Oral History Interview with David Greene

Philpot: This is Jonathan Philpot, it is February 23rd. I’m at the American Legion with…David Greene. It’s…11:46 a.m., and we’re going to talk about…his time in, in the military. If you don’t mind, just…start by giving your…date of birth and occupation, and then just introduce yourself, whatever you want to say.

Greene: Okay, I’m David Greene, and I was born December 22nd, 1923, and went into military service in April of ’43…yeah, and…I was discharged in January of ’46. Now, after the war I was in construction work for a while, and then I decided changing career would be advisable, 1:00or just be nice to have, and I had always flown, so I took a—and I already had a pilot’s license, and I took over the Mount Sterling Airport and ran it for almost twenty years. Then my hearing started going bad and I retired and started fishing [Chuckling].

Philpot: Okay. When you went into the military did, did you chose to enlist or were you drafted, or… Greene: I was—no I wasn’t drafted. I was a sophomore in engineering at Purdue, and I was going to be drafted, and so I joined—I found out if I joined the Enlisted Reserve Corps, the ERC, I’d go in about the same time as being drafted but I would have a better chance of getting a branch of service I wanted, and I was—since I had been in ROTC at Purdue, in artillery, I knew more about that and I thought, well that’s pretty good fit. And so then I—and so I joined the ERC and I wound up in artillery, after I, after 2:00I went, was, was called in. That let, that let me finish up my sophomore year in college.

Philpot: Okay. Where did, where did you go to boot camp?

Greene: I went there at…Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and we did our training on the 155 mm rifle, long rifles or long Toms, they called them, because you didn’t shoot them very much, cost too much, but they made one heck of a racket when you shot them, and no hearing aids or hearing…dampeners of any kind back in those days, you held your hand over, over your ears and that was it, and I think that’s why my hearing actually got it started going down hill.

Philpot: Okay. 3:00From there…where did, where did they send you?

Greene: They sent me back to college [Chuckling]. They…if you were an engineer, and your AGCT score was high enough, and you were training in something that they thought might be essential in the future, they had this ASTP program, Army Specialized Training Program, and the army had it, called ASTP, the navy had their own training program, they called it something else, and they’d, they sent us ba…back to college. I went to Clemson this time and this thing, the thing about it, the first semester I had, I had repeated what I had done the last year in Purdue. The second semester I got into some neat stuff, but at the end of the second semester, which came along just before the 4:00invasion…in June of what, ’40…’44. They decided to disband that program; they weren’t going to need all of us anyway. So, instead of saving all their bright brains, they was—we, they thought they were saving, they sent us, (that’s?) went to the airborne [Laughing]. And so I, I shipped out of there then, and went to the 13th Airborne Division in…Camp McCall, North Carolina, which is adjacent to Fort Bragg but which ha…which had been an airborne base, since its inception.

Philpot: Okay…[Chuckles – Philpot] that’s, that’s really surprising they did that sort of… Greene: Sir?

Philpot: I said that’s surprising that they, they chose to do that, but… Greene: Well, they did [Chuckling]. The funniest thing about it, I ran into people there, a good friend of mine that I had known at Purdue, but he had taken his basic training in California, and he wound up, we wound up in the same, the same battalion, artillery battalion.

Philpot: So, what, what did they do with you 5:00after they…put you—you know, sent you to airborne training?

