Oral History Interview with John M. Purdy

BETSY BRINSON: …John Purdy who is the Director of the Patton Museum of Cavalry and Armor in Fort Knox, Kentucky. The interview takes place on June fifth, the year two thousand and the interviewer is Betsy Brinson. Well thank you very much for talking with me. Could you just begin by giving me your full name and your date of birth and birthplace please.

JOHN PURDY: John Purdy, I was born in Owensboro, Kentucky in nineteen forty-two, August eighteenth. And I’ve been here a little over twenty-five years.

BRINSON: So, you’re a native Kentuckian.

PURDY: I am.

BRINSON: Did you, did your own, you mentioned earlier you had been in the military yourself at some point. What about your own education and military experience and preparation for the job that you have here?

PURDY: I got a degree in history from Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro. And I spent three years in the military, one year in training, and then two years I served as a second and then first Lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps, working with food service.

BRINSON: And then how was it you came to be interested in military history?

PURDY: Well, I was always interested in all types of history, and of course World War Two, I was of the age that grew up with many of the World War Two veterans. And I had been fascinated by their stories, from a young child, well even into most of my career here at the museum. I still am fascinated by their stories.

BRINSON: Do you have any family, ancestors, who were military?

PURDY: No, I come from a long line of draft dodgers, I say. My great-grandfather had some skirmishers, and I don’t know whether the Union was inside the barn or the Confederates were inside the barn, burned his barn down. And he was, in what is now downtown Owensboro is where he had his farm. And he moved way out to the western part of Davis county to get away from the Civil War. And I had an uncle, who was drafted in World War One and thought he was going home after the Armistice. Instead he went to France to relieve the soldiers that had been in combat over there. Another uncle who served in the states in World War Two, very brief, little contact with the military. Although most of my cousins did serve in the military, and even had one who made a career of it.

BRINSON: I am interested to know why you didn’t stay in the Military, but you elected to still be part...

PURDY: I really considered, and my mentors at the time were urging me to make a career of it, but as I was getting out, they had announced the first downsizing in Viet Nam. And I saw what, were the riffs in the early seventies coming, and this was a time to either get in or get out. And I decided that maybe I better get out before they said, the Army said, we no longer have use for you. In retrospect, now that I know what the criteria for the riff was, I could have probably stayed in. But it was making a decision at the very early stage of the Army downsizing in nineteen sixty-nine, and deciding that it was going to be a smaller Army, and it might be a smaller Army without me.

BRINSON: Tell me a little bit about the history of the Patton Museum, how old is it?

PURDY: The Patton Museum was formed as a museum in nineteen forty-nine, and we celebrated our fiftieth year, last year. The collection actually started coming to Fort Knox immediately after the war in Europe in World War Two. And was called the Patton collection, because the story told to me by the curator before me, is that General Patton selected some of the pieces to come here and wanted unusual pieces of armor to be available for study and research. The collection kept coming in and it wasn’t until nineteen forty-nine they decided to form a museum and dedicate it to General Patton. We’ve grown by bits and pieces over the years. The facility that we are in now, the first wing was built in nineteen seventy-two, and the latest wing was in nineteen ninety-two.

BRINSON: And you were telling me before we turned the tape recorder on, how many people come through here in a year.

PURDY: We have roughly three hundred and fifty thousand people come through in a year. They range from tourist to the soldiers who are in training here at Fort Knox, who get part of their training, their values training here in the museum.

BRINSON: And I would assume many veterans themselves, who have served here, or served with the cavalry?

PURDY: One of the problems we’re facing now, is from the day we became a museum in nineteen forty-nine up until recent, the last few years, we have relied heavily on the World War Two veterans coming through to tell their stories to their family, and have not been real good at telling the story to someone who, number one: has never been in the military, number two: does not have a close family member in the military. But now that we’ve had the volunteer Army for, what is it, almost thirty years, we’re getting a lot of tourists who come through, who have no real concept of what the military is itself, or what the Army is, much less what Armor is. So we are finding that we need to re-do all of our exhibits, because we are not going to be able to rely on the World War Two veteran. I mean even today, we get a very small number of World War Two veterans in, and we are not going to have them in the future. We’re also going to have more and more visitors who have not really had any contact with the military.

