So I don’t know how far he went, but after a while he’s try-, he’s gonna try to surface and I don’t know if the captain of the aircraft carrier or the destroyer said, “We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t try to sink that thing. We might capture it.” They come up and the Germans did a, broke all the rules of the, of how they rule. The captain should have committed suicide and blowed his vessel up. He didn’t do it. He let, he let his people abandon ship. Well anyway, we captured that durn ship. Her, her first cousin was the boat officer from the carrier; course the destroyers had their boat officers. And two men went through the conning tower and down in the, in the ship and they found, they found the hatch where the water was coming through. And that’s beyond my imagination because there must have been an awful lot of force, but there might have been enough, enough stuff that it slowed it down. But then they debated with, with their masks and everything on, couldn’t talk much about it, till one of them give a sign, “Let’s go. Close the hatch.” Because they done, done figured out if they got, if they got a booby trap, us and the submarine both gonna be down here together. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t booby trapped. They closed it and when they got it closed all the boarding crew went to work immediately and got the communication system. Now I can’t name, what’s the name of the, the German thing, it’s a famous name.
CA: I, ah—.
CP: A system that the—
CA: The Enigma Code?
CP: —whole world couldn’t break.
CA: The Enigma Code? Was that it?
CP: I can’t remember just exactly. But anyway, the whole world couldn’t break that code. And they put everything to secrecy in them two ships, three ships. They took that thing in tow from off of, off of Dakar in Africa and towed it to the island of Bermuda. And nobody but just a few inside knew what was going on. In Bermuda they flew all that stuff to Washington and the experts in that field knew immediately what had been going on. Every submarine was equipped with the same thing. And in France they had the Master Station and you had the spies over here. They reported every ship that was getting underway from the, from the east coast of the United States, his course and where he was going. And they was assigned a sub, station so-and-so on the code, and just wait. You’re the bait and they’re coming by after it. Just sunk them right and left. So they had to guard the secret then. Says, “This—we’ll just go a small step at a time,” till we kept picking on and they picked off, they must have got suspicious, I don’t know. But they stopped it, period, and the war was over.
CA: Where were you when the war ended?
CP: In China. Had the whole war in that durn Pacific and come back and thought I was home free. And I was a chief petty officer. I wouldn’t take warrant officer. I, I don’t know where I might have went if I was a warrant officer. So I’m on the, on the, I’m in San Diego and just wonder, ‘Man, what kind of a station, where I’m gonna get?’ I’m home free after all this time. And bang, they, every one of us, all up and down the coast, I forget what, had thirty or forty durn destroyers ready to be commissioned. I went to Orange, Texas. Of all the places you wouldn’t think Orange, Texas built ships, but they did. That’s another mystery to me, World War II. This nation will never do again what it did then. They was a few people that was just out for the buck. But the mass of our people went for the cause. “I’m here,” that’s the women. The women, for the first time they broke loose from society. That’s why you got Rosie the Riveter. But you had them all over. But now you’ve got them putting them in the durn Army and the, putting them, putting them in trenches. I can’t see that. I don’t, don’t agree with that. But they are, there’s a story going on the paper every day about them. Now, these, ah, there’s, about, about I guess thir-, a good thirty of us and our fleet had been there now. We couldn’t, we didn’t have a turnaround and rotate. When you got there you just stayed there till you wore out or tore up or something another. But we’re brand new. We was out there a matter of weeks before the end of the war when they dropped, dropped that second A-bomb up there. That Jap come out of his hole then. But anyway, we took over the duty of these destroyers, was all over Japan. Some referred to it as the military government, because now they just give up and we don’t know what them devils is gonna do. As I know, because I made, me and an ol’ chief gunner’s mate from Little Rock, Arkansas was in Yokosuka and now they opened up, we can, you can do a little travel. So they give me and this gunner’s mate permission, we could go, go to Tokyo. So we got on that durn train going to Tokyo, Ol’ Gunner, he was pretty sharp, you know, I’d, I’d trust him for my body guard, you know. Ol’ Gunner said, “Now Pool, we get that, get that end seat up here, get that end, get the end seat.” He said, “We’re gonna stand up.” He says, “Now I’m gonna look, I’m gonna cover everything down that way, and you keep your eye that way and get everything that way. And if anything where we can do it, well, we’ll do something.” Well, nothing happened. That train went up; we didn’t get too relaxed at that. But the, the admiration come. School children. I’d say in the eight to ten year, year old range. Not a peep out of them. One of them students was in charge and the Japs, now—you acquainted with submarine, ah,
sub-, subways in like New York?
CA: Um-hm.
