Oral History Interview with James Freeman

WILLIAM BERGE: The following is an unrehearsed taped interview with Mr. James Freeman of Louisville, Kentucky. The interview is conducted by William Berge, for the Kentucky Oral History Commission, at Cumberland Falls State Park. The interview is conducted here at the park on September 29, 2000, at Eleven A. M. Mr. Freeman, or Jim, do you mind if I call you Jim?

JAMES FREEMAN: Yeah. Jim.

BERGE: Jim, where were you born?

FREEMAN: Louisville, Kentucky.

BERGE: What date?

FREEMAN: March 20, 1918.

BERGE: 1918. What was your father’s name?

FREEMAN: George.

BERGE: Where was he born?

FREEMAN: He was born in Garrard County, Kentucky; then he later moved to Breathitt County, Kentucky, and then later came to Louisville. His father was a coal miner, underground coal miner, and he said, “you ain’t never getting me in that place.” 1:00So he went to Louisville, he said, “I ain’t going down in no hole.” BERGE: (laughs) That’s the truth buddy. I am from northeastern Pennsylvania, and everybody mined coal.

FREEMAN: Oh, yeah.

BERGE: The—I was going to ask you why your father ever left Lancaster to go to Jackson.

FREEMAN: That’s why he left. He left there and they hired him in Louisville to the old railway company. He was a streetcar motorman for nine years.

BERGE: Oh, in Louisville?

FREEMAN: Yeah, he was.

BERGE: What was your Mother’s maiden name?

FREEMAN: Well, her name was Laura Dever. D-e-v-e-r.

BERGE: Where was she from?

FREEMAN: She was born, I think, down 2:00there Summit, Kentucky, and later Louisville.

BERGE: Where’s that?

FREEMAN: Oh, it is just a little town about forty miles below Louisville; down there—Horse Cave—oh, down near the Black Rock Mines, down in there.

BERGE: Ok. What part of Louisville were you living in when you were born?

FREEMAN: Ah, on Eighteenth Street.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

FREEMAN: The house that I was born in is still standing.

BERGE: Huh.

FREEMAN: The one’s on each side of it are already torn down.

BERGE: Where did you go to school?

FREEMAN: Ah, when I first started school ( ) school, then later they transferred me to Twenty-Third and Cedar; and then of course, after that, my Dad lost his job with the railroad company.

BERGE: When was that?

FREEMAN: Ah, I guess about 1927, something like that, Dad used to run Eighteenth and Preston: of course, we lived on Eighteenth Street, and about once a month he used to stop 3:00his streetcar right there in front of the house, and dong, dong, dong, he set down on that bell, and my Mother would run me out and I’d get on the street car and I’d ride the street car out to the loop. That was the greatest thing.

BERGE: Oh, yeah, yeah.

FREEMAN: Then later he got laid off from that and he wanted to go back to farming so we went down in the country.

BERGE: Where?

FREEMAN: Well you know where the ( ) is today?

BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: Ok, there used to be a one room school right there where the ( ) is. 4:00BERGE: And that is where you went to school?

FREEMAN: That’s where I went to school—a one room school—Red Hill School.

BERGE: How long did you go there?

FREEMAN: Oh, yeah. I went to school, went all the way through school.

BERGE: Where did you finish?

FREEMAN: Well, we—we moved up into Indiana, up to the county outside of Lafayette Indiana. They had ( ) farming up there, and then in Twenty-Nine we came back to Louisville and I finished up in Roosevelt School, down in the west end of Louisville. And then I went to Western Junior High and then I left school after that. Just about finished the twelfth grade.

FREEMAN: My Dad, he got hurt, and he couldn’t work, and my Mother went to work for Brown and Williamson, nine dollars and fifty cents a week. There were six of us in the family, and she was keeping 5:00us together on that. That’s about the time I went in the CCC’s, 1936.

FREEMAN: Yeah. Pretty early.

BERGE: Well, how did you hear about the CCC?

FREEMAN: Well, it was in the papers and everything. You know, and I had been looking for work and couldn’t find anything, I had carried papers and done everything under the sun, you know, to make a nickel.

BERGE: You were about eighteen then, seventeen?

FREEMAN: I was seventeen.

BERGE: Do you remember … FREEMAN: When I went in the CC’s I was seventeen.

BERGE: Did you know anybody that went in before that?

FREEMAN: No, I didn’t, huh-huh. I didn’t know anybody.

BERGE: When you went in, do you remember where you went in, where you enlisted or whatever?

FREEMAN: Yeah, right there in Louisville. And they sent me to Fort Knox … BERGE: Big long trip?

FREEMAN: Yeah. And we ( ) tent city there at Fort Knox for a few days 6:00and then they put us on a troop train. And I went a—they sent me to ah,--Horse Haven. That’s in Idaho, that is right near—well you know where this big hullabaloo was with this guy who got shot and everything?