BRINSON: I wonder have you ever done any oral history with any of the veterans?

PURDY: We’ve done a little and it’s really been unfortunate. I get the stories from them as they are going through the museum or as they have questions. And most of them are reluctant to sit down, as I am with you, with a tape recorder. They tell their story and move on. There’s one gentleman who was a, actually he was a mechanic on D-Day on Omaha Beach. He has a great story of trying to work and fix equipment on the beach while people were shooting at him. It is a very emotional story for him, and I have three times now tried to get him to sit down with a tape recorder and get his story down, and have been unable to do it.

(Tape foes off and on)

BRINSON: Mr. Purdy, as you know, we here today to really talk about Margaret Collier a little bit and our interest through the Kentucky Civil Rights Project and some of her work, as well as some of the stories of the early integration here at Fort Knox. How did you first come to meet Margaret Collier?

PURDY: I don’t remember exactly how I came to meet her. The first business I did with her, is a, we have, as any institution that has a lot of people come through, we had a lost and found. And at that time, I was working with the gift shop. She would come each month and pick up our lost and found that had never been claimed. And we’d hold everything for a month. And than she had poor children somewhere who needed whatever, a jacket or a cap. And she was a very frugal lady, and she let nothing go to waste. And she had found that we were finding things and they never got back to their owner. So she, looking in her, the things she left us, this was at the time she was real big in the Operation Good Neighbor Program, where she brought kids in from the community, into Fort Knox and gave them, mostly for entertainment, but also education.

BRINSON: She brought them to see the museum?

PURDY: Well, not so much the museum, as brought them into Fort Knox for various and sundry programs. Go through, eat in the mess hall, that sort of thing, just see the military. I only knew her a few years before she retired. And then after she retired, she was a secretary to our Foundation, the Foundation that raised the money that built the buildings here. I got to know her much better.

BRINSON: Now the Foundation was for all of Fort Knox?

PURDY: No for the museum.

BRINSON: ...just for the museum.

PURDY: It was the Cavalry Armor Foundation, which is our fund raising...

BRINSON: So she served on the Board of the Foundation?

PURDY: She served on that Foundation for a number of years. And I really got to know her much better, after she retired. She was, mom was always an avid sports fan. Except for basketball, I’m not a big a sports fan as her, but she could tell you any game that got played last night; and wanted to know what you thought of it, and was really as rabid a sports fan as I’ve ever known. And was interested in the players and their lives, and that was always a topic of conversation with her. She was a lady who had come to Fort Knox, and I’ll let you research the exact date, I don’t remember off the top of my head. But she lived on Fort Knox, until she retired in nineteen seventy-five. She dedicated her whole life to Armor and this Installation. She had never traveled much. And after she retired, she bought her a big Cadillac car, a big, blue Cadillac and did quite a bit of traveling.

BRINSON: Do you remember any of the places that she...?

PURDY: She went to a lot of the traditional places, like Grand Canyon. And I remember she flew to Hawaii and spent a week or two in Hawaii. And of course, the other thing she was able to do, was to visit her boys. She had been the, there’s a Latin phrase, alma mater, she had been a second mother to many, many of the men who went through training here, and stayed in contact with them. I’ve even heard stories of her: a soldier coming back to Fort Knox to visit mom. And saying, “Mom, I’ve met this girl and I want to marry her, and this is what she’s like and everything.” They really sought her blessing before they got married. A number of them had done that. She had a network of people across the country, and spent a lot of years right after she retired and as long as she was able to, just traveling around visiting with them. And of course they had a number of reunions here. And when the units had their reunions, she was very much a part of the reunion group.

BRINSON: Do you know how she came about having the name Mom?