CP: You come, you come right up and you just walk in. Well their trains, Japanese trains are the same way. Your passenger cars come right in and they stop and them automatic doors open. Those coming off come off first, the come-ons last, but them little school kids, just like little soldiers, they would turn, march right together. Right up, right to a seat, sit down, never make a peep. I see them get on and get off like that. Then your mind gets going. The entire Japanese nation was a closed nation. Closed. No outside influence. You know who, who, who’s—now this comes back to Pearl Harbor, I can’t hardly see it, but maybe it was. Admiral Perry in what, 18-, I believe in the 1850s, we just kind of forced our self in. We went up there and they made a landing and I don’t know the depth of it, but we got to their government to try to get them to break the chain to make themself available and they agreed to part of it. But in one of these write-ups here, it’s got part of the, part of the deep buried hatred in the Japanese was for going back to, to Perry when he went there many years before. And, and they were so closed that they built this entire fleet. They built a tremendous fleet of, of ships of all, all descriptions before the war right under our nose. He opened our eyes at Pearl Harbor.
CA: How did you get to work for NASA?
CP: Almost by luck. Ah, NASA’s setup is by division and in my day and time the division called the Research and Development was a powerhouse. You had many other powerhouses in that; that’s these Germans. So I’m living in Sheffield and I am getting ready to go to the West Coast. I know I can cou-, I can get me a job in California. My cousin was an engineer, mechanical engineer. He’d been with the Army, the Corps of Engineers and now they formed NASA out of that and he come to NASA there and he was, he was, his so called station was in the research development part of it. So, Karl Heimburg was the head of it and his assistant was Bernard Tessman.
CA: So you worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center?
CP: I got the water transportation system for the man to the moon. [Mr. Pool shows pictures and documents] Commemorate the landing, landing on the moon. I got involved in all that little—
CA: Did you ever get to meet the astronauts?
CP: Yeah, I’ve met some of them. Not, not all of them. No, I was at the Cape for the launching and test site for testing and all kinds of—. There’s one of the earlier, one of the first, or the second barge, rather, the Promise. We got that and it was named Compromise by the Navy. And Heimburg said, “We will not have Compromise. We do not compromise.” So they, they made Promise. My other one was the Paleamon.
CA: That’s funny.
CP: They made the, made the Miami Herald there. “This Compromise Became Promise.”
CA: It did and that’s the boat that you used to pull the, ah, the spacecraft?
CP: No, the barges is what the spacecraft was in and you had tugboats, you pushed in the river and you pulled at sea.
CA: Um. Okay.
CP: Towed by cable. I was in the water transportation and as we become, starting from scratch and as we become more organized, I had me an office in the 4200 building, but I mainly stayed in New Orleans. A place called Michoud.
Patti Hannah: I never heard of that one.
CP: Michoud. Well, a way back in time before World War II or it might have been during World War II, they built a base in there and I can’t call the name. They built, probably built some kind of landing boats that the Navy used. And I don’t know what else they done, but there must be three or four hundred acres in that, in that place and it’s all been government. And they built giant buildings in there, so the missiles were designed—, engineered, designed and everything in Huntsville. And the first ones that was built, but they couldn’t mass produce, you know.
PH: Right.
CP: So now you got it built and you proved it works. Then, ah, okay, there’s two, two families of that Saturn. One, the first ones was Chrysler. And the big ones was Boeing. So that plant, they took that plant in New Orleans.
PH: Okay.
CP: And Chrysler and Boeing both went in, but they built, one built the big stage and the other built the other stage.
PH: The other stage.
CP: But when they finished building the contract Chrysler’s run out. Those were the ones they was doing all kinds of test with.
PH: Yeah.
CP: They were the biggies. But the Five [V], that was the biggie.
PH: Right.
CP: That’s the one that, that shook the windows for miles.
PH: Yeah.
CP: So, ah, they built that. And we had docks that a ship could come into and barges. You say, “Well, how do you, how do you, how do you load and unload these missiles?” Well, every craft that’s gonna handle them has got to have the capability of ballasting up or down. So all the docks is built just alike. We got them in New Orleans, I mean Michoud and at the Cape, where it’s going. Then we go to the West Coast, we got them at Seal Beach. So we get two stages out of there, North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas. So I have to go out there to their docks. They got one missile barge they keep on the West Coast. So I used to be a flyboy. I’d, I’d go to and from and sometimes I’d leave it in San Francisco [unintelligible]. So I made California from one end to the other. Then I’d have to ride the barge at sea in the early days
till they built the airplane. It don’t sound ugly, but, but it does sound a little ugly, the Pregnant Guppy. Did you ever hear of that plane?