BERGE: Yeah. Yeah.

FREEMAN: Well, that’s where we went, right there.

BERGE: Pretty country out there isn’t it?

FREEMAN: Oh, it is beautiful. Yeah, beautiful country.

BERGE: Were you anywhere near Coeur d’Alene?

FREEMAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. I went to—I wasn’t there at Horse Haven but just a short while, and they sent me over to 558, to Devils Elbow, and that was near Pritchard, that was before … BERGE: Excuse me, let me turn this off. (He has had a coughing fit) UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Want some water?

BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: You know what’s good for it? You don’t take Claritin do you?

BERGE: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Some Coffee? 7:00BERGE: Just water will be fine. It’ll be all right, I get this every spring and fall and didn’t start taking the Claritin early enough this fall.

FREEMAN: I’ve been taking it for four or five years.

BERGE: Well, I have too. I am supposed to take it every day, but it has not bothered me this summer. I don’t take it and then I let it slip up on me.

FREEMAN: I take it all year round, every day.

BERGE: I’m going to. But it seems like the older I get the worse it gets. But let’s get off this. Tell me this about your experiences out there again.

FREEMAN: Well, the first thing I did when I went to Idaho, I wound up there at Devils Elbow, it’s like I said near Pritchard, that’s close to Coeur d’Alene there and then, they transferred me to what they call Spike Camp.

BERGE: What was that?

FREEMAN: It’s primarily a fire camp. Twenty-five PC’s there 8:00and a Forest Ranger and a cook. We had a real nice camp. I was telling Bill about it today, we lived in four-man tents. Wooden floors wooden sides, and tent top.

FREEMAN: And we had a real nice Mess Hall and everything. And each one of us had to serve a week as Mess cook, you know had to help the cook. And primarily we were a fire camp in case of forest fires. Which we did, we had three or four short—we had three out there in the summer--and we had a park right close by there, it was called Shoshone Park and to 9:00get--we didn’t have to go but just to keep ourselves busy and keep our minds occupied we went down and worked on that park down there.

FREEMAN: Oh, just build little bridges and cleaning up the area … BERGE: When there were no fires.

FREEMAN: Yeah. Improving the pavilion down there and things like that.

BERGE: Course when you’d see people down there, it gave you something to do.

FREEMAN: Occasionally yeah, primarily this Spike Camp was close to Mullen, Idaho—Mullen was a close town to Wallace, Idaho and they went on one fire—we had one fire ( ) Springs, Montana.

BERGE: How did they transport you there?

FREEMAN: What?

BERGE: How would they transport you from your camp to … FREEMAN: They had a truck—by truck. We had a truck—truck driver. One of the men that was in the camp with us was a truck driver. We kept our packs—we had our packs, and there were three days rations in the packs besides all of our tools and everything, and they were always on the truck; 10:00and whenever we would get a call for a fire—and we had a fire tower right close to us, called ( ) Hill; and we would get a report from them that there was a certain fire someplace and we would ( ). We had one fire up on Gold Creek that was—we had to hike across snow up on Stevens Peak to get to the fire.

FREEMAN: Yeah. I was going to tell you about that. There was one fire at Missoula, Montana that was fifteen miles wide and seventeen miles long and five thousand men on that fire.

BERGE: They had fire balls there didn’t they?

FREEMAN: Yeah. They really had a big fire there, and of course, the biggest part of them were CC guys.

BERGE: Did you ever see a fire ball?

FREEMAN: Oh, yeah. You mean a crown fire?

BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I seen it. Just go out there and watch a pine tree, 11:00and it will start to turn yellow, and then turn brown, and then turn red, and whoosh, like that, just like gasoline, it just blow up.

BERGE: You remember a movie not too many years ago, and a book written by a man ( ) called “And A River Runs Through It”? Do you remember that?

FREEMAN: Hum-hum.

BERGE: Well, this man wrote a letter—a rather important history of a forest fire, I forget the title of the one he wrote about forest fires.

FREEMAN: The biggest fire that they had in that part of the country was in 1910. That burned five million acres. It was in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and northern part, I think, of Nevada. That just burned up the country, and that is—we had a hero there then. There was a guy named of Pulaski, I don’t even know if you noticed the tools Craig uses on the fire this year? 12:00It’s got an axe on one side and a ( ) on the other and it is a real light tool. And it is called a Pulaski, named after this guy.

BERGE: Yeah. Lightweight. Named after … FREEMAN: Yeah, this guy was a forest ranger, he had a crew with him—I read the story about it—this crew, I believe he had about fifteen men with him and they got trapped by fire. And he knew of an abandoned mine close by, and he got these men in that mine and they ( ) a bunch of blankets or something and put up in front of the mine. And a bunch of them panicked and wanted to get out; and he just happened to have a gun with him, and he pulled a gun on them, and saved their lives.