PURDY: No, I don’t. And we’ve got a lot of things that are marked with “Ma Collier”, and that to me has come after her death. It was always Mom as far as I know.

BRINSON: Because she, herself, never married and had any biological children, right?

PURDY: She never married and she was, in many respects, she was married to Fort Knox. She, and I don’t know where the Mom started, but the--you know, what I saw, were fifty, sixty year-old men, coming up to Mom and saying, “Mom, how you been? I’ve done this, or this has happened since we were last together.” And it was very much the name they used with her.

BRINSON: How was it she came to give you her papers and photographs and whatnot?

PURDY: I asked for them many, many times. We had a little thing, she was always going to write a book about what she did. She needed help in doing it. And we had a, our librarian at the time, Phyllis Kessler, knew some folks at the Center of Military History, who were in the history writing business. So we arranged for her to go to Washington and meet with these folks at the Center of Military History. She packed her Cadillac up and drove up there. They wanted to do--what we call the Army Green Books--the history of World War Two. They wanted to do one of the books on the Black Service Clubs, and really focusing in on her and her Service Club. And she--they were all excited--and then she raised the question, she said, “How much are you going to pay me?” And of course they said, “Well we are not going to pay you anything, this is not what we do.” And she packed her stuff up and came back and gave me a large piece of her mind and gave Phyllis a large piece of her mind, the very idea of sending somebody who wasn’t going to pay. Of course, she had the concept that many people do, that biography is something you make a lot of money off of. And really that kind of soured her on working with us, on her history. She’s got a great story to tell, and unfortunately she died without being able to tell the story.

BRINSON: Well it looks like you have a rich collection, just going through it quickly. And I can see several editions of a transcript, a manuscript where she’s attempted to layout...

PURDY: She worked on it and tried to lay it out, but it would have been so much a better story if a good writer could have gotten a hold of it while she was alive.

BRINSON: Am I correct? Is she really the first African-American woman in the Club Service portion of the Military?

PURDY: I don’t know if she was the first. She may very well have been the first. But I can’t tell you for certain that she was the first. She was one of the first.

BRINSON: What was she like as a Board member? As secretary of the Board, what were her responsibilities with that position?

PURDY: Well, of course, the major responsibility were the minutes of the meetings. But she served a much broader function, in that everyone on the Board is a volunteer and is a fund raiser. She recruited money from the Black community to help build this museum, and was very successful at it. She very much felt that the Black community owed something of a debt to Armor, and Armor certainly owed a debt to the Black community.

BRINSON: Now, when you say the Black community, do you mean that community on Base, that community in the surrounding area in Louisville?

PURDY: Really talking about a whole here, and this is my view, looking back on it. I’m very impressed with the fact that the NAACP--just before World War Two--changed its position and wanted to start fighting for integration. And at the same time as we got into World War Two, they were very concerned--the black soldiers in World War One, for the most part were Infantry men or laborers. And they were very concerned as we got into the technology of World War Two--and World War Two was our first big technological war--that black soldiers serve in positions of great responsibility, positions requiring them to operate complex equipment. And the Black Tank Battalions were very much a campaign of the NAACP. Probably more noted to most people are the Tuskegee airmen, who were in exactly the same position. There was a campaign first to create Black Armor units, then there, as there were with the airmen. And then there was another campaign--it was a political campaign--to get these units into combat, because if there hadn’t been the political pressure; the Black units would have trained here in the United States and would have stayed in the United States until the end of the war. The most noted of the Black Battalions, the Armor Battalions, was the Seven Sixty-First Tank Battalion, who had a great commander--that last I heard is still alive--who really pushed his men and got them trained. They were the opposing force for the tank destroyers at Fort Hood, and they would probably, without political pressure, they probably would have ended the war, being the opposing force at Fort Hood. So it very much was a political thing. It was a start, I see it, as a start to the Civil Rights movement, that the NAACP was very concerned that Black soldiers fought and died in proportion to other races; that they were in highly technical jobs. And Armor was one of those means of getting in highly technical jobs.