Greene: Well, we went through airborne training in, in gliders…which consisted, well there is a whole lot, of course, of, of physical education, and we’d run for five miles, and we’d forced march for twenty-five and do all that stuff, and then in, in the glider part, of course, a glider soldier and an airborne, a paratrooper, both are just soldiers. They just get there a different way, and I think they probably may have been a little bit tougher on airborne training than they were on the regular training, because we were supposed to go out and be at on our own for a good while before they caught up with us. We weren’t supposed to win anything, we just were supposed to raise tee-total cane back behind the lines is the purpose of it, and to make the enemy so nervous that they couldn’t 6:00really, they didn’t know exactly where people were, and that would give the main ground forces a chance to break through and come on and rescue, we were supposed to be rescued after three days. But…after we c…actually got into the glider riding part of it, they scared me so bad, I volunteered to jump. Of course glider, glider people were not volunteers; they were put in there. If you jumped out of an airplane you had to volunteer for that, and besides that, you got a fifty-dollar—a fifty dollar a month raise, which helped. And so, everb…anybody in the division that wanted to take parachute training, become qualified parachutist, was allowed to and we all went down to the airborne center in Fort Benning, 7:00in the summer of forty…four, and went through jump school, and of course doing that you wound up making five parachute jumps and you learned how to pack your own parachute and do all this other stuff. Then you were awarded your wings, and you’d get—I, my pay got doubled from a private at fifty-four dollars a month to…a-hundred-and-four, I think, I got fifty-four as a PFC at that time, and then, we went back to our division except I got a change in jobs after that. I had been what they called a wire sections communication, which w…we’d learn to how to run around on our bellies back in behind the lines and spring wire, and I was, I was changed then to S-2 which is intelligence, 8:00and that don’t mean I was very intelligent, I probably wouldn’t have been there if I had been, but…we, our purpose then—my purpose changed in, in the thing I was moved from A-Battery to Headquarters Battery and put into the S-2 Division of it. We would go in with the parachute infantry ahead of the gliders and help establish—try to get a little intellig…where the enemy was, and where we could set up our batteries and do this and that and the other, here’s the purpose of the whole thing, go…go in there a little bit ad…advance and kind of prepare the way for the gliders, so we kind of tell them what, what the lay of the land was. And…and then their same outfit would come and join us later with the gliders, if they, if they got there. Gliders had a bad habit of crashing 9:00and every time we flew them, we, we would tear some up, and under, and that was under civ..., you know, not under combat, but they were big bulky things, they carried a lot of weight, and when they cut loose from that plane, they were coming down, and if they got cut loose in the right place and they could find a place to land, they were in good shape, if for some reason they got cut loose at the wrong place, they, they were just kind of bad. And…(Whispering) go ahead.

Philpot: I was ( ) so, so what did they do…or where did they sent you once you finished the…the jump school—the, the only real note I have says you’re in France.

Greene: Okay. After jump school, we went back and finished up our training at Camp McCall, and we had our final maneuvers in…September or October, I can’t remember which, of ’44. And after that we were declared combat-ready, 10:00and the only thing is, we were ready to ship overseas, but they couldn’t find a place in a convoy for us, so we didn’t actually ship out until January of ’45, and that…probably saved a lot of our lives. If we’d gotten over there when we were ready, we would have been prime targets to go to the Battle of the Bulge, because that, that took place in December of ’45. And we had not had any combat, and we, we were probably the best trained division the army had, because we were—the last division just about for…la…I know it was the last airborne division formed. And so we took it, had the advantage of the mistakes 11:00they had made earlier, during the invasion and in, and other, other places, and so we had probably the best training of anybody. Anyhow, we got there, and we went in at Le Havre, France, and that place was bombed beyond recognition. There wasn’t anything left but ( ) where we’d bombed it before we, we went in there. They bulldozed the streets out, the wharves were gone, we had a floating wharf we bought over there, they unloaded us on a boat and took us ashore the rest of the way in smaller, smaller vessels. Of course (when the?)—fighting was all over with there, they, they had been captured three or four months ahead of time. And we were in…I forget the name of the camp there, they had some, they had the Camp Lucky Strike and Chesterfield, and different ones over there that you would go to while they were getting things 12:00ready to ship and go out to where your final destination was. We were there for several days, and…I like to starve to death, both on the boat and at, at that camp. We got two meals a day on the boat, and I was hungry, I wasn’t seasick or anything until one time. They had tongue and everybody else was sick and couldn’t eat their tongue and I ate about two or three different people’s s…portion of tongue and then I got sick [Chuckling]. So I haven’t eaten tongue since.

