Oral History Interview with William C. Bass

WILLIAM H. BERGE: The following is an unrehearsed tape interview with Mr. W. C. Bass, of De Kalb County, near Atlanta Georgia. The interview was conducted on June 6, 1990, at Two PM, by William C. Berge. Mr. Bass is going to tell me some of his experiences, particularly those related to his time in the CCC. Mr. Bass I want to thank you for letting me come down here today and talk with you. I am going to talk to Mr. Bass about his days in the CCC, now some days ago Mr. Bass had a tracheotomy so we won’t always be able to hear him. So if we can’t hear him sometime I will repeat what he said. Let’s start off by you telling me your full name and your date of birth. 1:00WILLIAM C. BASS: Born April the sixteenth, nineteen sixty.

BERGE: Mr. Bass, where were you born?

BASS: Born in Macon, Georgia.

BERGE: Macon, Georgia, Ok. Mr. Bass, what were your parent’s names?

BASS: My father was named Charles Thomas Bass. My mother was Bessie Elizabeth Bass.

BERGE: Ok. And where were they from? Were they from Macon too?

BASS: They were born in Macon.

BERGE: Ok. Another thing; whenever you want to stop and rest and go get a drink or something just let me know and we will stop Where did you go to school? 2:00BASS: Well, I started off in Macon and I went about third grade and my mother died. They put us in an orphans home.

BERGE: Where?

BASS: St. Simons Island.

BERGE: St. Simons.

BASS: Yeah. ( ) BERGE: Ok. That wasn’t a vacation home though? (laughs) BASS: No. It was all right. ( ) BERGE: How many children were there?

BASS: There was five of us.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

BASS: And my two sisters went to a ( ) home in Macon and I went to the Dodge Home on St. Simons.

BERGE: Tell 3:00me this Mr. Bass, when you… BASS: I went to school in a little school on St. Simons, till I was in the seventh grade. They transferred us to Brunswick on a bus and I finished the seventh grade and along about then things were pretty rough. Times were.

BERGE: What year was that about?

BASS: That was around 1930.

BERGE: Thirty.

BASS: And they took me to Savannah and put me on a ship which ( ) in Savannah, Georgia. The name of the ship was the S.S. Georgia.

BERGE: That is the one I saw the picture of here?

BASS: No that was another one.

BERGE: Ok.

BASS: So I stayed on it about four months, made a trip to Europe and back, 4:00liming bilges and jump (?) man. ( ).

BERGE: What kind of work did you do on it?

BASS: I steered it. I took a ship with another guy for a while and was ( ). So each one of us would steer two hours. We’d get up on the ( ) watch for two hours. See we’d swap.

BERGE: And then when you came back from Europe what did you do?

BASS: Well, I got on this other ship. I knew it was the S.S. Milan and I went from there to New York after that. Went in dry dock. Fixed it up all new paint from buckboard 5:00to ( ). Back to New York it was ( ). The sun at times in New York… BERGE: How old were you when you went to work on the ship?

BASS: I think ten years old.

BERGE: (laughs) How long did you stay on the ship?

BASS: About two years in all.

BERGE: And then what did you do?

BASS: Then I came back to Macon. And got back home with my family.

BERGE: With your grandparents? Or what?

BASS: With my sisters.

BERGE: Ok. Your sisters, ok. And then how long did you stay there?

BASS: Well, about two years, that I stayed around Macon. You couldn’t get nothing to do.

BERGE: Oh, no.

BASS: In 6:00a job of no kind. So had two first cousins ‘bout the same age that I was and we stayed down in the Okeefenokee Swamp fishing ( ) a good while you know. We would go down at a time and stay down there a week. Catch a bunch of fish and come back and sell them and go back down and we really enjoyed it. Then along come the CCC Camp.

BERGE: Yeah, how did you first hear about the CCC Camp? Do you remember?

BASS: I just don’t remember. But anyway 7:00I think I had a swelled up hand, from a cat fish.

BERGE: Jabbed you?

BASS: Jabbed me. And they like not let me in there because of the hand being swelled up.

BERGE: Six months at a time you signed up, wasn’t it?

BASS: No, I don’t remember I think it was a year wasn’t it?

BERGE: Well a lot of people I have talked with joined up six months at a time; and they would just keep signing over.

BASS: Well maybe it was.