BRINSON: Now you’re talking about the National NAACP?

PURDY: Yes.

BRINSON: Was there a local NAACP?

PURDY: If there was...

BRINSON: ....there was in Louisville, but...

PURDY: If there was, it did not really have any effect here. And I’m not aware of it. This was basically a national campaign. It was a battle that was fought in Washington. But the result of it, was that they did form Black Tank Battalions. There was some consideration to training Black soldiers separately, and maybe at Fort Riley, where they had experience training Black soldiers. The two horse cavalry units, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, were probably--and then let me go back to the NAACP accepting separate units--the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry are a good example. Because to become a ranking Sergeant or an officer in the Ninth or Tenth Cavalry was very prestigious for a black man to have happen to him in the, well from really the formation of the units after the Civil War, until World War Two. They were able to achieve a prestigious position that they felt, if they had been mixed in with everyone else, they would never have been able to achieve. So, within the Black community there is this, you can achieve more if you’re separate, or whether you should be integrated. But coming back to Fort Knox, they decided this was where Armor training was going on, so these black soldiers would have to be trained here at Fort Knox. How to train them? There were only a few, small handful at a time, that were coming through and being trained. There is no record that General Devers made this decision, but it was on his watch, so I say that General Devers did.

BRINSON: And Devers is D E V E R S ?

PURDY: Right. He just integrated them into the training. And even the OCS, I don’t know about the enlisted training, but in the OCS, they lived together. I’ve talked to a couple of officer candidates at the time, who said, “Yes there was a black man, just down the end of my bay.” So they lived together and they trained together. Then they went into separate units, the whites to--or I should say the non-blacks, because it’s unique to the Black history that they were in separate units. We had, I don’t know that we had any Japanese-Americans, but unlike the Japanese-American units that were formed really from the people who had been gathered up in the concentration camps, were in Japanese Infantry units. But any other race was in Armor units and Black units, they were in their own separate units.

BRINSON: And what was the year that, that training began here at Fort Knox?

PURDY: It started, the training started in forty-one, but the black soldiers really started in nineteen forty-two.

BRINSON: Okay.

PURDY: And went on, I’m assuming throughout the war. I know, overall within the Army the training never ceased. They, and this is a little bit different story, but they slowed the replacements, because in the Fall of nineteen forty-four, because the war was going to be over in December. And of course, right at the low point for replacements coming in is when the Battle of the Bulge started; and they kicked everything back in high gear. And the best I can tell, from that point until the end of the war, they never slowed down again. But it never ended here.

BRINSON: Do you have any sense of the numbers in the early years? Of black troops that were stationed here?

PURDY: Well, there are, I don’t remember the number of battalions, but think there was something like five battalions formed. And if you take five hundred men to a battalion, you get twenty-five hundred soldiers.

BRINSON: And they would have come from all over the country?

PURDY: They did come from all over the country. One of the problems a lot of the black soldiers had, is that the units were stationed throughout the South for the most part. And you had young, I’ll even say arrogant, they were cocky, good soldiers, who had kow-towed to no one in their life, thrown into the community of the South; where there were just things people did and things people didn’t do, if you were white or you were black. And they did not fit well in this, and had no training or experience to say well, it’s best if we go along with this, you know, we can draw a line here, but we don’t run around. One of the black soldiers, who had a great deal of difficulty, was a man by the name of Jackie Robinson, who was in the Seven Sixty-First Tank Battalion. Like many sports figures, he trained and was ready to deploy with his unit. And he had, had some conflicts, but he was ready to deploy with his unit, took a physical for deployment and they found he had a problem with, I think one of his legs. And here, he was irate that they weren’t going to let him go. And he demanded that they let him out of the Army, which the Army wasn’t inclined to do, but in his case they let him out of the Army.

BRINSON: Was this before he was famous?

PURDY: This was before, he got out of the Army and started playing minor league baseball somewhere.