PH: I’ve heard of it. Yeah.
CP: Well, it was built big enough for the S-4 stage. It had similar things. It had—
PH: Yeah.
CP: —it had giant trailers that ha-, had hydraulic lifts. You lift up and down and you’d match the deck on the airplane and just roll it right off.
PH: How neat. How neat.
CP: And on the barges it’s roll on or roll off.
PH: Yeah.
CP: The only thing, it costs almost a million dollars a set—
PH: Whew!
CP: —for them things you call trailer wheels.
PH: Yeah.
CP: But anyway I, I had, had [unintelligible] at Michoud and they keep, ah, keep the barges down there and they’d have two or three phases of this. I was the only government terrican, I call it, the jack of all trades and the master of none of them.
PH: Right.
CP: That was me. So I had the, I would have contract help to come in, maintaining whatever you’re, whatever needs to be maintained. You had generators and pumps and all that stuff on the mechanical side and your electrical system. And all the barges had, ah you could hook up to shore power when you were in to the dock, or when you’re out well, you’ve got your own engines. Matter of fact, you’re your own power.
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Veteran Interview with Carl L. Pool (B)World War 1939-1945; Ships(40:21) Mr. Carl Pool describes his military career and his career with NASAFlorence-Lauderdale Public LibraryFlorence-Lauderdale Public LibraryCarl L. Pool2013-01-17sound/textaudio/mp3 ; text/docxEnglishIs part of the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Collection. Contact the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library for permission to use. Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Carl L. Pool
January 17, 2013
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 2 of 2
Carl Pool: But once we broke the Japanese’s back, they like to broke ours before we did it, that was a bloody, bloody outfit for that, that period. So anyway, we operated there. Our planes flew, I don’t know the exact mileage that they’d fly. They had to calculate fuel. You got no fuel stations up there. I imagine that pilot, he might not have went that last mile, he might have made that 180 and headed home again. But you know, that Guadalcanal, them planes the Curtiss had photographed that whole durn island area because there was no, there was no charts. The Japanese had their charts they made, but we had no charts. And we had a, we had a photographic outfit, being a flagship. Wasn’t that many, there’s about ten men with a chief in charge of it. They come back with that durn film, they would develop that film, then, then make it into black and white pictures. And they had to have an identification and they’d get the crew’s mess hall, they’d have it for at least twelve hours, twelve hours it couldn’t be used and they’d lay this stuff out on the, on the deck and they had, ah, rolls of types of paper you could cement that on, paste it on and made that up in maps to where the, then they went out to where they could be, could be utilized or used. But that was just one of the chores. But anyway, the planes, they operated continuously. There was some in the air and gone at all times. I think we had twenty-four planes and they had their own, their own missions. Mission after mission. And of course, we housed and fed the crew and did the mechanical work on the planes and everything. Now then, this same night, that brings me back to my ol’ Quincy. The Quincy come in the night, the night that we got in, they come into Espiritu Santo for about six hours and some work that we could do they did on the ship and one of my shipmates, Donald Russo, my running mate when I was on the Quincy, he come over to the ship and just for a little bit said, “Well, we’re leaving in a few minutes, go back to the ship.” Anyway, that night the Quincy, the Vincennes, Astoria, and Australian cruiser Canberra was operating as one unit and they’re up there in the landing. They’ve been, been all over now and now it is the 9th, the night of the 9th of No—, ah, of August. The Japs come down, they, ah, our patrol planes had spotted them out of New Guinea, coming down, but they’d been playing around and changing the course and doing different things so nobody thought there was any danger. And then all at once they apparently went full speed ahead and they come down, and then they named it the [Swat], through these islands and there’s troop ships offloading right on his, right on his port hand side as he come down. But his intelligence had already got word to him that these cruisers and everything is, is just, is just laying, almost laying to at that Savo Island, off of Savo. And we never did it, but the Japs did. He launched, he launched a couple of their little ol’ sea planes and he went right up and he dropped, he dropped the flares and he illuminated all them ships. And they’re lined up over there, four, bing, bing, bing, bing. Sank all four of them within two hours and blowed the b-, bow, I don’t know how they got him, but the Chicago, another heavy cruiser, was up and away, not, not in the line with them at all. So that’s where I give, give you all that list of names there, the Quincy, now and I had in some of the mess, the man that found the Titanic. What’s his name?
Clint Alley: Ah, was it, ah, Ballard?
CP: Ballard. Ballard.
CA: Ballard.