BERGE: Do you remember how old you were when you first went to the CCC Camp?

BASS: Well, I lacked a day of being eighteen.

BERGE: Where did they take you first?

BASS: Where did they take me from Macon?

BERGE: Yeah.

BASS: I went to Fort Benning.

BERGE: How long did they keep you at Fort Benning?

BASS: I think we stayed down there three or four or five weeks. ( ) shots.

BERGE: Shots and a little training.

BASS: Yeah.

BERGE: And then where did you go?

BASS: Then I come to Warm Springs.

BERGE: Warm Springs. All right, what year was this?

BASS: That was in 1934. 8:00BERGE: Ok.

BASS: When ( ) in Warm Springs.

BERGE: Now how long were you in the CCC?

BASS: I come out in 1937.

BERGE: So you say three years.

BASS: Long about June, 1937.

BERGE: Were you at Warm Springs the whole time?

BASS: No, I was at ( ), at the time it was called Chipley.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

BASS: I think I was in Camp ( ).

BERGE: Were those the only two places you were?

BASS: That’s all.

BERGE: When you were at Warm Springs, did you ever see Mr. Roosevelt?

BASS: Oh, he come up there in that little old car and drive up there and talk to us. Wasn’t no bunch of guards with him, he was by himself.

BERGE: Huh-huh. What kind of stuff did he talk about, do you remember?

BASS: Oh, he would just talk about politics 9:00and what we were doing and we were doing a fine job, this, that and the other.

BERGE: He was really interested in Warm Springs wasn’t he?

BASS: Oh, he was interested in the boys getting something to do, that was the biggest thing.

BERGE: What did you all do there? What kind of work did you do at Warm Springs?

BASS: Well at Warm Springs, we started off building firebreaks, they called them. What it was a road where they could get about the woods in a truck. And then they started building a State Park at Warm Springs, at Pine Mountain.

BERGE: How far were they apart?

BASS: ( ) from Warm Springs to the State Park—Oh, about twenty-five 10:00miles. But we rode trucks every morning from there to the Park after we started that. And then they moved another camp over to Chipley… BERGE: And that’s when you moved over there?

BASS: They ( ) you boys go over there and start a camp up? And they come in one night on the train, one of them jokers.

BERGE: Where from?

BASS: All over north Georgia. We had one company truck so they sent me up there to get them. Well, I went up there with that truck and lined them all u out there, and I says, “Put your bags in the truck and you all are going to follow the truck down the road to get to camp.” I got them lined up there and ( ) bunch of little lambs, 11:00you know. I had a date that night and it was about dark when the train come in. So I told the ( ), I said, “now when I damp on the ( ) we got to get ( ).” It was about a mile from ( ) Pine Mountain and down a ways to where the ( ) was and about a mile to the camp. I kind of had them at a fast walk you know, I got them down there across the railroad to the main highway, with them. I tamped 12:00on that truck, those boys get a little faster, a little faster when I got there I had them strung out maybe…(laughs) BERGE: Behind the truck.

BASS: Yeah, I had ‘em strung out on that there road ( ) clean to the camp. (laughter) But we got ‘em all out there and got them all settled down. I really enjoyed it. I got up to where I was in charge of a Company ( ). And I was drawing big money then, $45.00 a month.

BERGE: That was big money.

BASS: I had me a car and 13:00frolicked every night. Didn’t have to worry about eatin’ or any of that.

BERGE: What was your—when your—ah—generally speaking what did you think of the food when you were in the camp?

BASS: Well I tell ya, ( ) just exactly like that Army did. You know how they feed in the Army they give you anything you’ve got ( ).

BERGE: Yeah. Hum-hum.

BASS: Anybody that says they can’t get enough to eat in any kind of service is a liar.

BERGE: Yeah. Did you have—did you meet—did you make a lot of friendships when you were in the CCC?

BASS: What are you talking about? The people?

BERGE: Yeah, The people… BASS: Natives?

BERGE: Well natives and other CCC members.

BASS: Oh yeah ( )get 14:00next to one of them because somebody ( ).

BERGE: What did they—what did they do at the camp for recreation?

BASS: They had any type of equipment that you want to use. They played baseball a lot.

BERGE: Did you ever play baseball against people from other places?

BASS: Oh, they played baseball against a little town there.