Philpot: Is that cow tongue, or… Greene: No, it…beef tongue. See I don’t know, I never heard, heard it served anywhere else, but they said that’s what it was, but…anyhow, that, that finally finished me up.

Philpot: Did, did they have a mess hall on the ship, or, or… Greene: Well, on the troop ship, they were converted liners 13:00and, and most of them I think were, and we had hammocks to sleep in. I don’t, I don’t remember if we had a hammock or a bunk bed, to tell you the truth. You got it for eight hours, somebody else got for eight, and the third person got it for the third eight, and then the rest of the time you had to just make yourself scarce and go wherever you could, on, on board the ship to, to kind of stay out of the way. But they really had, had it loaded up heavy, and it…that’s where I saw my first whale, right in the con…right in the middle of the convoy, there came whales floating along spouting, so that was, that was exciting.

Philpot: Yeah, I can imagine. So…well let’s see, you, you really doing great so far, I mean no, no way I’m going to ask a question [Laughter – Greene], you’re really doing wonderful.

Greene: Okay.

Philpot: When you got to the camp, what, what did they feed you there?

Greene: At Le Havre I, it…it wasn’t enough, because I remember one time, I always had a big appetite, I’d dropped a piece of bread in the mud and you had, you 14:00had to go and get this, and then you had to go back to your tent where you sleep and somewhere I dropped part of my bread in the mud and I picked it up and scrapped it off and ate it anyway. I had never been that hungry before or since, but…that was just me. Yeah, I remember it was cold, very cold there, we were sleeping in tents, we had, we had some kind of a stove in there. After that they, we moved us out, and we went through Paris. They put us in these, you’ve heard of these forty and eight cars, forty soldiers or eight horses or something like that, and they had about forty of us in there and it was full, I mean it…and we were in there for two days I think. We went through—one thing that happened, we went through the, the…yards, railroad yards 15:00in Paris and we were there for a while, while they were (switching?) trains around one thing or another, and not too far over from us there was a car with some big, great big vats of wine and somebody got the idea that we ought to get some of that wine. We figured out what it was, and how to get into it. And we, we all wound up with canteens full of wine and that, it, it got back then, somebody said, somebody stole all our wine and they came back to us. And they had a, an awful time getting that straightened out but nobody would ever admit to anything. By that time everybody had sobered up, by the time they found out [Chuckling], and so we didn’t get caught on that. 16:00When we moved on from there, my outfit, it was six-seventy-seventh glider field artillery battalion, we went to a place called (Chauvigny?) is on the Arne River and just south of Paris, and that was our, where we were going to be for a while, a ba…our base for the time being. It was a, it had originally been a French…casern, which was kind of walled fort with, with, a nice place, built out of brick, every, we had everything convenience in the world there. We had…places for training, we had big mess halls, big barracks, and of course, after—the Germans took it over, but 17:00they had been gone a couple of months before we got there and so there were the French and then Germans, and then the Americans took it. Now the French, I understand, are ba…are using it (moved in?) still. The rest of our division went, part of them went Sens, s-e-n-s, France, and the rest of them, part of them, went to (Oxier?), France, and they were all within the station about twenty miles of each other, so we could…and I’m, I think they had for similar conditions to live in that we had. But…we did, we went back to training again, and…again, I remember one time, they had introduced a new type of ammunition. I think it was a (pose?)