BRINSON: And he was stationed here?

PURDY: No, he was stationed, he was actually at Fort Hood when all this happened. Now, not every soldier that was in the Black Army units was trained in Armor. This was particularly true as they took casualties in Europe. There was not the replacement train coming in, in the Armor soldiers, that we were getting with the non-black soldiers. So, several times they went to, they did recruiting in the labor battalions, the service battalions and said, you know, do you want to fight with Armor, come join us. And they got true, on the job training. But they were unable to replace the soldiers that they lost easily. So, I don’t know that Jackie Robinson was here. He was in one of the Cavalry, the Horse Cavalry units at the beginning of the war.

BRINSON: I know that Margaret Collier had him back here for some event that she organized.

PURDY: And again coming back to her, that was something that, okay....

BRINSON: I’m going to stop here.

END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BRINSON: This is the beginning of side two.

PURDY: Mom Collier having a great love of sports--she enjoyed getting sports figures in here. And was able to get sports figures, Black sports figures; and also entertainment figures, that Fort Knox probably couldn’t have gotten otherwise. And I don’t think she was able to do it as much because she was Black, but because she was very, very persistent. If she wanted you to come to Fort Knox it was, “Will you please come to Fort Knox? Well, when can you come to Fort Knox? Okay, you tell me when you can come and we’ll make arrangements. What do you need to get to Fort Knox?” She just did not take no for an answer. And it was more her persistence than anything that got these people here.

BRINSON: I noticed in her materials here that there’s a good bit of Black history, as much as there was available to know at the time. And I gather that she actually, I’m assuming one: that she had her own love of history and two: that she must have used some of the Black history in her orientation with the soldiers here. Have you ever?

PURDY: I never attended any of her orientations, so I don’t know. But I’m sure--she was a reasonable, amateur historian. She was very good at collecting anecdotes and anecdotal type material, and did use it a lot in her conversations. She had--she was a very proud woman, proud of her race; proud of the accomplishments of her boys; and particularly after they got out of the Army. She wanted them to succeed in their business ventures as well, and was very proud of those who did. She was the type of historian who--she collected stories, and stories of successes; but at the same time she seemed to have a--and I’m just thinking about this as we talk--she seemed to have a difficulty of linking everything together into what you would call a good story. She collected the bits and pieces, but never quite linked everything together.

BRINSON: Well, I can see from the materials, they are basically short, biographical sketches of famous African-Americans in history. So you’re right, she was collecting at least, stories of people who did well, who were able to accomplish something.

PURDY: And she used them in, as I said, I never attended her orientation. But she used them just in casual conversation, talking about this or that, that happened; and she would bring these stories up. But she never--they were always just points, and that’s as far as she went with them.

BRINSON: How did the exhibit come about that you have here now that includes Margaret Collier?

PURDY: Well, of course we couldn’t have done the exhibit without her material. We had worked on--for many years--on doing something about the black soldiers, the only separate soldiers within the Armor’s history. It was only when she died, she left a bequest; left us the material and a bequest. So she funded part of the exhibit. And it was something she and I had talked about as long as I’ve known her. It finally came to fruition this last year. That’s probably the worst problem we have--is the museum--we tend to be very slow; and things tend to develop over long periods of time, much longer than I think is reasonable.

BRINSON: Do you know anything, have you heard comments from people who have come though and viewed the exhibit, either people who knew her or who didn’t know her?

PURDY: I haven’t gotten any comments. And I really, today this is a sensitive topic. And I really thought we would have to adjust. There would be criticism of something, where we had aimed to make one point and instead we made another point, unerringly.

BRINSON: Why is it a sensitive topic today?

PURDY: Well, I think race, in general, is a sensitive topic today. We all tend to be much more separate, even though I think for the most part, integration has been accomplished. And now as a society we look to our ethnic separates, separatism, much more than we did years ago. And so I expected some criticism or some, oh you’ve got this wrong. And we get this daily from some exhibit we do. But I’ve not gotten any negative comments.