BERGE: Yeah, my brother-in-law ( ) brother was telling me that when he was somewhere—maybe when he was at EMC, they played the CCC camps, in baseball.

BASS: Oh yeah, any of the little towns they played. We had a boy named James Langdon, who lived down here at Manchester. 15:00He was one of the best pitchers, as I have ever seen.

BERGE: Did they have any boxing?

BASS: Sure did. They had a boxing ring in that picture there, you can’t see it. They settled the squabbles out there with a pair of boxing gloves. Two got to fighting, well they would stop them and take them down and let them fight it out.

BERGE: That—for some reason that was a very popular sporting event in the CCC wasn’t it?

BASS: Boxing? Well, maybe it was a little bit, not too much.

BERGE: Not too much, huh?

BASS: But when one of them got mad and they got to struggling or something like that they would take them down.

BERGE: Did you see some good fights?

BASS: All day you would see them fight pretty much. 16:00BERGE: Did you learn any skills when you were in the three C’s?

BASS: Well, we had what you call foresters, and they… BERGE: What did you say?

BASS: Foresters.

BERGE: Foresters?

BASS: Yeah they were in charge of different groups. Say one group looked after ( ) trainees; one group looked after building ( ) and we had a road builder there. An old county chain-gang man, who was a road builder. We had some… BERGE: What did you learn from those men?

BASS: Yeah, and I had one that I always had a lot of respect for. He taught me what I know in ( ). 17:00BERGE: What’s that?

BASS: What I know he taught in building.

BERGE: Ok. Did you ever get a chance to do any building in the CCC?

BASS: Oh, my God, we built a lot of rock buildings over there. And a… BERGE: Sort of like the WPA did, those kind of buildings? The reason I ask you, up in Kentucky there was a lot of rock building built by the WPA. The three C’s build those buildings too?

BASS: No. We built a little--kind of a motel thing on the mountain at Pine Mountain. It was a beautiful building.

BERGE: Is it still there?

BASS: Still there. We built a bunch of cabins. We built a rock ( ) pool and all. We built an overhead bridge out of rock. You know with a road going under it, overpass over it. That’s built out of rock. Yeah. We done a lot of building, built a lot of log cabins. Built a lake 18:00down there and I was in on all that stuff.

BERGE: So really, what you did the rest of your life; you were really trained for in the three C’s?

BASS: I absolutely was. When I left( ) ( ) Flovilla Georgia. ( ) Springs Park down there and he moved from there over to Chipley with us and he was still in charge of construction. I ( ) set of plans, he would sit down there with me and teach me.

BERGE: Did you know then that you might go on and do this the rest of your life?

BASS: No.

BERGE: You didn’t.

BASS: No I didn’t have no idea.

BERGE: When you were young—a young man like eighteen, nineteen, in the three C’s—did 19:00you think about the future much or were you just marking time?

BASS: Well I got married before I got out of there, I liked nine days of being twenty-one years old.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

BASS: When I got out of there.

BERGE: Where was she from?

BASS: She was from Merriweather County, Ashley. This is my second wife here.

BERGE: So you met this wife down there at the… BASS: I met her in the CCC.

BERGE: Did many of the fellas get married?

BASS: Well there was quite a few of them did..

BERGE: And you could be married and be in the three C’s then, huh?

BASS: I stayed in there about three or four months, I think after I got married. They knew I was married, but really you wasn’t supposed to be in there, but they didn’t kick me out 20:00when I got married.

BERGE: What—How—let me just check on this—Ok. When you—in the three C’s do you think it was a–a really lucky experience for you to have gone in there?

BASS: Well, I really do, in other words it taught me a lot that I wouldn’t have got other wise. It was a good experience you—I learned so many different things and when I got out of there I worked in Columbus a good long while, construction foreman—superintendent—I learned it there at the CCC Camp.

BERGE: Do you think that your experience with the three C’s as a sort of a supervisor—because you as a supervisor—that 21:00was helpful too?

BASS: Sure was. In other words Thunderbird was my boss and he told me what to do and saw it was done.

BERGE: Where was he from?

BASS: He was from Indian Springs down… BERGE: In Georgia.

BASS: Yeah.

BERGE: Ok. That… BASS: He’s dead now.

BERGE: Yeah. Did they give you a lot of—did they give you advice on how to handle men or did you have to work those things out yourself.