-like shell. It was supposed to go off when it got so close to the ground, somehow where they could do that. Well we were doing a training exercise and I was acting as the forward observer on a ridge, and they were shooting overhead, and they ( ) shot them 18:00too low and they started going off right over the top of us and that was the closest I came to getting wounded [Chuckling] right there by our own shells, but…along, after we had been over there a month or two, we were assigned…the total time we were over there I think we just had three missions. One of them, of course we didn’t know, really know what we were doing most of the time that, the regular dogfaces didn't. We were just—officers did, but we were supposed to go and they’d tell us what to do and we (can?), when we got there. And you think you do all this training and mock up and all this stuff and we did, but…one of our missions was to cross the Rhine and kind of soften up on the other side of the Rhine, and it got cancelled, because about that time Patton was going like a bat out of hell right through there and he over ran the drop zone, he crossed the Rhine on his own, everything got, he just kept going. 19:00And another one was the same thing on another river, and I forgot the name of that river, and it was called off at the last minute. And the third one, I didn’t really, we really didn’t know exactly what it was until later on. The Germans had a place in Germany where they were working on the atomic bomb, they had a heavy water plant there and they had a bunch of scientists there, and our job—and we were getting pretty close, and the headquarter higher ups were afraid the scientists would get scattered, and we wanted them bad, 20:00and so our job was to go in there and, and quietly try to capture all those scientists and so we could, we’d have them ourselves and Russia didn’t get them really is what it amounted to. Somehow nobody told the free French Army, LeClerc’s army. He didn’t get the word he wasn’t supposed to go busting through there and they got to rolling, and they [Chuckling] overran that damn place before we got there and we were already loaded up in the airplanes on that one, and we had to unload when that started they could see what was happening, so we never did take of, and…and they g…they got scared, the scientists did, we—they got a few of them, but, but Le Clerk really s…I don’t, I don’t understand that, but, but the only reason I can figure we won the war is because the Germans screwed up worse than we did (and lost out?), because, we, we did a lot of stuff that wouldn’t…did 21:00communication is one thing and of course you got three or four countries working together and it was hard, I guess, to get everything coordinated like it should be. Anyhow they eventually got most of them back, they, they, they got them later, and, but, but Hitler was working on that atomic bomb right along with us, and. and that’s, to my knowledge, that is the last mission we were assigned, there were three of them altogether. And, and we didn’t do any of them, so we were there the highest trained division in the thing and never had, heard a shot fired in anger, which actually, looking back on it was probably pretty nice, probably lucky, we were known as Lucky 13th. After, after that, I, it wasn’t long until the war was over, and of course we were low point people, because you got out of the army after the war was over, on, on a bunch of point sheet. You had, I’m sure you’ve heard all this before. 22:00Philpot: Well, I haven’t on tape [Chuckles – Philpot and Greene], so to speak.