BERGE: Yeah, I’ve heard that story.

FREEMAN: He was the one that developed this tool, and it was named after him—a Pulaski.

BERGE: Yeah. One time. 13:00One summer I worked with a forest service interviewing people who had been in fires—about forest fires. The—when you first went up there though, when you were in that other place what kind of work did you do there?

FREEMAN: When I first went there?

BERGE: When you first went to Idaho I mean.

FREEMAN: First before I went to the Spike Camp, I was hanging telephone wires. The telephone lines out there we would hang them in the trees, see, and they were on split insulators, and you would climb a tree, and take this split insulator, and take the telephone line, and throw it up and put it in this split insulator and wrap a wire around it, and put a staple in the tree and tie it to that. The reason we done that, in case the tree fell on it up there it would just slide through that insulator, and it wouldn’t break the line. 14:00BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: And I hung telephone lines—we worked on the roads for a while. And most of the time I was there I cut a lot of timber—dead timber—cut a lot of dead timber out. And plant the trees, one crew was planting trees and one crew was cutting timber.

BERGE: When you went out there, did anybody that you knew go with you? Did any people from Louisville that you knew … FREEMAN: Huh-huh. I didn’t know—most of our guys were from down in the country in Kentucky, and we had boys there from Ohio and Louisiana. Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana were the three states.

BERGE: You went on the train I guess.

FREEMAN: Went on a troop train out there. Yep. We ( ) our mess kits with us and we had our ( ) call with us.

BERGE: Did you know, or did you think that you would be going quite a ways away 15:00when you …?

FREEMAN: No, I didn’t have any idea. When I got to Fort Knox, and they put us on that troop train—when they told us where we were going, to Idaho, and that is where we went. And I was going to tell you about the one fire we was on when they had that big fire at Missoula Montana, our crew went to—what they call—oh, ( ) Springs, Montana, on the Clark Fork River. And we had a fire there—we were there ten days—and there was this spot fire that had started from the big fire at Missoula. And this hill up in there was nothing but cliffs, and trees hanging in these rocks, and crevasses, and they wouldn’t let us stay up there at night because it was too dangerous; because you could fall over a precipice there you know, of maybe a hundred or two hundred feet. So they would take us down in a wheat field, right down below the mountain, big wheat fires right on the Clark Fork River, and we would put our sleeping bags out there and sleep there at night. 16:00The Forest Service had a big tent there to cook and feed us in. Boy, you talk about feeding, that Forest Service was good.

BERGE: Yeah. Better than the CC’s?

FREEMAN: Oh, you bet. We was always glad to get on the Forest Service. Anyway we was there ten days, and we couldn’t put the fire out. We had just about worked it out and we come out of there about dusk, and the next morning we would wake up and look up on the mountain, and there would be fire again. So finally we—they—the Northern Pacific Railway was right close by us there so they went to Spokane and got, I don’t know how many Indian pumps, and several thousand foot of inch and one-half hose, and we had to pump the Clarks Fork River dry.

BERGE: And you pumped up there? You pumped up that mountain?

FREEMAN: We pumped water--we hooked up--we started to pump, and then every 17:00three hundred feet we would stick another pump in, you know, and boost it on up. We put that fire out then.

BERGE: That is amazing, wasn’t it?

FREEMAN: Oh, yeah, we had water running back into the river.

BERGE: Yeah, running back down the mountain.

FREEMAN: Yeah, we got her out.

BERGE: Were you glad you were in one of those small size camps instead of the large size camp?

FREEMAN: Huh, Spike Camp? Yeah, yeah, I liked … BERGE: I mean Spike Camp.

FREEMAN: Yeah, it was nice. All we had there, we had a forest ranger there, he was a Swede.

BERGE: Was he in charge?

FREEMAN: Yeah, he was in charge. Yeah, that fellow was the only one we had; we had a cook, a civilian cook, and forest ranger was in charge.

BERGE: Was she good looking?

FREEMAN: No, it was a man. But Archie and I—I always got a kick out of him … BERGE: Was that the ranger?

FREEMAN: He was a Swede, yeah, and he couldn’t pronounce his J’s 18:00… BERGE: Yeah, you know Yack … FREEMAN: Yeah, when he talked he wanted a yack-hammer on the job, and he would say, “that is all they ever give us is peanut butter and yelly.” (laughter) BERGE: There was one man, he used to say, “hey, yack got upstairs and … FREEMAN: Yeah. (laughter). Archie, was quite a guy. I—in later years I got—after I grew up and I had a family, my wife and I, she loved to travel and I did too, and we’d take trips, and we went back out to Pritchard one time and drove out there; and I ran into Archie.