BASS: Well. I reckon you have to learn that kind of stuff yourself. You know you got to treat people like you want to be treated. I never had no trouble working people.

BERGE: Let me ask you some questions. Did—in all those years you were 22:00in the CCC did you think that the young men that were in there got along well together or was there a lot of fighting or what?

BASS: No, they would buddy up and there wasn’t no unusual disturbance amongst any of them. They didn’t fight much. They would fight one another but they wouldn’t fight one another too much. ( ).

BERGE: What would you think about a program like the three C’s now?

BASS: Well, I think if they would get a bunch of these boys that, are you know, a little bit unruly or something, get them out there and run them ( ); do what their told to do, 23:00that it would be mighty good. Back then it wasn’t because we were unruly, we didn’t have nothing we could do.

BERGE: That’s right.

BASS: And Roosevelt was the man that give us something to do by starting the CCC Camps.

BERGE: Huh-huh. What did—what did you think of him the first time you saw him? I mean tell me about when you first saw him and—can you remember that?

BASS: Well the first time I ever saw him he come into Warm Springs on the train.

BERGE: Did you all know he was coming and everything?

BASS: Oh, yes, we knew every time he was coming. And we’d be ( ). You’ve been to Warm Springs.

BERGE: Yeah.

BASS: Well you know right there where the railroad 24:00crosses the road? (tape has faded) ( ) ( ) left ( ) Warm Springs. Train would stop at the little depot ( ) my son has got it up on the farm I used to have.

BERGE: Is that right?

BASS: Yeah.

BERGE: And he would stop there and… BASS: He would stop there and get off and get in that little old car ( )…(Roosevelt) BERGE: Huh-huh. And he would talk to the boys and everything?

BASS: Well not as a habit he would come over to the camp and talk to them.

BERGE: I’ll bet people were really excited when he was coming, weren’t they?

BASS: Yes they were, ( ). Yeah, they really loved him, BERGE: Let me ask you something. You know—did you ever see a black member of the CCC? (Bass must have shook his head no) Never saw a Negro? There were Negro members you know, but not many, not many.

BASS: Never heard of… BERGE: Yeah, I know they never had them in the same camps, you know 25:00they were segregated in camps, but there were a few black, but not many, not many.

BASS: Most of the boys didn’t know there was any.

BERGE: Yeah. Most of the boys you met, were they from the city or the country.

BASS: Well you take up North, most of them was from ( ) up in there those little towns.

BERGE: Did you ever meet anybody from Atlanta?

BASS: Well, we had one or two in there.

BERGE: But, not many; most of them were from little towns, huh?

BASS: Most were from little town.

BERGE: Do you remember… BASS: One ( ) Chipley, over at Warm Springs we had some ( ) all around this area.

BERGE: Did you ever meet any from out-of-state?

BASS: No, but there was a good 26:00baseball pitcher, I think he went out-of-state to a camp somewhere, but I don’t know where.

BERGE: Do you—you don’t remember how you heard about the three C’s though?

BASS; Somebody may have told me about it, I don’t remember.

BERGE: Do you remember where you enlisted?

BASS: Well, I signed up in Macon.

BERGE: In Macon?

BASS: Yeah.

BERGE: What kind of bus—where was it—in a Post Office? Do you remember?

BASS: I don’t remember that.

BERGE: Huh-huh. When you were in the three C’s you said you bought a car.

BASS: Oh, yeah, I had a A Model Ford.

BERGE: Where did you get it? Where did you buy it?

BASS: Bought it in a Chevrolet place over in Chipley.

BERGE: Do you remember how much you paid for it? 27:00BASS: At Wisdom I think, yeah, Wisdom Chevrolet Company.

BERGE: Do you remember how much you… BASS: About a hundred and twenty-five… BERGE: How much?

BASS: About a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

BERGE: Was it a Model T?

BASS: No, a Model A. And I paid for it ten dollars a month I think.

BERGE: (laughs) Ten dollars a month was a lot of money when you making twenty-five or forty.

BASS: Then I finally graduated and bought me a little Chevrolet Tourer.

BERGE: ( )?

BASS: No, one seated.

BERGE: Oh, with a Rumble Seat? Or—what did they call those? Coupes?

BASS: Coupes.

BERGE: Coupes, Yeah, yeah.