BRINSON: You would expect negative comments from African-Americans or from whites or...?

PURDY: Both.

BRINSON: Both.

PURDY: Both. And it was--oh we did a temporary exhibit years ago and got a lot of negative comments from whites. This unit was no good, and that unit was no good, they shot themselves up. It’s the same thing that you get throughout society. There are those who will criticize focusing in on, particularly the Black race; but focusing in on--and I’m sure if we were to go down to South Texas we could get criticism for Mexicans, or out in the West on Indians. It’s not peculiar to Blacks, but here the focus more is on Blacks. And the black soldiers are, like their non-black brethren, they are very sensitive to their story; very sensitive to what they did and at least the Armor soldiers, black or white, are very quick to catch us on any point that we get, any error we make. They’ll call us on it real fast. Now, we did research everything we put out there much more carefully than we usually do, because I expected to be called on any errors we made. And I’ve really been surprised that we have gotten no criticism from any part of the community.

BRINSON: What was John Cranston’s role with this project?

PURDY: With this project, none really. He was the Armor Center historian and did the one oral history interview, just because we were getting so little from Mom Collier.

BRINSON: What do you mean, you were getting so little? She gave you her materials.

PURDY: Well, she—only--this was while she was still alive. And she hung on to it--I really think it comes back to when we sent her to the Center of Military History. I think she thought she had something that was very valuable in a monetary sense. And as valuable as it is, it does not have great monetary value; but it’s very valuable as I’m sure you’re well aware, that some of the things we value the most, do not have great monetary value. And I think she really thought that she had something of great monetary value, and being a frugal woman, she kept it close to her. And it did not, give out much information. And the photographs I found in the collections, we would have loved to have had copies of those years ago. And she kept them very close. She’d say, “Honey when I die you can have them, but I’ve got them now.”

BRINSON: I know Fort Knox has decreased its number of soldiers over the years. Do you have any idea what the total number of Military is at Fort Knox at this point? And how integrated is it at this point?

PURDY: It’s--well, the second question first, it’s totally integrated--there is nothing that is--including installation commanders. There is no real thought of race at Fort Knox. Fort Knox is much smaller now, and I can get you the numbers.

BRINSON: What would you guess? In the thousands?

PURDY: There’s probably--we’ve got two things, we’ve got our permanent party, which are people stationed here at Fort Knox, who spend a year or two or three at Fort Knox. Then we’ve got the people in training, some of whom spend twelve weeks, some of whom spend eight weeks, or even two weeks; and they measure the training load over a year. Well, if it’s a two week course, and let’s say they give it once a month, you can get a lot of people through in that. Whereas the permanent party is a much smaller group, and we separate the two. So, there’s, there’s probably, I’d say we’re training something less than ten thousand soldiers a year.

BRINSON: Am I correct? That the Military, the U. S. Military now is heavily African-American?

PURDY: Uh, there was an article in The New York Times, that gave some statistics on the racial make up. The combat forces, Armor, Infantry, Artillery, tend to be slightly under-represented with African-American soldiers. The Combat Support and Combat Services tend to be over represented. One of the branches in that article had thirty percent African-American soldiers in it. And the speculation is that a lot of people join the Army for various reasons, but a lot of them join for excitement, doing something different. But the African-Americans tend to be, or seem to be, joining the Army for a trade, a job, something they can carry into the civilian world. And at least that is the speculation on why that is true.

(Tape goes off and on)

BRINSON: Does that play out in terms of the permanent people who are stationed here now?

PURDY: I don’t know. I really can’t put a number or a ratio to it. There’s an awful lot of, we have an awful lot of black soldiers here today.

BRINSON: And probably many of them are women too, at this point in time.

PURDY: Well, we don’t have many women, and that’s because Armor is one of the three branches that still do not have women in them. So, Fort Knox tends to be much heavier, or I should say the Armor Center--because the Recruiting Command, which is also here at Fort Knox, tends to have a large number of women in it. But because Armor is an all male bastion--we don’t train--we train very few women; and they’re only in some of the basic training companies where they are going somewhere else to get their advanced skills. And we have practically no women in the Cadre.