Greene: Yeah.

Philpot: If you don’t mind explain the point system… Greene: Well… Philpot: …briefly, that would be good.

Greene: It…you got so much for your longevity, you got so much for each battle you’d been in, and so much for being overseas, and so, if you had high points, you had a good chance of getting out—of course the war was over, over there. I got low points, because we hadn’t been overseas very long. We had no combat, I think you had one battle star and we never did know what that was from, but they said put that on, and…so we were either set up for the army of occupation, or the…go to ja…go to Japan, the invasion of Japan. Well since we had all the equipment and all our stuff was all in good shape and everything, we wound up going to Japan and well headed that way. 23:00We didn’t get on board, again getting the convoy back to the states. It was August before we actually got started back to the station, our, our thing was come back through the states, get thirty days home, and assemble on the west coast and ship out. And they had plans were all made to do that. We…we got in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, they dropped the bombs. After that, pretty soon after that, the Japanese surrendered, the war was over and so there we were, we came back into New York Harbor, good old Statue of Liberty sitting up there, and…the war was over. They didn’t know what to do with us then; just too expensive to send us back overseas and they already had a lot of people there, and already there. And so then we…we 24:00got the thirty days at home and then went back to where we’d started out from at Camp McCall, North Carolina. It was in early winter, fall, fall, I guess of ’45…and then we, we—they just kept us until we trained and then one thing and another, everybody wanted to get out and go home, really. And so they, they were, were discharging people. In the meantime I’d, I’d made a mistake on, when I registered and signed into the army, I put on there I was a typist, I could type, but I couldn’t, never could type very well, I type worse now then I didn’t then, but our battalion clerk had, he was high points. He had come from somewhere else and he had high points. He got out and they looked on that and said, “would you like to be clerk?” 25:00And I said “I don’t think so.” And they s…[Chuckling], the war was over by that time, and everybody was playing and we were playing games and basketball and volleyball and baseball and doing a little bit of training on the side, but we had a pretty good time. Hell, I, they made me a, they gave me another stripe and I had to go—at that time I’d made me a T-4, I think, Technician fourth grade, and I became the battalion clerk. Everybody else was playing and I was working my tail off. And so that was a mistake that I had made, I never put typing on anything else again. So came back, I was still pretty busy, getting discharges ready and taking care of all this stuff, and…and I’d, when the…82nd Airborne came back who were true, which the 82nd and 101st were the, were the two 26:00most battle worthy, or what ever you want to call it, combat, no, no (troops?) in there. They had a lot of high point men in. Of course they had a lot of, a lot of their, their high point men, or older men, of course they weren’t there anymore, they’d been either killed or wounded. But they came back and they made them, had a big parade down New York, 5th Avenue in New York. They didn’t have enough people to make a parade, so we had t…lot of us—I didn’t go—again I missed out on the fun, because I was a clerk…had to change our patches on the shoulder, put 82nd Airborne patches and we went up there and met 82nd marched [Chuckling] down 5th Avenue like a victor, so a lot of our people did, and this was I think in November maybe, or it could have been December. Then thing went on and in January, late in January of ’46 then I go…I was discharged 27:00in, about the middle of Decem…the middle of January in ’46. The 82nd Airborne absorbed the 13th. The 13th ceased to exist and all the remaining people…were absorbed into the 82nd Airborne which of course is still going, it’s, it’s a, right, right today they’re, they’re in and out of Iraq all the time. The 82nd I guess is the ol…one, the only one that’s still…kind of like the one we had in World War II, mainly parachute, they don’t use gliders anymore. They, they just proved…lost too many men with them. So they’re mainly…shock—kind of shock proof, they are all parachute trained of course, and they’re kind of kin to special forces, in a way. Now, my old camp, we were down there had a, a reunion 28:00at Fort Bragg, my army division had a reunion at Fort Bragg several years ago, and we went back to old Camp McCall which had been the airborne camp, and now it’s still active, you don’t hear much about it, that’s where special forces train. They also have, conduct a survival school there in, in Camp McCall. The survival school is not just for the army, it’s for all, civilians, anybody that’s subject to be captured by the enemy in, any type, or (enemy?) or a friend whoever they call them anymore. And they go through the survival course there, it’s several months long, I think. Some don’t make it, and those that do wind up losing about fifteen or twenty or thirty pounds. It’s just that, that tough, because you have to learn a lot, and you got to be in the woods a lot by your own, 29:00and living on your own wits and everything, and that’s what’s going on at Camp McCall right there, like I say, they, they don’t, they don’t advertise it like they do these other places, but it’s just there and it’s…still [Chuckling] still going strong, and it’s really, it’s adjacent to Fort, Fort Bragg, and…thing I, that, that winds up my military service pretty much.

Philpot: Okay. Well let me…look at some of the, these are, these are just, you know, sort of sample questions that I…we’re not, not trying to run through all, or probably even most of them, but let me…see if there is anything specific…from I’d like to ask. That, that was really great though…that’s the best kind of interview when I, I don’t have to talk a lot [Chuckles – Greene]. Let’s see…did you leave anybody, 30:00anybody behind when you, when you got drafted, as far as girlfriend, parents, and anything like that?

Greene: Well, yeah, I did. I was pinned to a girl I had met at Purdue, and…anyhow, I think it was right after we got to France, I got my ‘Dear John’ letter and my pin back [Chuckling] and probably the best thing that had ever happened to me [Laughing]. I didn’t think so at the time, but looking back, why, I think I wouldn’t have met my wife if I hadn’t done that, and I couldn’t beat her [Chuckling].