BASS: It didn’t have a Rumble Seat I guess. Yeah it was a Chevrolet.

BERGE: What was the first—you told me and I can’t remember—what when you got out of the three C’s that was in thirty-seven? And where did you go to work then?

BASS: I went to work at the cotton mills to start with and I was working card man 28:00down there; and I hadn’t worked there very long and I got laid off. Then I went on down to Columbus ( ).

BERGE: How did you—did you have any trouble getting—do you think it helped you to get a job because you were in the three C’s?

BASS: It sure did. It taught me a trade and I liked to do most anything; I could lay rock or cement work, I could do any of it. Except roofing. I have never been able to do no roofing. Same as ( ).

BERGE: The roofs are too hot. (laughs) BASS: I‘ve put on build-up roof, but nailing on shingles I could do. 29:00BERGE: Tell me this now Mr. Bass, when you all started—like—the first thing you did when you went down there you cut fire breaks and stuff like that.

BASS: Yeah.

BERGE: Did you get instructions, or did they just send you out there with an axe and a saw and say start cutting.

BASS: Well each crew had about twenty, twenty-five men in it, and after you got out there and they give you an axe, a ( ) and a shovel. And they’d kind of show you how to dig up a tree. You know a tree is an easy thing if you know how to dig it up. All you got to do is dig down in the ( ) cut them off and push it over.

BERGE: Some of the men that I talked with in Kentucky told me that, in retrospect 30:00as they looked back that they didn’t get all that much instruction, but they thought that maybe that was a good thing. That they sort of learned to work things out themselves too. Do you think that’s true?

BASS: Well, you can watch somebody else do anything , catch on to it without any trouble.

BERGE: Huh-huh.

BASS: Course they’d take you out there and give you a shovel and ( ) an axe and you’d watch somebody else… BERGE: Did you think those young—those boys worked pretty hard or do you—were they ( ) pretty good workers.

BASS: They worked good. If they didn’t, well they didn’t stay there.

BERGE: Is that right? 31:00BASS: Yeah.

BERGE: In other words they would kick them out if they didn’t work?

BASS: Sure they could.

BERGE: If you signed up for say so long, could you get out if you wanted to?

BASS: If you had a pretty good excuse you could get out of it.

BERGE: You could, huh?

BASS: Yeah a lot of the guys were farm boys, you know and they would go in there and their Daddy would need them at home and they would get them out that way , you know because they needed them to plow.

BERGE: How often would you go home visiting your sisters when you were there?

BASS: Oh, I would go home about once a month. ( ) out of Macon you know. Warm Springs is about seventy, eighty; sixty, seventy miles.

BERGE: Yeah. So you could get over there on a week end.

BASS: Oh, yeah.

BERGE: Yeah. What was the work day like? How long was the work day?

BASS: You worked about eight hours.

BERGE: Did they have any kind of instruction or classes? 32:00Could you go to school if you wanted to, or… BASS: Oh, yeah, They had a professor there. If you wanted to go to school he would teach you.

BERGE: Did you take any classes?

BASS: No.

BERGE: What kind of classes would they have?

BASS: O they could—anything—reading, writing, history, math or anything. He would do whatever you wanted him to do.

BERGE: Did you ever learn anything about surveying or anything like that when you were there?

BASS: I learnt that on my own. (laughs) BERGE: Yeah. You learned how to use the equipment and everything on your own. Did they have pretty good tools and equipment?

BASS: They had to the best.

BERGE: They did, huh? You could get—did they have enough machines—they didn’t have machines—did they have enough tools and equipment for everybody?

BASS: Oh, yeah. They had tractors. They had big tractors. 33:00They had two.

BERGE: Did they have any bulldozers or anything like that?

BASS: No, but we had some very big old tractors that would pull ( ) and such as that. It had a blade on the front of it.

BERGE: Did anybody—did they have—well what did they do when they needed something like dynamite? Did they have specialists or did you all use that?

BASS: I done that too.

BERGE: You did, huh. Did somebody teach you?

BASS: They would show you how.

BERGE: (laughing) The would show you how, huh.

BASS: Yeah, there ain’t nothing to do dynamite. You got a ( ) cap you know, a fuse that you light. Now, I didn’t want none of those fuses that you lit. I always used electric caps.

BERGE: Oh. Okey. I’m going to turn this over just a minute.