BERGE: He was still there?

FREEMAN: I went to—well he wasn’t a ranger any more, he retired … BERGE: But he still was … FREEEMAN: Oh, yeah, he lived there—lived in a cabin up on the mountain around Pritchard … BERGE: Did he remember you?

FREEMAN: Yeah, he remembered me. And I went down to the post office 19:00and I asked them, I said, “I used to be in the CC camp.” I said, “did you ever know a guy by the name of Archie Jacobson?” “Why yes, sir we know him , can tell you right where he is at too.” And I went down, and opened the gate, and drove right on up the road about a quarter of a mile on up the hill; got to his cabin up there, and boy he was—my wife was really impressed with him. And he was showing us—he did a lot of gold mining out in the creeks back there, and he had nuggets; had a jar there and he had, I don’t know, some kind of jelly that he made and everything; and he gave my wife a jar of it and she was really impressed with him, you know. He was such a great guy. He was glad to see me and everything, he remembered me.

BERGE: Beautiful country out there.

FREEMAN: Oh, it’s wonderful, yeah, look out, and all you see is beautiful pine trees and everything.

BERGE: How long did you stay in Idaho and Montana area?

FREEMAN: Almost two years. Yeah.

FREEMAN: Yeah, 20:00well, I came home. Yeah, more or less my time was up I could have signed over another six months, but my time was up so I came home. Looked for a job and couldn’t find anything, things were still pretty tough you know … BERGE: What year was that?

FREEMAN: Hum?

BERGE: When was that?

FREEMAN: Well, I went in, in thirty-six, thirty-seven, it was the latter part of thirty-seven, and I couldn’t find anything so I—I stayed home about six months, and signed up again.

FREEMAN: And this time, they sent me to a camp that originated right here in Cumberland Falls, 1578, it went from here—moved from here--from 21:00Cumberland Falls to Grayville, Illinois. I didn’t pick it up here. Huh, that move to Grayville, Illinois, and we stayed in Grayville, Illinois about a year I think it was, and then we moved to Tulelake, California. That’s up in the lava beds, up near Merle, Oregon.

BERGE: Yeah, yeah, Captain Jack country.

FREEMAN: Yeah, yeah, and I was there at Tulelake about three weeks. And then we were building a new camp down at Orland, California, that’s near Marysville, and so we went--I was transferred down to Orland, and that is where I stayed. Stayed there eighteen months and … BERGE: So if you stayed out awhile you could get back in for a longer time?

FREEMAN: Yeah. Yeah. ( ) go back in.

BERGE: So you were really in about three years? Is that right?

FREEMAN: Oh, a little more than that, about three and one-half years.

BERGE: Yeah, that is about the longest of anybody I ever talked to.

FREEMAN: That’s where I learned my trade, right there at Orland.

FREEMAN: Well, I became a mechanic and a machinist ah, I—education was available to us, and I took English 22:00and History and I took Mechanics.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

FREEMAN: And when they gave us a test, and I past the mechanics test ninety-eight per cent.

BERGE: What percentage of you took these classes? Do you have any idea?

FREEMAN: The biggest part of us. From time to time the biggest part of us BERGE: They did?

FREEMAN: From time to time the biggest part of us would—took some part of classes.

BERGE: For something to do or …?

FREEMAN: Yeah, Herschel Chrome. Herschel, he took typing in camp, and he became company clerk, and later on he worked in the Pentagon. Yeah, he worked for the Government for years and years. 23:00He is ninety-six years old now, I think. He’ll be here.

BERGE: What did you do after you got out then? Where did they—did they discharge you there and send you home?

FREEMAN: No, I took that test out there, and I passed it at ninety-eight per cent, and the guy that was in the shop out there, his name was ( ) a French-Canadian, and he called me in the office, he says, “if you make ninety-eight per cent on that test on mechanics,” he said, “how come you ain’t in the shop? You ain’t got no business out on these canals out here.” We was—in California, we was working on irrigation canals. He says, “you ain’t got no business out on the irrigation canals.” I had already made Assistant Leader, see. I was getting ah, eleven dollars extra a month see.

BERGE: Yeah. I bet your mother was glad to be getting that extras in the check too.

FREEMAN: Well, she was only getting twenty-five dollars, I was getting the eleven. I was living high.

BERGE: Yeah. But that was a big deal for her, getting the twenty-five.

FREEMAN: Oh, yeah, it was, yeah. Twenty-five dollars was a big help at home.

BERGE: ( ).

FREEMAN: And so Clovis, 24:00he said, “you be in the shop Monday morning.” And I was. He taught me a lot. He taught me how to weld, how to work on machines, and how to run machinery and run a lath and things like that. So then I transferred from Orland to Otter Creek Park, here in Kentucky. And that’s where I was in camp with Leroy Brown.