Philpot: So…did, I guess then you, you weren’t getting letters from home from the girlfriend for the most part… Greene: I got plenty of letters from… Philpot: …did you ( )… Greene: …from home yeah, mm-mm. And I got them from her for a while, but then she met somebody, she, she wound up, went out to Mills College. She was younger than I was. I met her through a fraternity brother and she wound up in Mills College at in California and met somebody out there that she thought to be more stable for her and I sure hope so.

Philpot: Okay, let’s see…anything 31:00that—is there anything that happened at home that you missed that, you know…births, deaths, you know, anything like that that you wished you’d been here for, or… Greene: No. Actually, this is, you’re probably not supposed to say this, but I rather enjoyed my military time. I got out and I got to see a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, I was very lucky, I never got hurt, that was as close as I came to getting hurt was on the, that night parachute jump on maneuvers, I landed in a tree, pitch black dark, and I didn’t know it but s…I hit my leg on a branch coming down I guess, but when you make a, land in a tree, 32:00there’s not much you can do about it. You put your legs close together, really close together [Chuckling], you cover your face up and that’s it, you go down through there as best you can. Something got a hold of my leg and I didn’t even know it until two days later, it started hurting and I pulled my pants leg up and I could see the bone… Philpot: Oh!

Greene: …and ( ) so I, I found a medic. I thought I was wounded in terrible shape, he’s got sulfur out and put a band-aid or something on it and says “go on back you’re all right,” and it, it was, it healed up and never did give me any trouble at all. Sulfur powder was a great thing at that time.

Philpot: Is that, they are not using that anymore? The sulfur powder, do they still use that, or do you know?

Greene: I’m sorry.

Philpot: Do they still use that powder, or… Greene: Yeah, they use sulfur powder, mm-mm, yeah, of course we, we carried it with us all the time too, and…we had a little thing on there.

Philpot: Okay…let’s see…other 33:00than that…that battle star, did you, did you get any other medals or anything?

Greene: Oh, I got a good conduct medal [Chuckling] and I wonder why that, I sometimes wonder why they give it to me for my conduct, wasn’t all that good a lot of time, but… Philpot: I was, I was going to ask you, I’ve heard…quite a lot about…pranks, you know, people playing pranks on each other. Did…did you all play jokes or anything on ea…on, on each other, since you, you know, while—in your down time?

Greene: I…I don’t recall any, any big pranks going on. It…we, we were, we were really fairly serious people at that time, it…but…of course I won’t say we didn’t go out and drink every chance we got, which we did, but…but as far, as far as the…training and so forth, it’s, it was a pretty serious bunch of people.

Philpot: Okay…let’s 34:00see…[Chuckles – Philpot]. Some of these questions are kind of funny, given you know, how you’ve, you, you know, you’ve told me you were, you’re really lucky and didn’t have to, you know… Greene: Mm-mm, you didn’t think so at the time, we, we, actually we were looking forward to combat, because we had had all this training and, and you get to the point where you really want to see if you can do it, and not turn tail and run, and it depend, it’s kind of a matter or pride on it, and we never got a chance to do that, and I think we would have done all right.

Philpot: Well…was there any, was there anything that you did for good luck…like, you know, four-leaf clover or anything like that?

Greene: No, I wore a Saint Christopher medal, and that, that was about that, along with my dog tags, and that was about it, you know.

Philpot: Is…what, what is Saint Christopher the saint of?

Greene: Tra…is it travel? I’m not sure.

Philpot: It might be. That sounds about right.

Greene: And I, I’m not positive on it, but it’s supposed to, supposed to kind of keep, keep you in one piece.

Philpot: Let’s 35:00see…so, did you ever get to go back and, and finish your school, college?