END OF SIDE ONE TAPE ONE BASS.

BEGIN 34:00SIDE TWO TAPE ONE BASS BERGE: Huh, when you all lived there down say at Warm Springs and up at Pine Mountain both, you lived in tent barracks kind of thing?

BASS: In tent barracks at Warm Springs.

BERGE: How many men to a tent?

BASS: Eight.

BERGE: Eight. You built them yourself, didn’t you?

BASS: Yeah, they built them. Based on… BERGE: I talked with men that went to camps when they, when they were the first ones to go those camps and they would just literally take them in trucks. They would dump them out in the middle of the field. They would just build their camp—I mean you had to build something to live in. What did you do—and then of course, when you went to Pine Mountain you lived in bigger barracks?

BASS: We had those regular barracks, yeah.

BERGE: How many men in those barracks?

BASS: Well we had about , I’d say about fifty 35:00to a barracks.

BERGE: Were you there when they built those barracks?

BASS: Yeah. I was there when they was building them, but we was still at Warm Springs, you know.

BERGE: You were one of the builders of the barracks?

BASS: No.

BERGE: No.

BASS: They contracted those out.

BERGE: Oh, they did?

BASS: And they come in their in sections. They were pre-fab. Brought them in there and bolted them together.

BERGE: That was kind of early for that kind of stuff wasn’t it?

BASS: Yeah BERGE: Yeah.

BASS: For that pre-fab stuff.

BERGE: When—they get—when you were there at Warm Springs or even maybe up at Pine Mountain What did they do for water supply?

BASS: Ah, city had the water at Warm Springs, over at Pine Mountain, 36:00the spring up there on that State Park, was where Chipley got its water works from and the pipe run right in front of the camp.

BERGE: So you just tapped into it?

BASS: Run right up the road beside the camp. That was where we got water from.

BERGE: When you all were there did you build your own latrines and that kind of stuff?

BASS: Well, BERGE: Showers.

BASS: I built showers and ( ), but I went in there and built shower heads and all.

BERGE: Where did you—who did the cooking? Were they CCC members or were they hired.

BASS: They had regular cooks, CCC’s.

BERGE: That was part—that was their job, they were members of the CCC. 37:00Pretty good cooks?

BASS: Sure was ( ). They were real good. Oh, we had one guy, Marion Bates, he was from Atlanta. You asked me if I ( ) Atlanta. Well, he was an older man. I don’t know how he got in there because he was pretty old, but he was one of the cooks and he kind of taught these other guys from over to Chipley.

BERGE: Huh-huh. Taught them how to cook, I guess. Were there any Army men there?

BASS: No when I first went to Warm Springs they had an Army Mess Sergeant and an Army Supply Sergeant. They had an Army Captain and an Army Lieutenant 38:00and they ( ) done away with that Mess Sergeant after he trained some cooks, and also the supply sergeant and give it to one of the boys.

BERGE: Have you ever since you left the CCC, have you ever run into people you met there, or?

BASS: Well, most of them knew around here are dead. The one boy Spates, he lives here some in Atlanta, and I think he moved from his bad phone number that he gave me. I’ve been trying to get him for the last couple of days and I couldn’t get a hold of him. But a lot of the old guys that I knew, are dead.

BERGE: Oh, yeah, yeah.

BASS: Goat, a little boy name 39:00Goat, Mitchum… BERGE: All are in their seventies aren’t they?

BASS: The Langer boy down at Warm Springs he was, he was pretty close, me and him was.

BERGE: If you had it to do all over again, if you were a young man again—would you have gone back in it?

BASS: I sure would. I think that was the best training any young man today could get. I sure do. ( ) like that where somebody can tell him what to do and show him what to do and him the guts to try to do it.

BERGE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a good experience wasn’t it? Well I tell you Mr. Bass, I want to thank you for letting me come down here. It 40:00has been a help for me. Is there any—can you think of anything that I should have asked you about that I haven’t?

Any stories or… BASS: Well, BERGE: With what is going on today—I know I did a lot of interviews with men who lived in company coal camps and they would always would talk about all the pranking that went on shower and the wash house and stuff like that.

BASS: Oh, we got in there a lot of times, take somebody asleep take a shaving brush and a razor blade and cut that stuff up right fine and sprinkle it in the bed with him.