BRINSON: Right, okay, that makes sense. You said earlier that you thought the integration of the Military during World War Two actually was maybe the beginning or the precipitating factor for the Civil Rights movement. And as a historian yourself, you probably know that there are lots of historians, who agree with you; and that’s becoming a widely held theory. I wonder, do you have any, did you ever have any conversations with Margaret Collier, as to how she saw that?

PURDY: She had--for one thing, she was not that favorable to the Civil Rights movement itself. A lot of the protest and things, she didn’t see that as the way to advance. Now to say--I would not--well there’s a derogatory term, that’s kind of out of vogue now; but she was in no way an Uncle Tom. But when there were problems--and she had--one of her best services to each commanding general that she served under was she was kind of a truth detector. And she probably contributed as much to Fort Knox during the late sixties and early seventies, when the Army was having a lot of racial problems. She would ferret out, when there was a problem brewing, and she’d say, the black soldiers are right or the black soldiers are wrong. She’d go in and tell the commanding general, these guys are right or wrong; and in order to fix it, you need to do this or do that. And she was...

BRINSON: So she stood up for what she believed and thought was right?

PURDY: Very much so. But she also--and I would like to quote her and I can’t--but she did not feel that she had been oppressed. And she did not feel that any black person in the country needed to be oppressed, or needed to feel they were oppressed. And to complain that you were oppressed was, “Honey you just got to get out there and do whatever you need to do.” And she was very critical of some of the black Civil Rights leaders, who were if you will, the woe is me syndrome. She was very, highly critical of them. At the same time she--I would say she was--rejoiced or did rejoice in every major landmark that was made. She certainly was not against the Civil Rights movement, but she did not like a lot of the things that were done during the Civil Rights movement.

BRINSON: It sounds like though that she really supported using the established networks to resolve conflicts and tensions. That she did that...

PURDY: Absolutely, absolutely. And she--this started with General Devers. And she had a mild campaign going on. She always wanted to take the Patton name off the museum and put General Devers name on the museum. She felt like that his contribution was much greater. And his contribution to the Armor Center here at Fort Knox certainly was. Patton was never here. But she came in--and I don’t know exactly what General Dever’s orders to her were--but she had a very comfortable relationship with him; and that lasted through every commanding general. There were times when she could appear at his office and say she had to talk to him--and this is any commanding general that she served with--and whatever was going on, he chased everybody out of his office and would meet with her. She had that type of relationship. And the generals that came, generals do talk to each other; and when they came in, a new general would come in and he’d be told, “You listen to that lady they call Mom Collier. And she’ll keep you out of trouble.” And Fort Knox during all the time when they were having fragging incidents and everything during the Viet Nam War, Fort Knox had no problems.

BRINSON: What kind of incidents?

PURDY: Fragging. This is...

BRINSON: Fragging, F R A G G I N G?

PURDY: Right. And it’s a term from the later part of the Viet Nam War, this is where you roll a hand grenade under somebody’s bunk that you don’t like. It’s--there’s two splits, it was enlisted and an officer; and it was also black and white. Where you had black groups barricading themselves in a barracks and saying, “Until we get whatever we want, we’re not coming out.” It was really a low point for the Army, and the racial incidents really were secondary to a lot of other things that were going wrong with the Army during that period.

BRINSON: You had incidents like that here at Fort Knox?

PURDY: To my knowledge, not a single one. Europe was, it was dangerous to be an officer in Europe. It was deadly to be a black officer in Europe. I’m talking the period of seventy to seventy-three, roughly. It was also deadly to be in the wrong group in Viet Nam during that period. But Fort Knox, as far as I can tell, did not have any of that. And these are the same soldiers who are coming from Viet Nam to Fort Knox, or Germany to Fort Knox. But it was a different atmosphere here. And I attribute a great deal of that to Mom Collier, because she could sort through and where there were problems, where blacks were not getting treated the way they should have been: she could go to the CG and say, “You know, this has to stop.” And he would bring his pressure to bear that it stopped. So you didn’t have this sense of frustration without being able to fix things. Things got fixed at Fort Knox.