Greene: No, I didn’t. I should have, because the GI Bill was, it was enacted by Roosevelt in forty-four, before he died, and that was one of the greatest things that you’ve ever done for the soldiers in this country. (Clears throat) Had a much better deal then than the soldier's getting now. I could have gone to college or anything I wanted to do. And I had always wanted to learn to fly, so I learned to fly and they paid it, paid the whole deal. But I had—they gave me, I think seventy-five dollars a month (Coughs) excuse me, I’m talking too much—to live on. And 36:00so I, I just got my private license at that time, private pilots license. But…I could have done—should have gone back to Purdue, probably, but I decided well, I had seen the world and I didn’t oh I’m going to do it. My father had a construction business in hauling business, working out of Hazard, Kentucky. We were from here, but his business was located in Hazard, and I went to work for him, and we—that was back in the days before ever all the country roads were black top, they were all, they were all macadam, were rock-surface roads and you had to put rock on them every year. And so he worked through the Kentucky stone company and bid with them, and we rocked about fifteen or twenty counties in eastern Kentucky every year, most of it we had to haul in on a, just brought in a railroad, some we’d haul right out of the quarry, like up at Beattyville, and did some work in, 37:00in Virginia the same way, and then we decided to get into construction business, and so we bought a couple of dozers and one thing and another, and that was back in the early fifties, I guess…the state came up with what they call a two-cent-a-mile road. They put a two-cent tax on gasoline strictly for rural roads and they started building roads all over places and re-building that was bad, and you ne…you didn’t bid them on a yardage basis, you bid on a mileage basis, but you knew what the mileage, what the yardage was, because you had plans, but you just didn’t bid so much a yard, you used to bid them on a mileage basis, and we did several of those and we got in to the coal stripping a little bit, and…we 38:00had to s…I’m sorry now we ever did that after flying over Eastern Kentucky and seeing what they’ve done up there now, this mountain top removal, that’s, I’m sorry to ever had anything to do with it. But…we didn’t do too much good at that. I got married in 1948, and we were on a, I was on a strip job in Scott County, Tennessee down Oneida, Tennessee, up to Brimstone Creek, got married, and we were shipping coal pretty good. We had a couple of dozers down there and a shovel, and one thing and another, and…we went to Canada on our honeymoon we came back, don’t, I had rented an apartment my wife had never seen in Oneida, Tennessee and the market had broken and we went out of business. She never e…never saw the apartment [Chuckling] anytime, so we went back going to Hazard, and (clears throat) at the headquarters and back in construction again.

Philpot: All right, let’s see…you 39:00did say you had been to, to reunions, it said, do, do you attend reunions, and if so why?

Greene: And what now?

Philpot: And why, what, what makes you want to go to a reunion?

Greene: Why?

Philpot: Mm-mm.

Greene: We, my, our reunions were, were good. I say were good because…they don’t have them anymore. But we didn’t, I didn’t found out about the things until about twenty years ago, I guess, fifteen or twenty years ago, after it already had several. And then we’ve tried to make almost everyone—missed a couple since then. Had them in some good places, Niagara Falls, they had them in Virginia and Tacoma, Washington, San Antonio, Minneapolis…and the last one was last year—the year before—we’ve been ta…thinking about disbanding the division association 40:00for several years, because we were getting less people every year, all, no, no young blood coming in at all, of course, and…getting fewer people every year, who just weren’t able to come, and the last one was in…Branson, last September. I went, but I started having some heart problems and I didn’t get there, and I still, and I missed the last one, that when they finally voted and they finally got enough things to, to cancel the whole thing, and so we are not having any more reunions. But you’d see people you hadn’t seen for a long time, a lot of them you didn’t even remember until you got to talking to each other, because it, it…people change. But…we, we really enjoyed that, it gave us a chance to get out and see more of the country and, and reminisce.

Philpot: Did you have any, any close friends…that 41:00you still talk to from… Greene: Yeah… Philpot: …the association?

Greene: …mm-mm, yeah, mm-mm.

Philpot: Okay. I tell you what, you, you really did a good job of getting all my questions [Chuckling].

Greene: Oh [Chuckling] well… Philpot: The trouble the… Greene: I got to thinking about all this stuff that, and, it…you, you know, in what I could s…I kind of been trying to bring it back.

Philpot: Well is there…anything that you’d like to add or say that we haven’t covered in the interview so far?