BERGE: Oh. Well what did you do at Otter Creek?

BERGE: Yeah. I mean what was everybody doing there?

FREEMAN: Everybody, well part of them was working down in the rock quarry, and that’s where they built a big swimming pool, and I don’t know what all. I remember what I was doing, I worked on Flamingo Lodge. Now, 25:00the—for a long time the YMCA in Louisville, they claimed that they built the Flamingo Lodge and everything, and they didn’t do no such thing.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

FREEMAN: CCC’s built it, and I built part of the fireplace up there. Laid some of the stones in the fire place. But about every other week they would let us go home, and I would jus walk out to the highway, it wasn’t very far out to the highway, and I would walk out to Dixie and catch a Greyhound Bus home. And I’d be home on the week end, and I’d look for work. And I guess I was there, oh, pretty close to six weeks and my—a cousin of mine—got me a job at Louisville Tin and StoveCompany. And soon as I got the job I could get out see, you could get a discharge.

BERGE: Yeah. That was the nice thing about that program.

FREEMAN: Yeah, it was—so Captain discharged me and sent me home, and the following Monday morning I went to work at Louisville 26:00Tin and Stove Company, and I was welding. I did welding. I was welding tent stoves for the Army. And I worked that oh, for about four years, and I found a better job. Later on before the war started I worked at—wound up at Murphy Elevator Company as a machinist. And I followed that all my life; machine shop, tool and dye, I retired in June, and ( ) a tool and dye maker.

FREEMAN: ( ) I have been retired a little over twenty years.

BERGE: Hum-hum. I tell you that was a—sounds to me like it was not only a good experience for you, because of the money for you family and everything else, because you traveled all over the world or the country; but it was also good for you because it also prepared you for later 27:00on didn’t it?

FREEMAN: Right. Right. Oh, not telling what I would have wound up to have been. When I was a kid I done a lot of things. I jumped over the canal, and went swimming, and swam in the river, and operate trains—I done everything imaginable. Hush up, keep your ears closed.

BERGE: Well, I tell you it was a different time.

FREEMAN: But after that—after I got in the CC’s and found out how other people lived and everything, I settled down.

BERGE: I know I am just a little bit younger than you, but I can remember went I was a kid that the boy across the street from us went in the three C’s, you know. Boy, we thought that was wonderful. He, I remember when he came back, maybe he had been in six months or a year, and came back to visit his folks, and he had that uniform on, and we thought boy, that was the biggest deal.

FREEMAN: Well, I left Louisville 28:00when I first went in, I only weighed a hundred and eighteen pounds, and you know us city guys, that collar and everything else. I didn’t have a tan or anything, and I went to Idaho, and I went out there for two summers and a winter, and part of a winter, and it got forty below zero out there in Idaho. And I came home, and I had grown an inch and one-half, and I weighed a hundred and fifty pounds.

BERGE: Yeah, just finish that, I … END OF SIDE ONE TAPE ONE BEGIN SIDE TWO TAPE ONE FREEMAN BERGE: It sort of made a man of you out there.

FREEMAN: Yeah, I came home, and weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was just as brown as an Indian. And I walked in home--and I lived at Nineteenth and Duncan Street at that time--and I walked in home, and I didn’t even tell the folks I was coming home.

BERGE: What did she think when you … FREEMAN: I walked 29:00in home they didn’t even know me. (laughter) They wanted to know who that stranger was.

BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: I mean they looked again, and they recognized me, but I’d growed up. And cut timber, and fought fires, and done everything under the sun I tell you—made a man of me. Gave me something so to speak, it gave me a boot strap to pull myself up with.

BERGE: Sure. Sure. Yeah. It was a really great program I think. There were a lot of good programs then.

FREEMAN: We’ve been trying for years to get them back.

BERGE: Oh, yeah.

FREEMAN: You know you take all these … BERGE: ( ) {talking over Freeman} job corps, not the same thing at all.

FREEMAN: You take all the wild fires out west, if they had all them CC camps they had back in those days, those fires wouldn’t have been no trouble.

BERGE: You know, when I was a boy a lot of times there would be, you know, 30:00one of the sons, or both the sons would be in the three C’s, and the father would get some work with the WPA.

FREEMAN: Yeah, my Dad worked with the WPA. You know where the, hum, the amphitheatre is over there near Fort Clark?

BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: He worked on that for the WPA.

BERGE: Yeah, some of the projects were very similar.

FREEMAN: Oh, yeah.

BERGE: Yeah. And you know the WPA did other things, they put like ( ) in. You were talking about history, a lot of historians who graduated from Universities in those days couldn’t get jobs and they them to work. I mean just all kinds of people were put to work. It was a wonderful thing.