BRINSON: To your knowledge, John, did she have any, not enemies, but did she have people who disagreed with her, either among the black soldiers, who thought that she went about this in the wrong way or had the wrong attitude about...?

PURDY: Oh she had people--and during the period I knew her--she had already achieved the state of, if you will, an icon. So people who disagreed with her, tended to keep their mouths shut. I never got anything negative within the, from the black soldiers, although I’m sure some of them would wish that old woman would shut up and sit down. But she was so highly respected that they kept their opinions to themselves. With the whites, sometimes they would say, you know, she’s coming on too strong, she’s wielding her influence when it shouldn’t be wielded. There was always that aspect, and I think that’s pretty well true of anyone who has power and influence. That they’re--if you don’t agree with it, or if you think that--and you know, I never knew a company commander, who had a problem developing, who got told by the commanding general to fix his problem, but I’m sure that at the time none of them appreciated it, and appreciated the source of it.

BRINSON: Was she a big talker? At Board meetings for example, did she have a lot to say, or was she more of a quiet?

PURDY: In formal situations she tended to be kind of quiet. But in social situations she could talk your ear off, particularly if she got a subject that she was hot on. Baseball, if a player was not doing well, or if a player did not get received well, or whatever, she could get fired up and go on and on and on. So she was a big talker, but in formal situations she tended to be the listener. And then very often she would go one on one and make her point made. But she did not, in a formal meeting, and I’m thinking really of our Foundation meetings, she did not have much to say during the meeting. She would later go one on one with whomever and say, “Well I disagree with that.”

BRINSON: Was she active in a church that you know of?

PURDY: I don’t really know. I don’t know.

BRINSON: Or did she ever talk about faith?

PURDY: Only in a very general sense. She was a Christian, but I don’t know anything about her religion. She didn’t talk about it greatly.

BRINSON: And did she have any female friends that you know of, close female friends I mean? Outside the base?

PURDY: Not many, not many. Most of her friends were men. And you know, I’m thinking, some friends that we shared that had known her for many years, Clarence Pratt, who had been the President of the bank and was her executor, had been a friend of hers for many, many years and was very close to her.

BRINSON: Did she leave much of an estate? How could she have...?

PURDY: I don’t know that she left a very large estate. She did--I know there were--she was sponsoring some, if you will, sort of irregular scholarships, paying kids college. And I know there was a problem with that as they went into the, went from her to an executor, of getting the payments in, and that sort of thing, where they were time sensitive. But that was, she...

BRINSON: So, she was having trouble meeting those...

PURDY: No, I know she was doing this, because there were some problems as it went from her to an executor and bills had to be paid and that sort of thing.

BRINSON: I see, right.

PURDY: So, I know that part about her estate.

BRINSON: How did she die?

PURDY: Don’t really know.

BRINSON: Was her health--was it fairly sudden, was her health good up to...?

PURDY: She had deteriorated quite a bit. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t seen her in some time before she died. As she aged and was able to get around less, she stayed more to herself.

BRINSON: She was living off Base at that point.

PURDY: Yes, she moved off when she retired and she never lived on Post again. But she was, and I feel bad, like you do many times. I hadn’t checked on her and hadn’t seen her for some time and then she died. And you always intend and then it’s too late, and well you’ve missed the opportunity. But she very much--she was a very thin woman and she was very careful about what she ate. The greatest eating memory I have of her, is she would eat crackers until, regular soda crackers, until it wouldn’t quit. But she would always rub them together and rub the salt off of them before she ate them

BRINSON: I’m going to stop, thank you. This is rich material, thank you for...

PURDY: Okay.

END OF INTERVIEW