CP: Yeah, I went to San, to San Antonio, Texas before this happened and he, he was there. We had, ah, met at the oaks outside, the great big ol’, I guess they can handle a couple of thousand people, but we went there for our reunion. And they had all these heavy cruisers and people from Australia, from the Australian cruiser for our get-together. And he was there and that’s when he said, “We’re gonna go, we’re going to, we’re going to the Guadalcanal and we’re going to Savo Island.” Went down, went down in a little sub he’s got and found them ships sitting on, almost sitting on even keel, sunk. Usually think of one turning over, but they didn’t. And they put a, they put a bouquet of permanent made flowers on the deck and some kind of a little plaque on the deck from them little ol’ submarines he was down there in, did all that. So that, it’s al-, it always stuck to me, you know, my old ship, all the things that it did, ah, the many places I went, just starting from nothing and don’t know nothing and, and finally make all the rounds and survive it, well you, you wonder. I bet we had one of the most colorful ceremonies on the, on the equator, that’s on the Quincy, yeah on the Quincy when we’re making the Roosevelt’s goodwill tour because we had all these dignitaries on the ship. So they’re pollywogs, too. So everybody gets initiated. Course, it’s some of it they didn’t put them through that they did. We had a lot of officers that escaped it, but us little ol’ peons you’ve got all of it. When you got through, you knew you was initiated. There’s one I’ll never get over. We had a sail maker on the ship. He made a canvas chute about this big around and almost the size of this room, I guess. So they, they got that on the deck and they got water in it. But they put rotten eggs, let you have a couple of cases of rotten eggs they put in there and they got, they got the whips up here, “Get in there! Go!” You know. Course, once you get in there, there’s only way when you go is go out the other end. That was the stinkingest mess that I ever got in my life. That’s like the, you go to court, they have court, we had the regular ceremony, we had all the equipment, the ship bought that out of Philadelphia. I went across the equator about four or five times and we’d have initiation, but never had all that equipment we had on there. Fox Movietone had, they had, had movies of it and I bet they’s on the Quincy when she went down. Used to show them so, ever so often I guess when you got new, new men aboard, show them what we did in the past or if we do it again here’s what, what you’re in for.
Rhonda Haygood: So, how long were you in the service all together?
CP: Twenty-six years. Twenty-two years and ten months on, on ships. Two years, a tugboat captain in a shipyard. Oh yeah, went, went to, I went to Korea. We went to Korea and this is our, this is our goodies for going. We went around the world. We left Newport, Rhode Island through the Panama Canal, Pearl Harbor, and finally Japan and up to Korea and when we finished our tours at Korea we left there and we went down to Singapore, Hong Kong and what’s that durn island off the tip of, of India? Giant island. Been fighting wars over, between, between them, all of them is, all of them is Indians. Hot dang. Anyway, the city there, we went in this city and—jewelry makers, jewelry factories—I’m gonna get my wife some, some fine jewels for just a few dollars. And I got them, man they just looked fine and I got to Newport, Rhode Island and that’s returning now, finally I’m coming home with all the goodies. Two or three of them had bought some, says, “You know what?”—we found out, yeah, one of the banks had a person that could evaluate, evaluate, you know, precious stones. And he says, “You really want me to tell you what you got, huh?” I said, “Yeah, that’s what I want to know.” He says, “Coming out of that part of India,” he says, “that’s, that’s a, just a little better glass than what they put in a beer bottle.”
RH: Oh, no.
CP: I think I’ve still got that somewhere stashed at home. My wife, she never wore it.
RH: Did she get to go with you very much? You said you brought her to Hawaii, right?
CP: Yeah, yeah, she got to do quite a bit of going. But it was sad. We delayed marriage a long time. That’s the reason I got ma—, I knew her before I ever went in the Navy, you know.
RH: Oh.