BERGE: Yeah. What—on the park itself can you try to … FREEMAN: Otter Creek?

BERGE: Otter Creek, yeah. What was there when you went to work? Was there much 31:00… FREEMAN: Oh, we built a lot of roads and did a lot of reclamation work—ah, cutting brush out and everything like that. All kinds of jobs that we did. You never know, you might be on one job today, and they might put you on another job the next day, you know. They needed some men over here to do this or do that.

BERGE: How many guards did they have there?

FREEMAN: Ah, we had two hundred men there. We had eight barracks.

BERGE: That is bigger than most of those camps. Most of them were … FREEMAN: No, most of them were eight barracks. They were all—most of them were built in a H shape. You had two barracks, and then you had a latrine, and your bathrooms between them see. And then they had … BERGE: One story? 32:00BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: But we had a boy that came in our camp, and he never did associate with any of the other fellas to amount to anything. And we were a bunch of young guys, and we went to wrestling one day, and we were wrestling on one of the cots, and one of the guys kicked a little suitcase he had. And a bunch of guys looked at it, and there was a book there with a picture of Stalin on it, and they got to searching through his stuff and they found a card there and he belonged to The Youth Communist Leagues of America. And he had notes on the CCC, and notes on the Army, and things like that; and he wasn’t there at the barracks at the time, see. And when he came in, boy there were a bunch of mad guys around there, they were going to hang him. You know, hang him up on one of the rafters up there. And one of the guys ran over to the—got Captain Koonz, 33:00our Company Commander, and he come over there, by golly, and throwed a pistol on the guy and said, “boys, back off.” And they took him down and put him in the jail. There was a ( ) jail down at Orland, and a bunch of guys that was around there went down there close to Forth of July, and was throwing fire crackers at the window; they finally give him a ( ) discharge and sent him home.

BERGE: Where was he from, do you know?

FREEMAN: I don’t remember. I didn’t pay that much attention to it. I was busy with other things.

BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: I was in the shop then; and I was taking care of all the trucks, and helping out in the shop, and doing things that I was supposed to do in the shop.

BERGE: Where is your wife from?

BERGE: From Louisville. 34:00FREEMAN: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And when I went to the three C’s, I didn’t have no idea, she was just a kid you know, and I was in the CCC’s, and I didn’t pay much attention to her. She was a kind of dishwater blonde, but when I came home, after I was in the CCC’s, and I went back to California was a period of almost four years. I was sitting out on my porch—my folks had moved to 328 North Twentieth, that was about a block from where she lived—and I was sitting out on the porch one day, sitting out there 35:00on the front steps smoking a cigarette--I smoked then--and this pretty little girl come by, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

BERGE: You remembered her though.

FREEMAN: I didn’t recognize her, no. Oh, she was pretty. And the next morning I was out there again, and she came by again, and she would go in the grocery, and she never would come out. So the next day was Saturday, and I asked my Mother, I said, “who is that pretty little girl that goes in the grocery down there?” “Why you remember who that is, that is Rosie Greves, we used to live just two doors from her.” So my Mother sent me over to the grocery to get potatoes and bread, and I found out later she didn’t need any potatoes and bread; she sent me to the store on a ruse. And I got to talking to Rose and we made a date to go to a movie, and it wasn’t nothing big or nothing like that. I guess it was 36:00a month or so before we had another date. And so we had another date, and another one, and another one and then we started going steady; and June 8, 1940, her and I got married.

BERGE: Well, the thing about it is, you have to remember you looked a lot better then, than when she first saw you.

FREEMAN: Well, probably.

BERGE: You were just a little shrimp.

FREEMAN: But, anyway, my wife passed away February ninety-nine. And we had been married fifty-eight years and nine months.

BERGE: I’d guess you’d say definitely that your three C experience was really good for you, wasn’t it?

BERGE: It was also good for the country.

FREEMAN: In fact I think--I think what a man I turned out to be, I think that’s what the result was.

BERGE: Because of the three C’s. And 37:00it was good for your family when you went in and your mother.

FREEMAN: Oh, sure. Yep. Yep.

BRENT: Being in Louisville you know, you were around a lot of people, and your friends in school; what—you said you didn’t know anyone in the C’s—what did they do? Did they find jobs?

FREEMAN: Ah, some of them did, some of them just run around like Bruce Farmer, for instance, he used to sell Pot over in Boone Park, oh, there was a lot of that. And … BERGE: Huh-huh.

FREEMAN: Bruce, later on, I guess he got a job someplace. Another guy I knew, ah, Charlie Clark, he became a painter, his Dad had been painting for years, so he became a painter. He went in the CCC with me. Now that is when we went to 38:00… BERGE: What was his name?