BERGE: Yeah. (laughter) BASS: We 41:00done that a lot of times. A lot of times they would short-sheet them, you know what short sheet is?

BERGE: Yeah, Yeah.

BASS: Catch somebody that was going to be out late they would short sheet him.

BERGE: Did they have a regular time--did they have a reveille and taps and all that kind of stuff? Did people cheat on it and stay out late?

BASS: Oh, you mean did they have to be in at a certain time? Not necessarily no.

BERGE: You had electricity in your barracks and all that kind of stuff.

BASS: We had electricity.

BERGE: Actually for some people they were living better than they had ever lived in their life, I guess when they were in those camps. Any questions you want to ask me?

(there is a voice in the background and evidently Berge is answering him) No, those were seven days a week and you could go home and visit if you want, but you could stay right there.

BASS: Well you had to work five and one-half 42:00days a week.

BERGE: But I mean you could stay there… BASS: Oh, yeah, yeah. See on Saturday unless you got a little extra ( ) you had to stay there and work Saturday morning. Clean up the company, the grounds and the barracks.

BERGE: What about fires, did you put out any fires?

BASS: Not much. We put out a few little old fires, but we didn’t have too much of that. See down there it is not all that bad.

BERGE: Wasn’t a big problem then.

BASS: No.

BERGE: How did you get paid?

BASS: Paid cash.

BERGE: Cash. Just like in the Army you get—I used to talk to boys and they would get five dollars and twenty-five would be sent home, or something like that.

BASS: That’s right.

BERGE: Who 43:00did you send yours to?

BASS: My grandmom.

BERGE: Your grandmom.

BASS: She would send it back though.

BERGE: That is what I heard, most of those boys would send that money to their mom or their daddy, whoever got it would send it back to them you know.

BASS: Yeah, she would send it back. See I would send her twenty and keep five.

BERGE: That’s the way it was, in fact…A lot of families didn’t send it back because they couldn’t.

BASS: I was pretty lucky I hadn’t been that long—I got raised to I think thirty or thirty-five, I don’t remember now what it was, but any how… BERGE: ( ) I mean, you know, don’t worry about bragging or anything. Why do you think you got raised so quick? Were you a hard worker or… 44:00BASS: Well you ask him he will tell you.

BERGE: Even as a young boy you were a hard worker like that, huh?

BASS: Yeah I never did mind doing anything. (there is another voice in the background) BERGE: You know my experience was very much like that—I talked with some other people and there were two men I talked with earlier—there were a lot of them I talked with but these two men I talked with earlier both of those had the same kind of experience that you. And one man went up so fast—he was like you a hard worker—and he learned quickly and he stayed in this business forever. He became a foreman on big construction jobs; and the other man was actually graduate engineer when he went in the CCC. but he just went in like everybody else after he had been in a while they saw that he could do it and he was a hard worker and you know. But 45:00they really picked them didn’t they?

BASS: Well, you know out of two hundred boys, they had about three that were drawing forty-five dollars a month. ( ) foresters and army officers they had three that were drawing forty-five dollars a month. They had about five or six that drawed, I think it was thirty or thirty-five and the rest of them drawed thirty dollars a month. So you had to more or less… BERGE: You had to shine if you wanted those forty or forty-five dollars. 46:00I bet it was a good feeling when you got those raised though wasn’t it?

BASS: Well, it didn’t give me no great big jump or nothing like that because I ( ) for anything I did.

BERGE: Well at least it was recognition that the people … BASS: That’s what I mean.

BERGE: Well, I tell you I really enjoyed this Mr. Bass and it really has been a big help to me and I am glad you let me come out here to do this. I really enjoyed seeing your pictures. What was that?

BASS: Well that was where I painted the flag pole.

BERGE: Is that it?

BASS: Put that cap on it up there.

BERGE: Is that you on that pole?

BASS: I ( ).

BERGE: Is that you painting that pole?

BASS: That’s me painting that pole. 47:00(laughter) You see that ( ).

BERGE: Yeah, I see it.

BASS: Well that was the one ( ) ( ) I led them boys out there that ( ) (laughter) BERGE: That was fun. Was she good looking?

BASS: (Must be turned away from the mike).

END OF SIDE TWO TAPE ONE BASS-END OF TAPE.

END OF INTERVIEW.