CP: So about knew, about knew one another all of our lives, I guess. And I give her my little talk. I says, “You never been nowhere. You start, you starting where I started; you don’t know nothing.” And I says, “I will do all that’s in me to take care of you.” But I says, “Now, my intent, I don’t know, I might change my mind somewhere, but,” I says, “I figure on doing a career.” Well, at that time the depression is still in effect. I mean, it looks dismal. I know that you can make a living. But I says, “To just make that living and can’t get one inch above that.” But anyway, that Quincy, just put the final stamp, I was exposed to so much I just couldn’t, I was just overwhelmed, overwhelmed. And I guess I make myself get that way. I appreciate many things, to look at mountains, but to look at any, any kind of scenery or anything and stuff just, just gets my mind. But to get in total darkness and you can’t find a place today, total darkness and just, if you could, just lay down and look into the sky. It just, it’ll almost blow your mind. I believe there’s people today that, that has never been able to just gaze over a long period of time and take in the heavens and what have you. Course I, I, I get in, I get in orbit without bl-, without lifting off of the earth. I got, I got a man I bet, I bet y’all know him, too, retired from the Air Force, took the last flight of the Blackbird from San Diego to Washington. He’s been in the news; he’s been interviewed. Watch my little mind just go haywire. I know the man’s name. I talk to him over and over again. I talked to him and he said, “Now you,” he says, “you’ve been, you’ve been in this, you’ve had to be secret a little bit,” but he says, “mine’s still in effect. I can’t—.” [unintelligible] when the Blackbird takes off you got a fuel plane a way up there and you fuel and then he goes on to eighty thousand feet and he can just ‘putt-putt’ from then on. You can go around this earth; you can do all kinds of things. But you up there by yourself. He said, “Oh, you can get lonely; you can get lonely. Talk to the Lord.” Yeah, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re equipped you can do that, too. But, but he loves to talk and I do, too and I says, “I, I wasn’t there, but I can kind of soar with you. I just, just imagine what it is, you know.” Course you’re, ah, you’re doomed if something another happens. But he made it through and they retired that plane and it’s at the Smithsonian in Washington. They’ve got it up there, the Blackbird.
CA: Ah, going back to Pearl Harbor, when you heard that we were being attacked were you shocked about it or, or had y’all been expecting that or—?
CP: God no! No! No, the furthest thing from it. There’s too much ramification here. Long before now, now I’m backing down. 1937, the Japanese invaded China. I bet, I bet you got it in school, the book, The Rape of Nanking. Well that’s these Chinese, they went into China and we’ve always had a—not always—we’ve had an Asiatic fleet since in the 1800s in China. Or in the Chinese area. And in Shanghai, Shanghai used to be one of the world’s leading cities, one of the biggest cities in the world. And China, as you know, until communism never had a central government that had any power. Big cities governed themselves, even made their own money. So there was no, there was no real functional system, but the Chinese invaded China, as to why is anybody’s guess. And they was brutal. The Chin-, the Ja-, the Japs was brutal. But they’re in Shanghai and the western world’s Navies was in, was in, up there as well as the Americans. Stayed, stayed up at Shanghai, in the Shanghai area. That border front in Shanghai is thirty-four miles long. Just the durn waterfronts. And that water runs swift through there, but they, you’re anchored, anchored out, anchored, anchored down I reckon. Yeah. But anyway, the, the flagship in ’37 was named Augusta was a heavy cruiser and the Japs fired two rounds of artillery right across the bow of that and course the word went to, went to Washington just like that. And again the Quincy, I got the, got the names of them here somewhere with all this mess. If I was organized I could show you where in, in Long Beach, California them three heavy cruisers loaded, loaded, loaded and had the landing force, each one had Marines and sailors and the place in San Pedro called Reeves Field, Admiral Reeves, and it’s for drills and all marches and what have you. So, we’d take boats and make our landing over there and the Marines was training us, I was the landing force and we’re going to China. We’re all ready to go. And on the ship I can, I can remember they had the, you had these news, news reels and we’re down in the magazine in the lower part of the ship, you’re coming up, you got your helmet on and a jacket and they say, “Keep your head down. Keep your head down.” And he’s photographing you as you come up. Don’t want nobody to look up so you can identify the face. And they passed that off as though they’re in China, we’re there. But anyway, I’ve got that thing and then the word they cancelled out. Another one in Seattle in ’37, too, a highlight. Ah, Amelia Earhart went down in that Pacific and the Quincy, we got ready again to go to look for Amelia and they cancelled all of them out and sent the aircraft carrier Lexington. She steamed out and went to the South Pacific looking for Amelia Earhart. And then I got a so called doctor friend, he was in the Navy, was a, was a pilot. Dr. Mims from Tuscumbia; he’s retired now. Dr. Mims went, he went—what island did he go to? He studied where Amelia might have went down. And he went down and he rented a plane somewhere in them little ol’ islands down there and flew around there and I don’t know what all he did. But they have looked, the Japanese had all those islands when she went down. They’ve had all kinds of things, but what would they do to a woman if she did crash or they found her or something or another? Still a mystery. They have a theory, they got a theory of the little ol’ island and they think they found a part of the plane that might have floated up or something or another. But anyway, Amelia was, took the show for a