FREEMAN: Charlie Clark. We went to California, he was the one that got hurt out there.

BERGE: How did he get hurt?

FREEMAN: Oh, a bunch of us was playing football, you know just fooling around, and a bunch of them jumped on him and hurt his back. He laid—he was in the hospital for about two weeks, and finally they gave him a—they sent him home.

BERGE: With a discharge.

FREEMAN: Yeah, he got a discharge and went home. Honorable discharge, but they sent him home cause he got hurt. He wanted to go home. He was getting homesick too, so he wanted to go home. Oh, a bunch of guys—when I went to Western High School—Oh, I was more or less a student person. I was interested 39:00in reading and everything like that, and I did pretty good in school. But we had some guys there were ( ), and bullies, you know, get in a little bit of trouble, and I got over that.

BERGE: Did you ever get any of that boxing you had in the CCC’s?

FREEMAN: No, huh-huh.

BERGE: That was a pretty big thing though, wasn’t it?

FREEMAN: Yeah, it was. In fact, I lived next door to a guy that later became a champion. He went--he was in Golden Gloves, and I don’t know how many fights, and later on he went professional. Yeah. He was good. I tell you, my life in the CCC’s was the most important thing that ever happened in my life.

BERGE: Generally speaking, did—where you were stationed did the people in the camp get along pretty good?

FREEMAN: Real good, yeah. Real good. Oh we had our factions, you know, play tricks, 40:00they would short-sheet a guy; and one guy—one guy came in, and we had a bunch of rookies come in one time—this guy--one of the older guys--he got a little garter snake, found it out in the pond. And he took it, and put it in this guys bed, and this guy come in and he went to bed. He crawled down his sheets—and we all got our beds made up real nice you know—and he crawled down in his sheets and turned over and ( ). And this guy said, “well, I guess the snake must have got away.” So he goes to bed himself, and he crawled down in bed, and the snake was in his bed. The guy wasn’t such a rookie after all.

BERGE: Yeah, he knew what to do.

FREEMAN: Yeah, he knew what to do. He put the snake back in his bed. Oh, we did all kinds of tricks. We went to—when we went to Orland, we went to Chico—there was four of us went to Chico 41:00on a Rec trip—well they would send a recreation truck over, you know. And we missed the recreation truck coming back, and boy, I am telling you they—out there in that part of the country that Napa Country, you know—and shoot they would give you a gallon of wine, and shoot you for a gallon of water. And these four guys and I missed the truck, and had to walk, and it was twenty miles to Chico, back to Orland; and that road was just as straight as you could draw a line across the country.

BERGE: Right down the valley.

FREEMAN: Right down the valley. And the four of us, we had a couple of gallons of wine between us, and we started more or less hitch hiking back to camp and nobody—there wasn’t I guess two cars came along that road all night, you know. So we had to walk all the way back. By the time we got back we were pretty high, drinking all that wine. 42:00BERGE: Well, that way you didn’t have to carry it. (laughter) FREEMAN: Yeah. We didn’t get into trouble over it, but I went in and took a cold shower, and thought I was going to wake up and come out of it, and I hit my bed. I think it was on—it was on a Sunday—Saturday night we ( ) over to Chico, and this was Sunday and I went to sleep, and I woke up, and those damn guys had tied my thumbs to the head of the bed, and my toes to the foot of the bed—I couldn’t move. And if you missed Sunday chow, you didn’t get anything—generally we’d have fried chicken and ice cream and … BERGE: That was the big meal of the week.

FREEMAN: Big meal yeah. And then we—that night we’d have cold cuts, you know for supper.

BERGE: Yeah. Same as the army.

FREEMAN: Yeah. And them guys wouldn’t turn me loose. 43:00One guy stood there and looked at me, and he went back and got a tube of shaving cream, and come up and spread it all over my face like that, and stood there and laughed at me. So they’d cut up, and do things like that. I didn’t get mad about it. I wasn’t very happy about it, but I didn’t get mad about it. Didn’t do no good. Two or three guys would get around, and whip the hell out of you.

BERGE: The thing about that bunch of people, all of them—none of them were afraid of work, or they wouldn’t have been in the three C’s probably you know.

FREEMAN: No, no hard work. We worked hard.

BERGE: Yeah.

FREEMAN: We worked hard. Guys would go out on timber cutting, and road cutting, and no matter what they did, ah they worked hard. Some of the hardest work I have ever done in my life, was right there in the three C’s.

BERGE: Am I safe in saying that maybe the happiest times that you had in the three C’s were at that—when 44:00you were out with that little group about fires?