Greene: Well, I’ll just tell you what happened from there. I worked for my father for several years. And then we came to a difference of opinion. He didn’t want to get bigger and I wanted to get bigger, and so then I went with Talbot Construction out of Winchester, we did railr…railroad work and highway work. And this was 42:00right at the beginning of the interstate program. And so I worked with, with Scott Talbot for several years as a grade foreman, and then made superintendent, the last two jobs on I was superintendent of the job, one in west Kentucky nine-mile job, and another one, the last one I was on, was in…Parkersburg, West Virginia, but all interstate—what, wasn’t interstate in west Kentucky, as the west Kentucky toll road, you have around Beaver Dam. ( ) and Scott decided to sell out, and about that time my father passed away, and so I was finishing up the job in Parkersburg when he passed away, and, and then so, then I, I had a plane up there. So then I flew to Hazard when they told me he had had a massive stroke and he died before I got there. But then 43:00that worked out for me very well, because then I was to go in there, I was familiar with it, I took over his company and finished up his contracts and then so, that, because I did not want to be in the trucking business, and…then I’d gone, I went to work for Bizzack Brothers Construction Company, oh for a short while and in the meantime I was tired of being gone all of the time, and so I had been…on the airport board that’s formed the airport out there that located the airport, helped locate it, helped building it (clears throat). It, it had two operators and neither one of them could make it in this town, this was in forty…six, I guess—not no, not forty-six, sixty-six. And…I talked to my wife and said, “why don’t we,” I’d already, that time I had, I had gotten a commercial pilots license, I didn’t have an instrument reading or an instructor’s. “Do you want to try this for a year, 44:00try it home, if not I’ll go back to work where I can make a good [Chuckling] living in construction.” And so she said, “yeah, we will try it for a year,” and we stayed there about eighteen years, and it…the airport worked out real well, and…I did that and I became a…pilot examiner for the FAA. I could issue, give flight tests and issue license, or thumbs down, either way, and I did, even after I sold out, but my hearing started going back pretty bad in, in forty, in sixty…eighty-four, I’m, I’m getting my years straight here, and so, then I decided to sell out, so I sold out as of January the first ’85, but I kept my examiner’s, I could still give flight tests, one thing and another. I couldn’t do any serious instrument flying or anything like that because 45:00you can’t take a chance on missing radio communication when your hearing starts bad. It was gotten to get worse since then, but so then we moved, went to Okeechobee and I’ve been down there, and we bought a place down there and been down there ever since. Now Okeechobee has gone dry. I guess you heard, I don’t know if you heard about that or not, terrible shape down there, and you can’t get in the lake except with an airboat, because the water has receded. [Chuckling] Of course airboats will run on anything, but…you can’t get out there in a motorboat, except at certain places you can go, if you’re very, very careful where they got the ( ) it’s, but it’s getting lower all the time. So now we got a place down there to get rid of [Chuckling].

Philpot: Well, it, it sounds like you’ve had…quite an interesting life for sure, this ( ).

Greene: I couldn’t, I, I couldn’t beat it. 46:00I’ve done everything I [Chuckling] wanted to do first much, and I’m very, very for—most people can’t…can’t make a living at something they love to do and I was able to, I liked construction work, and am crazy about flying, and so as I started flying with, mainly when I was six years old, I guess when the Lindberg crossed the ocean and I built models, bought kits and I designed my own models, and you’d be surprised how much you can learn about aerodynamics from fooling with model airplanes. It…it was, it was, that really was a big help to me later in life, but I had airplanes in all the trees around Grassy Lick, I was, I was born here in Montgomery County, in Grassy Lick.

Philpot: Well, that seems like a good place to stop, I guess, I’ll have you sign 47:00the release form we’ve talked about…before the interview and…I thank you very much for talking to me, I sure ( )… Greene: All right, sure I enjoyed it. I don’t get gen…generally get to talk that much [Chuckling].

“END OF INTERVIEW”