while. Then the round the world cruise, back, yeah then, then was NASA. I’ll, I’ll wind up for you. I retired the 30th day, the 30th day of December, 1961, after spending three months in the hospital with suspected ulcer, ah, ca-, cancer of the stomach. But I survived all of that. And I come home with a wife and three children and retired on depression type pay. And you’ve never experienced it and it’ll be hard for you to come by what one dollar was really worth. What just a penny, a penny had buying power. All children knew what a penny was. If you had a penny you could go to the store and get a piece of candy. The storekeeper was glad to, glad to do it because they needed the business. But anyway, ah, we had a downturn, ah, I had me a job—oh yeah, I had another experience before I retired out of the Navy on the destroyer, Gearing. We was attached to the submarine, George Washington. The George Washington was the first built atomic submarine. With atomic submarine with the capability, the missile at that time was named Polaris, the Polaris missile. And she was equipped with a, a row of eight, eight like this, then a little passageway and eight over here like this and with a way of launching those, submerged, while you’re under the water. I still can’t come to terms with myself, but I’ve been aboard that submarine because we was attached to it, all the secrecy. And she come into Cape Canaveral and your navigation, ah, we didn’t have the satellite exactly like you have now and I can’t, I’m at a little bit of a loss. I know Westinghouse Electric had the, had the contract, but they set up and that submarine would come in, everything was guarded, nothing come around them. And they went through some, some thing of, and the electronic field at that time for the communication, what it was communication while they was submerged. So the, anyway to shorten that, at the Cape after she’s all set we go to sea with her, four destroyers, and we know that the, the Germans has got submarines all over the place. But we got four destroyers, two out in front of her and two back here and course our ships know where they’re gonna submerge and what course they’re gonna run. And then we went southeast of the Cape, I forget how many miles, then they fired, fired all them missiles. Not all of them fired, four of them. Fired four Polaris missiles proving that they could be fired from submerged. And today, that’s where all of them is planned to be launched, but the ones they got today we hope don’t never happen. Another long tale of submarines, I’d like to have a written story of how, ah, in the north of Russia somewhere, I always think of Murmansk, it’s a way up, and now this is the Cold War, Cold War is going on. But we find out, some Captain in the Navy says, “Well, you know, the whole world, you put, if you’ve got a cable that’s gonna run under the water, you’ll have something another warning, ‘Do Not Anchor, Cable Crossing.’” With the little thing they started and they found and we had a submarine, one specially equipped with a small sub, sub on that sub that could be launched and they found that cable, identified it, they had, they had stuff they could clamp on to that and, and find out what they got. But that was the first, the first step. They did that and they did that two or three times until they devised a way that we could, we could, we could just get, we could get, get it off of it automatic like. And we wait-, we waited till the Cold War was over before we told them about that. I don’t know why they told them then. Then we found the second one the same way on the Pacific side. Did the same thing. So we knew all the operating plans they was doing. At the tail end of World War II, my wife’s first cousin was a lieutenant in the Navy, in the Navy Reserve, got his education over here at UN-, UNA. Times were so hard the ol’ boy just said that he owned tennis shoes and washed dishes over there to help, to help pay being in college. Anyway, he’s on a jeep aircraft carrier and they’re on submarine patrol from, I always think of it, Argentina somewhere off of Buenos Aires or off one of them islands down there across to Africa and they’d find out that subs have got way down in there and they’d been trying to run merchant ships around different places to keep them out because the North Atlantic they just picking them off like flies up there, picking our ships off. Well anyway, they got on the tail end of this, of this sub and them subs has got, you’re running on battery power, you got, you got to surface to where you can run your engines and charge your batteries. So he tried to come up a couple of times and they dropped depth charges on him and they damaged him. So I don’t know how far he went, but after a while he’s try-, he’s gonna try to surface and I don’t know if the captain of the aircraft carrier or the destroyer said, “We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t try to sink that thing. We might capture it.” They come up and the Germans did a, broke all the rules of the, of how they rule. The captain should have committed suicide and blowed his vessel up. He didn’t do it. He let, he let his people abandon ship. Well anyway, we captured that durn ship. Her, her first cousin was the boat officer from the carrier; course the destroyers had their boat officers. And two men went through the conning tower and down in the, in the ship and they found, they found the hatch where the water was coming through. And that’s beyond my imagination because there must have been an awful lot of force, but there might have been enough, enough stuff that it slowed it down. But then they debated with, with their masks and everything on, couldn’t talk much about it, till one of them give a sign, “Let’s go. Close the hatch.” Because they done, done figured out if they got, if they got a booby trap, us and the submarine both gonna be down here together. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t booby trapped. They closed it and when they got it closed all the boarding crew went to work immediately and got the communication system. Now I can’t name, what’s the name of the, the German thing, it’s a famous name.
CA: I, ah—.