FREEMAN: Where? Spike Camp. Yeah. oh, yeah. We was—we was really a close group. I mean you know, really a close group. I’ve got some pictures at home with the gang, and any time that we went down the park or went any place the camaraderie was really close. We were more or less--we in the Spike Camp was a select crew, see. They picked us for various reasons, you know, the way we could get along and everything. How we worked … BERGE: You were really unsupervised weren’t you? In a sense? I mean there wasn’t a … FREEMAN: In a sense yeah. All we had was a forest ranger and we supervised ourselves. I mean Archie was there most of the time, 45:00and was a father figure. If we needed some, idea or some help or something like that he would have found us a ( ) and he would be with us see. He’s be right there with us on the fire, and no matter what we did, why he was protecting us all the time as far as finding us jobs. He would tell you what to do. Just like one time Bob ( ) and I we were cutting down a dead snag—they had what they called widow makers. And you know a snag, when it gets up real high its pretty small at the top, and this snag was burning at the top. And Bob and I had a cross cut saw—they didn’t have chain saws then—we had a cross cut saw, cutting the tree down. And of course, the tree was shaking, and they call a widow maker a chunk of fire came out of that, and hit me right in the back of the neck. 46:00Man, you couldn’t hit me any harder with a sledge hammer I don’t believe. And I went down to the ground and jumped up, and he come over and took the fire out around my collar, and we just hollered for a Medic—on the big fires like that we had a Medic with us—a boy, he was a CC boy and he was first aid. He came over and he slapped a handful of unguentine on that, and I went back and we cut that tree down, and I got out of the way. And you would cut those trees down and haul them into the fire see.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

FREEMAN: You would make a fire break.

BERGE: Yeah, with the trees.

FREEMAN: With the trees and cut the brush out and … BERGE: Getting back to the—when you were at Otter Creek, where did you all get the stone that you use there?

FREEMAN: We had a quarry. A quarry down there at what is called Lock Haven. A little town, at that time called Lock Haven, right on the L&M railroad 47:00. And we had a quarry—we got pictures someplace, at home of the quarry. And Leroy Brown was the Leader there at camp, and he worked down there in the quarry. I never did work down at the quarry very much, we’d get the stone for the Flamingo Lodge up there, and for different things that we built at the camp, and rock walls and we’d just go down at the quarry. And that is where they got the stone to build the big swimming pool there at Otter Creek.

BERGE: Well, I sure want to thank you for coming in here, and giving us this interview, it was very interesting to me. Do you have any other questions you want to ask?

BRENT: Did you say, you cut timber? Did they salvage the dead trees, or they were using that to build things with?

FREEMAN: Ah, most of the time we used it for fire wood. 48:00Once in a while we got a big enough tree, and was good enough for lumber they would send it down to the mills and they would make lumber out of some of it. We’d bring it back to the camp and we would build things there at the camp out of it. Yeah. Most of the time though, most of the trees that we cut down, we would cut them up in length, and of course, all of our barracks in Idaho we had wood fires. They had great big—they had five gallon drums made into fire—into stoves, one at each end of the barracks. That was another thing you had to—each week it was your time to build the fire, because it was cold. We let the fire go out at night, and sometimes before—it was below zero. We’d open the windows, and snow would blow in, 49:00and I would wake up in the morning and there would be snow on my bunk. We usually had a comforter, and two big blankets, and a sheet, and we kept pretty warm. We had good clothes too. We worked out in bad weather in forty below zero we had what they called ( ) pants. Real heavy canvas clothes, and we put them over our jeans and everything and we worked out in those. We had good boots and things, and by God we worked. I remember one time, and the only time I can remember that we didn’t work outside in the winter time, and that was about a week there; we had a--the wind got up and boy when that wind got up it would cut you in two.

BERGE: Yeah.

BRENT: What could you do in that type of weather?

FREEMAN: We worked in a tender. Bob ( ) and I, well we were a ( ) crew in ourselves. And we cut one tree down one day, 50:00and it went the wrong way, we undercut it right and everything … BERGE: The wind FREEMAN: I guess it might have been a little wind, and Bob and I—I was buried up to my knees in snow. And we would slide these—once we cut one down--we would slide it down the hill, you know in the snow and everything. The snow had a crust like on it, you could walk on it most of the time. And I was down to my knees in snow, and we were sawing and the tree started to fall, and of course, you would holler timber and all that. And they and Bob yelled at me, and said, “look out!” And that tree instead of going this way it headed right toward me, and it went right down my back. If I’d have been a foot over it would have caught me right in the middle. I couldn’t have got out of the way.

BERGE: Yeah.

BRENT: Not caught in the snow.

FREEMAN: Caught in the snow.

BERGE: It has sure been 51:00a pleasure to talk with you about this stuff.

FREEMAN: Oh, it was a great life I’ll tell you.

END OF SIDE TWO TAPE ONE END OF INTERVIEW.