CP: A system that the—
CA: The Enigma Code?
CP: —whole world couldn’t break.
CA: The Enigma Code? Was that it?
CP: I can’t remember just exactly. But anyway, the whole world couldn’t break that code. And they put everything to secrecy in them two ships, three ships. They took that thing in tow from off of, off of Dakar in Africa and towed it to the island of Bermuda. And nobody but just a few inside knew what was going on. In Bermuda they flew all that stuff to Washington and the experts in that field knew immediately what had been going on. Every submarine was equipped with the same thing. And in France they had the Master Station and you had the spies over here. They reported every ship that was getting underway from the, from the east coast of the United States, his course and where he was going. And they was assigned a sub, station so-and-so on the code, and just wait. You’re the bait and they’re coming by after it. Just sunk them right and left. So they had to guard the secret then. Says, “This—we’ll just go a small step at a time,” till we kept picking on and they picked off, they must have got suspicious, I don’t know. But they stopped it, period, and the war was over.
CA: Where were you when the war ended?
CP: In China. Had the whole war in that durn Pacific and come back and thought I was home free. And I was a chief petty officer. I wouldn’t take warrant officer. I, I don’t know where I might have went if I was a warrant officer. So I’m on the, on the, I’m in San Diego and just wonder, ‘Man, what kind of a station, where I’m gonna get?’ I’m home free after all this time. And bang, they, every one of us, all up and down the coast, I forget what, had thirty or forty durn destroyers ready to be commissioned. I went to Orange, Texas. Of all the places you wouldn’t think Orange, Texas built ships, but they did. That’s another mystery to me, World War II. This nation will never do again what it did then. They was a few people that was just out for the buck. But the mass of our people went for the cause. “I’m here,” that’s the women. The women, for the first time they broke loose from society. That’s why you got Rosie the Riveter. But you had them all over. But now you’ve got them putting them in the durn Army and the, putting them, putting them in trenches. I can’t see that. I don’t, don’t agree with that. But they are, there’s a story going on the paper every day about them. Now, these, ah, there’s, about, about I guess thir-, a good thirty of us and our fleet had been there now. We couldn’t, we didn’t have a turnaround and rotate. When you got there you just stayed there till you wore out or tore up or something another. But we’re brand new. We was out there a matter of weeks before the end of the war when they dropped, dropped that second A-bomb up there. That Jap come out of his hole then. But anyway, we took over the duty of these destroyers, was all over Japan. Some referred to it as the military government, because now they just give up and we don’t know what them devils is gonna do. As I know, because I made, me and an ol’ chief gunner’s mate from Little Rock, Arkansas was in Yokosuka and now they opened up, we can, you can do a little travel. So they give me and this gunner’s mate permission, we could go, go to Tokyo. So we got on that durn train going to Tokyo, Ol’ Gunner, he was pretty sharp, you know, I’d, I’d trust him for my body guard, you know. Ol’ Gunner said, “Now Pool, we get that, get that end seat up here, get that end, get the end seat.” He said, “We’re gonna stand up.” He says, “Now I’m gonna look, I’m gonna cover everything down that way, and you keep your eye that way and get everything that way. And if anything where we can do it, well, we’ll do something.” Well, nothing happened. That train went up; we didn’t get too relaxed at that. But the, the admiration come. School children. I’d say in the eight to ten year, year old range. Not a peep out of them. One of them students was in charge and the Japs, now—you acquainted with submarine, ah,
sub-, subways in like New York?
CA: Um-hm.
CP: You come, you come right up and you just walk in. Well their trains, Japanese trains are the same way. Your passenger cars come right in and they stop and them automatic doors open. Those coming off come off first, the come-ons last, but them little school kids, just like little soldiers, they would turn, march right together. Right up, right to a seat, sit down, never make a peep. I see them get on and get off like that. Then your mind gets going. The entire Japanese nation was a closed nation. Closed. No outside influence. You know who, who, who’s—now this comes back to Pearl Harbor, I can’t hardly see it, but maybe it was. Admiral Perry in what, 18-, I believe in the 1850s, we just kind of forced our self in. We went up there and they made a landing and I don’t know the depth of it, but we got to their government to try to get them to break the chain to make themself available and they agreed to part of it. But in one of these write-ups here, it’s got part of the, part of the deep buried hatred in the Japanese was for going back to, to Perry when he went there many years before. And, and they were so closed that they built this entire fleet. They built a tremendous fleet of, of ships of all, all descriptions before the war right under our nose. He opened our eyes at Pearl Harbor.
CA: How did you get to work for NASA?
CP: Almost by luck. Ah, NASA’s setup is by division and in my day and time the division called the Research and Development was a powerhouse. You had many other powerhouses in that; that’s these Germans. So I’m living in Sheffield and I am getting ready to go to the West Coast. I know I can cou-, I can get me a job in California. My cousin was an engineer, mechanical engineer. He’d been with the Army, the Corps of Engineers and now they formed NASA out of that and he come to NASA there and he was, he was, his so called station was in the research development part of it. So, Karl Heimburg was the head of it and his assistant was Bernard Tessman.
CA: So you worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center?
CP: I got the water transportation system for the man to the moon. [Mr. Pool shows pictures and documents] Commemorate the landing, landing on the moon. I got involved in all that little—
CA: Did you ever get to meet the astronauts?
CP: Yeah, I’ve met some of them. Not, not all of them. No, I was at the Cape for the launching and test site for testing and all kinds of—. There’s one of the earlier, one of the first, or the second barge, rather, the Promise. We got that and it was named Compromise by the Navy. And Heimburg said, “We will not have Compromise. We do not compromise.” So they, they made Promise. My other one was the Paleamon.
CA: That’s funny.
CP: They made the, made the Miami Herald there. “This Compromise Became Promise.”
CA: It did and that’s the boat that you used to pull the, ah, the spacecraft?
CP: No, the barges is what the spacecraft was in and you had tugboats, you pushed in the river and you pulled at sea.
CA: Um. Okay.
CP: Towed by cable. I was in the water transportation and as we become, starting from scratch and as we become more organized, I had me an office in the 4200 building, but I mainly stayed in New Orleans. A place called Michoud.
Patti Hannah: I never heard of that one.
CP: Michoud. Well, a way back in time before World War II or it might have been during World War II, they built a base in there and I can’t call the name. They built, probably built some kind of landing boats that the Navy used. And I don’t know what else they done, but there must be three or four hundred acres in that, in that place and it’s all been government. And they built giant buildings in there, so the missiles were designed—, engineered, designed and everything in Huntsville. And the first ones that was built, but they couldn’t mass produce, you know.
PH: Right.
CP: So now you got it built and you proved it works. Then, ah, okay, there’s two, two families of that Saturn. One, the first ones was Chrysler. And the big ones was Boeing. So that plant, they took that plant in New Orleans.
PH: Okay.
CP: And Chrysler and Boeing both went in, but they built, one built the big stage and the other built the other stage.
PH: The other stage.
CP: But when they finished building the contract Chrysler’s run out. Those were the ones they was doing all kinds of test with.
PH: Yeah.
CP: They were the biggies. But the Five [V], that was the biggie.
PH: Right.
CP: That’s the one that, that shook the windows for miles.
PH: Yeah.
CP: So, ah, they built that. And we had docks that a ship could come into and barges. You say, “Well, how do you, how do you, how do you load and unload these missiles?” Well, every craft that’s gonna handle them has got to have the capability of ballasting up or down. So all the docks is built just alike. We got them in New Orleans, I mean Michoud and at the Cape, where it’s going. Then we go to the West Coast, we got them at Seal Beach. So we get two stages out of there, North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas. So I have to go out there to their docks. They got one missile barge they keep on the West Coast. So I used to be a flyboy. I’d, I’d go to and from and sometimes I’d leave it in San Francisco [unintelligible]. So I made California from one end to the other. Then I’d have to ride the barge at sea in the early days
till they built the airplane. It don’t sound ugly, but, but it does sound a little ugly, the Pregnant Guppy. Did you ever hear of that plane?
PH: I’ve heard of it. Yeah.
CP: Well, it was built big enough for the S-4 stage. It had similar things. It had—
PH: Yeah.
CP: —it had giant trailers that ha-, had hydraulic lifts. You lift up and down and you’d match the deck on the airplane and just roll it right off.
PH: How neat. How neat.
CP: And on the barges it’s roll on or roll off.
PH: Yeah.
CP: The only thing, it costs almost a million dollars a set—
PH: Whew!
CP: —for them things you call trailer wheels.
PH: Yeah.
CP: But anyway I, I had, had [unintelligible] at Michoud and they keep, ah, keep the barges down there and they’d have two or three phases of this. I was the only government terrican, I call it, the jack of all trades and the master of none of them.
PH: Right.
CP: That was me. So I had the, I would have contract help to come in, maintaining whatever you’re, whatever needs to be maintained. You had generators and pumps and all that stuff on the mechanical side and your electrical system. And all the barges had, ah you could hook up to shore power when you were in to the dock, or when you’re out well, you’ve got your own engines. Matter of fact, you’re your own power.
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